Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess (review)

Souchou Yao, a Malaysian anthropologist based at the University of Sydney (Australia), explains how he wishes his book had been named Singapore on the Couch since its central concerns is with “a nationstate in mental turmoil seeking a cure” (p. xiv). Indeed, Yao’s book is a collection of case studies of contemporary events in Singapore, framed in terms of what he calls a “culture of excess” inextricably linked to national anxieties that are deeply rooted in the traumatic experiences of a struggling nation and its founding father Lee Kuan Yew. Yao’s approach is innovative and eclectic, drawing analytical concepts and methods quite freely from anthropology, political philosophy, legal studies, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies.

In the first two chapters, Yao sets up the framework. He explains the conventional distinction between contractual bases of political authority (often built up from liberal assumptions) and the moral bases of political authority, the second of which he claims is important for understanding how the Singapore State has managed the contradictions between capitalism and socialism (formulated as a “socialism that works”) and succeeded at garnering popular support through an appeal to family, community, and shared values. In The Singapore Story — the title of Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs and the endlessly retold public narrative of “Singapore’s struggles and the PAP leaders’ heroic endeavours” (p. 31) — Yao identifies examples of “high drama” (p. 28), “a sense of the tragic” (p. 31), “over-responses” (p. 41), an “over-wrought imagination”, and “psychological urgency” (p. 45), all part of Singapore’s culture of excess that characterizes even the way the State, in its “totalitarian ambitions” (p. 44), deals with a society that is divided, conflicted, in flux, and in danger of entering a democratic void. By constantly regenerating the experience of trauma, The Singapore Story produces national subjects who are compelled to remember by endlessly revisiting the drama, chaos, danger, and violence of Singapore’s past, and thereby receive continuous confirmation of the solution that only the PAP State can bring.

Chapter 3 locates the culture of excess in Singapore’s ambivalent attitudes to the West, whose morally decadent “yellow culture”, bodily indulgence, and bourgeois individualism must be rejected and even condemned in order to protect social discipline; and yet capital, technology, and consumer goods of the West are greatly desired by this postcolonial nation seeking prosperity and international status. The chapter gives an account of the anti-yellow culture activism of the Chinese-educated youth in the 1950s and 1960s and of the newly-installed PAP State’s dismissal of a distinguished British professor at the University of Malaya in Singapore for being critical of its cultural engineering policies. Singapore’s Occidentalism presents the West as “the silent, passive figure of alterity”, and Asian Values as all the elevated qualities that the West does not (or cannot) possess. Nevertheless, a fundamental ambivalence towards the West creates complex formations such as “Confucian capitalism” which Yao describes as a culture whose “economic calculations and pursuit of profit do not go together with heartless market forces, but sit cheek by jowl with social harmony and moral considerations” (pp. 73–74). The West, Yao explains, serves to warn of the vulnerability of this formation.

Chapter 4 examines the international and local reactions to the caning in 1994 of Michael Fay, an American teenager charged with mischievously damaging a large number of cars. Originally sentenced to six strokes of the cane, Fay received four strokes after the American President intervened with a plea for clemency. Yao explains how “order” in Singapore takes precedence over “law”, pointing to Lee Kuan Yew’s insistence on making the State master rather than servant of the law. And through this mastery, the State “practises” the law in order to “make meaning”: specifically, communicating in an unambiguous and belligerent way the disparity between Singapore’s tough stand and the West’s soft stand on crime, as well as the associated images of safety in Singapore and danger in...