Rites of Closure and Stages of Maturation - “The Disappearance of Rituals” - Ch. 3 by Byung-Chul Han

Stephen Alexander Beach 

(956 Words) 

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What does it mean to find closure in life? Ostensibly it means that something comes to understandable end through which we are able to process some of life’s mystery. The emphasis here is the need for an end and for contemplation of the whole. Han points out that today our communication flow prevents such closures and contemplation, and the production/consumption culture only seeks to consume and add in an endless cycle. 1 This is reflected in the constant need to relocate in order to continually progress in our lives, so to speak, or the endless stream of social media or news consumption. 2 Likewise, a globalized world, as well as a digital world, remove the boundaries that give closure, understanding, and contemplation. 

“In his essay Behutsame Ortsbestimmung [A careful definition of a place], the Hungarian writer Péter Nádas describes a village with an ancient wild pear tree at its centre as a ritually closed place: '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.'3 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 a deep unity among the people. It is where the villagers meet and sing: 'On warm summer nights, quiet singing can be heard from under the wild pear. The villagers sang quietly. They probably did not want to behave inappropriately and disturb the night.' There is not much to communicate in this place, and so no communicative noise disturbs the silence: 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. Under the pear tree, the villager indulges in 'ritual con-templation', a ritual silence, and gives his blessing to the 'content of collective consciousness'. The rituals of closure stabilize the village. They produce a cognitive mapping, something that is dissolved in the course of digitization and globalization? The villagers are deeply attached to each other. Perception, as well as action, takes on a collective form: seeing and hearing take place in common.” 

This leads Han to talk about a concept which I have written a lot about, that of how worldviews play a role of collective consciousness for communities. 

“Collective consciousness creates a community without communication. For the villagers, there is one story, continuously repeated, and this story is the world: ‘They do not have opinions on this or that, but incessantly tell just one great story.’ There is a tacit agreement in the village, and nobody disturbs this agreement with their personal experiences or opinions. 4 No one tries to be heard or to attract attention. Attention is primarily directed at the community itself. The ritual community is a community of common listening and belonging, a community in the quiet unity of silence. … A narrative is a form of closure: it has a beginning and an end and is characterized by a closed order. Information, by contrast, is additive, not narrative. It does not combine into a story, a song, that could form the basis of meaning and identity. Information can only be endlessly accumulated.” 

In this sense, death can be looked at in an interesting way. It is death which brings closure to the human life have lived. It is only in death that we can complete it and look back with contemplation and understanding at everything that happened. In that sense, once the stage of this life is complete, we are ready to be born again into the next life. 5 Now Han points out that a worldview which is completely closed in on itself, just like our contemporary world which is completely open to the novel, are both bad. There has to be a healthy mix of these opposites. 6 Indeed the most successful culture were able to take what was foreign and incorporate it into their culture and move forward. Globalization is one of these extremes where all closure and exclusion is removed for pure openness and homogeneity. 7 “The two cultural formations confront each other in hostile and irreconcilable opposition, but they have one thing in common: they exclude what is foreign.” 8

And so to tie this around to rituals, rituals punctuate human life and give closure to the phase before it. Only have closure on these stages can we psychologically mature in a healthy way and not become an infantile mind in an old body. They give way to qualitatively different experiences of life. 

“Thresholds are temporally intense transitions. Today, they are being erased and replaced by an accelerated and seamless communication and production. This is making us poorer in space and time. In our attempt to produce more space and time, we lose them. They lose their language and become mute. Thresholds speak. Thresholds transform. Beyond a thresh-old, there is what is other, what is foreign. In the absence of the imagination of the threshold, the magic of the thresh-old, all that is left is the hell of the same. The construction of the global is premised on the ruthless destruction of thresholds and transitions. Information and commodities prefer a world without thresholds: unresisting smoothness accelerates circulation. Today, temporally intense transitions are disintegrating into speedy passages, continuous links and endless clicks.” 9
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