It is testament to the power of photography and film, or what the culture has come to see as an immediate window onto reality, that there was such a response. The capacity of the camera to bring us confronting photo-journalistic images that marshal feelings of horror is well recognised; their importance cannot be underestimated (and on this basis one wonders why we don’t see more images of the true horrors of our war in Afghanistan and Pakistan or of life inside Australia’s concentration camps). But of course there was more going on here than the simple transmission of images. ‘Reality’ touched a particular nerve and had a broad significance, if not also an unconscious register. At one level we might suspect to be at work here a deep-going reaction formation to a core problem for human culture in general: killing for meat. At another, the Four Corners controversy and the practical reaction it has generated is redolent with all the elements of a distinctly late-modern politics of nature and our redefinition of just where we, especially the West, stand in relation to her.

One cannot discount the possibility that humans harbour species guilt over the destruction of animal life for our own life-giving purposes. Certainly we know that dead animals must be turned into ‘meat’ and then again into meals; from the raw to the cooked, and integrated into restrictive systems of meaning and psychologically acceptable forms: any potential horror involved in the production of meat, even in cultures where animals are likened to human kin, can be corralled or sequestered and explained culturally. Killing for life may be the original disavowal; perhaps more acute still in settled civilisations based on the growing of crops and killing for food of domesticated animals―those animal others we come to know closely. As with many unpalatable choices laid out by nature, humans have had to make their often conflicted actions palatable, even ethical, in order to answer to the higher gods and social ‘goods’ to which human natures also aspire.

In modernity, the need to sequester bloody reality has a whole anthropology and sociology of its own―from the generalisation of civilised behaviour from the European courts of kings and queens to

ordinary people, and Enlightened views of subjects and bodies leading to a distaste for public displays of blood or torture; to modern diversified societies’ divisions of labour around blood and bodies in trades and professions such as butchery and surgery; to today’s techno-mediated and mega-industrialised production of food for consumer consumption, globalised on the one hand, as in our export of live cattle, and fully sanitised, as in the meat we buy in supermarkets. Blood and guts have almost entirely disappeared from ordinary life (just like our wars, fought secretly or carried out at a distance by high-tech means), and certainly from shop windows, with the demise of butcher shops and with meat even touched up cosmetically on supermarket shelves.

So, hidden from view in our lives in general, animal death―or more particularly our confrontation with the fate of meekness and innocence at our own hands―is very hard to bear, and with the once relatively confident justifications for it beginning to slip away, the rawness of animal death itself tends to come into focus. In other words, the immediate sense of animal innocence and human cruelty is in play, but it is an opening to an enduring wound at the heart of culture.

I think it was something to be relatively proud of that the reaction from animal advocates and the cattle industry, as in Bob Katter’s statements and those of cattlemen and women themselves, was not one of racial accusation against Indonesians. There was no attempt to divert responsibility away from Australia even if Indonesia has latterly found racism in the government’s banning of exports to it alone. In fact, overall there seemed to be considerable sensitivity, albeit with very large commercial interests hovering in the background, to Muslim Indonesia’s halal requirements and the problems of poverty and unequal resources. The closeness of Australia’s north to Australia’s northern neighbour, geographically and in the kind of cross-cultural understanding that may be built via trade itself, was worth noting. And yet for all the attempts by mainstream animal advocates, cattle industry representative, independent MPs and the government, the debate has remained deeply unsettling. The language of animal ‘cruelty’ and its corollary in the ‘humane abattoir’, used by just about all the political players (though not some diehards who accuse the Australian middle class of denying poor Indonesians food), may be an attempt to bridge the nature–culture gap and to act decently, but whether that kind of distinctly ‘modern’ cultural solution will work today is a moot point.

Almost immediately there appeared in the debate the oxymoronic, weirdly redundant notion of cruelty in the slaughterhouse. Certainly there is a distinction to be made: animal death, on the one hand, cruelty through mismanagement, on the other. But it wasn’t merely that kind of cruelty that was exposed to us, and the notion of a humane abattoir sounds to postmodern people, and especially the young, just like Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the humane penitentiary, home to unspeakable cruelty―cruelty built into the notion itself. That modern institution, which like the insane asylum stood at the margins of society, was intensively involved in shaping modern people. The humane abattoir speaks similarly to the question of how animals figure as others to us, and what their autonomous natures and claims to life might be.

The independent MPs, the government and industry representatives believe that stun guns, the redesign of cages and modernisation of abattoirs in general are the solution. Animal suffering would indeed be lessened and many who have rectified the nature–culture faultline in their own lives as committed meat eaters will be content. But this will not settle calls for an end to the live cattle trade from other quarters. Again, much of the argument put against the transport of live animals for meat to other countries has revolved around cruelty. Animal suffering is the focus; conditions on ships and in slaughterhouses remote from Australia the target. But the sources of suffering in this context are both broader and more specific. While regional trade with our populous northern neighbour must be a (reciprocal) given, the vision of wealthy Australia’s mega-ships, huge animals and giant logistical operations that span the globe speak to many of the hubris and anti-nature attitude of growth-addicted global capitalism.

Many young animal activists have taken up Peter Singer’s notion of animal rights. But a much more telling, and historically apt, approach may rest in the critique of contemporary life symbolised in what has been called ‘self-kill vegetarianism’. This idea, that unless the individual is involved in the killing of their meat they will not eat it, does not discount animal killing as such. But it does indicate precisely the distance between the table and ‘meat production’ in our time. It is not likely that this is a practical politics for the mass of people, but it speaks of a hoped-for relationship that honours animals, brings the issue of food and nature close to home, and makes human responsibility an ethical confrontation, not merely a technical solution.

In several places locally we’ve been told that interpretation of the events in London is mere punditry without on-the-ground reporting (Media Watch, for instance), as if nothing can be said without the words and justifications as given by those involved themselves. Has our social knowledge, and the practice of interpretation, receded so far as to preclude considered judgements of a more general and systemic kind? Social life operates at different levels of awareness, and at different levels of emotional and practical commitment to the culture that shapes us. It used to be the role of the humanities—in universities that held interpretation to be a core function—to study such in broad terms, making our actions meaningful and meaning more complex. In fact, though marginalised and perhaps repressed, broader interpretations of neo-liberal life—what it means, and how it can’t last—have been ‘out there’ for as long as neo-liberalism itself; the signs were always there to be read. We are nothing if not deeply mired in contradictions in our present world of radical cultural change and disparate social futures for different social groups. In the midst of collapse and confusion perhaps general thinking will again become popular as we are forced to work out what those contradictions mean.

While Cameron and his constituency are plugging crime and gang behaviour as the explanation for London’s woes, more social commentary has focused on poverty and want, especially the alienating quality of Britain’s huge housing estates and the poor’s lack of education. More on the money still has been commentary that combines a focus on poverty with consumption and desire, or how want has been transformed and come to mean those contemporary identity fixers: products and lifestyle. If the underclass kids of England are not in want of food and shelter as such, but are undereducated and demeaned in myriad ways in their life circumstances, and at the same time bombarded with images of what counts in the society they liminally inhabit, it makes sense that what they want is an identity that holds sway—that means something to them and affects how others treat them. Howard Jacobson pointed out the Dickensianism of the images of kids labouring under the weight of huge LCD screens as they scurried or slinked or brazenly made their way round the streets of London, Birmingham, Manchester. But this is Dickens postmodernised, both in terms of consumption desire and, as Jacobson himself suggested, in terms of some notion of ‘rights’ as deployed by the young—an often empty call that bolsters a sense of entitlement but may have little actual content for those who have experienced extreme (cultural) disadvantage.

Of course, who can blame them for that? Some other commentary has been important in pointing out that there is a parallel in the apparent desires of looters/rioters and the scions of the neo-liberal order: consumption is where it is at broadly in the culture, and raised to an art form by that ‘lucky’ few—increasingly few proportionally speaking—who sit at the top of the pile. Financiers and corrupt politicians (moats anyone?) have figured in this assessment, and while some commentators have cast doubt on such a connection of corruption as directly linked to the riots, and fair enough—culture, it should be said, works by way of mood and undercurrent as much as the transmission of explicit views or the making of conscious connections. The mood across much of the Western world is not only one of fearfulness in the face of all kinds of change and collapse but radical suspicion and confusion, that is, where it has not already begun to transmute into explicitly radical anti-neo-liberal action (see the articles in this Arena Magazine on Spain and Croatia). If the markets can shudder and fall on the strength of ‘emotion’, as we are now being warned to expect at any moment, so too can ‘volatility’ erupt on the streets, although ‘emotion’ here may be some way from ‘irrational’.

Neo-liberalism has been the executive philosophy and overriding form of governance of a supercharged capitalism for some thirty years, as its basis in the communications revolution and other high-technological advances have carried it past the wildest dreams of any common-or-garden capitalist of the first half of the twentieth century. Hayek and his neo-conservative acolytes, all the way down to our common-or-garden Liberal and Labor politicians in Australia, may have ‘freed’ the economy, and much of civil society, from social constraint and thus opened the way institutionally to production and consumption on an unimaginable scale. But the real engine of change and ‘growth’ has always lain deeper and acted earlier in the culture and economy, propelling us towards a radical leap beyond the modernity with which we had all become familiar.

One aspect of that modernity was the welfare state, and understandings of care, comfort, education and morality writ large into state-based institutions, justified, contradictorially, as variously improving people or their social opportunities. Another was consumption, but within the bounds largely of the natural world and mechanical processes at the disposal of industry, and within the terms of an emergent but still only ‘picket-fence’ individualism, which was held in check by moralities of rectitude, or self-control, and softened by the ongoing existence of relatively stable local communities and their institutions. If the welfare state has abandoned many or most of its responsibilities to a broadly understood social constituency; if individualism now knows few bounds; and consumption has reached completely unsustainable levels environmentally and morally, ‘neo-liberalism’ is only partly to blame, though it will be the most visible target, especially the ‘corruption’ and ‘greed’ with which it is given a human face in everyday understandings of why things went wrong.

‘Greed’, however, is hardly a big enough or social enough concept to nail what has been going on—neither neo-liberalism itself, as theory or practice, nor, certainly, the underlying technoscientific revolution that emerged in a range of fields, offering late capitalism new substances to work on (for example, biological entities, newly isolated compounds), new means for the transformation of the material world (reconstitutive (techno-)science), new means for the promotion of products as identity aids (new media), a new space to research them (the neo-liberal university) and new, globalised conduits for rapid expansion and movement of finance (networked communications technologies). Neo-liberalism has been an especially expansionist and brutal regime of executive power in its paring back of historically achieved conditions for (relative) social decency, as in the welfare state and its fundamental assumption of social inclusion, or education (including the liberal university) focused on the formation of the person not just technique—with consequences like those witnessed in London. But that it has also ushered in, and in many respects obscured the deeper processes at work, in part because of its hubristic understanding of its own power has meant that the other layers of change unsettling culture and society today have not been easy to gauge or assess.

The Left’s response has not assisted very much in this either. Overrun and overawed by neo-liberalism’s apparent power, and with parts of the Left in any case deeply committed to a productivist view of society and any future we might inhabit, they fell in with the dominant project. In the case of Labo(u)r governments in the United Kingdom and Australia, they of course furthered the neo-liberal project, ‘streamlining’ the state, establishing new conditions for wealth accumulation and globalisation’s free-wheeling financial arrangements and, in the United Kingdom especially, for the spectacular financial collapse of 2008. That their commitment to neo-liberalism, unwavering as it is, is a key element in environmental collapse and climate change barely rates a mention. Certainly there seems little consciousness of the legacy of left economism and modernist productivism within these parties which today ties super-consumption and ‘growth at any cost’ to both social decay and planetary disaster. The ‘postmodern’ Left, on the other hand, while decrying many of the inequities produced by neo-liberalism and often arguing on the basis of ‘values’ and ‘rights’ for a range of ethical positions, is similarly blind to the nature of the underlying transformation that has powered neo-liberalism. Indeed, in the way that cultures work, surreptitiously, beneath the level of our awareness, our worlds have been shaped not simply by ‘neo-liberal values’, but by an emerging, new relation to knowledge, each other and the natural world, effected in the present conjunction of technique and science as carried by its intellectually trained agents. Techno-science has not merely given us new frontiers and means for production (the emphasis of left and right neoliberalism), but is transgressive of many of the fundaments of previous ways of life, reshaping our being in the world today in myriad complex ways.

Howard Jacobson’s comment about young people’s sense of their ‘rights’ leading to a generalised sense of entitlement has a right-wing ring to it, but he didn’t mean it like that, and it is worth examining further. We must be careful, given the coming period of potentially very serious rightwing reaction, to tease out this sort of question adequately.

Just as the middle class has lived off the transgressive frisson of wearing gangster chic, so transgressive theory and practice generally on the cultural Left, as in mediatised culture, celebrates the breaking of all sorts of bounds—of ‘respectability’, ‘hierarchy’, the ‘natural’ (the whole culture as an avant-garde). If there is ‘no respect’ forthcoming from London’s rioting youth, it is hardly surprising, not only because they have been left out and are ‘poor’, but because they, like us generally, don’t understand this transgressive ideology and where it comes from, deep in the common culture of techno-scientific capitalism, even if it fills up their lives and hopes and dreams.

It is testament to the power of photography and film, or what the culture has come to see as an immediate window onto reality, that there was such a response. The capacity of the camera to bring us confronting photo-journalistic images that marshal feelings of horror is well recognised; their importance cannot be underestimated (and on this basis one wonders why we don’t see more images of the true horrors of our war in Afghanistan and Pakistan or of life inside Australia’s concentration camps). But of course there was more going on here than the simple transmission of images. ‘Reality’ touched a particular nerve and had a broad significance, if not also an unconscious register. At one level we might suspect to be at work here a deep-going reaction formation to a core problem for human culture in general: killing for meat. At another, the Four Corners controversy and the practical reaction it has generated is redolent with all the elements of a distinctly late-modern politics of nature and our redefinition of just where we, especially the West, stand in relation to her.

One cannot discount the possibility that humans harbour species guilt over the destruction of animal life for our own life-giving purposes. Certainly we know that dead animals must be turned into ‘meat’ and then again into meals; from the raw to the cooked, and integrated into restrictive systems of meaning and psychologically acceptable forms: any potential horror involved in the production of meat, even in cultures where animals are likened to human kin, can be corralled or sequestered and explained culturally. Killing for life may be the original disavowal; perhaps more acute still in settled civilisations based on the growing of crops and killing for food of domesticated animals―those animal others we come to know closely. As with many unpalatable choices laid out by nature, humans have had to make their often conflicted actions palatable, even ethical, in order to answer to the higher gods and social ‘goods’ to which human natures also aspire.

In modernity, the need to sequester bloody reality has a whole anthropology and sociology of its own―from the generalisation of civilised behaviour from the European courts of kings and queens to ordinary people, and Enlightened views of subjects and bodies leading to a distaste for public displays of blood or torture; to modern diversified societies’ divisions of labour around blood and bodies in trades and professions such as butchery and surgery; to today’s techno-mediated and mega-industrialised production of food for consumer consumption, globalised on the one hand, as in our export of live cattle, and fully sanitised, as in the meat we buy in supermarkets. Blood and guts have almost entirely disappeared from ordinary life (just like our wars, fought secretly or carried out at a distance by high-tech means), and certainly from shop windows, with the demise of butcher shops and with meat even touched up cosmetically on supermarket shelves.

So, hidden from view in our lives in general, animal death―or more particularly our confrontation with the fate of meekness and innocence at our own hands―is very hard to bear, and with the once relatively confident justifications for it beginning to slip away, the rawness of animal death itself tends to come into focus. In other words, the immediate sense of animal innocence and human cruelty is in play, but it is an opening to an enduring wound at the heart of culture.

I think it was something to be relatively proud of that the reaction from animal advocates and the cattle industry, as in Bob Katter’s statements and those of cattlemen and women themselves, was not one of racial accusation against Indonesians. There was no attempt to divert responsibility away from Australia even if Indonesia has latterly found racism in the government’s banning of exports to it alone. In fact, overall there seemed to be considerable sensitivity, albeit with very large commercial interests hovering in the background, to Muslim Indonesia’s halal requirements and the problems of poverty and unequal resources. The closeness of Australia’s north to Australia’s northern neighbour, geographically and in the kind of cross-cultural understanding that may be built via trade itself, was worth noting. And yet for all the attempts by mainstream animal advocates, cattle industry representative, independent MPs and the government, the debate has remained deeply unsettling. The language of animal ‘cruelty’ and its corollary in the ‘humane abattoir’, used by just about all the political players (though not some diehards who accuse the Australian middle class of denying poor Indonesians food), may be an attempt to bridge the nature–culture gap and to act decently, but whether that kind of distinctly ‘modern’ cultural solution will work today is a moot point.

Almost immediately there appeared in the debate the oxymoronic, weirdly redundant notion of cruelty in the slaughterhouse. Certainly there is a distinction to be made: animal death, on the one hand, cruelty through mismanagement, on the other. But it wasn’t merely that kind of cruelty that was exposed to us, and the notion of a humane abattoir sounds to postmodern people, and especially the young, just like Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the humane penitentiary, home to unspeakable cruelty―cruelty built into the notion itself. That modern institution, which like the insane asylum stood at the margins of society, was intensively involved in shaping modern people. The humane abattoir speaks similarly to the question of how animals figure as others to us, and what their autonomous natures and claims to life might be.

The independent MPs, the government and industry representatives believe that stun guns, the redesign of cages and modernisation of abattoirs in general are the solution. Animal suffering would indeed be lessened and many who have rectified the nature–culture faultline in their own lives as committed meat eaters will be content. But this will not settle calls for an end to the live cattle trade from other quarters. Again, much of the argument put against the transport of live animals for meat to other countries has revolved around cruelty. Animal suffering is the focus; conditions on ships and in slaughterhouses remote from Australia the target. But the sources of suffering in this context are both broader and more specific. While regional trade with our populous northern neighbour must be a (reciprocal) given, the vision of wealthy Australia’s mega-ships, huge animals and giant logistical operations that span the globe speak to many of the hubris and anti-nature attitude of growth-addicted global capitalism.

Many young animal activists have taken up Peter Singer’s notion of animal rights. But a much more telling, and historically apt, approach may rest in the critique of contemporary life symbolised in what has been called ‘self-kill vegetarianism’. This idea, that unless the individual is involved in the killing of their meat they will not eat it, does not discount animal killing as such. But it does indicate precisely the distance between the table and ‘meat production’ in our time. It is not likely that this is a practical politics for the mass of people, but it speaks of a hoped-for relationship that honours animals, brings the issue of food and nature close to home, and makes human responsibility an ethical confrontation, not merely a technical solution.

OK. We know that human beings aren’t monkeys (even though we are both primates), and that care and comfort can be provided by non-biologically associated carers. But extreme closeness, constant touching and intimate suckling, which most mothers know create ties of the deepest kind with their children, are hard to recreate away from the actual mother, especially in the earliest weeks and months of the newborn’s life, a period of great intensity that leaves its mark for life. Mothers matter; and they happen to be female.

We also know that the closeness and complexity of this bodily and psychological tie, which goes both ways between mother and child, is implicated in difficult relationships that sometimes turn out to have pathological consequences for either or both parties. This is sometimes pointed to in post-humanist arguments for new, technologically mediated means and relationships for birthing and raising children (children can be scarred for life in heterosexual families; why shouldn’t men be mothers too etc.). But the kinds of difficulties that can grow up between mothers and children would seem to me to be part of the human condition, which is to say one of the risks of being human; one of the many things like sexual love, birth and death that, as we practise them, define us as a very particular kind of primate (one with culture, language, self-awareness, complex sociality). In the main, those relationships don’t turn out to be destructive. Indeed, they are usually a bedrock that helps to sustain whole complex webs of familial and extended familial life and the empathy for the ‘other’ basic to sociality.

The post-humanist view, which is also post-primate, actually, is just one of the self-serving arguments for commercial surrogacy that is currently supporting the farming out of pregnancy and birth to women in various circumstances. Often these women are from third world countries, or third world parts of the United States, and it doesn’t take much to see the truth of it: they are oppressed people with few options, being used by wealthy couples from the West. Other surrogate mothers, especially from the United States (where commercial surrogacy is legal), like many prostitutes post feminism, claim that it is simply their choice, and making money by selling their bodies is a commercial transaction like any other. But many of these women seem no different really from the first group: oppressed and used, though here they have adopted a rather sad notion of individual rights. The typical liberal goal of self-actualisation that usually justifies ‘choice’, whatever it may be, is absent.  ‘Choice’ may be no more than what these women end up doing— ‘choice’ as a post-hoc explanation dressed up morally as if to describe an act of independent will and action.  There may also be women who really do believe in the neo-liberal view of the world as an unrestricted market, where ‘rights’ actually means trading rights, pure and simple; where just about anything goes so long as there is a market for it. But why would we honour that view as a moral one?

In a number of recent television and newspaper depictions of surrogacy, some surrogate mothers do seem to veer towards a form of self-actualisation justification, saying they feel they have a special gift for giving birth (although why they do rather than any other female or mother is never raised). The work of such statements, however, seems mainly pointed at making clear that although these women are accepting payment, their motive is altruistic. In concert, in these same television shows and articles, we are shown how the buyers of women’s gestational services attempt to build caring relationships with the mother. ‘We went every day to see X and hold her hand before the birth’, ‘We sat with her when she had the ultrasound and watched our baby on the screen together’ etc. etc. The ‘altruistic’ commercial surrogate and the caring purchasers of gestational services are two side of the same happy narrative coin.

But there is something murky here. Images of the buyers’ relationship with the surrogate are typically incredibly uncomfortable-looking, as if the new parents just want to get the hell out of there―get on that plane and get home as fast as possible to enjoy the child by themselves in the happy cocoon they have imagined.  Despite the voiceovers that attempt to convince us of the protagonists’ good intentions and sometimes desperate need, there is something deeply perturbing going on. It is written in the images and the narrative: they always involve loss, vulnerability and inequality; the class and cross-cultural differences involved between buyers and sellers are patently obvious. The story inevitably ends with many viewers asking themselves what will the child think when s/he comes to consciousness of that past transaction; what will the real ending of the story be? This is especially slippery as such ponderings are usually against the grain of the meta-narrative that suggests we should be accepting of ‘difference’ and that any reluctance we might have is because we haven’t yet caught up with the cultural revolution happening before our eyes.

We already know it is very difficult for adopted children to accept that their biological mothers gave them up, even if those children consciously accept that as single women their mothers were blamed and shamed and faced intolerable societal pressures. Why then, should a child be expected to be sanguine about their being the object of a commercial exchange, or about a mother who gave them up for personal gain? Of course surrogacy usually involves the use of the gametes of one member or both of the purchasing couple—the man’s, or one of the men’s, usually (but not always), and if there is a woman, then sometimes the woman’s, depending on the status of her fertility. So often at least a part of the child’s genetic and familial line is ensured in the transaction, through the intervention of in vitro fertilisation techniques. In large part, I imagine, it is this that carries those who must be unnerved by the whole process past the psychological hurdles. The child isn’t just an ‘orphan’ picked up at the body shop. And together with the hefty fee paid for the service, a sense of just entitlement prevails. This of course plays within and against experienced desires and projected pleasures, which carry people forward, though those desires and imaginings now have much fuller rein exactly because the new fertilisation technologies exist.

As we live in a liberal democratic society in which democracy has come to mean openness to individuals’ personal rights and needs, with virtually no examination of what they might mean, the campaign for commercial surrogacy, as with other forms of ‘self-fulfillment’ and commercial transaction around body parts and processes, is readily conceived as one against mere superstitions and oppressive labellings. A sense of just entitlement takes off as a militant assertion of one’s ‘democratic’ rights. One’s ‘right’ to a child is put across as natural and fundamental, despite the fact it is only possible by virtue of a new class of technologies that promise to transcend human embodiment altogether. Politically, the problem is a conflation of political and basic human rights with personal desire, and with the limitless horizon of post-human engineering. The childishness of this vision of democracy and of cultural value is at times breathtaking.

So radically sensitised as we are to the claims of difference and suffering upon us, and to the imperative of individual self-fulfillment, Western populations have lost the capacity to make good judgements about the sources of our human being and how they may restrict what it is that we should desire. Sociologists, philosophers, psychologists, have long observed how human desire abounds and is in all cultures controlled; today any such basic propensity to boundlessness is supercharged by the high-tech revolution, especially in the biological techno-sciences. It is a cultural contradiction that for the things we want―often the most cherished things like babies and intimacy―we are prepared to sacrifice what arguably makes them thus: in the case of commercial surrogacy, the mother, and all she has stood for; and deeply embodied social relationships that do not take the abstracted form of money transactions.

Alison Caddick

Wikileaks is everywhere. The fall-out from the recent release of US diplomatic cables is everywhere causing havoc, raising blood pressure, embarrassing petty local upstarts and great powers all at the same time, and emboldening impressive demonstrations of solidarity by hackers, A-list celebrities, representatives of the ‘new class’ everywhere and civil rights lawyers. Julian Assange’s arrest, and the legitimacy of his actions as a member of the media, albeit of a new form, in the face of US threats to silence him by one means or another, do indeed require action: broad support for his mission to bring greater ‘truth’ to dealings between governments and their peoples; and for the rule of law, rather than the lynching mob (Palin) or the Machiavellian ‘conspiracy’ (Clinton), to come into play.

We can expect to see much more of both, however—crude assertions of power and legitimacy and the right to take violent retribution, in which camp so far Julia Gillard sits; and the Machiavellian playing out of strategies to trap and undermine Assange, to which, of course, we will not really be privy, but which in this now heightened atmosphere of conspiracy we will tend to see everywhere. And this is almost certainly where the Powers will ultimately win out. While being collectively alert to the possibility of ‘conspiracy’ may seem politically responsible, which is one of Assange’s aims, it may be this mindset itself that will make it hard, ultimately, to tell truth from lies, reality from fabrication. Assange is giving the public the opportunity to ‘see for themselves’, rather have others interpret for them, what is ‘really going on’ behind closed doors. Unfortunately, conspiracy theories by their nature mire us in more conspiracy, flooding the scene with undecidables.

The leaks themselves are being hailed in various guises, depending on who is doing the talking. As pointed out by Jonathan Holmes, Assange himself knows well enough that many of the leaks show no actual wrong doing, and his interest in revealing them has more to do with his overarching political philosophy (more of which in a moment) than the specific information in them. Needless to say, many of the cables are very substantial indeed in their content and are both politically explosive and revealing of attitudes and actions of profound importance. For Australia, perhaps, the most significant are the cables that reveal US and Australian government anxiety about the rising power of China, and the expression of US interests in maintaining a sphere of influence in the Asia-Pacific region. In this context, we not only get to see Australia’s pathetic subservience to the United States in the likes of ALP power broker Mark Arbib (and many others); we must also come to see more clearly just how important Australia is likely to be in this particular strategy, and how integrated into the US military/intelligence complex we may have to become for it to succeed (see Richard Tanter’s article in this issue of Arena Magazine).

But the underlying story in all this is not the content but the form—the form of the vehicle that brings the revelations in this mass (apparently) uninterpreted form, and the claims that are being made of it. As various commentators have pointed out, Assange is no simple whistleblower. Indeed he appears to have an enunciated philosophical/political position, which is basically that through mass breakthroughs of raw information the ‘conspiracies’ that governments routinely enact to protect the interests of a certain few will be undermined. He appears to be acting on the basis of a mathematical formula, worked out by him, whereby the conspiratorial cabals, which he conceives as relating to each other in terms of information exchanges via a pattern of networks, can be chopped up and incapacitated (through breakouts across established links) such that real parity in knowledge and power might, in theory at least, be enacted.

In his recent article in The Australian Assange describes what he is doing as ‘scientific journalism’, or providing readers with the ‘truth’―the raw data―so, as mentioned above, they can make up ‘their own minds’ (though as to what exactly it is not entirely clear). This immediately sounds an awfully naive note, because journalism and truth have never enjoyed a one-to-one relationship. It is not as if they ever could have: journalism―even exposés and investigative reporting―always involves an element of interpretation. It is in the nature of writing and publishing. Even in the contexts into which Wikileaks’ cables have tumbled or been placed (and let’s not forget that there is a strategy here) the cables do not come innocent as a little lamb. There isn’t much in this world that is raw data or unadulterated truth. But the juxtaposition of truth and science here perhaps has little to do with any standard of ‘scientific truth’ which suggests itself in this grab of terms. Perhaps ‘scientific’ means nothing more in Assange’s thinking than journalism empowered by his mathematical estimation of the quantity of ‘real’ information needed to break the conspirators’ system, which in turn is entirely dependent on the power on the techno-scientific, that is, the computer and the internet.

One can completely understand why so many people are beginning to hail Assange as a culture hero: he hates duplicity and is suspicious of power, and in the face of retribution that could only have been anticipated right from the start, he is determined and personally brave. But beyond that the celebration is resonant because he appears to have harnessed the internet in ways that already confirm and compound a culture belief: that the internet offers a break both into a new world and into a better one. We see it offering ‘truth’ and ‘science’ here, for example. It also confirms and compounds a growing political sensibility, or two potentials of the one nihilistic political culture: in the face of an impregnable power not listening to and unaccountable to the population, we face either individualist anarchist actions that promise to pierce that power, or continued deep apathy about politics and the potential for change, which is embedded in our culture’s bleak sense that (oppressive) power is everywhere.

But do all of Assange’s supporters really understand the world they live in through the framework of the network that is his fundamental viewpoint? And just what does this viewpoint bequeath in terms of a vision of society, the person and the moral life? Unless the network is relativised against whole realms of complex social intercourse, it tends to flatten a view of the social and sees politics in the thinnest of terms. Of course some do grasp Assange’s challenge in the way he intends: not just to this political ‘centre’ or to that one, against this ideology or that, but against both a centred society as such, and against interpretative institutions in general. At least this is one promise of the internet: radical transparency and a decentring of society—as it is often celebrated and in some respects is experienced by all of us when we sit down at the computer. There is no question that the internet facilitates new lines of interconnection that bypass old centres of (different kinds of) power: nation-states and universities, for example.

But why the form should be seen as innocent―as providing transparent, ‘scientific’, or necessarily liberatory ‘information’ untainted by culture or ideology is another thing entirely. And why a model of relationships built on information should encompass our understanding of knowledge or of politics is disturbing. For one it says nothing of the larger social complexes that inform contemporary politics; it certainly does not necessarily offer a critique of capitalism or its contemporary techno-scientific variant, and may only issue in bold but highly individuated acts of disobedience. In particular, it cannot offer any insight into its own formation, by which I do not mean its rational construction as a tool and technology (mathematical, engineered), but as a socio-cultural form that has emerged within the techno-scientific university and is itself intimately associated through the work of the intellectually trained with a new kind of hyper-individualist sociality and as switch-key of a super-charged capitalism.

As the world moves into what seems to be a political phase of response to the GFC, where labour parties are de-legitimised as mere clones of neo-liberal conservative parties and conservative parties bring out big guns to rein in spending; where students may again be taking to the streets; and in general where the political, social and environmental prospects for the future are radically unclear―interventions like Wikileaks’ will combine with a growing sentiment that ‘power’ in general must be taken down. The trouble is we need interpretation (rather than mere information) more than ever, indeed to identify exactly what this ‘power’ consists in―which is a question that was answered before being asked by Assange and others who see it through the lens of information and conspiracy.

Alison Caddick

But of course this is part of the problem. Supporters gather the crumbs thrown their way and their identification with this cornerstone institution of Australian life, or broader hopes for an ethic of co-operation, commits them again to vote Labor, leaving them ever more prone to cynicism and negativity when Labor fails to understand them, again. Other voters of course seem to accept that politics is about marginal seats and swinging votes, with hip-pocket considerations uppermost in this calculative approach to politics. These voters may be cynical too, but they will make this corrupt form of politics at least work for them.

At one level it is clear enough that left-wing cynicism and accusations of Labor irrelevance have emerged because of Labor’s failure on climate change under Rudd. The longer standing criticism gathering steam for many years is the so-called convergence of the parties, which is really a general shift to the Right—by those old standards of political difference—of both major parties, with Labor perhaps shifting furthest.

But it is still common, in letters to the editor and in conversations with a broad range of people, to hear a tone of incredulity; just why Labor has moved the way it has seems never to be really understood, and never to be satisfactorily explained. People are incredulous not just because they don’t understand what the shift means (and some sense it means something beyond the range of their common sense), but perhaps even more because Labor itself seems not to grasp what is obvious to others—that the party’s would-be goals and principles, as we still imagine them to be, are practically undercut by its actions and policies. This seems fair enough when you think of Rudd’s ETS solution to climate change that would have funded polluters and turned carbon to profit-making; or Gillard’s education revolution that continues to fund private schools so grossly and insults teachers by offering them monetary incentives to do their best by students; or that deeply disturbing humanitarian intervention into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. Solutions, revolutions and humanitarian interventions have turned out to be their very opposite. (See Bill Hannan, and Andrew Lattas and Barry Morris in this issue.)

For the person who looks on in disbelief this mismatch is disturbing, but it is indeed to the other sense of the ground shifting beneath their feet that we should turn. In another register these same observers must know that Labor has gone down the neo-liberal path—Labor generally makes no bones about it; we know that the market matters to Labor—we have heard it clearly in its defence of any number of policy initiatives; we know that there is this thing called ‘modern Labor’, which Hawke and Keating put on track and which has been unfolding since Whitlam. No one inside the party is trying to hide the fact that modern Labor has adjusted itself to a globalised neo-liberal reality. It has felt the power of the high-tech economy oriented to consumption and individualist satisfactions. As Labor itself makes plain, any social vision it has is utterly tied to growth—understood economistically and universalised as the greatest good from which all others flow and to which all social goods must contribute. No wonder unions now sit down with business in ways they never could have in the past. Today their interests seem self-evidently to be the same. (See Phil Cleary in this issue.)

So is it just a question of these fundamental-change deniers, that so many of us are seeing the Labor Party for what it is, and either getting fully on board the mega-engine of high-tech growth or alternatively, voting Green as many have and may well now do permanently? Has it just been too hard, too gut-wrenching to admit that the good old party, once and for all, is finally dead, or certainly dying? Or is it also because the prospect held out by modern Labor at its heart is in fact unbelievable?

Consciousness of social change is a complex, often self-denying state—one simultaneously of knowing and not knowing, of living change but also fearing or denying it; of witnessing one level of life and action but also sensing change at other levels of being that haven’t yet fully revealed themselves or been integrated into belief or rationality. The neo-liberal prospect (whether the Liberals’ version or Labor’s) of an exponentially expanding society of hyper-individualist consumers built on a-social market principles thought fundamentally not to be humanly controllable is a dystopian vision if ever there was one. Why would we want to face this vision squarely? And then it might also take some hard work to do so, yet this too is denied us as the neo-liberal university, and especially Labor’s vision of education, was thoroughly re-geared towards economism and high-tech productivism. There is nothing (and no interpretive position either) outside of the economy. What is left to Labor, in that other guise as expert technocrat manager, is merely to most efficiently deliver the social goods it believes can be engineered from this market’s bounty. This is the crying shame of modern Labor’s difference from the Liberals. All the good things about those who continue to support the Labor Party, their attachment to deeper values of care and co-operation, have nothing necessarily to do with modern Labor’s core attachments.

So it is not that ‘means’ have perverted the message: that Labor has chosen the wrong methods to deliver its education program, or to deliver its humanitarian goals, and that it is these that need to be changed, as many seem to hope will be possible. Rather, Labor has come to share the same basic model of society, the same basic goals: it has been carried along on the curl of a mighty techno-economic wave and believes it will garner a social dividend from it. For modern Labor, practically speaking, this is what the social is. This is not to say that Labor politicians and the broad array of its supporters don’t value a fuller experience of the social than the notion of a dividend implies. It’s just that the Labor Party is essentially uninterested in the question as a political (or philosophical) one.

On the one hand, politics is about managing the economy and delivering the dividend; on the other Labor already knows what the people want, which is to go on living the way they do, if in ways bigger and better than before. Politics is about technical know-how, with citizen-subjects lost to meaningful awareness of the social changes filtering into life and reshaping their aspirations, as surely none of the central political players have any purchase on the social meanings and consequences of the techno-economic shift, and no inclination to discover them.

The question of just how society is constituted always returns in periods of far-reaching social change. For the present Labor is not questioning its frame of reference.

* * *

As the Greens win in Melbourne and their vote across many seats exceeds expectations, we may not be seeing much of this kind of preparedness to search deeply either. A good part of the vote will be part of that bitter anti-Labor protest mentioned above. A good part of it will not reflect a single thought about the nature of the social, or even see the main task in the face of the neo-liberal market as the reassertion of its primacy. There will be plenty of technocrats within Green ranks, explicit or implicit, of the mind that technology will solve the planet’s woes. But at base the question of growth and alternatives to the version of it we already know is in play. The question of the social form in which we live is pressing beneath the surface of contradictions confusingly experienced—how to live well without consumerist notions of what that entails or, most recently, how a population might express itself in a degraded liberal-democratic form in which the cornerstone parties had nothing to say about the most pressing issues of our time.

More immediately perhaps, a fundamental valuation of the natural world is being held up as a counter to the economic vision associated with modernity, which is to say of either the Left or the Right, and which is just so out of date. As an autonomous realm of value vis-à-vis the techno-economic, and of potential new meanings for cultures positively oriented to the future, any practical defence of it will draw in questions of social being and organisation, and they won’t take the form of distributive questions primarily, and not at all in terms of ‘dividends’.

Alison Caddick

Of course this isn’t the reality for every teenager, but the research from various quarters is convincing in building a general picture of a trend. Left-liberal critics have, over years now, argued that the neo-liberal market has set this trend in motion, with advertising and markets being key factors; a story of exploitation through the selling power of sex. Conservatives typically pinpoint the issue as the moral bankruptcy of a certain ‘postmodern’ coterie who promote porn as liberating or, more mundanely, simply an aid to good sex. Needless to say, the conservative position neglects the fact that neo-liberalism has indeed unleashed an amoral market calculus in just about every sphere of personal and social life—the same one whose economic growth they celebrate—and if there is a morally bankrupt ‘postmodern’ understanding of sex and porn, it hasn’t emerged out of a vacuum.

Pornification refers not just to a revaluation of sex and sexual freedom—the message of the 1970s—but to the mainstreaming of porn in raunch, the style typical of Ralph and other mid-level-porn men’s magazines and represented over and over in sporting magazines, bill-board advertising and television shows revelling in the license now given to a certain range of men’s fantasies. Hard porn is certainly an object for both sets of critics mentioned above. But it is the filtering down of the pornographic gaze and attitude of barely contained salaciousness that is the larger cultural presence, and which is of special concern when we’re talking about children and the forming of sexual attitudes.

The idea in psychoanalysis and social theory that fantasy is important in individual and social life has by now filtered down into popular culture. Few would deny that how we think and act in the world is at some level mediated by fantasy. But the cultural inclination to see this as meaning our sexual fantasies should be ‘freed’, so that our unique needs are expressed, or amorally cultivated as an exploration of a performative self (sex is a complete construction), are already tired ideas. They certainly offer no critical help in grasping the meaning of pornification as a broad-ranging phenomenon. Sexual fantasy has jumped individual experience and the self’s individual projection in fantasy to return as an ideological object in the pornification of society as a whole. As there is no generally accepted social or cultural constraint in operation around the expression of sexual desire, we don’t know where to turn for justifications to limit it or why we should be cautious when it takes on a public life of its own.

Most of us register the greater presence of porn today, both its greater accessibility and the libertarian justifications put forward for it by business organisations like the Eros Foundation. But how we engage with pornography can no longer be contained within the terms of earlier understandings, where debate about porn assumed its limited circulation, a private sphere, a self capable of sustained reflection upon its actions and a market where the circulation of images and identities for sale had limits. Today porn circulates ceaselessly and is virtually ubiquitous in expanding networks of digital media, colonising and commodifying the body, sexuality and the private.

* * *

Germaine Greer was recently pilloried in The Monthly by Louis Nowra. As some feminist commentators noted, it might have been more appropriate to ask a woman to comment on The Female Eunuch’s 40-year anniversary (one might add, especially someone equipped to analyse Greer’s texts seriously and, even better, the meaning of the whole feminist, and now post-feminist enterprise). Nowra so badly missed the point about Greer, and The Female Eunuch, it was almost ludicrous. He thinks she doesn’t really like women, a view echoed by some younger women intellectuals over the years as part of their critique of second wave feminism’s emphasis on structure and patriarchy. But this is a view clearly not subscribed to by lots of women who see in her work a fearless advocacy on their behalf. Nowra also ridiculously criticised The Female Eunuch for not having got women into a better place over forty years—for having not got the future right—when surely its major purpose was to show how masculine power has worked to shape the lives and subjectivities of women. Does Nowra think that would have ceased to be the case?

One of Greer’s shocking observations that has always stuck with me is that it will be hard for men and women to achieve equality because of there being a hierarchy of those who penetrate and those who are penetrated. This is one of the things those younger intellectual women hated: the idea that women may be always-already vulnerable. Three other, not unconnected, contributions include Greer’s early observation of the tutoring of young girls in ‘how-to-look-after-your boyfriend’-type sex articles in girls’ magazines. Another was her rejection of the idea that a man who becomes a ‘woman’ is a woman. The third was her idea that the vagina is being replaced by other mere receptacles. Of course there is hyperbole in all this. But as people are more generally starting to worry about the pornification of society, devaluing of girls, the often criminal antics of footballers, with Ralph playing on prime time everywhere, it’s possible that Greer has a good nose for some of the brute-masculinising trends in our culture.

But should we be, as Nowra seems to be, worried about the kind of tough talk about sex that feminism itself has bequeathed us? Does it contribute to a general coarsening of sexual talk and imagery? Is it implicated in the pornification of society?

Of course feminists have been in an unenviable position in relation to the ‘exposés’ they have mounted in the spirit of laying bare gendered structures of power. ‘Making the personal political’ on one definition is pornographic itself, where practices once embedded in private life are flattened out and displayed on the cultural surface of conscious reality. Whether it’s domestic violence, incest or rape, the content is unseemly. But how is the unpalatable to be raised if not by breaking certain types of taboo?

An argument about the flow-on effects or unintended consequences of talking tough about sex might be applied to post-feminism too: if sex and gender are performative, in this view porn is just another sexual game, sophisticatedly understood as constructed in ironic narratives that only pious fools take seriously. But it follows that men’s-club-type fantasies and mass ‘sluttification’ are simply ‘what men want’, with lap dancers and swimsuit models enjoying being in on the joke. So billboards for men’s clubs are put up beside primary schools, while any basis in thinking as to why this might be a problem has been so undermined that those wanting them removed are called prudes.

* * *

Critics of feminism who blame the tough talk of feminist critique for adding to a culture of degradation and obscenity miss the deeper change that it going on around us. Older understandings of sex, desire and gender are being gathered up within new relations of power that draw upon older debates but also transform them. What is new here are our culture’s hyper-individualist belief in autonomy, a deep-going visual fetish fed by high-gloss advertising and screen culture, and the high-tech accessibility of porn; the old is inescapably patriarchal, but recreating itself in new forms. What might feel like an uncontrollable contagion moving through society is in fact a social process working its way through culturally authorised practices along old faultlines in our species being, part of which is that we are sexed and gendered and have an ambivalent attitude to our ‘animality’.

It’s unlikely that we are going to get over this ambivalence or complexity around nature/culture, an always volatile anchor point of sexual relations and the raising of children. Cognisant of this, not only should markets in sex and sexualised markets be restricted but moral discourse should be re-valued as a necessary adjunct to adult autonomous decision making.

Second-wave feminism was strongly focused on the question of women’s autonomy in the sense of women being able to act on the basis of their own decision making, when it was considered that women’s capacity for serious moral deliberation had been denied in historical patriarchy. This was itself a modern notion of autonomy; the rights of men, to their own conscience and sphere of personhood, applied to women. Post-feminism has been far more radical in its practices and understandings of autonomy, not unlike the culture in which it has emerged and flourished (although a reversion to young women calling themselves feminists seems to be underway).

In the context of the break-up of the modern social structures in the post-war period and the rise of neo-liberalism, autonomy can no longer be individual in the sense of the person exercising serious moral thought, including individual choice, about a taken-for-granted world. Rather, women, like everyone else, now experience a shifting world offering radically new kinds of choices built on technical means for dispensing with prior physical and social boundaries and the obligations that once attached to them.

Porn via high-tech massification of product, in a context of autonomy from cultural constraint, is exactly one such break out from obligation. It is also a break out from moral thoughtfulness as viewers of its content, as with pornification generally, are likely to believe it’s ‘just fantasy’. Yet the figures produced for and justified in porn culture will act back with the force of social facts, defining girls and women and enforcing their identities.

Some critical version of feminism, attuned to the new, will still be necessary.

Alison Caddick

Sure, the departure of Howard had left the Liberal Party bereft of a leader who, unlike Turnbull, could listen to his backbenchers and still take the strong stance, aggressively welding his team together (the success of his wedge politics creating a cast of near-acolytes). But what might have seemed some kind of rudderless chaos for a while after the election was only the beginning of a much larger fracturing. Turnbull has gone down not merely exposing the cracks but forcing the ugly duckling out through them and into the bright light of day.

As the immediate politics of the situation played out, there were in fact few choices. Even though Joe Hockey’s idea of repackaging climate change policy as a matter of conscience seemed to fit the political mood—faith-based policy, policy on the basis of belief, not ‘rationality’ or pragmatism—it was a sign of policy weakness, as well as possibly meaning defeat for the conservative push. With the dandyish Kevin Andrews having warmed up the audience, the ‘hairy-chested’ Howard-man-man Abbott was the true heir apparent. Addicted to getting their way, impassioned about the role of markets yet hunkering down round some notion of a base culture that would provide the ‘values’ by which to live, galvanised, still, around a border politics fuelled by and fuelling fear, the conservatives recognised their man and best bet for market differentiation vis-a-vis Rudd’s moderated neo-liberalism.

Around half the parliamentary Liberal Party now looks to Abbott to aggressively pursue their climate change scepticism, a stance taken seriously nowhere in the world except the fundamentalist Bible Belt of the United States and Australia. What the other half of the Liberal Party will do is not clear. Playing politics around such a basic division, winning the numbers just either side of a fifty-fifty split on ‘matters of belief’ seems impossible for a party needing to set stable policy directions. One can’t see the party being purged of its conservatives by its liberals: the latter aren’t as good at the politics as the party Right; they were, after all, seduced by Howard, losing any moral high ground they might have occupied, and they may no longer have any ‘pull’ in the community anyway around any residual Deakinite individualism which some might wish to resuscitate. Howard and the neo-liberal market effectively trashed that tradition, but also, the electorate may be unable to understand the difference implied by this image of the true liberal or be unlikely to take it seriously as either ethical or very different from the on-the-ground individualism offered by Rudd. Whatever the liberal critique of corporatist forms of government and their suppression of strong individual moralities, which has to be given some credence in history, the guiding concern in the outlook of all the major political currents remains the individual’s relation to the market, and in the present context most people live that as the power they feel when they make an individual consumer choice.

George Monbiot is pretty effectively arguing in the Copenhagen context that the political world will split in future between the ‘restrainers’ and the ‘enlargers’; another death knell for left and right social and terminological divisions hailing from the 19th century. But the question goes also to an understanding of the individual and the nature of the social: why restrain? On what basis might we restrain? What benefits and pleasures might ‘restraining’ bring? It is not ‘just’ a question of possibly saving the planet, but of how and why our ‘humanity’ requires whatever it is the notion ‘restraint’ might be straining to signify. Is it really just ‘restraint’ that we should be aiming for? Certainly its justification should not be mere survival, nor should it signify mere sustainability. Let’s hope it doesn’t suggest a social technology to make us behave better environmentally. Let’s hope, rather, that it involves a better knowledge of ourselves qua human beings: a better knowledge of the relation we need to constitute vis-a-vis the natural world and ‘others’ of all kinds if we are to remain within the bounds of what we define as necessary to our humanity. Unfortunately, ‘restraint’ remains within the orbit of a market-dominated paradigm—where what we must give up is what we might otherwise want, or be called to want. The point is to get to that place where not only do we not want it, but it is no longer a question because a fullness of living and being emanates from elsewhere.

This is to move way too quickly beyond the woes of the Liberal Party, but the enormous gulf represented even in these few paragraphs on the politics of reaction, on the one hand, and a possible opening to something very new, on the other, only underlines the moment we have arrived at. As the small island nations are making clear at Copenhagen, as the demonstrators led by Mary Robinson have been impressing, as the science has been making clear for a long time, fundamental choices are at stake. The Liberals’ conniptions, and ultimately reactionary choice of leader and orientation, point to the significant dangers that accompany periods of social threat, even when the lineaments of change have been evident for decades; even when it has been pointed out many times that it is neo-liberalism and the market under post modern conditions that have sown the seeds of destruction of the very social practices their loudest proponents wish to protect.

Eric Hobsbawn, in Age of Extremes, describes a fundamental shift that took place between the first and second world wars. While the First World War was the first modern war—total and technologised—it was as if no one really understood the powers that fed it. Leaders, and the people, still believed that an end to war would mean a return to what had been before. At war’s end the relative peace of the previous near century, remarkable prosperity and relatively settled social arrangements were what people harked back to; world war was an aberration, never to happen again. Yet radical cultural change had been filtering into pre-consciousness through the prescient art movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, just as science and industry were merging in novel ways in the first flowering of the techno-scientific paradigm (the successes of industrial chemistry and the German laboratory system). The period harked back to during the war had already been in flux. Abstract society, predicated upon a new sense of ungroundedness and a culture much less restrained by natural limits, had been felt, sometimes celebrated, certainly artistically and scientifically explored, just as fantasies of stability and rational achievement seemed to promise a return, rather than allow that the conditions of existence had actually shifted under the feet of the classes, bourgeois and working alike.

It would take another twenty years after the First World War, twenty years of preparation for war, worldwide depression, and war against Nazi reaction, for a shift in perspective facing towards the future rather than the past. For Hobsbawn, this ‘post-war consensus’ around Keynesian economics and the welfare state (broadly understood), seems to have been a period of realignment, of system catch-up, so that a more thorough, and perhaps more self-conscious modernity might emerge cognisant of the profound changes not only wrought by war but by the social and technological forces that had shaped it.

Of course, that consensus was exactly what neo-liberalism rose up against later in the century, just as the second surge of techno-scientific success supercharged the economy and produced unheard of material prosperity both in the West and beyond. We also know now that the forces and politics of material abundance, and more recently decadence, depended on environmental conditions and resources that make the ‘necessity’ of modernity and its heirs (‘necessity’ as understood in all the varieties of modernist Progress-based social theory, including Marxism) highly questionable. Taken to the brink by the latest techno-scientific surge, carried in the subject form of the hyper-individuated consumer, on the one hand, and the networked agent, on the other, the world is in fact in a very different circumstance than that described by Hobsbawn as the thirty year 20th-century war period. The need to face up to the conditions both of our humanity and a future no longer dependent on the rape of the earth presents a far greater challenge. But just as Hobsbawn outlines, with considerable delicacy, the commitments and hopes of the different groupings influential at that time, we face a period of system mismatch and cultural misunderstanding, of disorientation as the forces in play work their way through social life, and the possibility of grasping their meaning remains, as always, difficult—only to be realised within a protracted process of transformation.

The overall narrative to which Pusey, and then others, referred was first and foremost about recovering the Australia nation.  This would have to be the shell for any appeal to Australians, but now turned away from Howards ‘paranoid’ version to a softer nationalism, which could be grown naturally enough upon the bedrock of who we Australians really are.  Pusey’s descriptors included ‘secular’, ‘sharing’, ‘national’ and ‘practical’.  We are at heart, he said, Benthamites – utilitarians, not taken with theoretical or spiritual claims or absolute values, a common sense people with, it would seem, a modest self-interest that had been perverted by neo-liberalism.  In relation to climate change, a cornerstone issue for this future politics, the message must not be overwhleming.  The ‘urgent present’ of current campaigning must be re-narrativised in ‘lived time’ drawing on our ‘historical past’.  Constructing recognisable stories about ourselves that draw on those distinctive traits, we will be able to see ourselves as agents with a collective story at stake.

Overall the conference, over two days, was stimulating.  Not every paper-giver was as upbeat about the possibilties, with Green activists of different organisational alleigances more or less depressed by the hugeness, if not impossibility, of the task ahead.  But the obvious fact of people being engaged, and so many of them being young, was testimony to sense abroad that politics is again on the agenda.  Indeed, it is everywhere being discussed how we might reform our democracies, re-orientate markets, change values.  The emerging ferment is evident in the pages of this issue of Arena Magazine, living by its brief as an arena of a broad Left.  On the one hand, Tom Nairn positively assesses Rudd’s new social democracy from the vantage point of a dismal showing by British Labour, while Guy Rundle, on the other, sees Rudd as a ‘far from emancipatory’ micromanager of comtemporary life.  Andrew Thackrah discusses an influential new British book on climate change strategies and new possibilities for the citizen, as opposed to the consumer, while Russell Marks, countering the ‘racist’ accusation in relation to Indian student attacks, draws on some of the ‘new nationalism’ arguments put at the Deakin conference.  Alternatively, in a virtual how-to build your own, Race Mathews argues for a different tradition of worker co-operatives, while Ted Trainer and John Martin posit a ‘simpler way’ with a rural or close-to-nature orientation, as a kind of lived transitional practice.

The Deakin conference wasn’t nearly so broad a church.  There was a strong sense of an already forming policy orientation, and this has been evident since in The Australian‘s series ‘What’s Left?’.  Also led off by David Mcknight, it has had contributions from a range of writer activists, unionists, and politicians, with Robert Manne providing a broad politico-philosophical framework, also championing the new social democracy idea, as already clear in his writings in The Monthly since Rudd’s essay in that publication in March this year.  No new party is being suggested by this loosely associated group, so it would seem that the task may be to create a think tank or develop a forum that will provide tapped-in ideas and create a culture of new thinking to bolster Labor’s efforts, especially in relation to climate change.

But the rush to policy around a notion of ‘values’ is only partly reassuring, while the rush to confirm the said national trait of utilitarian (no theory, optional spirit and plain practical common sense) is not at all.  While Pusey’s observations may be empirically based, one couldn’t help wondering about both the religion that was once – not so long ago – a common feature of Anglo-Celtic Australian life (when spirit and moral absolute matched), and the many faith-based communities that have come to reside in Australia since the Anglo-Celt’s great secularisation.  And quite apart from this, given that the values and ideals evinced in the long period of neo-liberal ascendancy appeared to have their own transcendent quality, and given that utilitarianism may be a key undergirding of neo-liberal common sense, references back to some typical Benthamite Australian, rather than a break into something actually new, seems likely to be a hollow echo of a need rather than a meaning-laden call to change.

Robert Manne’s framing piece in the ‘What’s Left?’ series provides a larger canvas for this discussion of value and of theory, where some seem to think values can be egged into reality and theory dispenses with because all good people already know the answers.  Manne commences with the French Revolution and the values of liberty and equality (he neglects fraternity) which, he says, set the whole liberal ball rolling and around which the dominant perversions of 20th-century politics were played out: communism in its pursuit of equality denying liberty, and Nazism in its communalist fantasy denying equality on the basis of racialist ideology.  As the century proceeds, the two men left standing – social democracy and neo-liberalism – remain committed essentially to liberty, though of different ilks, with very different outcomes for the question of equality.  All the same, rejecting extremes of earlier communalist fantasies, and now in the death throes of neo-liberalism, those two values, liberty and equality, remain the pole stars of true democracy, indeed ‘social democracy’.

Social democracy in this view is social liberalism, not democratic socialism, and capitalism is simply not a target.  Neo-liberalism certainly is, but the competitive basis of capitalism itself, the forms of utilitarianism it has spawned, its fundamental counter to substantive equality, and indeed its denial of freedom of many peoples in many parts of the world, is simply left out of the equation.  In fact in this key article in a series called ‘What’s Left?’, which is an historical survey, albeit brief, of the key moments of Western political history, and now the key issues of the day, no mention whatsoever is made of ‘capitalism’.

This is intriguing.  The first thing to observe is that Manne is a political theorist, not in any way a social theorist.  The form of society, the means by which people are integrated into the collective life of a social form, the way culture constitutes us historically as significantly different different types of people over time – picket fence individualists (normalised subjects) in modernity, transgressive boundary-crossers (autononous actors) in postmodernity – is not on his radar.  And so any understanding of how these culturqal forms, embedded in deep structures of social and individual experience, underpin and play out in relation tot he valeus of the time and questions of the day is mightily restricted.

Those people with left histories now hopping on board this social democratic train may be deeply contrite about the role played by communism in the radical denial of both liberty and equality in actually existing socialism, and desperate for action in the face of climate change, but they may also be indulging others in writing a very partial history of the modern period.  The values of liberty and equality in Manne’s piece are themselves disconnected from their roots in the rise of modern capitalism and the form of life and power it implied; just as left struggles for 100 years are given no mooring in the depredations of extreme class conditions under domestic capitalism or colonial oppression; just as contemporary assumption about what individuals desire and feel they deserve seem to be denied specific analysis, perhaps for fear, ironically, of our utilitarian bent being upset by ‘too much theory’ and the expectation that good people will simply respond to good values.

There’s no doubting that politically a break into new consciousness has to be made, and that it will be in part arbitrary.  Fear, logic or intuition: a break has to be made from the claims and chains on consciousness that the form of society has over our being (which is never total).  But we must not shy away from a deep account  of the nature of that being, which is always historically re-constituted, and which can help to account for the difficulties in carrying through good programs on the basis of good values that others don’t share, or not yet.  Narratives are one thing, but structural accounts of the specific nature of contemporary social forms offer the more solid ground for working those narratives out.  In this case, while a certain practical attitude may define something about Australian life and national culture, the idea that some past good Australianness can be dug up and appealed to, as if our goodness was simply perverted by ‘neo-liberalism’, is likely to miss the constitutional commitment both of Rudd and the population to a utilitarianism now fed by the expectations of a post-modern market and high-tech solutions to our myriad problems.  If Manne could not name capitalism in his short history, resting entirely on a notion of neo-liberalism to do his work, this must be because it is seen primarily as a political philosophy, which has engineered a system, rather than an efflorescence of deep trends in the meshing of intellectual technique and capitalist development over centuries.

But Leser also neatly put the two sides of what he could only presume was Garrett’s dilemma: the desire to act and bring about ‘real’ change means having to do what politicians do: work with what they’ve got, the art of the possible. He notes the competing pressures on Garrett — the controversies and decisions he inherited, the legal constraints under which he operates, the legitimate competition of different interests, and so on, against Garrett’s putative, ‘real’ values. It all sounds reasonable. Garrett himself actually gives nothing away, repeating the well-rehearsed line about now being a member of the ALP and government, and being bound by the rules of Party and Cabinet. He says nothing about the ethics of his situation or his conscience, or the alternative choices he might have made. No doubt staying mum on this point is advisable talking to the media, but the lack of moral seriousness in the answer can only make him pathetic.

Perhaps the more interesting reference in this personalised vignette is to the larger dilemma in which so many people find themselves today. Their relationship to the given political process may be exemplified in the inadequacies of Garrett’s situation. Garrett wants to ‘really do something’, so he chooses a parliamentary party that has ‘real’ power. He is ‘forced’ to as no amount of back-biting from the sidelines can, in the normal course of things, really carry through specific change. We too must vote; and it makes sense that we channel our opinions and values through to the organ of our choosing, and ultimately to government (whether ‘our party’ wins or loses), as the institutional endpoint of our multiple deliberations.

In a parliamentary democracy, we at some level accept that constraints on our personal views will operate, and we in part accept that as the cost of ‘civilised’ or ‘tolerant’ society. Change, when it is indicated in our political choices, will move relatively slowly. When revolution was in the air, social democracy or social forms of liberalism coined the notion ‘gradualism’. Progressive change, even socialistic in its intentions, would move at a pace that was non-destructive, and, in an important sense, processually democratic. (Of course the ‘democratic’ part of liberal democracy would never have come into being if it had not been for revolution, or at least mass extra-parliamentary action — either as motor of specific institutional changes, like male and later female suffrage, or as instrument of fear in the hearts of the respectable middle classes whose consciences, under pressure, could be pricked towards instituting ‘social policy’.)

The tragedy is that Garrett seems unable, actually, to get anything more ‘done’ than if he was still protesting from the sidelines. His options, if he is in fact still Green at heart, are radically locked up. Similarly, while we voted Labor because Mr Rudd promised real action on the looming emergency of climate change, we are locked into a crippled political process. Rather than a policy that makes a real contribution to the reduction of carbon emissions, we have the cruel joke of the ETS, which promises to reduce emissions by 5 per cent by 2020, while providing discounts and loopholes to industries of the worst carbon-emitting kind. We want action, but in some way unbeknown to us as ordinary voters, government is radically beholden to interests beyond our democratic control. How could Garrett, and how could we, not know this?

Well, we always did, in the sense of the balancing of interests as per the description above of some ideal liberal or social liberal consensus around progress through moderate change. And yet, there is more to it than this. Something has shifted practically in that paradigm of political interaction and appeals to it may now be either merely nostalgic or deceptive. Is this why, sickening as it may be, many people now feel in their gut that something is going to have to give?

* * *

Recently, older statesmen of the Labor Party John Cain and Race Matthews in Victoria, and John Button previously, lamented the widespread practice of Labor Party branch stacking. It is corrupt, yes, but more importantly, it is crippling of the democratic process as they once knew it to exist within the Party. The possibility of bottom-up policy making that genuine membership in local branches might once have meant — a connection of the Party to real people with real concerns and views — is virtually dead. The Party is a media confection for infrequent, highly individuated voters on the one hand, and a grinding political machine on the other. In the former case there is management of voter perception; in the latter the management of powerful sectoral interests. Beware the disconnect is never allowed to surface!

The mediation of interests that Garrett and other ministers are involved in is different. That earlier democratic model of competing interests, as in individuals from different social bases meeting at the ballot box to vote for parties with roots in lived social formations, is long gone. While the Marxist Left never swallowed the assumption of fairness in the liberal-democratic description, and social democrats were prepared to go along with it for peace and security, and real material gain for working people, the institutional structures nevertheless had some meaning and purchase in reality. When the old, if submerged class model broadened to take account of the raft of new social movement issues and identities, life was breathed into a reformed Labor and, for a short time, the model again proffered practical outcomes that accorded with aspirations for change.

But of course, with the emergence proper of neo-liberalism things changed, fundamentally.

We are used now to saying that the political spectrum has shifted to the Right, that Left and Right have merged (and that there is such a thing as a radical Centre, see Geoff Sharp in this issue), but this could not be but for a common understanding among the old parties of ‘Left’ and ’Right’ that the modus operandi of government itself has shifted. That is, it is not just a matter of values having shifted as so many letters to the editor tend to suggest, as important as ideas and values are, but also of the structures that institute or give them body and, in certain respects, now have a life of their own. What one may now be ‘democratic about’ has shifted because the range of ‘legitimate’ issues has changed, but also because what is ‘legitimate’ has institutional bases that direct and constrain. False hope, which resides in a mismatch of implicit understandings and changed circumstances, is part of the ‘disconnect’, mentioned above, that political parties and government must manage.

When we are not living in a fool’s paradise in that part of our brain that says we inhabit a democracy, that part of our (historical) pre-consciousness that still takes democracy for granted, we also know that neo-liberalism has dispensed with the venerable ethic of public service as such; that the executive has become highly ‘politicised’; that lobby groups now wield tremendous power; that governments act to produce ‘results’; that leadership is dead; that management is the name of the game. A great deal more work needs to be done to examine just what the institution of an entrepreneurial ethic in the machinery of government means practically, but it seems to be the meeting of entrepreneurialism with management to that end that defines the mood and limit of our ‘democracy’.

* * *

In the end, the respectable middle classes of the ’60s and ’70s didn’t, in that century, have to worry about revolution from below, at least not from the ‘lower classes’. The revolution came from the Right, not the Left. And yet again, while this is true in some obvious sense, it does not at all grasp the conditions of the emergence of neo-liberalism as ideology and form of government, or the continuing importance of those conditions for a more self-conscious politics of change today. These intimations of post-modernity have certainly emerged from below.

When Jürgen Habermas warned against technocractic government 40 years ago, it wasn’t the ‘nanny state’ as such that concerned him. He saw an ossification of the social democratic model, which had come to depend on a soulless machinery for carving up the ‘social product’; a political system dedicated merely to ‘redistribution’, the sine qua non of politics and government in the post-war years. This dying political form was running up against the emerging values of the new social movements and the re-patterning of life they foretold: a ‘new grammar of life’; anti-rationalistic and, potentially as he meant it, open to discourse in the fullest sense of ethical and political contestation and communion. It was a politics as politics should be — about the ‘good life’: about how we wanted to live.

The pity was, the new social movements themselves were never creatures ex nihilo. While they represented a new politics, they could not see that they were the children of the same social conditions that would open out to neo-liberal victory, which would work its way through the institutions and lead to democratic impasse. They were unconscious of their roots in postwar growth (and their contribution to its generation in high-tech capitalism), which would later become a conscious mantra and lie at the base of our newly ‘unconscious’ political form. Our culture of entrepreneurialism, in which democratic ‘leadership’ is reduced to muscular action on the one hand (think Brumby on planning decisions or water policy, or Macklin on the Intervention — see Inga Ting’s and Melinda Hinkson’s articles in this issue), and the tightest technocratic management on the other (think Rudd and Garrett), is one political expression of the freedoms bought by growth and carried forward through the extreme individualism afforded by high-tech growth that sees the world, and thus politics, as embellishment of the self (see Mark Furlong’s article in this issue).

If we now find it difficult to wean ourselves off growth and all it entails as we surely must, both ethically and for survival’s sake, let’s hope that a culture of opposition this time round is conscious of the stakes, especially through an examination of the conditions of its own formation. Politics is never most basically the preserve of values; values do not emerge ex nihilo; all references to pendulums swinging are a-historical; politics without an analysis of culture and the formation of its underpinning institutions is empty.