Queen Elizabeth II has died. She was 96, and held the British throne for over 70 years. She witnessed prodigious change in her lifetime - as anyone of her age, rich or poor, upper or lower class, has done. She has presided over messy family history - her alcoholic sister Margaret, her playboy husband, her mostly unattractive and lumpen children, from the horsey Anne to the non-sweating but potentially paedophiliac Andrew. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, to be sure, but the Windsors were not and are not the only unhappy family in the world. Elizabeth is greatly admired for her adherence to her duty as monarch and as lynchpin of the UK constitution. And that is fair enough, but she is hardly the only person who has done her duty in her particular station in life. And most of those dutiful persons do not get the same ridiculous praise for doing their jobs competently.
Yes, the death of a British monarch occasions the most extraordinary volumes of cliché, platitudes, fawning, and po-faced bullshit. Here in supposedly republican Ireland, we are not immune to this disease. On the contrary, the airwaves are awash with the most repulsive forelock-tugging masquerading as serious 'commentary'. Battalions of Irish journalists and politicians queue up to recount joyfully and breathlessly the moment when the Queen was so delightfully condescending as to lift an eyebrow or fart in their general direction. The juice that has been squeezed out of the Queen's cúpla focail at her speech in Dublin Castle during her visit in 2011 is of so vast a volume as to precipitate greater sea-level rise than the coming collapse of the Greenland ice-cap. Why do we fawn so? Why do we fawn so in the Republic of Ireland, where we are not crown subjects? Why do we so relish the opportunity to abase ourselves? Why do we accede so gratefully in our own oppression, as Joyce scathingly but accurately put it?
The monarchy is the centrepiece of the constitution of the United Kingdom, certainly. But it also has functioned as a most wonderfully effective ideological apparatus. Marxist writers such as Gramsci and Althusser (the former a major influence on the latter) expended a lot of consideration thinking about why and how capitalist societies, characterised as they were and are by instability and gross inequality in wealth, political power and cultural legitimacy, manage to cohere and to reproduce themselves, and to repel, quash, silence or marginalize radical or revolutionary ideas and sentiments. Gramsci suggested that liberal democracies, through various institutions of both state and civil society, manage to produce and reproduce 'hegemony', or a kind of leadership at the level of ideas, morality and culture. Back in the 1980s, when Mrs Thatcher's Conservative governments dominated British politics, thinkers such as Stuart Hall sought to understand the capacity of the Thatcherite programme to saturate British political discourse. Thatcherism was so powerful and successful as to win even a very substantial working-class vote. To a leftist like Hall, this was an exceptional instance of the poor voting directly contrary to their own interests. Only an extraordinarily dense and textured web of ideological production could so convince the lower middle class and the working class of Britain that Mrs Thatcher's values and goals were isomorphic with their own - the very quintessence of hegemony.
In the 1970s, Althusser wrote his famous essay on 'Ideological State Apparatuses', to try to think a similar problematic. Drawing on Freudian theory, Althusser argued that 'ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence'. He also suggested that 'ideology has a material existence'. What he meant was that humans experience the unfairness and inequity of the society in which they live as a series of contradictions which are not resolvable in rational terms. Ideology - ideas and practices (hence the idea that ideology has a material existence) - offers apparent resolution of these contradictions on an imaginary level. For Althusser, as for Gramsci, ideology is produced and reproduced all across everyday institutions of civil society - the most obvious such institutions would be education and the media. But Althusser's stress on the materiality of ideology also allowed him to see ideology operating at the level of practice, an even more influential way of 'manufacturing consent' to society's structures than any propaganda or misinformation. When a student sits in a seminar room or lecture hall, for example, she is learning not just the manifest information or material which her lecturer puts before her. She is also learning, by her very actions, how to sit and pay attention, how to remain silent and concentrate, how to defer to a supposed authority, and. by the time exams come around, how to reproduce that combination of information and consent as the 'right' exam answer.
The monarchy, with its massive sense of tradition, its colourful spectacle, its rituals, its language and nomenclature, is such an apparatus in Britain but, because of the history of empire, with an extraordinary global reach. The monarchy, no matter the dutifulness or decency or stolidity (or grotesqueness) of its actual members, has been and is a machinery by which inequity, class prejudice, unfairness are produced and reproduced in Britain. The monarchy influences Britons not merely by explicit 'interpellation' (Althusser's term) or suggestion but by its very embodiment of unearned wealth, prestige, and elitism. The monarchy, no matter how much reformed or modernised (or vulgarised) it may be now and in times to come, is the antithesis of democracy and freedom. The sooner it goes the better for all.
Some reading:
From Jacobin:
