Singapore,the state,and decolonial spatiality

Absence, provocation, and resonance

Speaking to an international audience of graduate students at the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Graduate Conference held in Singapore in July 2013, Chua Beng Huat highlighted three concepts that he thought were critical for cultural studies to achieve greater methodological rigor. The concepts were absence, provocation, and resonance. While they have been deployed to mine insights, Chua argued, they have not been defined in a significant way to open up the field with fresh research questions and theoretical problems.

Coming from the doyen of cultural studies in Asia and one of the foremost political sociologists of his generation, whose interpretation of Asian politics has been very influential, the students were fixated. Chua exploited the case of Singapore to illustrate his point. The absence of corruption in Singapore, due to the unforgiving anti-corruption code adopted by the long-ruling party, poses a simple question of why and how such a code could have been adopted for so long when corruption is endemic and rife in Asia. The material success of Singapore, not least in combining economic liberalism with political conservatism, is a provocation to visitors to the city, phenomenologically, if not ideologically. But why should it be? In its export to the rest of Asia thus, the Singapore model has a wide, and perhaps deep, resonance with policy makers. What does this tell us about Asia in this historical juncture of capitalist globalization?

As I listened to Chua, who has been my intellectual mentor and teacher, a wave of discomfort washed across me. It was a familiar feeling and something that I have written about (see Goh, 2012) and thought of as postcolonial discomfort—that awkward and anxious feeling of inhabiting the same hybrid political–cultural space in and from which the ruling elites of Singapore pronounce their paternalistic Asian benevolence, in English. It was a discomfort that Chua first raised in an article on the resurrection of the social in Asian values discourse, which I then took as the backlight to locate and disavow the anxieties that prop up Asian values as a discourse.

Yet, largely because of my recent encounters with Walter Mignolo’s (2011) decolonial project and Kuan-Hsing Chen’s (2010) deimperialization project, I now doubt the déjà vu recurrence of discomfort should have a postcolonial valence. The more I reflect on them, the more Chua’s methodological invocations are opening up pinholes of insight into the colonial constitution of the political–cultural space in which we must construct our theoretical problems and research questions, trapping us in an epistemic feedback loop of memory, amnesia, and desire.

I would almost say that it is a pipedream for us to think we can take and work through the colonial categories of our knowledge, as though our political agency could be detached from these categories, like frustrated workmen with legacy tools and means of production they do not own, using them to work to transcend the conditions of production. “Almost,” because the tools are still there and it is not as though we have the luxury of stopping work completely. I am beginning to think that the intellectual equivalent of strategic strike action needs to be imagined, conceptualized and practiced. But first, we have to recognize our epistemic blind spot that is the state and we need to work that out.

Epistemic blind spot and the secrets of sociality

The one notable thing about Chua’s invocation of the three concepts is how the state is centrally implicated in all of them, threading through the examples of absence, provocation, and resonance as the political unconscious making Singapore desirable. I have been sensitized by my own work focused on unraveling the history of state formation in Southeast Asia, beginning in the late colonial past. Specifically, I have been interested in how the state knows the subjects it has to rule, rather than simply how the state sees or acts in the imagination of the nation.

Yet, I am feeling rather unsatisfied with the question. The state is neither an object of analysis nor agent of history. It would be even more ridiculous to give it the status of a knowing subject. There is something to Hegel’s philosophy of the state as the ultimate and sovereign objectification of the rational categories of thought, which in themselves are sufficient to capture the knowledge of reality, unfolding in history. The state is knowledge.

The overwhelming majority of the questions raised by the graduate students to Chua’s speech concerned the pragmatics of research, thesis writing and professional development. There was one question, however, that asked how should one treat the three concepts when studying the history of Islamic thought and its response to colonialism and modernity in Southeast Asia and beyond. The question is pertinent because it raises others. Could Islamic thought respond to the colonial state without already itself, as “Islamic thought,” being known and constructed as such by the state? Could Islamic thought respond to modernity without recourse to the self-knowing categories of the colonial state? Could we, scholars in the present, know Islamic thought and its responses without the same recourse?

I have been thinking about these questions with regard to the history of postcolonial thought of the Chinese in colonial Malaya, encompassing the intellectual history of the local-born Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore. The early 20th century saw the local Chinese population take up three broad political positions—favor the Confucianist reform movement of Kang Yuwei, support Sun Yat-sen’s Republican revolution, or turn their eyes to the British Empire in the hope of a commonwealth democracy.

Lim Boon Keng, a prominent British-educated medical doctor, embodied the three positions in his political activist career. As a Straits Chinese leader seeking to modernize the local native community, he espoused Confucianist reforms. Later, as a colonial legislator during the First World War, Lim articulated a vision of imperial multiculturalism and democratic peace under the Union Jack that the current Chinese intellectual fascination with the notion of tianxia, sovereignty under heaven, would not find unfamiliar. Disappointed with the conservativeness of the Empire, Lim went to China to head a university to school the Republic and the revolution in the wisdom of the ancient classics as well as to adapt the classics to modern needs. Rejected and dejected, he returned to Singapore, translating the Li Sao into English to express the pain of leaving his spiritual homeland for the Empire again, only to see Malaya quickly thrown into another era with the Japanese occupation, nationalist and communist revolts, and the politics of decolonization.

The colonial state never trusted Lim, even at the height of his profession of loyalty to the Empire, when he donned the uniform of a volunteer officer during the War and received the Order of the British Empire for it. In the 1920s, Lim’s educational venture was deemed communistic, secretive, and subversive by the intelligence arm of the colonial state. Even the anti-communist republican branches of the Kuomintang, successors of the Tongmenghui (Chinese Revolutionary League), was banned and suppressed for being a state within a state, imperium in imperio. The branches were seen as the modern version of the Chinese “secret society” that despite its pro-British conservativeness could unexpectedly be subverted and rise against the colonial state to supplant it with an unknown quality.

Throughout the later half of the 19th century, when colonial state building gained momentum, the singular preoccupation of the Government of the Straits Settlements was with the local offshoots and branches of the Heaven and Earth Society, more commonly known as “triads” after their triangle emblem, or simply as “Hoey” in the Settlements. Hoey is the phonetic transcription of 会 (which is also the “hui” in Tongmenghui), the translated meaning of which slipped across association, organization, society, company, group, alliance, league, and so on. For the colonial state, hoey signified a secret society in all its inscrutable ethnographic magnificence. It was not just an orientalist category signifying a problem of understanding and the lack thereof, but also a signifier of epistemic anxiety, that despite how much knowledge is gained of the hoey, there is always something being kept secret.

The colonial state went after any Chinese association the British officials deemed as having manifested as a hoey. It was a fit of recording fever. Books were chased and translated. Artifacts were seized, their symbols decoded. Members were arrested, their words interrogated, and if judged deceptive, deported and banished from the colony. Organizations were disbanded, at first in ritual acts of burning books and artifacts judged unnecessary for the state archive, and later simply broken up, their members banned from associating with each other.

British scholars, and later postcolonial scholars, studied the archive and theorized the hoey. The liberally inclined saw in the hoey the Chinese version of freemasonry, with transformative, even revolutionary, possibilities. Mostly, scholars saw the hoey as an endemic feature of Chinese society—the hoey was latent in any Chinese associational life, subversion and deceit intrinsic to oriental sociality.

Thus, the state constructed itself, not in producing knowledge in and of itself, but in producing knowledge of society. The colonial state called itself into existence and exercised its power in the pursuit of the secrets of society. It became the state only in knowing society.

At some point, in the postcolonial transition, sociology took over from anthropology—the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore was founded in 1965, the year Singapore became independent. The anthropological knowledge of the native other in imperium became sociological knowledge of the other in sovereign—society became enveloped by the knowledge apparatus of the state, probed by surveys and focus group interviews.

The drive to know the secrets of society was now redoubled so as to reconstruct society purged of its secrets, which would then be locked up in the state archive. Corruption became the postcolonial ruling elites’ obsession, purging their own ranks of the deceitful sociality at the heart of the state’s epistemic anxiety in a highly public manner. The absence of corruption is thus an epistemic artifact, and one that paradoxically necessitates the continuous discovery and abjection of ever-present corruption.

The hoey continued to rear its head in the political unconscious. The state saw secrecy and subversion everywhere. In 1987, a loose network of friends and associates who were involved in social justice advocacy and activism were administratively detained without trial for plotting a Marxist conspiracy to subvert the state. It did not matter that many of the activists, some inspired by Liberation Theology, others simply by liberal notions of human rights, went about their activism and espoused their views openly. That they operated in associations in society instead of in political parties visible to constant state surveillance meant that their activism was already secretive in nature. Those choosing the visible path of party politics were not spared, their words interrogated for libel lawsuits if they were to imply that the individuals of the ruling elites were corrupt in some way or another without airtight proof.

Yet, no one has been able to provide an alternative knowledge of the “secret societies” of old, the nationalist movements of the recent past, the repressed social activists of yesterday, or even Singapore society as such. Frustratingly, in all my attempts to study Singapore society, from streets carnivals to a popular Chinese temple to otherworldly Pentecostal Christians, I end up facing the state’s knowing pronouncements and rationalizations echoing through the symbolic and discursive materials and material space itself. And when I focus on the state and its archive, I end up looking at society and all its cultural exuberance transcribed, rationalized, and spatialized. Whichever way I turn, the state remains present but in my epistemic blind spot, directing and framing the way I see the world from that unseen space I am conscious of.

Spaces of bare life

Singapore is provocative because the state is everywhere in the social life of the country. Its commandments are interpellations of the social: smile for courtesy, queue for graciousness, have the right-sized family, save for rainy days, study for your future, work for your children, exercise for health, eat for wellness, speak good English for comprehensibility, and so on. The commandments are written into the urban fabric. They do not produce the postcolony of vulgar, visceral resistance to necropolitics, for the orientation is not twisted to the ruling elites and the spectacle of hybrids replacing colonials, but to the global marketplace (see Mbembe, 2001). This is one moment of the East Asian reaction to coloniality, that of embracing the Darwinian undertones of colonialism and quickening one’s evolution through spatial technologies for hyper-competition in the marketplace.

Singapore’s urban aesthetics appears to be one of speed, much like Hong Kong, its step-sister of common British parentage (Abaas, 1997). Yet, Singapore has not produced a politics of disappearance and grassroots movements for community empowerment, cultural rights, and heritage democratization. Hong Kong, despite the rapid erasure of comprehensible lived spaces and the dizzying return to China, has not lost its position and vantage point as the critic standing at the territorial and cultural margins of the nation, as the fermenter of revolutions.

Singapore was once part of the archipelagic Southeast Asian cultural zone, where Siam faded into Malaya and the East Indies. Nanyang, meaning the South Seas, Chinese cultures hybridizing between Chinese, British and Malayan points of reference were emergent. Its development has since been arrested since the expulsion of Singapore from the Malaysian Federation launched the city-state into the field of nationalism. It could have developed the emergent Malayan cultures to render the artifact of the nation. But the ruling elites, their political base in the state bureaucracy and its professional appendages, chose the state of emergency.

States of emergency, in Singapore, and in East and Southeast Asia in general, during the Cold War era have not been properly studied. In Singapore, the state chose to elevate itself into a position of exception in relation to the constitution of the Republic through absolute parliamentary dominance, which remains true today. Society with its emergent Malayan cultures was to be reduced to bare life, so that a good life plugged into the global economy could be achieved through the state’s suspension of politics. This historical rendition of Agamben’s (2005) indictment of the theology of sovereignty and the European state is not postcolonial. It is merely a mutation of the colonial state and its imposition of the theological fictions of sovereignty grounded in the knowing of oriental secrets and secrecy.

The “separation” from Malaysia formed the ideological justification for the suspension because the expulsion was blamed on excessive politics on the part of leftists and racialists that purportedly resulted in the riots and unrest in the decade leading to 1965. The imagination was not just that the nation was existentially challenged from being cut off from its economic hinterland, but that it was also harboring the political seditiousness intrinsic to oriental sociality. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s crying on national television at the moment of announcing “separation” was replayed repeatedly, the image giving succor to a people pained at the loss of ties with their blood and cultural relatives across the narrow straits separating Singapore from Malaysia. This was the origin of auctoritas in Lee, the personification of the knowing sovereign.

Resettlement of slum and village communities into public housing was the method of reducing communities first to bare life, just so that the good life revolving around state largesse and benevolence could be built up. This reduction to bare life in the first instance is something that most commentators and analysts of Singapore society miss out. The fallacy of the appeal to consequences is at its strongest here, since the resultant good life, misrecognized as modernity, is often taken as proof that the state was right to compel resettlement. Resettlement, in one fell swoop, cleared horizontally distributed communities of extended families and clans with thick sociality, with all their secrets, into ordered apartment blocks of flats with a uniform layout for nuclear families—a master bedroom, two smaller bedrooms, a kitchen, toilets, a dining room, and a living room in the largest type. The public housing flats provided for bare life.

But the reduction to bare life is not the mere expression of sovereignty, as it is generative of the very power over life, to produce and reproduce life. A flat was a square concrete deal that on the one hand catered for basic biological functions for the reproduction of labor and on the other hand cleared the slate for a cultural tabula rasa for the production of a malleable modern life. State-run social campaigns ranging from achieving the ideal family size to promoting selected consumer lifestyle habits permeated the public housing estates through state-managed grassroots committees and organizations. Each town had state-run crèches, schools, community centers, polyclinics, police stations, sports clubs, markets, food centers, banks, and parks, in which the campaigns ran in conjunction with the provision and policing of life.

Almost half a century on, today, the would-be privatization of these state spaces of life has not occurred. Instead, progress has only seen the taking over of food centers, markets, and crèches by para-state megaliths—the business arms of the state’s National Trade Union Congress and the ruling party’s community foundation. Individuals are still tagged by the unique life-long numbers of their identity cards, which class us in terms of age, gender, race, and place of birth and register us to the place of residence. The card is demanded by the police for random checks, government officers for provision of services, and companies and associations for employment and membership. One’s identity is suspect without the card. Communal uses of public space remain highly restricted and dominated by the grassroots organizations of the state.

Instead of speed, the urban logics and aesthetics in Singapore flatten space and life, thus laid bare. Agamben (1998) postulated that the camp has replaced the polis as the fundamental biopolitical paradigm in the West. In the redeveloped Asian city primed for the global economy, exemplified by Singapore, the city is the camp. The camp, as the nomos of our political space, is written and hidden into the redeveloped urban fabric.

State of forgetfulness

It is important to distinguish, schematically, the homo sacer of Asian coloniality, and thus the relationship between sovereign power and bare life, from the equivalents in 20th-century Europe and imperial territories. They are not unrelated, since the homo sacer I speak of, its Singaporean incarnation, is a European legacy and a response to the imperial form. The European form resided in the transition from the divine monarch to the sovereign state marking out raced bodies as exceptionally banned, reduced to bare life in camps. As is evident in my earlier discussion, the imperial form was founded on sovereign fictions constructing and knowing native sociality as such, with the raced native bodies of subversive sociality facing the threat of banishment from the colonial city to bare life in a penal colony or the savage homeland.

In Singapore, society as such is banned, reduced to bare life, and then resurrected by the giving developmental state through spatial technologies. Society is the justification for juridico-political exception and the site for administrative interventions for biopolitical production. State leaders take on the persona of the homo sacer existing at the threshold of nature and culture, savage and civilized, with their sociality expected to be banished but corruption always suspected.

In the European form, memory was invented as heritage and tradition, making for a state of civilization. In the imperial form, memory was archived as knowledge of native society, producing a state of culture. In Singapore, memory is forgetting; a state of forgetfulness pervades. The reduction to bare life fostered a general amnesia in society. What emergent postcolonial thought there were became forgotten, buried deep in the state archive, or lost in the haze of a diffused sociality.

This did not mean there were not attempts to remember and revive postcolonial thought. In 2007, an exhibition on “Lim Boon Keng: A Life to Remember (1869–1957)” was researched and curated by the Singapore Heritage Society, a non-governmental organization that had been at the forefront of campaigns to preserve grassroots heritage in the face of the state juggernaut. The exhibition was held in conjunction with the reprint of Lim’s work, The Chinese Crisis from Within, a seminal book first published in 1901 that defined the overseas Chinese reform movement. The book was reprinted by a local and progressive independent bookstore. The year 2007 was also the 50th year of Lim’s death. A workshop was organized, in which I presented a paper on the postcoloniality of Straits Chinese discourse in the colonial Legislative Council (see Goh, 2010).

Yet this remembrance was brief and fitful. Lim was quickly forgotten after the brief appearance in the state-run press as the exemplary son of Singapore and English-educated Chinese who recovered his racial heritage. His postcolonial ideas and sentiments were lost in the daily mill of life of the nation in the heartland. Few recognize the name today, except for Boon Keng train station on the national subway network. Ironically, the art piece, in the state-sponsored Art in Transit program to showcase local art “seamlessly” in the subway network, for Boon Keng is Metamorphosis by Lim Poh Teck, featuring icons of everyday life morphing from past to present in bright tropical colors. The postcolonial is not available in the spaces of bare life that the state has wrapped in nostalgia.

Paul Ricoeur (2004) writes of the politics of memory and amnesia in the narration of authorized history, in which the everyday resource of narrative (which makes available postcolonial thought) turns into a devious forgetting trap stripping us of the power to recount our lives. The crux, for Ricoeur (2004), is that this dispossession in remembrance involves a “secret complicity” on our part by a “wanting-not-to-know,” a desire to avoid through semi-passive, semi-active forgetting (pp. 448–449). Avoidance of what? In authorized history, the traumas of the nation are the leftist and racial riots leading up to statehood and expulsion from Malaysia, climaxing in Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s tears. But it is precisely this remembrance, repeated over and over again in books, photographs, museum exhibitions, and television programs, that forgets the trauma of resettlement into public housing and the reduction of culture-drenched sociality into the bare life of modernity.

In recent years, the authorized remembrances of Singapore’s progress into modern nationhood and global city status have reached a crescendo in the succession of publications by Lee offering his papers and memories as advice for the future. Bookstores in the city-state feature his books in entire bookcases that appear as monumental altars to the man and his thoughts. At the time of my writing this article, Lee, aged 90 years, has physically deteriorated, seemingly to a mentally alert man trapped in a frail body. The more important observation is that Singaporeans remain fascinated with his life, both in the sense of its unfolding with the history of Singapore and in the sense of his imminent mortality. Rumors and speculations abound about his health. Eyewitnesses make reports online, while photographs and televised events are scrutinized, and the annual National Day Parade is closely watched to see Lee’s own regression to bare life. While Lim Boon Keng and other postcolonials, including Lee’s own comrades in the critical founding moments of the nation, are forgotten, the sovereign slowly transforms himself into the prime representation of the homo sacer unto which our traumas, sins, and anxieties are extirpated.

The real forgetting trap is the state’s Singapore Memory Project. It was launched on August 2011, months after the ruling party suffered its greatest electoral setback and lost two cabinet members against the Workers’ Party, and is targeted to culminate in 2015 when Singapore celebrates its 50th year as an independent country. The target is to collect 5 million personal memories from individuals, associations, and groups. The Project’s icon is a collage of nostalgic images with the image of a tearing Lee at the moment of independence in the center. Tagged as a movement, it is envisioned as a spontaneous outpouring of memories that would bring citizens together for the big birthday bash. But this is also the cultivation of emotional citizenship that veils a more insidious operation characteristic of the epistemic state. It is to raid the last frontier of secrets stored in the memories of individual Singaporeans so as to produce a new archive from which a new authorized narrative could be sprung.

What would this new narrative do? The development of modernity from bare life has reached its contradictory limits. Singapore, as a city-state, now exists, materially and spiritually, as both a nation and a global city. The affluent population has other ideas to life than to maintain replacement fertility rates, and the ruling party’s locked-in economic model is dependent on population growth—absolute increase in laboring bodies—to sustain economic vibrancy. On the other hand, worsening income inequality threatens to unravel the social compact of exchanging political compliance for state provision of the good life. The state is planning for a renewed burst of urban redevelopment to accommodate a larger population on the small island, but the need for costly redevelopment and resettlement compete with the demand for greater welfare support and social development.

Meanwhile, a middle-class citizenry spurred by remembrances hanker for authentic heritage to ground their sense of self. Gentrification of old districts, now spotting mixtures of nostalgia-themed cafes and old-world coffee shops, has gathered pace to reduce redevelopment possibilities. Other citizen groups fight rearguard action to save old estates earmarked for demolition.

More interestingly, a movement, a real non-state one, has sprung up to save Bukit Brown Cemetery from plans to eventually turn it into a public housing town. The Cemetery, where many of the local colonial luminaries are buried, is now becoming a public archive for the recovery of the lost knowledge of past cultural life, beneath which sediment layers of postcolonial thought are waiting to be discovered. The tombs of Lim Boon Keng’s father, grandparents, and wife are rediscovered and celebrated at Bukit Brown. Lim, formerly buried at another cemetery that has already been cleared for public housing development, is the absence that now calls out to be heard. The provocation of the economically liberal but politically conservative city is rebounding on itself, and the citizens seem to have finally awakened to the spatiality of their epistemic blind spot.

The city, the grassroots, and the strike

Chua Beng Huat is correct in noting that the Singapore model has a wide resonance in Asia and around the world. This is why my concern with otherwise idiosyncratically local politics is something that travels beyond Singapore to an Asia replete with cities and their inter-referencing governments seeking to emulate Singapore in one way or another. Rapid urbanization has marked the rise of Asian economies in the past two decades. In the next two decades, these cities will seek to consolidate their positions within the capitalist world system. The Singapore model offers a success story that taps into the aspirations of migrants and policy makers alike, especially for cities in China, India, and the emergent economies of Southeast Asia.

Chua Beng Huat (2011) has already written on the Singapore model and what it manifestly offers in terms of urban planning knowledge. It is the political unconscious of the model, the nomos, that concerns me. At the heart of it is a (colonial) state that seeks to know fully society’s deepest secrets and flatten its rich cultural lifeworlds to spaces of bare life so as to reconstruct society in the state’s own modern imaginary of the good life. This is a totalizing vision that seeks to completely territorialize culture and to dominate, make, and shape life itself.

The current and last frontier of this statist and colonial enterprise is in the realm of memory, fostering an authorized narrative of selective amnesia, so that the nation as already materialized in the spaces of bare-modern life could resonate with the biographical consciousness of individual citizens. The state continues to do this in spite of the deterritorialization that globalization is supposed to bring. The Singapore model offers, precisely, the promise of remaining colonial and territorializing.

What then do we do? How do we do decoloniality? I have been thinking along two leftward grains of our intellectual archive and would like to throw these preliminary pebbles into our reflection pool. The first is inspired by Manuel Castells’ (1983) The City and the Grassroots. No matter how dominant the hegemonic interests of the day, the grassroots matters in the shaping of urban meanings and the symbolic expression of urban function. In terms of the discussion above, the secrets of sociality continue to shape the relevance and resonance of Singapore as a city, and these secrets, once tapped and archived, are the source of the state’s power to direct the shaping of urban culture. The implication then is to organize urban social movements, rather than defensive place-based movements, to seize back the secrets and mobilize around the triad of collective consumption, identity and autonomy. Gradually, neighborhood by neighborhood, we need to claw back the city from the state and capital, setting up cultural communes that would exchange their secrets with each other to create inter-local knowledge and secure their independence.

The organic intellectual, in the classic Gramscian sense but revised for Asian coloniality, needs to produce counter-articulations that reaffirm the sociality of communities. This organic intellectual needs to live as a constituent member of the communities, denying the choice of opting out by staying in gated condominiums and private estates where the top elite tier, including most intellectuals, live their lives separated from the masses. The organic intellectual must deny his or her own mobility, and cannot choose to enter and leave the community at will. There should be no spatial differentiation of the community living in the public housing estate as ethnographic subject and field site. The organic intellectual is more than the public intellectual who speaks truth to power in the public sphere. The organic intellectual must remember with the community against the state of forgetfulness, while working with the community to reclaim its public spaces and political discourses.

The second is a corollary of the struggle for establishing local cultural communes in the city. Traditional intellectuals have been providing the state with the expertise, methodology, and concepts to steal the secrets of sociality from communities, and to produce modernity in service of state and capital. The latest tool is social capital—the abstraction, quantification, and mapping of the sociality of communities. In the public housing estates in Singapore, the state promotes the building of greater social capital through a range of 10 escalating instrumental actions from saying hello to your neighbor to starting an interest group to widen your circle of friends. This interpellation of good citizens seeks to boost the resilience of society against the ravages of globalization and also to foster the acceptability and integration of immigrants brought in to feed the labor market. It presupposes the citizenry suffers from lack and blames communities for the spaces of bare life that the state itself reduced them to.

The organic intellectual should increase the intellectual cost of the state’s moral leadership by participating critically in its discourse. The organic intellectual should not abandon the mainstream institutions of learning and knowledge production, that is, the university and the think-tank. In this sense, the organic intellectual is also more than the citizen intellectual who operates exclusively from the vantage point of communities. Organic intellectuals should not disengage from the traditional intellectuals. On the contrary, the organic intellectual should be participating in state knowledge production, to bring in more theories and the criticism of theories into the state archive to increase the debates, disagreements, and conflicts between officials. Because of its dependence on the archive, and because of the intrinsic interpretive nature of the latter, intellectual conflicts between officials are endemic to the state.

The organic intellectual understands the closely related coloniality of the state archive and urban space and moves in the ideological tunnels connecting them to heighten epistemic conflicts. On the one hand, the organic intellectual would be expressing and affirming the sociality of the community, paying close attention to the flattened spatiality so as to revive texture and volume. On the other hand, for example, instead of rejecting social capital as a colonial concept, the organic intellectual would participate in multiplying and complicating perspectives on it.

The intellectual strike—the refusal, at a strategic time, to participate further in the discourse—takes place when the state seeks resolution and settlement on the internal debates that would ensue. This is the crucial moment when the state asks the organic intellectual to adjudicate through state-sponsored studies or workshop commentary. To deal with the Asian Centaur, this is the dual perspective of intellectual political action needed in decolonial spatiality.