Notes on Byung-Chul Han's 'Non-things' (Part 2)

Byung-Chul Han: author of Non-things,

trans. Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2022).

Page references given in the post refer to this work.

 

 

Note: This post is a continuation. To go to part one (sections I - VI), click here. We continue our reflections on Byung-Chul Han's new book by discussing things in their evil and magical aspects ...

 

 

VII.

 

Han argues that things have lost their malevolent or villainous character; that objects, if you like, no longer seek revenge upon subjects - even when those subjects are cartoon mice or silent film stars like Charlie Chaplin. Material reality has become a safe space and offers no resistance or dangers. 

 

Things, in short, are now subordinate to our control and "even Mickey Mouse leads a digital, smart and immaterial life [...] and no longer collides with physical reality" [47]. Now there's an app for everything and a quick solution to all life's problems. Objects behave themselves; even if we build our world upon their backs, they'll no longer attempt to shrug us off. 

 

But, just in case those pesky objects are still up to no good when we're not around to keep an eye on them, we have invented the Internet of Things: "The infosphere puts things in chains. [...] It tames things and turns them into servants catering to our needs." [49]

 

In the past, we accepted the independence of things; the kettle might start whistling before we were ready to make the tea; the door might start creaking or the window begin to rattle in the middle of the night, keeping us awake. 

 

Even Sartre remained familiar "with what it means to be touched by things" [50] and this filled the protagonist of Nausea (1938) with terror. On the other hand, for Rilke things emanated warmth and he fantasised about sleeping with his beloved objects. 

 

But then things cooled down and no longer warmed us, touched us, or seduced us. And now, things are not even frigid: 

 

"They have neither cold nor warmth; they are worn out. All their vitality is waning. They no longer represent a counterpart to humans. They are not opposing bodies. Who, today, feels looked at, or spoken to, by things? [...] Who feels threatened or enchanted by things?" [52].

Perhaps a handful of object-oriented philosophers and a small number of objectum sexuals - but that's about it. It's a bit depressing to realise just how poor in world we have become as we sit staring at screens (and this has nothing to do with the so-called cost of living crisis or rising inflation):

"The digital screen determines our experience of the world and shields us from reality. [...] Things lose their gravity, their independent life and their waywardness" [52], says Han. And he's right. 

 

Right also to argue the impossibility of forming a genuine relation with a world that consists more and more of digital objects (or non-things). People talk about a mental health crisis, but depression is "nothing other than a pathologically intensified poverty in world" [53].   

 

VIII.

Han argues that we perceive the world primarily through (and as) information. Information not only covers the world, but "undermines the thing level of reality" [56] in all its intensity of presence. 

 

One way to counter this would be to establish a magical relationship with the world that is not characterised by representation, but by touch (an idea that will appeal to witches and Lawrentians alike). This is really just a question of greater attentiveness paid to things as things and forgetting of self for a moment or two: "When the ego gets weak, it is able to hear that mute thing language." [57] 

 

This may of course be disturbing, but Han wants human beings to be disturbed by the world; to be "moved by something singular" [58], to be penetrated from behind and below, so that we are thrown into a condition of radical passivity and presence is allowed to burst in. This is what creates epiphanic moments (as well as erotic joy). 

Apart from magic, there's also art ... At its best, art creates things, or material realities that are born of handwork, as Rilke says. 

 

A poem, for example, has a "sensual-physical dimension that eludes its sense" [60]. And it is because a poem exceeds the signifier and isn't exhausted by its meaning, that it constitutes a thing. One doesn't simply read a poem - any more than one simply drinks a glass of fine wine - both invite one to experience and enjoy them (to know their body, as it were).

 

Unfortunately, art is - according to Byung-Chul Han - moving away from this materialist understanding of its own practice. And what is particularly depressing about today's art "is its inclination to communicate a preconceived opinion, a moral or political conviction: that is, its inclination to communicate information" [64].  

 

In brief: "Art is seized by a forgetfulness of things [...] It wants to instruct rather than seduce." [64]  

 

Artworks today lack silence, lack stillness, lack secrecy; instead, they shout and insist that we interact with them. This probably explains why I would now rather sit in my backgarden amongst the daisies, than visit a bookshop, gallery, or theatre.   

 

 

IX.

I'm going to refrain from commenting at length or in detail upon sections in Han's new book dealing with Kakfa's struggle against ghosts and the philosophical importance of the hand in the work of Martin Heidegger (something I have previously discussed in a couple of posts published in June of 2019: click here and here).   

 

However, I very much like Han's observation that, were he alive today, the former would reluctantly resign himself to the fact that "by inventing the internet, email and the smartphone, the ghosts had won their final victory over mankind" [54] [a]. 

 

And it's always good to be reminded how the latter raised his hand (and stomped his foot) in a vain attempt to defend the terrestrial world against the digital order. He was a bit of a Nazi, but it's hard not to admire many aspects of Heidegger's thinking. But, as Han concedes, human beings have long since stopped dwelling between Earth and Sky:

 

"Human beings soar up towards the un-thinged [unbedingtheit], the unconditioned [...] towards a transhuman and post-human age in which human life will be a pure exchange of information. [...] Digitilization is a resolute step along the way towards the abolition of the humanum. The future of humans seems mapped out: humans will abolish themselves in order to posit themselves as the absolute." [72]

 

There will be no things close to our hearts - but that won't matter, for we won't have hearts, nor hands, feet, or genitals in the disembodied time to come. 

 

What was that line from Proverbs again ...? [b]

 

 

X.      

 

Why do so many people have headaches today? (I have one now.)

 

Could it be because the world is so restless and noisy; because no one knows how to keep still and stay silent; because no one can close their eyes or shut their fucking mouths for a moment?

 

As Arthur Fleck says: "Everybody is awful these days. It's enough to make anyone crazy. [...] Everybody just yells and screams at each other. Nobody's civil anymore. Nobody thinks what it's like to be the other guy." [c] 

 

But you don't have to be a mentally ill loner to recognise this - Byung-Chul Han pretty much tells us the same thing: "Hypercommunication, the noise of communication, desecrates the world, profanes it." [76] 

 

Learning to listen is a crucial skill; as is learning to be still if you wish to know the transcendent joy of the Greater Day and gaze with wonder upon the immensity of blue (this includes the blue of the sky, the blue of the sea, or the blue of a butterfly's wing, for example). 

 

But, paradoxically, learning to gaze also involves learning how to close one's eyes and look away, because gazing has an imaginative component. And that's important, for as Han writes:

 

"Without imagination, there is only pornography. Today, perception itself has something pornographic about it. It has the form of immediate contact, almost of a copulation of image and eye. The erotic takes place when we close our eyes. [...]

      What is so ruinous about digital communication is that it means we no longer have time to close our eyes. The eyes are forced into a 'continuous voracity'. They lose the capacity for stillness, for deep attentiveness." [79]

 

Staring at a screen is not the same as gazing at the sky; if the latter produces wonder, the former results only in eyestrain and a slavish inability not to react to every stimulus (which, as Nietzsche pointed out, is symptomatic of exhaustion and spiritual decline). Noble and healthy souls know that doing nothing is better than being hyperactive; that philosophy, for example, is born from idleness. 

 

Han terms this ability to do nothing negative potentiality:

 

"It is not a negation of positive potential but a potential of its own. It enables spirit to to engage in still, contemplative lingering, that is, deep attentiveness. [...] Stillness can be restored only by a strengthening of negative potentiality." [82] 

And where is all this leading? Towards the loss of identity - the surrender of self - towards happy anonymity: "Only in stillness, in the great silence, do we enter into a relation with the nameless, which exceeds us [...]" [83]

 

 

XI.

Byung-Chul Han closes his book with an excurses which begins with him falling off his bicycle (talk about the villainy of things) and then falling in love with a jukebox (talk about things close to the heart).  

Han likes old jukeboxes from the 1950s; they are erotico-magical things to him which "makes listening to music a highly enjoyable visual, acoustic and tactile experience" [87]. The records played on the jukebox give him "a vague sense that the world back then must have been somehow more romantic and dream-like than it is today" [88].  

Admitting that Heidegger would probably not have been a fan of the jukebox, Han insists nevertheless that apart from playing tunes, it imparts presence and intensifies being, which is something Alexa can never do.

 

This does kind of hint at the fact that Han awards thing status to whatever objects he happens to favour: J’aime, je n’aime pas - Oh, Miss Brodie, you are Barthesian ...

 

  

Notes

 

[a] I keep telling members of the D. H. Lawrence Society that whilst Zoom is extensive it lacks intensity and that being connected is not the same as being in an actual relation. Like it or not, digital communication negates physical presence and "accelerates the disappearance of the other" [55]. 

      Unfortunately, they either do not listen, do not understand, or do not seem to care. To read my post on this subject: click here. 

[b] I'm referring to Proverbs 4:23: "Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life." According to Byung-Chul Han, this was placed above the front door to Heidegger's house. 

[c] Joaquin Phoenix in the role of Arthur Fleck (Joker) speaking to Robert De Niro's character Murray Franklin (shortly before shooting him) in Joker (dir. Todd Philips, 2019): click here to watch on YouTube. 

 

 

Musical bonus: as Byung-Chul Han loves French singers and jukeboxes so much, here's Serge Gainsbourg on TV in 1965 performing Le claquer de doigts.

 

    

On the Question of Distance and Proximity

Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant - Heidegger [1]

 

 

I.

 

In what I thought was an important post written at the start of the year, I invited members of the D. H. Lawrence Society and wider Lawrence world to reconsider their use of (and increasing reliance upon) Zoom: click here.

 

Alas, despite the post picking up almost 1,300 views, it seems that my fellow Lawrentians decided to ignore the issue I raised concerning technology and carry on Zooming. 

 

Indeed, during the summer, the D. H. Lawrence Society of Great Britain even organised and hosted an international virtual symposium in the belief that such an online event would bring "Lawrence scholars and enthusiasts from around the world back into proximity" [2].

 

In order to indicate why this belief is philosophically naive, let us turn to Heidegger's thought in this area ...

 

 

II.   

 

In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that natural science depends on a concept of time and space that limits our understanding of being in the world. We cannot construct meaningful notions of distance - this is near, that is far - or appreciate how things might reveal themselves in a manner that isn’t enframed by technology, simply based on what our boffins tell us. 

 

Twenty-years later, in his Bremen lecture series, Heidegger notes that because of planes, trains, and automobiles - as well as advances in the telecommunications industry - all distances in time and space are shrinking and yet, paradoxically, this does not bring nearness; for the latter does not consist in the mere closing of distance. 

 

Indeed, not only has nearness remained far away, but, if anything, it has become kept at bay by the frantic abolition of all distances [3].

 

The irony is, because everything in an age of techno-obscenity is close-up and immediately present in HD, we no longer have any experience of the nearness of those things that are nearest to us. For in order to experience nearness one needs to encounter things as things; i.e., in their actuality, not merely as representations or images on a screen.

 

One needs, in other words, to appreciate that the distance between objects is not something that can simply be measured in feet and inches; for it is neither neutral nor abstract, but a question of lived experience - or, more precisely, what Lawrence would think of in terms of relationship (or touch). 

 

Zoom, which during the coronavirus pandemic has risen to a position of dominance within the world of social media [4], will not enable you to climb down Pisgah and back into the nearness of the nearest; nor will it allow you to come back into touch, or meet within what Lawrence terms the fourth dimension.

 

I would suggest, in closing, that Heidegger is right to argue that nothing is more unearthly (and less Lawrentian) than the (nihilistic) collapsing of everything into uniform distancelessness, so that everything present is equally near and equally far. Those who value proximity need to recognise the importance of also preserving distance.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Martin Heidegger, 'Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?', trans. Bernd Magnus, in The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 20, no. 3 (March 1967), pp. 411–31. Click here to read on JSTOR. 

 

[2] I'm quoting from the promotional pdf for 'D. H. Lawrence, Distance and Proximity: an international virtual symposium' (10-14 July, 2021): click here.

[3] Martin Heidegger, 'The Thing', Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, (HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 161-180.

[4] In 2020, Zoom was the fifth most downloaded mobile app in the world.

Zoom: What Would D. H. Lawrence Do?

 

Sat at home, surrounded by screens, I am no longer anywhere, 

but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality. 

- Jean Baudrillard

 

I.

 

One of the things I admire about Christianity is the inherent challenge it poses: take up your cross and follow me. These words, spoken by Jesus, are not addressed to those who are merely looking for a new faith, but, rather, those who would establish an entirely new ethical practice or mode of being in the world [1]. 

 

As Nietzsche says, this evangelical way of life - which is often a difficult and dangerous way of life (i.e., one at odds with the world and which can get you fed to the lions) - is what distinguishes a Christian from a non-Christian; he or she doesn't merely think differently, they act differently [2].    

 

One finds a similar call to action in the work of D. H. Lawrence; a writer who demands a far greater level of committment from his followers than most others: "whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn’t like it - if he wants a safe seat in the audience - let him read somebody else" [3].   

 

Like Jesus, to whom he is often compared [4], Lawrence wants his readers to join him in the fight against modern techno-industrial society (or Mammon) and lead radically different lives from their fellow citizens, founded upon contrasting values.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, however, most readers choose to discreetly ignore this revolutionary aspect of his work - and this even includes members of the D. H. Lawrence Society ... 

 

 

II.

 

According to a senior figure within the above - who shall remain nameless - the most exciting thing to emerge out of lockdown (due to the coronavirus pandemic) is the massive extension of social media. 

 

It is, he says, not only a necessity for all of us to embrace new technology, but a wonderful opportunity for members of the Lawrence Society to move online and experience the delights of virtual meetings, rather than suffer the inconvenience of physically gathering in the actual world. 

 

Indeed, he seems to be something of an evangelist for the communications and technology company Zoom, describing his own use of the software as an uplifting experience. 

 

Maybe it is: I don’t know, 'cos I don't use Zoom.

 

But what I do know, however, is that Lawrence was profoundly troubled by transcendent ideals of uplift which run counter to his gargoyle aesthetic and dreams of climbing down Pisgah back into the nearness of the nearest (as Heidegger would say). 

 

He, Lawrence, was particularly concerned by forms of technology that stimulate false feeling and counterfeit notions of community: 

 

"The film, the radio, the gramophone [and now the internet], were all invented because physical effort and physical contact have become repulsive to man and woman alike. The aim is to abstract as far as possible." [5] 

 

Lawrence would thus surely regard social media as just another attempt by hyper-conscious individuals to experience everything in their heads and to exchange the sheer intensity of life lived in the flesh for a virtual sensation. His fear is not that this results in a loss of soul, but in a denial of the body and corporeal reality: 

 

"The amazing move into abstraction on the part of the whole of humanity […] means we loathe the physical element [...] We don't want to look at flesh-and-blood people - we want to watch their shadows on a screen. We don't want to hear their actual voices: only transmitted through a machine.” [6] 

 

The fact that many people prefer to interact with family and friends via a video link is, I think, rather sad. But the fact that a Lawrentian would choose to celebrate this and act as cheerleader for an American tech giant strikes me as, well, problematic to say the least ...

 

For whilst it's not mandatory for an admirer of Lawrence to agree with everything he wrote and live a faultlessly Lawrentian lifestyle, they might at least take his work seriously enough to accept that the question concerning technology remains of vital philosophical import. 

 

Indeed, one might suggest that it has never been more crucial than now to examine our (obsessive) relationship with the screen, which, since the first lockdown in the spring of last year, has become virtually our only communicative interface with the world. 

 

We work online, we shop on line, we play online and thus our professional lives, social lives, and even love lives are all mediated via screens ... If that isn't something to concern members of the D. H. Lawrence Society, then what is?       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Matthew 16:24. The New International Version of this line reads: "Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.'"   

 

[2] See Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), section 33.

      Of course, as Nietzsche goes on to say, hardly anybody who has called themselves a Christian has understood this and risen to the challenge that Jesus presented. Nevertheless: "Even today, such a life is possible, for certain men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will be possible at all times ... Not a belief but a doing, above all a not-doing of many things [...] To reduce being a Christian, Christianness, to a holding something to be true, to a mere phenomenality of consciousness, means to negate Christianness." Ibid., section 39.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Carlo Linati (22 Jan 1925) in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), letter number 3341, pp. 200-01.  

[4] See Catherine Brown, 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', in D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 426-441. 

      Brown notes of Lawrence: "Christ-like he preached an idiosyncratic vision of salvation both parabolically and explicitly, denounced hypocrisy and materialism, prioritised content over form and soul over intellect, liked children and communal living, prophesised destruction, was poor and physically weak, died in pain and believed in a kind of resurrection." [427] 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Men Must Work and Women as Well', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 277.

[6] Ibid., p. 283.

 

 

For a follow-up post to this one, click here.