This introductory chapter will introduce the rationale for this project, through an examination of the relationship between aesthetics and politics as conceived by philosopher Jacques Ranciere. For Ranciere, politics takes place along an axis of a distribution of the sensible: what can or cannot be seen, what can or cannot be heard, what can or cannot be said. When the terms of the system become fixed, a police order is established, whereupon politics is then said to effect a redistribution of the sensible. Dealing with the sensible (that which involves the five senses), all art forms are, to a large extent, political. Rancière’s definition of politics as a redistribution of the sensible thus provides the basis for the way the essays in this collection investigate the relationship between art and politics. To this end, the introduction will include a brief evaluation of how each of these essays participates in the political.

End Abstract

This collection of essays examines the contemporary arts as political practice in Singapore. Singapore marked 50 years of independence in 2015, and to commemorate the nation’s golden jubilee, the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) launched The Singapore Chronicles, a set of simple primers for the general public, to record, explain and offer insights into the country’s make-up. While in no way related to the work of the IPS, this collection hopes to provide critical insight into some of the more controversial talking points that have shaped Singapore’s identity as a nation. One of these is the role played by the contemporary arts in shaping Singapore’s political landscape. Politics is often perceived as that which limits the flourishing of the arts here. The objective of this volume is to critically examine the tenuous relationship between the arts and politics in Singapore, to suggest a mutually informative relationship between the two. Scholars agree that a democratic space is needed for the arts to flourish, and Singapore, as one such scholar noted, is not known for its democracy¹. Between the arts manifesto formed by the artistic community in 2013 calling for a more democratic handling of the arts, the removal in 2014 of three children’s books by the National Library Board due to their promotion of what is perceived to be non-traditional family values and most recently the ban on the public screening of Tan Pin Pin’s film To Singapore with Love because the film, as announced by the Media Development Authority, “undermines national security,”² the nation seems primed for an evaluation, and perhaps a re-vision, of the relationship between the arts and politics. Our intention is to demonstrate that aesthetic practice can be, indeed is, political, without having to be subjected to self-censorship. While censorship continues to be a point of contention in Singapore, what we aim to do is to expand the pejorative understanding of what it means to be politically engaged, beyond matters of party politics.

Our essays begin with the assumption that all art is indeed political and that all art form is a form of political practice. From this starting point, the essays examine both critically and creatively, specific ways in which the practice of art in Singapore redraws the boundaries that conventionally separate the arts from politics. In doing so, they open a dialogue between artistic practice and political practice that reinforces the mutuality of both, rather than their exclusivity. To this end, this volume aims to redefine our understanding of the political, to demonstrate that political involvement is not a simple matter of partisan politics, but constitutes what philosopher Jacques Rancière refers to as a redistribution of the sensible: what can or cannot be seen, what can or cannot be heard, what can or cannot be said. According to Rancière’s understanding, politics has an inherently aesthetic dimension, and aesthetics an inherently political one. More importantly, these conditions delimit the terms of inclusion and exclusion when we see, hear, speak, think, do and create. This distribution defines the fields of aesthetics and politics. For Rancière, aesthetics, especially contemporary art, and politics involve a redistribution of the sensible, or a dissensus. Steve Corcoran explains Rancière’s conceptualisation of political practice:

Politics, then, instead of consisting in an activity whose principle separates its domain out from the social, is an activity that consists only in blurring the boundaries between what is considered political and what is considered proper to the domain of social or private life.³

Politics, argues Rancière, “invents new forms of collective enunciation. It reframes the given by inventing new ways of making sense of the sensible, new configurations between the visible and the invisible, and between the audible and the inaudible, new distributions of space and time—in short, new bodily capacities. […] Politics creates a new form, as it were, of dissensual ‘common sense’.”⁴ Dissensus is figured not as a “designation of conflict as such, but is a specific type thereof, a conflict between sense and sense. Dissensus is a conflict between a sensory presentation and a way of making sense of it, or between several sensory regimes and/or bodies.”⁵ This volume is as much an examination into the ways Singapore is (re)imagined through the contemporary arts, as it is an investigation that chimes with Rancière’s understanding of the aesthetics of, and inherent to, politics, where politics constitutes precisely a redistribution of what can or cannot be seen and heard. Each essay here deals with the arts, society and politics in a manner that not only interrogates the boundaries we draw between these three spheres of action, reframing the way we make sense of them, but also reviews the conditions that shape the way we think of, or locate, bodies in relation to each other in these spheres, as well as in relation to the nation and the state. The essays in the collection speak to the complications involved in such a process of change, of negotiating between what can or is allowed to be said or seen, while at the same time attempting to subvert impositions of singular or binary notions of the constitution of values—cultural, social and political—and indeed between the personal and the collective.

As a process of change, this notion of political engagement through artistic practice as an activity that reframes the given or redistributes the sensible also anticipates the risks involved in any enterprise of transformation. Singaporean lawyer and playwright Eleanor Wong, whose plays are the subject of Chap. 7 of this volume, commented in an interview that political engagement requires an expression of the self that goes beyond the personal, requiring a redrawing of the boundaries one sets between the personal and the public, and requires one “to step over the line to being engaged.” Stepping over the line, and going beyond “what is simply accepted,” ⁶ necessarily involves risk, a wager, a stake in the future of the nation, as the public castigation of local writer Catherine Lim can testify to. Following her criticism of state leaders and the PAP in two articles published in The Straits Times in 1994, the idea that art must be practised in the exclusion of politics has come to be even more circumscribed by “out-of-bounds (OB) markers,” designed to keep the arts out of political involvement. Lim had criticised the People’s Action Party (PAP) for not being representative of the people and the then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong for being under the influence of his predecessor, the late Lee Kuan Yew. Taking exception to the claim, Goh had, at the time, challenged Lim to enter politics, to which her reply was, “I wrote as a responsible person interested in the direction of Singapore’s politics. I don’t have to join a political party to be able to comment on it.”⁷ Previously a regular columnist at The Straits Times, Lim was removed from the paper following the publication of her two articles, and OB markers exercised more explicitly. First used in 1991 by the then Minister for Information and the Arts George Yeo, the term “OB markers” describes the boundaries of acceptable political discourse, delimiting permissible topics for public discussion. Goh’s warning that she join a political party if she wanted to air political views in public suggests that there are limits and boundaries circumscribing political engagement—precisely what one can say, where one can say it—which Lim herself had transgressed. More significant was Lee Kuan Yew’s 1998 response:

Supposing Catherine Lim was writing about me and not the prime minister… She would not dare, right? Because my posture, my response has been such that nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul de sac […] Anybody who decides to take me on needs to put on knuckle dusters. If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you, try. There is no other way you can govern a Chinese society.⁸

“There is no other way you can govern a Chinese society;” paradoxically, Lee’s own sense of the political appears exemplary of the political wager. Tom Plate, author of Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew, recalls Lee saying at the end of the first day of the conversations that “I do not believe that one-man, one-vote, in either the US format or the British format or the French format, is the final position.”⁹ Plate later admitted that the “comment seemed to [him] breathtaking in its utter disregard of political correctness or polite qualification.”¹⁰ No stranger to controversy, Lee’s political practice redrew the boundaries of democratic political discourse. Plate writes, “Lee was well aware of what he was doing. Effective leaders usually do. They will do what they have to do. In classical political philosophy, the “Doctrine of Dirty Hands” postulates that all leaders will have to do things that otherwise would be morally (and probably legally) unacceptable in less authorised hands.”¹¹ Notwithstanding the “suffocating” and “Machiavellian” system of governance characterised by Singapore politics, also that of “Lee Kuan Yew getting his own way,” Lee exemplified political engagement as “parrhesia… [which] speaks to Maximum Truth, political correctness notwithstanding, people’s feelings notwithstanding.”¹² Plate hypothesises Lee as a fan of parrhesia, and not its opposite, isegoria (“everyone has an equal and absolute right to speak in public debate, whatever the truth value”¹³). “Everyone,” Plate explains, “can do their isegoria”; parrhesia, on the other hand, would seem a skill to be learnt, one perhaps best cultivated in a climate of adversity, such as in the early years of Singapore’s independence. Outside of politics, it is in artistic practice, perhaps, that these honed skills can be discerned and observed to speak truth to power.

The opening chapter to this collection sets the tone of the entire volume: Jeremy Fernando examines the creative impulse that is at the heart of politics and political stakes, of the art of governance as part of the economy of risk-taking, risk-making—a wager. Fernando’s creative critical piece scrutinises the relational...

Cover
Frontmatter
1. Introduction
2. Waxing on Wagers
3. Loo Zihan and the Body Confessional
4. Kiasipolitics: Sagas, Scandals and Suicides in Johann S. Lee’s Peculiar Chris
5. The Mosaic Body: Interpreting Disability in Performance
6. Embodying Multiplicity on the Singapore Stage: Plays of Difference
7. Becoming Ellen Toh: The Politics of Visibility in Invitation to Treat: The Eleanor Wong Trilogy
8. “Neighbors”: A Tiong Bahru Series
9. The Substation at 25: On Institutional Memory and Forgetting
Backmatter

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1. Introduction

Table of contents