Hyperion - Nietzsche Circle

189 Hyperion—Master of Ceremonies
Alain Badiou, in Five Lessons on Wagner, argues that whatever else
modernism may involve, it involves artistic experiments to see “whether a
modern ceremony is possible.” 1 By this, Badiou means whether a community’s
mode of self-representation, without transcendence, can be successful,
distinct from religion:
“
Why? Because a ceremony can be said to be a collectivity’s
or even a community’s mode of self-representation, but
transcendence is not an essential condition of it [in modernity].
In fact, we could say that the question posed [by modernism]
is whether a ceremony without transcendence is possible . . .
[W]hat is a ceremony without transcendence, a ceremony that
is therefore not a means to something but the thing itself, the
representation of the community in and of itself? (146).
Badiou never quite answers his question. But from what he does say I take
“ceremony” to be the act of forming a field in which subjects-in-the making can
repeatedly encounter and recognize one another as such. The stories and
behaviors engaged in within the performative field, from symbolic and material
exchanges and gift-giving, to dialogue or debate, to love-making, etc. arise
from the structured field of ceremony. They function as explicit readings (like
myths, legends, and folk tales) or implicit ones (like behaviors and passions),
readings of the ceremonial field itself and the roles that are performed in it.
We can think of ceremony then as the primordial basis for contemporaneous
or later forms of representational and expressive media, such as celebrations,
liturgy, music and dance, theater, literature, cinema, and so on. Purdy, like
post-romantic writers generally, re-imagines this primordial scene of ceremony
to create his fictional experiments, for the reason Badiou adduces, so that a
community may come into being via its repeatedly performed self-recognitions.
Badiou has always accepted the idea that modernity is distinguished from
traditional culture primarily by its lack of any comprehensive, generally
acceptable world of the kind that religion, myth, and their ritual practices have
made possible. Logics of Worlds, in its title and opening arguments, repeats
this view. 2 Whether this is historically so for all cultures or even for western
culture is not an issue for me here. Instead, I take it to be so for Purdy and