Talking about dying and death: On new discursive constructions of a formerly postulated taboo

Abstract

In this article, we pursue a critical and multimodal discourse analysis of texts in the context of the innovative German discourse project ‘30 young people talk to dying people and their relatives’ – an initiative by two German universities encouraging young people to develop an explicit attitude towards death. We take a detailed look at the various text forms (short films about discussions between the young people and dying patients, online postings about their experiences, etc.) by asking how the concepts of ‘dying’ and ‘death’ are new and differently constructed in these various textual artefacts. A formal as well as critical analysis of the semantic content produced by the participants will examine how this content is produced and how new types of sociocultural practices become visible in these texts.

Keywords

Critical discourse analysis discursive constructions of dying and death multimodality taboo

Introduction

Letztlich werden wir alle sterben,

deshalb müssen wir nicht warten, darüber nachzudenken.

At the end, we are all going to die.

That’s why we must not hesitate to think about it.¹

The discussion of the so-called death taboo is still a recent topic in sociological as well as psychological and clinical medical contexts (cf., for example, Thulesius et al., 2013; Zimmermann and Rodin, 2004), particularly with regard to the longstanding commonplace of characterising Western society as ‘death-denying’ (cf. Callahan, 2000; Kellehear, 1984). Opinions concerning this denial today diverge from the range of still existing representations in both general and everyday contexts as well as specific discourses such as those of palliative care, for example (cf. Zimemrmann, 2007), and, on the other hand, assumptions that the taboo appears to become less relevant nowadays (cf. Lee, 2008; Staudt, 2009; Wong, 2010). A perspective supporting at least partly the latter hypothesis is that of the authors of this article (and others, that is, Bendle, 2001: 353; Kaufman, 2005), who assume that talking about ‘dying’ and ‘death’ has become possible mainly in a medically focused context within a particular environment, namely, with patients and their relatives undergoing palliative care, thus in a clearly medicalised situation.

Based on a variety of our own experiences in this field of research, the authors had the idea of explicitly widening the discursive context in these palliative care situations in order to directly involve younger people in questions and discussion about dying and death. This was the birth of the discourse project ‘30 junge Menschen sprechen mit sterbenden Menschen und deren Angehörigen’ (n.d.) – an interdisciplinary project by Witten/Herdecke University, the University Hospital Düsseldorf and Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). One of the central goals and main focus of this project has been to encourage the young people involved to adopt a conscious attitude towards death. They were invited to take an active part in conversations with dying people and their relatives in order to explicitly discuss the topic of death in these dialogues. The originally closed and customised context in which talking about death had already been possible and in a way also essential for the patients had thus been opened for a broader audience and participation. This also helped to make the conversations more private and intimate, that is, less medicalised and with more concern for the value and needs of the individuals and their families (cf. Bendle, 2001: 362).

An important aspect of the project was the documentation of these conversations and their on-going assessment online, making it available to a broader audience. Each conversation between a younger person and a dying patient was filmed in order to evaluate and analyse their experiences afterwards. These short films are available online on a specific web link which also contains a weblog maintained by all participants as well as general information on the project. Furthermore, there is a Facebook page with continuing discussions about the project as well as a documentary film, Berührungsängste (2013, English: Fearful encounter; von Hören and Schulz, 2013), which shows an excerpt of conversations and which was promoted at a specific event in February 2013. The already opened context has thus again been broadened and made available to a potentially infinite number of recipients who, by watching these films and reading the weblog, can participate in the experiences within the project.

These various forms of documentation, which we summarise in Table 1, are the starting point of the analysis in this article. Coming from both a medical and philosophical as well as a linguistic perspective, we noticed that the various forms of expression, documentation and publication used and intentionally pursued within the project are new ways of discursively deconstructing the death taboo. By showing intimate details of their conversations about dying from cancer, for example, in audio-visual documentations or by discussing moral and ethical aspects on the weblog, the participants of the project make the concepts of ‘dying’ and ‘death’ more explicit in their social interaction and, in particular, in areas of communication in which they have not been discussed nor reviewed in detail before.

Table 1.

Texts that have been produced within and in succession to the discourse project.

Short film for each dialogue between patient and younger person (in total 30, available online)	Documentary: Berührungsängste (Engl.: Fearful encounter; 2013; von Hören and Schulz, 2013), Medienprojekt Wuppertal, Germany
Web link/blog: http://www.30jungemenschen.de	Schulz (2013)
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/30JungeMenschen	Schnell and Schulz (2015)
	30 junge Menschen [30 young people] (n.d.)

We therefore want to ask in more detail and from a discourse analytical perspective how the concepts of ‘dying’ and ‘death’ are newly and differently constructed in the various textual artefacts that have been published by and within the project. One of our main hypotheses here is that ‘talking’ about these topics often produces and expresses semantic content multimodally, especially when analysing the discourse outside of an exclusively medicalised context. Texts with these topics are thus not only verbal or dialogic but contain in particular (audio-)visual content, such as films, drawings, hypertextual representations and so on. We think that an important aspect of this project is that of publicly presenting and producing these texts, thereby placing them in direct communication with the recipient, that is, in an interactive environment where both producers and recipients can exchange meanings and comments.

In the following, thus, we want to take a closer look at particular texts that have been publicly presented by the participants on the weblog and within discussions in social media contexts, for example. We do not aim at a corpus-based examination of a high number of text forms here, which is of course an interesting further research project, but we want to emphasise individual examples that together illustrate the new way of dealing with the topics.

For our initial analysis, we apply methods from both critical discourse analysis (cf. Fairclough, 1999) and multimodal discourse analysis (cf. Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001; Jewitt, 2009). It is our goal to consider various examples of the discursive construction of sociocultural practice in both a specific context as well as across a multitude of texts as parts of a bigger coherent and intertextual discourse. We will examine in detail how the various resources in these discourses work together to construct meaning and how these texts mutually refer to and build on each other. The section entitled ‘A critical discourse analytical view of the death taboo’ therefore gives a short overview of the theoretical framework chosen for this examination and the approach we take in analysing a selection of three different texts. In the section ‘Analysing new constructions of “death” and “dying”’, we then analyse these texts from a multimodal as well as critical discourse perspective. The section ‘Discursive performances across texts’ gives a further and more complex analytical example of one of the individual sub-discourses in this project in order to illustrate the so-called discursive performances (cf. Wildfeuer, 2015) that become visible throughout the various text forms produced. We demonstrate in this section how these texts mutually influence and refer to each other and how these interferences give reason for a new discursive construction of the mentioned taboos. Finally, the section ‘Towards a new discourse of death’ summarises the results of the analysis and takes a deeper look into the sociocultural practices that become apparent in the analysis.

A critical discourse analytical view of the death taboo

According to Fairclough (1995), a critical approach to the analysis of discourse is ‘[…] a recognition that our social practice in general and our use of language [and other semiotic resources] in particular are coupled with cause and effect, that we may not be aware of under normal conditions […]’ (p. 54). He underlines that while communicating, people are often not aware of the direct connection between the language they use and the power that is being constructed and expressed by them at the same time. Especially in heterogeneous media texts that diverge from conventional discourse practices with a fixed and stable sociocultural context, this creativity of producing and constructing new and non-standard texts becomes visible (cf. Fairclough, 1995: 60). These texts are

sensitive barometers of cultural change which manifest in their heterogeneity and contradictoriness, the often tentative, unfinished and messy nature of change. Textual heterogeneity can be seen as a materialization of social and cultural contradictions and as important evidence for investigating these contradictions and their evolution. (Fairclough, 1995: 60)

Media texts such as those produced within the discourse project thus help us to understand underlying relationships between the creative discursive practices used for producing these texts and the particular social conditions that exist in the surrounding context. In the specific case of the project, the texts reflect the on-going discussion of talking about ‘dying’ and ‘death’ and show how the problems and difficulties of this topic are managed by the participants. As discursive artefacts, they make social conditions and changes of this specific context transparent and help understand how talking about ‘dying’ and ‘death’ today is possible.

From a discourse analytical perspective, Fairclough (1995) suggests analysing these texts according to communicative events expressed in these texts, and the order of the discourse in which they are embedded. This analysis is generally oriented towards three dimensions: (1) the text itself and its form and content, (2) the discourse practice which includes the processing of text production and consumption, and (3) the sociocultural practice including the situational and cultural context (cf. Fairclough, 1995: 57f.). For our specific context, we want to focus on the textual representations of the communicative events in their multimodal environment. For this, we will analyse particular representations of social practice in terms of so-called logical forms of the discourse that represent the actual semantic content expressed in and by the text. According to a recently developed framework for the analysis of these logical forms in filmic and other multimodal discourses (cf. Wildfeuer, 2012, 2014), we want to analyse how the various semiotic resources in these texts operate cross-modally and how it is possible to analyse the semantic representation of the discourse’s content. We will outline how the communicative events in the texts can be constructed by mostly data-driven bottom-up operations, including the recipient’s inferential mechanism of reasoning about the most plausible interpretation because of world and context knowledge. We will explain in detail how these logical forms of the discourse can be constructed.

Second, it will then be possible to analyse the social functions and uses of this intersemiotic interplay with regard to the discourse practice of producing and receiving the specific texts in their specific context, that is, from a top-down perspective including the wider context of the death taboo today, its manifestations on the one hand and rejections on the other hand. The analysis of the sociocultural practice in which the communicative events are embedded will thus follow a second basic question in critical media analysis, namely, that of how a communicative event ‘[…] draws upon the order of discourse (normatively or creatively), and what effect it has upon the order of discourse […]’ (Fairclough, 1995: 60).

We want to ask whether the communicative events expressed by the project participants are somehow influenced by the practices of their text production and the text genres they use to publicly present their ideas and experiences. In other words, does the use of publicly available texts change the way of representing, thus talking about the concepts of ‘dying’ and ‘death’? How are these concepts mentioned when expressed in a multimodal context and with the help of other resources than language? These questions are of particular interest with regard to current developments concerning the notion of the death taboo and the innovative ways of dealing with it (cf. Bartalos, 2009; Staudt, 2009).

With the analysis of various forms of textually communicating the experiences made in the project, we want to investigate in particular whether these texts indicate certain changes of the social constraints dealing with the topics of death and dying. On the basis of the initial results which we hope to find in our examination below, further empirical analysis will then be possible in order to work out a systematic overview of how the two topics are newly constructed and how the various texts of this and other projects may demonstrate a change in dealing with the topics of dying and death. This, however, is beyond the scope of this article. The examples which we will use for our analysis are, first and second, motion picture excerpts from the project’s short films and, third, a Facebook posting including a drawing by one of the younger project participants. In a second step, we will examine an example of a more complex sub-discourse of the project which is represented by both filmic text sequences from one of the short films and the documentary film as well as several blog entries and Facebook postings and their respective comments. The multimodal and intertextual references which are constructed throughout the number of texts will make it possible to consider in more detail and in a last step then how, according to Fairclough (1995), our discourse project might have had an influence on existing systems or cultures on the topic of death taboo. This is then an interesting question not only from a discourse analytical perspective but also from the broader perspective on general sociocultural aspects in communication and daily life.

Analysing new constructions of ‘death’ and ‘dying’

For the concrete analysis of the chosen texts, we draw on a new and integrative framework in multimodal discourse analysis that has been developed according to recent tools in verbal discourse analysis considering coherence and structure of verbal texts (cf. Asher and Lascarides, 2003; Wildfeuer, 2012, 2014; Bateman and Wildfeuer, 2014). The framework of the so-called logic of (film) discourse interpretation (cf. Wildfeuer, 2014) includes a perspective of formally examining the intersemiosis of semiotic resources in terms of logical forms of the discourse that help to describe the resources’ meaning-making process in the actual text. Furthermore, it allows the description of general functions of resources in their respective contexts, which makes it possible to analyse in more detail their contextual conventions and discourse dimensions.²

As a first example analysis of the logical forms that will help to work out the communicative events produced by the project participants, we choose a short sequence from one of the project’s films showing a conversation between two protagonists about the young person’s objectives of participating in the project.³ A short transcription of this sequence with a translation of the original German voice track is given in Table 2.

Table 2.

Transcription of a sequence from the beginning of the film ‘Jans Gespräch’ (00:00:50–00:01:01).

Filmic shot	Shot description	Audio/voice track^a
	Close-up of a man sitting in an armchair, listening to a young man talking to him Man nodding intensively	‘[…] hoping that, with the help of projects like this one’ – ‘Yes’. – I can see the human being as a whole and not only through the medical records’.
	Close-up of the young man’s hands folded	‘That I also want to talk to the persons, respond to them, who interest me most’.

The original German voice track is as follows: ‘[…] in der Hoffnung, dass ich durch Projekte wie dieses …’ – ‘Ja’. – ‘[…] den Menschen als Ganzes sehe und nicht nur vor einer Akte hänge als Mediziner. Dass ich auch mit den Menschen sprechen möchte, auf den Menschen eingehen möchte, da mich der Mensch an sich sehr interessiert’.

The young man talks about his hope that the project will help him to be a good doctor later who not only pays attention to the patient’s medical record but focuses on the patient as a person. The camera perspective filming this short dialogue is in both shots a close-up, first on the man listening, later on the young man’s hands folded in his lap. His voice is given in the background; his facial expression is not shown. The man in the armchair is nodding and thereby confirming what the other protagonist is saying. We can analyse from this short sequence the following logical forms, given in Figure 1. These logical forms represent the communicative events that are produced by the project participants in order to present their experiences in conversations with dying people. They display an abstract formulation of the events and discursive processes depicted within the various text forms by formally describing the discourse referents which occur within a certain segment of the discourse, thereby activating our interpretation of the event.

Figure 1.

Logical forms of the example film sequence from ‘Jans Gespräch’.

Since all films produced in this project represent a summary of the conversations participants had in various meeting situations, the logical forms naturally contain a semantic representation of this dialogue situation, which is expressed in the first line of the box in Figure 1 as $e_{π_{1}} = d i a l o g u e$ The two sub-events described as $e_{π_{1 a}}$ and $e_{π_{1 b}}$ in the two smaller boxes give a more detailed overview of what is expressed both verbally and non-verbally in this dialogue by the different contributions of the visual ‘[v]’ and auditory ‘[a]’ modalities. Each line in these two logical forms describes the various discourse referents and their multimodal contribution, labelled by a variable in parentheses, which lead to the inference of the ‘eventuality’ given in the last line of the box (cf. Asher and Lascarides, 2003). This eventuality summarises what is inferred as the discursive process given by the filmic events and the intersemiotic interplay of the various resources used within the film. This then is an explicit demonstration of how multimodal content is produced and inferred here.⁴

It is, for example, particularly important for the interpretation of this short sequence that, while listening to the other protagonist, the older man is nodding and thereby confirms the statements of his counterpart. This meaning assignment can only be interpreted through also describing the visual level of the film, in particular the gesture movements shown in detail by the close-up. The last line of the second box thus includes this discourse referent (q), which labels the process of nodding and, in combination with the other two referents, leads to the inference of

e_{π_{1 b}} = c o n f i r m

We can describe that the recipient will normally infer this eventuality because of his or her general knowledge that moving your head up and down means nodding, that is, confirming something. The logical operator

in the last line of each box expresses exactly this defeasible consequence relation that underlines our assumption of the described inference. This inference is essentially hypothetical, but can be made here based on our general world knowledge about gestures and non-verbal communicative behaviour, for example (cf. Schnell, 2005; Schnell and Mitzkat, 2006; Wildfeuer, 2014).

The analysis of the logical forms is thus a very basic description of what is expressed by the filmic text and its various semiotic resources working together. However, this is exactly what is described by Fairclough as the first dimension of a critical analysis of the communicative events in a discourse. It is the examination of the meaning-making processes that builds the basis for sociocultural interpretations of these texts. In order to come to these interpretations later, we can take these descriptions as a first basis for every text excerpt to be examined in the following. This will show us how meaning in these texts is expressed not exclusively by the language used in the dialogues and documentations, but also and particularly by the other semiotic resources chosen for the documentation. It will thus give us a first semantic basis for further interpretations.

In a second step, we can then pass over to the other two dimensions given by Fairclough: that of the discourse practice and the sociocultural practice (see above). We will do this by combining the semantic analysis with a pragmatic perspective on the social context and functions of the resources and logical forms, as given within the framework of systemic-functional linguistics (cf. Halliday, 2004). Within this framework, accounts on discourse analysis examine the ‘cultural and social dimensions which enter into the formation and constitution of language and of texts’ (Tseng, 2009: 9, cf. Tseng, 2013). The analysis is concerned with the social processes operating during the interaction of producer and recipient of a text, assuming that language is a social system in which meaning is made by social activity. The texts produced by this social activity are then the realisation of social contexts. An important perspective in this context is, according to Halliday (1978), the attribution of three general functions to language and other semiotic resources in social contexts, namely, the metafunctional organisation of semiotic systems in terms of the ideational, interpersonal and textual function. Ideational content constructs the events and actions of a story-line and gives information about characters, as well as temporal and spatial circumstances. Interpersonal metafunctions include the social aspects of semiotic resources, for example, the exchange of attitudes and feelings. Textual content, on the other hand, refers to the textual composition of particular discourse, its structure and overall coherence. Describing the respective functions of resources in a text and thus their particular communicative functions makes it possible to analyse the conventions of the sociocultural practices used in these texts and to identify the kind of information within the logical forms that will help us to better understand how meaning is created. In our examination, we will therefore evaluate the logical forms and their discourse referents in more detail and with regard to the functions they have in our specific context.

Applying the theoretical perspective to the sequence introduced above, we can find both ideational as well as interpersonal functioning resources. The general description of the dialogue situation and the statements the young man makes help us to understand the content of the film clip from a very general perspective (see Table 2 and Figure 1). Nevertheless, it is also necessary to take a look at the specific context of this material. It is only possible to understand the young man’s hopes and aims by knowing more details about this project. Only on this basis can the recipient know that the older man is a person who will die soon and that the reason for this conversation is this specific situation. The close-up of the man nodding and thereby confirming what is said by the young man is then also fulfilling an interpersonal function that influences the recipient’s distance to this character and helps to better understand his social status. It becomes possible for the recipient to establish a relationship with or an attitude towards this person. This interpersonal function is furthermore supported by the textual composition of this short sequence, which allows comparing the two protagonists in their confrontation by the various camera perspectives. This composition fulfils a textual function here. In a more detailed comparison of several film sequences from this project, we find out that this textual composition is a specific discourse practice within the context of this project, since this style has been chosen for all filmed conversation between the participants (see above).

From the broader perspective of the sociocultural practice, thus on the third and last dimension within Fairclough’s analytical framework, this specific discourse practice then has to be compared to other practices in order to find similarities or differences that may shed light on new ways to construct meaning. We will focus on these questions in our last part of the analysis in the section ‘Discursive performances across texts’.

For our next example, we selected a second sequence from a different clip, this time more focused on the notion of dying itself. The sequence is from the middle of the film ‘Annabelles Gespräch’⁵ where the two protagonists talk about the question whether dying gives pain. The transcription of the sequence is given in Table 3.

Table 3.

Transcription of a sequence from the middle of the film ‘Annabelles Gespräch’ (00:03:08–00:03:25).

Filmic shot	Shot description	Audio/voice track^a
	Close-up of a girl sitting next to a hospital bed	‘[…] Does one … feel something when one is dying? Or does one … do you feel only the pain?’ – ‘I feel … feel the pain. But, hold on’!
	Close-up of a woman lying in the hospital bed	‘Not so fast. I am still alive! So, I cannot know now, or whether one feels, how one dies. […]’

The original German voice track is as follows: ‘Spürt … spürt man, wenn man stirbt? Oder spürt man, spüren Sie nur, dass da Schmerzen sind?’ – ‘Ich schme …, ich spüre die Schmerzen. Aber Moment! Sekunde! So schnell sind wir nicht. Noch lebe ich! Also kann ich nicht wissen, wie man …, ob man spürt, wie man stirbt’.

The situation of the two protagonists is equal to that in the first sequence analysed. Both are filmed in close-ups, and the voice tracks are sometimes given only in the background when the person talking is not yet shown. We can analyse the following logical forms of this short sequence, as given in Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Logical forms of the example film sequence from ‘Annabelles Gespräch’.

Since for the understanding of what is expressed here the gestures of the protagonists do not seem as important as in the first example,⁶ we focus more on the voice track, that is, the concrete dialogue between the two participants. We can outline that the concept of dying is explicitly discussed by both participants. Whereas the younger one directly asks for details about the process of dying, the conversation partner gives an answer to these questions, but also rejects being labelled as ‘dying’. Since the participants have chosen to publish this conversation as a short film, the filmic techniques are of further importance. The camera perspectives are again close-ups, which are used throughout the entire film and in most of the other films by the project. There are no other sound or music tracks that might distract from the dialogue. We have again ideationally as well as interpersonally functioning resources in the discursive artefact which help us not only to comprehend what is said but also to establish certain attitudes towards the protagonists and their statements. The example sequence uses the same discourse practice as the first one analysed (see Table 1). Consequently, the filmic style chosen for the documentation of conversations is consistent and standardised, at least for this specific context of intimate situations.

Following as a third example, we focus on different text types that have been produced by project participants as an addition to the project-inherent short films. These texts were published by the participants after the official end of the project. The example in focus is a posting from one of the young participants, Dennis, from the project’s Facebook website in November 2012. Dennis had conversations with Mr Magon whom he portrayed in the drawing included in the posting. A screenshot of this posting is depicted in Figure 3.

Figure 3.

Screenshot of the Facebook posting by Dennis on 26 November 2012.

The text added to this drawing talks about his earlier conversation partner, Mr Magon, who had suffered from prostate cancer and died at the beginning of October 2012, a few weeks before this posting appeared online. Dennis as the author of this text writes about this drawing as an objectification of the fact that dying, death and a person taking leave of the world are not only combined with a radical end but can also be seen as a process of letting go, which produced something new and gave him back a continuity: drawing is again a part of himself.⁷

We can first analyse the following logical forms of this posting, as given in Figure 4. Again, it is important to take a look at both the visual as well as verbal resources used in this example.

Figure 4.

Logical form of the Facebook posting.

Whereas the drawing in itself in $e_{π_{1 a}}$ displays the man who Dennis is talking about in his posting, the notion of death becomes explicit in the verbal text given in $e_{π_{1 b}}$ . The analysis of the logical form helps us to see this explicitness in more detail. An examination of further descriptions by the project participants given in other postings would result in a number of explicit references to the concepts of dying and death as well as statements and arguments around how they process and deal with these topics.

From a functional perspective, both logical forms in Figure 4 allow finding ideational as well as interpersonal content that is used in this textual artefact. Whereas the drawing, for example, gives on one hand an impression of the participant, Mr Magon, and thus creates an ideationally functioning character, it explicitly creates, on the other hand and from an interpersonal perspective, an emotional response to this drawing. This emotional response is supported by the verbal description given in the corresponding text that also features ideationally constructed content, namely, the discussion of the drawing as a supportive instrument while thinking about Mr Magon’s death. Intersemiotically combined, the various resources of this posting create a coherent and comprehensive discourse which would seem fragmentary if either of the parts were missing.

A further aspect that plays an important role for the analysis of this text is the interactive environment in that it is embedded as a Facebook posting. The possibilities for every recipient to comment on this posting and thereby address the author directly and to like the posting by clicking it create a specific context of responding/evaluating what has been produced by the project participants (cf. Wildfeuer, 2015). From the broader perspective of the discursive and sociocultural practices, this is a new way of making accessible formerly closed and restricted discussions to a broader audience. We will address this in more detail in the following sections.

Discursive performances across texts

We have analysed various example techniques used by the project to discursively construct content in various media and in various forms of expression. How these techniques and the content we have analysed can be seen from a broader sociocultural perspective and with regard to former acquaintances with the concepts of dying and death will be described and examined in the section ‘Towards a new discourse of death’.

Before, we want to illustrate in more detail the productivity and mutual interferences between the participants of the project, their recipients as well as the individual text-making activities on both sides. We call these activities ‘discursive performances’ (cf. Wildfeuer, 2015), since they are a very creative handling of and within various text types (short films, blog entries, discussions on social media platforms, etc.) and at the same time a public presentation of the experiences. Their documentation is thus an enhanced way of performing and producing texts and content within a discourse that is in fact endlessly extendable.⁸ As we will show below, these performances are again constructed multimodally and in particular intertextually, that is, across a diverse range of texts.

A complex example which can demonstrate this multimodal and intertextual construction is the individual discourse context of one of the young participants, Nora, who met the dying patient Hanne(lore) W. and accompanied her until her death. Nora’s experiences and thoughts are not only summarised in one of the short films on the project’s webpage but were also included into the documentary film that was produced as a further product of the project. Furthermore, Nora is one of the participants who participated actively in the discussions on the project’s weblog and the Facebook page, sharing her thoughts and experiences in small blog entries and directly reacting to recipients’ comments. As a consequence, Nora’s individual (sub-)discourse within the overall discourse project has become a complex example of the discursive performances that have been invoked both in the participants themselves as well as in recipients of the texts. We give a short overview of this example and the various textual manifestations we will analyse below in Table 4. We will examine this discourse now similarly to the preceding analyses by pointing out the various multimodal discursive constructions of the concepts of dying and death.

Table 4.

Sub-discourse ‘Nora & Hanne’ and its various textual manifestations.

1	Initial conversation between Nora and Hanne and the evolving short film ‘Noras Gespräch’
2	Sequences of the documentary Film ‘Berührungsängste’ in which several further meetings of Nora and Hanne are shown
3	Blog entries and Facebook postings by Nora and her comments/discussion on blog and Facebook page
4	Exhibition at the ‘Night of Science’ in Düsseldorf, September 2013, including Nora’s texts and the above-mentioned film sequences and evoking the recipients’ direct participation

The main basis of this overall discourse is the initial conversation between Nora and Hanne (see row 1 in Table 4), which was then also captured as the main conversation in the short film ‘Nora’s Gespräch’.⁹ This short film again shows similar techniques to those we described above (close-ups of the participants, explicit mentions of the concepts in their dialogue, etc.) and could be analysed with similar logical forms representing these techniques and the propositional interpretation of the film’s events (see the transcription of two shots in Table 5).

Table 5.

Transcription of a sequence from the middle of the film ‘Noras Gespräch’.

Filmic shot	Shot description	Audio/voice track^a
	Close-up of Hanne, crying
	Close-up of Nora, crying and nodding	(Hanne): ‘I don’t want to think that I will be dying’.^b

Hanne’s original German voice track is ‘Ich möchte nicht daran denken, dass ich sterbe’.

Interestingly, the logical forms of these shots not only contain explicit mentions of the terms ‘death’ and ‘dying’ but also display the psychological state of both participants in detail, mostly shown in close-ups again. Some of the events to be analysed can thus not only be described as ‘dialogue’ or ‘say’ but also as ‘cry’/‘weep’. For the evaluation of the events in terms of their metafunctional diversification, this is an important aspect, since emotional representations mostly fulfil interpersonal functions in that they allow establishing a (positive or negative) relationship to the characters shown.

We forego any further detailed description of the logical forms due to space constraints, but refer to the example analyses in Figures 1 and 2 above. It would be interesting to pursue further empirical analyses here to compare the narrative events in the short films to those of the documentary film, in particular with regard to several smaller aspects such as the use of the camera and close-up shots or the montage of the different conversations into a coherent whole, for example. Furthermore, a more comprehensive empirical analysis could examine which statistical relationships between the representation of various events are available and how they influence the way of dealing with the topics. This again lies not in the scope of the discussion in this article.

Since the relationship between Nora and Hanne developed intensely during and after their initial conversation, the project’s organiser decided to accompany further meetings and conversations between the two with the film team to include them in the documentary film (for further information see Table 1). This film serves as the second analytical example within the complex discourse, and we choose one of the key scenes in the Nora and Hanne discourse (which is only one of three sub-discourses in this film) for the following discussion (see Table 6 for two shots from the film):

Table 6.

Shots from a sequence from the middle of the documentary film ‘Berührungsängste’ (01:06:48 – 01:08:06).

Filmic shot	Shot description	Insert (written language)
	Medium long shot of Hanne’s room in the hospice, Hanne lying on the bed, Nora and daughter sitting next to her
	Medium shot of Nora and a companion, sitting outside, crying	‘Hanne W. died 10 hours later’

The logical forms for these two shots can first be constructed as given in Figure 5, analysing the first event in the hospice room as $e_{π_{1}} = c a r e s s$ and the second as $e_{π_{1}} = w e e p$ an explicit representation of Nora’s sorrow.

Figure 5.

Logical forms of the two shots from the documentary film.

A further important factor of the dynamically unfolding filmic discourse is the use of the insert which appears in the middle of the second shot, saying ‘Hanne W. died 10 hours later’. This use of verbal–visual resources in the images is a further multimodal construction of meaning which plays an important role for the interpretation of the events, since the insert itself leads to the interpretation of a third event that can be described as the eventuality ${e_{π}}_{3} = i n f o r m a b o u t d e a t h$ given in the logical form in Figure 6.

Figure 6.

Further logical form to be interpreted from the second shot given in Table 6.

Since the verbal language in the insert uses the term ‘dying’, we have again a very explicit use of the notion of death here which is, in this case, represented by written language on the screen. The interpretation of the propositional content ‘inform about death’ is also a multimodally constructed meaning-making process of combining the various visual and verbal resources used within the film. In relation to the short film given on the project’s website, the documentary film as a whole and in particular the sequences showing Nora and Hanne serve as a continuing documentation of their conversations. It is thus a further possibility for recipients of the project to follow the experiences and feelings of the two participants in more detail. In addition, both films hold strong intertextual references that influence the recipient’s meaning-making processes. It could, for example, be interesting for people surfing on the website and watching the short films to get to know more about Nora’s experience in particular, for which the documentary film offers further opportunities.

This is also an aspect to which Nora herself is referring in her active participation on the website and within the Facebook postings and which we take here as a third manifestation within the sub-discourse. As reactions to the publication of the short film as a further blog entry, several people comment on this film directly on the website and share their impressions and thoughts on the project and Nora’s experiences. Nora herself comments on these reactions and answers questions or explains further details of the situations shown in the film. As a conclusion, she announces the release of the documentary and invites us to watch it to get more of the atmosphere she experienced.¹⁰ The interactive environment of the weblog thus not only allows public statements of the participants themselves but also enables recipients to directly respond to them and enter into dialogue.

All these postings and comments can be analysed with the presented framework, which would then mostly focus on the explicit use of the concepts of dying and death in the verbal language. Most of this functions ideationally as well as interpersonally, constructing both the semantic content of the postings and comments as well as allowing the expression of emotions and the construction of an attitude. It would again be interesting here to pursue a quantitative analysis of how often these concepts and terms are mentioned within the particular texts.

This use of both ideational as well as interpersonal resources clearly indicates new ways of discussing the topics of dying and death. Whereas conversations like these about personal and intimate experiences are still mostly private and normally not intended for a bigger audience, the discussions on the weblog as well as in comments on Facebook open up this context and allow recipients from all over the world to take part in the discussion. In Wildfeuer (2015), we describe this as a very specific discursive practice for the recipients who not only read and watch the various texts and films but also actively participate in the project by producing their own texts (such as comments, for example).

In addition to her comments, Nora also uses the weblog for postings in which she describes her feelings and thoughts about the project as a whole and the conversations and experiences she has. These texts as written manifestations represent a further way of dealing with the topics of the project, this time similar to writings in a diary that are produced and available for a public audience whose recipients are generally not known by the participants.

The same is true for comments on the project’s Facebook page, which is available for all (even non-registered) Internet users. Although it is not always clear who exactly is producing the individual posting, most of the participants also use their private account to get into dialogue with other recipients. As one example, we show in Figure 7 the announcement of the short film ‘Noras Gespräch’ from January 2013, which is shared, liked and commented on by several users. Nora is using her own Facebook account to thank some people for commenting and supporting her.

Figure 7.

Facebook posting as an announcement of the short film ‘Noras Gespräch’ from 30 January 2013 with four comments and 14 likes.

Texts like this allow the interactive exchange of thoughts, experiences and impressions both participants and recipients get from the actual conversations, the films and further texts of the project. Furthermore, they construct intertextual references to other texts of the project as well as to the participants, which allows establishing more intimate and personal relationships.¹¹

The fourth and last discursive artefact of the discussed sub-discourse is the project’s contribution to the so-called ‘Night of Science’ in Düsseldorf at the end of September 2013. This contribution was designed as a large cube of posters and images which show the participants and reproduce several of their weblog entries and Facebook posts. Furthermore, a video installation showed sequences from the various short films and the documentary film. While visitors to the exhibition watched these videos or read the texts, they were filmed and thus directly involved in the project by this interactive environment. We give an impression of this small exhibition in one of the photos that was shown on Facebook afterwards (see Figure 8).¹²

Figure 8.

Photo showing the project’s exhibition at the ‘Night of Science’ in Düsseldorf, 27 September 2013.

According to Meng (2004), we see this contribution to the exhibition as a multimodal discursive artefact that combines visual and textual resources with the screening of audio-visual material and that, as a whole, constructs meaning in various ways. Since the semantic content of the various parts of the exhibition is so manifold, we forego again analysing the various logical forms here due to space constraints. However, it would also be possible to outline the explicit mentions of ‘death’ and ‘dying’, for example. In the following, we will therefore focus on the discursive practice of participating in and producing multimodal content for an exhibition like this.

The various images of the participants, for example, which can be seen on the posters in the exhibition and which are also a salient aspect on the website, not only ideationally represent the various characters that have participated in the project but also invite recipients to emotionally react to these characters and the project as a whole. The fact that the faces of the participants are publicly presented in close-ups opens up a perspective on the project’s main topic that is no longer intimate and private and thus changes the general handling of and the perspective on the concepts of dying and death.

The possibility to watch sequences from the films during the exhibition without the normally necessary access to the website is again a more immediate confrontation of the recipients with the participants and their conversations. People are not only invited to watch the films but also directed to have at least a short look at them, when they are visiting the exhibition. They could only evade this situation by leaving the room. This is also an interpersonally constructed element of the discourse which offers the recipients ways of establishing specific relationships to the participants. The quantity of the content within this exhibition in its textual composition allows not only getting informed about the project through the various texts and images but also to reacting in terms of emotions and comments and to feeling related to the project and its statements.

Furthermore, this exhibition project represents a specific way of putting the former, mostly online produced content into the offline world and thereby making it further available to an even wider audience. It is both a multimodally as well as intertextually created montage of the previous texts that had been produced by and within the project in order to not only demonstrate the project itself but also publicly present its new ways of dealing with the topics. The exhibition (as well as further similar projects to which we do not refer here in more detail) makes these ways visible and explicit and can therefore also be seen as one of the various discursive performances in the project.

Towards a new discourse of death

Our analysis of the various text forms of the discourse project is based on different organisational levels of meaning construction in these texts. In order to demonstrate a more systematic way of describing and classifying this analysis, the semiotic resources and their meanings in this specific discursive context, we present here a more comprehensive overview of the various analytical strata for this discourse project in Figure 9.

Figure 9.

The discursive strata of the discourse project.

The notion of strata goes again back to fundamental approaches to discourse semantics that try to describe the strata of language built of the levels of grammar, discourse and social context (cf. Martin and Rose, 2003). For the various texts in the discourse project, it is not only language that constructs meaning but also the interplay of various other resources such as images and gestures whose combined semantic content and metafunctional use can be analysed with the help of the described tools. This analysis is embedded within the specific context of the discourse project, which guides the interpretation of the various characters in the short films or provides a standardised film style for these films. Figure 9 shows the correlations between various levels of strata and underlines the fact that meaning in this discourse is realised across various strata, thus, in direct reference to the specific context of the project and – as we will now outline in further detail – with influence on the level of the social practice and activity in other discourses. Furthermore, this overview makes it possible to summarise the detailed example analyses we have initially pursued in the sections ‘Analysing new constructions of “death” and “dying”’ and ‘Discursive performances across texts’ as a generalisation of the analytical steps that can then be taken for more empirical work on texts in this and similar projects.

With the help of this systematic view of the different strata, we can now find the first provisional answers to our above-mentioned research questions. We will do this from two different perspectives: first, as a summary of concrete analytical details of how the concepts of dying and death are newly and differently constructed within the publicly available texts of the project and, second, as an evaluation of how the communicative events that we analysed influence orders of discourse and social practice. The detailed view of both perspectives is then a combined approach of bottom-up as well as top-down analyses that, only in combination, enables a comprehensive view of the mutually influencing factors within this specific discourse.

Constructions of ‘death’ and ‘dying’

It has become visible that the semantic content in the various texts is constructed multimodally, with both verbal language and other semiotic resources. Whereas notions of ‘death’ and ‘dying’ are made explicit by directly talking about them (see the logical forms in the section ‘Analysing new constructions of “death” and “dying”’ that highlight this), the visual level supports this explicitness by showing the dying patients in close-ups and in their natural environment in hospitals or hospices or through a realistic drawing by one of the young people. As already mentioned above, these close-ups and representations of the dying patients form a consistent style of documentation within this project that shows intimate situations and therefore allows a direct confrontation with dying persons.

The filmic style is documentary and non-fictional, since the protagonists are authentic and do not play roles based on a screenplay. The montage of close-ups that show details like the hand of the young protagonist or the nodding of the dying man constructs interpersonal content which is in most cases transmitted by non-verbal resources.

The drawing is also a rather realistic and documental representation which allows the identification of the dying patient without any artificial creation of anonymity. The dying persons thus become identifiable individuals whose original character is not influenced by any role assignment or fictional arrangement.

This stands in a significant contrast to other renderings of dying persons which, in our society, are mostly fictional portrayals. Although nowadays dying and death have ‘invaded our living rooms in gory details’ (Wong, 2010: 74), these representations are normally constructed by a screenplay and are only seldom intimate and documentary reproductions. We are ‘increasingly familiar with screen-dead mannequins, but ever more distant from actual corpses’ (Davies, 2007: 48). In the discourse project, this distance from actually dying persons is interspersed by the texts.

At the same time, these representations are publicly accessible and thereby openly interpretable. Neither the website nor the Facebook page restricts the interpretation to a selected group of recipients, but, in contrast, tries to encompass a wide spectrum of possible audiences by linking and connecting to other pages and sources of information. It is an interactive environment in which recipients can directly communicate with project participants and comment on the texts. This opens up the discussion of the dominant topics of death and dying beyond a private and intimate group of people and allows infinite extensions and continuations. Nevertheless, the semantic content expressed in the texts does not seem influenced by these specific text productions. In contrast, the contributions in the weblog and the comments on Facebook are still very intimate and particularly explicit with regard to the topic of dying and death. Recipients are immediately confronted with emotions and reactions that, under other circumstances or within other contexts, may not have been expressed publicly.

These discussions and representation of the topics, both verbally and non-verbally, are a new way of publicly talking about ‘dying’ and ‘death’ by including individuals who are not personally known by the recipients, but identifiable by name. The direct exchange with these people via online media can then be seen as a deconstruction of the formerly postulated taboo, of not making explicit or directly talking about death and processes, circumstances and experiences of dying Wong (2012). This deconstruction is identifiable for the specific context of this discursive project and its connected texts, as much as in comments by recipients who were not directly involved in the project.

Changing discourses and practices

Our analysis of the discourse project and its texts supports the hypothesis that public discourse on dying and death can be significantly influenced by such interventions. Although this examination needs further empirical evaluation and research, we argue that we were able to demonstrate a change in discourse by our analysis of the multimodal content and its metafunctional use.

Since the project explicitly chose public display and discussion of intimate and private details of dying persons, it enters a new paradigm towards openly discussing and talking about death. This is not only being accepted by the project participants but also seems to be encouraged through positive feedback and adopted by recipients of this project. Preliminary analysis of comments on the weblog and the social media sites for this project supports this view. Most of the recipients talk about enriching and inspiring dialogues and the impressive work the participants have undertaken;¹³ others explicitly focus on the topic of denial, as for example in the following Facebook post: ‘Very cool idea!!!:-) Dying must be taken out of the taboo niche! Would be good for everyone …’.¹⁴ Online engagement of non-direct project participants not only leads to evaluative comments but also to an imitation and adaptation of the communicative processes that were used in the project. Examples for this category are short public comments which tell stories about friends or family members who have experienced the same or very similar moments. We see these comments and adaptations as first clear indications of how the discourse of death is being changed and will continue to be changed in future. The discourse project and its way of discursively deconstructing the formerly known death taboo pick up on this development and facilitate multimedia discussion and dialogue. This is in line with an on-going development towards a new ‘episteme of death’, as described by Staudt (2009). One important aspect of her argumentation against the death taboo is the desire for communication and connection that is largely taken up by the development of new practices of communicating online:

To the list of new spaces of discourse density we need to add the fact that we have moved into the information age and that this has allowed images of the dead and dying to enter our homes via television and the Internet in unprecedented numbers and forms. The whole electronic communication revolution, especially the Internet, also acts as a connective tissue among disciplines and peoples around the world and serves to magnify and expedite ideas. (Staudt, 2009: 15)

It is therefore not only the general availability of images, texts and further documentations of dying and death that increases a certain familiarity with these topics (cf. Davies, 2007; Wong, 2010) but also the possibilities of communicating details and circumstances in interactive environments. Being connected to others and thereby sharing ‘heightened levels of intimacy, solidarity, and liking’ (Walther, 1996: 4) leads to a sense of community and support that cannot be equally achieved in face-to-face communication, as Ferrigno-Stack et al. (2003) argue. With a study on the taboo topic of suicide in computer-mediated communication, the latter also maintain the hypothesis that online communication changes social barriers and constraints on identities as well as cultural practices that are still present in face-to-face-communication (cf. Ferrigno-Stack et al., 2003: 401–403).

On this basis and according to Fairclough (1995), our critical discourse analysis that we now have carried out with some plausible examples can therefore outline that the discursive events of this project draw upon the order of the more general discourse of death (see the quotation in the section ‘A critical discourse analytical view of the death taboo’). Assuming that the new way of deconstructing and thus denying the death taboo and thereby pushing a vibrant, public dialogue about dying and death can influence the general discussion about these topics, we see this project as one step towards further deconstructing boundaries within the general discourse and restructuring conversations about dying and death.

Footnotes

Funding

This research project is based on and refers to a public discourse project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (01GP1177B).

Notes

Author biographies

Janina Wildfeuer is a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Science at Bremen University, Germany. She teaches classes in Multimodal, Interdisciplinary and Applied Linguistics and researches film and other multimodal documents within several projects exploring the notion of multimodal discourse. Her publications include a monograph titled ‘Film Discourse Interpretation: Towards a New Paradigm for Multimodal Film Analysis’, published in 2014 with Routledge, as well as several contributions and papers on the analysis of multimodal artefacts such as film, comics and so on.

Martin W Schnell is Chair in Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Ethics and Communication at Witten/Herdecke University, Germany.

Christian Schulz is Deputy Medical Chief of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Palliative Care at the University Hospital Düsseldorf and Senior Lecturer at Heinrich-Heine University, Germany. He is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Psychosocial Oncology & Palliative Care, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School and a doctoral candidate in Existential Psychotherapy and Counselling at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, Middlesex University, London, UK.

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