The Disappearance of Rituals

A Topology of the Present

Byung-Chul Han, Daniel Steuer

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509542772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Untrammelled neoliberalism and the inexorable force of production have produced a 21st century crisis of community: a narcissistic cult of authenticity and mass turning-inward are among the pathologies engendered by it. We are individuals afloat in an atomised society, where the loss of the symbolic structures inherent in ritual behaviour has led to overdependence on the contingent to steer identity. Avoiding saccharine nostalgia for the rituals of the past, Han provides a genealogy of their disappearance as a means of diagnosing the pathologies of the present. He juxtaposes a community without communication – where the intensity of togetherness in silent recognition provides structure and meaning – to today's communication without community, which does away with collective feelings and leaves individuals exposed to exploitation and manipulation by neoliberal psycho-politics. The community that is invoked everywhere today is an atrophied and commoditized community that lacks the symbolic power to bind people together. For Han, it is only the mutual praxis of recognition borne by the ritualistic sharing of the symbolic between members of a community which creates the footholds of objectivity allowing us to make sense of time. This new book by one of the most creative cultural theorists writing today will be of interest to a wide readership.

1
The Compulsion of Production

Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails. Rituals are constituted by symbolic perception. Symbol (Greek: symbolon) originally referred to the sign of recognition between guest-friends (tessera hospitalis). One guest-friend broke a clay tablet in two, kept one half for himself and gave the other half to another as a sign of guest-friendship. Thus, a symbol serves the purpose of recognition. This recognition is a particular form of repetition:

But what is recognition? It is surely not merely a question of seeing something for the second time. Nor does it imply a whole series of encounters. Recognition means knowing something as that with which we are already acquainted. The unique process by which man ‘makes himself at home in the world’, to use a Hegelian phrase, is constituted by the fact that every act of recognition of something has already been liberated from our first contingent apprehension of it and is then raised into ideality. This is something that we are all familiar with. Recognition always implies that we have come to know something more authentically than we were able to do when caught up in our first encounter with it. Recognition elicits the permanent from the transient.¹

Symbolic perception, as recognition, is a perception of the permanent: the world is shorn of its contingency and acquires durability. Today, the world is symbolpoor. Data and information do not possess symbolic force and so do not allow for recognition. Those images and metaphors which found meaning and community, and stabilize life, are lost in symbolic emptiness. The experience of duration diminishes, and contingency dramatically proliferates.

We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable. They even make it accessible, like a house. They structure time, furnish it. In his novel Citadelle, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes rituals as temporal techniques of making oneself at home in the world:

And our immemorial rites are in Time what the dwelling is in Space. For it is well that the years should not seem to wear us away and disperse us like a handful of sand; rather they should fulfill us. It is meet that Time should be a building-up. Thus I go from one feast day to another, from anniversary to anniversary, from harvestide to harvestide as, when a child, I made my way from the Hall of Council to the rest room within my father’s palace, where every footstep had a meaning.²

Today, time lacks a solid structure. It is not a house but an erratic stream. It disintegrates into a mere sequence of point-like presences; it rushes off. There is nothing to provide time with any hold [Halt]. Time that rushes off is not habitable.

Rituals stabilize life. To paraphrase Antoine Saint-Exupéry, we may say: rituals are in life what things are in space. For Hannah Arendt it is the durability of things that gives them their ‘relative independence from men’. They ‘have the function of stabilizing human life’. Their ‘objectivity lies in the fact that … men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table’.³ In life, things serve as stabilizing resting points. Rituals serve the same purpose. Through their self-sameness, their repetitiveness, they stabilize life. They make life last [haltbar]. The contemporary compulsion to produce robs things of their endurance [Haltbarkeit]: it intentionally erodes duration in order to increase production, to force more consumption. Lingering, however, presupposes things that endure. If things are merely used up and consumed, there can be no lingering. And the same compulsion of production destabilizes life by undermining what is enduring in life. Thus, despite the fact that life expectancy is increasing, production is destroying life’s endurance.

A smartphone is not a ‘thing’ in Arendt’s sense. It lacks the very self-sameness that stabilizes life. It is also not a particularly enduring object. It differs from a thing like a table, which confronts me in its self-sameness. The content displayed on a smartphone, which demands our constant attention, is anything but self-same; the quick succession of bits of content displayed on a smartphone makes any lingering impossible. The restlessness inherent in the apparatus makes it a non-thing. The way in which people reach for their smartphones is also compulsive. But things should not compel us in this way.

Forms of ritual, such as manners, make possible both beautiful behaviour among humans and a beautiful, gentle treatment of things. In a ritual context, things are not consumed or used up [verbraucht] but used [gebraucht]. Thus, they can also become old. Under the compulsion of production, by contrast, we behave towards things, even towards the world, as consumers rather than as users. In return, they consume us. Relentless consumption surrounds us with disappearance, thus destabilizing life. Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things:

Mass teaches the priests to handle things in beautiful ways: the gentle holding of the chalice and the Host, the slow cleaning of the receptacles, the turning of the book’s pages. And the result of the beautiful handling of things: a spirit-lifting gaiety.⁴

Today, we consume not only things themselves but also the emotions that are bound up with things. You cannot consume things endlessly, but emotions you can. Thus, emotions open up a new field of infinite consumption. The emotionalization of commodities and the associated aestheticization of commodities are subject to the compulsion of production. Their function is to increase consumption and production. As a consequence, the aesthetic is colonized by the economic.

Emotions are more fleeting than things; they therefore do not stabilize life. In consuming emotions we do not relate to things but to ourselves. What we seek is emotional authenticity. Thus, the consumption of emotions strengthens the narcissistic relationship to ourselves. The relationship to the world that we have by way of the mediation of things is thereby increasingly lost.

Values today also serve as things for individual consumption. They become commodities. Values such as justice, humanity or sustainability are exploited for profit. One fair-trade enterprise has the slogan: ‘Change the world while drinking tea.’⁵ Changing the world through consumption – that would be the end of the revolution. Nowadays one can purchase vegan shoes or clothes; soon there will probably be vegan smartphones too. Neoliberalism often makes use of morality for its own ends. Moral values are consumed as marks of distinction. They are credited to the ego-account, appreciating the value of self. They increase our narcissistic self-respect. Through values we relate not to community but to our own egos.

The symbol, the tessera hospitalis, seals the alliance between the guest-friends. The word symbolon is situated within the semantic horizon of relation, wholeness and salvation. According to the myth related by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, humans were originally globular beings with two faces and four legs. Because they were so unruly, Zeus sought to weaken them by dividing them in two. Ever since their division, humans have been symbola, longing for their other half, longing for a healing wholeness. The Greek symbállein thus means ‘to bring together’. Rituals are also symbolic practices, practices of symbállein, in the sense that they bring people together and create an alliance, a wholeness, a community.

Symbolism as a medium of community is gradually disappearing. De-symbolization and de-ritualization condition one another. The social anthropologist Mary Douglas notes with amazement:

One of the gravest problems of our day is the lack of commitment to common symbols…. If it were merely a matter of our fragmentation into small groups, each committed to its proper symbolic forms, the case would be simple to understand. But more mysterious is a widespread, explicit rejection of rituals as such. Ritual has become a bad word signifying empty conform...