Falling down Internet subculture rabbit holes, clocking on and off “shit” jobs, wondering how the normal became weird and the weird became normal… writer and critic Cher Tan laments experiences many of us share. But she’s also dipped her toes in waters that don’t ripple in many of our directions. Plunging Singapore’s punk scene and the internet’s depths, she has a strong grasp of the transformative digital age and how it affects us.
Tan is a luminary, guiding us through the nine circles of the hell that is life under capitalism’s digital iteration. Walking ahead in her nine essays, she reveals truths to us with avuncular certainty, but also a dose of caution and what she does best — critique.
Peripathetic (2024) is a garden of essays, each of which grew independently, without a book in mind. “I just wrote essays about things I was preoccupied with”, she explains to me. However, she soon realised she was “grasping at something subterranean”, and that these essays had a lattice of roots lying underground. Putting the essays in conversation with each other unearthed this elaborate thematic network which links the personal, political and the punk.
When compiling the essays, she honoured the non-linearity of her thought processes and life. Disrupting chronology, the reader ping-pongs off walls of her teendom, childhood, adult life and twenties. In this way, the reader gains a better appreciation of Tan’s life, anecdotes smattered throughout essays which each provide a glimpse of personal truth but also a sense of reservation. Each essay masters time as slinky, stretching or compressing it to magnify a concept or step back from it. In “Speed Tests”, Tan jumps forward years to develop a time-lapse of the topography of piracy. Tan shrinks her life into a non-chronological description of each job she’s had in “Shit Jobs”, emphasising the life-flattening and time-distorting effects of labour.
“As I did not go to university, I have had a haphazard learning experience”, Tan explains, “and I wanted to reflect how I learnt things from subcultures”. Her essays are thick with theory, exploring Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the hyperreal as inadequate to describe our reality, preferring Situationist Guy Debord’s theory of society as “spectacle”. Tan holds the reader’s hand whilst dissecting complex concepts, her tone endearingly didactic rather than isolating or highfalutin. For every reference to “high culture”, she invokes Substack posts, anecdotal lessons from Singapore’s punk scene, TikTok videos, a reminder that her work does not ‘assimilate’ into a neoliberal ‘high style’ but occupies it, destroying and rebuilding it from within. She explains that she collapses the high brow/low brow dialectic as, “this is a reflection of who she is”, further outlining her work as an embodiment of her life.
Tan best resists literary neoliberal assimilation by managing the tension artists face between making a living and renouncing unethical institutions. Artists are uniquely placed in this dilemma, she explains, as “art hovers between job and vocation”. Endowed with powers of celebrity or awareness, artists can “bring people into a broader conversation about brutal catastrophes”, she explains. With this comes heightened personal responsibility: she spells out how artists must be “vigilant regarding co-option” in work and associations. She does this herself, vocally renouncing Zionist institutions and spreading awareness of Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) schemes.
This speaks to a central concern in “Influenza”, that, “the artist is the symbol of something”. In our stage of digital capitalism, artists have become image-based personalities, morphing into political actors. She best describes our view of artists as “anointed prophets”, given our pious devotion to writers-cum-influencers and their opinions. Of course, this is problematised by the demographics from which many of these religious leaders originate — upper-class coteries and networks of nepotism. The essay reminds us of art’s telos: “To make art is to find connection away from money and prestige. Or so you’d hope.” Given the rapid acceleration of our image-conscious media economy, Tan may be right to identify “hope” as our strongest force of counterattack.
Tan’s narration is at once truthful and unreliable. She is nothing short of transparent about her teenage miscreance and the lapses inherent to adolescence. Transmuting an atmosphere of Singapore’s punk scene into ink, she describes in “Lifestyle Church”: “We were so angry we wanted to tear everything down, but it was a learned helplessness, too”.
She includes frequent self-reflexive remarks, her awareness of narrative features and writing tropes deliciously satisfying. After delving into personal anecdotes that complicated her writing career, such as: “I didn’t come from a family of art enthusiasts or even readers”, she puts on her critic’s hat and meditates on the impact of mining “sob stories” for art. In this way, she weaves her didactic voice throughout, engaging both the keen reader and writer.
However, when holding a mirror to her past, she is self-deprecating. Of her journey to her current position as a writer and critic, she dismisses her talent: “I was quite simply often in the right place at the right time, a bumbling oaf, lucking out”. The essay collection’s title itself is a representation of this comic self-flagellation; she tells me, “Some people may see my life as pathetic”. Though her humility is endearing, it is impossible to imagine that such incisive essays could arise from anything but skill.
Her voice at once instructive and self-critical, the reader wades into low and high tides, bathing in the thrill of assumptions and surprises. Peripathetic leaps into the future, but not without holding our hand as we navigate the quick-changing present. God knows we need it.
