Writing Singapore: choreographed and emergent practices

ABSTRACT

Since Michel de Certeau, it has become feasible, fashionable even, to think of cities enunciatively; that is, to postulate an analogous relationship between the spatial and the discursive. In investigating the idea of urban texts, de Certeau constructs a pedestrian subject who, by way of traversing streets, embodies a practice that is vernacular and agentive, in resistance to the hegemony of systemic and normativised discourses. Conceived as a speech act, the physical act of walking takes on a rhetorical stance. Now what if we spin de Certeau's scheme around to posit a spatial economy of textual phenomena? The present article pursues this line by examining writing practices through de Certeau's distinction between Place/Strategy and Space/Tactic. Using Walking as an analytic frame for Writing and drawing on examples from Singapore, I propose two modalities of writing: Choreographed and Emergent. I will further look at how dynamic writing practices can usefully complicate this picture to obtain a nuanced understanding of top-down and bottom-up approaches to writing as a mode of cultural consumption and production.

KEYWORDS:

• Singapore
• Michel de Certeau
• choreographed multilingualism
• emergent multilingualism
• commodification

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Tong King Lee is Associate Professor of Translation at the University of Hong Kong.

Notes

1 See https://www.facebook.com/leehsienloong/photos/a.344710778924968/2405610962834929/?type=3&theater (accessed 11 July 2019).

2 Choreography is most evident in the many promotional videos produced by the National Library Board for its reading campaigns (e.g. a recent video for Read! Fest 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAehkFyPQdQ&t=26s), some of which take the form of themed music videos for public consumption (e.g. “Book at the Beach”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MtJkpezYFE&t=19s and “I’m Gonna Read a Book Today”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bam2TB2pb0s) (accessed 15 July 2019).

3 See, for example, “MacRitchie Reservoir: A Memory” by Lee Tzu Pheng: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mcZt4KsrzE and “Finding Enlightenment in the HDB Heartland” by Alvin Pang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mRSH9N395s (accessed 14 July 2019).

4 For an official video by The Arts House on myriad activities revolving around the Text in the City app, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeHdRnjoOIg (accessed 14 July 2019).

5 Gwee Li Sui, “Politics and the Singlish language,” The New York Times (13 May 2016). A counter op-ed was quickly written by the press secretary of the Prime Minister's office in retaliation to Gwee's viewpoint; see Chang Li Lin, “The Reality of Singlish,” The New York Times (23 May 2016).

6 SingPoWriMo's use of structural constraints in its daily cues and its consistent self-styling as heteroglossic and heterodox writing should be seen as a ludic corrective to the prevailing semiotic order rather than as a form of regimentation in themselves.

7 See https://www.thinglink.com/scene/780612664316395521?buttonSource=viewLimits and http://www.singlitstation.com/geotag (accessed 22 July 2019).

8 This phrase is adapted from Roland Barthes: “[T]he best model for the semantic study of the city will be provided … by the phrase of discourse. And here we rediscover [V]ictor Hugo's old intuition: the city is writing” (Barthes 1986, 95).