Capitalism and the state - a memory of reading Poulantzas on Achill, Summer 2006

2006 was a very tricky year.  In the spring, I lost my job as a college lecturer in unusually painful and troubling circumstances.   During the summer, I applied for many jobs and got no interviews.  At the very end of the summer, I was lucky enough to get an interview and I was offered a contract position.   In December, just after I had gone to New York on a holiday, my mother, Lavinia, died suddenly, and I had to turn on my heel and fly home. 

In the summer, though I was deeply worried about my employment situation and I was considering a move into journalism - the abandonment of my academic career, at the age of 41 - I was lucky enough to have a two week residency at the Heinrich Boll memorial cottage, on Achill Island in Co. Mayo.  Located on the edge of the village of Dugort and under the great breaking wave that Slievemore mountain seems to be from that easterly angle, the cottage (actually maybe two cottages knocked together,  or greatly extended from its original configuration) was purchased by Boll in the 1950s.  To him, as most clearly shown in his Irisches Tagebuch, Ireland in the 1950s was a rural Arcadia.   Given Boll's status as a German survivor of the most terrible war, this view of Ireland is hardly surprising.  But though Ireland began to change at the end of the 1950s, Boll kept on visiting Achill, until age made travel difficult for him.  In the 1980s, the house fell in desuetude and became dormant.  But in the 1990s, a combination of local Achill artists and civic activists, and the  Boll family, came together to revive and refurbish the house and make it into the beautiful artist's residence which it is now: a fitting memorial to a very fine writer.    

My remit was to write about Edward Said.  I doubt very much if Said had ever heard of Achill, let alone visited it (though he did visit Sligo, for the Yeats Summer School), but my application for a residency was accepted anyway.  I was lucky.   I got two weeks in July, and of the most magnificent weather.  I travelled down to Dugort with my car full of my collection of Saidiana, and with the most ambitious writing plans.  But of course I was distracted into other things: walking the magnificent expanse of Keel beach, barefoot as I do it every time, my feet becoming youthful and pink again in the chilly Atlantic; climbing Croaghaun at the island's western extremity to stand on the brink of its summit, where it drops 2200 feet to the gray ocean in a gigantic hooded wall which even now few people ever see; eating wonderful meals at Bervie, the jewel of Achill hotels, run by old and dear friends (find it at http://www.bervieachill.com/).  When not doing these things I read.  I read The Magic Mountain, sometimes reading it very late into the night, when my city-boy's timidity in the face of the almost animate blackness of the rural dark left me unable to sleep.  And I read Nicos Poulantzas's last book, State, Power, Socialism.  Poulantzas was a brilliant Greek Marxist political philosopher, influenced by but not limited to Louis Althusser, who brought a rigour to Marxist discussion of the nature of the state which it had mostly lacked - the old man himself not having given the institution of the state much thought.  Poulantzas famously debated the nature of the state with his great English interlocutor, Ralph Miliband, in the pages of the New Left Review.  This tussle, which represented a discussion of the state analagous to EP Thompson's quarrel with Althusser regarding theorizing the historical process, was one of the great Marxist arguments of the Seventies.  I enjoyed State, Power, Socialism in my own, partly Saidian, way because it addressed the spatial or geographical nature of the state institution - for a state to be a state, it must have a territory, which it turns into a jurisdiction.   It creates this juridical and political space in a wide variety of ways - demarcating borders, creating citizenship, developing a national education system, building infrastructure.  I found the whole argument deeply compelling.

I had a wonderful stay at the Boll cottage.  Needless to say, I wrote very little.   In retrospect, my sadness is that I did not invite my mother down to stay with me for a few days of the residency.  One of her many gifts to me was and is my love of Achill, which was started when I was about five years old and continues with me now.   I little thought that I'd never again see the island partly through her eyes.  Catching sight of my copy of State, Power, Socialism on the shelf now consequently brings a wash of complicated, overdetermined memories.

Here is Michael McCarthy reasserting Poulantzas's importance and value for us now:

Seven Theses on the Capitalist Democratic State

Conor