The NYC "Riot" As Spontaneous Ritual

How a lack of cultural rites spawns spontaneous (and unconscious) ritual.

In a culture that does not provide ritual to its youth, the youth will spontaneously generate ritual.

There are lots of reasons for the events in NYC yesterday. But here I want to examine the “riots” from the view of my (speculative) cultural anthropology.

• In the absence of death initiations or rites of passage, teenagers often take it upon themselves to create their own rites of passage unconsciously. From drug use to being submerged in the froth of Swiftie-ness, in the absence of intentional ritual, spontaneous ritual will automatically generate. 

Here is a clip from yesterday’s events. Notice the spontaneous production of a classic scapegoat ritual.

• Of course, humans used to deal with death and initiation via rites of passage more consciously and explicitly. The walkabout, vision quest, and Eleusinian mysteries as salient examples, etc..

• Today’s mainstream “rituals” (bar mitzvahs, baptisms, and the like) have sanitized the very determining feature of ritual—that of phenomenological transgression and transcendence—effectively putting a prohibition on true and/or novel ritual via the transgression-less repetition of “tradition”.

• The prohibition on ritual via tradition has been generally enforced by religion, meaning the slow demise of religious power has weakened tradition’s prohibition, allowing ritual to manifest in increasingly spontaneous and unconscious forms.

  I’ll talk more about the phenomenology of ritual and its importance in a moment.

• Western society today, being disconnected from and afraid of death in all its forms (hyper-focus on life extension and plastic surgery, hiding its elderly away in homes, etc.) has left kids in the coming-of-age zone stranded in their relationship to dissolution and indeterminacy. This collective avoidance tends to manifest in one of two ways - neurotic repression or psychotic embrace, both of which lead to unconscious attempts to reconcile with the indeterminacy of death.  See my previous entry on this topic, A-Void-Dance.

• I sometimes get flack for not posting enough “solutions”. My primary notion for cultural solution is actually simple: the return of initiation for the youth—conscious and culturally facilitated rites of passage. 

• A great movement is afoot. But while there is a rise in death literacy, increased interest in the occupation of the death doula, movement toward psychedelic-aided palliative care, and a rise in ritualistic adult retreats, the biggest piece of this puzzle is mostly missing—rites of passage for young adults. There are a number of reasons why, in this era of litigiousness and coddling, it has yet to be broadly implemented, but I view it as the most important component of the most important movement toward a more sane future.

• Camps like this Rites of Passage Journeys camp may hold some promise here. Confrontation with nature, survival, etc., are all helpful. My interactions on social media have pointed me at Sonz Youth, an outgrowth of Sacred Sons, which also seems promising. But I also think we need to get more creative. First, not everyone has access to the outdoors, or the travel required, and in the case of initiation, the orientation must be oriented toward the phenomenology of inner confrontation.  This means there must be some aspect which is solitary as opposed to collective (see the walkabout, vision quest, etc.). Alejandro Jodorowsky’s recent Psychomagic, for which there is a documentary I highly recommend, is an inspiring and creative place to start thinking from. Of course, parents must be deeply engaged and a profit motive must be mitigated.  

  

  That orange bar means that from here on out this will cover increasingly more complex ground—I’ll try to keep it brief!

More on the phenomenology of ritual, as promised…

1. EXPERIENCE OF RITUAL

First, for clarification, when I use the term “ritual” I do not mean “behavioral repetition”. That is too reliant on behavioralism, and instead merely defines either habit or tradition, with no view into the phenomenological state of the ritualized, making the term meaningless and unverifiable. For this reason, a strictly behavioral approach to ritual is simply not possible, and phenomenology—an ontology of experience—must play a part in identifying ritual.

I see 3 phenomenological criteria of ritual.

1st order experience: Self-relating Indeterminacy AKA Awe.

• Ritual induces of a state of self-relating indeterminacy, otherwise known as awe. Studies using fMRI imagining of the brain show “a reduced engagement in self-referential processing, in line with the subjective self-report measures” within states of awe. This typically results in some temporary loss of temporal and spatial context, as well as some degree of temporary identity loss. Hence “self-relating indeterminacy”.

Ok, sure. But what would this indeterminacy of awe have to do with “God”, “death”, “transgression”, “indeterminacy”, or “transcendence”?

Let’s start with God.

• The state of awe, is, in the first place, produced when the existing schema of the mind is overwhelmed—when an experience is “too large” for our existing cognitive structure to readily assimilate. The Grand Canyon is often brought up as a natural example: we come to the Grand Canyon with existing mental schemas for “canyon” and “river” and “desert”, yet somehow the experience of being there exceeds our schematics, throwing us into speechless awe, within which we are “at a loss for words” in the most literal possible sense—that which we are experiencing has exceed our language of identification, and thereby gone absent to it.

• This notion of excess/absence (relating to cognitive overwhelm/self-relating indeterminacy) is crucial in understanding the production of God. Remember, awe produces an indeterminacy which itself defies schematization—and indeterminacy is the suspension of particularity.

• Thus, when the ritualized are within the indeterminacy of awe, the stimuli (whatever it may be) may be “present”, but only in such excess that it has been made momentarily absent from particular designation.

• Put more bluntly, the state of ritual resists that mode of identification called language.

• The ritualized, thus within the state of indeterminacy, are thrown into resonance with whatever else is indeterminate. (Here we begin to get close to God)…

• It is a mathematical fact, for any who care about this sort of thing, that one indeterminacy is isomorphic or equivalent to any other. This is why, for instance, any subsection of the real numbers—no mater how small a slice (say, the space between the numbers 1 and 1.2)—is equivalent to the real number line taken as a whole. Similarly, the ritualized, tho particular and limited dividuals, are nevertheless equivalent, isomorphic, and resonant with the greatest of infinities.

• Thus in the state of ritual we are, within our own self-indeterminacy, self-immanent, in momentary resonance with “God”.

• “God” is thus experienced as the overwhelming uniformity that occurs when a multiplicity too large for its container (the human mind), nevertheless saturates the container.

• The state of ritual is likewise such a saturation, which floods the pre-existing schema of the ritualized.

2nd effect: Transgression.

• The self-relating indeterminacy just described, which causes temporal, spatial, and identity loss, is of course in direct conflict with the very apparatus which categorizes and preserves our experience of identity, time, and space—our minds. Thus the experience of ritual necessarily transgresses the phenomenological order (schema).

• This is why, for instance, not all “awe” is awesome. Much of it, in its sheer overwhelm, can feel awful.

• Tying ritual to transgression has a long and deep anthropological history, from Bataille to Girard. There is not a single serious philosopher or anthropologist I am aware of who disagrees with the necessity of this connection.

3rd effect: Transcendence.

• I want to be very clear here that I do NOT mean a transcendence into a “higher” form. Instead I mean the simple awareness that there exists experience beyond the definite, beyond on the finite. Awareness of the experience of the self as infinity.

• This infinity is not linearly sequential, and likewise we do not experience ascension in some sequential order or “towards” anything. In that sense there is no linear “growth” within the phenomenology of ritual. Rather it is the infinity of the exceeded self—the infinity of all things taken at once, amounting to the quality of self-absence.

• This quality of self-absence is, again, in its indeterminacy, isomorphic to “the nothingness of everything”, and Hegel would say, or God or Universe or Source or whatever else.

• Again (can’t stress this enough), this transcendence is experienced in place, as it were, and does NOT relate to a worldly ascension. No master race, no permanently ascended masters.

…

Lastly… Modernity’s Failure.

One of the great failures of modern culture is the suppression of the indeterminate state of ritual. In its failure to recognize the fundamental dialectic between determinate and indeterminate, society has produced a cult of the determinate—a cult of materialism—a cult which refuses to integrate indeterminacy, and rather labels the moment of indeterminacy “psychosis” or some aberration of regularity. But the truth is that true regularity is the swing between these two states, which may be generally categorized as ritual time and traditional time.

For the real natural order of things is the movement between chaos and order, oneness and many-ness, unity and division.

It is the job of any sane society to account for this oscillation, and instead of trying to suppress one end or the other, accommodate for both.

Cheers,

Ebert