Byung-Chul Han is the latest thing in Making Undergrads Read Philosophy, for good reason as far as these things go. Timothy Morthon is probably the relevant comparandum: there’s a good new idea, put in terms that young people will understand and packaged with enough appurtenances to get readers interested in digging into sterner stuff.
Han’s actually got a lot more irons in the fire than Morton, but the one that draws people’s attention the most is his claim that the modern subject is self-oppressed and self-exploited. The argument goes like this: historically, political subjects have been controlled and made to work by outside violence, while the people in control of that violence reap the profits. Now that’s not necessary anymore, because people have learned to exploit themselves, to think of themselves at once as entrepreneur and workforce – of course, while someone else still grabs the profits. That last category, a little underdefined by Han, would presumably be made up mostly of people who were born rich and thus never felt the need to turn their souls into wealth-producing machinery.
This is a pretty good approximation of the American economy as she is now, driven at the top by flows of venture and vulture capital that extract most of the gains and also turn even products will utopian potential (Patreon is a recent case that comes to mind, but see also all of social media) into millstones around the necks of their users. It’s also more a historical than a philosophical argument. The way Han fills that gap is by introducing the notion that we live in an age of positivity where sameness replaces difference and incentivizing ego-ideal replaces punishing superego. The negativity that served as the motor in earlier theories of history, Han argues, has been discarded like any other outmoded technology.
That idea had a certain plausibility when Han first published it, but the English translation had the misfortune of coming out not long after Trump got elected. It sure seems like negativity is coming back in spades. Was Han just wrong? I don’t think so, but there was always a big problem with Han’s way of arguing that happens to have been exposed by the events of the last few years. Even in 2011, how could a reasonable person have claimed that Agamben’s vision of modernity as the remapping of the world into concentration camps full of non-people was obsolete? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 people got exploded by US drone strikes that year, at least half of them civilians. Agamben says modern governments are defined by states of exception where the law provides no defence against arbitrary state violence. In 2011, America’s state of exception included Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya. It hasn’t exactly shrunk since then.
America is “lucky” in the sense that it can afford to keep the state of exception circumscribed and outside its borders. So are Germany, where Han teaches, and South Korea, where Han’s from. Lots of countries, including some developed ones like China and Israel, don’t enjoy that luxury. Han’s biggest intellectual vice is myopia: he just doesn’t see what’s outside the walled garden where he works.
This is disturbing, but hardly a reason to throw Topology of Violence in the chipper-shredder. Like everything else, it needs to be read critically. A book I was often thinking about when I read it was David Edgerton’s Shock of the old, a revisionist history of technology arguing that the impact of innovation gets way overstated (fun fact from within its pages: nuclear weapons delivered as many corpses per dollar as firebombs did in WWII. The main deliverable from that particular innovation has been anxiety about the coming apocalypse.) The way technology actually works, on a global scale, is as a repertoire from which bits are selected by users with particular needs and capacities. Worldwide, most users don’t choose the latest thing, either because they can’t afford it or because it won’t work without significant infrastructure investments or just because it’s designed to satisfy artificially generated needs that advertising hasn’t started to engender outside Western markets yet.
Given that Byung-Chul Han admits a sizeable material component to the entrepreneurial self (the total transparency of social media, for one thing), it’s no big leap to apply Edgerton’s theory here as well. Self-exploitation can take over from other disciplinary apparatuses in particular settings, where infrastructure (the internet, home workspaces) and incentives (lots and lots of money, not that you’ll ever get your hands on any) work together to turn it into the most effective (read: low-cost) way of getting people to do work. Where these conditions don’t hold, it’s not a viable technology of the self. We’re trying to export it (via the spread of social media, mostly) but the very conditions of the global economy prevent it from taking root: the whole thing doesn’t work if someone’s not being forced to mine raw materials for starvation wages.
That tells us something interesting about the entrepreneurial self and the society that explains it. Han is right to say that this self develops, survives and reproduces in an atmosphere of universal positivity. Given that other, more negativity-driven forms of exploitation persist across most of the globe, the territory taken up by this positivity must be limited. Moreover, since negativity abhors a vacuum, it also has to be defended. That means preemptive war abroad, but it also means platoons of pig-fucking cops to protect positivity-minded yuppied against the negative next-door. Not only that, if you’re Peter Thiel it means suing Gawker out of existence for pointing out that you suck at investing.
That lawsuit was part of a culture war between people who just wanted to feel good and people who still believed in enemies. Weirdly, Byung-Chul Han seems to be on the former side, since he thinks that Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction is just one more thing that’s gone obsolete. Not long after Gawker went under, though, it would become pretty much impossible to ignore that we did have enemies, even (maybe especially) if we just wanted to feel good.
Trump was a dead fish that washed over the gunwhales on a wave of negativity. His supporters were, and are, the most doctrinaire negative motherfuckers you can find – at least the ones who show up on TV. Was part of this negativity directed precisely against the positivity that Han identifies as capital’s new favorite way of extracting surplus value? It sure seems so, especially if we see the political correctness attacked by right-win pundits as a weird reflection of the culture of no criticism that defines the office space of most tech-companies. There are a lot of nice things about positivity, or nice things that get wrapped up in positivity: equality of race and gender and gender orientation, in short all of civil rights. By appropriating those things as tools of business, capital managed to politicize them and paradoxically to put them in a more perilous position than they’ve been in since the 60’s. Han’s purported description of modern culture thus ends up exposing one of its deepest faultlines.
So, are we stuck with a choice between endorsing Han’s dystopia of sticky positivity and, as it seems, siding with the Nazis? I don’t really feel that way – I think leftists can just go ahead and be mean – but I might be wrong. The reason that I started reading Byung-Chul Han was because his theory of the burnout society spoke pretty personally to me: I absolutely feel like I’m either exploiting myself or conscientiously not doing that by “wasting time,” which should be fun but isn’t. I’m pretty sure I didn’t used to be driven this way, but I don’t know how to get back there. Would I suffocate outside of the atmosphere of supercharged positivity in which I live and work?