Theme

APOCALYPSE AND UTOPIA

poster_thumbnail 2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. An epochal moment in modern history, this event presaged the collapse of Soviet Communism and elevated capitalism into unrivalled global command, suddenly freeing it of a serious ‘modern’ global competitor-ideology. Against the backdrop of a digital and information revolution that accelerated cultural and economic globalizations, this novel situation encouraged a mood of post-historical exhilaration, most vividly expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History? He argued that liberal capitalism had decisively vanquished all rival ideologies and thus represented the final end-point of political evolution.

However, two decades later, and especially in the aftermath of 9/11, the endist imagination has taken a darker apocalyptic turn as Western liberalism and capitalism wrestle with systemic crises. These include climate change and environmental degradation, energy crises, a ‘clash of civilizations’ between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West,’ a fiscal convulsion of a magnitude that has recalled the Great Depression, and a fundamental restructuring of the world system represented by the ‘rise of Asia.’  Liberal capitalism may have inherited the earth after 1989, and it may still lack a serious global competitor-system, but its ability to redress or resolve these crises remains far from apparent.

The modern Irish political and cultural imagination was never a stranger to rhetorics of utopia and apocalypse. The period from the early modern plantations to the calamitous history of the long nineteenth-century - the extended breakdown of Gaelic culture, the bloodletting of 1798, the devastation of the Great Famine, the violent class struggles of the Land Wars, the repeated collisions of nationalism and unionism that eventually issued in partition - fed catastrophist versions of history in modern Irish Catholic and Protestant cultures alike. Across much of the twentieth century, Irish society seemed too poor, backward and conservative to greatly nurture the utopian imagination, except in savagely thwarted or dystopian versions: the period between Yeats and Beckett experienced an efflorescence of radically experimental literary and cultural production steeped in a sense of historical catastrophe, cultural exhaustion and linguistic collapse.

Later, in the 1990s, as the island experienced the unprecedented prosperity of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ and the sense of a welcome release from a baleful history represented by the ‘Peace Process,’ a heady consumerist and end-of-history euphoria coursed through Irish popular culture too. A new confidence flourished that hope and history might be made to rhyme. Even then, however, the sense of history as catastrophe, long embedded in the Irish cultural imagination, persisted in subdued form, and the recent turbulence in the capitalist system has churned up a renewed sense of radical uncertainty.

Looking to these complex histories, present disturbances, and imagined futures, the IRISH SEMINAR 2009 will investigate the rhetorics of progress and catastrophe, apocalypse and utopia, millenarianism and anti-millenarianism, in Irish culture from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. The twentieth anniversary of ‘the Fall of the Wall’ offers an occasion to reflect on how the utopian promises of the Enlightenment and modernity issued in the nightmarish vistas of Cold War Nuclear Winters and post-Cold War Global Warmings. Within this framework, the IRISH SEMINAR will consider Irish literature in both major languages, film, popular culture, and social and intellectual history in a broad international context. 

Image: Arnalda Pomodoro, Sfera con sfera [sphere within sphere], Cast bronze, Trinity College Dublin.

This is a two tonne bronze sphere on a grand scale by the Italian sculptor. The sphere, his signature piece is a pun on his surname which means tomato. The TCD sphere is replicated at the Vatican, the UN, Berkeley and Tehran. At once sculptural, architectural and artisanal, the sphere can be viewed in many ways - a sign system like the brain's cortex, a globe in meltdown, a fruit bursting, an industrial machine in breakdown. The reflective sheen  also ensures that the sphere is implicated in its context.