Rituals are temporal techniques for housing oneself. They turn being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They are to time what…
Rituals are temporal techniques for housing oneself. They turn being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They are to time what things are to space. They stabilize life by structuring time. They are time architectures. They thereby make time inhabitable; they even make time something that may be entered, like a house. Today, time lacks a solid structure. It is not a house but a wild torrent. There is nothing that gives it stability. Time that rushes off is not inhabitable.
Rituals, like things close to our hearts, are the calm centres of life; they stabilize it. They are characterized by repetition. The compulsion of production and consumption eliminates repetition. It develops a compulsion of the new. Information cannot be repeated. As it is relevant only fleetingly, it reduces duration. It generates a compulsion for even new attractions. Things close to our hearts fo not have attraction. They are therefore repeatable.
Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. Cambridge: Polity Press.