He breathes hard as he makes his way in a dense forest of 
bamboo. He heard something. He ran. He finds the edge and sees his friend, Jonas. “Jonas! Jonas!” he exclaimed and he remembered that he is still being chased. Before he can bellow, an echoing sound was first to speak. His friend was spread-eagled in the clearing, lifeless. He ran towards him while breathing loudly the words, “Don’tshoot! Don’tshoot! Don’tshoot! Don’tsh…” and the flapping of wings and that loud echoing sound.
This is my best interpretation of the public announcement entitled ‘Takbo’ from the series Rights v.1(see video ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDCkrJSTrKI). Beside from my mediocre fiction writing skills it aims to deliver a narrative. It is for the readers and for them to be encapsulated in the narrative. It is to suture them. In the system of suture that Rebelle Musique Americas were able to deliver subversive images and voices. A persistent use of musical scores and themes juxtaposed to the documentary editing was a formula in presenting the rebel musicians. A similar wielding of suture was used by Rights. The dark and ominous scenes are definitely purposeful to put the audience in a trance that could summon fear, remorse and sympathy. The use of suture and its potentiality has been utilized to make a resistance or at least to depict the ubiquitous oppression of the state.
Usually films would show spectacle which antagonizes the very possibility of the unity of poverty. Take for instance the character of Will Smith in Pursuit of Happyness, a father who sells medical thing-of-a-jig and encounters a series of unfortunate events that are ultimately rooted in the fantasy of capital as an egalitarian system. He then pursues to be a stock-broker which is basically the job involving financial speculations. It basically tells the audience that even if your wife leaves you and your son, the landlord kicks you out and only 90 cents in your pocket, it’s still your lone struggle and history to handle. You can’t blame the government, you can’t blame the system and you should definitely not rebel together with the thousands of jobless Americans.
In contrast, Rights and Rebelle Musique Americas deploys a sense of cooperation rather competition among those who are marginalized. The very organization of Free Jonas Burgos Movement together with the Southern Tagalog Exposure materializes the collaboration of those excluded journalists and human rights activists. The depiction of the street protest in Argentina puts emphasis on the capacity and possibility for the oppressed and dominated to organize. Collectivism as oppose to individualism. Group agenda instead of personal interest. Unity (as opposed to fragmentation) of poverty.
The deployment of warm bodies as consumers is how biopolitics operate. “Biopower is based on strategies of control that transcend those institutional frameworks…”1 As biopolitical mechanisms exist together with its national agenda, eventually some will not agree and resist this agenda. This is where necropolitcs comes in, the labeling, targeting, and silencing of those who disagree. It was Michel Foucault that introduced these state mechanisms and manifests in the Philippine context as seen in Rights. The reenactments of interrogations and killings divert attention to the state’s aim to contain these human rights violations. A very characteristic of necropower to destroy bodies or as Achille Mbembe put it, the creation of deathscapes.
The very embodiment of an employment agent turned punk singer is what the narrative wants its audience to follow or sutured into. A sense of freedom to be rockstars as shown in the film is very logic of consumer freedom. You have these roles that you can pick from and wear whenever one chooses to. Biopolitics is concerned in preserving that ideology among its produced bodies. Biopower is based on control. The control being inflicted to Ian by the field where he navigates is the aim of social disciplines. Take for instance the persistence of the band to be recognized actually limits their space rather than widens it. As the movie progressed, Ian was unable to control his feelings to Debbie and Annik, and more the popularity of Joy Division looms over him and every performance threatens his health. The subject here is held to believe that control over things is what free choice guarantees though in conclusion the biopower relations is the one that controls the subject. Ian didn’t lose control, he was guided, he was controlled by the same mechanisms responsible for the hundreds of cases of political killings in the Philippines.
And a voice told her when and where to act she said "I’ve lost control again"
…and walked upon the edge of no escape and said I’ve lost control again2
The subjectivism takes on in the act of controlling or restraining oneself in accordance to the system’s coordinates. A mode of subjective position reconciles it as if there is an agreement that all shall subscribe to the conditions set by neoliberalism. The voice in the song, “told her when and where to act”. The voice is definitely not your hallucination but the insidious ideology that has been there since and before we were born.
On the same submission of consent, capital continues its accumulation. It is not that the capitalist is evil, it is the precisely the pursuit for historical agglomeration of exploited labor that has been responsible for the transformation of unalienated creative practice to alienated labor. These biopolitical and necorpolitical mechanisms introduced by Foucault have a job to do as seen by a functionalist. It is to enforce social discipline and make the conditions for capitalist accumulation possible. So, it is just right that there be a continuous divide between those who hold the means of production and those who have none. Well, it is functional, to those in the ruling class that has again a legitimate excuse to continue their comfortable and favorable lives at the expense of the exploiting the poor.
Be creative, be innovative and be productive are modern day mottos of capitalism. Though, those virtues should always be in the realm of formal not actual freedom (Zizek). An image according to Guy Debord, is what mediates us, our social relations. In order to for capital to expand an abstraction has to take place. A worldview that has to be naturalized that this is the only space where one can be creative, innovative, productive and be free. And, that is how Debord describes spectacle, “… appears simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification.”3 We are convinced that we are leaving a society of free choice. Take for instance the spectacle-of-love mobile exhibit. (We obviously acknowledge the ineffective means of showcasing the visuals). However, it tries critique the very notion of love as a transcending supernatural power beyond all odds and conquers all. But, in actuality it is love that is being conquered by the divide of social classes and uneven distribution of wealth. You marry within your own socio-economic group though it happens otherwise like what they show in movies. The more it is pervasively used to further justify a very uncommon event, a dream.
It is capitalism that took birth to every protest and resistances against it. The conditions of possibilities to pursue counter hegemonic struggle is set by the system that is why it is able to absorb it easily. A good example of this is one group’s take on the commodification of the history of say Mao, Bonifacio, Ninoy and gave an interesting title, Nationalism for Sale. What actually limits and allows these kinds of subversive analysis and observations is the semi-autonomization of the visual. Yes, it the system that gave life to the visual and the technology behind it though however it is used to profit and make expropriation of labor possible, it is still semi-autonomous. How do you think plays like Ang mga Lorena were able to operate? The play itself delivered a provocative message and in exchange, they have to use the visual technology of the present conditions plus one has to pay to hear the message.
The very concept of Jacques Ranciere of democracy as oppose to the neoliberal version of it provides both a critique and a challenge. The Democracy here forces to think beyond the gates of the system and ultimately to give way for that actual freedom that Zizek pertains to. The distribution of the sensible (Ranciere) is an experience that can be seen on how an industrial society shapes “…workers as spectators and then spectators as workers?”4 as traced by Jonathan Beller. It is in both concepts that the place and stakes of politics is determined. The Demos as elaborated by Ranciere are the excluded from the Oclos’s obsession of unification. It is in Beller’s analysis of mediation that this obsession of unification is reconciled. Mediation is the process of making the world an illusion and the Oclos obviously is in an illusion that the world is unified.
This illusion comes in different forms and they offer you a world were you can exercise suffrage, where the many is said to be the decisive voice, a government of the people, by the people for the people. And that phrase, “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” Democracy is the modern day fantasy everybody.
In an interview given by Alliche Mbembe, on the occasion of the publication of his book On Post-Colony, he stated firmly that democracy as a form of government and as a culture of public life does not have a future in Africa – or for that matter, elsewhere in the world – if it is not rethought precisely from the crucible of “necropower.”5
Lastly, it is this neoliberal concept that has to be rid off its spectacular shell and who knows what other things we can find.
“the tyranny of the 21st century is called ‘democracy’”
-Alfonso Cauron
Notes
1 FROM BIOPOLITICS TO NECROPOLITICS
ŠVERC ZNANJA u Beogradu 12. januara 2009.
[Marina Gržinić]
http://www.tkh-generator.net/sr/home
2 Joy Division, She’s Lost Control (extended version)
3 Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle, I. The Culmination of Separation, p.6
4 Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production Attention Economy
and the Society of Spectacle, 2006, Chap. 2 Production, p. 115
5 FROM BIOPOLITICS TO NECROPOLITICS
II. To differentiate in- between biopolitics and necropolitics
ŠVERC ZNANJA u Beogradu 12. januara 2009.
[Marina Gržinić]
http://www.tkh-generator.net/sr/home
Sources:
www.letssingit.com
www. imdb.com
