The "Schizophrenic" World-View of A Writer-Intellectual

In Our Postmodern Era

Readers, do you know the truth about scientific and technological "madness"? It is a Party secret!

This is the story of our "schizophrenic" existence in our postmodern world. It is about our involvement with the intractable multiplicities, contradictions and approximations of the actual political-bureaucratic process in Singapore and elsewhere in the world.

I am a polyglot, a writer and intellectual who examines the errors in our postmodern Singapore government with a sceptical and perspicacious mind.

I became a reluctant member of the working class not by choice but by virtue of economic necessity--as a victim of manipulation and subjugation by the Singapore Government. Wherever, whenever I am present or prospering, the Party perpetrators of stupidity, intolerance, envy and injustice will choose me for their target of oppression!

I have experienced hatred and emotional pain under the control and influence of the Singapore Government. It did not provide me, as a controlled citizen, with channels and surrogates for the free expression of my intellect and sexuality.

In Singapore, I found some of my fellow citizens living lives, as Henry David Thoreau would say, "of quiet desperation". These desperations will grow raucous and impatient eventually.

I have had neither the compulsion nor the interest to enter politics in Singapore. In Aristotelian terms, such abstention from active political-party involvement may amount to idiocy. It gives to the thugs, the corrupt and the mediocre every incentive and opportunity to take over.

But the sum of my politics is to try and support whatever social order is capable of reducing, even marginally, the aggregate of hatred and of pain in the human circumstance--and which allows my privacy and excellence breathing-space. I think of myself as an amorous and tenacious anarchist-writer-intellectual. Not, I think, a winning ticket.

Singapore, once an economic and political conquest of the British colonialists, is now a political, economic, social, cultural--and symbolic--capital of the Third World.

It has never been convincing to me that the Anglo-American ideals of the rule of law and the parliamentary process--as well as neocolonialism--are really of sheer irrelevance to the Singapore Government. It chooses economic security, "protection" from pauperization in old age, and safety or hygiene in our streets--instead of the freedom to publish (how many men and women write books? how many read them?) and a plurality of effective, credible and democratic political parties. Is the era of "pure politics" over?

It does look possible, however, that the coming years will witness conflicts between irreconcilable cultures and values, between anti-thetical world-visions even more divided by mutual fears and hatreds than are the ideological and ethnic camps of the past and present.

To reach the high places of human creativity, we may have to face the prospect of its relation to violence and death. (There is just too much that I have to grasp--simply too late in the day. I am now 55.)

Nonetheless, there may be some truth in the psychoanalytic conjecture that an overthrow, a psychically homicidal erasure of one's father-figure, is a necessary step towards independence; that there can be, without such rebellion, neither originality nor will to power.

The Singapore Government, like all other governments, has to torture its oppositionists to survive. But is even survival a justification for such torture?

I will not live and rest in peace until I've succeeded in achieving my goals as a published writer-intellectual-author.

I don't want to drift into a vegetable state--via dullness, boredom and stupidity--and thus defiling, within myself, within others, the meaning and worth of identity. I'm, after all, an atheist--not a religious or political fanatic--and my journey is half-completed, a disciplined home-coming to nothingness.

In a relationship supposedly based on companionship and happiness, a primordial ferocity lies close to desire, and even to love. This is the unspeakable technology of humiliation and torture. Sexual, social and love successes in my life are all about appearances--not results. Are they all smart and happy moves on my part--so desperate to have dates with women?

Already, there are those, like Foucault, who profess the end of authorship, of individual begetting, indeed of the persona of man. The era of "pure literature", "pure politics" and "pure culture" is over. Modernism is history.

The new writer-intellectual in the post-LKY era will be trained and educated in the Western intellectual tradition. His or her lack of interest in traditional Chinese philosophy belies his or her erudition in Western culture (philosophy, history, literature and psychology primarily)--and his or her "shallowness" in Chinese traditions.

He or she wants to capture a modernist sensibility--in politics, literature and philosophy--in his or her writing. He or she will not encourage the hopes, aspirations and needs of the present-day man or woman who searches for exclusive, obsessive and unlimited materialism, hedonism, sensual pleasure and affluence.

Singapore will then not be re-politicised as a liberated political system. It will also not be orientalized as an exotic, different culture--with all its unnatural libidinal constraints, punishment, discipline and lack. Such will be the experience of modernism in the 21st century after LKY's passing.

Since the new writer-intellectual is not too youthful, there will be no excesses and overflowing in the intellectual state of affairs among Singaporean urbanites in the post-LKY era.

"Pure literature" will be a literature that has indeed become an intelligent, honest and absorbing form of cultural entertainment and of intellectual fulfillment in modern Singapore, where control and surveillance in the politics of the body, or biopolitics, will still be transnational, deterritorialized. It will be a new form of identity and activity for the new intellectual-writer. No longer will he identify himself with a specific nation or political entity! Nationality then will be borderless; it will just be a state of mind rather than a place.

Love, sex and social life will be no longer blighted by traditional Chinese philosophy, values and customs.

One may draw the conclusion that those Singapore citizens who would already have abandoned the socialist past will be newly refreshed--an escape from the stability, dullness, boredom and order of the "schizophrenic" polity and society in its "old" and "outdated" form.

They will be able to put their lives into proper historical perspective, yes--namely, to come to terms with history itself!

To fully comprehend the socialist past is to come to terms with the present--the present historical circumstances, socioeconomic conditions, and mode of production. By stepping back from the immediacy of the the hustle and bustle of the capitalist present, and by creating a defamiliarizing perspective on the socialist past, the camera eye may find a way to present a properly historical understanding of reality.

It took too long before I understood that the ephemeral, the fragmentary, the derisive, the self-ironising are the key modes of modernity; before I realised that the interactions betwween high and popular culture, notably via the film and television--now the commanding instruments of general sensibility and, it may be, of invention--had largely replaced the monumental Western intellectual pantheon. Influential as they are, deconstruction and post-modernism are themselves only symptoms, bright bubbles at the surface of a much deeper mutation.

Socialist Singapore still exists in name, but is now a member of the regime of the World Trade Organization. The country has been integrated into the capitalist world economic system. The global marketplace thus threaten to annihilate all local differences for the production of maximum profit.

The neoliberalist ideology of the free market prophesizes the universal triumph of capitalism across the world. We have seen the "end of history".

But history, as recorded in the memories of individuals and reimagined in cinematic discourses, for instance, offers glimpses of life that reject the homogenization of the world under a single capitalist model--call it globalization, Americanization, or McDonaldization.

Languages and Dialects in Modern Singapore

Is there a more flexible position in regard to national identity and cultural affiliation?

There is no one dominant voice in the field.

The multiple tongues and dialects used in varieties of Singapore languages, testify to the fracturing of Singapore and Singaporeaness. Each dialect speaker is the voice of a special class, represents a particular stage of socioeconomic development, and embodies a specific level of modernity--within a many ensemble of heterogeneous formations in Singapore and the Singaporean diaspora.

This profusion of accents, in fact, comprises a pan-Chinese World--and a collective of diverse identities and positionalities that a single, geographical, national entity is unable to contain.

This is not a monologic world speaking one universal language. This world culture is a field of multi-lingual and multi-dialectal articulations that constantly challenge and redefine the boundaries of groups, ethnicities and national affiliation.

The capitalist world economy, as it has developed since the sixteenth century, is characterized by the geographic expansion of world markets, the central importance of international trade, and the pursuit of profit for its own sake.

Immanuel Wallerstein has said: "It was only with the emergence of the modern world economy in 16th-century Europe that we saw the full development and economic predominance of market rule. This was the system called capitalism. Capitalism and a world-economy (that is, a single division of labour but multiple politics and cultures) are obverse sides of the same coin."

A Global Neoliberalist Revolution

Neoliberalism is, in the first instance, a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.

The agenda of the Singapore Government has changed its nature as well: It means building a society of moderate affluence amid global capitalism. Singapore's system is a peaceful yet contradictory overlapping of capitalist economics and socialist politics. As such, our system embodies the essential internal contradictions of Singapore society.

In the 21st century, writers and intellectuals are engaged in cathartic rituals of exposing and healing the wounds, scars, and traumas inflicted by a totalitarian regime in hopeful anticipation of a more humane society that would respect the autonomy of the free citizen.

In the 21st century, we will see more and more artistic works that contain a tinge of nostalgia for a precapitalist way of life. Such modernist cultural deep "logic" is not unlike the dilemma of Euro-American high modernist culture in the early 20th century. Scientific, technological modernization and artistic, literary modernism will stand in opposition to each other within the framework of modernity.

This schism (between culture and technology, between the communal, idyllic past and a global, capitalist rationale of business management and creation of surplus value) with postmodernism itself, has become the subject of artistic representation with increasing frequency.

Forward-looking teleology of progress?

My Revulsion Toward A Dystopian One-Party State

The current spiraling socioeconomic gaps among people in our new capitalist market economy cannot be justified.

Citizens are guaranteed personal freedom while being denied civic liberties.

Postmodernism has now become a battlefield of intellectual and ideological contention between different persuasions.

It is now a testing ground for a confrontation between the neoliberals (who champion the advent of upper-class elitist civic autonomy and the rights of private ownership) and the Democratic Socialists (who advocate justice of redistribution and class equality).

In the absence of a commom and general belief in Democratic Socialism, can patriotism hold our people together?

Postmodernism--the co-existence of multiple temporalisties and modes of production, the symbiosis of capitalism and socialism, and the embodiment of continuities as well as discontinuities--is a return of the repressed.

Whereas a "citizen" lives within the restriction of the regime of the nation-state, a "netizen" moves in a dispersed, nebulous, intangible, virtual web of social relationships, body politics, and modes of technology.

The "citizen", with his finely crafted prose in the print media, stands in contrast to the "netizen", with his crude, sensational and instantaneous net production!

The traditional artistic merits associated with printed culture--the intricacy of structure, complexity of meaning, irony, ambiguity, multivalency anf indeterminacy--will become more and more difficult to sustain (on the quick-flashing, ephemeral computer screens and websites of the present and future world).

Global Biopolitics and Modern Life in Singapore

Bare life, or biopower, along with its explosion and control, damming and channeling, exuberance and destruction, constitute a large part of the subject of this essay.

The steady advance of capitalist globalization has absorbed and united countries and societies from disparate locales of the planet for the recycling of materials, goods, currencies, and affects across national borders.

Without exception, a nominally "socialist" state such as Singapore has also been locked into the busy global commerce in body, libido, and service as well as trade in the traditional capitalist economic domains of industry, manufacturing and finance.

Cultured critics ought to be sensitive to the dialectic of globalization and stay alert to actual patterns of domination and enslavement, as well as to emergent opportunities for liberation and justice.

Biopolitics in Singapore Modern Life

The nexus of body/power in capitalist modernity is a key issue in the thought of Michel Foucault. It is also one of the crises of masculinity in Singapore modern life.

Due to the blockage of their libidinal drives, some citizens are reduced to passivity, self-degradation, voyeurism, or masturbation. Voyeurism, the act of looking at the other rather than acting out a desire with the other, characterizes the psychosexual state of many Singapore males.

Many Singapore males thus have to visit certain sites--real or illusionary--of sociality, indulgence and transaction in the city--eroding, loosening and at times, destroying traditional social relationships built on the model of the "standard family" and the institution of marriage.

It is a reaction to, and correction of, the "imprisonment" and impoverishment, scarcity and deprivation, of their sexual lives, suffered in this postmodern life in a surveillance society.

Now, bodies, flesh, looks are commodities to be exchanged for money. (Voyeurs and peeping toms, for instance, are guilty of the commodification of women's bodies.)

Modern men and women can be both the agents of change and subjugated to the manipulation and domination by surveillance authorities in a given process.

Sexuality breaks down barriers of nationality, ethnicity, age and religion. It is the equalizer of all things, but at the same time it operates on the principle of social and economic inequality.

More important, the imperative of the global libidinal economy, with all its thrills and cruelty, forbids the long-term halting of the circulation of desire and capital.

Modern Life and Postmodernism in Singapore

The covert surveillance and control of bodies, desires, and sexuality in modern Singapore--as happened in bars, beauty parlours, massage parlours, brothels and other places of voyeurism and sexual fantasy--is a reality of the capitalist world system. It reflects the social and sexual lives of citizens in modern Singapore--and the conflict between nationalism and globalization--as it affects the private self.

Voyeurism also symbolizes the anxiety of the modern citizen who desires action but feels excluded from it.

The consciousness of his own inadequacy paralyzes his will to act. The image of the voyeur epitomizes his state of loneliness and frustration......The exaggerated persona of a lonely, self-pitying, unhappy drifter (!) is largely the result of unrequited libidinal fulfillment.

It is a modernist "inter-national" allegory, as it were, of alienation, disorientation, and imprisonment!

The private self is at a disjunction with the collective.

The collective wants to punish, monitor and reeducate the self-educated individualists -- yes, the self-reflexive and ironic quality of free souls who resist the System, the Network, the Company!f-reflexive and ironic quality of those free souls who resist the System, the Network, the Company!

For instance, prisons deprive them of natural sexuality and block their free discharge of libidinal energy. It is an attempt to solve the problem of male and female relations--the unceasing and continuing struggle between man and woman everywhere. It demands not only strength, but a vital spirit, using emotions and some innate artistic sense in its struggle to find balance, to reach unity and harmony, to achieve wholeness while maintaining its own separate self.

What prisons have accomplished, it appears, is the desexualization of males and emasculation of the independent-minded citizens in Singapore's political landscape in this modern times. Numerous political actions have changed and subjugated individuals into subjects! It is an ideological remolding and reeducation by the Singapore Government to maintain correct Party line.

In the extreme instance of sending an individual to a prison, the "delinquent" is reduced to a "pathologized subject" in Foucauldian terms. Ah, humanism and democracy!

A most salient feature in the life of the oppositionist intellectual dissident is the justaposition and incongruence between his high-level upper-class elitist education and the simple-mindedness of the working people surrounding him--a people whose vulgarity and uncouth expressions of "love" constantly undermine his opposition.

It is a consciously absurd and ridiculous way to live--for an intellectual-writer, whose intellectual and educational superiority opposes the Party's ideological attempts to transform him into its subject -- someone without an individuality and a strong mind of his own!!

The process of ideological reformation by the Party has, in a writer-intellectual's case (like mine!), been a colossal failure.

There can be no true union and joy, true harmony and beauty, true happiness and good health, in such an incomplete, partial and unconvincing sexual, love and social relationship between an upper-class elitist intellectual-writer and an uneducated working-class woman. It is bound to be ill-fated. There will be no true merging and union between two such separate bodies and minds! The "bond" between such an intellectual-writer and working-class woman remains as tenuous and uncertain as ever.

The difference in education and intellect between a writer-intellectual and the masses--the working class citizens--results in his accursed loneliness, but because he is superior, he deserves and demands attention and adulation. His social and political marginality is the result of his intellectual nonconformity to the Party's values, interests, beliefs and principles..

In the post-LKY era, there will be, hopefully, real change for such intellectual-writers. Singapore politics and society will undergo tremendous transformation: Intellectuals will reassume their role as the conscience of society.

Oh, the horrors of the socialist disciplining of their bodies and souls in prisons--as if these bodiers and souls (and perhaps, their hearts and minds too?) are, and have always been, capitalistic?

Intellectuals and humanists will call for the reconstruction of subjectivity (and the establishment of humanism in Singapore society). The days of lofty-minded, sexually-abstinent, women-fearing or (women-hating) and long-suffering intellectual-writers (the "consciences" of the society!) will be over! No longer will political intellectuals be silenced by the Party.

There will be still an obsessive pursuit by the nation of a market economy in this post-LKY era. Today, in the early years of the 21st century. the complicitous relationship between intellectual-writers and business interests is an accepted fact of life.

The self-controlled libidinal drives of the intellectual-writer can be sublimated into a noble social cause or a cultural and intellectual project. And there is no need for his energies and drives to be totally dissipated in sexual acts (with absolutely no intimation of sublimation or redemption). He will definitely NOT collapse psychically at the end of his life! The writer-intellectual will become, in the post-LKY era of the future, a Cultural Hero!

Michael Foucault suggests that a significant transformation in the form of control of the body took place in the West in the 1960s.

Industrial societies could content themselves with a much looser form of power over the body. Then it was discovered that control of sexuality could be attenuated and given new forms. One needs to study what kind of body the current society needs.

The exercise of power had become more diffuse, relaxed, and internalised since then. This corresponds to a general epochal shift from modernity to postmodernity.......

The decisive change in the regulation of the Singaporean libidinal economy occurred in the 1990s, when Singapore accelerated its integration into the capitalist world system.

The monitoring and control of sexuality and the body became more "democratic", internalized, immanent, and less heavy-handed.

In the 20th century, the libidinous economy of excess had reached a new height with many writers. Surplus sexuality will become the very theme and subject of these writers. "Literature", sexuality and the "authors" had all become commodities. The writer-intellectual, then, had to strive very hard NOT to become a Media Personality!

What will NOT matter to the writer-intellectual is the instantaneous surface feeling of a street wanderer, shopper, consumer, and "lover" in a city like Singapore. There will be none of the carefully cultivated materialism and superficiality in tone, style, and sensibility in his modernist writings. Readers will NOT feel a palpable flat presentism -- but, instead, real historical depth. Such readers--the not-too-young and adult Singaporeans -- will have many experiences or memories of the economic hardships and political turmoil of the past.

The politics of the body--namely, biopolitics--has, however, in Singapore's current postcolonial mentality, somehow or inexplicably or strangely mimicked novelistic archetypes of male-female sexuality of the traditional culture! It permeates the soul of every Singapore woman and man! Is she or he still a victim of neocolonialism? Hence, the retrogression among Singaporeans--compared to their Chinese and Western counterparts--in matters of sexuality, love and social life.

Subjectivism, Individualism and the Self--After LKY's Demise

A basic condition of Singapore literature after the demise of LKY is the emergence of the self from the collective discourse in the old tradition.

In the post-LKY era, one will witness the resurgence of interest in the self in Singapore literature. The authors in this post-LKY literature will depict the problematic relationship of the oppositionist individual to the collective. The homogeneity of tradition and the organic unity of society will disappear to a great extent. The ideological uniformity imposed by the Party will no longer serve as the basis of the collective after the death of LKY.

Even as the personal is inevitably related to the large collective, the relationship is never a simple correspondence or direct projection, but a matter of discontinuities and ruptures.

The self's engagement of the national and the public is full of contradictions, displacements, and non-equivalences.

Post-LKY fiction in Singapore will produce a new wave of writing that celebrates individualistic and humanistic values. The self will reemerge after decades of suppression. The self will be rediscovered against the background of the dominant, hegemonic Party discourse. In these future writings, once again, the individualist will find himself unable to integrate into the persuasions of the collective--as moulded by the Party. On their way toward a new individuality, the stories and novels will expose and unmask Party ideology and LKY's methods and past actions--namely, the project of transforming individuals into subjects!

The collective discourse of LKY's ideology is to subjugate people under the control of the Party by overt policing or covert reeducation.

But I will recuperate from my present travails and problems (as I have already disengaged long ago from the dominant Party ideology). My public discourse will continue to parody and challenge the solemnity of the elevated Party style of writing and speech-making.

Post-LKY literature will, to a large extent, be the disengagement from, and derision of, LKY-style language and presentation.

You will find that the position of the individualist vis-a-vis the collective is characterized by a set of non-coincidences, ironic situations, contradictions, and disunions.

Individuality is always inescapably enmeshed in a web of "collective" and "impersonal" relations--an "intertextual" system of discourses, images, representations, and ideologies.

Postmodernism is everyday life. in which ordinary citizens struggle to make a transition from the guarantees and rigidity of socialist welfare to the fluctuations and freedom of a mass consumer society. It is an existential space where ordinary people live their lives and conduct their daily business.

Nothing fuels a deeper hatred in our consciousness than the insight, forced on us, that we are falling short, that we are betraying ideals whose validity we fully (even if subliminally) acknowledge, indeed celebrate, but whose requirements seem to lie beyond our capacities or will. Nothing grows more unbearable than to be reminded recurrently (perpetually, it would seem) of what we ought to be and, so crassly, are not.

Ought we transform ourselves into full humanity, to renege our egos, our inborn appetites, our bias to licence and options--in the name of social justice and economic equality, as taught by the idealistic Moses, Jesus and Marx? Ought we, should we resigned ourselves to become willing or voluntary members of the collective, die for others? Ought we live for others?

Language, Dialect and Translation

How-- and where -- does the human brain house language(s)? How does the cortex of the polyglot, native or by acquisition, discriminate between--and keep apart-- different languages? (Overlaps, interference effects, confusions do tell us that this discrimination is not airtight, that it can falter under stress or with age.)

Are different languages internalised at different spatial points (synapses, transformers) in the cerebral and nervous system?

Is there any limit, psychologically or physiologically, to the number of different languages a man or woman can acquire? (There are language-accumulators as there are virtuosi of mental arithmetic and memory)?

How is 'room made' for a new language in the storage and recuperation mechanisms of the coertical network?

All of which are preliminary questions to that concerning the dynamics of translation-- of the actual switch from one language or dialect to another (a capacity which, in so-called 'simultaneous translation', operates virtually instantaneously!

Psycholinguists and neurochemists argue that the internalisation and emission of language-signals will, one day, be shown to be a neurochemical, an electro-molecular sequence as, in their model, are perception and memory.

Translation would then be a sub-class of the general neuro-physiology of meaning and pattern-recognitions. Intuition almost persuades me that this prognosis will be frustrated. The essential difficulty is that of any definition and positivist construct of consciousness itself.

When, in depth, consciousness is brought to bear analytically on consciousness, the circularities are irremediable.

So far, machine-translation and the electronic simulation of what are conjectured to be cerebral methods of linguistic transfer, enjoin scepticism.

Mechanical translation is in essence a macro-glossary, an accelerated 'looking-up' of possibly equivalent or corresponding terms in a prepared lexicon.

It works, where at all, in highly specified, bounded fields.

There is, as yet, no reliable evidence that machine-translation, however sophisticated its software, can render, even at rudimentary levels, a corpus of natural language, let alone of language with any philosophic or literary claims.

In these categories, discourse, already on the scale of the single word or phrase, IS FORMALLY AND SUBSTANTIVELY incommensurable.

There are no a priori, formalisable limits to the process of motion and transformation in meaning, to the concentric spheres of implicit historical, local suggestion and connotation, to innovation (the neologism, the expansion or contraction always latent in the known term or idiom).

Language is quick-silver; it cannot be immobilised in electronic boxes. We simply do not know how the brain, how human consciousness produce articulate sense, nor how they move from one sense-code to another in translation.

We can, at best, make out, via the study of cerebral lesions and speech-pathologies, something of the awesome fragility and complexity of the proceeding.

The death of a language, be it whispered by the merest handful on some parcel of condemned ground, is the death of a world.

With each day, the number of different ways in which we can say 'hope' diminishes. On its minute scale, my polyglot condition has been my uttermost luck.

Writers and Writing -- In a Postmodern Capitalist Society

As anyone who has ever attempted to write an essay, let alone a novel, can readily attest, writing is at once extremely time-consuming and, in the short term at least, highly "unproductive". This is the sociological problem of the writer.

Market relations are, of course, the distinguishing feature of a capitalist literary mode of production.

Market institutions are those in which writings are produced as a commodity, to be sold for money on the market.

A "market professional" is a professionalized writer who sells his literary properties to capitalized publishers.

A "corporate professional" is a writer who works as a salaried employee of a large media corporation (in television, radio, journalism or advertising, for example).

In the "royalty" system, the writer is paid an initial "advance" of some kind and thereafter a percentage of the receipts from sales. Substantial sums can still be paid as advances under the royalty system.

What we have been tracing here is a progressive movement, by turn, towards the commercialization of writing, and thence towards the "industrialization of the writer". For, as it became increasingly difficult to imagine a future beyond capitalism, so there seemed little left to say against commercially profitable industry, except perhaps that it is immoral.

In the 20th century, the market professional has fallen hostage to the vagaries of the star system.

Financial security, however, has become more available to the corporate professional--writing not only for the market but also as a salaried employee.

The corporate professional need not be formally employed by a corporation. "Freelance" commissions are quite common.

The central matter at issue is not so much the employment contract itself as the point of origin of the production. The corporate structure is characterized by a highly organized and fully capitalized market in which the direct commissioning of planned saleable products has become a normal mode.

Novelists are almost invariably either market or corporate professionals.

Writers for television and the press are much more likely to be "corporate professionals".

The paradox is, as the book trade cultivates its new mass market, members of a largely middle-class profession write for an increasingly working-class audience.

American writers, for instance, are overwhelmingly middle class and well-educated. Many are professors, other kinds of professionals, editors and journalists.

There is another set of institutionalized authorial relation of production--the "post-market institution". It refers to the direct or indirect form of government funding of the writing profession--or "public patronage" or "state patronage" of writing.

Singapore, which is a post-capitalist society, has a government that controls such "post-market" professionals--writers who write for, under and on behalf of, the Singapore Government. Under this form of patronage system, officially sponsored writers often enjoy considerable material security.

But what is the price of such a governmental patronage system--for the writer?

The price is, for enjoying such financial or material security, a general subservience to the cultural, political, ideological, economic and social needs of those in authority--namely, leaders and officials of the Singapore Government. The conflict, for such an officially-sponsored writer, between freedom of expression and government policies, no longer exists. It is a subservience that will be powerfully satirized in the new literature of the post-LKY era--by writers with intellectual honesty and moral principles.

The Singapore Government, for instance, has been determinedly sponsoring anti-Communist, anti-dissident, anti-oppositionist and anti-democrat writers even before Singapore became a fully independent and sovereign nation. (It sometimes does this, for instance, through "front organizations" of all kinds.)

Well, if you are patriotic, loyal (to the Singapore Government), and respectable (according to Party values and beliefs), then you will certainly be rewarded with sponsorship of your writing career and activities by the Singapore Government!

The Authorial Voice in Postmodern Writing

This is the age of hermeneutics--theories of "interpretation" that take as their central problem that of how to "understand" the more or less intended "meanings" of others.

For literary hermeneutics, the relevant meaning was that intended, either consciously or unconsciously, by the author of the literary text.

Traditional humanist writing understood its task essentially as that of expressing the author's intended meaning--the authoritative meaning.

Structuralist and post-structuralist semiology, by contrast, has revelled in the theoretical implication of the "death of the author". This means that modern writing always contains much more than the meaning intended by the writer, and that the writer is not the sole "author" of such meaning. This is anti-humanism in modern writing! Does the "author" still retain a central relevance in such modern writing?

In the more postmodern versions of post-structuralist semiology, readers are so constructed as to be able to read almost any text virtually as they please, conformingly, resistingly, negotiatedly, or however. Each of these last two moves seems absolutely necessary, especially given the sheer tenacity of the high-low and active-passive tropes. We need to acknowledge that the elite-popular opposition provides far too undifferentiated a sense of what different texts are actually like.

In our postmodernist intellectual climate, it is indeed still possible to recover something of an author's original intentions, especially if he should have made fairly determined, even desperate, attempts to explain them and that such intentions can provide the key to a privileged, if not necessarily absolutely privileged, reading of a text. Neither of these propositions seems to me obviously unreasonable.

Postmodern scepticism often professes as much indifference to the question of "politics" as to that of authorial intention: never mind the principles, feel the textuality, as it were.

But it is surely a matter of some consequence, for our understanding of the texts themselves as well as their subsequent exceptions, that the author or writer is the same individual human being who explains that he knows where he stands--namely, he is against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.

QUESTION:

What is the thesis of deconstruction and post-modernism? It is the incipient break of the contract between word and world, between semantic markers and stable sense!