Technology, Death and the Cultural Imagination

The centrepiece of British artist Damien Hirst's 2007 exhibition Beyond Belief was a human skull encrusted with 8,601 pavé diamonds (see Figure 1). Costing between £30 m and £40 m to produce and with an expected selling price of between £50 m and £100 m it was, and remains, the most expensive piece of art by a contemporary artist. The cost of For the Love of God is significant and not only because, as Richard Dorment wrote in The Telegraph on the day the piece was unveiled, it ‘questions something about the morality of art and money’.1 As Hirst himself said in an interview with Kirsty Wark for the BBC programme Newsnight, it represents ‘victory over death’.2 But this victory comes at a price. Flawless diamonds represent endurance and indestructibility but they are also the material expression of human labour coupled with sophisticated technical processes developed to mine the ore, extract the diamonds and cut and polish them. An average of 250 tons of ore must be mined in order to produce a one-carat gem quality polished diamond and diamond mining often involves exploitative labour practices and is devastating to the environment.

Figure 1. For the Love of God, sculpture by Damien Hirst, platinum cast of a human skull covered with 8,601 diamonds. Credit: © Damien Hirst. All rights reserved, DACS 2009.

It is possible to argue then, that For the Love of God expresses the ambivalence of our relationship to death in contemporary culture. On the one hand it functions, in traditional terms, as a momento mori, reminding us that our lives are finite while, on the other hand, it speaks of the possibility that human ingenuity and artistry, backed by significant wealth, can not only prolong life but can preserve it indefinitely. In Christian imagery, the momento mori functions to focus attention on preparation for the afterlife, emphasising the transitory nature of earthly pleasures and possessions, but For the Love of God represents the triumph of technics over death; the repositioning of death as a catastrophe to be avoided by recourse to the kinds of expertise that find their final expression in a human skull made from the hardest substance known, which we can only access through the use of considerable resources. The irony of the title is that it is both an exclamation of helplessness and exasperation in the face of prodigious fate, as well as a reference to the meaning of momento mori in the Christian context where it has, traditionally, functioned to remind us that salvation requires capitulation to the demands of scripture. Hirst's artwork is undeniably beautiful but it derives its value from the materials of which it is composed and the labour costs of its production rather than its spiritual or aesthetic significance. Thus, while it serves as a critique of the art market and the structuring of sensibilities under the terms of capital accumulation, it also functions to remind us that salvation, in contemporary secular culture, is figured in terms of consumer choice and investment in technoscientific expertise. It can be understood, then, as symbolic of a trend towards a conception of death (or death prevention) as the realisation of the techno-utopianism which has largely defined Western modernity which, like all utopian impulses, has its counterpart in some very specific cultural anxieties.

The impetus behind this collection was to address these anxieties and their cultural manifestations; to interrogate the role of technoscience in mediating between life and death and to examine the objects and artefacts that symbolise our relationship to death in the modern world. How have technologies structured our responses to death and dying in modernity? What is the role of visual culture and its associated technologies in representing changing attitudes to death? What are the politics of longevity under the terms of technologically mediated dying?

Consumer Medicine and the Spectre of ‘Undeath’

In what Megan Stern calls ‘consumer medicine’, ‘[w]here once doctors were endowed with natural authority and trust, now patients assume access to informed medical choices via contractual relationships with healthcare providers’ (2008, p. 351). Under these conditions, the body is thoroughly medicalised; opened up to inspection and monitoring by an array of technologies which make its inner workings visible, measurable and treatable. We are, to borrow a term from Pat Cadigan's cyberpunk novel Synners, ‘incurably informed’ (1991, p. 134). The body becomes a utopian space into which are projected fantasies of complete control, perpetual youth and longevity. Thus, social and fiscal success are equated with preservation of the self through techniques of correct consumption. To die is, in effect, to fail. ‘All bodies’, as Stern points out, ‘are destined to age and die, and this fact, in the context of a culture that presents the body as a major site for utopian fulfilment, generates feelings of anxiety and failure’ (2006, p. 78).

Thus, as Stern argues, it is the spectre of ‘undeath’ that haunts our cultures. As medical technologies are increasingly able to postpone the moment of death, in some cases indefinitely, so we are confronted with the need to choose, on behalf of relatives and loved ones, whether or not they should be allowed to die. We are confronted, in essence, with what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’, in short ‘a life that may be killed without the commission of homicide’ (1998, p. 165). For Agamben, this concept is vital in understanding how modern biopolitics increasingly invades the body. The values of modernity, he argues, are established on the basis of a reconceptualisation of the separation, made by the ancient Greeks, between ‘zoē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or group’ (1998, p. 1). Loosely stated, this separation corresponds to the distinction between private and public but, for the Greeks, zoē, the private life of individuals, was wholly excluded from the political sphere. Only bios, corresponding to human communication and public life, could be regulated under the law. Following Michel Foucault, Agamben argues that, in modern biopolitics, ‘the nation's health and biological life [become] a problem of sovereign power’ (1998, p. 3). Thus, the essential functions of life, including our death, increasingly become the subject of public examination and regulation.

He illustrates this with reference to the case of Karen Quinlan, an ‘overcomatose’ patient, who became the subject of a legal battle when the hospital, against the wishes of her parents, applied for the right to keep her alive indefinitely on life support. According to Agamben,

Karen Quinlan's body is really only anatomy in motion, a set of functions whose purpose is no longer the life of an organism. Her life is maintained only by means of life-support technology and by virtue of a legal decision. It is no longer life, but death in motion (1998, p. 186).

To be reduced to bare life is to be outside the protection of the law and politics but ‘no life, as exiles and bandits know well, is more “political”’(1998, p. 184). However, bare life is also the private foundation of our public values; what is common to all of us and what determines our politics in the first place. Our values, as Bauman reminds us, are ‘born of finitude’ (1992, p. 33). In other words, the knowledge that we all die is what prepares us to evaluate how we should live and the law which prohibits homicide is based on this understanding. Where technoscientific interventions have problematised the moment of death, the notion of what it means to live or what constitutes a valuable life is equally problematised. Or as Stern puts it:

It is difficult to fully engage with brain death because to do so is to witness our own potential vulnerability to ‘death without limits’, to become ‘bare life’. Witnessing bare life […] reveals just how precarious and, arguably, delusory is our status as free, autonomous individuals with inherent rights (2008, p. 351).

A similar problem of values attends the related phenomenon of voluntary euthanasia. Although, on the one hand, the spectre of undeath that haunts our medical technologies necessarily raises the question of the ethical proprietary of retaining a life that cannot be ‘lived’ in any meaningful sense of the word, on the other hand, the very notion of electing to die raises the question of on what grounds the decision can be said to be informed. This is the flip side of the technological utopianism that informs techniques like cryonic suspension, a process of freezing the body to indefinitely suspend the moment of death until such time as a cure can be found for currently terminal conditions. Currently, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation offers cryonic preservation for the cost of a $150,000 life insurance policy or $80,000 for neurosuspension (head only). An article available on the Alcor website called ‘Prospects of a Cure for Death’ states ‘[w]e want to come back with our memories, beliefs, and ambitions intact. If this isn't possible, we want to come back with as much as possible’.3 To request to die in a world that exhorts us to choose life and punishes us with disapprobation if we appear to choose otherwise (by being too fat, too thin, smoking, drinking alcohol, taking recreational drugs etc.) is a biopolitical move which re-states the sovereignty of the individual (Palladino, 2003). But, equally, it raises uncomfortable questions about the criteria we apply to whether a life is worthy of continuation. The ‘cryonauts’ that want to come back ‘intact’ with ‘as much as possible’ have no doubts. Their continuation is assured on the basis of wise investment and faith in a future which will welcome and applaud their choices.

Indeed, the transhumanist assumptions of Alcor's cryonauts can be understood as an expression of Fredric Jameson's ‘technological sublime’ (1991, p. 37), a response to the impossibility of thinking ‘the […] totality of the contemporary world system’ (1991, p. 38). For instance, according to Max More, co-founder and chairman of The Extropy Institute, ‘we are software and not hardware’ (1995, p. 34) and he sees no reason why we should not imagine a future in which cryonaut brains can be uploaded into a computer. If the self is threatened by its alter-determination as manipulable information; by what Jameson calls ‘labyrinthine conspiracies of autonomous but deadly interlocking and competing information agencies’ (1991, p. 38), then the field is provided with a concept of possessive selfhood which utilises the concept of information storage and retrieval. Indeed, as Jameson suggests, cyberpunk, a form of science fiction which flourished briefly during the 1980s and has had a lasting effect on the genre, crystallised both the paranoia and the heady excitement of an existence no longer circumscribed by the failings of the ‘meat’. Because the body is inconsequential, death is a becoming rather than an ending. Cryonauts are ‘undead’ or what More calls ‘de-animate’ (1994, p. 31); awaiting a future world in which death will only be understood in terms of technological failure.

Monsters, Vampires and Clones

Ambivalence towards the possibility of ‘undeath’ is older than medical science and is a recurrent theme of the gothic genre, both in literature and film, where vampires, zombies and other monsters continue to proliferate. The elevation of Dr Frankenstein's monster to the status of an enduring cultural icon can, in fact, be understood as due to constantly renewed anxieties about the ambiguous nature of successive medical technologies for prolonging life. As Stern points out, ‘Frankenstein's project is compatible with the utopian agenda of modern medicine. Informed by a background of reason and social responsibility, he is trying to achieve human longevity’ (2006, p. 66). Indeed, as Zygmunt Bauman has written, ‘[d]eath was an emphatic denial of everything that the brave new world of modernity stood for, and above all of its arrogant promise of the indivisible sovereignty of reason’ (1992, p. 134). The monster is a technologically produced, and thus grotesque, copy of human life and it is for this reason, as R. L. Rutsky suggests, that his creator finds him ugly when he perceives the creature in motion: ‘the ugliness of his creature only becomes monstrous or uncanny when brought to life, a life that remains, however, fragmentary, technological and ugly rather than fully living, beautiful and whole’ (1999, p. 37).

This description of the monster resonates suggestively with Jean Baudrillard's comparison between cloning and cancer. ‘There is something occulted inside us’, he writes, ‘our death. But something else is hidden there, lying in wait for us within each of our cells, the forgetting of death’ (2000, p. 5). Cancer cells are ‘undead’ in the sense that they are cells that have ‘forgotten’ to die at their appointed time and they too are ‘ugly’ and ‘uncanny’. For Baudrillard, there is a direct correspondence between the effect of cancer cells on the host body and the effect of techniques like cloning on the species. In the attempt to avoid death by cloning our existing selves, he argues, we will create something that is no longer human and, like Frankenstein's monster, he implies, a horror to the final generation of the ‘living, beautiful and whole’ who have produced it. This is echoed by Leon Kass in his foreword to Human Cloning and Human Dignity, a report produced by the President's Council on Bioethics in 2002. For Kass, it is important that we ‘steer a middle course’ between what he calls the ‘inhuman’ and the ‘posthuman’; between ‘barbaric disregard for human life’ and ‘the utopian project to remake humankind in our own image’ (2002, p. xvi)—the ‘infinite survival of the same’ (2005, p. 9) that Baudrillard warns against. For both Kass and Baudrillard then, the paradox of technoscience is that it promises to fully establish the ‘sovereignty of reason’ in enabling us to overcome death while, at the same time, threatening us with annihilation.

I would suggest then that cloning stands as a cipher for the anxieties that attend all our technologies. As Mark Neocleous argues, when Marx uses the metaphor of the vampire to describe capital, ‘[c]apital […] appears as dead labour turned into a form of life which in turn destroys the workers’ (2005, p. 50). It is not capital itself which is vampire-like but dead labour in the form of the machine which forces workers to become machine-like themselves. It is not only that factory work hastens the death of the workers but that ‘[i]n damaging human beings capital damages them as sensuous creatures—feeling, experiencing, sensing creatures’ (2005, p. 53). Dramatist Karel Capek's famous 1921 satire R.U.R (Rossums Universal Robots) first introduced to the cultural stage the idea of ‘simplified human beings [which had] no soul and [did] nothing but work […] what we would [now] regard as androids or clones’ (Aldiss, 1988, p. 221), an idea also developed in Aldous Huxley's equally famous 1932 novel Brave New World. So when Leon Kass warns against succumbing to the morality of ‘posthuman Brave New Worlders’ (2002, p. xvi), the reference to Huxley's novel immediately prompts associations with its critique of Fordism and the dangers of technological determinism. Once the techniques of production are applied to reproduction, Huxley suggests, the result will be replaceable clones whose lives are determined by their role in production and who cannot value life because their death is inconsequential. Human cloning is a possibility that is not yet a fact but clones, like Frankenstein's monster, remind us that all our technologies are paradoxical in that, in replacing or representing the functions of life, they present us with the possibility of living death.

Live! In a Cinema Near You

‘The cinema’, writes Gilles Deleuze, ‘can, with impunity, bring us close to things or take us away from them and revolve around them, it suppresses both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world’ (1989, p. 59). It is, arguably, this technique of suppression which conditions our response to technology in general. We no longer run screaming from the larger-than-life engine on the screen; equally we accept, with the same impunity, violent death and the mutilation of the body alongside the walking dead. A review of the show Sinatra at the London Palladium in 2006 announced ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes is back … and larger than life!’,4 a claim that seems either ridiculous or uncanny considering that the man himself died in 1998 but what is being celebrated here is not the resurrection of a dead media star but the technology that can provide the illusion that he ‘lives again’. The horizon that is suppressed here is death itself.

It is hardly surprising then, that it is, again, the spectre of undeath that haunts the technologies of cultural production. Writing about the advent of photography, Laura Mulvey points out that the photograph, ‘actually preserved, mechanically, a moment of life stopped and then held in perpetuity […]. With photography, the question of time and its passing, its relation to the past, to the “old” and to death, came into play’ (2006, p. 46). Later she quotes from Ian Christie's The Last Machine where the promise of cinema is illuminated by the response of the Paris newspapers reporting the Lumière Brothers’ first demonstration of cinema: ‘death will cease to be absolute … it will be possible to see our nearest alive again long after they have gone’ (Christie in Mulvey, 2006, p. 46). In Mulvey's fascinating account of the history of cinema spectatorship, she evokes the ‘technological uncanny’ to account for, not only the ‘sense of uncertainty and disorientation which has always accompanied a new technology that is not yet fully understood’ (2006, p. 27) but also the sense in which cinema blurs the boundaries between animate and inanimate; living and dead. In a sense, photography kills what it captures in rendering it inanimate and apparently devoid of life but, as Mulvey points out, cinema ‘resurrects’ the dead image and gives it a semblance of movement and vitality. In pre-digital cinema, images ‘killed’ into celluloid resolve into liveliness on the screen. Add to this the preservation of ‘dead’ stars, the ‘trickery’ which animates what is inorganic and understood as conventionally lifeless (as in the films of Georges Meliere) and the ability of digital techniques to produce ‘copies without originals’ (including human bodies which defy the laws of gravity, walk through walls and teleport) and the ghostliness of the uncanny (Freud's unheimlich) can be seen to attend the pleasure of cinema spectatorship and to produce its most sublime affects.

Displaying Death

In an article for The Guardian in March 2009 about the death of reality TV star Jade Goody, Gordon Burn refers to ‘the sublimated message of much of the news’ which, as he says, is ‘[d]eath stalking through the centre of life’. But, as he points out, this is death ‘happening to somebody else somewhere you're lucky enough not to be’.5 Furthermore, this spectacularised death served to heighten Goody's fame; to, in effect, establish her as a continued presence. She thus joins the pantheon of ‘die young, stay pretty’ gods and goddesses of the media like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Jimi Hendrix and Princess Diana who died violently or unexpectedly and lived on as icons of mediatised longevity. But Goody's highly publicised dying was, in contrast, a media managed event from the time she was given her diagnosis live on the Indian version of the ‘reality’ TV show Big Brother to her elaborately staged funeral. Goody effectively died ‘on TV’, utilising the complex technologies of the media to transform her death into a commodity. Indeed, she knowingly exploited her final days to raise money for her children's future education and to raise public awareness of the need for young women to protect against cancer of the uterus. She thus effectively enacted a confirmation of the link between contemporary biopolitics and the technologies of the media. Indeed, the two are inseparable. Goody's death returns us to Giorgio Agamben and his question of whether ‘today [… it is] legitimate or even possible to hold subjective technologies and political techniques apart’ (1998, p. 6). The ‘subjective technologies’ which are the expression of the politicisation of zoē, like public health campaigns and the techniques of their implementation, are writ large in the very public death, via the same medium through which these techniques are promulgated, of a 27-year-old woman who understood only too well the forms of contemporary redemption.

Goody's death, in fact, makes sense of Ariella Azoulay's description of television as ‘death's display showcase’. As she says, ‘Television cameras are present in nearly every place, as if no one-time moment shall remain alone. Cameras would lurk in anticipation of capturing the ultimate one-time moment—death—at its moment of occurrence’ (2001, p. 28). The display showcase ‘is a void inside which lies an object, a commodity—in fact, an image of commodity’. While the one-time moment of death itself will forever be occluded, the televised rituals of Goody's dying are almost a homage to the technological sublime; an acknowledgement of the power of technologies to raise the stakes; to enhance the exchange value of celebrity, the ultimate ‘image of commodity’ while, at the same time, we can bring death close and examine it at our leisure while also keeping it distant. ‘[T]elevison’, as Azoulay writes, ‘shows what is happening “there”—draws it closer, makes it similar, overcomes difference—and yet it illustrates the unbridgeable distance between the viewer and what is happening “there”’(2001, p. 16).

This distancing has the dual effect of rendering death inconsequential while, at the same time, we are permitted an intimacy that fails to deliver. This, I would suggest, partly explains the popularity of TV shows like CSI, which use sophisticated computer generated imagery to plunge inside the body at the moment of death. Like Body Worlds, Gunter von Hagen's exhibition of plastinated corpses and the Visible Human Project which makes the workings of the body available on the Internet through photographs of microscopically dissected cadavers, the showcasing of death allays the anxiety that there is something we will never know or that the power of capital will never reveal and make available for consumption. This is what Bauman means when he argues that, ‘[d]eath is the Other of modern life […] a skeleton in the cupboard left in the neat, orderly, functional and pleasing home modernity promised to build’ (1999, pp. 131, 134). In the instrumental language of rational efficiency ‘death must first be translated into the vocabulary of potentially terminal, yet also potentially curable, diseases. The most exceptionless of norms of human existence must be thus re-presented as abnormality’ (1999, p. 130, his emphasis); an abnormality that has been managed by recourse to increasingly sophisticated technologies.

The Special Issue

In considering the relationship between death and technology and how this relationship is played out in cultural productions, we are brought to the recognition of a specific ambivalence. On the one hand, we anxiously await the advances in medical technology which promise longevity while, on the other, we fear the power of technologies which can prolong life at the expense of a meaningful existence. What we fear then, is ‘undeath’; a concept made sense of in Agamben's analysis of contemporary biopolitics as structured around the management of zoē and the consequent production of forms of ‘bare life’ which become exempt from the law of homicide while requiring increasingly complex and proliferating definitions of the end of life.

This is connected, I have suggested, with the persistence of anxieties about the body which emerged in connection with industrial capitalism and are realised in Marx's concept of ‘dead labour’. This is a concept that is expressed, in various forms and in diverse representations, throughout the mediascape of contemporary culture.

From the persistence of Frankenstein's monster as a cultural icon, through the imagination of vampires and clones and Damien Hirst's celebrated artwork For the Love of God, the machine as counterpart to the labour process and its promise of plenty and prosperity at the expense of our humanity is constantly reiterated. This, as I have argued, is understandable through Mark Neocleous's reading of Marx as proposing that capital damages us as ‘feeling, experiencing, sensing creatures’, condemned to a living death. Thus, in our spectacularised culture, the constant consumption of heightened sensual experience through technologies of visual production enables a disavowal of death while, at the same time, death itself is spectacularised, commodified and rendered artefactual (Figure 2). While the corpse has become an object of anxious fascination, cinema offers the possibility of resurrection which connects with fantasies of a technological afterlife realised in techniques like cryonic suspension. It is thus the theme of dead labour, its relationship to technology, and its connection to contemporary forms of undeath which links the essays in this collection.

Figure 2. Masking death. Credit: Debra Benita Shaw.

Charles Thorpe's essay on Edgar Rice's play The Adding Machine opens the collection. Thorpe reads the play as an indictment of the machine and the instrumental rationality of early twentieth century American modernity, understood through the dead labour of clerical work and the accounting of both life and death in terms of enumeration and calculability.

This is followed by Christopher Townsend's analysis of Francis Picabia and René Clair's Entr'acte, an example of the response of the French avant garde to the horrors of the First World War, arguably the defining event of modernity in terms of the West's confrontation with the mass destruction made possible by technology. Townsend reads the short film through the post-war ‘rappel à l'ordre’ (call to order) and an early use of cinema to interrogate the relationship between nationalism and technological warfare.

In what she calls the ‘Postmortal Condition’, Céline Lafontaine offers an analysis of the contemporary obsession with cheating death in terms of the biopolitics of ageing and the way that successive biomedical analyses have ‘deconstructed’ death. She understands the politics of longevity in terms of, conversely, a more pronounced fear of death alongside the devaluing of old-age.

Elaine Campbell is concerned with the phenomenon of the televisual autopsy as performed in the US series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and the UK's Waking the Dead. By subjecting scenes from the series to a close reading in terms of Brian Ott's ‘dirty theory’ she excavates the erotic pleasure of such viewing and the way in which it thus has the potential to provide a counter-hegemony to the scientific ideology of death and dying.

Sue Tait is similarly concerned with death on screen but in terms of public responses to increasingly graphic imagery of death and dying in both narrative and documentary cinema. Through her analysis, she is brought to ask uncomfortable questions about the connection between the display of trophy images of Iraqi war dead by soldiers on the Internet and the way that successive technologies of representation have rendered spectacular death mundane and have thus affected ethical considerations of war and torture.

Finally, Andrew Cutting's paper explores what happens to the body after death in an analysis of the new funerary ritual of Celestis spaceflights which utilise technologies developed to launch satellites into orbit to enable mourners to send the ‘cremains’ of loved ones on a final journey around the planet.

Taken together, these papers provide an insight into the forms that the fear of death has taken throughout modernity and the way that technoscience has both produced and managed those fears. What emerges is a close connection between the technoscientific management of death, its cultural representations and how we understand what it means to be human. It is possible to argue, in fact, that modernity has been characterised by uncertainties about what it means to die; their representations and technological mediations. These, in turn, have had a profound effect on the ethics of life and living and their socio-political expressions.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Les Levidow, who commissioned this collection, for his patience and helpful advice. Many thanks, also, to all the contributors to this edition, including those whose papers, for various reasons, were withdrawn before the final edit. Equally, the author would like to thank all those who kindly agreed to referee the individual papers. Finally, the author would like to extend sincere thanks to Megan Stern for friendship, forbearance and the benefit of her knowledge and insight. Megan's ideas provided the impetus for this special issue and her thoughtful suggestions have, throughout, informed its production.

Notes

See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3665529/For-the-love-of-art-and-money.html.

See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/review/6713309.stm.

See http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/ProspectsOfACureForDeath.html.

See http://www.thisistheatre.com/londonshows/sinatra.html.

See http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/07/gordon-burn.