ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on three examples taken from everyday aesthetics: a multitudinous master class of yoga attracts thousands of young women in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor; a crowd applauds at the funeral of a famous university professor; and visitors line up for hours to walk on Christo’s installation The Floating Piers. If analyzed through semiotics, all these apparently different phenomena reveal a common thread: The demise of embodied rituals has left digital societies with an inextinguishable thirst for communitarian transcendence. The post-religious ways of achieving transcendence, though, taking shape in the empty frameworks of past religious “semiospheres”, are constantly in danger of being hijacked by the marketing discourse of post-capitalism, which transforms them into as many occasions for surreptitious spiritual alienation.
