Introduction
This book explores the haunted character of Singapore’s speculative economy. It attempts to understand the central role of ghosts within the nation’s emergent cultural logics, urban spaces, and ecologies—and their relevance, more broadly, to the experience of what has come to be known as “late” capital.
In this story, the spectral plays a number of conjoined roles.
First, the powers and proclivities of the nonliving are commonly called on to decipher the outcome of speculative processes and the occult character of risk. Cosmological assumptions of so-called Chinese religion—a syncretic accommodation of Taoism, Buddhism, Confucian philosophy, and evolving popular tradition—provide an ostensible set of natural laws to make sense of a moment in which Singaporeans are increasingly exposed to forms of “casino” capital, where speculation is the dominant mode of value-production.1 Ghosts provide a form of popular theorization that speaks to epochal anxieties and a new regime of “crazy” money characterized by a problematic materiality, by absent presences and unseen determinations. This lends itself to explanations about who gets rich, and why.
Second, these discourses animate a world of practice: a trade in lucrative reciprocities between living and dead. Ghosts, in Singapore, are not merely agents of traumatic recollection. They are also imagined to be economic agents and partners. The condition of the Chinese afterlife is one of inherent scarcity and lack, with ever-present dangers of “hunger” and of wasting away. Ghostliness is a mode of personhood propelled by wants and needs that mirror our own and that can be satisfied only by offerings from the human world: rites and remembrances, food and prayer, paper money and commodities. Spirits, be they ancestors or ghosts or deities, are presumed to possess the power to influence matters of chance. Individuals who court their gratitude—gamblers and market punters, businesspeople, investors, and fund managers—hope to affect the outcomes of everything from national lotteries to real estate developments. This gives rise to a lucrative secondary market, channeling millions of Singapore dollars and producing tangible wealth effects.
Although this is a site of calculation, it is not a cynical one. Viewed through the lens of a phantasmic populist finance capitalism, rooted in Chinese religious and environmental ontologies, the present order contains the potentials of an immanent “market paradise,” albeit one rife with hazards. Minor players can leverage flows of money, moving within numinous circuits, to realize personal prosperity and collective well-being. Spirits, both ghostly and ancestral, enable popular access to the nation’s sophisticated aeries of trade. Their influence reverses economic relationships of force, means and ends, to posit a radical democratization in which “small” money can exert an irrationally powerful influence via metaphysical know-how—to wag the dog, in effect. Such a discourse sees in both cash and commodity a wildly productive and sociable magic, not just a force of abstraction. What is built upon this alternative understanding, in real terms, is a speculative shadow trade of considerable volume that is inextricable from the nation’s formal businesses.
Participation in rites and spirit care, as we will see, is not simply understood as a technology to get rich. Profit, here, comes with (and is discursively inseparable from) broader notions of enhanced life, expressed in Singaporeans’ talk of “luck,” “prosperity,” and “health.” Spectro-economics imagines occult manipulations of value as a lever to influence every aspect of the human condition and to seize full ownership of the self. Via the correct ritual procedure, any unit of money can be placed into circuits of exchange that reshape fortunes to an extraordinary degree. Likewise, the humble urban flat—if its builders or owners observe ghostly etiquette—can serve as a vehicle both for profit and for limitless personal improvement that includes fertility, academic achievement, and abundant friendship. Commerce is frankly articulated as a medium of being in a total, qualitative sense. This is both individual and social; in the connective warp and woof of a pragmatic holism, individuals and their friends or families may benefit by association. There is an imagined benevolence, for example, in the extractive and physical violence of the construction site that claims to conjoin the fate of local property magnates to that of migrant laborers (see chapter 6). Here the concept of value is elevated to truly divine proportions. Its “proper” use, in popular accounts, serves to resolve the contradiction at the heart of the commodity, reconciling use and exchange in visions of wealth and wellness.
Third, spectral discourses are intensively caught up with questions of urban spaces, of their crucial role in value-production and civic order. Singapore’s economic system, as a carefully calibrated speculative superstructure, makes explicit use of the physical city as a primary instrument. The pursuit of foreign and domestic investment has involved a sweeping reconstruction of the island’s architectures and landscapes, removing informal settlements and forests and old graves to make room for modernized housing and a financialized “property state.”2 This has subjected their physical substances, processes, and long-standing sociospatial networks to unprecedented transformative violence. At the same time, such heroic travails are required for developmentalist governance, which pursues a necessarily paradoxical strategy: allowing volatility ever further into collective life, while attempting to minimize risk (broadly defined) via a securitization of the island’s lived fabric.
This upheaval must be read against understandings of geomancy and ghost ecology inherent to Chinese religion: a view of the city as a congelation of flow spaces in which human disturbance (including construction, investment, and devaluation) can attract, repel, and trap spirits and wealth amid congruences of energetic currents. In the accounts of believers, ghosts have quite literally been produced as unintended by-products of the nation’s economic ascendancy. In turn, they are thought to prey on both commercial and government development projects in ways that cause delay and necessitate offerings and negotiations by mediums, priests, and others. We will see how their alleged mischief, and the practices of ritual appeasement, introduce short circuits and localized breaches into what Singapore’s prime minister has called “a nation by design”: a spatial system of metonymic distributions, functional cells, and zones of exception, all of which work to promote investment, pacify the workforce, and reap the lucrative gains of risk without hazard.3 The disruptive field of ghosts, the presumptive locations and motives of their visitations, must be understood as an inverted topology—as the nation’s triumphalist tales and manicured districts, read from their nocturnal undersides.
But this, too, is understood to create opportunity. In the examples that follow, varied forms of traffic interact within the city’s disturbed parcels. These act as nodes of attraction and pulsion, synergy and conflict, synchronous and asynchronous agencies and events, streams and reservoirs of materials and media and energies and forms, modes of life and nonlife. Spectropolitan readings of the urbanscape—performed by mediums, geomancers, and practitioners of Chinese religion—draw on established spiritual-ecological principles. This is an art and a science that allows for diagnoses of material and energetic conditions of specific plots. These also suggest entrepreneurial openings, in which proper rites and protocol addressed to the putative concerns of resident spirits court their favors (monetary and other).
It is important to make clear, at the outset, that this book is not intended as an ethnography of Chinese popular religion in Singapore, or its metaphysics. There already exists a growing interdisciplinary literature concerning death, ancestral practices, and the afterlife here. Tong Chee Kiong, Terrence Heng, Kit Ying Lye, Janice Kam, Jack Meng-Tat Chia, and others have produced expert work that addresses these subjects.4 Nor do I offer a definitive or encyclopedic study of Singapore’s ghosts. The latter would broadly exceed the present work and would need to reflect the old and ever-evolving interplay of supernatural and religious discourses among the nation’s Chinese, Indians, Malays, and Eurasians, alongside its migrants and variously “blended” communities.5 It would also necessarily engage with regional spirit culture and hantu.6 As discussed later, there exists no purely “Chinese” imaginary in this diasporic context—all ghosts are, in the postcolony, intercultural beings.
Nor is the subject of what follows, qua hauntology, the spectral for itself. Rather, I am concerned with imaginative interventions into the life of capital. The ghosts in this work are a subpopulation that are understood to be partners in trade, entailed in matters of finance, and are imagined within a common cosmological and geomantic frame. As such, they provide an opening to another series of questions. By what means does a people at the ur-rational frontier of modern economy, so famously beholden to abstraction and fetishism, find room to reimagine their conditions? How might they construct an idea of agency within the “capitalist real”—one that imagines commodity, currency, and investment as magical means to manipulate and reconceptualize the terms of their pecuniary and political powers?7 And we may ask, not least, how is this accomplished within the strictures of illiberal laws and spaces? This is a study of how the spectral is deployed to produce a holist, ecological, quasi-utopian “true world” (in Nietzsche’s problematical sense) that is imagined not in the future—that central preoccupation of both neoliberal states and radical movements—but in an eternal, capitalist present. Ghosts, too, have their “end of history” to proclaim. This would appear to permanentize the regnant economic order, while at the same time imagining it fundamentally altered. Just as this “speaks back” to established theorizations of the social role of “specters” and “phantoms,” it likewise has consequences for an array of unsettled matters, from revolutionary theory to questions of desire and the notorious reality principle.8
Spectropolis argues that Singapore and its ghosts are of consequence, then, for several areas of academic concern. They are relevant, certainly, for the unfinished theorization of late capital—or for several definitions thereof, as considered in the next section. I will entertain questions of how the spectral helps us come to terms with the ineffable character of risk and the changing basis by which value is “produced”—both in the cultural imagination and via forms of speculative operation. I will consider, also, how spirits connect to questions of transformation and praxis. The fundamentally optimistic, if sometimes gothic, phantasmagorias of Chinese religion also provide a non-Western instance of controversial “accelerationist” models often rejected by more traditional Marxists and the progressive left.9 The stakes here extend beyond this particular approach to illiberal development and city making to broader questions of the life and futures of our present mode of production. In short, I argue, popular supernaturalisms help to theorize capital’s strange new forms, where Marxism and other analytical frameworks have proven to be less insightful—for reasons that will soon become clear.
At the same time, this context brings to bear a different, expanded conception of the ghost for the field of spectral studies: a possibly broader vision of its social role and imaginative potentials. Certainly it continues in its august functions: dysregulating time and space, reminding of traumatic pasts and lost futures, and personifying the generational sin of dead labor.10 But in the Singaporean collective mind, this figure breaks the narrow bounds of a Western melancholic construct—no matter how rich or troublesome. The spectral here extends to an inclusive subjectivity: economic and ecological actor, stochastic meddler, political bête noire, folder of Cartesian space. Taken seriously, its liveliness might inform new territories in the cultural life of the nonliving.
Last, I believe that what follows holds lessons for ethnographic models in which human and “other,” diversely defined, touch: the living and the departed, but also othered species, materials, energies, and configurations of relationality (what might be called “society,” in the broadest sense). This book directly concerns the fraught ontologies and epistemologies of intraspecies relationships and of environmental studies pursued beyond the frameworks of “science.” Its second half, in particular, explores how Singaporeans imagine ghosts and money via a crypto-ecology, a matrix of interdependencies among seemingly incommensurate entities. These are not merely relational but fundamentally social in nature. As I hope will become clear, the evocative and explanatory power of phantasmagoric holism lies precisely in its refusal to abandon questions of contact and influence amid the creep of abstraction—just as its logic appears to reject unweighted or “flat” cybernetic models of the world.
Amid such unsettled questions, Spectropolis argues that the projected personhood of the homeless, entrepreneurial soul may serve, in Marx’s sense, as a cipher: a guide not merely to the conditions of Singapore but to the faint outlines of a common planetary condition as well. It articulates a future that we all seem to be promised.
City of Risk and Security
We must consider then, by way of introduction, this planetary condition. To do so, we should ask what is meant, here, by late capitalism or late capital? These terms are not intended in the rather Weberian manner originally deployed by the Frankfurt School theorists, under the influence of Friedrich Pollock and Henryk Grossman. Despite Singapore’s muscular and assertive state, this is not meant to denote the rise of an “administered” society, an authoritarian phase of bureaucratization, or even a subtle Foucauldian penetration of power grids into the recesses of the subject.
For the purposes of what follows, late capital is understood to be a complex accommodation among modes of private enterprise, in which industry has come to stand alongside other powerfully “productive” spheres: finance, insurance, media, real estate, and tech. The prior history of this dynamic process is well-known: the rise of stocks and securities, the invention of money markets, the integration of global trading floors in 1986, wage repression, and the rise of a “shadow banking system” in the decade after 1980 stand among other watershed events in an ongoing ascendancy.11 Herein I retain key elements of Fredric Jameson’s characterization, which operates less like a finite list than as a collection of contributing factors and associated phenomena: globalization of production chains, linked markets and financial infrastructures, computation and automation, and real-time communication and logistics.12
Equally central for our story are questions of how value is understood to be produced. As David Harvey has argued, varied strains of capital now coexist. These are often in competition and disagree over motives, money, and methods, as was seen in bruited tensions between “business” and London’s City over Brexit.13 Spectral discourses respond to conditions in which the speculative mode, of finance and assumption of risk, appears dominant, at least to the extent to which the public mind cannot avoid the notion that this is how value is created. And, moreover, the notion that one is increasingly vulnerable to volatility produced elsewhere—via banking crises, national economic strategy, or other “macro” factors.
In Singapore, most new millionaires and billionaires are now understood to emerge through foresight and canny entrepreneurship. There are notably productive and quaintly neotraditional examples: massage chair sellers and spring roll millionaires.14 Among the routes to “crazy rich” fortunes, these stand alongside property development, insurance, digital assets, market activity and timely trades, retail, drop shipping, and other “grinds” that exploit marginal differences in online valuation. These are, despite their differences, viewed by respondents predominantly through the lens of speculation, not industry. Some enterprises succeed, while others fail; even “real” goods, after all, are subject to uncertain futures at market. It is well-known, moreover, that physical assets are financialized: fed into a superstructure that feigns their conversion to variable, abstract values.15
Hence, though the average Singaporean’s income is still earned as hours of work, this fact would appear to carry increasingly little weight at the level of belief and anxiety. Like elsewhere, for example, the retirement savings of today are invested predominantly in market-linked funds. The value of one’s nest egg thus hangs upon the mood of the market, at the mercy of wagers by large national and corporate actors. One accumulates hours paid at a socially determined average, but when it comes time to realize this value one is back at the betting table. In this context, a typical approach combines mandatory savings (under the Central Provident Fund or CPF scheme), linked to the success of a national investment program, with the growth in market resale prices of subsidized flats.16
It is beyond the scope of this study to weigh in on transcendent cultural effects of late capitalism, as with postmodernism in Jameson or time-space contraction and the various “fixes” described by Harvey or Edward Soja.17 Likewise, I won’t wade into debates with Marxists who argue that financial markets do not actually produce value.18 What is more important, here, is that we—the global we—believe that speculation operates increasingly as the mysterious crucible of value; that we exist in societies where those who get rich are the ones who successfully, and heroically, “stake”; and that we see our futures as increasingly “in the cards,” despite the nature of our labors.
This is absolutely the case in Singapore, for reasons given later. But such precarity, I would argue, is the case in much of both North and South. In fact, it lies at the epicenter of late capital itself, whereby profit and value increasingly emerge from—and are quantitatively determined by—degrees of risk. Economists such as Allison Schrager have shown how this has become the primary, indeed almost exclusive, basis of the calculus of modern value.19 The more vulnerability one assumes, the greater is the reward. By association, the yield on an investment diminishes as it gets safer. This is not merely a pricing mechanism; there is a growing literature that seeks to comprehend the far-reaching consequences of this for both macro- and microeconomies.20 In public commentary, we see the renewal of criticisms (now centuries old) that characterize the financial world simply as gambling by another name. In the legal and institutional realms, the boundaries that would separate speculation from “gaming” continue to be redrawn in a restless history documented by Ann Fabian, Jonathan Levy, Stuart Banner, and others.21
In this context, the notion of “managed risk” is a chimera that promises all the rewards of taking a chance, with limited exposure to its hazards.22 The operation of capital now hinges increasingly on courting dangers—necessary for value-production—while simultaneously attempting to diminish or mitigate them. One can always find someone to assume the potential downside of a given venture, at a price. This is securitization stricto sensu and in principle can be applied to any situation. It is possible to “short” future prices of stocks or commodities, insure or swap debt obligations, or defend against mortgage foreclosures (as happened prior to the 2007–8 financial crisis). The volume of such securities, derived from underlying products, now vastly exceeds the value of manufactured goods and services in the world economy.23
From here originates the unsettling enigma of finance. The logic of speculative markets requires risk. For these to operate, all players must assume it, or pay to pass it to others. It is clearly impossible to gamble on a phenomenon with a known outcome. At the same time, players put enormous ingenuity and effort into limiting their relative exposure. This is the case with diversification—spreading “positions” among a common market—or with hedges that offset bets against investments with noncorrelated vulnerabilities.24 This underlies, also, the continual appeal of algorithms or complex mathematical systems that attempt to outsmart the market in one way or another. These invariably fail, as most famously happened with Ryan Kavanaugh’s Monte Carlo model for foolproofing Hollywood productions against box-office flops.25 Today, there is always a proprietary Excel spreadsheet, based on quasi-occult mathematical formulas, that purports to tame chance for its users (and not for all the others). Clearly no speculative system can tolerate zero risk. This is why systems that do beat the odds, like card counting or insider trading, are forbidden: determinism threatens death to the game itself. This same is true for Singaporeans who seek lotto numbers or stock tips from ghosts: they seek not an end to gambling but a magical “edge” that will diminish their own exposure.
This first contradiction gives rise to a second: as Strange observed,26 securitization overwhelmingly appears to produce more risk and invite further security. The rise of options and second-order products, intended to offset the dangers of their underlying stocks and commodities, have introduced more volatility. Such devices are subject to increased internal complexity and a growing remove from any productive basis.27 While primary valuations—such as stock prices—often seem unmoored from the logic of productive conditions, derivatives behave yet more loosely.28 As one Singaporean day trader put it,
options are pure gambling. Typically, the number of people betting on options outnumbers the buyers of the underlying stock, and this makes for crazy changes in value at crazy speeds. The value of a stock may drop 3 percent on the exchange, but a derivative based on that stock may drop 25 percent. This kind of trading is not really about the underlying business, but more about volatility itself.29
Famously, Warren Buffet has warned against the effect of these in fueling volatility, saying that “derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.”30 The essence of Strange’s famous argument was that such volatility can be shown to ramify even more extensively across our economic systems. This was the same point made by former Bank of England director Mervyn King with respect to nations as “lenders of last resort.”31 As seen in the wake of the 2007–8 meltdowns, such expectations work to incentivize bigger and more reckless bets as losses are socialized—which seems inevitable, as the wagers themselves become catastrophically greater in magnitude.
A similar contradiction is also evident in practices beyond the markets. This was the case, for example, in attempts by Singapore’s Ministry of National Development to secure market dominance in petrochemical facilities at its satellite Jurong Island, which now handles up to a quarter of ExxonMobil’s global chemical capacity. Billions were invested in infrastructure, which has undeniably cemented the island as a key partner for major players. At the same time, it has produced increased exposure to industry-wide shocks, as in the collapse of oil prices in 2020. Ironically, state attempts to assure stability have chained the overall economy to the inherent uncertainties of specific sectors.32 In a similar manner, the price of guaranteed participation in contemporary forms of value-production in other fields, such as finance, has been liberalization—of monetary policy, import and export restrictions, and foreign access to local markets—that produces vulnerability to capital migrations. Here, too, the higher the stakes are, the bigger is the exposure, and thus more obvious becomes the need for coverage. And this greater security would then appear to beg for greater risks to be taken in the name of “opportunity cost.”
Singapore operates as a heightened example of this fraught condition—not as an exception to, but rather as an unusually advanced instance of, a global pathology. The city-state pursues the formula of speculative economy full bore, with intensity and ingenuity and without Euro-American ambivalence about the role of the state. Moreover, it embraces many key tenets of neoliberal thought, despite their apparent contradiction with statist illiberalism.33 As such, it represents not a marginal case but an extreme, through which global tendencies can be read with unusual clarity. Among these tendencies, two are particularly notable: the embrace by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) of speculative value-production and its insistence on the securitization of space.
The history of Singapore’s development is important here. As shown by Gavin Peebles and Peter Wilson, and by Linda Low, the city-state’s strategy has been built in large part upon the aggressive growth of the so-called FIRE industries: finance, insurance, and real estate.34 This has involved chiefly the positioning of the nation’s banks and investment houses as the financial center of a broader, vastly populous, and resource-rich Southeast Asia: a place where the dirty and bruising extractive industries of the region can be processed.35 Here receipts from trades like palm oil are converted into abstract investments, into financial “products” and gilt-edged condominium units. The decades from the mid-1980s, in particular, marked a full-scale embrace of both free-market ideology and the concoctions of investment houses, funds, currency traders, and other financial operators. A fore-tremor of this came with the spectacular case of Nick Leeson, the expat “rogue trader” who lost nearly a billion pounds for Barings Bank in the city in 1995. The full exposure of Singapore’s government and people became clear in the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which devastated the fortunes of a public grown fond of betting on market shares and related investments. This led to a raft of protective controls—but not to a diminished commitment to the sector, which has since exploded in size and diversity.
The dedication of the PAP to new, primarily financial and service-oriented trade has much to do with the timing of its transition away from light manufacturing—itself an acknowledgment of the dominance of China as the “world’s factory.” This coincided with the global emergence of new industries: IT, biotechnology, digital media, and the expanding universe of speculative property development and sales. All were pursued by national development groups, such as the Jurong Town Corporation, as possible replacements for a transient productive sector.36 Against theories of economic “take-off” popular during its independence moment, Singapore was haunted first and foremost by a sense of limited potentials, hindered by a paucity of space, citizens, and natural resources. There was no basis for a conventional industrial economy, as founding father Lee Kuan Yew was fond of reminding. Manufacturing and assembly could be, at best, a temporary stepping-stone toward reliance on more immaterial sources of revenue.
And of no small consequence to what follows, Singapore has increasingly bet on literal casino economics. In 2010, Marina Bay Sands was constructed on reclaimed land near the city’s central business district (CBD). This was reported to be the most expensive casino property investment in the world, a joint partnership with Las Vegas Sands amounting to 8 billion Singapore dollars (S$ or SGD). At the same time, Malaysia’s Genting Group built Resorts World Sentosa at the popular vacation island on Singapore’s southern coast.37 In April 2019, it was announced that the existing Marina Bay and Sentosa island “Integrated Resorts” (IRs)—the term itself is a careful avoidance of the word casino—would be extended to the tune of S$9 billion dollars. As Lee Kah-Wee has shown in his Las Vegas in Singapore, the rise of the IRs drew attention to the ambivalent view of the PAP toward gambling.38 Singaporeans and permanent residents are allowed to visit only by paying a hefty entrance fee of S$150 per day, and the casinos themselves are buried within labyrinthine malls containing retail shops and restaurants. Ironically, the construction of these was hampered by the global financial crisis, itself a result of betting on collateralized debt obligations largely pushed by investment banks and funds. Upon completion, however, these enterprises have proven to be as staggeringly lucrative as one might expect of a gaming hub in Southeast Asia. Revenue for each of the two locations is reported to exceed S$2 billion per year.
Such transactions proceed amid a model of development that exposes citizens to varied, calculated risks. This exposure is manifested in all walks of life. Certainly it is at the heart of the nation’s public housing under the Housing Development Board (HDB). This sacrament of political theology—which positions homeownership as the basis of participation in the Singaporean project—itself serves as a mode of quasi-speculative capital accumulation.39 Young couples can purchase newly constructed flats under the “Build-to-Order” (BTO) scheme. Owing to the managed growth of the national economy and the inflationary effect of land scarcity, these rarely lose value. No aspiring bourgeois would miss the chance to purchase a unit that is sure to be valued above the offering price when resold on the open market.40 Most rush at the opportunity, which is awarded by lottery. A BTO is a game of chance as well as a subsidized investment—putting it rather far from conventional notions of public housing anywhere else in the modern world.41 Its sale allows movement up the property ladder. The government thus spurs participation in a white-hot housing market, allowing the use of funds from the mandatory CPF savings scheme. HDBs can be purchased using money that is otherwise limited to few investment options. Hence the general market remains flush. This can drive worrying inflationary tendencies. Ironically, the authorities often step in with stringent “cooling measures” to limit participation in the speculative frenzy that they have at least partly created. New laws have extended the mandatory ownership period before a flat can be “flipped” or have added sales duties. These policies may be prudent but are nonetheless met with displeasure by a citizenry often overly leveraged in property. This is a particularly sore point for many older adults, who invested to the detriment of their retirement annuities.42
In reality, Singaporeans are participating de facto in modes of sanctioned risk all the time. The selfsame CPF fund is portrayed as a safe and staid “nest egg” and has limited lending options precisely to reduce exposure to risk, or literal gambling. Hence the ambivalence that shadows the nation’s casino projects, which generate vast sums and support large workforces. As noted, ministers have attempted to walk a tightrope here—expanding the presence of gaming while protecting Singaporeans from their own desire to play stakes. At the same time, CPF deposits produce sovereign wealth that is deployed in all manner of diversified speculation, without the knowledge of its contributors. Some of these positions have performed poorly in the bubbles of the “oughties.”
This does not come without anxiety. The government has shown concern about citizens’ exposure to the probabilistic enterprises that have made it rich. Although private investments are not regulated, the state has attempted to offset personal risk with heavy restrictions on CPF. There is clearly concern that a financial system built upon probability—as opposed to production—will eventually extend intolerable levels of volatility to the working public. The PAP’s managers have sought to inhibit destabilizing factors arising from an open economy, via monetary policy fixed almost exclusively on stabilizing the exchange rate of the Singapore dollar against currency trading. Such policies are shored up by a vast and penetrating regime to ward off social disorder and other potential ills associated with Western-style free markets and democracies. This involves the design of environment, and of social life, at the micro level. Here lies the central contradiction of Singapore today: a paradoxical desire to balance risk with certainty, and probability with determinism. Having mostly given up on industry, its leadership has allied itself with chance while promulgating a nanny-state political culture that would seek to curtail destabilizing events before they arise.
In fact, the power of the Singapore model stems not merely from its wealth or logistical prowess but also from an explicit engagement with late capital as a problem of danger and security. The state has attempted, through a variety of means, to control risk. It has done so, first, by obliging citizens to participate in the emerging economy and to privately absorb shocks and crises through assisted personal savings. These could be used to access quality housing programs, workfare and retraining initiatives, and subsidized health care. Second, it has disciplined all behaviors seen as excessively “chancy” or destabilizing, such as addictions or gambling. Third, it has narrowed the domain of human agency to civil life. Implicit in the nation’s formula is the presumption that social order helps to defray the volatility of economy. No less, it helps to maintain a flow of foreign direct investment in good times and in bad—and in the latter, through a conspicuous performance of a well-behaved polity in a tidy city.
In this way, the city’s efficacy emerges from a hard-nosed rejection of the association—common in Anglo-America—between free markets and Western-style democracy. Lee protested vociferously against the idea that liberalization of markets promotes or demands a liberal society. Instead, the PAP’s architects argued that the enabling of business required precisely the opposite: cooperation with an attentive, competent state. They worked to strong-arm the nascent trade unionist movement and demonstratively crushed the Singapore Airlines pilot strike, among other collective actions. At the same time, colonial-era emergency laws that curtailed speech and assembly were left intact and remain in effect today. Lee’s contrarian rejection of Western models—and, with them, the positive value attributed to an open society and democracy—embodied a belief that freedom to engage in value-production could be disassociated from other kinds of public agency or civil protection. He bet (correctly, as it turns out) that most Singaporeans would be content to pursue wealth independently of political participation and that a risk-minimizing society was optimal for the pursuit of finance—and likewise, that international capital prefers places that are maximally secure.
It might be argued that the West is edging toward Lee’s position.43 A quiet march of illiberal securitization appears to be under way in those nation-states where speculation represents a large share of the economy. Beyond the clear contemporary tendency toward illiberalism and antidemocratic movements within the present economic modality, cities that have increasingly opened themselves to speculative processes appear to invest in the largest amount of surveillance and policing and in narrow restrictions of allowable behavior.44 U.K. public order provisions, like the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act and the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, have effectively limited rights to protest in public spaces through the legal fiction of “aggravated trespass.”45 At the same time, large cities like London have seen an unfettered proliferation of surveillance and defense technologies. Something very similar is happening—in perhaps an even more corporate modality—in the United States, where the privatization of public spaces has opened the door to a raft of new prohibitions, occurring alongside an occlusion of civil liberties and an expansion of executive powers. Much of the world does appear to be Singaporeanizing.
There is something inherent in the anxieties of this emergent economic mode that would bias a shift toward the authoritarian. Populism, where it joins an embrace of unfettered financialization, moves ever more in this direction. It is entirely reasonable to suggest that Singaporean statecraft anticipated a central tendency of late capital itself and responded via the medium of urban governance and environment. This remains an unsettled business—securitization merely sets the stage for newer and more creative sources of insecurity.
Hauntology’s Expanded Field
To interrogate this insecurity, I draw on theorizations of the “spectral” as constellations of concepts and associations: absent presences, disrupted and paradoxical temporalities and spatial constructs, alternative and projected subjectivities, revisitations and recollections. It should be noted, from the outset, that words like specter and phantom are not often used in Singapore, just as they are gradually disappearing from nonacademic usage in other English-speaking contexts. Here people most commonly speak in English of the “ghost” or the Mandarin gui.
The Chinese-Singaporean ghost, as a variety of spirit, is a complexly projected social being, a species of homo economicus, and a spatial operator. Its imaginary, I believe, suggests new territories that expand on existing characterizations of spectrality within the theorizations of the 1990s’ so-called spectral turn. In particular, these speak in interesting ways to the insights of Jacques Derrida’s seminal Specters of Marx (1993). Preoccupations of this Southeast Asian context—regarding the dead, their spirits and ghosts, and the relation of these to phantasmal economies—echo many central strains and suggestive tangents of Derrida’s analysis. Certainly the imaginary of Singapore’s “local” specters—as historical and contemporary, nonmelancholic, social beings—elaborates in several respects on Derrida’s and Marx’s characterizations.
The first of these is an attention to space. Derrida, famously, proposes a vocabulary for the time and motion of the ghost: antecedence, generationality, fatherhood, and the repetition of exits, entrances, and reentrances.46 The haunting, as absent presence—as an appearance of a bodiless incorporation—puts time “out of joint.” It sets history, like a door, “off its hinges.” Shakespeare’s phrase is both spatial and temporal: a dis-placement of past and present, and of proper sequence. With the return of the exiled father-king, old crimes are restaged, and recursion dysregulates the contemporary. This necessitates a lexicon of portals, passages, and connective potentialities, folds and divergences, superpositions and juxtapositions. Derrida’s approach insists on the inextricable dualism of chronology–location: the specter, as agent of “différance,” creates slippages as well as delays. At first, the specter is exiled within the grave and beyond the ramparts of state. Then, without notice, it is proximate: in the body and the walls, the halls of power, and Hamlet’s Denmark.47 It “spooks” with the evocative force of exteriority, before—in the very gesture that underlies the uncanny—appearing without first traversing the threshold of distance or duration.
It would be unproductive to dismiss such language as merely metaphorical. Just as Derrida’s theorization conjoins space and time, it likewise refuses to divorce conceptual categories from “real” geography. For example, the “heterodidactic” complex of inside/outside alternately refers to life and death, to presence and absence, and later (via The Communist Manifesto) to Europe and its Others. This opposition thus structures categories of things and phenomena, as well as states of being, in terms of their abstract location in the collective mind. It also describes a relation among specific sites within an international order. I do not share Martin Jay’s concern that this confuses “the metaphoric and the real, the symbolic and the literal.”48 Derrida argues, and Singapore will attest, that blurring such differences is the essence of ghostly power. In fact, the elisions of such a “hauntological” orientation would seem eminently logical to Taoists—who believe that worldly and otherworldly places, with their materials and energies, are causally linked to (and by) words and images.
These are spatial clues that, in spectral studies, have largely gone without detailed consideration. The reasons for this are unclear. It is perhaps due to a Western preoccupation with the temporality of recall and repetition and with the ghost’s communicative function. Or it may arise from a psychoanalytic preoccupation with tragic recollection (see later). This chronotrope appears inescapable once the ghost is understood primarily as the messenger of past event and collective memory. And to be fair, recurrence is central not only to the oft-referenced writings of Freud but to contemporary clinical literature as well.49 Regardless, when the ghost is assumed to be an agent of repressed history, the spatial imperatives of Derrida’s theorization seem destined to fade into the background.
Other authors have taken notice, however. Achille Mbembe and Ruthmarie Mitsch, for example, deploy ghostliness to explore migratory circuits of laborers and refugees.50 The netherworld of these devalued and necrotized humans is understood as another intimate “outside,” a global slipstream that at once underpins, and is exiled from, the ostensibly safe spaces of a liberal order. This “nocturnal” conduit is further elaborated in Mbembe’s Necropolitics as both proximate and marginalized—whereby death increasingly forms both a site of production and a political limit-condition.51 This argument channels the critical spirit of Frantz Fanon, who situated the ghost in the anxious Manicheanism of the colony, a schizophrenic condition held together by a quotidian brutality.52 For Arjun Appadurai, it is the emergent megacity that is the locus of spectrality. As in Singapore, real estate provides for Mumbai a discursive channel that relates physical properties and phantasmal exchange-values.53 It is interesting that many such suggestive attempts at spatialization emerge from “southern” authors and subjects. These attempt to find a proper place for the spectral within analytical frames of society and politics.54 A similar focus on the “lived” discourse of the ghost, amid Singapore’s Western-Asian culture, likewise aligns what follows with ethnographic studies by Aihwa Ong, Erik Mueggler, Joseph Bosco, Julie Chu, Tine Gammeltoft, and Kenneth Dean, among others.55
In a sense, such an approach signals the timely recurrence of older ethnological literature on death, spirits, and religion. The “revenant” here may be Émile Durkheim, whose own treatment of ghosts and spirits was heavily topological—and, like Derrida’s, spoke of space in a register that was at once conceptual and literal. In many of the world’s religions, he noted, the departed are “separated and live in a world apart.” This delineation, which echoes observations by Victor Turner of Ndembu cosmology, operates as but one form, among many, of locational distinction among sacred and profane.56 In what follows, however, I attempt to illustrate how the peripatetic movements and materializations of the Singaporean ghost inhabit not merely a settled order in the social imagination but also an anticartography of the portalized and the un-hinged—of apertures and of disruptive byways that resist Cartesian demarcations and smack of deconstructive affinities.
Such is the case, for example, with the burning of offerings at urban sites (chapter 5), intended to draw ghosts to the flames and to “feed” and enrich them. This popular practice temporarily converts unremarkable spaces into sacred ones. Smoke and flame are thought to create a point of interchange between human and spectral worlds and to render this site visible within the crepuscular and confused perceptual domain of ghost-life. At the same time, the nonliving possess an independent ability to dis-locate and transport themselves instantaneously among noncontiguous loci: among urban locales, across cosmological planes, and into the hearts of securitized sites and protected areas. Discourses of trespass and transgression are animated by a metaphysics that casts space itself as an energetic medium that structures and regulates spectral activity. This medium is defined not by metric quantities such as distance but rather via qualitative properties and transmissions. Places are defined by a fluid logic of currents and pools, in which manifold forms of qi—as well as modes of value—come to be located and conducted. These share a fundamental substance with a spectrum of beings ranging from hungry ghosts to ancestral spirits to wealthy and powerful gods.
Here, too, the disruptive is connective. While disjoining the intended order of Singaporean state space, ghosts link points that were disconnected by design. They reconfigure “metonymic” state space, making unexpected circuits that defy the adjacencies and cataracts of the planner and the civil servant.57 At the same time, nature and city are possessed of energetic qualities that conduct and induce flows, force events, articulate pasts with possible futures, and produce wealth or ruin. Such spatiotemporal effects will be integral to an expanded theorization of the specter, across its variously imagined powers.
Derrida offers, also, a second theoretical opening—one equally suggestive. This concerns the relationship of ghosts to money and value. In a final chapter, he expands on Marx’s famous image of the “turning” table:
The form of wood . . . is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.
This excitation references a European craze of the 1850s, séances, during which tables would appear to rotate under ghostly locomotion. This was the stock-in-trade of somnambulists and spiritualists and was adopted by Marx to illustrate the deceptive “necromancy” of the commodity. Derrida goes a step further: this nexus of modern production contains, within itself, a ghost. As a technology for the extraction of abstract labor—whence the mysterious substance of exchange-value arises—the metamorphosis of an object into a thing-for-sale represents, in Capital, the very “phantomalization of property.”58 The “phantom” here refers to not generic ghostliness but a specific type: a deceitful false substance or impostor that possesses the humble piece of furniture and hijacks its concrete function. Derrida seizes on this lively image of the wooden automaton as the clear hauntological (that is, antiontological) entity. It is haunted by a stubborn irresolution, arising from the internal contradiction of the factory product—a struggle between the abstract and the concrete that has been further elucidated by Bill Brown, Bruno Latour, and others.59
The Marxian discourse of the commodity-as-possession, as ghost-vehicle, can be understood in at least two principal ways. As earlier, when the table gets ideas in its “brain,” and dances and spins, it has been converted from a useful thing to a phantom. This is the spectral understood as abstraction and false appearance. A second, related process of “hauntification” concerns the object’s newfound objectivity.60 Under the regime of exchange-value and the sway of a generalized fetishism, these appear—like the table—to have qualities that are independent of their collective human origins. Marx uses the religious metaphor of the fetish and that of the specter interchangeably, to evoke the uncanny autonomy of the thing given false appearance of life through the ventriloquism of capitalism’s productive magic.
Derrida observes that, for Marx, this ghostliness of the commodity—its animating or possessing spirit—is only exacerbated in the question of money. Money yet further abstracts the commodity-form, and, through spectral equivalence,
the metamorphosis of commodities . . . was already a process of transfiguring idealization that one may legitimately call spectropoetic. When the State emits paper money at a fixed rate, its intervention is compared to “magic” (magie) that transmutes paper into gold. . . . This magic always busies itself with ghosts, it does business with them.61
This Faustian conception of currency, its haunted aspect, has everything to do with this same fictional character of value, now purified in the bill of tender.62 Because the origin of this value remains concealed behind the false front of fetishism, its very Durkheimian power source—the mana of society itself—is misrecognized. Clearly this is the same “spuk” that dwells inside all the tat of a market economy. But in the monetary form, the final remnant of use-value, that last shred of concrete specificity, is relegated to pure fungibility. Metals and cash contain already, within their logic, the dangerous and self-propagating sorcery of financialization and fictive economy. Gold is “at once ghost and idol.”63 Liberation from even this substance, however, results in the “apparition of the bodiless body of money: not the lifeless body of the cadaver, but a life without personal life or individual property.” The material substrates were dangerously agnostic, but the unrestricted traffic between paper, gold, and goods is yet more so. We are left merely with “appearance or simulacrum,” which for Marx is the wondrous and fearsome essence of one spectral modality.64
How is this relevant for the next chapters? In the Singaporean case, Marx’s logic of ghostly goods is absolutely taken for granted—if, in moral terms, also stood on its head. We will see commodities that are quite literally ghost-possessions and -vehicles: economic instruments that are intended for use by the dead.65 The already-haunted nature of the commodity is clarified and instrumentalized in the invention of the spectro-commodity (see chapter 3). The latter rearranges the relationship between use-values and exchange-values by imagining these (contra Marx) as thoroughly interdependent. Typically, these are representations of “pure” value that become nonfungible use-values in the afterlife. This is the case with the purchase of a paper house, whereby money is exchanged for a form—effectively a bill of house-money—that is then presumed to give shelter in the netherworld.66 Alternately, overpaying for a cheap calculator or backpack, and attracting ghosts into them, radically “amplifies” their use-value and creates a method for controlling the vicissitudes of risk. In both cases, it is a disproportion or surplus of value itself that provides the magical efficacy.
Such practices engage the logic of evolving commodity forms, while yoking the spectral “problem” of the commodity to supernaturally enhanced modes of personal agency. At the same time, these serve to make meaning of incomprehensible relationships between objects and values. Through the commodity, ghosts generate value, just as value attracts ghosts. The spectral figure embodies the “problem” of valorization—as well as a resolution that is enacted through the dramaturgy of ritual exchange. As we will see, Singaporeans operationalize this connection as a lever for the holistic betterment of an existence made increasingly precarious by economies of probability. This is perhaps most clearly embodied in the contradictions of architecture, which in Singapore plays a heightened double role: both a primary form of capital accumulation and an aspirational domestic lifeworld. The spirits in a block of flats, drawn and placated through the channeling of value-as-money, are expected to engender further “prosperity” in all aspects of life (see chapter 6).
Spectral play becomes yet more literal in the case of money. Here the conception of the ghost passes beyond any Marxian conception of death-magic to a rather remarkable extent. Ghosts and value are, quite literally, seen to be forms of a common interacting energy. They are one and the same. Granted, these same qualities underpin everything in the cosmos, to some degree. But as the components of spirit are liberated from corporeality and matter, they are transformed into something of almost identical character and (in a heavily analogical view of the universe) can influence the fluid dynamics of capital’s “religious” substance to a hyperbolic degree. These relations are causal and direct. Here the spectral is not imagined under the signs of simulation, deception, or inversion; instead, the kinship of ghost and currency is explained as entirely authentic and “scientific” in nature.
Not only are the dead beyond the reach of probability in Chinese cosmology; they are also able—in fact, they are compelled—to interact amid the energetic flux of spaces and physical landscapes. The “push” and “pull” of an urban parcel arises from monetary inflows, quantities of material (which contain, also, their own varieties of qi), and the consequences of histories of trauma and transformation. In such a conception, the relation between ghosts and money is metaphorical and metaphysical; virtually any investment in a site will directly affect its underlying and invisible supernatural landscape. Engagement with local spirits, as in the work of mediumship described in chapter 6, must thus occur via physical substances qua substance, as well as through their function as substrates of social history.67
Derrida’s two theoretical trajectories—space and capital, in the form of goods and money—are deeply intertwined in the conceptions of Singaporean Chinese ghosts and ghost-practices. As I have mentioned, the flows of spirits and value are related via a highly precise, geomantic ecology that casts space as a medium where materials, histories, and energies are subject to a calculus of mutual force. It is largely impossible to speak, in this context, of the spectral without the spatial or the monetary; these are considered not via separate discourses but as components of a common epistemological tradition. These threads of spatiality and value are similarly enmeshed in the physical spaces of architecture and in the constructed urban landscape, as these underlie the Singapore state as a project. The complex discourses of ghost-topology—in rupturing and reconfiguring the dispensations of metonymic national construction, whereby the models of ideology and physical planning are analogous—cannot be meaningfully separated from the urban order of a regime of capital. I argue that “making place” for speculation entails both the physical production of the city as a site of speculative activity and its ongoing financialization. And, as we will soon discover, these processes animate the spectral phantasmagoria of this society to a remarkable degree.
What follows remains attentive to these theoretical precedents but differs, in other respects, from common tropes in spectral studies. I do not believe that the “s-word” can simply be applied to anything that is periodic, incompletely known, suppressed, Othered, multiple, provisional or conjectural, weird or eerie, melancholic-historical, or characterized by a problematic materiality or visuality. We should be careful with reified claims, for example, that modernity “is” ghostly68 or that modern media—film, digital media, literature, and music—are equally so. Instead of claiming that our present is spectral, we might do better to ask how spectrality is used to make sense of an increasingly alienating (but affectively urgent) array of structures and experiences: phantasmal equivalences, cyclical inequities, and “slow” violences.
To this end, I return to those practices (signifying and other) through which the ghost is “lived.” This presumes no simple or empirically given reality and in no way disparages or devalues the necessity of theory for the spectral. As we shall see, the ghost is itself a medium of theorization for Singaporean respondents, while remaining experientially real. They contemplate, make sense of things, and engage in symbolic labor. They are also conjured for their peculiar social gravity, albeit in ways that sometimes smack of confusion, negativity, or reactionary populism. As such, the spirits of Derrida’s heterogeneous inquiry must be called upon in their various guises as we consider the praxis by which the spectral returns to productive life.
To this end, this book is divided into two parts. The first, titled “Spectro-Capital,” explores in detail the history and financialized contemporaneity of ritual transactions, involving transfers of value and risk, between the human and spirit worlds. These chapters attend to the roles of money and commodities in the relations between ghosts and the living—as well as, in the case of auctions and burnings, moments of spectacular exchange that perform and concretize the liturgical rationality of sacred speculation. Chapter 1 introduces first and foremost the figure of the Singaporean Chinese ghost itself, the cultural conventions of spirit and afterlife that underlie its imaginary, and the logic that animates reciprocal exchange with the dead. Chapter 2 describes the use of so-called hell money and other forms of paper currency considered to be fungible in the afterlife and the circuits of reciprocity arising from their use. Chapter 3 shifts focus to the spectral commodity-world: the modern proliferation of paper goods used in burnt offerings and their own complex, postconsumer existences. I demonstrate how the procedures for such commerce follow conceptions of value as a cosmological energy, cycling among forms and materials and modes of signification. Such conceptions make legible, and provide agentive inroads into, the often ineffable nature of Singapore’s speculative doings and famous wealth.
Part 2, “The City and Ghostly Ecology,” links spectral economy with the economies of the urban environment. It is in the latter that discourses of value encounter the crypto-ecologies of geomancy and the “reading” of the city’s spaces as both material and haunted. These qualities are not opposed but radically interdependent—and implicated in the trauma of the national project. Ghosts play havoc and “assert,” through mediums and other interpreters, alternative regimes of ownership and social power. Their observance, moreover, would seem to reorder space as planned and designed. In this view of things, the architecture of the city may be spooked and reterritorialized, but it is not alienated. Chapter 4 briefly relates the story of the island’s sweeping re-creation and examines how ghosts are understood to be “born” from the project of national modernization. Chapter 5 deals specifically with the spatial effects of ancestral practices and how ritual manipulation of value at particular sites is thought to “rewire” the urbanscape, crosscutting its metonymic ordering with unexpected gateways and cataracts. Last, chapter 6 brings the book’s subjects together in an analysis of the most profitable and freighted local enterprise, real estate development. In this business, allegations of spectral violence exist alongside visions of a utopian, populist capitalism, entangling local and foreign agents within shared fates and fortunes.
By way of closure, the conclusion briefly considers consequences. One must ask what to make of the spectropolitan imaginary that underlies accounts of homeless, entrepreneurial souls—a redemptive populist ecology, its energies pulsing within the “real” city. How might we interpret its reversed lines of force, its stubborn holism, and its exorcism of the future? What might this mean for theorizations of capitalism and of the ghost?