“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, June 8, 2013

Ritual and Grief

Rick Muller sent me this piece, as I said. It's interesting that consumerism and grief are intertwined here: well it is Harvard Business School! But it's an interesting, speculative conjunction. The idea is that rituals enhance consumption and help to process grief: they do something a little bit contrary then (one is enhancing, the other palliative). And grief as we know is the inability to "swallow" something.

Rituals are an aesthetic attunement to a thing. As such they fall into the closure/death part of my OOO theory of causality. Grief and eating are two moments in a continuous process. Rituals open me up to eating and help to close me down to grief. Rituals ease my sincerity in that they lubricate my interaction with another entity.

No comments: