culture and values to focus instead on the theory’s normative construction of human emancipation. In his Five Years of the New Society, Marcos projects an outwardly radiating series of transformations centering on the recalibration of national “values”: first, such values will foster a sense of pride in the individual; it follows that this pride will foster a sense of belonging to a larger national community; and finally, a sense of belonging to a national community will enjoin individuals to seek “oneness with mankind.”28
To “Third Worldize” this model of human emancipation, Marcos sought the psychoaffective creation of a “decolonized” cultural subject. The New Society’s cultural policy indeed hinged on eradicating colonial subalternity by restoring the dignity and self-respect of the New Filipino. But as we shall see, Marcos’s program of cultural rehabilitation nonetheless called on the cultural sphere to effect an internal colonization along the lines of the cultural paternalism of white love. Its promise of a perfect social order presupposed the citizenry’s submission to the dictator’s “paternal” authority and the consolidation of a social hierarchy through the internalization of traditions invented by, and grounded in, the martial-law state.
The Internal Revolution and Governmentality
Despite its First World narcissism, the salience of modernization theory, as far as Marcos was concerned, lay in its emphasis on the power of cultural values to shape patterns of social conduct. The New Society was indeed the first deliberate attempt ever made in the Philippines to realign the cultural values of the populace with the development initiatives of the state.29 For Marcos, this process involved “restructuring mental dispositions and evolving an authentic individual and social consciousness.”30
Just months after the declaration of martial law, veteran psychological warfare specialist Jose Ma. Crisol, working through the auspices of the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ Office of Civil Relations, convened an academic think tank to construct a master plan for moral reform. Their report, Towards a Restructuring of Filipino Values, gave the following recommendation: “We should treat the country as our very own family, where the President of the Republic is the father and all the citizens as our brothers. From this new value we develop a strong sense of oneness, loyalty to the country, and a feeling of nationalism.”31
Thus elevating the family as the principal institution for formulating national values, the report anticipated Foucault’s description of the intimate connection between the family and the science of policing, Jacques Donzelot’s term for the “methods for developing the quality of the population and the strength of the nation.”32 For Foucault, the task of policing led to the rise of governmentality via a modern state that “exerci[zed] towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behavior of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of the family over his household and goods.”33 In Marcos’s own writings on the New Society, metaphors of the father’s role in a well-run household abound. Like the head of the household (in Tagalog, ama ng tahanan), the president’s primary role is to ensure that his house is in order, for this “does not only ensure the regularity of one’s daily bread; it provides the vitality that fills both the thirst for productive labor and creative contemplation.”34
In matters of culture, Marcos’s ama ng tahanan blended the cultural paternalism of the great white father of Benevolent Assimilation with the anticolonial stance of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Though he actively promoted modernization to bring about the humanist project of national development, he also prescribed a cultural liberation program that would correct the colonial mentality of the populace.
Marcos’s notion of cultural liberation closely follows Fanon’s conception of cultural rehabilitation. Because colonialism distorted, disfigured, and destroyed the native’s past, it devolves on the postcolonial state to seek a national culture in the past. Thus enmeshed in the psychoaffective operations of cultural rehabilitation, the creation of a national culture is a necessary feature of decolonization, for without it, liberated peoples would be “colorless, stateless, rootless—a race of angels.”35
The search for a national culture was a priority for Marcos, who saw it—in clearly Fanonian terms—as the “anchor” of a proud and noble race:
One of the most crucial tasks we faced after the declaration of martial law was to mend the tattered fabric of our society, to resuscitate the dying spirit of the nation. Clearly, the strategy for decolonization lay in a cultural liberation program directed toward an understanding, appreciation and internalization of our rich cultural heritage as a foundation for developing pride in ourselves as a people . . . meaningful and lasting change entails the reshaping not only of the existing social order but also of the consciousness of the individuals that together make up that order.36
For Marcos, national discipline rested on a concept of culture as both object and instrument of social and moral reform. Such faith in culture’s capacity to effect inner transformation as a necessary step toward securing external social transformation points to what Tony Bennett describes as a different mode of government, one “aimed at producing a citizenry, which, rather than needing to be externally and coercively directed, would increasingly monitor and regulate its own conduct.”37 For indeed, as Marcos put it, “We cannot permanently depend on the coercive powers of the state. We must give to the new political bond the force of our own individual discipline.”38 Marcos’s cultural liberation program was a bid to “governmentalize” culture—to “use culture as a resource through which those exposed to its influence would be led to ongoingly and progressively modify their thoughts, feelings and behaviour.”39
Marcos’s projection of a self-monitoring and self-regulating cultural subject bears a striking affinity with Foucault’s theory of governmentality. For Foucault, governmentality marked a radical shift in conceptions of the instruments and ends of government. Based on Machiavellian principles, earlier theories of governance gave to the state a single purpose: to secure the political obedience of the populace. This imperative was seen as the very precondition to the exercise of sovereignty, which in turn was pursued as an end in itself.40 Obedience to the law, in other words, made the end of sovereignty the exercise of sovereignty. With the rise of the modern state, Machiavellian notions of sovereignty gave way to a new conception of governance premised on the population as objects of care of the state. Eschewing the “self-referring circularity” of sovereignty, this mode of governance was characterized by a plurality of specific aims—for example, ensuring that the greatest possible quantity of wealth is produced, that the people are provided with the sufficient means of subsistence, and that the population is enabled to multiply. And so, while sovereignty looked to the law as the principal instrument for achieving obedience to the law, governmentality looked to how things were disposed to meet specific social ends.
In his Notes on the New Society of the Philippines, Marcos echoes Foucault’s observations on the circular logic of sovereignty (what Foucault calls juridico-discursive power). He concedes that the New Society readily calls to mind a Machiavellian “command society.” But such a society, he argues, has a weak social basis—a fear of authority—and can only engender a “crude discipline . . . the kind we have been subjected to as children.” It is therefore imperative to transcend the command society’s basis in notions of punishment: “We should be afraid of wrongdoing not because of the personal consequences to ourselves but because it might destroy the ‘balance’ of our community . . . Only in this way can our covenant with one another be made into a ‘lasting institution.’”41 Marcos introduces the notion of an “internal revolution” as the key to fostering a deeper social covenant:
We should not fall into the trap of a ‘surveilled’ society: this will defeat our purpose. Happily, our recourse was prescribed by Apolinario Mabini in another revolution, when he said that an ‘internal’ revolution was necessary for the success of an ‘external’
