"In the Midst of and at the Edges of this Maelstrom": Experience and Archives after the Falling Away

"IN THE MIDST OF AND AT THE EDGES OF THIS MAELSTROM": EXPERIENCE AND ARCHIVES AFTER THE FALLING AWAY Victor Bascara Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization by Neferti X. M. Tadiar. A John Hope Franklin Center book. Post-Contemporary Interventions Series. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Pp. 496. $95 cloth, $28.95 paper.An ever-growing body of recent scholarship in Philippine studies/ critical Filipino studies has interpellated US readers by referencing globality, specifically by examining manifestations of contemporary globalization and mapping their genealogies in and through the Philippines. Scholars such as Vicente Rafael, Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, Steve McKay, and Martin Manalansan IV have focused on such topics as the politics of translation, gendered labor migration, export processing zones, and diasporic sexuality, respectively. Their approaches resonate with what Neferti X. M. Tadiar productively terms "Philippine historical experience" in her recent book, Things Fall Away. As the methodology of the book demonstrates, Philippine historical experience is not a simply empirical object composed of, say, texts and cultural artifacts, but rather an irreducible matrix of affective sensibilities and elusive epistemologies. Philippine historical experience is then simultaneously a seemingly empirical point of access as well as an epistemological occasion to call into question the terms by which the Philippines, history, and even experience have come to be known by a wide range of institutions and disciplines, legible through such formations as, say, the Manila flyover network. Philippine historical experience may then be what Frantz Fanon in a not unrelated context memorably referred as a "zone of occult instability where the people dwell."1That is to say, the term "Philippine historical experience" seems straightforward enough, but it is not. And that is a good thing. It is this double move of both explaining and complicating that makes this concept rich and meaningful for understanding the ways in which the Philippines is, in Tadiar's phrasing, "in the midst of and at the edges of this maelstrom" (2). of what was once called the New World Order. "The New World Order" - calling to mind the sonorous twentieth-century cadences of then-President George H. W. Bush - is a less current phrase she has understandably replaced with globalization, as the older term figures prominently in an important monograph Tadiar previously published: Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004). New world order, globalization, neoliberalism, (post) modernity - whatever term one uses, it has become clear to even casual observers that the bloom is off the globalized rose at least since the uprisings in Seattle on the occasion of the World Trade Organization meeting there in 1999. That said, as Tadiar 's analyses show, appreciating the genealogies and new/subaltern formations of the makings of globalization can reveal occluded histories and give conceptual and concrete form to something that can still be called "revolution." For Tadiar, then, historical experience means "not only people's collective responses to the objective social and economic conditions in which they find themselves" but also "the collective subjective practices they engage in that help produce and remake those objective conditions" (10, emphasis added).So one challenge of Tadiar's current study, which the book quite ably meets, is a task that both dogs and enables research on globalization that is nevertheless case-specific: scrupulous attention to both the exceptional and the paradigmatic. The Philippines manages to be both marginal and central. And in either situation Tadiar's persuasive and rigorously historical materialist analysis draws on a methodology rooted largely in commendable capacities of exegeses of literature certainly, but also in the social text and in the contradictions and overdeterminations of late capitalism. …