The Ceremony of the World

Definition

The ceremony of the world is Baudrillard's name, in the closing chapter of Fatal Strategies (1983), for the order of pure rule — a world constituted not by meaning, production, or chance, but by the regulated, initiatory unfolding of signs. "In the order of highly conventional and perfectly arranged connections, in the order of connections devoid of the greatest necessity, ceremony is the equivalent of fatality." Its core principle: "The secret is made up of the annihilation of causes and the burial of ends in the organized order of appearances alone: the Rule of Appearances and Disappearances." The ceremony is "ecstatic… has no meaning, it has only esoteric rule. It has no end, since it is initiatory." Its exemplars are the Laws of Manu ("Every detail of existence… is minutely ritualized"), the Peking Opera ("a staging of the dual flinity of bodies, actions, voices and movements"), and the game: "There is nothing less theatrical than a passion for gambling." The ceremony is discrimination rather than difference: "Not difference, which is always meaningful, but discrimination, which is the truly rigorous form of labeling, and the equivalent to predestination in time." It is a tactile regime ("Two bodies that bump and collide are obscene and impure"), and theory itself is its analogue: "both are violent; both are produced to prevent things and concepts from touching indiscriminately." The concept supplies Baudrillard's positive alternative to chance and meaning — the world as a game whose rule must be mastered rather than decoded. See appearance-and-disappearance, destiny, the-secret, reversibility, objective-irony.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "ceremony is the equivalent of fatality"; "the Rule of Appearances and Disappearances"; "The process that regulates events… on the basis of the occurrence of a pure sign" (1983).
• Claude Lévi-Strauss — la pensée sauvage and the symbolic order: "It is we who… subjectivize, psychologize, and impose everywhere an occult subjectivity."
• Walter Benjamin — the "ceremonial aura" loss that Baudrillard reads in the contrast between Western and Oriental crowds.
• Not yet paged: the Laws of Manu, the Peking Opera, the Duke of Palagonia, Chuang-Tzu — the texts and figures of the ceremony.

Related Concepts

• Appearance and Disappearance — the cycle ceremony regulates.
• Destiny — "ceremony was the image of destiny."
• The Secret — ceremony preserves the secret and the rule.
• Reversibility — "all ceremonies are… violent in their unfolding, but this violence is that of the reversibility of the rule."
• Objective Irony — the game's objective irony (the Witz as "the dénouement of language").

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "The Ceremony of the World"; the Laws of Manu; the Peking Opera; dress vs. fashion; "Theory is just like ceremony."
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the pataphysics and the "game" register.
• The Apartment (Perec 1978/2006) — the wiki's kindred "rule of the game" at the scale of the everyday interior.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is the ceremony of the world a usable alternative to production, or an exoticism (Manu, Peking Opera, the casbah) that Baudrillard opposes to a modernity he has already declared finished? The wiki should mark the orientalism risk.
• The concept is explicitly anti-subjective and anti-desire: "Desire and chance are stricken from the ceremony." Can the wiki's interior/everyday materials (which centre atmosphere, care, homeliness) adopt it?
• Baudrillard says theory is "just like ceremony" — does that make his own text a ceremony? Is the book performatively rule-bound?