Little Gestures of Disappearance: Interpassivity and the Theory of Ritual

By Robert Pfaller

Finished: 12/12/16

Link to full article: http://media.wix.com/ugd/2dc745_d42982ca6b454240b2e50b13891ded8a.pdf

Summary:

 the concept of interpassivity is presented as a theoretical tool for understanding the ritual.

For ritual theory, the concept of interpassivity can serve to clarify the idea that ritual came before myth;

Interpassivity Versus Interactivity

the concept of interpassivity is opposed to that of interactivity. Interactivity in the arts means that observers must not only indulge in observation ("passivity"(2)), but also have to contribute creative "activity" for the completion of the artwork.

What could be the inverse structure of that? ... The artwork would be an artwork that observes itself. An example given by Slavoj Zizek seemed to perfectly exemplify this construction: “[...] let us remind ourselves of a phenomenon quite usual in popular television shows or serials: 'canned laughter'.”

****   Zizek had drawn from this example the conclusion that allegedly "subjective", "interior" entities such as feelings, emotions, thoughts, convictions etc. can have an "objective", "exterior" existence. In the context of art theory, this is an example of an artwork that observes itself: an interpassive artwork.

 Interpassivity in this case consists in delegated amusement.

Delegating One's Pleasure

 For example, there are people who use their video recorders in an interpassive way: when they find out that an interesting program is coming up on TV, they carefully program their recorders in order to record it. Then they feel relaxed and go out to meet some friends while the program is shown. Later they come home, they check whether everything has been recorded, and then, with deep satisfaction, they put the tape on a shelf without ever watching it. It is as if the machine had watched the program instead of the observers, vicariously.

*********   Interpassivity is delegated "passivity" - in the sense of delegated pleasure, or delegated consumption. Interpassive people are those who want to delegate their pleasures or their consumptions.

 the question of the method of interpassivity, turned out to be quite difficult and intriguing. It was here that we discovered the rituals of interpassivity.

The Rituals of Interpassivity

another example can be helpful. One may be familiar with the interpassive behavior of some intellectuals in libraries: these intellectuals find an interesting book, rush to the Xerox machine, copy some hundred pages, and then they give the book back and go home with a deep sense of satisfaction - as if the machine had already read the text in their place.

****  Figurativeness, and the substitution of a real act (like reading) by a figurative representation of it (like photocopying), is characteristic of ritual action. Interpassivity consists in ritual acts.

The interpassive person and her medium are thus not connected by tubes, but by a representation. The interpassive person delegates her pleasure to a medium by ritually causing this medium to perform a figurative representation of consumption.

A Magic of the Civilized

The ritual figurativeness that we have encountered within interpassivity is especially characteristic of magic action, where, as Sigmund Freud remarked, a symbol assumes the full value of the symbolized

Just as, for the so-called "savage", an act of voodoo may replace a real act of murder, for the intellectual, an act of interpassivity may replace a real act of intellectual work. Interpassivity can therefore quite aptly be called a magic of the civilized.

********  The only difference between the "savage" and our "civilized" intellectual consists in the fact that only the savage is aware of the fact that he is practising magic. The civilized, on the contrary, is not. What distinguishes the civilized from the savage is therefore not the fact that only the savage were performing magic acts, but - since both are performing them - the fact that only the savage is aware of it. Being civilized therefore seems to imply a lack of awareness of what one is really doing.

Devoid of any idea but still caught up in illusion

the act of photocopying in all its astonishing figurativeness stages an illusion - the illusion of reading. And of course, the photocopying intellectuals do not succumb to this illusion.

This bears out the fact that, devoid of any idea, one can still be caught up within an illusion. The kind of illusion we are facing here is therefore completely different from the structure of illusions as analyzed by philosophical tradition - where you have, for example, the image of a hand before your eyes, but you do not know if there really is a hand. In this Cartesian type of illusion you are aware of the image but uncertain about its truth-value. Yet in the illusion we are dealing with here, exactly the opposite is the case: you are completely certain about the image's truth value (the machine cannot read for you), but unaware of the image (which structures the situation you are in). "For they know not what they believe"--this would be, in biblical terms, the formula for the civilized position towards the illusion at work in interpassivity.

Illusions Without a Subject

However, as soon as one would make the illusion at work in the situation explicit ("Hey, you are acting as if..."), the civilized would immediately be able to recognize the illusion as an illusion, just as well as the savage does. For neither even think that representations of killing or reading were the same as killing or reading. They do not believe in the equivalence between the symbol and the symbolized.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein has pointed out, this lack of belief is a fundamental condition for practicing magic. Those who practice magic always clearly distinguish these magic practices from real, technical measures and they distinguish between situations in which they apply the ones or the others.(5) Magic thus presupposes that the magician does not take a symbolic act for real.

****  (Note: Interesting)   If, for example, I am at a soccer game and shout to a player who is too busy or too far away to hear me, I may believe in an illusion of communication, but I am not practicing magic. If, on the contrary, at home I shout to a soccer player shown on television, I do not at all believe that he could hear me, but I do practice magic. The recognition of the purely symbolic character of the magic practices is indicated by the shamefulness with which they are usually performed. This symbolic dimension also gets designated by their practitioners-strangely--through remarks like "this does not mean anything".

interpassivity therefore has a very interesting and particular kind of ownership: it is in a way nobody's illusion, an anonymous illusion, an illusion without a subject.

 The possibility of delegated reading does not depend on the presence of a believer, since it is not just a subjective illusion: delegation works for the intellectuals not because they thought that the machine could read for them; the machine reads for them because somebody else, an anonymous naive observer, could have thought that.(8) In this sense, the anonymous illusion is an "objective" illusion.

The Interpassivity of Rituals

****  With the help of an objective, anonymous illusion we can interpassively delegate all our pleasure.

 an anonymous other, not we - believes, then, in the equivalence and thinks that we were enjoying; and this anonymous belief in our enjoyment brings about the deep satisfaction that we experience when we never watch our VRC tapes.

This structure also applies for religious belief. Religious belief, too, can become subject to interpassive practice. Not we have to believe, then, ourselves (and consume, as it were, the "comforts of religion"), but only some anonymous other has to be made believe that we believed. Thanks to an anonymous illusion we are therefore able to derive a lot of satisfaction from not believing in our own religion.

The anonymous belief, which allows us not to believe, is being established through performing the ritual.

****  Therefore we can say that there exists a profound interpassivity of the ritual as such. Through rituals, individuals delegate their religious beliefs to interpassive media. Not only is interpassivity based on ritual, but also the ritual itself is based on interpassivity.

Disappearance becomes possible by performing a ritual, i.e. by offering a spectacle designed for an objective, anonymous belief. The objective belief, which is at work in ritual, renders superfluous the "subjective", personal belief of the religious believer. When objective belief is there (thanks to a ritual medium), the religious subject can go away.

Religion and Religious Hostility Against Ritual

The fact that religious rituals do have this interpassive dimension, allowing the believers to keep a distance from their religious belief, is very well illustrated by the history of religions. It is reflected in a constant hostility of the religions against their own rituals.

 As Sigmund Freud has noted, the history of every religion is characterized by constant returning "leaps of reform" (12) - by attempts to reduce the observance of allegedly "meaningless" rituals and to replace them by conscious attention to meaning. The use of ritual machinery and of specialists (priests) becomes more and more reduced in religious ideology

 An increasing imperative of "Do it yourself" characterizes the history of religion. The exteriority of ritual is thus being transformed into the interiority of religious consciousness, as it can be seen for example in the "leap" that led, in Christian religion, from Catholicism to Protestantism.

****  When religions abandon a good part of their own rituals, they try to destroy the interpassivity inherent in these rituals.

Anonymous, objective belief is being erased in order to establish subjective faith.

this process has its limits: ritual can never be completely abandoned; an "invisible religion", as conceived by David Hume, is not possible (or rather, it is not a religion anymore).(14) The religious superstructure of subjectivated faith can never completely replace its basis, the anonymous, objective belief embodied in ritual.

Civilized Blindness

Not the existence of objective belief can be abandoned, but its visibility. This is the reason why civilized people, as opposed to "savages", are unable to recognize that they are practicing magic.

the blindness for objective belief also implies an unawareness of one's own pleasure. "Civilized" cultures, blind to their magic dimensions, are therefore unable to consciously enjoy their pleasures.

...spending huge amounts of government money on campaigns to prevent young people from having pre-marital sex, demonizing and disenfranchising simple pleasures like drinking and smoking etc. are just the most striking examples of this growing ascetism. A general tendency towards a "culture of complaint"(16) gives proof to the fact that the so-called "civilized" are increasingly unable to experience their own pleasure as a pleasure.

Ritualism without Primitivism

What the key thesis of the "ritualists" about the "precedence of ritual" really says is that objective belief ("ritual") comes before subjective faith ("myth"). This implies that objective belief can stand alone, without being covered up by subjectivations, which render pleasure invisible and thus unpleasant. We have to add that this not only goes for so-called primitive societies

Objective, "interpassive" belief can stand for itself. And such an organization of the social imaginary is not a mark of primitive societies, but rather a mark of culture.

Stating that ritual comes before myth means that also high cultures are able to avoid the barbarism of succumbing to ascetic ideals.