Left Melancholy and Whitlam's Ghosts Some notes on Walter Benjamin's concept of Left Melancholy from various sources

below: Walter Benjamin, in a short essay published in 1931, spoke of a Left-Wing melanc holy, a concept that American political theorist Wendy Brown has more recently t aken up. Left melancholy applies to those no longer attached libidinal investmen ts and commitments that we make in political utopias and formations, especially to the socialist projects of the c20th that were given their (premature) death not ices by Francis Fukuyama, among others, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the Soviet Union, 1989-91. If for Freud [m]ourning is commonly th e reaction to the loss of a beloved person or an abstraction taking the place of the person, such as fatherland, freedom, an ideal and so on, [i]n some people, whom we for this reason suspect of having a pathological disposition, melancholi a appears in the place of mourning (2005. 203). If the loss of an object is worked-t hough in mourning a working-through whereby the libido as a whole sever its bonds with the object (204), [m]elancholia is mentally characterized by a profoundly painful depression, a lo ss of interest in the outside world, the loss of the ability to love, the inhibi tion of any kind of performance and a reduction in the sense of self, expressed in self-recrimination and self-directed insults, intensifying into the delusory expectation of punishment. We have a better understanding of this when we bear i n mind that mourning displays the same traits, apart from one: the disorder of s elf-esteem is absent. (204) Benjamin intensified this sense of melancholia in a review of poetry published i n 1931, where he aligns melancholy s response to loss to a cultural form and polit ical formation s position in Weimar Germany. Of this formation he acerbically asks : What, then, does the "intellectual elite" discover as it begins to take stock of its feelings? Those feelings themselves? They have long since been remaindered. What is left is the empty spaces where, in dusty heart-shaped trays, the feelin gs - nature and love, enthusiasm and humanity - once rested. Now the hollow form s are absentmindedly caressed. A know-all irony thinks it has much more in these supposed stereotypes than in the things themselves; it makes a great display of its poverty and turns the yawning emptiness into a celebration. For this is wha t is new about this objectivity - it takes as much pride in the traces of former spiritual goods as the bourgeois do in their material goods. Never have such co mfortable arrangements been made in such an uncomfortable situation. In short, this left-wing radicalism is precisely the attitude to which there is no longer, in general, any corresponding political action. It is not to the left of this or that tendency, but simply to the left of what is in general possible . For from the beginning all it has in mind is to enjoy itself in a negativistic quiet. (1999: 424-5) Rehabilitating and historicising Benjamin's concept Wendy Brown asks: [I]f we are slipping from liberalism to fascism, and if radical democracy or soc ialism is nowhere on the political horizon, don't we have to defend liberal demo cratic institutions and values? Isn't this the lesson of Weimar? I have labored to suggest that this is not the right diagnosis of our predicament: it does not grasp what is at stake in neoliberal governmentality - which is not fascism - no r on what grounds it might be challenged. Indeed, the left defense of the welfar e state in the 1980s, which seemed to stem from precisely such an analysis - "if we can't have socialism, at least we should preserve welfare state capitalism"

- backfired from just such a misdiagnosis. On the one hand, rather than articula ting an emancipatory vision that included the eradication rather than regulation of poverty, the Left appeared aligned with big government, big spending, and mi splaced compassion for those construed as failing to give their lives proper ent repreneurial shape. On the other hand, the welfare state was dismantled on the g rounds that had almost nothing to do with the terms of liberal democracy and eve rything to do with neoliberal economic and political rationality. We are not sim ply in the throes of a eight-wing or conservative positioning within liberal dem ocracy but rather at the threshold of a different political formation, one that conducts and legitimates itself on different grounds from liberal democracy even as it does not immediately divest itself of the name. This formation produces a twofold challenge for the Left. First, it compels us t o consider the implications of losing liberal democracy and especially its impli cations for our own work by learning what the Left had depended on and demanded from liberal democracy, which aspects of it have formed the basis of our critiqu es of it, rebellions against it, and identity based on differentiation from it. We may also need to mourn liberal democracy, avowing our ambivalent attachment t o it, our need for it, our mix of love and hostility toward it. The aim of this work is framed by the second challenge, that of devising intelligent strategies for challenging the neoliberal political-economic formation now taking shape and an intelligent countervision to this formation. (2005: 56-57) In order to resituate these fragments on Left melancholy into the period and con text of the object of my research here - the affects of the rise of Neoliberal g overnmentality on literary production and reception during the long Labor decade in Australia - we may first have to dispense with the notion of a single modern ity, and with its complementary concept of a global historical vanguard that dra gs the so-called developing world in its wake. Of course, the idea of a universa l, progressive history is what Benjamin, and following him, Brown critique as his toricism : [Thesis] XVI A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this no tion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism giv es the eternal image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experie nce with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to other to be drained b y the whore called Once upon a time in historicism s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history. XVII Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialist historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal hi story has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the o ther hand, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a c onfiguration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by whi ch it crystallized into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historica l subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognize s the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolut ionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a resu lt of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time ca nceled; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.

( Theses on the Philosophy of History

262-3)

Writing on his historical materialist antidote to the chain of empty homogeneous time(s) in historicism, Brown takes Benjamin to be intending a staging [of] the present in terms of a constructed historical-political consciou sness that itself blasts the present out of the continuum of history. A present figured as fecund rather than as determined on the one hand or as theologically presided over by empty time on the other produces what Benjamin famously calls a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. Only a chance, but a revolutionary one: this struggle over what the past could mean in the present is at the same time a struggle for the future. (2005: 13-14.) The aim of the work of untimely political critique is, for Brown, to contest sett led accounts of what time is, what the times are, and what political tempo and t emporality we should hew to in political life (4). I want to underline this point about unsettling temporalities by drawing attention to the diverse ways in whic h Left-melancholy and Left-mourning happen and, as a consequence, sharpen the al terity between how Neoliberalism happens in Australian political culture and how it emerges and ascends in North America, South America, the United Kingdom. Brown's essay is addressed to an American academic left audience, and one readin g in the wake of the Neoconservative turn of the Bush administration after the 1 1 September, 2001 attacks, for whom the civil rights of their liberal democracy were and are more fundamentally under siege than similar rights in Australia in the wake of 9-11 and the bombings in Bali. Also it s worth pointing out how what B rown in a later essay calls the present dangers of decontainment of the church f rom borders separating it from the state under neoceonservative political ration alities in North America is a minor phenomenon in Australian civil culture, as A manda Lohrey has persuasively argued in her 2005 Quarterly Essay Voting for Jesus : Christianity and Politics in Australia . So, while an Australian-based citizen-subject like me can certainly relate to si milar articulations in a more locally experienced conjuncture it needs be recogn ised that American liberalism is different in significant ways to Australian lib eralism, not least due to the historic compromises of the Deakinite Settlement a nd the establishment of the Court of Arbitration, the principle of the (white ma le) living wage, and their interlocking in a system of Protection (tariff and im migration). In the post-war period this assemblage combines with the commodities boom and Keynesian demand management to form the Labourist-Social-liberal armat ure. The organised Australian Labour movement was present at the inception of th e Federation in 1901 and remained a strong cultural force, especially in nationa list print-cultures, throughout the c20th. Also, as Marian Sawer argues in her T he Ethical State? Social Liberalism in Australia : "[i]t was fortuitous that the peak influence of social-liberal philosophy [. . .] coincided with Australia's nation-building period [c1890-c1914]. This conjuncture meant that these ideas we re built into the design of the new national institutions and continued to influ ence later developments through path dependence" (35). Closer to the present, the Neoliberalising of the economy and polity that the St ates underwent through Reagan's (1980-88) George Bush I's (1988-1992) presidenci es was inflected through the morally and socially conservative cold war mentalit ies of the Republican party and its bloc in ways that weren't replicated in Aust ralia until the culture wars of the mid-1990s. In some ways tha afterlife of the se culture wars lingers like a lost limb for the Left: we still want to win them , even after all the light and heat has been taken out of such battles as were f ought over the History of Settlement and refugee policy in the 1990s and early c 21st. But under these skirmishes and battles lies a deeper problem of loss, that

is knotted up in the Whitlam Government and its fall. The loss of that future the spectre of progress that shimmers just ahead of us - is, I think, still to be worked through. And perhaps in working through it, something other than that Neoliberal future of a return to and from appreciating investments in one's self , can emerge.