Consumer society and the technology of education a case study of the singapore education system

Table of Contents Page Abstract 2 List of Tables 3 List of Figures 4 List of Plates 5 Chapter 1 | Introduction 6 Chapter 2 | History of Megamachine Development in Singapore 24 Chapter 3 | Objects of Cyborganic Social Reproduction 45 Chapter 4 | The Hyper Human Cyborg 85 Chapter 5 | Towards Singularity or Apotheosis? 103 Bibliography 114 Appendix 1 | List of mp3 Projects 123 Appendix 2 | Baseline ICT standards for Schools in Singapore 124 1 Abstract Singapore has been hailed as a model of spectacular economic development, having gone from third world to first world in a mere three decades since its independence in 1965. The Singapore Education System (SES) is at the heart of this economic miracle, being responsible for the development of Singapore’s only resource, its people. The urgent development of this only resource to meet the needs of the global hypercapitalist economy is still regarded as a survival imperative today. Using the theories of Baudrillard regarding the consumer society and that of Mumford regarding the Megamachine and theories of hypercapitalism, I examine the role of the SES in cyborg development and production. I argue that the SES represents a type of technology which has been developed by what Mumford terms the megamachine through the technics of Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP)-state government which I trace from Singapore’s colonial heritage. The objects of education which together form the technology of education in Singapore employs what I term as procedural signification to prepare students not just in terms of skills but psychologically and mentally for their roles as cyborgs in the global hypercapitalist economy. The case of Singapore is unique because of the degree of entrenchment of the PAPstate government since independence which represents an example of continuous megamachine development since that time. The SES thus represents a technology of simulacra that parallels the formation of the Singapore megamachine which has refined the art and science of cybernetic reproduction. Schools are thus sites of production-consumption where the foundation of consumer society, the ego consumans is nurtured and where simultaneously its mirror, the homo machina is developed, both critical processes at the heart of the hypercapitalist project to ensure its own hegemony. The development of consumer society is thus inextricably linked to the development of what I term the neo-megamachine in Singapore and education is at the heart of this project. Finally, I speculate on the future of this hybrid entity which I call the machina consumans. Keywords: education, procedural signification, hypercapitalism, cyborg, cybernetic reproduction, megamachine, technics, simulacra, production, consumption, consumer society, ego consumans, homo machina, machina consumans. 2 List of Tables Page Table 1: Types of English Boy’s Schools in Singapore, circa 1819-1941 32 Table 2: Types of English Girl’s Schools in Singapore, circa 1819-1941 33 Table 3: Features of the Transition from the old hierarchical dominations to the new informatics of domination 89 Table 4: Characteristics of Hyperspace 91 Table 5: Summary of Singapore’s Masterplans for ICT in education 106 Table 6: Summary of Future Schools and their ICT Foci 108 3 List of Figures Page Figure 1: The Singapore Education Landscape 58 Figure 2: The Singapore Education Journey 59 4 List of Plates Page Plate 1: Eventual typical 21st century classroom in Singapore 68 Plate 2: 17th – 18th century German classroom at Museum of Molfsee 69 Plate 3: Ohio Girls Industrial School, United States, circa 1910-1919 69 Plate 4: Prussian Monitorial Classroom, circa 19th century 70 Plate 5: Dunlop Rubber Co. Ltd., circa 1940 71 Plate 6: Nokia handphone factory, circa 2007 72 Plate 7: Digital Office, circa 2008 73 Plate 8a: Victoria School, 1986 National Day observance parade rehearsal 73 Plate 8b: Banner hung at Yuan Ching Secondary School, 2010 74 Plate 9: Flatted factory along Commonwealth Drive 74 Plate 10: Fusionopolis Tower 75 Plate 11: Singapore Sports School 75 Plate 12a: Achievement banner hung outside Deyi Secondary School, circa 2000 75 Plate 12b: Three achievement posters hung on the facade of Zhenghua Secondary School, circa 2000 76 Plate 13: 2011 MOE teaching advertisement 79 Plate 14: Photograph of advertising for top PSLE scorers for 2011 at a bus stand 81 5 Chapter 1 | Introduction This thesis is an attempt to de-mythologize the scope and nature of education under hypercapitalism and its associated knowledge economy, which Graham defines as “the form of capitalism under which thought itself is produced, commodified, and exchanged within the globally integrated system of communication technologies” (Graham, 1999, p2). The discussion synthesizes the sociological perspectives of Baudrillard with that of various authors in the field of Marxian analytical tradition, communications theory and the cognitive sciences to argue that the Singapore Education System (SES) plays a critical role in not only reproducing structures which facilitate capitalism, but which also deepens and intensifies the hypercapitalistic expropriation of labour. The importance of this exploratory thesis lies in its study of education as a type of technology which is essential to hypercapitalism. The essential connection between education and hypercapitalism, by which labour is cyberneticised and expropriated however, is provided by the hegemonic influence of the state megamachine, especially in countries where the state megamachine is pervasive and is tightly interconnected with the capitalist megamachine. The historical underpinnings of these interconnections in Singapore are discussed in chapter 2. The resulting cyborganic relations to capital are further governed by the codes of consumer society in which education itself is a consumable object. These codes in turn bind cybernetic labour to capitalism through consumption. Hypercapitalism accelerates the rate of cyberneticisation of labour and simultaneously the rate of consumption. These processes are discussed in chapter 3. Chapter 4 examines the nature of cyborganic existence in Singapore and its implications on the subject. Finally, the purpose of this thesis is made explicit in the last chapter which examines the possible implications for society with speculation on what such continued cyborganic development might bring. Singapore provides a good case study of cybernetic social reproduction because of a confluence of socioeconomic factors. As a developmental state, generalized mass public education fulfils two crucial roles. Firstly, it was and still is 6 instrumental to capitalist development by way of valorisation by the state of its only perceived capital resource – human beings. Secondly, education in Singapore adopts a process Tremewan (1994, p74) calls “educating for submission”, which creates a pliant and submissive workforce attractive to global capital investment. These historical features are important contributors to the characteristic nature of what Vercellone terms “diffuse intellectuality” (Vercellone, 2007, p4) to describe the development of generally educated masses in what authors like Vercellone have termed “cognitive capitalism” (Ibid). Cognitive capitalism refers to the shift in late capitalism to capitalist dependence on the cognitive and immaterial aspects of labour (Dyer-Witherford, 1999). The relation of capital to labour is marked by the hegemony of knowledges, by a diffuse intellectuality, and by the driving role of the production of knowledges by means of knowledges connected to the increasingly immaterial and cognitive character of labour (Vercellone, 2007, p16). Singapore in its aspirations to become an education and Interactive Digital Media (IDM) hub among others has invested heavily in education to develop the necessary cybernetic capital for these purposes. These aspirations and the motivations behind them parallel Haraway’s (2000, p291) ironic faith: “At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg”. Haraway’s (2000, p34) heresy may have been her use of cyborg as a metaphor in her argument for the possibility of a liberal feminist utopia attained through the liberating and supremely equalizing hybridised being of the cyborg: A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. … but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. I argue that Haraway’s (2000) metaphor may be closer to reality than most of us realize and that this is evident in the case of the Singapore education landscape. Cognitive scientists have made great discoveries in understanding how the human mind works. Perhaps one of the most pertinent arguments to understanding the nature of cyber-organic capitalism is the work done by Edwin Hutchins (1995) on distributed cognition. Hutchins argues that external objects are used as extensions of the mind for memory in the performance of complex tasks. This argument for cyborgs is furthered by Andy Clark who argues that we are all “natural born 7 cyborgs” – organic entities which naturally co-opt their natural surroundings into the psyche and consciousness as part of daily life-processes, because the “[m]ind is a leaky organ, forever escaping its ‘natural’ confines and mingling shamelessly with body and with world” (Clark, 2001, p17). These arguments suggest that far from being a “metaphor” or an “image”, cyborgs are a reality and furthermore that human beings have always naturally been cybernetic in orientation. The term cybernetic was first coined by Wiener (1950, p8) who defines it as the “study of messages, and in particular the effective messages of control”. Wiener (1950, p9) further defines control as “nothing but the sending of messages which effectively change the behaviour of the recipient”. A central argument of this thesis is therefore that a cybernetic organism, in the fashion of Wiener (1950), is an organism that is capable of exerting control on animals, machines, humans and other cyborgs through communications – the ultimate all-consuming life-form. This proposition is central to the concept of cyber-organic capitalism, which is capitalism based on cyborg production and consumption which has been termed “hypercapitalism” and “cognitive capitalism” by other authors focusing on separate aspects of this advanced stage of capitalism currently dominating the globe. Indeed, mass public education is thus the best platform for both exerting cybernetic control, through the processes of “educating for submission” (Tremewan, 1994, p74), and for selecting those cybernetic capacities for which to develop a cyber-organic diffuse intellectuality, indoctrinated through the syllabi and curriculum. A cyborg is a hybrid entity comprising an organic component and an inorganic component. Suspending images of half-man, half-machine entities rife in contemporary science fiction, and more important than the seemingly obvious physical manifestations, an aspect of this particular hybridisation central to the arguments of Clark (2001), Haraway (2000) and Hutchins (1995) is that the organic component retains control of the inorganic components. Only then can the organic mind extend its influence to “external representational devices” (Hutchins, 1995), then the liberating freedoms of the cyborg-being be consumed and then can the mind “mingle shamelessly” (Clark, 2001) with the world. This realisation is important because it affirms organic agency over the materially 8 inorganic, the psyche (consciousness) over machine logic code. This natural initial dominance is not uncontested however. Constant interface with machine logic code gradually asserts an influence over the psyche, altering the consciousness of the organic agency. Thus, “the medium is the message" because it is “the medium that shapes controls the scale and form of human association and action” (McLuhan, 1964, p9). Maintaining organic control over the inorganic was relatively easy in the era of the pre-networked cyborg. During this period, inorganic components were externally situated and organic control and mental disembodiment was mostly restricted to the inorganic components being physically manipulated in the immediate vicinity. Communications with other cyborgs was also limited by relatively crude analogue voice transfer devices and once the communication was ended only a fragment of that information was stored in the cyborg’s internal memory and perhaps some of it was externally noted. Pre-network era cyborgs were not required to be proficient in the use of technology. Their pairing was predominantly with standalone analogue devices that rarely had the capacity or bandwidth for profound communicative effect. Network era cyborgs represent an evolutionary development in cybernetic relations of control compared to their analogue cousins beginning with and scaffolded by the omnipresence of the Internet. Not only is there greater interface potential, this digital interface enables a greater array of interface options and potentialities over a wider affective domain. This [computer/user] relationship is symbiotic: users invest certain aspects of themselves and their cultures when ‘making sense’ of their computers, and their use of computers may be viewed as contributing to individuals’ images and experiences of their selves and their bodies (Lupton, 2007, p423). This symbiosis is further enabled by developments in inorganic technology extending and enhancing the external mental disembodiment of the organic through advances in external memory and machine logic code algorithms which essentially erode the psychological space between internal and external. In Hutchin’s cockpit example, this may have been accomplished through an 9 autopilot, which is a programmable extension of the pilot’s intentions for the inorganic partner to fly a certain path. A more mundane example would be that of the macro in Microsoft office, another programmable means of automating inorganic partner responses to the organic will. There are however two key differences. The ability to create such a macro is more extant than creating an autopilot programme and more importantly this erstwhile macro, which represents an investment of self, culture and experience, may be digitally transferred and copied easily for consumption by other cyborgs, a function that was considerably harder to accomplish in the pre-network era. The argument that human beings have always been cybernetically orientated has important implications for conception of current developments in capitalism. It suggests that the current phase of capitalism represents an inexorable development and a centuries old process of fusing the man and the machine, the ultimate appropriation of labour by capital. Vercellone (2007, p18) argues that: the analysis of technical progress as an expression of a relation of forces concerning knowledge is everywhere present in Marx’s work and allows an alternative reading of some crucial aspects of his thought. The conflictual dynamic of the relation of knowledge to power occupies a central position in the explanation of the tendency of the increase of the organic and technical composition of capital. This tendency, Marx writes, results from the way the system of machines arises in its totality: ‘This road is, rather, dissection – through the division of labour, which gradually transforms the workers’ operations into more and more mechanical ones, so that at a certain point a mechanism can step into their places. Have the developments discussed so far been an inexorable evolution? In the context of development-focused, world-class obsessed (that is the constant pursuit of global recognition as an indication of success) Singapore, the concept of the relentless terminator-like, aggressive cyborg may find resonance in the everincreasing demands of globalisation placed on its tightly controlled workforce. IDM presents the means by which such cyborg fantasies may become reality. Yet while cybernetics (Wiener, 1950) seemingly increases external control, it simultaneously increases susceptibility to be controlled – itself susceptible to the same type of cybernetic control, where such control is exerted and executed through cybernetic networks and programmes that enable it. The ultimate 10 consumer now becomes the ultimate consumable. As Baudrillard (1996, p51-52) argues: Freed now from the need to refer to the human scale, to the ‘life-size’, and ever more taken up by the complexity of messages, mechanisms tend increasingly, on the model of the brain, towards an irreversible concentration of their structures, towards the quintessentially microcosmic. After the Promethean expansion of a technology striving to occupy the whole world, the entirety of space, we are now entering the era of a technology that works on the world ‘in-depth’ so to speak. The reign of electronics and cybernetics means that efficiency, freed from the shackles of gestural space, is henceforward dependent upon a saturation of minimal extension, governing a maximized field, which is without common measure with sensory experience. His argument is that human life is predicated upon its technological environment. Life evolves and adapts to its environment and through adaptation, the gradual mutation of an organism to suit its changing environment, and speciation, the evolution of a new species best suited to the environment, arrives at its essence. Conversely, “[t]echnological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike” (McLuhan, 1962, pii). The advent of advanced technics (Mumford et al, 1934, p1; refers to the application of technological innovation embedded within specific social milieu) heralds new spatial dimensions of existence and essence. More than extending the realm of normal space, these new spatial dimensions have warped time and shaped reality. The techne (artistic implication of knowledge) of the machine age focused on the magnification of muscular power however, the techne of the present focuses, as this case study on Singapore will show, on the acceleration of activity at all scales. As Virilio (2010, p6) states: the revolution de l’emport, or portable revolution, will round off in the transport revolution, and the revolution in transmission will land us in this interactive planisphere that will, they say, be capable of supplementing the overly cramped biosphere and its five continents. It will do this thanks to the feats in information technology of a virtual continent, the great colony of cyberspace taking over from the empires of yore. As Virilio (2010) notes, this acceleration changes the very nature of human existence, albeit unbeknownst to the subject undergoing this transformation. The search and conquest for microcosmic spaces is a self-perpetuating result of massconsumption as required to sustain the process at ever increasing scales. Here, I 11 shall introduce the term micromachine to describe the ever smaller assemblages, such as microchips and silicon integrated circuits that rival the power, capacity and capability of larger machines, miniaturized structures of the microcosmic, thus facilitate and accelerate travel in normal space in its own transport and in the creation of the ‘life-size’ through the articulate techne of interconnection with other such structures. Electrical and electronic interconnections in the microcosmic present another dimension of space, extending conquest and consumption beyond normal space. Indeed, “[e]lectrospace is to communications today as land is to crops and water to fish” (Armitage & Roberts, 2002, p159). Electrospace is the space within and between spaces generated by simulacra micromachine consciousness (referring to software which simulates the consciousness of human beings), such as automated programs and bots of which computer viruses are a malevolent if not excellent example. It exists neither in normal space nor in the microcosmic. Portal access to electrospace is possible only through the micromachine governed by its own physical laws and the technological and sociocultural milieu. Electrospace too is the space of acceleration, facilitating the conquest of normal space neutering once immutable distances in normal space. The micromachines relegated to the world of ‘lifesize’ also functions as such but in normal space and at lower rates of activity. I use the term hyperspace to emphasize the aspect of acceleration brought about by the time-space compression of such networks. Hyperspace is a facsimile of space(s) and contains facsimiles of spaces. In this, sense it is a space of simulacra and of simulation. Hyperspace is the space within which simulacra and simulations are created, multiplied and disseminated throughout its network. Hyperspace itself is a simulation of physical space. Servers store sites of consumption in machine code and travel between sites in hyperspace proceeds at electron speed. It is a consumptive simulacrum of consumer and consumed. As hyperspace becomes the primary sphere of activity, the rhythm (Lefebvre, 2004) of life thus becomes adapted to the extant structures of this new hyperspatial environment, the hyperspace operationalised by micromachines but governed by hyperspatially centred megamachines (Mumford et al, 1934; refers to the centralized control of large amounts of human and technological power). While the megamachines of the machine age, “one evil, 12 more mountainous than all the rest put together” (Ibid, p293), operated largely in normal space to overcome the muscular limits of the organic through the coordination, organisation and deployment of simple tools and animals to overcome human physical limits, the neo-megamachines of hyperreality are predicated upon accelerated consumption at the global scale. The neo- megamachine is a globally interconnected one, unlike its previous incarnations. The Transnational Corporation (TNC), with its global networks of unceasing production and supply chains meeting the consumptive needs of globally disparate markets united by continuous demand for its products, is an extant structure of hyperreality, is an example of such a neo-megamachine. As cybernetic networks have affected human patterns of perceptions so too, as McLuhan (1964, p19) argues, “money has reorganized the sense life of people just because it is an extension of our sense lives”. Human life in the present age is thus dominated by the confluence of simulacra, technology and money through megamachines exert capitalistic control. The pace of human life has accelerated, aided by the automation brought about by the micromachines in hyperspace and the dominating structures of megamachines. One manifestation of this acceleration takes the form of multitasking, which is the compression of increasing amounts of activity within normal time and often requiring extensive use of micromachines within hyperspace. This acceleration is geared towards meeting the insatiable demands of the global consumer society. While megamachines comprise assemblages of life-sized components of control in normal space, they are matched by their micromachine counterparts, assemblages of microchips and silicon integrated circuits that control hyperspace. Through this control of both the cosmic and micrcosmic, not only has the scale of consumption increased through globalization so too has the rate of consumption at all scales and for all materials. Palaces of ‘conspicuous consumption’ (Veblen, 1925 posited that status in society is determined by patterns of displayed consumption), hypermarkets, megamalls and shopping ‘cities’, in a reference to both scale and speed (facilitated by nodal transport provision along hyperspatial corridors) dot the globe on every continent and almost every country, paralleled by their countless electrospatial counterparts, as edifices to this new religion. 13 Governments, eager to expropriate the hyperspatial and its denizens through the extant use of micromachines, have become neo-megamachines in their own right. Normal space is thus relegated. Life that will not or cannot keep up becomes irrelevant and extinct in its irrelevance. The inexorable project of capitalism is thus to commodify and render consumable nothing less than life itself, a project driven for its own ends and developed incrementally beginning in Europe since the end of the 16th century becoming the extant system commanding the global neo-megamachine today. The acceleration of the megamachine and the development of advanced technics culminating in the acceleration of life itself for its destruction, reconstruction and commodification, heralds the age of accelerated capital accumulation. Hypercapitalism, made possible by its mirror of hyperconsumption, comprising disposability, fixation on novelty and endless “precession of simulacra” (Baudrillard, 1994, p1) novelty as metaconsumption and discounted consumption-in-excess is predicated upon the shifting of the new international division of labour (this is an outcome of the globalization of economic activity comprising the internationalisation of the social and technical division of labour) either in whole or part to the hyperspatial dimension. This requires the expropriation of the organic through indoctrinated complicity (discussed in chapter 2) and of digitised consciousness existing as digital memory or micromachines which are themselves simulacra of the organic. “Our materials base is shifting fossil fuels, metals and minerals – the raw resources of the industrial revolution – to genes – the raw resources of the biotech century” (Rifkin, 2000, p64). Human beings have been the indispensable raw resources for the development of Singapore, long recognised as Singapore’s only resource. Education is the process by which this cognitive capital is developed and cyberneticised. This cyberneticisation process facilitates hypercapitalism with its intensified technological means of production. This intensified production is paralleled by intensified consumption. Baudrillard argues that life under such intensified consumption is hyperreality. It is but a reflection of the precession of and reproduction of simulacra and of the cycles of their associated complicity of the objects caught within its orbit. In the age of hyperconsumption, instant replicability and pervasive replication have developed a society of 14 simulacrum made possible by the ubiquity of advanced communications and new media technologies. The age of hypercapitalism is the age of the megamachine (Mumford, 1934) accelerated ad infinitum through the continuous application of such technologies and technics (Ibid) – it is the age of the neo-megamachine requiring the concomitant development of hyperlife for its maintenance. Hyperlife thus represents the next step in evolution blurring, as Rifkin and others also argue, the boundaries between the organic and inorganic is but one in which the organic is reduced to a subordinate relationship to the needs of hyperconsumption. The appropriation of the genetic code and its subversion to complicity with the capitalist agenda through its objectification was a simple matter of technical prowess, the gene itself a simulacra of the metaphysical properties of the life world, another frontier in the subjugation and expropriation of life. Beginning with the subjugation and appropriation of plants and animals, the objectification of life has increased in rapidity under the puritanical advanced techne of hypercapitalism to “achieve a mimesis which replaces a natural world with an intelligible artificial one. If the simulacrum is so well designed that it becomes an effective organizer of reality, then surely it is the human being, not the simulacrum, who is turned into abstraction” (Baudrillard, 1996, p57). This abstraction thus completes the objectification of man as capital as man the organic is removed from the equation of life, leaving only the inorganic, like unto Baudrillard’s story of the illusionist who makes an automaton and then “in response to the perfection of his own machine is led to dismantle and mechanize himself” (Ibid, p56), to be valorized by capital and subsequently consumed by society. For this is the distinguishing characteristic form of hyperlife, its broad consumptive capacity – global ubiquity, mass-customizability yet locally branded – that comprises its hypervalue of globally accessible mass-customizable, ubiquitously functional consumability. “For the real object is the functional object” (Ibid, p48) and “in the face of the functional object the human being becomes dysfunctional, irrational and subjective: an empty form, open therefore to the mythology of the functional, to projected phantasies stemming from the stupefying efficiency of the outside world” (Ibid, p57). Into this void is emptied 15 what I shall term Capitalism In Veritas, the truth of Capitalism, as programming for control of the inorganic. “Man has to be assured of his power by some sense of participation, albeit merely a formal one. So the gestural system of control must be deemed indispensable – not to make the system work technically, for more advanced technology could (and no doubt will) make it unnecessary, but, rather to make that system work psychologically” (Ibid, p50). The presupposition of the separability of the psychological from the inorganic (and even the organic) thus makes possible the illusion of control especially in the machine age. Under the apparatus (here I am referring to Herbert Marcuse’s 2004 conception of large economic entities that tend to concentrate technological power and vice versa in their bureaucracies) of the machine age of capitalism, “[t]echnological power tends to concentrate economic power” (Arato & Gebhardt, 1978, p138), and “individualistic rationality has been transformed into technological rationality … [that] establishes standards of judgement and fosters attitudes which make men ready to accept and even to introcept the dictates of the apparatus” (Ibid). However the new accelerated rhythm (Lefebvre, 1992) of hyperlife makes such an arrangement cumbersome and unwieldy. Hyperconsumption culture demands nothing less than the assimilation of life in its entirety for the consummation of hyperreality. This separation is made possible through the separation of the consciousness of the organic from its shell through layers of simulation and simulacra. Thus, the virtual space of Cybersociety occupies the same virtual space as More’s Utopia [a fictitious island created by Sir Thomas More on which there is universal education]. These spaces are realised in precisely the same way. Both are the fictitious illusions of print media. The reader, confounded and numbed by the paradox of cognitive alienation, closes the circle of description that the author of individual experience opens by separating thought from thinker (Graham, 1999, p11) [in brackets, my clarification]. Graham thus argues that thought may be alienated from its embodied mind just as labour may be alienated from its product in Marxian interpretations of labour relations to production, but the process of thought alienation occurs through the dizzying effects of hyperspatial hyperreality – the embodied mind is unable to separate real from unreal or simulacra, and disembodied thought is thus alienated 16 from its embodied mind. Thus the consumer too becomes the consumed. Hyperspatial relations facilitated by micromachines have enabled this separation of consciousness beginning with the arguably primary component of consciousness, memory. Memory is normally thought of as a psychological function internal to the individual. However, memory tasks in the cockpit may be accomplished by functional systems which transcend the boundaries of the individual actor. Memory processses may be distributed among human agents, or between human agents and external representational devices (Hutchins, 1995, p284). Hutchins’ study on the measurement of distributed cognition in the cockpit micromachine of an airplane may have much wider implications then realized. The pervasive simulacra of technics and techne have converged technologies over such a broad spectra resulting in a level of ubiquity such that the parapsychological relations with many micromachines resemble that of a cockpit. As I am typing this thesis, I am constantly aware of myriad levels of information – time, electrospace available on the page, availability of micromachine functions – much like a Heads-Up-Display (HUD) of cockpit functions, while myriad processes operate in the background executed by simulacra micromachine consciousness which I draw upon as my external memory. While such extensions may be possible with basic technologies such as a hammer and nail, the crucial distinction between cybernetic technologies and rudimentary instrumentalities is the hyperspatial nature of this form of hybridisation and speciation. In terms of external memory, every vivid audio-visual historicity may be captured for posterity in hyperspace and accessed at any time almost instantaneously. But the enormity of such a data produces another problem of selection. As Vannevar Bush (1945) states: [E]ven in its present bulk we can hardly consult it. This is a much larger matter than merely the extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research; it involves the entire process by which man profits by his inheritance of acquired knowledge. The prime action of use is selection, and here we are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene. 17 Bush thus calls for new means by which technology may help man develop a transformational relationship with knowledge. Indeed, bots, programs which perform automated functions, representing the wishes of their human makers and thus are simulated human consciousness, may provide one such means of achieving this. Such memory fragments comprise fragmented remnants of simulacra consciousness but only fully programmed autonomous agents that constitute micromachine simulacra consciousness (bots) may execute the tasks which maintain hyperspace and its concomitant structures. Smart-phones and various mobile internet devices coupled with 3G data networks, satellite and fibre-optic cable connections facilitate the transmission of ever large amounts of data from anywhere at any time. These abilities are gained through the process of hybridisation and speciation. “We – more than any other creature on the planet – deploy non-biological elements (instruments, media, notations) to complement our basic biological modes of processing, creating extended cognitive systems whose computational and problem-solving profiles are quire [error from source] different from those of the naked brain” (Clark, 2001, p21). The multiple drafts theory of consciousness (Dennet, 1998) proposes that consciousness is an outcome (Dennet, 1991), the components of which, may thus be commodified and expropriated. Indeed, “[h]ypercapitalism, with its ‘knowledge economy’, is the form of capitalism under which thought itself is produced, commodified, and exchanged within the globally integrated system of communication technologies.” (Armitage & Roberts, 2002, p2) Immortalization in hyperspace reifies these fragments of consciousness which are soon subjected to one of the abilities of life – replication. Continued replication, accelerated in hyperspace, heightens the relevance of each successive copy relegating the original to obscurity, completing the reproduction process of simulacra consciousness. Nowhere is this heightening more evident than as expressed by Haraway (2000, p294): Modern machines are quintessentially microelectric devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. Modern machinery is an irreverent 18 upstart god, mocking the Father’s ubiquity and spirituality … Miniturization has turned out be about power; small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles … our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile – a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence. Baudrillard’s (1994) death of the original is at hand due to this cybernetic allure, the seduction of near total if somewhat facile control offered by micromachines is itself another simulation, one that facilitates the generation and intensification of simulacra in society, one which accelerates the disembodiment and commodification of thought, rendering the embodied original a remnant of hyperreality civilization. The emphasis on the reducibility of normal space and the objects therein thereby encompasses the organic as well. Through emphasizing the relevance of simulacra, the organic is reduced in complexity, to its constituent components genes; to fragmentary disparate components of consciousness, as expropriate-able resources, refining the capitalist project of exploitation of the organic which began so long ago. Haraway (2000, p295) suggests another perspective: “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints”. All is hyperreality. Simulacra consciousness and micromachine simulacra consciousness dictate hyperspatial imperatives which ripple through normal space-time warping reality to the hypercapitalist whim. Indeed, the megamachine “not merely served as the ideal model for explaining and eventually controlling all organic activities, but its fabrication and its continued improvement were what alone could give meaning to human existence” (Mumford, 1934, p293). Mumford continues to argue that an even more efficient megamachine predicated upon cybernetic control to replace the ancient megmachine, achieving apostheosis through the mystery unravelling powers bestowed by the “Sun God” (Mumford, 1934) of science and technology (Ibid, p294). Apart from the irrelevance of the organic and the control of the neo-megamachine, complicity in this ultimate 19 process of what I call procedural signification, or as Baudrillard argues, “the mental indoctrination of the masses to a planned calculus and a ‘basic’ capitalist investment and behaviour” (Baudrillard, 1988, p53), has been secured through the hyperspatial metaorgnizational consciousness of consumption. This collective consciousness, developed through diverse consumption of simulacra consciousness and micromachine simulacra consciousness, which is predicated upon novelty, is itself a simulacra of hyperreality, hungry for an ever dizzying array of products. The results of this metaconsumption (Ibid) is evident in the results of global consumption-in-excess – climate change, obesity at an unprecedented scale especially in home-regions of the neo-megamachine, global financial crises, systematic and inexorable extinction of all non-complicit organics, for it is only in complicity that relevance is found and existence assured. The politics of hyperreality is thus one of simulacra. The ethics of the neomegamachine reign supreme. The irrelevance of normal space is further evidenced by the seeming nonchalance of its inevitable destruction, the piecemeal, half-hearted and often token steps taken to mitigate its degradation despite aggressive calls for affirmative action by international panels setup by the united mandate of global governments, have yet to see fruition despite decades of research, observation and investigation. The latest 2011 ‘resolution’ to prevent global temperatures from rising by 2 degrees Celsius, contrasts with the previous ‘resolution’, which came to sensational global significance circa 2009, was to prevent global temperatures from rising by 1 degree Celsius. In years before that, the emphasis was to reduce emissions of temperature raising gases. The refined repetition of these and related pronouncements by global neo-megamachines form the fabric of the metanarrative matrix in hyperreality, its relevance relegated to the mass-resignation of impending disaster in normal space. For, all is well in hyperspace, where consumption proceeds unabated and unhampered by occurrences in normal space. The lure of the microcosmic is the lure of instant and constant perfection in a sea of consciousness, surrounded by the comforting presence of fragments from the past yet summoning the successes of the future in the present instance. Perhaps it is through consumption and instantiation that the remnants of the organic find an illusion of the emancipation Haraway (2000) 20 longs to celebrate, an illusion maintained by hypercapitalism to secure the continued complicity of the organic in its subjugation to the neo-megamachine. The rhythm (Lefebvre, 2004) of hyperlife is thus the combined rhythm (the regular occurrence of events) of hyperspace and normal space. For each unit of hyperlife, the specific rhythm is the confluence of the global neo-megamachines that dominate it and the intersection of the rhythms of the organic. The primacy of hyperspatial rhythm occludes that of normal space and the organic. In the age of hyperreality with the pervasiveness of simulacra, it becomes impossible to measure Lefebvre’s (2004, p12) notion of the presence, which refers to original “facts of both nature and culture, at the same time sensible, affective and moral”, however, Lefebvre’s (2004) concepts may be useful constructs with which to gain insights on the nature of the rhythm of hyperlife. There is an obvious arrhythmia (referring to dissonant rhythms) between the rhythms of hyperspace and that of normal space and hence between that of the neo-megamachine and of the organic. Examples of such conflicts occur among the hyperlife units of transnational neomegamachines that typically cross global temporal zones. Units communicating in real-time tend to communicate out of organic sync with their local temporal zone. Even within the same temporal zone, the primacy of hyperspace means that messages may be sent and action demanded immediately at intervals that are out of sync with either the rhythms of normal space or of the organic. A concrete example of this is the director of an organisation sending an email to an employee demanding a reply at 3 am local time. This rhythm logic is consistent with the rhythm logic of hyperspace and that of the neo-megamachine but totally inconsistent with that of normal space or of the organic. Applying Lefebvre’s (2004) rhythmanalysis, as the organic accelerates its own rhythms, polyrhythmia (conflictual co-existence) occurs where the employee becomes used to the temporal rhythms and demands of the director, though a satisfactory response to the director’s demands may still not have been achieved. After further acceleration of the organic, the employee may well achieve eurhythmia (constructive rhythm interactions) and respond favourably to the director’s demands. But to achieve promotion, the employee would have to attain isorhythmia (synchronous rhythms that are rare), the state in which the rhythms of the organic are synchronous with the rhythms of hyperspace and that of the neomegamachine, at which point the rhythms of normal space are best forgotten and 21 the rhythms of the organic best viewed as hindrances to be overcome for success in hyperspace, the turning of the screw of simulation and hyperreality thus complete for that unit of hyperlife. Hyperlife units that are unable to accelerate become irrelevant despite the organic reality that dissonance is ultimately detrimental to the organic which attempts to constantly accelerate to the hyperspatial. But this organic reality is irrelevant. This is but the genesis of the project of hypercapitalism to subsume (Vercellone, 2007) life which begins with cybernetic social reproduction. Vercellone prefers to use the term subsumption because “it better allows us to grasp the permanence of the opposition of capital to labour and the conflict for the control of the ‘intellectual powers of production’ in the unfolding of the different stages of the capitalist division of labour” (Ibid, p15). McLuhan argues, “the effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts but alter sense ratios and patterns of perception steadily and without resistance” (McLuhan, 1964, p18). Hypercapitalism thus changes the very nature of life through acceleration. The definition of hypercapitalism thus focuses on both the speed of capital accumulation, production and consumption and the commodication of disembodied consciousness made possible by cyber-organic union. The infinitesimal copies made possible by this regime of neo-megamachine accumulation thus generates the artifice and construct of hyperreality. The dissemination and exchange of human consciousness through cybernetworks further intensifies this hyperreality matrix. This consciousness has not been eradicated nor has it been fully subdued by the machine. Such technology does not yet exist though mass public education performs a primitive form of this function through programming which facilitates subordination to the neomegamachine. Thus, instead of Haraway’s (2000) cyborg utopia, the cyborgs being reproduced under the present regime of omnipresent TNCs, the global neomegamachines, have more in common with the T-101s of the movie “The Terminator” – having flesh and bone on the outside but on the inside the undeniable programming of the neo-megamachine in constant communications with its “skynet” equivalent – the ultimate killer instinct married with the ultimate killer application. Perhaps this is why Berger (1998, p157) argues that the terminator represents our deepest fears regarding technology because of its 22 immanence or very presence in our midst? As McLuhan (1964, p21) argues, “our human senses of which all media are extensions, are also fixed charges on our personal energies, and … they also configure the awareness and experience of each one of us”. In this chapter, I have assembled theories from disparate fields to justify the theoretical argument that the cyborg is a contextualised entity. This argument builds upon and integrates the theoretical arguments from the sociology of education, philosophy, political-science, and cognitive science to exemplify that research from all these fields is needed to study the complex development of cyborganics in society today. The SES facilitates the logics I have described above through processes of indoctrination into the procedure of being a successful cyborg worker in the Singapore economy. Through the use of technology, teachers affect the sense ratios and patterns of perception of their students as argued by McLuhan. Such indoctrination is carried out subtly through the entirety of the school system from the processes of each school to the processes of each class and the environments each creates which reduces resistance to the influences of technology at youth and simultaneously scales the rhythm of life to that of hyperlife. The logics of cybernetic control and consumer control are embedded in the curriculum and the syllabus supported by the system of academic rewards and scholarships. The next chapter examines the evolution of this system in its socio-cultural context. 23 Chapter 2 | History of Megamachine Development in Singapore This chapter chronicles the history of megamachine development and development of the machine civilization in Singapore. It begins with an account of Singapore before the arrival of the colonial megamachine. The chapter then moves towards understanding the complicity of foreign capitalist relations to the megamachine in Singapore central to its functioning today by tracing it to its colonial roots. This history may be divided into the following six broad periods, coinciding with the major periods in the development of Singapore: the colonial megamachine period, 1819-1941; the military megamachine period, 1942-1945; the return of the colonial megamachine period, 1946-1958; transition to the local megamachine, 1959-1965; consolidation of the local megamchine, 1965-1986; and the development of the Neo-megamachine, Post-1986 to the present. Throughout the chapter, the development of machine civilization, a prerequisite for the megamachine, will be discussed applying Mumford’s concepts of eotechnic, paleotechnic and neotechnic (Mumford et al, 1934). Given the word limitation of this thesis, I have decided to focus on the primary sources in this chapter for a deeper discussion. Ancient Singapore Archaeological evidence shows the existence of settlement on what is now known as Singapore as early as the third century (Sheppard et al, 1982, p1). As early as the seventh century, it had been established as an important trading city in the region. Indeed, the “eminent position of Singapore as a Focus of Communications … was well known as far back as one thousand seven hundred years ago” (Ibid, p5). Even then, the island was populated by both Malays and a seemingly large population of Chinese immigrants brought to the island by the vicissitudes of trade (Ibid). The city thrived under the constant threat of pirate attacks and invasions, successfully resisting a siege by seventy Siamese junks prior to 1349. By this time, the city was called Temasek or Lung Ya Men (Dragon’s Teeth Gate) by the Chinese. The city fell to Javanese invaders in 1376 in what has been called “The great sack of Singapore” (Ibid, p65). By the late fourteenth century, the island had been ruled by no less than five kings but the island city never regained its former importance in the region after the sacking of 1376 (Ibid, p66). This 24 account provides evidence that ancient Singapore was an important part of what Mumford would call the eotechnic (Mumford et al, 1934, p107) civilization (which in Western civilization occurred around 1000-1700 according to Mumford et al, 1934) of the region, with the technics of wood and maritime navigation used by the machine of trade and military conquest. While the island city would not have developed the same level of eotechnic civilization as that of Western civilization as described by Mumford (Ibid), Temasek would have been greatly influenced by the parallel developments in eotechnic civilization of its closest regional powers, Siam and Malaya. China too would have had some if not great impact in this regard as well given the significant maritime presence of the Chinese. It is likely, given the function of the island city during this period, that there was no system of public education and that children apprenticed in the occupations of their parents becoming fishermen, traders, businessmen or pirates. This served the social reproduction of the machine of trade and commerce adequately as the focus was on the goods and material being traded. The Colonial Megamachine Period, 1819-1941 By the time Sir Stamford Raffles landed in 1819, which marks the beginnings of modern Singapore and 123 years of unbroken control by the colonial megamachine, the population of the island consisted of about 150 fishermen and pirates (Sheppard et al, 1982). This time period coincides with two phases of development in western civilization according to Mumford – the paleotechnic (about 1700 – 1900) and neotechnic (about 1900 – Mumford’s time of writing, circa 1930s). Singapore on the other hand, even though it had regressed from its former significance, in the context of the influences of Malaya, Siam and China discussed above was still in its eotechnic phase of civilization. The arrival of the colonial megamachine meant the imposition of the western paleotechnic civilization upon the local eotechnic one. Just as England was less resistant to the “new methods and processes” (Mumford, et al, 1934, p152) of the paleotechnic because “the eotechnic regime had scarcely taken root” (Ibid) the imposition of colonial paleotechnics met with little resistance on the regressed post-great sacking society of Temasek. The effect of the colonial megamachine was thus to displace the dominion of the local machine. 25 This period, in which capital accumulation was accomplished mainly through colonisation and extraction of raw materials and other valuable resources through colonial ports, represented the end of the colonial era, beginning in the 15th century by Portugal and Spain and which England began in the late 16th century (Sheppard et al, 1982). Colonization was also a crucial means by which new sources of raw materials could be secured relatively cheaply for the fledging and expanding factories of the industrial revolution, which generally started in the late 18th century. This marked the beginnings of the megamachine in Singapore. Raffles sought to establish a British presence on Singapore in favour of the British East India Company (EIC), a machination of the colonial megamachine – programmed with the single-minded purpose of colonising “lesser” geographical areas for the extraction and repatriation of raw materials, precious stones and other items of value back to the monarchic home country of Britain. The EIC thus functioned like an early Transnational Corporation (TNC) in its search for profit but unlike modern TNCs, it also extended monarchic influence throughout all its possessions worldwide, achieved through treaties, favouring the colonial megamachine. To break the Dutch monopoly on trade in the Malay archipelago, Raffles made Singapore a free port, thereby attracting trade and commerce from the region (Tremewan, 1994). By 1824, recognising the commercial importance of Singapore, the Anglo-Dutch treaty, signed in the same year, established the island as a permanent British possession (Ibid). The Treaty of Friendship and Alliance between the EIC, Sultan Hussein of Johor and the Temenggong in 1824 ceded sovereignty of Singapore to the British (Ibid, p6). With the commercial success of Singapore, immigrants from the region arrived. The population jumped to 5000 by 1821, increased to just over 16,000 by 1827 and doubled to about 35,000 by 1840. By 1853-4, 13,000 male labourers arrived from China annually. The total population reached nearly 82,000 by 1860 and increased to about 96,000 by 1871 (Ibid). The majority of immigrants, who formed the backbone of the Singapore economy in this period (Thulaja, 1997), were Chinese labourers recruited by coolie-brokers and packed into 1400-men junks, known as hell ships, headed for the straits-settlements. Able-bodied Chinese men were also kidnapped and sold. This human trade became known as the “pig-trade” (Crone-Arbenz et al, 1988, p45). Upon arriving at their destination, they were put to work as 26 indentured workers, general labourers or coolies, rickshaw pullers and other menial occupations for little or no money, paying-off the price of their transport or purchase (Ibid). Even though, the contract system was the rule for employment after 1877, “the indenture system continued till 1914 when the British finally prohibited it” (Ibid, p44). Indeed, the pursuit of profit was the driving force of the colonial megamachine, for example, while the British recognised the dangers of gambling and opium farms, they were “allowed to exist to raise a profitable revenue” (Ibid). This account is consistent with what Mumford calls “the new barbarism”, for which he states that “there was a sharp shift of interest in life values to pecuniary values: the system of interests which only had been latent and which had been restricted in great measure to the merchant and leisure classes now pervaded every walk of life” (Mumford et al, 1934, p153). For many of these immigrants, except those who managed to escape to work as shop-helpers or craftsmen, life comprised living at or next to their place of toil in over-crowded coolie quarters or on the streets and “lived and died without either memory or hope” (Ibid, p154). If the “servility of the mine” (Ibid) was the bane of the workers in paleotechnic England, in Singapore it was the servility of entrepot trade. This indicates an important aspect of the colonial megamachine, that the nature of paleotechnic barbarism and brutality differed with geographical distance from its source, the heart of industry based on what Mumford terms “carboniferous capitalism” (Ibid, p156) – based on the burning of fossil fuels. The task of the colonial megamachine then was to extract more resources for industry at its core and through this process spread at the global scale, “the new habits of disorderly exploitation and wasteful expenditure” (Ibid, p158) with the accompanying “psychological results of carboniferous capitalism – the lowered morale, the expectation of something for nothing, the disregard for the balanced mode of production and consumption, the habituation to wreckage and debris as part of the normal human environment” (Ibid). These results were all observed in the operation of the colonial megamachine in Singapore. The colonial megamachine had ready adherents among the local populace. There were among the Chinese immigrants, those who emphasized 27 pecuniary values, willing serfs of the colonial megamachine – Chinese businessmen, whom Crone-Arbenz et al described as “relentless seekers of wealth” who “were equally keen on spending it on the good things in life” (CroneArbenz et al, 1988, p44). Epitomising the colonial megamachine’s expectation of something for nothing, their value to the colonial megamachine was noted by Francis Light, who according to Crone-Arbenz et al, claimed that “the Chinese were the only people of the East from whom a revenue may be raised without expense and extraordinary efforts on the part of the government” (Ibid, p43). Indeed, “labour was a resource to be exploited, to be mined, to be exhausted, and finally to be discarded” (Mumford et al, 1934, p172). The need for the colonial megamachine to maintain purity of identity resulted in “a policy of ‘divide and rule’ allied to territorial separation” (Christopher, 1988, p233). Such a policy no doubt made it relatively easier to discard alien labour as labour in the colonial homeland was discarded. The mechanisation associated with the eotechnic phase was, according to Mumford “for perhaps the first time, a direct ally of life” (Mumford et al, 1934, p247). But, despite Mumford’s euphoria at the possibilities of neotechnics to improve human life, he recognises and laments that “not alone have the older forms of technics seemed to constrain the development of the neotechnic economy: but the new inventions and devices have been frequently used to maintain, renew, and stabilize the structure of the old order” (Ibid, p266). Whether in the Western core or in Singapore, this persistent habituation of paleotechnic barbarism continues to rear its ugly head in the execution of the megamachine. The status of Singapore was maintained as that of a vassal, providing profit for the colonial megamachine with few if any of the benefits described by Mumford, such as the displacement of the proletariat or the conservation of the environment which were evident from the supposed dawn of the eotechnic phase in England in the 1700s through to the 1900s or beyond. The growth of the middle class comprising of local English-educated elites and the opening of the Ford motor factory in Singapore in 1941, the first in Southeast Asia, supports the notion of growing wealth in Singapore and the region. However, the vast majority of the local Asian population remained in subservient 28 proletarian positions in colonial megamachine society and were kept so by divide and rule policies. During this period, there was no structure of universal public education (Tremewan, 1994, p75) and the British were not interested in establishing one as this was neither required for their processes of resource extraction nor social control as these were exerted through direct control of the commodity trade (Ibid, p74). The efficient and effective functioning of the colonial megamachine depended on a docile divided population as part of the larger British divide and rule strategy. The colonial megamachine depended on a bureaucracy comprising the British elite and ethnic locals forming the middlemen and working classes. “Unskilled, migrant workers were adequate for commerce and services” (Ibid, p75). Even a rudimentary educated local populace would have threatened the status quo of elite status accorded to the British elite. Indeed, the education policy of Raffles maintained this status quo through the formation of the Singapore Institution: 1. To educate the sons of higher order natives and others 2. To afford the means of instruction in the native languages to such of the Company’s servants and others as may desire it 3. To collect the scattered literature and traditions of the country, with whatevernmay illustrate their laws and customs and to publish and circulate in a correct form the most important of these, with such other works as may be calculated to raise the character of the institution and to be useful or instructive to the people. (Lim, 2008, p62) [in bold, my emphasis] It is clear that Raffles’ education policy emphasized to benefit a select few. But by 1826, the Singapore Institution had not yet been set up because, as quoted by Lim (2008) “the native inhabitants of Singapore have not yet attained that state of civilization and knowledge which would qualify them to derive advantage from the enlarged system of education … establishment on the footing originally contemplated would be to incur heavy expense without any prospect of corresponding and adequate benefit” (Ibid, p63). In 1834, the Singapore Free School, the first English elementary school in Singapore opened at the foot of Fort Canning upon the approved proposition by Chaplain Darrah and had “32 boys in the English classes, 18 boys in the Tamil classes and 12 in the Chinese” (Ibid). In 1837, the Singapore Free School was relocated to the Singapore Institution (Ibid, 29 p64). By 1867, the first school reform was conducted in the Straits Settlements, comprising Singapore, Malacca and Penang which were amalgamated in 1826. This school reform resulted in the appointment of an Inspector of Schools for the Straits Settlements in 1872, the establishment of free Malay vernacular education and paid for English education improving on the pre-existing grant-in-aid system. By 1899, there were no less than 14 English boy’s schools in Singapore, of those only 3 were government schools, 9 were mission schools and 2 were ethnic based Chinese schools. In addition, there were also 5 English girl’s schools, all of which were mission schools (Ibid, p66). The University of Cambridge Local Examination was introduced in these schools in 1891. The total enrolment for all these schools, totalling 2466 (see tables 1 and 2) students was miniscule compared to the population at the time, suggesting that they mainly catered to children of the colonial masters and the local elites. But even then, these schools were modelled after the schools developed in paleotechnic England. The prevalent industrial schools designed for the children of labour were, according to Mumford, “regimented like an army, and the army camp became the universal school: teacher and pupil feared each other, even as did capitalist and worker” (Mumford et al, 1934, p195). While the schools in Singapore were no doubt less harsh because they were meant for the elite, they were likely run along similar disciplinarian and regimental overtones, especially those associated with the precepts of mission-style education. For the majority of the local children, apprenticeship was likely the dominant form of education with some attending ethnic based schools, set up by prominent members of their ethnic community or for the Chinese, their clan associations or Huey Kuans and which became ideologically influenced by the rise of communism in China (Tremewan, 1994, p76). According to Lim (2008, p70), there were 41 Boy’s and 16 Girl’s English schools in Singapore 1937. By comparison, according to Crone-Arbenz et al (1988, p53), there were more than 40 Chinese schools in Singapore by 1920 (Crone-Arbenz et al, 1988, p53). However, English education was to produce the next generation of local elites who would become clerks in the local merchant houses and the colonial civil service (Ibid). The educational “needs” of the Chinese were thus largely ignored by the colonial government, more concerned with the Malay aristocracy 30 (Tremewan, 1994, p76) and the revenue-making activities of the Chinese, for which education had little significance. Some of these elite would later return to leadership of the fledging local-based megamachine. Thus did the colonial megamachine form the basis of education as a tool to meet its purposes for capitalist subsumption of labour. Tables 1 and 2 on the next two pages provide a general idea of the state of education in this period and are not meant for detailed comparison. The data on government and government-aided schools shows that only a small number of girls and boys were educated in this period in a mix of mission schools and Chinese schools. Those who attended school were predominantly Chinese for boys but Europeans and Eurasians for Girls. The total numbers educated were relatively much smaller than compared to present enrolment rates though the relatively disproportionate amount of Chinese boys enrolled in this period suggests that the confucianist logic also accompanied the largely Chinese migrant labour. Since it is safe to assume that schooling in this period was a luxury, it would also tend to suggest that there was already in existence a relatively wealthy class of Chinese in society. More research into these inferences would be interesting but is not the purpose of this thesis. 31 Table 1: Types of English Boy’s Schools in Singapore, circa 1819-1941 (Lim, 2008, p70). 32 Table 2: Types of English Girl’s Schools in Singapore, circa 1819-1941 (Lim, 2008, p71). By 1939, the world was at war, and the colonial megamachine focused its machinations on making war against the military megamachine of Japan. The Military Megamachine Period, 1942-1945 This period provides an opportunity to compare two foreign megamachines vying for control of the region and the world. Like the Western colonial megamachines, the Japanese magamachine sought the riches of Asia. Taking lessons from the Western colonial megamachines, in 1940, the Japanese megamachine advertised their honourable intention of creating the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity sphere extending from China to New Guinea and Singapore. And also in a similar vein, according to Crone-Arbenz et al (1988, p80), “Why couldn’t Asians rule Asians … [and] Why should Caucasian colonialists be allowed to exploit and export tin, rubber, oil, tungsten, etc to their home-countries, leaving the 450-odd million natives half-starving, depleted, heart-broken, dependent, obsequious and God-forsaken? On their part the Japanese believed in themselves – in their Emperor, their gods and in the superiority of their youth who were among the toughest and fiercest”. Indeed, the ramblings of a rival 33 megamachine, Japan resolved to take by force what they were late to acquire opportunistically. The Japanese megamachine had made preparations utilizing the Japanese citizens who were working in Singapore at the time and “had studied everything – from the eccentricities of the locals to the secrets of the impenetrable Malaysian jungles. Dead bodies sent for burial in Japan contained maps and other vital information” (Ibid, p81). Singapore was invaded on 1st Feb 1942, and by 15th of that same month. The British had surrendered even though they possessed military superiority, their love of coin probably outweighed by their love of self-preservation (Ibid, p83). Perhaps this too could be added to the list of brutalities meted out by the British colonial megamachine? It is a matter of historical irony, that the humiliating British surrender took place at the very site which represented western eotechnic prowess (American) in Singapore – the Ford motor factory. The island was renamed Syonan meaning “Light of the South” but despite the Japanese preinvasion indications to the contrary, they began the systematic slaughter of any and all resistance showing special brutality for the Chinese, exacting revenge for their support of China against previous Japanese incursions. “Thousands were machine-gunned on beaches and buried in self-dug-out graves” (Ibid, p116). Under the constant eye of the Kempeitai or military police, public executions were implemented for lesser crimes such as robbing, whose unfortunate heads stuck on poles in prominent locations became warning posts for other would-be criminals. All schools were appropriated by the Japanese occupation forces and according to Lim, The Cairnhill school was “used as a ‘comfort station” for officers and other ranks” (Lim, 2008, p71). It is safe to assume that all public services including education ground to a virtual halt. Intensifying the divide and rule policy, the Japanese favoured one race, despising another, namely the Chinese, and turned even family members into would-be informants. If the paleotechnic factory in western civilization became a “house of terror” (Mumford et al, 1934, p174) because of the inhumane treatment and regimentation of life, then the Japanese military megamachine also turned Singapore into one. The significance of this period in the development of the post-colonial megamachine life-sense was that the emphasis on pecuniary values at the expense of life values was a virtue 34 compared to the wanton disregard for non-Japanese life. But “what began as a nightmare had to continue as such for three-and-a-half years” (Crone-Arbenz et al, 1988, p119). At the end of which, the previous colonial megamachine would return to re-claim their prize. The Return of the Colonial Megamachine, 1946-1958 The British Military Administration (BMA) was set up to return Singapore to the normalcy that existed before the Japanese occupation. Many basic necessities were in short supply. “Could history then blame them if they had behaved a little like the Japanese military administrators” (Ibid, p139)? For example, the contractual system was adopted to supply the needs of the local populace, but as Crone-Arbenz et al (1988, p140) reported, “the army and the contractors seemed to have and enjoy everything”. The youths who completed their university life in this period “had justifiably been anti British colonialism” (Crone-Arbenz et al, 1988, p141) including some of the pioneers who would later form Singapore’s first independent government, among whom was Lee Kuan Yew (Ibid, p142). The irony was that the return of the previous colonial megamachine sparked the desire for freedom from the local populations, especially after having the opportunity to compare the experiences of brutality inflicted by the foreign megamachines. Although “the direct reaction of the machine was to make people materialistic and rational: its indirect action was often to make them hyperemotional and irrational” (Mumford et al, 1934, p284). This desire for freedom, though long in the making, could be seen in terms of what Mumford calls the “resistance to the machine” (Ibid, p285). The first of the attempts to wrest freedom away from the British colonial megamachine came in the form of what is now known as the Communist Emergency. This referred to the state of emergency declared by the British to prevent a possible communist insurgency led by the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and its militant armed wing formed during the occupation, the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) – a group that had been instrumental in resisting the Japanese both in Singapore and Malaysia. Use of force and detention without trial were imposed on any and all suspected members of the MCP and MPAJA and their collaborators (Tremewan, 1994, p14). 35 The communists responded by launching attacks on British concerns and were responsible for the murder of the second High Commissioner of the Communist Emergency, Sir Henry Gurney (Crone-Arbenz et al, 1988, p154). In essence, the emergency was “really an undeclared war between the British colonial government and the MCP” (Ibid, p157) which conducted a war of guerrilla terrorism, used during the occupation, against the British. Militant communism was the culmination of nearly two centuries of megamachine rule, in which a large poverty class had been created, with some improvement towards the end of the British colonial megamachine but which ballooned again during the reign of the Japanese military megamachine, exacerbating the conditions of poverty and human degradation. Indeed this was a centuries old class struggle renewed and surfaced by military conflict. As Crone-Arbenz et al observed, “communism thrived richly in poverty” (Ibid, p159). The British had attempted to address this root cause by revising wages “to reflect the post-war cost of living” (Ibid, p149) but this was too little too late. The MCP launched a major military offensive in December of 1948 and the MPAJA was renamed the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA). The British response was swift and fierce, imposing anti-guerilla warfare, resettling thousands of Chinese squatters, strafing villages and even torturing prisoners (Tremewan, 1994, p16). The importance of Singapore and Malaya, relating the global interests of the neotechnic colonial megamachine was clear from the “ferocity of the British military response”, as Tremewan (1994, p17) rightly states, resulting in the defeat of the MNLA by 1955. Singapore was spared the open British military response to preserve the economic interest of the colonial megamachine, relying mainly on police enforcement and detention without trial for suspected communists (Tremewan, 1994, p16). Into the midst of this militarised class struggle, Lee Kuan Yew brought the interests of the local “bourgeois nationalists” (Ibid, p17) to the fore. In a student discussion group in 1950, Lee said: “But if we do not give leadership, it will come from the other ranks of society, and if these leaders attain power, as they have the support of the masses, we shall find that we, as a class, have merely changed masters” (Ibid) [in bold my emphasis]. Tremewan (1994, p17) argues that their 36 upper-class status would be elevated to that of master by “making a deal with the colonial power” thereby setting the stage for the post-colonial megamachine. In addition, Lee had surmised that the British would have had been more accepting of a leadership which shared “certain ideals in common with the Commonwealth” (Ibid), thus supporting the principle tenets of the megamachine. Realising that canvassing the support of the masses was a prerequisite to political success, Lee established himself as an activist lawyer for more than 100 unions and associations. The unions were the traditional platform for communist canvassing (Ibid). Lee persevered in this endeavour despite being ridiculed for his bourgeois background and his inability to speak Mandarin and/or Chinese dialects but was able to form the People’s Action Party (PAP) in 1954 including mainstream communist leaders and elements (Ibid). The non-communists controlled the Central Executive Committee to prevent British sanction while the communists had the support of the masses in the party (Ibid). At the same time Lee established close ties with the British Special Branch and especially the Director of the Special Branch (Ibid). These alliances were crucial if the PAP was to achieve victory in the 1959 elections and formed the basic raw materials of the fledgling local machine. The British megamachine sought to enhance its divide and rule policy through education. According to Tremewan (1994), the “British educational policy in Singapore after the war must be seen in the context of its broader strategy to defeat the left throughout Malaya and Singapore by manipulating communal factors of race, language and religion to prevent further development of unity among the lower classes” (Ibid, p76). This was done by taking control of the Chinese schools which had prospered before the occupation without British involvement to control the spread of communist ideologies, improving the English education to create a locally sympathetic capitalist class and widening the gap between the Chinese-educated and English-educated Chinese, eventually “destroying the social base” (Ibid, p77) of the former. Upper class occupational positions were reserved for the English-educated while the vernacular educated were relegated to technical positions (Ibid, p78). Thus the British megamachine could exert cultural imperialism and social control through divide and rule using 37 education as the vehicle for transmission. But, according to Tremewan (1994), this policy could not be made explicit because “the Chinese education system still had considerable power to mobilize the masses.” In what Tremewan (1994, p78) termed the “pretense of accommodation”, “the colonial administration used the ideological cover of a multilingual education policy to move towards its goal of a centralised, state controlled education system which would be most likely to produce a cooperative [but small proportion of] English-educated capitalist class (mainly Chinese but including a few Indians and fewer Malays)”, thereby transforming the “vast majority of the population … into wage labourers, an industrial working class” (Ibid, p79) [in brackets, my addition]. According to Tremewan (1994, p79), this was “the legacy on which the PAP-state refined to suit the contingencies of its political ambitions and its alliance with foreign capital” (Ibid, p81). The PAP would build on this legacy when they won a resounding victory to gain independence for Singapore in 1959. Transition to the Local Megamachine, 1959-1964 On 31st May 1959, the PAP which “had secured 43 out of the 51 seats in the first Legislative Assembly of the new self-governing state of Singapore, polling 53.4% of the votes cast” (Crone-Arbenz et al, 1988, p204) addressed the masses at the Padang. Interestingly, “the English-educated voters had largely rejected the PAP” (Ibid, p206). This was due to anti-PAP sentiments built-up in the English- language newspapers, the Singapore Standard and The Straits Times (Ibid). By 1961, however, growing divisions in the uneasy alliance with the communists had begun to unravel and “after Lee forced a vote of confidence in the legislature on the merger proposals” (Tremewan, 1994, p27), the communists split from the PAP, taking 80% of the PAP membership including most of the cadres, and formed the Barisan Sosialis. This proved a fortuitous development, because as Tremewan (1994) explains “the Lee faction had finally isolated its opponents so that the full weight of the security apparatus could be brought down upon them” (Ibid). And indeed, the communist leaders were systematically targeted and imprisoned without trial throughout this period under Operations such as “Coldstore” (Ibid). After virtually eliminating its opposition, the PAP- government sought to strengthen and entrench its power base. The PAP, as Tremewan (1994) explains, had “begun systematically to extend the role of the 38 state and to tie in its parliamentary political organisation to the Singapore state administration. From this period it becomes appropriate to refer to the ‘PAPstate’, a key characteristic of the local megamachine, to describe this characteristic of PAP governance” (Ibid, p31). To counter the declining entrepot trade and rising unemployment, the local machine pursued a policy of Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI), as did many other Asian Tigers, in which dependency on foreign imports is reduced by manufacturing the imported products locally. In this way, “foreign capital could retain its interests, continuing to profit from the acquisition of raw materials and also from the provision of technology and credit” (Ibid). The formation of the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) helped in the regulation of the growing industrial working class that resulted, carefully excising communist elements. ISI however, required a large hinterland to make local mass production cost effective, but Singapore’s expulsion from Malaya in 1965 caused an initial setback (Ibid). Education in this period also reflected the struggle between the political right and left. Extending state control to education, all content of vernacular education was replaced with a “standardised state approved syllabus” (Ibid, p81). The syllabus would ensure that the system produced workers with the required skills for the ISI policy. Standardisation was not implemented without resistance, especially in the Chinese-vernacular schools which provided the base for the intellectual left, and was not limited to the syllabus but to political ideology as well. As Tremewan (1994) reports, “students and faculty [of Nanyang University] were arrested, expelled or deported for their political activities. The imposed curriculum reorganisation of Nanyang in 1964 led to widespread protest, which was summarily suppressed” (Ibid, p83) [in brackets my addition]. Consolidation of the Local Megamachine, 1965-1986 By 1965, the communists had been politically defeated and social control of the growing industrial working class was achieved through tripartite relations, comprising government, industry and worker representatives, under the auspices of the NTUC. The loss of the Malayan hinterland after expulsion in 1965 meant the impracticability of ISI. However, this period coincided fortuitously with a rise in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from the More Developed Countries (MDCs) 39 seeking favourable locations overseas. The amount of autonomy the local megamachine had secured through its PAP-state apparatus, the zero-tolerance it had showed for communist elements, as well as the extensive social control it exerted through the NTUC and education, all foundation elements of the local megamachine, proved ample incentive for it to secure FDI from capitalist countries such the USA. Indeed, as Tremewan (1994, p87) observes, “the new strategy [of] Export-Oriented Industrialization (EOI), became the economic alliance between the PAP-state and foreign capital from 1965 onwards”. In 1966, the implementation of the bilingual policy meant that “all first-year secondary pupils were required to learn a second language. From 1969, “all students had to offer a second language in the school certificate examinations” (Tremewan, 1994, p87). The bilingual education policy assured the ascendancy of English as lingua franca, a neutral language which would improve cohesion and provide a gateway to the science and technical knowledge of the west. Development of the Neo-megamachine, Post-1986 to the present In this period, the Singapore megamachine emphasized the attraction of foreign capital making Singapore an “offshore centre for foreign capital” (Ibid, p39). The policies successfully positioned Singapore as a regional if not global financial hub, with its attendant multiplier effects. As money and investments flowed into Singapore, more employment was created and the retail sector expanded as incomes rose, leading to continuous virtuous cycles of economic growth. But the transition to a knowledge economy intensified the megamachine’s processes of human capital development. Continued upgrading of skills and lifelong learning became key phrases of the new economy. Education was heavily emphasized as the path to success in political rhetoric and annual heavy investment in education contributed to the legitimacy of the PAP-state. But thus legitimacy was derived from the inseparability of PAP-state orchestration of the economy, economic success and educational success with increasing rhetoric as a package deal. Unlike the development of the PAP-state apparatus which transformed the local machine to the megamachine, and apart from the development of colonial impulses through the emphasis on overseas branches, the development of the neo- 40 megamachine is one based upon the successful cybernetic control of consumer society through the development of a class structure. The genius of this project lay in the development of a quasi-religious myth which rivalled the allure that communism once held. Explaining the allure of communism, Crone-Arbenz et al (1988, p217) writes: Communism allured not only the illiterate and the poor but also the intellectuals [and in some cases the wealthy as well] who craved for moderate leadership and political adventurism. Communist beliefs, methods, lifestyles, reasoning, promises and fulfilments became noble substitutes for religions … [which had] not greatly helped Asians to eradicate poverty, illiteracy, ignorance, to ward off wars, colonial exploitations and local tyranny. Communism offered solutions to all these issues. The world’s majority has consisted of the poor peasants and the victimised industrial workers, and fighting for them would offer the communists earthly salavation! Even before the rise of the consumer society, it is arguable that there was widespread consumption of ideology, but these were rooted in the originality of the leader-orators who espoused them and who were able to energize the masses through the individualism of their sheer conviction, for which Lee himself was arguably a master. Moreover it was easy for an ideology such as that of communism, with a mass-utopian view promising freedom from the capitalist yoke of the colonial megamachine and freedom and self-determination, to find symbolic resonance with the downtrodden masses. Similarly, the PAP-state apparatus has successfully created an allure offering rational solutions to improve wealth, increase success and eradicate what little rhetorical poverty remains. The “precession of simulacra” (Baudrillard, 1994, Ch1) in the forms of models of success lies abundantly in the landscape and even in the people and candidates fielded by the party. Baudrillard (1994, Ch1) argues that such a precession is characteristic of simulation and that it is accompanied by the confusion of fact with model which results in the model taking precedence which is in part also due to the prolific circulation of such models. This is apparent in how political leadership is linked through a complex and elaborate series of educational and cadre selection processes to political leadership in Singapore established by the precept of meritocracy (Tan, 2008, p7), a system which emphasizes the production of model cybernetic units. 41 Lessons of the Megamachine in Singapore From this history, we are able to derive certain generalisations of the nature of the megamachine in Singapore. The technics of the megamachine, firstly, centred upon social control. Initially, it relied heavily on the manipulation and control of class, whether it was along ethnic lines or along the lines of culture, colonial or native, as several iterations and refinements to the “divide and rule” policy reveals. This was an effective method of control and ensured that the colonial megamachine maintained control and was adopted by the local machine after the transition to independence. The use of education to exert refined control over the population continued through deliberate machinations of social advancement and occupation while maintaining a close relevance with the global capitalist megamachine was a practice that has continued and is continuously refined by the local machine. As Singapore developed, through its successful policy of export-orientation, the large low-income class of migrant labourers was gradually transformed into a large, relatively wealthier middle-class. As Tremewan (1994, p74) argues, the PAP-state government was able to simultaneously develop and maintain a submissive middle class through what he terms “educating for submission”, using various sorting mechanisms in the education system that ensure the success of the elites in school, leading to positions of authority within the economy. The resulting class structure has thus been maintained by the neo-megamachine of the PAP-state government and seen as crucial to continued development (Tremewan, 1994, p74). Despite the Baudrillardian notion that all classes seem to have coalesced into a large consumer class, consumer society is still very much hierarchically structured. The illusion that has been created is that consumption is the expression of freedom, which maintains class structures through the order of the megamachine. Secondly, the emphasis on pecuniary values, a legacy no doubt of the paleotechnic colonial megamachine was, in the case of Singapore, based upon entrepot trade rather than, in the Western core, based on industry. This meant that the local population remained dependent on the colonial megamachine which controlled all 42 trade and would not advance to a position which would challenge the industrial production of the home-country. The emphasis on pecuniary values was continued by the local machine which drilled into the collective psyche of the masses the twin but related ideological constructs of remaining relevant coupled with competition at the global scale, which was especially crucial to the local machine’s initial push for industrialisation. These twin ideological constructs were instrumental in seeking justification for policies eschewing welfarism while at the same time intensifying competition at all scale in society. The ingenuity of this strategy lies in the fact that it has provided the incumbent government with both its moral authority and claim to legitimacy resulting in the local megamachine we are familiar with today. Finally, one important distinction between the colonial megamachine and the local machine was in its treatment of the human being. The colonial megamachine viewed the local populations as an exploitable management issue (Crone-Arbenz et al, 1988) whose only value lay in what pecuniary wealth they could generate, and hence cared little for the condition of their lives as long as this objective could be achieved. Whatever development that occurred was largely incidental and was seen as beneficial to the social control so that extraction of raw material and accumulation of pecuniary values could continue unabated. The local machine on the other hand, recognising the power for effecting change that lay within each human being, especially after the tumultuous struggle for independence, coupled with the realisation that Singapore had no natural resources, emphasized the importance of human capital (Tremewan, 1994, p74). Education, in addition to social control, was thus viewed as a means of increasing the potential pecuniary return inherent in each person. A refinement of the technics of education was to have the masses accept and internalize their own exploitation as a selfempowerment and potential for liberation from their own class positions. One mechanism by which this is achieved is through the meritocratic system as argued by Tan (2008, p7) “to contain a new politics of disillusionment and resistance”. The use of meritocracy for internalized exploitation is a new capitalist logic to consumer society, whereby the masses are made complicit in their own exploitation through the promise of freedom from their class positions. A further important refinement in the technics of education was in enhancing its ability to 43 direct human resources along developmental paths relevant to the economy through processes of selection and sorting. These processes were minutely chartered through layers of curriculum, hierarchy of national examinations, hierarchy of schools and the education policy itself. This discussion is for the next chapter. 44 Chapter 3 | Objects of Cyborganic Social Reproduction This chapter shall examine the objects of social reproduction in the form of mass public education focusing on primary, secondary and post-secondary education, with specific reference Singapore. Cyborg social reproduction is central to maintaining the intertwining cycles of production and consumption that form the structural web of hypercivilization because, as Graham (1999) asserts, it is the “conscious aspect” of labour which is commodified and valorized. Furthermore, “[l]abour is definitely within the sphere of value” (Baudrillard, 1988, p111). The ensuing discussion will draw on traditions of thought which account for the intertwining cycles of production and consumption thereby resulting in the hyperreality of the present and the “desert of the real” (Baudrillard, 1994, p1) because “the real is in fact not only escapable but also illusory, and the imaginary has come to assume the features of the palpably resistant” (Guillen, 2007, p453). Thus, what was once imperceptible and intangible belonging to realms of the imagination now becomes perceptible and even tangible though still not entirely so but seeming to have more substance than the real which has faded into the background of hyperreality taking on the characteristics of illusion. In the same way, the SES emphasizes the imaginary of simulacra, technology and money of the dominant megamachine. From the perspective of production, work on the current dominant form of capitalism emphasizes the importance of “knowledge workers”, who provide the intellectuality needed for creative production. As Vercellone argues, this new proletariat, termed “cognitariat” (Berardi, 2003) or “cybertariat” (Huws, 2001) is the driving force of the new world economy, taking the place of the proletariat in industrial capitalism. The relation of capital to labour is marked by the hegemony of knowledges, by a diffuse intellectuality, and by the driving role of the production of knowledges by means of knowledges connected to the increasingly immaterial and cognitive character of labour (Vercellone, 2007, p16). 45 Authors such as Vercellone have argued that this form of capitalism is radically different from previous forms of capitalism in that it is focused on the valorization of “living knowledge” (Ibid, p18) instead of “dead knowledge” in fixed capital. Thus the term cognitive capitalism has been used emphasizing the centrality of living capital and mass intellectuality required for the current mode of production and regime of accumulation (Ibid). Others, such as Graham, have used the term “hypercapitalism” to emphasize the commodification of thought itself and its subsequent accelerated exchange through cybernetic networks: Hypercapitalism, with its ‘knowledge economy’, is the form of capitalism under which thought itself is produced, commodified, and exchanged within the globally integrated system of communication technologies. (Graham, 1999, p2) Indeed, the valorisation of “living knowledge” in labour, as opposed to “dead knowledge” in fixed capital, is central to the production of surplus value in the present form of capitalism. The term “biocapitalism” has also been used to highlight this increasing significance of biological-intellectual input in the form of the “living knowledge” of labour (Dyer-Witheford, 2000). Social reproduction has been recognised as an important component in the process of generating what Marx terms the “General Intellect” (Vercellone, 2007, p14) and for which Vercellone terms “diffuse intellectuality” (Ibid, p16) emphasizing the generalized yet distributed nature of such intellectual labour. Previous efforts at understanding this current form of capitalism have tended to focus on information workers, the new knowledge created, and the new cybernetic relations to capital within a Marxist conflict perspective which seems on the one hand overly deterministic in assigning significance to the new white-collared class, while on the other, does not seem to adequately account for the presence of a new type of blue-collared worker. Neither do previous efforts consider the ripple effects across the global economy of the presence of mass intellectuality and their cybernetic connections accounting for the widespread generation and accelerated exchange of consciousness which are crucial to the new global economy. 46 For Baudrillard, we are living in a hyperreality where “models replace the real” and where “the connection between images and simulations and reality ‘implodes’ (explodes inward) and as this happens, our sense of the real disappears” (Berger, 1998, p288). Hypercapitalism facilitates the construction of this fabric of hypereality through the emphasis on the hyperspatial and celebration in its use. Hypercapitalist production, as argued by others as well, involves the valorization of not only labour but thought as well. It is accelerated production requiring the acceleration and atomisation of consciousness for thought expropriation and exchange. The processes of labour valorization have been well-researched while the valorization of thought has only been recently discussed. This thesis contends that in order for the valorization of thought to proceed in as smooth a fashion as that of labour, resistance to such valorization must first be overcome, conflictive though that process may be. One crucial aspect of this valorization is the appropriation of the means of social reproduction, governed by the complicity of the state neo-megamachine, and also argued by many other authors in previous forms of capitalism, but none so integrated as the present advanced stage of capitalism, re-purposing such means to meet the needs of hypercapitalism – the development of cybernetic social reproduction. The goal is to create a cyberorganic lifeform complicit to the processes and cycles of production and simultaneously a consumer dependent on those very processes and cycles for existence, perpetuating both cycles. Singapore is an excellent example of these processes because as chapter 2 has outlined, these processes are intertwined with the development of the megamachine and nowhere are these connections more salient than in Singapore with its PAP-state apparatus dominance over education. Tremewan (1994, p148) argues that: In the development of the education system since 1959 educational practices have had the primary and related functions of countering political opposition and sorting agents into class positions for the reproduction of labour power. This sorting has been carried out by means of meritocratic educational policies integrated with state breeding and immigration programmes. As chapter 2 has shown, the processes of megamachine development from pre- to the post-colonial period have had several effects inexorably resulting in the 47 current PAP-state megamachine. As McLuhan (1964, p15) argues “any medium has the power of imposing its own assumptions on the unwary”. This thesis further argues that the crucial connection between the cycles of production and consumption lies in what Baudrillard (1988, p54) terms production’s “strategy of desire”. This desire includes not only that of external objects but the object of the perfected body and all it contains resulting in fetishtistic consumption for individuation for consumption is “a powerful element in social control (by atomizing individual consumers); yet at the same time it requires the intensification of bureaucratic control over the processes of consumption, which is subsequently heralded, with increased intensity, as the reign of freedom” (Baudrillard, 1988, p53) [italics the original emphasis]. The wider environment must also support such valorization, involving the transformation of the city into a cybernetic wonderland of connections of simulated experiences where consumable simulacra abound intensified by the globally coordinated complicity of neo-megamachines in this process is indispensable. However, only with advanced cybernetic control skills, would it be possible for a cyborg to successfully navigate such an environment. Part of this cybernetic social reproduction process therefore involves indoctrination of what I shall term the procedures of signification to be able to navigate what Baudrillard terms the “political economy of the sign” (Ibid, p57) and inculcate its values. While the object of consumption, as Baudrillard argues, “collectively assigns the consumers a place in relation to a code” (Ibid, p55), it is the role of cybernetic social reproduction to inculcate the acceptable cybernetic interpretation of this code vis-à-vis that of the neo-megamachine for which this code operates. This process of indoctrination of procedural signification is central to cybernetic social reproduction and may be found in its core objects the landscape, the curriculum, the classroom, the teacher, assessments, and the student. These objects need to be examined in the context of the historical complicity of Singapore education to capitalism which I argued in chapter 2. 48 The Human Capital Theory (Ballantine, 1997) considers education an investment in human capital that propels economic growth. An expert society of skilled, well-trained and informed citizens is therefore necessary to remain competitive. Using various cost-accounting techniques and GNP data between Developed and Less Developed Countries, proponents of this theory suggest that differences in productivity and national development are due to differences in levels of education, thus positing a direct relationship between level of education with productivity and national development. With people being officially recognized as Singapore’s only resource investment in education has been an important political agenda. The Singapore government has historically invested large sums of money, which stood at 3.2% of GDP in 2009 (Trading Economics), to stimulate education expansion, beginning with grant-in-aid English medium schools during the post-war period. These aid-grants were eventually extended to Chinese medium schools as well, however all other language medium schools eventually closed-down with the ascendance of English as the chosen lingua franca for national integration and integration with the global economy (Tremewan, 1994). Expenditure on education has steadily expanded. Since 1991, government expenditure on education is second only to defense (Government of Singapore, 1991, p57). This expenditure increase is also in part due to population increase as well as economic expansion. The more advanced an economy, the greater the need for education at all levels. Thus education is not only closely related to the economy but is to a certain extent determined by its needs. The ideological “neutrality” of adopting an overtly functional approach in pursuing national policies complicit to the capitalist agenda diverts attention away from focus on the resulting class conflict, which arises from the functional yet elite (bourgeoisie) domination of the working masses (proletariat), and how the education system reinforces, reproduces and intensifies such conflict. Such domination serves to facilitate the functional exploitation of the surplus value of labour for profit required for capital accumulation. Furthermore, in a natural resource scarce country such as Singapore, the struggle for scarce resources between classes and different social groups is endemic. The hegemonic class therefore controls these scarce resources and through such control wields power over the lower classes to further the functional deployment 49 and exploitation of such resources including human capital for valorization and accumulation. Education has thus conditioned human capital for such valorization. As Marcuse (2004, p64) states: In the course of the technological process a new rationality and newstandards of individuality have spread over society, different from and even opposed to those which initiated the march of technology. These changes arc not the (direct or derivative) effect of machinery on its users or of mass production on its consumer: they are rather themselves determining factors in the development of machinery and mass production … [and continues to explain that as specialization of function due to increasing standardization of processes, the] bureaucracy thus emerges on an apparently objective and impersonal ground, provided by the rational specialization of functions, and this rationality in turn serves to increase the rationality of submission [in brackets my words]. Indeed, the basis of such rationality is evident in the very foundations of Singapore educational policy. A 10-year programme was implemented in educational policy in Singapore was based on the following general principles: First that education should aim at fostering and extending the capacity for self-government and the ideal of civic loyalty and responsibility; Second that equal educational opportunity should be afforded to the children – both boys and girls – of all races; Third, that upon a basis of free primary education there should be developed such secondary; vocational and higher education as will best meet the needs of the country (Soon, 1988, p4). In 1978, Goh Keng Swee was appointed by then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to study the problems in education. The report submitted would revolutionize education in Singapore – now known as the Goh Report. Two major problems highlighted were: Firstly, the bilingual policy during this period was ineffective with a high rate of illiteracy in English. The transformation of the economy from one based on mercantilism to import substitution and export orientation based on industrialization resulted in the rapid demand for English education. As Singapore entered the international arena, many job opportunities were available to those fluent in English. At the same time, mother tongue was taught to prevent the loss of cultural roots. But “the Goh report found that only 19% of each primary school cohort passed both languages at Ordinary level” (Ibid, p10), 50 attesting to the ineffectiveness of the bilingual policy just 12 years after its introduction in 1966. The bilingual policy was beneficial for society in that it created a lingua franca for the multi-racial and multi-ethnic population, thereby enabling communication. Though many were not fluent in English, even a rudimentary grasp of the language facilitated communication and hence trade and commerce, employment and job opportunities. Communication was also vital for national integration and multiculturalism, giving individuals and disparate groups a sense of identity and community. Thus the introduction of English through bilingualism functioned as a powerful ideological apparatus which not only fostered economic growth but also ideologically contributed to decreased prejudice and intolerance thereby promoting social cohesion, justifying its own implementation. The bilingual policy is therefore congruent with the two main aims of education – firstly, complicity with capitalism, to develop a modern industrial nation and secondly to nurture a cohesive multiracial policy (Wilson, 1978, p1-28 and p232-50), which would foster the stabilizing conditions necessary for valorization of cognitive capital and capital accumulation. However, only those fluent in the English language would be destined for positions of high leadership, thereby aiding in the selection process and providing the basis for differentiation of society according to linguistic attainment. This dichotomy is recognized and accepted today as necessary for complicity in the capitalist project: “A cornerstone of Singapore’s education system is the bilingual policy which allows each child to learn English and his Mother Tongue, which could be Malay, Chinese or Tamil, to the best of his abilities. This enables children to be proficient in English, which is the language of commerce, technology and administration, and their Mother Tongue, the language of their cultural heritage.” (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2010a) Although the intention was for the learning of mother tongue to facilitate cultural transmission and value formation in the traditions of the specific cultural group, the seeming failure of the bilingual policy as mentioned in the Goh report represented a dysfunction in education. 51 The bilingual policy also maintained class structures of society, as the use of English as lingua franca excluded the proletariat from all upper class positions. English, once the language of the colonial masters, became the language of the learned bourgeoisie, since only the wealthy in society were able to afford sending their children to expensive and hence exclusive English medium schools and pay the associated high costs of tuition (lessons with a private tutor). Simultaneously, mother tongue instruction was used to legitimise the use of English as lingua franca by appealing to the cultural needs of the masses amidst the extremely volatile circumstances of such issues arising from the politicisation of language. To repudiate accusations of inequality, the languages of the four main races were officially accepted as national languages. Tremewan (1994, p74) argued that the bilingual policy was an attempt by the government to legitimise its own hegemony by changing the composition of the class conflict. The two opposing groups were the English educated versus the non-English educated which included the Chinese educated. Through the bilingual policy, Tremewan (1994, p190) argues that the composition of conflict was changed to a dominant Chinese English educated class versus the non-English educated. Mother tongue was used to buy-over the Chinese English-speaking elite (due to their bilingual ability) into believing that firstly there was equality in language and secondly that their cultural needs were being addressed (Ibid). The second problem was of high attrition rates due to “failure to achieve expected standards; premature school leaving; repetition of low grades; and unemployable school leavers” (Soon, 1988, p10). The high attrition rates represented a waste in potential and scarce manpower resources. The failure of this main institution and agency of socialisation and selection resulted in social disorder and even chaos as evidenced by the industrial and political unrest and student protests of the period from 1966-78. The Goh Report was therefore necessary to correct this dysfunction. These same industrial and political unrest and student protests of the period were the result of the inherent contradictions within the capitalist mode of production. The aim of the Goh Report was thus to discover a more effective means of legitimising the capitalist development state and to extend hegemony over the population. Whatever the interpretation, the Goh report resulted in reforms that led to The New Education System (NES) in which the education 52 system was streamlined to support the bilingual policy and reduce the attrition rate. One feature introduced by the NES at the time was streaming to enhance the principles of meritocracy in education. Streaming and Meritocracy Streaming is based on the belief that ability is measurable and thus students can be differentiated using performance tests such as school-based assessment and intelligence quotient tests conducted by teachers at predetermined ages. Meritocracy may be defined as a system of rewards based on ability alone. Meritocracy, as practised in the SES, results in the sorting of learners according to their different and varying abilities to maximize their potential. The ideological exhortation that meritocracy provides opportunities for social mobility that allows children to improve their socioeconomic status was accepted prima facie by Singaporeans (Tremewan, 1994). Streaming based on this system of meritocracy coupled with educational subsidies may provide a certain level of equality for less competitive groups. Not only are uniform classes with children of similar ability easier to teach, mixed classes in fact hamper the progress of better students. It is also important to identify the best to facilitate selection and allocation early. Streaming thus began at Primary 4 (10-year old age group) in the belief that it would maximize students’ abilities as early as possible. Students were streamed to bilingual or monolingual classes according to linguistic ability tests. This was replaced with EM1, EM2 and EM3 streams in 1991 (Ng, 2004). In 2008, what is termed subject-based banding replaced the EM streaming system (Ministry of Education, Singapore, retrieved 18 Mar, 2012). These policies introduced intense competition into the classroom at a very early age but are consistent with the state’s conception of meritocracy. After the Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE), students are further streamed according to academic ability to Normal or Express streams in secondary school. Those displaying exceptional linguistic and academic ability are selected for the Special Assistance Programme (SAP). Since the chance of success is based entirely on objective tests and scholastic achievement and not ascribed socioeconomic status of parents, meritocracy thus functions on this apparent basis of achievement and equal 53 opportunity. Functionally, streaming thus seemingly corrected the aforementioned dysfunction in education. By drastically reducing the attrition rate, streaming in the education system produced sufficient numbers of vocational technicians, engineers and professionals necessary for industrialization and continued economic growth which has in turn resulted in Singapore’s prosperity. Streaming was thus effective in facilitating socialization directly by keeping more than 90% of the school-going children in schools and very efficiently allocated students into their future roles ensuring that society reproduces itself. Through individual students’ acceptance and commitment to their respective streams and hence their future roles, streaming emphasizes and maintains social order by preparing people for the differing future stratified roles needed for the orderly functioning of society. The acceptance of streaming in itself legitimates stratification and differentiation thereby legitimizing the social structure and social order of the local megamachine and prevents rebellion and uprising. There was no room for late developers in society. Streaming, functional though it may be, thus reproduces class structure. Class correspondence theory suggests that the “social relations of the educational encounter correspond closely to the social relations of dominance, subordination and motivation in the economic sphere” (Bowles & Gintis, 1976, p265). Streaming then, clearly intensified the social relations of education [which] replicate the hierarchial division of labour … [whereby] alienated labour is reflected in the student’s lack of control over his or her education, the alienation of the students from the curricula content, and the motivation of the school [that] works through a system of grades and external rewards rather than student’s integration with … the process of learning (Ibid, p131). Singaporean students thus end up not understanding why they are learning what they are learning. Streaming further reproduced and intensified the class struggle in and through education as “different levels of education feed workers into different levels within the occupational structure and correspondingly … tend toward an internal organization comparable to the hierarchal division of labour” (Ibid). Streaming therefore has an important role in the subordination and suppression of labour. Education is therefore functionally tied to the economic and social institutions of society and cannot be understood independently of 54 them. The major role of education in capitalist societies is thus to reproduce labour, a process which has been refined greatly in Singapore resulting in titles such as the ‘Developmental State’ and the ‘Confucianist State’. So, despite the apparent equality and meritocracy, streaming still reflects class structures and the hegemony of the elite. Though there is equality of opportunity in admission into primary schools, parents of high Social Economic Status (SoEcSt) may use the resources at their disposal including economic, cultural and social capital to ensure that their offspring succeed. Hence although social status is not ascribed, the advantages of high economic status are still transferred. Studies show that the SoEcSt of parents affect children’s achievement and years of formal schooling and thus educational attainment. Predictably, children of parents with high SoEcSt, specifically their occupational status, not only do better in schools but also spend a greater number of years in education. Ko Yiu Chung’s (1991, p220) study on status attainment showed that the father’s educational level and occupation coupled with the mother’s educational level affects not only their children’s educational attainment but also their eventual occupation. Ko found that children of professionals are thus highly likely to become professionals themselves. Meritocracy thus reproduces the capitalist relations to labour quite effectively. According to Tremewan, the deeply inculcated ideology of meritocracy ensured that “people blamed themselves for their failure to raise their class status” (Tremewan, 1994, p96). Kenneth Tan further observes that [a]s the economic and political elite are rewarded (or are rewarding themselves) with larger prizes, a vast and visible inequality of outcomes will replace the incentive effect with a sense of resentment, helplessness, social disengagement, and even envy among those who perceive themselves as systematically disadvantaged. As the elite class endeavors to renew itself, defining merit in its own image, it will become increasingly narrow, exclusive, and dismissive toward others, losing the benefit of a broader range of less traditional talent (Tan, 2008, p24). The SES has thus served the interests of capital well. Within the school system, students at all levels were thoroughly and successfully indoctrinated with the ideologies of meritocracy and equality. Relatively academically unsuccessful students have arguably accepted their futures with obedience and confucianist acceptance and reverence for educational qualification thus attesting to the power of the Ideological State Apparatus in Singapore. 55 Indeed, Tan (2008) argues that the very concept of meritocracy as it is practised in Singapore is contradictory in that it has resulted in not only inequality but elitism as well through rigorous educational sorting mechanism such as government scholarships. He goes on to argue that although meritocracy has served to justify and legitimate an “authoritarian”, “pro-capitalist” and “technocratic” government, he predicts that it is ultimately doomed to become an instrument that maintains the illusions so necessary to the continuation of the fabric of consumer society: As the economic and political elite are rewarded (or are rewarding themselves) with larger prizes, a vast and visible inequality of outcomes will replace the incentive effect with a sense of resentment, helplessness, social disengagement, and even envy among those who perceive themselves as systematically disadvantaged. As the elite class endeavors to renew itself, defining merit in its own image, it will become increasingly narrow, exclusive, and dismissive toward others, losing the benefit of a broader range of less traditional talent … As public-sector careers become more lucrative, civil service and minister’s salaries will mutate from a politically courageous (and somewhat extreme) public sector innovation … into a preoccupation with staying in power mainly for the money and achieving this through image politics, vote buying and so on … In fact, Singapore’s meritocratic system has been practised so extremely that it is starting to show signs of becoming a victim of its own success (Ibid). The historical inertia of complicity with capitalism has ensured the centrality of the global hypercapitalist agenda in the SES. This is apparent in the landscape of the SES. The Singapore Education Landscape in 2011 “The Singapore Education Landscape” (see figure 1 and figure 2), also labelled “The Singapore Education Journey” (SEJ) in figure 2, presents a roadmap of education in Singapore in the sense that paths are indicated for prospective cyborgs from the bottom to the top. From a Baudrillardian perspective, this roadmap has multiple significations. It may be interpreted as an advertisement of its product – the SES – which is a product that produces other sub-products, such as the curriculum, the classroom, the teacher, assessments and ultimately the student. At this level, the ‘advertisement’ functions to code the main product, separating from its referent, of the Singapore education system differentiating it from other competing products in its uniqueness as well as coding the sub- 56 products along the various paths and levels, preceding consumption of the object. Simultaneously coded in the structural presentation of the roadmap are the signifieds of attainment and advancement from the bottom through the layers to top representing the pinnacle of achievement paralleling the hypercapitalist hierarchy of performance and reward. The “Secondary Special/Express Course” cyborg for example is differentiated from the “Secondary Normal (Technical Course)” cyborg replete with linguistic signifiers in brackets suggesting even finer differentiation. Only upon consumption does the value implication of the product and sub-product become transferred to each individual thus becoming apparent. Consumption of this product therefore assigns the status of product to the consumer who is also consumed by the product. Thus as a product, the cyborg is differentiated by the system of signs that dominates consumer society. 57 Figure 1: The Singapore Education Landscape (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2005b). 58 Figure 2: The Singapore Education Journey (Ministry of Education, Singapore). 59 The existence of both models of such similarity also illustrates subtly the profusion of models that exist and will continue to grow as models becomes obsolete and are tweaked for improvement. At the level of model, the roadmap functions as a simulacra “in that it not only presents an absence as a presence, the imaginary as the real, it also undermines any contrast to the real, absorbing the real within itself” (Baudrillard, 1988, p6). For example, the roadmap suggests the equality of the various levels along the ‘journey’ though this is an illusion as the drastic differences in the curriculum for “Secondary Special/Express Course” cyborgs for example and “Secondary Normal (Technical Course)” cyborgs are not stated. Schools such as Assumption Pathlight and Northlight are also conspicuously absent despite recent public attention drawn to their opening and catering to school dropouts. Students classified with “special needs” are also channelled into the mainstream system of sorting. The most recent iteration of the “The Singapore Education Journey” places the “Workplace” as the pinnacle of educational achievement at the same level as University attainment. This is consistent with the valorization of educational processes. Furthermore, the culmination at the top of all the pathways perpetuates the grand illusion that all cyborg units (i.e. students) would reach this endpoint, concealing the reality that many cyborg units do not. In 2009, 25.4% of each primary one school cohort reaches 1 of the three local universities, NUS, NTU or SMU (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2010a, p12). This figure does not include those who enrol in universities abroad. Each level thus signifies an abstract value, a Cumulative Estimated Potential (CEP), with Use Value (UV) increasing towards the top of the “value chain” of procedural signification, just as an incomplete product acquires greater UV, the further down it goes along the value chain. For cyborganic units, Use Value (UV) is encoded through certification. We know that the commodity is both exchange value and use value. But the latter is always concrete and particular, contingent on its own destiny, whether this is the process of individual consumption or in the labor process … the two are coupled; but neither is strongly implied by the other (Ibid, p64). By Use Value and Exchange Value, here Baudrillard is distinguishing between the instrumental purpose value of an object and its economic value and argues that the 60 link between them is subjective. Baudrillard also argues in rather cryptic fashion that a hierarchical system of shared meanings regarding position and status of objects which he terms the code exists at a meta-structural level in society. This code thus helps to order all objects in the system of objects in society and enable the reproduction of simulacra (Rojek & Bryan, 1993, p137-138). Thus, the UV implied through educational certification is in itself “an abstraction … of the system of needs cloaked in the false evidence of a concrete destination and purpose, an intrinsic finality of goods and products” (Baudrillard, 1988, p65) [italics original emphasis]. UV of cyborganic units is a composite of both temporal regimentation imposed by the programming of the syllabus as well as spatial regimentation imposed by the programming of the classroom and school, each to be discussed later. A student with a GCE O-Level certificate from a Singaporean neighbourhood school (common public school found in heartland Housing and Development Board estates, typically catering to students of mixed ethnicities and abilities from lower to middle socioeconomic class backgrounds) for example may not have as many opportunities as another student with the same certificate from an elite school, the additional opportunities being available to the latter student due to his elite school associations. The SES of the post-colonial megamachine may thus be seen as a collection of sites where the code in relation to education is being constantly constructed and restructured. For example, the recent imposition of 10-years of compulsory education ensures a minimum UV for all Singaporean cyborganics even though school dropouts continue to defy this neo-megamachine logic, the implementation of the “-light” schools ensure reintegration and re-adsorption into the body of the neo-megamachine. The Exchange Value (EV) of each unit is further determined by the vagaries of supply and demand in the labour market consistent within the contextual political economy, sites where the code of the corporate megamachine is then imposed on cybernetic units. Such sites are “strategically hidden and shifted” (Rojek & Bryan, 1993, p137). The apparent variety of educational paths provides an illusion of equality of opportunity. By portraying all schools as equivalent, the model-map disguises the reality of differentiation between schools. Not all parents in Singapore may send their children to premier schools like Raffles Institution for example. This in turn 61 facilitates the meritocratic myth but appearing on the surface to cater to multivariate needs. Meritocracy is after all based on the notion of equality of access to initial entry (all having the same starting line excluding genetic disposition). The roadmap thus furthers the illusion that assessment at each stage of codification of learning – Primary School Leaving Examinations, Ordinarylevels and Advanced-levels – there is equality of opportunity for attainment disguising the stark differences in social and cultural capital endowments of various cyborganic units. With the focus on efficiency in public cybernetic maturation institutions, it is no wonder that the tuition industry in Singapore comprised 2296 locally-owned tuition and private educational institutions in 2001 (Department of Statistics, Singapore, 2002, p6). By 2008, the local private tuition industry was worth S$820 million with 500 tuition centres and tuition teachers earning as much as S$520,000 per annum including expenses for “high-value” subjects like physics (Rachel Scully, 2010). Therefore, just like the map in Baudrillard’s myth, the “Singapore Education Journey” seems more real than reality, even though it only offers one real option – the academic, the acceptable functional future of every cybernetic unit, paramount above all else, where all pathways lead to the same “workplace” reality – the only reality of relevance. “The Singapore Education Landscape” remains an important object, because just as advertising and other marketing techniques reduce resistance to consumption, the roadmap reduces the resistance to consumption of the process of procedural signification simultaneously signifying a quality product which in turn produces a quality product and global brand name – the Singaporean cyborg. The frequent reviews to update the curriculum ensure that not only content but assessment of the curriculum is ever more integrated with the commodifying requirements of global hypercapitalism. 62 The Curriculum How do we prepare our children today to thrive in a future driven by globalisation and technological advancements? Schools provide a strong academic foundation for our young. To help our children thrive in a fastchanging world, schools and parents need to work hand-in-hand to help them develop 21st century competencies (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2010b). This overt complicity with the capitalist project makes palatable the social consumption of its signification with overlays of meritocracy and accompanying ideological assurances of equality. Implicit in this envisioning of the certain technological path to success is an assumption of continued growth and success in a promised future through the process of education. But herein lies the paradoxical vanity for “it is growth itself which is a function of inequality. “It is the need of the inegalitarian social order – the social structure of privilege – to maintain itself that produces and reproduces growth as its strategic element” (Baudrillard, 1998, p53). Singaporeans are constantly reminded of this strategic element: We [the Singapore government] are also investing heavily in education to prepare our students, who will be the workers of tomorrow. These investments have paid off. Results of the 2009 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) just released show that among 65 countries tested, Singaporean students rank within the top five countries for reading, mathematics and science. But other Asian economies like South Korea, Hong Kong and Shanghai (representing China) had high scores too. This shows the quality of talent in Asia, and the competition we face (Unknown Correspondent, 2011a) [Italics my emphasis]. Like the students, textbooks remain one of the most visible objects of the curriculum and form in Baudrillardian terms, the Lowest Common Multiples (LCM) of the culture of education with its emphasis on mastery of superior content. In his examination of the multiplication of art, Baudrillard notes that as art becomes increasingly multiplied, “they no longer exist as works of art, as materials with meaning … but have become finished objects themselves …” (Baudrillard, 1990, p71). So too have textbooks which have now come to be equated with the perfection of attainment, such that if a cyborganic unit ingests all that is contained within a textbook, perfect attainment is all but assured. Like Baudrillard’s (1996) critique of art, the process of meaning transmission that is a 63 crucial part of each unique process is lost in the multiplication. Indeed, this process is repeated in the multiplication of other educational objects as well, such as the schools and the very students themselves. This perspective may be summarised by the following statement: ‘We hope it [the Singapore University of Technology and Design] will provide a different experience for the students - a very high-quality academic environment that will stimulate the students to go beyond the book knowledge (and) to apply it to solve problems, use it in the real world, and apply it to make a commercial success in the economy and in business,' (italics my emphasis) he [Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong] said. (Lee U-Wen, 2010). Education in Singapore is thus geared towards further integration with the global hypercapitalist economy and the creation of a “speed elite” (Hoofd, 2010) with its focus on the future. I want to stress that this summoning of a future time to the present, what I shall henceforth refer to as instantiation, for the efficient and purposeful integration into a technologically advanced global economy with a primary emphasis on the collective summarizes the ethic of hypercapitalist education. Indeed, made possible by new media technologies of instantiation, this signification of the collectivist future becomes the raison de’etre for future history as well as the justification for mass cyber-organic integrative education. The curriculum thus represents a form of temporal regimentation, codified around predetermined programming of knowledge and values, functional and thereby necessarily relevant for global hypercapitalist formation, for download to cyborganic units. The curriculum is an object of this political economy of the social reproduction of human instrumentality, for a curriculum, and its associated processes of procedural signification, in addition to its temporal element, itself conveys EV as well as UV to the cyborganics which undergo its indoctrination. Thus, the urgency to develop a world-class curriculum recognised as a sign of quality globally. The curriculum thus acquires EV and UV, just as the Singapore Mathematics curriculum has been adopted by some schools in the United States above their own local curriculum, a fact which was well televised as a matter of national pride in Singapore. Even further differentiation is achieved through the 64 development of a hierarchy of schools. Schools which offer the same national curriculum may be differentiated by specific niche areas and excellence resulting in product outputs of higher UVs than the norm. Other Integrated Programme (IP) schools (schools which provide education from secondary 1 through to the second year of junior college where the GCE Advanced level examination or equivalent is the final assessment; the GCE Ordinary level which is the typical final assessment at secondary 4 and 5 is skipped) offer a different but approved curriculum as an alternative on the same path. Both types of schools only accept cyborganic inputs of high UV to ensure future performance. Cyborganic EV and UV are thus codified around their inherent temporal regimentation, achieving functional cybernetic fusion within predetermined timeframes. Indeed this temporal tyranny, paralleling the tyranny of the clock of the industrial factory, and the automatonated response of attending school, realized through the implementation of the syllabus and the education roadmap demands completed cyborganic perfection within the parameters of the map. The logic of the curriculum thus follows the logic of the neo-megamachines of the global hypercapitalist economy. All subjects in the curriculum, just like objects of consumption, are selected based on their potential value for future hypercapitalist employment or national integration. The content of the subjects themselves are continually revised to ensure relevance to global hypercapitalism is maintained. Subjects that are no longer relevant are discarded, extinct in their irrelevance. But this course is not new to Singapore which has always adopted a functionalist approach to economic development for which education was seen as vital with human capital being its only resource. Generally, this view has shaped educational policies and the system of education since 1979. Educational policies have rarely strayed from this path if at all. Temporal regimentation (need to achieve certain goals within a specified time) is codified in the various syllabus documents for each level of cybernetic development detailing the content of procedural signification at each level and for each subject. Together with assessment, as stated in the aims of each syllabus, codifying temporal regimentation, the UV of each unit is ascertained. 65 Assessment Assessment flows from codifying syllabi and has evolved from its basic function of selecting and sorting workers for industrial society, refined to further duplicate the conditions of the hypercapitalistic workplace. Project Work (assessment based on real-world problems and working in groups to derive solutions to those problems) has been included to simulate the conditions of working in teams which have become the cornerstone of the knowledge and innovation based hypercapitalistic economy. This is often combined with new Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to foster the development of what has been termed 21st century skills (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2010b) to ensure that students acquired skills relevant to the job market. Problem Based Learning has been introduced in some schools to emphasize the primacy of solving problems coupled with Innovation and Enterprise programmes to ensure that those same problem solving skills are applied innovatively to advance the hypercapitalist project. The introduction of Science Practical Assessment (SPA) illustrates this overt complicity well. The Advanced level H2 Chemistry syllabus states that: “this approach has been adopted in recognition of the need for students to develop skills that will be of long term value in an increasingly technological world rather than focusing on large quantities of factual material which may have only short term relevance” (Singapore Examinations & Assessment Branch, 2011, p1). Furthermore, one of the aims of the syllabus is stated as to enable students to “be suitably prepared for employment and/or further studies beyond A level” (Ibid). The syllabi of other subjects contain similar justifications of orientation. The “English Language Syllabus 2001 for Primary and Secondary Schools” for example, state that: “the ability to speak and write English effectively, therefore, has become an essential skill in the workplace, and a mastery of English is vital to Singapore’s pupils” (Singapore Examinations & Assessment Branch, 2001, p1). Relevance to the economy thus becomes the raison d’etre for academic pursuits in Singapore. 66 Assessment also serves to reinforce the system of encoding value onto cyborganic units. Formative assessment codifies EV ensuring a continuous upgrade of each cyborganic unit’s ability to accept programming of procedural signification. Formative assessment ensures the codification of EV should any cybernetic unit fails to achieve UV through completion of the procedural signification. This was crucial before the implementation of 10-year compulsory education ensuring minimum UV attainment. Indeed, many pre-digital analogue units were able to find suitable employment based on their EV alone. However, streamlined and intensified processes of procedural signification now demand that digital cybernetic units complete their cybernetic maturation processes to achieve encoded UV for more precise and deliberate sorting in the new global hypercapitalist market. Regardless of path, summative assessment encodes final UV on cyborganic units for successful completion of the processes of procedural signification. Classrooms The classrooms of 21st century Singapore bear striking resemblance to those of 18th century industrial revolution classrooms, optimized for the efficient dissemination of knowledge and indoctrination of procedures achieved through strict adherence to norms established by the regimentation of space in an orderly columnar paralleling the factory layouts for which the products of the system of procedural signification would ultimately engage in productive labour. Consider the spatial organisation of the classrooms below (see plates 1-4) representing different time periods and cultural backgrounds. 67 Plate 1: Eventual typical 21st century classroom in Singapore (Xavier Lur, 2010). The photograph above shows an eventual Singaporean classroom of the 21st century replete with MacBooks, spatially regimented in standard 6-columnar arrangement of uniformly industrial blue-coloured chairs and tables usually oriented towards the whiteboard at the front of the class where the teacher and associated desk are usually positioned though these are not shown in the image. Contrast this with the following photographs of classrooms from around the world representing different time periods (plates 2-4). 68 Plate 2: 17th – 18th century German classroom at Museum of Molfsee (Oliver Ross). Plate 3: Ohio Girls Industrial School, United States, circa 1910-1919 (Ohio Historical Society website). 69 If we go back further in history to the Prussian roots of the modern classroom, we find that little has changed (see plate 4 below). Plate 4: Prussian monitorial classroom, circa 19th century (Gary Woodill, 2009). Despite the apparent difference in class sizes, the characteristic features that define a classroom have remained unchanged throughout the centuries from inception – the spatial arrangement of tightly spaced columnar desks and chairs which emphasize conformity orientated towards a teacher in the front modelled for efficient dissemination of content. Indeed according to Gary Woodill (2009): Like prisons and mental hospitals, classrooms captured and constricted bodies in order to render them as docile subjects. Their purpose was as much disciplinary as educational, developed as part of the new bureaucratic state apparatus that brought unruly people under social control. The power of the classroom as a technology gave teachers the ability to better regulate large groups of students, in order to inculcate them with a standardized curriculum. Pushed to the extreme, monitorial classrooms of the 19th century could hold over 1000 pupils, all performing the same acts, under the watchful eyes of senior students (“monitors”), and the instructor. 70 United States educational reformer Horace Mann wrote that “Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former” (Brainy Quote website). st The same descriptions could apply to the 21 century Singaporean classroom. Spatial regimentation and its associated discipline serve the neo-megamachine in that it directly prepared units for the workplace by simulating the environment of industrial production, which was the goal of industrial education (see plate 5 below). Plate 5: Dunlop Rubber Co Ltd, circa 1940 (Merseyside Maritime Museum website). The modern industrial complex has also changed little in terms of spatial arrangement, except with the addition of digital instrumentalities (see plate 6 below). Indeed, the 21st century classroom bears much resemblance to 21st century office spaces built for the cognitariat (see plate 7 below). The classroom too is therefore an object in the system of objects of education. It is a technology of simulation of bureaucratic control and of the end state of the workplace depicted on the education map. It is the technology which encapsulates the entropic dimension of the Singapore Education Journey in its uni-directionality, its apparent randomness of selection and dissipation of ‘waste’ units through superannuation, self-disenfranchisement and other processes. 71 As the plates in this chapter have implied, the use of technology in education so far seems to have extended the “tyranny” of the classroom beyond its traditional boundaries. Under the guise of self-directed learning, technologies such as virtual learning environments are very much centrally “directed” replete with start-times and end-times for assignments as well as submission instructions and deadlines, the only difference being that the teacher has now automated the administrative functions that once limited its implementation to within the traditional confines of the classroom. Far from being liberating, these technologies have potentially turned all out-of-classroom time into classroom time albeit without the walls. Indeed, these changes mirror the ways in which technology have transformed work through technologies such as email which too can be answered anytime anywhere. In effect, the implementation of such technologies in the classroom prepares young cyborganics for the future roles under similar conditions. Plate 6: Nokia handphone factory, circa 2007 (Mobile Phones website). 72 Plate 7: Digital Office, circa 2008 (Office Design Gallery website). The School The school housing the classroom also functions as an object in the system of educational objects (after Baudrillard’s 1996 system of objects). The school represents a larger spatial and temporal regimentation than the classroom with programmed activities, such as assembly and recess, occurring at predetermined times and in programmed spatial arrangements (see plate 8a below). These procedures of regimentation are reinforced by suitable codes, some of which are clearly inscribed for emphasis (see plate 8b below). Plate 8a: Victoria school, 1986 National Day Observance parade rehearsal (Random Notes website, 1986). 73 Plate 8b: Banner hung at Yuan Ching Secondary School, 2010 (Jeremy Goh, 2010). Schools in Singapore (see plate 8a above), just like the classrooms they contain are simulacra of the workplace (see plate 9 below). Plate 9: Flatted factory along Commonwealth Drive (Annonymous Blogger, 2009). 74 Even the modern school buildings (see plate 10 below) endeavour to simulate the eventual office complex workplaces (see plate 11 below) their units would be employed in through the increased use of glass and other associated postmodern architectural design concepts. Plate 10: Singapore Sports School (Wikipedia page, 2007). Plate 11: Fusionopolis Tower (Star Bamboo Singapore, 2008). Schools also advertise their productivity achievements through the usual channels of persuasion through the media and banners or posters hung on their facades (see plates 12a and 12b below). Plate 12a: Achievement banner hung outside Deyi Secondary School, circa 2000 (Students of the World Website). 75 Plate 12b: Three achievement posters hung on the facade of Zhenghua Secondary School, circa 2000 (H88 website). Plate 12b was retrieved from a property website which was using the photograph to advertise for property in the vicinity of the school. This illustration highlights my argument that the school is an object. It is an object in the larger system of objects, as illustrated by plate 12b, and it is an object in the educational system of objects. Schools in Singapore may be analysed according to Ritzers’s (1983, p100-107) MacDonaldization of society theory and especially in terms of four aspects. Firstly, schools in the system of the Singapore Education Journey are organised such that, through procedural signification, cybernetic units may complete their respective journeys in the most effective method in terms of cost and effort for the system. This is Ritzer’s principle of efficiency and as Ritzer observes is also advertised as a benefit to each cybernetic unit. Cybernetic units which are not able to complete this journey as programmed thus become unfortunately irrelevant. The second principle of calculability emphasizes quantity which is then equated with quality of the entire system. For example, commenting on the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), Minister of Education Ng Eng Hen said: “What is comforting to me as Minister of 76 Education is that the performance of our weakest students - those at the last quartile - is still above the international average” (Ministry of Education, 2005a). The entire structure of the Singapore Education Journey is orderly and universal pattern which reinforces the hyperreality of the map. This is Ritzer’s (1983) third principle of predictability which may be found in the replicated temporally and spatially regimented and controlled workplace-simulated environs of each class to the entire school grounds reinforcing the automatonic auto-pilot nature of everyday existence. Finally, technology adds Ritzer’s final principle of control through substitution of non-human technology. In the school context, this is manifested through the use of technology to enforce the discipline and regimentation of homework. In the classroom, temporal regimentation is enforced through the computer in task submission reducing teacher monitoring to a secondary failsafe. Such processes once again simulate the cybernetic control exerted by the neo-megamachine at the workplace. While schools may be analysed in terms of the MacDonaldization thesis, it would be erroneous to assume that they are all equal. Just like any retail chain, public schools also have their equivalent of flagship outlets and high-value boutique stores producing products of respective value. In 1992, the MOE began using what it termed the Mean Subject Grade (MSG), the average of each individual unit’s score for all subjects tested, to rank academic performance of schools (Koh, 2000). The Straits Times quickly found relevance in producing an annual supplement, “ST 100 Schools”, ranking the top 100 schools in Singapore. This practice resulted in an annual influx of petitions resulting in heightened parental competition in contributions to such schools as parents clambered for places in the top schools for their children. Despite the discontinuation of this practice in 2001 owing to the shift in emphasis to “peaks of excellence” (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2007a, p1) in favour of recognising a broader range of abilities rather than just academic, this has not stopped capable parents from obtaining the MSGs and compiling their own unofficial lists of top schools on blogs such as http://sg.theasianparent.com/forum/singapore-school-ranking-2010 and http://www.kiasuparents.com/kiasu/content/singapores-top-primary-schools, which only highlight the continued emphasis placed on pure academic 77 performance and the persistent hierarchy of schools that exists despite the apparent equality portrayed on the map of the “Singapore Education Journey”. The Teachers Teachers also function as objects signifying successful products of procedural signification as well as functionally useful hypercapitalist cyborganic units. This is highlighted by advertising emphasizing the outward appearance of hypercapitalist success. Indeed as Baudrillard observes, “there is one object finer, more precious and more dazzling than any other – and even more laden with connotations than the automobile … the body has today become an object of salvation. It has literally taken over that moral and ideological function from the soul” (Baudrillard, 1998, p129). The association of suits and ties with successful hypercapitalistic endeavour, contrasting with the fact that most teachers dress smart casual, combined with the overt chiselled masculinity of deliberation (see plate 13 below), contrasting with the fact that 21,773 out of the total 29,875 teachers employed are female (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2010a, p3), is equated with the appropriate development of “tomorrow’s leaders” and “the next generation” (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2011), emphasizing that relevant professional cyborganic units prepare young units for the workplace and facilitate attainment of such employment in a tribute to the salvific perfection of the neomale form as corporate leader and thus “great teacher” (Ibid). This optimization of perfection represents for Haraway, a transition from old hierarchical dominations to the informatics of domination (Haraway, 2000, p300). 78 Plate 13: 2011 MOE teaching advertisement (Ministry Of Education, Singapore, 2011). Following an emphasis on recruitment of such teachers, as policy, MOE began recognizing 80% of previous work experience and increased salaries and increased the speed of promotion of mid-career teachers beginning in 2007 (Unknown Correspondent, 2011b). Currently, one in four MOE teachers are midcareer professionals (Unknown Correspondent, 2011c). Apart from the obvious transfer of workplace knowledge, such cyborganic units are preferred because of their networking abilities beyond the confines of the school. One school principal was quoted as saying: ‘For example, you can have an (former) engineer teaching design and technology, where they build structures, and he or she will say 'we're not building it because I'm teaching you to do well in your exams but this kind of structure is commonly used in a bridge or certain highways.’ Mid-career teachers also tend to understand the importance of networking, he added, and are more willing to work with outside contacts such as town councils and community centres for school programmes (Ibid) [Italics my emphasis]. 79 Teachers mediate the knowledge they instruct. They process such knowledge and present what they interpret and feel as the most relevant required by the central authority. In this sense, teachers mediate the will of the neo-megamachine with its capitalist structures, translating them into instructions for cybernetic units. The hidden curriculum thus comprises the code as translated by teachers and imparted to students in the formal curriculum. Teachers are therefore, knowingly or unknowingly, complicit in the machinations of the neo-megamachine. Their complicity is assured by their very own role as labour. The Educational Component of the Neo-Megamachine Procedural signification is thus accomplished through the system of objects of public education. The education roadmap is internalized by cyborganic units as reality, the model of their existence throughout cyborganic maturation. The curriculum ensures temporal regimentation, while the classroom ensures spatial regimentation around predetermined programming. Assessment encodes EV and UV on the cyborganic products of this entire process. Assessment thus confers, insofar as attainment signifies prodigious employment, “symbolic wealth” which according to Baudrillard & Poster (1988, p111) has nothing to do with material social wealth that is produced but rather “mocking natural necessity, comes conversely from destruction, the deconstruction of value, transgression or discharge”. Such wealth leads to comparisons among cyborganic units and inevitably the social deconstruction of less valued units. Apart from their UV or EV, each object of education “legitimates the sign by the real and which founds the real by the sign” in a “circularity [that] is the very secret of all metaphysical (ideological) operationality” (Baudrillard & Poster, 1988, p87). Similarly, in the educational system of objects the “use value, the ‘literal’ and ideal finality of the object, resurges continually from the system of exchange value, the effect of concreteness, reality and denotation results from the complex play of interference of networks and codes” (Ibid, p90). It is impossible here to determine the definitive sign value for objects in the Singapore educational system for [t]he sign value cannot admit to its own deductive abstraction any more than exchange value can. Whatever it denies and represses, it will attempt to exorcise and integrate into its own operation: such is the status of the ‘real’, of the referent, which are only the simulacrum of the symbolic, its form reduced and intercepted by the sign (Ibid, p92). 80 Such is the power of the sign of top-scorers promoting various products of milk and assessment books (see plate 14 below) with the promise of replication upon purchase as “the sign attempts to mislead: it permits itself to appear as totality, to efface the traces of its abstract transcendence, and parades itself as the reality principle of meaning” (Ibid). Such is the power of each object in its simulacra and simulation. Taken together, these objects form the technology of education and of its simulation. Plate 14: Photograph of advertising for top PSLE scorers for 2011 at a bus stand (Rants of a Shutterbug Weblog, 2011). Recently, one concerned Singaporean parent’s letter to the new Minister of Education Heng Swee Keat encapsulates and exemplifies the arguments made so far. I have chosen to examine this fortuitous letter here because it resonates with my own experience as an educator and former Head of Department at a PreUniversity Institute and because the letter resonates with three strands that I have discussed in this thesis, namely that education is complicit with industry in the form of neo-megamachine subjugation, that such subjugation takes the form of procedural indoctrination, and finally that consumer society values fostered by the cultural imposition of neo-megamachine subjugation and procedural indoctrination result in the cyborganic object, the consumer man, the Singaporean “obsessed with chasing grades”. While the letter does not prove theory, it provides an example of the salience of these strands in the Singaporean educational context and a lens through which Baudrillardian notions may be invoked. The letter, which quickly became viral, itself an example of an attempt 81 to use technology to break the cycles of subjugation, states the neomegamachine’s capitalistic subjugation thus: Here's what happens when schools are run like businesses. Teachers become workers assessed and ranked according to quantifiable output. The principal is like the CEO, answerable to a higher authority based on numbers. Students become products, they are valued only according to the quantifiable output they can contribute, everything else is peripheral or redundant. Everything is reduced to numbers (Of Kids & Education Weblog, 2012). Indeed, the reducibility of all of nature including the subject has been vital to hypercapitalist development, whether in the natural environment or in human health, the ability to quantify digitally all of life enables the calculation of costs and benefits which govern how resources are allocated or not allocated, prioritised or de-prioritised, a system based entirely on hyperreality typically favouring short run gains over longer term benefits in accordance with the rules governing consumer society. Again this hyperreality is evident as the author states: Many teachers today are told to mark the language of a composition based on how many ‘good phrases’ are used. In my son’s school, a commercial book of good phrases is part of the syllabus and the kids are told to learn these phrases, even for spelling. These phrases are often so bombastic and pretentious that nobody in real life would actually use them. Yet the students are taught them because “ticks” are given for each ‘good phrase’ and added to their vocabulary score (Ibid) [italics, my emphasis]. Hypercapitalistic values are likewise imposed in all areas of educational life as signs of success are rewarded with increased consumptive power. Thus the author laments: This obsession with results extends outside of the classroom. In my daughter’s school, the performing arts groups are given funding according to how well they perform in the SYF. Likewise, bigger budgets are given to sports that bring in medals. The list goes on. What this breeds in the race for medals and results is that schools often prioritise these over values like effort, sportsmanship and character building (Ibid) [italics, my emphasis]. Indeed, it is through the indoctrination of such procedures of relationships between what comprises recognised success and what comprises approved reward that young cyborgs internalize the signs associated with successful products. So complete is this procedural signification that: 82 As a direct outcome of a school system that emphasises scores above all else and uses these scores to dictate the child's educational path at a very early age, Singaporeans have become obsessed with chasing grades … for many, they have become life-centric, meaning kids spend every waking hour performing tasks that will help them better their score. The mindless pursuit of academic achievement has become so overarching that many parents are now sending their kids for what I call indiscriminate tuition – tuition in every single examinable subject whether or not the child actually needs it … Tuition has become a crutch - even if the kids are doing well on their own, parents fear the consequences of doing without it. The backlash is that our children’s self-worth and perception have become intrinsically linked to their academic grades. Teachers, peers and possibly parents judge the value of students according to their academic ability. I know children whose self-esteem is low simply because they don’t do as well in school as their classmates. In the “branded” schools, it also breeds elitism because these students deem others less academically-inclined as somehow inferior. When my daughter attended her first day of school in sec 1, many of her new classmates, meeting her for the first time, didn’t ask ‘what’s your name?’ but ‘what’s your t-score? (Ibid) [italics, my emphasis]. This portion of the letter, resonates with Baudrillard (1998, p191) who states that “[i]n the generalized process of consumption, there is no longer any soul, no shadow, no double, and no image in the specular sense”, for it describes the soulless state of education for the test described above. The letter written suggests that the author may be experiencing a “contradiction within being”, although Baudrillard (Ibid) claims that “there is no longer any contradiction within being, or any problematic of being and appearance.” It is arguable that even if the author represents those in society who struggle with this “contradiction within being”, the author herself suggests that for many in society, those Singaporeans who have become obsessed, those parents who fear the consequences of doing without tuition, and all those who value people according to academic ability, seem closer to Baudrillard’s (1998, p191-192) description of the consumer man: There is no longer anything but the transmission and reception of signs. Consumer man never comes face to face with his own needs, any more than with the specific product of his labour; nor is he ever confronted with his own image: he is immanent in the signs he arranges. Despite the author’s exhortation for a change to a more “meaningful” and “kinder system” based on more intangible values such as integrity and respect, she 83 unfortunately did not give suggestions on how such a system would be and ironically falls into familiar consumptive patterns of objectifying the subject when she states that: “If half your students fail in an exam, it doesn’t reflect badly on the student – it reflects badly on the teaching” (Of Kids & Education Weblog, 2012). Thus the author assumes that, firstly all students are equally endowed, whether culturally, economically, or intellectually, and secondly, that it is the responsibility of all teachers to make all their students pass exams. Indeed, the contradiction the author experiences within seems to concern itself more with the reconciliation of micro issues, namely the passing of exams and attaining the intangible values which seems to be the depth of her reflection rather than the broader Baudrillardian concern with transcendence: There is no transcendence any more, no finality, no objective … what characterizes this society is the absence of ‘reflection’, of a perspective on itself. There is therefore no maleficient agency either, like that of the Devil, with whom one could enter a Faustian pact to gain wealth and glory, since one is given these things by a beneficient maternal ambience – the affluent society (Baudrillard, 1998, p192). And, like any other “consumer man”, the author resorts to establishing herself as a “corporate writer”, thereby strengthening the sign-value established when identifying herself as a parent. The media has proceeded to enhance the sign value of her letter (and the one examined in chapter 4) and despite its quickly attained viral status its sign value in the system of objects remains unclear. The letter and the responses which follow (but are not analysed in this thesis) exemplify the structure of procedural signification of the educational component of the neo-megamachine as operationalized through the Singapore Education Journey. The bureaucratic structure is itself a sign of authority and the power of decision over each cohort of cyborganic units. Through this process the other component parts of the neo-megamachine, of local and global industry and of government are able to replicate themselves indefinitely. The next chapter shall focus on the accelerated nature of cyborganic units contextualized within the educational structures of the neo-megamachine and consumer society. 84 Chapter 4 | The Hyper Human Cyborg The hyper human cyborg (a human accelerated through cybernetics and knowingly or unknowingly complicit with the politics of technology and hence embroiled in the system of objects and its related codes) is a myth of education. This myth is layered by codes which govern both perception and society. To unravel this myth, we must peel away these layers and I start with the layer of meritocracy. As argued by Tan (2008, p7), meritocracy is a myth because it is a contradiction in which even greater inequality is the result while it justifies authoritarian technocracy. Education is a myth because it too is a paradox in which even greater subjugation to the neo-megamachine is the result while it justifies the same technocracy with the promise of greater freedom through selfdetermination. It is a myth because it promises empowerment and freedom through intellectual and academic accomplishment when all the while contributing to what Strivers (2008b, p1) calls “the illusion of freedom and equality”, while simultaneously enforcing the discipline of the logic of the machine. The purpose of this chapter is to unravel the myth of the hyper human cyborg through an analysis on the nature of the product of the SES, the hyper human cyborg and to discuss the implications of the previous chapters on the development of the cyborg in Singapore society. Stivers argues that “modern technology [which] includes both machines and nonmaterial techniques such as bureaucracy, advertising and propaganda” (2008b, p2) and that “technology is driven by the will to power” (2008b, p2), it “is the context within which to understand the meaning of freedom and equality today” (2008b, p2). Stivers (2008b) continues to argue that processes of technology and the intensity of its consumption displaces spheres of human life creating a meaningless dehumanised environment. This is true to the extent that life values are seconded to pecuniary values and life values become reduced to cost-benefit analyses. This tension and seeming dominance of pecuniary values of life values in Singapore may be evidenced in its downward spiralling Total Fertility Rate (TFR) from 2.37 in 1974 to which stands at 1.15 by September of 2011 (Janice Heng & Li Xueying, 2011). Even then, the declining TFR seems to be 85 emphasized mainly as an economic problem rather than a social one of desiring children. It is perhaps also important that over the same period, Singapore’s economic development and indicators of economic success increased steadily while TFR continued to decline due to the “Stop at Two” policy introduced in 1972 which linked having more children with a lower quality of life. Despite a reversal in 1987 with the New Population policy of “having 2 or more if you can afford it”, and a Baby Bonus scheme introduced in 2000, the TFR continued to decline (Ibid). The logic of pecuniary values over life values seems to dominate even as resistance may be evident in the continuing argument for greater “worklife-balance” and “family friendly policies”. Despite these efforts, the “precession of simulacra” in the form of “models of life” as espoused by the various policies had a certain dehumanising influence in terms of how new life is viewed, in that it is equated with cost. “Technics” (Mumford, 1934) are then applied to children through cybernetic education to ensure their functional use to society. Cybernetic Education (education infused with technology and its politics) is replete with “non-material techniques” or “technics” in Mumford’s terminology, which I have termed procedural signification. It is through such technics that the illusions of freedom, equality and meritocracy are maintained and unknowingly consumed by the society interwoven with the indoctrinated Confucian ethic of moral responsibility to knowledge. According to Chua, “[a]cademic knowledge helped the government to inscribe the ‘Confucianism’ as the essential ‘nature/truth’ of the Singapore Chinese population. As this truth was to be revitalised through formal education processes, resources were provided by the government to further the investigation and accumulation of knowledge of Confucianism” (Chua & Murdoch University, 1995, p29). Confucianism thus became the technics of the neo-megamachine. The complexity of the logic of this situation may best be summarized by Sommers who states that “Our ignorance of the causes of our volitions leads to the erroneous belief in free will. And the belief in free will leads in turn to the erroneous belief in moral responsibility." Ross (2007, p64) proposes "that a large part of the explanation may be the other way around: the belief in robust moral responsibility leads to the belief in free will". Indeed, this belief, built upon beliefs in meritocracy, freedom and equality, is essential in maintaining cybernetic 86 control, also in Singapore. Stivers (2008a, p371), continues his demystification by stating that: [e]quality today is about the deification of power, the worship of power. We want to believe that equality represents the political power of the group, whereas power lies in the technological system. Certain groups and individuals temporarily benefit more from the advance of technology, but power has become abstract and as such is centered in the technological system. We are all equal in our inequality next to technology. Freedom has suffered a similar fate as its reality encompasses forced consumerism, legal or bureaucratic process, and technological necessity. The reversal of meaning of freedom and equality in a technological civilization reveals what lay hidden beneath the surface all along—equality without individual freedom is only another form of tyranny. It is thus unsurprising that meritocracy in such a civilization manifests itself, Tan (2008) argues, as inequality and one which adds to this particular form of tyranny as argued by Stivers (2008a) in the Singapore context. This is because its postcolonial situation was one in which people were recognised as its only resource which became the focus of social engineering and other forms of “technics”. The complicity of this only resource was thus crucial to the development of the neomegamachine which was equated with the success of Singapore and thus the PAPstate (Tremewan, 1994) and ergo the project of cybernetic state education to produce hyper-humans. Procedural signification used for cybernetic education is facilitated through the abundance of simulacra and simulations which make up the system of objects in education, discussed in the previous chapter. Simulacra and simulation are in turn reinforced by the profusion of models for which Baudrillard (1998, p27) who states that “today a kind of fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and abundance, constituted by the multiplication of objects, services and material goods, and this represents a fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species.” Baudrillard uses the term “precession” to describe the general slow changes in the orientation and effect of simulacra through each successive introduction of new models. Such a precession inexorably alters sense ratios and patterns of perception as McLuhan argues. Indeed this mutation has been towards the creation of the hyper human – a species of human evolved to the habitat of saturated simulacra and simulation, of models in excess and of hyperreality. 87 However, in order to complete this mutation a cyborganic adaptation to technology is also required, one which instantiates, or intensifies instantaneously, consciousness access to the ecology of technology, the global cybernetic network of the neo-megamachine. Paralleling these processes have been the profusion of the model in the landscape of physical reality, where reality is now converted to that of the model, just as the Singapore Education Journey is the model of reality, so too are the rows of HDB flats and residential estates all mimicking the same model of existential development built around economic principles of efficiency, calculability and predictability, a landscape which contributes to further dehumanisation of the hyper-human. The landscape of the hyper human cyborg is thus one of the model. Haraway describes a cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world changing fiction” (Haraway, 2000, p291). Yet this is a fiction which is no less intense than the profusion of models, of simulacra and simulations. It is therefore useful here to review the relevant portions of Haraway’s “chart of transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks” (Ibid, p300) she calls the “informatics of domination” (Ibid) [see table 3 below]: 88 Representation Simulation Bourgeois novel, realism Science Fiction, postmodernism Organism Biotic component Biology and clinical practice Biology as inscription Physiology Communications engineering Small group Subsystem Perfection Optimization Eugenics Population Control Decadence Obsolescence Organic Division of Labour Ergonomics/cybernetics of labour Functional specialization Modular construction Reproduction Replication Scientific management in home / factory Education Global factory / electronic cottage School Site of production-consumption Public / Private Cyborg citizenship Nature / culture Fields of difference Cooperation Communications enhancement Mind Artificial intelligence White capitalist patriarchy Informatics of domination Functional Preparation / Cyborg Procedural Signification Table 3: Features of the Transition from the old hierarchical dominations to the new informatics of domination (adapted from Haraway, 2000). The cyborg is thus a result of the “informationalization of life” in terms used by Scott Lash (2002, p176). This informationalization has, as Mark Slouka argues, 89 made us comfortable with unreality through acceleration. “Walking across a landscape at six miles an hour, we experience the particular reality of place: its smells, sounds, colours, textures, and so on. Driving at seventy miles an hour, the experience is very different. The car isolates us, distances us; the world beyond the windshield … seems vaguely unreal. At supersonic speeds, the divorce is complete. A landscape at 30,000 feet is an abstraction, as unlike real life as a painting” (Slouka, 1995, p3). As Lash (2002, p176) points out, such technology “includes the movement of symbols along with people that we understand as transport” and so technology “becomes something that enters into our forms of life. Communication at a distance, and culture at a distance involve the pervasion of technological forms of life” (2002, p176). Thus the masterplans for ICT in education (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2010f) serve to reinforce the role of education in the informatics of domination through emphasis on networks, virtuality and hyperreality. Communications Technology at once replaces reality with an accelerated reality which contains the cultural system of objects and the Baudrillardian simulacra and simulations of the original also accelerated to the pace of the machine for consumption at the pace of hyper-acceleration, “an unreality we’ve grown used to” (Slouka, 1995, p3), as Slouka continues “[t]he world rendered as pure information not only fascinates our eyes and minds, it captures our hearts. We feel augmented and empowered. Our hearts beat in the machines. This is the Eros” (Slouka, p30). The capitalist project thus thrives on this immersive constant sensuousness and stimulation applied through the technology of the neomegamachine. For, it too contributes through the networking of information and the abundance of signs it brings, providing ecstasy with global command and control. Hyperreality is the space of euphoric and unrestrained hypercapitalism. Thus if we were to attempt to list the characteristics of hyperspace or the space of hyperreality, it would contain the following features (see table 4 below): 90 Cyberspace, virtuality Acceleration Networked Stimulation, Eros Consumption Abundance of Objects Irrelevance of the Real Sign, Simulacra, Simulation Infinity, Timeless Space Table 4: Characteristics of Hyperspace (adapted from Slouka, 1995 and Lash, 2002). The informatics of domination therefore serves to maintain and forward the hypercapitalist agenda through intensification of cybernetic control achieved subtly with the Eros of hyperspace. The valorization of the social reproduction of labour through the system of objects in education is achieved through some of the trends in education identified by Haraway (2000, p308) such as the [d]eepening coupling of high-tech capital needs and public education at all levels; differentiated by race, class, and gender; education for mass ignorance and repression in technocratic and militarized culture; growing industrial direction of education (especially higher education) by sciencebased multinationals (particularly in electronics- and biotechnologydependent companies) and; highly educated, numerous elites in a progressively bimodal society. Furthermore, the system of education is unlike any other system of production. It is one in which the labour-process of the teachers comprises the work of exertion of cybernetic control and procedural signification that produces UVs embodied in the cybernetic units as output, the future cognitariat which exceed the abilities of the teachers, as evidenced by the irony that digital natives receive programming from digital migrants, which contributed to its formation, for which the “abstraction of value begins only in the second stage of exchange value” (Baudrillard & Poster, 1988, p112). The fact that cyborganic units possess 91 qualities which exceed their programmers suggest that some of these qualities must be obtained from their external environment while teachers contribute by facilitating organization of procedural signification processes, hence landscape plays an important role in their formation. Deconstructing the Human and Reconstructing the Cyborg The hyper human, so termed by myself because of the accelerated state of reality and action realized through advanced ICTs and immersion in simulacra through New Media, is a hybrid being comprised of the organic and the inorganic – a cyborg. The ubiquity of New Media Technologies offers the means of objectifying the Kantian transcendental being and reducing the organic consciousness to machine predictable and wholly consumable bits and bytes as made possible by the multiple drafts theory of consciousness (Dennet, 1991), for what is not reducible remains irrelevant to hyperlife and its economy. This logic must be hard encoded by years of programming to ensure development of the “ego consumans” (Baudrillard, 1988, p57) on the one hand and what I call the homo machina on the other. Baudrillard uses the term “ego consumans” to describe the contradictory individualizing yet collective desire and need to acquire and consume objects as an integral aspect of each person in consumer society. I use the term homo machina to refer to the cyborg organism which by nature is coded to hyperspace through the procedural signification processes of cybernetic education. The challenge of cybernetic reproduction is thus to accelerate young humans to the necessary hyperspatial realm of hyperreality existence. Knowledge, skill, and cybernetic subjugation are the doctrines of assimilation. Successful assimilation of these imperatives required deconstruction of the human and this was facilitated by cyberspace for there the reality of your own experience would change depending on which part of yourself you decided to admit to, and which you suppressed; each time you took on another persona on a computer network (or pretended you were another sex), the cyberspace world would adjust accordingly, proving that just as there is no core self, neither is there an objective reality outside the individual mind (Slouka, 1995, p36). Procedural signification thus emphasized the continued suppression of those aspects of self irrelevant to the hypercapitalist regime of accumulation and mode 92 of production. This is combined with the purposeful manipulation of hyperreality to equate with reality in order to shape cyborganic experience resulting in ultimate subjugation to neo-megamachine cybernetic control. The interplay of learned procedures in edifices of maturation and persistent exposure to the precession of signs in advertising and mass media completes the young cyborg’s indoctrination to procedural signification, overwriting the organic with the programming of productive capitalism on the one hand and the logic of consumption on the other resulting in the ultimate marriage of homo machina and ego consumans – the machina consumans as the organic and ego become machinated. The overwhelming success of this process of procedural signification maybe observed in the symptoms of consumption-in-excess, such as obesity, the commodity fetishism of food which is rampant throughout the elitist consumer societies of the globe. Among immature machina consumans, this is hardly surprising given that programming for machina self-maintenance inputs at a slower rate than that of the ego consumans which is reinforced by the consumption patterns of society and guardians. Cyborg reproduction is thus governed by the logic of machina consumans – performance driven coupled with luxury consumption. One side effect of this logic has been a sharp decline in Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in hypercapitalist countries with Singapore’s standing at 1.16 on 21st Jan 2011. Delayed organic reproduction, inability or undesirability thereof may represent the failure of the organic to keep up with the realities of hypercivilization as life is reduced to the sum total of employment achievement and consumption. However, the avoidance of reproduction may be seen from a consumption perspective. As a consumptive object children lack the novelty that other sorts of consumption bring, perhaps differentiated by gender or outward appearance and other intangibles of ego like personality which are still overshadowed by the excesses possible by typical leisure much less luxury consumption, of for example a trip to a foreign exotic destination, or an indulgence in one of the many abundant simulations like Universal Studios Singapore. Repeated consumption of such, seemingly typical, consumptive experiences entails only the initial minor discomfort of forfeiture of opportunity cost associated but yields instant or near 93 instant satisfaction and gratification. Comparatively, the opportunity cost of children is exponentially greater, not only in capitalistic terms, but in temporal terms as well which in itself is a factor of great import in accelerated hypercivilization. Furthermore, the satisfaction or gratification derived remains unclear and prolonged perhaps over decades with little or no guarantee of any return at all. Perhaps the most important aspect is that the progeny of machina consumans is also more consumer than consumed the higher the class, a truism supported by the increased consumption of various leisure and luxury items associated with economic growth while TFR continues to decline sharply. Perhaps it is not the replacement of a puritan religious-based morality (Debord, 1994, p33) by a hedonistic morality as suggested Baudrillard & Poster (1988), though evidence exists to support this thesis, but rather that the puritan morality of the old has been replaced by an even more intense puritan logic of consumption. For such a logic may be seen as the evolution of the logic of production in which all objects, including the human, are declared what I call “productionis nova” (reconstruct-able objects of production) and thus appropriable for valorization (of cognitive capital) by capital for production. Under the new puritan logic of consumption (consumption itself has become a religion), what I shall term, “consumans novo” (consumer of novelty) provides the meta-framework for social relations of consumption and the question: “How can pleasure be maximised?” becomes the central tenet of society. Therefore, the preponderance of hedonistic morality only serves to reinforce the meta-puritan morality (coupled with the new puritan logic is its parallel morality) of consumption. Coupled with the moral protestant work ethic of production of western Europe shaping homo machina, machina consumans is complete, globalized yet rooted in and popularized by mass consumption culture associated with affluent hypercapitalism. In Singapore, machina consumans manifests itself as the the large increasing mass of middleclasses replete with its own hedonistic version of the Protestant work ethic, epitomised by the Hokkien phrase “ai piah eh niah jia”, roughly translated as “work with all your might to win”. This ethic has been adopted by the SES as illustrated, even if subtly, by plate 8b. 94 Haraway’s (2000) vision of the cyborg utopia parallels a dystopia which resonates with my thesis so far. On the one hand, the emancipating freedoms brought about by the union of machine and organic results in a non-gendered, deep-ecological future of equipresent participation is a world in which the organic has mastered the machine, however not resulting in a slave relationship to the organic but rather manages an uneasy functional partnership that is mutually beneficial, a mutualism arising out of a respectful and authentic, not simulated fear of the power of the machine if unfettered and unrestrained. However, it is the argument here that the present looms towards a future in which the obverse is true as the rhythm of the machine overrides life – resulting in hyperlife, closer to the dystopian future presented in “The Terminator” movies. It is not the machine that adapts but the organic. Consider the irony that advanced education has lengthened maturation while accelerating hypercapitalist relevant performance and achievement – functions that reinforce and promote production and its “mirror of consumption” (Baudrillard & Poster, 1988, Ch4). Before the industrial revolution, adulthood was attained at much younger ages through cultural rites of passage related to the acquisition of essential life survival skills, such as hunting, riding, various home-making tasks and so on. Cyborgs complete maturation much later to acquire the skills necessary to support the neomegamachine(s), its political economy and ultimately its project replete with skills to survive hypercivilization not nature. Education is thus production- consumption. Cybernetic resilience is in itself simulacra resilience bred for one environment – that of hypercapitalist cycles of production and consumption with a rhythm of hyperspace. This continuous “pro-sumption” occurs as lifelong learning in which cyborganic units continuously struggle to remain relevant to maintain their consumptive class and associated consumption patterns. Thus, education is both the site of cyborg production and development of what Baudrillard terms the “ego consumans”. It is thus not possible to conjure an alternative under this regime where even the means of social reproduction is appropriated and complicit in these selfperpetuating cycles. The product of mass public education is thus an object with functional value, its instrumental purpose determined both by level of education 95 attained, field of specialization acquired if any and the quality of that attainment. All of the above are summarized in various recognized certifications – in terms of school affiliation, number of distinctions with the inclusion of those who possess other physical and athletic prowess. Thus, does the cyborganic object obtain exchange value, a concept reinforced through the embrace of the human capital theory, which is indicated by the system of wages with salaries starting at S$2,770 for trainees (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2012) and faster promotions with higher pay for mid-career teachers (Salary.sg, 2007). Likewise, the cyborganic object too has symbolic value, which unlike other objects which gain such value in the system of objects, is imprinted on the cyborganic unit during the processes of procedural signification – the product of an elite school for example symbolizes leadership, intelligence and innovation while the product of a neighbourhood school may symbolize determined obedient productivity, the former representing the cultural and social capital associated with the elite classes. This is a simplification as the actual symbolic value represents a complex interplay of factors unique to each cyborganic object yet the general imprint of mass procedural signification still remains a significant contributing factor. The symbolic value so attained is very close to the manner in which a cyborganic object obtains its sign value in that, its sign value is also imprinted during the processes of procedural signification – elite products may thus signify prestige, status and class disposition. In the case of the educational sub-system at least, the latter two values may be disrupted by the former two and vice versa, as recent cases, which received some media attention in Singapore, of fraudulent certificates and fraudulent credentials have shown. As of 15 September 2011, 18 Chinese nationals were jailed because they used fake degrees (Faris Mokhtar, 2011). As the previous chapter has argued, the educational system is a simulacrum of the model with the simulation being the notion that all objects achieve equality of attainment through the system, an illusion propagated by the concept of equality of access in which equality of access itself is an assumption predicated upon other equalities in terms of cultural, economic and social capital. The cyborganic models being produced in the mass factory-processes of the schools mimic the unending reproducibility of a Toyota production line with continuous 96 improvements through Quality Circles (QCs), Work Improvement Teams (WITs) and the like counterparts in education. The model itself has been reproduced through several iterations of incremental improvements, ensuring continuous “innovation” and novelty. Everything is thus always instantly reproducible. The illusion is therefore maintained that it is possible for all cyborganic objects to attain equal functional values. The pace of hypercapitalism reinforces the dominance, pervasion and persistence of the model for its strategic value, for change might disrupt the continuity of reproducibility of the cyborganic object. Education is the complicit crucible praxis of this production, commodification and consumption. The time spent in education is the space in which cybernetic acquisition prepares young cyborgs for technocratic ascension, dependent upon the success of the accepted programming captured in digital portfolios and certifications of achievement. The future is thus summoned to the present in this repeated process of instantiation, a process through which young cyborgs are indoctrinated with the mantra that future success is predicated upon present complicity and obedience, for each cohort of cyborgs. This pervasion and persistence of the model thus maintains the irrelevance of the real – only the relevance of hypercapitalist hyperreality remains. Life becomes a swirl of achievement orientated activities such as make-up classes, enrichment classes, revision classes, approved Co-curricula activities and tuition in an attempt to comply with the capitalist project of “being ready for the challenges of the 21st century” (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2010c). Indeed, Tremewan (1994) argued that the elite class ensured the maintenance of its own position through the determination of the machinations of the means of social reproduction. The “PAP-State government” as Tremewan (1994) defines, with its close links to transnational capital, thus represents one form of the neomegamachine which has developed an education system for the deconstruction of human beings and their reconstruction as cyborganic units. “[C]apitalism which demands that schools prepare a loyal, docile, disciplined workforce for society, is seen as a societal force behind the ‘coercion’ in classrooms” (Ballantine, 1997, p211). Furthermore, power influences how ‘cultural capital’ is transmitted and reproduced. Teachers control the use of space and time, initiate interactions, and define 97 the rules. Thus the routines and rituals of schools represent the dominant value system that the schools are passing to young people. Those who are successfully selected, classified and evaluated in school are likely to be successful in society as adults. Schools alone do not determine their own internal power structure or their unequal outcomes … [but must be viewed] within the larger societal context of social class, ideological, and material forces (Ballantine, 1997, p211). While Wiener’s theory of cybernetic control provides a blueprint and mathematical proof for the use of human beings, despite Wiener’s own objections to such a use, through the use of language and communications (Wiener, 1950) reveals the human susceptibility to such manipulation, it is the concepts of McLuhan and Thoreau which provides the connection with communications, technology and cyborganic development. Firstly, McLuhan’s concept that the “medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1987) suggests the human susceptibility to influence, as medium influences perception of the message, by the medium because of the symbiotic relationship between message and medium, further supporting Wiener’s theory of cybernetic control. The medium thus affects society and through this affect, may be used for control as “a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence” (McLuhan, 1987, p8). Indeed, McLuhan’s conceptualization of medium to include any object with social effect may be fortuitously applied to New Media with its enhanced interactivity and visceral engagement which likely enhances this human susceptibility. Secondly, Thoreau’s famous pronouncement that: “we have become the tools of our tools” (Thoreau, 2003, p33) suggest that human beings have been reduced to instruments of our own instrumentalities. What more is a cyborg, if not a glorified tool of hypercapitalist productivity? The Cyborganic Tool The cyborganic object is no mere tool. Like McLuhan’s light bulb, it is a medium which has social effect but that effect extends into the cybernetic realm of networked virtualities. “We shape our tools and our tools shape us (McLuhan’s Wake, documentary, 2002).” Indeed the cyborganic tool arguably exerts much greater power to shape society than previous analogue forms. Yet with this tremendous increase in the power to shape the environment, the cyborganic object remains akin to McLuhan’s light bulb, a medium, but unlike the light bulb 98 contains content, but a content that, too, has be appropriated by another tool, which has been accelerated along with the continuous inexorable development of the cyborganic object – capitalism. For capitalism is, in its most basic purpose, a tool governing the exchange of materials and services, and as we “shape” this tool to serve us better, it has shaped us, in the ways in which human beings have reconstructed social reproduction and education to be complicit with the needs of the tool of capitalism. In becoming more like the machines they used and in seeking ever more material consumption just as the machine consumes resources in resonance with consumer society where simulacrum pervades and dominates where the referent of inner organic life is no more where the finely oiled machinery turns with every cog. A fortuitous example of the pre-eminence of simulacrum in Singapore education may be found in a letter written to Today newspaper dated May 24th 2011, by an author claiming to be primary school teacher with 40 years of service in MOE. The author writes: [A]ny visit to a school by a Ministry of Education (MOE) official … was almost always an exercise in putting up a show to impress the VIPs. … A sprucing up of the physical environment would precede the visit. Some schools even engaged contractors to paint, wash and tidy up the entire school. The moment a school was notified … no time was wasted in getting the school ready … A few chosen classes were put through mandatory rehearsals to refine and perfect the lesson(s) which the VIP and his/her entourage would sit in and observe. The school executive committee worked at a frenzy to fine-tune its presentation with masterfully chosen slides … The hoi polloi of the teaching staff were often excluded from the high-profile visit [and] … did not get a chance to meet the minister and his team, to provide the visitors useful information or critical feedback concerning slow and disadvantaged learners and about the flaws in professional and ranking issues that had caused unease in not only a few teachers. It was apparently better to avoid upsetting the minister and other MOE officials by leaving out teachers who would speak their mind without fear or favour. Indeed the VIPs usually left satisfied that all was cozy in the school (Ho Kong Loon, 2011). Assuming that this letter is an accurate factual recount of actual events, and finding resonance in my own direct experience, we may conclude that this letter represents evidence that agency still exists in the consumer society despite Baudrillard’s somewhat absolutist fatalist position that no agency is possible. It also highlights, however, the pervasion and dominance of simulacrum, at least in 99 the development of the mass yet diffuse cyborg intellectuality. It exemplifies the manner in which the neo-megamachine scaffolds the creation and consumption of simulacrum, though its conscious complicity in the process is debatable, under the illusions of ‘outreach’ or ‘getting to know the ground’. The ire of the author lies in the unravelling of these illusions. Yet the fact that such ‘outbursts’ to the press are sporadic and few and far between at best also lends some weight to Baudrillard’s argument of the disenchantment of the masses. Furthermore, the fact that the author has only written in after 40 years of service suggests that this letter has been written at a point which would not significantly affect the author’s career, given that the article carries the author’s full name, which is likely another significant reason for the lack of such “frank feedback” as the author terms it. The system of objects in education, as discussed in chapter 3, is also revealed as integral to these processes of simulacra and simulation, in maintaining the illusion of physical newness and perfection in accordance with the rule governing the cult of the new in the consumer society. Thus it is in the consumption of the visit by the VIPs which is of paramount importance and like any consumption, the customer must be afforded the best possible experience. Thus the school recognising its position as object in the educational system of objects attempts to enhance its sign value to perfect the consumptive union. Indeed, elements of Debord’s (1994) society of spectacle may be discerned. The visit to the school is less important than the images of Debord’s (1994, p35) “perfection” that are expected by the VIPs, in other words the spectacle generated from viewing the perfected physical environment and observing the perfected classroom teaching and learning episode all of which connote the illusion of continuous perfection – a simulacrum of the highest order. In such a spectacle, genuine human interactions that the author suggests represent a threat to the illusion of perfection and so steps must be made to preserve the simulacrum. Indeed, it is evident that the teachers themselves are subjected to some form of procedural signification in preparation for the visit. The appearance of perfection is thus paramount. It is a wonderful example of commodity fetishism (Debord, 1994, p17), scaffolded by the neo-megamachine, the obsession with the perfected educational object culminating in the perfected cyborganic object, or near as perfect as each individual cyborganic unit may obtain. “All that was once directly 100 lived has become mere representation” (Ibid, p1). This representation is to Baudrillard the elaborate simulacrum obtained through system of objects in consumer society. Indeed, the lamentation of Ho that there was no opportunity to “provide useful information or critical feedback” is consistent with Debord’s (1994, p33) criticisms that the inauthentic environments created by the society of spectacle hinder critical thought, through processes similar to what the author described, leading ultimately to the mortification of knowledge. In the process, past, present and future implode – only the spectacle, authorised and approved exists – the simulation thus instantiates perfection just as the cyborganic object serves as a capsule, imperfect though it may be, for the perfected system of education. It is also possible to apply Veblen’s (1925) theory of conspicuous consumption albeit with some modification to adequately account for the objects of education. According to Veblen’s (1925, p27) theory, conspicuous consumption refers to decisively visible consumption with the purpose of obtaining prestige and status. This explains the consumption authorized by the school, presumably by the principal but most likely with the complicity of the executive committee, described by the author. This consumption takes three forms: firstly, consumption of additional contractor services by the executive committee to spruce-up and beautify the school, consumption of the time and expertise of the executive committee to prepare and rehearse masterful presentations, and finally consumption of the time and effort of the teachers and students in the chosen classes to be observed. This consumption is formally different from the consumption of material objects, for it is the consumption of services which either directly or indirectly enhance the objects of education, which in turn enhance the image and appearance of the school thereby maintaining the simulacrum. The contractors, for example enhance the appearance of the physical environment, while the executive-committee likely enhances the appearance of the programmes of the school and finally, the class to be observed enhances the appearance of the teaching abilities of the teacher and the learning abilities of the students. All of these become objects which represent the larger object of the school. Indeed, the system of objects is made manifest. 101 Such consumption not only represents an attempt to raise the image and appearance of the school and its system of objects – its leaders, teachers and students, it simultaneously generates and maintains the simulacrum of perfection. While such consumption was decidedly not the type of consumption Veblen had in mind, it certainly displays the characteristics that Veblen emphasized when describing his theory. The underlying assumption is that the VIPs are aware to a certain extent that such consumptive preparation occurs before any visit. While it is arguable that such preparations made by schools may be explained by other socio-psychological theories governing social behaviour in organizational settings, it is undeniable that whatever these other explanations may be, the end result is still the generation of simulacrum and indeed that was emphasized by the lament of Ho in that “the visitors usually left satisfied that all was cozy in the school” (Ho Kong Loon, 2011). My purpose here has been to develop an argument for analysing such activities from the perspective of consumption and consumer society in the context of education and in doing so to understand the behaviour and nature of the hyper human cyborg. The Map of the Singapore Education Journey and Baudrillard’s Map The example above describes briefly another aspect of the Singapore Education Journey (SEJ). The SEJ as it is described by the neo-megamachine thus comprises the objects and their consumption, briefly illustrated by the example above. Every object in the educational system of objects thus aligns itself with the model. The example illustrates the nature of the relationship between the model and its implementation, which ensures the maintenance of the illusion of the model. I have used concepts from the theories of Baudrillard’s Consumer Society, Debord’s Society of Spectacle and Veblen’s Conspicuous Consumption to arrive at a holistic analysis of the nature of simulacrum consumption resulting ultimately in the irrelevance of the real. Perhaps that is the crux of the author’s lament in the example analysed in this chapter. But what of the future? What is the direction this is taking in education? The next chapter will conclude this thesis with a speculation on the future. 102 Chapter 5 | Towards Singularity or Apotheosis? Contemporary hypermodern societies like Singapore now stand at a crossroads. Perhaps unrealizing, they have been inching towards the Kurzweilian Singularity as technology progresses and as citizens have defined themselves by such progress. The use of the machine logic of organisation and subjugation predates the digital age, as analysed by Mumford (1934) and other authors. The digital age has entrenched machine logic through the intensification of activities and deepening of the processes of vertical control simultaneously extensifying its geographical scope to encompass the entire globe, made possible through the advent of advanced ICT. Today the neo-megamachine reigns supreme in the form of TNCs and governments, even as Wiener (1950) condemned the potential subjugation of human beings by technology for capital through the use of his cybernetic theory of control facilitating the human use of human beings, like Oppenheimer (the “father of the atomic bomb"), he could not have controlled every aspect of the field he was credited with founding. Through such networks of cybernetic control have the entire globe been subjugated to the dictates of hypercapitaistic endeavour. Human beings, the cognitariat provide the creative energies while working at the hyper-speed of the machine, situated in, yet creating and re-creating the hyperreality of their new cyborganic habitat. All under the panoptic gaze of the neo-megamachine masters through the myriad network connections encircling the globe which mimic the millions of dendritic neural connections in each human brain. Thus, our tools of control have become for us the means by which we are controlled. As Thoreau (2003, p36) observed, “But Lo! Men have become the tools of their tools”. And as we have become more like our tools, everything is made simultaneously available through these same connections. All places, all objects, all cultures seem a click away. The profusion of objects satisfies our consumptive cravings. We too become the tools of other cyborgs and their consumptive pleasure, our very consciousness in bits being consumed through the worldwide web (Graham, 1999). “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us” as McLuhan (1964, p19) lamented. In the network society of the neo-megamachine, simulacra and simulations take precedence and the model is paramount. Simulacra and simulations order life in systematic and predictable simplicity. Like Disneyland 103 or Wonderland, our landscapes a re-modelled after ‘World class’, itself a model among many, with no precise definition. Like McDonald’s, The London Eye, the Singapore flyer, simulated landscapes of the model, ‘world class’ is thus synonymous with the model or possession thereof. The Inverted Human I have argued that the neo-megamachine logic of subjugation pervades the Singapore education system and that as objects entrenched in the system of objects in hypercapitalist Singapore, human-beings are like soulless cogs in the machine or as Baudrillard has described it: “the alienated human being is not merely a being diminished and impoverished but left intact in its essence: it is being turned inside out, changed into something evil, into its own enemy, set against itself” (Baudrillard, 1998, p190). The cyborganic object is thus in Baudrillardian terms an inverted subject, subjugated to be objectified to its former tool, now master – capitalism. Evidence of such inversion and subjugation may be found in the sporadic outcries of the “disenchanted masses”. One example of such an outcry may be found in a recent letter to the “Voices” segment of Today newspaper titled “What comes after capitalism?” In the article, the author comments on the debate regarding the indicator used to determine the success of a nation and states that “We must first decide what kind of society we want Singapore to be before we choose such a tool” (Paul Chain Shau Woo, 2011). The author continues to quote Robert Skidelsky regarding socialism: “It will inherit the earth not by dispossessing the rich of their property, but by providing motives and incentives for behaviour that are unconnected with the further accumulation of wealth.” The author ends his letter by asking: “Where is our Government leading us? … [and] what sort of ‘post-capitalist’ society does the Government want to build for Singapore?” (Ibid) The letter provides evidence that the masses are not all as anaesthesised by consumer society into alienated submission as argued by Baudrillard, for where there is one voice, perhaps many more have yet to realize their resistance. In this consumer society, inextricably complicit with hypercapitalism, social reproduction too must function to ensure the next generation of complicit human instrumentality. While physical merger between technology and the organic is 104 presently in its infancy, the mental and psychological merger has had decades of development through processes of distributed cognition which have only recently been studied by Hutchins, Clark and others have demonstrated how man has become more reliant on external instrumentalities. The occurrence of the Kurzweilian (2005) Singularity, given the complicity of said technologies with hypercapitalism and what Haraway (2000, p300) terms the “informatics of domination”, may be seen as the culmination of the capitalist project which began in the pre-industrial era and now continues at an accelerated rate through hypercapitalism, a rate that increases with each generation as the means of social reproduction is co-opted to produce the next generation ever more effective and efficient cyborgs. Tools of Tools Collectively, these means by which humans become the tools of their tools have been termed 21st century skills and have been determined by the neomegamachine to be crucial for the further capitalist development and so have become educational priorities throughout advanced capitalist economies. “Singapore aims to be a global media city with the Interactive and Digital Media (IDM) sector as a key driver” (National Research Foundation). In the SES, these imperatives have been implemented through three successive masterplans for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education – mp1 (1997 – 2002), then mp2 (2003 – 2008), followed by mp3 (started 2009 and still ongoing). The goals of each masterplan may be summarised in table 5 below. The main purpose of mp1 was to develop the basic public education-dedicated ICT infrastructure and ensure that teachers had basic word-processing and presentation related ICT skills. mp2 focused on the use of ICT by teachers and students through decentralization of funding while mp3 seeks to “transform the learning environments” (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2010d) of schools in Singapore. No less than 19 projects have been commissioned under mp3 (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2010e) [see Appendix 1 for a complete listing as of 25 Mar, 2011]. Although the purpose of all the masterplans has been to increase the use of technology in education, I will focus on the third masterplan which aims to intensify technology use. In particular, I will focus on two mp3 projects – 105 baseline ICT standards for all schools from primary to junior college level, and Future Schools@Singapore (FS@SG). Baseline ICT standards is of particular significance because of the scope of its implementation to include all subjects for all schools excluding tertiary institutions, while FS@SG are presently test-beds which represent the potential ICT models on which other schools in Singapore will eventually be based. mp1 Enhance linkages between the school and the world around it mp2 Students use ICT effectively for active learning Generate innovative processes in education Connections between curriculum, instruction and assessment are enhanced using ICT Enhance creative thinking, lifelong learning and social Teachers use ICT responsibility effectively for professional and personal growth Promote administrative and management Schools have the capacity excellence in the education and capability in using ICT system for school improvement There is active research in ICT in education There is an infrastructure that supports widespread and effective use of ICT mp3 Students develop competencies for selfdirected use of ICT as well as become discerning and responsible ICT users School leaders provide the direction and create the conditions to harness ICT for learning and teaching Teachers have the capacity to plan and deliver ICTenriched learning experiences for students to become self-directed and collaborative learners, as well as nurture students to become discerning and responsible ICT users ICT infrastructure supports learning anytime, anywhere Table 5: Summary of Singapore’s Masterplans for ICT in education (adapted from Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2010f, 2010g and 2010h). Baseline ICT Standards The primacy of technology in the learning process has been institutionalized through the form of Baseline ICT Standards (BICTS) which have been compulsorily implemented in all schools since 2007 (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2007b) [see appendix 2]. These standards have been described as defining “the basic level of knowledge, skills and values that Singapore pupils 106 need in order to fully benefit from a curriculum enriched with ICT, and eventually thrive in a technology-driven society” (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2010e) [Italicized, my emphasis]. This technology-driven society of hypercapitalism uses cyborganic beings as its tool for the processes of consumption creation through procedural signification of the values of technology. Education, the means by which social reproduction is co-opted and made complicit with capitalism, is thus a sub-system in the larger system of objects. BICTS are one component under the SEJ examined in Chapter 3. BICTS is critical for sustaining the political economy in Singapore as it has twofold significance. Firstly, by guaranteeing the valorization of labour in the use of basic ICT, the neo-megamachine is able to develop cyborganic capital which in turn can be harnessed as cognitariat for the hypercapitalist economy, thereby legitimising the neo-megamachine in the ideology of its relevance to the global hypercapitalist project. Secondly, and related to the first point, the neo-megamachine is able to further reify the meritocratic process with the introduction of ICT as another “great leveller” mythologizing the enhancement of learning with pronouncements of catering to the digital natives, thereby covering other impediments to such enhancement such as lack of economic or cultural capital. The BICTS ensures basic cyborganic interface is possible by primary school level and increases the centrality of cybernetics in all primary and secondary schools nationwide. At the completion of the primary school level, cyborgs will be able to operate computers and applications, use the internet to communicate and search for information, create documents with word processors, use spreadsheets, create presentations with multimedia and “collect data using ICT tools”. By the end of the secondary school level, cyborgs will developed more advanced skills in the abovementioned areas including the integration of digital media from various sources (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2007b). BICTS is also aligned with the acquisition of ethical and legal values in the use of ICT, what MOE has termed “cyberwellness” to mandate self-sustainability and legal compliance. Indeed BICTS has prompted some schools such as Crescent Girls’ School to make the use of tablet PCs for lessons and homework compulsory despite the cost to the students who have to pay substantially for them even after receiving discounts. BICTS is indeed a far-reaching project and represents a nationwide attempt to 107 develop a fundamental cyborganic culture in the SEJ, but an even deeper cybernetic relationship is envisioned, to be created with the aid of local and transnational corporate capital. This is the goal of the FS@SG project. FS@SG The FS@SG project aims to develop new and futuristic ICT applications for teaching and learning in Singapore in collaboration with industry partners due to the costs involved. According to a news report, for example, the installation of a wireless network in Canberra Primary School would cost around $150,000 (Wong Mun Wai, 2007). Table 6 below summarizes the ICT focus for each school in the FS@SG project. School Beacon Primary ICT Foci Podcasting and peer-review, Video Production Studio, Co-writing, parental monitoring and tracking online Canberra Primary Solving puzzles on touchscreen and mobile devices Crescent (CGS) Hwa (HCI) Girls’ Chong Jurong Secondary School Immersive Virtual Reality, Learning profile portal and resource matching, expert discussion online Institute Global classroom involving virtual mentorship schemes and digital access to overseas library collections Mobile learning with tablet PCs Table 6 – Summary of Future Schools and their ICT Foci (adapted from Gracia Chiang, 2007 and Wong Mun Wai, 2007). These schools will likely become models for other schools to emulate and the new School of Science and Technology will also be joining this group. The range of ICTs under development in the schools listed above cover the gamut of technologies and suggest that, if this is a glimpse of learning to come, technology will soon become indispensable in the classroom. Clarke’s pronouncement that we are “natural born cyborgs” is becoming a reality. But as we “progress” towards closer and closer “relationships” with our technology, what of the relationships with the real, the natural and the organic? Would we want to visit the real nature reserve if we can just flick a button and enter the virtual one? 108 This reduction of the real to convenient virtual bytes causes a de-resolution of the real and intensifies hyperreality for reality is now experienced through a technological lens. The real, natural and organic take a back seat for we have placed the cybernetic in the position of predominance. While a true cyborganic being requires both its cybernetic and organic components to survive, the technological becomes the lens through which life is experienced, which becomes the hyperreality of the global classroom, the constancy of being monitored by an omnipresent big brother vis-à-vis parents, teachers and even peers. FS@SG will undoubtedly intensify cyborganic culture and along with it, the issues and concerns raised by the author of the letter above, namely the obsession with grades and success brought about by omnipresent monitoring and comparisons and the reduction of value to the quantifiable. Interestingly, there seems to be an underlying assumption that the implementation of such technology would be beneficial to all learners equally whatever the foci chosen. This is another way in which such technology reifies success in the sense that once implemented, the technology is assumed to be equally successful and equally beneficient to all. What would happen if a CGS student, for example, was found to benefit more from mentorship that virtual reality? Would that student have access to HCI’s resources? Or is it likely that in the future, would all schools have all these technologies? Once implemented, technology has a way of dictating direction and environment. What then is the tool? The tool which decides what uses it or the tool which uses it? Let us now recall Clark who argues that the “mind is a leaky organ” (Clark, 2001, p17), always “shamelessly” mingling with the world outside. Hutchins has examined how this is accomplished through distributed cognition with the example of how the mind is distributed to various components of the aircraft cockpit simultaneously working in tandem to land an aircraft. The pilot remains in control but is dependent on those external machines to land the craft. In essence the pilot is a cyborg, comprised of a complicit organic component dependent to a great extent on the inorganic components of the cockpit navigational instruments which lead the way, telling the pilot what actions to take next through the information displayed. Returning to education, the erstwhile learner is like unto the pilot and the technology implemented in the school like 109 unto the cockpit, the main difference being that the pilot is an “expert” who knows how to fly a plane, while the learner analogous to a novice. In which case, if the technology is a plane, does the novice fly the plane or does the plane fly the novice? What type of Singularity? BICTS, FS@SG and the other projects represent the culmination of the three successive masterplans and encapsulate the processes of indoctrination of procedural signification central to cybernetic social reproduction. These processes are crucial to developing acceptance of future singularity in whatever form, be it through organic-inorganic merger or the digitisation of consciousness and its transfer into inorganic vessels. This thesis has argued that digitisation and transference of consciousness into inorganic vessels already occurs even if in somewhat infantile and primitive fashion. My argument here is that the products of procedural signification today are the proto-organisms heralding the inevitable singularity event. According to the current discourse, while the exact form of post-singularity life is debatable (this could occur through one of 4 means, either a physical merger, a transference of consciousness to machine bodies, a digitisation of consciousness and downloading to the network or sentient machine life), a rupture in the present mode of existence representing a discontinuity from the existential or even essential realms of either the modern or the post-modern would occur. Yet this technologically deterministic prediction (I emphasize that this vision of lifeform development premised upon the “evolution” of the inorganic is fundamentally flawed in its Kurzweilian assumption of continued human agency) is not without its politics, as Haraway (2000) argued, but rather, and this is my emphasis throughout this thesis, is complicit with global hypercapitalism. The assumption that any organic merger with technology resulting in speciation that would be a rupture from its proto-genetic heritage, would be a supposition at best. The politics of technology and its complicity, the DNA of any technological merger, will continue to determine the mutative trajectory of any speciation. The development of any new cyborganic species, replete with codes of consumption and procedural signification and its associated hierarchy of needs and wants, which is superior to any existing species, would compete for dominance, 110 eventually replacing the old as the Neanderthal was replaced by Homo Sapien, so too would Cybo Superior replace Homo Sapien. If planetary evolution has taught us anything, it is that there can be only one dominant species on the planet. With the ascension of the cyborganic species, the subjugation of the organic to the machine as argued by Marcuse and others is all but assured. Given the present grip of hypercapitalism, any singularity event would be a highly selective process, privileging some over others. As Slouka warns “we’d forget that most of the human race was more immediately interested in survival than transcendence; that, as we spent more and more of our time fulfilling ourselves … that, as we wandered through virtual forests, real ones burned” (Slouka, 1995, p38). Falling towards Apotheosis? At the ideological level, mass public education, as technics, serves to pacify the masses through indoctrination into acceptance of the processes and procedures of selective meritocratic attainment determined by the elite classes. The technics encode the acceptance of the duality of recognising oneself as exploitable ranked resource on one hand, while obtaining the contrasting concepts of freedom and equality on the other. The various cybernetic processes implemented through the curriculum and in the classroom only serve to reinforce the cybernetic control exerted on each cyborganic unit and extend the tyranny of the classroom beyond the confines of the school. While this thesis focuses on societies governed by megamachines that are complicit with hypercapitalism, it is worth exploring further the nature of the cyborg in alternative societies where the megamachine is not complicit with capitalism. Although there is room in theoretical discourse for such alternative societies to exist, it is worth studying whether they really do and in what form. The findings from such research may contribute to the understanding of humanity today as a continuum of cyborganic singularity. Education may in turn be examined as functioning at different levels of complicity within this continuum. Even as we consider the degree to which education seems inextricably complicit with the global hypercapitalist project in capitalist economies, perhaps the 111 fundamental question remains as to whether this complicity may be avoided. And then, even if this avoidance is theoretically possible, it is debatable whether limits should be placed on the degree of complicity education should have to the global hypercapitalist project. Such an understanding will allow academia to assess whether Singaporean and other societies are able to avoid the eventual Baudrillardian (1998) disenchantment of the masses. According to Baudrillard (1998, p191), “the age of consumption, being the historical culmination of the whole process of accelerated productivity under the sign of capital, is also the age of radical alienation.” Already, this sense has manifested itself in Singapore through what Rachel Chang (2011) has termed a “[p]alpable sense of loss of identity” among Singaporeans. Yet despite these signs of disenchantment, futurists like Kurzweil (2005) claim that man’s ultimate merger with technology would lead human beings into a new era of unprecedented human achievement and freedom. Processes of hypercapitalism are inextricably embedded in the places in which they unfold. Hence the impacts of hypercapitalism will be mediated by a complexity of forces including that of education emanating from the local society, producing distinct outcomes resulting in a variety of cyborganic possibilities. We could examine the relevance of Baudrillard’s (1973, p90) “Mirror of Production” in which he argues that people are “alienated as labour” instead of the traditional Marxian argument that people are alienated because they sell their labour. This shift in focus has intense ramifications for educators as education is a critical formative period of socialisation for work. Tremewan (1994) has termed this “educating for submission” but I have used the term “procedural signification” in this thesis to emphasize the robotic nature of cyborganic development while simultaneously hinting at its dehumanising aspects. We could also examine how the acceleration of life facilitates this process of dehumanisation through the work of authors such as Virilio. Any study of this process of gradual dehumanisation (or cyborgification in cybernetic education) must also be contextualised within consumer society, recognising that the process is embedded within the signs and codes connecting education with hypercapitalism and the illusions that these connections perpetuate and signify. Education as exemplified in this thesis may 112 be examined as a technological tool which facilitates the manipulation of labour through cyborganic reproduction for the global hypercapitalist neo-megamachine. 113 Bibliography Annonymous Blogger. (2009, December 20). Heritage Trail@Queenstown – a true pioneer in many senses. Singapore: Weblog. Retrieved 11 Mar, 2010 from the World Wide Web: http://mybusybodycorner.blogspot.com/2009/12/heritagetrail-queenstown-true-pioneer.html. Arato, A. & Gebhardt, E. (1978). 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(2010e). edumall 2.0 The ICT Connection. Singapore: Ministry of Education. Retrieved 25 Mar, 2011from the World Wide Web: http://ictconnection.edumall.sg/cos/o.x?c=/ictconnection/pagetree&func=view&ri d=760 123 Appendix 2 | Baseline ICT standards for Schools in Singapore Ministry of Education, Singapore. (2007b). Baseline ICT Standards for Pupils (Version 4). Singapore: Ministry of Education. Retrieved from 25 Mar, 2011from the World Wide Web: http://ictteachersinqatar.wikispaces.com/file/view/singapore+ICT+Stds.pdf 124 [...]... prevent a possible communist insurgency led by the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and its militant armed wing formed during the occupation, the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) – a group that had been instrumental in resisting the Japanese both in Singapore and Malaysia Use of force and detention without trial were imposed on any and all suspected members of the MCP and MPAJA and their collaborators... the education policy of Raffles maintained this status quo through the formation of the Singapore Institution: 1 To educate the sons of higher order natives and others 2 To afford the means of instruction in the native languages to such of the Company’s servants and others as may desire it 3 To collect the scattered literature and traditions of the country, with whatevernmay illustrate their laws and. .. normal space and at lower rates of activity I use the term hyperspace to emphasize the aspect of acceleration brought about by the time-space compression of such networks Hyperspace is a facsimile of space(s) and contains facsimiles of spaces In this, sense it is a space of simulacra and of simulation Hyperspace is the space within which simulacra and simulations are created, multiplied and disseminated... thus the combined rhythm (the regular occurrence of events) of hyperspace and normal space For each unit of hyperlife, the specific rhythm is the confluence of the global neo-megamachines that dominate it and the intersection of the rhythms of the organic The primacy of hyperspatial rhythm occludes that of normal space and the organic In the age of hyperreality with the pervasiveness of simulacra, it... This marked the beginnings of the megamachine in Singapore Raffles sought to establish a British presence on Singapore in favour of the British East India Company (EIC), a machination of the colonial megamachine – programmed with the single-minded purpose of colonising “lesser” geographical areas for the extraction and repatriation of raw materials, precious stones and other items of value back to the. .. sent and action demanded immediately at intervals that are out of sync with either the rhythms of normal space or of the organic A concrete example of this is the director of an organisation sending an email to an employee demanding a reply at 3 am local time This rhythm logic is consistent with the rhythm logic of hyperspace and that of the neo-megamachine but totally inconsistent with that of normal... education had little significance Some of these elite would later return to leadership of the fledging local-based megamachine Thus did the colonial megamachine form the basis of education as a tool to meet its purposes for capitalist subsumption of labour Tables 1 and 2 on the next two pages provide a general idea of the state of education in this period and are not meant for detailed comparison The. .. 1934) of science and technology (Ibid, p294) Apart from the irrelevance of the organic and the control of the neo-megamachine, complicity in this ultimate 19 process of what I call procedural signification, or as Baudrillard argues, the mental indoctrination of the masses to a planned calculus and a ‘basic’ capitalist investment and behaviour” (Baudrillard, 1988, p53), has been secured through the hyperspatial... renamed the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) The British response was swift and fierce, imposing anti-guerilla warfare, resettling thousands of Chinese squatters, strafing villages and even torturing prisoners (Tremewan, 1994, p16) The importance of Singapore and Malaya, relating the global interests of the neotechnic colonial megamachine was clear from the “ferocity of the British military response”,... age is thus dominated by the confluence of simulacra, technology and money through megamachines exert capitalistic control The pace of human life has accelerated, aided by the automation brought about by the micromachines in hyperspace and the dominating structures of megamachines One manifestation of this acceleration takes the form of multitasking, which is the compression of increasing amounts of ... that Haraway’s (2000) metaphor may be closer to reality than most of us realize and that this is evident in the case of the Singapore education landscape Cognitive scientists have made great... subjugation and expropriation of life Beginning with the subjugation and appropriation of plants and animals, the objectification of life has increased in rapidity under the puritanical advanced... execution of the megamachine The status of Singapore was maintained as that of a vassal, providing profit for the colonial megamachine with few if any of the benefits described by Mumford, such as the