The Irish Century (2)

Search For a Method
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the twentieth century was the century of the triumph of capitalism and the global market. This is the pressing lesson of the last thirty years; but if so, it was certainly built on convulsive crises of capitalism and vibrantly bloodied challenges to parliamentary (representative) democracy and the free market.

There is an option to engage with this philosophically, rather than just as a history lesson. To do that, we need to engage with how the agents of those processes thought of themselves and how we now assimilate how they thought of themselves. Only in this way can we overcome the 'discursive procedure of absolution' (P.5) by which the victors of the twentieth century re-write their motives in the Second World War and many other events.

In the Irish case, the vigorous grasping for a revised judgement of the 'men (sic) of 1916' during the 1970s constitutes a key moment in the swirling subjectivity of the century. This was so not only because of the strategic requirement for the Irish Republic to stand idly by while the North of the island imploded in the 1970s. It is also significant because the revision was, ultimately, rejected, having borne fruit in the Celtic Tiger. The original sin of rising without a democratic mandate continues to be managed not as the revisionists aspired to, but as the living generations after the rising insisted - by simple inconsistency. There is not guilt, there is not forgiveness, there is the remission of sin by victory.

This facilitates a continued standing apart by 'us' from the twentieth century's response to the fervid imperialism of the late 19th century. It would be difficult for a historical perspective to portray 1916 as anything other than part of the collapse of imperialism, part of the repeated breaches of constitutional continuity that were the necessary consequence of the gluttonous imperial ambitions of the 19th century European powers. But such a consciousness of the legitimacy of uprising against the tyrannt has had virtually no purchase in the Irish consciosuness of the 1916 rising. It is unnecessary. 1916 can be a deus ex machina. There is a rationalisation which allows the basic rule of ethical norms is breached when judging 1916 - this action was correct, but must not be repeated. Roger Casement, it seems to 'us', was a very strange man fighting obscure personal wars with some unimaginable King of Belgium.

Our historians evince a mercurial awareness, derived from their detailed knowledge of the primary sources, that some alternative moral sensibility then existed among the men of 1916, one which could then send men and women out to transform the world. The historians approach this strange phenomenon with the disinterested interest of the collector of butterflies. We see it, we understand it intellectually, but it leaves us cold. The idea of taking personal responsibility for changing, by rupture, the way society is organised seems to us entirely hubristic and we contain 1916 with a deft self-dislocation from this, its embarrasingly defining subjectivity.

This example of 1916 can act as an icon for the enigmas that the changing subjectivity of the century have brought us to, making us aware that we are still intimately tied to the near past, allowing us mostly to replace empathy with judgement, and necessarily displacing judgement by conformity when the judgement implies too much. To get past this, we too need an immanent method, one like Badiou which seeks to say what we can say about what the century meant for the people of the century (P.43).