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3.3 Death and Representation

Where psychoanalysis discuses the self in terms of the psychical my concern is with that of the visual. I choose this area not simply because my interest is in video but because my interest is also in that which has been ‘invisibled’ in the world but is made most explicitly visible in horror film and forensics. It is perhaps wrong of me to choose to use only those discourses concerned with the visual; it may embed me in the very discursive bias that I have argued against in terms of visual economies when science and phallologocentric language try to ‘capture’ knowledge through what is visual. But, as I have also stated in the ‘Pleasure’ chapter, the visual is, of course, not implicitly phallologocentric; what has been made invisible, or is not (yet) visualizable, elucidates the idea of an entirely visual economy as problematic. This chapter will hopefully present an alternative image of the shock of visuality of death, (as opposed to the fear of death, or quiet respect for death, the concealment of death). The visceral visuality of death has remained relatively invisible and indeed has been overcoded with an enormous amount of prohibition and sanctioning in terms of what is ‘suitable’ and ‘unsuitable’ for which discursive representation. My main question is where is death in the visual when it is divided so rigidly into epistemes of the aesthetic and the scientific, yet seems to be representing the same, or a similar, image? In terms of my emphasis on the visual, there is no other sense that arouses such sanctioning and prohibition. In ‘Pleasure’ I quoted Braidotti discussing ‘medical pornography’. Is forensics to the forensic scientist or coroner the same as that which is pleasure to the horror fan? Is it death porn? What is the pleasure in such confrontations with death and the almost ceremonial activities that surround both (special processes to follow: for the coroner, legal processes and even surgical processes; for the film fan, the rating system, the viewing/borrowing system; and both trying to find the ultimately outrageous spectacle)? Is the overwriting of vision for pleasure with vision for knowledge an attempt to prevent pleasure being ‘outed’ from unsuitable arenas? Pleasure is a science secret. It is one of the invisibled aspects of any science, such as forensics, which works within a visual economy. The scientist as such is invisible and hence any drive or pleasure he may exhibit is invisible. Are we to believe that any confession of pleasure from the empirical scientist is proof of the subjectivity of knowledge that feminist theory has already and anyway confirmed (though of course the sciences are yet to catch up with feminism in agreeing with this)?

Truth and knowledge are supposed to be available in the visual. Even psychoanalysis is an attempt to visualize the psyche through language. Is the visual such a ripe territory for being misconstrued because it is always pornography? What is wrong with pornography? Implicitly nothing, until it is given a moral or, in this case, subjective value judgement, where the images signify only one meaning. One meaning is valuable only in relation with other meanings, but when one meaning becomes the meaning the image then signifies truth. Perhaps the prohibition on the representation of ‘real’ death in horror films/mondo films/snuff films is that truth, when it affords subjective pleasure, is no longer ‘true’. Paul Virilio quotes Walter Benjamin as saying “cinema-goers have become examiners, but examiners having fun”, [35] then himself states “If we turn the phrase around, things look a bit less promising: what we are now dealing with is an audience for whom the investigation, the test, has become fun… Nothing is sacred anymore because nothing is now meant to be inviolable. This is the tracking down of darkness, the tragedy brought about by the exaggerated love of light”. [36] Virilio’s anxiety about excavating everything visually is about the falsity that all knowledge can be discovered if we keep looking. I would at this moment in history that cinema-goers are not examiners, because the ‘look’ of the examiner is kept fiercely distinct from the look of the audience. Certainly the audience can examine, but only so long as the pretext of ‘light’ or un-serious examination is maintained, the darkness of the cinema being a forced form of darkness that is meant to remind the audience that the ‘truth’ of the film being examined is artificial. This environment juxtaposes with the hyper-lit autopsy room where by illuminating everything, an environment specifically aimed at discovering knowledge by expelling darkness is presented. The darkness Virilio nostalgically longs for is artificially forced into the cinema. When this darkness is removed, along with the ultra-light of the coroner’s room, and the image is placed in a lounge room, where ‘real’ news death sits alongside ‘fake’ death, the role of the examiner and the viewer-for-pleasure is entirely conflated. This is why video, not cinema, is the focus of my work. Virilio points out that all examiners are audience, an observation that conforms to post-modernity’s stripping away at science. Audiences are disembodied eyes collectively viewing. Like scientists, they tend to watch without being, to be situated as ob-serving and hence ob-jective to that which is watched. Herb Blau, in The Audience [37] continues this idea by studying the audience in theatre, where ‘real’ bodies onstage collide with ‘real’ bodies in the audience. He writes of the making visible of the audience as a slow, painful and redoubling process, where being made visible is still an act of being watched and being seen by an other. He states: “At the level of the primary process, what constitutes the representation also seems to produce its witness. Which breeds the redoubled enigma: What can look at itself is not one.” [38] Blau emphasizes the disembodied viewer that cannot look at itself because it has no self to look at while engaging in viewing/examination, and points to the bodily potential of the theatre, where viewing bodies are made actual and double by being viewer and viewed. These ideas stand in opposition to the examiner in cinema and forensics who need never ‘become’ body. Traditionally without an other to look at the self there is no potential to be subjective - the ‘live’ audience and players of theatre have such potential, but in the cinema the emphatic disembodiment of celluloid affirms the non-embodiment of the audience. Similarly, the forensic pathologist works with a dead body, who can no longer look in order that the examiner may be subjectively constituted by being looked at. As soon as the dead person becomes corpse, subject transfers to object and potential gazing other is irrefutably object of the look by a disembodied subject (ob-server). Although both cinematic audience and forensic pathologist are constructed as objective observers, their situatedness remains important. When both arenas are conflated into a lounge-room, and autopsy videos are available to be viewed alongside film, the disembodied subject’s ‘appropriateness’, constituted through its arena, is no longer clear. While all audiences may be examiners, their examination is constituted as much by their place as what they watch. Watching both subject matters in a lounge room on video at one’s leisure (and pleasure) strips away the vestige of professional objectivity that makes an image correct for one person (coroner) to witness and entirely incorrect for an other (everybody else).

Andreas Huyssen points out that “Vision as pleasure and desire has to be subdued and manipulated so that vision as technical and social control can emerge triumphant.” [39] This is precisely where the idea that the scientist has no pleasure emerges. It is also the realm of medical pornography - when to look is to control and not to desire without domination. The matrix of power, to be found in excavating and knowing the mechanism of death and the body literally inside out, would become void if there were any suggestion that the coroner actually enjoyed his work in an ‘inappropriate’ (i.e. non-scientific) manner. But that forensics is enjoyable and indeed to be enjoyed is glaringly evident in popular culture: The X-Files hides forensics behind monsters so that those who enjoy it do not feel like they are ‘really’ enjoying death. The victim and the narrative of death become monstrous so the audience does not have to. The body in murder mysteries is made inorganic, transformed into a series of clues when the image of the body is just as desired as the narrative that creates it. The image of the body alone is one that seems highly contentious as a site for pleasure in culture. Repression of desire for an image of the body in death, (something radically different but often misconstrued as desire for the dead body) leads me to the first post-psychoanalytic exploration of the idea of death I wish to discuss, that put forward by Alphonso Lingis in the prologue quote. Death, when it is not evoked and used as a vehicle for pleasure (an ambition still to be fully theorized, both in the body of this chapter and in the desires of audiences of forensics and film), becomes the key term in a form of male hysteric nihilism. In order to begin to suggest a potentially positive, even jouissant representation of a way in which to engage with images of death, outside of this dominant male nihilistic reading, a brief exploration of this nihilistic view is necessary.

In the introduction to the uniquely named The Hysterical Male; New Feminist Theory Arthur and Marilouise Kroker evoke a moment in history - already arrived, or what I would be less suspicious of, to come - where the phallic signifier is at the point of failing and falling, and the male subject is left flailing as a mutant subject. The Krokers make some outrageous claims in their introduction to some essays by some not-so-un-hysterical theorists. For example, “Power, fleeing its basis in sexuality generally and male subjectivity specifically, becomes now a viral power, a power which speaks only in the previously transgressive feminist language of absence, rupture, plurality and the trace.” [40] At this point I must emphasize that through the next sections I will be using the term ‘male’ and ‘male hysteric’, ‘male philosopher’ and other ‘male’ prefixed words. By ‘male’ here I mean that which is embedded essentially in a fixed phallologocentric discursive structure, that values the integrity of the fully formulated, complete, rational subject above all else, and hence represents the phantasy of what it means to be a ‘male’ subject. The term is representative, it is a notional not a literal use of the term and it stands for an ideal not for an actual.  What I do wish to make firm with the use of the term ‘male’ is the notion of an idealized subject that is of enough value to affirm the phantasy of a loss of value in death. The loss of being presumes always the presence of being and in phallologocentric capitalist culture, where presence equals male subjectivity (specifically white, with an identifiably desirable class and non-diff-abled status) this value structure excludes everything else. Braidotti states

Only a subject who historically has profited from the entitlements of subjectivity and the rights of citizenship can afford to put his ‘solidity’ into question. Marginal subjectivities, or social forces who have not yet been granted the entitlement of symbolic presence - and this includes women - cannot easily relinquish boundaries and rights which they have hardly gained yet. [41]

In order to even begin to explore different methods of imaging and imagining death I must first get through popular anxieties about the loss of this ultra-valued subjectivity of masculinity and point out why it fails as a satisfactory means of analyzing the anxieties about death which plague every individual, valued or not. The Krokers, by suggesting masculinity is so threatened its anxieties are now comparable to those of feminists, are suggesting that popular masculine theorists and their theories are able to be taken on board with feminist discourses. This claim is utopian, and I maintain that whatever a ‘feminine’ or ‘feminist’ version of death is, including its threats, drives and such, it is always going to be different to those of the dominant (hence only) subject position. I am not going to locate and articulate the feminist differences (of which there are, essentially, none), but only begin to tease out suggestive spaces, which I see as places for beginning to think about death as something other than mourning the loss of the ultimate capitalist product - subjectivity. To isolate one single ‘feminist’ theory of death is, of course, to limit and close the discursive potential.

While most post modern theorists with a feminist slant would sympathize with the halcyon [42] view of power being located in the absences, the fissures, slips and traces of discourse, few would agree with the Krokers that it has already happened. Their affirmation, or in patriarchal terms, their re-affirmation that the feminine/ist is always and easily identifiable as ‘absence, rupture’ and so on is a little problematic in its veering towards an idea that something is essentially a feminine/feminist/non-male language when it addresses these adjectives. They are almost mimetically re-speaking the key words or catch terms of feminism/post-modernism hysterically themselves, deliberately perhaps, but these mimetic hysterics risk becoming anti-feminist by taking on feminist language in the same manner feminists took on the oppressively isomorphic language of phallologocentric power. ‘Too soon’ is the cry I am again tempted to utter. The Krokers’ opinion on hysterics seems ambivalent; they claim Freud’s Dora as a modern existential heroine yet the male hysteric is neither clearly heroic in a post-modern way nor pathetic in his wielding of the new ‘innocent’ symbol of the erect penis. But where they are useful for my purpose is where the Krokers make visible the language of many masculine post-modern theorists who themselves are faced with the conceptual death of their (male) subjectivity. The massive and ambitious claim that paradigms of power are already post-masculine and embedded firmly in the realm of the feminine/ist represents, for my purposes, not the post-phallic social corpus that the Krokers believe their work locates, but the idea that the crumbling male subject, post-ed by modernity and post modern discourse, is one which hitherto has been expressed most clearly in the discursive nihilism evident in earlier male theorists’ discussions on death. There is no moment or event of post-masculine subjectivity and hence no sudden rupture of the male hysteric. The male hysteric has existed potentially for as long as any threat to male subjectivity has occurred.

The ‘apocalypse’ of phallologocentrism is an effect, a gradual transformation or process, but the Krokers’ desire to make it into a marked event is seen with grave suspicion by Brian Massumi who writes,

Apocalyptic visions are… suspect. If the apocalypse is already as here as it will get, there is no need to keep on announcing it (Kroker and Kroker). Apocalypse is the non-event of the millennium… But in the end the idea, the very concept of the cause may have to go, in favor of effect and their interweavings (syndromes). [43]

‘Apocalypse for whom?’ is one of the more urgent questions the Krokers’ theory begs.

Death has always been and always is the apocalypse - the apocalypse of every subject is death, and for every subject the idea of their own singular death apocalyptic. Theoretical apocalypse, the death of the integrated male subject, is a luxury apocalypse compared to the anxiety expressed at the annihilation of the subject altogether, of consciousness altogether or of whatever any one particular theorist believes is that which is annihilated at the point of death. Annihilation anxiety breeds this nihilistic theoretical approach. The Krokers are useful for identifying the becoming visible of the hysteric male, the male whose subjectivity is changing its solidity, and, I will agree with the Krokers here, always being threatened, if never actually ceased or robbed of power. Their final statement is the one I find most useful, “[their book] nominates new feminist theory in light of the inverted world of the male hysteric. What results is an intense, provocative and creative theorization of feminism under the failing sign of male hystericization - the death of the privileged ideology of the unitary male subject. [My emphasis]” [44]

Hysteria seems in certain instances particularly suited to the male. Not only at the threat of death but by being a male subject, especially in a Lacanian post-mirror stage where every moment of subjectivity following the first vision of the ‘ideal-I’ is spent striving towards re-capturing that ideal image, the subject is always idealized but never safe. Masculinity is in this sense more prone to the institutional power matrices that codify it than any phantasy of a feminine/ist ‘subject’. Not only does the masculine subject rely on the system to maintain its privileged position, but also, it relies on the system to keep the subject in line; to keep it ‘normal’ and hence within the boundaries of what constitutes a desirable subjectivity. Policing of the masculine subject is a desirable state for the maintenance of such a subject. Because power is a relativity that changes in order to encompass or repudiate whatever faces it as a new other, the subject too must shift concurrently. In her discussion of Foucault’s theories of subjectivity, Braidotti places the subject within this fragile context;

[Foucault] argues that the constitution of the fragile, split subject of the post metaphysical era is in fact a process of culturally coding certain functions and acts as signifying, acceptable, normal, desirable. In other words one becomes a subject through a set of interdictions and permissions, which inscribe one’s subjectivity in a bedrock of power. The subject thus is a heap of fragmented parts held together by the symbolic glue that is the attachment to, or identification with, the phallogocentric symbol. A heap of rabble calling itself the center of creation; a knot of desiring and trembling flesh, projecting itself to the height of an imperial consciousness. I am struck by the violence of the gesture that binds a fractured self to the performative illusion of unity, mastery, self-transparence. I am amazed by the terrifying stupidity of that illusion of unity, and by its incomprehensible force. [45]

The cause of male hysteria is this very fractured product that masculine subjectivity enacts. Braidotti is right to call this forced binding of the subject violent. Violence comes from terror and the terror that haunts the subject as to its fragility - its imminent loss through splitting apart or becoming unglued - is the result of living within a phantasy of unity in the first place. Stupidity is not necessarily how I would envisage the phantasy of unity. Perhaps a severe and almost universal pathology of repression as to the subject’s phantasmatic state of being, perhaps a conscious stupidity covering over a very definite hysteria-causing anxiety of dis-memberment of the self. What the Krokers may be articulating then is the ‘coming out’ of the phantasy of unity by masculine subjectivities, something which seems to have little to do with feminist theory and more to do with the performance of masculine anxiety, a catharsis. But returning to death, Braidotti’s analytic dismemberment of the subject that is already dismembered is an anxious condition that death may transform, by altering the goals of subjectivity, rather than pushing subjectivity towards a complete annihilation of the subject phantasy. When theorists exclaim and mourn the nihilistic absence of consciousness that death imminently threatens, they are simultaneously exclaiming, asserting and once and for all capturing the concept of something to lose. Any anxiety about a fractured self is entirely void at the moment of threatening nothingness. By its very threatened loss, the masculine subject is re-created and affirmed. So the fear of death for the idealized masculine subject is also an affirmation of a unified identity. Death theory may become a tool of self-delusion for the masculine theorist who insists on focusing in upon the great being of unified consciousness.

Alphonso Lingis suggests

No induction from the demise of all men so far - that rigor mortis I can observe in the stillness of being - leads rigorously to the certainty of my death; no deduction from the laws ever in force enables me to conclude to the certainty of my coming reduction to definitive impotence. It is the certainty of my imminent death, which is the way the certainty of non-being comes to me, that makes doubt about the present beings, and consequently the quest for empirical certainty, first possible. [46]

Ironic that amongst discourses of science which strive for empirical knowledge, and discourses of deconstruction which strive to prove the futility of the concept of truth, death, stands as the only potential truth amongst all other suspicious theories. As Lingis points out, the philosopher will attempt to theorize the potential non-beings that surround her/him in order to re-theorize the unshakeable truth of imminent death. Post-modern theory attacks the concept of truth in general, and rightly so, but from Lingis’ words are distilled a more insipid inquiry; behind the quest to disprove truth really stands a male hysteric quest to disprove the absoluteness of death. A form of articulated repression perhaps, made easier by the division between philosophy and images of death, with its democratic reduction of all subjectivities found in forensics. Here emerges the one moment where stands most clearly the male hysteric. If the female is the traditional bearer of symptoms of repression then death is the moment when repression and becoming-hysteric transcend gender, or perhaps swap gender. It is difficult to theorize a female anxiety about loss of self when culturally for a woman being of self is still in a process of becoming, despite the abundance of representations of aestheticized female corpses in all manner of art, literature [47] and, of course, horror film. [48] Bodies, especially those of male theorists, are theorized as full with their own being, hyper-being subjectivities with the potential for transcendent consciousness. Their flesh is repressed while the integrated body-container, which is phantasized as visually representing the subject, is filled with every nuance of being in conscious existence. Corpses are rarely theorized. The mind rules over the face, which rules over the torso and limbs when subjectivity is theorized. Lingis’ philosophy of nihilism hurtles him through a hysteric re-writing of death, writing at one moment that death is all and anything we ever strive towards and at the next stating that he remains entirely unconvinced about the imminence of the absence of being. The words ‘definitive impotence’ sum up a peculiarly phallologocentric anxiety, which begins by overvaluing the integrity of the subject in life (where integrity is valued over life). Why? Is it to increase the armored resistance to its annihilation in death? To know death theoretically and ontologically so well that by knowing one’s subjectivity inside out its annihilation seems impossible?

Out of male hysteria (before the hysteric of the Krokers - the backlash male hysteric who was frightened at the state of his subjectivity), comes the male subject who is frightened at his absence. There is no body in the nihilistic hysteric. Lingis speaks of the mind, the existence of the self, the force of the subject but not of the flesh that is left before or after death. The relationship between the flesh and the hysteric philosopher is forced. He represses the flesh because it’s not the death of the flesh he is worried about but the death of the force of the self. The flesh is denied or it is changed into ecstatic (ex-stasis) plethora, as in Bataille’s ‘Sexual Plethora and Death.’ Here to die is really to procreate and to exceed the single self, similar to the reproductive life of single cell organisms. At the other end of the scale, death is becoming higher. Sexual plethora attains (religious) transcendence which itself is plethora for Bataille, leading to a sacrificial self. In order to sacrifice the self, of course, it must be more valued than is anything else. Once again the philosopher agonizes the absence of subjectivity. The phantasy of death being essential, and hence, desirable due to procreation and species assurance, is present and important as a feature also in the work of Freud and Lacan. Preceding Bataille, both psychoanalysts claim that there is some kind of instinctual drive for death that takes on a somewhat suspicious, even Christ-like ‘nobility’ in dying so that the species may survive.  Lacan states:

We know that sexual division, in so far as it reigns over most living beings, is that which ensures the survival of a species… Let us say that the species survives in the form of its individuals: Nevertheless, the survival of the horse as a species has a meaning - each horse is transitory and dies. So you see the link between sex and death, sex and the death of the individual, is fundamental. [49]

Aside from the problem of inherent and compulsory procreative heterosexuality in this comment, the idea that there is an (natural) aim towards death contradicts both the overvaluation of the subject in life and the anxious refusal of death that haunts every. It also suggests that the instinct towards death is not, in human animals, overwritten by drive which, especially for Lacan, should not sit comfortably. Nihilism is in this way closely related to psychoanalysis, the former fears in death the absence of consciousness or being, the latter locates a drive for it in consciousness of being (which is not the same as conscious/unconscious but is juxtaposition between consciousness and flesh). The nihilist however seems defiantly a-moral in his stance on death by suggesting some kind of purity/nothingness in absence, while the psychoanalyst almost suggests a morality in dying for one’s species, albeit a biological morality (Freud’s use of A. Weissman’s work on germ cells! [50] ). Though I do not wish to suggest these works are inherently moral, a-moral or immoral, by pointing out the potential to read them as such I wish to indicate the rife over-signification of the concept of death always within any ‘other’ realm than the flesh. Death is ecstatically religious (Bataille), biologically obscure (germ cells), sexually overloaded (Lacan) or simply nothing (Lingis). The terror of death, the fear of what being dead means – its affect - seems strangely suppressed in the writings of these and many other theorists. Why? Is creating a definitive knowledge around death a means of overcoming it? One thing remains constant; whatever meaning death represents it remains defiantly difficult to speak about without theory being inherently lacking. But can death represent anything? Over-investment in life is an over-dependence on meaning (the meaning of being a subject and the meaning in being which contradicts the un-meaning of death). Perhaps this is why theory must lack when speaking of death. Or perhaps theory just is not a great genre for expressing terror.  Death as an it does not work. Death is not a thing, it is not a process, dying is but death is not. Something that is not a being cannot have ontology so theorizing death is necessarily impossible while speaking within a system of ontology. Dead may be represented, death cannot. This could be another reason why the male nihilistic hysteric genre of discourse focuses upon the non-visual, the theoretical and the sacrificial – all of these strategies invest death with meaning, despite the clear indications that there is no meaning in something that has no ‘being’ or material incarnation.

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