Navigating Differences by Terence Chong

Author:Terence Chong [Chong, Terence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE STATE AND THE MORALITY OF ARTISTIC PROTESTS

Sociology has sought to understand protests as unpredictable outbursts of collective sentiments or as a collective action tool for the pursuit of group interests. James Jasper argued that protests should be best understood as public and collective articulations of moral beliefs and feelings.4 This is a decidedly Durkheimian approach that sees society as a normative order in which its underpinning moral beliefs and sentiments have to be contested and tested regularly to ensure societal values reflect individual consciences. As such, protests are needed because modern institutions are rationalized and thus fail to allow for moral contests and tests to become the vehicle for the re-enactment of social order. But beyond the Durkheimian base, Jasper makes the case that culture as shared understanding and practices of communication is a crucial dimension of protests and the fundamental moral beliefs and feelings have to be expressed through culture. Protest organizers are therefore “very much like artists”, creating new cultural perspectives and affections that encapsulate the moral intuitions of individuals, allowing these individuals to coalesce into a social movement and identify themselves as a social group.5

This is useful for understanding the situation in Singapore in the 1990s. For more than two decades after independence in 1965, the developmental state deployed draconian political instruments to suppress dissent and emasculate civil society. Coupled with extensive resettlement of the population into public housing estates with modern amenities under the rubric of urban redevelopment, the state directed the energies of the citizenry towards becoming a modern workforce for industrialization. Memories of the political chaos experienced during decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, marked by public demonstrations, violent strikes and fatal racial riots, were used to justify authoritarian order. Protests were thus treated as imminent threats to the fragile social order of independent Singapore.

Conditioned by the overemphasis on public order and extreme sanctions on dissent, ordinary citizens were not able to overcome the cultivated fear to engage the liberalization of politics and society that the Goh Chok Tong government began in the early 1990s. Civil society groups, representing special causes in nature conservation, heritage preservation, women’s rights and minority rights, made strides but stayed clear of protests and, instead, channelled their work into advocacy and lobbying. Artists were the ones who waded into protests, not as organizers of protest movements, but as individual voices of conscience calling out attention to grievous injustices in the liberalizing climate. From Jasper’s work, we can explain why this was so. With the political discourse and shared understandings dominated by the hegemonic party-state, it took especial and daring creativity to challenge and protest the established normative culture, so as to open up the social space for new ways of thinking and feeling.

On New Year’s Eve in 1993, performance artist Josef Ng staged the rare public protest in the form of performance art and provoked a major backlash from the liberalizing state. A month earlier, the police staged an entrapment operation in Tanjong Rhu, a well-known gay cruising

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