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Notes
1.
Some geographers have even suggested that we abandon the concept of scale. See
Marston et ah (2005).
References
CRONON, W. (1999) A place for stories: nature, history and narrative. In: Buttimer, A. and Wallin, L.
(eds) Nature and identity in cross-cultural perspective. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 201-234.
CROWLEY, E. (1998) A Dublin girl: growing up in the 1930s. New York: Soho Press.
JONES, K. (1998) Scale as epistemology, Political Geography, 17(1), 25-28.
LEFEBVRE, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
MARSTON, S. (2000) The social construction of scale, Progress in Human Geography, 24(2), 219-242.
MARSTON, S., JONES, J.P. and WOODWARD, K. (2005) Human Geography without scale,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30(4), 416-32.
NEWSTEAD, C , REID, C. and SPARKE, M. (2003) The cultural geography of scale. In: Anderson, K.,
Domosh, M., Pile, S. and Thrift, N, (eds) Handbook of cultural geography. London: Sage, 485487.
NI CHINNEIDE, M. (1936) (ed.) Peig: a scealfein do scriobh Peig Sayers [An autobiography of Peig
Sayers]. Dublin: Clolucht an Talboidigh.
6 CRIOMHTHAIN, T. (1929) An t-oileanach: sceal a bheathadhfem do scriobh Tomas 6 Crtomhthain
[The Islander]. Dublin: C.S. 6 Fallamhain.
6 FAOLAIN, N. (1996) Are you somebody? the accidental memoir of a Dublin -woman. Dublin: New
Island Books.
6 SUILEABHAIN, M. (1933) Fiche blian ag fas [Twenty years a-growing]. Dublin: Clolucht an
Talboidigh.
SHERIDAN, P. (1999) 44: Dublin made me. London: Macmillan.
Response
Andrew Kincaid
Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Writing about cities remains as complex and controversial as ever. The great themes of
modernism and modernity - alienation, change, loss, progress, history - that first drove
Freud, Marx, Benjamin and others to reflect upon the meaning and structure of urban life
continue to motivate contemporary scholarship across a range of disciplines. When Engels
wrote his scathing expose of the condition of the working class in England in 1845, his eye
was drawn into the murky labyrinths of Manchester and London, and in particular to the lurid
dens of the Irish immigrant quarters. Today, the tensions inherent in the processes of
migration, competition and capitalism that concerned the modernizing reformers of the
nineteenth century are more explosive than ever. For Freud the changing infrastructure of
Vienna, most notably the building of the Ringstrasse and the emergence of suburbs beyond
the city's medieval boundaries, created a new kind of urban experience that fed upon change,
desire, loss and fear. For contemporary societies, the connection between the material
environment and psychological insecurity plays out in popular culture and everyday life.
Today, questions about the urban landscape form a backdrop to major concerns not only in
geography and history but in cultural studies, sociology, literature, and film. The plethora of
different disciplines points to something about the modern city that has been obvious from the
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start: it is virtually impossible to represent or define it simply. For Engels, empiricism and
polemic combined to reveal the economic production of space. For Freud and Benjamin, the
city housed memory and nostalgia, allowing for psychological and cultural excavation.
Contemporary critics of urbanism continue to recognize the city as an anti-disciplinary object.
Roland Barthes warns that anyone wishing to engage the city 'must be at once a semiologist,
a geographer, an historian, an urbanist, an architect, and probably a psychoanalyst' (p. 191).
Michel de Certeau claims that the city is 'the most immoderate of texts' (p. 152).
My own interest in questions about nationalism and modernity, in the shape of Irish
independence and the social, psychological and economic legacies of colonialism, brought
me to studying the specifics of architecture and urban planning history in Dublin. As an
immigrant from Dublin and a graduate student in an interdisciplinary cultural studies program
in the United States in the early 1990s, I read about Paris, Berlin and London, and the ways
in which the process of modernization in these metropolitan cities produced mainstream
cultural modernism. I also analyzed postcolonial movements around the world. At heart, I
take the themes of postcolonialism to be a global rethinking of earlier questions that were
studied under the rubric of modernity, namely the contradictions of modem life: peasants and
cities, immigrants and the new world, memory and official history, religion and
secularization, catastrophe and progress. As someone who has always been fascinated by the
contradictions of Dublin - its class divisions, its literary communality vs. its alienating
crowds, the depth of its history vs. its mad rush to change - 1 sensed that there was more of
a connection between modernism and the physical city than had heretofore been considered.
Ultimately, it was architecture that allowed me to gather these concerns together. Studying the
production of urban space allowed me a text, a backdrop against which to view the questions
of modernity in an Irish context. In Postcolonial Dublin I am primarily concerned with
thinking about the ways in which the processes of modernization and the discourses of
modernity and improvement were mobilized to justify, embrace, or reject nationalism. Four
moments in the evolution of the Irish state stood out as test cases for legitimation of ideology
through the built environment: the decade before independence, the postindependent period,
the 1960s, and the 1990s. Each period involved a robust debate about remaking Irish culture
and economics. As historians, politicians, and writers grappled with these issues, architects
and planners both reflected those debates and forged their own answers to them.
If my book largely uses the urban environment in order to examine something else,
namely, the structure and ideology of nationalism, then it takes also as one of its premises that
nationalism was not a coherent movement, but one made up of competing classes and
interests (genders, regions, etc). Some of the critics who review my book clearly accept this
premise, while others take issue with the decidedly interdisciplinary, political lens through
which I view Irish history. Concomitant with my approach is the basic idea that space is the
product of the tensions already inherent in society. The problem with such a tack is knowing
which contradictions to privilege. My primary concerns are with the struggle between
colonialism and nationalism, through which class and economics manifest themselves.
Gerry Kearns and David Nally acknowledge and support the polemical nature of viewing
space through this broadly Marxist lens. Nally, for example, recognizes the ways in which
'the urban fabric is used to shape and direct social change,' the ways geography works to
'galvanise support for improvements'. This approach allows Nally to think about the politics
of improvement, a central theme in my own work, and lets him broaden his analysis to
compare different geographical locations where development logic has been employed. A
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postcolonial perspective forces one to be critical of the concepts of improvement, allowing
the critic to view it as one of the main discursive strategies by which classes remained
stratified. The postcolonial critic also sees historical continuity, recurring rhetorical devices
employed for similar purposes. It is the nature of materialist postcolonial criticism to see
similar patterns of cultural domination operating in imperial and nationalist moments. Nally,
for example, draws parallels between the language of contemporary politics in Ireland
(councilor Tormey's use of the phrase 'Knackeragua') and Thackeray's dismissive
description of the "rural Irish poor. Like Keams, Nally's intellectual predisposition is toward
thinking about Ireland in a comparative, global setting. The stakes of accepting Ireland as a
colony are deeply significant and controversial. If one recognizes the binary of colonialism
and nationalism, then the complicated and violent natures of control and resistance, culture
and self-determination become paramount. Keams, too, is sympathetic to the postcolonial
approach and recognizes that the 'dialectic of revolution and management' is integral to
Western modernity and, therefore, also to colonial history. (Again, here, at the risk of being
too simplistic, I would like to point out my own basic premise - that modernity worked by
producing its counterpart, the primitive and backward, against which to define itself).
Thinking about culture as conflict, and architecture and urban planning as a significant part
of culture, allows me to identify, as Kearns supports, alterations to the landscape as symptoms
of— even potential solutions to — deeper controversy.
Ruth McManus broadly critiques Postcolonial Dublin for many of the same reasons
Kearns and Nally are willing to acknowledge its contributions. McManus is, foremost, in
disagreement with the fundamental political slant of my work. Openly suspicious of how far
'we can extend this [colonial and Marxist] 'reading' of the landscape,' McManus argues
primarily that civic improvements (trusts, wide streets, public buildings) and the emergence
of planning had as their agenda liberal, altruistic philanthropy. On this, McManus has a point.
But, again, we come at these issues from opposing theoretical frameworks. I would maintain,
in the wake of postcolonial theory, that philanthropy is never innocent or neutral. While it is
noble to wish to ameliorate poverty and other social ills, I argue that the implementation of
these improvements, especially in the context of a regime hanging on tightly to power, can
never be removed from the broad context in which they operate. As other critics of my book
included here note, the discipline of geography works with the concepts of scale. Individual
choices, familial obligations are connected to religious and class formations, which in tum are
connected to national and even international networks.
McManus and I also have a fundamental disagreement over the nature of evidence. Many
times throughout her review, she writes that I do not supply enough support for my theoretical
claims. While I take issue with her assessment, we are also in a disciplinary conflict over what
constitutes legitimate patterns of proof. McManus argues, for example, that I provide 'no
evidence' to support my thesis that the foundation of trusts in Ireland and across the empire
in the late Victorian period was intended both to improve everyday conditions and to maintain
the status of the empire; in other words, trusts were part of a broader geopolitics. In my
introduction, I supply a pattern of evidence - the appearance of trusts across the British
colonies from Australia to India to Africa - to prove that trusts engaged a particular colonial
problem. By connecting, for example, the years in which these trusts were formed to a larger
historical moment - that is, a moment of challenge to the Empire - I demonstrate the
motivations behind the trust. Moreover, it was the British who created these trusts, and it was
in their interest to do so: the word trust, after all, as I mention in the book, means to hold
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something safe for somebody else until s/he reaches a certain age of maturity.
The differences between McManus and myself also stem from our disciplinary
backgrounds. Her focus on evidence in my book points to, I think, her discipline, historical
geography, which, like the field of history, privileges the finding of an original source, an urtext that can claim canonicity and primary authorship and intent. While literary scholars, too,
research primary documents, we are more inclined to look for patterns, recurring themes and
words. The legacy of New Criticism, which persists, is that the words on the page can
themselves offer insight into the meaning of a text. The idea of locating a smoking gun, even
a colonial one, is a myth and, itself, supports a particular agenda.
One thing several of the reviewers, in particular Mary Gilmartin and Denis Linehan,
highlight is a lack of attention to the experience of space; that is, how people use it, move
through it, and experience it in a way that is different from the original design and purpose of
the planner or architect. I appreciate this criticism and acknowledge that greater attention to
this kind of reading of space would only have strengthened my overall argument. I am
certainly aware that many recent books in Irish Studies have engaged the production of space
in this manner. (I am thinking, for example, of Kevin Kearns' work on oral history). I
appreciate the impetus always to think about the practice of everyday life. And yet, my aim
in writing Postcolonial Dublin was somewhat different. As Joan Scott famously argues in
'The Evidence of Experience,' '[T]he project of making experience visible precludes critical
examination of the workings of the ideological system itself....' I had hoped, in largely
steering clear of relying on oral evidence and/or anthropological investigation, to be able to
focus on the politics of the state. A primary goal in this book was to think about a theory of
the state: What is a state? Who are its agents? Can a state be located? Does a state represent
a single class, a mixture of classes, all classes? My concern was that Irish Studies has so
stressed nationalism and its popular movements and individuals that the productive
mechanisms and animating bureaucracy of the state were viewed as sterile and static, and
therefore ignored.
A limitation in working with the texts and discourses of urban planning and architecture
may be this sense of their two-dimensionality. The etymology of the word 'plan' comes from
the word 'plane,' meaning to lay out, to flatten. It is out of this conception of space that
Utopian thinking emerges. Utopia is inherently and linguistically spatial. Several of the critics
engage, directly or indirectly, with my efforts to read urbanism as a site in which the tensions
and contradictions of modern and national life can be transcended. Embedded in each of the
modernizing moments that I examine is the dream, the hope to rise above and project an
orderly vision of architecture and everyday Irish life. I would like to clarify David Nally's
interpretation of my discussion of the Ballymun towers in the 1960s. He mentions that I seem
to 'excoriate' international style modernism as 'vapid.' But I would respectfully suggest that
I go to great pains to read the Utopian impulses behind the moves to bring rational and
unadorned structures to Dublin. I don't mean to split hairs, but I believe this distinction is
important because of the internal tensions of modernism: Utopia and dystopia, after all,- are
but ways of thinking about the contradictions that are already entrenched in the structure of
society. Continuing along these lines, Kearns and Michael Punch comment upon my reading
of Temple Bar. Like Abercrombie's 'Dublin of the Future' or the green field suburbs of Cabra
and Crumlin in the 1930s, today's Temple Bar is the most compact and glamorous example
of global restructuring in recent Irish history. Kearns and Punch each develop an opposing
side of this equation. Kearns suggests that I might be too dismissive in my critique of Temple
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Bar's ersatz cosmopolitanism, because, as he mentions, such places bring people back to the
city center, and help to produce a 'high value-added economy'. I see the benefit in
acknowledging Temple Bar's potential, but we should not lose sight of the fact that Temple
Bar has received more subsidies and tax breaks than any other piece of real estate in Ireland.
Punch opens up the more dystopian aspects of contemporary gentrification, addressing the
'divisive, destructive, and unjust' policies that have displaced indigenous communities and
fractured formerly cohesive spaces. These interpretations get to the heart of my book and to
all of our interdisciplinary concerns with how globalization is affecting Irish society's
understanding of its own history, as well as its imagining and construction of its future. My
own aim was to place Temple Bar squarely within the history of modernism, interesting for
its attempts to imagine a communal public sphere, and as interesting for its failure to achieve
it.
The themes of cultural and literary modernism are, in essence, geographical concerns.
Alienation, displacement, fragmentation, inwardness, even language and its uses, are the
results of rapidly altering understandings of spatial scales. If we see canonical literary
modernism as beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, we can trace the movement's
origins (it is always necessary to stress the connection between an intellectual movement and
the material places its participants move through and inhabit) to a disruption in the lived
practices and perceptions of physical and psychological scale. The period witnessed the
collapse of empires, the rage of nationalisms, the growth of underground transport, the
theorization of the unconscious, the rise of mass consumerism, and the horror of world war.
At the core of my book is an attempt to answer the questions: how did Ireland engage the
experience of modernity? How (or where) can one read the effects and the contradictions of
modem life? Using the urban environment as my text allowed me, in part, to take on these
broader cultural concerns, questions that of necessity rose and fell between scales, moving, at
times, from the universal appeals made in the name of colonial planning (from Geddes' work,
for example, in India, Ireland, and Palestine) to the nationalist desire to harness
modernization and traditionalism in post-independence suburbs, to familial struggles with
globalization in contemporary memoirs. While I don't fully agree with Mary Gilmartin's
assessment of my 'fundamental discomfort with the concept of scale,' I am indebted to her
excellent suggestions as to how I could have better bridged the national and the global, the
indigenous and the colonizer. I found particularly useful and fascinating her insights into Irish
and native American experiences and how they translate into different forms of memoirs.
Recent years have seen several scholars and writers - Luke Gibbons, Paul Muldoon, and
Fintan O'Toole, among others - begin to chart these overlaps.
In addition to Gilmartin's useful recommendations, Linehan encourages me to push my
definition and understanding of architectural modernism further than I do. My goal was to
illustrate how various artistic and cultural strands of modernism - international style, art deco,
neoclassicism, postmodernism - were imported into the cultural and political life of
postcolonial Ireland. Dublin, too, was part of the international story of modernism and was
not excluded or isolated from architectural and planning debates that were occurring
internationally. I appreciate Linehan's suggestion that I could have extended my investigation
to include more studies of homegrown spatial strategies, in which Catholicism developed a
uniquely Irish response to solving the tensions of modernism.
Yvonne Whelan raises an objection to my statement that Irish nationalism worked
through mobilizing a largely rural populace, and that urban space was not a primary setting
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to the anticolonial struggles. Her criticism is astute and points to a lack of clarity on my part
in that particular section, entitled 'Dublin and Nationalist Historiography'. While anticolonial
resistance was represented as a rural affair, my point throughout the book was to show the
long and deep history of urban struggle, particularly as it manifested itself as a broad debate
over the meaning of architectural style and the implementation of urban change, ranging from
early colonial market towns through the radical restructuring of Dublin by the Wide Streets
Commissioners, to the laying out of suburbs and contemporary gentrification.
The critics* who generously commented on Postcolonial Dublin raised a whole host of
interesting and surprising issues and questions, from new connections between Ireland and
other, global, sites of contact, to investigations into the nature of evidence in history. Dublin
holds a privileged place in the history of modernism, and I am pleased and grateful to be a
part of the conversation that thoroughly and insistently ensures that, for better or worse, it will
continue to exist at the forefront of economic and cultural change.
References
BARTHES, R. (1994 [1985]) The semiotic challenge. Berkeley: University of California Press.
BENJAMIN, W. (1969) Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books.
DE CERTEAU, M. (1984 [1980]). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
ENGELS, F. (1968 [1845]) The condition of the working class in England. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
FREUD, S. (1965 [1904]) The psychopathology of everyday life. New York: Norton.
GIBBONS, L. (1996) Transformations in Irish culture. Cork: Cork University Press.
KEARNS, K. (1994) Dublin tenement life: an oral history. New York: Penguin.
MULDOON, P. (1987) Meeting the British. Winston-Salem, N.C: Wake Forest University Press.
OTOOLE, F. (2005) White savage: William Johnson and the invention of America. London: Faber.
SCOTT, J. (1991) The evidence of experience, Critical Inquiry, 17(4), 773-97.