Byung-Chul Han, Fatigue and the Illusion of Freedom

It took me a week to read and fully annotate Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society. It is an interesting book that tries to be alarming and disturbing at the same time. One has the perception of being at the center of a conspiracy, and as a function of that, his argumentation is axiomatic, judgmental, and apocryphal.

Han has been able to use very well the cards that he “hides” up his sleeve of publicity. His “little books” are some more books than others. In any case, they are the product of circumstances and driven by a spirit that claims to be “renovating” based, of course, on the re-reading of the authors that captivates him and that he paraphrases not always openly. He has in his favor, it must be said, the relational exercise and, by extension, a network thinking and discourse, a tool he knows how to use effectively, especially for a society still anchored in a certain way in a tradition that has in the grid of experience a way of reasoning and imagining.

They are short books, they can be read in one sitting. If you want to break them down, you will need a little more time. But they are conceived for a general public, no matter how much astonishment and amazement they may have caused in the academy.

Organized in twelve chapters, two of which were added to the 2020 edition, La sociedad del cansancio is an epilogue of despair, a tsunami that seems to sweep away everything. It makes noise, no doubt about it, but this noise is intended to overlook the alarms of postmodernity. For Han, we have arrived at the late-modern society as subjects of a performance that survives in a completely illusory freedom. The arrival at this condition does not adequately collate the consequences, nor, above all, the criticisms associated with the exhaustion of the rational-positivist paradigm.

Han’s thesis are not new, what is “new” is the delivery, which makes them suggestive and “renovating” for a public de-limited by advertising and marketing strategies. Pretending a “renovating” spirit, what prevails is a principle of inevitability, a new teleologism, a new secularity that will have in the Smart-Space, its space of referentiality. There is no renovation or alternativity in Han, there is, however, a search that seeks to unravel the reasons behind this new condition.

And the absence of alternativity is established in the nostalgic and almost archeological handling of the argumentation. Chapters such as “Vita activa” and “Pedagogy of looking” are compendiums of longing. Nietzsche, Heidegger and Arendt appear legitimized by their arguments but outdated in the face of the maelstrom of a society in which the contemplative capacity has been lost, where “nothing is constant and lasting” [1]. To say, therefore, that Han is indebted to Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault is naive. He is, in any case, passionate about these continental authors and others whom he does not always mention, but who serve him for his mimetic argumentation. Han is not a thinker of rigor, in the continental sense of contemporary philosophy.

However, the grammar and discursivity in Han are interesting. He always constructs short sentences, sentences with an emphasis on the axiom, preceded, mostly by a reference. Underlying this logic is his criterion of argumentation. The reader has then the erroneous perception that he is in front of an argumentative finding.

In any case, Han uses the logical architecture of his fetish thinkers to flesh out his argument. For example, he elevates neural pathology to a historical category, using the same algorithm as Foucault. From this delimitation, he articulates a sort of diagnostic philosophy closely related to negation that leads to a diatribe, overlooking what is really happening in contemporary thought, especially in the new contributions to the phenomenology of cognition [2], to mention just one example.

For Han, the 21st century is not the century of bacteria or viruses —this is very questionable—, as was the 20th century, but of neuronal diseases such as depression. The difference seems to lie not in the disease itself -they are not infections- but in their consequences, which are none other than excess positivity, as the author himself calls it. If contagious diseases and therefore the immunology associated with them introduce negativity, that is, the other that invades the body; in the pathologies of the 21st century, the other has been eliminated [3], leaving only an individuality devoid of any instance of domination subject to itself. These displacements are producing an unnoticed paradigm shift without sufficient analytical collation. Thus, “the disappearance of otherness and strangeness” gives way to difference [4]. The emphasis here is not on finding the questioned reasons for the “disappearance”, but on the legitimization of what he calls —“disregarding” Derrida— difference.

But let us return to the thesis of immunology. For Han, immunology is not an exclusively explanatory principle in the medical field. Han elevates immunology to the category of paradigm -without referring to Kuhn- and explanatory principle from which its foundation makes sense. The immunological becomes an instrumental principle to explain the dialectic of negation, the expulsion of the other as a function of a violence that would protect us from “a much greater violence, which would be mortal” [5]. The negation, the other, the strangeness, will only be elements put in function of legitimizing what he calls the overabundance or excess of positivity.

Once again, it is necessary to delimit where the utilitarian handling of the term immunology begins, and to what extent Han uses it simply to support a thesis that could be perfectly explained from philosophical, anthropological and sociological thought. In any case, Han functions from a thought as reminiscence. This makes his “relational” thinking not the search for a totality, but rather an exercise in dispersion.

If for Foucault pathology has an explanatory character in terms of philosophy, anthropology and sociology, for Han it will only function as teleology. Han is not from epistemological recognition and by not being so, he makes The Burnout Society  a legitimate cry, but also an epilogue of despair. His text is more disturbance than reason and argumentation. Han is —how to doubt it— an heir to the discourse of postmodernity, but he does not recognize himself as such. Performativity and fascination weigh more than argumentation epistemologically speaking.

The inadvertent change of paradigm would come for Han to manage not a dialectic of negativity, but the prevalence of pathological states attributable to an excess of positivity that does not cease to be violent. Violence consists not only in denying the other, but also in affirming the identical, generating what the author calls “overabundance of the identical / excess of positivity” [6]. This condition is no longer viral and not being viral, immunology as a “paradigm” does not offer access for its understanding. “Exhaustion, fatigue and suffocation in the face of overabundance are not immunological reactions either. They all consist of manifestations of a neuronal violence, which is not viral, since it does not derive from any immunological negativity.” [7]

In this way, the “subject” devoid of the other, which is nothing other than the “strange”, the different in the scheme of the immunology of the inside out, only counts on himself, on his potentiality and performance. The nature of this new “subject” is in the displacement from a disciplinary society —Freud, Foucault…— to what Han proposes as a society of performance. If the disciplinary or control society full of psychiatric hospitals and prisons generated a subject of obedience and terror; the performance society has only “subjects who are entrepreneurs of themselves. Those walls of disciplinary institutions, which delimited the space between the normal and the abnormal, have an archaic effect”. [8]

If the disciplinary society tutored by the panopticon is immunologically negative insofar as it forces the expulsion or isolation of the other which is nothing other than the different, the performance society is governed by an unlimited power to do, initiative and performance motivation. If the disciplinary society “produces” madmen and criminals, the performance society produces depressives and failures. It seems that, in Han’s logic, both societies are inherent to the social unconscious in the pursuit of maximizing production, as a consequence of their actions.

If in Orwell’s 1984 or Yoko Ogama’s The Memory Police, society is aware that it is being watched, punished and dominated, perhaps today in the performance society we are not so aware of this. The eagerness, but above all the pressure for performance —which can be translated not only as content— generates a systemic violence where the subject is self-exploited. Once the other has been expelled, we live -in the words of Han- always with the anguish of not doing everything we could do and on top of that we blame ourselves for our supposed inability. This anguish is the consequence of our own self-exploitation.

This is the nature of the late-modern society where the performance imperative, as the reason for the social foundation, generates neurological diseases such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD], borderline personality disorder [BPD] or occupational burnout syndrome [ODS]. These disorders generate disintegrated, fragmented and dispersed personalities, founded and based on multitasking. If for some this is a “time management technique”, for Han multitasking is a regression to the world of wild animals that use this “technique” to ensure survival.

The subject of multitasking is the antithesis of the contemplative subject. From the subject of deep attention, to the subject of hyper-attention. From the capacity to listen, which is a condition for deep and contemplative attention, to the hyperactive ego that does not have access to it because it listens to itself and to its requirements of self-affirmation. A kind of new egocentrism that Han calls autistic [9], and that is traded on social networks in “function of increasing the narcissistic feeling of self, building a crowd that applauds and pays attention to an ego that is exposed as if it were a commodity”. [10]

This ego-commodity, bases its performance on a principle of self-confirmation and identity, which becomes self-destruction. “The subject who is obliged to perform kills himself on the basis of self-realization. Here self-realization and self-destruction coincide” [11]. Nothing is enough for the subject of performance and in the absence of prohibitions and mandates, typical of the disciplinary society, it is thought that everything is possible. Freedom is confused with the illusion that all this symptomatology generates, forgetting that, although the external dominating instance “disappears”, this does not eliminate the coercive structure, in any case the unhinged search for performance is the new coercion that destroys the subject of performance.

It is required then —and this is one of the conclusions of the book— another use of time, where one does not live obsessed with productivity, where the exercise of looking and listening is at the center of attention. The notion of time —until now modern— also demands a redefinition, especially in terms of determining also the notion of work from the new electronic devices that Han calls “portable work field”. One manages to breathe the Heidegerian spirit in the preliminary conclusions of the book. However, Han does not acknowledge his debt to Being and Time.

Han’s rhetoric seeks, above all things, to make visible a political map, much more evident from the re-signification of the positive in terms of viral infection. The Third World War, which has been nothing other than the pandemic of the coronavirus, has further underlined the theses of this contemporary thinker [12]. From the inexpressiveness that has meant covering our faces with masks for two years, to the displacement of the centers of power, the post-pandemic society, according to Han, is dangerously heading towards a regime of biopolitical surveillance. A survival society in which, in order to achieve such objectives, we have been able to sacrifice contact with our fellow human beings, mobility or sociability.