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ECER Conference, Crete, 2004
John Schostak Institute of Education, MMU
Jill Schostak CARE, University of East Anglia
Heather Piper Institute of Education, MMU
Cathie Pearce Institute of Education, MMU
Death is one of those things that, mostly, only happens once in a lifetime. So you have to make the most of it. How it is treated tends to depend on culture and tradition. Disney makes light of it - there are the happy ghosts, or scary ones that get to be defeated in the end, meaning, Death can be negotiated with in some way. Then there is Hollywood adventure death where Arnie clad in belts of bullets, machine gun in hand, yells “Hasta la vista baby” and wars get to be rewritten to the benefit of the Paying Public who need to believe in Something. And then there is small screen teenage pretty death where Buffy or the Charmed Ones make out with the beautiful and stake or zap the ugly into dust; or for the whole family there are the hospital teams fighting to save the victims of tragic accidents or horrific cancers. Alongside this is CNN death with its images of surgical strikes, collateral damage, car bombs, genocide and the wasted faces of extreme poverty. These are the scripted frames where scenes of death are managed for Prime Time and Oscars.
Death in real life, what is that? This time it's personal. That awareness of the vulnerability of the self - my self - in the face of the Other, that radical negation of life and biography, creates an horizon to consciousness that is always outside its reach either to bring closure or to extend infinitely. Death is the gap in the line of the horizon where no total view can be accomplished. It is the beyond the horizon, the frame, the screen where life and action cannot be supported. Or is it? How can we know, one way or the other? This, of course, is where the professionals make their entrance, those who claim to know: the priests, the philosophers, the scientists, the teachers of every kind. And in their wake, there are the politicians, the merchants, the sales team who know how to spin, package and make the deal of a lifetime. But at the back of that, at the back of all of it there's
Akhar,he's been here a year, and it was only three weeks ago during an art lesson, a lesson about a door, 'you open a door and what do you see'? He was working with one of our teaching assistants, and just suddenly opened up to her twelve months on, here's a child who came here to learn English, but that was not his only difficulty, and he started to tell the teaching assistant about doors, and how he'd hide behind doors and that his brother was arrested and taken to the police station, and was killed in there … but it's taken 12 months for us to realise what had happened to him when he'd left Iraq … you don't know how many years he's been told not to speak about it, he's had to come to terms with his older brother's murder, who was only about 18.
Has death arrived in the place of education?. What can be said? What ought to be done? What can we make of humanity? What can be hoped for? These questions echo Kant's as the fundamental questions of philosophy or to put it another way, of an education for those who live face to face with others who look back and make judgements of what to do next. The burden of depicting such questions is depicted by Kundera in the Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). who explored the boundaries of relationships both between the characters and within a wider sense of humanity. The characters are caught up in events that are outside of their control and where the 'unbearable' is both the lightness of freedom and the heaviness of burden.
All the elements are there:
Faced with this during a lesson, a silenced death, a murder, now being spoken about, let out, a lesson about 'what is behind the door' falls into a reality that opens on to a world far removed from the British classroom. How many worlds are there in a single classroom? What is being kept silent there?
The elements are those of the uncanny as described by Royle (2003). The uncanny is an experience of reading situations where more (or perhaps less) is always going on than is apparent, where the ghosts of past (or future) situations haunt the present. Face to face what is going on? The other always exceeds what can be known, what can be said, what can be experienced. What dealings may be had, face to face, with the other?
Theory makes models, reduces experiences to what can be explained. It produces theoretical automata that stand for the realities being explained, manipulated. It seeks to produce descriptions of the real that exhaust the real of its strangeness. In doing so, it becomes more uncanny as it becomes haunted by the vitality, the differences, the remainders that theory itself cannot accommodate. Theory kills what it explains. The ideal types of sociology are not real living beings. The statistics on the balance sheet are not food. Contemporary globalised capitalism is a machine that increasingly circulates electronic data streams, managed by semi-intelligent software agents that automatically 'make decisions', that is according to an algorithm, about buying and selling. In this virtual world human beings are just meat on the ends of terminals, like carcases in an abattoir (c.f., Gibson's necromancer and also the film Matrix - Badiou et al 2004 - as a Cartesian-style twist).
Strangeness is the experience that shifts perception ever so slightly so that what had seemed so real, so solid melts into air. This is the experience written of by Berman (1982) describing the social, cultural and industrial changes that have taken the label 'modernism', that great change in consciousness concerning the real and the place of being human within it. For the modern mind through reason all could be mastered, progress was to be measured to the extent that nature could be brought under rational control. This was so, whether this was the reason of the scientist working out the laws of nature, or the reason of the political economist working in terms of the variety of flavours of democracy or in terms of the variants of the Hegelian/Marxist vision of the end of history where State and Reason would be one and the same. Reason provided the grand narrative of progress.
For those crushed in the progress towards the rational democratic or communist state, they could only mourn the lost certainties and values of a past age. The 'sacrifice' of those crushed would, of course, be considered worth it by those who would benefit in later ages. However, as reason has not delivered mastery over nature in any full sense the modern has been haunted by fascism, war, terrorism, poverty, disease and ecological disaster. It has, in that Freudian sense, been a return of the repressed, the uncanny that reason whether in its democratic or Marxist senses cannot find the measure of, cannot contain, nor keep closeted behind the door.
For that reason, the challenge by the philosophers of the postmodern, deconstruction and poststructuralism to the modern has been to undermine the certainties of reason and the steady onward march of progress towards total mastery and thus the identity of State and Reason as a totalitarian framework. Although such writers as Lacan, Barthes, Lyotard, Derrida, Levinas, Kristeva, Irigaray, Foucault, Baudrillard, Virillio, Deleuze and Guatari cannot be lumped together or sorted out as either postmodernists or as post structuralists in any homogeneous sense, they are all influential voices providing antitotalitarian, antitranscendental, and antifoundationalist strategies or ways of thinking. Yet, they are all haunted voices scribbling under the spectral gaze of Hegel (c.f., Descombes 1980, Butler 1999/1987, Roth 1988, Rabaté 2002, Baugh 2003, Davies 2004). The lineage is straightforward enough. It was Kojève (1969) who, through a series of courses from 1933-1939, popularised the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit for an audience hungry for an alternative to the Cartesian-Kantian privileging of the cogito. A cogito that seemed incapable of explaining or dealing with the horrors of the world wars. His courses were attended by, amongst others, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Levinas, and Sartre. Hyppolite (1974), who was to publish the first full translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit into French (in 1946) introduced Foucault and Deleuze to Hegel during his classes (Heckman 1974). Moreover, Derrida studied under him at the Ecole Normal and later it was Wahl influenced by Kierkegaard and Hegel who was for a time Derrida's research supervisor (Baugh 2003:41). The web of influence is pervasive and subtle and the Hegelian drama as told by Kojève, the struggle to the death between warriors who come face to face, is still in its various mutations playing to a packed world audience.
What is this:
They're (a Somali family) absolutely petrified; they've come from where there's been violence, everyone shooting, and they don't know who they can trust. One lad in the reception class was rigid with fear in class … his family had been subjected to fighting with guns and his mother had escaped into the forest with her two elder sons and the boy we have. Her two other sons have disappeared, she doesn't know where they are now, one child had been repeatedly raped. That probably is extreme … One child in Year 4, I know he's been here since Year 1 and it was only this year … we encouraged him to speak to somebody. The children are gradually able to open up to us, but they've got to feel secure to do that.
Terrifying ghosts of the real inhabit this text. We as readers can only form vague simulations of what had, what could have happened, and the impact on minds and bodies drawn perhaps from the resources of news, drama and stories enacted through text or the broadcast media. We inhabit a world of textuality, an intertextual field which is both the material trace mediating between consciousnesses and the displacement of the real. Yet, when it happens, death, or the threat of death, confronts the individual in his or her existential singularity and also as an impossibility:
My death is an impossibility: I cannot die alone. I can only know of the other's death such that I die as other, that the other's death in “me” is my own most possibility as impossibility; death is the absolute which gives me over to the other (Schuster 1997: 7).
How does one react to the promise of death as it stares down the barrel of a gun or glints on the blade of a knife?
In the account of the Somali family can we just see the outlines of the Hegelian drama? They have been caught up in fighting, not as warriors but as 'collateral damage' as the Western generals tend to say, or as 'goods' to be fought over, ravaged, consumed. They are implicitly there, wanting to live, petrified in their fear. So too are the warriors who care nothing for lives but fight for the recognition to be masters. The masters care only for the fulfilment of their desires reducing others to the status of worthlessness, or to objects whose value is measured to the extent that they can be appropriated for the satisfaction of desires. In meeting the other, the only concern is whether the other is a threat to the fulfilment of their desires. In the desire to be supreme, the other is indeed a threat. Thus, when the Hegelian warriors confront each other, each wanting the other to recognise their superiority, their desire to be master over their own natures, that is mastery over the fear of death, there are only three possible outcomes: they both die in the struggle hence neither gets what they want; or, one dies and again neither gets what they want because there is no one other than the victor to recognise the victory; or, one gives in, fearing to die and thus recognises the other as master. However, even in this latter possibility, the master does not get recognition from an equal, only someone who has submitted and is willing to be a slave to the winner's desires as master. Hence, the slave's recognition is worthless. As a further twist, it is the slave, who in trying to meet the master's desires, in the process invents ways of transforming nature through the use of tools in order to hunt or grow food, or build homes and so on. That is, the slave through the use and development of reason generates the culture and knowledge that ultimately masters nature. This defines for Hegel an educational process. In short, education is born in the labour of the slave. It is through this mastery of nature by the production of culture that generates the rational basis for the possibility of a re-negotiation between master and slave in order to bring about the final state of society where all prior conflicts are drawn within the State as Reason. This very brief account of the historical development of the Hegelian drama from confrontation, and struggle to a final mediation under Reason/State is recounted here in order to reflect on its ghostly reappearances in philosophy, political economy and the conflicts of desire that form the dynamics of everyday personal, social and cultural life that in turn underpins a notion of slave-education.
Death the Absolute Master
“But if god is gone and man is no longer master then who is master?” Kundera (1990)
In the struggle of the two Hegelian warriors the contest was a kind of game of chicken - in the confrontation with certain death who would chicken out first? The two consciousnesses - if we can put it that way - were face to face not so much with each other, but with the Absolute absence of consciousness, Death itself: existence versus the abyssal nothingness. Death is the ultimate limit to all knowledge, all reason, all culture, all forms of representation - in short, it is the limit to the realm of the symbolic. In this way, Death and the Real are synonymous: the real cannot be caught up into the webs of the symbolic any more can death. The Real is the limit of the symbolic. To the extent that the life of the human being, the being who is the symbolic animal par excellence, is Real, then the human harbours death as an abyss, an emptiness, a gap, a void, a tear in the fabric of the cultural. Bataille had another way of putting it.
Each being is distinct from all others. His birth, his death, the events of his life may have an interest for others, but he alone is directly concerned in them. He is born alone. He dies alone. Between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity.
This gulf exists, for instance, between you, listening to me, and me, speaking to you. We are attempting to communicate, but no communication between us can abolish our fundamental difference. If you die, it is not my death. You and I are discontinuous beings. (Bataille 1987: 12)
Why then should I care about you, or you about me for that matter? Isn't this the return of that hellish Hegelian warrior confrontation where I will attempt to master you because I know its not in your deepest interests to care about me? So, I need to assure my interests and one way or another, the struggle begins.
Communication cannot sew up the essential abyss at the heart of all human communication. Language fails in its essential mission to address another, to reach the address of the other. The letter of assurance never arrives.
Writing is a space of conflict for post-structuralists. So, in writing or reading about death there is no easy way to produce a meaning, a unifying story to tell that pins it down. To this end Barthes, Kristeva and other post-structuralists, particularly those within Tel Quel, (Mai 1991), display a reluctance in defining the 'texte'. Thus the text became 'a basic ideological weapon which can contribute directly to a revolutionary change in society', (Mai 1991:37). Tel Quel were united in their aversion to communication, because they saw it as an agent of cohesion feeding consensus. But what exactly is the relevance here?
Here is the writing of a paper for a conference that is to be delivered, an act which presupposes a writer/writers of the paper and an audience as destination who will read the text and/or attend the session to listen to the spoken presentation of the paper. Is the implication that the gap at the heart of communication can be covered in some way? Notions of writing and reading/listening are thus what are at stake in this section. Can a single specifiable meaning be achieved where what was intended is what is read? That is, can we know what the author intended? Even if we cannot have this level of certainty can we at least say that, writers write in order to say something, readers read in order to discover some meaning from the text being read? This is not to say that writers always succeed in saying exactly what they wanted to say, or even aim to succeed in writing what they want to say. Nor is it to say that readers always come to a meaning the writer intended, however, tenuous that intended meaning was for the writer. However, at least, reading/writing are necessarily framing activities. That is to say, there is an act of leaving clues an act of detection, a de-crypting. a filling in to make sense of gaps all in the hope that that some encounter, some meeting, some communion, some meaning may be brought close enough for each to touch the other.
Let us return to the excerpt of Akhar's story as cited above. The teacher is narrating the child's story; Akhar is not telling us himself and thus effectively he is absent and “dead” to us, apart from a second-hand presence. Of course the teacher may be determined to represent Akhar faithfully and sincerely, but can this be done? The teacher has not experienced this trauma first-hand. The teacher has no personal knowledge of the culture and its traditions with which to understand the context for the experience and thus inform the telling of the story. Akhar has related his story in a language foreign to himself, rather than in his own native one. Leaving aside the distress he probably feels in telling it (after all it has taken him a year to do so) what slippages of meaning have crept into the telling of the story in this foreign English language? How can these be recognised let alone factored in? Furthermore, the fact is that Akhar did not recount his story to the teacher. Rather he talked to one of the teaching assistants. In other words the teacher has got this story third-hand at best, as far as we, the audience can detect. What has happened to the details of the story in the passage from the one to the other? What slippages of meaning have occurred? What effect did this sudden opening up have on the teaching assistant, especially in view of the tragedy that then proceeded to unfold in the telling by Akhar? The teaching assistant presumably was simply expecting to help a young child comply with a curriculum requirement to create some fiction around the notion of opening up a door.
And yet how did this teaching assistant cope? We are not informed by this extract, It is outside the story of Akhar, and whilst there is a sense in which that is so, there is also a sense in which it so obviously is not so. Akhar chose to tell this particular teaching assistant at this particular moment in time, in this particular space. Whilst Akhar is absent and merely spoken of/about, this particular teaching assistant has no voice at all. Rather all s/he has from the excerpt is a title - 'teaching assistant' and the fact that it was s/he to whom Akhar opened up. Akhar actually managed to open the door and talk about what he saw even though we remain unaware of how his life has changed after this experience. The textualisation of a life always extracts, too soon, too crudely, too cruelly.
How did all of these circumstances influence the recounting of Akhar's story to the teacher who is speaking in this excerpt cited here? What is the professional relationship of the teaching assistant to the teacher who is telling us this story? We assume the professional roles of assistant and teacher are different, due to training, career expectations, opportunities and so on. But we also need to consider the power structure too as the story excerpt we are reading is given by the teacher who has been told by the teaching assistant, who has been told by Akhar. No matter how well intentioned the teacher, the story cannot be a truly faithful representation for all of these reasons. One can offer the other the visual space of a door, but one cannot cross through for the other. One cannot die for another and one cannot tell an experience for the other. Up until now the story has been subjected to a discourse analysis from the point of view of the slippages of meaning that have inevitably crept in unannounced in the telling of the story - i.e., by the authors of the story. We have outlined the trajectory of the loss of author[ity] of the lived experience as it passes from Akhar to the teacher. Akhar as the author has died once again in this trajectory. Only the ghost of his voice remains.
Meanwhile, here in the paper we have taken over that story for our purposes in order to fulfil the promise given in the title of the paper 'Death the final frontier'. The story has now been taken out of its 'original' context, the classroom, and written [up] as 'data' and 'evidence' for consideration and discussion in an academic context. Yet in so doing, Akhar's voice continues to haunt us as we remain inveigled in the lesson plan of opening doors in order to present it as 'educative' at a conference on Education. Thus it has been juxta-posed to excerpts from other contexts - readings taken from academic texts, or other excerpts from fieldwork projects and so on. We, as reader-writers, have taken it on, and imposed on it our own author[ship] here in this paper. The death of the author can only be at the expense of the birth of the reader (Barthes, 1977). You, the audience for this paper, will impose your own frameworks on Akhar's story, such that our author[ity] wanes as you re-write/author[ise] it for yourselves in your own singular fashion. New origins will be composed by the interests of each reader in order to explain the 'real reasons' behind the citation, the teacher's lesson, and Akhar creating the door through which a glimpse of his story, his experience, his feeling can be seen.
This demise of Author[ity] and birth of the reader pertains to the theory and practice of 'intertextuality'. Intertextuality was a neologism coined by Julia Kristeva in 1969 to describe the processes by which the meaning of any single text relates on the one hand to the symbolic-phenotext of the subject-addressee as a structured and mappable fragment of communication, and, on the other, from the semiotic-genotext of text to text organised by the subject's drives and energies. The symbolic and the semiotic comprise what Kristeva calls the speaking subject Kristeva 1980, 1984). This balance between the semiotic and the symbolic is a dynamic one, forever changing. The speaking subject is thus always in a crisis of identity and reduction to zero before assuming another identity and this Kristeva refers to as the subject-on-trial. Let us return to the story of Akhar's door.
Akhar tells his story to the teaching assistant. He has presumably decided to tell his story - perhaps he feels an intuitive drive to do so in order to reduce his distress, perhaps he feels this is a safe space at long last after one year of slow deliberation, whatever the reason, and we can only speculate, he tells his story. Perhaps he is looking to bridge the gap between himself and his experience and that other, the teaching assistant. He wants the assistant to listen, and perhaps to respond in some way. Maybe he needs to reach out from his solitude to this other, another solitude, the teaching assistant. His speaking subject faces a crisis of identity, of reduction to zero and the need to take on another plural identity before the whole process begins again. Akhar is a subject-on-trial. The teaching assistant there to help the child with his school-work is also a subject-on-trial in responding to the other and to the world. The fact that s/he unexpectedly faces an extra-curricular story of utter personal tragedy is merely a factor of this event, requiring the speaking subject to find new inner resources in order to try and relate to Akhar and bridge that gap between two individuals. And so it goes on throughout the entire trajectory of loss of author[ship]. In other words, the Author as Master of the Meaning is dead.
What is left? This is the story of a door that opened up, unexpectedly, that in its telling has enabled many to stand at that door - or better, the many doors that have, are and will open up - so that each may look beyond a given space to another space. The gap, of course, between each is still there but choices now arise. What are they?
''In Papua, says the geographer Baron, 'language and its vocabulary grows ever smaller because after each death several words are eliminated as a sign of mourning'. On this point we outdo the Papuans: we respectfully embalm the language of dead writers and reject the words and new meanings which appear in the world of ideas' (Barthes 1987: 48)
Is this what we are doing here? Embalming the words of Akhar, rendering them bereft of emotion and creativity, innovation, and change, confining them instead to the production of mediocrity/sameness and conformity? The telling as an academic exercise. In other words, have we created a universalising signifier - facing the Absolute master, contesting the ' empty beyond'- filling it with some vacuous meaning that effectively neutralizes it by a surgical strike of intertextual analysis from the canon of Kristeva? Or have we thereby opened up a door to Kristeva's poetic analysis, such that the threshold opens out to a beyond of gestalt play, figuring, rhetorical spaces, quasi-transcendentals that beckon alluringly with promises of new life, new salvations?
Death, if it cannot be faced, generates all the strategies of indirection. So, at one level, euphemisms dominate the discourses of death as in any others where adults are inhibited. To speak of death requires never quite saying what we mean; therefore death is a slippery concept where meanings are obscured. Consider for example everyday phrases (at least in the UK) where death is used as a metaphor: 'if looks could kill', 'deadly serious', 'loved to death', 'died and gone to heaven', 'drop dead gorgeous'; yet death is presumably not the point here. However, when death is the point of a discussion we're more likely to hear or say, 'we lost her', 's/he didn't wake up', 's/he passed on', 'passed away', 'has gone to a better place', ' is pushing up daisies', 'has popped their clogs' and so on. The process of dying is similarly obscured by the technical discourse of the medics: 'malignant', 'terminally ill', 'vital signs'. It is death side stepped by euphemism where euphemism looks away from the fear of the reality, the immediacy and the solitariness of death. The project of looking away, deferring, side stepping, overlooking, misplacing the place of death shuts the door, ever so gently on death.
For Heidegger (1995) social conformity was the product of the fear of death. Being alone means we have to face our own mortality whereas the crowd is impersonal and takes us beyond the reach of death. By submerging ourselves in the 'they' we deny that which makes our existence singular, our own. The crowd, the mass, the 'they' keeps the door to the personal touch of death closed. Death is the one thing that another cannot do for us, and so death is that which gives quality to 'mineness'. For Lingis (1989) and Boothby (1991) adopting a Lacanian psychoanalytic standpoint, death and the fear of death is the experience the ego feels at the moment of a threat of significant change to its sense of cohesion and stability. These, in a sense, are variants on the Hegelian drama. It is not so much the warriors face to face as the individual alone facing up to death and thus achieving some sort of existential authenticity, or refusing to face up to death, refusing the engagement altogether by opting to lose one's self in the anonymity of the crowd. The latter is denial of death rather than accepting the possibility of death and recognising one's desire to live that motivates the action leading not to subjection to slavery as a basis for transcendence through work and culture, but to the anonymous crowd as a means of achieving some hoped for transcendence through which death is denied as a possibility. Closing the door on death, opens the door to the political control of the masses as a force to be mobilised, as an audience to be mesmerised by a spectacle, as a citizen to be transformed into a soldier, or a consumer, or a voter according to a logic of salvation that never delivers. Buy coca cola and get the 'real thing'. Join the army and be a man. Vote and be free.
In his political analyses Laclau employs the concept of the empty signifier to explain hegemony, that is, how certain groups achieve a universalising power over others. An empty signifier has universalising effects, but essentially has no content. Take for example, the notion of being patriotic. What it means to be patriotic will depend on the historical circumstances of the time when the call to be patriotic is made. The content that fills the signifier may be capitalistic, fascist, socialist, democratic, revolutionary depending on which faction wins. Laclau 2000:82-3) tells the story of a preacher, Antonio Conselheiro, in Brazil unsuccessful for most of his life in gathering followers. One day he entered a village where people were rioting against tax collectors and said 'the Republic is the Antichrist'. These words became the universalising signifier gathering the people together. under its banner and starting 'a mass rebellion which took several years for the government to defeat.' In effect, the particular becomes universalised under the signifier. The effect is to generate a quasi-transcendental which stabilises meanings for a period of time, that is, until another contest takes place. For Zizek (2000: 100-1) Laclau's position is that 'each Universal is the battleground on which the multitude of particular contents fight for hegemony,' thus 'all positive content of the Universal is the contingent result of hegemonic struggle - in itself, the Universal is absolutely empty.' What does this mean in relation to the role of death in human life?
If death mobilises fear, self survival and denial then it would seem that a universal signifier that promises salvation through transcendence of the particularities and frailties of life by offering 'life everlasting' in some Heaven or some other form of immunity such as the science fiction-like hope of the time when gene therapy will produce eternal youth on earth prove to be attractive. In that sense, there will be those who line up their siren signifiers to mobilise the hopes of the masses who yearn to overcome the threat of Death, tempting them to adopt their particular transcendental position - whether religious, scientific or political or some combination of all.
An ethnomethodological analysis demonstrated that, around the clinical absolutes of death, much is dependent on perception, interpretation and shared working assumptions and thus that the concept of death is relative (Sudnow ; Douglas ). If death, conceptually, is in some way 'relative' it can be managed, controlled, filed away. Historically, we learn, different societies and indeed, the same societies at different times have been characterised by distinct understandings of death. Ariés (1975) suggests that during the Middle Ages the dominant discourse resulted in a 'taming' of death. The majority would be aware they were dying for some time and were therefore able to prepare for it. Bedchambers were public places and the dead would co-exist with the living more easily than today. More recently death has been described by Ariés as more 'wild', largely hidden from view. Many die in hospitals, not their homes; dead bodies are quickly removed from sight (and especially from children), cleansed with antiseptic, and then quickly cremated or placed in cemeteries that no longer tend to be in the centre of cities and towns.
Death has been dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it impossible to know which step was the real death … Doctors are the masters of death … emotions must be avoided both in the hospital and everywhere in society. One does not have the right to become emotional other than in private, that is to say, secretly (Ariés 1975: 88-89).
Even funerals are formalised and an absence of emotion is encouraged, and too much emotion is considered bad taste, at least in many western cultures. Schuster (1997) notes that the formalised and forced mourning is actually a repression of that which it claims to represent. He claims that 'we are losing our ability to see death, to speak of an end, to resolve our own resolutions'(1997: 2). Furthermore:
'These distortions of our life experience are learned, they run deep and they are political' (Macdonald with Rich 1984: 109).
The repression of private feelings in response to the death of a loved on in public stand in stark contrast to the pubic weeping in the streets for a public figure such as Princess Dianna whom they have never even met. There is a symbolic function here where the signifier, Diana, is over run as it were by a flood of feelings ordinarily repressed. The symbolic function the performed by the revered name, Diana, draws together a vast array of repressed contents in the lives of individuals which otherwise would receive no such public, or even personal, expression and thus recognition.
The routine and symbolic orders of death are typically gendered as observed by Macdonald with Rich (1984):
Today men are the specialists of death … male doctors oversee dying, male priests and rabbis perform the rituals of death, and even the active role of laying out the dead no longer belongs to woman (now the work of male undertaker). Woman is only the passive mourner, the helpless griever. And it is men who vie with each other to invent technologies that can bring about total death and destruction (ibid: 80).
The death symbolic and its expression in routine practices, then, positions men and women. Of course, there are female doctors, nurses, and others who in a variety of ways manage death. But the actual sex of the individual is subjected to the role played. The role is gendered articulating a male order. Such an order extends to the manner in which we die: 'Men in battle are portrayed as brave and fearless … meanwhile behind the lines, women and children are being raped, dying of violence and malnutrition, and their pain and their deaths go unrecorded and unhonored' (ibid: 110). Of course, today, there are female soldiers, and women place themselves in the front line, but the roles they play do not undermine the male, patriarchal, or indeed, religious fundamentalist orders. Indeed, their sacrifices underwrite those orders.
Such underwriting continues into our everyday imaginary of what is or is not newsworthy about death, especially in relation to child deaths (Gerrard 2004). Some (Holly Wells, Jessica Chapman and James Bulger) quickly become household names, whilst others, (Daniel Nolan, Hannah Williams and Adam Morrell) few will have heard of, and Gerrard suggests a number of possible reasons for this phenomena. She outlines a horrific murder of a young woman (Lynne Burgess) by her husband at a similar time to the trial of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, that barely made the news, and points out that Holly and Jessica were prepubescent little girls and their innocence is perhaps what made them adorable and their deaths noteworthy. Similarly James Bulger quickly became Jamie which served to emphasise his childishness.
Gerrard provides details of the death of 14 year old Adam Morrell (which received very little media coverage) who was killed by friends when he threatened to report their drug taking. He suffered 280 injuries and his killers (his friends) played a game whilst he was dying to see who would finish him off. Gerrard suggests that the death of Holly and Jessica is somehow closed off in a small-town world kind of way, whereas Adam's death 'opens out on to a broader canvas of slaughter' where we can glimpse neighbour rape, torture and murder and orgies of killing as in Rwanda (ibid: 23). Gerrard provides further examples that we tend to forget (at least in the UK) more easily, the deaths of runaways, drug addicts, prostitutes. Women's murders are typically of secondary interest to those of children, as we tend to regard childhood as symbolic of life in Eden. Furthermore, Gerrard reminds us that in the UK between 5 and 8 children are killed by a stranger whereas 10 times that number are killed by someone they know, usually a member of their family and in their own home. She suggests that domesticity dampens our interest as it is less bizarre. It appears there is a pecking order even for murder.
In experiencing the death of others (for we cannot experience our own) and those close to them, there is perhaps a kind of empathetic identification. Does this mean that the gap between 'I' and 'you' can in some way be closed? We have feelings of empathy, sympathy, compassion, pity but as Goldie (2000) , Nussbaum(2001), Baggini (2002) and others point out there is often considerable confusion about what these emotions are and the ways in which we understand them. What are we doing when we empathise? Sharing? Being in someone's shoes? Extending our world - reaching out to others? The sentiments written on sympathy cards are full of emotional clichés of empathic identification. We “feel for someone” “are with them in their thoughts” “our heart goes out to them” (on a Cartesian line presumably) and what brings such emotions about? Fear? Threat? A realisation of our own fallibility? Or, as Aristotle said because “it is the sort of thing that might happen to us”? Of course there are the uglier sides of emotion too; revenge, envy, jealousy and as Portmann (2000) points out, more subtle notions of schadenfreude - the guilty pleasure we may experience when bad things happen to other people.
As a basic human response it may seem easy to recognise emotions in others either face to face, through newspapers, TV images, photographs, film and literature. We can recognise grief, shock, fear, despair, terror and we often respond emotionally ourselves. What happens when we do this? How can we understand our emotions and especially our emotions towards others? And why is it important?
In the contemporary world we are saturated with images and stories of suffering, death and dying. Only recently the Beslan tragedy has been relived in minute detail - images, words, interviews, live reportage, video footage up to the final moments of the explosions and gunfire. Many believe that such exposure has dulled our senses and blown our appetites for feeling and acting in the world as a kind of emotional immunity. In the UK, Red Nose day and children in Need ( fund raising events for children and adults living in poverty) work on the premise that we need to have our consciences pricked and that we will only respond to the images of appalling poverty and suffering if they are accompanied by music and pleas by celebrities displaying their humanity. What they are appealing to however is a notion of emotions as impulses.
Nussbaum reminds us that such a view was held by the Early Greek Stoics. Emotions were considered in this period to be non reasoning and unthinking energies - emotional 'storms' in which people are pushed and pulled around and where emotions are very much located in the body not the mind and therefore not intelligible. Although Nussbaum goes on to say that such a view has been widely discredited in philosophical terms it is still important because it captures something of the experience and is still very influential today in law and public policy and, we would like to argue, throughout the media and with those dealing with death. Buggini too says that this is a Cook's tour of emotions which invoke metaphors of hot and cold; boiling and simmering and keeping the lid firmly on. We would like to argue that a conception of emotions as impulses is un-educational in that it teaches suppression, repression and denial of the importance of emotional experience. Consider our earlier account of Akhar.
Emotions, like subjectivities, are not homogeneous. They do not have a single referent nor do they reside in one place. In the Western world we may not fear starvation or human sacrifice but we do fear premature death, being stricken without warning and diseases for which there are no known cures. The ways in which our fears of death are mobilised may differ in cultural and social terms but the emotions are universal. However to say that emotions are universal is not to say that they are easily defined. As Bernard Williams commented on a radio programme “the only things that can be defined are those without history” and emotions do have histories, if not identities as well.
Psychoanalytic paradigms such as Freud and Lacan have recognised how past experiences affect our emotional present and futures and such perspectives are important and significant. However emotions in these accounts are seen as a subterranean drive of the unconscious and where language is able to name, tame and frame and shame emotions in an attempt to understand and explain. Martha Nussbaum refers to emotions as 'upheavals of thought' - an intrinsic engagement with emotional processes not as inner or outer; upper or downer and for us. Bagginni too talks of 'tatonement' a French term which can be loosely translated as “feeling one's way” and for us, such conceptions of emotions hold some educational promise.
As Goldie (2000) points out there is a tendency for both the empirical sciences and philosophy to over intellectualise the emotions. Their openness and indeterminacy may be difficult to contend with if we conceive of them in terms of impulses. There are historical and political perspectives too for being suspicious of excess in emotional terms. However, Deleuze and Guattari ask us to reconsider emotion (in their terms the notion of desire) in more productive terms rather than as repressed or unconscious acts. For them, it is humanity's inability to understand or acknowledge the ways in which our desires are mobilised, manipulated and managed that make us susceptible to authoritarian, capitalist and totalitarian regimes. Embedded between our emotions and feelings are philosophical insights that are both intriguing and puzzling to consider. What would an emotion that is less sure of itself be like? How could we be less emotionally sure without losing our capacity to feel? How can we evaluate and engage with our emotional experience? And how does this help engage with the otherness of the pain, the sorrow, the death of the other? And how do we then face our own death and the collapse of all possible projects?
There is an absurdity to existence in that Death renders any hope of permanence, any thought of rationality in the world, any future everlasting project futile. In the desire to order the social rationally and control events, death arrives as a non-scheduled status passage (Glaser and Strauss 1967). This absurdity has to be managed just as the many other (usually) unsought, 'negative' and non-scheduled status passages that people find hard to deal with, or embarrassing, and which can render individuals experiencing them (in a sense) a non-person (eg becoming mentally ill; contracting HIV; suffering severe brain injury; going bankrupt; being sent to prison etc). All these evoke a sense of passing beyond an acceptable social limit, a transgression. Implicit in any act of transgression is a taboo. And at the back of all taboos, according to Bataille, is the fear of violence:
what we call death is in the first place the consciousness we have of it. We perceive the transition from the living state to the corpse, that is, to the tormenting object that the corpse of one man is for another. For each man who regards it with awe, the corpse is the image of his own destiny. It bears witness to a violence which destroys not one man alone but all men in the end. The taboo which lays hold on the others at the sight of a corpse is the distance they put between themselves and violence, by which they cut themselves off from violence. (Bataille 1987: 44)
For Bataille the function of all taboos is to combat violence. However,
'Organised transgression together with the taboo make social life what it is.' (Bataille 1987:65)
Death, of course, comes in many forms: natural, suicide, murder, genocide. In the context of the point of view of social order, the human desire for rationality and the hope for eternal life, any death is a violence. And of course, Bataille (1987:11), when he says 'Eroticism … is assenting to life up to the point of death' reminds us of de Sade who wrote: 'there is not a libertine some little way gone in vice, who does not know what a hold murder has on the senses.' and again '(t)here is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.' Desire, sex, murder, death and the assent to life are all linked in a perverse formula that sells and sells in hollywood and in the newsagents. Bataille explores the nature of the taboo that underpins the possibility of rational society.
War in a way boils down to the collective organisation of aggressive urges. Like work it is organised by the community; like work it has a purpose, it is the answer to the considered intention of those who wage it. We cannot say therefore that war and violence are in conflict. But war is organised violence. The transgression of the taboo is not animal violence. It is violence still, used by a creature capable of reason (putting his knowledge to the service of violence for the time being). At the very least the taboo is the threshold beyond which murder is possible; and for the community war comes about when the threshold is crossed. (Bataille 1987:64)
All of this is a variant of the Hegelian drama that makes explicit what is at stake. We are some removed from the two warrior consciousnesses facing each other in a game of death defying chicken. War and work have become the two sides of social organisation where work requires a taboo against violence in order to develop its projects yet the taboo itself calls to transgression, a siren signifier leading to disaster. There is:
always a temptation to knock down a barrier; the forbidden action takes on a significance it lacks before fear widens the gap between us and it and invests it with an aura of excitement. “There is nothing”, writes de Sade, “that can set bounds to licentiousness .. The best way of enlarging and multiplying one's desires is to try to limit them”. Nothing can set bounds to licentiousness … rather there is nothing that can conquer violence. (Bataille 1987:48)
This is the challenge to both the ethical and the political dimensions of human society if it is to be founded on the love of wisdom rather than the love (and awe) of deities.
In a debate between Critchley, Laclau, Derrida and Rorty the question of the ethical arose (Mouffe 1996). Essentially, Critchley - a staunch Derridean - saw the ethical as foundational. Laclau and Rorty did not. Critchley sees deconstruction as an ethical demand in the Levinasian manner where the subjectivity, that is the freedom and spontaneity, of an individual is called into question by the other person. This happens at a pre-rational level. The suffering, for example, of the other is responded to at a level that is essentially pre-rational. This provides a foundation upon which to build a first philosophy, that is an ethics which provides a position from which to de-construct politics and other social forms. Rorty's reply is characteristically simple and disarming:
I don't find Levinas's Other any more useful than Heidegger's Being - both strike me as gawky, awkward, and unenlightening. I see ethics as what we have to start creating when we face a choice between two irreconcilable actions, each of which would, in other circumstances, have been natural and proper. Neither my child nor my country is very much like the Levinasian Other, but when I face a choice between incriminating my child or breaking my country's laws by committing perjury, I start looking around for some ethical principles. I may not find any that help, but that is another question. My failure to do so is not satisfactorily explained by reference to an Abyss that separates me from an Other. (Rorty, in Mouffe 1996: 41)
What if Rorty's fictional illustration is inadequate to the discussion here? It doesn't have the existential stab to the heart of a real life complex situation. How for example do we respond to the many images of death and terror that slot between the adverts for luxury cars and sexy images of film and pop stars in newspapers and on television? How again do we respond to the intimately distant sadness of the pain of loved ones? And again how do we respond to the sight of an accident in the street involving strangers?
Danger of death comes suddenly, personally, suspending all sense of the routine. Just like this, at seven-fifteen on a Friday morning in the reception of a local general hospital a wife waits with her husband for the day-ward to open up and admit patients - her, in fact, for a mastectomy. Nine o'clock in one of the many theatres the health-care professionals await their first patient. This woman who is wife to this husband is the first patient. She is wheeled in from the anaesthetic room. The theatre staff move forward and begin to make her ready. The surgeons are scrubbed up and waiting - they have a long list that day. Something is wrong although nothing is said. The theatre technicians step back. The patient is not breathing properly. The anaesthetic consultant speaks a few brief words to her trainee doctor who runs back into the anaesthetic room. He re-enters the main theatre, empty-handed and heads off out into the corridor running, returning some seconds later with some tubing. One of the nurses has meanwhile stepped forwards to cover up the naked flesh of the patient whilst we others await the unfolding of events. We all wait silently, hushed, still. The junior doctor returns running some tubing in his hands. This is quickly connected up and suddenly all is well. Everybody jumps into action as the consultant anaesthetist first apologises to the surgeons for the delay and then speaks sternly to her trainee doctor about what is expected of him.
In this story, there is a call to action, an imperative that commands. It has been made clear due to an error, an oversight by a young and inexperienced professional who had failed to bring an appropriate piece of equipment. Where does responsibility lie for the possibility of tragedy? Derrida, following Levinas, writes of infinite responsibility towards the other.
If I conduct myself particularly well with regard to someone, I know that it is to the detriment of an other; of one nation to the detriment of another nation, of one family to the detriment of another family, of my friends to the detriment of other friends or non-friends, etc. This is the infinitude that inscribes itself within responsibility; otherwise there would be no ethical problems or decisions. (in Mouffe 1996 :86)
How is blame assigned when responsibility is infinite?
“There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless” Kundera (1990)
Perhaps it is at the moment of blame, or during the hushed moment that is a prelude to disaster that we come of age and are able to understand the ethical as an impossible responsibility to others. At such a moment I know that I can kill another, that the other can kill me. I know that my loved ones are vulnerable as are the loved ones of the other. It is this intimation of the 'all at onceness' of the incompletely knowable and ultimately unmasterable alternatives that generates both the political and the ethical opening up the possibility of an education.
As always there is a choice, even if the choice is denied. Akhar opened a door at the request of his teacher, not the door that the teacher expected. There is a sudden disjunction here between the routine production of a lesson, meant to be fun perhaps, and the devastating life history that the door symbolised for Akhar. This paper has been nothing but a continuation of this lesson as opened up by Akhar drawing out its implications. In the process fundamentally different choices can be made: denial, political exploitation, ethical responsibility and so on. When a teacher adopts one or other of these choices a fundamental decision is made as to the role of schooling in the lives of young people that has implications more generally for the social and cultural orders in their most general sense.
Faced with a child who has experienced death in the family, some teachers take the view that 'school is one place the child can forget it, so we just help them to forget', in other words it will not be talked about. Others think that death is best 'dealt with on an informal level … other children are a huge support, they'll take the child's mind off it, but also some of them will be interested in the experiences, so they will share, and often they'll share in their own language, but you get the body language, so we deal with it in that way'. This may suggest that some teachers tend to abdicate their responsibilities to other children considered better equipped to cope. In some inner city schools in Manchester UK teachers reported not being aware of the histories of some refugee and asylum seeking children who had experienced the horrors of war and only learning of these experiences by chance. Others would be aware of their pupil's experiences, but not sure what to do with this awareness:
You can't predict what's going to trigger something off in a child … we've a child who seems to be OK at the moment, but had a very difficult period about 6 months ago, he's a Palestinian refugee … it's knowing about the family, them being in another country and being faced with death … His art teacher was saying that lots of his poetry and his writing and drawings were about that, and it's knowing how to raise it, if it doesn't come from the child, it's hard.
Some teachers are aware of their own lack of training and yet have some intuition into what they feel may at least help to an extent:
It (art or drama) gives people permission to say what they need to say. In some Year 4 poems, children put themselves into the position of a refugee (they weren't refugee children) and wrote poems on that. We're a school that does address the issues. There's a child at the moment, his mum's in St Ann's hospice, she's only got weeks to live, he's a reception child so he knows about it but he hasn't quite got it in his head, but if he was an older child we would be wondering what to do with him.
What does addressing the issues mean? In this case it is assuming that adults in the school are more likely to deal with death better than family and friends:
We're intending going on the internet to see if there are any books, but I worry for this child because it could well be that his mum dies while we're on holiday, there would have been some support for him here, (although we have no training or guidance in it) but in the 13 years I've been here, there've only been 3 children I've known where a parent has died, but when it does happen … I think we should have some sort of a bereavement policy.
It is seen as an unusual event, an event that calls for policy, perhaps a means of marking the event:
There was in the past a Somali child who'd just arrived and he had a heart defect, and something could happen any time, he died, the class didn't see his death - it happened at home - the class made an album of their thoughts about him, gave it to the family (they didn't speak much English), and we planted a tree outside here, all children who were here then, have gone, but it was a shock for them, they're grown up now and will still see the tree and think about him. We've still got the family; in fact, one of the boys in Year 4 started here just after his brother had died.
Death is encountered as an unusual event, disrupting the normal smooth course of schooling. It opens the door to an otherness that requires special policies and monuments thus setting it apart from the business of schooling. Death arises elsewhere and is carried into school. The challenge posed by death, however, is that it is the destiny of all. What kinds of responses should be made?
Keeping death out there, out of sight, out of mind is an option always under threat. The distance between life and death as an ever present possibility is no distance at all. The institutions that manage our lives and our deaths are organised to maintain power structures in the face of other power structures and threats to power. The challenges for philosophy, education and research centre around this question of the initimate otherness of death - something that Lacan called extimacy to stress both the intimacy and the externality of the relation of self to otherness. The lesson of the door continues: how to open it and what to do when it opens. The questions posed by this lesson are key to contemporary philosophy, education and research in that it re-poses the relation between the domains of the private and the public. To what extent should philosophy, education and research engage with the politics in the public domain that frames the possibility of their existence as projects, as careers, as ways of thinking, living and acting in the world. Or are they to be restricted to the private and domesticated domains of schooling for the masses and private development for the elite?
This question has been posed in the debates between Rorty and Derrida. Rorty has branded Derrida with the mark of the private ironist (1999; Mouffe 1996). By this he means to make a distinction between the kind of philosophical thinking that leads to self fulfilment and the kinds of discourses that are necessary for active engagement on the public stage of politics. He considers that there is no necessary relation between a philosopher's philosophy and the politics adopted. He cites Heidegger's involvement with Nazism. In addition, Rorty has no time for a politics that would ground itself in an ethics whereas Derrida draws upon the ethics of Levinas to ground a sense of responsibility towards the other. The argument between these people who essentially admire each other is instructive of the challenge to be faced. Rorty puts his case simply:
consider the principle 'Thou shalt not kill'. This is admirably universal, but is it more or less rational than the principle 'Do not kill unless one is a soldier defending his or her country, or is preventing a murder, or is a state executioner, or a merciful practitioner of euthanasia'? I have no idea whether it is more or less rational, and so do not find the term 'rational' useful in this area. If I am told that a controversial action which I have taken has to be defended by being subsumed under a universal rational principle, I may be able to dream up such a principle to fit the occasion, but sometimes I may only be able to say, 'Well, it seemed like the best thing to do at the time, all things considered.' It is not clear whether the latter defence is less rational than some universal-sounding principle which I have dreamt up ad hoc to justify my action. It is not clear that all the moral dilemmas to do with population control, the rationing of health care, and the like - should wait upon the formulation of principles for their solution. (Rorty 1999: xxx)
Rorty and Bataille seem very close on the issue that any taboo has its socially organised transgressions. To the question of what to do, Rorty is only able to answer that he has no rational solution but that he prefers to adopt strategies that minimize cruelty. Rather than resting his preference on some transcendental first principle he suggests: 'it is best to think of moral progress as a matter of increasing sensitivity, increasing responsiveness to the needs of a larger and larger variety of people and things.' (Rorty 1999: 81).If one asks why, there is no other answer than to say it depends on upbringing and the social context within which one has lived. Philosophy cannot be appealed to, to provide any further foundation. Hence:
there is no neutral, common ground to which an experienced Nazi philosopher and I can repair in order to argue out our differences. That Nazi and I will always strike one another as begging all the crucial questions, arguing in circles. (Rorty 1999: 15)
This debate underlines serious questions as to the role of philosophy in the harsh world of politics. Put it simply, can philosophy address the question of whether there is a direct relationship between the philosophy adopted and the kinds of education and politics that then ensue? If there is, then perhaps Rorty's Nazi philosopher may yet be convinced. If not, then how do we proceed? Are we then simply drawn back into the Hegelian continual struggle for mastery without anything founding the struggle other than the desire to win?
Turning to education, schools caught up in what was earlier described as 'slave education' are involved in transforming the minds and bodies of children into tools to meet the needs and interests of the master organisations, the power bases of society at local and global levels. Yet the lesson of the door revealed, quite by chance it would seem, another kind of educational moment. It was that moment where the barriers between the personal and the public, the domestic and the political melted to open onto realities that challenge both personal and professional resources. At this moment education is challenged to deal with the real life histories of individuals who are slowly, often painfully, making their way in a complex, contradictory and often dangerous world. Can young people be educated to engage transformatively with the world about? Or, should the door again be closed, ever so gently, locked shut with a silent symbolic monument to grief?
And finally, is research a version of slave education, ever refining the means by which to engineer young people into quietude and compliance, ever re-engineering and fixing adults to fit the changing needs of the master organisations and power bases? The door opened by Akhar is a glimpse into an alternative research domain where the role is to explore what has been opened up in terms of its philosophical and educational possibilities for engagement with the world about. Arendt asked 'what if we were to prioritise birth rather than death in our cultural imagination?' (see Fraser 2003: 17). For research, philosophy and education the door is always open to such alternatives. However, the possibility of an Eichman is always founded upon the ordinary, everyday routines by which we close the door.
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