At a club the other day I was waiting for a drink and scanning the scene around me when a though popped into my head.
Is partying a weird sublimation of ritual?
Slightly buzzed as I was, such momentary impressions can often lose their initial oomph once the night is done. A couple of days later, though, I still found myself thinking about this one, because once you go past the surface similarities like the drugs and the music a kinship between ritual practice and the party scene becomes increasingly evident. Not unlike the ongoing resurgence of fundamentally religious belief in the progressive left—what many have called the Great Awokening—the party scene is a modern incarnation for a primordial impulse.
But it’s not just any old party. Those early college functions where you’d hang out in piss-stained couches gulping down cheap beer is not what I mean. Instead picture those nights where everything seems to fall into place and the vibes are just right. You know what I’m talking about. Those nights where you seem to magically shed all your burdens and truly manage to cut loose – where the morning after whatever moronic thing you did or how shitty you might feel is of little concern. You wake up and feel oddly revitalized—cathartic even.
You might not realize it but what you’ve experienced is the momentary suppression of your sense of self and the accompanying feelings of rapture, transport, and suggestibility this experience can produce – also quite common in ritual but with the important caveat that, in the latter, these effects are the means rather than the ends.
While our pre-modern ritual forms exert a stabilizing function in group dynamics via the promotion of solidarity and the instantiation of the group’s belief system, the ritualistic energy in the party scene seems a far more base expression. Wanting to feel released from our weighty sense of self, grown ever more pronounced in the modern scholastic-industrial consciousness, we now crave the feeling of transport and the opportunity to channel what me might call, for lack of a better word, our ambivalent human energies. In other words, we have kept the means but largely discarded the ends.
And though this would suggest that the vacuous nature of partying can only harness the ritual impulse in a function-less, disconnected, vaguely masturbatory sort of way, I suspect it’s the best we can do for now – its presuppositions and attitudes certainly better suited to modernity than those of pre-modern ritual.
Think of a first communion, a wedding, a bar-mitzvah, etc… Does anyone look enraptured? Does anyone look like they’re truly in the presence of the numen? Sure maybe someone gets teary-eyed but that’s about it. We go through the motions but cannot tap into the ambivalent human energies that come out in ritualization, and even modern, secular rituals like a college graduation are mostly impotent. Much too on the nose and self-aware for us moderns who cannot help but see ourselves as perceived by others, we are unable to alter our sense of self and the ritual fails to provide the spiritual and psychological payload.
Partying, on the other hand, is perfectly positioned to allow the individual to punch through into that other realm where they can both relieve themselves from the cumbersome aspects of the self and feel more attune with that life-affirming, ineffable aspect of being which now appears to reside wholly inside ourselves – yet another expression of that paradigmatic modernist effort of slotting ourselves into the place of God.
Unencumbered by transcendental belief and the actual function of the ritual (becoming man and wife, initiation into adolescence, etc…) the party-goer is free to journey inward and find communion with themselves. And yes there’s obviously some level of interaction but a great party is all about the individual and their attempts to get in the zone. In this sense, I’m often astounded at the strangely individualistic aesthetics of nightlife, like those raves where everyone seems to be in their closed-off world – vaguely reminiscent of the unmediated connection the shaman or mystic strives to achieve with the higher realm.
The channeling of energies and release from the self are key components but they’re not the only ritualistic aspects in the party scene, and so I turn to Catherine Bell’s definition of ritual as a “privileged action”, a status that applies to the party scene in more ways than one.
One of the most powerful aspects of nightlife is precisely how it allows us to engage in the ritualized overthrow of established norms. Consider the allowance for more brazenly egoistic, overindulgent, and sex-driven action… the heightened sense of hierarchy coupled with possibility of violence and danger… the attenuation of the cardboard-smile politeness so pervasive in commercial society: all factors that illustrate how partying has become ritualized through its “setting apart”. And as the increasing HR-ification of the world seeks to sterilize more and more of our private spaces, expect to see a compensatory overflow of Saturnalic energy burst forth into the party scene.
Downstream from our casual nihilism, the monumental significance which hedonism has acquired must also be taken into account. Now the law of land, the importance of material pleasure is such that even the highly-valued productive aspects of life cannot hope to compete as most people don’t really feel any sort of passion for what they do. Working for the weekend, our productive efforts are, in the end, motivated largely by the goal of hedonism, a simple reality which imbues the party scene with much outsized importance. Indeed, the depiction of the perfect afterlife as a sort of never-ending party where every desire can be infinitely sated is not uncommon.
There are also some—let’s say symbolic—connections which I can’t help but observe. Partying and reveling are not recent inventions by any means yet in the modern era they have acquired a synchronistic quality. As a permanent celebration of the present, the party scene perfectly encapsulates the cultural horizons of a society which seeks to ruthlessly sever its links to the past and can only conceive of the future through a heady brew of naive optimism and vaguely defined ‘progress’. A globalized ritual for a globalized world where, in the search for fleeting, immanent sensations, we feel ourselves elevated. But then, once the party is over, nothing… Like endless black after death.
It’s important to not get too hung up on labels and definitions. We must see past the forms to what lies beneath. Pro-sports, political rallies, the party scene… these are the living rituals. Remember: the desire for altered states of consciousness, religiosity and ritualism, violence and Eros, these things cannot be suppressed or destroyed, they can only well up into new forms.
In the end what interests me here is the resurgence of the old in the new, the spiraling permutations of culture and human nature, the integration of wholly new domains. What do these kaleidoscopic transformations mean? And what do they say about us and our time?