Abstract
This essay follows in the wake of recent philosophical writings, principally by Jacques Derrida, on the ineradicable relationship between faith and knowledge, a relationship which comes to us by way of the history of Christianity. At bottom, what links the two is the act of promising; and what makes promising possible are the workings of the technological. Promises arguably lie at the basis of the political and the social. The possibility of making and breaking pledges, of bearing or renouncing obligations, of exchanging vows and taking oaths forges a sense of futurity and chance, allowing an opening to otherness. It is this possibility of promising that engenders the sense of something to come, of events yet to arrive, hence of a messianism underlying both historical time and political engagement. Without promises, neither covenants nor consensus nor conflicts could arise, and neither would the sense of contingency these invariably foster. These matters of hope in a messianic future and the technologies through which they are conveyed link the study of the Catholic Mass to studies of more subtle, less obvious, but Masslike cultural scenes of the sort I consider here.
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Notes
For a succinct historical analysis of the Philippine state, see Benedict Anderson, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines,” in The Specter of Comparisons (London: Verso 1998),192–226.
John Sidel, Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999);
Paul D. Hutchcroft, Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
I owe this term to James T. Siegel, Fetish Recognition Revolution (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), perhaps one the most important and incisive works on the relationship between nationalism and technology.
For a discussion of the historical link between linguistic and social hierarchies, see Vicente L. Rafael, “Taglish, or the Phantom Power of the Lingua Franca,” in White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 162–89.
For a discussion of the history of this nationalist fantasy, see the introduction to Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
For an elaboration of the notion of damayan, see Reynaldo Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Uprisings in the Philippines, 1840–1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979).
Fenella Cannell on Bikol province, south of Manila, Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
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© 2006 Bruce T. Morrill, Joanna E. Ziegler, and Susan Rodgers
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Rafael, V.L. (2006). The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in Recent Philippine History. In: Morrill, B.T., Ziegler, J.E., Rodgers, S. (eds) Practicing Catholic. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982964_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982964_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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