Repeated ritual participation recasts uncertainty as tolerable certainty

Evidence

To recall Benedict Anderson’s prescient description, such rituals are the “diurnal regularities of the imagining life”—a ceremony that is “incessantly repeated … in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull” (1991, 36) of each participant. Algorithmically mediated rituals (like those characterizing the use of dating apps) have the capacity to produce certainty in intimate life because they change the very “terms in which uncertainty is understood” (Appadurai 2016, 86) among participating users. In so doing, they offer a retrospective stability to the inherently volatile conditions of online dating, costaging a repeated certainty alongside uncertainty—and hence recasting this uncertainty through the very agreement to participate in the ritual process. Scrolls and swipes are how we survive the wounds opened by the rite of passage into speculative communities. Yet, at the same time, this extension of temporality achieved through them also contains an element of enjoyment. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 234

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Ritualized rehydration of specimens becomes a contemplative act of homage — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 196