“The simplicity on the far side of complexity,” a phrase coined by Alfred North Whitehead, aptly describes The Disappearance of Rituals (2020) by Korean-born Roman Catholic continental philosopher Byung Chuhl Han.
If you have some training in philosophy, you can tell that Han is a master of Hegel, Marx, Jean Baudrillard, and scores of other thinkers inside and out—and it helps if the reader is, too—but he spares the reader any kind of historical or philosophical rehearsal of them.
Instead, he starts with everyday experience—the everyday experience of someone living in that cultural epoch of ours that he calls “neoliberal” and “post-industrial.”
By everyday, I really do mean everyday: films, pornography or tattoos, social media or advertising. Think about shipping containers: the kind of boxes, envelopes, or the packaging that, say, Amazon or UPS might use in shipping a parcel from point A to point B.
These containers are bare. They are inexpensive and unadorned. They are strictly utilitarian. They play, or attempt to play, absolutely no formal role. After all, the real action of such a transaction is not the form of a packaging, but the content of the container.
In this they are the opposite of the Japanese parcel. In Japan, Han explains, the formal element is magnified in the practice of packaging a good, a message—any kind of content—for delivery.
The same applies to that literary and poetic genre of the haiku.
The haiku poetic form … is determined by the overabundance of the signifier. Haikus pay little attention to the signified. They do not communicate anything. They are a pure play of language … that produces no meaning. Haikus are linguistic ceremonies. (Han, Disappearance of Rituals, 63)
The same, mutatis mutandis, applies to packaging.
The intense formalism and aestheticism that characterizes rituals in general also dominates everyday ritual practices in Japan. Take packaging, for instance. The Japanese put any trivial thing into a magnificent envelope. According to Barthes, the idea behind a Japanese parcel is “that the triviality of a thing be disproportionate to the luxury of the envelope.” (Han, 63-64)
The same applies to the kimono:
In the same way the kimono veils the body with an overabundance of signifiers, a play of colour and form. The body as a bearer of signifiers is opposed to the pornographic body, which is unveiled, and hence obscene. The pornographic body, free of signifiers, indicates only the naked signified, the naked truth, namely the sexual organ. (Han, 64)
The same applies, finally, to the Japanese tea ceremony:
A Japanese tea ceremony subjects us to a minutely detailed process of ritualized gesture. Here, there is no space for psychology. Participants are truly [regelrecht] desynchronized. The proper movements of the hands and body have a graphic clarity, and there is no uncertainty about them deriving from the influence of the mind or soul. The actors immerse themselves in ritual gestures, and these gestures create an absence, a forgetfulness of self. In a tea ceremony, there is no communication. Nothing is communicated. There is ritual silence [Schweigen]. Ritual gesture takes the place of communication. The soul falls silent. In the stillness, participants exchange gestures which generate an intense being-with. The soothing effect of a tea ceremony results from the fact that its ritual silence is so strongly opposed to today’s communicative noise, today’s communication without community. The ceremony brings forth a community without communication. (Han, 64-65)
What is the point? For now it is this: rituals, while radically non-utilitarian, can serve as tools (paradoxically, given that tools are, by their very nature, utilitarian) with which we can resist the nihilistic, empty culture in which we find ourselves. They help us cope.
In order to survive, perhaps we must first ritually thrive.
But the Japanese tea ritual is only one of several images or metaphors Han deploys to show us the connection between the loss of rituals in our culture and our neoliberal hellscape. Two others are the premodern practice of dueling and an old, wild pear tree.
The point about dueling, in short, is that it is the opposite of our current military-industrial reliance upon drone warfare. Like the Japanese tea ceremony, dueling consists of all manner of customs, etiquette, and game-like qualities.
While premodern warfare—the clearest form of which is dueling—is a contest of honor based on the chivalric code, “which had a decisive influence on the notion of military honour in Europe.” Modern warfare—epitomized by the contemporary industry of drone warfare—is based on production, completely conforming to the logic of our neoliberal, postindustrial era. In drone warfare,
The opponent is dissolved into data. As a former director of the U.S. National Security Agency put it: “We kill people based on metadata.” The opponent who is to be destroyed is now no more than a set of data. Drone warfare is dataistic killing. The killing takes place without any fighting, is devoid of any drama, any fate. It is carried out mechanically, under the merciless guidance of data streams. The goal is dataistically transparent killing. Today, everything is made to fit that form of production. The form of war that produces death is diametrically opposed to war as ritual combat. Production and ritual are mutually exclusive. Drone warfare is an image of the society in which everything has become a matter of work, production and performance. (Han, 75)
Finally, a less distressing image, that of a pear tree rooted in the ancient center of a Hungarian village. Han elaborates on the importance of the tree by borrowing a description from Hungarian writer Péter Nádas:
“Ever since I have lived near this gigantic wild pear tree, I have not needed to go yonder when I want to look into the distance or back in time.” (Han, 29)
Han continues:
The village represents a closed order. It makes lingering possible. Thus you do not need to go “yonder.” The old wild pear tree is a centre of gravity that creates deep unity among the people. It is where villagers meet and sing …. (Han, 29)
Around this tree, there is communal singing, but there is also profound and penetrating silence. “There is not much to communicate in this place, and so no communicative noise disturbs the silence.” Han continues, now quoting Nádas again:
You get the feeling that life here does not consist of personal experiences … but of a deep keeping of silence. That is understandable, however, given that a human being blessed with individual consciousness is permanently forced to say more than he knows, whereas in a pre-modern environment everyone says much less than everyone knows. (Han, 30)
Such are the blessings of the old pear tree: a sense of both song and silence (much in keeping with the kind of ignorantia we find in such sages as Socrates and Nicolaus of Cusa), both of which allow us to do what Han seems to value (both in this book but also in others) above almost all else: to linger. To resist the temptation to rush, to repudiate the distinctly market-driven tendency toward distraction.
I close with one final implication—one bearing on the current state of immigration policy in the United States—of the old pear tree: its connection with place, or (to use Han’s term) site, including the geopolitical site. Although the pear tree embodies a kind of ritual of closure, this need not lead to what Han calls site fundamentalism.
Human beings are creatures of sites [Ortswesen]. Dwelling, staying, is only possible where there is a site. But a creature or sites is not necessarily a site fundamentalist [Ortsfundamentalist]. Being a creature of sites does not rule our hospitality. The destructive de-siting of the world by the global smooths out all the differences and permits only variations of the same. Otherness, the foreign, inhibits production. Thus, the global produces a hell of the same. It is this violence of the global, in particular, that stirs up site fundamentalism. (Han, 32-33)
What is the difference between site fundamentalism, on the one hand, and the kind of vision Han is inculcating, on the other? In a word, it is hospitality, a practice that is also a habit and a virtue.
However much the current administration in the United States tries to impose the kind of closure or closedness that is, in fact, necessary for a healthy life (even a healthy national life), one can only hope and pray (voting accordingly, of course) that such efforts are tempered with a corresponding commitment to hospitality of neighbor.
The Rev. Dr. Matt Boulter is the rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in east central Austin, Texas. A former Presbyterian minister with a Ph.D. in philosophy, Matt’s great love is reaching the city with the love, the good news, of Jesus Christ.
