Abstract
Why should relations with spectral beings be so important to Singapore—a nation that is thought to stand at the forefront of highly technical, hyperrational, and secularized modes of speculative capital? This article explores why property development and the production of modern architecture have become a major site of concern about ghosts and hauntings, and of practices intended to mollify the dead. Such phenomena are not vestiges of a curious or quaint “folk” belief, but rather an assemblage of modern popular discourses and that seek to comprehend mysterious aspects of contemporary capital: the abstract logics and material outcomes of speculative processes, the roles of risk and precarity in the production of extreme wealth, and of the city as a commodity-world comprising contradictory (and apparently irreconcilable) forms of value. Ultimately, the conjectural figure of the ghost—through an occult decoding of relations between risk and wealth—offers a lens through which we might glimpse the underlying logic of a novel, emergent economic order.
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