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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
How do the dead live among us today? Approaching death from the perspective of media and communication studies, anthropology, and sociology, this book explains how the all-encompassing presence of mediated death profoundly transforms contemporary society. It explores rituals of mourning and the livestreaming of death in hybrid media, as well as contemporary media-driven practices of immortalization. Sumiala draws on examples ranging from the iconic deaths of Margaret Thatcher and David Bowie to those of ordinary people ritualized on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. In addition, this book examines digital mourning of global events including the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Coronavirus pandemic. Mediated Death is a must-read for scholars and students of communication studies, as well as general readers interested in exploring the meaning of mediated death in contemporary society.
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Seitenzahl: 314
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
1 Mediating Death
‘Madness That Is Shared Is Not Madness’
The Problem of Mortality
The Myth of Media Overcoming Death
The Structure of the Book
2 A Brief History of an Idea
Early Spectacles of Death
Envisioning Death
Death in Hybrid Media
3 The Event of Death
Time of Death Events
Spatial Endeavours
Death Event as Ritual
4 Rethinking Mourning Rituals
Hybrid Grief in Social Media
Networked Mourning
Vernacular Sorrow
5 Ritual Contestations
Who Counts as an Ideal Victim?
Vicarious Witnessing
Livestreaming Death
6 Rituals Connect and Separate
Remembering Not to Forget
Ritual Insensibility
Whose Memories Matter?
Multifaceted Connections
7 The Quest for Post-Mortality
Floating Death
The Dilemma of Immortality
‘Who Wants to Live Forever?’
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Begin Reading
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Preface
Figure 0.1
Covid-19 mural in Helsinki.
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
The funeral of President John F. Kennedy: The family in mourning.
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Manchester worker bee – a mourning symbol after the UK arena attack in 2017.
Figure 4.2
‘Je suis Charlie’ meme on Edward Munch’s ‘The Cry’.
Figure 4.3
Street mural of David Bowie in Brixton, London.
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
The funeral of Margaret Thatcher.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
The death of George Floyd. Black Lives Matter movement meme.
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
The death of Diego Maradona. ‘The old Maradona’.
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MEDIATED DEATH
Johanna Sumiala
polity
Copyright © Johanna Sumiala 2022
The right of Johanna Sumiala to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UKPolity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4455-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Sumiala, Johanna, author.Title: Mediated death / Johanna Sumiala.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A leading scholar’s robust analysis of the meaning of death in digital society”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2021017654 (print) | LCCN 2021017655 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509544530 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509544547 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509544554 (epub) | ISBN 9781509550418 (pdf)Subjects: LCSH: Death--Social aspects. | Death in mass media. | Digital media--Social aspects.Classification: LCC HQ1073 .S86 2022 (print) | LCC HQ1073 (ebook) | DDC 306.9--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017654LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017655
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
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Preface
My mother died in January 2007. She was 58 years old and had stomach cancer. In one of her last public appearances, less than a month before she passed away, she stood at the corner of the Finnish National Gallery just opposite the National Theatre – a historical site in Helsinki, the capital of Finland – patiently waiting to be taken to a doctor by my father and me. I will never forget her appearance as she waited for us on that breezy day, trying to look as casual as possible while, in reality, she was something else. Her face had lost its gloss and her body had lost its flesh – she was only skin and bones. All joy had abandoned her. This scene struck me: I was miserable, as I knew that I would lose her soon, but I was also perplexed when I realized that I had never seen in public anyone – let alone my own family member – so close to death as my mother was in her ill state standing there in open, urban space. I do not believe that I am alone with these thoughts. As claimed by many modern theorists of death, such as Tony Walter (1994), middleage and middle-class death is carefully hidden behind the doors of hospitals, hospices, or private homes; it is kept away so as to avoid disturbing the busy lives of the living. Modern death is institutionalized and managed by professionals and medical specialists. It is effectively nothing that we – as the living – should be bothered with in our everyday public lives.
Of course, public life in contemporary society is not free of death. On the contrary, death in its mediated form is present everywhere. We cannot walk through a city without encountering at least some form of mediated death. News and tabloid papers sold at stores and kiosks are full of death – because death sells. When we go to the movies, read books in cafes, or play games on our mobile phones on the train on the journey back from work or school, we encounter death. News media and entertainment feature, to a great extent, crime, violence, fatal attractions, illness, and loss. But we do not even need to leave our home to be surrounded by mediated death; no matter where we are or what we are doing, a mere glance at our smartphones is enough to be faced with death, as it is seemingly ever-present on news and social media. We learn about and post about death on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and we mourn, debate, and gossip about death in Messenger and WhatsApp. In this modern state of hypermediation of social life (Powell, 2015; Scolari, 2015), death is more present than we even realize. I find this new social reality – which is immersed in mediated death – both intriguing and uncanny; it certainly warrants a scholarly endeavour.
Looking back at 2007, the year my mother passed away, I recognize that this personal encounter with death has influenced my academic writing. While death as an academic topic was not entirely new to me, my first-hand experience of it led me to begin exploring it in more theoretical and empirical detail. I was captivated by the puzzle of the simultaneous presence and absence, exceptionality and everydayness of death in contemporary society. That same year, a school shooting took place near my hometown of Helsinki. A teenage boy, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, opened fire at his high school in Jokela. He killed eight people and wounded many others before ultimately taking his own life. At the time, this type of mass violence by young perpetrators was unheard of in Finland, though it was not totally unknown to the Finnish public. News on school shootings in other parts of the world had previously made headlines. The Jokela school shooting was quickly transformed into a media event of a disruptive nature. As a scholar of media and communication, I wanted to develop a greater understanding of this death spectacle and the role of the media in its public ritualization (Sumiala & Tikka, 2010; Sumiala, 2013a). In the years that followed, I continued on this scholarly path and explored public death as a social phenomenon in various cases and contexts of national and international significance. Some of these subjects are incorporated into this book, including the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Sumiala, 2015), the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris (Sumiala et al., 2018), Finnish school shootings (Sumiala, 2019a), the death of Vilja Eerika Tarkki (Sumiala, 2013b), and the death of pop icon David Bowie (Sumiala, 2019b). Of course, I have also conducted new empirical research for this book on, for example, the death of football legend Diego Maradona, the Christchurch massacre, and the deaths of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, two victims of racialized violence in the United States and global symbols of the Black Lives Matter social movement. In addition to case studies, I have also empirically investigated some emerging death-related digital phenomena, such as livestreaming suicides and digital immortalization, not to forget digital ritualization related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the last ten years of my scholarly venture into mediated death, media as a field of research has changed drastically, as have the social and public rituals triggered by death. When my mother died, I did not post the news on Facebook or on any other social media platform. It was not a thing to do in my social bubble at the time. I would have found it odd, and probably disrespectful to her memory. If the same situation were to occur in today’s world, I am uncertain as to what I would do. In recent years, I have learnt about the sudden death of friends through social media. I have sent my digital condolences on Facebook, including broken-heart and crying emojis in my posts in an attempt to express my sympathy for the bereaving family and share my feelings of loss with a virtual community. I have also participated in public mourning rituals organized as Facebook events. For some of us, however, hybrid media mourning and commemoration are not enough. I have noticed an emerging interest in digital afterlife, immortality, and life with ‘digital zombies’, as Debra Bassett (2015) characterizes this type of digitally immersed, post-mortal existence.
This book constitutes an attempt to make sense of these historical, social, and cultural transformations in the mediation of death, and to understand how the shifting dynamics in our communication environment shape the multitude of ritual responses that we, as inhabitants of a society saturated by hybrid media, generate to cope with death, and the fear of annihilation that it triggers. In the words of media theorist Mark Deuze (2012), we can only ‘imagine life outside media’. Hence, every study of death as mediated in present-day hybrid media is, in fact, an investigation into the meaning and significance of death in contemporary society.
As I began to put the various pieces of this manuscript together, a death event of an unimaginable scale was unfolding in hybrid media. In February and March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic stretched across the globe, halting societies, closing borders, and forcing people to stay home. Death as mediated was the main news story for months. Bodies laid on the streets and in hotels, mass graves, overcrowded hospitals, traumatized medical workers, desperate family members, lost politicians, and angry crowds inundated our public lives through all forms of media, making it impossible to escape death.
Importantly, something else happened. People did not just stare at the rising death toll on the news – they started to act. Rituals of mourning, solidarity, and support spread throughout hybrid media. People were clapping, banging kettles, and singing together from their balconies throughout Europe and the world, and these gatherings were recorded and posted on social media. Italians sang the old partisan song ‘Bella Ciao’ to keep up their spirits during the lockdown. In the UK, people gathered to offer thanks to the National Health Service, and children drew rainbows to foster hope (Sumiala, 2021). These symbolic acts demonstrated the power of mediated rituals to unify people in the face of ubiquitous public death. Unsurprisingly, however, many other types of symbolic performances and rituals circulated throughout hybrid media. People held demonstrations against government decisions to restrict people’s right to move freely by closing down businesses and other institutions. Conspiracy theories about the virus emerged in hybrid media. As of the publication of this book, these phenomena are ongoing. New waves and virus mutations continue to make headlines alongside the news of vaccination campaigns. While we cannot be certain of how our lives will continue to be shaped by the virus in the near – let alone the more distant – future, there is one thing that we do know: death as hypermediated has left a historical mark in the collective memory of the inhabitants of our digitally immersed society.
Figure 0.1 COVID-19 mural in Helsinki.
Courtesy of Ester Speeänen.
Book projects are always collective efforts in several respects, and this book is no exception. I could not have pulled this project together without the encouragement, inspiration, and support I received from my colleagues. I wish to thank the international community of scholars on media and death, of which I am proud to be a part. Special thanks go to Barbie Zelizer, Lilie Chouliaraki, and John Durham Peters for the intellectual inspiration and insight that you have shared with me during the process of writing this book. I must also offer my warm thanks to Amanda Lagerkvist for the many philosophical – if not existential – dialogues that we have had on this very topic. Thank you, Dorthe Refslund Christensen – and Kjetil Sandvik, who is somewhere out there – for your founding work on media, death, and continuous bonds, and for your efforts in building up and maintaining the Nordic network of online death; it would not be the same without you. I also want to thank Tony Walter and Tal Morse for our conversations and your work on media, society, and death, which I have found extremely helpful in thinking about the interplay between death in society, news, and social media. In addition, I want to share my thanks to David Hesmondhalgh, whose academic interest in popular music and culture enlightened my work on the life and death of David Bowie and made me realize that what we consider ‘real’ life in academic work and the world of ‘fiction’ can sometimes overlap in the most curious way.
Three academic institutions have been vital in providing the necessary means and support to finalize this book. I wish to thank my home institution, the University of Helsinki, and, in particular, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, where I started this project. The Austrian Academy of Sciences and its lead professor, Dr Mathias Karamasin, generously offered me the chance to focus on my writing in Spring 2019. The London School of Economics and Political Science and Professor Nick Couldry in its Department of Media and Communications kindly invited me as a visiting fellow and provided important support throughout the writing process. For external financial support, I want to express my gratitude to The Finnish Nonfiction Writers Association for the grant that I was awarded in the very early stage of this project.
‘Home is where your heart is’, they say. I wish to express my warm thanks for their co-authorship, intellectual encouragement, collegial support, and friendship to my Finnish colleagues, who have so generously offered their care and have helped me with various intellectual and practical challenges. Thank you, Katja Valaskivi, Minttu Tikka, Anu Harju, Salli Hakala, Lotta Lounasmeri, Lilly Korpiola, and many others with whom I have had a chance to share this academic and personal journey. Thanks for bearing with me during the not-so-cheerful moments of this project.
I have been fortunate to have worked with numerous wonderful research assistants. Thank you, Maiju Lehikoinen, Annaliina Niitamo, Roosa Kontiokari, Anna-Liisa Heino, and Alli Wartiovaara for your precise work on polishing this manuscript. I must also express my warmest thanks to Polity Press and its supportive and highly professional editorial staff, including Mary Savigar, Ellen McDonald-Kramer, and Stephanie Homer. Any shortcomings of this book are mine and mine alone.
Finally, I wish to thank my family. Janne – my life companion and a fellow academic – not only has the brain and the heart but also the stomach to listen to my endless morbid reflections on death, be it at the breakfast table, while watching telly, or on a highway driving to our summer cottage. I love the way that you say, ‘my wife, a scholar of mediated death ritual’ with a certain tone of your voice. For my final thanks, I want to dedicate this book to my two beautiful daughters, Elisa and Ester – now young adults. I gave you birth, but it is you who have given me so much life, meaning, and joy on my earthly journey that it almost hurts to think about it. Thank you.
1Mediating Death
Death is ultimately nothing more than the social line of demarcation separating the ‘dead’ from the ‘living’: therefore, it affects both equally.
Baudrillard, 1993, p. 127
On 20 January 2014, Mrs Hayley Cropper (played by British actress Julie Hesmondhalgh), terminally ill of pancreatic cancer, took her own life in the iconic Coronation Street, the longest-running soap opera in the history of television (Wilson, 2014). Hayley, with no chance of recovery, decided to end her suffering before the illness could cause her unbearable pain. This decision was not easily made, with the final, decisive act being the culmination of months of slow-building television. The tragic screening was heavily publicized on ITV throughout the previous weekend. British media prepared viewers for it by providing a space for a public debate about whether Hayley’s decision was morally justified. The show’s producers brought experts into the studio to discuss Hayley’s death. The death scene played out in a discreet manner. Hayley was shown sleeping away in the arms of her loving husband, Roy. After the episode, information on several humanitarian helplines appeared on the screen to offer help to any who may have been disturbed by the scene. In the days that followed, Hayley’s death was widely re-screened and discussed throughout British mainstream media. The next peak in public interest in Coronation Street centred around an episode featuring Hayley’s funeral, which was bursting with emotion. Her coffin, brightly decorated with painted flowers, was brought to a ceremony hall accompanied by the iconic Queen song ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. The camera followed the main characters as Hayley’s relatives, friends, and neighbours participated in the ceremony. Many were moved – some were in tears – while Roy struggled silently with his emotions. The feeling of ‘sharing the moment’ was palpable; it could be felt on both sides of the screen.
Many years after Hayley’s mediated death aired on TV, her death and funeral scenes still appear on YouTube and stimulate collective emotion (ReadySalted80, 2014). The comments on these YouTube clips reveal the heterogeneous reactions of ordinary people to this mediated death. At a glance, the comments indicate that many were moved by Hayley’s death. Some say that they still miss her and react positively to the funeral setting, the decorated coffin, and the music. Other commenters make an explicit connection to their personal experiences, stating that Hayley’s death and funeral remind them of points in their lives at which they lost relatives and loved ones. However, there are also commenters who express feelings of antipathy and resentment, saying, for example, that they did not like Hayley’s character in the series. Some commenters even criticize others’ mediated mourning over Hayley – as she was ‘only’ a fictional character and did not die for ‘real’.
The comments do not offer much context. We do not know who these people on social media are or have a sense of their level of involvement with the series. As such, we can say nothing concretely about their motivations for participating in this digital discussion triggered by Hayley’s mediated death. And yet these people are coming together to share this death event on social media. In leaving their mark, they create social life around this peculiar death. Thus, we may characterize this type of death as simultaneously ‘virtual’ and ‘real’, ‘spectacular’ and ‘mundane’, ‘strange’ and ‘ordinary’ – all features that I claim are characteristic of modern mediated death.
Furthermore, Hayley Cropper’s death invites us to think about the workings of death in modern, digitally saturated society. What makes Hayley’s death interesting for our purposes is its obscurity as a social and cultural phenomenon and its ubiquitous and hybrid media saturation. The character, who dies, is fictional; the public, who participate in this death event, are ‘virtual’, as they associate, connect, and identify with Hayley’s fatal story online and through mainstream media. However, as Caroline Kitch and Janice Hume (2008, p. xiv) point out, ‘death stories are less about the dead than about the living’. Additionally, Hayley’s death stirred emotions, morals, and values well beyond the soap opera’s storyline; consequently, her death became an indicator of social life and the way in which it expresses itself in modern society (cf. Metcalf & Huntington, 1997, p. 2) – the topic that I aim to understand in this book.
In this effort, I am interested in the kind of mediated death that attracts public attention in digital media, whether through online news stories by journalists or posts uploaded on social networks by ordinary people. Hannah Arendt (1990 [1958]) has famously argued that the public is the essence of the social. In her work, acting in the public space – shared by others – is essential to a fulfilled human existence. Today, not only journalists but also ordinary people using diverse digital media platforms have the means to act in public space and establish communication between life and death and, therefore, shape social reality as it pertains to the loss of life and how it impacts the living. It is fair to assert that, today, death in its public and profoundly hypermediated form (cf. Powell, 2015; Scolari, 2015), a concept that points here to the complex processes that shape the public presence of death in today’s society, has also become hybridized (Chadwick, 2013; Graham et al., 2013; cf. Kraidy, 2005). Andrew Chadwick (2013, p. 9) argues that ‘hybridity alerts us to the unusual things that happen when distinct entities come together to create something new that nevertheless has continuities with the old’. In his work, Chadwick (2013) refers in particular to the interaction between journalistic news media and social media. I wish to argue in this book that the digitally immersed hybridization of death across different communication platforms alerts us to the curious phenomena that take place as death meets modern media, and the social implications embedded in these hypermediated assemblages (see also Sumiala et al., 2018).
‘Madness That Is Shared Is Not Madness’
The concept of thinking about death through the lens of social life and, in turn, society is by no means new (cf. Howarth, 2007a). Hence, we must turn for a while to classical social theory. Already in the writings of the founding fathers of sociology, death bears a role in understanding the nature of social life. Émile Durkheim (1995 [1912]), one of the key thinkers in the early social theory of ritual, created a theory of the origin of social life in which the funerary rituals of aboriginal people play a significant role. Max Weber (1930) developed his theory of the spirit of capitalism by emphasizing death in his analysis of the Puritan belief in predestination. For both Durkheim and Weber, death was not primarily a question of the end of individual human life, but one of rituals and beliefs that were critical in the formation or development of society (Walter, 2008).
Among more contemporary social and cultural theorists, Zygmunt Bauman (2001), Peter Berger (1969), Ernest Becker (1973), Philippe Ariès (1977), Norbert Elias (1985), and Jean Baudrillard (1993) have all theorized death in modern society. Zygmunt Bauman (2001, pp. 2–3) discusses society as a tragic act of sharing. For Bauman, society constitutes a fatal condition associated with our mortality and is something that we, as human beings, cannot change.
‘society’ is another name for agreeing and sharing, but also the power which makes what has been agreed and is shared dignified …. ‘Living in society’ – agreeing, sharing and respecting what we share – is the sole recipe for living happily (if not forever after). Custom, habit and routine take the poison of absurdity out of the sting of the finality of life.
Bauman, 2001, p. 2
Society … is ‘a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning’. ‘Mad’ are only the unshared meanings. Madness is no madness when shared.
Bauman, 2001, p. 2
For Bauman, society is a collective arrangement for muddling through with the tragic condition of mortality. He claims that we need customs, habits, and routines to take ‘the poison of absurdity out of the sting of the finality of life’. Taking inspiration from Durkheim’s (1995 [1912]), Weber’s (1930), and Bauman’s (2001) work on death and society, I wish to advance thinking about mediated ritual as a central means of coping with death and its social consequence in modern society immersed in hybrid media communication. Another influential figure who has contributed to our understanding of death in social theory is Peter Berger (1969, p. 52); he argues that ‘every human society is, in the last resort, men banded together in the face of death’. In other words, we create social order to stave off the chaos and anomie brought about by death. Although they come from different intellectual traditions, Durkheim, Weber, Bauman, and Berger all presume that death is a powerful element in the constitution of social life.
The Problem of Mortality
While the connection between death and society is well established in the social theoretical literature, it remains a connection that is considered highly ambivalent and complex. We may call this the dilemma of mortality in modern society. In the literature, modern society is often characterized in social thought as ‘death denying’. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker claims that ‘the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity … to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man’ (Becker, 1973, p. ix). This denial, Becker argues, is a key mechanism for modern social life (to overcome death) and, consequently, for the continuation of society.
The idea of modern society as death denying has not developed separately from history. One of the most cited thinkers in the history of Western death is Phillippe Ariès (1977), who asserts that there have been four overlapping periods in the social and cultural history of ‘Western’ death: the eras of ‘tame death’, ‘death of the self’, ‘death of the other’, and ‘invisible death’ – the last phase consisting of elements of denial of death. The era that characterizes the first millennium, ‘tame death’, describes the condition of a natural acceptance of death as the end of life. In this period, death was considered too common to be feared; people observed, in Ariès’s thinking, an explicit connection between the afterlife or otherworld and life on Earth. During the era of ‘death of the self’, which, according to Ariès, lasted until the eighteenth century, people began to play a more reflexive and active role in their perception of death. In this era, death no longer meant merely the weakening of life but, rather, the destruction of the self. Hence, the role of institutional religion (the Church) was crucial in maintaining authority over death during this period. Later, amid the development of natural science and the declining role of religious institutions in society, authority over death was gradually transferred to medicine and medical doctors. In this era, that of ‘death of the other’, death began to be seen as a social problem demanding scientific and professional control. By the nineteenth century, death was viewed as a staging post for reunion in the hereafter. There was a shift from the demise of the self to that of loved ones (family members and kin). Finally, according to Ariès, the twentieth century is characterized by an era of ‘forbidden’ or ‘invisible death’, a historical condition in which death is removed from ‘public’ display – such as at home, where loved ones can easily gather to say their goodbyes – and moved to hospitals and nursing homes. Ariès refers to this phase as ‘the lie’ in modern Western society. While he believes that the original motive was to shield the dying from the unpleasant reality of terminal illness, in the early twentieth century it became ‘no longer for the sake of the dying person, but for society’s sake, for the sake of those close to the dying person’ that this ‘procedure of hushing up’ had to occur. In this era, death was not to be mentioned so as to avoid ‘the disturbance and the overly strong and unbearable emotion caused by the ugliness of dying and by the very presence of death in the midst of a happy life, for it is henceforth given that life is always happy or should always seem to be so’ (Ariès, 1974, 87; see also Zimmermann & Rodin, 2004). For Ariès, death in modern society is ‘shameful and forbidden’; it is something that must be ‘hushed up’ so as to avoid interrupting the pleasant rhythm of modern social life (cf. Jacobsen, 2016). In other words, it must be repressed.
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.
