White Sight and The King
If you were anywhere near media of any kind for the last week, kings will not have escaped your attention. White sight is incarnated in the figure of the “king” and attendant kingship. It’s fun to poke at the failings of the coronation—whether Charles saying “this is boring” or Camilla’s “I won” smirking—but the sight of the king anchors white supremacy. And it’s failing even at that. Sorry to be a killjoy.
The “king” is not any individual monarch but the imagined perfect viewpoint from which white sight sees what it sees. It is the point from which colonizing violence is surrogated. In the case of the plantation, the figure of the king was surrogated to the overseer, the one carrying his scepter, the other a stick of office and punishment.
Today, the scepter surrogates into the police truncheon, while kingship is the monumental statue. From this dominant viewpoint, the “king” orders white reality by the combination of surveillance and violence within the framework of hierarchy. Increasingly, though, any white person whatever is using sovereign violence as they please, creating chaos with which to justify further repression.
In what you might call legacy whiteness, in exchange for deference, the king served as a mirror with which to “fix,” in the photographic sense, white identity. As a mirror, what Scottish writer Tom Nairn famously called the “enchanted glass” of monarchy proper offered a display of pomp and pomposity sufficient to make deference to its racialized hierarchy feel meaningful. This mirror-stage of whiteness still asserts that whiteness is the fairest of them all.
As a mirror, kingship worked in the familiar way. A male-identified person imagines that they are the king, while a female-identified person imagines themselves as the princess or queen. Or so film theorist Laura Mulvey explained it back in 1975. But as Mulvey herself has since acknowledged, that binary is too simple, even in theory. Kingship has always allowed for multiple forms of identification, as the Van Dyck portrait of Charles I, still owned by the royal family, makes visible. But it’s still failing.
Mulvey said nothing explicitly about whiteness, although the whiteness of a classic Hollywood actor is presumed. But as the Meghan Markle affair has clearly demonstrated, the royal mirror operates a one-drop-of-blood rule. Even a famous, conventionally-beautiful actor fails that test. This t(a)int in the mirror—which, to be clear, is in no way a “flaw” except in white sight—induces a failure of white identification. In this way, it is modern. One-drop law was a 20th century innovation as part of Jim Crow.
The mirror sells the myth that nothing ever changes, that the tradition of whiteness is “timeless.” In fact, monarchy changes all the time. To take the British case, the monarchy was abolished in the 17th century; redefined as a constitutional monarchy in 1688; reimagined as an imperial pageant by Victoria; and most recently dramatized for television by Elizabeth II.
At the same time, kingship is and was always a double vision. In the medieval understanding of kingship that underpins the whole edifice, the king has two bodies. One is the actual body of the king, subject to disease and death like anyone else. It is this body allows for the imagined substitution of any (white) person in the mirror with the king.
The other is the unchanging and eternal King, the essence of Majesty who never dies, often understood as the “portrait of the king.” It was an offense of lèse-majesté to turn your back on the king’s picture because it was kingship, not a representation of it. This kingship is now called sovereignty, meaning that republics and other democracies all have it. It is why Michel Foucault famously said “In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king” or sovereign power. The individual body must be connected to this immaterial Majesty to have power.
The relation between the white body and sovereign power has become highly unstable since the 2008 financial crisis. By 2011, Nairn saw the monarchy as a surrogate for “English identity…to the symbolic supranationality of a Royal Crown and Family.” This “England” was both to dominate in the British archipelago and be subsumed into Europe. Nairn assumed that the far-right of the time expressed only “extinct racism.” Five years later Britain voted to leave the European Union in a fury of renewed white supremacy. Surrogacy had failed.
In the US, the sight of the king allows for a similar doubling. In recalling the American revolution, it expresses white supremacy, while allowing for armed insurrection in its defense against that very king. The cultural unconscious of whiteness is no more “logical” than any other set of desires and prohibitions, after all.
As political theorist Mark Neocleous puts it, “the King’s two bodies” were retained and transformed as a modern theory of power: “this state-machine is the most mystical body known.” Like the “Englishness” that so many English writers assume to be ineffable and unknowable, kingship-as-sovereignty gives whiteness it mystical power.
Mystical power is unpredictable. Sometimes it has been surrogated through the Leader, whether Boris Johnson or Donald Trump. Increasingly it routes through aggressive white identity—think Proud Boys—or the Nazi affiliations of the latest Texas mass shooter. The “mainstream” keeps hoping these people will return to order, or what “King” Charles calls “harmony.” They won’t. They think kingship adheres to them, in their white bodies, and that they all have the sovereign use of violence. Sorry to be a killjoy.