The grand interruption: death online and mediated lifelines of shared vulnerability

Abstract

This essay aims to shed light on two online phenomena dominated by women in the contemporary Swedish context—blogs about terminal illness and support groups for the bereaved—and explore what they mean for those afflicted by suffering and loss. We will show that in the shadow of the grand interruption—the moment when the life narrative itself is cut off because of imminent or sudden death—the studied online activities of mourners and the illness stricken, but also and more profoundly, the internet itself, become literal lifelines, both individual and collective. When they assume a salvific vital role this entails both possibilities and predicaments. Studying various renditions of lifeline communication both enables a re-conceptualization of our culture of connectivity as an existential and ambivalent terrain and requires an “upgrading” of the existential to our contemporary technological culture. In forging existential philosophy and the new materialism into a productive, if not tensionless, conversation we stress, firstly, that in emphasizing life and downplaying subjective death some strands of affect theory may neglect the universal absolutes of death and suffering, as sources of fecundity. Ontologically, technologies are lifelines precisely because of severe illness and loss. And secondly, we show that through their practices these women partake in what Karl Jaspers calls a truly “existential elucidation” in both words and deeds, but also importantly through affective encounters online. Their practices display the significance of shared vulnerability in and through the digital. Lifeline communication offers, beyond narrative, the simple promise of being there for one another online, in mutual ethical veneration of both silence and alterity. Hence, attending to grand interruptions allows for appreciating important and heretofore neglected existential implications of mediation, from the horizon of those who in the wake of loss or ill health stand before the abyss, and who live and die with the technology.

Keywords:

• Vulnerability
• existential philosophy
• affect
• digital culture
• death

Acknowledgements

This research is part of the programme “Existential Terrains: Memory and Meaning in Cultures of Connectivity,” headed by Associate Professor and Wallenberg Academy Fellow Amanda Lagerkvist, in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. The project is funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, The Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation, and Stockholm University and has been approved by the Regional Ethics Board in Stockholm. The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers and Charles M. Ess and Marta Zarzycka for their important suggestions that substantially improved the essay.

Notes

1. Here we follow Lagerkvist (2016) who suggests that classic themes in existential philosophy such as death, time, being there, and being-in-and-with, could be harnessed and reworked, “upgraded” and mobilized, in order to unpack our digital existence.

2. We have studied communication in their open guestbook on their homepage, other PR materials from their website, and newspaper articles devoted to the network. VIMIL has different local cells all over Sweden. It was set up online by five afflicted women and two men in 1999. It has over six hundred members and in September of 2016 there were 335 members of the FB-group. Approximately 89 percent of the members of VIMIL are female, and most of them have lost their partners. They estimate that five members are from a “different cultural or religious background,” and that around five have lost same-sex partners. They describe themselves as very broad, and that people from different social strata and parts of the country meet there. VIMIL’s activities comprise both online and offline dimensions: meetings in physical spaces, the chatroom, the guestbook, and the Facebook group which started in 2010, and which for many constitutes its hub.

3. According to this thesis, the institutionalization and compartmentalization of death in modern society resulted in its sequestering, and in the invisibility and renunciation of finitude, whereby fundamental existential experiences such as illness, death, and mourning were removed from everyday life, into the hands of anonymous institutions and professionals or into the private sphere (Philip Ariès 1977; Zygmunt Bauman 1992). However social media sites seem to have de-sequestered death and grief in Western society, disrupting norms about mourning and the right way and time to grieve in the “secular” Global North.

4. The notion of the grand interruption here echoes Derrida’s eulogy to Emmanuel Levinas, when he muses about how death renders another “interruption at the heart of interruption itself” (in Pinchevski 2014, n. 7, p. 70)—that is to the infinite separation of human beings that is inherent to our existence, and a condition for ethics.

5. In this context it is essential to note the claim that the denial of death in Western culture is actually reflected in how scholars have treated it. Death has however played a very important role in the history of feminist theory which at first glance refutes such claims. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir argued that the very expelling of death is actually entwined with the positioning of women in Western society. She held that one of the key factors of the subjugation of women is that they have been associated (in theology, scientific scholarship, and popular understanding) with the body, materiality and birth, and thereby with death. Masculinity, in turn, belongs to the infinite: “Death is a woman and it is for women to bewail the dead because death is their work” (Simone de Beauvoir [1949] 1993, 179; cf. Sara Heinämaa 2010, 73). Making this intersection visible was thus one key constituent of the analysis that produced second-wave feminism. In response to the allegation that death is an existential and indiscriminate given, and an equalizer of the final hour, feminists have since stressed that everything humanly imaginable about death—and the normative lifespan preceding it—is always gendered. In this view, our mortality is as diffracted as our “one life” (cf. Marta Zarzycka 2016).

6. Karen Barad uses the concept of intra-action in contrast to the concept of interaction, which presumes the prior existence of independent entities. Building on Niels Bohr’s quantum physics, the notion of intra-action emphasizes that there are no clear cuts between subject and object, observer and observed, cause and effect as the relations, boundaries, and properties are determined through specific agential intra-actions whereby nobody or nothing is left unaffected. Barad’s notion of intra-action is therefore a reworking of the traditional concept of causality, as well as a reworking of traditional epistemology (Karen Barad 2003).

7. In retrospect one may wonder if de Beauvoir’s key deliberation was also perhaps an exception? It seems that both in social constructionism (where death has been problematized as a cliché about our common fate, masking inequalities) and in the new materialism (where death is deemed an anthropocentric obsession) our finitude as a given has been largely shunned. One key exemption in the latter case is Nina Lykke’s work on queer widowhood which shares our phenomenological perspective on vulnerability, and underlines the irrevocability of human suffering.

8. This move echoes the problematization of the preoccupation with death in masculinist existential philosophy among feminist philosophers and phenomenologists, who for good reasons stressed that natality, not mortality, is primary for us as (political) human beings, and that care should be seen as an existential given (see e.g., Hannah Arendt 1958; Tania Chanter 2001; Heinämaa 2010).

9. This resonates with how the concept of the lifeline was described by Victoria Pitts already in 2004 in her study of breast cancer websites. Informed by an ethics of responsibility for others, implying that experiences and information should be shared with others to support and prevent, women’s breast cancer communities were, according to Pitts, “powerful sources of women-centred knowledge and activism” (Victoria Pitts 2004, 49).

10. http://www.barometern.se/bonus-weekend/christina-forlorade-sin-man-mitt-i-livet/

11. Even if death was prioritized by Heidegger, he also pointed out that it relates to birth, to being-toward-beginning: “… factical Dasein exists natively and natively it dies also already in the sense of being-towards-death …. In the unity of thrownness and fleeting, that is, anticipatory being-towards-death, birth and death existentially ‘hang together’” ([1927] 1986, 374). Cited and translated in Miguel Vatter (2006, 139).