Shadowboxing in the halls of power

In a week that saw Brian Cowen stomp angrily from studio to studio, mouth afroth, horns lowered and tail swishing dangerously, Patrick Barry wonders if our home-grown Rageguy might be less a slave to his own passions, and more a skilled and expert manipulator furious with a purpose.

Last Saturday, Kathy Sheridan profiled Cowen in the Irish Times. In this particularly feathered swansong, one particular description of the man’s media performance stands out: he was described as ‘impatient at the impertinence of [RTÉ newsreader] Dobson's questions, barely suppressing an explosive frustration.’ In a tawdry episode brought on by a bowl of soup and a round of golf, Cowen sought to affirm confidence in his leadership of Fianna Fáil by ‘consulting’ with his colleagues. Over the last few days, Cowen has had his ‘back against the wall’ and ‘been up against it’, according to various traditional commentators. Cowen himself has stated in recent days that there would always be a ‘Cowen from Clara’ fighting for Fianna Fáil. For the Taoiseach and his senior colleagues, it’s all about ‘the fight’.

Where does this macho posturing come from, and why the violent language, much of which mainstream commentators lap up in their call-and-response machismo? It is entirely consistent with the creative destruction form of capitalism currently being practiced across much of Europe. We have to destroy to build they say; capitalism hates a vacuum. In the New Imperialism David Harvey proposes a theory of ‘spatial fix’ which describes why capital cannot abide a limit to its own profitability. Instead, it seeks increased speed of turnover and innovation to produce ever faster transport and communications infrastructure. Benjamin Noys grabs this idea of capital accumulation and calls it accelerationism. In a recent paper called The Grammar of Neoliberalism he refers to how the creative forces of destruction of capitalism will be unleashed where:

What is at fault is not capitalism, but its impurities, in a repetition of the mantra of those one-time ‘masters of the universe’ turned temporary beggars for handouts. Accelerationism takes on the form of an unearned nostalgia for the very recent past.

We might say that this kind of unearned nostalgia is reflected in the ways we hear people speak of ‘getting back to where we were’; as if all we have to do is cut our wages to 2006 levels and we’ll all be buying plasma TVs again. Noys tells us that this kind of nostalgia for the past desires us to ‘hurry along now’ to some future time: 

Operating in the mode of a macho hard-edged realism, what accelerationism attests to is the poverty of a theoretical imagination unable to reconstruct any rationality in the present and instead content to wallow in the fantasmatic residues of capitalism’s own irrationalisms.

Does this “macho hard-edged realism” remind you of anyone in particular? No? Try this then:

Mr Cowen's microphone was reported to be off, but his assessment of the Fine Gael leader's contribution was clearly heard in the press gallery.‘Fool,’ he said of Mr Kenny.

Irish Independent, July 11 2010

‘I will not be accused of seeking to cause treason to my country,’ he said. ‘I find that beyond the pale.’ Mr Cowen, known for wearing his patriotism on his sleeve, insisted he was beholden to nobody in his 25 years of political life.

Irish Independent, March 31 2010

Speaking on Morning Ireland, Lenihan praised the ‘resilience’ that the Irish people had displayed up until this point, and added that it was providing a future for the children of the country. He added: ‘Anger is not a policy. Anger does not solve a country’s problems.’

TheJournal.ie, September 30 2010

What is common to these three very selective quotations from Cowen and the stalker Lenihan is a studied impatience with any suggestion they may be causing distress among the general population over decisions that they have taken. Appeals to ‘us’ to the stay the course and be resolute and strong in the face of a crisis are also forms of Noys’s accelerationism. We cannot go backward for we can only, (wait for it), go forward. Asking questions about very deliberately ideological choices are met with stern retribution and intemperance. Try this out from Lenihan from last October:

 ‘As a general election approaches in the next 18 months there is a responsibility on the Opposition parties… to understand the realities that this country faces and to come up with realistic policies to address them,’ Minister Lenihan said. ‘Anger and abuse cannot function as policies any longer for this country.’

 This kind of realism means that opposition itself is unproductive time and effort. If they could, The Brians would tell us that we are wasting our time by suggesting that there is another way. Like the Borg, resistance is futile. As recently as last weekend, Cowen was at it again. He was leading a government ‘despite relentless opposition from other political parties, who have benefited from the fact that they don’t hold the responsibility of government’. In other words, there’s no point in opposition because opposition is not government.

For the Brians, their neoliberal policy position is an embattled outpost of reason and common sense in the face of the mad lefty utopianism of the press, even while they are given free rein to articulate their own agenda in that same press. Yes, I said it: mad lefty utopianism. You know, the likes of Sarah Carey and Fionnan Sheehan. DCU’s Seán Phelan has done a job of work charting the use of such rhetoric in the mainstream media. During his time as Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy gave some choice radio interviews in which he essentially threatens the listener that if certain policy ‘choices’ are not made, then we can forget about our hyper-consumptive lifestyles:

 ‘The Irish economy has slowed down, and we . . . don’t want to pretend that it is not happening, ‘cause that’s what we did in the ‘70s and as a result of not pretending that there was a crisis about that particular time, it was always going to turn up. So, em, as Minister for Finance . . . this Government is not going to do anything in the budget or into the future which is going to put that at risk and to go back from where we came from.’ (From Phelan, 2007; McCreevy interviewed on RTE, 2001).

 By invoking the 1970s, we’ll end up back in the 1970s where brown was the colour of choice and we didn’t even have a second TV channel. Phelan says that he uses this because we don’t want to be ‘haunted by the spectre of Irish historical failure’. The present makes sense, goes the McCreevy line, so let’s keep doing what we’re doing. Anything else for McCreevy would be a ‘philosophy much to be admired, not to be decried by some of these left wing pinkos.’ The Brians have learned much from Kildare’s infamous son.

(Image top via thoth, god of knowledge on Flickr)