Review of Boris Frankel: Zombies, Lilliputians & Sadists: The Power of the Living Dead and the Future of Australia, Curtin University Books, 2004. (from 2005)
Boris Frankel causes me problems. I agree with so many of the things he has to say about contemporary Australia (although in his latest book the evidence is sometimes lacking and occasionally unconvincingly expressed) and what he proposes for the future in Australia:
• The existence of neoliberal hegemony and the concomitant agreement between the right and centre of Australian politics on economic and social policy.
• The complicity of the mainstream media in promoting the neoliberal agenda and excluding radical dissenting voices.
• The fact that there is an intensification of what he calls ‘sadistic’ practices in workplaces and for the unemployed.
• The poverty of the Australian education system.
• The urgent need for redistribution and environmentally sustainable practices.
• The pointlessness of the left’s (the Zombies) call to revolution (although this sometimes seems like a caricature).
• The reduction of the full-time working week to thirty hours.
• The advocacy for an Australian ‘social-industrial complex’ in opposition to the military-industrial complexes of North America and Europe.
There is so much to agree with, so many useful insights on such a wide range of issues and some thought-provoking suggestions for pathways Australia could take to a more just and equitable society.
Why then do I feel a strange dissatisfaction as I finish this third instalment in Frankel’s analysis of Australian society? Is it the negative tone that always seems to infuse his writing – the slightly hectoring call for us to arise from our slumber alongside the occasional reminders of the hopelessness of it all? Is it the broad sweep of his analysis, encompassing such divergent (but connected) areas as taxation, education, environment, culture, superannuation, welfare, religion and the media, when postmodern prophets caution us against such grand narratives?
In my own research that caution has come to represent a touchstone, which works against hubristic notion that we have to any extent ‘got things right’ or that we are using, or even fully understand, the right categories to describe reality and the many problems that we face. The problem may, after all, be that the horizons of what is politically possible, the limits to our imagination, are constrained by the language and categories that we use.
This reminds me of former Victorian premier, Jeffery Kennett. A number of years ago Kennett attended a VCOSS conference at which he accused the participants of being negative. He bemoaned the reluctance of people to work for progress in what was after all a state “on the move”. Why were these people talking down his achievements, when there were infinite possibilities available for people who have the requisite goals and aims, and are industrious and entrepreneurial? His government was providing opportunities and getting things done, and all he could hear was people carping and talking down the state. The reasons I think he saw the conference as being negative was that he understood society as a game and he thought he understood what that game was. To him, these people, complaining about the achievements of his government, did not want to play the game, were talking about a different game, or wanted to opt out of the game altogether.
The fact is that the boundaries of what is political (and what is possible) are not set like they are in a game – people change and grow, and the relations between people (social exchange) expand and a contract the boundary of what is politically possible. For Kennett, the idea of what is positive or negative for the state, for the poor, for people’s self-esteem etc was contained within the parameters of what he conceived as politically possible. He could only see what was being said at the conference within the narrow parameters of his game and concluded that either people were being negative or unrealistic.
Similarly I think Frankel has needlessly limited the scope of political possibilities. My problem is that I agree wholeheartedly with so much of the analysis and proposals, which come from a vast store of knowledge and a real concern for a fairer and more humane nation and world, but it gets us no closer to expanding the boundaries of the political. This is mainly due to a reluctance (for, what I understand from his previous publications to be, political reasons) to engage with the vital insights on politics and society provided by theorists like Michel Foucault. In fact there appears to be an almost perverse effort to keep any insights provided by postmodern theorists out of the book altogether (other than the occasional jab at loons like Zizek). Surely we can question some of the crazier and useless drivel about marching bravely into a post-modern future and still engage with the insights of those who put into question enlightenment and modernist assumptions.
Foucault in particular fixes our gaze to the complexity of power relations as opposed to teleological notions of power as one-sided and oppressive. Tellingly, although Frankel’s book has ‘Power’ in the sub-title and lists ‘Power (Social Science) – Australia’ in the bibliographical notes, the concept of ‘power’ appears under-theorised in the book and the word is almost entirely absent from the index. The main entry comes in the conclusion entitled ‘Challenging the power of the living dead’ in which he states that the “sustainable social-industrial political strategy would need to be empowered by various institutional innovations and reforms, such as a bill of rights and electoral reforms” (296), “…[a]nd if more people knew that they had the power to shape and change their society and environment through the institutional processes of a social-industrial democracy…they would be more motivated to participate in constructing a vibrant citizenry (300). Maybe, and maybe not – ‘empowerment’ as Barbara Cruikshank has pointed “is a power relationship, a relationship of government; it can be used well or badly”. The same goes for the active citizen. The question of the extent to which citizens should place their faith in institutional processes and institutional politics remains a moot point. We can’t assume that in advance and we may, by doing so, be playing into the hands of the neoliberal/neoconsevative sadists.
For someone like Jeffery Kennett, his inability or unwillingness to engage with theoretical insights, which could expand and enhance the political sphere to create real meaningful democracy and include marginalised people, is unsurprising. For someone like Boris Frankel, former Professor of Citizenship Studies at Swinburne University, his reluctance is confusing. Frankel remains one of the few radical intellectuals to bravely offer a wide-ranging analysis of the rise and rise of sadistic practices in Australia, and to provide some optimism and practical solutions for the mess we are in. It is therefore doubly frustrating that he feels the need to narrow the scope of political options by ignoring a fertile ground for fostering dissent and challenging the neoliberal/neoconservative hegemony.
^^V 
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