The Disappearance of Rituals A Topology of the Present- Byung-Chul Han
Rituals
Rituals are symbolic acts. They bring forth a community without communication. Rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They turn the world into a reliable place. They make life last [haltbar]. Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition, as a form of recognition, is therefore a form of completion. Past and present are brought together into a living present.
Rituals produce sociocultural axes of resonance along which may be experienced three different kinds of resonant relationship: vertical (e.g. to the gods, the cosmos, time, or eternity), horizontal (within one’s social community),and diagonal (with respect to things).
Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. Rituals are narrative processes that do not allow for acceleration.
Roland Barthes: Rituals protect us against the abysses of being.
Rituals make the world objective; they mediate our relation to the world.
The ritual community is a community of common listening and belonging, a community in the quiet unity of silence
Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life.
Rites of passage give structure to life in the same way seasons do... They make possible a deep experience of order
Rituals conflict with work and production... Where everything is subordinated to production, ritual disappears
Ritual society is a society of rules.
Rituals are performed before, during and after a chase
Symbols The Greek symbállein thus means ‘to bring together’ Symbolism as a medium of community is gradually disappearing. The disappearance of symbols points towards the increasing atomization of society.
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Dwelling requires duration. Perception is never at rest: it has lost the capacity to linger. Today, the soul does not pray. It is permanently producing itself.
The person who expects something new and exciting all the time, by contrast, overlooks what is already there.
Digital communication channels are filled with echo chambers in which the voices we hear are mainly our own. Likes, friends and followers do not provide us with resonance; they only strengthen the echoes of the self.
In our attempt to produce more space and time, we lose them. They lose their language and become mute. Thresholds speak. Thresholds transform. Beyond a thresh old, there is what is other, what is foreign. In the absence of the imagination of the threshold, the magic of the thresh old, all that is left is the hell of the same
Silent listening unites a people and creates a community without communication... The silence gives rise to listening.
we cannot remain silent because we are subject to the compulsion of communication, the compulsion of production
Rest belongs to the sphere of the sacred... it transcends work, and it must in no way come into contact with work..
The sacred unites those things and values that give vitality to a community. The formation of community is its essential trait. Capitalism, by contrast, erases the distinction between the sacred and the profane by totalizing the profane. It makes everything comparable to every thing else and thus equal to everything else. Capitalism brings forth a hell of the same.
What must be won back is contemplative rest. If our life is deprived of all its contemplative elements, we become suffocated by our own activity.
The human being is no longer the sovereign subject of knowledge, the originator of knowledge. Knowledge is now produced mechanically
The pathology of today’s society is the excess of positivity. It is a ‘too much’, not a ‘too little’, that is making us sick.
CULTURE
culture is not an excluding but an including identity.
Hyper-culture is a formula for cultural consumption. Culture is offered in commodity form.
Today, to live means merely to produce.
We are all workers, and no longer players
Our culture is hostile to pleasure and form.
ART
Magic and enchantment – the true sources of art – disappear from culture, to be replaced by discourse.
we are confronted with simplified claims and messages that are artificially imposed on the work of art.
A society obsessed with production does not have any access to strong play, to death as an intensity of life.
Post-historical society is characterized by a ‘ruthless aesthetization’, an aesthetic formalization, of life.
Poems are magic ceremonies of language
The poetic principle returns pleasure to language through a radical break with the economy of the production of meaning. The poetic does not produce
Magic spells do not convey any meaning... That is why they appear magical, like doors that lead nowhere.
A Japanese tea ceremony subjects us to a minutely detailed process of ritualized gesture. The actors immerse themselves in ritual gestures, and these gestures create an absence, a forgetfulness of self. .. There is ritual silence... Ritual gesture takes the place of communication. The soul falls silent.
Poems play with fuzzy edges
NARRATIVE
A narrative is a form of closure: it has a beginning and an end and is characterized by a closed order. Information, by contrast, is additive, not narrative.
Religion: is to a large extent narrative. Every day is given a narrative tension, is made meaningful, by the overall narrative. Time itself becomes narrative, that is, meaningful
Capitalism lacks narrativity
WORK AND PLAY
Because of the compulsion of work and production, we are losing the capacity to play.
the compulsion of production destroys play.
the history of the Occident, namely the transition from myth to truth, which coincides with the transition from play to work
SOCIETY
Contemporary society is characterized by constant and relentless moralizing. But at the same time society is becoming more and more brutal.
Forms of politeness are disappearing, disregarded by the cult of authenticity
we are becoming hostile towards form
BEAUTY
The beautiful does not by itself produce knowledge, but it entertains the cognitive mechanisms and, by doing so, promotes the production of knowledge
Seduction is a game. It belongs to the order of ritual.
seduction implies a playful use of power/
Power is not evil. Power is games of strategy- foucault
The intimacy of love falls outside the sphere of seduction. It represents the end of play and the beginning of psychology and confession.
Seduction requires the negativity of the secret
Ambiguities are essential to the language of eroticism.
The rigorous linguistic hygiene of political correctness makes erotic seduction impossible
Seduction and production are not compatible: