the end(s) of certainty

[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.

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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.

On the Historical Sociology of Literary Form I

*More PhD revision introduction material. This is part of the methodology section. Any comments will be appreciated*

Franco Moretti's Rhetoric of Fiction

[F]ormal patterns are what literature uses in order to master historical reality, and to reshape its materials in the chosen ideological key: if form is disregarded, not only do we lose the complexity (and therefore the interest) of the whole process – we miss the strictly political significance too. (Moretti, 2000a: xiii)

In key essays from the collection Signs Taken for Wonders (2005), in his analysis of the Bildungsroman in European Culture in The Way of the World (2000a), in Modern Epic (1996), and even through his more recent “quantitative turn” in Graphs, Maps, Trees (2007a), literary historian Franco Moretti has consistently performed his literary studies from a Marxist-based theory of the historical sociology of literary form.

For Moretti literature is neither fully autonomous from the society out of which it emerges and into which it circulates, nor is it determined by the mode of production in the last instance, as is claimed in the literary theories that base their metaphysics on the Althusserian problematic (Jameson 2003: 25-6). Literature, instead, works through a morphological bricolage that brings various symbolic forms, conventions of narrative, together in a single text (2000a xii, 5). These forms, or narrative morphemes, are generated out of “rhetorical innovations, which are the result of chance” (1996: 6). And yet the forces impelling which of these innovations are selected and how they are combined to enact the morphological bricolage of the individual literary text is a matter of “social selection” (6). These forces of selection point to “the idea that literature follows great social changes – that it always ‘comes after’. [Where] [t]o come after, however, does not mean to repeat (‘reflect’) what already exists, but the exact opposite: to resolve the problems set by history” (6).

In Moretti’s literary practise the analysis of the literary text’s form is to be placed into a dialectic with a sociological analysis that is mediated, and delimited, by the shared historical milieu of text and society (6). To invoke Said’s terms, acts of criticism move between text and its affiliations to the “world” by way of what he calls “genuine historical research” (Said 1991: 175). Like Said, Moretti aims his literary practise at understanding and explaining how and why literary texts operate on, with and even against “power relations” (6). He argues that a literary text’s“[r]hetorical ‘daring’ testifies to a will that wants to overturn the power relations of the symbolic order [while] ‘[c]ommonplaces’ and semantic inertia, for their part, are the potential result of that daring no less than its opposite” (2005 8).

For Moretti, “literary discourse is entirely contained within the rhetorical domain” as “the substantial function of literature is to secure consent. To make individuals feel ‘at ease’ in the world they happen to live in, to reconcile them in a pleasant and imperceptible way to its prevailing cultural norms” (2005 4, 27). But what literature, in most but not all of its instances, is seeking to secure consent for, and what those cultural norms are, requires “[k]nowledge of the socio-historical context of a literary work or genre” (8). This historically specific sociological knowledge

is not [. . .] an ‘extra’ to be kept in the margins of rhetorical analysis. In general, whether one is aware of it or not, such knowledge furnishes the starting point for interpretation itself, providing it with those initial hypothesis [sic] without which rhetorical mechanisms would be hard to understand, or would tell us very little indeed. (2005: 8)

Moretti has tended to focus his literary history around moments of great transformation and crisis in Western European history. His study of the Bildungsroman situates its emergence

[a]t the turn of the eighteenth century [when] much more than just a rethinking of youth was at stake. Virtually without notice, in the dreams and nightmares of the so-called ‘double-revolution’, Europe plunges into modernity, but without possessing a culture of modernity. If youth, therefore, achieves its symbolic centrality, and the ‘great narrative’ of the Bildungsroman comes into being, this is because Europe has to attach a meaning, not so much to youth, as to modernity. (Moretti, 2000a: 5)

Similarly, his analysis of Joyce’s Ulysses reads its historical sociology as being no less than “the crisis of liberal capitalism” at “the end of the liberal century” – the nineteenth century (2005: 201, 189). While these judgements are made within powerfully persuasive essays of literary study, there is in Moretti’s palpable enthusiasm a tendency to fall for, in what he himself has warned is, the “’Zeitgeist fallacy’” where,

[a] satisfactory level of rhetorical [literary formal] analysis has been reached. The configuration obtained seems to refer unambiguously to a particular hierarchy of values. So one performs the conclusive welding-together of rhetoric and social history. Let us suppose that up until now the argument has been flawless. It is precisely at this point that one makes a mistake. One succumbs to the allure of the sweeping generalization[:] the idea – single, solitary, resplendent – in which a whole epoch is supposedly summed up. (2005: 24-25)

Moretti’s warnings aside, what is singularly productive about his practises of literary history is how he brings the concept of symbolic form to the forefront of his literary history and situates it on the boundary between the literary text and the historically understood operations of that society which it shares. His studies of the Bildungsroman, while at times bordering on the dangerously historicist in that the conception of modernity he uses positions Western European modernity as the avant garde of human development, provide an exemplary application of the “the idea [. . .] that literary genres are problem-solving devices, which address a contradiction in their environment, offering an imaginary resolution by means of their formal organization” (2006: 73). His analysis of the classical Bildungsroman as a genre structured by youth as a symbolic form which works to make sense of Western Europe’s “dreams and nightmares of the so-called ‘double-revolution’ [through which it] plunges into modernity, but without possessing a culture of modernity” provides a model for analysing the symbolic form of youth as a highly-charged trope during the period of Grunge fiction’s production and reception: the 1980s and 1990s (2000a: 5).

Moretti argues that the signifier – youth – comes to carry a new conception in the late eighteenth century, “a symbolic shift” in which being young is no longer defined by not being an adult, but comes instead to symbolise a period of open uncertainty; of “exploration”, “mobility” and “perennially dissatisfied and restless” “interiority” (4). Youth is chosen to symbolise the protean nature of the industrial and political revolutions of the eighteenth century “because of its ability to accentuate modernity’s ‘essence’, the sign of a world that seeks its meaning in the future rather than in the past” (5). As Moretti argues, however, youth can become this central symbolic form for Western European modernity because it also ends (5-6) The protean, revolutionary nature of capitalist modernity that Marx writes of as a “[c]onstant revolutionizing, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation [. . .] All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into the air” finds in the symbolic form of youth a symbolic end, as youth itself ends and comes of age with the onset of adulthood (Marx cited in Berman 95).

This symbolic form of youth structures the plot and narration of the Bildungsroman genre through which ideological content is presented and naturalised. One of Moretti’s most striking claims is that the political work that the Bildungsroman performs is not to embed “intolerant, normative, monologic” ideologies into a culture so much as to provide a symbolic form that allows the bourgeoisie to think a contradiction that, rather than being solved, must be lived with “and even transform[ed] into a tool for survival” (2000a: 10). The Bildungsroman, on this reading, is a form that helps the modern subject to live with that “interiorization of contradiction” that, for Moretti, marks “modern socialization” (10).

Moretti’s analysis of the morphology of the Bildungsroman enables us to begin to extricate the complex political and social affects and ideas that ‘youth’ carried as a symbolic form in Australian political culture in the 1990s. As the discussion in the “Reappraising Grunge fiction” section above sought to make clear, the trope of youth has been at the centre of not only the critical reception of Grunge fiction, but has also acted out a primary part in the generationalism that structured significant sections of the culture war debates in Australia in the mid-1990s. The symbolic form of youth as a period of experimentation, rebellion, innocence and irresponsibility carries the implication that such conduct will settle into patterns of adult behaviour, and that this maturation take shape on the foundation of a coming-of-age, or Bildungs – a formation of the autonomous and socialized self. In Grunge fiction, however, this formation fails. And its failure is less a matter of authorial immaturity than a generic convention. The question that Moretti’s methods of historical sociology of literary form raises in the case of Grunge fiction is how do what type of modernity do we read these failed Bildungs with and against?

*

While Moretti’s method of an historical sociology of literary form provides the primary literary model for the readings of literary texts that are performed in chapters two, three and four his historical sociology comes close to universalising a conception of Western European modernity that is historicist, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s pejorative sense of the term, and that flattens out geographic and localised specificities (2000: 6-16). In order to borrow the model of Morretti’s methods without its grand periodising and Eurocentric assumptions, chapter one will present a compressed and localised temporal and spatial grid out of which an historical sociology that affiliates with Grunge fiction will be presented. Before coming to this historical sociology, key aspects of Fredric Jameson’s methods of literary criticism will be considered as these are also the bases on which the readings will be conducted in the later chapters.

Notes. Barry Hindess on Governmentalities

Some notes from
Barry Hindess. Discourses of power: from Hobbes to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

Foucault maintains that . . . there is a certain continuity between the government of oneself, the government of a household [oeconomy] 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. [105]

[W]hat matters in the study of governmental power [from the perspective of government as the regulation of conduct] is not so much the state itself, considered as a more or less unified set of instrumentalities, but rather the broader strategies of government within which the instrumentalities of the state are incorporated and deployed. [109]

For Hindess there is also another more specific and precise form of Foucault's use of the term government: "'the particular form of governing which can be applied to the state as a whole.'" [Foucault cite. 109]

Government, in this specific sense, is not to be confused with the rule of the prince, feudal magnate or emperor, or even with the collective rule over themselves that is often said to have been excercised by citizens of the independent Greek communities and of the Roman republic. [109]

The government is based on intrinsic rational principles- reason of state - and has as its main object population. Population has 'its own regularities, its own rate of deaths and diseases, its cycles of scarcity, etc' [and it emerged due to an understanding of it] as characterized by its own aggregate phenomena, irreducible to those of the families contained within it. [Foucault cite. 111]

Population "comes to appear as above all else as the ultimate end of government. In constrast to sovereignty, government has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.; and the means that the government uses to attain those ends are themselves all in some sense immanent to the population. [Foucault cite. 111-2]

3 'approaches to the general problem of government: discipline, pastoral power, liberalism.' [112]

3 rationalities of government.

1. Discipline
'A productive power par excellence: it aims not only to constrain those over whom it is exercised, but also to enhance and make use of their capacities.'
[113]

The idea that the conduct of others (and of oneself) can be subjected to instrumental control is clearly predicated on an orientation which Heidegger describes as 'the essence of technology'. This orientation treats the world as consisting essentially of forces that can be harnessed, at least in principle, to human purposes. Human individuals and human aggregates, too, will thus be seen, like all other phenomena, as if they were a standing reserve of energy to be put to use. But before this can happen, what it is that will be used in this way - what Heidegger refers to as 'a calculable coherence of forces' - must first be defined and identified. For this reason, Foucault insists that the expansion of discipline in this period goes hand-in-hand with the invention of the humanist subject; that is, of the conception of the human individual as endowned with a soul, consciousness, guilt, remorse, and other features of an interiority that can be worked on by other agents. This humanist subject came to be seen as the locus of usable energy and, therefore, as the focus of instrumental control: the focus, in other words, of discipline. [115]

Such discipline requires techniques of knowledge about and concerning the human subject. Thus discipline is knowledge/power. Techniques of disciplinary power include: surveillance, regimentation, classification. [118]

2. Pastoral Power (Shepherd-flock game): police, confession, guidance and self-examination

a more continuous and more intimate form of government than consensual ones: "to promote the well-being of its [a government's] subjects by means of detailed and comprehensive regulation of their behaviour. [. . . ] Pastoral power . . . is concerned more with the welfare of its subjects than with their liberty." [118]

Three facets of pastoral power: i. "Shepherd governs a flock and each of its member, rather than a territory and each of its inhabitants. [ . . . ii] the flock exists in and through the activity of the shepherd: remove the shepherd and the flock is likely to collapse into a mass of dispersed individuals. [ . . . iii] the shepherd cares for the flock both individually and collectively, attending to the needs of its members." [119]

Hindess summarizes Foucault's reach into older meanings of 'police': It referred both to an area of government administration - covering everything apart from justice, finance, the army and diplomacy - and to the objectives of that administration. In effect, police was responsible for the comprehensive regulation of social life in the interests and development of society and the improvement of individuals, and it was expected to pursue these objectives in the most rational fashion . . ."a good national 'police' was not to be achieved solely by politicians or by a professional corp of 'police', but by publicly concerned, philanthropically minded citizens." [Andrews cite. 120-121]

"The theory of police exemplifies the comprehensive responsibility for the welfare of the flock and each of its members that is central to Foucault's account of the 'pastoral' rationality of government." [121]

The early [Christian] church developed models of pastoral power which were later adapted by 17c 'Confessional' states in Europe.

"[T]he 'pastoral' ise of confession, self-examination and guidance continue to be found today, not only in Christian churches and sects, but also in the work of a variety of specialized state agencies and private charitable and philanthropic organizations, in may kinds of counselling, therapy and techniques of personality modification . . . In such cases, the training of individuals in the exercise of self-government serves as an instrument of the government of their conduct. . . . [T]he 'pastoral' use of confession, self-exmaination and guidance of conduct should be seen as instruments of government that work in part through the formation of individuals who can normally be relied upon to impose an appropriate rule on their own behaviour.[122-3]

3. Liberty and the Liberal Rationality of Government

From one, orthodox, perspective "[t]he fundamental problem of liberal government . . . is to build the appropriate restraints into a system of government that nevertheless remains sufficiently powerful to secure the liberty of its subjects." [124]

Foucault's very different perspective on Liberal rationality begins from his tenets that wherever power is freedom (to some extent) is always already there, and that governmental power works through the behaviour [conduct] of free persons. For Foucault the fundamental rationality of Liberal government is that it should promote the freedom of its subjects rather than see such freedoms as threats to its governing. Thus Liberal government seeks to secure what it considers as natural conditions for the generation of this freedom; security of markets-economy, population growth. At the heart of liberalism, in this view, is an interventionist state. [124-5]

Two Liberal critiques of police:
I. "the comprehensiveness of police attempts at regulation - the fact that they are aimed at the entire population - must be rejected on the grounds that the primary objective of the state should be the defence of individual liberty not the pursuit of happiness." [126]

II. Foucault's analysis of liberal critique of police focuses through something similar to Adam Smith's critique in which police=regulation=dependency=conditions for degeneration. cf "nanny state" critiques in which welfare is seen to blunt self-reliance, independence and moral improvement. Here the market comes shining through as that self-regulating and 'natural' realm, or sphere, in which these attributes can best be generated in a condition which is 'state-free'.

So, "[i]n Foucault's terms, then, the liberal rationality of government regards the liberty of its subjects as an indispensable element of government itself." [129]

Governing through a freedom that is regulated indirectly: through the formation of selves that is the aim of education. Or the formation of selves that occurs through enculturation, or what in German is called Bildung: often the first term in the literary genre class the Bildungsroman, or the formation or coming-of-age novel.

One research problem in my thesis is this: if neo-liberalism, a newer form of governmental rationality best summed up in the texts of the Chicago School political-economic intellectual Milton Friedman, becomes ascendant over the long Labor decade then how does its regulation through formation of selves appear in Australian literary fiction and in Australian Labor party discourse? In other words, is there an Australian inflection to the Bildungs of neoliberalism? Some previous thoughts here.