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Introduction

The Problem of Information

Just after the end of the Second World War, a small, plain booklet titled Ireland’s Stand was published in Dublin collecting a selection of speeches delivered by Eamon de Valera, the Irish Taoiseach, during the six years of conflict. Drawn from press interviews, statements made in Dáil sessions, and radio broadcasts, the speeches outline the evolving rationale for the state’s wartime policy of neutrality. As its title suggests, the booklet as a whole was also meant to defend the policy in the postwar world, in which the niceties of national self-preservation, practiced and articulated seemingly without regard for larger ideological or geopolitical alignments, were receiving an even less welcome hearing than they had in the decade before the war. Indeed, for many officials and opinion makers in the victorious Allied nations, Irish neutrality remained all but synonymous with collaboration. While not an official government publication, Ireland’s Stand was nevertheless produced within the ambit of the Government Publications Office and distributed—especially to interested foreign readers—through the Government Information Bureau.¹ With its cream-colored cover, the booklet can thus be rightly viewed as a form of off-white propaganda, poised between openly announcing and quietly dampening its source. The opening paragraph of its anonymous introduction manifests this affiliation: “The years 1939 to 1945 were years of national tension in Ireland. They brought forward in their most acute form questions of international relationship, defense, supplies and food production. Happily, the Irish people and the Irish Government were at one in these grave matters, and by that unity and the discipline and self-sacrifice of the community as a whole the many perils in the situation were avoided and Irish neutrality was maintained.”² Balancing the peril, gravity, and tension of the war years against the communal self-determination both secured and represented by neutrality, the rhetoric of the passage underscores what had already become the familiar official image of “Ireland’s stand”: that of singular perseverance amid exceptionally dangerous impositions on the state’s independence. As propaganda, the passage provides an effective set of strong terms and associations with which to inform the meaning of neutrality.

Because of the familiarity of this image, it is fundamental to note the peculiar idiom of the passage, which on its own seems to clash with the conventional harmonics of Irish neutrality. Between grim poles of global devastation and national preservation, the passage turns on the word “happily,” a mediating term meant to convey grateful and fortunate relief, but also carrying the sense of secure and appropriate contentment. Given that the war years in Ireland have since become characterized by their unremitting claustrophobia and horizonless isolation, this turn is at best odd. Yet it chimes with what is perhaps the most famous Irish statement of the war years, a speech made by de Valera that is not, however, collected in Ireland’s Stand: his St. Patrick’s Day broadcast of 1943. Delivered on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Gaelic League, the speech has come to exemplify the insular vision of Irish life, its second paragraph alone standing as the regressive essence of what passes for “de Valera’s Ireland”:

Acutely conscious though we all are of the misery and desolation in which the greater part of the world is plunged, let us turn aside for a moment to that ideal Ireland that we would have. That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit—a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be the forums for the wisdom of serene old age. It would, in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desires that man should live.³

The devotion paid by later critics to this single paragraph of a single broadcast, as though de Valera never uttered another word into a microphone, is almost touching. With some justification, de Valera has been taken to task for flattening the diversity of Irish experience in articulating a traditionally sanctioned, rurally based conception of society, one apparently unable to comprehend happiness outside the confines of field, family, church, and language. But this reading comes at the cost of ignoring the broadcast’s attention to the risks of increasing stratification amid scarcity, to the possibility of concentrating privilege with those already possessing it. Its vision of self-sufficient contentment based on shared commitments to health, welfare, and respect is indeed all the more plangent for its conditionality.⁴ Hardly the outline of a program of national redistribution, the speech nonetheless understands the “ideal Ireland that we would have” by recognizing the very real constraints on its achievement.

These constraints are spelled out in the other fourteen paragraphs of the broadcast, in which the ongoing pursuit of an ideal self-determination is rhetorically couched among the all-too-real challenges to Irish independence. The speech explicitly identifies the latter as the material conditions of the war, what the second paragraph names as the “misery and desolation in which the greater part of the world is plunged.” Closing the speech in Irish, de Valera again sounds this note in its final paragraph, contrasting the “calamity” (anachain) and “misfortune” (mí-ádh) brought by the war with the “protection” (scáth) and “shelter” (dídean) afforded by non-belligerence.⁵ Within this frame, the “Ireland which we dreamed of” represents not the idealist renunciation of the realities of the world, but a momentary inward “turn” toward alternative possibilities that is itself necessitated by those realities. Taken in its entirety, the speech insists on this relationship, and the point becomes even sharper when the speech is read in the context of the policy statements collected in Ireland’s Stand. Nowhere in the text of the St. Patrick’s Day broadcast does the word “neutrality” appear, and this fact might account for why it was not included in a booklet partly aimed at foreign readers; yet in the speech, neutrality everywhere serves as the term mediating between “misery and desolation” close at hand and the possibility of future contentment. In response to the German invasion of the neutral Low Countries in May 1940, de Valera made this very point: “You know that we have declared our neutrality and proclaimed our desire and intention to save our people from the horrors of this war. Small countries like ours had the same desire. Some of these small countries had no greater wish than not to be involved in the war. They have been involved against their will, not having done anything as far as we can see to deserve what has happened them. The fact that we want to keep out of this war may not be sufficient to save us.”⁶ As a real and dynamic practice, neutrality—and not the invocation of an ideal Ireland—embodied the response to wartime constraints on independence. In this moment, safeguarding Irish autonomy thus hinged on the acute consciousness of the wider crises of self-preservation ushered in by the war.

One marker of these crises can be gleaned from the radiophonic origin of the speech. In its first paragraph, de Valera notes that “before the present war began I was accustomed on St Patrick’s Day to speak to our kinsfolk in foreign lands, particularly those in the United States,” whereas he now speaks to a primarily domestic audience.⁷ This note refers to the severely curtailed Irish shortwave service, whose operation during the war was compromised by electricity shortages and the inability to obtain more powerful transmitting equipment from abroad.⁸ Rather than understanding global communications as the harbinger of a McLuhanite “global village,” with its giddy faith in universal connectivity, the broadcast’s awareness of material impingements on transmission and reception is more akin to Raymond Williams’s diagnosis of a later phase of such communication networks:

The new technologies of cable and satellite, because they can be represented as socially new and therefore as creating a new political situation, are in their commonly foreseen forms essentially paranational. Existing societies will be urged, under the excuse of technical reasons, to relax or abolish virtually all their internal regulatory powers. If the price includes a few unproblematic legalities, or gestures to “community” interests, it will be paid.... The real costs, meanwhile, will be paid elsewhere. The social costs and consequences of the penetration of any society and its economy by the high-flying paranational system will be left to be paid or to be defaulted on by surviving national political entities.⁹

Turned necessarily inward, the broadcast manifests in its material conditions of production and reception an early, if inchoate, instance of the coercive stratification identified by Williams. As a matter of transmission and reception, that is, the broadcast objectifies conditions of uneven access that were particularly acute during the war, but have since become naturalized as the structure of technological modernity itself.

A final word remains in order about the St. Patrick’s Day broadcast. Much of the subsequent criticism directed at its invocation of an ideal Ireland has centered on the depiction of “comely maidens.” The locution was already timeworn in 1943, but still testified in all its mustiness to the deeply conservative role assigned to women in the 1937 Constitution. While indefensible, the word “comely” has become critical shorthand for the repressive denial of women’s lived experience in “de Valera’s Ireland,” a monolithic tag used to convey the outline of a paleolithic social environment. In this, the specification of the many privations endured by Irish women is not well served by appealing to a heuristic device drawn from a single phrase in a single broadcast.¹⁰ In the present context, this idealizing compression is especially noteworthy, since the word “comely” seems to appear only in the printed text of the broadcast. In de Valera’s recording of the speech, he instead invokes “happy maidens.” This recording may not be a transcription recording of the live broadcast, but rather a version of the speech pressed to gramophone disc for release in the Irish diaspora.¹¹ Whether of the live broadcast or not, this recording nonetheless represents an important “turn” outward and, like Ireland’s Stand, suggests an alertness to modern channels of dissemination that runs counter to received images of cloistered otherworldliness. The monumentalization of the St. Patrick’s Day speech not only ignores this historical context, but also bases itself on the presumed singularity of what circulated in multiple forms. It is therefore precisely the discrepancy among the intermedial iterations of the speech that demonstrates the precariousness of Ireland’s position in the world. The agility of the state’s neutrality policy here finds its ground. In place, then, of the singular hallmark reliant on the misrecognition of an isolated paragraph for an auratic voice, the St. Patrick’s Day speech discloses a field of mediation. Produced by how people live as they do and the reasons why they live as they must, this field has as its unlikely keyword, at times rendered all but inaudible, the word “happy.”

With its anxieties and supplications couched only as the touchstones of an era gratefully superseded, de Valera’s homely vision may seem an odd place to begin a study of the problem of information. Yet this problem names the practical contradiction born of the scarcity of information coupled with its overabundance; and in this way, it opens on to a much more pervasive quandary at work in the circulation of the speech and in its subsequent reception. As such, the opening set piece anticipates the questions of transmission and reception that animate the chapters of this book, in the final pages of which the charged implications of the keyword “happy” will be explicitly addressed. With its center located in the global ideological contests of the Second World War, this book argues that Irish cultural production of the period cannot be understood outside the conflict’s mediating relations, but instead must be approached as having been actively constituted by their realization. The problem of information is therefore understood to be an international predicament that has specific manifestations in Irish contexts. At the same time, the book does not assume the congruence of cultural field and national or geographical territory. Already effected by emigration and partition, this dissociation was dramatically extended and retempered by the emergence of an international media economy increasingly premised on the national consequences of extra- and paranational forces. The rise of intercontinental shortwave broadcasting, the twinned refinements of propaganda technique and analysis, the growth of and competition among press services and news agencies, and the work of disparate networks of translation and dissemination all had a transformative impact not only on diplomacy and statecraft, but also on everyday practical senses of worldly engagement, cosmopolitan style, national allegiance, and communal security. While attention to these changing relations helps to historicize this moment, Ireland and the Problem of Information nevertheless considers as the stakes of its investigation the effort, in the words of Terry Eagleton, “to grasp history as structured material struggle,” in order that the political continuities of this earlier moment with our own “information age” become less mystified.¹² To that end, the purpose of this introduction will be to explain the methodological choices and critical decisions underwriting the book.

In its selection of primary materials, this book builds on the recent work of historians, archivists, and librarians to challenge the received and complementary narratives of Irish inwardness and Irish exceptionalism that for decades have formed the governing perceptions of Ireland in the war years. This hard-won access to a wide array of government files has provided a more complicated understanding not only of the rhetoric of “Ireland’s stand,” but of the political forces shaping its articulation. In advocating for progressive policies of inquiry and access, these researchers helped instigate what has been called the “Irish freedom of information ‘revolution,’ ” which culminated in the passage of the National Archives Act (1986) and ultimately the Freedom of Information Act (1997).¹³ Since its founding in 1922, the Irish government had practiced a closed system of administration, sacrificing its citizens’ right to know to euphemistic “matters of state” and denying any relation between the two. In its slow reform, Irish policy was not unique, but echoed international standards of openness and restriction, as Dermot Keogh summarizes:

The Irish State, a bastion of classical bureaucratic conservatism for most of the twentieth century, could not have avoided being affected by such dramatic international changes [in policies of access to government documentation]. The Westminster model of closed government was applied in an extreme and unreformed way by the early generations of politicians and civil servants in the new state. The civil war divide made little difference to the philosophy of bureaucratic politics shared by Cumann na nGaedheal/Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. The British model, despite earlier intellectual interest during the War of Independence between 1919 and 1921 with the US and the Swiss, prevailed. Paradoxically, that was as much the case in departments that were inherited by the new state from the British period as it was for the newly established departments like External Affairs and Defence.¹⁴

While this administrative legacy was evidence of an incorporative transfer, it also reflected and confirmed a culture of secrecy that characterized many powerful institutions of national life, from the Catholic Church and national army to journalism and the medical professions.¹⁵ As Gerard O’Brien notes, this ethos was especially marked among the state’s founding political generation:

Much of the reluctance of such men and of their civil service advisers (some of them of the same age) to confront the need for archival reform related to their ambiguous attitude to their personal past. Evidence has emerged, though slowly, that the alternating bumptuousness and self-confident serenity of many veterans sometimes concealed a sense of guilt over horrors perpetrated or connived at by them, or simply because they had survived where other less fortunate comrades had perished.... Through all the warnings and prohibitions issued by politicians and officials to applicant-researchers, even to the end of the 1960s, there reverberated the central statement that the people of Ireland were not yet ready for too thorough a presentation of the past.¹⁶

Driven by the persistence of “applicant-researchers,” a younger generation of civil servants led the reform of closed archives, bringing Irish policy into line with North American, Australian, and (eventually) European access protocols. In doing so, this generation undermined a foundational relationship: “Many of the civil servants who made that freedom of information revolution possible ‘subverted’ the system from within. Many of their predecessors would not have been best pleased. But the democratic institutions of the state are stronger for the ultimate ‘betrayal’ of the imported Westminster model of administration.”¹⁷ Rather than return to some authentic “Irish” model, this subversion instead instituted new conditions of openness to Ireland’s historical record, one potent effect of which has indeed been a destabilization of the compatible narratives of Irish inwardness and Irish exceptionalism. As a national “revolution,” that is, this betrayal of the “imported Westminster model of administration” in favor of international alignment adduces a critical fact about the Irish habitus: that the specificity of Irish national self-determination takes form only in relation to international, “worldly” engagement.

There is no reason to regard international alignment as uniformly positive or as a relation founded in equality of power or transparency of motivation: a dense and growing record of evidence suggests otherwise. This point is acutely important to note in the midst of modernism’s “transnational” turn. For all of their startlingly expansive effects, many of the more recent conceptions of “globalism” or “worldliness” in modernist studies have a propensity to the paranational, in assuming or announcing the (beneficial) supersession of nation- or state-centered models by more fluid recognitions of global interpenetration. In its reliance on a notion of supersession, however, this recent turn risks embodying the paranational in Williams’s sense, as that “represented as socially new and therefore as creating a new political situation.” Greater access to Irish archives has indeed provided a more complex sense of Irish cultural production in its widest scope at midcentury, one realized perhaps most fully in a number of historiographical studies that have confronted long-standing perceptions. By graphically intensifying the contests between nationalism and internationalism that defined Ireland’s relationship to the world, the Second World War upended the modern Irish cultural field. As a result, struggles between nationalism and internationalism can now in much finer detail be understood in tandem with the forces structuring nationalism and internationalism as alternate modes of aligning Ireland with the world, as competing poles of worldly engagement. While they were often still communicated as opposed stances taken in regard to the qualities of Irish life, nationalism and internationalism were increasingly and knowingly mobilized on institutional footings that no longer recognized this opposition. If nationalism and internationalism could serve as ideological markers of Ireland’s place in the world order, it was because there were now specific institutional possibilities for their realization: as matters of strategic positioning, they were operationalized by Irish and non-Irish players alike. Nationalist poetry could function as the vehicle for cosmopolitan connection; lucid comprehension of global diplomacy could justify protective withdrawal; broadcast appeals to Ireland’s history could be made to sanction any postwar settlement: specific prerogatives such as these were foundational to the Irish field because they were necessitated by its oscillating practical conditions. These relations are absolutely political, but they skew—sometimes severely—any tidy or desired sense of political correspondence, in producing disquieting alliances articulated through unexpectedly common vocabulary.

Whereas the work of Irish writers has been paramount in conventional accounts of literary modernism, Ireland itself only rarely occupies a meaningful position in accounts of modernism’s historical trajectory. By 1940, Irish writing appeared at once to recede from its high modernist apogee and to fall back on a worn set of insular precepts: what had once been a fitting place to renounce or flee could not, after Yeats and Joyce, seem to offer even these hopes to its writers. In order to begin to redress this situation, Ireland and the Problem of Information examines the pivotal mediations through which social knowledge was produced in the mid-twentieth century. It considers how the meaning of cultural work assumed new weight amid wartime strategic imperatives, as the manipulation and redirection of literary expression came to reflect not only the immense totality of total war, but also literature’s increasingly explicit position among—rather than above or apart from—technological media of transmission and reception. In doing so, the book queries the privileged place still frequently accorded to isolated, individual authors, works, and “voices” in both modernist and Irish studies. For this reason, the motivated crossing of borders—between states and nations, cultural and social fields, institutions and formations, media and formats—serves as the governing current running through each chapter. Transcription, recording, collation, redaction, translation, rediffusion: this mediating practice took many forms. Even as the forces behind them were misrecognized (and often remain categorized) as distinctly non- or extraliterary forms of agency, they were transforming the contours and coordinates of the late modernist field into those recognized in today’s “information age.” These border crossings were not only motivated by specific and identifiable interests, but carried out under the aegis of particular agencies elided by subsequent reports of the volitionless “unfolding” and spread of global networks. Precisely because of its “national” focus, the book argues that these motivated border crossings significantly alter relations within and among national fields, but in no way obviate the necessity of these “inter-national” relations for understanding broader, more “global” circuits of transmission and reception. Far from happening somewhere between chance and fate whenever someone opens a book, these worldly mediations underscore the formative labor of classification in the literary, cultural, and political configurations of the late modernist 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 segments enriched and were located within patterns discerned through more systematic “content analysis” of transmitted programming. Because typed pages could be cataloged for duplication or redaction, these methodological innovations depended on transcripts produced by monitoring agencies, which is to say that transcripts offered the only practical means of maintaining an accessible archive of wartime broadcasts. Like this intermedial procedure, analytical methods were inherently heteronomous in responding to wartime contingencies. In this, they were manifestations of the new possibilities created at the disputed boundary between cultural production and social power. Rather than isolate qualitative and quantitative analysis, this provisional accommodation in turn offers an ambivalent point of reference for today’s institutional struggles waged over similar potentials.

Because of this historical relationship, Ireland and the Problem of Information refuses any prior categorical denomination of what were being formed, de-formed, and reconstituted by volatile interactions, for reasons that can be clarified in reference to the strongest recent analysis of related concerns. In Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, Mark Wollaeger examines the relationship of modernism to propaganda, like the marketplace, one of the “others” against which literary modernism has been conventionally defined. Tracing this relation of aesthetics and politics through close readings of works by six canonical figures, Wollaeger argues that “both modernism and propaganda provided mechanisms for coping with information flows that had begun to outstrip the processing capacity of the mind; both fabricated new forms of coherence in response to new experiences of chaos.”²⁸ By situating mainstays of modernist critical discourse (for example, fragmentation, formal recalcitrance, discontinuous temporality, and subjective impressionism) within a British media environment rapidly expanding under military and imperial contingencies, he understands modernism and propaganda as homologous modes of organizing modern experience, as “incipient languages of the new information age.”²⁹ In his account, modernism and propaganda deviate recognizably in their respective orientations toward autonomy and integration, a differentiation occurring in “a kind of psychosocial contact zone defined at one extreme by subjectivity construed as a sanctuary for being, and at the other by propaganda as an encompassing array of manipulative discourses.”³⁰ In staging this distinction as a question of means and ends, the book’s close readings present various coeval mechanisms of understanding produced “in response to new experiences of chaos,” but assume the priority (in both senses of the word) of the categorical difference of modernism and propaganda. While the readings are nuanced in locating texts within what he calls the “information-propaganda matrix,” or the continuum of “psychosocial” states between sanctuary and manipulation, it is nonetheless the case that, in distinguishing modernist narrative and propagandistic technique, their categorical difference both precedes and outweighs any homologous likeness or continuity. Wollaeger’s literary objects possess a given categorical priority by virtue of their canonicity—that is, by an end that sanctions the means of its recognition. As such, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda deals less with informative interactions than with confirmative distinctions.

The most substantial effect of this classification appears in the complete identification of “new experiences of chaos” with information overload. In totalizing this “literary” understanding of a grossly uneven field, Wollaeger misses the dialectical relation of overload and privation. It is a short step to information overload from subjectivity under siege by impinging “discourses,” but one that evades accompanying conditions of scarcity, restriction, and unequal access: “chaos” certainly results as often (and more devastatingly) from access to too little as from exposure to too much. More to the point, “chaos” names the structure of feeling produced by simultaneous overabundance and scarcity, the structural contradiction that is second nature, a “new form of coherence,” in the so-called information age. One canonical dramatization of this stratified condition is the “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which information inundates the reader while ultimately providing little qualitative increase to what is known of the day’s events. On a smaller, sharper scale, this condition similarly animates the chance encounter in “Wandering Rocks” of Stephen Dedalus and his younger sister Dilly, just after she purchases a French primer at a secondhand bookstall. Looking into her blue eyes, he fears for Dilly as he fears her, believing that one or both of them will be drowned in the undertow of their family’s dissolution. Caught between compassion and self-preservation, Stephen thinks “Misery! Misery!,” a narrative repetition that specifies the objective destitution and subjective distress characterizing the familial situation.³¹ By demonstrating how trickles no less than torrents constitute “flows,” both examples challenge the adequacy of this metaphoric notion, which, like “overload,” has assumed a lopsided heuristic power in proportion to its ability to euphemize objective relations of uneven distribution.³² While finding in the fluvial “channels” and “currents” terms more specifically appropriate to the circulatory processes it examines, Ireland and the Problem of Information altogether avoids the figurative language of “flows,” choosing instead simply to attend to particular media or formats in their practical materiality. Beyond methodological considerations, this decision represents an attempt to sound out a peculiarly Irish dynamic, in which knowing only too much is reflexively predicated on knowing very little.³³

A last point about “flows” indicates why this decision is not the gnomic putdown it might seem, but, like Joyce’s doubled “misery,” a critical acknowledgment of unevenness. Where the problem of information designates the coupling of lack and surfeit, the necessary corollary is the act of putting in formation what Lisa Gitelman calls the “data of culture.”³⁴ Rather than define information as a thing or quantity available prior to or beyond its use, it is crucial to recognize this practical work of formally organizing and structuring units or items for their access. This recognition in turn locates access not as a value-free condition, but as the function of administration and control, a distinction especially important in a moment enthralled by “raw data,” yet periodically unnerved by reminders of its collection and storage as “big data.” In this regard, Wollaeger states a fundamental epistemological relationship, in noting how the “complex entangling of modernism, new media, and propaganda” inheres in the interplay of details (whether “fragments” or “facts”) and “larger systems of meaning that invest them with significance.”³⁵ Yet this “investment” cannot be fully understood when presented as a self-realizing action, an event that happens of its own being. By allowing categorical presuppositions leveraged through a metaphoric language of “flows” to stand in for determining motivation in both transmission and reception, actual agents and their real investments evaporate. Already possessing an object in hand, this dominant analytical method, so common to both modernist and new media scholarship, thus misses the stakes of its investigation. This connection becomes clearer through Raymond Williams’s account of watching television programs intercut with commercials and previews: “The notion of ‘interruption,’ while it still has some residual force from an older model, has become inadequate. What is being offered is not, in older terms, a programme of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real ‘broadcasting.’ ”³⁶ This passage specifies the essence of the process of putting items “in formation,” particularly as they are received and experienced at the point of access. In Williams’s sense of composite sequences of cross-fading items, Ireland and the Problem of Information finds justification for its emphasis on noncanonical and ephemeral works less for what they indicate about the modernist literary canon than what they demonstrate and make concrete about practical acts of formation.

Information is not indeterminate because its dispositions or forms cannot be described, but, as Douglas Raber notes, because it can be described and mobilized in so many contradictory ways.³⁷ Over and over again in what follows, this books tracks figures who possess some kind of authoritative expertise or professional specialization that is hidden, denied, displaced, repurposed, or misrecognized, in service to new or alternative forms of agency. What they mobilize is less properly information than their access—to the data of culture, to disseminating institutions and networks, to reception communities, and to their own specific forms of authority. As an interaction of autonomy and heteronomy, this practical mobilization is decisive. For even in its most cautionary guises, such access represents a possibility for communication that is otherwise silenced, whether through epistemological neglect, planned obsolescence, or critical abnegation. With the instantiation of information as the defining term of contemporary existence, it has become easy to forget the primary mediating work of giving form to content, of articulating relations and contradictions, and of rendering this work “in formation”; and, moreover, to abstract this work into infinitely sequential acts of “storage” and “retrieval” that promise a condition of access devoid of mediation. This forgetfulness is a generalized example of what Timothy Brennan indeed names in a more specialized sense as “flow”: “not simply influence but the air of inevitability that surrounds certain concepts traveling through the intellectual market, where the borrowing of ideas is concealed in order to replay a theatrical act of discovery of what is already hegemonic, so that the predominant can continue to enjoy the status of the emergent.”³⁸ Among its other effects, this maneuver casts processes that were once, and often still are, fiercely contested strategies of forming and working-through as transhistorical categories or transcendental objects. Recognizing this structure helps lay bare the question of access, while also serving to objectify failings or denials of access. In a glancing comment, Bourdieu once remarked that cultural capital “should in fact [be called] informational capital to give the notion its full generality.”³⁹ What this gloss suggests, then, is that information is legitimated simultaneously in specific formations and as a condition of its accessibility. For this reason, this study declines in advance of its investigation to substantialize “information” as an abstract economic, philosophical, or technological category. This book is not a work of ontology. Information does not exist outside of its classification: hence the problem of information.