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correspondents at large MANILA

Metropolitan Life and Uncivil Death

Metro MaNiLa iN 2006 iS a LaBYriNtHiNe, MegaLoPoLitaN for-

neferti tadiar

treSS of foreCLoSUre. aLMoSt aLL tHe MaiN arterieS of tHe metropolis have become virtually enclosed corridors of free-flowing vehicular traffic, without regulated crossings where pedestrians and cross-street flow might momentarily interrupt the stream of hun- dreds of thousands of cars, buses, and trucks careening down these roads every day. With the help of numerous flyovers, or over- passes, and underpasses built by the metropolitan government over the last decade and a half, these ten-lane roads have become high- ways that coast and tunnel through the thick of the city, connecting the scattered, archipelagic commercial centers and gated communi- ties where the upper-class and upwardly mobile sectors work, live, shop, and socialize. In recent years, more and more metal and concrete barricades erected against wayward human traffic cordon off the public-access roads of these freeways to discipline the unruly movements of the public commuting masses and ensure the unimpeded mobility of pri- vate motorists. These coercive measures foreground the monumental effort it takes to carry out the imperative that urban planning serves: streamlining class stratification. Indeed, above and all along the main highway, Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA), the recently built el- evated mass rail transit system attempts to channel the urban masses in a vertically parallel conduit of their own. Although all these recent urban transit modifications were ostensibly made to alleviate the ever- increasing congestion of one of the most densely populated cities in the world (with almost thirteen million people in an area of 636 square kilometers), they are also part of a more general, if haphazard, strat- egy of social disciplinary action and regulation that might also limn aspects of the current order of power and conditions of struggle. With massive pedestrian overpasses looming several stories above the freeways like parapets of metal and concrete, built to seg- regate the carless citizenry, and with concrete ramparts and barri- cades protecting the free movement of a globally aspiring propertied

Neferti tadiar is associate professor in the department of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and visiting associate professor in the department of Womens Studies at Barnard College. She is the author of Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong UP, 2004) and coeditor (with angela Y. davis) of an anthology of essays entitled Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation (Palgrave, 2005). Her new book, Things Fall Away: Philippine Literature, Historical Experience, and Tangential Makings of Globality, is forthcoming from duke University Press. a current project, discourse on empire: Living under the rule of Permanent War, is under way.

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[ 2007 by the moder n language association of america ]

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class from sluggish engulfment in the sea of social contradictions composed of human ur- ban surplus, Metro Manila today appears to be a monument of reified class antagonisms. However, far from permanently fixed, com- partmentalized spaces, which would fit a co- lonial or apartheid city, Manilas sociospatial organization consists of dynamic, channeled movements through twined conduits and pas- sageways connecting differentiated pools of urban interiors with selective social contents. By interiors I mean both the indoor spaces of massive shopping centers, office build- ings, and individual homes and the outdoor spaces of private subdivisions and inner-city neighborhoods. Manila might in fact be said to have become a city of variegated interiors. Though these passageways and pools may be intertwined with and adjacent to one another, like pedestrian overpasses and highways, pri- vate residences and squatter homes, the chan- neling of movement by the built environment keeps people circulating within their own strata. Just as the technology of cell-phone texting enables various social groups to keep within their own communication net- works regardless of geography, so urban de- velopments regulate and contain socialities and social fluencies by means of pathways. Channeling is Manilas metropolitan technol- ogy of foreclosure. One of the things that is foreclosed is the modern urban experience of contradictory class encounters on the street, the experience of face-to-face class struggle that long shaped the political subjectivities of urban dwell- ers as well as the political life of the nation. Confrontations between beggars and motor- ists, street children and elites, workers and students, abounded not only in literary plots of the last few decades but also in the contra- dictory narratives of imagined community that played out in public politics. Charac- teristics of urban experience that structured subject formation and political cultures in urban communities, such as social visibility

and physical proximity, are increasingly sub- merged under a regime of flows-and-densities management. Against the clustering that both resulted from and aggravated urban conges- tion, a metropolitan policy of facilitating and freeing movement, of streamlining flows, now prevails. This modus operandi, which helps to realize dreams of flow, mobility, and circulation, encourages ever-more-parochial forms of locality, such as the deterritorial- ized locality of global culture. On EDSA, gi- ant billboards and video screens advertising high-end commodities and lifestyles flank the avenue on both sides, creating a televisual stream experience that virtually connects commuters and other motorists to a local- global world of capitalist desire. If we understand the way that the de facto metropolitan practice of urging and streamlining movement disables other pos- sible configurations of social life, we might recognize this rules affinity with the policy unironically named Calibrated Preemptive Response (CPR) that the government of Glo- ria Macapagal Arroyo (known as GMA) an- nounced in 2005 as its new approach to public expressions of social dissent. In tandem with other policies of this administration, CPR is a matter of resuscitating a state in critical con- dition. Faced with severe losses of legitimacy and public confidence as oppositionists in- side and outside of the governmentinclud- ing the military, sectors of which continue to conspire to overthrow itair evidence of cor- ruption and electoral fraud and as radical-left critics assault its self-aggrandizing embrace of globalization and the war on terror, the GMA states slim hold on power arguably de- pends on the simple practice of moving right along, a practice of not only letting objections slide but also violently crushing and elimi- nating any threat in the way of its ambition. Effectively a license to intimidate, use force against, and round up rallyists before a rally is held (hence preemptive), CPR and other government policiessuch as the directive

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muzzling military officers who might testify against the GMA administration in senate investigations, the proclamation of a state of emergency to prevent another possible popu- lar revolt on the anniversary of the first one, and the brutal extrajudicial killings of scores of legal activists and journalists by paramili- tary security forces (more than seven hundred since GMA came to power in 2001)are part of an overall strategy of preemptive action by the state against its enemies. It is perhaps not facetious to point out that, in politics as much as in driving, no left turns are allowed. I have risked the possibility that the af- finity I suggest between traffic management and state policies might be adjudged a bad analogy or an overstretched metaphor1 to call attention to the broader conditions of fore- closure and preemption operating in both and, more, to the struggles they are directed against and the grave losses they entail. Those broader conditions include a national, as well as global, political and economic structural adjustment of the needs and operative logics of a territorial mode of power and accumula- tion to those of a liberal, capitalist mode. In the Philippines, foreclosure and preemption are flexible strategies by which those seem- ingly contradictory modes of accumulation (i.e., direct theft and free market exploita- tion) and their corresponding modes of gov- ernment (dictatorship and democracy) are combined to maximize power and profits against vigorous movements of resistance to both. What I especially want to point out are the conditions of embattlement that these modes of management attest to. As a conse- quence of a longer history of crisis and strug- gle, the metropolitan capital, as much as the Philippine state, is under siege. Damaged and dented barricades, concrete buildings and highway ramparts perpetually covered with layers of dirt and the black sediment of ex- haust, almost every inch of the dilapidated and physically ravaged built environment marked by overuse and misuse, overtaxed

and underfunded resources, hardship and ad- versity, and the rubble and refuse of uneven development and destruction strewn next to glorious monuments of wealththese are the visible artifacts and ruins of war. The metropolis is paved with roads of war. As means and symbols of universal modern progress, the wide boulevards and highways of Metro Manila were historically the products of colonial and neocolonial, postindependent nation-states attempts to control the potentially insurgent movements of the urban Filipino populace. Since the colo- nial invasion of the Philippines by the United States in 1898, the roads and bridges of Ma- nila have served as a battleground of contra- dictory social practices and ideals. Under the rule of independent democracy established by United States colonial power in the post Second World War period, the streets of the Philippine cultural capital, while built in the putative interests of national development, in- creasingly turned into counterhegemonic sites of political representation. In the 1960s, mas- sive and frequent rallies, protests, and dem- onstrations took hold of the streets of Manila, opposed to the corrupt, United Statesbacked government of Ferdinand Marcos and the ex- ploitative, monopolistic rule of the oligarchic classes. Marcos garrisoned the metropolis not only with soldiers and police but also with spectacular modern public works designed to appeal to the economic and cultural sensi- bilities of his international political clientele and paid for with funds looted from coffers filled with foreign loans and foreign aid. The old city of Manila was unified with surround- ing cities and outlying municipalities, and all were transformed into a single, shining me- tropolis that would serve as the showcase of Marcoss authoritarian vision of a New Soci- ety, dubbed the City of Man. Although radi- cal contestation of the state continued to erupt periodically on the streets of Metro Manila and eventually, in 1986, a popular revolt on EDSA deposed the dictatorial regime, urban

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life was forced to take place within the politi- cal and cultural confines of this authoritarian metropolitan order. In the political, social, aesthetic, and moral project that was the City of Man, all social excess, especially the con- tradictory, inassimilable, militant elements of the polity, was destined for expulsion or elimination. This modernization project laid down the relations between city and country that have characterized the last few decades. In the Philippine poet-journalist Jose La- cabas well-known 1971 protest poem Ang mga kagila-gilalas na pakikipagsapalaran ni Juan de la Cruz (The Amazing Adventures of Juan de la Cruz), the stock figure of the Filipino everyman is reinvented as a poor urban dweller who finds himself everywhere excluded by a city of prohibitive rules. The amazing adventures of Juan de la Cruz, a would-be urban f lneur (all spruced up / though with empty pockets), consist of encounter after encounter with signs con- straining his wants and desires: BAWAL MANI- GARILYO (SMOKING PROHIBITED), BAWAL PUMARADA (PARKING PROHIBITED), KEEP OFF THE GRASS, YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD BUT WE NEED CASH.2 The repeated expulsion of Juan from every parcel of urban space that he sets his foot on finally propels him out of the city altogether and into rural armed struggle:
When Juan de la Cruz would swallow no more clutching a machete his clothes all tattered and torn his pockets still empty he ran up Mount Arayat The emaciated Juan de la Cruz WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE said the military and they blamed the goddamned kids for agitating such a peaceful citizen as Juan de la Cruz.

Written at the height of urban radical stu- dent and labor movements and the launch of an armed communist movement in the coun- tryside, Lacabas poem captures a principal social dynamic that would characterize the succeeding decades of urban life under Mar- coss authoritarian rule. Declaring martial law in 1972 in a violent bid to stay in power, against the intense opposition to his rule, Marcos and his wife, Imelda, attempted to transform the autarchic, crisis-ridden national capital into a showcase of modern urban de- velopment, able to garner huge loans from in- ternational financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Manilas restructuring into a modern metropolis entailed massive dislocations of squatter communities, which would never- theless continue to increase as Marcoss brutal military counterinsurgency operations in the countryside against the communist peoples war resulted in the large-scale displacement of rural populations from their homes. And yet the repressive conditions of urban life that Marcoss political and economic policies created for the urban poor became, for many writers and activists, conditions of possibil- ity for radicalizing students and workers. The city as a brutal, violent world in which the rich and powerful crushed simple, often rural peoples dreams was a familiar theme in the socially conscious Tagalog literature emerg- ing out of the 1960s and would continue as a salient theme of many social realist films made under martial law. Lacabas protest poem, by contrast, epitomized a newly shared politicized experience of the repressive social and aesthetic mandates of the metropolitanist order, which impelled legions of young men and women to join the revolutionary armed struggle taking place in the countryside. In a reversal of the typical relations of the country and the city, the rural areas were reinscribed by the revolutionary movement as a place of historical possibility, the site of future prom- ise, which the metropolis had foreclosed.

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Thirty years of counterinsurgent civil warfare later, after the so-called restoration of democracy, numerous attempted military coups, the promise and failure of the Asian boom, neoliberalist restructuring, scandals of presidential corruption, another regime change through popular revolt, state alliance with the global war on terror, and a total war by the state against a reinvigorated left- ist movement, Metro Manilas promise of an alternative future remains submerged under the cacophony of contradictory modes of social existence and aspiration, all vying for survival, if not predominance. Under a gov- ernment that rules by both dictatorship and democracy, the metropolis is slowly drowning in the thick noise of its own crisis-managed convolution of social fluencies, so that, de- spite its virtual extension through an eco- nomic network comprising other cities in the country and through the urban-based world economy comprising other globalizing and global cities, metropolitan life has become more enclosed than ever, immersed in the dense space-time of its congested flows. As a consequence, the metropolis is cir- cumscribed by a periphery that has become ever more liminal. That periphery is no longer simply the countryside defined by its agricul- tural economy. It is, rather, the areas beyond the pale of state-sanctioned metropolitan civil societyexit zones of abandonment, forced disappearance, and brutal death to which those deemed inassimilable or antagonistic

to metropolitan life are condemned. That the periphery can be found in small, impov- erished villages that have become targets of the states preemptive war is almost certainly because they are also where a vigorous politi- cal movement has enabled radical hopes for other forms of collective life to thrive. If the mounting extrajudicial political executions carried out in the periphery barely register for metropolitan subjects, it is perhaps be- cause for them, caught in the tunnel vision of mandatory flow, alternative channels of social imagining have been foreclosed.

Notes
1. For an argument about the relation between traffic and the economy, see the chapter Metropolitan Dreams in my Fantasy-Production (77112). 2. All translations are mine. The last two quotations are in English in the original.

Works Cited
Lacaba, Jose. Ang mga kagila-gilalas na pakikipagsapala- ran ni Juan de la Cruz [The Amazing Adventures of Juan de la Cruz]. Ang mga kagila-gilalas na pakikipag- sapalaran: Mga tulang nahalungat sa bukbuking baul [The Amazing Adventures: Poems Rummaged from a Worm-Infested Chest]. Quezon City: Office of Re- search and Pubs., Ateneo de Manila U, 1979. 10709. Tadiar, Neferti. Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2004.