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The Disappearance of Rituals A Topology of the Present- Byung-Chul Han

Rituals

Rituals are symbolic acts. They bring forth a community without communication. Rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They turn the world into a reliable place. They make life last [haltbar]. Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition, as a form of recognition, is therefore a form of completion. Past and present are brought together into a living present.

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).

Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. Rituals are narrative processes that do not allow for acceleration.

Roland Barthes: Rituals protect us against the abysses of being.

Rituals make the world objective; they mediate our relation to the world.

The ritual community is a community of common listening and belonging, a community in the quiet unity of silence

Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life.

Rites of passage give structure to life in the same way seasons do... They make possible a deep experience of order

Rituals conflict with work and production... Where everything is subordinated to production, ritual disappears

Ritual society is a society of rules.

Rituals are performed before, during and after a chase

Symbols The Greek symbállein thus means ‘to bring together’ Symbolism as a medium of community is gradually disappearing. The disappearance of symbols points towards the increasing atomization of society.

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Dwelling requires duration. Perception is never at rest: it has lost the capacity to linger. Today, the soul does not pray. It is permanently producing itself.

The person who expects something new and exciting all the time, by contrast, overlooks what is already there.

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.

In our attempt to produce more space and time, we lose them. They lose their language and become mute. Thresholds speak. Thresholds transform. Beyond a thresh old, there is what is other, what is foreign. In the absence of the imagination of the threshold, the magic of the thresh old, all that is left is the hell of the same

Silent listening unites a people and creates a community without communication... The silence gives rise to listening.

we cannot remain silent because we are subject to the compulsion of communication, the compulsion of production

Rest belongs to the sphere of the sacred... it transcends work, and it must in no way come into contact with work..

The sacred unites those things and values that give vitality to a community. The formation of community is its essential trait. Capitalism, by contrast, erases the distinction between the sacred and the profane by totalizing the profane. It makes everything comparable to every thing else and thus equal to everything else. Capitalism brings forth a hell of the same.

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.

The human being is no longer the sovereign subject of knowledge, the originator of knowledge. Knowledge is now produced mechanically

The pathology of today’s society is the excess of positivity. It is a ‘too much’, not a ‘too little’, that is making us sick.

CULTURE

culture is not an excluding but an including identity.

Hyper-culture is a formula for cultural consumption. Culture is offered in commodity form.

Today, to live means merely to produce.

We are all workers, and no longer players

Our culture is hostile to pleasure and form.

ART

Magic and enchantment – the true sources of art – disappear from culture, to be replaced by discourse.

we are confronted with simplified claims and messages that are artificially imposed on the work of art.

A society obsessed with production does not have any access to strong play, to death as an intensity of life.

Post-historical society is characterized by a ‘ruthless aesthetization’, an aesthetic formalization, of life.

Poems are magic ceremonies of language

The poetic principle returns pleasure to language through a radical break with the economy of the production of meaning. The poetic does not produce

Magic spells do not convey any meaning... That is why they appear magical, like doors that lead nowhere.

A Japanese tea ceremony subjects us to a minutely detailed process of ritualized gesture. The actors immerse themselves in ritual gestures, and these gestures create an absence, a forgetfulness of self. .. There is ritual silence... Ritual gesture takes the place of communication. The soul falls silent.

Poems play with fuzzy edges

NARRATIVE

A narrative is a form of closure: it has a beginning and an end and is characterized by a closed order. Information, by contrast, is additive, not narrative.

Religion: is to a large extent narrative. Every day is given a narrative tension, is made meaningful, by the overall narrative. Time itself becomes narrative, that is, meaningful

Capitalism lacks narrativity

WORK AND PLAY

Because of the compulsion of work and production, we are losing the capacity to play.

the compulsion of production destroys play.

the history of the Occident, namely the transition from myth to truth, which coincides with the transition from play to work

SOCIETY

Contemporary society is characterized by constant and relentless moralizing. But at the same time society is becoming more and more brutal.

Forms of politeness are disappearing, disregarded by the cult of authenticity

we are becoming hostile towards form

BEAUTY

The beautiful does not by itself produce knowledge, but it entertains the cognitive mechanisms and, by doing so, promotes the production of knowledge

Seduction is a game. It belongs to the order of ritual.

seduction implies a playful use of power/

Power is not evil. Power is games of strategy- foucault

The intimacy of love falls outside the sphere of seduction. It represents the end of play and the beginning of psychology and confession.

Seduction requires the negativity of the secret

Ambiguities are essential to the language of eroticism.

The rigorous linguistic hygiene of political correctness makes erotic seduction impossible

Seduction and production are not compatible:

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‘The digital order deobjectifies the world by rendering it information... The world is becoming progressively untouchable, foggy and ghostly.’ -Byung-Chul Han-

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Mitch Miller

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Meredith Drum

Meredith Drum is an interdisciplinary artist working with video, animation, installation, augmented reality, and various modes of public participation. Her projects center around the cultivation of care for others, both humans and non-humans. 

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Krzysztof Wodiczko

“THERE’S A MAJOR CULTURAL WAR MACHINE THAT PERPETUATES AND REINFORCES OLD BELIEFS UNDERLYING THE CULTURE OF WAR. ONE OF THOSE BELIEFS IS THAT PEACE IS MADE THROUGH WAR.”

Full Interview: https://caroldbecker.com/krzysztof-wodiczko-interview

“PARTICIPATORY MEDIA-ART PROJECTS IN PUBLIC SPACES GIVE SURVIVORS A CHANCE TO SHIFT FROM POST-TRAUMATIC SILENCE TO PUBLIC WORDS AND GESTURES.”

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 "art is not complicated — it is complex" -Thomas Hirschhorn-

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Thomas Hirschhorn

Art needs to be universal. That’s how I have always encountered art. I don’t necessarily feel included in the world of art, say, or in the art market, or during discussions on art. But the art itself, that has always included me. That’s why I wanted to insist that art is an inclusive dynamic, an inclusive movement. You know, there are worse things in life than taking a Styrofoam sculpture with you.

full interview: https://the-talks.com/interview/thomas-hirschhorn/

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Doreen Garner

Assertively reclaiming power, Garner’s work confronts viewers, challenging them to consider their complacency in systems of objectification, racism, false narratives, and historical omissions while commemorating those who have been subjected to enslavement, medical torture, and racial oppression. 

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"…THROUGH ART WE CAN FIND VALUE AND A MEANS OF RESISTANCE." -Barbara Kruger-

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Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

“It is not possible to decolonize the museum without decolonizing the world.”

 book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism

seminal book, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography

the roots of photography in extraction and erasure.

“photographs should not be thought of as raw archaic material, primary sources, or positive facts whose intrinsic meaning is to be spelled out through research.”

“the infrastructure of extractions”: that is, what enabled the camera’s access to people as free raw material for the production of photographs, which then became “primary sources” for other experts to consult and interpret.

there is not a single photograph associated with the rape of between one and two million German women. 

Based on the assumption that many of them were taken at the same sites where rape occurred—one to two million rapes, largely in one city, so consider the dense geographic occurrence of rape—I asked myself which of them required an extra epistemological manipulation in order to dissociate it from the mass rape of women.

 universal ethics of the gaze.

When imperial violence is not brought to an end through the transformation of the infrastructure that enables it, such violence will be a continuous reality.

what do you do with all the corpses that have already been shown, let alone produced? 

“Extraction is never only of objects, it is always also of knowledge.”

I am interested in the presence of documents at the moment when physical violence is exercised and how the documents are used to tame the horror. 

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Sammy Baloji

 …AND TO THOSE NORTH SEA WAVES WHISPERING SUNKEN STORIES (II)

At the beginning of World War I, thirty-two Congolese immigrants in Belgium volunteered to fight in the Belgian army. Among them was Albert Kudjabo, who was captured in August 1914 and spent the rest of the war at a prison camp in Münster. There, he was forced to participate in an archive project of the state-funded Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, which made acoustic recordings of African prisoners of war. The recording of Kudjabo drumming and singing, which forms part of Sammy Baloji’s installation …AND TO THOSE NORTH SEA WAVES WHISPERING SUNKEN STORIES (II) (2021) has been stored in the Sound Archives of Humboldt University in Berlin. Kudjabo is anonymously credited there, using a racist term, in a convergence of the violence of war and that of the colonial archive.

How history is constructed—what is remembered and what is omitted—is an important thread that runs through Baloji’s work. The artist revisits histories of extraction and displacement, allowing silenced voices to finally be heard. In this work, Baloji parallels Kudjabo’s story with the Wardian case, a glass container that transported plants on English ships. It marked a clear beginning of the domestication of plants, the expansion of British imperialism, and a global decline in biodiversity. Baloji’s Wardian case alludes to Congolese displacement: it houses plants native to Congo and takes the form of a crystal, referencing the minerals extracted in Congo that have shaped the country’s past and present. The title of the piece refers to remnants of war—shipwrecks and large quantities of unexploded ammunition—that can still be found at the bottom of the North Sea. An analogy to colonial history, their presence becomes clear once their unresolved toxicity begins to surface and influence the present.

Heidi Ballet

Other artworks:

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Jean-Jacques Lebel

Poison soluble. Scènes de l’occupation américaine à Bagdad [Solvable Poison. Scenes from the American Occupation in Baghdad], 2013, activates pain and trauma

Poison Soluble is a maze-like structure whose hanging walls are composed of photographs of Abu Ghraib detainees being tortured, sexually abused, and in other ways violated by U.S. soldiers

The aim of this project is to provoke the viewer to meditate on the consequences of colonialism.”

Siddartha Mitter called the piece, plus another by Lebel at the Biennale, “an object lesson in how a certain European and masculine mode of antiracist and anticolonial art, though forged in real political battles, lost its way and lapsed into exploitation.”

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Đào Châu Hải

In 2010, Đào created Ballad of the East Sea after traveling to this small arm of the Pacific Ocean, which has been the object of violent disputes between bordering countries. He has adapted this work for the 12th Berlin Biennale, where it echoes issues of border wars and migration, all of which are just as critical as ever to the world today.

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Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Oh shining star testify

invites us to consider the forms of entanglement between the destruction of bodies and the erasure of images, and the conditions under which these same bodies and images might once again reappear.

The piece is structured around CCTV footage taken from an Israeli military surveillance camera. On March 19, 2014, 14 year-old Yusuf ­Shawamreh crossed the ‘separation fence’ erected by the Israeli military near Hebron. He was going to pick Akub an edible plant that is a delicacy in Palestinian cuisine, blooming only for only a short period of time and growing at high altitudes. After crossing the fence Israeli forces ambushed and shot him dead. A court injunction forced the military surveillance footage to be released and consequently circulated online only to be removed later. Oh shining star weaves together a fragmented script sampled from online recordings of everyday erasures and erosion of bodies, land and built structures but also their reappearance through ritual and performance. Moments from this material appear as moving layers with images building in density on top of each other, obscuring what came before in an accumulation of constant testament and constant erasure. Retrieving, in this unfolding accumulation and dissipation of testament, certain moments that have passed us by as noise, what we can not turn to see and what we can not turn away from. Uncounted bodies counter their own erasures, appearing on a street, on a link, on a feed.

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Cornelia Parker + Tilda Swinton, The Maybe, 1995.

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Blood and Dust by Angela Ferrari

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Paulina Leon

and if I find them what?