Boundary work: approaching literary and political history « b...

Lakatos argues for a model of the history of science in which a degenerative research programme is replaced by a progressive research programme after the theoretical and ontological commitments of the old programme can no longer weather, through what Lakatos calls the protective belt, new, or new configurations of, phenomena (132, 136-44). Lakatos spatialises scientific knowledge and methods in terms of a hard core of theoretical commitments protected by this belt of hypotheses and secondary commitments – elements which can be altered and discarded without the hard core being fundamentally challenged.

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in Lakatos’ model of change in knowledge production is that it modifies the criteria upon which practitioners in a field can ascertain a paradigm shift

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non-literary areas of studies and in particular three theories that cross boundaries between the political and the literary fields: Jürgen Habermas’ history and theory of the public sphere; Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of the literary field; and the application of Foucault’s concept of governmentality to literary fiction. I will expand on these three central theories below, but would just like to affirm that what was signalled in the auto-biographical opening of this thesis are those shadow-structures- “the dynamic, informal networks and collaborations that form beneath and across the surface structures

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One boundary across which this thesis shuttles is that which intersects citizenship studies and Australian literary studies. The study of citizenship is well-suited to literary studies as the figure of the citizen is, at its most basic, Janus faced: the public, institutional face necessarily borders a private and intimate one. Novels, in particular, are similarly oriented, with their representations of subjective interiority, of phenomenological lived experience, textualised and addressed to an open assemblage of reading and critical publics, including markets, which can use the text in a variety of ways.

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Any genealogy, in Foucault’s sense of the term, of the citizen will often be faced with having to locate those borders at, and moments in, which the interiority of the subject – that revealed and lived in the private”intimate sphere” – is renegotiated and refigured by its relation to that intersubjective realm of the public which is the concern of states, media and corporations, wherein the self is an addressee and subject of law (Habermas, 1989: 55).

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The figure of the citizen – a subject in relation to a nation-state, primarily, who has a set of putatively equal rights and obligations legitimated and enforced by the nation-state in which they have membership – is a very useful one to overlay onto individual literary texts and the spheres, fields and discursive formations that they circulate in

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Jürgen Habermas’ focus on the literary precursor to the political public sphere in his historically concrete work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1989). The rational-critical acts of active citizens whose new-won privateness provides the foundation upon which to participate in spheres of public debate and decision in relation to the limits of the state are pre-figured by cultural forms

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The civilised citizen who learns of the modes of private-public subjectivity and rational-critical debate through the print-culture discipline of ‘English’ provides a strong model, albeit residual, for a relationship between citizenship and literary text

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If Mark Davis is right when he argues that “the decline of the literary paradigm isn’t simply to do with literature; it’s to do with a broader reconceptualisation of the public sphere itself” then something of this reconfiguration should be visible, and even audible, in fiction itself

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If there is a figure of the citizen in Bourdieu’s work in such books as The Rules of Art, then this figure is to be assumed rather than one that is explicitly delineated and analysed by Bourdieu. Indeed, the figure of the citizen in this study of the genesis of the literary field is that of a game-player in a relatively autonomous field who seeks to accumulate symbolic capital through the contra market-liberal tenet of “loser takes all”(21). This quest for the sort of capital that is to some extent residually pre-modern (consecrated honour and distinction) is portrayed by Bourdieu as initiated by a refusal of the logic of the market in material goods: a refusal of commercial success

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n seeking to fuse art for art’s sake (Kantian indifference) with literary realism, Sentimental Education, for Bourdieu, both refuses the market in material goods and at the same time depicts the quotidian lives of a group of young middle-class Parisien men in the period leading up to the 1848 revolts, thereby foundationally contributes toward “the constitution of the literary field as a world apart, subject to its own laws [and which produced] principles of intellectual freedom”

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What is critical then in Bourdieu’s account of the literary field and its ‘generations’ of autonomy is how the market is positioned and considered within his sociology of art and literary art in particular. Specifically, there is a problem with Bourdieu’s sociology of symbolic capital and autonomy in the literary field if we find that the logics and games of the dominant market, as opposed to the market in symbolic goods, begins to break the containers Bourdieu has placed around them. The limits of Bourdieu’s sociology of the literary field are therefore ones that will be tested in this thesis by examining the rationalities and discourses of the market in relation to those of the market in symbolic goods and the operations of the literary field at moments in the long Labor decade.

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I want to suggest that the representation of subjects in literary fiction of the period can be read as ones traversed by the emergence and dominance of Neoliberal governmentalities.

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read self-formations, Bildung, as mimetic of historical changes in governmentality

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Rather than slinking off backstage as Globalisation made glittering and triumphant entry, the Australian nation-state changed and re-formed in 1990s. The textual spaces and temporalities of the national remain fundamental to how we live our private and public lives.

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