Post 18: "Post-65"
To 'I think' and 'I am' must be added the self –that is the passive position ... ; to the determination and the undetermined must be added the form of the determinable, namely time. Nor is 'add' entirely the right word here, since it is rather a matter of establishing the difference and interiorising it within being and thought.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Deleuze's remark about Kant's contribution to ontology is an observation made about how the indeterminate becomes determinable via the move to ground "being" in time. While he makes the point while exploring the basis of "being", I think that the notion that "time" (not even the abstract "time" of Delueze and Kant but a more general commonsensical perception of time as "history", "sequence", the spinning of the earth on its axis as it makes its annual journey around the ...) is intimately woven into any attempt to apprehend identity is an interesting, and highly significant proposition.
In Hui Yi's very recent post, she mentions a "new" website, started by "post-65" Members of Parliament. In this post, "post 18", I intend to think about the notion of the "post-65" as a kind of time signifier that has been deployed as a crucial stitch in the fabric of national identity.
"Post-65": What it's meant to convey
I suppose few people would disagree that generally, "Post-65", is meant to designate at least two things. "Post-65" is usually used to refer to younger Singaporeans who grew up in post-independence Singapore and thus constitute a group of citizens that did not personally experience the difficulties and struggles that Singapore faced as a developing country. This seems to be what is meant when older ministers use the term. The implication is often that these "post-65" Singaporeans run the risk of forgetting the past and of taking Singapore's economic success for granted. The second, and perhaps weaker sense of a "post-65" generation, connotes the sense of Singaporeans who grew up with opportunities and aspirations that earlier generations of Singaporeans did not have; opportunities gained because of Singapore's growing economic prosperity and transformation into modern city-state. Of course, both uses overlap and the emphasis on what is really referred to unsteadily sways between each pole, depending on who the speaker is.
I think that these Members of Parliament use the term "post-65" in an attempt to show that there is political representation that understands this younger group of Singaporeans and does this in an attempt to identify with this group. This identification is crucial given the first and stronger sense of "post-65" as it has normally been applied in political discourse. These young MPs want to suggest that they too, perhaps, have been accused of forgetting Singapore's difficult past but via their optimistic engagement with the political status quo, aim to show that there are youthful elements that do not take Singapore's success for granted and want to do good for the nation.
Consequences?
What the term, and its deployment as group identity ("post-65 generation", "post-65 MPs") does, however, have consequences that are not immediately obvious in the rather pedantic observations that I've made so far. Here are two reflections on the ideological implications:
1. The term "quilts" identity. Slavoj Zizek, in The Sublime Object of Ideology observes that "quilting performs [a] totalization by means of which [the] free-floating of ideological elements is halted, fixed – that is to say, by means of which they becomes part of a structured network of meaning." Of course the term "post-65" was already part of a network of political meanings, but when it is adopted as a nominal identity by politicians themselves, it becomes more settled as a precise nodal point from which other terms and other meanings will derive their significance. Pre-MPs-calling-themselves-post-65, the term could have been more easily deployed in other ways (as the terms "Gen X", "Gen Y" and indeed, "slacker" often are) but now, the term takes a more clearly designated place in a state authorized spectrum of political signifiers. Of course people will still use the term in their own idiosyncratic ways but since it has entered political parlence, this plurality will probably fizzle out. Of course, I think of the term "Senior Minister" and what it used to mean (the other senior ministers were Goh Keng Swee and Rajaratnam) before it came to only mean "Ex-Prime Minister". And as Zizek points out, this quilting is ultimately governed by the specter of the "the Lacanian One". In this case, that would be the governing belief that in a single moment in August 1965, for the first time in the history of the universe, a nation was conceived and birthed, parthogenically, in the tears of a founding Father.
2. The term codifies a certain view of history. If a "post-65" generation of leaders exists, 1965, must have been a key moment in the nation's history, a moment more significant than 1941,1959, 1963,1979, 1981 or even 1985. When historical interpretation becomes a marker of identity, identity takes history within itself, neutralizes it, makes it an object and replicates it in our beliefs and subsequent representations of the historical event. A more neutral manifestation of this: It seems that Singaporeans have a penchant for identifying themselves with the year of their birth. "You what year, one?" is probably unique in the manner by which we think about how old we are in relation to other people. This phenomenon usually occurs with people who have IC Nos. that begin from 1968, the year when IC Nos. began showing the year of birth. So "I 1974 one" or "I 1985 one" makes sense in this rather singular practice. Of course, these identifications as well as the way they are iterated are normally devoid of ideological significance of a "1965"(Or are they? do they not encode a history of serialization? Of numerically representing and thus effacing difference?) The blanket term "post-65" has the potential to play a similar function. How long before it becomes part of a new serialization of identity that manages, in a single inscription, to cross out autonomous identity and leave the distinct marks of a particular view of national history, by tagging us with a name that is not our own?
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Deleuze's remark about Kant's contribution to ontology is an observation made about how the indeterminate becomes determinable via the move to ground "being" in time. While he makes the point while exploring the basis of "being", I think that the notion that "time" (not even the abstract "time" of Delueze and Kant but a more general commonsensical perception of time as "history", "sequence", the spinning of the earth on its axis as it makes its annual journey around the ...) is intimately woven into any attempt to apprehend identity is an interesting, and highly significant proposition.
In Hui Yi's very recent post, she mentions a "new" website, started by "post-65" Members of Parliament. In this post, "post 18", I intend to think about the notion of the "post-65" as a kind of time signifier that has been deployed as a crucial stitch in the fabric of national identity.
"Post-65": What it's meant to convey
I suppose few people would disagree that generally, "Post-65", is meant to designate at least two things. "Post-65" is usually used to refer to younger Singaporeans who grew up in post-independence Singapore and thus constitute a group of citizens that did not personally experience the difficulties and struggles that Singapore faced as a developing country. This seems to be what is meant when older ministers use the term. The implication is often that these "post-65" Singaporeans run the risk of forgetting the past and of taking Singapore's economic success for granted. The second, and perhaps weaker sense of a "post-65" generation, connotes the sense of Singaporeans who grew up with opportunities and aspirations that earlier generations of Singaporeans did not have; opportunities gained because of Singapore's growing economic prosperity and transformation into modern city-state. Of course, both uses overlap and the emphasis on what is really referred to unsteadily sways between each pole, depending on who the speaker is.
I think that these Members of Parliament use the term "post-65" in an attempt to show that there is political representation that understands this younger group of Singaporeans and does this in an attempt to identify with this group. This identification is crucial given the first and stronger sense of "post-65" as it has normally been applied in political discourse. These young MPs want to suggest that they too, perhaps, have been accused of forgetting Singapore's difficult past but via their optimistic engagement with the political status quo, aim to show that there are youthful elements that do not take Singapore's success for granted and want to do good for the nation.
Consequences?
What the term, and its deployment as group identity ("post-65 generation", "post-65 MPs") does, however, have consequences that are not immediately obvious in the rather pedantic observations that I've made so far. Here are two reflections on the ideological implications:
1. The term "quilts" identity. Slavoj Zizek, in The Sublime Object of Ideology observes that "quilting performs [a] totalization by means of which [the] free-floating of ideological elements is halted, fixed – that is to say, by means of which they becomes part of a structured network of meaning." Of course the term "post-65" was already part of a network of political meanings, but when it is adopted as a nominal identity by politicians themselves, it becomes more settled as a precise nodal point from which other terms and other meanings will derive their significance. Pre-MPs-calling-themselves-post-65, the term could have been more easily deployed in other ways (as the terms "Gen X", "Gen Y" and indeed, "slacker" often are) but now, the term takes a more clearly designated place in a state authorized spectrum of political signifiers. Of course people will still use the term in their own idiosyncratic ways but since it has entered political parlence, this plurality will probably fizzle out. Of course, I think of the term "Senior Minister" and what it used to mean (the other senior ministers were Goh Keng Swee and Rajaratnam) before it came to only mean "Ex-Prime Minister". And as Zizek points out, this quilting is ultimately governed by the specter of the "the Lacanian One". In this case, that would be the governing belief that in a single moment in August 1965, for the first time in the history of the universe, a nation was conceived and birthed, parthogenically, in the tears of a founding Father.
2. The term codifies a certain view of history. If a "post-65" generation of leaders exists, 1965, must have been a key moment in the nation's history, a moment more significant than 1941,1959, 1963,1979, 1981 or even 1985. When historical interpretation becomes a marker of identity, identity takes history within itself, neutralizes it, makes it an object and replicates it in our beliefs and subsequent representations of the historical event. A more neutral manifestation of this: It seems that Singaporeans have a penchant for identifying themselves with the year of their birth. "You what year, one?" is probably unique in the manner by which we think about how old we are in relation to other people. This phenomenon usually occurs with people who have IC Nos. that begin from 1968, the year when IC Nos. began showing the year of birth. So "I 1974 one" or "I 1985 one" makes sense in this rather singular practice. Of course, these identifications as well as the way they are iterated are normally devoid of ideological significance of a "1965"(Or are they? do they not encode a history of serialization? Of numerically representing and thus effacing difference?) The blanket term "post-65" has the potential to play a similar function. How long before it becomes part of a new serialization of identity that manages, in a single inscription, to cross out autonomous identity and leave the distinct marks of a particular view of national history, by tagging us with a name that is not our own?
posted by gary at 7:14 PM
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