[Philippine corruption] Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics Understanding the War on Drugs in Bagong Silang, Philippines #10/204

A banner clamoring for justice for the violent murder of Aris. Photo by Steffen Jensen.

FIGURE 4.Family members mourn the death of a child killed amid the crossfire of vigilante killings. FromBagong Silang, directed by Jayneca Reyes, 2016. Courtesy of Jayneca Reyes.

Toward Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics

Conceptually, the book places itself within what can be referred to as subaltern politics (Tadiar 2009; Spivak 1988; Mbembe 2001). We understand subaltern politics as the attempt to understand local politics on its own terms as well as the political practices of people who are often invisible. This moves attention away from, for instance, motivations for the war on drugs to how different groups in Bagong Silang—potential victims, the people who carry out the killings, and those who watch, bear witness, and sometimes collaborate with the state—live, understand, and engage with the war. In recent years, subaltern studies have gained traction in the Philippines.⁹Some of the best of these studies are by Chuan Yean Soon (2012) and by Wataru Kusaka (2017a, 2017b). These studies explore what the authors call voices from below or subaltern politics. Taking his cue from James Scott (1985) and his notion of “hidden transcripts,” Soon excavates the hidden logics and perceptions in his informants’ understanding of politics. He identifies the concept of tulong, or “help,” as a meaningful way to understand how people talk about and perceive the morality of politics. Parallel to this in our work in Bagong Silang, tulongemerges as a central concept, even in relation to monetary exchanges with officialdom, which might otherwise be construed as corruption. It is important that when done in the right fashion, that is, when they are transformed into tulong, Soon argues, these monetary exchanges build safety and provide both sides with important means of survival (see also Hapal and Jensen 2017).

In parallel with the work of Soon, that of Kusaka (2017b) focuses on the morality of local politics from below. Based on long-term fieldwork in an informal settlement in Manila, Kusaka identifies what he calls a “dual public sphere,” comprising both a civic sphere and a mass sphere where the civic sphere comprises formal, associational politics, often conducted in English whereas the mass sphere is animated by a different set of political motivations emerging from poor communities mostly conducted in Tagalog. He employs the spheres as heuristic categories for understanding politics in a different way than from above. Using this heuristic device, Kusaka produces an exemplary analysis of a bifurcated society. He shows how class divides are reinforced by language, whereby all that matters to the elite—the economy, the legal system, the important part of the media, education and politics—is conducted in English, a language that few within the mass sphere really master. The sensibilities and moralities are often at odds such that those in the civic sphere frequently feel contempt toward the mass sphere. To some extent, this is reciprocated within the mass sphere, as Michael Pinches’s 1991 analysis of perceptions of the middle class in a poor urban neighborhood also illustrates. One of Kusaka’s (2017b) important contributions is that he empirically substantiates the divide by combining statistics with a qualitative analysis of data from both the mass and civic spheres that provides the reader with an understanding of how these spheres are both discursive realms and concrete life worlds. A second, possibly more important, contribution is his explicating, in positive ways and with much empathy, of the life worlds of his poor informants in the informal settlement. From his account, we are able to see the contours of a subaltern politics—or in the words of Achille Mbembe (2001), in his exploration of postcolonial African subjectivities, how they “exercise their existence” (9).

The concept of the dual public sphere allows Kusaka to explore class divides and moral politics in insightful ways, including how the mass sphere engages with politics. However, the juxtaposition of the two spheres arguably takes on a life of its own, with the potential implication that they become monolithic entities pitted against each other. Yet our data from Bagong Silang suggests that it is difficult to think of residents there as part of a homogenous group. In an article published in 2016 as part of a collection attempting to understand the war on drugs, Kusaka develops the argument and identifies internal divisions within the settlement of the urban poor to illustrate the conviction that some people were deemed beyond repair and hence killable by their neighbors, and indeed even by themselves. This analysis resonates with Nicole Curato’s insightful 2016 contribution on what she calls “latent anxieties” about drugs, which become translated into anxiety about the potential, violent acts of neighbors in urban, poor communities.