Byung-Chul Han’s last tango.
After 8 years I am writing about Byung-Chul Han again. In December 2014 I reviewed his main books in a double post in Spanish that began with an entry entitled “Transparency, fatigue and psychopolitics” and continued with “Philosophy for dummies?”. There is something in this philosopher that attracts readers a lot: in my case, I think it is more his writing style than most of his proposals. Although many of his diagnoses point to critical areas of contemporary life (Big Data, self-exploitation, commodification, etc.), as I said in that double post:
(…) the little books of this philosopher are a breath of fresh air… although some of these airs remind us of things already written throughout the twentieth century regarding mass culture, from the Adorno and Horkheimer’s apocalypticism to Baudrillard’s “transparencies”.
One of his biggest shots out of the gate came when Byung-Chul Han announced the end of the “immune model.” According to Han, the immunological era had been abandoned in favor of another paradigm where “otherness and strangeness” have disappeared and only “difference” reigns (The Burnout Society). Byung-Chul Han located the initial moment of that transition at the end of the Cold War.
Postimmunological — indeed, postmodern — difference does not make anyone sick (…) Foreignness itself is being deactivated into a formula of consumption. The alien is giving way to the exotic. The tourist travels through it. The tourist — that is, the consumer — is no longer an immunological subject (The Burnout Society).
At the time, Han’s position caught my attention, especially because I wrote my review just when the case of Teresa Romero had occurred, the nursing assistant infected with Ebola who kept Spain in suspense for several weeks:
I was interested in the hypothesis according to which the immunological model would be in a phase of overcoming -something very possible- but I do not finish reconciling it with the day to day of our society. The recent Ebola crisis in Spain shows us that the fear of the Other (in this case a virus that also comes from… Africa) is still alive and kicking.
I suppose that after two years of the pandemic, Byung-Chul Han would have reviewed his proposals about the end of immunological models, the same ones that still govern social life on a global scale.
After reading most of his books up to 2014, I had
buzzing in my ears Byung-Chul Han’s recurring demand to stop the machine, be quiet and slow down our thought. This very romantic and nineteenth-century idea -which proposes to return to an idealized past where tranquility, silence and slow time apparently reigned, and therefore one could think in peace- reminds me too much of Theodor Adorno’s criticisms of the disturbing “syncopation” and the “monotonous beat” of jazz… In short: we need intellectuals who are capable of thinking not only about but also from the cultural conditions of contemporary society.
Now, we can move on to Byung-Chul Han’s Non–things · Upheaval in the Lifeworld.
The non-things
I return to Byung-Chul Han via his Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld (2022) that I read at the end of last year. Faithful to his anti-digital approach, the author warns us that
Things that smell nice, and shimmering, glittering, wondrous things: hairbands, hats, perfume, small bells, emeralds, stamps — roses and birds too. And the people no longer know what all these things were once for. Along with the things, memories disappear as well.
We do not live in a totalitarian regime whose memory police brutally rob us of our things and memories. It is rather our intoxication by communication and information that makes things disappear. Information — that is, non-things — obscures things and drains them of their colour. We live not under a violent regime but under a rule of information that claims to be freedom.
We no longer dwell on the earth and under the sky but on Google Earth and in the Cloud. The world is becoming increasingly intangible, cloud-like and ghostly. There are no tangible and arrestable [hand- und dingfest] things.
The industrial revolution solidified and expanded the sphere of things, distancing us from nature and the crafts. But only digitalization puts an end to the paradigm of the thing. It subordinates things to information.
Things that do not exist, the solid that dissolves in the air… Byung-Chul Han reviews the postmodern catechism of the 1980s from A to Z, but now illuminating those reflections with the powerful lights of digital transformation.
In this book Byung-Chul Han renews his apocalyptic repertoire with new technologies -such as the smartphone- and formats -such as the selfie-. Perhaps inspired by Julio Cortázar (“They aren’t giving you a watch, you are the gift, they are giving you yourself for the watch’s birthday”), Byung-Chul Han only sees the smartphone as a diabolical instrument that “permanently watches its user”:
We are controlled and programmed by it. It is not we who use the smartphone; the smartphone uses us. The real actor is the smartphone.
Even if Byung-Chul Han seems to be close to Alessandro Baricco's The Game
The human being of the future is no longer interested in things — is not a worker (homo faber) but a player (homo ludens).
…that movement is less than fleeting:
A form of rule in which human beings did nothing but play would be perfect domination.
For Byung-Chul Han, the smartphone is an object of total domination, a “submission apparatus” similar to a rosary. Regarding the dematerialization of photography, Byung-Chul Han argues that
The digital medium transforms the rays of light into data, that is, into numeric relations. Data is without light.
…and puts Walter Benjamin on the scene:
The human countenance is today again conquering photography — in the form of the selfie. The selfie turns the countenance into a face, which is then exhibited on digital platforms such as Facebook. Unlike the analogue portrait, the selfie is bursting at the seams with exhibition value. Cult value disappears altogether. A selfie is an exhibited face without aura. It lacks ‘melancholic’ beauty. It is characterized by digital cheerfulness.
In his descent into the world of non-things, Byung-Chul Han also dialogues with authors such as Nick Srnicek and Shoshana Zubbof that criticize platform capitalism …
Information capitalism is an intensified form of capitalism. Unlike industrial capitalism, it commodifies not just the material world but the immaterial world. Life itself takes on the form of a commodity. Human relationships are commercialized wholesale. Social media exploits all communication. Platforms such as Airbnb commercialize hospitality. Information capitalism conquers every corner of our lives, even of our souls.
Platforms like Facebook or Google are our new feudal lords. We tirelessly work their land and produce the valuable data that they exploit. We feel free, although we are completely exploited and controlled. In a system that exploits freedom, there is no resistance. Once it coincides with freedom, rule becomes total.
By clicking on the like button, we submit ourselves to the context of rule.
In this new journey through digital hell Byung-Chul Han couldn’t help but say something about Artificial Intelligence. I’m sorry to say it, but at times he borders on banality:
Artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking, for the very reason that it cannot get goosebumps.
Although it is not hard to agree with some of Byung-Chul Han’s characterizations of the cult of Big Data — like Han, computational methods are also in vogue — his apocalyptic vision prevents him from finding something positive in one of the most important scientific transformations of the last decades:
Big data provides a rudimentary knowledge. It remains limited to correlations and pattern recognition, in which, however, nothing is understood.
Big data is additive. What is additive does not form a totality, a conclusion. It lacks a concept, that is, the grip that includes the parts in a totality.
Let’s go back to the non-things. They are disappearing. They are ghosts of modernity. They don’t even rebel anymore.
Digitalization has deprived things of any ‘defiant’ materiality, any intractability.
The dissolution of the material dimension is for Byung-Chul Han the prelude to something worse:
We are headed towards a transhuman and post-human age in which human life will be a pure exchange of information (…) Digitalization is a resolute step along the way towards the abolition of the humanum.
End (for now).
Byung-Chul Han’s last tango
I must confess that Byung-Chul Han’s Non-things did not surprise me. “Soup again”, Mafalda would have said… Like some fiction writers, I have the impression that Byung-Chul Han always tells us the same story with slight changes. If he were a musician instead of a philosopher, his brief and elaborate phrasing would come from an old bandoneon player who cries over and over again a “material” world that will never return…
Big algorithms
I would like to return to two issues that I consider very important. First, the rejection of computational methods, algorithms and Big Data. Any minimally serious researcher today is clear that quantitative methods provide a series of data (often in the form of visualizations) that are subject to interpretation processes just like the data obtained with qualitative methods.
Despite Byung-Chul Han, no one expects Big Data to generate “concepts” or “understand” the results: that task, until further notice, is in the hands of human actors. What the new computational methods can do -and are doing- is provide a description of very complex processes, from climate change to the spread of a virus, hitherto impossible to focus on with traditional methods.
Like any scientific procedure, computational methods are imperfect and are constantly being revised (otherwise they would not be scientific methods). In a certain way, Byung-Chul Han’s approach ends up being a specular reflection of Chris Anderson’s statemens about “the end of theory”. InJuly 2008 Andersen decreed in Wired the “end of the social and humanistic sciences” due to the entry into the “Petabyte era”. At the end, we have two opposing, antagonistic and superficial visions -even if one of them appears dressed in a philosophical gala- that end up canceling each other out.
Things
The dematerialization of things proposed by Byung-Chul Han goes against certain less apocalyptic contemporary approaches more interested in tackling the planet’s problems with something more than words. From the ideas proposed by Jussi Parikka in A Geology of the Media to the “new materialisms” supported by theorists such as Benjamin Bratton in The Terraforming or in The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World, I am convinced that there are texts and authors better equipped to focus on the world around us. On a philosophical level, rather than getting caught up in the cloud of non-things, I find Graham Harman’s “speculative realism” much more seductive (see for example Object-Oriented Ontology. A new theory of everything).
Things are not disappearing. They are intertwining with the information forming a new type of hybrid entity. The same is happening with humans: we are hybridizing with our technologies since the first Homo Sapiens modeled a tool hitting two stones.
The jukebox
Byung-Chul Han concludes Non–things · Upheaval in the Lifeworld with a final digression dedicated to his jukebox (in Spain, the “gramola”), that instrument that makes
The jukebox makes listening to music a highly enjoyable visual, acoustic and tactile experience.
This claim for mechanical musical reproduction puzzled me. I have no doubt that the great masters who inspired Byung-Chul Han, from Theodor Adorno to Martin Heidegger, would have reviled that device that replaced the irreplaceable live musical experience. In the same way, it is possible that Byung-Chul Han’s grandchildren will one day be glad of the sensory experience of Spotify, that wonderful digital application that at the beginning of the 21st century put all the music of the world just a couple of clicks away…
For now, yes, this is the end.
Bonus tracks
Spanish version: “El último tango de Byung-Chul Han”
