The Labyrinth, Postmodernity and Ritual

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Use of Popular Culture and the Everyday

'Matter out of place' is the title of one of the chapters in 'Trickster Makes This World'. In it Lewis Hyde discuses the significance of dirt in many of the trickster myths. He draws on the work of Mary Douglas who describes dirt as matter out of place. Any system orders the world in such a way as to designate some things that don't fit into the order as dirt - 'Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements'.

So for example shoes are not dirty in themselves, but they are on the dining table, and food is not dirty but it is on clothing. Hyde suggests that 'if dirt is a by-product of the creation of order then a fight about dirt is a fight about how we have shaped our world'. This is why trickster is always playing with dirt.

When the Sony Walkman first appeared it disturbed the boundaries between private and public worlds. It was 'out of place' in the symbolic ordering, or classificatory system of things. 'It offended people's ideas about what sort of activities belonged where'. The meaning of the Sony Walkman in this respect was not something essential to the Walkman itself but 'a product of how that object is socially constructed through classification, language and representation'. And further its meaning was in relation to other objects within the classificatory system and how it was different.

Now today, the Walkman is much more an accepted part of everyday life, and perhaps the panic has moved on to other new technologies like the Internet or mobile phone. The strategic use of popular culture and the everyday in the Labyrinth is matter out of place, particularly because of its location in St Paul's. The prevalent view of culture in church still seems to be a high/low distinction. It has reified cultural forms located in the past. Putting on a Discman to listen to music that you'd most likely hear in a club in the early hours of the morning is transgressing boundaries. It's not what you expect in a cathedral.

In a consumer culture people use the cultural resources available to them to make meaning. For large numbers of people the resources of popular culture are what they use to construct identity and position themselves in relation to others, to develop some notion of authenticity.

One use made of popular music in this way is to mark out space - 'forms of popular music and their stylistic innovations are one of the key ways in which local spaces can be appropriated and made habitable'. So the use of the type of music in the Labyrinth on Discmans is in this way a very strategic marking out of habitable space.

At the tenth station, 'Others', the walker is greeted by a laptop computer with a screen of virtual candles. In the meditation they are encouraged to 'light' a candle by clicking on the wick with the mouse and then to pray for someone. The candles are from the Internet site www.embody.co.uk designed for an 'online' spiritual experience of prayer. The choice to use virtual candles rather than real ones is strategic. The surprising thing is that rather than being naff, they do evoke a sense of sacred space, and the ritual seems to work with the technology, at least for a large proportion of participants. They function somewhat like an 'icon of the present', representing the mystery of the faith in the language of the here and now.

The use of popular culture, indeed the whole approach to inculturation, is under girded by a theology of the incarnation - 'The incarnation gives us the model of relevance. God shows up on our turf speaking our language so that we might understand'. The CDs of music and meditation were available for sale in the cathedral shop. Participants can thus reproduce the experience of the candles and pray at home on their own computer. In this way the ritual connects back into the everyday.