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===== A Cartography of Resistance:
The British State and Derry Republicanism =====

Introduction to Section 1

Section 1 of the thesis discusses the research literature on Northern Ireland and outlines the specific research problems of this thesis. These are in brief, the development of a model of social theory capable of bridging the gap between micro and macro sociological accounts and a research practice explicitly concerned with the social location of social inquiry. Critical ethnography, also referred to as a discourse-ethnographic approach, is posed as a model appropriate to both of these concerns. Chapter 1 discusses the specific problems of research in 'conflict' situations such as those of researching the Northern Irish context and concludes with a brief discussion of the notion of a critical ethnographic method. This discussion is extended in the conclusion to the thesis.

Chapter 2 outlines the traditional dichotomy between structure and agency orientated approaches in social theory and discusses attempts by Marxist and Post-structuralist theory to overcome this dichotomy; that is, to produce an approach which is both micro and macro and capable of theorising struggle and social change. It argues that the concerns with language(s) and specificity in contemporary discourse theoretical approaches are most useful in this respect.

== Chapter 1
Introduction: Entry into the (Discursive) Field ==

1.1 Introduction - Ignorance and Knowledge: The Initial Research Context
1.2 Positioned Accounting
1.3 Critical Analysis
Footnotes to Chapter 1

'There is no such thing as a neutral language, for language is the means by which culture, the totality of our response to the world we live in, is communicated' (Gerry Adams, 1986: 138)

1.1 Introduction - Ignorance and Knowledge: The Initial Research Context

Much of the work of this thesis may be said to have begun in 1977 when I was an undergraduate at University College of North Wales (UCNW) studying a course in political sociology, taught by a man subsequently to become my doctoral (PhD) thesis supervisor, John Borland. The course was largely a case study of Northern Ireland. The PhD thesis proper began in September 1978 upon my arrival in Derry. Here I conducted an ethnographic study for just over one year of community work in Derry and in particular the Derry Youth and Community Workshop (DYCW). During this period of field research I worked as a full-time communications tutor in the workshop and prepared an evaluation report for its management committee and director. 1 Funded initially by a Social Science Research Council (Pool) Award I have spent the years since then extending this ethnographic account into a more general account of the discursive formation of Northern Ireland.

The aim of this thesis is to describe the distribution and interaction of different understandings (and therefore consequent practices concerning) the 'Northern Ireland Problem' 2. These practices and understandings I have, following Foucault (1972), termed discourses. The theoretical and methodological organisation of the thesis is discussed in more detail in the chapters which follow, but at this juncture one could suggest that the thesis is in a very important sense about the 'writing' or production of the 'Northern Ireland Problem'.

Like Burton's book The Politics of Legitimacy (1978), with which it shares much in common both theoretically and substantively, this thesis is concerned with Catholic Republican community. This thesis also shares an ethnographic approach with Burton's work, further it is an ethnographic base supplemented and developed by a concern with ideological formations as the context for community practices. Published ethnographies of Northern Ireland are unusual enough in themselves, but Burton's work is particularly significant in its attempt to ground this approach in a theory of ideological formations. This thesis, like Burton's work, sees ethnography as crucial in any attempt to destabilise a fairly traditional dichotomy within sociological thinking, that of micro and macro perspectives. (One might also add the related dichotomy of 'subjective' and 'objective' emphases.) Again, this point is developed further in the following chapters but is mentioned at the outset because of its crucial significance to the direction of this work.

Many other factors have been important in shaping this thesis, some related more visibly to developments in social theory, others arising more visibly from the specific field situation, all inevitably melded together in what is glossed as the 'research experience'. This introduction will seek to raise these factors briefly then allow the main body of the text to develop them in more detail. Being dumped in the middle of the Bogside is not without its problems for an Englishman. This is essentially what happened to me in 1978. After a few visits to the Derry Youth and Community Workshop and some preliminary negotiations with its director and the North West Centre for Learning and Development, I suddenly found myself living there with empty research diaries, a much crumpled paperback edition of Berger and Luckman's The Social Construction of Reality (1966) and a commission to write a report on the DYCW which had first stirred my interest in the place. This thesis then is the story, or rather a small part of it, of that and subsequent research experience. Despite the horror stories of callous bigotry and paramilitary psychopathology 3 both the Bogside and myself survived the experience. Needless to say, the Bogside gave me far more than I could give it and I thank the people of Derry for that. The Derry Youth and Community Workshop, then situated in Lawrence Hill in the old Foyle School, was a very alive, gripping, stressful, happy, sad place where anything could and quite often did happen. A place where 'institutionalisation' and 'habitualisation' were being consciously and consistently fought. It was a place that advocated change for changes sake. An environment designed, in the words of its director, Paddy Doherty 4, to 'blast the young people from their low-level existence, a kind of non-lived life of discoing and drinking'. A place where a monumental, deliberate attempt was being made to overcome a mind-dulling, self-confidence-draining, 'colonial', 'ghetto' mentality and develop new ways of being in the world. Within six weeks of being in the workshop, one of the trainees (the young people working in the workshop) presented me with an armband he had made in the leather- work class. It read 'Failure is Impossible'! I was present at a tutors' meeting in the workshop two weeks prior to this where the director was discussing organisational matters. He spoke thus, 'When we say something is impossible, we mean impossible according to the way we are perceiving things at that moment. Our job is to change our perception of reality to make everything, anything possible'. It was a place then with articulate visionary ideals which were being worked at with superhuman, almost manic energy. Not surprisingly I was impressed, and like Lord Melchett 5, soon came to regard the workshop with a 'mixture of pride and terror'.

By contrast, my stock of field techniques and theories felt quite impoverished. The 'ordinary' people I was supposed to be studying seemed to be possessed not only with saintly motivation and superhuman energy but also had an extremely articulate theorisation of themselves and their situation. Even on my own narrow academic terms they seemed much more skilled than I. I noted with some anxiety the ease and fluency with which Bion's 'basic assumption' theory (Bion, 1961), organisational dynamics (Miller and Rice, 1967) and Kleinian psychoanalysis (De Board, 1978) were bandied about at every meeting. Even the trainees seemed to be familiar with 'fight/flight' models, 'pairing', 'projectional transference', 'negotiation of personal space' and 'boundary maintenance'. I quaked in the soles of my shoes at the frightening degree of commitment and honesty with which the tutors in the workshop discussed each other and their situation at the weekly meetings. I tried vainly for the first two or three months of my research to capture (write) in my diary the great energy, excitement and tension of the DYCW. My first major research project then, scared the hell out of me and excited me beyond belief.

All this, of course, was further compounded for me by the fact that this wondrous project was occurring in the well-known, and in some quarters infamous, Bogside/Creggan area of Londonderry 6. The problem for me was not so much the scare-stories (outsider perspectives) of Ulster bigotry or pathology, nor even the militarised nature of everyday life in parts of Northern Ireland. These aspects, particularly the former, were rapidly put into a more informed, that is, insider perspective. As young, male and English, initially unknowing of and unknown to a gemeinschaft, Republican community, they were not unimportant 7. There was however, a more pressing problem. How did this wider context within which the Derry workshop existed affect its progress and development and how did the Derry workshop affect its environment? What was its 'environment'? If 'writing' 8 the workshop was going to be a difficult task, how much more difficult would it be when it was located in such an environment, or more exactly, such a series of environments? The Bogside/Creggan area was a Catholic, Republican, Irish, radical gemeinschaft community at war, and not only was I an outsider to all these features and more (the 'Tavistock' theories of the DYCW, for instance), but my ignorance was not simply an absence or lack, but a positivity. That is, I was not simply 'outside' of all of these things but my difference was a plenitude of mythology and other histories 9. The complexity of the task of describing the workshop, the Bogside/Creggan community and the wider situation of Northern Ireland was then, a matter of grappling with a number of related problems, problems of both ignorance and knowledge. From the very start of the research then, I was implicated in my data and analysis.

1.2 Positioned Accounting

One research problem which was there at the start and has shown remarkable persistence throughout deserves mention at this juncture. Put blandly it was a problem of other people's perception and use of the research. Pressures were obviously felt in terms of my ability to do justice to Derry and the Derry Workshop in my initial account, no easy task as I have already tried to suggest 10. But much more of a problem was the wider context of the research. Significantly how would my account of the field-work process be evaluated and mobilised by others. This is in fact a rather complex problem and is addressed further, in more detail, in the thesis in a number of different ways.
Talal Asad (1973) and others have pointed out several ways in which the social sciences, particularly anthropology, are implicated in colonial and state power. It is the work of Michel Foucault (1972, 1976, 1977) however, which has provided the most detailed commentary on the links between knowledge, power and the social sciences. Foucault's political-somatics describe power/knowledge relations, and trace the genealogy of 19th and 20th century social science endeavour. The account is one which crucially implicates social science in a series of disciplinary and surveillance mechanisms of power. Put simply, he describes the way in which the social sciences develop the technologies with which to police 'bodies', or more widely 'the social'. Research in conflict situations, particularly in my case, in a Republican community in Derry, can only serve to highlight and make more urgent, the problems Foucault raises in his critique. Much of the research literature on Northern Ireland, for example, is written with the express intention of solving the 'Northern Ireland Problem'. Naturally enough however, the solution depends on the definition of the problem and vice versa. It is for the main body of the thesis to outline the particularities of these solutions and problems 11. One can note however, that because of the awful human costs of the conflict in Northern Ireland and its seeming irrationality within the context of Western European social democracies, many, if not most research accounts are motivated explicitly by a search for the solution to an urgent, but seemingly insoluble problem. This is true whether one is talking about counter- insurgency theory (Wilkinson, 1974; Kitson, 1971; Moss, 1972), explicitly designed to help the state wipe out any threats to itself, or accounts motivated by rather more humane and benign considerations 12 (Harris, 1972; Barritt and Carter, 1972).

Some research accounts of Northern Ireland are quite open about their motivation, such as many of those written by marxists. Martin (1986) divides these approaches into two main schools, the 'anti-imperialist' and the 'revisionist'. The anti-imperialist school sees British imperialism as the root cause of the sectarian division and therefore concludes that British withdrawal and national independence are, at least, prerequisites for a solution. The anti- imperialist school is cited as originating in the work of Marx, Engels and Lenin and even more significantly James Conolly. It is best represented currently by de Paor (1970), McCann (1980) and Farrell (1976). The revisionists on the other hand view the British presence as largely benign. A central tenet of these approaches is that imperialism is not crucial in discussion of Northern Ireland. The work of the British and Irish Communist Party (1972), Boserup (1972), Probert (1978), Nairn (1981) and Bew et al (1979) are cited as revisionist (Martin, 1986: 57 FF).

Less explicitly positioned accounts, but positioned nevertheless, are obtained from liberal-pluralist academics (Darby, 1976, 1983). These accounts suggest themselves to be less positioned, or even unpositioned, outside ideology, in two significant senses. Firstly, their only motivation, as such, is a liberal humanism, or 'unquestionable' horror at the realities of the Northern Ireland Problem. Secondly, a naive empiricism which suggests that such accounts simply report the terrible facts which are 'out there' to be gathered. In this sense there is often an overlap between these accounts and those commissioned or motivated by religious or humanitarian groups. It is, importantly, not the sincerity of these accounts which is questionable, simply their ability to operate outside of ideology and ultimately their adequacy as explanations. In order to devise or suggest solutions to the 'Northern Ireland Problem' one must first decide what the problem is and this definitional process cannot help but foreground some things at the expense of others. They involve 'problematics' in the sense that Althusser uses the term in Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 57). The process must be based on a series of known and unknown criteria. The definition allows the possibility of asking some questions, but refuses the possibility of asking others. It must then, be located in a particular, positioned view, a particular discursive position. The apparently positionless (un-voiced) accounts of bourgeois social science are sometimes those one needs to be most sceptical of, for if there is one crucial conclusion to this thesis it is that accounts of the social world are always voiced or positioned and that accounts of Northern Ireland can never be simply neutral reports of 'what is really there'. This is the case whether it is the 'descriptive' voice of the ethnographer who sees her/his work as simply descriptive and therefore above theory, as outside of ideology, or indeed the marxist, or other, for whom truth lies beneath the mystifying surface of phenomenal forms, only revealed, at last, by the scientific practice of the researcher/intellectual. There is then, following Foucault (1977), Derrida (1967), and others no originary truth to be uncovered about the 'Northern Ireland Problem' 13. There are accounts which exist in both 'the field' and the academy which are all positioned according to various criteria and exist in a state of continuous interaction, infection, support and conflict, that is, what this thesis calls a series of competing discursive formations.

Particularly since the beginning of the 1980s, several other types of accounts of Northern Ireland have emerged. Although these accounts are distinguished by at least two distinct strategies, feminism (Fairweather et al, 1984 and D'Arcy, 1981) and community politics (O'Dowd et al, 1980 and Frazer, 1981, 1982), they are at least as significant in the kind of data they release. Many of these accounts attempt to be descriptive, albeit, importantly, an explicitly positioned description, and concern themselves with areas and levels of analysis largely ignored in earlier mainstream analyses, the position of women within Northern Ireland, or community work / community-state politics, for example. There are a few important exceptions to the newness of this category, significantly (Weiner, 1975; Harris, 1972 and finally Burton, 1978). Other important exceptions would be those works of journalism (McCann, 1974; Curtis, 1984) or fiction (Murphy, 1978; Johnson, 1977). Several 'fictional' works of recent times are worth mentioning Ruby in the Rain and several of the BBC's Play for Today, or Play of the Month series, several films, significantly, Maeve, Writing on the Wall, Anne Devlin, even perhaps Cal 14. Several biographical and autobiographical works have also been published recently (Sands, 1983; Adams, 1982) which reveal much about everyday community life.

'Fictional' works need to be given an important place in accounts of Northern Ireland. The traditional dichotomies between works of non-fiction and works of fiction do not bear close investigation. So-called 'information' must always be 'packaged' and even news stories must be coded according to certain mythic and narrative conventions as Hall's work on the Faulklands/Malvinas affair clearly demontrates (Hall, 1985). Equally, novels, films, plays and so forth are rich in ethnographic and cultural data. Some social theorists have commented on this fact (Berger, 1966; Nisbet, 1976 and others), but such a dichotomy is embedded quite deeply in the very nature of the social science academy. Recent work, significantly in cultural and media theory, the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies for example, in the field of popular culture, has begun to seriously challenge the information/entertainment or fact/fiction dichotomy, and more importantly incorporate, largely via the recent work in the fields of ideological critique and discourse theory, these developments into a theorised account of social science commentary (for example Hall, 1985). These developments have been greatly advanced by the work of critical anthropologists and literary theorists 15. A number of accounts of Northern Ireland blur the distinction between fiction and theory altogether. One which deserves particular mention as it is discussed later is Armand Gatti's film Writing on the Wall 16. An excellent account of the importance of fiction to sociology is provided by Schlesinger et al (1983) in their book Televising Terrorism , written on terrorism and Northern Ireland.

One noticeable feature of much of the fictional literature and that written from community or feminist perspectives is the local, specific or particularistic nature of their discussion. They tend to be strategic and openly partial explanations of the events in Northern Ireland, reticent, because of their concern with what one might term 'lived-complexity', to offer general accounts, and therefore solutions to the Northern Ireland Problem. Burton states of his work,

'This (book) does not constitute a general explanation but I believe it does contribute to the understanding of an extraordinarily complex political situation, as well as illustrating the considerable epistemological and theoretical problems involved in the explanation of any social phenomena' (Burton, 1978: 162-63).

Some accounts, it is true, argue that the 'problem' is precisely the previous 'invisibility' of particular explanations, accounts or groups of people, be they women, the working class or particular communities. Even here, however, the tendency is to emphasise complexity and localised explanation. Said provides an important caution here,

'Unless theory is answerable either through its successes or failures to the essential untidiness, the essential unmasterable presence that constitutes a large part of the historical and social situations, then theory becomes an ideological trap which transfixes both its users and what it is used on' (Said, 1982: 241).

Burton begins his excellent book, for example, by declaring its partiality (Burton, 1978). Whilst there are a few reasonably useful historical accounts of the Irish Republican Army (Bowyer-Bell, 1970; Coogan, 1980 and Kelly, 1982) 17, Burton's book is one of the very few sociological accounts to discuss the complex relation between the IRA and the community of which they are a part. Another would be Nelson's book Ulster's Uncertain Defenders (1984), although this book is concerned with Protestant Loyalist paramilitaries. The equally interesting Fairweather book is a collection of personal accounts and biographies thematically organised to demonstrate many differing, similar, contradictory accounts. This provides a complex multi-voiced account extremely unusual in academic texts (Fairweather et al, 1984). Burton (1978), McCann (1974), Frazer (1981) and D'Arcy (1981) follow this trend towards dialogism. I include this thesis as significantly within this category. It is in many senses a partial account and I openly declare so. The success of my account and the consequences of my construction of the Northern Ireland Problem you the reader must judge.

1.3 Critical Analysis

For my part I claim that this thesis attempts to be a critical analysis. That is, it is an analysis that is not only self-reflexive while attempting to consider its own conditions of production as far as it is able, but also attempts to theorise the significance of these conditions of possibility for its analysis. There is then, an attempt, as Burton (1978) and other writers plead for, to integrate discussion of theory and method with data.

'It is a sociologial cliche that the theory and method a researcher uses influences the particular transposition of social reality that is produced in the research monographs. If more than lip service were paid to this fundamental proposition the sociologist would have his (sic) theoretical problems and methodological prescriptions explicitly intertwined with his (sic) substantive text. The 'why' and 'how' of a thesis would be openly enmeshed in the production of the 'what' (Burton, 1978: 164).

Hygienic theory, then, must allow itself to be infected by the data. Burton discusses this point in relation to several leftist accounts of Northern Ireland. Although I would wish to add many other approaches to these leftist accounts the criticism is worth noting,

'Several leftist attempts to establish a general explanation of the Northern Ireland trouble have by omitting one level of analysis (the level of 'lived-experience') produced programmatic and problematic theorising. The complexity of the problem has been sacrificed to maintain the plausibility of a theoretical position' (Burton, 1978: 157).
Elsewhere Burton states of 'macro' approaches to the study of Northern Ireland,

'Their very breadth deals cavalierly with the manner in which their theses and prognoses account for the construction of reality found at community level. Their obvious fault is that, in the effort to portray the problems, such analyses are prone to do violence to the complexity of the social worlds they claim to have mastered. The result is banality, partiality (unacknowledged) or selective amnesia' (Burton, 1978: 130).

Interestingly, Burton goes on to state that although in his case, the spirit was willing, there are 'numerous difficulties' (Burton, 1978: 164). Unfortunately he does not discuss in any detail what these difficulties are. I will argue below that, in his case, one severe difficulty for him is his failure to discuss in any adequate manner the importance of language, more precisely language-in-action, a reasonable three word definition of discourse, to his sociological treatise. He does, however, provide a very useful appendix which attempts to trace some of the parameters of his discussion and should be given credit for this. More will be said of this below, for now, it should be noted that there are political and theoretical reasons why self-reflexivity cannot, as is sadly too often the case, be simply regarded as methodological navel-gazing. Intellectuals are implicated in the accounts they produce and theoretical approaches construct as much as they describe. Following Anderson we can note,

'Whilst theoretical discourse is predicated on other discourses anterior to it and constituting its conditions of existence, no discourse or text is in any sense reducible to its exterior conditions. The text exists on conditions of possibility which do not constitute its truth, essence or origin' (Anderson, 1978: 94 - my emphasis).

This thesis aims to be a critical analysis in a further sense, a sense perhaps most successfully colonised in the past by marxist analysis. It is critical in the sense that it is premised on the basic 'unfreedom of things', in the notion, that is, that some explanations of the social world carry more weight than others. In this post-marxist era 18 one can define criticalness as a concern with what Deleuze and Guattari (1977), Guattari (1983) and Spivak (1979), amongst others, have called the plurality of the margin. Significantly this is a concern with the complexity of social structuring and the operation of power. This explanation sees the ability to define the limits and boundaries of marginal elements as a key feature of the operation of power.

In an article on explanation and culture Gayatri Spivak states,

'The putative centre welcomes selective inhabitants of the margin in order better to exclude the margin. And it is the centre which offers the official explanation; or, the centre is defined and reproduced by the explanation it can express ... By pointing attention to ... marginality, I have been attempting not to win the centre ... but to point to the irreducibility of the margin in all explanations' (Spivak, 1979: 206).

There are a number of things to note, importantly power is not seen as simply prohibitive, as inflexible, on the contrary limited flexibility or selective incorporation is seen to be vital.

The margin then, and its existence, is crucially important for the centre, affirming its dynamism and ability to incorporate change. In examining migrant women's writing in 'multicultural' Australia, Sneja Gunew has this to say,

'The answer then to 'What does the centre want?' is that it desires the existence of the marginal but not (perhaps) its marginal specifications . At this point an example: recall the period when women's writing was compared with black writing, and both were described in terms of the politics of the colonised body. What has happened now is that theorists from within black writing are establishing their differences not only from malestream writing but also from women's writing, by constructing it as white and middle class. What we are being offered now is the construction of differences from within the marginal. So the answer to 'What does the margin want?' is margins , that is plurality (Gunew, 1985: 143 - my emphasis).

This thesis argues that an important feature of understanding the context of Catholic Republican community (the Bogside/Creggan) concerns the politics of the marginal voice. It is important to realise that 'margins are ambiguous in their registering of power relations ... As well as offering sanctuary to the powerless, margins are also places of authority and coercion' (Gunew, 1985: 142). The community of the Bogside/Creggan is both self-defining and defined by the (British) state; that is, it is produced in struggle. It is potentially an entity defined as 'terrorist' a 'Republican ghetto' and therefore available to be 'policed' appropriately from a counter-insurgency perspective. At the same moment, however, it must be understood as a site of resistance to this 'policing', its conditions of resistance created by the operation of power upon it. Central to this is the fact that the official discourse of the British state cannot easily admit a heterogeneous entity, or at least the heterogeneity that could/does exist must be carefully controlled. This has specific implications, for example, in the construction of the terrorist 'other', the IRA, and the relation that exists between the IRA and the Bogside/Creggan community. Consider, for example, a short news item reporting some comments made by Bob Geldof upon receiving a citation by the British Queen for his Band-Aid spectacular in aid of the Ethiopian famine victims.

The item was titled 'Bob Geldof has slammed Irish Americans for supporting the IRA'. This was then followed by some direct speech from Geldof,

'I am delighted at being cited by the Queen, despite the suggestion that the British are murdering Irish people. The IRA are not preserving anything. They are murdering Irish people. The IRA, the UVF and the UDA are some of the biggest murderers on this planet'.

The commentator then said,

'He urged people not to support them. He said the IRA are simply murderers'. (16th June 1986, ABC Radio 6WF, Perth, Western Australia)

There are many things to note about this news item, not the least of which is the use of direct speech as an authentication device, a 'reality effect', this practice is common not only to the 'packaging' of news (Bonney and Wilson, 1984), but also to ethnographic accounts 19. This immediately raises the question of Geldof's authority as an 'accredited witness' (Hall, 1973). Geldof is quoted obviously because he is famous, 'news value' in that sense. He is, however, more importantly in this case Irish and therefore somebody who is 'inside' the situation. Further questions to be considered then are, firstly, how does the institutional voice incorporate or relate to, this insider account? How is the direct voice mobilised? How are the quotes staged by the quoter? Secondly, how does this textual work attempt to incorporate or bind-in its audience? Much is happening, then, in an apparently innocuous news report. Far from being simply the innocent reporting of a statement by a well-known individual - simply 'news', as its presentation would have it - it is a positioned intervention in the discursive construction of the 'Northern Ireland Problem'. I am not concerned here to give a full textual analysis of this news report, later sections of this thesis investigate the theoretical, methodological and substantive concerns raised by this example. I am not concerned for the moment, about the fact that this is from a Western Australian news medium. The relation between British and Australian news coverage of Ireland is complex and would require lengthy analysis. There are a few important conclusions to be drawn at this juncture, however, which demonstrate the process of closure within the official discourse (Burton and Carlen, 1977), a process which illustrates an attempt to singularise what is a plural margin.

A significant feature of the official discourse is its disavowal of difference. the IRA are simply murderers. They are murderers, as opposed for example to soldiers, and they are nothing other than murderers. There are, then, only two possibilities, good and bad. Further, we are good and they are bad. Crucially, in this binary regime of truth the UVF and the UDA are impossible to discuss. The initial complexity of ensus-oriented, value-neutral social discourse which claims to describe a natural order given independently of the discursive practices that speak of it, or one in which harmonious functional roles co- operate in a shared system in which contestation and dissent are deviant, or one which accepts at face-value a community's commonplace rationalisations of its social inequities and relations of domination. Critical social discourse assumes that domination is a product of a combination of interest and power which is successful in the longer term only to the degree that it conceals itself behind a near-seamless web of rationalising or neutralising discourses that is properly called the dominating ideological system of that community' (Lemke, 1985: 1).

Two further features of the research pertaining to the problem/solution scenario, both of which are the subject of ro or constitutional dimensions of the 'Northern Ireland Problem'.

Despite making a plea for a broadening of the solutions debate in this specific way, however, it must be stressed that I do not intend to provide, or even attempt to provide a solution to the Northern Ireland Problem, even one which would take a community/state focus as a magic answer, the matter is much more Rees, at the time Secretary of State for Northern ireland, produced a somewhat surprising account of the violent nature of Ireland by pointing to, "for example, Bloody Friday and Bloody Sunday." The parameters of the 'solutions debate' are crucial to an understanding of the Northern Ireland Problem. It is vital to remember that 'solutions' like explanations of what it is that needs solving are always ideological, that they are active participants in the discursive formation of Northern Ireland. This is, of course, the case even with solutions which purport to be simply desirous of an 'end to the killing'. Liberal humanist perspectives are perspectives, that is to say positioned despite their suggestion otherwise. Peace, murder and justice as discursive constructs, are all examined in later chapters, suffice to say at this bombs are still used.

Speaking on Northern Ireland can the have disastrous consequences. Equally dangerous on occasions is speaking in Northern Ireland. It often takes a great deal of personal courage for the people who live there to speak out against either the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), British Army, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) or the paramilitary groups of Republicanism or Loyalism. All are 'armed and dangerous' and all take exception to certain forms of criticism. The consequences of speaking your mind in Northern Ireland can be serious, dramatic and even and by it, a happy wreck' (Foucault, 1971: 7-8).

Foucault was concerned to demonstrate the fact that in order to speak of something one has to engage with a discursive formation. One does not simply speak in a vacuum, the language one uses is, of necessity, embedded in a field of history and possibility. It is this sense in which language speaks the speaker rather than the converse. Discourses existing outside the individuals create the possibility of what can be said or not said. This is a challenge then, to what might be termed a correspondence model of language, whereby language is conceived as a neutral medium that simply describes a reality external to it. The concept of language as constituative receives further Six Counties, and whether this situation is a 'war' or an 'emergency situation' is precisely what is at stake in the ideological and political formations and struggles. Burton does, however, make some comments of note on language and its impact for his research.

The IRA might be better termed 'terrorists' than guerrillas in that they do not seek to build up a military force which actually confronts the reigning militia in a conventional fashion, as, say in Vietnam. No particular guarantee of anything. The complexity of 'lived accounts' is necessary but the category of experience and its linguistic manifestation in the direct voice, is problematic.

As Gunew argues, one of those 'fictions' underpinning the them-us binary opposition is the one which asks on just what authority 'they' speak to 'us'. Since the beginning of story-telling there has always been this question of auctoritas: who is licensed to hold us with a glittering eye? Invariably the answer comes: the witness, or, the simulacrum of one. As Deleuze reminds us, the direct voice, the authority of experience is the most compelling. But as we also know, from seeing endless documentary interviews and being bored graphic methods, ethnography will continue to 'fall short'.

Burton's three main comments on ethnography are a useful, if incomplete, place to begin such an address. Burton argues that the problems with ethnographic method cluster around the stages and process of becoming an insider, for him the problems revolve around:

1 the personal equation
2 observer presence
3 post-factum explanation

The 'personal equation' involves what Burton describes as the conjunction of institutional and discursive phenomena involved in creating a place from which to speak, a regime of truth, conditions of possibility which allow certain things to be said, but not others.

This point is related to Burton's second problem with ethnographic methods, what he terms 'observer presence',

'As Vidich (1955) makes clear, the researcher by joining a social situation alters that which he (she) would hold constant ... (168) ... Rather than concentrating on evaluating the degree of intrusion the researcher makes, on the social setting ... effort should be directed to justifying why the comments a researcher makes on that setting are the ones they are' (Burton, 1978: 170).

The conditions of possibility for the ethnographer are partly explained by disciplinary knowledges and institutions and Burton is correct in his assumption of the significance of this for the researcher's practice. It is crucial in this context to remember aries on ethnographic writing are intimately connected with the belief that

'the perspective and style of ethnography is dated, reflecting a naive era of social science which is no longer socially or epistemologically defensible' (Webster, 1982: 112).

That which is socially and/or epistemologically no longer defensible can be summarised briefly by an understanding of ethnography as the 'science of writing the other' (Rabinow, 1985: 10). There are several points involved in this conception. Importantly, ethnography is no longer understood as a process whereby a subject of consciousness goes 'into the field', and scientifically - and therefore objectively/neutrally - collects (pseudo) insider - is ruptured. The process is not linear, not a progression to a chimeral authentic truth, but rather a continual to-ing and fro-ing, a continuous 'tacking between inside and outside events' (Clifford 1982: 12).

There is no fixed inside and outside of a semiotic system. To conceptualise my entry into the Bogside and 'progression' within it as a linear process, gradually becoming more and more of an insider is to misconstrue the multi-levelled, polyvalent character of cultural interaction which is the very thing ethnography sets out to capture. There is no point of origin and no destination per se - there are indeed strategic or tactical starts and stops but these are contingent not absolute; they are

There are then, serious questions about the ethnographic gaze, if it can never be an unproblematic, scientific mimetic gaze, what is it? Further, what significance is there in it? Sharp makes a number of points worth noting.

Firstly,

'The participant observer is faced with the issue of defining the boundaries of the problem under study. Although methodologically and practically it may be essential to limit one's fieldwork to relatively small-scale situations ... such contexts are always part of a much larger structure that has to be theorised if one is going to make any sense of what is going on. An understanding of that larger structure cannot be obtained by merely juxtaposing and adding together a whole range of limited theories concerning defined areas, as is the practice in much bourgeois social theory' (Sharp, 1981: 115).

Sharp further notes the tendency in participant observation to define the 'micro' situation as constituted by the subjects who are being observed. For example,

'The sociolinguistic or ethnographic tradition has posed the question of the speaking subject within a phenomenological framework, offering an individualistic, interactional model of communication in which the subject as intentional consciousness is the source of speech acts whose meanings are negotiated in social interaction with other intentional conscious subjects. Work in this tradition involves analysis of spoken discourse in face-to-face interaction and is underpinned by an interactionist form of social psychological theory. The problem here is that the communicative situation is conceived as a kind of stage setting in which the actors are free to do as they will, including freely selecting from the language system conceptualised as a resource. Such an approach is committed to individualism and accords well with the aesthetic ideology of humanism which emphasises individual creativity, the autonomy and singularity of the art object, and the private, individual character of reading. The work of Fish, Iser, in literary theory, of Berger and Lukmann, Goffman, and Bauman and Sherzer in ethnography are examples of this kind of approach which has been broadly critiqued from a number of points of view (see Coward and Ellis, 1977).

The sociolinguistic view of the subject is in tension with the historical materialist view, which sees the subject as the bearer of social relations and ideologies. This view, modified by the work of Voloshinov (1930) and Althusser's theoretical challenge to economic reductionism (1971) involves the serious consideration of signifying practices in which the subject is seen as constituted in language. The mechanism by which ideology works is through this positioning of the subject in discourse. In a neo-materialist theory of the subject there can be no dialogue between speaking subjects, nor can meanings be made in any situation, which are not determined by the broader context of the whole culture. Thus discourse must be seen from a macro-sociolinguistic perspective (Fowler, 1981) as the product and expression of broadly based facts of social, cultural and economic organisation. This is the sense in which the immediate speech situation and what is said and done within it are constituted by and simultaneously constitute social macro-structure (Fowler, 1981; Halliday, 1978, 1985; Lemke, 1985; Thibault, 1985)' (Threadgold, 1986: 37- 38).

What one is left with then, what the ethnographer examines is literally a map of the social 33. The term 'social' is meant to constitute a break with the sociological concept of 'society', which tends to construct a pre-given, independent interior entity. The social is understood as a grid of institutions and practices mapping the distribution of power/resistance. Each 'micro' interaction being at one and the same moment a macro-action. Ethnography then has much to do with the literary theory conception of reading, where reading is understood to be an active process - a writing.

Thus the term 'reading' when applied to these varying texts does not imply purely a literary process; for what is suggested is a process of reading, not words, documents or accounts, but what Foucault calls statements or significatory functions (Foucault, 1972, pp 80-87 and 106-77).

'Such conceptual reading entails an attempt to construct the totality of representations within which the particular representations are produced, be it text, artefact, statistical record or photography. This entails paying as much attention to what is not stated in or by the representation as to what actually is stated.

It may seem strange to use the concept of reading in relation to the whole range of representations suggested as ethnographic data, and it should be remembered that the mode and techniques of reading employed at any one time should be appropriate to the medium of the significatory function being read. But the very significance of these functions lies in their diffuseness and the fact that they cannot be related via a referent or subject but only through the constituted field which is the condition of their existence ... Thus the individual observer is removed from the central position in conventional social inquiry, and retains only subsidiary positions (a) as collector or collator of data conceived as representations, (b) as reading subject. The scientific objectivity of observations no longer rests upon the status of a knowing subject, or as a professional anthropologist, the onus being shifted from a need to be scientific to a need to read representations. Abolished also is the teleology which makes the experience of fieldwork the very professionalising ritual which confers objectivity upon the observations made during the experience. Moreover a larger range of data could potentially be admitted to the inquiry, the limitations on the relevance of data being a property of any specific current situation' (Ennew, 1976: 62).

The following chapter will develop the conceptions of discourse and ideology more fully; initially by retracing some of the steps of this last section of Chapter 1 in order to explicate more fully what is at stake in this debate.

Given that much of this section appears negative and pessimistic, I should like to close with a statement from Gayatri Spivak, one of the foremost writers on theories of racial and sexual difference/otherness, a concretely 'political' deconstructionist, which summarises her notion of the usefulness of theorising interpretation of the social. It emphasises meaning-making as an active process of production, as heteroglossic practice constantly in struggle, as a skewed and an uneven process and finally concrete analysis - poststructuralist ethnography, for example - as liberating.

Spivak has been talking to her students about Ricouer and textualising the world, making the point that textualising is a prerequisite to interpretation. One of the students asked her a question,

'It's all very well to try to live like a book; but what if no-one else is prepared to read?'

Spivak replied,

'Everyone reads life and the world like a book. Even the so- called 'illiterate'. But especially the leaders of our society, ... the politicians, the businessmen (sic), the ones who make plans. Without the reading of the world as a book, there is no prediction, no planning, no taxes, no laws, no welfare, no war ... Yet these leaders read the world in terms of rationality and averages, as if it were a textbook. The world actually writes itself with the many-levelled, unfixable intricacy and openness of a work of literature. If, through our study ... we can learn ourselves and teach others to read the world in the 'proper' risky way, and to act upon that lesson, perhaps we ... would not be forever such hapless victims' (Spivak, 1981: 671).

Footnotes to Chapter 1

1 Presented in 1980 and titled Apathy is Frozen Violence: The DYCW, A Field Study .

2 'Northern Ireland Problem': capital letters are used for this phrase to foreground its 'constructed' nature. CF particularly Chapter 3. Throughout this thesis I have chosen to use the terms Derry and Northern Ireland unless quoting people who use different terms. There is no 'neutral' terminology available and I recognise the ambivalence this must create for any writer.

3 The reactions of my family, my peers and others upon learning of the site of my intended research are worth noting. People suggested I was 'mad' and some members of my immediate family were genuinely worried for my physical safety. From the outset of the research then, the 'ways of speaking about' (understanding of) Northern Ireland were firmly placed on the research agenda. British mythologies (Barthes, 1974/3) of the 'Irish problem' were upper-most in my mind. Banal as it may seem then, the first research finding was that the Bogside/Creggan community comprised of 'ordinary folks like us'.

4 Paddy Doherty was known variously as Paddy Bogside and King of the Bogside. CF Eamon McCann (1973).

5 Lord Melchett was one of the chief officers of Manpower Services Programme at the time.

6 Hereafter referred to as Derry. See also footnote 2.

7 After being in the Workshop for only a few days I confided in the administrator my discomfort at being an 'observer', he replied 'Don't worry in this situation you are also the 'observed', you're not the only one checking people out'. This assertion was repeated throughout my time in Derry. Burton (1978) remarks on this phenomena and had similar experiences. Obviously the 'military' nature of the community and my Englishness necessitated my being 'checked out'. It was only several years after I left Derry that I realised the full extent of this procedure. Further comments are made in the text below.

8 Having promised to write an evaluation report for the Workshop I was, from the start, conscious that whatever I did 'in the field', the final product would be a piece of writing . This is not an insignificant observation as my comments on ethnography and writing demonstrate.

9 The journalist Eamon McCann, himself a Derry-man, as long ago as 1971 (McCann, 1971) remarked that the great majority of British people, dependent on press accounts of what is
happening in Northern Ireland are by now incapable of forming a judgement about it, so one-sided has been the coverage. Further comments are made about the British press in this thesis, but the fearful and dubious reactions to my research plans are significantly explained by McCann's notion. There is another, perhaps more general, point to be made here however, and this relates to the theorisation of the inside/outside distinctions often central to ethnographic work. Put bluntly ethnography is largely understood as a study of them by us , and although a great deal of energy is expended in sorting out them , us remains unconsidered. This model sees the ethnographer as an empty vessel filled up by the field data. Further comments are made about this in the text's discussion of ethnography as the 'science of other'.

10 I was horrified to read an article in the Derry Journal (October 1978), one of Derry's two major newspapers. It announced 'Job survey brings new hope to City'. It contained a picture of the 'survey director' of the potential jobs scheme, a Mr Alan Mansfield of the University College of North Wales. What had happened was that some young people from the Workshop and I had tried (with not a great deal of success I must say) to organise an import-substitution survey. The idea being to see if anything bought-in to Derry could be made there instead, or if there were any waste products from local firms that could be used to make something and thus create work for someone. The newspaper made it sound like I had arrived to give everyone in Derry (a place with massive unemployment problems) a job. In some ways the press release was very useful to me, everyone in the community soon knew not only what I was and where I was from but what I looked like. Nevertheless I was considerably worried at the possible creation of an impossible promise. Needless to say the people of Derry were not as gullible as I had imagined and the article was not damaging at all, in fact quite the reverse. As 'The Journal' is the paper predominantly read by the Bogside/Creggan community, it was very helpful in introducing me.

11 John Darby (esp 1976, but also 1983), deserves special mention as someone who has provided a useful summary of social science approaches to Northern Ireland.

12 I am aware of the value-laden (ideological) nature of this distinction. This thesis is, as I state in the text, motivated by a belief in what Marcuse called the essential 'unfreedom of things' and accepts this as a crucial ethical/political dimension to all critical analysis.

13 The problem of 'origins' is considered further in the text, particularly in the commentary on ethnography and mimesis.

14 Cal , of course, is much closer to a mainstream romance, simply in a Northern Ireland setting, than the other three films, which are explicitly an attempt to address the 'Irish Question' or dimensions of it.

15 A number of journals and particular theorists are referred to in the text in its discussion of critical ethnography. 16 Writing on the Wall was made in Derry with the help of the tutors and trainees of the DYCW.

17 Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie's book, The Provisional IRA is due to be published by Heinemann on 19th June 1987.

18 This term is explained in Chapter 2, but it essentially refers to the enormous impact of feminist and post-structuralist challenges to marxist theory, especially its theorisation of power, totality and the primacy of class interpellation.

19 The section of this thesis concerning critical ethnography will make some further comments on such matters.

20 Unless, of course, one considers the second basic premise of the official discourse - that of the 'two communities', a more clearly 'colonial field'. Within that it is quite feasible to discuss the loyalist community and the pathology of the UDF and the UDA. These latter two groups may also be categorised as simply, that is, naturally and singularly so, pathological killers. Here the concept 'Irish' refers to a racist category, a community less civilised than the British (CF Chapter 3). The discursive formation of the Northern Ireland Problem is such that the IRA are foregrounded as the epitomy of Irish pathology, even when Geldof mentions the UDF and the UDA the radio announcer doesn't.

21 The British media coverage of the hungerstrike campaign reveals a similar tendency.

22 The chapter on Republican discourse examines some of this kind of material which I was able to gather in Derry.

23 One such general model applied to Northern Ireland which I have not been able to pin down to a specific research account, but was in circulation in Derry during my stay there, revolved around psychoanalysis. The 'explanation' of street rioting in Derry, was put down to the men of Bogside/Creggan 'proving' their masculinity in one of the few avenues left to them. They were, commonly, not the breadwinner of the family and this in crucial ways robbed them of their 'manhood' and thus physical violence became a way of regaining their lost masculinity. Now whilst one can admit the importance of psychoanalysis as a disciplinary technology, and also the important connections to be made between 'masculinity and muscularity' (Dyer, 1979) to propose the above as an account of the 'Northern Ireland Problem' is banal in the extreme. 24 Naturally, following its self-description as a neutral arbiter between the 'two communities', the British state had a great deal invested in being seen to be part of this 'attempt at reconciliation'.

25 This thesis cannot provide anything like an adequate account of the Peace People. It is, however, worth noting that the ideological construction of the activities of this group by many, particularly outside of Northern Ireland, as being 'outside of ideology', precisely non-positioned, placed impossible expectations on the group. By ignoring the context of the 'peace' debate, the movement was unable to sustain, despite the best of intentions, its own momentum. It might also be added that one consequence of giving the Peace People money was not giving it to other community initiatives.

26 The examples here are too numerous to mention, but the Terror and the Tears published by the RUC and discussed later in this thesis will illustrate the matter concisely.

27 A F N Clarke (1983) Contact reviewed in the Guardian Weekly , vol. 128, no 14 (week ending 3rd April 1983) in an article by Derek Brown called 'Action Man'.

28 Darby's discussion of Ulster, Northern Ireland, the Six Counties and the north of Ireland is discussed in detail in Chapter 4.

29 I use 'technologies' rather than methodology or theory firstly so as not to separate theory from method, and secondly, because the term seeks to include the wider, institutional context of the practices employed.

30 Chapter 5 on Derry and the concept of place develop a particular strand of this argument in relation to my ethnography of the Bogside/Creggan.

31 Or at least a dimension common to research in conflict situations.

32 Both Webster (1982, 1983) and Clifford (1982) discuss ethnography as 'fiction'. Clifford defines ethnography as a fiction both about other cultural realities and about its own mode of production (1982: 114).

33 Deleuze (1977) actually uses the term 'cartography'.

Freotopia

This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 18 September, 1996 and hosted at freotopia.org/people/alanmansfield/ch1.html (it was last updated on 27 March, 2021), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.