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March 12, 2008
I want to return to Mark Davies' paper, The clash of paradigms: Australian literary theory after liberalism in the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, (Vol 7, 2007) that I mentioned in this earlier post. The cultural formation of the Australian Leaviste attacked attacked critical theory---broadly understood--- so as to defend modernist aesthetics and to displace in the difficult questions critical theory posed about the hidden class and gender cultural allegiances of liberalism as part of its critique of a utilitarian modernity.My interest here is less the cultural formation of the Australian Leavisite paradigm than Davis' argument about its white racism, as part of his argument to map out the parameters of an Australian cultural critique.
In the latter part of this paper Davis argues that the humanist Leavisite cultural formation operates as a broadly representative national moral conscience that indexes events against, and demands fidelity to, the truths of enlightenment humanism.
The high-culture humanist resonances of their book titles—Manne’s The Way We Live Now recycles Trollope’s title of 1875 and imitates its moralism; Gaita’s A Common Humanity echoes F. R. Leavis’s
The Common Pursuit—emphasise this ambition. They are thus deeply engaged in what Marian Sawer has described as the broader project of Australian social liberalism which is to defend the ideal of the interventionist, ethical state against he imposts of free-market ideology and the withdrawal of the state from wealth redistribution (Sawer). Ultimately they have provided a “soft” oppositionality that sets itself up in critique of formations figured as threats to bourgeois liberal mores—radical feminism, racism—but which has rarely seriously questioned the whiteness that arguably predicates Australian public life.
His argument is that members of the above formation have tended to enact a logic of whiteness even as they aspire to righteous antiracism, so as to maintain the authority and coherence of their own speaking
positions.
Davies spells this claim out thus:
Manne’s “In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right”, published in Australian Quarterly Essay, is in many ways an exemplary text that mounts a sustained critique of new right attempts to discredit the claims of the Stolen Generation of Aboriginal children. Yet Manne’s essay overlooks the ways in which Aborigines have themselves exercised agency and resistance throughout a long history of welfarist child-theft, apart from mention of an entrenched “fear of the police” that resulted in people “running off into the bush” at the first sight of officialdom.
Is this 'sustained critique' also overlooking indigenous resistance an enacting a logic of whiteness? Possibly, by default. Lets' grant Davis this. What then?
Well, this 'overlooking' is pretty much countered, as Davies himself acknowledges, by Manne becoming a representative of an emerging self-conscious, self-critical strand in Australian liberalism. As Davis says, it is a self-critical strand:
given that his [Manne's] work increasingly offers a critique from within of liberal whiteness, developed in response to a full-frontal confrontation with the race politics of the new conservatism.....My point here though, is that gradualist though the above shifts might be, cultural formations such as coterie liberalism are never static, and that in the case of Australian coterie liberalism something has begun to change, not least its modes of cultural authority. Having borne witness to recent conservative attacks on Aborigines and asylum-seekers, in particular, and under intense pressure from conservatives attacking both its key figures and even its normative understandings of racial tolerance and multiculturalism, liberalism has arguably started to interrogate its own racialised practices.
I'm not sure where this leaves us. A self critical social liberalism breaking with its past? A social liberalism that was on the defensive whilst retaining its critical edge re race politics----indigenous, refugee, immigration ---- during the conservative ascendancy of John Howard. Does not that make it part of an oppositional discourse? Well, that's how I've interpreted it.
Davies explores the way the conservative ascendancy of the last decade has changed the contexts in which literary-critical theory operates and says that this has meant that:
Liberalism, now, is in decline as a social discourse, its institutions in disarray, a situation that has arguably predicated the declining relevance of iterary-critical theory, increasingly mired in its own largely gestural repertoires, given its status as a largely oppositional discourse founded in a culture of critique.
What this means is that the dominant formations at work in the public sphere are no longer those of liberalism, but are those of conservatism. Davis argues that this new situation requires making the new conservatism and its social texts a sustained focus of critical scholarly attentions, and adds:
It seems extraordinary that there has been little sustained critique of the new conservatism from within the new humanities, given that the very “history of the present”, from its literatures to its political mandates, is increasingly underpinned by the social nostalgia, populist authoritarianism, and market
logic of the new conservatism.
He adds that to do so will require building links, not least between the new humanities and liberalism.This puzzles me as I had understood that of cultural and literary studies, for all its embrace of postmodernism, continues to work within liberalism; albeit a postmodern liberalism.
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Gary,
Davies is spot on in his account of the conservative ascendency in Australia:
Isn't the conservative ascendancy currently being rolled back, liberalism is returning to the foreground, and critical theory remaining on the margins of the public sphere?