Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (review)

In the introduction of her recent book, Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience in the Makings of Globalization, Neferti Tadiar writes of seeking to understand globalization from the perspective of those who suffer, in all senses of that word, its production. Focusing on the Philippines from the 1970s to the 1990s, Tadiar asks what we, its anonymous, cosmopolitan addressee, can possibly learn from the historical experiences and literary productions of Filipinos struggling with and against the demands of interlocking hegemonic forces. These forces include: an aggressively expansive global capitalist network; a Philippine nation-state in both its authoritarian and postauthoritarian moments; varieties of liberal cosmopolitan identities proposed by feminist, gay liberation as well as the new social movements; and an ongoing Marxist revolutionary movement under the aegis of the Communist Party of the Philippines. The author examines how these hegemonizing forces draw their sustenance from the living labor of Filipinos and how the latter in turn absorb and parry the shocks of hegemony's demands. She does so through a sustained reading of a wide range of writings: novels, poetry, journalism, as well as different strands of academic scholarship over the last thirty years, situating her project within the broad ambit of what has come to be known as subaltern studies.

What emerges from her analysis is a welter of contradictory practices. Such practices produce not only dominant forms of sociality and hierarchies of power. They also put forth alternative ways of being ordered toward other historical possibilities. Tadiar begins by arguing that the globalization of capitalist modes of production hinges on the conversion of living labor into something that is pliant and "feminized." Tadiar sees the feminization of labor as the realization of what Marx had observed to be the universal tendency toward the prostitution of labor power in the face of capital. Reduced as such, labor becomes homogenized into a resource for servicing the unceasing need for surplus value. The nation-state profits from this gendering of living labor. Tadiar shows how the discourse of nationalism similarly situates women's reproductive, domesticating labor as subordinate and merely derivative of masculine productive labor. But rather than reiterate the feminist-Marxist condemnation of capitalism's reproduction of generalized prostitution and nationalism's patriarchal subordination of women, the author instead inquires into the productive capacities of the prostitute—which here includes the overseas contract worker—herself. In explicating the stories and poetry of Fanny Garcia, Ruth Mabanglo, and Luna Sicat, among others, she seeks to demonstrate the ways by which women reconfigure the terms of their subjugation and thereby resist their reduction into mere objects of value by both capital and the state.

These acts of self-fashioning, however, are never unitary. They instead open up into different tendencies. Such include: the invention of "woman" (babae) as a liberal subject, detached from its earlier social connections; the invocation of the self as a performative being, that is, a kind of medium that is hospitable to the comings and goings of otherness harking back to precolonial and Catholic practices of spirit mediumship; the embracing of contingency that makes for an ethic of risk and an erotics of gambling as a condition for freedom. Each possibility is implied in the other. Tadiar leads us to see from her consideration of Filipina writing the emergence of what she refers to as "pluri-subject," a subject that is essentially plural, always a "part-subject" (Kapwa) oriented toward proximate affiliations, not oedipal identification with others. In this way, the "prostituted," deracinated woman, whether at home or abroad, is shown to be not only the basis for the extraction of surplus value as well as the ground for the erection of nationalist identity. She also realizes herself as an agent and locus of historical experience, capable through her labor of creating a mode of being, an alternative temporality that "falls outside" the time and space circumscribed by capitalist progress and nationalist citizenship. And...