Introduction: The Troubles with the Peace Process: Contemporary Northern Irish Culture

Introduction: The Troubles with the Peace Process: Contemporary Northern Irish CultureAuthor(s): AARON KELLYSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 40/41 (winter 2009), pp. 1-17Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20750098 .

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Int/6^pon: The Troubles with tne Peace Process: Contemporary Northern Irish Culture

AARON KELLY

Richard Kirkland's Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland since 1965:

Moments of Danger (1996) astutely engaged Antonio Gramsci's concept of an 'interregnum' through which to analyse the North. The interregnum carries with it the sense of a period of uneasy, stalled transition where there

is a collapse of prevailing positions and the slow, fractious emergence of

counter-tendencies yet to achieve full articulation. As Gramsci famously

put it: 'The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the

new cannot be born; and in this interregnum a great variety of morbid

symptoms appear'.1 For Kirkland, Northern Ireland since the 1960s offers a

charged coalescence of such contestatory pressures rendered as both change and stagnation. Kirkland perceives a certain kind of historical fatalism or

entrapment in the dominant means of responding to the Troubles and its

aftermath, a resigned acceptance of the inevitability of this period of crisis as the product of peremptory historical drives. Kirkland notes that during the Troubles the sense of crisis often became its own self-fulfilling tautol

ogy: 'there is a crisis because there is a crisis ... an endlessly circular act of

re-beginning'.2 Much of the literature and criticism which tried to grapple with the Troubles found there to be only the repetition of an exhausted yet

simultaneously exhausting set of historical paradigms that foreclosed the

possibility of something else, something different. A key, highly influential,

though also disputed example is Seamus Heaney's bog poetry that culmi

nate in his most politicized and fatalistic collection, North (1972). Heaney's own mission to find historical parallels or other cultural and political situa

tions by which he could comprehend and contextualize the Troubles was

sharply focused by P.V. Glob's The Bog People (1965). Glob's book detailed a series of archaeological finds in Scandinavia in which the bodies of the vic

tims of ancient sacrificial rites were exhumed, having been preserved for

KELLY, Introduction', Irish Review 40-41 (2009) 1



centuries in peat bogs. Notably, Heaney discovers in these archaeological

specimens not merely parallel deaths with which to compare contemporary violence but, more resonantly for him, confirmation of recurrent historical

patterns of violence and human behaviour. For Heaney, in Jungian mode, these recurrent structures of violence constituted what he termed 'an

archetypal pattern', so that history can only repeat a self-iterating and

inevitable process.3 Within the realm of fiction, Brian Moore's Lies of Silence

stands as a correspondingly resigned acquiescence to what it terms 'that

endless mindless chain of killings'.4 With the advent of the Peace Process, such fatalistic inevitabilities seem

to have dissipated. What is noteworthy, however, given Richard Kirkland's

Gramscian designation of the Troubles as a kind of interregnum whose

morbid symptoms persisted in the resigned and self-perpetuating tautology that there is a crisis because there is a crisis, is that the Peace Process can in

fact be considered the continuation rather than the interruption of para

digms of historical inevitability. In other words, there is a Peace Process

because there is a Peace Process. This supersaturating tautology does as

much now to delimit other possibilities and interventions as did the stan

dard account of the Troubles as the sum total of the North's historical fate.

As such, the paradigm of an apparently irresistible historical narrative with

out alternatives in the North has now been gathered under the sign of the

Peace Process for which, according to its governing state-sponsored logic, there is no alternative to its pervasive inexorability. Although the names

have changed - from the Troubles to the Peace Process - it is the same

rubric of historical enclosure that once viewed bombs, killings and road

blocks as immutable which now regards with consonant certainty the

unshakeable ineluctability of multinational capital, corporate re-branding and consumerism. In both cases a whole history of class struggle, issues of

gender, disenfranchisement or dissent is erased. And there is more to dissent

than leaving a car bomb in Omagh or voting for Jim Allister. It does not, or

at least it should not, follow that the entirely just demand that the killings were ceased results only in us all becoming customers. As Glenn Patterson

says in regard to urban gentrification and redevelopment strategies: 'the

opposite of all that went before is not this'.5

Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement) the

emphasis, through the consociational model upon which the Peace Process

is grounded, has been on consensus, on, perhaps obviously enough, agree ment. But mainstream politics in the North therefore forgoes the capacity to disagree. There was a fear in some circles that the rise to electoral promi nence of both the DUP and Sinn Fein was a sign that politics was

becoming more extreme, more polarized. If anything, the opposite is true:

2 KELLY, Introduction', Irish Review 40-41 (2009)



that each has moved closer to the centre. And unfortunately, that centre is

not one of ethical redress but a consensual acceptance of what constitutes

the realities of the present. It is above all an economic centre that in fact

requires politics to relinquish itself. Consensus is the codeword given to this

depleted politics, which is in fact assent to the dominance of the market

and neo-liberalism. The Peace Process and the effort to put the past behind

us has coincided with a more global set of shifts in Western neo-liberal

democracies - which locally occur in the Blairite Third Way society of

stakeholders in Britain or the Celtic Tiger's supposedly shared, universal

benefits in the Republic - most famously encapsulated in Francis

Fukuyama's concept of'the end of history'. Fukuyama's notion posits that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalism and liberal democracy have won and that there are no meaningful ideological or political conflicts

left to resolve. Fukuyama regards the present as the fulfilment of history and

its reformist, ameliorative promises, and he equates post-cold war global

capitalism (and indeed American imperialism) with democracy to create, in

his own terms at least, a Utopia of a world supposedly beyond political divi

sion, ideological conflict or historical change.6 In wider global terms as well as its own specific functionality, the Belfast

Agreement is therefore an agreement that suspends the capacity of politics to disagree in Jacques Ranciere's sense of the term disagreement or mesen

tente. Ranciere stresses the importance of the excluded, the people or the

demos, the supplementary part of every account of the population, those

who have no name, who remain invisible and inaudible, who can only

penetrate the dominant order through a mode of agency that transforms

fundamentally the aesthetic co-ordinates of the community by implement

ing the universal presupposition of politics: we are all equal. Ranciere

argues that politics worthy of the term politics occurs only when those

who have no part take part:

[T]he struggle between rich and poor is not social reality, which politics then has to deal with. It is the actual institution of politics itself. There is

politics when there is a part of those who have no part -

thus, there is

politics when there is the count of the unaccounted-for, a part or party of the poor. Politics does not happen just because the poor oppose the rich. It is the other way around: politics (that is, the interruption of the

simple effects of domination by the rich) causes the poor to exist as an

entity . . . Politics exists when the natural order of domination is inter

rupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part.7

In other words, the notion that liberal democratic consensus exists as a

means of resolving tensions such as class antagonism is misguided since that

consensual order marks rather the suspension of politics proper. Damningly




therefore within the tenets of Western liberal pluralism, those oppressed, who have no part, who are made to stand apart, are only permitted to have a part in the new global dispensation by becoming symbols of a dominant

normalcy which is itself the very causal source of their ongoing apartness, exclusion and oppression. Ranciere's notion of disagreement or dissensus

offers a means of challenging the reiterative consensus and agreement demanded by the Peace Process:

Consensus refers to that which is censored. Experiences are the sensible

configuration of lived common word. Consensus means that whatever

your personal commitments, interests, and values may be, you perceive the same things, you give them the same name. But there is no contest on what appears, on what is given in a situation and as a situation.

Consensus means that the only point of contest lies on what has to be done as a response to the given situation. Correspondingly, dissensus and

disagreement don't only mean conflict of interests, ideas and so on. They mean that there is a debate on the sensible givens of a situation, a debate on that which you see and feel, on how it can be told and discussed, who is able to name it and argue about it.8

While the consociational political model saturates the Belfast Agreement, there is a distinct lack of economics or economic provision in the text. The

point here though is to insist that there is a prior, economic subtext written

all over the Belfast Agreement, but it is scripted by Adam Smith's famous

'invisible hand' ? the market ? in an ink invisible to the scrutiny of those on

the receiving end of its effects. In this manner, the supposedly political pro vision of the Belfast Agreement is merely the glossy dust jacket of another

work whose text faces elsewhere. By way of analogy, in Book 13 of St

Augustine's Confessions the divine word is figured as the book of the sky but

the supreme irony and source of pain is that to the earth-dwellers the book

is turned in the wrong direction. From earth, the book of the sky shows

only its clouded, dark side, whereas the legible side is turned away, towards

the side of the Heavenly Father and his angels. In other words, it is paradox

ically accessible to the only ones who do not need to read the book, those

who are the origin of the word or who enact its decrees. So too the Good

Friday Agreement, though sent to every household in the North, guards for

the initiates another secret text beyond democratic scrutiny or account.

The effort to democratize the Northern Irish state ? which of course was

brought into being in abeyance of democracy in the first place ?

unhappily coincides with a moment in history where the structures of representative

democracy are increasingly unwilling or unable to contest the directives of

the global market. Mainstream politics is now a masquerade choreographed

by neo-liberal economics and is no longer - if it ever was - a means by




which those excluded by the latter may articulate their disenfranchisement.

Politics as consensus feigns to include those whom it has already excluded

socially and economically. Having already suffered in voiceless silence, Derek

Mahon's mushrooms in a disused shed must now fear, amongst other things,

gentrification strategies of regeneration, advertising slogans, or, worse still, their token inclusion in some well-intentioned though meretricious focus

group. So what of art and culture in all this, particularly with reference, as

Ranciere would have it, to those who have no part, to those excluded from

the governing consensus? During the Troubles, Edna Longley usefully pro

posed the North as 'a cultural corridor', a space of ambiguity and

interchange where the dominant ideologies may be seen to break down and

be surmounted:'a zone where Ireland and Britain permeate one another'.9

This sense of the North as a cultural corridor is just as germane and exigent now in the Peace Process, given that all the negotiations, machinations and

agreements which compromise the latter have taken place in very different, less open corridors ? those of power: corridors which only ever offer path

ways to corporate boardrooms, to secret deals behind closed doors, which

demean the democracy which they putatively embody. If the best of litera

ture and culture during the Troubles always offered dissent, alternative

perspectives, a challenge to the prevailing identity politics, then it would be a

shame, after all that, if art now became identical to the governing logic of

what is; because there is a sense in which the Peace Process demands that

culture becomes normal - less charged or political - because it supposedly

takes place now in a normal society. In other words, it should reconcile itself

with what is. But why should it?

Ranciere's work is highly attuned to how the aesthetic has always been a

deeply political realm of competing processes of, on the one hand, delimi

tation and control, and, on the other, democratization. The aesthetic, for

Ranciere, has always been embedded in what he calls le partage du sensible, the partition or distribution of the sensible. The distribution of the sensible

is the system of divisions and boundaries that define what is visible and

audible within a specific society. This partition of the sensible can either

authorize particular modes of perception or grant a means of challenging dominant ways of seeing. The aesthetic assumes the full range of its mean

ing in enabling a questioning of the existing political order: of what can be

thought, said or heard; of who has the opportunity to think, say or hear; of

the forms and modes in which all these processes take place. In order to

understand in more detail the democratic and anarchic potential of the aes

thetic, Ranciere's concept can be elaborated in some of his core examples. In The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing (2004) Ranciere unfolds the

importance of the aesthetic through a reading of Plato's Phaedrus. In




Phaedrus the myth of the cicadas is deployed to contrast two categories of

being: the workers who come, at the hot hour when the cicadas sing, to

take a nap in the shade; and the congregated philosophers, separated from

the former by their leisure of speech and exchange of words. The inequali

ty of the incarnations of souls is directly linked to the capacity manifested

by these souls to bear the view of heavenly truths. As Ranciere surmises:

'The inferiority of a given condition thus revealed the indignity of a mode

of life separated from true modes of seeing and speaking!10 There are appro

priate modes of perceiving and appropriate people who have access to

those modes, while lower beings lack the time and talent to participate in

this regime of what is sensible. For Plato, and the tradition of thought which he institutes, the order of the polls coincides with an order of dis course. Certain citizens have possession of the logos, of the word, and others

do not. There is a logic of the proper, which requires everyone to be in

their proper place partaking of their proper affairs. Work to the workers and

philosophy for the dialecticians. Writing, or what Ranciere calls literarity, confuses this hierarchy by disordering what Plato conceived as the harmo

ny of three things: the occupations of the citizens, their ways of doing; their

mode of being or ethos; and the communal law of the community. Writing achieves this disordering by confusing the destination of living speech in

Plato's optimal city.There is a division in Plato between speech and writing. Plato trusts speech to help order his polls', you can be sure of who is saying what, to whom in what context, and how the recipient responds, if the logos is possessed by philosophers and citizens and denied to lower beings who are silenced by the ordering of public life. By contrast, Plato fears writing because it cannot be regulated in this manner. Where speech demarcates the

hierarchy between the philosophers as thinking subjects and the mute

workers by the cicadas, in addition to structuring the context and situation

in which this division of the sensible takes place as a measure of citizenship,

writing is potentially accessible and available to everyone. It can be pro

duced, read, disseminated, and interpreted in ways and contexts that are not

sanctioned by the public ordering of the polls. In writing, Plato cannot be

sure who is the designated subject or receiver, what is the ethical purpose of

the text and so on. Ranciere asserts: 'The availability of a series of words

lacking a legitimate speaker and an equally legitimate interlocutor inter

rupts Plato's logic of the proper . . . this "excess of words" that I call literarity

disrupts the relation between an order of discourse and its social func

tions.'11 In other words, even those who are not entitled to the logos,

according to Plato, those whom he would relegate to non-speaking status, have access to writing, since it is capable of going to places that it should

not, into the hands of those whom Plato would make mute manual workers




and nothing else. Hence, for Ranciere, democracy - in the truest sense - is

a certain sharing of the perceptible, a more equitable redistribution of its

sites. And, in an affirmation of the relations between the aesthetic and the

political, culture is part of this redistribution, this recasting of who can per ceive and speak, of what is possible and of what can be registered and

acknowledged by a society. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews's (De-)Constructing the North: Fiction and the

Northern Ireland Troubles since 1969 (2003) is a significant account of contem

porary Northern Irish writing, especially the generation of Robert McLiam

Wilson, Glenn Patterson and their peers. Kennedy-Andrews finds that such

writers embody a new postmodern or deconstructive turn which under

mines the prevailing ideologies of Irish nationalism and unionism. For him, the new Northern Irish writing 'exhibits a postmodern multiplicity and

heterogeneity, a plurality of viewpoints, a resistance to closure and totalisa

tion . . . issues of identity, justice, freedom, and so forth are constantly subject to imaginative interrogation and reconstruction, constantly to be debated, revised and determined'.12 This is certainly a key set of directions to pick up on in recent literature in the North. However, Richard Kirkland's Identity Parades (2002) provides a counter-argument to the celebration of a new

postmodern Northern fiction and the multiplicity and pluralism it repre sents. Kirkland suspects that underpinning such postmodern plurality is a

bourgeois ideology which is engaged in the reconstitution of its dominance

in the North and more globally. So what appears as liberation from tradi

tional constraint is actually a more socially coded individualism ultimately conditioned by consumerism and the economic logic of bourgeois society. Hence, Kirkland reads the apparent newly pluralistic and diverse cultures of, for example, Patterson's Fat Lad (1992), McLiam Wilson's Eureka Street

(1996), or Colin Bateman's Cycle of Violence (1994), as emanating not from

multiplicity but from the same underlying socio-economic imperative:

While each novel charts a form of resistance it is possible for the individ ual to take when faced with the perceived constrictions of Nationalist and/or Unionist ideology, at the same time they all acknowledge (although to varying degrees) the futility of attempting to resist the onward march of postmodern capitalism.13

Of course not all deconstructive, revisionary or heterogeneous cultural prac tice can be construed as an endorsement of postmodern capitalism. It is just that the critique of what was does not have to be the mere affirmation of

what is. As art had an ongoing role in dissent from a dominant identity poli tics, it should retain rather than relinquish its non-identical relation to society, its capacity to continue its critique, to offer alternative modes of registering




its social materials from prevailing norms (even if these norms have become

postmodern ones).This is not to downplay the potentials and possibilities of

contemporary Northern Irish culture but rather to insist that there is a speci

ficity and contestation about what is emerging from the current ferment and

energies, so that the latter do not all end up culminating in the same thing. And there are many possibilities at present in the North in this period of

change that should remain the site of alternatives and openness rather than

the foreclosure of all practice within the same postmodern rubric.

In his work, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of

Ideology (2003), Slavoj Zizek picks up on one of the most iconic images dur

ing the fall of the Communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe: a photograph of Romanian rebels waving their national flag with the red star, the

Communist symbol, cut out. Hence, in place of the central organizing symbol of national life, there is nothing but a hole. To Zizek, this hole offers a fleeting

ghmpse of the moment of possibility in times of political upheaval, wherein an

old order has yet to be fully superseded by a new regime of power:

It is difficult to imagine a more salient index of the 'open' character of a

historical situation 'in its becoming' as Kierkegaard would have put it, of

that intermediate phase when the former Master-Signifier, although it

has already lost the hegemonical power, has not yet been replaced by the new one.14

Comparably, the Peace Process, and much of the cultural production which

accompanies it, could be considered moments of becoming and openness,

glances toward a new and more generous dispensation. But much as the

seeming end to dominance of sectarian polarities is to be welcomed, so too

a newly dominant context of a redeveloping, postmodern North which

would forget all its histories demands circumspection. There is a really

telling passage in McLiam Wilson s Eureka Street which encapsulates both

vibrant Utopian impulses and more discreetly problematic quiescences, when the narrative sweeps generously across Belfast:

As your eye roams the city (as your eyes must, as our eyes, those demo

cratic unideological things always will, giving witness, testimony), you see that there is indeed a division in the people here. Some call it reli

gion, some call it politics. But the most reliable, the most ubiquitous division is money. Money is the division that you can always put your money on. You see leafy streets and leafless ones. You can imagine leafy lives and leafless ones. In the plump suburbs and the concrete districts

your eyes see some truths, some real difference. The scars and marks of

violence reside in only one type of place. Many of the populace seem to

live well. Many prosper while many suffer. Belfast is a city that has lost its




heart. A shipbuilding, rope-making, linen-weaving town. It builds no

ships, makes no rope and weaves no linen. Those trades died. A city can't survive without something to do with itself. . .This place often feels like the belly of the universe. It is a place much filmed but little seen . . . The

city's surface is thick with its living citizens. Its earth is richly sown with its many dead. The city is a repository of narratives, of stories. Present

tense, past tense or future. The city is a novel.15

Hence, McLiam Wilson's narrative eyes - 'those democratic unideological

things' ? which encompass Belfast with visionary clarity in Eureka Street

promise a more humane cartography that acknowledges class inequality but

also dangerously couch that sweeping, Utopian impulse in 'unideological' terms. In other words, this new Belfast is offered as an open space beyond ide

ology, like the hole in the Romanian flag which strikes Zizek as teeming with

the possibilities of a moment of historical becoming. It is vital, therefore, that

the apparently plural possibilities of a new North unrestricted by outmoded

ideologies are not solely reduced to the embodiment of a now dominant post modern reordering. In this reading, Eureka Street's roaming narrative eyes do

not offer a perspective unsullied by ideology but rather a vantage point that

would suppress its own ideological situatedness. By contrast, what is made

plain, for example, in Ciaran Carson's work, through its deployment of Walter

Benjamin's flaneur, is that the freedom or urban movement and subjectivity

promised by fl?nerie is not available to everyone equally and that power (in sec

tarian, state and economic terms) demarcates rigidly the access of specific constituencies to civic, public or properly democratic spaces.

To this end, there is no better cultural engagement with the new post modern North coming into being than Eoghan McTigue's series of

photographs All Over Again (2003). McTigue's project chimes with Zizek's reading of the hole in the Romanian flag as an index of a historical situa

tion in its becoming, since it documents white-washed and painted-over murals around Belfast. Once demarcations of sectarian absolutes and con

flict affiliations, these murals await the newly sanctioned signifiers and

symbols of the Peace Process. The murals in McTigue's series have been

blanked to make way for more acceptable images of a new alignment. All

Over Again facilitates an appraisal of the limitations of both the older sectar

ian and emergently dominant postmodern paradigms. The photographs of

white-washed or painted over murals are, variously, spectrally suggestive shrouds of interred images and political slogans, or blank or open signifiers, intricate interpretative interstices in their own right. Most of all, the photo

graphs of these blanked signs attest to the dynamics of historical process, its

continual renegotiation of both the past and the present, and the layering of

evermore subsumed communal memories in its wake. That said, McTigue's




series makes clear that all these murals compete with other signs in Belfast

and are never merely communal self-affirmation and internal dialogue. The

photograph of Hopewell Crescent juxtaposes the partially white-washed

mural with a satellite dish at the side of the terrace, gesturing to other mes

sages and signals to decipher, other places and other affinities. It suggests

something beyond, a something else, just as these photographs intimate

other scripts, other signs, change, history happening for better or for worse,

something other than just the singular voice of sectarian community. Urban

space will always produce this otherness, even as those in power attempt to

control it; it will offer counter-narratives, resistances, ambiguities, connec

tions. The photograph of the blanked out mural on Dromara Street (above) in the Lower Ormeau area of Belfast, which still faintly displays its former

message criticizing the slow implementation of the Good Friday Agreement and its guiding principles, offers an interesting tension between the mural

itself and the large David Allen advertising board revolving above it, not to

mention the Women's Coalition advertisement portentously frozen in the

moment of its disappearance and replacement by an urban development

promotion. The photograph captures the advertising sign in the midst of

rotating its display, proffering another indeterminate sign, an openness between advertisements that seduces us towards a further blankness ? the




phantasmagorical realm of commodity culture. While the North is suppos

edly emerging from the blight of a sectarian politics of private or intimate

tribes, the advertising sign then raises the issue of a very different kind of

privatized space - that of capital and commerce.

So McTigue's photography on murals indicates that even the seemingly most monologic and singular of signs and statements are always already and

fundamentally unstable, prone to decay, reinscription, multivocality and

subversion. But unlike Zizek's affirmative reading of the hole in the post Communist Romanian flag, it is also possible to interpret the blankness of

McTigue's images, not as a free space yet to be inscribed by power but

rather as an adumbration or articulation of a new Master-Signifier. Firstly, the overriding blankness of these walls itself indicates that a properly shared

and equitable public sphere in the city is yet to be established, yet to be

inscribed on the very fabric of our society. In addition, the blank spaces of

McTigue's images can also be construed as the very ground of power's simultaneous expression and mystification (that power being the relativized

social pluralism underscoring global capital), rather than a subversion of it.

By way of explanation, John Berger, who so influenced the work of the

postmodern geographies of Edward Soja, remains highly instructive. Berger observes of the spatial dislocations of the new era of globalization:

Prophesy now involves a geographical rather than historical projection; it is space not time that hides consequences from us.To prophesy today it is

only necessary to know men as they are throughout the whole world in their inequality. Any contemporary narrative which ignores the urgency of this dimension is incomplete.16

In other words, the blankness of All Over Again divulges the 'hole' residing in

any celebratory narrative of the photographs as the signalling of a new plu ralistic city of possibility. For the liberal democracy of globalization pursues the final repression of class and social inequality in its discourse of cultural

difference, its normative society of differentiated individuals. Therein, class

antagonism is rewritten as cultural diversity, a revalued sign of society's

healthy polyphony, so that, divested of its own terms and context, the lan

guage of class becomes simply one register amongst others of a cultural

relativism that rewords a global bourgeois hegemony and material disadvan

tage as social pluralism. The dominant narratives of a new Northern

dispensation of cosmopolitanism intentionally override the appraisal of

material disenfranchisement. Hence, specific, situated and locatable inequali ties become displaced by global codes of liberal pluralism. The structural,

organisational ground of liberal pluralism must remain incomplete or

blanked since it is charged with spatially mystifying the very inequalities and




exclusions by which its own creed of inclusiveness is produced. Indeed, Zizek himself appraises the untenability of Western democratic liberalism's

basis in a global capitalist system of profound inequality and exclusion in the

following manner:

The problem with the liberal democracy is that a priori, for structural

reasons, it cannot be universalized . . . the triumphant liberal-democratic

'new world order' is more and more marked by a frontier separating its 'inside' from its 'outside'

? a frontier between those who manage to

remain 'within' (the 'developed', those to whom the rules of human

rights, social security, etc., apply) and the others, the excluded (the main concern of 'developed' apropos of them is to contain their explosive potential, even if the price to be paid for such containment is the neglect of elementary democratic principles) [. . .] The traditional liberal opposi tion between 'open' pluralist societies and 'closed' nationalist-corporatist societies founded on the exclusion of the Other has thus to be brought to its point of self-reference: the liberal gaze itself functions according to the same logic insofar as it is founded upon the exclusion of the Other.17

So the new pluralistic, postmodern North promises an inclusivity that is

actually grounded in material exclusivity. Hence, what appear blank spaces of unideological opening may instead assume their full meaning as the nec

essary mystification and foreclosure of social conditions and inequality in

the all-encompassing relativism of postmodern pluralism. To misappropriate Marx (Groucho, that is, as opposed to my usual misap

plications of Karl), I am sure that not all the contributors to this Irish Review

theme would wish to affiliate themselves to a polemic of which I am a

member, but all the contributors, in their varying ways, aim at rethinking culture in the North. The essays are attempts to recalibrate art and culture across the Troubles and the Peace Process eras, whether by shedding new

light on literature produced during the Troubles and finding new interpre tative pathways thereto, or by engaging with both the residual effects of

critical commonplaces about the Troubles and the emergence of newly dominant paradigms about the Peace Process and the supposed roles which

art should play in these nascent contexts. All of the contributions to this

theme disrupt any easy narrative by which the Troubles feed into the Peace

Process, any clear demarcation between these apparent epochal shifts, and

finally any attempt to sanction a one-dimensional role by which culture

must function if it is to accord with some official directive as to what the

North was, is, and will be. Richard Kirkland's article, 'Ballygawley,

Ballylynn, Belfast: Writing about Modernity and Settlement in Northern

Ireland', challenges two nominally opposed yet mutually restrictive para

digms about modernity and the North. One position is that modernity




disrupts the known, settled and familiar (in a manner bemoaned by a tribal or customary sense of place and tradition), while the other is that moderni

ty's inevitability supplants anachronistic atavisms in a benign, reformist way

(as the liberal-progressive narrative of history would assert). In a sustained

engagement across a range of materials, including urban and town planning, road construction, architecture and literature, Kirkland rethinks some of the

persistent ways in which culture has understood and represented ideas of

progress, narrative, and change in Northern Ireland. Instead of apprehend

ing modernity as a narrative, or as an allegory of transformation, Kirkland

focuses on specific moments of resistance, adaptation and accommodation

which allow for a potentially more dynamic and historical engagement with processes which are necessarily incomplete and uneven. Using Paul

Muldoon's poem 'The Sightseers' as a touchstone throughout, Kirkland

illustrates that a concentration on the uneven or unresolved allows for dif

ferent stories to be told and argues that this is a valuable possibility when

one considers the pervasive manner in which the antagonisms of the North

have so frequently been presented as an unresolved struggle between the

bitterness of the past and the possibility of a progressive, modern future.

Rather than construing the antagonism between two already agreed enti

ties (the past and the future, the regressive and the modern), Kirkland's

dialectical critique finds antagonisms and resistances within, between and

across the unresolved fabric of each of these apparent polarities by way of

recasting the terms of the debate by which modernity is considered in the

North. His analysis concludes with an examination of the work of Charles

Brett, including the speculative architectural history of Belfast produced by Brett under the anagrammed pseudonym Albert Rechts.

Eoin Flannery's 'Troubling Bodies: Suffering, Resistance and Hope in

Colum McCann's "Troubles" Short Fiction' redresses a longstanding critical

neglect of the short-story form in regard to Troubles fiction and focuses in

particular on Colum McCann, a writer whose own shorter fiction has been

undervalued. Taking up Frank O'Connor's and Sean O'Faolain's arguments that the short story is the apposite form for those outside of social consen

sus (as opposed to the novel which nominally articulates and orders that consensus of representation), Flannery picks up on the apparent peripheral

ity of the short-story form, coupled with its stylistic and formal embrace of

unconventional representational codes, which facilitates the narration of

trauma, excess, and violence in regard to the short fiction of McCann.

Flannery pinpoints how McCann incorporates literary conventions such as

oral storytelling, myth, magic realism and symbolism in his works. The com

bined formal and thematic contents of McCann's fictions, Flannery argues,

compel the reader to imagine beyond the parameters of the immediate,




beyond the horizons of burdensome ideologies and to interrogate how the

present and future have been disfigured by repressive, oppositional politico cultural histories in the past. Flannery highlights the body as a recurrent

thematic presence in McCann's work, and discusses how it is differentially exhibited as a site of political and cultural contestation, and as a resource for

possible political solidarity in a Northern Irish context. In these stories

McCann's Utopian ambitions are literally 'embodied'; an unspecified, yet

implicit, Utopian investment is made by McCann in the fertile, emergent bodies and imaginations of his younger characters.

Laura Pelaschiar's contribution, 'Terrorists and Freedom Fighters in

Northern Irish Fiction', utilizes Franco Moretti's concepts of bricolage and

refunctionalization to discuss paradigm shifts in Northern Irish fiction

across the Troubles and the Peace Process. For Moretti, refunctionalization

consists in the discovery of new functions for literary themes, norms and

rhetorics already in circulation and this can only happen in an elastic struc

ture, which is able to absorb novelty without disintegrating itself. As

Pelaschiar notes, bricolage requires in turn the presence of flexible pieces, which are able to add a new function to their original one.

Refunctionalization helps Pelaschiar examine a shift in the representation of Belfast in from the home of alienation, confusion, violence and closure

to a refunctionalized vision in the poetry and prose of Ciaran Carson and

in the novels of Glenn Patterson, Deirdre Madden, Colin Bateman and

Robert McLiam Wilson. Therein, Pelaschiar argues, Belfast becomes a fer

tile and postmodern location for alternative histories which points to a

more open-ended logic of narrative and of narration and to the possibility of discovering new languages and new perspectives for a definition of iden

tity. Covering an array of fiction, Pelaschiar focuses, in particular, upon the

work of Colin Bateman as offering an ironic distancing of prevailing cer

tainty or tired cliche in anticipation of a better future.

Shane Alcobia-Murphy's "Strange Little Girls": Medbh McGuckian's

Poetics of Exemplarity' opens up new ways of reading Medbh McGuckian's

work in a dialogue between feminism and visual culture. Alcobia-Murphy draws upon debates within feminism about the imaging of women within a

patriarchal scopic economy Rather than viewing women as passive objects unable to control their own representation when gazed upon by men or

even when visualizing themselves in roles allocated by patriarchy, Alcobia

Murphy moves from the work of Cindy Sherman to advance the possibilities of the masquerade. Therein mimicry and theatrics constitute an overt parody, a knowing, though not complicit, restaging of what is expected of the sub

ject. As an embodied discourse that reveals, critiques and ultimately resists

the codes by which the male projective eye seeks to confirm its authority,




the masquerade is a key feminist mode of self-production in late twentieth

and early twenty-first-century culture. Such a feminist revisionary praxis,

according to Alcobia-Murphy, lies at the heart of Medbh McGuckian's

work. Recognizing her propensity for creating poetic centos - bricolages of

unattributed quotations that are dislocated from their original sources -

Alcobia-Murphy interprets many of her poems as masquerades, wherein the

poetic self is brought into the world whilst simultaneously withdrawing from the public gaze. One form which this takes is the revisionary masquer

ade, whereby the poet appropriates extracts from a biography of a historical

female icon and subtly rewrites the original text, foregrounding, in the

process, the patriarchal codes by which that persona lived, and exposing her

socially allocated gendered subject position. Her peculiar method of compo

sition, weaving together quotations from source texts, enables her to re-live

and re-examine the lives and works of historical and literary female icons

and to use them as exemplars for her own work.

Suzanna Chan's 'Space Shuttle/Pass Odyssey: Creative Mobility, Gender, Class and "Donegall Pass'" discusses Space Shuttle, an art project initiated by Belfast's Paragon Studios involving a series of six different projects, called

'missions', which ran between 2006 and 2007 in selected locations around

Belfast. Chan focuses on one of these 'missions' called Pass Odyssey. Run by an all-women group of artists and designers called Call Centre Collective, this project took place in the Donegall Pass area of Belfast and, through

engaged creativity, proposed to provide local residents with potential means

to take control of their environment's future development. Chan appraises these strategies in a context of intensive market-led regeneration in the 'post conflict' city and its remarginalization of disenfranchised communities. Pass

Odyssey also addressed the gendering of access and women's constricted

mobility in non-public, sectarianized communities, which Chan interprets in terms of the contrasting postmodernist discourses of liberatory mobility that resonate in Space Shuttle's metaphors of travel. Chan concludes by

considering how the class asymmetries between Call Centre Collective and

the residents of the area were negotiated in attempts to promote the

interests of Donegall Pass.

Colin Graham's contribution, 'Gagarin's Point of View: Memory and

Space in Recent Northern Irish Art', takes as its starting point the current

re-branding of Belfast by way of a wider meditation on the packaging of

history and its particularities and antagonisms into a past that is palatable for

tourism. Such efforts at selling Belfast in a marketplace dovetail with what

Graham deems the failure of post-Good Friday Agreement Northern

Ireland to deal with what the Peace Process itself euphemistically calls its

'heritage', the history to which it has only anxiously given a neutralizing




gloss. Graham considers how contemporary art may intervene in how past,

present, and future are being imagined with reference to the work of Sean

Hillen and to the Space Shuttle projects which Suzanna Chan also analyses. To Graham, Hillens Omagh Memorial (2008) contests the official effort to

fix historical memory on the basis of some supposedly consensual perspec tive by which collective trauma can be monumentalized, while Space Shuttle

offers differing pathways by which to map Belfast as a real, living city than

those subsumed under corporate re-branding strategies.

Finally, Sarah Brouillette's 'Northern Ireland Inc.: Branding a Region at

the 2007 Smithsonian Folklife Festival' examines how Northern Ireland

was represented in 2007 at the famous Smithsonian Folklife Festival, an

event steeped in 1960s counter-cultural history in the USA and apparently the repository of progressive, Utopian goals which would preserve cultural

practices in their own vibrant specificity (as opposed to petrifying them as

archival curiosities or indeed giving in to the bland standardizations of con

sumer culture and its commodities). However, Brouillette investigates how

the Northern Ireland programme at the 2007 festival in fact showcased the

naivety of conceiving displays of everyday or 'living' arts and culture as

attempts to preserve and inculcate appreciation for the specificity of diverse

folk traditions. According to Brouillette, the assumed cultural specificity that justifies organizing a programme devoted to the region is grounds and

means for the North's post-conflict integration into global markets. What

was included was there precisely to the extent that it was compatible with

the cultural diplomacy goals of improving the North's public image and

encouraging its business engagements with transnational partners. To

Brouillette, this supposed staging of cultural difference is undermined by the standardizing terms in which it takes place: those of the global market

place. As such, the seeming effort to accommodate diversity and cultural

specificity is facilitated by the very economic imperatives which actually erase difference in the standardization of all things into the same. Such con

ditions preclude any meaningful encounter with the other, any negotiation with specific forms of cultural diversity by reducing and translating all

cultures into the dominant logic of the global market.18

Notes and References

1 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and

Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1973), p. 276.

2 Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland since 1965: Moments of Danger

(London: Longman, 1996), p. 9.

3 Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968?1978 (London: Faber and Faber,

1980), p. 58.




4 Brian Moore, Lies of Silence (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), p. 64.

5 Glenn Patterson, Luxus: A Visual and Verbal Collaboration by Victor Sloan and Glenn Patterson

(Portadown: Millennium Court Arts Centre, 2007), p. 23.

6 See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992). 7 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 11.

8 Jacques Ranciere,'Comment and Responses', Theory & Event, 6:4 (2003), para. 4.

9 Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle:

Bloodaxe, 1994) pp. 194-5. 10 Jacques Ranciere, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 103.

11 Jacques Ranciere,'Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Ranciere', Diacritics,

30:2 (2000), p. 115. 12 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, (De-)Constructing the North: Fiction and the Northern Ireland

Troubles since 1969 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003), p. 275. 13 Richard Kirkland, Identity Parades: Northern Irish Culture and Dissident Subjects (Liverpool:

Liverpool University Press, 2002), p. 123.

14 Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 1.

15 Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street (London: Minerva, 1996), pp. 214?16.

16 John Berger, The Look of Things (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 40. 17 Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative, pp. 222-3.

18 I would like to dedicate my own part of this Irish Review special theme to the memory of

my dad, Jim Kelly (1936-2008).




Documents

Introduction: The Troubles with the Peace Process: Contemporary Northern Irish Culture