#I need to dig that Geczy quote up again and add it to the collection

[hunxi-after-hours]

collecting some of the thoughts in The Disappearance of Rituals on performance, communication, and authenticity:

Chapter 1: "The Compulsion of Production"

"Digital communication is increasingly developing into communication without community. The neoliberal regime encourages communication without community by isolating everyone as the producer of him- or herself. Producing is derived from the Latin verb producere, meaning presenting or making visible. Like the French produire it still carries the meaning of presenting. Se produire means 'to play to the gallery'. The colloquial German expression sich produzieren probably has the same etymology. Today, we are constantly and compulsively playing to the gallery. This is especially the case, for instance, on social media: the social is coming to be completely subordinated in order to garner more attention. The compulsion of self-production leads to a crisis of community. The so-called 'community' that is today invoked everywhere is an atrophied community, perhaps even a kind of commodified and consumerized community. It lacks the symbolic power to bind people together" (13).

Chapter 2: "The Compulsion of Authenticity"

"The society of authenticity is a performance society. All members perform themselves. All produce themselves. Everyone pays homage to the cult of the self, the worship of the self in which everyone is his or her own priest" (16).

"Taylor's moral justification of authenticity ignores that subtle process, within the neoliberal regime, by which ideas of freedom and self-realization are transformed into vehicles for more efficient exploitation. The neoliberal regime exploits morality. Once it is able to present itself as freedom, domination becomes complete. Authenticity is a neoliberal form of production. You exploit yourself voluntarily in the belief that you are realizing yourself. In the cult of authenticity, the neoliberal regime appropriates the person himself and turns him into a highly efficient site of production" (18).

"With the rise of the cult of authenticity, tattoos have also become fashionable again. Within a ritual context, they symbolize the alliance between individual and community. In the nineteenth century, when tattoos were very popular, especially among the upper classes, the body was still a surface onto which yearnings and dreams were projected. Today, tattoos lack any symbolic power. All they do is point to the uniqueness of the bearer. The body is neither a ritual stage nor a surface of projection; rather, it is an advertising space. The neoliberal hell of the same is populated with tattooed clones" (20).

"The culture of authenticity goes hand in hand with the distrust of ritualized forms of interaction. Only spontaneous emotion, that is, a subjective state, is authentic. Behaviour that has been formed in some way is denigrated as inauthentic or superficial. In the society of authenticity, actions are guided internally, motivated psychologically, whereas in ritual societies actions are determined by externalized forms of interaction. Rituals make the world objective; they mediate our relation to the world. The compulsion of authenticity, by contrast, makes everything subjective, thereby intensifying narcissistic tendencies" (23).