Rappa

Modern Death Dances: The Irreverent Politics of Postmodernism

Antonio L Rappa

National University of Singapore

As social scientists, we tend to be attracted to the fragility of life in between socially constructed social spaces, between life and death, spaces that are often disguised as culture. Our science questions the ease with which we seem to accept politics as something existing within a separate and distinguishable realm, a meta / phorical / physical space that conforms to the structures of an outer reality with an inner conscience. Like the birds of the Galapagos, we measure ourselves on the precipice of evolution without even knowing it. "We watched the wondrous creature take flight into the hedge, and form the darkness, flicker its little light on and off, fly toward the rear of the garden until it disappeared behind a lush bougainvillaea".

How can we make any real sense of the turning and twisting of lights when death surrounds us as an affable shroud? Are our thoughts not helplessly directed, as we are hopelessly hurled towards the clammy naïveté of mass consumerism and bourgeois commercialism? Constantini was, amongst other things, right about the little guys -- life in Chiapas, Medan, Guadalajara, Alor Setar, San Cristobal De Las Casas, Johor Bahru, or Tijuana is only as different as the gods would have it. Gods like us who live life to the death. Our daily trysts with closure, completion, endings, solvents, finalities, and conclusions, remind us to behave in ways that are appropriate to the depth of our "cultural" affiliations, our penchant for collecting things we do not need, believing things we do not hear, and cherishing writings we do not read. We desire instant emotional, and physical gratification – the modern ethos of traditional dance. Life, then, is a wonderful death trance, twirling us quickly, sometimes slowly, distracting us from an end we ignore, yet secretly desire.

A recent re-reading of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (1990) served as a reminder of how life and death are being increasingly framed by the violence of technology, and global capital movements. Like the critical theorists, Adorno, Horkheimer, Lefebvre, Berman, Latour, and Kariel, Postman warned of the dehumanizing potential of technologically-based societies. Public and private spaces become increasingly enmeshed as meaningless symbols with worthless teleologies. Postman, however, failed to consider the impact of the internationalization of American media; that the same paradigmatic shift from print to television as the main interface between media producers and media consumers in America of the early 1980s would consume Latin America, Africa, and Asia. These modern cultural masks of death are totems for social normality, and political correctness in society, a correctness that prepares us as we prepare for that last gasp, that last breath, that final rush, "[t]here was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was."

But things have not spun entirely gone out of sensual control, and we have not laughed ourselves to death. Rather, the narratives that construct our daily lives appear to move us deeper into the twilight of near-death, into a fascinating world of digitized, mechanized automatons, living lives in support of a powerful minority with equally zombie-like existence, with no greater control over themselves. Note how CNN provides frames of violence, transmitted live, securing the gaze of faceless watchers, and other private voyeurs of public space, while talking-heads speak with great seriousness in indescribable, foreign accents about every single moment in the television box. Rather than amusing ourselves to death, we appear to be living a death-like experience with predisposed scripts that keep us on-line, in touch, and on cue. There are no more spaces to be explored, no connections to be made, no diversity, passion, or difference.

Our modern dances with death reveals the ambiguity and ambivalence of Rortyan and Bauman modernities, which are simultaneously unable to offer alternatives because of modern technology-based Karielite violence. These modern rites are metaphors for acknowledging death at several points in life, that which makes us "keep on keeping on", driven by an emotional anxiety driven more by a need to forestall death, rather than a desire extend life. Specifically, these dances around death illustrate the modern propensity to weaken postmodern moves to engage and challenge a technological modernity based on violence, terror, and coercion, "Ah, blissful fatigue, ah sweet death. / Defeated at last we shall succumb / to the dark stealthy chariot / of dawn’s warm slumber…"

As a start, the postmodern reader questions the basis of modern patriarchal systems of authority in texts named after Descartes, Kant, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. These convergences represent optimistic variations on modern philosophical oeuvres that began (without any degree of certainty) in 1596 with the Cartesian causal chain. The technological tour de force we know as "progression" or alternatively, "advancement", may be traced its Enlightenment epistemology of the past three centuries. The strains and continuities of 17th century Hobbesian political science, Kantian anti-transcendental metaphysical challenges, eudiamonism, and a spirited Hegelian absolutism similarly influenced Enlightenment narratives of despair with a man-made god who had become increasingly dehumanized by this early form of "testing for evidence".

As an end, and without seeking closure, technology-based modernity continues to dominate the 20th century into the 21st century through the romantic appeal of "advanced" technology, amusement centers, the management of information, and its uncontrollable drive for efficiency, productivity, and advancement. But the evidence of modern texts as a whole, and as the sum of its parts, reveal more problems for civil society, and fewer ways to disengage from its simple retinue of paradoxes as we dance closer to death. The postmodern political theorist becomes no less than a pithy choreographer of modern death rites.

Preferred Citation: Antonio L. Rappa, "Modern Death Dances: Narratives from the Irreverent Politics of Postmodernism"

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