My problem is with Part One. It is written in a language I am not at home in, and insofar as I understand it, its messages are banal and platitudinous, albeit very worthy – nothing, nobody is black and white, communicability is all, and we must keep open, flexible, interactive minds. Heck, it does sound elementary. Wark’s cloudier version is ‘the virtual republic … is the conversation of possibilities, in which people’s particular attributes and points of view work out a way of negotiating and negotiate’. The image he ‘would want to offer for thinking about Australia is ... the kind of city street where rednecks and faggots can acknowledge each other’s existence and yet pass on by’. Devoutly to be wished of course. The problem is when rednecks and faggots have to do something more than merely, acknowledge and pass on. Wark’s left ventricle says that as long as they talk nothing else matters. He says of a Ramona Koval interview with William Gass (about ‘making Jews into lamps’) ‘what matters, in the end, is not who is right in the debate about the relationships between aesthetic and ethical responsibility, but that there is a conversation about it’. This is his position too on The Hand That Signed The Paper. ‘The novel works. It opens a space. Others put something into that space, ranging from polemics about the Jews and the Bolsheviks to apologies for the pure land of imaginative writing.’ Wark would not accept this as a moral and intellectual abdication. He says of Raymond Gaita, ‘For him there are right-thinking people, and wrong. For me there is the common world of judgment, where all our flawed and partial thoughts might, in their differences, resonate in the flickering light of the truth. The reader can judge which she or he prefers: compulsory moralism or the ethics of difference. (Wark does have a line in rhetorical gestures that I find vacuous. Championing the aesthetic is ‘a position that favours the infinite freedom that opens up when images and words reflect on themselves and reveal the sublime beyond the limits of the freedom we think we know’.)

His right ventricle however murmurs with some unease at his absolute tolerance. He feels obliged to land some condemnations. So, for example, when he says, ‘I accept that there are conceptions of the world in which it means something to talk about the Holocaust as absolute evil. That means nothing to me. I reject the doctrine of “absolute evil” (as meaningless)’, he feels obliged to add that ‘to me the Holocaust was an unmitigated crime’. The trouble with this is that an act becomes a crime only when often gratuitous and changeable human laws declare it so. Homosexual acts in Tasmania, not wearing the veil in Kabul, importing contraceptives into Ireland, all crimes in some eyes and jurisdictions. ‘Unmitigated’ is a meaningless intensifier, as in ‘This essay is an unmitigated disgrace!’ [Teacher flings exercise book at Molesworth.] Is that the worst Wark can say of the Holocaust? I hear the boiling of blood.

Elsewhere Wark passes by rednecks (rather more often than faggots) and instead of the polite acknowledgment he gives them the raspberry.

Riemer is less prone to the hectoring tone of/Gerard] Henderson or quiet certainties of ‘Robert] Manne, but I suspect that his alternating tones of tolerance and impatience may also be losing their appeal to all but the ageing newspaper editors, who seem to want indefinitely extend a public platform to what are really the rhetorical and historical assumptions of a passing era.

That is a slur, not an argument, in anyone’s philosophy – and Susan Wyndham and Shelley Gare, for a start, might want to wave their birth certificates at this cad.

Wark continues to think in a starkly adversarial mode. Peter Craven cannot be dismissed as a ‘Melbourne literary gossip columnist’, least of all by someone who presents himself as the evangelist of the fair hearing. Then, on the other side, The Virtual Republic works partly as a history of Wark’s irreligious opinions, and so he works his way through a paean to his many mentors and colleagues. He sums up the game.

To write without resentment, fear, or lack of the other. The postmodern writing of Foss and Taylor, Morris and Michaels, Gibson and Muecke, Martin and Lumby, Ettler, Cohen and Callas avoided those traps... the postmodern writings of Riemer, Manne, and Gaita, Koch, of Garner and Williamson – did not.

Note the linguistic touch by which the goodies get the heroic syntax of the Agincourt speech’s ‘Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot ...’ whereas the baddies cop arhythmia. This elevation of unknowns, opportunists, and the cabalistically academic over track-record luminaries should send the Australian reading public (and most of the Australian intellectual community) into gales of laughter. That in itself proves nothing, but Wark should see the flashing orange light. His promotion of an alternative team is never dispassionate and sometimes (as in the case of Catharine Lumby) downright embarrassing.

His hurdle is partly one of recognised achievement, partly one of language. Wark is briefly dismissive of the hoary charge of jargon, his line being that everyone has their own jargon. Well yes, but some jargons are far more widespread and permeable than others. Cultural commentators and critics are read avidly because they communicate. Others are not because they don’t.

Where in Wark’s team is there anyone to compare, for a combination of bravura, wit, demotic accessibility, and a razor intellect with, say, Robert Dessaix, or David Marr or John Forbes or Suzanne Kiernan?

The heroes of The Virtual Republic are well established in tertiary institutions and media outlets. But they don’t have a public following in the way that, yes, Andrew Riemer does. I for one will accept Auden’s line and at least listen to them, maybe even forgive them, if only they would write well. I readily acknowledge that I had finished my tertiary education – as had the likes of David Williamson or Helen Garner – when postmodernism had not yet reached university departments. It simply wasn’t there for me to taste, much less swallow. The way of the world – and Wark does not acknowledge this simple fact – is that once you have left the academy you have already acquired the philosophical and linguistic structures within which you will continue to speak. Conversions are rare.

To study up and embrace a new approach you must be motivated, seduced. Postmodernism however has never struck me as having much of a siren song. It has offered neither honeyed words nor exciting promises. But I’m still open to approaches.