Waking up to fatigue society

For those not capable of reading German, a summary of Byung-Chul
Han's worthwhile essay on ``fatigue society'' (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft
Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2010): 

Chapter 1 is entitled ``The Neuronal Power'' and sets out with the
claim that frames the entire essay: ``Every age has its main
maladies.'' Han differentiates the bacterial age that ended (at
the latest) with the discovery of antibiotics, the viral age that
ended with the advance of immunology, and finally the present age:
the neuronal age. Its dominant maladies are neurological illnesses
like depression, ADHD, borderline personality syndrome and burnout
syndrome. The crucial difference between maladies of the viral age
and the neuronal age is that between infection and infarction. An
infection is caused by the negativity of the immunological other,
whereas an infarct is the result of an excess of positivity. Unlike
a virus, neuronal illnesses cannot simply be warded off like an
outside attacker.

The immunological paradigm which dominated the past century is
based on a clear differentiation between friend and enemy or inside
and outside. During the cold war, everybody knew who the enemy was,
and Han points out an affinity between immunological and military
rhetoric. Just like the models underlying medical thinking, social
and political organization in the viral age is predicated on the
need to defend the inside (an organism, a society, a bloc) from
outside foreign invaders (a virus, a stranger, an oppositional
ideology), regardless of whether they pose a threat or not. The
otherness of the outside element is sufficient justification for
its expulsion.

Han's central claim is that, since the end of the cold war, social
formations have moved away from this immunological paradigm (and
so has medicine). The central categories of immunology, otherness
and foreignness, are disappearing, and a new category is taking
their place: difference. Difference, unlike otherness, does not
trigger a response from the immune system. Difference is to otherness
as the tourist is to the foreign intruder. It can roam across a
terrain without necessarily evoking a violent response.

The immunological paradigm is based around a dialectic of negativity.
The virus breaks into the organism and tries to negate it, and the
organism in turn tries to negate the intruding virus. Each player,
to survive, must negate its negation. A weaker version of this
process occurs in immunization; the formation of antibodies is the
outcome of the organism's negation of a controlled amount of
negativity.

The disappearance of otherness means that we now live in a time
bereft of negativity. Neuronal maladies may still involve a dialectic,
but it is a dialectic of positivity, not negativity. Hyperactivity
or burnout are the result of an excess of positivity. The violence/power
(Gewalt) of positivity stems from over-producing, over-achieving
or over-communicating. It is not based on anything alien to the
system, it is immanent to the system. As such, neuronal violence
can no longer be responded to like viral power. (For this reason,
though he finds some of his ideas useful, Han ultimately rejects
Baudrillard for hewing too closely to the viral conception of
power.)

Chapter 2 is called ``Beyond Disciplinary Society'' and continues
Han's engagement with what in Germany are often called sociological
diagnoses of the present (Gegenwartsdiagnosen). ``Disciplinary
society'' evokes the work of Michel Foucault, whose notion of
discipline accurately describes the working viral power. However,
disciplinary society with its clinics, asylums and factories has
since been displaced by the society in and around spaces like malls,
airports, gyms and office towers. What, exactly, has taken the
place of disciplinary society? Han finds that the notion of control
society still retains too much negativity (presumably because it
suggests that somebody is doing the controlling). Instead, he
proposes that we live in an achievement society (Leistungsgesellschaft).
Achievement society has replaced the ``Thou shalt not'' of disciplinary
society with the affirmation: Yes we can! The entrepreneurial
subject of achievement society does not need commandments---it has
projects. Han writes: ``Disciplinary society is dominated by the
No. Its negativity creates the insane and criminals. Achievement
society, in contrast, gives rise to depressives and failures.''

These shifts notwithstanding, Han points out one important aspect
of continuity that persists in the social unconscious: the drive
to maximize production. This drive is also at the root of the
transition from disciplinary to achievement society. A society
founded upon positivity and affirmation is simply more productive.
In other regards, the transition is not a break. He does not argue
that everything is different or that we are free of disciplinary
commandments. When we say, Yes we can! we already have learned that
we shall.

Thus, the entrepreneurial subject of achievement society is in a
situation of ``paradox freedom.'' Drawing on Alain Ehrenberg (whose
work on depression also informs Malabou's What Shall We Do with
Our Brain?), Han notes that a society in which status is no longer
strictly prescribed on the basis of class or gender but which
instead propagates the norm of individual initiative (or, as they
say in the States, ``personal responsibility'') unleashes a new
kind of systemic violence. The entrepreneurial subject is put in
a position of self-exploitation, since the compulsion to labor no
longer emanates from outside of it. It freely becomes an animal
laborans. This form of systemic violence leads to ``psychic
infarctions'' that affect not just the self---the self, Han points
out, is still an immunological category---but the soul, by which
Han means something like the capacity to form social bonds. In
achievement society, this capacity is dissipated by the incessant
command to produce. In other words, the paradox can be expressed
like this: We may be free to undertake any conceivable venture,
but as a result, we lose our soul---or rather, we burn out our
soul. The illnesses mentioned above are the pathological manifestations
of this paradox situation.

The paradox of freedom is nicely captured in this observation:
``The complaint of the depressive individual, Nothing is possible,
is only possible in a society that believes, Nothing is impossible.''

Chapter 3, ``A Deep Boredom,'' turns from over-production to
over-communication. Specifically, Han is concerned with multitasking
as a technique to accommodate the new economy of attention that
has arisen alongside the new forms of productivity. Unlike some
commentators, however, Han does not take multitasking to be a
radically new technique. ``Multitasking is widespread among animals
in the wild,'' he writes. ``It is an attention technique that is
indispensable for wilderness survival.'' Newer social developments
are actually making human society more like the wilderness, where
predators must ensure they aren't eaten while eating their prey.
Han points out that mobbing matches this pattern (and one might
add other forms of bullying).

Human culture, on the other hand, arose from a different kind of
attention technique. Multitasking is a form of hyperattention, but
culture (including philosophy) requires the deep attention of
contemplation. The contemplative life had a bad rep in modern
philosophy; consider Arendt's The Human Condition (which she wanted
to name Vita Activa), or Lukács's opposition to ``the contemplative
duality of subject and object.'' Han wants to build up the vita
comtemplativa's reputation once again.

Thus, the fourth chapter is called ``Vita Activa'' and is dedicated
to a critique of Hannah Arendt. Against Arendt's assumption that
modern development leads ever further down the road of massification
and degradation of humanity, Han notes that the hyperactive,
hyperneurotic individual of contemporary society is anything but
animalistic. It is an animal laborans, but not the sort of animal
that Arendt envisioned. It is, rather, ceaselessly engaged in
individualized activity. Why?

Borrowing from Agamben, Han describes our lives as ``naked.'' They
are naked because of what sociologists call secularization. Divested
of faith, our lives have become fleeting. The religions---techniques
that once gave our lives duration and embedded them in a wider
narrative---have been lost. We react by being hyperactive; ``Bare
life and bare labor are contingent upon each other,'' Han notes.
Arendt's case for the vita activa unwittingly aligns itself with
the hyperactivity of the late-modern subject.

In the fifth chapter, ``Pedagogy of Seeing,'' Han seeks to develop
the preconditions for the contemplative life. According to Nietzsche's
Götzendämmerung, vision, or the activity of seeing, is the faculty
through which to learn deep attention. Vision requires selecting
stimuli and impulses to reacts on and resisting others. In other
words, learning to see means learning to say no. Seeing, like
contemplation, is not a passive act. It does not simply say yes to
all that transpires. Likewise, our eyes are actually more active
when we keep them focused on something rather than letting them
respond to every single stimulus. It takes practice to resist
grabbing your smartphone every time its blinking LED alerts you to
a new email or a new mention on Twitter. ``The hyperactive
intensification of activity makes activity change into hyperpassivity,''
Han writes.

How does one escape the ``hyperactive intensification of activity''?
The answer is a verb, zögern, that translates both as ``hesitate''
and (with the prefix ver-) ``procrastinate.'' Is this really a
philosopher recommending we procrastinate? Yes, in a way. By
procrastinating, we introduce the negativity of interruption into
the infinite succession of one-damn-thing-after-the-other. Another
example Han mentions is anger. Anger has its own temporality,
because it puts the present into question, thus opening up the
possibility of ushering in a new state of affairs. (What better
example than the current ``anger in Egypt''?)

In closing this chapter, Han differentiates two forms of capacity
(Potenz): negative capacity and positive capacity. The latter is
the capacity to do something, whereas the former is the capacity
not to do. Negative capacity is the eye's capacity not to see the
blinking LED on your smartphone. It is the capacity to say no.
Negative capacity is not incapacity.

When Han states, ``It is an illusion to believe that the more active
one becomes, the freer one is,'' he points out that freedom requires
more than just positive capacity. An activity that stems solely
from my positive capacity is hyperactivity, which turns into
hyperpassivity. To be truly, freely active, I must exercise my
negative capacity, that is, I must be contemplative.

The next chapter I will skip, not just because I want to exercise
my negative capacity, but also because it does not do much to
advance Han's argument. It is called ``The Case of Bartleby'' and
discusses Melville's Bartleby along with Deleuze's and Agamben's
readings of it.

The final chapter is the titular chapter in which Han finally
develops the concept of ``fatigue society.'' It is also the densest
chapter, so pardon me if my summary is not entirely lucid. Setting
out from the observation that achievement society with its one-sided
focus on activity produces profound fatigue, Han draws heavily on
an essay on fatigue by Austrian playwright Peter Handke. Handke
makes a distinction between divisive and conciliative fatigue.
Achievement society gives rise to the first kind, which isolates
individuals. It's the kind of fatigue that makes you want to say,
``Shut up! I'm very tired and I just want to sleep!''---if you can
speak at all. Conciliative fatigue, in contrast, opens up a space
of communication by loosening the grip of the ego and making it
porous. It is hard for me to think of an example of this kind of
fatigue since it has probably been years since I felt it. Handke
emphasizes that it is inspiring: It inspires a certain composure
and playfulness. Interestingly, Handke speculates that the crowd
assembled during the first Pentecost experienced exactly this kind
of fatigue. When the crowd received the Holy Spirit and started
communicating across language barriers by speaking in tongues,
onlookers believed they were drunk. Handke's immanent interpretation
of this scene suggests they were experiencing a fatigue that made
this kind of community without kinship possible.

Fatigue society, then, is not a sociological Gegenwartsdiagnose.
Rather, it is Han's hopeful assessment of the immanent possibilities
of our achievement society. It is a prophetic concept before it is
an analytic or diagnostic concept, evoking the prospect of a society
in which the productivity drive in the social unconscious is overcome
through the inspiration of our negative capacity---inspiration
not-to-do.

[ jboy | first published 1 February 2011 ]