Page 18 [18]
OCR
WOLFGANG BRAUNGART constrained within the field of religion either in the narrower sense of ritualistic form, or in the broader sense of “religioid” civil religion. This is particularly true for the individualistic modern age, which is skeptical of rituals. The “fatigued self” (Alain Ehrenberg) is always a menace to the individual in our times. It appears that this “fatigued self” even encourages the desire for sensory experience via sequences of ritual acts insofar as the subject finds that these acts are pre-existing within culture. The subject can confide in them; it does not have to invent them anew and give them meaning. Events such as the significant number of intellectual conversions to Catholicism, a strictly ritualised faith, from the Romantic period to the present, may even be explained by this. The age of Enlightenment placed its trust in the communicative rationality common to all people, which fundamentally enabled them to handle their tasks and conflicts themselves, and yet, despite this, it is the century of secret associations and societies with their own ritual practices of social integration (e.g., the rituals of the Freemasons). Even Protestantism, a religion which is skeptical of rituals, is currently discovering the liberating power that the ritual can offer. Freedom and self-determination, on the one hand, and the desire to belong, on the other: these are two sides of the same coin. Indeed, rituals can change and bring themselves into line with new historical expectations of their function. They are, nevertheless, conservatively persistent; they cannot subjugate themselves to the pressure to outdo one another within the “experience society” [Erlebnisgesellschaft] (cf. Gerhard Schulze) without also doing away with themselves. This is also highly relevant to the aesthetic of originality and one-upmanship that characterises the modern age. The renouveau catholique arose from modern French intellectual and aesthetic culture. This example, in particular, demonstrates that the conservatism of the ritual has its own place within a society’s dynamics, and that this conservatism can even contribute to cultural dynamisation.* RITUAL AND LITERATURE: THESIS A ritual is performative; it is an experience and an event that carries sense and meaning, evidence and significance. This applies both to active involvement in a ritual and the observation of a ritual: each of which is participatory. The meaning of the occurrences within a religious ritual must be learnt, and must, therefore, be revealed. It is not a matter of discourse but of aesthetic experience. One can only ever experience something. Even those following the * Burckhard Dücker: Rituale: Formen — Funktionen — Geschichte, Stuttgart/Weimar, Metzler, 2007, 182. +16 +
