When death is a reminder to live (should be titled: Preemptive death)

'South Korean companies are sending employees on "fake funeral" courses to help prevent suicide. The "well-dying craze" has become an integral part of training at Samsung, which has built its own fake funeral centre'

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2e29bbb6-574b-11dd-916c-...

This looks alarmingly like a dress rehearsal for something... it certainly resonates spookily with loose talk of an imminent 'die off', whether as Bordigan 'accident' of intensified non-reproduction or, as the conspiracy theory has it, at the hand of consciously conspiring bearers of capital (WW1, influenza). even without giving credence to such ideas, this new trend seems even more sinister than the spate of suicide to which it supposedly responds.

ok so it's supposed to prevent, not encourage, suicide but really, what kind of society stages mass rehearsed die-ins? forget rod dickinson and the jonestown massacre or jeremy deller's manic mourning for the working class, this is pre-enactment, capital's deathwish devolved onto its human host, in a ritual that replaces the old religious post-rationalisations (someone died, but it was god's will, thus we have some handle on it) with a preemptive strike against a form of individuated striking. an instrumentalisation of the funeral, death as a goal directed activity.

as capital enters a new and even more morbid phase of its protracted endgame, will Soylent Green style death parlours replace the style bars and art galleries as the ultimate cultural experience? is this form of un-death and zombiedom the sign of imminent peak exploitation? when worked so hard that only the thought of one's demise can keep one living, management parries with a well staged, pre-emptive death. in pasolini's Salo, suicide is the last form of resistance, but here this dissidence is itself recontained. while the bosses rehearse their crunch-time self-exculpations, workers are encouraged to get in touch with their inner corpse.

as usual with extreme manifestations of 'weirdness', this only makes more explicit the 'normal' resignation and self-destructiveness inherent in life as the ghostly servant of capital, or, lower down the hierarchy, shovelling coal in the hold of the death ship. taking the logic of risk management to a new pitch, and making the perennial qualities of capitalist non-life explicit, now one has to die well to go on living poorly.

B

When death is a reminder to live

By Anna Fifield

Published: 19:36 | Last updated: 19:36

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South Korean workers are being sent on “well-dying” courses to encourage them to assess their priorities in life and as a suicide prevention measure. The country has the highest rate of self-inflicted death in the developed world, with 24.7 cases per 100,000 people. Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor are among companies that have booked “fake funerals” for their employees.

Fake funerals

South Korean companies are sending employees on 'fake funeral' courses to help prevent suicide