Preface

"Just in case you thought experience and the representation of experience melted into one another, death provides a structural principle separating the twoÉ . See the difference.

Seeing the Difference, the two-day Institute whose proceedings are included here, took its title from Regina Barreca's notion of "difference" but evolved from the Townsend Center's long-term concerns with aging, social suffering, death and dying. Both on our own, and in collaboration with other units such as the Human Rights Center and the Institute for International Studies, the Townsend Center has continued to be expressly concerned with the tensions between the moral orientation that these topics demand of the humanities and the pragmatic orientation so often applied to them. Our object is to seek grounded responses and humanely valid ways of refiguring the predicaments of our time.

We were well aware of the problems that plague inquiry related to severe illness and death. One thinks of Walter Benjamin's addressing the incongruence between the concept and event of death and the multiplicity of approaches--avoidance, repetition, metonymy, particularized description of historical moments and events--we bring to it2; as well as of Zygmunt Bauman's observation that modernity did not conquer mortality, it "categorized the knowable techniques and practices of measurable efficacy and effectiveness."3 In BaumanÕs terms, we humanize mortality by viewing it as a set of problems. We seek an "enemy" and kill it. We turn to "projects" that we can handle and thereby attempt to give ourselves a sense of mastery over reality.

The aim of Seeing the Difference was to explore the techne of dying, representations of death, and what one might call an ethics of dying; but it accepted at the start a double sense of "difference": BarrecaÕs view of death as separation or "difference" (a "structural principle"), and our own acknowledgement that we, in our various disciplines, also view death "differently" and develop languages that are too often particular to our own fields.

Dying bridges a no man's land where the unfathomed and the unknowable confront the scientific and the humanistic imaginations. While death may be the vanishing point of medical knowledge and representation, it is also a point of mediation. Neither doctors nor humanists, nor artists nor policy makers, can provide answers where death is concerned; any inquiry into its cultural, scientific, and perhaps even spiritual contours must be a plural one.

My aim in planning Seeing the Difference was to bring together three angles of perception: those of clinicians, humanists and artists. These conceptual frameworks offered in turn different ways of understanding the dying body: the medical view of the body as literal text for implementing physical and psychological change; the humanist's view of the body as the site of complex layers of meaning to be explored through a range of interpretive strategies; and the artist's creation of the body in terms of alternative explanatory systems that may mediate between the physical and the metaphysical, that may confront an "unknowable" or "inexplicable" and give it form.

Seeing the Difference explored the boundaries and the connections that pertain among these three different sites of knowledge and interpretation. Through the two days of discussion, participants joined in an effort to clarify their own understandings and to work toward the conceptualization of new forms of empathy towards those who face imminent death. It is not at all incidental that this was an extraordinary group of people. I knew many of the speakers from earlier occasions at the Townsend Center, and there was no doubt that these people would bring the best of their professional experience and understanding to our discussions. But the participants were also extraordinary. Exploring the net and using electronic lists, the Townsend Center staff was able to attract participation from people who were not part of our regular constituency, individuals in a range of professional locations--including social services and health-related professions--who could bring to the Institute experience and points of view that might be different from our own.

The ultimate purpose of Seeing the Difference was to produce, in video, print, and on-line formats, a record that could be used in other settings where practitioners are trained to work with the dying. Our project was in one sense about what cannot be figured: in the words of Dr. Frank Gonzalez-Crussi, one of our speakers, it was about absence or "negative space"; and it was about silence and the liminal. As the participants learned too, however, the institute was really about "making meaning" of what all too often appears to be meaningless. Seeing the Difference preceded by over a year the events of September 11, 2001. But now, with those events inscribed in our minds, imaginations, and even our history, and with the necessity of dealing with loss and emptiness on an enormous scale, our project's goal of finding meaning, of using multiple lenses to "see," seems all the more crucial.

-- Christina M. Gillis
Associate Director, Townsend Center for the Humanities
Project Director, "Seeing the Difference"

Notes

1 Quoted in Death and Representation, edited by Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 174.

2 Ronald Schleifer, "Walter Benjamin and the Crisis of Representation: Multiplicy, Meaning, and Athematic Death," in ibid., p. 313.

3 Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 152, 163.