Ghost-Modernism?

We might ask, finally, what is at stake in considering Singapore’s ghosts, as we have in the foregoing. What insights do they offer to an emerging picture of the contemporary?1

By now, I hope to have established the spectral imaginary as a means to conceptualize contemporary economy and address epochal anxieties about value at the mercy of unknown outcomes. It enables a vision of utopian striving within a humanistic, socially embedded capital—offering resources that are at once epistemological and participatory.2 Herein, gui transcend their roles as melancholic revenants, to appear as curious amalgams of Nietzsche’s “free spirits” and the modern market’s free agents.3 As such, they provide a magical means to introduce equivalence in Singapore’s experience of late capital—granting entrée to worlds of speculation and being a hedge for reaping reward without risk. This extends beyond questions of money and profit to animate complex and malleable logics of prosperity and personal–cosmological–socioecological balances. As beings beyond the order of society, state, and time, ghosts also perform as speculative modes of subjectivity. They are invoked for the fear that they inspire and the mischief that they make.4 Amid the discursive effervescence of haunting narratives, spirits are known to determine the course of events and to halt (if only temporarily) the authoritarian machine in its path. Most significantly, perhaps, they have come to embody a single nexus of risk and security: as those who cause ruin or wealth, who weaken and empower, who prey upon and protect the worker, and so forth.

Encrypted in this figure, moreover, are lessons about late capital itself. Even if we eschew literal claims that contemporary economy “is” spectral, there is a great deal about it to fuel ghostly interpretations. There is, as we have seen, the ascension of probability and uncertainty. There is likewise, as illustrated by Singapore’s speculative properties, the problem of abstraction and the stubborn resistance of the material. There is the haunting presence of catastrophe and collapse, dramatizing the brutal fact that our expansionist markets require damaged, ghostly ecologies.5 Equally undeniable, as Mbembe has pointed out, is the dilatory presence of death within all future scenarios of value-production. A kind of dark anti-utopianism is on the march, once again, and it is not hard to detect a literal necropolitics growing within both the ideology and the realpolitik of much neo-neoliberal ideology.6

The figure of the ghost is of importance, likewise, in considering pressing questions of history, the increasingly precarious status of the future, and the possibilities left for praxis in the present. It is in these questions that the Singapore case speaks perhaps most directly to spectral theory. On one hand, we cannot ignore Derrida’s formulation, mentioned earlier, in which the reappearance of the ghost signals an extended, disjointed present. Such disjointedness does not appear to offer any clear resolution. Derrida makes quick work of neoconservative claims about the “end of history.” However, from the standpoint of the early 1990s and the apparent triumph of capital, the endgame of The Communist Manifesto is likewise replaced by a condition of revolution in perpetuity, whereby the true “spirit” of Marxism is a constant hauntological engagement with the spectral regime of value. We welcome the ghostly—invite it, even—by committing to the attitude of dialectical engagement, “the critical idea or questioning stance.”7 This occurs, necessarily, without any eschatological timeline and in full awareness of the failure of “actually existing” socialism(s). A similarly compelling, if more depressive, vision was offered by Mark Fisher, for whom this present was haunted by “the slow cancellation of the future.”8 Fisher argues that a widespread cultural malaise arises, not least, from the recognition that our many progressive and utopian visions have themselves become ghosts, sacrificed to a single, neoliberal inevitability. “Cancellation” does not mean that there will be no future but rather means that there can be only one.

Both conditions—the spectral present and the extinction of alternatives—are all too clear in the Singapore model. The quality of daily life seems dominated by the paradoxes of fetishism (see chapter 3) and by instrumental, productive logic. Fisher’s endgame might resemble, quite literally, the photorealistic urban renderings delivered, year after year, by the government: disciplined, “green,” and beholden to the cause of accumulation above all else. There is, here, an exclusive orientation toward the future, inherent within the developmentalist ethos—not least in the forward gaze of speculation. This is a culture of anticipation in which true modernity is always in (to use the PAP term of art) the “next lap.” Fisher would recognize, all too well, a cruel avant-gardism that makes of the present a treadmill, an accelerating pace of labor in pursuit of unending downpayment. The corollary of this futurism is a kind of dementia. Singapore’s official discourse appears invested in a vague and fragmentary recollection of the national past and in a mythos of origin: a “third world” outpost, a “tiny island” or “fishing village.” By the same logic, kampung life is depicted via caricature, as a mix of communitarian bonhomie and squalor.

However, the “problem” of Singapore’s present, as an acute case of a global condition, appears magically reversed—enchanted and radically benign—in the light of local spectral discourses. Chinese religion has little concern for world-historical drama, modernist stadial history, “end times,” or divine apotheoses. By contrast, its cosmological vision emphasizes the cyclical and the eternal persistence of a dynamic unity between continuity and change that is manifested in the contemporary.9 These are, as we have seen, open to limitless improvement: the underlying expectation of spectro-economic activity is that the conditions of both living and dead can be bettered, within the now.

In this present, the repressive and disempowering mechanisms of capital are reversed—made benevolent, positive sum, and all enriching—via ghostly agency. The huat life, the prosperous and happy one, is achieved in a holistic sense by performing apparently irrational economic actions: by reversing the relationship between capital and profit; by seeking occult reconciliation between use- and exchange-value; by overpayment and seemingly unproductive expenditure; and last, by reemphasizing the market as a space of social interactions not among objects but among persons, living and dead. What is surprising about Singapore’s ghosts is the degree to which their variety of presentism contradicts the disjointed, claustrophobic conditions described by Derrida and Fisher; by contrast, they animate a phantasmagoria of popular control, flattened hierarchies, and defiance against the grinding wheels of money and time. An ecological vision, theorizing the play of energies, monies, interactions, and representations, reorders and makes coherent the structural underpinnings of the real itself. What Singaporean respondents describe is what we might (semiseriously) call “ghost-modernism”: a structure of belief that eschews world-historical futures or revolutionary-eschatological redemptions in favor of an enchanted present.10

Of course, this better and more accessible world is conjectured within—and not against—contemporary economy. In being so, it echoes another strand of Fisher’s work: as a worldview that remains, in many aspects, constrained by a capitalist realism. Viewed in such a light, it might appear as a wild and populist analogue of the reformisms and “accelerationist” positions that seek to amplify or temper existing dynamics within the present mode of production. However, the moral order of the spectropolis must be seen as highly ambivalent with respect to the dominant, value-driven regime. On one hand, there is an ecstatic embrace of money, the commodity, and schemes of finance and securitization. Getting rich is, at all times, seen as glorious. On the other, ghost-practices cannot be divorced from nonmonetary notions of betterment: luck, health, and generalized prosperity. Most importantly, the spectro-economic expectation is of radical accessibility; as with other forms of prosperity gospel, anyone can become wealthy.11 This goal is pursued through an almost satirical reversal of rational economic logic. The paradise of Chinese religion is imagined within capitalism, but only by transforming the very nature of its basic processes and instrumental requirements.

The figure of the ghost itself embodies this immanent countereconomy and inhabits it via a kind of total ecological condition (see later). It is exterior to time, a condition that comes with power over earthly matters. It is also exterior to the order of governance by state or market. Its role thus inverts many of capital’s dynamics and offers a promise of popular accessibility, while also asserting an alternative authority over formal economic projects. At the same time, the ghost’s “untimeliness” allows it to be seen as an aggressive advocate for the value of the old and the obsolete. While ostensibly tickled by novelties, the commodity for the ghost remains, in a sense, ever young. It performs that quiet praxis theorized by Walter Benjamin and Max Pensky: denaturalizing the regime of novelty and obsolescence, the endless and needless destruction of qualitative wealth.

The ghost, then, may or may not signal the worrying shift identified by Fisher, in which neoliberalism has foreclosed any notion of collective progress beyond the bounds of capital. All plans, it would seem, must now be made from within a state of capture. Spectro-economics does not embody the aggressive hostility of so-called revenge capitalism—as embodied by certain subcultures surrounding cryptocurrency. Though it involves the creation of alternative currencies, markets, commodities, and transactions, it does not preclude participation in more formal channels, such as the stock market or the formal development trade. In this reading, our ghosts might be seen to embody a kind of “spirited pragmatism”: an admixture of enchantment and acceptance. At the same time, we must view their insistence upon inversions and analogism and imagination, and upon the social, as drawing attention to the necromancy of capital itself—its own dark fictions, phantom equivalences, and perverse irrationalities—so as to struggle with them.

The particular nature of this imaginative take on capital leads, necessarily, to a third matter of consequence: the embrace of urban space as a wildly complex, extrahuman field of engagement and relation. Where Chinese religion offers no eschatology, it has ecology of a most remarkable kind. This is not a typical, “naturalist” approach—though it remains largely compatible with discourses of environmental science and often reinforces, via its own physical and metaphysical theories, biochemical accounts of the health of flora and fauna or their interactions. It is an extraordinary systematization, both in the breadth of its holism and in the detail of its analytical capacity. For this reason, I have only been able to touch on certain features in this book—in effect, those that relate ghosts to matters of space and economy. In summary, however, we should note a few of its relevant principles.

In essence, sites are seen as porous loci in which plant and animal life interacts with materiality (wood, fire, earth, water, metal) and with their corresponding energetic “phases.” The presence and configuration of multiple living species, alongside varied inorganic matter, cause “balance” insofar as phase cycles of qi can continue to circulate. Opposed qualities—night and day, wet and dry, male and female, expansive and recessive—should be balanced as yin and yang. Equanimity, in a given locale, will largely determine health, wealth, and luck in human life and add a positive or negative magnifying factor to value-production there.

This discourse concerns not merely physical quantities but—as we have seen with Master Goh’s site analysis—alignments and positions, openings, and axes. All of these influence the magnetism of a site for ghosts. For example, in geomantic theory, the “gates” to the spirit realm exist at the northeast and southwest of the home or plot, and for this reason, the placement of yin elements there (water, willow trees, and other “fluid” elements) encourages passage in and out. Placement of yin elements in alignment with front doors and principal elements can also signal “openness” and vulnerability. As in chapters 5 and 6, this may bring good or bad consequences, depending on how the owners and occupants manage a high degree of spectral traffic. At the same time, the placement of objects with human qualities—that is, mimetic representations of people—can attract ghosts, if the latter feel that the objects are being “venerated.”12 Such objects should be kept away from yin corners, centers and axes, and other areas of significant attraction or perceived “importance” within spatial hierarchies. What this demonstrates, in a rather extraordinary manner, is that forms and representations are not excluded from this ecological system either.

Likewise, human events may produce chains of disturbance in their reordering of material landscapes and the relative positions of their elements. For example, a concrete-and-glass condo or HDB, replacing a swatch of tertiary forest, adds dramatically to metal and mineral phases, often to the detriment of wood—with its necessary life-producing, expansive qualities. Elaborate gates, aligned with front entrances in Western style, invite problems: inflows of ghosts and outflows of value. Such anthropogenic factors occur alongside social unrest (in both “big” historical tragedies and private microtraumas) that likewise upsets the equanimity of energies. Disequilibrium draws spectral activity, because ghosts, as yin beings, can move easily in yin-heavy environs. At the same time, they will search for yang energies as a symptom of their “hunger.” This means that sites of wartime tragedy are as apt to be haunted as those of modernization and development.

Last, and perhaps most remarkable, is the fact that this ecology is not seen to be distinct, either spatially or causally, from economy. As we have seen, value becomes a lever to interact with this complex ecological system—to repair or take advantage of imbalances, encourage troublesome spirits to leave, or seek their cooperation in making luck. In this sense, as I have noted, traumatic events or disturbance of a site’s physical properties can be seen (in properly late capitalistic terms) as a source of both risk and opportunity. As much as ghosts act as “agents of recollection,” they respond to environments in which past events are preserved and encoded. Viewed in this way, spectral “trouble” is merely a kind of sedimentation within the social-material landscape of the city, amid its labile configurations.

I would argue that such a model should be taken very seriously by those who urgently seek new, paraecological models that do the urgent work of relating human and nonhuman lives and experiences. In a profound sense, the holist orientation of geomantic theory in Chinese religion bridges differences between methodological orientations of object ontology and the “multispecies turn” in the social sciences.13 Each element of the system—be it a stone or an abandoned wristwatch, a person or an animal, a unit of money or an image—is integral to relations affecting the well-being of the cosmic totality. The living and the dead, social history and daily life, animate and inorganic matter, substance and image, are brought into a field yet more expanded than many of those proposed in contemporary models, post Donna Haraway. Questions of “touch” here appear less like epistemological barriers—because questions of mutual understanding are deemphasized in favor of those concerning mutual health and flourishing. While obviously anthropocentric, such an ontology is not “flat”—because the powers of certain actors are acknowledged to determine, above others, the presents and futures of sites. In a broad sense, this raises questions about whether the social sciences should in fact be adopting ways of seeing from their sites of inquiry, rather than simply “decoding” them.

Singapore’s ghost-economy and ghost-theory thus involve an expansion from time to space, from history to ecology or geography. In a very clear sense, this mirrors the environmental determinism of the Singapore state’s ideology and its intensive attentions to the city’s natures and architectures—albeit without its futurism and temporal discipline. This in no way invalidates the well-established chronopolitics of ghostliness. Rather, it adds a novel dimension of the present as an environment: a site that serves as a locus of temporal predicaments.

Is the Singaporean believer “at home,” then, in a world of alienation and abstraction, one increasingly available to spectral associations and interpretations? Perhaps. At least, there is a mature discourse here that is of use when trying to make meaning from a peculiar state of things. But local narratives of the dead are never homely, in any abiding sense; they are not a place to get comfortable. The numinous is, here, a state of permanent upheaval as well as possibility—it explains and allows action while remaining deeply dangerous, fearful, and unknown. Such popularizing tendencies do not work against the ultimate mythos of Singapore’s state or of capital: of the value of value or of a prosperous futurity. Hauntings do not cancel projects; rather, they slow them, contort them, or make them locally ineffective or irrational. Given appropriate forms of ritual action, the bulldozers are able to be started again. In the process, however, acknowledgment must be made of dissenting visions of the future and its production.

Against the emergent order, however, it is the perverse optimism of the specter that gives hope—not least in its indefatigable sociability. Against an ever more gleefully anomic cultural imaginary, whether neoliberal or populist, the pestering spirit would speak of obligation, mutuality, and the common weal. These, like Herbert Marcuse’s thoughts of freedom and happiness, continue to “haunt the mind.”14 Behind the apparently naive faith in expansive and proliferating value, in alignment with the cosmic will, is the shape of something both radical and anthropologically familiar: an affirmation of continuity, reciprocity, and life well lived. Death-as-negation and death as a world-making force are locked in a pitched struggle, and ever more so. In between stand the ghosts.