Past, Present and Post-Tropicality

A Working Archive of Design, Research and Thoughts

The research thesis dissects three chronological modes of dominant ‘tropicality’ in Singapore through the lens of modern infrastructure: colonial (British control), post-colonial (nation-building) and contemporary (neoliberal). Crucially, it investigates ‘infrastructures’ of such dominant ‘tropicality’ alongside ordinary people’s lived tropical worlds and their socio-natural relationships, which created an alternative ‘infra-structure’ of tropicality – the radical potential of which is often unnoticed. In doing so, the thesis establishes a catalogue of alternative, subaltern practices, embodied knowledge and material culture, unsettling reductive, neocolonial ‘tropicality’ towards a post-tropical condition.

Infrastructure and Infra-structures

The thesis proposes broadening the study of tropicality from the ‘bigness’ associated with global techno scientific networks, augmentation of landscapes and state infrastructures, to include an overlooked ‘smallness’ of subaltern socio-natural practices, relations and socialities in the everyday. Infrastructure is one of modernity’s tool mobilized by dominant regimes to moderate people’s relationship to ‘tropical-ness’. Yet, other life-worlds are subtly narrated and nested within practices, embodied knowledge and material cultures – collectively termed ‘infra-structures’.

Colonial Mode: The ‘Tropical Other’

The tropical ‘other’ emerged during the early colonial settler period and was romanticized in a Saidian orientalist fashion, mixed with images of “Edenic plenitude” and “primitive” hedonism. It was in the second phase of European encounter with the tropics, described by David Arnold as ‘scientific tropicality’, that the tropics became a “torrid zone” where abundance was made troubling in new aspects of heat, humidity and plagues.

Dwelling Beyond Colonial Control

James C. Scott finds metis to be crucial for the ‘political life’ of oppressed groups, which is “found neither in overt collective defiance or power holders nor in complete hegemonic compliance”. This describes the position of the kampung dwellers perfectly: a population that kept out of trouble but were not technically law-abiding in their erection of ‘illegal’ dwellings. Their infra-structures for dwelling within the tropical environment gave them autonomy outside colonial governance, threatening the legitimacy of the latter.

It did not matter if the trees were actually planted and not ‘wild’ or if the pond they trapped fish in during hightide was leftover from a farm – ‘nature’ was not kept pristine or exoticized, the environment as it appeared simply constituted a material reality; a ground for gathering embodied knowledge. Tropicality was never an ‘other’; it was the ‘total environment’ of struggles, sensuous delights, and conjunctural infra-structures.

Nation-Building Mode: The Garden City

The razing of kampungs and farms, and the subsequent relocation of people into mass housing, must be read as part of the island-wide totalizing infrastructural project undertaken by the developmentalist state. However, the production and consumption of infrastructure is nonetheless deeply embodied in everyday practices and human relations, enabling alternate worlds to persist through creative agency of those who subscribe to anything outside the hegemonic repertoire.

Tropical Modernism as Infrastructural Field

The developmentalist state extended the use of biopolitical infrastructure to a totalitarian degree unprecedented during colonial times, curating private and public spaces and environments towards the creation of “model citizens of a high-modernist nation state”. Singapore public housing effectively integrated marginally-dwelling populations into the socio-economic citizenry of an emerging nation-state. The modern subject was forged through taming subaltern tropicality, using the twin infrastructural instruments of ‘open space’ and machinised housing.

The singular modern subject is nonexistent; instead, we find people “entering modernity” on their own terms, enabled by a transplanted aesthetic of tropicality which suddenly becomes resistive in its new context. What developed out of these abstract modernist spaces was a mass culture of appropriation which resisted high-modernist containment of corporal and socio-natural interactions, adapting the tropical habitus of kampung dwelling.

Neoliberal Mode: Tropical City of Excellence

In the (re)making of Singapore for the new century, urban planning remained an important ‘technocratic’ exercise’ in the development of the island’s ‘residential’, ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘tourist’ images. In the next phase of Singapore’s rapid transformation, new technologies and urban systems were adopted in creating certain ‘milieus’ to ensure Singapore’s physical image matched those of the Western cosmopolis, mimicking the ideal temperate conditions which these systems inherently espouse.

Post-modernist Assemblages of Tropical Cosmopolitanism

As part of and yet resistant to the capitalist infrastructures of the ‘air-con nation’, the neoliberal landscape of private property holds an infra-structure of ‘cosmopolitanism from below’ hidden behind the seemingly superficial foil of post-modernist consumption of styles and commodities. The thesis turns to focus on the everyday practices occurring at the intensified intersection between state infrastructure and connective networks of global flows, arguing how they exhibit a subjectivity of ‘vernacularised tropical cosmopolitanism’.

Despite capitalist efforts of commodifying infrastructure to make ‘tropicality’ an optional phenomenological experience confined to certain ‘milieaus’, the embeddedness of past tropical life-worlds continue to be practiced through these “heterogenous configurations” of infra-structure in which people explore their own vernacular version of cosmopolitan subjectivity.

Towards a Praxis of Post-Tropicality

As everyday infra-structures of a lived, embodied tropicality are produced and maintained with every rogue sidewalk garden or bucket of collected rainwater, dominant infrastructures of an abstract, universal tropicality are unsubscribed and overwritten. The cataloging, identifying and naming of elements that make up alternative tropicalities aim to articulate a ‘practical-critical’ consciousness that begins to re-explore and re-assemble a life-world that consciously rejects dominant ‘tropicality’, drawing us closer to a post-tropical socio-nature that transcends dichotomies, abstractions and universals.