Reading and rhythm

[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)

[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.

Neoliberalism as the cultural logic of finance capitalism: a reading of Anthony Macris's Capital Volume One

Another PhD excerpt from the penultimate section of the third and final chapter. The key sentence in this section is

This play of the embedding and dis-embedding of the symbols and models in a novel, which is often analogized as the play of reflections in a series of mirrors, is again a cultural form for derivatives, the avant-garde of finance capitalism, which take a 'grounded' asset and turns it through a complex set of risk-calculating mirrors, embedding and dis-embedding the financial 'instrument' as its ownership changes hands and its integrity is disaggregated, or fragmented as the "underlying asset can now itself become an abstract relation" (Lee and LiPuma, 2005: 412).

The aim of the 'reading' here is to homologize a literary technique -- the Generative mise en abyme -- with a set of finance capital techniques -- financial derivatives.*

Paul Kelly, as we saw, narrativised finance capital in the form of the evaluative historical future which narrates Australian, and indeed, global modernity in his The End of Certainty. This is a cultural logic of finance capitalism: the finance markets will decide the fate, indeed they are the times, of national bodies like the Australian one. In Elliot Perlman's novel, Three Dollars, the cultural logic of finance capital is repressed, emerging as the ideologeme of epilepsy: the body convulsive and unconscious, its electrical rhythms in a state of arrhythmia. For Fredric Jameson finance capitalism has its own cultural logics which are based on the abstraction of money that neither produces nor consumes but rather circulates in money markets (1997: 265). Published in the same year as Macris's book Jameson's "Culture and Finance Capital" is a suggestive essay using Giovanni Arrighi's spiral, rather than a progressive, model to explain the three stages of capitalism: the implantation, or embedding stage; the productive development stage; and finally the financial speculation stage (248, 251). Jameson seeks to locate homologous cultural forms which match the psychic dimensions required to live in, with, and critique these stages (260-65). Using Simmel's theories on the link between the money form and forms of abstract consciousness in the modernist period, Jameson extrapolates on the notion of capitalism as increasing mental abstraction in the modernist phase by suggesting that in the third stage of financial capitalism money takes flight from the ground on which it is generated, not to be re-invested into machinery or land, but rather to be invested in the deterritorialized cyberspace of financial markets (259-60). Rather than being linked to substances and objects, in finance capitalism money relates abstractly to other monies, producing new forms of abstraction especially those derived from speculation on the volatility of inflation and deflation of money (261). Jameson looks at and historicizes the career of the form of the "image fragment'" including the ways that it has been presented and conceived between the modernist period and our own 'post'-modernist one. The dominant form in this 'period' is the film preview: an advertisement for a future product sufficient in itself (261-62). There are image fragments opaque to analysis and those, like the ones Roland Barthes analysed in Mythologies, that are over-signifying. They use stereotypes, where an excess of meaning serves the connotating second order meanings (264). Jameson writes: "I think we need a concept of renarrativization of these fragments to complement Barthes's diagnosis of connotation at an earlier stage of mass culture" (264). While "in the modern moment the play [of image fragments] remains meaningless" postmodern representations of "total flow" art attempts to renarrativise those cultural fragments, that assert their independent stereotypical significance, into a continuum:

[w]hat happens here is that each former fragment of a narrative, which was once incomprehensible without the narrative context as a whole, has now become capable of emitting a complete narrative message in its own right. It has become autonomous, not in the formal sense I attributed to modernist processes, but rather in its newly acquired capacity to soak up content and to project it in a kind of instant reflex - whence the vanishing away of affect in the postmodern. The situation of contingency or meaninglessness, of alienation, has been superseded by this cultural renarrativization of the broken prices of the image world. (264)

Modernist abstraction is money itself in a situation of capital accumulation. Money abstract and empty - looking sideways toward what it can hitch a ride to: "it is thus incomplete like the modernist images I have been evoking; it directs attention elsewhere, beyond itself, towards what is supposed to complete (and also abolish) it [ - ] it knows a semiautonomy" (264). Macris's innovation is to have found a way to renarrativise, or to make continuous up to a point, image-fragments without merely presenting a string of over-signifying stereotypes. Instead, in Capital, volume one's London Underground track we read not of Grunge bodies but of something like a Grunge cavern within which used commodities, other life-forms and organic matter too small and fast to qualify for mercenary attention are narrativised into a slow motion singular camera-tracking mimesis. These London Underground subjects and objects, a pregnant mouse, a Lucozade bottle, the Australian tourist, are also temporalities thus making a continuity out of different times.

Yet Macris is not content to leave his depiction of the increasing penetration of market forces at renarrativizing fragments back into their material situations. He also introduces a literary 'machine' into his novel in the form of Generative mises en abyme. In its more basic forms the mise en abyme can be defined as employing

relatively simple, near-mechanical procedures of miniaturisation, embedding, and mirroring, later progressing to more complex modes of reflection across multiple narrative levels, and only reaching the truly generative stage once the mirrors proliferate and distort, converting the text into a field of reflections governed by modalities that go beyond referential and mimetic functions. (Macris, 2003: 51-2)

This play of the embedding and dis-embedding of the symbols and models in a novel, which is often analogized as the play of reflections in a series of mirrors, is again a cultural form for derivatives, the avant-garde of finance capitalism, which take a 'grounded' asset and turn it through a complex set of risk-calculating mirrors, embedding and dis-embedding the financial 'instrument' as its ownership changes hands and its integrity is disaggregated, or fragmented as the "underlying asset can now itself become an abstract relation" (Lee and LiPuma, 2005: 412). Indeed, the homologous descriptions below of the culture of financial derivative circulation and that of Macris's Generative mise en abyme are worth noting: "[o]nce speculative capital devoted to financial derivatives becomes self-reflexive and begins to feed on itself, it develops a direction dynamic towards an autonomous and self-expanding form" (412). While Macris writes in similar terms:

By multiplying the actual number of mises en abyme, and making each of them of the same importance, Simon has begun to solve the problem of having an originary text that is mirrored at all: the first term has been abolished, and there is now only an infinite series of reflections amongst multiple mirrors, all of which 'produce' one another. (2003: 53)

My argument here is that the ensemble of literary forms Macris produces with his novel Capital, volume one is on the one hand aimed at undoing a naturalisation of Neoliberal Bildung, in the novel's thread of biographical episodes, and on the other a homology of the operations of the leading instrument of finance capitalism in the form of the Generative mise en abyme. These two threads, or tracks, in being presented alternately ask to be read into and against each other. Thus the episodes of failed Neoliberal Bildung are traversed by image-fragments from the other thread, such as the accordion that appears on page 180as the young boy travels toward Brisbane, while another accordion appears in the London Underground thread (199-201). In the young boy's eyes the accordion is a folk instrument, while in the tunnel it becomes apparent that the accordion is being used to attract the attention of the Underground commuters to a mini-market where an old David Bowie cassette is for sale. The novel appears to ask: what is the meaning and value of an accordion, and is it even possible to fix a stable meaning and value onto such an instrument?

------------------------------------------------------------------
Jameson, Fredric. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry 24.1 (Autumn, 1997): 246-65.

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

Lee, Benjamin and Edward LiPuma. “Financial Derivatives and the Rise of Circulation.” Economy and Society 34.3 (August 2005): 404-27.

Macris, Anthony. “Claude Simon and the Emergence of the Generative mise en abyme.” AULMA 99 (2003): 50-66.

___, Capital, Volume One. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1997.

Perlman, Elliot. Three Dollars. Sydney: Picador, 1998.

In the transnational underground: writing neoliberalism in Three Dollars and Capital volume one [ASAL remix]

[Below is a conference paper presented at the 2008 ASAL Conference: Australian Literature in a Global World. It's a re-mix of parts of previous drafts with some newer riffs and lines of argument added. Any comments would be appreciated.]

In a chapter from the 2002 Collection Departures: How Australia Re-invents Itself, Paul Gillen writes 'The word 'Globalisation' is everywhere these days: in books and journal articles, the speeches of pundits and politicians, news items and everyday conversations.' Gillen suggests 'it may be useful to think of it as an example of what Richard Dawkins calls a meme . . . a semantic entity that successfully reproduces itself.'

What Gillen then does in this chapter titled "Globalism and its discontents" is to analyse and compare two modes of writing, from an Australian perspective, about globalisation. On the one hand he works through a reading of John Wiseman's Global Nation? Australia and the Politics of Globalization and McKenzie Wark's Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace: the Light on the Hill in a Postmodern World and finds that there is a positive and optimistic engagement with the potential of transnational civic structures and technological and cosmopolitan cultural networks in these works published in the years 1998-1999. On the other hand Gillen's reading of three Australian novels of the same period have 'an entirely different ambience.' The novels Gillen selects here are Bernard Cohen's Snowdome, Elliot Perlman's Three Dollars and Anthony Macris's Capital, Volume One and he finds '[t]he novelists sound like people who have just lost their jobs. They are sardonic, angry and upset. They are not interested in solutions. They want to grumble, make trouble and lash out.'

I want to add to Gillen's readings by approaching Three Dollars and Capital, Volume One as responses to neoliberalism rather than globalization. And I want to place the ideas of a different non-fictional 1998 text alongside these novels - Mitchell Dean and Barry Hindess's Governing Australia: Studies in Contemporary Rationalities of Government - in order to offer the sort of reading enabled by substituting globalisation as a heuristic with Foucault's notion of neoliberalism as a form of governmentality and political rationality.

***

There is a moment near the end of Elliot Perlman's popular novelistic critique of economic rationalism - Three Dollars - when the narrator Eddie Harnovey launches into a philosophical reflection on the proper conduct of a free will. This working through of an ethics occurs in the novel after Eddie has lost his public service job, having refused to water down his environmental impact report which is heavily critical of plans for an industrial development. Not only has Eddie lost his formerly secure job with a Government Department of Environment, but his young daughter has recently started to have epileptic seizures, and his wife's academic career and PhD thesis on the death of Keynesian political economy, have been overwhelmed by her casualisation at the university where she tutors and the return of depression.
While waiting for the suburban train that will take him home Eddie sits above the underground train station [Melbourne's inner-city Flagstaff Station], unemployed for the first time since leaving university and just having had an absurd counselling session with a government psychologist whose avant-garde managerialism Eddie parries with argument and sardonic replies. Fighting back self-pity he reflects on the uses of free will:

It was growing increasingly overcast. As I saw it, the only real use we could have for free will as a concept was in an ethical or moral sense. Free will, although we really mean free action, is the construct we have to use to assess whether or not an action is an appropriate candidate for an ethical judgement. . . [S]o long as an individual feels free from other people's coercion in his or her choice to do or not to do something, it does not matter that innumerable previous and present events have determined which choice the individual ultimately makes. For among the causal events will be past ethical judgements and the present expectation of future ones. Such an understanding of free will makes it possible for us to describe people's behavior as moral or immoral. Without it everyone is amoral.
I wondered how Kant and Hume and the others did this stuff without the benefit of a railway station.

It's not the logic of the argument that I find interesting or persuasive but the way by which Eddie's situation - unemployed and waiting for the train to take him home - acts on the argument. In anthropologist Mark Auge's terms Eddie's thinking on ethical conduct occurs on the precipice of a non-place: a place that is not a home or destination; often a place of commerce like a shopping mall, or a hub for transport like an airport. But more than just a non-place there is a temporal dimension to the moments at the train station which range from waiting to leaving, if the timing is right, to being too late if the timing is wrong. Eddie in Three Dollars is waiting for the next train to take him home.
Eddie's precarious state is framed by the orderly expectation of the next train arriving to take him home. His ethical thinking, like the train that will come, has a destination. Eddie's active citizenship, his social liberalism, generates its own good timing. In other words Eddie's acts of citizenship throughout the novel - whistleblowing, helping a homeless man to find the owner of a lost dog, helping a woman with a headache - are on track to arrive back to him: all good deeds are recognised in the cosmic calculus of this novel's portrayal of social liberal citizenship. And this is precisely the narrative logic of the novel when Eddie's free-falling descent into pauperdom is caught by Nick at the homeless shelter who teaches Eddie the tricks of surviving on the street: returning Eddie's prior stranger-sociability.
In Three Dollars time at the edge of the non-place of the train station is for the abstract logic of an ethics that shares much with the logic of capitalist commodity exchange: investment in strangers will ultimately pay dividends. The train will come.

Three Dollars has had a busy public life, helped by the 2004 film adaptation and its subsequent harsh reception by News Limited commentators and by prominent neoconservative intellectual Keith Windschuttle. The chief complaint of these reviewers was the unrealistic speed of Eddie's fall from middle-class security. Regardless of the main intent of these reviews, which targetted the movie as an anachronistic attack on what they saw as the settled question of economic rationalism, the melodramatic fall of Eddie, once unemployed, disfigures and spoils what is up to that point an interesting, funny and complex narrativisation of the ascendance of neoliberal governmentality.
In an essay accompanying the screenplay to the movie - "The Human Cost of Economic Rationalism" - Perlman writes:

What can perhaps be regarded as the fundamental axiom of economic rationalism holds that the workings of the completely free market, that is, one unimpeded by government intervention or regulation, will deliver the best possible social outcomes, that is to say, maximum material benefits and the optimal distribution of these benefits.
If this return to the economic jungle is the abrogation of the social contract upon which civilised society is predicated, then so much the worse for social contract.

Perlman in both this essay and in his debut novel does make some valid even persuasive points. Indeed, whether you talk of a Foucauldian neoliberalism or economic rationalism there is certainly the effects of privatisation of previously state administered utilities and concerns, and there has certainly been a loosening of the regulatory controls in key sectors, most notably in the finance sector following the clean float of the exchange rate and the loosening of foreign bank controls. However, it would be mistaken to think that because one mode of regulation and governance has been removed that there is therefore no regulation or governance; or that the state can’t regulate in the interests of multi-national corporations. Rather than there being no regulation a state regulating in the interests of capital is different to one in which the state is powerless. So, I think that while Perlman is on the right track in criticizing the direction of the relatively recent shifts in government, I think he has mis-diagnosed changes in regulatory regimes for the absence of regulation. And here is where the Foucauldian concept of governmentality starts to explain what Perlman misses.

Writing more recently about the utility of Foucualt's concept of governmentality, Mitchell Dean argues that while it has been used to give thick descriptions and analyses of 'the rationalities, techniques, goals and identities formed in the practices that seek to guide the conduct of oneself or others', there is a also a critical side to such analyses when they can detail the disjunction between the 'programmes of government' and 'the domain of effects.'
So, if some of the programmes of neoliberal governmentality aim at forming the self as flexible, accountable, entrepreneurial or efficient, then rather than the portrayal of economic rationalism as a free-market ideology that is able to be resisted because outside the self - as in Three Dollars - in Tony Macris's Capital, Volume One the 'domain of effects' is continually presented in a very different use of a train station and through beginning, rather than ending, the novel with an unemployed figure: 'Ever since he was unexpectedly laid off from work three weeks ago ('The recession, I'm afraid,' were the only words of explanation), his days have been spent keeping his spirits up by arranging outings - preferably those that are either cheap or free.' [18]
And it is towards one of these outings that that the novel begins,with a young Australian traveller on a inner-London bound train recounting the delays that have made him late to meet a friend who he will go on to see a movie with. This initial everyday suspense – will he make the connection – is heightened by not knowing what the time is. So a low-level anxiety pervades the opening of the novel and this underscores the minutely detailed descriptions of the advertising in train’s interior and the other passenger’s faces. In Bakhtin’s terms the novel opens with the chronotope of a modern metropolitan journey structuring its timespace, but the arrival at the train station and finally discovering how late the young Australian actually is ends this chronotope – the journey is over. So, what happens next?

It’s at this point that the narrative splits – the next chapter is a first person episode in the life of a young suburban Brisbane boy walking to school: this is start of a journey as well with the young boy headed along a white concrete footpath which he imagines as having the shape and form evoked by 1970s pop songs and the Superman movie. On the footpath he spins a 2 cent coin, the Queen and the frill-necked lizard start to come to life, as does the coin itself: its 'spinning shadow precedes it, acid grey swarming with amber particles over the hot white concrete'[15].
This split narrative – alternating chapters between the London Underground narrative which is continuous and occurs over a period of about half an hour, and the first-person negative epiphanies of the young Brisbane boy at various moments in his life: from the pre-pubescent schoolboy to working as a teacher in London – is a similar technique to the one Frank Moorhouse named discontinuous narrative. The effect here is to rupture a developmental temporality, especially one of organic growth. The first-person episodes are ones of disillusion, humiliation, loss and even violence where commodity and market culture breaks up the identity and integrity of the narrator and separates him from others. The global market, in cultural products especially, is thematised in these first-person chapters as the means by which the citizen-subject has their desires formed. The figure of David Bowie is prominent in both narrative threads as a commodity-producing industry that deposits desires in the narrator that become stockpiled and useless over time:

I knock my forehead against the toilet door; I want to cry. There must be some way of getting all this Bowie junk out of my head. I feel as if I had been poisoned, years of afternoons in front of the record player unwitting sessions of exposure to low-level radiation, my brain drip fed with sterile data, passive data that lies there inert, blocking the flow. I feel like a cat taught how to use a can opener, given an unlimited supply of Whiskas and left to eat itself to death. How did all that brain junk get in there in the first place? I put it there. Pocket money from my parents, Christmas money from my relatives, TEAS cheques from the Department of Finance, dole cheques from the DSS pay cheques from Pancakes, all spent on records. But it’s not only my fault. RCA is to blame. Tony Defreak is to blame. David is to blame. (150)

Franco Moretti in his chapter on Joyce’s Ulysses in Modern Epic argues that in Ulysses the use of multiple voices – or polyphony – is deanthropomorphised and the voices are institutional ones. Macris takes this dehumanist narrating technique further in the London Underground where the labels on chip packets and sports drinks start to generate textuality and speak directly to us. The London Underground becomes a space in which the writing moves with the focus and rhythm of a range of modern cameras: sometimes it slows the frames down to lingering like a still image, and at other points the rushed mass-movement of train commuters in the tunnels reads like a time-lapse sequence. The camera-eye also zooms in and out: at one point honing in on a piece of grit caught in a commuter’s eye, at one point tracking the slow-motion sequence of a lucozade bottle performing an acrobatic tumble.

In his 2007 essay '"The Strangest of Station Names": Changing Trains with Kracauer and Benjamin,' Barry Langford writes: 'the railway station is a site of magical departures, and not despite but precisely by virtue of its irrevocable instantiation of the everyday.' And this everyday-ness is, for Langford, one of the 'twin technological marvels and avatars [in affinity with cinema] of urban modernity, shrinking and rearranging the cultural experience of space and time, running . . . on parallel tracks [and constituting one of the key] commonplaces of the cultural history of modernism' (emphasis added). As a commonplace - a rhetorical figure - the train station comes with a cultural history that is conjured into the zone of a text's reading: a figure of time-space compression. Time-space compression - a concept from the Marxist geographer David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity - is the experience of urban modernity as the capitalist system makes its way out of crises of accumulation by speeding up and shrinking time-space. Harvey's basic argument is that the cultural experience of post modernity is largely determined by a shift in the regime of capitalist accumulation prompted by the breakdown of the solid regimes of the post World War II Keynesian Bretton-Woods system. From solid to flexible regimes. This moment in the early 1970s is also the moment in which the Chicago School economists begin to ascend over the Keynesians: the moment in which neoliberalism finds its purchase in response to the crises of consumer capitalism and its Fordist-Keynesian-Welfare State government.
The question that Three Dollars ultimately poses is how do 'we' get out of or surmount the neoliberal system, neoliberal governmentality? But first the novel needs to prefigure the living hell of neoliberalism, slowly building toward a experiential crisis that reflects the social-political one moving with the force of a tidal wave into University and Government Public service areas. And this brings us back to Langford's train station: that commonplace figure 'shrinking and rearranging the cultural experience of space and time.' Three Dollars invoke this figure of the underground rail station only to position the narrator largely on the mouth of the underground, having Eddie go down the escalator a little, only to seek a way quickly out: ultimately with the job offer of a position in human resources in a large bank left ambiguously dangling at the novel’s end.
Had Eddie descended into the train station underground the quotidian experience of neoliberal governmentality's shrinking and rearranging of time-space might have been offered to the reader. But Eddie only dips his toe into the underground. The figure of the train station forms at the edge of the [political] unconscious of Three Dollars.


Whereas in Capital, Volume One around half an hour spent moving through a few tunnels and platforms plunges the reader into a decompressed time-space where the self is radically re-formed, like the economy under Paul Keating, with the unemployed Australian tourist trapped in the underground, '[H]is whole head seems to be at the mercy of the wind that has finally succeeded in penetrating his ears, nose, mouth, and is free to roar through the network of tunnels and passageways under his face. He tries to step forward, but the wind is now so strong that it is nearly impossible.' [226]