In a
recent article, I explored at length how immersing oneself in the world of
modern technology puts a person into a world that is totally free of organic
perishability and thus numbs that person to the possibility of death. I also discussed how constantly living in a
world of experience that separates a person from the possibility of death,
makes death a particularly scary experience for which the person is totally
unprepared. Death becomes a foreign
experience that is magnified as a result of the relative lack of direct contact
with it and particularly in a natural environment. Hence, the rise in modern existential despair
and the modern dread of death.
However,
my good friend Dr. Jorge Cappon, professor emeritus at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico and well known psychoanalyst, has pointed out to me that
there are two forms of symbolic death that occur in the modern technological
world that do have an impact on people: the planned obsolescence of machines
and the deletion of e-mails. This
observation is the starting point for my renewed exploration of the
relationship between technology and death.
In this article, I will discuss some of the effects of symbolic
technological death on people.
The first form of
symbolic technological death to be considered here is the planned obsolescence
of machines. Modern machines may be
potentially immortal, because of the potential use of replaceable parts to keep
them going indefinitely. But they are
designed to stop working well after a certain amount of use, so that companies
can make money selling new models to customers.
One could say that these machines die metaphorically. And because most of these machines are not
biodegradable, death for them means the cessation of function rather that the
cessation of form. Yes, parts of the
machine could corrode or rust, and the machines may even break apart or become
misshapen. But, for the most part, the
material substance is maintained and some if not all aspects of the material
form are maintained. The machines are
highly defined figures that are not built to completely undifferentiate and
merge again with the organic grounding from which they came. Many times they are taken to junk yards. Sometimes different parts of these defunct
machines are salvaged and recycled for use in other machines. But, for the most part, these machines are
condemned to exist in the purgatory of continued material existence in some
form with no continued use as coherent entities. In the junk yard, they become a part of a
tension-pocket of discarded disjunctive defined discrete material entities that
have no organic or mechanical connection to one another and that float in what
for humans is an experiential vacuum.
This
represents a model for humans of a death that is not really death, because the
machine cannot truly undifferentiate and degrade back into the organic
grounding. Planned obsolescence leads to
the immortal but lifeless existence of permanent hulks cluttering the face of
the earth without ever reuniting with the soil of the earth.
Another model for death
takes a very different path of ceasing to exist. Rather than existing without living forever,
this other model is one where an entity instantaneously totally ceases to
exist. I’m talking about the deletion of
e-mails. The average person has no feel
for what happens when he deletes an e-mail.
The e-mail simply disappears into a vacuum, into nothingness. There is definitely no process of organic
decay. There is no becoming one with the
earth again in such a way that the substance of the entity can be used to
create new organisms, new living figures.
The e-mail does not participate in the ongoing flow of life in such a
way that it can make and preserve organic imprints in other life forms. The e-mail simply ceases to exist, having
left no permanent imprint in the person’s field of experience. If planned obsolescence is a metaphor for a
person’s body being forever lifeless and forever intact, a free-floating figure
that ends up a part of a tension-pocket of disjunctive junk in a junk heap, a
deleted e-mail is a metaphor for a person’s body disappearing into a
non-material universe, an experiential vacuum where everything is totally
annihilated. How does a person wrap his
mind around total non-existence?
There
is actually one other kind of entity that serves as the basis of two metaphors
for death from within modern technological society. This entity is the television program. A television program metaphorically dies in
two ways. It dies when a person turns
off the television, either during or after the program. When a person turns off a television program,
at that moment, the program totally ceases to exist within the viewer’s field
of experience. It disappears within an
experiential vacuum. Another form of
program death is when a program series dies when the last episode shows. Granted the program can go into reruns, but
the viewer is no longer living with the characters in the same way in an
unfolding imitation of life time; living within the characters’ lives, as if he
was actually part of the program, as if he had an alternate life narrative that
was perhaps more exciting, more stimulating than his own. One can watch a television series on Netflix
or DVD’s, but it is not the same as an alternate life narrative, because a person
can see the last episode first if he wants to.
And often a person has been told or has read or has even seen how the
series ends by the time he has access to it on Netflix or DVD’s.
At
any rate, television programs are vacuumized life, not real primary experience
life, and that explains how one can turn off a program so instantly with no
signs of a foreshadowed decaying or cessation of existence. There is something in television programs
that trivializes the flow of life, by vacuumizing it and being able to simply
turn it on and off on a machine. And yet
many people find their own lives so vacuumized, so empty as a result of living
in modern technological society, that they feel more alive living vicariously
in their favorite vacuumized television series.
Which is why when the spell is broken and the series ends and the
characters totally cease to exist in real life time with no physical remains,
no organic decay, it is a cessation of existence that can leave the viewer as
empty or emptier than before he started watching the show.
So
there is definitely a paradox here with regard to the phenomena a person
encounters in his field of experience in modern technological society. On one
hand, the structures created in our modern world, whether material or electronic,
do provide a sense of permanence and a sense of transcendence over the natural
world of organic perishability. So that
being surrounded by these phenomena, we can trick ourselves psychologically
into thinking that we have escaped the influences of organic perishability and
even our own organic mortality.
But
although we do escape reminders of our full organic mortality, as a result of
living apart from nature, we don’t escape confrontations with the cessation of
existence. When a machine breaks down
and ceases to operate, it is as if its machine life has up and left it, leaving
behind a material hulk that never decays back into the earth where it can be
reincarnated into a different material phenomenon. The machine breaking down is a scary metaphor
for death. It is a metaphor for the
brain dead people who are in a coma and kept alive indefinitely by modern
medical technology. A brain dead person
is a lifeless hulk of a person who has lost his capacity for
consciousness. Such a state of existence
represents a kind of a living death. And
what about an old machine that can function a little, move a little, but is
useless for the kind of serious work for which it is created. Compare this with a person who is partly
conscious but can’t speak, can’t move and thus basically can’t communicate or
function by himself.
It
would be harder to find any kind of human metaphors for the deletion of an
e-mail. Or anything else on a
computer. What does it mean for a
phenomenon in cyberspace to cease to exist?
For one thing, no readily accessible remains can be found by the average
computer user. Yes, there are people who
can recover deleted e-mails, but most people experience the deletion of an
e-mail as the total cessation of existence of the e-mail. There is no corpse left, no hulk or piece of
junk left. Just nothingness. Total nothingness is pretty scary for a
person in modern technological society trying to deal with his own future
non-existence. In truth, it is much
scarier than an organic death, and gradual disintegration into the soil.
There
is a good metaphor for the human images we see on a screen. Yes, those are images of real humans on the
screen (except the virtual ones), but the total experiential effect of images
on a screen is that of vacuumized humans, humans without substance, humans
without breadth, humans without tactile qualities. As vacuumized humans, they come off to us as
ghost-like phenomena. Spirits from
another world. Television is a
vacuumized space that lacks substance much like the spirit world. So there is a sense in which we are not
participating in our own primary experience real world, when we immerse
ourselves in the world of television.
And when a popular television series is over, and the images of our favorite
characters vanish from our fields of experience like ghosts, we realize that we
have emotionally committed ourselves to an ungrounded world, where we have
pulled ourselves out of the flow of real primary experience life and the flow
of blendable continual stimuli that stimulate us to life as the animals that we
are. The flow of blendable continual
stimuli that act as the foundation for the organic imprints we make, receive
and preserve, the rich vibrant life experiences we are capable of having and the
surrogate immortality we create as the comforting preparation for death. Spending too much time living with ghosts
interferes with our capacity to live the kind of life that can diminish our
fear, our despair over death.
Dr.
Cappon was right in pointing out that there are symbolic deaths created by
technology in modern technological society.
So our fear of death comes from both our distancing ourselves from death
through the solid technological structures among which we live as well as
through the distorted forms of cessation of existence and of partial existence
created through the functioning of modern technology. Some people will try to escape death by
becoming cyborgs, and that has been discussed in previous articles. But for most people, the sensory distortion
among which they live will have a serious effect on their ability to confront
the possibility of their own mortalities.
It will lead to the existential despair and the dread of death that is
the hallmark of people living within an increasingly present technological
mantel that covers their lives.
(c) 2015 Laurence Mesirow
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