In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Steven Knepper and Robert Wyllie about their article “In the Swarm of Byung-Chul Han,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 191 in our online store.
In the Swarm of Byung-Chul Han
Steven Knepper and Robert Wyllie
Finding the sky “too beautiful” to study metallurgy in Seoul, Byung-Chul Han emigrated to Germany in the 1980s to study philosophy. This fateful decision resonates in perhaps the central theme of Han’s books: in a time of rampant hyperactivity, contemplation becomes countercultural. Now a professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin and one of Germany’s most prominent thinkers, Han’s breakthrough book, The Burnout Society, will soon be translated into sixteen other languages in addition to his adoptive German. Since 2015, twelve of Han’s short books have appeared in English. They draw insights from Buddhism, Plato, Meister Eckhart, Romanticism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and critical theory. They engage key contemporaries in brief bursts: Agamben, Bauman, Badiou, Girard, Esposito, as well as the entrepreneur-journalist Chris Anderson and the controversial novelist (and recent Nobel laureate) Peter Handke.
Most of Han’s books are variations on the theme of hyperactivity. Late modern people, Han argues, are overstimulated, flooded with possibilities, and under constant internal pressure to “experience” and “achieve.” Rather than a Foucauldian subject repressed by specific disciplinary techniques, the late modern person is served with an open-ended injunction to infinite self-optimization. Han writes, “Foucault’s disciplinary society of prisons, hospitals, jails, barracks, and factories no longer reflects contemporary society. A society of glass office towers, shopping malls, fitness centers, yoga studios, and beauty clinics long ago took its place.” Power no longer typically represses but rather permits, encourages, and incentivizes. Han argues that other (post)modern philosophers fail to conceptualize the implications of this shift. While presented as liberation, the result is often self-inflicted violence. Depression, attention-deficit disorder (ADD), and screen addiction are all symptoms of the “burnout” of the “achievement-subject.”
Han claims a new “violence” of positivity is at work: the “power of positive thinking” turns out to be a remorseless, even deadly, imperative to optimize and achieve without end. Workaholics, health-obsessed gym-goers, and curators of online personas treat their lives as “projects.” Leisure is given over to “networking.” The achievement-subject is always checking email, always counting “likes” and “mentions” on social media and calories burned on smart watches. For Han, we are devotees of a cult of personal achievement, ritually drawing our smartphone “rosaries.” Space for silence, solitude, and “profound boredom”—the space needed for deep contemplative attention—evaporates. Likewise, the “Others” who might resist our projects and occasion real encounters, such as in love and art, are smoothed out into readily consumable differences. Han sees in all of this the outlines of Nietzsche’s health-obsessed “last men,” who are compulsively busy and chipper out of unknowing despair.
Why do we inflict endless exertion upon ourselves? This is perhaps the most baffling question, since there are no substantive goods or ends to be pursued but only the endless project. While Han skillfully adapts it to our digital moment, this question is actually as old as modernity. At the origins of continental political thought, Rousseau asks why his fellow citizen is “forever active, sweats, scurries,” and “works to the death, even rushes toward it in order to be in a position to live.” These eighteenth-century bourgeois are the forerunners of Nietzsche’s “ropemakers” and Heidegger’s “das Man,” who live without inheritance or destiny, in an aimless “whizzing” time. Like Rousseau, Han sees the modern human as a project. Of course, hyperactivity now takes a different form than in Rousseau’s day. Digital technology has made human life much more broadly open-ended. The workday has no clear ending given smartphones, digital workplaces, and “the cloud.” We burn out even on our leisure: time is emptied away as we endlessly surf the internet or succumb to autoplay binges on Netflix.
The Burnout Society and its follow-up, Topology of Violence, are field reports on these last men. Han thinks that resistance from outside our personal projects is disappearing, and this leaves late moderns unable to create meaningful time through narrative and memory. The master/slave dialectic that produced man and time for Alexandre Kojève is over, and therefore Hegel’s “spirit” or Heidegger’s “Dasein” is submerged. We are now master and slave both, auto-enslaved to our endless project. Like Kojève, Han thinks humans have returned to an animal state in the absence of the duration, struggle, and fate that gave meaning to history. Animals multitask, he proposes, while human culture alone cultivated deep attention. Han thinks that awareness of our possibilities leads us not into social competition with others but into absolute competition: we strive to outdo ourselves. As extensive media coverage for celebrity suicides suggests, depression and burnout are prevalent among the highly successful “top dogs,” and not just among social underdogs. In this utterly depoliticized environment at the end of history, achievement-subjects like steroidal “fitness zombies” and Botoxed “beauty zombies” push their personal projects too far. Perhaps even Han, the theorist of it all, ironically performs the role of the hyperproductive academic “publishing zombie.”
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