Against Surfing

Most English audiences have not yet heard of Byung-Chul Han. Erik Butler’s recent translations of The Transparency Society (2015) and The Burnout Society (2015) by Stanford University Press are promising. The Korean-born German philosopher and cultural theorist currently teaches at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. He is the author of sixteen books and has been translated into over a dozen languages. He looks at our current drives to performance and transparency and its organization by neoliberal market forces. In an era of multimedia screens and hypercommunication, Han speaks on behalf of the secret, of shadows and opacity, of the inaction of contemplation, the Other, and—perhaps his foremost concern—negativity. Especially today, negativity is seldom upheld as scrupulously and taken with such seriousness as Han takes it. This is perhaps his primary contribution to contemporary theory. For Han “the society of transparency manifests first and foremost as a society of positivity” (The Transparency Society, 1). Alongside our notions of optimization and efficiency comes an evacuation of depth, of nuance, and of lingering, and of all the beauty that emerges only with patience, he says. Han contrasts the cadence of narration to the unimpeded acceleration of information. Where narration is ritualistic and ceremonial, information is additive and productive. In contrast, he observes, “thresholds and transitions are zones of mystery, uncertainty, transformation, death, and fear, but also yearning, hope, and expectation. Their negativity constitutes the topology of passion” (32).As Han illustrates in The Transparency Society, our current society is one in which all alterity is lost, where the friction of difference is evacuated. Where pure information reigns, knowledge lacks all depth. “Compulsion for transparency flattens the human being itself, making it a functional element within a system” (2–3). Han shows that there is a sensitivity to human communication that transparency can know nothing of. He addresses what Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg could not yet see: with optimization and operationality comes a compulsion to accelerate, and to strip ourselves of all ambivalence and ambiguity, of all humanity. The society of hypercommunication and exhibition no longer has access to the cult value of its objects, he argues, or to ritual. It is barred from the society of transparency. The society of transparency is thus pornographic. Eros instead inhabits the ambivalent play between the hidden and the open, and “the erotic presumes the negativity of the secret and hiddenness” (25). A spectacle with neither narration nor choreography, the world today is one of exhibition, not representation. Here the inside and the outside, the public and the private, collapse into one another. But a polis without an oikos is no longer properly political either. The society of transparency is thus depoliticizing. A shift accompanies our embrace of communication technologies then; the digital age supersedes the biopolitical. Current digital panoptica are “aperspectival” and decentralized (45).Han continues this analysis in The Burnout Society. Contemporary society suffers from an overabundance of “positivity,” he repeats, a dialectic not of the Other but of the Same. This creates new challenges. Han writes, “The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates, it does not exclude, it exhausts. That is why it proves inaccessible to unmediated perception” (The Burnout Society, 7). If anything, we now suffer from a surplus of freedom. Whereas the biopolitical regime of the previous century was disciplinary, the twenty-first century is performative and achievement based. Depression, ADHD, and burnout syndrome express a surplus of positivity, not repression or negation. Our current skills in “multitasking” are not a development but a regression. What we are losing are the skills of contemplation and listening. Not the vita activa that Hannah Arendt argues we are lacking, but instead—more and more—it is the vita contemplativa that is lost to us. Restlessness dominates the hour. An astute and critical reader of Giorgio Agamben, Han asserts that the late modern subject is both homo sacer and sovereign. Not only those on the margins but all rest in a perpetual “state of exception.” “In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination” (19). The totalizing force of capitalism enacts a kind of positive violence, what Han calls “the violence of consensus” (48). He shows how self-exploitation is more efficient than any dominating, exterior force.Han shows that our contemporary infatuation with productivity exhausts us and burns us out, and our drive to continuously expose ourselves, our need to ceaselessly make our every word clear and transparent, ruins all alterity and otherness. In The Transparency Society Han writes, “Transparency is an ideology. Like all ideologies, it has a positive core that has been mystified and made absolute. The danger of transparency lies in such ideologization. If totalized, it yields terror” (viii). Here perhaps is the greatest weakness of Han’s otherwise beautiful, almost Benjaminian essays. Just as his observations on digital and social media remain perceptive culturally, his relative distance from politics is clear, too. Transparency and neoliberalism may remain in agreement, but what about other ideological orientations? Surely the type of terrorism causing European society so much alarm is not about transparency, and the “state of exception” of Syrian refugees is not the same one we each experience personally in our restless self-exploitation. Still, Han eloquently shows how worthwhile it is to linger, to remain open, and not get caught up in how many “hits” our social media pages receive. Indeed, if we have the time to stop and contemplate, we should do so, rather than just surf

Aesthetics · Art · Contemplation · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Norm (philosophy · Patience · Political science · Sociology · Theology · Transparency (behavior · Witness · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Law · Media Studies and Communication · Philosophy

• La perspectiva política de Byung-Chul Han y su comprensión de la alteridad

  Open Access•Luis Fernando Butierrez•Política y Sociedad•2022

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