âThe power to change oneâs life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark,â James Salter wrote in his 1975 novel, âLight Years.â An encounter with a single âslenderâ line of writing, as he put it, can send a reader spinning off on a new trajectory; her life becomes divided into a before and an after the moment of reading. For Kevin Maret, an undergraduate art student at the University of Idaho, that moment came while reading âIn the Swarm: Digital Prospects,â a slim monograph by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han that was first published in English by M.I.T., in 2017. In May of 2023, while scrolling Instagram, Maret encountered a video gloss on Hanâs work; Maret was intrigued enough that he borrowed âIn the Swarmâ from his university library. Hanâs writing, polemical and aphoristic, spoke to Maretâs experience of growing up on social media, and crystallized for him the lack of control he felt regarding his relationship to the Internet. In a recent conversation, Maret pointed out a few of his favorite lines: âThe occupants of the digital panopticon are not prisoners. Their element is illusory freedom. They feed the digital panopticon with information by exhibiting themselves and shining a light on every part of their lives.â He told me, of the book, âThe first time I read it, I read it in two hours.â
Since then, Maret has kept âIn the Swarmâ out on library loan and carries it with him like a talisman. âI can put this in a jacket pocket if I walk down to the coffee shop or the field by my house,â he told me. He stocked up on other books by Han: âThe Transparency Society,â âSaving Beauty,â and âThe Agony of Eros,â which are all written in the same pamphletary format, somewhere between manifesto and essay, and mostly run under a hundred pages. Maret is part of a growing coterie of readers who have embraced Han as a kind of sage of the Internet era. Elizabeth Nakamura, a twentysomething art-gallery associate in San Francisco, had a similar conversion experience, during the early days of pandemic lockdown, after someone in a Discord chat suggested that she check out Hanâs work. She downloaded âThe Agony of Erosâ from Libgen, a Web site that is known for pirated e-books. (She possesses Hanâs books only in PDF form, like digital samizdat.) The monograph argues that the overexposure and self-aggrandizement encouraged by social media have killed the possibility of truly erotic experience, which requires an encounter with an other. âIâm like queening out reading this,â she told me, using Gen Z slang for effusive enjoymentâfangirling. âItâs a meme but not in the funny wayâin the way that itâs sort of concise and easily disseminated. I can send this to my friends who arenât as into reading to help them think about something,â she said. Like a Sartre for the age of screens, Han puts words to our prevailing condition of not-quite-hopeless digital despair.
Born in 1959 in South Korea, Han originally studied metallurgy in Seoul, to placate his parents, who wanted him to take up a practical discipline. When he was twenty-two, he moved to Germany; he pledged to continue his studies but switched to philosophy, with a focus on Martin Heidegger. In 1994, he got a Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, and then began teaching phenomenology, aesthetics, and religion, eventually landing at Berlin University of the Arts. He has published steadily throughout the past two decades, but has shunned interviews and has rarely travelled outside of Germany. John Thompson, the director of Polity, an independent publisher in the United Kingdom that has put out fourteen of Hanâs books since 2017, told me the demand for his work has grown largely by word of mouth. âThere has been this grassroots reception of Byung-Chul Han that has driven the demand, and itâs not the conventional way of major review coverage,â he said. Thompson continued, âHeâs like an engine. The ideas and the books are just flowing.â
Hanâs breakout work was âThe Burnout Society,â originally published in German, in 2010. Nearly a decade before the writer Anne Helen Petersen tackled âmillennial burnout,â Han diagnosed what he called âthe violence of positivity,â deriving from âoverproduction, overachievement, and overcommunication.â We are so stimulated, chiefly by the Internet, that we paradoxically cannot feel or comprehend much of anything. One of the ironies of Hanâs writing is that it travels easily through the very channels that he despairs of. By condensing his ideas into brief, unadorned sentences, Han flatters the reader into almost feeling as though she has thought the thoughts herself. âThe Burnout Societyâ and Hanâs other books now star in countless YouTube explainer videos and TikTok summaries. His ideas have particularly struck a chord with readers who deal in aestheticsâartists, curators, designers, and architectsâeven though Han has not quite been embraced by philosophy academe. (An essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2017 cautiously labelled him âas good a candidate as any for philosopher of the moment.â) His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. According to the Spanish newspaper El PaÃs, âThe Burnout Societyâ has sold more than a hundred thousand copies across Latin America, Korea, Spain, and Italy. A museum director in Beijing told me, âThe Chinese art world is obsessed with him.â Alberto Olmos, a well-known Spanish author and critic, described Han to me as a âwonderful DJ of philosophy,â spinning together referencesâBarthes, Baudrillard, Benjaminâin catchy new combinations. In 2023, in an interview with Dazed Korea, the K-pop star RM, from the band BTS, recommended âThe Agony of Eros,â adding, âYou might find yourself deeply frustrated because the book suggests that the love we are currently experiencing is not love.â
My own first encounter with Han was âNon-things,â which I found positioned prominently in the small-press section of an independent bookstore. I was drawn by its gnomic title and the postmodern collage on its cover: a photograph of skyscrapers seen from within a city, spliced with a photo of skyscrapers shot from above, turning the buildings into a geometric abstraction. In âNon-things,â Han argues that online we encounter a glut of informationâi.e., non-thingsâthat distracts us from having experiences with objects in the world: âThe digital screen determines our experience of the world and shields us from reality.â The best way to read Han is similar to the best way of reading the Bible: flip through, find an evocative line, and proceed from there. Each sentence is a microcosm of the book, and each book is a microcosm of the Åuvre, thus the reader need not delve too deep to get the point. âThe smartphone is a mobile labour camp in which we voluntarily intern ourselves,â Han writes in âNon-things.â Spicy! It is a koan to meditate upon, and a description that immediately makes one hate oneself for staring at a screen. I kept reading because I felt like I had to, in case Han might be able to offer me some salvation.
Hanâs latest book in English translation, âThe Crisis of Narration,â was published in the U.S. earlier this month. (Like comic books, the volumes seem to roll out one extended, episodic narrative; all of the Polity editions have similar cover designs, forming a coherent visual brand.) The book is about the decline of âstorytelling,â which in Hanâs argument is an endangered mode of establishing meaning in an age dominated by the bullet points and edited clips of content that we consume online. The book builds upon the argument of âNon-things,â but, instead of lamenting a dearth of real-life objects, Han laments our ability to narrativize our âlived moments.â âFor digital platforms, data are more valuable than narratives. They do not want narrative reflection.â Is this why my life as documented on Instagram doesnât actually add up to a unified whole, despite all the time and labor Iâve invested into curating my account? Hanâs concept of âinformation,â the opposite of narration, which requires a kind of non-data-driven capacity for imagination, has something in common with âcontent,â the catchall term that both describes and denatures twenty-first-century culture into so much undifferentiated mush. In âThe Crisis of Narration,â Han writes, âIn digital late modernity, we conceal the nakednessâthe absence of meaning in our livesâby constantly posting, liking, and sharing. The noise of communication and information is supposed to ensure that lifeâs terrifying vacuity remains hidden.â
To that, the Internet-addled brain simply wants to respond: âYas queen!!! Byung-Chul Han, run me over with a truck.â If you are a denizen of social media, to read Han is to feel both dragged and affirmed. His status as a kind of philosophy daddy to a younger generation is reinforced by the scant glimpses that readers get of his personal image. In photographs, he wears mainly shades of black, often with a broken-in but still elegant leather jacket and a thin scarf. His long hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and his skin glows like an influencerâs. His telegenic quality belies his isolation from the media ecosystem. He is not on social platforms; he told El PaÃs in a rare interview that he writes three sentences a day and spends most of his time caring for his plants and playing Bach and Schumann on the piano. His aura of offlinenessâwe craven online people might be tempted to call it a personal brandâseems to confirm that he has access to some wisdom that the rest of us lack.
Charles Pidgeon, a doctoral student in the University of Oxfordâs English faculty, who studies literature about the Internet, described Hanâs work as âkind of old-fashioned humanism: What are you taking from this? Something that should reorient your relationship to the world and to your own life.â But he added that Hanâs digestible grand pronouncements donât always hold up to close scrutiny. âThere are a lot of things you can pick holes at,â Pidgeon told me. He pointed to âThe Burnout Societyâ âs argument that humanity has shifted from an âimmunological society,â characterized by barriers, to a âneuronal society,â characterized by boundlessness and frictionless circulation. Of course, the COVID pandemic signalled an extreme return to an immunologically organized world, which had not really gone away. âThe kind of reductive clarity which is so important to how his writing functions is also part of the risk of it going very wrong,â Pidgeon said.
In âThe Crisis of Narrationâ especially, Han runs the risk of speaking with too much curmudgeonly distance from his subject matter. He rightly observes âthe present hype around narratives,â which might include the mania for âstorytellingâ in corporate marketing or the rampant popularity of TED talks. He argues that, though âstoriesâ is a buzzword, we have lost a true, deeper capacity for narrative meaning-making. (Here he evokes the archetypal âfire around which humans gather to tell each other stories.â) He describes posting on social media as âpornographic self-presentation or self-promotionââwhich is fair enough. There is little in his writing, however, to acknowledge that digital spaces can also produce meaningful experiences, an oversight that, at this point in the twenty-first century, seems almost quaint. We donât read Han for a holistic orthodoxy; itâs hard to blame a sixty-something-year-old for not grasping TikTokâs paradoxical way of fostering both exploitative and emancipatory forms of expression. But he overlooks the way that social media enables self-narrativization, the construction and projection of a personal identity, with a freedom that was never possible in the top-down hierarchy of traditional media. For many people, the Internet is the new campfire.
One has to wonder what Han makes of the way that his own ideas have flourished in the Internet information economy, within the avalanche of non-things. When we read about the Internet, we so often crave an answer or a solution: Is a technology good or bad? How can we escape it? Han is not in the business of offering solutions or bullet-pointed life hacks, but online his writing can be readily turned into convenient, digestible lessons. (One TikTok caption: âByung-Chul Han and self optimization #capitalism #marxism #therapy.â) Hanâs books âcritique excess digital consumption but are also compatible with it,â Pidgeon told me. They can be used as âanother fashionable or modish set of thoughts to be pushed through S.E.O. and imbibed in little chunks by people,â he added. âThatâs the real trap of it. You can never be outside of the system that youâre trying to talk about.â But Hanâs ardent, almost brutalist style is also designed to speak for itself, and in that sense it resists digital cultureâs way of forcing a person to stand in for his creative output. Part of Hanâs revelation to readers is that they do not have to be a persona. If Han posted his own TikTok videos, most commenters would probably just ask what brand of leather jacket he was wearing. (Honestly, I want to know that, too.) Perhaps we should take his writing as an incitement to live our own offline lives instead. Until we put his ideas into practice, though, his writing offers an aspirational symbol to tote around, to flip through, to explain to our friends. As Maret, the University of Idaho student, put it, âThe Han Hive is activated.â â¦
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#Internetâs #Favorite #Philosopher