I think Peter Beilharz identifies something crucial [. . .] when he argues that we are living through the decline of the model of “industrial citizenship” that laborism [sic] put in place in the 1950s. What we need now, he says, is a reinvention of citizenship in the context of a “republicanism beyond laborism.” But if this is easier said than done, more readily defined than desired, part of the problem may be that in Australia what Kobena Mercer calls the “not so ‘new’” social movements, with their “‘race, class, gender’ mantra,” have not only developed in conflict with laborism but also created positive programs by a practical engagement with it. (Morris, 1998: 202)
The Australian Labourist-Social-Liberal consensus that was discarded in the long Labor decade was the central discursive assemblage in the post-war period until the advent of stagflation in 1973-74. The inflationary consequences of the United States’s financing of the Vietnam War and subsequent collapse of the fixed exchange rate system that had survived since the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement were both markers of and causes for the shift in the global political economy that David Harvey has characterised as turning from a regime of fixed to one of flexible capital accumulation (1989: 137, 140-2). The social and discursive bloc, which formed in and through the Labourist-Social-Liberal consensus elevated the industrial citizen as its key subject-citizen above other forms, and forms of social citizenship were placed in a subsidiary relationship to the white male wage-earner whose welfare was tied to the Keynesian utopia of full-employment and the living ‘family’ wage (Castles, 2002: 48-49). This consensus composed, as Morris argues, a forcefield against which other social and intellectual movements were able to work alongside and, importantly, in contest with. Thus the collapse of this consensus had consequences that spread out into Australian society and that are still felt.
The consequences and aftermath of the displacement of industrial citizenship, as a form of governmentality, are topics that few non-fiction writers of the long Labor decade have given much attention to. This is understandable as industrial citizenship in Australia privileged the productive, white, male wage earner and thereby failed to recognise other forms of citizen-subjectivity as differently but equally entitled to make claims on the state. With its foregrounding and thematising of structures of feeling and use of symbolic forms, the dirty realism of those novels of Australian Grunge fiction which present the failed formations of unemployed young men, digs into the aftermath of the collapse of this consensus by focussing on the moments at which a residual industrial citizenship vapourizes and those traditional, Labourist practices of Australian male self-formation along with practices of self not deemed flexible, mobile, healthy of enterprising enough are presented as the discarded by-products of the new Neoliberal techniques of government.
In Tsiolkas’s Loaded an assemblage of identity forms and investments in political projects focused through the narrator-hero, Ari Voulis, do not so much fail to reconcile each to each, spatially harmonize, as fail to form a temporal harmony, or eurhythmia. Loaded is a post-industrial citizenship novel: a novel that presents multiple citizen-subjects as forms of governmentality all vying within and through Ari without the baseline forms of governmentality that the Labourist-Social-Liberal consensus underwrote and directed through industrial citizenship. As Morris implies, the collapse of the centrality of the industrial citizen has not been replaced by more socially expansive forms, such as forms of identity politics that base their claims and forms around sex, race and gender, but rather has vacated the forcefield of governmentalities to market-based forms. Thus Johnson observes that
the ALP’s natural constituency moved from being the white, blue collar male industrial worker, co-operating with white, male employees in manufacturing industry, to being a member of any class, sex, sexuality, race or ethnicity working in cutting-edge manufacturing, a new information economy, or in the service industries, and all working together to make Australia internationally competitive. (2000: 30)
She goes on to argue that Keating “tended to privilege social issues that were compatible with his construction of economic issues and not recognise others. Furthermore, he was trying to reshape constructions of the social in ways that fitted his particular economic vision” (31). Keating’s privileging of certain social issues was not merely an act of recognising that the forces of post-industrialism had changed the Australian social landscape, so much as it was a technique and rationality of government which sought to
actively shape citizen diversities in ways that were aligned with a particular economic project and particular set of government policies. What [Keating] claimed to be a story about diversity was really a story about another form of narrative closure. (34)
The tear of governmentality that we saw in Lohrey’s and Moorhouse’s works of mourning is depicted in Loaded through a series of urban and inner-urban tableaux in which Ari’s increasingly drug-fuelled practices of self strive for a fullness of time: a time in which multiple times are brought together. As Elizabeth McMahon argues, Ari is attempting to perform a new practice of moving through Melbourne: a choreography which “transform[s] the grid of the city into personal space by dance” (2000: 166). For McMahon “Ari’s walking [and dancing] knowledge of Melbourne produces an alternative map of the city according to ethnicity, particularly the map of second-generation Greeks; and of sexuality, specifically male homosexuality” (169). While this is a productive way of interpreting and explaining Ari’s movements I want to extend McMahon’s notion of Ari’s movements as de Certeau-based spatial practices, into a more temporal dimension by focusing on the “beat, tempo and dynamics” of the forms of governmentality that the novel depicts (169, 172). Ari’s movements through Melbourne, his choreography, are practices of self in relation to the forms of citizenship, the rationalities and practices of government, that are circulating in his milieu as social, cultural and political movements. These minoritarian forms of government are however faced with the ascendance of Neoliberalism. In the figure of Ari we have an attempt to choreograph, improvise and compose a way out of Neoliberalism through rhythmic practices. If, as Morris argues, Neoliberalism attempts to conduct time, then a way to resist its forms of thought and technique is to practise the self as proximate to what Neoliberalism abjects: those diseased, dangerous, and revolutionary temporalities. Ari is, in a way, a bricoleur of a number of rhythmic bodies: of male homosexuality; of a young unemployed working-class Melbourne male; and of a first generation post-war Australian-Greek.
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[Wh]en the institutions on which the three elements of citizenship depended parted company, it became possible for each to go its separate way, travelling at its own speed under direction of its own peculiar principles. Before long they were spread far out along the course, and it is only within the last few months, that the three runners have come abreast of each other. (Marshall, 1950: 13)
What I am is a runner. Running away from a thousand and one things that people say you have to be or should want to be. (Tsiolkas, 1995: 149)
Tsiolkas’ Loaded is, on the surface, a typical first novel. Tsiolkas is a gay Greek-Australian, who lived in Melbourne, and so is his narrator Ari. The myth of first novels is that they are thinly disguised, if not explicitly, autobiography, often a type of Bildungsroman. Loaded effects a confessional tone, but apart from Ari’s coming-out as gay through the narrative itself, there is no successful socialisation or autonomy achieved in the narrative: the two ‘tasks’ of the classic Bildungsroman (Moretti, 2000a: 15). Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Loaded is temporally and spatially compressed with the novel’s events occurring over twenty-four hours and its structure presented through a quartet of parts that are marked with the basic compass points of metropolitan Melbourne: North, South, West and East. Ari’s life is at a crisis point: he’s 19 and a disappointment to his parents and some of his friends. He’s not at university, he refuses work, he smokes and snorts and drinks and dances and fucks to excess. He’s gay, but hates faggots, and fears coming-out to his parents, worried at how he will be perceived by the Greek-Australian community that he is trying to break away from.
This day in the life of Ari represented in Loaded is partly a social and psychological journey through the suburban and urban areas of Melbourne, tracking Ari as he moves through various sites and spaces, from his family home, to his friend’s engagement party, to a Greek Club, a gay nightclub and a few back lanes and beats for quick anonymous sex. Along the way, he fights and rages against any attempt to fix his identity, whether it be political, ethnic, or sexual. He also ingests and smokes drugs including mainly speed, nicotine and alcohol, along with ecstasy and acid, marijuana and amyl nitrate which he uses to control the tempo of his movements, especially for dancing. Each of the Quartets is headed with an epigraph from a pop song, including Smells Like Teen Spirit: the paradigmatic Grunge song. Ari’s world is saturated with music.
Reading Loaded through the lens of identity politics foregrounds Ari’s desire to negotiate a plural identity that is fluid enough to keep him moving through the fixed recognitions that interpellate and dominate him. Read this way Ari is struggling against the institutions and structures of official multiculturalism, racism, against the threat to his sense of masculinity that being gay poses, and to maintain a fidelity to working-class solidarity and a socialist future while unemployed. He uses an identity politics of inverting the perjorative slang by which he is interpellated, as a technique of resistance:
Fucking faggot rings in my ear. Faggot I don’t mind. I like the word. I like queer. I like the Greek word pousti. I hate the word gay. Hate the word homosexual. I like the word wog, can’t stand dago, ethnic, Greek-Australian. You’re either Greek or Australian, you have to make a choice. Me, I’m neither. It’s not that I can’t decide; I don’t like definitions.
If I was black I’d call myself nigger. It’s strong, scary, loud. I like it for the same reason I like the words cocksucker and wog. If I was Asian I’d call myself a gook, but I’d use it loudly and ferociously so it scares whitey. Use it to show whitey that it’s not all yes-sir-no-sir-we-Asians-work-hard-good-capitalist-do-anything-the-white-man-says-sir. Wog, nigger, gook. Cocksucker. Use them right, the words have guts. (114-15)
At certain junctures in the narrative Ari occupies, often with anger, one particular side of the triangle of identities he moves within: “[e]thnicity is a scam, a bullshit, a piece of crock. The fortresses of the rich wogs on the hill are there not to keep the Australezo out, but to refuse entry to the uneducated-long-haired-bleached-blonde-no money wog” (45). At another conjuncture in a Greek club a discussion about Left politics has an intoxicated Ari focussing his sexuality:
-Marxism is dead. Kristin tells Stephen. He bangs his fist on the table and stands over us.
-Communism, the degenerate state of the Soviet Union may be dead, but not Marxism. He looks around at me and Spiro for support. I avert my eyes. He’s talking politics and I’m thinking how hot he looks.
Marxism, he continues, is not dead, it can’t be dead. It’s the only theory that makes sense of alienation.
I pour myself another drink. I’m not following the conversation which matters shit to me. I’m on edge. (61)
While his self-identification as a gay man is resisted by identifying as a real man: “[e]very time I look at a gay man, even if I think he’s attractive, I can’t forget he’s a faggot. I get off on real men, masculinity is what causes my cock to get hard, makes me feel the sweat and danger of sex” (91).
This is a complicated struggle for the hero-narrator as there appears no simple single or harmonious set of identities from which to form in ways that he desires, or that permit him the mixture of freedom, pleasure and solidarity he wants and is driven toward. In one subchapter called “Five transcendental moments” he presents five events and the list of, largely, negative commandments that are his creed:
Thou shall not give a shit what people think. [. . .] Thou art not responsible for thy parents’ failure. [. . .] Thou can have a man and be a man. [. . .] Thou shalt despise all humanity, regardless of race, creed or religion. [. . .] Thou shalt never steal from the poor or the old but fuck the rich for all it’s worth. (100-01)
This code is matched by other stacatto outpourings of identity statements that are largely negations, interspersed with the positive desires that emanate from the pleasure he takes in sex:
There is no way out of this boring life unless you have lots of money. Unless you are born with lots of money it takes a lifetime to make lots of money. Hard work bores me. I ain’t no worker.
I’m ruled by my cock. I see someone I think is attractive and I want to be with them, taste them, put my cock in their face or up their arse or through their cunt. I can’t imagine any of this ever changing. Marriage is out.
I’m not Australian, I’m not Greek, I’m not anything. I’m not a worker, I’m not a student, I’m not an artist, I’m not a junkie, I’m not a conversationalist, I’m not an Australian, not a wog, not anything. I’m not left wing, right wing, centre, left of centre, right of Genghis Kahn. I don’t vote. I don’t demonstrate. I don’t do charity.
What I am is a runner. Running away from a thousand and one things that people say you have to be or should want to be. [ . . .]
I like music, I like film, I’m going to have sex, listen to music and watch film for the rest of my life. I am here living my life. I’m not going to fall in love. I’m not going to change a thing, no one will remember me when I’m dead. My epitaph: he slept, he ate, he fucked, he pissed, he shat. He ran to escape history. That’s his story. (148-50)
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Much like the characters in Lohrey’s The Reading Group Ari is searching for a continuum of technologies of the self and technologies of power: techniques for conducting the self that can join with those used to conduct the state. What is different in Loaded and indeed Praise is that, unlike Lohrey’s and Moorhouse’s works of mourning, young unemployed males are the narrator-heroes. Like Wilhelm Meister in Goethe’s classic Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Ari and Gordon are both seeking to ‘become’ outside the world of work and, like Goethe’s hero, are symbolic forms of ‘youth’ through which chronotopes of, in the case of Grunge, illness and mobility are presented (Goethe, Moretti, 2000a: 29-32). [i] Moretti argues that the Bildungsroman narrative genre aims, through the symbolic form of youth, to effect “a compromise in the contradictory forms of modernity to be presented – freedom and happiness, identity and change, security and metamorphoses” (Moretti, 2000a: 9). In Loaded, like Praise, and as we shall see, in 1988 also, compromise between these terms is never a possibility.
In Loaded what is significant for a reading of the novel as a text of the long Labor decade is less the person that Ari is or refuses to be than the novel’s use of literary techniques that contest the tropes of Neoliberalism that were considered earlier. In other words, I want to shift the focus of this chapter from a sociological and psychological reading to one of an historical sociology of literary form, because, following Georg Lukács, “in literature what is truly social is form” (Lukács, cited in Moretti, 2005a: 10). Indeed, for Lukcács “[f]orm is sociological not only as a mediating element, as a principle which connects author and receiver, making literature a social fact, but also in its relationship with the material to be formed” (10). The formal qualities of “times, rhythms and fluctuations, [. . .] densities and fluidities, [. . .] hardnesses and softnesses” are what “the life given to [literary form] as subject matter” is represented as (10, emphasis added). As Walter Benjamin argued literary form, as a subset of cultural form, is also historical in the sense that its uses are dependent on the historical moment in which it is used, and historical in the sense that it is through cultural forms that we grasp historical times (Osborne, 1995: 156, 200-01).
My argument in regard to the form of Loaded is that as a figure of youth in a time when Neoliberalism is redefining ‘the social,’ in part through figures of youth, we can grasp the sexualised, intoxicated, mobile psych-soma of Ari as the multi-form attempt to bring together those “times, rhythms and fluctuations” that are abjected by Neoliberal governmentalities. Wark argues that the forms of identity politics 1960s social liberation movements promoted, which were in turn articulated to Labor in the long Labor decade, “did not take as their premise the differences between people, they took as their premise one founding difference apiece – gender, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, and made this one difference the foundation for an essence of sameness” and also asserts that Loaded represents this social liberational pluralism of differences “with its dense and noisy mix of ethnic, sexual and class differences” (1999: 306-07). I argue, instead, that rather than ‘hear’ Loaded as dissonance, atonality, or Nirvana-esque Grunge we can also look at those moments when different tempos and rhythms are overlaid. Such a rhythmanalysis analyses how and with what qualities of tempo and measure “rhythm enters into a general construction of time, of movement and becoming” (Lefebvre, 2004: 79).
Ari is loaded with drugs. It is close to the end of his odyssey through Melbourne. He is at a nightclub in the city’s north and having just procured and snorted some speed, he starts to feel the onrush of the ecstasy that he had taken. Sitting in a toilet cubicle where the “smell is pungent” and he feels “slightly nauseous” he is drawn toward the dance floor as “the nausea leaves, to be replaced by a sensation of joy which starts at my gut and envelops my body” (94). The first rhythm to note is that of the rise and fall of nausea, replaced by a radiating visceral joy. Next, “the music from the club crashes into the cubicle and a soulful woman’s voice rides the patterns of the drum machine” which introduces a layering of rhythms: a polyrhythmia, whereby the growing radiation of visceral “pleasure emanating from my gut” “connects with” “[h]er voice, her delight in making music” (94). Two rhythms then, to which is added a third in the form of “the pulsating crowd” into which he runs and begins to dance with. A fourth rhythm is the “sweet joy of chemical death” he experiences on the dance floor as he inhales some “amyl nitrate” (95). A fifth is the lift-off crescendo of the “Chic” song Lost in Music whose “bass beats lift me into the stratosphere” (95). A sixth rhythm is a look of shy desire he receives and rejects from a “Filopino boy” whose “slim body does not attract me” (95).
Clearly, these rhythms are representations of dance and music experience. But as a layering of polyrhythms that are in harmony, that are experienced as pleasurable, regardless of the mimetic depiction of drug use that enable this experience, this scene, surrounded as it is by abjections, foregrounds transgressive techniques of self through a symbolic youth that offer a way of putting torn and dissonant abjected temporalities together. As “[t]he LSD, the ecstasy, the speed, the dope, the alcohol rush around my body” either side of this eurhythmic scene is a confrontation with an abject identity: “A slut, I [Ari] agree. Let’s go” and “We call him [Ari] Persephone. You know the story don’t you, she spends half her time in hell, the other half in the real world”(94 and 96).
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A slut who lives in the underworld is not a description of a young Australian male coming-of-age in the long Labor decade. Hypermobile, having dangerous beat sex in alleyways, refusing employment. This is not the type of “flexibility within and between sectors” that Neoliberalism asks of youth (Keating, 1999: par.13). In contesting the formation of identities under Neoliberal rationalities by first negating them, and secondly by seeking to take the abjected parts of them and dance them into harmony of rhythms, Loaded acts as a powerful critique of, and a creative response to, the embedding of these forms of governmentality in Australian political culture.
[i] This is Bakhtin’s term for fusions of time-space in novels that “are the organizing centers [sic] for the fundamental narrative events of the novel. The chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied” whereby “time becomes palpable and visible; the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins” (1981: 250)
