“The Transparency Society” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Erik Butler)

Han often complains about modernity. In this short monograph he takes on the modern pose of transparency. He asserts that the trend towards greater transparency is far from positive. “The society of transparency is not a society of trust, but a society of control…. Total transparency imposes a temporality on political communication that makes slow, long-term planning impossible…. Compulsive conformity proceeds from transparency. In this way, transparency stabilizes the dominant system.”

For Han, the transparent society is one of enforced intimate relations with strangers. “In modernity, theatrical distance is increasingly abandoned in favor of intimacy…. The world today is no theater where actions and feelings are represented and interpreted, but a market on which intimacies are exhibited, sold, and consumed. The theater is a site of representation, whereas the market is a site of exhibition…. Intimacy is the psychological formula of transparency…. The tyranny of intimacy psychologizes and personalizes everything…. The public sphere becomes an exhibition space…. As a society of revealing and denuding, the society of transparency works against all forms of the mask…. The mounting deritualization and denarrativization of society also strip it of forms of symbolic appearance and render it naked…. Human beings become sociable when they preserve distance from one another. Intimacy, in contrast, destroys distance…. The society of intimacy is a psychologized, deritualized society. It is a society of confession, laying-bare, and the pornographic lack of distance…. Narcissistic subjects who lack the ability of scenic distantiation populate the society of intimacy…. Experience [Erfahrung] means facing the Other. Experiencing [Erlebnis], in contrast, means encountering oneself everywhere.”

Magic and enchantment are lost in a world of transparency. It only produces a world burdened by facts and data. “The society of transparency is a society without poets, without seduction or metamorphosis. After all, it is the poet who produces scenic illusions, forms of appearance, and ritual and ceremonial signs: he sets artifacts and antifacts against hyperreal, naked evidence…. Today’s society of transparency lacks divine light inhabited by metaphysical tension. Transparency has no transcendence…. The society of transparency not only lacks truth; it also lacks symbolic appearance. Neither truth nor symbolic appearance are see-through. Only emptiness is entirely transparent…. The mass of information and imagery offers fullness in which emptiness is still noticeable…. Transparency also does not entail clairvoyance. The mass of information produces no truth.”

Finally, Han compares the world of transparency to Bentham’s vision of the panopticon. “The digital panopticon of the twenty-first century is aperpectival insofar as it no longer conducts surveillance from a central point, with the omnipotence of the despotic gaze. The distinction between center and periphery, which is fundamental to the Benthamian panopticon, has disappeared entirely…. The inhabitants of today’s panopticon network and communicate with each other intensively. Not lonesomeness through isolation, but hypercommunication guarantees transparency. Above all, the particularity of the digital panopticon is that its inhabitants actively collaborate in its construction and maintenance by putting themselves on display and baring themselves. They display themselves on the panoptic market…. The society of control achieves perfection when subjects bare themselves not through outer constraint but through self-generated need, that is, when the feat of having to abandon one’s private and intimate sphere yields to the need to put oneself on display without shame…. No community, in the strong sense, can form in the society of transparency. Instead chance gatherings [Ansammlungen] or crowds [Vielheiten] of isolated individuals, or egos, emerge…. Today the entire globe is developing into a panopticon. There is no outside space. The panopticon is becoming total. No wall separates inside from outside.”

“Psycho-Politics” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Erik Butler)

Han’s short treatise is a rumination on modernity and the digital age. He covers his usual well-trod themes through the lens of neo-Hegelianism. First, he takes on twenty-first century labor practice. “Today everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself…. Conditions are defined by the solitude of an entrepreneur who is isolated and self-combating and practices auto-exploitation voluntarily…. When production is immaterial, everyone already owns the means of production him- or herself.”

Han is worried about dig data and the end of intimacy, subjectivity, and uniqueness. He is wary of a humanity ruled by averages and correlation without causation. He fears the commoditization of the soul. “Today, we are entering the age of digital psychopolitics. It means passing from passive surveillance to active steering…. Big data is a highly efficient psychopolitical instrument that makes it possible to achieve comprehensive knowledge of the dynamics of social communication. This knowledge is knowledge for the sake of domination and control (Herrschaftswissen): it facilitates intervention in the psyche and enables influence to take place on a pre-reflexive level…. Digital psychopolitics transforms the negativity of freely made decisions into the positivity of factual states (Sachverhalte). Indeed, persons are being positivized into things, which can be quantified, measured and steered.”

For Han, each individual has become an optimizing machine. “Now productivity is not to be enhanced by overcoming physical resistance so much as by optimizing psychic or mental processes. Physical discipline has given way to mental optimization…. The neoliberal regime utterly claims the technology of the self for its own purposes: perpetual self-optimization — as the exemplary neoliberal technology of the self — represents nothing so much as a highly efficient mode of domination and exploitation…. The self-as-a-work-of-art amounts to a beautiful but deceptive illusion that the neoliberal regime maintains…. The neoliberal imperative of self-optimization serves only to promote perfect functioning within the system…. It is not concern for the good life that drives self-optimization. Rather, self-optimization follows from systemic constraints —from the logic of quantifying success on the market.”

The idiot stands opposed to psychopolitics. “Every philosopher who has brought forth a new idiom, — a new language, a new way of thinking — has necessarily been an idiot. Only the idiot has access to the wholly Other…. The history of philosophy is a history of idiotisms. Socrates knows only that he does not know; he is an idiot. Likewise, Descartes — who casts doubt on everything — is an idiot. Cogito ergo sum is idiotic…. The idiot is a modern-day heretic. Etymologically, heresy means ‘choice’. Thus, the heretic is one who commands free choice: the courage to deviate from orthodoxy. As a heretic, the idiot represents a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus. The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider…. Idiotism stands opposed to the neoliberal power of domination: total communication and total surveillance.”

“The Agony of Eros” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Erik Butler)

This short book, by Han, is a meditation on the conflict he sees between modernity and eros. Han begins, “The crisis of love does not derive from too many others so much as from the erosion of the Other. This erosion is occurring in all spheres of life; its corollary is the mounting narcissification of the Self…. Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego…. Eros—erotic desire—conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the atopia, indeed the utopia, of the wholly Other.”

Modernity has become what Han describes as a “burnout culture.” He decries the sterilization, the lack of differentiation, the consumption, and the fetishization of materialism. “Today, more and more, dignity, decency, and propriety—matters of maintaining distance—are disappearing. That is, the ability to experience the Other in terms of his or her otherness is being lost…. Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings…. Achievement society—which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project—has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion.” Han suggests that modernity lives in a constant present. It is unable to reach back into the past or push forward to a future, because it is stuck in banality. “Today, the future is shedding the negativity of the Other and positivizing itself an optimized present that excludes all disaster…. Memory is not an organ of simple restitution, by means of which one makes the past present again. In memory, what has been is constantly changing. It is a progressive, living, narrative process.”

Han discusses how eros necessitates the change of the ego upon first contact with the Other, “According to Ficino, love is the “most serious disease of all”; a “change,” it “takes away from a man that which is his own and changes him into the nature of another.” Such injury and transformation constitute its negativity. Today, through the increasing positivization and domestication of love, it is disappearing entirely. One stays the same and seeks only the confirmation of oneself in the Other.” Han stays on the theme of the transformation of the Self through eros, but with a Hegelian twist, “Love is an absolute end unto itself. It is absolute because it presupposes death, the surrender of the self. The “true essence of love consists in giving up consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in another.”” Han continues, “As an absolute end, love passes through death…. The reconciled return to oneself out of the Other means anything but violent appropriation of the Other…. Rather it is the gift of the Other—preceded by the surrender, the giving up, of one’s own self.” Han returns to Ficino, “When Ficino writes that the lover loses himself in another self—and yet, in this same waning oblivion, “recovers” and even “possesses” himself—this possession is the gift of the Other. The priority of the Other distinguishes the power of Eros from the violence of Ares. When power is a relation of domination, I assert myself against and oppose the Other by subjugating him or her to myself. In contrast, the power (Macht) or eros implies powerlessness and unconsciousness (Ohn-Macht); instead of affirming myself, I lose myself in (or for) the Other, who then rights me again: “The ruler possesses others through himself, but the lover takes possession of himself through another, and the farther each of the lovers is from himself, the nearer he is to the other, and though he is dead in himself, he comes to life again in the other.”” Han ends, “Eros is the medium for intensifying life to the point of death…. Faithfulness is a form of decision and conclusion that introduces an eternity into time.”

Han finishes by returning to the theme of the duality of eros, with a riff on Badiou, “Love is a “Two scene,” a theater meant for a duo, to paraphrase Badiou. Interrupting the isolated perspective of the One, it makes the world arise anew from the vantage point of the Other, or Difference. Love, as an experience and an encounter is marked by the negativity of upheaval: “It is clear that under the effect of a loving encounter, if I want to be really faithful to it, I must completely rework my ordinary way of ‘living’ [habiter] my situation.” The “event” is a moment of “truth”; it introduces a new and entirely different way of being into the habit of habiter, the situation at hand. It gives rise to something that circumstances cannot account for. It interrupts the Same in favor of the Other…. This transcendental fidelity may be understood as a universal quality of eros…. Love as an event—as a “Two scene”—is dehabitualizing and denarcissifying. It generates a “rupture,” a “hole” in the order of the Habitual and the Same…. Eros manifests itself as the revolutionary yearning for an entirely different way of loving.”