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POETIC RITUALITY AND TRANSCULTURALITY
1hey are mostly regarded as practices of pre-modern, “primitive” cultures,
which, at best, still have legitimacy in religious or traditional contexts. As pri¬
marily collective social practices that affirm community, rituals seem hardly
compatible with a modern pluralistic and democratic society, which focuses
on the autonomy of the individual. But is this really so? Did the questions of
cultural identity and belonging, and the need for collective cultural practices
to assure community, simply disappear? Based on a broad concept of ritual
and an ambivalent understanding of modernity, recent research on rituals
has fundamentally differentiated our prejudices toward those community¬
building cultural practices. Hans-Georg Soeffner even ascribed a “ritualistic
anti-ritualism” to the protest movements of the 1960s and 1980s.* Modern
industrial societies also have their rituals, one could say, according to Soef¬
fner, but they do not necessarily admit their rituality to themselves. Thus, in
public discourse, mass performances and political performances are labeled
as “events,” “festivals,” or “happenings.” The terms emphasize the supposed
freedom, voluntariness, and informality of these performances. But neither
are rituals exclusively formal and rigid; nor are modern cultural performances
always open and arbitrary. Rather, it is questionable whether symbolic cultural
practices are properly described by this new language and whether their social
commitment is not somewhat concealed by it.
However, it must be remembered that criticism of rituals is as old as rituals
themselves. As public, symbolic, cultural performances, with which a social
group or society stages its self-image and its central, ‘most sacred’ values,
rituals have always been and still are viewed and questioned critically. Yet, a
culture seemingly cannot abandon its ritual forms entirely but rather creates
new ones. In the course of the Enlightenment’s critique of religion, for exam¬
ple, religious rituals came under particular scrutiny, while the theatricality
and rituality of political performances during the French Revolution cannot
be denied (as Georg Biichner already demonstrated impressively in his play
Dantons Tod). Such a discrepancy is also evident, albeit in a different way, in
Brecht’s play — and this is precisely what this paper will argue.
Therefore, a general negative understanding of rituals as being merely for¬
mal and instrumental is all too narrow. This pejorative notion also takes into
account that rituals have a suggestive effect due to their emotional, captivating
character and are, therefore, above all, manipulative. But this is not necessarily
the case. Rituals are manifold. Not all of them are heteronomous, authoritar¬
ian practices, and they do not only occur in pre-modern times or totalitarian
systems. Rituals can be both strictly regulated and structured, as well as being
* Hans-Georg Soeffner: Rituale des Antiritualismus — Materialien fiir Außeralltägliches, in H.
U. Gumbrecht - K.L. Pfeiffer (eds.): Materialität der Kommunikation, Frankfurt a. M., Suhr¬
kamp, 1988, 519-546; Hans-Georg Soeffner: Gesellschaft ohne Baldachin. Über die Labilität
von Ordnungskonstruktionen, Weilerswist, Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2000.
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