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ch5. Presentation at Culture and the State in May 2003 that draws upon earlier writings on vision & fascism and extends selected analytical frameworks. A version of the paper is published in the collection Culture & the State: Landscape & Ecology (ISBN: 1-55195-139-8)

"It has become fashionable in some quarters to see Singapore as a model: of economic growth in particular, but also of social harmony. Clean streets, greenery, forests of high-rise apartments and little crime are indeed attractive features to the non-streetwise Japanese tourist or to the all-too-streetwise denizen of many North American or even European cities." [1]

For a country all but invisible on a globe, Singapore is surprisingly visible despite its land area of only 680 sq km. One of the economic superstars of Asia, this small country has transformed itself from Third world to First world in a span of less than three decades; its economic success is marketed as being phenomenal and largely free of the societal ills and problems that have plagued development in the West. What is significant about Singapore is not simply that it functions as an allegory and model of advanced capital, but that this essentially fascist model is being exported to other developing countries.

If one reframes fascism as a set of practices rather than a mere formal political category, one can conceptualize fascism as a politics of vision - vision as in a long range goal (such as the thousand year Reich) as well as in the optical sense, for fascism is an utopic discourse which achieves control of the masses through the calculated construction of the visible (think light shows, mass displays, monumental architecture, surveillance etc.). Inscribed in fascist vision are relations of power, not simply the Foucaldian notion of gaze as power, but the sheer constructed nature of vision (in short, the politics of vision itself). Thus vision constitutes not just what is seen but also what is unseen (such as the de-visualization of the opposition, oppression and the individual in fascist regimes). What this presentation examines is how Singapore's lauded nation-building housing projects (and its representations) are such manifestations of visual politics.

For Griffin, fascism is a charismatic form of nationalism which attempts to bring about what is conceived as a "positive, life-asserting, transformation" of how the people experience everyday reality and their place in history by enabling them to feel spontaneously an integral part of the nation and its 'higher' destiny. The most important consequence of the fascist dream of creating a cohesive national state is the aestheticisation of politics, expressed itself in the continual creation of a cultic social environment through creating 'sacred' spaces through monumental public building schemes and the constant invention of public ceremonies and rituals linked to the regeneration of the national community [2]. The very image of place becomes paramount and space has to be materialized and shaped to make visible this vision of the national community. David Harvey has noted the historical alliance of utopia with the city and how these "grandiose metaphorical meanings" are so entangled in the "grubby day to day practices" that it produces emotions and beliefs about the "good life" and urban form [3]. Thus the landscape is not merely a geographical entity but the "ensemble of material and social practices and their symbolic representation". [4]

The Facade and the Picturesque

Christine Boyer extends Lynch's work on the imageability of the city to differentiate between the figured and disfigured city [5]. The 'figured' city is imageable and remembered because its parts are easily recognized and structured to form a mental image; while the 'disfigured city' is the dialectical invisible city covered by this figured city which remains unimageable and forgotten and therefore invisible and excluded. The connecting in-between spaces are forgotten easily, allowing instead a rational and imaginary order of things that glorifies the figured city to dominate our vision and imagination [6].

Other than the city center which adheres to the colonial grid system; the roads in Singapore wind like rivers through the city, typically flanked on both sides by shade trees on an approximately three metre wide grass belt that offsets the sidewalk and buildings from the road. The urban environment becomes picturesque and constructed to offer visual surprises around every turn like the English landscape garden. This decision to reject the grid system of roads typical in most urban centers is more than simply aesthetic and to offer visual pleasure. The meandering of the roads expand the feeling of space by extending travel time; the main island of Singapore measures only 42 km East to West and 23 km North to South, yet it typically takes one up to two hours to traverse the island. And as the roads wend through the landscape, the masses' vision is obstructed by every curve in the road thus robbing them of the ability to survey the entire landscape and grasp the totality of their surroundings; the roads direct their vision to variations of the 'figured' ideal while gently skirting them past 'disfigured' spaces.

Centrality

In Engel's study of the working class in England he marvels at how the cities are built so that someone from the middle class can live for years and commute in and out of it daily without coming into contact with a working class quarter or workers as long as they confine themselves to their own affairs - squalor and misery become invisible [7]. About 90% of Singapore's population resides in housing developments built by the government, the remaining few who can afford it dwell in condominiums or houses in private residential areas located in 'hamlets' beyond the fringes of housing developments. Thus the residents of private housing are not only set off from the main populace, but is further reinforced through the emphasis on boundaries; walls and security guards are frequently employed and the roads have individual names rather than numbered names as in the housing estates. Even within housing developments, there is a social hierarchy manifested through spatial practice. Flats closer to industrial areas, further from town centers, are built for lower incomes and are maintained with less care; while those near town centers, main thoroughfares and retail areas offer more spacious apartments and landscaping for high income dwellers. It's a very model of a Le Corbusier city. One's vision is perpetually directed towards the center through the spatial arrangement of apartment blocks around a town center; and the spatial relations of these town centers to the city's center.

The city's center itself is loaded with 'representational' space built to evoke the desired feelings of patriotic pride in progress, from the colonial grandeur of the government district on the esplanade to the gleaming skyscrapers of the financial districts. Such a centralized city and its town hubs are a manifestation of power and control in organizing space/vision. This closed and concentric form as a locus of power finds its perfect expression for Foucault in Bentham's Panopticon which uses visibility as a means of discipline through inscribe onto the subject "a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power". [8]

Surveillance

A (non)feature in the Singapore landscape that has social/visual significance is the absence of alleys outside of those extant in conservation areas. To use Goffman's typology, the eradication of alleys also mean the eradication of 'backstage' and private areas, leaving one no choice but to use 'frontstage' routes sanctioned and built by the planners, thus directing one's vision to the frontal façade. This affords the institutional state apparatus a high degree of surveillance and control and reflects their fear of the masses and their desire to contain them through the elimination of physical and symbolic spaces for resistance; in the perpetual 'frontstage' zone, people can be arrested for participating in an 'illegal gathering' defined as an unregistered gathering of more than five people. The frontstage is more than just a site of performance, it is also the space in which one can see others and vice versa, thus a panoptical site in essence.

Even in the supposed refuge of one's home, one cannot escape this panoptical gaze. Houses in private residential areas are usually constructed back to back such that their backyards are only separated by a fence. One simply has to look out of the window to see what the neighbors are doing, and vice versa. The apartment blocks in government housing projects in particular are not placed for privacy but to maximize mutual surveillance. The windows in every room provide more than just ventilation. Each slab block of approximately 110 apartments (depending on the design and size of apartments) is placed such that one can see at least what half the inhabitants of the facing block are doing. Night never casts its shroud of invisibility in Singapore for street lamps illuminate every corner when the sun sets and the housing projects are lit up with hundreds of fluorescent lights. The masses become contained and controlled in their own homes. Housing thus becomes a means of controlling bodies like forced conscription and ensuring that everything has and is in its place. [9]

Reification of the Proletariat

In its modernization attempts, the government imposed its vision of the rational city on the populace by bulldozing villages and forcibly relocating people to such high-rise "New Towns". The flexible living spaces of kampong (village) living is replaced by modernist demarcations of living space in concrete - this is the living room, this is the bedroom, this is the storeroom. Living in HDB flats, the people had to give up more than control over living space but also food plots and relationships built in the community. Village living was marked by resource sharing in the community; thus high-rise living forced its inhabitants to sell their labor and buy into the economy to pay for food bills, utilities and appliances. Thus a new social dynamic was forged towards the rational ideals of meritocracy, specialization and efficiency. Zukin's analysis of Disneyland is particularly instructive as Singapore is similarly constructed through themed zones that 'restores' and invents collective memory whereby "the fantasies of the powerless are magically projected onto landscape developed by the powerful". Thus planners materialize what a home should be like, what a communal space should be like - conflict is designed out, and comfort designed in [10]. In an earlier essay, I had likened these housing developments to Benjamin's arcades - both are dreamworlds of their respective societies, sensory spectacles based on facades.

Housing estates built by the Housing Development Board (HDB) are not known for their innovative architecture. Yet despite their generic designs and unassuming façade, their layout reveals a forcible orientation of space for the government's ends. While there are many variants in the designs, HDB flats well into 90s have two common features - the void deck and the common corridor. In order to create the PAP's vision of a multi-racial society living in harmony, the masses are channeled through sites of forced interaction in the hope that familiarity would not breed contempt. The lifts in these housing developments do not stop on every floor, thus to negotiate from a public space to one's private space, one has to walk through the void deck to the lift well, stop at a floor closest to one's apartment and take the common corridor on that floor which is the only access route to the other apartments. Yet this forced ?frontstage? interaction is dysfunctional for despite having a mix of ethnicities living in any apartment block, there is a mutual fear of contagion and of one?s neighbors evidenced by the presence of at least three locks on every household?s door.

Spatial practices, however, are not static and changes in population dynamics engendered by those early enclosures have led to shifts in the forms of enclosure. Liminal space, which provides a site of alternative or oppositional uses, is increasingly being eliminated in the public and private spaces of HDB flats. The first HDB designs did not forcibly demarcate the interior; and these single-room or 3-room flats were strung side by side on common corridors. As families transitioned from the extended families of village living into nuclear families of urban living, the principles of rationality and acquisition instilled from selling their labor power and education become reflected in the designs of later 4-room and 5-room flat whose spatial interiors reflect the new norms of personal space, and display typical of bourgeois interior - rooms now have fixed functions which gravitate around spaces set aside for entertainment.

The 'executive' and 'mansionette' designs are the epitome of this ideal, with 'display' spaces that overtake living spaces, as well as the provision of a 'study' which is often used as a maid's quarters. This increasingly privileging of the bourgeois interior as an ideal parallels the denigration and eradication of the public space of the common corridor. Apartments become accessible through private corridors linked to common corridors, and living along a common corridor became a sign of one's lower social economic status. The proletariat thus becomes mired in (Lukacsian) bourgeois antimonies which captures them psychically through the sumptuous manifestation of comfort and progress, and physically embeds them deeper into relations of production in order to afford these ideals [11]. Aesthetics is not merely an academic category, but a potent socio-political force.

The "Generic City"

Rem Koolhaas aptly describes Singapore as an exemplar of a Generic City - a model of a city that emerges to the fore in the age of global capital. A city without history, one that is superficial and constructed through appearances. A city that abandons what does not work and has outlived its use, including its history, reinventing it for consumption and visual pleasure [12]. Old colonial shophouses are 'conserved' as upmarket pubs and boutiques, and the old waterfront areas are transformed into a glittering succession of bars and restaurants. One's identification, pleasure, and education become linked to a particular kind of subjectivity whose sources are the lifestyles showcased and staged in advertisements and well-designed fragments of the city that advertise it as objective fact [13]. The Generic City (or what some would call cosmopolitan), then, is a theme park not unlike Disneyland - Singapore has become Asia 'light', a sanitized multicultural buffet of representative cultures garnished with a sampling of oriental tyranny. Representation itself becomes a locus of power through architecture, maps, and coffee table books; as Koolhaas notes, there is a calculated redundancy of representation in the Generic City - for Singapore it is in the 'Garden City' and official photographs of the housing developments never fail to include a branch, or a bush, or a tree in its composition. [14]

Implications

Fascism in the Western popular imagination is largely defined by images of Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy [15]. Ruth Levitas notes the Anglo-American equation of utopia as totalitarian; and totalitarian as communism or fascism [16]. This construction of fascism as other elides the similarities and complicity of capitalist democracies - thus they can only fail to recognize fascism in other parts of the world, and in themselves. September 11 marked the fascist turn in global politics - particularly in the US with its Patriot Act, racial profiling, and spectacles of unified national community. By discursively constructing fascism as the evil other, democracy is therefore good - yet democracy is equally utopic and oppressive in form. Ideological unconsciousness is not the sole province of communist and fascist regimes. Harvey questions how community (typically transposed from rural images) has been valorized in critical writings, as if it was the cure for all ills and oppressions in (capital) cities - but communities themselves are also sites of exclusion and oppression [17].

The charge of reification from the Left also applies to itself - there is a blind faith in the virtues of nationhood, identity and community; which are equally valorized by fascist regimes. Just as Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment recognized both the liberating potential and destructive power of the Enlightenment legacy, we must be critical of ourselves - ever wary of the reification and janus-face of critique.