The Disappearance of Rituals. Byung-Chul Han

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

NOTES

      1 1. Gadamer, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, p. 47.

      2 2. Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands, p. 16.

      3 3. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 137.

      4 4. Handke, Phantasien der Wiederholung, p. 8.

      5 5. See ‘Tee trinkend die Welt verändern? Yes, we Kännchen’, at https://blog.naturkost.com/2016/11/charitea-bio-tee-fair-trade.

      6 6. Douglas, Natural Symbols, p. 1.

      7 7. Transl. note: See Türcke, Hyperaktiv! Kritik der Aufmerksamkeitsdefizitkultur.

      8 8. Kierkegaard, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, p. 3.

      9 9. Ibid.

      10 10. Ibid., p. 4.

      11 11. Handke, Phantasien der Wiederholung, p. 57.

      12 12. Rosa, Resonances, p. 173.

      13 13. Transl. note: ‘Community’ in English in the original.

      14 14. Barthes, The Neutral, p. 124.

      15 15. The need for ritual and fixed rules is being felt again following years of excessive deregulation. It is no coincidence that the subtitle of Jordan B. Peterson’s well-known self-help book, 12 Rules for Life, is An Antidote to Chaos. The demand for individually designed rites to mark the phases of life and their transitional points is also on the increase, with the place of priests now taken by so-called ritual designers. These novel rituals have to obey the imperative of authenticity and creativity. But they are not rituals in the proper sense. They do not exert the symbolic force which directs life towards something higher and thus provides meaning and orientation. Where there is no longer a higher order, rituals disappear.