[Another in a series of unedited excerpts from a thesis that is currently under examination]

Julie Thompson Klein’s notion of boundary work recalls the concept of the “protective belt” in Imre Lakatos’ history and philosophy of science (Chalmers, 1999: 130-48). For Lakatos change in scientific method and theory is neither forced by what Karl Popper termed falsification, nor in the manner suggested by Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigms of scientific knowledge and method which shift in ways whereby one paradigm is ultimately incommensurable with another (130). Instead Lakatos argues for a model of the history of science in which a degenerative research programme is replaced by a progressive research programme after the theoretical and ontological commitments of the old programme can no longer weather, through what Lakatos calls the protective belt, new, or new configurations of, phenomena (132, 136-44). Lakatos spatialises scientific knowledge and methods in terms of a hard core of theoretical commitments protected by this belt of hypotheses and secondary commitments – elements which can be altered and discarded without the hard core being fundamentally challenged. Leaving aside the tropes of “hard core” and “protective belt” here – which on the one hand suggest music and pornography and on the other planets – what is useful in Lakatos’ model of change in knowledge production is that it modifies the criteria upon which practitioners in a field can ascertain a paradigm shift. Specifically, what Lakatos, like Klein and Dixon are pointing to, I would say, is that evidence of boundary work, or of shifts in the workings involving the protective belt of a discipline or research programme, need not necessarily indicate that core (whether soft, hard or something in-between) beliefs and commitments, or to use Foucault’s terms, fundamental rationalities, are thereby also profoundly shifting. Of course, such evidence could well indicate that a tectonic movement is in play. But at the outset of this thesis I will not be making such judgments. Rather than set out into this thesis forearmed with the knowledge that there has been a paradigm shift in literary studies, alongside a similar shift in Australian political culture, this thesis instead will move through a set of boundary works which may sometimes be negative, or protective, and at other times positive, attempting to open the borders between disciplines and disciplinary and, indeed, non-disciplinary, fields and knowledges. This second type of boundary work, or boundary permeation, is one Klein calls “specialty migration” (Dixon 2004: 32). While not claiming to be a specialist in political theory, Australian political history or Australian Labor history, the boundary work in this thesis comes from sustained reading and engagement in these non-literary areas of studies and in particular three theories that cross boundaries between the political and the literary fields: Jürgen Habermas’ history and theory of the public sphere; Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of the literary field; and the application of Foucault’s concept of governmentality to literary fiction. I will expand on these three central theories below, but would just like to affirm that what was signalled in the auto-biographical opening of this thesis are those shadow-structures- “the dynamic, informal networks and collaborations that form beneath and across the surface structures” – in the fields of rock music culture and small business that while mostly superfluous to the academic register of this thesis are the fields through which the historical traces of the long Labor decade were in part deposited in me (Dixon, 2004: 32). The boundary work of this thesis is also, thereby, inflected by those traces.

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One boundary across which this thesis shuttles is that which intersects citizenship studies and Australian literary studies. The study of citizenship is well-suited to literary studies as the figure of the citizen is, at its most basic, Janus faced: the public, institutional face necessarily borders a private and intimate one. Novels, in particular, are similarly oriented, with their representations of subjective interiority, of phenomenological lived experience, textualised and addressed to an open assemblage of reading and critical publics, including markets, which can use the text in a variety of ways. Any genealogy, in Foucault’s sense of the term, of the citizen will often be faced with having to locate those borders at, and moments in, which the interiority of the subject – that revealed and lived in the private”intimate sphere” – is renegotiated and refigured by its relation to that intersubjective realm of the public which is the concern of states, media and corporations, wherein the self is an addressee and subject of law (Habermas, 1989: 55).

The figure of the citizen – a subject in relation to a nation-state, primarily, who has a set of putatively equal rights and obligations legitimated and enforced by the nation-state in which they have membership – is a very useful one to overlay onto individual literary texts and the spheres, fields and discursive formations that they circulate in (Janoski, 1998: 9). The shifting fortunes of citizenship studies reflect the forces acting on this fundamental figure of Liberalism; a figure that is less of interest for its substantive instantiations than for the rationalities, narratives, discourses and problematics that its varied meanings and forms are played out within (Hindess, 2000: 68).

What, then, are the ways with which citizenship is useful for a literary history, and in particular a literary history of the long Labor decade? There are three main ways in which citizenship provides a fruitful heuristic for literary history: each of these ‘ways’ are models and methods that do specific boundary work. Firstly, there is Jürgen Habermas’ focus on the literary precursor to the political public sphere in his historically concrete work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1989). The rational-critical acts of active citizens whose new-won privateness provides the foundation upon which to participate in spheres of public debate and decision in relation to the limits of the state are pre-figured by cultural forms (Habermas, 1989: 31-43). [i] And most significantly it is the European novel and the creation of “fiction” that, Habermas argues, does this formative work (50). The significance of the literary precursor to the political public sphere, for the literary history pursued in this thesis, lies in the historical model it proposes for a relationship between literary fiction, print culture, and the forms of those acts of citizenship that entwine literary texts in public-political discourse. Specifically, this model raises questions about the phase of modernity in which the public sphere of letters first arose and, consequently, about nostalgic and ‘imaginary’ desires for this precursor relationship to be revitalised or achieved in the long Labor decade, or in our contemporary period. [ii] The civilised citizen who learns of the modes of private-public subjectivity and rational-critical debate through the print-culture discipline of ‘English’ provides a strong model, albeit residual, for a relationship between citizenship and literary text (Hunter, 1988: 262-65). If Mark Davis is right when he argues that “the decline of the literary paradigm isn’t simply to do with literature; it’s to do with a broader reconceptualisation of the public sphere itself” then something of this reconfiguration should be visible, and even audible, in fiction itself (Davis 2006: 95). The type of boundary work suggested by Habermas’ genealogy of the public sphere is pursued in sections of chapters 1 and 3.

The second model of a relationship between the literary text and the citizen is that submerged in Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on the literary field. I say submerged because Bourdieu is concerned with the genesis of “autonomy” in the cultural fields and the uses to which such autonomy can be put in the service of criticism and intellectual ‘representation’ (220-21, 129-31).[iii] If there is a figure of the citizen in Bourdieu’s work in such books as The Rules of Art, then this figure is to be assumed rather than one that is explicitly delineated and analysed by Bourdieu. Indeed, the figure of the citizen in this study of the genesis of the literary field is that of a game-player in a relatively autonomous field who seeks to accumulate symbolic capital through the contra market-liberal tenet of “loser takes all”(21). This quest for the sort of capital that is to some extent residually pre-modern (consecrated honour and distinction) is portrayed by Bourdieu as initiated by a refusal of the logic of the market in material goods: a refusal of commercial success (21, 141-42). Such a refusal is tied up in the logics of modern aesthetics – the Kantian notion of an indifference to the play of elements – and for Bourdieu such an aesthetics is found in Gustav Flaubert’s Bildungsroman, Sentimental Education, which merges its baroque formal creativity with the, up to that point, undervalued genre of the realist novel (Guillory: 384, 390). In seeking to fuse art for art’s sake (Kantian indifference) with literary realism, Sentimental Education, for Bourdieu, both refuses the market in material goods and at the same time depicts the quotidian lives of a group of young middle-class Parisien men in the period leading up to the 1848 revolts, thereby foundationally contributes toward “the constitution of the literary field as a world apart, subject to its own laws [and which produced] principles of intellectual freedom” (Bourdieu, 1996: 48). This apparent paradox in Flaubert’s final novel is for Bourdieu the move which initiates a limited autonomy within the French literary field: an autonomy that remains a condition of French, if not also, Western and even modernity.

The connection to citizenship, in Bourdieu’s rules of the operations of the literary field, is that thread joining the autonomy of the citizen, who is putatively sovereign and free, to the work of the literary and, by extension intellectual, fields which also create a type of autonomy. The benefit for us of Bourdieu’s perspective on this thread (joining citizenship to the literary text) is that his sociology of autonomy in the literary field is one that portrays autonomy’s creation as being field-specific and as being produced in the games of the field that are played out against the shadow of the dominating logics of the markets in material goods and the game of state-based power. What is critical then in Bourdieu’s account of the literary field and its ‘generations’ of autonomy is how the market is positioned and considered within his sociology of art and literary art in particular. Specifically, there is a problem with Bourdieu’s sociology of symbolic capital and autonomy in the literary field if we find that the logics and games of the dominant market, as opposed to the market in symbolic goods, begins to break the containers Bourdieu has placed around them. The limits of Bourdieu’s sociology of the literary field are therefore ones that will be tested in this thesis by examining the rationalities and discourses of the market in relation to those of the market in symbolic goods and the operations of the literary field at moments in the long Labor decade. If the long Labor decade refigured the citizen-subject as Neoliberal – as subject to market rationalities and entrepreneurial techniques – then to what extent are the operations of the literary field, with its markets in symbolic goods, its ‘rules’ and ‘trade’ in symbolic capital, able to function apart or outside of this ascendant form of governmentality?

This brings us to the third model and method here: that of the connection between governmentality and literature. Firstly, I want to just draw back from the extensive writings on this subject as they are usually summarised and presented, and sketch another more literary approach to this boundary.[iv] I want to suggest that the representation of subjects in literary fiction of the period can be read as ones traversed by the emergence and dominance of Neoliberal governmentalities. In other words, rather than a Foucauldian archaeology and genealogy of the technologies and rationalities of self-government, discipline and pastoral power that English instantiates as a pedagogy, and rather than an extension of such methods of investigation to the literary field, what I aim to do in this thesis is offer a set of, in some ways, orthodox close-readings of the subjects of narration and narrating in literary fiction; to read self-formations, Bildung, as mimetic of historical changes in governmentality. If the citizen is significantly re-formed in the long Labor decade in Australia, then realist novels of the period, especially those that use coming-of-age or Bildungsroman generic conventions, provide fertile ground for interpreting how certain aspects of citizenship are being represented and figured. Indeed, there may be emergent forms of citizenship figured in literary mimesis that are yet to be circulated in the field of Australian literary studies. Such emergent forms and techniques of the citizen-subject, while firmly sutured to the nation-state, present a

challenge for critics and teachers of Australian literature [which] is to retain a space for talking about ‘nation’ in relation to the literary, without becom[ing] institutionally captive to the cultural space of the national [instead becoming] a constitutive, rather than a merely reactive, part of a global literary culture. (Dale: 135).

Leigh Dale’s call for a type of literary inter-nationalism invokes a model of that positive and negative boundary work that this thesis seeks to shuttle between. If it seems at times that the cultural space of the national weighs too heavily on the proceeding pages, it is because those pronouncements of its death made in the 1990s were premature. Rather than slinking off backstage as Globalisation made glittering and triumphant entry, the Australian nation-state changed and re-formed in 1990s. The textual spaces and temporalities of the national remain fundamental to how we live our private and public lives. They don’t comprise the whole story, and for some who live and work in Australia, they exert only a minor force. Yet my becoming was made in Australia, in the long Labor decade. Making available what is constitutive about this period is what follows.

 

 

[i] I’m not suggesting that there is a universal access to the ‘classical’ public sphere – nor does Habermas, who in his 1961 preface to Structural Transformation, wrote:

Our investigation is limited to the structure and function of the liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere, to its emergence and transformation. Thus it refers to those features of a historical constellation that attained dominance and leaves aside the plebian public sphere as a variant that in a sense was suppressed in the historical process. (1989: xviii)

[ii] ‘Imaginary’ here refers to the use of the term as it is found in the Public Culture journal where it is defined at an angle to Cornelius Castoriadis’s use of the term, where it has a more radically creative meaning (Castoriadis: 13-18). Dilip Gaonkar writes:

the idea of social imaginary [refers] broadly to the way a given people imagine their collective social life. Within the folds of a social imaginary, we see ourselves as agents who traverse a social space and inhabit a temporal horizon, entertain certain beliefs and norms, engage in and make sense of our practices in terms of purpose, timing, appropriateness, and exist among other agents. (2002: 10)

[iii] Representation in the political sense rather than semiotic one. In other words to stand in as an agent for someone or group that is unable to make their claims (to justice or rights) to other groups or to a state.

[iv] I am referring here to Ian Hunter’s work in Culture and Government: the Emergence of Literary Education (1988). Hunter argues that “the birth of English [is] the contingent outcome of the redeployment of the minority aesthetic practice of the ethical exemplar inside a governmental pedagogy organised by the technology of moral supervision” (21). Thus English is a set of practices and techniques for governing population. In this thesis I am less interested in English as governmental techniques and political rationalities, than in ‘reading’ the representations of Neoliberal governmentalities in literary and political texts.