This essay deals with importance of ritual and its disappearance in the modern world. Han begins, “Rituals serve as a background against which our present times may seem to stand out more clearly…. Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based…. Today, the world is symbol poor…. 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 are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable.” Han focuses on ritual’s role in lessening the importance of the Self and creating community, “Rituals are also symbolic practices, practices of symballein, in the sense that they bring people together and create an alliance, a wholeness, a community…. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence.” Han also emphasizes the role of the physical, “Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified.”
Han contrasts the modern notion of authenticity with the communal notions of ritual. “The society of authenticity is a performance society…. Authenticity is in fact the enemy of community. The narcissism of authenticity undermines community…. The cult of authenticity shifts the question of identity from society to the individual person. Within the cult of authenticity, the production of self becomes a permanent activity…. Authenticity is a neoliberal form of production. You exploit yourself voluntarily in the belief that you are realizing yourself…. Today, the world is not a theatre in which roles are played and ritual gestures exchanged, but a market in which one exposes and exhibits oneself…. In the name of authenticity or genuineness, the semblance of beauty, the ritual gesture, is today discarded as something purely external. But this genuineness is, in truth, crudeness and barbarity…. We live in a culture of the affect. Where ritual gestures and manners decay, affect and emotion gain the upper hand.”
All rituals of politeness have been discarded by modernity. “A ritual of politeness is not an expression of subjective feeling; it is an objective act. It resembles a magical invocation that produces a positive mental state…. In a society of authenticity, actions are guided internally, motivated psychologically, whereas in ritual societies actions are determined by externalized forms of interaction. Rituals make the world objective…. Politeness is pure form. Nothing is intended by it. It is empty. As a ritual form, it is devoid of any moral content…. As a form of ritual, politeness is without heart and without desire, without wish. It is more art than morality. It exhausts itself in the pure exchange of ritual gestures…. Forms of politeness are disappearing, disregarded by the cult of authenticity. Beautiful forms of conduct are becoming ever rarer…. The more moralizing a society, the more impolite it is.”
Han also laments the loss of pageantry, play, and festival. Today, all life is mere work. Modernity is the consumption society par excellence. One only stops to rest so that he may work some more. “Rituals and ceremonies are the genuinely human acts which allow life to appear to be an enchanting, celebratory affair…. As forms of play, festivals are self-representations of life. They are characterized by an excess, an expression of an overflowing life that does not aim at a goal…. In the festival, life relates to itself instead of subordinating itself to external purposes…. The time of the festival is time standing still…. It thus makes lingering possible. Time as a sequence of transient, fleeting moments is suspended. There is no goal one walks towards.” To linger and to contemplate has been lost in the hustle and bustle for ever more. “Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion…. Rest belongs to the sphere of the sacred…. It transcends work, and it must in no way come into contact with work…. Rest and work represent two fundamentally different existential forms.” Ritual, even in the everyday, marks the passage of time. “Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life. They are forms of closure…. Thresholds, as transitions, give rhythm to, articulate, and even narrate space and time…. 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.”
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