Eurhythmania

Graeber's rhythmanalysis of the first 5,000 years of debt

2011-08-07T11:26:00.000+10:00

Excerpt from an essay version of David Graeber's timely Debt: The first Five Thousand Years. Graeber here argues for an historical analysis of the present that works through a rhythmanalysis: attempting to layer the multiple rhythms of the present together (long durations, the medium and the micro rhythms as a contemporaneity) and feel them. "How do all these rhythms weave in and out of each other? Is there one core rhythm pushing the others along? How do they sit inside one another, syncopate, concatenate, harmonise, clash?"

Historical action tends to be narrative in form. In order to be able to make an intervention in history (arguably, in order to act decisively in any circumstances), one has to be able to cast oneself in some sort of story — though, speaking as someone who has actually had the opportunity to be in the middle of one or two world historical events, I can also attest that one in that situation is almost never quite certain what sort of drama it really is, since there are usually several alternatives battling it out, and that the question is not entirely resolved until everything is over (and never completely resolved even then). But I think there’s something that comes before even that. When one is first trying to assess a historical situation, having no real idea where one stands, trying to place oneself in a much larger stream of history so as to be able to start to think about what the problem even is, then usually it’s less a matter of placing oneself in a story than of figuring out the larger rhythmic structure, the ebb and flow of historical movements. Is what is happening around me the result of a generational political realignment, a movement of capitalism’s boom or bust cycle, the beginning or result of a new wave of struggles, the inevitable unfolding of a Kondratieff B curve? Or is it all these things? How do all these rhythms weave in and out of each other? Is there one core rhythm pushing the others along? How do they sit inside one another, syncopate, concatenate, harmonise, clash?

Let me briefly lay out what might be at stake here. I’ll focus here on cycles of capitalism, secondarily on war. This is because I don’t like capitalism and think that it’s rapidly destroying the planet, and that if we are going to survive as a species, we’re really going to have to come up with something else. I also don’t like war, both for all the obvious reasons, but also, because it strikes me as one of the main ways capitalism has managed to perpetuate itself. So in picking through possible theories of historical cycles, this is what I have had primarily in mind. Even here there are any number of possibilities. Here are a few:

Are we seeing an alternation between periods of peace and massive global warfare? In the late 19th century, for example, war between major industrial powers seemed to be a thing of the past, and this was accompanied by vast growth of both trade, and revolutionary internationalism (of broadly anarchist inspiration). 1914 marked a kind of reaction, a shift to 70 years mainly concerned with fighting, or planning for, world wars. The moment the Cold War ended, the pattern of the 1890s seemed to be repeating itself, and the reaction was predictable.

Or could one look at brief cycles — sub-cycles perhaps? This is particularly clear in the US, where one can see a continual alternation, since WWII, between periods of relative peace and democratic mobilisation immediately followed by a ratcheting up of international conflict: the civil rights movement followed by Vietnam, for example; the anti-nuclear movement of the ’70s followed by Reagan’s proxy wars and abandonment of détente; the global justice movement followed by the War on Terror.

Or should we be looking at financialisation? Are we dealing with Fernand Braudel or Giovanni Arrighi’s alternation between hegemonic powers (Genoa/ Venice, Holland, England, USA), which start as centers for commercial and industrial capital, later turn into centers of finance capital, and then collapse?

If so, then the question is of shifting hegemonies to East Asia, and whether (as Wallerstein for instance has recently been predicting) the US will gradually shift into the role of military enforcer for East Asian capital, provoking a realignment between Russia and the EU. Or, in fact, if all bets are off because the whole system is about to shift since, as Wallerstein also suggests, we are entering into an even more profound, 500-year cycle shift in the nature of the world-system itself?

Are we dealing with a global movement, as some autonomists (for example, the Midnight Notes collective) propose, of waves of popular struggle, as capitalism reaches a point of saturation and collapse — a crisis of inclusion as it were?

According to this version, the period from 1945 to perhaps 1975 was marked by a tacit deal with elements of the North Atlantic male working class, who were offered guaranteed good jobs and social security in exchange for political loyalty. The problem for capital was that more and more people demanded in on the deal: people in the Third World, excluded minorities in the North, and, finally, women. At this point the system broke, the oil shock and recession of the ’70s became a way of declaring that all deals were off: such groups could have political rights but these would no longer have any economic consequences.

Then, the argument goes, a new cycle began in which workers tried — or were encouraged — to buy into capitalism itself, whether in the form of micro-credit, stock options, mortgage refinancing, or 401ks. It’s this movement that seems to have hit its limit now, since, contrary to much heady rhetoric, capitalism is not and can never be a democratic system that provides equal opportunities to everyone, and the moment there’s a serious attempt to include the bulk of the population even in one country (the US) into the deal, the whole thing collapses into energy crisis and global recession all over again.

None of these are necessarily mutually exclusive but they have very different strategic implications. Much rests on which factor one happens to decide is the driving force: the internal dynamics of capitalism, the rise and fall of empires, the challenge of popular resistance? But when it comes to reading the rhythms in this way, the current moment still throws up unusual difficulties. There is a widespread sense that we are heading towards some kind of fundamental rupture, that old rhythms can no longer be counted on to repeat themselves, that we might be entering a new sort of time. Wallerstein says so much explicitly: if everything were going the way it generally has tended to go, for the last 500 years, East Asia would emerge as the new center of capitalist dominance. Problem is we may be coming to the end of a 500 year cycle and moving into a world that works on entirely different principles (subtext: capitalism itself may be coming to an end). In which case, who knows? Similarly, cycles of militarism cannot continue in the same form in a world where major military powers are capable of extinguishing all life on earth, with all-out war between them therefore impossible. Then there’s the factor of imminent ecological catastrophe.

Literary History and its criticisms as mises en abyme

2011-07-03T21:47:00.001+10:00

Reading from a distance: J.F Vernay's Panorama of Australian Literary History

Vernay on Grunge fiction and the theme of sexual predation

Haunted by Revolution: Whitlam's ghost and the public sphere of letters in Amanda Lohrey's The Reading Group

2011-06-27T07:03:00.000+10:00

There has been a spate of death notices circulating in the Australian public sphere over the last few years. Essays and articles reporting both the death of the literary novel and the death of social democracy continue to proliferate in journals and broadsheets. Regarding these social democratic death notices, this tradition of mourning echoes back at least to Mark Latham’s 1998 third-way manifesto Civilising Global Capital where he argues that ‘The need for a fresh assessment of the politics of the Left has rarely seemed more urgent . . . Large slabs of post-war social democratic thinking have been made moribund by the new political economy of globalisation’ (Latham xxxvi). More recently, in a Quarterly Essay titled ‘What’s Left? The death of social democracy’ Clive Hamilton, writes that:

In the early 1970s, a crisis in the world economy caused a tectonic shift in the realm of politics. In short, social democracy was mugged by stagflation – a combination of high unemployment and high inflation.

In Australia, the Whitlam government was a spectacular casualty of th[is] new dispensation. Whitlam’s prediction on the 11th of November 1975 that nothing would save the Governor-General proved incorrect: the Dismissal was not just the end of a government that had dreams grander than “responsible economic management”, it also marked the beginning of the end of the era of social democracy. The ghost of the Whitlam government has stalked the Labor party ever since, turning visionary reformers into cautious economic managers desperate to prove that they can be trusted to put their hands on the economic levers.
(Hamilton 7)

These post-mortems on the death of Left politics, which are haunted by the ghost or spectre of a political leader and his government, are also accompanied by reports on the death of Australian literary fiction. For example, journalist and non-fiction writer, Mark Mordue in a 2003 Sydney Morning Herald essay titled, ‘Is the novel dead?’ answers: ‘Fiction is dead. Long live non-fiction’ (Mordue par. 1). Mordue argues that similar articles expressing anxiety over Australian literature’s death are often a call for a literary fiction which is social realist in form and content: a political fiction that engages with the real contemporary world of social class and working lives (Mordue par. 19). In this vein Malcolm Knox, in a recent essay in Overland, writes that ‘Original writing derives from real life, from the real world, from the concrete’ (11). Knox ties this production of, and reading sensitivity to, original writing to a call for a renewal of a politically Left literary aesthetic: the truth that will defeat the lies of the Howard Government is formed from defamiliarising the banalities of literary fiction’s stock images (Knox 11). Mordue, however, questions fiction’s capacity for such a return to the real; it’s former reading audience now finding their desire for it increasingly fulfilled in non-fiction:

was [there] a growing conflict between the nature of “art” and the project of engagement in this country? The boom in non-fiction certainly suggested some missing connection, a breach in fiction’s ability to commune with a public it had somehow forgotten or left behind. (Mordue par. 7)

Taking a more materialist line on this death of fiction debate Mark Davis ties the two deaths together:

the decline of the literary paradigm can be understood in terms of broader social and governmental shifts related to globalisation, such as the decline of post-war consensus (‘welfare state’) politics and their supplanting by a new consensus based on around free-market notions of deregulation, privatisation and trade liberalisation, and the rise of the global information economy. Seen in these terms the decline of the literary paradigm isn’t simply to do with literature; it’s to do with a broader reconceptualisation of the public sphere itself. (Davis 5)

What to make of these two, perhaps connected, deaths – of social democracy and literary fiction – is what I will explore here through Amanda Lohrey’s 1988 novel The Reading Group. In particular I will follow two suggestions already made in the death notices above: firstly, Clive Hamilton’s suggestion that Whitlam’s ghost haunts the contemporary Labor party, and secondly, Mark Davis’ suggestion that the decline of the literary paradigm is entwined with the public sphere itself being reconceptualized.

The ghost of Whitlam.
Amanda Lohrey was born in 1947 and raised in Hobart in a working-class family that had strong connections to the trade union movement (Mead par. 3). Her first novel, The Morality of Gentlemen, published in 1984, revisits a Hobart waterfront dispute from the 1950s in the middle of the Menzies era, when the spectre of communism was cause for intense political battles for the hearts and minds of the industrial left, resulting in the split of the labour movement. Lohrey was educated at the University of Tasmania, taking a degree in Political Science and received a scholarship to study at Cambridge University, where she read social theory (Mead par. 3). Her husband, Andrew Lohrey held a seat in the Tasmanian House of Assembly, as a Labor Party member, from 1972 to 1986 and was for a time Minister for Primary Industries (Mead par. 3)
Her second novel, The Reading Group, reflects these biographical traces, and one aspect of its political mimesis was considered defamatory enough that a writ was served and the initial print run scraped and republished with the offending lines removed (Wilde 475).

The Reading Group can been called an elegy for the intellectual left. It is certainly that, but it is also a novelistic post-mortem on a specific social formation after–Whitlam. The novel tracks, through a series of almost discontinuous tableaux, the lives of eight former members of a reading group who have lost the utopian and revolutionary hopes that they previously invested in the labour movement. After-Whitlam time, in the novel, is a time of privatised utopias (Lohrey, TRG 268-9), of drought and permanent bush fires (41), of menacing plague-bearers(63), and a new patriotism that is fiercely marketed (45-6). Liberalism is condemned as indecisive and weak by a conservative poet in late-night television monologues (54), and the state vacillates over whether or not to declare a state of emergency (248-54). Meanwhile, the former reading group members continue on, channelling their revolutionary desires into: Don Juan-like conquests (26-8); restoring a home to an idealised Victorian purity (10-11); seeking the moment of an amalgamated political-poetic-sexual conversion (221-8); a knightly crusade to save just one of the underclass (89-92); attaining political power through being an indispensably coherent ministerial advisor (42-3). The novel ends with the fires still burning, decisions of state deferred, bombs exploding. No one really develops, no one comes to any transforming decisions or self-knowledge, the aporias and contradictions of their uoptias passed over, the menace remains.
The novel’s final word goes to the potential pederast high school teacher, Lyndon Hughes, who tells us :

I don’t sneer at utopia. I’d never be that crass. It’s just that I live for the utopia of the present. It’s a utopia of space, not of time. It’s a life lived with an intense awareness of its own space. Of where my body is now. Who’s the philosopher here? I’m the philosopher. (268 emphasis added)

A spatial utopia makes literal sense, as utopia is of space rather than temporality. But in our imaginations utopias are usually before or behind us: their perfection haunts the present from the past as much as from the future. In modernity utopia is usually before us - in the future - and its promise is mostly cast in terms of revolution, rather than evolution or reform. When the planets are aligned, and things fall into place, there is potential for revolution. This alignment is timely and thereby temporal. Time becomes full and opportune, ripe for decisive action (kairos).
The slogan of Gough Whitlam’s 1972 election campaign was ‘It’s time’:

Men and women of Australia!
The decision we will make for our country on the 2nd of December is a choice between the past and the future. There are moments in history when the whole fate and future of nations can be decided in a single decision. For Australia, this is such a time. It’s time . . . (Whitlam par. 1)

The Reading Group is allegorical and symbolic in its settings and temporalities: a place like Hobart but not quite; and a time in the near future like the Fraser years, Labor’s interregnum, before the coming of Hawke, the messiah. But maybe Hawke is part of that near future too (Lohrey, TRG 202-4). This elusive disjointedness could be called after-Whitlam time for the intellectual left. Whitlam’s ghost haunts the characters like the ghost of King Hamlet haunts Hamlet . After-Whitlam, after Whitlam’s timeliness, time is out of joint for the intellectual left.(Derrida)

The public sphere of letters.
Speaking to a reading group at Sydney University after the publication of her novel, Lohrey gave some background to her own motivations in writing this elegy for the intellectual left after-Whitlam:

Some of us were young at a time when there was a great Utopian vision and didn’t want to grow up to be Yuppies. What a let down. There was this great flare in Australia. This brief flare in the 70s. Whatever you think of Whitlam and his extraordinary Government, there was this great flare of, “Goodness it’s all possible! Let’s change the National Anthem, let’s perhaps think about republicanism. Let’s get out of Vietnam. Let’s recognise China. Let’s do all these things and see what happens!” You know, it was almost like a fictional process. Let’s shuffle the deck. And people got very excited and felt the sense of possibility, of trying out the new. And then it all imploded. It all deflated for various reasons and we’d all have our own stories to tell about that, depending on our experience. (Lohrey, Writers in Action 210)

The Reading Group is Lohrey’s story about the aftermath of a political time, Whitlam time, that was so full and ripe with the promise of possibilities that it was almost like a fictional process. Although only 10 when Governor General Kerr dismissed Whitlam the promises of Whitlamism still haunt me.
Lohrey’s novel asks: How do we read and write after this promise has died? And it begins to answer this question by asking what a reading group, and by extension, what writing fiction, can actually mean and do for Left politics. In Mark Davis’ terms this amounts to a fictional inquiry into the literary paradigm. In Jurgen Habermas’ terms, an inquiry into the literary public sphere, or the public sphere of letters.

For Habermas the mature, or political bourgeois public sphere of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries develops from a new sense of privateness represented in epistolary novels such as Richardson’s Pamela (Habermas 43, 48). The psychological intimacy of the letter form makes its way into novels and these intimate, and yet publicly addressed, forms provide the means with which the rising bourgeoisie will judge, reflect and learn in order to work out what models and implications their new privateness promises (Habermas 48-51). This literary precursor public sphere develops in the institutions, such as journals, periodicals, salons and coffee houses, through which literary models of a new privateness become a question to be answered through critical judgement and reason (Habermas 31-43). In an age when monarchical, church and aristocratic power was being challenged by the rising capitalist class, public authority, no longer paraded before subjects and no longer practised in secret, was opening up to such critical judgements (Habermas 27-31). The political public sphere, for Habermas, evolves out of its literary precursor as this new privateness becomes essentially human: located in the intimate domestic family home and thereby separate from the ascendant constitutional, administrative and military state (Habermas 51-6). The mature political public sphere, which is a powerful imaginary or ideal in liberal democratic capitalism, is a virtual space where private people come together to deliberate the terms and decisions of public authority and its regulations (Habermas 27).

What I’m interested in here is Habermas’ suggestive notion that it is the child that gives birth to the adult public sphere. To put this idea back into Lohrey’s terrain and temporality, what hope is there for a literary public sphere after-Whitlam? In other words if, as Habermas suggests, a mature public sphere is developed out of its literary precursor, then what sort of new privateness, after-Whitlam, might this precursor public sphere generate?

‘They used to have a reading group. It had been a waste of time really, an old fashioned idea that no seriously active person would ever bother with’ (Lohrey, TRG 29). In the time of the reading group they are all still members of the Australian Labor Party, although their participation is experienced as a laborious, frustrating grind (Lohrey, TRG 32). The novel hints at what Peter Beilharz calls the labour movement’s mania for policy in this interregnum period between Whitlam and Hawke: the disciplined factional machinery of the party preparing it for government; the discourse of economic rationalism filtering down into the branch level; the Accord and the deregulation of finance are just around the corner (Beliharz 102-30).

They attempt to read political philosophy mainly, so as to work out the rationale underlying the Labor party machine (Lohrey, TRG 33-34). The political organiser and academic Sam argues that such collective reading will help them to learn the dance-steps of politics; to anticipate and perhaps lead:

Sam [said] that politics was a form of dancing: you had to know the steps. And the steps changed all the time; so that just when you’d learnt one set the formation would change, or the formation would stay the same but the tempo would alter . . .
Renata had asked the obvious question: she didn’t see how reading could improve your dancing. Listening, maybe, but to what?
Well, said Sam, you had to know how to listen, you had to know how to interpret the code, and since all concepts came back to words, reading could help you to anticipate. And in any form of dancing, any structured form of dancing, he’d corrected himself, every step has a name.
So, you could teach yourself dancing from a book?
Sam didn’t see why not; after all, you could teach yourself yoga from a book.
Yes, said Renata, but yoga isn’t done to a beat, except that of your breathing. In music there was a rhythm that the body had to experience for itself.
True, but you didn’t have to hear it played; all you had to do was to learn how to read music.
Renata had given up at this point. There was something wrong with this argument of Sam’s, she knew, but she couldn’t pinpoint it, not towards the end of a meal with a head hazy from Andrew’s Beaujolais. (29-30 emphasis in original)

Renata’s doubts cast aside the eight reading group members push on. They struggle to read Gramsci and Plato in the living room (34); it soon falls apart:

[T]here was something faintly ridiculous and Victorian about a reading group. Reading groups were for fanatics or Trotskyists, people who were fringe or impotent, or for middle-aged housewives who had nothing better to do with their time. Reading with other people was unsophisticated, uncool: reading was something you did alone. (33-4)

This desire for a reading group, especially one that reads political philosophy, is structurally in keeping with Habermas’ narrative of the genesis of the mature public sphere. In a sense such a desire is like a ghost in the machinery of modernity, returning periodically in different places, in different times. But in this novel the intellectual left after-Whitlam finds that such a collective reading is too spectral to make that transition from the literary to the political public sphere. Their utopian energies, their desires for revolution, turn inward. Unable to read the rhythms of their own desires as a relation between the private and the public, they are both not in and out of time. They lack a felt-sense of the rhythms of the times: the revolutionary time they heard in and projected onto Whitlam(ism) becomes the lost object of a Left melancholy that breaks out in the novel’s proliferating moments of mania.

Stephen Knight, in his Scripsi critique of The Reading Group, argues that the novel’s politics are created formally: that its (near) futurism; allegorical context; and deployment of Brecht’s alienation technique, interrogate the expressive realism of its characters, situations and institutions (Knight 204-5). These formal politics make any mimetic reading of the novel impossible.

So, finally, on the one hand, by interrogating the relations between reading, writing and public-political activity, Lohrey suggests that the moment of Whitlamism’s social democracy and its complementary literary paradigm is a dead or lost object against which the work of Left mourning can begin its labour. On this reading the novel is a work of mourning that rather than presenting the positive objects and projects of new political-libidinal investments, negates such a presentation through the dystopia of its allegorical contexts. This technique of negation, Knight argues, gives the novel the power to think (Knight 204-5). And yet, on the other hand, the novel’s formal politics is also a politics of temporal rhythm which suggests that the time of revolution might be less an opening called out by, and read off from, escalating crises than by the structure of rhythmic feeling writing and reading listens for and works to perform: perhaps a new set of relations between the intimate private and the political public spheres represented in the public sphere of letters.

Stephen Knight ends his untimely critique of The Reading Group arguing that he finds in Lohrey’s novel her hope for a writable future for radical Australia (Knight 207). But a writable future that dances in step and time with the present, that thinks rhythmically, sounds even more promising. The Reading Group makes such a promise.

Works Cited
Beilharz, Peter. Transforming labor: labour tradition and the labor decade in Australia. Oakleigh: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Davis, Mark. “The decline of the literary paradigm in Australian publishing.” [see sidebar for link]

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Habermas, Jurgen. The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge: Polity, 1989.

Hamilton, Clive. “What’s left? The death of social democracy.” Quarterly Essay 21 Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006.

Knight, Stephen. “A writable future.” Scripsi 5.2 (1989): 203-207.

Knox, Malcolm. “The case for ‘Original’ Australian fiction.” Overland 182 (2006): 4 – 11.[see sidebar for link]

Latham, Mark. Civilising global capital: new thinking for Australian Labor. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1998.

Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life. Trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Continuum, 2004.

Lohrey, Amanda. The morality of gentlemen. Chippendale: Picador, 1984.

___. The reading group. Chippendale: Picador, 1988.

___. ‘Amanda Lohrey: The reading group’ Ed. Gerry Turcotte. Writers in action: the writers choice evenings. Paddington: Currency, 1990. 205 – 224.

Mead, Jenna. ‘Amanda Lohrey’ entry in Dictionary of Literary Biography. [awaiting publication]

Mordue, Mark. “Is the novel dead?” Essay, 25 January 2003. Sydney Morning Herald. 11 July 2004 .

Whitlam, Gough. “It's Time For Leadership.” Policy Speech for the Australian Labor Party at the Blacktown Civic Centre, 13 November 1972. 8 May 2006

‘Lohrey, Amanda’ entry in The Oxford companion to Australian literature. Ed. William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton, and Barry Andrews. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1994: 475.

[From ASAL 2006 Conference paper]

Reads like teen spirit: Australian Grunge Fiction

2011-06-27T06:47:00.000+10:00

It’s difficult to listen to Nirvana without hearing omens of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Suicide floods songs, and other art forms, with meanings that explain the emotions and symbols in song lyrics, in the way the song is sung, in its timbres and tempo. Jim Morrison from the Doors – an accidental death, or overdose – Ian Curtis from Joy Division – suicide by hanging: two figures whose baritonal excursions into the dark side are given an endorsement by their early deaths. This is the End – ahh, of course! Love will tear us apart – chilling, full of foreboding. Listening to and watching Cobain, Morrison and Curtis we feel we can know and feel that they are expressing suicidal emotions and obsessive thoughts of mortality.

It’s hard then to go back to the moment of Nirvana’s global emergence. Back to 1991 and the song Smells like teen spirit. You might remember the video: the band is set up in a high school gym, various subgroups of American teen culture in the bleachers, cheerleaders shaking their pom poms, one with the Anarchy symbol on her top, Kurt Cobain in a striped long sleeved T-shirt his bleached-blonde hair long and stringy, covering his eyes, as the band grind out the heavy verses, moving into overdrive for the anthemic chorus: Here we are now, entertain us. By the video’s end there’s a riot going on: the gym floor has been invaded, the drums are being attacked, and Cobain is screaming ‘No denial’.

It’s an angry song, even one of desperation, but hardly a premonition of suicide. There’s something else going on in that song and I don’t think this something else can be explained by Kurt Cobain’s suicide. In fact, the meanings that we make of songs like Smells like teen spirit might be less guided by the expression of the artist’s soul, and more by our own needs to find a form for making sense of the world we live in. Smells like teen spirit is, I think, a perfect example of a form that helped a mass of people make sense of the world. Not by explaining the world, but more by providing four and a bit minutes of song which performed the feeling of the contradictions of teen spirit.

What do I mean by the feeling of the contradictions of teen spirit? Just a touch of theory by way of explanation. One of the founders of Cultural Studies, Raymond Williams, argued that culture was not only ordinary - that you didn’t need a degree in fine arts to consume it in galleries because culture was how you walked and talked everyday - but that its expressions were structured feelings: or producing a structure of feeling. This is Williams:

“[I]t was a structure in the sense that you could perceive it operating in one work after another which wasn’t otherwise connected – people weren’t learning it from each other; yet it was one of feeling much more than thought – a pattern of impulses, restraints, tones.” [from Politics and letters: Interviews with the New Left, London New Left Books, 1979: 159 ]

What a great way of defining a genre like grunge: ‘ a structure operating in one work after another which wasn’t otherwise connected.’

Smells like teen spirit read this way, as structure of feeling, is an ambivalent text that oscillates between a sludgey spaced-out futility, and a dense, explosive anger that accelerates, then brakes, accelerates again. It veers between slowdown and speed-up: the vocal tone moves from sarcasm to sincerity; a hatred directed both inward and outward and an idealism that is blocked. Lyrically, and more importantly in Cobain’s timbre, is a feeling of abjection, of something debasing that he’s reached deep into himself to eject but can’t - it remains stuck in his throat and belly. A denial, that can’t be blasted out through speed or power.

The lyric of Smells like teen spirit has as its central subject youth culture: the teen spirit that the form of the song is so ambivalent about. The lyric demands that youth culture be about more than entertainment: that was a central promise of rock music, and punk in particular. But in the end, well whatever, Nevermind.

Nirvana try to breathe their teen spirit into one of post-war youth culture’s key forms: the rock song. But here youth as a symbol of speed and revolt is rendered in a deeply ambivalent text that also presents youth culture as a sludge-like state that is too slow and thick to storm the barricades. Let’s trash the gym then go to the mall for a cheeseburger deluxe with fries.

Smells like teen spirit sounds like a last gasp call to arms for a dominant version of youth culture. Has rock progressed since Grunge? I don’t follow the game closely enough anymore, but the song sounds like the last rebellion in the line that runs from the Velvet Underground through the Stooges to Joy Division: Nirvana stage a revolution that is exhausted before it begins.

So, Nirvana’s smells like teen spirit as a structure of feeling – a form of song, a structure with a conventional verse/ chorus/ solo format – that provided a compelling aural text for feeling your way into the world in 1991-92. Grunge becomes a buzzword and a subculture in the West.

In the same year Brisbane based novelist Andrew McGahan writes Praise which is retrospectively nominated as the germinal Australian Grunge novel. Late 1991 is also the time, in Australia, of growing unemployment queues: the aftermath of the recession of 1990. If youth is a key symbol of modernisation, of speed, then what happens to this symbol in a time of slow-down or recession? What happens to teen spirit as an idea, as a feeling, when an economy gets ill and decelerates?

This slow-down in growth was diagnosed, by the newly minted Prime Minister Paul Keating, as being caused by endemic blockages in the economic body. There were clogged, sclerotic arteries in need of clearing so as to get the financial blood flowing quicker. The prescription was for more economic reform: more flexibility, open-ness, youthful vitality.

So, I’ve taken a leap into a strange hybrid of economic and medical discourse here. Not much of a leap when you consider that the current economic crisis – the sub prime crisis based in the US– is often referred to as a contagion that might infect other economies. Bodies that get ill can also be filled with teen spirit and, I’m arguing, these symbols of youth become highly contradictory and problematic in the period of the early to mid 1990s.
This problem emerges in a stream of art and popular culture: grunge – grunge music and grunge fiction. And it emerges with some force because the youthful speed demanded for further economic reform clashes head on with a strain of youth culture that had operated in terms of its own superior cultural and social speed pitting itself against the authority of the state and the commodification of the markets.

What then happens when the state authorises a speed-up in the process of commodification through the symbols of youth? In other words if youth is the symbolic means by which economic modernisation is promoted by politicians like Paul Keating, by the youthful Bill Clinton, then where does teen spirit go to in order to rebel. I think you can hear the sound of this grinding of the gears in Nirvana’s song which speeds up and slows down in turn.

Four years later, in 1995, a new genre of Australian fiction emerged under the name of grunge. Christos Tsiolkas’ short novel, Loaded [adapted as the 1998 film Head On], was one of a number of these novels marketed and debated within a critical literary discourse which tended to interpret these novels as autobiographical and realistic representations of an urban youth culture that was out to shock and that had lost its way. Loaded narrates twentyfour hours in the life of 19 year old Ari Voulis, as he tells us about his journey and experiences through the four corners of suburban Melbourne. A first generation migrant, who is jobless and gay, Ari’s day is fuelled by a constant ingestion of drugs, of masturbation and sex in backlanes and beats, endless fights, flights and refusals, the tentative beginnings of a romance and a soundtrack that accompanies his movements and dancing throughout the city and its places.

The pace of his day matches his main drug choices: speed for acceleration and aggression and marijuana for relaxing and slowing down. His fundamental tone is one of refusal and sarcasm but this is mixed with moments of tenderness and sincerity, especially for his family and his best friend Johnny, a transivestite. His hatred is directed both out and inwardly. And he thrives on abjection, seeking it in sex and also from the insults of his father.

Loaded is a more complex text than Smells like teen spirit, but it too is deeply ambivalent about teen spirit or youth as a symbol. Ari is torn in three directions: a wog who hates wogs, gay but afraid of being identified as a faggot and working-class in a time of residual solidarity. Ari begins the novel waking at his brother’s student share house in East Melbourne, and ends it in the West in his family-home on his bed, exhausted, waiting for sleep. He has moved and danced through the four corners of suburban Melbourne, but hasn’t developed or really gone anywhere. Rather than self-formation Ari’s self is internally split three ways; rather than integrating into the world, Ari thrives on its abject sites and refuses its basic demand: that he get a job and settle down. Although a highly compressed narrative Loaded is a failed coming of age novel: a de-formation novel. It reads like teen spirit in crisis.
So, reading grunge fiction as though it is the expression of authentic adolescent feelings, misses another way of interpreting that reads through structures of feeling, and that reads youth as a symbol rather than as a fact. We can read Kurt Cobain’s suicide into his songs, into his singing performances, but this can’t explain why Nirvana were so timely, so instantly, globally embraced. When grunge is read against a dominant national and international response to recession that speeds up the processes of reform and uses the language of youthfulness to persuade the polity to modernise the economic body, such a reading suggests that what this modernising body abjects or expels enters the symbolic field of youth. Grunge seems like a pretty accurate name for this return of the abject body, during and after a recession. Ari the narrator in Loaded says:

“There is a last, and very cherished, urban myth. That every new generation has it better that the one that came before it. Bullshit. I am surfing on the down-curve of capital. The generations after this one are not going to build on the peasants’ landholdings. There’s no jobs, no work, no factories, no wage packet, no half-acre block. There is no more land. I am sliding towards the sewer. I’m not even struggling against the flow. I can smell the pungent aroma of shit, but I’m still breathing.” (Loaded 144)

Is this teen spirit, or does it just read like it?

[From a paper presented at Utas Postgraduate Conference, 21 September, 2007]

Reading and rhythm

2011-06-26T21:13:00.002+10:00

[An older draft post. Better out than in].

I’m currently searching for, and developing, a theory of rhythm which is at the same time one of reading. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, in Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of representational time is useful here as she conceives of reading ‘postmodern’ fiction as being a co-creative improvisation. Is this what we are invited to do in, or with, Anthony Macris’ novel Capital, volume one? To co-compose as we move with the generative mise en abyme’s machinic and organic oscillations and pulsations? Is the sound of, the rhythms of Capital, volume one like the sound that Robert Fink describes as the ‘media sublime’? What does it feel like ('feel' here to include structured feeling in Raymond Williams' sense of emerging cultural forms as 'structures of feeling') to read rhythmically?

If grunge literature attempts to use dissonance (Three dollars resolves its dissonance into consonance) alongside its temporalities of abjection, drug-use states, and thereby has one foot in the universe of tonality-representation (to use the language of Attali, Adorno, Ermarth et al: the key point here is that there are multiple ways out of scale and tonality – out of harmony, representation, exchange, consent and consensus), then Macris’s novel is drawing on a different, more French heritage of thought and practice to write outside of tonality and representation: to write so that the reader is moved – so that the reader must dance in order to read. And yet content, rather than just form, is central to understanding Macris’ novel for the 'bouncing ball', the floor lights that flash the next dance-step position, are not movements shaped by the cosmopolitan tourist’s new purchase or discovery, or by the movement toward redemption or reconciliation or creation – the movement here is constellated within the journeys of a milieu of discarded commodities, of forms that have expired, of the drive to satisfy the fetish of the commodity. Alongside the body of the reader are the bodies of the text’s things: the lucozade bottle, the pregnant mouse.

To draw back into another novel under consideration in the thesis, we find in Amanda Lohrey’s The Reading Group a key passage that sets this train of thought in motion. Disillusioned with late 1970s orthodox Labourist politics, the literary agent Renata attends a reading group of friends and former Left activists which is seeking to reignite Left political revolutionary feeling. During the initial meeting Renata wonders at a homology between reading politically and dancing as political leadership. What is touched on just at the edge of thought (a line from David Malouf's Remembering Babylon) for Renata is the sense that while reading is able to ingest codes and systems (the steps of politics) it is also something rhythmic, something felt in the same way that rhythm is felt in the body.

Sam [said] that politics was a form of dancing: you had to know the steps. And the steps changed all the time; so that just when you’d learnt one set the formation would change, or the formation would stay the same but the tempo would alter . . .
Renata had asked the obvious question: she didn’t see how reading could improve your dancing. Listening, maybe, but to what?
Well, said Sam, you had to know how to listen, you had to know how to interpret the code, and since all concepts came back to words, reading could help you to anticipate. And in any form of dancing, any structured form of dancing, he’d corrected himself, every step has a name.
So, you could teach yourself dancing from a book?
Sam didn’t see why not; after all, you could teach yourself yoga from a book.
Yes, said Renata, but yoga isn’t done to a beat, except that of your breathing. In music there was a rhythm that the body had to experience for itself.
True, but you didn’t have to hear it played; all you had to do was to learn how to read music.
Renata had given up at this point. There was something wrong with this argument of Sam’s, she knew, but she couldn’t pinpoint it, not towards the end of a meal with a head hazy from Andrew’s Beaujolais. (The Reading Group 29-30)

[T]here was something faintly ridiculous and Victorian about a reading group. Reading groups were for fanatics or Trotskyists, people who were fringe or impotent, or for middle-aged housewives who had nothing better to do with their time. Reading with other people was unsophisticated, uncool: reading was something you did alone. (33-4)

Thus we come to a hard core of one of the questions at the base of this thesis: what, if anything, gets [read] into novels? Is there something material, something spiritual, something historical, something bodily-rhythmic that manages to lodge itself in novels and becomes, for the better ones, the content and substance upon which the reader’s identifications and empathies are then made to loop back through the reflective prompts of formal (aesthetic) ethics and politics?

Do we read, also, with our body? Do we experience rhythms in, or even through, our bodies as we read? Ermarth:

The reader . . . has a harder time of it [Ermarth writing here about a Borges story]. The story forces reader attention into play between semantic systems, and that play is what constitutes rhythmic time. The echoes of those multiple systems shine through, pullulate, in the transparent moment, and force the reader to be aware that at any point multiple turnings are possible. Reader attention alternates between contradictory possibilities, and the rhythms of this attention cannot be reduced to statement. [68]

Macris’s novel does something similar; the two narrative threads force a switching between narrative orientations (narrator: third and first-persons, time-space, episode and mock-epic, discontinuous and continuous), between paradigms. In the London Underground [LU] thread the initial orientation is framed by the negative: by missing the train. This missed train is analogous to Ermarth’s depiction of postmodern temporality as rhythmic time: a time off the track[s]. Yet in this negativity of the LU thread the productive and generative force of the narrative is made. In other words the initial negativity is a precondition for the positivity that follows: albeit a positivity that is dirty, gritty, lacking in redemption or reconciliation, or even the satisfaction of successful (Spivak's continuist) commodity exchange. An incommensurability or discontinuity between the two narrative 'threads' that is not a contradiction to be resolved, or an ideologically open gap to be symptomatically filled by an (psycho) analytic meaning or truth. No. Instead the negativity of this incommensurable gap between the chapters sparks the generation-machine of the novel's secondary layer of formal movement: the rhizomic root weave of motiffs and themes, mise en abyme, multiplying and imploding across these gaps and ruptures.

Avant-garde and Capital, volume one (Macris not Marx)

2011-06-26T21:12:00.001+10:00

[Another older, draft post.].

For mediation in Benjamin has more of the character of a switch between circuits (opening a gap in Gadamer’s ‘closed circuits of historical life’, triggered by the metonymic structure of the image) than the production of a shared conceptual space, since the terms of its relations are located in different temporal dimensions.
Peter Osborne, The politics of time : 151

The intention to produce an avant-garde novel is rarely matched by its realisation. The odds weigh heavily against success. Primarily, the reception, or consumption, of the artefact as avant-garde depends on the serendipity of the chosen form and content: for to be ahead of the contemporary is partly a gamble on behalf of the primary producer and the work-gang involved in production, manufacture, packaging, distribution, and promotion. Expensive market research might assist in this task, but such mercenary information-gathering is so antithetical to the codes of author-novelist as artist-prophet, that even the whiff of market measurement immediately removes avant-garde from our table of evaluations.

Why this seems a natural response is itself interesting and something that Pierre Bourdieu has, in part, analysed and explained in his The Rules of Art, by way of arguing that aesthetic autonomy is a value created in opposition to economic and political power. The power of the creative work gains its critical and forerunning position because it negates and distances its immanent content from what its contemporary audience take to be the dominant poles of economic and political power, since bourgeois liberal capitalism became ascendant.

However, Bourdieu’s sociological analysis of the literary field’s creation of symbolic capital , and the importance of avant-garde-ness to this type of capital, is too reliant on a sociological reading of the content of fictional narrative: in particular Gustave Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, which Bourdieu models as a map of pre-1848 Paris, in which the novel’s representation of the movements and locations of socio-political-economic classes of men, with the hero Frederic Moreau structuring this literary geography, are read as an ur-map of how the rules of the literary field are both played and inaugurated. Within this genealogy of the French literary field, the avant-garde assumes its rule-like status as an innovative break in both the dominant forms and in the composition of the dominant personnel. The social break is largely driven by a biologically generational turnover. Franco Moretti, in the first chapter of his Graphs, Maps, Trees, concurs with Bourdieu here: generational change is homologous to generic change.

This leaves the question of form. For it’s one thing to propose that generational change drives, and is at, the centre of the modern literary field’s renewal and production. But such biological new-ness has no necessary relationship to generic innovation – whether such innovation is mere bricolage is another question. And to what extent is avant-garde status, avant-garde production, aesthetic innovation only? Indeed, can avant-garde, a term with etymological roots in military discourse, have a non-political import?

For Bourdieu what is innovative, and thereby a decisive instance of literary avant-garde-ness, about A Sentimental Education is that the novel’s realism is present in its focus on everyday events and objects, and yet the description and presentation of such everyday events and objects, is formally sophisticated – the artistry of the language is intended for its own pleasure. Art for art’s sake. The innovation here, for Bourdieu, is that literary aesthetics achieves here a form of autonomy for the text, and symbolic capital for the author, who, from the consecrated position of being judged by their peers to have achieved such autonomy (in fact negating power- business and politics), obtains a right to practice judgement over and against power. For Bourdieu, the public intellectual, in France at least, represented by Zola during the Dreyfus affair, and subsequently Sartre, derives their symbolic capital through mastering the rules of the literary field, and its version of the rules of art.

However, what is conceptualised as avant-garde here, in Bourdieu’s history, or genesis as it is subtitled, is based upon an understanding of time and history which is infused with that mixture of modernity and linear progress that Walter Benjamin termed historicist.

In a basic way Anthony Macris’ novel, Capital, volume one, pitches its claim to innovation with its dualistic structure: the chapters alternate, with the odd-numbered chapters told in third-person, present tense, set in a highly compressed time-space, and situated in sections of the London Underground train network. The even-numbered chapters are conventional, first-person micro-stories, or episodes, concerned with coming of age –style subjects; their style is reminiscent of the epicleti (little epiphanies) of paralysis classification that James Joyce gave his short story collection The Dubliners. But what is of particular interest here is that the London Underground narrative is both self-consciously avant-garde, and that its self-consciousness extends to the political philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, alongside David Harvey’s Marxist geography of the condition of postmodernity. My argument here is that this degree of self-consciousness in the London Underground narrative of Macris’s novel, presents a constant switching between circuits not only within this thread of the novel, but between this thread and the other, more conventional one.

Indeed, while Benjamin’s multi-temporality, his messianic time as exterior and ultimately redemptive of all of history, might be a model for how avant-garde-ness functions, for how to escape the nightmare of history, what Macris’ novel does, instead, is to generate a rhizomic root-weave of potentially live switching-points, through which the reader can enter the novel, not as a spatialized circuitry that takes time to flow or move through, but as a multi-temporal text-machine capable of generating “a ‘model’ of the Messianic, ‘shot through’ with ‘chips’ of Messianic time, a site of a ‘weak’ Messianic power.” (Osborne, 149) . . .

We need a conceptual bridge back from now-time to a new narrativity, such that its disjunctive power might have a transformative effect on modes of identification and action. Unless we can find one, Benjamin’s ecstatic ‘now’ will remain a mere ‘time-lag’ or ‘in-between’, without historical force. (Osborne, 156)

Hypothesis: Capital, volume one attempts a now-time in its London Underground thread - an interruption in which the detritus of history doesn’t so much pile up as recombine through text, and in which the Young man is like the angel of history, blown by the wind coming in from paradise. The interruption here is signalled from the first sentence, ‘The young man in the fawn trench coat cannot wait to get off the train.’ (1). The re-seaming of this now-time, in which chips of the Messianic shoot through, into the episodes and chronotopes of the bildungs – one the key literary genres of modernity, and of modernisation – narratives, enacts this conceptual bridge of a needed new narrativity. How successfully is another matter, but I think there is a strong claim to this being part of the novel’s intent.

The flexible body politic: fitter and healthier for what?

2011-06-26T21:09:00.001+10:00

[An older draft post. Time to let loose].

A couple of quotes from Australian author of fiction and essayist Amanda Lohrey which nail the mode of neoliberalism she detected in sections of late-1980s Sydney culture. For Lohrey 'new age' practices of self-government are displacements of earlier utopian projects. These new technologies of self focus political-libidinal investments in the individual body because that's the last space of controllable shelter and control in a time of radical reform (a term popular in the Australian mainstream media in the 1980s which referred to the privatising and deregulating policies of the Federal Labor Government).

The title of Lohrey's essay is, of course, a reference to Jameson's famous essay, but something like a Foucauldian interest in the technologies of the self and the rationalities of liberalism can be seen in this essay and indeed in the trajectory of Lohrey's fiction, which shifts from the influence of aesthetic Marxisms like Brecht, Lukacs, Benjamin and Bloch's, to, as I say, a Foucauldian interest in the formations of the body and self, and in the forces of the psyche-body circuit acting in relation to social-historical changes. I think, for Lohrey, it is the role of narrative and language too on these more recent interests that make her fiction fascinating and a good resource to write PhD research from.

Her last two works of fiction The Philosopher's Doll (2004) and Camille's Bread (1995) move more firmly into the territory I'm attempting to describe above, after the more sustained focus on political party (Australian Labor Party) and State-based politics of the first two novels: The Morality of Gentlemen (1984) and The Reading Group (1988). Effectively Lohrey's interest in the poetics of politics, as Jenna Mead describes it, moves from a focus on the governmentality of state to one on the governmentality of the citizen-subject. Is this shift one that can be explained by her sensitivity to new social forms or is it (also, perhaps) a sign of 'the maturing author'?

From ‘The Project of the Self under Late Capitalism’ Australia’s Best Essays, 2001.

What are these new and emergent structures of feeling? This was something that first engaged me when I went to live in Sydney in 1987. . . . a new sensibility was developing that was a portent of how Australia generally might see the world ten or even twenty years from now. As for my Shiatsu practitioners, they differed from the mainstream only in degree not kind. In essence they were fierce materialists who, through a rigorous regimen of diet and physical training aspired to re-invent themselves by reconditioning their material base, the body – if necessary, cell by cell. They aspired to a kind of utopia of the body, and what could be more Australian than that? They were Zen surfers without the waves. (246-7)

Since then I’ve kept a watching brief on the evolution of the idea of the self as a constant work-in-progress and the concomitant growth of what might be described as privatised utopias; the utopia of one. . . . When all is free-floating, unstable, in a process of being dismantled or alienated from you [Z. Bauman’s liquid modernity], what is it you have left? And the answer is: the body. The body itself becomes a utopian site. And the project of the utopian body is primarily about the pragmatics of health, fitness and diets . . . ‘Fitter and healthier for what?’ (248-9)

the end(s) of certainty

2011-06-26T20:44:00.001+10:00

[An older post kept in storage but may as well let it out of the deep freeze].
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I'm publishing a few posts from the last few years here which focus on the central place of Paul Kelly's 1992 The End of Certainty in any understanding of the long Labor Decade. Kelly's 'story of the 1980s', as his book was subtitled, acts as both the hegemonic means into thinking about this period (one of almost national-epic governmental change) and as itself a text of a considerable force through which the long decade becomes narrativised and thereby available for making meaning and legitimating political projects. In other words, my interest in this 'history' is dual: as a text through which to periodise; and as a text which performs a particular type of periodisation.

The post immediately below is a relatively short one, and attempts to analyse the narrating position Kelly adopts at certain points in the narrative. From where and when can Kelly as narrator know, with an Olympian and magisterial certainty, that a critical political decision was pragmatic and yet inadequate to what the times demanded? The tentative answere here is that if we consider that Kelly is employing conventions from the Bildungsroman, we can use the extensive critical apparatus that has formed around discussion of this form to unpack how, and perhaps why, this narrating position is adopted. Indeed, Joseph Slaughter's notion of the Bildungsroman narrator employing a future-anterior form, or a tautological teleology, is very helpful in explaining how The end of certainty makes this key move. But why? Some answers proferred here.

_________________________________________________________

The ‘banana republic’ was a dose of shock therapy for the nation which for a while left a legacy of crisis which Labor could have utilised to impose far tougher policies on the nation. The opposition gave labor plenty of room. Howard called for a freeze of wages and public spending; the New Right was mugging unions from Robe River to Mudginberri. Keating’s authority was as potent as Hawke’s popularity. The prime minister declared the crisis the equivalent of war. The historical judgement in terms of the public mood and the depth of the problem is that the Hawke-Keating team failed to seize the full magnitude of the moment. Labor could have gone further but lacked the courage and imagination.

Labor felt it was heroic enough – its decisions were draconian by orthodox standards and its advisers were pleased. Labor was also frightened by the demons of revolt from its base and a community backlash. Hawke and Keating depicted themselves as bold warriors. But history will record that the times demanded more and would have given more.

Paul Kelly, The End of Certainty, 1992, p227.

To many Australian of my age (born in the 1960s), who were forming into adults in the 1980s, this quote from the end of a critical chapter in journalist Paul Kelly’s epic bildungsroman of the Australian Labor Party’s modernisation of the Australian economy, will trigger memories of a set of key events, narrative sequences and political dramatis personae. The ‘banana republic’ referred to here is a dystopian warning that treasurer Paul Keating dispatched, speaking on the phone to the king of talk-back radio in Australia at the time, John Laws, in 1986. Having instituted a ‘clean float’ of the Australian currency on the international exchange markets in late 1983, Australia’s integration into global finance markets now provided a moment by moment measurement of the nation’s economic performance and worth: the price of the $A. Combined with those stubbornly residual national accounts measures, which the Keynesian era had provided, such as the balance of trade, the current and capital accounts, foreign debt, Keating in 1986 judged the signs of national economic prospects to be quickly darkening. The storm warning transmitted on a nationally syndicated morning radio show in 1986, predicted landfall at Argentina if the ship of state wasn’t decisively and quickly steered away from that regressive land.

The notion of a banana republic, a nation-state prone to military dictatorships and juntas, surviving, for the few, on precarious agricultural production, forever in debt to the developed world, was the dystopian destination coiled in the storm warning Keating employed to legitimate how and where the ship of state must now be steered: into rougher, but ultimately more prosperous, international waters. If Australia, and we are talking about Australia, was not to be a banana republic, what then was it to be?

Kelly makes it clear that history itself found that the efforts made to steer away from this dystopia didn’t meet its demands. That, instead of ultimately averting the banana republic the possibility, unfortunately, lingers (in 1992).

These are understandable yet odd claims made by Paul Kelly, who has become highly influential as a political commentator, working both in the production of extended historical narratives like The end of certainty, and more tightly as editor-at-large for Rupert Murdoch’s national broadsheet The Australian. It is understandable that Kelly would make such grand claims about a history which he knows in so much as his historiography is political in very specific ways. Kelly, in the passage cited above, is actually asserting that it is the times, anthropomorphised here as that ‘subject’ (collective or singular, we aren’t told) which made a demand which wasn’t fully supplied, or complied with.

How can Kelly claim to know not only what History will record but what the times demanded? It’s instructive to turn back a few pages in this chapter to find the figure of this position from which such a judgement is made: it is the jury of the international markets – an anthropomorphised collective subjectivity that makes judgements like a judicial operative. That the markets are to be figured as subjective is one astonishing trope, but that a market (which is itself a moment in which the commodity form exists – that moment at which demand and supply come to terms and perform an exchange) is not an army, a general giving orders, a bureaucrat administering statutory regulations, but a jury is a key trope in what Kelly is performing in his political narrative (political both in subject and purpose). For to ascribe the clear, eye and ear of a jury to what the times demanded, and further, to what the times demanded as being that which history will record, is to suggest that the markets are a jury: comprised of regular, ordinary citizens, who will adjudge the evidence, and hear testimony and argument, who will be directed by judges, and who will reach either a majority or unanimous verdict. When Kelly writes that the times demanded more, he infers that the markets demanded more . . . that, indeed, what the ‘markets’ demanded was more deregulation (particularly of the labour market), less public spending. What was demanded was undersupplied – that is why History is able to record a deficit in political will and action; a surplus of Labourism’s sentimental traditionalism.

Kelly’s narrative may seem reasonable from out perspective, after 10 years of neo-conservative governance: a neo-conservatism that has its own Australian aspects. But it might be useful to ask not only from where Kelly’s narrative/ historical writing voices its certainty (one of the unintentional ironies, surely, here is the paradox of an age of uncertainty, so certainly described and above all judged by history’s magisterial, almost moral, eyes and ears) but more importantly from when (in other words is there a type of temporal structure – a chronotope?). And here’s the clue: Kelly writes that ‘the times demanded more’. This is an odd anthropomorphism when analysed as a clause. However, the concept that distinct times make distinct demands, even at a national, or even international, level is a commonplace notion: it is a notion that forms a fundamental operation in political rhetoric, and it is also an emblem of a narrative genre: the coming of age genre – the Bildungsroman. For to meet the demands of the times, or of an age, is effectively to come of age – to become integrated into the age, and in so making this accommodation, to accept ‘reality’, or to develop realism.

Kelly’s bildungsroman (of course, The end of certainty, is more than this) is classical in the two ways of the progenitor of the genre (Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s apprenticeship): the self forms a mature identity both through self integration and through integration with the world. In Kelly’s Bildungsroman Keating plays out the role of Wilhelm, but we are stuck in the transition phase, and Keating’s time at the helm is not yet secured. Kelly, perhaps, is speaking from the Tower Society, The end of certainty the book of Keating’s life – the instruction manual necessary to complete the formation. But alongside Keating is the nation itself – the body politic – which is to be reformed, modernised, to grow out of both its previous generation (the Menzies generation which is like the ancien regime: lethargic, rigidified, sclerotic, closed, old, no longer flexible and efficient, protean and creative, confident and outward looking), and also its youthful, adolescent phase (the Whitlam era: crazy mad, rushing, self-indulgent, experimental, idealist).

As mentioned above Kelly can’t write a classical(and thereby closed) Bildungsroman as his central subjects – Keating & Australia – are still being re-formed/ developed, modernised. The economic realism, which Kelly has made his peace with, has formed him as an individual. His writing, his textuality, his rhetoric is a performance of his maturity – he has integrated politics with economics and found a realism from which to articulate the zeitgeist (the times) as that which the jury of the international markets had judged Australia’s political elite and found that its demands were not fully met! Writing in 1992 the nationl re-formation (the necessary breaking of the Australian settlement) is a becoming that has a telos, a set of destinations. These end points, as Meaghan Morris following Annie Cot argues, are utopian – endless economic growth, that doesn’t so much move towards filling, or closing, a lack, but rather creates and exacerbates the lack in the performance of a neo-conservative discourse. It is Grunge literature that captures some of this movement: rather than a dystopia, it is an atopia that emerges in the thematics of Australian grunge literature as that lack which neo-conservative discourse fuels. In grunge lit, rather than coming-of-age as individual subjects the transition from youth/ adolescence/ teenage to adulthood/ maturity is not only thwarted, it is instead refused, negated, caught in a feedback loop, stuck – the metamorphosis (itself a trope of re-generation) fails, becomes diseased and dies.

A significant strand in Kelly’s historical narrative is the notion, itself a key convention of the Bildungsroman, that political leaders rise into executive power due to the mis/fit between some innate personality trait and the character of the times: that the mixture of contingent circumstances combined with the ‘philosophies’ of the party leaders and challengers, must also align with a personality that fits the times, the party, the mood, the necessities and the constituencies (including business, international forces etc). Another way to put this is to say that a successful stateswoman or statesman will have a biography that maps not only the personal traits 'called-out' by the times, but that they will be able to persuade a majority to alter with the times. It’s no surprise then that Meaghan Morris, in her essay 'Ecstasy and economics', considers theories of immantentism and the aestheticisation of politics, largely through reference to Kelly’s previous portraits of Keating in The Hawke Ascendancy.

For what is subtextual in The end of certainty is the call of the times for a charismatic leader: a leader whose personality enables them to successfully lead (essentially to orchestrate a viable hegeharmonics, themselves), and whose individual formation has been tempered by a productive accommodation with global, post-Keynesian economic realism. Morris rejects Kelly's demand for a leader to suit the times, but not without first praising Kelly's skill in mise en scene, in religious allusion, and in portraiture. I add a skill in employing conventions in the Bildungsroman.

Marginaphilia and ebooks

2011-06-12T12:08:00.001+10:00

Simon Reynolds is my favourite writer on musical history. His Blissed Out helped me make theoretical sense of late 80s and early 90s pop, hip hop and rock. Rip it Up and Start Again, a history of the post-punk movement, places Talking Heads next to Wire, The Fall side by side with Joy Division, providing a map of those social, political and aesthetic threads that made this movement so tantalizing, as well as introducing new music to seek out. So, when news came that Reynolds has a new book, Retromania, I went to Amazon to see if it was available in Kindle form. Yes, it was.

A few months ago I would’ve bought a cheap Kindle version, immediately downloaded it to my Apple iPod touch or MacBook Pro laptop and read most of it. The surge in the $A has made Amazon books relatively cheap. And the velocity at which a book can be searched for, found, bought and downloaded to a reading device, produces a type of techno-rush that is addictive and sort of powerful. But within the last few months I’ve moved back to paper books. In fact, I’ve recently bought a number of Kindle ebooks via Amazon that I’ve read or even skimmed quickly once downloaded, which I’ve subsequently purchased in paper form. Did these ebooks become samplers or tasters; a cheaper, quicker, buzzier form that become the basis on which to decide to make the investment in the paper form? But ebooks are not tasters in the same way that a 45rpm vinyl single was a taster for a 33&1/3rpm lp. ebooks are not shorter in length than their non-digital versions.

Maybe it’s the devices I’m reading on that have left me hankering for the paper version—I read with a pencil in hand, underlining, making annotations. The Mac Kindle software does make these writing/reading techniques available but, ironically, it’s quicker and more habitual for me to read with a pencil than to stop, highlight a passage, and type in a note. Reading paper with a pencil is a way of beginning to take notes; those proto-notes that, for me at least, begin to raise questions, make connections, and highlight significant and difficult passages—a widely used and well-worn technique. Others do this via writing in a reading journal.

On the one hand these techniques for making meaning of what’s read by writing don’t necessarily require paper and pencils (or pens). Expert readers make mental notes and, as I’ve noted, ebooks can be annotated digitally. But marking the paper page is a form of writing-over and writing-back to the text that places the reader’s body, mediated by the lead pencil or ink pen, onto the page. This is not to say that highlighting a sentence in an e-book, then typing a comment, leaves no impression or mark, just that it is a disembodied, digital mark rather than an embodied, physical and analogue one.

I like to mark and score the text: to evaluate, re-organise, illustrate, scratch and change it. At present I know how to do this with paper books and pencils, so that is why I’ve increasingly returned to paper books when I want to make a bodily investment in reading them. But with the growth in touch-screen tablet computers there must already be applications that allow such personalized marginalia to be written onto ebooks. When that happens—if it hasn’t already—ebooks will have become capable of an embodied and annotative, reading practice.

In the meantime, I’ll be getting the paper version of Retromania.

Unbinding spells: Malouf's romantic postcolonial existentialism, Pel Mel and Praise

2011-03-27T21:10:00.000+11:00

Ever fallen under the spell of a writer or a particular book?

John Irving, author of The World According to Garp among other novels, talked about a moment in writing when the the universe of a novel fell under one tone of voice. When a single tonal register enclosed the world of the novel: its characters, events, places. Is this what happens when we are drawn into a story or oeuvre - we surrender to something like a gravitational pull, and stop resisting the story and storytelling and begin to feel our way into the emotional contours of the tale?

Do we ever really begin to inhabit a story until sparks of identification and feeling make the jump from the page to our emotional and cognitive receptors? And once sparked, to put the question in its inverted form, what sorts of readings are those that rasp against the grain of the verbal wood or unrepress the traumas and loss that the text is a maze of dreamwork-like symptoms for? Do we need to first be spellbound before such literary-critical unbindings occur?

Australian novelist, poet, essayist David Malouf did exert a spell over me for a period in the mid 1990s. Malouf's fictional prose often tumbles and flows through a mesmerizing tone of voice, that combines romantic awe with tenderness and a sly sense of humour. Malouf is also a canny plotter and seems to have ingested much of Heidegger's early existentialism and Edward Said's postcolonialism, giving his prose sustained passages of reflection where the narrator works through a problem or event with the timing and feel of the calmer, epiphanic instances of romantic poetry.

Malouf's novels are often structured around an intense homosocial relationship and often involving an 'artist' who the narrator is close to yet ultimately distant from. These romantic artists are also postcolonial forerunners: their primary mode of being-in-the-world is forged out of a confrontation with the limits of colonial structures and discourses, and in such confrontation the creative imagination (what Cornelius Castoriadis calls the Radical Imagination) is enabled to break into newness or alterity. Frank Harland (Harland's Half Acre), Gemmy Fairlie (Remembering Babylon), the wild Child (An Imaginary Life) and Johnno are characters in Malouf's fictions that become post-colonial through their creative responses to encounters with the limits of colonial space and imperial presence. If, as Heidegger in Being and Time argues, authentic existence is a modification, rather than transcendence, of everyday being-with-others then the creative modifications of such colonial and nationalist social being in Malouf's fictions are postcolonial becomings that hover on the brink of transcendental idealism without ever becoming ungrounded.

Exiled from Rome to the rural village of Tomas the poet Ovid, the narrrator of Malouf's second novel An Imaginary Life, tells us early in the narrative that:

[T]he spirits have to be recognised to become real. They are not quite outside us, nor even entirely within, but flow back and forth between us and the objects we have made, the landscape we have shaped and move in. We have dreamed all these things in our deepest lives and they are ourselves. It is our self we are making out there, and when the landscape is complete we shall become the gods who are intended for it. [28]

Yet later in the novel, after Ovid has worked through the mourning of his lost father and had the existential encounter with his own mortality (being-toward-death), such Romantic idealism enters a dialectic with a returned gaze of a Native child - the wild wolf-like Child of the village:

What I remember clearly now are his eyes, fixed on me across the open space between the trees, that stare is something I could not have imagined. I have seen nothing like it before, except from the eyes of my child, so many years ago . . . It exceeds my imagining, that sharp little face with its black stare, and I think how poorly my poetry . . . compares with the accidental reality of this creature who must exist not to impress but simply because he has somehow tumbled into being. [50 - emphasis added]

In Remembering Babylon [1993] a character's authentic existential experience is also dialectically entwined with the ethics of the Other - the Other for whom the self's recognition (and vice versa) establishes identity:

[H]er regard was upon him . . .trying to see right into him, to catch his spirit, aware, as the others were not, that he was not entirely what he allowed them to see . . .her gaze was so open and vulnerable that he felt no threat in it, and in himself only a stillness, a sense of tender ease at being exposed for a moment - not to her, but to himself . . . he felt in the concentration of her gaze that he hung there still. Something, in that moment, had been settled between them . . . he went back and back to it. [35-6]

In the scene above the putatively indigenized Gemmy Fairlie (Malouf's portrayal of the white indigene as hybrid racial-cultural subject), gives presence to a totality of possibilities for postcolonial inhabitance through the reflection returned to Janet McIvor's open gaze:

'I have never seen anyone clearer in all my life. All that he was. All.' Something Gemmy had touched off in them [Janet and her brother Lachlan] was what they were still living, both, in their different ways . . .[and] in a stilled moment that had lasted for years, Gemmy as she saw him, once and for all, up there on the stripped and shiny rail, never to fall . . .drawn by the power, all unconscious in them, of their gaze, their need to draw him into their lives - love, again, love - overbalanced but not yet falling. [195-9]

I do still find both the expression and the ideas spellbinding: the possibilities of the imagination working with presence and Others to enable a deeper dwelling, and the simple, precise and elegant language, that tumbles clauses together in a conversational tone. The Free and Radical Imagination and the radical social imaginary are tempting dreams to believe in, as sources of postcoloniality, justice and liberation. But the social imaginary doesn't behave in the same way as the creative-productive imagination: the power of institutions, of discourses, of the production and distribution of commodities, of the turning of people into waste products, the power of capital to shape and form the social imaginaries that most people live within.

Reading Malouf's fiction as postcolonial Romantic existentialism finds its limits when you start looking to historicise the period from which he begins to produce prose: 1975 to the present. From someone of my generation 1975 is the year punk rock starts to emerge, and this musical-cultural form was short, sharp and rooted in negation and Warlholian aesthetics. So, while Malouf's seductive prose and ethical-aesthetic project retains its power to spell me, I feel like I'm being gravitationally pulled into a history that doesn't square with being shaken by experiencing Newcastle's post-punk band Pel Mel at the MacQuarie Uni Bar in 1983 and feeling as though that was where life was. And it wasn't until Andrew McGahan's Praise (1992) that something of what Pel Mel were doing - a shared structure of feeling - came into Australian fiction, for me at least, with the tone of voice of Praise's Gordon Buchanan:

I'd always maintained a certain distance from the staff at the Capital. I liked them, I drank with them, but I didn't get involved. There were only a few, Carla and Morris, and maybe Lisa, that I bothered with outside of work hours. Most of my friends came from other parts of my life. From school. University. Most of the sex came from there too, but there wasn't much sex and what there was hadn't been much good. I was young and nervous and not very enthusiastic. I didn't have the libido I felt I was supposed to have. And I didn't expect things to improve. I relied on masturbation.

Praise [7].

[Pel Mel - No word from China You tube link]

The uses of FB literacy

2011-01-06T11:19:00.000+11:00

I'm ambivalent about Facebook. I tend to lurk there, occasionally posting You Tube clips, but mostly checking in on friends and acquaintances, feeling as though I'm part of a network. My ambivalence springs, in part, from being uncomfortable with the genres of writing it seems to demand: the additive comment, the quick witted rejoinder, the enthusiastic affirmation, the self-display update.

As a teacher of young adult literacy, one of the complaints I hear about FB is that it is a time-wasting distraction, taking teens away from education, real life. I wonder, though, if there are opportunities in the engagement these young adults have in FB for literacy learning. Because it values script above oral communication, FB surely offers opportunities for literacy growth as young people are generally more accomplished in the oral genres: in order to grow a FB network, teens need to write in ways that form and build relationships. A problem, however, is that the appearance of a 'teacher' figure--who might act as means for such improvements--within a FB teenage social network, would bend the network out of shape. But what if there is no teacher/ mentor figure? What if one of the achievements of FB is to open spaces in which such hierarchies are flatter?

If there are uses for literacy improvement within FB that go beyond promoting programs and courses, these are perhaps to be found in the less direct, catalytic effects achieved by working on building social trust across multiple networks. In other words, FB opens up multiple social networks that individuals can engage in. But these networks crosshatch with others. It is, then, the capacities and skills to move between networks that might well be more important (in governing the self and in participating in the government of others) than building symbolic capital (in Bourdieu's sense--the cachet that one's name has) in one network. Indeed, such capacities to move between networks could be seen as a new type of symbolic capital.

These concerns go to the concept and practice of translation: moving between networks, fields, and situations in ways that the knowledge, skills and self-belief practiced and invested in one activity, in one social network, can be drawn on in another. For example, it took me a while to accept the idea that teaching a class was a performance and not a manifestation of innate responses to a curriculum-based situation. Having performed live music over a number of years, I began to translate the techniques of preparing for and performing a gig to the tutorial situation: rehearsal, learning the pieces, improvising, recording rehearsals, having a set list, timing, keep going, playing as though it was the first time, using adrenaline . . . There are other practices involved in tutoring that gigging can't prepare you for, but having translated these key performance techniques helped to generate belief in my own capacities. I was able to move between networks, or fields, through these gateway techniques that were learnt initially in a domain that I was enthusiastic about; driven to participate in.

The sorts of enthusiasms that circulate through FB require computer and social techniques and knowledge that complaints (or grizzling--see below) about the uselessness of FB ignore. The drive to be-friend and grow one's network generates opportunities for literacy growth that, however seemingly 'useless', can be translated into other networks, fields and situations. Providing we recognise what literacies are already happening.

Complaints about the uselessness or even malign influence of FB are part of what Meaghan Morris argues is 'Grizzling about Facebook'. Morris finds that such grizzling, as can be found in the Murdoch press, for example, is an old genre in which technological innovation is held to be an attack on traditional or everyday life. Thus the trope, in FB grizzling, of its valorising of inauthentic friendships and facile communications in contrast to the authentic sincere relationships that old media, like telephones, letter writing supposedly enable:

‘Facebook no substitute for real world contact' is a grizzle in this sense. What on earth is supposed to follow from a declaration like that? If parents are being incited to pull the plug on their children, or to seize their mobile phones, will millions of adults also rush off-line to chat in a neighbouring office or across the back fence? What would happen in the ‘real world' of our working lives if we did so?

Against FB grizzling, Morris mounts a defence of the utopian possibilities of it and other social media. Indeed, what I find most interesting in her argument, is that she sees FB's best attribute as its capacity to combine genres of sociality. It is perhaps in this combinant facility that FB encourages translation as a skill, making it a tool for literacy learning.

Let me offer my own two or three cents about utopia and Facebook. First, Facebook is not all quizzes, ‘hey babes' and pokes. Most negative media stories obsess about one or two features (photos and status updates in particular), but the point about Facebook is that it bundles together multiple functions and potential things to do. Most of us never use all of them, and other social networking platforms do some of these things better than Facebook does (MySpace for new music, Live Journal for communities, Ning for interest groups, Twitter for global converse and news as-it-happens …), but what Facebook does well is combine: you can write private letters, play games, send gifts, do quizzes, circulate news, post notes, music and clips, share photos or research, test your knowledge, join groups and causes, make haiku-like allusions to your state of mind and chat on-line with friends, all in one place and time—restoring or relieving, according to need, the pattern of an everyday life. Facebook is on-line culture ‘lite': this makes it an object of scorn for digital elitists and ‘white noise' haters (see Tuttle), but it is also a source of its mainstream appeal. Corresponding to this variety of uses is the diversity of kinds of contact Facebook allows, with the relation between ‘contact' and intimacy also having the potential to vary over time within each singular friendship. In this respect it follows the rhythms of ‘real life' as a whole: as Lauren Berlant puts it, ‘all kinds of emotional dependency and sustenance can flourish amongst people who only meet each other at one or a few points on the grid of the field of their life' (‘Faceless Book').

Nothing flourishes for people who join Facebook and do nothing with it; passive or un-giving use of any network is rewarded in kind (Strohmeyer). As Thompson points out, a depth dimension to ‘ambient awareness' accumulates only with time and aggregation. It does grow over time; Facebook has increased my affective quality of life, and not only because it offers a break from my academic service work. The collective stream of posts brings me word of books, articles, music, films, video clips and news that I would otherwise never discover. At a time of life when new involvements become more rare, I suddenly have digital penfriends with whom I exchange old-fashioned letters through Inbox (one of the least remarked features of Facebook), while an acquaintance from decades ago has become a dear friend whom I contact almost daily. Retrieving a joy of my childhood, when my father would bring home a ‘two bob' chocolate on a Friday night and we'd listen to The Goon Show and My Word on the ABC, I play variants of Scrabble with friends on four continents throughout the day. Facebook also nudges me to remember more of my past than I am wont to do, as other people's actions unpredictably pull bits of our scattered lives together. There is more to this aspect than the nostalgia decried by Susan Dominus (‘sometimes it seems like Facebook is the most back-ward looking innovation ever expected to change the future') and Steve Tuttle (‘Goodbye, William and Mary alums I barely remember from 25 years ago'). Facebook has utopian force for me because it gently undoes the dissociative patterns I learned as a girl in pugnaciously ‘real' Australian country towns; it lets me have family on the same plane as my ex-students, my friends who talk books, my colleagues in Hong Kong and Australia and friends who also post in Italian, French and Chinese. Directly because of Facebook, I was able to speak by phone to a much-loved cousin just before he died. If Facebook vanished overnight, I would experience grief.

on Meanland

2010-12-23T15:47:00.000+11:00

A summary of the articles and discussions at Overland's site about the Meanland project: Reading in a time of change.

Literary politics in the Anthropocene

2010-11-27T19:26:00.007+11:00

Below is a fairly unaltered copy of a paper presented mid-year at the Australasian Association for Literature's 'Literature and Science' conference. Seeing Ian McEwan's Solar in a bookstore window, recently, reminds me of this paper and one of its central purposes: to place Solar against Andrew McGahan's much more interesting novel about the connections between climate, libido, madness, magic realism and sublime geological experience.

Can we understand the geological sublime? Ian McEwan's Solar and Andrew McGahan's Wonders of a Godless World.

A quick precis before offering the detail of this paper. Firstly, I’ll outline historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent essay on the challenges to historical practice posed by anthropogenic global warming, and focus in particular on his argument that placing human species history in conversation with histories of capital—a conversation or dialogue that he claims is necessitated by climate change—is an exercise in probing the limits of historical understanding. In the second part, I’ll draw on one of the central arguments in Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative: which is that whether in fictional or historical form, narrative can work with, and on, the aporia produced by thinking cosmological and phenomenological time together. The hypothesis that is built out of the first two parts of the paper is that fiction’s capacity to refigure time provides distinctive resources in pushing the limits of understanding.

The third and final parts test this hypothesis against two recent novels that take climate change as a central subject: Ian McEwan’s Solar and Andrew McGahan’s Wonders of a Godless World. Finally, running through these last two parts will be my claim that in spite of it not being explicitly concerned with anthropogenic global warming, McGahan’s novel more successfully addresses itself to the ways that fiction can partake in the politics of climate change because its key characters are intimate with geological time and have degrees of geological agency. Effectively, they have understandings of dimensions of geological time and space that might usually be experienced as sublime.

1. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Climate of History.

Chakrabarty’s essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses” is a series of cumulative arguments which set out the ramifications of climate change for human histories. I’ll quickly outline the first three theses, before unpacking the fourth a little more.

Thesis 1: Anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse between the Age-old distinction between natural and human history.

Chakrabarty argues once you accept anthropogenic global warming, or other human-induced causes for climate and geological change, then the human history/natural history dichotomy collapses due to human species being considered geological agents: a force of nature in the geological sense akin to those events when there has been mass extinctions of species. So, rather than nature being portrayed as the unchanging, seasonally cyclic backdrop to the theatre of political or social history, these backdrops have come to life and must be presented as more dynamic and enmeshed in human history than before. The inverse is also true: that natural histories that cover the last 250 years need to take our geological agency as a species into account.

Thesis 2: The idea of the Anthropocene, the new geological Epoch when humans exist as a geological force, severely qualifies humanist histories of modernity/ globalization.

For Chakrabarty humanist histories of modernity and globalization place freedom at their centre. The story of the last 250 years of human civilization is, he claims, thematically centred on the development and spread of freedom. Yet, the last 250 years has also been periodized as the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene. The previous epoch of the Holocene, stretching back around 10 to 12, 000 years, provided a rise in temperature conducive to agrarian civilization. But since the onset of the industrial revolution, the affect on the earth of fossil fuel use has shifted it into a new set of conditions in which human species are geologically potent. To place geological and human time scales together like this is quite unsettling, and one implication of this polyrhythm is we are led to conclude that, to quote Chakrabarty, “The mansion of modern freedom stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use.”

Thesis 3: The geological hypothesis regarding the Anthropocene requires us to put global histories of capital in conversation with the species history of humans.

The argument here is that it is at the level of species, and not nations, for example, that humans have become geological agents in the last 250 years. This argument, however, is not compatible with global histories of capital in which uneven development and intra and inter-national inequality mean that the benefits of industrialization have not been enjoyed in a just manner. Similarly, within recent histories of globalization the problems posed by climate change are a matter of a crisis in capitalist management. Chakrabarty poses the question “If capitalism were to mutate beyond its current forms or even to end, would climate change still pose a problem?” His answer is that it would and it does because there are certain boundary or parameter conditions, such as temperature bands, which once crossed spell the end of the species, whether our dominant system is capitalism or not. We therefore can’t subsume species history of humans to histories of global capital but instead need to place them in dialogue.

We are now at the fourth and crucial thesis, which is

Thesis 4: The cross-hatching of species history and the history of capital is a process of probing the limits of historical understanding.

This cross-hatching or conversation between species history and history of capital throws up the enormous problem of historical understanding. Chakrabarty is using understanding here in a technical sense, derived from the hermeneutic tradition, where the primary technique of interpretation in human sciences, like history, is the practice of re-imagining or re-enacting the life experience of others based on your own life. Humanist history is also based in the technique of explanation—a technique it shares with the natural sciences. But the argument here is that while we can give explanations for what caused, say, the depression of the 1930s, and while we can understand what it might have been like to have lived through those times—explanations and understandings that are available to us in histories of capital—we can offer only explanations for how human species are and have become geological agents. The reason we cannot understand ourselves as human species is because we can never experience ourselves as a species. Chakrabarty: “Even is we were to emotionally identify with a word like mankind, we would not know what being a species is, for, in species history, humans are only an instance of the concept species as indeed would be any other life form. But one never experiences being a concept.” As he also puts it: “ There can be no phenomenology of us as a species.”

2. Time and Narrative

The problem Chakrabarty develops is dealt with on a more general level in Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative. Ricoeur wants to know, alongside other questions, if we can reconcile our lived or phenomenological experience of time with what can be called, objective, cosmological, or universal time. These two forms of time map fairly neatly onto the problem that Chakrabarty puts his finger on: namely, how can we reconcile phenomenological time—the time of understanding—with human species and geological time—the time made available through quantification and explanation? Ricoeur’s response is that narrative can figure time in ways that enable degrees of understanding and explanation, which help us to bridge these two poles of time. Ricoeur makes a series of distinctions between historical and fictive time, two of which will help make the transition in my argument here toward its discussion of Solar and Wonders of a Godless World. Unlike narrative historical time, fictive time removes a set of constraints on the narrator who as historian needs to re-inscribe lived time onto cosmic time through reference to such temporalizations of time as calendars, generations, and archival traces. Secondly, and related to the first point, fiction can explore new figurations of lived time that can be related to cosmological time in new ways. Freed from some of the constraints of historical time, fiction can, perhaps, assist us to imaginatively understand what a conversation between human species history and a history of capital can be, or to understand what the geological agency of human species might be like to experience.

So, the hypothesis built here out of the first two parts of the paper is that fiction’s capacity to refigure time provides distinct resources in probing the limits of understanding. I now turn to the third and fourth parts of the paper, which will test this hypothesis.

3. Solar

Ian McEwan’s Solar, published earlier this year, takes climate change, its politics and economics, as its central topic and focus for a comic satire. Its central literary techniques are narratorial irony and synecdoche, in particular the fleshing out of the central character—Noble prize winning physicist, Michael Beard—as a despicably, all-too-human assemblage of sins and flaws which is part of a whole humanity unsuited to the altruism called out by the challenges of climate change. His is a part of the glutton-ness, slothful, proud, lustful, greedy, wrathful and envious whole. A whole beholden to Neoliberal capitalism with little altruism to recommend it. McEwan’s narrator focalizes the narration through Beard and his numerous adventures, varying the level of irony to achieve satiric effects, and to oscillate between a distancing and drawing close to Beard who we are invited to both despise and empathize with. This oscillation in narratorial distance combined with its satirical aims, make Solar a realist comic apocalypse novel. Again, the apocalyptic allegory runs through Beard, whose appetites—one too many sandwiches or packets of chips, one too many sexual affairs—are speeding up his own end, which we are encouraged to think of as an allegory of the end of the species. His appetites are, however, not tragic but comic flaws, for in spite of his sinfulness, he has some redeeming attributes, and is himself sometimes victim to the sinful drives of others.

Solar’s presentation of technological innovation, biophysics research, institutional (bureaucratic, academic, state) politics, and capitalist entrepreneurialism, provide both the novel’s targets for satire and its pathway through to a more redemptive and hopeful opening, emblematized in the central character, Beard’s, ambivalent ‘final’ feeling: an intensely strong emotion, which is either a last heart attack/stroke, or his paternal love for his young daughter, whose long future, his efforts—almost as a by product of his drives/sinfulness—in the field of photosynthetic energy production, might well ensure.

Solar has been received and marketed within the framework of the politics of climate change. McEwan appeared on ABC’s Lateline commenting on the Copenhagen Conference, for example. But how, if at all, does it refigure time? Does it help us to understand the sublime dimensions of a geological time that is now affected by human species activity?

Solar offers one figuration of time with which to develop an understanding of the relationship between human species time and geological time. This scene comes at the start of part 2 as Beard’s plane prepares to land at London, in 2005. As it descends, Beard has a geographically wide-angled and longue duree vision of the city and its surrounds which juxtaposes key events, relationships, places and concerns in his life with the rise of industrialization and modernization. “The hot breath of civilization. He felt it, everyone was feeling it, on the neck, in the face. Beard, gazing down from his wondrous and wonderfully dirty machine believed in his better moments that he had the answer to the problem. At last, he had a mission, it was consuming him, and he was running out of time. “ (Kindle version location. 1756-63). The central metaphor in this scene is his own apartment, which is full of spore-infested food and unwashed dishes. This trope becomes an emblem in the final passage of this section, when he wonders “how could we ever begin to restrain ourselves? We appeared, at this height, like a spreading lichen, a ravaging bloom of algae, a mould enveloping a soft fruit – we were such a wild success. Up there with the spores!” (loc. 1833-47). Human species spreading over the rocks as lichen. It’s a nice image but not one that really opens up a way of understanding geological agency in the Anthropocene.

Solar doesn’t really help us to understand what living in the Anthropocene means, except that human species, in spite of ourselves, might have a future by virtue of a liberal techno-scientific-capitalism that we hope will function to produce new energy sources. The logics of physics and the market seem to lie outside this comically corrupted human species, and these are, it seems, what we might best place our faith in. Solar’s comic apocalyptic mode, avoids the fatalism, even biocentrism, of some ecological discourse, and provides a more pluralistic and provisional set of openings to the problems of the Anthropocene than a novel written with the conventions of a tragic apocalypse. But unless you can stretch the allegory so far as to see Beard’s body as an emblem of the geological body of the earth, I don’t see how Solar can be read within the problematic that Chakrabarty draws attention to.

4. Wonders

Andrew McGahan’s 2009 novel Wonders of a Godless World—which will be shortened to Wonders—is oriented around the relationship between madness, geological human agency, and geological phenomena. There are very few comic moments in this mix of science fiction and magic realism, and it treads a more tragic apocalyptic generic terrain than Solar. Its central literary techniques are the use of alternating third and second person narrative voices, which are crucial in how the novel’s characters become able to experience and communicate sublime dimensions of geological phenomena and time.

The plot involves a young woman known as the orphan, who is on the cusp of coming-of-age and who works in an unnamed island hospital with a range of mentally ill patients. A mysterious, almost constantly unconscious figure enters the hospital and her life—the Foreigner. The mythically titled characters extend to Four other inmates, all suffering from different forms of trauma-based madness, are given similarly mythic or archetypal names: the Duke, the Witch, the Archangel and the Virgin. The reason for these mythic and even fairytale-type names is that the orphan is almost completely aphasic: unable to express or understand speech and text. She has some linguistic facility, but cannot remember names. The third person narration of the novel is, somewhat magically focalized through her subjectivity, her thoughts. And here is where the plot develops, for the Foreigner, it transpires, can make himself understood to her and understand her through a type of psychic communication, which he performs in the second person narration of the novel. The Orphan’s possible madness becomes an undecidable question in the novel: is she hallucinating the dialogue with the Foreigner, who lies unconscious for much of the time of the novel, or is he engaged in a type of education for her which is a cover for a more menacing project?

The plot thickens when volcanic activity near the hospital is experienced by the orphan as a range of vibrations and felt forces, which she has the capacity to read in ways that are precise and predictive. If her linguistic aphasia is a form of madness, then this madness might be due to her astonishing geological literacy. The Foreigner is quick to detect these skills and begins his seduction of her, which includes a type of biospheric travel, where he and the Orphan leave their bodies, and travel together as shadow selves or ghost bodies to the freak climate and geological events that have caused him to die and be reborn 4 times. In this string of 5 lives, the foreigner lives each life, motivated by his drive to either avenge or transcend his initial rejection by the earth, in a particular manner—as a rapacious mining venture capitalist, as a Gaia-worshipping conservationist, as a New Age transcendental Guru and solitary island dweller, and as an astronaut. In both these travels and in the stories the Foreigner re-enacts for the Orphan, we see phases in the history of capital, and see them start to act as geological agents. Indeed, the plot trajectory of Wonders is toward the Foreigner stoking then violently taking over the Orphan’s latent powers of geological telekinesis to enact his revenge on a malign earth,

an immensely powerful beast. I saw the hard, carved faces carved faces of the continents, and the inexorable currents of the oceans flowing. I felt the atmosphere humming with electricity, and the inside of the planet bursting with suppressed heat. I sensed what a savage thing the world really is—strong, hot and driven by systems so vast that they dwarf mankind and all his works to nullity. (237)

In the final scenes of the novel, geological agency is embodied in these characters. Back in third person narration the Orphan attempts to act on the local volcano’s magma to assist in her benign scheme to thwart the Foreigner’s plot, by accessing

the aura of life enfolding the whole planet. So it wasn’t a matter of squeezing the power from herself, it was a matter of shaping her mind into a conduit through which the energy could pass—and then of inviting the power to flow from the planet’s vast supply.

The orphan took a deep breath, considered the magma once more. Then she breathed out, opened her mind, and asked . . .

And the living world answered.

Ha! It was like being accelerated to an incredible speed while standing still, it was like being lifted by a thousand warm hands. It was wonderful. And as the energy burnt though her, she turned it and focused it upon the underground reservoirs. The magma turned livid gold. And then to white hot, bursting upwards. (301)

In interviews McGahan has said his original intention was to write a novel with no human characters; only weather and geological events. Finding such a task outside the realm of the novel form, McGahan’s compromise is a novel where geology and climate are not so much ‘characters’ as intimately proximate and understandable phenomena. Finally, the Orphan’s “understanding” of natural energy systems seems to be based on principles (and feelings) of how phenomena act across dimensions of time-space different to those made available in the natural or human sciences. Her understanding, perhaps, is situated at the boundary between geological times and human species time(s). She crosses that boundary, aided—for us as readers—by the Foreigner’s and the novel’s narrator’s narration of her thoughts and feelings, which push a fictional sense of understanding toward forms of madness that, in Aristotle’s theory of poetics, are a probable impossibility.

Seemingly locked into the closed circuitry of capitalist realism, a sustained political and cultural response to the challenges of climate change hits a number of walls. Understanding, rather than just explaining, that human species have been geological agents since around the time of the invention of the steam engine--for at least the last 250 years--confronts those fundamental liberal political rationalities that capitalist realism and its latest neoliberal phase are based in: that freedom is a function of the limits of the sovereign's or the state's capacity to promote security and growth; the corollary being that civil society and the 'market' are the spheres that 'naturally' produce security, growth and freedom. All three of these values of liberalism (biopolitics--the turn to life) are threatened by climate change: the physical conditions on which the life of human species depends are seriously under threat as temperatures rise. Liberalism's long rapprochement with a fossil fuelled capitalist economy is, it appears, unsustainable and no guarantee of the freedom, growth and security of the human species. Belief in the natural genius of the market, which is what underlies Neoliberalism's faith in non-government solutions to challenges, is what has led us into the anthropocene. Understanding that we have been in this new epoch for a while is surely a first step in forging a realignment of ethics and politics: new environmentalities, perhaps.

Accepting the explanation of climate change in anthropogenic global warming, challenges our understanding of human and natural time, human and natural histories. Fictive narrative, myth, and even Big History provide ways into new realisms. These promise alternatives that can exceed the possibilities offered by the Neo-Lib/Neo-Con thinking that informs McEwan's glib, capitalist realist satire.

2 hotels and the motels

2010-11-25T22:42:00.000+11:00

Lowdowns

2010-11-22T22:24:00.000+11:00

Player One: Massey Lectures 2010

2010-10-12T20:51:00.000+11:00

Gen-Xer, Douglas Coupland, is presenting the Canadian radio lecture series--The Masseys--this year and they are to be given in the form of a fictional novel. An excerpt is here.

Paradise

2010-10-09T20:29:00.001+11:00

I had vague 1990s memories of the Melbourne-based band, Paradise Motel: noir, cinematic, slow, heroin-tempo soundscapes. But on the recommendation of a mate I took a proverbial punt and caught them last night on their Hobart leg of a national tour. They were a chakra-opening revelation.

The experience was supported by the venue decor: Sirens Ballroom up on the second floor in a wedding cake ceiling-rosed, vinyl-floored ballroom with plastered roof trusses, and a secreted balcony looking onto the stage area all creating a 1930s ambience, Berlin-esque. The support act was negligible: uninventive, melancholic, folk strains that suffered from a lack of guitar figures that broke from dull repetition.

The Paradise Motel, however, launched into "German Girl", building their soundscape slowly, seductively, before a spine-opening, crystalline shock entered the ballroom. I was smitten. At times they sounded like a acid doused waking dream. At others like the warm rocking of the womb.

As if the Triffids ran headlong into the Bad Seeds in the court of Nico.

Know your product

2010-09-16T21:08:00.000+10:00

Human Capital: abilities machines producing income streams

2010-09-12T19:56:00.000+10:00

A great passage from Jodi Dean's essay "Drive as the structure of Biopolitics: Economy, Sovereignty and Capture".

Neoliberalism is [. . .] a governmentality wherein economic reason confronts, judges, and displaces governmental reason. Foucault’s primary examples are Germany and the United States. In each instance neoliberalism arises out of a critique of excessive governance (2008: 322), as a response to a mode of government that is erring on the side of too much and hence endangering freedom. The interesting twist is that where one would expect such a critique to urge the state to take its hands off the economy, it does something else instead: it subjects the state to the economy. German and American neoliberals reverse the equation, making the economy the legitimator of the state. ‘In other words: a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state’ (2008: 116).

This reversal intensifies and extends biopolitical processes and mechanisms. Insofar as neoliberalism emphasizes the market as a site of competition rather than exchange, it demands that the state combat anti-competitive mechanisms and work to spread opportunities for competition. Consequently, the state must be ever vigilant in these efforts as well as vigilant about its own efficiency in so doing. Such vigilance, moreover, is exercised not just with regard to government, as its operations and resources are privatized. Rather, neoliberalism entails a governmentality of ‘active, multiple, vigilant, and omnipresent’ intervention in society (2008:160). Society, too, must be opened up and subjected to the dynamic of competition. For neoliberals, this takes the form of the enterprise society, a vital, differentiated society of productive entrepreneurs, that is, individuals who take responsibility for their own success and well-being (hence, Foucault emphasizes their role as producers rather than consumers).

American neoliberalism was particularly effective in extending biopolitics via its theory of human capital. Human capital was the concept through which neoliberals grasped labor in its specificity, the way they sought to understand the meaning of labor means for the working person, the rationality underlying the worker’s choices. Treating income as a return on capital, neoliberals construed the worker’s income in terms of the capital he has in himself. Because of the multiplicity of factors influencing workers’ choices – mobility, quality of life, familiarity, capacities to adapt, aversion to risk – the theory of human capital enabled economic analysis to permeate a variety of new domains, domains previously the purview of the human sciences that developed around disciplinary institutions (sociology, psychology, demography, criminology, etc).

Foucault explains that there are two primary kinds of human capital, innate and acquired. Innate elements are heritable, genetic. A person concerned with her child’s innate human capital can take the proper steps toward finding an appropriate co-producer of this child. She can seek to secure a mate with desirable traits that might reduce her off-springs’ risks and enhance their competitive position. Genetic research is thus valuable to individuals in an enterprise society as it provides a knowledge they can use to plan for the future. At the same time, it gives rise to a complex of issues of screening, disclosure, prevention, and risk. Acquired capital refers to the skills and capacities that prepare individuals for competition. Health care, both infant and maternal, is important here, as are matters of health and hygiene, diet and exercise, relationships and opportunities. In this regard, the theory of human capital stimulates interventions in family life as it asks about the best ways to produce economic competitors. Neoliberalism’s emphasis on education as preparation for work similarly targets the worker as an ‘abilities machine.’ Rather than producing critical humanists or responsible citizens, the theory of human capital treats education as a means for instilling in the worker those specific capacities that render him sufficiently competent, competitive, and flexible.

Under neoliberalism, then, power gets a hold of individuals to the extent that they are little enterprises, abilities machines competing in the market.

References are to Michel Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics. Thomas Lemke has an excellent summary of the lectures, here.

What's new . . . government intervention to spread the fragile market form

2010-09-10T20:39:00.000+10:00

From John Protevi's essay "What does Foucault think is new about Neoliberalism"

Neoliberalism [. . .] Foucault insists, is something other than liberalism; neoliberals "break" with classical liberalism; we must "avoid at all costs" seeing neoliberalism as a mere "repetition" of classical liberalism after a Keynesian interlude. So for Foucault neoliberalism is a modification of the art of governing as an exercise of political sovereignty; it is another turning point in the history of the state seen through the grid of governmentality. Its novelty consists in an interventionist state which creates conditions for the artificial or purely competitive market in which homo economicus makes choices as rational self-entrepreneur.

For Foucault, neoliberal macroeconomics is not so much a shift from the Keynesian objective of full employment to the monetarist control of inflation (although it does of course entail that as well), as it is a change in government's relation to market structure. For classical liberals, the market was a natural mechanism for the exchange of commodities. For the neoliberals, the market is an ideal structure of competition, fragile and in need of construction and support. Thus neoliberalism is not laissez-faire, but interventionist, though neoliberal intervention into society occurs at the level of the conditions of market, and its intervention must take the form of the "rule of law".

Let us repeat the key contrast. Classical liberals want the market to be a free natural zone where government can't interfere, precisely to let the invisible hand provide for social benefits from individual self-interest. There's a whole anthropology here of the natural homo economicus as only an abstraction from concrete man living in civil society, of which the juridical subject is another abstraction. But the important thing for classical liberals, ignored by the neoliberals, is the Smithian analysis of moral sentiments and the need for government to provide the moral framework that the market erodes. So the classical liberal formula is "protect the market from government in order to allow social benefits from natural exchange." The neoliberals say we must proceed on two paths: (1) we must have government intervention at the level of the conditions of the market in order (2) to spread the enterprise form throughout the social fabric. So the neoliberal formula here is "use government to change society to constitute an artificial and fragile market."

For Foucault, the American neoliberals are more radical than their German counterparts. They share the desire to intervene at the level of market conditions to support fragile competition. But for government / market relations they also want to refuse to shield government from market relations: they want to submit all government actions to cost-benefit analysis. But this is just macro-level reflection of the move to insert market relations throughout the social fabric. This is not simply the drive to privatize government services; it also entails making the surviving government agencies into enterprises, so that we must ask what is bottom line for, in the American system, agencies such as Amtrak, the Post Office, the National Parks, and so on). And this is not just the drive to make any multi-unit organization into a collection of enterprises (each department in a university has its own bottom line and its own contribution to the university bottom line: e.g., loss of subventions for university presses). It goes further than that: each individual becomes an enterprise, a self-entrepreneur.

What we all Want

2010-09-10T15:42:00.002+10:00

Inner City Blues

2010-09-08T11:20:00.000+10:00

--audio only--

Other side of Town

2010-09-08T11:19:00.000+10:00

--audio only--

Man out of Time

2010-09-03T13:04:00.000+10:00

Walking in the rain

2010-08-29T16:27:00.002+10:00

Don't you worry 'bout a thing

2010-08-28T07:19:00.000+10:00

Over the wall

2010-08-27T23:29:00.000+10:00

Can't get no Protection

2010-08-27T22:49:00.000+10:00

"What Really Matters?" Becoming Volatile.

2010-08-11T10:41:00.001+10:00

Australia's 2010 federal election is presenting with all sorts of symptoms of a political and cultural malaise. A primary symptom is the palpable disconnection between the citizenry and leading politicians, rendered nowhere so much as in the distaste many feel about the method of the previous Prime Minister's untimely dispatch by a Labor party spooked by falling opinion polls and a combined onslaught from News Ltd's national broadsheet, talkback radio and the grand wrecker of federal politics, Coalition leader Tony Abbott. This disconnection is also due to a political reporting and commentating media culture that has been denuded of expertise in policy areas and which seeks to make 'gotcha' moments: where politicians are caught in a back-flip or inconsistency, or revealing slip. The failure of both major parties to stake out long-term, thought-through policy positions on a set of interconnecting problems and opportunities--a response to global warming and climate change, peak oil, physical and social infrastructure, health, water, population policy, alternative energy, indigenous citizenships--which are argued for, explained and narrativised is also a symptom of this malaise.

Some analyses of this illness in the body politic have honed in on the Neoliberal causes of these problems. Gary Sauer-Thompson has run a series of posts which link the malaise to the Neoliberal mode of governance that I've argued, as well, has come to dominate our political culture. Gary, points to an opinion piece by Overland editor Jeff Sparrow on the ABC's Drum Unleashed site, which diagnoses the sickness currently afflicting Australian political culture as being caused by the embedding of market rationalities into everyday life:

the commodity called 'politics' can only compete by adopting the forms used by the TV producers who specialise in reality programming. Channel Nine's decision to hire Mark Latham should be understood in those terms: it's the equivalent of livening up a dull episode of Big Brother by introducing a minor celeb into the house. But Gillard's pledge to henceforth be true to herself should also be familiar to television aficionados, for it's a common stage on the 'winner's journey' on every reality show. The huffing contestant on The Biggest Loser breaks down in tears and then, after a hug from Michelle, vows to dig deep and redouble his training: that's what makes good entertainment product.

Such is the dilemma facing political journalists. A reporter might be deeply fascinated by policy and its implications, but if he or she brings back footage of two middle-aged people arguing behind lecterns when everyone else screens the human drama of Kevin confronting Julia, the ratings will tank.

The problem, then, is not about the media so much as about the market into which media is sold.

One of the most socially significant developments in Australian political and cultural life over the last few decades has been the evolution of neoliberalism from a fringe doctrine to a philosophy now largely ubiquitous. The neoliberal turn was always about more than pure economics, involving an insistence that notions of individual autonomy, consumerism, efficient markets and transactional thinking should be extended into all social relations, even - or, perhaps, especially - those that had previously been dominated by quite different rules.

Not surprisingly, the results have been profound - and you see them very clearly during an election.

I agree with all of this, but I think we need to specify what the dominant forms of markets are in the early twenty-first century. There needs to be greater recognition of the extent to which the embedding of market thinking and market techniques into political culture is increasingly modelled on markets in financial derivatives. This might sound like a slightly wacky, unreconstructed Marxist approach. But I'd like to just lay out some thoughts below and see what you make of them.

1. Neoliberalism and the drive: feedback loops.

In a much-anticipated and needed return to Crikey yesterday [pay-walled], Guy Rundle analysed the malaise. Here's a key, summary section of his essay:

Twenty years ago, we — or the political elites — made a decision to shift the centre of gravity from public to private life, in a whole range of areas, from social expenditure, to pensions, to the question of work hours and wages, in every conceivable field. That is, of course, but of a larger global process — and one, to a degree beyond the control of individual governments — but we really ram-rodded it here, off a fairly collective base.
The result has been a certain type of society in which both the space for public life, and the means by which people without much social power could project themselves into it, has been diminished. Where in the 1980s we were talking — briefly — of the 35-hour week, we are now heading towards the 48-hour week (and two salaries, to afford a house), performed by people living in spec-built suburbs with little amenity, in under-serviced cities, and in conditions of diminishing, not increasing, social mobility for themselves and their children.
In these circumstances, the private choice — the cable TV, the McMansion, the retreat to the home space and to the defiant, antinomian cry (much heard in the UK election) “I don’t do politics” — becomes overdetermined, becomes the only real choice there is. Yet even as people pursue their lives in the wilderness of plasmas, they are privy to a never-ending cascade of information informing them that a) the current way of life is politically, economically, and ecologically unsustainable and b) the gap between their lives and the levers of power is so huge there’s bugger all they an do about it in the current framework.
Those things that need a public sphere in order to exist — such as the res publica, and a genuinely pluralist media — lapse into a non-democratic condition, the res publica
To blame the public for the changed conditions of their life, and the way that earlier decisions by an elite shaped their lives, is to finger the victim, not the culprit. A series of cave-ins, ducked battles, and soft options by the people who controlled parties, papers and powers, and a refusal to stand up to the genuinely malign, has brought us to this point. It seems distinctive in the world — there is a collapse of political legitimacy everywhere, but only in Australia have I seen this degree of total exasperation and frustration, combined with an inability, at the moment, to imagine how it could be done any other way. The topic is cancer, indeed.

What I want to hone in on is Rundle's notion of a round-about in which a media-political economy-political parties-pollsters-public circle just keeps rolling along: a sort of feedback loop in motion. Jodi Dean has analysed the connections between Foucault's Neoliberalism (as the Birth of Biopolitics) and the Lacanian drive in terms of a turn towards life, and away from sovereign-state forms of power: a feedback loop without an object.

2. Sunday morning.

Rundle, in his Crikey essay, takes aim at Paul Kelly as Kelly has jumped on the bandwagon of bemoaning the lack of grip the political class has on what is happening in the election and yet Kelly has been at the helm of the Neoliberal onslaught for over 20 years. Kelly, until recently, appeared as the press corp doyen on the ABC's Insiders show. When Sunday morning TV used to be governed by regulations that demanded commercial stations have religious programming (from memory in the 60s and 70s) the intellectual leader of the Democratic Labour Party and mentor of Tony Abbot, Bob Santamaria, used to appear on Sunday mornings to give his culturally conservative, Catholic and agrarian socialist perspective on politics. Kelly had slid into this time slot and role in recent times. You could argue that Kelly is a right-wing Labourist, much like Santamaria, although they would disagree violently on the role between markets and the state.

So, it's been interesting to see who and what has filled this significant time slot on the Insiders recently. Kelly has been gone for a while, but now there is a segment called "What really matters?" which is hosted by Michele Levine the CEO of Roy Morgan Research. The slot is backgrounded with aerobics-style dance music--a trend in political reporting these days, along with the playing of songs whose chorus literalizes a personality characteristic--which signals a high-energy loop in which we do something that makes us fit, flexible, ready. Levine presents her analyses of marginal seat polling, which includes some qualitative responses, pop-psephology, and pop-demographics.

From Santamaria, via Paul Kelly, to political polling in marginal seat expertise. What is this drift signalling?

3. Sitting on the fence.

What circulates in loops like the one Rundle describes? If Neoliberalism has become the dominant set of techniques and ideas by which all kinds of objects, selves, institutions are conducted, guided, governed, then how are these forms of market reasoning coming to the surface in the current election campaign?Applying the methods of market research to political polling is one way we can see such embedding of market techniques in political culture. But surely such polling only registers what people think, feel or hope for? In case you think I'm about to run a media-manipulates citizens in the interests of capital line . . .well, I am. But rather than argue that what is going on is a conspiracy designed to dupe people, my contention is that we are all--the media, bloggers, politicians, the public . . .-- subject to the mentalities by which finance capital must continue to circulate around the globe; accelerating and with maximum income streaming potential. How do you obtain a financial advantage, how do you manage risk in your electorate, how do we seek investments in our electorate? Make your seat marginal.

The feedback loop of current politics finds its most symptomatic expression in the dialogue that occurs between marginal seat electors, the media, the pollsters and politicians. That is the primary loop in our political culture, and it is governed by the logics of making an electorate, making yourself as an elector, volatile.

Watching SBS's forum show Insight, last night, which asked swinging voters from marginal seats to give voice to their opinions, I was struck by how little it mattered that they grasped policy or understood basic institutional functions and history. What mattered was that they were confidently undecided. They were swinging, they were certain that they were 'sitting on the fence'. They were trading on their volatility as human capital. It didn't matter what implications policy had for anyone outside their business or family. What mattered was how they could attract the best investments in their human capital by wavering, swinging, fence-sitting.

4. Human capital: the subject as derivative.

Critiques of Neoliberalism often stall at the level of the state and forget about the embedding of market reasoning and techniques in everyday life. Similarly, the vantage provided by much Marxism is limited in focussing on the alienation caused by the commodification of labour. These are both valuable, albeit, restricted modes of critique and analysis. What Foucault's analysis of Neoliberalism as governmentality offers is an understanding of how liberal-capitalist practices and thought fundamentally shifted in the 1960s and 1970s.

These new or Neo-liberal forms reconceptualised human labour as human capital. This might appear as a minor ploy. But the shift from conceiving of the human subject as the seller of labour to an entrepreneur of one-self, and investor in one's human capital, is a profound one. This massive shift has coincided with and been caused by the exponential growth in financial markets, and markets in financial derivatives, which are traded not on the basis of underlying asset value, or their growth in value, but on the magnitude of their volatility. Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee write

The financial community's development of the concept and modelling of volatility was [an important] step in the objectification of risk. The central idea is that the market can best describe and predict the behavior of abstract risk by measuring its variability over time. The understanding is that the magnitude rather than the direction of change in the values for a specific derivative communicates all the financial information necessary to price it. Note that the measure of volatility tries to formally incorporate the contextual social information that had to be removed to produce abstract rick in the first place. The social is reintroduced in, and misrecognized as, the history of a derivative's volatility. The result is that all the complex socio-historical forces that shape the value of asset underlying a derivative are now simply a pattern of price movements. (Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk, Duke, 2004: 146)

5. Becoming volatile

When political parties converge over primary questions of political economy, and their policies are conducted as auctions which require one side to take a seemingly opposite position to the other, and the question for parties is not how to break up the Neoliberal consensus but in what directions will we fiddle around the edges, pander to fears, makes promises that will be easy to break and hard to deliver, voters seek advantage in any opportunity.

They invest and sell their vote. Whether they sell short (bet against) or long (bet for), it doesn't matter anymore. They are selling to grow their income stream. They are advised and guided by the political stock-brokers, agents and analysts that people the assemblage of the pollsters-media-politician machine. They are in a constant state of trading the volatility. Becoming volatile.

David Harvey: capitalism as crisis

2010-07-02T23:44:00.000+10:00

Via Lenin's Tomb">

From East to Arcane

2010-06-07T11:09:00.005+10:00

On the 30th anniversary of Australian pub-rock band Cold Chisel's LP East and in anticipation of the release of Crow's Arcane, here's "Cheap Wine" (below, at this post's end). Indeed, with the wine glut in Australia and having maintained a permanent rash of greying ginger beardiness for a while now, I can relate to the chorus.

East itself is thematically unified by a blues and reggae-tinged isolation and anger; an uncertain masculinity coming to terms with Asia and the demise of the Labourist-social-liberal armature in Australian political culture. It still bites. And swings, with a lyrical and romantic lushness that comes out in Barnes and even Moss's voices and in Moss's classy blues guitar lines, these elements at times given spot-on support by the spaciousness of the arrangements. It's the link between the piano and the drums that work so well and I think I was, not consciously at the time, going after this feel and reverbating sound when I played with drummer and musical production powerhouse Richard Andrew in Crow.

On one of Chisel's comeback tours--Yakuza Girls (I think it was called)--Crow played support in the concrete arena of Sydney Entertainment Centre. We set up on our small allotted space--which was massively large in comparison to other venues like the Globe or Annandale--and were introduced by Chisel's keyboard-playing lead songwriter Don Walker. Walker asked the Chisel audience to give us a go, and praised Pete Fenton's songwriting.

True dat, Pete Fenton is a fine songwriter, up there with Robert Forster, David McComb and Don Walker. And Pete Archer, now back in the My Kind of Pain era line-up, is an outstanding songwriter and six-stringed soundscaper. Reunited with Jim Woff and John Fenton on bass and drums, whose sophisticated feel for rhythm and arrangement brings the band into the ambit of a dynamic power, subtlety and depth.

Crow are now in the midst of launching their reformation LP, and while I'd like to be there with them I'm looking forward to Arcane and hope it's what they were hoping for and that it proves for those who see them as heirs to Chisel, the Birthday party (and even Midnight Oil), that they have always spoken their own musical language.

Once I smoked a Dannemann cigar . . .

Governing the biosphere

2010-06-07T01:16:00.004+10:00

One of the problems with implementing national and global policy regimes toward mitigating carbon pollution is that while we can agree with how and even why such regimes are necessary, we are at the limits of current knowledges in attempting to understand anthropogenic global warming. This is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essential argument about the disconnection between climate scientists’ almost universal urging of polities to take significant action to mitigate carbon pollution and the recent u-turn away from such political action after the Copenhagen Conference and in the face of a concerted attack on this climate science consensus by a small band of contrarians and so-called skeptics, aided, in Australia at least, by the immensely influential News Limited.
The complexities and, it must be said, uncertainties of climate science—a science which relies on limited data and whose findings are often projections into the future—have increasingly entered into what we might still want to call a public sphere, where they must compete with deeply embedded discourses that are antithetical to any project that takes anthropogenic global warming as its starting point. Before I get to what I think these discourses are, a more obvious point to make about why a policy response to anthropogenic global warming is currently fading is that media can more easily frame and tell a story of small heroic individuals holding onto their critical independence from a monolithic conspiracy in which government and self-interested scientists attempt to dupe a gullible public into implementing an authoritarian left-wing form of anti-market control. If media seek to dramatise events so that we more readily consume its productions, then the recent climate science believers versus skeptics battle can be seen as one example of this media form. Of course, the dramatizing of this debate into a two-sided battle has other motivations beyond the drive to sell newspapers and, ultimately, advertising to media consumers. There are other discourses at work in such Manichean oppositions, and it is to a consideration of these that I now want to turn.
It is important that we historicise this debate, and it is no surprise that the first periodizing move I will make is to assert that we are in the age of Neoliberalism. Still. Because despite what Kevin Rudd wrote in his Monthly essay about Neoliberalism back in 2008, and despite claims that the Global financial crisis is the death knell of Neoliberalism, as a set of practices and techniques that are combined with forms of reasoning and goals, Neoliberalism continues as the dominant governmentality, if not as the dominant ideology. The distinction I am making here between ideology and governmentality is essentially a Foucauldian one, and it seeks to cut through the seeming paradox of an essay in which Rudd professes his social democratic beliefs, offering a critical genealogy of Neoliberalism, while his government continues to practice key Neoliberal techniques of governing our conduct, such as an unemployment services sector where the unemployed person is subject to a barrage of self-monitoring and self-governing actions designed to empower and enable them to make choices through which a more flexible and entrepreneurial self is formed. I’m not arguing that the regime of deregulation, privatization, financialization and so on is not Neoliberal. Rather, I’m seeking to make what I think is an important distinction between the social democratic or even Marxist critiques of Neoliberalism—whose essential argument is that the state has abandoned its protection of the citizenry while the capitalist market has been given free reign—and the Foucauldian critical genealogy of Neoliberalism, which seeks to understand it as the governmentalisation of the state rather than its shrinking and disappearance. It is not so much that under Neoliberalism the market is what governs us as the social state has vacated the field, it is that in many of the significant spheres of life we are conceived of as human capital, and thereby we are conducted to be entrepreneurs of ourselves: to risk manage our lives, make investments with our time, to manage a portfolio of interests and activities, to seek to appreciate our assets. As individuals as human capital under Neoliberalism, so too the state. And what I’m arguing here is that the various arms of the state in Australia and in the Anglosphere, has not ceased to be Neoliberal in these senses that I’m outlining.
Climate science enters the contemporary public sphere under a number, but primarily, these conditions: under Neoliberalism seemingly in retreat as ideology but remaining as dominant governmentality. And it fundamentally challenges key components in the assemblage of Neoliberalism. Rather than conceiving of humans as individual atoms of capital, climate science sees humans as one species among many, but that species which now are affecting the global climate. For some scientists this aspect of human species history’s impact on earth’s geology and climate requires a new periodization in geological time from the Helocene to the Anthropocene.

**
We are at an historic opening. What needs to be settled on is how we govern the future. If Neoliberalism is the cultural and political logic of financial capitalism in a time of digital technology, then its techniques of future management have failed. As the Global Financial Crisis continues to ramify and we move from states bailing out private wealth to states bailing out other states, as is evident in the response to Greece’s sovereign debt crisis, there is an opening for new forms of future management, new forms for governing the future. Such a project presents a profound challenge to the liberal political project. This is due to the liberal project’s reliance on a tight coupling between negative freedom—defined as freedom from the state—and an epistemology in which a non-state sphere of human interaction—under Neoliberalism: the market, under earlier forms of liberalism: civil society, or society—produces its most liberating, productive and efficient results when no one entity seeks to understand and explain how it functions and how to improve it. This second component in this coupling is emblematized by Adam Smith’s invisible hand: a force akin to nature, one that is sublime to the extent that it can’t be understood and explained by a sovereign, and that if let be will promote these liberating, productive and efficient results.
Of course, the corollary of this liberal coupling is that individuals are autonomous, self-governing. Thus Hayek’s Neoliberalism, as some commentators observe, is a type of liberalism mixed with a set of conservative injunctions about the importance of slow change, and the traditions embodied in the family and other institutions. What distinguishes Hayek’s (Neo)liberalism from classical versions like Adam Smith’s is that, unlike Smith, Hayek believes our freedom is produced by a realm of artefacticity: a type of cultural activity in which institutions emerge with the weight of tradition and the flexibility that comes from being produced by free people. This realm lies between that of reason (which codifies laws) and that of nature. While Smith sees the invisible hand as natural, for Hayek human civilization is produced in this in-between realm, where traditions mix with radical freedom, mediated by that most free of structures: the market.
What, then, are the implications of this understanding of Neoliberalism’s coupling of negative freedom with an epistemology that disavows the sovereign’s knowledge of society for the politics of climate change? Under Liberal rationalities, markets will naturally produce solutions to climate change, rather than governments. Under Neoliberalism, markets will artefactually produce solutions. At this conjuncture, we are left at the mercy of the delay that suits industries of mining and fossil fuel-based energy manufacture. This delay is justified by a commitment to growth and the trickle-down of jobs and shareholder equity.
What is at stake is the future and that is problematic in a global system still governed by a future in which short-selling and complex derivatives circulate and structure our basic orientations toward time.
It is only when we can sort out the financial culture that has come to be so dominant a forcefield since 1973, that we can begin to articulate a politics of the future outside of that which stymies and panics the present. Coming to terms with and surmounting the autumnal post-1973 global financial system, are prerequisites for dealing with the internalisation of carbon in a system of exchange which seeks neither to defer or displace its waste.

Dancing the arrhythmia of financial derivatives

2010-05-08T13:13:00.000+10:00

I've just started to dip into Gillian Tett's 2009 narrative Fool's Gold: How unrestrained greed corrupted a dream, shattered global markets and unleashed a catastrophe. Tett's book tells how J.P Morgan bankers "developed an innovative set of products with names such as 'credit default swaps' and 'synthetic collateralized debt obligations' which fall under the name of credit derviatives" in the 1990s and 2000s. Ok, the subtitle is a bit 'tabloid screamer' and any 'dream' in the world of financial capital is hardly going to be pure or innocent prior to its corruption by 'bad people'. But I'm interested in gaining a better understanding of contemporary finance and financial derivatives, in particular, and Tett--whose PhD was in social anthropology--has written a book that comes with a reputation for offering graspable explanations of phenomena in the arcane world of credit derivatives.

At this early stage of reading, I'm getting my head around the definitions.

As the name implies, a derivative is [. . .] nothing more than a contract whose value derives from some other asset -- a bond, a stock, a quantity of gold. Key to derivatives is that those who buy and sell them are each making a bet on the value of the asset. Derivatives provide a way for investors to protect themselves, for example, against a possible negative future price swing, or to make high-stakes bets on price swings for what might be huge payoffs. At the heart of the business is a dance with time.

Say, on a particular day, the pound-to-pound exchange rate is such that one British pound buys $1.50. Someone who will be making a trip from England to the US six months from now and thinks the exchange rate may become less favourable might decide to make a contract to ensure that he can still buy dollars at that rate just before his trip. he might even enter into an agreement to exchange 1,000 [pounds] with a bank in six months' time, at $1.50, no matter what the actual exchange rate is by then. One way to arrange the deal would be to agree the deal must happen, no matter what the actual exchange rate is at the time, and that would be a future. A variation would be that the traveller agrees to pay a fee, say $25, to have the option to make the exchange at the $1.50 rate, which he would decide not to exercise if the rate actually became more favourable. (10-11)

In this next set of quotes, Tett is recounting the emergence of "a bold new era of derivatives innovation" "in the late 1970s" (11).

[T]he best way to insulate against such volatility [in currency prices and inflation, as was present in the post-1970s period of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of pegged exchange rates and inflationary pressures caused by the OPEC oil shocks] was to buy diversified pools of assets. If, fore example, a company with business in both the US and Germany was concerned about swings in the dollar-to-Deutschmark rate, it could protect itself by holding equal quantities of both currencies. Whichever way the rate might swing, the losses would be offset by equal gains. But an innovative way to protect against swings was to buy derivatives offering clients the right to purchase currencies at specified exchange rates in the future. Interest rate futures and options burst onto the scene, allowing investors and bankers to gamble on the level of rates in the future.

Another hot area of the derivatives trade [. . .] was the highly creative business [. . .] known as 'swaps'. In these deals, investment banks would find two parties with complementary needs in the financial markets and would broker an exchange between them to the benefit of both, earning the bank large fees.

Say, for example, two home owners have $500,000 ten-year mortgages, but one has a floating rate deal, while the other has a rate fixed at 8 per cent. If the owner expects the rates to fall, while the other owner expects them to rise, then rather than each trying to get a new loan, they could agree that each quarter, during the life of their mortgages, they will 'swap' their payments. The actual mortgage loans do not change hands, they stay on the original banks' books, making the deal what the bankers call 'synthetic'. (12)

And the final quote for the time being concerns what is the central concept of contemporary finance capital: risk. For any British readers, you'll probably already hearing that a hung parliament and minority government are bad for business because business doesn't like uncertainty: it proposes too great a risk. Coming from Tasmania--a small state at the far south-east end of Australia--our proportional representation system of voting has recently allowed a symmetrically hung lower house parliament to be voted in: 10 Labor [sic], 10 Liberal [cf. American Republicans and British Tories] and 5 Green.

Prior to the election, voters here were warned that a hung parliament would be bad for business and the delay in establishing a minority Labor government with Green support was met with cries from business groups that capital investment in the state was being lost due to this uncertainty. But if, as Foucault cogently argues, neoliberalism is that form of governmentality in which the human being is recast as an entrepreneur of him or herself, then it should follow that the rewards from investing one's own human capital in such a system are commensurate with the level of risk involved. Surely, successful entrepreneurs are those best able to live with and take advantage of risks and uncertainty?

According to Tett, however, capital wants it both ways:

Players also had different motives for wanting to place bets on future asset prices. Some investors liked derivatives because they wanted to control risk, like the wheat farmers who preferred to lock in at a profitable price [when making a futures contract]. Others wanted to use them to make high-risk bets in the hope of windfall profits. The crucial point about derivatives was that they could do two things: help investors reduce risk or create a good deal more risk. Everything depended on how they were used, on the motives and skills of those who traded in them. (14)

This doubleness in the function of derivatives and in the discourse of contemporary finance capital reminds me of one of Zygmunt Bauman's key ideas in his long sociological essay Liquid Modernity [Link here is to a pdf file, containing a lecture by Bauman, where he writes on the idea of liquid modernity. See here, for the book]. For Bauman, the power of the global elite resides not just in their finance-enabled capacity to not get stuck in any one place; to move quickly and flexibly around the world, making lightening-fast investments, exploiting opportunities before others even know they exist, able to avoid legal systems. Their power lies also in how dense and solid they can become, how they can materialize and make the world material to their needs, desires and drives. Neoliberal techniques of flexibility and fluidity are, in Bauman's understanding, complemented by something like a business sublime: an awesome, monolithic, material power that digs itself into a territory, which it defends and advances.

Is it the capacity to do both, to be both solid and liquid, to seek to eliminate risk and cultivate it, that makes contemporary capitalism so disorienting and difficult to understand? Coming to terms with the conceptual form (their temporality, in particular) of what I think are neoliberal capitalism's leading instruments--financial derivatives--should help to better grasp the present conjuncture and ways out of and through it. If, as Tett writes, "[a]t the heart of the business is a dance with time", then perhaps it is the rhythms of these forms that we need to hear and feel in order to play them differently; in ways that take the pulse of all those times that are, have and will be abjected.

Shattered into a thousand pieces: Anglophone Literary Studies c2000

2010-02-18T22:24:00.000+11:00

Rob Dixon's essay on Boundary Work and Australian Literary Studies--here--circles around Julie Thompson Klein's Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (1996) which is an important work in interdisciplinary studies, and proposes the concept of boundary work and contains a very interesting chapter on the genealogy of interdisciplinarity in (North American) Literary Studies. Klein's genealogy is a relatively familiar one, especially with its account of the ruptions that, what Americans call, 'Theory' brought in its wake. But Klein's account halts around 1992 with Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn's edited collection Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (1992) providing the more up-to-date resource she draws upon.
So, for a more contemporary and Australian-inflected assessment, I've been drawn back to re-reading Australian Cultural Studies academic John Frow's inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, a version of which was published as 'Text, Culture, Rhetoric: Some futures for English' in Critical Quarterly 43.1 (Spring 2001): 5-18.
Frow seems more pessimistic about Literary Studies than either Klein, or Rob Dixon for that matter. Yet Frow's disciplinary trajectory has long been entwined with the more sociological side of textual aesthetics - what he calls the social relations of textuality (a.k.a cultural studies). Some extended quotes then, below, and a kicker at the end when Frow turns back (if he ever turned away) towards aesthetics and close-reading, giving a model of boundary work that is like a musical loop that alters with each reflexive playing: a circling between text and frames, where any knowledge of what frames the meaning and uses of a text (the illocutionary force of writing and speech) must always come out of an encounter with its figurative and organisational specificity, and not just be read off from another text. Before this more positive ending, Frow begins with a sharply, critical diagnosis of the state of what he calls his home discipline: Literary Studies.

In its frequent complicity with a commercial apparatus for which it is an underpaid source of publicity, and in its acquiescence in the fetishisation of literary value, literary studies in the university has paid the price of certain lack of reflexivity, a certain lack of political conscience. For at the same time as Literature, with a capital L, flourishes in the great world, literary studies is in disarray as never before.

The great structuralist project - enunciated in the work of Tynjanov and Jakobson, of Makarovsky, of Barthes and Genette and Todorov - of a systematic poetics, a project whose lineage goes back to Aristotle, to medieval poetics and to Renaissance iconology, has disappeared without a trace; the notion that we could produce a cumulative body of knowledge grounded in agreed-upon principles and categories, in a continuing and coherent conversation, is like a remembered dream. The discipline of literary studies is now shattered into a thousand pieces, the most vivid emblem of which is perhaps the myriad entirely unrelated panel sessions at the annual meetings of the American Modern Langage Association.

The poststructuralist complication of the project for a systematic poetics failed - for complex political and conjunctural reasons - to work as its continuation, and in its wake the discipline of literary studies has been split between[:]
[1] a barely theorised 'ethical' criticism, the idiot scion of the classical and neoclassical pedagogies of ethical formation, which generates an endless stream of thematic commentary around the category of the (unified or disunified) 'self';

[2] a deconstructive criticism now enfeebled and demoralised since the disgracing of Paul de Man - an event, however, which perhaps only confirmed an exhaustion that had already firmly set in;

[3] a 'political' criticism whose routine practice is grounded in the category of identity and for which textuality is deemed to have an expressive or instrumental relation to race or gender or sexual preference;

[4] a historicist criticism, now more empiricist that Foucauldian, for which the literary archive has a merely documentary value;

[5] and a chattering belletrism - dominant in all the literary reviews with their obsession with Sylvia's diary and Kingsley's letters and Martin's autobiography - which has mush more to do with gossip than with the sytematic study of texts. In one sense the discipline of literary studies is flourishing as never before; in another, it has become lost in irrelevance. [7-8]

Allowing for ['the relative contingency of the reception and uptake of texts'] is crucial, because the effects of texts cannot be read off from their structure. All we can do with this kind of tension [between the textual and the public lives of texts], I think, is try to make it work productively, by seeking to move backwards and forwards between detailed textual analysis and analysis of the framing conditions under which texts are taken up into the complexities of public cultural space. And this is in part how I understand the project of contemporary cultural studies. [12]

A series of decisions about how and what to read is thus framed by this [series of overlapping regimes of value contingently present as a] regression of frames, and it is this series itself that then becomes an object of attention. But it does not yield itself to a sociological or literary-historical description: the framing conditions of textuality are not to be thought of as general and objectively transposable structures which can be apprehended in their own right; they are extrapolations from an act of reading, and they can be defined only a posteriori. Textuality and its conditions of possibility are mutually constitutive and can be reconstructed from each other in a kind of hermeneutic bootstrapping which precludes conclusion and the perspective of a total understanding. [13]

The Morality of Gentlemen and the Hawke-Keating Governments: some approaches for a dialogue

2010-02-17T20:12:00.002+11:00

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This paper--below--was presented at the UTas School of English, Journalism and European Languages work in progress day, in late 2006. I'm republishing it now as I'm working towards a another paper/essay which compares the novel that is its focus with Sylvia Lawson's 2003 historical fiction The Outside Story. In this 2006 paper I was attempting to overlay a reading of Amanda Lohrey's first novel--The Morality of Gentlemen (1984)--onto the personnel and key decisions of the start of the Long Labor Decade: in particular the 'characters' of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, and the two key decsions taken in 1983: the float of the $A and the institution of the Accord (Prices and Income). There are some problems with this paper, not least in its simplistic attempt to set up a critique of political history through the terms suggested by a novel, but a problem also in not theorising, and thereby justifying, why literary critique is at all necessary in what is also a critical political history. In retrospect the problems here would have been dissipated by loosening up the hold of positivism on the political history; a history which I now consider to be less real , less determinative, and more itself fictional, more itself responsive to forces and discourses that impact in different ways in different fields. What I'm trying to say is that rather than using literary fiction to read (political) History, I now tend to read Fiction and (political) History as being differently determined and produced by textuality (the operations of genre, language, discourse), the forcefields of culture and materialism, and from the unconscious. In hindsight the attempt here is within the zone of what Edward Said would call an affiliative reading: a directed historicism.

Another point is that I was on a mission at this time to give some history of the Hawke-Keating government to my colleagues in the school. There is a profound dearth of economic understanding in the humanities and postgrads who have lived for much of their lives in an economic boom (1994-2008), like the baby boomers before them, tend to accept that the conditions of their boomtime are natural ones. Labourism is central to Australian history, and yet no one talks about it in the literary humanities! On the other hand I had more personal reasons for this encounter with labourism: while my formation was in small business, and its classical- and neo-liberalism, I had just become secretary of the University's Postgraduate Association in the aftermath of the VSU legislation. So, I had first hand experience of the value of Unionism and the desire to persuade others, and myself, to the cause of unionism in a time of neoliberal arrogance. Oh yeah, Workchoices Mk I had been legislated too!

These points aside, Lohrey's novel is a thrilling story and also a lesson in how the politics of form informs a reading just as much as the content's morality and politics.
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I’m going to sketch a methodological problem in my research arising out of the question of what sort of literary history works for this project. In order to sketch this problem and set out a preliminary response to it I will firstly outline the periodisation I’m employing, the long Labor decade, and fill in some of its key characters, events, themes and projects. Secondly I will then move to an individual novel, Amanda Lohrey’s debut novel The Morality of Gentlemen, published in 1984, give a quick précis of its plot, and its key formal attributes. My argument, or hypothesis, is that Lohrey’s novel provides a model with which to read the long labour decade. The methodological problem I’m currently working through is this: is this type of reading a form of literary history or is it something closer to a political-sociological history that is emptied of its substantive historical forces in order to submit its textuality to literary criticism? Or on the other hand is it a social-political reading of a literary text which reduces its literary textuality in search of History.

My research project aims to write a literary history of the long Labor decade: that 13 year period of the federal ALP government, 1983 to 1996, that begins with former ACTU President Bob Hawke’s messianic ascendance over Malcolm Fraser, and ends with John Howard’s Lazurus-like return, defeating Paul Keating. The semantic shifts between Hawke’s and Keating’s election slogans are a useful way into the changes in political projects over this period. Both Hawke in 83 and Keating in 96 have their three ‘r’s: Hawke promising Reconstruction, Recovery and Reconciliation, and Keating promising a Republic, Regional engagement, and Reconciliation.

Hawke’s three arghhhs directly address the crisis atmosphere that surrounded the recession of 1982, the worst since the Great Depression, and the industrial conflicts that also mark this moment. Recovery and Reconstruction, evoke a war time sense of crisis, demanding sacrifice, nation-building measures and unification. Reconciliation, for Hawke, is not a promise aimed at indigenous recognition and justice but instead aspires to industrial harmony and consensus. Hawke’s 1979 Boyer Lecture had the utopian title The Resolution of conflict, and this personal belief in his capacity to bring all Australia together and heal its divisions through a national consensus, finds its codification in the agreement struck in early 1983 between the then opposition Labor party and the ACTU: the Prices and Incomes Accord or the Accord Mark I.

The Accord was a compromise between the political and industrial wings of the Labor movement which hinged on two central compacts: firstly, that the ACTU would minimise its wage claims and industrial activism, which were held to be inflationary and increasing unemployment, in return for an increased social wage, tax cuts, and a revival of Whitlam’s universal health insurance scheme, in the form of Medicare. The second compact agreed that once in Government the Party would move in concert with the ACTU to intervene in industry policy.

In the fine print of the Accord was an agreement for a Labour directed modernisation of Australian industry, especially those parts involving manufacture and technology, which would open the door to the transition to a planned economy. Here was the utopian opening for ex-communists, socialists, and social democrats in the labour movement, who believed that capitalism could be more than civilised, or compromised with.

Keating’s three r’s, at the coda of the long decade, signal a rhetorical shift from industrial and economic crisis, to a cultural, even post-colonial project. While regional engagement with Asia certainly, or rather necessarily, had its economic purpose, Keating cast this relationship in terms of a post-colonial maturity that interlocked with indigenous reconciliation and independent republicanism. Settled, mature, prosperous and cosmopolitan, Keating’s cultural big picture vision for Australia belied his 1980s image as the head-kicking world’s greatest Treasurer, who had liberalised and opened up an anachronistic, inward-looking Fortress Australia.
Did Keating morph over the long decade or was he actually both a cultural and economic moderniser? To invest in Keating as a hero of the cosmopolitan left and heir to Whitlam’s legacy of cultural modernisation requires that you repress Keating the treasurer. What returns over and over throughout the long decade is the signal act upon which Keating’s name as Treasurer was made: the deregulation of banking and the float of the currency in late 1983. There is still a debate over the degree to which this decision was forced by global financial necessity or came out of ideological belief but either way, the decision to float, effectively releasing the currency onto the open seas of global markets, opened up a new means of measuring our national worth: were we competitive? Would we sink or swim? What did the world think of our prospects, our economy, us? Could we win?

The victory of Australia II in the America’s cup yacht race, 10 weeks before the decision to float was taken, symbolically confirmed that on the rough seas of global competition we could beat the best of American technology, money and entrepreneurship. Yet by 1986, Keating warned us, and also informed the global financial markets, that things were so bad we were in danger of becoming a banana republic. By 1987 the America’s cup was unbolted from Freemantle, and a new Accord had been negotiated: Accord mark II.

The two decisions at the start of the long Labor decade, the Accord and the deregulation of finance and currency controls, operated out of two contradictory logics. The Accord was Labourist, and in its fine print was the opening for the redirected hopes of political economists and ex-communists, especially those operating in the Amalgamated Metal Worker’s Union, for a transition to a Labor planned socialism. On the other hand, financial deregulation unleashed the logic of postmodern capital, which had scrutinised this fine print and by 1986 declared it too expensive.

Amanda Lohrey’s novel, The Morality of Gentlemen, was published in 1984, although its period of production belongs more to the 1970s. It’s an historical novel working on two narrative temporalities: one time frame concerns the dramatic story of an industrial conflict on the Hobart Docks in the mid 1950s, which is based on the Hursey case and the other frames a set of interviews of witnesses to these events and reflections on these by a Labor historian, in the 1970s. The central plot turns on the Waterside Worker’s Union and its majority decision to demand a political levy payable to the Labor Party who it is hoped will remove the anti-unionist Menzies Government. Three members refuse to pay the levy, arguing that union membership should not cancel out the liberal political right to exercise their individual consciences. The leading unionists argue that solidarity is a greater value.

The plot moves through a sequence of dramatic escalations in this conflict, which widen into a battle between the Communist party organizers active on the Waterfront, in league with more labourist Unionists, a State governing Labor party hoping that the conflict will go away, and an historic bloc struck between Liberal party parliamentarians, the dissenting unionists, the Catholic church hierarchy, the anti-communist Movement within the wider set of Unions, and the Shipping company which employs the waterside workers. The drama heightens with a union picket line at the docks, preventing the dissenters to sign on for work, which sees small outbreaks of violence before moving into a court case where the dissenters’ rights are upheld. The last event in this plot is the High Court’s decision to overturn the Tasmanian judge’s ruling, affirming the industrial right of Unions to determine who political levies can be paid to.

This novel would appear to lend itself to a socialist realism form where a class-based conflict is staged in a workplace and a heroic working-class character chooses to align themself with the revolutionary proletariat, its political formation and the teleological certainty of the transition to that realm of freedom after capitalism. Lohrey however is writing in the 1970s, after the New left critiques of the Old Left, and opts for Bertold Brecht’s, rather than Georg Lukacs’, formal methods. Brecht is anti-realism. He argues that realism provokes a reader or audience to identify with characters and situations and aims to elicit a catharthis which contains then purges any politically conceptual response to the work or text. Rather than identify with the text Brecht advocates an alienation effect, which aims at denaturalising the positions that realism invites the audience to enter into. Lohrey’s deployment of Brecht’s epic theatre methods work to constantly destabilise any identification the reader might have with typical and heroic working class figures, or against evil bourgeois employers and their political class. The morality of the novel’s gentlemen also is not aligned to any political position. These destabilisations work through a continual shift in the narrative’s focalisations as well as through a metafictional questioning of the reliability of the witnesses that the narrator interviews in the more recent timeframe. The novel asks that we choose our own positions based on the political arguments of the text.

The Morality of Gentlemen was re-published by The Vulgar Press in 2002 and Lohrey gave a lecture to re-introduce and re-appraise her first novel. She talked about the contradiction of two narrative logics she was cast into from a young age. On the one hand her extended family was Labourist, committed to union solidarity, and belief in the evils of capitalism. On the other hand her mother had enrolled her in a Catholic school, which during the Cold War 50s, was a site where the school’s hierarchy would attack the atheist, communist menace that had infiltrated the Labour movement. The novel aims to contest the narrative and rhetorical legacies of the Menzies hegemony, which were revived in the anti-unionist and even Cold War rhetoric of the Fraser period.

To conclude, how does this novel work as a model with which to read the long Labor decade? I think there are two readings enabled through the novel, and a third that I’m fishing around for. The first concerns the roles and uses of Labour traditions in licensing and legitimating party policy. The Accord discloses two competing Labourist traditions: firstly, that strong trade unions should support the party into government where the party can protect workers and their wages through legislation and budget decisions. This tradition is presented in The morality of Gentlemen by the right of a Union to direct political levies to the party. But in Lohrey’s novel the Waterside Worker’s Union is presented as a democratic organization which refuses to be guided by the State Labor party’s Premier into relinquishing this core principle of solidarity. The tradition Lohrey represents here indicates that Unions need not always sacrifice their demands for the sake of getting the party into government. Secondly, the Accord invokes a Labourist tradition of aiming to socialise industry. The novel examines this labour utopia through New Left ideas about the libidinal and personal, rather than rational and public, sources of a revolutionary negation of capitalism. The novel highlights the personal nature of grievances and conflicts that are channelled into political action. It also tracks a sub-plot in which a key communist party union organizer provokes the libido of the Union lawyer’s wife. Lohrey’s next novel, The reading group, is a more sustained exploration of the libidinal and unconscious drives underlying revolutionary desire and its utopias.

So, was the Accord, on this reading, doomed? Only to the extent that the Union movement choose to bind itself to the party in government at nearly any cost. More acute is the novel’s critique of a productivist, socialisation of industry, utopia. There are other alternatives to capitalism, and Lohrey’s writing career has consistently explored these emerging forms, beyond labourism.

The second reading model enabled concerns character realism and the Brechtian method employed to destabilise its orthodoxies. Hawke’s messianic, folk hero glow seems straight out of Australian socialist realism’s central typecasting. Hawke had a larrikin, sports loving, persona, which was sanctified by his successful and popular Presidency of the ACTU. Hawke had the form and feel of a Labourist folk hero who invited emotional identification, even love. Hawke’s capacity to heal a divided nation, to negotiate grand new compromises through summits and consensus, masked the extent to which a whole set of other collective actors and institutional forces would set the terms upon which consensus could be reached. Consensus is a formal or abstract device which, as Peter Beilharz argues, amounted to the ethos that, ultimately, people should be nice to each other. This is not to say that Hawke had no social justice principles or commitments, but rather that his consensual approach meant that nearly all the Labour traditions were up for re-negotiation under his leadership.

Thirdly, the subject of Keating’s economic realism. The decision to float the currency and deregulate banking can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand the government had no choice – it was an act of necessity forced on it by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s, the rise of neo-liberal economic policy as the only alternative to the failure of Keynesianism and the decisions of America and other developed countries to float their currencies prior to Australia. In other words it was a mature act of economic realism, rather than idealism. The lessons of Whitlam stood here as a counter-tradition, advising Labour to get smart about the new conditions for economic management. On the other hand this decision was based in a faith in one of capitalism’s utopias: that a free market is the best mechanism for producing and distributing goods and services.

So, Keating’s founding act as Treasurer can be viewed as an ambivalent one: realist and utopian. Read through the formal politics of Lohrey’s novel this act’s realism becomes denaturalised and its supposed necessity recast as a decision of narrative form. The question then is does global capitalism itself make decisions about narrative form? I’ve got no answers to this.

Finally, reading Keating’s market utopia through the novel. This is perhaps where the novel reaches its limits as a model for reading this event. Lohrey’s novel is concerned with her own traditional narratives, which are filtered through Brecht’s modernist aesthetics and New Left ideas about the politics of the libido and the entwining of the personal and political spheres. However the logics and forces unleashed by late capitalist finance are perhaps postmodern and better left to be read through other novels written in the wake of the float such as Anthony Macris’ Capital, volume One, or Kate Jennings’ Moral Hazard.

Don't worry about the government

2010-02-03T12:35:00.000+11:00

Not really. You should be very worried about the government.

But this title of a Talking Heads song from their '77 LP is an invitation to visit my underused Wordpress blog Bildungs and Food (see the connection with Talking Heads?) Anyway, there's a new post up over there--Distant and close-reading in the Anthropocene--which circles around some recent developments in literary studies, tying these to ideas from Dipesh Chakrabarty's recent essay "The climate of history" and heading toward a reading of Andrew McGahan's latest novel Wonders of a Godless World.

I've been enjoying and learning from Timothy Morton's iTunes course Environment and Literature University of California Davis Campus, and this discussion of the problems with disavowing the abstractions in the concrete is interesting and a good reminder of the dangers of the rush to posit the concrete in the face of the fictions of financial derivatives etc.

The Proposition: conducting a family

2010-01-11T07:39:00.005+11:00

After the recent Nick Cave stoush I was primed to find The Proposition, broadcast last night on ABC TV, confirming that this baddest of seeds had little to say about Australian colonial history. Considering my predisposition, I have to grudgingly admit that there were good elements in the film. The plotting is fairly complex, giving the film a narrative drive that keeps your interest to the end, although the biblical and Western signifiers paint the directions that the plot is heading toward in bold colours. Nested within its Western plot--crazed-outlaws who must be brought to justice non-conventionally by a sentimental sheriff--is a biblical tale of a family of brothers, one of which must make sacrifices and perform acts of redemption in order to stall the general violence unleashed by the violence of colonisation. The Proposition tells of the settlement of Australia as the establishment of the moral law that good men struggle to animate inside sovereign law.

Set somewhere near the desert-dominated 'centre' of mainland Australia in the post-Gold Rush period (1870s?), a frontier settlement--what one character frequently refers to as "this god-forsaken land"--is caught up in the violence of establishing 'civilised order'. The murder and rape of a pregnant settler, which occurs prior to the beginning of the narrative, stands as the story's most abominable crime, and this sexual-violence hovers around the edge of the film, coming forward in the violent denouement. The frontier setting provides the narrative with three themes of Australian colonial history: the violent taking of Aboriginal land, the problems of British transplantation, and Irish-Australian outlaws. These themes are tied together through the film's central dramatic question: will Charlie Burns rejoin his brother's gang, or deliver his Kurtz-like older brother Arthur to the law, or enact the moral law and take his life?

The film opposes two models of family: the Burns family, who live in caves, described by the frightened local Aboriginals as dogs, and who have failed to reproduce. Against this outlaw, dysfunctional family is the frontier town's police captain, Stanley, and his wife Martha. Their homestead is surrounded by a rose garden and this trope of out-of-place Englishness is reinforced by their formal dress and carved turkey on Christmas Day. Martha is the story's English Rose--her dead-friend Eliza Hopkins is the fate that awaits her if her police-husband fails in his quest to "civilise this place". Martha dreams of Eliza's death and of holding her baby. This is a vision of her own future, which will either occur or be thwarted. These then are the two central families of the film: one is pathologically, transgressively diseased--gone mad like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness--the other contains the best chances for civilisation in this frontier settlement: reproducing moral law and Britishness.

The question is whether the generic elements of the film--its Western structure, its biblical allusions and its intertextuality with Conrad's novel of colonial horror--enable something new to be presented about, or a productive vista to be opened onto, Australian colonial history. Another way to come at this question is to ask what roles women, Aboriginals and the land play in the movie. I think these are ultimately props to The Proposition's central drama of men sorting out how reproduction will occur and how families will be morally constituted on the frontier.

Despite the Sydney Nolan hues of the film's landscape shots and the moments of musical pathos, mainly supplied by Warren Ellis' violin, this is a film about men--white men--sorting out the codes of civilisation within which families can be protected and subjects produced. The 19th century frontier settlement enables the Western-biblical-Conradian elements to be used, but these features reinforce the white patriarchal ideology that underlies these genres. Colonisation unleashes a general violence which can drive those on the margins--the Irish in Australia--to a type of transgressive madness, but this is presented as a universal problem of European-Christian civilisation: a dilemma that can be contained and resolved only within families. Ultimately, the film is less a proposition than a restatement of a biblical lesson that uses the setting of the Australian colonial period to animate its white patriarchal beliefs.

Carbon Trading: the 2015 crisis in sub-prime carboffsets

2009-12-05T11:24:00.003+11:00

Hopefully, I'm not alone in being fundamentally confused and a little ignorant about what the Emissions Trading Scheme legislation rejected by the Australian Senate this week would've brought about. Putting a cap on the amount of carbon pollution and letting the market price this carbon, seem to be the basics of the scheme.

Markets and prices, huh? The ABC's radio and sometimes TV economics correspondent Stephen Long was last night discussing some of the dangers of such a scheme on Lateline. Long observes that there are already derivatives in the carbon trading markets, as investors seek to "manage risk" by hedging, securitizing, selling short, and so on, products based in these markets. He worries that the practice of investing in carbon offsets--carbon sinks or tree plantations that putatively function to balance pollution elsewhere--needs the sorts of governmental compliance, accreditation and oversight regimes that were globally absent in the lead-up to the 2007 GFC, to ensure that such carbon-offsetting actually achieves its aim of capturing carbon. Without such oversight there is the distinct danger that markets in offsetting will develop their own version of sub-prime mortgages: unsustainable carbon sinks, plantation forests that are fronts for pulp materials, land-clearing to make way for such offset plantations which are stages in plans for other forms of development, or simply forests that exist only on paper.

It makes sense then, that Murdoch's Neoliberal economist--Michael Stutchbury--supports the pricing of carbon, even though he is a trenchant critic of the Neoliberal-post Social Democracy Rudd Government which failed to get the upper house numbers to push through their Emissions Trading Scheme earlier this week; a scheme with carbon pricing at its centre.

Long argues that there are either going to be huge compliance costs if carbon trading is to be comprehensively regulated, or we could well see a crash triggered by the collapse in the sub-prime carboffset market.

Zoo Music Girls

2009-12-02T22:34:00.014+11:00

Anwyn Crawford in the latest Overland calling the naked truth on Emperor Nick Cave:

It’s his transformation into an antipodean Elvis Costello – growing old, mild and respectably bourgeois along with his audience – that really makes me mad. Not because I believe that Cave has sold out or betrayed his musical talent – he had precious little to begin with – but because the deference paid to him and to his work grows in inverse proportion to its increasing mediocrity, to its juvenile silliness and self-parody. Witness Grinderman, a mid-life crisis thinly disguised as a Bad Seeds side project, with ‘No Pussy Blues’ or, even more crudely, ‘Go Tell the Women’, which loudly complains: ‘All we wanted was a little consensual rape in the morning/ And maybe a bit more in the evening.’ Consensual rape, eh? Happy thought, indeed

.

After being excited by the Birthday Party in the early 1980s, I've found nearly all of Cave's subsequent product, repetitively lifeless. Cave's literary reputation seems to have drawn on his musical one, and what's particularly valuable in Crawford's critique is that it interprets Cave's oeuvre across the forms he works in, so that his musical cachet is not permitted to bolster his literary and screenwriting ones. It takes adroit writing to kick out all three legs of this tripod. Crawford's flattening of the romantic myth built up around Cave--Hamlet pow pow pow--king hits Cave's misogyny.

There's actually something happening here. Something at stake. Devastating.

****Postscript****

A letter in response to Crawford's essay has opened up a debate--of sorts--on Overland's new blog.

Reading through the essay again and now the replies to it, I think that while there is indeed a polemical edge to the essay, what excites me about it is that it opens up ways of talking about aesthetics and meaning--in this case pop music and the gendered, sex-murderous ways of dealing with certain desires--that is so rare in Australian textuality. It's ironic that Fotis Kapetorpoulos' letter attacks Crawford on the basis of what he argues is disavowal of Cave's Duende, his ineffable and unparalleled expressions of Eros. Ironic, as his critique reduces her arguments to a litany of pathological, sociological essences: puritanical, anglo, middle-class, 1980s undergraduate . . . You are thin-skinned, I am sensitive. You have a sociologically overdetermined response to great art, I have transcended my sociological constraints and just experience genius/art . . .

What I think is happening, then, is that Crawford has disaggregated elements of form and content in what is a repeated motif in Cave's oeuvre: his transcendence or, perhaps better, his transports of abjection out of the traps and murk of desire are constantly--boringly, repetitively--figured and formed through the sex-murder of the desired girls that pass through his songs. Cave's fixation is boring. More importantly, his modes of expressing this resolution of this strain of desire are not universal but just one way of aesthetically and ethically dealing with it and, as Crawford cogently argues, this formal and lyrical resolution is misogynist and repetitively dull.

The Birthday Party were dangerous, but Cave's art has become safe. The horror has become a stale cliche. Whether ironically intended or not, Cave's misogynist representations are also fixations that are stuck in a rut, his un-repressions long since thrilling.

Or, as Poetix puts it:

[T]he problem isn’t really to do with whether the enjoyment (or the discomfort) is sincere or not, but to do with whether the interplay between enjoyment and discomfort is managed creatively or has been allowed to become just another well-established masturbatory routine.

****One more thing****

To use a verbotten 80s undergraduate term, the primary intertext of Anwyn's critique is Peter Conrad's consecrating profile-essay on Cave in The Monthly. In other words, it's important, although not essential, to situate Crawford's critique both in the con-text of Conrad's hagiographic review of Cave's artistic production and in the broader network of literary journals and magazines, in which the role of The Monthly in relation to Overland becomes important.

In short, Overland is the literary journal with greatest claim to being on the Left in Australia. It's Communist Party of Australia roots have kept the journal close to aspects of the radical nationalist project that was strong in the 1950s and 60s. The Monthly, on the other hand, started as a quality--read glossy ads for sports watches and sleek cars--left-leaning magazine which featured long-essays aimed at a tertiary educated, well-off audience who were interested in areas of political and social life that permitted a complex, finely written analysis to enter into. As the Howard-era drew to a close, the magazine increasingly became a partisan organ, guided, it seemed, by former Conservative Right Wing Cold War-rior Robert Manne's vision of a more morally correct Australian liberalism. This project has seen Manne's voice and vision come to align the magazine with Opposition leader then Prime Minister Rudd's rhetoric and ideology, publishing Rudd's essay in praise of the German Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in which Rudd sought to set out his form of Christian-based social justice as a contrast to the Howard Government's dalliances with evangelical churches like Hillsong, with its prosperity gospel, and, more importantly, publishing Rudd's analysis of Neoliberalism and the Global Financial Crisis.

Rudd-Manne's analysis of Neoliberalism irks, not least because it is conducted with pious moralisms that operate within the circuitry of social-liberalism. How much a magazine of the left can The Monthly be when its central argument about the last 30 years of Neoliberalism is that there should really have been more government regulation of financial and other markets. Guy Rundle argues, in the same Overland as Crawford's essay, that Rudd's Neoliberalism seeks to shape the conduct of our everyday lives because his Government really has no interest in the transformation of society. In other words Rudd's Government is intensifying Neoliberal governmentalities. The Monthly can and will never make this sort of argument explicitly because its political essays are constrained by a social-liberalism that precludes any analysis of how market rationalities form the self and society. Instead, under the guidance of Manne (and Rudd), such analysis sees the self and society as protected from and outside of markets. Firmly regulate some of the markets, to a limited extent, and Neoliberalism is kept at bay. Nevermind that the exhortations to social entrepreneurialism and individual flexibility, just to name two Neoliberal techniques, continue unabated under Rudd.

Anyway, to see such a magazine engage in firming Cave's literary reputation is an index of how his artistic cachet has become, in Anwyn's words, middlebrow. What is at stake, then, is both the relationship of Cave's ethics to his aesthetics from a Left perspective, and practices of Left critique itself. What Anwyn has done is to perform a rigorous critique of one of the central motifs in Cave's work from both an aesthetic and feminist perspective. In so doing she has fundamentally challenged the Left-basis of--what Pierre Bourdieu calls--the symbolic capital that The Monthly and Peter Conrad claimed for Cave.

****Two more points****

Trawling the web, it appears that Crawford's reaction to Peter Conrad's consecration of Cave in The Monthly was preceded by this spray a few months back, coming from ABC radio host and former sax player with the Models (Birthday Party alumni), James Valentine. Valentine writes:

I get Nick Cave. He’s a writer, a songwriter, a hustler and a self pimper. He’s fine. He’s out there hacking away trying to pay his mortage and live an interesting life with a book advance and some song royalties. He gets asked to do this that and the other and why should he say no? He’s gotta eat. If people want to put him on the cover of the magazine and they think it will sell, why would Nick complain.
But can I just say – I’ve never heard anything he’s done that I’ve wanted to hear again. His novel was crap. His film The Proposition was OK. I’m yet to read his new book , but I’ve certainly read a lot about it already.
Such a slim body of work for so much reporting and critical comment. This is because of the very nature of his work and persona. It appeals directly to the kind of person who becomes a rock critic. art commentator, a commissioning editor.
This is because he possess that mysterious quality which was so potent in the mid seventies and eighties; credibility.
Credibility was everything back then. Credibility sought by all and granted only to a few meant that your every utterance had meaning. To be credible had nothing to do with actual ability. One had to wear only black, have only a rudimentary grasp of music and songwriting, and write tunes of great angst.
It helped if you’d experienced great angst but in Nick’s case it was enough to do a good impression of great angst. For true credibility, you had to take drugs. And the bad ones, not just a reggae cigarette in the band room.
These songs, excreable listening to most, were lauded by his followers as the most compelling utterances ever, and of course if you didn’t like them, it was because you were shallow and Nick was too much for you.
So compelling as though that may have been to the door bitches, the writers for the street papers, the JJJ set, the RRR set, I think now as we age we could apply some different criteria.
What’s he actually done?
Not that much.
Is it any good?
Not really.
Nick seems to me to be a one trick pony. He discovered early on that if you shove Jesus and the bible into your work, it makes it sound deep. Just say the word Jesus, or Elijah or Gethsemane and it sets off a whirlpool of meaning for people and you’re work is done.
His obscenity is too constant to be anything but adolescent. He has no range, he only brays.

And, finally. I was thinking of a similar Australian artist, from the same era and punk milieu, who had taken a more interesting path. I'm sure there are quite a few candidates, but Dave Graney is in many ways a more Australian figure than Cave, and a more literary one, too. Graney is a wry, larrikin version of a post-punk storyteller, a yarn-spinning bullshit artist, who has always worked at an angle to postmodern culture through gentle satire-homage of 70s and 80s suburban fantasies of cool hipsterdom. Graney, in some ways, is like Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens: actually treasured by more people because he is accessible and engaged. Unlike Cave, who presents his product as expression wrought from his soul, Graney takes his schtick seriously.

Leos, the Liberal leadership and wild flowers

2009-11-30T11:14:00.002+11:00

Ok. Call me a bit crazy, superficial, but there's some zodiac logic that might shed a bit of light on the current conniptions in the Australian Liberal party.

Let's start with the star signs of the previous prime minister and his deputy: John Howard and Peter Costello were both Leos. Interestingly, so was the next Liberal Party leader, Brendan Nelson, and so is Joe Hockey. The Howard-era Liberal party has a certain Leonine flavour.

Consider, then, the rest of the current crop of Liberal party leaders and aspirants: Malcolm Turnbull, Kevin Andrews (well, he has put his hand up), Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott. All Scorpions. All capable of intense bouts of stinging vengeance. All full of intense self-belief.

Here's the juice. One astrological theory is that, starting with Aries, each subsequent sign is a progression from the previous one: Aries->Taurus->Gemini->Cancer->Leo->Virgo->Libra->Scorpio->Sagittarius->Capricorn->Aquarius->Pisces->Aries . . .

The Hawke-Keating tussle involved a battle between the Sagittarian Hawke and the Capricorn Keating. The Howard-Rudd showdown had the Leo Howard defeated by the Virgo Rudd. This logic would see Rudd conquered by a Libran, which is Julia Gillard's sign, but not by a Scorpion, and certainly not by a Leo, like Hockey.

Australians seem to be done with Leos for now, and Scorpions seem too early. The love affair with Kevin continues. But if Joe Hockey does get in, his wooing of the electorate will need to be pretty special. It will need to be as smooth as the Floaters:

Leo and my name is Joe
You see I like all voters of the world
You see to me all voters are wild flowers
And if you understand what I'm sayin'
I want you to

Mmm take my hand
Come with me, baby, to Love Land
Let me show you how sweet it could be
Sharing love with me, I want you to

Float, float on (So float with me, baby)
Float on, float on (Yeah)
Float, float, float on (Float with Joe, y'all)
Float on, float on

Red Toryism and Australia's Neoliberal past

2009-11-28T15:14:00.005+11:00

British politics can be a useful guide for the direction that Australian political parties might head in. Thatcher's neoliberal programme--of privatisations, anti-unionism, small government, personal responsibility allied to a strident nationalism and moral and social conservatism--was a model that the Australian Liberal party took up and put into effect during John Howard's prime ministership: 1996 to 2007. Yet, to align the right-wing Australian party to the British Conservatives too neatly ignores a key point Guy Rundle makes in his essay "When the rubric hits the road":

Australia is not Britain, the neoliberal reconstruction of the economy was undertaken by a Labor government, which reemphasised a collective agreement with the nation, and offered some compensation for the effects of economic restructuring. And, by the standards of Thatcher, the Howard government changed almost nothing of the fabric of Australian life. (Overland 197: 9)

I think the subtext of Rundle's assertion here--that Howard had little left to work with in seeking to reconstruct society because Labor had already done most of that work--requires some unpacking. Such a disaggregation of the effects of Neoliberalism on the Australian economy and on Australian society is analytically useful because it helps in understanding why so-called Keynesian responses to the Global Financial Crisis do not end Neoliberalism but have, arguably, intensified aspects of it.

While useful as an exercise in comparisons and contrasts, mapping British political formations onto Australian ones--as though what is geographically distant is also temporally ahead--needs to take the specifically local and national characteristics of the two systems into account. So, in order to get to the main topic of this post--Red Toryism--I will quickly run through an historical sketch of Australian Neoliberal labourism. I do this as I think coming to terms with how Australian society (rather than economy) was Neoliberalised under Labor is a good starting point in seeking to understand what the implications of Red Toryism might be for Australian political culture, and, in particular, a good basis on which to see the forms of governmental practice and reasoning that Red Toryism enacts as being available to any formation within Australian political culture: the Greens, the Nationals, the Liberals and Labor. In other words, to begin to analyse Red Toryism from the understanding that Australian labourism was the carrier of neoliberalism helps to tune out the noise that disavows Labor's embedding of Red Toryist governmentalities. Such embedding might already be occurring, and whether it is framed and branded as Left or Right is, ultimately, noise.

To quickly rehearse Labor's Neoliberalisation of the Australian economy and society: it occured through the putative modernisation of Labourism and its core citizen-subjectivity: the industrial citizen. On the one hand, the transformation of the Australian political economy in the 1980s came about through the floating of the exchange rate, the relaxation of foreign banking restrictions, and the realignment of the Reserve Bank's objectives from reducing unemployment (c1983) to reducing the current account deficit (c 1986--when Keating made his Banana Republic warning) to its current and final focus on finance capital's key requirement: the minimising of inflation. Combined with reducing tariffs and privatising former government-owned enterprises, Labor's 'modernising' of the Australian political economy was accompanied by a reinstatement of the national health insurance scheme in the guise of Medicare, and a series of social-wage contracts--the Accords--which traded wage restraint for social goods, between the Government and the peak trade union body, the ACTU (Australian Council of Trade Unions).

Labor's neoliberal reformation of Australian society, however, was embedded through practices of conducting one's own and other's conduct (the conduct of conduct is Foucault's definition of governmentality). These practices were, and are, saturated with forms of thought: reasoning, concepts, calculations etc. The industrial citizen--labourism's key citzen-subject--protected by arbitration, tariffs, belonging to a trade union, and benefiting from racially exclusive and sexist policies, became reformed as a flexible enterprise, that was open and mobile, efficient and productive, independent and entrepreneurial. Labour--as a category in understanding political economy--was reformed from a fundamental category which could be protected and de-commodified, to one that was subsumed within the category of capital: from labour to human capital. This form of reasoning opened up the category of labour to a foundational reconception whereby work becomes a form of economic conduct which the individual or society can choose to invest in, take risks over, across a portfolio of skills and practices in order to generate an income stream. This Foucauldian understanding of the transformation of labour under Chicago School neoliberalism is nicely summed up in the aphorism: in neoliberalism we become entrepreneurs of ourselves.

It was thus through the re-formation of Labor and labourism that Neoliberalism became embedded as the dominant form of governmentality in Australian political culture. Labor's social-market approach to Neoliberalism--closer to German ordoliberalism than the Chicago School variant--gave the Howard-led coalition a set of social governmentalities against which to define themselves and to remake. The 'Big Picture' directions that Keating sought to move Australian political culture in--a Republic, Reconciliation, and increasing Regional connections with Asia Pacific nations--were framed by Howard as too modernist a path for those Australian traditions and values that had kept Australian society unified and anchored. Thus Rundle argues that

Labor simply took over what should have been the Liberals’ historical role – neoliberal reconstruction – and badged it as a form of modernisation, making it part of a distinctive progressive package, and leaving the Libs with nowhere to go but populism with a use-by date (Rundle, Crikey Newsletter 26.11.09).

So, any mapping of British political culture onto the Australian scene while useful is never neat. Some argue--including Paul Keating, who would say this--that Blair's New Labour, and its third way projects, was a rehearsal of ALP policy in the long Labor decade: 1983-1996. The notion that the British present is our political future needs to be taken with a wary openness. That said, I think it's worth getting some sense of what is being called Red Toryism, as outlines of the projects that are being mooted under David Cameron's leadership of the Tories, start to take shape. As I argued above, there is no necessary pipeline which articulates British Labour's policies--governmentalities--to Australian Labor's, nor one between the Tories and the Australian Coalition.

Having cleared the decks a bit, I will get to an analysis of Red Toryism in a latter post. What, however, has sparked this post was doyen of the boomer cultural left in Australia--Phillip Adams--giving a warm audience to Phillip Blond and his ideas a dew days ago on ABC's Late Night Live. Blond's website is here and he is being talked of as David Cameron's court Philosopher. Adams' response to Blond alarmed me a little as Blond's advocacy of social enterprises sounds a lot like Hayek's notion of catallaxies. I wonder, in particular, what 'social' actually means in this form of neoliberalism?

The second prompt to this post--which was meant to be about Red Toryism--is from a truly excellent analysis of the phenomenon here, which comes via Voyou Desoeuvre. Alex Andrews presents a fantastic analysis of Red Toryism: "Tory Neoliberalism: Why a vote for the Conservative Party is a vote for continuity, not change".

As Alex writes,

it is quite clear what Cameron’s Tories are really offering. There is no change here it is neoliberalism almost all the way down, ‘conservative means’ to ‘progressive ends’ are the same as they have been for thirty years. Cameron is in seamless continuity with Thatcherism and, in fact, New Labour.

Compare this to Rundle's analysis of 'Ruddism' in Overland:

Ruddism is a mode of post-social democratic labour adapted to Australian conditions and history, one that displays no real interest in challenging an atomised neoliberal social order and must therefore explore increasingly specific measures in the management of a population. (10)

Rundle goes on to write that it is Rudd's micromanagerial reshaping of social life which constitutes the essence of Rudd's governmentality: an essence which leaves untouched the "inadequacy of the conventional political frame to humanity's challenges". Getting outside this conventional political frame requires an understanding of Australia's recent past that grasps the extent to which the embedding of Neoliberalism in Australian political culture was achieved through the transformation of Labourism. Such an approach to recent Australian political history also requires that the Ghosts of Whitlam are properly mourned and that Neoliberalism is increasingly understood as more than neoclassical economics.

***

Gary Sauer-Thompson has also pointed to Blond's Red Toryism, here. Blond's article from Prospect Feb, 2009 "Rise of the Red Tories" makes for interesting reading. Blond's vision is neoliberal in the sense that there are multiple neoliberalisms that are essentially critiques of the previous version of liberal capitalism, which seek to establish new modes of governmentality because the previous mode governed us too much (This is Foucault's basic insight into liberalism as a mode of government: we are governed too much). Blond's progressive conservatism reads as sharing much with Hayek's liberalism, where civic associations and markets are conflated and seen as the source of liberty and moral values. As Mitchell Dean argues--here--in his discussion of Hayek, this variant of neoliberalism is both radical and conservative. Blond does not admit that capitalism plays any part in the breakdown of social life, which he blames on 1960s left-libertarianism. This is worrying as Blond's governmentality opens the door to a reactionary authoritarian response to the social fragmentation that his concomitant advocacy of greater marketisation of social relations gives rise to.

Indeed, advocating decentralisation of state-enterprises--hospitals etc.--so that local trust funds, local capital can come into ownership and control of the management of these bodies, requires a removal of forms of welfare-state style government, but not forms of government as such. The state will govern differently: it will empower and enable. Such neoliberal rostrums sound excellent, but in reality there is no single act of empowerment to be followed by the enabled local community thereafter exercising its morally edifying, defragmenting, efficient and freedom-enhancing control over the local school, hospital etc. Rather, Blond's project would see an ongoing mode of governing through communities which would be constituted on a continuum with those who are capable of self-management and self-empowerment--at one end--and those that require greater policing, older modes of government--at the other. What, also, is to prevent these public-private bodies from becoming shareholder entities, where majority shareholders determine their directions and activities if not state-based regulation and enforcement?

Red Toryism's rediscovery of the social and society is a rationality that needs to be analysed. What are the objects, aims, methods and ends of this modes of governmentality--this Red Toryism- that seeks to radically alter modes of government in the names of "society", this "civitas", the "local". What, in other words, counts as society, civic and local?

Ruddism: some thoughts

2009-11-17T13:15:00.005+11:00

It’s probably derriere garde—in some quarters—to use the language of blog posts and newspapers as metaphors for understanding contemporary government, but I wonder if it’s worth considering that the projects of the current Rudd-Labor Government are actually happening under or over the fold.

Two years into this Government’s tenure and there is a sense that the mainstream media are propagating a continuation of the sorts of commentator culture warrior, ‘balance’ reporting-interviewing practices, that came to dominate the end of the Howard era. Such techniques seemed to have worked effectively in the early to mid noughties, when economic and national security were presented as constantly under threat and the Leader’s ubiquitous radio presence was sought to establish the firm borders between those who were with us and those against. (We still listen to the ABC’s News Radio of a morning in our household, as we did in the Howard era, and one notable difference is the lack of the Leader’s voice on the radio). So, before looking at the so-called substance of the mediatized products of the Rudd Government, I want to consider the forms of the media-government mix

The current Leader is more a creature of television and the new social media: breakfast magazine-style TV, in particular. Rudd is narrowcasting more than Howard, and this has prompted some mainstream political journalists to draw attention to the repetition of Rudd’s sequences of narrowcasts, suggesting that this technique is redolent with spin and micro-managed manipulation.

Rudd is using media differently to Howard, and these different practices have left the broadsheet, TV and radio political journalist elite at a loss. Consider, for example, the weekly ABC TV show The Insiders. This one hour Sunday morning show is a magazine-style program, which comprises about 8 segments. The primary section of the show is an ‘discussion’ chaired by ex-Labor staffer Barry Cassidy, who presides over three TV, radio or print political journalists/ commentators, as they range over what they see as the main political events of the week. This panel is meant to be ‘balanced’—meaning that to the right of the screen is a culture-warrior News Ltd commentator, and to the left a social-liberal Fairfax or Labor-aligned journalist/ commentator resides. This segment is interrupted by a cross to The Senior Political Journalist—Paul Kelly—whose magisterial analysis is handed down in a language of absolute definitiveness that frequently clashes with the shifting ephemera of week-to-week politics.

The panel, the host, the doyen . . . these are truly insiders, but what they are inside increasingly appears to be the new outside. If Rudd is the king of spin, then these in-outsiders are often secondary spinners, offered one to two minutes to interpret the political rhetoric and events of the week in ways that rarely produce any insight into what is going on, under the fold.

Rudd doesn’t appear on The Insiders. He has, however, been appearing on a talk-variety TV show, Rove, which aims at something like the 18-39 demographic. He also appears on ABC TV’s flagship current affairs show, The 7:30 Report. The point is that the mix of media through which politics is both occurring and being reported is shifting, and that the insiders of the political journalism establishment have attempted to explain changes in this mix by drawing on a discourse which personalizes politics through the leader’s style of leadership. There is, of course, nothing new in this focus on the personal techniques of self of the Leader. But such a focus is, I think, bring prompted by a lack of understanding about what is going on under the fold.

So, as the techniques of governing through the media shift, what is going on? Can these changes be reported in the old ways? Maybe not. Maybe such changes need both a new language of abstract analysis and more narrative-based forms of testimony—even collective testimony—to articulate such changes. A mixture of what can be said and told about what is happening on the ground combined with an analysis of how these forms of practices and thought can be explained at the level of larger organizations, of the state, of NGOs and so on.

What was happening on the ground during the Howard-era was to some extent routed through the figure of the ordinary Australian who was defined in the media as someone whose freedom and values were not to be contained or directed by cosmopolitan elites. Such culture war tropes were neatly allied to the figure of the small-business owner, the mom and dad shareholder, and to nebulous family values. Thus a neoliberal-neoconservative amalgam of practices and pressures circulated through the figure of the ordinary Australian: a figure that was posited as being grounded; as living in the 'real world'. The short-circuiting of this amalgam in the Australian context arrived in various events, not least, the Schapelle Corby drug-trials, the Chaser’s APEC stunt and the anti-Workchoices campaigns. These events, among others, tore at the media complicity in these amalgams of the neolib-neocon project. But the tear in media fabric has been replaced by old ideas about social democracy—fed by Rudd himself—and about Labor’s Whitlamite propensity to fiscal largesse and hence self and national destruction. Rudd’s neoliberalism is thus presented as more of the same, but with a social-democratic heart. The mainstream characterization of Rudd as the King of Spin is to some extent, the judgment of journalists whose bearings are set in an earlier period of government: the Hawke-Keating period. Howard did much to persuade people that his Government was a type of permanent opposition, rolling back the cultural arrogance of the Keating era and its allies in the arts, the universities, the Fairfax press and the ABC. Rudd’s talk appears as spin, because it doesn’t rely on the modes of consensus amongst the political-journalist class that Hawke, Keating and Howard’s spin, did. But what is probably happening is that these forms of consensus are being mediated differently. What appears as repetition to an outsider who was once inside, appears as effective rhetoric and policy to those currently inside, or at least to those connected to government in ways that make the appearance of repetition, an irrelevance--background noise.

In short, what is needed, and what may well be circulating but I don’t know of, is a language that joins the social practices of the ground—of the local, the private, the bodily—to those of the region, the state, the corporate . . . In Foucauldian terms, there needs to be a language that can narrate and explain a new continuum of governmentality.

Now, maybe such a continuum is not a cause for celebration or affirmation, but rather invites and requires critique. Fine. But there is a preliminary need to more accurately narrate and analyse the current continuum. Which brings me, finally, to some suggestive fragments embedded in a recent Guy Rundle essay, “The End of the Whitlamists” in Arena Magazine (no. 102). Rundle’s topic is the residual Whitlamism that has affected the way that some on the Left view the prospects for cultural and social reform that the Rudd Government offers. I have previously analysed Whitlamism as a spectre that haunts the Australian Left, and have argued that its ghostly-ness is evidence of a loss to be worked through. Rundle is taking a similar tack, effectively arguing that one critical component of Whitlamism is that it lingers as a form of melancholy for sections of the Left intelligentsia, especially sections working in the arts and cultural industries.

Rundle has some sharp and, I would say, Foucauldian points to make about the forms of governmentality emerging in the Rudd-era. (He hints that this line of analysis will be expanded on in an upcoming essay in Overland.) So, to the quotes:

‘New Labour’ style regimes mark the end of one type of alliance between organized labour—or the suburban mainstream as it has now become—and an avant-garde intelligentsia, a model going back in explicit form to the 60s, and with its roots in the 19th century. Yet the artistic intelligentsia cannot successfully reflect on its own presuppositions—its rebelliousness hardened into orthodoxy—to mount a sufficiently new critical position on ‘Ruddism’ One can see this, for example, in the somewhat disappointing contribution of centre-left magazine The Monthly to publish contributions with a degree of critical or theoretical depth (some essays by Anne Manne aside) because its implicit ‘Whitlamist’ attitude to Labor, state and culture, lacks a framework with which to analyse the distinctive—and far from emancipatory—approach of the Rudd government to social and cultural life.

One can see this as a renewed push for an explicitly social democratic intellectual movement from a number of left and centre-left writers and activists, one which wears its acceptance of limits as a badge of pride, a sort of reverse radicalism, Yet such moves are occupying a space that has already been carved out by the Rudd-ALP—it is an intellectual movement drawing its legitimacy from a political process, rather than leading it through the application of a critical imagination. That secondary status shunts such people into the position of supply strategies of cultural management to a ruling party—hence a new-found focus on the nature of a progressive patriotism, and a search for ways to manufacture ‘belonging’.

For many the forces of darkness [the neoconservative reaction of the Rudd Government to media-based moral panics, which see Rudd condemn certain figures and which put pressure on censorship regimes: e.g. the Bill Henson affair] are attacks on the big freedoms, which are rarely seriously attacked, while increasing regimes of subjective re-shaping and microregulation of social desires go increasingly unchallenged, because they are wrapped up in various guises (preventative health measures appear to be the most recent) that maintain the old image of social improvement. Only when such processes swing round to take in the artistic community—and that is the Henson case in essence—do such people become aware of the profound transformations of state-society relations taking place.

The avant-garde intelligentsia, by and large, haven’t understood that [there could be different ideas of progress].

Towards an analysis of the paradoxes of libertarian climate change denial

2009-11-15T20:32:00.001+11:00

There had, until recently, seemed to be a consensus surrounding the link between carbon pollution and climate change, following the British Stern Review and after Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The so-called climate change sceptics and denialists, however, have maintained their position and even advanced their numbers over the last few years. On one level, the powerful coal and oil industries, and the trade unions that organise the labour these industries employ, have agents working to stall and demobilise action that would mitigate pollution, or at least to ensure that any market-schemes to reduce pollution include subsidies and deals that embed a corporatist solution. Tabloid media contrarians—trollumnists!—shock jocks, disaffected academics and the like, compose another bloc in the prosecution of this scepticism and denialism. The shills are easy to dismiss, but the force of their arguments lock into more deeply buried ideas about nature, modernity, economy, political identity and political rationalities. In particular, those that circulate in the forms of liberalism and libertarianism that have come to dominate the political-economy in the last 30 or so years. These ideas are, arguably, what enables the contrarians to appeal to and even constitute publics. While one way to understand these ideas is to see them as ideologies—the unconscious criteria for defining reality by which a society, or social group, serves its own interests—I want to apply Michel Foucault’s modes of analysis to these forms of governmentality, understanding these ideas as forms of reasoning, or rationalities, which are attached to practices, or techniques for acting.

One of the basic concepts in liberalism is the regulation of civil society and its primary mechanism for exchange—the market—by something natural and something invisible to the state and sovereign. I want to explore this concept in terms of Hayek’s concept of catallaxy and investigate what this central theoretical component in Hayek’s liberalism (or perhaps, his libertarianism) does to the natural-ness of classic liberalism’s conception of the relation between the state-sovereign and civil society. So, towards my analysis there are a number of key quotes from Mitchell Dean's analysis on Hayek's conception of freedom in Dean's 1999 book Governmentality, below. (Dean's book has a 2nd edition, with a post-GFC postscript).

Some interpretation and further reflections on Dean's excellent explication, to follow. But, something that does initially occur to me is that when nature itself begins to shift, under conditions of climate change, Hayek's tripartite structure--nature, culture, reason--is fundamentally destablized. What might follow, for Hayekian acolytes, is a mania in the wake of a loss: the loss of a unquestionably stable nature that was assumed to be impervious to the influence of culture--the markets, the family, the spontaneous social orders that culture throws up--and the state.

There might be a right-wing mourning in its early stages.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Freedom as artefact

“Neoliberalism . . . introduces a quite distinctive concept of freedom. As Graham Burchell (1996: 24) has remarked, freedom is no longer the freedom of the ‘system of natural liberty’ of Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment but freedom of ‘artefact’ of F.A. Hayek” (155).

“For neo-liberalism, freedom is no longer a natural attribute of Homo oeconomicus, the rational subject of interest. It is an artefact. Yet Hayek’s position is important because it alerts us to the different ways in which it can be an artefact. For the German post-war ordoliberals such as Alexander von Rustow, freedom is something to be contrived by a ‘vital policy’ that promotes the conditions of the free, entrepreneurial conduct of economically rational individuals (Gordon, 1991: 40-1). Hayek, however, offers a critique of this kind of approach when he conceives of culture as an intermediate and key layer between nature and reason.” (156)

“Freedom for Hayek is a product neither of nature nor of governmental policy and its institutions but of cultural evolution conceived as the development of civilization and its discipline. The introduction of this theme of cultural evolution allows his argument to outflank the either/or logic implied in the opposition between the natural and the artificial conceived as the processes of biological selection and the rational designs of government (Hayek, 1979: 155). He conceives nature, culture and rational design as three separate processes, each of which gives rise to ‘rules of conduct’. These rules are stratified: at base, the ‘instinctual’ drives; above these ‘traditions’ restraining the first; and finally, the ‘thin layer of deliberately adopted or modified rules’ (1979: 159-60). So drives, traditions and consciously adopted rules operate within the respective spheres of nature, culture and reason.” (156)

“In the course of cultural evolution, Hayek argues, rules of conduct are selected that help human groups adapt to their social environment, prosper and expand. The development of civilization is thus dependent on the capacity to learn and pass on these rules of conduct. Cultural evolution is a kind of ongoing learning process. These rules change in the course of the transition to an ‘abstract and open’ society in which relations among strangers are governed by abstract rules (forming the basis of laws) and impersonal signals (such as those provided by prices) (1979: 162). Such cultural rules of conduct are learnt not from rationally constructed institutions but from the ‘spontaneous social orders’ [catallaxies] of the market, language, morals and the law. An important consequence follows. Reason does not lead to civilisation; it is its effect. Reason is the consequence of those learnt rules of conduct by which humans become intelligent and it is by submitting to their discipline that humans can become free (1979: 163). This is one point at which neo-liberalism meets neo-conservatism and the concern of communitarianism for the ‘moral order’. In response to the claim that freedom involves a kind of romantic notion of self-fulfilment, Hayek shows that freedom depends on the disciplining effects of social orders that have developed through cultural evolution. It is by observing the rules of conduct learnt in the course of that evolution – around the market and the family, in particular – that we learn how to practise our freedom.” (156-57)

“The specificity of Hayek’s conception of freedom is that it is both negative, in that it is freedom from coercion by the arbitrary will of others, and anti-naturalist, in that its conditions are not found in the natural state of humankind. Hayek is thus able to criticize what he calls the ‘constructivism’ of the type Foucault finds in the ordoliberals and which, coming from a very different political stance, might best be represented by Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1957), which showed how the historical establishment of markets in labour, money and land requires active legal and governmental reform.” (157)

“For Hayek . . . the market is neither a natural sphere of the relations between exchanging individuals nor an artificial contrivance of appropriate policies but a spontaneous social order governed by customary rules selected by a complex learning process. He uses the German word Bildung to designate a social order that is not a consciously designed institution but is established in the course of its own development. The question of the political conditions of the market is one of developing the appropriate constitutional framework according to the ‘rule of law’. This means that government exercises coercion and restraint of individuals only in accordance with the rules learnt from the process of cultural evolution, or, as he puts it, ‘the recognized rules of just conduct designed to define and protect the domain of all individuals’ (Hayek, 1979: 109). The rule of law means that government is limited to applying universal rules announced in advance to an unknown number of cases and in an unknown number of future instances. One consequence of this is that it is not possible to make laws which discriminate in favour or against any particular class of individuals and so avoid parliaments and laws becoming the ‘playball of group interests’ (1979: 99). Another is that is creates the conditions by which the cultural rules of conduct contained within the spontaneous orders of the market – and indeed of morals, language and law itself – can be reinforced and not abandoned or transgressed. Hayek thus agrees with the ordoliberals on the need for definite political and legal conditions of the market. However, for Hayek these are to be secured by a constitutional framework that limits governmental regulation by a conception of the rule of law that is derived from the rules of conduct arrived at in the process of cultural evolution.” (157-58)

“Hayek succeeds in providing an anti-naturalistic conception of freedom that bypasses processes of social reform and which restricts political reform to imposing limits on the action of government. Yet, as we have seen, reform is cultural not simply because this neo-liberalism has run out of alternatives. It is cultural because what is at issue are the values and rules of conduct that have been developed in the course of the evolution of spontaneous social orders. This is why the ethos of neo-liberalism is at once conservative and radical. It is conservative in its revival and restoration of the values (or ‘virtues’) and rules of conduct associated with these orders, particularly those of the market. And it is radical because, by the process of reduplication and folding back, it multiplies and ramifies these values and rules into ever-new spheres including its own instruments and agencies.” (162)

“Hayek’s philosophy makes intelligible the goals of contemporary neo-liberalism as no less than the deployment of the culturally acquired rules of conduct to safeguard our civilization and the freedom it secures. In its invocation of virtues associated with the spontaneous social orders of the market and family, neo-liberalism is clearly consistent with neo-conservatism. The clearest difference would be in the different conceptions of the means of eliciting these virtues. Here neo-conservatism only has exhortation, sovereign measures and a ‘statist’ imposition of morality that often runs counter to its anti-political impulses. Contemporary liberalism, by contrast, operationalizes culturally acquired values by reforming ever-new spheres so they are accountable to the imperatives of learnt rules of conduct, including and especially the institutions of national government themselves. When public authority must act, it must be sure that it does so in conformity with the rules of conduct associated with markets. For example, according to one influential US text ‘reinventing government’ is about making it ‘entrepreneurial’ (Osborne and Gaebler, 1993). In Australia, the public employment service is replaced by a network of employment placement enterprises, in which the public agency is now in competition with private and community enterprises. Because change can no longer be a rationally directed process of social reform, for neo-liberalism it must be conducted according to cultural values, rules and norms. So far these rules and values have been best condensed into the cultural form of ‘enterprise’ and the ‘consumer’.” (163-64)

Terra Mort

2009-11-10T18:17:00.004+11:00

UB40-The Earth Dies Screaming. extended mix

What does a dying world sound like? A slow, unwinding. A mid-tempo dub skank. A sweet despair.

UB40's lament is both oddly nationalistic and environmental: "Your country needs you let's strike up the band". It's from the cold war period of mutually assured destruction (MAD) c1980. But it still hits hard. Now. And harder when the lyrics are deferred for the first four minutes to open up the duration of the music to the slow footsteps of the bass.

This is a sustainable speed. Those other more intensive tempos are layered as a double-skank, that comes over the walking-pace of the bass.

The libertarians, contrarians, denialists and sceptics that seek to ramp up the pace of economic growth--again--and celebrate its laying waste to the biosphere, lack a body capable of anything but isorhythmia and arrhythmia: the dissonant rhythms that impel each other into speculative furies of acceleration and . . . crash. Again and again and again.

The rhythms of the earth in harmony with the rhythms of the social--something heard at the edges of the beginnings of UB40's lament--is a eurhythmia that perhaps can only be heard and felt locally. Maybe you need to put and play your body into your local social- and bio-spheres before any movement towards region, nation . . . can be felt.

Asylum as risk-management

2009-11-07T19:57:00.003+11:00

Perhaps one of the prisms through which many Australians see asylum seekers is that of risk. The management of and investments in forms of risk were at the heart of the Global Financial Crisis, where the collapse of an exponentially multiplying viral network of arcane financial instruments dumped the risks avoided and insured against onto the budgets of nation-states.

In our everyday lives we experience forms of risk management: on a general level these involve the physical and mental hazards we choose to avoid or engage in, while more concretely the management of risk can involve the decisions made about investing in a new set of brakes for the car or whether or not we can afford to visit the dentist. With the increasing financialization of the economy over the last 30 years, the rewards that can result from speculative risk-taking have also entered everyday discourse. For most Australians this form of risk-taking has been directed into housing: buying and selling not only the primary place of residence, but moving into investment properties. Taking up the multiple forms of credit, and financial derivatives, was regarded as a low-risk activity until the collapse of Lehmann Brothers last year.

While one way to think about asylum seekers is to consider them to be taking life-risks, their precarious passages are more impelled than chosen. The hazards faced are not chosen under the same conditions as a middle-class Australian might choose to lock-in a fixed mortgage interest rate, or whether to invest in their child’s education by sending them to the local Anglican school.

A significant amount of the vitriol directed at asylum seekers is displaced onto the drivers, bookers and owners of the boats the refugees travel on. The people smugglers are cast as the evil profiteers who tempt the refugees with promises of a supine Australian welcome. Such a narrative, with its stock characters of innocents and evil, helps to provide a target for what is fear and resentment.

I think this is displaced fear and resentment, which originally derives from how the asylum seekers project back an image of the risk-managing citizen to the neoliberal citizens of contemporary Australia. For the ‘ordinary’ Australian, risk-management is now embedded in everyday calculations. You rise or fall on the basis of how willing you are take risks, and on the basis of how hard you are willing to work to support those investments made. Asylum seekers who are cast as queue-jumping, and seen as having the savings to invest in the hazard of seeking Australian citizenship, reflect back an image of the risk-managing citizen, but it is an image whose conditions of risk-taking have to be kept out of the frame. One way to keep these too difficult worldly and global risks from interfering with the containable imaginary aspirations of neoliberal citizenship is to decouple asylum seekers from the events that are impelling them away from their homelands.

For once these more troubling events enter the frame of the movement of peoples in and out of Australian space and time, the neoliberal image of the risk-managing self starts to decompose. The edges are what need to be kept invisible and silenced, so that the image of the ordinary Australian rewarded for risk-taking and hard-work is not complicated by the social, world-systemic dimensions of the hazards. The fear of the asylum seeker is driven, in part, by a fear of the risks that can’t be managed or chosen in a bid to seek returns on our investments, and by a resentment about the artefactuality of Australian citizenship.

Perhaps then, the recent de-intensifying or this fear and resentment is a corollary of the small movements away from the heights of neoliberal financial capitalism. The Australian government responses to the GFC have, to some extent, socialised risk. The link between border and financial security appears tight. It remains to be seen whether the recent movements in the governmentality of these elements of security will be matched with a similar response to global warming and climate change.

Retired to the shoe throwing circuit

2009-11-04T15:46:00.002+11:00

John Howard has been honoured with a hurled-shoe

attack at Cambridge.

"It was a pathetic throw. He would never have been in my team,"
Mr Howard said.

Pot meet kettle:

Sloughing off the skin of Labourism

2009-10-16T22:29:00.001+11:00

**Below is a long off-cut from the Phd. It summarises and evaluates a variety of political histories: Greg Melleuish's work on Australian Liberalism, George Megalogenis' The Longest Decade and Ken Wark's essayistic analysis of Australian political and cultural postmodernity.**

Paul Kelly’s extremely influential tome The End of Certainty stands out as the most widely read and referred to sources on the long Labor decade, and is still to be found on the reading lists of Australian University subjects in political science and government. Kelly’s main argument in this political history, that is densely filled with insider-detail, is that in the 1980s the exhaustion of the Federation era ‘Australian Settlement’ both became apparent and was wilfully, rightly dismantled by the Hawke-Keating government. Kelly’s text is the central history of the long Labor decade, and his heuristic of the Australian Settlement widely circulates in Australian political culture as the commonsense in popular Australian historiography of the period. As a number of critics of Kelly’s text and central heuristic have argued The End of Certainty is both a history of politics and a profoundly political historiography that claims that Australian modernity was prevented by long exhausted traditions instituted at the time of federation which were inward-looking and stunting, leaving Australia unprepared for the maturity and growth that are demanded by the new conditions of globalisation (Beilharz, 1993b, Macintyre, 2004 and Walter, 1996: 27-42). The argument of the text is that these traditions, the five pillars of the Australian Settlement,[i] are marks of an immature nation then and in 1992 and that their final dismantling under the supervision of the Hawke-Keating government modernised Australia. Ultimately for Kelly in The End of Certainty the long Labor decade is the period of the long overdue modernisation of Australian political culture whose central hero was Paul Keating. However, the politics of this tome are located in its use of the Bildungsroman narrative form in order to use the cultural identification between Australian national character and Labourism that Russel Ward had written of in The Australian Legend (1966) to argue that the Labourist Australian national character was "a paradox: a young nation with geriatric arteries" which needed to mature by sloughing off the "Sentimental Traditionalism" of Labourism (Kelly, 1994: 13 and 2).

Greg Melleuish’s essayistic history of post-federation Australian political culture is less inclined to see the long Labor decade as modernisation forced by global realities. Rather he sees it as a dual attack on moral and collective freedom and the traditional institutions that reproduce the conditions for these forms – the family, the Christian churches and the unified nation – by an expanding government in league with Unionism. Melleuish speaks from that morality of Liberalism that Judith Brett argues is central to the Liberal tradition in Australia (Brett, 2003: 7-12). For Melleuish "[t]he Labor mission was fundamentally corporatist and efficiency-based rather than individualistic and liberal’ and its ‘measures to deregulate the Australian financial sector and float the dollar were not introduced to enhance individual economic liberty" but were "always intended as a form of disciplinary control rather than as a tool for creating greater freedom" (1998: 55). Melleuish calls the economic rationalists ‘new liberal’ and in an assessment that chimes with those of neoliberalism in the Foucauldian school writes, “[t]hose who attacked protection and regulation used the language both of liberty and of managerial efficiency . . . the language and rhetoric [of which] achieved a wide currency [that] became embedded in public debate as an ideal measure against which the real world could be evaluated “(56).

Melleuish sees Australian political culture as having been subjected to cultural transformations that have been ‘sold’ to the Australian public through packages promising transformation and redemption (72).[ii] These packages operate against what Melleuish sees and values as the liberal propensity of localised free associations in civil society to conduct their own lives outside of any ‘’package’ that the government and the state has sought to impose on [these] ordinary Australians" (84-5 and 93). Melleuish’s analysis of economic rationalism shares much with Foucault’s analysis of Neo-Liberalism, except Melleuish has normative commitments to family, nation and church organisations as a Burkean conservative who values institutions which function to reproduce social forms that have a moral framework. The similarity then lies in Melleuish’s critique of economic rationalism as a set of practices which compel freedom: "Freedom compelled is no freedom at all. Efficiency disguised as freedom, and used to coerce individuals into forms of behaviour that economic managers desire, is no better. Despite its talk of liberty, economic rationalism – as state policy – smells too much of coercion’ (85).

There are a number of other political histories which intersect the long Labor decade. George Megalogenis, journalist for News Ltd.’s national broadsheet The Australian, in his The Longest Decade (2006) argues that the economic boom that began in 1991 and continued into 2006 is a useful periodisation on which to fashion a political-cultural history. For Megalogenis Paul Keating and John Howard’s rule should be considered as a continuous enactment of the project of economic reform. Of course Megalogenis is writing before the institution of Workchoices: a set of regulations that placed the individual contract at the heart of employment relations and also ultimately aimed to de-unionise Australian workplaces. As Megalogenis observes in his revised version: "Howard had the deregulation equation the wrong way around. He was preaching reform in the personal economy to make employees more productive. But when pressed on global warming, he reverted to a protectionist formula. He said he would not be exporting Australian jobs to Asia"(2008).

As a distinct period in the historiography of Australian political culture ‘the longest decade’ (1991-2006) is given coherence by the continuous economic growth that proceeded the recession of 1990-1991 and by Megalogenis’ claim that this ‘boom’ is the legacy of Keating and Howard’s shared project of reforming, meaning neoliberalising, the Australian economy. But Megalogenis’s periodisation is focused on the aftermath of the embedding of neoliberalism in Australian political culture rather than excavating the techniques by which it became embedded and contested. Megalogenis writes,

The boom of the past 15 years has not secured social cohesion. Instead, it has encouraged a mass outbreak of social climbing. Deregulation has taught Australians to see their self-worth through bricks-and-mortar and the size of the bribe they can extract from government. Avarice is the new black, and the political system has sanctified it with the term ‘aspirational voting’. [ . . . ] The open economy has flipped the clichés of the Australian character. Egalitarianism is now the motto of the haves; capital gains, the mantra of the punters. (2006: 299)

This is breezy, punchy journalistic history, that is colloquial in tone and firm in its evaluations. Megalogenis is an economist who marshals demographic statistics into his argument in order to support his claims like that above concerning the lack of social cohesion over the period. Yet as Megalogenis’ post-2007 election revised extract above makes clear the continuous narrative of the so-called longest decade cleaved around three central, and as I will argue below, ghostly pillars of Australian Labourism: Protection, Arbitration and Unionism. In this sense the return of spectres of Australian Labourism roused by the Coalition’s Workchoices legislation draws attention from the fact of 15 years of economic growth and the cultural politics of managing the boom over that period to questions concerning the history of Australian Labourism. For if the ‘longest decade’ ends with these Labourist ghosts haunting the body politic we must wonder at the extent to which and how the living forms of these ghosts were interred, discarded and lost. The periodisation used in this thesis – the long Labor decade – complements Megalogenis’s, while their overlapping period (1991-1996) points more to the contested legacy of the Keating Prime Ministership and to the disorienting temporal effects of a neoliberalising Labor government than to any defects in either that the other can explain.

Postmodernisation?

“The Hawke legacy is a laboratory of empirical experiment that is, among other things, a ‘third way’ between dogmatic insistence on a politics of rationalism and a do-nothing politics of pragmatism” (Wark, 1999: 335). McKenzie Wark’s writing on the long Labor decade is mediated through his experience of being in a Liberal Party stronghold as the results of the 1993 election are announced hearing Keating’s speech on the true believers and reflecting on how this signifier makes him feel (1999). It is also mediated by three ‘documentaries’ (two are fictionalised documentaries) on Labor in power. The first is True Believers focussing on John Curtin and Ben Chifley in office, the HV Evatt leader in opposition then The Dismissal which hones in on the final period of the Whitlam government and finally Labor in Power the short Labor decade. Wark calls each an epic and there is something of the formation of nation in each media text, and a monumental size to the importance of the three government projects, their obstacles, conditions, opponents. In a sense what Wark does is similar to what Beilharz does in Transforming Labour, which is to assess Labor tradition through ‘historiography’ so as to assess the fidelity of the Hawke-Keating government to Labor tradition. While Beilharz’s politics are enunciated from a moving position across a spectrum of Left ideologies as he attempts to stay left as the old certainties dissolve and Labor in power shifts right, Wark’s approach is cultural and minimal and libertarian: "I used to be true believer, and a labour movement leftist, but these days I’ve lost faith in anything but the practicalities of forming electoral majorities out of a commitment to [. . .] [m]inimising avoidable suffering – if there is a feeling that structures the whole of Labor culture, I think that’s it" (Wark, 1999: 181).

For Wark the Labor party is adept at producing and circulating fables which have to reach their publics and constituents through contemporary media like radio and television. For Wark these reinventions of the fables of Labor always have this structure of feeling – minimising avoidable suffering. Wark is adept at picking up on the key implications of shifts in policy and events like the Accord, which signal that the Australian Labor Party and ACTU agree to forego short-term pursuit of wage claims, compensated for by an increase in social wage, in order to address high inflation and high unemployment.

Effectively Wark re-rells the story of the long Labor decade through the Labor in Power documentary, with short excursions into his ideas about the vectoral nature of ‘politics’ and celebrity (179). Key events are summarised: the Accord, the float, the 1985 tax Summit. Wark’s narrative shifts to a focus on Keating, to the problems with Keating’s manichean, black-white, right-wrong rationalism in opposition to Hawke’s empiricist- consensual style of decision making. Keating as the celebrity starts to ascend for Wark and then we move into the 1986 Banana Republic episode (200). Next Wark unpacks economic rationalism: idealist extrapolation of understanding of part of economy to whole economy operating through an idealist and utopian faith in a future that the present actions can bring forth (201). Wark is of course astute, bringing to bear his sociology of culture:

It envisages a change from political to economic time where change that cannot be measured, the eventfulness of fortune, gives way to uncertainty that can be quantified, the calculus of risk. This pure quantifiable time never arrives [and displaces and defers in through the techniques used to move toward it], but it acts as a permanent alternative dreamtime, the purity of which stands as a measure of the impurity of the sordid political time of the present. (Wark, 1999: 201-02)

Wark also writes that,

The changes Labor itself unleashed when in office created an economy, a polity and a culture that were considerably more dynamic than the quiet backwater in which people my age, who I’ll call Generation Gough, were probably the last to experience. The sense that there may be profound qualitative changes afoot in the 90s contributed to the resistant mood of the information proletariat and the reactionary instincts of Hansonite populism. (Wark, 1999: 260).

For Wark these judgements are preliminary to his (post)modernist advocacy of the need for Labor to enter the information and postindustrial age by carrying their ethos of “minimising avoidable suffering” into cyberspace through the urbane and cosmopolitan cultures that travel on the vectors of celebrities (260-64).[iii] Wark’s postmodernity is a particular brand of modernity[iv] in which the traditional and even modern cultures of Labor and Labourism are to be sloughed off as redundant skins suited to suburban and therefore ineffective politics. To make his point Wark enlists the memory of those for whom Gough Whitlam was only ever a figure on television: “Besides being culture and politics, the Whitlam fable is also television. For some of my contemporaries, it was more television than anything else” (265). Thus for Wark, “[p]art of the challenge for Labor at the end of the 90s became that of finding ways of articulating this broader, less directly political memory of Labor’s past to the party’s future electoral ambition” (267).

The key sections in Wark’s book, in terms of his writing of the long Labor decade, are ‘Steering the Third Way Leftwards” and “Postindustrial Class Struggle” (272-285). In these chapters Wark argues that “[s]ome on the left of the Labor party” need to join “the public consensus on what actually happened in the 80s and 90s” (273). Via Lindsay Tanner’s gloss on Kelly’s Australian Settlement thesis, Wark argues for a new Labourist pragmatism. What is missing from Wark’s vision is any account of labour that is not postindustrial or any account of culture that is not mediated by television. That culture might be experienced while playing footy or netball is somehow too suburban for Wark and thereby ‘traditional’. For Wark the social body can be re-assembled. In the language of Deleuze it can make new assemblages, in order to accommodate the new global flows of information and culture. Yet the gains of such cheerful positivity are hardly accessible to all. Indeed as the social body reassembles those parts no longer contemporary, urbane, or able to couple are perhaps simply abjected. Wark’s conceit is that they tell fables while he deals in facts and actualities (274).

The central problem in Wark’s ‘narrative’ is that he confuses the culture of neoliberalism with cultural globalization: effectively arguing that any of the side-effects of globalization can be squared away through the more egalitarian cultural governance that such globalization brings in its wake – if only we are urbane enough to heed the call of and fall into line with the cosmopolitan slipstream. This is a dangerously circular argument that treats all blockages in the flows of globalization as opportunities for (good) cultural, and thereby economic, reform (283 and 290-2).[v] Culture is not merely as response to political economic forces not are political economic forces driven by changes in culture. Wark’s model of politics would seem to place culture in the position of that which mediates technological change and thereby is at the avant-garde of political and economic change: “[t]he medium through which economic or political change or negotiation takes place is partly cultural” (337). While there is a case for this conception of a cultural determinism, and theories of cultural materialism do give a central place to the material effects of culture, the claim that cultural forms precede political ones and that thereby politics needs to turn the forms of the cultural avant garde to its advantage, albeit guided by a specific ethos, is a more an academic disciplinary move or gambit whereby the methods and metaphysical commitments of political science and sociology are to be subsumed by those of cultural studies. Wark’s key slippage is between culture and economy: economy is a type of culture (283). Again there is some truth in this definition, but to argue that economic forms and systems are in part cultural is not to concede that the distinction is thereby redundant and the economic to be subsumed by the cultural. Equally, as John Frow among others argues, the cultural sphere is traversed by commodification and is itself an industry, part of the economy (1997 and Jameson, 1991). The other point that needs to be made is that Wark is confusing the social life of the post-commodity (the uses of information after it has been exchanged) with what is social about commodification: for Wark commoditized information cannot be reifying or alienating as information has a social life that exceeds the exchange. This is to read one temporal condition in the social life or career of a thing – the moment of use or waste or gift – onto that different temporal state of being a commodity (Frow, 1992). This is rhetorical and textual de-reification that takes information out of the circuitry of commodification by focussing on that type of information that is popular, already public and ‘cultural’. That certain information might be highly guarded, and patented, that it might constitute knowledge and disciplinary expertise within a field of technical specialities is bracketed by Wark due to the focus on popular culture, television in particular, in his text. This subsumption of economy to culture under the new conditions of media vectors in the postindustrial, information age opens the door to a discourse on cultural governance which can present itself as governance as such.[vi] What is missing in Wark’s post-long Labor decade account is a greater reach into the culture of Chicago School Neoliberalism and its focus on the microeconomics of human capital and the rationalities by which the human subject as labour becomes that human subject as enterprise and as entrepreneur of one’s potentials and capacities. Wark is too fixed on consuming and meaning-making subject to entertain the notion that information can be an investment in one’s own human capital, and that egalitarian access to information might be less a matter of keeping the postmodern light on the hill on than of furthering the Neoliberal project of embedding governmentalities which function to form the self as entrepreneur of one’s own human capital (Foucault, 2008).

[i] I will return to a more extensive analysis of Kelly’s conception of an ‘Australian Settlement’ later. However, the five pillars of the ‘exhausted’ Australian Settlement were: a white Australia which protected white male jobs from Asian emigrants and promoted White citizenship rights over Aboriginal ones; a system of industrial tariff protection which enabled employers to vouchsafe the jobs that were to be paid a ‘living wage’ according to need rather than means; an Arbitration Court which adjudicated on these wage cases and upon the principle of a living wage; a paternalistic utilitarian State which sought to support and assist its citizens in achieving ‘happiness’; and an expectation that Britain (then America) would provide an imperial benevolence in terms of financial and physical security (Kelly, 1994: 1-11).

[ii] Transformation and redemption are both operations of narrative. Melleuish has missed the obvious narrative form of the coming-of-age ‘package’.

[iii] On the meanings of culture, celebrity and cyberspace Wark writes:

If Labor is a culture then it is flanked on one side by the problem of celebrity and on the other by the problem of cyberspace. By celebrity, I mean the need to create an image for the vectors of the media, through which the public reads proposal for what it could desire. By cyberspace, I mean the need to learn empirically from the great wealth of information available and create the peculiar kind of specialized knowledge that is the guile of the political generalist. (1999: 264)

[iv] John Frow suggests that postmodernism, as a word,

[c]an be taken as designating nothing more and nothing less than a genre of theoretical writing. [ . . . Y]our first major gambit must be to predicate the existence or non-existence of the postmodern. . . . The classical structure of this gambit [ . . .] is this: first, you assume the existence of a historical shift in sensibility, which you call the postmodern; then you define it by opposition to whatever you take the modern to have been; finally, you seek to give a content to the postmodern in terms of this opposition. The content, that is to say, is deduced logically from the axiom of existence and only then described as historically real. (1997: 15)

Peter Osborne argues that modernity is a multiple, qualitative and not chronological concept (1995 and 1992). For Zygmunt Bauman the historicism of a post modernity elides, again, the qualitative shift in that experience of time and space that is better explained and connoted by the figuring of a move from a solid to liquid modernity (2000). Furthermore, the alternative modernities ‘school’ that surrounds the Chicago University based Public Culture journal, including Dipesh Chakrabarty, argue that the paths to and through modernity are multiple and that to fix any one path is often Eurocentric if not also teleological (Goankar, 2002: 4 and Chakrabarty, 2000:6-16).

In Wark’s account of the lessons for Labor of the long Labor decade revenants, ghosts, hauntings and utopias are suburban and backwards, to be blasted away by synchronising with the techniques and social forms enabled by the new modernity that is transnational, cosmopolitan and led by mediatised postindustrial information technologies. While this is a manifesto for a certain formation of Australian Left-intellectuals, not all intellectuals are caught in the slipstream that Wark argues is dragging humanity into the Network age, nor is his “temporalisation of time” (Osborne, 1995) able to account for disjointed time (Derrida, 1993) or the experience of multiple times which Ernst Bloch argued was one of the key techniques the Nazi leadership used to conduct the arrhythmic temporalities of a bloc of social formations in the 1930s (Bloch 1991: ).Overall Wark’s project for a postmodern Labor Party and Labourism is hampered, in a similar way to Paul Kelly’s project for a new Australian Settlement, by its politics of time: its deterministic modernisation that divides the social realm into those who are going forward, those stuck and those heading back.

[v] Wark writes that

whether anyone likes it or not it [Labor] will have to be open to the global information vector to some degree, for it is through globalisation that new sources of wealth creation will produce the pudding to be shared out to Labor’s traditional base. The paradox is that the only way for Labor to honour its traditional communities is a leap into a modern, perhaps even postmodern future.(1999: 292)

This is view that could be almost entirely substituted for the one Paul Kelly proffered in 1992 in The End of Certainty, save that while Kelly proselytisers for free markets Wark speaks for free information. It’s the teleological inevitability of both positions that is identical, and this is surprising since Wark’s use of the term postmodern should suggest that a teleological conception of history is rejected. The opposite is the case. Chapter 3 explores discourses of modernisation and postmodernisation in depth.

[vi] Carol Johnson is sceptical about those more ‘positive’ and triumphalist narratives, like Wark’s, in which the inevitable political implications for any Left response to a wholesale shift into the post-industrial information are glibly presented:

A modernist belief in the inevitability of technological progress and the grand narratives of economic liberalism have been combined with more postmodern conceptions of an information and cultural economy. . . .Various governments have used the information revolution to justify policies of free trade and deregulation that have a long history in neo-liberalism. Nor has the cyber-age succeeded in undermining traditional identities and power relations, rather those identities and power relations have been adapted to the new conditions. . . One needs to be deeply sceptical regarding the way in which politicians use arguments about the ‘inevitable’ implications of unprecedented social change. (2000: 138-9)

We are governed too much

2009-10-05T22:34:00.002+11:00

**Some bits and pieces from the thesis' cutting room carpet. This off-cut is an attempt to delineate three responses to Neoliberalism**

There are two faultlines that run through writing on neoliberalism: effectively splitting comment and analysis of Neoliberalism into three camps. On the one hand are its supporters, who fail to see anything new or neo in what they consider to be Liberalism with its ‘traditional’ critique of government interference and belief in markets and civil associations as the storehouses and generators of human meaning and liberty. Secondly, there are those critiques of neoliberalism which identify its key method as the deregulation of state controls on capital and markets, a method which is articulated to other marketisations such as the privatisation of former state-owned enterprises, reductions in aspects of the social wage, and the installment of managerialist and casualisation regimes into state bureaucracies. For this second critical camp, the neoliberal project effects the removal of government from regulating and policing exchanges in what are often transnational market. This fostering of ‘the powerless state’ is cast by these critics as a de-democratising movement that reinstalls class divisions and deflects the costs of global trade and commerce unto the weakest and most vulnerable people. What is neo about Neoliberalism for these ‘Neoliberalism-removes-the-state’s-capacity to protect its citizens’ is that it is contra-Keynesian techniques of government [?]. The third stance on Neoliberalism arises out of Michel Foucault’s analysis, which initially coins the neologism governmentality in order to analyse a continuum of conduct ranging from techniques for ruling and guiding the self to those of states. The advantage of Foucault’s heuristic is that it brings to the surface the primary technique of Liberalism being a form of critique at being over-governed which constitutes a mode of self-government. In other words, the putative state of freedom from which the Liberal critique is issued is not outside government but is constituted in the act of the critique: an enacting of governmentality. Thus for political analysts and historians influenced by Foucault’s ideas on governmentality like Nikolas Rose Neoliberalism, advanced liberalism as he calls it, is a form of governing through freedom; a mode of governing that forms and guides conduct towards market rationalities but which is not the absence of government that either the first camp claim neoliberalism to be nor that which the second camp (inc Bourdieu, David Harvey, Michael Pusey) want to make present again through the modes of regulation familiar from the Keynesian period.

However, I don’t want to suggest that there is only the Foucauldian theory of Neo-liberalism, as the depiction of Neo-liberalism by the second camp is certainly descriptive of what constitutes a new attack on the Keynesian instruments of citizen support and formation. There has been a realignment in the wage-profit ratio since the mid-1970s when, proponents from the second camp like David Harvey argue, a redirection of capital into greater concentration occurred.

Neoliberalism: the conduct of economic conduct

2009-10-02T23:49:00.003+10:00

Governmentality

For Foucault, the “encounter between the technologies of domination of others [power] and those of the self I call “governmentality”” (225). Drawing on a sixteenth-century Western European discourse of ‘government’ Foucault seeks to reactivate these older meanings of the term so as to break up the fusion that government and state have in current discourse (2001: 341). These older meanings of government

designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed—the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It covered not only the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection but also modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, that were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others. The relationship proper to power would therefore be sought not on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary contracts (all of which can, at best, only be the instruments of power) but, rather, in the area of that singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government. (341)

Thus for Foucault the state is not synonymous with government so much as subjected to

the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on. Thus the state can only be understood in its survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality. (Foucault, 2001: 221)

Wendy Brown observes that “as is often the case with Foucault’s ideas [. . .] the notion of governmentality is both extremely theoretically fecund and woefully underspecified” and it is from the scholars of governmentality that much of the fleshing out and application of Foucault’s fecund concept has emerged (Brown, 2005: 142). Indeed, Thomas Lemke’s work on governmentality provides the conceptual basis for thinking it as a continuum of rationalities and techniques which stretches from the self to the state:

While many forms of contemporary critique still rely on the dualism of freedom and constraint, consensus and violence, from the perspective of governmentality the polarity of subjectivity and power ceases to be plausible: government refers to a continuum, which extends from political government right through to forms of self-regulation – namely, “technologies of the self.” (Lemke, 2002: 59)[i]

By taking governmentality as a continuum on which self and state both range, a re-conceptualisation is enabled for the reversible New Left and second wave Feminist tenet: the personal is the political and the political is the personal. Yet such a re-conceptualisation must itself be historicised if we are to move beyond the period of the heyday of the New Left in the 1950s and 1960s when Neoliberal forms of governmentality began to emerge and be codified by Chicago University figures like Gary Becker. For Foucault

the interest of [Becker’s] theory of human capital is that it represents two processes, one that we could call the extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain, and second, on the basis of this, the possibility of giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic. (The Birth of Biopolitics: 219)

Foucault's argument is that in these theories of human capital the proper theoretical consideration that capital and land have been given in economic theory has yet to be applied to labour. While for Marx it is capitalism that produces abstract labour, for Neoliberals like Becker the category of abstract labour is a false one that results from the limitations of classical economic theory and its concerns with mechanisms and processes of production and of exchange (221-22). Rather than see the self as the seller of labour, Neoliberals see the self as “an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself“ (226).

The enterprising and entrepreneurial self is a fixture of everyday life now. But where does Libertarianism fit into these practices of American Neoliberalism? If Neoliberalism is, in part, a textual practice then how does it happen in text, in specifically local ways, in Australia? In order to explore these questions I will look below at Left-libertarian writer Moorhouse's shifting positions on governmentality around the time of the breakdown of the post-war boom and the financial system that had enabled it. What is of particular interest is how a Left-Libertarian practises literary politics before, during and after a shift in their own conception of governmentality and before, during and after what is arguably the emergence and dominance of the Neoliberal modes of governmentality. Lohrey’s Left-Labourist literary trajectory passes through the long Labor decade and hence Neoliberal governmentality at a later point. Yet, her initial orientation propels her focus away from technologies of the state towards those of the self. This is a curious cross-trajectory. Why would ostensibly Left novelists respond to the same phenomena in inverted ways? Before addressing this question I will move into a mid-range reading of Moorhouse and Lohrey's oeuvres.

[i] Barry Hindess also refers to governmentality as a continuum:

Foucault maintains that [. . .] there is a certain continuity between the government of oneself, the government of a household and the government of a state or community. Linked to this continuity, he argues, is the fact that the principles of political action and those of personal conduct can be seen as being intimately related. He suggests, for example, that successful government of others depends, in the first instance, on the capacity of those doing the governing to govern themselves. As for the governed, to the extent that it avoids the extremes of domination, their government must aim to affect their conduct—that is, it must operate through their capacity to regulate their own behaviour. In this respect too, successful government of others is often thought to depend on the ability of those others to govern themselves, and it must therefore aim to secure the conditions under which they are enabled to do so. (1996: 105)

Transforming Labourism

2009-09-26T09:30:00.006+10:00

I haven't posted for a while, a hiatus due, I suppose, to the ennui that followed obtaining the doctorate after having to revise substantial sections of what was a stitched together initial submission. While the examiners' reports had some good things to say about the content of the research and some of its presentation, it was generally chastised for poor organisation and structure. Justifiably.

What I find now, after having revised the work to a much more coherent and concise form, is that the blind spots that enabled so much of the argument to proceed, appear wilfully, embarrassingly ignorant. I wonder if this is a common post-research feeling: that the insight gained into a small area of a specific field of knowledge came at the expense of holding other areas at a distance; blurred and unfocussed at the edge of vision's field? At a conference I attended in July, a Professor talked about her earlier research project as being a search guided by the settings of her 'metal detector'--signalling the presence of colonial and post-colonial metals, rather than other cultural and political phenomena. To borrow this analogy my doctoral research's metal detector was set to the transformations of Australian Labor and labourism in the period 1983-96, the rise of neoliberalism and the representation of citizenship in Australian novels by and about young men.

Post-thesis I've relaxed the filters on the detector, and the nationalist, whiteness and masculinist settings--although I was critical of all three of these areas--of the thesis research, appear now as limited and narrowed. At present I feel that having spent so long ignoring other frequencies, all I can hear is noise: I'd managed to compose out a limited combination of cultural and political rhythms, and now that other political and cultural temporalities have become present, I have no idea where to begin writing. Indeed, I find myself increasingly playing and thinking in terms of the piano; trying to marry the left-hand to the right, feeling my way toward stride techniques, focussing increasingly on playing accompanied melody, rather then comping chords while a vocal or instrumental melody is imagined in my head.

Still, the sorts of insight that my doctoral research produced are, for all the blindness that enabled them, worth disseminating. Here then, below, is a summary of some of the key writings on Australian Labourism. A topic that seems to have come back around now that Labor is back in power, federally, and questions of What's Left have arisen. The degree to which Labourism itself was neoliberalised (in David Harvey's and Michel Foucault's senses of the term) is an historical fact yet to be worked through by many who identify as Left. Sorry to say, but a symptom of this malaise is the weirdness of Robert Manne lecturing the Left on what Neoliberalism and Social Democracy are. Manne's definition of social democracy empties it of its socialisation aims, making it a type of social liberalism. His definition of neoliberalism shares much with David Harvey's but, crucially, fails to engage with the subjective dimensions of neoliberalism: the self as entrepreneur of itself, the self as the store of human capital that one must invest in. Studying Grunge fiction, gives you a sense of how neoliberalism is lived with; how it was embedded into everyday life, and, in particular, how it articulated to labourist conceptions of Australian national character, presenting the coming-of-age of Australian society in the 1980s-90s as a labourism growing up by becoming open to the world, productive, flexible, independent.

One indication of this Bildungsroman of Australian Labourism can be seen in the opening chapters of Paul Kelly's The March of the Patriots. Kelly asserts--rather than argues or brings together a set of historiographical writings--that Australian modernity began in 1983 with the deregulation of finance, under the Labor government. Apart from being myopic, and even narcissistic, historiography (it seems that Kelly's reference for his modernisation thesis is his prequel tome The End of Certainty where he argues that the Australian Settlement was demolished or dismantled by the Hawke-Keating governments) the notion that Australian modernity began in 1983 signals that labourism's coming-of-age was achieved through the financialization of labourist characteristics and practices. Thus the neoliberalisation of Australian labourism, for Kelly, marks the emergence of modern Australia, although Kelly would not see this history in those terms.

Kelly is right to mark this moment--1983's deregulation of exchange-rate controls, and relaxation of banking licences--as an important one. He is wrong, however, to equate this moment with the arrival of Australian modernity. Wrong, not least, for the conflation of one sequence of modernization (financial deregulation) with modernity as such. Thus, he posits a singular modernity that on inspection appears to be ultimately governed by the temporalities of finance capitalism. To reduce and singularize modernity to such a narrow conception of political-economy is enabled by a particular sort of blindness. What that is, I'm yet to grasp or understand, although I think Guy Rundle's characterisation of Kelly as a power intellectual (in contrast to the "public intellectual") hints at the uses to which Kelly's commentary and concepts of political-economic history are turned.

_____________________________________________________________________

Labourism

Fundamental to a consideration of the periodisation of the long Labor decade is the middle term: Labor and its discourse Labourism. Australian Labourism is a central discursive, ideological, cultural and institutional form of twentieth-century Australian political culture. The cultural and post-colonial projects of the second Keating Government (1993-96) are certainly important but they sit uneasily within those currents of Labor traditions that form around industrial issues and events. Beilharz writes that “[h]istorically [. . .] labourism kept returning as the more durable core of the Australian left. This may reflect its practicability; it also suggests, in one sense, that a weaker distinction than that firmly drawn between socialism and labourism might be appropriate, for labourism after all is also a kind of socialism” (38). But if labourism is a kind of socialism it is “the Australian version of those kinds of socialist reformism which construct socialism as a variation on capitalist civilisation rather than its negation. It is this longer, mainstream labour tradition which is now at risk” (38).

The gap between the discourse of socialism, as the negation of capitalism, and Labourism is made more explicit in Jim Hagan’s The History of the A.C.T.U., where he argues that

[t]he tenets of Labourism were White Australia, Tariff Protection, compulsory arbitration, strong unions, and the Labor party. White Australia kept out Asiatics who threatened the standard of living and the unions’ strength; tariff protection diminished unemployment and kept wages low; compulsory arbitration restrained the greedy and unfair employer; a strong union movement made it [. . .] possible to enhance and supplement arbitration’s achievements; and Labor Government made sure that no one interfered with these excellent arrangements. (1981: 14)

Similar to Hagan, Frank Bongiorno sees the articulation of trade unions to the ALP as the central mechanism of Labourism:
[t]he idea that an independent Labor Party, supported by a strong trade union movement, should seek a redistribution of wealth in favour of the working class through the parliamentary system [. . .] has been a tenet to which any activist working in the Labor Party has had to subscribe. It meant that socialism had to be a gradual affair because Labor sought to achieve its aims through popularly elected parliaments. (“Labourism”)

More succinctly, Beilharz writes that it is “the ideology, or better, the culture of the labour movement as it is articulated politically” (1994: 36). Ralph Miliband argues that its ideology resides in core demands that are industrial first, and social second:

Labourism is above all concerned with the advancement of concrete demands of immediate advantage to the working class and organised labour wages and conditions of work; trade union rights, the better provision of services and benefits in the field of health, education, housing, transport, family allowances, unemployment benefits, pensions and so on. (cited in Beilharz, 1994: 36)

Rob Watts defines Labourism so nebulously that it appears as an orientation towards the state that the social movement formed out of Trade Unionists uses to enact claims solely for improving their material conditions. For Watts, Labourism is merely “a strategy of using the state to advance the interests of the workers, deploying whatever political and discursive material is to hand” (52).

Labourism is a flexible set of practices, institutional relationships and ways of making meaning that articulates the labour movement to the Labor Party and both to the apparatuses of the state in the interests of improving material working rewards and conditions as a first measure, and in gaining social goods and conditions as a second goal. One key question of the long Labor decade for Beilharz was whether or not Labourism was flexible enough a discourse to weather the dismantling of Hagan’s first three tenets without becoming empty and ceasing to be a source of tradition which could be drawn on to generate a political culture capable of participating in shaping the political economy (Beilharz, 1994: 4-5). Furthermore, could Labourism still be said to be active in Australian political culture once the ‘protection’ that it had struggled to institute was disappearing? (3) Was Australian Labourism during the long Labor decade so discredited that it was unable to re-vitalise by re-articulating to formations on its Left and even Right wings? If there was a emptying of Labor tradition, as Beilharz argues, then was this disposal to be rued considering that Australian Labourism had been racist and heavily biased against equal opportunities for women for much of its existence? (McQueen, 2004: 30-44; Sawer, 2003b: 373-75). Was Labourism flexible enough a discourse to be modernised without being entirely lost?

Beilharz’s Transforming Labor is a long, mournful and sometimes melancholic argument against such effective flexibility not because Labourism is not a flexible discourse but because the political economy upon which it functioned no longer existed in 1994. Beilharz’s argument in Transforming Labor is that Australian Labourism is a species of the discourses of modernity, and like modernity comprises an interconnected series of Janus-faces: Social-liberal with socialist; backward-looking Romantic with forward-looking modernist; statist with civic; and utopian with pragmatic (36-48). Of course, Beilharz’s judgement about the culture-political economy relationship in Labourism is not to be taken uncritically. If the Hawke-Keating Government fundamentally altered the governance and shape of the Australian political economy then how are we to assess the degrees and origins of what determined these changes: were such governing changes inevitable considering the shifts in geopolitics and global finance and trade capitalism, or were they contingent and driven by nationally immanent cultural, social and political forces? Was Labourism a large ensemble of traditional forms and principles, utopias and pragmatic alliances, or did it possess a hard core of central tenets that if refused or negated would empty the ‘tradition’ to the point that it could no longer be meaningfully drawn on? Where does Labourism fit into narratives of the long decade? Was Labourism, as a set of principles and traditions, fundamentally recast by the Hawke-Keating Government? Was there a betrayal of a socialist or social democratic project, or were the accusers nostalgic for, or melancholy about, a type of Labourism that had never existed, except as hope and oppositional critique? These are all difficult questions which will be addressed throughout the thesis. The beginnings of an answer, however, requires shifting our focus to the discourse to which Labourism was articulated through long periods of the twentieth century: Social-liberalism.

______________________________________________________________

Works Cited

Beilharz, Peter. Transforming Labor: Labour Tradition and the Labor Decade in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Hagan, Jim. The History of the A.C.T.U.. Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1981.

Kelly, Paul. The End of Certainty: Power, Politics and Business in Australia. Rev. ed. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1994.

“Labourism.” Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre. Eds. The Oxford Companion to Australian History. Rev. ed. South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2001. 374-75.

McQueen, Humphrey. A New Britannia. 4th. ed. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2004.

Sawer, Marian. “Reinventing the Labor party: From Laborism to Equal Opportunity.” Ed. Jenny Hocking and Colleen Lewis. It’s Time Again: Whitlam and Modern Labor. Armadale: circa, 2003b. 373-92.

Watts, Rob. “Laborism and the State: Confronting Modernity.” Ed. Paul James. The State in Question: Transformations of the Australian State. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1996. 38-73.

What's Rudd building in there?

2009-06-11T12:13:00.005+10:00

What is Kevin Rudd? Can't he just tear off the mask and come clean?

Stop bloking around, bloke. Fella. Are you a social democrat with a Bonhoffer heart, or a Neoliberal with shaken sauce bottle dollops of moral populism ?

Australians like their leaders to embody some simple, straighforward ethos. That leaders might craft a persona that sometimes cracks open to reveal - gasp - contradictions, media techniques, or even an ambitious driven politician, is unremarkable. The sense of something manipulative, power-mad or even fundamentally false behind the mask(s), has less perhaps to do with Rudd's all-too-common politician's contradictions, than with his 1st term government's position in the electoral cycle (the honeymoon period is waning, and it's time for the "tough" decisions), and with the convulsions that Neoliberal-Finance-Capitalism has been through since he came to power.

Rudd ALP was elected on a cyclic turn away from the hubris of the 11 year-old Coalition and with four main pitches: to roll-back the Neoliberal excess of Howard's Industrial relations laws; to install a carbon trading scheme; to invest in run-down national infrastructure; and to be more fiscally prudent. The collapse of the global mineral commodity market has undercut government revenue significantlty and the second and fourth of these election pitches have been let go, or deferred. The first has been achieved, but with so many qualifications that Unions are pushing for more roll-back.

That leaves national infrastructure, which has been tied into the "stimulus" packages. Certainly, the direction and nature of these investments have been affected by the convulsions in the global credit markets, but what is surprising here is how long it took the government to argue for these investments; how they were framed in the media as soft infrastructure, or wasteful, because the money invested didn't appear in the guise of hard things like roads, rail, ports, or appear in small business investment. The media framing of the story and debates around infrastructure investment reveals that Australia is a place for men who run small businesses. The Howard government did much to normalise this culture, which imposes itself on Rudd and the Mournings with Mel an Cholia constituency that forms part of his public. It's no surprise that Rudd reaches into his own version of this culture when appealing to the ordinary Australians that Howard did so much to form.

I think the frisson over Rudd's persona, arising out of his use of arcane colloquialisms, is tied up in these difficulties and reversals. Rudd has the aura of certain traditions about him, but these are aligned with his bureaucratic techniques, and with his suburban Christianity. The sort of Australia that Rudd and his government is building raise questions about the builders and the project manager: the traditions and techniques he's using.

However, looking for the one real Rudd won't reveal anything except our own desire to know what's going on in this conjuncture. And that is both too difficult, and too complex, to know. At present.

Acapella Beach Boys

2009-05-29T18:56:00.002+10:00

Left Melancholy and Whitlam's Ghosts

2009-05-29T17:52:00.006+10:00

Some notes on Walter Benjamin's concept of Left Melancholy from various sources below:

Walter Benjamin, in a short essay published in 1931, spoke of a Left-Wing melancholy, a concept that American political theorist Wendy Brown has more recently taken up. Left melancholy applies to those no longer attached libidinal investments and commitments that ‘we’ make in political utopias and formations, especially to the socialist projects of the c20th that were given their (premature) death notices by Francis Fukuyama, among others, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the Soviet Union, 1989-91. If for Freud “[m]ourning is commonly the reaction to the loss of a beloved person or an abstraction taking the place of the person, such as fatherland, freedom, an ideal and so on, [i]n some people, whom we for this reason suspect of having a pathological disposition, melancholia appears in the place of mourning”(2005. 203). If the loss of an ’object’ is worked-though in mourning a working-through whereby “the libido as a whole sever its bonds with the object” (204),

[m]elancholia is mentally characterized by a profoundly painful depression, a loss of interest in the outside world, the loss of the ability to love, the inhibition of any kind of performance and a reduction in the sense of self, expressed in self-recrimination and self-directed insults, intensifying into the delusory expectation of punishment. We have a better understanding of this when we bear in mind that mourning displays the same traits, apart from one: the disorder of self-esteem is absent. (204)

Benjamin intensified this sense of melancholia in a review of poetry published in 1931, where he aligns melancholy’s response to loss to a cultural form and political formation’s position in Weimar Germany. Of this formation he acerbically asks:

What, then, does the "intellectual elite" discover as it begins to take stock of its feelings? Those feelings themselves? They have long since been remaindered. What is left is the empty spaces where, in dusty heart-shaped trays, the feelings - nature and love, enthusiasm and humanity - once rested. Now the hollow forms are absentmindedly caressed. A know-all irony thinks it has much more in these supposed stereotypes than in the things themselves; it makes a great display of its poverty and turns the yawning emptiness into a celebration. For this is what is new about this objectivity - it takes as much pride in the traces of former spiritual goods as the bourgeois do in their material goods. Never have such comfortable arrangements been made in such an uncomfortable situation.
In short, this left-wing radicalism is precisely the attitude to which there is no longer, in general, any corresponding political action. It is not to the left of this or that tendency, but simply to the left of what is in general possible. For from the beginning all it has in mind is to enjoy itself in a negativistic quiet.
(1999: 424-5)

Rehabilitating and historicising Benjamin's concept Wendy Brown asks:

[I]f we are slipping from liberalism to fascism, and if radical democracy or socialism is nowhere on the political horizon, don't we have to defend liberal democratic institutions and values? Isn't this the lesson of Weimar? I have labored to suggest that this is not the right diagnosis of our predicament: it does not grasp what is at stake in neoliberal governmentality - which is not fascism - nor on what grounds it might be challenged. Indeed, the left defense of the welfare state in the 1980s, which seemed to stem from precisely such an analysis - "if we can't have socialism, at least we should preserve welfare state capitalism" - backfired from just such a misdiagnosis. On the one hand, rather than articulating an emancipatory vision that included the eradication rather than regulation of poverty, the Left appeared aligned with big government, big spending, and misplaced compassion for those construed as failing to give their lives proper entrepreneurial shape. On the other hand, the welfare state was dismantled on the grounds that had almost nothing to do with the terms of liberal democracy and everything to do with neoliberal economic and political rationality. We are not simply in the throes of a eight-wing or conservative positioning within liberal democracy but rather at the threshold of a different political formation, one that conducts and legitimates itself on different grounds from liberal democracy even as it does not immediately divest itself of the name.

This formation produces a twofold challenge for the Left. First, it compels us to consider the implications of losing liberal democracy and especially its implications for our own work by learning what the Left had depended on and demanded from liberal democracy, which aspects of it have formed the basis of our critiques of it, rebellions against it, and identity based on differentiation from it. We may also need to mourn liberal democracy, avowing our ambivalent attachment to it, our need for it, our mix of love and hostility toward it. The aim of this work is framed by the second challenge, that of devising intelligent strategies for challenging the neoliberal political-economic formation now taking shape and an intelligent countervision to this formation. (2005: 56-57)

In order to resituate these fragments on Left melancholy into the period and context of the object of my research here - the affects of the rise of Neoliberal governmentality on literary production and reception during the long Labor decade in Australia - we may first have to dispense with the notion of a single modernity, and with its complementary concept of a global historical vanguard that drags the so-called developing world in its wake. Of course, the idea of a universal, progressive history is what Benjamin, and following him, Brown critique as ‘historicism’:

[Thesis] XVI
A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the “eternal” image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to other to be drained by the whore called “Once upon a time” in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.

XVII
Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialist historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallized into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history – blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
(“Theses on the Philosophy of History” 262-3)

Writing on his historical materialist antidote to the chain of empty homogeneous time(s) in historicism, Brown takes Benjamin to be intending a

staging [of] the present in terms of a constructed historical-political consciousness that itself blasts the present out of the continuum of history. A present figured as fecund rather than as determined on the one hand or as theologically presided over by empty time on the other produces what Benjamin famously calls “ a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. Only a chance, but a revolutionary one: this struggle over what the past could mean in the present is at the same time a struggle for the future. (2005: 13-14.)

The aim of the work of untimely political critique is, for Brown, “to contest settled accounts of what time is, what the times are, and what political tempo and temporality we should hew to in political life” (4). I want to underline this point about unsettling temporalities by drawing attention to the diverse ways in which Left-melancholy and Left-mourning happen and, as a consequence, sharpen the alterity between how Neoliberalism happens in Australian political culture and how it emerges and ascends in North America, South America, the United Kingdom.

Brown's essay is addressed to an American academic left audience, and one reading in the wake of the Neoconservative turn of the Bush administration after the 11 September, 2001 attacks, for whom the civil rights of their liberal democracy were and are more fundamentally under siege than similar rights in Australia in the wake of 9-11 and the bombings in Bali. Also it’s worth pointing out how what Brown in a later essay calls the present dangers of decontainment of the church from borders separating it from the state under neoceonservative political rationalities in North America is a minor phenomenon in Australian civil culture, as Amanda Lohrey has persuasively argued in her 2005 Quarterly Essay “Voting for Jesus: Christianity and Politics in Australia”.

So, while an Australian-based citizen-subject like me can certainly relate to similar articulations in a more locally experienced conjuncture it needs be recognised that American liberalism is different in significant ways to Australian liberalism, not least due to the historic compromises of the Deakinite Settlement and the establishment of the Court of Arbitration, the principle of the (white male) living wage, and their interlocking in a system of Protection (tariff and immigration). In the post-war period this assemblage combines with the commodities boom and Keynesian demand management to form the Labourist-Social-liberal armature. The organised Australian Labour movement was present at the inception of the Federation in 1901 and remained a strong cultural force, especially in nationalist print-cultures, throughout the c20th. Also, as Marian Sawer argues in her The Ethical State? Social Liberalism in Australia : "[i]t was fortuitous that the peak influence of social-liberal philosophy [. . .] coincided with Australia's nation-building period [c1890-c1914]. This conjuncture meant that these ideas were built into the design of the new national institutions and continued to influence later developments through path dependence" (35).

Closer to the present, the Neoliberalising of the economy and polity that the States underwent through Reagan's (1980-88) George Bush I's (1988-1992) presidencies was inflected through the morally and socially conservative cold war mentalities of the Republican party and its bloc in ways that weren't replicated in Australia until the culture wars of the mid-1990s. In some ways tha afterlife of these culture wars lingers like a lost limb for the Left: we still want to win them, even after all the light and heat has been taken out of such battles as were fought over the History of Settlement and refugee policy in the 1990s and early c21st. But under these skirmishes and battles lies a deeper problem of loss, that is knotted up in the Whitlam Government and its fall. The loss of that future - the spectre of progress that shimmers just ahead of us - is, I think, still to be worked through. And perhaps in working through it, something other than that Neoliberal future of a return to and from appreciating investments in one's self, can emerge.

The Labourist-Social-liberal armature

2009-05-27T21:41:00.002+10:00

(Another PhD extract. This one is from the historical sociology section of the PhD. The concept of the armature is counter to the notion of consensus, or social contract, that is contained in Paul Kelly's Australian Settlement. Again, any comment will be welcomed)

The Labourist-Social-liberal armature

Australian Labourism was primarily articulated to Social-liberalism throughout the twentieth century. We can see and feel this articulation through the heuristic of an armature. This armature generated, protected and provided the framework for fashioning the white male productive wage earner as the citizen-subject and thereby primary object of government. It was a complex structure of feeling centred around the concepts of protection and the just wage, the driver for a set of institutional tools – centrally the Arbitration Court – and increasingly those utilities that provided education, health, and housing services through the welfare state, during the post-war period. It brought together a harmonic convergence of political actors who enacted and were emboldened by its forcefield and energy.

The Arbitration Court was the key state institution which both directed energy into the armature and was in turn driven by it. The court was given dynamic institutional weight through the Harvester decision made by the head of the court Social-liberal Henry Higgins who, in 1907, judged that employers should pay wages according to the need of the male employee in so far as such need was measured not on the bases of an employer’s capacity to pay but rather on the basis of what a nuclear family required to live reasonably: the living wage (Sawer 58-9, Castles, 2002: 44). Sawer calls this decision “the defining event of Australian social liberalism” (58).

The establishment of this court and the Harvester decision might sound like distant, minor events in the long Labor decade, but any sense of the depth of change in the long Labor decade must account for the loss that the evacuation of the commitment to this institution wrought. Combined with the Social-liberal practices of Keynesian government which dominated the post-World War II period until 1973-74 and which were articulated also to the institutions of the “New Protection” – tariffs and racially based labour migration limits – the Arbitration Court’s governance of social citizenship through industrial techniques melded Labourist and Social-liberal tenets into a forcefield that established a hegemony surviving numerous challenges until the 1970s when it began to break down.

Higgins’ 1907 Harvester Judgement and its significance for the long Labor decade was seen in the choice of H R. Nicholls for the name of a political society whose main goal was to “promote a debate on industrial relations and to promote the system’s reform”: meaning to expunge the Arbitration Court and thereby this central institution of the Labourist-Social-liberal armature from Australian political culture (Castles, 2002: 43 and Kelly, 1994: 253, 260-2). Nicholls was editor of the Hobart Mercury newspaper and won a contempt of court case against Higgins after labelling Higgins “a political judge” in 1911 (“Nicholls, Henry Richard”, Nicholls cited in Kelly, 1994: 260). A group of businessmen, lawyers, academics, intellectuals and politicians formed this New Right society in 1986; its invitation to join was co-signed by future federal Liberal Party treasurer and deputy leader Peter Costello, and it read in part: “[w]e would probably have to go back to the early days of Federation, and the debates leading up to the passing of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act, to find a precedent for this debate” (cited in Kelly 260). Ironically, Costello held the federal lower house seat named after Nicholls’ enemy, and it was Costello who earned his New Right political reputation as an industrial barrister in the Dollar Sweets case where common law was successfully used to break a union strike in 1985 (Kelly, 1994: 258). This case and others like it weakened the power of the Arbitration Commission and the Unions (255-9).

This movement in the long decade away from the institutions and forms of the armature struck at the core political arrangements that had provided the protective forcefield and framework for much of Australia’s post-federation history. These arrangements have been described by Francis Castles as composing a “wage-earner’s welfare state” (Castles, 1994: 8). Castles’ conception is, for Beilharz, based on “the relative strength of the local labor movement, linked together with a largely economic or material conception of wellbeing, [which] saw the development of political and welfare arrangements which functioned primarily in the interests of men as workers rather than of citizens as such” (Beilharz, 1994: 7).

Castles has four axioms for the Australian wage-earners’ welfare state:

occupational welfare has been more important than state expenditure [;] collective saving for social security provision has been outweighed by private saving for owner-occupied housing [ ;] the preferred model of social services financing has been progressive taxation [; and] women have had a different and lesser status than men. (12-15)

He argues that it survived into the 1980s despite the changes to its central axioms that the social movement for women’s equality, the collapse of the White Australia policy and the diminution of the role of wage regulation all brought (16). Castles notes that while “the Whitlam government flirted with more European notions of social insurance as well as beginning Australia’s disengagement from high levels of tariff protection,” the “post-tax dispersion of male wages from employment as egalitarian as any in the advanced world” remained a central pillar of the wage-earners' welfare state into the mid-1980s (16).

Writing on what he calls “the Labor decade” Castles declares any interpretation of Labor’s impact in the area of Social protection to be “paradoxical” as the government’s “policy activism” promoted managerial and economic rationalist techniques in administration which did little to change the “policy norms” in the area of social protection (17). Castles argues that Hawke-Keating Labor adapted rather than overturned the wage-earners' welfare state, with the reintroduction of universal health care and introduction of the S.G.C (Superannuation Guarantee Charge) being cases of social and industrial citizenship respectively (21). Yet the living standards of average wage earners over the Labor decade – which in a wage-earners' welfare state must be the prime metric – decreased, the use of the Arbitration Court decreased and the financialisation of the Australian economy produced forms of market-based income other than wage-earning ones (22-23). The key change, though, is in the loss of male full-time jobs due both to the steady increase of female labour force participation and to changes in manufacturing brought about by “structural reforms,” striking at the central pillar of the wage-earners' welfare state: protection of the white wage-earning male (22).

While Castles sees the wage-earners' welfare state as being “refurbished,” rather than demolished, his 1994 essay is not interested in the regimes and techniques by which citizen-subjects are themselves refurbished (25). In order to enter this characteristic of the Labourist-Social-liberal armature, and to begin to analyse how citizen-subjects were being reshaped and re-sculpted in the long Labor decade we need to bring the discussion and analysis to this level and consider industrial citizenship.

'Round Midnight

2009-05-23T20:36:00.002+10:00

I've been searching for this clip of Monk for a while. From memory it's also from the biopic Straight no Chaser. Glorious sound and visions: Monk looks and sounds like he's having a ball.

Neoliberalism: ideology & practice

2009-05-22T09:24:00.010+10:00

From the first paragraphs of Leo Panitch and Martin Konings in the latest New Left Reviw (57). "Myths of Neoliberal Deregulation" (Subscriber access)

If a single root cause has predominated in explanations of the current global financial crisis, it is ‘deregulation’. Lack of state oversight of financial markets is widely cited—not only in the opinion columns of the financial press, but by left-wing commentators, too—as having permitted the perilous over-leveraging of financial institutions, based on weakly securitized debt, that has brought about the present debacle. This diagnosis of the cause of the crisis also steers towards a particular solution: if deregulation allowed markets to get out of control, then we must look to re-regulation as the way out. Thus Will Hutton sees the subprime crisis as the result of decades of laissez-faire policies, resulting in excessive financial growth and instability; now that ‘Anglo-Saxon financial capitalism has suffered a fundamental reverse’, he looks forward to the return of Keynesian regulatory policies. Eric Helleiner also hopes that ‘the crisis may be pushing us toward a more decentralized and re-regulated global financial order . . . more compatible with diverse forms of capitalism’ that would ‘sit less comfortably with an entirely liberal set of rules for the movement of capital and financial services’. By contrast, Robin Blackburn’s analysis of the crisis makes the point that ‘financialization was born in a quite heavily regulated world’, and he questions whether ‘more and better regulation’, even while needed, will ‘be enough’. But his account of the crisis mainly emphasizes rampant financial innovation in an unregulated shadow banking system.

For many authors, this focus on ‘deregulation’ in explaining the current crisis is closely associated with a Polanyian understanding of the shifting boundaries between state and market, which would see markets as having become 'disembedded’ from the state. From this perspective, we may now be witnessing the start of a movement whereby the market will be re-embedded in public norms and regulatory institutions. As Robert Wade recently wrote in these pages:

Governmental responses to the crisis suggest that we have entered the second leg of Polanyi’s ‘double movement’, the recurrent pattern in capitalism whereby (to oversimplify) a regime of free markets and increasing commodification generates such suffering and displacement as to prompt attempts to impose closer regulation of markets and de-commodification.

The central problem with this perspective is the tendency to analyse the financial dynamics of the past decades within the terms of that era’s hegemonic self-representation—that is, through the key tenets of neoliberal ideology: the retreat of public institutions from social and economic life, and the return to a pre-Keynesian era of non-intervention. But it was only on the most stylized and superficial reading that the state could be seen to have withdrawn. Neoliberal practices did not entail institutional retreat so much as the expansion and consolidation of the networks of institutional linkages that sustained the imperial power of American finance. Of course it has become commonplace to assert that states and markets should not be seen as really counter-posed; but such claims have tended to remain rather perfunctory, and most research has remained guided by the notion that financial expansion has been accompanied by the attenuation of the state. A concrete account of the many ways in which the us state and financial markets are mutually constituted must necessarily involve an awareness that the practical effects of neoliberal ideologies are not well represented in those discourses themselves. Neoliberalism and financial expansion did not lift the market out of its social context; rather, they embedded financial forms and principles more deeply in the fabric of American society.

This is not to deny that changes in the mode of regulation played an important role in the developments that led to the crisis, but rather to argue that these should be situated within a wider context of financialized class relations. [pages 67-8]