Thursday, October 30, 2008
Book Publishers and Governmental Surveillance
My Rights -- As A Citizen and
Writer --
To Publish Serious and Quality
Essays
(to be Collected in Printed Books)
Due To
the Timid and Subservient
Local Publishers
Readers of my previous blog entry will be surprised by this latest new post, as I have last indicated that it might be quite sometime before I will resume active blogging activities in this particular website. Well, I am back too soon! -- unfortunately for the chief reason that I'm suffering from state interventions into my attempt to write, and to have my writings published in book form by hopefully brave publishers in the local print media industry.
Indeed, I have failed miserably! The surveillance web, spun by the PAP authorities, has ensured that I will never be successful as a writer in the print media (which is easier for the PAP to control by intimidation and harassment and threats than the electronic media).
I have already come to terms with the reality that we are all under constant surveillance. But I can't get used to the idea that I am somehow a PRIME SUSPECT for subversion in the oppositionist camp of critics and dissidents! Am I still required to demonstrate my political innocence? My identity is known to the authorities: they know, to enlighten my readers, my shopping preferences, health status, marital status, financial situation, date of birth, gender, age, monthly income, race, the locations of my many (past and present) residences, physical characteristics, family background, handphone number, level of education, profession, magazine preferences, utility consumption, responsiveness to money-making opportunities, constituency, size and brand of clothes worn, habits, lifestyle preferences, hobbies, religious affiliations, home-ownership, mortgate payments, mode of transport, responsiveness to direct female solicitations, contributions to political, religious and charitable groups, electronic products ownership, pet ownership, interests, book preferences, music preferences, and, lastly, heterosexual orientation/preference.
The PAP Government's determination to build a surveillance state behind the backs of singaporeans is becoming increasingly sinister! It is a measure of ministerial arrogance! The PAP Government is trying to end the presumption of innocence. What am I guilty of? Political subversion? What kind of major changes is the government clearly determined to enforce -- in the relationship between the citizen and the state?
Is this an example of twisted priorities? (Or are we looking at something far more worrying?) Do they not realise that heightened and sustained surveillance increases mistrust in any society? It places the delicate social contract between individuals and the state under the pressures, intrusions and disapprovals of our government's surveillance systems.
What are the costs of all these surveillance schemes, efforts, techniques, technologies, methods, systems, measures, plans, etc.? Will I be correctly, accurately and fairly identified, as a writer with a liberated, liberal and libertarian outlook? If not, will such wrong, inaccurate and unfair identification lead to my loss of RIGHTS as a man, human being, citizen and writer? Or even, to Fraudulent and False Arrest by the police enforcers of the "just" laws?
There will be a huge disruption in the day-to-day running of my life -- until this matter concerning my attempt to write on socio-political issues in Singapore and to have such writings published locally -- is resolved conclusively by the (surveillance) authorities!
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Temporary Cessation Of My Blog Entries/Postings (Updated Version)
I am sorry to announce to all my faithful and enthusiastic readers and fellow netizens who have been following these postings of mine in the present blog that I shall discontinue my posting activities in this blog indefinitely.
The reason? I am now working on a book of collected essays, which I am hoping to publish sometime next year. To continue posting blog articles, comments and excerpts (from books that I have read)--as I have been doing since April 2008--would divert much of my limited energy and attention from this major and ambitious effort of mine--which has been my life-long goal as a writer. (I am not satisfied with being an electronically published writer--as a blogger and commentator in the SDP website: http://www.yoursdp.org/; I have to aim for my ultimate objective, which is to be a published writer of PRINTED books.)
Please understand that I would resume my posting activities in this blog after the conclusion (and hopefully, success) of my said writing project. (Please support me by looking out for this first published book of mine when it appears in bookstores next year!)
Only a man like me -- an unrepentant INDIVIDUALIST -- can exercise my own private/personal regulating of my own behaviour! It has proven to be far better for me to constrain excessive risk-taking on my part -- in this exclusively personal, individualistic way of mine --than to let the manipulative and intrusive government regulate my own personal life and behaviour!
The government must take responsibility for my past failure as a man, human being, writer and citizen. My self-damaging lifestyle has involuntarily been a fact of my life. And my reputation has been tarnished -- without any responsibility on my part for such a happening!
Does the PAP Government not feel CONTRITE yet -- NOW? It is a flawed government -- despite what it publicly, openly and shamelessly claimed to be a "good" and "able" government! It is, in fact, full of greedy, inept, power-mad, corrupt, dishonest and unprincipled officers and officials!
They cannot compare me -- with the behaviour, lifestyle, preferences, values, qualities, and actions of an individualist, an theoretical anarchist, an oppositionist, and a modernist -- with the state of the Singapore economy! How can they? Both parties (oh, parties? I am just one single solo person! -- and they?) are as different and opposed to each other as would a masculine heterosexual man be when contrasted to an effeminate arse-hole loving homosexual!
The PAP Government is not infallible! It is NOT omniscient! My FUTURE cannot be forecast or predicted with 100% accuracy by this bunch of lunatic, nutty officials and officers! Such forecasts and predictions by them on other major matters or issues in the past have been shown, revealed and exposed as unscientific!
I may be becoming poorer and poorer in my finances: my debts are going up; my financial difficulties abound constantly -- without any genuine prospect of being solved; my attempt to service my housing loan from the Singapore government only gives me a headache! I want to ask, for instance, why Singapore Power (no doubt a privatised utilities company) is using tactics of harassment and intimidation in order to recover my debt? (Surely, the Singapore government should look into such matters and advise Singapore Power to give consumers like me a grace period -- yes, sufficient time -- to repay their debts without suffering mental anguish and emotional distress, not to mention financial pressure? And how, indeed, should I effectively and successfully reduce or restructure my debts -- as one wise financial counsellor advises? I call upon the Singapore Goverrnment to spped up the implementation of a DEBT REPAYMENT SCHEME -- to give low-wage earners or workers and the unemployed -- as well as oppositionist-dissidents like me, who are under perpetual surveillance by none other than officers and officials from the Singapore government itself! -- an alternative to destitution and homelessness!)
But, on the other hand -- and I'm happy to say so! -- I am becoming richer and richer in my mind. Even as I am being constantly regarded and treated as a criminal, or as a subversive, I'm getting, at the same time, more and more powerful in my writing. I want to build up my knowledge of human rights violations, government abuses, judicial injustices and maltreatment of dissidents (like me, for instance) by the ubiquitous officers, agents, operatives and officials of the surveillance groups or teams who are working for the PAP Government! Yes, I'm definitely going to be a major or key informant and inspiration for the foreign media and intellectuals in general. Yes, as former NMP Chia Shi Teck says, those intellectuals who know must speak up and scream!
I am in greater control of my life now as a writer and lover. Yes, I'm now in moral, intellectual and physical ascendancy! (Truly!)
Until my next posting, goodbye!
Sunday, October 12, 2008
On State Spying and the Death of Privacy In The Postmodern World
Why did I behave, think and express myself the way I did--often irrationally and so fruitlessly--throughout the last 36 years? And why was there a point of reference in the year 1972? What actually did take place in my life in that year?
I want to establish what certain events did occur to me during that year and subsequently. I'm not interested, as biased postmodern officials of the PAP Government would be, in 'proving' to the public that these certain events meant what prejudiced official representatives of the PAP Government wanted them to mean--in other words, in support of, or favouring, their loaded interpretations of those events!
What were those past attempts, based on my remembrances or memories, by the intelligence and security personnel of the PAP Government, to manufacture and concoct so-called recorded "evidences" (of incidents, escapades and happenings in the course of the last 36 years of my life) that would seem, yes!, to 'prove' my alleged "unsound" or "schizophrenic" mind, and, yes!, to discredit me as a man, human being, and citizen with long-held moral and political principles, convictions, beliefs, ideals, and values?--and, yes, finally, to nullify any cherished ambition and aspiration of mine to be a serious published writer (of quality books and essays) with honest motives and intentions?
Why would the PAP Government, since 1972, want to treat me--yes, to regard me, officially or otherwise--as a spy working covertly or overtly, for the PAP Government? What were its motives, its intentions--in manipulating and turning me into such as unproductive and inefficient spy--in those planned different roles, capacities, guises and ways adopted or undertaken, over the past 36 years, by an aspiring and single-minded writer like me?
I'm trying to reconstruct, as accurately and as completely as possible, the key momemts of my last 36 years in my mind now--probably not in the exact sequences in which they have occurred--and then using such a reconstructed picture or understanding, to provide a definitive selection of such events in my life (which I would eventually reveal in future essays of mine but which I would now use, as the basis of my present attempt to give to the public a rational--in other words, a questioning and probing--account of my life) as a so-called "spy", writer, lover and dissident!
This essay is by an oppositionist--one who rejects postmodernism--like me! And I will not entertain the public by telling stories or interpreting events in a way that contains so much ambiguities, contradictions, inconsistencies and illogicalities. I'm going to give the public a conventional or traditional historical account of my life. It will be based on a self-chosen series of aesthetic and moral choices. It is not going to give readers a multiplicity of viewpoints or interpretations, which the biased PAP Government will hold and interweave into a number of different and conflicting narratives.
I want now to reveal the multiplicity of VOICES purporting to represent the official Party, which has been maintaining lines and tricks of communication with those citizens they have focussed their attention on (from their enclosed base of operation up in the Top Secret location in Singapore)--and concentrating their efforts and energy, second-by-second, minute-by-minute, day-by-day, in their close control and surveillance of such (knowing and unknowing) citizens by telling bizarre stories, sometimes as raving lunatics, sometimes as vulgar, cruel and unmannerly critics, and sometimes in a cunningly and sexually tempting manner!, in their feverish and nightmarish work as official postmodernists, for such a long time now, yes, from mid 20th century to the present moment, early in the 21st century!
And who were -- and still are (!) -- these VOICES? They are from the following (both male and female) members of The Special Top Secret Project (under the Project Director, Military Security Department, MINDEF) a covert operation known to the CORE GROUP of leading power-players in the PEOPLE'S ACTION PARTY, namely: Tan Hong Huat, Ang, David Ong, Phyllis Balakrishnan, Melinda, Nancy, Wendy, Ms Oh, Ms Lum, Ms Heng, Catherine, Irene Fong, (and a host of other masturbating pricks and cunts, unknown to me, yet!).
But for how long can they sustain such "imprisonment" of me--and of each and every one of the other controlled (especially unknowingly) citizens? Till each and every one of them die?
This is my advice to these Party officers or officials: Improve your mind! Cultivate a taste for fine reading! There are certain qualities in a man's being that money and other temptations cannot buy. You know you can't win by reasoned arguments and persuasion. So you people used, instead, threats, force or other cunning (especially linguistic) trickeries in your long-distance communications with us -- the victims of governmental surveillance and control -- to make your points or to achieve your goals. Why? Are you so insecure, so weak, and so deficient?
As often-disrespectful voices from the ministries, you are simply not respecting human rights!
You're abusing your ministerial powers and privileges! If you Party representatives, fucking bastards!, force me into displaying bizarre and purposeless behaviour, don't complain later that I disrespect you! Don't try to dirty, corrupt or contaminate my world--or I'll continue to resist you (the "people" or government of Singapore?) with all my resources -- especially intellectual -- and with all my potency, as a human being, man citizen and writer! Surely, you can't help me--assuming that THAT is indeed your aim! no? --to live a good, productive and satisfying life--by precisely interfering with my life!?
I have rejected -- not completely though --postmodernism and unthinking subordination to those who are out to reduce me to a mere abject subject -- without any compelling individuality of my own! I'd rather be, and die, like a poor man -- if I can't compell you, Party officers and officials, to respect me, on my own conditions and terms !
I'll never give up fighting against the Party and insisting on asserting my rights as a man, human being, citizen and writer! I want to have a say in running and leading my own life. Is that too much to ask for in a democratic society?
Are the Party officers' and officials' motives (and intentions) beyond reproach? Why must I be controlled and regarded as a subversive "government agent"--as implied by their usage of the term "implantee" when refering to me (as in: "A man has been implanted as an agent--thus, "implantee"!--in a targetted organization to spy on its personnel?")?
What did I mean by claiming that I'd been put under such close surveillance by the PAP Government? Well, the answer is simple: The People's Action Party -- through its lackeys and toadies working in the Singapore Government -- have been "implanting" its authoritarian and autocratic ideology, beliefs and attitudes -- subtly, cleverly, incrementally, stealthily, and diligently -- since those early days in 1972, into the BRAIN of a helpless, poor, and unfortunate citizen (namely: yours truly, David Chua Chuan Seah) whose own rights, personal beliefs and attitudes had been patiently, dutifully, cunningly and cruelly put under "observation", "examination" and "judgment" by the surveillance authorities in the wards of the Medical Centre at SAFTI, after he had returned from a few days out as an AWOL offender in 1972.
Who (in Singapore or elsewhere) can help me resolve my conflict -- both personal and public -- with these fucking PAP lackeys and toadies -- mostly nameless and faceless "voices", whose identities have been the subject of my investigations and which I've had some inkling of, intermittently, throughout the past 36 years, during which I, by forcing these PAP toadies to "expose" themselves as unprincipled, inept, greedy, power-mad and lazy governmental "controllers" with annoying, irritating, insulting and disrespectful methods and techniques of communications, finally earn my "respect" at last! For they have come to terms, finally, with my insistent determination and persistent efforts to set things right -- yes, to clean up the messiness, dirtiness and sinfulness (like my "schizophrenia", my "subversiveness", my "criminality", my "perversions", and my "immorality") that "I" had created or caused in my life during the past 36 years!
To emphasize, I'm not interested in the PAP Government's viewpoints and interpretations on those certain events in my life during the past 36 years. I want, instead, to establish the historical facts -- the actual events or occurrences in my controlled life, based on my memories (and from documentary "evidences" or official records of such events which have come into my knowledge)!
It matters a lot to my self-respect--that my personal life-history can be understood, examined and accurately, if not comprehensively, recorded with honesty, seriousness and graciousness. I want my leaders NOT to insult my dignity and intelligence any more--from now onwards!
FOREVER IN MY HEART: Postmodernist PAP Female Neo-Conservative Censors and Monitors Over The Last 36 Years
My Lifetime:
Those "Feminine",
"Truthful", "Magnanimous",
"Broad-minded", "Open-minded",
"Liberated" and "Honest"
Women!
(Which I Have Been "Meeting" --
Yes! Oh Dear! --
Through Electronic
Inter-Connections
and Telecommunications
With Them Over The Past
36 Years In Our
Postmodern Surveillance Society)
Of Women's Ugliness, Stupidity, and Sadness:
The Ageing Cunts, Drooping Tits, and Misshapen Bodies of "The Loves of My Lifetime"!
Introduction:
Not many postmodernist PAP female censors, spies and monitors -- working for the Singapore government as surveillance agents -- can qualify as femme fatales! Not even in those early youthful years! How many postmodernist PAP female censors, spies and monitors can be charmers, enchantresses, seductresses, sirens, temptresses or vamps? How do they look -- in terms of facial and physical appearance? Even when they were young, they were hardly beautiful, happy or intelligent! Physically, and facially, they were not even attractive! Now that they are already old, do they still look stupid, ugly, and sad -- as when they ere young?
Questions For These Romantic Women:
Are they still really THAT old-fashioned, still THAT prudish, still THAT overmodest, still THAT narrow-minded, still THAT old-maidish, still THAT priggish, still THAT puritanical, still THAT stuffy, still THAT ultra-virtuous, still THATprim, still THAT prissy, still THAT proper, still THAT squeamish, still THAT square, still THAT strait-laced, still THAT Victorian? And, yet, still so utterly lacking in basic humanity, honesty, feminity, and truthfulness -- not to mention basic human courtesy!
Commentary:
Postmodernist PAP women -- as censors, monitors and spies -- have been, and are still, all expressing themselves in an affected, feigned, hypocritical, hypercritical, hysterical, artificial, assumed, counterfeit, fabricated, fake, false, imitative, insincere, opinionated, pseudo, sham, simulated and spurious manner!
Are they, perhaps, now really "schizophrenic" themselves? (After all these years spent working in a MADHOUSE -- manipulating, humiliating and controlling (scientific and technological) "schizophrenics"?)
Conclusion:
I have absolutely no interest -- especially in a sexual (and certainly not in any romantic sense) --in associating with such misleading, self-interested and dishonest (not to mention ugly, sad and stupid) story-telling postmodernist PAP female spies, monitors and censors! What else is there for a knowing, knowledgeable and self-aware writer like me -- truthful, articulate and honest(not to mention still happy, intelligent and good-looking) who, as also a law-abiding citizen and human being, faces conflicts and pressures generated by his attempt to come to terms with his discovery of a world which has now become totally different from what he has always known, or thought he knew (even after his "implantation" in that significant year 1972) -- to say?
Decision:
It's your decision!
-- Ms HO CHING
(Prominent Member of The Government and The
Establishment; Wife of PM Lee Hsien Loong;
and, Arguably, The Most Powerful Woman in Singapore!)
They -- all these surveillance officers (male or female) -- all know my important name and flat number; but there will be no more extension of their "telecommunication lines" to my assertive, resurgent and bold being -- as a man, human, and citizen! And also even more as a writer, I might -- just might -- "HAVE" them! That's how I'd solved the long-standing and outstanding problem of trying to have "REAL" sexual relations with these ugly, sad and stupid female members of the most powerful and highest authority of this country -- as a presently FINANCIALLY destitute and dissident writer (who is despersately seeking FINANCIAL assistance from the great welfare agency)!
They will always be women to me! (But are they -- these moral and religious fanatics -- AHEAD of -- or BEHIND -- the time?)
PERSONAL REMINDER:
From now onwards, as these PAP/SGwomen don't -- and can't -- respond positively and respectfully to my higher intellectual and moral level of discourse, debate, discussion and conversation, I'll just have to hit their soft, sensitive, insecure, vulnerable and weak spots or areas -- in other words, their sense or image of their own facial and physical appearances! Yes, it's a matter of tit-for-tat! And an eye for an eye! But didn't they ask for it? Serve them right!
Finally, I'm trying to avoid being affected by the TOXIC atmosphere existing in their Control Room -- on their side! Or to put it differently: I want to avoid being infected by the viruses from their side!
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Telling Stories (Part Two)
MY STORY-TELLING:
PART TWO OF MY LIFE (2009 -- )
On Postmodernism, Relativism,
Nonsense and Frivolities
To postmodernists, truths exist only in relation to specific discourses. There are no absolute or universal facts--only stories that "work" at particular times for their particular "speakers". Pragmatism in philosophy puts forward a similar argument. Structuralists, poststructuralists and new historicists argue that it is impossible to access reality except through texts.
Discourse theorists suggests that it is NOT truth that counts, but who defines it, and what uses they put it to; KNOWLEDGE IS USED IN THE EXERCISE OF POWER:
- Observers are never neutral or disinterested. Truth-claims serve specific interests;
- You can only look at an object of enquiry from a particular viewpoint, and through a specific set of expectations and requirements;
- No account of historical reality is free of narrative--because you can't reconstruct the past as it "really" happened, you can only tell stories about it.
This can be seen as a relativist outlook. It can lead to a critical engagement with history. It enables new histories to be written that reveal the significance of previously neglected groups, or which challenge dominant but biased accounts; feminist histories or Marxist histories would be two examples of this. [But is there any guarantee such re-writing of history will not be subjected to biased outlook and misleading interpretations of their own -- reflecting considerable vested interests invested into such "histories"-- rendering such "histories" totally unacceptable to traditional historians (and to someone like me?)].
Since all histories are stories, historians needn't worry about evidence, accuracy or validation--as they can be all simulated or manufactured! Does all this not open the door to irresponsible, even dangerous, revisions of history? And give itself no grounds on which to dispute them? Are there not clear boundaries between history and fiction? Do we not need to believe that there are such things as undeniable, objective facts? If we don't tell it like it is, we'll all be mad!
Postmodernists can defend their position by claiming that it is not about choosing between pure facts and fantasy. (You can tell that one account is truer than another--without assuming that your knowledge is perfect or that new facts won't come to light.)
Postmodernist relativism makes us aware of the rules and conventions under which claims are made--i.e., we must "play" by the agreed rules--applying, in other words, the standards of the historical community. We must be "in" the history language game; we must be historians! (Yes, but what kind of historians?)
The Challenging Practices of Everyday Life
ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT DISOBEDIENCE --
AS PRACTISED BY INDIVIDUALISTS
IN THEIR EVERYDAY LIFE
In order to understand the present way of life, you should attend less to a total picture of society as a whole and more to the seemingly insignificant details of how people go about living their lives.
By doing so, you'll find in contemporary life not some falsely unified spirit of the age, but a complex mass of interweaving and contradictory desires, concerns and stories.
Everyday life is creative. Everyday life is full of such acts of "poaching, tricking, speaking, strolling, desiring". We are not passive victims of consumer society. We make our material conditions bearable and make sense of the world we live in. Every day, we engage in the creative production of our own power struggles, pleasures, and acts of disobedience -- AS INDIVIDUALISTS (YES, AND CERTAINLY, SORRY, NOT AS SUBJECTS, WHO ARE ALL ALREADY DEFEATED, COMPROMISED AND SUBMISSIVE AGENTS OF THE SYSTEM, NO LESS!).
In doing so, we CREATE IMPORTANT CRACKS IN THE MONOLITH OF THE DOMINANT ECONOMIC ORDER!
We may not be able to change the world, but at least, we can migrate across the cultural environment, taking bits we need from whatever products and experiences are available. (Hey, hey, hey!) In short, day-to-day life is about making do against the system!
Postmodern Politics
Society, to them, has fragmented into so many conflicting knowledges, identities, needs, and views--it is not possible or desirable to see the human race as "one big fmily"!
This situation arises out of the fact that socieites arebecoming multi-cultural and our lifestyles are becoming cosmopolitan. It also means that there is no agreement about what is worth believing (or knowing) any more! That social conditions are in a frightening state of disrepair! Postmodernists--some of them--see it as far more constructive to push the fragmentation as far as it will go--and use it to your advantage!
diversity and disagreement are part of political discourse. To generate new ideas and experiences, postmodernists--many of them, yes!--propose that we should activitate the differences between people and between the cultural spaces they inhabit.
Possibilities for creativity are contained in this activation. (It also contains the potential for violent conflict; some postmodern thinkers would rather see violence than flabby tolerance. But it is our responsibility to ensure that the activation will only encourage possibilities for creativity--and nothing violent, conflicting, flabby or tolerant!)
Individual Identity and Society in the Postmodern Capitalist System
Capitalism and Modern Societies
The postmodern position on individual identity and society (as an early statement): the world is fragmented and in a flux--in which individuals are liberated from any "repressive" notions about the rationality, unity, or stability of the self.
The modernity's capitalist system, in which repression and dominance are lived by the people, shows up the power relationship between modern society and individual desire!
Subjects and their pleasures are defined and controlled by the institutions of the modern state (unless or except if you're still individualists!). Capitalism has infiltrated all of existence. It has taken away from people -- except and excluding all those who are still individualists -- the possibility of experiencing genuine freedom, expression and satisfasction. All desires under capitalism are "fake", "mediated" desires. (For those who are still NOT yet SUBJECTS in the system, this is not necessarily true!)
Modernity has expanded communication technologies and consumerism into our lives--which are central to an insidious kind of totalitarianism. Thus totalitarianism produces "false needs" and seeks to penetrate consciousness itself--neutralizing all voices of dissent, and turning us all into interchangeable components of the capitalist machine -- except yours truly, whose voice of conscience and dissent remains clear, strong, vibrant, loud and still uncompromised -- after all these years -- by the Capitalist system!
Even in democratic societies, mass culture acts as an authoritarian force which reduces people to passive social conformity. It injects the capitalist status quo into people's unconscious--making its victims lose their individuality, and persuades them (its victims) to willingly accept mass culture's values!
Five Facts On Modernism
- Modernism adopted adversarial stance toeards the postmodern world by making powerful critical statements about postmodern society;
- Modernism achieved genuine quality--as in avant-garde literature--by aiming for the highest order (of purity and autonomy) in writing and self=expression;
- Modernist literature opposed capitalism;
- The so-called "death of the author" in literature was regarded by modernism as excessively anti-historical and asocial;
- The proper understanding of a text is impossible without knowing something about the "who, where, and when" of it.
Six Facts On Postmodernism
- There is no clean, objective distinction between the modern and the postmodern. (There is no chasm or a point of transition between the two periods);
- Postmodernism involves "both/and" thinking;
- Postmodernism is sucked into the orbit of commerce, mass culture, assembly-line mentality, kitsch art, mass media, advertising, fetishization of commodities, capitalism;
- Postmodernist art is drained of meaning and emotional force by commercialisation;
- Postmodernism is a social and economic event brought about mainly by the spread of mass industry;
- Postmodernism is a cultural matter of changes in the arts.
Friday, October 3, 2008
The Life and Times of An Amorous Writer
Singapore: 1981--2008
In 1981, at the age of 28, as a handsome, intelligent and happy man, I started to have penetrative sexual intercourse with women for the first time in my life! And I also decided to devote myself wholeheartedly to a freelance writing career--contributing, regularly and unflinchingly, thoughtful but interesting articles to various magazines published in Singapore.
The year before, in 1980, when I was 27, I had resigned from my untenable position as a Personnel Officer in Singapore Food Industries, where I worked miserably for 4 years. Prior to that unsatisfactory position in that government-controlled company, I had been working unhappily as a Clerical Officer in the Ministry of Defence for about 10 months (between Dec. 1975 and Oct. 1976). I had spent the entire year before, in 1975, at the age of 22 --after having served two-and-a-half years in the SAF as a National Serviceman and becoming a reservist in June 1974--trying to find out what I should do to survive as an aspiring writer.
In 1981, 6 years later, at the age of 28, I had my first (as mentioned earlier) and most enjoyable penetrative sexual intercourse -- with a PHYSICALLY ATTRACTIVE and INTELLIGENT woman called Kelly. Kelly was a stunningly beautiful commuter whom I first met on a bus plying along Orchard Road one morning.
That year (1981), the cinemas in Singapore were screening "Reds", "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and "Chariots of Fire". It was also the year when the late opposition leader J. B. Jeyaretnam won his first political victory over the PAP at the Anson By-Election.
I was residing happily at Whampoa Drive then--spending my free time reading books and magazines and listening to rock music. (John Lennon had died the previous year.) I was beginning to engage myself in the naive, simple and unsophisticated enjoyment of a life based on music, magazines, books and penetrative sexual intercourse (with prostitutes, no less!). I also started to spend, that year, much of my free time composing, first, anti-government, and then later, pro-government, letters to The Straits Times--which published, over the next few years, more than 20 pro-government letters of mine--including that PAP-fawning and, especially, pro-LKY letter, "On voters and leaders", in the year 1984 (another General Elections year).
I was having very satisfying sexual relations with many captivating and different women in 1984, an unpredictably disappointing General Elections year for the PAP, when it had a shock over the discouraging polling results.
It was also the year when "The Killing Fields" and "Amadeus" were being screened in the cinemas.
In December the next year (1985), I moved into a one-room HDB rental flat at Jalan Kukoh. Sometime in the middle of 1986, at the age of 33, I befriended a sexy but married woman called Canty, 35, while I was having dinner alone at a Food Court in the old Forum Galleria in Orchard Road. Canty approached me eagerly, and after seeing her for a few days, she soon became my lover. Oh, she was shameless and uninhibited--that amazing woman! I had the best three months of my sexual life with her.
That year, the local cinemas were screening "Top Gun", "9 1/2 Weeks", and "Aliens".
Turning 34 the next year (1987), I moved into a small rented room in an old private apartment at Telok Kurau. It was the year when the Singapore government detained a group of alleged "Marxist Conspirators". Typical PAP politics!
The cinemas were screening "Fatal Attraction", "Wall Street", "The Last Emperor" and "The Untouchables".
1987 was also the year when I began to visit, over the next few years (until 1989), Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia--several times.
In 1990, at age 37, I moved into a 5-room HDB flat in Yishun. I got to know a pretty but married 26-year-old woman called Khin Khin, who was working at Philips Singapore Pte Ltd at that time.
That year, I remember, the cinemas were screening "Dances With Wolves" and "Home Alone".
And I spent the next 4 years (until 1994) with the English-educated but temperamental Khin Khin as my regular weekend lover, making passionate love with her every time.
I eventually ended my intense affair with Khin Khin in 1994, at age 41, but not before taking her (a rock music fan) on an outing, for the last time--significantly, to a Bob Dylan concert held at the Indoor Stadium in Kallang in February of that year.
I moved into a large private residence at Chempaka Avenue in December 1994 and spent one fruitful year frequenting the brothels in Geylang--during my spare time. There, I met Jenny, Linda, Hantu and a host of other attractive and inviting ladies--who all served me very well!
I was working on a 17-page-long essay called "Notes From The Underground" from that year (1994) onwards--using the personal computer which I had just bought.
In 1995, I moved into a 4-room HDB flat at Hougang and continued to use my personal computer for my freelance writing. Over the next few years, I continuously revised this long confessional essay and sent many different versions and copies of it--while it was still a work-in-progress--to many different people in Singapore. Finally, in 1997, at age 44, I completed the definite version of my essay with much satisfaction. I sent this last completed version to a local cultural magazine for publication. But it was rejected--to my great disappointment. Fuck the Cultured Bastard!
That year, the cinemas were screening "Con Air" and "The Fifth Element".
By late December of that year (1997), I had already moved into a 3-room HDB flat in Yishun. I then visited Taiwan and befriended a young and pretty tour guide named Ann. We spent one week in Taiwan together--visiting places of interest, eating at restaurants, and then spending intimate nights together in hotel rooms, making sweet love. It was a most enjoyable trip for me.
Beginning from 1998, when I turned 45, I became a full-time serious writer--spending my days at my new 3-room Yishun flat or at the public libraries, composing essay after essay--with the intention of publishing them as a collection of essays in book-form.
For the next 10 years (till 2008), I worked diligently at my self-chosen vocation--reading widely and deeply and writing skillfully and carefully. My father passed away in 2000 and my mother two years later, in 2002 (when I was 49).
Habitually, I had two wonderfully devoted female companions during these 10 long years, when I was working as a serious full-time writer (of essays) and as an aspiring author (of controversial books). I met sweet and enthusiastic Jennifer, who was 26 then, at a bank near Aljunied MRT Station. And I befriended charming and pretty Yan, who was 25 then, at Pudu Raya Station in Kuala Lumpur one morning while I was on holiday. Jennifer and Yan were both attractive, cheerful and generous in spirit. I had many very interesting conversations with these two fine ladies, and I managed to persuade them to have sexual relations with me eventually--after they had trustingly and honestly accepted and understood that I needed more than just light physical contact with them during our encounters or meetings.
I became a still-active senior citizen, at 55, in 2008. It was a most eventful and significant year for me--as a full-time writer and as a still-horny man. I had not lost my sexual desires or appetites for women--even after reaching 55. What a personal feat--for a liberated, liberal and libertarian intellectual-writer like me!
But now, I sometimes had to pay for the services of prostitutes--for the satisfaction of my sexual needs, as I was no longer youthful or handsome enough to attract ordinary respectable women as my sexual partners.
I was therefore extremely lucky to have met my new-found girlfriend and lover, Yi Xuan, an attractive and sexy 22-year-old Chinese woman whom I picked up from a coffeeshop at Geylang near noon on Sunday, 19.10.08, and with whom I spent a terrific 1-hour love session in bed at a hotel located in the vicinity. Yi Xuan was responsive, interested, amiable, companionable, considerate, sociable, friendly, genial, helpful, kind, obliging and solicitous. What an amazing woman--one with heightened feminity! I would like to fuck this pretty woman again and again! It was an electrifying and realistic sexual intercourse--totally unlike those deceptive, illusionary and imaginary occasions with the seven masturbating pussies from the Network (the Company, the System, the Party), whose long-distant, faraway, remote-controlled and manipulative performances (as sex service workers) are anything but fortifying to such a humane soul, mind, heart and body like me--yes, to a man, human being, citizen and amorous Modernist writer in this postmodern world. Hello, Brave New World! Ha, ha, ha!
I am a well-read oppositionist intellectual, an honest partisan reviewer, a cultivated American scholar, a responsible published blogger, a versatile political commentator, a liberated weekly newsmaker! I like to read, write, think and fuck pretty women--and also exert my personal impact on my readers. However, I've been not much of a success so far as a reader, writer, thinker and fucker. Why? Because I've been too meek, acquiescent, compliant, deferential, docile, forbearing, gentle, humble, long-suffering, mild, modest, patient, peaceful, resigned, slavish, soft, spineless, spiritless, subdued, submissive, tame, timid, unambitious, unassuming, unpretentious, unresisting, weak and yielding! Yes, I should have been more arrogant and rebellious. Indeed, hopefully, I WILL BE--from now onwards!
Meanwhile, I had not visited the local cinemas for a very long time now.
I had also, for the first time, bought my first handphone in 2008--and used it frequently to contact my publishers, both in Singapore and Malaysia. I had, too, bought a new personal computer--for about S$1,000/- in August and even started to become a regular blogger.
But my first love will always be writing--and, yes, women (especially pretty ones)! I tried, quite successfully, to befriend as many pretty women as possible--and even managed to have sexual relations with many of these young and attractive women in hotel rooms--and also at my home in Yishun--while patronizing prostitutes at the same time. Many of these women--prostitutes or otherwise--were remarkably beautiful, youthful and friendly.The year 2008 was indeed exceptional for me as a man.
Finally, as a serious full-time writer, I had managed to write, in the year 2008, at the highest artistic and intellectual level--like a self-assured contributor to the great Partisan Review or The American Scholar (two American journals of the highest quality). It was no mean achievement on my part. The problem was, I was still having trouble trying to get these critical essays published in book-form--as a collection of essays--by local publishers. I may be getting poorer and poorer in my finances; but I am becoming richer and richer in my mind! I have striven to become a more powerful writer. And, yes, I have succeeded in becoming more potent in fucking women. Indeed, I am in major (if not total) control of my life. I am in ascendancy! (Yes! Yes! Yes!)
And, yes, individuality--not subjectivity--has sustained me in this messy but exciting postmodern world. Hello again, Brave New World!
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
The "Schizophrenic" World-View of A Writer-Intellectual
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!