Weihsin Gui: Revised Abstract

This essay examines two seemingly disparate texts that share the same title: Wang Gungwu’s Pulse (1950), a series of lyric poems largely addressing the experience of individuals transitioning between rural and urban life and also the first collection of English-language poetry by a Malayan/Singaporean writer; Lydia Kwa’s Pulse (2010), a novel about a Singaporean-born acupuncturist living in Canada who returns to the country after a long absence to attend the funeral of her former female lover’s son. Separated by sixty years, the similarity between Wang’s poetry and Kwa’s prose is more than titular.

This essay poses the following questions regarding the connection between literature and cultural politics in Singapore: what if we understood fiction and poetry less in terms of a humanistic resistance towards or redemption of a coldly rational and pragmatic society, and more in terms of a set of tactics and techniques of caring for one’s self and other selves within a social system that determines what kinds of human subjectivities are appropriate, even legitimate, for an information age of global capital? In other words, if Singapore has achieved an accelerated modernity via the government’s relentless enframing of its human and natural resources through technocratic expertise, can we think of literature not just as an impassioned outcry against this state of affairs but also as a different manifestation of expertise in the sense of tekhne: the bringing forth or configuration of various political, social, and cultural forces through language as art?

The theoretical armature of this essay draws on Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault’s respective discussions of technology versus poetry and tekhne as a form of ethical poetics.

Heidegger, in “A Question Concerning Technology” (1954), distinguishes between (on the one hand) technology’s enframing or challenging-forth of human and natural resources into a standing-reserve to be expended and (on the other hand) poetry’s unfolding or bringing-forth of as yet unrevealed or inarticulated relations and forces between humans and nature that are foreclosed or disavowed through technological enframing. Both technology and poetry are different modes of tekhne rather than opposed modalities; therefore, the poiesis of literature can work immanently, within and through technology, without necessarily culminating in the latter’s enframing power. Hence Michel Foucault’s further elaboration of tekhne as embodied or materialized knowledge and the creative labor of writing one’s self (poiesis) as an ethical activity that is both social and relational rather than self-centered.

As Michael Barr points out in “Beyond Technocracy: The culture of elite governance in Lee Hsien Loong’s Singapore” (2005), the conventional understanding that the Singaporean state has a purely pragmatic and inhuman mindset is not entirely correct. The technocratic expertise of Singapore’s ruling elite is a combination of technical proficiency, problem-solving acumen, personal charisma, and inspirational leadership, manifested in certain key figures such as the current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. What if Singaporean fiction and poetry operated through similar means but to different ends? To directly resist the definition of literature as “a luxury we cannot afford” (to use Lee Kuan Yew’s famous phrase) might require adopting an overly defensive position in the contestation of cultural politics. On the other hand, treating literature as a technology we cannot avoid might help us apprehend how fiction and poetry have played and continue to play important roles as both tekhne and poiesis in Singapore’s cultural imaginary, whether at home or abroad.