Dr Nicholas Cox

This article analyses innovative burial products linked to emergent modes of ‘eco’ death-styling. It focuses, specifically, on producers of sustainable coffins designed to prevent the environmental impacts of the dead and, instead, to make the corpse an agent of positive environmental renewal. Operating within the digital marketplace and presenting themselves as a green alternative to ‘industrial’ forms of bodily disposal, these producers offer novel funeral commodities to the ecologically responsible consumer contemplating death. We identify a tension, in the marketing discourses associated with these products, between a genuine concern with sustainability and complicity with a neoliberal ideology which sees ‘green consumerism’ and individualised ‘choices’ as the ‘solution’ to climate breakdown and ecological crisis. ‘Eco’ coffins provide, it is claimed, instruments for the management of post-mortem corporeality, extending neoliberal practices of biopolitical self-regulation into and after death. Similarly, the designers of these products position themselves as entrepreneurial agents disrupting the funeral market and transforming attitudes to death and our relation to nature. Although they offer a critique of the harms associated with the ‘conventional’ funeral industry, their ‘start-up’ ethos aligns them with the free-market orientation of Silicon Valley ideology. Although they effectively merge aesthetic appeal, innovative design and sustainability, eco coffins are commodities, proffered to ‘eco-sensitive’ consumers in the Global North, their production and circulation evidence of how ‘capitalism extracts value from domains that were previously not perceived as elements of the sphere of economic activity – social interactions, the body, life… from death and the dead.’

The polarised Leave/Remain positions offered by Brexit hampered opportunities for Britons to articulate the complexity of their affective political allegiances. Turning our focus on Grayson Perry: Divided Britain (2017, C4, Swan Films), we argue that Perry’s role as artist-ethnographer enabled an exploration ‘from below’ of the tensions occluded by deliberative democratic debate in febrile post-Brexit Britain. Intervening in a conjuncture of which Brexit was symptomatic, Perry’s arts documentary with Channel 4 provided the space to articulate newly configured affective and political affiliations in terms both of Britain as place and Britishness as identity. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s conception of agonistic politics, we argue the programme provided a space of confrontation for groups defined as polarised ‘camps’ to contest and debate through their emotional and symbolic differences which exposed the limitations of the ‘post-political’ formation. However, while the programme visualises Perry’s ‘left populist’ strategy of crafting two similar pots through ethnographic listening and interactions with Leave and Remain communities, we argue the focus on predominantly white communities ultimately offers a limited notion of what ‘a people’ with the potential to revitalise democracy in contemporary Britain could be.