Research & Writing

Don’t Go Far: Identity and Modernity in Irish Railway Design

Dubin, Ireland 2017

Introduction
‘In time, one is only what one is: what one has always been. In space, one can be another person.’ Susan Sontag (1977, p.117)

Historian Alan Trachtenberg states that ‘Nothing else in the nineteenth century seemed as vivid and dramatic a sign of modernity as the railroad’ (Schivelbusch, p. xiii ). The first railway line was established in Ireland in 1834. This line connected Dublin city to Kingstown port. In an RTE documentary, Larry Mc Mahon states that his father, the station master at Ballyshannon in county Donegal, had a theory that the railway was a way for the British Government to extend its empire as it had done in India (RTE, “Next Stop”, 2 March 1977). The railway system in Ireland would reflect an imposed British ideology of colonialism capitalism and modernity. From the middle of the nineteenth century until the establishment of Ireland as a free state railway design would solidify the presence of British empire. Irish Independence was fueled by the need to emanciate from British rule. In the twentieth century, the advent of new transport technology, airplane and car travel, challenged the railway’s image of modernity and colonialism. As Ireland became a Free State in 1922 and became a Republic in 1949, it would strive to shake off the old symbols and assert a new identity. This thesis takes as its central case study the design and material culture of the Irish national railway system in post-colonial Ireland. The research questions how the railway system as a previously established symbol of British progress is met and adopted to represent a newly independent state.
Transport was nationalised in Ireland under Córas Iompair Éireann (CIE) in 1950. In any given country, the post war period proves to be an evocative time for technology and design as this was a period of transformative events that shaped the way that everyday life was lived. Although Ireland was not directly involved in the Second World War, the country had its own particular challenges as a newly independent

state. The separation and partition of north and south had shaken the confidence in the new found independence and cast doubt in a nation building identity. The postwar era was a time for economic growth and established modernity for many European countries.
Social historian Mary E. Daly suggests that the decade following the end of the second World War became a period ‘when Ireland was most out of step with Western Europe’ ( 2016, p.2). In observing a map of the railways at its peak in the 1920s, and comparing it to the system today, the entire island experienced dramatic railway line closures and never fully recovered. Daly’s statement that Ireland had become ‘out of the step’ with the rest of Europe in the 1940s and1950s is illustrated through the massive dismantling of the railway network at this same time. As many countries experienced economic stability and job growth the Irish Free State was experiencing mass immigration and unemployment. In the 1960s, the state reversed some of the protectionist policies and eased trade and economic ties to Britain as it began the process of joining the European Economic Community (EEC). While the 1960s are commonly associated with great economic growth, Daly argues against this narrative. She sees 1960s Ireland as not fully experiencing modernity, rather, she posits that this decade was in retrospect a time for much needed stability. Using CIE as a case study, this thesis will push this statement further and suggest that for Ireland modernity was a constant conflict. In Modernity at Large: Dimensions of Globalization, Arjun Appadurai states that for the ‘former colony, decolonisation is a dialogue with the colonial past, and not a simple dismantling of colonial habits and modes of life’ (Appadurai, 1996, p.9). This thesis aims to illustrate how this dialogue is materialised in the design and material culture of Irish railways.

Republic of Ireland had no choice but to fully embrace economic progress in order to survive. In the quest for economic development, Ireland had to define its identity. This research casts an eye on the Irish railways as they clearly reflect the obstacles that the country faced in its quest to catch up with the other more established European countries that fully identified themselves as modern.

ChiCle

J’y suis, J'y reste (I am here, I stay here): the chewing gum on the streets of Dublin 1

EXCERPT

Lefebvre’s representational space: Walter Benjamin’s Botanising on the asphalt

‘The two bodies are the self and society: sometimes they are so near as to be almost merged; sometimes they are far apart. The tension between them allows the elaboration of meanings.’

(Mary Douglas, 1978, p. 112)

The evidence of chewing gum on the pavement visually illustrates the relationship of the body to the city. Lefebvre separates the actions or activity in space into work and production. He makes a distinction between production which has use value and work which involves no use value at all. He also states that nature creates but it does not ‘labour’ or ‘produce’. The things that nature creates are made ‘a rose has no why therefore it blooms because it blooms...it does not know that it is beautiful, that it smells good, that it embodies a symmetry of the nth order’ therefore ‘nature is not staged’(The Production of Space p. 71). Like nature we are able to create or make, but unlike nature some of our making is waste, and unlike a rose, some of this waste does not biodegrade.

Glen Rigley admits two opposing feelings about the labour of removing the gum from the streets. He makes the statement that he no longer takes pictures of the streets as ‘it is the same thing over and over again’ the pattern just keeps repeating as it sometimes seemed endless (personal communication, 14, March 2017). On the the other hand he was very excited to share the details of all he had been able to deduce from the chewing gum litter.

He prefers his current job to his previous one as a taxi driver and feels a sense of pride from seeing the street clean. When he is asked, he smiles and admits he enjoys chewing gum and points out the irony of his last name.

The ‘labour’ of Mr. Rigley can become the material ‘work’ for the Artist Francis Alys.

Harper Montgomery’s essay on the work of Francis Alys describes the artist’s work ‘social dynamics are inextricably linked to the physical qualities of the street, its role as a physical container for the bodies plus the stuff strewn around it, the traces of the lives that acquired there, the banal and ubiquitous, the quest for any particle that could potentially become poetic’ (Modern Procession p.139).

The artist Francis Alys has chosen Mexico City as material. In one of his pieces ‘Sometimes Making something leads to Nothing’ he pushes a large block of ice throughout Mexico City until the block completely dissolves (Francis Alys, p. 46). His art performance is reviving the myth of the Flâneur or the dandy.

The concept of the Flâneur in respect to the body in the city, might be a rejection of the Sisyphus myth, being caught in an endless cycle of production. The flâneur concept rejects this trap as it subverts the idea of production into one of creation.

A dandy spends ten hours a day dressing, if he likes, but once dressed he thinks no more about it’

The dandy may put an enormous amount of energy into an activity, but if it should ever appear that he did, or that he was in any way concerned with the result, then the effect should be lost ( Ferguson, 2007, p. 61).

Susan Solnit states that the flâneur is an ‘ambiguous figure both resistant to and seduced by the new commercial culture’ (Solnit, p.200). She suggests that the concept of the flâneur which Walter Benjamin had written so much about, even coining the phrase ‘botanising on the asphalt’, ‘never existed except a as type or an ideal’(Solnit, p.200). As a European artist living in Mexico, Francis Alys may have the privileged time for suggestive acts of poetry in an urban setting. Putting aside his his social position, Aly’s flâneur performances challenge the ideas of production. Most importantly his work highlights how the flâneur as an ideal still persists and is resurrected in our everyday symbolic gestures and the unconscious need for ambiguity in work and labour.

In her writings on pollution and taboo, Mary Douglas also sees the power in ambiguity. She points out that order is about limit while disorder is unlimited and thus challenges the established order. In ambiguity ‘potential for patterning is indefinite’ thus ‘symbolises both danger and power’ (Douglas, 2012, p. 95).