Since the publication of the memoirs of Singapore's elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew from 1998 to 2000, there has been a flurry of autobiographies and biographies of former politicians determined to have their legacies reinstated, if not recognised. This trend has probably reached a new peak in the recent publication of Men in white, a 600-page book commissioned by the government-linked media group, Singapore Press Holdings, which supposedly renders a more inclusive and impartial historical account of the People's Action Party. Underlying the revelation of political dramas in this volume are the increasing trends towards the simplification of the otherwise complex structural forces behind the shaping of the republic's modern identity to the idiosyncrasies and agencies of several personalities.
Here, The Asian modern becomes critical in its focus on what its author C.J.W.-L. Wee sees as the ‘cultural logic’ in the evolution of the Singapore state and society rather than the facticity of its political chronology. The Associate Professor takes on an ambitious multidisciplinary effort to theorise what post-colonial Singapore's officialdom construed as its ‘traditional Asian’ society against the intersecting paradigms and demands of Western capitalism, modernity and development. Behind his expansive coverage of issues from social engineering, economic restructuring and urban planning, to the performance and cinematic arts, Wee seeks to demonstrate the manifestations and tensions behind the ‘humourless morality lesson as an economic success story’.
Inheriting not just the institutions, but also paternalistic worldviews from their former colonial masters, the governing Anglicised elite harbour dilemmas of ‘traditions’ as they embark on industrialisation and modernisation. With its Fordist-Talyorist disciplinary mechanisms, the post-colonial state embarked on tuning its workforce for modern shipyards and factories in the 1960s, and the post-modern culture industries several decades later. Even as it entails the ruthless emasculation of organic social fabrics and containment of what is thought of as irrational and superstitious cultural practices, the political leadership paradoxically promises an alternative Asian modernity founded upon highly reified Confucian notions of collectivism against what it sees as the less deferential notions of Western individualism.
To Wee, however, this ‘new civilisation’ is no more than the ‘petit-bourgeois philistine modernity’ that not only confuses, but celebrates comprador and consumerist lifestyle capitalism, one that reduces culture to a corporate branding exercise. In turn, the simultaneous promises and anguish of a de-territorialised and de-cultured modernity creates new complexities and social pathologies that ordinary citizens as well as intellectuals and artists are still trying to grapple with. On the cultural front, the angst is articulated through several fronts. This includes the bleak portrayals of the monolithic public housing landscape and its inhabitants by prominent foreign architecture critics such as Rem Koolhaas and Singaporean filmmaker Eric Khoo, as well as the explorations of identity estrangement and explorations by theatre practitioners such as Kuo Pao Kun and Ong Keng Seng. On the whole, these productions try to understand what Wee describes as the ‘cultural violence and costs it took to become modern Asian societies’.
Despite its completeness in the republic, the author raises questions in his epilogue on the continued presence of the interventionist-authoritarian state as its leaders urge its people towards the post-Fordist ‘intelligent productivity’. However, it remains to be seen how this emphasis on the knowledge-based economy would be a potentially empowering and democratising experience for Singaporeans. In addition, Wee ponders on how Singapore's cultural imaginations and trajectories would be re-moulded in light of the shifting geo-political foci of power with the re-emergence of China.
Even as he acknowledges the case of Singapore as the most radical experiment in social engineering, Wee is largely aware the experience of the tiny city-state should not be representative of the larger Asian context. Nonetheless, he has provided a refreshing perspective in perhaps framing the complexities in which the non-Western world engages with the often conflicting processes of modernisation and westernisation. Wee's project has been regarded as being too ‘impenetrable to all but the academic insider’. However, it is only through such academic rigour that one can interrogate and illustrate the dynamics between a concept as elusive as modernity to a country as small as Singapore.
