RITE opens up inspiring spaces for innovation and transformation – and thus for other possible futures.
When mythologist Joseph Campbell pointed out that reality consists of the myths we cannot see through, he explained decades in advance why the climate transition today struggles to gain momentum.
This phenomenon can be understood with the climate crisis as an example: Everything points to the fact that the crisis has its roots in modernity’s conception of the world as something “outside” of us humans – something we can control and exploit. Based on this belief, modern institutions such as industrialism, consumerism, and others have caused the climate crisis and therefore cannot be expected to solve it. Thus, the societal transformation that many today recognize as necessary must be preceded by a profound cultural transformation, as we need access to ideas and ways of acting that are not available within the “inside” of the worldview of late modernity that our institutions maintain today.
Achieving such a cultural transformation is, of course, incredibly difficult, but relational interpersonal practices still hold the tools – including, not least, the arts, which still have the freedom to create situations and spaces where beliefs hidden in institutions and systems can be revealed.
Rites and rituals are social techniques with the capacity to both create new and maintain existing institutions. Therefore, RITE focuses on identifying and unveiling rituals that covertly uphold structures that limit our contemporary perceptions of both the present and the future. For the same reason, we study and practice how rituals can be used more consciously, not least by developing and testing new ones.
In summary, our methodology reveals how hidden ideology and habitual thinking manage to control behaviors and expectations. It also exposes a kind of “social interspaces”; action spaces where taken-for-granted truths can be renegotiated in interaction with concerned people and organizations; spaces where strategies no one could have anticipated beforehand can emerge and be cultivated.
Rationality is valued in our time above other, more complex human capacities such as intuition, discernment, and wonder.
Since the breakthrough of industrialism, this focus on reason has certainly led to an unfathomable expansion of technology and human reach – but at the cost of transforming society into a machine. A machine that now seems to be running amok.
The roots of this late-modern predicament can be traced back to Aristotle and Descartes, or rather to how categorical, dualistic, and dichotomous aspects of their thinking have, over centuries, been interpreted in ways that shaped the modern belief that everything “outside” human consciousness (nowadays even the body) is something “other.” Something we believe ourselves to have sovereign rights to name, control, own, and exploit—a dominion whose consequences the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has described as follows:
“Because we late-modern humans […] strive to make the world available, it always appears to us as a ‘point of aggression,’ or a series of aggression points—that is, as objects to be known, attained, conquered, controlled, or exploited. And precisely through this, ‘life’ – that which forms the experience of the living and of encounters, that which makes resonance possible – withdraws from us, which in turn leads to fear, frustration, anger, even despair, which then manifests in, among other things, impotent political aggression.”
Modernity’s sanctification of rationality has also led to the paradoxical result that we modern secular humans – without seeming to realize it – tend to both worship and submit to the very artifacts and systems we have created. And as slaves to these, we seem incapable of anything but continuing to produce and consume our way toward ecological, economic, political, and humanitarian catastrophe.
This is why it is urgent that we, as a society, release our fear and instead focus on cultivating practices that embrace change, complexity, and transformation.
But how?
Joseph Campbell’s observation that reality consists of the myths we are unable to see through, both explains and motivates why we at RITE employ conceptual strategies to uncover the myths and beliefs concealed behind what society collectively and unthinkingly holds to be true – or simply takes for granted. In other words, what lies behind what appears to be in our time.
Our methodology has varied over the years, but our strategies have always rested on a conceptual foundation, drawing inspiration primarily from various schools of Eastern European conceptual art from the 1970s. Time and again, we have been surprised by how effectively our conceptual frameworks function as tools for the kind of societal inquiries we specialize in.
Most strikingly, we are often astonished by how this tool manages to astonish ourselves – again and again exposing our own blind spots in relation to the very culture we are part of.
Lambros Malafouris, professor of cognitive and anthropological archaeology, may touch on an explanation for this uncanny capacity of concepts when he notes that intelligent use of material culture precedes intelligent thought and that the symbolic use of material culture can precede symbolic thinking. According to Malafouris, this observation leads to the hypothesis that the tool may, in fact, be more intelligent than its maker – and that, over time, it may reveal itself to possess a consciousness of its own.
Strengthened by our previous inquiries, we no longer fear inhabiting what we cannot easily grasp or articulate. Nor do we shy away from moving through indistinct realms, free from the paralyzing demands of efficiency, measurability, and immediate accessibility – spaces where there is ample time and space to search, to wander, and to get lost. Together.
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