Neferti XM Tadiar: Things Fall Away (2009) and Remaindered Life (2022) (Marisol Vasquez, Non Core Post 9 / 10 )

I have been reading Neferti XM Tadiar’s Remaindered Life on and off this past semester. I also read a few of her chapters from her earlier work Things Fall Away. I like how Tadiar sometimes throws some media theory to the wayside and applies it loosely to think about the way that bodies and infrastructures can become a type of media or technology. For example, in Things Fall Away Tadiar states:

“Under the dominant sway of capitalist imperatives, supplementary modes of experience have wrought the transformed conditions of the national ‘‘prostitution’’ economy, the diaspora of domestic labor, the explosion of the urban informal economy, the rise of crony capitalism, the metropolitanist restructuring of the nation’s capital, the deracination of the peasantry, the modernization of social relations in the countryside, the democra- tization of the nation, and the emergence of a permanent political state of emergency. These fallout experiences articulated in contemporary Philippine literatures can therefore serve as devices for tracking the dynamics of political and economic transformation, which they invisibly mediate.” (Tadiar 8) 

 In other words, Tadiar thinks more about how the bodies inscribed with devalued labor are mediated within these economic transformations. Again, I like how her deployment of media theory is less theoretically disembodied and considers its materiality on invisible lives. Although I am quoting her earlier work Things Fall Away, her new book Remaindered Life shares many resonances. 

Works Cited

Neferti X. M. Tadiar and Fredric Jameson. Things Fall Away. Duke University Press, 2009, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392446.