Comings and Goings of Age in the Long Labor Decade: Small Business, Musical Culture and English

Below is the ficto-critical opening to my PhD.
__________________________

I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood.

(Foucault, 1997: 318)

Two trends coalesced during the 1980s – the internationalisation of the world economy in which success became the survival of the fittest; and the gradual but inexorable weakening of Australia’s ‘imperial’ links with its two patrons, Britain and America. The message was manifest – Australia must stand on its own ability. Australians, in fact, had waited longer than most nations to address the true definitions of nationhood – the acceptance of responsibility for their own fate. (Kelly, 1994: 13)

I am [. . .] interested in how the subject constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individual himself. They are models he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed on him by his culture, his society, his social group. (Foucault, 1997: 291)

 

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote that

[t]he starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. The first thing to do is to make such an inventory. (1971: 324).

While I appreciate that Gramsci’s choice of verbs here could be construed as recommending an account, it is fitting that this thesis begins with an ambiguity over terms that can turn either toward narrative or economic meanings. While I will proceed by keeping to the spirit of Gramsci’s advice, I want, however, to shift into a narrative mode in order to tell my own story of citizenship and formation, or Bildung. Not because I think it’s of great interest, but because it helps to orient the different directions that this thesis sets out on. I lived through the long Labor Decade in three ways pertinent to this thesis: through my experiences in a small family business; in my participation in Sydney musical culture; and by studying English at Technical College and at University. Having lived through it my first reference points are those historical traces this time deposited in me.

*

 

Boundary work: approaching literary and political history

[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.

*

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.

 

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[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.

 

The Ends of Certainty: The Australian Settlement and Neoliberal Globalisation

*More from the PhD. This section comes after the introduction to the third of three chapters and seeks to present and critique Paul Kelly’s influential narrrativisation of the long Labor decade.
Kelly devises the heuristic of the Australian Settlement — a 90 year old political-economic ‘contract’ between Social Liberals and Labourists — which he argues is being irresistibly dismantled by economic globalisation. The corollary is that the political party best able to align its reform policies with the direction of globalisation is best able to govern and most deserving of government. Kelly’s story of the 1980s and early 1990s is, generically, one of a national coming-of-age. Unlike the UK and the USA it was a Labor party that governed through the emergence and dominance of Neoliberal policies in Australia. This coincidence of an ostensibly left-wing political party in league with a left-wing social movement (the Australian Council of Trade Unions – ACTU) implementing Neoliberal policy had a profoundly destabilizing and even confusing effect on Australian political culture and cultural politics. Kelly’s narrativising of this period through one of the key genres of modernisation is thereby both an understandable performance aimed at goving narrative shape to this destabilizing period, and a highly charged instance of a cultural form — the Bildungsroman — called on to naturalize Neoliberalism as a national inevitability and opportunity to mature and become independent.
Ironically Kelly is certain about the unstoppable force of what he conceives as globalisation.*

Two trends coalesced during the 1980s – the internationalisation of the world economy in which success became the survival of the fittest; and the gradual but inexorable weakening of Australia’s ‘imperial’ links with its two patrons, Britain and America. The message was manifest – Australia must stand on its own ability. Australians, in fact, had waited longer than most nations to address the true definitions of nationhood – the acceptance of responsibility for their own fate. (Kelly, 1994: 13)

In Kelly’s The End of Certainty the Australian nation is personified and emplotted through the narrative model, and using the narrative techniques of, the classical Bildungsroman. In this narrative of nation a youthful Australian economic self is presented as being pulled into an uncertain future by irresistible, modernising global forces. The combination of the twin forces of economic globalisation and post-colonial de-coupling from Great Britain and America present Australian political culture with an opportunity to come-of-age: to be independent. For Kelly this opportunity for independence is to be understood by acknowledging why the long Labor decade had been such a period of transformation, and indeed loss. The long Labor decade needed to be understood as the exhaustion of what he calls the ninety-year-old Australian Settlement:

The story of the 1980s is the attempt to remake the Australian political tradition. This decade saw the collapse of the ideas which Australia had embraced nearly a century before and which had shaped the condition of its people. The 1980s was a time of both exhilaration and pessimism, but the central message shining through its convulsions was the obsolescence of the old order and the promotion of new political idea as the basis for a new Australia.

The generation after Federation in 1901 turned an emerging national consensus into new laws and institutions. This was the Australian Settlement. (1)

Kelly’s Australian Settlement is comprised of five pillars or five institutional commitments which gained consent from a dominant bloc in the political class in the immediate post-Federation period, and which he groups “under five headings – White Australia, Industry Protection, Wage Arbitration, State Paternalism, and Imperial Benevolence” (1-2). More specifically Kelly characterises these foundations of Australia as:

faith in government authority; belief in egalitarianism; a method of judicial determination in centralised wage fixation; protection of its industry and its jobs; dependence upon a great power (first Britain, then America) for its security and its finance; and, above all, hostility to its geographical location, exhibited in fear of external domination and internal contamination from the peoples of the Asia/ Pacific. Its bedrock ideology was protection; its solution, a Fortress Australia, guaranteed as part of an impregnable Empire spanning the globe. This framework – introspective, defensive, dependent – is undergoing an irresistible demolition. (2)

Kelly’s essential argument here is that Australian political culture is both reacting to exogenous economic and post-imperial shocks and to an endogenous institutional and cultural agreement that is exhausted. For Kelly

the 1980s saw the Labor-Liberal paradigm being eroded as the major battleground of ideas [as t]he real division is between the internationalist rationalists and the sentimental traditionalists; it is between those who know the Australian Settlement is unsustainable and those who fight to retain it. (2)

Thus Australian political culture in the long Labor decade is to be understood as being remade in the face of new realities. Throughout this thesis I have largely agreed with this line of argument. But Kelly’s story of the long Labor decade is one that uses this heuristic of the ninety-year-old Australian Settlement in order to bring a specific representation of what Tim Rowse calls a “characterology” into this narration of nation (1978: 94). In a close-reading of Keith Hancock’s influential “enquiry [into] the status of Australian nationhood or civilisation,” Australia (1930), Rowse detects a particular logic at work in Hancock’s text; a

generous use of characterological explanations for the flawed policies he is criticizing. Not a particular class or interest (such as a working class defending itself through reforming ideologies), but the idealism of a ‘people’, the optimistic, generous, reckless instincts of every Australian were evident in its ill-conceived economic and political arrangements. Hancock moves effortlessly from personality to national policy. I shall call the logic of this kind of argument the immanence of subjectivity: the national or social level is reducible to the personal. In Australia this logic is exploited enthusiastically. Hancock lifts characterology from the subordinate marginal place it occupies in previous sociological descriptions of Australia, and places it at the centre of his nationhood argument. The dilemmas of an ethical, interventionist [social] liberalism, its aspirations and pitfall, are evoked as the engaging but innocent quality of the emergent Australian personality. The metaphors of youth, age and maturation which run through the book have a logical as well as a literary felicity. (1978: 79, 93-94)

The “immanence of subjectivity” whereby the national or social level is reduced to the personal is a logic we have seen at work in the language of Keating. For Rowse, Hancock’s master-work presents an Australian character through which he makes his arguments about the direction that Australian political culture should proceed by casting Social-Liberal ideals as adolescent and thereby as able to come-of-age toward a “cultural maturity” which was defined by “its defence of British interests in particular and of Australian capitalist interests in general” (79, 81).

Kelly too deploys a characterology, an immanence of subjectivity, which shifts from the qualities he characterises as embedded in the Australian Settlement to those needed and to be affirmed in the time of the post-Settlement. Thus in the following section we can see how Kelly “moves effortlessly from personality to national policy” when he writes:

The obsolescence of the old order is documented. Since Federation Australia has failed to sustain its high standard of living compared with other nations. Australia’s economic problems are not new; they are certainly not the result of the 1980s, the 1970s, or the 1960s. The malaise stretches back much further to the post-Federation Settlement. Australia’s economic problem is a ninety-year-old problem. The legacy of the Settlement has been relative economic decline throughout the century. Australia is a paradox – a young nation with geriatric arteries. (13)

There are similarities here with Keating’s statement that

It was our view that finance is the lifeblood of the economy and that this country’s financial arteries were clogged by redundant and outdated regulation and the lack of effective competition. In a sluggish economy that needs investment and dynamic entrepreneurship it is essential that the financial system encourage and sponsor the initiative rather than stifle it (Keating, 1987: 184)

The similarities between Kelly’s and Keating’s body metaphors turn on the figure of financial arteries which suggests that the paradox Kelly is referring to is that of a young political culture which has not been mature enough to embrace, by encouraging to make flow, the vital lifeblood of international finance and which has been locked into the debilitating stasis of the Australian Settlement’s “introspective, defensive, dependent [. . .] Fortress” (2). The paradox is thus a political culture which has stuck to an immature Settlement and thereby overprotected and restricted the economy with “protectionist shackles which stifled its first century” (6). By casting the destruction of the Australian Settlement as inevitable and those who resist its demise as “sentimental traditionalists” Kelly presents a modernisation thesis which gains in power by the immanent subjectivities ascribed to both the old and new Australia; here represented as those in the Fortress and the masculine builders:

[t]he [long Labor] decade saw the collapse of the Australian Settlement, the old protected Fortress Australia. In the 1960s it was shaken; in the 1970s its edifice was falling; in the 1980s the builders were on site fighting about the framework for the new Australia. (13)

Kelly’s thesis of the inevitable dismantling of the Australian Settlement provides a structural organising power over the temporality of the text. At those moments in the detailed narration when interpretation and, indeed, evaluation are proffered, Kelly consistently reaches into the temporal and characterological binary opposition between, on the one hand, the traditionalists who valued the Australian Settlement and Fortress Australia, and on the other, the modernisers who reformed the economy in line with the expectation and judgements of the international markets. Emblematic of the structural power of Kelly’s modernisation thesis is the manner in which he frames and presents the micro-economic labour reforms of the late 1980s. Here Kelly presents the problem – a series of economic crises – the solution for which he advocates as being heedful of “the need for more efficient workers, firms and industries” (386). Next, he asserts that the solution to the problem was one of changing “work habits and company practice” (386). This solution is presented as a “new benchmark against which Australian institutions and practice would be measured – the benchmark of international competition. It was a repudiation of the values of Fortress Australia” (386). The evaluative weight clearly lies on the side seeking to avoid the illness, old-age and immobility of the traditional forms of governmentality. The characterology Kelly employs in this evaluation of micro-economic policy is redolent with this modernist temporality:

The new benchmark would affect ultimately every enterprise in the nation. It derived from the realisation that lack of international competitiveness had declined over the previous two decades, a legacy of cultural attitudes dating back to the post-Federation Settlement and more recent economic policy failures. Hawke’s initiative was an attack on the habits of protection, regulation and national introspection. It meant changes in how people worked, their motives, their outlook and their relations with fellow workers and managers. (386)

Similarly his final evaluation on this episode of the long Labor decade intensifies the violent undercurrent that this modernizing inevitability is presented through: “[m]icro-economic reform was about changing Australia’s work culture and destroying the mindset that produced the Australian Settlement” (398). Near the end of Kelly’s story of the long Labor decade he writes that with the passing of the Australian Settlement there is an optimism

rooted in an appreciation of the progress towards a new national compact. [. . .] The essence of [which] was national maturity, more emphasis on individual responsibility and less on state power, a more open and tolerant society, an economy geared to a new test of international competition, a greater reliance on markets to set prices, an emphasis on welfare as a need not a right, a growing stress on individual achievement, history and national destiny. (679-80)

Near the end of the long Labor decade, in Kelly’s estimation, Australia was coming-of-age.

*

As was mentioned above there have been a number of substantive critiques of Kelly’s text and the heuristic of the Australian Settlement in particular. For some, like Geoffrey Stokes, “to the extent that we can speak of a ‘Settlement’ in Australia, it was one reached on a wider range of key conflict or cleavages than those to which Kelly refers” (2004: 5-6). On other hand, there are those critics who dismiss its temporalization of Australian political culture. Stuart Macintyre writes: “Kelly has little interest in recent history. His Settlement is a cipher for the long-delayed and urgently needed deregulation of the Australian economy” (31-32). Paul Smyth argues that

[t]he relevant historical context to the rise of economic rationalism in the 1980s was not any crisis in federation-style developmentalism – let alone the tariff regime of Kelly’s Australian Settlement – but that central object of attack of the monetarists, supply-siders and other globalising neo-liberals: Australia’s Keynesian legacy. (2004: 40)

For Tim Rowse “Kelly’s story of the dissolution of the Australian Settlement is the closest thing we have to a widely respected account of the modernisation of Australian politics” but it is one that ignores the

Keynesian critique of two of the pillars of the Australian Settlement: compulsory arbitration and industry protection. The effect of pointing to this [. . .] critique [. . .] is to break open Kelly’s category of sentimental traditionalists, that is, to show that there is more than one way to be critical of the recent neo-liberal antidotes to the Australian Settlement. (2003: 220)

But the most extensive and sustained critique of Kelly’s text comes from James Walter who is alive to the diachronic antecedents and synchronic bedfellow of Kelly’s central argument. Walter links Kelly’s construction of the Australian Settlement to Hancock’s Australia, a link that has been given further emphasis in this thesis through their shared use of ‘characterology’ (1996: 33). Moving sideways, Walter pairs his hermeneutics of Kelly’s text with a reading of Francis Fukuyama’s coterminous “The End of History?” arguing that both texts “express the wisdom of the moment with a comprehensiveness and historical sweep that gives [them] real force” but the problem with both is that they “re-read the past in anachronistic ways” (33, 36). Fukuyama’s triumphal declaration of the victory of the “free market” and “‘the liberal idea'” embedded in a “universal, directional history” collapses the distinction between Social-Liberalism and its market-based cousin, thereby effecting a depoliticization between the quite serious differences between forms of Liberalism (36-37). For Walter,

Kelly’s anachronism – and emptying of political history – is even clearer. His astute description of ‘the Australian Settlement’ shows the ameliorative tendency, and the expectation of a significant role by the state, to be leading characteristics in Australian politics. The difficulty emerges when he implies that, because such assumptions no longer seem appropriate, they were always mistaken. Thus, the tactics which generated a local politics and sustained an economy increasingly oriented to Australia’s interests can be shrugged off as simply ‘the protectionist shackles which stifled its (Australia’s) first century’. How such delusions could have survived, with (to some extent) bipartisan support and popular acceptance, is a mystery. That there might be some cause for pride in Australia’s political achievement is inconceivable. (37)

These critiques of Kelly’s text and its key heuristic, the Australian Settlement, go some way toward unsettling the inevitability that his claims generate. It is my contention, though, that the characterology, in both its crucial introductory pages and throughout Kelly’s history, where he narrates and explains his Australian Settlement thesis, rests on a set of Bildungsroman conventions. Primarily Kelly is characterising Australian political culture as being forced to face a realistic vision of its prospects and in having its former Fortress both dismantled and in torn down, opens itself to and integrates with the world. In arguing that the inevitable collapse of the pillars of the Australian Settlement produced such new foundations as a “deeper sense of national self-reliance, [. . .] an emphasis on individual responsibility [and] Australia’s economic orientation was more outward-looking and its aspiration was to become an efficient and confident nation” Kelly is presenting a Bildungsroman of nation: one through which key rationalities of Neoliberalism are embedded into Australian political culture (150). This form enables a narrativising of Neoliberal rationalities through the narrative technique of generating a forceful historical future. As Bakhtin argues, in the Bildungsroman the hero

emerges along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other. This transition is accomplished in him and through him. He is forced to become a new, unprecedented type of human being. What is happening here is precisely the emergence of a new man. The organizing force held by the future is therefore extremely great here – and this is not, of course, the private biographical future, but the historical future. (1986: 23-4)

Thus the twinned emergence of the hero and history, which is in a transitional or interregnum period, generates a powerful forward momentum which when tied to the organic development of the hero’s transition from youth to maturity makes the Bildungsroman an ideal form for providing symbolic pathways through periods of modernisation. And indeed, as Moretti argues, the Bildungsroman is ready-made for eighteenth-century European modernity, which chooses youth as its central form into which this fusion of historical and biographical time will occur. For Moretti this choice is

[b]ecause, I think, at the turn of the eighteenth century 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. (5)

Kelly’s young nation with geriatric arteries, coming into maturity after the collapse of the Australian Settlement, is in a similar position to the symbolic youth that Moretti analyses as being a form with which the uncertainty and motility of European post-Revolution modernity can be represented. Kelly’s Australia, finally standing on its own and leaving the Fortress of tradition, is also in an interregnum: between the Labourist-Social-Liberal consensus and the ascendance of the Neoliberal forms of government. Indeed, in constructing such a distant and monolithic edifice as the five pillars of the Australian Settlement Kelly generates a level of modernising momentum which can barely be contained by the characterology through which this Bildungsroman of nation is presented. Yet as Joseph Slaughter argues “[t]he tautological-teleological complex of inherency in becoming articulates the impossibly anticipatory and retrospective (proleptic and analeptic) temporality of the story of the modern citizen-subjectivation shared by human rights and the Bildungsroman” (1415). What Slaughter is referring to here is the paradox, in the classic Bildungsroman structure, of a narrative in which the story of becoming is issued from a present in which the becoming has been achieved: the past that is presented as open is closed from the perspective of the narrator who can narrate the story of a becoming because they have seen its final shape.

A similar narrative technique exists in The End of Certainty where Kelly’s authorial persona disappears and is replaced by the evaluating voice of a historical future: that of the valuations of the international markets:

[t]he ‘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. (227).

Here we have a clear indication of the tautological-teleological complex. Kelly here slips away and it is the future historical that speaks. The ‘times’ are personified as making demands that weren’t met. What Kelly means here is that the dramatic fall in the Australian dollar that precipitated Keating’s “Banana Republic [. . .] shock therapy” treatment, history will show, should have been cause for a deep wage cut (208). The Bildungsroman form generates this tautological-teleology but on whose authority is this judgement made: who are the times? One clue is provided in the same chapter where Kelly writes: “In late 1985 the jury – the financial markets – voted against Keating by forcing another major depreciation of the $A” (208). Also, Kelly, weighing into a dispute over how to determine the rate of micro-economic reform, between ALP Industry Minister Senator John Button and Chicago economist David Hale, argues that while they are both correct,

the difference is the test of measurement: it is whether Australia is judged by its own historical standard or by an international standard. There is no dispute that Australia has made advances; but those advances are not sufficient unless they are advances in relation to Australia’s trading partners, all of whom have their own micro-economic reform programs. (389)

Later Kelly writes, “Labor’s failure at the ‘micro’ level was to use the historical standard of comparison, not an international standard of ‘first-best’ practice” (397). It can be argued then that the historical future in The End of Certainty is what the international financial and other markets decide: they are the times. This seems like common sense, but as a temporalization of time, achieved in part through the Bildungsroman form and supported by the anthropomorphism of “the times,” the positioning of the international markets as the judges of political decisions narrativises Neoliberal self-government as a technique of Australian political culture that effectively grants the international finance markets authorship of the history of our times. To be part of history a nation, a political culture, a self needs to anticipate what the markets will demand. More.

*

To come-of-age during the end of certainty is to enter the formative pressures of Neoliberal temporality. As Morris argues, the fusion of what were considered formerly discrete, because non-economic, spaces in Chicago School economic theory, results “in a generalized economic tabulation where human time would be the primary element'” (1998: 184). In Kelly’s Bildungsroman of nation we can see how the historical future too is subject to Neoliberalism.