Performing Fear in Television Production: Practices of an Illiberal Democracy 9789048555604

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Fear and the Fragility of Myths
2 Playing Games with Heritage
3 Drama Writing and Audiences as Affective Superaddressee
4 Producing Art, Producing Difference
5 Making Reality TV: The Pleasures of Disciplining in a Control Society
Reflections
References
Index

Citation preview

Performing Fear in Television Production

Asian Visual Cultures This series focuses on visual cultures that are produced, distributed and consumed in Asia and by Asian communities worldwide. Visual cultures have been implicated in creative policies of the state and in global cultural networks (such as the art world, film festivals and the Internet), particularly since the emergence of digital technologies. Asia is home to some of the major film, television and video industries in the world, while Asian contemporary artists are selling their works for record prices at the international art markets. Visual communication and innovation is also thriving in transnational networks and communities at the grass-roots level. Asian Visual Cultures seeks to explore how the texts and contexts of Asian visual cultures shape, express and negotiate new forms of creativity, subjectivity and cultural politics. It specifically aims to probe into the political, commercial and digital contexts in which visual cultures emerge and circulate, and to trace the potential of these cultures for political or social critique. It welcomes scholarly monographs and edited volumes in English by both established and early-career researchers. Series Editors Jeroen de Kloet, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Edwin Jurriëns, The University of Melbourne, Australia Editorial Board Gaik Cheng Khoo, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Simon Fraser University, Canada Larissa Hjorth, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Amanda Rath, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany Anthony Fung, Chinese University of Hong Kong Lotte Hoek, Edinburgh University, United Kingdom Yoshitaka Mori, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Japan

Performing Fear in Television Production Practices of an Illiberal Democracy

Siao Yuong Fong

Amsterdam University Press

The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

Cover illustration: Miriana Del Gatto Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 457 9 e-isbn 978 90 4855 560 4 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463724579 nur 674 © Siao Yuong Fong / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 9 1 Fear and the Fragility of Myths

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2 Playing Games with Heritage

63

3 Drama Writing and Audiences as Affective Superaddressee

85

4 Producing Art, Producing Difference

115

5 Making Reality TV: The Pleasures of Disciplining in a Control Society 141 Reflections 177 References 191 Index 209

Acknowledgements This book has been a long time coming. When I started it, I could not have imagined the journey it would take me on and how many people I would meet along the way. Firstly, I would like to express my deep-seated gratitude to Mark Hobart for his utter commitment and unwavering support throughout this journey. His determination and intellectual rigour guided me through the research and writing of this project. I thank him for teaching me so much more than just how to research, and for always bringing me back to thinking about this project as an intellectual endeavour, when the demands of the academic profession risked pulling me in other directions. I would also like to thank Manishita Dass for always asking the hard questions, and for pushing me to widen my perspectives both in scholarship and in life. Her gentle but critical mentorship played no small part in shaping my approach to academia and I continue to draw inspiration from her self-assured broad-mindedness in difficult times. I thank the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore for providing me with the institutional support that I needed to turn this research into a book. In particular, I am grateful for their funding dedicated to reviewing an earlier version of this book’s manuscript under the FASS-ARI Book Manuscript Grant (2019/2020). My sincere thanks also go to Chua Beng Huat, C.J. Wee Wan-ling, and Jeroen de Kloet, whose intellectual legacies have inspired me greatly, for taking the time to review the manuscript. Their honest and constructive comments were instrumental in my reshaping of this project into the form that it takes now. Many thanks to my editors at Amsterdam University Press for their support through this process and to Miriana Del Gatto for designing the artwork on the book’s cover. Thank you also to the many colleagues and friends who have read and commented on my work throughout the years. While my memory is bound to let me down here, and I sincerely apologize for that in advance, they include John Ellis, Jonathan Corpus Ong, Audrey Yue, Jinna Tay, Tania Lim, Ivan Kwek, Aswin Punathembekar, Jonathan Grey, Adrienne Shaw, Shiori Shakuto, Sylvia Ang, Courtney Fu, Carola Lorea, Andrew Ong, the reviewers at European Journal of Cultural Studies and Television & New Media, as well as my colleagues at Lancaster University. For encouraging me and expanding my intellectual horizons in one way or another, I am truly grateful to all of them and I sure hope to thank every single one in person in due time. Finally, I would like to thank my two book

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reviewers, Terence Lee and Liew Kai Khiun. It is an honour to have them read my work and refer to me as their peer when, for so many years, I looked up to their work for guidance. I will continue to stand on their shoulders. As with any work of an ethnographic nature, I owe this project to the generosity of the many interlocutors I encountered during fieldwork, some of whom have become close friends and continue to inspire me with their resilience. It is because of their hospitality that this research was made possible. For extending themselves when they did not have to, I am truly thankful. And finally, to my family to whom this book is dedicated. Mom, Dad, Sis, thank you for your unquestioning support throughout. It is your quiet but never-wavering backing that provided me with a safe harbour to rest and recharge whenever I needed to do so during this long and arduous journey. And to my partner Michel, your presence, sacrifices and endless belief in me kept me afloat during those times when my own belief risked faltering. Thank you for being my biggest cheerleader. This book is for you.

Introduction Abstract This chapter presents the theoretical and empirical puzzle of the book and argues for the Singapore case as instructive to understanding authoritarian resilience. Situated on the mercurial edge between state illiberalism and capitalist forces, the group of independent television producers I study embody the multiple subjectivities that navigate illiberal capitalist democracies. The book explores the work involved in ideologically sustaining such a social order through their lived experiences and practices. I provide a theoretical mapping of the book to elaborate on how the two senses of ‘performing fear’ – first the performative practices that instantiate fear as relational lens through which Singapore is to be understood; and second the affective meaning-making practices of producers that conjure and sustain audiences as anxiety-inducing – serve to perpetuate the existing social order. Keywords: Illiberal democracy; Performativity; Fear; Affect; Television production; Singapore

It was one of those uneventful afternoons on the set of the ‘live’ Reality TV show I was interning for. Everyone went about their usual business. Stationed next to the Camera Director in the front-end of the panel room, I sat quietly staring at the dozens of monitors that observed the Reality TV show contestants around the clock in Big Brother style. Five metres behind me, the censor on duty watched the ‘live’ broadcast conscientiously on a separate monitor for anything that needed immediate censoring. A woman in her early twenties, she was one of the dozens of part-timers who were hired on an hourly rate to act as censors for the ‘live’ programme. The instructions given to her when she was hired were simple: blur or mute what you deem problematic; and record what you censored in a logbook. Outside the panel room, the Production Manager monitored our work by watching what the audiences would see – the post-censored ‘live’ broadcast on television.

Fong, Siao Yuong, Performing Fear in Television Production: Practices of an Illiberal Democracy, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463724579_intro

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The mood in the panel room was relaxed, almost sleepy. This was one of those afternoons when the contestants had no designated activities and were free to rest. With nothing in particular to focus our attention on, the Camera Director switched around the different cameras to capture what the different contestants were doing. We stopped at a CCTV shot of the girls’ bedroom where two of the female contestants were casually chatting. The microphones picked up their conversation about their underwear, during which one of the contestants held up the underwear in question. I thought nothing of it as we quietly moved on to another room after a couple of moments. The peaceful quiet in the panel room was abruptly broken a few minutes later with the Production Manager running in. “What did you censor? What happened?” the Production Manager yelled as she ran towards the young censor. “Oh, erm,” the young lady replied slightly surprised. “The contestant held up her underwear, I wasn’t sure whether that was okay, so I blurred it.” Clearly relieved that nothing serious actually happened on set, the Production Manager said, “You don’t have to censor that. Don’t do it again in the future, okay?”

The young censor nodded and turned back to her monitors, as everything went back to normal. She quietly fulfilled her duty by writing the incident down in her censor logbook. ‘Underwear’ must have been the trendy topic of that week because another female contestant held up her underwear on screen again two days later in a casual conversation. A different young woman was on duty as censor that day. Following her predecessor’s footsteps, she blurred the image of the underwear. The Production Manager rushed into the panel room to find out what happened. To her frustration, the censor revealed that she decided to censor because she read in the logbook that the previous censor had blurred the image of underwear two days ago and so assumed that was the protocol. This was my first ethnography. I had set out to do fieldwork on media production in illiberal Singapore following decades of widespread reporting of its authoritarian government’s tough censorship measures. So naturally, instances of censorship on set attracted my attention. However, this was not what I had expected. My immediate reading of this situation was to attribute it to the inexperience of the censors, which raised further questions about why these young censors were hired in the first place. How could an authoritarian state like Singapore allow part-timers who were barely twenty years old to do its censorship work?

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Underlying these questions I had in my head was, of course, my own assumption that media systems in authoritarian contexts were run like tight ships. I imagined that I would find fearful media workers cowering under draconian laws but instead witnessed a plethora of misunderstandings, confused practices and quibbling producers. Looking at the bumbling young censors, I wondered if I had gotten my questions backwards. Perhaps I should start by asking what made me assume that in the first place. There were broad structures in place. The censors were meant to use the government-issued content guidelines as a reference, but these vague guidelines leave so much room for interpretation that they prove helpful only in very limited instances. Most of media work operate in the much larger grey areas potentially covered but not specified by the guidelines. On the ground, this translated into endless contestations regarding what was allowed or not, what to do in different circumstances and their potential consequences. Despite multiple producers’ protests against what they called ‘self-censoring’ of the underwear on screen, avoiding showing underwear eventually became common practice during the production process. This book is my attempt at making sense of these arguments and practices, and how they worked towards authoritarian resilience in the media in the absence of state presence. Alarm bells are ringing all over the world for liberal democracy. While the decline of liberal democratic capitalism has been predicted more than forty years earlier (e.g. Macpherson 1977), the recent political upheavals have caused some commentators to warn about the failure of liberal democratic capitalism as a social model (Han 2016; Tan 2018). Globally, renewed interests in searching for alternative social configurations present an opportune moment to explore other political and social possibilities. Speculating on the future of capitalist societies with the rise of China, Žižek (2015) has predicted that the Singapore model of state-interventionist capitalist democracy is the direction future capitalist democratic states will head towards. If we are to take Žižek’s prediction literally, Singapore – as a nonliberal capitalist democracy efficiently run for the past five decades1 – makes for an intriguing case of an alternative modernity2 situated in between both the non-democratic and liberal democratic capitalist models. In the spirit of examining the Singapore model of illiberal capitalist democracy as an 1 George has argued that Singapore is the only country rated ‘very high’ on the United Nations’ human development index (UNDP 2016) that has a ‘not free’ press freedom rating from Freedom House (2017) which makes Singapore the archetype of a high-income illiberal state (George 2019). 2 The term ‘modernity’ is used here as an analytic category following Grossberg who proposed ‘modernity as an ongoing contestation, as something to be won, not merely in a struggle over interpretations, but in material struggles over power and the very becoming of reality’ (2010b: 85).

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alternative social order, I raise the broader question of what are involved in maintaining the ideological legitimacy of an illiberal state amidst the global hegemony of liberal democratic ideals? This brings our attention to the workings of the mass media. So what goes into the ideological sustenance of an illiberal capitalist democracy? While much of the critical discussion of the media in illiberal or authoritarian contexts focus on state policy and practice,3 the emphasis on strong states is inadequate in accounting for the social imaginary that the everyday practices of those who negotiate these forces embody. Instead, discourses around state power tend to perpetuate misnomers about the media as mere tools of the state and sustains myths about the absolute power of strong states. Turning to the lived everyday of media producers in Singapore, this book seeks to critically evaluate how state-articulated ‘fear’ provides the conditions that enable an imaginary centred around an overdetermined social continually constituted through performative practices, that afford a self-perpetuating illiberal social order. Performing Fear offers an ethnographic account of how power works in a politically stable4 illiberal capitalist democracy that appears like a closed disciplinary system of governance when approached structurally (Trocki 2006; Wong 2001; Lee 2010; Lingle 1996). While Foucault’s disciplinary and governmental models of power are often used to frame authoritarian resilience in the media, I show how power in Singapore’s media has moved beyond discipline or biopolitics to resemble Deleuze’s societies of control (1992), whereby the logics of control has shifted away from the state’s strategic intentions towards the unpredictability of imagined audiences, thereby rendering power decentralized, relational, and constantly changing. I do this by examining the practices that are largely absent from state- or text-centric accounts, including practices that do not typically conjure impressions of censorship or fear. Set in a context where ‘fear’ is the key discursive frame through which both state and popular accounts understand Singapore’s social order, I seek to understand what power looks like in practice, even 3 The recent ‘institutional turn’ in the literature on authoritarian resilience has seen a returning focus on state policies and state practices that offer innovative explanations of the workings of authoritarianism within a variety of media realms. For instance, Repnikova (2017) examined the relationship between China’s authorities and journalists to question the dichotomous categories of resistance versus control, while Roberts (2020) explained the Chinese state’s Internet censorship strategies to ensure regime survival. 4 There have been several recent ethnographies of the media in politically unstable states, such as Bajoghli’s (2019) ethnography of cultural producers of the revolutionary state of Iran and Samet’s (2019) study of journalists in Venezuela.

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when the subjects involved do not necessarily feel fear. This makes a separation between ‘fear’ as articulatory tool and as felt senses that emerge in social situations, and how the two interact in media production practices. In this sense, this is not a book about fear in its ontological sense but provides a sustained critical engagement with the cultural logics of ‘fear’ in the media of an illiberal state without centring on the realms of traditionally imagined censorship and its associations of state repression. I approach the issue through an ethnography of the everyday practices of those who are tasked with mediating the relationship between the state and society – independent media producers largely doing Public Service Broadcasting work. Departing from state focus, Performing Fear offers an alternative account of the puzzle of authoritarian resilience by showing how audiences emerge as the central figure in the performance of democracy in an illiberal state, which perpetuates the status quo in the absence of state directives. I argue that while the state provides the conditions of possibility, audiences function as the central problematic for producers of mass entertainment media, through which they work out antagonisms of society and negotiate their anxieties. In managing the relationship between the state and society, media producers invoke ideas of audiences that engender anxieties and self-policing, which reproduce a vicious cycle of self-perpetuating fear. Using the case study of Singapore, I pose a series of questions that explore what it takes to perpetuate authoritarian resilience in the mass media. How, in what terms and through what means, does a politically stable illiberal capitalist state like Singapore formulate its dominant imaginary of social order? What are the television production practices that perform and instantiate the social imaginary, and who are the audiences that are conjured and performed in the process? What are the roles played by imagined audiences in sustaining authoritarian resilience in the media? If, as I will argue in the book, audiences function as the central problematic that engenders anxieties and self-policing amongst producers, can the audience become a surrogate for the authoritarian state?

The Media of an Illiberal Capitalist Democracy To say that Singapore is a modern disciplinary society in a Foucaultian sense would be an understatement […] Singapore has in many cases worn out established theoretical paradigms of all kinds, while spinning life into higher states of unreality (Chun 2012: 684).

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In many ways, Singapore’s media production seems like an unlikely case study. While doing my fieldwork, I often encountered questions like ‘why Singapore?’ and regularly met with bewilderment from producers who were painfully aware of their small industry and audience size. The producers’ frequent allusions to the Singaporean media industry being ‘boring’ or having nothing interesting for researchers to learn about are underlined by the state’s seemingly exceeding stability. Conventionally, ethnographies of media production highlighting the role of politics are dominated by cases that focus either on coercion or moments of social change (see, for instance, Robert Samet’s 2019 ethnography of how crime journalists in Venezuela transformed the state’s approach to punitive security; and Narges Bajoghli’s 2019 ethnography of the contestations among pro-regime cultural producers about how to define the revolutionary state of Iran). In contrast, scholars of illiberal or authoritarian capitalism have treated Singapore as an exceptionally instructive case study since no existing state can match its record of political stability and high socio-economic development (e.g. George 2007; Carney 2018; Rodan 2004). The ruling party of Singapore has never lost power since 1959 and Singapore’s first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, led the government for thirty-one years before his political successions. By focusing on Singapore as a politically stable illiberal state, I hope to highlight an important aspect that is missing from media ethnographies of authoritarian states – the often invisible everyday work that goes into maintaining regime stability in a context whereby political upheaval is far from the popular imagination. Local production in Singapore is intimately linked to the state. It is dominated by MediaCorp, Singapore’s monopoly free-to-air and national broadcaster, which delivers content over seven TV channels, eight FM radio stations and MeWatch – an Internet enabled application service accessible online. Despite its status now as a corporation, MediaCorp has deep connections with the state, first set up as a government department in 1963 and later transformed into a statutory board in 1980 before being corporatized in 1994. Since then, it ventured into commercialization while retaining its Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) role. It is now fully owned by Temasek Holdings, the investment arm of the Singaporean state.5 Between 1994 and 2011, public service content was mainly funded via a Radio and TV License fee collected 5 There was a brief period of limited competition in the free-to-air broadcasting market between 2000 and 2004 during which a second terrestrial broadcaster, MediaWorks, was granted operational license. This disruption of MediaCorp’s monopoly over the market proved commercially devastating for both companies and MediaWorks was shut down in 2005.

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directly from the public. The public license fee was abolished in 2011 and replaced with a series of block grants directly funded by the governing authority, Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), and other government agencies, thereby strengthening the links between the state and broadcaster. The IMDA still funds most of their PSB through MediaCorp because its mass audiences remain PSB’s strongest reach in the local population.6 Several tensions run through Singapore’s media industry, as evident through its funding structures. As an illiberal democracy, the Singaporean government places importance on the state-linked media to continue its hegemonic work over the people. Despite declining viewership of MediaCorp’s TV channels, annual PSB funding from the state has increased over the years. For instance, IMDA spent S$112 million on PSB funding in 2012 compared to S$346 million in 2019 (Media Development Authority 2013; Infocomm Media Development Authority 2020). With this increased funding, the relationship between MediaCorp and the state has become more entrenched. MediaCorp’s revenue of S$505 million in the financial year of 2019 means IMDA’s PSB funding, most of which still go to MediaCorp, constituted the majority of its revenue source (Temasek 2020). Apart from direct funding arrangements between the IMDA and MediaCorp, the IMDA also funds other major platforms through schemes such as the PSB Contestable Funds Scheme; and commissions independent production houses to create content. Adding more complexity to the state’s funding role, several Ministries and government agencies also fund free-to-air programmes (see Chapters Four and Five). At the same time, the government’s privatizing of MediaCorp subjects them to the capitalist forces of the free market. In this sense, Singapore’s media, the vast majority of which still relies on state funding,7 is in a vitally important but also precarious position. The antagonisms between the public service and commercial imperatives of local production are matters of great frustration to some of my informants. As one of them put it succinctly: We have the fucking KPI of a corporation and we have the fucking limitations of a public service broadcast. It’s fucking annoying. 6 The numbers are not made available, but my interview with the head of PSB in IMDA corroborates this. 7 This is markedly different to the case of the PRC where the vast majority of television productions deal purely with the profit margin (Schneider 2012). For instance, television stations primarily rely on drama programmes for advertising revenue, which account for 90 per cent of the total revenues. Private capital dominates television drama in the PRC by accounting for about 80 per cent of the total investment.

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In this book, I explore the intersection of state power and capitalist development, as lived among a group of independent media producers situated on the mercurial edge between illiberalism and capitalist forces. The producers I discuss in this book reside at a most awkward intersection between the state and the people and navigate multiple subjectivities as representatives of the state, public service providers, as well as commercial entertainment producers. These producers spend most of their time making free-to-air programmes commissioned by MediaCorp under the IMDA’s Public Service Broadcasting8 funding schemes. When I was doing fieldwork, MediaCorp outsourced roughly 40 per cent of local PSB productions to independent production companies per year and produced the rest in-house. These companies, which were responsible for the production of a large proportion of free-to-air television programmes in Singapore,9 had to bid annually for the projects. As a result of the industry structure, my informants were often subjected to the illiberal and disciplinary practices of both the state and the market. As a case in point, in serving the state’s paternalistic multiculturalist national agenda (see Chapter One), local production’s clear segmentation of TV content along linguistic lines has not only limited regional expansionist efforts (Pugsley 2007) but also caused a decline in local viewership (Lim et al. 2019). Even though the tensions between the ideological and commercial obligations of media work are often presented as contradictions inherent to forces of illiberal capital in Singapore, there are a gamut of complex practices and understandings involved. In particular, this book focuses on a group of independent mass media producers who work on Chinese-language television in Singapore – the most watched locally – in order to explore the practices and processes of boundary-making amongst the seasoned producers of an established industry segment (Chapters Two and Three) and the newcomers attempting to challenge the status quo (Chapters Four and Five). In this book, I am interested in how such boundaries become stabilized and how they are understood and transgressed by media producers situated in a particularly unsettling position between the state, capital and society. These producers occupy a liminal space that requires them to constantly negotiate the discursive thresholds of public service and commerce, state 8 Between 2008 and 2012, IMDA provided about $470 million in PSB funding, resulting in about 2,000 hours of original local PSB productions each year (Channel NewsAsia 9 July 2012). In 2013, MediaCorp fulfilled a total of 6,039.5 hours of PSB programming, out of which 2,439.5 were locally produced (Media Development Authority 2014: 70). 9 PSB programming accounted for almost 69 per cent of broadcasting hours in 2013.

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power and market forces, the national and the global. The work that these producers do can therefore illuminate the intersections and permeations of these relations, how they are given meaning through their practices, and also how they may be implicated in sustaining the structures of power they live under. A common explanation of how producers negotiate the complex statemedia-politics nexus has been through the concept of ‘OB Markers’, a term in Singapore that refers to topics that are deemed ‘out-of-bounds’ or too sensitive for coverage in the media (Cheong 2013; Lee 2002). This framing of producers as self-censoring in line with state directives prove to be more complex in practice. The ideological work that the illiberal state requires its media to do has translated into limitations on media pluralism in favour of producers suturing over antagonisms to articulate some shared morality or value system in the name of consensus. At the same time, the Singaporean government’s brand of conservatism, where policymakers repeatedly defer to what they represent as the conservative majority of Singaporean society as justification, has resulted in high intolerance towards diversity of opinion and a culture where complaints are taken extremely seriously. These could be complaints filed with MediaCorp, with the authorities, or through online comments that are reported in mainstream media. ‘It’s so easy to write in, you know’, the head of the compliance team in MediaCorp lamented to me in an interview. ‘Just write something online, somebody picks it up, that’s it. It goes viral […] They may not be complaining to you. They just write what their opinion is about something and then IMDA will see it and then they will start to investigate as well’. Any complaint from the public could result in potential punishment for both the producers and the broadcaster, whether in terms of monetary fines from the authorities or internal disciplinary action. Beyond the hassle of having to write reports for every single complaint, these investigations have an affective impact on media workers. During the time of my main ethnographic fieldwork between 2012 and 2014, MediaCorp’s compliance department was required to go through a mandatory interrogation process for any alleged breach of protocol that occurred on television. Those years were still traumatic for the head of the compliance team when I spoke to him in 2019. Despite the years that have passed, he recounted the details like they had just happened: It can be very stressful […] it’s like an interrogation, a police interrogation. Two folks from the enforcement division will interview you […] You have to sign a statement […] [Heaving a sigh of relief ] They stopped it. Thank goodness.

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These complaints affected not just the compliance team. I found out later that by the time these incidents trickled down to independent producers doing the creative work, the content of the complaints were often not even specified. Merely the fact that there were complaints warranted serious attention from all concerned. This political climate where potentially anyone could get producers into trouble, even if unintentionally, resulted in a work culture where anticipatory paranoia about viewer complaints feature heavily in everyday production situations. Combined with the structural requirements of PSB in a monopoly free-to-air broadcaster, producers have to engage in the antagonistic practice of imagining audiences as ‘mass’ (by suturing differences) while anticipating and avoiding individual acts of departure from the mass in terms of complaints. Producers therefore have multiple potentially antagonistic roles to play, including educating and challenging the audience as PSB providers; entertaining consumers for ratings; perpetuating state ideology; and avoiding sensitive issues. All of these entail different engagements with, and imaginations of, audiences. Insofar as attempts to imagine audiences are ways of trying to work out what, or who, are the masses, then examinations of how audiences work in production seem to be ways through which to try to frame what goes on in wider society. In this sense, the imagined audiences that producers struggle over are emblematic of the larger tensions inherent to the maintaining of ideological and electoral legitimacy of an illiberal democratic state in a globalized world. For the producers who live through these tensions in their everyday work, abstract concepts such as ‘illiberalism’, ‘capitalism’ or ‘democracy’ involve a gamut of different, variously understood and partly unknown processes that risk being overlooked or taken for granted if subsumed under the term ‘illiberal capitalist democracy’. A starting point for this work is therefore the suspension of conventional analytical categories in favour of the discursive and material processes for boundary and subject making. Like for the producers and censors I met on the set of the Reality TV show, the lines between the state and non-state are constantly remade in practice, at times intentionally emphasized or blurred for particular purposes, and on other occasions rendered redundant. By analyzing the lived experiences of television producers, Performing Fear offers an ethnographic account of authoritarian resilience in the media that opens up analyses into the ideological, processual, ideational and affective practices that emerge from the plurality of perspectives, arguments and struggles of those involved, and how these sustain, alter or perform certain ideas about authoritarian societies.

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Performing Fear While the underwear censorship incident seemed like just another minor mix-up at the time, I later realized its implications for an illiberal context like Singapore. For viewers at home, witnessing acts of censorship without knowing what was censored can lead them to assume, like the Production Manager did initially, that there were serious matters that required censoring. Repeatedly occurring over time, such incidents create the sense that this illiberal society has many issues that its state or its population should fear. In this sense, the censors performing their imagined roles enabled uncertainties about viewers (in the case of the first censor) to reproduce ideas of a censorious state-linked media, a conservative audience and an illiberal society with much to fear. This book shows how media production practices that ‘perform 10 fear’ enable the ideological perpetuation of the illiberal social order in the absence of state intervention. The performance of fear manifests in two interrelated senses and corresponds to two sets of practices, and the book explores how these two assemblages of practices can formulate a selfsustaining model of power using the case study of Singapore’s state-linked television. I argue that the overdetermined social – manifested in this case as ‘the audience’ – functions as the central problematic that affords this model of power. ‘Performing fear’ in the first sense refers to the producers’ work in continually constituting the social imaginary (Laclau 1990) of contemporary Singapore society. ‘Fear’ as a well-rehearsed narrative about Singapore is the key discursive tool and cultural lens through which state and popular discourse make sense of social order. In doing state-funded Public Service Broadcasting work, producers thereby regularly constitute the dominant social imaginaries of Singapore. Drawing on immersive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in several mass entertainment television productions (namely a Reality Television show, two game shows, a long form drama and a short form drama) in Singapore through a period of sixteen months between 2012 and 2014, repeated yearly visits after, in-depth interviews conducted between 2018 and 2020, and continuing conversations with my informants, I show how the different genres allow producers to perform – conceptualized as practices of reconstituting – various aspects of the social imaginary such as meritocracy, capitalism, ethnicity, etc. This first set of practices 10 I use performativity as theorized by Judith Butler in terms of performance as constitutive practices (Butler 1999).

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are performative as they continually call upon and instantiate fear as the relational lens through which Singapore is to be understood. Constituting social imaginaries entail a shared understanding of who the addressee is. While the different genres also afford producers different relationships with audiences, they conjure ideas of an audience that is linguistically organized but emptied of – and needing of protection from – other social antagonisms. The conjured audience resulting from this first set of practices is however incongruent to audience encounters as experienced by producers in their daily work, which manifests as unpredictable viewer complaints and the anticipatory paranoia and anxiety that emerges from producers’ second set of practices – managing audience potentiality. I argue that producers make sense of and cope with this incongruency of imagined audiences and their excesses affectively. To borrow Ahmed’s (2004) conceptualization, the anxiety associated with this incongruency ‘sticks’ to the ‘bodies’ of imagined audiences and is sustained performatively through further affective encounters. ‘Performing fear’ in the second sense therefore refers to the affective meaning-making practices of producers that conjure and sustain audiences as anxiety-inducing. The two performances of fear come together through imagined audiences in production practice – conceptualized as ‘affective superaddressee’ (see more in Chapter Three) – which serve a crucial role in the model of power in Singapore’s media. The power model proceeds as such. The producers’ practices produce a vicious cycle whereby the vast amount of different ways viewers could react to their programmes reproduce the Singaporean subject as unknown, uncontrollable and unpredictable, which furthers uncertainties that then continually engender more anxieties and self-policing among producers. It is through these practices that ideas of the state as censorious and the Singaporean subject as infantile or conservative are reproduced. This then further perpetuates the need for producers to hide and contain the fragility of the state of things, which performatively sustains the image of a fearful and obeying media. Contrary to the often-repeated disciplinary model (in the Foucauldian sense) of power originating from state intentionality in accounts of authoritarian resilience in the media (e.g. George & Venkiteswaran 2019; Lee 2010), Performing Fear develops its model of power in conversation with ideas central to Deleuze’s ‘Societies of Control’ such as the modulation of conduct based on unpredictable relationality (Deleuze 1992) and the literature on affect (Massumi 2002; 2015; Anderson 2014) that explore how affective flows operate in modes of continual variation and transformation, thereby enabling the function of power through modulations of potentiality. Through the case of Singapore,

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I consider whether ‘the audience’ can – or indeed has – become a surrogate for the strong state in disciplining its media. The main arguments in this book therefore revolve around three conceptual themes, namely myths and imaginaries, fear and affect, and audiences and power. As part of the aim of the book is to offer a different critical framework to think about power in authoritarian media, I briefly sketch out how I approach these themes theoretically in the rest of this introductory chapter.

Myths / Imaginaries How are we to conceive of the ideological work that mass media producers in Singapore do? Criticizing traditional ideas about ideology as false consciousness, Althusser theorized it as ways of representing the Imaginary, which is the relation between subjects and their conditions of existence, and what interpellates (positions and addresses) them as subjects. While theorists differ on the technicalities,11 they broadly agree that imaginaries connote a conscious, more or less institutionalized framework, which enables people to make sense of their social life as a coherent totality. However, these accounts largely deal with an ideal and require subjects to exist only in relation to the ‘imaginary’. Having to deal with multiple antagonistic roles and relations as well as unpredictable viewer complaints, my informants have to rather be conceived of as the support of a decentred complex of practices and statuses which have distinct conditions of existence. This is where Laclau’s theoretically sophisticated exposition of how imaginaries vary according to different practices and subjectivities becomes useful. Ernesto Laclau (1990) theorized ‘myths’ as new ‘spaces of representation’ that are designed to make sense of and suture dislocations, which he defined as ‘the primary ontological level of constitution of the social […] a dislocation is not a necessary moment in the self-transformation of the structure but is its failure to achieve constitution and is mere temporality in this sense’ (2015: 32–34). Myths, as surfaces on which dislocations and social demands 11 So how exactly do imaginaries work? Theorists differ. For Althusser, Imaginaries are related to class. For Lacan, they are founded on the Symbolic and the formation of the ego. From a different theoretical lineage, Foucault analyzed the mechanisms of power/knowledge strategies that function in the Imaginary. Taylor envisioned the role of social imaginaries in ‘modern societies’ as ‘what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society’ (2004: 15). He situated imaginaries as beyond structure and explicit doctrines, and within the realm of ‘practice that largely carries the understanding’ (2004: 54).

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can be inscribed, transform into imaginaries when they successfully conceal social dislocations by inscribing a wider range of social demands. A collective social imaginary, according to Laclau, is […] a horizon: it is not one among other objects but an absolute limit which structures a field of intelligibility and is thus the condition of possibility for the emergence of any object […] as modes of representation of the very form of fullness, they are located beyond the precariousness and dislocations typical of the world of objects (Laclau 2015: 48).

Laclau’s theorization of the relation between myth and imaginary as ‘radically hegemonic and unstable’ (2015: 51) captures the temporal shifts that occur between the two and the work involved in mythical articulations. If we considered myths beyond the boundaries of nation-states, it also raises intriguing questions about how far the myths constituting Singapore’s social imaginary are implicated in the global hegemony of liberal democratic ideals. I find Laclau’s theorization helpful in thinking about the ideological work of the mass media in Singapore because his account of how myths (as practices of representation) transform into Imaginaries offers a way to consider how issues manifest in practice. Chapter One’s exploration of state narratives provide an overview of the myths of multiculturalism and capital that constitute Singapore’s social imaginary, and captures the impossible unity and incomplete hegemonic closures inherent to modern capitalist societies; between the singularizing claims about the market, national identity or multiculturalism, and their heterogeneous configurations in practice. The ethnographic chapters then examine the types of production practices that go into suturing dislocations of myths as well as which of these myths, and when, structured producers’ fields of intelligibility to move into the realm of imaginaries. While concepts like myths and imaginaries seem like abstract ways to frame what goes on in Singapore’s media production, what was most interesting to me was how they manifested in a variety of ways in the lived experiences of my informants. In particular, Chapters Two and Four explore the ideological, ideational and affective implications of the state’s use of language as its social order’s key regulative idea (Sakai 1992: 326) for everyday production practice and how these shaped the status quo in different ways. These myths of Singapore as illiberal capitalist democracy articulated by the state are carried by performative and affective practices of its media producers, as well as imagined audiences as invoked addressee. In the next sections, I elaborate on how I make use of fear, affect, and audiences in the book.

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Fear / Affect When the underwear censorship incident happened, my first thought was of the assertions I had often encountered over the years about how Singapore is plagued by fear and self-censorship. ‘This must be a symptom of the “fear” that these commentaries and journalistic accounts were referring to’, I thought to myself. But being present in the panel room as a member of the production team, I did not actually feel the so-called fear amongst those around me. In fact, the rest of those in the room barely seemed to have noticed anything unusual happening before the Production Manager ran in, an act which disrupted the affect in the room. To complicate matters, the multiple encounters between the Production Manager and the censors signalled anxiety about the act of censoring rather the issue of showing underwear itself. It did not feel right to encompass these intersecting and complex practices under the broad claim of ‘fear’. It occurred to me then that my immediate reading of the situation had been clouded by the widely circulated hegemonic accounts that Singaporeans are fearful of the state, and that I had to be careful to separate the assumptions I brought from the actual encounters I witnessed in the field, which proved to be far richer in ethnographic and affective details. It is with this vigilance in mind that I clarify my use of fear and affect in this book.12 I refer to fear in two distinct ways, the first as articulations and the cultural lens through which Singapore as social order is understood in most accounts; and the second as felt senses that emerge in the daily work of media producers, which I propose to study as affective practices. Let me begin with fear as articulation. Ahmed (2004) proposed a model of sociality of emotion to understand textual representations of affect in state and popular accounts that highlights the importance of considering the cultural politics behind claims of emotionality. She argued that ‘emotionality as a claim about a subject or a collective is clearly dependent on relations of power, which endow “others” with meaning and value’ (Ahmed 2004: 4). The Cultural Studies concept of articulation as the linking of different discursive elements is central here (Hall 1996a). By linking various social 12 Since this book is not about fear as an inner state or coherent object of study, I will not rehash the well-repeated arguments among different approaches to emotions here. Sara Ahmed offers a comprehensive overview of the critiques of behaviourist, cognitive and biological theories of emotion, such as their reinforcing of the mind-body dualism, interior-exterior dichotomy, and assumptions of intentionality (Ahmed 2004: 5–12). There are further issues with regards to the problematic nature of universalizing what ‘fear’ means across languages and cultures (Needham 1981: 57).

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phenomena with the concept of fear, these accounts are performative as ‘the loop of the performative works powerfully […] [and] both generate their objects, and repeat past associations’ (Ahmed 2004: 194). Ahmed’s model is useful as a framework for reading how texts name, perform and instantiate emotions as an affective relationship between people, thereby forming affective economies. In Chapter One, I show how the state uses fear as its main affective tool to articulate the dislocations of its imaginaries, thereby justifying state intervention in much of Singapore’s social life. In response, popular discourse and critics impute fear on the imagined population. Fear as articulation is therefore the key discursive tool and cultural lens through which state and popular discourse make sense of social order. In the second instance, I also approach fear (and other affects) as a felt sense that emerges in the daily work of media producers. This is where I depart from Ahmed’s account. Ahmed’s key claim is that affect does not reside in signs or commodities, but is produced in its circulation like a form of capital (2004: 157). However, this risks decontextualizing affect (Wetherell 2015) and conflating its ontological, conjunctural and lived contexts (Grossberg 2010a: 314). As I noted earlier with my initial understanding of the censorship incident, there are dangers in confusing more ontological theorizations of some sort of ‘fear’ underlying the Singaporean psyche with empirical observations. To sidestep these risks, Wetherell alongside others in Cultural Studies (Harding & Pribram 2002; Grossberg 2010a) proposed focusing our attention on affective practices that are grounded in what she called ‘multi-modal situated event(s)’ (Wetherell 2015: 159) that cannot be removed from immediate relationships and specific negotiations and activity. Contrary to tendencies in certain branches of affect theory 13 to dismiss the discursive focus of mainstream practice theory, Wetherell proposed combining the analytical accomplishments of social science research with affect theory through studying what she conceptualizes as ‘affective practice […] a figuration where body possibilities and routines become recruited or entangled together with meaning making and with other social and material figurations’ (2012: 19). Applied here, this would entail a study of 13 As Leys critiqued, much of the work in new affect theory worked as reactions against the dominance of rational consciousness by proposing instead that actions are determined by affective dispositions that are independent of consciousness and pre-discursive (Leys 2011: 443). In so doing, such works implicitly reinforce the false dichotomy between mind and body. By focusing on situated practices rather than some sort of isolated emotion as the unit of analysis, this book challenges the ‘split between a semi-conscious, automaton-like, reactive body and the reflexive, discursive, interpreting, meaning-making, communicating social actor’ (Wetherell 2015: 160).

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the embodied affective meaning making practices of producers as they make sense of, debate or articulate claims during production situations. In clearly separating fear as articulation in state and popular accounts from affective practices in producers’ daily work, I examine the complex intersections between the discursive and lived dimensions of fear while keeping in mind that these are the analytical categories of the scholar. This cross-examination is also, in a sense, an explication of the complex relationship between the illiberal state and media production practices beyond directives or oppression. Ethnographic examination of affect – even if grounded in practices – is, nonetheless, tricky. Any analysis of the affective motivations or impacts within ethnographic encounters will necessarily entail a degree of my own reading of the situations as a participant. It is therefore important to me that my writing in this book clearly illustrates that distinction. I do that partly with the strategy of including both the original words of my informants and multiple translations in my writing, as I elaborate in the method section later in this chapter.

Audience / Power Even though the uncertainty of audiences is by now a common assumption within production studies literature, these works that are mostly based on case studies in the West demonstrate how the industries are fuelled by anxiety because nobody knows what makes a hit (Gitlin 2004 [1988]; Caldwell 2008). Traversing how institutional imaginations of audiences interact with audience actuality in production practice to perpetuate illiberalism, this book speaks to wider audience studies literature by extending beyond market concerns to consider the relational ways in which audiences impact on television production. In mediating the relationship between state and society, the producers I worked with regularly invoked audiences as an object of concern,14 with referents ranging from abstract notions (public, mass etc.) to different groups of audiences (according to gender, age, race etc.), to single persons (producers often talked about themselves or particular friends or family 14 Taylor (2004) emphasized the importance of a shared understanding of the addresser and addressee relationship in constituting modern social imaginaries: ‘part of what makes sense of it is some picture of ourselves as speaking to others to whom we are related in a certain way […] There is a speech act here, addresser and addressees, and some understanding of how they can stand in this relation to each other’ (Taylor 2004: 45). In other words, the producers’ ideological work requires some sense of whom they have to address.

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members when imagining responses to their work), to the broadcaster or the authorities (as an abstract whole or as individuals they personally know), to sponsors or ratings. Drawing on the rich strain of writing in Media Studies on audiences as a ‘discursive construct’ (Ang 1991; Hartley 1992; Nightingale 1996), I am interested in how different producers discussed the issue with each other in various contexts.15 Audiences come to crowd the scene of production through this conjuring and shifting, which bring a multiplicity of perspectives into relevance, either sequentially or at the same time. So when do producers struggle over whom or what audiences are, and under what circumstances are such questions kept concealed? To what extent are these practices affective and how do they link to wider circuits of power? For the producers I worked with, who exactly were watching what and in what numbers remained a mystery to them, as information about ratings was withheld by the authorities and broadcaster. This practice introduced uncertainty to the core of television production in Singapore. The shroud of secrecy surrounding audience matters had practical consequences for the producers. They relied, on the one hand, on an imagined audience they constructed through the myths and social imaginaries they constituted in their daily work. This was based on a particular idea of the social organized around linguistic (and ethnic) difference but emptied otherwise of all other antagonisms (see Chapters Two and Four). On the other hand, these ideas were constantly ruptured by audience encounters that manifested predominantly as viewer complaints. Empowered by a state system that takes any form of criticism very seriously, these viewer complaints were always potentially punishing, which had serious consequences for producers’ daily work (see Chapters Three and Five). To account for this incoherence between the two imagined audiences, I draw on a distinct, more philosophical branch of affect theory as a theoretical toolbox to develop the concept of audiences as ‘affective superaddressee’ in order to think about audience power in illiberal contexts. While I carve out the theoretical contours of the concept using ethnographic details in Chapter Three, briefly here, the concept of ‘superaddressee’ (Bakhtin 1986: 15 This raises a different set of questions. Who is representing what as audiences to whom, under what circumstances and for what purposes? Addressing the issue of representing as, Hobart argued that ‘[a]udiences do not exist purely in themselves as measurable objects […] independent of the frameworks used to study them’ (2010a: 203). Applied to audiences, the transformation in representing as is complex because it often consists of serial practices. In this sense, by studying these practices of representing audiences as, I aim to establish what sorts of practices which producers engaged in at different stages of their work, for what purposes, and what these suggest about their anxieties or concerns.

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126) allows for the encompassing of often-contradictory imaginations of audiences that producers in illiberal contexts like Singapore are forced to evoke. Audiences as superaddressee work affectively in the first level by embodying the multiple and often mutually exclusive potentials that coexist within audience encounters (Massumi 2002: 32), modulating interactive possibilities but always exceeding attempts to control it. Sustained through affective practices, the potentials of the ‘affective superaddressee are not just delimited but also articulated within interactions, thereby undergoing perpetual transformation. On the second level, by embodying contradictory coexisting potentials, audiences as ‘affective superaddressee’ organize producers’ practices around affective logic. Simply put, this concept considers audience power as residing, in large parts, in the excesses of any audience encounter – the potential responses that could have but did not occur, while always threatening to be a possibility – that feed back into producer-audience relations. In the case of Singapore, this ‘affective superaddressee’ manifests as a constantly morphing and unaddressable audience, imagined in various instances as uncontrollable, infantile, conservative or ‘other’, empowered to punish, yet never predictable. In imagining audiences in many different ways but always presupposing their criticisms, producers are not dealing with an actual viewer or category of viewers, but an abstraction of the viewer as the instrument of censure, displeasure and complaint – one that engenders anxieties in multiple ways and works effectively to evoke self-policing among producers, as empowered by both the media system and subjects’ own performative practices. This account of imagined audiences has implications for how power works in the lived everyday of media producers in authoritarian Singapore. Literature on authoritarian media (and on Singaporean media) overwhelmingly frame power using Foucault’s disciplinary, and biopolitical or governmentality terms. Under disciplinary models of power, authoritarian state institutions control the media through policy and legislation, which presumably result in individual self-censorship (Rodan 2004: 34; Trocki 2006); while biopolitics and governmentality work through mass-level regulatory techniques that shape individual conduct by defining how groups relate to each other. The biopolitics and governmentality of state policies in Singapore are well explored in academic literature (for e.g. Lee 2010; George 2005) but, more often than not, overemphasize the strategic intentionality and rationality of the state and tend to reduce everyday life and social relations to residual effects of initiatives emanating from dispersed but coherent concentrations of authority (Barnett et al. 2008: 624–653). While

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biopolitics and governmentality are strong features of the Singaporean state’s interventionist style of governing and imagining the social (see Chapter One), my ethnography of how are they lived, negotiated and contested by and among media producers suggests that how power manifests in lived experiences increasingly resembles Deleuze’s society of control (1992: 3–7). Since Deleuze’s writing on it was brief, I outline what I understand as the key differences between control societies and Foucault’s discipline and biopolitics, in conversation with how scholars have made use of Deleuze’s analysis. The first difference lies in control society’s departure from state intentionality as origin of power. Audiences as ‘affective superaddressee’ complicate how normativity works since audiences as a multiplicity increases the number of different ways in which their responses could discipline media producers’ actions. This shift in where producers imagine the key problematic is crucial, since it means that power as manifested in the daily practices of production becomes ‘ever more decentralized and is now no longer in any straightforward sense connected to easily locatable institutions and exerted by centrally placed actors but is rather spread out in extremely complex structures and networks where it is not possible to excavate the origin or place of power’ (Rasmussen 2011: 1). Accordingly, the manner in which audiences’ control at times moves beyond the moulding of actions according to normative standards in disciplinary power to resemble Deleuze’s control societies where producers’ actions are modulated according to relational, situational and constantly shifting standards (Chapters Three and Five). However, the power of audiences and its excesses is also always in a mode of continuous variation, undergoing perpetual displacements, re-compositions and transformations, thereby making it inherently temporal in nature. Ideas about ‘audiences’ are able to control producers’ practices precisely because they are the highly uncertain, ambiguous and therefore mutable and transformable. Such a decentralized logic of control is effective because it is difficult to locate and constantly changing. This book shows the serious implications for producers’ subjectivities and practices in daily life.

A Word on the Ethnography Needless to say, I am indebted to the many incredibly generous people I met during fieldwork who extended beyond themselves to include me in their worlds. The majority of the encounters that appear in this book are from the sixteen months I spent in Singapore between June 2012 and October 2013 working for and observing different television productions.

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The ethnography was based on participative observations from when I worked alongside the crew, supplemented by informal, or where necessary, formal interviews, and any other information gathered from following the productions. Fieldwork started with me working as an intern for the production companies. After establishing more trust with the producers towards the latter part of fieldwork, I was allowed to stay on solely as a researcher. As much as possible, I followed the production process from pre- to post-production for each programme I worked on. However, the phases I could observe differed depending on the nature of each production and how much access I was given. As an intern, I was at the bottom of the hierarchy of labour and was often assigned odd jobs that ranged from transcribing to cleaning. However, I was also given more ‘skilled’ responsibilities due to my prior production experience and higher educational background. I also suspect that my dual role as PhD researcher prevented the producers from treating me in the same way they would regular interns who were usually much younger. After the ethnographies came the challenge of writing up. The abundance of materials collected in the field created difficulties in choosing which materials to use and how to write them up. In selecting which practices to write up, I always start with the materials that show the primary concerns of the producers at the time before considering the implications of these concerns. In other words, I take my subjects’ words as axiomatic, and this also applies to the choice of incidents or examples that I raise, as I try as much as possible to stick primarily to what were of concern to them. The chapters in this book therefore consist largely of arguments, contestations and discussions among the producers that I encountered during my fieldwork, during which they debated about issues that they did not agree on. While these may not be typical or average instances of media production, atypical or extreme cases often reveal more information because they activate more actors and mechanisms in those situations (Flyvbjerg 2011: 86). In this sense, these encounters work as explicit illustrations of the issues that mattered to them enough to deserve discussion and serve as instances of rupture that illustrate how practices work to articulate and constitute a constantly shifting work and cultural sensibility. As my research subjects spoke a variety of languages – including English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, some Malay words and Singlish – among themselves, I include the original phrases and words and their translation(s)16 16 I realized there was no straightforward way to translate the material into English. Both government and schools in Singapore lacked an official or consistent translation system. Different

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for the terms I deemed important in this book. Often, you will find that there may be more than one translation attached to each word. I do this on purpose in order to ‘stay close to the complexities and contradictions of existence’, as Flyvbjerg (2011: 95) advised. While I will put forth my arguments about the materials in this book, my way of writing also leaves room for readers to make their own interpretations if they wish to do so. By not monopolizing the interpretive space, I hope that I demonstrate my empathy to my subjects with this approach to writing up.

Organization of the Book What goes into the ideological sustenance of an illiberal capitalist democracy? The following chapters approach the puzzle of authoritarian resilience in the media from different angles. Chapter One examines the myths – broadly capitalism and multiculturalism with all their antagonisms – that formulate the Singaporean state’s construction of its social imaginary(s). Through this chapter, I argue two points. First, fear is the key discursive tool and affective logic through which state and popular discourse make sense of social order. Second, the multiple functions of fear centre around struggles over the overdetermined social. I discuss how the population as antagonism result in structural and practical consequences for how media producers can imagine and access their audiences. Having set the structural and contextual scene, the rest of the chapters explore ethnographically the cultural politics of fear as manifested in production practices of different genres of television. Beginning with one of the most-made genres in Singaporean television, Chapter Two uses two state-funded game shows about heritage to examine the well-oiled practices and the mundane everyday work that goes into making infotainment in an illiberal capitalist democracy. Through the chapter, I show how these practices enable an ideological construction of audiences that continually condemn the Singaporean subject as a work in progress, and sustain a vicious cycle of perpetual to-be-upgraded-ness by denying and disarticulating the underlying antagonisms of Singapore society. government agencies had different groups of translators working for them. To overcome the issue of translation in the book, I cross-checked relevant Mandarin terms across the major ChineseEnglish dictionaries sold in Singaporean bookstores. Cases where there were inconsistencies have been noted.

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Extending the ideological emptying of audiences into a more detailed examination of the competing goals and demands of illiberalism in Singapore’s media, Chapter Three focuses on how the multiple roles and relations of illiberal capital are embodied by producers in the struggles of scriptwriting a crime drama. These struggles centre around the audience as problematic. Developing the concept of audiences as ‘affective superaddressee’, I examine the ways in which the dislocations of illiberal capitalism manifest in anxieties engendered by imagined audiences that serve to perpetuate authoritarian resilience in the everyday media production. If the old-timers of Chinese-language media production in Singapore had developed a set of established work practices that serve the status quo, what are the potentials for newcomers to change that? Chapter Four follows the journey of a new director who arrived with the explicit aim to challenge the state of affairs in mass media production. It demonstrates both the reliability and the incompleteness of ideological reproduction by detailing the processes of how contestations surrounding potentials for generating tears in the dominant social order eventually led to the reinforcing of categorical boundaries. Focusing on the affective ideational practices of producers when producing a state-sponsored art drama, I argue that what ultimately enabled this social imaginary were myths of cultural and linguistic difference in society. I end the book with a genre that is uncommonly made in Singapore – Reality TV. What are the possibilities for disrupting the status quo in the absence of well-established conventions? Traversing from fear to anxiety to pleasure, Chapter Five focuses on how the affective practices of producers were productive in creating stage-managed affective spectacles emptied of any real controversy or social impact. I argue that what results is a form of power that operates similar to Deleuze’s ‘control societies’ that moves beyond discipline to modulate producers’ behaviour based on constantly shifting standards. The final chapter accounts for the time that has passed since the ethnographies. Using materials from in-depth interviews conducted between 2018 and 2020, I reflect on the implications of how audience power is shifting from the background to the foreground in producers’ articulations and revisit the idea of audiences as affective superaddressee in the context of increasing digitalization and audience fragmentation.

1

Fear and the Fragility of Myths Abstract Chapter One examines the myths that formulate the Singaporean state’s construction of its social imaginary(s) – broadly capitalism and multiculturalism with all their antagonisms. Through this chapter, I argue two points. First, fear is the key discursive tool and affective logic through which state and popular discourse make sense of social order. Second, the multiple functions of fear center around struggles over the overdetermined social. I discuss how the population as antagonism result in structural and practical consequences for how media producers can imagine and access audiences. Having set the structural and contextual scene, the remaining four chapters explore ethnographically the cultural politics of fear as manifested in production practices of different genres of television. Keywords: Fear; Social Imaginary; Multiculturalism; Singapore; Capitalism; Meritocracy

The real fragility of the remarkable society that has been created in this tiny island state […] is not its ethnic and cultural complexity per se. It is rather in the artificiality of the attempts to prune it into a precarious order, and to resist rather than accept and welcome forces of change (Clammer 1998: 26). If we want ratings, we have to reflect life […] Policy affects our everyday lives but anything that puts our policies under examination will be deemed sensitive […] Things that are close to real life may evoke huge audience emotions […] so we cannot even do programmes that are close to the heart of the people (interview with Producer A, 2013). Yes, good ratings are important. But it is only perfect if we get good ratings without negative comments (interview with Producer B, 2019).

What goes into the ideological sustenance of an illiberal capitalist democracy? The struggles of representational work articulated by the two Fong, Siao Yuong, Performing Fear in Television Production: Practices of an Illiberal Democracy, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463724579_ch01

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producers quoted above point to the difficulties of such an endeavour for media producers in an illiberal capitalist democracy like Singapore. So what are the tensions that underlie producers’ seemingly impossible strive for high viewership without triggering political sensitivities or negative audience feedback? This chapter approaches the question from the perspective of the myths that producers are supposed to constitute in their daily work that formulate the Singaporean state’s construction of its social imaginary(s). I draw on a specific set of theoretical tools in this chapter. Theorizing dislocations as the ‘primary ontological level of constitution of the social’ (Laclau 2015: 32), Laclau argued in his later works that antagonism is ‘a form of discursive inscription – i.e. of master – of […] dislocation’ (2004: 319). In other words, the discursive construction of antagonism is the negation of – and the imposition of identity upon – this more constitutive dislocatory character of all identity (Žižek 1990: 251–4). As a form of discursive response to dislocations, antagonism ‘is not equivalent to radical exclusion. What it does is to dichotomize the social space, but both sides of the antagonistic relation are necessary in order to create a single space of representation’ (Laclau 2004: 319). Antagonism can be seen as ideological insofar as it conceals the dislocatory character of identity by constituting a new space of representation, a mythical space, based on antagonistic relations. The Singaporean state’s biopolitical policies and discourse, and popular criticisms examined in this chapter articulate the dislocations of Singapore’s social in some way or other, whether as antagonisms or other forms of myth.1 These dislocations are what require constant effort on the part of producers to suture, in order to reconstitute the dominant social imaginary. This chapter explores the main myths of Singaporean nationhood and raises questions about which of these mythical spaces, and when, may reach moments where a ‘general form of fullness’ (Laclau 2015: 51) predominates to form an imaginary. Through analyzing the state’s policies alongside discourse from official, popular and academic accounts, this chapter makes two broad arguments. First, I show how the state uses fear as its main affective tool to articulate the dislocations of this imaginary, thereby justifying state intervention in much of Singapore’s social life. Second, I also discuss how these dislocations result in structural and practical consequences for the media industry and 1 Barthes’s (1972) outlining of contemporary bourgeois myth is also highly suggestive here since it explores how one class (the political class, in this case) may play with social imaginaries. At the same time, this also raises questions about how the Singaporean state’s myths are implicated in global (Euro-American) myths of liberal democracy.

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its workers. This chapter can therefore be also read as an ideological and structural overview of Singapore’s brand of illiberalism that underpin the ethnographies. The first two sections of the chapter deal with ‘capitalism’, ‘multiculturalism’ and their construction of ‘national identity’ as articulations – the discursive suturing of the dislocatory nature of any such identity. It does not of course follow though that people strive to live by, or according to what they imagine, such myths as promulgating. The third section therefore explores the state’s regulation of the media in their attempt to control popular discussion of these myths. Through that, I draw out how ‘fear’, as the key discursive tool through which state and popular discourse make sense of social order, centres around struggles over imagining the overdetermined social. In other words, what the government ‘fears’ is the chaotic population. In essence, this chapter considers the social imaginary – as constituted through fear – that the production practices discussed in the rest of this book attempt to continually reconstitute.

Being a Singaporean Capitalist Subject […] capital names a systematic network in which a massive sequence of social practices are aggregated and linked. Capital is a relation that emerges from within the field of practices as a whole and recodes their ordering mechanisms, placing terms into relations that did not previously obtain. As a consequence, capital ensures that by coding vast fields of practices with its own internal directionality, practices which are apparently “outside” of its logical operation are neither troubling nor disruptive of its function (Walker 2019: 76).

Singapore was a British colony until 1963 when it became a state within the Malaysian federation for two years before becoming an independent republic in 1965. The government, which is controlled by a single party2 since the nation’s independence, holds up economic growth as its primary goal. The People’s Action Party’s (PAP) single party rule has allowed it to create an attractive environment for foreign investment, on which Singapore’s modern economy was built. This was done through a combination of pro-business legislations, co-optation of trade unions and attractive fiscal incentives. As a result, Singapore achieved exponential economic growth and is now one of

2

At present, the People’s Action Party (PAP) holds 83 out of 93 parliamentary seats.

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the richest countries in the world.3 Despite these economic accomplishments, official discourse on the economy is littered with articulations of anxiety. As part of the state-sanctioned narrative of how Singapore came about, the government often combines an emphasis on the economic prosperity of the nation with warnings about the fragility of Singapore’s economy. For instance, in a speech at the opening of a state-sponsored exhibition of Singapore history in 1984, Singapore’s former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew said, We have to be perpetually vigilant. Singaporeans will be reminded of the vulnerable nature of our society, because the fundamentals on which our survival rests are slender and tight: a limited land area, no agriculture, large dependence on international trade, on foreign investments and on imported technology (Lee 1984a).

We have here a powerful representative of the government 4 warning Singaporeans to be ‘vigilant’ about a set of concerns that have been repeatedly enunciated in public rhetoric. These regular warnings raise several questions: How have different people represented what is worth worrying about and what do they tell us about the problems underlying this emphasis on the economy in the Singapore state’s construction of nationhood? Singapore’s national narratives often emphasize the development of its First World economy. While these accounts celebrate Singapore’s economic success, they are often accompanied by warnings about its vulnerability. For instance, in a forum of the Singapore National Employers’ Federation in 1996, Lee warned young Singaporeans against taking high rates of economic growth for granted (Crane 1996). Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s Prime Minister since 2004 and son of Lee Kuan Yew, made similar warnings in a parliamentary speech in 2007: Singapore’s situation is totally different. We are a tiny, multi-racial, multi-religious, one little red dot out of so many red dots in the middle of Southeast Asia, lack land, lack air space, lack sea space, lack water, sometimes, also run short of sand and granite, operating in a fast-changing competitive global environment against very powerful competitors […] 3 Singapore’s GDP grew from an estimated US$704mil in 1960 (at current US dollar) to US$364bil in 2018 (World Bank 2019). 4 The late Lee was Singapore’s first Prime Minister and governed Singapore for over 30 years. He was a highly respected figure in the country.

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Our model is ‘paranoid’ government – a government which worries all the time […] Whenever people tell you not to worry, you start getting concerned (Lee, H. L. 2007).

Strikingly, the Singapore government presents a very similar official narrative across three decades, emphasizing Singapore’s lack of resources and the fragility of its economic success in order to warn Singaporeans against taking economic prosperity for granted. From reminders of Singapore’s vulnerability to paranoia and worry, the government clearly uses fear-related affect to frame how Singaporeans should understand its economic situation. Journalistic reports on Singapore’s concerns with being economically uncompetitive have appeared periodically over the years (e.g. Crane 1996; Tan 2012a). However, these accounts have re-presented fears about the economy by linking it to other matters. For instance, writing for Singapore broadsheet The Straits Times, local journalist Melissa Tan attributed the government’s easing of restrictions on foreign labour to ‘Singapore’s fear of being uncompetitive’ (Tan 2012b). Here, she represented changes in government policy as ‘Singapore’s fear’. The Business Times Singapore also ran an article that asserted that Singaporean society had ‘the fear that the younger generation will not be as financially secure as their parents’ (Cai 2014). So these news articles departed from the government’s cautions against taking the economy for granted and represented both the government and Singaporeans as fearful. What were to be feared – uncompetitiveness, insecurity – were related but different. In reframing varying concerns related to the economy under the idea of ‘fear’, these journalistic accounts also point to potential problems beyond changing attitudes, such as the influx of migrant workers and the sustainability of the global economy. ‘Fear’ therefore serves as a way to disentangle the various issues of concern underlying the emphasis on the economy as a source of worry. Many academic accounts have tried to make sense of these narratives. According to Chia, an Australia-based academic who works on educational history and systems, the government’s implementation of the National Education programme in schools in 1996 to teach the state’s version of Singapore’s history reflects ‘the government’s fear that Singaporeans, particularly the youth, would take Singapore’s prosperity for granted’ (2014: 70). Again, this account represented government policy as indicative of the government’s ‘fear’. Contrary to arguments that these narratives demonstrate the government’s ‘fear’, some accounts have argued that the government used these narratives as political tools. For Tan, a Political Scientist, these enunciations

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have ‘mainly been about shaping the public imagination with narratives of permanent vulnerability and fragile success’ (2007b: 17). He wrote: The most basic source of Singapore’s authoritarian culture since the state gained independence in 1965 has been fear. Over the decades, fear—or, more accurately, paranoia—has been at the center of evolving public discourse concerning questions of national as well as personal survival (2008b: 3).

Tan wrote in a later piece that the state’s narrative that emphasizes the nation’s significant but fragile economic success could ‘sustain enough of a culture of anxiety to militate against complacency about achieving and maintaining material affluence’ (2016: 236). For Tan, fear exists within ‘public discourse’. Importantly, for Tan, the idea of ‘anxious (even paranoid), materialistic and politically apathetic’ Singaporeans exists within the state’s hegemonic account, which raises the question of the extent to which that account might impact on how Singaporeans imagine each other. Other accounts have focused on how these narratives produced certain effects in Singaporeans. Chua, in his sociological critique, argued: Survival is repeatedly thematized discursively by the political leaders and often by the led too. Its connotative, ideological effect provides the rationale for, and consequently generates, a ‘crisis mentality’ […] produces an overanxious tendency (Chua 1995b: 19).

In interpreting the government’s warnings against taking prosperity for granted, Chua represented the issue as one of ‘survival’, which he argued created ‘an overanxious tendency’ among Singaporeans. Tan also argued that this has ‘created an anxious society that is apprehensive even of itself’ (2007a: 6) and socialized Singaporeans into beings that are ‘fearful of both change as well as difference’ (2007b: 22). Gomez, a Communications Professor who unsuccessfully ran for parliament thrice as a member of opposition political parties, argued that ‘feelings of anxiety and uncertainty displayed by the economically dependent middle class whenever the ruling party raises the spectre of economic downfall have been linked to the slow rate of the democratisation process’ (2000: 16). Similarly, Ooi and Gomez wrote that ‘the PAP has encouraged its citizens to internalize fears of instability and opt for the conservative authoritarianism’ (2006: 11). Note that, while for Gomez and Ooi, Singaporeans were fearful, for Tan, ‘fear’ existed within public discourse.

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Even though these academic accounts use ‘fear’ to understand the situation, this ‘fear’ was inflected differently. These include referring to it as an ‘ideological effect’, an ‘overanxious tendency’, and ‘internalize[d]’ feelings that exist within the government on some accounts and among Singaporeans in others. Singaporeans were also represented as fearful of themselves, ‘change’, ‘difference’, the ‘democratisation process’, and ‘instability’ in these various arguments. This suggests that different people had different ideas about the role of ‘fear’ in narratives about the economy and used ‘fear’ as a discursive tool for articulating various concerns for different purposes. On the one hand, it is striking how state, popular and academic accounts commonly use ‘fear’ to inflect the grand narrative of the vulnerability of Singapore’s economic success, suggesting that ‘fear’ functions as a ‘privileged discursive point of this partial fixation’ or ‘nodal point’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 112). On the other hand, the different inflections also speak to the plurality of perspectives in understanding the situation and the different types of problems associated with the economy in Singapore. However, what is significant is how these difficult social and political questions get reformulated into economic ones, which allows the government to reduce complex social problems to a matter of economic development (Chua 2017: 51). These accounts’ relentless emphasis on the importance of (and the dangers of losing) economic prosperity point to the salience of the issue in Singapore but also raise the question of the dislocations they are silencing. Enshrined in Singapore’s national ideology together with the imperative of economic progress are ideals of ‘meritocracy’ and equality. The logic of capitalism serves the appearance of meritocracy by individualizing material success or failure but relies on the displacement of dynamic differences that are often contextual (Deleuze & Guattari 1983: 190). Such insistence on meritocracy encourages the embedding of self-interest above other contingencies in Singapore’s nationhood. To further complicate matters for the Singaporean capitalist subject, the government criticizes exactly this emphasis on selfinterest (or what they call ‘Western’ values of excessive individualism) and endorses so-called ‘Asian Values’ or ‘communitarianism’ (Chua 1995b; 2017) that place society above the self.5 Herein lies the antagonisms of capitalism 5 To combat capitalism’s creation of excessive self-centredness, the government attempted several ideological measures including imposing compulsory moral education through religious studies, and later articulating a carefully curated version of Confucianism in the 1980s. When these failed to be taken up on a mass-scale, the government formulated a new national ideology of communitarianism in the form of a list of ‘Shared Values’ to emphasize society over self (Chua 2017: 57–61). Scholars have commented that these were part of the government’s strategies to mobilize the country towards economic goals and global competitiveness (Wee 2000: 129–143).

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in Singapore for the individual: to be fully interpellated as a Singaporean subject, one has to simultaneously embody the self-centred competitive subjectivity by ignoring structural and circumstantial inequalities while at the same time sacrifice to remedy the same inequalities; to concurrently recognize the shared precariousness of life with others while separating one’s lived reality from fellow citizens. Meritocracy achieves mythic status in Singapore through this ambiguity between its goals of individual self-interest and the greater good (couched often in the discourse of equal opportunity and fairness). It is precisely the unresolved switching between these two incompatible positions at different times that characterizes what Barthes (1972) called the ‘turnstile effect’ of myths. However, the myth of meritocracy and the antagonism between the two positions further hide the dislocations underneath. In Chua’s words, ‘this is a government that ideologically denies the significance of capitalism as culture and its manifest material effects, while aggressively encouraging it substantively in education and production’ (2003b: 67). Chua points precisely to the state’s discursive suturing of the dislocations of capitalism in Singapore through ideologies of ‘communitarianism’ and ‘Asian Values’. On the societal level, these narratives ‘displace and suppress any public discourse that foregrounds the human costs of a capitalist culture’ (Chua 2003b: 67), as well as legitimize and compel individualism, competition and self-centredness, which allows the government to sidestep the high levels of income inequality in Singapore (Teo 2018: 171–75). Rahim argued that this also allows the government to hide ‘the systemic structural, historical and institutional factors that have contributed to inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic socio-economic disparities’ (Rahim 2009: 47) and for Lee, this achieves the effect of disciplining Singaporeans into adhering to the governmentendorsed status quo (Lee 2010: 32). By presenting these dislocations as the antagonism between ‘Western’ self-interest and ‘Asian Values’, the state discursively sutures the dislocations of capitalism’s lived realities in Singapore. In a sense, these references to fear, while used by the state to understand Singapore’s economic situation, simultaneously function as articulatory devices that point to these same issues that threaten and limit the capitalist Singaporean identity. While these dislocations are contained, denied and buried by myths such as meritocracy, they continue to bubble to the surface through references to fear and anxieties.6 These dislocations relate in complex ways 6 The issue of migrant workers in Singapore is an example of how articulations of fear may expose underlying dislocations of capitalism in Singapore. The relentless pursuit of economic

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to ethnicity, class and nationality that draw links to axes of inequality amongst Singaporeans as well; and threaten to rupture official myths of meritocracy and equality that are crucial parts of the national imaginary. It was precisely these dislocations underlying narratives of market competition that producers needed to conceal in their daily work, that also opened up spaces of representation for them to continually reconstitute the myths of meritocracy that formulate Singapore’s social imaginary. The complex relationship Singapore society has with capitalism affect producers beyond their ideological production work and manifests also in the media industry’s structure. Despite much of the industry depending on state funding and being expected to do Public Service work, the government privatized the national public broadcaster in 1994, thrusting the public broadcaster into the realms of commercial competition. I asked about this industry structure during an interview with the head of Public Service Broadcasting at the IMDA. In reply, she spoke about the communitarian values of PSB in terms of servicing audiences and developing the local growth in Singapore sees it, on the one hand, importing large numbers of migrant workers, and on the other hand, articulating anxieties associated with these migrants. The state has presented an antagonistic position on the matter over the years. While needing foreign contract workers to maintain economic growth, the state has continued over the years to frame these workers as to be feared and to employ ‘othering’ strategies including ‘use-and-discard’ immigration policies that carefully exclude foreign workers from Singapore society and ‘subject their presence to state-sponsored social disciplinary containment measures’ (Yeoh 2006: 32). It is important to note here that these exclusionary measures are only imposed on migrant workers that do certain types of – usually manual physical – work, the majority of whom originate from South Asia. The state’s, and to a certain extent wider society’s, different treatment of these workers compared to highly skilled and highly paid ‘foreign talents’ reveal the limits of narratives of equality and meritocracy (Yeoh 2004; Goh 2013). The majority of Singaporeans’ silent endorsement of this discriminatory and exploitative system is, for Chua, testament to the hegemony of economic development’s crucial position in ideas of ‘Singaporean-ness’, in that migrant workers’ low levels of economic development are perceived among Singaporeans as reflective of their ‘otherness’, thereby rendering them ‘outsiders’ of the Singapore imaginary (Chua 2003b: 69). This relationship is antagonistic in Laclau’s sense since Singapore’s capitalist identity both relies on, and is constantly disrupted by, these migrant workers, making them its ‘constitutive outside’. The state’s policies that essentially remove migrant workers’ rights and its inflections of fear of the ‘Other’ provide a discursive tool through which the dislocations inherent in Singapore’s desire for relentless economic development get repackaged as the antagonism between Singaporeans and foreign workers. As a case in point, the explosion of COVID-19 cases among migrant workers living in overcrowded dormitories, and the state’s subsequent containment and discursive separation of them from the rest of society by reporting two sets of infection figures – one for ‘community spread’ and the other for migrant workers – both allayed Singaporeans’ fears of widespread infection and exposed capitalism’s unequally distributed human costs in actuality. However, while this invited heated discussions in mainstream and social media, criticisms remained centred on the foreign workers, a testament to the antagonism’s successful concealing of the dislocations underlying it.

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industry as a whole, before justifying that ‘there is value in the broadcaster having a commercial discipline as well to make sure that the money used is used properly and well spent’ (my italics). This argument that the state can ‘discipline’ the public broadcaster to achieve its public service goals (greater good) through market competition (individual self-interest) is testament to the significance of capitalist ideology underlying the logics of state governance in Singapore. As a result, both the public broadcaster and its producers are caught in a situation where they have to both satisfy PSB remits and compete with commercial players for viewership, a challenge that has proven increasingly difficult over the years and that has crucially resulted in producers embodying multiple antagonistic relationships with the broadcaster and audiences (see Chapter Three). As a case in point, the complicated relationship independent producers have with MediaCorp, who serves as both their commissioner and their competitor, manifests in struggles over viewer information. For the independent producers who worked for MediaCorp, even basic rating information was not readily available. Up till today, the producers I worked with during my fieldwork have to, in their own words, ‘beg’ for the ratings of their programmes. In a fieldwork interview conducted in 2013, one of the veteran independent producers who had previously worked in MediaCorp commented in frustration: A lot of the time, what is most disturbing is that sometimes we get comments from network officers that says things like ‘the cleaning auntie said this, my wife didn’t like the programme’, things like that. So your wife is representing how many people? Is she representative of the viewers we are trying to target? Then I can say ‘oh no, my children love it very much’. So we can argue until the cows come home and we are still not on the same page […] If they want to do it in a more scientific manner, then do it in a scientific manner. Have a proper system that actually churn out data and is transparent to the producers and all of us will be talking on the same page, rather than every day we have to guess what is going on. Even until now, I am unable to get ratings for programmes other than my own programmes. They will churn out ratings only for my own programmes. Sometimes I try to look at things from the helicopter view, I’m unable to do so because they don’t want to share […] After begging, they will give you a rough idea but they won’t give you exact figures […] I don’t know why they don’t want to give us, it’s just they prefer to keep it non-transparent7. 7

This response was in English.

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Such practices of secrecy and the producer’s frustrations are revealing of the uneasy power relationship between MediaCorp and independent producers. While the two work closely together in their shared aims of producing high quality programming that achieve good ratings, this process also necessitates MediaCorp management sharing viewership information in order for all involved to be ‘on the same page’. However, the competitive relationship between the two also prohibit MediaCorp from doing so. In this sense, this struggle over viewer information betrays what I think are the dislocations of a simultaneous pursuit of individual self-interest that comes with free market competition and its denial in the discursive celebration of communitarianism. More broadly, MediaCorp’s secrecy around viewership figures reflect the tight control over information and working cultures typical of state institutions in Singapore. In my conversations with both state officials from the IMDA and managers at the monopoly free-to-air broadcaster MediaCorp over the past ten years, I had frequently and repeatedly tried to ask about the secrecy around viewer information. In most instances, my informants seemed keen to quickly move the conversation on to other topics and I had never been able to obtain much information beyond attributions of secrecy to market competition, which raises broader questions about whether capitalist logic is used to discursively justify or distract from the uneasiness stemming from these practices of power and control. Regardless, this practice of secrecy poses real problems for producers. MediaCorp’s reluctance to share exact figures of audience ratings mean producers have little to base their ideas about audiences on. This also facilitates competing accounts of audiences on different occasions. If ideas about ‘the audience’ involved mostly guesswork, not least because available data, however limited in value, was withheld, the producers’ and network officers’ attributions of various – sometimes contradictory – characteristics to ‘the audience’ not only suggests that it has no clear referent, but also further adds to the ambiguity of the notion, setting the stage for ‘the audience’ as a reference to serve as a continuously mutating and malleable problem for producers.

The ‘Multi’ of Singapore’s Nationhood Rather than a necessary and desirable moral good in itself, the state’s multiracial policy is portrayed as a utilitarian solution to the ever-present threat of racial violence. This creates a sense of precariousness, fragility

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and distrust, so that fear of a differently raced person always exists. Fear, rather than mutual respect, becomes the basis of multicultural living (Kathiravelu 2017: 164). The government projects Singapore’s multi-religious, multilingual, and multiracial condition through the lenses of fear and of celebration, producing a formal expression of social harmony in diversity that [is] fragile and potentially dangerous (Tan 2018: 33).

The struggle over audiences point to broader issues of how populations are imagined and governed in Singapore. Despite Singapore’s official branding of itself as a global cosmopolitan society (Yeoh 2004; 2006), studies have shown that Singaporeans tend to navigate away from perceived cultural differences, and ‘employ strategies to maintain boundaries’ with the cultural other (Ong and Yeoh 2008: 98). This approach to difference is not exclusive to attitudes towards foreigners in Singapore, but rather echoes how the Singaporean state governs multiculturalism in the nation-state. Much has been written on multiracialism, multiculturalism, and multilingualism in Singapore. While these are separate issues, race and ethnicity, language, religion and culture tend to get conflated in government policies in their attempt to classify these complexities into neat categories. I shall not aim here to give an exhaustive discussion of all the complex issues involved but to provide a sketch of the state’s approach to difference that underlies myths of multiculturalism so crucial to Singapore’s social imaginary. Official accounts enshrine multiracialism, multiculturalism, multilingualism and multi-religiosity as key parts of Singapore’s national identity. However, this is often accompanied by reiterating the vulnerability of social harmony and the potential threat of racial violence, religious radicalization, terrorism and Islamophobia. For instance, in his National Day Rally speech in 1996, then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong spoke about the younger generation’s lack of knowledge about Singapore’s history. This ignorance has serious consequences […] They will not know what dangers lie just off the highway, if they veer off the narrow path and trip up over sensitive issues of race, language and religion […] Singapore will fail (Goh 1996).

Goh was referring to the ‘race riots’ in Singapore in 1964 and 1969, and arguing for the implementation of the National Education programme in schools, in which all students are taught the state-approved version of Singapore history.

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Warnings about the dangers of racial violence continue in more recent state speeches. The Prime Minister reminded community leaders of it again in a speech in 2015: We started off in the 1960s with race riots […] We will never forget the experience, the fear, the uncertainty, the anxiety, the loss of lives […] For the younger ones who are lucky, who have never seen such racial strife before, well, we have to constantly remind them, how precious this harmony is (Prime Minister’s Office Singapore 6 Oct 2015).

These official enunciations frame the issue of multiracialism in Singapore in terms of vulnerability and fear. While the problems of multiculturalism are common to most modern capitalist societies, what is worth noting is the Singaporean state’s heavy investment into the narrative and importantly, how they frame the issues as worthy of fear repeatedly. Chua argued that this is part of a governmental directive. He wrote that ‘the fear of racial violence has been ideologically invested with mythic proportion and inscribed on the social and political body so as to rationalize and facilitate the imposition of social regulations, policing and discipline’ (2004: 100). These policing strategies, according to Chua, include implementing an official version of multiracialism that works as a form of social control (Chua 2003b). It is worth going into how the Singaporean state governs multiracialism and the underlying tensions that require regular official warnings of its fragility. Several scholars have discussed how modern Singapore’s official construction of multiracialism is the result of a crystallization of the colonial practice of racially categorizing subjects (Ang and Stratton 2018: S73; Purushotam 2000: 13). Born out of an era when biological race and white supremacist ideology underpinned colonial rule, the term ‘race’ is now widely deemed problematic. However, the term is still continually and uncritically used in Singapore’s official and social life. Faced with the challenge of governing a multicultural population at the nation’s independence, the postcolonial government entrenched existing ‘race’ categories by radically simplifying cultural differences among citizens into the official four groups of ethnic Chinese, Malay, Indian and Others (CMIO). Inconsistent criteria were used in the process of defining each group. The diverse ethnic Chinese from different dialect groups were reduced to Mandarin speaking Huaren (华人); the different ethnic groups from neighbouring Java, West Sumatra, Sulawesi, Riau and Peninsula were reduced to the single category of ‘Malay’, which was then fused with Islam; and those from various South Asian countries were grouped under the category of ‘Indian’. This radical simplification to

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four racial groups also involved homogenizing the complex ethnic, linguistic and religious differences of the population within these administrative categories. As Chua wrote, the ‘instrumental use of different convenient elements – language, religion and geography – as the basis of organizing the three race groups shows clearly that the race categories were politically constructed to derive the constitutive components of “multiracialism” as both a national character and national ideology’ (2017: 130). The ‘multi’ in this approach to multiculturalism is a numerical function and merely refers to multiple different and separate cultures. Till today, these ‘race’ categories still guide, to a large extent, how the Singaporean government organizes Singapore society through state initiatives including a public housing policy8 that establishes racial quotas for each public housing neighbourhood and block, and ethnic-based welfare bodies that compel Singaporeans to assist the socially disadvantaged within their own ethnic communities. Such policies push Singaporean society towards ethnic compartmentalization, promote ethnicity-centric Singaporean identities and result in little cross-ethnic or cross-cultural understanding (Rahim 2009: 48). As a consequence, there is an almost compulsory racialization of social life in Singapore. The government’s enormous investment into the official validation of the three separate reified Chinese, Malay and Indian cultures as part of its national identity betray its approach to cultural difference, whereby experiences of discontinuity and cultural difference are projected into the logic of species difference, which postulates the presence of the foreigner, foreign language and culture as an outside of a somewhat essentialized realm of homogeneous national culture and language (Sakai 2019). The reduction and regulation of the lived experiences of cultural differences, whereby subjectivities are temporal and transformative in social interactions, to atemporal, unchanging, bounded and impermeable identity categories tend to result in exclusionary measures when subjects’ different ‘identities’ are imagined to compete with each other. This was bound to produce dislocations. Scholars have argued that the Singapore state’s distrust and fear of the 230 million Malays in the neighbouring larger Malay-Muslim states of Indonesia and Malaysia, have also translated into distrust of Singaporean Malays at home whom are presumed by the state to be subjected to competing loyalties between the nation and their fellow Malay-Muslims in the 8 The Ethnic Integration Policy was implemented on 1 March 1989 to ‘promote racial integration and harmony in Housing and Development Board (HDB) estates’ and prevent the ‘emergence of ethnic enclaves in HDB estates’ (HistorySG 2016).

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region. According to these scholars, this can be observed through policies that preserve the numerical majority of the ethnic Chinese in Singapore,9 Singapore’s high military spending, and the Singapore military’s removal of ethnic Malays from virtually all positions of strategic decision (Rahim 2009: 78–91; Walsh 2007: 273). Rahim has argued that the Singapore government’s security paradigm is driven by ‘a pervasive fear of the national and regional “other”’ (2009: 110) that has ‘contributed to a Singaporean national identity that is rooted in the culture of fear, paranoia and insecurity’ (2009: 80). The government’s exclusion of ethnic Malays from key military positions because they imagine contradictions between Malay and Singaporean ‘identities’ result from its inability to imagine a ‘Singaporean’ subjectivity due to the presumed fullness of an essentialized ‘Malay identity’ that is racially embodied, unchanging and inescapable. The articulations of fear of racial violence above therefore reveal an irony: the government’s official racialization of Singaporean subjects to ensure equal recognition of all ethnicities also ironically makes the threat of racial conflict potentially endemic. In a sense, these warnings of racial violence by the government (and echoed in journalistic accounts) not only remind people of, but also at the same time contribute to, the fragility of ethnic relations in Singapore. If language is ‘a form of political labor to create a continuity at the elusive point of discontinuity in the social […] whereby the very relation between the addresser and the addressee is created, redefined, or modified’ (Sakai 2019: 271), the dislocations of a national identity based on neatly segregated and internally homogenous racial categories emerge clearly from the Singaporean state’s language policies. Native dialects, which were the mother tongues and predominant spoken languages of early immigrant settlers in Singapore, were banned from national education and all media. In replacement, the government imposed a policy of bilingualism, in which English was the nation’s first language and all Singaporeans get assigned a ‘mother tongue’ as defined by the state. In line with the classificatory and homogenizing logic of the CMIO multiracialism, the state decided that the mother tongues of the Chinese-Malay-Indian trichotomy would be Mandarin, Bahasa and Tamil. According to Lee Kuan Yew, the primacy of the English language was necessary to keep ‘everybody [at a] level playing field, or be prepared for big trouble’ (Straits Times 31 December 1996). While the government represents 9 Heng and Devan (1992) argued that the Singaporean government’s reproductive policies indicate its desire for the social to function as a machine, which presupposes an operator with full and absolute mastery to ‘routinely evacuate […] what eludes, limits, or obstructs absolute knowability, management, and control’ (1992: 346).

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the English language as a tool to allay internal (avoiding racial privileges or tensions by placing everyone at a culturally equal starting point) and external (avoiding the threat of global uncompetitiveness and irrelevance) dangers, it also articulates anxieties about ‘Westernization’ and proposed the importance of the ‘mother tongue’ as a solution. Referring to the ‘Speak Mandarin’ campaign, the late Lee Kuan Yew said that Mandarin ‘reminds us that we are part of an ancient civilisation with an unbroken history of over 5,000 years’ (Lee 1984b). His son, the current Prime Minister of Singapore, also said that the ‘mother tongue gives us a crucial part of our values, roots and identity’ (Lee 1999). Framed through the lens of fear, the state’s project to formulate a national identity based on English (representing access to the global economy and racial equality) and mother tongues (representing access to ‘roots’) is fraught with difficulties. The formalist and essentialist definition of ‘mother tongue’ in Singapore highlights the synthetic nature of a project that is supposed to access some authentic racial self (Ang and Stratton 2018: S78). Many scholars have also problematized the ‘dubious linkage between a mother tongue and an essentialized race-culture’ (Chua 2009: 242; see also Rappa and Wee 2006; Chun 1996; Wee 1988). More importantly, if Singaporeans are to access their ‘values, roots and identity’ through their mother tongues, to be ‘Singaporean’ is then to always be separated out at ‘Chinese’, Malay’ or ‘Indian’ (Purushotam 2000: 210). The ethnic identities of Singaporeans will therefore always serve as the limit to and disrupt any formulation of a national identity. In this sense, the government’s articulations of fear of ‘Westernization’ conceal these dislocations within Singapore’s multiculturalism by representing the problem as an antagonism between ‘Westernization’ and ‘values, roots and identity’. Not unexpectedly, the complexities of the cultural terrain of contemporary Singapore society often exceed the logic of neat racial and linguistic categories10. In particular, the state’s strict control of languages and its banning of both Singlish and dialects in the mass media have come under intense debate and criticism over the years. Proponents of Singlish, a variation of English born out of an organic mix of the four official languages

10 According to the Singapore census, 35 per cent of the residents mostly spoke Mandarin at home in 2000, and the number rose to 35.6 per cent in 2010. Previously, Chinese dialects were most spoken at home in 1990. While the use of Chinese dialects has dropped in recent years, the percentage of residents mostly speaking English at home has risen from 18.8 per cent in 1990 to 32.3 per cent in 2010, making English the second most spoken language at home (Census of Population 2000; 2010).

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and various dialects, all of which come from entirely different language families,11 frequently advocate it as a more organic representative of Singapore’s multicultural identity. There are also those who criticize how dialects are ‘regarded with fear and treated with loathing in the official language policies’ (Lim 2009: 52) and propose dialects as more authentic mother tongues for Singaporeans. Despite their critique of the government’s master narrative of multiculturalism in Singapore, these proposed alternatives (whether Singlish as a new hybrid or dialects as authentic) rely on the unity of language as ‘regulative idea’. Drawing on Kant (1929), Sakai wrote that a […] language may be pure, authentic, hybridized, polluted, or corrupt, yet regardless of a particular assessment of it, the very possibility of praising, authenticating, complaining about, or deploring it is offered by the unity of that language as a regulative idea (Sakai 2019: 272).

In other words, language as regulative idea is not given in experience but rather organizes knowledge and allows us to discuss the communal experience behind that national or ethnic language. In this sense, language as regulative idea works for the myth of cultural difference as ethnic, linguistic, species and ultimately bounded difference. For Laclau, a myth becomes a collective imaginary when it ‘represents the very form of fullness […] [that] can be “embodied” by the most diverse of contents’ (2015: 49–50). Whether the Singaporean state’s socially engineered version of racial harmony; critics’ ideas about cultural hybridization and mixing (e.g. George 2000: 174; Lai 2017: 171); or the implications of cultural authenticity underlying proposals for the preservation of dialects and heritage, the articulation of these different and incompatible social demands to the myth of cultural difference as ethnic, linguistic and species (read: bounded) difference add to its ‘general form of fullness’ and push it towards the imaginary horizon. These serve to conceal the dislocations of multiculturalism in Singapore such as the everyday practices and problems of global capitalism (Chua 2003b: 67; 1998: 172); intergenerational family divides; rifts within ethnic communities over linguistic prestige (Zhao & Liu 2007), class and economic inequalities (Tan 2003; Song 2007: 79); how its ‘divided social structure […] gives rise to anxiety, fear and paranoia’ to legitimize an intrusive state (Tan 2018: 10; Chua 2017: 137); and provide ‘further discipline for a labour force within global capitalism’ (Wee 2000: 140). 11 English is Indo-European, Chinese is Sino-Tibetan, Malay is Austronesian and Tamil is Dravidian.

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These dislocations – the organic, potentially transformative, and therefore uncontrollable forces of multiculturalism – are concealed and absorbed by the imaginary horizon of linguistic and ethnic difference. The most immediate impact that the Singaporean state’s brand of multiculturalism has on the media industry is its consequent organization according to similar artificially drawn linguistic and racial divides. Even though I did not realize it at the time, my fieldwork was deeply structured by this divide. My arrival at a Chinese-language focus for this project was due to a mixture of opportunity and timing, and Latour’s advice to ‘follow the thread of networks of practices and instruments’ (Latour 1993: 121) inductively and empirically, but keeping in mind that the networks do not go everywhere. When I started my ethnographic fieldwork in Singapore, my network of producers and contacts led me to different types of productions, all of which were Chinese-language productions. I attempted to break out of this circuit, but found difficulties in starting afresh. When I asked about English-language productions during my fieldwork, I was met mostly with a lack of interest and not many willing contacts. At the time, it seemed to me that producer networks were organized according to language in Singapore, and while producers worked across different productions, many often worked in those of the same language. This did not prove a major problem for the producers I studied since Chinese-language television productions are the most watched in Singapore (Tan 2008: 47; Chua 2012: 69).12 The comparative dominance of Chinese-language television means these producers enjoy the privilege of not needing to venture outside of Chinese-language productions due to the relatively larger supply of Chinese-language production jobs. In this sense, the focus on Chinese-language productions was largely driven by how producers were self-organized in the field, which turned out to be very telling about how the Singaporean government’s categorization of the media according to language perpetuates ethnic and linguistic divisions. It is by no means a coincidence that my own membership within the ethnic ‘Chinese’ community in Singapore both compelled – consciously or unconsciously – my contacts to introduce me to Chinese-language productions, and allowed me access to these productions. While the boundaries between Chinese-language productions and projects of other languages are porous, I met more producers who mostly worked on English-language productions crossing over to work on Chinese-language productions than the reverse during my fieldwork. 12 Chinese-language Channel8 maintained the highest weekly reach at 51.1 per cent among FTA channels (Channel NewsAsia 7 Nov 2018).

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These crossovers sometimes provided interesting occasions of disagreements that foregrounded the practices that may be taken for granted in a majority dominant work environment that risked insularity (see Chapter Four). For me, these practices dismiss any sort of presuppositions about ‘Chineseness’ or a bounded entity called Chinese-language television that risk reproducing the racial myths perpetuated by the state,13 but rather present the ongoing work involved in suturing internal contradictions in order to produce particular and situational notions of ‘Chineseness’, often in relational terms. With the Chinese being the majority ethnic group in Singapore, my informants rarely articulated their work from the perspective of being Chinese. However, the state myths of multiculturalism based on ethnic separations and silencing of dislocations along other axes have consequences for how producers can imagine their audiences along linguistic lines. What is ostensibly a practice in market differentiation is not just an attempt to mark the different channels in distinctive ways but also acts to interpellate the audience as particular sorts of subjects. Clearly, the institutional imagination of audiences bears a complicated relationship with the state’s desire to make potentially unwieldly populations knowable and controllable. Furthermore, as elaborated in the previous section, the institutional constitution of audiences alone involves imagining viewers in multiple antagonistic ways; as the target of state propaganda (PSB remit), ratings, consumers, fans and participants, audience-as-commodities for advertisers, and now as Chinese. The subsuming of these multiple institution-audience relationships under ‘Chinese’ land MediaCorp in all sorts of contradictions. Note, for instance, how its head of acquisitions described Singapore’s Chinese-speaking audiences during a panel organized by the Asia Television Forum in 2020: Talking about the Chinese-speaking audience, they are a diverse but paradoxically they are also a bit more homogenous […] They are a grounded lot, but also surprisingly savvy […] Fundamentally though, the Chinese audience group is no different to any other group.

If the institutional persona of the Chinese-speaking audience sounds confused enough, the question of how audiences work in everyday production practice can neither be settled through some ‘technical definitions’ 13 The pitfalls of any sort of assumptions about ‘Chineseness’ based on language, culture, race or ethnicity has been extensively written about in a huge wealth of literature. Chun (1996; 2017) and Ang (2001) offer critical discussions of the notion of ‘Chineseness’.

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referenced during such institutional events nor through some other authoritative agent. One of the goals of the rest of this book is therefore to ethnographically examine the complex roles imagined audiences play in the practices of producers as they attempt to manage the dislocations of capitalism and state sanctioned multiculturalism in their everyday work.

Imagining Populations and the Overdetermined Social Population is a name for a sequence of strategic deployments that are concatenated through a process of articulation between state territoriality, the socioeconomic attempt to fix the role and supply of labor, and the process of the formation of national language as regulative regime (Walker & Sakai 2019: 25).

As discussed in the previous two sections, the Singaporean state uses fear as a discursive tool to promulgate the myths of meritocracy and multiculturalism to understand social order in Singapore. These myths work through regulating how the population is to be imagined. It does not, of course, follow that the people live according to what the myths proclaim. To maintain the myths constructed through social engineering and ideological discourse, the Singaporean government enacted a string of laws and policies that provide the authorities with the tools to pre-empt and police public debate. Desires and mechanisms used to control public opinion are, of course, a common aspect of illiberal states’ limiting of media pluralism. In the particular case of Singapore, the state uses articulations of fears of racial violence as a discursive justification for designating the entire domain of ethnicity and religion as taboo, resulting in a society that is thoroughly racialized and yet not allowed to discuss its issues in public. Critics often use fear as a discursive tool in response to the state’s restrictions on expression, for instance by describing Singapore as a ‘fear driven regime’ (Nair 2012) or as having ‘a climate of fear’ (Au 2013). By imputing fear on the imagined population, critics offer competing accounts of the Singaporean population than the state. In this section, I discuss the state’s strategies in governing media and popular expression as well as their criticisms to show how articulations of fear revolve around struggles over the overdetermined Singapore social.

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The history of the PAP regime is filled with laws that restrict different forms of expression.14 In publishing, the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act (NPPA) gives the government unqualified discretion to decide which publishers may obtain licenses, and to approve whom may own crucial management shares in publishing companies. Publishers are also subject to the Undesirable Publications Act (UPA), which prohibits ‘objectionable’ publications. These can include the depiction of obscenity, race or religion. The act allows controversial publications to be handled by the ministry rather than the judiciary (Cenite 2006: 182). When it comes to films, The IMDA also requires all films that wish to screen in Singapore to be submitted for classification under the Films Act. Censors can prohibit, approve and classify, or approve films with alterations. The Act also criminalizes those who make, exhibit, distribute or import ‘party political films’, which it defines as a film either ‘made by or on behalf of any political party in Singapore’ or ‘made by any person and directed towards any political end in Singapore’. The vague definition gives the authorities wide censorship discretions. The Broadcasting Act similarly gives the IMDA power to license both local and foreign broadcasters in Singapore. Broadcasting companies also require their chief executive officers, directors and the chairmen of their boards to be approved by the minister-in-charge. Even though IMDA rarely issues direct orders to broadcasters, the monopoly free-to-air broadcaster, MediaCorp, is also wholly owned by Temasek Holdings, the investment branch of the government. MediaCorp may also be fined if the IMDA finds that any of its programmes contravene broadcasting standards. These standards, which are specified in a series of guidelines and programme codes, are worded vaguely and can be subject to varying interpretations.15 Furthermore, the IMDA is also not only the regulator (in terms of censorship and content guidelines), but also the industry developer. The exact numbers 14 While I focus on the governance of traditional media and social media in this chapter, critics often argue that the PAP’s punitive action against political opposition using its legal apparatus such as the Internal Security Act (ISA), which authoritizes the state to detain without trial, underlies what former opposition party member Gomez called ‘the popular fear that the PAP will persecute any independent political expression’ (2000: 17). The PAP also has a habit of arresting and suing its political opponents to bankruptcy. Jothie Rajah (2012) offers a more extensive discussion of the Singaporean government’s use of legislation against political opponents. PAP politicians have also filed civil lawsuits against critics. Most recently, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong sued blogger Roy Ngerng in 2015 for defamation for a blog post that alleged that the government misused the Central Provident Funds. The courts found Ngerng guilty and ordered him to pay $150,000 in damages to Lee over the next seventeen years (Lee 2016). 15 I examine how the guidelines affect producers’ practices in more detail in Chapter Four.

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are not made available, but the IMDA funds approximately 60 per cent of locally produced television hours (MediaCorp 2010; Channel NewsAsia 9 July 2012). In their attempts to extend their regulation of expression in traditional media to the realm of online media, the government further introduced new laws. First, they enacted a controversial16 licensing scheme in June 2013 that makes it necessary for popular news websites with more than an average of 50,000 viewers per month to obtain a license from the government. Under the licensing scheme, registered websites have to put up a $50,000 bond and ‘comply within 24 hours to IMDA’s directions to remove content that is found to be in breach of content standards’ (Xu 2013). The rule also prohibits the websites from receiving funding from foreign sources. Since the imposition of the scheme, several news websites have shut down (Reimold 2013; Channel NewsAsia 3 May 2015) and the IMDA has threatened to close down others (Tang 2016). Second, the government passed the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill (POFMA) in May 2019, which empowers ministers to order corrections or take down statements made online that they deem false and against ‘public interest’. Notably, POFMA allows politicians to directly target individuals’ statements online.17 Critics have argued that the bill will ‘deepen a culture of self-censorship’ in Singapore (George 2019b), particularly since discretionary powers lie with party politicians rather than any independent third party institution. In 2021, the government passed the broadly worded Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act (FICA) that authorizes the Ministry of Home Affairs to investigate individuals, social media or Internet services under suspicions of ‘hostile information campaigns’ (Ministry of Home Affairs 2021), further expanding barriers of entry to Singapore’s media landscape.

16 There was no parliamentary debate before the scheme was introduced. The announcement was not well-received as bloggers quickly mobilized to form #FreeMyInternet, a movement aimed at drawing attention to the dangers of giving the government the power to require websites to register. Facebook, Yahoo, Google and eBay also expressed their reservations about the ruling (Feng 2013). 17 Before POFMA was enacted, the state used other legislation to charge individuals’ online expression. For instance, in 2015, the courts charged then sixteen-year-old blogger Amos Yee with making ‘remarks against Christianity, with the deliberate intention of wounding the religious feelings of Christians in general’ (Tan 2015) under the Penal Code Section 298 for a YouTube video he posted in which he compared Lee Kuan Yew to Jesus and criticized Christianity. He also faced obscenity charges for uploading an image illustrating two people having sex, on which he superimposed the faces of Lee and Margaret Thatcher. The teenager was sentenced to four weeks in jail.

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Needless to say, these laws demonstrate the illiberal Singaporean state’s intolerance for media pluralism. Given the close links between the various media and the state in Singapore, it is also not surprising that there has been little comment on the effects of these laws from the mainstream media outlets. The exceptions tend to come from independent artists and filmmakers. For instance, Singaporean artist Godwin Koay argued that the government creates ‘fear’ among creative workers through funding and ownership means. This is backed by the Singaporean context whereby artists rely largely on government funding to operate. Koay argued that it allows the state to survey and control artists and art production. In an online commentary, he wrote: ‘Singapore, where fear leads you and beats you and eats you and becomes you. Fear as the clingwrap for paradise’ (Koay 2016). Despite being written in a more abstract way, Koay offers an often-heard account that represents the state’s funding and ownership structures in Singapore as causing ‘fear’ among artists in insidious ways. In a rare insider’s account of mainstream journalism in Singapore, the former Chief Editor of the TODAY newspaper published a book entitled Reluctant Editor (Balji 2019) detailing the ‘newsroom that felt under siege […] [and how] journalists turned fearful’ (Yong 2019). Certain scholars have also argued that these rules lead to ‘widespread self-censorship to avoid confrontation with authoritarian regimes’ (Rodan 2004: 16; see also Lee, T. 2007: 62). For instance, the journalist turned academic George argued that the press controls ‘represses challengers with minimum political cost’ (2007: 127) and ‘the cooperation of media workers and owners, like that of the public, is based on instrumental considerations and ideological conviction as well as fear’ (2006: 42). More commonly, however, commentaries on the government’s legal and structural restrictions appeal to some version of wider society, represented as ‘Singaporeans’, ‘the public’ or simply ‘Singapore’. On one end of the spectrum, an often repeated line of argument within popular and government discussions of state censorship is the need to align media or art works with the values of the public, represented as largely conservative. For instance, an article in The Straits Times asserted that ‘the majority of Singaporeans are conservative and that they really expect the Government to be a bulwark against bad influences […] [for] fear of being lured away by unwholesome attractions’ (Yeo & Mahizhnan 1999). More recently, Senior Minister of State for Law and Heath Edwin Tong claimed, with regards to the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill (POFMA) passed in May 2019, that ‘the overwhelming majority of Singaporeans want strong laws to deal with online falsehoods’ (The Online Citizen 6 May 2019). This type of argument

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attribute ‘fear’ to the unverifiable ‘majority of Singaporeans’ represented as ‘conservative’ and serves to justify the state’s interferences into expression. Crucially, this ideological sleight of hand shifts the source of intolerance for pluralism in opinion from the state to ‘the people’. This is further complicated by the other end of the spectrum, whereby political critics have represented state interferences into expression as causing fear in Singapore. For example, freelance journalist Han, who had been openly critical of various government policies in the past, argued that both the laws and restrictions on funding ‘contribute towards a climate of fear and a culture of self-censorship in Singapore’ (Han 2013). It is noteworthy that Han writes for several international news outlets and does not rely on local newspapers for work. Scholars Birch and Phillips wrote that there was a ‘predominant and pervasive culture of fear operating in Singapore […] a fear of critical comment’ (2003: 116). Blogger Nair postulated that these laws caused ‘fear in the people’s minds of their government and what they will do to them if they disobey’ (Nair 2012). Commenting on the effects of the website licensing schemes, blogger Au wrote ‘a determined PAP can blanket Singapore again with fear […] fear can be induced all over again’ (2013). Opposition politician Chee also commented that it has the ‘tendency to breed more fear and conformist behaviour’ (Tan 2013). While these accounts represented government schemes as causing ‘fear’, the ways in which ‘fear’ affected people varied, including as a ‘climate’, ‘predominant and pervasive culture’ and as something that could ‘blanket Singapore’. These ‘fears’ were also imagined as causing people to engage in different activities, including ‘self-censorship’ and ‘conformist behaviour’. When it comes to politics, critics often pinpoint the PAP government as causing fear in Singaporeans but in varying ways. A prominent opposition personality, Dr. Lee Siew-Choh, the former opposition party member, claimed that ‘half the strength of the PAP come[s] from the fear it has instilled in the minds of the people’ (Mutalib 1992: 303). One of the alleged effects of this ‘fear’ is a proclaimed reluctance of Singaporeans to support the political opposition (e.g. Peh 2007; Gomez 2000: 19). For instance, in an interview with The Guardian, Jeyaretnam stated that ‘people are frightened to get involved as candidates or even to help the opposition. There is a very real fear of what the PAP can do’ (Tisdall 2006). It is important to note that these representations of Singaporeans as fearful, which have been appearing more frequently since the 1990s, were largely spearheaded by opposition party members. They alleged that Singaporeans felt fear and that fear had a clear object – the PAP government. Even though it is striking how these accounts commonly use ‘fear’ as a concept to explain the political situation

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in Singapore, they have different ideas of how fear worked on people and how it was identifiable. In other words, these accounts represented a variety of activities (including the lack of political participation; the PAP’s strength; difficulties in progressing) as reflecting ‘fear’ in the people. These are acts of articulation that link different matters to ‘fear’ and to the abstract notion of ‘the people’. In a more elaborate account of the nature of ‘fear’ in Singapore, popular fiction writer Catherine Lim, also known for her social commentary published in 1994 in The Straits Times that invited criticisms from the Prime Minister at the time, wrote on her website: The fear in Singapore is a special, almost unique kind, for it is self-imposed […] the fear is far more subtle, far less palpable and noticeable, but no less effective. It is the fear of losing the good life, the material prosperity that the PAP leadership has made possible. It is, most of all, the fear of being sued by the Government and being reduced to bankruptcy (Lim 2010).

In her attempt to describe the ‘fear’ that she claimed Singapore (which she presumably meant as Singaporeans) had, Lim articulated the links between various situations – government lawsuits, bankruptcy, losing ‘the good life’ – and ‘fear’. In academic writing, political scientist Tan argued in one of his critiques of social policies in Singapore that the nation has a ‘politics of apprehension – a ghostly kind of fear that, in a menacing way, haunts the minds of Singaporeans’ (2007b: 2). However, that is not the only line of argument put forward. Applying Foucault’s concept of governmentality to Singapore, media scholar Lee proposed that […] the common view of Singaporeans as ‘frightened’ or fearful of authority is no longer accurate […] citizens have been co-opted and indeed ‘disciplined’ […] Singaporeans have chosen and accepted – either overtly or tacitly, but nonetheless freely […] to be subjected to the principles and practices of governmentality […] In this regard, Singapore can perhaps be described as a ‘frightened community’ of happy and contented, welldisciplined and auto-regulated, and thus highly productive cultural citizens (Lee 2010: 148–151).

Lee’s assertion that Singaporeans had moved beyond ‘fear’ to being ‘coopted and “disciplined”’ is based on his analysis of largely government policies. Applied here, Foucault’s concept of governmentality then serves

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as the intellectual bridge to link government policies and his claims about ‘the people’ (Barnett et al. 2008: 625–628). Lee’s account, like the previous accounts described above, was an attempt to represent the Singaporean population and suggests that despite ‘fear’ being a commonly used term to understand the effects of the Singapore authority’s history and style of governing, there are varying ways to interpret the situation. Notably, most of these accounts essentially involve various people making claims about what wider Singaporean society, however imagined, feels. While these various accounts commonly use the concept of fear to understand various situations in Singapore, they are not analogous and have different ideas of how fear worked on people and how it was identifiable. As these accounts show, the popular assertion that the government causes fear in Singaporeans is often based on different, sometimes incommensurate, ways of imagining populations – whether as conduits of values, as agents, or as items of information. The implications are twofold. The repeated uses of ‘fear’ from not only the ruling class but also other groups in society to represent the situation in Singapore suggests ‘fear’ can be treated as a ‘privileged discursive point of this partial fixation’ or ‘nodal point’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 112),18 through which various classes of people attempted different, and sometimes rival, accounts of social phenomena on various occasions for certain audiences and to accomplish specific purposes. I argued in the first two sections of this chapter that the state uses fear as a discursive device to articulate antagonisms and myths related to meritocracy and multiculturalism so as to conceal other dislocations. Here, however, both state and critical accounts’ uses of ‘fear’ to describe the people combine with the state’s ideological sleight of hand that designates ‘the people’ as the source of intolerance. This conflation of different ideas of ‘the people’ as problem through articulations of fear leads to more serious implications. As these accounts make evident, what Singaporeans feel is articulated for them by different classes of people, often in a detemporalized manner. The accounts’ representations of various matters (policies, election results, polls etc.) as reflective of ‘fear’ among Singaporeans that then manifest in different ways raise questions about the work that ideas about populations 18 Both Hall (1996a: 144) and Laclau & Mouffe (1985: 120) have criticized Gramsci’s predetermined organization of hegemony around class. However, the point here is that Hall and Gramsci emphasize the constitution of relatively stable unities in articulation and discourse, which form hegemony. Laclau and Mouffe, on the other hand, argued against totalizing accounts for which structure, in some sense, transcends practice.

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do in these cases. In a sense, the accounts’ loose usage of abstract terms such as ‘Singapore’, ‘Singaporeans’, ‘people’ or ‘the public’ that are difficult to account for point to the fact that they are able to articulate fear with other elements precisely because of the unknowability of ‘the people’. This enables ‘the people’ and its variants to function as articulatory devices in different instances, and in contradictory ways. For instance, Singaporean filmmaker Ken Kwek offered a different account of ‘the people’ in a speech entitled ‘Of Fear and Filmmaking’. During the speech, Kwek described how his film Sex, Violence, Family Values (2012) was banned immediately before release, after the IMDA received several complaints regarding the film’s trailer.19 I went into it [filmmaking] looking for less censorship, more freedom and less fear […] Here’s the thing. I am no longer afraid of Lee Kuan Yew and the intimidation tactics so to speak of the government. I’m afraid of the average citizen. I’m afraid of the guy next door (Kwek 2015).

In trying to make a broader point about the difficulties of filmmaking in Singapore, Kwek represented the few complainants as ‘the average citizen’ and ‘the guy next door’, whom filmmakers should be afraid of. Addressing a small audience at an event called ‘Telling Stories Live’, Kwek skilfully used the idea of fear, whose source he represented as the ambiguous ‘average citizen’, to produce a dramatic account, which departs from the usual assertions of fear of the government. His speech therefore demonstrates how the unknowability of ‘the people’ can be rearticulated in different ways to serve different purposes. The notion of ‘the people’ therefore serves as a political tool to justify either state interventions or political opposition, or as a potential problem as represented here by Kwek. So while viewed from a distance, these articulations of fear seem to suggest an uncontested picture of a fearful Singapore society, matters get more complex when analyzed in detail. These representations reveal different, at times incommensurate, ways of imagining the population. Crucially, the vague and abstract ways in which ideas of the people are talked about allows them to be rearticulated in different ways. In a sense, this uncertain nature of ideas about ‘the people’ (whether imagined as all Singaporeans or 19 The portion of the trailer deemed objectionable by complainants was a fictional conversation between an ethnic Chinese director and an Indian actor, during which both made racist remarks about each other. The director defended it as racial satire. He also noted inconsistencies in the IMDA’s later requests for him to censor the Chinese director’s comments, but not the Indian actor’s.

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the ‘average citizen’ etc.) functions like Laclau’s mythical space – a space of representation opened up by dislocations in the social, as discussed in earlier sections. In ‘the people’ as mythical space, it is through an ‘overdetermination of functions that this social order is imposed and consolidated. But this overdetermination, which is the source of its strength, is also […] a radically hegemonic and unstable relation; one that is exposed to an “outside” that it is essentially incapable of mastering’ (Laclau 2015: 50–51). Understood in this way, both government’s continuing and all-encompassing attempts at managing the population, as well as critics’ articulations of ‘fear’, are then similarly attempts at partially fixing, calling into existence and managing an unknowable social. Consequently, the more competing and incompatible social demands are articulated to the myth of ‘the people’, the more it is pushed towards the imaginary horizon, in which case the myth of the people serves as the final suture to conceal dislocations of the social. This construction of ‘the people’ as mythical space proves crucial for the work that imagined audiences would do in everyday production situations. As mythical space, ‘the people’ is all-encompassing and allows different contradictory characteristics to be attributed to it. This makes it simultaneously compliant and antithetical to practices stemming from illiberal cultures of production, including that of a general intolerance towards diversity of opinion, especially in conjunction with secrecy around audience information on the part of the broadcaster and the state. The state’s attributing of interventions to the conservative majority transfers the burden of indicating any breach of media conduct to audiences, which has resulted in a hyperawareness towards viewer complaints in the industry. To illustrate the extent of such heightened sensitivities, I was surprised to find out from my conversations with informants that the content of complaints were often not even specified when they reach the independent producers doing the creative work. Merely the fact that there were complaints was enough to make it a serious matter for everyone involved. The myth of ‘the people’, linguistic divisions, little tolerance for diverse opinions, taking complaints serious and secrecy around viewers thereby constitute audiences as structural problematic of the media industry in Singapore.

Performing Fear, Imagining Audiences I have argued that the government uses fear as the key affect to discursively frame the myths and social imaginaries through which Singapore’s social order is to be understood. The fragility of mythical spaces requires constant

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attention. By doing state-funded Public Service Broadcasting work, the producers studied in this book also continually perform the same fears through reconstituting the myths and frames of reference in order to manage the dislocations that threaten to rupture myths of meritocracy, equality and multiculturalism. This relates to accounts that represent Singapore society as fearful due to state policies and practices, which reveal different, at times incommensurate, ways of imagining the Singaporean people. Understood as myth, ‘the people’ concurrently conceal dislocations of the social while constantly disrupting the hegemonic stability of Singapore society, thereby contributing to the fragility of its precarious order. Apart from representational work, producers working under Singapore’s brand of illiberalism also have to deal with its structural consequences for the media industry and its imagination of audiences. The state’s ideological apparatuses require producers to formulate their relationship with audiences (both in terms of a market relationship and a Public Service relationship) along ethnic lines but emptied of other social axes. Antagonistic relations between MediaCorp and producers also manifest in terms of cultures of secrecy and withholding of audience information. Furthermore, the state’s interventionist style of governing the media industry alongside attributing its interventions to ‘the people’ results in heightened sensitivities to viewer complaints. While secrecy around viewer information in Singapore may seem like an insignificant practice in the midst of the wider governmental features of the Singaporean state’s illiberal interventionist style of governing, it works in combination with the overdetermined, unknowable and dislocated social to produce serious consequences for producers’ subjectivities and practices. The resulting all-encompassing audience as myth is a crucial part of the puzzle of authoritarian resilience in Singapore’s media. So how are the biopolitics discussed in this chapter lived, negotiated and contested by and among media producers? And if fear is used to frame how Singapore’s social imaginary is to be understood, how does fear as discursive tool translate into the daily work of producers tasked with its reproduction? When it comes to affect, ‘ideology critique presumes that dominant ideas are lived affectively […] whilst governmentality approaches assume that subjectification involves the moulding of affective dispositions – but they reduce questions of the organization of affect to one form/process of mediation’ (Anderson 2016: 749). Anderson proposed instead the importance of investigating how biopolitical techniques shape capacities to affect and be affected; how affective life may exceed biopolitical techniques; and how affect serves as a condition for biopolitics (2012: 36). That is what the rest of this book aims to investigate.

2

Playing Games with Heritage Abstract Beginning with one of the most-made genres in Singaporean television, Chapter Two uses two state-funded game shows about heritage to examine the well-oiled practices and the mundane everyday work that goes into making infotainment in an illiberal capitalist democracy. Through the chapter, I show how these practices enable an ideological construction of audiences that continually condemn the Singaporean subject as a work in progress, and sustain a vicious cycle of perpetual to-be-upgraded-ness by denying and disarticulating the underlying antagonisms of Singapore society. Keywords: Game shows; Heritage; Infotainment; Antagonisms; Status quo; Meritocracy

If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it’s because they express the corporate situation with great precision […] the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within (Deleuze 1992: 4–5).

Throughout my fieldwork and subsequent visits to my field sites, I observed first-hand how the forces of capital and state power impacted on different producers differently. I was reminded of this again during a recent visit when I was invited to a lunch party at one of my fieldwork companies to celebrate the Lunar New Year. As I chatted with some of my informants while waiting for the feast to begin, I noticed how the producers who were in charge of variety and infotainment programmes continued typing away on their computers without participating in the festivities. After the main activity of the celebration, the lo hei,1 those producers collected 1 Lo Hei is a Chinese New Year practice that involves the tossing of the yu sheng, a dish made up of thin slices of raw fish and shredded vegetables that symbolize auspicious meanings. Lo

Fong, Siao Yuong, Performing Fear in Television Production: Practices of an Illiberal Democracy, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463724579_ch02

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their plates of buffet food and quietly returned to their workstations to eat while continuing their work. I stood with the majority of the other producers who ate while chatting with each other informally. When I asked one of the producers about whether the variety and infotainment department was very busy, she commented in a half-joking manner, ‘no choice, they have to earn the money to support the whole company’. I often heard comments like that – told either as a joke or a complaint – during my fieldwork. After lunch, I walked over to the desk of one of the variety producers when I noticed he had a moment of respite. He informed me that he was juggling four projects at one go and had worked throughout the Lunar New Year holidays. At the time of my fieldwork, the production company I worked with produced more informational programmes than drama series annually. According to the Chief Creative Director, this is because the company made little profit from drama serials. To balance the books, they produced more variety and informational programmes that tended to make better profit. This meant that there was a high turnover rate of programmes and those working in the department were often juggling multiple projects or moving quickly from one project to the next without rest in between. The state broadcaster commissions more infotainment programmes using the Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) funds than other genres due to their smaller budgets and quicker turnaround time, making them one of the most common and convenient ways for perpetuating state myths. Independent producers specializing in infotainment and variety programmes funded by the PSB scheme are therefore caught at the crossroads between capital and public service, and often feel the brunt of market and state forces in ways that are different from producers making other types of programmes. The expectations to turnover programmes quickly and rushed production schedules meant that producers working on variety and informational programmes often had to fall back on the well-oiled practices they had built up over the years, particularly in instances of diff icult decisions. Using two state-funded game shows about heritage as examples, this chapter begins the ethnographic portion of the book by examining the mundane everyday work that goes into making infotainment game shows, one of the most-made genres in Singaporean television. Even though both programmes were called ‘information game shows’ in their concept papers, their different formats arguably landed them in Hei is a Cantonese term that in this context loosely translates to “tossing up good fortune”. The ritual involves participants saying auspicious phrases while tossing the dish (roots.sg 2016).

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different subgenres, with one being a quiz show and the other an outdoor game show.2 This chapter details how the different formats necessitated different practices in maintaining the myths constituting Singapore’s social imaginary. The two productions shared the same Executive Producer who conceptualized and wrote the programmes on his own. As a consequence, my f indings were largely based on my observations during the production shoots, informal commentaries by the production personnel and later interviews. Even though the two projects had the same Executive Producer, the rest of their production teams differed. I was allowed to follow the crucial first few days of production shoot for both programmes, during which the producers argued over and adjusted to f ind the best ways to work together. As typical of ethnographic research, the selection of the two particular game shows discussed in this chapter was to a large degree unplanned. They were the two game shows that I encountered during my f ieldwork, for which I had relatively more access to. However, the fact that two ‘randomly encountered’ – from the perspective of ethnographic f ieldwork – game shows both revolved around the same theme is signif icant. Both programmes, like many of the infotainment programmes funded by the government’s Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) scheme, dealt in one way or another with issues of heritage in Singapore. If genres speak to the value system and power structures from which they emerge (Holmes 2008: 23), and various scholars (e.g. Holmes 2008; Whannel 1990) have argued that game shows present a ‘utopian sensibility’ (Dyer 2002: 24–27) in response to ‘specific inadequacies in society’ (2002: 26), the fact that so many infotainment PSB programmes funded by the government address the issue of heritage raises questions about whether, and how, heritage may present as an inadequacy in Singaporean society, and what implications these have for state-sponsored PSB work. Off icially, the Singaporean government presents the need for ‘heritage’ as a solution to alleged ‘Westernization’ (Goh 1988: 15). However, many scholars have 2 However, there are disagreements in academic writing about the definitions of game shows and quiz shows (Holmes 2008: 14; Hoerschelmann 2006: 8; Bonner 2003: 12). This mirrors wider debates about genres in general, which mean different things for different people, change over time and are far from fixed (Buckingham 1993: 137). In fact, Turner wrote that ‘there is not much evidence that the term “genre” or any equivalent abstraction is actually used on […] industrial process’ (2001: 5). As this book examines everyday practices, its focus is not on the abstract systems of meaning of genre but what production practices articulate about genre if and when relevant.

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written on the tensions that underlie heritage discourses in Singapore. For instance, Kwok et al. wrote: Hence we live out certain paradoxical tendencies in our contemporary social life […] On the one hand, we lay claim to a rich and complex heritage drawn from the major civilisations of the world. On the other, we easily lapse into a fragmentary and superficial understanding of culture and tradition. On the one hand, we pride ourselves in being adaptable and modern. On the other, we are uncomfortable with “modern values”; we invoke “traditional values” as a defence mechanism, as if they constitute a fortress under siege, as if traditions have remained static and frozen throughout history (1999: 4).

Kwok et al. point to some of the complex tensions behind the government’s heritage discourse, which correspond to the dislocations I discussed in the previous chapter. The state’s representation of the problem as an antagonism between a selective use of ‘Asian traditions’ or ‘heritage’ in the singular as opposed to ‘modernity’ or ‘Westernization’ then works to conceal the dislocations of the officially constructed Singaporean historical narrative. These dislocations include the unease of living with relentless capitalist development over the past five decades, which entailed a destruction and reconstruction of ‘heritage’ remnants and discourse, aggressive social engineering, and the ideological erasure of inequalities. So how did producers tasked with perpetuating state myths imagine the problem of heritage in Singapore, and how did they respond through game shows? The two game shows broadly deal with the challenges of taming the multivocality of history into a singular state heritage narrative; and of adhering to the state-curated myth of heritage that is emptied of its social aspects. Through the theme of heritage, this chapter also speaks to wider concerns within PSB and infotainment scholarship. Using the two case studies, I address the following questions: How do producers in an illiberal democracy manage the implied contradiction (Hartley 2001: 119–120) between game shows as an entertainment genre that has been criticized for the celebration of consumption and penalizing of thinking, with Public Service Broadcasting? Are infotainment’s double tasks of informing and educating the public/citizen while entertaining the consumer contradictory in the context of an illiberal capitalist democracy like Singapore? If game shows are criticized for its enactment of capitalist ideology (Fiske 1987: 268), how did the producers make use of competition in different programme formats in their concealing of the dislocations of Singaporean society? Finally, if the

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constitution of social imaginaries relies on the implicit audience, what does the constructed audience in these game shows look like? I end the chapter with a discussion of how these practices conjure audiences as an invisible fiction (Hartley 1992) for the Singaporean state.

Quizzing Heritage When heritage became an issue of concern to the government in Singapore in the 1980s, Goh Chok Tong, then First Deputy Prime Minister, declared in 1988 that ‘we are part of a long Asian civilization and […] should not be assimilated by the West and become a pseudo-Western society’ (Goh 1988: 15). Heritage, it was argued, provided ‘the substance of social and psychological defence’ (The Committee on Heritage Report 1988: 26) against ‘Westernization’. Shortly after in 1993, the government set up its statutory board in charge of heritage matters, the National Heritage Board (NHB). Aside from the war analogy (‘defence’) used to articulate the antagonism between heritage and ‘Westernization’, what is striking is how heritage was presented as ‘a long Asian civilization’. ‘Asian’, in this case, is at once inclusive of the many ethnicities, cultures and traditions in Singapore, and exclusive in terms of the way it allowed the government to select what constituted ‘Asian’. The deliberate ambiguity of the singular ‘Asian civilization’ sutured the differences among various traditions. Fast forward to the 2010s, the NHB states that its responsibilities lie in ‘telling the Singapore story, sharing the Singaporean experience and imparting our Singapore spirit […] to preserve and celebrate the shared heritage of our diverse communities, for the purpose of education, nation-building and cultural understanding’ (National Heritage Board 2020). Notably, ‘heritage’ when used for the state’s nation-building purposes involve imagining ‘Asian civilization’, ‘the Singapore story’, ‘experience’ and ‘spirit’ in the singular. In emphasizing ‘shared heritage’, ‘heritage’ for the NHB is really about the engineering of a common historical narrative rather than the preservation or celebration of its diverse lineages.3 As discussed in the previous chapter, attempts to formulate a common or singular national heritage for a multi-ethnic, -cultural, -lingual and -religious society that was previously colonized by the British and occupied 3 NHB’s website is in English, and does not feature content in the other official languages of Singapore. While purporting to represent the heritage of all ethnicities of Singapore, the absence of their various languages on the NHB website silences the cultural nuances of the various cultures and traditions that come with them.

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by the Japanese, are fraught with difficulties. These are compounded by state policies that artificially compartmentalize society’s multiplicities into neat and internally homogenized categories. The dislocations of such a common heritage arise from the plurality of interpretations, histories and experiences of heritage sites, remnants and events that disrupt any articulated version. Given these problems, the government’s emphasis on the singular nature of heritage matters has implications for media producers tasked with representing Singapore’s heritage. Seen in this way, quiz shows offer opportunities for producers to reduce the dislocations in heritage narratives to the question and answer format. Knowledge in quiz shows have long been described as an accumulation of facts, severed from any context or interpretation (Tulloch 1976; Whannel 1992: 187). As Holmes pointed out, ‘the form of the question always instructs the answerer to give a particular kind of response [and] aim[s] to delimit the potential answers which the respondent can provide’ (Holmes 2008: 87). In other words, the question and answer format presupposes there is only one ‘right’ answer to a question. When applied to heritage, the question and answer format allows producers to exercise ‘control over meaning’ (Bell & Van Leeuwen 1994: 225) by reducing the problems of heritage in Singapore to answerable questions. In this section, I explore how producers of a quiz show, which I shall rename as Questions for anonymity reasons, managed the dislocations of heritage knowledge in their practices. The production of Questions can be divided into two parts. In the first part, contestants, led by two celebrity team leaders, visited various heritage locations where they posed quiz questions to their opposing teams. The questions were related to the respective locations they found themselves at and were edited into short videos. In the second part of the production, both teams reunited in the studio, where they watched each other’s videos and had to answer the questions posed by the opposing team. I will examine how producers coped with the dislocations of heritage information in the two portions of the show respectively, beginning with the outdoor location shoot. I followed the production on several days of outdoor shoot as one of the production interns. During these shoots, the team assigned to me ad hoc tasks like carrying things or directing traffic, which allowed me to observe the production process at the same time. It was one of those warm and sunny afternoons when our production bus arrived at Fort Tanjong Katong. I stood in the middle of the open field at the site carrying the umbrella that shielded the celebrity host from the scorching midday sun as she rehearsed the information about the fort on her script. According to the show’s script, the original fort had been buried underground and was discovered by

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local residents in 2001. However, it was subsequently buried again to avoid mosquitoes from breeding within its old walls. As she read through the information, the celebrity host, a young and inexperienced female host, started raising questions to the producer. She felt that the reason why the fort was buried again made a better question than the one in the script, which asked what the area, Katong, was named after. She argued that her question was more difficult since there were multiple possible answers. The fort could have been buried because there were ghost sightings, mosquitoes, or for fear that children might fall in. Already frustrated by the high temperatures and rushed production schedule, the Producer brushed her off. Speaking from the position of a much more senior and experienced producer, he lectured that they should choose, in his own words, ‘the safe (安全) question, the question without dispute/debate/controversy (Confirmed 没有争议的问题)’ for the programme. The producer’s strategy to choose ‘safe’ questions that eliminated the potentiality of multiple answers is not surprising given the quiz show format. However, the way in which he worded his justification, in terms of safety and controversy, suggests his motivations went beyond sticking to genre conventions. Even though the etymology of Katong also pointed to several possible answers, the question was ‘safe’ because the government had provided a definitive account that it was named after an extinct breed of sea turtles. In the absence of an official – note singular – interpretation of why the fort was buried that would effectively close down other interpretations, the producer’s framing of the question proposed by the young host as ‘unsafe’ suggests that official heritage information functioned as protection against the dangers of ‘dispute/debate/controversy’. This runs counter to the more common understanding that producers are enslaved to representing official accounts and points to a general aversion towards debate. In this sense, the producers’ tactic of avoiding quiz questions with multiple potential answers stemmed from a need to manage the multiplicities (of perspectives, understandings, experiences) that will always exceed a singular heritage narrative. Such an approach to heritage relies on the accuracy of information in the programme, which is not straightforward given the sometimes uncertain and social nature of historical information. Another incident on a separate shoot day at a Chinese temple is illustrative. We had arranged to meet a representative from the National Heritage Board (NHB) at the temple that morning. The NHB representative was meant to play the role of a ‘heritage expert’ and explain the history of the temple for the shoot. One of the questions to be set at the temple were about the carvings on two of the temple’s

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beams. Following the pre-written script, the NHB representative described on camera that one beam was carved by craftsmen from Hui An, while the other was done by those from Quan Zhou, both places in China. At that point, the temple manager stopped the recording. Explaining himself to the producer and NHB representative, he advised that we change the script to say that both beams were carved by craftsmen from the two Chinese locations. ‘Don’t state things so clearly on television (上电视不要讲的那么清楚)’, he said softly. ‘But why?’ the Producer questioned. Reluctantly, the temple manager revealed that they were unsure about whether the craftsmen from Hui An and Quan Zhou had worked together on both carvings, or if they had divided the two beams between them. Nodding in agreement, the Producer changed the script’s phrasing to be worded more vaguely. While the need to have unambiguous answers is a generic requirement of quiz shows, I was struck by how anxieties surrounding the uncertain nature of historical information extended beyond the producers to the temple manager who felt the need to correct the government representative. To avoid the potential inaccuracies inherent in interpretations of what happened in the past through historical remnants, they employed strategic ambiguity as a tactic. Despite the quiz show format supposedly enabling producers to exercise ‘control over meaning’ (Bell & Van Leeuwen 1994: 225) by delimiting potential answers (Holmes 2008: 87), for the PSB producers tasked with perpetuating the state’s heritage myths, this involved employing different tactics such as avoidance of certain questions and strategic ambiguity to wrestle the multivocality of heritage into order. In reducing heritage to the question and answer format, underlined by a general aversion to debate, producers carefully eliminated the social and interpretive aspects of heritage in exchange for a generalized objective version of historical knowledge. To perpetuate state myths, they evacuated the past of its human experiences and details. These underlying anxieties went beyond the writing of quiz questions and extended to the studio portion of the programme. After setting the ‘safe’ questions on the outdoor shoots, the producers and both teams reunited in the studio for the competition part of the programme. On the first day of studio recording, I was not given any duties after helping with rehearsals and was therefore able to shift between the studio control panel where the Studio Director and crew controlled camera cuts and videos, and the studio floor where the hosts, contestants and hint-givers performed for the cameras. For the recording of the first set of contestants, I situated myself at the studio floor to observe the ‘live’ recording alongside the Executive Producer, who would give instructions to the floor manager from time to time. During that first recording, the pre-edited videos of questions and answers played

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on the screens built into the production set for the contestants, and the control room cut to written versions of the questions that would stay on the screens when the contestants answered the questions. After the recording of one episode, I was settling myself down in the studio control panel when I overheard the Associate Producer (AP) relay a message from the Executive Producer to the Production Assistant (PA) in charge of cueing the videos, telling her not to stay on the question on the screen when the shot was cut back to the studio floor. Instead, she should switch to the programme logo. PA: But sometimes they (meaning the hosts or contestants) refer back to the question. AP: That is what he (referring to the Executive Producer) doesn’t want. Because they fear/are afraid/worry (怕) that some questions may be wrong […] PA: Wrong? They are correct! AP: They want to be able to change them later on. It is safer this way. 4

Like the Production Assistant, I was puzzled by this message. Even after the questions were set, shot, edited and the studio session already recorded, the producers preferred to have the option of altering the questions. Despite already selecting the ‘safe’ questions during production, the producers felt the need to be even ‘safer’. Given the production team’s prior work on the quiz questions, this precautionary practice in the studio was evidently not aimed at the questions themselves. After having watched the ‘live’ recording of the first set of contestants, the Executive Producer realized that the lively discussions between the game show host, celebrity team hosts and contestants involved exchanges of different interpretations, perspectives and analyses of the questions and heritage topics – discussions that they had difficulty controlling due to the ‘live’ nature of the recording. This clearly raised alarm bells for the Executive Producer who needed to ensure a lock down on any possibilities of alternative interpretations of meaning in the end product of the programme. His instruction to remove the written questions on the screens was therefore a pre-emptive tactic that would allow him room to perhaps rephrase the questions later on in post-production, if the need arose. Here we have a senior producer not just teaching a junior producer about common practice in production – on the careful denial of interpretation in heritage quiz shows, avoidance of the 4 I noted this conversation down by hand at the scene. It was primarily in Mandarin. I underlined the terms used in English.

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complex nature of heritage in Singapore and the emphasis on objective knowledge – but also performatively reproducing state-funded heritage representational work as to be thought of in terms of ‘safety’ and coconstitutively danger and fear. The producers’ practices reveal the difficulties of reducing the multivocality and contestability of heritage to decontextualized knowledge in the informational portion of infotainment heritage quiz shows. Furthermore, producers had to reconcile infotainment’s double demands of information and entertainment (Hartley 2001: 120). This raises questions about how the producers of a PSB heritage quiz show in this illiberal context would balance the two demands, particularly since the info- aspect of the programme involved obvious problems. The Executive Producer wrote the entertainment value into the design of the studio portion of the quiz. Having set the questions for their opposing teams, the contestants paired up with their respective celebrity team hosts reunited in the studio for a face-off. In every round, each contestant-host pair took turns to pose their questions to the opposing team. The teams themselves determined the monetary worth of each question, which the answering team would either win or lose from their pot of money depending on whether they got the answer right. The team with more money at the end of the quiz won. To add to the fun, there were another two characters in the studio whose roles were to provide ‘hints’ or ‘clues’ that may or may not be accurate. Contestants could pay for the clues using game money and decide whether to believe them. A famous female television host moderated the studio game. According to the quiz show’s concept paper, its entertainment value resided in the battles of wit among the contestants, hint-givers and hosts as they aimed to be tricky, misleading and specious. Both the Executive Producer and the Chief Creative Director would brief the main host, hint-givers and celebrity team hosts after the recording of each episode. As we recorded one episode after another, everyone started adjusting to the Executive Producer’s and Chief Creative Director’s requirements. I noticed how they reduced significantly their debate around heritage information, and shifted their focus to performing their individual speciousness. By the third episode, a clear dramatic arc had formed. Rui, the much younger and inexperienced female team host, mostly showed her feelings through her facial expressions. This led to Lun,5 the much more seasoned male team host, often guessing the right answers. After recording the third episode, the Chief Creative Director (CCD) sat down with the two 5

I used synonyms for the two hosts as per all informants in the book.

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hosts for a briefing. I happened to be sitting next to them and wrote the conversation in my notebook.6 CCD: I think episode three was good for everyone. We are about there already. Lun: [To Rui] Your facial expression was so good at that point! Rui: [Confused] Which one? Lun: [Amused] Whenever I answer correctly, your face turns red! It is so obvious! CCD: [Nodding in agreement at Rui] Yes, at that point I wanted to make a face to tell you to show some expressions, but I didn’t expect you to do it already. Rui: [Slightly embarrassed] I am like that when I play games! I cannot hide my feelings! CCD: So it is very good now. The two of you have very distinct positioning (定位). Just maintain it.

The Chief Creative Director’s emphasis on dramatization through ‘expression’ and ‘distinct positioning’ here, alongside their apparent avoidance of debating the heritage information presented in the quiz, are telling. These tactics that subtly shift the focus from the quiz to the competition helped to distract from the multivocality of heritage and the obvious problems of reducing heritage to quiz show formats by transferring viewer attention to the individuals involved. In the end, what the quiz show was testing was not the contestants’ knowledge of Singapore’s heritage but their abilities to perform, and discern through, speciousness. In this sense, rather than the presumed contradiction between the informational and entertainment goals of infotainment (Hartley 2001), the producers of Questions demonstrated how to meet the PSB demands in an illiberal democracy by inversely making use of the entertainment value of competition to conceal the dislocations of, and perpetuate, state heritage myths.

Consuming Heritage, Performing Meritocracy Apart from reducing heritage knowledge to singular narratives through the quiz show format, producers faced further difficulties in representing a heritage that has been ideologically and physically reinvented to compensate 6 This quote was in Mandarin.

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for what the state demolished in the name of economic development. Further to the long-established antagonism between heritage preservation and economic concerns, scholarship on game shows has linked the genre to capitalist practices such as its overt concerns with consumerism (Hills 2005: 178; Holmes 2008: 60) and performances of everyday work and meritocracy (Macdonald 2003: 82; Bonner 2003: 156; Fiske 2011). So how may the producers reconcile their PSB aims of informing the public and educating the citizen (Hartley 2001) with a genre known for treating its audience as a consumer, particularly given the sensitivities around the Singaporean state’s prioritizing of capital over heritage? This is particularly resonant in an illiberal democracy like Singapore where heritage is heavily curated by the state and therefore requires constant maintenance through PSB. Briefly, in the immediate post-independence period and for another two decades, ‘the Singapore landscape was dominated by a demolish-and-rebuild philosophy […] [because] the construction of a new nation-state based on a vision of modernity required first an erasure of traces of the past’ (Kong & Yeoh 2003: 131). It was precisely because the physical heritage that was sacrif iced for capitalist expansion required the state’s ideological reinvention that it was particularly prone to radical simplifications (Devan 1999: 31). Drawing on heritage scholars Ashworth, Graham and Tunbridge (2007), Wong (2017) argued that heritage management in Singapore utilises a ‘core+’ model, whereby ‘a plural society adopts a leading culture which is not the culture of the majority or, indeed, even that of any of the diverse cultural groups involved’ (2007: 155). Instead, the state prefers ‘heritage’ that is ‘imported from outside, imposed from above and politically-motivated’ (Wong 2017: 186) to distract from the tensions that underlie Singapore’s heritage. In order to do so, Chua argued that the state created what he called the ‘myth of communitarianism’ by producing […] its own nostalgia for a mythological Asian communitarian society, placed in an unspecified and unspecifiable distant past. The myth of communitarianism thus functions as an utopian vision that reinvents a cherished past […] backed by the PAP government which is committed to translating it into future reality (Chua 1995a: 239).

The heavily reimagined past creates problems for PSB producers in terms of the representability of the ‘heritage’ featured in their programmes. The second game show I worked on during fieldwork, which I shall here rename as Intergenerational Love, attempted precisely to reimagine the past through the present.

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Intergenerational Love was an outdoor game show that involved pairs of grandchildren and grandparents as participants. In each episode, two pairs of participants – each pair consisting of a grandchild and a grandparent – competed against each other. Two well-known Singaporean television hosts – a male and a female – led the pairs. Each team therefore consisted of three members, namely a grandchild, a grandparent and a host. The two teams raced against each other to guess clues presented to them and which, if guessed correctly, led them to secret locations. They then had to complete tasks at each location. The f irst team to complete tasks at six locations and head back to the starting point won. The winning team received a larger cash prize than the losing team but both returned with some earnings. The teams were presented with six clue cards prepared by the production team and guessed each location based on the pictorial clues. The six locations were divided into three themes, each theme containing two locations: one was labelled modern and young while the other supposedly represented the traditional or old. For instance, one of the themes in the first episode was hairstyling. The two locations were an old fashioned street barber and a modern blow bar – where customers’ hair were styled while they enjoyed wine. By showcasing the various locations, the programme’s concept paper argued that the show helped ‘the television audience understand the humanities and history (人文历史) of various locations [and] the inside stories of our rich culture (丰富的文化底蕴)’. Elaborating on how this could be accomplished, the Writer detailed: The game design considers the characteristics of both generations and their knowledge and worldviews. The game provides a learning bridge between the two generations (两代之间学习的桥梁). [Contestants] share their ‘memories of time’ (“岁月回忆”) through the game, strengthening their inter-generational relationship and inheriting (传承) grandparents’ experience and wisdom.

Here, the game design deliberately linked family and heritage, which reflects a well-worn state strategy. Wee has noted what he called the ‘dodgy social biology’ (2000: 139) underlying the government’s emphasis on how families, rather than history or culture, transmit values and identity. According to Wee, this allows the government to remove physical markers of history and reinvent urban heritage in the name of economic development, without compromising their claims of national rootedness. For Heng and Devan, this ‘ideological fantasy of transgenerational replication’ (1992: 353) is part of a

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more sinister manoeuvre to render the omnipotent and all-encompassing state natural. Nevertheless, the show’s basis that contestants ‘share their “memories of time” through the game’ relied on linkages between contestants’ memories and the locations chosen, which proved tricky. In an attempt to increase the relatability of locations, many of the locations that the Writer chose were linked to goods and products generally associated with an older time period. Most ‘secret locations’ were shops that sold similar goods or services in different eras. This is hardly surprising considering the ways in which capitalist subjectivities are intricately linked to many aspects of Singaporean life.7 However, in doing so, the programme’s focus on locations linked to consumer goods also implies that no matter the differences between grandparents and grandchildren, they were united as consumers. Consumption ‘provides a learning bridge between the two generations’ and memory was rearticulated as an act of consumption. Consequently, in marrying consumerism and heritage, the programme effectively reflects Baudrillard’s theorization of consumption as ‘the citizen’s duty’ (1988: 48) and successfully combines the public, citizen and consumer in addressing its viewers. This raises questions about how consumption was represented when linked to heritage. Conventionally, consumption has been theorized as reflecting class (Bourdieu 1984: 6) or more broadly individualism (Douglas and Isherwood 1979: 68). However, issues of class, taste, identity, and society were silenced in Intergenerational Love. Instead, consumption was rearticulated as only two categories – old and new. The programme addressed contestants not as individuals but as grandchild or grandparent, and categorized products as old or new. Every episode recycled the same roles and categories. Faced with the challenge of representing Singaporean heritage as a relatively unproblematic whole to a presumed mass audience, producers presented chosen consumer goods featured in the programme in a way that ignored the fact that only Singaporeans belonging to certain social classes, ethnic groups or cultures may have used them, and instead framed each product or shop as either old (heritage) or new (modern), hence claiming to represent the collective memory of entire generations. If the act 7 Famously, Chua (2003a) wrote about consumption culture in Singapore, and game shows have been criticized for reinforcing the logics of consumerism (Wayne 2000; Hills 2005; Dunn 1986). However, ‘it is not enough to simply accept the argument that a particular show promotes consumerism: we need to examine how it constructs consumer identities in practice’ (Holmes 2008: 105). Rather than presuming the programme’s construction of consumer identities, which sidesteps the issue of agency, it is necessary to examine how consumerism itself has been imagined.

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of consumption is the exchange of signs, the particular brand of heritage consumption represented in Intergenerational Love carefully removed connotations of class, taste, ethnicity and gender, leaving the products and goods as almost empty signifiers. The programme ended up with an impersonal, bland and vacuous version of heritage. The programme’s discursive framing of heritage as two reductive categories – old and new – meant that both grandparents and grandchildren had to embody the entire cultures of their respective generations. By performing the roles they were positioned in within the game design, the contestants concealed the dislocations of state multiculturalism in Singapore by absorbing the difficulties in the representability of ‘heritage’ locations and their disconnects from official narratives of what was supposedly their heritage. This was, however, a double-edged sword, since it relied on the contestants’ performances in the game, which were difficult to control. During the outdoor shoots as we rushed from one location to another, the contestants often looked lost despite standing in a shop supposedly representing their generation. In the episode with the street barber and blow bar, neither of the grandparents in the two teams were able to describe their experiences with the barber in the past even when asked by the hosts. These instances whereby contestants clearly did not recognize or relate to the heritage locations threatened to expose the dislocations of the state’s heritage narrative. To buffer the dislocatory effects, the Writer made a further articulatory step. The programme’s slogan read: 穿越时空祖孙情 祖孙出动智闯关 Intergenerational love transcends time and space, Grand partners advance the stages with wit.

According to the programme’s design, its key concept ‘transcendence’ could only be achieved with ‘intergenerational love’. The contestants benefited not by learning more about the past, but by regaining ‘the feelings from their younger days’ and gaining ‘emotional connection [my italics]’. MediaCorp’s website also described that Intergenerational Love ‘combines facts and information of our society with emotional connections between two generations [my italics]’ (XinMSN 2013c). In this sense, the game design’s linking of family with emotions transferred attention away from the dislocations of heritage locations towards intergenerational love. The game tested how well grandparents and grandchildren worked together more than their respective knowledge of the heritage locations.

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In order to achieve this effect, the producers regularly attempted to encourage and capture performances of ‘intergenerational love’ in the contestants. I remember one particular incident from when I followed the production shoot for the first episode. It was a sunny afternoon when the production bus reached one of the outdoor locations. The highly competitive celebrity host of one of the teams, Dave, ran far ahead of his two teammates in his hurry to find the specific location, while the rest of the production team, including myself, the crew and the producer, trailed slowly behind together with the contestants consisting of a grandmother and her grandson. As we strolled along, the producer suddenly shouted out for Dave. Prompting him to walk alongside the contestants, the producer looked at Dave while silently pointing at the held hands between the grandson and grandmother. Understanding what the producer wanted immediately, Dave swiftly walked over, grabbed the grandmother’s other hand and started walking alongside the pair. The producer then quietly instructed the cameraman to focus on the held hands. The final edited version of the episode included this conversation: Wide shot of host, grandson and grandmother walking and holding hands. The grandmother is walking in the middle. Host: Boy, do you go walking with your grandmother usually? Grandson: No. Host: Do you usually hold your grandmother’s hands in public on the streets? Cut to a close up shot of the celebrity host holding the grandmother’s hand. Grandson: Yes. Host: That’s more like it. What do you want to be when you grow up? Silence. Host: Be a filial grandson! Grandmother laughs. Host: [Jokes] You don’t even know how to say these nice things. You still need me to teach you to do so!

The insertion of this clip into the episode despite it slowing the fast pace of the editing demonstrates the producers’ intentional shift in focus onto the relationship between grandson and grandmother. In response to the grandson’s less-than-model answer to Dave’s question, Dave – upon the suggestion of the producer – awkwardly guided the conversation to highlight more overtly the affect of an ideal inter-generational relationship. This

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presents an interesting twist to the usual association of game shows with inferiority due to the presence of high emotion (Miller 2001: 77). Here, the encouragement of certain kinds of emotions was part of the production tactics used to fulfil PSB obligations of perpetuating the state myth of intergenerational transmission of values, identity and heritage. This deliberate construction of the ideal family also works as a suture over Singapore society’s antagonistic relationship with its elderly, who are often blamed for the increasing stress on the nation’s resources, including increases in taxation (Depillis 2014) and foreign immigrants (population.sg 2013).8 Taken together, Intergenerational Love rearticulated memory through consumption. The consumables, which were stripped of class, race, gender, religion and history, were argued to enable heritage-learning between generations. To facilitate intergenerational inheritance, emotions were emphasized to conceal the dislocations of homogenous intergenerational heritage. By upholding the myth of family with emotions and erasing antagonisms of class and race within and between generations, the programme created a Singaporean ‘heritage’ through consumption, inherited via the happy Singaporean ‘family’. The myth of heritage was sustained by the myth of family. If Intergenerational Love was a game show about intergenerational relationships, this had implications for how its competition was to be represented. In a classic piece of writing on game shows, Fiske stated […] this ritual-game-ritual is an enactment of capitalist ideology. Individuals are constructed as different but equal in opportunity […] Such an ideology and its ritual/game performances grounds social or class differences in individual natural differences and thus naturalizes the class system (Fiske 2011: 268; my italics).

Written based on Western liberal models of competition in game shows, Fiske argued that the game conventions reduce class differences to natural differences, thereby justifying brash competition between individuals. However, when implicated in PSB heritage making, Intergenerational Love’s game elements rearticulated social differences as a measurement of 8 In particular, the government’s plans to build nursing homes or apartments for the elderly in certain areas have been met with protest and petitions (AsiaOne 28 May 2012; AsiaOne 9 February 2012). The reported increase in numbers of abandoned and homeless elderly Singaporeans (Whang 2013), of old parents suing their children for ‘a lack of maintenance’ (Chang 2013) and of children sending their aged parents to nursing homes outside of Singapore (Koh 2012) paint a very different picture of intergenerational relationships than Intergenerational Love.

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intergenerational relationships. Consequently, if one team lost to the other by too much of a margin, the programme risked challenging the myth of family and intergenerational love. This proved a concern for the producers involved. The production team went through careful screening of the pairs of contestants before recording to make sure the dynamics between grandchild and grandparent was right and that they could potentially work well together. After recording the first episode, the production team quickly realized that Dave, the male host, was a much better game player than Joey, the female host. Making full use of that, they decided to pair Dave with what the Associate Producer called ‘the bad contestants’ to help them with the game. The Head Writer also briefed his production assistants to offer hints should a clue prove too difficult for a particular team of contestants. I asked the Head Writer about the issue in an interview after the recordings: You must have competitiveness (竞争性) because you want to reach that effect (效果) […] [Referring to the difference in contestants’ performances] A lot of times, there are conditions that you cannot control […] We may not be able to give consideration to (兼顾) fairness, but competitiveness is important.

In referring to ‘competitiveness’ as ‘effect’, the Head Writer hints at the performance of competitiveness to be achieved through various tactics that buffered the differences in abilities of competing teams. These different tactics were meant to upkeep the appearance that contestants, in a game of how well they could work together as family, performed comparatively on par, thereby maintaining the myths of family and heritage. This seemingly seamless mythmaking formula points to the uncomfortable co-existence of relentless capitalist development and traditional ideas of culture in Singapore. Notably, the sustaining of these myths worked hand-in-hand with the performance of meritocracy. The various practices that producers engaged in to ensure competitiveness as effect had to be hidden from audiences not just in order to maintain the myths but also to conceal the deliberate unfairness built into the actual competition. For instance, the Head Writer regularly briefed the contestants not to discuss the process of the day with others. The producers also carefully excluded from the final edited programme any footage of the bus drivers or production teams helping the contestants with clues. These production practices that had to be hidden from viewers therefore achieved the double effects of both upholding the state myths of

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family and heritage; and staging the appearance of equal opportunity for television audiences, thereby performing decontextualized competition and meritocracy.

Imagining Audiences, Emptying Subjects My analysis of the production of the two game shows in this chapter indicate the work that went into maintaining the myths that constitute Singapore’s social imaginary. In doing so, producers also reproduced the hegemonic fears that frame Singapore’s dominant social order. These fears were performed, for instance, through producers’ precautionary practices around ‘safe’ quiz questions and their careful formulation of family and heritage myths. If Public Service Broadcasting relies on the imagined ‘public’ as audience, part of the work of PSB producers then also lies in conjuring audiences for the state. This raises the immediate question of whether we should think of the conjured audience as ‘the public’ or ‘citizen’ as conventionally imagined in PSB or as the ‘consumer’ in commercial media. While these categories may be used commonly within media scholarship, they remain largely analytical rather than practical categories for the PSB producers I met. Even when emerging more explicitly in analysis, these categories were intertwined, as illustrated by Intergenerational Love’s use of consumerism in perpetuating heritage myths. More commonly, producers articulated Singapore’s free-to-air target audience as ‘mass’. So how do the production practices we discussed conjure audiences as an invisible fiction (Hartley 1992)? And what does this imagined ‘mass audience’ look like? When I asked the Executive Producer of the two game shows whom his audiences were, he replied that Singaporean free-to-air producers had to target their programmes at a mass audience. However, he quickly then qualified that statement by asking me, a young intern at the time, whether I thought ‘young people’ watched television. When I replied negatively, he nodded in agreement and said that even though those who watched his shows were more likely to be older viewers, he still hoped to be able to reach wider audiences. The Executive Producer presented an interesting account here. Unlike earlier imaginations of mass audience as a vast and undifferentiated collectivity, producers in Singapore were highly aware of the fragmentation of audiences but treated the idea of ‘mass audience’ as an aspiration. This was partly due to the decreasing numbers of, and yet compulsory, PSB audience. PSB viewers are compulsory for both the state and the producers I study, because without them, there would be no subject

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for the state’s hegemony and no work for the producers. Part of the task of the producers in managing the relationship between the state and society therefore lies in imagining and invoking audiences. However, decreasing viewer numbers for free-to-air television in a nation-state with an already small media market meant PSB producers had to target across differentiated audience groups in order to reach wider numbers to justify continued state funding, thereby resulting in the aspired ‘mass audience’. At the same time, industry structure and government discourse force producers to imagine the so-called ‘mass audience’ along linguistic, and by extension ethnic, lines (Chapter One). What is ostensibly a practice in market differentiation is not just an attempt to mark the channels in distinctive ways but also acts to interpellate the audience as particular sorts of subjects. This swinging between ‘mass’ and ‘niche’ produces interesting effects. In line with state biopolitics, the two programmes articulated all-inclusive and blanket accounts of heritage by using various techniques to conceal the dislocations – the social contingencies and the polysemic nature of history and traditions – of heritage myths. Producers also downplayed social differences in their efforts to perform the ‘effect’ of competitiveness. Whether through their aversion to debate, strategic ambiguity in representing heritage or careful eliminating of the room for interpretation, these practices evacuated the past of any human or social aspects and reduced it to sets of decontextualized questions, locations or traits (e.g. Old and New). This replacement of human subjects with traits raises questions about the kind of audience conjured. Is it possible to be a human subject if you don’t have a past? If addressing a mass, these practices and their aversion to debate produce an imagined audience that had to be shielded from the dislocations of their own society, through performances of state myths and cultural ideals such as heritage, family, meritocracy, and so on. Taken together, these ideas continually condemn the Singaporean subject as a work in progress, and sustain a vicious cycle of perpetual to-be-upgraded-ness by denying and disarticulating the underlying dislocations of Singapore society. Furthermore, when faced with a state ideology and industry structure that forces them to imagine audiences according to language and ethnicity but with other social differences sutured to formulate a mass, producers had to construct a Singaporean subject that is emptied of any accompanying variables of taste, class, gender and generation etc. In the case of the producers I worked with, this was simply ‘the Chinese audience’. This is an imagined audience with built-in uncertainties. Without being able to account for these variations or nuances within viewers groups, audiences become unpredictable for producers since their actual encounters with

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viewers will always be in excess of any constructed totality. Combined with producers’ arbitrary encounters with individual viewers through complaints, these practices conjure a Singaporean audience that is empty, unpredictable and essentially un-addressable. As a result, this is a media system within a social structure that has unpredictability built-in, and heightened anxieties as a consequence. This leads to a vicious cycle for producers as the ignoring or suturing of differences within these categories only creates more uncertainties in terms of the vast amount of different ways viewers could react. So how does the inherent ambiguity of audiences in Singapore feature in the practices of drama producers who have worked together for a long time on Chinese-language television? The next chapter examines the issues raised and debated by producers with years of experience producing for Channel8 and therefore long-term relationships with its audiences.

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Drama Writing and Audiences as Affective Superaddressee Abstract Extending the ideological emptying of audiences into a more detailed examination of the competing goals and demands of illiberalism in Singapore’s media, Chapter Three focuses on how the multiple roles and relations of illiberal capital are embodied by producers in the struggles of scriptwriting a crime drama. These struggles revolve around the audience as a problematic. Developing the concept of audiences as ‘affective superaddressee’, I examine the ways in which the dislocations of illiberal capitalism manifest in anxieties engendered by imagined audiences that serve to perpetuate authoritarian resilience in everyday media production. Keywords: Affective superaddressee; Control society; Illiberal capitalist democracy; Media production; Drama writing; Imagined Audiences

I barely saw the boss of the production company in the first phases of my fieldwork there, during which I worked more on variety programmes. That changed dramatically in the latter phases of my stay at that company when I worked on several dramas back to back. My daily observations during my time there suggest that he spent much of his time in the office participating in pre-production creative meetings for the company’s prime time dramas. This observation did not go unnoticed by others working at the company. Producers working on the variety or infotainment programmes would sometimes comment on the relatively lesser attention the boss showed to their work compared to the dramas. In an explanatory but also frustrated tone, one of the Assistant Producers specializing in variety shows at the time explained to me that this was because the prime time dramas served as the brand of the company for audiences. From an early point in my fieldwork, I had realized that the amount of time the boss of the company dedicated to the writing of its prime time dramas speak to the importance

Fong, Siao Yuong, Performing Fear in Television Production: Practices of an Illiberal Democracy, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463724579_ch03

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the company placed on them. In some ways, this is not surprising. Despite changes in Singaporean television over the years, ‘it is the Mandarin dramas and comedies that continue till today to produce the highest ratings’ (Tan 2008: 47). Compared to the constraints of variety and infotainment programmes, drama productions’ higher budgets, bigger teams, longer turnover time, and importantly, their attraction of more viewer attention also often mean their producers have to take more into consideration during their preproduction phases. While the television production landscape in Singapore is dominated by state funding that usually comes with public service remits, MediaCorp, the broadcasting monopoly, also depends to a significant degree on advertising and sponsorship revenue. Furthermore, the Singaporean government’s brand of conservatism, where policymakers repeatedly defer to what they represent as the conservative majority of Singaporean society as justification, has led to a culture where complaints are taken extremely seriously. This goes beyond production’s self-censorship in line with state directives. Limitations on media pluralism created a general intolerance of diversity of opinion in favour of producers suturing over antagonisms to articulate some shared morality or value system in the name of consensus. Drama producers in an illiberal capitalist democracy like Singapore therefore have to straddle several potentially antagonistic positions, including as PSB providers; as commercial entertainers; as perpetuators of state ideology; and as societal moral gatekeepers. I observed the writing and pre-production phases for one of these prime time dramas during my fieldwork where many of these considerations emerged. During the script discussion meetings that I sat in for, the creative team often referred fondly to the past dramas they had written together. It was evident to me that this group of producers have a long history with MediaCorp. This presumably translates into a relatively more established working relationship with the broadcaster, the authorities, as well as audiences. So a key question that I had when I approached this production was how experienced producers of Chinese-language prime time dramas in Singapore manage the multiple demands of television making in an illiberal capitalist democracy, particularly when compared to producers of variety and infotainment programmes. In the first instance, much of the differences I noticed manifested in drama producers’ contestations over audiences. If the variety producers’ implicit conjuring of audiences as empty subjects (Chapter Two) resulted from the ideological forces of illiberalism, the drama producers’ explicit struggles with audiences in this chapter reflect the complex interplay

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between the ideological and processual dimensions of illiberalism with its market imperatives. The multiple character of public television in Singapore has ramifications for the various ways in which its audiences may be imagined, whether as the target of state propaganda, ratings, consumers, fans and participants, audience-as-commodities for advertisers or others. Creative producers carry these various relationships with audiences (the institutional, creative, state and processual) in their daily work. In this chapter, I examine the pre-production writing phases of a state-funded drama to consider how power intersects and manifests through these different accounts of audiences in the production practices of drama producers in an illiberal capitalist democracy. The case study under investigation in this chapter is a drama series about cybercrime that was commissioned by MediaCorp. In other words, this was a PSB programme in which producers were explicitly required to warn audiences of the government-enunciated dangers of cybercrime. Scholarship generally recognize that the mass media (television in particular) is a powerful source of myths about crime and justice that involves a convergence of political motivations, public sentiments and the considerations of the crime-industrial complex (Kort-Butler and Hartshorn 2011: 40–41). So how do these various considerations manifest in the media production of an illiberal democracy? The three main sections of this chapter deal with different aspects of drama writing. I start with their structural constraints, including being forced to take on the theme of cybercrime and other informal ‘rules’ related to portraying law and order in Singapore. In the second section, I focus on questions of morality and how these relate to imagined audience responses. The third section discusses the producers’ requirements to anticipate indirect influences of their work on audiences. Finally, I end the chapter with a theoretical discussion of audiences as affective superaddressee.

The Structural Constraints of Drama Writing in an Illiberal Democracy The producers met with an immediate concern from the beginning – the programme’s subject matter. According to one of the leading producers1 in 1 I address the producers by their job title in this chapter. However, in certain instances where comments may be deemed sensitive, I eliminate their title to provide another layer of anonymity.

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the project, the IMDA wanted to warn audiences about the pitfalls of the Internet through the drama series.2 He commented in English, ‘we actually got forced by the government to do this. It’s about the Internet, and how on the Internet you cannot trust everything you see. That kind of propaganda things’. Having worked together on several prime time Channel8 drama serials prior to this, the team had built a relationship with MediaCorp. While this meant that MediaCorp officials often preferred them when selecting candidates for commissions, the number of jobs was limited so they often had to take whatever was available. In his opinion, this topic of cybercrime was a difficult one to tackle well and MediaCorp tended to outsource the difficult projects to independent production companies who had little choice other than to accept them. The other members of the core creative team also complained several times that MediaCorp imposed the topic on them. The producers’ frustrations about having to write a drama on a stateimposed topic is underlined by what the independent producers perceive as an unequal relationship between them and the broadcasters, who function both as their commissioner and their competition. In a telling comment during the early script discussions, the Executive Producer emphasized to the rest of the creative team how they are unable to rely on MediaCorp’s preapproval of their plot idea as ‘we are the ones who will have to bear the consequences (承担) in the end. It will sabotage (sabo) us’. Even though the head of MediaCorp’s internal censorship department is supposed to vet all scripts before production, in practice, there was little gatekeeping on the part of the broadcaster beyond appointing the theme of cybercrime. Due to the tight schedules, the production company only sent the scripts to MediaCorp for vetting when shooting had already started. The scripts for later episodes were also written while production for the earlier episodes were on-going. MediaCorp therefore had little time to reflect on any issues they may want to change, and both MediaCorp and IMDA often only gave feedback after watching the edited episodes. This is despite the fact that productions altered in signif icant ways from the proposal stage to the final versions. This is not uncommon practice. When I asked the Executive Producer about this, he said that the commissioning officers did not usually read all the scripts and had never in his experience given feedback at the 2 There was no law pertaining to online falsehoods in Singapore during the time of fieldwork. However, the government passed the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act in 2019. Colloquially known as the Fake News Act, the law has been criticized for providing ministers broad powers to remove information as a means of censorship. Ongoing research on mobilizations of the Act indicate it is largely used to defend government policies against criticism online.

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scripting stage. This meant that the responsibility of fulfilling perceived obligations towards themes and avoiding potentially problematic areas rested heavily on the producers, as any changes MediaCorp or the IMDA wanted at the post-production stage would cost more time and money for the production company. Under such circumstances, producers repeatedly complained that they did not want to do a programme about this topic. As the Head Writer said, ‘this is a very difficult subject matter to tackle (这是个很难做的题材)’. So what exactly did the producers find difficult about this theme? The ‘Rules’ of Portraying Crime in Singapore By the time I conducted the ethnography for this production, I had finished my internship with this company. I was allowed to sit in for scriptwriting meetings, which occurred over a period of roughly two months in the later part of 2013. The core creative team that drove pre-production comprised of the Executive Producer (EP), one of the directors (Dir), and the Head Writer (Wri). The three were middle-aged Chinese males and had collaborated for many years. Known to them as the intern doing her doctoral research, and as the youngest and only female in the group, my default position in these meetings was to be armed with either a laptop or a notebook, recording the discussions and taking copious amounts of notes quietly. As there were usually one or two production personnel taking notes in every meeting anyway, my presence in the room was never jarring in a physical sense. In this particular case, I was allowed to sit in for the programme’s scriptwriting meetings for helping to arrange some interviews with specialists in cyber forensics and law. The Executive Producer asked me to arrange these interviews in order for the creative team to get some technical and legal information that would be useful for scripting. In their proposal that was written to bid for the project, the creative team described the drama as set in a law firm that specializes in damage control for reputational injuries resulting from cyber conflicts. Both the male and female leads were projected as lawyers in the initial proposal and the drama broadly involved cases whereby victims of cyber conflicts seek help from the drama’s lead characters. These characters would resolve their problems using technological means such as hacking and obtain justice along the way. As the drama revolved around the theme of the dangers of cybercrime, the creative team had some questions to ask before beginning the writing process. Upon the request of the Executive Producer, I arranged for the team to meet with two specialists in cyber law. However, after we met up with

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the two specialists, the team realized they had a problem. Both specialists informed us that hacking without a court order was illegal, which rang alarm bells for the producers. They were worried about the male lead engaging in hacking activities since he would be breaking the law knowingly. After speaking to the consultants, we found an empty table in the outside area of a busy Starbucks café nearby and sat down for a meeting. To get around the issue of the lead characters breaking the law as lawyers, the producers proposed several alternative occupations for the characters that they thought would improve the situation. The Writer suggested changing the male lead’s character to a university professor whom the police sometimes consulted for cases, as seen in films like Indiana Jones and certain Japanese dramas. The Executive Producer then proposed that he could be a lawyer who never fights cases in court, but instead takes on jobs similar to a private investigator who works with the police. However, these suggestions were met with objections from the Director. Dir: If we want to do in detail, there are many things we cannot do. If the female lead is a policewoman, the police cannot look for Private Investigators (PI). Wri: That’s Singapore […] How about set in Malaysia? Dir: Singapore doesn’t have such things, that’s what is difficult about doing it in Singapore […] EP: But can you accept the university setting? He is like a consultant sort of person. I know Singapore doesn’t have such a thing, but do you think it will be a problem if we did it (你觉得有问题吗)?3

The Director’s comment that ‘Singapore doesn’t have such things, that’s what is difficult about doing it in Singapore’, which the other two producers agreed with, suggests that departure from what was possible in Singapore could potentially raise problems. The producers’ worries about portraying the story’s context beyond what they thought could and was likely to happen in Singapore point to their sensitivities towards how they represent public institutions in Singapore. In questioning whether the male lead could work as a consultant, the Executive Producer suggests that perhaps the university setting provides more room for manoeuvre compared to the policing or legal industries in mass media representations. 3 These meetings were primarily in Mandarin with a mix of English. I underlined the English terms used as accurately as possible, and included the original Chinese words when relevant.

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However, beyond concerns around accuracy to the Singapore context, it is worth going more into what is involved when representing institutions of law and order in an illiberal context like Singapore. This emerged when the creative team debated whether the female lead should be a policewoman. Dir: If she was a cop, we have production problems. EP: But you will still need a second male lead that is a cop anyway. Wri: Because we will definitely need cops in the series, because certain cases […] Dir: If we do use the police as a background, it would be improper/ unbecoming/unseemly (怎么像样) to not work with the police on it […] A lot of things we cannot say, many things we cannot do. We cannot do things that break the law, that kind of thing. [silence] [laments] We’re just trying to make a living (我们只是混口饭吃嘛) […] Plus it is against the rules for the police to look for Private Investigators or consultants in Singapore. EP: Even if we didn’t care about the rules, we can’t make the police work with a Private Investigator for small cases.

The Director’s concerns here were multiple. In arguing that ‘it would be improper / unbecoming / unseemly to not work with the police on it’ if they used the Singapore Police as a background for the programme, the Director referred to production conventions in Singapore. These norms dictate that productions should collaborate with the Singapore Police Force when producing a programme that uses it as a background, deviation from which would be deemed ‘improper’. This puts the producers in a difficult situation as such an arrangement would then come with many other restrictions, as articulated by the Director’s comment that ‘a lot of things we cannot say, many things we cannot do’. Underlying the Director’s lament that they’re ‘just trying to make a living’ was the producers’ general unwillingness to collaborate with the police on the programme. This was not uncommon practice. When I was tasked with arranging meetings with specialists on cyber forensics, my first inclination was to approach the police for official advice on the legality of cybercrime. Running the idea by the creative team, I was struck by their strong objections. Upon hearing my suggestion, one of the producers immediately stopped me, saying ‘once we approach the police, it will be endless (没完没了). They will ask to see the tapes, which we cannot do’. In a rather melodramatic moment of jest, he commented ‘Singapore police is worse than gangsters / illegal triads (黑社会)!’ While the statement was meant as a humorous gesture to

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educate an outsider like myself about production practices, it also served as a clear indication of the difficulties involved in working with a public institution like the police. The difficulties go beyond direct intervention from the police. The producers also cautioned against portraying the police as acting ‘against the rules’ or implying their incompetence through making them work with private investigators for ‘small cases’. Painfully aware of their roles as perpetuators of cultural myths about crime and justice (Kort-Butler and Hartshorn 2011: 40), these producers had to carefully tiptoe around their representations of public institutions of law and order. In an illiberal context like Singapore, this involved avoiding the red tape of the Police Force, representing them in a good light, while limiting themselves to what was not just accurate to but imagined as possible in the Singaporean context. Despite being a state-funded mandated programme on issues of crime in Singapore, these PSB producers had a great many structural hoops to jump through.

From the Media’s Moral Responsibility to Disapproving Audiences Beyond the structural constraints, the producers’ major concern was with the drama’s lead character. This is not surprising since it is generally agreed that the appeal of a drama’s central character is one of the key factors in the success of any crime drama series (Turnbull 2014: 97–98). However, what was striking for me while observing the script discussions was how the male lead’s importance was framed by the producers, and how that framing shifted throughout the conversations. In the initial phase of script discussions, the producers broadly articulated their worries about the male lead’s occupation as a matter of their ‘responsibility’ as media producers. ‘As the media, it is our responsibility […] If he is a lawyer, we’re restricted to this moral/ethical (道德) responsibility (责任) as the media’, the Director explained to the rest of the creative team during an early script meeting. But what did the Director mean by ‘moral/ ethical responsibility’, and what does that refer to in the context of Singapore television? The IMDA introduced the issue of ‘morals’ and ‘responsibility’ in several parts of its programme code for free-to-air television. According to the document, it is ‘the responsibility of broadcasters to ensure that their programmes […] comply fully with the Code’ (Media Development Authority 2013a: 1), which includes ideas about morality. The relevant part of the document stated that programmes should

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promote appreciation of good social and moral values. Stories must generally reflect respect for law and order, parents, elders and fellow human beings. Stories should clearly portray good morals e.g. heroic and villainous characters must be distinguishable, and the lifestyles of gangs and gangsters should not be portrayed as desirable (2013a: 5).

The producers’ initial articulations about concerns over the male lead breaking the law as a lawyer echoes the Code’s emphasis on clear distinctions between heroic and villainous characters. This framing emerged in the producers’ debate regarding the male lead’s occupation following our meetings with the cyber law specialists. Wri: Our lead character, he is not a swindler (老千). By right, he naturally/innately/inherently (天生) shouldn’t break the law. Unless he doesn’t care and breaks the law to investigate the truth […] EP: If he is a lawyer […] Wri: Even more guilty (罪加一等)! EP: No. The ones who break the law aren’t him. Wri: He is the brain, the organizer, even worse as a lawyer. He uses the loopholes of the law.

The Code’s reference to respecting the law as part of the moral values to be promoted and for producers to separate characters into clear ‘heroic’ and ‘villainous’ categories coincides with the Writer’s anxiety towards the male lead breaking the law because by the code’s standards, only ‘bad’ characters such as swindlers would innately break the law. This is clearly based on an implied pedagogical relationship between media and audience. It is worth noting however, that the Executive Producer did not agree with reducing the notoriously complex issue of Internet usage and morality into the neat boxes of good and bad, or hero and villain. Given the subjective and interpretive nature of morality, the Writer switched tactic and brought up the issue of audiences. Wri: Mainly because the audience (观众) will feel like we are promoting/advocating/encouraging (提倡) something that is negative (负面) and there isn’t a payback. The audience will feel we are encouraging (鼓励) breaking the law. EP: Actually, if we avoid the major issues by going into minor ones (避重就轻), we should be able to get away with it (避得过) […] If you hack someone’s computer because he is doing illegal things,

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only he will say this is illegal. The general/ordinary/common viewer (一般观众) won’t have a problem (问题) […] Wri: This is morally/ethically (道德上) okay, but legally not okay. The problem is, if we want to be picky about this, the information that we obtained illegally won’t be accepted in court by the judge. EP: Actually we can avoid it […] Actually the audience will understand (都明白). They won’t think about the evidence in court.

I noted down this moment clearly since it was the first time that the issue of audiences was brought up in this discussion so far, in what seemed to me to be deliberate invoking of audiences as an articulatory tool to justify the Writer’s point. This produced an obvious discursive shift from debating what the male lead could or could not do, to explicating what the audience would feel about it. This discursive shift has implications for how we think about produceraudience relations in Singapore. As PSB providers in an illiberal democracy, the producers’ first concerns – as shown by what dominated much of the earlier part of their discussions – were with the normative boundaries of their portrayal of the male lead. The discussion was dominated by terms such as ‘we can’t’ and ‘he shouldn’t’. However, as debates about morality tends towards the abstract, the Writer justified his position by invoking audiences. This shift is testament to the producers’ perception that potential audience reactions are more effective as authorial justification. As the conversation proceeded and the producers disagreed with each other as to how ‘the audience’ would react, however, it quickly became apparent that the idea of audiences actually opened up more room for debate. How the producers debated audiences is significant. The Writer’s worry that ‘the audience will feel we are encouraging something that is negative and there isn’t a payback’ was not just based on the conservative idea that showing something on television was tantamount to ‘promoting/advocating/ encouraging’ it. It also attributed the assumption to ‘the audience’, which the Writer imagined as disapproving. This crucially transferred the moral and educational responsibility of the media (as designated in the Code) over to audiences. Even though the Executive Producer disagreed with the Writer, his argument that ‘we should be able to get away with it’ similarly attributed the moral policing of their representation to what audiences might feel. In this sense, ‘the audience’ carried the moral, ethical and legal burdens of the show. The two producers’ difference in opinion here point to their different approaches to audiences. It is worth noting that both the Writer and the

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Director have worked in Chinese-language drama production in Singapore for decades, and commanded more experience in ‘knowing the audience’. Comparatively, the Executive Producer started his career in variety and comedy shows before venturing into drama production at a later stage. As an entrepreneur, he also had more of a penchant for moving outside of the safety zones in pursuit of ratings. In a later interview, the Executive Producer told me that he felt producers should be ‘one step ahead of the viewers […] we shouldn’t be going after them, we should be leading them’. However, he also lamented that most others, including network officers, did not feel that way and were often preoccupied with the authorities rather than ‘what the market wants’. Nonetheless, whether worrying about audiences disapproving of them encouraging breaking the law or thinking they could get away with it, the underlying concern between the producers was not ‘what the audience wants’ but ‘what the audience may have a problem with’. In other words, despite their disagreements and the Executive Producer’s seeming attunement to ratings and desire to challenge the audience, it is telling that their primary concern was with avoiding ‘problems’ with ‘the audience’. The Power of Audience Potentials Crucially, this imagined disapproving audience is deeply implicated in the practice of transferring the moral policing responsibilities of the media to audiences. While seemingly innocuous, this ideological sleight of hand in fact alters the nature of moral gatekeeping in drama writing from what should or should not be portrayed to how audiences could potentially respond. It did not occur to me then amidst the messiness of fieldwork, and it was only upon reflection later that I realized the implications of this manoeuvre. Notably, the discursive shift to what audiences would feel led to the Executive Producer changing his stance from agreeing that the male lead should not break the law in absolutist terms to asserting that in fact, audiences would not notice. However, he struggled to convince the other two. Increasingly perplexed by their anxieties about audiences, he turned to speak directly to me. EP: [To me] Let me ask you. Before we met these specialists and we didn’t know that their jobs did not allow them to hack others, if you saw someone hack a bad person on TV for a good cause […] Will you think he did something wrong?

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With comparatively little prior production experience and having lived overseas for several years, I was not considered to have much local audience knowledge and therefore was used to the three producers speaking largely amongst themselves during discussions. This was why I was surprised when the Executive Producer oriented his gaze directly to address me. Caught off guard, I mumbled something about seeing hackers on television often. Without waiting for my full answer, the Director jumped in with his opinion. Dir: I will definitely think he did something wrong, because I know […] I know about these law things. I can emotionally (情感上) accept this if the emotions are big (情感很大). Then I will not care (不管). Wri: It is not about caring or not. It is whether someone will write in to scold/curse/reproach us (骂我们) […] EP: The original setting of a hacker and thief was already a setting that presumes crime. We already knew he was going to break the law. Wri: But for a good cause. EP: But based on this logic, what we spoke about today doesn’t contradict with anything we’re doing. He is breaking the law. Wri: But if the audience saw the male lead breaking the law, they won’t love him. EP: My question is: will the audience know he is breaking the law? Dir: Yes I think it is obvious […] Breaking the law knowingly (知法犯法) is something that people just won’t buy […] Wri: If we don’t care/mind so much (太在乎) about this, if the audience scolds/curses/reproaches us (观众骂我们也不要管), is that okay? Because he is doing it for a good cause, not to harm others […] Dir: But the problem is he is a lawyer […] Wri: If he wasn’t a lawyer? Dir: Then it is excusable/forgivable (情有可原).

In a creative effort to circumvent that, the Executive Producer then suggested that the male lead could have split personality. He would imagine working with a secret hacker, but the programme would later reveal at the end of the series that the hacker was actually the character himself. Wri: If the male lead is of split personality, can audience accept (接受) it? No, right […] EP: If we can keep this secret to the last episode and reveal his split personality, we get scolded/cursed at (被骂) for only one episode.

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Even if half of the audience doesn’t accept it, it is still okay. But if we say he is of split personality at the start, then we won’t have ratings.

Despite proposing a creative solution to the problems, the producers raised further concerns. By this point, the producers had raised a wide collection of concerns based on the original premise of a lawyer male lead that engaged in hacking activities. These multiple shifts in discursive positioning suggest a dislocation of the source of worry or disapproval, the precise manner of which the producers imagined in a variety of ways. In other words, producers recognized their subjection to anxieties about audiences in general but articulated a wide range of – at times incompatible – reasons for and ways of worrying. Contrary to initial intentions to use audience claims to close down on the discussion, anticipations of viewer responses resulted in more intense debates. The unfolding of the discussion is revealing about their multiple intersecting concerns. Using himself as surrogate viewer, the Director’s comment about emotionally accepting the premise if the ‘emotions are big’ refers to the moralistic audience’s unacceptance as concern. Contradicting him, the Writer argued that the real issue was about potential complaints, hence pointing to the punishing structures of both MediaCorp and the authorities as the problem. In worrying about the audience not loving the character and pondering whether they could simply not ‘care/mind’ scolding from the audience, his point of anxiety then shifted to the affective relationship between audience and producer. In addition, the Executive Producer’s reluctance to make the male lead of split character explicitly articulated getting ‘scolded’ and not having ratings as two separate concerns. The most immediate observation is the variety of different concerns producers imagined with regards to audience responses. This is testament to ‘the audience’ embodying the multiple producer-audience relationships (including PSB, commercial, punitive, state ideology etc.) enabled by the illiberal media system that goes beyond, and in addition to, ratings. Despite uncertainty about audiences being a norm within production studies literature, the extent of how shifting and contradictory producers’ viewpoints were within this short exchange is striking. Apart from referring to different groups as viewers in the discussion, ranging from ‘the audience’ as a whole; to the ‘general/ordinary/common viewer’; to the Director and myself as individual viewers, the producers also raised several different ideas about how audiences could react. Most notably, the Writer changed his stances from line to line, contradicting himself along the way. Collectively,

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the group pointed out numerous potential responses. Within a few sentences, they suggested the possibilities of getting reproached/scolded by members of the audience; the audience not loving the male lead; the audience not caring that the male lead broke the law because it was for a good cause; the audience abandoning their moralistic judgements if ‘the emotions are big’ enough; wondering whether they could just not care about being reproached/ scolded; the audience not buying it; the audience not even noticing that the male lead was breaking the law; and not watching. The variety of responses raised here within this short exchange not only demonstrates how unsure producers were about audiences. The producers’ imagination of a huge range of possibilities in which audiences could react suggests that what we are dealing with are audience potentials and their excesses. I draw on Massumi’s theorization of affect as ‘the virtual co-presence of potentials’ (Massumi, 2015: 5) and ‘an excess […] that is experienced alongside every actual production of meaning in language or in any performance of a useful function’ (Massumi, 2015: 8) here. Approached affectively, imagined audiences serve as multiple and mutually exclusive potentials that coexist within events, with specific encounters always involving surplus or excesses. This has particular implications for how power works in the media of an illiberal context like Singapore where ‘the audience’ has to embody multiple intersecting relations, while constantly disrupted by unpredictable viewer complaints. What struck me the most was how producers imagined the majority of these potential responses to be negative ones. This is deeply implicated in the producers’ repeated articulation of worrying about being ‘scolded’. It is illuminating of the awkward position these producers were in when anticipating potential issues with their work. Producers faced difficulties in obtaining information about their viewers. MediaCorp’s management regularly withheld rating information and producers often had to request for the ratings of their own programmes through personal connections. This culture of secrecy made it incredibly difficult for producers to assess viewer preferences by comparing their own work to others, or even to know which parts of their shows had higher ratings. 4 So who exactly was watching what and in what numbers often remained a mystery to producers 4 This is exacerbated by the fact that each broadcaster engages its own system of viewer measurement. To counter these inconsistencies, the authorities created its own standardized audience measurement system called SG-TAM in 2016. However, the authorities still practice the same withholding of such data, which means production houses are still reliant on the broadcaster to partial viewer information.

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outside of management. This practice introduced uncertainty to the core of media production. Importantly, it also means that producers had to base a significant portion of their audience knowledge on viewer complaints, which serve as direct feedback to producers. These could be complaints filed with MediaCorp, with the authorities, or through online comments that are then captured and reported in mainstream media. Any complaint from the public could result in potential punishment for both the producers and the broadcaster, whether in terms of monetary fines from the authorities or internal disciplinary action. Both independent producers and MediaCorp’s internal censors have complained to me about being required to write reports for every single viewer complaint received to be submitted to the authorities. As one censor said to me exasperatedly, ‘it could be anyone!’. This political climate resulted in a work culture that foregrounds viewer complaints in everyday production situations. Under these circumstances, it is little wonder that producers overwhelmingly imagined potential viewer responses to be disapproving. These various potential negative viewer responses result from the multiple and intersecting relationships producers had with imagined audiences, as these shifted from bad ratings to moral complainants to removed viewers within a matter of sentences. Looking back at how the interaction unfolded, with the producers offering contradictory opinions throughout, we can see how the interaction partly shaped the flow and outcome of the discussion. As evidenced by the Writer’s anxiety towards viewers who may write in to complain about them, these complaints serve to perpetually displace, recompose and transform audience potentials. This points to how audience knowledge as potential is not just delimited within interactions but also articulated, modulated and transformed within interactions beyond individual producers’ personal experiences (Massumi, 2015: 120). So while the multiplicities of audience potentials policed producers practices, the kind of anxiety stemming from inter-subjective and relational practices of anticipating potential viewer responses goes beyond the more dialectical framework of predicting ratings to an anticipatory paranoia towards the multitudes of audience potentials, all of which could threaten to punish in different ways. The group dismissed the idea of split personality for the male lead. Appealing to Both Basic and Unaccepting Audiences The various potential negative viewer responses signal the many problems that come with shifting the burden of moral policing onto an imagined audience that already embodies commercial and ideological relationships

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with public service producers. To creatively circumvent the conundrum, the Executive Producer suggested an invented job title called ‘The Discloser’. For him, the invented job sheds the ideological and moral baggage of occupations such as lawyers, which then allows them to get away with portraying the male lead engaging in hacking activities. However, the rest of the team raised further concerns about whether the audience could accept the professional ethics of such an occupation. Wri: If you say his job is ‘Discloser’, the local audience (本地观众) will feel it’s a job of no substance (虚无的工作) […] It works in Japan, but I am not sure locally. What if he is a PR company? He protects your secrets, your image […] It’s easier to understand. Discloser, it feels like there is no such occupation.

By this point in the conversation, I realized how these producers were really caught between a rock and a hard place. In working with a commonly understood occupation such as lawyer, producers had to manage an audience imagined to be moralistic and unaccepting of behaviour outside of legal convention. In attempting to break out of these conventions by creating a new role, they imagined a local audience that found anything outside of the commonly known jobs difficult ‘to understand’. How does one navigate an audience reduced to the lowest common denominator yet always threatening to punish? Operating with the double-edged sword that is audiences, it is no wonder that the producers were anxious about the programme’s premise. To get around the problems of morality and the occupation’s lack of pre-established functions, the producers scaled back on the new occupation in the final script by getting rid of the title ‘Discloser’ and only including the character’s name on his business card. In the first episode, the programme explained the occupation in a conversation between the male (ML) and female (FL) lead characters. ML: I believe you can see that even though I own a public relations company in name, in reality, my job is to resolve any inconvenient and troublesome problems for my clients (我的工作是替客户解 决任何麻烦和棘手的问题). FL: You make it sound good, but in fact you just clean the poop and wipe the buttocks of rich people (替有钱人收拾大便、擦屁股的). ML: Actually, your job as a lawyer is not that different from mine. FL: Don’t compare me with those lawyers who are greedy for money. I will not bury my conscience (埋没良知) and fight for the guilty.

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ML: As a lawyer, you should view all in the same light (一视同仁). Before the judge decides on the verdict, everyone is innocent. You are too unprofessional, no wonder you lost your job.

Rather than using the title ‘Discloser’ for the male lead, the producers avoided potential problems by describing it as a public relations company. Using commonly known roles such as public relations and lawyers as comparisons, the script helped audiences to imagine what type of work the male lead did and eased them into the programme. Furthermore, the female lead verbalized potential concerns producers thought audiences may have about the male lead’s lack of ‘conscience’ or professional ethics. By accusing him of wiping the buttocks of rich people, the female lead provided the male lead with a chance for rebuttal, through which he stated that he viewed all in the same light and assumed innocence before verdict. Above all, the end result demonstrates the creative techniques required by producers in Singapore to overcome the many imagined problems and anxieties that come with drama writing in an illiberal context. Despite settling with ‘the Discloser’ as the male lead’s job title, the producers were still evidently uncomfortable with writing a lead character that broke the law. They repeatedly brought up the issue throughout the rest of the script writing meetings while reassuring themselves that they made the right creative decision. Dir: In our drama, the female lead is against it [referring to breaking the law]. But the male lead doesn’t judge it as right or wrong. He sees that there is love (爱) behind the acts. He is not conscienceless (丧尽天良). Wri: He may need some extraordinary measures (非常手段) but they don’t harm anyone […] But maybe at the end we can still have a case like that [where the male lead gets caught] to meet/satisfy/ answer (满足) audiences with a higher sense of morality (道德感), so that at least they feel he has to bear the consequences for his actions. We still need that, if not people will feel we are wrong to be above the law. But at least we show that his intentions are good, so that even if he did illegal things, we decrease the scolding/reprimanding voices (责骂的声音).

Articulations such as these were littered throughout the rest of the script discussion meetings. Having already decided on the programme premise by that point, I was initially confused as to their laborious and repeated

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authorial justification for it that went beyond using debate to flesh out and resolve concerns and tensions. Combined with the structural requirements of PSB in a monopoly free-to-air broadcaster, producers have to engage in the antagonistic practice of imagining audiences in various ways, whether as receivers of state propaganda, moral police, or viewers simply expecting to be entertained; while anticipating individual acts of departure from these imagined viewer groups in terms of ‘scolding voices’ or complaints. The anxieties attached to this process can be affectively exhausting. In a sense, in repeatedly formulating and refining an argument of rationalization they could possibly use later as a defence in the case of public complaints, the producers also engaged in the affective practice of allaying their own anxieties. On hindsight, I think what this practice produces also extends beyond the final product or viewer reactions to it. By being reference points for each other to discuss potential problems, the stress producers place on articulating justifications to each other within these production scenarios also continues to perpetuate audience potentialities such as ‘scolding/ reprimanding voices’ as real possibilities that have to be taken perhaps more seriously than they should be as a disciplining force.

Anticipating the Passive Implications of Portraying Crime If the disapproving moralistic viewer emerges as a key figure in the everyday work of drama producers in Singapore, another character comes into play when portraying crime – the potential law breaker. Scholarship on television drama argue that quality crime dramas in the UK and US are characterized by their ‘documentary’ impulses and socialrealist aesthetics to portraying crime (Turnbull 2014). In fact, this pursuit of accurate and detailed representations of cybercrime was, according to the Executive Producer, the main reason why he asked me to consult the cyber forensics specialists. However, for producers in an illiberal democracy like Singapore, the figure of the potential law breaker is always lurking in the background. A clause in the programme code issued by the IMDA for free-to-air television in Singapore dedicated to the portrayal of crime pre-empted this concern: In programmes dealing with criminal activities, whether in fiction or a documentary, there may be conflict between the demands of realism and the risk of unintentionally assisting the criminally inclined. Careful

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thought should be given and, where appropriate, advice taken from the police, before information is given about law-breaking or methods/techniques countering law enforcement or other security measures (Media Development Authority 2013a: 7–8).

In essence, the producers are caught in the contradictions between generic requirements and their perceived media responsibility to upkeep the myth of technology being complicated and inaccessible so as to discourage crime. As an example, one of the first cases written into the plot of the drama involved a character stealing the fingerprints of another character in order to enter into a building. During our first meetings with the two cyber forensics specialists, the Writer asked a series of detailed questions regarding the technicalities of such a manoeuvre. To our surprise, both specialists explained that given the present technological advances of commercial fingerprint scanners, simply placing a paper printout of the fingerprint in front of the scanner would do the trick. When I explained this detail to the production team in a later meeting,5 one of the Assistant Directors (AD) present flagged it up as a potential issue. ‘You all raise the theft, crime rate in Singapore’, she said, ‘TV is a powerful tool, you know?’ Since that was the first time I had heard of this line of argument, I misunderstood her as expressing opposition to the idea of fingerprint theft and remarked ‘But that’s how the movies have always done it’. Explaining to me patiently, she then clarified ‘but they always do it with a latex, a skin layer […] it’s not that easy’. To get around the problem in the final programme, the production portrayed the scene as such: The character scans the fingerprints off the cups using his modified spectacles, which provides a live feed to the male lead’s gadget. The gadget then converts the live feed to a black and white fingerprint scan using special software. In other words, the producers used several technical tools – modified spectacles, receiving gadget and conversion software – to create a gap between the characters and audiences, and maintain the impression that such illegal activities were difficult to achieve. What was striking to me in this incident was the manner in which the Assistant Director raised the issue, which sounded a great deal like a mimicking of the state’s line of argument. Rather than referring to IMDA’s guideline as a restriction on them to depict the cases the way they wanted, the Assistant Director discussed it as producers’ responsibility not to ‘raise the theft, crime rate in Singapore’. Underlying this is the simplistic and didactic idea 5 Those in discussion included one of the writers, one of the directors, two Assistant Directors and myself.

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that media portrayals promoted crime. This rang alarm bells in my head, particularly since it was coming from the Assistant Director who was not much older than I was and similarly exposed to both Hollywood’s and Hong Kong’s criminal dramas where such portrayals were commonplace. Surely, Singaporean producers did not buy into that idea. As I followed the creative team through the rest of pre-production phases, I realized that statements such as these voicing concerns regarding the representation of criminal activities in the programme were not uncommon at all. One particular conversation in a later meeting was particularly memorable. We were at a later phase of the scripting by this point. The first drafts of the script had already been written and so the Executive Producer organized a production meeting with the Writer, a different Director (Dir B) and myself to discuss for detailed corrections. At one point during the meeting that extended into the late evening, the producers considered how to visually portray the suicide of a female character in the series. Since they needed the character to survive the suicide attempt, the Director suggested that he could portray her overdosing on medication. EP: That is like, nothing much to watch on screen. Wri: But if she jumps off the building, she will die for sure. Dir B: Find a sexy starlet, shut the window, turn on the gas, and take a shower. EP: No, cannot. These days, scenes like shutting the window and turning on the gas, they will cut it. Wri: You cannot teach people how to commit suicide (教人自杀) […] EP: How about if she slits her wrist, her hand is submerged in the hot water tub. So the shot has red coloured water flowing down, as we reveal her hand in the water and her pale face […] Wri: This way, will you be teaching people how to commit suicide? EP: Yeah, this way we teach people how to commit suicide too […] How about if when we cut to it, the bathtub is already red. Wri: Yes, but the water is warm so that the blood doesn’t clot. You are teaching people how to commit suicide […] Dir B: What about if the water is already red the moment we cut to it? Wri: If there are too many visuals (画面太过多), they will still request for it not to be too bloody (血腥).

When I f irst witnessed this exchange at the scene, I was struck by the repeated framing of the problem as not ‘teaching people how to commit suicide’. Like the Assistant Director from before, this seemed to suggest that

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producers assumed a pedagogical relationship between them and audiences. However, looking back at the materials, I realized that both the Executive Producer’s and the Writer’s curious citations of ‘teaching’ referred to the compliance department at MediaCorp, as evidenced by the phrases ‘These days […] they will cut it’ and ‘they will still request for it not to be too bloody’. Known colloquially as MediaCorp’s internal censorship department, the compliance team vetted every programme before broadcast and regularly suggested cuts and edits. In this sense, rather than articulations of what they should not be doing (‘teaching’ suicide), these references were instances of the producers mimicking common accusations made against them in the past by the compliance team. Even though producers, and in particular independent producers, may imagine the ‘internal censors’ as a source of creative interference, the compliance team often bears the brunt from MediaCorp’s management and the IMDA when it comes to complaints. The head of the compliance team in MediaCorp acknowledged these concerns in a later interview. When I asked him how he copes in instances of complaints, he explained that his off icial replies always emphasize that their portrayals are ‘not instructional’, even though ‘it triggers stuff sometimes’ despite their best efforts at minimizing depictions. Underlying both producers’ and the compliance team’s concerns about potentially increasing the crime rate or teaching techniques of suicide are debates regarding the line between depiction and pedagogy. In this sense, their avoidance of ‘instructional’ depictions, whereby the steps of suicide are shown, is a tactic at distancing their work from being interpreted as ‘teaching’. However, the compliance team’s mentions of how depictions may ‘trigger’ people is telling, as it expands their concerns from the media portrayal to also encompass potential viewer reactions. While the standard line that the head of the compliance team engaged during my interview was that they always emphasize compliance with the content guidelines, a detailed reading of the guidelines reveal that it does not offer too much protection. The idea that television programmes have an effect on audiences is implicit in IMDA’s programme code, which requires that every television production: […] takes into consideration the greater influence of local productions, as viewers can more easily identify with the lifestyles and values portrayed in them […] The implications, influences, lasting impressions and cumulative impact of such programmes must also be considered (Media Development Authority 2013a: 1).

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So while the authorities hint at audience identification with local programmes as the cause, the code uses terms such as ‘influences, ‘impressions’ and ‘cumulative impact’, which are notoriously vague. What constitutes ‘influence’, for whom and how? Here, the code not only employed the word ‘influence’ twice, but also used the passive voice. This sets up a vague injunction that enshrines uncertainty with exnomination. Such ambiguous terms place producers in a conundrum, since ‘greater influence’ is highly subjective and interpretable, while its ‘cumulative impact’ is even more difficult to assess. In effect, the state outsources the responsibility of policing social deviance to media producers through the code. The inflections of media effects theories underlying the Code allows almost anything to be attributed to media portrayals in Singapore, which leaves both MediaCorp and producers open to accusations. In practice, this places Singaporean media workers in a passive and reactive position. As the head of the compliance team informed me helplessly regarding the IMDA, ‘as far as I know, they are complaints-driven […] Even one complaint, even one feedback, they will write to us’. This need to anticipate socially deviant behaviour in viewers, which manifests in most cases as complaints, points to the awkward position producers are in when anticipating potential issues with their work. On the one hand, the authorities’ programme code requires all productions to take into consideration the ‘implications, influences, lasting impressions and cumulative impact’ (Media Development Authority, 2013a: 1) of their programmes, thereby implicitly asking producers to predict the effect their programmes will have on audiences. On the other hand, producers face difficulties in obtaining even basic information about their viewers. MediaCorp’s culture of secrecy with regards to viewer information makes it incredibly difficult for producers to assess viewer preferences and inclinations, and introduces uncertainty to the core of media production. This raises questions about how the inherent ambiguity of the programme code affects production practices. For a state-linked media industry like Singapore’s, the broad underlying idea of public service broadcasting as a didactic means is not unique, the most immediate reminder of which is John Reith’s values for the BBC to ‘inform, educate, entertain’ (Chisholm 2006; BBC News 18 November 1999; Graham 2009; Broadcast Now 16 December 2002). However, what is striking here is that while the programme was meant to educate viewers about cybercrime, producers mostly focused on what not to teach in practice. As evidenced by the producers’ references to media responsibility through phrases like ‘you cannot teach people to commit suicide’ and ‘you all raise the crime rate in Singapore’, this difficulty manifests as a re-articulation of an essentially reactive practice of anticipating complaints

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as media responsibility. Even though this may seem merely like a rhetorical practice, my initial confusion towards this as an outsider researcher and intern can be suggestive of the learning experience of a young media worker entering the production industry. In this sense, this is witness to illiberal PSB’s departure from traditional educational or informative aims and the ongoing practice of re-imagining public service broadcasting values as careful avoidance of triggers. How does one make television without appealing to the affective responses of audiences? As a case in point, the scene of the woman committing suicide ended up like the following: [Segment one: eight seconds] Television programme reports on woman’s prostitution scandal, intercut with pictures of the woman in a bikini. [Segment two: ten seconds] Woman drinks, cries, and drops her wine glass. [Segment three: one second] Close up shot of water running from a tap. It is unclear whether it was a bathtub or sink tap. [Segment four: eleven seconds] Quick intercuts between close up shots of the woman crying in front of the mirror, and pictures of her in a bikini. The woman appears to be standing in front of the sink mirror, and not in the bathtub. [Segment five: four seconds] The shot cross-fades to a black and white shot of the woman lying unconscious in a bathtub full of water. There appears to be some amounts of dark coloured liquid floating in the tub. We see half of the woman’s wrist, which appears to be cut (horizontally). The cut wrist lies on top of her body, above the water. There is a limited amount of blood where the cut is. Slow fade to black.

The woman did not die from the suicide. Producers used several techniques to cleverly avoid ‘teaching people how to commit suicide’ and making it ‘too bloody’. First, the scene did not show the actual action of cutting the wrist. Second, segment five, which was the only shot that portrayed the suicide, lasted only four seconds out of the thirty seconds scene. Third, segments one to four showed no sign of the process of the suicide. This means the scene only showed four seconds worth of the aftermath of the suicide, and nothing of the process. Fourth, the woman’s wrist appeared above the water in segment five. By not submerging her wrist in the hot water, which prevents the blood from clotting as detailed by the Executive Producer and Writer, they did not ‘teach people how to commit suicide’. The woman’s wrist was also slit from side to side instead of from the wrist to the elbow, which is the ineffective way of committing the act. Fifth, segment

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five, the only segment where blood was present, was shown in black and white, while segments one to four were in colour. This presumably dulled the effect of it being ‘too bloody’. Combining the moral, disapproving audiences in the previous section and the easily corruptible and influenced viewers here, producers have to engage in multiple layers of prediction and similarly bear multiple layers of consequences. Not only are they tasked to predict audience reactions; they have to also anticipate MediaCorp commissioners and IMDA officials’ predictions of audience reactions. There are also at least two broad ways in which producers have to consider audiences in their work. Further to anticipating the active (potential) responses of different imagined audiences, producers also have to consider the passive implications, articulated in abstract terms and somehow measured cumulatively. These active responses and passive implications also intersect with producers’ multiple subject positions, as public service providers, entertainment producers, representatives of the state, citizens and audiences themselves. Demands on producers to manage the complex corresponding relationships with imagined audiences therefore constitutes the antagonism that lies at the core of television making in Singapore. In a sense, this chapter examined the uncertainties central to television representation practices and how they manifested in producers’ discussions of the drama series.

Audiences as Affective Superaddressee Despite being experienced in making prime time Mandarin dramas and many years of working together, the producers in this chapter argued their way through a range of anxieties related to perceived restrictions working under MediaCorp and IMDA, and anticipated criticisms from audiences. Contrary to popular imagination of state repression in authoritarian contexts, it was ideas about audiences rather than the authorities that engendered the most anxieties in producers. This is, of course, not a novel observation. Ganti’s (2012) study of Bollywood producers, for instance, noted how they perceived audiences as limiting the types of themes, plots and characterizations that they could represent. Coming from the media industry of an illiberal capitalist democracy, however, my informants depart from the Indian audience imagined by Ganti’s producers to be restrictive but largely monolithic. Having examined the production practices of both the informational variety and drama genres of television so far, I would like to take some time to reflect on the imagined audience constructed in Singapore.

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As the de facto national broadcaster, MediaCorp’s institutional imagination of audiences bears a complicated relationship with the state’s desire to make potentially unwieldly populations knowable and controllable. Struggles over imagined audiences are therefore emblematic of the larger tensions inherent to carving out the contours of national belonging in Singapore. As Chapter One and Two discussed, state myths of multiculturalism based on the division of Singaporeans into the colonially inherited Chinese-MalayIndian-Others (CMIO) categories have resulted in clear segmentation of the media industries and the racialization of audiences along ethno-linguistic lines. This is complicated by the class-based ‘cosmopolitan-heartlander’ binary that the state imagines upon the populace. The state’s project to formulate a national identity based on English (representing access to the global economy and racial equality) and mother tongues (representing access to ‘roots’) is fraught with difficulties since the ethnic identities of Singaporeans will always serve as the limit to and disrupt any formulation of a national identity. In line with the nation’s obsession with formulating a collective understanding of ‘culture’, the illiberal state’s limitations on media pluralism also mean these antagonisms are often sutured in favour of the articulation of a shared value system. The state’s PSB instructive of promoting a national shared culture combined with the financial unsustainability of carving smaller niche markets compel producers to imagine their viewers using the inherently problematic category: ‘mass’ audience. The institutional constitution of audiences alone involves imagining viewers in multiple antagonistic ways; as the target of state propaganda (PSB remit), ratings, consumers, fans and participants, audience-as-commodities for advertisers, as ethnic and class categories. Subsuming these multiple institution-audience relationships under the bracket term ‘mass audience’ result in all sorts of contradictions. The articulation of audiences as ‘mass’ is underscored by the Singaporean state’s brand of accountability (Rodan and Hughes, 2014) that often appeal to some version of wider society, represented as largely conservative, as justification for political decisions. This type of argument works as ideological sleight of hand that shifts the source of intolerance for pluralism in opinion from the state to ‘the people’, thereby transferring the burden of indicating any breach of media conduct to audiences, which has resulted in a hyperawareness towards viewer complaints in the industry. With global trends since the 2010s towards anti-fandom and online citizen policing, the rise of social media also marked audiences’ entrance into the fight for Singapore’s hegemonic national culture. Any complaint from the public, filed officially or informally via online comments, trigger investigations and could

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result in potential punishment for both the producers and the broadcaster, whether in terms of fines from the authorities or internal disciplinary action. Departing from self-censorship in line with state directives, this political climate where potentially anyone could get producers into trouble resulted in a work culture where anticipatory paranoia about viewer complaints feature heavily in everyday production. Importantly, MediaCorp’s reluctance to share exact figures of audience ratings also means that producers based a significant portion of their audience knowledge on viewer complaints, which serve as rare direct feedback to producers. This facilitates competing accounts of audiences on different occasions, further disrupting the notion of a shared national culture and setting the stage for ‘the audience’ to serve as a continuously mutating problem for producers. Audiences come to crowd the scenes of drama production in two major ways. As PSB producers working in an illiberal context, my informants were initially concerned with the normative boundaries of what they could not portray in a lead character. Their discursive shift to invoking audiences as authorial justification, however, opened up intense debates instead of closing down the argument since partial audience information combined with the protean character of ‘audiences’ allowed producers to imagine through the notion a wide variety of potential active responses to their creative decisions. Their worries included what they thought they could not do, what audiences might feel, do, or not feel and accept. These anxieties were in turn directed to the audience as a whole, groups of audiences, and in some instances, individual viewers. In other words, they imagined and talked about audiences and their manners of disapproval in a variety of ways that were contradictory at times. This imagination of viewers’ active responses is then further temporally dislocated by them having to simultaneously anticipate and predict the passive, and future, implications of their work on audience members. These anxieties about audiences are embedded more broadly within the various elements of illiberalism. As elaborated in Chapters One and Two, the Singaporean state’s framing of its dominant imaginary compels its media to elide and suture social differences in favour of a conjured audience essentially emptied of any real qualities. This conjured audience, however, runs in tension to how it is experienced by producers on a daily basis. A result of the structural demands and processual empowerments of Singapore’s brand of illiberalism, the shifting of moral policing to audiences and of anticipating social deviance to producers results in an experience of audiences characterized by unpredictability, unknowability and always potentially punishing. Combined with the structural requirements of PSB

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in a monopoly free-to-air broadcaster, producers have to engage in the antagonistic practice of imagining audiences as ‘mass’ (by suturing differences) while anticipating and avoiding individual acts of departure from the mass in terms of complaints. The incoherence between how audiences are conjured and experienced present the key tension in the book, essentially rendering audiences as unaddressable. The tensions and antagonisms inherent in how producers imagine audiences here differ from conventional accounts of producer-audience relations based on liberal media models, whether envisioned in more functionalist terms (Smythe, 1977; Bolin, 2009); as ‘viewers like us’ (Dornfled 1998; Caldwell 2008) or entirely different (Ganti, 2012); or simply as producers’ social experiences (Ross, 2014; Powdermaker, 1951; Gitlin, 1988; Zafirau, 2009). Moving forward, I propose conceptualizing audiences as what I would like to call ‘affective superaddressee’ as a way of thinking about producer-audience relations in illiberal contexts. Let me break it down. Restrictions on media diversity, which requires producers to imagine audiences as ‘mass’, combined with the multiple roles (including PSB, commercial) and processes (state funding, state empowered punishment through viewer complaints) mediating the producer-audience relationship, means the imagined audience has to embody these various intersecting and contradictory subject positions. As the case study illustrated, this goes beyond the prediction of ‘what audiences want’ in terms of ratings. ‘The audience’ also carried the pedagogical burdens of upholding morality and ‘reprimanding’ the media while being easily influenced. In this sense, audiences function in ways that go beyond simply being the addressee, towards what Bakhtin called a ‘superaddressee’, who is someone ‘whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed, either in some metaphysical distance or in distant historical time’ (Bakhtin, 1986: 126). Bakhtin’s concept of ‘superaddressee’ allows for the encompassing of often-contradictory imaginations of audiences that occur within production situations. Audiences as ‘superaddressee’ work affectively on two levels – first, by embodying the multiple and mutually exclusive potentials that coexist within audience encounters, modulating interactive possibilities (Massumi, 2002). As elaborated in the last section, the protean character of ‘audiences’ led producers to imagine through the notion a variety of potential conditions. Through this anticipatory paranoia, the potentials of ‘the audience’ were not just delimited but also articulated within interactions, thereby undergoing perpetual transformation. Simply put, this concept considers audience power as residing, in large parts, in the excesses of any audience encounter – the potential responses that could have but did not occur, while

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always threatening to be a possibility – that feed back into producer-audience relations. This does not mean complete chaos, however. On the second level, despite always exceeding attempts to control and organize it, audiences as ‘affective superaddressee’ evokes certain kinds of affective responses from producers. Made possible by the secrecy around audience knowledge and the ease with which viewers are empowered to punish them through complaints, producers made sense of and coped with the anticipatory paranoia of managing audience potentiality affectively. Strikingly, the majority of these potential responses were anticipated to be negative ones. In particular, the producers’ repeated mentions of getting scolded by viewers, in the form of written complaints or otherwise, points to the affective impact that had on them. By the end of the conversation, everyone involved were exhausted and decided to reluctantly accept the premise in which the male lead broke the law knowingly, while being ambiguous about the male lead’s occupation. However, throughout the rest of the writing process, the producers involved repeatedly articulated the audiences’ reprimanding voices as their anxiety. If the superaddressee is not a particular person, but is imagined to understand any utterance in ‘just the right way’, in the case of Singapore, the presumed ‘right way’ of understanding any utterance is one of disapproval. This resembles Williams’ (1977) ‘structures of feeling’ or Anderson’s (2012) ‘affective condition’ that through ‘intensifications and resonances […] condition without determining how things can be attuned to and come to be present and felt’ (Anderson, 2016: 748). The key structure of feeling in this case is not an anticipation of ‘what audience wants’ but paranoia about ‘what they could potentially do to negate or disapprove’. Applied to this case, the ‘affective superaddressee’ manifests as an allencompassing and unaddressable audience, imagined in various instances as infantile, conservative or judging, empowered to punish, yet never predictable. Under these circumstances, audiences as ‘affective superaddressee’ act as effective tools of enforcing self-policing in producers because of its ambiguity and opaqueness that make its referents at once so diverse but often overlapping and its potential consequences so prolix. In imagining audiences in many different ways but always presupposing their criticisms, producers are not dealing with an actual viewer or category of viewers, but possibly an abstraction of the viewer as the instrument of censure, displeasure and complaint – one that engenders anxieties in multiple ways and works effectively to evoke self-policing among producers, as empowered by both the media system and subjects’ own performative practices.

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Conceptualizing audiences as ‘affective superaddressee’ that engenders self-policing during the production process is illuminating of the consequences of Singapore’s illiberal media system in everyday media production. This goes beyond the binary of remit versus profit to capture the antagonisms of a media system that requires producers to culturally suture society’s dislocations. The producers’ anxieties about audiences were further underlined by the broadcaster’s crucial intransparency with regards to basic rating information, which makes it even harder to anticipate audience potentials. The producers’ attribution of various – sometimes contradictory – characteristics to ‘the audience’ not only suggests that it has no clear referent, but also further adds to the ambiguity of the notion. ‘The audience’ as a reference therefore serves as a continuously mutating and malleable problem for producers. The obscurity of what specifically the producers might be doing wrong makes the feared superaddressee more effective as a means of engendering self-policing. Through proposing the concept of audiences as ‘affective superaddressee’, I hope to show how insights from affect theory can help capture the nuances and fluidity in manifestations of audience power beyond ratings. Based on event-logic, the concept of ‘affective superaddressee’ invites investigation into audience-producer relations as sites of contestation and re-articulation, to consider how the multiplicity and ambivalences of illiberalism’s ideological, discursive and processual dimensions intersect to affect producer-audience relations in specific contexts and encounters. In this sense, conceptualizing audiences as ‘affective superaddressee’ helps illuminate the relational ways in which power works through the structuration of the field of possibilities (in this case by exponentially expanding and mutating it), modulating potential interactions to control the process of emergence itself. This extends Ang’s (1991) broad argument that the actual practices of audiences will always exceed and disrupt institutional constructions of audiences by offering an illustration of how this precariousness can turn the television audience into a disciplinary tool for the media. In this sense, audiences as affective superaddressee raises broader questions about how such struggles may relate to authoritarian resilience or further perpetuate illiberalism. Treated as a communicative and interactive negotiation of normativity in Singaporean television making, the repeated appeal to different forms of audiences in their formulation of what may be acceptable is significant. If governmentality involves subjects’ shaping of the self or actions based on normative ideas, the uncertainties inherent in the morphing nature of imagined audiences as sources of normativity has implications for how power works in television production. So what happens when the formation

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of norms involve discussions that surround shifting and uncertain ideas about audiences? Davies discussed how Deleuzian control societies move beyond normative rationalities by ‘blur[ing] the distinction between “right” and “wrong” conduct’ (2015: 47). Taken to its logical conclusion, the way in which power works through audiences then moves beyond how power works in Foucauldian disciplinary societies (in which behaviour is moulded according to normative standards) to resemble Deleuze’s control societies where producers’ actions are modulated according to relational, situational and constantly shifting standards. Ideas about ‘audiences’ are able to control producers’ practices precisely because they are uncertain, ambiguous and therefore mutable and transformable. Such a decentralized source of control is effective because it is difficult to locate and constantly changing, which has serious implications for producers’ subjectivities and practices. This could go some way to explain why there is, strikingly, so much contestations regarding the creative writing norms among these producers who presumably should share similar ideas about their relationships with audiences. At the same time, the multiplicity of tendencies present in every audience encounter also entails the possibility of different outcomes emerging. Having worked on Chinese-language television for many years, it is little surprise that the well-oiled practices of the producers in Chapters Two and Three tended to perpetuate authoritarian resilience. What might happen when someone unfamiliar with the industry’s production norms enters the scene? In the next chapter, I follow the journey of a young and ambitious director as he attempts to disrupt the status quo in Chinese-language television in Singapore.

4

Producing Art, Producing Difference Abstract If the old-timers of media production in Singapore had developed a set of established work practices that serve the status quo, what are the potentials for newcomers to change that? Chapter Four follows the journey of a new director determined to challenge prevailing practices that uphold the status quo in mass media production. It demonstrates both the reliability and the incompleteness of ideological reproduction by detailing how initial contestations that risked to tear the fabric of the dominant social order eventually ended up reinforcing categorical boundaries. Focusing on the affective ideational practices of producers when making a state-sponsored art drama, I argue that what ultimately enabled the dominant social imaginary to prevail were myths of cultural and linguistic difference in society. Keywords: Ideological reproduction; Status quo; Affective ideational practices; Myths of multiculturalism; Affective myth; Chinese audience

Ivan1 was one of the most passionate directors I had ever met. Having been highly recommended by two informants on separate occasions, his name came to my mind when my Executive Producer asked me if I knew any new directors for a potential project for MediaCorp’s online platform. The project, Loving Art, was a government funded short-form drama series about the arts in Singapore. Even though Ivan mostly directed English-language dramas, he decided to join the team on his first Chinese-language production because the theme, arts in Singapore, was something he felt strongly about. As we got to know each other better through the pre-production process, I increasingly marvelled at his grand ambitions to model his work after global productions like Game of Thrones, his vision to ‘lead the audience’, and his genuine desire to change the media landscape in Singapore. This 1

I use pseudonyms for all my informants in the book.

Fong, Siao Yuong, Performing Fear in Television Production: Practices of an Illiberal Democracy, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463724579_ch04

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was not an easy feat for someone working in an industry plagued by inertia and perpetually low budgets. Throughout the production process, Ivan repeatedly expressed his wish to challenge the status quo in Singapore through his work. However, that weighed heavily on his mind every time he asked me to join him for smoke breaks after clashing with colleagues. Different working styles and his entry into the team as a first-time director of Chinese-language productions caused frictions. I suspect that was why I became a bit of a confidant for him during the production period as somewhat of an ‘outsider’ myself. During those three odd months, I regularly sat and listened to Ivan complain about the difficulties of changing things while chain smoking at the office rooftops and corridors. When the Executive Producer hired Ivan, he had told me that he hoped engaging a new director would help the team to create something different from what audiences were used to. Since Loving Art was commissioned by the Singapore National Arts Council (NAC)2 for broadcast on MediaCorp’s online platform,3 this seemed plausible particularly given the new platform for which the programme was made. Given the well-oiled practices that I observed in the production processes of the game shows and dramas in reproducing the social order, the immediate question I had was whether, and how, the introduction of an ‘outsider’ would be able to change things. Will Ivan manage to challenge the status quo? And what is the ideal social order represented when producers were given the opportunity to reimagine one through the abstract medium of art? How might the change in production cultures and platform facilitate, or not, a change in imagined audiences? This chapter demonstrates both the reliability and the incompleteness of ideological reproduction by detailing how producers’ practices when creating a state-sponsored art drama involved contestations surrounding potentials for generating tears in the dominant social order. In particular, I detail how their affective meaning-making practices produced difference, which led to the eventual reinforcing of the existing social order despite the struggles. The chapter reflects on the myths that enabled the perpetuation of the status quo and raises the question of how to rethink fear and authoritarian resilience to account for the non-linear dynamics of contested interactive practices. 2 The NAC is a subsidiary under the IMDA. 3 Xinmsn was launched by MediaCorp and Microsoft as a joint venture in 2010. The web portal provided news and entertainment information, streamed MediaCorp programmes after television broadcasts, and also uploaded original programmes such as Loving Art. It closed on 1 April 2015 and MediaCorp shifted its video content to toggle.sg, which was later renamed MeWatch.

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To briefly set the stage, the series consisted of five different stories split into ten episodes of ten minutes each. The Executive Producer proposed in his concept paper submitted to MediaCorp that each story would link a relationship (be it parent-child or lovers) to an art form. While actors dramatized the episodes, the series featured real artists’ works that were created for the episodes. In other words, professional artists created the artworks but actors played the artists in the drama. To connect all five stories, the Executive Producer designed the character of the ‘mystery man’4 who ‘walks into the life [sic] of various people & [sic] resolves their relationship issues with the power of art’. In the following sections, I examine how Ivan and others tried to challenge the status quo in their design of the artworks, and the writing of storylines and characters.

Debating Graffiti, Producing Difference With the programme’s explicit emphasis on the arts in Singapore, the immediate question raised is then what is considered the ‘arts’5 in Singapore, and conversely, what needed to be denied when representing the arts in a television programme. One particular artwork proved particularly controversial. The episode featured graffiti as its artform, which raised alarm bells for everyone involved in the first instance. I examine the debates around the design of the graffiti artwork during the production process in this section. The producers were especially sensitive about how graffiti was portrayed in the episode because of the artform’s particular history and persecution under the Vandalism Act in Singapore. When enacted in 1966, the Vandalism Act was the first legislative instrument authorized by the then young nation (at one-year of independence) to prescribe mandatory corporal punishment. Through her analysis of the events of 1966, the sub-text of the parliamentary debates on the Act and its early prosecutions, legal scholar Jothie Rajah 4 The Executive Producer commented to me that when he wrote the concept paper, he had not thought each story through. The creative team found it difficult to convert the idea of the ‘mystery man’ into a character of the show and at one point contemplated scrapping the idea altogether. They did not do so in the end because the ‘mystery man’ played a crucial role in the concept paper they had submitted to MediaCorp. 5 The art forms depicted in the series were graff iti or street art, percussion, rock music, photography, and installation art. The Executive Producer selected these and wrote them into the proposal in a hurry to send to MediaCorp. When the Director asked to change one of the selections to hip hop music later on, the Executive Producer rejected that request based on the selections being already approved by MediaCorp.

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(2012) argued that the Act was not about vandalism but was rather used as a tool by the state to ‘demarcate certain expressions of opposition politics as criminal and anti-national – thus consolidating the state’s power over the space of “nation”, in both material and discursive terms’ (Rajah 2012: 65). Kicked out of mainstream political and media spaces, the dominant opposition politicians and their followers turned to the streets to communicate their dissent in the early 1960s. In this context, Rajah argued that the Vandalism Act’s significant shift from the then-existing punishment for comparable conduct, which was a fine of $50, to the violent mandatory caning upon conviction and up to three years of prison, was designed as a form of deterrence towards opposition political expression. Rajah further illustrated how later uses of the Act expanded beyond repressing political expression to become ‘a vehicle for state pedagogy, such that the “citizen” is instructed on how to constitute individual identity in terms of “good” citizenship, virtuous conduct and “Asian values”’ (2012: 65) as part of the national defence against the vulnerability of Singapore. She argued that this exercise of the state’s power to command discourse resulted in an infantilization of the citizenry (2012: 91) and the emptying of the adversarial system of its potential to produce counter-narratives (2012: 113). Up till this day, the government continues to arrest people, including graffiti artists, using the Vandalism Act, thereby reproducing social order in Singapore to be understood through the lens of fear and a vulnerable Singapore under threat. Under such circumstances and the plethora of cases in which the Singaporean authorities have criminalized graffiti works, it was no wonder producers were worried. I was tasked with contacting and coordinating with the artists involved in the programme and noticed several tactics that the producers used to cope with the perceived risks of the graffiti portrayal. Before the selection of artists started, the Executive Producer asked me to send a list of shortlisted artists to the National Arts Council (NAC) ‘to see if there’s anyone they will like us not to use’. I sent the list to MediaCorp, which coordinated with the NAC. One week later, the commissioning officer from MediaCorp replied. Please go ahead with the artists. NAC has given the green light. However, do be careful on the Graffiti portion. Below is NAC’s comments/advise [sic]: ‘As mentioned, “graffiti” in the Singapore context is unrelated to the Street Art / Graffiti that exists elsewhere. For your own reference, the distinction between graffiti and vandalism is not as distinct. Whether graffiti or vandalism, permission of the property owner is not sought. Both inevitably deface or alter the object. Vandalism suggests pure destruction

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of property as a sole intent. Graffiti’s primary intent and method is of individual expression, stretching into public / social commentary […] Will leave decision to you – just need to contextualise k6 [sic]? Thanks’.

The Executive Producer’s act of sending a list of artists to NAC for permission was an attempt at obtaining preapproval of the artists chosen. However, the issue came up again in an early script meeting, in which I took part along with Ivan, the Director (Dir), one of the male Writers (Wri), and the Executive Producer (EP). Dir: This story is potentially the most sensitive one. Because graffiti is not really art, or recognized as an art, it might be vandalism things like that. If the programme go [sic] out, if MDA might think we are encouraging certain things, things like that, so it’s a tough one […] EP: We already sent them the story and we asked them to comment, and they have some feedback about graffiti and vandalism. Dir: Because to really nail the heart, we have to go beyond […] We must break the perspective. Is this vandalism or is this art? […] EP: Wait, this has an answer. With permission, it’s art. Without permission, it is vandalism, I think that is the simplest. Wri: So we need to clarify that clearly in the script (交代清楚).7

The producers and the NAC official touched on several different matters here. In his hopes of pre-empting any problems ahead, the Executive Producer secured approval for the artist. However, as the NAC official pointed out, what was more tricky was the definition of graffiti and how it differed from vandalism. The fluid definition of graffiti was also a source of anxiety for the producers. As Ivan stated that ‘the heart’ of the matter was regarding whether graffiti was vandalism or art, he clearly indicated his desire to ‘break the perspective’. In wanting to play with the perceived boundaries between art and vandalism, Ivan was challenging the power long held by the state to define what constituted vandalism. The Executive Producer immediately stopped him in his tracks by drawing the boundaries using ‘permission’. In defining graffiti art in the programme as work done with ‘permission’ because ‘that is the simplest’, the Executive Producer contradicted the email 6 ‘k’ here refers to ‘okay’. 7 In this quote, the Director and Executive Producer spoke predominantly in English, while the Writer spoke in Mandarin.

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from the NAC, which clearly stated that ‘whether graffiti or vandalism, permission of the property owner is not sought’. The NAC’s more open determining of the boundaries through the artist’s ‘intent’ still left too much room for subjective interpretations of what constituted ‘individual expression’ or ‘public/social commentary’. In ensuring that the graffiti was drawn with permission, its definition shifted from the public realm of ‘commentary’ and ‘expression’ to the private realm of ‘commissioned artwork’. The Director’s idea of ‘break[ing] the perspective’ was quickly dismissed by the group, suggesting a collective impulse to define and divide content into two clear categories – the permissible and impermissible – and to ignore the nuances in between as a way of coping with the uncertainties. Notably, the Vandalism Act’s usage in Singapore expanded upon the parameters of the offense beyond visible markings on surfaces to the meaning and content of the markings (Rajah 2012: 80), which was then used by the state as a pedagogical tool to define what constituted a good Singaporean subject. This clearly reflected in Ivan’s worries that ‘MDA might think we are encouraging certain things’, a comment I heard very often amongst PSB producers during my fieldwork. Underlying the comment is the implication that ideological compliance with the government (or the ruling party) was necessary for the constitution of a good Singaporean subject and the protection of the nation (2012: 79); and the producers were obliged to know what to represent and what not to ‘encourage’. Seen in this way, the producers had an immense task as this introduced a perpetual element of interpretation into every piece of graffiti, of which the power to decide whether the graffiti reflected good citizenship was always to an extent outside of the hands of the creators. In this light, despite the producers’ pre-emptive tactics to reduce the risks of the graffiti artwork being interpreted as vandalism, they still faced problems when designing the graffiti itself. Creating the ‘Positive’ Graffiti We engaged the services of Riz, an ethnic Malay graff iti artist, for the episode. I accompanied Ivan to meet Riz on their first meeting, during which we explained the storyline to Riz. The graffiti episode was about a defiant teenage boy who liked to vandalize, and his bad relationship with his teacher. Overwhelmed by his gambling parents who had disappeared, and loan sharks who harassed him, the boy spray-painted red crosses on public walls to vent his frustrations. The show culminated when, after a series of turning points, the teacher chased away the loan sharks with

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some spray paint, and the boy created a piece of graffiti art – legally on an approved school wall – and reconciled with his teacher. Riz sent us several sketches after that meeting and changed them to Ivan’s request that the piece be more ‘wholesome’. With only a week to go before the shoot of the graffiti artist creating the piece of work ‘live’, the Locations Scout asked me for a final sketch of Riz’s artwork. The Principal of the secondary school, where we planned to shoot the ‘live’ spray painting, had asked to see the sketch. I sent over the latest sketch Riz had provided me with, which featured a visualization of the teacher chasing the loan sharks away with spray paint. A day later, I received a message in a WhatsApp chat group shared by key production personnel for the episode. The Locations Scout (LS) asked the Production Manager (PM) for advice because she had received feedback from the Principal. LS: [Principal wrote] ‘I dont [sic] think this image is appropriate for my sch8 wall. There is no positive msg fr it and the imagery of the gangster can be misunderstood as an identity of the sch […] I’m afraid I cant [sic] approve this image. Perhaps I call u later to discuss’. PM: We can change the gangster look […] We will just change the graffiti till school approve. Dir: The positive message is this: the teacher is a hero who defeats the loansharks. So what does the Principal want? What other positive messages does he want? […] LS: I hv written to him our positive message too9.

In the first instance, the Principal’s search for a ‘positive message’ is testament to sensitivities around imputing meaning that reflects good citizenry in graffiti and how subjective such interpretations can be since the Principal found no ‘positive message’ while the Locations Scout and Director did. Later in the day, the Director sent me this written message. These are my words abt the final mural. Let wang, our lead, be in the middle of the mural. He bursts out of an X like a super hero, with spray cans 8 As the Locations Scout used many abbreviations in her quote, I list them here rather than in the text for clarity. ‘Sch’ is short for ‘school’; ‘msg’ for ‘message’; ‘fr’ represents ‘from’; and ‘hv’ for ‘have’. 9 The quotes, particularly written ones, were left in their original form with grammatical mistakes to illustrate the often casual language use.

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in his hands […] Basically we glorify and make the teacher a super hero […] For the school to approve, they need the theme of good triumphing over evil. Right now it just seems like wang is chasing the loanshark with spray cans. And the principle [sic] is afraid students might emulate.

Even though the Principal said there was a lack of a ‘positive message’ and expressed his concerns that ‘the gangster can be misunderstood as an identity of the sch[ool]’, the Director thought the Principal was ‘afraid students might emulate’. These are three different issues. Not only does this show the multiple levels of interpretation and varying frames of reference that occurred in production communication, it also started becoming clear to me that there are varying interpretations of what ‘positive message’ meant, and that this ‘positive message’ is based on rather different assumptions about its presumed opposite, the negative – whether imagined as student emulation or misunderstood identity. The Production Manager called me that evening asking why there was the image of a loan shark in the sketch. I replied that it was in the script and the Director had suggested inserting a loan shark caricature. Shortly after the call, she wrote to me: Tell the artist to have less negativity for this mural. Less ah long10 stuffs. More triumphant stuffs. Please explain to him that for the school, we need more positivity.

The Production Manager again used the ‘positivity’ and ‘negativity’ binary to give instructions to the artist. Here, ‘negativity’ was associated with loan sharks, while ‘positivity’ was ‘triumphant’. I reflected all the comments back to Riz who then sent over another sketch, which the Principal still did not approve of. By this point, it was already the night before we were due to shoot the graffiti episode. The Executive Producer called the Principal, a personal friend of his, and eventually managed to persuade him to let the team spray paint and shoot in his school the next day, provided that Riz took his suggestions into consideration. The Principal wrote to the production team: The overall artwork in the school should send a tone of optimism and not be morbid. Also, images related to violence and gangsterism should not be used or if inevitable be played down or translated in a positive way. 10 ‘Ah Long’ is a Singlish term for loan shark.

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The principal’s overall use of ‘positive’ echoes the repeated use of the term – and its accompanying concepts – amongst the producers. In his message, the Principal used the word ‘positive’ again. In this case, ‘positive’ should ‘send a tone of optimism’ and was opposed to ‘morbid’ and ‘violence and gangsterism’. However, for the Principal, the negative could be ‘translated in a positive way’. To him, positive and negative therefore were not two essential qualities, but perhaps different sides of the same thing, which raises interesting questions that I explore in the next section. On the morning of the shoot, the Principal designated two inward-looking walls for the graffiti. These were not the ones the team had previously chosen. Despite the Director’s repeated request for an outdoor wall, the Principal declined. He said, ‘up till now, I still have not seen the final piece […] I cannot take the risk of putting it in an open place where parents and students can see easily’. Unable to convince the Principal, the director decided to shoot the acting scenes in the school, but execute the graffiti painting scenes in a less ideal backup venue run by the NAC. The Principal’s indication that parents and students seeing the artwork was a ‘risk’ point to his own anxieties about differing interpretations of the artwork and the pressures to manage those potential reactions. In this sense, his repeated rejection of the drafts embodied the state’s relentless control over meaning and what was considered legitimate artwork. In other words, the principal reproduced the state and its framing of matters of graffiti using fear. Even though the producers managed to find a way to film the graffiti portion at another location, the graffiti’s design had already gone through several rounds of changes in the team’s attempt to satisfy the Principal. Despite Ivan’s best intentions and the Executive Producer’s pre-emptive tactics at defining graffiti, the production team ended up with a severely toned down version of the original artwork after a series of struggles. Curiously, the detailed exposition of how producers and the Principal debated the graffiti involved frequent references to ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in various ways. Given its repetition, I would like to explore this articulatory practice and its implications for the performative practices of authoritarian resilience in more detail in the next section.

Producing Difference, Performing Fear This episode demonstrated the complexity of concerns media producers faced during the shoot of Loving Art, and the creativity and resilience they and the artist displayed in working around the problems they faced. While

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uncertainties around logistical issues such as the availability of venues may have shaped the production content in this case, the process to negotiate the venue with the Principal was telling. It is striking that everyone involved in this negotiation process repeatedly framed the graffiti artwork in terms of ‘positivity’ versus ‘negativity’. So why did the producers and the Principal repeatedly use these terms? What exactly is this ‘negativity’ that was to be avoided and why did producers worry about showing it? Since the term ‘positive’ was repeated so often throughout the episode, it is worth going into its etymology to examine how it played out in this context. The OED defines ‘positive’ in various ways, including ‘consisting in or characterized by constructive action […] optimistic; good, beneficial, advantageous’ (A.II.4.d) and simply ‘senses opposed to negative’ (A.II.4). On the other hand, ‘negative’ is defined as ‘denial or refusal’ (c.I.1.c); ‘the side, position, or aspect of a question, which is opposed to the affirmative or positive’ (a.I.4.a); and ‘absence or negative of good’ (a.II.7.a). From their dictionary definitions, both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ partly determine each other’s meanings, which in turn maintains their ambivalence in interpretation. In the production process, producers put terms such as ‘wholesome’, ‘triumphant’, ‘optimism’, ‘good’, and ‘hero’ in the same register as ‘positive’, while ‘dark’, ‘morbid’ and ‘gangsterism’ were classified under ‘negativity’. As discussed, these terms refer to different things, thus changing the meaning of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in various contexts. At the end of the episode, it was no clearer what the ‘negativity’ to be avoided in the artwork specifically was. So if the ‘negativity’ producers were worried about was not immediately obvious even to the producers themselves, here, it may be useful to refer to Derrida’s discussion of the pharmakon, which he described as ‘having no stable essence, no “proper” characteristics, it is not, in any sense (metaphysical, physical, chemical, alchemical) of the word, a substance […] [but] the prior medium in which differentiation in general is produced, along with the opposition’ (1981: 125–126). Functioning like Derrida’s pharmakon, terms like ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ have ‘no stable essence’ (1981: 125) and presume difference and their opposites. The two are not meaningful without each other. This explains the ‘undecidability’ – a Derridean term – of the concepts. […] undecidability is always a determinate oscillation between possibilities […] These possibilities are themselves highly determined in strictly defined situations […] which are upon occasion terribly necessary and always irreplaceably singular (Derrida 1988: 148).

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If ‘defined situations’ determine the meanings of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, matters become more complicated. This invites closer examination of how the various producers imagined what they described as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. How did the parties involved imagine the object of their commentary, graffiti? The officer from the NAC thought what defined a graffiti was its intention of ‘individual expression, stretching into public / social commentary’. To the Principal, the graffiti reflected identity, which Ivan interpreted as portraying contents to be emulated. These accounts of graffiti reflect differing ideas of what an image, and by extension a media product, was and did. Furthermore, the producers, NAC and MediaCorp officers and school Principal made those statements at different moments, to different people, in different contexts, arguably for different purposes. At different points, individual producers and the artist may have produced for different audiences and purposes, possibly including the imagined television audience, to satisfy the Principal, or simply to get the job done. In turn, the Principal interfered with the production because of his ideas about the reactions of his students and their parents. Without a common understanding of graffiti, shared presumptions about the media, or a stable target audience, the various articulations about the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ traits of the artwork formed complex and vague ‘defined situations’ (Derrida 1988: 148) for the producers to work in and for the artist to create. If the meanings of the various articulations of the work constantly shifted, why did the producers repeatedly choose to use these terms despite them not making the situation any clearer? In this case, perhaps the significance of the articulations of positive and negative lies not in the binary itself, but in the practice of differentiating. If, according to Deleuze, ‘difference must be shown differing’ (1994: 56) and is ‘groundless, anarchic, constantly creating and never the same as itself’ (Colebrook 2002: 12), then the act of differentiating is productive. In the case of the graffiti, we are dealing with the productive tensions between the articulable (what was variously said about the images) and the visible (or the non-discursive images). In this sense, the repetition from all sides about negativity versus positivity seems to be a way of avoiding debates over the relationship between art and graffiti in Singapore, which raise further issues such as who has the power to decide what is art, whom imagined audiences are and consequently uncertainties over reactions to art works. This practice of articulating ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ is productive because it reproduces both the false binary and the boundaries between them. This tendency was also demonstrated by the producers in their search for a clear definition of graffiti early in the production process. Even though

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the NAC provided room for interpretation, the producers chose to represent graffiti in the programme as an art form done with permission because ‘that is the simplest’, hence setting the bar of permissibility – for themselves – a level higher for the sake of being safe from the NAC’s potential criticism. This is part of their search for clear boundaries that eliminate complexities and nuances. However, they often end up being either evidently simplistic or incoherent. These practices of denial are resonant of the continual implications of such rigid closures on human subjects and the way the world is to be understood. In this sense, the underlying concern of producers transmutes from the vague ‘negativity’ into worries about the open-ended nature of artworks, the complex human subject and the accompanying ambiguity. These practices are also testament to the precarious position of these producers alongside the anxieties arising from ambiguities built into the media industry’s structure – independent producers’ vulnerable relationship with MediaCorp and the authorities, uncertainties about audiences and the power of vocal viewers to complain – and the producers’ strategies to reduce and manage those worries, often by simplifying, avoiding and choosing the ‘safe’ option. Such rejections of complexities and the persistent categorizations into dichotomies hold significance in producers’ practices. The elimination of what was deemed ‘negative’ from Loving Art hints at the underlying assumption that representation equals endorsement. The combination of simplifying for ease of understanding and the presupposition that showing is approving therefore creates an environment of self-perpetuating silencing, censorship and avoidance. These practices then continually constitute the boundaries for classifications of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, validating these artificial divisions in the process. By reinforcing such false dichotomies, producers are then pushed into one of only two positions deemed available and instantiate a relationship between PSB producers and PSB audiences that is based on dichotomous positions. And by desperately seeking the abstract and mutable ‘positive’ position, these production practices also performatively constitute its opposite, the equally abstract and mutable ‘negative’ that is to be avoided, censored and feared, thereby reproducing fear as the relational lens through which social order in Singapore is to be understood. In this way, through these practices, the performance of fear perpetuates itself.

Producing the ‘Chinese’ Subject While the struggles around graffiti artwork produced articulations of the difference between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, another axis of difference

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ran through the rest of the production process. Ivan’s unique position as a relative outsider and newcomer to Chinese-language television production in Singapore propelled him to confront many creative norms of local Chineselanguage television. This went beyond the graffiti artwork and extended to the scriptwriting. As compared to the other directors I had worked with during fieldwork, he was particularly involved in the creative processes of writing the script. Ivan debated extensively with the other producers about representational issues. In this section, I trace some of these arguments to highlight how the practices of producers contributed to meaning-making and audience subject formation. In particular, I examine how difference was reproduced through the signifier of ‘Chinese’ and the ‘Chinese audience’ that enabled, and was carried by, these practices. One of the first issues that emerged during the early stages of the production was that of the gender balance of the series. In the initial creative phase, the two writers (both men) only planned for one female lead character in all five stories. Ivan raised this as a problem with the Production Manager, a middle-aged female with many years of production experience, who concurred that the series needed at least one more female lead for gender balance. The three of us sat and discussed how all five stories would work out if we changed the gender of the lead character from a man to a woman. At the end of the meeting, we agreed that the story on rock music was the most suitable one for this move. The story revolved around the broken relationship between a father and his child, who was an aspiring rock musician. In the first story outline, the producers had envisioned the child as a son. We agreed at the end of the meeting that Ivan would bring up the possibility of changing the character to a daughter during the next script meeting. It was Ivan’s first script meeting with the team. While he had previously chatted with the Executive Producer (EP), this was the first time he met the Writer (Wri). The Writer was an experienced scriptwriter for Chineselanguage dramas in Singapore who had collaborated with the Executive Producer for many years. This was in stark contrast to Ivan who was at least ten years younger and worked predominantly on English-language programmes. As the then-young intern, I was used to not being spoken to on such occasions. In this particular meeting, however, I became increasingly conscious of being the only woman in the room as they contemplated the possibility of switching the character’s gender. Wri: If it was a conflict between father and daughter, I feel that we cannot reach the atmosphere (气氛僵). Dir: I think you are biased/prejudiced (偏见) about this.

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Wri: I have a daughter so I am biased. I worry (担心) the emotions between father and daughter won’t be too intense (强烈) […] Personally I prefer daughter […] I think that when a daughter is Dir:  with her father, she would really dare to say things (敢讲) […] Wri: It will become a scolding (骂) or quarrel (吵架). It’s not like man against man. Dir: You must understand the power of rock. Wri: We live in an Eastern society (东方社会). This is how it is […] If the daughter is too rebellious (叛逆) and isn’t filial (不孝顺) to the father, the character will immediately be unaccepted by the audience.

The Writer drew on age-old ideas about gender norms within the family that supported patriarchal society in his argument with Ivan. Notably, when Ivan disagreed with his ideas of societal norms, he invoked ‘the audience’ in ‘Eastern society’ to justify the different expectations of daughters and sons within family units. Unconvinced, Ivan pulled the conversation away from familial roles to point out the underlying biases against women that often result in such portrayals, which he described as ‘a stereotype’. Dir: That’s what I’m afraid of /worry about/fear (怕) you know. I want to innovate (创新). We shouldn’t have this opinion about females and males […] Our society is biased (偏见) against females. All Asian societies […] So if we don’t think this through when we write, it may be a stereotype again. Wri: When discussing issues we cannot be too avant-garde/progressive (前卫), because we’re making this for a general/average/common/ ordinary (普通) audience […] Your shooting style can be avantgarde/progressive (前卫) but the values (价值观) cannot […] I’m not a male chauvinist (大男人) but we need to be more balanced (要拿捏不要太一面倒). If not, the values will invite controversy (引起争论).

To counter the Writer’s logic that women have to be this way because Singapore is an ‘Eastern society’, Ivan pointed out the biases against females that is part of a wider problem shared by all ‘Asian societies’, alongside his desire not to perpetuate the bias through writing stereotypes. Noticing Ivan’s implicit accusation of bias, the Writer qualified that he was not a ‘male chauvinist’ and counter-accused Ivan of being too progressive and imbalanced. As the argument proceeded, the speaking tones of both Ivan and the Writer

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became increasingly affective and by this point of the conversation, both had started raising their voices. However, with the Writer’s invoking of the ‘general/average/common/ordinary audience’, Ivan was stumped and had no comeback. At this point, I looked over at the Executive Producer who had become quiet over the course of the conversation. Sensing the awkwardness, the Executive Producer quickly suggested that we move on and revisit the issue another time. The identification of women with ‘values’ or tradition is found in many cultures, but the attribution to ‘Eastern society’ suggests reference to a cultural cliché that picks up on more serious themes. To me, the producers’ arguments about parenting, familial roles and gender stereotypes point to difficulties in handling the underlying antagonisms of a society that declares itself to be at once modern and possessing so called traditional Asian values. Importantly, to deal with these antagonisms, the Writer evoked different ideas about audiences throughout. These audiences manifested in various ways, for instance as ‘Eastern’ audiences, as the ‘common/ordinary/average audience’, as himself as father, or simply as ‘the audience’. Ideas about what these audiences clearly shaped his creative work. However, he also used articulations of audiences as a way to police the others. That the evoking of the ‘general/average/common/ordinary audience’ and possible ‘controversy’ immediately blocked the conversation suggests that any potential controversial responses from audiences were effective as a policing tool. Notions such as the average or Eastern audience are imagined, highly debatable and impossible to verify. The indeterminacy of such notions allows producers to imagine through them any number of potential responses, which in this case served to police the discussion of a potentially more progressive portrayal of women. Furthermore, these practices of evoking imagined audiences in discussions were implicated in power relations, as the Writer’s explanatory tone towards the younger and less experienced Ivan makes clear. Throughout the discussion, neither Ivan nor the Writer asked me about my lived experience as a daughter in this society for reference. This suggests that the implications of the argument went beyond figuring out ideal gender norms. Ivan’s challenge of the Writer’s ideas about how daughters should be portrayed was also a challenge of his authority over how well his ‘knew his audience’. Invoking his years of experience writing Chinese-language dramas to speak for the ‘general audience’, the Writer asserted his power in this instance with a younger director. The unequal power relationship, empowered by the indeterminacy of audiences as empty signifier, therefore facilitated tendencies towards the status quo.

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Underlying the conjuring of audiences were also the two producers’ different ideas about their relationships with audiences. Ivan asked me to join him on a smoke break right after this argument. As we stood in the stairwell, he complained about how he disagreed with the Writer’s invoking of audiences to dictate their representational work. ‘We should be leading the audience! Not following the audience!’, he exclaimed exasperated. As I nodded at Ivan in acknowledgement of his frustration, I secretly wondered how far he would fight his way to challenge the status quo in this production. These were the early days after all. This is a ‘Chinese’ Production The Writer shared a proposed scene breakdown with the few of us who were present shortly after that meeting. A few days later, I received a long email from Ivan that he had sent to the creative team. In the email, he informed us that he had shared the proposed scene breakdown written by the Writer with a group of female friends and asked for their opinions. He then listed their feedback – most of which negative – in the email and concluded by proposing an entirely new storyline for the episode that he hoped we could discuss during our second script meeting scheduled for the week after. A week later, as I walked into the office for the script meeting, the Executive Producer informed me that the Writer had pulled out from the project but he was in the process of searching for a replacement. Shocked, I immediately asked why. The Executive Producer then gave a vague answer about the Writer having other commitments and changed the topic. It was evident when Ivan arrived that he had already been informed about this, and we went on with our script meeting. Ivan asked me to join him on a smoke break shortly afterwards. I watched him as he stood pensively at our usual spot in the stairwell. Breaking the silence after a while, he said ‘you know what happened to the Writer, right?’ Without waiting for my answer, he launched into a worried ramble. I don’t want to rock the boat too much. I’m worried about that man, seriously, it’s not what I intend to do, piss people off. I read the story, I have opinions about the story, it’s my job as a director […] what should I do? I’ve never done Chinese drama before, English seems to be okay […] [hesitates] I’m scared. I’m scared. This is a new environment for me […] I don’t want to come in and swing my dick around, you know what I mean, right? No lah, it’s not my intention, I want to play by the rules […] I think I was wrong.

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Ivan was never shy about expressing his emotions, but there was something about this particular episode that felt different from his usual comedically dramatic performances. He seemed genuinely shaken by what had happened and clearly did not expect the Writer to make this move. As he tried to come to terms with what had transpired, he informed me that the Writer was very unhappy about him sharing the proposed scene break down with others. ‘I didn’t know’, he explained to me, frowning. Clearly, the key event that sparked this development was the Director’s sharing of the proposed scene breakdown with potential audiences outside of the creative team and his use of targeted audience feedback to win his argument with the Writer. Like Ivan, I was surprised by the Writer’s quitting and quietly wondered what necessitated the extent of his response. Reviewing the fieldwork materials later, it struck me that what grounded these script discussions were ideas about the imagined audience that the Writer held. This is an audience fiction that experienced producers like the Writer had constructed over many years of writing Chinese-language drama, and it formed a bubble within which they could create. Even though Ivan and the Writer argued heatedly about the scriptwriting, the Writer soldiered on with the work. However, Ivan’s act of reaching outside of the creative team punctured that bubble and was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In a sense, the Writer’s act of quitting the project was his way of protecting that audience fiction. These producers were evidently sensitive about the issue of audiences. However, in his efforts to come to terms with the situation, Ivan associated the problem with his lack of experience in making ‘Chinese drama’. This was the first time that Ivan had ever articulated this as a ‘Chinese’ issue as opposed to ‘English’ since I met him, and this was clearly an affective response. As he had never encountered a problem with this practice when working for English-language programmes, he seemed to suggest that this disagreement was due to the show being a ‘Chinese drama’. But what exactly was ‘Chinese’ about this? When confronted with backlash from an unfamiliar environment with ‘rules’ he had broken, Ivan made sense of the situation by explaining it as resulting from being ‘Chinese’. In other words, attributing it to ‘Chinese’ was Ivan’s affective response to his anxieties about difference. This affective response raises questions about whether his articulation of ‘Chinese’ suggests an appeal to deep-seated myths of difference imagined along ethnic, linguistic or cultural lines. Realizing the severity of directly challenging the established audience fiction, Ivan stopped the practice of asking outsiders for comments. With the Writer gone, we switched the character to a female without much resistance.

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However, even though Ivan succeeded in challenging a character stereotype in this instance, something changed in him after this incident. I noticed how he started raising the issue of ‘Chinese’ while talking about a variety of matters. The Executive Producer found someone new to take over writing duties soon after the first writer left. This second writer was much more agreeable and took to Ivan’s often direct comments quite well. In one such instance, the two of them were discussing their differing production experiences when the writer asked Ivan to consider the potential of working on more dramas for Channel8, the dominant Chinese-language channel on MediaCorp. In reply, Ivan commented ‘it’s a new environment. I’m scared too. I don’t like the Chinese style of acting, script, story, directing, everything lah!’ Despite clearly talking about the individual channel, Ivan re-articulated it as ‘Chinese style’. The writer nodded at Ivan’s curt comments as someone practicing the so-called ‘Chinese style’ of drama production. Sensing the awkwardness, we did not pursue that line of conversation any further. However, some of Ivan’s later comments on Channel8 were revealing of what he meant by ‘Chinese style’. For instance, in an email commenting on the episode on rock music, he wrote: Please avoid Voice Overs and expository dialogue […] Let’s do this in a tasteful way […] I guess my most important note will be to not let this sequence decay into a melodramatic Taiwanese MTV […] throw all that sentimental kitsch out of the window. We go unsentimental […] This way we get a nice mature, tasteful family drama that deviates hugely from channel eight stuff. My greatest wish is for good, tasteful dialogue. We should aim to create tasteful and mature content.

In one short email, Ivan associated ‘channel eight stuff’ with ‘Voice Overs’, ‘expository dialogue’, ‘melodramatic Taiwanese MTV’, ‘sentimental kitsch’ and content that is not ‘tasteful and mature’. While these variously referred to writing techniques, storyline and tone, Ivan’s repeated use of the word ‘tasteful’ (four times in one paragraph) raises questions about class, maturity and the judgement of them. Clearly, Ivan was wrestling with taste and class here, yet he strikingly subsumed the representation of class under the label ‘Chinese’ or Channel8. This continued till the post-production period. One day during the postproduction phase, as Ivan and I waited for the editor to sort through shots, we looked at some clips of the female lead for the rock music episode. The conversation was in English.

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Dir: Were you there when we were styling her? Author: No. Dir: It was a fucking long process. Author: Why? Dir Because the Chinese mentality of rock musicians, it’s just damn […] It’s caricatures. Denim, stockings […] I was like ‘this is damn sleazy’ […] It’s a mismatch of ideas. Musicians don’t dress like that. They’re chilled. They dress like me.

Throughout the production, Ivan represented a series of different matters as ‘Chinese’, including working practices and taboos (in the case of not asking outsiders for script comments); writing, acting and directing styles and tones; taste and class; and ideas about dressing. Here, ‘Chinese’ was a ‘mentality’ or ‘ideas’, which further complicates the previous understandings of ‘Chinese’ as ‘style’, ‘environment’, and ‘stuff’. In this case, ‘Chinese’ becomes rather complex and suggests Ivan using ‘Chinese’ as a floating signifier to articulate an assemblage of complexities. The implications of this are multiple. When confronted by contentions at work, Ivan attributed them to contradictions between channels, which were then conflated with Chinese versus English or Western, and further extended to a series of other matters like creative styles, taste and class. Here, channels, languages, and styles – all very different matters – were merged. In this sense, his reduction of various differences to the Chinese-English dichotomy was not innocent. It is testament to the racialization of Singaporean society and the conflation of race and ethnicity in official discourse, which demarcates Singaporeans and their respective cultures into neat categories that fail to account for inevitable internal variations, as elaborated in Chapter One. Such neat categories that ignore variances of class, dialect and cultural practices within and between classifications, force producers to imagine problems along linguistic and ethnic lines. Enabled by industry structure and state ideology, and perpetuated by articulatory practices such as Ivan’s, ‘Chinese’ as signifier becomes ‘terminally ambiguous’ in official and everyday use, ‘interpretable simultaneously as the proximate object of study […] or as an abstract, relational object of study […] as a mode of human activity […] of inquiry [and] a totality […] Customs and thinking then tend to emerge as the phenomena’ (Hobart 2000: 14). This not only allows a variety of different phenomena to be attributed to and explained away by ‘Chinese’, it also reproduces ‘Chinese’ as difference and as boundary. Furthermore, from his initial emphasis on being ‘scared’ of the ‘new environment’ as his affective response to the shock of the Writer leaving;

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to his later expression of ‘dislike’ of ‘Chinese-style’ production; and the disdain for distasteful ‘channel eight stuff’ and the ‘Chinese mentality’, Ivan’s continual references to ‘Chinese’ were immersed in affect. His association of dislike and fear to ‘Chinese’ productions suggests articulations of ‘Chinese’ as an affective response to the experience of difference when working in a new environment, particularly since these started after the incident with the first writer. ‘Chinese’ as signifier evidently carried many of Ivan’s frustrations as he worked through the problems in the production. This practice is productive as it subsumes various problems under the label of ‘Chinese’ and raises questions about the role of affect in producing difference. In a sense, such affective meaning-making practices could further the ideas of difference and boundaries around the signifier ‘Chinese’ by associating it with certain affects, which are recalled with each articulation and encounter. This functions similarly to what Ahmed (2004) described as the ‘sticking’ effect of emotion, whereby certain affects ‘stick’ to the bodies of specific images, ideas or caricatures, and are reproduced through repeated framing. In this case, this raises questions on the broader implications of articulating ‘Chinese’ as an affective meaning-making practice. Blame it on the ‘Chinese Audience’ Looking back on my fieldwork notes, I noticed a particular change in the production team’s construction of audiences as subjects. In that first script meeting, the Writer appealed to ‘the audience’ in ‘Eastern society’ and the ‘general/average/common/ordinary audience’11 to end the argument about gender portrayal in the rock music episode. Even though that managed to stop that particular conversation, Ivan expressed his attitude clearly to me in a complaint that he wanted to ‘lead the audience’ rather than ‘follow the audience’. He also put his words into action by seeking potential viewer feedback on the early proposed scene breakdown. However, Ivan’s approach towards audiences changed with the Writer’s quitting of the programme, which had a clear affective impact on him. He made sense of the situation by articulating this contention as ‘the rules’ of ‘Chinese drama’, with the rules being the protection of its audience fiction. Others around Ivan adjusted to him as well, and I started noticing mentions of the ‘Chinese audience’ around him. For instance, during one of the later script meetings, the Executive Producer and Ivan had to sort out the 11 It is unclear whether the Writer referred to audience in singular or plural, as the Chinese term for audience (观众) could mean both.

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storyline for the main character of the entire series – the mystery man. Even though the series consisted of five separate stories, the stories were linked together via the character of the mystery man, who would appear to help the other characters resolve their problems through the art forms in each episode. Unhappy with the idea, Ivan proposed getting rid of the character altogether as he felt they could not link all the stories together in a coherent and satisfactory manner. The Executive Producer resisted because the mystery man was written in the concept pitched to MediaCorp. An extensive argument ensued during which Ivan listed the different fallacies in logic and backstory that the character of the mystery man had, which he felt was impossible to rectify. After several hours of exhausting discussion, the Executive Producer turned to Ivan and said frankly: Can I convince you this way? Chinese viewers won’t go and question all these things [referring to issues of logic and backstory] […] If I use this explanation, can you accept it?

Knowing Ivan’s insistence on the details of plotline and backstory, the Executive Producer used ‘Chinese viewers’ to effectively stop the discussion. What is striking to me was how apparent he made the fact that he was using ‘Chinese viewers’ as a justification that they would get away with the problems Ivan mentioned. Ivan was unhappy with this explanation but reluctantly accepted it eventually. In this sense, the Executive Producer pointed particularly to ‘Chinese viewers’ as he knew Ivan was unfamiliar with them, hence giving him the power to imbue the notion with whatever characteristics he deemed necessary for the situation. In this articulation, ‘Chinese viewers’ were imagined as not ‘question[ing]’ in order to explain away the background story problems around the mystery man. ‘Chinese viewers’ therefore acted as an effective disciplinary tool for the producers. Underlined by the affective practices’ production of difference along linguistic and ethnic lines as discussed above, this discursive shift from the ‘general’ viewer to the ‘Chinese viewer’ went beyond individual instrumental encounters. I joined Ivan during parts of the post-production phase to observe his editing process. Ivan and I were sitting in the edit suite reviewing a scene between the father and daughter in the rock music story when he exclaimed: Dir: This line (referring to ‘对妈妈是这样，对我也是这样’ translated as ‘you were like this to mom, and now to me too’), I hate this line man! It’s too much!

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Author: She said it in the other scene too. Dir: The other scene, I accept, because they are fighting, she shouts ‘mommy etc. etc.’ that is fine. But this one, no. The writer wants to reinforce it, but the character won’t say it in reality […] But whatever, lah. Just let it go. Chinese audience likes this shit.12

I was surprised when I heard this. This was a marked difference from the beginning phases of production when he proclaimed that we should be leading and not following audiences. What happened in between that caused such a change in tone? Upon reflection, this shift made more sense. Ivan’s affective tone in expressing his ‘hate’ for the line and the ‘Chinese audience’ that ‘likes this shit’ reminds of his affective meaning-making practices of articulating ‘Chinese’ in the other aspects of production. In this sense, his blaming of the ‘Chinese audience’ is testament to the implications of producing difference and affect’s role in the subject formation of audiences. Being ethnic Chinese himself, Ivan had a complicated relationship with what he was articulating as the ‘Chinese audience’. This shift in his position suggests a coping mechanism to disassociate his own identity as Chinese from the ‘Chinese audience’. In other words, this marked a broader process of forming the ‘Chinese audience’ as Other. Importantly, Ivan’s journey illustrates how the affective notion of the ‘Chinese audience’ worked to discipline and self-discipline the Director into reproducing creative norms. However, the notion was effective not just because the Director had little experience with it. In playing different roles in different instances, for different producers and their different purposes, the ‘Chinese audience’ is ‘ambiguous insofar as it is unable to constitute itself as a precise difference within a closed totality’ (Laclau 1989: 80). This association of audiences with, and swinging between, sometimes incompatible notions is what characterizes myth more generally. In this sense, the eventual perpetuation of production norms was enabled by both the myth of cultural difference and audiences as myth.

Reproducing Difference If Chapter Two illustrated game show producers’ well-oiled practices of emptying Singaporean subjects of qualities and Chapter Three showed how audience power works amongst experienced drama producers, Ivan’s 12 I noted down the conversation at the scene. It was in English.

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journey to challenge the status quo in this chapter highlights how affective meaning-making practices reproduced familiar categorical differences such as positive-negative and ‘Chinese-English’, and how these processes were productive. The two dichotomies that emerged in this chapter point to related but different underlying issues. Due to the graffiti’s sensitive nature, the producers’ repeated rejection of ambiguity and compulsion to classify, were very much motivated by the state. In the first instance, the producers’ search for clear lines of permissibility reflects issues within the legal and broadcasting system in Singapore. Vagueness in regulatory documents, policies and instructions from the authorities and MediaCorp engenders both the producers’ and the Principal’s anxieties. The pressure to predict and manage essentially unpredictable interpretations of graffiti artworks meant producers dealt with high levels of uncertainty and resulting anxieties. At the same time, the open-ended nature of visual art makes it immensely difficult to predict and describe what exactly would work. It is little wonder that producers rejected this ambiguity by these complexities into the clearly defined categories of positive versus negative. However, this practice was productive as it continually constituted the categories as valid despite them being vacuous of meaning. This reproduced the vague boundaries that producers wrestled with in their representational practices. In this sense, even though the producers struggled with the Principal about what constituted positive and negative in the graffiti, the process perpetuated the positive-negative dichotomy regardless of how much this individual piece of graffiti was ‘subversive’. In doing so, this practice shapes producers’ relationship with audiences as defined by boundaries of permissibility, with them always needing to occupy the ‘positive’ position. Beyond the individual instances of artwork created, it was these types of practices that reproduced Singapore’s media work and social order as to be understood through the lens of boundaries and fear. One notable articulated dichotomy was of particular signif icance. Throughout the production process, Ivan referred to the ‘Chinese-English’ dichotomy, a practice that was echoed by many of the other producers and crew in the production in order to account for contestations at work. ‘Chinese’ referred to a variety of issues such as ‘mentality’, ‘culture’ and ‘environment’. They were linked to and conflated with language in ways that were sufficiently ambiguous as to make the exact reference hard to pin down but such that the participants had some sense of what was meant. This suggests that ‘Chinese’ or ‘Chinese-language’ does not exist as a meaningful category outside of a given context, but was rather used as a tool to explain, close down, refuse and dismiss ambiguities and contingencies – a strategy

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similarly deployed by the government. In this sense, Ivan’s reduction of a range of matters, including audiences, taste and class to the label ‘Chinese’ was testament to the demarcations of Singapore society and its media industry along racial and linguistic lines. These demarcations, translated into neat categories, permeate almost all aspects of Singapore’s social life and the structure of its media industry. As this chapter illustrated, in the absence of evidence otherwise, the highlighting of ‘Chinese’ as difference helped reinforce the status quo and resist change. This was accomplished particularly through the invoking of the ‘Chinese audience’. As audiences played a crucial role in the struggles among producers, it is worth further considering the conditions that allowed ‘the audience’ as performatively constituted to engender self-policing and the implications for how to rethink fear and authoritarian resilience to account for the non-linear dynamics of performative and contested interactive practices involved. While much of existing Production Studies literature discuss how producers compete over their power to ‘know the audience’ or ‘speak for the audience’, what was interesting for me was how that played out in this particular project. The production process featured different producers using audiences to either reinforce or disrupt the existing imaginary. In particular, the shift from talking about audiences in general to the ‘Chinese audience’ point to the several underlying factors that enabled the eventual use of ‘Chinese audience’ to perpetuate the dominant social imaginary. First and foremost, the inherent ambiguity of notions of the audience was key. While producers regularly invoked audiences as an object of concern, who exactly was watching what and in what numbers remained a mystery to them, as information about ratings was withheld by MediaCorp. This practice leaves power in the hands of management and introduces uncertainty at the core of television production in Singapore. Under these structural conditions, the producers’ practices of emptying audiences as subjects of qualities (see Chapter Two) in their efforts to perpetuate state myths then introduces more inherent uncertainty in imagined audiences. In a sense, the constant evoking of audiences in varying ways formed a vicious cycle of increasing levels of unpredictability where without looking into the differences of gender, ethnicity, class, generation, or religious and political inclinations to say the least, what comes to be labelled as ‘Chinese audience’ constitutes a mystery to producers. Appeals to the mysterious ‘Chinese audience’ in cases of disagreements on categorical differences then often lead to the use of audiences to reinforce existing binaries such as positive-negative, Eastern-Western, or Chinese-English. In this way, the ‘Chinese audience’ as signifier serves to reproduce the conditions that cause producers anxieties.

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Emptied of essential qualities, audiences as signifier could then serve different purposes of articulation by carrying different meanings. Notably, affect played a crucial role here. Practices around audiences were immersed in affect. When Ivan ventured outside of the closed production circle to get audience feedback on the script, he provoked the Writer to quit the project in anger. In turn, Ivan’s response was clearly affective to me. As a newcomer to the project, Ivan attributed his felt sense of shock and difference to ‘Chinese’, an association that came not from the production encounter but Ivan’s prior ideas, triggered by his affective response. In this sense, if social imaginaries are what enables, and are carried by, practice, it was the myth of cultural difference, underlined by linguistic difference, that enabled this ideological association. This stems from what I think is a symbiotic relationship between affective meaning-making and subject formation within the imaginary. As an empty signifier, audiences could carry the ideas and affect that other signifiers could not. In turn, ideas based on myths of cultural difference triggered by affective encounters can get attached to signifiers such as the ‘Chinese audience’, which then facilitates perpetuation of the status quo. Emptied of qualities and therefore encompassing differing, sometimes incompatible or contradictory attributions and affects to be assigned to it, the ‘Chinese audience’ becomes affective myth. While individual instances of ‘resistance’ or ‘struggle’ happen, like in the case of Ivan, which results in changes in the final products, the practices also reproduced categorical differences that arguably last more permanently. Resulting from a combination of articulation, resistance and affective practices, the ‘Chinese audience’ as signifier eventually carried a lot of affects for Ivan. In this case, Ivan left the production with more entrenched ideas about the ‘Chinese’ audience as subject than when he began. He has not taken on a Chinese language project for MediaCorp since. Extended more broadly, Ivan’s case has implications for how the ‘audience’ or ‘Chinese audience’ – in whatever configuration is applicable depending on the context – serve as floating signifiers of difference and carriers of affect that could be instrumental in perpetuating existing ideological orders and power arrangements. While game show production highlighted the practices that emptied Singaporean subjects of qualities, this chapter examined the productivity of producing difference. These articulations of difference were inextricably linked to the introduction of an ‘outsider’ to Chinese-language television production who served as an antagonism to, and threatened to rupture, its established audience fiction. In a sense, this chapter illustrates the ideational processes of constructing audiences as affective superaddressee. Without the

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burden of experience with Chinese audiences like in the previous chapters, Ivan went in with a clean slate and left with more entrenched ideas. This illustrates the expansive power of audience as affective superaddressee affecting both old-timers and newcomers in different but related manners.

5

Making Reality TV: The Pleasures of Disciplining in a Control Society Abstract I end the book with a genre not commonly made in Singapore – Reality TV. What are the possibilities for disrupting the status quo in the absence of well-established conventions? ‘Feeling’ their way through the production process, producers’ affective flows reflect the zeitgeist of Singapore’s illiberal state and are testament to its authoritarian resilience. Traversing from fear to anxiety to pleasure, Chapter Five focuses on how the affective practices of producers were productive in creating stage-managed affective spectacles emptied of any real controversy or social impact. I argue that the result is a form of power that operates similar to Deleuze’s ‘control societies’, moving beyond discipline to modulate producers’ behaviour shaped by constantly shifting standards. Keywords: Discipline; Control Societies; Imagined audiences

There is broad consensus among Reality TV scholars and critics that the genre relies on producing scandals, controversies and moral panics to create dramatic spectacles (Biltereyst 2004). In particular, there are many works that discuss Reality TV’s reproduction of racial, gender and class stereotypes as part of portraying ‘the real’ (Wood and Skeggs 2008). So how does a Reality TV production in an illiberal state like Singapore court and manage controversy? This was the question that I brought with me when I started my ethnography of the reality show discussed in this chapter. I initially imagined that I would be observing a production team cleverly manipulating social discourse while skilfully avoiding censorship. These expectations were quickly side railed as my days – and my fieldwork diary – became consumed by the daily chaos that ensued on set. In many ways, this was the hardest ethnography for me to write up. This was in part due to the fact that this ethnography was exceptional in many

Fong, Siao Yuong, Performing Fear in Television Production: Practices of an Illiberal Democracy, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463724579_ch05

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aspects. Unlike the more routinized production processes I experienced in the other case studies, this production involved a larger than usual number of producers working together on a new ‘live’ reality programme format with little established work structure. As a result, a large portion of the daily grind on set involved constant, sometimes confrontational, arguments among producers about how best to do things. The general atmosphere of this production was very different from and much more affectively charged compared to the rest of the productions I would work on. So how does one produce the controversies expected of reality shows under the watchful eyes of an illiberal state1 when there is little established understanding of how to do so? Furthermore, if, like I argued in the previous chapters, the power stemming from imagined audiences functions like Deleuze’s control societies, how do producers cope when being forced to confront potential audience reactions in a genre that is supposed to display ‘the real’? In the absence of entrenched work conventions or practices, producers largely ‘felt’ their way through the production. While trying to affect audiences through the format of a Reality TV show broadcasted ‘live’, producers were highly affected themselves. What I wish to do in this chapter is to capture the affective tendencies that motivated some of these practices and to argue that these affective instincts reflect and intertwine with cultural circuits of value in Singapore. Traversing from fear to anxiety to pleasure, this chapter focuses on the affective journeys of producers in the production process and how such affective flows were products of, and productive of, the zeitgeist of this illiberal nation state. For a long time, I struggled with talking about my own emotional states during that particular fieldwork experience. Upon reflection, I came to realize that the affective dimensions of the experience were related to the particular situation we were placed in. Part of this was because the production process was, for many of the producers I worked with and myself, like struggling to tame a constantly mutating wild beast. The physical and emotional exhaustion that came with managing the uncertainties of the 1 The programme in this chapter is privately funded but still had state links. Despite not being funded under the official Public Service Broadcasting funding scheme, the production still had partial funding from the National Environment Agency (NEA). This Reality TV programme was also the only production I worked on that was not aired on MediaCorp, the monopoly free-to-air broadcaster, but the cable television company Starhub. Even though the programme was free to view, it was only accessible to households with Starhub’s TV box, hence reducing the programme’s viewers to cable television subscribers. A key question I ask in this chapter is therefore whether producers in this programme shared a similar relationship with their imagined audiences than in the previous case studies and how that relationship translated into their work practices.

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programme’s ‘live’ emotional drama – and its lack of – over an extended period of time was overwhelming. Having wrestled with the materials for several years, I realized a large part of the difficulty in writing up lies in capturing the high emotional charge of the experience and relating these affective practices in an intellectually coherent manner. This chapter represents my latest attempt at pulling together what I feel are the most significant tensions and affects that underline the many complex practices I observed, and these partly emerge from reflections on my own affective experience throughout this ethnography. The chapter will be organized according to the three main sets of affective practices in the production process – from precaution and nervousness in censorship; to control and anxiety about dramatic spectacle; to the pleasures and perils of discipline – and how such affective flows perform fear. Due to the complexity of the programme’s work structure, I would like to begin the chapter with a brief explication of how different members of the production team worked together on a daily basis for a ‘live’ Reality TV format.

Producing Reality TV This was my first ethnography and I was not quite sure what to expect. Even though I had some television production experience from before, I had never worked on Reality TV. On my first day, I arrived at an industrial building that had been converted into the production set amidst a frenzied atmosphere. The Production Manager who was to be in charge of the interns quickly hustled me into a corner before hurrying off. Having been given little information prior to the day, I started conversing with the other interns sitting around me and soon learnt that I was interning for an independent production company that had been commissioned by the broadcaster to produce the Reality TV show. Most of the production team was engaged on a similar basis as I was, as precarious short-term labour for the project. After ten minutes, the Production Coordinator hurried back to the production crew’s sitting area to give us our first interns’ briefing. I found out that the programme is the Singaporean version of a reality programme that originated in Mexico in 2002. While it had been franchised to other countries including Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the United States of America, it was being produced for the first time in Singapore in 2012. In the version I was to work on, the programme manifested as a Chinese-language reality singing competition whereby fourteen contestants from around the world were chosen through auditions to enter into the academy. Throughout the duration of the competition, the contestants were

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to live in a confined space monitored by CCTVs and cameras around the clock and were not allowed contact with the outside world. Contestants attended vocal, dance and other classes during the week to prepare for their weekly live concert, after which a designated number of contestants were eliminated. The programme departed from the original 24-hour format in Mexico and instead aired from 7am to 1am daily. The combination of a ‘live’ observation of the contestants during the week and a singing competition on Saturdays meant that the production had to be split into two groups – one working at the ‘house’ and the other preparing and executing the weekly performance and competition. I did not know it at the time but this briefing also turned out to be the last time I would receive such clear explanations of what was going on throughout the rest of my production experience. As one of the interns, I was assigned to be part of the group that observed contestants and broadcasted ‘live’ from the ‘house’ set. Throughout the three months of production, I spent ten hours a day working as a logger2 in the panel room. The team of which I was part – consisting of the Studio Director, Panel Producer, Graphics Operator, Sound Engineer, Tape Operator and Logger – was one of two teams that controlled the cameras and what went on air during the eighteen hours of live broadcast everyday. The two teams worked either early morning or late night shifts3 and rotated weekly. The studio team worked six days a week, with the exception of Saturdays, during which there was no live broadcast as the contestants prepared for their competition performance in the evenings. The experience allowed me to observe first-hand many of the production practices as they happened on a daily basis. However, as I was expected to be at my work station all of the time, 4 my field observations were primarily on what happened within the panel room.5 2 As a logger, my job was to sit in the panel room and log down what happened during my shift, making special notes of conversations or actions that I deemed would be useful for the 30-minute daily highlights edit. As the working hours were long and awkward, there was barely time for the team members to have a social life outside of work, resulting in social activities taking place amongst the work colleagues. This meant that, throughout the period of my internship, I spent large amounts of time each day with my research subjects – both on and off work. 3 The early morning shifts started at 6am and ended at 4pm, while the late night shifts lasted from 3pm to 1am the next day. The overlaps in shifts made sure that there was a full team covering the entire duration of ‘live’ broadcast. There were also chaperons who stayed throughout the night to watch the contestants when the programme went off air. 4 Those working in the panel room were supposed to be at their stations at all times. We covered each other’s job scopes when taking turns for short bathroom and meal breaks. 5 As an intern, I was not allowed to sit in for creative or production meetings, most of which took place during my shifts anyway.

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As the case study’s programme format was produced for the first time in Singapore, there were rival understandings among producers of what the production hierarchy was. So first I outline the daily workings on the set of the production, as I understood it towards the end of the production. The programme broadcasted ‘live’ from the set – with a four-minutes delay for censorship purposes6 – from 7am to 1am on Sundays to Fridays. During the ‘live’ broadcasts, a production crew worked on set. It consisted of three teams. First, the panel team – the Camera Director who controlled what the cameras filmed and which shots to cut to; the Panel Producer who advised on which stories to focus on; the Logger who sat beside them and wrote down what happened on screen; and the rest of the technical team including the Sound and Tape Operators – managed what went on air. The Camera Director was in charge in the panel room. Second, the floor team took care of what needed to be done on the actual set. The Floor Manager coordinated the panel, production and the rest on set, the Talent Chaperon took care of the contestants, and the Production Manager oversaw all production personnel. Third, the creative team took charge of the dramatic elements of the programme. The creative team, which seemed to give directions to both the floor team and panel team, consisted of the Executive Producer, Head Writer, two Story Producers, and the Panel Producer. The team made creative decisions together. Two Story Producers wrote and edited the daily 30-minute highlights that aired the next day. Together with the Executive Producer and the Head Writer,7 the team decided not only on the dramatic elements to focus on weekly, but also which special guests, teachers and classes to arrange for the programme. Notably, the vast majority of the creative producers – the Executive Producer, two Story Producers, the Head Writer, Panel Producer, one – out of two – of the Camera Directors, the Floor Manager and Talent Chaperon – were female. Even though we each had our own job scopes, we frequently covered for each other to allow for breaks through the long working hours, which means that access to alter what went on air was dispersed amongst various team members.8 6 This was to allow the censors to blur, mute or cut the programme where deemed necessary. I examine censorship in more detail later in this chapter. 7 The Head Writer scripted the singing competition, the elimination segment on Sundays, and the edited daily highlights. 8 Considering the set-up of the production team, a key question for my ethnography was: how straightforward was the Camera Director’s supposed control of the broadcast in the panel room? As one of the intern loggers, I spent most of my time in the panel room next to the Camera Director and Panel Producer. The Panel Producer and two Story Producers were supposed to advise the Camera Director on the stories to focus on in each segment while the Camera Director

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There was little established work structure in the first week of production. Producers spent most of their time scrambling to figure out how to make the project work. As the days went by, I gradually found out and experienced first-hand many of the difficulties the producers of this programme dealt with. First, the programme was an unfamiliar format for all of the producers. None of the producers had ever broadcasted ‘live’ eighteen hours a day. This meant that not only was their workflow9 unclear, they were also uncertain about the boundaries they were working within since the authorities had also never regulated this type of programme. Second, the producers were juggling the ‘live’ reality show, singing competition and concert event formats altogether. These different forms required different preparations and coordination, hence creating additional workload. Third, producers worked long hours and had little rest over the entire production period of roughly three months. As part of the studio team that worked six days a week, I experienced regular lack of sleep and fatigue by the mid-point of production. Those producers with more responsibilities – many of whom worked seven days a week – were even more exhausted. Fourth, there were several groups of producers coming from different production backgrounds10 working together. Unlike in the previous chapters, most of the producers here were freelancers who worked together for the first time. There was also a larger than usual number of producers required for directed the shots. However, the Panel Producer, in moments of excitement, often ended up instructing what to shoot. To complicate matters, during the production period, the Camera Director would at times ask the Panel Producer or the Logger to control the shots during quieter periods. I was also once asked to control the soundboard because the Audio Engineer visited the bathroom. This flexibility allowed the Camera Director and others in the panel room to take breaks for meals or bathroom trips. In sum, daily operations in the panel room injected an element of contingency into the management of broadcasts. 9 There were many incidents of communication errors that resulted in uncoordinated events, misunderstandings and high levels of frustration among the producers. The problems in communication improved over time but not at a speed or eff iciency satisfactory to many of the producers I spoke to. This resulted in a general sense of unhappiness towards the end of the project. 10 Broadly, the producers’ backgrounds could be divided along several lines of axis. Some had prior experience and training in MediaCorp. They recounted the tensions between them and the producers who left to work for MediaWorks when it was set up in 2001 as MediaCorp’s competitor. Some of them had moved on to work primarily on films. These producers further contrasted with younger independent producers who had never worked for either broadcaster. There were also differences between those who worked predominantly on Chinese- and English-language programmes, which manifested not only in language proficiency issues but also work habits. Finally, producers with relatively more experience in the newer Reality TV formats regularly debated with those used to working on traditional genres. I elaborate on these issues in the chapters where relevant.

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this production. The unfamiliarity resulted in clashes between working styles and ideas at times. As one of the interns, I was situated at the bottom of the production hierarchy and at the receiving end of instructions from almost everyone else on set. It was a real challenge figuring out what was the vision behind the many conflicting and constantly changing instructions I received. However, I discovered I was not the only one who felt that way during one of my interviews with the Talent Chaperon (TC).11 In this conversation, I had asked her about her job scope in taking care of the contestants. TC:  No one teach you how to do this kind of thing, you just think from their perspective what they need […] I try to make their lives comfortable. But if their aim/purpose (宗旨) is to put them through trials (磨炼), then I have to step back and I cannot give them too many comforts. Author: What is their aim/purpose (宗旨) then? TC:  The objective of this? I don’t know. [laughs] [whispers] It changes everyday! [laughs] This is performance on the spot (临场表现). That’s my challenge also. Sometimes I give too much, they want me to pull back. Give too little, they want me to show concern. So sometimes I feel a bit ‘So what should I do now?’

As I smiled and nodded in agreement, I realized that the Talent Chaperon, who dealt with the contestants on a daily basis, and was the only production personnel formally allowed contact with them, was as confused as I was. On hindsight, the Talent Chaperon’s comments encapsulated much of how things worked on set. Even though her job entailed the highest chance of directly affecting the contestants’ behaviour, she was often unsure about what she was supposed to do. She modified her approach to contestants based on feedback from the creative team, but because that feedback changed ‘everyday’, she felt lost. The confusion and unpredictability of having to ‘perform on the spot’ on a daily basis constituted much of the emotional labour, and eventual fatigue, of producers more generally. Under such circumstances, the producers I worked with relied on their instincts rather than well-oiled practices in producing Reality TV. Having 11 This interview was conducted on 6 August 2012, and was in a mix of English and Mandarin. I underlined the English terms, and included the original Chinese characters of important terms. All quotes specif ied as interviews in this chapter were audio recorded. Other quotes were recorded by hand.

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to traverse the tricky terrains of producing controversy for Reality TV in an authoritarian state, many of the practices that resulted from their instinctual responses were highly affective. I hope to capture some of these affective tendencies behind their practices in the rest of this chapter. Beginning with the censorship element of the programme, I first examine the producers’ sense of precaution in response to the culture of secrecy that pervades state agencies in Singapore.

Censoring Reality TV Two days prior to going on air, members from the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) (the government agency in charge of censorship) came for a tour of the set. About an hour prior to the tour, the Associate Producer entered the panel room where I was situated and announced that the people from IMDA would be having a meeting in the ‘dining room’ of the set later. She requested for all microphones to be put on mute during the meeting before leaving the room. Roughly f ifteen minutes later, the Production Manager came into the panel room with new instructions. In addition to muting the microphones, we had to also switch the cameras off during the meeting. Not long after, the Production Coordinator rushed into the room in a panic and yelled at us to not only turn off the cameras but to also pan them away from the meeting. Understandably perplexed, the Camera Director on duty asked why these measures were necessary. The Production Coordinator promptly replied that they were going to discuss ‘censorship issues’ to which the director immediately replied ‘oh, okay’, as if that revelation made it self-explanatory why such secrecy was required. During the meeting, there was a palpable silence on set. As I walked out of the panel room to get some water, I was surprised to f ind that the Executive Producer was sitting alone outside waiting for the meeting to end. When I went back to my desk, I wrote in my notebook: Why was the Executive Producer excluded from the meeting even though this was her programme? Even more curiously, why did she not seem unsettled by that? Why the secrecy? No one seemed to know, but everyone seemed to know to keep quiet about it. This was my first encounter with the authorities during fieldwork and I was struck by the precautionary practices everyone engaged in to ensure secrecy. What was more surprising for me was the manner in which the producers accepted the arrangement without questioning; suggesting that this was not uncommon practice and that their responses

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to situations involving matters of censorship had been pre-articulated. These practices clearly articulated to me the power relationship between the production company and the authorities. Ostensibly, being more transparent about censorship issues creates clearer censorship standards. This intentional secrecy is particularly pertinent since those excluded from the censorship meeting were precisely the ones who would be censoring the programme. In these cases, these practices perpetuated the unknowability of what was going on. This resulted in an increased sense that there was something that producers should worry about. These kinds of practices are performative as they call upon ideas about the state and perpetuate its power by continually reconstituting and reaffirming imagined boundaries and creating an environment of self-perpetuating silencing, censorship and avoidance. I never saw members of the IMDA visit the set again, but I felt their presence throughout the rest of the production period in the form of hourly paid precarious labour. After the meeting and tour, the IMDA decided that a separate censorship station should be set up for the programme that would be broadcasted with a four-minute delay. The four minutes allowed for the censors on duty to censor certain content if the need arose. As the IMDA only decided to implement a censorship station on set two days prior to the programme going ‘live’, the production team had little time to react. At the last minute, the broadcaster outsourced censorship responsibilities to a private media services company, which engaged part-timers on an hourly basis to act as censors. Due to budget constraints, several of the censors hired were interns with the majority of them being students. In a later interview with me, the boss of the media services company, whom I shall call Ali, acknowledged with bemusement the irony of the situation. ‘These part-timers don’t know anything about censorship!’, he exclaimed at one point, ‘They don’t know nuts about censorship!’ Even though this censorship set up may seem more performative than functional, the culture of secrecy around censorship, vague censorship guidelines, combined with inexperienced censors created an environment with high levels of uncertainty. As a result, the censors’ instinctive responses were mired in caution. I was having dinner in the production crew’s pantry on set one evening and happened to sit next to one of the bosses of the media services company engaged to provided censorship services. He was in the midst of briefing a new censor, a middle-aged woman. ‘When in doubt, just be safe […] Just censor’, he emphasized, as she wrote that down in her notebook while nodding in agreement. ‘How do you know what to censor?’, I asked, taking

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advantage of my physical proximity to join the conversation. The boss turned to me and explained about the content guidelines issued by the IMDA, which he called ‘The Bible’, on which censors based their decisions. ‘But I’ve read the guidelines. It is quite vague’, I answered. ‘Yes’, he replied and immediately turned back to the censor he was briefing. ‘So if anything, just be safe. Use your judgement. They also cannot say it’s your fault’. The censors were not alone in emphasizing safety in matters of censorship. Due to the lack of space, the censorship station was set up in the panel room. This meant that both censors and producers actively participated in discussions on censorship, and producers often instructed censors about what to do. Throughout my time with the production, there were countless instances when producers opted to ‘just censor’ potential problems when they were unsure, despite protest from those who were less risk averse. Over time, ‘just censoring’ became common practice to the point where Story Producers, when asked on the walkie talkie whether something should be censored, would advise to ‘just censor’ without having even seen the shot. This tendency to ‘just censor’ in times of uncertainty and hurry stems from the affective toll that working on a ‘live’ reality show in an illiberal context takes on producers. As one of the creative producers commented about censorship on the programme: ‘Ultimately, it is the EP’s call. But they are very nervous because it’s “live”. They don’t have time to seek approval’. If not having approval from the EP implies taking responsibility for potential consequences, this nervousness raises questions about what the censors and producers needed to be ‘safe’ from. While they were technically acting on behalf of IMDA, the censors were positioned between production and the authorities, and worked within the same culture of secrecy and with the vague content guidelines that producers had. Both the censors and producers therefore shared the responsibilities of predicting what audiences might find offensive or complain about. This nervousness stems from the ambiguities of a censorship system triggered by viewer complaints. Their tendency to ‘just censor’ was therefore their affective response to cope with the nervousness that risked overwhelming the entire ‘live’ broadcast period. Such tendencies to ‘just censor’ speak to larger issues within the media industry. These practices are performative because they continually constitute working assumptions about Singaporean audiences. Repeated instances of censoring for ‘safety’ perpetuated a vicious cycle whereby producers, censors and audiences imagined each other as overly conservative and therefore acted accordingly. This, in my opinion, forms part of the practices that perform fear in Singapore’s media and society.

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Between Control and Affective Spectacle Despite the genre’s publicity claims to portraying ‘the real’, Reality TV formats rely on participants’ performances of ordinariness. Early studies of Reality TV formats such as Big Brother indicate that audiences look for moments of authenticity in an unreal environment (Hill 2002) and that the guiding criterion for its production lies in the consistent and unfiltered display of emotion and affect (see Grindstaff 2002; 2009). Such displays are what Grindstaff (2002) has called ‘the money shot’ as they provide both climatic narrative moments and evidence of authenticity. The money shot — the eruption of raw, real emotion on-screen — is a prerequisite for, but not synonymous with, branded affect, because dramatic outbursts of emotional expressivity are “branded” only as they are taken up, circulated, replayed, and recycled […] as brands in relation to the spectacular emotion or affect they produce/evoke […] Here we argue that branded affect is a key signifier of what reality TV is […] within an emerging emotion economy in ways consistent with important cultural, social, and economic trends (Grindstaff & Murray 2015: 111–112).

What does ‘the money shot’ for a Reality TV show in an illiberal state look like? And how do they intersect with Singapore’s circuits of cultural value? In this section, I would like to examine producers’ second set of affective practices as they wrestled with anxiety and control when managing the relationship between affect and spectacle in the programme. Getting ‘the money shot’ was a daily challenge for us. The production team spent considerable amounts of energy everyday trying to evoke expressions of emotion from contestants. Strategies included constant encouragement from producers for contestants to be more expressive, and mandatory ‘Confession Room’ sessions during which contestants entered an enclosed space to talk about their feelings. During these ‘confession’ sessions, producers provided contestants with lists of questions that forced them to talk about potentially controversial issues that happened during the day. The ‘money shots’ were difficult to obtain despite these efforts. In an interview with two male contestants after the programme was over, I asked about the constant need for drama on the show. C1: I think most Singaporeans […] they are still quite well-behaved/ well-disciplined (规矩), and won’t have so many overly dramatic moments (太drama的东西) […] I think most Singaporeans still

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hide a lot of things in our hearts. Because after all Singapore is very small. If you said or did something wrong, once you go out, many people will know. Singapore is very small, you could potentially be recognized everywhere […] C2: This is Asia. Ethnic Chinese people (华人) are more conservative (保守). C1: We will bitch or discuss the flaws of others (人家的缺点) only privately (私底下) with good friends, but not in front of people we are not familiar with (不熟的人).12

What seems to emerge is that what is deemed good ‘Singaporean’, ‘Asian’ or ‘Chinese’ behaviour, as understood by the majority of the contestants, contradicts Reality TV’s demands for spectacular emotion or drama. This was evidently a source of frustration for the producers throughout the production process. Using the metaphor of a chess game, the Head Writer commented to me in annoyance that ‘the most important chess piece (棋子) in a reality show are the contestants. But we cannot go and tell the contestants what to do! We can only tell them to speak their minds’.13 We were already more than midway through the ‘live’ broadcast by the time I interviewed her, and the Head Writer’s frustration was palpable. Understandably, the dramatic narratives of Reality TV shows such as this one rely upon dramatic spectacles expressed visually and verbally. However, what is striking for me about her comment is her use of the chess game as metaphor. Describing contestants as a ‘chess piece’ implies a form of control over how the game is played and her frustrations really stem from the producers’ lack of complete control since they could not dictate contestants’ actions. Rather than the ‘eruption of raw, real emotion on screen’ (Grindstaff & Murray 2015: 111), the money shot in this context seems closely intertwined with the producers’ affective tendency for control over contestants’ behaviour. If the right way of being Singaporean entails not having too many ‘overly dramatic moments’, the production team found dramatic expression in one of the younger male contestants from the PRC. The contestant, whom I shall call Loong, had just moved to Singapore not too long before joining the programme, and he did not fit the ‘well-behaved’ stereotype that was 12 Interview conducted on 23 November 2012. It was predominantly in Mandarin, with a mix of English words. I highlighted the important Mandarin terms and underlined the English ones. All quotes specified as interviews in this chapter were audio recorded. Other quotes were recorded by hand. 13 The interview was conducted on 23 August 2012 in a mix of English and Mandarin.

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described of Singaporeans by the previous contestant I had interviewed. At barely twenty years old, Loong was one of the youngest contestants in the production and had some difficulties adjusting to the pressures of the programme. While he mostly got along with the other boys, he also had a temper and was often quick to react to stimulus. As a result, he had several verbal altercations with the other contestants. His often-physical emotional outbursts – such as throwing his cap on the floor in anger – made for very good television. This is why I was surprised by the producers’ affective responses to his eruptions of raw emotion on screen. I asked the Talent Chaperon (TC) about Loong in an interview during the production. TC: [Frowning] At the time, I was really very worried/concerned/ fearful (担心). I was worried he would break the glass. Because he was like a volcano, slowing building up […] Actually we were all very worried. We were almost going to rush in and grab him. But we couldn’t because it is ‘live’, so we just let him be. So I worried and worried, even until after transmission […] [The more the Talent Chaperon spoke about Loong, the more worried her tone became] When he was unhappy, his face would show it. He kept wanting to speak about his unhappiness, and I didn’t let him, so sometimes I would tell him to sleep on it, don’t react immediately, because he is the kind of person [clicks her fingers quickly]. Author: But why? TC: You want him to learn to let it stand for a while (沉淀), don’t immediately say ‘I’m in a bad mood (不爽)’ or ‘I want to hit you’. Author: Why? TC: It’s just part of growing up.

I was perplexed by this line of reasoning. How did a Reality TV show’s production of ‘the money shot’ turn into a production team teaching a contestant to sleep on his feelings? My confusion was evident to the Talent Chaperon as I pulled the conversation back to our search for dramatic narratives in the show. Author: But isn’t that dramatic? [As if recognizing my confusion, the Talent Chaperon switched to a less affective tone to explain herself] TC: Yes, but at that time we did not know how dramatic we wanted, at that time we did not know the degree, we were still exploring

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our programme’s format. Of course at the time I was worried/ concerned/fearful (担心), I was afraid/feared/dreaded/worried (怕) that he would be too violent […] He can explode but I did not want him to be too violent.

The production team’s pulling of Loong back from his organic emotional outbursts seems counter-intuitive given that such verbal and bodily exhibitions of emotions and conflict correspond with producers’ expectations of a reality programme’s dramatic narrative. So what exactly was going on here? Why did the producers feel the need to manage Loong’s emotional reactions if Reality TV was about selling expressive affect? Even though the Talent Chaperon attributed it to potential violence after I explicitly asked about the programme’s dramatic effect, her initial highly affective response was telling. In the span of the short conversation, she said she felt ‘worried/concerned/fearful/afraid’ (担心 and 怕) at least six times. I could feel her sense of anxiety about that period of time even during that later interview with her. Her instinctive response to restrict Loong from speaking about his unhappiness suggests that such organic emotional outbursts worried her. What was it about these raw emotions that proved worrying? The Talent Chaperon’s concerns about the uncertain boundaries of the new programme format and her pulling Loong back from being too dramatic despite the nature of the programme suggests that what was dangerous was not entirely what Loong could say during such emotional outbursts but the uncontrollable nature of such expressions of emotion itself. In other words, this was an affective response to her worries about losing control of the situation. What starts to emerge is this repeated desire among producers to control the relatively uncontrollable elements of a Reality TV show. The Talent Chaperon demonstrated a tension between controlling and encouraging the contestant’s display of emotions, expressed interestingly in a way that resembled an elder teaching a child. Tellingly, her reference to Loong’s expression of emotions to not being grown up points to a difference in cultural understandings of what is correct behaviour. This raises questions about whether this was perhaps a case of disciplining Loong, a new immigrant, into feeling what Singaporean culture deems the ‘correct’ or appropriate emotions. Even though producers wanted drama in the programme, they also displayed a tendency to exercise restraint in situations that could potentially get out of control and the desire to carefully mould contestants into what

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they deemed appropriate expressions of emotion. One of the producers I interviewed14 pointed to this tension in a highly emotional manner: When you [referring to the production team in general] do everything, you want to do it, but you don’t do it boldly (放胆去做) and make the thing a big hoo-hah. You don’t have the guts/courage/nerve (胆子) to do it. And you still want to calm down/appease (抚平) the whole thing […] Ultimately, when you do things, you are not ruthless/relentless/resolute (狠) enough. If you want to make it negative, let the whole thing be very negative and splash all over the newspapers. Go ahead! But can you bear/ endure (承受) something like that? Can you do it?

As she points to the producers’ struggles between doing something ‘boldly’ and to ‘calm down/appease the whole thing’, we start to unravel the tensions producers felt between encouraging dramatic elements and holding back, suggesting an underlying need for a sense of control. The critical tone of the producer betrays her deeper frustrations. She had worked in the local television industry for many years and her anger towards the production team clearly speaks to her helplessness towards wider problems faced by practitioners. In criticizing producers for being not ‘ruthless/relentless/ resolute enough’, she implied that producers faced some sort of danger, which required ‘guts’, ‘ruthless[ness]’ and ‘bold[ness]’ to overcome. What is striking is that a process such as producing television entertainment was characterized by affective language related to risk and fear. This raises the questions: Who did the producers have to ‘calm down/ appease’? If Reality TV formats rely on the production of scandals and controversies, why did producers feel the need to appease that? Another event on set provided some food for thought. The second month of ‘live’ broadcast coincided with the lunar ‘ghost month’ during which, according to Chinese mythology, the gates of hell opened for spirits of the netherworld to roam earth for a month. The producers planned a series of simulations of ghost sightings on the programme, in conjunction with the ghost month’s theme. Contestants were informed of the simulations, so the latter were aimed at viewers. The simulations were planned to start early morning during one of the first few days of the ‘ghost month’ around 7am when we began daily transmission. The creative team had planned and rehearsed for this event for a while by now and all the members in the creative team who were not usually on set so early showed up. The crew had arrived 14 I leave out the producer’s job title here, as these comments may potentially be sensitive.

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early that morning to prepare for the moment of reveal and there was a buzz of anticipation in the air as we got ready for our first shot. As the clock struck 7am, we began ‘live’ broadcast with the programme theme song before cutting to our usual CCTV shots of the quiet bedrooms where the contestants slept. A few minutes in, we received the cue. We watched on our monitors as one of the interns with long black hair wearing a white dress walked into the girls’ bedroom to lie on one of the empty beds, as the Camera Director changed to a seemingly innocent CCTV shot of the room to capture the act. The ghost simulation effect turned out great. There was a sense of quiet celebration amongst the crew in the panel room for making it work. As we continued switching between different CCTV shows to subtly reveal the ghost simulations, the Head Writer who was standing behind us observing suggested that perhaps we could add a visual insert with a disclaimer at the end of the day saying that the ghost event was ‘peaceful’. The Production Manager who was standing beside her disagreed and said that was not necessary. Shortly afterwards, the Executive Producer received a call informing her that someone had directly called the production company to complain that his wife and himself got frightened by the ghost simulation, and that ‘it was bad for Singapore society’.15 He also threatened to call the authorities. Upon receiving the call, the Executive Producer came into the panel room to inform us about it and asked us to hold off on the ghost simulations. The atmosphere in the panel room immediately changed. The tension in the air was palpable as the Executive Producer ran in and out of the panel room seeming eager to deal with the matter but unsure about what to do. However, when she saw that the same caller had posted a complaint on the programme’s Facebook page, she immediately ordered the Production Manager to screen a visual insert with a disclaimer and apology. By this point, the producers in the panel room were in a frenzy. Producers asked each other whether we should continue with the rest of the planned ghost simulations. The Camera Director yelled angrily, ‘why should we bother with this kind of audience?’ Nonetheless, we screened the visual insert. After it was shown, Starhub, the broadcaster, sent an email asking the production team to cancel all planned ghost simulations for the rest of the day. Reluctant to give up on a creative idea they had worked tirelessly for, the Executive Producer left the panel room to call Starhub about the decision. While the rest of us waited in the panel room, the Graphics Operator who was monitoring the programme’s social media noticed that Starhub had 15 I did not have access to the exact words of the complaint because it was phoned in.

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posted a screenshot of viewer comments16 onto their own Facebook page. The comments accused Starhub of playing pranks on their contestants and Starhub’s reposting it on their own Facebook page was clearly a strategy for online publicity. However, the post was deleted shortly after. This provoked a passionate discussion among the Story Producer (SP), Production Manager (PM), Camera Director (CD) and Panel Producer (PP) in the panel room. SP: [Frustrated] Actually we shouldn’t delete it! Then it can start a dialogue. There will surely be fans! PM: [In a helpless tone] But as the broadcaster, they cannot. CD: [Yelling in anger] Singapore production has so many restrictions! [referring to audiences] They want to complain about so many things. Complain that Singapore TV is bad, but then they still come with so many restrictions! PP: Singapore is like that! If one audience complains to MDA, then they will take action.

The emotional charge in the panel room that day was exceptionally high. The producers clearly did not expect to receive the complaint and their immediate responses were telling. Even though the complaint originated from one single viewer, the producers deemed it necessary to post an apology on air. Starhub even requested a cancellation of the rest of the simulations. These immediate responses suggest the viewer complaint caused serious concerns among the producers and executives. Understandably, the caller had threatened to complain to the IMDA, which would have meant that the producers could have faced disciplinary action against their programme by the authorities. This compelled both the Executive Producer and Starhub to take it seriously. However, not all producers shared the same reactions. The post of the screenshot on Starhub’s Facebook page showed that, although it was quickly taken down to control the damage, not all who worked at Starhub treated negative viewer comments the same way. Also, while the Camera Director and Panel Producer complained that audiences restricted their creative freedom and got them in trouble with the IMDA, the Story Producer thought the post provided an opportunity for publicity. Even though the producers worried about audiences, they did so in different ways. In particular, the Executive Producer, although troubled after taking the call informing her about the complaint, did not take action. However, when 16 I did not have a chance to look at the post as it was taken down very quickly.

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the same viewer posted on the programme’s Facebook page, she immediately asked for a visual insert as apology. This suggests that what concerned her more was not just the complaint of one viewer but the complaint being exposed online and the risk of it ‘going viral’. How are we to understand this minor but crucial difference? The importance of the Facebook post over the telephone complaint suggests that, for the Executive Producer, what was of significance was not only the viewer’s opinion about the producers’ conduct but the inscription of that opinion on a publicly accessible platform. The two forms are of distinct natures. The Facebook post served as the breaking point in this case because of its potential for triggering exponentially more and importantly unpredictable feedback online. In a way, the Story Producer’s comment about the potential of ‘fans’ expressing favour of the ghost simulation online also recognizes the importance of this inscription in the power relationship between audiences and producers. However, the networked nature of how online comments work means it would be impossible to predict or manage the energy they could create. If one viewer complaint was still manageable, the potential explosion of comments in online networks was not. This has implications for the way we think about how power works in production in relation to audiences. In an effort to eliminate the potentials of further online comments, producers were compelled to respond early to individual complaints seriously. This meant that producers’ conduct was not just moulded according to normative standards of society (however conceived) but also modulated to somewhat random and unpredictable viewer complaints. In other words, producers were increasingly motivated to act based on individual instances of audience inscriptions as compared to more abstract senses of societal standards. This shifts the power relationship from a dialectical (producers vs. state or producers vs. audience) to a modulatory one. In his writing on the distinction between how power works in control societies and in Foucauldian disciplinary societies, Deleuze wrote: Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous […] what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position – licit or illicit – and effects a universal modulation (Deleuze 1992: 6–7).

In this case, what counted were not some more or less stable normative standard but the tracking – and traceability – of inscribed complaints. This inscription applies not just to online posts but also more broadly to

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viewer complaints to the IMDA. The manner in which power works in this formulation is inherently relational as it depends on whoever complains on specific occasions and on which platforms. In turn, the relational nature of this power relationship then makes it also necessarily shifting and unpredictable. Davies elaborated on the potential temporal consequences of such a model of power. […] control societies blur the distinction between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ conduct, which is so critical to disciplinary societies. ‘Nudges’ based on behavioural economics, for example, do not seek normative rationality, but the right form of irrationality. Crises come to an end. Exceptions, on the other hand, are temporal in nature, but needn’t be time limited, and can endure to the point of permanence. (Davies 2015: 47)

Taken to its logical conclusion, this functioning of power based not on normative rationality but on exceptions, manifested in terms of viewer complaints, can incept into every instance of production that involves any form of producer-audience relationship. The tension between thinking about audiences in terms of normative standards versus individual complaints emerged when I asked the Head Writer (HW) and Panel Producer (PP) to comment on the ghost simulations in separate interviews. HW: Will the audience accept it? I don’t know. You’re placing a wager/ gamble (赌注). PP: Actually the ghost thing, it isn’t bad. But Singapore is too conservative (保守). It works, it works, it can work. It has an alternate/offbeat (另类) publicity effect (宣传效果). It can work but Singapore is too conservative. It’s so easy, so simple, anyone go to MDA to complain and you will get it.

While both the Head Writer and Panel Producer talked about audiences in terms of broad groups as ‘the audience’ and ‘Singapore’, the Panel Producer clearly articulated the tensions that emerges from what they felt about Singaporean audiences as a whole and the individual complaints that constantly disrupt that felt sense. In other words, audiences serve as its own antagonism. The anxieties that come with constantly anticipating unpredictable audiences (‘anyone can go to MDA to complain and you will get it’) are evident from the producers’ sense of helplessness and powerlessness.

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Reality TV depends on the evoking of viewers’ affective reactions to sustain itself. According to Kavka: The relationship between viewer affect and the constructed unmediation of reality programming is thus a reciprocal one; our affective response ‘proves’ that this reality matters (i.e., it must be real if we care so much), while the fact that the actions and faces on screen belong to ‘real’ people serves to justify our having an affective response (i.e., real people give us a reason to care). The feeling guarantees the reality, and the reality justifies the feeling. Reality TV is both compelling and threatening because these programmes bridge the once-firm division between spectacle and experience, between the staged event and actuality, through mediated intimacy. (Kavka 2005: 95)

In this sense, the strong reactions from viewers that the production team received were testament to their achievement. However, the affective responses of the producers say otherwise. Even though the Executive Producer eventually managed to convince Starhub to continue the simulations later that day, the incident clearly had an affective impact on her. When I later asked the Executive Producer about the audience feedback in an interview, she said: We, to be honest with you, have to get used to that […] We are also taken aback by the extreme reaction of the audiences, you know? But if we sit back and look at it, we realize that it’s better we get an extreme reaction than no reaction at all, you know what I mean? […] The ghost one, when people are giving their reaction, at first I was like ‘these people don’t know what the hell they are talking about’, if I was in America they would have called me a phenomenal success! […] In Asia, they criticize but at the end of the day, I know one thing. We were very convincing. They didn’t know if it was real or not real. They were totally confused whether it was real or not real, so have I not achieved something as a producer? For them to be so convinced by it that they have to question whether it was real or not real, and fear for the safety of the contestants! So we have to take a step back and realize, isn’t it every producer’s dream to be so convincing with the story that you can make people cry, laugh, angry, bitter, resentful and now fear?17

In a sense, the Executive Producer rationalized her programming strategy by echoing Kavka’s argument – that Reality TV is compelling and threatening 17 The quote was in English.

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because of its blurring of the boundaries between spectacle and experience. However, her highly defensive tone betrayed her deeper feelings. I was slightly confounded by the affective tone of the Executive Producer when she responded to this question, which differed from the way she answered the other questions. She clearly felt hurt by the viewer responses. Her lament that she got criticized because she was ‘in Asia’, and that ‘it’s better we get an extreme reaction than no reaction at all’ highlighted a sense of powerlessness in dealing with the ‘extreme reaction of the audiences’. This later rationalization of matters by re-emphasizing how she, as a producer, ‘achieved something’ through evoking emotions in audiences was her way of reconciling with and re-articulating her power in a situation where she felt powerless. In my opinion, this affective response is a main product of the zeitgeist of this illiberal state and is productive of the affective tendencies of producers in encounters with viewers to pull back and regain a sense of control. Taken together, producers seemed to wrestle with a dilemma. On the one hand, they interfered with the programme in a number of ways to evoke affective responses from contestants and audiences. On the other hand, they worried about matters getting out of control, and about potential viewer complaints and consecutive actions taken by the IMDA. These concerns were not absolute, however, as the way the IMDA works – through viewer complaints – meant that producers had to work with the volatility that came with their constantly shifting position that was relational to unpredictable audiences. In this sense, the ambiguity that lies at the core of the production makes both the productive and silencing effects incomplete. This anxiety of anticipating the potential complaint of any single viewer, manifested here in the paralyzing struggle between evoking and controlling narrative drama, makes the producers’ work environment resemble that of a Deleuzian control society.

The Pleasures of Discipline and Punishment in a Control Society Since the production team’s efforts at creating affective spectacles were constantly mitigated by producer-audience relations that function like Deleuze’s control society, they shifted their strategy for getting ‘the money shot’ towards the middle of the production period. This new strategy involved emphasizing the disciplinary elements of the programme for dramatic spectacle. Many works have highlighted how Reality TV reflect and reproduce wider social problems by individualizing structural inequalities

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(e.g. Wood & Skeggs 2008). In this section, I not only examine producers’ treatment of discipline (in the Foucauldian sense) but also hope to capture the affective tendencies behind them. These include both the kind of affective spectacles that producers created on screen, and the pleasure that the producers’ derived from that. Through discussing three disciplinary elements18 – surveillance, punishment and examination, I argue that the various affective flows intertwine with wider cultural circuits of value. Surveillance The observational format of the programme whereby contestants were isolated from the outside world in an area monitored constantly by cameras resembles the Panopticon. Even though the actions of contestants were available for all to see, the contestants could not know who was observing them at what times. This system of surveillance is reminiscent of Foucault’s discussion of the Panopticon whereby the prisoner can always see the tower but never knows from where he is being observed, hence inducing effects of disciplinary power (1979: 195–228). In Foucault’s description, however, the prison wardens could only see but not hear. Here, the producers – and 18 While this chapter focuses on the producers’ treatment of the contestants, it is important to note that these practices were situated alongside the producers’ own experiences of the disciplinary power of surveillance. The producers’ performance was constantly monitored not only by the Executive Producer through the ‘live’ broadcast and logs, but often also by other producers who reflected their observations to the Executive Producer or Story Producers. The uncertainty of whom was observing who meant everyone was a possible observer and held disciplinary power. This complicated and expanded sources of discipline exponentially and perhaps suggests the use of disciplinary techniques for increased control over production. I experienced f irst hand, as one of the loggers, surveillance within the production team. An incident showed me that I was watched not only by those who wrote directly to me on the logs, namely the Executive Producer and Story Producers. Two contestants sat in the girls’ bedroom one night to work on their songs together. While I logged that down, I was unable to hear some of their conversations as they spoke softly and therefore did not log down what they said. The next day, the Production Manager asked me why I did not log that conversation and revealed that one of the editors, who were watching the ‘live’ broadcast, noted that I did not log down a conversation that was potentially useful. That editor then notified the Story Producers and Executive Producer about it. One of the Sound Engineers, who happened to be at the meeting with them, commented that sometimes the Camera Director, Panel Producer and loggers could be distracted by chatter amongst themselves. The Camera Director and Panel Producer in question were also given warnings by the Production Manager. The realization that those who watched us extended beyond the Executive Producer and Story Producers made me feel that I had to watch myself because I did not know who was observing me at which times. After that, the chatter among the Camera Director, Panel Producer and myself decreased considerably during broadcast hours.

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audiences to a certain extent – could do both. Hence, it was not just the compulsory visibility of the contestants but also their knowability – and the contrasting un-knowability of those who observed – that had disciplining effects and affects. Reality TV literature has long made the argument that the genre portrays surveillance not as a form of social control but instead associates it with positive values like individualism, self-expression, authenticity and empowerment (Andrejevic 2002, 2004; Deery 2015) in order to acclimatize viewers to increasingly pervasive forms of surveillance. The producers I worked with put a different spin to this one of the weeks during the production. Instead of the usual session with the ‘Principal’ of the Academy on Sundays, a replacement appeared unannounced on set on a weekday morning. He was one of the vocal teachers with a particularly fierce persona on the show, whom I shall call Lee. On his first morning of appearance as replacement principal, Lee strolled quietly into the bedrooms of the contestants, telling the ones who noticed him to keep quiet, before surprising those who had not. Once everyone found out about his arrival, he commanded all the contestants to gather in the living room area within seconds before announcing his role as replacement Principal. As he paced slowly up and down the living room with his hands behind his back, he said authoritatively: I often watch the programme and see many people sleeping during this time. That’s why I specifically requested to come at this time […] So those of you with bad attitudes (态度不好), and bad states of mind/mental attitudes (心态不正), this is going to be terrible for you (糟糕). Anticipate slowly this week. You don’t know when I will appear […] I am watching you at every moment (无时无刻都在看着你).

Having verbally asserted his authority, Lee began his first task. ‘Look at this house!’ he said, ‘it’s in a mess!’ After berating all the contestants, he instructed them to pack their rooms in five minutes, sending the contestants into a frenzy. Counting down the seconds, he marched into the rooms to begin his inspection, throwing items that were not kept neatly out of the room. The contestants were sent scrambling back again to pack up within a minute. Admittedly, Lee’s surprise visit made for spectacular television. This sequence made it into both the daily and weekly highlights segments. I found out later that this was in fact a deliberate programming strategy that Lee had discussed with the creative team. His tactics therefore offer a peculiar glimpse of what producers imagined audiences – and perhaps

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themselves – wanted to see. Notably, this tactic of saying he was watching the contestants ‘at every moment’ and that the contestants never knew when he might appear clearly highlighted the system of surveillance. Even though constant observation was part of the programme format and contestants were aware of it, the fact that he emphasized the surveillance to accentuate himself as a source of judgement and potential punishment is striking. This strategy caused discernible changes in the contestants. In the Confession Room later that day, Zhou, a male Malaysian contestant said: This week I feel a lot of pressure, because I have to maintain vigilance (戒备心) at all times. I have to beware of or be on guard against (隄防), and take note of anything that’s amiss. [Referring to Lee] If he appears suddenly and sees something I didn’t place properly, I will get into trouble again.

Following Lee’s performance, the rest of the teachers also started mentioning that they could monitor the contestants on television that week, using that to warn them against making mistakes. As a result, the contestants started behaving nervously due to the constant surveillance they were under. The day after the surprise visit, while waiting for the morning exercise, three of the male contestants were chatting when Loong brought up the possibility of Lee showing up. Loong: If the Principal came in now, my life would end (我的半条命 就完了). Zhou: Hey, don’t scare (吓) us like that.19 19 Incidentally, both Zhou (Malaysian) and Loong (PRC), the two who most overtly expressed how they were affected by the episode, were not Singaporean. This raises the questions of how the replacement Principal’s actions differ from the way the Singaporean authorities (government, police, intelligence services) operate, and to what extent this re-enacted what it was like to be Singaporean. I highlight two personal anecdotes that are interesting. I visited a protest against the government’s White Paper during my fieldwork. In Singapore, protest organizers are legally obliged to obtain permits from the police and restrict their speakers only to Singaporeans. During the protest I attended, a man in the crowd started shouting in front of the stage in the middle of a speech. The speaker’s invitation for the man to express his opinions met with verbal requests from others in the crowd for the man to show his Identity Card to prove he was Singaporean. It struck me how extensively Singaporeans were aware of and expected government surveillance on the occasion. Also, during a panel in the London Southeast Asian Festival, for which I was invited to speak about censorship in Singapore, the organizers anticipated the presence of undercover agents from the Internal Security Department. They also decided against broadcasting the panel discussion to audiences in Singapore through Skype. This took me by surprise, as we were a small panel located in London, which I did not expect would provoke the interest of the Singaporean

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After the morning exercise, Loong again commented in his bedroom, ‘Principal, please don’t come here. If he comes here, my mental state will collapse!’ Not long after, Lee promptly showed up on the set and walked into Loong’s bedroom. Standing behind Loong, Lee asked ‘How are you?’ Visibly shocked, Loong replied, ‘I’m afraid of/fear/dread (怕) seeing you!’ Lee smiled and shouted for all the contestants to gather in the living room. He proceeded to give Loong a scolding for not wearing shoes to exercise in the morning, demonstrating that he was indeed watching. ‘I didn’t intend to come today’, he joked, ‘but you’ve been calling my name since the morning, so I came’. How are we to understand and frame what Lee was doing? He purposely emphasized and made sure contestants knew the power of the surveillance system. Not only did he say, ‘I am watching you at every moment’, he demonstrated it by appearing at the Academy because Loong had been talking about him all morning. Furthermore, Lee was also not the only teacher in the Academy that emphasized the observation apparatus. Particularly towards the middle and end of the series, many instructors often mentioned they could monitor everything the contestants did on television. In this case, Lee’s and the other teachers’ conduct on the programme were telling. While the observational apparatus enabled the inducement of disciplinary power on the contestants, what is striking is how the production team (which the teachers were a part of) explicitly emphasized the surveillance to the contestants. This treatment of surveillance and the affective responses evoked in contestants in the programme looks very different from the portrayal of surveillance as self-empowerment, authenticity and expression in other Reality TV contexts. In this sense, their intentional departure from Reality TV conventions point to the pleasure taken by producers – and also their imagined pleasure in audiences – in the display and assertion of disciplinary power on the contestants, and the emotional effects evoked in them. In other words, they hint at their desire to create, and the pleasure they took in creating, affective spectacle through imposing power. Punishment This strategy to create dramatic spectacle by emphasizing the surveillance apparatus to discipline the contestants worked together with another aspect government. These two incidents suggest that the assumption of government surveillance may be more commonly held – and accepted – among Singaporeans than I expected. This could then possibly have a correlation with the fact that the two contestants in the Academy that expressed their unease most explicitly were not Singaporean and had not spent much time in the country at the time.

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of the production – punishment for deviation. The way Lee treated the contestants – scolding and sending them scrambling to tidy up their rooms –was intentionally crafted to resemble disciplinary exercises in the military. When Lee visited without warning, he announced to the contestants: This week, I am your replacement Principal. I don’t like to be called Principal (院长). I like to be called drillmaster/instructor (教官). So call me hot and spicy drillmaster/instructor (麻辣教官) […] While I am on the job, abide by my rules (规矩).

He proceeded to set several rules, including that all contestants had to run on the treadmill for at least 30 to 45 minutes daily, and that they had to be ready in the classroom fifteen minutes before every class. ‘Everyone listen up’, he advised, ‘you don’t want to be punished by me. Really, it is no fun’. The effects of these rules showed the day after. One of the male contestants, whom I shall call Ian, would usually get up early every morning and wake everyone up. However, many of the contestants tended to show up late to the early morning exercise class. On this morning, in response to Lee’s new rules, everyone woke up early to get ready for the class. The four male contestants sat in the classroom fifteen minutes before the teacher arrived as they were instructed. On the other hand, the three female contestants arrived slightly later. In the 30-minute edited daily highlights, the programme host narrated: This morning, everyone woke up early to get ready for class fifteen minutes before. This is all thanks to the responsible Ian […] Under the leadership (带领) of Ian, the boys were ready for exercise early. In comparison, the girls were less organized (组织性) and were much later than the boys.

Lee made a surprise visit later in the morning and berated the female contestants for not being ready at the venue fifteen minutes prior to the start of exercise class. Lee’s preference for being called a ‘drillmaster/instructor’ rather than ‘Principal’ suggests a shift from the educational and governing role of a Principal to a focus on the implementation of rules and drills. This points to a militarization of the Academy. The rules that regulated contestants’ activities during the day (including sleep schedule, exercise time, and classes) exercised power over the contestants through the economization and arrangement of their time. Such an economization by setting specific amounts of time – fifteen minutes before each class; 45 minutes on the treadmill – towards which contestants had to attain daily, provided both a

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regulation of activity and a standard, which if breached, equated to deviancy or disobedience. The fact that the girls were berated showed that the rules offered a measure of comparison amongst the contestants. Ian had always been the earliest one to wake up amongst the male contestants and had woken the other contestants up often before the rule was set. However, the existence of the rule accentuated his ‘leadership’ because his morning habits coincided with the new rule. Conversely, even though the female contestants were not late to exercise class, the rule highlighted them as ‘less organized’. In this sense, the rules to control sleep patterns, punctuality and exercise durations down to the number of minutes provided a means of measurement of the contestants. By setting rules for correct conduct, Lee was then also able to threaten punishment for deviancy from them. One incident was particularly memorable. On the second day of the week of Lee’s reign as replacement principal, Zhou and Loong misplaced the lyrics score sheet for the song they were meant to learn that week. They spent the morning scrambling around in a panic to find the lyrics with no success. The two contestants showed up at their vocal class meekly hoping nobody had noticed that, but Lee knew. Holding new printouts of the song lyrics in his hands, he chided the two contestants in the classroom before taking them to the living room. ‘You have to be punished for misplacing your song lyrics’, Lee said, before promptly announcing that the two contestants were to do fifty repetitions of squats each while saying ‘I will not forget to bring my lyrics’ and ‘I will not misplace my things’. The two contestants were visibly shocked. Turning to look at each other, they were not sure if this was a joke. ‘What are you waiting for?’ Lee shouted, which jerked the two contestants into beginning their fifty repetitions. In the manner resembling a military trainer, Lee shouted at the two contestants while they did their squats, making them say the lines louder and repeat when they failed to say the exact words. When the contestants finished their fifty repetitions, Lee threatened to increase the repetitions to one hundred and fifty if they did it again before sending them running back to the class in shame. For me, what was curious was where this spectacular display of punishment occurred. Lee deliberately took the two contestants out to a separate room for the punishment. This suggests that the exercises, rather than used as a warning for other contestants, were meant more as a spectacle for audiences. Beyond the punishment sequence, the contestants’ compliance with and deviance from Lee’s rules, in particular the daily exercise routine, became the focus of the broadcast, especially during ‘downtime’. For Foucault, this normalization is a key part of disciplinary power that

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‘produces subjected and practiced bodies, “docile” bodies’ (Foucault 1979: 137–138). It was a question both of making the slightest departures from correct behaviour subject to punishment, and of giving a punitive function to the apparently indifferent elements of the disciplinary apparatus; so that, if necessary, everything might serve to punish the slightest thing; each subject finds himself caught in a punishable, punishing universality’ (Foucault 1979: 178).

Not only did exercise become an apparatus of discipline, punishment and measurement of conformity, the demeaning exhibition of exercise in the form of rather juvenile punishment as spectacle for audiences gave ‘a punitive function to the apparently indifferent elements of the disciplinary apparatus’ (1979: 178). The surveillance of cameras, seemingly indifferent before, therefore became another part of the disciplinary apparatus by constantly watching for deviancy, and threatening further punishment. This may seem counter-intuitive in a programme where both singing competition and reality elements seek to expose the uniqueness of the contestants. In this sense, the programme provided insight into a reality singing competition with a distinctly Singaporean twist – where homogenization and conformity were celebrated, and discipline and punishment were presumed to evoke pleasure. How did the programme explain these disciplinary techniques? In the daily highlights programme, the host narrated: ‘The replacement Principal may seem to show no mercy (毫不留情), but his whip/spur on (鞭策) has reason/sense (道理). Everyone will slowly understand the implied meaning (含义) behind it’. Even though the daily highlights programme downplayed the pleasure taken in spectacular punishment and highlighted instead the implied meaning behind such displays of disciplinary power, several other ‘surprises’ were arranged – and talked about excitedly by producers – that had little ‘reason/sense’ or ‘implied meaning’. For instance, producers arranged for a late night workout session in addition to the morning exercise classes as a way to shock the contestants. However, the surprise failed due to the lack of communication between the creative team and the production team, resulting in the production team notifying the contestants of the class beforehand. The Executive Producer flew into a rage because of it, and subsequent meetings were arranged to discuss it. In these cases, what were the surprises and shocks supposed to achieve? Again, the desire to control elements of the programme, and to provoke reactions and responses from

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the contestants, point to the pleasure in creating spectacle through the imposition of power. Dean has argued for the centrality of pleasure in Foucault’s work on power relations and biopower with what he later called ‘an erotics of discipline’ (Dean 2012: 481). In the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1990), Foucault wrote about the ‘perpetual spirals of power and pleasure […] pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power’ (1990: 45). So is what we are witnessing here the kind of affective spectacle that producers imagined give audiences – and themselves – pleasure? One way of thinking about this is perhaps to consider how this pleasure in exercising disciplinary power on contestants worked alongside the producers’ sense of powerlessness in their subjection to audience power. In practice, these ‘spirals of power and pleasure’ involving different power relationships between producers, contestants and audiences were shifting and fleeting. In anticipation of potential audience responses, the creative team advised Lee to soften his disciplinary tactics after a mere few days. A producer20 whom I interviewed after the production ended commented on the way the production team dealt with this episode. P: If you want to do military style, you have to make it really extreme, go on newspapers everyday, get cursed at/scolded ( 骂) by people. This is another effect (效果). This is another way of doing it […] You cannot do something of no consequence/ without any bite (无关痛痒), you cannot do middle (中间), you cannot do a little bit. If you want to do it, you have to do the extreme. The thing is, if you’re not extreme, you don’t have the impact. If you don’t have the impact, why would people watch? But they [referring to the rest of the producers] cannot take it. Remember the week they asked Lee to come? Two days later, on Thursday, they already told him to tone down. They are very afraid/worried/fearful (怕)! Author: Of what? P: Of getting scolded/cursed (骂) by people, that people will complain. Even the Production Manager. She came and said ‘please ask him, the punishment cannot go too extreme […] [referring to the exercise repetitions] They think that that one is punishment. 20 I omitted the producer’s job title here as these comments may potentially be sensitive.

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It’s not even punishment, it’s kid’s punishment! I’m not using a cane to hit them! They are afraid/worried/fearful (怕)!

This producer evidently sees herself as different from the rest of the producers, whom according to her, were ‘afraid/worried/fearful’ of going ‘too extreme’ despite their desire for spectacular punishment. In her reading of the situation, it is interesting that she attributed producers’ worries to both ‘getting scolded/cursed’ and complaints. Her mention of ‘getting scolded/cursed’ before complaints suggests that producers considered it of equal, if not greater, importance compared to the potential punishment of complaints. In practice, the line between being scolded and complaints is likely blurred. As a means of inducing self-policing, it is not difficult to imagine how scolding voices as an abstract notion could easily lead to official complaints. The implication is then that producers were afraid of inducing negative sentiments in audiences, and therefore both desired and worried about the ‘effect’ and ‘impact’ that the ‘military style’ punishment might have on audiences. What emerges again is the tendency in producers to create or provoke reactions in audiences but also pull back. In this case, that tendency to ‘tone down’ was articulated by the producer clearly in affective terms. What is striking is that, even with disciplinary techniques that gave producers relatively more control when creating dramatic effect, producers were afraid of being ‘too extreme’ and highlighted not merely viewer complaints but also any negative reactions among audiences as to be feared. This fear of unfavourable responses meant that producers were trapped in a no-win situation of being either subjected to the backlash of vocal minorities when provoking reactions, or creating un-impactful versions of dramatic spectacles by avoiding any situation that potentially invited negative responses. In the ‘perpetual spirals of power and pleasure’, producers were caught between a rock and a hard place. While Foucault’s work on power emphasized practices of pleasure rather than pleasure as an affect or a principle, I would like to reflect on the affective dimension of my own experience of this episode. For a long time, I struggled to articulate why the creative team appeared to be so emotionally invested in attempts to surprise or discipline contestants in seemingly inconsequential ways. The writing up process helped me think through the underlying issues by reflecting on my own affective experience. Working on a ‘live’ Reality TV programme often felt emotionally and mentally straining because we had to manage and control contestants’ erratic conduct on the one hand and anticipate unpredictable audiences on the other. The ‘live’

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format of the programme increased the anxieties I felt and my eventual fatigue since we were on edge at all times over an extended period. On hindsight, I feel like perhaps in the context where we were subjected to audiences’ policing power, which worked in a more decentralized, shifting and relational manner resembling that of Deleuze’s control society, reverting to imposing a Foucauldian model of disciplinary power felt quite comforting. This could go some way to explain the pleasure producers felt in exercising disciplinary power on contestants amidst their subjection to unpredictable audiences. At the same time, this strategy also speaks to the producers’ projection of what their imagined audiences derived pleasure from watching. And in that case, if Loong’s emotional outbursts of anger were deemed the wrong type of affective display, were fear and shock when submitting to authority and discipline the correct type of affective spectacles instead? This raises questions about whether this affective episode – and practice – was testament to the imagined or felt zeitgeist of this illiberal state. Examination – Censoring Audiences? According to Foucault, ‘the success of disciplinary power derives no doubt from the use of simple instruments; hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment and their combination in a procedure that is specif ic to it, the examination’ (Foucault 1979: 170). Foucault’s third instrument of discipline, the examination, manifested in the programme as the weekly concert, which provided the occasion for the arranging, differentiating and judging of contestants under observation. This culminated in the announcement of the weekly result the morning after the concert, during which the principal went through the performances and rankings of each contestant, before announcing the one with the lowest score for the week. In other words, the examination of the programme manifested as its competition element. This element of the discipline created problems for the production team, however, because it took power out of their control and put it into the hands of voting viewers. Unlike the f irst two elements of disciplinary power, the examination instrument brought little pleasure. The involvement of viewers in this element of the programme opened the production up to the different issues they had to deal with as part of the work of maintaining the social imaginary of an illiberal capitalist democracy. To manage the potential risks of audience voting, the production team departed from the original programme format to build in judges’ scores to

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make up 30 per cent of the contestants’ total marks, while audience votes made up 70 per cent. According to the Executive Producer: It goes back to the fact that we are a very kiasu21 society and that as a first season you don’t know, your audiences are not trained yet to be able to make the right decisions sometimes. So there’s just a small little bolster of precaution to have industry expert decision making up 30 per cent […] It’s about not giving the audience too much power […] We don’t know how they will react so we just put it in there […] It’s like censorship! Just in case, you know what I mean, they make all the wrong decisions.22

Kiasu is a Singlish term commonly used in both daily conversations and news reports in Singapore. It can refer to a several conditions. According to singlishdictionary.com, when used as an adjective, it generally defines as ‘afraid of losing out to someone’. However, it could also mean ‘play safe’; ‘used to describe a person, commonly a government official, who is rigidly over-cautious and unprepared to take any risk’; ‘scared to lose’; ‘to be scared to fail’; or ‘overly competitive’23 (2014 ‘Kiasu’ B.a.). In this context, the Executive Producer probably used the term to mean ‘playing safe’ and avoiding risk. In representing the competition design as ‘not giving the audience too much power’, she articulated the need to be ‘safe’ from audience power. If voting in reality shows in Western democracies is ‘demotic’ (Turner 2010) and meant to distract viewers from their lack of engagement in the larger political sphere through a false sense of empowerment (Deery 2015: 166), the production team’s ‘censorship’ of what they perceive as the untrained (‘your audiences are not trained yet’) and unpredictable (‘we don’t know how they will react’) voting audience suggests that even the pseudo democratic power of viewers in a Reality TV show had to be guarded against. On the flip side, producers also had to manage away the contradictions between ideals of meritocracy and popular voting. Throughout the broadcast, the contestants were explicitly forbidden from discussing the competition, but the team could do little to stop viewers from doing so. In one particular 21 The word is a Singlish term describing a person as ‘afraid of losing out to someone’ (singlishdictionary.com 2014) and originated from the Chinese term literally translated as ‘afraid/ fear of losing’ (怕输). 22 Recorded interview with the Executive Producer on 26 August 2012. This quote was given in English. 23 ‘Overly competitive’ is quite different from the other definitions provided, which suggests that kiasu is a description of certain traits imagined as held among Singaporeans rather than a term with a coherent set of references.

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incident during the competition, one of the contestants’ father’s posted on his Facebook page expressing disappointment because, despite spending what he deemed a considerable sum of money to vote for his son, he still had the lowest number of votes that week. The contestant’s father, who was a lowly paid worker, wrote that he was going to give up on the competition because he simply could not afford voting every week on his meagre salary. The post contained angry comments about the unfairness of the competition, alleging that it based the results not on talent but on the wealth of family and friends. That post was quickly deleted from the broadcaster’s Facebook page.24 The production team’s silencing of class from discussions about the competition was cognate and intentional in this case. This reminds of how producers of the game shows in Chapter Two performed decontextualized competition and suggests producers’ anxieties about revealing the limitations of meritocracy, which is one of the founding myths of Singapore’s social imaginary. In between controlling audience power and maintaining the appearance of free contest, the team produced a stage-managed competition. The producers’ anxieties about competition stem from their different imagined roles in relation to audiences. They had to shield audiences from the limits of their own unrealized power, train them to make the ‘right’ decisions, and maintain the cultural ideal of meritocracy for audiences despite their distrust of it. In the context of producers’ self-policing through imagined ideas about audiences, these practices targeted at audiences are not insignificant. They produce a vicious cycle whereby the protection of audiences from the realities of their own power perpetuates ideas about the untrained and unpredictable audience as Other, leading to further instances of self-policing based on the potential responses of these imagined audiences. In this sense, this disciplinary instrument meant for the contestants ended up disciplining producers.

Reflections This chapter was an account of how power worked in a Reality TV programme, with the analysis guided by the affective flows of the producers. In the absence of established ways of producing Reality TV, the producers I worked with largely ‘felt’ their way through the work. Their practices were therefore revealing about the affective tendencies that intertwine with 24 I read it on the laptop when a colleague showed it to me at work, but by the time I could try to search for it again at the end of the workday, it was gone.

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wider cultural circuits of value. In particular, I broadly borrowed Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power alongside Deleuze’s writing on control societies to work through these affects – safety and precaution, anxiety and control, and pleasure and discipline – and the ways in which audiences as ‘affective superaddressee’ can be productive. The many roles of audiences, underlined by a media and censorship system that gives voice and power to a vocal conservative minority through complaints, placed producers in an impossible position of having to satisfy, please and not offend different sectors of audiences that were imagined in different ways and that all had easy access to potentially punish them (through lack of ratings or complaints). What emerges is a group of producers that desired and worked to provoke reactions from audiences, but at the same time, was afraid of the responses given, whether through complaints, feedback, or votes. Underlying these are at least two different imaginations of audiences. When entertaining viewers with drama or ‘effect’, producers imagined them as easily offended. In engaging with them for the competition results, they thought of audiences as unpredictable and untrained. Taken together, producers dealt with an imagined audience that was incredibly difficult to address and built a producer-audience relationship that was increasingly based on instances of (actual or potential) viewer complaints. Modulations of producers’ conduct based on continuous, contextually dependent, and often highly subjective exceptions to the rule make production work in the manner resembling Deleuze’s ‘control’, whereby power is decentralized and based on shifting and unpredictable sources. This can have an affective impact on producers. As I reflected on my own experience working on the production, these anticipatory anxieties were draining over extended periods of time. Having to work under such circumstances, it was little wonder that the pleasure of exercising disciplinary power on contestants then provided instances of respite from what felt like emotional and mental fatigue. These affective tendencies are suggestive about what kinds of affective spectacles were assumed allowed and which were not. The pleasure taken in the military style of disciplining contestants and the anxiety about losing control over Loong’s emotional outbursts suggest that the right affective displays consist of fear, deference to authority and self-discipline, as opposed to organic outbursts, critique and anger. In a sense, these affects reflect the zeitgeist of Singapore in ways consistent with important cultural, social and political trends, hence explaining not just the pleasure producers took in imposing discipline but their assumption of viewers’ pleasure. However, that pleasure is always incomplete and needing to be censored, as evident

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from the central tension that runs across the chapter whereby the producers clearly struggled between allowing and encouraging dramatic elements, and controlling them. In wishing to avoid contestants who were tame and quiet as against disobedient and unmanageable; and bored audiences versus their ‘extreme’ reactions, what producers ended up with was controlled pseudo-, or stage-managed, controversy. In a genre of television that thrives on producing scandals, controversies and affective spectacles, what type of spectacle did the producers create? Traditionally, conceptualizations of spectacles comprise of mediated visual excess and sensations (Debord’s 2004: 1; Inden 2013: 498). The production process of this show, however, reveals the irony of its supposed spectacles. These were reprocessed and evacuated of what producers deemed could affect the senses, whether by offending or creating controversy, in order to avoid potential complaints and be ‘safe’. What remained was emptied-out spectacle. And these emptied-out spectacles also empty the genre – meant to portray some semblance of reality – of its potential for rupturing our myths and social imaginaries, thereby preserving the status quo and perpetuating authoritarian resilience.

Reflections Abstract This epilogue accounts for the time that has passed since the ethnographies. Using materials from in-depth interviews conducted between 2018 and 2020, I reflect on the implications of how audience power is shifting from the background to the foreground in producers’ articulations and revisit the idea of audiences as affective superaddressee in the context of increasing digitalization and audience fragmentation. Keywords: Focus groups; Affective superaddressee; Audience panopticon; Audience fragmentation

I am sitting amidst Christmas decorations in one of the restaurants in MediaCorp in December 2019 with Michael,1 the head of the organization’s compliance department. This was meant to be a casual conversation over lunch in order for me to catch up on any changes in the industry that has occurred over the past few years. As we go through our salads, pastas and multiple coffees, Michael spends the bulk of our meal detailing the steps that he takes whenever there are complaints over MediaCorp’s programmes. Reflecting on what he feels is an increasingly aware and sensitive audience over the years, he grumbled, ‘It’s so easy to write in, you know? Just tweet or put it on Facebook. You don’t have to call even, you know? Just write something online, somebody picks it up, that’s it, it goes viral […] They may not be complaining to you. They just write […] what their opinion is about something and then IMDA will see it and then they will start to investigate […] You have to answer to the bosses, you have to answer to your management […] and also sometimes it goes as high as our chairman, you know? Sometimes […] people will write their complaint letter and then they will CC the Prime Minister’s Office!’ 1

I use synonyms for all my informants in this book.

Fong, Siao Yuong, Performing Fear in Television Production: Practices of an Illiberal Democracy, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463724579_refl

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It is apparent to me in my field visits between 2018 and 2020 that the issue of viewer complaints has become much more pronounced, at least in the rhetoric of my informants. Despite repeatedly hearing about these incidents from various producers, I often still find myself surprised by them. During my lunch with Michael, he mentioned a variety of different complainants ranging from individual viewer members who threaten to file police reports; to schools’ legal teams; to religious associations and animal welfare organizations. As he recounted these various examples with rigour, as if to convey his incredulity, I silently wondered what this shift from quiet anxiety to vocal expression entailed. It does not help that the identities of the complainants are not always revealed. ‘It could be anyone’, Michael exclaimed. ‘It could be a competitor, it could be past employees of the company who have an axe to grind […] I mean it could be a genuine concern from the public as well, of course. But we don’t know, we don’t know the identity’. Just then, I noticed a change in his eyes, as though a thought suddenly occurred to him. He stopped answering my questions and started asking me about what I did at the office and who attended the talks I gave. Upon my reassurance that my research was for academic purposes, he admitted that he was worried about the media picking up on the details of his censorship work. He quickly qualified that none of what he was saying was really sensitive or problematic, but he would feel more comfortable if the media did not know about any of the details. This was when the extent of, and the affect of, Michael’s anticipatory paranoia really struck me. It is a strange reality to be confronted with, this sense of passivity, to be perpetually reactive. I ended the lunch conversation with a question I like to ask all of my interviewees. ‘Do you enjoy your work?’ I queried casually. He looked at me and smiled tiredly, ‘No, not really […] Over the years, I have gotten a lot of white hair’.

Performing Fear I focused on television production practices in this book to argue that the production culture of an illiberal capitalist democracy like Singapore can be understood through the idea of ‘performing fear’. In the first sense, producers engaged in a variety of practices, such as playing it safe, rejecting ambiguity, establishing boundaries and denying antagonisms in their attempts to create performances of meritocracy, competition, heritage, and so on, in their media representations. These may be varying, incoherent

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or contradictory at times, but they contributed to the assemblages of performances through which state-sponsored ideas about Singapore that were largely framed through lenses of fear emerged. These practices that in the first instance continually reconstitute fear as the state’s ideological framing of Singapore also performatively constitute ideas about Singaporean audiences. This then relates to the second sense of the performance of fear. The complex intersections of state, institutional and creative imaginations of audiences, constantly interrupted by the actuality of viewer complaints in an illiberal environment with little tolerance for plurality of media opinion materialize audiences as an all-encompassing anxiety inducing figure. I developed the concept of audiences as affective superaddressee to carve out its contours as manifested in daily production practice. Crucially, the sensitivities and secrecy around audiences facilitate conservative minorities imposing their power on producers. In many cases, the corresponding anxieties engendered resulted in producers playing it safe by producing overly conservative content. Experiences of what can seem like the increasing volatility of the social then leads to more attempts to control or manage it through self-policing, thereby resulting in a vicious cycle in television production that reproduces the fearful media, the censorious state and the unpredictable and conservative audience. In this second sense, these practices performatively perpetuate fear. While the chapters in this book can be read separately as production ethnographies of different programmes, together they form different pieces of the puzzle of authoritarian resilience in Singapore’s media. Starting with an analysis of the state’s biopolitical governance, Chapter One detailed the dominant myths that formulate Singapore’s imaginary and how these myths led to the structural and ideological constraints of its media industry, including its linguistic (and by extension ethnic) divisions; limitations of media plurality; structural sensitivities to complaints; and practices of secrecy around viewer information. Chapters Two to Five examined the production practices that result. Chapter Two focused on the practices that emerged from the ideological aspects of illiberalism. As a consequence of the state’s compulsory homogenization and racialization of Singapore’s social, the game show producers in Chapter Two engaged in a series of practices to deny and avoid the antagonisms of Singaporean society. These include representing Singapore’s heritage in strikingly vacuous ways to the point of heritage being an empty signif ier; and covert practices of obscuring elements of inequality to perform the ‘effect’ of competitiveness. In the process, producers conjured up Singaporeans as empty subjects by imagining

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viewers along racial and linguistic lines while suturing the tensions and diversity within them, which producers in Singapore were not allowed to discuss or self-reflect on. In constructing a Singaporean subject that is emptied of antagonisms, producers perpetuate a vicious cycle whereby the ignoring or suturing of differences within ethnic categories only creates more uncertainties in terms of the vast amount of different ways viewers could react. This ideological manoeuvre made audiences highly unpredictable for producers since their actual encounters with viewers will always be in excess of any constructed totality. Chapter Three examined the institutional, state and market dimensions of illiberalism through their manifestations in how corresponding constructed audience fictions interacted with producers’ arbitrary encounters with individual viewers through complaints in drama writing practices, conjuring a Singaporean audience that is empty, unpredictable and essentially un-addressable. The unpredictability built into this media system within an illiberal context makes it fertile ground for affective logic and responses to accompanying anxieties. Chapters Four and Five explored how that enabled authoritarian resilience in two different instances that presented opportunities for resistance, whether through the affective construction of the ‘Chinese’ audience as difference that quelled challenges to the status quo (Chapter Four); or through the insidious shaping of the pleasures and fears of carving out the terrains for a new genre (Chapter Five). By examining audiences as the central problematic through which producers worked out antagonisms of society and negotiated their anxieties, this book offers an account of authoritarian resilience that departs from state power (as commonly assumed in disciplinary or governmentality models) and that focuses on the potentialities of audiences as a tool of control. Through detailing everyday practices of producers, my key claim in the book is that the state and its censorship system constitute the condition rather than the problem of everyday production. The particular situation in Singapore is enabled by both the ideological and interventionist aspects of state illiberalism, which provides the conditions of possibility for audiences as a distorted manifestation of populism to underlie production work. This worked through the mechanisms and techniques of the politics of affect (Anderson 2012) that targeted the affective capacities of producers (Chapter Three and Four) and enabled collective affects such as the fear of any form of dissent and complaints to become part of the conditions for control. I have drawn on Deleuze’s work on societies of control to understand how power works through the inability for producers to know what exactly

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they might be doing wrong – decentralized and based on temporal exceptions to the rule. However, by no means do I wish to imply Singapore as a control society imposed by an authoritarian state that functions autopilot through strategic ambiguity. Nor do I mean to suggest that Singapore has been emptied of normative rationality. Rather, I have attempted through this book to paint a picture of how power in the media works through complex congeries of practices; practices that do not exist in vacuum but form complex relationships with the media system. As is the relational nature of the politics of affect, ‘there’s an objective degree of freedom even in the most deterministic system’ (Massumi 2015: 17). Returning to my initial question of whether audiences can become surrogate for the strong state in disciplining its media, through showing how audiences as affective superaddressee perpetuate authoritarian resilience, the book not only illustrates the blurring boundaries between the state and non-state, but also how intermediaries are often most effective when discursively distanced from the state, thereby recreating the image of a coherent state entity. It is this distancing of the state from the everyday work of media control that continues to legitimize the illiberal state and its practices amidst the hegemony of liberalism. These raise the larger questions about whether states can harness the productivity of desire (the multitudes of differences) that capitalism exploits as a way of controlling the media and its producers, and in turn, whether there is a blurring of the lines between capitalist and state forces. Since my fieldwork, we have witnessed global trends towards anti-fandom (Click 2019), increasing online harassment, citizen policing and surveillance society (Reeves 2017). How can we think through the relationships between state, society and media governmentality as mediated by technology on a more global level while grounded in specific contexts? Perhaps invitations from the field of affect theory to change our frameworks of understanding politics from power structures, strategic intentions and outcomes, to the modulatory and relational techniques and processes that underlie situated encounters can shift how we consider what constitutes political power and consequently freedom.

Who’s Watching? My main argument in the book is that audiences serve as a key piece of the puzzle of authoritarian resilience in Singapore’s media. The approach to audiences that I take in this book departs from conventional

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accounts that treat audiences as locus (as container of identity, culture, knowledge or belonging) and moves towards thinking about audiences as nexus – as the modulations and contestations of connections and links between and among spaces and relations. 2 In the rest of this chapter, I would like to reflect on how we can think about the work that audiences, when approached this way, do as well as consider some more recent developments. The Audience Panopticon At the risk of sounding pedestrian, it is perhaps interesting here to reconsider Foucault’s metaphor of the panopticon prison. Unlike producers’ interactions with the authorities or MediaCorp, which are often based on actual relationships with individual off icials, producers’ encounters with audiences prove more elusive and sporadic. So can we think of producers as always being subjected to permanent visibility by some unknown source known as audiences? How does power work in media production through audiences? Given the nature of audiences that is inherently ambiguous and opaque, audiences in a sense are very effective as the invisible observer in the panopticon prison, observing producers who are permanently visible. I would like to consider the analogy of visibility that is inherent to the model of panopticism. Foucault’s original model emphasizes only on the realm of visibility that governs the bodies and actions of the prisoners but not what they say or think. However, Deleuze in his book on Foucault talks about not just the visible but also the articulable in panopticism. When Foucault def ines Panopticism, either he specif ically sees it as an optical or luminous arrangement that characterizes prison, or he views it abstractly as a machine that not only affects visible matter in general […] but also in general passes through every articulable function. So the abstract formula of Panopticism is no longer ‘to see without being seen’ but to impose a particular conduct on a particular human multiplicity […] The list is endless, but it is always concerned with unformed and unorganized matter and unformalized, unfinalized 2 I borrow the analogy of audiences as locus versus nexus from Marwan Kraidy, who raised it during a seminar on ‘Decolonizing Approaches to Users and Audiences in the Global South’ organized on 25 February 2022 by the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) at the University of Westminster.

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functions, the two variables being indissolubly linked (Deleuze 1988: 33–34).

If extended to producers, the power of panopticism works not just as producers and their work as ‘visible matter’ but also producers and their work as ‘articulable function’. In other words, how ideas about audiences may impact on producers involves not just producers’ practices of imagining how audiences may respond, but also how they imagine and articulate what their work is and their function as media producers. In this sense, how audiences come to crowd the scenes of production therefore involve at least three sets of practices – producers imagining audiences, producers imagining themselves, and audiences imagining other audiences – all of which are situated and relational. Tensions between institutional and production accounts, and audience actualities run across all three sets of practices. In the case of the independent producers studied in this book, audiences serve at least four functions: as ratings; as human subjects (imagined in all sorts of ways); as discursive tool; and as an extension of the authorities or vice versa. The functions are not unproblematic neither. When it comes to the process of reducing audiences to ratings, the independent producers are constantly subjected to MediaCorp’s internal changes in measurements and withholding of rating information. There also seems to be an increasing collapse of the lines between the various functions (between the masses as audience and the masses as censor for instance). As an invisible f iction, audiences in Singapore are ideologically conjured as linguistically organized, emptied of antagonisms and temporally swinging between mass and niche. This conjured audience runs in tension to how it is experienced by producers on a daily basis, which is that of unpredictability, unknowability and always potentially punishing. When it trickles down to independent producers, even the content of complaints are often not specif ied. Frustratingly, the mere existence of complaints makes it a serious enough matter for everyone involved. The incoherence between how audiences are conjured and uncertainties of how audiences are experienced present the key tension in the book, essentially rendering audiences as affective superaddressee. What results is a form of power that operates similar to Deleuze’s ‘control societies’ that moves beyond discipline or governmentality to modulate producers’ behaviour based on constantly shifting standards. A line often repeated from my conversations with producers is that ‘it could be anyone’. It could be anyone on the other side of the audience panopticon, indeed.

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Of Data and the Return to Mass I, nobody, can imagine anything today. Things are just changing […] it’s a very stressful conversation and […] I cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel. – Interview with a senior member of MediaCorp’s management in 2019

Coming back to Singapore in 2018, the independent producers tell me about the many changes they have experienced in their working relationship with MediaCorp. Complaining about the lack of clarity regarding how ratings are measured in times of digitalization, one of the directors lamented, ‘they always change the rules, what can we do?’ Another director chipped in and commented, ‘nobody knows what’s going on in Mediacorp! Nobody knows’. The producers’ sense of helplessness and resignation towards the many structural changes happening beyond their control was clear, but I had to figure out what was going on behind these laments. Increasingly, the industry struggles with the audience problematic. Compared to my fieldwork between 2012 and 2014, my informants spoke about audiences as a problem much more frequently and in clearly affective tones in my more recent conversations with them. As the senior member of MediaCorp’s management quoted above admitted to me in 2019, MediaCorp is plagued by a sense of fatigue, and he felt that the industry no longer has a good understanding of its audiences. Both the IMDA and MediaCorp have responded by implementing structural changes to the industry in various attempts at tackling the audience problematic. Ironically, producers are not the only ones subjected to MediaCorp’s secrecy about its viewer data. Perhaps as a response to years of difficulties in obtaining comprehensive audience data about their own PSB funded content, the IMDA embarked on a costly commission of its own television audience measurement system called SG-TAM. The system that launched in 2016 was designed to provide a comparative standard of measuring the performance of the main television platforms available in Singapore for the benefit of the industry. Paradoxically, this information remains in the hands of network management and out of the knowledge realms of individual producers. For MediaCorp as an institution, the audience problematic is always tied to decreasing viewership and advertising revenue. In their attempt to combat increasing digitalization and audience fragmentation, MediaCorp relaunched their OTT platform and entered a phase where they experimented with commissioning niche content for targeted viewer groups for a few years after my main ethnographic fieldwork. This went beyond channel or platform specific commissioning teams to identifying defined profiles of market

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segments such as the ‘parents with kids track’ or the ‘millennia track’. For two to three years, MediaCorp produced a flurry of content featuring YouTubers and social media influencers in an attempt to attract younger viewers. However, the financial unsustainability of this model, combined with efforts to reinvent MediaCorp as a transmedia network, saw its return to consolidated commissioning by language in 2018. Constrained by Singapore’s small audience market and its status as national broadcaster, MediaCorp moved back to institutionally imagining audiences as masses organized linguistically and the problems that come with it as detailed in this book. This return to ‘producing for everyone’ is marked by MediaCorp moving from selling the reach of media products to packaging data points as targeted audiences to advertisers to meet their commercial KPIs. Insofar as attempts to pin down audiences are ways of trying to work out what, or who, are the masses and how we can know about, measure, influence and control them, then we are committed to imagining or representing the masses as audiences, or indeed the audiences as masses. MediaCorp’s interpretation of viewer practices using data is its latest attempt at taming what Ien Ang called the audience chaos, the ‘endless, unruly and uncontrollable play of differences in social practices related to television viewing’ (1994: 205). Nonetheless, the institutional project of combining two incommensurable ways of imagining audiences (as items of information reduced to ratings or data, however conceived or measured; and as social practices of viewing) was bound to produce more uncertainties. Baudrillard articulated this incommensurability succinctly: An operational system which is statistical, information-based, and simulational is projected onto a traditional values system, onto a system of representation, will, and opinion. This collage, this collusion between the two, gives rise to an indefinite and useless polemic (Baudrillard 1988: 209).

It is little wonder that this latest institutional strategy of MediaCorp has failed to offer more clarity or certainty about audiences. As the senior member of MediaCorp’s management quoted earlier admitted to me frankly, ‘we only have a good persona of our target viewers, but we have no real idea about our audiences’. Green Light Audience as data, of course, has less to do with the everyday work that producers and commissioners do compared to audiences imagined as human subjects, whether as moral police or other permutations. The kind

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of policing work that imagined audiences do that I detailed in the book occurred largely in the absence of sustained interactive encounters with viewers. I would like to consider this in relation to another development in audience-producer relationships since my ethnography, which promised more direct engagement with viewers. For quite a number of years, the unpredictability of audiences’ practices and decreasing viewership has led to conflicts between producers and commissioners about who better knows what audiences want. To deal with these arguments, MediaCorp implemented mandatory concept-testing focus groups for drama commissions in 2017 in the hopes of raising viewership. The exercise, tellingly called The Green Light Project, was designed to provide a means to test out drama concepts with selected viewers before commissioning the programmes. All approved drama proposals have to go through this process. Let me put together a picture of what happens in a typical focus group session based on the accounts of my informants. The immediate question I had when I first heard about the Green Light project was whom were the participants? On average, between eight to ten selected viewers sit around in a focus group setting together with a moderator from MediaCorp in each session. The moderator begins the focus group by asking each attendee to introduce themselves. To the surprise of one of the directors who attended these sessions, the attendees he witnessed were in his opinion particularly competent at articulating which segments of the population they were meant to represent in the setting, in terms of their gender, age group and occupation. For him, it seemed that the attendees were clearly aware of the capacity in which they were invited to participate. The sessions work around three documents prepared by the production teams: the synopsis of the drama, a write up of the pilot episode (not the script), and brief biographical descriptions of the key characters. After the attendees read the documents, the moderator invites them to rate the drama from one to ten before offering more qualitative opinions. The attendees proceed to criticize various aspects of the story concept, including plot premise and character designs. Some offer suggestions on how to change certain details. At the end of each session, the attendees rate the same drama again from one to ten. These suggestions and ratings are then summarized into a report by another note taker and passed onto the network officers who request the creative teams to make changes according to the articulated suggestions. There are serial practices involved. These include the reduction of the non-discursive concepts and visuals of dramas to discursive statements presented in the form of written documents to be read instead of experienced; the reduction of audience-producer or audience-media relationships

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to this one encounter; and the further reduction of these encounters to measurements (rating from one to ten) and reports mediated by note takers, and to be interpreted by MediaCorp officials in a decontextualized manner. In Cultural Studies terms, writing articulates. So while these regular sessions may appear like an almost automated process removed of subjective intervention, there is insidious power residing in these serial practices of representing audiences as, which involve the complex agency of different people on different occasions. Throughout the process, the producers have no opportunity to reply to the comments and are reduced to passively waiting for MediaCorp’s final report. The producers I spoke to realize the dangers this process poses for their creative work. As one producer commented, ‘if the programmer cannot filter out the noise, this session will harm the entire production […] This tool is a double edged sword’. This raises questions about how important a role the focus groups play in the creative process. Unfortunately, MediaCorp places huge emphasis on these audience feedback and producers feel like they have little choice but to comply. As its name suggests, The Green Light Project serves as a means for MediaCorp commissioners to obtain ‘approval’ from audiences beforehand. This ‘approval’ is a resource they could use to justify decisions made to those in management and to mitigate the unpredictability of audience ratings or feedback. The seeming generality of the solution depends on a closure achieved by fitting complex circumstances to a predesigned template. The neatness of the models and methods function to obscure a highly questionable relationship to actuality. While some of my informants appreciated the intentions (finding the elusive audience) of The Green Light Project, all of them uniformly expressed reservations about the execution (practices) of it. My conversations with independent producers about this inevitably lead to heated discussions about the problems of this set up. During the focus group sessions, the creative teams are allowed to watch the session in a separate room invisible to the participants. My informants repeatedly expressed their surprise at how opinionated the participants were and how harshly they criticized the story concepts every time they attended these sessions. Their suggestions reflect their personal taste, so sometimes we will hear opinions that are self-contradictory […] After attending two or three sessions, I decided never to go again […] There is no room for us to argue anyway, so listening to these sessions only makes me feel demoralized. – Producer A

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I have heard variations of Producer A’s comments repeatedly in the past few years. These highly affective laments reveal not just their frustrations towards MediaCorp but also their incredulity about how participants (presented as viewers) responded to their work in these sessions. The focus group sessions can be very uncomfortable experiences for the observing producers because these encounters, which are highly subjective, situational and dependent on the selection of participants, force producers to confront the arbitrariness of audiences’ ‘viewing practices’, albeit in an artificial setting. Reflecting on the set up of the exercise, one producer lamented that the way in which these participants are positioned in those situations compel them to be critical, particularly when asked probing questions by the mediator. Another producer complained that participants often changed their opinions based on group dynamics and what others said. In this sense, these encounters at the Green Light Project highlight to producers the relational nature of viewer feedback and further complicate the already problematic processes and practices of imagining audiences. The inherently unpredictable nature of audiences that are laid bare in these encounters therefore force producers to confront both the impossibility – and relationality – of audiences and their powerlessness as producers in their subjection to the arrangement. Interestingly, frustrations about the Green Light Project are not restricted to independent producers. MediaCorp officials increasingly find the exercise unhelpful. Again, this speaks to the incommensurability between two ideas of audiences – as relatively coherent and stable human subjects (representing others in their respective population segments) and as social viewing or articulatory practices – and the impossibility of, and risks involved in, attempting to capture and fix populations, masses or audiences as quotidian. Such attempts will only ever serve to further indicate audiences as ‘the horizon of discursive knowledge’ (Hobart 2017: 29), thereby highlighting that audiences constitute the limits of the articulable. Ending the previous discussion I had with Producer A, I asked about the Green Light Project, ‘Do you feel like you “know the audience” better after this?’ Producer A immediately replied, ‘No, I do not’. Producer B, who was in the room with us, reflected on the question for a moment and said, ‘I do not even know what it means to “know the audience” anymore’.

Moving Forward Rather than an ontological exploration of the possibilities of fear and anxieties for social or political action (e.g. Eklundh et al. 2017), this book

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grounds itself in the complexity of the conjuncture to, in Grossberg’s words, ‘denaturalize the present and open up the future’ (2010b: 100). This obviously raises the question of the temporality of the conjuncture and the provisional nature of this book’s argument. While the model of power that I presented in the book was largely based on my ethnographic fieldwork between 2012 and 2014, the major developments that have happened since, as outlined above, saw an institutional return to imagining audiences as linguistically organized mass and audiences increasingly viewed as a problematic, a testament to the argument I made about authoritarian resilience. At the same time, even though my focus in this book was to present audiences as a crucial part of illiberal media making in Singapore, it is increasingly apparent from the developments that I have highlighted that the audience problematic has become an issue for not just independent producers but also state intermediaries and gatekeepers. In other words, we are at a conjuncture to consider how the politics of affect discussed in this book may present changing potentialities moving forward. In my conversations with the producers between 2018 and 2021, a line I often hear when I ask how they cope with these difficulties of audiences seems to signal attempts at reducing the role of imagined audiences, whether as institutional data or as human subjects, in production work. In a recent conversation with a senior member of MediaCorp’s management, I asked him how he envisions a better institution and industry in Singapore and was surprised that he failed to mention better ratings despite MediaCorp’s dropping viewership. Arguing that MediaCorp’s blind pursuit of ratings as a commercial organization is unwise, he preferred to move the institution towards a fully public service network where certain ‘reach’ is unnecessary. Increasingly, this sentiment of separating production work from ratings is shared by independent producers as well. ‘Actually, we have reached a point whereby we no longer want to think about imagined audiences, we try our best not to’, an experienced Executive Producer of dramas told me in 2019. If affective life is not just subject to, but also an ‘outside’ that exceeds biopolitical mechanisms (Anderson 2012), my informants’ overwhelming anxieties about audiences in 2014 seemed to have turned into something else, be it the sense of fatigue that plagues MediaCorp or the frustrations and resignation that independent producers feel. As producers become more aware of, and explicitly talk about, the audience problematic, I wonder if this signals a tipping point. So perhaps it is a good idea to end this book by raising questions about whether one of the ways in which producers might cope with their anxious sense of powerlessness is to move towards an audience-less approach to television making. The implications of such a shift for authoritarian media making remains to be seen.

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Reflections Anderson, B. (2012) ‘Affect and Biopower: Towards a Politics of Life’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37(1), pp. 28–43. Ang, I. (1994) ‘In the Realm of Uncertainty: The Global Village and Capitalist Postmodernity’, in Crowley, D. and Mitchell, D. (eds.) Communication Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 193–213. Baudrillard, J. (1988) Selected Writings. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. Click, M. A. (ed.) (2019) Anti-fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age. New York: New York University Press (Postmillennial Pop). Deleuze, G. (1988) Foucault. Translated by S. Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eklundh, E., Zevnik, A. and Guittet, E.-P. (eds.) (2017) Politics of Anxiety. London; New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Grossberg, L. (2010b) Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham: Duke University Press. Hobart, M. (2017) ‘Some Thoughts about Imagining Audiences: First Draft of Background to a Planned Special Issue on Imagining Audiences’. Massumi, B. (2015) Politics of Affect. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity. Reeves, J. (2017) Citizen Spies: The Long Rise of America’s Surveillance Society. New York: New York University Press.

Index Affect 20–26, 37, 41, n.53, 60–61, 78, 98, 113, 134, 139, 142, 151, 154, 160, 170, 178, 180–81, 189 Affective economies 24 Affective excesses 20, 27–28, 98, 111, 180 Affective practices 18, 20, 22–26, 31, 102, 116, 134–37, 139, 143, 151 Affective superaddressee 20, 26–28, 31, 87, 108–14, 139–40, 174, 179, 181, 183 See also Emotion; Fear; Spectacle Ambiguity 40, 43, 67, 70, 82, 83, 106, 112–13, 126, 137, 138, 161, 178, 181 IMDA Programme Code 106 Strategic 67, 82, 181 Viewer responses 43, 83, 112–13, 126, 138 Antagonisms 13, 15, 17, 20, 26, 30, 34, 39, 40, n.41, 48, 58, 66, 67, 74, 79, 86, 108, 109, 111, 113, 129, 139, 159, 178, 179, 180, 183, Anxieties 13, 20, 23, 25, n. 26, 27, 31, 36, 38, 40, n. 41, 45, 48, 49, 70, 83, 93, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 108, 110, 112, 113, 119, 123, 126, 131, 137, 138, 142, 143, 151, 154, 159, 161, 171, 173, 174, 178, 179, 180, 188, 189 See also Paranoia, Anticipatory Art in Singapore 55, 116, 117, 125, 126, 135, 137 Graffiti 117–123 See also Loving Art; National Arts Council; Vandalism Audiences Audience, Chinese 51, 82, 115, 127, 134–36, 138–40, 180 Audiences, Imagined / Audience fiction 12, 13, 18, 20, 22, 26, 27, 31, 52, 60, 82, 85, 87, 92–114, 116, 125, 129, 131, 138, 142, 163, 171, 173–74, 186, 189 Audience, Mass 15, 18, 25, 76, 81, 82, 109, 111, 183, 184–85, 188, 189 Audience power 26, 27, 31, 111, 113, 136, 169, 172, 173, 177 Affective superaddressee 20, 26, 27, 28, 31, 85, 87, 108–114, 139, 140, 174, 177, 179, 181, 183 Audiences, Disapproving 92–95, 97, 99, 102, 108, 110, 112 Policing, Moral 92–95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 108, 110, 111, 185 Audience potentials 20, 26, 27, 31, 68, 69, 94, 95–99, 102, 105, 106, 108–14, 123, 129, 134, 142, 150, 158, 161, 169, 170, 174, 175, 180, 183 Unaddressable 27, 111, 113

Complaints 17, 18, 20, 21, 26, 59, 60, 61, 83, 86, 97, 98, 99, 102, 105, 106, 109, 110, 112, 150, 158, 159, 161, 170, 174, 175, 177–78, 179, 180, 183 Encounters 20, 26, 27, 82, 83, 98, 111, 113, 114, 135, 161, 180–82, 186–88 Disciplinary tool 28, 102, 113, 114, 135, 136, 181 Fragmentation, Audience 31, 81, 177, 184 Panopticon 182–183 Producer-audience relations 27, 97, 111–13, 159, 161, 174, 186 Scolding 96–98, 101–02, 112, 128, 169–70 See also Minority, Conservative Authoritarianism, State 10, 13, 14, 38, 55, 148, 181 Authoritarian resilience 9, 11, 12, n.12, 13, 18, 20, 30, 31, 61, 85, 113, 114, 116, 123, 138, 142, 175, 179, 180, 181, 189 Media 11, 12, 21, 27, 30, 61, 85, 108, 189 Biopolitics 12, 27, 28, 34, 61, 82, 179, 189 Capitalism 9, 11–16, 18, 19, 22, 24, 30, 31, 33–43, 45, 49, 52, 63–64, 66, 74, 76, 79–80, 85–87, 108, 171, 178, 181 Censorship 9–13, 20, 24, 53, 55, 59, 88, 99, 105, 126, 141, 145, 148–50, n.164, 174, 178, 179, 180, 183 Audiences, Censoring 171–73 Guidelines 11, 53, 105, 149–50 Imagined roles, Censors’ 9–13, 19 Secrecy 148–50 Self-censorship 17, 23, 27, 54–56, 86, 110 Chinese Affective meaning-making practices 130– 36, 139 Eastern/Chinese society 152, 128–30, 134, 138 Patriarchal norms 126–29 Chinese-language television 16, 50–51, 83, 86, 95, 114, 115–16, 127, 129, 131–34, n.146 ‘Chinese’ as floating signifier 45–49, 51, 109, 126–40 See also Audience, Chinese Communitarianism 39, 41, 43, 74 Competition n.14, 36, 37, n.39, 40–43, 48, 66, 70, 73, 78–81, 82, 88, 143–44, 146, 168, 171–73, 174, 178–79 Consumption Consumers 18, 51, 66, 74, 76, 81, 87, 109 Consumerism / consumption culture 66, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 81

210  Conservatism Government 17, 38, 86 Majority, Conservative 17, 19, 21, 27, 55, 56, 60, 86, 109, 112, 150, 152, 159 Minority, Conservative 170, 174, 179 Control Audience responses 20, 27, 109, 112–13, 157, 171, 173, 180, 185 Contestants’ behaviour 71, 77, 80, 143, 151–155, 163, 167, 168, 170, 174–75 Control society see Societies of control Interpretations of heritage knowledge 68, 70 State control n.12, 27, 35, 43, 45, n.47, 48, 51–52, 55, 123 Crime drama Implications of portraying crime 102–08, 110–13 Genre conventions 92, 102 IMDA programme code 92–93, 102–03, 105–08 Moral responsibility 92–95, 99, 100, 101 Pedagogy 105, 111 Rules of portraying crime in Singapore 89–92

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Scriptwriting 85–140, 186–88 See also Crime Drama Emotions 23–24, 33, 77, 79, 96–98, 128, 131, 134, 142–43, 147, 151–55, 157, 161, 165, 170–71, 174 See also Affect Ethnicity 19, 41, 44–52, 67, 77, 82, 133, 138 Fear as Affective Practices 20, 24–25, 72, 134, 153–55, 165, 169–71, 174 as Articulatory Tool 12–13, 23–24, 33, 35, 37–38, 40, 52, 55–58, 60 as Cultural lens 12–13, 19–20, 33, 45–48, 116, 118, 123, 137 as Nodal Point 39, 58 See also Performance, Performing fear Foucault, Michel 12, 13, n.21, 27–28, 57, 162, 167–71, 174, 182–83 Game shows 19, 30, 63–67, 74–76, 81, 116, 136, 139, 173, 179 Genre 64–66, 69, 74, 79 Infotainment 30, 63–67, 72–73, 85–86 See also Quiz

Democracy Democracy, Illiberal 9, 11–13, 15, 18, 22, 30, 33, 34, 63, 66, 73–74, 86–87, 94, 102, 108, 171, 178 Democracy, Liberal 11, n.34

Generations 37, 44, 138 Intergenerational 49, 75–80 See also Intergenerational Love

Deleuze, Gilles 12, 20, 28, 31, 39, 63, 114, 125, 141–42, 158, 161, 171, 174, 180, 182–83

Governmentality 12, 27–28, 45, 57–58, 61, 113, 180–81, 183

Difference Sociocultural 26, 38, 39, 44–46, 49–50, 60, 67, 82–83, 110–11, 115, 116, 131–40 Deleuze and difference 125 Derrida and difference 124–25 False dichotomies 109, 122, 125–26, 133, 137–38 See also Multiculturalism

Heritage 30, 49, 63–83, 178–79

Discipline 16, 17, 20, 40, n.41, 42, 43, 49, 99, 102, 113, 135–36, 142, 151, 154, 157, 181 See also Power, Disciplinary model Dislocations 21-22, 34 of capitalism 35–43, 66 of multiculturalism 43–52, 68, 73, 77, 79, 82 of the social 52–61, 113 Drama Dramatic spectacles 141, 143, 145, 151–55, 161, 165, 170, 174–75 Primetime 85–88, 108

Ghost simulation 155–160

Ideology Ideology work 9, 12, 16–19, 21–22, n.25, 30–31, 33–35, 38–42, 45–46, 52, 55–56, 58, 61, 66, 73–75, 79, 82, 86–87, 95, 97, 99–100, 109, 113, 116, 120, 133, 139, 179–180, 183 Legitimacy, Ideological 12, 18 Illiberalism State-intervention 11, 19, 24, 28, 34, 59–61, 92, 180, 187 Social order 9, 12–13, 19, 22–24, 30–31, 33, 35, 52, 60, 81, 115–116, 118, 126, 137 See also Democracy, Illiberal Imaginaries Practices 21–22 Social imaginaries 12–13, 19–22, 24, n.25, 26, 30–31, 33–35, 41, 44, 49–50, 60–61, 65, 67, 81, 110, 115, 138–39, 171, 173, 175, 179

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Index

IMDA or Infocomm Media Development Authority 15–17, 41, 43, 59, 88, 105, 108, n.116, 148–50, 157, 159, 161, 177, 184 Ambiguity 88–89, 105–106, 108 Content guidelines 53–54, 92–93, 102–03, 105–06 SG-TAM n.98, 184 See also Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) Intergenerational Love 74–82 Laclau, Ernesto 19, 21–22, 34, 39, n.41, 49, 58, 60, 136 Languages 22, n.23, 29, 44, 46–52, n.67, 82, 98, 137, 155, 185 Chinese-language television 16, 31, 50–51, 83, 86, 95, 114–16, 127, 129, 131–33, 139, 143, n.146 Loving Art 115–40

of meritocracy 40–41, 173 of ‘the people’ 60–61 NAC or National Arts Council 116, 118–20, 123, 125–26 Paranoia, Anticipatory 18, 20, 37, 38, 47, 49, 99, 110, 111, 112, 174, 178 PAP or People’s Action Party 35, 38, 53, 56–57, 74 See also Singaporean Government Performance of democracy 13 of family 77–78, 82 of meritocracy 73–74, 79–82, 178–79 Performativity 9, 12, n.19, 20, 22, 24, 27, 72, 112, 123, 126, 138, 149–50, 179 Performing fear 19–21, 60–61, 81, 123–26, 143, 150, 178–81

MediaCorp Commissions 15–16, 42, 64, 87–88, 108, 116, 118, 184–87 Compliance 17–18, 97, 99, 105–06, 177–78 Green Light Project 185–88 Language policies 16, 51, 185 Ratings 42, 61, 98, 110, 138, 182–85, 189 Relationship with independent producers 16, 41–43, 61, 86–89, 108, 117–18, 126, 133, 137, n.146 Relationship with the state 14–18, 53–54, 86, 109 See also PSB or Public Service Broadcasting

Pluralism 18, 39, 56, 68, 109 Media pluralism 17, 52, 55, 86, 109, 179

Meritocracy 19, 39–41, 52, 58, 61, 73–74, 80–82, 172–73, 178

Potentiality Change 31, 50–51, 115–16, 118, 189 Multivocality, Managing 68–70, 109 Potentiality, Audience 20, 26–27, 94–99, 102, 105, 108, 110–13, 123, 129, 131, 134, 142, 158, 161, 169–71, 173–75, 180 Potentiality, Modulations of 20, 113, 159 Threats/problems 37, 44, 47, 59, 89–90, 101–03, 105–06, 119, 150–52, 154 See also Punishment

Minority, Conservative 170, 174, 179 Multiculturalism State agendas 16, 22, 30, 34–36, 43–52, 58, 61, 67, 77, 109, 115 CMIO multiracialism policies 44–52 Languages 44, 47–52 Multivocality 66, 69–70, 72–73, 113 Myths 21–22, 33–35, 175, 179 Myth, Affective 115, 139 of communitarianism 74 of crime 87, 92, 103 of difference 44–45, 49–51, 109, 116, 131, 136, 139 of equality of family 79–83 of fragility 20, 33, 36–38, 43–45, 47, 60–61 of heritage 65–67, 70, 73, 79–83

Police Moral police 94–95, 99, 102, 109, 185 Policing debates 52, 129 Self-policing 13, 20, 27, 99, 112–13, 138, 170–71, 173, 179, 186 Social policing 45, 106 The police force 17, 90–92, 103, n.164, 178 Positive-negative binary 120–26, 137–38 Pharmakon 124

Power Audience power 25–28, 31, 95–99, 111–14, 126, 129, 136, 140, 142, 158–59, 161, 173–74, 177, 179, 182–83 Disciplinary model 12, 13, 20, 27–28, 57, 114, 143, 158–59, 161–75, 180, 184 Examination 171–73 Punishment 165–71 Surveillance 162–65 Discursive power n.21, 23–24, 103, 129, 135, 138 MediaCorp 43

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Model of power in Singapore media 19–21, 31, 87, 98, 138, 158–59, 180–83, 187–89 Pleasure 27, 31, 112, 141–43, 161–62, 165, 168–71, 174, 180 State power 12, 14, 16–17, 36, 53–54, 63, n.88, 110–11, 118–20, 139, 149, 180 See also Biopolitics See also Control Society See also Governmentality PSB or Public service broadcasting 14–16, 18, 41–42, 51, 64–66, 70, 72–74, 79, 81–82, 86–87, 92, 94, 97, 102, 107, 109–11, 120, 126, 184 Punishment 17–18, 26–27, 97, 99–100, 110–12, 117–18, 126, 161–62, 164–71, 174, 183 Questions 68–73 Quiz Quiz show 65, 67–73 Quiz questions 68–71, 81 Race 25, 36, 43–53, n.59, 79, 109, 133, 138, 141, 179–80 Reality TV Censorship 9–11, 18, 148–50 Genre conventions 141–42, n.146, 151–52, 163, 165, 168, 172, 175 Money shot 151–53 Branded affect 151–55, 160–65, 169, 171, 174–75 Drama vs. control 151–61 See also Spectacle Repression, State 13, 55, 108, 118 Safety from Controversy 69–72, 81, 95, 126, 149–50, 172, 174–75, 178–79 See also IMDA, Content guidelines Singaporean government on Construction of nationhood 35–52 on Heritage 48–49, 65–68, 73–75 on Language policies 47–50 on Lee Kuan Yew 14, 36, 47, 48, n.54, 59 on Lee Hsien Loong 36, n.53 on Meritocracy 39–41, see also Meritocracy

on Migrant workers n.40–41 on Multiracialism 43–52, see also multiracialism on Survival 36, 38 on the Broadcasting Act 53 on the Films Act 53 on the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act (FICA) 54 on the Internal Security Act (ISA) n.53 on the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act (NPPA) 53 on the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill (POFMA) 54–55 on the Undesirable Publications Act (UPA) 53 on Vulnerability 36–39, 44–45, 118 Social, Overdetermined 12, 19, 30, 33, 35, 52, 59–61 Societies of control 12, 20, 28, 31, 114, 141–42, 158–61, 171, 174, 180–81, 183 Spectacle 31, 143, 151–52, 160–62, 165, 167–71, 174–75 Status quo 63, 114–17, 129–30, 137–39, 141, 175–80 Superaddressee, Affective 20, 26–28, 31, 87, 108–14, 139–40, 174, 179, 181, 183 State-linked media 14–19, 30–31, 41–43, 50–56, 61, 63–67, 79–82, 86–88, 92, 97, 106, 109–11, 115–16, 118–20, 133, 137–38, 142, 179–81 Values ‘Asian Values’ 39–40, 66, 118, 129 Cultural circuits of value 142, 162, 174 Family Values 75, 79 PSB values 93, 105–07, 128 Shared Values n.39, 41, 48, 55, ‘Western’ values 39, 163 Vandalism 118–120 Vandalism Act 117–18, 120 Westernization 48, 65–67 Zeitgeist 141–42, 161, 171, 174