The Irish Century 6

The Passion For the Real and the Montage of Semblance
Twentieth century Marxists across Europe wrote at length about the concept of ideology. It was transformed from a minor gloss in Marx's own writings to a major conceptual framework. The key critical experience was of a consciousness which expresses a reality from which it is separated. In this century, the efficacy of misrepresentation is repeatedly experienced. Thus in the famous Moscow showtrials, a process is gone through which, at least on the face of it, can only convince the already-convinced ...... and yet the process was gone through.

The hunger to engage with the real and transform it, went hand in hand, in the twentieth century, with a deep suspicion of all apparent realities. It seemed that only by pushing past appearances could reality be grasped, and only by imposing death could one's grasp of reality be assured.

There was an alternative to this approach, an alternative of what Badiou calls 'subtraction', of measuring the obstacles in our path, rather than destroying them. When we notice how the twentieth century talked about the death of the novel and how the novel survived that death, we see the difference between these two options. As Joyce apparently culminated the novel and then slipped into the on-going history of the novel we see the destruction transforming into subtraction.

Badiou thinks he can see in Malevich's painting White on White (1918) 'the origin of a subtractive protocol of thought' (P.56). malevich, he thinks has reduced the difference he observes to the difference between a place and what takes place there. So writes Badiou: "There is another passion for the real, a differential and differenting passion devoted to the construction of a minimal difference, to the delineation of its axiomatic."(P56) Malevich wishes to erase the past, but by seeing differently.

Reading this, I cannot but recall Nights Candle are Blown Out by Sean Keating; this great work of Irish Independence which should stand in our National Museum and which instead glorifies the private board room of the Electricity Supply Board, erases the past and sees all Ireland in the promise of electricity. It is socialist realism without the socialism and it recalls Lenin's famous definition of socialism as 'Soviet Power Plus Electrification'.

Keating stands well above the mediocre Irish representatives of modernism, allowing only that the Turneresque Jack B yeats stands above them all. But as Ernie O'Malley, the former I.R.A. man, pointed out in his notes for an exhibition of Jack B. Yeats' works, Yeats turned away from reality to an interior world at the very moment of Irish independence. He did not belong.

It is Keating who tells the tale of what painting meant to this neo-colonial society. Keating's burst of enthusiasm, his escape from a provincial naturalism into an almost surrealistic glorification of the Shannon Electrification Scheme in this painting means more to us now than it did for much of the twentieth century. As Badiou prioritises Malevich in retrospect, Irish people can now see in Keating's painting, the post colonial pride and independence of spirit which eluded the independent Irish for so long. This is not about inventing content, it is not about learning how to see what was there, unnoticed, it is about the hunger for the new, ecstatically sated. Maybe more importantly, it is about the insertion of the poetic as a moment of allegory which subverts the dominant ideology from within. As with Malevich, there is here a frozen, subtractive expression of difference. The characters meet like the accidental collisions of a surrealist work suggesting things are afoot that are other than they seem. They meet because electrification was different.

This was a characteristic twentieth century experience in Ireland which takes on new meanings for us, as watchers. Irish artists like Flann O'Brien, Louis le Brocquoy, Patrick Kavanagh, Sheamus Heaney play constantly with this danger of historical meaning in the surreal and the confessional and retreat again and again into the personal and the humorous. Keating let the discipline slip. The reality that only history sees is given to us by Keating's momentary effusiveness about the Shannon electrification scheme.

Keating's painting risies above the academic realism that was his metier and as a result it rises above the conservatism within which he was confined. For a moment he is no longer a visual counterpart to O'Riada's belated celebratory music. This is achieved by the simple mechanism of inserting a vibrant allegory within the strictures of realism. But there is nothing new in Keating, except that his work is not older. It is not distance that his paintings measure, but presence. In this painting Keating measures who installed electricity in Ireland. There is no intellectual break-through. Rather, there is a pose, an aspiring pose that means more to us than to him. With all the heroism that Malevich used to try and see the real world, rather than merely to destroy it, Keating tried to insist on a reality that must be there, but defies measurement. He insisted: this must be a nation, for we have declared a nation; men such as these real men have died for this nation; it builds, it walks and talks like a nation so it must be a nation. If we would only say that it is, it would be.

But it was not enough.

The Irish Century (5)

A New World. Yes, but When ?
Let us try to filter the idea of that century through a work by an emblematic Irish writer, contrasted with his European counterpart. The idea of that century is that it generated a subjectivity marked by an openness to antagonism, caused in turn by a determination not just to think about a better world but to actually engage in projects of transforming human society.

Sean O'Casey is a quintessentially Irish revolutionary playwright, as Brecht was the European revolutionary playwright. He contrasts starkly with Brecht. Where Brecht sought to purge all vestiges of romanticism from German writing, O'Casey sees in romanticism, partciularly in its expressionist form, as expressing the zeal which the revolutinary endeavour requires. O'Casey is the revolutionary socialist artist taken up with the gestures of the nationalist revolutionary. For Brecht the revolutionising of dramaturgy is his contribution to revolution. For O'Casey, dramaturgy only reflects its inverse. I mean by this that the sense of self arising from the mise en scene is only a posture of the identity of self underlying the moment, for O'Casey. O'Casey relies primarily on his sentimental attachment to the working man (and, even more, the working class woman), while Brecht relies primarily on his sentimental attachment to the writer.

Brecht adopts a critical relationship to the expressionist theatre of the masses, exemplified in Ernest Toller's play of the same name. O'Casey rejects Arnold Whesker's project of taking theatre to the massess, insisting the workers must learn to act themselves. For Brecht, there is, in addition, the interrelationship between character and history. The poetic sensibility characteristic of the century is a shadow on his theatre, as he struggles to place the individual within the inhuman scale of a kind of history which insists on eliminating all ideals in the reality of blood. O'Casey does historical backdrop merely as assured technique. It isn't the fundamental technical problem, rather it is a fact he brings to the play from life. Nor is it the moral issue.

Brecht engages with the ideal of a proletarian art, while O'Casey (like Trotsky) denies the existence of any such thing. Where for Brecht the self-celebration of a spectating bourgeoisie at the theatre must be rejected and fought, for O'Casey it must be expanded and extended. Badiou says of Brecht "Without doubt, Brecht is the most universal and the most indisputable among those artists who explicitly linked their existence and creativity to so-called communist politics." (P. 43) O'Casey, by contrast, is neither universal nor indisputable. Where Brecht was always tangental and contained within the sphere of art, even as he seemed repeatedly, magically, to step outside that sphere; O'Casey is not a party man, but his admiration for the USSR knows no bounds. He serves on the editorial board of the Daily Worker without being in the party.

All hints of Shakespearean universality are increasingly undermined in O'Casey by the particular, the symbolic and the farcical. Far from being indisputable, O'Casey seems more often than not a man of the romanticism of the 19th century, apparently disgarding the tropes of modernism as fast as he can. It is very easy to look down on him and very hard not to feel his distance from the post-modern intellectual. The Shakespearean constantly seeps through in Brecht, his historical references often whisking him away from the condition of the workers to the human condition. And then, as if to confirm the contrast, the deeper you dig, the more O'Casey's 19th century styles seem more and more like a mysterious modernism, somehow very specifically twentieth century.

In the documentary, Cradle of Genius, O'Casey breaks into song with an abandon more akin to the real homeless than to the Beckettian homeless. We approach his mature plays with regret that the Shakespearean sheen is gone off them, the inverse of the perception of comtemporary communists, who preferred the mature plays. Those later plays were O'Casey grappling with the reality of an independent Catholic, autarkic, Ireland and doing so in fantasy, in symbolism, didactically - by any means possible. In his autobiographic Inishfallen Fare Thee Well, O'Casey talks about the 'curtain of dark separation' which had fallen down between him and Irish political culture when he expressed his crticisms of the 1916 rising.

Unbeknownst to W.B. Yeats, his rejection of O'Casey's Silver Tassie then came to constitute the key hegemoic act of the Abbey, asserting itself as the dominant ideological institution of national culture in theatre. In that way the a-political Yeats set himself up to be used, after Yeats, by failed politician Ernest Blythe and others to support the homogeneous catholic, nationalist culture that was to prove so critical to the Irish century, thus transforming the Abbey in to the sinister institution it would long be. Thus appeared the dividing line between O'Casey and the institutions of 20th Century Ireland, a dividing line which reflected O'Casey's express challenge to contemporary ideology on behalf of the search for the dramma of 20th century life. By contrast, Brecht insisted on ending his days in the German Democratic Republic, institutionalised.

The dividing line between Brecht and O'Casey is not that between 20th century modernism and 19th century naturalism. Although O'Casey is confusingly labeled naturalist by many critics, the label does not bear critical examination. Indeed his rejection both of nationalist naturalism and 1930s socialist realism was categoric. What is characteristic of O'Casey, and what separates him from Brecht, is that his faith in humanity is unshakeable. He does not grasp towards a revolutionary cause, he begins from it. Revolutionary politics, it is sometimes said, relies on the blind enthusiasm of youth. O'Casey was that impossible thing, an eternal teenager. Brecht is admired because he creeps forward like an aging Galileo, the multiple inflections of his reflections open, by accident, to expression in the modernist form. Where Brecht constituted the undrammatic post-modernism enveloped within modernism, O'Casey constituted the drammatic expression of the aspirations which always lie outside the shallow idealism of nationalism.

Thus when O'Casey writes about Ireland, we experience something alien both from the militant consciousness of 20th century European culture and from the isolated, in-bred shadow of a culture that Ireland's marginal existence allowed it.

I cannot think of a single piece on Ireland by O'Casey to match Brecht's short, apocaplyptic piece used by Badiou. Yet it is not hard to imagine his responses to Brecht's modernist radicalism:

a) Where Brecht says that the new can only come about as the seizure of ruin; O'Casey would say that the future can only be built out of people's lives;
b) Where Brecht thinks that the adversary of the new is no longer a force, but is now a neutral abjection, a rotting neutrality; O'Casey feels the vitriol of piety and deception all around, suppressing the vibrancy of life;

c) Where Brecht is so conscious that the relationship of words to things has been undone; O'Casey is brimful of words to glorify the imagination;

d) Where in Brecht the passion for the real has become a conviction that in murder we can make out the metonymy of History, for O'Casey just living verges on being a metaphor for the future.

e) Where Brecht imagines that the end is with us once the oppressor no longer wears a mask; O'Casey would not so much unmask the oppressor as the oppressed.

Even as Ireland, in the character of O'Casey, embraces 20th century dissent in so many of its forms, there is never despair. The real is never just banal. O'Casey, in letters, complains of how plaintive Irish writers have become in the 1940s and 1950s. Most impressively of any event in this century, Ireland seemed to protect O'Casey from the impossible burdens of the 20th century culture he knew well. He was always his own man, unlike Brecht. And the new world ? Well, that might have to wait.

The Irish Century (4)

The Unreconciled
The unfolding of the twentieth century was a transition from a catclysmic war to a worse war. The First World War created two contrary senses - that this must be the last war or that this wasted war must be repaired by a good war. Thus the century went from violence to violence and threw aside its pacifists

The First World War deepened the sense of the twentieth century as, at the same time, an age of hope and an age of exhaustion. "The century is haunted by a non-dialectical relationship between necessity and will".(P.31) Violence - the violence so characteristic of the century - marks the points where the dialectical conjunction might have been. In this century, these unreconciled opposites would not be endured. They would be violently reconciled, irrespective of the cost, or at least unaware of it.

As we look back on nationalist Ireland today, we do so from within a new restoration, similar to the restoration of the bourbons after the fall of Napoleon. This new restoration is, again, marked by the apparent triumph of resignation towards necessity. The collapse of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the USSR, the withering of Chinese communism, the eclipse of the European Communist parties, the weakening of trade unions everywhere, all constitute parts of the long failure of the Russian Revolution and the restoration of the pre-World War One society of internationally mobile capital.

After that century, this has become a world in which it would cost as much to feed the whole planet as Euopeans and North American's spend on perfume; but this fact seems without immanent consequence. After that century, Ireland has become a country which seems, in GDP terms, one of the richest in the world and seems to have left behind the past which made it so. The European resignation and the Irish enrichment mean that the distance between Ireland and its European environment is marked, less and less, by the counterposition of the nationalist martyr and the modernist killer which once seemed to mark Ireland apart. The history of Irish participation in the First World War, a point of shame for nationalist Ireland, has become a mere gap in historiography to be filled and reaffirmed in walking tours of World War One graveyards in Belgium and Northern France. The restoration of pre-WW1 Europe and the invention of post-colonial Ireland create a meeting of minds such that European culture now empowers the Irish businessman, rather than comforting the closet Irish intellectual.

The Irish Century (3)

The Beast (The Age)
Poetically, the twentieth century lies between trace and destination. When Yeats tried to elucidate the meaning of the national revolution for him, it was primarily as an event from which he distances himself. But it was also something he articulates himself as intimately related to.

As the century began, the scientific view had been giving way to a more subjectivist, organicist approach in which there was an insistence on uncovering what it means to 'live in accordance with the will-to-live'. (P. 14) When Yeats looks at the national revolution, he knows that the national revolution is looking at itself through him, its least likely sympathiser. Thus he can reduce history to his own moral ambiguities.

Noone ever believed more firmly in the esoteric and the private than Yeats, but behind these hobbies he partakes more fully than many Irish writers in the subversion of the private by the sense of history which pervades the modernism of the early twentieh century. This intensifying sense of history made it seem sensible to sacrifice the individual for grand causes. This was so not only in the throes of national revolution. Decades later as Ireland watched the history of Europe unfold, there still seemed causes for which, in the 1940s and 1950s, a few men would sit in reconciled bravery, within condemned man's cells and await execution, telling family and sweathearts in final letters how they accepted their fate for the justice of their cause.

But the Irish hold tenuously to this twentieth century intensity. More often than not, the revivialist catholicism of Cardinal Paul Cullen seems to be framing such self-sacrifice, rather than the aspiration to transform mankind. The Irish nationalist sensibility is less about building the future than recapturing the mythical past. The speedily re-written failure of the 1980s hunger strikes, strangely echoing the triumph of failure of 1916 itself, only re-emphaisises the hollow militancy and unsettling traditionalism of Ireland's revolutionary tradition.

In Ireland's case, the sense of history was at the service of myth. "The Twentith Century Idea was to confront history, to master it politically" (P.15), writes Badiou. But, as so many commentators noted, the Irish sensibility was captured by history, not surpassing it. The Irish appeared to be compulsively reliving the past - to the point that the few modernist intellectuals seemed entirely out of place and the most 19th century intellectuals seemed most at home.

Thus Yeats does not see a confrontation between the burden of history and the aspirations of the promethian hero. It is not hubris that worries him. It is a more classic tragedy - the foolish defiance of fate. Marx had written of the the transformation of the self conciding with the transformation of society - but it is quite the opposite to believe that the sacrifice of the self can be a substitute for the transformation of reality; it is altogether more primitive.

The characteristic Irish tragedy is not the terrorisation of the mass, it is the lonely execution of the political martyr, a more genteel, more desolate and less transformative outcome. The heroism seeking discontinuity which transfixes Europe has little resonance in Ireland. While Europe's modernist culture increasingly thought of itself as a new age, the ruling culture of Ireland was increasingly located in a sense of itself as a timeless celtic refuge. It is not without significance that the Pearse cult at its height toyed with a sacriligious analogy with 'the' crucifixtion. The spiritual does not follow from the transformation of the material, as seemed so obvious across Europe, it seems in Ireland to substitute for the transformation of the material and, maybe, to transform the material.

This difference is overlain on a similarity. If we look across Europe to Badiou's choice, Osip Mandelstam, in his poem The Age (1923), we find the very same sense of the funereal heaviness of the age interwoven with a delicate, fragile promise. Detoured through a 19th century nationalism, the Irish poet ends up, with the simulacrum of a European sensibility.

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).

The Irish Century (1)

Ireland's Century

Alain Badiou is one of the few philosophers of substance to emerge from the radical left of the 1960-70s and to continue writing challenging works. His major work, Being and Event, makes an innovative attempt to base metaphysics on set theory. Almost alone, structuralism and Maoism still seem serious reference points for this formidable French philosopher. In his book The Century he grapples with the meaning of the twentieth century, in a series of talks delivered between October 1998 and March 2000.

His subject matter slips from us, even as we read. His desired subject matter may be the historical geography of some shared pubic space for the international intelligentsia of Western Europe, or it may be the public space of French civic society. What it isn't - and couldn't be - is a shared space adequate to the fractured civil society of the European Union or an experience that would comprehend the particular concerns of the Irish intelligentsia, if there is such strange beast. Indeed a convention underlies the book which has been problematic in West European theoretical debate for centuries. We can engage with this work, but we cannot simply enter its fictional shared space, what ever that may be.

His translator describes this work as a "pedagogy of conviction that must of necessity abhor nostalgia, it is a matter of conveying moments and inventions that were simultaneously refractory to interpretation and addressed to everyone, over and above linguistic affiliation." (P.xi) That this is what the translator also calls a 'universal address' is the first challenge this work presents, even before we position ourselves in relation to its commitment to conviction - and that is because it is not a universal address.

But that is an opportunity. His work easily becomes a foil with which to engage with a putative public space closer to us. It allows another 'us' to be invented and played with, a collectivity which may be the 'us' of an aspiring nation, of a frustratingly unempowered Irish intelligentsia or of the few pro-Europeans by principle. It doesn't really matter, as long as this 'we' is used in the understanding of how problematic it also is.

In Memory Of George Politzer

John Paul Sartre once wrote that the only reason to write is to be read. Blogs elide the categorical he wished to paint. An author can become a reader of her own material maybe only by waiting long enough to forget the experience of writing. But an unread blog can be a private space in which to practice self-disclosure, in which to pretend to be worthy. In this space, there is no need to wait to forget in order to become my own reader. I am my own reader, because no one else is reading. Maybe someone will massage my ego if I offer it to the unknown. But I did not sell myself for that. I merely joined in a fashion. I remain innocent. I think not.

So I begin