Remaindered Life of Citizen-Man, Medium of Democracy

東 南 アジア 研 究
49 巻 3 号
democracy, but more importantly the very form of value-abstraction intrinsic to the commodity.
In the altered status of the aesthetic image as simultaneously matter and meaning, in the silent
eloquence of things themselves, which short story writers strove to craft (Arguillaʼs
contribution to Philippine literature acknowledged as “his blending of fact and symbol, his
creation of congruence of style and language and experience” [Hosillos 1984: 119]), we recognize
the perceptual effects of the separation between abstract exchange-value and concrete usevalue
defining the commodity-form. 23)
The separation performed in this mode of symbolizing is crucial to the distanciation within
the subject that the short story performs between the reflective self and his nature, a
distanciation that Paul de Man argues is the structure of irony. Indeed, I would argue that the
program of the short story is the performance of this structure of irony, which de Man reads in
Baudelaire in terms of “dédoublement as the characteristic that sets apart a reflective activity,
such as that of the philosopher, from the activity of the ordinary self caught in everyday
concerns” [de Man 1983: 212]. Baudelaireʼs description of the reflective self as “un homme qui
ait acquis, par habitude, la force de se dédoubler rapidement et dʼassister comme spectateur
désinteressé aux phénomènes de son moi” articulates the subjectifying effect of this mode of
symbolizing [quoted in ibid.: 211-212]. The “disinterested spectator” is constituted through the
differentiation (alienation or separation) of the experiencing human self from the self caught in
and as part of the (nonhuman) natural, empirical world. If irony is a synchronic structure, in
which the process of distanciation between selves takes place in a single moment, the
commonwealth short story distills this single moment in the instantaneity of the symbol.
The aesthetics of the commodity form, as a secularized, subjectifying relation to social
power, thus becomes generalized as the principle for decoding social relations and individual
behavior and for constructing meaningful experience, a hermeneutic or principle of intelligibility
that was to apply more broadly to the world at large. Paradoxically, it is through the
Filipinization of qualities and themes conveyed by the apparatus of “national literature” that a
particular practice of abstraction is universalized and a colonial history of remaindering of
alternative forms of life is extended.
23) Following on Alfred Sohn-Rethelʼs thesis that “the formal analysis of the commodity holds the key
to . . . the historical explanation of the abstract conceptual mode of thinking and of the division of
intellectual and manual labor that came into existence with it,” Žižek argues that the structure of the
commodity-form articulates the anatomy of the Kantian transcendental subject, which serves as “the
a priori frame of ʻobjectiveʼ scientific knowledge” [Žižek 1997: 16]. My argument is slightly different
in that I am not claiming that the short story installs the Kantian transcendental subject. Rather, I am
arguing that writers labored to approximate the protocols of perception and proper “modern” mode
of symbolizing, which they diligently learned from U. S. and European writers of the short story, in
order to convey Filipino humanity to an international community, by participating in “the world
republic of letters.” In doing so, they visibly display the aesthetic precepts of capitalist modernity.
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