Remaindered Life of Citizen-Man, Medium of Democracy

Abstract

The widely-lauded progressive achievements of U. S. colonialism in the Philippines during the early decades of the twentieth century included the installation of modern technologies of public sanitation, mass transportation, communication and education as necessary conditions of a developing democracy and its underlying humanism. This article discusses how emergent media of communication established under U. S. colonial rule contributed to the implementing of universal standards of human life and experience towards the formation of citizen-man, as the currency and code required for Filipinos' political self-rule. I analyze the reorganization of perceptual and subjective forms entailed by U. S. imperial forms of governmentality, including the gender and race effects of social accommodations to the protocols of personhood of citizen-man, through the media apparatuses of literature, photography, and radio. Finally, I examine other modes of sensorial experience and perceptibility and forms of human and social life, which are remaindered, devalued and/or rendered illegible in the reconfiguration of natives according to the normative ideals and structures of liberal democracy, in order to expand the parameters of our understanding of the relation between social media and democracy.