The Disappearance of Rituals. Byung-Chul Han
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