I felt this touches on some of the things I've been thinking about regarding social services that build virtual worlds on top of offline spaces, and the items and spaces that appear within those services — so I'd like to share a few passages.
*"Ritual" carries the meaning of a ceremony — it refers to the small bits of happiness we can gain by repeating some seemingly trivial thing in our daily lives.
1. Rituals in time correspond to dwellings in space. Rituals make time habitable. Rituals make it possible to enter and leave time as if it were a home. Rituals give order to time. They arrange time.
They describe rituals as the time-technique by which we bring time into the house. "Rituals in time correspond to the home in space. It's a good thing when time, rather than being something that uses us up and crushes us like a handful of sand slipping away, appears as something that completes us.
Today, time has no firm structure. It is not a house but a flux in constant flux.Time disintegrates into a mere succession of punctual, present moments. Time rushes away. Nothing gives time a pause. Time that rushes away is not habitable.
In the days before there was a concept called SNS, Cyworld offered this kind of pause in daily life. A diary. Sharing. Among the tools for decorating that diary were the mini-room, the character, and the BGM. (Bondee and most other metaverses or SNS services today follow the opposite flow.)
2. 'In life, rituals correspond to things in space. For Hannah Arendt, what gives things their "independence from human existence" is their durability (their capacity to pause). Things "have the task of stabilizing human life." The objectivity of things lies in the fact that "things provide a human sameness [...] against the rapid changes of natural life." Put another way, it lies "in the stabilizing sameness that stems from the fact that the same chair and the same table stand, unchanged and as familiar things, before a person who changes every day."
Things are the fixed stakes that stabilize life. Rituals do the same.Through the sameness of ritual, through repetition, ritual makes life lasting (makes it pause-able).
Within the framework of ritual, things are used, not consumed or used up. That means things can also age.Today we not only consume things, we consume the emotions loaded onto them as well.
Things cannot be consumed infinitely, but emotions can.Thus emotion opens up a new, infinite field of consumption. The emotionalization of the commodity, and the aestheticization that comes with it, are subject to the compulsion of production. Emotionalization and aestheticization are meant to drive consumption and production. In this way the aesthetic is colonized by the economic.
The new settles into routine in no time. The new is a commodity. It is consumed and instantly triggers the desire for another new thing. The compulsion to shake off routine only produces more routine. The temporal structure embedded in the new causes it to fade into routine almost immediately. The new does not permit fulfilling repetition. The compulsion of production — the compulsion toward novelty — only deepens the swamp of routine. To escape the emptiness of routine, we consume more new things, more new stimuli and experiences. It is precisely that emptiness that drives communication and consumption. The "intense (intensive) life" that the neoliberal regime advertises is nothing other than intense consumption. Against the illusion of the "intense life," we need to contemplate other forms of life that are more intense than ceaseless consumption and communication.
The voice demanding empathy grows loud precisely in an atomized society. The current hubbub around empathy is, first and foremost, driven by the economy. Empathy is mobilized as an effective means of production. Empathy serves to emotionally stain and steer the individual. In the neoliberal regime, it is not only working hours but the entire individual that is exploited. Here, emotional management is more effective than rational management. The former penetrates deeper into the individual than the latter.
Today, digital communication is developing more and more into communication without community. The neoliberal regime enforces community-less communication by individualizing everyone as the producer of their own self. The etymological root of the German word "produzieren" (to produce) is the Latin "producere," meaning "to bring forth" or "to make visible." The French word "produire," from the same root, still means "to show."
It means "to put oneself on display." The everyday German expression "sich produzieren" (to show off, to make a spectacle of oneself) probably comes from the same root. Today, everywhere, we compulsively put ourselves on display. Social media is a prime example. The social dimension is completely subordinated to self-production (self-display). Everyone produces themselves in order to receive more attention. The compulsion of self-production brings on the crisis of community. The so-called "community" invoked everywhere today is nothing more than the dissolution stage of community — its commodity form, its consumption form. There is no symbolic binding force in "community" in this sense.
Community-less communication accelerates, because it is additive. Ritual, by contrast, is a narrative process, and narrative does not allow acceleration. Symbols stand still (stehen still). Information, on the other hand, does not stand still. Information exists by circulating (sind). Today, silence (Stille) merely means a pause in communication. Silence produces nothing. In the post-industrial era, the noise of machines is pushed aside by the noise of communication. More information, more communication, promises more production.
The Ritual of Closure
What that village shows is a closed order. That village makes dwelling possible. So "there is no need to leave." An old wild pear tree exerts a gravitational pull, integrating the people and producing a deep cohesion. The inhabitants gather under it and sing. "On warm summer nights, a low singing can be heard from beneath that wild pear tree. The village was singing quietly. It was clearly making an effort not to disturb the night unjustly."2 In this place there is not much to communicate. The noise of communication does not disturb the silence. "One gets the sense that here, life is not made up of individual experiences but of [ ] deep silence. And that is quite understandable. A human being blessed with individual consciousness is constantly forced to say more than they know, whereas in the pre-modern atmosphere, everyone says far less than what everyone already knows."25 Under the wild pear tree, the village sinks into "ritual contemplation," into ritual silence, and consents to "the content of the collective consciousness." The ritual of closure stabilizes the place. That ritual generates a cognitive mapping (kognitives Mapping) that is being dissolved under the waves of digitalization and globalization.
The inhabitants of that village live in a state of deep cohesion. Not only perception but action too takes a collective form. They see and hear together. Actions are not attributed to any particular subject. "When the village does or perceives something, that action or perception has no subject, no individual. In other words, the individuals who participate in the action or perception are ritually swallowed by the collective consciousness, and their experience is attributed to the general name that represents the place."27 Collective consciousness creates a community without communication. One great story (Erzählung) repeats itself over and over, and that story is the world for the inhabitants of that village. "They have no opinions about this or that. Instead, they uninterruptedly carry on a single great story."28 What reigns in that village is wordless consent. No one disturbs that consent with individual experiences or opinions. No one tries to draw others' attention. Everyone's attention is directed primarily at the community. The ritual community is a community of listening-together and belonging-together, a community that is silent within a quiet concord.
When that original nearness disappears, it is precisely then that excessive communication arises. Communication without community is pushed aside by community without communication.
A story is a form of closure. A story has a beginning and an end. A story depicts a closed order. Information, on the other hand, is not narrative but additive (additiv). Pieces of information do not join together (zusammenschließen) to form one story, one song that creates meaning and identity. Pieces of information permit only endless communication. Beside the old wild pear tree there is silence. Because everything has already been said. Today, the noise of communication drives silence out.
Ritual gives form to the essential transitions in life. Rituals are forms of closure. Without rituals, we simply keep sliding along. For example, we grow older without aging. Or we remain infantile consumers who never mature. Today, the discontinuity of one's own time is pushed aside by the continuity of production and consumption.
Rites of transition — rites of passage — structure life like the seasons. The one who crosses the threshold ends one stage of life and enters a new one. Thresholds, as points of transition, give space and time rhythm and clarity. In a word, they turn space and time into narrative (erzahlen). Thresholds make a deep experience of order possible. Thresholds are time-intensive points of transition. Today they are being demolished in the name of faster, uninterrupted communication and production. As a result, we become poorer in both space and time. We strive to produce more space and time and end up losing space and time. Space and time lose their language and fall silent. The threshold speaks. The threshold transforms. Beyond the threshold lies something other, something foreign. Without the illusion of the threshold, without the magic of the threshold, only the hell of sameness remains. Globalization proceeds by pitilessly demolishing thresholds and transitions. Information and commodities prefer a world without thresholds. Frictionless smoothness accelerates the circulation of information and commodities. Today the time-intensive transition point bursts and turns into a point you pass through quickly. It becomes a continuous link, an endless click.
"The Disappearance of Rituals" points out, above all, that community is vanishing today. Of course, hyper-communication driven by digitalization makes us more and more connected. But being connected does not mean we are binding more deeply or growing more intimate. Social media, too, eliminates sociality by placing the ego at the center. In spite of digital hyper-communication, loneliness and isolation are on the rise in our society. Today we are ceaselessly pressured to communicate our opinions, desires, wishes, and preferences — to tell the story of our lives. Everyone shows themselves (produzieren). Everyone performs themselves (performen). Everyone pledges loyalty to self-worship, to the cult of the self. That is why I said: ritual produces community without communication, whereas today, communication without community has taken the lead. It grows ever rarer for us to hold a shared festival. Everyone only celebrates themselves. We need to break free from the idea that all pleasure comes from the fulfillment of wishes. Only consumer society uses wish-fulfillment as its orienting criterion. In a festival, my wishes are not what's at stake. In shared play, I am not trying to fulfill my wishes. Rather, I am immersed in a "passion for the rules (Regelleidenschaft)." My claim is not that we should return to the past. Rather, I argue that we must invent new forms of shared action and play. We must invent new shared actions and games that take place beyond the self, beyond desire, beyond consumption — and that form community. This book moves toward a future society. We have forgotten that community brings happiness. We define freedom, too, from an individual perspective. The German word "Freiheit" (freedom) originally meant "being among friends (bei Freunden sein)." "Freiheit" and "Freund" (friend) share the same root. Freedom evokes successful relationships. Accordingly, we must also redefine freedom on the basis of community.
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리추얼의 종말
꾸준하게 오늘의 세계에 대해 예리한 분석과 비타협적인 비판을 선보여온 철학자 한병철의 신작. ‘리추얼’을 열쇳말 삼아, 우리 사회가 어떤 모양으로 존재하고 있는지 진단하고 더 좋은 삶
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