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Time, Landscape and Desire in Singapore Lee Weng Choy It's been a while since I've dreamt of flying. The closest I've come to it these days is the little "air time" I get while dreaming that I'm jumping to slam dunk a basketball (something I can't, sadly, do in reality). It's been said that dreams about flying, as well as dreams about basketball (scoring), are dreams about sex. Why I'm thinking about flying right now doesn't have to do with sexual desire so much, but desire nonetheless. When I started writing down these impressions, I was standing on a hill in San Francisco, watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean. And the colours of the sky, the great expanse of water, made me think of how wonderful it would be to be a sea bird - I know it's a cliche’d image, but perhaps it was fitting; I was, after all, on vacation, visiting a place where I used to live. I live in Singapore now, and it is Singapore which is the real location of these thoughts. In Singapore, on the other hand, I hardly ever think about flying over the city. In Singapore, the notion of a bird's eye view - for me at least - has less to do with enjoying the island's scenery than with a frame of mind prevalent amongst those of us who live here who've made a vocation out of "reading" this place. Get a bunch of artists together, for instance, and it won't be long before the subject moves away from the particular issues of, say, installation art to the problems of society at large: that the education system here neglects the arts, that the government is constraining, that the people are overly consumerist, and so on. It is hard to find talk about any dimension of Singaporean life that does not quickly turn into a commentary about the totality of the Singapore system. No doubt this reflex is a product of living with a state which itself has been so totalising in its perceptions and actions. And of course the "reader" of Singapore par excellence is none other than Lee Kuan Yew, with his "helicopter", if not quite bird's eye, view, and his "authoritative" readings of events past, present and future. But the desire to read in terms of the total seems to emanate from almost everywhere: not only from those who are in control, but from those who complain as well as those who celebrate; from the conservative to the critical. While I might not fantasise about flying over the country, I must admit that flying into Singapore by airplane can be rather dramatic: you pass the jungles of Johore and then there emerge towers of HDB (Housing Development Board) flats, skyscrapers and highways. Nevertheless, Singapore is perhaps the greenest of the capital cities in Southeast Asia. The tree-lined drive from the airport into town certainly gives a good and strong impression to the newly arrived. But somehow, I want more; this is the tropics. One of my fantasies is for the length of Orchard Road to be covered by a canopy of tropical forest, with the buildings punching through. Nature is certainly everywhere here, but the enduring impression I have of this city is of the single-minded desire for mastery over nature. Since Independence, hills have been flattened and land has been "reclaimed" to expand the country's surface area. One imagines that the whole terrain of the island can be transformed by instrumental reason if so desired. This desire for mastery is of course what has been traditionally defined as the essence of urbanisation. Singapore is just a particularly successful example. If the island could be covered with a dome and entirely airconditioned, it probably would. On my last vacation, San Francisco reminded me about an aspect of city life which is so obvious, but which I had forgotten: that nature is not absent, but in fact abounds in the city. We may think that concrete, steel, glass and asphalt dominate, but sometimes what gives a particular corner of town its character are its trees. And what is a city without its parks? - what apartment block is completely bereft of potted plants and pets? Much as we urban dwellers drive nature away, we also always try to reintroduce it into the metropolis. For all our efforts to control, to order, to be industrial, mechanical, technological, one could say that "Nature" - in the many roles which it plays (from the beautiful, the pastoral, the opposite-of-culture, or the unconscious) - is the repressed of the city, which inevitably returns. Even with Singapore in mind, there are few big cities I know of where nature is as visible as in San Francisco. It's most famous landmark, for example, The Golden Gate Bridge, is spectacular precisely because of that combination of natural splendour and civil engineering. The bridge heightens, frames our awareness of the hills and mountains, the mouth of the bay opening into the Pacific; yet it is these same surroundings which frame and make the bridge so pretty. One is always looking at a view in San Francisco: whether at the Golden Gate and Marin County from some hill in the city, or the city itself while driving along a windy road in the Oakland hills. Sure, the San Francisco Bay Area is intensely developed and urban, but everywhere "Nature" is there - indeed, it is the frame of almost every view. In contrast, my own experience of Singapore as a place has little to do with such views, or the object of such views - landscapes - but with time. This would seem inevitable, as Singapore is, as almost everyone either always says, or is always told, a very small place. But the way in which accidents are used as explanations almost always betray an overcompensation. Singapore's small size may be an accident of geography and history, but we who live here seem to have made a fetish out of the country's small size. My own feeling is this is not all that small a space. Personally, I find it too crowded, but it is, after all, a city - yet is it not also a country? Perhaps the problem with size has a lot to do with this bipolar confusion: city or country? If it is a city, then I would argue it still has plenty of space. The island that is Manhattan - another favourite vacation destination of mine - is much smaller than Singapore, and no less populated. Speaking of Manhattan, I was there again on this last trip. Visiting Manhattan is like walking into a movie. Every thing is an image of itself. The camera loves Manhattan. Every person, every street scene, is incurably photogenic, and simply by virtue of being framed by the city itself. If San Francisco for me is a city of vistas where the urban is always framed by nature - hills or bay, blue sky or ocean - then New York is the city where life, as incredibly diverse, teeming and vibrant as it is, is always mediated by the idea of the "City". It may no longer be the ideal or model for metropolises around the world, but New York remains the paradigm of the experience of the "City": with its rectangular grid, its grandiose pretensions - it is densely built-up, diverse and dynamic, relentless, intimidating and exciting, alienating yet welcoming, simultaneously snobbish and down-to-earth, a centre of capitalism, crime and culture. New York may be far more exciting, but Singapore is no less a city of signs. And signs which are appropriated from everywhere: from Disneyland to ancient Asian traditions. It is this great capacity - seamless and relentless - to appropriate which characterises Singapore as a city pervaded by the idea of progress - the city as predicated on the future. In Singapore I never forget where I am. How can one? - there is the hot, humid climate. But it is more than that. When I go on vacation, say to San Francisco, I experience multiple times; I experience decades. I visit old neighbourhoods that seem largely unchanged since I first saw them, or will discover places which look like they that haven't changed since the '80s or '70s or '60s. If I went to, say, Paris or Beijing I would experience centuries. In India, it would be millennia. But in Singapore, there seems to be only one time: the present, a hurried present. Every old building seems to wear a worrisome face - of being under siege, of waiting to be knocked down or perhaps worse, renovated. Life may be more hectic in Hong Kong, Tokyo, or in New York, but I don't know of any place else where it feels that everyone marches in the same step. The pace, although it might not be the fastest on the planet, is perhaps the most persistent. New York, San Francisco, Singapore. For me, each in turn embodies, is framed by, an extreme of the urban experience: the idea of the "City", the return of nature, and the march of time. Like most Singaporeans I always feel busy, pressured by work. Over-working is like an epidemic in Singapore, a disease that has gotten out of control. Life in Singapore is work, and work is about the pressures of time more than the pleasures of place. So no wonder I don't take the time to contemplate my environs. I associate the pleasures of place with outside of Singapore, outside, when I go on vacation for rest and relaxation. I sleep so much better elsewhere. The other outside for me is the movies. Movies that almost always take place elsewhere (which would not be remedied even if Singapore's film industry were to take off, I watch so many). Movie-going is an avoidance of real-time: I suspend disbelief and sit in the dark of cinema-houses, watching, usually, the latest Hollywood fare - which so often seduce me with the promise that New York or San Francisco will be the backdrop. But when I leave the cinema the warm air of Singapore has the effect of the warm air of getting out of the airport after flying in from the United States. Movie-going has been compared to dreaming. But travelling is also like dreaming. It always surprises me how easily, after eleven months of being away, I can automatically slip into being in San Francisco or New York, and feel like I was there yesterday. And when I am there, Singapore feels like a dream. When I return, the situation instantly reverses, and then the American vacation becomes dreamlike. I am fortunate that I can take the time to have extended vacations and travel. Perhaps it is significant that my vacations, my travels, are to places of my past. So that when I go to San Francisco, part of my pleasure is being struck by the fact and experience that some things haven't change, that my old friends are still there. Which is the opposite of what I feel about Singapore. That things are always changing. There is always some new building or infrastructure that I will have noticed has started or completed when I return. Obviously, my comparisons are problematic. Because I work in Singapore and I vacation elsewhere, it is unfair to compare time in Singapore with time elsewhere. If I don't admit to being anxiously obsessed with Singapore's size, I do make a fetish of the Outside. Why do I live in Singapore, if I my enjoyment is framed by elsewhere? This association between one's homeland, work and time versus the Other country and pleasure is perhaps true for people who live elsewhere than Singapore. A friend of mine in San Francisco was saying the same: that she can never really enjoy a vacation unless she leaves town. But from my own experience the situation in Singapore is unique; I have lived elsewhere, including the San Francisco Bay Area and I have never felt so divided in my experience of the present/work versus the vacation/Other-place/the past. I believe Singapore itself encourages this division. In an article published in "The City", a special issue of Commentary, Sanjay Krishnan argued: "because Singapore is a small country, because it is a metropolis without a hinterland ... This means our lack of space has forced us to think our relationship to our surroundings more in terms of time, or the changes effected through time, instead of our experience of spaces." Singapore is small, my qualifications notwithstanding, and this smallness has become a ruling idea - so much so that we have no space, and thus time is everything. And so we are always running out of time. That is why I find that I immediately experience another time elsewhere. That elsewhere there is always more time. My ramblings about vacation have a parallel in the nostalgia Singaporeans feel for that most sentimentally charged, lost landscape, the kampung. Sociologist Chua Beng Huat,in his article, "Nostalgia for Kampungs", explains how Singaporean nostalgia for the kampung, "particularly for those who had never lived in one", is a symptom of the "politicisation of stress". Invoking the spirit of the kampung is a popular, if not entirely articulate, response to the stresses of living under the disciplinary effects of industrial capitalism. Lost are the joys of carefree childhood; these have been replaced by long hours of study and compulsory extra curricular activities. Gone is the spontaneity of casual interaction among acquaintances which are fundamental to feelings of belonging and community-building; in its place is the feeling of social isolation in a sea of strangers within a new town with a formally planned, uniform visual environment that defies instant recognition of one's immediate location. Gone too are the high levels of discretionary free time to be filled with leisure activities; instead, there is a constant filling up of hours by externally imposed work which is often more alienating than self-actualising. But, as Chua argues, nostalgia for the kampung is by no means a desire to return to its specific reality, "with all its material disadvantages"; rather, this nostalgia is "indicative of the desire to 'rest', to be content with one's lot after having strived for long and arduous years, instead of striving for just that little bit more." However, this desire to reassert control over one's life and thus over the logic of capital, will not, as Chua reminds us, be supported by a government whose very legitimacy from the onset has been predicated on ceaseless economic development. "The people must be constantly pushed to the competitive edge, for to rest content is to risk being overtaken by others ..." My desires, I have hoped to suggest, while they are not exactly for Singapore, are of Singapore. This desire for the Other, for the Outside, for an Other time, is a typical Singaporean desire, a desire produced in reaction to this bargain we have made with global capitalism. In his book on the "experience of modernity", All that is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman offers us Goethe's Faust as a central image for the condition of modern society and the modern individual. Faust is famous as love story whose protagonist makes a bargain with the devil, but for Berman, the play epitomises the idea that self-development and economic development "must fuse into one, before either of these archetypally modern promises can be fulfilled". These great developments - intellectual, moral, economic, social - that Faust initiates have great human costs. "This is the meaning of Faust's relationship with the devil: human powers can be developed only through what Marx called 'the powers of the underworld', dark and fearful energies that may erupt with a horrible force beyond all human control." For Berman, "Goethe's Faust is the first, and still the best, tragedy of development." While Singapore does not conceive of its capitalist development in terms of tragedy, as Krishan notes: We imagine ourselves as being in a state of perpetual crisis, solving one problem in order to anticipate the next; articulating our history not in terms of the past, but of the future ... Here success is tied to the discipline and efficiency with which the social workforce has subjected itself to this idea of "speed" and its concomitant structures of control.... Here the lack of space enforces the need to exploit time better, be it in terms of greater productivity, timing, or planning. We imagine ourselves concretely through endless projections; whether short- or long-term we build our city as we build our nation, through an inevitable future of shocking change, visualised and manipulated through time. We might go so far as to claim that it is the precise lack of space that has forced Singaporean society to a will to mastery over time. Singapore overcompensates, has performance anxiety. Not that it fails to perform, but it fears that it might - it flies, but has a "fear of flying". And perhaps like the protagonist in the Erica Jong novel, Singapore is torn between a lover which can perform (global capitalism), and a lover which cannot, but is more desired (a sense of arrival, of happiness). The view from above, while it has become the modus operandi of both Singapore's leadership and its critics, this above, is also an outside. In Singapore it is so difficult to be in Singapore. At the forum "Visual Articulation of Urbanised Spaces", organised jointly by the Goethe-Institut and the Singapore Art Museum, one speaker, architect Richard Ho, expressed his concerns that our particular modes of mastering time might render us poorer socially and culturally. Architecture is for Ho a vital archive of social memory. He criticised the way our economic development appropriates architectural heritage at the expense of other values, historical, architectural and cultural. As an example, he discussed the conversion of the former girls convent school, the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus (CHIJ), into its present state as a shopping and restaurant complex. No advocate of Catholicism, Ho is nevertheless angered by how the conversion has utterly disregarded the chapel's history: it can now be rented as a venue for all sorts of functions and parties. What is equally disturbing is that a basement has been added, and constructed so as to give the impression that the former school had a catacomb-like lower level. For Ho this collapsing of the present and past, this invention of a false past in Singapore buildings runs counter to function of architecture as being part of our social memory. Chua, also a speaker at this forum, responded to Ho's comments unsympathetically. The former seemed less concerned about any decline into a state of architectural kitsch than the predominance in Singapore of this wishing to be elsewhere, this wishing for things to be otherwise. We wish we didn't have such bad architecture and taste; we wish we had a more engaged civil society; we wish we didn't live under this paternalistic government. Chua argued that foreigners, outsiders, don't seem to have a problem reading Singapore; it is we who live here who have a problem reading this place. Singaporeans seem to forget that this seamless, relentless appropriation is in fact our culture. Ironically, for a society which is so thoroughly framed by the economic, the idea that the economic character of our society is fundamental to our culture is repressed; instead, what we desire from culture is couched longingly in terms of ethnicity and the arts. Singaporean desire - as with any desire, if psychoanalysis offers any insight - is framed by misrecognition. According to psychoanalysis, the infant first acquires a sense of identity when he has an image of himself which unifies all his disjointed experiences. To do so, he identifies with this image, and so much so that it is a process of self love. But the infant - or the society, if we see this desire writ large - misrecognises this imagined unity as an ideal, as something more perfect and thus as something other than what it is. So at the moment it says, "this is me", it is also saying "I am another". Chua is not suggesting that we simply celebrate what we have, as if by finally recognising what we are then we would become whole and happy - as if this "it" were the essense of our identity and self-contentment. Rather, he suggests that we should move away from this wishing to be elsewhere, which dangerously belies a desire for any solution to be a total solution. Intervention should be in the specific, the particular. We need to move beyond the view from above, to the ground; we shouldn't be only preoccupied with flying, but learn to walk, slowly. In reading the signs and texts that make up Singapore, perhaps we should take heed from German critic Walter Benjamin, who wrote in "One-Way Street": The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it ... |