A Guide to Walking: Convening the Singapore Psychogeographical Society (27 October, 2011)
It’s quite a trend within local art practices to address the rapid transformations of our cityscape and culture which causes the historical amnesia that creates the…perhaps…most contingent Singaporean identity, that of an urban city dweller cut from his or her roots, in which any instance of self-reflexivity heightens the sense of disorientation. We have seen and heard enough of the countless diatribes on the effects of modernity, the stammering loop that spews out vile discontentment with progress and the loss of our cultural bearings. While we witness this in different shades, all these voices seem to conjoin together into this eternally reoccurring, momentum gaining resentment that calls for a slower pace of life. Even more repulsive are the weaker strands that readily dive into any avenue that allows them to fill this gap, falling into the trap of nostalgia, when the past is utterly exotified and exalted as a pastoral memory.
Debbie Ding’s Psychogeoforensics lecture, the last instalment of the Lecher of Art series at the Substation, is conceived from this same terrain of uprootedness. She imagines Singapore in the shape of a black hole, the ultimate non-space, what Marc Auge defines as “a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity.” Staring at a projected image of a blackened Singapore map is indeed an uncanny sight. On the surface, it disavows any form of signification, the image of our nation rendered as a total abstraction. Yet the contours that define its edges begin to illuminate its function as a frame that, as Debbie puts it “invites signification and attracts questions.” In a quick turn, abstraction gives rise to curiosity, as the blackness injects a degree of strangeness to what we can obviously make out to be our country. It’s like being plunged into a dream state- we sense that we have been here before but we seem to be traversing an unusual space with possible traps and surprises lingering at each corner; or revisiting a foreign country a second time without a copy of lonely planet- you vaguely remember the routes and sites, but being confronted with a colourful reality, the whims of your desires, and a sense of time not governed by a fixed daily routine, the perception of your surroundings heightens, and you begin to transverse the space with child-like eyes, forming a fragmentary and affective map that pulsates and changes shape according to the rhythms of life, both real and imagined.
Recuperating the potential of blackness as an invitation and entrance to our own psychic and physical investment with our lived spaces, Debbie cuts through the two blackholes- unproductive resentment towards the rapid transformation of our cityscape and the seduction of nostalgia. She proposes an assemblage of techniques which are laid out systematically in the toolkit publication of her lecture, ranging from derives, narrative reconstruction, pictorial reconstruction, map-making, analysing street symbols, walking along road networks, questioning designated zones, tracing desire lines… you get the ‘drift’.
It is a light and playful practice in philosophy it its most effective sense- the generation of concepts, without strict adherence to the specific tradition of thought that it stems from, that function as tools which allow us to connect and experience life both critically and joyfully. The idea of psychogeoforensics stems from the idea of psychogeography initiated by the Situationists which calls for a greater awareness of the way the built space of the city influences and affects the emotions and actions of its people. Extending this concept with the idea of forensics, Debbie fortifies this practice with the looming absence of an official historical and cultural narrative and identity in Singapore as a mystery to be solved. The word forensic conjures up scientific methodologies utilised towards the recovery of a certain explanation or cause to a mystery. Debbie mentions that the word is to be taken more broadly, as a means to discourse, of which, in her words we go “through all the possible clues of Singapore’s whereabouts, so that one day we may find out where Singapore truly is.” This seems a bit puzzling- no doubt that the search will reconnect us with our surroundings, yet with the impetus being the revelation of what and where Singapore is, it seems to resemble some exercise in affirming national identity. It could be positioned as an abstract endpoint that we all reflexively acknowledge as that which can never be fulfilled. Yet it is indeed troubling that such a desire for complete understanding fuels and governs our actions. In this sense, the idea of forensics seems to obscure the play of mind, imaginative impulsion and exploratory adventure that Debbie conjures in her presentation.
Forensics induces a certain element of exoticism. It almost seduces people with the element of mystery to engage with a practice of psychogeography. This should not be taken as a charge that dilutes a more authentic psychogeographical engagement with the city, but as a reflexive move that recognises that in order to look at reality with childlike-eyes, we would inevitably have to gaze at our surroundings with a certain degree of exoticism. We need mystery and strangeness to sustain our desire to engage with something other than ourselves. This links us back to our history of British colonisation and the exotifying gaze towards us as an Asian other, ultimately conjuring up the ethical problems of such a power relation. Debbie mentions how British architects have utilised Indo-Saracenic designs that not only invested in their own western sensibilities, but also reproduced Asian designs as a symbolic justification for the violence that they have inflicted onto pre-existing localised cultures. While this is true, such investments should not merely be seen as a strategy for the appropriation of Asian culture for the expansion of the Empire. A libidinal desire for the other and the need for transformation also fuels their contact with the East. And to a certain degree, in the practice of psychogeoforensics, we have to engage and reactivate this desire which ultimately results in the exotifying of our surroundings. To enter the ideal headspace and to attain the level of awareness for such an engagement with our surroundings, it is almost necessary for us to make what is familiar strange and exciting again. This should not be posed as a problem. Rather it should be seen as an inescapable logic in life. The exotifying gaze aids in the framing of an otherwise immense space with a myriad of objects and subjects, transforming a familiar space into an otherly space. We should not be consumed by it, but it should be taken as it is, a tool and frame that provides an entrance in which we enter and pass through…trailing on.
Must this frame necessary take the form of a cultural referent that we already deem as exotic…such as Geylang and Balestier which we view as a more spontaneous, sprawling district in Singapore? We must also learn to produce strangeness, to train our eyes to gaze out strangely, and to really wonder, become curious, let even our unconscious and dream narratives influence our actions. It is very apt for this lecture to take place within the substation, whose founder Kuo Pao Kun believed strongly in ‘play’ as a means to sensing an other and the creation of a reflective space that facitiliates the formation of a rich network of multiple connections and linkages. Debbie’s restrained call to action rests within this emancipative drive as applied to our psychological and geographical landscape. We are all automatically members of the Singapore Psychogeographical Society… walkers/writers with a wealth of material around us, our city made unfamiliar, littered with curiosities, a map constantly rewritten through the weaving of our own narratives.
