period. This signal moment in the history of the Irish cultural field is indeed an early indicator of the antagonistic cooperation that has since come more generally to structure the cultural field of the “information age.”
Because Irish literary expression was believed to evince a singular national identity having both aesthetic value and political utility, modern Irish writing was forged and continually animated by controversies over literary autonomy versus political intervention, pedagogy versus propaganda, and the ideal virtues of art versus the practical effects of direct social engagement, as D. George Boyce notes: “It was these problems and possibilities that quickly destroyed any neat symmetry of political decline paralleled by cultural revival: for, just as the political crisis of 1891 [the Parnell split] gave an impetus to the literary movement, so the literary movement helped shape and release new political forces that threatened Yeats’ hope of an imaginative Irish literature tailored for a critical yet appreciative audience, that would enable Ireland to make a distinctive contribution to the common European cultural heritage.”18 Caught between calls for a national literature free of external constraints and demands for a didactic literature of political utility, Irish writing came to manifest a truly stereophonic relationship to and for its audiences. Without ever locating a stable or final balance, it began dynamically to pan between coterie groupings and mass movements, domestic and foreign expectations, and national and international readerships. Exacerbating these controversies was the concurrent recognition that Ireland was what Christopher Morash terms “an informational field,” an entity determined not by geographical borders, but by the circulation of newspapers, crisscrossing telegraph wires, and radio waves.19 In establishing the basis on which modern Irish writing was instituted, these controversies were conducted as material practices of circulation and reception, carried out by agents who recognized themselves to be engaging in their activities as position-takings within a zone of positions constituting this “informational field.” This is to say that every move made, every stance taken by particular agents acknowledged those made by other agents in the field, while realizing specific possibilities for movement opened up by the field itself. As Pierre Bourdieu has written, “The network of objective relations between positions subtends and orients the strategies which the occupants of the different positions implement in their struggles to defend or improve their positions (i.e., their position-takings), strategies which depend for their force and form on the position each agent occupies in the power relations [of the field].”20 In Ireland, with its especially close and mutually determinative relationship of literary and political activity, these relational contests were most intensely waged around the very classification of “literary” versus “political” communication, for this porous and shifting boundary was what was at stake in the emergent and evolving structure of the “informational field.”
For Bourdieu, “the most disputed frontier of all is the one which separates the field of cultural production and the field of power,” an insight that articulates this study’s primary point of departure in approaching the Second World War.21 As a global conflagration, the war allowed a novel set of stands to be taken to the extent that it produced a novel set of stations to be occupied, a new series of “opportunities” to be realized. Rather than as an instance of military determinism, this relationship should be understood as a historical determination of forces and interactions along this “most disputed frontier” between fields, at the precise moment of its deepest crisis. Reconfigured by diverse systems of translation and propagation, broadcasting services, the dictates of ministries of information, and the institutions governing these emerging forms of mediation, this boundary was both highly mutable and durable, as it was practically instantiated and experienced. A critical distinction helps bear out this point. As will explicitly be seen in its second chapter and conclusion, this book draws on the notion of “Irish literary space” described in Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters, which presents the Literary Revival as a “paradigm” for the alliances, rivalries, and subversions incumbent to competing for literary recognition and preeminence on a world scale. She understands literary works to exist in an international field, a “world” in which value is assessed and measured according to the works’ relational distance to the centers of literary authority. In this “world literary space,” Paris stands as the center of centers, the most prestigious seat of legitimating authority and the point around which the structures that determine and classify literariness are organized. Naming this classifying function the “Greenwich meridian of literature,” Casanova sees it as the capacity to define both literary space and literary time, both the aesthetic distance of all other locations from the center and the aesthetic remove from the modernity, the “present,” of the center.22 Imagined as “an enchanted world, a kingdom of pure creation, the best of all possible worlds where universality reigns through liberty and equality,” this republic of letters is rather a zone of incessant antagonism, where domination is exercised though the mechanism of universality itself.23 Without being either entranced by metropolitan norms or stunted by peripheral underdevelopment, modern Irish literature is for her exemplary, having broken free of purely national literary space without yielding to purely international literary space.
However compelling and generative this model is, Ireland and the Problem of Information nevertheless treats it as a specific field of actions and values within what Armand Mattelart calls “world communication,” or the “internationalization of a mode of communication that has progressively become a way of organizing the world.”24 Eschewing the ideological identification of “communication” solely with modern mass media, Mattelart concentrates instead on the practical activities of exchange (such as migration, broadcasting, intelligence analysis, international treaties, mercantile relations) that constitute the “world” as a “contradictory system made up all at once of interdependencies and interconnections, of schisms, fragmentations, and exclusions.”25 Both geographical and symbolic entity, this world arises through the imposition of universal modes, rather than in their inexorable systemic reproduction. This focus is embodied in a methodological recognition:
There is the danger of allowing oneself to be enclosed within the “international,” just as some, at the other end of the spectrum, risk becoming immured in the ghetto of the “local.” In succumbing to this danger, one risks subscribing to a determinist conception in which the international is converted into the imperative—just as, at the opposite pole, the exclusive withdrawal into the local perimeter is the shortest way to relativism. There is overestimation of the international dimension on one side, underestimation on the other. All these levels of reality, however—international, local, regional, and national—are meaningless unless they are articulated with each other, unless one points out their interactions, and unless one refuses to set up false dilemmas and polarities but instead tries to seek out the connections, mediations, and negotiations operating among these dimensions, without at the same time neglecting the very real existence of power relations among them.26
In this regard, the present study is less a comparative project, one that presupposes the stability or givenness of the entities it compares, than an examination of the constitutive instability of literary, medial, and political relations as they inform one another. By presenting modal case studies of the problem of information, each chapter that follows reads expressive works as mediated by their total communicative context—that is, at the disputed boundary between cultural production and social power.
In specifying the parameters of this total communicative context, this book is most acutely concerned with radio broadcasting. Ernest Mandel has written that “if World War II was the conveyor-belt and motorised war, it was also the radio war. In no previous conflict had warring governments enjoyed the possibility of directly reaching so many millions of men and women with their attempts at indoctrination and ideological manipulation.”27 Given radio’s disregard of grounded borders, listeners in any one place could tune in domestic and foreign stations that addressed them as particular audiences and targeted them as members of particular publics. For state authorities, this amplified relationship led almost simultaneously to ways of understanding broadcasting that relied equally on qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis, in which hermeneutic “close readings” of individual
