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The Technics of the Contemporary Funeral
🕑 Added 2017-01-29 16:16:00 +0000 UTCRoger Caillois is mostly known in game studies as the guy who created the typology of games. Within his four types, each resting on a scale of pure play to pure rules, he created a matrix of understanding how people played. Along the way, he tried to figure out what play really is, and that typology is interesting in that it brings in the play of being another person: mimesis, reproduction, and for Caillois it meant taking on a role.
But what game studies, and the general discussion of Caillois in relation to games, doesn't often talk about is his work in Man and the Sacred. It's a book that, like most of Caillois' career at the time, is spent just trying to figure what the hell the sacred even is. It turns out that it's pretty simple: the sacred is what we say it is.
I say all of this to say that I was at a funeral recently and I was struck by the ritual of it and how god damn weird it is in the contemporary period. There's nothing particularly novel about making the claim, but I can't remember the last time I read about a the technical details of a contemporary funeral and how that ritual has changed in the postdigital age.
A couple years ago you couldn't turn around without stumbling over a thinkpiece about the Facebook pages of the dead, but no one told me that slideshows of photos ripped from the Facebook feeds of the dead would be shown on a flat screen television as a kind of digital shrine near the more traditional, more bleak shrine.
Social media is about images and text within context; the very concept of the feed is based on coherence generated through relationships with a presented self. And now the reality of the funeral, at least in the corner of the world in which my dead appear, is that we chop and screw that context into an exquisite corpse that is supposed to say something about that person.
Standing there and watching this slideshow of clipped images was surreal. Not because of that life-being-remixed property, but instead because it was clear that I wasn't meant to merely be seeing how the world saw the deceased. It wasn't a statement about being together or family relationships. Instead, it was about enshrining someone's subjectivity. The funeral itself became a process of seeing the world in the way that the deceased did. It was about looking out of eyes that no longer saw. It was about seeing the images that they saw in order to reconstruct them.
The sermon, that hellish Southern thing required at all funeral services, is the older form of that. It has a familiar cadence for those who have gone to enough funerals in this part of the world: The Bible tells us that life really, really sucks, but God is there to help you out. The dead person had accepted God into their heart, and hoo boy that's a good thing because God is literally the only salve for the open wound that is being alive. (At this particular funeral, God went even further, and became the only way of respecting life itself against the violences of abortion, ISIS, and a mixed bag of other bad stuff). Knowing that they have accepted God into their heart before skipping through the veil of tears gets put onto the audience, and there's the obligatory altar call that brings other people into the fold.
I lay this process out not to judge it (although I'm not a fan), but rather to say that the monologue sermon that uses mourning as a conversion process works the same way that the photos from the Facebook feed do. It's about taking that person's subjectivity and proliferating it until it consumes everyone in the audience.
To actually loop back around to Caillois, we're meant to experience mimesis, to play the part of the figure we remember from the time before death. We're trying to freeze who that person was and then to step inside of them, to see the whole shape of their life from the center of their universe, their own mind. And it doesn't work, because that couldn't ever work, but it is nonetheless attempted. And it's sacred in that it is fully demarcated from the rest of human life. It's the ritual itself, and newer technological mediations merely augment the process, but they never really change it.
