Ritual and Repetition
From the smallest hello, the briefest reconfiguration
of face, motion of hand, or hint of sound, we infer recognition. Communication
is established and the self is reconfirmed. The world is continues on its
rightful axis. No matter how vestigial in character, however passing in time, a
ritual has been completed. An exchange is completed to the profit of all.
Satisfaction reigns all around. This slightest of signs (whose importance is
measured by the slight caused if left unrecognised) offers a microcosm, a
minimal redaction, of the everyday presence of ritual in our lives. Such events
may be described as ritualised because codified, codified because repeated,
repeated regularly (on meeting, even constituting meeting itself). Repetition;
whence our ability to recognise these
otherwise faint flickerings found floating by in the
flood-tide of everyday signs. If a response is found
(equally vestigial, equally passing) then recognition is achieved, one is
warmed because remembered, recognised, one's identity is reconfirmed by a
response from an-other, a response from some 'significant' others,
representatives of the community one is a part of (that one believes one
belongs to). Writ large, this community may be humanity, if encompassing a
lesser group, its membership is nonetheless everything to those who define
themselves by its canons. Either way this community is made up of those 'like
us', and valorises the Same. Otherwise (especially in
mass society) there are those who of necessity must remain anonymous, empty of
recognition, those who pass by, the neutral background of everyday passage, of
the realities of mass transit. And then there are those singled-out as
belonging to the community of the damned...
If the latter category is definitive of the abjected position in a hierarchy, the communication of a
negative recognition, and may exist as potential in any relation to the
anonymous mass, then it is within the community of positive recognition itself
that hierarchy is to be found freed of its tainted quality. It is within any
such community that hierarchy is to be found in its most subtle forms (a
ranking often implicitly shared despite self's preference for self, such is our
dependency upon others). It is this relation that makes of every community a
putative closed society (where everyone 'knows their place'). Equality and
freedom may be the ideal, but the need to belong exerts a steady -even
structural- counter-pull. Providing us with yet another permanent tension,
another 'issue' under continual renegotiation; often a key ingredient in the
'flavour' of the community or society in question. Another endless negotiation
in the never-to-be-finished dialectic of Hegel's game of recognition with its
stakes of bondage and dominance (usually known under its evocative
mistranslation as the 'Master/Slave' relation). These are the exchanges that
mark inequality, voluntary or involuntary. Here due-recognition shows respect, is the 'proper' mark of respect, but also serves as
the mark of servility (hence its sensitivity in relations between the generations
and between peers - who is 'up' who is 'down'...). This is a mark, an exchange, that marks hierarchical or divided societies
regardless of their self-image. For all societies are divided; not least by
generation and the division of labour. And when all other divisions are
supposed to have become 'egalitarianised', there is
always the confluence of gender and the stare/return of stare, the complex
inter-relation of sex and vision, and the fraught, misdirected and mis-taken, and contested meanings that result from these
encounters.
In all cases the slightest sign evades slight. A test
is passed. The password given. The gift of presence,
also the debt of recognition, the gift-debt of position, is returned,
recognised, confirmed. The acid test, one that burns holes in the fabric of
community, leaving scars on the body of society, can be found in cases of
recognition failed or denied. These may evoke a response such as a pragmatic,
world-weary, shrug of the shoulders, or may provoke instant fury and internal
agony. It is the mark of its power over us, its role in the constitution of
ourselves, that the absence of recognition acts like a
corrosive eating away at our guarded sense of self, our proud sense of honour,
and just sense of balance; our acute sense of rightful exchange (and such
exchanges as the key to rightfulness). For ritual is always about exchange -
moreover that most valued, yet most immaterial, of exchanges; identity exchange
(brute possession may be made to support it, but is better read as being
squandered in its cause). The world is a worse place if we pass by
unacknowledged. If our signals go unanswered. If the mirror no longer reflects.
At the opposite extreme from the liminal
flicker of recognition - the minimal incarnation of sign in the instant, an
instant which promises a sense of self-satisfaction in the immediate future -
there is the horizon-forming event that swallows up time in order to grasp the
umbilical cord of eternity - the vortex into which society throws itself, and
from which it reissues, reborn - its long term future guarantied. Both forms, minimal and maximal, are nevertheless the gifts of
repetition (and hold out, in turn, the gift of the repetition of the sublunary
world they appear to support). Such mega-festivals of recognition, grand
evocations of the communication of community, are the most eagerly anticipated
(or dreaded) annual event; the most planned-for, most eagerly-awaited kind of
cyclic convocation, presaging and promising the return of full meaning as the wheel
comes full circle. A
grand repetition comes to pass. Ritual is here experienced at its
most intense, even if the rituality itself has become invisible, second nature,
force of habit (there are exceptions, but they are almost entirely horrible). Ritual as key to the annual festival (Christmas, Holi, Ramadan, Passover, Thanksgiving, or else the National
Day). Such rituals are the key marker of religion and of nation, of the
identity of community (in divided communities a site of contestation or
putative reunion). Such festivals often involve months of preparation, saving,
organising, spending.... (Some ritual
events may take years to prepare; witness the Olympics, the once in a lifetime
trip to
And in between: the rituals of language and place. The
place of our everyday language in our ritual existence, codes learnt by
exposure and frequent use; repetition. Our use of 'our' sounds; we are
comprehended; we belong to a language community. Taking place in and defining
the space of that community; 'our' place, the physical return 'home', familiar
streets, a familiar environment - the 'at home' felt in the city or the country
or wherever we may be. Ownership is not the issue here: the less people own the
more important the territory they nominate as theirs (and the dialectal and
semantic forms which constitute their mental 'home'); their territoriality,
site of (everyday) rituals - that which they return to. A place defined and
defended by rituals; rituals verbal and enacted, rituals of symbolic violence
and of actual violence; as when the badge of membership, and its continual
witness, repetition, is disturbed by that apotheosis of transgression: the
Other.
Repetition is ritual. (All repetition has ritual
effects - which is why we worry so over the presence of coincidence; as
disturbing in its way as a break in the chain of repetition.)
Yet ritual is also a repetition - and one with distant
echoes - of that which appears invariant in the human condition; if the
dominant mode of exchange varies, then the need for an exchange that results in
some form of identity does not.
Copyright 2004 Peter Nesteruk