“The facility to alter one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone comment,” James Salter wrote in his 1975 novel, “Mild Years.” An encounter with a single “slender” line of writing, as he put it, can ship a reader spinning off on a brand new trajectory; her life turns into divided right into a earlier than and an after the second of studying. For Kevin Maret, an undergraduate artwork pupil on the College of Idaho, that second got here whereas studying “Within the Swarm: Digital Prospects,” a slim monograph by the thinker Byung-Chul Han that was first revealed in English by M.I.T., in 2017. In Might of 2023, whereas scrolling Instagram, Maret encountered a video gloss on Han’s work; Maret was intrigued sufficient that he borrowed “Within the Swarm” from his college library. Han’s writing, polemical and aphoristic, spoke to Maret’s expertise of rising up on social media, and crystallized for him the dearth of management he felt relating to his relationship to the Web. In a current dialog, Maret identified a number of of his favourite traces: “The occupants of the digital panopticon usually are not prisoners. Their ingredient is illusory freedom. They feed the digital panopticon with data by exhibiting themselves and shining a light-weight on each a part of their lives.” He instructed me, of the e book, “The primary time I learn it, I learn it in two hours.”
Since then, Maret has saved “Within the Swarm” out on library mortgage and carries it with him like a talisman. “I can put this in a jacket pocket if I stroll all the way down to the espresso store or the sector by my home,” he instructed me. He stocked up on different books by Han: “The Transparency Society,” “Saving Magnificence,” and “The Agony of Eros,” that are all written in the identical pamphletary format, someplace between manifesto and essay, and largely run below 100 pages. Maret is a part of a rising coterie of readers who’ve embraced Han as a type of sage of the Web period. Elizabeth Nakamura, a twentysomething art-gallery affiliate in San Francisco, had an identical conversion expertise, through the early days of pandemic lockdown, after somebody in a Discord chat prompt that she take a look at Han’s work. She downloaded “The Agony of Eros” from Libgen, a Site that’s recognized for pirated e-books. (She possesses Han’s books solely in PDF type, like digital samizdat.) The monograph argues that the overexposure and self-aggrandizement inspired by social media have killed the potential for actually erotic expertise, which requires an encounter with an different. “I’m like queening out studying this,” she instructed me, utilizing Gen Z slang for effusive enjoyment—fangirling. “It’s a meme however not within the humorous approach—in the way in which that it’s kind of concise and simply disseminated. I can ship this to my mates who aren’t as into studying to assist them take into consideration one thing,” she stated. Like a Sartre for the age of screens, Han places phrases to our prevailing situation of not-quite-hopeless digital despair.
Born in 1959 in South Korea, Han initially studied metallurgy in Seoul, to placate his mother and father, who needed him to take up a sensible self-discipline. When he was twenty-two, he moved to Germany; he pledged to proceed his research however switched to philosophy, with a deal with Martin Heidegger. In 1994, he acquired a Ph.D. from the College of Freiburg, after which started educating phenomenology, aesthetics, and faith, finally touchdown at Berlin College of the Arts. He has revealed steadily all through the previous twenty years, however has shunned interviews and has hardly ever travelled exterior of Germany. John Thompson, the director of Polity, an impartial writer in the UK that has put out fourteen of Han’s books since 2017, instructed me the demand for his work has grown largely by phrase of mouth. “There was this grassroots reception of Byung-Chul Han that has pushed the demand, and it’s not the standard approach of main overview protection,” he stated. Thompson continued, “He’s like an engine. The concepts and the books are simply flowing.”
Han’s breakout work was “The Burnout Society,” initially revealed in German, in 2010. Almost a decade earlier than the author Anne Helen Petersen tackled “millennial burnout,” Han recognized what he referred to as “the violence of positivity,” deriving from “overproduction, overachievement, and overcommunication.” We’re so stimulated, mainly by the Web, that we paradoxically can’t really feel or comprehend a lot of something. One of many ironies of Han’s writing is that it travels simply by the very channels that he despairs of. By condensing his concepts into transient, unadorned sentences, Han flatters the reader into nearly feeling as if she has thought the ideas herself. “The Burnout Society” and Han’s different books now star in numerous YouTube explainer movies and TikTok summaries. His concepts have notably struck a chord with readers who deal in aesthetics—artists, curators, designers, and designers—despite the fact that Han has not fairly been embraced by philosophy academe. (An essay within the Los Angeles Evaluation of Books in 2017 cautiously labelled him “nearly as good a candidate as any for thinker of the second.”) His work has been translated into greater than a dozen languages. In accordance with the Spanish newspaper El País, “The Burnout Society” has bought greater than 100 thousand copies throughout Latin America, Korea, Spain, and Italy. A museum director in Beijing instructed me, “The Chinese language artwork world is obsessive about him.” Alberto Olmos, a widely known Spanish creator and critic, described Han to me as a “great DJ of philosophy,” spinning collectively references—Barthes, Baudrillard, Benjamin—in catchy new mixtures. In 2023, in an interview with Dazed Korea, the Okay-pop star RM, from the band BTS, really useful “The Agony of Eros,” including, “You would possibly end up deeply annoyed as a result of the e book means that the love we’re at present experiencing will not be love.”
My very own first encounter with Han was “Non-things,” which I discovered positioned prominently within the small-press part of an impartial bookstore. I used to be drawn by its gnomic title and the postmodern collage on its cowl: {a photograph} of skyscrapers seen from inside a metropolis, spliced with a photograph of skyscrapers shot from above, turning the buildings into a geometrical abstraction. In “Non-things,” Han argues that on-line we encounter a glut of data—i.e., non-things—that distracts us from having experiences with objects on the planet: “The digital display determines our expertise of the world and shields us from actuality.” The easiest way to learn Han is much like the easiest way of studying the Bible: flip by, discover an evocative line, and proceed from there. Every sentence is a microcosm of the e book, and every e book is a microcosm of the œuvre, thus the reader needn’t delve too deep to get the purpose. “The smartphone is a cell labour camp by which we voluntarily intern ourselves,” Han writes in “Non-things.” Spicy! It’s a koan to meditate upon, and an outline that instantly makes one hate oneself for looking at a display. I saved studying as a result of I felt like I needed to, in case Han would possibly be capable of supply me some salvation.
Han’s newest e book in English translation, “The Disaster of Narration,” was revealed within the U.S. earlier this month. (Like comedian books, the volumes appear to roll out one prolonged, episodic narrative; all the Polity editions have related cowl designs, forming a coherent visible model.) The e book is in regards to the decline of “storytelling,” which in Han’s argument is an endangered mode of creating which means in an age dominated by the bullet factors and edited clips of content material that we devour on-line. The e book builds upon the argument of “Non-things,” however, as an alternative of lamenting a dearth of real-life objects, Han laments our capability to narrativize our “lived moments.” “For digital platforms, information are extra precious than narratives. They don’t need narrative reflection.” Is that this why my life as documented on Instagram doesn’t really add as much as a unified complete, regardless of on a regular basis and labor I’ve invested into curating my account? Han’s idea of “data,” the other of narration, which requires a type of non-data-driven capability for creativeness, has one thing in frequent with “content material,” the catchall time period that each describes and denatures twenty-first-century tradition into a lot undifferentiated mush. In “The Disaster of Narration,” Han writes, “In digital late modernity, we conceal the nakedness—the absence of which means in our lives—by consistently posting, liking, and sharing. The noise of communication and data is meant to make sure that life’s terrifying vacuity stays hidden.”
To that, the Web-addled mind merely needs to reply: “Yas queen!!! Byung-Chul Han, run me over with a truck.” If you’re a denizen of social media, to learn Han is to really feel each dragged and affirmed. His standing as a type of philosophy daddy to a youthful era is bolstered by the scant glimpses that readers get of his private picture. In pictures, he wears primarily shades of black, usually with a broken-in however nonetheless elegant leather-based jacket and a skinny scarf. His lengthy hair is pulled again right into a ponytail, and his pores and skin glows like an influencer’s. His telegenic high quality belies his isolation from the media ecosystem. He isn’t on social platforms; he instructed El País in a uncommon interview that he writes three sentences a day and spends most of his time caring for his vegetation and taking part in Bach and Schumann on the piano. His aura of offlineness—we craven on-line folks is perhaps tempted to name it a private model—appears to verify that he has entry to some knowledge that the remainder of us lack.
Charles Pidgeon, a doctoral pupil within the College of Oxford’s English school, who research literature in regards to the Web, described Han’s work as “type of old style humanism: What are you taking from this? One thing that ought to reorient your relationship to the world and to your individual life.” However he added that Han’s digestible grand pronouncements don’t all the time maintain as much as shut scrutiny. “There are a whole lot of issues you’ll be able to choose holes at,” Pidgeon instructed me. He pointed to “The Burnout Society” ’s argument that humanity has shifted from an “immunological society,” characterised by obstacles, to a “neuronal society,” characterised by boundlessness and frictionless circulation. After all, the COVID pandemic signalled an excessive return to an immunologically organized world, which had probably not gone away. “The type of reductive readability which is so essential to how his writing features can also be a part of the chance of it going very flawed,” Pidgeon stated.
In “The Disaster of Narration” particularly, Han runs the chance of talking with an excessive amount of curmudgeonly distance from his subject material. He rightly observes “the current hype round narratives,” which could embody the mania for “storytelling” in company advertising or the rampant recognition of TED talks. He argues that, although “tales” is a buzzword, we’ve misplaced a real, deeper capability for narrative meaning-making. (Right here he evokes the archetypal “fireplace round which people collect to inform one another tales.”) He describes posting on social media as “pornographic self-presentation or self-promotion”—which is honest sufficient. There may be little in his writing, nonetheless, to acknowledge that digital areas can even produce significant experiences, an oversight that, at this level within the twenty-first century, appears nearly quaint. We don’t learn Han for a holistic orthodoxy; it’s onerous accountable a sixty-something-year-old for not greedy TikTok’s paradoxical approach of fostering each exploitative and emancipatory types of expression. However he overlooks the way in which that social media allows self-narrativization, the development and projection of a private identification, with a freedom that was by no means attainable within the top-down hierarchy of conventional media. For many individuals, the Web is the brand new campfire.
One has to surprise what Han makes of the way in which that his personal concepts have flourished within the Web data financial system, inside the avalanche of non-things. Once we learn in regards to the Web, we so usually crave a solution or an answer: Is a know-how good or unhealthy? How can we escape it? Han will not be within the enterprise of providing options or bullet-pointed life hacks, however on-line his writing could be readily was handy, digestible classes. (One TikTok caption: “Byung-Chul Han and self optimization #capitalism #marxism #remedy.”) Han’s books “critique extra digital consumption however are additionally suitable with it,” Pidgeon instructed me. They can be utilized as “one other modern or modish set of ideas to be pushed by S.E.O. and imbibed in little chunks by folks,” he added. “That’s the true lure of it. You possibly can by no means be exterior of the system that you simply’re attempting to speak about.” However Han’s ardent, nearly brutalist type can also be designed to talk for itself, and in that sense it resists digital tradition’s approach of forcing an individual to face in for his artistic output. A part of Han’s revelation to readers is that they don’t have to be a persona. If Han posted his personal TikTok movies, most commenters would most likely simply ask what model of leather-based jacket he was carrying. (Actually, I need to know that, too.) Maybe we must always take his writing as an incitement to stay our personal offline lives as an alternative. Till we put his concepts into apply, although, his writing presents an aspirational image to tote round, to flip by, to clarify to our mates. As Maret, the College of Idaho pupil, put it, “The Han Hive is activated.” ♦