10 - Representing the Singapore modern: Dick Lee, pop music, and the “New” Asia

Summary

I

In an implicit criticism of Francis Fukuyama, political philosopher Chantal Mouffe says, “Not long ago we were being told … that liberal democracy had won and that history had ended.” The event that matters is, of course, the collapse of communism. What caught some people offguard, however, was that instead of the heralded ‘New World Order’, the victory of universal values, and the generalization of ‘post-conventional’ identities, we were witnessing the explosion of particularisms and an increasing challenge to Western universalism”, a universalism characterized as “rationalist and individualist (Mouffe 1993, pp. 1, 3) — the supposed culmination of the modern era ushered in by the Renaissance.

Mouffe is referring to the burst of ethnic nationalisms — “the archaic” — which has erupted in Eastern Europe, and of particularistic movements such as radical feminism. Since the 1980s, similar politicocultural contestations or resistances against Western universalism have also occurred in parts of East and Southeast Asia which have experienced high rates of economic growth until the Asian economic crisis in 1997. Samuel Huntington, of Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, has wrongly but influentially chosen to see this challenge as a “clash of civilizations” between Sinic or Confucianist, Islamic and Western civilizations.

While the essentialist term “civilization” must be interrogated (as if the vastness of Asia could be a single, fixed cultural entity), a discourse on “East Asian modernity” has emerged, claiming the status of a counter- or alternative model of modernity — a “regional” universalism, if you like — in which “traditional” Asian values of family-centredness, self-control, frugality, and corporate identity are seen as the foundations for Asian success. Within this discourse, some Asians like to believe that we have indigenized modernity, and that we might escape the cultural deracination thought to be taking place in the West — perceived to be the consequence of its supposedly extreme, individualist modernity. The discourse thus espouses a neo-traditional modernity that has a less prominent role for individualist, bourgeois democracy.