In “Digital Resurrection,” Alexandra Sherlock brings up a paradox first written about by Roland Barthes. A photograph is a paradox between life and death: “the moment is dead but the photograph is alive and present.” (170).
An embodied death can be overturned in our minds by the presences of images and media of that person. The absence of an animated body no longer means that person is out of reach. Indeed, we need only to turn to celebrity deaths — where estates and listening companies make millions — to see the self enduring past the physical body.
Does this change our understanding of finality? Death as an inevitable, totalizing concept is softened when we can stream living videos, images, and audio of the deceased. “It is a living image of the dead thing,” Barthes wrote: “the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive.” (Sherlock, 170).
Sherlock also addressed death as disruption. The dead body “reminds us of our own fate, resulting in the disruption of identity, system.” (169). A celebrity death is a highly publicized sort of disruption — if even this beautiful, wealthy, famous person can die, it shatters the illusion of escaping our own fate.
So it comes as no surprise that celebrity deaths are often “spun”: Tupac faked it to dip out of gang warfare and live anonymous in Cuba. The Illuminati killed Michael Jackson and Prince and Bowie. Combined with photographic paradox, it is as if celebrities are not really dead — they’ve simply reached a point where no new content is produced. It’s a tidy way to side-step the death disruption and avoid thinking about that one, inevitable fate.
Taken to the extreme, this type of thinking erases the concept of death from consciousness all together.