(Inter)Facing Death

Life in Global Uncertainty

Sam Han

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315446745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

In modern times, death is understood to have undergone a transformation not unlike religion. Whereas in the past it was out in the open, it now resides mostly in specialized spaces of sequestration—funeral homes, hospitals and other medical facilities. A mainstay in so-called traditional societies in the form of ritual practices, death was usually messy but meaningful, with the questions of what happens to the dead or where they go lying at the heart of traditional culture and religion. In modernity, however, we are said to have effectively sanitized it, embalmed it and packaged it—but it seems that death is back. In the current era marked by economic, political and social uncertainty, we see it on television, on the Internet; we see it almost everywhere. (Inter)Facing Death analyzes the nexus of death and digital culture in the contemporary moment in the context of recent developments in social, cultural and political theory. It argues that death today can be thought of as "interfaced, " that is mediated and expressed, in various aspects of contemporary life rather than put to the side or overcome, as many narratives of modernity have suggested. Employing concepts from anthropology, sociology, media studies and communications, (Inter)Facing Death examines diverse phenomena where death and digital culture meet, including art, online suicide pacts, the mourning of celebrity deaths, terrorist beheadings and selfies. Providing new lines of thinking about one of the oldest questions facing the human and social sciences, this book will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory, anthropology, sociology and cultural and media studies with interests in death.

1 Beyond finitude

The place of death in the modern human sciences

Introduction

Knowing that one is going to die has been associated with virtue across Eastern and Western schools of thought. Contrary to popular belief, the Stoics did not face death stoically. Rather, they thought it unnecessary, and even impossible, to be afraid of death. Their thinking was that since we are alive, we could never exist in a state of death. If we can never actually “be” dead, how could we be afraid of it? When we do die, then we will not be conscious of it. Epicurus’ solution was rooted in a simple tenet—it is impossible be afraid of a state that we could never occupy consciously.

The Stoics, however, did see a value in facing death. To look death in the eye is to see it as nothing exceptional but rather as the persistently open door. There was no need to fear it. The lesson, approaching the more contemporary, colloquial use of the term “stoic,” was to use the ever-open door as an opportunity to appreciate what we have while alive. The act of reminding ourselves what is good about life by keeping in view that it could all come to an end basically summarizes the Stoic ethic. In other words, the exposure to suffering acts somewhat immunologically.

But, what the Stoic ethic implies is that one necessarily has to be “reminded” of one’s own impending demise. So, what makes us “forget” in the first place? Is it simply a human reaction to cling to life as the Freudian reading of Eros would have it (Freud 2015)? Is it a product of the biological impulse to survive as identified by the theory of evolution (Dawkins 2016)? These questions are not answered all that meaningfully by the Stoics. In fact, what seems to be at play is the positing of a universal human condition with a penchant for ingratitude and disappointment. In the writings of Epictectus, one of the key figures of Stoicism, the role of philosophy is therapeutic, and thus precisely to alleviate such feelings. The good life is one devoid of anxiety and fear and one filled with peace of mind.

Yet, the Stoic prescription is death-awareness; the task is then to be reminded of death. Whether or not it makes us uncomfortable, “the prospect of death” and the “thought that you’re going to die, and someday the people you love are going to die,” will “ultimately make our lives much happier than they would otherwise be,” as one contemporary Stoic put it (Beck 2015). But one wonders whether anyone needs to go out of his or her way to be reminded of death in this day and age. To be told by contemporary Stoic philosophers such as William Irvine (Irvine 2009) or Massimo Pigliucci (Pigliucci 2018) that we need to think more about death perhaps needs to be qualified in times where 24-hour cable news, smartphone notifications and shared content on social media include freely floating images and videos of death. When reminders of death are so frequent, why has the Stoic attitude toward death not spread more widely?

Obviously, the arguable lack of death-awareness in contemporary culture cannot be seen simply as failure of Stoicism. In fact, the present book suggests that we do “face” death but in a way that differs greatly from when the Stoics were active but also even as recently as half a century ago when a philosophical trend initiated by Heidegger had arguably placed death at its core. Contrariwise, the book focuses on the technological context between figurations of death from the Stoics up to the ontological phenomenology of Heidegger and the digital present. The rise of digital culture, resulting from the permeation of digital technology into everyday life, I argue, has given us reason to think that a new orientation toward death. This is a direct outgrowth of not only the sheer amount of death imagery and video online but also due to the specific regime of aesthetics and practices facilitated by digitality. In fact, the broad argument of this book is that there is a form of death-awareness specific to contemporary digital culture, one which evidently has not resulted in either the Stoic attitude or what existential thinkers call “authenticity.” (This will be explored in greater depth later on.)

The analytic of finitude

One of the things this book has to establish is that there was a baseline awareness of death prior to the digital era. This may be a contentious claim, especially for some death studies scholars who suggest that the modern era has been characterized by the sequestering of death, resulting from an institutionalization of “denying” death, as Ernest Becker’s work had famously put it (Becker 1973). However, as I argue below, at least in the post-war period, in the United States and the West, there were many attempted philosophical détentes with death, which revolved around what Michel Foucault has called the “analytic of finitude” (Foucault 1992).

Finitude, for the uninitiated, is how Foucault describes the intellectual construction of the human being in modern empirical sciences. In highlighting the tensions between “the historical and transcendental,” as Béatrice Han-Pile puts it (Han 2002), Foucault attempts to illustrate the episteme of the modern era through the construction of what he calls the Figure of Man. “Before the end of the eighteenth century,” he pronounces, “man did not exist—anymore than the potency of life, the fecundity of labor, or the historical density of language” (Foucault 1992: 336). This “recent creature” is an epistemological construct, and bound by various historical forces, such as “labor, life and language.” In Foucault’s words:

No doubt, on the level of appearances, modernity begins when the human being begins to exist within his organism, inside the shell of his head, inside the armature of his limbs, and in the whole structure of his physiology; when he begins to exist at the center of labor by whose principles he is governed and whose product eludes him; when he lodges his thought in the folds of a language so much older than himself that he cannot master its significations, even though they have been called back to life by the insistence of his words.

(Foucault 1992: 346)

This strange “doublet” of being both the object of modern scientific knowledge as well as that which “renders all knowledge possible” is why Foucault describes the “man” in the analytic of finitude as “empirico-transcendental” (Foucault 1992: 347).

By bringing to light the duality, and disjunctive history, of modern subjectivity, Foucault lays bare what Heidegger before him called the “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) of human existence. After Kant, Western thought could not simply continue to stick with the delusion of the universality of the nature of human being. Thus, with Kant but also Heidegger, Foucault situates the human being within a “world”—that is within space and time, and decidedly not as some kind of universal spirit progressing in a linear manner, as Hegel saw it, for instance.

While Foucault’s stance on existentialism is widely known to be negative, especially with reference to his dismissal of Sartre as being from the 19th century, there is a more complex picture to be gleaned regarding the relationship of existential thought and Foucault. Although that issue is in itself interesting, others have explored it further (May 2005). What is of greater importance to the intellectual questions of the present book is how Foucault’s interpretation of the development of the human sciences is defined by his understanding of the limits of human existence. Although, according to Foucault’s archaeological method, this is a move inaugurated by Kant and then later concretized by Heidegger, it is useful, in terms of gauging the proliferation of the notion of finitude in popular consciousness, to look at Sartre, who, as the historian Ethan Kleinberg has put it, “popularized” Heidegger, first in France, and later throughout much of the world (Kleinberg 2007: 111). Although Sartre is prolific, his work, as it relates to finitude can be captured by his encounters—both implicit and explicit—with the work of Heidegger. An extended analysis of this encounter is unnecessary and, quite frankly, has been done by others, including Kleinberg himself and Mark Poster (Poster 1977). But it suffices to say that Sartre’s work is founded upon Heideggerian themes of existence, transcendence and choice, and this includes the more formally philosophical works as well as the works of fiction and essays.

Returning to the analytic of finitude, for Sartre, it appears in the term “facticity.” Both finitude and facticity can be understood as ways of expressing the structural or environmental context of human existence. The concrete, as opposed to metaphysical, aspects of one’s existence, including space, time, place of birth, language, among other things, limit an individual. Or, as Karl Jaspers calls them, “boundary situations,” referring to the historical relativity, death, suffering, struggle and guilt, set the context of human existence. But, in “existential philosophy,” the term that Paul Tillich uses to describe this line of thought, one’s facticity hardly determines the entirety of one’s existence. It merely sets it up. Human beings have the capacity to respond to their circumstances. This is what constitutes “transcendence.” Indeed, what allows for the existentialist credo of “existence over essence” is precisely this ability to take a position, or an attitude, toward one’s limits. As Sartre writes, “man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself” (Sartre 2007: 22). Thus, one can create separation from one’s own facticity and deal with it in various ways. Human existence therefore consists of both “facticity,” that is those properties that are “objective,” as well as “transcendence,” which is the subjective attempt of understanding those properties and subsequently developing a position toward them, resulting in the individual being able to make choices and decisions, culminating in what are called “projects.” The self is therefore not given but rather constantly made and remade within a situation. It is not simply Being but rather being-in-the-world. To quote Sartre again,

man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills exists, just as he wills himself to be after he exists, just as he wills himself to be after being thrown into existence, man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.

(Sartre 2007: 22)

But a critical aspect of this indeterminate existence is the resultant freedom that opens up the self to anxiety. The “thrownness” of human existence can sometimes be felt as “abandonment.” Without some metaphysical canopy, such as a cosmic belief system or a monotheistic God, the human being is “without any support or help.” The human being is not free but rather “condemned to be free, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything he does” (Sartre 2007: 29). Anxiety, then, is a vulnerability, a term that we will return to in the course of this book, which is part and parcel of post-metaphysical existence as such. Unlike fear, there is no direct source of the threat. Anxiety (or angst) arises when the attempts at transcendence are interrupted in some way. This can sometimes arise as a result of the experience of alienation or estrangement much in the way of the fictional works of Kafka. In other words, when one’s orientation to the world loses meaning, there is the potential for “groundlessness.” One’s self-making in the world—one’s engagements or relations to it—therefore, must continually provide a “ground” for existence. Without it, one risks the creeping horizon of “nothingness.” When there is no practical foothold into the world, in the form of “projects,” in the parlance of existentialism, the self encounters his or her own finitude—death. After all, it is through these projects—one’s work, one’s relationships, one’s reflexive self-identity—that one “is.” Without them, he or she “is” not anything.

It is here that Sartre and Heidegger along with others in existential philosophy locate an opportunity. The void of nothingness may cause anxiety but it is also the occasion to live authentically and accept the very finitude of human existence. As Tillich points out, “finitude is the very structure of the human mind” (Tillich 2006: 98). In existential thought, the fear of death, guilt and despair are all “default settings” of human existence, offering up an illustration of our freedom, which beckons us to constantly choose and make decisions about what to do. In the face of nothingness or death, I cannot simply act in accordance with an externally prescribed model but must, as a result of the seriousness of facing death, really make tough choices with a degree of self-awareness that, without the prospect of death, would be made more nonchalantly. As the philosopher of religion Merold Westphal has put it, it adds “poignancy on how we live our life” (Westphal 1987: 97). It breaks us out of the “tranquilized everydayness,” in which death hardly registers. For most of us, we live in a haze of self-deception. To be-toward-death is, for many thinkers of finitude, is an achievement when perched in this light. It amounts to a freeing of ourselves, and even an acceptance of responsibility that comes with asking the question, “Have you fulfilled the task of becoming a self and have you used the gift of selfhood wisely (Westphal 1987: 101)”? It is having the “courage to be oneself” (Westphal 1987: 98).

Much like the Stoics, we can say that the analytic of finitude as exhibited by its existential adherents, upholds a view of death as not an end to life but as that which gives it a more serious quality. In facing death, the human being reconsiders his or her own existence—and at least according to the “ethics” of finitude—dampens down the alienation and absurdity of modern life. It suggests that by leaning into the terror of nonbeing and death, the self can live whatever is left of life in a more “authentic” or “responsible” manner. As Westphal describes it, “the absolute and unsurpassable limits of human existence” become the “possible vehicles for entering into freedom” (Westphal 1987: 102). This is precisely the paradox of death in the service of life.

All death or just my death?

One feature of existential thought’s position on death is that it is from the perspective of the individual. From Karl Jaspers to Heidegger to Sartre, the death, which puts into question the “impersonal mode of social existence,” is precisely one’s own death. There is very little—if any—mention of the impact of the death of others. Even Tillich calls existential philosophy a philosophy of “personal existence.” The same can be said of other philosophers, who also describe the work of Heidegger as the philosophy of “personal existence” (Blackham 1952: 97). In one very influential primer on existential thought, the interpretation of Heidegger’s conception of “death” is as “my death.” Thus “my death” is the “capital possibility” that becomes the “clue to authentic living” because it offers the truth of the situation that is “hidden from us by our daily preoccupation.” Blackham, for instance, offers explications in the first person of the particular form of amor fati in Heidegger. As he writes, “I anticipate death not by suicide but by living in the presence of death as always immediately possible.” The very possibility of authentic living is to “accept” death and thus “wake up” to the contingency of existence itself and “refuse to be deceived” and not reject the world. It is within this “detachment” that the “power” of authentic personal existence” springs up (Blackham 1952: 97).

In other words, the call to action of existential thought is entirely at the level of the subjective. This is a charge that has been leveled at Sartre especially, but with good reason since even he describes his project as “subjectivist” (Sartre 2007: 23). “Choice”—that is, the individual subject’s ability to choose what he or she will be—is what constitutes freedom. The centrality of individual choice, according to Sartre at least, results in a “direct responsibility” toward others. “It is not a screen that separates us from action,” he states, “but a condition of action itself” (Sartre 2007: 27). While this may open up Sartre’s thought to something like deontological ethics, especially with the emphasis on the individual responsibility toward the moral principle of authenticity as opposed to the greater good, it is pretty clear that the “ideal process,” if one wants to think of it this way, is cumulative. In other words, as more and more individuals live authentically, there will be less alienation, estrangement, less paralyzing dread and, with that, more responsibility to others.

This is not meant to be a criticism of any kind to potentially scaling up existentialist ethics. Although that is a rather interesting question, it is largely beside the point here. What is of greater interest is that the understanding of death is individualized in existential thought. There, one’s own death plays a key function. The “nothingness” that Sartre refers to is abstract but the implication is clearly one’s own finitude. The “being-toward-death” that Heidegger writes about is also a state of Dasein. It is not the fact of death as such that triggers the enlightened, authentic state of being but rather the possibility that it would affect the individual.

The sustained focus on the death of the individual in existential thought can then be understood as a product of an ethical necessity occasioned, acco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the (inter)face in an era of pervasive death
• 1 Beyond finitude: the place of death in the modern human sciences
• 2 “Let’s die together”: online suicide pacts in East Asia (with Nurul Amillin Hussain)
• 3 Rethinking personhood: death selfies, digital remains and dividuals
• 4 The coronation of Choi Jin-sil: celebrity death, media events and civil religiosity
• 5 Terror as death regime: the spectacle of beheading
• 6 The state, death and memory in the work of Ai Weiwei
• 7 Image-ing the tragic: the metapicture of banal suffering
• 8 Life in an uncertain era: biopolitics, thanatopolitics and necropolitics
• Index