70 Chris Hudson
are visceral rather than conscious or knowing (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, p.
1), are well suited for deployment as part of the symbiotic relationship that
capitalism has developed with nature—notable in the growth of eco-tourism—
since they do not have clear boundaries, are not easily controlled, and do not
have easily identifiable origins. Affect is contingent upon aesthetics, because, as
Virginia Postrel defines it, “Aesthetics is the way we communicate through the
senses. It is the art of creating reactions without words, through the look and
feel of people, places and things.... The effects are immediate, perceptual and
emotional” (Postrel 2003, p. 6). An eco-aesthetic, now a significant feature of life
in Singapore, is a form of affect that simultaneously exploits a range of senses
through the production of an urban sensorium in combination with the relentless
promotion of the consumption of food and consumer goods.
It has been noted that the power of vision and the “dictatorship of the eye”
(Macnaghten and Urry 1999, p. 111) once dominated tourist interactions with nature
to such an extent that “the tourist gaze” (Urry 1990) came to be understood as the
primary mode of engagement. Places were generally consumed visually (Urry
1990, p. 1). Martin Jay has argued that modernity has been characterized by “scopic
regimes” and vision should be understood as the master sense of the modern era (Jay
1992, p. 179). In the postmodern era, however, the perceptual field has widened, and
other senses have increased in importance. This change can be related to new forms
of political economy, particularly in Singapore where the early post-independence
modernizing and industrializing strategies of the People’s Action Party government
were replaced by forms of post-Fordist flexible production and a symbolic economy
characterized by the promotion of the arts and other intangibles such as “buzz”.
The work of David Howes and others (2004) has challenged the previous
hegemony, of the visual in favor of an approach that privileges the sensual. The
“sensory turn” has precipitated a greater emphasis on understanding the sensational
and embodied elements of social phenomena such as place making, the multi-
sensory nature of cities (Adams and Guy 2007) and culture in general (Pink 2009).
The exploitation of the senses is crucial for the production of an eco-culture because
senses can be discursively organized for the purpose of constructing diverse natures
that can then be exploited in various ways and deployed for different purposes
(Macnaghten and Urry 1999, pp. 107–8). The greening project can simultaneously
help temper the effects of the urban heat island, for example, and also provide the
natural beauty designed to generate affects.
Singapore’s greening project has aestheticized the urban environment and
transformed extensive tracts of urban space into enchanted environments where the
generation of an eco-culture can also mean the almost unremitting excitement of the
senses (Hudson 2014). The marketing of “buzz” and “funky” and the generation
of affects such as “happiness” have tapped into a now-global marketing strategy
known as “the experience economy” (see Pine and Gilmore 2011). The staging of
experiences can transform space into “experiencescapes”, that is, sites of market
production, stylized landscapes that are strategically planned, laid out, and designed
to produce experiences of pleasure, enjoyment, and entertainment (O’Dell 2005, p.