The Queen and her Civilisation
The death of Queen Elizabeth II comes with an idea that she had, for the more than 70 years of her reign, represented a reference of fixed stability for her Kingdom and Commonwealth. Although it is known that she was occasionally involved in political decisions, and that her authority had been the guarantee of all sorts of partisan political activity, there is an idea that the Queen held the centre of power as an empty place. We don’t know much about her political views, only that from this empty centre she hoped to hold together what may be considered to be a people, indeed a diversity of peoples. I am reminded a little of the passages of Seminar VI (lessons XI and XII) relating the case of an obsessional who valued his queen (in the chess sense), under the condition of keeping her out of any action, since should she be tested, the phallus (as she is in this Seminar) would be found to be just another signifier within the set, and not the exception which seems to guarantee the totality of the set. With this the obsessional misunderstood that chess is a game that requires the protection of another piece than the Queen. It’s often thought that if a modern monarch should exercise their power, it would be the end of their monarchy.
But I’m also led to think about “civilisation”, a signifier which has a resonance in the Freudian field, and also a signifier not far from the place of the Queen. In Britain this is immediately a rather odd signifier. It sounds like a word from a far distant time, a time where a kind of social cohesiveness could be imagined in a way that has no currency any more. I’m brought back, for instance, to the world of Kenneth Clarke’s 1969 documentary series “Civilisation”, narrating a particular history of Western civilisation, a narrative which now seems narrow and unnatural in its scope. And there is something of this long gone of the power of this signifier that matches the sense that what is lost with the Queen’s death is something that has not had currency for a very long time. And the affairs around her death which are unfolding as I write, seem firmly tinged with a nostalgia indicative that what is lost is a final marker of something already long gone.
Of course there are a variety of ways of thinking of civilisation. If it is that of the narrative of Kenneth Clarke for instance, of a cohesiveness at the level of a narrative, of a certain shared contents, then we might well say for instance that social divisions, for instance of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or class, indicate that civilisation was only ever a semblant made of the self interests of those who maintain power. That if we don’t agree, then the current civilisation would better be broken in favour of a better, more equitable, civilisation, with a new story. It’s one way of thinking of civilisation. Fine.
For Freud, civilisation as he found it was a collectivising mechanism organised and marked in its discontents by constraints that require repression (see for instance his Civilisation and its Discontents, and the fantastic extended discussion of it here). That is to say that Freud’s civilisation was one organised around the supposition that people are more generally neurotic, and civilisation was arranged in a way that lead to this, and was organised by this. From a Lacanian perspective we might say that this is an idea of civilisation organised around a ‘common sense’ (as opposed to a private sense), organised not by a particular social bond, since there have always been antagonisms at the level of social bond, of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and so on, which could be sustained and constrained to some extent within the bounds of a civilisation. But rather as the sense of a shared guarantee of the social bond. We call a guarantee of the social bond a Name of the Father, and when we believed that it held at the level of civilisation, we called it the Name of the Father.
Lacan was clear that the future would bring increasing segregation as the price of the diminishment of the Name of the Father (see for instance his Note on the Father and Universalism, 1968, in The Lacanian Review issue 3). Rather than being a protected phallus, it seems to me that the function of the Queen was to act as the embodiment, as the institutionalisation, of a guarantee of the social bond supposed of a nation and the remnants of its empire. A guarantee that could only be maintained on the basis that it remained at the level of guarantee, and removed from the level of guaranteed social and political contents. But it has been 35 years since Margaret Thatcher said that there is no such thing as society, and acted accordingly, such that none could be assumed, and here, and now, the “neuroticentric” world of Freud’s civilisation is gone. It can be noted that the assumption of the Name of the Father among some neurotics, with the supposition of a normalcy that comes with it, can seem itself distinctly odd now. It can be noted too that it is not the case everywhere. It seems that the Francophone world for instance, maintains something of its civilisation in this sense, it's a word that retains its value there, if contested. And perhaps some of the seemingly prevalent anguish in the face of the occasional questioning of long held norms in France attests to the fragility of civilisation there.
If the word civilisation seems to belong to a long gone era, perhaps it is because a certain prevalent sense of what a civilisation is, has, here in the UK, passed. It did not pass just now, but little by little, and long ago. It is not the job of psychoanalysis to prop up the remnants of that civilisation, but to support the inventions, as we find them, of new ways of living amongst one another, and resisting the draw of segregation, which can come even in the form of segregations against those taken to be segregative.
Alasdair Duncan
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