Death and culture.

How we shall survive in the memory of others

Lidia Zuin1

In Semiotics of Culture, the text word is used in reference to a set of signs. This
concept is found both in the work of the Czech semioticist Ivan Bystrina and in the texts of
the Russian theorist Iuri Lotman. Initially I will focus in the work of Bystrina, mostly in his
lecture at Pontifcia Universidade Catlica de So Paulo, in 1995, which was transcribed and
entitled as Tpicos de Semitica da Cultura (Topics about Semiotics of Culture).
In this lecture, texts are indicated as a set of signs that have communicative and
informative, expressive, emotive, aesthetic and social values. This same notion is also found
in the Semiotics of Culture under the name of image, as we have seen since the preface of
the book Emoo e Imaginao (2014), organized by the professors Norval Baitello Junior
(PUC-SP) and Christoph Wulf (Freie Universitt Berlin). It is Baitello who mainly uses the
word image in reference to not only visual images, but also auditory, olfactory or even
proprioceptive images (the images we have about ourselves and which are, according to the
researcher, poorly studied).
Namely, texts can be written or grammatical elements, but also images, rites, myths,
sounds etc. And, according to Bystrina, texts are among us since the very primordial stages of
humanity, though they have been lost along the ages. In other words, if man appeared in
Africa 200.000 years ago, he only conquered his modern behavior much after (50.000 years
ago) and History started to be recorded only about 5.500 years ago. Therefore, we dont know
exactly how were the mimic dynamics or even how the primitive men started speaking.
However, it was found in Turkey some very old vestiges of pollen, which came from
the flowers the Neanderthal used along their funerary rites. Besides this primitive text, there
are also cave paintings done during the Paleolithic. These images were made inside those
caves that werent used as home, but as temples. Other images also were found on rocks, as
well sculptures were made of bones, horns and other materials.

Lidia Zuin has a M.A. degree in communications and semiotics and a B.A. in journalism. This article refers to a
experimental lecture presented in Escola Superior de Administrao, Marketing e Comunicao de Sorocaba
(Esamc).

Thus, Bystrina divides such texts in three categories: instrumental texts, rational and
creative and imaginative. The instrumental texts are daily present in mans life, and they are
quite pragmatic and technical. Now, the rational texts refer to the natural sciences and math,
for example. The creative and imaginative texts are myths, rites, ideologies, fictions and
works of art.
Despite making this separation, Bystrina arguments that nowadays it is difficult to find
a pure instrumental or rational text. However, there are examples that are absolute
instrumental texts, such as a phonebook or a timetable for trains and metro both dont
demand so much reasoning or creativity to be interpreted. Pure rational texts are also found as
thesis and dissertations or in math. Still, even in the hard sciences, which means Physics, the
Relativity Theory does not fit only as a rational text, since it requires a deeper abstraction to
be understood therefore, it is a rational text, but also creative and imaginative.
The Czech semioticist enforces that instrumental texts exist since the very beginning
of humanity and they are essential to the species survival. The rational texts appeared much
after, in more advanced civilizations such as the ancient Greece and China. Nonetheless, the
creative and imaginative texts are the ones predominant in the human culture and they are also
responsible to sustain man in his physical, material and psychic aspects.
Bystrina defines culture is a set of texts, which are works of art, myths, rites etc. All of
them are grammatically organized according to the language and they are also culturally
organized. These are the texts work, as well as culture, as a mean of overcoming the
existential fear in humanity. In other words, it is believed that man is the only animal or living
being that knows he will die. Though elephants go to elephant cemeteries at the end of their
lives, that does not mean they knew they would die along their lives. However, when man
learns he will die (Memento mori), he finds himself in horror of death and in Nihilism, which
can be solved with cultural elements that will give existence a meaning, for example.
With that said, Bystrina makes another division in the concept of text according to
codes, which can be primary, secondary or tertiary. The primary codes exist in the biological
sphere of man, such as the genetic code. The secondary codes are related to the language,
being grammar one possibility. The tertiary codes are the ones that are in the basis of culture
and they appear, mainly in the Occidental culture, in a binary form. These dualisms generate
an opposition between the poles and each of them has a valuation. In this way, as Bystrina
points out, it is much easier for man to make his choices.

Between pleasure and displeasure, health and sickness, life and death, we can find a
disharmony between the poles mostly in life and deaths case. Negatively valuated in a
much more intense way than the life pole, death creates an asymmetry according to its
inexorability. It is for such reason that many cultures (or even all cultures), as Bystrina
reminds, man searches for his immortality. And in order to overcome this unbalance, human
beings operate in irrationality, finding support in myths, rites, religions and different kinds of
tertiary codes, cultural texts. This way, man creates a Second Reality, as Bystrina argues.
This same notion also appears in the Edgar Morins work, also with an alike name:
Second Existence. In The Enigma of Man, the French anthropologist gives a further
description of this concept, in which man, agonized before death as something inevitable,
declines and transpose it to the mythological and ritual level. By the way, this aspect is well
analyzed in his book Man and death. So, by doing that, man softens the asymmetry created
and accepts the concept of life and death in a way one does not cancel the other.

Death as a root of culture

It would be possible to think

about

death

as

propelling,

as

an

inspiration to man in order to create

culture according to myths, rites, images
and different texts. Ivan Bystrina did not
mention this in his work, where he
included as roots of culture these four
possibilities:

dream,

game,

psychopathological variants and altered

states

of

mind.

However,

when

describing dream, Bystrina mentions Greek mythology, where the god of sleep is Hypnos,
who is twin of Thanatos, god of death. Furthermore, Xefononte also says that sleep is the
closest moment in life where one gets to death.
Another aspect raised in Tpicos de Semitica da Cultura is how hard is to children,
during the earliest periods of infancy, it is to differ between dream and reality, mainly when it

is a bad dream. This is part of the human ontological process, as much it is, possibly, part of
the phylogenetic formation of the specie, since man, in his primordial stages, also couldnt
distinguish it.
One more example is given by Bystrina when he mentions the Australian aboriginal
myth of creation. These people believe that the first beings drew in rocks what they dreamed
(plants, animals etc), giving this way a material source and life to these internal images. This
also happens, in a way, in the myth of Jeovah as sculptor who give life to his creations by
blowing it in other words, he gives them an spirit. The interesting fact is that the word spirit
comes from the Latin spiritus, which means blow, breath. The Greek equivalent is pneuma,
which is also related to wind, as much it is in the Hebraic words for soul (ruach) and spirit
(neshama): both are about breathing.
Thereby, these myths are based in the transposition of internal images (endogenous)
to external images (exogenous). This concept is found mainly in Hans Beltings works and it
is also described in Norval Baitello Jr.s paper in Emoo e Imaginao (2014) it specially
focus in the interior-exterior movement of images and emotions.
Also, Belting in his book Antropologa de la Imagen mentions that the nobles in 15
century used to order their portraits, hoping they would have they will keep their memory
lively even after the death of their bodies. That means their existence would prosper in
another body, the image, which for Belting is a second body. This was the same intention of
Francisco Sassetti, an Italian noble that ordered the construction of a chapel that would be
entitled after him and would be built in Florence. Philippe-Alain Michaud narrates this in his
book about Aby Warburgs work, saying that Sassetti ordered panels in which his personal
history was related to St. Francis. These images are all around his and his wifes tombs. For
Warburg, the portraits on the wall of his chapel reflect his own, indomitable will to live
[Daseinswillen], which the painter's hand obeys by manifesting to the eye the miracle of an
ephemeral human face, captured and held fast for its own sake" (apud Michaud, 2004, p.114).

Sassetti Chapel, in Florence, Italy

As Belting describes, this also happened in a way with the humanists of the German
reform. They hoped their texts would serve as a mean of survival, that they would keep
themselves alive and remembered after their works, which would be read in the future for
different generations. Although, some even ordered medallions in which their faces would be
recorded it was something Desiderius Erasmus did.
That has a close approach to the Czech-Brazilian thinker, Vilm Flusser, when he
spoke the phrase which became the title of a documentary about him: We shall survive in the
memory of others. In other words, we shall overcome death and be kept alive in the memory
of others, as information, as endogenous images. In his philosophical autobiography,
Bodenlos, Flusser remembers his friendship with the Brazilian writer Guimares Rosa and
how he submitted his work to translations that were many times poorly made (also because
his work is full of regional expressions and neologisms that are hard to be related in other
languages). However, it is understood that Rosa was afraid of death and of oblivion, that is
why he wanted, in a way, to be famous: he wanted that more and more people could know his

work and, this way, he would be culturally immortalized. This has something to do with the
idea that symbols live more than men, as pointed by Harry Pross.
This is why we keep
talking and studying the work
of people who died long ago
for

instance

philosophers.

the

Greek
Artists,

scientists, writers that long ago

deceased are still alive in the
cultural

and

informational

level. This happens also, in a

way, with celebrities, who had
their existence and actions
deeply enforced by media.
Always present in peoples lives as news, pictures and videos, celebrities tend to become
images, as indicated by Christoph Wulf in his paper A criao mimtica e a circulao de
emoes: um estudo de caso, also found in the book Emoo e Imaginao. There he
discusses about the televised funeral of Michael Jackson and how people were emotionally
affected and didnt want to believe the artist was dead (like when Elvis Presley died and the
phrase Elvis aint dead was born).

On the left, Michael Jacksons hologram at Billboard Music Awards in 2014. On the right, Sony
Xperia Z2 advertising

However, in Michael Jacksons case specially, Wulf indicates that the funeral
ceremony and all the staging performed along the event turned out as an attempt of the living
to make the deceased be kept alive during at least some hours and to certify in a common

ritual that we are still alive (Wulf, 2014, p.207). And Michael is still part of our lives in the
same way he was before, as an image both as an hologram or as an auditory memory in
advertising such as the mobile phone Sony Xperia Z2.
Something like that also happened to Princess Diana, who was theme of a new
biographical movie in 2013, where Naomi Watts was lead actress. The film has as main focus
how the media coverage was suffocative to the character even after Diana was divorced and
left her position in the British Royal Family in other words, she was somehow not a
celebrity anymore. But the paparazzi did not think like that and they annoyed and followed
her, depriving her from the right to oblivion. This way, media and the media culture can
concentrate in many shallow practices, as we can see in the tabloids, where they are many
times in the search for enforcing information that are mostly irrelevant. But, in any case, this
material is still consumed by many people or these magazines, websites and TV programs
wouldnt exist until nowadays.

On the left, Alexander McQueens collection in 2007, when McQueen was still the designer. On the
right, Spring/Summer 2011 collection presented in 2010, when Sarah Burton became McQueens
designer

In fashion, this process also develops in a way, since brands keep their designers
name even after his death and try to follow his legacy. This happened when Alexander
McQueen died and Sarah Burton became the new designer of the brand, even though the
previous name was kept as the brands title. On an interview to Vogue, in 2010, Burton
mentioned that her first female collection would follow McQueens steps and it is even
possible to see such thing in the first moments of Burton ahead the brand, but during the next

years she began to present another aesthetics that were a little bit far from McQueens, who
was much more conceptual and created stronger pieces.
Therefore, culture works as a log of information which will be passed on along the
history, from practical actions to, literally, the access to information. This was what Vannevar
Bush imagined when creating the MEMEX project, which since its name makes a reference to
memory (memory extension or memory index). In other words, Bush proposed the creation of
a machine where people could access fast and flexibly all written registries, images,
communications etc. This proposal helped to form the configurations of computers and
hyperlinks. Later, this would be updated by Ted Nelson in his project Xanadu, which was
named after a Coleridges poem about a place in literary memory where nothing is forgotten.
Thus, we understand that there is a trust in the machine as a medium of information
record and dynamic access, which turns out to computers specifications, to Internet and,
consequently, to collaborative encyclopedias (Wiki). However, some researchers such as
Dietmar Kamper show the insecurity also presented in these media, mostly in his paper As
mquinas so to mortais como as pessoas (Machines are as mortal as people). That means,
even it is possible to restore or conserve a painting, it is also subjected to deterioration in the
same way machines are, since they became more and more obsoletes as time flows.
Nevertheless, it is much easier to save information, mainly in digital forms, or even
restore objects than extend a human life. This is the project of the transhumanist concept:
search for the human survival both in the mind upload (the translation of the consciousness in
information readable by computers) or even the extinction of aging, as studies Aubrey de
Grey.
Therefore, we conclude, mainly according to Bystrina, that the human culture and its
creations, its texts, work as a way to overcome the asymmetry caused by death and give a
meaning to life. All these developments on visual arts, funerary rites, mythology, media and
even on transhumanism are texts of culture that invariably keep playing with the existential
fear.

References

BELTING, Hans. Antropologa de la imagen. Buenos Aires: Katz, 2007

BYSTRINA, Ivan. Tpicos de Semitica da Cultura. So Paulo: Centro Interdisciplinar de
Semitica da Cultura e da Mdia, 1995
BAITELLO Jr, Norval; WULF, Christoph (org.). Emoo e imaginao: os sentidos e as
imagens em movimento. So Paulo: Estao das Letras e Cores, 2014
DEEKS,

Sarah.

Burton

for

McQueen.

Vogue.

2010.

<http://www.vogue.co.uk/news/2010/05/27/sarah-burton-is-named-new-creative-director-atalexander-mcqueen>
FLUSSER, Vilm. Bodenlos. So Paulo: Annablume, 2011
KAMPER, Dietmar.. As mquinas so to mortais como as pessoas. Uma tentativa de
excluir o telemtico do pensamento. s/d. Disponvel em
<http://www.eca.usp.br/nucleos/filocom/traducao9.html>
MICHAUD, Philippe-Alain. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. Nova Iorque: Zone
Books, 2004
MORIN, Edgar. O Homem e a Morte. Portugal: Publicaes Europa-Amrica, 1970
___. O enigma do homem. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1979