ritual loss from phones to the club
On my phone today, instagram reels spat out countless clips about morning rituals
About morning routines
About daily 5-9 am activities before your 9-5 job
Swathes of soft pallets and clean homes. Pastel tracksuits and matcha lattes in thick ceramic mugs.
Incense smoke floating above an expensive yoga mat.
Candle-lit bubblebaths and a top-ten best-selling novel.
Aesthetics primed, posed, ready for action. Bit-size representations of fictitious lives. Thumbs burning, we swipe again.
This time we see someone waking up in their fluffy feather duvet. When did they get up to put their phones on a tripod to capture this moment? Was it the night before? I chuckle as I imagine the moment beyond the frame, the pretend waking up, just for an audience they do not know. How many takes was it for the perfect shot?
In a fractured world, we crave depth. We are tired explorers wading through an overly industrialised landscape that has disconnected us from each other, and the earth. We seek out the edges of experience, sometimes by dancing, sometimes by moving. Sometimes by consuming. Often by scrolling.
In a world that suppresses our pleasure and then sells it back to us; a world that demands us to be bounded, demarcated individuals, separate from others, we find pockets of belonging, connection, hope and possibilities that soften our separateness. Some of us search for connections in clubs which are places to let loose and lose oneself in the dance. Some of us search for it in the algorithmic devices in our pockets. We don’t always find it in either.
This trend of documenting and sharing day-to-day routines, turning the mundane into aesthetic content, neatly squeezed around the workplace hours of 9-5, is framed as lives to aspire to in their beauty. Perhaps they are an attempt to imbue the drudgery of daily life under capitalism with a bit of magic and mystique. To make it sexy. Sellable. Consumable. Desirable. This internet, specifically social media, is no longer a place for the fantastical or salacious, or genuine connection with like-minded people. It is designed for addiction. What Gioia calls dopamine culture, otherwise known as the attention economy, is dominated by corporations that want us to spend most of our waking lives swiping on the internet, trolling passively through a world mediated by digital distraction. And we have fallen right into that honey trap. We are so far down into it that the doomscroll has replaced ritual. When we exploit possible sites of personal and daily ritual for content, we empty it, leaving it but a ghost of its potential. Secular urban culture is devoid of ritual, and the remnants of our cries for depth are evident in these internet trends.
The first of Gioia’s thirteen observations on ritual is that “the smartphone cannot be a ritualistic object.” He quotes philosopher Byung-Chul Han to point out that the smartphone embodies restlessness: “It lacks the very self-sameness that stabilizes life […] The restlessness inherent in the apparatus makes it a non-thing.”
“So we shouldn’t be surprised when people get upset at smartphone use in ritualistic settings—concert halls, movie theatres, shrines, etc. They instinctively feel that the phone is the enemy of ritual.”
As a nightlife writer, I think about this in relation to the club experience, specifically discussions about phones on the dancefloor. Last year, the non-consensual filming and posting of a clubber at London club Fabric sparked outrage—both at the fact that someone violated Fabric’s no-phone policy and vitriol towards the person being filmed, mocking him and rendering the previously semi-private dancefloor unsafe. Anyone could be captured and made a fool of for the screen-based world’s prying eyes.
Beyond this viral moment, there has always been a conversation about smartphones in clubs. Some feel their presence prevents people from really letting loose, whereas others argue the militant rules against phones are a bit overkill and infringe on the supposed personal freedom of the dancefloor.
Deep down inside, many party stalwarts see the collective dance and music found in clubs as a deeply ritualistic activity. It’s why we keep coming back. Perhaps this is why many feel instinctively, as Gioia suggests, that phones feel wrong here. On the flip side, our need to market and sell certain parties has meant that images and photography circulating viral DJ moments are beneficial to the branding exercise many promoters are expected to partake in.
“The pervading feeling that we were meant to photograph, and be photographed, is ultimately what drove home that we were in the dead space of a museum - a place where culture is preserved for the public to gawk at, rather than actively created” - The Museumification of Techno by Michelle Lhooq
I am very wary and resistant to writing, popular imagination and scholarship that presents clubbing as solely utopian, free, loving and progressive. Much of my research emerged out of both, a want to recognise my deep need for the rituals of clubbing, dance and music with other sweaty bodies, and a stringent frustration with the wealth of uncritical romanticised perspectives that resemble the “absurd ramblings of neo-hippie rave culture” (Hesmondalgh, 1997) that portray DJs as ‘shamans’ and audiences as ‘tribes’. Not only are there problems with academics appropriating indigenous terminology and applying it to mostly White entertainment industries, but these accounts also misread what might be a case of people earning a living from culture rather than some new religious movement. Additionally, in popular culture and nightlife alike, the overuse of liberatory and radical language applied to commercial urban clubs feels like a shallow smokescreen, masking the exploitative practices at the heart of the industry. It imbues contemporary club cultures with a radicality it simply will not live up to when we consider, much like with social media, who actually owns these spaces and whose interests they prioritise.
Far from a transcendent utopia, clubbing in its current articulations as a hyper-capitalist sped-up industry is ritual decontextualised, much like ritual exploited as content in the aestheticising of daily routine. Another of Gioia’s observations is that “When deprived of rituals, people are driven to create their own [...] In an overly digitized world, people embrace with intensity the few remaining ritualistic activities available to them. Halloween gets turned into something extravagant—not just for children anymore, but adults too. The same is true of Valentine’s Day or Mardi Gras and other ritualized occasions. They are pushed to extremes because people have so few embodied rituals in the digital age. Many of these originated as religious observances, but are more vehemently pursued by those engulfed in secular online culture—because they need this release the most.”
This intensity is tangible in the club. Jaws so far unhinged, a face barely resembles a face, seedy men and aggressive security, crowds disassociated and passive - grotesque at its worse, a hollow distortion of embodied communing at its best. Some of the most lost souls find themselves in the club, week after week, pushing beyond their limits, searching for depth, craving meaning or escape from life. We push it to extremes because of how much we yearn for this release - and yet when we seek it, we are bombarded with high entrance costs, confronted with a pat down from a rough security guard, shuffled into an overcrowded dancefloor with no break space save the sardine-packed smoking area. We exhaust our bodies staying out all night in the hopes of a glimpse of connection, maybe even transcendence. On top of that those who make these spaces happen know how unscrupulous this work is. As Ed Gillet asks, “What good is a communal dancefloor if those who sustain it are exploited?” Nope, no utopia here.
For some, clubbing is one of the few places of embodied collective rituals around dance and music. And yet, they are designed for commercial priorities, not ritualistic or collective activity. The overreliance on commercial and commodified nightlife as one of the few places for this type of need does a disservice to the kinds of ritual communing beyond capitalism we really crave.
If we want to honour our desire and need for collective rituals, perhaps we need cathedral thinking. Sarah Thankam Mathews brings us to literal cathedrals in the European Middle Ages to describe a way of finding our way back to communal ritual. Cathedrals were places for worship, rituals, celebrations, education, and governance, acting as social centres akin to city halls. “Cathedral thinking is one strategy [...] to counter the pathological, death-dealing capitalist short-termism that infects the present.” Cathedral thinking involves labour and planning over a long time, participation, and visioning to have an impact over decades, centuries, and generations. It is profoundly slow compared to the sped-up experiences of life through our phones in the club.
Cathedrals may be one metaphor, but for those of us who prefer to dream beyond institutional frames, the world outside offers stunning stories of gathering, moving, and gyrating out of the barriers of time and space. Butterflies perform aerial dances simply for the sheer joy of it, while leopard slugs gorgeously entwine themselves around each other and slide down a mucus rope off a tree branch in mating rituals. When the world outside looks like that surely we can do better than naming yet another East London club after whatever meaningless unit number the building happens to be.
We deserve larger collective rituals beyond the constraints of a commercial club or social media content. What would our party rituals look like if not dictated by licensing laws, property developers or the alcohol industry? Or our personal daily rituals not informed by their content-led aestheticisation and addiction-design? Save your burning thumbs from yet another swipe.
We deserve to party beyond clubs. We need collective, hedonistic rituals that truly ground and nourish us. Experiences that root us into the world, not disconnect us. There is depth and magic to be found if we make space for it.
To more unplugged, offline dreamscrolling, daydreaming and partying.