Progressives who are inclined to lash out at the monarchy
and have fired their vitriol at the new Duke and Duchess of Sussex may be
missing the point.
Leftist critics were right about Britain’s recent royal
wedding, but for the wrong reason. They conceded how Meghan Markle is a
sympathetic figure - a feminist and a mixed-race woman - but they opposed the
form of monarchy that was celebrated (if we ignore a few complaints about
taxpayers’ money being spent).
What these critics failed to perceive is the emancipatory
dimension of this form itself, of the big public ritual which socially links a
community. To explain this point, we should go back to Novalis, the key figure
of German Romanticism, who is usually perceived as a representative of the
conservative turn of Romanticism, but his position is much more paradoxical.
Monarchy is the highest form of republic, “no king can
exist without a republic and no republic without a king”.
Or, to quote Nathan Ross’s resume: “the true measure
of a Republic consists of the lived relation of the citizens to the idea of the
whole in which they live. The unity that a law creates is merely coercive. /…/
The unifying factor must be a sensual one, a comprehensive human embodiment of
the morals that make a common identity possible. For Novalis, the best such
mediating factor for the idea of the republic is a monarch. /…/ While the
institution might satisfy our intellect, it leaves our imagination cold. A
living, breathing human being /…/ provides us with a symbol that we can more
intuitively embrace as standing in relation to our own existence. /…/ The
concepts of the Republic and monarch are not only reconcilable, but presuppose
one another.”
Guessing Game
Novalis’ point is not just some banality such as how social
identification should not be merely intellectual (the point also made by
Sigmund Freud in his Mass Psychology and Ego Analysis).
Instead, the core of his argument concerns the “performative”dimension
of political representation: in an authentic act of representation, people do
not simply assert through a representative what they want, they only become
aware of what they want through the act of representation.
So, Novalis argues that the role of the king should not be
to give people what they think they want, but to elevate and give measure to
their desires: “the political, or the force that binds people together,
should be a force that gives measure to desires rather than merely appealing to
desires.”
There is an important insight given here: politics is not
just about pursuing one’s interest. At a more basic level, it is about offering
a vision of communal identity which defines the frame of our interests. As for
the obvious reproach that such massive rituals were practiced by Hitler (not to
mention Stalin), one should never forget that, in organizing the big Nazi
performances, Hitler copied (and changed, of course) Social-Democratic
and Communist public events. So, instead of rejecting this idea as
proto-Fascist, one should rather look for its Leftist antecedents and
associations.
And one doesn’t have to look far. Just recall the staged
performance of "Storming the Winter Palace" in Petrograd
(now Saint Petersburg), on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, on
7 November 1920. Tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, students and artists
worked round the clock, living on kasha (the tasteless wheat porridge), tea and
frozen apples, and preparing for the performance at the very place where the
event "really took place" three years earlier; their work
was coordinated by army officers, as well as by the avant-garde artists,
musicians and directors, from Malevich to Meyerhold.
Although this was acting and not "reality," the
soldiers and sailors were playing themselves - many of them not only actually
participated in the event of 1917, but were also simultaneously involved in the
real battles of the Civil War that were raging in the near vicinity of
Petrograd, a city under siege and suffering from severe shortages of food.
A contemporary commented on the performance: "The
future historian will record how, throughout one of the bloodiest and most
brutal revolutions, all of Russia was acting"; and the formalist
theoretician Viktor Shklovski noted that "some kind of elemental
process is taking place where the living fabric of life is being transformed
into the theatrical."
This was not a performance of actors for the public, but a
performance in which the public itself was the actor.
We should therefore shamelessly assert intense immersion
into the social body, a shared ritualistic performance that would put all good
old liberals into shock and awe by its “totalitarian” intensity –
something Wagner was aiming at in his great ritualistic scenes at the end of
Acts I and III of Parsifal.
Like Parsifal, the great concerts of the German hard-rock
band Rammstein (say, the one in the arena of Nimes on July 23, 2005) should
also be called, as Wagner called his Parsifal, Bühnenweihfestspiel (“sacred
festival performance”) which is the vehicle for the collectivity’s affirmation
of itself.
All liberal-individualist prejudices should fall here –
yes, each individual should be fully immersed into a crowd, joyfully abandoning
their individual critical mind. Meanwhile, passion should obliterate reasoning.
Thus, to conclude, and circle back to the marriage of
Meghan and Harry: criticize it as much as you want, but don’t forget to look
for a radical emancipatory version of what this spectacle achieved.
