"Death and Dead Bodies: On the Change in Exposure to Death in Contemporary Society"
Presentation at the Volkswagen Foundation Symposium:
Key Topics of the Humanities
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Berlin, 12.1.-14.1.2009
To start with, I have to admit that we are in the beginning of their work. The project started in November last year and, now in January; we cannot present any results, but merely attempt to sketch the problem, and adumbrate our subject, and indicate the way we want to go.
There are quite good reasons to consider our subject matter to be one of the key topics not only in the Humanities: Death is definitely a topic that has been taken to be at the root of culture and society. Despite its importance, however, one can argue that the humanities rather neglect death and seemed to confer it to the life sciences. Indeed, the objection that death was ignored (not only) by the humanities and considered only from and the perspective of life constitutes one of the grounds for our research project. Indeed, the thesis c not only claims that the Humanities ignore death. Its main thrust is that modern society in general has been turning away from death. Death, thus, seems to have become a taboo in modern society.
Even if taboo may be a misleading concept since it pertains to societies with a simple social structure, it nevertheless is used as a topos that seems to define the self-description of modern society. From Sigmund Freud to Michel Foucault theorists share the opinion that modern society turns away from the death; moreover, also empirical research seems to corroborate this view in terms of the medicalization of death, its spatial expatriation into the hospital and its privatization.
On the other had, in the last decade we witness a number of developments that bluntly contradict this view. Thus, the wide popularity of, e.g., Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who turned the attention towards the dying person and the experience of the death and mourning, contradicts the denial of death as does the rapid acceptance of palliative medicine and the rapid dissemination of the hospice movement which dedicates itself to the dying person. In addition, also the mass media seem to exploit the scandalous potential of death and rely on an undoubted acceptance of their discourse on death with respect to the new realistic renderings of death bodies in film and television. But also on the internet and in live events death seems to enjoy a new popularity, as e.g. the highly successful “plastination shows” have demonstrated.
Thus, whereas on the one hand we still observe tendencies towards the denial of death, at the same time we witness a new visibility of a culture of the death. This tension between the displacement of the death as a constitutive element of the modern age, on the one hand, and the increasing popularization of the death in the recent decades, on the other, provides the starting point of our project. Admittedly, this tension is too broad to be investigated by an empirical research project. Therefore, we cut down the topic in two steps without trying to loose the connection to the main question. In the first step we aim to treat the death not only as an abstract subject but turn towards the concrete body, i.e. the dead body. And in the second step we decided to examine none of the "clear cases" which stand for the removal of taboo from the death, as for example the hospice movement or palliative medicine. We rather want to study an object that imparts the tension between the removal of taboo and the taboo of death.
For this reason we focus on the clinical section respectively autopsy. Our interest in the section is caused by the fact that in the most western societies the disposition for the clinical section decreases dramatically, i.e. fewer and fewer people are prepared to dedicate their own or relative’s dead bodies to a medical section. With respect to Germany this means that the rate of sections dropped from a low 18% (1980) to 3% in 2000 and possibly only 1% in 2008. This decrease of the section rate and its presumed acceptance stands in a stark contrast to the publicity of dead bodies and their section, as can be seen in the popularity of medico-legal sections in film and television. It seems as if the section entailed the modern ambivalence of death in a nutshell, as if it ran almost through: whereas the clinical section stands on the shady side of the tabooing, the anatomical one and the forensic section enjoys a very new and astonishingly growing popularity. It is on the basis of this image that we analyze the section as an example for the ambivalence of the role of the death in modern culture.
As focused the topic now may be, is it quite obvious that one single discipline cannot cover such a complex subject-matter. Therefore, we want to start the research from the perspective of different for this kind of research and this kind of object appropriate disciplines: On the one hand, we realize that the organization and legal regulation of the section may have a heavy influence on its decreasing importance. The legal aspect of the section and its international variation is studied by Brigitte Tag from the University of Zurich, while the sociological subproject of Hubert Knoblauch in Berlin deals with the formal organization of the section and their actual praxis in the clinical or pathological context. In addition, the medicine-historical project by Dominik Gross from Aachen examine the media provided knowledge about the section and thus the most visible sources to see on which base people decide for and especially against the section – a topic that is also tackled by the a sub-project of the Berlin group with respect to visual media. The Aachen group also deals with the ethical problems of the decision for the section. All these questions, of course, relate to the basic question of the relation of the people to dead bodies and to their dead bodies – a question that concerns the philosophy of Andrea Esser from Marburg. She will establish a conceptual border for the different projects from the different disciplines. An already existing close cooperation with experts from different areas of the medicine complements the interdisciplinary alignment which should allow us to examine the section empirically.
The examination of the focused subject matter of the clinical section in its context is expected to yield concepts that allow specifying the questions in such a way as to be able to turn to further adjoining, related and contrasting phenomena, such as organ transplant, advance directive or new funeral rituals. An extension that is planned in the second phase of our research will be accompanied by an attempt to consult other scientific disciplines, such as Economics, Religious Studies and Ethnology to widen the scope of our conclusions.
This cooperation should leads to a more differentiated view of the "Revolution of the Death", i.e. to give an empirically grounded answer to the main question and to describe and explain the borders and border movements towards death. On the other side, the cooperative work on will serve interdisciplarity for its own sake. Because we are the only project encompassing different disciplines focusing on the subject of death (not only in the German-speaking area), our project should, we hope, contribute to the origin of a multidisciplinary Thanatology which is neither limited to the psychological consultation of persons concerned with death nor only to the medical treatment of the dying and dead people. The development of such a multidisciplinary Thanatology will be supported by our work in public relations, and eventually, the juridical and medicine-ethical subproject’s pursuit to change the juridical situation respectively the medicine-ethical praxis of the clinical section.
Indeed, this is only a vision of the future because we are still at the beginning of our work. Yet, at the beginning, we are still very open for suggestions and hints. This is what I am hoping for now, thanking you for your attention and looking forward to the discussion.
