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Neil Small
CONCLUSION: FROM THE SOCIOLOGICAL TO THE ONTOLOGICAL We have then a culture of death, but a symbolic existence that excludes the dead. Further, as we have seen above, in a society dominated by a survival mode we have decided that dying is what other people do. Neither the mortality of the body nor the psychic need to engage with death has overcome that observed historical trend to suppress death, dying and the dead. But I have also argued that scholarship which identifies a grand scheme of things is flawed for three fundamental reasons. First, because it does not recognise the diversity that has been so identified in other parts of this book. Second, it does not, in terms of Habermas’s schema for what makes an adequate social theory, engage with a critique of the truth content of tradition and the nature of how meaning is created and renewed. Third, in its modernist rationality it does not allow us to explore, or cross over, the epistemological break that the end of embodied life entails. It is not just the limitation of language and the modernist concern with truth as opposed to being, but it is the reluctance to go as far as Derrida or Baudrillard would take us – that is, into an aporetic and paradoxical discourse of death and life. Death and difference is both social and individual. Bourdieu helps here with ‘habitus’, an invaluable concept when it comes to locating differences between individuals in apparently similar social situations (see Robbins 1991). But we need something a little more visceral. If it is not normal to be dead when we consider social discourse or individual self-perception, we have to live in a world where everyone dies. We have to incorporate a concern with being embodied and becoming dead. There is a point where the sociological succumbs to the ontological but an ontological which has been changed, at postmodernism’s insistence, to identify meaning in what is missing (Bourke 1996). Many writers have sought to underline how death, the dying and t h e d e a d a r e m i s s i n g. Wh a t i s a l s o m i s s i n g i s g r a n d narrative. We are now concerned with perspectives and positionings and with the deconstruction of categories. As contributors to this book have illustrated, we must engage with death and difference. This final chapter has sought to