Cultural governance and creative industries in Singapore

Abstract

Singapore, a leading country in the Asia‐Pacific region, is currently attempting to transform its cultural industry into creative economy. Creative economies capitalise on how knowledge can be marketed by merging arts, technology and business. They ensure a nation's competitiveness within an integrated global economy. This paper critically examines Singapore's recent cultural policy developments in tourism, broadcasting and new media. It argues that new creative industries have produced new consumption patterns and identities that harness the place‐branding of “New Asia” as a form of cultural capital and a strategy of regional dominance. Cybernetics is proposed as an approach to frame creative cultural governance and consumption in Singapore.

KEYWORDS:

• creative economy
• cultural policy
• cultural governance
• Singapore
• consumption
• New Asia
• cultural studies

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research for this paper was funded by the University of Melbourne Faculty of Arts Small Grant 2003. Earlier versions of it were presented at “Knowledge, Culture, Power: The Politics of Cultural Studies in the Asian Region”, Joint Humanities Research Centre/ National Institute for Asia and the Pacific Conference, Australian National University, Canberra, 22–24 October 2004; and “Emerging Subjectivities, Cultures and Movements”, Inter‐Asia Cultural Studies Conference, Korean National University of Arts, Seoul, 22–24 July 2005.

Notes

1. Although Kwok and Low (2002) have also emphasised this in their exemplary analysis of cultural policy and the new Asian Renaissance in Singapore, their analysis touches on Foucault's rationality tangentially and does not elaborate how governmentality is a form of subjectification and a practice of ethics.

2. This approach differs from Margaret Morse's (1998) suggestion that feedback produces interactivity by constituting a feeling of liveness, and Sherry Turkle's (1995) emphasis on how feedback engages the user as a second self.

3. Although Wee's (1996, 1999) recent writings on popular Singapore singer Dick Lee deals with the consumption of popular culture, his analysis examines Lee from the realm of production and stages Singapore from a top‐down statist framework of modernisation and development. Similarly, although the edition of Reading Culture: Textual Practices in Singapore uses popular media practices to understand the impact of the state on public culture, this framework attends to consumption only as a strategy of reading (see Chew & Kramer‐Dahl 1999).