Neglecting the Material Dimension: Irish Intellectuals and the Problem of Identity

Neglecting the Material Dimension: Irish Intellectuals and the Problem of IdentityAuthor(s): Liam O'DowdSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 3 (1988), pp. 8-17Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735308 .

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Neglecting the Material Dimension:

Irish intellectuals and the

problem of identity

LIAM O'DOWD

In an age of technical specialisation and proliferating disciplinary boundaries, those intellectuals who concern themselves with cultural and national identity offer a welcome holistic perspective on Irish society. In the process, however, a

new hybrid discipline seems to have been created which might be entided cultural studies. Dominated by literary intellectuals and critics it draws also on

historians, journalists, philosophers and, to a lesser extent social scientists.

Characteristic contributions to the field include the growing corpus of literary criticism, Conor Cruise O'Brien's and F.S.L. Lyons' work on cultural identity, the Crane Bag, Richard Kearney's Irish Mind and the work of the Field Day

group. The main themes of the new cultural studies concern the exploration of com?

munal and national identity with particular reference to the intersection of

culture and politics. Within this framework it addresses the "clash of cultures', the 'two traditions', the relationship between 'modernity' and 'tradition',

'pluralism', the 'identity crisis', and above all the Irish literary tradition and its

relationship to politics. In its holism, its literary orientation and its commitment

to the primacy of ideas in social change, the new cultural studies has much in

common with the intellectual tradition it seeks to revise. Intellectuals are im

plicidy seen in a vanguard role as arbitrers of identity, and as purveyors of ideas,

rather than as signposts of particular material or class interests. This stance differs

little from that of traditional nationalist, clerical, and literary intellectuals in

Ireland since the late nineteenth century. The new cultural studies have sought to give

a richer and more diversified content to Irish identities by revising older

accounts. To date, however, they have shared the traditional reluctance of Irish

intellectuals to systematically investigate how changing material circumstances

have shaped conceptions of identity and, by extension, the role of intellectuals.

The neglect of the material dimension seriously undermines the holistic thrust

of cultural analysis. This article explores the reasons for this neglect and suggests that part of the answer is to be found in the changing role of the greatly expanded intellectual stratum in Irish society. As Michael Kelly observed in the first issue of this journal, all countries have

8



The Material Dimension 9

knowledge or culture workers who can be defined sociologically as intellec?

tuals: writers, artists, researchers, teachers, clergy, scientists and technical ex?

perts. As a social category it is imprecise. Its composition and boundaries are

continually contested. An intellectual elite from within the broad category

may appropriate the label for itself while denying it to others. The 'others'

may not want the label anyway and may wish to avoid some of its elitist or pe?

jorative connotations. To be a professional, for example, seems to beg fewer

questions than to be known as an intellectual.

Gramsci makes the point that everyone performs intellectual activity but not

everyone performs the function of an intellectual in society. The range of in?

tellectual functions, the people who fill them, and what they do can tell us

much about the society as a whole. Many intellectuals would reject this rather

inclusive understanding, insisting that 'quality of mind' rather than 'social

function' should be the criterion used to discriminate between intellectuals

and non-intellectuals. 'Quality of mind' is an even more problematical discriminator than function however. It threatens to remove intellectuals

from concrete social relations altogether by encouraging a myth of a transcen?

dent and eternal intellectuality. Nevertheless, the endless debates over 'quality of mind' is a characteristic form of intellectual activity and a necessary reminder that the intellectual status is a socially contested one.

Sociological studies of intellectuals have noted a secular trend in all industrial

societies towards an increase in the size of intellectual strata and in the degree of intellectual specialisation. The limiting factor here is a society's capacity to

divert large material resources from the daily process of production and social

reproduction to support extended intellectual labour. Of course, the scale of

resources, and the social process by which they are diverted, vary widely. Intellectual activity in complex industrial societies is characterised by a cen?

tral tension between the universalising tendency of humanistic intellectuals

and the thrust towards technical specialisation which proceeds without ex?

plicit reference to teleological questions. Michel Foucault, for example, has

distinguished between the 'traditional intellectual' who attempts to be the

'representative of the universal', or the 'consciousness of everyone' and the

'specific intellectuals' or the 'knowledge elite' who do have organic links with a variety of specific contexts and the capacity to influence social change in areas

such as education and production. Ireland, especially nationalist Ireland, has been well stocked with Foucault's

'traditional intellectuals'. This is scarcely surprising. In all countries where the

'national question' has been politically central, such intellectuals have played a

prominent role. They 'imagine national community' in Benedict Anderson's

phrase. Part of this imagining is the continuing invention of tradition and of

ideal futures. Furthermore, as Ernest Gellner has pointed out, nationalist



10 O'Dowd

intellectuals attempt to establish a type of closed shop for themselves within

national boundaries, notably in the educational and administrative systems of

the new state.

Typically, however, as national boundaries become settied, intellectuals' ex

plicity concern with cultural and national identity declines. Many traditional in?

tellectuals assume specific functions in the new order. Specialist intellectuals

come to have a much more prominent role in an intellectual stratum which is in?

clined to take cultural and national identity for granted. In Ireland, however, the long drawn out struggle over national boundaries has

coincided with considerable expansion and specialisation of the intellectual

stratum. Rather paradoxically, traditional intellectuals' preoccupation with

Irish identity and uniqueness is in danger of becoming an established intellectual

specialism in its own right. Focused on the relationship between culture and

politics, it has left the analysis of economic and class issues to others. Thus the

material framework of cultural and political activity disappears or is hived off as

the preserve of specialist intellectuals such as professional economists, civil ser?

vants and financial experts. This arrangement, however unconsciously arrived

at, has advantages for both sides. Traditional intellectuals preserve the illusion of

holism, while others laying claim to specialist expertise. Specialist intellectuals, on the other hand, can avoid locating their activity within a wider social context.

The casualty here is the type of holistic analysis which recognises the necessary material framework of cultural (including intellectual) activity. Identity is de?

fined as a matter of ideas and cultural values which float free of economic organ? isation and material interests.

The neglect of the material dimension of identity is not just a product of an

evolving specialisation among Irish intellectuals. It predates much of this

specialisation. When historians examine the written records of twentieth cen?

tury Irish history, they find there much evidence of the primacy accorded to

cultural action in forging Irish identity in diverse areas such as religion, art,

literature, folklore and language. The connection between cultural movements

and the politics of nationalism before Partition has an abiding fascination for

Irish intellectuals. The shaping of an Irish cultural identity around literary

figures of international repute, even the eventual emergence of a separate Irish

state, seems a testimony to the power of ideas and the triumph of intellectuals

who promulgated them. The subsequent disenchantment and alienation of

Irish intellectuals, the disappointment of the high expectations engendered by the pre-Partition movements only adds to the fascination with the culture of

politics and the politics of culture.

The impact of literature on Irish intellectuals5 understanding of identity is im?

mense and can be traced to the cultural revival prior to Partition. Here, in

Maurice Goldring's words, Irish history and politics came to be understood as




the intersecting autobiographies of a small group of men and women whose im?

aginative powers made individual and Irish uniqueness a matter of universal in?

terest. This approach to understanding history, politics and even literature itself

has a powerful appeal for Irish intellectuals even for those who contribute to the

new cultural studies. It gives the current concern with Irish identity a certain

coherence and fixes it in a recognised intellectual tradition. It draws on the vast

international interest in Ireland seen through the great texts of the great writers.

However illuminating and creative such an approach is, it is no substitute for the

systemtic analysis of the relationship between economic interests and com?

peting versions of identity on offer.

Historically, the Labour and Cooperative movements did try to insist that a

higher priority be accorded to changing the material and economic framework

of the new Ireland. Their success was very limited, however, because the

material framework they wished to change was relatively new ? a product of the

agrarian upheavals and uneven industrial development of the second half of the

nineteenth century. The political struggles of the period between 1912 and 1921

did not usher in a socio-economic revolution so much as confirm one which had

already taken place: peasant proprietorship, industrialisation of the north-east, the decline of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and the rise of the commercial and pro? fessional middle classes. The intellectual leadership of the main political and

cultural movements were themselves products of this framework. They took it

for granted rather than thought of changing it. Despite the efforts of intellec?

tuals like Connolly and George Russell, both the Labour and Cooperative movements became defined as sectional or sectoral movements marginal to the

central task of building a nation and finding an identity for it.

Intellectual commitment was to the overarching power of ideas, including the

belief that independence would usher in an era of economic development. In an

attempt to undermine the politics of emotional abstractions in the early 1920s,

George Russell, was the among the few to insist on the material underpinning of

both politics and culture (including intellectual activity). He noted in the Irish

Statesman that whatever culture existed was largely literary, a product of an over?

whelmingly agricultural economy. He suggested that only when the economic

base was diversified could employment be found for the technical specialists so

necessary for 'informed government' or a

politics based on expert knowledge. Russell's insistence that 'bedrock lies in the fields and factories, not in the

recognition of some abstract political doctrine' {Irish Statesman, 20.9.1924) was

to find few echoes among Irish intellectuals.

After Partition, as before, mainstream intellectual debates concentrated on

versions of cultural and national identity rather than on questions of economic

organisation. Sustained interest in the nature of economic organisation was

largely confned to marginal groupings and individuals, notably left-wing



12 O'Dowd

intellectuals associated with the labour movements in both North and South.

This is not to suggest that mainstream intellectuals ignored economic questions as an inspection of the cultural journals of the period will reveal. Rather, they saw politics and culture as decisively conditioning economic organisation rather

than vke versa. The most elaborated social ideology of the period, Catholic cor?

poratism, envisaged an economy based on natural law as enshrined in the moral

and social principles of the church. It so happened that the ideal advocated was

an improved version of what already existed in Irish small towns and rural areas.

This was an agriculturally based economy based on small property owners and

one highly productive of clerical vocations.

The main concern of nationalist and clerical intellectuals was to 'purify5 Irish

identity while leaving unchallenged the basic economic and class relationships of

the society. No strong socialist alternative existed to propose a reconstruction of

Irish society on an alternative basis. It was left to literary intellectuals to provide the most critical insights into the economic and class basis of the new cultural

order. This criticism was at its most trenchant in exposing the mythmaking of

the 'gombeenmen', 'urban peasants5 and 'tariff patriots' who dominated the

new Ireland through an authoritarian church and a politics based on petty self

interest and an inward looking vacuous nationalism. O'Faolain in The Bell in? sisted on 'life before any abstraction, in whatever magnificent words it may clothe itself5. The writers sought to demolish the myths of the noble peasant and the Gaelic past which were such a

large part of the dominant ideology. They

sought to confront abstractions such as 'the Catholic Mind, the Irish Mind, and

the Gaelic Mind5 with fictional and direct accounts of alternative realities. The

latter included the conditions of the Dublin and Belfast working class, islanders,

fishermen, emigrants and seasonal migrants and women, groups who were

idealised, marginalised or ignored in the dominant orthodoxies.

Importandy, however, the programme of the literary intellectuals was one of

critical exposure rather than systematic radical analysis. They were in no position to mobilise or participate in mass movements for an alternative order. In the

end, their dissent did not go beyond a battle of ideas within the intellectual

stratum. Here, they did not propose an alternative to the prevailing vanguard

image of intellectuals as arbitrers of cultural identity, rather they appeared to be

suggesting a more 'civilised' vanguard with a different style of relating to its

followers.

The leading intellectuals of the period fitted Foucault's characterisation of

'traditional intellectuals'. As in post-colonial situations elsewhere, intellectuals

were more concerned with re-inventing the past and prescribing for the future

rather than with empirically analysing the present. They claimed knowledge and

expertise across a wide area at a time when disciplinary boundaries were far fewer

and less restrictive than they are today. Catholic clergy claimed wide expertise




not only in moral philosophy, but in education, sociology and psychology.

University professors ranged widely over the classics, art, literature, economics

and contemporary politics. Few modern university professors could approach the record of Cork's Alfred O'Rahilly who could boast of publications on topics including money, Catholic social principles, electromagnetics, flour milling and

gospel meditations. Intellectual eclecticism was also evident in the cultural jour? nals which ranged widely over art, literature, political economy and religion.

It would be grossly misleading, of course, to characterise post-Partition Ireland as some kind of intellectuals5 golden age. On the contrary, only a small

minority could lay claim to the eclectic knowledge, or critical insights, of the

leading intellectuals. Priests and teachers dominated a small intellectual stratum

which often promulgated an exceedingly narrow and authoritarian social

ideology for popular consumption. By the end of the 1950s, only about 2% of

primary school students went to university and 16% to secondary school. The

figures for university were identical in the North, but secondary school enrol?

ment was somewhat higher with 64% of primary school children getting some

secondary education by 1961 ? double the proportion a decade earlier. Intellec?

tuals were a tiny educated elite in a population which were highly literate but

which had little formal education. They could scarcely be accused of being

representative of the population at large in terms of sex (they were overwhelm?

ingly male), class origins or years of formal education.

North-South comparisons are revealing, if asymetrical. Unionism was not a

nationalist movement and it never sought a separate sovereign state to ac?

complish specific economic, cultural or political goals. From the outset, unionist intellectuals did not see the state as a positive initiating agent but as a

bulwark against Catholicism and nationalism. They had no language to revive

and no sustained critique of foreign oppression. As Desmond Bell has observed

recently: we5ll find no Hyde or Pearse on the streets of Portadown! Popular

Loyalism did not need intellectuals to invent its past. Unlike their Catholic

nationalist counterparts in the South, unionist intellectuals generated no

blueprints for an ideal order of the future. Protestant intellectuals who might have fulfilled this function seldom saw Northern Ireland as their sole reference

point and many of the North5s resident intellectuals, especially in academic life, radio and television, came from Britain.

More universal trends were shared by North and South, however. The long term trend in the size of the intellectual stratum in both areas is clear if we take

the census category of professionals as a crude (and conservative) indicator.

Although the population of both parts of Ireland has remained relatively static

between 1926 and 1981, the number of professionals has increased five-fold in

the North and three-fold in the South reaching 14% of the gainfully occupied population in each area. Most of the increase has occurred since the 1950s. There



M O'Dowd

are significant, if declining, differences in the composition of the professional

categpry. Clergymen have been much more numerous in the south. When their

numbers reached a high point in the South between the 1930s and the 1950s, they were five times more significant than in the North as a proportion of all pro? fessionals. They are still proportionately

more than twice as important in the

South. Since 1926 clergy and teachers taken together have accounted for be?

tween 53% and 60% of all professionals in the South and between 35% and 46% in the North.

The differences reveal the different economic and occupational structure of

Protestant Ulster. Catholic education has been historically biassed towards arts

and humanities and the Protestant system has favoured science and technical

subjects. Recent sociological research has revealed that these differences persist in the North although they are declining.

In both areas, especially since the early 1960s, intellectual occupations have

become more varied and specialised. The state is now clearly the major institu?

tional support of the new specialised intellectuals. In the South, this has meant

the emergence of large groups of intellectuals whose training and work are ever

further removed from clerical influence. These include the staff of state agencies, research institutes, universities and advanced technical colleges. The growing numbers of specialist intellectuals in both areas isdirecdy linked to the expan?

ding involvement of the state in the management of the economy, in promoting multi-national investment and in presiding over new forms of integration into

the global economic, political and cultural framework.

In the South, the charter for the rise of the new 'specific' intellectuals was the

Whittaker-Lemass programme of economic modernisation. In the North, it

was the application of British welfarism to Northern Ireland in the post-war

years, Stormont's economic modernisation programmes of the 1960s and, above all, the imposition ?f Direct Rule. By the early 1960s it appeared that the

focus of intellectual attention had at last decisively shifted towards the economic

framework. The rise of the new 'state affiliated' intellectuals seemed to be part of

the growth of a technical intelligentsia in all industrialised countries. They

promised an instrumental rationality more suited to performing partial tasks

rather than to tackling grand questions of social organisation and political direc?

tion. There were signs that the pre-eminence of the 'traditional intellectuals'

concerned with large questions of cultural and national identity was at an end.

The vision of a Catholic corporate order had vanished without trace in the socio

economic crisis of the 1950s. It even appeared that the goal of Irish unity could

be sidetracked by economic cooperation between North and South.

In both parts of Ireland, the new 'specific' intellectuals were the immediate

beneficiaries of economic modernisation. Perhaps the characteristic intellectuals

of the new economic order were the professional economists. Ronan Fanning




has remarked how the anti-materialist intellectual ambience of the period 1920

50 was unfavourable to economics. According to Joseph Lee, by the mid 1950s

there were only twenty professional economists in the Republic. By the 1980s

there were over three hundred. Economics now became stripped of its earlier

overlay of Catholic moral philosophy. Its increasingly technical and quantitative form, however, disguised an ideological stance which left little room for socialist

or other non-conventional economists.

The experience of economics was mirrored in other areas. Employment op?

portunities grew with the expansion of educational systems, administrative and

research agencies, new manufacturing and financial organisations. Ireland's in?

volvement in the EEC and a whole range of international bodies provided new

contacts and job opportunities. A growing number of academics in the

humanities, science and technology, and the social sciences began to be trained

in American, British and, to a lesser extent, in European universities.

Ecumenical religion and a range of critical and liberal ideas were being widely

disseminated in the mass media, notably television. It appeared that the intellec?

tual environment had altered radically. At first, all the key social indicators ap?

peared to confirm that economic modernisation was benefiting

a much wider

constituency than the intellectuals. Rising incomes, new manufacturing jobs,

and an expanding population characterised both North and South. In the

South, the stemming of emigration and the dramatic rise in the marriage rates in

the 1960s seemed to mark a shift of historic proportions. Economic develop? ment now seemed to be a condition of political and cultural development rather

than vice versa.

Intellectuals' recognition of the importance of the economic dimension was

not the product of systematic analysis of the relationship between the changing structure of material interests and the new political and cultural outlooks.

Rather, its importance was deemed self-evident as were its political and cultural

implications. Social change was understood in typically elitist and idealist

fashion as the spread of a virus of modern ideas through all sectors of Irish life.

The new intellectuals were to be the privileged mediators of these ideas ? the

carriers of modernisation.

A succession of shocks quickly shattered this rather idyllic scenario. Firstly, the eruption of the Northern crisis forced back onto the intellectual agenda, ap?

parently anachronistic questions of religion, nationality and identity. In Seamus

Deane's words: 'just as the scar-tissue of material development had begun to

form, the old wounds opened again' ?

'Identity, National Character, Historical Development' (Crane Bag, 8 (1), 1984).

Far from being obliterated by economic modernisation, militant

republicanism and militant loyalism had emerged in even more virulent form

than before. It was as if the literary intellectuals' critical exposure of social



16 O'Dowd

consequences of religion and nationalism had never happened. In the South,

resistance to the 'modernisation' proved surprisingly stubborn in relation to the

position ofwomen, family lawandmoral attitudes. Above all, the return of mass

emigration and mass unemployment, the greater visibility of social inequality, and the debt crisis made clear the precarious basis of the whole 'economic

miracle'.

No systematic scrutiny has emerged, however, of the changing relationship of

intellectuals to new economic interests and power structures. No new formu?

lation of the dynamic relationship between economic change, on the one hand, and cultural and political change on the other was

produced. Instead, the over?

arching partitioning of intellectual commentary was confirmed. In one com?

partment, the new economic specialists sought to construct a consensus on the

technical and pragmatic requirements of national (regional, in the case of the

North) policy. As Alan Matthews has pointed out, this has proved successful, not in the efficacy of its prescriptions, but in its capacity to generate ideological consensus and marginalise socialist or radical economic alternatives. Economics

obscured the workings of contradictory class and power interests. Remarkably, the more economistic economics became, the more politicised the economy became as state involvement in economic decision-making became more

critical.

On the other side of the divide, intellectuals struggled to provide a holistic ac?

count of an increasingly complex environment. In a study of cultural journals, Richard Kearney decried the partitioning of socio-political debate' dealing with

'reality' from the literary debate dealing with imaginative vision. The various

contributions to cultural analysis have indeed sought to come to terms with this

relationship and have debated it at length. What Kearney, and other con?

tributors to the new cultural studies, did not fully grasp was the more fun?

damental partitioning of economic analysis from other forms of social commen?

tary. Their publications gave relatively low priority to the discussion of

economic issues.

Instead, the new 'traditional' intellectuals have reached for the problem of

identity and a belief in the primacy of ideas to the near-exclusion of the evolving material context of these ideas. A rather abstract debate has proceeded within

the intellectual tradition of the 'old' traditional intellectuals. It has construed

their preoccupations with Irish cultural and national identity as a tradition of

ideas and texts, rather than as the products of a changing environment of

economic, class and power relations. It ignores the changing size, composition and role of the whole intellectual stratum and the extent to which it now

depends on state institutions. Furthermore, it has failed to interpret the further

loss of control by both states in Ireland over their own economic destinies.

There is room here for a financial crisis of the intellectuals, never mind an iden?

tity crisis.




The 'de-colonising5 thesis advanced by Kiberd, Deane and others seems to

hold the most explicit promise of incorporating questions of material develop? ment and identity within one frame. Todate, however, it has merely juxtaposed them ? with the material dimension receiving perfunctory treatment. There are

problems with the thesis. While Ireland's economic and political dependency is

superficially akin to that of many Third World states, it remains among the thir?

ty wealthiest countries in the world. Its intellectual stratum or its educational

system may be unevenly developed, but it is scarcely undeveloped in a Third

World sense. The future 'beyond colonisation5 has not been specified for North

and South. Even if such a specification is premature, it is legitimate to ask which

are the key lines of development into the future.

The intellectual debate about identity is not the same today as it was even thir?

ty years ago. A whole range of specialist disciplines have fed into the cultural

studies debate providing a much richer and more diversified view of the Irish

past and present than existed twenty five years ago. In Northern Ireland, for ex?

ample, the intense study of the conflict has at least made clear that Protestant

and Catholic identities cannot be equated merely with intellectual traditions or

with ideas floating about in people's heads. They are also rooted in the popular

experiences of class, work, unemployment and state authority. The versions of cultural and national identity promulgated by intellectuals not

only reflect the place of intellectuals in the social structure, it also at once

represents and obscures other interests. For all its uniqueness, Ireland is no dif?

ferent from other countries in this respect. The intellectual stratum, the com?

plex of class interests and the overall social structure have all changed together. These changes need to be analysed if the debate on cultural and national identity is not to become fixed at the level of ahistorical abstraction.

Far more questions than answers remain. Does the new intellectual stratum

constitute a new class in its own right? Has that peculiar animal, the Irish nation?

al bourgeoisie begun to develop its own 'organic intellectuals5 within the 26

county state? Are there signs at long last that unionism is developing an Ulster

nationalist intelligentsia? What role are clerical intellectuals playing in the

emerging social order? Above all, what new forms of interaction are developing between intellectuals, popular cultures and the flux of material interests in Irish

society and beyond?



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Neglecting the Material Dimension: Irish Intellectuals and the Problem of Identity