Mediated Death. Johanna Sumiala

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Yet another important contributor to the ‘denial of death’ thesis is social theorist Norbert Elias (1985), whose analysis of the social abandonment of dying people in modern society draws its power from the civilizing process. Elias argues: ‘Death is the problem of the living. Dead people have no problems’ (1985, p. 3). While Elias does not agree with Ariès’s depiction of death in medieval life as peaceful and ‘tame’ – pointing out that life in medieval feudal states was ‘passionate, violent, and therefore uncertain, brief and wild’ compared with the relatively predictable life we lead in highly industrialized societies – he shared the view that mortality in modern society is put into hiding. According to Elias (1985), the repression of death and dying in modern society (cf. Becker, 1973; Bauman, 1992a, 1992b) stems from a societal lack of adequate conceptual and emotional tools to face one’s own death.

The dilemma of mortality in modern society cannot be properly addressed without considering death as a taboo. Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer was one of the first scholars to popularize the notion that conversation about death constitutes a taboo in modern society. His work was clearly influenced by Freudian psycho-analytical theory. In his article ‘The Pornography of Death’, originally published in 1955 and reprinted in Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain in 1965, Gorer draws a parallel between death and sexuality, stating that the twentieth century has seen ‘an unremarked shift in prudery … copulation has become more and more mentionable, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon societies’ (Gorer, 1965, p. 193). Gorer connects this ‘prudery’ concerning death directly with what he terms the ‘pornography of death’. In Gorer’s thinking, social prudery in modern society prevents ‘natural’ death from being openly discussed. This leads to the pornographization of death, forcing society to come to terms with the inevitability of death in some other form – such as, I will argue in this book, hybrid media.

      Finally, one of the most radical theories pertaining to the problem of mortality in modern society and related denial of death is from Jean Baudrillard. In his seminal book L’échange symbolique et la mort (1976), translated into English as Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993), Baudrillard evaluates the ambivalent relationship between death and modern life through the lens of the suppression of symbolic exchange in modern capitalist society. Baudrillard maintains that modern capitalist society aims to abolish death and eliminate it from symbolic exchange in life. He argues: ‘We have desocialised death by overturning bioanthropological laws, by according it the immunity of science and by making it autonomous, as individual fatality’ (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 131). Elsewhere, Baudrillard claims:

      today, it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly; nothing else is as offensive as this. Death is a delinquency, and an incurable deviancy. The dead are no longer inflicted on any place or spacetime, they can find no resting place; they are thrown into a radical utopia. They are no longer even packed in and shut up, but obliterated.

      Baudrillard, 1993, p. 126

In Baudrillard’s view, this is a fatal condition of modern society. He draws on the work of Marcel Mauss on gift economy and exchange, bringing it into critical dialogue with Marxist political economy. For Baudrillard, the attempt to eliminate death in modern capitalist society destroys the fundamental logic of social life – that is, the symbolic exchange between life and death. When life and death are separated from each other in this way, they are banalized and lose their meaning – death becomes a commodity. Consequently, the further modern capitalist society runs from death by trying to naturalize and tame it in line with its own calculative logic, the emptier – and more dead inside – it becomes (cf. Arppe, 1992, pp. 133–7).

      Baudrillard’s radical idea to destroy this logic is to use its own tools to abolish it – the ‘hyperlogic of death’ (Arppe, 1992, p. 139). Michael Gane (1993), the author of the introduction to Symbolic Exchange and Death, explains Baudrillard’s idea as follows:

      Death must be played against death: a radical tautology that makes the system’s own logic the ultimate weapon. The only strategy against the hyperrealist system is some form of cover pataphysics, ‘a science of imaginary solutions’; that is, a science-fiction of the system’s reversal against itself at the extreme limit of simulation, a reversible simulation in a hyperlogic of death and destruction.

      Gane, 1993, pp. 4–5

For Baudrillard (1993, pp. 37–8), the radical form with which to resist the deadly logic of the capitalist modern society is terrorism. In Baudrillard’s thinking, terrorism resembles the sacrifice inherent in ancient ritual killings (see also Arppe, 1992, pp. 140–2). In modern capitalist society, which tries to tame death, the fatal and arbitrary death brought about by terrorism escapes the immanent and calculative logic of capitalism and brings death – for a moment – back to the logic of symbolic exchange. This is because, as Baudrillard (1993, p. 37) argues, ‘the system can easily compute every death, even war atrocities, but cannot compute the death-challenge or symbolic death’. In Baudrillard’s view, the radical hyperlogic of terrorist death can liberate death from being capitalism’s hostage and, thus, help to destroy the corrupt system and return it to the realm of symbolic exchange of life and death.

      While highly influential in modern social thought, the denial of death thesis and its varied intellectual developments associated with the dilemma of mortality in modern society have received intense criticism. Drawing on Allan Kellehear’s (1984) sociological work on death, Camilla Zimmermann and Gary Rodin (2004, p. 12) offer an insightful critique of the denial of death thesis. Zimmermann and Rodin critically assess five pieces of sociological ‘evidence’ that are commonly employed to support the thesis: (1) the taboo of conversation about death; (2) the medicalization of death; (3) the segregation of the dying from the rest of society; (4) the decline of mourning rituals; and (5) death-denying funeral practices. Zimmermann and Rodin confront the thesis by reading it against the idea of the modernization of society. They resist the idea that the institutionalization and the individualization of death are symptoms of a pathology of modern society. In their view, death has been restructured in modern society in line with the contemporary principles of progress, rationality, and efficiency – concepts that cannot be automatically thought of as signs of repression or denial (Zimmermann & Rodin, 2004).

In this book, I do not aim to justify or invalidate the denial of death thesis; rather, I aim to elaborate on this idea in the context of our contemporary lives, which are immersed in hybrid media. I am particularly interested in looking at the dilemma of mortality in modern society through the workings of death in hybrid media against three features discussed by Zimmermann and Rodin (2004): the decline of mourning rituals, the taboo of conversation about death, and segregation of the dying from the rest of society. My argument concerning mediated mourning rituals in present-day society consists of three interconnected elements. First, I argue that, in contrast to seeing a decline of mourning rituals in contemporary society, we currently witness expansion of ritual mourning as a profoundly mediated practice dispersed across diverse news media and social media platforms, as well as different actors. What follows is vernacularization and pluralization of mourning associated with increased public visibility of death in society. Second, I maintain that this re-invention and re-purposing of mediated mourning rituals in contemporary society is a highly ambivalent phenomenon and puts the social function of death rituals in limbo. Moreover, collective values and norms associated with appropriate public presentation of death become increasingly contingent. As a result, new public contestations around ritual mourning, status of victims, and death taboos emerge in modern society. Third, I claim that the relationships negotiated in ritual action, be it public mourning or commemoration, are also changing. The purpose of letting the deceased ‘rest in peace’ as an outcome of ritual activity is today more typically replaced in hybrid media by a commitment to keep relationships between the living and the dead alive in society. Due to the development of new digital communication technology – in particular, artificial intelligence – unique thought patterns are revealed to (re)categorize life and death as well as explore new ideas about digital existence, afterlife, and immortality (see СКАЧАТЬ