Marginalizing mortality: the fight against death as the communicative cultural condition

ABSTRACT

Rhetoric is intertwined with imagined and hypothesized conceptions of the future. An intellectual and discursive tool that is permanently engaged in our planning against future exigencies and, importantly, designed through invention and operating through delivery, rhetoric is an organic response in the contemporary human effort to elude death. Our current, mediated human condition is a unifying cultural effort to marginalize death from both the mind and body. Through analysis of National Geographic’s series Limitless, this study explores our cultural pursuit to postpone and defeat death with didactic cultural structures, such as storytelling that intertwines adventure with health advice. As medical technology allows a rhetoric of human victory over death, the contemporary human condition leverages lifestyle changes and commitment to nutrition and exercise. A central rhetorical human motive in the mediated world is currently manifest in the contemporary focus on prolonging life.

KEYWORDS:

• rhetoric
• death
• technology
• health
• culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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