Remembering Diana

Cultural Memory and the Reinvention of Authority

V. Seidler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349340163, 9780230320260
• eBook ISBN: 9780230371903
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Analysingthe events surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, Vic Seidlerconsiders the public outpourings of grief and displays of emotion whichprompted new kinds of identification and belonging in which communities came together regardless of race, class, gender and sexuality.

1

Introduction: Postmodern Imaginations and Cultural Memories of Grief

A time to mourn

As the crowds took to the streets at the end of August 1997 bearing their flowers, as the news of the death of Princess Diana swept around the world, a different vision of the nation was taking shape. People were joined together in their grief and they were ready to recognise and acknowledge whomever wanted to join them. It was not a moment for judgement but of acceptance. People could come together in their pain and confusion. People could share their feelings with people they had never met, because they recognised themselves in each other, in the loss and grief they shared. There was also will and determination as people insisted that they would queue to sign the books of condolence, however long they had to wait.

From the beginning people said that they had to come in person to the palace in order ‘to make real’ what had happened. It was not good enough to watch the events unfolding on their television screens. This was not just a royal spectacle and went beyond the politics of deference as subjects, rather than as citizens that the media was used to dealing with. Reporters and commentators were struggling from the beginning to find the right words to articulate what was going on. They were confused about why people weren’t happy to sit at home: it was beyond their comprehension that people should feel a personal need to come themselves in person and bring flowers.

Bringing flowers became the way of ‘paying respects’ to Diana. But the flowers also became something more, for many in those days of mourning they became a declaration of love and longing for her. Through the flowers people also declared a right and a duty towards her. They had a right to have an equal voice in the mourning. This was a new vision of democracy where people were no longer waiting in deference to hear what the arrangements would be from their ‘betters’. People insisted on being able to mourn in their own ways and they insisted on using the public space to do so. For a week the streets belonged to the people and people made these spaces their own as they organised different rituals and shrines. It was a moving scene to watch these shrines take shape along The Mall and around Kensington Palace. This was an expression of a different, more personal form of spirituality. People were finding their own words to express their grief. The traditional religious authorities somehow could not express what they were feeling. Young and old, white, Asian and Afro-Caribbean, gay and straight, women and men, all of them were struggling to find their own words from the heart to express their own personal sadness, grief, anger and loss.

These were informal gatherings but they were no less dignified. This was not the public hysteria that the press sometimes talked about. This was a quiet revolution taking place that was being given form as a revolution of flowers. Fundamentally, it was also an assertion of democracy for each flower represented a person or a family. This represented a new vision of flower power and it was to be called ‘the flower revolution’.¹ As people felt entitled to take control over public spaces so there seemed to be an aspiration towards a different vision of an alternative democracy and a different vision of nation as a re-imagined post-traditional community.

Families sometimes came together to write out their grief and loss and it was moving to see so many people stretching to read the words, as if also searching for an adequate expression for what they felt inside too. But people had to find their own words, as a form of growing in their own felt authority. They were often not prepared to take on the words of others unless they had weighed each and every word to see if they fitted. Often people went to great lengths to find their own words, to express themselves and their spiritualities.

For some Diana had become a feminist icon, for she represented in a symbolic way the struggles that so many women were going through themselves to find their own sense of meaning and self-worth. In her separation and divorce and in her struggle to sustain an open and loving relationship with her children she reflected the struggles that so many women knew as their own. But in the public grief that followed her death a more inclusive politics was also taking shape in which women and men could share their grief with one another. It was a spiritual politics taking shape for the millennium. It was grounded in a new sense of self-confidence that you could be felt in the devolution discussion especially in Scotland where, over the years, there had been a growing sense of cultural and political self-confidence.

It was not, as New Labour sometimes represented it, that people wanted a form of decentralised power that was closer to them, a new model of government. They wanted to believe in themselves and the right to grow in their own authority. This was equally true in politics as it was in spirituality. There was a sense, often difficult to articulate, that democracy could become more than a system of governance and that if a new post-traditional Britain were to emerge it would be characterised by a revitalised democratic culture that would sustain individuals in their sense of self-worth and with an equal voice. This would mark the end of a cultures of deference that would make a difference to the ways families, schools and work could be organised.

Re-inventing authority

Feeling empowered to take to the streets and occupy urban spaces was part of a changing vision of authority relationships in the West. In the 1980s freedom and authority had taken narrow market terms in the individualism of Thatcher and Reagan. People learnt to be selfish, to put their own interests above the concern for others, in the laissezfaire conviction that it would work out best for the community. But as they became aware of the human costs and the social inequalities and injustices it was producing, they stepped back. They wanted the right to achieve for themselves, and they did not feel that individuals should be prevented from developing their own talents and abilities, because others might not be able to match them.

They did not believe in a socialist vision that had become identified with equality as ‘sameness’ and even an aspiration to level down. People insisted on freedom to make their own lives, but they did not necessarily want to see others disadvantaged. This became crucial to the democratic policies of New Labour that professed a concern with the education of ‘all our children’, not just the children of a small elite. But whether this is possible without challenging the forms of socially divisive elite education is questionable.

With the public grief that followed Diana’s death there was also public anger. Many people felt that the Windsors had not acted properly towards Diana when she was alive, and they were determined that they should do the right thing by her now that she had died. This was an assertion of democratic sovereignty that the Windsors would have to bow to as well, if they wanted to sustain their position. The people were impatient with a protocol that did not accord with their popular wishes. It was the protocol that had to give way and, as the Queen was forced to make a public television statement to the nation and then bow her head as Diana’s coffin moved by, the people did not feel vindicated, only that this is what Diana had deserved. They had assigned themselves to be the public guardians of her children, and made sure that their voices were heard in Westminster Abbey in support of her brother’s brave words.

The Queen was obliged to return to London from Balmoral to publicly acknowledge that lessons would have to be learnt from Diana’s death. But it clear that Diana’s death changed the public standing of the monarchy. This was part of Diana’s revolution. In her death she had transformed the House of Windsor in ways she probably would not have managed had she lived into old age. She had paradoxically become an icon of a different vision of national identity, which was more inclusive and so more democratic and that was also uncertain about whether it needed a monarchy at all. This had not been a movement for republicanism, but it seemed a movement that could easily consider such an option if it needed too.

If it seemed in line with aspects of New Labour, it also seems to have shaken the Tory party into a new concern with inclusiveness and compassion. Relieved from the responsibilities of office, the Conservative Party in Blackpool were to welcome gays and single parents. They were to acknowledge mistakes of the past. Whether people will believe this conversion is another matter, but the recognition of a more inclusive vision of nation rejecting Tebbitt’s attack on multiculturalism as the speech of a ‘dinosaur’ was a welcome recognition of new realities.²

If we live in a new country in which care and compassion are no longer to be stigmatised as signs of weakness this has to be part of Diana’s revolution. The fear of any sign of weakness has always characterised patriarchal politics. Hitler, for instance, as an extreme example, made sure that there were no photographic images of him wearing glasses, for this was a sign of weakness that was unfitting in the Führer. But Diana brought vulnerability into the public sphere with the immediacy of her Panorama interview.

She wanted people to know the reality of her life within the walls of the House of Windsor and she trusted they would respond. This was a risk and people in Charles’ camp were ready to take advantage declaring her to be unstable, if not mad. It took personal courage to take a risk so publicly, but millions responded to it. She did not hide her vulnerability. Traditionally, a woman in her position would regard vulnerability as a sign of weakness. She was not to be forgiven and she was to pay the price in the loss of her title of HRH, but she did not lose the custody of her children as she feared.

When Nicholas Soames attacked the Princess after her Panorama interview as a woman exhibiting the advanced symptoms of paranoia, he doubtless imagined that he was articulating the unspoken prejudices of the silent majority. But his buffoonish insensitivity was out of touch with the public mood of sympathy for Diana. The sentiments he expressed had long ago retreated to the fringes of British life and he was made to feel a fool who had further damaged Charles’ side of the story. The country that Soames sought to represent no longer existed and the silent majority had shifted its attitudes.

But many people had not understood this and they continue to insist that the public response to Diana’s death was a fabrication of the media. They see it as a disturbing moment of irrationality, somehow proved by the feelings of grief so many people professed to feel for a person they did not know. These emotions could have only been whipped up by the press and the idea of ‘mass hysteria’ came to be the ruling discourse not only in the mass media but also in social research set within rationalist terms. They sought to attack those who felt otherwise as ‘naïve’ and so shamed many people’s memories of a different reality.

Forming subjectivities

Rather than reflect upon the public expressions of grief and the ways that it showed so many people had come to identify with Diana, many found it difficult to think what was happening. The rationalist traditions that still dominate British intellectual life feel much easier when they can disdain emotions. They are automatically perceived as ‘irrational’ and devalued as ‘feminine’. The fact many men also participated was interpreted as a ‘feminisation’ of culture and the influence of feminism as a cultural force.

But in its own way this failed to come to terms with the emotional lives of men and could reinforce the notion that ‘emotions’ are to be identified with the ‘feminine’. Many people were surprised by their own emotional responses and feelings of loss and grief for Diana, especially since they had not registered that she had been important to them. This has to do with the suddenness of her death and the tragic circumstances that were somehow intensified in the recognition that she had at last seemed to have found love and happiness in her personal life.

People have been sharply divided in the response to her death. Many people felt moved and touched by a sense of loss they had not expected. Others felt coerced by the intensity of the public mood, as if there had to be something wrong with them if they did not feel identified with the public mood of grief. Indifference could seem a sign of insensitivity. I was struck by the sharpness of these disagreements, as I was by my own feelings of loss and grief. I started writing about these different responses, in an attempt to make sense of them for myself. I was struck by the numbers of people concerned to collect newspapers as if they needed some kind of public record of those magical days. It was an extraordinary time that will remain vivid for so many people, a marker of a shift in British cultural life and a sign of the emergence of a ‘New Britain’. I think John Gray was right that the public response to Diana’s death ‘is a revelation of the country we have become’ (Guardian, Wednesday, 3 September 1997, p. 15) though the task remains of how we are to map out these cultural changes that have been part of Diana’s revolution.

The connections people were making with themselves and others in the days after Diana’s death also questioned the terms of a neo-liberalism that was shaping contemporary societies in the West. Paul du Gay has written that nowadays the character of the ‘entrepreneur’ as a category of person can no longer be seen as just one among a plurality of possible ethical personalities but rather as an ontological priority.³ Economic and social transformations that marked a globalised new capitalism work to devolve responsibility so that it is up to individuals to create narratives to explain their own lives and provide answers that previously the state would have offered. Individuals are rendered responsible for their own fates and they can only blame themselves if they turn out to fail or be ‘losers’.

For contemporary neo-liberal governments to govern better means governing less. Nikolas Rose identifies this as an ‘ethno politics’ which he thinks is intrinsic to New Labour and its Third Way. In his terms this shapes new modalities for folding authority into the soul of the individual as it instils a new ‘regime of subjectification’ that emphasises autonomy, freedom, choice, authenticity, enterprise and lifestyle. Individuals have to optimise themselves through ‘working on themselves’ in all spheres of social life. This enterprising self learns to govern itself through rules of conduct that refer to energy, initiative, calculation and personal responsibility. As Rose has it, the enterprising self is thus a calculating self, a self that calculates about itself and that works upon itself in order to better itself (p. 146).⁴

Where Beck might talk about a need to seek ‘biographical solutions to systematic contradictions’ (Beck, 2002: xxii),⁵ Rose coming with a reading of Foucault that draws upon a top-down vision of governmentality talks about the imperatives to work on yourself to maximise your inner potential that are framed externally through a technical–calculative rational framework. There is a narrative of individuals having to choose and manage themselves appropriately within a framework that gives no recognition to the ‘self’ or the ‘soul’ other than what is framed through prevailing social discourses. It is the ‘effect’ of these discourses that is brought into being through their practice.

But this leaves no space for a tension between emotional and psychic needs that were critical to a feminist and queer discourse in Rose’s ‘new technologies of freedom’. There is no psychic pain and suffering or hidden injuries that need to be addressed so that people can live more fulfilling lives and relationships. There is no space of recognition for a ‘crisis in subjectivity’ where young people can feel obliged, whatever their individual qualities and emotional needs, to produce forms of subjectivity that allow them to compete effectively in an uncertain world where there is tension for young people between the incessant cultural demand to ‘know who you are’ and the demand to mobilise their subjectivities to become successful entrepreneurs of the self.

Like much thought around reflexive modernisation and individuation, it still grants privilege to ideas of rationality and if it makes space for ideas of emotional life it tends to be an affect that is disciplined through these discourses and relationships. We need, as Anthony Elliot has recognised a ‘novel awareness of the creative character of imagination and desire’ that breaks with the hegemony of the modernist codes when it comes to personhood.⁶ We need different ways of understanding how human subjects make sense of these social transformations and the kind of inner tension this creates for themselves because they also want to live more meaningful lives and relationships. Rose has little sense of the transformative power of subjectivity and the ways people can change their lives since he assumes it is discourses that articulate and so make up subjectivities, and there is no sense of resistance shaped through alternative desires, needs and values.

The existential anxieties that young people are often obliged to live also calls for creative responses and new modes of being since as Ben Sanders recognises in his project on ‘twentysomethings?’ unlike their parent’s generation ‘they have never grown up expecting forms of work (or other social institutions) to provide a solid foundation for themselves, Rather, they have a form of resoluteness about themselves, and coping mechanism, that acknowledges that responsibility for the construction of their lives lies within themselves…’.⁷ Richard Sennett has recognised how new capitalist flexible worki...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Postmodern Imaginations and Cultural Memories of Grief
• 2 Memories, Myths, Icons and Images
• 3 Shock, Public Grief, and Spaces of Belonging
• 4 Authority, Masculinities and Emotional Lives
• 5 Citizenships, Multicultures and ‘Community’
• 6 Grief, Public Space and ‘People’s Power’
• 7 Symbolic Resistance, Love and Relationship
• 8 Cultural Memories, Vulnerability and Human Values
• 9 Democracy, ‘New Britain’, Freedom and Self-Invention
• 10 New Capitalism, Authority and Recognition
• 11 Global Media, Future Hopes and Cultural Memories
• 12 Conclusion: Postmodern Identities, Citizenships and the Re-invention of Authority
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index