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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 primarily 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 communitybuilding 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 Soeffner, 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 example, 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 formal 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, authoritarian 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., Suhrkamp, 1988, 519-546; Hans-Georg Soeffner: Gesellschaft ohne Baldachin. Über die Labilität von Ordnungskonstruktionen, Weilerswist, Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2000. + 31 +
