The Technics of the Contemporary Funeral

Roger 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.