In the last chapter I suggested that Loaded's orientation to the negativity of the particular symptomatizes the waning of more traditional forms of political discourse linked to notions of class, or to forms of communal solidarity at odds with the atomizing forces of capitalism. The novel's implicit longing for a working-class or communal politics means that it also ends up distancing itself from Ari's nihilistic, hedonistic self-absorption. At the same time, the constant confusion of affect and critique—or the production of critique as a form of affect—allows us to argue that Ari's negativity is something like the afterlife of a politics, the spectral remainder of a worldview that is no longer capable of anchoring the sort of cognitive map for which the novel's cartographic orientation cries out. Of the numerous critical responses to the novel, few have stressed its working-class orientation or grappled with this sense that its most euphoric moments are bound up with a negativity that it ultimately seems to disavow. Ian Syson's discussion of Loaded, which I touched on in the last chapter, stands out in this respect. So too does Ivan Cañadas's discussion of the relationship between Loaded and Head On, which I will get to in a moment. As we will see later in this chapter, Tsiolkas's involvement in the Melbourne Workers Theatre leaves no doubt that these issues weigh upon him and inform a commitment to diverse genres and media forms that reflect his interest in counter-hegemonic cultural spaces.

For the most part, however, critical discourse about Loaded has tended to endorse Ari's position and tried hard to extract a politics from it. For Anja Schwarz, the novel maps a “new set of spatial as well as linguistic strategies” that put it at odds with “hegemonic readings of identity and space.” She relates this directly to debates about immigration, implying that Loaded allegorizes a broader tension between difference and the fiction of a homogenized, Anglo- Celtic Australian nation. Elizabeth McMahon suggests something similar when she writes that “Ari's walking knowledge of Melbourne produces an alternative map of the city according to ethnicity, particularly the map of second-generation Greeks; and of sexuality, specifically male homosexuals.”