Crisis and Contingency at the Dashboard

Adele Peters, “Singapore Plans To Become The World’s First Smart Nation,” Fast Company, January 22, 2015 →.

Shannon Mattern, “Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard,” Places Journal, March 2015.

National Security Coordination Centre, Singapore, “Explaining the RAHS Programme,” in Thinking about the Future: Strategic Anticipation and RAHS, eds. Edna Tan Hong Ngoh and Hoo Tiang Boon (Singapore: National Security Coordination Secretariat, 2008), 5.

Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Duke University Press, 2014), 39.

As Luhmann suggests, “Everything becomes contingent whenever what is observed depends on who is being observed.” See Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford University Press, 1998), 48.

See, for instance, Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Stanford University Press, 1991); and Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (Sage, 1992).

The broader argument here is that the distant but ever encroaching horizon of ecological disaster falls outside the “traditional horizons” of most of our institutions, thus disincentivizing any corrective action until it is too late. As an example, Carney points out that the horizon for monetary policy typically lasts no more than a decade. See Carney, “Breaking the tragedy of the horizon—climate change and financial stability” (speech, Lloyd’s, London, September 29, 2015).

Elena Eposito, The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society (Edward Elgar, 2011), 105.

While the scope of the present essay prevents me from describing the complexity of Roitman’s historico-philosophical account of crisis, it bears mentioning that the elevation of crisis into a “transcendental placeholder” comes at the end of a historical process through which God, reason, and truth were successively displaced by a mode of observation taking place from within immanence, leaving us to assume a “negative occupation of the immanent world.” Roitman, Anti-Crisis, 9, 69–70.

Quoted in Joe Nocera, “As Credit Crisis Spiraled, Alarm Led to Action,” New York Times, October 1, 2008.

Roitman, Anti-Crisis, 83.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2007). The turn of the black swan from singular event to enduring condition was made official at the 7th International Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning Symposium held in Singapore, where the theme was “Black Swans and Black Elephants.”

See Laura Hyun Yi Kang, “The Uses of Asianization: Figuring Crises, 1997–98 and 2007–?,” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (September 2012): 411–36.

Rosalind C. Morris, “Accidental Histories, Post-Historical Practice?: Re-reading Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance in the Actuarial Age,” Anthropological Quarterly 83, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 599.

For a recent assessment of Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative, see Lily Kong and Orlando Woods, “The ideological alignment of smart urbanism in Singapore: Critical reflections on a political paradox,” Urban Studies 55, no. 4 (2018): 679–701.

Paul Virilio, The Original Accident, trans. Julie Rose (Polity Press, 2007).

Morris, “Accidental Histories,” 599.

I’ve explored in a previous text the perverse libidinal economy producing the reception of the dashcam footage of the Ferrari–taxi crash. See Ho Rui An, “An Accident: Two Views from the Dashboard,” in Concrete Island, eds. Kenneth Tay and Luca Lum (NUS Museum, 2016), 60–69.

This seeming eclipsing of class in the racialization of the migrant might be partly the result of race, specifically the categories of CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others) inherited from colonial policy, being the dominant biopolitical schema for governance in Singapore. For a detailed account of the development of Singapore’s CMIO framework, see Michael D. Barr and Zlatko Skrbiš, Constructing Singapore: Elitism, Ethnicity and the Nation-Building Project (NIAS Press, 2008).

For a considered reading of the riot against labor conditions of migrant workers in Singapore, see Daniel P. S. Goh, “The Little India Riot and the Spatiality of Migrant Labor in Singapore,” Society & Space, September 8, 2014.

Lee Hsien Loong, “National Day Rally 2017” (speech, Institute of Technical Education College Central, Singapore, August 20, 2017).

Lee, “National Day Rally 2017.”

By “clearing the dirt,” I mean to invoke the original referent of “dashboard”: the wooden panel fixed at the front of the horse carriage to protect the rider against the dirt being “dashed up” by the horses’ movements. I borrow “geo-body” from Thongchai Winichakul, who describes the production of national self-image as a process inextricably bound up with technologies of mapping. See Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (University of Hawaii Press, 1994).

This is in line with Keller Easterling’s work on the zone as a space of exception from which the state withdraws only to further increase its power. Easterling cites Singapore to demonstrate how the city-state has become the model to negotiate this apparent contradiction. I would only add that what further complicates the case of Singapore is the implication of the “nation.” See Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014).

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, eds. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 146–50.

The notion of Singapore being “at a crossroads” as it faces an uncertain future has been repeated by politicians in recent years to the point of it becoming a running joke. What’s remarkable is how the “crossroads” that once served as a spatial metaphor to describe the city-state being at the intersection between East and West has today come to denote instead a temporal horizon where decisions have to be made before it’s too late.

To this end, one might question if in Giorgio Agamben’s influential theory of the sovereign performative as the power to decide the state of exception, his reading of the aporetic origin of state power reinstitutes crisis as its own “blind spot” by taking crisis as a condition postulated from the outset, rather than coming about through some breakdown of representation. See Roitman, Anti-Crisis, 70.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT Press, 2016), 82.

See →.

Chun, Updating to Remain the Same, 74–76.

Chun, Updating to Remain the Same, 82.

For a reading of how uncertainty constitutes the epistemology of the test-bed city, see Orit Halpern, Jesse LeCavalier, Nerea Calvillo, and Wolfgang Pietsch, “Test-Bed Urbanism,” Public Culture 25, no. 2 (2013): 273–306.

My reading of the state worker as reengineer draws upon Stefano Harney’s account of the post-Fordist turn of public administration in North America. See Stefano Harney, State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality (Duke University Press, 2002).

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 261.

I understand that in invoking Deleuze and Guattari, there is a risk of conflating the (postcolonial) nation-state with the state, or the Urstaat, as Deleuze and Guattari call it. But to the extent that the social democratic basis upon which most postcolonial nation-states were established has since been eroded, this subsumption of nation to state retains its critical force. I would further add that it would take much more for the interval between “nation” and “state” in the “nation-state” formulation to be foreclosed, but this is a subject for a separate essay. For critical accounts on this “depoliticization” of the nation-state, see Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (Verso, 2009); and Chan Heng Chee, Politics in an Administrative State: Where Has the Politics Gone? (Department of Political Science, University of Singapore, 1975).

For a theoretical treatment of the “unsublatability” between capitalist development and the nation-state in the context of recessionary Japan, see Yukata Nagahara, “Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre Do Their Ghost-Dance: Globalization and the Nation-State,” in Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, eds. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian (Duke University Press, 2006), 299–330. This discussion is especially pertinent to the economies of East Asia, where the strong hand of the state credited for the region’s decades of “miracle” growth has seen its role significantly reconfigured since the so-called Washington Consensus.

Morris, “Accidental Histories,” 603.

In Singapore, one such community, focusing on footage of traffic violations, is the Singapore Reckless Drivers Community on Facebook: →.