The Filipino Primitive. Sarita Echavez See

Murphy Memorial Museum). There is something about the collection and display of the Filipino that requires the erasure of the history of its presence. As Nerissa Balce has pointed out in her study of American war and photography, the visible representation of the Filipino in American culture paradoxically has secured the erasure of the circumstances surrounding that visibility.15

      However, in order to take up Derrida’s invitation to participate in the “deconstruction in progress” of the archive, I must exert pressure on his concept of the citizen in ways that complement, I think, the aforementioned critiques of Marx’s privileging of the proletariat over the colonized. In naming the jussive and sequential meanings invoked by the arkhe, Derrida argues that the former precedes the latter. The arkhe of commandment precedes—it is “even earlier” than—the arkhe of commencement.16 Accordingly, Derrida spends significantly more time explaining the “jussive” meaning of the word “archive” and its association with the law, “a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded.” The archons are “citizens” who wield power as the “guardians” of the documents that they physically collect, protect, and hermeneutically control. The archons are “accorded the hermeneutic right and competence.” Hence, “entrusted to such archons,” the documents come to “speak the law.”17 But where there are citizens, there are slaves. Nowhere in Derrida’s account of the jussive arkhe of commandment can we detect the presence of the slave in the house of the archon-citizen. Nowhere can we find the trace of what Fred Moten has called the para-ontological, the force exerted by the object of possession onto the subject.18 What is lacking is the history that ought to be.

      When we turn our attention to the sequential arkhe of commencement, we find that Derrida associates it with “the originary, the first, the principial [sic], the primitive.”19 Though Derrida clearly is referring to the temporal primitive, might the temporal primitive also be racial? Throughout this book I argue that the temporal primitive is a racial primitive.20 Our understanding of origins is always already racial. By engaging with the history of Marx’s idea of “primitive accumulation” and juxtaposing it with an analysis of the processes of “accumulating the primitive,” I join with Coulthard and others in understanding the temporal, especially the cumulation and the developmentalism of capital, as racial. Hence, as I elaborate in the first two chapters on the American museum, the acquisition of the racial primitive in the collections of the imperial archive—what the curator-critic Jan Bernabe has called the “archive imperative”—must be analyzed in conjunction with the acquisition of epistemological capital.21 When it comes to the American museum, the Philippine exhibition constitutes a space where a history ought to be. This book intervenes in that space free of history. I take up with hope Derrida’s proposition that the violence of the shelter provided by the archive is not easy to contain: “Contrary to the impression one often has, such a concept [of the arkhe] is not easy to archive.”22 But I take up Derrida’s proposition by picking up the pen—by writing—and in the rest of this introductory chapter, I address the politics of penmanship, the modes of freedom as well as enclosure that writing unleashes.

      Writing and Accumulation I: Penmanship, Enclosure, and the Coming of Style

      Though my itinerary might seem erratic, I propose that in order to arrive at the possibility of a decolonial study of the Philippine collection and exhibition in the American museum, one must take a detour through the history of the Western act, scene, and product of writing, which I argue fundamentally are intertwined with capitalist accumulation. In the following sections, I address these basic questions: What is the nature of the relationship between writing and accumulation? How might the study of this relationship allow us to unschool ourselves and interrupt the mastery of knowledge? I try to answer these questions by describing the political and ethical stakes of studying the relation between writing and accumulation. I argue that there is an intimate union, a marriage, between writing and accumulation. I first offer a condensed political history of that relationship, starting with the idea of penmanship as an act of stylistic enclosure that coincides with land enclosure, population transfer, and capitalist accumulation in early Renaissance Europe. I then analyze the relationship between the novel as a genre and property, specifically between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel and the themes of marriage and inheritance. From this account of the literary representation of shifts in modes of accumulation, I turn to theorists of color who challenge this marriage between writing, accumulation, and capital. In so doing, these variously minoritized scholars turn our attention to the possibility of the rewriting of debt. They propose that living in accumulated debt, normatively understood as a negative thing, is a positivity. They dare to ask what a general commitment to “disownership,” in Fred Moten’s phrasing, would look like in a world destroyed and made over more and more rapidly by accumulation.23 Who would do or who does such a foolish thing?

      By the end of this book, I will have argued that we need to listen to the foolish in order to unlearn the habit/us of capitalist accumulation, and I pay special attention to the foolishness of the illiterate. Though the illiterate usually are deemed limited by their incapacity to read, the illiterate must and do create alternative practices of coding and decoding untutored by the strictures of colonial education. Take, for example, Betty Grable’s character Loco in the classic Hollywood comedy How to Marry a Millionaire. Even as she gamely joins a husband-hunting scheme, Loco berates a would-be target when he decides to disinherit his daughter for marrying against his wishes. Loco says to him, “No matter how much money my mother didn’t have, she would never disinherit me.”24 It is Loco, the crazy and stupid one, who makes nonsense of the values of the rich, defends the values of the poor, and envisions a world without disinheritance. One cannot disinherit someone if one has no money: That is precisely Loco’s point. No one can disinherit anyone if no one has money.

      Like Loco, illiterates are unschooled, and that can be a positive quality. Though we are trained to value literacy and the literary as universal markers of intelligence and respectability, with each chapter in this book I offer a reading practice (paradoxically, I realize) that allows for more imaginative listening to the illiterate and the alternative knowledge generated by critical literalism. In chapter 3, on the writer Carlos Bulosan, I argue that his illiterate, low-born character Magno Rubio produces a highly literalist approach to words and, hence, to the world of debt peonage he inhabits. Magno Rubio can expose systemic structures of exploitation and violence with much more acuity than can his more educated coworkers. This form of literalism is discernible in visual art too. Chapter 4, on the artist Stephanie Syjuco, argues that Syjuco’s way of sticking to the surface—in her nearly two-dimensional sculpture—recalls and renovates Karl Marx’s insistence that a critique of capitalism must begin not with the fantasy of the origin or the concrete base of the economy but rather with phenomena like money that we see immediately on the surface of society. In the concluding chapter, I focus on Syjuco’s social media and online crowdsourcing practices. Stepping out of the museum proper, I discuss contemporary practices of accumulation in order to provide a critique of the recent, presumably anti-capitalist trend of consuming craft practices—from homemade soap to DIY carpentry to so-called back-to-the-land homesteading.

      But what do I mean when I say that there is an intimate union between writing and accumulation? Let us take up the pen. In his study The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital, Richard Halpern argues that the rise of different writing—penmanship—styles in early Renaissance England coincided with massive political, socioeconomic, and cultural upheavals in the wake of enclosure, population transfer, and capitalist accumulation. Writing capital has everything to do with “breeding capital,” in Halpern’s phrase, and we can trace that relationship through the surprising link between the figure of the beggar and the figure of the schoolboy.25 According to Halpern, during this era of tremendous displacement and dispossession, the truancy of the wandering vagrant was transformed—schooled, as it were—into the truancy of the absentee pupil. From there, Halpern outlines how this transformation was both reflected and effected by the pedagogy of penmanship and the stylistic enclosure of schoolboys.

      Before focusing on the graphological pen, Halpern first accounts for the geographical penning in of people and