Abstract

This lecture will investigate how technics are deployed in the organization of the authoritarian regimes of Rodrigo Duterte and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Langdon Winner (1977) defined technics as the “whole body of technical activities” with a methodic structure that people engage in to realize tasks and objectives. In this definition, technics include within its scope the technical as well as the practical dimensions of a method to secure a desired end. Following Michel Foucault’s (1980) concept of a regime of knowledge, I would extend the scope of technics to, on the one hand, include an epistemological dimension and, on the other, locate it in the realm of the political. Technics includes an epistemological dimension socially and discursively constructed and whose function is the organization of the technical process as well as its practical effects according to a specific logic.

The task at hand is broad and complex. The lecture will work on the initial approach of investigating the counterinsurgency programs of the two regimes. It will specifically analyze the communicative dimension of the said programs. This will include an analysis of the knowledge-constructing discourse of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) in their Facebook posts. It will compare and use two sets of Facebook posts of the NTF-ELCAC, one during the period of Duterte and another during the period of Marcos Jr. I will argue how Duterte and Marcos Jr.’s authoritarianism is partly organized by a meganet-enabled digital space whose discourse is actively shaped by the state through the NTF-ELCAC. Discourse is a strategic component of this authoritarianism and the existing functionalities afforded by Facebook – the technical component of the technics – largely enabled and empowered NTF-ELCAC to shape a discourse informed by an anti-terror logic. I will further argue how Duterte’s and Marcos Jr.’s authoritarian technics has extensively constructed and institutionalized a regime of knowledge and sanctioned definite forms of practices that reinforce authoritarianism.