In Full View ‐ Cybersuicide, Hypervisual Self and Public Showcase of Death (For Real)

The practice of suicide has taken on a new meaning in the last few decades: along with the advent of media technologies and cybernetic communication systems, it has become an unbridled pursuit of a global visibility. The transnational character of such an increasingly extended and accelerated visibility resides exactly in those possibilities that have become available through images (more precisely: by the roles played by images in the new media system) to the worldwide virtual audience of anonymous onlookers. Taking part in the distribution of suicidal messages via the planetary grand scale optics in an unprecedented manner couples with an effect that goes in line with (but also beyond) all intentionality of the victim: suicide has become a real-time event, a spectacle over the channels of popular social networks that have facilitated not only its live recording and transmission over internet, but also its online archiving and the possibility of repetition (in an almost ritualistic way) for a massive consumption at any given moment in time by any cyber-spectator. For the human being thus exposed, is it assistance (in the process of looking) that becomes a mode of survival, of overcoming death, a “liberation” from it – as opposed to non-assistance which leads to the condemnation of death? Has the practice of suicide become a passage from actual being to virtual being in the exercise of one’s own death as yet another spectacle, with a psychological goal in mind? Finally and cynically: “What's the point of doing it if everyone isn't going to see it?” In this paper I treat suicide as a highly mobile kind of cultural practice, understood as the invention of concepts, of theoretical and performative images that link up with images produced through the visual machine itself; the aim is to try and understand the dimensions of a dialogue between the man and the machine under the globalization regime, in the times when every dialogue between the man and another man becomes as important as it seems to be futile anymore.