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ABSTRACT
On the weekend of the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the Irish Consulate in Chicago memorialised a different occasion: the 86th anniversary of the death of Francis O’Neill (1848–1936), a Cork-born collector of Irish music in the United States. This paper posits that the sociopolitical construction “Irish traditional culture” constitutes an exercise of power over land and bodies, shaping and sustaining the structures of the island’s political economy as part of a racial/colonial/imperial project. My argument centres James Byrne (1868–1931), an itinerant piper “discovered” in Kilkenny in 1903. O’Neill’s account of Byrne’s life demonstrates the development of an ideological narrative of tradition as the foundation of Irish modernity. To deterritorialise land-based practices and construct a White Irish citizen subject to global capital, colonial technologies of governance mobilise resources from “authentic” points of origin, inventing their administrators as the heroic saviours of vanishing culture. James Byrne, in contrast, is situated as a possession containing value to be extracted and as a contaminated body refusing to become a compliant capitalist subject harnessed to empire. By interrogating this narrative, I hope to foster nuanced discussion around the enduring structural interdependence of “Irishness” with transnational political economy.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Facebook post from the Consulate General of Ireland, Chicago, 28 January 2022, featuring the Consulate-commissioned collage by artist Seliena Coyle with a portrait of Francis O’Neill: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02kSjfvVmSX5gqXKGeUskwWz3cL16xkWCXL4uPAohvpFJKCdYRWmYvv5CwDJQk6Lqjl&id=426335370749853. Coyle’s work is archived here: https://shorturl.at/yHIK4.
2. Quoted from the Department of Foreign Affairs press release, no longer available. Original link: https://www.dfa.ie/irish-consulate/chicago/news-and-events/news-archive/st-brigids-day–a-celebration-of-irish-american-women-in-music.html.
3. Ibid.
4. On the centrality of the diaspora see: Department of Foreign Affairs, Global Ireland.
5. Long, “Icons,” May 4, 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20170718141622/https://paper-bird.net/2015/05/04/icons/.
6. Sobchack, “Postmodern Modes of Ethnicity,” 335.
7. da Silva, “Black Feminist Poethics,” 91. Michelangelo Pistoletto is an Italian artist and theorist who paints upon mirrors. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/michelangelo-pistoletto.
8. da Silva, “Black Feminist Poethics,” 92.
9. da Silva, “Difference Without Separability,” 57–58; quoted in Guenther, “Abolish the World as We Know It,” 32.
10. Lloyd, Irish Culture, 8.
11. “To date, theorising Irishness as white privilege has been hampered by legacies of racialisation of Irishness as structured by anti-Irish racism in Ireland and abroad. However, Ireland’s new position as topping the Globalisation Index, its status symbol as the locus of ‘cool’ culture, and its privileged position within an ever-expanding European Community calls for the understanding of Irishness as white supremacy. Whiteness works best when it remains a hidden part of the normative social orders.” Lentin, “Black Bodies and ‘Headless Hookers’,” 9.
12. “Recruited for global capitalism, Irishness has become a form of discursive currency, motivating and authenticating a variety of heritage narratives and commercial transactions, often through its status as a form of ‘enriched whiteness.’” Negra, “The Irish in Us,” 1.
13. See Meaney, Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change.
14. For a complete account of the analytics of raciality, see da Silva, “Socio-Logos of Justice.”
15. Zane Shaw, “Vigilantism and Violence.” http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2020/10/between-system-loyal-vigilantism-and.html.
16. I am deliberately referencing contrapuntalism; see Said, Culture and Imperialism.
17. Rodney, Upper Guinea Coast, 116.
18. Ibid, 117. See also Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism.
19. A constitutive mechanism in biology is an immune response that prevents microbial replication. Following Lloyd’s analogy of Irishness as contagion, I read a strategy to neutralise bodies and minds rendered as “diseased” threats. See Paludan et al., “Constitutive Immune Mechanisms.”
20. Deloria, Playing Indian, 3. Quoted in Tallbear, “Playing Indian.” Here, Deloria draws upon the analysis of D.H. Lawrence: “Savage Indians served Americans as oppositional figures against whom one might imagine a civilized national Self. Coded as freedom, however, wild Indianness proved equally attractive, setting up a…dialectic of simultaneous desire and repulsion.”
21. For an account of the construction of value resting on time and fungibility, see da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 224.
22. Arthur, “Analytics of Raciality.” May 12, 2020. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2020/07/12/denise-ferreira-da-silva-analytics-of-raciality/.
23. Ibid.
24. As delineated by McCabe, Sins of the Father.
25. I will return to the concept of unpayable debt in the second section of this essay, ”The body swap.”
26. The significance of the capitalisation of Subject/Subjectivity is explained in the first section of this essay, ”Disappearing disappearance.” See also note 54 on capitalisation.
27. Lloyd, Irish Culture, 9.
28. An Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger), along with An Drochshaol (the Bad Life,) are terms used to denote the colonially-engineered famine that struck Ireland from roughly 1845–49.
29. Donnelly, The Land and the People, 57, 78.
30. Crowley, Murphy, and Smyth, Atlas, 265–76.
31. For an account of the political economy of this period, see Miller, Emigrants and Exiles. On the centrality of cattle, see McCabe, Sins of the Father, Kindle ed. loc. 56
32. McCabe, “Middle Men.”
33. Ffrench, Biographical History, 311.
34. McCabe, “Irish Comprador Class.”
35. For a thorough account, see McCabe, Sins of the Father.
36. McCabe, “Middle Men.”
37. Ibid.
38. On the TIME cover, see https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/leo-varadkar-makes-front-cover-of-time-magazine/35927285.html.
39. The centre of a black hole, theorised to constitute a wormhole, is called an island. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0922–34.
40. “Culture becomes capital, and vice versa, while political action increasingly consists of the struggle to maintain democratic autonomy in the face of global market forces.” Coleman and Coulter, End of Irish History, 187.
41. Petty, A Treatise of Ireland, preface, quoted in McCabe, Sins of the Father, 64.
42. McCabe makes the same point about Irish education: “[I]t’s also what our education system was set up for. At pre-independence it was to be civil servants for the Empire. After 1922 it was to be civil servants for Rome.” McCabe, “Middle Men.”
43. O’Malley, Beat Cop. 137–139, 142, 193, 201, 204–205. O’Malley deals extensively with O’Neill’s legacy regarding American labour and race relations, including both O’Neill’s interest in militarising the police and his involvement with police torture. O’Neill’s legacy exemplifies the purpose of assimilation as a colonial strategy.
44. O’Malley, Beat Cop, 142–143, 202–205.
45. O’Malley, Beat Cop. On the “authority of the badge,” 213; on O’Neill’s trip to Ireland, 239; for Breathnach and Carolan quotes, 286.
46. O’Malley, Beat Cop, 266–279.
47. Ibid., 238–269.
48. Ibid., 236–239.
49. McMahon, Races of Europe, 247–271. McMahon gives a detailed historical account of race and Irish cultural nationalism. See 267 for influences from völkisch Germany on Ireland, and 260 for a description of a programme virtually identical to indigenismo.
For a full account of the analytics of raciality, see da Silva, “Socio-logos of Justice.”
50. da Silva, “No-Bodies,” 224.
51. Projects of eugenic control reflect an ideology in which the white European underclass can contain “atavistic” members. Atavistic bodies are those considered deviant, defective, and a danger to the proliferation of Whiteness. This potentially includes anyone considered insufficiently compliant with, or unable to adhere to, the hegemonic norms of Subjectivity within its colonial paradigm of racialised cisheteropatriarchy. O’Neill and his forensic department did the work of cataloguing atavism: measuring, documenting, and assessing the bodies of working-class people who were arrested. Meanwhile, in his personal life, he collected “vanishing” culture. O’Malley, Beat Cop, 148–152; see also Sekula, “The Body and the Archive.”
52. da Silva, interviewed by Leeb and Stakemeier, “End to ‘This’ World.” https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/articles/interview-ferreira-da-silva/.
53. Guenther, “Abolish,” 30.
54. Henceforth, I will refer to this category as Subject, capitalised (in every sense). Likewise, I consistently style both “Black” and “White” as proper nouns throughout this essay to accurately reflect the interdependent function of each as a category. See also: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/time-to-capitalize-blackand-white/613159/.
55. In the Kantian program, this is not a priori knowledge. See Hanna, “Kant’s Theory of Judgment.”
56. Guenther, “Abolish,” 30.
57. da Silva, “No-Bodies,” 224.
58. Ibid.
59. da Silva, “Black Feminist Poethics,” 84–85.
60. da Silva, Global Idea, 117.
61. See also da Silva on Foucault and racial discourse: Unpayable Debt, 133–135.
62. See generally da Silva, “Black Feminist Poethics.”
63. da Silva, Global Idea, 83–84.
64. Poll na bPéist, “the wormhole,“ is a geological formation found on Inis Mór. Appropriately, it is also known as the Serpent’s Lair. https://www.galwaytourism.ie/the-wormhole-on-inis-mor/.
65. da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 232.
66. Ibid, 241.
67. Lloyd, Irish Culture, 8.
68. da Silva “extends concern” to “the entire Kantian critical tradition, including Marxist critique and critical race theory, at least to the extent that the latter is based on a demand for equal rights and/or a desire for recognition,” within a programme where it is possible for “sovereignty and justice [to] function as political devices to maintain and/or correct the orderly composition of the world.” Guenther, “Abolish,” 29. “Orderly composition,” in this context, is a reference to The Ordered World.
69. da Silva, Denise Ferreira. Unpayable Debt. 14
70. Ibid., 233–242.
71. Ibid., 232–234.
72. The legal foundation of this claim is found in Justice Daniel’s concurring opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford/Separate_Daniel, 475–476.
73. da Silva, “Unpayable Debt” lecture, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoGYffNpZ1o.
74. da Silva, Unpayable Debt. 26, 95–103, 106
75. Ibid., 147–156.
76. In her “Unpayable Debt” lecture, da Silva paraphrases the following quotation from Douglass: “During all the years of their bondage, the slave master had a direct interest in discrediting the personality of those he held as property. Every man who had a thousand dollars so invested had a thousand reasons for painting the black men as fit only for the slavery…The holders the holders of twenty hundred million dollars’ worth of property in human chattels procured the means of influencing press, pulpit, and politician, and through these instrumentalities they belittled our virtues and magnified our vices, and have made us odious in the eyes of the world.” Douglass, “The Color Line,” 573.
77. da Silva, “Unpayable Debt” lecture, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoGYffNpZ1o.
78. The lowercase “s” designates a condition of being that is not Subject under the analytics of raciality.
79. I reference here the notorious 1882 pronouncement of Col. Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian School. https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/teach/kill-indian-him-and-save-man-r-h-pratt-education-native-americans.
80. Ireland’s diaspora constitutes a “resource” under the comprador FDI model. See: Department of Foreign Affairs, Diaspora Strategy, inside front cover.
81. Panel, “Unpayable Debts,” Appel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toIxV6zJ1A0&t=2592s.
82. Negra, “The Irish in Us,” 1.
83. da Silva, Denise Ferreira. Unpayable Debt. 14.
84. Panel, “Unpayable Debts,” Negrón-Muntaner. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toIxV6zJ1A0&t=3118s.
85. The relevant law: https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1997/act/39/section/110/enacted/en/html.
86. Lentin, “Black Bodies,” 9.
87. A basic explanation of the credit default swap: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/credit_default_swap.
88. Here I reference Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s notion of “the circle,” a sarcastic reference to State bodies tasked with what he called “the administration of the race,” e.g. the Folklore Commission. See Coleman, “Ó Cadhain, Rhetoric, and Immanence,” 193. I note here as well that the debt of negative accumulation cannot disappear. It will remain, fixed within the same logical loop. The entities that hold it include those that Ó Cadhain names.
89. On black holes, see https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0922–34.
90. TallBear, “Identity is a Poor Substitute,” 474.
91. O’Neill, Minstrels and Musicians, 322.
92. Ibid., 320. The Rowsome family are now in their sixth generation of piping and pipe-making. https://kevinrowsome.com/rowsome-tradition/gen1-samuel. In 2017, uilleann piping was inscribed in UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. As the UNESCO inscription explains, “uilleann piping is a musical practice which uses a particular type of bagpipe (known as the ‘uilleann,’ ‘Irish’ or ‘Union’ pipes) to play Irish music.” https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/uilleann-piping-01264. Accessed 17 October 2022.
93. O’Neill discusses three different pipers named James Byrne, each of whom are referred to on various occasions by nicknames such as Jem, Jemmy, or Jim. Two of these men are father and son; they, and the other members of their family, are discussed in Minstrels and Musicians, 217–221.
The third James Byrne, the focus of this essay, is described on pages 320–323. He was apparently no relation, but was peripherally connected to them because his patron, Samuel Rowsome (pages 297–299) was taught by the eldest James Byrne and remained friendly with this Byrne’s sons, all of whom were pipers.
94. “When Jim was in the district the news quickly spread, and those of us who knew him … hastened to hear him play as few others could.” Matt Keirnan recalled: “The first piper I ever saw and heard was…the famous Jem Byrne of travelling fame. And when I heard him I immediately got the piping bug. The tones of the pipes, I thought it was beautiful.” Maureen Kinsman recalled Byrne as “…a gentle white-haired old man who was the friend of so many Irish children…Old Jim the Piper, for year in, year out, he walked all over the South of Ireland playing his weather-beaten bagpipes in the small towns where he was greeted with warmth and respect.” Gill, “Seanchas – James ‘Jem’ Byrne,” 38–41.
John Henebry, the brother of Father Richard Henebry, seems to have had a special relationship with Byrne. Tommy Kearney, a former student of both James Byrne and John Henebry, described his own mentors’ relationship in a 1976 interview: “Mr Henebry would do anything for him. He loved him as a musician and thought at the time nobody played like him.” Gill, “Seanchas,” 43–44.
It is unclear whether “anything,” in this case, could encompass any disruption of the structures that produced Byrne’s status as always-already-vanishing, the attendant material conditions that reified that status, or the mode of transcendental consciousness that subtended both.
95. See O’Neill’s accounts of the deaths of pipers Richard Stephenson and George McCarthy. O’Neill, Minstrels and Musicians, 271–273 and 295–296 respectively.
96. Lloyd, Irish Culture, 43. “The Irish circulate, and with them circulate pestilence and the odour of excrement.”
97. See Costello, Eugene. Transhumance.
98. See Helleiner, Irish Travellers. I would tentatively suggest that the form of Othering directed at Irish Travellers constructs a category of subject deemed incapable of properly possessing property. See also Ó Haodha, “Cultural Disappearance.”
99. Patronage of artists was an important practice with a well-documented history in Gaelic Ireland, evolving amid social and political turmoil and surviving into the nineteenth century. For eighteenth-century examples, see O’Sullivan, Carolan.
100. O’Neill, Minstrels and Musicians, 322.
101. Ibid. I read “spiritual welfare” here to include Byrne’s perceived need for engulfment by Spirit in the Kantian sense. It also likely refers to intoxicating spirits.
102. Henebry, Earlier Studies, 10–11.
103. Gill, “Seanchas – James ‘Jem’ Byrne,” 40–41.
104. Ibid, 40.
105. Ibid., 41. Gill quotes Maureen Kinsman, who recalled her mother urging Byrne in later years to go to the Feis Cheoil in Dublin, the scene of his success at previous competitions. Byrne replied, “Now Ma’m, what would an old man like me be doing in the city of Dublin in these shabby clothes? Sure, I’m content to play my music to the children.” Kinsman’s mother replied, “Bless my heart, he’s still the finest player in Ireland.” In the end, “Old Jim went off to Dublin all dressed up in my father’s second best suit, and proudly tucked under his arm was my father’s brand-new ebony and ivory bagpipes, with its silver keys and its bright green velvet tassels bobbing up and down.”
Gill surmises that this most likely refers to Byrne’s last appearance at the competition in 1928. That year, Byrne won first place, as he had in 1905 and 1917. See O’Neill, Barry. “Piping Contests at the Feis,” 7.
106. See O’Brien, “Performing POZ,” for a related account of contagion in Irish cultural representations. O’Brien focuses on the dramaturgy of stigma in depictions of HIV/AIDS, wherein anachronistic images of horrible death in workhouse-like conditions – which accurately represent the probable fate of several unassimilated itinerant pipers of O’Neill’s acquaintance – are depicted as taking place years after the introduction of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART).
While tuberculosis, rather than HIV/AIDS, struck fear in O’Neill’s time, cultural memory of contagion is powerful enough that twenty-first century representations of blood-borne disease depict 19th-century workhouse deaths. Meanwhile, the imagery chosen by O’Neill in 1913 to recount the events of 1903 invokes the AIDS crisis that began almost a century later.
For a powerful account of contagion in cultural memory, see Tony MacMahon on the great piper Séamus Ennis, a TB patient: https://journalofmusic.com/focus/master.
107. O’Neill, Minstrels and Musicians, 320–323.
108. Lloyd, Irish Culture, 43.
109. Ibid., 44.
110. Locke, Works. 117–118, paragraphs 29–32. In this paradigm, nothing that bodies located outside of humanity do, or are forced to do, can be regarded as labour. If this were possible, that would falsify Locke’s tautological proposition that labour creates property, and that only humans, who create property, can be properly considered to work.
111. Henebry, Earlier Studies, 10–11. Touhey and Delaney did have something significant in common with the Byrne: all three struggled in their personal lives. However, O’Neill never applies such rhetoric to either of the propertied pipers.
112. Gray, “Elegy,” 8.
113. O’Malley, Beat Cop, 162, 182–184.
114. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 156. On neocolonialism generally, see Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism.
115. Mullen, “How the Irish Became Settlers, 81–96.
116. See also Lennon, Irish Orientalism. I do not intend to dismiss comparative work; rather, I propose to extend the potential of such readings.
117. Cherán, “Kahlo.” July 4, 2021, paragraph 2. https://hyperallergic.com/660471/indigenous-perspective-frida-kahlo/
118. da Silva, Global Idea of Race, xl.
119. It is precisely this fantasy that motivates the contemporary Irish far right.
120. O’Malley, Beat Cop, 18, 237–238. See also O’Neill, Francis, Sketchy Recollections, 103–104. In another striking parallel, TR served as Police Commissioner of New York City from 1895–1897. O’Neill thought enough of TR to preserve the medal acquired during TR’s 1904 visit to Chicago in his scrapbooks, along with numerous clippings from Hyde’s speeches and essays. The scrapbooks are now in the private collection of O'Neill’s great-granddaughter Mary Lesch. (O’Malley, private communication.)
121. Then-Irish Ambassador to the US, Daniel Mulhall, wrote approvingly in 2018 of Hyde’s 1905 summit with Roosevelt, and its focus on their shared ideologies of cultural revival. https://www.dfa.ie/irish-embassy/usa/about-us/ambassador/ambassadors-blog/douglas-hyde-in-america-1891_1906/.
122. Roosevelt, Holidays, 65. Roosevelt’s full account occupies Chapter 3, 63–97. In the same passage, Roosevelt goes on to mention the Othâkîwaki athlete Wa-Tho-Huk, baptised Jacobus Franciscus Thorpe and known as Jim Thorpe, who had been incarcerated at Col. Richard Pratt’s Carlisle Indian School: “If the Navajo can bring with him into civilization the ability to preserve his striking and bewildering rhythm, he will have done in music what Thorpe, the Olympic champion, did in athletics.” 65.
A double Olympic gold medallist, Thorpe is invoked, using his baptismal name, as an exemplary alumnus. As a man whose great talent and success within the Ordered World could not prevent a later life marked by poverty, disenfranchisement, and alcoholism, Thorpe’s story has some striking parallels with that of James Byrne. This is no more a coincidence than the mutual admiration of Roosevelt and Douglas Hyde.
123. Hyde, Language, Lore, and Lyrics, 135–144.
124. Beatty, “Language Politics,” 45.
125. “Due to the balance of population in Ireland and the powerful civilizational elements in British identity construction, the fusion narratives of Anglo-Irish Celticists emphasised culture over biology.” McMahon, The Races of Europe, 264.
126. See Martin Dowling’s review of the Forde Collection (Carolan and Uí Éigeartaigh, 2021) for the online Journal of Music in Ireland. https://journalofmusic.com/opinion/cultural-treasures-bound-barbarism.
127. On materia prima, see da Silva, “Matter Beyond the Equation of Value.”
On necessity/necessitas, see notes 57–58; see also da Silva, ”No-Bodies,” 214–215. ”Early and later writings of determination, of necessity as a signifier of power, assert the mind’s privilege of self-determination. Everywhere else, in the stage of exteriority, the one occupied by the body and other external things, universal reason governs as necessitas; in the shapes of force and order, it constrains, regulates or limits. It acts as the exterior power (as law or form) that composes and destroys the things of the universe.“ 214.
See also Dowling, Traditional Music: “An ancient, ideal, and pre-Anglicised aristocratic culture was linked and conflated with the most backward locations and practices of peasant culture still surviving, but in a peculiarly ahistorical and abstract way. The actual practitioner is necessarily dehumanised in this relationship. To borrow a Lacanian phrase, the national essence is in the peasant subject more than he is himself in his quotidian actuality. Therefore it was required to distil and abstract that essence from him.” 236–237.
Dowling further quotes James O’Brien Moran, an esteemed piper who currently carries on Byrne’s legacy in Waterford. O’Brien Moran pointed out that tune collectors “considered the precious artifacts the peasant held in memory were too delicate and refined for their own illiterate sensibilities.” O’Brien Moran, “Pioneer Musicologists,” 96.
128. See O’Malley, Beat Cop, 241–246, for an account of the challenges O’Neill faced in notating and publishing this kind of music.
129. Chatterjee, “The Nation in Heterogeneous Time,” 33; see also da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 221–226.
130. da Silva, “Difference Without Separability,” 65.
131. Lloyd, Irish Culture, 44.
132. Beatty, “Language Politics,” 45.
133. Beatty, “Language Politics,” 45–46.
134. Father J.K. Fielding’s book was deliberately named to evoke D.W. Griffith’s 1915 cinematic ode to the Ku Klux Klan, Birth of a Nation. Fielding, Resurrection of a Nation, 29, vii.
135. TallBear, “Playing Indian,” paragraph 2.
136. For a comprehensive account of the problem, see Deloria, Playing Indian; see also TallBear, “Playing Indian.” Following Deloria and TallBear, I argue that in the context of Irishness, “playing Indian” is about becoming White – and either American, or party to a ”special relationship” with the American State. See https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorials/2023/04/15/the-irish-times-view-on-ireland-and-the-united-states-the-special-relationship/
137. For an explanation of the reference and its influence as the “Hot Dog Guy” meme, see Rebecca Onion’s Slate article. https://slate.com/culture/2020/08/hot-dog-costume-meme-i-think-you-should-leave.html.
138. da Silva, “In the Raw,” I.
139. Ibid, and see da Silva, “Hacking the Subject,” and Unpayable Debt, 51–55 and 118–120, for her Black feminist poethical reading of Kant’s das Ding an sich.
140. Ó Cadhain, “Béaloideas.”
141. Ibid. quoted and translated in Coleman, “Ó Cadhain, Rhetoric, and Immanence,” 193. In this passage, I have chosen to use an Irish grammatical form of Cré as a proper noun, An Chré, while writing in English.
142. Ibid., 191–192.
143. Coleman, “Ó Cadhain, Rhetoric, and Immanence,” 191.
144. da Silva, “Hacking the Subject,” 38.
145. da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 54.
146. Ibid., 284–285.
147. Ibid., 275.
148. Schwartz, “Perfect Hallucination,” 3.
149. da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 121.
150. da Silva, “Difference Without Separability,” 65; on Leibniz, 58; for Planck and the ultraviolet catastrophe, see https://falsabeh.medium.com/the-unsolvable-problem-that-foreshadowed-quantum-mechanics-c43c46686270.
In 1900, reckoning with mathematical expression of the reality that an object cannot emit infinite energy – a problem termed the ultraviolet catastrophe – Max Planck reluctantly imagined the infinity of existence as composed of discrete, inseparably entangled units (quanta.) In so doing, Planck unwillingly shattered the Newtonian basis of the Ordered World in his successful attempt to describe the true potency of a hypothetical object that both perfectly absorbs and perfectly emits radition, termed the ideal blackbody. Observing existence as infinity, infinity as discrete, and discrete units as infinitely entangled turns out to possess far more power than the previously posited idea of continuous, infinite force.
151. Fisher, “Terminator vs Avatar,” 339.
152. da Silva, “Difference Without Separability,” 61.
153. Francis O’Neill to Séamus O’Floinn, 15 October 1918. Nicholas Carolan Collection, Irish Traditional Music Archive, Dublin, Ireland.
154. See also Sutherland, Resurrecting the Black Body, on life, death, and living death packaged, sold, and consumed by Subjectivity.
155. O’Brien, The Third Policeman, 109–111, 188–189. In the fictional world of Flann O’Brien, omnium is a chemical substance, ”the essential inherent interior essence which is hidden in the root of the kernel of everything.” 110. In physics, the problem known as the ultraviolet catastrophe arose from the initially inexpliable contradiction between observable reality and a mathematical model that incorrectly predicted infinite energy emission from physical objects – a behaviour attibuted to omnium.
156. da Silva, “Difference without Separability,” 58.
157. The reference here is to Audre Lorde’s quote: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” Lorde, Sister Outsider, 112 (my italics).
158. Fisher, “Terminator vs Avatar,” 339.
159. McCarthy, Denis. Report on Concrete Blocks, 47–57. The mica scandal arose in 2011 in response to the discovery of building blocks contaminated with excessive amounts of mica. The defective blocks rendered at least 5,000 rural Irish homes uninhabitable. A June 2017 report cited unenforced regulations – a classic feature of the comprador FDI model.
Mica can, in fact, fluoresce under blacklight. It is widely available in powdered form for craft purposes.
160. da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 28. “Intrastructure” is Silva’s word for the entire post-Enlightenment programme animated by the analytics of raciality. It sustains the Ordered World.
161. Sí an Bhrú is an Irish-language name for Newgrange, one of the famous Boyne Valley passage tombs. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/659.
Gaa-zhigaagwanzhikaag is an Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) name for the land now occupied by the settler City of Chicago. Šikaakonki is a Myaamia (Miami) name for the same place. It is the land of the Council of the Three Fires (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations,) as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo, and Illinois Nations. See: https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2014/12/17/chicago-in-ojibwe/, https://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/diversity/chicago-indigenous.