Ritual Collapse
The Death of the Pageantry and Cohesion
Pageantry has disappeared from politics, at most something done to play into stereotypes to harken back to older rituals like kissing babies. Due to the intensification of online political spaces, there isn’t a reason to use the same public grandeur that once existed in American politics and culture. Ritual serves a purpose. It is a binding action for a community, it provides something similar to rites of passage. Even the smallest of actions can be considered ritual when it comes to the inclusion of a new member to a social structure. We see it all the time, but we never bother to formalize it, giving it only a second glance to show who is in and who is out. The weakness lies there because formality is power, at one point politicians would host dinners for the working man or sponsor festivals in some great show of excess to win the hearts of voters. Often the politicians would do this for cynical reasons, but it still had a purpose, even outside of the direct bribery of the voter base. This purpose was and is to show society's abundance and build up the community. The disappearance of ritual, the slow withdrawal from the open acknowledgement of form, slowly breaks apart the bonds that hold social orders together.
In organizations, be it the corporate firm or political party, ritual is all but dead, the large pageantry shown is only done to solicit the few who have the means to support the organization or to manufacture consent from those forced to partake in hazing. It acts only as a lubricant to make everything seem okay, like a community, like a family but does nothing for the practitioners or the shamans who lead these rituals. Anything viewed as a higher form of ritual is immediately cast off, where it’s so extravagant and silly it must only be done for the self-aggrandizement of leadership or some vain attempt to build cults of personality. This is often the case nowadays because ritual has been ceded to consumption for the sake of the individual, not for building up the collective.
The vitality has waned as the institutions these acts used to serve have waned. The slow plodding death of the Nation-State has created a loss of value; even outside of the death of the social order, there is a death of belief. The radical online who hasn't even started RCIA goes to a Catholic Mass for their own ego. The same goes for the befuddled syndicalist who goes to an IWW meeting. These rituals are there on a personal level, for the person to say “I genuinely believe! I am a member of the movement!” without giving more or sacrificing. They do not wish to expend more energy than they put in. They don’t view the institutions as what they are.
The institution is the permissive Other, this great sounding board that allows us to define ourselves in opposition to it, which uses ritual to allow the individual to chase desire or, at the very least, project their desire into the institution. This can be most overtly seen with Catholicism, with Slavoj Zizek’s analysis of the Church using the movie The Sound of Music as the base of his analysis: “It’s not to prohibit, in this case, sexual pleasures. It’s a much more cynical contact, as it were, between the church as an institution and the believer troubled with, in this case, sexual desires. It is this hidden, obscene permission that you get.” Ritual is there to pat you on the back, to release the Id and strengthen the Superego in controlled spaces.
The ability for ritual to act as this release has been broken, the destruction of stillness. Again fixating on the Catholic Church, something is to be said of the Marian Cult, specifically the Rosary, where that becomes a meditative act, submitting the ego to silence and meditation on the numerous mysteries of Christ. This stillness has been lost, the Id no longer safely released in ritual excess gives itself over to hyperactivity, the most base yet refined way of existence. In Burnout Society Byung-Chul Han directly addresses the baseness of the modern habit of multitasking “An animal busy with eating must also attend to other tasks. For example, it must hold rivals away from its prey. It must constantly be on the lookout, lest it be eaten while eating.” The hyperactivity inside the Rosary is satiated through the repetitive. There is no place for stillness, the calmness of ritual in postmodernity, only for the constant darting of eyes. It is easy to lay blame for this deficit of attention on technology or the material consequences of the world as it is and on what is Real, but it is not limited to just the material world but how we engage with it on a psychological level. The postmodern subject does not want ritualism because it feels needless, a waste that does not play into the ingrained desire for achievement. The symbolic value of ritualism collapsed as the Modern subject gave way to repression and the Postmodern subject gave itself fully over to ‘personal liberation’.
This personal liberation is a surrender to desire itself, the neurotic craving of the mind that constantly shifts, made up of the Ego’s wants, the Superego’s expectations and the Id’s base fixations. The constant growling of an empty stomach that can never be filled, where everything eaten is then disregarded as useless. The animalistic hyperactivity embodies itself in desire, especially how postmodern desire exhibits itself. The stillness of ritual is not something intrinsic to Potlatch, where Potlatch is often a very active event, but still remains relevant here. Grand celebrations, even when hyperactive, do not appeal to the conscious desires of the Subject, but to destruction and waste. The Achievement subject is imbued with the subconscious desire for efficiency and hyperactivity, the rapid beating of the heart to move closer and closer to their personal goals.
Potlatch represents more of a play on superego while also appealing to the Id, it does not produce stillness in the same way as the Rosary does. It is a celebration of the excess George Batailles describes in The Accursed Share “Potlatch is, like commerce, a means of circulating wealth, but it excludes bargaining. More often than not it is the solemn giving of considerable riches, offered by a chief to his rival for the purpose of humiliating, challenging and obligating him.” It is something to one up another, but at the same time provides something to the one challenged. Despite resources being squandered there is still psychological use acquired. Later when talking about the basic rules of the General Economy he describes “what is appropriated in the squander is the prestige it gives to the squanderer (whether an individual or a group), which is acquired by him as a possession and which determines his rank;” Prestige, status, and to some degree de-alienation occur during Potlatch. Capitalism denies potlatch with overcorrection, where instead of releasing the Id like an excess of a steam built up in an engine allows it to continue building pressure until it’s violent explosion, while transforming the Super Ego into the Ego Ideal, the sweet seduction of projecting oneself in their ideal place, enslavement to one’s own desires.
Capitalism’s overabundance of appeal to the Superego and Id has no borders. Its consumption without sacrifice and how it encourages engagement with ideology in the form of commodity undermines the ideology inherently. It’s why the previously mentioned “larpers” are likely to switch as soon as the ideology doesn’t feel as if it clicks. The personal ritual of attendance, of reification in belief, does nothing to strengthen the bond between the individual and the institution. Potlatch, using excess to show strength to bring the community together, isn’t all-powerful in overcoming that lack of connection but is a step in the right direction. Providing a place to give oneself over to the community while simultaneously being the act of sacrifice appealing to the Id and Ego, the base wants destruction and the displacement of self onto the group.
The Potlatch, at least in the case of politics, takes the form of art. It’s a show put on for both the performers and the audience. To take from Bataille’s The Notion of Expenditure when quantifying artistic production divides them into two categories: real and symbolic, the actual waste of resources and the displacement of the self into the story, the latter is the easier to commit to, theater and cinema is counted among that symbolic waste where they give an emotional catharsis, but theater is not limited to scripts being recited on a stage. The ritual of the Mass can be equated to theater. The Missal is close to a script but also acts as a meditation on the sacrifice performed in the Eucharist. The morbidity of the Church has led directly to its success, with Bataille describing “the value of the theme of the Son of God's ignominious crucifixion, which carries human dread to a representation of loss and limitless degradation.” The Passion of Christ is the death we can look towards, to project ourselves into. The Eucharist is a ritual that, if taken literally, allows the Catholic to consume the flesh of the one who suffered, becoming one whole with that suffering through carrying Christ with them. The consumption strengthens the community, the flesh of the Living God in politics; this is less dramatic, but that consumption is still there, be it memorabilia or more direct rituals, inaugurations, or oaths of loyalty; all these small parts contain a fraction of the power of the Mass has to a Catholic, but they build on each other, strengthening the expenditure by making it standard practice. The embracement of art in politics, where the ritual is artistic as much as it is psychological because art is psychological.
The sterility of the Postmodern bourgeois system has undermined the arts, both the majesty of political theater and what is commonly associated with art. The Bourgeois sterility has always been present, with Georges Bataille commenting on this in his article The "Old Mole" and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist “any member of the bourgeoisie who has become conscious that his most vigorous and vital instincts, if he does not repress them, necessarily make him an enemy of his own class, is condemned” It is why the bourgeois and intelligentsia no longer focus on the great works of art but instead focus on the constant recreation of old forms, the mimicry of the past to maintain some sense of stability, watering it down with artificial intelligence to make it as producible as possible.
The economization of art grew in abundance with the postmodern obsession with the destruction of all forms, the physical medium of art suffered the most, with early postmodernism having some sense of form, subject, and a defined Other in modernism to base itself in reaction to, but now all that is left is the reaction to the reaction, slowly devolving into a false sense of art. Postmodernism and poststructuralism’s hatred of form in reaction to the Modernists and Structuralists does not sting as it once had when the modernist ideas of the Grand Narrative have been gutted into parody. Its incestious behavior has rendered it sterile, critique for critique's sake with nothing to define itself in opposition to.
The farce of the postmodern narrative can be epitomized in the habit of online virtue signalling. Jumping from narrative to narrative, cause to cause, protests break for brunch and other pleasantries. The term “treatlerite” has been thrown around by the Left Communists and Maoists on twitter, but they themselves take part in the same consumerist pleasures, not actually grappling onto their ideas with any certainty but often flipping between transgressive points to feel more correct. There is no narrative trying to win the battle of history, but masturbating over themselves. The liberals struggle in the same way, undermining their own symbols, often taking their position of power for granted, ignoring the power of ritual as a show of strength and unity, only engaging in ritual when it is ‘efficient’ or ‘good optics’. The liberal and conservative are unable to stick their necks fully on the line for their beliefs, even in the wasteful aspects of ritual. At most you end up with the mass releases of Id, be it vandalism, protests without organs, and other populist swellings.
Hyperactivity can be seen everywhere in politics, especially within the overtly online parts of the political spectrum. The most overt example was some /pol/ user’s breakdown at some right wing protest, screaming to the sun “What about the memes!” viewing his propaganda as the endpoint of politics, the continuous creation, it no longer enters the realm of art or other projects but the object of worship of some wayward cult. The Icarian delusion of reaching high while being so low, imagining his wings being melted by those existing inside the overton window. But since this protest, that random /pol/ user’s ideology has been boiled down to its bare essentials, taking from Mikado “the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone All centuries but this, and every country but his own” building their pantheons to everything except what’s right in front of them.
This just leaves a banal fetishization of the past, museums online dedicated to how we used to do rituals, how beautiful it once was. This fetishization has become worse than what Marinetti warned of museums in the Futurist Manifesto “Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side by side forever with beings you hate or do not know.” The modern trend to make edits of the past, to capture the essence of anemoia, becomes a flagellant action, not wanting to sacrifice, to make the ritual to become the object worthy of sacrificing on behalf of the movement, the perpetual mourning. The auto-exploitation becomes denial of personal liberation through the glorious action of the obliteration of the self in the name of an Idea. The individual is called to be hyperactive, the continuous creation, always acting without breathing so it becomes the most banal fetishizations of history, of marches, uniforms, while acting as if it's something high.
The auto-exploitation presented in the fetishizations of history is most abundant in postmodern capitalism because the only vague formation of an Other is the past, the unreachable, to look back on. The edits are prayers to the God of History begging them to be an object of it once more, but there are no answers to these prayers, only silence. But this silence does not reach them, it’s no longer the death of God that requires a lantern in the morning but the death of Ideology, it becomes an activity to continuously take apart in, a psychological compulsion like a child grabbing at their stuffed animal to get some sense of safety. The crowd that lauds this fetishization only exists for itself, keeping themselves trapped within this historical fetishization of ritual while not being able to genuinely participate in it themselves. This self exploitation does not limit itself to just the fetishist of history but to the entirety of Postmodern capitalism with Byung-Chul Han describing in The Burnout Society “In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard,victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination.” Auto Exploitation begets a lack of stillness, the need to keep reaching the compulsive subject has nothing to grab onto as a foundation to ground themselves back into safety. But this descent into auto exploitation has been inevitable from the start.
America lacks her Numa Pompilius, the mythical second king of Rome, who led the settling of ritual in Rome’s infancy. America never had this in her early days out of the vapid secularism of the Founding Fathers. This isn’t to speak down to the Founding Fathers for their secularism but in their mimicry of Rome and the incorporation of Liberal-Bourgeois Values, they missed what brought the Romans together, the rituals. Roman religion is more comparable with the praxis of Shinto, lived experience. The rituals of Shintoism expand to not just the community like the Rosary or the Mass, but the personal, having abundant rituals for at home cleansing, Sokyo Ohno in Shinto: The Kami Way gets into the home worship ”To awaken early, wash the face, rinse the mouth, and purify the body and mind by worshiping the kami and the ancestral spirits gives meaning to the day and enables one to begin work with a pure feeling. The kami are sincere and always guard those who have faith. One's ancestors add unseen strength and help. Thus one is able to live a righteous life.” The American morning ritual has no respect for the State, the only people who acknowledge the state in morning rituals are either military or children with the Pledge of Allegiance. Shintoism and Roman Hellenism are not the same as the communal excess of Potlatch but still have their relevance, where even the most banal of our rituals like the Television Sign-off has been done away with in the name of hyperactivity.
The lack of the equivalent to Numa has led to the American State going through what could only be described as a demise of the Symbolic Order, our foundations for symbolism rely on Liberalism. The issue is that those who take up the ideological mantle of liberalism neglect their duty to their office, to make sure that the Sacred remains Sacred, the vestal fire of liberalism has slowly dwindled into a smouldering ash. Plutarch spells out the importance of Numa in his book Parallel Lives ”Numa taught them to regard these offices, not as a pollution, but as a duty paid to the gods below, into whose hands the better part of us is transmitted” There is no sanctimony or sacrificial actions done by the modern priests of the ideological order, they have grown lazy, the temple is rotten, caving in on itself.
This rot is most apparent in the decline of the pomp and circumstance around inaugurations and political campaigning. Inaugurations feel like some bureaucratic trickery, where the oath of office lacks the soul it once had, not the ritual where popular sovereignty is reaffirmed. Campaigners no longer even take the effort to touch their base, skulking on the internet with the assumption of victory because of their own virtues. Virtue is never enough, Numa’s legitimization of the Roman state was built on lies, talking to the Gods. Prestige is all that matters, how people perceive you, virtues are one's own self-assessment unless someone puts in the effort to make their virtues known, coining them into prestige. The gaining of prestige serves its purpose outside of the validation of the individual but by building up the Symbolic Order, breathing more power into symbols through mass psychological gratification.
This isn’t to call for the grand over correction the French took part in with the Cult of Reason, the attempts to recreate forms without function, which would be effectively a Cargo Cult. All form and no substance means nothing. The Manna from God only sustained the Israelites because they had to reaffirm their belief in the substance, to give it flavor where there was none. It’s calling for the restructuring of the symbolic order, the creation of new symbols to be latched onto that aren’t locked behind a screen or the paywall of the fancy dinners filled to the brim with sterile bourgeois politicians. The abhorrence of ritual by the modern politico is out of a sheer lack of wanting to waste, they would rather be beaten in some banal protest as a blood letting than to waste resources on the most basic of political ritual.
The essence of Potlatch here is that even the smallest rituals build up prestige for a political organization. The issue is reminding oneself that it is ritual, not true political action, falling more under the realm of propaganda than under direct action. The risk of not remembering its place, the fact that it’s a contact with the Sacred leads to Cargo Cultism, rituals are for membership to strengthen their ties with the organization, for those outside to see the prestige and waste of an organization. The great project of the 21st Century is to correct the zealotry of Postmodernism, that the Achievement Subject now solely guided by desire and hyperactivity lacks any solid conviction. Controlled releases of hyperactivity, the embracing of stillness in other places all comes together, the return of meaning to humanity.