Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity (Field Day Files)

IRISH TIMES sketches an alternative conception of historical time. It argues that ways of living that are recalcitrant to capitalist logic, and therefore targeted for destruction, are not backward remainders of outmoded traditions, but are themselves adaptations of older formations that responded to earlier waves of modernization. Modernity does not replace tradition, nor tradition lag behind modernity, but each emerges always in differential relation to its counterpart. Irish culture has been deeply informed by this sense of layered time, in the ways it is haunted by unworked-through pasts and in the self-conscious theory and practice of Irish political and aesthetic modernism. In essays on the memory and commemoration of the Famine, on James Connolly s and James Joyce s parallel explorations of history and temporality, and on the figure of the ruin in Irish culture and visual art, DAVID LLOYD analyzes the persistence of the non-modern in Irish culture, showing it to be a resource for cultural invention rather than a drag on progress and modernization. The living on of supposedly exhausted cultural practices offers, he argues, still viable utopian possibilities, even at a moment when capitalist modernity seems to have become universally sovereign.