The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present

The creation of self, however, must not be self-centred; it has to take place against the backdrop of a social horizon of meaning that gives the act of self-creation a relevance that transcends the self:

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.

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’.

Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life. They are forms of closure. Without them, we slip through. Thus, we age without growing old, or we remain infantile consumers who never become adults.

While symbolic 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 compulsion to reject routines produces more routines.

Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity.

Because of the compulsion of work and production, we are losing the capacity to play. We only rarely make playful use of language; we only put it to work. It is obliged to communicate information or produce meaning. As a result, we have no access to forms of language that shine all by themselves. Language as a medium of information has no splendour

Likes, friends and followers do not provide us with resonance; they only strengthen the echoes of the self.