Читать книгу The Disappearance of Rituals - Byung-Chul Han - Страница 6

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 conformity. We are witnessing a revolt against formalism, even against form.⁶

The disappearance of symbols points towards the increasing atomization of society. At the same time, society is becoming increasingly narcissistic. The narcissistic process of internalization develops an aversion to form. Objective forms are avoided in favour of subjective states. Rituals evade narcissistic interiority. The ego-libido cannot attach itself to them. Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence. They depsychologize and de-internalize those enacting them.

Symbolic perception is gradually being replaced by a serial perception that is incapable of producing the experience of duration. Serial perception, the constant registering of the new, does not linger. Rather, it rushes from one piece of information to the next, from one experience to the next, from one sensation to the next, without ever coming to closure. Watching film series is so popular today because they conform to the habit of serial perception. At the level of media consumption, this habit leads to binge watching, to comatose viewing. While symbolic perception is intensive, serial perception is extensive. Because of its extensiveness, serial perception is characterized by shallow attention. Intensity is giving way everywhere to extensity. Digital communication is extensive communication; it does not establish relationships, only connections.

The neoliberal regime pushes serial perception, reinforces the serial habitus. It intentionally abolishes duration in order to drive more consumption. The permanent process of updating, which has now extended to all areas of life, does not permit the development of any duration or allow for any completion. The everpresent compulsion of production leads to a de-housing [Enthausung], making life more contingent, transient and unstable. But dwelling requires duration.

Attention deficit disorder results from a pathological intensification of serial perception. Perception is never at rest: it has lost the capacity to linger. The cultural technique of deep attention emerged precisely out of ritual and religious practices. It is no accident that ‘religion’ is derived from relegere: to take note. Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is a place of the highest degree of attention. According to Malebranche, attention is the natural prayer of the soul. Today, the soul does not pray. It is permanently producing itself.

Today, many forms of repetition, such as learning by heart, are scorned on account of the supposed stifling of creativity and innovation they involve. The expression ‘to learn something by heart’, like the French apprendre par coeur, tells us that apparently only repetition reaches the heart. In the face of increasing rates of attention deficit disorder, the introduction of ‘ritual studies’ as a school subject has recently been advocated as a means of reviving the exercise of ritual repetition as a cultural technique.⁷ Repetition stabilizes and deepens attention.

Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity. What is the origin of the intensity that characterizes repetition and protects it against becoming routine? For Kierkegaard, repetition and recollection represent the same movement but in opposite directions, ‘because what is recollected has already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards’.⁸ Repetition, as a form of recognition, is therefore a form of completion. Past and present are brought together into a living present. As a form of completion, repetition founds duration and intensity. It ensures that time lingers.

Kierkegaard takes repetition to be opposed to hope as well as to recollection:

Hope is new attire, stiff and starched and splendid. Still, since it has not yet been tried on, one does not know whether it will suit one, or whether it will fit. Recollection is discarded clothing which, however lovely it might be, no longer suits one because one has outgrown it. Repetition is clothing that never becomes worn, that fits snugly and comfortably, that neither pulls nor hangs too loosely.⁹

It is, Kierkegaard writes, ‘only the new of which one tires. One never tires of the old.’ The old is ‘the daily bread that satisfies through blessing’. It brings happiness: ‘and only a person who does not delude himself that repetition ought to be something new, for then he tires of it, is genuinely happy’.¹⁰

The daily bread provides no stimuli. Stimuli quickly pale. Repetition discovers intensity in what provides no stimuli, in the unprepossessing, in the bland. The person who expects something new and exciting all the time, by contrast, overlooks what is already there. The meaning, that is, the path, can be repeated. You do not grow tired of the path:

I can only repeat something altogether uneventful that was yet accompanied by something in the corner of my eyes that pleased me (the light of the day or the dusk); even a sunset is already event-like and unrepeatable; I cannot even repeat a particular light, or a dusk, but only a path (and must be prepared for all the stones on it, even the new ones).¹¹

Chasing new stimuli, excitement and experience, we lose the capacity for repetition. The neoliberal dispositifs of authenticity, innovation and creativity involve a permanent compulsion to seek the new, but they ultimately only produce variations of the same. The old, what once was and what allows for a fulfilling repetition, is expunged because it opposes the logic of intensification that pertains to production. Repetition, by contrast, stabilizes life. Its characteristic trait is the ‘making at home in the world’ [Einhausung].

The new quickly deteriorates into routine. It is a commodity that is used up and arouses the need for the new again. The compulsion to reject routines produces more routines. The temporal logic inherent in the new means that it quickly fades into routine; it does not allow for a fulfilling repetition. The compulsion of production, as the compulsion to seek the new, only gets us deeper into the quagmire of routine. In order to escape routine, to escape emptiness, we consume ever more new things, new stimuli and experiences. It is precisely the feeling of emptiness which spurs communication and consumption. The ‘intense life’ advertised by the neoliberal regime is in truth simply a life of intense consumption. In the face of an illusory ‘intense life’, we must consider the possibility that there may be another form of life that is more intense than that of constant consumption and communication.

Rituals bring forth a community in which resonances occur, one that is capable of accord, of a common rhythm:

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).¹²

Without resonance we are thrown back on to ourselves, isolated. Increasing narcissism works against the experience of resonance. Resonance is not an echo of the self; the dimension of the other is inherent in it. It means accord. Where resonance disappears completely, depression arises. Today’s crisis of community is a crisis of resonance. 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.

Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified. They are written into the body, incorporated, that is, physically internalized. Thus, rituals create a bodily knowledge and memory, an embodied identity, a bodily connection. A ritual community is a communal body [Körperschaft], and there is a bodily dimension inherent to community. To the extent that it exerts a disembodying influence, digitalization weakens common ties. Digital communication is disembodied communication.

Ritual acts also include feelings, but the bearer of these feelings is not the isolated individual. In a ritual of mourning, for instance, the mourning is an objective feeling, a collective feeling. It is impersonal. Collective feelings have nothing to do with individual psychology. In a ritual of mourning, the community is the actual subject that mourns. Faced with the experience of loss, the community imposes the mourning upon itself. Such collective feelings consolidate a community. The increasing atomization of society also takes hold of its emotional world. The formation of collective feelings becomes less frequent. Instead, fleeting affects and emotions, the states of isolated individuals, predominate. Unlike emotions and affects, feelings can be collective. Digital communication, however, is predominantly affect based: it tends towards the immediate outpouring of affect. Twitter is an affective medium, and the politics based on it is an affective politics. Politics is reason and mediation; reason, which is time-intensive, is currently being replaced by immediate affect.

The neoliberal regime isolates people while at the same time invoking empathy. Because it is a resonant body, however, ritual community does not require empathy. The demand for empathy can be heard in particular in atomized societies. The present hype surrounding the concept has primarily economic causes: empathy is used as an efficient means of production; it serves the purpose of emotionally influencing and directing people. Under the neoliberal regime, a person is not only exploited during working hours; rather, the whole person is exploited. In this context, emotional management turns out to be more effective than rational management. The former reaches deeper into a person than does the latter. Neoliberal psycho-politics attempts to elicit positive emotions and to exploit them. In the final analysis, it is freedom itself that is here being exploited. In this respect, neoliberal psycho-politics differs from the biopolitics of industrial modernity, which operates through disciplinary compulsion and command.

Digital communication is increasingly developing into communication without community. The neoliberal regime encourages communication without community by isolating everyone as the producer of him- or herself. Producing is derived from the Latin verb producere, meaning presenting or making visible. Like the French produire it still carries the meaning of presenting. Se produire means ‘to play to the gallery’. The colloquial German expression sich produzieren probably has the same etymology. Today, we are constantly and compulsively playing to the gallery. This is especially the case, for instance, on social media: the social is coming to be completely subordinated to self-production. Everyone is producing him- or herself in order to garner more attention. The compulsion of self-production leads to a crisis of community. The so-called ‘community’¹³ that is today invoked everywhere is an atrophied community, perhaps even a kind of commodified and consumerized community. It lacks the symbolic power to bind people together.

Communication without community can be accelerated because it is additive. Rituals, by contrast, are narrative processes that do not allow for acceleration. Symbols stand still. This is not the case with information: information exists by circulating. Stillness only means that communication ceases, stands still. It does not produce anything. In the post-industrial age, the noise of the machines gives way to the noise of communication. More information and more communication holds out the promise of more production. Thus, the compulsion of production expresses itself in the compulsion of communication.

The compulsion of production brings with it the compulsion to perform well. Performance differs from labour in libido-economical terms. In the case of labour, the ego need not take centre stage. In the case of performance, however, the ego relates specifically to itself. It not only produces an object; it produces itself. Someone who is absorbed by object-libido does not produce but rather exhausts him- or herself. The narcissistic relation to the self constitutes the performance. The ego-libido rules over the performing subject. The better it performs, the more ego it gains. Freud, we know, associated the ego-libido with the death drive. The narcissistic subject of performance breaks apart because of a fatal accumulation of ego-libido. It exploits itself voluntarily and passionately until it breaks down. It optimizes itself to death. Its failing is called depression or burnout.

In a society governed by ritual, there is no depression. In such a society, the soul is fully absorbed by ritual forms; it is even emptied out. Rituals contain aspects of the world, and they produce in us a strong relationship to the world. Depression, by contrast, is based on an excessive relation to self. Wholly incapable of leaving the self behind, of transcending ourselves and relating to the world, we withdraw into our shells. The world disappears. We circle around ourselves, tortured by feelings of emptiness. Rituals, by contrast, disburden the ego of the self, de-psychologizing and de-internalizing the ego.

Hierarchies and power relations are often inscribed in rituals. By means of their aesthetic aspects, rituals can also lend a certain aura to domination. But they are in essence symbolic practices of ‘making at home in the world’. Roland Barthes also conceives of rituals and ceremonies from the perspective of ‘making at home in the world’. They protect us, he says, against the abysses of being: ‘Ceremony … protects like a house: something that allows one to live in one’s feelings. Example: mourning… .’ The ceremony of mourning ‘acts like a varnish, protects, insulates the skin against the atrocious burns of mourning’.¹⁴ When there are no rituals to act as protective measures, life is wholly unprotected. The compulsion of production cannot cope with this transcendental lack of protection and lack of being at home, which it ultimately exacerbates.¹⁵