An Intro to Archival Death (2024)

YouTuber TwoMad died this year while playing Overwatch, which people only found out from his Discord status, showing that he was still in the middle of a game long after his death. What someone was doing right before their death used to be a very difficult thing to find out, but now, these kinds of stories are everywhere. One example of this is gore. There are hundreds if not thousands of sites whose only purpose is to methodically group gory videos into categories such as industrial, medical, and suicide. There are subsections of social media sites such as Twitter dedicated to drugs and self-harm, where accounts often become inactive, usually forever, for reasons that their followers don't have to do much work to guess. We live in a world of hyper-documented death. Following the advent of modern technology, death is archived in a fundamentally novel way. And yet, is this archival methodology so different than what we had in the past?

We live in an age where death is available for viewing online, instead of existing as a nebulous, mysterious concept. That is not limited just to gore; even mainstream news is constantly showing images of war, killing, and violence. That is why it is impossible to discuss documented mortality such as gore without first discussing the concept of spectacular death. Spectacular death is a concept derived from Guy Debord’s “spectacle”. As Debord writes in his 1967 Society of the Spectacle, the spectacle is “a world vision which has become objectified” (Debord 5). A spectacle is inherently relational, involving an “image” of the world making its way into interactions between people. Without these interactions, a spectacle cannot exist. Applying this to death as it appears in spectacle, spectacular death is not simply the image of death, but rather “people's imagined relationship with death: collective imaginaries of and around death” (Sumiala and Jacobsen 2). This definition of spectacular death is thus similar to the act of, for example, watching gore, or even one of those seemingly ‘funny’ videos of people slipping on ice, in the sense that both only have value through establishing a relationship between mortality and its viewers.

The kind of documented death we see on social media platforms, however, deserves a more specific term than simply spectacular death. Digital death, in contrast to spectacular death, is “mediatised to an increased level through digital communication technologies that are available to anyone with digital access” (Sumiala and Jacobsen 5). One of the most telling examples of digital death is rorochan_1999, a Japanese livestreamer whose streams showed signs of psychological decline until she ultimately livestreamed herself jumping off of the 13th floor of her residential building. The streams are still available for viewing online, if you know where to look. And yet the most striking part of the story is not the streams themselves, which show her playing piano and singing off-key, but the reason that she committed suicide: to be remembered forever as an Internet legend. The rorochan_1999 story reveals a societal self-awareness of the impending spectacle — a universal, borderless acknowledgement of cyber-death — as it perpetuates a feedback circuit of mortality.

These remnants of a life once lived are also a topic well-discussed in philosophy. In his final interview, a time where he was hyper-cognizant of his death, Jacques Derrida describes the ‘traces we leave behind’ as “never simply ours but [sic.] already from the very beginning beyond us and out of our control. Whether ‘spoken or written’, ‘all these gestures’, says Derrida, ‘leave us and begin to act independently of us’” (Naas 114). Digital death is a very direct example of the trace; a posthumous social media profile speaks for the person once in charge of it, keeping webs of interactions, status updates and all its history up for the public eye. Anyone with TwoMad’s, for instance, Discord information could go and see the trace left by something as minute as his open Overwatch window.

However, there are similar exhibits of archival death from before the rise of modern technology, such as catacombs. As I was writing early versions of this piece, I traveled through Paris and Rome, which offer intricate catacombs and crypts that arrange skulls and other bones into nearly-living works of art. The body is thrust into a role larger than itself, a role that examines its relationship with other skulls and bones. In this sense, a piece of bone in a catacomb can be interpreted as a Derridean trace, speaking for its ‘owner’ long after they have passed from this realm.

Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” explores archival death through a critical lens by addressing the exhibit of two black girls who were killed on the Recovery. The 1792 trial focused entirely on one of the girls, and the other — Venus — was, for nebulous reasons, ignored. In this case, whatever archived documents exist failed to proportionally represent all of the accounts that should have been considered. The sheer lack of this proportionality can be considered a trace of its own. Hartman continues to discuss this lack of proper proportionality in “there are hundreds of thousands of other girls who share her circ*mstances and these circ*mstances have generated few stories. And the stories that exist are not about them, but rather about the violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives, transformed them into commodities and corpses, and identified them with names tossed-off as insults and crass jokes. The archive is, in this case, a death sentence” (Hartman 2). Hartman not only sheds light on the flaws and violence of the archive, but also deliberately utilizes words such as ‘generated’, ‘commodities’, and ‘identified’ to emphasize that these flaws are part of a methodical process of production.

Hartman goes even further to say that what does lie in the archive is often inaccurate, referring to “rumors, scandals, lies, invented evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible metaphors, chance events, and fantasies that constitute the archive and determine what can be said about the past” (Hartman 9). Hartman shatters the notion of the ‘infallible’ and ‘historically accurate’ archive by listing a few examples of prevalent contaminants, but also maintains that archival death is not a modern concept, and in fact quite the opposite.

We are brought to the question: what is the difference between archival death then and now? Perhaps the most direct answer is accessibility, since legal records and underground tunnels are far harder to access than social media feeds. The ground is more even, and what traces are available are slightly more controlled by the person in question. And yet, while the medium of the archive has changed, and a dimension of spectacle has been added, the process of production of traces remains active in one way or another. Whether in the past or present, we die, therefore we are.

1137 words

Works Cited:

Debord, G. (1977). Society of the spectacle. Black & Red.

Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in Two acts. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 12(2), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1

Naas, M. (2014). When it comes to mourning. Jacques Derrida, 113–121. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315744612-13

Sumiala, J., & Jacobsen, M. H. (2024). Digital Death and spectacular death. Social Sciences, 13(2), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci13020101