The relationship to the world that we have by way of the mediation of things is thereby increasingly lost.
Values today also serve as things for individual consumption. They become commodities. Values such as justice, humanity or sustainability are exploited for profit. One fair-trade enterprise has the slogan: ‘Change the world while drinking tea.’5 Changing the world through consumption – that would be the end of the revolution. Nowadays one can purchase vegan shoes or clothes; soon there will probably be vegan smartphones too. Neoliberalism often makes use of morality for its own ends. Moral values are consumed as marks of distinction. They are credited to the ego-account, appreciating the value of self. They increase our narcissistic self-respect. Through values we relate not to community but to our own egos.
The symbol, the tessera hospitalis, seals the alliance between the guest-friends. The word symbolon is situated within the semantic horizon of relation, wholeness and salvation. According to the myth related by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, humans were originally globular beings with two faces and four legs. Because they were so unruly, Zeus sought to weaken them by dividing them in two. Ever since their division, humans have been symbola, longing for their other half, longing for a healing wholeness. The Greek symbállein thus means ‘to bring together’. Rituals are also symbolic practices, practices of symbállein, in the sense that they bring people together and create an alliance, a wholeness, a community.
Symbolism as a medium of community is gradually disappearing. De-symbolization and de-ritualization condition one another. The social anthropologist Mary Douglas notes with amazement:
One of the gravest problems of our day is the lack of commitment to common symbols…. If it were merely a matter of our fragmentation into small groups, each committed to its proper symbolic forms, the case would be simple to understand. But more mysterious is a widespread, explicit rejection of rituals as such. Ritual has become a bad word signifying empty conformity. We are witnessing a revolt against formalism, even against form.6
The disappearance of symbols points towards the increasing atomization of society. At the same time, society is becoming increasingly narcissistic. The narcissistic process of internalization develops an aversion to form. Objective forms are avoided in favour of subjective states. Rituals evade narcissistic interiority. The ego-libido cannot attach itself to them. Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence. They depsychologize and de-internalize those enacting them.
Symbolic perception is gradually being replaced by a serial perception that is incapable of producing the experience of duration. Serial perception, the constant registering of the new, does not linger. Rather, it rushes from one piece of information to the next, from one experience to the next, from one sensation to the next, without ever coming to closure. Watching film series is so popular today because they conform to the habit of serial perception. At the level of media consumption, this habit leads to binge watching, to comatose viewing. 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 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
