Sherman Tan

Table of Contents (tentative)

Preface …… Or, Why Romeo and Juliet Doesn’t Quite Cut It

Introduction

Part I: Context
Chapter 1 …… We Contemporary, “Cool”  Singaporeans
Chapter 2 …… The (Chinese) Millennial Complaint

Part II: Courtship
Chapter 3 …… “Coffee” Meets “Bagel”
Chapter 4 …… Courting Consumers
Chapter 5 …… Courting Citizens

Part III: Caution
Chapter 6 …… Carnal Compulsions
Chapter 7 …… Cunning Charades
Chapter 8 …… Uncertain Consequences

Part IV: Connection
Chapter 9 …… Contemplation and (Self-)Control
Chapter 10 …… Comparison and Class-ification
Chapter 11 …… Closeness and Commitment

Conclusion …… Contentment and Compromise?

[ Short Abstract ]  In this thesis, I argue that the rising levels and subjective experiences of singlehood in Singapore are symptomatic of broader currents of social change and (pseudo)liberalisation in the country. Especially among younger Singaporeans, and with the advent of postmodern culture, there exist collective desires (both real and imagined) to overcome political and social histories of patriarchy and authority, in the public/private domains of state governance, work, education, family and friendship. However, these desires to liberalize and seek emancipation through singledom (and other everyday personal projects) ultimately fall short of expectations, or fail to satisfy positive expectations, since they must contend with the elusiveness of identity, and the vacuity and uncertainty of an ineradicable political, cultural and historical void in postcolonial Singapore. Ironically, attempts to search for (or revive) authentic forms of freedom in a (highly desired) postmodern, post-Oedipal, secular and post-ideological Singapore, instead, continue to produce disillusionments and offer no relief from precarity/uncertainty, whilst unwittingly creating new “gods” and novel forms of (self) regulation and control.

[ Extended Abstract ]          I started on my Ph.D. journey, in 2014, with the intention of writing an ethnography of romantic relationships, dating culture and singlehood in Singapore. My anthropological enterprise, however, has diverged from a straightforward description of gendered, class-stratified or racial distinctions of elective/non-elective, short-term/durable singledom. Instead, for all its specific forms, embodiments and particularities, I argue that the experience and cultural representations of singledom should be employed as a critical heuristic towards understanding postcolonial Singapore and the aporias which mark the advent of hyper-capitalism on the island-state. In particular, singlehood as a social phenomenon highlights the chronic desire - yet, dissatisfaction - at the level of intimate relationships, as symptomatic of impasses and antagonisms that plague the celebratory discourses and practices of neoliberalism, consumerism and technological capitalism in first-world Singapore. I argue that singlehood, and its subsequent and multiple trajectories into marriage, coupledom and family (however these may be defined), is inevitably afflicted with what Lauren Berlant (2011) calls “cruel optimism”, and must contend with what Mari Ruti (2009) describes in psychoanalytic terms as “the fall of fantasies” amidst “a world of fragile things”. In other words, the promises of happiness and fulfilment that attach to couplehood and family life may be found wanting - or at the least, fraying - even as these intimate relationships are paradoxically idealised by the state, community and individuals, yet experienced at some point as dissatisfying or insufficient, amidst a lifeworld of other persistent desires.

Taking as my starting point, and focusing on the embodied experiences of singles in Singapore, as well as cultural and mediated representations of singledom in theatre, film, television and cyberspace, I attempt to conceptually distill and describe the permanence of “singleness" at an interpersonal and social-relational level, differentiating this categorically from singlehood/singledom as lived experience or symbolic presentation. “Singleness", as a marker of Singaporean contemporaneity, is defined as the persistent void/otherness and irretrievable loss of authenticity which eludes each attempt at identification and self-identity. As such, “singleness" may be genealogically traced from the inauguration of an independent, postcolonial Singapore - uniquely divorced from any sense of historical indignity or singular cultural tradition/origin - and further sustained through, and in spite of, the compulsive (and repetitive) labour of state-making alongside projects of social construction and self-determination. Concurrently, encounters with “singleness" are ever more pronounced against what I describe as  the advent of "postmodern culture" in Singapore - a transitory and unstable social formation, involving intellectual, artistic, public and individual ambitions to move beyond various forms of patriarchy and authority, to ultimately post-oedipal and post-ideological cultural configurations. “Singleness", in itself, as irreducible void/otherness, however, may neither be approached directly nor observed empirically, only inferred from all necessarily futile attempts to eradicate this lacuna or furnish it with positive and progressive meaning. Not limited to its manifestation in singlehood, “singleness" - as a palpable sense of nullity and absence - traverses various spaces and scales of political, cultural and social being in Singapore. It motivates desires for (re)productivity in the time of neoliberal personhood, while producing abjections (avoidances/dismissals) of personal, communal and national confrontations with existential precarity, (ir)relevance and (in)significance, amidst a constantly changing global climate of migration, labour and capital flows.

Ultimately, singlehood/singledom (as embodied experience or cultural-symbolic representation) is a fertile site of enquiry for the presence and definition of “singleness” in the Singaporean context. During my year-and-a-half-long fieldwork in the country, singles - of different class, gender and religious orientations, and across various ages - bore attitudes towards their singledom as personally liberating or limiting, or were simply ambivalent towards their experience of singlehood. However - and regardless of their existence as happy, bitter or indifferent singles - the material and existential conditions of singledom afforded these individuals a space of heightened recognition, reflection, (re)assessment of their participation in meaningful life projects, whether this entailed the persistent search for intimate partnership and the desire for marriage and family, and/or involved having sufficient time to pursue activities such as activism, philanthropy, and the enjoyment of a new hobby, or material fulfillment within the pleasure-circuits of urban consumerism. The horizon of “singleness”, as described above, appears in the experience of singlehood as the relentless personal pursuit of symbolic goals and simulacra (Baudrillard, 1981) in the time of late- or hyper-capitalism, accompanied by an equally fastidious repudiation of lethargy and fatalism in singledom and their damaging effects. These (temporal and sometimes temporary) pursuits and desires take on both embodied emotional and material forms of labour, but more importantly, single individuals stress the enduring need for personal productivity in these spaces, citing narratives of precarious, banal and meaningless living which should be avoided at all costs. At the same time, “singleness” permeates the lives of single individuals (and arguably, couples too) through the state ideology and cultural impetus, more than anything, to substitute these forms of personal productivity for possible biological reproductivity in the familial domain. In short, the clearest encounter with “singleness” in singlehood may be traced in the double-movement of desiring and searching for productive activity (and desire itself), and the concomitant abjection of insignificant and purposeless lives. However, “singleness” stubbornly persists even when singlehood ends, both in the duration or aftermath of singledom, underlined by narratives of dissatisfaction and restlessness in coupledom and family life, and encapsulated by the ineradicable social demand that one’s commitment to intimate relationships and families must contend with other capitalist desires in a Singaporean cultural lifeworld which stresses material enjoyment and pleasurable self-improvement.

In Singapore, government language policy promotes Mandarin as the official Chinese variety, while discouraging the use of other Chinese ‘dialects.’ This article examines Singaporean citizens’ comments in blogs and discussion forums about the value and relevance of these stigmatized languages. While these online discourses overtly contrast with state discourses in their positive evaluations of the non-Mandarin languages, both bodies of discourse presuppose a common ground of language ideology: namely that a language is an alienable commodity that can be actively manipulated and that possesses a specific value. The discourses also follow shared patterns of constructing sociolinguistic difference through semiotic processes of iconization, recursivity and erasure. My analysis distinguishes between the discourses’ implicit language-ideological presuppositions and their explicitly articulated linguistic-evaluative content, and traces their interrelation. The shared presuppositions are important for actors’ bids to enlist (different) normative sociolinguistic hierarchies in the service of projects of hegemonic nation-building, as well as for the purposes of politically subversive identity work.

In this paper, I explore a range of sociological and anthropological theories that either (i) stress structural determination, (ii) stress agency and intentionality, or (iii) attempt to reconcile both the structural and agential dimensions of social action. In particular, I provide a brief outline of Durkheimian functionalism, Max Weber's writings and Rational Choice Theory, as well as recent theoretical models that stress a dialectical relationship between structure and agency - namely, Anthony Giddens' Structuration Theory and Pierre Bourdieu's ideas on habitus and fields.

The Singapore Chinese community has been experiencing a major language shift the last few decades. The use of Chinese vernaculars for intra-ethnic communication has given way to an increasing presence of English or Mandarin Chinese in most domains of language use. This is mainly a result of government language policy as well as the rising importance of languages with more global relevance. This paper examines how family structure can play a role in influencing language use, language attitudes and language identity among younger generation Singaporeans vis-à-vis Chinese vernaculars. Through individual interviews, the study gathered data from 19 Singaporeans from two types of family background (extended family vs nuclear families). The findings indicate that participants who grew up in extended families are more likely to use more vernaculars and are also more likely to be positively oriented towards the use of vernaculars. However, living in extended families per se does not account for this trend. Closer analysis shows that it is the nature and extent of the interaction in the vernacular with the grandparents in extended families that better explain positive attitudes to vernaculars. The wider implications of these findings for language maintenance and shift of minority languages are discussed in the framework of social interactional view of language.

In Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled (2012, NYU Press), Michael Cobb proposes to attach “the letter ‘S’ to the LGBTQ abbreviation (LGBTQS)”, calling for a greater critical attention to singlehood, as part of “sexualities that deserve more sustained attention, political interventions, and cultural investigations” (p. 5). I respond to Cobb's provocation, taking seriously the phenomenon of singledom among youths and working adults in Singapore, experienced existentially as a choice and/or a curse. Drawing upon eight months of initial fieldwork in Singapore, I attend to the state's hegemonic discourse of heterosexual coupledom, family and reproduction, and by contrast, its presentation of the rising levels of singlehood as a crisis of capitalist modernity and development - a problem to be addressed by extensive social engineering and public education. At the same time, I examine the mediated and cultural literacies of singlehood in the country, including (but not limited to) filmic, theatrical and televised presentations of dating, courtship and romantic desire, the increasing popularity of matchmaking agencies and rising use of internet-based or mobile dating applications, as well as everyday talk and attitudes toward being single in Singapore. By doing so, I will unpack the complexities of this cultural production; being single involves learning and embodying particular subjectivities, both in terms of one's emotions, behaviours and desires. Ultimately, I broach the question of how and why singlehood constitutes a troubling aporia for the Singaporean state and wider society. I ask why singledom is often viewed as a necessarily temporary or deficient condition of individual being - singles are treated as wanting to be happily “coupled” - or as living barely bearable, unhappy and/or unfulfilled lives. Subsequently, the need to eradicate or sublate singlehood into the couple or familial unit suggests its existence as a dangerous excess for state and society. By focusing on the elected singlehood of young educated middle-class women in Singapore, and on feminist activism in the country, I enquire into what being single means, as a queer sexual, but also moral and political stance, against prevailing heteronormative state and social expectations in this particular Asian context. Overall, I propose to think about singlehood, but also with it, as generative of critical insight and as potential queer resistance.

In Singapore, low-waged migrant workers from around Asia amount to at least 20 percent of the total population. While much of the academic literature ethnographically documents the labour conditions endured by these workers, as well as their personal relationships with familial kin from their countries of origin, there is a significant lack of critical analysis pertaining to the ways in which Singaporean citizens relate to these migrant others in everyday contexts. I suggest that these inter-asian ties, between citizen-subjects and migrants, are increasingly mediated by a politics of sympathetic affect, harnessed by activist groups such as Transient Workers Count Too (TwC2) and other advocates for the rights and recognition of these migrant communities, pressing for the betterment of their working and living conditions. Sympathetic identification with migrant others, in particular, operates with a lexicon of humanising personal narratives – ranging from migrants’ experiences of estrangement from loved ones, to scenes of suffering amidst the hardships wrought upon them by work demands and living in foreign lands. However, these emancipatory projects, must also be critically examined against the spectre of migrants’ racial otherness – which often invokes visceral and embodied responses of disgust, fear and anxiety for Singaporean citizens – in light of migrants’ co-habitation of urban space in modern, land-scarce Singapore. While not discrediting the intentions of TwC2 and other forms of advocacy to better migrants’ circumstances, I examine, in more critical detail, the ethical and epistemological entailments of a politics of affective recognition, centred on these migrant workers. In particular, I argue that the ways by which they are interpellated into the Singaporean imagination, involve the reproduction of dominant gendered (heteronormative) ideologies of familial intimacy and “reproductive futurity” (Edelman, 2004). At the same time, promises of solidarity with migrant workers are based on shared trajectories of hope and longing for personal fulfilment, derived ultimately from private desire and affectionate relationships, often juxtaposed with migrants’ cruel but inevitable alienation in capitalist immersion, exploitation and inequity. In this regard, the imaginative and fantasmatic projections of otherness and the production of sympathetic affects directed at migrant communities, may well indeed serve the reflexive and self-identificatory projects of Singaporean citizen-subjects, and simultaneously, obscure other emergent asymmetries in us-other relations.

[SHORT ABSTRACT] Romantic love in Singapore unfolds through film, television and in everyday relations. Tensions exist between the (neo)liberal, orderly aesthetics of living and transgressive aspects of passionate love. I describe the public scenes and political impasses engendered by these affective configurations.

[FULL ABSTRACT] Contemporary Singaporean living takes place at the intersection of multiple forces, namely, political transitions from the developmental state to neoliberal governance, the rapid rise of an urban landscape pervaded by market capitalism and widespread consumerism, together with the ruling elite’s sustained emphasis on developing a unique yet hybrid postcolonial identity for its citizenry, drawing on their multicultural and multireligious “Asian” modernity and traditions. While there has been much academic interest concerning these state-sanctioned modernising trajectories, little has been written about the intimate spaces and affective tenor of everyday relationships. From portrayals of love, desire and sexuality in recent Singapore cinema and television soap operas, to observations from my initial fieldwork of six months, I focus on the lived experience of romantic relationships as a site of intergenerational reproduction, socialised habit, cultural innovation, as well as intensified attachments to material objects and fantasies. I argue that these relationships are marked by tensions between the (neo)liberal and orderly social aesthetics of “balanced” lifestyles, self-moderation and self-regulation, on the one hand, and structures of feeling involving the transgressive or sacrificial extremities of romantic (or other forms of) desire, on the other. These aporias have also blurred the boundaries between private, everyday struggles of individuals and couples, and intimate publics (Berlant, 2008) that offer recognition, validation, and ultimately, reassurance for Singaporeans experiencing these contradictory pressures. Finally, I trace the political implications of these intimately lived tensions, palpable in the state’s present difficulty in securing affective loyalties from its citizen-subjects.

Since her independence from the British in 1965, Singapore has experienced a rapid surge of globalisation, urbanisation and industrialisation, transforming the nation-state into a thriving hub of economic activity in the Southeast Asian region. Some of the outcomes of these modernising transitions include an expanding affluent Chinese middle-class as well as the rise of consumerism among the local population. While there has been a significant amount of interest and scholarship around the cultural and intergenerational effects of Asian (capitalist) modernity, scant attention has been paid to the dialectical relationship between economic life, on the one hand, and the lived realities of romantic love, desire and intimacy, on the other. Ultimately, how does economic being and its material forms, intersect with structures of feeling and sentiment, in the cultural space of love and romance? My ethnographic research focuses on teenage to middle-aged Chinese Singaporeans — a majority ethnic group amidst the country's multicultural citizenry — across multiple sites and scenes of courtship and marriage. Subsequently, I raise certain questions around initial observations that subjects feel uncomfortable, embarrassed or guilty, sometimes concealing or disavowing personal wealth, material desires or economic aspirations, in the context of everyday conversations and dealings concerning love and relationships.

In thriving Asian “Tiger” economies such as Singapore, the expansion and intensification of consumer activity has frequently been regarded, in both public and state discourses, as being responsible for perpetuating a homogeneous culture of Western materialism, individualism and excess. Unfortunately, this hegemonic and negative view of conspicuous consumerism obscures the agentive, creative and sometimes conflictual aspects of consumers’ lifestyle practices. More specifically, everyday consumption constitutes a fertile site of inquiry into the implicit and varied ethical and normative positions adopted by citizen-subjects. These pertain to broad notions of individual autonomy and social responsibility amidst a lifeworld of desirous commodities, as well as concerns about the nation’s economic, social and environmental sustainability and future. As such, consumer activity is productive of ethical relations between people and things, between persons and others, and between citizens and the nation-state. This paper outlines how these relational fields intersect with one another in the politics of contemporary Singaporean life, and argues for a greater focus on the everyday practices, sites and objects of consumption, since they potentially reproduce different kinds of materialisms as well as give rise to various regimes of lifestyle literacies, social evaluations and ethical sensibilities.

The Singaporean state is often viewed by its citizens as one that pays lip service to democratic principles, yet is notably authoritarian in its implementation and enforcement of various initiatives. One key criticism concerns the possibility of wider democratic participation and inclusion through the enlargement and deregulation of the public space for social engagement by a politically informed and active citizenry. In response, the state has been compelled to address these critiques and growing dissatisfaction, but at the same time there has been an emergence of new strategies of centralized governance through the use of soft-power mechanisms. In particular, one sees new hegemonic imperatives (by the state) in delineating acceptable and unacceptable spaces and conduct with regards to political engagement, discussion and debate. These are, paradoxically, instances of monologic state projects that seek to constitute and sanction seemingly dialogic and democratic political forums to address and dispel discontent with existing government policies. In my analysis, I will demonstrate that the monologic fantasy on the part of the authoritarian and paternalistic state lives on in attempts to define the boundaries of possible and acceptable political dialogue through its use of “out-of-bounds (OB) markers”, and through the reproduction of political commonsense pertaining to what an acceptable democratic practice with “Asian Values” should be. This implies a broader critique of deliberative democratic cultures, making a critical case for the importance of vigilance against attempts to re-inscribe the exercise of sovereign force by means of monologic strategies under the cover of seemingly dialogic frameworks.

Cultures of cuteness constitute richly textured (text-tured) and aestheticized sites for the analysis of material culture and consumption in contemporary societies. In my presentation, I engage with the existing literature on the cute-kitsch: its multilayered formations, its intersections with a multitude of other sociocultural discourses, as well as its complex ideological effects on subjectivity and the production of a specific modern sensual and aesthetic condition of sociality. By treating 'cuteness' as a simultaneously empty and over-determined signifier, and as a carrier of potentially contradictory social meanings, I demonstrate that various cultures of cuteness - including (but not limited to) popular manifestations of consumerist complexes such as 'Hello Kitty', 'The Powerpuff Girls', and the yellow 'Minions' in the movie 'Despicable Me' - can be understood as amalgamations and/or networks of meaning (indexical/representational orders) that are both subject to and reliant upon semiotic processes of mediation. To this extent, I explain how the concepts of 'sensational form' (Birgit Meyer), 'semiotic ideology' (Webb Keane), 'commodity register' (Asif Agha), 'metaculture' (Greg Urban), and the 'politics of immediation' (William Mazzarella) can elucidate and clarify 'cuteness' as a constellation/sedimentation of sociocultural meaning. I conclude by means of thinking about cultures of cuteness as polyphonic or dialogic discourses constituted by a multitude of social voices (Mikhail Bakhtin) and its implications for the analysis of forms of cuteness.

From the late twentieth century to the present, democratic theory and practice has relied on a number of taken-for-granted assumptions, including (but not limited to) the advocacy of a free and just public sphere where deliberative and rational debate can take place, the importance of communication and consensus towards the legitimation of political authority, and the primacy of establishing healthy and well-intended social and political institutions to ensure these aforementioned objectives. These commonly accepted wisdoms are premised on Jurgen Habermas’ theory of democracy and communicative action, and this paradigm of thought has been especially influential towards informing political practice in Western democracies. However, radically different ideas on democracy, the nature of political power, and the content of resistance/emancipation, emerge in Michel Foucault and Judith Butler’s writings. Together, their political theories disconcert and problematize the relatively straightforward view of democracy as put forward by Habermas. In this presentation, I critically examine how Habermas on the one hand, and Foucault/Butler on the other, rely on divergent definitions of discourse, language, and communication, which subsequently inform their various attempts to formulate adequate diagnoses (and prognoses) of the issues surrounding democratic politics and the exercise of power and resistance.

"The sociolinguistic situation in Singapore is extremely complex and involves language ideologies that are “created, sustained, and ultimately abandoned in favor of alternative ideologies” (Wee, 2006), through official language policy and planning. This is evident in the government’s attempts to promote Putonghua as the official Chinese variety in various domains, whilst discouraging the use of other Chinese “dialects” – seeking to eradicate these codes from the overall linguistic landscape.

This paper examines online discourses taken from Singaporean citizens’ comments in web-blogs and discussion forums concerning the value/relevance of these stigmatized dialects. Interestingly, these online “discourses of resistance”, which seek to re-value these linguistic codes, trade on the same language ideologies that are sustained through the official discourses aimed at their de-valuation. Both these discourses tend to view language as an alienable commodity and as a reified object, as something that can be actively manipulated, controlled and which possesses a specific value. Both discourses also involve the construal of linguistic difference through the semiotic processes of iconization, recursivity and erasure (Irvine & Gal, 2000). Overall, this paper suggests that although these discourses may differ in content, they presuppose a common ground of language ideology and its related processes, confirming the view that “movements to save minority languages are often structured around the same received notions of language that have led to their oppression and/or suppression” (Woolard, 1998). Indeed, these shared language ideologies might be important for various agencies and actors, especially in their bid to enlist language for the purposes of sociopolitical action."

The Singapore Chinese community has been experiencing a major language shift the last few decades. The use of Chinese vernaculars for intra-ethnic communication has given way to an increasing presence of English or Mandarin Chinese in most domains of language use. This is mainly a result of government language policy as well as the rising importance of languages with more global relevance. This paper examines how family structure can play a role in influencing language use, language attitudes and language identity among younger generation Singaporeans vis-à-vis Chinese vernaculars. Through individual interviews, the study gathered data from 19 Singaporeans from two types of family background (extended family vs nuclear families). The findings indicate that participants who grew up in extended families are more likely to use more vernaculars and are also more likely to be positively oriented towards the use of vernaculars. However, living in extended families per se does not account for this trend. Closer analysis shows that it is the nature and extent of the interaction in the vernacular with the grandparents in extended families that better explain positive attitudes to vernaculars. The wider implications of these findings for language maintenance and shift of minority languages are discussed in the framework of social interactional view of language.

In this short commentary, I critically attend to the voraciousness of criticisms levelled by many Singaporeans at the City Harvest Church (CHC) and its members, especially local commentary that prides itself on the self-enlightened views of Singaporeans which have withstood the religious fantasies and illusions sustained by a corrupt clergy, as well as the fact that secular rule-of-law has won a decisive victory for public transparency, accountability and rationality, in stark contrast to the secrecy and mystifications engulfing a CHC community deeply entrenched in their affectively-aroused and pitifully undiscerning loyalty to their church. I argue that the zealous commentary of enlightened post-ideological Singaporeans vis-a-vis their CHC counterparts, may simply serve to produce enough pink noise that whitewashes the former’s very real ideological susceptibility, especially in the face of recent events. One should - at the very least - ask if Singaporean critics of CHC’s brand of fanaticism, are similarly under the affective spell of Lee Kuan Yew’s most timely passing, or subject to euphoric appeals for sexual self-determination that are currently in vogue. CHC or not, enlightened or not, Singaporeans have to confront the present reality of their ideological quagmire, instead of moving beyond it too hastily.

“Affect” is an important theoretical concept in the contemporary social sciences. Some affect theorists define “affect” in opposition to “emotion”. According to them, the former differs from the latter, because it exists outside of language, discourse and signification. These theorists invoke “affect” in order to emphasise the potentiality, indeterminacy and relationality of social being, in contrast to the assumed fixity and closure of sociocultural experience, as a result of its structuration by linguistic, discursive, and more generally, semiotic forms. It follows that “affect” is valorised by affect theorists as unmediated experience, and as a virtual realm of existence untainted by sociocultural mediation. The present thesis, however, rejects this dualistic approach to “affect” and, instead, argues that affective experience is mediated in and through semiotic processes in sociocultural life. It develops a semiotic approach to affect, underpinned by existing linguistic- and semiotic-anthropological theories and insights. Through a re-reading of recent treatments of “affect” in the anthropological literature, such as Navaro-Yashin’s The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (2012) and Mazzarella’s Censorium: The Open Edge of Mass Publicity (2013), this thesis describes and explicates, in greater detail, how “affect” is modulated through semiotic and metasemiotic mediation in each of these ethnographic accounts. All in all, the present thesis argues that “affect”, although commonly perceived as unmediated sociocultural experience, may paradoxically be produced through the workings of semiotic mediation. At the same time, it will demonstrate that a semiotic approach to affect can adequately account for the political, historical and public dimensions of “affect”, as well as its relationship with material objects and social subjectivities.