Writing Singapore: Choreographed and Emergent Practices

Abstract

Since Michel de Certeau, it has become feasible, fashionable even, to think of cities enunciatively; that is, to postulate an analogous relationship between the spatial and the discursive. In investigating the idea of urban texts, de Certeau constructs a pedestrian subject who, by way of traversing streets, embodies a practice that is vernacular and agentive, in resistance to the hegemony of systemic and normativised discourses. Conceived as a speech act, the physical act of walking takes on a rhetorical stance. Now what if we spin de Certeau’s scheme around to posit a spatial economy of textual phenomena? The present article pursues this line by examining writing practices through de Certeau’s distinction between Place/Strategy and Space/Tactic. Using Walking as an analytic frame for Writing and drawing on examples from Singapore, I propose two modalities of writing: Choreographed and Emergent. I will further look at how dynamic writing practices can usefully complicate this picture to obtain a nuanced understanding of top-down and bottom-up approaches to writing as a mode of cultural consumption and production.