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Motherless Tongues
The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation
By Vicente L. Rafael Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7457-2
CHAPTER 1
Welcoming What Comes
Translating Sovereignty in the Revolutionary Philippines
Beyond need, the object of desire is, humanly, the miracle; it is sovereign life, beyond the necessity that suffering defines.
— GEORGE BATAILLE,The Accursed Share
After more than three hundred years of colonial rule, Filipinos began a revolution against the Spanish regime in August 1896. Through a complicated chain of events, by 1898 they succeeded in defeating the Spanish forces with the aid of the United States, declared independence, and soon formed a Republic under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo along with the wealthiest men in the archipelago. But by February 1899 Filipinos were engulfed in a new war against an emergent U.S. empire that lasted until 1902 and paved the way for U.S. occupation until 1941. During these turbulent years Filipinos sought to account for the event of the Revolution as the struggle to regain, if not enact, their sovereignty. But given the class divisions in colonial society — divisions that were violently disturbed and nearly overturned in the course of fighting — sovereignty came to mean and, perhaps just as important, be experienced differently by different groups.
What were the idioms of sovereignty that circulated between and among the Filipino elites who sought to assume control of the Republic and the people who fought and supported the Revolution? Given the recent surge of scholarly interest in the question of sovereignty as it relates to power and freedom in the making of Western modernity, is there something that the history of the Revolution in the Philippines can contribute to our comparative understanding of this topic? In particular were there ways the Philippine Revolution, especially in its Spanish and vernacular articulations, opened up alternative notions of sovereignty and other ways of experiencing freedom distinct from imperial notions of self-determination and absolute mastery?
Sovereignty and the Political Theology of Empire
Like many other nation-states the Philippines bears an imperial inheritance. More than three centuries of Spanish colonial rule have left behind a certain idea of sovereignty rooted in Christian thinking. It is an idea of sovereignty that gives the ruler the freedom to take exception to the law. Whether embodied by the king, by the state, or, in its nationalist revolutionary moment, by the people, sovereignty is the power to define and decide upon what is exceptional, so exceptional as to warrant the breaking of laws in view of either preserving or destroying the existing order and establishing a new one altogether. In Carl Schmitt's oft-quoted definition, "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception." It is the sovereign who, in founding the law, gives to himself the license to operate both inside and outside of it. The self-legislating and self-granting agency of the sovereign is precisely what allows him to decide who will live and who will die and what forms such living and dying are to take; who is the friend and who is the enemy and the terms of such friendship and enmity; and who is the citizen and who is the foreigner and the laws of citizenship that allow for the assimilation or expulsion of the foreign. The power to decide on the exception — to break with the norm, rupturing the precedents and processes of deliberation and debate — gives to sovereignty an absolutist nature. Jean Bodin, writing some three and a half centuries earlier, foreshadows Schmitt in saying, "Sovereignty is not limited either in power or in function or in length of time. ... For he is absolutely sovereign who recognizes nothing, after God, that is greater than himself." Sovereignty as absolute power is thus absolutely free of any obligations and conditions. This makes it a kind of impossible power, truly exceptional because it is beholden to no one and nothing else but God. However, rather than serve as a limit, God here figures an infinite force, exceeding any attempt at codification into positive human law. Like a pure gift it can neither be calculated nor reciprocated. True sovereignty, freed from the limits of human laws, is beholden only to God's laws. The sovereign comes to be the sole agent of Divine power. He thereby embodies the impossible possibility of a thoroughly nonhuman, immortal power manifesting itself in the world.
This awesome conception of sovereignty, however, ran into insurmountable difficulties in the case of the Spanish Empire in its efforts to rule the Indies. The assertion of the king's power always required its representation and delegation. His absolute power to decide was undercut by the recurring need to channel his will through the mediating institutions of colonial bureaucracies, courts of law, the movement of armies and missionaries, the coercive collection of tribute and labor, periodic inspections, and annual visitations to the colonies that generated endless cascades of paperwork, all of which distorted and deformed even as they sought to convey the shape and substance of royal authority. Imperial sovereignty, if there was such a thing, was thus split between an absolute prerogative to decide and take exception, and the necessity to divide and partition itself among its various representatives and representations, rehearsing and exhibiting its capacities in spectacles whose meanings and dissemination it could not always control. Less than absolute, sovereignty was always other than itself.
We can see the animating contradictions of Spanish imperial sovereignty, for example, in one of its important institutions, the Patronato Real (Royal Patronage) of the Catholic Church. Emblematic of the vanguard role of the Spanish Crown in the Counter-Reformation, the Patronato Real obligated the monarch to supply the material and military needs of the Church and further its planetary project of evangelization. It grew out of the imperative to conjugate colonialism with Catholic conversion. Beginning with a series of papal bulls between 1486 and 1493, the Crown received the Indies as a papal "donation," a gift for which it would assume the responsibility of converting native peoples.
The Patronato also granted the Crown the right to all tithes collected in the Indies and, more important, the privilege to appoint bishops and assign parishes that fell vacant in all the colonies beginning in 1508. Evangelization in turn legitimized conquest as a supremely moral undertaking designed to liberate the very subjects it subjugated, filling them with the Word of God that resonated with the will of the Spanish king. Acting as the "vicar of Christ," the king enjoyed what some Dominican theologians described as a "supernatural sovereignty" over the Indies. Unlike the "natural sovereignty" that local princes exercised to ensure the earthly needs of their people, supernatural sovereignty meant that the king was obligated to act in ways that would ensure the salvation of the souls of all colonial subjects. He was thus expected to use everything within his power to intervene and protect Christian converts against the threat of non-Christians. This included waging "just wars" meant to secure the submission as well as consent of natives to the king's protection. Imperial sovereignty was thus meant to generate the global conditions necessary to spread the Word of God.
We can see, then, how Spanish imperialism was sustained by a political theology. State power was understood in ideal terms not merely as a means for the accumulation of wealth but also as the expression and extension of Divine power. Human laws were thus regarded as the instruments for the actualization of natural and Divine law. In this context sovereignty possessed what we might think of as a magical quality owing to its transcendent source. Because it rested on that which was immortal and nonhuman, its force was such that it could break with and thereby free itself from every human norm and custom so as to pave the way for the emergence of a new social order under God's name. Colonial intervention in the name of Christian conversion was thus construed as an act of liberation. It was a means for establishing the king's supernatural sovereignty to free native peoples where before only the tyranny of paganism and demonic practices existed. Not surprisingly this proto-modern conception of imperialism was predicated on an order constituted in and through a hierarchy that reached down from heaven to earth: God, king, colonial officials, and missionaries ruling over local elites and the mass of male and female natives. It was an order that was further articulated through a linguistic hierarchy: Latin as God's language and Castilian as the idiom of the king and his officials on top, local vernaculars as instruments of conversion and colonial command for native subjects below.
But as I have indicated, Spanish political theology was far from seamless. In practice the sovereign could never be fully sovereign. Imperial sovereignty was always fraught, mired in the material complications of historical contingencies: ambitious merchants and corrupt officials, for example, or foreign pirates and rebellious natives. In the case of Spain, church and state relations were as mutually dependent as they were antagonistic, as each sought to gain absolute authority over the other. Symptomatic of these tensions was the essential yet odd position of the missionary priest.
The key importance of evangelization made the Spanish missionary an indispensable relay in the transmission of God's Word and the king's will. Often the only representative of empire in the farthest reaches of the realm, the missionary enjoyed considerable influence and great latitude in interpreting or, more often, setting aside the laws of the king in the name of preserving and furthering God's laws. The missionary's position was further enhanced by his knowledge of native speech. It allowed him to stand as the indispensable mediator between colonizers and colonized, translating between the demands of one and the responses of the other. Capable of traversing different political, social, and linguistic realms, the missionary occupied a position at a remove from all these. In this way the clergy constituted a critical force within colonial society. Intimately, at times oppressively involved in the day-to-day affairs of the people, he came to possess the power to decide on the exception — for example, abusive colonial officials, accused sorcerers, heterodox ritual practices, or subversive nationalists. This capacity for deciding not only what was an exception but how to deal with it turned the priest into a kind of sovereign power himself, often undercutting the authority of the king's colonial representatives in Manila. The missionary was thus a sort of double agent, simultaneously enacting and limiting, enabling while challenging the absolutist vocation of the king's supernatural sovereignty.
The contradictions of Spanish imperial sovereignty became more acute in the aftermath of the Napoleonic invasions and the momentous loss of Spanish possessions in the Americas during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The rise of a liberal constitutional regime in Spain was meant to repudiate monarchial absolutism. Yet it sought to consolidate what was left of the empire after the 1820s by redeploying the economic and political mechanisms of its Bourbon dynastic predecessor. Throughout the nineteenth century both liberal and conservative governments rationalized and broadened the exercise of state power in what remained of Spain's imperial possessions — to make that power, in a word, more, not less, absolute.
In the Philippine colony this meant, among other things, strengthening the functions of the governor general, extending colonial control to areas previously outside of Spanish reach, launching military offensives against recalcitrant Muslims and other non-Christians, consolidating the state monopolies on tobacco and alcohol, introducing a new tax code, revising the penal code, regularizing native names to ease tribute collection, attempting (and failing) to secularize parish churches and public education, and liberalizing foreign trade. But it also meant denying Filipino representation to the Spanish Parliament, even as Puerto Rican and Cuban creoles were given seats. Deemed to be racially inferior and far more culturally heterogeneous by virtue of the presence of sizable non-Christian populations that had long resisted Spanish rule, Filipinos — creole, mestizo, and indio alike — were consigned to live in a state of exception, subjects of Spanish sovereignty but ineligible for Spanish citizenship. And despite liberal animosity toward the friar orders whose properties had been despoiled in the Peninsula, in the Philippine colony the liberal state redoubled its reliance on the regular orders so as to protect the regime against the rising tide of filibusterismo, or subversive thinking, and the frequent outbreak of peasant revolts.
These contradictions would be discerned most acutely by the ilustrados — the emergent, Spanish-speaking, Philippine-born, university-educated, racially mixed colonial bourgeoisie. Influenced by liberal ideals that professed equality under the law for all citizens of the Spanish imperial nation in the wake of the Cádiz Constitution, they felt simultaneously entitled to and excluded from a share in colonial power. Desirous of tapping into the sovereign power of the state by way of assimilation into Spanish society and gaining representation in the Spanish Parliament, ilustrado nationalists as self-styled sons of the nation targeted the friars in particular for blocking the path of their political ambitions. They blamed the soberania monacal (monastic sovereignty), as Marcelo H. del Pilar put it, for all the colony's ills. The friars responded by threatening ilustrados with imprisonment and excommunication. Calling each other filibusteros (subversives), and thus traitors to the patria, Spanish friars and Filipino ilustrados sought to portray the one as the negation of the other. In doing so each claimed the right to call themselves the real patriots and thus sovereign citizens, while casting the others precisely as the exception to be expelled from the body politic. Given the racial logic of imperial rule, it is not surprising that the Spanish liberal state, despite its disdain for the friars, would side with them against the growing militancy of Filipino nationalists.
As separatist sentiments took hold over assimilationist aspirations, there arose in 1892 a secret revolutionary society called the Katipunan, literally "the gathering," dedicated to gaining freedom from imperial rule. With the Spanish discovery of its secret cells, colonial authorities were seized with terror at the prospect of a mass uprising and a race war. When the Revolution erupted in August 1896, imperial sovereignty entered into a prolonged period of crisis. But rather than disappear it continued to exist in displaced form, informing revolutionary discourses on "popular sovereignty."
Revolution and Popular Sovereignty
What was the Revolution, and how would it come to reappropriate Spanish sovereignty? According to the Proclamation of Independence of 12 June 1898, written in Spanish and declared from the window of Emilio Aguinaldo's house in Kawit, Cavite, the Revolution was the people's response to "the ominous yoke of Spanish domination" that included "the arbitrary arrests and cruel treatments conducted by the Guardia Civil," the "executions by firing squad ... the unjust deportations of eminent persons of high social position, all at the instigation of the Archbishop and the friars." Thus did the people (el pueblo) begin a "revolutionary movement [un movimento revolucionario] ... with the purpose of recuperating the independence and sovereignty that Spain had taken from them" when Spain began colonizing the archipelago in 1565. Revolution from the perspective of the Proclamation is the restoration of a precolonial sovereignty. It signaled the inauguration of a new era as a return to an ancient one.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Motherless Tongues by Vicente L. Rafael. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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