MODERN IRELAND: SHRIVELED DRAGONS, HYSTERICAL ENERGY
Sep 14th, 2007 by Conor McCabe
Joe Cleary does not do generations.
His latest book, Outrageous fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland, is a series of self-contained essays, linked by common themes and approaches. “It seeks… to map the intersecting forces that structure the field of modern Irish literary and cultural production,” writes Cleary, “and to query some of the received modes of thinking about the period [1800-2000] that informs Irish cultural studies.” Or, to put it another way, “it is an historical materialist work that diagnoses how socio-historical forces converge to shape particular aesthetic ideologies and forms, and how the latter in turn coalesce to mould conceptions of the histories that initially stimulated them.”
That’s the other thing. Joe Cleary does not do easy either.
Not to mind. Admittedly, it is an academic text, but it does come with a non-academic price-tag (€25 in Easons). The text itself can be somewhat difficult at times, but, given that all of the recent populist analytical texts pertaining to Ireland are rubbish, maybe it’s time to delve into the academic world and see what the lads and lassies are talking about these days. The one thing Joe Cleary does, however, and does superbly, is rigorous analysis. This book is essential for anyone even remotely interested in Ireland and the Irish. The essays cover literary culture, history, politics, colonialism, and the Pogues. There is nothing like it out there at the moment.
Joe Cleary has a lot to say about current Irish intellectual discourse. “Three broad scholarly formations have commanded the field of Irish literary and cultural studies for some time now” he writes. “Revisionism, feminism, and what is now commonly called postcolonial studies. Many of the most substantive works of literary and cultural scholarship here in recent times have emerged from one or another of these intellectual formations or, more accurately, from the contentions between them.” Of himself, he is decidedly, although not uncritically, within the field of postcolonial studies. Cleary, however, is well aware of the dangers of such a reductive approach, and acknowledges the crossover that occurs between each grouping and the need to avoid “overly tidy systematizations of Irish cultural studies.”
Nevertheless, the broad impress of revisionist, postcolonial and feminist studies on the production of knowledge in the humanities in recent decades is indisputable, and most conceptualizations of modern Irish social and cultural history are now indebted to one another, or to some combination, of these formations.”
The point here is not to categorize individual writers and critics, but to show that Irish intellectual discourse, in broad terms, takes place within a three-way discourse between feminism, revisionism, and postcolonial studies.
Not that there is much debate. Each discourse tends to see itself in oppositional terms to the other, at the same time portraying its particular analysis as radical, innovative, and dissident. Joe Cleary argues, however, that the three broad intellectual discourses in Ireland have a lot more in common than they believe, in no small way because these discourses are produced by the same class of people.
In this din of dissent it is easily forgotten that intellectual and cultural debate, however conducted, is monopolized in Modern Ireland (as elsewhere of course) by reasonably well-to-do middle-class women and men who typically share a great deal in common despite the constitutive divisions of the intellectual field. Such sibling commonalities include similar modes of education and professional training, shared forms of cultural taste and cultural capital, and, more significantly, a collective structural positioning and vantage-point within the larger social system conferred by their occupation as intellectual workers. These shared experiences and interests surface in relatively standardized languages of argument and analysis, repeated reworking, via a rather narrow band of methodologies, of relatively small sets of key authors and topics, and reciprocated tolerances for certain modes of licensed ignorance.
In other words, the Irish middle class is a bunch of smug cunts who’ve read the same small books.
I must say, it’s one of my favourite passages in the book, simply because, for me, it rings true with what passes for debate in this country. A pet project of mine is Irish working class culture, and for the most part my experience of growing up on a council housing estate in Ireland is not one shared with the majority of critics, commentators and, indeed, bloggers. There are a few who have that background, but it is a few. My intellectual world, which is labour and working class history, is without doubt a foreign country to the educated middle-classes. And as for current/contemporary debates on the nature of class and class analysis… more wine, anyone? It should be chilled by now. There’s cheese on the table if you’re feeling peckish.
But I digress. Unlike Joe, who goes on to explain that the faultline in Irish intellectual discourse is not just the same cosy required reading, but also the complete lack of awareness that this is the case.
Where literary and cultural studies specifically are concerned, these sibling identities across divisions register above all in terms of a widespread tendency to equate political engagement and analysis with thematizing ‘the political’ in literary or other cultural texts. Conceived thus, political analysis in the cultural sphere essentially amounts to producing new readings of cultural texts or artefacts that foreground political and social themes. The analytical idioms in such cases will undoubtedly be very-up-to-the-moment, but the actual practise.. will still remain largely consonant with the older modes of ‘ethical’ criticism characteristic of the discipline of literary criticism in its bourgeois meridian. whether the object of analysis is a high modernist literary text or a popular film, a work of visual art or music, the debate in such instances will predictably be conducted mainly at the level of the semiotic context of the text.This means that more complex ’sociological’ questions about how works of art of any kind, or indeed academic analyzes of such works, can actually effect change, go almost totally unexamined.”
In terms of Irish intellectual and cultural discourse, the problems are much more deep-rooted and generally unopposed.
Irish cultural criticism attends remarkably little as a rule to the sedimented, and mostly only slowly-changing, aesthetic ideologies that regulate the production of individual artistic works. It investigates even less the operations of the institutional networks (of schools and universities; circuits of publishing and performance; cinemas, theatres, museums, galleries; ministries of culture and culture industries) that organize the cultural field and mediate how texts are disseminated to the public and achieve meaning. The changing ways in which cultural and intellectual institutions negotiate their relationship with the domains of the state and the market in late capitalist conditions are equally ignored.”
The hard, materialist production of culture in Ireland is rarely, if ever, analyzed. Irish blogging has, at least, begun to tackle this topic, but outside of its world and more serious academic discourse, the story is a dead parrot. Picture the almost universal praise for RTE’s Prosperity, with commentators highlighting its gritty realism and social function. No mention that is reinforces the mainstream, and middle-class, view of working class as “a problem”, and not as a culture. And why shouldn’t it reinforce a middle-class view of the working class? Sure isn’t it made by the middle class team that made the other “working-class as a problem” drama, Adam and Paul?
More digression. Ok. One more quote and then I’l finish up. Here, Cleary talks about the production of knowledge in Irish universities.
In fine, the Irish universities promote and reward certain textualist modes of humanistic research, and even if they do not actively discourage or legislatively exclude other modes, they don’t support them much either.”
To carry on my personal bugbear, neither Irish labour or Irish working class studies are taught in any Irish university. The last course I know of was one run by the history department in NUI Maynooth in 2001. At that time, it was the ONLY course of its kind in the Republic. The Irish, educated, middle class is completely ignorant (my words now, no Joe’s), of vast areas of the island’s history and culture, and yet believes itself to be on top of all things intellectual ‘cos it has those small set of books to call on, and a degree at the end of it all.
What started out as a review, has ended up as a personal rant. Joe Cleary’s book has a lot more to offer than what I’ve quoted here so far. First of all, he does not shy away from criticising the left in Ireland, particularly its lack of a viable alternative to the late capitalist Ireland we inhabit. He provides an excellent argument for Ireland as a post- or neo-naturalist island, as opposed to postmodernist in the European/American sense. Joe Cleary also argues, with great force, that the DeValrea Ireland v Lemass Ireland is a false dichotomy. Finally, he gives a brilliant Bakhtinian analysis of the Pogues as Carnival. The writing is dense, the arguments anything but.
Enjoy.
For an alternative view of Ireland, however, you could of course pick up this DVD.
The Irish, educated, middle class is completely ignorant (my words now, no Joe’s), of vast areas of the island’s history and culture, and yet believes itself to be on top ‘cos it has those small set of books to call on, and a degree at the end of it all.
But surely it’s not a question of belief: it is on top. And that ought to explain why you don’t tend to get courses on Irish labour taught in universities.
oops. typo on my part. I meant to say “on top of things” as in, it’s got smarts. But yeah. It’s on top, as well.
What I find interesting about your point is that it chimes exactly with my experience of academia and irish studies and critical art and cultural theory in particular. The discourse is one which is self-limited, particularly in the latter area which broadly speaking has no real traction as regards socio-political or economic issues except ironically in the most uncritical and simplistic fashion. A faux internationalism which suggests ‘well we’re all the same’ prevails and which shuns analysis of Irish culture and history. Well, yes. They’re all the same because they’re essentially middle-class and therefore the cultural connections that are made tend to be middle class and avoid such unpleasantness such as our rather tangled history. On the other hand Irish studies is slightly different if only because of the influence of post-colonial studies. But that is an area which weirdly, or perhaps not so weirdly, also tends to be somewhat indifferent of labour or working class history because it is more concerned with the ‘nation’. And revisionism similarly is preoccupied with the nation - despite it’s infrequent avowals of interest in class issues. Feminism is arguably one of the few areas where there is some attempt to actually, y’know, deal with peoples lives.
you should have a read of Cleary’s essay on Irish naturalism and post/neo-naturalism. It’s fucking excellent. also, with regard to the intellectual prowess of the Irish middle-class, I’m reminded of what a mutual friend of ours once told me about an idea for a social-political reading of ephemera, only to be told that it would make a good coffee-table book. Joe Cleary, for one, would have loved the idea I would guess.
Cleary comes from a post-colonial and irish studies background - his doctoral supervisor was Edward Said - but it is by no means an uncritical background. I saw Cleary lecture out in Maynooth, and I’ve been a fan ever since.
Cheer up McCabe it is not that bad. So apparently most people in the middle class professions of academia, literary criticism and opinion piece journalism are middle class and only ever talk to each other, is anyone surprised?
Think of all the areas where the working class rule the roost. Construction. The Sunday World. League of Ireland soccer. Chunky gold jewellery. Graffiti. The recreational drugs industry. Markey Robinson. Fair City. Dublin Bus. With all this, who really cares what the tweed jacket wearing, pipe smoking twats think? Stuff their bourgeois meridian, you keep on with your working class studies, that is what the working class really need.
The whole Post Colonial studies version of Irish-ness is a neat trick; buy into a post-marxist identity poiltics paradigm that gets you out of having to explain the class struggle within Ireland from the early 19c onwards and the rise of the native bourgeoisie and often enthusiastic participation of said bourgeoisie in the service of the Empire. As WBS said above, it allows you to privilege ‘Nation’ over class, while ensuring that said ‘nation’ remains a comfortably distant regulative ideal, rather than a reflection of any actual - or possible - nation.
Bang on sonofstan. For an example of how cultural issues become impossibly tangled when they attempt to engage on this ground how about this as a fine example of begging numerous questions…
http://www.recirca.com/articles/cotter/index.shtml
Average Irish Blogger, the almost complete absence of working class academics is an Irish thing. In fact, a very average Irish thing.
Tommy Murtagh claims to have a working class background and seems to maintain that he remains of the working class. His accent says otherwise, his department is irrelevant as far as this post goes and most of his stories are clearly polished to suit his politics. But it’s something, I guess.
I remember in his autobiography Experience Martin Amis describing a conversation he had with his young son about class. The curious little oike was wondering whether the Amis’ were upper or middle class. Neither opined the father, we’re a member of the thinking class. Or that’s what I remember. As a novelist he seems to think of himself outside of class in order to be able to give all the classes the odd poke. While looking for the reference for this though I came across a very good review of the House of Meetings, which describes exactly the point at which Amis got his chops into Islamofascism.
Knowing your interests a little bit Kevin, I think you’d like it, unless you’ve read it before: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n01/soar01_.html
I saw it January, actually. I’ve always held (however lightly) that Amis’ attack on Hitchens in Koba was one of the reasons for Hitchens’s lurch to wherever he lurched. Conceding to himself that he’d got Stalinism wrong, Hitchens decided he needed to get something big right - and all by himself. If the LRB piece is right, and Amis did indeed follow Hitchens, then, in my view, whether he realises it or not, he’s reaping seeds he long ago sowed.
Or not. I’m just throwing it out there.
Funnily enough, the LRB online is essentially the only thing I’ve continued to read on a consistent basis over the last year or so. I recall being a little disappointed by the review because, whatever about Amis’ current politics, his fiction was at one stage undeniably decent. And that’s not a closed argument, by the way: Banville rated House of Meetings very well, and having since read it, I too thought it of considerable merit.
His politics, well, that’s another country. Same goes for the voice and tone he brings to political discussion. I saw you commented on the Steven Poole piece, so you probably saw I got in there too. I’ve become disillusioned by Hitchens of late, but I think it’s fair to say that, in comparison to Amis, he still has some valuable things to throw out there.
That’s entirely impertinent. My apologies.
That there are almost no working class academics in Ireland is surely not surprising yet. We haven’t had free fees for that long; even without fees, registration itself is expensive; and paying for and surviving during postgraduate studies is, I would imagine, hardly inexpensive. Right?
Hmm, I demand an editing option in these comments.
If working class people are, according to your current post, those without power to change or even influence society, then surely every Humanities professor in the country is a member of the working class?
where do I say that the working class in Ireland have no power? I say that in the last ten years the increase in wages has not seen a change in societal power relations - quite a different thing.
With regard to professors, How so? The definition put forward by Zweig is in relation to the workplace.
humanities professors have quite a lot of autonomy with regard to setting courses, control of curriculum, degree requirements, and other traditional faculty responsibilities. That’s what makes them part of the middle class, and it is as part of that class that they have more (i repeat, more, not exclusive) influence over policy than, say, temp classroom assistants or bank clerks, or copy editors.
I’m not saying tha the working class have no power to change or influence society - in fact, they”ve got tonnes, but they’ve got to be organised, and in that respect they need to get themselves organised around political power, as well as maintaining a strong trade union movement.
At the moment, the working class do not see themselves as a vested interest - something that the middle class most certainly do. In fact, the working class in Ireland seem to think that they’re in the same boat as the middle class - quite a con, no?
The move towards a strong working class identity is both political and cultural.
with regard to free fees, that has made a difference, and i think in the next ten years or so we’re going to see a lot more working class phds. Dublin Corporation paid for mine, anyway, and for that I’m eternally grateful. seriously. Interesting times ahead alright. But, Joe Cleary’s argument is that the current analysis is in a middle-class cul-de-sac (semi-detached, of course), and on that point he is correct.
My last comment was a joke which demanded semi-deliberate misreading of your other post. Out of interest, can you hold up a working-class movement in another country or in another age that as a model for what you would think the Irish working-class must become if it is to have those tonnes of power you believe it can have.
And as far as the interesting times ahead goes, I say indeed. In my arts block, I know only two people who’d fit your description - any description - of working-class. But they’re the smartest kids in the class, and at least one plans to go down the avenue to academia.
No. you can’t. All you can do is look to other situations as guides - and for insights, maybe, - but ultimately, the only way to understand Irish society is to study Irish society - not import a model from another time or place and hope for the best.
The thing about Zweig is that i think his comments on class and power - especially with regard to the american experience of a co-called huge middle class - have a resonance with irish society. Although, a lot of his book on the american wrking class deals with specifics that have no real parallel here.
What we have to do is take some of the ideas and adapt them to the irish situation. It’s why i like Cleary so much , because that’s exactly what he’s done.
Sorry about not picking up on the irony - i think i just get into a really defensive mood when it comes to this topic.
It must be somewhat comforting to think that your personal career failings are not your own fault but due to some shadowy conspiracy by middle class academics.
I dunno. I think Joe Cleary’s done alright for himself, no?
A side issue Conor - and probably me blaming ‘my personal career failings on some shadowy conspiracy’ but I deeply envious of your ability to get the corpo to pay for your PhD - on three occasions (start of MA, first and second year PhD) I’ve been turned down by them on separate technicalities (nothing to do with being secretly loaded) - and filling out those epic forms is harder than most academic work I’ve ever had to do………I still grumble to myself every time i pass those bunkers.
Access to whatever meagre funding there is for research in this country isn’t easy - although, interestingly, the research councils here fund a marginally higher percentage of all PhDs here than do the equivalent bodies in England and Wales (I think - I’ll have to dig up the figures again to check); problem is, they fund them at a much lower level in a more expensive country.
i got funding off them from the start of my BA, so when it came to the PhD I was already “on the books”. you’re right about funding, though. The corpo grant was around €4,500 a year, while the internal university of ulster grant (for which I was turned down, leading me to fall back on Dublin corporation), was around €22,000 a year. Having said that, the corpo grant (along with summer work) made it all possible. I don’t envy your situation , sonofstan, it’s tough enough even with the corpo grant.
Got IRCHSS money in the end so it wasn’t that tragic….
To get away from the personal and back to the political though; working class kids going to college are still going to find it harder to justify to their parents and peer group the deferral of earning any money into their early 20s - later if they go on to postgrad work, and will be competing with middle class kids where it is now fairly much the norm to live at home (at least among students from Dublin) and receive generous parental support. We’re still, in a way, in the situation here that Richard Hoggart described in the memoir bit of the Uses of Literacy where the working- class ‘Grammar School Boy’ finds himself alienated from both his roots and his eventual class situation; the advantage is i guess, that this position gives a clear eyed understanding of the ‘hidden injuries of class’ as Sennett puts it, and the incentive to do something about it for the next generation.
Oh yeah. I mean, it’s by no means the norm. Having said that, two of my closest friends, both from working class families, had the complete support of their families in their endeavours (as did I). One’s now a teacher, the other a social worker. It’s changing, but it’ll take time.
Cleary’s point, I stress again, is the situation now. It is an analysis of the current state of play, and where Irish cultural studies needs to go, in his opinion.
Oh. with the post-grad thing, though, that’s when the “waster” kicks in. They’re probably right as well.
Oh. By the way. (This is a cross-comment from the other post). The parents of my friend who’s the teacher, they own their own home and both kids went to college - the father’s a carpenter, the mother worked in an office - and they have no problem with being reminded they are working class. They also know that FF are fucking us.
Going back a little way, and slightly off the point, the idea Hitchens got ‘Stalinism’ wrong is highly unlikely. Hitchens was a Trotskyite from the off, was never a Stalinist, and indeed was a member of the International Socialists - a group known for their vociferous condemnation of Stalin and indeed ‘actually existing socialism’ i.e. the USSR. Amis’s preoccupation with Koba struck me as the preoccupation of a man who actually couldn’t distinguish between different currents of thought on the left, had come to the subject relatively late in life and used broad brush strokes to describe something he wasn’t really comfortable with.
On the main thrust of the comments, it is remarkable how poorly funded post-grad research is. The IRCHSS goes some way, but even still… And this at a time when 3rd level is repositioning itself explicitly to expand post-grad…
Get into science, man, they give you nose money there.
Too much hard work…