Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)Representability (Intellect Books - Culture, Disease, and Well-Being)

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First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. 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 written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Front cover image: “Secunda musculorum tabula”, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543). Artist: Jan Stephen van Calcar. The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. Cover design: Jenny Scott Copy-editor: Jennifer Alluisi Typesetting: John Teehan ISBN 978–1–84150–322–6 / EISBN 978-1-84150-542-8 Culture, disease, and well-being (Print) ISSN 2042-177X Culture, disease, and well-being (Online) ISSN 2042-1788 Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

Contents

List of Figures...................................................................................viii



Acknowledgments...............................................................................ix

Introduction......................................................................................... 1 Tristanne Connolly Classical Death: Comedy and Tragedy 1. Life, Death, and the In-Between: The Duck-Rabbit/ The Face of the Clown........................................................................ 21 Alan Blum 2. The Illness of Hope, the Cure of Truth and the Difference of Principle: A Reflexive Analysis of Antigone’s and Meursault’s Confrontations with Death.............................................43 Kieran Bonner Enlightenment and Romanticism: Aestheticizing the Corpse 3. Reflexive Vectors: Art, Anatomy and Death in Cowper and Gamelin..........................................................................59 Morgan Tunzelmann

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Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

4. “Mother of Unworthy Woe”: Infant Death and Sentimental Maternity in British Romantic Women’s Poetry and Midwifery Books................................................................................ 77 Tristanne Connolly 5. Speaking of Death: Remembrance and Lamentation........................97 Jan Plecash Memorialization and the City 6. Enjoyment’s Petrification: The Luxor Obelisk in a Melancholic Century..................................................................... 123 Michael Follert 7. Barcelona, In Memoriam: The Tension Between Urban Renovation and the Past.................................................................. 139 Marta Marín-Dòmine 8. Jewish Victims and German Youth: Questions of Pedagogy and Responsibility at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.........................................................................151 Elke Grenzer 9. X Marks the Spot: New Orleans Under Erasure............................... 169 Kevin Dowler 10. Life and Death in New Orleans: Disaster Tours Imagined............... 183 Stephen Svenson and Cory Ruf

vi

Policy: Border Control Between Life and Death 11. Hope and Resignation in Medical Care: When Doctors Go to Court to Terminate Patient Treatment........................................ 201 Diego Llovet 12. Life-threatening (Anaphylactic) Food Allergies: School Life, Health and Well-being...................................................................... 217 Saeed Hydaralli Live Deaths and Afterlives 13. Game Death: Fantasy and Mastery in Scenario Paintball................ 233 Ariane Hanemaayer 14. Delirious Exhibitionism: Negotiating Technologies in Timothy Leary’s Live Death..............................................................249 Elizabeth C. Effinger 15. How the Dead Circulate (in Life)...................................................... 261 Peter McHugh

Bibliography..................................................................................... 271



Notes on Contributors......................................................................299

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Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

List of Figures Page 22

Fig. 1.1

Duck-Rabbit from Fliegende Blatter. (Wikimedia Commons reproduction of public domain image)

Page 65

Fig. 3.1

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates (1787). Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

Page 68

Fig. 3.2

Jacques Gamelin, Nouveau recueil d’osteologie et de myologie (1779), p. 30. Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine, Washington, DC.

Page 72

Fig. 3.3

William Cowper. Myotomia reformata; or an anatomical treatise on the muscles of the human body. London: R. Knaplock, 1724. Courtesy of the Wellcome Trust, Wellcome Library of Medicine, London, UK.

Page 125

Fig. 6.1

Gaspard Gobaux, Place Louis XV, 1850. Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Page 129

Fig. 6.2

Unknown artist, Robespierre Guillotining the Executioner After Having Guillotined All the French, ca. 1794. Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Page 145

Fig. 7.1

“Más amor.” Photo credit: Marta Marín-Dòmine.

Page 193

Fig. 10.1

“Shame On YOU.” Photo credit: Rita Tourkova.

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Acknowledgments

As part of the series Culture, Disease and Well-Being: The Grey Zone of Health and Illness, this volume represents the work of a multidisciplinary project in Medical Humanities. We are grateful to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) whose funding makes the project possible. The Grey Zone group’s base for research, workshops and connection with the community is the Culture of Cities Centre in downtown Toronto. Our sincere thanks to the Faculty of Arts, University of Waterloo for supporting the Centre.  Some of the work in this collection was, in an earlier, performative shape, presented at the End Notes symposium held on the Ides of March 2008 at the Culture of Cities Centre. End Notes was organized by Jan Plecash as part of the Centre’s Symptoms of the City series of community events. Thanks to Morgan Tunzelmann for invaluable help in preparing the manuscript, to Steve Clark for incisive and constructive comments on the Introduction, to the Grey Zone group for inspired insights on the character and focus of the volume, and to May Yao at Intellect Books for her efforts on behalf of the Grey Zone series.

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Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

x

Introduction Tristanne Connolly

This collection is called Spectacular Death because it is preoccupied with how, and whether, it is possible to represent death. Death can only be known to the living through its images; in that sense, death is always spectacular, while it eludes any vision we have of it. For the dying themselves, death will inevitably take away their powers of perception, whether in death itself as the ceasing of thought and existence (at least as we know them), or beforehand when the faculties go, alienating the process of death from the one who undergoes it, making it an action that cannot be reflected on. Yet it may be a kind of intensification of reflection, with one’s life flashing before one’s eyes, or even as in dementia, where awareness is not entirely suspended but at times transformed, mixing fact and fiction and making the past seem more immediate than the present. From certain faith perspectives, death, perhaps because it is unknowable, becomes the repository of all knowledge: that is when one’s actions are revealed and judged; that is when the answers to mysteries are unfolded. Whether death can be a spectacle may be taken as a question of cultural history. Influentially, Philippe Ariès traces a Western progression from a “tame” early medieval death, a common and expected event prepared for in rituals “with no theatrics,” through an individualization of mortality with the concept of judgment and the liber vitae recording one’s deeds, followed by a shift from “one’s own death” to “thy death,” with the eighteenth and nineteenth century “cult of tombs and cemeteries and the romantic, rhetorical treatment of death” (Ariès 1974: 13, 32, 56). Each of these stages involves some attempt at representing death, increasingly ostentatiously. The modern brings a “brutal” change: “Death, so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden” (Ariès 1974: 85). It is because death is considered a spectacle, now of a different kind, that it must be closed to sight: “one must avoid…the disturbance and the overly strong and unbearable emotion caused 1

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

by the ugliness of dying and by the very presence of death” (Ariès 1974: 87). With the death focus moving from the individual to the family to the hospital, “death has been dissected,” which one might think would render it more scientifically knowable, and more visually exposed, but for Ariès (1974: 88–9), it is the opposite: death is “cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it impossible to know which step was the real death… All these little silent deaths have replaced and erased the great dramatic act of death.” However, small, broken, elusive silences may be a different kind of dramatic act—like the three unplayed movements that make up John Cage’s 4’33”. Even a specifically historical view shows the challenges of reflection on mortality require interdisciplinarity, as religion, art and medicine act as different media for the representation of death. Death studies are not a unified field, but are composed of disparate stations in various areas. Studies of death have tended to trace historical patterns or crossculturally compare customs; consider the nature of death as a concept, its moral value, its implications for existence and identity, from a philosophical perspective; examine psychological grief reactions or offer self-help advice for coming to terms with one’s own death and the loss of loved ones; and determine causes of death with a view to prevention through medical advancement or social reform. The concern of this volume is, on the contrary, to examine the examinations, to ask to what extent, by what means and to what end, can we examine something as elusive as death (“The undiscover’d country from whose bourn / No traveller returns,” as Hamlet said [Shakespeare 1982: III.i.79–80])? Instead of considering death as a clinical or social problem to be managed, or a phenomenon to be studied quantitatively, these essays range from studying how that management is organized and motivated, and questioning its purposes, to exploring the ways in which death is at once fled from and embraced by technology, philosophy and politics. The signs of death are essentially cryptic. Science is inadequate to decode them, just as inadequate as the humanities and social sciences, or a whole interdisciplinary army. The impulse to decode is itself problematic. The crypt contains and conceals; examiners of death are invested in it and enveloped in it. All the while medical progress aims to displace death, it also depends on death (from Enlightenment anatomization to contemporary organ harvesting); the progress of all human knowledge, including human knowledge of death, climbs on a pile of ideological corpses (Plato, Che, Elvis, as McHugh muses in Chapter 15 of this volume; or Ariès, Kübler-Ross). This volume is interested in what humane death means, not so much in terms of familiar ethical debates on euthanasia or hospice care, but humane death in terms of the human sciences. We ask these questions knowing that we face the crypt, therefore trying to embrace a spirit of Socratic ignorance. The unexamined death is not worth dying. The essays collected here juxtapose idealism, and the heroic bodies it creates, with policy, and the docile bodies it creates. Attitudes range from the salutary power of death to crystallize a cause, to make human beings take existential responsibility, to death as a bureaucratic exercise in counting with empty ciphers; and representation of death as 2

Introduction

ugly distortions, inevitable failures, or appeals to a criterion of beauty. The various kinds of public death considered—from disaster and war, to media broadcast of communal or individual death, to the displacement of death from home to hospital—call up the question, to whom does death belong? To what extent does public ritual assuage grief and guilt and harmonize the individual with the collective, and to what extent does it dispel such Enlightenment dreams and rather heighten the tension between private and public attempts, and needs, to make meaning out of death? Death is an ultimate marker for questioning the motivations of medicine: its efforts seek to cure illness and prolong life. It would seem to be a profession set against death. But what profession is not? The humanities also are an assertion of human endeavor against human extinction.1 Medicine, perhaps most explicitly, aims at the impossible goal of controlling death, and so to examine the representation of death in medicine and culture is a hypercharged locus for theorizing about the paradoxical limits of scientific mastery and human knowledge. In interrogating the medical and social articulation of death, what is revealed is the resistance of death to articulation, to representation, alongside an essential need to face it, speak it, mark it. Death is an enormous, an ultimate, topic: this collection wants to take on that very magnitude in its intractability, and its corollary, that death is common. “’Tis common,” says Gertrude to Hamlet about his father’s death; “all that lives must die” (Shakespeare 1982: I.ii.72). Resistant as he is to tempering his intense mourning, Hamlet himself in his irreverence later takes up the tradition of death as leveler of all pretence and pleasure, grotesquely observing that “we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table” (Shakespeare 1982: IV.iii.21–4). Two modes to one final result, tragedy and comic relief, bring up perhaps the most pressing suggestions of spectacular death: dramatization, simulation versus authenticity, and related to these, nihilism and absurdity versus commitment, sympathy and faith (which perhaps may equally be roles to be played). This collection attempts to do justice to the broad continuum of spectacle, and of death, as contributors take their vantage points from particular gradations of the spectrum, or watch the dynamic motion of apparently opposed perspectives. There is potentially a kind of authenticity in dramatic representation, which can be understood with reference to Romantic aesthetics, where the attraction of death and pleasure in its contemplation is at a height, in its continuation of Enlightenment debates on sensation, especially on what in human nature or psychology attracts us to painful sights. Because sensation was understood largely in physiological terms (the nerves were thought to function like veins, carrying a fluid which would transport feeling and thought through the body [see Rousseau 2004]), it was closely connected to empirical medicine, which likewise valued vision and touch and involved its own painful sights, seeking a direct knowledge of the body through anatomization. British Romantic dramatist 3

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

Joanna Baillie stands at the intersection of literature, philosophy and medicine here, well-connected as she was to writers and thinkers of the time from Walter Scott and Lord Byron to William Godwin, and intimately connected to its medical innovators. The great anatomists John and William Hunter were her uncles; Matthew Baillie, her brother, was a pioneer of morbid anatomy (indeed, she lived with him at London’s Great Windmill Street Anatomy School). While her theories in the Preface to her Plays on the Passions (2001; first published 1798) are precursors for Wordsworth’s (1963: 241, 244) insistence on “common life” and “the real language of men” in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1963; first published 1800), they also empirically examine human perception and response, or as Karen Dwyer (2000: 23) puts it, create “for our instruction an anatomical theatre in which she lays bare [the] pathology” of the passions. Baillie roundly disposes of most of the history of drama before her (except Shakespeare) for the fault of modeling its characters on other dramatic characters, rather than on “the boundless variety of nature” in the “human character which first furnished materials for those works” (Baillie 2001: 87, 113). Like Wordsworth (1963: 248) also (in his disdain of the “gross and violent stimulants” of urban modernity,2 which sounds familiar after decades of worry about movie and video game violence, and the moral minefield of the Internet, as the media of spectacle evolve), Baillie clings to a moral purpose for her productions, seeking to understand looking at death as something other than perverse: It cannot be any pleasure we receive from the sufferings of a fellow-creature which attracts such multitudes of people to a publick execution, though it is the horrour we conceive for such a spectacle that keeps so many more away. To see a human being bearing himself up under such circumstances, or struggling with the terrible apprehensions which such a situation impresses, must be the powerful incentive, which makes us press forward to behold what we shrink from, and wait with trembling expectation for what we dread. For though few at such a spectacle can get near enough to distinguish the expression of a face, or the minuter parts of a criminal’s behaviour, yet from a considerable distance will they eagerly mark whether he steps firmly; whether the motions of his body denote agitation or calmness, and if the wind does but ruffle his garment, they will, even from that change upon the outline of his distant figure, read some expression connected with his dreadful situation. (Baillie 2001: 69–70) The approach to death is fascinating for its observers, whether tenderhearted or twisted; each detail is loaded with significance, yet it seems most likely a mistaken significance, if the random flutter of wind on a garment is taken for an eloquent sign. However, death itself (even in executions) is random and arbitrary, subject to accident yet ruthless in its effects. But if death has any worth here, it is as drama: as spectators, we learn about human 4

Introduction

nature, and we either see a poignant tableau of weakness failing under intense suffering, or an edifying exemplum of noble fortitude prevailing. The same executed criminal would later be a candidate for dissection, another public spectacle which displays the human interior to increase our knowledge and advance our well-being. The discourse Baillie joins here is infused with reverence for sensibility, the definitive importance of deep and refined feeling that grew out of the empirical emphasis on sensation. The criminal becomes a figure of sympathetic interest, and the response to his ordeal proves not only his mettle as a human being, but also the virtue and worth of those who witness the spectacle. Baillie certainly has Edmund Burke in mind, particularly a striking passage from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1990; first published 1757): Chuse a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favourite actors; spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations; unite the greatest effects of poetry, painting and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy. (Burke 1990: 43) What Burke sees as “real sympathy” triumphing, however, is also the triumph of the abject appetites of the crowd whose erect minds get more of a rise from watching real human suffering from a safe vantage point than from the dramatic catharsis of fictional suffering. For Burke, self-preservation plays a crucial part in the “delight” humans get from the spectacle of suffering and death. This delight is necessary to prevent us from “shunning scenes of misery” and to prompt us “to relieve ourselves in relieving those who suffer” (Burke 1990: 43). But there is a definite limit. Death is what lends pain its sublime power; however, “when danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight” (Burke 1990: 36). Real death becomes simply the better spectacle—so long as it is not oneself who is dying. When Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man (1989; first published 1791) attacks Burke’s criticisms of the French Revolution,3 he turns his dramatic and aesthetic theory against him, putting his finger painfully on their contradictory valuation of spectacle and reality: Not one glance of compassion, not one commiserating reflection…has he bestowed on those that lingered out the most wretched of lives, a life without hope, in the most miserable of prisons… He is not affected by the 5

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

reality of distress touching upon his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird. (Paine 1989: 64) If Burke is going to appreciate death, it has to be a good show.4 He pities the pretty, fashionable Marie Antoinette but not the unfortunate prisoners who are not on display but hidden behind distant stone walls. Like Baillie’s execution audience, he is attached to the accidental details, the apparent significance of a flutter of clothing, which Paine categorically considers to be missing the point. For Burke, voyeuristic intensity, when pain or death press too nearly, turns into its anaesthetic opposite; he cannot feel the real, and death becomes an abyss. But for Paine, lingering without hope—a life of suffering ending in death—is an ultimate reality-test. Not only does he consider it possible to pay attention to the dying bird itself, to perceive death beyond its spectacle, but he suggests death has the potential to clarify perception of all that surrounds it: politics, morals, tastes, character and commitment. For Paine, death reveals truth and strips away the inauthentic. We might here, with Peter McHugh in this volume, realize that a certain famous dying bird provides a similar locus for death-denial: Monty Python’s parrot (Chapman et. al. 1989: 104–5). “Remarkable bird the Norwegian Blue, beautiful plumage…” “The plumage don’t enter into it—it’s stone dead!” For the customer, like Paine, death is incontestable: “(takes parrot out of cage, shouts) Hello Polly, Polly (bangs it against counter) Polly Parrot, wake up. Polly. (throws it in the air and lets it fall to the floor) Now that’s what I call a dead parrot”—like Samuel Johnson refuting Berkeley by kicking a stone. The shopkeeper offers every explanation except death: “It’s not dead, it’s resting,” “It’s stunned,” “It’s probably pining for the fjords.” But what the customer offers as rebuttal is a series of synonyms: “This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot.” Et cetera. If it is ridiculous to insist that the parrot is anything other than dead, it is equally ridiculous to keep naming death and get no closer to it, nor ever solve the problem (the customer is, of course, sent on a wild goose chase to “A Similar Pet Shop in Bolton, Lancs” to pursue the problem of replacing the ex-parrot, almost as stuck in the circular absurdity and futility of death as Sartre’s (1982) characters in No Exit). The parrot was dead and nailed to the perch in the first place. The customer, so wise to the undeniability of death, did not notice this. The shopkeeper may be one up on him for manipulating death as a trick, or indeed an opportunity to see how much nonsense he can get away with (it’s no more a Norwegian Blue than it is a live parrot). But both are dealing with something that happened before the fact, a death that leaves them both behind. Perhaps all writing about death suffers the fate of Swedenborg’s work in the eyes of William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1988; first published 1790): “And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up” (Blake 1988: 34). The writing is what is left behind when the body is gone. In an ordinary 6

Introduction

situation, the winding sheet would wrap the corpse, eventually be stained by it, decompose along with it. Even then, the linen clothes would be contiguous, a metonymy of death. Even the corpse brings questions: is it death, or just what death leaves behind? This exceptional situation of resurrection as imagined by Blake emphasizes that writing about death, like coming to the tomb with spices for anointing, might invite the same question: “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen” (Luke 24: 5–6).5 The desire for resurrection is partly the desire that being should continue after death; it is also a desire to know death, to perceive it, to pass over that boundary with one’s receptiveness intact. Legendarily, of course, Jesus fulfils this desire, on both sides of the divide: in his own resurrection of the body, and in the tactile evidence he provides for doubting Thomas. With the medical interests of this collection, it is worth noticing that Thomas is a kind of anatomist: “Except that I shall…thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20: 25). Such a collision of the empirical and the spiritual can be seen in Swedenborg himself, who was a scientist (or natural philosopher) before his fateful first night of visions: before “the Lord selected me,” he says, “my purpose previously had been to explore nature, chemistry, and the sciences of mining and anatomy” (Robsahm 1875: 35). One of the things Blake is talking about is empiricism. It is, like the winding sheet, attached to the body, to the material, and thus cannot account for death beyond its material leavings. However, Swedenborg and Thomas would seem to be exceptions. What Swedenborg does in his visionary knowledge is travel the cosmos: he visits the realms of heaven and hell, studies their workings and reveals their structure in “Memorable Relations,” which Blake’s “Memorable Fancies” are modeled upon, or parody. Swedenborg recalls, “that same night also were opened to me, so that I became thoroughly convinced of their reality, the worlds of spirits, heaven, and hell… From that day I gave up the study of all worldly science, and laboured in spiritual things” (Robsahm 1875: 36). He applies his scientific skills and method to study the afterworld, since it has proven to be “real,” most remarkably taxonomy and anatomy, since he maps out the regions of heaven and hell on the form of the human body. Blake, as a visionary himself, cannot be suggesting that there is no way to know the world of the dead; he takes his own trips in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and practices his own empirical disciplines (anthropology? sociology? “As I was walking among the fires of hell…I collected some of their Proverbs: thinking that as the sayings used in a nation, mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell, shew the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments” [Blake 1988: 35]). He is explicit about Swedenborg’s limitations: “Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth: Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods. And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions” (Blake 1988: 43). One way to gloss this would be to say that “new truth” is not possible without self-reflexive analysis, and constructive doubt of the very principles that are the basis of one’s discipline. When narrating his recollections, Swedenborg warns Robsahm, “Take 7

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

good care; this is the direct road to insanity: for when a man pores over spiritual and hidden things, he cannot protect himself against the delusions of hell, which then come over him and trouble him, when from his natural man and by his own speculations he tries to fathom heavenly things, which transcend his comprehension” (Robsahm 1875: 34–5). The very safety and success of his endeavor relies on resisting any interpretation of data “in the infernal or diabolical sense” (Blake 1988: 44). The “heavenly things” are not so much a divine or natural limit placed on human knowledge as a restriction selfimposed by science and disciplinary boundaries. Swedenborg here seems to be making an exception for himself. In his chosenness, and in his rational control, he can travel to these dangerous areas and be unaffected by them. This is comparable to a scientist’s or physician’s commitment to professional objectivity and purposeful development of desensitization, enabling such practices as anatomization but also pre-defining to some extent the way death will be seen and what will not be seen. The angel at the tomb at once indicates what is there and what is not there. If death is an absent presence—the body or the memory that reminds us the loved one is gone, the fact or the experience of death that we can only know by what we do not know and what we have lost—then the crypt is an icon of absent presence. Jacques Derrida repeatedly asks, “What is a crypt? No crypt presents itself. The grounds [lieux] are so disposed as to disguise and to hide: something, always a body in some way. But also to disguise the act of hiding and to hide the disguise: the crypt hides as it holds” (Derrida 1986: xiv). The crypt keeps the other alive by burying it inside oneself; preserves it by sealing it off, inaccessible. So it is at once self and other, secret and public, preserved yet decaying, separate yet incorporated. And besides, as Derrida (1986: xv) muses, with “the hermeticism and the indefatigable effort to maintain it” there is also “the failure of that effort, the permeation from within or from without, seeping through the crypt’s partitions, passing from one part of the divided Self to the other.” Not only is it a figure of paradox, opposites coexisting, it is a figure of leakage and blending, through the borders meant to separate and contain (perfectly according with the architectural image: imagine shining white neoclassical marble, built to house decay, and itself decaying over the years into a Romantic ruin which retains, even increases, its compelling aesthetics and symbolism with every crack in its edifice). For Jodey Castricano (2001: 51), Derrida’s “crypt is a textual device enabling words to point to at least two different things at the same time.” There may be benefits, then, to writing as the winding sheet. The function of the crypt is like the function of binary in quantum computing. Normally, a bit could potentially be 0 or 1, but a qubit, with the capacity for superposition, could be 0, 1, or both at once. However, confirming the state of the particle results in decoherence: observation reduces it to one actuality. If you don’t check the state of the particle, or open the tomb, it could potentially be both—and as long as you don’t look, it remains both. With death, we can’t look—what would we be able to confirm?—so it must remain both.

8

Introduction

In this volume, like Hamlet, we irreverently take comedy as readily as tragedy as a mode for death, and comedy can mean hope as much as black humor. Oscar Wilde once said about Dickens’ (2008) tear-jerking scene in The Old Curiosity Shop, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing” (Ellman 1988: 469). Characteristically, Wilde reverses expectations and scoffs at Victorian values, the child, the family and virtuous stoicism. Yet it also suggests that a sentimentalized fiction of death is laughable if one has any true feeling. By definition, comedy is not necessarily funny but can simply be a narrative structure with a happy ending; a comedic relation to death, then, can conceive of a life as a narrative structure, and ask then how death might constitute a happy ending—or note that, as dramatic comedies from Shakespeare to Wilde and beyond tend to show, that happy ending is as inevitable, as structurally determined, as death. Again with Wilde’s (2003: 1082) counterintuitive reversals: “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” If fact need not take precedence over fiction, likewise, we insist on putting theory together with practice, and philosophy with policy. A classic cultural example for these binaries is Frankenstein (Shelley 1999). In some ways a model of interdisciplinary practice, Victor Frankenstein discovered the secret of life by studying old and new science, alchemy and chemistry, together; yet in other ways, he espouses non-reflection as a principle. His name alone is a code-word for playing God, asserting the limitations of thought beyond which humans should not go. It could be said that if he had reflected on what he was doing in making the creature, everything would have gone much better: perhaps he would not have proceeded beyond those forbidden borders, or, more likely (given what Shelley seems to condemn most in him) he would have taken responsibility for his creation. One of the crucial problems for Frankenstein’s monster is also a crucial concern for this volume: what kind of social interactions do the dead have? He seeks society and nurturance but is rejected by all because they can immediately see he is not of the living. Only the blind man speaks to him as if he is human and alive (suggesting how the crypt, and memory, by keeping hidden, might allow the preservation of the dead). What kind of thoughts do the dead have? If this volume intends to bring reflection to death, we must ask, remembering the opposite views of Burke and Paine, whether death ultimately paralyzes reflection or finally reveals all. In the novel, the creature is unbelievably articulate; he educates himself in history, literature and philosophy, and can, better than Victor Frankenstein, ponder his own fate and actions. In the classic movie version (James Whale 1931), though his sensitive soul becomes apparent, Boris Karloff ’s magnificent voice is used only for grunts. The creature, then, in his various manifestations, is like the crypt: eloquent and inarticulate at once, and embodying at once his creator’s triumph over death, and death’s escape from even the most successful efforts of control. Frankenstein’s monster would be the ideal representative for spectacular death: iconically recognizable as death crossed back over and made visible in the land of the living, and, from its nineteenth-century popularization on stage to its immortality on film, the horror show Western culture will 9

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

never forget. With our hands over our eyes, we want to see but we don’t want to see. Do we scream or do we sympathize? Or do we laugh? In Chapter 1 of this book, Blum’s “Life, Death, and the In-Between: The Duck-Rabbit / The Face of the Clown” offers an orientation to the concept of the Grey Zone while it explores the possibility of a comic relation to death. The duck-rabbit optical illusion, like the comedy and tragedy masks, allows for two different views of the same patterns, but with the uncanny benefit of simultaneity. Death is similarly together and apart, collective and irreducibly individual; impenetrably obscure, yet self-evidently clear. Blum takes a Lacanian tack in order to approach the forgetting of death (and the forgetting of that forgetting) as a “researchable opportunity,” in opposition to the ethical Derridean approach which makes it “occasion for a deconstructive lament.” Following Rancière, Blum suggests that an aesthetic relation to death allows for seeing the irresolution of death not as incomplete but as coherent in ambiguity. The sense of our own death being somehow different becomes laughable; Blum turns to Lucretius’ depiction of the furious and futile activities of desire against death, but again insists on an analysis which goes beyond the ethical judgment, again with Lacan: this is a version of jouissance, already akin to death drive, but “a death drive that insists to live.” The desire for immortality, as for knowledge, is impossible but the desire is Socratically “honoured…in the face of its impossible realization.” Community and individuality are not so separate: it is the community, after all, that assigns us our individual place, yet that position includes the capacity for escape, as the hole in being is included in the symbolic order for Lacan. Blum argues such disengagement can be called aesthetic: “a capacity to seem to be at home with what is temporary and contingent and at the same time to be desirous of something other, to be two in one.” Baudelaire brings these ideas together with his idea that the comic subsists in being dual yet appearing unaware of one’s duality. As Blum interprets Baudelaire, “here, what is laughable is that our very superiority is a curse, and even more, that this curse gives us pleasure.” In Chapter 2, Bonner picks up on classical tragedy in an examination of Sophocles’ Antigone (1986), which juxtaposes it with Camus’ L’Étranger (1942). These are two figures who, contrary to the contemporary bio-medical model that considers life as the highest good, die for the truth. He makes use of Arendt’s distinction between labor, work and action. In relation to death, labor sustains life, work creates heirlooms and action initiates stories which survive. But death raises the specter of futility against all three. Since human beings are reflective, there must be more than life, yet in modern representations, death is occluded, taboo. Bonner argues that this very denial “analytically includes the possibility of facing and accepting.” Though Antigone and Meursault may seem polar opposites of commitment and nihilism, Bonner wrestles them into ironic accord. Meursault’s realization that nothing matters confirms that something does matter; there is liberation in the truth that we are all condemned to die. Antigone may be seen to be 10

Introduction

laboring under an illusion that her brother’s burial matters intensely. While the relative perspectives of her fellow characters cause them to judge her actions as traitorous, insane or noble, from Arendt’s perspective, a principle is immortal and transcends the individual, and principles are manifested through action, for their own sake, whether they make a difference or not. The next section moves from Classical to Enlightenment with Morgan Tunzelmann’s application of visual rhetoric, first to Jacques Louis David’s Death of Socrates (1787) and then to anatomical illustrations from William Cowper’s Myotomia Reformata (1733) and Jacques Gamelin’s Nouveau recueil d’osteologie et de myologie (1779). The relationship between justice and dissection (implied by the Murder Act in Britain as well as by iconography of Justitia and Anatomia) in effect retrospectively rewrites the life of the corpse, in a categorization akin to the taxonomy of its body parts. There is both a tension and a correspondence between corpse and corpus, as medical illustration forms a space beyond the anatomy theatre and the clinic in which the corpse is aestheticized and sanitized. This space is the “controlled and rational field of the page” where “the visual rendition of anatomy becomes, like the antiquary’s footnotes and the anatomist’s delineation of structures, a reflexive performance of the objectivity of viewing” which “ultimately brings the anatomist and the corpse into the same representational field.” The examination of The Death of Socrates emphasizes how vectors in the painting point away from the inevitable, actual (and unrepresentable) death of Socrates to higher things, and create a neoclassical, geometrized depiction of the approach to the good death. In Gamelin, Tunzelmann finds a parodic echo of Michelangelo’s God and Adam in anatomist and corpse, deanimated and untouchable in death. The dissection table forms a plane in which dwell the anatomist, his instruments and the corpse, a transitional area between medicine and the unknowable afterlife. On the contrary, Cowper’s bodies are “aggressively animated” in poses of classical statuary, an assertion of the ideal type and thus more a representation of how to represent anatomy than of the corpse itself. In contrast to neoclassical order, the sentimental aesthetics of Romanticism concern Connolly’s examination of British women poets’ laments on infant death in the context of midwifery writing. Focal texts include Martha Mears’ The Pupil of Nature: or, Candid Advice to the Fair Sex (1797), “To the Memory of a Lovely Infant, Written Seven Years after his Death” (1802) by Ann Hunter (wife of John Hunter the surgeon and anatomist), and Mary Ann Browne’s “Lays of a Mother” (1834). As birth becomes increasingly medicalized, promises of safety for mother and child steadily increase, relying on an idealization of healthy, fulfilling motherhood as natural (and medical advice as the mediator of nature’s wisdom). Placental circulation and breastfeeding offer medical models for the cultural understanding of an unbreakable bond between mother and child, who are one though separate. In both the rhetoric of midwifery writing and the imagery of poetry, these biological bonds are spiritualized, tying together the life and health, and the death and salvation, of mother and child. Whether the laments promote Christian 11

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

consolation (to be thankful that the child is in heaven) or suggest its inadequacy, both are based on, and reinforce, such an idealized mother-child bond. Further, these poems tend to be formulaic, and frequent and popular enough in the period to constitute a subgenre. The unspeakable nature of grief is housed in stock phrases which, while they may ring hollow in their failure to fathom maternal sorrow, gesture toward authentic feeling by acknowledging the privacy of bereavement and the limits of sympathy. From poetry to music, Plecash examines the lament with an example from Fauré, Au cimetière (1990; first published 1888), with words by Richepin, alongside Schumann’s writing about the death and memorialization of his composer predecessors, Beethoven and Schubert (1965). She places these in the eclectic and fruitful context of folklorist Margaret Bennett’s study of Scottish customs, both social and medical, surrounding death (2004). Plecash observes, “Where the customary injunction is never to speak ill of the dead, medicine’s practical injunction is never to speak—that is, not to enter into the practices and discourse of remembrance—at all.” The instances from the arts, then, embark on an interdisciplinary dialogue which could suggest what shape medical memorialization might take. Lament is a discourse formed to reflect on life and death. It has a capacity to harmonize different relations to loss, just as Schumann’s piece debating how Beethoven should be commemorated (“A Monument to Beethoven: Four Views” [1965, first published 1836]) uses the four-voice form of the chorale to enable a modulated sympathy with all of the speakers’ different positions. “Schumann presents composition as a funerary practice intending the remembrance, refreshment and disclosure of meaning.” The first chapters in the following section on urban memorialization are also concerned with public art; in Follert’s case, a monument that attests more to forgetfulness and disavowal than to memory, as the Luxor Obelisk, an ancient and unrelated monument displaced from Egypt, stands where the guillotine once did. Follert finds a telling “slip” in writing on the French Revolution by such as Arendt and Lyotard, who focus on various events other than the apparently central one of the execution of Louis XVI. Follert interprets the monument’s resistance to interpretation through Freud, with help from Žižek, suggesting, rather than mourning, “a melancholic relation to glory” and the historic violence and death that underpins it. “While this excess or sublime violence was in one sense necessary to the eventual institution of democracy, it remained unassimilable to and persists as a stain on the latter.” Through Kant, Follert discusses the legal and philosophical implications of the regicide: “it is as if the state commits suicide,” and legitimacy is murdered along with its figurehead. In its Egyptian context, the obelisk represents the Pharaoh’s sovereignty and also his death: the death of ancestors (or Freudian fathers) sustains the Law. Yet from a European viewpoint, it is a sign detached from what it signifies, in its displacement, but also in its “inscrutable” ancientness, and its position as a monument to modern emptiness or sublime excess—to the holes in the symbolic order, which are yet a part of it. 12

Introduction

Marín-Dòmine similarly considers non-monuments to what is not there as she takes a flâneur’s stroll with a camera through her native city of Barcelona. Here, the historical deaths conspicuously ignored are of the twentieth century and obscured by another mode of national self-reinvention, driven by globalized capitalist consumption. She calls on Benjamin as a theoretical companion and traces the consequences of the “transformation of urban space in the name of a modernity that has been privileging, for the last twenty years or so, neutrality and spectacle.” In Catalonia, local language, culture and political structures were repressed by dictatorship, and now as Spain projects its new democratic image to Europe and the world, those local differences (and the bloodshed of Civil War resistance) are again subsumed under an “official” Spanishness. The local is rendered obsolete in urban renovation, as the cityscape loses its landmarks for old habitués and its ability to transmit its past to future inhabitants or visitors. Marín-Dòmine juxtaposes the demolition of an old theatre with the films that had been shown there, and in the graffiti that now adorns it, the simple phrase más amor reveals the cultural neediness of the new non-places that cover layers of history. Marín-Dòmine argues, movingly, that if all that speaks for the city is erased, then the opposite of language—silence, or violence—must be the inevitable result of breaking our connections to the dead. The discussion turns from Franco to the Nazis with Grenzer who analyzes the “Museum Suitcase” project at the Sachsenhausen work camp, now transformed into a youth camp: national memorialization in an educational context. Grenzer begins with Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and the paradoxical relationship between personal responsibility and collective memory. While Arendt criticizes the guilt of younger Germans as sentimental, and Eichmann sees them as victims needing him for a scapegoat, Grenzer considers the possibility of an active generational guilt. “Notably absent from Sachsenhausen’s youth programs is an attempt to grapple with why and how the concentration camp constitutes a particular ethical responsibility for those who did not participate in the execution of the crimes.” Even while it attempts to bridge this alienation through imaginative identification with Jewish victims, and, “despite the difficult contents,” claims to create pleasure and bildung out of memorialization of the Nazi past, the pedagogy of Sachsenhausen presupposes the new generation’s alienation from history. Moving into more recent history, two essays on the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans take opposing perspectives on representation and restoration. Dowler begins in the iconic cemetery of Easy Rider to capture the combination of death and excess which has “externally defined New Orleans,” where the necropolis asserts the remaining, even predominant, presence of the dead, the exposure of what is elsewhere buried. After Agamben, New Orleans is a “state of exception, a zone of indistinction,” a “ludic space” on “the threshold between life and death.” This is intensified “through the catastrophic effects of Katrina, and arguably redoubled again through the efforts to restore the symbolic order in its aftermath.” The X code inscribed on the houses of victims is a 13

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

floating signifier, placing the dead under erasure. “As Blanchot claims, the disaster ‘describes,’ and so in a single stroke dismantles the textual apparatus that holds the world together for us.” Yet Dowler argues that modernity has created a permanent state of emergency. Catastrophe is quotidian; the X is not cryptic but prosaically explainable—or at least it was designed to be: in practice, “the multiplication of improvised, unauthorized or ill-trained search teams in these zones, as part of the overall breakdown of systems, led to the erosion of the symbolic system designed to restore it, thus undoing any guarantee of the imposition of a rational order.” The markings of the dead do not correspond to the dead: bodies that escape the count inhabit an uncontrolled space, officially neither alive or dead, thus undead, like zombies. While Dowler explores a flood of meaninglessness and “the fantasy of breach and healing,” Svenson and Ruf insist on possible redemption. Analyzing the phenomenon of disaster tourism, they weigh voyeurism and volunteerism (and their possible intersections) as motivations. “Dark tourism” is a product of postmodernity in its reliance on technology—the information superhighway which broadcasts disasters and makes them international spectacles—all the while it exemplifies disillusionment with the postmodern, not only the failure of order and progress, but also a desire for meaning and purpose. Volunteer tourism provides a possible route for those seeking relations not entirely determined by commodification. Secular and religious theodicies, and “the imaginaries of tourism and pilgrimage,” provide interpretive structures for disaster tourism. Disaster could be seen as a punishment from God or an instance of suffering, which is an opportunity to develop and strengthen the soul and demonstrate compassion and charity. There is pleasure and benefit for the self in doing good to others. Though comparable in the touristic sense of the privileged outsider coming in to a scene of disaster, attracted to it as a unique experience, the Schadenfreude, or the cynical desire for verification of untrustworthy media representations, that may characterize the pleasure of the dark tourist is different from the pleasure of the volunteer tourist with its dreams of reconciliation with the other and the self and with modernity. From public disasters to public policy, the subsequent essays examine the desires of medicine and law to contain the threat of death and deflect responsibility for death. In this light, death is a disaster to be avoided by proper consciousness of public safety or a risk to be calculated in terms of public good, with agency often removed from the one whose life is in question. Llovet looks at court cases where families contest doctors’ “do not resuscitate” orders. He analyzes the implications of the contested transfer from the category of “patient” to “dying person,” a category shift based on a proleptic judgment of the imminence of death, in relation to what medical science can or cannot do for the individual. Llovet perceives “a big change” in attitudes, where families and doctors seem to have traded places: now, “families, on the one hand, represent the optimistic attitude that progress in science and technology is good because it offers us solutions to pressing human problems such as death. Doctors, on the other hand, represent a cautious attitude 14

Introduction

that suggests that technical and scientific progress can actually make things worse.” The role of the good patient or good next of kin remains one who follows the advice of the doctor, and the wishes of families (even when they articulate such Enlightenment faith in science) are presented in medical and court discourse as weak, emotional, attached and unreasonable. But on the part of medicine, such irony is productive: “with the assistance of the law and the state, medicine today institutionalizes the breach of its own ethical commitments. In so doing, it creates a (small but meaningful) space in professional practice in which the injunction to let die becomes a celebration of medicine’s commitment to life.” For Hydaralli, Sabrina’s Law, meant to protect schoolchildren with life-threatening food allergies, provides an opportunity to meditate on the purposes of education and its relationship to health and well-being. The case of Sabrina Shannon shows that even the most vigilant attention to fatal allergens cannot rule out death from accidental exposure. One response is to try to create an environment which ensures complete avoidance. However, the measures conducive to this—for instance, restriction to lunches brought from home eaten in segregated areas—have repercussions for the anaphylactic children’s experience of community and responsibility, both of which are essential to education and to well-being in the widest sense. The child is constructed as a victim in need of protection, or, following Žižek, “the child is protected at the price of remaining a victim.” Hydaralli appeals to Socrates’ advice to Charmides: “if the head and the body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul,” and indeed, “the headache will be an unexpected benefit…if the pain in his head compels him to improve his mind” (Plato 1999: 864–5). If responsibility for dealing with the dangers any environment holds are placed in the hands of the young person, she will be more likely to develop a “healthy” appreciation of risk and not be deprived of the potential for self-development that comes with the communal challenges and joys of breaking bread. For a social occasion which, on the contrary, centers on purposely courting death (or the shadow of it), Hanemaayer turns to paintball. Military role-play provides a locus for analyzing the attraction of death fantasies. The paradoxical relation of the authentic to the pretend in “game death” is essential to the pleasure involved: one does not really die, which is a relief, yet if one did not take the game seriously and act as though one’s life were at stake, where would the fun be? She uses the theories of George Herbert Mead on social relations in games to reconsider the relation to the other as, in one way, the mental identification with others, such as predicting the opponent’s next move, and in another way, the entire array of possibilities enabled by the mutually-agreed upon rules and shape of the game. (In death also, we are in the hands of others, and of a structured necessity.) Borders blur between “real” and “play” military action as paintball technology is used to train soldiers, and paintball players use the tactics of soldiers and reenact political and historical scenarios. Hanemaayer finds fascinating usage in the paintball magazine Jungle, in an article giving strategic advice: “History calls them berserkers, kamikazes, 15

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

jihadis, martyrs… They are a force to be reckoned with, though they can’t come back and attack again. But you can.” The paintball berserker is more berserk than the real one, and he has greater mastery of conditions: sacrificing himself, he can come out both victorious and alive. Hanemaayer creates a constellation with Baudrillard (simulation and dissimulation), Freud (mastery over unpleasure) and Lacan (mastery of one’s own body as other in sadomasochism) to navigate the relation of the mastery of “game death” to the freedom to choose death, to choose what is not a choice and to assert one’s control over the uncontrollable. To master death through technology is to use particularly modern means to close the particularly modern gap between pleasure and death. Effinger examines how Timothy Leary toyed with various high-tech possibilities for immortality: the self-preservation of cryonic freeze or downloading his brain, or the self-memorialization of documenting his passing. Leary’s neologism “designer dying,” not only planned but also “a hip, chic, vogue thing to do,” captures his attitude toward death as the last taboo to break, another counter-cultural transcendence of institutional constraints and natural limitations. Technology—and drugs—can be reclaimed from the service of “factory death.” However, Effinger entertains the possibility that Leary is a techno-skeptic and that his decision not to webcast his death need not be construed as a disappointment or lack of commitment, but as another kind of choice, one which foresees, and indeed characteristically parodies (or para-dies), “the pointlessness of our hyper-enthusiasm over techno-possibilities, of our infinite belief in technology to cure our own finitude.” She compares Leary to Bob Flanagan in terms of cyber-death: if others create a second life online, they create a virtual second death. But while this would initially seem cold, detached and escapist, Effinger insists “there is an unacknowledged poignancy in the shape-shifting theatricality of his dying.” And conversely, but in equally human terms, she places the accent on Leary’s having fun with death. “That he had his cremated ashes blasted into outer space” demonstrates a weariness of gravity in all senses. Effinger suggests the Internet, following cyber-theorists Hubert Drefus and Sherry Turkle, may be more of a safety net, similar to Hanemaayer’s simulations cushioning any final plunge by rendering only a riskfree, virtual version of death. Is a commitment to death in such terms only a simulated commitment? After all the orchestration, after the minute recording of Leary’s quotidian online dying (at home, in pajamas, keeping daily track of his symptoms and signs), his website was reduced to a white screen with the slogan, “Think for yourself and question authority.” In the end, death is as evasive as the Cretan liar, and Leary reminds us yet again that we seekers won’t get to get what we’re after till the day we die.6 The continuing lives of the dead, in the limited perception of the living, are not found only in the eerie glow of the computer screen, but also in the network of human relations. McHugh begins with Simmel and the mutual presupposition which makes us, simultaneously, one to ourselves and other to others, in a continual circulation of transitive alterities. Thrownness is a first instance of this: joining a system already in 16

Introduction

motion. Death, then, is one transition among many; however, in it, one is no longer able to presuppose. “But decomposition of the body does not dispose of the social person, one with a history of transition that amounts to reputation, relations with others, proclivities known and unknown, and all the many other aspects of living in the world.” Death, then, “is not the end of it, but the point at which the biological and social diverge.” Plato, Che and Elvis are no longer with us, but “Plato,” “Che” and “Elvis” remain in social circulation. The dead are an absent presence in that the living are alive to their own lives and memories, and to those of the dead who cannot be alive to them themselves; circulation becomes one-way. Like a footprint, one leaves a lifeprint; like a footprint in sand, this lifeprint is not static. As time goes on, others reinterpret, misunderstand, remember differently, or cease to care, “the dead thereby becoming creatures who change but do not act.” In the continuing social life of the dead, “everything becomes common property, the contents of a life’s transitions in the world now publicly abandoned to it,” to the amorality of circulation which preserves both sense and nonsense, where friends, enemies and strangers alike are the preservers. Peter McHugh passed away in January 2010. We honor him for his uncompromising commitment to analytical reflection. If in death it is left to others to shape what one remains to be, he has given rich material. We hope we can live up to that responsibility. Endnotes 1.

Even Bataille’s (1986: 101) embrace of eroticism and death as excess, as a dissolution which can destroy our self-containment, as Baudrillard (1993: 157–8) argues, still battles against human extinction by being based on reproduction as excess, the birth of new life requiring death.

2.

One of the forces working "to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind" in his time, according to Wordsworth (1963: 249), is "the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies."

3.

In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) (Burke 1993).

4.

Of course, class is also at stake here, social position tied to spectacle and sensibility, and the relative significance of the deaths involved: in the previous passage, the attraction of Burke's scenario involved a "criminal of high rank..” (On Marie Antoinette, see Burke 1993: 71–8.)

17

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

5.

There are, of course, interesting variations between the synoptic gospels (see also Mark 16, Matthew 28). All three include the latter phrase in some form. In Luke there are two figures at the tomb; in Mark, a young man, and in Matthew, the angel of the Lord.

6.

As in "The Seeker" (Townshend 1971), where Leary takes his place among other anti-establishment anti-gurus:

               

I asked Bobby Dylan I asked the Beatles I asked Timothy Leary But he couldn't help me either They call me the seeker I've been searching low and high I won't get to get what I'm after Till the day I die.

18

Classical Death: Comedy and Tragedy

19

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

20

1 Life, Death and the In-Between: The Duck-Rabbit/The Face of the Clown Alan Blum

Introduction The distinctions between life and death and the passages between them seem good examples of the fundamental ambiguity expressed in the notion of the Grey Zone, pointing to a border both necessary and opportune, an occasion for reflection that is correlative with the materiality of mortal existence and the spiritual demands it makes upon humans. One reminder of such indistinct distinctions is the need for an art of living, more than a good disposition but a desire to develop a way of “seeing-as” in the idiom of Wittgenstein (1953), empowering us to see two aspects of one thing and one aspect in and of two things as a kind of art of artfulness in seeing as such, perhaps even a road to an art of life. Wittgenstein used Jastrow’s famous illustration of the figure of a duck-rabbit, a duck that could be seen as a rabbit or vice versa, a rabbit that could be seen as a duck, to show how it was not one thing or the other as in a choice, or intelligible simply as dependent upon context or circumstances or on more information to be filled in, because the figure itself was what it was because of seeing it as such, where it is seeing-as that is fundamentally ambiguous, capable of pointing out aspects in one that are two and for two that are one, serving in its way as a standard for the relation to ambiguity. The duck-rabbit (Fig. 1.1) is both together and apart: together it is two-in-one, one figure with two aspects, which makes seeing it as either one or the other gratuitous; on the other hand, this is not correct since seeing it as one, as a duck-rabbit, assumes that we can identify the two aspects first, that we can recognize and identify rabbits and ducks separately. That the duck and the rabbit share a togetherness and an apartness means 21

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

Fig. 1.1. Duck-Rabbit from Fliegende Blatter. (Wikimedia Commons reproduction of public domain image)

that seeing them as comparable requires identifying and differentiating them, but that distinguishing them in this way in the first place depends upon their being presented to and for us in this strange juxtaposition as a figure. Thus, what is first is not the figure but the need to which it answers, the situation in which it emerges, or the problem to which it replies. The contradiction displayed by the figure, instead of being an idle curiosity, invites us to ask after its point: notably, here, to demonstrate the enigmatic inevitability of ambiguity in a demonstrably palpable way, to one conceived as subject to an inflexible relation to thought and language. Beyond the interaction that seems to be referenced by choosing and decision making—as if the puzzle of the figure and its need for a solution appears to center intersubjective relations as a decision to be made, over the question of whether it represents one thing or the other—when what it really intimates is a movement of desire aspiring for clarity about the problem of ambiguity rather than its resolution, and so, an imaginary anticipating dialogue as a means of pedagogical transformation. Death is like this: on the one hand, it is together and apart since its togetherness speaks to our all sharing death in a way that seems to erase its singularity, but then to focus only on this is to concentrate on generic or abstract death. On the other hand, the apartness of death seems to make reference to the finite singularity of the life it brings to a tangible end, the possibility (in the words of Deleuze and Guattari) of confiding “to the ears of the future the enduring sensations that give it its body: the ceaselessly revived suffering of men, their renewed protest, their relentlessly resumed struggle” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 166–7, in Rancière 2008: 5). 22

Life, Death and the In-Between: The Duck-Rabbit/The Face of the Clown

Rancière gives to this reading an inflection that invests life with the character of art through the figure of the monument, as if a singular life condenses and expresses collective suffering with an eye to the future, to what he calls a people yet to come. Thus, death is together and apart in these senses: it is together with the life that it embodies with an eye to a people yet to come, to posterity, and yet must remain apart from this fate by virtue of its particular manner of displaying the tension between its “means for producing an effect and…the reality of that effect” (Rancière 2008: 5). Death, raising the question of the real effect of a life, offers the life to a people yet to come as an expression of the intimate connection of the life to collective suffering as if the life itself is a trope. If death, like the duck-rabbit, is together and apart, the death of one is comparable to the death of all, while yet the death of one must be oriented to as incomparable in ways that make the work of addressing this space, what we might call death work (which is together and apart from life in this respect). The art of the life is then not dependent on its great achievements nor on some vision of narrative closure, but on the capacity to make its effects real “for a people yet to come,” that is, as a mediation for a future that remains free and open. Loss and Lack Death begins to dramatize the difference between loss and lack, for it is not as if we overcome a lack of whatever could prevent death (something that could make us more complete or live forever) as if death is like an imperfection, or even that what we lose in death is what we once had, like a fuller or longer life, because whatever life we did have never included a guarantee of being eternal as something that we could be said to have possessed. If death does raise the question of the kind of loss to which it is true, that could only be answered by the living. I suspect that in many cases the living would equate losing someone with missing someone, and even this misrecognition could help us see the difference between someone essential to us and someone who just happened to be there, as a doorstop or chattering television set or yapping pet, as a way for us to think about what and who really matters, or about mattering. Yet if death is an occasion to reflect upon mattering, then grief allows us to realize the life that we lose in mourning it is a life so essential to us that, in its loss, we seem to lose some essential part of ourselves, inviting us to reconsider what really matters. But then we have no way of thinking of our own death as loss because this can only be measured against what we have and are now, and so, a loss imaginable only as unimaginable. Because the loss we might anticipate in our death is imagined only as a deprivation of what we now have, it seems an external abstraction similar to a theft, making a robbery rather than an aporia the paradigm of loss. Beyond lack and loss, we exist within the field of this contradiction. If it is a burden, it has not been inflicted upon us in the same way as misfortune, because mortality seems part of the grammar of being human, and so makes death nature’s way of showing 23

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

its indifference. Descartes’ questioning whether he is dreaming or even dead asks for criteria to distinguish between life and death, which we cannot provide and never could because what we need and lack here is not something more (e.g., information or knowledge) since we have all there is (see Descartes 2008: 14-17). As we said, we are not lacking; what we have is death and there is nothing more than this (or what we have is life and there is nothing more than this). Everything is just perfect, thank you! No need for more science or research. There is nothing more to be known about death; everything is as it is. This does not mean that we need and desire nothing more, but it is not, say, the cure for death, because death is incurable, although the fear or preoccupation surrounding death might have to be healed. Death, then, helps us recognize healing as analogous to what Socrates called the second sailing: the best the sailors at sea in a storm can do when they realize they have to rely on their own human resources rather than external or magical intervention (Bernadette 1989). In the absence of cure, we turn to healing, for it is the human way, second best. This might mean that we have death and something more: the capacity for healing, the capacity to laugh (or better, to be artful). Descartes proposes that mediation (and so, meditation) is essential to life, making the absence of mediation inconceivable to us since we would have to meditate on that (see the possibility of impossibility in Heidegger 1962), facing its incommensurability or difference that makes it only external and nothing more, formal in that sense, with no inner life. For death to have an inner life, we would need to imagine it reflexively as a relationship to being dead. Imagining being dead is one of the many comic ways that circulate in collective life around the question of death and its obscurity. Typically, this is the only way death is part of our life, and because of this, we often imagine the dead as coming to life (e.g., the undead or zombies). But then we said that death is not obscure at all, just as clear as the nose on your face. Perhaps that is the enigma: the riddle of death is to address the question of whether it is obscure or clear. Living as Prayer It is just hard to comprehend life as anything more than an article of faith, because, if it requires being measured by what is unlike it (other than life), what is unlike life in this sense cannot be reflected upon because it is immune to reflection. What this implies, curiously enough, is that life itself is immune to reflection since we cannot reflect upon its limits as if they were other than life, making life into a kind of sickness that, because immune to reflection, cannot be cured by reflection. This is part of the discourse on the pharmakon that Plato initiated and to which Derrida (1981) contributed, making life the affliction to which reflection, as antidote, is continuously applied in the expectation of cure. But then, as we said, life might be immune to reflection in that sense. 24

Life, Death and the In-Between: The Duck-Rabbit/The Face of the Clown

If life (and death) is immune to reflection, one could say, so much the worse for reflection! But then, if we need to do what is being done here (reading, writing, reflecting upon death), that is, reflecting upon what seems immune to reflection and is insoluble, there might just be a place in life, necessary and desirable, for such foolishness, for reflection upon what seems immune to reflection. It might be this conception of immunity rather than reflection that needs rethinking. This is the inspiration for the digital divide, not between those who are and are not literate with respect to that, but between analogical and digital representation. For example, if death is immune to reflection for any of the reasons offered, then it could be treated simply in terms of the information it discloses, that is, as a sign system contained in the records, archives and traces handed down and which allow death to “speak” in the way of the History Channel, in which the life that is gone can still be material to be read and reread. As information, life and death are alike in being available for enumeration. In this way, according to those engineers who treat the world as a computer, life and death are similar in being data, and life itself is an ongoing process of creating and disposing of such matter. In line with this view, death does not end circulation but continues it as long as bureaucracy has the force to perpetuate a trace. Depriving death of its intimacy in this way makes any life into data or material, keeping it alive in the surreal shape of an archival afterlife to be plundered. We might contrast this view of keeping the dead alive with that of the Greeks described by De Coulanges (1955) who showed, in The Ancient City, how a life can live after death only in the traces of the intimate relations in which it has participated and reciprocally shaped. The dispute here is over different views of immortality and ways the imaginary of digitalization strives to rescue death from its essential finality by claiming that anything is thinkable, and so, reversible, because scientific research is an unending process of revision and the return of the dead to life might be “just around the corner.” And what kind of prospect would that be, the return of the dead, or living forever? To say that death only “lives” within life means that the inner life of death is something like a living relation to such a condition (say, to inertia). This is one point of Melville’s Bartleby character: to represent such a relationship (Melville 1997). To many, Bartleby is the living dead (the uncanny presence) that seems somewhat measured in relation to the zombie (if the dead coming to life is a fantasy, a wish, etc., the living dead is part of life). Note that Bartleby can be made to incarnate the freedom from the body that the character Cephelus praised in The Republic (freedom from the complexity of the symbolic order and its trials and tribulations, which he named eros and attributed to youth in contrast to agedness) (Plato 1941: 4-6). Death can also be construed as freedom from mediation in ways that make mediation two-sided, a necessary condition and a curse. Thus, Bartleby, as a figure for the living dead, has also been used to personify antipathy towards work and productivity, and so, as a spokesperson for the deconstruction of convention and as an incarnation of freedom, transgression and resistance, as well as an icon of the living dead. One could certainly propose that Bartleby can stand for the extinction of singularity endangered by generic versions of death (and of life) that treat mortality as external and “relative” rather than as an intimate aspect of the life. 25

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

The intimacy of death is the territory explored by Barthes (1981) through the photograph and its link to death through its capacity to revive the life of the deceased, or of the past as a force in the present, because it summons to memory not only the loss, but also a sense of falling short, of knowing in retrospect how more could always have been done. So the photograph reinstates the intimate character of the relation as such, not in its generic role as archive and “information,” but as a way of arousing a reflection upon culpability, remorse and desire, and so, upon mattering. The Singular Experience of Death Lacan says that what appears as absolute to and for the individual is always relative in relation to Other. The finality of death seems here a good example, binding and incorrigible for the subject, and yet always intelligible as part of a process that circulates for all alike in a way that recurs, correlative with life itself, and so, relative in that sense. Here I rely on Jacques Alain-Miller (2007: 19): “Jouissance as a relationship to the Other, is an absolute for the subject… The term is well made to distinguish the jouissance of the Other, since in the Other, all terms are relative to each other and are held in a system, and the Other is so little an absolute, that the question is posed of its guarantee, of the Other of the Other, of the Other of the Other which would guarantee it, and this Other of the Other cannot be found.” In other words, while the death drive is absolute for the subject for whom life appears imperative, no such drive can be imagined for the Other (unless we rationalize its movement as agency through the objet a that provides solutions through notions of purposiveness, God, innate or sufficient reason) because its circulation deprives it of any necessity except the sense of absolute contingency, or in the idiom, brute, contingent chaos. The discourse on death recurrently displays the working out of this relationship in the search for justification (a guarantee), for a method of speaking absolutistically while remembering relativism, or of being in two places (absolutism and relativism) at once, trying to gain access to non-being, and in general, speaking under the auspices of the “as if,” as if our life is eternal, while forgetting, or forgetting we are forgetting, that it is not. Derrida tries to raise the problem of forgetting that it is, and then of forgetting that we forget, as an ethical problem (Derrida 2002) which Lacan (1997) had discussed as a phenomenon in the spirit of Freud rather than pejoratively, centering forgetting and the forgetting of forgetting as researchable opportunities rather than occasion for a deconstructive lament. That the discourse of death circulates upon this agonistic terrain ratifies death in life as a problem to work out by reinstating its eventful character. Note, though, that this distinction between jouissance for the subject and for the Other is, as a human distinction, a classification done under the auspices of the symbolic order, essentially imaginary (dare we say, in anticipation, a formula?). 26

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Derrida speaks of this relationship by depicting death as both irreplaceable and singular (my death) and substitutable, circulating from speaker to speaker (1993: 21), showing, inadvertently perhaps, how desire, or what he calls the “as such,” necessary to the subject, requires the “impossible possibility” of imagining the unimaginable (the existence of non-existence, the non being of being) in a way that must link the thinking of being (of singularity) to the impossible thought of what is unthinkable (and here, Lacan’s objet a), making in its way any moment of life only bearable to him as a life of deconstruction (“without alibi”). Derrida’s writing on death passes through the three stages of the homage as a pretext for mourning over the loss of others, to the confrontation with the possibility of impossibility in Heidegger, to his final concern with dissemination and posterity. From Derrida’s perspective, the eternal deconstructibility of any present, of any resolution, must haunt all speech in ways that I cannot take up here but do elsewhere, ways that we might think of as ethical rather than aesthetic (Calarco [2003] is particularly good on his relationship to Heidegger). This sense of the absolutism of death, basically grounded in epistemology, should, in the full sense, be understood as imaginary; that is, as a mode of fascination with one’s own image, rooted in a libidinal attachment to one’s perpetuity as both intimate and external, as both mine and in the hands of others, thinking the condition of one being in the hands of others, and so, of being used and oriented to as a condition that marks the beginning, but certainly not the end, of theorizing death. Here, if narcissism seems to trump equality, it is only because, according to much philosophy, people are seen as not typically and routinely in the situation of facing death, and when they are compelled to do so, are forced to reflect on death. Thus, people are viewed, by and large, as selfish and limited, needing some impending crisis to rise above their indolence and live thinkingly. But even if this seems true, there might be something about death and its unique and singular absolutism that makes this repression intelligible. Or is it simply the fact that people have to be forced to be reflective about anything and everything, and that death is no different in this respect? But then again, it might be retorted that it is the absolutistic involvement in death that is unique and singular, as compared to our relationship to any other condition, because in our relation to death as compared to anything else we see our absence mirrored in a way that nourishes an image of our duality, both seen and unseen, seeing our selves as unseen (absent) and, simultaneously, seen as such. Given such an image, when we detach ourselves from encountering death absolutely by trying to impersonate the impersonality of otherness, we might risk losing its sense as a phenomenon invariably and intimately linked to the need for reassurance. This suggests that part of the being of death is that it shows as enigmatic and unsettling for anyone who would consider it.

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Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

Intimate and Universal Death In reflectively engaging dying, we actually live under the auspices of this concern for the difference between death as ours and death as a phenomenon, as absolute and relative, as belonging only to me and/or to everyone. Perhaps more than any notion, death throws into relief the question of the imaginary, because in the apparent absence of any empirical ground for speculation, it dramatizes how life (and dying) must exceed symbolization. But this shows the limits of a conception of life as waiting for death insofar as it deprives death of significance, except “relatively,” and if, as Gödel (1949) said, existence cannot be relativized, it is the absolutism of death that must be considered (that it is mine and mine alone, that no one can die for another, etc., marks its singularity as too forceful to be pacified by the fact that it happens to everyone). So the idea that living is dying is a monumental abstraction: dying, as experienced, is something only and exclusively happening to me, myself and I, even while it is a happening for all. It is as if inhabiting the contradiction is suffering an affect, being without justification. If the experience of a contradiction typically must be normalized, reconciled, justified (take the case of someone doing what they know is wrong), then accepting the condition without alibi (as Derrida [2002] says), that is, without trying to deny, excuse or explain it, simply accepts it as a pathos to suffer (as if an affliction that entraps one). Thus, the absolutism of death, despite the fact that it happens to everyone, dramatizes the collective fascination with finite singularity as a mortal fate, and so confirms the coexistence of apartness and togetherness in any action as the inescapable formula for humanity, the signature of its duality, as if a stigma, the DNA of humankind. This is to say that the tension between the absolutism of death for me and the relativism of death for Other (as Lacan says) is perhaps the fundamental cliché about death for the subject: either, if I die, so does everyone (as if one can be pacified by this), or, though he or she or everyone dies, so will I (this is intended to curb my indifference or selfishness, as in reminding the dim-witted that they too will die). Given these comments, the idea of birth as that moment when the in-between character of life as awaiting becomes poignant suggests that the best of reflection must grasp the irony of this mix of living and dying as jouissance, the insistence of the drive of life (narcissism or self-preservation) for the subject who must suffer the pain of this distress wordlessly. Birth as becoming undead, the repetitive gesture of the living dead towards natality, can give surcease from sorrow but only that and no more (Poe’s lost Lenore, “nevermore”).Yet isn’t part of the comedy of life linked to this abundance, this copious connection of death to life and life to death that is and has been often grasped through the image of procreation and fertility and of the mindlessness of life as something that needs be put to use? Thus again, the duck-rabbit appears, because it is not as if we choose either death for me or death for everyone, because death is both at once: both intimate and inexplicably 28

Life, Death and the In-Between: The Duck-Rabbit/The Face of the Clown

analogical in its experience of singularity, an event shared by all, enumerated as 0 or 1, absent or present, digital, counted and dissected as parts of mortal bodies. It is the ambiguity of this border between life and death that fertilizes questions for the living as the obscure and riveting enigma of life and death: how to keep the dead alive, and how to keep those who live from being dead (the living dead). Any good teacher attends to these questions, asking how life can pay its respects to death and, vice versa, how death can pay its respects to life. Keeping the dead alive speaks to the notion of revitalization, tradition, past and dissemination, that is, how to keep ourselves and those with whom we are engaged from letting the past disappear, and so, burdening ourselves, at worst, with only a present, and at best, with regret for what has vanished. How to keep the living from being dead speaks to the notion of seduction, of enlivening, engaging and revivifying those tempted to remain comatose, i.e., how to keep ourselves and those with whom we are engaged from inertia. Note that, in these cases, the problem is always posed for the living at any present in ways that must accept this focus. If the teacher wants to bring the past to life for the student, this must go hand-in-hand with awakening the student and resisting the stupor of self-absorption in the present. Intellectualizing Death Death can teach us about the limits of knowledge, for how could we ever know what is death except externally, as in the way of science? Science might tell us how it is to die or what leads up to dying, or what material and efficient causation is involved in the decline and termination of the body, but then it speaks about dying as if it is death. No discourse or discipline knows about death, not medicine, theology nor philosophy. We only know of death by thinking about the remains and influences of those who are dead; we only know from the perspective of life and not as we might imagine the dead to engage being dead. Thinking of that, we ask, how could the dead relate to their being dead? But how could we even fathom an answer here? I feel sure that Wittgenstein would find this a case of bewitchment by an eccentric picture of language. Here we see the imaginary as a kind of anthropomorphic relation to our selves. Wishful thinking might hope that being dead is another way of life, as if we are anthropologists speculating on another “culture” (the way of life of the dead, their weltanschaaung). Imagine death as a site of multiculturalism: the zombies, the ghosts, the ghouls, the vampires, the angels, so many “diverse” kinds of dead lives. But then again, what qualifies those like us, alive and well, to speak about being dead? This should show us both the limits of what we know and the limits of science’s way of knowing, because knowledge of death, in this sense, never answers to our needs in life, nor to the demands we make of knowledge, nor to the question of what is it to know something in a way that is engaging, intimate and of value (unless we are easily satisfied). 29

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

This is to say that what is known about death cannot be enough for us in life, showing us not only the value of death as the event that points to the limits of knowledge, but also the value of life in disclosing how knowledge always strains to answer to the resonance that it imagines as its ground. Death remains exemplary in many related ways, seeming to show us again, for example, how we are always in the hands of others, testifying to the limits of mastery and of the social per se. In such ways, death seems the best example of thinking the limits, of coming up against the limits and recognizing how we need to gather our resources to reflect upon that. Can we say that death and non-being are reciprocal images that we can only “access” by implication? But then, Parmenides teaches us that we must always gather our resources to think against the grain in resisting treating what seems as what is. But this is only the first shape of resistance, for even in recognizing that, we can hardly grasp what “what is” is. This begins to capture the tension between the intimacy and universality of death as a stand-in for any phenomenon; that is, while no one can die for another, as in the cliché, the other cliché that everyone has to die only highlights this tension. Moreover, this abstraction, perhaps necessary in relation to death, points to a difference between being aware of something and having knowledge of it, and so says something significant about having knowledge as an intimate rather than external experience. The collective wisdom on death says that we can have it both ways because death works in a manner that is both and at once intimate and universal. But, as the Phaedo (Plato 1993) shows us, for we who are the living, the real matter of death in life always concerns the fear of death and the imaginary relation to being dead. Together and Apart What Rancière calls the tension between being together and apart, equivalent to Nancy’s notion of shared being, or to Simmel’s conception of the ambiguity of the social as the border between the generic and the individual, is the space from which the aesthetic is assumed to emerge (Rancière 2008: 3-5, Nancy 1988:70, Simmel 1997: 170-4). This allows us to appreciate the tension at the heart of any signifier that must mix the social and the individual, on the model of the duck-rabbit, first in the relation of the externality of the word and the intimacy of its meaning (what Lacan calls the tension between the signifier and signification [1991: 178, 279]), then in the discourse between the togetherness of the speakers, their views and the intimacy of desire that these views conceal and disclose, as part of the movement towards idealization that marks the singularity of the discourse, as if a collective representation and its implicit concerted problem that Rancière calls a “form of common expression” or “a certain sensory fabric” (2008: 4). The aesthetic grasp of the relation between together and apart in the discourse grasps the universal as the form of the particulars; for example, it sees the singularity of the death in the suffering 30

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of the particulars of the life, “creating a form of common expression, or a form of the expression of the community, namely [after Deleuze and Guattari] ‘the song of the earth or the cry of men.’ What is common is ‘sensation.’ The human beings are tied together by a certain sensory fabric” (Rancière 2008: 4). Here is how to think this. The singularity of a life is oriented to as a form of common expression, as the monument of a singular manner of suffering the impersonality of collective forces, taking its shape as if a song of the cry of men. Every life is (or can be seen as) a song of suffering. If the particulars of a life express the trajectory of impersonal, inhuman forces or song of the earth (Deleuze’s suffering, struggling cries of men, Rancière’s chaos, Lacan’s jouissance of Other), this way of seeing a life as a monument of and to suffering in a singular manner can be (seen as) both an expression of collective affliction and an offer for a people not yet, a people yet to come. It can be seen as such an expression. Any life can be seen as a song of suffering, as if a collective expression. The monument, a figure for the artwork, artefact, the thing that is fabricated as even text and its narrative, condenses and displaces the inarticulate suffering intimate to a people. The complexity of sensations, in this sense, takes on the form of a monument, which in turn takes on the identity of a person who “speaks to the ears of the future” (Rancière 2008: 4). The significance of a life now removed from simply its achievements, productivity, luck of its accomplishments or repute can only make reference to the music that might be heard in its course in ways that make the genius of reply problematic and decisive, the work of a “people yet to come,” converting any life into a posthumous object of desire as an effect that might endure or not. Thus the narrative character of a life consists not in the representation of content it offers, as in biography or history, but in the relation of togetherness between (shall we say) its form and content, that if the story told and the method of telling are together in the sense of the relationship of the invisible and the visible, of the speaker and the spoken, what remains apart is the irremediable surfeit that exceeds representation as the hole in being, the Real. In the case of death, it is the tension between its absolutism and relativism that speaks to this, between my experience of my finite singularity (death as irremediably mine) and its generic abstraction as an event belonging to the species. The implication for an aesthetic relationship to death is simply here, then, that it is seen as neither my death (absolutely) or everyone’s death (relatively) as if an either-or choice between one and the other, the duck or the rabbit, but both at once. The seeing-as of death, seeing it aesthetically, means that working out this relationship between its singularity as mine and its plurality as Other is the work of thought that suffers this irresolution not as incomplete but as a fateful inconsistency. Aesthetic seeing-as means that death is not resolved interpretively, as in the proposition that says “this is death,” that makes a declaration or represents a content with an air of finality, instead pointing out aspects of how its togetherness and apartness might cohere as ambiguous. 31

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

This oppressive equality that links us all by virtue of the death we must share seems to make our sense of difference, whether as individual or species, vainglorious, and so laughable. Lucretius still remains the exemplary spokesman for this view: Finally, what great and evil desire for life forces us to such restless activity amid dangers of uncertain outcome? Truly a sure termination of life stands near at hand for mortals, nor can we avoid the meeting with death. Moreover, we spin about in the same place and are still present there, nor do we forge, by living, any new pleasures for ourselves. But while what we desire is absent, it seems superior to other things; when we have gained this, we seek for something else, and an unchanged thirst for life still holds us open-mouthed. Lastly, there is doubt what fortune time may bring, what may be sent to us by chance, what end is pressing upon us. By prolonging life we do not diminish by a hair the period of death, nor can we take anything away from it so that we may be dead less long. Finally, although by your living you bring to an end as many generations as you please, yet the death that awaits you will be none the less eternal; and he who made an end of life today will be dead no less long than he who many months and years ago. (Lucretius 1965: 113) The ignorance or delusion derided by Lucretius as the belief in immortality for which there is no proof, or the frenzied preoccupation with death that he sneers at rather than analyzes, seems a superstition analogous to the maxim of Socratic ignorance. The lifesustaining stories of Socrates to his friends about the immortality of the soul, reflecting the drive to live inspired by human anxiety in the relation to the unknown that is evoked by death, intelligible as the desire to live forever in the face of knowing its impossibility, are much like the maxim of Socratic ignorance and its counsel to pursue knowledge though one can never know more than his ignorance; that is, to pursue the desire to know in the face of its impossibility. We can think of this as a version of Lacan’s drive, jouissance, the necessary and desirable desire for the impossible, and so as a death drive that insists to live. If nothing lasts, going on can seem as ludicrous as the maxim of Socratic ignorance that honors the desire for knowledge in the face of its impossible realization. As Nietzsche affirms, the sense of the groundlessness of Being makes inaction appear necessary and action ludicrous. The coexistence of the desire for life and the knowledge of the inevitability of death stirs in the human soul, in relation to the uncanny foreboding of disappearance in all that exists and in all that we hold dear. Thus, in reply to Lucretius, we could only point to him and to his image, to his circulation as a life force, and so, as real, as an aesthetic phenomenon; but then this is as accidental as the silence that might follow any other death in the fortuitous event of its lack of such influences or successors. 32

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That is, we might not be as lucky as Lucretius or as talented! Here we are not simply saying that the relationship to death requires respite as a kind of escapism or denial, but that the aesthetic character of existence seems to invite the self-understanding of mortality as the kind of justification that neither knowledge nor ethics can provide, and in the words of Rancière’s reformulation of Kant’s disengagement or notion of form, appears as a “double negation”: “To speak of an aesthetic dimension of knowledge is to speak of a dimension of ignorance which divides the idea and the practice of knowledge themselves… The object of aesthetic apprehension is characterized as that which is neither an object of knowledge nor an object of desire” (Rancière 2006: 1). In other words, to apprehend death aesthetically is not to see it in terms of its causal structure, material composition, nor as desirable or not, for these conditions that apply to the social representation of death do not evoke its intimate singularity, its “who” rather than what. To say that “aesthetic apprehension of a form is without concept” echoes Simmel’s injunction to provide form to material conditions, to rethink the phenomenon, not in terms of its efficiency or desirability, but as a representation accompanied by a certain ignorance (that is, knowledge of one’s limits, or, in Lacan, of the hole in the symbolic order as a modernization of the maxim of Socratic ignorance [1988: 5-7, 16-21]). In this way, Rancière, after Lacan and others, finds oppressiveness not in death per se but in these ways of representing death (as knowledge, as undesirable) that neutralize an aesthetic relationship to speech. Thus, if a conventional view of death limits or “neutralizes” the element of desire in aesthetics, aesthetics then overcomes and elevates such views, “neutralizing” them in its way: It is thus that such experience is much more than appreciating works of art. It concerns the definition of a type of experience which neutralizes the circular relationship of knowledge as know-how and knowledge as the distribution of roles. Aesthetic experience eludes the sensible distribution of roles and competences which structures the hierarchical order. (Rancière 2006: 4) He says that the aesthetic experience “neutralizes” conventional speech, just as I say that unreflective versions of death “neutralize” the aesthetic desire, but we are saying the same: the aesthetic relation to speech “takes on wings,” as Plato would say, readjusting, reallocating and revitalizing the empty speech with which it begins and that holds it down with its restricted economy of signifiers. Thus, as the poetic impulse struggles with its own repressed core, it is through this “struggle” that the repressive structure of common speech is moderated, relaxed and revisited.

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Life as an Aesthetic Phenomenon If such a condition as death is treated as a condition that limits us from thinking aesthetically, or as a constraint upon us that neutralizes the desire we conceive as aesthetic, then we begin to appreciate the two-sidedness driving the division of the subject and its development as a relationship to language that enables us to begin to give form to material conditions in ways that animate theorizing as an uncanny embodiment, as both escape and sacrificial, and so, as driven in its relentlessness, in its very jouissance that is the death drive revealed in Socratic ignorance (that the truth has to be pursued even and in so far as we know that we do not know). This is to say that an aesthetic relation to the “original division” of the subject makes reference to an ideal speaker able to double herself as two-in-one (“in other words, the identity of a subject capable of escaping the assignment to a private condition and of intervening in the affairs of the community” [Rancière 2006: 6]). Here, the “affairs of the community” could be the common language, its doxa and familiar distinctions and proper names (that pin people down) and the “escape” from the private assignment can be not simply rejection but what Rancière calls (a transgressive affirmation) a reformulation aiming to reassign meaning to what had been privately assigned, the second sailing, where what had been thought is rethought as if for the second time. Because it is a social order (the symbolic order) that “assigns” us to a private condition and its name, that assignment includes, for any one so subject, a capacity for “escape.” This escape (Levinas 2002) begins to make reference to the powers of disengagement that we might call aesthetic: a capacity to seem to be at home with what is temporary and contingent and at the same time to be desirous of something other, to be two in one, as reflected in the division or ban honored in the lingo of Lacan. This capacity for escape is included in the symbolic order itself as the hole in Being (Lacan 1978: 279-80) or desire that is necessary and exempt, a necessary exemption, an exemption both necessary and desirable, which comes to view for an aesthetic eye: If one does not cling to the thesis of the identity of subject and object taught by idealism; if the subject mind reflecting itself critically, does not equate itself to, and “devour,” everything which exists, it may happen that the mind, which has become as unidentical to the world as the world has to it, takes on a small moment of not-being-engulfed-in-blindcontingency: a very paradoxical form of hope if you like. And the very curious persistence of the idea of immortality may be connected to this. (Adorno 2001: 135) If the notion of ambiguity seems to point to its character as loss or a “fall” from some definitive standard of exactitude, or even as a lack or deficiency accompanying the socalled alienation of modern society, the strong conception understands it as dissemination 34

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that recurs as the Grey Zone intrinsic to the human being as (in the words of Plato) both original (absolute) and image (relative) (1999), as the constant and ever-present passage between these registers. That is, as a social phenomenon, ambiguity, in the words of Peter McHugh in Chapter 15 of this volume, is exemplified in and as the relationship of circulation, of the passage as such. The development of life as the repressed story of the relationship integral to any image (say, the destiny of the one who dies, who has died, who must and will die), is not a task of looking backward to fill in hermeneutic detail for what has been eclipsed, or to look ahead for guarantees, but to enjoy performing at whatever might, through its eloquence, rescue the image from the oblivion of repression, from the story its condensation can only repress. Yet the superstitious belief in our immortality which seems to permit us to evade the reality of death, when reformulated as a belief in our life as a source of indefinite influences, not only depends upon the fortuna that links any life to social fertility (the fortuna that deprives the homeless, loveless and abandoned of such grace) but makes our sense of the value of a life instrumental as if our “immortality” resides in the consequences of our life as such. Shouldn’t we be able to face life in the shadow of the inevitability of death, come what may, without respect to any speculation on our effects or afterlife? In this way, such a death drive brings to life as an object the representation of the canon itself not as “great books” or information, cold knowledge, or art works, nor as ruling discriminations, but as action (or oeuvre in the words of Derrida) animated in the gesture of prosopopeia, creating the death drive as a resemblance (not a likeness) of life’s version of its existence as art, of the art of life, neither as art history or museology, but as the aesthetic justification noted by Nietzsche (1974: 151), the need and desire to perform at life in the shadow of death, the desire to enact hyperbolically the action that renounces inaction as if unaware, suffering the mix of pleasure and pain that such a pose must inherit. In the words of Lacan (1997: 295), “It is precisely the function of the beautiful to reveal to us the site of man’s relationship to his own death, and to reveal it to us only in a blinding flash.” Comedy In order for…an emergence of the comic to exist, there must be two beings in the presence of each other…a phenomenon that belongs to the class of all artistic phenomena that show the existence in the human being of a permanent dualism, the capacity of being both himself and someone else at one and the same time…the essence of this type of comic is to appear to be unaware of oneself…that he is dual and that he is ignorant of none of the phenomena of his dual nature. (Baudelaire 1972: 160–161)

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Is absolute humor not the performance at life as if it is eternal, knowing full well that it is not? In this sense, what Baudelaire (1972: 151) names absolute humor (“in this case laughter is the expression of the idea of superiority, no longer of man over man, but of man over nature”) evokes the dualism he notes only if we supply an interpretation that makes this coherent, as in the notion of the human advantage over nature as a fall in the way the superiority of human to nature becomes a burden to suffer through the figure of self-consciousness which both trumps nature and condemns us to such a burden that we find unimaginable in nature. Here, what is laughable is that our very superiority is a curse, and even more, that this curse gives us pleasure, making laughter the symptom of the “giddy intoxication” suffered by virtue of our dual nature and its contradiction (Baudelaire [1972: 150], on the convulsion in laughter as a symptom). What is laughable is that our claim to know what we are and to speak it depends upon our ignorance of what we are not. Or better, that our silence about what we are not depends upon our capacity to disregard this in speaking about what we are. What is comic is that the self-consciousness that we so prize both reveals to us and retracts our sense of being special, showing us in the mirror of our dreams that being both nothing and something, at once, in a flash, making our beauty wretched and our wretchedness beautiful, gives us pause in such a reflection to think about our life hic et nunc. We see ourselves as if neither one nor the other, neither the duck nor the rabbit but both at once. Our “superiority” must reside in our ability not simply to forget this, or to forget that we forget, but to show our jouissance in our acting as if unaware, that is, in disguising our selves as such. We remain ignorant of the indifference of Other while acting as if it is a spectator to our action who needs and desires to be entertained. What is comical is that the desire to be at our best and to overcome a transference relation to multis can only be registered in the fateful struggle within, between our higher and lower parts, as an agonistic drama recognizable as repetitive in its irresolution, and yet, as necessary and desirable to perform. Thus, if ordinary humor laughs at the mistake in choosing duck over rabbit or rabbit over duck when the circumstances clearly reveal what is to be done, investing the laugh with a taint of superiority over the “low life” disclosed in the type who wrestles over such choice, absolute humor takes its pleasure from contemplating how the conceit revealed in any expectation of resolution shows both the togetherness and apartness of the human actor, and how such a conceit is both absolute and relative, singular and plural, mine and mine alone and the burden of any man and everyman. If the Greeks called comedy the imitation of low life, we seem to be the low life whose recognition of this mixes the pleasure and pain in our laughter: “laughter is essentially… contradictory, that is to say it is at one and the same time a sign of infinite greatness and of infinite wretchedness, infinite wretchedness in relation to the absolute being, of whom man has an inkling, infinite greatness in relation to the beasts. It is from the constant clash of these two infinites that laughter flows” (Baudelaire 1972: 148). It is the conjunction of these clashing infinites that impresses upon us the absolutism of death as both mine and 36

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mine alone, and as belonging to everyone, as relative. The pleasure of this pain and the pain of this pleasure is only laughable as we drive to exhibit our vulgarity in a way that feigns superiority, in a performance that is exhibitionist as if untouched by vulgarity and vulgar as if untouched by superiority, a performance that feigns unawareness of duality. This comic grasp, feigning unawareness of the limits of mortality described above by Lucretius and his science, can also show indifference to the melancholy advice that attacks the illusion of immortality on the grounds of the fragility of memory. The duality of Baudelaire’s comic relationship and its two minds in one comes alive as the unawareness feigned in action knowing better. To conceive of a way of life under the auspices of the subject in this manner, as the course of action that this figure recommends, (to live knowing this, to live in the manner of such a subject) invites us to rethink death as a relationship metonymically rather than simply metaphorically: the oriented action that we can calculate as embodiment, i.e., the question of how the relationship to death is to be lived, is to be suffered. This is to say that the comic vision of death requires life to be performance, making what is Real such an insistence itself. In other words, if death appears both relative and absolute, in senses we have discussed, such a relationship needs to be embodied as such, as that disengagement from the fatality of condition and content that would permit us to move freely, perhaps bringing to mind the figure of the aesthetic relationship through Simmel’s metaphor of the stranger as one who comes and goes, is here today and gone tomorrow, linked to particular circumstances only through the opportunities they present for analysis that are invariably accidental and elicited in confidence. Here, the supreme example of absolute humor remains writing such as this, writing about death: It is remarkable, all the same, that we are so little able to incorporate death, since, in view of our continuing state of non-identity with ourselves, the opposite might be expected. And even the power of the instinct of self preservation…seems to me insufficient to explain it, if it is taken on its own… Nevertheless, this experience of death as something fortuitous and external—rather like an illness one has been infected with, without knowing its source—does contain a moment connected with the autonomy of mind. It is that because the mind has wrested itself so strongly from what we merely are, has made itself so autonomous, this itself gives rise to a hope that mere existence might not be everything. (Adorno 2001: 135) The recognition that “existence might not be everything” remains grave rather than comic unless it expresses “giddy intoxication” in its view of how its superiority, assumed and maintained all along as if existence is truly “everything” and tinged with the vulgarity of such absorption, is now put to rest in performing, that is, is relaxed only as it is expressed in the action that performs at existence as if it is everything, while showing in this very 37

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performance its awareness of existence not being everything, thus disavowing what it does and playing at what it disavows in a gesture that can only laugh sadly and brood with gaiety, the gesture that the Irish wake always tries to ritualize. This would be the comic version of the “as if.” Bergson’s Human Comedy Henri Bergson develops this duality or contradiction around the idea that ordinary humor is what is laughable in the human condition, say, the specter of inelasticity and the automation that haunts all actions despite our varied and common attempts to be expressive and singular, as if humankind suffers from a repetitive tic, the recurrent force that makes transparent the limits of the self-understanding of singularity as it becomes exposed in the inescapable automated gesture discernible in any action. If this formulaic tic of mundanity makes any claim to agency appear as a vainglorious pretension, it is only on condition that its automated character is a show of absentmindedness, a kind of unsociable insularity laughable because of its self-absorbed character: What is the object of such contradictions except to help us to put our finger on the obliviousness of the characters to their own actions? Inattention to self and consequently to others is what we invariably find. And if we look at the matter closely, we see that inattention here is equivalent to what we have called unsociability. The chief cause of rigidity is the neglect to look around—and more especially within oneself: how can a man fashion his personality…if he does not first study others as well as himself? Rigidity, automatism, absentmindedness and unsociability are all inextricably entwined. And all serve as ingredients to the making up of the comic in character. (Bergson 1956: 156) Note that what Bergson identifies here is what Baudelaire would call ordinary humor, the collective vision of the laughable now discernible in a grammar of social life that identifies the comic as a collective representation. But the gap between ordinary or significative humor and absolute humor, the gap we call the Grey Zone, is precisely the space separating Bergson’s theorizing from what it theorizes, that which empowers Bergson to see comedy as not simply laughable automatism but as grounded in a vision of what is essential for comedy to be itself and to be true to itself, a vision that can confer upon practices such as automatism their comic character, a vision seeming both invisible and needing to be visible (Didi-Huberman 2005) that permits him to measure the appearances of comedy by whatever he sees it as, to see it as true to itself in its many untruths and to see its untruths as such only by grace of his seeing its truth, as if this 38

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very difference between truth and falsity is like the duck-rabbit, not one or the other, as revealed in a proposition or assertive choice, but both at once. To see comedy as inelasticity in self-awareness, to see it as such, is to have the intuition of comedy in the first place that permits us to recognize it as this or that, to see any usage as comic, to grasp the absolutism of seeing-as in relation to comedy or anything else. It is the difference between seeing-as as subject (as an unexamined resource, a formula that we use with definitive assurance) and as object (as fundamentally ambiguous) that makes what is seen and its manner of being seen both at once the issue, the problem for humans reflected in the comic relationship to the gestural aspect of any action. Thus, we might venture that comedy in this shape of absolute humor (comedy being true to itself, its notion) could be interchangeable with self-knowledge as long as we adhere to Bergson’s formula, laughable and inelastic as it might seem: It might be said that all character is comic, provided we mean by character the ready-made element in our personality, that mechanical element that resembles a piece of clockwork wound up once and for all and capable of working automatically. It is, if you will, that which causes us to imitate ourselves. And it is also, for that very reason, that which enables others to imitate us. Every comic character is a type. Inversely, every resemblance to a type has something comic in it. (Bergson 1956: 156) Self-knowledge, then, is reflected not simply in knowing this as in avowing it to be true because the inescapable force of this element, its universality, makes avowal and disavowal gratuitous since what is undeniable is platitudinous (“all the world’s a stage”), or at worst ignorant, and perhaps laughable at best. As itself an instance of seeing-as, seeing absolute humor as self-knowledge is to act as if unaware of this typicality, as if our freedom and spontaneity excludes our being mechanical and rigid while knowing full well that we are not one rather than the other (duck, rabbit), but both at once. Because we commit to free and spontaneous action, acting as if we are not unfree can only be our special (singular?) touch of irony. The practice of comedy performs at freedom as if unaware of the limits of free action, knowing full well the force of its automatism. We recognize this in relation to death, for the distinction between its absolute and relative character rests on the inelastic conceit of finite singularity from which we typically do not escape and which we seem to require as our formula. Durkheim even uses this “fact” as an indication of the choice for life (1951: 43-6), that most humans prefer to live, but this misses the absolute humor reflected in the mechanical and readymade desire to continue life and living, the laughable conceit of the human type that it chooses to live rather than has to, that the desire for life is immune to reflection, and, because of this, always strange when it is reflected upon as a decisive choice (as in those extreme situations that can make it seem grave or ludicrous, as if either one or the other, rather than both tragic and comic at once). 39

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Theatrum Mundi I have explored the discourse on death as if I am both inside and desiring an outsideness, together and apart as if a duck-rabbit, fated in this paper to reiterate the maxim of Heraclitus that man is a plaything of the logos but without any assurance of the good-heartedness of such a figure as Plato had Timaeus assume in that dialogue (1949), for as Lacan says, the subjectivity of Other as relative must remain enigmatic, perhaps terrifying (1978: 20329). The discourse of death, operating in this space since the Phaedo, basically a discourse addressing ways and means of healing fear of the unknown, recommends the art of the comic “as if ” as the strongest sense it can conceive for the metaphor of theatrum mundi that “all the world is a stage,” making the death drive subordinate not to the Gods in a restricted sense, nor to the panopticon, nor to the code and its customs, but to the presencing of what must come out of the human imagination and is recognized as being essential: “The gods are made, invented, but are not fictitious. They certainly come forth out of the human imagination in contrast to what actually exists, but they do this as essential forms, and this product of the mind is at the same time recognized as being what is essential” (Paolucci and Paolucci 1975: 312). Comedy shows that the recognition of what is essential cannot escape being formulaic and possibly inelastic, while at the same time being necessary and desirable, neither one nor the other but both at once, as long as it is mediated as a problem. This is because every account or analysis, every narrative, is both necessary and, in its own special way, a formula, and so, as a signature of singularity, a signature nevertheless, necessarily compliant to the code that legitimates the assignment of incomparability that licenses the name as the human trademark of singularity. Comedy laughs at this necessity, knowing it for what it is. What this leads to is the suggestion that theatrum mundi is not simply a description of the relation of view to gaze, or of the mechanics of sociality and of theatricality as pretence and calculation, but reaffirms as being essential the need of life for a hyperbolic investment in itself as a life force, the perennial need and desire to perform in accord with some sense of what is essential or of what life needs. We might now return to the notion of comedy as a bridge between the absolutism and relativism of death for the subject. For this life force is not an equal opportunity open to everyone and anyone, since the hyperbolic investment of life in itself can only be entertained by one free of the constraint Agamben calls bare life (2002) or Arendt calls labor (1998). In other words, seeing-as is the practice of theatrum mundi now seen as (and for) what it is, the art of life. In other words, to be in position to perform at life is a luxury, while yet, this luxury seems perverse, for the freedom from bare life is precisely a burden to be suffered by reflection in ways that include the reflection upon death. The omnipresent reflection upon death is an offering of life itself as if a perverse gift of reflection to whosoever inherits its fate. It is as if, out of guilt, reflection punishes those fortunate enough to have its gift bestowed, rectifying in this gesture the inequities of the social order in ways that can only elicit a 40

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laugh. Baudelaire’s comedy, as a commentary of human upon nature that at one and the same time elevates and condemns the human to both pleasure and pain, acknowledges that the relativism disclosed in human impotence in relation to the jouissance of the Other always calls for an unconditional response of the subject to the life that will forsake him, demanding the jouissance of the subject be absolute in its own way. Given the relativism of life for the Other, the subject life can and must be absolute, as the laugh of the Greek expresses. This must be the formula for the love of life and seen as the formula it is. Such gravity must be light-hearted and such light-heartedness must be grave if the formula is to contribute to an art of life. This is why, if comedy seems to offer salvation from death, tragedy mocks this as a gesture all too human, expressed in that happy-sad figure on the face of the clown, not happy versus despairing, but both at once, much like Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit that is not simply either a duck or a rabbit (“depending upon the context” as the realistic folk might say), but both at once, two-in-one.

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2 The Illness of Hope, the Cure of Truth and the Difference of Principle: A Reflexive Analysis of Antigone’s and Meursault’s Confrontations with Death Kieran Bonner

Arendt and Human Activity Camus’ Meursault and Sophocles’ Antigone are both characters in literature who act in ways that require them to deliberately confront their own mortality. In both cases, their actions lead to their executions, requiring that they struggle with the meaning and fear of death. These two cases raise issues of hope, acceptance of the truth of the human condition, and the question of what difference human action can make given the inevitability of death. I propose to examine both examples as a way of working through two possible stories of death. To set a frame, I begin with Hannah Arendt’s description of the fundamental levels of human activity and the different relation each activity has to death. In The Human Condition (1998), Arendt develops a phenomenology of human activity, describing three fundamentally different and, conceptually speaking, mutually distinct dimensions: labor, work and action. The activity of labor is concerned with human actions that are oriented toward survival, whether individual or species. According to Arendt, “it corresponds to the biological processes of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor” (1998: 7). The activity of “work provides an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings” (1998: 8). This activity builds a “world,” which becomes a home for humans that is more than a mere environment just to survive in: it is concerned with producing things that will outlast our individual earthly existence and so connects us to past and future generations. Work fills the world with “meaningful” 43

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artifacts—from heirlooms, to houses, to cities, to works of art and ultimately to stories of great deeds and great words. The latter artifacts (stories) depend on and connect with action. Action, the third dimension of human activity, is “the only activity that goes on between [humans] without the intermediary of things [of the world] or [the] matter [of survival]” (Arendt 1998: 176) Action refers to individual initiative, the beginning of something new. Through the medium of words and deeds, “humans insert themselves into the human world… It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before” (1998: 177). Arendt’s approach to the human condition, and therefore to the way death appears in the human condition, is pluralist. She looks at one phenomenon—human activity—and sees three fundamental dimensions. Her approach is multi-perspectival, and for Arendt, this multitude of perspectives is not just another theoretical orientation but is crucial for the art needed to recognize reality, including the reality of death, in its full complexity. For Arendt, each of these dimensions needs a community or realm (conditions, as she calls them) if they are to have a reality in the world. All three are potentials: what we, by virtue of being human, are capable of. Arendt, of course, is not just descriptive but is also prescriptive in the sense that without the development of all three, our opportunity to be fully human is greatly lessened (Canovan 1992: 99–154). Without the activity of labor, we would not survive; without the products of work, human existence would be more nomadic than worldly, and we would not have a tangible connection to our ancestors or descendants. Without action (and speech), we would be without a human relation to the unpredictable, the relation that allows us to recognize human uniqueness. According to Arendt: All three activities and their corresponding conditions are intimately connected with the most general condition of human existence: birth and death, natality and mortality. Labor assures not only individual survival, but also the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history… Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought. (1998: 9) Death has a different reality in each of the dimensions of labor, work and action. Because labor is organized by and around the biological life process, death is an animating, if negative, principle. Yet, this dimension of human activity is also haunted by “the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time” (Arendt 1998: 9). Work (and its products) is a response to that futility since it places the struggle for living in a context 44

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where human artifacts live on after individual death. It introduces a sense of permanence into human experience. It is not just that our products survive, but that they survive in a way that gives us a connection with past and future generations—a world we share with those who are no longer and those who are not yet—despite our individual mortality. This sharing is not a direct communing but is shared through the “things” that we inherit and pass on. Through action, stories are created—stories that are worth telling, stories of the words and deeds of individuals, whether Antigone, Socrates or even a fictional person like Meursault. In this case, unlike work, where products survive human mortality, individuals live on in and through stories, whether this is the purely personal level regarding people who have had a decisive influence on us, or, more collectively, in terms of the stories passed on to us through culture and tradition. There is an intimate connection between work and action when, as in Homer’s Iliad, we have an epic story about a hero who had to choose between a long and comfortable life but one that would not lead to fame, or a short life with a painful death but with the promise of a fame that would live through generations. Of course, just as our having the story of Achilles depends on Homer, or the story of Socrates depends on Plato, there is a contingency and arbitrariness to the stories that live and those that do not. As McHugh demonstrates in Chapter 15 of this volume, the presence of such stories is the initiative of those who happen to live: “Any circulation of the dead in life is generated by those who are living…and so the contents of this asymmetry of coming and going will depend on their particular projects, memories, reminders, coincidents” (McHugh 2010: 383). The haunt of futility to which the sense of a world was to be a solution returns, even when considering what lives on. Does the problem of futility, despite our contemporary collective and individual mastery over the life process, not haunt all three dimensions of labor, work and action? And what is the relation between our desire to tell stories and the futility that the prospect of death raises? Reflexively speaking, what is the status of the theorist’s story, that is, this very reflection on reflections on death? Victory of the Animal Laborens According to Arendt, the sense that life is futile is most present (or least distant) within the horizon of the biological life process. As Arendt describes it, the modern age has made the urgency of the biological life process, which drives the laboring activity, dominant. She attributes this dominance to the rise of the social realm: “the emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices— from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere” (Arendt 1998: 38, 46). She goes on to say that “society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public” (Arendt 45

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1998: 46). From the perspective of this life-world, as Arendt further explains, “it is always life itself which is the supreme standard to which everything else is referred, and the interests of the individual as well as the interests of mankind are always equated with individual life or the life of the species as though it were a matter of course that life is the highest good” (Arendt 1998: 311–12). This “victory of the laboring human” (1998:46) according to Arendt, organizes the way we act and think in contemporary society. As life is the highest good, death becomes the greatest evil. Survival as an individual and as a species is success, while non-existence is failure or unadulterated loss. For example, the concern with “species extinction” is one of the animating elements to the global warming debate. In an era where life itself (and not what life is for) is the highest good, the art or science dedicated to preserving life will be prominent. One such orientation is the bio-medical model of illness, which is “based on a conception of the body as a physical system” (Jary and Jary 1995: 46). As Share et al. (2007: 283) point out, “this model dominates current thinking about wellness and illness as it appears in people’s everyday beliefs and attitudes, in the practices of most health care workers and in medical research and policy making.” Advances in medical science and technology are justifiably celebrated for the way they contribute to the survival of individual and species. Whether this concern is with technologies that aid in the survival of premature babies, or research that leads to new pharmaceutical options in controlling illnesses like heart disease and cancer, these initiatives demonstrate, collectively and individually, the great will to live. When life is the highest good, whether measured in terms of United Nations, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or World Health Organization criteria, cultural animation is continually generated in terms of the progress made in relation to the limit of life. As death within the bio-medical model is conceptualized somatically, this creates a problem for humans, who also have consciousness and engage in reflective thinking. While it is true that the great advances in medical science are “governed by the ideal of mastery through knowledge and by means of scientific investigation it permanently extends the limits of what can be controlled…even this scientific Enlightenment…finds its limit in the ungraspability of death” (Gadamer 1996: 69). If death is the ultimate limit and medical science is both animated (to postpone the inevitable) and silenced (“I will leave you alone with your loved one”) by this limit, this raises the question of what we do with our consciousness of death. It is often claimed that in modern Western societies, in contrast with previous eras, death is “treated as a taboo subject, with consequent difficulties for those in grief “ (Jary and Jary 1995: 146). Gadamer, moreover, has noted the “radical and specifically contemporary occurrence…with the gradual disappearance of the representation of death in modern society” (1996: 61), and Freud’s work on our inability to confront the specter of death (see Chapter 1 of this book on this issue of denial) has been popularized in the fame of Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book (1974), The Denial of Death.1 46

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There are many rather obvious reasons why we would want to repress death. More than all other experiences, death forces a reflection on the meaning and value of life. It requires that one think about the life lived, the choices made, as death’s finality reveals the limitedness of such choices and living. In Arendt’s terminology, death makes vivid the “fleeting character of time” (1998: 8) and the choices we make within time. The experience of death raises the haunt of the futility of life, that nothing we do matters in life. The haunt of futility and nihilism is the specter raised by the unavoidability of death. This haunt is precisely the haunt of a being whose consciousness provides a challenge to thinking about our inevitable non-being.2 The gradual disappearance of the representation of death in contemporary society is a concern for a being for which consciousness of existence is central. Human consciousness includes awareness of the possibility of our non-being, making death, as Arendt stated, a central concept for metaphysics and those most concerned with metaphysics, philosophers and theologians. Yet, “for every living person there is something incomprehensible in the fact that this human consciousness [is] capable of anticipating the future will one day come to an end” (Gadamer 1996: 63). Since thinking is an ever-present possibility for all humans, a certain kind of orientation has to be developed to make our inevitable demise banal and everyday. Referring to “everyday Dasein,” Heidegger argues that: [D]eath is encountered as a well-known event occurring within-theworld… The “they” [everyday Dasein] has already stored away an interpretation for this event. It talks of it in a “fugitive” manner, either expressly or else in a way which is mostly inhibited, as if to say, “One of these days one will die too, in the end; but right now it has nothing to do with us…” In Dasein’s public way of interpreting, it is said that “one dies;” it is said because everyone else and oneself can talk himself into saying that “in no case is it I myself,” for this “one” is “nobody.”3 (Heidegger 1962: 297) In a world that is animated and focused on the life process, death has a meaning, though a meaning that subverts the concern with survival. Death raises the issue of the terror of the futility of life since the latter only has meaning in its ability to overcome, postpone or render marginal the threat of death. Death is the enemy, a potential encounter that must be, even if only temporarily, defeated and postponed. In Berger’s sociological summary of the implication of Heidegger’s thought: [S]ociety provides us with taken-for-granted structures within which, as long as we follow the rules, we are shielded from the naked terrors of our condition… We are surrounded by darkness on all sides as we 47

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rush through our brief span of life toward inevitable death. The agonized question “Why?” that almost every man feels at some moment or other as he becomes conscious of his condition is quickly stifled by cliché answers that society has available. (Berger 1963: 149) While this shows denial of practical social action, the fact of denial alludes to the possibility that this meaning can be faced. That is, the action of denial analytically includes the possibility of facing and accepting. The particular meaning of death, in the context of a world where life is the highest good, remains concealed in a denial that also offers the possibility of revealing its particular secret or truth. Death shows it has a power to reveal its secret precisely through the efforts to conceal it. Facing Futility: Camus’ Meursault I’d lived in a certain way and I could just as well lived in a different way. I’d done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done one thing whereas I had done another. So what?… Nothing, nothing mattered and I know very well why… What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me, what did his God or the lives people chose or the destinies they selected matter to me, when one and the same destiny was to select me and thousands of millions of other privileged people who, like him [the prison chaplain], called themselves my brothers. Didn’t he understand? Everyone was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others too would be condemned one day. He too would be condemned. What did it matter if he was accused of murder and then executed for not crying at this mother’s funeral? (Camus 1942: 115–6) Meursault can be read as Camus’ example of facing the possibility of meaning that the denial of death reveals. As Camus himself said about his protagonist, The Outsider is “the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth” (1942: 119). The “passion for an absolute and for truth” that Meursault embodies, according to Camus, reaches its climax when he arrives at a fundamental certainty; he was “sure of the death that was coming” to him (Camus 1942: 115). As Meursault says, this truth “was all that I had. But at least it was a truth which I had hold of just as it had hold of me” (1942: 115). And this truth is that we are all condemned to die. Indeed, “the law of mortality” is “the only reliable law of a life spent between birth and death” (Arendt 1998: 246) and nothing, says Meursault, can make a difference to this certainty. While we may wish it otherwise, while we strive to postpone our encounter with this absolute as much as possible, we cannot escape its condemnation. It is a truth that applies to those who 48

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distance themselves from it, as for Meursault, who now faces it. When the priest offers the possibility of the consolation of an afterlife (if he seeks forgiveness), Meursault rejects this as an attempt to make a difference, an attempt to see that something matters when nothing matters: nothing makes a difference to the death that is coming to all. Meursault embodies the action of facing the futility of life. He also demonstrates that the fundamental certainty, despite all the changes and novelty that the life process privileges, is the truth gained through facing the meaning of death (and therefore life) in the age of life process dominance. While denial sustains the narcissism necessary for energy and growth, engaging the reality of death offers the compensation of gaining a truth, a certainty that can be held onto despite and through the full recognition of the futility that is life. In this case, the futility of life is forced to yield a meaning, a certainty that is absolute for all. It is ironic that this certainty is revealed to Meursault when the priest offers him a possible way of avoiding it by gaining distance from the certainty of death. Meursault’s resolution to the ungraspability of death is an ironic certainty: “[H]e [the chaplain] seemed so certain of everything, didn’t he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman’s head. He couldn’t even be sure he was alive because he was living like a dead man. I might seem to be empty-handed. But I was sure of myself, sure of everything, surer than he was, sure of my life and sure of the death that was coming to me” (Camus 1942: 115). As Meursault points out, the belief in God, or the possibility of an afterlife, or any other ideas about life and death only seem “to be sure.” From Meursault’s perspective, moreover, the danger of such belief systems is that they tempt us to avoid living a life. The priest, despite his apparent certainty, cannot “be sure that he is alive because he was living like a dead man.” So, though the experience of death is not subjectively available, it is possible to recognize that some lives are not really lived; some lives are best understood as a dead person’s walking. What could ground that claim of Meursault? Given the acknowledgement that “nothing makes a difference,” how is it possible for Meursault to say that the prison chaplain is living like a dead man (in his rationalization of death as a stage in a larger theological scheme), while Meursault is fully alive in his own certainty, his own possession of the surety of “the death that was coming” to him? Meursault connects his knowledge of the death that is coming to him (he will be executed the next morning) with being sure of his life. That is, the difference between himself and the chaplain is the acknowledgement that the certainty of death relativizes all other knowledge claims. With regard to a life that acknowledges the certainty of death as that which is fundamental, all other claims to knowledge are relative. “[One’s] God or the lives people chose or the destinies they selected” (Camus 1942: 115) do not make a difference to this fundamental truth. In relation to the absolute certainty of this fate, the certainty that this is our future, “nothing, nothing mattered.” Being really alive involves living a life that faces this truth. This acknowledgment on the part of Meursault comes after previously struggling with the hope of an appeal or even of an escape because of the difficulty he has with accepting “such an absolute 49

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certainty” (Camus 1942: 105). His outburst, and the realization that accompanied the outburst, comes in reaction to questions that the chaplain was asking him to think about (for example, whether “he was quite sure” about his lack of belief in God)—questions that, to Merseault, “didn’t seem to matter” (Camus 1942: 111). Meursault can be understood as one response to Arendt’s concern with the futility of life and the fleeting character of time. From the perspective of the world centered on the life process, the denial built into the “they” relation to death is entirely plausible. As survival and living is the dominant shared contemporary concern (because of the rise of society and its incorporation of the public realm), the inevitability of death is to be marginalized, removed from representation. Meursault does not so much transform this world as he shows what a “profound passion, the passion for an absolute and for truth” (Camus 1942: 119) looks like in this world. Meursault agrees to die because he is now in possession of the truth of human powerlessness to make a difference to the absolute difference of death. Before his encounter with the chaplain, he struggles with the inevitability of his fate. “The vital thing,” he says, “was that there be this chance of escaping, of breaking out of this implacable ritual, of making a mad dash for it which would admit every possible hope… Willing as I was, I just couldn’t accept such an absolute certainty [of the inevitability of death];” the problem “with the guillotine was that you had no chance at all, absolutely none” (Camus 1942: 105, 107). When he comes into possession of the truth, on the other hand, he can see that it was this hope that was preventing him from grasping the truth, not only of his situation but also of the human condition: This great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes. I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world. And finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. (Camus 1942: 117) Meursault’s confrontation with the chaplain “purged him” of all his ills, “killed all” his hopes. And yet Meursault comes to possess and be in possession of “an absolute” (Camus 1942: 119). This “finding” leads him to realize that he is happy and that he has led a happy life. The choices he made (to not cry at his mother’s funeral, to agree to marry Marie, to return to the beach, to fire the pistol that killed the Arab) were choices that now make sense given the recognition that life is lived in a world that is benignly indifferent.4 At the end of his life when his hopes for a way out of his absurd situation are strongest, at the end of his life when his inevitable death must be faced (and therefore the temptation to want to believe that there is something more than death), he passionately embraces the truth of benign indifference. The possession of this truth liberates him in such a way that Meursault “agrees to die for the truth.” 50

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Ironically, the content of the truth he agrees to die for is that his action of grasping the truth does not make a difference. The world (“the mass of signs and stars in the night sky”) is indifferent to the difference of human action. Whether he dies or lives, what he did in this life, what anyone does, is a matter of indifference: “Nothing, nothing mattered,” Meursault says, “when one and the same destiny was to select me and thousands of millions of other privileged people” (Camus 1942: 115–6). Yet, his grasp of this truth helps him realize that he had “been happy;” he had lived a life according to this truth and, on the night before his execution, now accepts that to hope for an escape or an appeal is an illness that is cured only by his grasping of this truth. Like the ancient Greeks, then, Meursault sees hope as one of the evils in Pandora’s box, raising the question of whether we want to be ill with hope or cured by truth. The almost perfect clarity of Meursault’s relation to death under the condition of life process dominance suggests a tension between the happiness that a truthful life offers and the discomfort and illness that a hopeful life offers. Again ironically, Meursault’s happiness is tied to the recognition that nothing in life matters. It can be argued that this position deconstructs itself since its foundation lies in the liberating possibility involved in possessing and being possessed by the truth. In other words, Meursault’s happiness, his agreement to die for the truth, suggests that the truth matters, leaving us with the irony that, after all, something does matter, in this case the possession of the truth (Bonner 2001). Meursault’s passionate outburst, his understanding that the chaplain was “living like a dead man,” that the chaplain’s metaphysical and theological certainties were not “worth one hair of a woman’s head,” all show that there are differences in life that matter: the liberation involved in recognizing the truth that we are all condemned to die, a recognition that “purged him of his ills,” which demonstrates that being in possession of the truth matters. It would be impossible to make sense of his happiness otherwise. In agreeing to die for the truth, is Camus not also implying that the action of finding the truth is superior to being blind to it? And though the truth in this case involves coming to terms with the world’s benign indifference, the very importance of the action of accepting the truth undermines the potential despair invited by the futility of life and the fleeting character of time. Agreeing to Die for the Truth With the character Antigone (in Sophocles’ eponymous play) we have another example of someone who agrees to die, another character who struggles with the mortal consequences of her own actions. It has been decreed by Creon, Antigone’s uncle and the ruler of Thebes, that her brother, Polyneices, should not be buried as a punishment for betraying the city. Her other brother, Eteocles, who fought for the city and died in battle with Polyneices, is to be buried with full state honors. When Antigone tells her sister 51

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Ismene that she intends to defy the law and bury their brother, Ismene says, “You must be mad” and that “this obsession will destroy you. You’re certain to fail” (Sophocles 1986: 135). Antigone’s commitment to defying the law established by Creon, and so her willing and knowing risk of death, leads her sister, Ismene, to accuse her of insanity. How can we assess Antigone’s action in light of what has been developed so far? In terms of the drama of the play, from Ismene’s perspective, it is the action of an obsessed person, while from Creon’s perspective, it is the act of an arrogant woman who wants to put herself above the law. Could one say that from Meursault’s perspective, she is in the grip of an illness, a hope that her action will make a difference? Antigone seems to be acting under the illusion that something matters: it matters that her brother Polyneices be buried, regardless of the fact that this act will result in her own death. Is Antigone in the grip of an illusion that is beginning to look like insanity? Is she (mentally) ill? From the perspective of a world dominated by survival and on the assumption that life itself is the highest good, her action certainly looks irrational. But, as already established, the life process, even if dominant, remains only one dimension for understanding human activity. On his assumption of power, Creon states that he has been “put to the supreme test by the exercise of lawful power in the State” (Sophocles 1986: 139). He declares “that no one who is an enemy of the State shall ever be a friend of mine. The State…is the ship we all sail in. If she sinks we all drown, and friendship drowns with us” (Sophocles 1986: 140). Survival of the State is the issue for Creon and, as such, the death of the State is to be feared. And, of course, without survival, we could not have a world or a public realm. Because Polyneices returned “at the head of a foreign army, to destroy his homeland, to burn down the city and reduce the people to a condition of slavery,” Creon has a law passed that “he is to have no grave at all” as a way to “make it quite plain that never under [his] administration will people who commit crimes against the state reap any benefits from their actions” (Sophocles 1986: 140). As Creon says to his son, Haemon (Antigone’s fiancé), “she is a confessed traitor, and if I were to spare her life, I too would betray the state and its law, and everything I stand for” (Sophocles 1986: 159). Haemon tries to argue (and the Chorus eventually comes to recognize) that Antigone’s action has changed the horizon. The people of Thebes now say that “in burying her brother, who was killed in action, she did something most people consider decent and honorable… She should be given a medal for it, those same people say, and her name inscribed on a roll of honor” (Sophocles 1986: 161). What initially appeared as insane and futile is now seen as honorable and decent. Where before, Ismene saw the attempt to act as an obsession and “bound to fail,” she “is now proud to stand with her in the dock” and to support Antigone (Sophocles 1986: 155). In positing the idea that action makes a difference, Sophocles is proposing a different relation to death than that possessed by Meursault: if nothing makes a difference to the inevitability of our death, if, as the Chorus says, the “desperate mortality [of humans] 52

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is their only certainty” (Sophocles 1986: 167), does the changed horizon make any real difference? While it does for Haemon and the people of Thebes in their new understanding of Antigone’s actions, in the context of our mortal condemnation, does that really matter? Or does this tell us something about the nature of action in contradistinction to labor, and therefore death, under worldly (rather than life process) conditions? Action, Principle and the World “Action,” Arendt (1968a: 151) says, “insofar as it is free is neither under the guidance of the intellect nor under the dictate of the will—although it needs both for the execution of any particular goal—but springs from…principle.” Principles, she further argues: do not operate from within the self as motives do—but inspire, as it were, from without; and they are much too general to prescribe particular goals… In distinction from its goal, the principle of an action can be repeated time and again, it is inexhaustible, and in distinction from its motive the validity of a principle is universal, it is not bound to any particular person or to any particular group… Such principles are honor or glory, love of equality. (Arendt 1968a: 151–2) From the perspective of action, both Antigone and Meursault can be seen to agree to die for the sake of a principle. One way to make sense of the tension or contradiction between the content of the truth that Meursault comes to grasp (“nothing, nothing matters”) and the significance involved in being in possession of the truth, is that his action makes manifest the truth as an example of a principle. If principles inspire action, then, in this case, the principle of truth is brought alive through Meursault’s speech to the chaplain. “The manifestation of principle,” Arendt says, “comes about only through action [words and deeds],” and principles “are manifest in the world as long as the action lasts” (1968a: 152). This suggests that principles matter and that a principled relation to action can give us some resources regarding the haunt of futility that death raises. Antigone’s action brings the principles of honor and decency to life, and so the meaning of her action changes from criminal to honorable. This highlights the potential boundlessness of an act, its potential to change the horizon that is both irreversible and unpredictable. When challenged by Creon (“And yet you dared to disobey the law”), Antigone replies, “the laws you enact cannot overturn ancient moralities or common human decency. They speak of a language of eternity…they are for today, yesterday and all time” (Sophocles 1986: 151). Polyneices may have been a traitor, but he was still a human being, “not an animal” (Sophocles 1986: 154). Antigone’s retort speaks to the idea of the universality of principle, in this case, of common human decency. Though 53

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her motive is to bury her brother and her goal is that he be buried, here she defends her action in relation to the universality of principle. How does the principle become recognizable here? Antigone achieves this by an action that shows her willingness to face death. That is, the principle at stake transforms the urgency of her survival, a transformation she shows in both words and deeds. Antigone, through the action of burial and by defying the law of the state, brings to appearance the principle of common human decency. Her action of burying her brother is not a brute deed, like a bomb in a crowded square. It is a deed supported with words and defended on the basis of its principle rather than its outcomes.5 This points to another feature of action: it is done for its own sake, for its own excellence. It is Creon’s belief that the fear of death will prevent all but the insane from disobeying the law under penalty of death. It is the willingness to act in a way that risks their own security that the insane and the principled seem to have something in common. The death/life distinction, according to Meursault, is the difference that nothing is powerful enough to make a difference. As noted, in an era dominated by life process concerns, this is a central cultural distinction. In Antigone, Creon embodies this orientation; the fear of death will bring people into line and turn potential traitors into law-abiding citizens. Yet Antigone says that “death is the worst thing that can happen,” as though there are not outcomes worse than death. Thus, the inescapable inevitability of death does not have to mean only that death makes life futile, that “nothing, nothing matters.” In Antigone, acting for the principle of common human decency matters, in the way that grasping and dying for the truth matters to Meursault. This is to say that Meursault’s example (of grasping and dying for the truth) is more important than his knowledge. In what way does Antigone’s action aid in the resolution of the tension between the truth involved in recognizing the nature of principle and the truth involved in recognizing the inevitability of death? From the perspective of the world and the public realm, if a principle is truly worth living for, it is also worth dying for; that is, from the perspective of one inspired by principle, the significant difference in life is not between death and life but between being principled or unprincipled. All death is not the same: “some deaths are more honorable than others” (Sophocles 1986: 137). Having the courage to act on a principle shows that in the political world, the distinction between life and death is secondary; action in this sense takes some of the force of the life/death distinction away. More specifically, action brings death and life together; both are seen to be oriented to the same end—in this case, keeping alive common human decency. Antigone’s action requires courage—the willingness to put one’s own security at risk. Courage, Arendt says, is central to political action (1968a: 156). From the perspective of life, “we should be the first to condemn courage as the foolish and even vicious contempt for life and its interests, that is for the allegedly highest of all goods.” Yet, courage is “indispensable for political action… because in politics not life but the world is at stake” (1968a: 156). 54

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Creon, speaking from the perspective of the centrality of survival (of the self, of the State) thinks that the worst thing that can happen to a person is that they will die, so it becomes his ultimate threat. For example, his threat to the soldier who first reports the burial is that “money will not save your life” (Sophocles 1986: 146). In effect, this is to say that the most powerful distinction in life is between life and death, that our greatest commonality is that we share life with all who currently live; our greatest separation, therefore, is our difference from those who are no longer. This is one way of understanding the concept of humanity: we have a solidarity with, and a responsibility for, all humans who are alive. In this sense, Creon speaks to the urgency of survival that is bound up with a horizon dominated by the life process. However, the action that brings the principle of common human decency to appearance shows that we can have a community with some who are dead and be out of community with some (in some circumstances, all) who are alive. That is, vis à vis a principled commitment to common human decency, the difference between life and death is secondary. “A principled practice can fail without being a failure of principle,” and “practice can succeed without being a morally committed practice… A principled actor orients to the (essential) significance of his action in that he understands its being undertaken as a sign of value” (Blum and McHugh 1984: 118–9). Or, as Antigone says, “if I die in the attempt, I shall die in the knowledge that I have acted justly” (Sophocles 1986: 136). Reflexively speaking, the examples of Antigone and Meursault are available as artifacts that have been handed down to us through a literary tradition; in this sense, they are remnants of Arendt’s (rather than Meursault’s) sense of world. While each provides the occasion to work with the “ungraspability of death,” the very existence of this sense of world itself provides the theorist with resources to gain some detachment from the dominance of the life process horizon. In so far as it does, it facilitates the theorist’s ability to generate likely meanings and likely stories as responses to the everpresent possibility of futility, stories to help reconcile us with regard to what Socrates called the childish fear that cannot be consoled and the illness of our hope to make a difference to the death that is absolutely certain. Arendt, citing Isak Dinesen, says “’all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.’ The story,” she goes on to say, “reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings” (Arendt 1968b: 104). Perhaps what is admirable about Meursault is the way he embraces, and therefore bears, the truth that death shows life as a sequence of sheer happenings. However, that is bearable because Camus leaves us with the story of Meursault, the story of one who, in facing the futility of life, agrees to die for the truth.

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Acknowledgements An earlier version of the Antigone portion of this paper has been accepted for publication by the Association of Core Texts and Courses, Proceedings from the 14th Annual Conference: “Who are we? Old, New, and Timeless Answers from Core Texts.” That version was concerned with pedagogy and politics. I am grateful for their permission to re-use some portions of that paper here. I also thank Ryan Devitt for helping me with editing and formatting the paper. Endnotes 1.

Gadamer’s reflections are relevant here, too: “for there is a deep connection between the knowledge of death, the knowledge of one’s own finitude, that is, the certainty that one day one must die, and, on the other hand, the almost imperious demand of not wanting to know, of not wanting to possess this sort of certain knowledge… Man’s very ability to envisage his own future lends to it such a tangible presence that he cannot grasp the thought of it coming to an end. We can be said to have a future for as long as we are aware that we have no future. The repression of death reflects a will to life” (1996: 64–5).

2.

It is as though Marx and Engels’ famous phrase opening The Communist Manifesto can be re-worded: “A spectre is haunting the modern world; the spectre of death.”

3.

See Chapter 1 of this volume for a critical analysis of Heidegger's formulation of death.

4.

McHugh's formulation of circulation in Chapter 15 of this volume is a sustained analysis of this kind of world.

5.

According to Durkheim (1951), Antigone's actions would qualify as suicide and, as such, is not unrelated to the media image of the suicide bomber. But here we have a way of distinguishing between the deeds of a terror campaign and the deeds inspired by principled action. While both may be grounded in an opposition to the necessary laws that support the stability of the state, a terror campaign, insofar as its aim or goal is to demoralize the enemy, is focused on consequences.

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Enlightenment and Romanticism: Aestheticizing the Corpse

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3 Reflexive Vectors: Art, Anatomy and Death in Cowper and Gamelin Morgan Tunzelmann

The Eighteenth-Century Dissection Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scientific practices were grounded in methods dominated by quantitative measurement and classificatory systems. A common justification for this method invokes a concept of a Nature whose ordered design revealed a rational, divine principle behind her creation; for example, as John Maubray writes in The Female Physician, “Nature is the implanted and innate Quality of Things…the Faculty and Propensity of every Mind…the Mixture and Temperature of the four Elements…that which giveth Form, by a specifick Difference, to every thing” (1730: 4). Man’s task was simply to elucidate the patterns of Nature within the forms around him, including his own body. Such was the intellectual currency of these methods that they flowed freely over into the developing professional discipline of medicine, circumscribing medical theory and praxis within physiology, or the study of the structure and function of living bodily processes. In De Praxi Medica, seventeenthcentury Italian physician Giorgio Balgivi describes the human body’s ordained blueprint as amenable for the human mind to conceptualize: [The body] operates by number, weight and measures…[and] thus by the wish of God, the highest Creator of all things, who, so that the framework of the human body should be accommodated more suitably to the capacity of the mind, seems to have sketched the most ordered series of proportions in the human body by the pen of Mathematics alone. (qtd. in Fox et al. 1995: 58) 59

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Paradoxically, physiology or “Nature’s word”1 is dependent upon the act of dissection and, inescapably, upon the occurrence of death itself; therefore, anatomists can only discern the processes of living through hindsight, after those processes have been denatured by the cessation of what vitalist Xavier Bichat called “the functions that resist death” (Bichat 1800, in Haigh 1984: 10). Bichat conceived of the vital forces of the body as opposing the default pressure of deanimation or death. In order to further infer which functions correspond to given visible systems, medical theorists delineated an “organic economy” of human physiology whose framework enabled the “systematic investigation of corporeal fibers, tissues, vessels, and membranes” that comprised the modus operandi of eighteenth-century vitalists (Fox 1995: 58). “Nature’s word” is not only dependent upon the act of dissection, but also upon the methodical and analogical nature of relating parts to one another and to their functions. The systematic study of physiology thus can be described as a hermeneutics of anatomy, paralleled with the traditional “interpretive, exegetical, and theoretical procedure performed on a resisting text, [that]…rank[s] close reading above the ostentatious shallowness of sight” (Stafford 1996: 46). In the practice of medicine, it is precisely the systematic or rational nature of investigation that mitigates the shallowness of sight and allows the “decoding hermeneuticist…the alleged capacity to probe beneath deluding surfaces” (Stafford 1996: 46). Yet paradoxically, the rational “pen of Mathematics” dictates not only the order and method of investigation but also the lens through which the body is viewed and ultimately rendered on the page in a symmetrical and aesthetic manner. This chapter discusses the creation and viewing of the medical illustration as an aesthetic performance whose ostensive rationalism enables the illustration to represent discursive and cultural assumptions about the corpse and the presence of death in eighteenth-century medicine. The acts of dissecting, describing, illustrating and deducing physiological processes are similar to the documenting, counting, classifying and cataloguing inherent within textual scholarship; furthermore, both are scholarly pursuits that rely on the propagation of learned authority to justify their means. The means of the anatomist, however, were and are more gruesome than those of the bibliophile. The doctor, historically, has long been feared and reviled, not only for his association with death, but also because laypeople tended to be suspicious that the scientific nature of his profession made him callous and dismissive of the cultural imperative to treat the dead with respect. Like the textual scholars, anatomists direct their energies to “collecting” their preferred “texts” or corpses and are limited in these efforts by what is supplied by the “library” from which they borrow, a place that could be variously likened to the scaffold, the graveyard, the hospital or Nature itself. There is, however, an overtly rhetorical aspect to the anatomist’s activities. In order to obtain their “texts,” anatomists must first convince a fractious public that plundering, stripping and cutting the bodies of its deceased members aids in increasing humans’ knowledge of the terms of their embodiment, which in turn directly 60

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facilitates an improved quality of life; the job of the anatomist thus included an early modern version of public relations. As Helen MacDonald asserts, “Dealing with the dead in controversial ways always requires some form of rationalization. It is part of the process through which access to bodies is socially negotiated” (2005: 13).2 As MacDonald also explains, one of the most practical ways to “socially negotiate” dissection is to frame the act as a punishment dealt only to criminals. Under the British Act for better preventing the horrid Crime of Murder (25 Geo. 2, c. 37, 1752), or the Murder Act, the College of Surgeons “had the right to” the bodies of all convicted murderers executed in London (MacDonald 2005: 12). The state identified the criminal as one whose flagrant opposition to the “known Humanity and natural Genius of the British Nation” made it “necessary that some further Terror and peculiar Mark of Infamy be added to the Punishment of Death” (Cay 1758: 111). The Murder Act thus not only explicitly rendered the act of dissection as a punishment, but also provided surgeons with the authority of ownership by converging the arms of the surgeon and those of the Crown. The association of criminality with bodies lying upon the autopsy table may account for some of the rowdy enthusiasm with which physicians and other members of the public attended dissections at anatomy theatres, yet the enthusiasm seems to have had an air of indecency to it. Astley Cooper, for instance, who presided over the Surgeons’ Hall from 1793 to 1796, deplored the overcrowded theatre and “excessive” applause of the audience (Tyrell 1827: 153). And for student physicians, “familiarizing” their hearts to the process of learning anatomy through dissection, what obstetrician William Hunter described as “a kind of necessary Inhumanity,” must have been easier when the student could reassure himself that it was a former criminal being rent by the scalpel (in Richardson 2001: 30–1). The public relations campaign, therefore, was waged as much to calm the selfdirected anxieties of the anatomists as it was to appease the still skeptical public. However, the assumption that these participants usually held—that they were dissecting or viewing the dissection of the bodies of criminals—was often false. The demand for bodies was much greater than the State’s production of executed prisoners; thus, physicians often obtained their bodies through other, often clandestine means. Corpses were as likely to be picked off from the dead wards of charity hospitals as delivered from the scaffold.3 Yet the actual circumstances behind the acquisition of corpses do not usurp or influence the performative resonance of the dissection, especially in its form as public spectacle. Such was the importance of maintaining the status of dissection as a balancing act of retribution for a society ransacked by the given individual’s presumed infringement of order (whether by criminal acts, or indirectly through poverty, or both): the narrative of circumstances of an individual’s life and death are changed to suit the needs of medical inquiry. Dissection is not only a possessive act by the surgeon, one that implicates the corpse within the domain of medicine, but also one that has the potential, through a discursive visual narrative, to symbolically recreate the circumstances of the life that produced the corpse. Therefore, the act of dissection is a reflexive performance 61

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of order that bears resemblance to the counting and cataloguing that signified “scientific investigation” during this period. Both dissection and scientific inquiry are performed partly to affirm their own rationality and propriety. Similarly, there is also strong precedence for associating anatomy with justice, as well as with rationality; symbols and icons of the latter are common in visual depictions of medicine and anatomy. Jonathan Sawday (1996) relates how the personified figure of Anatomia, who can be viewed in the title-page plates of several Renaissance and early modern anatomy books, resembles the personification of Justice.4 In the title-page of Govard Bidloo’s Anatomia humani corporis (1685),5 Anatomia is “revealed by Time” to be “enthroned” while her assistants examine a skull, a dissected arm and an anatomical engraving.6 Even before Anatomia, the Greek myth of anatomical division has a moralistic undertone: in the Symposium, Plato describes how Zeus, exasperated at the insolence of humanity, who were “originally a tri-sexed and spherical species” (1996: 51), punished the human race by bisecting their bodies, and making them walk upon two legs, vowing that “If there is any sign of wantonness in them after that, and they will not keep quiet, I will bisect them again, and they shall hop on one leg” (1996: 51). Made by the anatomist, the longitudinal incision from stem to sternum that is the “peculiar Mark of Infamy” upon the body also bisects what was once whole (and perhaps, insolent).7 Dissection and anatomy are therefore based on a scholarly, rational, moral and judicial8 framework within which anatomists can align their pursuit of freshly deceased bodies for dissection. Such a framework aids in fashioning dissection as part and parcel of a promise that is concurrent with the “notion of mortality as a curable condition [that] may be regarded as an ultimate threshold of Enlightenment meliorism” (Roberts 1993: 151). The framework relies not only on a futurist rhetoric of immortality, however, but also on the historicist notion of a past age that obscures and hides the anatomist’s “text,” which can only be revealed through the break caused by the enlightened gaze. In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault (1994) claims that one way to discursively legitimize dissection is by constructing a triumphal narrative, one that attributes the suspicions of laypeople toward anatomists as superstition, one that identifies morality as a major stumbling block for scientific investigation, and one that consequently forced groundbreaking physicians such as Giovanni Morgani and Antonio Valsalva to slip “furtively” into graveyards to exhume and dissect corpses on the spot. According to this version of events, it was only with “the coming of the Enlightenment [that] death, too… became for the philosophical mind an object and source of knowledge”: A fine transmutation of the corpse had taken place: gloomy respect had condemned it to putrefaction, to the dark work of destruction; in the boldness of the gesture that violated only to reveal, to bring to the light of day, the corpse became the brightest moment in the figures of truth. Knowledge spins where once larva is formed. (Foucault 1994: 125)9 62

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Foucault thus identifies the role that the reconstitutional narrative plays as a discursive rational field within which dissection or “pathological anatomy” can be construed as central: Historians linked the new medical spirit with the discovery of pathological anatomy, which seemed to define it in its essentials, to bear it and overlap it, to form both its most vital expression and its deepest reason; the methods of analysis, the clinical examination, even the reorganization of the schools and hospitals seemed to derive their significance from pathological anatomy. (Foucault 1994: 124) That pathological anatomy is manifested essentially within the space of the clinic and the method of the clinical examination is, of course, one of the basic premises of Foucault’s book, as is the important description of the gaze as simultaneously piercing and systematizing (1994: 107–23). Yet while Foucault’s gaze deals primarily with active symptoms, the anatomist can only view traces or remainders of disease. While the gaze operates directly through and within the clinic, the anatomist’s gaze is always further filtered through the presence of death within the deanimated corpse. And while the Foucauldian gaze reduces the body to its symptoms, the anatomist literally reduces the corpse to unrecognizable shreds. The anatomist is thus perhaps more dependent on physiological abstractions than the clinician for his reconstruction of something whole and functional. Due to the messy appearance of a dissected corpse, understanding the body’s physiology in any sort of systemic or ordered manner almost always requires that the body’s anatomical structure be reconstructed aesthetically, either visually or verbally on paper, so that the tasks of arranging and abstracting may then be completed. In William Cowper’s Myotomia Reformata (1733) and Jacques Gamelin’s Nouveau recueil d’osteologie et de myologie (1779), the anatomical illustrations represent the discursive tensions between corpse and medical corpus in which the former is resurrected symbolically upon the pages of the latter, its former inhabitant’s criminality (and/or poverty) erased and replaced by a glorified figure. Part of the idealism of the grandly gesticulating figures can simply be attributed to their existence as sketched renditions, for as Edward Tufte notes, “drawings sometimes have a useful abstracting, idealizing quality” (1997: 57) that can be particularly handy in anatomical illustration used for instructing students (i.e., “a generic heart is depicted, not a particular or idiosyncratic heart”[1997: 57]).10 However, whether the illustrations are intended to be “scientific” or “artistic,” in both texts the significance of the anatomical illustration as a “site” that replaces both the dissecting theatre and the clinic is twofold. First, although the illustration makes accessible the experience of viewing the interior recesses of the body, the very representational quality of the image also subverts most abject qualms that viewers might experience 63

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upon seeing and smelling decaying flesh; viewers are relieved of any association with the collective spectacle of the anatomy theatre. The image is therefore not only aestheticized but also largely sanitized, assuring the viewer that any inferences he or she makes from the illustration are untainted by his or her emotions or revulsion towards the preserved corpse, which Mary Wollstonecraft once described as “treason against humanity,” stating that “nothing is so ugly as the human form when deprived of life, and thus dried into stone, merely to preserve the most disgusting image of death” (qtd. in Porter 2004: 220). Second, the gestures and poses or “directionality” of the illustrated figures may potentially form vectors between figures within an image, as well as between the figures and the viewer’s gaze.11 What ultimately facilitates the sanitized depiction of the corpse and the conscious directionality of its gestures, however, is the corpse’s figuration within the controlled and rational field of the page. My question, however, does not only consider the figures simply as a distraction from the gruesome finality of the circumstances underlying their creation, but further addresses how the visual rendition of anatomy becomes, like the antiquary’s footnotes and the anatomist’s delineation of structures, a reflexive performance of the objectivity of viewing. And as we will see in Gamelin and Cowper, the reflexive performance of viewing ultimately brings the anatomist and the corpse into the same representational field. Reflexive Representations and the Sanitizing of Decay The Death of Socrates Before addressing vectors in anatomical illustrations, I wish to provide a similar analysis in fine art. The neoclassical painter Jacques Louis David’s Death of Socrates (1787) is a good example of how the “vectors” formed by the presumed directions of viewers’ gazes aid in explicating a moral or didactic message. The painting depicts the Greek philosopher pontificating as he reaches for the goblet of hemlock proffered to him (Fig. 3.1). Notable for its “classical austerity and severity,” David’s painting presents Socrates as choosing death for the purpose of preserving the dignity that the thinker would have lost had he acquiesced to the Athens senate’s demands for him to eschew philosophical debate. As art historian Barbara Stafford notes, David’s painting contains an “ostentatiously embodied moral geometry” (1993: 12) in which the directionality of the figures models the proper behavior of a solemn thinker. Here Socrates faces death while sitting fully upright on the edge of the bed, his right hand reaching for the poisoned goblet, gazing Crito directly in the eye, the upward gesture of his left arm visually clarifying the subject of his last speech: that immortality awaits. Socrates’ posture contrasts starkly with those of his companions: while the gestures of the surrounding men imply an empathetic anticipation of the pain Socrates will undergo (thus depicting them as “men of sympathy”),12 their downward-cast gazes and curved poses indicate 64

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Fig. 3.1. Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates (1787). Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

that their attentions are distracted from the realm of eternal things, instead remaining preoccupied with the Platonic cavern of the transient body and its base emotions. (Even Plato, seated at the end of the bed, gazes at his feet.) David’s painting ultimately reinforces what Stafford terms “a Neoclassical pictorial logic” in which “Reality was geometrical”: The invisible immortality [Socrates] was convinced he would soon grasp was congruent with the haptic solidity of the painting’s style. The achievement of certitude, or the noetic attainment of Ideas by the mind, corresponded to the abrupt outlining and unmechanical drawing of the figures… Rough parataxis, or tactile juxtaposition of bodies, further symbolized the uneasy dialectical tension between that which is and that which is not yet. (Stafford 1993: 15–6) While Stafford’s description delves fruitfully into multifaceted contours, juxtapositions and musculature of the figures, reducing the analyses of these classically rendered human forms into vectors highlights the compositional balance or gestalt of the scene. In 65

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David’s painting, the straight, upward vector of Socrates’ body singularly overpowers the numerous, downward, curved vectors of his followers, thus demonstrating the “measure” of the man relative to his contemporaries. But whereas vectors in geometrical figures ultimately form angles that, in a closed shape, form a “zero sum,” the action of vectors between these detailed figures effectively animates a scene and reflects the degree of conviction in the figures. Furthermore, the appearance of motion in the painting draws the viewer’s attention in upon the figures or “agents” of the vectors and encourages him or her to construct a narrative of events that inform the painting’s content. Yet this narrative is circular or reflexive rather than teleological. While the painting’s contextual grounding in Plato’s accounts of Socrates establishes a degree of historicity, the resonance of the scene distances the viewer from the full implications of the painting’s presumed allusion to death. Furthermore, although educated viewers of the painting would likely be familiar with the events that led up to Socrates’ deathbed, it would be arguably difficult to cognize the finality of Socrates’ death, except, for the imaginative viewer, in terms of visible symptoms of poisoning: salivation, paleness, convulsions, which are, of course, the only possible way to depict Socrates’ death mimetically (had David chosen instead to attempt to render the moment just after Socrates ingested poison). The figure of Socrates reflects his upright narrative; however, the viewer’s gaze is allowed the relief of tracing a vector from the philosopher’s pointed finger back down towards the more familiar contortions of misbegotten sympathy. Tracing this circular path of vectors allows the viewer to avoid the problem of attempting to imagine Socrates’ end and instead to focus upon the contrast between spiritual foresight and the lack thereof. Of course, whether experienced as a cognitive or an internal bodily sensation, both foresight and ignorance are living processes, and what Socrates will inflict upon himself is unimaginable, representable only in second degree: by representing other representations. The animated figures gesture not towards a future but towards a particular moment in time to which the viewer’s attention must cycle back. The Death of Socrates, then, foregrounds the classical “good death” through the balanced composition particularly prized during the Neoclassical period. In the anatomical illustration, the directionality of the gestures indicates the purposeful creation of a human figuration that is not only generic, but, more importantly, encapsulated within the rational field of the page. The posed figures within the fields, with their definitive gestures and finely rendered skeleto-muscular details, lend themselves well to visual and scientific examination. Therefore, the task of abstraction, of “select[ing] impressions from a hypothetically infinite field” (Law 1993: 182), which includes geometrizing and reassembling, can be constituted within a coherent field that enables the vectors of the image to form a gestalt or sense of balance through the closed sum or circularity of the vectors. If one agent of the image points up, as in David’s painting, the other agent or agents point down, and the contrast between the two allows the viewer to avoid the uneasiness of conceptualizing death. The pleasure of viewing the image stems in part 66

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from the removed, satisfied circumspection that characterizes the objective viewer (Law 1993: 167–75). Haptic Connections While the expression of power and virtue in The Death of Socrates is quite evident, the dynamic (if one exists) between the figures depicted in my example from Jacques Gamelin’s Nouveau recueil d’osteologie et de myologie (1779) is more ambiguous, and not only because the image includes one subject who, unlike Socrates, is depicted after death. The son of a merchant, the artist Gamelin undertook the prodigious task of producing the seminal work after receiving a large inheritance. Although less than 200 copies of Gamelin’s book were printed, sales of the book (at 40 livres each) were so poor that Gamelin became bankrupt, and the remaining copies of the book were pulped or “dismembered” (Rifkin et al. 2006: 219–27)—a literal death of the text. Nonetheless, the rare book is “a masterpiece of Romantic anatomical illustration” (Hook and Norman 1991: 316), due in large part to the striking amount of accurate and contrasting detail present in the engravings. Like the British anatomists, Gamelin’s work was enabled by judicial sanctions; local magistrates allowed Gamelin access to the corpses of executed criminals, which he then both dissected and sketched himself before handing over his illustrations to engravers. Gamelin’s creativity produced striking scenes of the Resurrection and Crucifixion, as well as apocalyptic images such as “Death on Winged Horse Riding Over Fallen Bodies,” and “Four Horsemen of Apocalypse,” and also several osteological plates of skeletons engaging in carnivalesque and sometimes abhorrent pursuits: playing musical instruments, bursting into a drunken tavern or participating in a mock of the rape of the Sabine women (Hook and Norman 1991: 316). Gamelin’s plates “show a constant interplay between the artistic and the anatomic…[his] technical perfection, coupled with the emotional and fantastical elements in his images, have led him to be seen as a precursor of Goya” (Bazin 1938: 8). Death is omnipresent in Gamelin’s art, and as such it is classical, chaotic and divinely ordained.13 While Gamelin certainly dealt in the apocalyptic, the sublime and the deathly, many of the plates in Nouveau recueil are dramatic in a subtler manner. Most of the plates in the book depict flayed bodies against neutral backgrounds. Like the malevolent skeletons mentioned above, these bodies are also animated, thus exhibiting directionality or the agency to possess part of the image. Yet, unlike those apocalyptic figures, these animated bodies are not threatening. Devoid of any associations of criminality, the bodies stand, stretch or recline so as to display their muscles and bones to full effect, thus presented as existing for the sake of the viewer’s gaze. But in their passivity lies a decidedly unnatural otherness. Figure 3.2, for example, depicts a corpse posed in an awkward yet stylized manner that is clearly intended for visual analysis. The plate displays a corpse laid upon 67

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a round table that has been tilted nearly vertically; thus the viewer confronts the image on the same horizontal plane (rather than looking straight down upon the corpse). This angle also shows the profiles of the figures standing on the left side of the image, next to the table. While the corpse’s torso is laid flat out upon the surface of the table, its hips are swiveled so that its legs and feet point left, and the head, too, is posed in that direction. The left leg hangs off the round surface, presumably to better display both anterior and posterior muscles. The shoulders are also tilted so that the right is above the left; the left arm also hangs off the round surface, with a hand that appears to be grasping the edge. The right arm is straight and draped over a block at roughly a 45 degree angle from the torso. It is this arm and hand that is closest to the two male figures—like Gamelin, most probably anatomists as well as artists—who gaze intently at the corpse. Were the agents in the image to be divided into sections, there would be three parts: the left side of the image, occupied by the two artists, the right side of the image, occupied by the corpse (and the negative space on the far right), and the interstitial space, forming a rough quadrilateral (or, if one is imaginative, a triangle). One side of the shape is delineated by the corpse’s legs, and another side is outlined by the right arms of corpse and artist, extended to form a single line.

Fig. 3.2. Jacques Gamelin, Nouveau recueil d’osteologie et de myologie (1779), p. 30. Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine, Washington, DC. 68

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Is it possible to discern a narrative from the vectors of this image? A prescient narrative would not only address the dynamic between the anatomist and the corpse but would also attempt to reconcile the ordained blueprint or the cataloguing impulse with Gamelin’s aesthetic primacy in order to allude to the presence of the élan vital—and the lack thereof—within the image. The most salient element in the illustration is the corpse, as it not only occupies the center of the image but is crisply outlined, its various muscle fibers contrasted against each other, set off from the table upon which it rests and distinguished from the anatomists.14 Thus the corpse could be said to embody Foucault’s triumphal narrative as a bright “figure of truth” (1994: 125). Stripped of clothing, skin, and fat, the smoothly edged and muscular corpse seduces the gaze, tempting the anatomists to further disassemble and, of course, conceptually reassemble its structures and fibers. Yet if we trace the vector of the anatomist’s gaze (the one whose eyes are visible), we see that it does not pierce but rather skims the surface of the corpse; there is even a possibility that it follows the direction of the “gaze” of the corpse, which, like the corpse’s face, is obscured, contributing to its otherness and protecting the audience from the disquieting experience of observing the facial expression of a dead body. The only vector that directly links the anatomist and the corpse is the one formed by their right arms; “connections” are established through the “orientation” and “similar content” of the two limbs (Tufte 1997: 82). The arms both have a muscular appearance, and the hands of the living and dead are precariously close to touching in a way that is reminiscent of the depiction between God and Adam in Michaelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, the famous section of the painter’s Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco. But it is unclear, here, just who would be enlivened and ensouled. Instead of reaching forth with anticipation, as Adam does, the corpse’s ostensive attention faces the opposite direction. The possibility of touch is wholly forestalled by the corpse’s limp and unresponsive hand: the deanimation of that particular body part signifies its untouchable nature in death. Therefore the “absolute difference” between the anatomists and the corpse creates tension in the narrative, as the way they “appear to assume positions relative to one another” actually “threaten[s] the certainty of that absolute difference” (Wilson 1987: 89). In this image, it is not quite certain who maintains the higher degree of physical integrity and agency. In order for the living anatomist to re-consolidate his authority over the corpse, therefore, the mediating touch between the two is signified not by flesh, but instead by the instruments that are carefully laid out in the interstitial space between the living and the dead. This space is the blank surface of the round table, whose opposite edges are clutched by both anatomist and corpse. Scissors, a knife, graspers or tweezers, and a hook (likely used to take hold of muscle fibers) somehow rest in place upon the vertical table, parallel both to each other and to the vector of the arms. Significantly, the illustration does not provide a demonstration of the proper use of the instruments by the anatomists; it is enough that the instruments point in the direction of the corpse, representing their potential to cut, grasp and tease out various fibers—in other words, to further compromise the integrity of 69

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the corpse as a whole and finely made object, or, more frighteningly, to threaten to loosen the abject coils of internal organs contained by the muscles. At the same time, however, the instruments are presumed responsible for the corpse’s present appearance in the first place. The table, thus, is not only a potential site of Foucault’s gaze but also represents a transitional medium between the living and the dead, and between the field of medicine and the unknowable field of the afterlife (upon whose precipice the corpse appears to be balanced). And while, unlike The Death of Socrates, the vectors in Gamelin have the potential to trace a teleological narrative, the viewer nonetheless encounters the same problem: the incommensurability of death to the imaginative intellect. The mind has no choice but to return to the dialectic between anatomist and corpse, the “performance” that “is both of and by both of them” (Wilson 1987: 72). A Representation of Anatomical Representation In our third figure, the corpse appears to exist amidst the landscape of the afterlife. Myotomia Reformata, William Cowper’s treatise on the structure and actions of the muscles, is “illustrated with figures after the life,” as the title page tells the reader, implying the existence of some sort of perpetual aesthetic limbo in which archetypal bodies may be imprinted upon the viewer’s mind. Such a state would well suit scientific purposes, for Cowper explains later in the Preface that it is the job of the Philosophers and Physicians: to preserve the Curious Fabric of the Human Body, to acquaint themselves fully with the Nature and Constitution of that Noble Subject; for that is the only way to learn what are the secret Springs by which the mysterious Operations of Sense and Motion are performed; to discover by the Symptoms of Disease the several Causes and Seats of them, together with the proper Methods for their Prevention and Cure. (Cowper 1733: 2) Cowper also notes, in the Introduction, that discovering the causes behind the mechanisms of human muscles should be pursued via “the proper Means of attaining them, which are only Experiments and just Reasonings drawn from Mathematical Principles” (1733: ii). To that end, he is a product of the medical theories of his time (which were more than eighty years before Gamelin’s). Throughout Myotomia Reformata appear geometrical diagrams that are intended to demonstrate the action of the muscles as closed Euclidean sums. Such diagrams demonstrate the textual subjugation of flesh before what Stafford terms a “geometrical enthusiasm” (1993: 11) prevalent during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as the commitment to finding the source of life encoded within the body. 70

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What is more relevant to this chapter, however, is the appearance within Cowper’s text of what I will call the “denaturing” series: at least one series of plates in which the same figure, bodily system or organ is gradually presented in less detail. These series not only encourage the viewer’s gaze to move across several pages with a sense of continuity, but they also explicitly render upon the page the process of decay or decomposition of the corpse. Figure 3.3 is part of a set of images, the first of which presents a flayed but whole corpse, and the last of which presents a skeleton. While the central figure in each image maintains the same pose, the contextual background of each plate changes: for example, the background of the image of the skeleton depicts several other skeletons lying in coffins, while the background of Figure 3.3 shows the top of a crumbling Greek column, overgrown with foliage, as well as a tablet upon which is rendered a second image of the corpse. The aesthetic limbo within which the animated corpse is displayed may thus represent the feared death of the entwinement of classical art and anatomy. In the growing scientific impulse to represent individual forms in an empirical manner, exactly as they are viewed, there is a prescience of the loss of the ideal type in Cowper’s plate. Yet other readings are possible here. While it initially appears contradictory that the rendition of decay seems to be involved in “preserving the Curious Fabric of the Human Body,” when we consider this “afterlife” as akin to a conceptual space of anatomical representation in which figures are aggressively animated to deflect connotations of death, the decaying body takes on new significance as a mode of inquiry. As Stafford describes: [dissection] stood for an investigative intellectual method that uncovered the duplicity of the world. Discursive thought called upon powers of baring abstraction whereby the lowly particular was severed from the significant subject, the unimportant individual was subtracted from the important universal… One involved manual probing, the other cerebral grasping. Each suggested the stripping away of excess by decomposition and fragmentation for the purpose of control. (Stafford 1993: 47) While there may appear to be some potential in this image for acknowledging the presence of death, the alignment of images of decay with methods of visual analysis further deflects the potential of death. The illustration within an illustration directs the viewer’s attention from corpus to corpus (not corpus to corpse). What is shown in these anatomical illustrations is not the death of that body but the proper means of its representation. Thus, this particular plate of Cowper’s is a reflexive performance of viewing par excellence. Both Gamelin’s and Cowper’s anatomical plates aid in demonstrating the very epistemological practices that are responsible for the initial need for dissection. 71

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Fig. 3.3. William Cowper. Myotomia reformata; or an anatomical treatise on the muscles of the human body. London: R. Knaplock, 1724. Courtesy of the Wellcome Trust, Wellcome Library of Medicine, London, UK. 72

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Because the “functions” that are supposed to continuously forestall death are primarily hermeneutic and analogical in nature, they can be depicted abstractly, rather than concretely. The hermeneutics of physiology—”Nature’s word”—can thus be applied to performative narratives of the anatomist and the corpse. Where the development of the eighteenth-century clinic enabled pathological concepts in medicine, so too does the encapsulation of a rational field within the space of the anatomical illustration nicely distract from the origins of the corpse and its death. Endnotes 1.

The etymology of “physiology” is the Greek physis (nature, origin) with logia (word) (OED).

2.

See Chapters 1 and 2 of MacDonald's Human Remains (2005).

3.

Despite the Murder Act, bodies for dissection remained scarce, and most medical men still obtained their specimens elsewhere. Corpses were stolen from graves by entrepreneurial middlemen, or people were murdered and their bodies sold (William Burke and William Hare being among the most famous examples). Bodies were also drawn from the unclaimed poor in hospital dead houses (MacDonald 2005: 13).

4.

Anatomia, however, holds a scalpel or mirror in place of a set of scales.

5.

William Cowper would later reuse this title page, as well as other plates that originally appeared in Bidloo, in his Anatomia Corporum Humanorum (1698).

6.

Sawday also claims that in Iulius Casserius's Tabulae anatomicae, Anatomia resembles an empirically inclined Athene, balancing a mirror on her knee in order to better see the skull near her “in just the same way that Perseus could see (and defeat) the Medusa with the help of Athene’s polished shield” (1996: 183).

7.

In another example of the association between medicine and law, Ludmilla Jordanova notes that medical discourses were used to explain cultural concerns about the health of the body politic, henceforth justifying the furor of executions and violence that occurred during the French Revolution (1999: 118–30). In that case, law is the agent of medicine, rather than the other way around.

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8.

While here my reference to "judicial" has a particular historical context within eighteenth-century British law, throughout the rest of the chapter I use "justice" in a more general sense to imply the idea of balance and measure. As Laura M. Slatkin notes (2004: 26), in Hesiod's Works and Days, the figure of Justice is concerned with measuring out the passage of day through the seasonal work of farming. The “equilibrating logic of nature” encapsulated in Justice is a “feat of human cognition,” as is Balgivi’s assurance that the body is a reflection of an ordered nature (in Fox et. al. 1995: 58).

9.

Foucault goes on to debunk the circumstances of such a "reconstitution [as] historically false" (1994: 125). However, I would argue that there he is overly dismissive of the difficulties that both English and French physicians had to overcome in order to obtain a minimum number of corpses suitable for dissection. Helen MacDonald, for example, describes a number of problems in obtaining specimens suitable for dissection that are not strictly limited to nationality (e.g., the statistical difficulty of obtaining young, non-deformed corpses, particularly females, whose families would go to greater lengths to prevent their wives' and daughters' bodies from being autopsied, as well as the practical problem of slowing the natural decomposition process, or of obtaining and dissecting the corpse before it decayed) (2005: 25–43).

10. The image of a generic or normative body part is common in Renaissance and early modern books that do double duty as manuals for physicians and for art students, such as Andreas Vesalius' or William Cowper's books. However, during the later part of the eighteenth century, physicians, such as William Hunter, begin to stress the need to create anatomical illustrations that are exact copies of the particular body viewed by the illustrator. 11. Social semioticians Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen note that vectors usually emanate from "an active participant" and are directed to a single goal, although vectors can also be multidirectional (2006: 42). Kress and van Leeuwen discuss vectors within the context of outlining a practice of visual rhetoric, which assumes that images contain an encoded "visual grammar." I use several basic principles of visual rhetoric in this chapter but refrain from identifying any illustration as containing and communicating a single "meaning." 12. For a more complete account of the significance of sympathy and sensibility to eighteenth-century culture, see G. J. Barker-Benfield's The Culture of Sensibility (1992).

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13. Jacques Gamelin rendered a number of classical scenes, notably The Fall of Phaetheon, an oil painting owned by the gallery of the Palazzo Rondanini in Rome. He also made several chiaroscuro drawings, including “Scene of Murder from an Unidentified Classical Subject” and “Odysseus Killing the Suitors of Penelope” (see Carlson 1996). 14. Contrastingly, Luke Wilson notes that most depictions of dissection in the Renaissance anatomy theatre foreground the anatomist or professor: "The purpose of the anatomy is the verification or demonstration of the text, and so the center of focus is the professor" (1987: 64).

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4 “Mother of Unworthy Woe”: Infant Death and Sentimental Maternity in British Romantic Women’s Poetry and Midwifery Books Tristanne Connolly

Introduction The joy of becoming a mother, the anticipated pleasure of presenting a fond husband with the dearest pledge of mutual love is chilled by imaginary terrors… We must hasten to convince the timid female, that the very state, at which she has been taught to tremble, brings her nearer to the perfection of her being. (Mears 1797: 4)            

For the lov’d Innocent that moulders here Suppress the sigh; ah! stop the falling tear. From Heav’n’s high court the gracious mandate came; The spotless soul forsakes it’s mortal frame; Joyful the new-form’d Angel bursts away, And hails the regions of eternal day. (Greensted 1796: 28)

Over the course of the eighteenth century, medical men gradually but decisively took over the management of childbirth which had previously been overseen by women midwives along with local “gossips” or female family and friends of the mother. What might be called a life event became a medical event; previously, physicians were only called in the event of serious complications (that is, when the birth became a medical problem). The presence of a physician in the female space of the delivery room was a sign and an acknowledgement of the nearness of death. Adrian Wilson argues that the border 77

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between male and female involvement in childbirth at this time was drawn by death: “the role of the male practitioner was to deliver a dead child, usually with the crotchet, which required a surgical training, whereas the technique of turning the child belonged to midwives, precisely because this permitted a live birth” (1995: 52). In order to detach themselves from such associations and gain access to childbirth under non-emergency circumstances, medical men had to find ways to give assurances that they could deliver live babies. The secret invention (most likely the forceps) which the Chamberlen family (the earliest male practitioners of midwifery in London, from before 1620) claimed could save mothers and children in births obstructed by the head was one of the first and most famous of these assurances (Wilson 1995: 53–4). The debate over “man-midwifery” raged in print over the course of the century, and among many facets of the argument was the question of which kind of care was safest: the warm, knowing hands of the traditional female midwife, or the efficient instruments of the innovative medical man. As the physicians gained ground, and the midwives tried to shore up their ground in their own profession, the debate produced escalating promises of safety, as if to demonstrate the evolution of Foucault’s Enlightenment medical “myth of a total disappearance of disease in an untroubled, dispassionate society restored to its original state of health” (1994: 31–2). The medicalization of childbirth (which, even as they defended their craft, drew midwives into its terms and away from a non-medical or folk-medical position) increasingly erased the danger and pain of birth, until Martha Mears, the last woman to write a midwifery book until the twentieth century (Donnison 1977: 60), approvingly quotes the male authorities she studied under1 and insists the “terrors” of childbirth are “imaginary” (Mears 1797: 4). The outcome of the midwifery debates, then, reflects a cultural transformation which increasingly separates birth from death. The perception of childbirth changes from a process inevitably precarious for both mother and child to a natural, healthy one in which complications only occur if one does not follow nature. Nature is interpreted, of course, through medical advice. What this chapter seeks to do is examine how women writers responded to the presence of death in birth: how midwives handled the difficulty of promising safety to their patients in the face of the reality that birth carries dangers for both mother and child, and how women dealt with those dangers, in terms of the emotions involved, ranging from mothers’ joys to grief to sympathy. I concentrate on public writing rather than diaries or letters in order to study the public face of maternity in the age, and I concentrate on poetry since as a genre it has special claims upon occasions where other kinds of language seem inadequate. Forms of verse still in public use, such as greeting cards and religious hymns, demonstrate the idea that poetry provides formulae which can speak for us what we cannot express; on the one hand, poetry provides intimate expression, and on the other hand, it provides shapes for that expression which conform to social expectations. In relation to death, this effect is especially pronounced: formulae provide a gesture already composed with care to express sincere sympathies, but also to 78

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express the realization that the grief of the bereaved is too hard to contain in language and too private to be fathomed by another. Both birth and death are experiences at once universal and intensely private, experiences that demand sympathetic response yet make any seem inadequate. In studying British women’s poetry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it becomes apparent that poems about childbirth itself are rare.2 As in the novels of the time, pregnancy is unspeakable: it seems that babies just suddenly appear. What may be surprising, though, is that far from unspeakable is the topic of infant death. Laments for infants are plentiful enough in books of women’s poetry to constitute their own poetic sub-genre; they predominate among other apparently requisite topics of women’s verse, such as odes to pets.3 The place of these poems among such frivolous material is puzzling, if not shocking, to a modern reader, but it indicates the formulaic nature of the laments, and suggests an accepted, even expected subject for poetry rather than a taboo. Again there is an illuminating example from fiction: in Matthew Lewis’s enormously popular and controversial Gothic novel from 1796, The Monk (Lewis 2004: 311–2, 341–3), a pregnant nun is punished by the abbess by being locked in the crypt of the convent and starved. She has her baby there, and when she is finally found, she is cradling its corpse in her arms and will not part with it even though it is crawling with maggots. When a later edition of The Monk appeared, expurgated of offensive material, this scene remained.4 Why would a rotting baby not be considered offensive? But this is a picture of admirable maternal devotion. Sentiment, crucial to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century morality as well as aesthetics, saves the episode, as does the image of motherhood it emphatically depicts. Motherhood is more natural than the religious constraints that attempt vainly and perversely to suppress it.5 The bond between mother and child is unbreakable and persists even beyond death. The Gothic conventions and the sensationalism which might seem to detract from the sensitivity of the scene actually help to make the point. Though the conventions of medical and literary writing speak differently of motherhood and mortality, both appeal to similar assumptions about sympathy and authority, emotion and restraint. Whether midwifery books and poems admit, or try to transcend, the intimate connection between birth and death, both positions rely on and perpetuate a sentimental idealization of motherhood.6 Sympathy and Danger in Midwifery Writing Motherhood and sentiment are rhetorical bases for authority which come up repeatedly in women’s midwifery writing. Elizabeth Nihell, in her Treatise on the Art of Midwifery, insists, “All the partiality, all the tender feelings it is so natural for me to have for the sufferings of my own sex, would be sufficient to with-hold me from desiring to establish any opinion or practice tending to endanger the personal safety of women in child-birth, or of any thing so dear to them as their children. I am myself a mother” (1760: viii). 79

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Because she writes on the principle that midwifery is essentially a feminine profession, she is constrained to make essentialist arguments which rely on the idea that all women, by virtue of being women, have innate maternal instincts, and that the biological experience of femininity in itself allows women to understand and sympathize with each other. But this is also a challenge to medical knowledge: the resonant phrase, “I am a mother myself,” succinctly places experiential knowledge of the body above objective knowledge. Mears, at the end of the century, similarly establishes her credibility through feminine experience and feminine feeling as at least as important as her training: “I hope my own sex will grant a candid hearing to one who is herself a mother;—who has united the advantages of experience with those of a regular education and a moderate share of practice;—who knows no language but that of the heart” (1797: 2–3). While each side of the midwifery debate claims to know the body better, conversely, each side blames the other for endangering lives. Donnison notes the stereotypes mustered in writing against women midwives—ignorance, superstitious belief in old wives’ tales, drunkenness—to assert their incompetence (1977: 33). However, the midwives were no less vicious in their attacks on medical men, recounting horror-stories of “male-practice” (as Nihell punningly calls it). Sarah Stone, in A Complete Practice of Midwifery describes “Infants…born alive, with their Brains working out of their heads: occasion’d by the too common use of Instruments” (1737: xii) and Nihell condemns the ignorance of a manmidwife who “struck” the crotchet “into the mother and not the child” (the child was born without a mark on it, but the mother died), and another who didn’t realize he was delivering twins (Nihell considers one of the babies got off easy with “only an arm plucked off ”) (1760: 291, 296). Stone makes it explicit that theoretical medical knowledge does not necessarily bring an improvement in practice: “these young Gentlemen-Professors put on a finish’d assurance, with pretence that their Knowledge exceeds any Woman’s, because they have seen, or gone thro’, a Course of Anatomy: and so, if the Mother, or Child, or both die, as it often happens, then they die Secundum Artem” (1737: xi). Stone explicitly pits male medical against female experiential knowledge: “dissecting the Dead, and being just and tender to the Living, are vastly different; for it must be supposed that there is a tender regard one Woman bears to another, and a natural Sympathy in those that have gone thro’ the Pangs of Childbearing; which, doubtless, occasion a compassion for those that labour under those circumstances, which no man can be a judge of ” (1737: xiv). Male practitioners know the female body through death. It is not as though Stone refuses this kind of morbid knowledge; rather she refuses the idea of its being independent of living knowledge. “I have seen several Women open’d; and ‘tis not improper for all of the Profession to see Dissections, and read Anatomy, as I have done. But had I inspected into them all my life, and not been instructed in Midwifery by my Mother, and Deputy to her full six years, it would have signified but little” (Stone 1737: xiv–xv). Nihell figures that even the worst woman midwife can’t do as much damage as a man-midwife can:

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female practitioners…are incapable of doing so much actual mischief as the male-ones, oftenest more ignorant than themselves, but who with less tenderness and more rashness go to work with their instruments, where the skill and management of a good midwife would have probably prevented the difficulty, or even after its coming into existence, prove more efficacious towards saving both mother and child: always with due preference however to the mother. (Nihell 1760: viii–ix) It is still a dangerous situation, and Nihell does not go so far as to credit women midwives with the capacity of overcoming all difficulties and saving all lives. Similarly, Stone says without her mother’s training she would not “have dared to have undertaken such a Profession, lest any Life should have been lost thro’ my ignorance, which I am well assured, thro’ the blessing of God, has never happened” (1737: xv). It is partly her skill that preserves her patients, but she does not claim full credit: it is also God’s blessing— beyond her control. As the debate proceeds, what results is an increase of promises, and a steady decrease in acknowledgement of danger, reaching its culmination in the exuberantly confident follow-nature rhetoric of Mears. She asks, “Is woman the only part of animated nature, whose powers are said to be weakened when she wants most to exert them; and who must pass, as it were, though the shades of death, to give life and nutrient to another being? Away with such a silly, such an impious idea. Providence has with equal goodness and wisdom ordered it otherwise” (Mears 1797: 5). Her benevolent assertions have surprisingly blasphemous implications: they overturn Providence’s curse on Eve. Two years earlier, the more circumspect Margaret Stephen does not go this far, but still the trend of downplaying danger is evident: there is nothing of so great importance, as that those creatures, on whom He has impressed his own image, should be safely introduced upon the great theatre of the world; and although God gave laws to nature for the performance of this work, yet He has not confined these laws within such strict bounds, that they cannot err: no, moral deformity has introduced some degree of physical distortion among our race; which needs no greater proof than a comparison of the dialogue between the Almighty and Eve, with daily experience in child-birth.7 (Stephen 1795: 8) Stephen’s more orthodox position is that the “moral deformity” introduced by original sin is responsible for that portion of suffering and peril in childbirth that became physically innate at the Fall and is irreducible by any degree of human progress. On the contrary, Mears tends to ascribe difficulties in pregnancy and labor to a more personal and less inevitable moral degeneracy. For instance, as regards diet: 81

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Our taste, in its natural unvitiated state, would always perceive the greatest sweetness in the most salutary food. The Supreme Being, whose infinite goodness hath made the pleasures of sensible creatures the instruments of their preservation, informs us by that which is pleasing to the palate what will agree with the stomach and constitution. But if, from improper habits, we have lost all relish for sweet simplicity, we must attend to the dictates of reason and experience. (Mears 1797: 53) God apparently ordains pleasure for his creatures; Mears clears him of responsibility for pain and places it squarely on “improper habits” or, in earlier paragraphs, “luxury” and “vitiated” appetite (1797: 50–1). Humans can choose to be free of these things, and therefore free of illness. “In short, the chief restraint we wish to impose is that prescribed by nature—the restraint of temperance and sobriety… We are only desirous of guarding pregnant women against the indulgence of a depraved taste” (Mears 1797: 51). “Prescribed by nature” is a perfect phrase to describe what is going on here, as a manifestation of the “myth of a total disappearance of disease in an untroubled, dispassionate society restored to its original state of health” (Foucault 1994: 31). This was supposed to culminate in the final disappearance of “medicine itself…together with its object and its raison d’être” (Foucault 1994: 32). It makes sense that Mears should take the position she does, because one of her impassioned arguments is against the perception of pregnancy as an illness. “A state of pregnancy has too generally been considered a state of indisposition or disease: this is a fatal error and the source of almost all the evils to which women in childbearing are liable” (Mears 1797: 4). It would seem that here Mears is endorsing the traditional view of pregnancy as a life event, counter to the increasing medicalization of childbirth. But, curiously, she finds that both “the fairy tales of old nurses” and “the rules without number, and the medicines without necessity which interested men so often prescribe” (Mears 1797: 4) exacerbate the fears of pregnant women, while she puts forward her particular brand of medicine (and medicine it is, with her endorsement of the writings of male physicians) as able to communicate “the dictates of reason and experience,” able to prescribe for nature. Mears: The Pathology of Passion One of the ways in which nature, in its precarious, unspoiled state, protects the pregnant woman is through the feminine feeling which also underpins Mears’ authority. Mears (1797: 5, 15, 27) endorses the idea that there is “increased sensibility” (that is, sensitivity) in pregnant women, particularly of the womb but sympathetically affecting “other parts.” Ideally, this serves to give “timely warnings of the approach of danger;” she calls the awakened nerves “vigilant centinels.” Yet she also considers the fears of a 82

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mother-to-be as “preposterous ideas of danger;” they are considered to come from horror stories—a false education counter to nature: “the few instances they may have known of miscarriage, or of death, outweigh in the quivering scale of fancy the numbers not to be counted of persons in the like condition, who enjoy both then and afterwards a greater degree of health than they ever before experienced.” Some feelings and experiences of pregnant women are lent the authority of nature, while others are written off as unnatural. If they undermine the promises of medicine, they are not granted medical validity, and indeed, are blamed for medicine’s failure to deliver promised safety. Fears are considered not only preposterous, but harmful to both mother and child: “Languor, debility, and disease are the consequences;” “the difficulty of child-birth is increased; and a puny, or distorted infant is sometimes brought forth—the victim of its mother’s terrors” (Mears 1797: 28). The role of sensibility in Mears is a good example of the double bind of motherhood identified in different ways by Toni Bowers and Julie Kipp. Kipp argues Romantic-period mothers were “indicted indiscriminately” in writing “for following and/or rejecting their presumed natures” and accordingly judged as either “dangerously good” or “naturally bad” (2003: 11). Bowers finds that “even those mothers who follow all the rules for maternal excellence find their authority compromised, their ‘virtue’ productive of… suffering” (1996: 16). Sensibility, as a central maternal virtue for Mears, is a fault-line in her assurance that her advice of following Nature will ensure safety—that women are naturally built to be perfect mothers. Women are endowed with an inner “centinel,” but women’s feelings about their own bodies are unreliable; those feelings are intensified in order to give warning signals, but they cause the very dangers they are meant to guard against. And just as a woman, for Mears, is supposed to approach nearer to the perfection of her being in maternity, maternity exacerbates the supposedly innate female quality of excess sensibility—and concomitant dependence on another to soothe and indulge—an indulgence which here translates into restraint. It is the duty of the husband “to soothe with kind indulgence the emotions of quickened sensibility”—”there is no passion so unruly as not to yield at length to the soft controul of tenderness and reason” (Mears 1797: 32). Amanda Gilroy (2000) finds Mears operating on very Foucauldian terms here, creating docile bodies, both domestically controlled and self-restrained. But it is also interesting to note that in Mears’ predecessors, the sympathy and soothing occurred between women who had undergone the pains of labor, whereas for Mears, it is between a man and wife and based not on pain but on pleasure. “What delightful emotions must that man feel, who dries the tear as it steals down the cheek of beauty,—who anticipates the silent wish,—and shelters from each rude blast the tender buds of mutual affection!” (Mears 1797: 29). A main reason Mears recommends the soothing indulgence of mothers-to-be is her insistence that the emotions always affect the physical constitution, and all the more with the heightened emotion, and the two delicate bodies involved in pregnancy. Mears warns, 83

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“no hereditary, no constitutional disease can be so injurious to the child in the womb as the mother’s ungoverned anger… Its feverish spirit escapes the filtering, corrective powers of the placenta, and enters into the system of the child, which kind nature had in vain secured from every other taint” (1797: 31). Mears had previously explained the function of the placenta,8 emphasizing that “the two systems of blood vessels” of mother and child “are completely distinct, and have no sort of direct communication”; the child’s blood can remain pure even if the mother’s is infected. She explains, “the placenta seems to perform the office of a gland, secreting alimentary juices from the blood in a manner probably not unlike that in which milk is secreted from the breasts” (Mears 1797: 12–4). Nature ensures that disease can be filtered out, but the “feverish spirit” of anger passes through the placenta’s guard. Physically, even in pregnancy when they are two bodies in one, there is a buffer zone between mother and child, but emotionally they are inseparable. The equation between placenta and breasts suggests a continuity, before and after delivery, in the physical and emotional relationship between mother and child. In fact, Mears sees breastfeeding as an extension of Nature’s “contriv[ances]…for the nourishment, growth, and security of the child while in the womb,” and by repeating the contemporary wisdom that the mother’s “health and happiness, and very often her life [are] dependent on the discharge of this most sacred of all duties” (1797: 139), she characterizes infant care as a continuation of the symbiotic oneness of pregnancy. Mears emphasizes the intimacy of the mother/child relationship by eroticizing it: “the act itself is attended with a sweet thrilling, and delightful sensations, of which those only who have felt them can form any idea.” (1797: 140), Curiously, her inside information on this impenetrable bond is a conventional statement in previous books by men. Compare James Nelson in An Essay on the Government of Children: “All Mothers who have experienc’d it, whose Minds are temper’d with natural Affection, assure us, that there is an inexpressible Pleasure in giving Suck, which none but Mothers know” (1753: 44). Mears offers a “fact” which she “think[s], will make some impression on the feeling heart. The wives of the American savages extend this mark of solicitude even to infants who die upon the breast. After having bestowed upon them the rights of sepulture, they come once a day, for several weeks, and press from the nipple a few drops of milk upon the grave of the departed suckling!” (1797: 140–1). Maternal duties extend to the grave; the physical closeness of mother and child is not severed by death. The “feeling heart” is sympathetic, more to the efforts of the savage’s wife to enact idealized motherhood despite the death of the child, than maternal grief, here sublimated into continuation of proper maternal duties, replication of a “natural,” unbroken relationship between mother and child. Julie Kipp remarks that in a group of poems by Felicia Hemans depicting mothers dying with their children, “death is preferable to the dissolution of the mother-child bond…death becomes…the only way of maintaining a state of perfect sympathy between 84

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mother and child because it is a condition which admits of no possibility of change or individuation” (2003: 91). If this informs Hemans’ recurring variations on the charged theme of suicide/infanticide, it also lies behind the conventional formulae of sympathy in poems on infant death. “Perfect sympathy” between mother and child—or the “perfect” expression of sympathy by a consoling friend—seems to assume the “static union” Kipp describes, but perhaps not so much (as she suggests) because of “a mother’s desire to return her child to the protective shelter of the womb” (2003: 91) as the writer’s desire to preserve idealized motherhood in the face of death. Poetic Convention and Christian Consolation: Greensted, Taylor, Moody Some of the conventions which shape the sub-genre of laments for infants9—and their relation to conventions of ideal maternity as articulated in the midwifery books—can be perceived in the poem by Greensted (1796: 28) that is one of the epigraphs to this chapter. Greensted’s exhortation to “suppress the sigh” is comparable to Mears’ warnings on maternal emotion. However, in the context of the poem, maintaining equanimity will do nothing to protect the health and well-being of a child who has already succumbed to death. It is as if the mother’s emotions still constitute a threat to the child’s life and her own—as if the symbiotic bond were still there. And it is as if the actions of a bereaved mother are dangerous in their potential to undermine idealized motherhood and motherhood as salvation. The death of the child and the grief of the mother reveal all a writer like Mears strives to conceal in her assertions that following nature leads to safety. The ongoing effort to control maternal emotion, in the lament, attempts to contain this threat, and, unable to assert the natural well-being of the child through physical health, does so through its ultimate spiritual transformation into an angel, the reason for the mother to be calm, thankful and satisfied. Following the mandate of Heaven here is like following Nature and Providence in Mears. Jane Taylor’s poem “On the Death of an Infant” (1826: 125)10 reinterprets a child’s death as God’s mysterious way of answering the mother’s prayers: “A child was all she asked, with many a vow;— / Mother—Behold the child an angel now!” Wanting nothing but a child, her desires are in line with a Providence which ordains motherhood as innately feminine. But pursuing this sanctioned desire, this mother has been rewarded with pain and bereavement. To save Providence from fault, the death of the child has to be transformed into a good: “how the gift” of an angel “transcends the poor request” for a child. Maternity likewise must be exonerated: death fulfils the ultimate goal of motherhood, raising virtuous offspring who will go to heaven. Taylor’s poem makes a lacuna of the earthly lives of mother and child, skipping ahead to the final result, dramatizing the idea that motherhood is a woman’s salvation: the deceased daughter will “guide thy footsteps to the world of light;— / A ministering spirit sent to thee, / 85

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That where she is, there thou mayst also be” Physically there may be separation between mother and child, but their spiritual bond is unbreakable and persists beyond death. Yet Mears describes such a bond through its physical analogues: the function of the placenta and breastfeeding. The mutual salvation of mother and child spiritualizes breastfeeding. The mother educates the child to virtue, and the child leads the mother to heaven: the health of their souls is interdependent. Barbara Gelpi explains that in writing of the period, “the infusion of breast milk becomes a trope for the infusion of knowledge” (1992: 71) and nourishment of both kinds by the biological mother is considered healthiest and irreplaceable. This is reversed in the trope seen in Taylor’s poem: the child educates the mother in leading her to heaven, and the child’s spiritual influence upon the mother is unique and ideal, because of the child’s innocence, but also because of the mother finding “the perfection of her being” in her relation to her child. The imagery of Elizabeth Moody’s “On the Death of an Infant” (1798: 74) enacts both the disembodiment on which consolation relies, and its ultimate impossibility. The poem begins with a standard formula exhorting restraint of grief: “Let no more tears bewail this little flower” Again, death is better than dangerous, sinful life: the flower-infant is “Taken from life in life’s propitious hour; / Ere blasts of spring had nipt it in its bed, / Or winter’s storms had gather’d round its head.” From this organic beginning, the imagery becomes celestial: “The dawn of day, that glimmered on his eyes / Shone like a meteor passing through the skies.” From a meteor which has brightness and substance follows darkness and insubstantiality: “Death’s sable cloud o’er the pale lustre stray’d / And wrapt the beam in everlasting shade.” This increasing ethereality is motivated by and culminates in the child’s purity: “Purer than saints—the guiltless spirit flew / Nor one corrupted taint from earth it drew.” It was barely touched by material substance in its brief physical life. But the poem’s close undermines this disembodiment: “With innocence it meets and leaves—the tomb.” The death-knell of the final words is amplified by the dash that precedes them. The final emphasis is on the tomb and the unspoken decay of the body extended over time belies the brief moment the child’s spirit spent there and also the implied eternity in heaven which contrasts its fleeting life. Inconsolable Gothic: Dacre As if in rebellion against the conventions of consolation, Charlotte Dacre dramatizes the mother’s refusal to be comforted.11 “The Mother to Her Dying Infant” (Dacre 1805: 1:39–41) begins, “Die, my love—I’ll not regret thee—” A shocking start, but nonetheless her reasoning is according to convention: “If thou liv’st, what ills beset thee! / Die, and never know to grieve.” Dacre perceives that the recommended resignation, pushed to its limit, would become a denial of the mother-child bond; the idea of the child being unregrettably safe in heaven would become heartlessness. Dacre also picks up on the 86

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eroticization latent in the physical and emotional intensity of mother-child attachment (as in the “sweet thrilling” of breastfeeding in Mears): if it were not for the title, this first line could refer to a lover, especially in the context of the passionate and tragic amorous scenarios that make up much of the rest of Hours of Solitude. The transfer of attachment from sexual partner to child seems exaggerated to the edge of perversion in this poem, while the element of death here serves less to evoke gentle, devout sympathy or insist on the transcendence of the maternal bond, than to posit an unnatural mother-child symbiosis. Breastfeeding becomes macabre: In my arms will I enfold thee Till thou freeze my living clay. Sympathetic, softly stealing, Thou my heart shalt undermine; My warmth to thine no warmth revealing, But thy cold shall pierce through mine. Thy little arms my throat surrounding, Stiffly there shall long remain… The baby has latched on to its mother’s breast, due not to healthy appetite or effective technique, but rigor mortis! The italics emphasize reversal (e.g., “My…thine”), and the reversals are manifold: there is a flow not from mother to child, but from child to mother. The trope of the child leading the mother to heaven is already a reversal of parental education; and here, reversed again, the child leads the mother away from salvation to morbid attachments. The italics also emphasize the mother’s sense of failure in the face of her child’s demise. She blames herself, perhaps due to hinted guilt: she repeatedly calls herself a wretch, and even entreats the “little corpse” for vindication: “Say for thee I did my duty— / Tell me that, oh, infant saint!” Hoffer and Hull find in their study of infanticide that, through the eighteenth century, expressions of maternal love, such as weeping for a child’s death, and even “temporary ‘fits’, in which women went ‘out of their senses’” (1981: 68–70, 84–5), were increasingly accepted as proof of innocence. For Mears, in a diatribe against vile seducers, “the ravings of a distracted mother, and at the cries of infant blood!” (1797: 30) are the natural and inevitable result of extramarital reproduction (and the mother in Dacre is “solitary”). Infanticide is in question to the extent that the mother does not fit the picture of idealized, sentimental maternity. But idealized motherhood itself induces guilt. Mears’ unshakeable belief in physical and spiritual sympathy between mother and child leads her to assert that the mother’s excesses harm the child—no wonder then that this Gothically extreme mother continually accuses herself, even though her excess is of 87

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maternal attachment that is supposed to be unfathomable and unbreakable. “Sympathetic, softly stealing, / Thou my heart shalt undermine”: these are the dangers of sympathy. Dacre entangles the physical and the spiritual much more inextricably than Mears or the other poets. This mother foresees the deathly embrace continuing “Till time our mutual dust confounding, / We vegetate on earth again.” This vegetative resurrection, is it the sinful delusion of a mother who cannot transcend the physical loss of her child to rejoice in its salvation? Or is it a macabre mockery of the inadequacy of such Christian consolation (which may well seem more pronounced to Dacre, given her Jewish heritage12)? The mother’s embrace of her child is a variation on the embrace of the demon lover which Adriana Craciun highlights in her discussion of Hours of Solitude. Craciun suggests that “we can just as easily focus on the ability of these beings to transform themselves, most significantly their bodies, rather than on their inability to maintain material cohesion;” the mother here, by embracing decay, attempts to create a different relationship with her child, and demonstrates, as Craciun argues, “To be disembodied from the ‘natural’ body leaves open options other than being an immortal soul” (2003: 118, 130). Although this mother is surrounded by “friends” who are “cruel” because they wish to “bear” her “away” from the corpse of her child, it is her own voice that rebukes her with the consolation formula: Wretch! what feelings now possess thee? Selfish mother, let him go; Does his happiness distress thee, Mother of unworthy woe? This could be a change of heart and a glimpse of salvation for the mother, but it does not take effect. It is distilled to the point of bluntness. Spoken in the mother’s voice, it takes on a bipolar character, implicitly as excessive and irrational as her embrace of the corpse. At the poem’s end, the mother returns to the dark version of the “better off in heaven” formula: “Little baby, thou art blest! / I, a solitary rover, / Know no peace till endless rest.” The same consolation that encourages emotional restraint feeds her despair. Voicing Maternal Lamentation: Browne Mary Ann Browne, in a poem which begins with the cry “My Baby! My Baby! They’ve Told Me He is Dead” (1834: 50–2), directly confronts the question of who has a right to speak about maternal loss, and in what way. She writes in the voice of an intensely grieving mother; other voices are filtered through hers. “They’ve told me he is dead; / That they’ve ta’en him to the church-yard, and the funeral rite is said.” The ritual is spoken but the mother only hears about it second-hand as something already done. She is not 88

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present at the ceremony; her absence alienates her own sorrow from formal grieving. The words of the funeral rite are excluded from the poem, and the mother rejects other conventional consolation as well: “to comfort me / They say ‘t is gone away to rest, where sorrow cannot be! / I heed not, I care not, lay ashes on my head; / Let me lie down in silence too, mine only child is dead!” Her grief is unspeakable precisely because of her continuing union with her child: if one dies and is silent, then both should be. As in Dacre, this is not salvation but embrace of decay. She calls for ashes, a reminder of her own physical mortality, and she had previously imagined her son’s silence in grotesquely physical terms: “his lips are lying silent there / And worms may o’er them creep.” But in the next stanza, she insists on her exclusive right to speak. “Who dared to speak of comfort? I tell thee, he is gone… I tell thee that these arms have clasped his young limbs o’er and o’er, / And I tell thee that these empty arms shall never clasp him more.” She speaks, but in bodily terms. She insists on a physical loss that cannot be transcended into spiritual comfort, nor expressed by language alone—she has to describe a gesture. The repetition of words is like the repetition of the gesture, showing that language becomes as compulsive as grief makes her, repeatedly trying to grasp something that is not there. She reiterates her accusation, “Who art thou, with solemn brow, who wouldst whisper words of peace? / They fall on me like dew on rocks, I pray, I pray thee, cease!” Not only is the repetition of formulaic comfort like water-torture to her; also, she has become cold and hard at the death of her only child, as in the reversed maternal nourishment envisioned by Dacre. Breastfeeding is supposed to be essential to the health of both mother and child; here the symbiotic relationship is broken by the child’s death, and the mother has no outlet. Instead of a soft breast, the image is a rock, which does not offer, but rather repels the comforting dew. Without a child, she internalizes breastfeeding: “Oh let me speak of sorrow, and nurture it with tears.” Indulging her own grief is cast as nurturance by bodily fluid. (A poem by Caroline Bowles Southey, “To a Dying Infant,” describes dwelling on the child’s memory in such terms: “Feeding thine own distress / With accurate greediness” [1839: 122–7].) The speaker in Browne’s poem, paradoxically, immerses herself in what she has lost— the full, earthly life of her child, “the hope with which I looked to future years” and “the treasures that in him were stored for me.” Motherhood as salvation is deeply problematic here: Browne reveals the corollary that loss of motherhood means loss of salvation, of treasures that would be stored up in heaven for a good mother. The formula of the child leading the mother to heaven tries to circumvent this logic, but still inevitably takes the spiritual credit away from the mother. Further, if the child is the mother’s treasure in heaven, “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 9:21, KJV; cf. Luke 12:34). Is her heart in heaven, or with the lost earthly life of her child that “moth and dust doth corrupt” (Matthew 9:19, KJV)? Even if her heart is in heaven, it could be for the sake of her child rather than her own relationship with God: which one is she more devoted to? As in the poems that exhort restraint of grief, here the mother’s attachment to her child, 89

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which would have been her salvation, can potentially be her damnation too, if she gives in to the shadow of idolatry or despair. She “tr[ies] to find the bound of this my burning agony.” She searches for a limit to this limitless grief, so that she might overcome it, more by exhausting than restraining it. But what kind of “bound” would “burning agony” have? Even apart from the inexplicit suggestion of eternal fires, the imagery itself is boundless. Something that is consuming itself in flame would be constantly changing shape, and as long as it had fuel it would continue to burn. In her excess she mixes metaphors freely, describing the “o’erwear[ying]…task” of memory as “weav[ing] around my spirit… A hollow cloud of comfort, a mocking, specious mask.” Weaving a form for a spirit could be an image of pregnancy, the mother spinning the child’s body from her own, but that body, like her comfort over its loss, is illusory and ethereal, a hollow cloud. Oddly enough, the indulgent consolation she chooses for herself against the restrained conventional kind brings about the same trite imagery of heaven, clouds of comfort. Neither of the alternatives allows her to pass the bound of her burning grief. She silences the empty words of others, but when she speaks of her own sorrow, she finds herself in a dream, “Till my soul, awakening with a start, recoileth in its dread, / As again it echoeth the words, ‘My child, my child is dead’.” In the end, even her own authentic cry of grief becomes a hollow echo, and she recoils from it as she had rejected condolences in favor of a wish for the ultimate gesture of the unspeakable, “Let me lie down in silence too.” Her rejection of comfort, and her justification of her own authority, rest on a statement at the poem’s center: “Thou never wast a mother, or thou never couldst have said, / There is comfort for a mother, whose only babe is dead!” Experience is the only way to understand motherhood; only mothers can understand each other. But the argument familiar from midwifery is complicated by its conjunction with loss. Grief is also intensely private yet common, and experience of it can increase capacity for sympathy. But this mother has lost her only child—she is a childless mother—the very thing she appeals to for comprehension and consolation is something she no longer participates in, can no longer claim. Mothers who have children remaining to them would have to sympathize, not entirely by experience, but by imagining how they would feel if they had lost them all. This is the converse of the essentialist argument implied by maternity being an exclusively feminine domain. All women are latent mothers, and so have latent maternal abilities and sympathies. In Browne’s formulation, all mothers are potentially bereaved mothers, bereaved of their children and their motherhood. Both sides of the assumption are necessary to Browne because, adding another paradox, she wrote these lines before she had children. (In fact, this is true of most of the poets considered so far.13) The voice of the mother imagined for this poem undermines Browne’s own poetic authority. Yet the mother’s voice trembles also: how can she speak if she is no longer a mother? Since what is at issue becomes speaking as a mother, maternal authority in this poem is a matter less of essence or experience than rhetoric or performativity. All voices in the poem are filtered through the mother’s, and take on the rhythm of her 90

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driven yet halting excess. It is possible that, while both the condolences of others and the mother’s own tear-nurtured grief are shown to be hollow echoes, perhaps the limits laid for maternal sympathy are also meant to be colored by extreme feminine feeling. Her deep grief causes her to despair of sympathy, and exaggerate its limitations. Lamentation as Series: Browne’s “Lays of a Mother” In Nineteeth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (Armstrong et al. 1996), this poem stands on its own. In its original context, however, it is part of a series, “Lays of a Mother”: this dramatic resistance to consolation is embedded in a description of the course of grief which resolves into Christian resignation. Yet, in turn, the series is embedded in a book entitled The Birth-day Gift (part of a series of tiny volumes on the themes of particular occasions, meant to be given as presents14): an incongruously cheery context, again bringing to the fore the question of convention and rhetoric, sentimentalism and dramatic effect, and their connection to “real” sympathy, as well as their role in conceiving and uniting the seemingly opposed aspects of idealized motherhood. Restraint may seem docile, and excess may seem subversive of control on dangerous maternal emotion, and both may seem artificial travesties of maternal grief, but they arise equally from a desire for mother-child bonds to persist beyond birth and beyond the grave. The final lines of the final poem in Browne’s series (1834: 70–1) evoke the familiar formula of the child’s safety away from the cruel world (and even from its mother’s stormy sorrows): “Where clouds and tempests cannot rage; / Far from the touch of grief or crime, / My babe is treasured up for me!” The babe as treasure reasserts the idea of the child as the mother’s salvation, even though she has come to the more orthodox realization that her salvation must be via her own faith: “now I feel indeed / Who bindeth up the broken reed, / By whom I am redeemed alone!” (the latter emphasis mine). This final poem concerns the mother’s thanks that she did not receive her initial wish, upon her child’s death, “to be gone” herself. She considers it “mercy, that I was not ta’en / At mine own hasty word! for how / Might I have followed thee, my child!” The child is innocent and receives (maternal) protection from Christ, but the mother is sinful and unprotected (without a mother/child relationship of her own):

Thy Saviour’s arms had sheltered thee, Thy heart was purified from sin; Mine was uncleansed and unforgiven, And as if grief had claims on Heaven, I thought to die would surely be An entrance to thine home to win!

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Does grief not have claims on Heaven? The sinfulness of a death wish, the idealized mother’s devoted wish to die along with her child, and Heaven’s compassion for grief, are all blurred together here. Earlier, in poem II (Browne 1834: 53–5), the mother asks the angelic child to pray for her, “if that above forgiven / Thy mother’s sorrows be”. Do mother’s sorrows require forgiveness? Strangely, her return to resignation and correct belief involve the idea of a Heaven indifferent to, or even judgmental of, maternal grief in bereavement. The forgiveness might be considered necessary for the idolatry that remains—whose home is “thine home,” Christ’s or the child’s?—but that idolatry is a necessary effect of the ideal mother’s absolute devotion to her child. Mother’s love is a virtue and a sin. Even in the final poem’s resignation, her expectation is centered on her child: “Therefore abide I still my time, / Knowing, however it may be, / Though weary be my pilgrimage… My babe is treasured up for me” She has nothing to do but walk on through this world in hope of finally rejoining her child. The rest of her life is to wait: at once a sign of the mother’s ongoing grief and her existence being bound up in her child. One is discouraged by Christian consolation and medical advice, while the other is assumed by both. Throughout “Lays of a Mother,” the child’s birthday is superimposed on the child’s death-day, as seen in Poem II:

We should forget thy birth-day now; The happiest day for thee Was that, whereon from earth below Thy spirit was set free!

This trope in itself is an attempt to bring birth and death together—or to juxtapose them, to emphasize their difference. Poem III (Browne 1834: 56–60) places at its beginning and end images of earthly and heavenly suckling: the mother remembers the child’s birth, when “first, with a free gush of tears, / I laid thee on my breast,” then she imagines that in death, “Thou sittest by life’s holy well, / And drinkest from its spring,” and the poem closes, “the life we measure out by years / Is freely given to thee, / From that vast fount, unmixed with tears, / The great eternity!” Heavenly nurturing is described in terms of transcendent breastfeeding: a vast and endless supply that gives eternal instead of mortal life, unmixed with maternal sorrows. The medical texts of the period insist no mother’s milk could be better for the child than the biological mother’s; or, no proper mother could willingly resign the duty of suckling her child. Here, perhaps the mother can only reconcile herself to handing her child over to another’s care when that other is God as divine wet-nurse. Yet the exclusivity of the mother-child bond justifies reluctance to part with a child even into such good hands as God’s. Further, God’s suckling nourishes only the soul and would not alone sustain a living child, to whom the mother’s feeding would be necessary. In “Lays of a Mother,” this duty is transferred to death. In Poem IV (Browne 92

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1834: 60-62), the mother thinks of the child’s death, at which she was not present: “I kissed thee with a mother’s joy,— / We parted,—a few weeks went past, / And thou wast in thy grave, my boy!” As the mother is the only one who can nurture the child toward life, so also toward death:

Oh were the strangers kind to thee? Did they with gentleness attend? They might—but in their ministry They could not their whole being blend. There is but one on earth, my child, Could fitly tend thy dying couch, Could sooth thy moans with accents mild, And smooth thy bed with tenderest touch.

In nursing, the mother’s “whole being blends” in care of the child in the sense that she gives her own strength and nutrients, from her body, for the feeding of the child, and a collection of physical and emotional processes work in concert toward this purpose: her whole being is involved. When “thy little life is quenched,” the connotations are that its spark is extinguished and its thirst is slaked—as if the two went together. “Quench” is also defined “To put out, extinguish, douse (a fire or flame)” (OED 1b): in this sense, a generous flow of liquid can smother and kill. The mother says, if she had been there:

I should have laid me down by thee, And kissed away thy failing breath, And shared in every agony, Perhaps, in mercy, shared thy death.

Kissing the breath can be paralleled to sucking the milk; again breastfeeding is reversed on multiple levels, the mother imbibing from the child, and nurturing its death, with the connection produced by the intimate feeding cementing an inimitable, unbreakable bond of shared feelings, both pleasure and pain. But this is a fantasy of sharing the child’s death: the mother was absent, and now the child is absent from her in death while she lives on. Conclusion: Hunter “graves…the mournful rhyme” I have suggested that authority to speak about the mysteries of maternity, and maternal loss, in these poems and in midwifery writing, lies in rhetoric. Like the grave, rhetoric here points to both absence and presence. It is an artificial way for writers who have not had the experience of the loss of a child to sympathize with such grief or to make 93

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it dramatically real for an audience. But authentic grief has need of the same artificial formulae: for one, to provide the image, the motions of consolation where none is possible, in hope that the real feeling might be produced out of its gestures; and for another, to express itself in form. These ideas come clearest in a poem by Anne Hunter (wife of the surgeon John Hunter whose experiments revealed the separate circulation of the placenta). Her poem, “To the Memory of a Lovely Infant, Written Seven Years after his Death,” (1802: 55-7), is informed by her own experience of loss15 and depicts a complexity of response which seems in accord with honesty. Her grief is as intense as Dacre’s Gothic subject: “Hope whisper’d, ‘sure he sleeps’, I wildly press’d / The lovely image to my aching breast, / And felt the fearful chill of nature’s awful rest,” yet at that time, “When lost in grief, my eyes refus’d a tear,” while “Now I can weep.” Hunter uses the conventions of the form to capture not just consolation or refusal of consolation, but the mixed suspension between that is her experience of grief. The genre itself is suspended between the two, with its bipolar attraction to mothers who are wildly inconsolable or grateful for their child’s early departure to heaven, and its efforts to usher the mothers safely from the one extreme to the other. Hunter does not seek to affect the progression to consolation, nor to refuse it. Rather, much of the poem concentrates on a desire to be comforted, clouded by impossibility: “Must woes on woes accumulated roll, / And cloud with care the sunshine of the soul?” The poem’s close acknowledges the dulling of grief that comes with time, but not its end; the resolution is not consolation but memorialization:

‘Tis long since past; forgetfulness has spread Her misty mantle o’er unnumber’d dead; But fond affection lingers in the gloom; Near the dim lamp that glimmers o’er the tomb She graves with trembling hand the mournful rhyme, Where memory recalls departed time, Brings back in one short hour the dream of years, And sprinkles on the grave a mother’s tears.

Here the grave is a poem, as “the mournful rhyme” is “graved” in the tomb itself. Again the breastfeeding imagery appears, with the sprinkling of tears upon the grave, reasserting maternal connection. But the effect of memory is to bring back a dream. Are the seven years elapsed since the child’s death became a dream, and the child’s presence returned in image to the mother? Are the years of the child’s life, which never unfolded but were dreamed by the mother, seen here in the vision of an hour? Or are the seven years of grief condensed into an hour? Is the grief, or the child, only a dream in retrospect? The hand of affection writing a rhyme calls up all of these at once and makes them all equally real—as real as a dream, a poem or the absent presence of a tomb. The poet herself, 94

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with her real grief, makes an allegorical figure of herself to close the poem: personified affection holding poetic vigil in the tomb, inscribing what might be these very verses. In the end, Hunter makes what could be called a conscious choice of artificiality to express her authentic loss. Endnotes 1.

“Let it not be supposed, that, after having spent some years under the most eminent professors of midwifery, and devoted a great part of my time to the perusal of the best treatises on the subject, such as those of a Harvey, a Leake, a Smellie, and a Denman, I am now ungratefully endeavouring to bring their doctrines and their practice into disrepute. On the contrary, I would with heartfelt rapture strain my feeble voice to swell the note of public praise which they have so justly deserved. I would put their books into the hands of every midwife in the kingdom” (Mears 1797: 3).

2.

On Romantic-era pregnancy poems, see Connolly (2009).

3.

For instance, in Isabella Kelly’s A Collection of Poems and Fables, “Retired Thoughts to a Departed Infant” is followed almost immediately by “Epitaph on a Favorite Tame Chicken” (1794: 38–9, 40–1). In Frances Greensted’s Fugitive Pieces, her several epitaphs for infants coexist with “To a Young Lady, With a present of a Squirrel, named Cupid,” an epitaph and even an elegy on a squirrel, and a poem “On the Death of a Goldfinch” (1796: 10, 19, 21, 22, 28–31).

4.

See the “Introduction” and “Appendix E: Variants” in Lewis (2004: 21–2, 472–3)

5.

The Monk is written from a Protestant perspective which sees the celibate Catholic religious life as warping natural morality.

6.

For more information and different perspectives on the cultural development of idealized motherhood, see Perry (1991) and Gelpi (1992), as well as Bowers (1996) and Kipp (2003) discussed later in this chapter.

7.

It is, unfortunately, not a dialogue; the Lord God speaks to Eve and she doesn't talk back. "Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16, KJV).

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8.

The separate circulation of the placenta had been established by John Hunter. See Moore (2005: 131–2, 379–83) for an accessible explanation of the discovery’s tangled publication history.

9.

For an examination of poetic conventions of Christian consolation on the death of children that concentrates on major male Romantic poets, see Lerner (1997: 40–81).

10. For this and all of the close readings that follow, the reference for the entire poem will be given once at the beginning of the discussion. All quotations from each poem can be found on the page initially cited. 11. The contrast between restraint and excess in mourning in the poems juxtaposed in this essay can be seen to reflect the transition Ariès sees between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Eighteenth-century mourning “imposed…a certain type of social life…in the course of which the sorrow might be dissipated without, however, allowing its expression to exceed a level fixed by social conventions,” while “in the nineteenth century this level was no longer respected” and mourning “even claimed to have no obligations to social conventions and to be the most spontaneous [Ariès later qualifies, “or apparently spontaneous”] and insurmountable expression of a very grave wound: people cried, fainted, languished, and fasted” (Ariès 1974: 66–8). These Romantic-period poems are caught between the two, but also reveal the gravitational pull on mourning of other surrounding ideologies (of gender, maternity and medicine) to specify and complicate Ariès’ broader historical transition. 12. For biographical information on Dacre, see the entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography under her married name Charlotte Byrne. Dacre is a nom de plume; her maiden name was King. 13. Dacre had not yet had children when she wrote Hours of Solitude. Jane Taylor never married nor had children. See respective ODNB entries. 14. The end pages advertise other “Elegant Presents” available from the same publishers, including A Parting Gift to a Christian Friend, “Also a miniature edition,” and A Bridal Gift which can be bound in figured or watered silk for higher prices. 15. She had four children; two lived beyond childhood. See her entry in ODNB.

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5 Speaking of Death: Remembrance and Lamentation Jan Plecash

In truth, if you really want to make sure about love in yourself or in another person, then note how he relates himself to one who is dead. (Kierkegaard 1962: 318) There are people who wouldn’t be caught dead reading an obituary, as a matter of small talk in everyday life, and there are others who flip or click to that page as a matter of undying interest, whatever else may be going on in the news. If nothing else, this peculiarity may give some hint as to the existential reach of Kierkegaard’s advice or of the varieties of tension and response death can evoke as an occasion for remembrance and recognition. But how to situate such an occasion, which seems as self-evident perhaps as a funeral? That death requires speech or representation, or calls upon memory to do a work outside of its usual rounds, does not recommend a history: what a history would tell is that the need to remember and give personal expression to a loss in respect of human life has always been with us. Yet this “always” is a kind of instruction as to what it may mean that the living speak and sing of the dead. The hermeneutic philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer elaborates: As far back as human memory extends we can recognize as an undisputed characteristic of human beings that they perform some kind of funeral rites. Already in very early times this was done with a boundless expenditure of human ceremony, adornment and art, all devoted to honouring the dead. For the non-specialist it is always a source of astonishment to discover that so many of the splendours of fine art we so admire were in fact votive offerings. In this humankind stands unique among all other creatures, as unique as in the expression of language. Or perhaps it is something even more original. In any case the evidence of 97

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rituals connected with death in early history extends much further back than do records of human speech. (1996: 62–3) What is noteworthy here is not the fact of historical continuity so much as the character Gadamer gives it. We could be astonished by the “boundless expenditure of human ceremony, adornment and art, all devoted to honouring the dead,” he suggests, and we could admire its uniqueness or definitiveness for our sense of ourselves. Remembrance and lamentation must then answer to the desire to honor the dead in ways that show such expenditure and devotion even in grief or mourning, perhaps as part of what these actions are or call for. Similarly, that death calls for some form of composition or composure from the living does not recommend a critique of any of the many forms of remembrance and lament, as if, in advance of some satisfying understanding of what these abiding representations are about, it was possible to speak well about better or worse ways of doing them. It would seem immoderate or misguided to critique a child’s cry at the graveside (or anyone’s) with reference to the work of a professional speaker, mourner or musician, though it might do well to compare or differentiate them in some dimension of practice, function, understanding or capability. Instead of critique, then, one speaks (newspapers comment, families commemorate, artists intentionally create in their chosen media) as if there are better and worse ways of dying, so that remembrance and lamentation first provisionally appear as what death calls up from the living as a kind of reply to at least one of its finalities: that what has died is what is done (no more…) in such a way as to be forever un-undoable. Whether the reference is to a life or to a deed, in common usage death is not about things which are defeasible or reversible, subject to mitigation or retrieval, nor alienable, as in the commonplace that memory will assert its claims as soon as the living relation is extinguished. Transformation or transition is consequently also part of the discourse surrounding death: from what is manifest to what is not; from what pertains to one realm or order of being to what pertains to another; from what is immediate or unthought and taken for granted to what elicits medi(t)ation; from the familiarities of one time or place to the unknowns of a next—times past and future. Methodologically, this speaks more particularly to the actions of seeking and clarifying than to those of describing or classifying as ends in themselves. Or perhaps, since to this extent death itself seems to resemble the deeds by which it is commemorated, it would be best to proceed by trying to give shape to remembrance and lamentation as if they were questions, at least minor mysteries. In practice or as practice, remembrance answers to something collective and specifically human, as Gadamer and others suggest, and so also the transformation or re-working of record that the elegiac forms represent. Why then, to begin with, the practice of making remembrance substantial, public in the simplest sense of being open to any view, in ceremony? 98

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Funeral Rites Folklorist Margaret Bennett, in her collection of Scottish customs, begins a section devoted to death and burial with the observation that there is nothing accidental about the recourse to ritual upon the occasion of a death. “[A]t a time when the bereaved cannot possibly have the inner resources to organize anew the entire procedure from the moment of death to the last farewell of burial,” she says, the formal apparatus of custom, no matter what the custom may happen to be, serves as a vehicle for the organization of an otherwise overwhelming experience (Bennett 2004: 203). It also maintains for the bereaved a relation to the meaning of the event: Death, we’re told, is the only thing in this life we can all be sure of: “Oor first breath is the beginning o daith” is re-echoed in the Gaelic proverb “Am fear as fhaide bha beò riamh, fhuair e ΄m bàs,” [the oldest man that ever lived, died at last]. The absolute certainty is affirmed in “daith is deaf, an will hear nae denial,” and again in “amaisidh an dall air an reilig” [a blind man will find his way to the burial ground]. When a death occurs suddenly or unexpectedly we may hear folk remark that “daith comes in an spears nae questions,” or “it’s no particular who it takes awa.” Whatever the circumstances, wherever the bereavement, the most frequently heard saying must surely be the universal cautionary advice: “Ne’er speak ill o the dead.” (Bennett 2004: 203–4) If death spares no one and so is not particular, each one who dies, is, and this ensemble is a matter for everyone’s interest. That is, the need to affirm the particularity of a life or to mark its belonging both to a universal condition (mortality) and to a time (its own) appears from the start as a communal rather than a solitary interest. In an interview from Bennett, three older informants speak with pride about the way funerals were always well attended and still are in their village: [Interviewer] How did you manage to tell people about death? [Informant 1] In the country [when I was young] two young boys, say twelve, thirteen years old, were asked to go round the village to tell what time the coffin was to be lifted away. As a matter of fact…we were guilty of waiting for someone to die so we could earn two or three pennies for doing it, usually a sixpence! [Informant 2] When a death happened in the village long ago the horn was blown, that everyone could hear, and everyone knew that somebody died, and they would stop working till the funeral was over. 99

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[Interviewer] What happens nowadays? [Informant 3] The undertakers put [death notices] up in the town, so we usually write out about fifteen, and there’s various shops in the town that have notices, so if you’re passing any day you’ll check, ‘cos you know that shop usually carries a death notice—you just check up out of interest…it gives you the person’s name, their address, when the service is on, when the funeral is leaving, and where it’s going to, and if there’s flowers [or] sometimes they might ask “No flowers by request.” (Bennett 2004: 243) “Telling the news” is not just the topic but the action of the passage above, which tells also of how it was done in the old and even older days and how it’s done now, as if any listener would want to know “out of interest.” The informants’ satisfaction is not quantitative, that everybody gets told, but that the community is alive in such a way that the telling gets done inclusively and purposively, beginning a cycle of activity that prepares an occasion for memory, which is also told at its proper place in the ceremonies and ritually completed at their close. It is perhaps not necessary to reproduce the particulars of Scottish funerals so much as to dwell a little on Bennett’s insight that their form serves to organize remembrance of the dead not only through ceremonial action but through the universal “Never speak ill…” It is in relation to this injunction that the tensions internal to remembrance begin to appear. Two further examples from Bennett should help make them visible, the first from a fairly lively raconteur concerning the difficulty of speaking well, and the second an appreciation of the ease: So this big fellow says about his father, who hadn’t treated his wife too well, “Wull now go down on our knees and say a dacoit of the rosary for my father who is a bright angel in heaven.” Now a dacoit is a bandit, he should have said a decade, ten Hail Marys of the Rosary. When it was all over and they’d gone home my mother or granny would say, “Did ye hear that, a bright angel? Never worked a day in his life… Well if that’s a bright angel, we can get in any time!” (Bennett 2004: 241) It is taken for granted in the telling that the relation between a life and a standard of virtue can be strained, broken, diverted or never realized, and in a plenitude of ways. This is part of the stuff of remembrance. It appears here as a gap the raconteur chooses to fill with wry humor, between the gift of such a life, a gift understood as a universal 100

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with at least the same weight as mortality, and its actual attainments. It is otherwise, but not some other implied knowledge, with the funeral of John Stewart, whose grandsonin-law recalls: [Informant] … The fact that his [neighbors] went and dug the grave the night before… I thought that was magnificent… [Interviewer] And you drove up from Glasgow the day of it? [Informant] Aye, but, eh, the memories of that, when folk would come out of the church and line up the big hill for the mile and a half walk to the cemetery. [Interviewer] And they carried him that distance every step of the way? [Informant] Oh aye… [Interviewer] Now, he was an old man when he died, he was over 90. Was it a sad occasion or was it something else? [Informant] Oh, there was sadness, there was regret that they’d miss him. Well, as far as I was concerned there was just a few people that I have met in my life that I would say “I was pleased I knew that person.” …he was a man of very few words, but what he did say was fantastic, eh… But it wasn’t a sad occasion as such; you know, I’ve seen mournful occasions, but John Stewart wisnae a mournful type of person. (Bennett 2004: 264–5) Person and type of person merge in this example in such a way as to suggest a life well lived in terms of its lifelong course through the actual succession of days. A person may thus be particular, and mourned for the way his distinctiveness in living will be missed, just as a person may, in his particulars, give cause for everyone’s mournfulness. No one in Bennett’s collection speaks as though such differences are fortuitous: rather as if they are at least suggestive of the idea that something on the order of gift exchange should be understood of a life by its bearer and later affirmed by its ceremonial bearers (i.e., that the community should partner in this exchange by recalling the gift, whatever forms or deformations it has taken on in its time). This commitment to seeing in death an occasion for seeing meaning raises an interesting question about modern medicine’s relation to remembrance. Bennett affords an unusual opportunity to shift perspective simply by locating medical practice within the realm of 101

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custom, noting that the distinction between knowledge and superstition is itself a hardy commonplace (of which her local examples span four centuries). It is true, she remarks, that the professionals “are all highly trained in dealing with the process of dying, offer great comfort to all concerned, and at the time of death…automatically and meticulously follow the procedures which are standard to the establishment” (Bennett 2004: 294). It is also true that custom is inflected or reflected in all of the procedures (“attitudes and beliefs have more to do with tradition than with training” [Bennett 2004: 295]). Some nursing informants tell, for example, that deaths really do “come in threes,” even if it can be seen that selections in counting have to be made in order to affirm the belief: “like, depending on the time scale, some of them would wait maybe a month to be able to say that, you know. And the fact that there was maybe another one hot on the heels didnie count as a fourth. It counted as the first one towards the next three” (Bennett 2004: 295). There is equally familiar speculation that death favors the evening hours, even if the designated time varies from midnight to 4:00 a.m.; or from the end of, to just before the beginning of, visiting hours; or perhaps very, very early in the morning, before the start of the working day. The practices for removal are also full of references to tradition, from caskets by any other name to shrouding the home for preparation and procession: [Interviewer] When there’s a death on the ward is there a particular way the nurses remove the body without causing distress to the other patients? [Informant 1] You always…they’d stop at the end of the ward, and whoever had noticed them, you’d curtain off as many beds as possible, so that nobody would see. Everybody knew what was happening obviously. It was one of the rituals, therefore, if you knew that someone was going to die, you’d move them up nearer the exit of the ward… But in the hospital we work in, the trolley itself is covered by a blanket and a pillow…it’s the bread bin type, but it’s got a blanket over the top so that it looks just like a normal trolley. [Informant 2] …it was like a breid bin. But it had a casket on top, an aluminum casket, and you put the body on the trolley and the casket went [over]…you made a corridor of screens so that the patients that were in bed didnie see the body, but they knew that there was a body being wheeled out. (Bennett 2004: 295–6) Bennett notes that responses to death are as varied among hospital staff as in any other sector of society and that the same folk wisdoms are called upon as needed: “that life must go on, care of the living must not be affected by attention to the dead, even if it means lifting spirits by making light of serious matters” (2004: 296). The last indebtedness she 102

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offers is in this latter vein, that medicine, like everyday life, has its anecdotes of hilarity and ceremonial derailment parallel with “accounts which tell of abandoning the coffin because the funeral party was too drunk to carry on!” (Bennett 2004: 296). She finds the medical version in the “universal told-as-true stories at every hospital of some ‘poor little nurse’ who gets sent to the mortuary by her superiors only to ‘die of fright’ when the corpse (one of her ‘friends’ lying under a sheet) sits up and groans” (Bennett 2004: 297). One thing absent from the medical examples, here, is a sense of the intimacy and inclusiveness of the others. The standard anecdote is instructive because it establishes among other things a relative priority for life and death in the hospital. In a hospital, in ways that the practice of medicine might make seem obvious, death ought not to interfere with either the value or the work of caring for the living. This objective “must not be affected by attention to the dead” even if the professionals know, like everyone else, that death does have claims on the living and asks just so far for their attention. In the anecdote taken as a kind of initiation or in-house training, then, it is death that sits up on the mortuary slab in the guise of a capital omission: a life that might have been overlooked. The lesson for “poor little nurses” is thus perhaps to learn to attend to life by ceasing to “die of fright” in deliberately turning away from death (vigorously prioritizing and separating the two realms). If the medical anecdote establishes a kind of triage relation in which the lessons of death, whatever they may be, will always come last on the list of what needs care and attention, since patients certainly do, the abandoned coffin in the funerary anecdote from everyday life speaks to a different interest through its example of drunken derailment. Whether the mourners are drinking in haste to forget (affirm that life must go on) or to remember (that it is not trivial for life that life ends), the burden of the story is that these two claims on awareness require balancing or harmonizing, as life inevitably goes on for the living. Here it becomes possible to see in medicine’s viewpoint at least one significant difference from the custom it draws upon in order to construct its own. Where the customary injunction is never to speak ill of the dead, medicine’s practical injunction is never to speak—that is, not to enter into the practices and discourse of remembrance at all. The justification for this suspension is as familiar to everyday persons as it is to medical personnel through the popular imagery of rescue, of saving lives and (so) cheating death of as many of its victims as possible—a very old figure for some views of medicine’s charter as well as a much-touted present-day accomplishment. There is no need to decry the medical miracles of this or any other age; however, we must wonder whether this is the most fitting attitude medicine might take to a parameter it does share with all others. For present purposes, it is at least necessary to note the stance in order to note that the authority accorded to medicine in its undertakings may neither coincide with, nor “trump” on the grounds of greater or more urgent purpose, whatever it is that death asks people and communities to remember. To put it another way, in relation to 103

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this discourse, medicine already appears to position itself as an auditor whose work lies elsewhere. But what is there to hear? Funeral Writing Bennett’s informants speak in such a way as to tell how things are done without necessarily asking what it means that they are done that way. This suffices as storytelling does, by offering implicit and sometimes explicit food for thought. What is already audible in her examples is a cluster of concerns for and references to the uniqueness of any life taken as gift; the quality and example of any life taken from the point of view of its particular story; the quality of the community that receives and grounds such a life; the interdependence of a life’s times and its bearer’s experiences; the double quality of death as a limit and, as itself, the bearer of a requirement for the living. The obituary distills the funeral in accordance with such concerns, even at its slightest accomplishing of the specificity of the grave stone (“in loving memory, name, b.d.”). The more modest and the most elaborated obituaries remain observant, representing the value of the life that has ended with reference to its attainments and distinctions, fortune and misfortune, relations in and with its community, legacy. This record is offered as the work of the nearest for the one who cannot now be present, their act of remembrance. Formulaically, the good father, mother, friend or sibling is located in the context of a necessary loss (“will be sorely missed/fondly remembered”) whose bearing is at once the unique life and life story of the dead person and the relationships in which he or she stood to the living ones, who by implication also love(d) and matter(ed). And it is offered to the notice of strangers who are nevertheless fellow-travelers: kin from the point of view of mortality. Already in the obituary, then, translation occurs: a life is gathered into an image of itself as the life that death requires affirmation of. This calls for some attentiveness. At its most inclusive, the community of those who die is identical to the community of those who live except that, in contemporary views of the whole, in the community of the living, those who live, live by virtue of or in despite of oppression and war; derive their being from inscrutable and impersonal natural and social forces; find themselves everywhere subject to economic, political and cultural fiat, awash in conditions, givens and determinants. Those who die, by contrast, are characterized by or directed to the reality of representation via their own stories, in which all of the machinations and claims of the living world will have a part, but cannot really be the whole (i.e., the life) at all. Life and world might seem opposed here—that is, we have pragmatic, epic and skeptical traditions, to name a few, in whose terms they can be seen that way—but in its mortuary work, the obituary organizes a different relation. It links the event of death with the requirement not only of memory in particular (e.g., in the private sense in 104

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which an individual can recall “the time when…”) but of a particular form of memory (the public record or acknowledgement of a person’s particular being and ceasing to be) whose address is directed equally to individual and community and whose content points in a similarly double way to the value of a life/loss. If obituary serves in this way as a symbolic coffin, how should one go about paying respects to its contents? Is the problem of representing a life in some way similar to the problem of living one? If every individual is born with a twin called the collective and a life-long relationship in which both parties have speaking parts, of what does the wholeness of the life consist? The wholeness of the collective is often represented in contemporary thought either as the source of the machinations, impediments and trauma with which the individual is afflicted in the course of attempts to make a life or as the relatively inert “found material” out of which the individual constructs his or her identity against a relatively undifferentiated background of contention. Both positions tend to omit or obscure the problems of influence and relatedness that individuals in search of their own stories might experience simply by encounter with that curious freedom in the course of exercising it (in the middle of war, plague, disaster, still to be oneself; so also in the middle of family, vocation, institutional arrangement, sought-for affiliations, friendship, argument, love, civic duty, and so on).1 How one might pay respects to this unlikely whole is thematic in most of the writings of the composer Robert Schumann (1810–1856), who is known for his music but rather less for giving music an intelligible mode of speech in the public life of his time. He founded the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (“New Periodical for Music”) in Leipzig in 1834 and wrote hundreds of occasional pieces for it over the next decade, passing the journal to a colleague when he left the city in 1844. He revisited these thought-pieces near the end of his life, selecting, editing and publishing two volumes in 1854, as Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker (“Collected Writings about Music and Musicians”). The preface to this work is Schumann’s story of its coming-to-be. He relates how the original journal grew out of evening gatherings of a group of “mostly young” musicians in Leipzig who met to socialize and exchange ideas about the state of their art, mindful of its piecemeal support and scant public presence beyond the concert hall; exercised by the wish not only to foster appreciation for new voices like those of Mendelssohn and Chopin following the still-recent deaths of Beethoven and Schubert, but also to create a kind of improvement in the general understanding of music (Schumann 1965). Schumann refers to the journal itself as a transformation of the accidental and ephemeral character of the original group: “The pleasure of a firm and close association of young talents was of short duration. Death claimed one of our dearest associates… Some of the others left Leipzig for a time” (1965: 13). He took up the enterprise himself rather than watch over its dissolution and adopted the literary conceit of a group, the Davidsbund (“League of David”), as a way to typify “divergent views about art” through characters who could be counted upon to express them. There were three principal members of the 105

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Davidsbund: Florestan, a young man who generally spoke in the mode of enthusiasm; Eusebius, an equally young man given to speculation; and Raro, an older figure who often mediated between the two. Visiting and honorary “Davidsbündler” occasionally appeared to thematize other indices of an issue. Although they “vanished, not unmissed” from Schumann’s later writings for the journal, they are present, along with such a visitor, Jonathan, to discuss what would constitute adequate remembrance in “A Monument to Beethoven: Four Views” (1836, in Schumann 1965). The piece was occasioned by the slow progress of an effort to raise funds for a monument to Beethoven in the city of his birth, Bonn.2 Florestan begins the conversation with impatience and condemnation, imagining a shoddy monument in some way commensurate with the composer’s treatment in life: “Poor Beethoven! Your Symphony in D minor, and all your fine songs of pain (and joy)— we do not consider them great enough to justify letting you off without a monument. Our homage is inescapable!” (Schumann 1965: 91). Noting that Eusebius is already annoyed with him (the former is the dreary equivalent of a “company man,” in his view), he continues to sharpen the contrast between a massively underappreciated life, the suffering and difficulty of which were never answered by any friendship or aid (“But we just dash through the streets. Nobody knows him, nobody greets him…”) and the ease (or sleaze) of a monument (1965: 92). That empty gestures redound to the emptyheaded was already the case during the most beautiful performances of Beethoven’s day: “The public claps its hands, and the Philistine cries out: ‘That is true music!’”—before the public goes home, leaving him to die “without a child at his heart in the wilderness of a big city” (1965: 92). A monument only amounts to a piece of collective hypocrisy, Florestan asserts, which if built should be stamped with a poetic indictment when it finally falls to ruin. He offers an acerbic example from Goethe as his last word.3 “If we must recall someone from limbo,” the visitor Jonathan picks up, it could be the critic who wrote of Beethoven in 1800 that he could go far if only, et cetera. In fact, one has and one hasn’t: a little fundraising might go better for the critic, “maybe to save him from starvation” (Schumann 1965: 92). In the longer perspective, “a monument is a ruin facing forward (the ruin a monument facing backward), and questionable at that” (1965: 93) for it happens that Bonn and Vienna both have a claim to Beethoven: “He is entered in the church registers of each… And then there is Leipzig…with the distinction of being the first city to have interested itself in Beethoven’s compositions” (1965: 93). This is a distinction which has brought great pleasure to the city, and yet, Jonathan recalls, when he once went to Leipzig’s cemetery to pay respects to Johann Sebastian Bach, he could find no marker: “When I asked the gravedigger about it, he shook his head, the name meaning nothing, and said ‘There are many Bachs’” (1965: 93). He finds in this encounter a reminder that ashes are scattered in order to turn attention away from “perishable dust or the image of common death” to what is more meaningful: “And indeed, I prefer to picture him seated upright at his organ in the prime of life, the 106

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music swelling out from under his feet and fingers” (1965: 93). Better yet to remember by playing the music itself, as Mendelssohn did on the same organ, recalling the way it speaks of life to anyone, including some place for the utterance of sentiments like these: “I felt a twinge that I could lay no flower upon his urn, and I lost some of my respect for the Leipzigers of 1750. So, don’t urge me now to express my feelings about a monument to Beethoven” (1965: 93). Eusebius, meanwhile, is still struggling with his feelings about disrespect and the vertiginous prospect of public speech. “At this moment many hundreds are listening to me,” he blurts, squeaks or trumpets at the beginning of his offering: “One should move on tiptoe in church—but you, Florestan, offended me with your heavy tread” (Schumann 1965: 93–4). The question of a monument isn’t just personal and so cannot be exhausted by tirades, transports or similar invocations. Beyond this or that city, it takes in the whole nation and possibly a different homeland altogether. He notes that both Schiller and Gutenberg are the subjects of recent memorial projects though their lives and works are centuries apart. “Look at yourselves!” he admonishes, and sharpens his own point by offering the example of a modest memorial which stands under the windows of Bach’s house, embodying thankfulness all the more for being the gift of bygone students, not to Bach, but for another teacher who also called forth genuine regard for what he taught (1965: 94). If this is so in the particular instance, Eusebius demands, how much more so for “an entire nation, which teaches great aims and patriotism on every page” (1965: 94) and has in Beethoven a student who realized them in volumes? He begins a list of possible monuments, none of them modest: “a temple in the style of Palladio” with nine statues representing the nine muses and the nine symphonies (festivals and contests should take place here); or “a hundred century-old oaks” replanted “in such a way as to spell his name;” or a likeness “in a gigantic frame,” overlooking the Rhine; or, suddenly changing tack, “if one were to prefer something useful to the living, found an academy in his honour…in which his concept would be taught…a school for poets, or better, a school of music in the Greek sense… Get on with it,” he urges as he finally loses his composure, “and remember that the memorial will be your own!” (1965: 94-5). Finally there is Raro, who is able to be brief in face of such outpourings, intended and unintended. “Your ideas have no handle,” he tells the companions: “Florestan destroys and Eusebius lets things drop” (Schumann 1965: 95). Yet everything that has been said “attests to our veneration and gratitude to departed and beloved heroes,” for even Florestan concedes “that we must somehow make an outward show of our homage, that if no beginning is made, another generation will condemn our indolence” (1965: 95). Behind the hyperbole, moreover, “there may linger some base caution and greed, perhaps a nagging fear of being taken at one’s word if one goes about praising monuments too recklessly” (1965: 95). Raro proposes that the younger men join forces around the work in hand. Collections are being made by actual persons, he reminds them—already a good beginning—and fittingly, at musical events. So they should continue until a monument 107

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can be made—”a high obelisk or some pyramidal edifice”—with equally sympathetic relations to our notions of human mystery and grandeur (1965: 95). It need mean no more to us or to future generations, he reminds them, than that “the contemporaries of a great man…who treasured his works…were mindful enough of their debt to acknowledge it by an extraordinary symbol” (1965: 95). Schumann’s method in this lovely exercise in equilibration may help to reposition the question of what it means to represent a life from the perspective of death, if, as gathered to this point briefly, the discourse of death is a discourse about the quality of life. One of the first things Schumann presents for consideration is the way, and not just the fact, that remembrance is personal. A reader is invited to see this equally or as well in Florestan’s heady appropriation of Beethoven’s suffering as in Eusebius’ attempted self-effacement in face of his achievement; in Jonathan’s historicism, which places Beethoven among mortals bearing gifts and borne away in turn, locating his own melancholy alongside his membership of this condition; and in Raro’s moderation, keeping time, which reconciles great gifts and great debts in such a way as to lose nothing of affirmation in the understanding of loss. Then again, because it is of persons and done by persons, necessarily embedded in meanings, remembrance is collective. All of the speakers assume or presuppose a common obligation for care and recognition of the living as the basis for completing the communal circle of such care at death. It comes about on this basis that Florestan’s condemnation of the monument is also his condemnation of the Viennese for their failure to acknowledge Beethoven while he was alive; that Jonathan socializes the monument in proportion to his understanding of time and ignorance as sources of such neglect; that Eusebius elevates it out of his sense of the absolute necessity of the ideal—that every community should and must look after its “great aims;” while Raro grounds it in its common meaning (gift), adding the hint that mindfulness is a means as well as an end for those who would make one. In Schumann’s grammar, correlatively, there is no whole without parts. It is through “four views” in this case that a reader is enabled to explore one thing. If the conversational character of the piece is taken into account, this is not a matter of projecting the speakers into contest and finding a winner. (Who would it be? Raro for even-handedness or practicality? Eusebius for upholding a value in the confusion of accumulating possibilities, or trying to? Jonathan, for being the most objective in his subjectivity? Florestan, for bringing the most feeling to the question?) Nor will it really do, as if taxonomizing, to apportion each speaker indifferently to his difference. (What now? Are all equally valued, all equally different and so all equally indistinct as to their relationship?) The companions are talking with each other about something and understand themselves to be making contributions. They sound like they disagree because in some cases they do. The sound of disagreement (or emphasis, or excitement, or detachment) is less a guide to what they are saying than a kind of portrait once again of the way they agree that the subject 108

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is important. The reader is under the same necessity as the speakers to differentiate or disentangle the workings of feeling and meaning in the exchange he or she is privileged to read the whole of, while the author, having written all four views, suggests by the form of his composition that understanding is at least to some degree a matter of creating (and maintaining, in view of the tides) a fruitful relation among parts which differ only with respect to their partiality (here views) and not with respect to their aim (an adequate idea of remembrance) or origin (the occasion of a particular death) or condition (the capacity to concert themselves around it for a purpose). It is perfectly easy, reading this piece, to exercise sympathies for one or another speaker, but the broader invitation, echoing the “never speak ill…” sentiment, seems to be to find a basis for some sympathy with them all, to comprehend all of them. The implied unity does not ask for any dissolution of differences; presenting persons with their views attached (or vice versa) is quite an effective way to indicate a need to resist such reduction. Reasons why are already apparent if it is considered that Florestan’s nose-thumbing at convention is also his attestation to the uniqueness of persons, if not their claims to intelligence, appreciation or respect; Jonathan’s dolor is also his lucidity regarding the dependence of memory upon persons and its fortunes in face of the full range of their capacities, to say nothing of the natural limit that every capacity is finally incapacitated by; Eusebius’ anxiety over speech is also his commitment to representing the need for concepts of purpose and acknowledgement among persons in their ensemble, regardless of particular capacities or of the present state of collective understanding; Raro’s abstraction is also his custodial feeling for, and concrete response to, the difficulties of keeping faith at its mark or to its task, so to speak, insofar as it is something kept or lost (and if kept, then with inevitably different degrees of realization) by persons. Would it be best to take the step indicated as to the constitution of persons and see all these characters as parts of any character in principle? It is not, after all, difficult to imagine for anyone how passion without moderation, a longer view or some differentiation from its object, could destroy its object; or that imaginary gifts, however marvelous, could be imagined indefinitely if they were only imagined; or how the most conscientious objectivity could license not only modesty or melancholy in tune with its measures, but also skepticism, manipulation, rejection, inertia and empty criticism; or that the achievement of clarity in some aspect of life could be as indifferent to others’ strivings as it is here willing to lend a hand. The wholeness of this life, on Schumann’s example, is its part-ness. Remembrance in these terms becomes necessary and characteristic as a form of composition (comprehension), which cannot take place without disclosing its own elements. These could be described in many ways: vague promptings, feelings, idea(l)s, other voices, obligations, commitments, specific desires, received meanings, memories and events, hopes and fears, determinate skills and practices—some knowledge, however partial, of the instrument. They are arranged for the reader in terms of their origin in a being whose composite character is the ground of its ability to act on behalf of any purpose. If the obituary is meant to be a life lesson in this sense, Schumann’s memorial 109

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chorale4 is a very fitting and fond obituary for a composer who once remarked to a young friend that he had known how to die (compose and concert himself among others) since he was “a boy of fifteen” (Beethoven 1951: 151) and that it was a poor sort of man who didn’t know or care for this little art that life and art require. Death Singing It is not a far step to seek the place of lamentation in remembrance at this point. First, it is not the materiality of bodies that marks the discourse of death so much as their capacity to signify (or, in this complex of received wisdom, whose gesture always points away from the “common, perishable image” as if to say, “that’s only a reminder,” there is a kind of injunction not to confuse the body with the life, the house with its inhabitant’s abode). By custom, where there is no longer a body, there is the idealization of a life, its remembrance. In the remembrance of a gift and a loss, there is also sorrow, something to lament. A lament is not quite another obituary, however, even when it is written on the occasion of a death that will occasion one.5 Neither is it discontinuous: in poetic and musical forms, it presents in or as motion what the obituary presents as or at rest. A companion piece of sorts, performatively it is heard but not seen (one can look at the poet, but cannot relate to the recitation in this mode); like flowers, it may or may not be part of the rites in which, when it is a part, it is only ever a part. It need not displace, replace or substitute for other elements even though it may or may not accompany them. It can exist independently, so to speak, of a “real” death, though it might be less misleading to say that since there is never any shortage of death, past, present or future, it can supply its own occasions. To what part of death, then, does lamentation give substance or voice? If the customary answer is “feeling,” it could be surmised that the lament organizes grief or feelings of loss as the obituary arranges memory, in the first instance around a requirement of meaning that belongs to death as a discourse. A particular kind of participation or performance requirement is already intimated, hence the idea of an event. In Bennett’s Scottish material, for example, laments for bagpipes are still in use, while in the 1800s women were given a role of supplication, dressed in full tartans, taking silent, kneeling stations “at intervals” on the way to the graveyard, while men continued in procession to the burial ground. They were to position themselves in such a way as to be seen from the graveside, figures of loss and prayer, rising only to join the celebrants at the end of the interment (Carmichael, qtd. in Bennett 2004: 245). Such a tableau for lamentation would not be unrecognizable in the present day: however distant from current fashions, it both illustrates and enacts the need to acknowledge the mystery surrounding loss, life and passage. In Schumann’s piece, every view of remembrance contains the possibility of lamentation, but its surface utterance is given to the view that speaks to the universal character of death, generalizing the way everyone is subject to mortality. Jonathan, seeking one Bach, is reminded 110

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that there are many, i.e., that there are generations, names meaning nothing without remembrance. Thinking about recognition, he finds use, pleasure and appreciation of beautiful achievements, but also neglect, forgetfulness and ignorance. In this way, he is recalled to himself as one capable of being exercised and questioned by such actions, and while he cannot endorse the collective for falling short of its best expression (“I lost some of my respect…”), he does himself offer what he doesn’t find there (“I prefer to recall…”). On this showing, which includes the way each perspective could realize or fall short of its mark, the aesthetic work of the lament is to collect and represent the meaning of this universal (the human being) in this particular (living) as the obituary speaks for the particular (this human being) in the universal (life). If this seems like a recipe for endless confusion, perhaps it is, but musical examples are fairly forthright in rendering the form of the cry within the generalized form of a life (beginning, middle, end; arising, emerging, falling away; waxing and waning), where the range of representation has always been inclusive, from the lightest sigh to the most desolate or desperate anguish. What one cries over has already appeared in a variety of ways, hardly exhaustive: the life well-lived and the life ill-spent; the haste that confuses forgetting and remembering; the way that both forgetting and remembering call up pain for further address and/or pleasure in undertaking; the challenge supplied to character and community by “never speak ill…;” the public record and “for better or for worse” of every action; the way the question of the quality of care and recognition among people can concert and disconcert those who would pose it, making error and failure integral rather than mere accidents or side effects of life. Something of this condition is captured in the text of a setting by Gabriel Fauré, composed and first published in 1888 for a particular dedicatee, Mme. Maurice Sulzbach. A lament proper, the work was included in a collection of art songs published in 1908. The text is from a poem cycle called The Sea, by Jean Richepin:

At the Cemetery

Au cimetière



Happy the man who dies here Like The birds of the field! His body, near his friends, Is placed In the grass and in songs. He sleeps a good mellow Sleep Beneath the radiant sky. All those he knew Have come

Heureux qui meurt ici, Ainsi que Les oiseaux des champs! Son corps, près des amis, Est mis Dans l’herbe et dans les chants. Il dort d’un bon Sommeil vermeil, Sous le ciel radieux. Tous ceux qu’il a connus, Venus,

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And bid him a long farewell. By his cross his relatives, Weeping, remain kneeling, And his bones, beneath the flowers, With tears Are softly moistened. Everybody, on the black wood, May read Whether he was young or not, And may, with true Regrets, Call him by his name. How much more unfortunate Are those Who die at sea And beneath the deep waves Go off Far from their beloved country! Ah, the poor men who for their only Shrouds Have green seaweeds Where they toss unknown, Completely naked And their eyes wide open!

[First 12 lines repeated]

Lui font de longs adieux. À sa croix les parents Pleurents, restent à genouillés, Et ses os, sous les fleurs, De pleurs Sont doucement mouillés. Chacun sur le bois noir, Peut voir S’il était jeune ou non, Et peut, avec des vrais Regrets, L’appeler par son nom. Combien plus malchanceux Sont ceux Qui meurent à la mé(r) Et sous le flot profond S’en vont Loin du pays aimé! Ah! Pauvres! Qui pour seuls Linceuls Ont les goëmons verts, Où l’on roule inconnu, Tout nu, Et les yeux grands ouverts! [Heureux qui meurt…de longs adieux] (Fauré 1990: xii, 188–92)

The body that can be placed equally in grass and in songs, or lost at sea, is the transsubstantial one belonging to people. Here, the poet gathers his threads for significance under the heading of fortune while the musician provides a form for comprehension. Both offer a field of meaning for anyone to enter. Fauré’s setting depicts measure and loss of measure, or accord and tempest, insofar as one can speak descriptively, adding selfrestoration through a repetition of the poet’s material in such a way as to suggest a cycle in experience that should be understood as intrinsic to it.6 Depending on perspective, the poet might be read as offering no more than cliché: to superior beings (“That’s the way the cookie crumbles!”), to inferior ones (“People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones!”) or to the pretentious (“ars longa, vita brevis”). He might also be read as offering less a sentiment for momentary consumption than an observation that deserves respect: that there are lives that find their place and footing in the world and there are 112

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lives that don’t, or lose both, as in an elegiac line from Boethius (qtd. in Claasen 2007: 7): “whoever fell, was never on a stable plane.” The poem might stand as a valuation for a community that is producing too many casualties in the same vein (for shouldn’t everyone have the well-formed, well-met death of those who make it to their “déjeuner sur l’herbe,” and isn’t it painful to observe or suffer this failure in oneself or in others?) In the tradition, in any case, lament is formally concerned with recognition, not simply of mischance, but of the gap between human potential and the forms of organization and event that become its vehicles. The contrast in fortunes is as wide as can be. In the poem’s terms, the fortunate man is fortunate by accord with an order of nature (“like the birds of the field,” “in the grass,” “beneath the radiant sky,” “beneath the flowers”), echoed in human nature (“near his friends,” “in songs,” “all those he knew have come”). He need not fear anonymity or self-loss (“a good mellow sleep,” “everybody…may read”), nor neglect (“a long farewell,” “his bones…softly moistened” with tears). He has memory (“true regrets”); he can be called by his name. These images serve as an encomium to the kind of life death would have the living aspire to: the fortunate man’s internal harmony is to be inferred from the way it is reflected in the care and recognition of his friends and relations, his others. Some part of this aspiration requires recognition that it is the same sea that produces smooth sailing and shipwreck. An ancient figure for what is self-moving and for both inner and outer life, the sea engulfs the unfortunate men (“beneath the deep waves”) who begin to lose (“go off far”) whatever at the limit they could care for (“their beloved country”), because at the limit (“for their only shrouds”), they have neither works, deeds nor relations in which to house themselves, but only issueless effects and stimuli (“green seaweeds”). These poor ones who cannot rise to the surface of their occasions live (“die”) in a place other to self-recognition if not to desire (“at sea”). Seen from the cemetery, they are bereft of memory (“they toss unknown”), are seen but are themselves unseeing (“completely naked”) in a strange imitation of the common image of death (“and their eyes wide open”). Richepin’s text ends having posed the contrast between the best and worst of fortunes by invoking one element that connects them: a sea that can manifest itself in salty tears and in storms that might overturn the largest vessel. Fauré’s music continues as a return to the mindful praise at the poem’s beginning, which might serve to remind an auditor that lamentation itself has a purpose related to the way that in life every passing day presents opportunities for regret (or joy). The character who sings of death is like the composite character of Schumann’s piece, who by virtue of the capacity to act faces his or her consequentiality as a gift that can also be a curse. If death enjoins the living to live up to the gift a life is, lamentation speaks to every derailment and every kind of derangement with the rather homely reminder to restore or revise one’s form(s) and content(s) and begin again, life’s end not being the end of life, not “a matter of life and death,” but a kind of dedication or “votive offering” in its own right. 113

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Resting Places This raises an interesting question to close with, of how medicine might hear such a non-medicinal view of the suffering it takes as the object of its profession. When death sings, it sings that death is surely loss of life for the dead person, but it is also a deeply resonant occasion to think over the possibilities of care and transformation among the living. The interest of obituary is partly this: that it is compelling in both inspiring and horrifying ways to read about how people have lived their lives—under any emotional sign—in ways that are potentially instructive. Perhaps obituary is compelling, then, because it presupposes the interest of Kierkegaard’s tiny pedagogy for remembrance, which has as many ways of being understood and acted upon as the collective can supply to it or the individual can improvise, for better and for worse. The interest of lamentation is companionate: the consequentiality of every view and every action in relation to the promise of a life, individual or collective, and the need to understand the complicated freedom of such a condition. It is compelling perhaps because it presupposes a specifically human aspiration to do and be well that cannot be secured in any result (as if one result could underwrite an entire life) and so asks for renewal in actions that will always bring the same actualities with them. Lament suffers—and offers—the thought that understanding this form of life is an intrinsic and essential need. But should one then say, because there is no cure for a constitution that includes such suffering as one of its parts, that life itself is a disease? Or could disease rather be a kind of un-thought relation to death (life) that calls for acquaintance with lamentation (artful and thoughtful depictions of the story of living)? Art and medicine might find a meeting place in just this space, where the actuality and thus creative demand of what there is to understand is grounded in an affirmation of what is to be nurtured in the aspiration to a good life, the best under the ever-present circumstances engendered as much by the partiality of knowledge as of ignorance. It could be argued, returning to medical custom, that the practical orientation of medicine presupposes, brackets or disavows the relevance of this space in ways that could make reflection on it as empty an exercise as priorities within medicine might suggest. For presupposition, the type for such an argument would be “We already know;” for bracketing, “We fix them up so they can resume;” and for non-necessity, “Life is suspended here in favor of treatment, which has its own modalities.” In addition, the notion of rescue suggests that medical practice establishes a boundary through its ban on remembrance, a boundary that does intend delineation of a proper sphere for medical care and relationship. In practice, a doctor is not normally a friend, relation or fellow-traveler except insofar as a course of treatment defines a mutual interest; the work is not normally addressed to such an end, and we do like our practitioners to prove skillful in both professional knowledge and demeanor when we are patients. Yet however readily such priorities may be affirmed, the boundary itself creates a reference to the difference between the patient and the person 114

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in every patient, just as the requirements of the profession create the distinction between the practitioner and the person in every practitioner. From this point of view, since the institution itself is a communal work and interest, since the roles themselves partake of ritual, and since in practice, public controversy and conflict over their meaning opens invariably onto questions of quality—of experience, care, performance, knowledge, duty and right—it begins to seem that medicine is no stranger to the discourse of remembrance, even if the latter’s use and appearances are subordinate to more pressing tasks. But more pressing tasks, from the point of view of remembrance, could reference any situation in which differing claims, wishes, objects and obligations to life are having their say with the subject, and if medicine has a characteristic means of “reducing noise” that is decisive and often effective in terms of its goals, it would not seem to have an account of how this situation (“noise”) is common: to be divided in relation to oneself and one’s relations such that respect can be paid to the problem of what good action, good practice or meaningful self-expenditure might look like in a given situation. Perhaps this is because ‘a given situation’ has no procedural dimension to which a method like postmortem could be applied when procedure fails, just as ordinary life offers very few chances for spectacular rescue but needs its extraordinary moments nevertheless. A question then remains as to what it means or what it might look like to be subject to remembrance or to lament in the ordinary sense, and there is a story, again about Schumann, that may serve as a source of suggestion. In the autumn of 1838, Schumann moved briefly from Leipzig to Vienna for a period of several months, hoping to transfer the Neue Zeitschrift to that city to increase both its readership and his income. A part of the enterprise involved the wish to convince the man who would become his father-in-law that he had sufficient means to marry and support the latter’s daughter (this courtship is a story in itself for those interested in Schumann’s biography). The effort failed for a variety of reasons, including the influence of more conventional views on music writing that had led Schumann to found the journal in the first place, as well as “official and bureaucratic obstacles” (Schumann 1965: 167, n.2) he was unable to negotiate on that occasion. While he was in Vienna, however, he took the opportunity to visit the graveyard in which Beethoven and Schubert were buried, and the visit prompted him to look up Schubert’s surviving brother. During the course of their meeting, Schubert’s brother was moved to show him some of the compositions Schubert had left in his keeping. The compositions included seven of Schubert’s eight symphonies and other instrumental works that had never been performed during Schubert’s lifetime. Schumann arranged to send the seventh of these symphonies to Mendelssohn in Leipzig, who conducted its premiere on March 21, 1839 with the Gewandhaus orchestra and subsequently saw it through publication with Breitkopf and Härtel. In 1840, he wrote his own account of this moment (“Schubert’s Symphony in C”) for the journal. Its organization is noteworthy as both a transformation on experience and as an exercise in the form of remembrance. 115

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He begins with what could be common or shared: a musician visiting Vienna for the first time could be absorbed in the delights, sights and sounds of that city. They are admirable in themselves, and yet it is Vienna’s musical heritage that might be even nearer and whose sign is a churchyard “where almost side by side lie two of the greatest men his art has ever produced” (Schumann 1965: 163). In Schumann’s telling, it would be natural (a fitting expression of interest and relation) to contemplate the specific value of the predecessor in the present, and this is what the remainder of the article sets out to do, the writer no longer depicting the composite being of the earlier piece but composing in its terms. There is something to lament. In his own case, as with many of his contemporaries, he was never able to meet either of these exemplars during their lifetimes (“It had not been my good fortune…” [Schumann 1965: 163]). Entertaining this regret, he recalls Schubert’s brother as someone he might converse with about the man and the artist. The newspaper version of the story is dispensed with quickly: “He showed me, among other things, the scores of a number of symphonies, some still unheard, some examined and put away as too difficult” (Schumann 1965: 163). What follows is a kind of meditation and appreciation of the meaning of such a story. There are first of all the actual conditions with which such work and workers are obliged to deal: “One must know Vienna, the problems of musical life there, the difficulty of assembling the resources required for the performance of large works, to understand how it could be possible that in the city where Schubert lived and worked little or nothing of his music is heard beyond his songs” (Schumann 1965: 163–4). Alongside the custom and condition of this particular time and place, and contributing in its own way to its texture, there is also the received wisdom and its distribution of possibilities within a field: “It is so often said, and to the considerable annoyance of composers, that ‘after Beethoven one should forgo symphonic ambitions’” (Schumann 1965: 164). Schumann points out the naivety of such advice, particularly the way it effaces the difference between “lifeless mirrorings of Beethovenesque idioms,” in which case the advice is partly true; questions of individual development, in which the composer’s mastery of form is what is at issue rather than any larger “influence…on the public or on the evolution of the symphony;” and those whose work, like Schubert’s, has developed and realized its aspirations in such a way as to constitute such an influence (Schumann 1965: 164). Of conditions, which here begin to resemble the multiplicity of human interest and understandings at play in any time or place, Schumann remarks on the way such an irreducible melee creates both the need and the dependence of aspiration on goodwill: “Who knows how long the symphony now under discussion might have lain in darkness and dust?” (1965: 164), citing Mendelssohn, who was ready to conduct the work and the publishers who were willing to prepare it after its positive reception. What is irreducible is not incomprehensible, then, and since conditions are also the ground of such particularity as an(y) individual will create in relation to them, Schumann turns to 116

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what can be said of aspiration for its own part, noting that Schubert has re-imagined the symphony or invested it with his particular character and understanding, which is to say that he has taken it up as an inheritance and not simply a means of production. This creative initiative is the object of Schumann’s appreciation while his interest is in achieving a proportionate grasp of the significance of such expenditure. First for the recipient, he remarks, is that “we may refresh ourselves here in the fullness of spirit that flows forth” from the work (Schumann 1965: 165). Such vitality can be read equally from the work’s own evocation of place and the composer’s implied relations to his life and surroundings, yet Schumann also eschews a programmatic statement of what the symphony says or stands for: “Persons choose too variously in their imaginings of texts and pictures. The eighteen-year-old often hears something world-shaking in music which suggests to a grown man no more than a local incident. The composer himself may have had nothing else in mind than to get down the best music that was in him” (1965: 165). Like everyone else, then, the composer composes out of his own variety. If remembrance does not aim to reduce what it contemplates (for example, to be a source of definitive or causal statements), however, why do its meditations matter? One likes to believe that the outside world, bright today, dark tomorrow, often penetrates to the spiritual recesses of the poet and musician, and to hear such a symphony as this is to concede that it carries hidden away within it more than mere lovely song, more than mere joy and sorrow expressed in conventional musical terms… Here, besides sheer mastery of the technique of composition, is life in every fibre, colour in the finest shadings, meaning everywhere, the acutest etching of detail. (Schumann 1965: 165) The piece settles, as to aspiration, on a kind of writing which relates implied gifts with the gift given, including a discussion of the extraordinary dimension (a “different realm” in Schumann’s usage) disclosed by Schubert’s orchestrating without an orchestra, finding the specific idiom of individual instruments without the instruments at hand, attending to the idea of “something to say” while creating its utterance, and in this way, developing a work that speaks to many of such journeying (Schumann 1965: 166). Here, composition becomes a formal requirement of understanding and utterance alike, with remembrance its manner of thinking, for “[to] break down the individual movements into their constituent parts would amuse neither ourselves nor the reader” if the point is to relate them (Schumann 1965: 166), not only to the kind of story they tell, but to the teller’s unique way(s) of answering to the communal need for meaning. Meaning is itself then the gift and striving Schumann supposes of the work as his point of relation to it. From almost any angle, “Schubert’s symphony” sounds a far cry from “medical practice.” Nor is any of this to suggest that it isn’t, or that doctors should take up musical instruments alongside or in place of surgical ones. But insofar as meaning 117

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occasionally becomes a question within medicine, it is quite suggestive that there should be a discourse (form of comprehension) that organizes reflection on the life in/of any practice, that collects and relates parts in preference to the dissection of wholes, or that takes as a mundane resource for understanding, the fluidity of the exchange between types of relation to the need for meaning and types of practice or experience. As a spokesman of sorts, Schumann presents composition as a funerary practice intending the remembrance, refreshment and disclosure of meaning (1965: 167). “Thus my visit to the grave…,” he ends his piece, speaking of riches. Endnotes 1.

The foregrounding of forces against which there is no recourse and in terms of which memory is elided or equated with trauma, as remembrance becomes testimony or witness, remains perhaps paradigmatic in Holocaust studies. A more interactional view which differentiates itself around the idea of contested memory or versions of events and collective or individual experience can be found in work on postcolonialism (Whitehead 2008) and on the violence of globalization (Robben 2005). More broadly historical and literary studies, by taking up questions of form and uses of memory, also foreground considerations of its created character, whether the agent/author is individual or collective (Claasen 2007; Demoor 2005; Kittredge 2008; Olberding 2005; Steiner 2004; Strauss 2000).

2.

Schumann donated the proceeds of a memorial composition to this project, his Opus 17, "Fantasie für Pianoforte." The project began eight years after Beethoven's death in 1827 and met with poor initial response. Franz Liszt assumed the task of ensuring that adequate funds were eventually raised: the monument was completed in 1845 (Schumann 1965: 95, n.1).

3.

As translated: "As long as one still lives and does / a hail of stones is one's reward. / At last when one is dead and gone / a call goes out for sums of gold / to build a splendid monument / in honor of his earthly woes. / The world may judge your own return / from this acknowledgement of debt / 'Twere shrewder far, I do believe, / the once forgotten to forget." (Schumann 1965: 92)

4.

A standard chorale is a setting in four voices of a sacred text; the madrigal is a secular cousin. In both cases the subject is love. Here, Schumann's four voices are recognizable stand-ins for feeling, fact, value and judgment as centers of action. In music, four different voice qualities would be harmonized around a single text and their simultaneity would be pervasive for an auditor as the text was sung. What is 118

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pervasive in the written version is the agreement to speak, while text unfolds as a function of view and what is simultaneous is the meaning the reader will complete as he or she reads. 5.

Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation 2009) gathers the lament and its cognates for common curiosity in this way: the entry for "lament" remarks the universality of the form among cultures and notes its relations to religion and literature, oral storytelling, singing and instrumental music. "Elegy" is given a contemplative dimension: "on the death of someone or on a sorrow generally… [A] form of lyric poetry, [it] can also reflect on something that seems strange or mysterious to the author." In music, elegy is described as being typically "of a sad or somber nature." "Kommós" is given its common meaning ("literally 'a beating' of the breasts in mourning") and its specialized use in Greek tragedy: "a lyrical song of lamentation…that the chorus and a dramatic character sing together" when the tension of the play rises to a climax of grief or horror or joy. "Threnody" is given its function ("a song or hymn of mourning composed as a memorial to a dead person") and an etymology: "from the Greek word threnoidia, from threnos (a ‘lament’) + oide (‘song’); ultimately, from the Proto-Indo-European root wed- (‘to speak’) that is also the precursor of such words as ‘ode’, ‘tragedy’, ‘comedy’, ‘parody’, ‘melody,’ and ‘rhapsody.’” “Dirge,” finally, is aligned with a concern for action: “a somber song…such as would be appropriate to perform at a funeral…derived from the Latin Dirige, Domine, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meam (‘Direct my way in your sight, O Lord my God’), the first words of the first antiphon in the Matins of the Office for the Dead.”

6.

For interest, in June 2009, iTunes listed several recordings of this song (Fauré Opus 51, No.2): for high, medium and low voice, as well as an instrumental reading with cello taking the vocal part. For writers who have been exploring the relations between aesthetic forms and cultural understanding, see Hagberg 2005; Henigan 2007; Kaufman 2005; Martin 2007; Schuster 2003; Weinbaum 2001.

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6 Enjoyment’s Petrification: The Luxor Obelisk in a Melancholic Century Michael Follert

When the guillotine was erected at Place de la Révolution in January of 1793, it assumed the post of a bronze statue of Louis XVI’s forebear, felled and melted down only months earlier. As the most central square in Paris, it had formerly celebrated the dominion of the king as Place Louis XV. Renamed and baptized in Louis’s blood, the square would soon become stage for the execution of several thousand suspected counter-revolutionaries. The guillotine periodically carried out its swift and spectacular justice here until the smell of blood compelled local residents to seek its removal to more modest dwellings (Hamer 1992: 82). Four decades later, in 1833, a hulking, granite obelisk of Egyptian antiquity was erected at the center of the same square as if to recall the guillotine’s former dominion. The Luxor Obelisk, a gift of the Viceroy of Egypt, has remained there with remarkable staying power—much longer than did the crumbling plaster Statue de la Liberté of the Revolution or the incomplete expiatory monument to “Louis XVI, martyr” during the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830). The monuments once inscribing the site with an explicit view to its legacy were leveled in little time and replaced by an “immutable stone” of a civilization long-buried, curiously making no explicit statement on the history it inherited. The Event and Its Stain When Arendt (1990: 50) speaks of the public memory of the French Revolution, it is the dates corresponding to the Fall of the Bastille (July 14), the death of Robespierre (9 Thermidor on the French Republican Calendar), and the rise of Napoleon (18 Brumaire) that appear to resound the most. But 2 Pluviôse, the date of Louis XVI’s execution, does not seem to merit significant notice. Echoing George Bataille’s notion that the execution of the king inaugurated the “criminal nature of the French people, its existence in guilt” 123

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(Cox 2006 113), Jean-François Lyotard, a thinker less immediately associated with the French Revolution, argues that today the memory of this act haunts all of the politics, the philosophy and the literature of the French. The integrity of any text or decree after the regicide is thence measured up against that singular event, “[le] crime [qui] a été perpétré en France en 1792 […qu’on] a tué un brave roi tout-à-fait aimiable” (Lyotard 1985: 583).1 Indeed, Arendt may be correct in her exclusion, ascertaining that this date has mostly been eclipsed from public memory. Lyotard’s point, however, is that the memory is more subtextual, haunting each system of meaning or rule grounded in its respective longing for legitimacy. Lyotard also tells us that no American, Briton nor German—pace Arendt—could truly understand the tenacity of this crime’s stain, despite their shared inheritance of the democratic tradition. The very obscurity of the memory of the event in Lyotard’s own writing, however, is a point of some irony: he mistakenly identifies the year of the execution as 1792 rather than 1793, perhaps confounding the date of the king’s deposition with the date of the regicide. The memory, despite its insistence in one manner, for Lyotard, reveals itself distorted. What exactly, then, is he tapping into here, and—without fetishizing history qua the memorization of dates—why this slip? How does the singularity of this event, now more than two centuries past, register in French public memory? Indeed, what can this non-descript monument, the Luxor Obelisk (Fig. 6.1), tell us about how the French oriented toward the traumatic moments of the Revolution in the century that followed it, in this “century of commemorations but also of forgetfulness” (Hollier 1994: 812)? Melancholic Glory During the period of the July Monarchy (1830–1848), Victor Hugo remarked upon the festival of 1839 celebrating the death of the king: “under the spell of the obelisk, the populace dances, a forgetful Oedipus, on the stage of its crime” (Hollier 1994: 675). For the festival’s participants, save the writer, the violent history of the site appears to be displaced by its new monument. Where once reigned the rites of expiation or explicit celebration in the early days following the regicide emerged a ritual of forgetting. One travel writer commented in the same period on the fate of the site that had come to be named Place de la Concorde: “The voice of the people…as if still more desirous of obliterating the past and living only for the present, gives it the simple designation of Place de l’Obelisque” (Simpson 1847: 430). The obelisk, he suggests, effaced its predecessors, with the square taking the former as its new referent. This archaeo-logic of displacing a more recent history by excavating a more remote past denotes a relationship with “the Orient” that extended far beyond France’s failed conquest of Egypt under Napoleon. In an inversion of the iconoclasm of the pre-Thermidorian days of the Revolution, the French in the nineteenth century “[remembered] in order to forget” (Wengrow 2005: 139). 124

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Fig. 6.1. Gaspard Gobaux, Place Louis XV, 1850. Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

A day following the execution of Louis XVI, the editor of Le Patriote français pleaded, “Illustrious day! Never to be forgotten day! May you come down to posterity without stain! Calumny be ever far from you! Historians, show yourselves worthy of your times! Write the truth, and nothing but the truth. Never was the truth so sacred, never so becoming to tell!” (Arasse 1989: 57). This injunction would surely have resonated with the inaugural historian of the Revolution, Jules Michelet, who inherited the memory of the Revolutionary moment from his father. Writing his Histoire de la Révolution française, published in 1847, Michelet lamented that the people of France had “repudiated its friend… Nay, its own father, the great eighteenth century! They have forgotten,” he added, “that the eighteenth century founded liberty on the enfranchisement of the mind” (qtd. in Huet 1997: 101). While the revolutionaries themselves sought to “do away with every remnant of the past” (Huet 1997: 132–3), Michelet rebuked his contemporaries for doing the same. He wished, rather, to restore to the revolutionary moment the glory it was due, recalling its Enlightenment legacy even at the expense of exhuming its traumatic excesses. 125

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Drawing largely on the work of Michelet, Marie-Hélène Huet’s Mourning Glory2 examines how post-Revolutionary France dealt with the sublime character of the founding moments of the First Republic at the levels of aesthetic and political forms of representation. “Mourning” in Huet’s work implies an attempt at reconciliation with the past, yet an attempt that does not, and indeed cannot, completely put the past to rest. There is a remainder—something that continues to insist upon public memory. To take Freud’s clinical understanding of the term,3 the process of mourning entails the subject completely de-cathecting a lost or dead love-object and consequently becoming open to new objects. Yet something else not quite captured by Huet’s title seems to be at stake with the relation to the past conveyed here. Though deprived of her wordplay, we might do better to consider, using Freud’s complementary term, a melancholic relation to glory.4 Crimen immortale, inexpiabile The Janus-faced character of the French Revolution has been the object of considerable scrutiny in recent scholarly work. If its ennobling moments, like the storming of the Bastille or the enunciation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, are what survive most vividly in the hallowed historical imagination of the Revolution, then the September Massacres, the trial and execution of Louis XVI, and the ensuing Reign of Terror persist merely as a muted stain upon revolutionary glory. This tension reached a peak, notes Huet, during the July Monarchy which rededicated the Panthéon to the memory of “the great (dead) men of the Fatherland” while scores of bodies covered in quicklime still languished in the “wasteland of the cemeteries of the Terror” (1997: 5). French public memory seems to have relegated the horrifying moments of the Revolution, despite what I argue to be their simultaneously auspicious character, to its footnotes.5 Jean Baudrillard claims that, today, history has produced “a perfectly pious vision of the Revolution, cast in terms of the Rights of Man… A vision which allows [the French] to eliminate Saint-Just from the Dictionnaire de la Révolution” (1994a: 23–4). Saint-Just’s vanishing act illustrates the status of the Jacobins, the agents of the Terror and campaigners for the king’s execution, as the “vanishing mediator” between the ancien régime and liberal democracy. As Žižek tells us, it is “difficult and disquieting to acknowledge and assume fully the fact that, without the Jacobinical ‘excess,’ there would be no ‘normal’ pluralistic democracy” (2002: 184).6 While this excess or sublime violence was in one sense necessary to the eventual institution of democracy, it remained unassimilable to and persists as a stain on the latter. The excesses of the Revolution perhaps attained their most traumatic character in the regicide. With the registration of the king’s death within a juridical frame that still relied 126

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in the last instance upon a principle of sovereignty that he embodied, the law consumed itself like a snake eating its own tail. The Revolutionary Constitution of 1791 reaffirmed, after all, just two years prior to Louis’s execution, the king’s inviolability as sovereign. As Goldhammer notes, the trying of Louis XVI as “Louis Capet”—as a citizen—was merely a “strategic revolutionary fiction that permitted his judgment in a court that would otherwise have no jurisdiction—no legitimacy—to judge a sacred being” (2005: 19).7 It is because of this “criminal” inversion of the law that Kant, himself a republican sympathizer, lamented “it is as if the state commits suicide” when the people put to death their very guarantor of legitimacy by formal execution (1996: 98).8 Unlike an assassination, the act of putting a sovereign to death by juridical process violated the principle of legitimacy in such a manner that it could, according to Kant, “never be forgiven either in this world or the next” (1996: 97). Such an act destroys the possibility of the collectivity surviving by any legitimate means. Or, to put it otherwise, the collectivity survives but, as Lyotard suggests, under the “signe d’un crime.” This is perhaps partly why the Revolution “left no monuments to commemorate its achievements” (Huet 1997: 4). The only testament to the Revolution remains the Champ de Mars, “a sandy plain,” Michelet observed, one “as flat as Arabia” (Huet 1997: 102). Michelet remarked in 1847 upon the obscurity of the memory of the Revolution in the cityscape of Paris in contrast with the lasting markers of France’s then-fallen regimes: “…the Empire has its column and has furthermore taken the Arc de Triomphe over almost entirely for itself; the monarchy has its Louvre and its Invalides; the feudal Church of 1200 is still enthroned in majesty in Notre-Dame; even the Romans have the thermal baths of Caesar. And the Revolution’s monument is… emptiness” (Hamer 1992: 82). There was a profundity to the “wastelands” of the Revolution like the Champ de Mars or the cemetery of the Terror, haunted by civic neglect in Michelet’s time. These sites intimated something that could not be captured by “any piece of human architecture” (Huet 1997: 102). Michelet was understandably hostile to the placement of the Luxor Obelisk there, in the center of Paris, on such an auspicious square. This was a site where, he announced, “the Nation alone has the right to be represented” (Hollier 1994: 673). The Revolution, in his view, had a sublime character and the obelisk was out of place in this public square—the place of the people. Describing it as the “obelisk of the pharaohs,” Michelet preferred it hidden away in the Louvre (“the palace of the kings”), along with the relics of the ancien régime. The remains of the monarchic past needed to be placed in their properly sepulchral domain (Higonnet 2005: 62). Indeed, notable contemporaries from across the political spectrum including Hugo, Borel, Chateaubriand and Balzac were also critical of the sheer out-of-place-ness of the obelisk. Yet for all of its obscurity, the obelisk retains a strange fit to the site’s legacy of revolutionary excess.

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The Obelisk and its Other Monuments are carried away on the river of time. Suddenly, on the Place de la Concorde, there is silence. The name changes: Place de la Terreur. Obelisks and pyramids collapse as the metonymic pollutions of nearby rivers (whether Nile or Seine) reach them. (Hollier 1992: 169–70) The importation of the obelisk to the center of Paris, where once stood the guillotine, appears at first symbolically at odds with the “ever-exilic, ever-transitory place of death in modern urban life” (Vidler 2000: 123). Foucault speaks of the shift in urban development in the early nineteenth century whereby cemeteries, once the “sacred and immortal heart of the city,” were displaced to the outskirts of the latter with a view to managing contagion and public health (1986: 25). Yet it would seem that there persists in city life a fascination with the spectacle of death and its remains. In Vidler’s reading of Bataille, the Luxor Obelisk resembles a forensic chalk-etched “x” marking the scene of a crime. Death here returns to the “sacred and immortal heart of the city” through the obelisk even as it strains to obliterate the memory of the very death it marks. The monument, like a cenotaph, stands in for the place of death so that death will not appear to us as such (Hollier 1992: 36). If the obelisk works to bury the past, it simultaneously undoes this by subliminally recalling the scene of death. In one respect, we see how the obelisk is read against and through its more majestic counterpart, the pyramid. In Bataille’s reading, the obelisk was to the pharaoh’s sovereignty what the pyramid was to his corpse (1985: 215). Both structures point upward—the former like a beam of sunlight, reified. Yet the obelisk is traditionally capped with a small pyramid, as Mark Taylor notes, undercutting the “monumental desire” that the former represents (1987: 120). The living pharaoh’s sovereignty, we may say, as displayed in this architectural indeterminacy, remained closely hinged upon the interred remains of his dead forebears, just as the dead father in Freud sustains the Law as its ultimate symbolic authority (1953: 140–61). The indistinction between obelisk and pyramid is further betrayed in one notable Revolutionary period image (Fig. 6.2). The engraving shows Robespierre at the height of the Terror, guillotining the state executioner. Robespierre here, literally pulling the strings behind the violence, is primed to decapitate the chief functionary of the executions in an omen to the former’s own demise soon to follow. Behind the primary scene is a field of guillotines, multiply reduplicated as if to account for each of the deaths incurred under the Terror. Near front stands a pyramid-obelisk structure with the inscription: “Cy git toute la France” (“Here lies all of France”), satirizing the extremes to which the Jacobins would go to purify the nascent body politic—that, if necessary, all of the French could be put to death to save “the nation.” The obelisk that would eventually find its way to Place de la Concorde, and that is bizarrely anticipated here four decades in advance. This, however, had little to do with Robespierre himself, who had the guillotine moved to a more remote location, the 128

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Fig. 6.2. Unknown artist, Robespierre Guillotining the Executioner After Having Guillotined All the French, ca. 1794. Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France. 129

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Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and then one even more remote, Barrière du Thrône, during the years of the Terror (Hollier 1994: 588). The coincidence of the pyramid-obelisk structure and Robespierre is strange also if we consider Robespierre’s disdain for the spectacular quality that executions had previously attained. No doubt he would find such a memorial, publicizing the merely quotidian acts of swift Revolutionary justice, out of place. Looking at the image, one is struck by how the structure behind the scene of the execution appears as a strange hybrid of the pyramid and the obelisk. It bears some of the formal qualities of the obelisk (it has an inscription; it is situated upon a stone base), yet it lacks the typical shaft-like form of the latter. Recent scholarly references to this image also betray the difficulty in properly classifying it. Porterfield describes the object depicted here as a “pyramid-obelisk” structure (1998: 20), while Burton on one page uses the term “pyramid,” and then “obelisk” on the next, to describe the very same image (2001: 54–5)! However, the image, in its indistinction, unwittingly tells us something about sovereignty: that sovereignty achieves its highest expression in the power over the lives of the members of the polity—as the monopoly-holder of legitimate violence. The paradox here is that popular sovereignty might transcend or survive the death of the people.9 Put otherwise, at Place de la Révolution the marker of death (the tomb or pyramid) becomes indistinct from the marker of sovereignty (the obelisk). From Personification to Petrification The years following the Revolution witnessed multiple regimes jockeying to secure interpretive authority over the former Place de la Révolution where the guillotine intermittently meted out revolutionary justice. The July Monarchy transformed the square in two key ways: first, by renaming it Place de la Concorde, and secondly, by placing an obelisk at its centre, where a statue celebrating the majesty of the king once stood. Claiming the site in the name of unity (concorde) was strategic. It would presumably both conceal the volatile history of the site and dispel criticism over the ruling regime’s legitimacy. Louis-Philippe famously remarked to his prefect of Paris at the time that the obelisk “would recall no political event,” thereby offering the public no recollection of the past. It was a public monument, by some accounts, chosen purely for its meaninglessness (Burton 2001: 64). Indeed, this move exposed the ideological hollowness of a regime that would obtain its name from, of all places, the month of its inauguration.10 While it did not come entirely without its own symbolic baggage, the obelisk had the character of being a relatively “open emblem.” “Although redolent with submerged and long-forgotten significance,” Haxell (1989: 74) notes, the obelisk, for modern Europeans, was “unattached to any cogent sign-system” and “available for a multiplicity of readings.” The inscrutability of the obelisk’s inscription at the time could only have enhanced this indeterminacy. One may recall here Hegel’s description of Egyptian art 130

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as “especially ambiguous;” how it could “accrue meaning through its setting and the expectations of the public” (Porterfield 1998: 29). It was for this very reason that Pierre Joseph Proudhon disdained public monuments such as the Obelisk, the Panthéon and the Madeleine. For Proudhon, writing in the 1860s, these monuments represented “a whole culture in which signs had become detached from what they signified, in which grandiose surfaces concealed an underlying void” (Burton 2001: 64).11 The Obelisk appeared as the symptom of an empty culture, forfeiting its past as sentinel to the gates of an Egyptian temple. Proudhon’s charge of symbolic emptiness here recalls the sign of a crime articulated by Lyotard: “Taken as a whole, our monuments denote a people whose conscience is empty… We have nothing in our minds, neither law, morality, philosophy, nor economic sense, only sham, pure arbitrariness, error, disguise, mendacity, and the cult of pleasure” (Burton 2001: 64). Writing a century or so after the obelisk was parked at Place de la Concorde, Robert Musil was dismayed at the plight of monuments, how their secondary function as simple place-markers comes to overtake their initial symbolic significance. He notes, “you employ them as a compass or a distance marker; when you happen upon the wellknown square, you sense them as you would a tree, as part of the street scenery, and you would be momentarily stunned were they to be missing one morning” (Musil 2006: 65).12 According to Musil, while the monument is constructed typically to recall some memory and instill a sense of the auspicious in public life, its tendency with time is to fall into the backdrop of the cityscape, to “elude our perceptive faculties,” as indeed the obelisk seemed to have done successfully by the early twentieth century. Great events or individuals are, at best, cast into oblivion by such markers, and, at worst, petrified as lumbering monoliths. Musil exhorts monuments to “try a little harder” (2006: 67), indeed, to take a lesson from contemporary advertising gimmicks to solicit the public’s attention. We know Musil has entered the realm of the facetious when he exclaims, “we have a right to ask more out of monuments today!” (2006: 67). But there is certainly a sense in his writing that, even by the 1930s, most conventional monuments were out of step with their time. They escaped public notice behind the shock, the speed, the noise and the general loss of aura in urban life. Rather than asking monuments to change, Bataille begs of his contemporaries a “renewed astonishment” that “from remote regions of the earth and from the dawn of the ages, this Egyptian image of the IMPERISHABLE, this petrified sunbeam, arrives at the center of urban life” (1985: 215). When Baron von Haussmann, during the Second Empire (1852–1870), undertook the modern reconstruction of Paris, his chief architect, Jacques Ignace Hittorff, resisted the former’s desire to have the obelisk relocated; his desire was to grant the site the sense of grandeur it was “due.” While Haussmann saw the obelisk as drab and out of place in his Paris, it remained integral to Hittorff ’s plans. Boyer notes that the obelisk was a central feature to Hittorff ’s conception of the square, “the center of focus for his closed perspectival views and the icon of concord in his ceremonial display” (1996: 38). 131

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But even if Haussmann had his way, civic reconstruction of the site “could not rob the guillotine and the traumas of the Revolution of their continued force in the psychic life of the community or do away with the need to come to terms with them” (Hamer 1992: 78). Timothy J. Clark suggests Haussmann failed to appreciate that “there are places in every city which disqualify themselves from the symbolic order—by the very density of different histories that have claimed the place and spilt blood” (1984: 50). Yet this disqualification should not be confused with exclusion or erasure. The blood that “slaked the soil of the square” (Arasse 1989: 52) was, all the same, the outcome of the putatively procedural rationality of a public trial. Hence, the trial and execution were registered within public culture, to which the symbolic order is a repository. The point that we should take from Lacan, however, is that the symbolic order includes everything yet is still fundamentally incomplete. It includes even the gaps and excesses that it fails to integrate—or rather, it includes the mark of those excesses—through its very orientation to self-consistency. Hence, while the event may be disavowed in one manner, it still lingers in the recesses of public memory in that state through its inscrutable monument, not re-presenting, but giving body to an excess. To invert Wengrow (2005: 139) here, we may say the symbolic order forgets in order to remember. Melancholic Remains To further understand the status of the obelisk as monument and “anti-monument,” it is helpful to consider Freud’s work Mourning and Melancholia. While Freud speaks here of individual experiences of loss, and typically the loss of a love object, his concepts lend themselves a certain degree of flexibility. Early in his essay, Freud notes that loss may be experienced toward other kinds of objects, such as “one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (1957: 243), leaving the term open to an endless litany (“and so on”) of possibilities. As was suggested earlier, what was lost in the regicide was not simply a father-figure who, like the primal father of Totem and Taboo, was the object of ambivalent feelings. What was lost was the ideal he had incarnated—the idea of legitimacy. According to Freud, the melancholic undertakes to disavow the loss of an object, while simultaneously introjecting it. Grieving here takes the course of an unconscious process that resists full closure, unlike mourning, which, for Freud, takes place at the level of conscious activity. While mourning has a normative character to it (it is in some sense a necessary process for us all to go through), melancholia in its intense symptomography appears pathological.13 Of course, if we consider melancholia experienced at the level of collective life, these symptoms appear attenuated, diffused into a collective anxiety. Indeed, such a collective melancholia seems to endure more generally in cultural and institutional forms for Freud, in the “customs, ceremonies, and laws which the original relation to the primal father had left behind” (1953: 160). 132

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In Freud’s primal scene parable from Totem and Taboo, the totem represents the inability of the community to reconcile itself to its founding violence. This founding violence, we may argue, produces a constitutive melancholia in the political unconscious. As with the melancholic subject, the lost object is incorporated in a new, dissimulated form in the primordial community, in such a manner as to obscure the initial loss. However, the French in the nineteenth century, reborn out of revolution, no longer had the luxury of an “inconceivably remote past” into which to project those tumultuous founding moments. Further, even as the regicide and Terror are obscured in public memory, the principles of transparency and rationality inherited from the Enlightenment seemingly precluded the kinds of distortions involved in turning the dead father, as in the Totem and Taboo narrative, into a totemic being to be ritually sacrificed. If we can add to Freud’s analysis here, we might argue that while Freud focuses on the ambivalent relationship with the murdered father (as object of both love and hate) as the source of trauma, the real trauma is that the primal community, in instituting taboo or law, is exposed to a gap—to a lost sense of legitimacy that never actually existed (the primal father’s rule was arbitrary and tyrannical) but is retroactively produced as lost in the founding murderous gesture. The founding myth, in a sense, obscures this loss. In his reading of Freud, Žižek observes that, as an “absolute crime,” “public” regicide “cannot be properly ‘forgotten’ (undone, expiated and forgiven); it must persist as a repressed traumatic kernel, since it contains the founding gesture of the legal order—its eradication from the ‘unconscious memory’ would entail the disintegration of the very reign of law; this reign would be deprived of its (repressed) founding force” (2002: 208). While melancholia, like mourning, generally passes with time, there is something in patricide—or in this case, regicide—that resists such an overcoming. It persists as a kind of constitutive melancholia. Indeed, if Place de la Concorde could be fully “disqualified” (cf. Clark 1984: 50) or “excluded” from the symbolic order, then it surely would have been left empty, or marked by some less imposing object. However, as Bataille notes, “it was contrary to the majesty of the site to leave an empty space” (1985: 221). The obelisk does what could not be accomplished by an empty lot, an expiatory monument, or a tributary statue of liberty, which would either obliterate the past or simply obscure the sublime character of those revolutionary events. To mourn the loss at the level of collective consciousness—by some literal reproduction—would potentially be devastating…or so Bataille claims, without hyperbole: “a mortal torment is the lot of the one before whom [the obelisk’s] reality becomes naked” (1985: 221). Place de la Concorde, now open to the rapid flow of traffic, has become one of the most dangerous motorways in Paris—death summoned to the Obelisk as if by the centripetal force of sacrificial atonement. Speaking in the last couple of decades, Baudrillard observed that the French have entered “an active age of ressentiment and repentance” (1994a: 22), a kind of flight backwards, and especially so in public life where 133

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public buildings and monuments seem to have taken on a distinctly mausolean quality. In one respect, this seems to reflect a continuation of the perpetual revolutions of the nineteenth century. It was in the late nineteenth century that Proudhon, looking back on this cycle of revolutions, observed that “there never has been such a thing as several revolutions…there is only one revolution, selfsame and perpetual” (in Arendt 1990: 51). This “révolution en permanence” (1990: 51) suggests that the events following 1789 in France set in motion a process of perpetual decentering that would resist resolution despite every attempt to placate their memory. Where the obelisk attempts to placate, it ultimately fails. The site of the death of God is marked by a psychotic stain, one which announces the former, but with much less hysteria than Nietzsche’s frenetic madman let loose in the square. In place of the vanishing Name-of-the-Father re-emerges the thing-itself, the stain of enjoyment or jouissance that marks the inconsistency within the symbolic order. It is here that the monument obtains a state of “petrified enjoyment” (Žižek 1992: 240), a granite protuberance giving body to the law’s founding violence, yet without re-presenting it. It is against this irrational, repressed kernel that the Enlightenment comes up against its limits. As Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) famously noted, Enlightenment is blind to its auspices, to its own mythology. Rebecca Comay, in speaking of the French Revolution as the legacy of the Enlightenment, expresses metaphorically what becomes literal for our purposes: that reason “disavows its own identity with the faith that it castigates and that it thereby prolongs as a stony relic or foreign body blocking thought” (2004: 381). In denying its preconditions and the non-rational sources of political authority, Enlightenment gives way to melancholia, of which the obelisk is a symptom. Endnotes 1.

“The crime that was perpetrated in France in 1792, in which a brave and truly amiable king was murdered.”

2.

A two-pronged gesture is made in Huet's (1997) title, Mourning Glory: on the one hand, it denotes the task of finding reconciliation with the sublime violence that was expressed through and secured the nascent popular sovereignty of the French Republic, while on the other hand, it denotes the task of fully putting to rest the (vain) glorious legacy of a regime of divine kings and landed aristocrats violently excised.

3.

Freud's voice is uniquely pertinent in our discussion as one of his key psychoanthropological works, Totem and Taboo (Freud 1953), presents a vivid dramatization of society’s birth. Indeed, a number of writers have sought to read, if cautiously, the events of the French Revolution and the execution of Louis XVI in particular in 134

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relation to Freud’s speculative primal scene (most notably Jacques André (1993) in La révolution fratricide and Lynn Hunt (1992) in The Family Romance of the French Revolution). Indeed, at play in the Revolution was arguably the staging of society’s re-birth, even if that moment would be obscured by a chain of revolutions and counter-revolutions lasting through France’s “long nineteenth century.” 4.

Despite Huet's (1997) forensic account of the representational practices surrounding the most auspicious moments of the French Revolution, the status of the Luxor Obelisk remains absent from her discussion. Given that the decades following the Revolution are granted significant space in her work, it is strange that the destiny of the site that witnessed some of the bloodiest moments of the Revolution, Place de la Concorde, goes unobserved. Perhaps it is the obscurity of the square’s central monument itself, displaced by time and its place of origin—explicitly recalling no specific moment of the Revolution—that causes it to escape her regard.

5.

“Trauma” here obtains a character different from that of the natural disaster, of war, or of the kinds of state violence that fall within the purview of sovereign authority already constituted. While these events may indeed have a traumatic character all their own, they tend not to threaten the collapse of the symbolic order as the public trial of a sovereign.

6.

It may be worth considering Lyotard's (1995) triumvirate of the Briton, the German and the American to elaborate this point. Although each represents a democracy in its own right, none experienced a revolution of quite the same character of the French. Each political system, however, evidences its own point of excess. The British retain the traces of royalism despite going through their own regicidal moment. The German Democratic Republic exists united by the guilt of its mid-century fratricidal excesses. And we seem frequently witness to the extra-juridical excesses of torture and humiliation that, while disavowed by the American justice system, seem to persist through the silence of the latter as its obscene underside. The point is not that regicide or the Terror is essential to normally functioning democracy, but that this was the particular course that sublime violence took in the genesis of the French Republic. Perhaps the greater insight here is that "normal" democracy does not exist without its gaps, traumas or hiccups; without referring to a point of excess that seems to disrupt the rationalist discourse upon which it is based.

7.

It is worth noting that while the National Convention found Louis guilty by a unanimous vote, the decision to kill him was made by the narrowest of margins. Equally contentious, though, was the very principle of holding a trial in the first place. While the Girondins aimed to preserve the feint of legitimacy that came with 135

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a trial—the fantasy that rule could be transferred through a kind of procedural rationality without a hitch—the Jacobins insisted that to try the king, who is always already usurper of the people’s sovereignty, is to presume the possibility of his innocence. For the latter, it was only through extra-juridical, sublime violence that the people could establish their sovereignty. 8.

As the trial violated the very principle of the king's inviolability, it follows that it also violated many due process provisions to secure the guilty verdict. Among the list of procedural violations were irregularities in the constitution of the jury, improper acquisition of evidence, restrictions on the defendant's access to the evidence or to adequate representation, and limits to the defence's ability to call witnesses or to take time to prepare a defense (Jordan 1979: 102). This is in stark contrast to Walzer's avowal that the trial was at least partially fair, given that “specific charges were brought against the king and evidence was collected to substantiate them; the king and his lawyers were informed of the charges and of the evidence; and Louis was permitted to defend himself in detail and in public against them” (1992: 77). In comparison to Jordan’s more damning evidence, Walzer strains to salvage the juridical soundness of the trial under the pretense of its formality and the legitimacy of its larger frame.

9.

This is elaborated in the image by the use of an upside-down Phrygian cap, a sartorial marker of popular sovereignty reminiscent of the curved guillotine blade (Hugo 2006: 11). The inverted cap, pegged atop the memorial stone, appears to be emitting smoke, pointing to sovereignty's potentially self-annihilating quality. The Terror evidenced the mad, unbounded quality of sovereign power; that in the last instance all of the members of the political community may be expendable for the nation to achieve its self-identity. The inversion of the smoldering cap, representing the principle of liberty, points to this paradox. The use of the Phrygian cap also recalls the liberty tree (l’arbre de la liberté), a popular Revolutionary maypole-like structure that it sat atop. Contemporaries would have noted that the liberty tree was planted as an obligatory rite for the Revolutionary Festival of the King’s Death (Ozouf 1991: 256).

10. Indeed, even as it represented a decisive break with the restored Bourbon monarchy of 1814, the very idea of a "bourgeois" monarchy seemed a contradiction in terms, evoking fully neither the spirit of republicanism nor monarchism. 11. Old structures, in Proudhon's critique, seem to have become arbitrary signifiers, losing whatever firm footing they once had in the past. The Panthéon, once a church, was turned into a monument and crypt for the great dead men of France, while conversely the Madeleine, a temple inspired by classical Greek architecture, was turned into a church without the typical adornments of bells or a chapel. 136

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12. Anaïs Nin (1975: 194) remarked on this, specifically in relation to the Luxor Obelisk, in Cities of the Interior, how disorienting it would be if “the square [were] left without its searchlight into the sky.” 13. Note Freud's list of symptoms: "profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in selfreproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment" (Freud 1957: 244).

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7 Barcelona, In Memoriam: The Tension Between Urban Renovation and the Past Marta Marín Dòmine

Camera in Hand The following chain of thoughts—a reflection upon the problematic urban transformations Barcelona is undergoing—overtook me one day while out strolling some of its neighborhoods. The “I,” myself, is by no means a neutral spectator, neither a merely curious stroller wanting to discover the city, nor a 21st century flâneur in the urban milieu. It is an “I” long influenced by the city of which she is a native and, as is usually the case, an “I” that corresponds to a subject conjoined of complex and often contradictory feelings about the city. Thus, the Barcelona I see, the Barcelona I sense and experience, is one of the multiple shapes the Other might take, and this means that my complaints, my loves and my dislikes are possibly both primal and well-informed. This foreshortening between the “I” and the object is the origin of the malaise behind these reflections, and it should not, I believe, foreclose upon my analysis, since it entails, or so I am trying to claim, a commentary upon some of the changes the city is undergoing that touch the core of our discussion: death, in this case related to a specific urban space. The fact that the “I” who narrates, explores, analyzes and criticizes the changes the city is undergoing, has been constituted in many ways by this very same space, should be taken as an index, albeit a humble one, and an opportunity: to explore the consequences of what Walter Benjamin would call the transformation of urban space in the name of a modernity that has been privileging, for the last twenty years or so, neutrality and spectacle, a transformation in which the city has turned its back on experience in order to become a set of spaces isolated for the sake of its own consumption.1 139

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The comments that follow, then, are an attempt to conjoin subjectivity and politics, and there is probably no better way to do that than by reflecting on the past and death—a death that, in this case, results from a crucial event in recent Spanish history, an event with very specific effects in Catalonia, the Autonomous Community of which Barcelona is the capital. I am referring to the Civil War that ended with the victory of Franco’s troops in 1939, setting up a dictatorship that lasted until the death of the general in 1975. Catalonia was among the regions that fought against the fascist ideology and the Francoists. Furthermore, it was one of the communities to suffer Italian air raids during the war and, later on, repression under the dictatorship. That the history of the defeated had been censured during the almost forty years of dictatorship falls into the logic of the political system of the time. The political period following the death of the dictator is known as the “Transition,” a signifier indicating a period of negotiation, the length of which historians have not agreed upon, since for some it ended in 1978, the year of the promulgation of the Constitution, while for others it ended in 1982 with the election of the Socialist Prime Minister Felipe González. The Prime Minister’s mandate opened what is widely considered to be the epoch of full democracy in Spain (Cebrián 1980; Preston 1986), an epoch that promoted what was later known as the “Pacto del silencio,” a political approach to the recent past that recommended oblivion over knowledge and the implementation of a politics of reparation. In Catalonia, however, as well as in some other communities where the language and culture differ from the official Spanish one, the period of transition was marked mostly by claims seeking to re-establish the political institutions that had been destroyed by the dictatorship. This has been a long process and is still ongoing, although Spain is now defined as a state composed of seventeen Autonomous Communities, three of which—Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia—have distinct languages, cultures and political institutions with a history that goes back to the Middle Ages. The need to put democratic Spain on the map of modern Europe meant, for many, and particularly for the Socialist Party in power, that the nation had to be reconstructed on the basis of a modernity defined as “new” and without any trace of the bloody past. Blood and progress, in this case, did not seem to go hand-in-hand, not in the postwar Europe that had already reconstructed itself on top of its own killing fields. What followed the Transition was a vigorous marketing campaign, so to speak, that sought to reconstitute a product, that of a nation ready for export. Notable among its exports were the films of Pedro Almodóvar, which perfectly combined the modern and universal with the local and exotic, goods in which all references to that bloody past were erased: a sanitized export product ready for delivery, the perfect packaging of the Spanish other, renovated with a pinch of modern extravaganza. The tension between modernity and the difficult-to-come-to-terms-with past was more salient in communities such as Catalonia, where politicians grappled with a choice between modernizing the 140

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region, in effect offering a new “product” for export, or responding to popular claims revindicating the signs of local identity so long repressed by the dictatorship. One could state, echoing the perspective sustained by Joan Ramon Resina in his thorough analysis of the development of Barcelona from the nineteenth century to the present, that the “regeneration” of the city—as it was called in the ‘90s—was mainly done at the expense of those popular claims, and that the history of the nation (as Catalonia defined itself) was in many ways discarded in order to achieve a modernity oriented towards attracting business, foreign investment and tourists (Resina 2008).2 Barcelona underwent dramatic changes beginning in the ‘70s and reached a dramatic point in the late ‘80s in preparation for the 1992 celebration of the Olympic Games. Barcelona’s urban renovation seemed (and still seems) to have as its core purpose the erasure of the past, a past that was articulated in two dimensions: that inherent in its own culture, and that referred to by “the war” and the subsequent years of the dictatorship. Both of these representations of time and experience past did not fit into the project of a new city whose aim was to reach a point of neutrality. Thus, the “unofficial history,” the history of the defeated, of those revolutionary workers and intellectuals alike who, back in the 1930s, fought for ideals that, in theory, were shared by the “modern” politicians in power (in the 1980s represented by the mayor of Barcelona, Pasqual Maragall, leader of the Socialist Party of Catalonia)—such a history was deemed “anti-modern” and ill-suited to represent the image Barcelona projected into the future, a Barcelona imagined without its past, cleansed of its ghosts and hence of its dead. Death was wiped out of the scenario, which resulted in a rather contradictory gesture since the politics of urban renovation attempted to kill both collective memory and history. In this political state of affairs, many historical sites were never restored, and some belonging to local culture were torn down. As an example, a stretch of restaurants known as the xiringuitos, frequented by customers of diverse social background, was destroyed because it was deemed too close to the city beach and therefore contrary to the “Coastal Law.”3 This massive demolition ultimately worked in favor of the construction of a strip of gentrified restaurants and discothèques—a bit further away from the beach—whose style and purpose were to serve young locals and tourists alike. On the other hand, the persistence of names of streets and symbols recalling the Francoist era was not contested by the engineers of a Barcelona that, in order to be on the map (European, International), strove to be “sexy” and have just the right amount of history to evoke the appeal of exoticism. Barcelona had, after all, Gaudí’s building to serve this purpose, provided the Catalan nationalist ideology that inspired and was expressed in the works was wiped off the map. The Barcelona that resulted from this massive change now extends its fingers into the 21st century. A city that prides and sells itself as being “the best shop in the world” (“La botiga del món” is the Catalan slogan created by the Socialist city council) is a city that has exchanged the fabric of urban history and social relations for a tissue of confections.4 However, the very lack of limits that this Barcelona seems to offer creates a scenario that, 141

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encapsulating the dream life of late capitalism (a place of performance according to the promise of the eternal jouissance of bodies, objects and substances), has come to collide with a new—and in that sense “modern” as well—resurgent need to recuperate the past, which in Catalan and Spanish society has taken political shape in a decree known as the “Law of the Historical Memory.”5 This recuperation of memory within the Spanish context (regardless of the theoretical debate around the [re‑]conceptualization of “memory”), and more specifically in zones known to have been strongholds of antifascist resistance during the war, entails the return to history of the defeated, representing a return not only of the history of a large sector of the population that has been silenced during almost 40 years of dictatorship, but also the history of the exiles, the almost half-million people who crossed the border into France seeking refugee and protection from Franco’s troops and the subsequent regime. It also concerns the history of the dead in Spain. Between these two poles, modernization and the recuperation of the past, it is the first that seems to guide the urban renovation of the city. Hence, and paraphrasing Walter Benjamin (1999), Barcelona is becoming a city poor in experience, where not only the legacy of knowledge encapsulated in narratives of the urban cityscape—along with the aesthetics of old shops, markets, gardens cemeteries, and cafés—is rapidly vanishing, but also Barcelona’s local history linking it to national and international events, and with it the possibility for transmitting the knowledge and legacy of that past through the mediation of memory. Allow me, then, to go against the grain and to take you arm-in-arm on a stroll to revisit together a couple of the scenarios I myself encountered on my recent perambulations. It must be said that, while a native daughter, I am only an intermittent visitor to Barcelona, and that these lapses of time have served only to enhance the constant changes in the cityscape, creating a sort of a window to find, perhaps, a guide for my perplexity. I take out my camera. Taking Pictures It could be stated that taking pictures is already a mark of detachment from the object being photographed, but it is not detached enough since it awakens in the photographer the desire to record something; in so doing, does one recognize some disruption, some difference in respect to an ideal model in mind? And, of course, at the same time, taking a picture may stem from an absolutely contrary intention, one corresponding to a sort of touristic testimonial wish to record the fact that one was “there,” at the very same place that one was expected to be, and hence picture and postcard will coincide. In the latter modality of picture taking, the subject is erased from the picture, even if he or she is there, printed or digitized, since the picture taken corresponds to a designed site representing the place, while in the other modality, the desire of the subject is present 142

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even if the photographer is not, since his or her eye directs our gaze. Touristic picture taking is not concerned about place as place, with its peculiarities and differences, but rather, the tourist’s interest lies in place as spectacle. By contrast, taking a picture as a result of recognizing some difference is one of the possible gestures of the flâneur, even though it risks, as Benjamin (1999: 262–7) points out, eclipsing the aura of the site qua object. What renders this type of picture taking close to the spirit of the wandering walker, in contrast with the rather compulsive gesture of the touristic snapshot, is that, in the very act of taking the picture, the photographer recognizes in the site something that belongs to experience rather than to the logic of consumption. My picture taking, as much a rhetorical artifice, is an index of my perplexity in the face of the disruption of what once was “my” Barcelona, a dislocation of the image of my ideal Barcelona. This perception, rather than being solely the product of nostalgia, and thus inevitably paired with any transformation of the object, is also the result produced by the rapid city planning that prepared Barcelona to be a city-as-spectacle. According to this design, the city is articulated as a patchwork of scenarios that rarely produce any event beyond the expected. It goes hand-in-hand with policies seeking to control events and to integrate the unpredictable, the spontaneous and the rebellious into the event itself. A pointed example of this tight control of the script of the new Barcelona was the strategy employed in response to anti-Forum protests of July 2004. The Forum is the name of both a new urban complex and a celebration (the Universal Forum of Cultures) devoted to the so-called “dialogue of cultures.” The complex, completed in 2004 at a cost of 341 million Euros (U.S. $426 million), has been deemed “the largest and costliest European nonplace to date—a nonplace in Marc Augé’s sense, one of those postmodern spaces that spawn neither identity nor relations” (Resina 2008: 231). It was constructed on the ruin of an old neighborhood on the northeast littoral of the city, which was torn down to clear the site. It has to be pointed out that the place had also been an execution site where scores of antifascists met their end during the dictatorship, over the course of almost thirteen years. Once again, the city seemed oblivious of its dead, although a wall sculpture in remembrance of the executed was erected in their memory. But the erection of a site capable of swallowing any event that could challenge its raison d’être is a rather extreme construction of an image of the city as new. As Resina explains, a group of activists protesting the site/celebration of the Forum entered into the enclosed area, coming from the sea, imitating the arrival of illegal immigrants to Spain. To counteract this protest, Forum employees were told to welcome the activists by giving them bottles of water, the same way real undocumented immigrants are treated, to save them from dehydration. Later on, though, when one of the activists threw away the bottle he had been given, security officers reacted with violence against the group (Resina 2008: 230–1). Such site-events seem to dissolve Barcelona into a scenario of neutrality (or rather “neutralization”—not exempt from control—a sort of self-colonization by which the local is deemed passé and redundant). 143

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Contrary to my reluctance, I agreed to meet with a friend in a small square in the medieval quarter of the city. Our point of rendezvous was an old café where we used to hang out when we were university students back in the ‘80s, following, in a sort of mimetic tradition, the practice of other students and bohemian artists before us. I am waiting there, feeling myself already awkward, as if ejected from the scene, not knowing exactly what is out of place (besides myself) nor what is preventing me from feeling at home, an uncanny sensation. Suddenly I have an acute feeling of anachronism: I see passing by before the entrance of the old café the very man who used regularly to pass by during my days as student, more than twenty years ago. Older, but wearing what looks to me the same set of clothes—the black corduroy trousers and jacket so beloved of his generation in the ‘80s, a sort of carte d’identité of (late) existentialism and the Western European left. I see him walking hastily, bending, as if trying to avoid the bustle of activity around him. His figure (and here I would like to take up my camera in order to be able later to point out to you, there, there he is) takes shape as a cogent metaphor for Barcelona’s rejection of time, recent time, and a walking image of the exile that the project of urban modernization has forced upon the city’s inhabitants. One thinks of the dislocations produced by Haussmann’s renovations of Paris, which gave rise to the lamentations that “in tearing down so much of the old city, he obliterated the delicate interlace of mind and architecture, the mental map walkers carried with them and the geographical correlatives to their memories and associations” (Solnit 2000: 205). The old café, now full of tourists, and the man walking by stand as two realms of the city, too far apart to be reconciled: one is vanishing, and the other one will never know of it. Not so far from this little old square with its café was another site of vanishing, this time a demolition: the Paris, a movie theatre very much a node in the Barcelonan entertainment network. The last movie I recall seeing there was Salvador (Puig Antich), back in 2006, a film by Manuel Huerga. Salvador Puig Antich is also a household name in the city, one of the last victims of Franco’s Regime, a young anarchist who in 1974 received the death penalty and was executed. The empty space of the Paris made it possible for someone to climb one of the naked walls and spray paint in graffiti más amor, more love (just below the scaffolding, Fig. 7.1). Read within the context I have been sketching, the graffiti seems to express a passionate and critical demand against the fever of renovations and real estate profiteering. Both the needy graffiti and the man walking hastily by the old café were, to my eyes, symptoms of the fact that in Barcelona, the local is becoming an anachronism. Within the dynamic of the perpetual exploitation of the urban space, the city itself is being emptied of meaning in order that it be welcoming to consumption. This is how it has been planned from above. Such designs lead to the disturbing inference that one of the reasons visitors keep coming to Barcelona is because the city is erasing its historical density and disguising it in a sort of self-produced and much-expected exoticism.6 144

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Fig. 7.1. “Más amor.” Photo credit: Marta Marín-Dòmine.

Corpses Up and Down: Two Sequences In a crucial sequence of El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive), Víctor Erice’s 1973 film set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War circa 1940, Anna, the little girl protagonist, visits a ruined farmhouse in the Castilian landscape to discover, to her surprise and fear, that a man is in hiding there. Man and girl do not speak to each other but manage to lose their fears and to find a way to communicate. The scene mimics the encounter of the little girl and the monster in the famous sequence by the lake in James Whale’s 1931 version of Frankenstein, although Anna does not end up being killed. On the contrary, the encounter with the mysterious man aids her to overcome the horror and fascination that she felt while watching that scene from Frankenstein for the first time in the cinema of her little village. The meaning of the scene within the Spanish context 145

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is twofold as it talks about the silenced history of the antifascist maquis, the Resistance guerrillas who fought in the mountains and whose domain straddled both sides of the Pyrenees. The maquis found places for refuge in deserted houses and in villages: they were indeed the “good monsters” that populated for a time the Spanish landscape and whose disappeared corpses are still punctuating a mortuary geography, fragmented, like the body of the monster in the American film.7 The past and its missing corpses are not easily erased, and the city or village become spaces where narratives are both burial sites and places to make these bodies alive in a way that is sort of between two deaths. The anonymous burial sites are sites insisting upon a narrative and closure, and until such time as that symbolic restitution is effected, the bodies are not dead nor alive, but un-dead like the creature in Frankenstein, who is biologically alive but symbolically un-housed. Another film, the Catalan documentary En construcción (Under construction), by José Luís Guerín (2001), furnishes the material of a metaphor for the presence of the past and its corpses colliding with the forces of the urban renovation and its carelessness towards collective memory. Guerín’s documentary takes place at a construction site in one of the neighborhoods most affected by the renovations preparing Barcelona for the 1992 Olympic Games, the “barrio chino”—in fact, the red light district. Much was torn down and new apartments were built to serve the needs of Barcelona’s young professionals. The film documents all the stages of this process, from the demolition of the old to the construction of the new, along with a portrait of the destiny of some of the neighborhood’s inhabitants who were forced to move to other areas. At first sight, the film could be taken to be a celebration of modernity, with its long, angular sequences of cranes, reminiscent of the construction sites painted by Fernand Léger. However, what is at stake here, as soon becomes obvious in the central role given to the old inhabitants of the area, is a critique of the callousness with which the living neighborhood is treated, a neighborhood whose present has been deemed too “unclean” for the new Barcelona-to-be, while its past has been completely overlooked, rejected or ignored.8 Gary Wray McDonough has stressed how: these planned changes have had devastating impact on lifeways in the barrio chino, whether in neighbourhood bars, special interest areas, or places of prostitution which, even in the 1980s, were seen as incompatible with a new city… Where once multiple bars structured a street, now perhaps one survives—if the street itself does… Still, this renovation confirms the devalorization of the past, especially of the complex fabric of social and cultural meanings which barrio residents created in bars, streets, markets, and other institutions. (Wray McDonough 2003: 280–1)

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It is also important to note the disappearance in use of the name “barrio chino” (and thus as well its popular origins). Even though the barrio chino corresponded to a very delimited set of streets, the area now is widely known as El Raval, a name that does not carry with it the resonances of marginal life that inhabited the original name. One of the most striking scenes in Under construction shows the discovery of an ancient Roman cemetery during the construction. The work comes to a temporary halt to give way to a group of archaeologists to analyze the remnants. For what seems like a period of weeks, a hole lies open in the middle of the neighborhood, surrounded by curious locals who keep asking each other about the nature and history of the recently discovered graves. The camera catches glimpses of conversations: do those corpses really belong to ancient Romans as TV programs want to make us believe or are they bodies of some of those disappeared during and after the Civil War? What is most interesting is the metonymical chain that the construction site has articulated in the popular imaginary: from an archaeological dig to a Francoist mass grave, the images are symptomatic of the silencing of the past and of what the renovations of the city were not able to bring into the open. The site is now complete, the cemetery covered by new buildings, new stores and new businesses. Thus, a renovation without reviewing, as a way of renewing—what, the past? A city without remnants? Transition from Death to Atemporal Modernity These two film sequences are to me two possible ways by which Spanish society in general, and the city of Barcelona in particular (regardless of its cultural and linguistic differences with respect to the rest of Spain), have to deal with death, especially when linked to the politics of a recent past whose causes and consequences are still difficult to discuss openly. I am referring not to a lack of historical scholarship related to this past—the written production is generous—but to a lack of open political debate. One has the feeling that an opportunity has been missed and that only the construction of a new political, social and psychological scenario would allow for a real debate about the place of memory in a city so eager to see itself as “modern” and to be accepted as such. A debate would need, for example, to take a close look at the strategies and solutions employed by other cities that have been painfully stricken by their pasts in order to acknowledge it, to confront it and, if necessary, to construct a distance from it. One would also like to call attention to the necessity for a critical discussion of the concept of “modernity” that underlies the urban planning model in force, to analyze the effects its implementation has on the lives of urban inhabitants and visitors and, consequently, in their collective imaginary. This becomes most urgent in the context of analyses like that of Janet Carsten, who, in her introduction to the collective volume 147

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Ghosts of Memory, argues that, in the wake of twentieth century events—whose collection of genocides and mass killings has in the Holocaust the trope for the century’s massive annihilation—”the imperative to witness and record the details of these events is the prerequisite for twentieth-century identity” (2007: 2). It is also through the contributions in her volume, in which Carsten puts in relation kinship and memory, that the reader learns that the sense of community—whether it be in a colony in Bengal, among the sex workers of London or among those who are persecuted and forced to be nomadic in Mongolia—relies upon the connections of the living with their dead. When remembered, the dead open up a space that enables a sense of continuity, not as immobility, but as a necessary frame limiting the shape of future constructions, constructions that may even be critical of the past. However, the city planners of Barcelona seem to have surrendered to the idea that renovation and modernity can only be accomplished by eliminating the past and have embraced a will to construct an Other clean of difference, a quasi-totalitarian ideal that deems history as disruptive of continuity and sameness. It is worth mentioning here that the renovation of the old façades of Barcelona in preparation for the Olympics was promoted under the slogan of Barcelona posa’t guapa (Barcelona, doll yourself up), an exhortation to show the city off and put her on display rather than as a simple restoration of its own heritage. The modernization of Barcelona has been, as Joan Ramon Resina puts it, a way for its inhabitants to embrace a future without referents: “because there is no such thing as a selfreferential future, an uncompromising modernity can only be a reflection of the violence required to undo traditions and blow up the emotional connection with the past” (2008: 25). The emotional connection with the past is not a theological construction, but a way of knowing one’s bearings. It ought to enable the telling of stories in a myriad of shapes or forms that perform a critical renewal of values, which is—or ought to be—at the core of any modern, socially oriented project. Knowledge of and confrontation with the past, besides creating the possibility for an open dialogue between death and life (surely a fundamental step in the transmission of experience), allows for a type of creativity that does not invent from scratch, but rather acknowledges the “others” who have preceded us, and along with them the complex sediment of lives and experiences, from the most private to the public, from the realm of the senses to that of the political. After the recent violent events that took place in the Parisian banlieus, one could listen to numerous radio and TV programs arguing that the lack of narratives linking those youths to their pasts is likely one of the obstacles blocking the connection between them and their present place, a connection of perhaps deep importance for those whose families have come from another place or country. Lacking those past references, and not knowing much of the history in which their families have been rooted, makes it difficult, if not impossible, to build a sense of community, of belonging, even if later on one has to be critical with the past. In order to allow for a critical representation, the past, even 148

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when regained in modernity, should not be used to recreate myths of the origins or to bolster the belief in any sort of essentialism, as “modern literature” has widely shown in breaking away from old narrative forms. On the contrary, it should be taken as an index of the particularities of a given society or community, as a political and emotional sample that adds up to the comprehension of humankind. The sense of history (local, regional or national) gives a frame of reference to the newcomer, a background upon which to build a sense of belonging, or a critical rejection and the postulation and creation of new spaces. This is, however, the point of view at work in the various studies of the psychoanalyst and anthropologist Olivier Douville (2008), who underlines the necessity of inhabiting spaces where the constructions of memory are possible, especially when the past has already been silenced. For memory is a marker of space, a container to excess. And it is worth noting that excess, rather than being close to life, is a dissolution of an imaginary nothingness, in which not even death can be represented. Could this analysis be extended to the latest eruptions of violence in Barcelona, largely produced by new immigrants inhabiting downtown, along with the lack of care that some visitors and some segments of the locals seem to show towards the city? Rather than being a conservative claim to turn back to old-fashioned ways, I would argue that to acknowledge the past—and most specifically, the violent recent past of the city and, for that matter, of the entire country—would be in the service of a potential future closure. Before that, however, the community needs to face and debate its past, without fear of antagonism or crisis. But debate and crisis do not seem to belong to the “modern” project of our globalized cities in which “dialogue” has become synonymous with general consent and “polite” silence, and dissent has become a sign of bad citizenship. If we do not contest this current state of affairs, I would say that sooner or later, we will have to face the inevitable reaction that follows the tightening of control and lack of recognition: violence. If the way to approach cities, as De Certeau (1988) claims, is through walking (and if the movements made when walking can be compared to “turns of phrases” and “stylistic figures”), then should walking become impossible—because the urban space has been stripped of the elements that made strolling likely or pleasurable: of its streets, of its shops, of its squares, of all references of its own, including its own dead—then the alarming consequence will be that cities fall into silence. Or violence, since violence is not a language. Endnotes 1.

For a deeper analysis on the relation between the lost experience and the poverty of knowledge, see Benjamin (1999).

2.

"Three years after the [Olympic] Games, tourism in Barcelona had grown by 65 percent and rose steadily thereafter" (Martín Ayllón, qtd. in Resina 2008: 226). 149

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3.

"Costal Law" is a Spanish Law that regulates, among others, the construction spaces between the coastal line and urban dwellings.

4.

I suggest watching one of the official TV advertisements: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=sKUWZGHK9sY&feature=related

5.

The Law of the Historical Memory (Ley de la Memoria Histórica en España) was approved by the Congress of Deputies on October 31, 2007. In general terms, the law has been set up to provide the acknowledgment of the history of victims (inside and in exile) of Franco’s dictatorship through various forms of reparation and symbolic acts.

6.

One could argue that this seems to be the general destiny of Western European cities, and while common to most of them, I would argue that Barcelona is an extreme example of neutralization of space.

7.

Franco's regime is blamed for the disappearance of around 30,000 people, many of whose bodies were buried in mass graves alongside roads and pathways. A popular movement to locate these mass graves, to identify the bodies and to bury them in a dignified manner, emerged at the turn of the last century. The first detailed book to call the attention to the existence of the mass graves came out in 2003 (de Silva and Macias 2003).

8.

It is worth mentioning that this neighborhood has been the focus of many literary representations of the city, some of the most notorious being those of Genet (1949) and Mandiargues (1967).

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8 Jewish Victims and German Youth: Questions of Pedagogy and Responsibility at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Elke Grenzer

Introduction [A]bout a year ago [i.e., in the spring of 1959], I heard from an acquaintance who had just returned from a trip to Germany that a certain feeling of guilt had seized some sections of German youth…and the fact of this guilt complex was for me as much of a landmark as, let us say, the landing of the first man-bearing rocket on the moon. It became an essential point of my inner life, around which many of my thoughts crystallized. This was why I did not escape…when I knew the search commando was closing in on me… After these conversations about the guilt feeling among young people in Germany, which made such a deep impression upon me, I felt I no longer had the right to disappear. This is also why I offered, in a written statement, at the beginning of this examination…to hang myself in public. I wanted to do my part in lifting the burden of guilt from German youth, for these young people are, after all, innocent of the events, and of the acts of their fathers during the last war. (Eichmann, qtd. in Arendt 1994a: 242) In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt reminds us that one of the predicaments of Adolf Eichmann’s capture was his stated willingness to be tried in an Israeli court and to face the punishment of death, in order to expropriate “the burden of guilt from German 151

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youth.” Eichmann’s eagerness to hang himself in public and his acceptance of punishment for his deeds originates not from a sense of culpability for the crimes he committed— since he had pleaded innocence in response to the charges—but from his sense of duty to a new generation of German youth “seized” by a “guilt complex.” For Eichmann, it is not contrition for his role in organizing, implementing and executing the plans of the Final Solution, but rather the effects of his deeds on others that have induced a sense of regret in young Germans, and it is this effect of widespread guilt that strikes Eichmann as something as profound and as novel as “the landing of the first man-bearing rocket on the moon.” This abdication of personal agency on Eichmann’s behalf remains relevant, not just in its evasion of personal responsibility for the crimes of Nazism, but in the role and place of German guilt that follows in the aftermath of Nazism. This chapter takes into account the problem of responsibility represented by the relation of German youth to their national past in a case study of some of the education initiatives at Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp that skirts the city of Berlin. The initiatives aimed at German youth two generations removed from their Nazi past make vivid tensions in the social construction of a national German history, disclosing the problem of the transmission of this past as a tension between understanding the events of Nazism and its victims and engaging this understanding reflexively. In what follows, I consider how some of the pedagogical projects used to engage contemporary German youth bring to view controversies about the ideal relationships between Germans and Jews within the context of the unique character of German society and the place of its genocide within its history. In particular, the efforts to come to terms with a German collective past through an identification with Jewish victims underscores the incompatibility produced by the demands of personal responsibility and the use of the camp as a memorial site in which to educate and transmit the history of Nazism. Arendt’s refusal to grant any moral substance to the claim of the experience of guilt among the generation of Germans that were too young to have participated fully during the war provides an interesting vantage point from which to contemplate the form of responsibility towards an inherited historical past. When Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem in the early 1960s, she dismissed secondary guilt by referring to its displacement from the present, noting, “those young German men and women who every once and a while—on the occasion of all the Diary of Anne Frank hubbub and of the Eichmann trial—treat us to hysterical outbreaks of guilt feelings are not staggering under the burden of the past, their fathers’ guilt; rather, they are trying to escape from the pressure of very present and actual problems into a cheap sentimentality” (Arendt 1994a: 251). In her censure of “cheap sentimentality,” Arendt refused to allow the possibility that a new generation of Germans can be guilty, not because they are wholly innocent of the crimes of their fathers, but because guilt belongs to action in a way that requires personal responsibility. In Arendt’s terms, individual responsibility is tied to the agent who must reflect on the need for action in a way that does not substitute sentimentality 152

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for action. That is, if guilt in the strongest sense derives from action rooted in reflexivity, the inauthentic use of guilt as a pretext shows that Arendt does not reject guilt per se, but rejects a use that avoids reflecting upon the grounds of the action done. Arendt dismisses Eichmann’s professed guilt about German youth in much the same way as she regards the “hysteric outbreaks” of post-war German youth: as a disingenuous mask. For Eichmann, it is not repentance, but guilty feelings towards the innocent German youth that begin to mobilize in him what he refers to as something resembling an “inner life.” In using guilt as a pretext to evade considering his actions, he appears to confuse concern for the effects of his actions with the question of his responsibility, allowing him to misrecognize responsibility as sentimentality. In obsessing about German youth as victims, by reflecting upon how one such as he could come to do as he did, Eichmann’s guilt seems a pitiful way of exonerating himself from responsibility; while it produces loquaciousness on his part, it tends to conceal the absence of any real attempt to understand how his actions produced the guilt in the first instance. That is, rather than account for the fact that his role in the crimes of Nazism helped to produce the guilt that Germans are supposedly experiencing, he is satisfied with an image of guilt that imagines a new generation as passively digesting the past. In this way, Eichmann views Germans as receiving their past in a deterministic way because he can only imagine guilt through association, not in the scene proper. This in turn allows Eichmann to treat himself as passive by linking his present only to its consequences, such as these, and not to his delusional grasp of himself and of his hysterical place in Hitler’s mission. Eichmann’s blindness—his inability to see how he could do what he did—is masked by his wallowing in guilt. Similarly, by imagining the limits of responsibility on the part of German youth to be their experience of guilt by association towards their past, predecessor or nation, he divests them of initiative by not understanding their need to come to terms reflectively with the question of how their past came to be as it was (including the actions of Eichmann), that which now marks them as indelibly informed by this past. Eichmann imagines a generation that resembles and mirrors his own sense of inauthentic guilt that is produced by implication of its effects rather than as a struggle to grasp how Germans could conduct themselves in such a way. Thus, curiously, both Arendt and Eichmann imagine German youth as passive; however, they can be distinguished by the fact that Arendt seeks to connect guilt to the grounds of action, to the events and deeds committed in the name of Nazism, and to the recognition that in contemplating these deeds, one suffers because one has to struggle to understand how they were produced in the first instance. In part, Eichmann in Jerusalem can be read as an attempt to bring the deeds in question into contact with the agent responsible by continuously constructing a composite of Eichmann based on his account of events. What Arendt sets up is the possibility for justice by thinking about how one can do the action, i.e., the action of reflecting upon guilt and responsibility in ways authentic and inauthentic, opening the door to a consideration of what it is to act and to be an actor, and 153

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so, to influence not only the self but the other in this way. That is, a real interest in German youth should, in contrast, develop from a desire to invite their reflection upon action and its sources, a reflection that can only begin with images of effects upon others, yet cannot truly end. In part, inheriting a collective past includes locating such beginnings among the representations of the grounds of Eichmann’s deeds, as well as identifying their materialization in images of custody and terror, and in the ways in which the Final Solution was systematically implemented in the concentration camp. Arendt’s contribution to this inheritance, although controversial, remains relevant in its demand to consider national inheritance as the need to tell the story of the past in a way that accounts for the deeds of Nazism. Eichmann in Jerusalem, in its attempt to grapple with the organization of Nazism, examined the systematic ways the implementation of the concentration camp reflected a relationship forged between bureaucracy and power, whose soullessness was directly manifested in the words and deeds of Eichmann. Notably absent from Sachsenhausen’s youth programs is an attempt to grapple with why and how the concentration camp constitutes a particular ethical responsibility for those who did not participate in the execution of the crimes. In fact, the transformation of the camp itself into a source of pleasure for contemporary German youth not only displaces the question of how Germany, in the name of a nationalist project, managed to produce six million Jewish victims, but the recognition that Germans are the perpetrators of the Final Solution. The staged encounter between the dead Jewish victims of Nazism and its living heirs at Sachsenhausen in a peculiar way manages to realize Eichmann’s desire for German youth to escape the burden of guilt for their past. The New Youth Camp at Sachsenhausen The recent changes made to the camp memorial’s mandate, most notably its directive to use the site as a magnet for school field trips, and the conversion of the chief of staff of the concentration camps’ villa into a youth meeting center and hostel in the summer of 2006, brings to the surface specific ways in which the concentration camp is used as a site for transmitting the past as a source of pleasurable rather than painful renewal for present generations. Notably, its advertised aim to “increase learner confidence and bring over an experience of success and still be enjoyable despite the difficult contents” (Appendix I) joins pleasure and pain in a manner that is analogous to Eichmann’s disjointed discovery of an “inner life.” The way in which the victims of Nazism are made present in the lives of German youth through the explicit promise of “confidence,” “success,” and “enjoyment” speaks to a conferral of value upon a form of teaching that emphasizes predetermined “learning outcomes” that are expected to follow from a specific form of pedagogic engagement and method. The stated aim of the successful deployment of the didactic method, despite the 154

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“difficult contents,” is grounded in a notion of bildung,1 in which the formation of selfexpression in the student is coeval with the acquisition of knowledge. The education of youth, even with respect to the history of the Holocaust, shares a problem common to all such educational initiatives: every generation, unavoidably, has a distorted relation to the past. This challenge, to seek rectification by imagining a reconnection with events and persons remote in time or experience, requires some conception of the young as newcomers who must familiarize themselves with the ways of the world. In this sense, Holocaust education is not unlike any pedagogical project in its need and desire to develop relations to history that, embedded in any present, always begins as if separated or alienated from the past. In her chapter in Afterwards: Struggles with Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Justice, Britta Frede-Wenger frames this problem in epistemological terms, claiming that the gap between the event and the experience of the event is one of the biggest challenges for education in Germany today. She asks, “[H]ow can somebody experience an absence of something he or she has never known?” (Frede-Wenger 2005: 128). The problem, as presented by Frede-Wenger, is posed as a need to engage and stimulate a present generation in the face of its presumed self-absorption and indifference to a past that it did not have a direct hand in creating. In this sense, Holocaust education is one form of this common problem of the transmission of history; and yet, such an aura of commonness would not do justice to the specificity of this case in terms of the challenges posed by the Holocaust as the particular stamp of German history and what it means to inherit that history as a form of collective remembrance. The transmutation of the Sachsenhausen camp into a public space of remembrance underscores the emphasis placed upon correcting historical distance through an interest in the practice of visualization. That is, in its attempt to solve the epistemological puzzle of the problem of knowing “something he or she has never known,” we can begin to examine the place of the site itself and the prominence given to the visual in pedagogical remedies that seek to correct this gap in knowledge. The education initiatives aimed at youth in the camp attempt to resolve the problem of experience by depending upon a reanimation of the Jewish victim. Of concern is the symbolic work that the Jewish victim performs in the pedagogical exercises that attempt to reshape “what is unknown” into a visible field of knowledge and the ethical issues integral to memorialization that follow from such an initiative. This form of epistemological anxiety in relation to whether or not one can know something without directly experiencing it can also be applied to the question of whether or not one can ever truly be in the shoes of the suffering other (and here we might think of a class of sufferers: the tortured, the destitute, the murdered), through imagination or thought (see Boltanski 1999). Witnessing, in the wake of the Holocaust, offers a notion of suffering that does not end with the pain of the victim, or the imaginative capacities of the other, but in the pledge to disseminate the stories and accounts of those who suffered. In 155

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the case of this retelling of suffering at the hands of German perpetrators, in the voice of their direct and indirect descendents, the issue of witnessing as a form of narration brings into view not just the story of the other, but of the one charged with the task of telling the story. Because of this, the speech of the narrator or storyteller is inseparable from its representation. Yet the case of the curriculum offered at Sachsenhausen, with its emphasis upon pleasure as an end in itself, and the fact that the setting of the concentration camp is not perceived as antithetical to this intended aim brings to the fore the peculiar utopia of a new German nation. Rather than avoiding the precincts of an idealized Nazi form, the site is imagined as a place for promoting the moral awakening of the German child through a form of memorialization that joins an aesthetic of individual suffering with a form of self-cultivation that transcends the historical circumstances of Nazism. In its presumptions about “child-centered” teaching, the pedagogical aims say less about the actual ways in which German youth want or need to learn about their shared past than about the explicit desires of German adults at the beginning of a nationalist project. The programming at the camp falls under the rubric of a pedagogical philosophy of “discovery learning” (Brandenburg Memorials Foundation 2009). This is a year-round effort that advertises itself as an alternative to traditional forms of teaching and learning about the Holocaust. The method is premised on the notion that learning is an adventurous experience and that this experience in turn can help shape self-directed learning. In this sense students are supervised within a specific set of programs but are not directly taught by teachers. During school vacation, the site even doubles as a summer camp destination for German youths. One summer camp program (simply entitled “Workcamp”) consists of grooming the existing memorial site, general maintenance of the campgrounds and crematorium, as well as monitored archeological digs. Historically, many visiting schoolchildren have participated in the Museumskoffer program offered from 1998 until 2010.2 This version of camp life attempts to incorporate a playful approach in its learning philosophy by explicitly promising pleasure to all students who participate. “Learning, defined as the acquisition of information, knowledge and skills, must also be enjoyable if it is to be successful, perhaps especially when dealing with such a sensitive theme as the National Socialist persecution of the Jews” (Appendix I). It is a form of learning based around the learner’s own initiative and interests, with the particular aim of shaping those interests through artistic expression. Pledging enjoyment in connection to “productive” learning introduces pleasure itself as an edifying experience. The transformation of Sachsenhausen from its realization as the basis for what Agamben (1998) terms “bare life,” of a life reduced to bios, into a pleasurable destination for young Germans, relies upon an inversion of the state of exception into the most promising of circumstances: an individual life lived under the auspices of bildung. As one of the first concentration camps built in Germany after Hitler came to power, the building of Sachsenhausen in 1936 was a spatial anticipation of the system of marginalization and exclusion that was the basis for eventual extermination. 156

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Sachsenhausen is the architectural expression of SS totalitarianism, and besides being exemplary in the sense that it was a model for other camps, its administrative function was central in the operation of all German-controlled camps. The camp’s topography constitutes a legacy of what Daniel Libeskind (1998) identifies as a social geography: it is a totalizing architectonic that “defined the spatial relationship between Germans and Jews”. The camp grounds themselves are shaped in a perfect equilateral triangle—the symbol that conflates the architectural and bureaucratic production of death that resulted in what Arendt refers to as “the production of corpses” (1994b: 441). The triangular shape of the grounds remains as a synecdoche for genocide, a form of incarceration in which dehumanization began with the strict color-coded system of triangles of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Socialist Communists, Poles, homosexuals, and the double triangle for Jews. This materialization of social exclusion and extermination not only served as a model for Auschwitz, but also played a pivotal administrative function for German officials in their organization and dispensing of orders to the hundreds of other concentration camps. The site was also central to Stalin’s system from 1945–1950 as a brutal internment camp. Just two years after the Berlin wall was erected in 1963, the site was converted by the GDR into a national memorial. The original gates and the false message of hope, “Arbeit macht frei,” remain ominously intact, along with the roll call area, crematorium, shooting gallery and medical experiment laboratory. In the 25 years of the East German commemoration of the site, Sachsenhausen was preserved by the state and expressly defined as a site of mourning for communist victims of Nazism. The straightforward narrative was designed to renew faith in the purpose of Socialism and to fortify the sentiment of victory over capitalism. After German reunification and a contentious effort to convert the grounds into urban housing,3 Sachsenhausen was eventually designated as an official memorial site by the state of Brandenburg. Over time, a new administrative body made up of former East and West Germans began to articulate its purpose and mandate within the context of civic remembrance. Most importantly, these mandates were envisioned within the milieu of a newly reunited democratic Germany. At present, the directive of the site has been clearly articulated in the form of various initiatives that aim to exhibit and account for the multiple histories of the site. The former GDR memorials have been sustained, but within quotation marks; i.e., as an example of the East German commemoration of its “triumph” over the Nazi past. At the opposite end of the camp, there is a separate exhibition of prisoners under Stalin, acknowledging the “double history” of the site. As well, the two Jewish barracks, originally rebuilt before 1989 and burned down 10 days after a visit by Yitzhak Rabin in 1992, now contain a multi-media exhibition concerning the fates of Jewish victims (Wiedmer 1999: 189). Although Sachsenhausen was considered a “work camp” and not an extermination camp, it is typical of death camps in the sense that death was the means through which to accomplish the goals of the camp. The German state’s classification of the body, that is, the 157

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fascist reduction of the inmates at Sachsenhausen to nothing more than race, religion, political affiliation and sexual orientation, was the basis for conferring the public identity of private citizens. Sachsenhausen exemplifies the rationalized and methodical ways in which the public codes of social stratification were utilized in eviscerating the identities of victims. The memorialization of the camp is inseparable from the production of death. Thus, it is not simply the acknowledgement and recovery of the loss of the individual that is at stake, but also a dramatic representation of the encounter with the victim at the moment he was murdered. In treating the site as a memorial for different types and classes of victims, Sachsenhausen institutionalizes mourning through the preservation of the camp as a heritage site, possibly risking undoing the very identification it seeks to achieve between spectator and victim. The production of the site as an “authentic” history of German pasts and multiple brutalities conducted in the name of German nationalism colors the current approach to advocating a new form of German nationalism through efforts to draw schoolchildren to the site. It is this distillation of the multiple histories and functions of the site through this mandate to educate German youth about the victims of Sachsenhausen that reframes the limits of mastery in a way that runs counter to the overall exhibition of the camp. These different approaches demonstrate two seemingly contradictory impulses in preserving the history of the site: on the one hand, the indexicality of the brutal conditions of the camp made vivid by the preservation and embellishment of the camp’s function as a totalitarian site of physical oppression dramatizes the horror of the camp; on the other hand, the promotion of the camp as an idyllic space for German youth to experience history as pleasurable provides for the possibility of a pedagogy that is capable of transcending the conditions of the camp. Thus the question posed by Wenger—how to make the events of the Holocaust imaginable for the subject that did not experience it directly—is restaged by objectives that seek to make history relevant and interesting to the learner, bringing past and present into contact through exercises that simulate time travel. Museumskoffer/Museum Suitcase During school trips, teachers are expected to relinquish their role as instructors, working instead as facilitators of the learning process. This gesture of removing the authority of the instructor’s knowledge is a key part of discovery/discovering learning. The release from authoritative knowledge is one of the purported pleasures of this enterprise, accentuating the learning process as self-directed. Teaching in the traditional sense detracts from the image of play and happiness of discovery/discovering learning. Here, the pedagogical initiative treats the children’s camp as a travesty of education. First, in the idea of designing it as painless, it tries to make a painful memory palatable 158

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instead of imitating, for example, what Dominick LaCapra (1994) refers to as a working through, rather than an acting out of memory. Second, it perpetuates the travesty that the living can identify with the dead as if this is unambiguous, rather than problematic. Campers are expected to adopt a Jewish victim and spend their time developing a biography or “Silhouette Picture.” The program begins with a general orientation that teaches youth about the religious life of Judaism, its practices and its beliefs, as well as providing an overview of the history and fates of the 200,000 Jews that had lived in Berlin. At this point, campers are encouraged by the camp director to examine the many texts, documents, photos and drawings in the research archives to help them select a particular Jewish victim upon whom they will base their project. The aim is to interpret the life of the victim through created artifacts and crafted objects that will be able to stand in for the victim’s life. The children’s experience of the project is considered just as important as the content that they generate. Campers are expected to keep a diary that reflects upon such questions as “How did I feel/Which feelings were released as I worked through the prisoner’s biographies? Which were the most important parts of the biographies for me?” (Appendix I). Here, each child’s subjective experience of the project is considered just as important as the experience of the victim. Diary-keeping forms an integral part not only of the child’s development of an empathic understanding of the victim’s biography, but also of the child’s own capacity to articulate and shape an autobiography. This celebration of sentiment as a form of liberal bildung allows for a new generation of Germans to reinvent their present through a controlled return to the past through the strategy of this form of memoir writing. In another exercise, visiting schoolchildren are asked to write letters impersonating the voice of a prisoner (see Appendix II). The camp brochure elaborates on the relationship between “making visible” and the directive of teaching emotions. The Museumskoffer project “contains various media. Prisoner’s reports are available in the form of texts, cassettes or film as are copies of documents, photos and drawings” in a compiled CD-ROM. The intended aim is “to enable prisoners, which the SS had tried to silence, to be visible once again as individuals as they are represented by silhouettes in the case study. This approach connects the factual knowledge gained by working through a prisoner’s biography with the emotional side of learning about a prisoner” (Appendix I). Adopting a Jewish victim is a strategy for re-imaging the scale of horror of the camp from the perspective of one prisoner. Yet the understanding of the victim as a life lived rather than simply exterminated is tied to the expressiveness of the child who is required to craft artifacts and fill in a silhouette picture of the victim. Part of the pedagogy of Museum Suitcase is the restoration of individuality to the victim as a way of redressing the crimes of the perpetrators. That is, the filling in of the silhouette picture is assumed as one way in which the anonymity of mass victimization is made intelligible through the account of a singular fate, revived in the form of a ghost. 159

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The reflexive relation between youth and victim reconceptualizes their differences through the production of intertwined biographies. The inclusion of questions into the portraiture activity, such as “What is he thinking of? What is he dreaming about?” (Brandenburg Memorials Foundation, n.d., translation mine), is intended to help youth capture the “personality” of the victim. This form of portraiture without a sitter stresses the fixed continuity between the portrayed subject and the portrayer without addressing the basis upon which this unity is established. With a focus upon evoking presence, of recovery without loss, intimacy is forged through an idyllic communion between the German child and Jewish victim and so forces a connection between members who are irrevocably apart. This program attests to the specific tension in the formal transmission of memory between adult Germans and German children. In the practice of visualizing the Jewish victim, in its aim to embody memory for the adult Jewish victim, the program denies the basis of an untellable German past, of the German subject that does not speak and does not account for its past. Rather, it is the knowing gaze of the German child established through the practice of visualization that forms the capacity to create a speaking German subject. By imagining the unfulfilled dreams of the victims, German youth are able to dream of a future in which they will be fulfilled. In her book The Child’s View of the Third Reich in German Literature: The Eye among the Blind, Pinfold points to the commonplace use of this privileged point of view. The narrative use of the child’s point of view, she argues, is part of an “age-old tradition that allows children to see things more clearly than adults by endowing them with visual rather than analytic perception, intuitive rather than learned responses” (Pinfold 2001: 141). The romantic underpinnings of a childhood undisturbed by a factual return to the scene of the crime successfully diminishes the horror of the original event through a redemptive return to a state of innocence, where the body of the exotic other is inscribed onto the landscape of childhood. Here, the stage of youth is positioned as a primitive, i.e., an untainted figure, a marker that stands in for “an earlier and purer stage of contemporary civilization” (Stewart 1993:146). Susan Stewart paraphrases Baudrillard’s comments from The System of Objects, noting that the anteriority of youth is analogous to the “primitive,” and that it is this anterior realm of both childhood and the “primitive” that the act of remembrance authorizes (1993: 146). By bringing what is remote into the nostalgic space of childhood, the exotic object closes the distance of the past: The exotic object represents distance appropriated… To have a souvenir of the exotic is to possess both a specimen and a trophy; on the one hand the object must be marked as exterior and foreign, on the other it must be marked as arising directly out of the experience of the possessor. It is thus placed within an intimate distance; space is transformed into interiority, into “personal space.” (Stewart 1993: 147) 160

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This intimate distance created through the act of remembrance departs in important ways from a stance of "melancholic identification and surrogate victimage" (LaCapra 2004: 142) often elicited in the memorialization of the Holocaust. It is the inscription of German youth upon the Jewish body that realizes the possibility for a double redemption, redressing the crisis of remembering or witnessing a past that one did not experience directly through a virtual encounter with the victim. The creation of an "intimate distance" reenacts the original event in order to bring what has been killed back to life. In the quest for the true constitution of the victim, is the past not brought to life in order to kill it again, and so, to bury its ethical remainder once and for all? Victim for a Day The genre of identification with the victim, of “doing”/impersonating a victim for a day, sentimentalizes the distance of subjectivity in ways that infantilize learners instead of inviting them to engage in the ambiguity of the very situation that both separates them from their past and intimates their attachment or belonging together with this past. Museumskoffer attempts to resolve the problem of estrangement from a past history by bringing the victims of Nazism into contact with the imagined, nostalgic space of youth. Here, German youth are conscripted into a newly relevant role, one dependent upon the victims of Nazism. Rather than the reenactment of the past as the site of trauma (of repetition), the Jewish victim becomes the imaginary space in which to construct a secular citizen. As a rite of passage, discovery learning is a means of bringing German youth into contact with a past predicated as being forever lost. In the attempt to recover the individual biographies of Jewish victims, such a scenario joins the fates of German youth with Jewish victims in an imaginary embrace. This privatized communion foreshortens the public distance necessary to transform the conditions of apathy, converting the confrontation with the past by simulating it as if an informal exchange. The presentation of the other as someone who can be chosen or adopted at will presents history as a choice where events, accounts or documents of the past might also be included or excluded at will. Marc Redfield cites the danger posed by a visual model that depends upon this virtual relation: [S]ympathy is no longer the product of representation or mimesis per se, but of the occurrence of a “sympathy,” structured like representation or, more precisely, like metaphor: a sort of substitution, by which we are put in the place of another… Ethical and representational systems predicated on sympathy will constantly be precarious. Even before attending to their rhetorical complications, one encounters difficulties…its reliance on representation and identification means that ethical judgment becomes 161

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flavored with voyeurism and sadomasochism, since sympathy requires for its existence the spectacle of an other’s suffering. (1996: 137) This focus on the victim as interchangeable obscures the problem of witnessing, and the need to arouse the question in youth themselves about their relation to the world, such that he or she might ask, am I a part of history and/or is it part of me? In which ways am I oriented to fluctuations and conversation in this story and so present as another speaker? This form of education requires the need to see oneself in history through the recognition of history as a living part of one’s self. It is this mix of attachment and separation that needs to be preserved as the topic of the site and the object of thought that is eclipsed in this methodology. Instead of treating youth in this way—that is, by introducing the pain of bildung through identification with the victim and producing pleasure from this pain in using it as a source of enjoyment and “confidence building”—what is required is a reflective approach to the painful and significant images and memories. The repressed structure of German self- understanding would be engaged and made discursive as something more than simply painful, but as confusion to be suffered in its representation. In order to get youth to recognize that they should be querying their history and its two-sidedness as if a symptom, the emphasis would be on creating an inventive pedagogy for teaching and learning this form of engagement with history and responsibility. Conclusion This attempt at bildung borrows from an Enlightenment ideal of a harmonious public and private, where the fashioning of an educated citizen is formulated from the vantage point of the stage prior to a worldly appearance in the public sphere. This period of youthfulness is a threshold, designed as a rite of passage between the privacy of the family and full-fledged participation in German society. Constitutive of this “rite of passage” is the aim to prepare youth for the corrupting influences of the adult world by instilling a model of historicism that is dependent upon a capacity, in Rousseau’s terms, to “experience the pleasure of virtue” as an end in itself. The objective of making the learning of history an entertainment poses the problem of education in the strongest sense, first in terms of the question of how any present generation is to be engaged in its way with the past, for it is not simply the dead bodies of the past that are at issue, but the past itself as dead for any present. For any present, the matter at issue is the problem of animating its past in ways that are reflective. The proposition that this be done as entertainment, as painless, presupposes fundamental and discursive antagonism over the question of what education is and is not and what kind of relationship learning bears to pleasure. 162

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This model of national memory envisions education as having to overcome the ambiguity of distance of the subject to the event through pleasurable play, through the travesty of a friendly relation to the horror. What I have attempted to suggest here is that an alternative has to contemplate producing in youth an Arendtean aporia occasioned by being forced to reflect upon how they might “belong” to their past (even if absent) or on what it is to belong to or be responsible for one’s country and family. The aporia would then induce perhaps a painful reflection on membership or inclusion in the collective, of deaths in the past that were “produced” by one’s own nation in ways that could disseminate responsibility to a new generation. In this way, pedagogy would have to make family and country interlocutors by compelling youth to examine, question and create a more vital engagement through reflexive initiatives that invite a new generation of Germans to take responsibility for their own history. Appendix I Text from Brandenburg Memorials Foundation 2009. Reprinted by permission of Memorial and Museum Sachsenhausen. Memorial and Museum Sachsenhausen: The Museum’s Case Study The museum’s case study Learning, defined as the acquisition of information, knowledge and skills, must also be enjoyable if it is to be successful, perhaps especially when dealing with such a sensitive theme as the National Socialist persecution of the Jews. Learning in Sachsenhausen then is not to be defined by the amount of work done by an individual nor by grade, for how is it possible to award a grade for work on this theme? It must be a style of learning that sensitizes people and developments, is relevant to a person’s ethical and political orientation and enables people to ensure that Auschwitz—and the long political path to Auschwitz begun with stereotypes and discrimination—can never happen again. The most appropriate style of learning is a didactic method called “discovery learning.” This is a form of learning based around the learner’s own initiative and interests. It tries to increase learner confidence and bring over an experience of success and still be enjoyable despite the difficult contents. As a way of using discovery learning the museum and memorial has developed the “museum case study: Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.”

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The museum portrays the history of the Jews that were imprisoned at different times and for various reasons in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, putting the fate of individual prisoners in the foreground. Some survived, many did not. Where it has been possible, we have detailed the lives of prisoners from their birth to their death and if they are still living, up until the present day, although the focal point of the prisoner biographies always remains the time they spent in Sachsenhausen. In many instances we know very little about the lives of Sachsenhausen’s prisoners and this is also noticeable in the museum’s case study. The fates of many prisoners have been well-documented, but others are missing information or have only been put together from the perspectives of those responsible—the Gestapo. The museum’s case study contains various media. Prisoner’s reports are available in the form of texts, cassettes or film as are copies of documents, photos and drawings. This is to enable prisoners, which the SS had tried to silence, to be visible once again as individuals and they are represented by silhouettes in the case study. This approach connects the factual knowledge gained by working through a prisoner’s biography with the emotional side of learning about a prisoner. The school pupils decide by themselves on which of the two levels they are going to work. The knowledge that they gain, the feelings that the subject releases and any remaining questions can be expressed creatively by filling out the prisoner silhouette. The museum’s case study serves as preparation for a visit to Sachsenhausen and especially to the exhibition “Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen concentration camp” in barracks No.38. Visitors should be at least 15 years old. To work successfully with the museum’s case study, the following points are important and should be taken into account.        

1. 2. 3. 4.

The preparation of the pupils Time needed The discussion after the visit Possible themes during a visit to Sachsenhausen

1.

Pupils must have an understanding of Jewish society and its religious and cultural background. We have provided material to help in this matter in the appendix.

2.

The time available for teaching with the museum’s case study should be planned together with the museum staff. Three hours teaching time is really the absolute minimum, but a longer stay is recommended.

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3. 4.

If there is very little time available to spend on the case study, the importance of the work done after the visit cannot be underestimated. The results of the work should be presented after the visit and the following points discussed: How did I feel/Which feelings were released as I worked through the prisoner’s biographies? Which were the most important parts of the biographies for me? Shortly before a visit to the memorial, it is useful to discuss the visit one more time with the pupils. It is of vital importance that the pupils understand that the layout of the camp has been changed since National Socialist times. Photos can help to give the pupils an idea of the site. In order that the pupils profit from a visit to the memorial questions about the camp should be collected before the visit.

The contents of the “Museum case study: Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen concentration camp”: •  General information •  The construction and expansion of Sachsenhausen concentration camp •  The mass arrests in 1938: “Arbeitsscheu Reich” •  The November pogrom 1938 •  The “Landra-Fots” Jewish prisoners in September 1939 •  The arrest of Polish Jews in September 1939 •  Jewish prisoners 1939–1942 •  The shooting of Jewish prisoners in May 1942 •  Resistance to the deportation: the revolt of the 18 •  Jewish prisoners and the use of Jewish property •  Sachsenhausen as a transit camp •  The sub-camps •  Death march and liberation •  Estrongo and Andreas Nachama

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Appendix II Text from Brandenburg Memorials Foundation, n.d., translation mine Projekte and Arbeitsblätter: Vorschläge zur Arbeit in der Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen Thema: Häftlingsalltag Projects and Worksheets: Models for Exercises at the Sachsenhausen Memorial Foundation Topic: Everyday life of the prisoner Neben kontrollierten (zensierten) Briefen, die Häftlinge manchmal schreiben durften, gab es auch Gelegenheiten, z.B. bei Arbeits-kommandos, dass unzensierte Briefe das Lager verlieβen. Dies war sehr gefährlich und der Häftling musste, wenn der Versuch schief ging, mit sehr harter Bestrafung rechnen. Ja sogar um sein Leben fürchten. Schreibe solch einen Brief, bei dem du davon ausgehst, dass er deine Familie erreicht, ohne kontrolliert zu werden! Besides controlled (censored) letters that prisoners were permitted to write from time to time, there was also the opportunity to send an uncensored letter through, for example, the Arbeits-kommando of the concentration camp. This was very dangerous and the prisoner had to calculate the very heavy consequences, especially if the attempt was discovered. In fact, it could cost his life. Write such a letter, where you assume that it reaches your family without being censored! Machmal war es Häftlingen möglich, Briefe nach Hause zu schreiben. Diese Briefe wurden aber, bevor sie abgeschikt wurden, kontolliert (zensiert). Den Schreibern war es nicht gestatet, die Wahrheit über die Zustände im Konzentrationslager zu berichten, daher mussten sie sehr vorsichtig, allgemein und eher positiv ausdrücken. Schreibe einen Brief, der unter solchen Umständen entstanden sein könnte! Sometimes it was possible for prisoners to write a letter home to their families. These letters were censored before they were mailed though. It was not possible for the writer to report the truth about the state of affairs in the concentration camp, therefore they had to be extremely careful to give an overall impression that was positive. Write a letter that could have been written under such circumstances!

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Endnotes 1.

For a conception of bildung see Gadamer (1994) 9–19.

2.

The Museum Suitcase program was formally offered from the period of 1998–2010 at the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum. According to Director Wolfgang Titz of the Pedagogy Department at the Sachsenhausen camp, the "museumskoffer" was first developed in 1996–97 by Kerstin Engelhardt and Sigrid Müller in connection with the opening of the permanent exhibition "Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp" in the 38th Barrack. In 1998 it was introduced as an educational tool designed to prepare school children in advance of their visit to the camp. Originally the material was gathered in an old suitcase and loaned to teachers in preparation for their visit to the memorial. A methodological guide was provided to help in the implementation; however, according to the camp’s pedagogical team, the complexity and scope of the material required teaching staff to accompany the suitcase to the schools.   The mandate of the program was to tell the history of the Jewish people who were in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the basis of individual fates. Since many victims did not survive and the perspective of the perpetrator was usually the only lens through which the details of victims were known, the stated intention of the program was to recover and bring to life an individual prisoner through a silhouette picture by working with a smattering of clues contained in the “museum suitcase”. The museum suitcase offered a variety of different media: written reports of inmates, cassettes or film, secondary documents, photos and drawings. Using the materials of the museum suitcase, students were charged with restoring an image of particularity to the individual victims whose distinct personalities were obliterated by the concentration camp SS.   The demand of the program was great, prompting the organizers to copy the material for two other museum suitcases. In 2002, the use of a CD-ROM on the everyday life of prisoners, developed and released by the Sachsenhausen Memorial, reflected the shifting forms of technology and the interests of young people in generating modern-media presentations. Although the rapid technological changes in forms of media rendered the suitcase less desirable as a medium for teaching students about Jewish prisoners, the methodological components of the program— discovery learning and the design of the silhouette victim - feature prominently in other pedagogical offerings at the camp (Titz, qtd. in Seferens 2011). 3.

After the Wall fell, state and municipal planners announced their intentions to urbanize Sachsenhausen with 10,000 new housing units that included converting the existing camp structures into social facilities such as kindergartens and 167

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commercial offices. At the time, Daniel Libeskind proposed a memorialization of the site through an urban redevelopment where social welfare initiatives could coexist with an eroding camp structure. Libeskind’s architectural disarmament of the site was intended as a reinvention of the space in order to record the past and also as a rebirth for the most vulnerable inhabitants of the former East Germany: the unemployed, the uneducated and the unskilled. His proposal to preserve the camp and rehabilitate existing social conditions included plans to restore the town’s pre-Holocaust status as a renowned centre for the creation of musical instruments. As a result of this proposal the selection committee eventually changed its stance and decided to preserve and restore the existing concentration camp, as well as additional museums on medicine and racism under National Socialism (Libeskind 1997: 102–107).

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9 X Marks the Spot: New Orleans Under Erasure Kevin Dowler

If the film Easy Rider (Hopper 1969) is organized around a disquisition on the problem of normalcy, about a desire to settle down and fit in, this desire is seemingly perpetually frustrated by a series of encounters with the scenes of parodic excess with which the film is stitched together. Within this parade of excesses, perhaps the most excessive comes with the portrayal of an acid trip that takes place predominantly in the St. Louis Number One cemetery in New Orleans. Acting as a peroration on death presaging the actual demise of the two main characters, Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper), in a fiery inferno at the end of the film, the trip to New Orleans itself is precipitated by the violent death of George Hanson (played by Jack Nicholson). Honoring Hanson’s last wish, Wyatt and Billy make good on his desire by visiting a famous brothel in the city. The sequence that follows upon this is an extended montage, conjoining a series of disjunctive and distorted, surrealistic images from the cemetery and Mardi Gras, along with distorted sound, overlaid with the paranoid ramblings of the characters, primarily of Karen (Karen Black), one of the two prostitutes from the brothel who accompany Billy and Wyatt on their “trip” into the cemetery. On the soundtrack, Karen repeats, “I wanna get out of here” over and over as she kneels in the tight spaces between the tombs, and it is not clear whether this means away from the hallucinogenic effects of the drug or, in keeping with the cemetery location, life on earth. The tenor of the sequence is disturbing, all the more so in its formal distinction from the aesthetic of the rest of the film, and the trip is decidedly morbid and angst-ridden; in the context of the cemetery scenes, the interspersed shots from Mardi Gras take on an eerie, menacing aspect, particularly those of flames that anticipate the final shot of the film, and transform their festive character into dark foreboding. Reputedly, Dennis Hopper, as the film’s director, goaded Peter Fonda into reminiscing about his mother’s suicide in order to capture the scene of Wyatt crying atop one of the tombs near the end of the sequence, which ends with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. 169

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In its gesture toward excess, and through its location in the cemetery, this scene is reminiscent of the spectacle of tarantism, a dancing mania occurring in Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries that often took place in cemeteries. Also known as St. Vitus’s dance, it was thought to be a cure for the bite of a tarantula spider, but modern speculation suggests it was ergot poisoning resulting from the ingestion of moldy grain, which produces convulsions and hallucinations and which is the same substance from which LSD is derived. The carnivalesque and grotesque dimensions of tarantism reappear here in modern form, particularly in the heightened mania produced through the close proximity of festivity and death. Whether knowingly or not, the film sequence echoes this older phenomenon, and it is altogether appropriate that it should occur as it does in New Orleans, which appears—in the continental imaginary at least— as the site of excess and inversion. Through the conjunction of the brothel and the cemetery, and the infusing of both with a surreal, hallucinogenic feel, this sequence provides a moment that neatly conflates the two central tropes that have externally defined New Orleans: sex and death. As Joseph Roach notes, “New Orleans itself becomes the ludic space, the behavioural vortex, for the rest of the nation” (Roach 1996: 231). Hanson’s central aim to travel with Billy and Wyatt in order to fulfill his desire to visit the brothel expresses this fantasy of New Orleans as a liminal space, exemplified in the excess of the Mardi Gras and redoubled through the release from constraint offered by the drug experience. At the same time, as Roach suggests, “the dead seem to remain more closely present to the living in New Orleans than they do elsewhere” (1996: 14), a notion to which the centrality of the graveyard location of the scene from Easy Rider and the morbidity that ultimately colors the experience amply testifies. New Orleans exemplifies in many ways the public display of all that nominally remains private elsewhere. The very cities of the dead, the necropolises that dot the landscape of New Orleans and feature in such film scenes, make a mockery of the land of the living, especially because of the way in which their construction and durability ensure they will far outlast the shanties for the living that surround them. Whereas in other places, the dead rest beneath the earth, invisible and for the most part forgotten, in New Orleans, to borrow a phrase from Marx, the “dead generations [weigh] like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (2002: 19), their houses a constant reminder of the transitory nature of the dwellings of its current residents. In many ways, the discourse of death prevails here, and arguably the sex is foregrounded through excessive carnivalesque display as a feeble spasm that makes a brief, futile display of mortal resistance. Death, then, reigns sovereign, and New Orleans is a sepulchre. Indeed, as was the case in the wake of hurricane Katrina, the homes of the city, or at least parts of it, became tombs, watery graves that were assimilated with their formal counterparts, making good in a grotesque manner on the incipient possibility that the city is truly a necropolis, a city of the dead: no longer the play of death, its ritualized spectacle, but the real thing. 170

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It might be appropriate, given the peculiar features of New Orleans, to describe the city after Agamben as exemplifying a state of exception, a zone of indistinction. As a “ludic space” with its blurring of the threshold between life and death, living and dead, New Orleans seems to correspond with the collapse of boundaries described by Agamben. The notion of a “topological zone of indistinction” in which “the state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass through one another” (Agamben 1998: 37) aptly characterizes features exhibited by New Orleans. In such a zone, characterized as it is by the suspension of norms, peculiar forces are unleashed, uninhibited by law. The blurring of boundaries between bodies and signs, the Real and the symbolic order, that appears to be the mark upon the body of New Orleans, thus constitutes an intriguing starting place for inquiry. If, nevertheless, as Agamben claims, the state of exception has expanded beyond specific confines to become the operation of power over everyday life in general (1998: 38), we might see this revealed more explicitly in particular moments. I want to argue here that the examination of the scene of operations of emergency power in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina provides one such opportunity to observe a case that brings to light features otherwise perhaps less visible. However, it is not so much that juridical norms are withdrawn and New Orleans is reduced to “bare life” (Agamben 1998: 8)—though this does seem to be the case—but rather that Katrina itself produced a zone of indistinction by severing the relation between signifier and signified, address and body, in a manner that required repair in its wake. It is this repair work that is of interest to the extent that it both succeeds and fails. If there was already, as suggested, a state of exception prevailing in New Orleans, this is doubled over through the catastrophic effects of Katrina and arguably redoubled again through the efforts to restore the symbolic order in its aftermath. It is here in this nexus that I want to dwell, in the region between the dead and the undead, between the private and public, between display and hiding, on the threshold of the symbolic order. In a city already noted for its peculiar relation to death, I want to examine the city as a catastrophe and the way that the private—at least the body as property—is situated, in both its presence and absence. Put more bluntly, the interest here is with the power over the living and dead, the subjugation of bodies and its effects. In the context of Katrina, this is made manifest, or public, through the operations of the various institutions of the social order that hold sway over the living and the dead, that interfere with the relation between the two with interesting and provocative effects. If the X1 marks the spot in the city of the dead, there are all sorts of interesting questions that can be raised about it, from the banal to the sublime, and we will attempt to examine a clutch of them here. It is the work of the X itself that is the focal point, the crossing out—”sous rature” as they say—of Being, beyond the Heideggerian/Derridian text, down on the street. If Socrates, as Cicero says, brought philosophy down from the skies and into the city (Cicero 1920: 108), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) likewise lifted the problem of the writing of Being from the text and painted it in Day-Glo orange on 171

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the dwellings of the living and the dead. As Agamben notes, “the floating signifier—this guiding concept in the human sciences of the twentieth century—corresponds to the state of exception” (2005: 37). The X, floating on the fluids expelled by Katrina’s body, is that very thing. The City Is a Brand There is, of course, a history of the brand of New Orleans that quite literally marks the bodies of its past, with continuing resonance into the present. As Roach remarks of the Code noir, promulgated in 1685 by Louis XIV, the branding of slaves with the fleur-de-lis became customary, thus “the body so marked becomes an effigy by way of example… enacting the body politic in the materiality of the natural body” (1996: 57–8). Already circulating, then, some three hundred years ago, is a kind of uncanny sign that appears in the wrong place, marking the location of the living dead. We could most certainly couple this in a perverse manner with another, not-sodifferent X, the gesture that Heidegger makes when he erases Being as an apparently insufficient yet necessary signifier. In the same way that the sign Being both stands and is simultaneously crossed out, the slave both remains and is erased at the same time, human and inhuman, undead. For Heidegger, “the essence of man is a part of that which in the crossed intersecting lines of Being puts thinking under a claim of a more originary command” (1958: 83). Here one must think about what such an “originary command” might consist of, and how the lines of the X and the fleur-de-lis intersect at the point where the sign loses its meaning entirely and yet stands for an entire system. This creepiness, the history of the brand, the mark, the erasure of being, can be yoked together with the kind of cryptography—with its allusion to the crypt—that appears in the aftermath of Katrina. Although it appears on structures (those less than solid homes of the not-quite-living, the dead and undead) rather than on bodies, as a mark it still encodes the presence and absence of bodies, makes a tally as part of an accounting system that doesn’t account for anything, as something that shifts from what we think of as a discourse to pure sign, both nothing and everything, in which—to finish the Agamben quote about the floating signifier—”the norm is in force without being applied” (2005: 37). It is in a way a curious inversion of the signature. If we presume the illiteracy of our putative slave, his or her legal existence might take the form of an X (if a subject need be produced for a contract), whereas in this more recent context we encounter what is almost its opposite: not the X as the absence of writing, but rather its reduction to pure form. If what Heidegger (and, aptly here, grammatology) was pointing to was the fundamental ambiguity that language cannot be rid of, its accursed share, we might view this as a catastrophe, the kind of gap that starts to open on the other side of the assurances given to us by the promise of mastery promulgated in enlightenment discourse. We are 172

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certainly already overly familiar with (if we have yet to learn from) Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002) dialectic of enlightenment and Heidegger’s (1977) characterization of technology, through a series of negative reflections on collective life, to the more recent formulation of Ulrich Beck’s (1992) “risk society,” wherein is described the ways in which the mastery over outer and inner nature through science and technology have produced the very opposite of their intended outcomes: the liberation of humankind has in fact led to its enslavement. If this is a catastrophe, we are alerted by these authors to the ways in which this has become installed, ironically perhaps, through reason as a component of everyday life. As Beck notes, “at the centre lie the risks and consequences of modernization, which are revealed as irreversible threats to the life of plants, animals, human beings” (1992: 13). We begin to see in this expression how disaster (both imminent and immanent) is etched into the quotidian in such a way that it becomes the operating mode. At the same time, disaster as an operating mode introduces the undoing of representation, and thus places ambiguity at the core of representation, in ways we have already hinted at. As Susanna Hoffman explains, “in the face of catastrophe, the disequilibrium becomes acute” (2002: 114–5). As she writes in the case of disasters such as Katrina, “the environment rears up implacably to demonstrate that the divisions by which the people regimented reality are illusion” (Hoffman 2002: 114–5). Important to note here is how Hoffman points to the way that the “physical plane converges into what people have distinguished as the cultural, continuously confusing their tidy arrangement” (2002: 114–5), and threatens to sever the threads stitching together the symbolic order. The X marks that spot to which she points, and becomes, as will be seen below, the means to sew up the (w)hole. In a sense, the (permanent) catastrophe is also the “state of exception” described by Agamben, but moreover a state which becomes, as he suggests, general, no longer exceptional. On the one hand, the disaster is an acute point, insofar as it precipitates a breakdown in the symbolic order, and thus functions as a kind of limit case where the Real threatens the perimeters of meaning. Disasters, as Oliver-Smith writes, “disclose in their unfolding the linkages and the interpenetration of natural forces and agents, power structures and social arrangements, and cultural values and belief systems” (2002: 26). This is where, as Blanchot claims, the disaster “de-scribes” (1995: 7), and so in a single stroke dismantles the textual apparatus that holds the world together for us. Disaster is, as Blanchot says, “the limit of writing.” In their singularity, disasters throw into relief the tenuousness of the social and symbolic order of things, over against what Hoffman describes as the implacability of nature. As Kant attempted to demonstrate in the third critique, the sublime, as the infinite magnitude of the natural, produces awe and terror precisely by virtue of our inability to measure it (2000: 143–8). Here, interestingly, Kant notes how mathematics treats magnitude not as an empirical thing but as an indeterminate relation (2000: 131–43), in other words, an X. However, over against the collapse of reason in the face of an implacable, vast nature beyond the capacity of 173

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humans to grasp as a whole, Kant tries to rescue reason in terms of a satisfaction that reason creates a moral order that can be imposed upon the world (Guyer 2000: xxxii). The question of satisfaction in the moral order, however, is precisely what is raised in the twentieth-century critiques of Enlightenment thought, and which continues to be raised in various forms today, insofar as both inner and outer nature are subject to the vicissitudes of reason. Permanent Catastrophe It is through these discourses that the definitions of catastrophe and disaster are transformed from defining a singular and irruptive event into a constitutive state of inner nature. The notion of disaster, rather than a phenomenon visited upon us by a malevolent external nature, comes to be increasingly characterized as embedded in the everyday. Thus, as Seligmann-Silva argues, “instead of representing only an unusual, unique, unexpected event which would account for an interruption in history, in the twentieth century, the catastrophe’s materialization grew more and more to be seen in reality, that is to say, in quotidian life. The prosaic experience of modern humanity is filled with shocks, with confrontation, with danger” (2003: 143). In this manner, the logic of disaster embeds itself in the cultural realm, and becomes constitutive of both inner and social experience. This is manifest in the texts of types such as Benjamin and Simmel, just to name two of many, who write from what Frank Kermode has described as an “apocalyptic” worldview (1968: 2) characteristic of modernism, which could equally well describe the critics of enlightenment in general. Like Beck and others, Kermode notes that in this perspective, “no longer imminent, the End is immanent” (1967: 25), There is at the same time, however, a normative disposition derived from quantitative analysis as well, which situates disaster in a similar manner firmly in the human realm. Luckin, for instance, observes that beginning in the nineteenth century, against the cosmic order of the disaster, a discourse of the accidental started to emerge, depicted “as statistically normal and thus as part of the expected and ‘normal’ flow and structure of everyday social life. By now, the accidental was coming to be depicted as endogenous rather than exogenous to human motivations, actions, and processes” (2003: 182). In this respect, both the literary-philosophical and scientific points of view coincide, at least insofar as the locus of disaster is relocated from the natural to the social and cultural realms as part of the rhythm of everyday life. The kind of “normality” derived from scientistic procedures produces, as Luckin (2003: 189) describes, new and different frames of reference, where the formulation of safety standards or protective legislation comes to situate disaster in both a preventative and remedial framework, especially as it is organized through the increasing state power in the domains of human life and death (as described by Foucault, for example). As I 174

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will attempt to describe further below, one of the central features of the aftermath of Katrina was the breakdown of the normative order represented in the failure of FEMA to adequately cope with the situation with which it was presented. Here we might spot evidence for the predicted outcome of the dialectic of enlightenment. Obviously, from a critical theory perspective, this notion of adequate control over events (both natural and social) has come to be disparaged, but the notion of disaster nevertheless comes to be viewed in a similar way as a component of the normal flow and rhythm of human life. The formulation of disaster as an operating mode of cultural and social as well as scientific modernity leads to a condition in which it becomes, paradoxically, as Seligmann-Silva puts it, a “prosaic experience” (2003: 143). Under the condition of quotidian catastrophes, Baudelaire enjoins us to “Pensez à X” (in Seligmann-Silva 2003: 144). This comes as a consequence of the impossibility of representing the disaster, which, as Blanchot writes, “is neither noun nor verb, but a remainder which would bar with invisibility and illegibility all that shows and is said—a remainder which is neither a result (as in subtraction), nor a quantity left over (as in division)” (1995: 40). In other words, it is an empty sign. It is not, then, that catastrophe is beyond representation but rather marks its limit. This is the sense in which the disaster de-scribes. At the same time, however, as it de-scribes, it also inscribes, making a mark as it crosses everything out. If Being is the impossible signifier, it is in the interstices of the X where something survives and is to be located, the remainder. It is crucial to remember that it is not the case that Being is erased, but that the catastrophe is that it remains both visible and crossed out, its own eerie palimpsest. The de-scription of the catastrophe finds its material location in the crossing of two lines that form the X. It is at that edge between the said and the unsayable that the X inserts itself as a crossing sign. The X Explained If catastrophe is the operating mode of the quotidian, one version of this is amply demonstrated through the prosaic explanation provided by Ruel Douvillier, who describes the function of the marking system on the buildings in the flood zones of New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina for the audience of Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke (2006). “The first slash of the X,” he explains, “signifies that the team has entered the building.” This, then, is the first cut, which marks the entry to the location, the incision that allows penetration: the home is opened like a wound for inspection, the private realm collapsing into the public domain via the search protocol. This is followed by a sort of closure, the sealing of the wound, as it were: “Once the team exits the building they complete the X with another slash.” In the film, this “slash” is emphasized by the cutting motion of Douvillier’s downward motion of hand and arm. And thus the X is completed with a kind of sanctioned violence, evident in the routine way that it is 175

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described. That second “complete” cut is emphatic and final as it seals the tomb and ends with a public judgment. There is a beauty and simplicity in such a magnanimous gesture, beneficent in its resonation with the blessing of the sacrament. Similar to the echoes of the fleur-de-lis branded on the flesh of bodies under the Code noir, this gesture harkens back also to the plague in seventeenth-century London, where Defoe quotes a municipal order “that every House visited be marked with a red Cross a Foot long, in the middle of the Door, evident to be seen, and with these usual printed words, that is to say, Lord have Mercy upon us, to be set up close over the same Cross” (2001: 42–3). It is clear through the measured, even tones of Douvillier, the man of the city, that there is no cryptic dimension here, that the explanation, once made, is self-evident, the direct expression of administrative reason. There is no excess to address: this is rendered moot by the downward gesture; what is on the other side of the wall is sealed with that final downward slash, and its meaning is lodged right at the surface of the threshold, beyond which angels do not go. In this version of the operation, there is no disaster; everything is condensed in the X with no further discussion required. This marking system is mandated by the FEMA (2003) Urban Search and Rescue Task Force, which performs what is described as “coordinated building triage” in the event of an emergency or disaster. In so doing, it is expected that “information gathered by T[ask] F[orce] personnel must be represented in a standardized fashion to ensure uniformity and clarity” (FEMA 2003: IV-9). In the case of “search assessment marking,” for which Douvillier provides the description, “an ‘X’ that is 2’ x 2’ in size will be made with International Orange color spray paint” (FEMA 2003: IV-11). What can immediately be remarked upon in the particular example in the documentary is the other X visible in the background, which is notable for the way that it violates the protocol, since it is in red rather than the requisite International Orange (red was the color of the markings on the plague houses). Already, then, even in the midst of a discourse that organizes the X as a routine, quotidian practice, is a kind of disruption and a hint that this practice is not as stable as it is portrayed to be. Designed to be eminently “readable,” the FEMA document carefully denotes the way that information is to be inscribed: “distinct markings will be made inside the four quadrants of the X to clearly denote the search status and findings at the time of this assessment. The marks will be made with carpenter chalk, lumber crayon, or duct tape and black magic marker” (2003: IV-12). An assay of images of the search areas, however, quickly reveals the consistent violation of these schemata, and the consequent destabilization of their signification. The multiplication of improvised, unauthorized or ill-trained search teams in these zones, as part of the overall breakdown of systems, led to the erosion of the symbolic system designed to restore it, thus undoing any guarantee of the imposition of a rational order. This was particularly the case, as will be examined below, with the subject of the lower quadrant: the disposition of the bodies of “victims,” both living and dead. 176

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As Spike Lee’s film goes on to show, the experience of the X is itself a disaster, a disturbing disruption that belies the normative order iterated in the description provided by Douvillier. This is also confirmed in other accounts that surfaced in the press and in the myriad blogs and image banks that appeared in the wake of Katrina. It is certain that the frequency and terms with which the X’s were and continue to be referred to can be taken as symptomatic of their peculiar character, which belies the prosaic description of FEMA marking system; they appear instead as occult signs that seem to further deepen the unsettling sensations of the eerie cityscape. Matter Out of Place One press account, entitled “Surreal Landscape Alters Perspective” (Jones 2005), notes the proliferation of graffiti messages in the city, and in particular “those cryptic messages,” the X’s with which the houses were marked. Unlike the pathos evoked through the system of graffiti messaging that took the place of a collapsed communications infrastructure, accounts like this one indicate that the X’s reserve to themselves different sensations. Another press source (Hilton 2006), in similar terms, reports that “on every home was a cryptic equation in orange spray paint.” Yet another (Barry 2005) notes how a “crude symbol has surfaced in New Orleans to displace for now the fleur-de-lis,” which reminds us again of the branding of bodies and city. The author suggests that the Day-Glo orange X’s are “the color of Halloween,” and describes the markings as a kind of “macabre graffiti.” These voices provide for us another version, where, as the title of the latter article claims, “X marks the Pain.” As Slavoj Žižek writes, “a perfectly ‘natural’ and ‘familiar’ situation is denatured, becomes ‘uncanny,’ loaded with horror and threatening possibilities, as soon as we add to it a small supplementary feature, a detail that ‘does not belong,’ that sticks out, is ‘out of place,’ does not make any sense within the frame of the idyllic scene” (1991: 88). In this case, obviously, we do not have anything approaching an idyllic scene; there is already an experience of the out of place, whether that be the fluid, or what Jones calls the “surreal landscape” itself and the alterity it evokes. However, and despite the already queer situation, the X constitutes that detail that does not belong, that invokes the sensation of the uncanny. As many have pointed out, the uncanny is a translation of unheimlich, at the center of which is the heim, the home, and this is precisely what is decentered through the inscription, the cuts that sever the home from its moorings. In this spot hovers the X, mediating, as it were, between outside and inside, between public and private, home and street, at least what was left of the latter pair. It does so, however, in a heightened and enigmatic way, by being a signifier without a signified. As in the case of Lacan’s usage of the anamorphic death’s head in Holbein’s Ambassadors (see Lacan 1978: 85-90), Žižek points out to us the way that, as a “meaningless stain,” the 177

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X “opens up an abyss…and we find ourselves in a realm of total ambiguity” (1991: 91). If the anamorphic image is in one way unlike the X insofar as “looking awry,” as Žižek puts it, reveals the death’s head icon, and the X is intended to be directly apprehended, they nevertheless share, in their ambiguity and state of exception, the effect of destabilizing and undermining the equilibrium of the normal, the illusion of regimented reality. What the disaster does is more properly what it undoes: it is the schema that keeps, however tenuously in the case of New Orleans, the living and the dead at one remove from each other. The fluids compromise the idea of an address and an addressee, since everything is floating, signifiers included. The X confirms, if you will, this state in which the conventional boundaries become blurred, overlap and mix in a hideous manner. Exemplified in the first instance by the giving way of the levees and the bodies floating in a deathly soup, the X in its wake produces a disjuncture precisely through its reassertion of order. Thus it is the obscene character of the X, overwriting or doubling the disaster, that is the locus of its disturbing effect. We can see this effect as it is condensed in segments from Lee’s film, where death is written everywhere but reduced here to the signs of its presence and absence, the zero or the two. There is, in perhaps an uncanny manner, an acceptance of the mark—its truth function—which is at the same time the locus of its irruptive effect. As Wendell Pierce remarks over a montage of marked houses, “it’s so weird to go through my neighborhood and see the markings,” and “then all of a sudden when you see that number in the shell of a house, ‘two’… You know, like, wow man, right around the corner, two people died in this home, you know, and it’s just so deafeningly quiet.” Pierce points to a practice that emerges to accompany the marks, a macabre accounting system that reasserts a confidence in the epistemological status of statistical aggregates but is at the same time weird in its total abstraction, its deafening silence. It is notable that as he moves through the neighborhood he repeats to himself the mantra “no bodies, no bodies,” since he is not talking about bodies at all, but about numbers, oscillating between the happiness of the zero and the interminable loss of the two, the latter itself a sign, the two fingers of the upper quadrant of the X: peace; victory; end. There is then, as Gordon (1997) and Luckin (2003) note, a faith in the normative value of the objectivity of the number, but which is at the same time the inscription that unhinges. What the X also stands in for is a sort of double system, of which the X is the point of intersection. Žižek describes a Ruth Rendell novel (1991: 30–1), wherein there is a “contingent encounter” of two networks of communication, one a group of adolescents playing a spy game with drops and messages, and a man who accidentally espies one of the children hiding a message and misinterprets this as part of the actions of a “real” spy ring. The man then eagerly attempts to break the code and discover the meaning of these messages. Žižek takes this to exemplify the Lacanian notion of communication as successful misunderstanding. As he points out with respect to the novel, “the two poles of the communication are thus asymmetrical. The adolescent ‘network’ embodies the 178

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great Other, the signifier’s mechanism, the universe of ciphers and codes, in its senseless, idiotic automatism” (1991: 31). This is the mechanism of the X. The voices of the Spike Lee film speak quite literally from these two poles, and exemplify the “misunderstanding” of the game of communication. After Katrina disrupted the postal system, the messages kept missing their addressees. The zero is, in particular instances, senseless. According to Žižek (1991), the idiotic automatism finds its guarantee in the accident, in a bit of reality that seems to prove the meaningfulness of the sign. However, as was the case in New Orleans, nothing following disaster functioned the way it was supposed to. This emerges acutely in a segment from the Spike Lee film in which Paris Ervin recounts the story of his “mother’s” body: I found out a few days earlier from getting in contact with people in the Search and Rescue Teams that they had gone to the house and they wrote a zero, meaning no body was found in there, so I was thinking, “Oh, ok, so at least she made it out. She may be sick but she’s not…she made it out.” When I went to the house, all three of the doors were locked, so there was no way for them to go into the house, to search the house… After the flood waters let down, they were saying people were finding relatives and their loved ones in their house and that their house had not been searched. So I called 911, and within a few minutes some police officers showed up, and they searched the house and they had in fact found my mother’s body in the house… She was in the kitchen, under the refrigerator. When the police came out and found my mother, they took a police report and said it’d take about two weeks or so. They said it wouldn’t take as long because they knew who she was and that it wasn’t just somebody that they found, and that I was the only other person living there with her. But it turned out to take much longer than that… The only way they were releasing bodies at that time was with finger prints, dental X-rays, or DNA samples. (Lee 2006) The zero in this case produces a horror that goes unanswered, with no body to back up the sign, exemplifying the miscommunication described by Žižek. Here, the code is pure idiocy, the mark on a locked crypt. What is captured in this sequence is how this individual is himself locked in a senseless system in which his mother becomes undead. The true horror comes with the disjunction between the systems of communication at the point where they intersect. The absence of certification belies the unstable status of bodies as subjects. The pervasiveness of bureaucratic knowledge, as Žižek notes,

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gives birth to a certain gap best exemplified by the French “certificat d’existence,” or by strange stories, reported from time to time, of how… some unfortunate individual, asking a certain favour from a state apparatus, is informed that, according to the register, he is officially dead or nonexistent, and that, in order to be able to make claims, he must first produce official documents that prove his existence—do we not find here the bureaucratic version of “in-between the two deaths”? When bureaucratic knowledge thus brings home the absurd discord between the Symbolic and the Real, it opens us up to the experience of an order that is radically heterogeneous to commonsense positive reality. (Žižek 2003: 120–1) Likewise in our case, an administrative apparatus pronounces a (non-existent) living body dead as an inversion of the (unidentified) dead body counted as alive. The eeriness of the effect is the same: the fundamental schism of the symbolic and the real becomes traumatically apparent as the relation between body and code fractures. As Dr. Louis Cataldie notes of Ervin’s case: You found that body in that house, “it must be my mom.” Well unfortunately that’s not true, and that’s not true for several reasons. There was a lot of drift and a lot of flood and people did drift in and out. Some people…ran to other houses (perhaps if you were in a one-story house you ran to a two-story house). Houses were moved everywhere, [every] which way. Also…there were no street signs left, so people couldn’t really tell me exactly what house they came out of. (Lee 2006) Initially, the code appears to function properly by designating the missing body as presumed alive, the zero as the guarantee, the nothing that gives life. However, the crypt remains shut, the lock is not picked, and so the sign suddenly has no body. One would imagine then that a series of numbers would satisfy this lack: 911 first, then the conversion of the zero, the little o, the hole, could be made into a one, a positive signifier that would then produce the body. But as we see, this in turn just makes things worse, as numbers and bodies no longer coincide; bodies and numbers alike float away in the floodwaters. Addresses are fluid in this system, no longer rigidly designating their proper place. At this juncture, the mother becomes undead, a body without a home. In order for it to be delivered back, it too has to be deciphered, decoded and decrypted before it can be properly interred.

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The Indelible Mark The spectacular racialized ressentiment exhibited in Spike Lee’s film is an expression of a desire to offer a counter-discourse to the hypertrophy of reason (as Adorno described the concentration camp [2001: 112-20]) as it organizes bodies in a logic of order exemplified in the notably less-than-systematic marking system of the X. The living dead, the undead and the dead together operate within, and are defined by, this order. If there is a point at which such an order is made manifest, it is revealed in the disordering that follows in the wake of disaster, as was the case with the bare life experienced by those herded into the Superdome. The disaster truly de-scribes, as it reinscribes and encrypts positions in the aftermath. As Tierney et al. point out, on the one hand the dead were made to disappear, in a manner that “came eerily to resemble the administration’s policy in Iraq, which prohibits the media from showing images of dead American soldiers” (2006: 73). This policy attempted to contain further leakage (for which the Army Corps of Engineers were blamed in the first place) by barring the image of death as out of place, as if, in a death-saturated media, such images matter. Rather the military draws attention to itself, against the principle of posse comitatus, as the thing out of place. On the other hand, the warrant for the military’s place is found in that same media, which “characterized victims as opportunistic looters and violent criminals…through the lens of civil unrest,” invoking “parallels between the conditions in this city and urban insurgency in Iraq” (Tierney et. al. 2006: 60). It is at this juncture where the intersection of the X, to reiterate Heidegger, “puts thinking under the claim of an originary command” (1958: 83). The hypertrophy of reason finds its expression in the martial order, which stands against the body that it is putatively nominated to defend, where (as was the case with Romero’s [1968] zombies in the film Night of the Living Dead) the force must be mustered to vanquish the undead who roam the no-man’s-land of the desecrated city. On August 26, 2005, just before the hurricane struck, Governor Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency in the state of Louisiana, breaching the levees avant la lettre to allow the influx of the military. Troops, however, showed up with more weapons than rescue equipment: “After the flood waters receded, police officers, federal agents, and troops patrolled the city and settled into a posture of undeclared martial law” (Garrett and Tetlow 2006: 143). The invitation of the military heralded the production of “a zone of absolute indeterminacy between anomie and law, in which the sphere of creatures and the juridical order are caught up in a single catastrophe” (Agamben 2005: 57). In the midst of the disaster, humanity loses its distinguishing features, reduced to bare life: physically alive but symbolically dead (and, hence, undead). Humans are carted around like cattle; they are enumerated alongside pets on the fronts of houses; and they are left to languish like beasts, or likened to zombies. 181

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It was in these circumstances that the X truly crossed out Being. Its power provoked, as one commentator noted, the desire to efface the effacement itself: “I just wanted to take paint with me and paint them over. I can’t imagine going home to my mom or dad’s, or to the house of someone I was looking for, and seeing it on the side of the house” (Lewis 2006). There is a strong desire to remove the stain, to disavow the Real and to undertake an infantile gesture to rid himself of gaze of the Other. However, such a disfigurement does not remove the stain; rather, it only makes it worse. It is this stain that marks the impossibility of reintegration or a return to normality after the crisis. In Victor Turner’s formulation, “a social drama begins with a normative ‘breach’ that produces a ‘schism’ in the community and proceeds through a period of ‘crisis,’ a phase of ‘redress,’ and finally to ‘reintegration’ if the redress is successful, or to continued schism if it is not” (in Hilgartner 2007: 155). This is the social science discourse of the fantasy of breach and healing, as the dramatistic version of events allows. This implies an “as if,” that some order preceded the crisis, that a breach can be closed again. The crux of the X is, however, that impossible kernel around which the experience of loss is concentrated, as if there was something there to lose. This is why it operates the way it does, as a sign into which fantasies of meaning are poured, even if, in the end, it means nothing at all. Acknowledgements Special thanks to Michael Follert for research assistance, as well as contributions to the initial conference presentation of this paper. Endnote 1.

Here the “X” refers to the mark that emergency response teams would spray-paint on houses and other buildings damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Accompanied by numbers and initials, the symbol enabled rescue workers to communicate the date they entered the homes, the type of hazards the building contained and the number of bodies found within (Halford et. al. 2006).

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10 Life and Death in New Orleans: Disaster Tours Imagined Stephen Svenson and Cory Ruf

On January 4, 2006, Gray Line International, a company that operates bus tours in cities across the United States and the world, began conducting sightseeing tours in New Orleans that offered tourists a glimpse of the areas of city worst afflicted by Hurricane Katrina. The tour, entitled “Hurricane Katrina: America’s Worst Catastrophe,” provided and still provides today the opportunity for tourists to “Drive past an actual levee that ‘breached’ and see the resulting devastation that displaced hundreds of thousands U.S. residents” (Mowbray 2006). Some observers decried the Gray Line tour and other similar tours as acts of voyeurism, claiming that the tours sensationalized people’s suffering. Others observed these tours as potentially helpful. As one activist stated, “there should be tours, but they should be linked with people who are displaced and coming up with a plan of action” (Reuters 2005). This quotation indicates the moral ambiguity surrounding the practice of disaster tourism as indeed many of the people who participate in disaster tours in New Orleans also worked as volunteers and/or donated money to the rebuilding effort. Dark Tourism, Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans In their book Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster, John Lennon and Malcolm Foley designate dark tourism as a qualitatively postmodern practice, a function of both late modern technological advances and the collapse of faith in the modernist notion that humanity is continually and inexorably improving its technologies, refining its systems of governance and expanding its capacity for reason (2007: 11). They argue that dark tourism is postmodern in that global telecommunication technologies play a 183

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major part in creating the initial interest, the objects of dark tourism themselves appear to introduce anxiety and doubt about the project of modernity, and the educative elements of sites are accompanied by elements of commodification and a commercial ethic which accepts that visitation is an opportunity to develop a tourism product. Companies such as Gray Line International highlight these educational purposes as their primary selling point, using recognizable artifacts to anchor their tourism products. In New Orleans, the Superdome, the broken levees and the Ninth Ward are used as markers to create widespread recognition of the disaster. The Superdome is known as the location where thousands of residents were left stranded with barely any food for days. The broken levees act as physical evidence of this tragedy while the Lower Ninth Ward itself is framed as “the place to see” in terms of disaster, destruction and also, now, reconstruction. In addition, these sights/sites undergo a process of sacralization through the repetitive play of images and stories in the mass media and Internet. Dean MacCannell states that sacralization involves a number of processes, which include naming the site “The Disaster of New Orleans;” framing and elevating the site, for example, repetitively highlighting the death and destruction that took place; enshrinement, a process that made the Superdome into a renowned artifact; mechanical reproduction of the sacred object, for example, T-shirts that state, “I’ve seen the destruction of New Orleans;” and finally, the social reproduction of new sites, such as Gray Line International Sightseeing Tours offering “Hurricane Katrina: America’s Greatest Catastrophe” tours instead of, or in addition to, the typical French Quarter or cemetery tours (qtd. in Urry 2002: 10). On account of the fact that Katrina tore through such a historically important section of the United States and claimed the lives of so many citizens, it was not unusual that the American media focused so much attention on the event. Television stations such as WWL (New Orleans), WLOX (Biloxi), as well as larger media conglomerates like NBC and CNN, all received recognition in the form of Peabody awards for their around-the-clock coverage of the storm and its horrifying aftermath (Bluestein 2006). Disturbingly real depictions of the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians who weathered the storm bombarded North America’s television screens for months after the disaster. These media sources also helped authenticate sites such as the Superdome, the breached levees and the Ninth Ward as they became familiar backdrops to the relentless portrayals of human carnage. These sites now act as forces that impel dark tourists to New Orleans. For Lennon and Foley, sites that are the object of dark tourism produce doubt or anxiety about the project of modernism (2007: 11). They suggest that the anxiety that sites of disaster evoke is postmodern in the sense that they call into question the hallmark developments of modernism, high technology and liberal democracy, and expose that modernism cannot sufficiently protect humans from natural disasters, political violence and other social unrest (Lennon and Foley 2007: 21). This commodification of anxiety would appear to be a defining characteristic of dark tourism.

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Anxiety, Death and Dark Tourism Lennon and Foley’s definition of dark tourism omits the existential questions that are germane to human preoccupation with death and, by extension, to the attraction of dark tourism. Death is the object of so much human fascination precisely because it is not fully knowable to people who have not experienced it. Those who have died cannot share their experiences with the living, and the living cannot make any verifiable assertion that one can have consciousness after one’s physical death. Human fascination with death is exemplified by the myriad works of literature, visual art and music that attempt to explain death’s enigmatic qualities. Religious doctrines instruct devotees on how to live a moral life in order to secure residency in purportedly blissful afterlives. These artifacts, though, are mere approximations of how it is to die: a function of the bewilderment of the living, not the retrospection of the dead. Zygmunt Bauman (2003) comments that one can only interpret what it means to die from observing the death of others. Even for the most sensitive artists and the most studied theologians, what significance one derives from the death of others is significantly a function of the “creative contribution of the subject’s imaginative powers” (Bauman 2003: 4). Pilgrimage to the sites of catastrophic death is not a new phenomenon. Pilgrims for centuries have congregated at these sites to memorialize the deaths of ancestors. As Lennon and Foley note, sites of violent death and natural disaster hold substantial “religious or ideological significance, which transcends the event itself to provide meaning to a group of people” (2007: 3). In the context of postmodernity, the process of applying significance to a site of mass death, due extensively to the reach of mass media and the Internet as has been outlined, happens well before the area has recovered from the catastrophe. However, it is typical to react to media reportage with a mild, generalized cynicism that is a general symptom of postmodernity (Urry 2002: 79). There is a strong interest in seeing raw and fresh wounds of disaster with one’s own eyes, to make one’s own meanings out of disaster, and ultimately, to satisfy one’s curiosity about the condition of death, and through some practices resist the commodification of anxiety that dark tourism is predicated on. Consequently, it has become a common practice to visit sites of death and disaster long before local actors have completed the rebuilding process. Absent from Lennon and Foley’s work are those examples of tourism to regions still rebuilding from recent disasters. Their discussion focuses almost exclusively on museums, monuments, battlefields and other exhibits that memorialize and interpret disasters (mostly catastrophic acts of violence) that occurred decades before and show no direct physical evidence of destruction or loss of life. And though Lennon and Foley rightly identify dark tourism as a postmodern practice, they fail to identify how the postmodern paradigm allows for scholars to theorize dark tourism as an object of pleasure or self-fulfillment. 185

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Sociologist John Urry notes that the postmodern paradigm allows for tourists to view any site, product or experience as an object of tourism from which one can derive pleasure, awe or titillation (2002: 91). Dark tourism, the viewing of disaster and death as the object of tourism, is perhaps the most radical extension of the notion that any location, site or event is a valid object of tourism—viewing sites that are heavily associated with morbidity are not ostensibly relaxing or fun. Tourists are not drawn to sites of calamitous death exclusively to memorialize the extensive loss of life—tourists are drawn to these locations for a variety of personal motivations. Given the existence of the Gray Line Katrina tour and other similar tours, there is an obvious appeal for tourists to view sites that create a narrative of the destruction that Katrina wreaked upon New Orleans. In some cases, remnants of the destruction (debris and dilapidated, abandoned houses) are still visible in the Lower Ninth Ward; in others, tour guides indicate how a site that, at present, shows no remnants of the trauma that occurred there, was the location of significant loss of life, violence or other human suffering. Lennon and Foley’s notion of dark tourism can only in part account for the large numbers of people from the United States, Canada, Europe, Mexico and Central America who have gone and continue to go to New Orleans not only to view the sites of disaster and destruction but also to lend a hand, or in the case of Mexican nationals, find employment.1 Where postmodern tourism is one answer here, this is only part of the social imaginary of disaster tourism. A stronger version of disaster tourism demonstrates how the commodification of anxiety is in fact resisted and that these journeys are often rooted in different and sometimes contradictory motives that are in and of themselves productive of relation to anxiety. We want to go beyond a postmodern analysis that would reduce the phenomenon to mere consumerism. What may appear as instances of disaster tourism and the disaster tourist, à la Lennon and Foley, gloss a more complex phenomenon, one that is accessible through an explication of the social imaginary that grounds this movement of people to participate in a more active way in the life of an area recovering from disaster. In this case, the imaginary we have constructed provides a sketch of some of the interpretive structure available to the “disaster” tourist, a structure composed of secular and religious theodicies and the imaginaries of tourism and pilgrimage. Theodicies: Secular and Religious Underlying the movement of people to view the disaster that Hurricane Katrina caused and to participate in rebuilding efforts were a set of secular and religious theodicies that imparted understanding and prescribed culpability for the catastrophic event. There were two main related theodic discourses that emerged from Christian America. Both posit a world where human beings exercise free will and natural and moral evil is needed to encourage moral and spiritual development. This emphasis on “development” 186

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and its relation to external rewards and punishment is implicit in the term “theodicy,” which combines the Greek words for god and justice. The main theodic solution to the problem of evil, most prevalent in the media at the time (and that might be considered “predictably” American), concerned the notion that Hurricane Katrina was sent by God as punishment for the sins of the people of America and in particular New Orleans.2 The other theodicy represented in the media coverage and rhetoric of religious leaders referenced the idea that from the tragedy of the hurricane emerges an opportunity to demonstrate God’s glory. This framing of the event allowed people to orient to Katrina as part of the ongoing story of humanity’s overcoming of suffering, where the natural evil of Katrina is seen in terms of John Hick’s (1978; 1983) theodicy, inspired by the Church Father Irenaeus and described in John Keats’ phrase, “the vale of soul making.”3 Thus for more liberal Christians, those likely animated by an Irenaean interpretation of Katrina, the hurricane presented an opportunity to form the soul through demonstrating the virtues of “trust (faith), generosity, kindness, the agape aspect of love, prudence, unselfishness” (Hick 1983: 48). Hick’s “vale of soul making” theodicy is more difficult to detect in the mainstream reporting on Hurricane Katrina, but it is strongly represented in the Christian press and in interviews with mission tourists and volunteer tourists.

Secular theodicies also arose where blame was attached to the U.S. government for its inaction with regard to repairing the levees and for failing to cut carbon emissions, with many people linking Hurricane Katrina to global warming, a claim made by environmentalists. Quoting popular fiction writer Michael Crichton, one commentator observed that the environmentalist constructs nature as an Eden that humankind gradually befouls, where nature moves “from a state of grace, to a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result from eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all” (Goldenberg 2005). This interpretation mirrors the punishment theodicy and perhaps demonstrates how deeply theodicies in general, and the punishment theodicy in particular, are embedded in the modern Western social imaginary. Secular theodicies also provided for the logic of service, placing blame for the devastation squarely on the shoulders of the government and activating people’s interest in helping through the use of social justice frames.4 One volunteer we interviewed articulates the irrelevance of theodic motivation for volunteering: So I think it kind of flips it around. And it’s not a matter, you know of… bad things happen. Things happen, good things and bad things happen. But I think the wonderful thing that really happens is people who have faith or people who believe in the goodness of people and want to help, whether they are doing it under the banner of an organized religion or whether they are doing it under the banner of being an atheist that believes in doing good things towards fellow man. People do good things 187

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and yet when these bad things happen, what a tremendous opportunity for people to step up and show their faith in God or in God’s ways or just to be able to demonstrate their desire to help, their desire to be good. Unlike this volunteer, those on the ground receiving aid did make a distinction with regard to motivation. Different theodicies, for the administrator of a post-Katrina Christian relief camp we interviewed, were exemplified in talk of the type of visitor that came to help out. She stated, “There are two kinds of people who come down here to help out. There are those that come down here shakin’ their fingers at us, and there are those that come down here to serve. I prefer the ones that come down here to serve.” Mission and the Imaginary of Pilgrimage As we have outlined, Hurricane Katrina brought into play religious and secular theodicies which functioned to provide meaning structures, assign culpability and in some way inform people how to act. Many observers were surprised that while State and National organizations were relatively slow to act in addressing Hurricane Katrina, faithbased organizations acted immediately to provide living space for victims, human power for clean up and rebuilding, and large amounts of funding. A tremendous flow of volunteer resources made its way to the Gulf Coast in the weeks and months after Hurricane Katrina. Christian and secular volunteers were propelled to go beyond monetary donations and to donate their skills, time, and labor to the task of cleaning up and rebuilding the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, to undertake what, in Christian terms, is a mission, a form of pilgrimage. The modern structure of mission mirrors the structure of modern pilgrimage. For anthropologist Victor Turner, modern pilgrimages, “unlike the mindless collective migrations familiar in ancient and medieval times, are voluntary and individual. Each is a personal act, following a personal decision and resulting in a wide range of significant personal experience” (1973: 198; emphasis ours).5 However, this is not the complete story of modern pilgrimage, as in the case of mission tourism, where pilgrimage reasserts some of its collective “medieval” ritual function. Turner and Turner emphasize that modern pilgrims are “offered liberation from profane social structures…in order to intensify the pilgrim’s attachment to his own religion” (1978: 9). Medieval forms of pilgrimage emphasized the collectivity: participants went on the pilgrimage as representatives of a place-bound group, which reinforced and strengthened the community of origin. The same can be said somewhat of mission tourism to the post-Katrina Gulf Coast. Church members travel to the Gulf Coast as a group and as representatives of the church that sponsors them. They take part in a liminal experience—liberation from the structures of the church and everyday life. Upon returning, the group shares their experiences with the church in a ritual of return. 188

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Hurricane Katrina presented the Christian, particularly one oriented to the Irenaean theodicy, with an ideal opportunity for spiritual growth and increased attachment to the Christian religion through engaging two elements that are central to the faith: the idea of worshipping God through service to one’s fellows and personal development. The focus on these two elements in the liminal environment that the post-Katrina Gulf Coast provided resonates with Edith and Victor Turner’s description of the pilgrim as “one who divests himself of the mundane concomitants of religion—which become entangled with its practice in the local situation—to confront, in a special ‘far’ milieu, the basic elements and structures of his faith in their unshielded virgin radiance” (1978: 15). In fact, mission trips have always had an affinity with both pilgrimage and tourism in that there is a movement to a liminal space, a time period spent there and then a reintegration into the original milieu. Tourist travel structurally resembles this ritual process of separation, liminality and reintegration. We want to go on now to explore how the imagining of mission as pilgrimage both converges with and diverges from imaginings of tourism and illustrate the tensions that may emerge for the social actor. The Imaginary of Tourism Modern tourism has been characterized negatively as superficial (Boorstin 1961) and nihilistic (McHugh et al. 1974) or, in more positive language, as a quest for authenticity (MacCannell 1976) or as a sacred journey (Graburn 1977). For MacCannell and Graburn, the tourist is the modern pilgrim. For those tourists oriented to notions of authenticity, post-Katrina New Orleans in particular was and is a perfect place to encounter Otherness in the chaos that had been wrought, with numerous pilgrimage sites available and taking on an added aura of authenticity due to the cataclysm. Ample opportunity was also present for those who wished to test themselves in this heroic landscape. A notion of tourist pleasure is for the most part missing from the analysis of tourism by MacCannell and Graburn, a situation that John Urry seeks to remedy in his analysis of tourism. For John Urry (2002: 3), tourists derive pleasure from viewing extraordinary sights/ sites that they would not encounter in everyday life; this orientation towards viewing is “the tourist gaze.” Imagined pleasures are intimately tied to the construction of the gaze. Places are chosen to be gazed upon because there is anticipation, especially through daydreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures, either on a different scale or involving different senses from those customarily encountered. Such anticipation is constructed and sustained through a variety of non-tourist practices, such as film, TV, literature, magazines, records, and videos, which construct and reinforce that gaze. While the quest for authenticity and the pursuit of pleasure may seem like contradictory motivations and are often partitioned by theorists such as MacCannell, they are not mutually exclusive. Cohen (1979), in his examination of the phenomenological modes 189

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of tourist experiences, makes room in the tourist imaginary for essentially all tourist experience and motivations. His modes of touristic experiences are ranked “so that they span the spectrum between the experience of the traveller in pursuit of ‘mere’ pleasure in the strange and the novel, to that of the modern pilgrim in quest for meaning at somebody else’s centre” (Cohen 1979: 180). These poles are in some ways analogous to those of Urry’s tourist that emphasizes the consumption of pleasure and MacCannell’s conception of the tourist as seeking the “authentic.” What is noteworthy about Cohen’s typology is that he acknowledges that the tourist can, in fact, inhabit more than one mode on a trip, or that different trips can be undertaken with different modes. Cohen’s typology shows the multiple dimensions of tourism experience that begin to indicate the complexity of the tourist imaginary. Given the overwhelming nature of Cohen’s claim of continuum, returning to more basic binary distinctions can help restore some footing here. Urry (2002: 12) demonstrates this approach when he states that “tourism results from the basic binary division between the ordinary/everyday and the extraordinary.” This attention to the extraordinary highlights the ways in which volunteering after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was imagined with regard to this binary. Certainly, in the case of relief activities, the promise of a once-in-a-lifetime, extraordinary experience was recognized as something that could capture people’s imagination and move them to action. Appeals for volunteers came across all kinds of media, particularly television. More intimate and personal requests for aid were communicated through interpersonal connections and affiliations with organizations like churches, through email. One such example references Biblical scripture in its appeal to volunteers: Dear Stephen, “In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” Matthew 5:16 The people of Louisiana and Mississippi love volunteers! It’s common knowledge down here that the faith-based community has responded in an extraordinary way to help the people who survived Hurricane Katrina. (Buss 2009) While notions of mission and service are overt in the appeals, particularly those that are broadcast through churches, notions of tourism are also used, referencing the tourist imaginary. Some of these appeals explicitly used touristic values as a way of enticing volunteers to come and help out. One such example comes from an email forwarded by a friend who is part of a Christian home-schoolers’ network: Please pass this information along to others. Even if one persons comes to volunteer it helps. It has been 9 months and it sitll [sic] looks like the hurricane hit yesterday. The people in Cameron parish are good, 190

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hardworking people. The Gulf coast is their home. Many of these families have been here through the generations. Their income comes from gulf coast industries. The media CANNOT portray just how much was destroyed. Come see it for yourself. It is tremendous. On the news hurricane katrina is blasted over and over. Dont let the people of Cameron Parish be forgotten. They need our help. Vacation season is upon us. Perhaps you could come down to Cameron parish and have a once-in-a-lifetime vacation you wont ever forget. (Varney 2006, sic) This focus on experiencing the extraordinary, the “once-in-a-lifetime,” has become an increasing preoccupation of Western moderns. Postmodern Pleasures of Disaster Tourism Urry describes tourism as a late-modern social development in which Western subjects travel to look upon extraordinary sites in “places [that] are chosen to be gazed upon because there is anticipation, especially through daydream and fantasy, of intense pleasures, either on a different scale or involving different senses than those customarily encountered” (2002: 3). Sites of destruction or violence do not connote the light-hearted, hedonistic “fun” that is typically associated with vacationing. However, sites that are objects of dark tourism are extraordinary examples of events of destruction or persistent human suffering that do not normally figure into the daily experience of the constituents of the Western middle-class. Hence, we can use Urry’s definition of tourism to explain the appeal of visiting sites of disaster: pleasure may be derived both from the novelty of observing sites of exceptional suffering (suffering that is abnormal in its intensity and/or its scale) and the intensity of emotion that those sites tend to inspire. Urry notes that the escalating influence of electronic media on Western society has significantly influenced tourist behavior. Like Lennon and Foley, he identifies how electronic media are influential venues for making tourists aware of what destinations one could possibly visit. Urry theorizes that persistent exposure to shocking or fantastical images through visual media has radically altered how individuals experience everyday life and hence has shifted the types of experiences from which tourists seek to derive pleasure. Urry argues that this relentless exposure to “visual media…has resulted in a massive upward shift in the level of what is ‘ordinary’ and hence what people view as ‘extraordinary’” (2002: 92). Traditional tourist destinations do not provide sufficient stimulation or “thrill” for generations of viewers who were weaned on video games, violent films and twentyfour hour cable news—experiences that, for much of the North American middle-class, have become constitutive of “everyday living.” Hence, media cause tourists to seek out increasingly startling and immersing experiences to be the objects of sightseeing. 191

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In our hyper-mediatized age, news media communicate exposé images of violent and natural disasters often before the crisis has abated, before any renewal has occurred. These images “offer sensory impressions and convey emotions that heighten the mediated confrontation with death and destruction” (Bates and Ahmed 2007: 189, 191). Television networks, newspapers and Internet news outlets featured coverage of Hurricane Katrina that provided harrowing images of the windstorm, the flooding and the physical destruction that resulted from the August 29, 2005 hurricane. Obviously, images of newly homeless New Orleans residents, flooded homes and wind-stripped buildings would incite strong emotions for viewers, particularly because they depicted a real natural disaster in the United States. The reporting, particularly in the initial hours and days after the Hurricane’s touchdown, often presented explicit images of physical destruction and human suffering without providing contextual information to ground the interpretation of the viewer (Bates and Ahmed 2007: 192). The articulation of these images constructs a hierarchical relationship between the subject/viewer (who is presumably watching from a safe location and thus occupies a privileged position) and the object/victim. The lack of deep, subtle explanation of the historical context of the specificity of the situation, and the absence of the locals’ testimonies, function to dehumanize the victims (Bates and Ahmed 2007: 192, 198). The discourse surrounding disaster tourism to New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward reflects the cynicism towards viewing “crass,” decontextualized reportage of Hurricane Katrina. A sign visible in front of the non-profit organization Common Ground Relief ’s operations houses admonishes tourists for voyeuristically peering out of bus and car windows to observe the remnants of destruction: “Tourist: Shame On You, Driving By Without Stopping, Paying To See My Pain. 1600+ died here” (Fig. 10.1). This “in your face” statement quite clearly articulates the tension surrounding the image of the tourist, who can be imagined on one hand as “shameful” in their behavior, while at the same time holding out the possibility of being converted into a different kind of tourist, one that serves the interests of the community. The sign implies that the tourist is committing a voyeuristic, exploitative act by viewing the wounds of the Lower Ninth Ward without contributing to its redevelopment or, at the very least, having a dialogue with residents and local volunteers. The discourse reflects that there are also more “authentic,” productive and humane ways to experience post-Katrina New Orleans and that “disaster” tourism is an ethically contested terrain. Tourist activity in the postmodern era is multifarious, consisting of much more than the sightseeing and beach vacations that represent two of the most conventional models of Western tourist practices. To an increasing lot of travelers, these conventional forms represent excessively commercial, “inauthentic” cultural practices. Consequently, significant numbers of Western vacationers have sought “alternative” tourist experiences to avoid or symbolically reject conventional tourism. They seek vacations that offer deep self-reflection, interaction with a community of others (locals or other tourists) and the 192

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Fig. 10.1. “Shame On YOU.” Photo credit: Rita Tourkova.

opportunity to undertake volunteer work in underprivileged communities located at or surrounding their destination. Hence, for many tourists, it is simply not satisfying enough to gaze upon sites of death and destruction; sites of natural disaster draw tourists looking to aid in the redevelopment process. Germane to our discussion is the nascent form of volunteer tourism. The descriptor “volunteer tourist” refers to an individual “who, for various reasons, volunteers in an organized way to undertake holidays that might involve the aiding or alleviating the material poverty of some groups in society, the restoration of certain environments, or research into aspects of society or environment” (Wearing 2001: 1). Volunteer holidays range from a few days to many months in duration and draw participants from diverse segments of the population. Volunteers to sites of disasters or communities that suffer enduring hardship include health care practitioners, lawyers, social workers, engineers, 193

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skilled and unskilled laborers, and students. Participants often view volunteer tourism as a high-minded or noble form of travel when contrasted to allegedly more consumptive, diversionary forms of conventional tourism (Mustonen 2005: 164). Volunteer tourist activities regularly qualify as instantiations of dark tourism. Volunteer tourists frequent locations that have experienced natural disasters or suffer deprivation—horrific occurrences that are volunteer tourism’s raisons d’être. Volunteer tourists, who often work side-by-side with local community-based organizations, are granted privileged access to communities that have suffered hardships. Consequently, a volunteer tourist’s exposure to the physical and social remnants of disaster is more immersive and more explicit than that of tourists who have come only to gaze upon poverty or destruction. It may be that, for some, volunteering may simply be an extension of middle class noblesse oblige, and “privileged access” is simply an extension of a kind of status game wherein the tourist parlays the unique “authentic” experience into a kind of cultural capital. These are distinct possibilities of pleasure in a context that implies a more self-serving orientation to volunteering that we shall return to later. It is counterintuitive to regard unpaid, physically strenuous voluntary work as an appealing leisure activity. Urry, through his explication of the relationship between postmodernity and tourism, provides scholarly insight into how we can conceptualize volunteer tourism as both act of labor and a source of pleasure. Urry describes the process of dedifferentiation, the blending of formerly discrete societal categories, a key tenet of postmodern theory: “Postmodernism involves a dissolving of the boundaries, not only between high and low cultures, but also between different cultural forms, such as tourism, art, education, photography, television, music, sport, shopping and architecture” (2002: 74). Pertinent to our discussion is the breaking down of the conceptual binaries between work and play, between daily life and tourism. Urry’s conception of tourist pleasure assumes a binary between a tedious daily life and the out-of-the-ordinary pleasures that one consumes (or aims to consume) on vacation. It has evolved from the notion that menial labor, whether manual or bureaucratic, dominates people’s quotidian activities— by implication, the doldrums of daily life cause workers to want to engage in relaxation, sightseeing and diversionary play in beautiful or fascinating environments. However, this conceptual model of a quotidian life—one of physically grueling work punctuated by rejuvenating holidays—is dependent on the outmoded class structure of the Industrial West. As a result of the West’s post-WWII transformation from an industrial economy to a post-Fordist one, fewer workers occupy blue-collar jobs. Much of the North American workforce, from salaried professionals to minimum-wage laborers, fills a diverse array of service sector jobs. Doing manual labor in a disaster zone, for many, provides the novelty that tourists allegedly crave. In one sense, volunteer tourism is a function of the aspect of postmodernity that deems any activity as a potential object of tourist fancy. However, we must also consider volunteer tourism, and dark tourism generally, as a reaction to postmodernity. It represents a 194

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concerted effort to rectify the existential angst individuals suffer as a result of the collapse of the popular belief in objective, enduring moral truth. Zygmunt Bauman dedicates his Intimations of Postmodernity to describing the postmodern “state of mind,” a state of mind that is, as Bauman laments, “marked above all by its all-deriding, all-eroding, all-dissolving destructiveness” (1992: viii). However, unlike modernity, postmodernity is not characterized by a collective move to erect and universalize social structures and moral philosophies to fill the void created by the dissolution of premodern mindsets (Bauman 1992: ix). Postmodernism perpetuates this process of critical deconstruction, putting into question the human ability to ascertain reason and by extension invalidates Modernist grand narratives, ontologies that purport to explain the totality of human social relations. The resulting discursive environment features a noisy plurality of ideologies and lifestyles, no one occupying a position of absolute authority. The condition of generalized cynicism causes citizens of Western democracies to be dubious of governing institutions, like Church and State; accordingly, states less often make pronouncements on how to live a moral life. “With societies (institutionalized as nation-states) losing interest in the promotion of cultural uniformity and renouncing their role as spokesmen of universal reason, agents face ethical confusion and lack of clarity of moral choices as a permanent condition” (Bauman 1992: xxii). Thus, secular agents are left to fashion individualized codes of ethics, their senses of morality having no ostensible basis in any natural law. This moral indeterminacy, Bauman writes, puts individuals in a state of solipsistic fear that they must resolve on their own (1992: xviii). We can conceptualize volunteer tourism as an attempt to allay the existential vertigo of the postmodern “state of mind” and a site for volunteers to experience the moral fulfillment and interpersonal connectedness that is allegedly absent from everyday life. Like premodern pilgrimage, it is an instantiation of travel to a location that is the object of collective meaning-making, and it acts as a site for self-reflection. Volunteer tourists have myriad motivations for serving devastated communities; often, the individual participant has several reasons for volunteering. Volunteers often claim that a humanitarian impulse catalyzed their desire to help out in poor or disasterstricken areas. In the context of New Orleans, sentiments of sympathy for those people who have suffered as a result of Hurricane Katrina would appear to have played an instrumental role in compelling people to volunteer. The initial, striking media images of New Orleans’ ravaged communities no doubt aroused feelings of profound sorrow and, consequently, sympathy for the victims in receptive viewers—enough so that many of them sought to assist in the relief effort that occurred in the days, weeks and months following Hurricane Katrina. However, we have argued that sympathy is not a strong motivation for tourists to volunteer in poor or under-serviced areas and that we cannot deem such activity to be purely altruistic. Our interviewees’ claims about their motivations for volunteering 195

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suggest that individuals seldom partake in volunteer tourism for purely disinterested purposes. Consistent with the academic discourse surrounding volunteer tourism, people narrate their volunteer experiences as being heavily related, even instrumental, to their processes of self-development and self-actualization (Mustonen 2005: 170). We spoke at length with one volunteer who claimed that her sympathy for the victims of Hurricane Katrina was the catalytic motivation for her to travel from Illinois to New Orleans to aid in the relief effort. She stated that her desire to help the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward was the deciding factor that compelled her to volunteer in New Orleans. However, she implied that her volunteering stint in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward gave her ample opportunity for self-reflection. “Personally, it’s my personal development that keeps me down here. I’ve been working on some stuff for about nine months and that’s shifted too… I came down to help people… And I’m doing that…but I also found that there was stuff I needed to work on. So I’ve been really doing that. So that’s been a real focus for me.” The theme of personal development and healing was an oft-repeated mantra among the mission tourists and volunteer tourists we interviewed, indicating a fundamentally different relation to disaster than that imagined by Lennon and Foley’s dark tourism. For many of these individuals, it appeared that everyday life was the catastrophe and somehow, paradoxically, the opportunity to do something meaningful provided the motivation for the journey to the Lower Ninth Ward. Another volunteer underscores this point when describing the deep issue that the volunteer journey was helping her to engage: Essentially the issue is worthlessness and being worthy as a person and if you are never forced to depend on yourself where do you develop that from? You know? And so of course you know of course when you’re at home you can still develop that. But for me I knew that’s what I needed to do, to force myself into a place where that kind of healing can begin. So that’s where this has been kind of a process of breaking down all the barriers, kind of seeing what’s really going on inside, getting to the core…and then once you see that core it’s like wow. Wow. This has been affecting my life for however long like 27 years. So now I can actually build from this and build out and be whole and be healthy…and it’s mine. In addition to benefiting the local community, our interviewees were clear that they participated in the rebuilding of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward for the purposes of their own individual self development and/or spiritual healing. Community development of a different source was also realized by church volunteers. The impact on faith communities, particularly those located in the Northern United States is evident. As one church member stated, “It’s a, you know, it’s, it’s really helped pull us 196

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together, we’re a, we’re, we have not just, within our own congregation we have all the, when we come down here, we, we have all these experiences together and then, so a silly one, we go back, we all hug each other now up North. [laughter] Sounds funny.” Ironically, the community being served most strongly by this church’s participation is not the Lower Ninth Ward but the church community itself. The ward’s residents have long been dispersed, and for a variety of reasons and despite strong efforts, have not returned in the numbers imagined, while northern congregations have found new life in the celebration of death that defines the volunteer’s Lower Ninth Ward. The Lower Ninth Ward continues to languish for lack of infrastructure and the return of its former residents, while the volunteer opportunity of the Katrina disaster provides an opportunity for northern congregations to flourish. Conclusion Paradoxically, a dark tourism that incorporates volunteer tourism and mission tourism in its understanding demonstrates that it is not the commodification of death and disaster that indicates anxiety over the project of modernity. Rather, it is the fractured postmodern character of everyday life that gives death and disaster their poignancy as opportunities to reassert the modernist promise. The disaster tours that sprung up after Hurricane Katrina, in their many versions, provide an exemplary case of the “grey zone” of dark tourism. Discourses around tourism and the tourist (the tourist as healer vs. defiler, tourism as rejuvenator vs. destroyer), as they surface in the mass media and in interviews with residents and visitors (tourists, activists, wanderers, pilgrims) to the Lower Ninth Ward, reflect age-old ethical tensions over the place of pleasure and its relation to health and death in the city. The devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the responses of “dark tourists” speak not just to a fascination with death but to hopes and dreams of healing, rejuvenation and reconciliation with the project of modernity. Volunteer tourism and mission tourism, as well as more conventional “disaster” tourism in post-Katrina New Orleans, in some way exemplify the need for the actors and communities to come to terms with a catastrophic breach not necessarily originating in the devastation of the City. Endnotes 1.

Though this particular group is not a focus of this paper, it is important to note that many Mexican and Central American workers traveled to New Orleans after the floods ebbed in search of employment. See Quinones (2006).

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2.

Michael Eric Dyson (2006) has also written on the topic of theodicy in relation to hurricane Katrina but focuses on "black faith" in his explication of punitive, attributive and redistributive theodicies in order to argue for the reestablishment of black neighborhoods. Here we refer to theodicies in order to develop them as resources for the volunteer tourist.

3.

For Irenaeus and Keats, see their passages in Larrimore (2000: 28–34, 248–50).

4.

Arlinghaus (2006) details some of these frames.

5.

The phrase "mindless collective migrations" employed by Turner, though strong, we believe reflects Turner's need to distinguish what he felt was the more reflexive character of modern life from that of medieval times.

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11 Hope and Resignation in Medical Care: When Doctors Go to Court to Terminate Patient Treatment Diego Llovet

Introduction: The Moral Order of Medicine For common sense, there may be some question of whether “being sick” constitutes a social role at all—isn’t it simply a state of fact, a “condition”? Things are not so simple as this. The test is the existence of a set of institutionalized expectations and the corresponding sentiments and sanctions. (Parsons 1951: 436) In the essay from which the above passage is taken, American sociologist Talcott Parsons suggests that the practice of medicine is as much about organizing and regulating the relations and exchanges that take place among the individuals involved as it is about fighting disease and restoring health. Doctors, patients, relatives, nurses, orderlies and other people come together in the pursuit of health and well-being and, in so doing, pose a practical problem of social order that medicine needs to solve. The question is thus asked: in what manner should these individuals interact with each other? What are the standards of ideal conduct that define a “good” patient or a “good” doctor? Parsons suggests that medicine solves this organizational problem by defining, teaching and enforcing the expectations that it has of participants—that is, by assigning them a role that they will need to perform. Doctors, for example, are told to avoid developing emotional attachments to patients, while patients are taught to seek professional help and to want to get better when ill. Like any other social institution, medicine formulates hierarchies, classifications, prescriptions and prohibitions that create a normative environment for those who are part of it. 201

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In this chapter, I propose to show how this body of mostly unwritten rules is constructed and enforced in contemporary medical practice, with particular reference to the area of end-of-life decision-making and the care of the dying patient. Modern medicine uses the category of the dying patient as a way of telling the difference between patients who can and those who cannot be rescued from their illnesses, between those who are curable and those who are not and will die as a consequence within a certain period of time. Typically, medicine finds its “dying” candidates among certain geriatric patients, the terminally ill (e.g., some types of cancer) and patients in intensive care (e.g., head trauma victims). My argument is that, in medicine’s description of the proper care of dying patients, it is possible to find a version of good medical citizenship that applies to doctors and patients alike. For my analysis, I have chosen to focus on how medicine deals with dying patients in a hospital setting in contemporary Canada (as opposed to, say, how people die at home, at the hospice or on the battlefield). In particular, I have selected five cases from the province of Ontario in which patients and their families disagreed with and fought the opinion of the attending physicians that the patients were “dying” and that nothing else could be done to save their lives. These patients and their families demanded that doctors do everything in their power to continue treating the patients. In some cases, the resistance to being labeled “a dying person” reached the court system to become a legal case. This typically happened when doctors sought to adjust, in disagreement with the patient’s family, medical treatment to the new status of the patient. This adjustment may have consisted of the withdrawal of treatment (such as removing a ventilator assisting the patient to breathe) and/or the withholding of life-saving measures during a medical emergency (such as not performing resuscitation in the event of cardio-respiratory arrest, also known as giving a “do not resuscitate order”). The cases thus pit doctors against patients and their families. From the point of view of medicine, these cases exemplify the irrationality and denial that the announcement of impending death (our own or that of a loved one) can produce in patients and families. And medicine may be right about the imminence of death in many or most cases, but this is not how I will treat the five cases. Instead, they are interesting for methodological reasons. According to David Sudnow (1967), author of a key study on modern death and dying in America, medical statements declaring a patient to be “dying” are contingent on the application of professionally relevant methods of analysis and interpretation of the patient’s condition that necessarily take into account the state of medical research and science as well as the organizational requirements of hospitals and other health care settings. In other words, the label applied to the dying patient is the product of decisions that reflect assumptions, ideas and values governing medical practice. Under ideal conditions for medicine, physicians decide that a patient is dying and the patient’s family accepts that he or she needs to be allowed to die. In the five cases under study, contrarily, the relatives’ rejection of the label forces medicine to explain in detail why it thinks families need to let go. The families force medicine to explain its own moral order, 202

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how it normally sees the patient, the medical profession and the pursuit of health and wellbeing. I will bring to view these explanations by looking at transcripts of legal hearings conducted before the Ontario Consent and Capacity Board, an independent organization created by the provincial government where doctors can make their case (when facing opposition from the patient’s relatives) that the patient needs to be allowed to die. This method of analysis that brings to view the moral order of social interaction by looking at its exception (in this case the dying patient who refuses to discharge their duty to die) has deep roots in social theory and can be found in different formulations in Georg Simmel’s notion of the stranger (1950), Harold Garfinkel’s notion of the breaching experiment (1967) and Alan Blum’s notion of the ethical collision (2003). Common to these three forms of theorizing is the requirement to identify a “native informant” who has detailed knowledge of the local culture and the norms that apply to it. The analyst must also look for situations in which this native informant is forced to verbalize and make explicit their version of the normative order. Typically, legislators make good informants and Parliaments make good sites in which the informant reveals the normative order of society by imagining and describing the deviant and the criminal. In this case, Ontario’s medical profession will play the role of native informant and legislator: it will be seen talking about how those patients who refuse to die are in fact in violation of a fundamental value. The next section demonstrates how the legal and institutional organization of medicine in Ontario creates a space where medical practitioners can convene, like legislators in a Parliament, to discuss pressing moral infractions and the best ways to deal with them. In other words, it is the forum in which medicine constitutes itself as a mechanism of repression. Historically, the cases studied here are important because they bring to view a new medical opinion: namely, that death is a natural and acceptable part of any person’s biography and that doctors ought to know the circumstances in which it is best not to intervene to save or prolong the life of a patient who is at risk of death, even when it would be possible to do so. This idea is radically different from ideas that doctors had some time ago, when physicians were expected always to do everything in their power to save and prolong a patient’s life. In the 1970s and 1980s, cases like those of Karen Quinlan pitted families against doctors because families did not want medical treatment for their loved ones, whom they saw as having no hope of recovery. Medicine, at the time, refused to stop treatment and kept these patients alive, sometimes for years. As a response, families then organized the “right to die” movement. Today, medicine seems to have appropriated the ethos of this movement as a standard of good medical practice. This is a big change: medicine has gone from saying that life is always in the patient’s best interest to saying that death may sometimes be in the patient’s best interest. This, however, does not mean that medicine today is no longer committed to the preservation of human life. If anything, the cases under study demonstrate the strength and the currency of this commitment. That is, the change is not in the values of medicine 203

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but the ways and methods in which these values are demonstrated and enforced. In the past, medicine proved its “love of life” in a black-and-white manner by plainly refusing to let go of the patient. Today, with medicine’s renunciation of the rigid equations of life equals good and death equals bad, the sanctity of life is affirmed in much subtler ways. The method today is to define certain cases as “exceptions” or “emergencies” (Agamben 1998: 2005), which allows medical practitioners, “this time only” and “given extenuating circumstances,” to exempt themselves from their professionally mandated obligation to save the life of the patient. With the assistance of the law and the state, medicine today institutionalizes the breach of its own ethical commitments. In so doing, it creates a (small but meaningful) space in professional practice in which the injunction to let die becomes a celebration of medicine’s commitment to life. Medicine’s Parliament: The Consent and Capacity Board In Ontario, as in most other North American jurisdictions, the law describes the relations between doctors and patients as egalitarian in the sense that physicians may not make medical decisions without consulting with and seeking consent from the patient. Ideally, the physician may never go against the patient’s wishes and decisions, however foolish these may seem from a doctor’s point of view. This emphasis on patient autonomy is identified in the literature as a relatively new development in the history of Western medical practice, a positive move away from the medical paternalism that had historically silenced and excluded patients from participating in and deciding on their own treatment (Katz 1984). In Ontario, this notion of patient autonomy is enshrined in and protected by the Health Care Consent Act (Government of Ontario 1996), which clearly states, “no treatment without consent.” Normally, doctors cannot oppose a treatment decision made by the patient. But under special circumstances (e.g., insanity and severe trauma) that render the patient incapable of deciding for him- or herself, the law establishes mechanisms to find someone to make decisions on behalf of the patient. While, in the majority of cases, family members will act as surrogate decision makers for the incompetent patient, this role can also be played by the state (through the Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee), a doctor or any other person granted the status of guardian. The verdict of whether a patient is capable of making treatment decisions will depend on whether he or she is “able to understand the information that is relevant to making a decision about the treatment, admission or personal assistance service, as the case may be, and able to appreciate the reasonably foreseeable consequences of a decision or lack of decision” (Government of Ontario 1996). In many situations, the principle of the inviolability of patient autonomy is extended to those making decisions on behalf of the patient. The decisions of surrogate decision makers are, like the patient’s, inviolable as long as they are based on explicit wishes 204

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expressed in the past by the patient while still capable. In the absence of an express wish, surrogate decision makers must consider the patient’s “best interest.” The law states: In deciding what the incapable person’s best interests are, the person who gives or refuses consent on his or her behalf shall take into consideration, (a) the values and beliefs that the person knows the incapable person held when capable and believes he or she would still act on if capable; (b) any wishes expressed by the incapable person with respect to the treatment that are not required to be followed under paragraph 1 of subsection (1); and (c) the following factors: 1. Whether the treatment is likely to, i. improve the incapable person’s condition or well-being, ii. prevent the incapable person’s condition or well-being from deteriorating, or iii. reduce the extent to which, or the rate at which, the incapable person’s condition or well-being is likely to deteriorate. 2. Whether the incapable person’s condition or well-being is likely to improve, remain the same or deteriorate without the treatment. 3. Whether the benefit the incapable person is expected to obtain from the treatment outweighs the risk of harm to him or her. 4. Whether a less restrictive or less intrusive treatment would be as beneficial as the treatment that is proposed. (Government of Ontario 1996, c. 2, Sched. A, s. 21 [2]) Legally speaking, it is exactly at this point where surrogate decision makers can be challenged by doctors regarding treatment decisions. Current legislation allows doctors to question how relatives have come to refuse treatment that the doctor believes is medically required (such as letting the patient die) by applying to the Consent and Capacity Board, an independent organization created by the province of Ontario that conducts hearings regarding a person’s capacity to make important financial and health care decisions. The decisions of the board, which are legally binding, may compel relatives to consent to the treatment proposed by the patient’s doctor. When unable to demonstrate explicit prior wishes on behalf of the patient to the Ontario Consent and Capacity Board’s satisfaction, surrogate decision makers are required to work with an even more volatile concept: that of the patient’s “values” and “beliefs.” Here, surrogate decision makers are required to formulate a sort of “philosophy 205

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of life” that they believe was the ethical driving force in their relative’s conscious life. In all of the cases reviewed, however, the Consent and Capacity Board rejected the relatives’ arguments in the style of the following: We accept that the patient told her children never to give up. Encouraging perseverance and determination is something that most parents do. [But]…[d]id Ms. P. [the patient] believe that not to give up extended to performing CPR on an unconscious person whose organs were shutting down? (Ontario Consent and Capacity Board 2005) Note that, at this point, families are required to abide by item C of the Health Care Consent Act, which directs decision makers to make strictly medical considerations, such as whether the patient’s condition is likely to improve or not as a result of the treatment being proposed. The questions laid out under this item in the law can only be answered by medical experts. At this point, medicine regains sovereignty over the patient and is able to state that doctors “know best,” that doctors are better equipped to defend the patient’s best interest. The liberal culture marked by an explicit defense of patient rights and autonomy now crumbles under the weight of unilateral medical expertise. Surrogate decision makers lose their rights as interlocutors of medicine and are made to appear as people whose good sense and reason have been impaired by the trying experience of seeing a loved one suffer through disease and pain. This is how medicine paints patients’ relatives before the Consent and Capacity Board: [The] Dr. wrote… During my daily discussions with the family, it is clear that they are having a difficult time coping with [the patient’s] acute illness. (Ontario Consent and Capacity Board 2007b) While Mr. J.S. testified with great dignity, it was clear to us that he was not ready to accept his mother’s condition. (Ontario Consent and Capacity Board 2007c) Mr. G. rejected the physicians’ statement that there was no way to cure the condition of E.J.G.’s brain and thereby restore some higher level of function to him. In our view his assertion was based upon hope, not science or medicine. (Ontario Consent and Capacity Board 2007a) In cases heard by the board, a battle breaks out between doctors and families in which the parties compete to assert the right to represent the patient and his or her “real” needs. In this conflict, families are effectively painted as unable to protect the patient’s best interests, while doctors are portrayed as advocates for the patient. 206

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Medicine’s Representation of the Dying Patient The five cases that dramatize this battle between medicine and patients’ families all happen in Ontario and fall under the Consent and Capacity Board’s jurisdiction. Hearings for these cases are fairly recent and were conducted between October 2003 and September 2007. With one exception, they all involve older adults between the ages of 78 and 90. The exception was an eight-month-old baby who had suffered oxygen deprivation at birth and was left in a vegetative state. All patients had had relatively lengthy hospital stays. In all cases, doctors had proposed courses of treatment that reflected their diagnosis that the patient had entered the dying process and that it was time to “let them go.” These courses of treatment included, depending on the case, a refusal to admit the patient to the intensive care unit in case of cardiac arrest or septic shock, the implementation of “do not resuscitate” orders1, the withdrawal of forced ventilation, and the stopping of artificial nutrition and hydration. In all cases, relatives of the patients (sons, daughters and parents) rejected these recommendations made by doctors and demanded that everything be done to keep their loved ones alive. By refusing to give consent to the proposed treatment, relatives gave doctors an opportunity to challenge their decisions before the Consent and Capacity Board by suggesting in legal form that they were not acting in the patient’s best interest. In all five cases, doctors sought and managed to legally revoke the families’ decisions. The institutional circuit of decision-making reflecting the battle between medicine and families does not end with a decision by the province’s Consent and Capacity Board. At this level, an unfavorable decision still allows the family a certain amount of time to give consent to the proposed treatment. However, relatives can also challenge the board’s decision by presenting their case before regular courts of justice, all the way up to the Superior Court. However, in this paper I focus only on decisions made by the board. Hopelessness When making their cases before the Consent and Capacity Board, doctors developed what we can call a “narrative of decay” in which the patient is presented as irreversibly and progressively damaged. This narrative has the following distinct moments. The first one is the construction of the patient as being “in bad shape,” medically speaking. Doctors enumerate a series of conditions: Mrs. H.J.’s life expectancy was six months to a year, less if she suffered another cardiac arrest or serious infection… [She]…was bedridden… [and] suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease… It destroys the brain and is ultimately fatal one way or another. [This] was one of the most severe cases 207

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[the doctor] he had ever seen… Mrs. H.J. could not…communicate… [She required] a “J” tube for feeding. (Ontario Consent and Capacity Board 2003) Ms. P. had had a major stroke about three years ago and she had a major cognitive deficit… Ms. P’s…organ systems were shutting down. She was malnourished. Her platelet count was continuing to drop and she required transfusions. She did not have muscle function. Her kidneys were operating at 20% of normal. She was on a ventilator. She had had a tracheotomy. She was being fed through a tube inserted into her stomach. Ms. P. was unconscious… She required frequent rotation in her bed because of bed sores. (Ontario Consent and Capacity Board 2005) The narrative then continues with medicine’s reflection on the difference that medical science can make in such extreme cases. Reflecting on the treatments applied to their patients, doctors inevitably came to the conclusion that these medical interventions were useless because they failed to produce adequate results. The patient Mrs H.J., for example, had been treated with antibiotics for a series of infections, which became increasingly resistant to drugs and therefore impossible to defeat. Patients Ms. P and Mrs. K.M.S., for example, could not absorb the nutrients provided by their feeding tubes and became debilitated. In all cases, doctors identified one or more “irreversible” and “untreatable” conditions in their patients, and in four out of five cases they reported that the patient’s overall health was quickly spiraling downward. Medical interventions could only improve the patient’s condition to a lower base point of health. This is the ominous ethics of “there will be no good news.” [The] Dr. testified there would be no good news… Mrs. H.J.’s prognosis was certain. Timing was the only question. Certainly, there could always be hope but for Mrs. H.J. it was sadly scant. Mrs. H.J. was inexorably approaching death’s cold door and already within reach of knocking on it. (Ontario Consent and Capacity Board 2003) [The] Drs. were both adamant that E.J.G.’s brain condition was irreversible and untreatable. He would not get better. (Ontario Consent and Capacity Board 2007a) However, the argument was not that treatment was medically innocuous, given the patients’ conditions. In other words, the argument was not that treatment did not make any difference. To the contrary, a major point that doctors made systematically and forcefully throughout their expert testimony before the board was that the treatment administered 208

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to patients to keep them alive was, in fact, harmful. Doctors construct this notion of “harm to the patient” by talking in detail about what they call “the burden of treatment,” that is, the pain, discomfort and undermining consequences associated with a certain kind of medical interventions. Patient Mrs. H.J.’s physician, for example, explained that the suctioning of lungs made breathing harder, that the intravenous administration of drugs and other substances opened avenues for new infections and that forced ventilation radically debilitated the patient. Patient Mr. G.A.’s doctor stated that applying cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) required breaking at least a few of the patient’s ribs and elaborated on the problems associated with stays in the intensive care unit (ICU). In particular, he mentioned “ICU delirium,” which is the patient’s inability to concentrate due to ongoing interruptions of the sleep cycle caused by permanent medical activity in the ward.2 Patient Mrs. K.M.S.’s physician said that staying in bed, something inevitable with these patients, favored the formation of bedsores and the outbreak of infections. The same doctor explained how tube feeding damaged the patient’s airways and could produce pneumonia. Patient Mr. E.J.G.’s doctor told of hospital-borne infections and complications arising from the use of assisted ventilation. Here are samples of this talk: [The] Dr. said of chest compression for resuscitation, “At Mr. G.A.’s age, if you’re not breaking ribs, you’re not pushing hard enough.” (Ontario Consent and Capacity Board 2007b) [T]reating any of her symptoms resulted in additional symptoms and risks, “cascading” health problems. Mrs. K.M.S. contracted pneumonia, but the antibiotics used to treat it led to a bowel disruption as a result of which Mrs. K.M.S. contracted c. difficile, which led to diarrhoea, which led to the breakdown of skin around her rectum, which was likely to result in bed sores. (Ontario Consent and Capacity Board 2007c) Non-beneficence This notion that the patient is being “harmed,” however, does not come from the fact that the patient is, objectively speaking, in pain. After all, pain and suffering are normal and necessary occurrences in medical practice (think, for example, of surgery). Instead, the notion of patient harm is grounded, according to the cases under review, in the assessment that treatment is “not beneficial” to the patient. The category of “nonbeneficial treatments,” it should be noted, is not limited to interventions that bring absolutely no progress to the patient (such as performing CPR on a dead person). Instead, it contains, as well, a range of measures that may have a direct and favorable impact on the patient’s physiological state but which are declared to be insufficient to warrant 209

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their application, according to some standard. Doctors use the notion of “non-beneficial treatment” (also called “futile”) to distinguish between interventions worth pursuing and those that are not. And this distinction is made by taking into consideration the “costs” and the “returns” of particular medical interventions. A recurrent example in these cases is the use of CPR and ventilators on patients. The argument is often that these technologies, while having the potential of saving or maintaining the patient’s life, also mean that the patient’s survival will take place under conditions of intensive and chronic hospital care, never free from discomfort and machines. “Harm” only happens if the pain that medicine inflicts on the patient as part of treatment (a required investment) does not yield results that doctors can deem satisfactory. Here is cost-benefit analysis in action: “Benefit,” as used in this paragraph of the legislation, to us meant balancing the good results with the bad results, what [the] Dr. referred to throughout the Hearing as “the burdens of treatment.” The burdens of treatment included pain, discomfort and loss of dignity, factors that went into the equation of “benefit.” The good result was prolonging Mrs. H.J.’s life, although not everyone might see that as a good result for her, given her overall condition. (Ontario Consent and Capacity Board 2003) To medicine, the fact that these patients’ cost-benefit equations yielded a negative result (that is, the costs were higher than the benefits) meant not that nothing could be done to save the patient’s lives. Instead, it meant that nothing should be done to keep them alive. This conscious estimation made by doctors is, in other words, a matter of value— not a matter of science. This inherently political estimation is grounded in medicine’s understanding of human dignity and the profession’s duty to protect and preserve a dignified existence for all their patients. While certain treatments do involve a degree of patient suffering and humiliation (think of a colonoscopy as a case of the latter), suffering and humiliation only become ethical infractions perpetrated by medicine when painful and humiliating procedures are known to not have medically “acceptable” results. When a patient is labeled as “dying,” medicine seeks to ban a series of treatments that are seen as an affront to human dignity for their high costs and low returns, treatments that undermine the patient’s quality of life and well-being. To let the patient die is to help the patient preserve their dignity. That is, dignity is introduced as a justification to intervene—it makes such an intervention a lawful one. [The doctor] said that the ICU staff felt that Ms. P. had a right to her dignity such that if her heart failed she should be allowed to die. (Ontario Consent and Capacity Board 2005)

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[The physicians] said E.J.G. was suffering even if he could not feel pain or discomfort… [The doctor] distinguished between pain, which E.J.G. could not feel, and suffering, which she described as something E.J.G. might endure in an existential sense in response to invasive but futile procedures… In determining E.J.G.’s well-being, we were entitled to consider the constant invasions and humiliations to which his inert body was subject. At some point those factors overrode the presumption in favour of continuing life. (Ontario Consent and Capacity Board 2007a) In medicine’s view, failure to avoid non-beneficial treatments for “dying” patients would lead the doctor to condemn the patient to a sort of living death, a life not worth living. This type of existence consists of a reduction of the “full” human being to “mere life” via the use of available medical technology—a reduction to mere, meaningless biological life. Imagine an inert, unconscious body, bedridden, connected to machines that breathe for and feed the patient. Medicine here makes a distinction between physiological activity, which corresponds to parts and organs of the body, on the one hand, and the overall ability of the person to function in the world as a biological and social entity on the other. “The physician’s goal,” claim renowned critics of non-beneficial treatment (Schneiderman, Jecker and Jonsen 1996: 670), “is not merely to affect some part of the body but to benefit the patient as a whole.” Medicine is here distinguishing between the patient as a collection of body parts that can be affected individually through treatment (a liver here, a heart there) and the patient as a “whole person.” With this formulation, medical science rejects the treatment of the person as “just a body” and seeks to ground its relations with patients in humanism instead of technocracy and detailed anatomical and physiological knowledge. Paradoxically, medicine’s newfound love of humanism and rejection of technocracy are expressed through technical notions of testing and measurement implied in the logic of cost-benefit analysis. By taking “the whole person” as the object of medical care, modern medicine echoes a distinction already made in recent in social and political thought in the works of philosophers Giorgio Agamben (2002) and Hannah Arendt (1998), who painted each in their own terms (Agamben in the Musselmann and Arendt in the laborer) the vision of “mere life” as a terrible fate. Here, the board shows in the case of Patient Mrs. H.J. the distinction that turns “life itself ” into a ban for modern medicine, a category of serious deviance within modern professional practice: We thought “well-being” involved more than mere life itself… “Wellbeing” includes considerations such as the person’s dignity and levels of pain… It was implicit in [the] Dr.’s evidence that the subject medical interventions eroded Mrs. H.J.’s dignity even while continuing her life… With life there might always be hope but not always dignity. (Ontario Consent and Capacity Board 2003) 211

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Medicine’s Critique of Science and Technology: When Doctors Become Torturers The cases presented by doctors before the board show us that medicine today has a less optimistic view of its own practice. It is no longer the case that medicine and doctors represent the good and that disease represents evil because the application of medical knowledge in addressing patients’ needs is no longer unproblematic. Indeed, medicine today has come to develop a narrative of its own work and identity that includes the (likely) possibility that physicians will unknowingly inflict suffering on the patients that they seek to cure. In medicine’s view, scientific and technological progress is in part to blame for this situation. The idea is that while developments like CPR and assisted breathing devices offer doctors opportunities to save and sustain the life of the patient in situations that were unthinkable a decade ago, these advances in science and technology actually represent a regression in moral terms because they turn the patient into the appendix of a machine and take away the dignity and humanity of the person. Medicine today has thus developed a critique of scientific and technological progress and has started to instruct physicians to adopt a critical stance regarding the use of certain technologies. Medicine has become critical of Enlightenment’s promise of permanent progress and asks doctors to develop the ability to be reflexive in their use of science and technology. There are, as a consequence, two different forms of compassion in modern medicine. On the one hand, doctors are expected to be moved by the pain and the suffering produced by their patient’s disease. Their compassion would compel them to act and to try everything in their power to relieve the patient from the discomfort of his or her disease. On the other hand, the patient may suffer not only the original disease that brought him or her to the doctor’s door in the first place but also the pain and discomfort produced by medical interventions. The latter is what medicine wants to avoid today by questioning scientific and technical progress and its unrestrained and unreflexive application. This second sense of compassion puts doctors in a difficult position. The moral obligation to do something for the patient is, at the same time, the possible cause of the moral condemnation of doctors as their patients’ victimizers. All these are cases in which doctors seem to be saying that medical treatment is harming the patient and that it should therefore be stopped. The point that medicine makes is that doctors would become torturers if they tried to preserve or prolong the life of a dying patient. A recent Canadian case (CTV News 2007; 2008) reflects this anxiety of medicine regarding the infliction of pain. Samuel Golubchuk, 84 in 2007, an Orthodox Jew living in Manitoba who was in an intensive care unit, was at one point deemed by doctors to have no chance of recovery. Given this prognosis, doctors suggested that he be disconnected from his ventilator, a proposal that Golubchuk’s family rejected due to religious reasons. The hospital insisted and the family responded by going to court and winning a temporary injunction, which the hospital then tried to appeal. Eventually, Golubchuk died without the hospital’s intervention, the way the family had wanted. 212

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From medicine’s point of view, to preserve life in this situation was tantamount to torture. In fact, this is why Golubchuk’s “doctors resigned their privileges at the hospital’s intensive care unit” (Lambert 2008). Reporting on the case, medical ethicist Peter Singer (2007) suggested that so-called futile cases (of which the five examples analyzed in this paper are examples) can be difficult for health care teams because they feel that they are being forced to act against their sense of professional values. Seeing the patient suffer needlessly, doctors and nurses suffer, too. The pain of the patient is the pain of the doctor. In regard to Patient Ms. P., the Consent and Capacity Board wrote: [The clinical manager] thought that the patient was experiencing pain. Her ICU staff had had to go for counselling as they were upset that they would be required to do CPR given the patient’s medical condition. (Ontario Consent and Capacity Board 2005) In an article published in the Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Policy, law professor George Smith (1995) continued this line of argument by saying that obligating doctors to provide non-beneficial treatment to dying patients is equivalent to cruel and unusual punishment of prisoners, prohibited by the U.S. Constitution. Non-beneficial treatment is then associated with the doctor’s violation of the “do no harm” principle that grounds medical education. The Superiority of Politics over Science From the point of view of practical action, medicine is today in a complex situation. On the one hand, it recognizes and promotes the legacy of scientific and technical development that makes complex medical interventions possible. Medicine today saves lives thanks to progress, doctors acknowledge. At the same time, the very availability of the fruits of progress puts doctors and patients in harm’s way and turns doctors into torturers, not healers. Medicine today thus suffers the ambiguity of its relationship to science and technology and tries to develop a method, which it teaches to doctors and patients alike, to deal with the situation of not knowing how far to take medical interventions. “When is enough, enough?,” asks medicine. This is, of course, a practical problem and a matter of decision-making. The answer that medicine has developed consists of a theory that distinguishes scientific and technological progress on the one hand from moral values on the other and ensures that the former are subjected to the latter. It is, in other words, a theory that asserts the superiority of politics over science. This theory is associated with the work of Daniel Callahan (1973), who wrote that medicine needed to quit using technology unreflexively (that is, using technology simply because it is available) and to attend to its 213

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potentially harmful by-products. Callahan underscores the need to moderate how much we come to expect from technology, to develop a public morality that will regulate how much technological development is desirable and how far existing technology should be taken in dealing with practical problems. More and better technology is not always equivalent to happiness, he says. Callahan then applied his critique of technology to the specific case of senior care (1988) where he developed concrete guidelines to help doctors and families decide when an elderly patient has received enough care and it is time to let go. Again, the argument is that the decision needs to be made on moral, not technological grounds. Moral grounds include asking whether the person had lived a “full” and “meaningful” life, and whether caring for the patient negatively affects the balance of duty that different generations owe to each other. Around the time Callahan was developing his ideas, doctors and medical researchers were working towards a concept of non-beneficial treatment (which they called “medical futility”) that could be used in the clinical setting. Schneiderman, Jecker and Jonsen (1990) proposed that a treatment should be considered futile when it had proven to be useless in the last one hundred applications and if it was concluded that it could not end permanent unconsciousness or eliminate dependence on intensive medical care. Doctors now had a qualitative and quantitative rule of thumb to deal with the ambiguities that technology had brought to medical practice. With the concept of medical futility, medicine shows us what it believes constitutes true progress. The profession, medicine states, does not progress by developing more and newer science and technology. Instead, it progresses by developing a critical awareness of its tools and what they can and cannot offer, a sense of moderation and self-restraint in how it orients to the means at its disposal. Patients are similarly expected to adopt this predisposition. The distinction between values and science becomes the standard of competence for doctors and patients alike. Conclusion In this chapter, I have sought to reconstruct for the reader how medicine today thinks and acts with regard to the dying patient. To do so, I have collected and analyzed a small number of significant cases in which medicine makes explicit some elements of the normative order by which doctors and patients (and their families) are expected to abide. The cases heard by the Ontario Consent and Capacity Board are particularly useful here because the board consistently sided with the arguments of medicine in its decisions, quickly dismissing as unreasonable the position of families. The transcripts of these cases thus offer, to the detriment of the families involved, a clear picture of the ideological tenets of the moral order of contemporary medicine. I take these transcripts to be the voice of medicine, unhindered. 214

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Key to the story presented in the transcripts is a conflict between two characters, one presented as weak, the other presented as strong. The former is the family of the patient, who wants to preserve and prolong the life of the patient, while the latter is the attending physician who wants to terminate treatment and let the patient go. Each represents a different attitude towards medical science and technology. Families, on the one hand, represent the optimistic attitude that progress in science and technology is good because it offers us solutions to pressing human problems such as death. Doctors, on the other hand, represent a cautious attitude that suggests that technical and scientific progress can actually make things worse. The conflict between antagonist (the family) and protagonist (the doctor) in this narrative reveals an opposition of two ways of life, one that medicine is claiming to abandon and the other that medicine is claiming to embrace. The former is the way of life of Enlightenment, which is grounded in a notion of permanent progress that enables us to overcome every problem and limitation that we may happen to experience. It is a way of life that promises that one day we will live free from constraint, restrictions or necessity and that human agency and capability will expand far beyond the narrow limits imposed on us by physical environment and our embodied nature. This is the imaginary that medicine today seeks to repress by teaching families resignation to death. By contrast, medicine now suggests a way of life where limits are recognized, where death is not seen as a problem that needs to be overcome. Instead, death is seen as the natural culmination of biological life, a necessity that cannot and should not be avoided because all life must come to an end. Medicine wants to terminate treatment for the dying patient because this is how it is able to make way for “the end,” to give it its proper place in the person’s biography. Of course, “the end” will come no matter what the effort, but medicine seems concerned that trying to prevent it means that something important is being lost or at least concealed: namely, the process of decay of the human being, both as a body and as a person. Labeling someone as “dying” ensures that this process of decline (i.e., of aging) is visible. Free from the interference of life-sustaining measures, the dying patient slowly takes leave from life and becomes a ruin: the patient becomes, in Simmel’s words (1959), a site of life from which life has departed. Like an old building exposed to the destructive influences of nature, the dying patient becomes a spectacle of a struggle between the upward striving forces of life, will and spirit and the downward dragging forces of death and nature—a struggle in which the latter seem to prevail. The ruin, Simmel writes, fascinates us because the spectacle of decay allows us to experience the past directly and materially. He says, “in the case of the ruin, the fact that life with its wealth and its changes once dwelled here constitutes an immediately perceived presence. The ruin creates the present form of a past life” (Simmel 1959: 265). And he suggests that this material experience of the past conveys a certain sense of peacefulness. Could this be the reason why medicine insists so adamantly on letting the 215

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process of dying run its course unimpeded when it is clear that the patient has no hope of recovery? Allowing the dying patient to become a ruin, in Simmel’s sense, would enable friends and family to experience peacefulness in the face of the death of a loved one. A ruin, the dying patient palpably stands before friends and family as everything that the person once was, empowering them to mourn a loss not yet consummated. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Alan Blum as well as Tristanne Connolly and my colleagues Elke Grenzer, Jan Plecash, Gordon Thompson, Saeed Hydaralli and Amanda Delong for their constructive commentaries and contributions. Endnotes 1.

For the medical profession, the term “do not resuscitate” is inaccurate and should be taken to mean “do not attempt resuscitation.” The comment makes visible medicine’s concern about the limits of its own science and technique as well as its desire to make these limits public by naming its procedures in ways that do not generate “false hope” among practitioners and clients. This recognition of the limited usefulness of the technique of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation comes after a relatively long period of optimism regarding the applicability of this technique.

2.

Medicine's formulation of the ICU as a setting that exacerbates disorders and suffering through sleep deprivation is strikingly similar to the formulation of sleep deprivation as a technique of torture. The Guardian, for example, printed an article (Goldenberg 2004) about the U.S. Army’s use of sleep deprivation against suspects of terrorism on an equal footing with mock executions.

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12 Life-threatening (Anaphylactic) Food Allergies: School Life, Health and Well-being Saeed Hydaralli

What we do is never understood, but always only praised or censured. (Nietzsche 1974: 219) …but you come to me as though I professed to know about the questions which I ask… Whereas the fact is I am, as you are, an inquirer into the truth… Please then allow me time to reflect. (Plato 1999: 877) Sabrina Shannon and Sabrina’s Law On September 30, 2003, Sabrina Shannon, who was 13 years old and in Grade 9, died one day after eating cheese-tainted fries in her school cafeteria in Pembroke, Ontario. Around 11:40 that morning, Sabrina and her best friend went to the cafeteria, and Sabrina ordered fries after again making sure that they were cooked in vegetable rather than peanut oil. In the class after lunch, Sabrina began to wheeze. Thinking she was having an asthma attack, the teen headed for the school office at the other end of the building. By the time she got there, Sabrina was in trouble, and kept repeating “It’s my asthma.” A teacher raced to Sabrina’s locker to get her EpiPen in case it was in fact her food allergies; school officials called an ambulance. Sabrina collapsed and lost consciousness, going into cardiac arrest before the EpiPen could be administered, before the ambulance arrived. (Smith 2005) 217

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According to the coroner’s report, Sabrina died as a result of anaphylactic shock1 from a food allergy (Smith 2005). The coroner posited that the allergic trigger was dairy protein, which Sabrina would have been exposed to through cross-contamination from tongs used to lift her fries. Those same tongs had also been used to serve orders accompanied by poutine, the side dish of gravy and melted cheese curds. She would have been allergic to the curds. (Smith 2005) In fact it had been medically established many years prior that Sabrina indeed had an anaphylactic allergy to peanuts, dairy and soy (Smith 2005). In other words, Sabrina’s anaphylaxis was known to her, which accounts for why she carried an EpiPen2 to school, typically in her backpack (Smith 2005). Sabrina’s tragic death has since resulted, with the help of relentless advocacy from her mother, Sara Shannon, as well as those who shared her commitment, in the advent of what is called Sabrina’s Law,3 which took effect January 1, 2006, requiring all publicly funded schools in Ontario to abide by the anaphylactic safety policies stipulated by that legislation.4 That law requires all such schools to have measures in place to protect children at risk from anaphylaxis. At the heart of those measures is the adoption of “strategies that reduce the risk of exposure to anaphylactic causative agents in classrooms and common school areas” (Government of Ontario 2005). That legislation, and similar measures implemented by schools and school boards throughout much of the Western world, has been approvingly received by many who see it as indispensable to the safety of students with life-threatening (anaphylactic) food allergies (see Bock et al. 2001, 2007; Simons 2006; and Williams 2002). The measures that schools and school boards have adopted to secure the safety of such children are deemed essential by the foregoing perspective, based on the belief that such precautions are a necessary, and not too onerous, imposition for keeping the risk of death at bay. Such a view also takes its impetus from the “increasing awareness that anaphylaxis now occurs frequently in community settings [such as schools] where no health care professionals are present and where it is most commonly triggered by food” (Simons 2006: 367). In direct contrast is the belief that understands such a measure as an example of a policy that “impinges upon the everyday and peculiarly public domain of the school” whereby they “involve more than preventative health measures; rather they are articulated in terms of the management of risk” and thus “the very locus of responsibility for the security of children’s social bodies has changed from private to public social spaces” (Rous and Hunt 2004: 825, 834). In other words, the latter argues that attending to the health and medical well-being of children in such a rigorous way—that is, beyond the preventative, and inclusive of the management of those risks—exceeds the mandate of the school community and the public space it represents and is rather the responsibility of the private realm (the family, in conjunction with the science of medicine). 218

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Rather than intervene in this debate with yet another perspective, another interpretation to add to the mix (Blum 2003: 15), we note that the opposing voices are united by a common, and fundamental, problem that invites reflection around the question of the relationship between education and health and well-being. We further note that it is precisely the work of reflection in relation to that very important question that is significantly missing (that represents the gap) in these opposing views. That is, rather than attempting to engage and work through the vertigo that such a problem releases, both medicine and its critics come to the problem as advocates with contrasting positions. It is that (missing) work of reflection that this paper is intended to satisfy. In part, moreover, our interest is to sustain the conversation in ways that permit attention to those borders and limits (the Grey Zone) that haunt any practice of problem solving (reflection). As such, we will have achieved our objective of both clarifying the problem and ensuring that it remains inviting for anyone who is friendly to conversation (analysis). Education and Health and Well-being: Care for the Self From a certain medically informed view, anaphylactic food allergies are today seen as an implacable foe that threatens the lives of many, especially school-age children (see Bock et al. 2001, 2007; Simons 2006; and Williams 2002). As such, death is believed to haunt childhood in the figure of anaphylaxis. “By the dawn of the new millennium, allergic diseases were more common, more commonly fatal and apparently induced by an ever widening range of allergens” (Jackson 2006: 11). Furthermore, “[t]he largest number of incident cases is among children and adolescents…fatalities from foodinduced anaphylaxis peak in adolescents and young adults” (Simons 2008: 402). As a consequence, the risks confronted by children with life-threatening food allergies have come to be viewed by officials (elected, education and medical) as a situation that necessitates intervention. Sabrina’s Law, and the Canadian School Boards Association (CSBA) handbook policy recommendations that served as a template for that legislation,5 are expressive of the medically sanctioned view that schools need to take a more decisive role in protecting the physical health and well-being of their student population, especially those who have severe (life-threatening) chronic diseases which are vulnerable to environmental conditions and are believed to be within the mandate of schools to control or eliminate. More specifically, the legislation demands that schools implement a series of actions that would provide for a significantly safer physical environment for students who have anaphylactic food allergies. That perceived exigency is strengthened by the scientific knowledge that “the first episode of anaphylaxis can be fatal” (Simons 2006: 375). A significant part of the rationale for this push to eliminate as much as possible the presence of “anaphylactic causative agents” is the threat they are believed to pose to even those who might be vigilant about their anaphylaxis. Indeed, Sabrina Shannon is 219

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reported to have been one who displayed such caution and awareness. Almost three years prior to her death, Sabrina had produced a documentary with her aunt, Kathleen Whelan, that originally aired on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio’s Outfront program in May 2001. The documentary was a first-person narrative about living with lifethreatening allergies. According to the media reports in relation to Sabrina’s death, that awareness of the challenges of her situation translated into the care that Sabrina is reputed to have typically exercised in relation to her food allergies (Smith 2005). For example, on the day she ate the contaminated fries, she is thought to have ensured that those fries were not cooked in or with any of the allergens to which she was susceptible. However, even such attentiveness could not spare her from the severity of her condition; the small amounts of dairy allergen transferred onto her fries through cross-contamination via the same tongs that were earlier used to serve poutine proved fatal. The advent of legislation clearly indicates the official belief that Sabrina Shannon’s death (and the deaths of others who have died while in a school setting)6 would have been preventable if there had been more explicit precautions (policies) in place. The legislation proposes that, without the implementation of such policies as it has specified, the lives of children with anaphylactic food allergies will be at significantly increased risk. Officials understand the development and implementation of such policies as an advance over a more informal approach, and as a natural complement to the clinical advances that medicine has accomplished, in relation to anaphylaxis.7 Thus, it is believed that, especially in the absence of health care professionals on site, such as a nurse, “the only way to guarantee their [students’] safety is complete avoidance of the allergic substance” (Canadian School Boards Association 2001: 2). Here we see that schools in Ontario have been legislated to make safety paramount above all else in relation to anaphylactic students. As such, the essence of Sabrina’s Law is directed at the implementation of “strategies that reduce the risk of exposure to anaphylactic causative agents in classrooms and common school areas” (Government of Ontario 2005). The measures that Sabrina’s Law and related initiatives articulate,8 which ultimately suppress some of the most elementary and appetizing ritual aspects of the school (lunch) experience, and which we will later show to have immeasurable consequences for the development of both the child and the community, can only be understood as reflective of a particular understanding of the threat that is represented by anaphylactic food allergens. Consistent with that perspective, anaphylaxis seems to have been configured as part of what has come to be “referred to as a ‘modern plague’ [emphasis added] of allergic diseases sweeping the globe” (Jackson 2006: 12). Anaphylaxis, it would appear, is deemed to be the gravest form of an epidemic of allergies. Consistent with the conventional understanding of such situations, the anaphylactic student might be said to be rendered by the medico-educational nexus as a victim in need of protection. And because these students are conceived to be at the mercy of forces beyond their control (in this case, the indiscriminate presence of anaphylactic food allergens), they are dependent on the goodwill of others to secure for 220

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them conditions that are conducive to their safety. Such protection as has been objectified in Sabrina’s Law is seen by the collective (represented by the medical and educational institutions) as the goodwill that remedies the situation faced by the anaphylactic child, the victim. What is ironic, and excluded from the discourse, is that the protection that Sabrina’s Law offers to the child comes at the price of the child relinquishing any responsibility for his or her health and safety vis-à-vis food allergens. We might say that the child is protected at the price of remaining a victim9 (Zizek 2008: 49–56). That is, Sabrina’s law proposes that it can only protect the child under conditions where the child accepts the law’s construction of him or her as helpless in the face of such a threat. Most importantly, the inescapability of threats, manifesting in a variety of shapes, to the health and safety of children in schools raises the problem of the relationship between education and health and well-being. So far we have shown that the position represented by Sabrina’s Law constructs the anaphylactic child as a victim in need of protection, a service that the law offers in exchange for the child assuming a posture of docility. What we have not, as yet, diligently pursued in relation to such a finding—though we have offered a few reflections—are the ways in which that exchange (protection at the price of docility) addresses the implied social contract around the giving and receiving of an education. One understanding of the nature of that implied social contract is represented by the position that holds the view that education has a limited role to play in the health and safety of children, especially in the context where school personnel are required to assume what it argues are responsibilities that exceed the defined roles (and competencies) of those personnel (Rous and Hunt 2004). Sabrina’s Law, according to this view, imposes, without precedent and basis, both a preventative and a “managerial” responsibility for students’ health on school personnel (teachers and administrators). The following policy requirements, for example, might be cited as corroborative of that view: An individual plan for a pupil with an anaphylactic allergy shall be consistent with the board’s policy and shall include: 1. Details informing employees and others who are in direct contact with the pupil on a regular basis of the type of allergy, monitoring and avoidance strategies and appropriate treatment. 2. A readily accessible emergency procedure for the pupil, including emergency contact information. 3. Storage for epinephrine auto-injectors, where necessary. (Government of Ontario 2005: c. 7, s. 2 (3))

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Consequently, it is argued, “school teachers have become ‘responsibilized’ for an expanding range of risks to the physical, sexual and moral well-being of school children… The protection of children’s social bodies has increasingly become a public responsibility” (Rous and Hunt 2004: 825). The thrust of this view is that legislation such as Sabrina’s Law “blur[s] the boundaries between public and private dimensions of social life, between personal and institutional responsibilities” (Rous and Hunt 2004: 834). Here the interest seems to be in asserting the public character of public schools that is in need of protection from elements that are not respectful of that status. Thus the management of medical risks (and the individualizing of those risks) that policy initiatives such as Sabrina’s Law are believed to exemplify are read as imposing a health management mandate that is incommensurate with the character of schools as public spaces and education as a public enterprise. Yet that there might be a relationship between education, health and well-being, one that does not necessarily abide by such private-public distinctions, would seem to have a precedent in the earliest conceptions of education. Let us listen to Foucault: In keeping with a tradition that goes back a very long way in Greek culture, the care of the self is in close correlation with medical thought and practice. This ancient correlation became increasingly strong, so much so that Plutarch is able to say, at the beginning of Advice about Keeping Well, that philosophy and medicine are concerned with “a single field.” (Foucault 1988: 54) In this view, both philosophy (education) and medicine are concerned with the well-being of the individual, both physiologically (the body) and intellectually (the soul). Foucault continues, “The improvement, the perfecting of the soul that one seeks in philosophy, the paideia the latter is supposed to ensure, increasingly assumes a medical colouration. Educating oneself and taking care of oneself are interconnected activities” (Foucault 1988: 55). Because the disturbed or threatened body is a potential distraction from the ability of the soul to develop, education has absorbed into its mandate a concern with the vigor of the body as complementary to the health of the soul. Education (philosophy) is focused by the art of existence, which combines a cultivation of the soul with the strengthening of the body. Just as fair weather, purified into the purest brilliancy, does not admit of a still greater degree of clearness; so, when a man takes care of his body and his soul, weaving the texture of his good from both, his condition is perfect, and he has found the consummation of his prayers, if there is no commotion in his soul or pain in his body. (Seneca, cited in Foucault 1988: 46)

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While we might now be in a position to say that education and medicine have a long affiliation (embodied in part, for example, in the modern form of physical and health education as integral to the school curriculum), that connection is still in need of clarification. How might this help rescue the anaphylactic child from his or her status as a victim of the prevailing environment with which he or she is burdened under legislation such as Sabrina’s Law, and, consequently also liberate school personnel, especially teachers, from the epiphenomenal role of managing policy directed at the protection (health and safety) of perceived vulnerable students (victims) so that both students and teachers might return to their respective pursuits of paideia and pedagogy?10 That is, our work still needs to strengthen its exposition of the fertile and collaborative relationship that education and medicine have historically had to true well-being. In so doing, we also bring to view the ways in which policies such as Sabrina’s Law inadvertently work to distort that relationship, and ultimately undermine the well-being of anaphylactic students by perverting their educational experience, while possibly detracting from the ability of teachers to fully engage the practice of pedagogy. Education as a Matter of Life and Death Socrates, in Charmides (Plato 1999), being told that Charmides has recently been suffering from a headache, uses that information as an occasion to affirm the indispensability of both philosophy (education) and medicine to health and well-being. However, somewhat differently from Foucault’s (1988) reading of the Greeks, Socrates suggests that an education (attending to the soul) is a pre-condition for true health and well-being: You ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head or the head without the eyes, so neither ought you to attempt to cure the body without the soul…for the part can never be well unless the whole is well… If the head and the body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul… The great error of our day in the treatment of the human [is] that physicians separate the soul from the body. (Plato 1999: 864) Similar to Foucault, Socrates upholds the inextricable relation between education and medicine, a position that goes against the view that imagines them as distinct domains of responsibility, the public and the private (pace Rous and Hunt 2004). Yet, while education and medicine might be inseparable in the way that Foucault suggests, Socrates invites us to go against convention that says that “without our health we are nothing” by suggesting that it is without a healthy (cultivated) soul that we are deficient. We understand Socrates as proposing that, without a cultivated soul, our bodily health is wasted on us in the way 223

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that youth is said to be wasted on the young. Thus, we might understand the tendency of “physicians separat[ing] the soul from the body” as illustrative of a preoccupation with the body that obscures an awareness of the soul, and therefore, an understanding of the priority of the soul. Thus Socrates tells us in the Phaedo that “the soul…to the bodily eye is dark and invisible, and can be attained only by philosophy” (Plato 1999: 626). Medicine, Socrates proposes, too often treats the body as if it is the sole object of health and well-being. While Foucault (1988) helps us to see that an education cannot be pursued in the absence of attention to bodily health, whereby it (education) necessarily “assumes a medical coloration,” Socrates invites an examination and, wherever necessary, a reorientation of that relationship. Thus we might begin to see Sabrina’s Law, and similar policies, as being in the grip of medicine to the extent that they lose some perspective on the proper relation and ratio between education and medicine. For example, the proposal that calls for anaphylactic students to be required “…to eat only food prepared at home or approved for consumption” (Canadian School Boards Association 2001: 31) seems to be consistent with the need for education to heed medical considerations. After all, “Twelve of the 31 fatalities [of food-induced anaphylaxis between 2001 and 2006 in the U.S.] were caused by individuals with peanut or tree nut allergy [sic] consuming desserts (candy and bakery products) prepared away from home, and without having properly inquired about the ingredients” (Bock et al. 2007: 1016). Without doubt, eating out is always a source of worry for someone with an anaphylactic food allergy, especially allergies to the kinds of foods that are often used as ingredients in the making of other types of foods, thus hidden from view. Moreover, “contamination of cookware and serving utensils or hidden ingredients in sauces are often not appreciated by cooking and serving staff and can pose a risk for food-allergic individuals” (Wang and Sampson 2007: 656). Indeed, it was the contamination of a serving utensil that proved fatal for Sabrina Shannon. Moreover, “[f]or processed foods in particular, labeling might be absent, hard to read because of small print, or hard to comprehend because of multisyllabic chemical terms” (Simons 2006: 372). Nevertheless, such a policy that bans the eating of foods not “prepared at home or approved for consumption” raises a variety of questions around the self-cultivation that is inextricable from the education mandate. While such a policy might, in conjunction with the other policies previously given, work to protect anaphylactic students from exposure to dangerous allergens, it raises questions about the cultivation in the student of qualities such as independence, responsibility and self-possession, traits that are fundamental, even indispensable, to the art of existence and to the art of (well)-being-inthe-world. Put differently, a disproportionate (or exaggerated) focus on medical well-being risks interfering with the ability, and necessity, of the child to participate in the life of the school to an extent conducive to the self-development requisite for a vital and stimulating existence. For example, the ban that restricts the anaphylactic child to the eating of food that is “approved for consumption” (Canadian School Boards Association 2001: 31), 224

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which includes the proscription of food-sharing (regardless of the age of the child), limits the (older) child in developing his or her facility with the craft of self-management and amounts to an abdication of control over his or her own well-being-in-the-world. To resist the smothering blandishments of medicine, to be reserved in relation to its offerings and the kind of security it promises, opens up the possibility for self-management, for developing a healthy relationship to one’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Moreover, the call for “allergen-free eating areas” and/or the “establishing of safe eating areas” (Canadian School Boards Association 2001: 31) risks further interfering with the child’s participation in the life of the school to the extent that is needed for both self-development and the nurturing of a community of friends.11 Here we are pointing to the ineffable contribution to self-realization and community building that sharing a meal with and among one’s friends and peers fosters. Put differently, sharing our meals with others is a fundamental condition of self-cultivation as well as the sustaining of community. Roland Barthes only begins to hint at this when he tells us that “One could say that an entire ‘world’ (social environment) is present in and signified by food [taking our meals together]” (1997: 32). Barthes provides us with an axiom whose significance he leaves us to develop. Derrida takes up that challenge by clarifying what Barthes only represents somewhat elliptically: “’One must eat well’ does not mean above all taking in and grasping in itself, but learning and giving to eat, learning-to-give-the-other-to-eat. One never eats entirely on one’s own: this constitutes the rule underlying the statement, ‘One must eat well’” (1995a: 282). Note firstly that Derrida proposes that eating well is invariably conjoined with eating with others. Policy that isolates the anaphylactic child (what a “safe eating area” as prescribed by the Canadian School Boards Association handbook essentially amounts to) would then, if we follow Derrida, deprive that child of the opportunity to eat well. It ought to be abundantly evident, even from such a small excerpt of the text, that Derrida means by “eating well” more than (or even, other than) a consideration for the nutritive or safe character of the meal. He is clearly pointing to the inter-subjective (or communal) possibilities that eating together opens up. Eating well, that is, the taking of one’s meal with others, is a ritual that integrates one into a community and at the same time binds that community. Falk notes, “The ‘act of alimentary communion’ (Durkheim 1965) is also an essential moment in the (re)constitution of the community, manifested in the Latin etymology of the word ‘companion’: com = together, panis = bread, or literally, ‘one who takes bread with someone’” (Falk 1991: 760). What is more, the ritual of eating together is a form of self-exposure that invites self-reflection on the part of the entire group in ways that necessarily provoke selfunderstanding. Such self-understanding is what Derrida seems to want to bring to mind when he speaks of the “learning and giving” that comprises eating well. That Sabrina’s Law (and similar initiatives) might make for a safer environment for the student (that is, make the environment, in some measure, less life-threatening) does not necessarily mean that it has made for a better life, both in the present and the future, for the student. Such measures exemplify the danger that Gadamer talks about 225

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as “the threat of doing too much” (1996: 114). Perhaps we have to have our anaphylactic students orient to the threat that the school environment represents in ways that will strengthen their development as thoughtful beings, doing so with a certain quantum of risk. Allergies remind us that the environments in which we live are not always hospitable, or better, are always both a resource and a threat. In this way we can treat the allergy as a stigma12 that relentlessly reminds us to engage the world in which we live with a healthy dose of caution and respect. It further reminds us that there is great danger in assuming that our environments are benign, without risk. With this perspective, a child might perhaps more readily agree to be respectful of the necessary precautions that tend to protect against catastrophe or unnecessary harm. The child sees herself as vulnerable, as not immune to the vagaries of the everyday, and as being the one who is in large measure responsible for negotiating the risks and pleasures (often conjoined) that are always beckoning. There is an alternative: schools are best placed to deliver appropriate awareness education for all on the risks, myths, realities and inclusive day to day management of food allergies. A robust risk management and educational approach in schools, that isn’t reliant on a ban, will offer the allergic child an opportunity to learn self management of their condition within the semi-protected environment of the school, so preparing them for life outside school. The UK Anaphylaxis Campaign point[s] out that the ban approach offers only a false sense of security for the allergic child and there is of course no absolute guarantee that a school can be totally “nut-free.” (Higgs 2008: 342) Policies that seek to guarantee the safety of the anaphylactic child often conflict with the need for the student to develop as an active participant in her well-being. Thus Plato gives to Critias, in his conversation with Socrates, the counter-intuitive insight that the soul might benefit from having to contend with bodily afflictions. “The headache will be an unexpected benefit to my young relation [Charmides], if the pain in his head compels him to improve his mind” (Plato 1999: 865). Thus Socrates invites us to reflect on the ways in which Sabrina’s Law risks solving the problem represented by the threat of anaphylaxis by orienting to the part (guaranteeing the safety of the body) at the expense of the wellbeing of the whole (that is, the mutual and reciprocal benefit that accrues to both the child in the form of self-cultivation, and the life of the community in the form of integrating difference and managing risk, by virtue of the child’s full participation in the school community). Accordingly, we are able to see that, while it is ostensibly food allergens that are the object of the ban, in actuality what is banned are the following: the opportunity for the anaphylactic child to negotiate the challenging conditions that are endemic to the everyday, a feature of being-in-the-world-as-a-child; the opportunity for the anaphylactic 226

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child to participate in the fundamental school ritual of sharing the luncheon meal with one’s peers and to receive the benefits that accrue from such an encounter, and finally, the opportunity for the entire school community to be strengthened by the inclusion of the anaphylactic child in that community-defining ritual. In the kind of double calamity that is reminiscent of Greek tragedy, the anaphylactic child is banned from the pursuit of self-development at the expense of the enrichment of the community. Conclusion The “crisis” of anaphylaxis tells us that what is at stake is a matter of life and death, and therefore calls for a necessary sacrifice that secures life against the real threat of death. Yet, upon reflection, we see that it is the higher good of the anaphylactic child’s selfcultivation and a vital communal life—the very profit that an education (philosophy) implicitly promises—that severely risks being sacrificed as the price for the guarantee of the student’s physical well-being (life). That amounts to a cruel irony whereby it is the very life of the child, in the sense of paideia, that risks being sacrificed in order to secure his or her safety. The trouble here is not with the principle of sacrifice, since we know that sacrifice, manifested in a variety of shapes, is fundamental to robustness, individually and collectively.13 Rather, the problem has to do with the nature of the sacrifice that is being invoked by the ban. Speaking with the Greeks, we are able to say that the kind of sacrifice being advocated by Sabrina’s Law has to be turned on its head. Thus, “Socrates’s…claim in the Crito that ‘the really important thing is not to live, but to live well.’.. is in fact the central move in Socrates’s justification of his active participation in his own execution. He in other words enacts the sacrifice of bare life that the prioritization of the good life entails” (Norris 2005: 7). We might say that what is often needed vis-à-vis the unremitting threats to health and well-being (including the risk of death) that saturate modern urban living (and is a mark of the human condition) is not so much the cure that medicine relentlessly pursues, and in this case, attempts to secure in conjunction with the law (the ban), but rather the ambiguity of the healing touch14 that education (philosophy) makes available to all who are its committed interlocutors. Endnotes 1.

Anaphylaxis is defined as “a severe, potentially fatal, systemic allergic reaction that occurs suddenly after contact with an allergy causing substance” (Sampson et al. 2006, qtd. in Eigenmann 2007: 265). Most important for our purposes is the fact that “Food is one of the most common inciting allergens” (Wang and Sampson 2007: 651). “Food-induced anaphylaxis is commonly triggered by cow’s milk, egg, 227

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peanut, tree nuts, finned fish, shellfish, wheat, soy, or sesame; however, any food may be implicated, including other seeds, fruits, vegetables, gums, and spices” (Simons 2008: 404). 2.

An EpiPen, an auto-injector, contains a dose of epinephrine, "a hormone that the body naturally produces in response to stress. It works on the cardiovascular and respiratory systems to constrict blood vessels and relax the chest muscles to improve breathing" (Canadian School Boards Association 2001: 12). We might note that a key problem that has been cited by many who are familiar with the EpiPen is what has been called its counter-intuitive design. That is, the needle is located not at the end where one removes the cap, but at the other end. This has resulted in many injecting themselves in the thumb or hand rather than the person who is experiencing the anaphylactic reaction.

3.

The full transcript of Sabrina’s Law, 2005, S.O. 2005, Chapter 7, can be accessed at the Government of Ontario’s website at http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/statutes/ english/elaws_statutes_05s07_e.htm.

4.

The introduction of legislation such as Sabrina's Law has benefited from tremendous support, both directly and indirectly, from medicine. For example: At a press conference in Ottawa almost a year after Sabrina's death, Dr. Andrew McCallum, the chief coroner for Eastern Ontario, called for the implementation of comprehensive anaphylaxis management plans in the schools, and said that high schools, in particular, needed to pay better attention to the need to protect allergic children such as Sabrina. All schools, he said, should keep EpiPens available in the school office and staff and teachers must have proper training in the use of the device. (Smith 2005) Furthermore, here is a statement from Dr. Jeff Williams, a pediatrician in the UK: The most common situation of this kind [food-induced anaphylaxis] is the school classroom and playground. The provision of training and establishment of protocols of management for nurseries and schools must now be accepted as essential. (Williams 2002: 366) See also Bock et al. (2001: 193) and Simons (2006: 374), all physicians who also express support for such policies that comprise Sabrina’s Law.



5.

Prior to the advent of Sabrina’s Law, many school boards in Ontario relied on the CSBA Handbook as the basis for policy development in relation to anaphylaxis. Excerpts from that handbook will be subsequently cited.

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6.

For example, Bock et al. (2001; 2007) document a total of 63 individuals who died from food-induced anaphylaxis in the U.S. between 1994 and 2006. Of those, 13 died while under the auspices of school life, including college settings.

7.

For discussion of some such advances see Jackson (2006).

8.

For example, the Canadian School Boards Association (2001: 31–2) recommends the following measures as fundamental to an effective strategy for combating anaphylaxis: • Require anaphylactic students to eat only food prepared at home or approved for consumption [emphasis in the original]. • Discourage the sharing of food, utensils, and containers. • Develop strategies for monitoring allergen-free areas and for identifying high-risk areas for anaphylactic students. • As a last resort, if allergen-free eating areas cannot be established, provide a safe eating area for the anaphylactic child.

9.

Zizek (2008: 53) proposes that the paradox of victimhood resides in the fact that protection for the one constructed as a victim is given on the condition that he or she “remains a victim.”

10. Here we want to evoke what Michel Serres (1998: 8) tells us is the “naked meaning” of the Greek word pedagogy: “The voyage of children… Learning launches wandering.” That is, teaching is the practice that launches children on a voyage of learning that significantly comprises an imaginative wandering. 11. Agamben (1998) reminds us that the ban is inhabited by bare life, which we understand to mean, in good measure, a life whose highest virtue is that it is not death. It is biological life, a life comprised significantly of mere existence (Agamben 2005). 12. Here we mean to evoke, in part, the medical connotation of stigma as "a visible sign or characteristic of a disease" (OED). But additionally, we want to call to mind the figure of a stigma as that burden, perhaps assuming a different contour for different people, that befalls everyone and which they must each learn to manage in ways that become sources of strength rather than vulnerability. 13. Two abiding notions of sacrifice that are understood as foundational to collective well-being are given to us by Rousseau (1968) in his discussion of The Social Contract and Freud (1961) in his Civilization and its Discontents.

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14. I owe this distinction between the ambiguity of the healing touch (the Grey Zone) and the cure to Alan Blum.

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13 Game Death: Fantasy and Mastery in Scenario Paintball Ariane Hanemaayer

We were under heavy fire. Bullets were flying at us from all sides, and we were dispersed, crouching below the various deserted, dilapidated wooden shacks that once made up a small, quaint and quiet village, now marked by the onslaught of heavy artillery. We were told that we were now in the Kandahar province, and it was hot. Amidst the bullets, the sun was beating down on us; we were wearing full uniforms, digital ACU to be exact, and mine was soaked with sweat and splatter. I peeked up above the windowsill under which I sought refuge from the hailstorm of fire, and once again took cover. Another burst of artillery rang in my ears as I huddled; it was all I could hear besides my belabored, quick and heavy breathing. We had sustained heavy casualties. I was holding up the rear, covering the braver of us pushing out on the offensive line. I was scared but also functioning on adrenaline. The platoon had pulled back twenty feet to regroup and strategize to outflank the attackers. It was a battle to the last man standing. The small group of Afghani terrorists were stronger than we thought, in our arrogance, and had a lot more experience than we anticipated when we first took a look at them. Our team leader, who we called Gridd, was trying to calm us down and boost morale. He encouraged me to move forward for a better vantage point. I had my reservations, but I ran forward to the front lines. I lifted my head above the cover I had taken behind a structure that was only a few short steps to the closest enemy shooter. Seeing no one, I rushed towards an enemy hideout when I was suddenly shot in the face. I frantically looked around and saw my attacker, who was now ducking behind the fence that was diagonal to my location. I hadn’t seen him. I shouted, “I’m hit!” I walked to the base, spitting profusely. I saw blood. When the shell had hit my mask, the shards from the shell had perforated the breathing holes and had slit my lip. The paint 233

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left a terrible taste in my mouth. I guzzled a bottle of water, desperately trying to wash the awful taste from my mouth. When everyone returned, we discussed war stories, and I met the woman shooter who had outgunned me. I gave her a high-five and told her what a good shot she was. It was my first time playing paintball, and it was thrilling. The game of paintball has recently gained a lot of media attention. The once backyard hide-and-go-seek game with little sports credibility has exploded into a recreational and competitive sports genre of war play over the last few decades. The game has undergone significant changes from the simple “tag” scenarios and transformed into myriad gaming plot lines. One such game is speedball, a televised game played on a sports field with air-inflated obstacles. It has gained international status: teams from various leagues in Australia, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, and a number of leagues in Canada and the U.S. compete for an annual world cup. The game also takes the form of large scenarios that reenact actual war strategies and fictitious stories, called, for my purposes, scenario paintball. In scenario paintball, the games are played on fields that are designed to look like villages, with free-standing wooden housing structures. There are opposing teams that shoot at each other to achieve an objective, usually capturing field “territory” or a “flag.” The game is played out under the guise of a narrative, and players are separated into teams with different objectives to complete in order to win; it might be America versus the terrorists, for example, DEA versus the drug lords, or a World War Two D-day reenactment. One thing common to all forms of the paintball game is the pseudo-weapons called paintball “guns” or “markers.” The guns are powered by carbon gas or pump action. When active, the gun fires a single or semi-automatic burst of paintballs. In some cases, the guns are made to look authentic to army-issued rifles, like AK47s, but there are also the lower-grade recreational players’ guns that look like rifles with an attached air tube. The gun is fired by pulling a trigger, and the paintballs, made from biodegradable corn oil, break on impact, leaving a blotch of bright colored paint. Once a paintball breaks on you, you are “shot” and considered “dead,” no longer in play; you must leave the field. If a paintball grazes your arm, for example, you are not shot or dead; the paint must break and leave a mark the size of a quarter for game death to occur in the regulation standards. The games are highly complicated with rules and regulations, but the purpose of my paper is not to disclose these things here, but rather provide a working knowledge of these games for further consideration and theorizing. Additionally, the game and its equipment have been used for various military training operations, training the new recruits to take orders under fire without the risk of live weapons. Likewise, the psychological community interested in cognitive processes has been using the game for scenario purposes, studying human action and time measurements for following commands in high-risk and high-stress situations (see, for example, Smith 2003). Medical journals have examined the sport as well, publishing articles on ocular injury and safety concerns for game-play and equipment (see, for example, Neely et al. 2009). Other 234

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scholars have been interested in the game’s postmodern relation to sports play (Aupers 2006; Rinehart 1998) or even the processes used on the field to engage in strategic activity and object-subject interaction and negotiation (Hanemaayer 2009). But little scholarly interest has developed in what these games mean and their relation to the death fantasy. The Game This chapter’s interest lies in the relation between games and the desirability of playing out death scenarios. Various venues are available for the modern player to engage in war scenarios, from first-person shooter video games to laser tag. Youths and adults alike participate in paintball, making this game particularly of interest: apparently there is something broadly desirable about the scenarios and experiences that it offers, as opposed to video games which, it could be argued, have a greater appeal to young people (see, for example, Prensky 2001). Conceptually, the game is a site where imaginative war scenarios illuminate the desire for enjoyment, play and role-taking. Paintball is a game of war reenactment, of military play and strategy. It is the site where the imagination, the thrill of possible game “death,” converges with authenticity of military tactics and strategic planning. The game’s operations and infantry formations take place in a different relation to reality as there is minimal to zero risk of casualty or death in paintball game play. In this way, the game aspect is somehow remembered through the player’s reliance on the safety of his play but necessarily forgotten to embrace the scenario’s realness. The game, as a structured experience, requires that the player is aware of the rules but also that he forgets them to be a good player. George Herbert Mead (1934) contends that games are an important part of social life because they exemplify the individual’s relation to the social group. Mead refers to this relation as the generalized other; it represents the individual’s relation to the organizational form of human action. The fundamental difference between the game and play is that in the latter the [player] must have the attitude of all the others involved in that game. The attitudes of the other players which the participant assumes organize into a sort of unit, and it is that organization which controls the response of the individual. The illustration used was of a person playing baseball. Each one of his own acts is determined by his assumption of the action of the others who are playing the game. What he does is controlled by his being everyone else on that team, at least insofar as those attitudes affect his own particular response. We get then an “other” which is an organization of the attitudes of those involved in the same process. (Mead 1934:153–4)

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To accomplish play, all players must be committed to a shared understanding of the various conditions of the game situation. Each player, in acting in accordance with the rules of the game, anticipates that others will also act with the same understandings in mind. The other is not a concrete reference to any particular player so much as a standin for an imaginary understanding of the possible lines of action any one player could make and what could be possibly expected as legitimate and illegitimate play of the other teammates. Mead’s description of games illuminates action as a set of moves; social life is a set of moves. In this way, the game metaphor emphasizes that, in social life as a collective form of action, individuals necessarily rely on an organization of the other (be it a person/player, object or social situation) that is uncertain; individuals imagine possible actions of others when they themselves are acting. In such a world, any social situation is understood through an indirect relation to reality. Building on Mead’s metaphor, the game, as constructed by shared understandings of gesture, is an indirect understanding of the linguistic relation to reality. Language is a set of symbols that mediate the individual’s relation to reality in any social situation insofar as language is necessary to talk about and understand the real, but it is not what is real in and of itself. This ambiguity between the symbol and the real can be referred to as the grey zone. Interestingly, the game of paintball is acknowledged as a game; to treat the game of paintball as real would be considered psychotic. However, players must act authentically to the game conditions. In the introductory narrative, for example, players act as if the scenario and paint bullets are real; they hide and run away from the paint balls, being “shot” means being “dead,” and, subsequently, no longer in play. In this way, the game is appreciated as a game but represents an imaginary relation to death that is mediated by the actions in the game scenario. Or, in Mead’s terms, the other is the collective organization of game conditions (possible gestures, legitimate and illegitimate moves, and roles) that players treat as real conditions (being shot, being dead). The death scenario is made possible by the shared understanding of it as mediated by the players’ necessary reliance on the organized notion of the game conditions as they relate to an incomplete understanding of death and war situations. The notion of “no longer in play” is both a legitimate move for being shot in the game as well as a representation for death in the game’s symbolic order. Game death is one imaginary relation to an understanding of death that is at a distance from the real occurrence. This chapter will use a dialectical method of analysis to develop one possible theoretical understanding of this phenomenon. Alan Blum describes such a method of inquiry as: one (it might be said) that dialectically engages oppositions (the either/ or) and pacifies their extremism through analysis itself, and analysis that always seeks to develop from the truth of the opposition (of both sides) as if it is searching for a way of living with its ambiguity. The notion 236

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of the Grey Zone suggests that this “development” is never realized in a final and tangible product (definition, action) but in its way is an open question rather than a definitive answer. The modus vivendi resists treating the realization of the theorist’s desire as an end because its ambiguity requires its very lack of fulfillment to be enjoyable (this relates to oppositions of cure and healing, desire and jouissance, pleasure and enjoyment). (Blum 2006: 5) Rather than coding or categorizing typifications of death in the game scenario, this chapter will instead seek to develop a deeper relation between the desire to enact death in the game and the construction of an imaginary relation to the unknown experience of death: one possible set of moves to expose the “otherness” (in the Meadian sense) of death as an irremediable phenomenon that surfaces in the game of paintball as players enact death scenarios and fantasies for enjoyment. Berserker The game is organized around a military metaphor of play: players often mimic real war events, strategies and command structures. The notion of a suicide bomber in paintball would be carried out along authentic mimicry of the real thing, with the exception of live fire. To develop the notion of the game and its relation to the desirability of the death fantasy, this section will formulate usage taken from Jungle, a paintball magazine: More terrifying than opponents who have nothing to lose are those who want to get shot while attacking you. History calls them berserkers, kamikazes, jihadis, martyrs…Davy Crockett at the Alamo… They are a force to be reckoned with, though they can’t come back and attack again. But you can. (Norman 2009: 49) The thrill narrative that begins this article creates a sense of displacement between the kamikaze caricature of the past and the player in the game. By invoking sensational language such as “terrifying” and “force to be reckoned with,” the past kamikaze berserker, a thing of “Davy Crockett” stories, becomes a present possibility: “But you can.” History’s berserker could not come back to attack again, the consequence of death, but now, in the game of paintball, the player can play out the stories and escape the consequences of real death. Part of the game objective in paintball is to “kill” as many opposing players as possible, while trying to avoid getting shot yourself. Kamikaze play strategy allows the player to achieve the game’s goals, but with a twist—he succeeds and dies in the game but has no fear of death to stop him. The paintball berserker, unrestrained by the 237

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implications of kamikaze death, is endowed by the game conditions with an improved ability to carry out the kamikaze mission. The article proceeds, like a how-to manual, to introduce a strategy for playing out the kamikaze role during the game of paintball: Attack with as much speed and (initial) silence as possible, exploiting their weakest side. Your goal is to breach their defences so that you get side and back shots on them. Most bunkers protect players from the front and a little bit from the side…but rarely from oblique angles or directly behind. Deploy a distraction that doesn’t mind getting hosed [shot at, eliminated] (that’s the whole point) while the rest of you charge silently into action. Once you’re compromised, it’s time to go out in a blaze of glory. Markers up. Feet on fire. Go, go, go! You’re going to get hit—who cares? Take out one guy, and it’s a trade. Take out two or more, and you’ve offset their numbers in your team’s favour. (Norman 2009: 51) The article’s focus on strategy lays out a framework for being a successful kamikaze player in the game of paintball, such as being silent, deploying distractions and offsetting the bodies on the opposing side. These instructions are comparable to the military strategies of surprise attacks or berserker missions. While directions are necessary for game playing, as rules are a way to regulate legitimate and illegitimate actions on the field, the collective “other” of the game, direction and instruction are also necessary in military action to regulate the moves of the equivalent real life situation. The real military situation, what paintball is playing and pretending to be, has a game aspect; there are objectives and instructions, as well as a field of battle where those moves take place. In the paintball game, instructions delimit when and how objectives are and can be accomplished. This denotes when and how the game is won, and when and how the game is lost. For example, the kamikaze usage describes legitimate moves for being a successful kamikaze player, outlining the moves that are how the game can be won. As well, being shot means game death, the game is lost. In the military, similar instructions are used to define how a mission is accomplished and completed, what moves are expected of the soldiers (players) carrying out the mission. To complete the mission, for example, is to “win;” to lose means to fail to meet the objective or even to die. For the real berserker, completing the mission is both winning, accomplishing the mission, and losing, death. Much like the rationale for military kamikaze missions, the article states that playing out the life-risking scenario is good for the team if the objective is accomplished, “killing” other players to complete the object of the game and win. Making a how-to set of instructions for aspiring kamikaze players implies that the article is promising a 238

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kind of mastery over the outcome of the game, that following the instructions leads to winning. Recalling Mead, players act in game play on certain expectancies of possible responses to each move in the game. But the moves of the game are carried out in uncertainty, as any one of a number of possible moves could follow, producing success or, equally, failure. The conditions and rules of the game represent the imaginary relation to mastery, as players necessarily rely on the order of the generalized other (this set of moves for kamikaze role-playing, or even orders and instructions for real military operations) without an assured knowledge of whether they will win or lose. In the game or in the military mission, players and soldiers, without knowing the outcome, have to act as if they will win. The promise of mastery in following the rules of legitimate and illegitimate moves is also intertwined with winning, with “going out in a blaze of glory.” For the kamikaze play, this suggests that there is something desirable about playing out this death-mimicking role and strategy within the game conditions. I will now put these two notions, mastery over the game conditions and the desirability to play out the death scenario, in conversation with one another. In addition to the conditions of the game as an imaginary relation to mastery, an issue in the article is the notion that the kamikaze role of risk-taking on one’s (game) life is both desirable and exciting. While the speaker in the text does not address what makes this kind of action seductive and thrilling—these notions are relied on but not openly developed—the interesting part of the game aspect is that it is possible to live out these desires of life-risking through fantasy and controlled game rules and lines of action where there is no consequence of death. This game is an imitation scenario of the real military situations where people do risk or surrender their lives in warfare, and, as this article points out through its sensationalized language, this experience is not only a desirable experience in relation to game play and mastery, but also, for the one who plays out this role, it can be an exciting experience. The very interest in this kind of selfannulling action or life-risking activity as desirable, exciting and pleasurable under the conditions of a game scenario demonstrates that it is an occasion to consider this essence in a more detailed manner. That the excitement of the kamikaze experience takes place in the context of regulations, rules and fixed boundaries (physically as well as by defining legitimate and illegitimate moves) suggests that the player interested in living out life-risking scenarios in the game is one that is playing so long as he cannot get harmed: the player desires to act out his own death but does not want to die. Someone who is interested in risk in a way that is controlled through game play, using weapons that are imitations, points to a desire for mastery over the risk element of those situations. The idea that the actor cannot really experience harm in the sense of losing his life makes playing out the scenario entirely enjoyable, without the possibility of more permanent repercussions and consequences, such as the real death of kamikaze pilots who hurled their airplanes at enemy lines. The player interested in acting out death scenarios without the possibility of death is one who 239

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is interested in pleasure-seeking but also concerned with control over impending harm. This desire for mastery over the risk of death and harm illuminates a version of a rational player, one who acts on his desire knowing the risks and how to eliminate them. This rational actor is aware of his mortality and so attempts to eliminate the possibility of harm by removing possible dangers: namely, lead bullets are merely paint pellets on this field. The control over particular conditions gives the actor a sense of security that he relies on, enabling the death-play moves under the assumption of mastery over the environment and harmful conditions. The actor who desires to pursue a fascination with death, who does not want to die, can only live out this desire through the game scenario. In this way, the text not only promises mastery over the outcome of the game but also promises the excitement of the death scenario experience. The game provides the venue for the death fantasy, as the game mediates the unpredictability of the environment’s conditions through the expected conditions of the game equipment and its moves. The player who commits to a “game reality” of the kamikaze lines of action is able to grasp at his desire to live through an exciting death—without dying. This is one way the player orients to death, by playing out death fantasies in an imitation of reality, the game. The game allows the player to construct a field where mastery over the conditions of war, with weapons as disarmed game props, allows for the desired “brushes with death,” risk-taking, or kamikaze role to become about pleasure and enjoyment, and the element of death is played out in a fantastic relation rather than a fatal one. What is enabled by the fantasy is “going out in a blaze of glory”: the berserker strategy provides the player with a possibility to win the game, and the conditions of the game allow the player to “win” insofar as he enacts the fantasy without the consequences of death. The relationship between mastery and fantasy suggests that the win-win situation of the game implies a kind of cowardice that the kamikaze game role hints at. The desire to avoid the consequences of death in the kamikaze action shows that “winning” is the construction of particular expected conditions, grasping at the experience of the death scenario but maintaining the ability to escape it. While the player commits to the game conditions to grasp at the berserker moves, he fears the commitment of the real action; the player needs the game and its promise of mastery, or he cannot act out his fantasy. Now, the player seems more berserk than real berserkers; he desires the enjoyment of the fulfillment of his death fantasy, but he must forget his commitment to the game. Death Fantasy As developed through the Mead frame of reference for the other, players commit to and rely on the collective conditions of the game as if they are real. The mastery over the conditions of war through a game situation suggests a tension between the desire to live out the excitement of death fantasies and acknowledgement that the game is pretend. The pleasure of the self-annulling kamikaze role can only be achieved if a player forgets 240

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his appreciation for the game and its alterations. The necessary reliance on those altered conditions (mastery over the environment) points to a symptomatic relation to the desire to act out fantasies of one’s own death. The game, treated as a stand-in for language (or signifiers, symbols), has an imaginary relation to mastery through the use of rules, expectancies, sets of moves and so on. Just as language has an imaginary relation to the real, the symbols are a way of representing the real but also reveal a desire to master and know it. The ambiguity of the game situation points to a tension between the pretend and the real as the desire to master the conditions of the game to play out the death fantasy shows an acknowledgement of the real through an engagement with the pretend (the use of paint instead of lead bullets, for example), the desire for the excitement and pleasure of acting out one’s own death through fantasy, and the necessary forgetfulness of the game conditions to achieve it. What makes the paintball berserker more berserk than a real kamikaze is the fantasy that the game is playing at. In the game, the player survives the mission, whereas the real kamikaze cannot escape the consequences of death at the completion of the act; but it is the fantasy of the game, the desire for mastery over its conditions, that enables it. To play out the fantasy, the fantasy is real in some form; is the pretender suffering from madness if he takes the game as real? Consider Jean Baudrillard’s statement on simulation: To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulation is not pretending… Therefore, pretending, or dissimultating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas the simulation threatens the difference between the “true” and the “false,” the “real” and the “imaginary.” (Baudrillard 1994b: 3) Baudrillard contends that the distinction between the imaginary and the real becomes distorted through the disconnect between the subject and the object, what is being feigned. Symbols become a simulation when the speaker takes the symbol as if it grants the real. In paintball, dissimulation, “to pretend not to have what one has,” is the game itself. To play the game, players organize their actions within the conditions and legitimate and illegitimate moves of the game. The commitment to the game situation is necessarily forgotten for the game’s action to take place, but this forgetting is a pretending not to have the game; the player’s actions are carried out in relation to the collective organization of the game as if it is real, as developed earlier in Mead. The game’s conditions are present insofar as they are maintained and created by the player’s commitment to the other’s notions of game moves, the game’s equipment and so on. The distance between a real kamikaze and the paintball kamikaze is made visible through the use of pretend weapons, 241

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weapons collectively appreciated as artificial, and pretend game conditions; the distance is distorted by the fantasy of death without dying. The dissimulation becomes secondary to simulation by the representation of death in the fantasy. The player feigns the death scenario, but death is absent. In paintball, the kamikaze can never reproduce itself outside of the game conditions: it is the dissimulation, the commitment to the constructed conditions, that is required for the player to escape death. But the kamikaze can never be reproduced because it is relying on an absent, imaginary relation to death (it is impossible to play out the kamikaze without the consequence of dying) that enables the player to act it out in the fantasy. By relating to the unknown reality of death by acting out death fantasies, the player creates a hyperreal relation to death. Baudrillard refers to the hyperreal, simulacra, as “the generation of models of a real without origin or reality” (1994b: 1). The fantasy is a simulation of death: it feigns the real death experience in the absence of an original, genuine or real death. The death fantasy makes the dissimulation of the game possible. The very absence of death makes it possible for the player to pretend not to play. The fantasy enables the game, but it is also disconnected from the game conditions; the desire to act out the fantasy as enabled by the mastery of the game situation replaces the appreciation for the pretend. The simulacrum of the death experience enables the player to master and know death with an imaginary, dissimulated experience of the kamikaze on the paintball field. The death fantasy simulacrum obscures the imaginary relation to death with the false promise that the representation will fulfill the real. The simulated feigns to have what is absent, death; the player seeks out the fantasy to attain that which is promised, the death experience, without the consequences. The desire to master death through the game is a lie—but also real. Death is hyperreal, disconnected from the original, but feigning its presence. The player is berserk insofar as the desire for self-destruction manifests itself in the fantasy of mastery. Death Drive Paintball is thus an occasion to act out death fantasies without dying, mastering the conditions of the game to create a situation even more berserk than the real kamikaze. The grey area between the death fantasy and the desire to master death appears in the game’s structure; the fantasy is enabled by the hyperreal relation to death—players commit to the pretend because of their desire to master death. Drawing on the observations of Sigmund Freud will allow us to treat this desire as symptomatic of a collective symptom or collective desire rather than as a situation caused by any particular force. This excerpt from Freud will help move our concern to one that is socially oriented to the symptomatic desire to master death:

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If the doctor looks down a child’s throat or carries out some small operation on him, we may be quite sure that these frightening experiences will be the subject of the next game; but we must not in that connection overlook the fact that there is a yield of pleasure from another source. As the child passes over from the passivity of the experience to the activity of the game, he hands on the disagreeable experience to one of his playmates and in this way revenges himself on a substitute. (Freud 1955: 17) In Freud’s passage about a small child who undergoes an unpleasurable experience at the doctor’s office, the child seeks to act out the role of the doctor in later games with his playmates. While Mead may argue that this is one way that the child is learning to consider the role of the generalized other, taking on other “roles” in the community, Freud’s observations point to the child’s need to assert himself actively rather than passively in a game situation. The game situation allows for the construction of common understandings of play and moves that could create an imaginary situation of mastery over various real conditions or possible harms. In this way, the child, in game play, desires to actively engage the unpleasurable experience through mastery over it. The collective desires to be masters over its pain rather than passive to it. In relation to paintball, this particularly suggests that players seek out the paintball game to assert themselves over possible feelings of disempowerment in relation to death. Paintball provides people who are afraid of the consequence death a chance to live out their fantasies of war scenarios and high-risk situations without dying. To consider the broader implications of both the child’s game as well as paintball, in Freud’s words, “there is a yield of pleasure from another source.” Pleasure emerges from a situation where one feels in control or master over its conditions, even if that situation is one of self-destruction, as seen in the kamikaze usage. The child’s game enables the change from passivity, falling victim to the disagreeable harm, to activity, “revenging himself on a substitute.” In Mead’s terms, this act of revenge is not following the rules, while at the same time still playing out the legitimate moves of the “doctor.” Not following the rules is still acknowledging the social organization of the other; by deviating from the other, it still recognizes what that other is that should be done but is not being done. The child, then, knowing that the experience about to be played out is harmful, still assumes the role of the doctor although he knows he should not. To become the master over the harm, the child must act that harm out on another. So the desire for the pleasure of the active role, the master over the pain, is still, in the Meadian sense, playing within the set of allowable moves. But what is it about the desire to act out destructive situations on a substitute that fascinates the collective? Freud sought to explain this fascination towards aggression and self-destruction as a “distinction between the ‘ego-instincts’ and the sexual instincts, and the view that the former exercise pressure toward death and the latter towards a 243

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prolongation of life” (1955: 44). Freud postulated that the unconscious desires of the mind presented themselves in two intertwined anxieties: death and life conservation. All action is carried out in a symptomatic relation to one of these two angsts. The desire to preserve life, for Freud, was entwined with a desire towards cohesion and unity. For a subject, a symptom of this desire for unity is present in the Mead concept of the other. That is, the need for structure is evident in the presentation of the game metaphor. As a subject, the player sees herself as an object unto himself within the group, just as the group is object to her. The game takes place in a situation where the player acts in relation to the otherness of the group: both her actions as well as anticipated actions of others represent her desire to act in accordance with the group’s notion of legitimate and illegitimate moves. The uncertainty of the social situation, however, is what makes the need for unity an anxiety; the player acts as if the game is real within a symbolic order of the game. She acts as if the game is real while simultaneously appreciating that it is not real (the distance). For the Kamikaze player, the game is symptomatic of a desire for unity insofar as kamikaze actions are carried out in relation to the appropriate game rules (the other) as well as in relation to the desire for mastery over the conditions of the act (the kamikaze game death). The game provides a kind of mastery over the conditions of death that a real enactment of the role would consequently enforce. Freud contended that obtaining “mastery over an object coincides with that object’s destruction” (1955: 54). To master death is to destroy or dismantle the conditions of death, the conditions of the game. Destroying the possibility of death, removing the consequences from the outcome, is to control it. So, to master the conditions of the kamikaze role, a way to preserve life while pursuing the act, requires a desire for self-destruction (death) and also a desire for selfpreservation (not to die). The fascination with self-destruction is linked to the pleasure of mastery and the related control to destroy that which the mastery enables to preserve. Death can be mastered through the conditions of the game, but it is an anxiety as it is solely possible in the context of the game; it is impossible to control when or how one will die. The conditions of the game allow for the preservation of life while also providing a venue for the mastery over the possibility of death. The pleasure of the death fantasy lies in the desire to master the angst surrounding the conservation of life as well as the conditions of death. The intertwined anxieties of the desire to preserve and the desire to destroy frame the pleasure of the power of the death fantasy. The desire to master our conditions is an unconscious drive that makes symptomatic the moves of the kamikaze role in the paintball game. The impossibility of control over the prolongation of life, and likewise over death, leaves the game of paintball as merely an imaginary relation that stands in for this symptomatic desire for the kamikaze play and the mastery over those conditions. The inability to master or destroy death gives it a quality of otherness that is irremediable. It is here that I will now turn to a notion of suffering, addressing the otherness of death, the desire to master its impossibility and the jouissance of this pleasure. 244

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Suffering For Freud, the pleasure of the death drive is related to a desire for mastery in relation to the object of fantasy. The anxieties of the desire to preserve and the desire to destroy are intertwined with the experience of pleasure and mastery. However, as discussed in relation to Baudrillard, the power of the death fantasy finds itself in a hyperreal relation to the object of fantasy (death); that is, the conditions of the game are necessarily forgotten and relation between mastery and play is feigned because death is absent. The death fantasy tends toward an image of life preservation and self-destruction; the game’s conditions provide the preservation of life, and the fantasy tries to capture the experience of death through mastery over it. The absence of death and the hyperreal disconnection between mastery and play is symptomatic of a relation to coping with the loss of the fantasy object of death, for it is never present in the game, nor is it possible to master. To further consider the game and the death fantasy in relation to coping with loss of the object of fantasy (death), consider Jacques Lacan’s discussion of the sado-masochist: “Freud articulated in the most categorical way that at the outset of the sado-masochistic drive, pain has nothing to do with it. It is a question of Herrschaft [ruling], of Bewältigung [overcoming], violence done to what?… A violence that the subject commits, with a view to mastery, upon himself ” (Lacan 1978: 183). Lacan states the subject of the death-drive, a drive for self-destruction, commits a kind of injury, an alteration upon himself. The desire of the sado-masochist is not self-harm or self-destruction in a literal sense; “pain has nothing to do with it.” Instead, Lacan says, the desire of the subject is to exert an injury, an alteration on himself as both the subject and the object of the injury and alteration. For the subject, the pleasure of the drive is transforming his own desire to injure into a mastery over his own body, “ruling” over himself, “overcoming” the drive towards perseverance and homeostasis. It is through this transformation that the Freudian notions of surviving and preservation are intertwined with the notions of destruction and suffering. The subject treats his body as if it were the object of the other. The alteration of the subject’s body is the transformation into the bourreau;1 the subject experiences the desire to adjudicate harm onto his body, thus forming a relation to himself as both master (the other) and the object of the fantasy. But this treatment of himself is incomplete. Lacan goes on, describing the course of the death drive: At the moment when the loop is closed, when it is from one pole to the other that there has been a reversal, when the other has come into play, when the subject has taken himself as the end, the terminus of the drive. At this moment, pain comes into play in so far as the subject experiences it from the other. He will become, will be able to become, in his theoretical deduction, a sadistic subject, in so far as the completed 245

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loop of the drive will have brought into play the action of the other. What is at issue in the drive is finally revealed here—the course of the drive is the only form of the transgression that is permitted to the subject in relation to the pleasure principle. (Lacan 1978: 183) For the subject, the transformation of the body as the object of the other is the point when the drive comes to a close. The sadism of the subject is revealed through the action of the other; the subject harms the body as if it is the other (the object of the fantasy) in an action to achieve mastery over his own condition (pain). While at the outset “pain has nothing to do with it,” it is now that “pain comes into play;” at the beginning, the desire was to overcome himself. Now, the pain symbolically represents the pleasure of the other, mastering the administration of pain. In this way, the subject overcomes the life drive towards unity, cohesion and preservation. He acts against the pleasure principle and finds a different kind of pleasure, jouissance. However, “the subject will realize that his desire is merely a vain detour with the aim of catching the jouissance of the other” (Lacan 1978: 183). The experience of jouissance is both an offense and a pleasure in the sense of the death drive. Overcoming the desire for survival offends the life instinct, and it is also pleasurable, grasping at the experience of the other, as well as mastering his own pain. But, as the subject continues to pursue his desire for mastery, the gaze of the other in the drive, he comes to realize that it is an incomplete transformation, as in the end it is merely himself reenacting both the executioner and the recipient of the harm. This is reminiscent of the hyperreal relation in the death fantasy. The subject is simulating the relationship between himself and the other, but the experience of jouissance is the affective result, a simulation of the act of the other. The fantasy is a form of coping with the distance between the simulation of the jouissance of the other and the desire for mastery. In addition to the desire to catch the jouissance of the other, Lacan also reveals that the act of the drive is an indiscretion that the subject commits against himself, and the drive towards certainty and prolonging, being the bearer and executioner of his own pain, is a path to empty-handedness. The emptiness of the desire for mastery—”catching the other”—is part of the human condition. The death drive is an experience that reveals the hole of being. The fantasy as an act of coping has implications for this hole in being (le sujet troué). Recalling Mead, the other represented a collective agreement of moves in a social situation. For Lacan, the other emphasizes the uncertainty accompanied by the individual’s relation to the Other; that the Other is relied on but unknown. The Other, for Lacan, is lost to the subject because it is both what joins the subject (individual) to the social, the relation to the collective, and also separates the subject from it, the distance. The object of fantasy, then, is lost to the subject, despite his desire to master it. The pleasure of the sado-masochist is the fleeting pursuit of the other’s pleasure, even if it is impossible to know due to the distance and uncertainty of its very relation to being. 246

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To consider this notion in relation to paintball and the kamikaze, this form of play demonstrates the subject’s (player’s) desire to overcome the life instinct and his desire to master the uncertainty of death (the other). In playing the kamikaze role, the transformation occurs when the player’s desire to kill turns in on himself, and he becomes the object of his own demise. The player chooses his own death by being the perpetrator against himself; it is he who runs out against the opposing team, anticipating the opposing gunmen and their moves to shoot him. The pleasure of the death role in this form of play is related to the jouissance of the opposing player. The kamikaze treats his (game) death as the object of the other; assuming the reversal, the role of the other, he strives for mastery over his conditions in the game, making himelf object of the other and anticipating his own death. Although it is the kamikaze player who experiences the death, he attempts to catch the jouissance of the other (an opponent shooter) by dignifying death with his choice, the transformation and reversal. By striving to recover the loss of the object, his death, he violates the game moves of preservation and finds the experience of the kamikaze pleasurable due to the desire to control the conditions of (his) death. Considering the implications of this development in light of the collective, this resolution illuminates an interest in exercising a need for dignity, to overcome death through choice. The game, as a form of coping with the loss of unity with the other, is also a way to find pleasure in its distance. The paintball game is symptomatic of this loss: the desire to master the conditions of death and the desire to choose actively the death situation over the passivity of an uncertain other. The impossibility of truly ruling over the conditions of death leaves the subject in a situation where any freedom to choose death becomes a way to catch the jouissance of the Otherness of death. The pleasure and dignity of death is having a glimpse of choice over its conditions. Curiously enough, in the conditions in which someone says to you, freedom or death!, the only proof of freedom that you can have in the conditions laid out before you is precisely to choose death, for there, you show that you have freedom of choice. (Lacan 1978:213) Acknowledgements The movement of this paper was inspired by my grandmother’s stories of austerity and courage, and the dignity she embodied in her life and death. Margaret MacMillan showed me how to live with humility and modesty, and to always carry a jig in one’s step and a Glengarry tune in the heart. I dedicate this chapter to her memory. For Pebby.

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Endnotes 1.

Torturer; executioner; one with the power to adjudge execution onto another.

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14 Delirious Exhibitionism: Negotiating Technologies in Timothy Leary’s Live Death Elizabeth C. Effinger

What man does best in the face of death is to tell a story. (Neale 1971: 118) Timothy Leary, the infamous counterculture icon-turned-futurist, controversially explored death and the role communication technologies play in the event. Diagnosed with prostate cancer, Leary set out planning his death—entertaining the possibilities of webcasting and cryogenic preservation—a process he enthusiastically describes in his final book, Design for Dying (1997). For Leary, technology is the key to death, the means of improving if not avoiding death. Straddling the line, Leary proffers rather than prescribes a profusion of rebellious designs for dying. Stressing the importance of simultaneously embracing death and technology, Leary candidly considers what it means to humanly die and to die humanely. Given the current climate—the recent death of LSD discoverer Dr. Albert Hofmann, the recent revival of LSD medical research trials, as well as this being just over a decade since the launch of Leary’s ashes into space—it is only fitting that we return to reconsider the influence/impact of this controversial figure.1 However, this return will not focus on Leary’s LSD research; rather, it will consider Leary’s research into death and dying, as well as (the event of) his own death. New insights into Leary’s writings on death might be made by considering the extent to which it is deliberately outrageous. While much has been said about Leary’s “spirit,” none have identified it as ironic. Many critics have labeled Leary as a “technoevangelist” or “cyberguru,” which I suggest is to hastily overlook Leary’s own libelous postmodern warning: “Don’t believe anything I say,” (1997: 31), which echoes the quasi-mocking audio-clip on his website, “Think for yourself and question authority” (Leary 2008). Perhaps in this unsettling laugh we might hear Foucault who, writing on the end of man in The Order of Things, suggests that “[t]o all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation…to all these warped and twisted 249

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forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh—which means, to a certain extent, a silent one” (2002: 373). Leary has been many things: Harvard professor turned LSD pied piper turned convict, then CIA informant, as well as self-proclaimed Futurist and Extropian. But he is only marginally heard as a voice within the death discourse of, most notably, Kübler-Ross, Kevorkian and Webb. In the 1960s, Leary went about establishing the ideal conditions, the “set and setting,” for LSD use, driving around in the infamous Magic Bus. In the 1990s, after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, Leary set about to do the same, in the same scandalous way, for what he saw as the last taboo left for him to break—death— only this time using a much larger vehicle, the high-speed Internet. The result was Design for Dying, which reads like a guerilla guide for celebratory dying. From exploring the way to “go out of our minds to use our heads,” Leary fittingly ends his controversial life exploring the way to “go out” (1997: 4). Design for Dying Design for Dying reads as part diary, research report, postmodern pastiche and even, as Marcel O’Gorman suggests, an “instruction manual for those who hold out hope that technology will lead the way to immortality” (2007: 16). This heterogeneous text that resists simple classification mirrors the difficulty in finalizing Leary’s position on death as it appears to oscillate between extremes: desperate to live and/or to wildly die. While a case could easily be made for Leary’s ambivalence through a reading of the Freudian death-drive, I want to limit my examination of Leary to the way in which he uniquely considers how new technologies can mediate/negotiate death—or life at the time of death—through their ecstasy-producing capabilities. Today’s technologies provide us with synthetic means of producing ekstasis, from the Greek, to be “beside oneself ” (OED). The drug ecstasy is Leary’s way to break out of the mind and the limitations imposed on it, an experience he describes as “death-rebirth.” Marilyn Webb describes the psychedelic experience as one “that can encourage memories to arise as well as induce and mimic an ecstatic, mystical state” (1999: 265), an experience that some, like Leary, see as “a way to prepare for the shift in consciousness that may occur in dying.” Webb suggests that Leary’s approach to “get ready was to use his standard candy store of drugs” (Webb 1999: 265). From Designer Drugs to Designer Dying Leary’s complex approach to dying is described in his neologism of “designer dying”—a catchphrase for a death that is “designer” both in the sense of being fashionable and 250

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exciting and more generally in being designed or planned. Leary is influenced by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who takes aim at the way death in Western practice is sterilized and professionalized. Kübler-Ross aligns herself with the suffering patient, who she says is suffering more than before, at least emotionally. She points out the bitter irony that the more scientific advancements we seem to make, “the more we seem to fear and deny the reality of death” (Kübler-Ross 1969: 21). Leary sees himself as continuing the project of Kübler-Ross, but from an “anti-authoritarian, digital, fun-loving perspective” (Leary 1997: 110) and grounds his argument in accusing various institutions and their practitioners (priests, police, physicians) of encouraging death denial. He identifies our fear of death as a policing tactic constructed to undermine people’s autonomy and instead glorify victimization (i.e., the sinners and the sick are in need of saving), transforming our death into a manufactured “factory death,” which is to say, the “hospital-prison mode of dying that most Westerners experience today” (1997: 110). The case of Karen Ann Quinlan (an earlier Terri Shiavo) is Leary’s prime example of factory death, while Dr. Kevorkian is considered in the terms of an “angel of mercy” and “great hero” (1997:116). The clichéd slogan of Nike—which, like the right-to-die wars, also characterized much of the ‘90s—is exactly what Leary says about breaking the last cultural taboo of death: “Just Do It!” (1997: 117). Leary, unlike Kübler-Ross, is more optimistic about the role of technology in negotiating death and dying, suggesting that “technology has redefined death. In the past, most deaths were relatively instantaneous. With the evolution of medical technology, scientists have come to view death as a ‘syndrome’… Death, like disease, is now seen more as a cluster of attributes” (1997: 116). Despite being excited by the possibilities of technology, Leary nevertheless admits that with the extension of life via medical technologies comes the extension of the dis-ease, the prolongation of pain, physical and/ or emotional. Leary’s “solution” to the dis-ease is to take an active role in one’s dying by planning the how, where and when of the final act: “I encourage those who have the strength of will and independence of mind to continue to wage the fun campaign in favor of personal autonomy in life and in death” (1997: 119). He brings vivaciousness to death discourse with a penchant for passages that seem to walk out of a Pynchon novel: “[W]e need not go ‘quietly’ and passively into that dark night or the neon-lit, Musak-enhanced Disney-heaven of the Jesus Gang” (Leary 1997: 143). He calls designer dying “a hip, chic, vogue thing to do. It’s the most elegant thing you can do. Even if you’ve lived your life like a complete slob, you can die with terrific style” (Leary 1997: 4). In an interview with the New York Times, Leary says, “That’s the beauty of directed dying. At the last minute I can decide to be eaten by worms or go to the barbecue” (Mansnerus 1995). Leary’s unique approach is, when dealing with a heavy concept such as death, “You gotta keep a sense of humor which means a sense of humanity” (Hallis 1994). Leary suggests that death as we know it is about to become obsolete since, in an information society such as ours, we can script, produce and direct our own deaths. Some 251

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options Leary cobbles together for his proposed Evolutionary Menu include: “voluntary deanimation” (suicide); “humanist natural deanimation” (natural death without medical intervention); premortem hibernation (cryonic freeze); cryogenics; cryonic preservation of neural tissue or DNA; system upgrades, cyborgization of life extension (uploaded consciousness); cellular/DNA repair (keep your jeans genes clean); and cloning (1997: 143–8). Leary himself entertains cryonics, though opts out after finding the scientists at CryoCare to be too serious. R. U. Sirius reports in the preface to Design for Dying that Leary didn’t want to wake up “to a bunch of humorless men carrying clipboards” (Leary 1997: 9). Ultimately, despite having explored transhumanist and Extropian technologies, Leary (perhaps bored) opts out of these new medical technologies in favor of exploring new communication technologies. Turn of Events: New Medical to New Media In a second phase in his deanimation, Leary shifts his reliance on medical technologies to new media, conducting daily interviews online and with major magazines and newspapers, being professionally photographed, uploading photos, essays and letters alongside a web design team that digitally archives his corpus and records his dying with Hi-8 video cameras.2 Alondra Nelson identifies Leary as a “technoevangelist” (2002: 2), a fitting enough term for Leary, whose writings investigate the spiritual dimensions of new technologies, chemical or electronic. While Nelson registers Leary’s critique of identity in light of (new) computer technology as an extreme point of view, she also acknowledges that “the spirit of Leary’s discourse of disembodiment” is consistent with changes in perceptions of identity in the digital age (2002: 3). Nelson neglects to explore these changes in perceptions of identity in detail, though it is clear her discussion about changes in identity in the digital age alludes to other technoevangelists of the 1990s, in particular Sherry Turkle. Nelson overlooks the possibility that Leary is perhaps ahead of his time, that he is a technoskeptic or a neo-Luddite, and that his view is consistent with changes in perceptions of identity, foreseeing the pointlessness of our hyper-enthusiasm over techno-possibilities, of our infinite belief in technology to cure our own finitude. Leary is uniquely positioned as an individual who enacts and parodies, whose changes in theories and designs for dying embody a politics of disembodiment—one who embraces both a kind of Baudrillardian simulacrum and a mortal death. Ultimately, Leary’s decision not to have a high-tech death was still his design for his death, and as such technically holds Leary to his manifesto of having the right to choose. Still, some are frustrated by Leary’s decision not to webcast his death or use another high-tech option (see Sirius’ introduction to Design for Dying in Leary 1997: 7–8). His perspectives on dying and disembodiment are inconsistent and mutable, and make his death into the question of mutable identity in our digital age. 252

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Part of Leary’s finale involved creating a second life online. With a virtual home as part of his homepage, visitors to the website could take a tour of it, clicking through doors and hallways to the inner sanctum: the “deanimation chamber” (his bedroom). Despite daily updating his vital statistics and drug intake to his webpage, he is not alone in using the computer to record his dying and is arguably not the most extreme either. In 1996, the same year of Leary’s death and writing of Design for Dying, the extreme performance artist Bob Flanagan (who once drove nails through his penis) recorded his year dying from cystic fibrosis (Flanagan 2000).3 The result, published posthumously in 2000, was The Pain Journal, a text that attempts to perform the intimate connection between the disease, the computer and the writer. For Flanagan, as John Zuern observes, “the computer occupies a middle position between companion and tool, a switchpoint linking his work as artist and diarist to his family, his circle of devoted friends, his audiences throughout the world, and the medical apparatuses that treat, but cannot cure, his disease” (2003: v). Zuern describes Flanagan’s account as an “unsentimental testimony of an artist’s confrontation with illness and death” (2003: v), and yet reading the stream of “d’s” or backslashes—evidence of where Flanagan has fallen asleep with his fingers on the keyboard—strangely evokes more emotion than Leary’s text. Whereas Flanagan is more descriptive about his disease and the daily pain than about death, Leary skims over the pain and disease, privileging the larger taboo, death. O’Gorman, who admits that Leary should be admired “for his final push to write a book that at once attempts to demystify and embrace death,” also finds that his “pushy insistence on transhumanist technologies reveal a man who was not content to simply die amongst friends, Irish wake style, but who denied death with all the tools at his disposal” (2007: 17). I hesitate to reduce Leary’s position to a “pushy insistence on transhumanist technologies” as it negates the element of irony in Leary’s writing (most evident in his interviews with Paul Krassner) that undermines an entirely serious project of technological life extension. Still, O’Gorman correctly identifies Leary as engaging in certain death denial activities. In being the perpetual researcher, in making a project out of his dying that seems to become larger than his imminent death itself, Leary does everything but die. His research becomes a means of death denial, following the trajectory that Neale describes as passing “from denial of death to worship of death and back to denial again” (1971: 118). Leary develops equations like “SM2LE” (Space Migration Towards Life Extension) bastardizing the seriousness of science, as well as laughs about the possibility of being accidentally deleted if his consciousness were uploaded to a computer (1977: 137). And, telling his readers explicitly not to take him seriously, the only thing Leary seems to truly be pushy about is poking fun, having a good laugh—parodying death.

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Parodying = paro/dying Nelson (2002), Zuern (2003), Pitts (2004) and O’Gorman (2007) all identify Leary as one of many individuals to celebrate the Internet’s disembodying impact on identity, though none of these critics raise the possibility that Leary might have a similarly fractured perspective on the subject itself. I want to suggest that to take Leary narrowly, as a technoevangelist or cyberguru, is a flawed strategy, one that is incongruent with his own politics. There is an unacknowledged poignancy in the shape-shifting theatricality of his dying, which is particularly apt if we recall how the concept he grapples with (death and dying) resists easy definition, let alone representation. While O’Gorman suggests that Leary’s book is intended to be an antidote to the typical process of dying (2007: 16), I read it more as an anecdote, in light of how Leary tells us not to take him seriously and laughs at the possibility of being deleted, showing the ways in which (accidental) death will continue to plague the posthuman and immortality achieved in the archive. O’Gorman suggests, “Leary does indeed serve, and perhaps has always served, as a sort of Promethean hero for a culture that has grown weary of its finitude” (2007: 17). However, considering Leary’s parodic style, coupled with the fact that he had his cremated ashes blasted into outer space, it might be more apt to say that Leary is a figurehead for a culture not necessarily weary of its finitude so much as one weary of its gravity (in all senses of the word).4 Charlton McIlwain is also weary of the gravity of the death discourse, finding the reduction of everything to the fear and denial of death to be “virtually meaningless” considering the “changes in every other area of social life over the past three decades, and the very cosmopolitan nature of the way we orient ourselves to and practice ways of death and dying in America” (2005: 207). McIlwain examines the impact of new technologies, such as television and the Internet, on American death culture. His analysis of the intersections between death and technology is helping expand the death discourse. While McIlwain devotes most of his analysis to television, the medium from which he suggests American death culture derives most of its meanings and messages, he also offers a detailed critique of the Internet’s role. McIlwain focuses his critique of Internet technology on the company website for Forever Enterprises, Inc., a company that produces and markets multimedia biographies that they dub as “LifeStories” and innovatively offers a streamlined, digitized, Internet-webcast funeral service. While McIlwain’s discussion of the Internet, specifically the webcast funeral service or the digitally recorded personalized messages done in advance, varies slightly from the case of Leary, who planned to use the webcast to record the moment of his death, it nevertheless is an investigation into “how injecting technology into the complex realm of death, dying, and memory changes or is otherwise likely to influence the degree to which we invite or eschew death” (McIlwain 2005: 208). McIlwain sounds optimistic about the role of new media in the death discourse, suggesting that we have begun “a process of dragging death 254

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out of the mire of fear, denial, and privacy…the transformation of death from taboo to ‘pop’” (2005: 9). If part of making death “pop” involves the shift from private to public space, McIlwain asks the necessary question, “Should we turn to entertainment media as a vehicle to lift death’s discourse out of the mire of private fascination?” (2005: 20). Stimulated Images and Simulated Commitments Hubert L. Dreyfus (2001) offers a more tentative picture of the role of entertainment media in our lives. To critique the Internet, Dreyfus applies Kierkegaard’s analysis of the Press and identifies the kinds of commitments we make online as being a significant weakness of (living life on) the Internet. There are a couple of ways to frame Leary’s online death through Kierkegaard’s theory of commitments. Dreyfus, following Kierkegaard, suggests that when we respond to a calling, to something which gets our “infinite passion— that is, when we respond by accepting an unconditional commitment—this commitment determines what will be the significant issue for us for the rest of our life” (2001: 86). A quick survey of Leary’s life—rebellious professor, convict and ex-con on the run—makes it clear that antiauthoritarianism was his unconditional commitment. And so, perhaps in keeping with this intense passion for antiauthority, not following through with his contract with CryoCare, or the plans to die online, were not examples of Leary wimping out—or denying his finitude, as O’Gorman sees it—so much as examples of his antiauthoritarian spirit, of keeping his unconditional commitment right to the death. Dreyfus notes that “Kierkegaard would surely argue that, while the Internet, like the public sphere and the press, does not prohibit unconditional commitments, in the end, it undermines them” (2001: 88). Instead, the Internet primarily encourages imagined commitments, which as Dreyfus notes, “hold us only when our imaginations are captivated by the simulations… But the risks are only imaginary and have no long-term consequences. The temptation is to live in a world of stimulating images and simulated commitments and thus to lead a simulated life” (2001: 88). Kierkegaard’s notion of imagined or simulated commitments is one way to approach Leary’s withdrawal from dying online, from cryonics and from using technology to mediate his death. Having made the commitments—many imagined commitments at that—for his death, and having gone through with none of them, it almost begs the question whether Leary died at all. By making imagined commitments to death, as Dreyfus, paraphrasing Kierkegaard, notes, the “risks are only imaginary and have no long-term consequences” (2001: 88). Is this not, then, in a way, draining the risk and long-term consequences of his death? By making simulated promises and simulated plans for what is to be a simulated death, what happens to the real death? Furthermore, as Dreyfus notes, “the attraction of the Net…is that it inhibits that final plunge” (2001: 88). Dreyfus’s reference to a “final plunge,” of committing yourself to something that involves some sort of risk, is especially appropriate considering Leary’s 255

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commitment to another kind of “final plunge,” death. Essentially, Dreyfus is suggesting that the Net might be better thought of as a safety-Net (a point echoed by other Internet theorists, such as Sherry Turkle) insofar as it inhibits that final plunge. Drawing on this safety-feature of the Net, there are a couple of ways to consequently interpret Leary’s flirtation with it as a vehicle for his death. If the Net is attractive because it inhibits risk, or taking the final plunge, is this why Leary used it as a platform for his death? Was the hope that the Net would stave off death? Or was Leary’s agenda to bring risk, the final plunge, to the Net?5 This kind of risk still hasn’t entered into the Internet: sites such as YouTube ban any obscene and defamatory content.6 The fact that Leary made many plans to use a variety of technologies, and ultimately ended up opting out of them all, leaves Leary’s position within the death discourse ambiguous. The gist of Kierkegaard’s argument surrounding commitments is that talk is cheap; the only way to know that you have an unconditional commitment is if it transfers into action. The questions we are left with are: Is Leary’s talk cheap? Did Leary have an unconditional commitment to death, or was it a simulated commitment? Assuming that Leary, by opting out of his flashy high-tech death options, only made a simulated commitment, what are the implications of making a simulated commitment to death? What does that look like? Perhaps by making a simulated commitment to a high-tech death, Leary is not actually denying death, but embracing it. Ultimately, it is difficult to ground Leary’s position and just as difficult to believe that he only had one. Perhaps this dilettantish spirit results from coming after the orgy. Dying to Disappear “After the Orgy” Leary, in similar terms as Bob Flanagan, describes his dying as “performance art” (1997: 100). And while, in the end, Leary didn’t webcast his death, he did webcast his process of dying. Leary’s choice to webcast his dying combines interface and performance, which Jean Baudrillard calls the “two leitmotifs of today” (2005: 94). Baudrillard writes: If I had to characterize the current state of affairs, I would say that it is “after the orgy.” The orgy, in a way, was the explosive movement of modernity, of liberation in every domain… It was a total orgy: of reality, rationality, sexuality, critique and anti-critique, growth and growth crises. We have explored all the paths of production and virtual overproduction of objects, signs, messages, ideologies, pleasures. (Baudrillard 2005: 104) This notion of being “after the orgy” appropriately frames Leary, who psychedelically seduced the ‘60s and was in the ‘90s found with his fingers in everything: saying “yes” to both living forever and dying fashionably. And yet, to say “yes” to everything is to 256

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explore everything, after which we are left bored. As Jacques Derrida, in The Gift of Death, echoing Baudrillard, says, “There is an affinity, or at least a synchrony, between a culture of boredom and an orgiastic one” (Derrida 1995b: 35). Sylvère Lotringer in Overexposed best describes the Baudrillardean orgy: “Orgy, like the spectacle, is permanent. It’s not God’s death, but boredom, American style. It’s the anxiety of the bulimic, the martyrdom of the obese, the obsessive fear of all those who monstrously consume themselves, out of sheer self-exhaustion, in order to better disappear” (2007: 19). Lotringer’s gritty description of the orgy, particularly the concept of monstrous self-consumption in order to disappear, captures the activities of the dying Leary: doing interviews, photoops, webcasting, uploading his vital statistics and daily drug use, creating a website that mirrors his house with the feature of virtually touring it, conducting death research as well as penning a final book. Leary’s webpage promises death at the end. As Baudrillard says, “we live in a world of simulation, a world where the highest function of the sign is to make reality disappear and to mask this disappearance at the same time” (2005: 110). It certainly seems that Leary embodies what Baudrillard means when he says, “All our reality has become experimental. In the absence of fate, modern man is left to limitless experimentation on himself ” (2005: 181), or when Baudrillard credits the media as having “discovered daily life and existential banality as the most deadly event” (2005: 182). It is as if Leary is engaged in a dialogue with Baudrillard, perhaps even trying to outstrip him and make his death the most deadly event. As a result of overexposing himself via his broadcasts, Leary makes his death (look) part of the everyday life and existential banality which Baudrillard finds to be the most deadly event. However, the way in which Leary most explores Baudrillard’s orgiastic theory is in terms of how overexposure can lead to disappearance. According to Baudrillard, “there are two ways to disappear: either one demands not to be seen… or one turns to the delirious exhibitionism of one’s own nullity” (2005: 183). Leary’s continuous updating of his vital statistics, of cataloging his drug intake, certainly qualifies as delirious (or de-Leary-ous) exhibitionism at its finest. Certainly, there is some slippage between disappearing and dying: Leary’s life is slowly ending in a proliferation of “real time” images and “If everything ends in visibility, which like heat in the theory of energy is the most degraded form of existence, the crucial point is to succeed in making this… an object of contemplation, amazement and perverse desire” (Baudrillard 2005: 183–4). This perverse visibility of death is Leary’s project of breaking taboo, of showing himself haggard in pajamas or an old hockey jersey rather than dressed to the nines. Watching Leary’s elaborately orchestrated death online is to “savor the intricacies of an orgy without tomorrow… Death should logically enter the screen as an experimental event… Did it happen or not? The farther we go in the orgy of images and viewing, the less we can believe. ‘Real time’ vision only adds to the unreality of things” (Baudrillard 2005: 193–4). It is only fitting that this technology which leaves us with a profound uncertainty is used to consider death, given our profound uncertainty over it. 257

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The Future of Death, Now? Posthuman vs Posthumor McIlwain (2005) argues that if a hyper-technologized approach to death and dying is realized in the future, we will recognize it in our attitudes and approaches to how we “do” death, through the metaphor of the theatre.7 McIlwain suggests that using the metaphor of the theatre to help frame future death culture will: equalize two dominant modes to emotional response or orientations toward death and dying: fear or seriousness and entertainment… The theatre of death inspired by technology will not likely cause our fear of dying to disappear, but it will allow us to confront that fear, to channel it into individual and collective actions that allow us to ally it to some degree. It will also allow us to see not only the tragedy of death, but also the comedy of it, as well as the fantastical possibilities that death may bring. (McIlwain 2005: 245) The metaphor of the theatre, which McIlwain uses to describe this future death culture, is already an excellent way to describe the manner of Leary’s death—an event that is perhaps the best example for McIlwain’s theory. In this sense, the future has already passed. It is McIlwain’s notion of the equalization between seriousness and entertainment that makes his critique/metaphor of the theatre so invaluable. This equalization describes Leary’s own attitude and approaches to death and offers perhaps the most convincing explanation of how to justify and rectify Leary’s ambiguous position. If we interpret Leary’s willingness to make serious statements about death, contribute to the death discourse alongside more “serious” voices like Kübler-Ross, explore new ways to alleviate suffering and even death and simultaneously turn around and joke about being deleted, and tell his readers not to take him seriously, all as the equalization between the serious and the entertaining—we might have to reevaluate Leary’s position within the death discourse and reframe his identity not as a “technoevangelist” or “cyberguru” (in the traditional understanding of these terms—of extreme zeal for technology) so much as a humanist and humorist critiquing technology ahead of his time. In our current death culture, we suffer, if not from being posthuman, at least from being post-humor. If, as Neale suggests, “what man does best in the face of death is to tell a story” (1971: 118), we have only interpreted this one way: in the sense of creating texts or narratives. Our posthumor death culture has overlooked the other possibility of Neale’s statement: of “telling a story” in the sense of lying, fibbing, of playfully making something up, of not being serious about what one says. Neale also asks, “What is a ‘finely-finished death’? It is a death, not a fading away. Die now or fade later. It is also an uncommon death” (1971: 90). Thus, Leary’s greatest impact, I suspect, is in having already recognized the need for entertainment, or play, in death. Leary’s “spirit,” too often interpreted as 258

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extreme faith in technology, in the form of posthumanism, transhumanism, cryonics and/or Extropianism, might be reevaluated more playfully: Leary’s response is not an “unrealistic” denial of death but an unusually human confrontation, private fears in a public forum, defiance about autonomy in death just as in life. What Leary contributes to the death discourse is a spirit of restlessness, of exhausting all possibilities, of selfexperimenting and -experiencing, as well as a spirit of facetiousness: in mocking the very possibilities he raises, seemingly parodying science and technology, blind progress and the seriousness of thanatological discourse itself. Posthumou®s Sometime after Leary’s death, his official website—with the virtual tours, video clips and vital statistics—was taken down. Today, the original website is only viewable through often unreliable pages on the Internet Archives, and a trip to the original URL address (www.leary.com) finds a white screen with a single sentence: “Think for yourself and question authority” (Leary 2008). And, in fact, we are left to think for ourselves about what has possibly happened to his website, Leary’s online presence, which was so integral to his dying process. Was this Leary’s gesture at stepping away from the archive? Is this a sign of him failing, of not leaving his digital footprint? Or are we to infer that this disappearance is the symbol of the intimate connection we always already have with our technologies, that as posthumans when the bio-corpse collapses so too does the textual and technological corpus? Is this simply a gimmicky realization of Leary’s motto, “Dial On, Tune In, Hang Out, Link Up, Escape-Delete”? Or (and this is my suspicion) is this just Leary flipping us off, those of us looking into his death, looking to find him, to find some answers or perhaps tips for avoiding death; those of us having missed the point here, taking him and death far too seriously? Acknowledgements An earlier version of this chapter was presented at The Culture of Cities Centre. I would like to thank Tristanne Connolly and Marcel O’Gorman for their vital contributions. Endnotes 1.

Dr. Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered the LSD compound, died in April 2008, and as New York Times journalist Benedict Carey (2008) reports, health officials in Switzerland have recently approved the first known medical trial of LSD 259

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in over 35 years. Fittingly, the research trial is set to explore how LSD can reduce anxiety at the time of one’s death. 2.

Greenfield (2006: 582) notes that Leary's death was in fact recorded using Hi-8 video cameras. Allegedly, however, no footage has ever been released.

3.

1996 was also the launch of JenniCam, which involved Jennifer Ringley willingly webcasting her daily life, a phenomenon that would inspire Reality TV.

4.

Undoubtedly, Leary would have laughed over the recent debacle that was James Doohan's memorial. The ashes of television actor Doohan, who played Star Trek's "Scotty," were set aboard a memorial space shuttle (the same shuttle company used to launch Leary's ashes twelve years earlier). As John Schwartz (2008) from The New York Times reports, Doohan’s launch on August 3, 2008 failed, leaving the ashes of the outer space icon, the television character credited with discovering teleportation, grounded (!). The mission to escape the grave and gravity has failed.

5.

If Leary’s agenda of bringing risk to the Internet was to be brought about through the webcasting of his suicide, then that risk still remains to be present. According to the Terms of Use of the largest video-sharing website, YouTube (2010), posting videos of suicide would be banned under the consideration of it being either “obscene or defamatory material.”

6.

Risk has only entered into Hollywood depictions of the Internet in films, such as the recent thriller Untraceable (2008) wherein a killer uses the Internet to broadcast the “real-time” torturous deaths of his victims. In addition to broadcasting the deaths “live,” the twist of the movie is that the audience, the web-users who logon to the killer’s website to watch the deaths, are made complicit in the killing; the more number of “hits” on the website, the faster the victim dies.

7.

On a smaller scale than what McIlwain describes with FEI, this kind of future death culture is already visible with Facebook. The online social networking site is routinely referenced by news anchors, reporting the increase in the number of postmortem hits—as well as having its own "death policy." Under the heading "Termination," Facebook (2008) indicates that, in the event of a user's death, his or her page will gain "special memorialized status" and remain active for a "period of time determined by us to allow other users to post and view comments."

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15 How the Dead Circulate (in Life) Peter McHugh

Only to humanity, in contrast to nature, has the right to connect and separate been granted, and in the distinctive manner that one of these activities is always the presupposition of the other. (Simmel 1997: 171) We connect, and we separate, in expression of a right granted by our humanity, always presupposing the other in whatever particular way. We can imagine that presupposing one another in this transit back and forth among connection and separation forms a primitive circle, as a one “follows” an other and the other precedes the follower, while simultaneously the other also follows the one, and so on in transits of separation and collection that repeat and repeat, a one being one while simultaneously being also an other to another one, each both following and being followed, connecting and disconnecting, separating and coming together in their twoness and their oneness, their oneness being that each is constituted within the infinitude of human circularity. This infinity, moreover, is not simply a sum of onenesses, but rather a round of transitive compositions that are both specifically identifiable in themselves as well as a collective realization of humanity’s grant, the capacity to presuppose. Coming together/separating is not merely the gathering and dissolution of singularities but, as Simmel suggests with “presupposing,” a continuing anticipation of transitivity, an oriented coming together into a collective oneness of onenesses as well as an oriented separating into distinct onenesses, then coming together again and separating again, and then again in that circle of back and forth, but always within the ambit of circulation. These alterities, continually in some relation of transitivity, of simultaneous mobility within the form of that encirclement, cannot be construed as independent of each other, however distinct, individuated, particular or extraordinary they may be. 261

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One instance of circulation’s persistence is the transitory first experience of having been “thrown” into the world, a world that had come before, and of awakening to that fact and to its facticity as pregiven, for the very first time.1 Thrownness provokes a recognition of the involuntary yet motile discovery of having entered a place that is already underway, a first transition, as it were, where first is a measure not of time but of primacy, of the ineluctably given, as a condition of existence. Thrownness thus initiates recognition of social fact: the one encompassing circle of separating and coming together, understood to collect the twoness of oneself and of alterity in a relation, the substance of which is being in the middle of things. Circulation enacts this fact and possibility, all the while narrating itself to the vernacular as “the meaning of life,” that is, as the story of human movement, development, change and, of course, its decomposition. Indeed, thrownness is equivalent to social birth insofar as it is the origin of the understanding that coming together and separating are an inevitable form of the life-world. Death, too, often thought to be birth’s successor as the final or ultimate or metamorphic transition, nevertheless “lives a human life” (Alexandre Kojeve, cited in Strauss 2000: 91) in these very respects: in the per se of death’s incarnate and universal alterity, an alterity that always arrives but never departs; in the now segregated and utter singularity of its host, who is no longer able to presuppose; in its place in memory, desire and suffering; and as one transition among the horizon of all transitions around and within which the meaning of life is construed. (I use death here in its limited sense, to exclude dying, which is altogether distinct because in dying desire has not yet been extinguished.) Because the dead can no longer presuppose the other, death is for them a kind of “ontological graduation” from circulation and transition (Strauss 2000: 98). The dead do not go, just as death never departs them, and so coming and presupposition of the other will cease, in harmony with the decoupling fissure in the circle of coming and going and the vanished presence of presupposition. In this moment, death represents both the circulation and stasis that are simultaneously joined in one narrative occasion, where together one’s animation, presupposing and dying circulate toward the condition of an end—a life living itself out, when these very parts now collectively constitute that death by absenting themselves in a fatal moment of transformation, as the host suffers irretrievable loss of desire and thus also of any need for them. In this respect, death, as distinct from dying, would seem to become a mere formality that follows upon dying, a terminating transition, because presupposition and the rest, the language that is life, are left just to those who remain to witness it. And this is exactly true, but true only as far as it goes, namely, for death’s host. Death marks a final transition for the host-as-person as a transition between experience and void. But decomposition of the body does not dispose of the social person, one with a history of transition that amounts to reputation, relations with others, proclivities known and unknown, and all the many other aspects of living in the world, aspects which the body once may have signified but which is not essential to its sociality given the existence of public memory. The “mere formality” of 262

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death in its inevitable universality remains just that in the sense that its mereness means it is not quite annihilation. It leaves the accumulation of life’s transitions untouched, and thus the dead one’s book of social identity (as distinct from self-consciousness) remains open, both to history and to history’s own further temporal transitions. Thus, death is final only for its host and raises certain questions even about the universal dimension of collective conduct. Plato, Che Guevara and Elvis Presley are gone without doubt, for example, but “Plato,” “Che” and “Elvis” are still here. How? Death and dying are often paired on the assumption they differ only in the matter of finality, a premature gloss on death as social extinction that turns away from what death is beyond its biological fact. Simmel’s characterization of the social as beings presupposing one another is of course absent for the dead, who are no longer able to presuppose, no longer able to share this most fundamental element of sociality. Yet this is not the end of it, but the point at which the biological and social diverge. The dead can no longer presuppose but they do continue to circulate, in effect to participate in circulation, because public memory and reputation do not evaporate at death. Circulation continues to carry all transition, including the “actions” of the dead if and as they participate in those transitions at the initiative of the living, whatever they may be—hence “Plato,” “Che” and “Elvis.” And so the dead live on, whatever they may have been, as (now disattached) objects of honor and horror and inspiration and caricature and impersonation and loss, et cetera, still circulating but by reputation and reputation’s changes, some of which will come about, in fact, postmortem, and all of them a circulation. Once having accepted that the dead do leave something to circulate and thus continue to participate in life’s transitions, the question becomes how this is possible. What does it mean theoretically—how can it be said—that a now absent life is also present and in transit? Recall the essential characteristics of social circulation, its connecting and separating, coming and going. In circulation of the dead we find an analog to coming and going in what now manifests itself in a distinctly mortal dialectic of absence and presence, which collects for the living the absence of the dead as itself a presence to them, as in memory, imagination and desire. The loss of her particularity, her personhood, becomes a presence of the lost, a figure in silhouette of presence-absence, and through which death, though omnipotent in its way, is nevertheless not eradication. Simply put, the living are alive to their own history and memory, and that is where the dead reside, as it were. And so, although the lost are no longer here, neither do they vanish or become irrelevant ipso facto. Instead, being a mortal occasion and thus including some envelopment within the part of mortality that is life, death’s absences are simultaneously present to life in the particular content that they were and are, and absent to life in their capacities of presupposition, embodiment, et cetera. This is to say that these are absences that nevertheless convey substance, the contents of a life rather than nothingness, because death is not retrogressive. This is real death, a circulatory dialectic of presence 263

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and absence, one we will see again in relation to the living. Oddly, perhaps eerily to some, life and death remain together beyond their antitheses as the being-in-common of all mortality, in a transformed but continuing relation of movement, of circulation, that unlocks mortality’s gate and permeates the wall between what turns out to be the same presupposing and imagining and remembering by the living side of the relation as one element; and for the dead, now buried in silence, figurative connections to the particular circulating materials of the relation’s own live history. Ergo, an absence comes to be present and what had been threatened with extinction returns as its own footprint, fingerprint, imprint. Aesthetically, the life that had receded in death returns, now as its lifeprint, for whomever may be interested. (Further on we will note the risk in that possibility.) Within this mortal dialectic of the dead in life, the vitality of the dead is thus the presence of their absence, whereas for the living, it is the dead’s absence of their presence, which together create both the possibility and limit of continuous circulation. Their loss is not simply restricted to, say, mourning, but includes the life-changing transition it signifies, a changed relation, radically changed, because the passage of death means the passing of reciprocity, a fate suffered also (enjoyed or ignored) by the living, and not limited to that first moment of clarity and shock upon the realization of a mortal transition. Reciprocity now is concentrated in the dead’s own lifeprint and any grief but for oneself. Yet the relation survives in its way. Again, how? Any circulation of the dead in life is generated by those who are living, those able to presuppose and to act, and so the contents of this asymmetry in coming and going will depend on their particular projects, memories, reminders and coincidents. The dead, of course, can no longer make their own entrance. They are always already there, biding time, hollow now in that they no longer possess their own substance and “live” entirely within history and repute. And yet it is not as though the quality and content of their influence will be unchanging or permanently fixed, because whatever the dead have already deposited in life may expand by discovery as time passes, or, more likely, changing public interests will generate different standards for attachment, valorization and opprobrium, the dead thereby becoming creatures who change but do not act. The inevitable reappraisals, agonizing or not, of past political leaders, writers, criminals, generations and so on are only the most obvious examples of public grading, changing conditions and shifting alliances. Altogether, this circulation may be manifold, depending on what had been the nature of their relations with family and friends, idlers, enemies, admirers, users, evaluators, casuals, the whole collective—anyone connected in any way, a number of whom will not notice the absence, nor care. So will it be manifold in the circumstantial particulars it synthesizes: the now and the then, a life and an imprint, capacity and incapacity, loss and memory, presence and absence as same and other, also not-same and other, and of course the very hinge of this particularity, the hinge of receding and forgetting. 264

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In any case, the dialectic does create and sustain the relation’s narrative imprint, an imprint that is real. Although the powers of social initiative are gone, history’s socially ascribed characterizations of personhood remain, in spite of what seems an infinite human distance. Analogous to a fingerprint or footprint, they are a composition in the present of particular images, memories and actions, without any necessary connection to death, but to absence, and we realize that the absence which regularly takes place when separating in life must also be so in death, but forever. In either case it remains substantial for however long history-as-memory permits, at the end of which we will find not an absence but a nullity. There can be—most often will be, sooner or later—a point of circulatory cessation, a kind of second death, relegation to potter’s field, for the totally forgotten and now disposable postmortem dead, as circulation exotically passes away from itself, serving instead to escort, as it were, the dead to their exclusive habitat on The Other Side.2 One wonders about “Che” here.3 One wonders about the living, too, and whether the photograph fades for those who must live always within this limited asymmetry of circulation. We have followed the general nature of circulation as one of social transition, and then how circulation is accomplished as conduct, with particular attention to the transition between life and death. Further, in its continuation after death, circulation demonstrates it is not a simple mechanical process by virtue of the mortal dialectic, in which changes in a deceased’s reputation, relevant public knowledge or standards of social conduct create yet another or different understanding of the dead person—the results not known to the dead but publicly available in a process that could in principle continue indefinitely. These need now to be formulated as a whole, as a form with its own parameters, necessities and limits. Obviously, the significant difference in circulation of the dead is that presupposition, the equivalent of oriented common-sense knowledge, is now one-sided, including as it does a side in which other can only be history, no longer vested with initiation and response—no longer even a subject able to be oriented to an other as fact and possibility—and thus lacking selfhood. These are the facts, facts which in some cases have been cited to establish the “mineness” of death as a nonrelational problem, one in which a person inevitably dies alone.4 But it is also a fact that the dead are, socially, very much alive, though in limited ways, if we shift the living as other to the dead in the dialectic of transition among these two alterities and their circumstances. The living, who will be friends, enemies and strangers, exemplify a perfect asymmetry in relation to the dead because they continue to possess the same qualities of presupposition and the rest that have departed their partner in transition, a transfiguring change that is certainly not the equivalent of an end to the relation but will shift in practical action from the symmetries of mutuality to unidirection, in which the initiating one is present and 265

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the other absent except in the dead’s lifeprint in memory. Here is the place of circulation where we find Plato, Che and Elvis, with whom we share alterities of whatever kind, as we perform and examine the perfect asymmetry of the mortal dialectic, in particular the powers of the living vis-à-vis the prospects of the dead. Those still here inherit certain powers delivered by that asymmetry, as they shape and shape again the lives of those now powerless and who can neither reject nor accept what we do as we do it. We inherit the dead’s estate, constituted from our common circulating action, history and reputation, part or all of which will be accessible to any interested party and where everything becomes common property, the contents of a life’s transitions in the world now publicly abandoned to it.5 In other words, at root the transformed relation is one of laissez-faire in its extreme form: anything goes except intervention. The major conditions that create this situation are the perfect asymmetry of resources and power between living and dead, the seductive monopoly of remodeling, after-fashioning, revisionism, even venality by the living, in conjunction with circulation’s own impregnable power as one universal form in the structure of the social. Circulation is an ontological beast of burden, its work to carry all social transition—all transition, including birth, death, traffic, the web, plane crashes, taxes, file sharing, life’s comedy and tragedy, elections, giving a kiss…on and on, social exchange ad infinitum.6 Circulation is not made, for it is not a thing, nor can it be tampered with or avoided because it is everywhere and employs none of the senses. It just is, atemporal, not finite, not a being nor created, but the world’s ageless, potent and imperceptible gatherer of human transition as one part of history.7 As a consequence of circulation’s selection of all transition without exception, the entire panoply of transitive conduct is conveyed without arbitration by value or values, whether saintly or criminal, and so becomes part of the “conscience collective,” and as we know, Durkheim intends that to mean not a conscience but a consciousness. In a word, circulation is amoral, the carrier of any and every transit, whatever its virtue, however wanton. It is indifferent to value, and though a different order of discourse, it is linked in conduct to laissez faire by democratically making all history of transition publicly accessible. Given this accessibility, the living can use the dead for any transit whatsoever, legal or illegal, high or low—even, sometimes, comically replacing them but without themselves having to go all the way, as in the fable of the dead voter.8 Circulation thus carries social treasure, social gore, social junk, social sense and social nonsense, all social transition. Its compass is fixed, singular, self-evidently uncritical, because it does not advocate anything with regard to what it already includes. Being part of the whole, it conveys any and all of the whole’s human transitions. This is a limit that is selective but also indiscriminate, including as it does every little thing and every big thing that comes and goes, and so—metaphorically speaking—where circulation is concerned, all its inhabitants might as well be metonymy. It is this pervasive and intractable nature of circulation’s structure, together with the manifold relationships and life circumstances 266

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already depicted, which are the grammars of language that constitute the participation of the dead in life. The postmortem atmosphere, for the great and common alike, is inhabited by many selves and by a personhood who no longer possesses one, all amidst a near-infinite accumulation of transitions. It is an atmosphere that exposes the dead as communicants still, but whose only human capital, personhood, is no longer given a place—stateless now, not anonymous but out of the picture, irrelevant, just another transition and one more opportunity for any party to refashion as it chooses. In fact, given the default participation of the dead inherent in perfect asymmetry, there would continue to be an open opportunity for any public to circulate any possible possibility of transition, many a possible possibility, even every possible possibility, separately or together.9 Thus the perfect asymmetry of the capacity to initiate/resist between living and dead shifts all power to determine the substance of transition to the living, as the former twoness of a transition becomes by default a oneness plus that one’s memories of the antecedent twoness, a oneness together with a now phantom twoness. At base, this is a one acting for the other and subject to the vagaries of the other’s death, as well as one’s own memory and intention, however faithful. It resembles what now must be an imagined rehearsal attached to a remembered alter (another transition) rather than full-blown two-in-one.10 But in its sum it will nevertheless carry the representative effect of genuine transition, in spite of the discrepancy in authorship, if it becomes known by those close to the dead and it comports with their knowledge of the history of the relation, or if it can be made to seem so. In principle, various living members inherit as their own histories various aspects now cached in the silhouette, and they work things out with others who express some interest or claim as participant in the deceased’s welfare. Yet culture, both popular and elevated, and our brief diversion here into the simplest of practicalities, should prepare us for live conduct in these affairs that can run from melodrama to farce, sometimes on the basis of the very same materials. Imagine the discovery of contradictory wills at a meeting to “read the will.” The muttering, glowering and cursing that signal melodrama, along with simultaneous happy whoops and shouts, may make for farce, for free-for-all, any and all of which are transformations in various degrees of conformity or not—heartbreak would seem to have no place at this table— with the images that inhabit the presence of the absence of the former personhood at issue. In these encounters, the dead and the living continue to change, in the vernacular, before our very eyes, as encounters that would join the presence-of-the-absence and are constituted by whatever images they have created as part of their content, mundane and otherwise. Passing, whatever may have happened in getting there, is movement to a secular place of great vulnerability, where the history belonging to what had been a living circulation will represent many directions already in play, including understandings and desires from family and the intricacies of its divisions, friends and others with contingent interests 267

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that may go well beyond the formalities of ceremony—solicitors of various stripe less afflicted by the death than drawn to the supra-personal possibilities of the deceased as property. In any case, each in their way will demonstrate life, its end and its ends. Endnotes 1.

See, for example, Heidegger (1962: 219ff).

2.

Presumably, those driven to make an indelible mark live in dread of this above all, but in the event it will make no difference to them.

3.

This wondering may be premature: as this was being written, a motion picture specifically about Che was in production. [Editor's note: This refers to Soderbergh's two-part Che (2008), recently preceded by the less comprehensive biopic, Diarios de motorcycleta/The Motorcycle Diaries (Salles 2004).]

4.

This Heideggerian view has been challenged (e.g., Lingis 2003). For us, it is not whether the dead die alone but that relations established in life continue to effect some influence on the living.

5.

Nancy discusses abandonment in the context of any member's own indebtedness/ guilt for the way things are ontologically (1988: 137).

6.

Changing one's mind or being neurotic, for example, would not themselves circulate until associated with some form of sociality.

7.

Parmenides: "That [which] has never been and will never be because it is" (cited in Blanchot 1992: 41). Isness transcends the temporal in both senses of the term.

8.

Insinuation, implication and the like come to mind here. By the same token, affirmative claims have the same structural opportunity, demonstrating once again, as if needed, how language works both sides of the street.

9.

Most famously, this string of possibility is the (negative) premise of the Monty Python just-purchased dead parrot sketch, in which every possible possibility the owner advances for the parrot's deadness is denied by the seller as being no possibility whatever (Chapman et al. 1989: 104–5). Such possibilities are endless among the revered dead and are perspicuous in the work of historians.

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10. The imagist vocabulary of imprint, lifeprint and the like is intended to illuminate the taxing imaginative work required of the living if and as they envision—picture— this relation, given that its substance is both profound and empty, as if an echo. It was stimulated by the works of Georges Didi-Huberman (1984; 2005).

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Alan Blum, the Director of the Grey Zone Project, received his PhD from the University of Chicago in Social Psychology, was a National Institutes of Mental Health fellow at the Harvard Medical School, and was an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow at King’s College of Cambridge University, England. Blum has a history of affiliations with medically relevant research and education, including research in psychiatric hospitals for the Jury Project at the University of Chicago; co-teaching sociology to students at the Harvard Medical School; research on psychiatric residents at Harvard; creating a research program on the Sociology of Health and Illness at Roosevelt Hospital, New York while at Columbia University; and co-directing research for the Canadian National Institutes for the Blind. Among his publications are The Imaginative Structure of the City (McGillQueen’s University Press, 2003), Self-reflection in the Arts and Sciences with Peter McHugh (Humanities Press, 1984) and Socrates: The Original and Its Images (Routledge, 1978). Kieran Bonner is Professor of Sociology at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo. He was a co-investigator on the Culture of Cities: Montreal Toronto Berlin Dublin Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada project and Chair of its Executive Committee from 2000–2005. He is author of books and articles on the urban rural distinction, power and parenting; the cultures of Dublin, Montreal and Toronto; and phenomenology, hermeneutics, analysis, symbolic interaction, reflexivity, Socrates and dialectic, interdisciplinary dialogue, and student motivation. Currently, he is Director of the Human Sciences Initiative at St. Jerome’s University and Associate Chair, Graduate Studies in Sociology at the University of Waterloo. Tristanne Connolly is Associate Professor in the English Department at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo. She is the author of William Blake and the Body (Palgrave, 2002) and articles on various aspects of Blake. She is co-editor, with Steve 299

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Clark, of Liberating Medicine 1780–1830 (Pickering & Chatto, 2009) and of Queer Blake with Helen P. Bruder (Palgrave, 2010). As a co-investigator on the CIHR project, City Life and Well-Being: The Grey Zone of Health and Illness, she is currently researching representations of reproduction in the long eighteenth century. Kevin Dowler is Associate Professor in the Communication Studies Program and Graduate Programs in Communication and Culture, Sociology, and Interdisciplinary Studies at York University. He has published a number of articles on Canadian federal cultural and communications policy and on municipal cultural policy. His most recent research is focused on the development and transformation of municipal arts policy and economies of cities in North America and Europe, and on media and catastrophe as part of the Grey Zone project on city and health and well-being. He has also worked as a composer in the film and television industries, participated in the arts community as an administrator in artist-run centers, and acted as a sound recordist, sound editor, and composer for a number of filmmakers and video artists. Elizabeth C. Effinger is a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of Western Ontario. Her research interests include the intersections between critical theory and new media. She is currently working on a mixed-media performance piece that combines an elliptical machine with Derrida’s work on the ellipsis. Michael Follert is a PhD candidate in Sociology at York University and has worked as a researcher with the Culture of Cities Centre in Toronto. His current research revolves around popular sovereignty, regicide, and the underdetermination of modern subjectivity. Elke Grenzer’s doctoral research examines the reanimation of the Jewish scapegoat in the reconstruction of the memory of the Holocaust in Berlin. In the early 2000s, she codirected the documentary film Berlin Topographies and has published several articles on memorial practices after the fall of the wall in Germany. She holds an MA in Sociology from York University and is a doctoral candidate in the same program. Currently she is a contributing co-editor, with Jan Plecash, of the interdisciplinary volume entitled Of Indeterminate Birth: Studies in the Culture of Origins, Fertility and Creation with Intellect Press. Her work there examines the jurisdictional and cultural disputes between midwives and physicians. Ariane Hanemaayer is a doctoral student in sociology, theory and culture at the University of Alberta, Canada. Ariane’s work on the Grey Zone project examined the lived experience of addiction and recovery as a temporal phenomenon. Her past research on paintball can be found in Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life (Peter 300

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Lang, 2009). Her current research explores and analyzes the body, pleasure, and touch through the methods of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Heideggarian phenomenology. Saeed Hydaralli is a PhD (ABD) candidate in the Department of Sociology at York University. He is currently writing a dissertation that examines, through case studies, specific city by-laws and regulations that are directed to the enigmatic problem of public health and safety. Saeed is also Sessional Faculty at The Ontario College of Art and Design and the University of Guelph (at Humber) in the areas of City Life, Material Culture, and Consumer Behaviour. Diego Llovet studied sociology at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and at York University in Canada, where he is currently a doctoral student. During his studies he has been and continues to be part of different research projects hosted at the Culture of Cities Centre. His research has focused on the relation between the automobile and mass society, in particular through the figure of the drunk driver. His interest in the regulation of bad driving has led him to take up the question of competence and incompetence as a problem that stimulates the imagination of contemporary culture in myriad ways. Marta Marín-Dòmine was born in Barcelona and lived briefly in London and California before graduating from the University Autonoma of Barcelona in Translation Studies with a dissertation on Psychoanalysis, Translation and Literary Theory. Her current research concerns contemporary Catalan and Spanish literature, focusing mainly on postwar literature and the literature of Spanish survivors of various concentration camps. She is now working on the problematics of memory and their impact on cultural productions. She currently teaches in the Department of Languages and Literatures at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, where she co-directs the Research Group LI/ER (Literature. Internment/Exclusion. Research). She is also co-editor of the volume The Camp: Narratives of Internment and Exclusion (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008). Peter McHugh, Professor Emeritus at York University, is known for developing, with Alan Blum, the sociological sub-field of Analysis, which developed from the ethnomethodological tradition. He authored or co-authored a number of influential books, including Defining the Situation: The Organization of Meaning in Social Interaction (Bobbs-Merrill, 1968) and (with Stanley Raffel, Daniel C. Foss and Alan Blum) On the Beginning of Social Inquiry (Routledge, 1974). Jan Plecash is a PhD student at York University whose main research interest in the Grey Zone project is on the self-conception of medicine as displayed in its interpretive practices in clinical and educational settings. She is particularly interested in the way contemporary relations to birth and death, both within and relative to the medical frame 301

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of reference, describe a field of discourse in which biological and biographical fact appear variously as grounds or resources for sense-making and life-choices, as determinants, and as incommensurables whose respective claims could only negate each other. Cory Ruf is a graduate student in the Master of Journalism program at Ryerson University. He has acted as a “volunteer tourist” in Kenya, Mexico and India. Stephen Svenson is working towards a PhD in the department of Sociology at the University of Waterloo and is a researcher on the CIHR-funded project City Life and Well-Being: The Grey Zone of Health and Illness. He is developing a number of case studies that explore the intersection of leisure, health and community. Morgan Tunzelmann is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. She has been a graduate student member of the Grey Zone project since 2007. Her research interests focus on the aesthetics of scientific illustration during the late eighteenth century.

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