The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in Recent Philippine History

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.