Foucault and Ideas

"If you say something often enough, it becomes the reality."
No, Foucault didn't say this, though Foucault really meant this.

I was admitted to USP as a Science student. Had I not been talking to people, I wouldn't have known of this programme's existence from that part of the world that I came from. In class, I was presented "Power/Knowledge" as my first reading. I learnt about the Panopticon and Foucault's "Power of the Gaze". I read that paper more than ten times, and felt demoralised that I still couldn't really understand everything.

Now that I'm in my Fourth Year, I was presented, yet again, Foucault. Such a brilliant man, I assumed. I heard much about him. Into Foucault's work I jumped, "The History of Madness".

Can "Madness" have a history? Isn't it a condition, a mental/psychological condition? Isn't it a sickness of sorts? How can a person write a History of Madness (or Happiness, or Loneliness)? 

His way of writing history is, to say the least, weird. Brilliantly weird. As a deconstructionist, he attempts to move away from "chronology". There isn't any teleology, no past, no future, lots of present looking into the past, and bits and pieces of the past that are haphazardly stitched together. But nonetheless, brilliant.

Madness, to my understanding of him (because no one can truly understand him, I think), is a form of the powerful subjugating those who are too liberal, those who do not follow norms. What do we call madness? Why is madness a medical condition? Why confine mad men and alienate them so much, to the extent one keeps thinking "the mad man may hurt me!"? Why confine them like a prisoner? If they can't restrain themselves like how criminals can't, do we lump the two together? They seem to be punished in the same manner (at least in the beginning of that history).

He mentioned, that physical sickness suddenly became a private affair and madness a public affair. It is true. Leprosy was a disease that was "deserving" of confinement for as long as Christiandom was hegemonic.

He writes in power/knowledge that power creates knowledge, which is a notch above "knowledge is power".

I then went back to the Discipline/Punish ( where the Benthamite Panopticon was situated). Discipline doesn't make one conform, he says. Discipline separates, distinguishes, and sieves out. Punish those who are different from others.

A global identity: paradoxical?

A year back, I led a city tour and asked an international student - "where are you from? *smiles*" She frowns back, "I hate it when people ask this question. I don't know; it's a long story." "Tell me?" SHe then went on about how both her parents are Indians (one from North, one from South) and worked in Bahrain. They met in Bahrain. Her mother became pregnant with her, and rushed back to India to ensure her daughter would get an Indian passport. When the child was a week old, they flew to Sri Lanka and stayed there till she was 9. They then migrated to Bahrain and stayed there till she was 17. She then flew to London for her further education, before coming on an exchange to Singapore.
I probed further, "But surely there was a place you felt closest to?"
She replied, "Yes, Bahrain. But I went to an international school in Bahrain, so I wasn't acquainted with Bahrain per se. But I identify with that place the most. It was where I grew up in."

There's nothing wrong with that. Or is there? Why was the term "third culture kid" invented?
I write today with the aim to tell third culture kids that there is really nothing wrong, and perhaps they were made to believe that there is something wrong with them because the world doesn't see a horizon as broad as theirs, and could never half comprehend their world.

Wiki "Blind men and the elephant." That is a story originating from India about how different people only see part of a picture. Perhaps like kids born in the same land as their parents, they cannot comprehend an elephant, and bring with them a small skewed picture of their perception of what a third-culture kid may feel like. And hence "Snobbish? Slack? Spoilt?" are words that "local kids" use to perceive TCK.

Singapore is a young nation and many of its citizens still hold skewed stereotypes of its fellow counterparts, in terms of races, religion, gender, age, dialect group, ... This may have been a Confucian tradition of hierarchy, core-periphery, and stereotypes. I sometimes struggle with trying not to stereotype and giving the benefit of doubt too. My parents' perception of other races and religions are unfortunately not as cordial and all-embracing, and I lived with them for the past two decades. It would have rubbed off somehow. This is not uncommon in Singapore too.

Sorry... We didn't know International Baccalaurate was difficult, even more difficult than A Levels in many respect. We only knew that we are constantly compared to "Raffles" and "Hwa Chong" and striving towards the Ox-bridge or Ivy League schools - and then be ashamed if we cannot speak Standard English, or study much harder, or speak up in class only to find that we speak nonsense. For those who are luckier, they may migrate there, get a passport there, marry a Caucasian/non-Singaporean Asian and settle down overseas. That was what many parents of JC kids aspired towards. All JC kids know is that "ethanol + ethanoic acid = ethyl ethanoate" and "glocalization (quote localization of McDonalds) is a phenomenon to suggest that globalization is not all culture-antagonizing". Many of us didn't really truly understand what we were memorizing. A science student like myself and many of my peers wouldn't know what's the link between USSR and Russia, nor Cold War in general. We used the term Cold War when our good friends don't talk to us after some dispute. God knows how it was related to USA, let alone democracy and communism. (I didn't have the luxury of taking History in Secondary School and read only Geography, so I probably knew land forms and tectonics better than my History counterparts).

Third culture kids, we have lots to learn from you, but we do have a lot on our mind as well. We don't know if you would leave us jobless like what our parents often complain about ("expats!"). We don't know if you understand day-to-day struggles like squeezing up an SBS bus or MRT. We don't know if you actually have tasted chicken rice, actually, or if you live on spaghetti and ratatouille on a daily basis (I learnt the latter dish only from the rat movie; how "educated" I am!). We sometimes don't understand what's with democracy (ok I identify with this quite a lot) and why should we fight for freedom and individual rights. We don't really know what our political system is about - but we know enough not to question it if we don't know anything. We know stuff. We know how molecules interact, how we can calculate the conservation of mass and energy, and recite the proton number of elements in periodic tables. We know how to "differentiate" and "integrate" functions, how to draw a logarithm graph and what are the causes, advantages and disadvantages of globalization and technology (we learnt that in General Paper). We don't really know where Bahrain or Sicily is (at least for myself and my peers when we were in JC).

We know "ang mohs" and kids of expats go to international school. They are expats and must therefore be rich. They are rich and therefore must be snobbish (because our parents told us how snobbish their bosses are!). They are "ang mohs" and therefore have school politics that are similar to Gossip Girls, Friends, and other American dramas and we think they eat McDonalds and potato everyday. Not that we don't. But we don't really know. Really.

There's nothing wrong with a global identity, I think. My friends feel more Korean than Singaporean after watching tons of Korean dramas. And most of us Uni students prefer Starbucks (if we can afford it). Some of my friends took French. I went to India. I think NUS has a mix of just everything, and you are a global citizen par excellence, something Singapore is striving towards.