On Football and the (Lost) Art of Time-Wasting

 

Today, we live in an era of universal Fergie time; one impatient of stoppages 

and which threatens to extend a 90-minute game indefinitely.

 

 

I.

 

I don't like football. I used to, when I was a child, in the '70s. Back then, I used to love playing football on the green and watching big match highlights on TV. But not now. I suppose I've changed. But so too has football changed. As one commentator writes:

 

"The sport that we loved so much as children no longer exists. It has been replaced with a Narrative of Football; a new game deeply entrenched in analysis, code, writing, superfluous discourse, and orchestrated controversy." [1]

 

This is football in the age of hyperreality and hypercapitalism. And it's also football played at such a manic pace that it has lost all sense of sporting rhythm; hyperactivity has destroyed the ebb and flow of the game and that most vital (and complex) aspect known as time-wasting. 

 

II.

 

In an excellent piece for The Guardian, Barney Ronay describes how in the latest version of what was once the beautiful - often boring and profoundly frustrating - game, everything is now micro-engineered to produce maximum effective playing time. 

 

Referees, argues Ronay, are now no longer present "simply to keep the mechanics of the game working, to understand handball and fouls and offside, but to police how football should feel and look, to decide what exactly can be deemed entertainment" [2]. 

 

This is the referee as television floor manager - that is to say, as the one who ensures that a TV production goes smoothly and that everyone involved in the on-field action - players, managers, supporters - knows exactly what they have to do and when they have to do it. Keep the ball moving! Keep the noise levels high! Ensure there are plenty of talking points for the pundits to analyse! And above all, don't ever forget the cameras are rolling!

 

This season, referees have been empowered (and instructed) to take aggressive action against time-wasting. And Ronay is right to say this is "a profound and quietly sinister little tweak, a value judgment taken without any broader consultation on what the game should look and feel like, with some deeply undesirable implications" [3]. 

 

Of course, on the face of it, this is an entirely reasonable change to make; in fact, the laws of the game have always discouraged (and allowed referees to punish) time-wasting. But, what is going on here is really something quite radical, driven by purely commercial considerations: 

 

"As ever, follow the money. The drive to increase active 'game time' (itself a vapid, ill-defined concept) comes directly from Fifa. And Fifa is essentiality a TV rights distributions agency, its entire model based around increasing screen revenues. What we have here is the laws of the game being employed as a tool to doctor the perceived TV entertainment value of the product ..." [4] 

 

If it risks player fatigue or injury, never mind! If it risks pissing off the fans in the stadium, who understand how the art of time-wasting is an intrinsic part of the game, who cares? The people who count are the big name sponsors and the punters who pay to watch the match live on TV - and they won't tolerate dead air. 

Ronay concludes:  

"Football is not a gameshow. This is not choreographed entertainment. The reason this thing has survived and flourished is precisely because it is messy and feverish, made up of both piano and forte, moments of fury interspersed with interludes of vital, brain-mangling boredom. And yes, time-wasting is part of the game, an ugly, maddening part, but a source of beauty in its referred effects; not to mention an entirely legitimate tactic in a 90-minute game." [5]

Unfortunately, however, football is now choreographed entertainment; played by millionaires, owned by billionaires, and watched by a global TV audience who expect non-stop action and plenty of goals, i.e., exactly the same kind of idiots who think one-day cricket is superior - because faster and more sensational - to test match cricket and want to see six after six after six.  

Ronay's hope that in this burnout society we will once again allow sport to catch its breath, is, sadly, in vain ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Luke Alex Davis, 'Football Is Dead' (3 April 2022), on the website Playrface: click here. 

 

[2-5] Barney Ronay, 'Time-wasting in football is ugly, maddening - and absolutely vital', The Guardian (17 August 2023): click here. Those who are interested in this topic might also like to read: Cameron Carter, 'Football has elevated time-wasting into a sophisticated art form', The Guardian (19 Oct 2022): click here.  

 

 

For a related post to this one on football as a global televised spectacle, click here.

Reflections on The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han (Part 2: From The Pedagogy of Seeing to Burnout Society)

Byung-Chul Han in the documentary film Müdigkeitsgesellschaft - 

Byung-Chul Han in Seoul/Berlin (dir. Isabella Gresser, 2015) 

Click here to view a trailer, or here to watch the film in full (with English subtitles)

 

 

III. 

 

I believe it was Cato the Elder who said: 

 

'Never is one more active than when doing nothing; never is one less alone than when by one's self.'

 

And I think I know what he means: namely, that the contemplative life - the concept of which was first introduced into philosophy by Aristotle and developed by the Stoics (before being given a Latin twist by Augustine) - is, in terms of Geistigkeit, the most noble form of existence.

 

Anyhoo, let's return to The Burnout Society (2015), in which Byung-Chul Han gives his interpretation of Cato's dictum. I remind readers that the titles given in bold are Han's own and that page numbers refer to the English edition of the text, translated by Erik Butler and published by the MIT Press.

  

    

IV.

 

The Pedagogy of Seeing

 

Returning to the theme of vita contemplativa, Byung-Chul Han calls on Nietzsche who knew a thing or two about the importance of developing a way of life in which one learns to ignore distractions and resist stimuli. For when one reacts immediately and surrenders to every impulse, one is not only behaving in a vulgar manner, but displaying symptoms of spiritual exhaustion.   

 

However, it's important to note that the vita contemplativa "is not a matter of passive affirmation and being open to whatever happens" [21]; instead, it "offers resistance to crowding, intrusive stimuli" [21]. 

 

In other words, the contemplative life is a sovereign manner of saying No to the world [a]; an active negation of the negative by preferring not to, as Bartleby would have it [b].

 

It's also important to note that it's "an illusion to believe that being more active means being freer" [22]. You're not free if you are obeying every impulse or external stimulus and lack what Nietzsche terms the excluding instincts, without which "action scatters into restless, hyperactive reaction and abreaction" [22]. 

 

It's important to know how to pause and delay; only the machine grinds endlessly on and on and, despite its enormous power, the computer or iPhone is not intelligent; in fact, says Han, it's just a stupid mechanical device insofar as it lacks the ability to daydream.  

 

Perhaps because we can't say No, we are also losing the capacity for rage, a powerful emotion which, according to Han, "puts the present as a whole into question" [22] and is as different from anger as fear is from angst. 

 

In brief, increasing positivization denies all negative energy (evil). And that's a concern, because, as Hegel argued, "negativity is precisely what keeps existence [Dasein] alive" [24]. Or, as Zarathustra says: Man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him. 

 

 

The Bartleby Case

 

I used to hate Melville's Bartleby - as this post from 31 Jan 2013 demonstrates. But I've since changed my mind and now have a greater appreciation for his tale. Indeed, Bartleby's signature phrase, I prefer not to, has even become one of the unofficial slogans of Torpedo the Ark (along with curb your enthusiasm and never trust a hippie). 

 

Han offers us what he terms a pathological reading of the story (rather than a metaphysical or theological interpretation) in relation to his own theories of exhaustion and neurotic hyperactivity. He reads Bartleby's silence and immobility as "symptoms characteristic of neurasthenia" [25] and doesn't much care for the character: "his signature phrase [...] expresses neither the negative potency of not-to nor the instinct for delay and deferral that is essential for 'spirituality'" [25-26].     

 

Of course, Bartleby is still an obedience-subject belonging to disciplinary society (Melville publised the story in 1853), so although he dies in complete isolation, he doesn't develop the symptoms of depression which are the hallmark of our society:   

 

"Feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, or fear of failure do not belong to Bartleby's emotional household. Constant self-reproach and self-aggression are unknown to him. He does not face the imperative to be himself that characterizes late-modern achievement society." [26]

 

Ontotheological interpretations of the Bartleby case - like Giorgio Agamben's - are ultimately compromised by their failure to "take note of the change of mental structure [psychischer Strukturwandel] in the present day" [26] [c]. 

 

Further, in a simlar manner to Deleuze, Agamben "elevates Bartleby to a metaphysical position of the highest potency" [27], and it was this giving him angelic or even Christ-like status that used to irritate me also. 

 

Still, whilst I would prefer not to see him in a messianic light, I do think that Bartleby's tale is more than merely a story of exhaustion (it's also a tale of seduction, for example, in which the object extracts its revenge).           

 

 

The Society of Tiredness

 

In order to improve performance and maximise achievement, says Han, we are increasingly relying upon neuro-enhancing drugs and energy drinks. The ironic result: we are generating ever greater levels of fatigue: "The excessiveness of performance enhancement leads to psychic infarctions." [31] 

 

And this can't be good - certainly not if it leads to not only feeling physically exhausted, but mentally tired of everyone and everything. For tiredness of the latter kind leaves us feeling separate and isolated. 

 

If only there could be a shared tiredness; one in which we are not tired of others, but with others; one that brings us back into touch; one that lies beyond exhaustion. Han calls this a tiredness of negative potency. If only we had the chance, at least for one day a week, to just log off and rest; if only we could re-establish the Sabbath (a day of not-doing) and counter the machine-ideal of 24/7.

O for the boredom of a childhood Sunday!

Burnout Society

For Byung-Chul Han, both Kantian and Freudian models of the self are now untenable. 

 

Kant's moral subject who obeys his conscience and wishes to fulfil his duty, has, for example, been replaced by the late-modern achievement subject who has no interest in obedience to the moral law within or any sense of obligation.    

 

Psychoanalysis - a theory designed for a repressive age - is also outmoded:

 

"The Freudian unconscious is not a formation that exists outside of time. It is a product of the disciplinary society, dominated by the negativity of prohibitions and repression, that we have long since left behind." [36]. 

It may still be instructive (and important) to read Kant and Freud - and Han has clearly read a good deal of both authors - but they tell us about passed forms of self and society, not present forms. 

 

But then that could be said of pretty much every author writing before the digital age of information-technology and social media. It's not simply that their thinking is antiquated, but that they have too much character [d], which is why so many young people find them offensive and so many old works - once regarded as classics - now come with trigger warnings.

We need people with character; people who still possess an awareness of Otherness and haven't fallen into solipsism and narcissism; people who can still love and mourn and experience a range of psychic states born of negativity; people who still listen to the voice of their daimon; people who refuse to be hyperactive self-exploiting Letzter Menschen whom Han thinks of as zombies: "too alive to die, and too dead to live" [51].   

Notes

 

[a] In an early post on Torpedo the Ark - published 1 August 2014 - I discussed the importance of being able to say no: click here. 

 

[b] Han offers a critical (and clinical) reading of the Bartleby Case in the following chapter. 

[c] Not having read Agamben's take on the Bartleby case, I can't say if this is fair or not. Readers who wish to investigate this matter further can find Agamben's essay, 'Bartleby, or On Contingency', in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 243-271. 

 

[d] As Han reminds us, for Freud, character "is a phenomenon of negativity" [40] - and thus problematic within an age of woke. Today, speakers with character are accused of hate speech and being no platformed across university campuses by those who demand moral and political correctness (and positivity) at all times. "Today", writes Han, "violence issues more readily from the conformism of consensus than from the antagonism of dissent." [48] 

 

 

To read part one of this post on The Burnout Society, click here.       

Reflections on The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han (Part 1: From Neuronal Power to Vita Activa)

Stanford University Press (2015)

 

 

I. 

 

Many years ago, I wrote a short novel that dealt with existential themes of boredom, fatigue, world-weariness, etc. It was called Exhaustion and the first line read:  'Ours is essentially a fagged-out age, so ... Oh fuck it, who cares? I can't be bothered to write any more.' 

 

As a matter of fact, that was also the last line.    

 

Anyway, this is only coincidently relevant to Byung-Chul Han's essay The Burnout Society [a] and it's his work which I would like to discuss here ... 

II.

 

Neuronal Power

 

"Every age has its signature afflictions." [1] 

 

That's a great opening line, I think. Unfortunately, what follows now seems amusingly naive and dated: 

 

"Despite fear of an influenza epidemic, we are not living in a viral age. Thanks to immunological technology, we have already left it behind. From a pathological standpoint, the incipient twenty-first century is determined neither by bacteria nor by viruses, but by neurons." [1]

 

I suppose, writing in 2010, Han wasn't to know what 2019 would bring; although some might say that as a theorist and commentator who draws on literature, philosophy, and both the social and natural sciences, it's his job to anticipate possibilities in the foreseeable future and not just rehash ideas from the past.

 

That seems a bit harsh, however, so let's just overlook the above and concede that neurological conditions - including depression, personality disorder, and burnout syndrome - also play a significant role in life today. 

 

These are not viral infections, but infarctions, says Han, that result from "an excess of positivity" [1]. He continues: "The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts."

 

We have, if you like, been sent mad with fatigue by our own 24/7 lifestyles (lived increasingly online), in which all Otherness is exorcised. And because Otherness is disappearing, "we live in a time that is poor in negativity" [4] - even if rich in difference (the form by which the Same likes to disguise itself).    

Beyond Disciplinary Society

Like Baudrillard, Han wants us to forget Foucault - or, at any rate, agree that today's society is no longer the one that Foucault described fifty-years ago. The prisons, asylums, and workhouses, of old have been replaced by fitness studios, fast-food outlets, and shopping malls:

 

"Twenty-first century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]. Also its inhabitants are no longer 'obedience-subjects' but 'achievement-subjects'. They are entrepreneurs of themselves." [8]    

Foucault's theory of power simply cannot account for how things are now, says Han. 

 

However, whilst I agree that the world has changed, it's simply mistaken to say that Foucault's cratology is tied to a negative (or repressive) model of power; the power to prohibit and say No. Foucault explicitly rejects this model and challenges traditional representations in which power is characterised in an exclusively restrictive manner; "poor in resources, sparing of its methods, monotonous in the tactics it utilizes, incapable of invention, and seemingly doomed always to repeat itself" [b]. 

 

Contrary to the above, Foucault offers us a gay, energy-based model of power outside of accepted values and beyond the "negative and emaciated form of prohibition" [c]. This model allows power to produce things - including forms of knowledge - as well as induce pleasures. And so, it explains very well why - as Han later notes - despite there being a paradigm shift from disciplinary society to achievement society, there has been a level of continuity and no real break exists between the modal verbs Should and Can. 

 

In other words, achievement society still has the same network of power running through it as disciplinary society. It's just that whereas the latter required our obedience to authority, the former requires us to show some initiative and be self-motivated and self-expressive - and, above all, achieve - to the point of exhaustion and depression [d].   

 

The contemporary subject is voluntarily self-exploitative; the perfect worker, determined to have a nice day and always wear that happy face (until the crack-up and break down comes due to excessive positivity and compulsive freedom).  

 

 

Profound Boredom

 

"Excessive positivity also expresses iself as an excess of stimuli, information, and impulses. It radically changes the structure and economy of attention. Perception becomes fragmented and scattered." [12]

 

Perhaps this is why Han chooses to publish his work in essay form and to favour short sentences; he's making a somewhat patronising assumption about his reader's ability to concentrate and follow complex arguments at length. 

 

Of course, he might have a point: I know that my own ability to think has flattened over recent years, even as it has broadened and, indeed, accelerated. For Han, this shows regression to animality. For wild animals, he says, are "incapable of contemplative immersion" [12]; they are always alert to what's going on around them and easily distracted [e].               

  

For Han, human regression of this nature is a bad thing. Why? Because we owe the cultural achievements of humanity "to deep, contemplative attention" [13]. Scatty individuals may by good at multitasking and playing video games (not things Han approves of), but they'll never produce great works of art or philosophy. Having a low boredom threshold, makes one incapable of "the profound idleness that benefits the creative process" [13].

Unfortunately, this simply sounds like bourgeois snobbery (even when you call upon Walter Benjamin and Nietzsche for support).

And so, whilst I can certainly see the attractions of the vita contemplativa, I'm not going to knock those for whom such a life would be intolerable, nor denigrate the cognitive abilities (and dancing skills) of animals.      

 

 

Vita Activa

 

One philosopher who wasn't prepared to simply dismiss the via activa as mere restless stupidity, was Hannah Arendt [f]. Particularly if action results in the birth of something new. 

 

Unfortunately, Arendt thinks that modern society - as a society of perfected slavery - "nullifies any possibility for action when it degrades the human being into an animal laborans, a beast of burden" [17], subsumed within the herd. 

 

Byung-Chul Han doesn't buy into this argument, however, and doesn't think Arendt has much to tell us about today's world:

"Arendt's descriptions of the modern animal laborans do not correspond to what we can observe in today's achievement society. The late-modern animal laborans does not give up its individuality or ego in order to merge, through the work it performs, with the anonymous life of the species. Rather, contemporary labour society [...] fosters individuality ... The late-modern animal laborans is equipped with an ego just short of bursting. And it is anything but passive [...] It is hyperactive and hyperneurotic." [17-18]  

 

I suppose that's why Frank Costanza's cry of Serenity now! continues to resonate so powerfully; we all desire a little peace and quiet in our lives [g]. And that perhaps requires learning how to live a little more slowly; Han argues that everything seems sped up and transient today:   

 

"The general denarrativization of the world [following the death of God] is reinforcing the feeling of fleetingness. It makes life bare." [18]

 

Indeed, it makes life so bare, that it's even barer "than the life of homo sacer" [18] [h] - which is really bare! Almost unbearable in its bareness: and yet we seek to preserve ourselves and keep going as long as possible. Han says we are like the Muselmänner, "albeit well fed and probably obese" [19]. 

 

An unpleasant remark on which to close the first part of this post, but Byung-Chul said it, not me ...

Notes

 

[a] I'm reading the English translation by Erik Butler, published by Stanford University Press in 2015, and all page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. 

      The original German work, entitled Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, was published in Berlin by Matthes & Seitz Verlag, in 2010. Readers will note that the title literally translates as 'Fatigue Society', but I suppose the term burnout - coined in 1970 by the German-born American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger - has greater contemporary resonance. Freudenberger defined burnout as a state of mental and physical exhaustion caused by overwork amongst professionals. See his book Burn Out: The High Cost of High Achievement (1980). 

 

[b] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998), p. 85.

 

[c] Ibid., p. 86.

 

[d] It should be noted that unlike French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg, Han doesn't think that depression is simply the pathological expression of an individual's failure to become themselves. He also thinks that it also arises from a lack of attachment [Bindungsarmut] to others within an increasingly fragmented and atomised society: 

      "Ehrenberg lends no attention to this aspect of depression. He also overlooks the systemic violence inhabiting achievement society, which provokes psychic infarctions. It is not the imperative only to belong to oneself, but the pressure to achieve that causes exhaustive depression. Seen in this light, burnout syndrome does not express the exhausted self so much as the exhausted, burnt-out soul. According to Ehrenberg, depression spreads when the commandments and prohibitions of disciplinary society yield to self-responsibility and initiative. In reality, it is not the excess of responsibility and initiative that makes one sick, but the imperative to achieve: the new commandment of late-modern labour society." [10]

      To be fair, I've not read Ehrenberg's work, so can't say if Han's criticism is justified. Readers who wish to make up their own minds should see The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, trans. Enrico Caouette et al, (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010).   

[e] I'm not sure about this. It's true, perhaps, that monkey's don't meditate, but I've watched my cat sit for hours staring at the same spot having heard a sound that suggests to her the presence of a small rodent and it seems to me that this might legitimately be described as a form of contemplative immersion. One suspects that Han is guilty of anthropocentric conceit to suggest otherwise and it's worth noting that later in this chapter he writes: "Only human beings can dance" [14], which seems palpably untrue. However, it's also worth noting that - somewhat paradoxically - in the chapter Vita Activa Han refers to the serenity [Gelassenheit] of animals [18], which, he argues, man has lost. 

[f] See The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998). This work was first published in 1958, so the fact that parts of its sociological analysis are dated is hardly surprising. 

 

[g] I have written on this desire for serenity in an earlier post on Torpedo the Ark: click here. 

[h] Homo sacer, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, refers to an accursed figure, excluded from society because of some trespass, whom any citizen may kill without incurring punishment. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben developed the term within his work, using it to stand for an absolutely expendable life (such as the life of a Jewish inmate in a Nazi concentration camp, for example). See Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford University Press, 1998). 

 

 

To read part two of this post on The Burnout Society, click here. 

Reflections on The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han (Part 2: From Porn to The End of Theory)

Byung-Chul Han

 

IV. 

 

Whilst philosophe du moment Byung-Chul Han gives reference to the four great Bs of 20th-century French philosophy - Bataille, Blanchot, Barthes, and Baudrillard - it's clear that The Agony of Eros (2017) is primarily written under the influence of Alain Badiou. 

 

Which means his defence of love is really just an excuse to stage a neo-Marxist assault upon techno-capitalism, developing his argument that the latter is responsible for creating a burned-out society in which an obscene (pornographic) ideal of transparency and self-disclosure is the cultural norm, compromising other values, including secrecy, silence, and shame, upon which eros (and mental health) depend.    

 

Writing in The Burnout Society (2015), Han describes a pathological landscape shaped by depression, attention defecit disorder, and exhaustion, all thanks to a 24/7 lifestyle of continuous positivity - a form of violence in his view - in which we are all expected to become entrepreneurs of the self. This leads not only to ever greater levels of self-exploitation, but to narcissism, and thus the extermination of Otherness, which, once more, is crucial for love and, indeed, society. 

 

For when subjects are concerned exclusively with themselves, then relationship with others becomes impossible - as does thought - and we end up living in l'enfer du même ruled over by the kind of painfully inferior and deeply stupid politicians presently posturing (and virtue signalling) on the global stage. 

 

Anyway, let's return to The Agony of Eros (2017). I remind readers that the titles given in bold are Han's own and that page numbers given refer to the English edition of the text, translated by Erik Butler and published by the MIT Press. 

 

 

V.

 

Porn

Han opens his fourth chapter with the kind of concise statement that readers will either love or loathe: "Porn is a matter of bare life on display." [29] 

 

It's an attempt, I suppose, to distill Baudrillard's rather complex idea of porn as the hyperreality of sex (i.e. the more sexual than sex) into a kind of pithy observation that some will find profound and others see as a piece of shallow sloganeering. Of course, it could be both ... 

Si vous aimez l'amour, vous aimerez le surréalisme, said André Breton [a]. But if you love Love, you're also going to hate porn, which, according to Han, is antagonistic to eros and spells the end of sexuality as he would have it; i.e., something authentic, something natural, something sacred. 

 

The pornographication of the world is, he says, "unfolding as the profanation of the world" [29] - and this is a very bad thing; presumably because some things, like love, should be reserved only for the gods and not made freely available for misuse and commercial exploitation by mortals. 

 

Men might be encouraged to play with love - one possible definition of erotics. But should not be allowed to debase love - one possible definition of porn, in which there is nothing playful, nothing sanctified, nothing mysterious: "In contrast, the erotic is never free of secrecy." [32]             

 

Again, all this interests, but it does seem to be going over old ground; do we really want to resurrect the tired opposition between eroticism on the one side and porn on the other? One recalls D. H. Lawrence's axiom: "What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another." [b]  

 

 

Fantasy

 

In Why Love Hurts (Polity, 2012), Eva Illouz makes the fascinating claim that, thanks to dating apps like Tinder, desire is no longer determined by the unconscious mind, so much as conscious selection. 

 

What's more, she argues, we have had our imagination heightened by all the faces and bodies we encounter online, with the result that we are more often disappointed with those we meet in the real world; the flesh never shapes up.  

 

Han doesn't quite buy this though: 

 

"Counter to what Illouz assumes, desire is not 'rationalized' today by increasing opportunities for, and criteria of, choice. Instead, unchecked freedom of choice is threatening to bring about the end of desire. [...] Today's ego [...] does not desire. To be sure, consumer culture is constantly producing new wants and needs by means of media images and narratives. But desire is something different from both wanting and needing. Illouz does not take the libido-economical particularity of desire into account." [37]

For Han, fantasy survives because it inhabits an undefined space that is outside the network of information-technology: 

 

"It is not heightened fantasy, but - if anything - higher expectations that are responsible for the mounting disappointment experienced in contemporary society." [ 38]

 

The high information density of social media is not conducive to the imagination. That's why, says Han, "pornography which maximizes visual information [...] destroys erotic fantasy" [38]. The secret of eroticism is that it forever withdraws the object of one's desire from view; it provides a glimpse, but never reveals all. Love - like horror - takes place in the shadows. Indeed, at its most extreme, love is blind and makes blind; a retreat into the "twilight space of dreams and desire" [40].        

 

Unfortunately, today, "faced with the sheer volume of hypervisible images, we can no longer shut our eyes" [40]. Compulsive (and compulsory) hypervigilance certainly makes it extremely difficult to do so and hypervisibility might be thought the "telos of the society of transparency" [40-41].  

 

The agony of eros thus involves not only a crisis of fantasy, but being forced like Alex in A Clockwork Orange to have our eyelids clamped open, so that we might see everything all of the time. 

 

The Politics of Eros

 

Oh dear, Byung-Chul Han and I are forced to part company once more; too much talk, right from the off, concerning the universal nature of love (Badiou) and beautiful souls guided by Eros (Plato) ... 

 

As for contemporary politics within a burnout society, well, according to Han, it's founded on pleasure-based desire (epithumia) and has no interest in either eros or thumos - the latter being something I have written about on Torpedo the Ark: click here and/or here, for example [c].

 

Whilst acknowledging that "a politics of love will never exist" [44], that doesn't stop Han dreaming of love stories unfolding against a background of political events and of a secret resonance existing between politics and love. For political action is "mutual desire for another way of living - a more just world aligned with eros on every register" [44]. 

 

Is it? That's news to me. I mean it could be that, but it could be something entirely different; a politics of evil, for example, which understands love to be an eternal part of life, but only a part: "And when it is treated as if it were a whole, it becomes a disease [...]" [d].      

 

That, in a nutshell, is my concern with Byung-Chul Han: that he turns a once healthy process of the human soul (love) into a diseased ideal and I suggest he read Lawrence's hugely important novels Aaron's Rod (1922) and Kangaroo (1923) to get an astonishing insight into this. Or some Nietzsche.      

 

 

The End of Theory

 

When not inspired by the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism, Heidegger was moved by the beating wings of the god of love; it was Eros who encouraged him as a thinker to venture along previously untrodden paths into the incalculable. At least that's what he told his wife. And Han believes him, because he also believes that:

 

"Without seduction by the atopic Other, which sparks erotic desire, thinking withers into mere work, which always reproduces the Same." [47] 

 

Thinking not only becomes more powerful, but also more uncanny, when it's eroticised. Without erotic inspiration it just becomes dreary and repetitive: "Likewise, love without eros and the spiritual lift it provides deteriorates into mere 'sensuality'." [48] 

 

This is why an artificial intelligence will never be able to produce a beautiful philosophical concept and why genuine thinking "transcends the positivity of given facts" [49] and data-analysis. Confronted with the "pullulating mass of information and data" [50], says Han, we need theoretical thinking more than ever. For theories, like ceremonies and rituals, "confer form on the world" [50] and keep things from breaking down into sprawling chaos.

 

In other words, information overload "massively heightens the entropy of the world; it raises the level of noise" [50]. And that's a problem, because thinking "as an expedition into quietness" [50] demands calm. We are faced with a spiritual crisis at top volume: "Rampant, massive information - an excess of positivity - makes a racket." [50] 

    

And just as we can't close our eyes, neither can we block up ears. Philosophy might be the "translation of eros into logos" [52], but when it speaks it does so in a seductive whisper, it doesn't shout or issue commands. And it still respects the importance of silence. 

 

And on that note, I'll shut up ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] No surprise that Byung-Chul Han eventually calls on André Breton for support, describing the surrealist reinvention of love as "an artistic, existential, and political gesture" which "ascribes a universal power to eros"; the power of poetic revolution and renewal. See chapter 6, 'The Politics of Eros', in The Agony of Eros. The lines quoted are on p. 46. 

 

[b] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236. 

      Having said this, Lawrence does then go on to call for rigorous censorship of genuine pornography, which he says you can recognise "by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit" [241]. Where Lawrence and Byung-Chul Han appear to significantly differ is on the question of secrecy. Whereas the latter thinks it fundamental to eroticism, Lawrence writes:

      "The whole question of pornography seems to me a question of secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things. Secrecy has always an element of fear in it, amounting very often to hate. Modesty is gentle and reserved." [243]

      Of course, Lawrence was writing in a different time. Today, pornography is not underworld or under the counter, it's freely and openly available online and the styles, values, and norms of the sex industry have been largely determine mainstream culture (this is what is meant by pornification). Still, what he writes in this essay is something that the author of The Agony of Eros might like to consider.   

 

[c] Whilst I don't expect Han to have read either of the above posts, I'm surprised he didn't refer to Peter Sloterdijk's work on thumos in his psycho-political study Zorn und Zeit (2006). 

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 328.

      See also Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010) in which I discuss the politics of evil (as well as the politics of style, the politics of cruelty, and the politics of desire), with reference to the work of Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence. 

 

 

To read part one of this post - Melancholia to Bare Life - click here.