Doing Politics: Writing on Public Life. Judith Brett. Text.
The particular difficulties of assessing the place of the work of Judy Brett in the landscape of Australian political commentary came home to me when I read this sentence in her reflection on writing about our historically central prime minister:
I now see that my PhD about [Viennese poet Hugo Von Hoffmansthal] was a rehearsal for my work on Menzies.
(p. 257)
Well, I mean yes. The dialogue between decadent symbolism — Hoffmansthal’s most striking figure is about “the eyes of language” staring at you — and the rise and fall of the Grain Elevators Board is there for all to see. The savage imagery and deconstructive force of Rilke, Berg and Walser is all Chris Kenny and Troy Bramston talk about.
That point I should add is aimed not at Brett, but at the political commentators who surround her in the mainstream media, or more precisely the editors who employ them: a crew of decent-enough roundsers and policy wonks whose only response to the big top of human circus acts — Abbott, Rudd, Latham, ScoMo, Keating, Palmer, Hanson etc — is to label them “crazy”. That only worked when such people were in the minority. Now it’s the norm, and it is painfully obvious how little the MSM have to tell us about what’s really going on.
It’s in that context that Brett’s writing stands somewhat alone (aside from this publication, of course) in giving deep interpretation of political event and character to current events, in an approach steered by, but not slavish to, psychoanalysis — which in broad terms means an approach, descended from Freud, which sees the self as split, multi-part, in internal conflict, semi-obscure to itself, and steered in the pursuit of its desires, by fantasy, paradox and self-sabotage, as much as by rational focus.
For an approach like this, rejecting irrational action as just “crazy” is the very opposite of understanding what real forces are at work; it is only by understanding the particular dynamics of “crazy” that we understand the political culture as a whole.
Paradoxically, Melbourne was, from the 1940s, a centre and pioneer of psychoanalytic political theory. That tradition, manifested in its modern iteration by Alan Davies and Graham Little, was somewhat cloistered; Brett, in Meanjin, The Age Monthly Review and Arena (where, disclosure, she and I were co-editors) brought it into the public sphere, where it was taken up by The Age, for a time, and then the Schwartz suzerainty of the Quarterly Essay and The Monthly.
That period was kicked off by her book on Ming’s crucial political turn, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, which argued that Menzies’ 1942 speech — in which he appealed to various social groups “between” the bourgeois elite and the organised working class — was as much about his own conflicted, guilt-ridden relationship with the rural parents he’d left to become an establishment figure and how negotiating that symbolic compromise took him from being the hopeless, failing politician of the late 1930s and early ’40s to the wholly integrated and effective leader he became.
As Brett notes in a reflection on that book, in this book, it was still a work somewhat bound within psychoanalysis and the thrill of its explanatory power. Compared with academic versions, it was a light touch, but it was still sufficiently continental to send the Liberal-oriented historical establishment nuts, in particular Gerard Henderson for whom it has become a perpetual wound (‘So Menzies wanted to root his mum and kill his dad, did he?’ Media Watch Dog, passim) — indeed a wound shaped like a breast, a breast expressing milk. It still drives Liberalati like David Kemp — for whom Menzies is a sort of self-knowing godhead — to distraction.
That more doctrinaire framework was broken down, into a style of interpretive political commentary that saw the fractured nature of the key political actors as both their undermining flaw, but also their route to wielding the power of affective politics — a politics based on the marshalling of dispersed public emotion and giving it form, in which people can recognise their ideal selves, the people they aspire to be.
Her most important essay in that respect concerned John Howard’s self-reinvention in the early ’90s as a cultural rather than political-economic figure, stealing Labor’s claim, held from Curtin to Hawke, to represent Australia’s best essence, our quiet assumption of a fair go, and a rough equality of collective conduct. Held as the imaginary space wherein we both emblazon and obscure the real place, Brett argued — convincingly in my view — that the move had left Labor with nothing, and that the party was intellectually unequipped to respond to it.
Only Rudd could, and just as Howard used his own fantastically robust ability for self-deception to sell the whole shebang, so Rudd’s ability to take it from him sprang from his mildly messianic sense of self — a productive narcissism that came apart as the demands and frustrations of real power wore on.
Since Rudd’s departure, Labor has been as unable to respond to lesser players as it was when Howard was in power — and were thus (though Brett doesn’t touch on Scott Morrison here) defeated by ScoMo’s jerrybuilt religious-political mix of “quiet Australians” and “the promise of Australia”.
That Labor or its leaders still haven’t got that (there are long-suffering soldiers within who got the message) is a measure of the degree to which the relationship between Labor and a left intelligentsia — really consecrated in the 1920s — had fallen apart, as Labor turned to the opposite of interpretive commentary, the circular logic of polling and focus groups. The press gallery, or its editors, was happy to follow. In the MSM, as other figures such as Alan Ramsey fell away and Don Watson withdrew from frequent commentary, Brett’s work has become a distinctive figure in the landscape.
Figures who attempt such an interpretive politics, such as Sean Kelly and David Marr, fall short, because with all their will they cannot see the right-wing figures they write of, from within the centre of the figure under study. Politics, before it can be judged according to your own values, must be understood from its own core, as the place where the person and the world meet. All politics is fantasy of a unified order. The successful politician — Howard, Hawke, Christine Milne, maybe Gillard — narrows the gap and does not mind it. The part-success — Rudd, Keating, Turnbull — cannot resolve it. And the failures falls in to it.
Brett’s take on that disjuncture came, she notes, from having become a part of the left in the heady 1970s university milieu, and finding that the Marxist class analysis on offer, even in its more sophisticated form, did not, in identifying the Liberals as the representatives of the bourgeoise, capture the affective attachment of the lower- and middle-middle classes from which she came, to the whole network of institutions and round of life, from church groups to auxiliaries etc that constituted the Liberal lifeworld and its (conventionally culturally bounded) progressive slant.
In constituting this group as the “moral middle classes” (in part, a denial of the myth that Menzies birthed the party, Zeus-like, from his forehead, rather than drawing on, and then purging, the enormous ferment of post-World War II progressivism) Brett was accused (fairly, I think) of underselling the conflictual nature of actual classes, and the manner in which middle class solidarity can easily shuck its moral character and become savage and annihilatory when threatened, such that fascism can appear, in a trice.
That affective relationship to her origin class has thus shaped some of her work in ways that have leant more to the imaginary than the real, and in recent times has led her to an impasse of sort. There is one of the milder pieces on Morrison here because, though her writing on him has been never less than readable and challenging, elsewhere she simply cannot keep, with regards to him, the interpretive equanimity that allows her to assess Howard or Turnbull so exactly.
Howard, in his glutinous populism, his summoning of a world of terry towelling, Bega cheese, the queen on the TV, Chemist Warehouse, Packed to the Rafters, and non-lethal shark attacks, the whole loved, hated torpor of Australian life he represented, carried some imprint of earlier democratic hopes, at least in image.
ScoMo, the happy-clappy crappy tourism PR flak from the noplace Shire, his existence barely flickering outside of photo ops, his indifference to the country he runs, Jenny perpetually fluttering around him in discourse, like heteronormative Tinker Bell — there the continuity with Australian traditions ends, and one is left with what we are now, the globalised continent-suburb, and persons — leaders and led — so suffused with flows of signification that the interior dynamics of psychoanalysis don’t work so effectively any more. Brett can’t really hide her hatred of ScoMo and it is very funny to watch.
But it also raises the question of whether there is not a distortion in the view of Australians past and present which appears here. The ScoMo piece, and others such elsewhere, express the common view among intellectuals, which I share, that something, fairly recently, has really gone nurggghhh with this place, that the combination of cash and carry corporatism, media oligopoly rule, defunded, evacuated culture, atomisation of social experience, and character decay in political life has really done for us.
Yet Brett’s account of our evolution, in a section from her 2019 book on Australian political history, From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage, suggests that our distinctive political evolution and institutions (the goddam Australian ballot, preferential voting, etc) represent something of a flowering of the democratic spirit Down Under, that we might identify with. There is thus a disjuncture between then and now to be explained, and the shadow of a Fall thus appears, some tragic, epochal disaster.
The alternative take might be that many of these institutions — preferencing, compulsory voting, etc — were the process by which various power elites created and maintained a stable order, lasting decades, locking out more chaotic democratic events, and that the mess we’re in now is the system’s accumulated decadence. One could argue that Brett’s overvaluation of a “consensualist” interpretation of our history — that we got together and made stuff happen by agreement rather than there was a series of struggles, “we” lost most of them, and an uneasy truce persists — might be bound up with what the middle class is, or was.
One might even suggest a psychoanalytic-autobiographical element, a writer making reparations to a cultural milieu that made it possible for her to learn the critical cultural techniques by which the values of said milieu — empire loyalty, bourgeois propertarianism, protestant continence — are deprived of their self-belief and reframed as enabling fantasies. It may be similar to the practice of those more vanilla political commentators — Megalogenis, Tingle, etc — influenced by, and attentive to, Brett who offer a simple idealised past (migration-based growth, “good government”) from which the fall has occurred.
But if so, that’s not really Brett’s fault. Doing Politics is a neat collection — that could well have been half as long again — of one of the most searching writers on the politics of the everyday and everyday politics, not merely here but anywhere. And in the final piece –“The chook in the Australian unconscious” — shows what interpretive writing can really do on the open road, and how much better our damn media would be were it a little more Hofmansthal, a little less HuffPo.
