Hallo zusammen,
Dank meiner jüngeren Schwester, die z. Zt. in einem Institut für Spiritualität der KarmelitInnen tätig ist, bin ich auf das Werk des südkoreanischen Philosophen Byung-Chul Han gestoßen, und spezifisch auf ein Interview mit ihm, das vor 2 Jahren vom Magazin ArtReview veröffentlicht wurde.
Selbstverständlich liegen sämtliche Rechte bei der Autorin und dem Magazin. Diese Übersetzung ist wie immer eine wichtige Übung für mich, und zudem ein Gefallen für meine beiden Schwester, die gerade diesen in der heutigen Zeit so bedeutenden Philosophen (der auch noch in deutscher Sprache schreibt) entdecken - so wie ich.
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han: “Practico la filosofía como un arte”
Gesine Borcherdt 02 December 2021 ArtReview
(Traducción del inglés por Sérvulo Uzcátegui Gómez)
El filósofo acerca de cómo podríamos responder a un mundo de alienación digital
Byung-Chul Han es un filósofo con muchos seguidores en el mundo del arte, donde sus escritos, originalmente en alemán, sobre condiciones modernas tan perennes como la alienación, la soledad, la fragmentación y desintegración de la realidad, y el papel de la tecnología en fomentar tantos males han encontrado tanto aprobación como escepticismo. Undinge (No Cosas), el más reciente libro del filósofo nacido en Corea del Sur y asentado en Berlín, fue publicado este mismo año.
ArtReview Undinge gira entorno a nuestra pérdida de conexión con las cosas en favor de la información digital. ¿Qué tienen los objetos que las nuevas tecnologías no tienen?
Byung-Chul Han Undinge propone que la edad de las cosas ha terminado. El orden terreno, el orden de la tierra, consiste en objetos que asumen una forma permanente y proveen un entorno estable para la habitación humana. Hoy en día el orden terreno ha sido reemplazado por el orden digital. El orden digital hace menos tangible al mundo informatizándolo. Actualmente las no cosas están entrando a nuestro entorno desde todos lados y desplazando a las cosas.
A las no cosas las llamo información. Hoy en día estamos en la transición de la edad de las cosas a la edad de las no cosas. La información, no las cosas, define ahora nuestro entorno. Ya no ocupamos más el cielo y la tierra sino Google Earth y la Nube. El mundo se está volviendo progresivamente menos tangible, más nebuloso y fantasmal. Nada es substancial. Me hace pensar en la novela La Policía de la Memoria (1994), de la escritora japonesa Yoko Ogawa. La novela relata sobre una isla sin nombre donde los objetos - ligas para el cabello, sombreros, estampillas, incluso rosas y pájaros - desaparecen irremediablemente. Junto con los objetos, los recuerdos también desaparecen. La gente vive en un eterno invierno de olvido y pérdida. Una progresiva desintegración se apodera de todo. Incluso partes del cuerpo desaparecen. Al final todo es sólo voces incorpóreas, flotando por el aire.
En algunos aspectos, esta isla de los recuerdos perdidos se asemeja a nuestro presente. La información disuelve a la realidad, la cual es sólo tan fantasmal como esas voces incorpóreas. La digitalización desmaterializa, desencarna y eventualmente desgarra la sustancialidad de nuestro mundo. También elimina los recuerdos. Antes que seguir el rastro de los recuerdos, amasamos data e información. Todos nos hemos convertido en infomaníacos. Esta infomanía hace que las cosas desaparezcan. ¿Qué le pasa a las cosas cuando son permeadas por la información? La informatización de nuestro mundo convierte las cosas en «infómatas», a saber actores que procesan información. El smartphone no es una cosa sino un infómata, o incluso un informante, nos monitorea e influye en nosotros.
Las cosas no nos espían. Es por eso que confiamos en ellas, en una manera en que no confiamos en el smartphone. Todo dispositivo, cualquier herramienta de dominación, engendra sus propios objetos de devoción, los cuales son usados para promover la sumisión. Ellos estabilizan el dominio. El smartphone es el objeto de devoción del régimen de la información digital. Como herramienta de represión actúa como un rosario, lo cual representa el dispositivo móvil en su manejabilidad. "Dar like» es orar digitalmente. Continuamos yendo al confesionario. Nos exponemos a nosotros mismos voluntariamente, aunque ya no estamos pidiendo perdón, sino antes bien atención.
AR Undinge enfatiza las ideas, halladas en muchos de sus libros, de que en lugar de construir relaciones con otros – o los otros – los humanos se están cada vez más reflejando a sí mismos. Sin embargo, la gente vive en relaciones e incluso hoy en día permanecen apegadas a cosas que no quieren desechar. Cuál es la diferencia entre entonces y ahora, siendo entonces el tiempo antes de la globalización y la digitalización?
BCH No sé si la gente que pasa todo su tiempo mirando los smartphones todavía tengan o necesiten cosas que estén cerca de su corazón. Las cosas están retrocediendo al fondo de nuestra atención. La actual hiperinflación de cosas, la cual condujo a su explosiva proliferación, sólo resalta nuestra creciente indiferencia hacia ellas. Casi están muertas al nacer.
Nuestra obsesión ya no es por las cosas, sino por la información y la data. Hoy en día producimos y consumimos más información que cosas. En realidad nos drogamos en la comunicación. Las energías de la líbido han sido redireccionadas de las cosas a las no cosas. La consecuencia es la infomanía. Ahora todos somos infomaníacos. El fetichismo de los objetos probablemente ya ha terminado. Nos estamos volviendo fetichistas de la información y la data. Ahora incluso se habla de datasexuales. Pulsar y deslizar los dedos sobre la pantalla de un smartphone es casi un gesto litúrgico, y tiene un efecto masivo sobre nuestra relación con el mundo. La información que no nos interesa es desplazada con los dedos. El contenido que nos gusta, por otro lado, es agrandado, usando el movimiento de pinza de nuestros dedos. Literalmente tenemos un dominio sobre el mundo. Depende enteramente de nosotros.
Así es como el smartphone amplifica nuestro ego. Sometemos al mundo a nuestras necesidades con deslizar un poco nuestros dedos. El mundo se nos aparece a la luz digital de la completa disponibilidad. La indisponibilidad es precisamente lo que hace otro al otro, y así desaparece. Despojado de su alteridad, ahora es meramente consumible. Tinder convierte al otro en un objeto sexual. Usando el smartphone, nos retiramos hacia una esfera narcisista, una libre de lo desconocido del otro. Hace obtenible al otro cosificándolo. Convierte un tú en un eso. Esa desaparición del otro es precisamente por lo que el smartphone nos hace solitarios.
AR Usted escribe, «las cosas son lugares de reposo para la vida», queriendo decir que están cargadas de significado. Usted cita su jukebox (rockola) como un ejemplo, el cual ejerce un poder casi mágico para usted. Qué responde cuando alguien lo acusa de nostalgia?
BCH Bajo ninguna circunstancia quiero alabar objetos viejos y hermosos. Eso sería muy antifilosófico. Me refiero a las cosas como lugares de reposo para la vida porque estabilizan la vida humana. La misma silla y la misma mesa, en su monotonía, confieren a la voluble vida humana algo de estabilidad y continuidad. Podemos persistir con las cosas. Con la información, sin embargo, no podemos.
Si queremos entender en qué clase de sociedad vivimos, tenemos que comprender lo que es la información. La información tiene muy poca vigencia. Carece de estabilidad temporal ya que vive de la excitación de la sorpresa. Debido a su inestabilidad temporal, fragmenta la percepción. Nos arroja a un continuo frenesí de actualidad. De allí que sea imposible permanecer en la información. Es así como se diferencia de las cosas. La información pone al sistema cognitivo en un estado de ansiedad. Nos encontramos con la información con la sospecha de que podría muy fácilmente ser otra cosa. Está acompañado por la desconfianza básica. Fortalece la experiencia de la contingencia.
Las noticias falsas encarnan una forma reforzada de la contingencia que es inherente en la información. Y la información, debido a su condición efímera, hace desaparecer prácticas cognitivas que consumen tiempo tales como la experiencia, la memoria o la percepción. Así que mis análisis nada tienen que ver con la nostalgia.
AR En su obra usted repetidamente gira en torno a la digitalización, por cómo hace desaparecer al otro y hace florecer el narcisismo, así como facilita la autoexplotación voluntaria en la era del neoliberalismo. ¿Cómo concibió inicialmente esos temas? ¿Hay un enfoque personal para ello?
BCH En el núcleo de mis libros La Sociedad del Cansancio (2010) y Psicopolítica (2017) yace la comprensión de que el análisis de Foucault de la sociedad disciplinaria ya no puede explicar nuestro presente. Distingo entre el régimen disciplinario y el régimen neoliberal. El régimen disciplinario funciona con órdenes y restricciones. Es opresivo. Suprime la libertad. El régimen neoliberal por otro lado no es opresivo, sino seductor y permisivo. Explota la libertad en lugar de suprimirla. Nos explotamos voluntariamente y apasionadamente a nosotros mismos creyendo que nos realizamos.
Así que no vivimos en una sociedad disciplinaria sino en una meritocracia. Foucault no vio eso. Los súbditos de la meritocracia neoliberal, creyendo ellos mismos ser libres, son en realidad siervos. Son siervos absolutos, explotándose a sí mismos sin un amo. La autoexplotación es más eficiente que la explotación por otros, porque va de la mano con una sensación de libertad. Kafka expresó muy adecuadamente esa libertad paradójica del siervo en un aforismo: ‘El animal le arrebata el látigo a su amo y se azota a sí mismo para volverse el amo’.
Esta constante autoflagelación es agotadora y deprimente. El trabajo mismo, no importa cuán duro pueda ser, no conduce al cansancio profundo. Incluso aunque podemos estar cansados después del trabajo, no es lo mismo que un cansancio destructivo. En algún punto, el trabajo llega a su fin. La presión para rendir que aplicamos a nosotros mismos, por otro lado, dura más tiempo que las horas laborales. Nos atormenta en nuestro sueño y con frecuencia nos lleva a noches de insomnio. Es posible recuperarse del trabajo. Pero es imposible recuperarse de la presión de rendimiento.
Es especialmente esa presión interna, esa presión por rendir y optimizar, la que nos vuelve cansados y deprimidos. Así que no es la opresión sino la depresión la que es el signo patológico de nuestros tiempos. Sólo un régimen opresivo provoca resistencia. El régimen neoliberal, el cual no suprime sino que explota la libertad, no encuentra resistencia. La autoridad es completa cuando se enmascara como libertad. Esas son intuiciones que se sitúan en el corazón de mis ensayos sociocríticos. Pueden ser resumidos como: el otro desaparece.
AR Usted no rehuye términos como magia y misterio. ¿Se clasificaría usted mismo como un romántico?
BCH Para mí, todo lo que es es mágico y misterioso. Nuestra retina está cubierta completamente por la córnea, incluso demasiado, de modo que ya no lo percibimos. Yo diría que no soy un romántico, sino un realista que percibe el mundo tal y como es. Consiste simplemente en magia y misterio.
Por tres años establecí un jardín que florecía en invierno. También escribí sobre ello un libro con el título Loa a la Tierra (2018). Mi entendimiento de ser un jardinero es: La Tierra es mágica. Quien quiera afirmar otra cosa está ciego. La tierra no es un recurso, no un simple medio para conseguir los fines humanos. Nuestra relación de hoy en día con la naturaleza no está determinada por la observación sorprendida, sino solamente por acción instrumental. El Antropoceno es precisamente el resultado del total sometimiento de la Tierra/naturaleza a las leyes de la acción humana. De esa manera desencadena procesos que no sucederían sin su intervención, y conducen a una total pérdida del control.
No basta que ahora tengamos que ser más cuidadosos con la Tierra como recurso. Debemos devolverle su magia, su dignidad. Debemos aprender de nuevo a maravillarnos ante ella. Los desastres naturales son las consecuencias de la acción humana absoluta. La acción es el verbo para la historia. El ángel de la historia de Walter Benjamin es confrontado con las consecuencias catastróficas de la acción humana. Frente a él, el montón de escombros de la historia crece hasta el cielo. Pero él no puede removerlo, porque lo arrastra la tormenta del futuro llamada progreso. Sus ojos y boca abiertos reflejan su impotencia. Sólo un ángel de la inacción sería capaz de defenderse a sí mismo contra la tormenta.
Debemos redescubrir la capacidad de inacción, la capacidad que no actúa. Así, mi nuevo libro, en el cual estoy trabajando en este momento, tiene el título Vita contemplativa o de la inactividad. Es una contraparte o un antídoto al libro de Hannah Arendt Vita activa o de la vida activa (Vita activa oder vom tätigen Leben, 1958), el cual glorifica la acción humana.
AR En Undinge usted escribe, ‘Guardamos masas de datos, y aún así nunca retornamos a los recuerdos. Acumulamos amigos y seguidores, sin encontrar a un otro.” Encantamientos similares se escucharon en tiempos de la invención de la tipografía y más tarde del periódico y la televisión… ¿Podría ser que usted está catastrofizando la situación?
BCH Mi meta no es catastrofizar el mundo, sino iluminarlo. Mi tarea como filósofo es explicar en qué clase de sociedad vivimos. Cuando digo que el régimen neoliberal explota la libertad en lugar de suprimirla, o que el smartphone en el objeto de devoción del régimen digital de la información, no tiene nada que ver con difundir rumores de perdición. La filosofía es hablar la verdad.
En años recientes he trabajado en una fenomenología de la información para hacer comprensible el mundo de hoy. En Undinge he hecho la proposición de que en nuestros días percibimos la realidad primaria en términos de información. Como consecuencia, raramente hay contacto tangible con la realidad. La realidad ha sido despojada de su presencia. Ya no percibimos sus vibraciones físicas. La capa de información, la cual cubre los objetos como una membrana, escuda la percepción de intensidades. La percepción, reducida a información, nos insensibiliza a ambientes y atmósferas. Las habitaciones pierden su poética. Dan paso a redes sin espacio en las cuales se esparce la información. El tiempo digital, con su foco en el presente, en el momento, dispersa la fragancia del tiempo. El tiempo es atomizado a una secuencia de presentes aislados. Los átomos no tienen fragancia.
Sólo una práctica narrativa del tiempo produce moléculas fragantes de tiempo. Así la informatización de la realidad conduce a una pérdida de espacio y tiempo. Eso no tiene nada que ver con difundir rumores de perdición. Éso es fenomenología.
AR Actualmente usted está en Roma, el epítome de un lugar de pátina e historia, donde la vida pasa en las calles, la comida con amigos y familia es importante, y el Vaticano es omnipresente. ¿No tiene la sensación de que sus quejas acerca del aislamiento del hombre y las satisfacciones digitales substitutas sólo incumben a ciertos grupos o situaciones?
BCH ¿Qué sentido tiene cuando la gente se reúne y mayormente sólo mira a sus smartphones? A pesar de la interconectividad y la comunicación total, la gente hoy en día se siente más sola que nunca. Te convertimos en un eso disponible, consumible. El mundo se está quedando sin ti. Éso nos hace solitarios.
En ese aspecto no hay diferencia entre Roma, Nueva York o Seúl. Roma me impresionó en un sentido diferente. Para la felicidad necesitamos un otro imponente, superior. La digitalización se deshace de cualquier contraparte, cualquier resistencia, cualquier otro. Suaviza todo. El smartphone es smart porque hace disponible todo y remueve toda la resistencia. Roma es especialmente abundante en imponer a otros.
Hoy de nuevo di una vuelta en bicicleta por toda la ciudad y visité incontables iglesias. Descubrí una hermosa iglesia que ofrecía una experiencia de presencia en mí muy rara ahora. La iglesia es antes bien pequeña. Una vez que entras, te hallas inmediatamente bajo una cúpula. La cúpula está decorada en patrones formados por octágonos. Estos disminuyen de tamaño hacia el centro de la cúpula, así que la cúpula crea un fuerte jalón óptico hacia arriba. La luz irrumpe a través de ventanas dispuestas alrededor del pico de la cúpula, donde flota la imagen de una paloma dorada. El todo forma un sublime otro con un tirón vertical que efectivamente me hace flotar en el espacio. Estaba elevado. Fue allí cuando comprendí lo que es el espíritu santo. No es otra cosa que el otro. Fue una experiencia emocionante, la experiencia de la presencia, justo dentro de una cosa santa.
AR En su opinión, ¿qué tiene que pasar para que el mundo una vez más se preocupe él mismo con cosas reales, cargadas de vida – y sobre todo con otras personas? ¿Cómo podemos aprender a lidiar con los dilemas de nuestro tiempo?
BCH Cada libro mío termina en una contranarrativa utópica. En La Sociedad del Cansancio me opuse a la fatiga del yo, la cual lleva a la depresión, con la fatiga del nosotros, la cual produce comunidad. En La Expulsión de lo Distinto [2016] contrasté el creciente narcisismo con el arte de escuchar. Psicopolítica propone idiotismo como una figura utópica contra la completa interconectividad y la completa vigilancia. Un idiota es alguien que no está en la red. En La Agonía del Eros [2012] propongo que sólo el Eros es capaz de derrotar la depresión. El Aroma del Tiempo [2014] articula un arte de persistir. Mis libros analizan los malestares de nuestra sociedad y proponen conceptos para superarlos. Sí, tenemos que trabajar en nuevas formas de vida y nuevas narrativas.
AR Otro libro suyo se llama La Desaparición de los Rituales [2020]. ¿Cómo los rituales, la gente y las cosas ayudan a arraigarnos en nuestras vidas? ¿No podemos gestionarlo nosotros mismos?
BCH Los rituales son arquitecturas de tiempo, estructurando y estabilizando la vida, y están en declive. La pandemia ha acelerado la desaparición de los rituales. El trabajo también tiene aspectos rituales. Vamos al trabajo en horas establecidas. El trabajo tiene lugar en la comunidad. En el home office, el ritual del trabajo se perdió completamente. El día pierde su ritmo y estructura. De alguna forma nos vuelve cansados y deprimidos.
En El Principito [1943], de [Antoine de] Saint-Exupéry, el principito le pide al zorro que venga siempre a la misma hora exacta, para que la visita se convierta en un ritual. El principito le explica al zorro lo que es un ritual. Los rituales son al tiempo lo que las habitaciones son a un apartamento. Hacen al tiempo accesible como una casa. Organizan el tiempo, lo arreglan. De ese modo haces que el tiempo parezca importante.
El tiempo hoy día carece de una estructura sólida. No es una casa, sino un río caprichoso. La desaparición de los rituales no significa simplemente que tengamos más libertad. La flexibilización total de la vida trae pérdidas también. Puede que los rituales restrinjan la libertad, pero estructuran y estabilizan la vida. Anclan valores y sistemas simbólicos en el cuerpo, fortaleciendo la comunidad. En los rituales experimentamos la comunidad, la cercanía comunal, físicamente.
La digitalización elimina la fisicalidad del mundo. Luego viene la pandemia. Agrava la pérdida de la experiencia física de la comunidad. Usted pregunta: ¿no podemos hacerlo por nosotros mismos? Hoy día rechazamos todos los rituales como algo externo, formal y por lo tanto no auténtico. El neoliberalismo produce una cultura de la autenticidad, la cual coloca al ego en su centro. La cultura de la autenticidad desarrolla una desconfianza de las formas ritualizadas de interacción. Sólo las emociones espontáneas, los estados subjetivos, son auténticos. La conducta modelada, por ejemplo la cortesía, es descartada como no auténtica o superficial. El culto narcisista de la autenticidad es en parte responsable por la creciente brutalidad de la sociedad.
En mi libro discuto el caso contra el culto de la autenticidad, por una ética de las formas hermosas. Los gestos de cortesía no son sólo superficiales. El filósofo francés Alain dice que los gestos de cortesía tienen un gran la poder en nuestros pensamientos. Que si imitas la bondad, la buena voluntad y la alegría, y pasas por movimientos tales como la reverencia, ayuda contra el mal humor así como contra el dolor de estómago. A menudo lo externo tiene una mayor fuerza que lo interno.
Blaise Pascal dijo una vez que en lugar de desesperar por una pérdida de fe, uno simplemente debe ir a misa y unirse a rituales como la oración y el canto, en otras palabras imitar, ya que precisamente éso te devolverá la fe. Lo externo transforma lo interno, produce nuevas condiciones. Allí yace el poder de los rituales. Y nuestra consciencia hoy día ya no está arraigada en las cosas. Esas cosas externas pueden ser muy efectivas en estabilizar la consciencia. Con la información eso es muy difícil, puesto que es realmente volátil y tiene un rango muy estrecho de relevancia.
AR Usted disfruta la lengua alemana en una forma casi disectiva y celebra un estilo paratáctico de escritura, el cual le da una voz única en la crítica cultural contemporánea. Es como una mezcla de Martin Heidegger y el Zen. ¿Cuál es su conexión con ellos?
BCH Un periodista del semanario alemán Die Zeit dijo una vez que puedo derribar constructos de pensamiento que sostienen nuestra cotidianidad con sólo unas pocas oraciones. ¿Porqué escribir un libro de 1000 páginas si puede iluminar el mundo con pocas palabras? Un libro de 1000 páginas, el cual tiene que explicar de qué se trata el mundo, quizás no pueda expresar lo que un simple haiku puede: ‘La primera nieve – hasta las hojas del narciso se doblan’ o ‘Las campanas del templo se apagan. Las flores fragantes permanecen. ¡Una tarde perfecta!’ (Bashō)
En mis escritos, en verdad hago uso de ese efecto haiku. Digo: Es-así. Eso crea un efecto de evidencia, el cual tiene sentido para todos. Un periodista escribió una vez que mis libros se están volviendo progresivamente más delgados, que en algún punto desaparecerán completamente. Yo añadiría que entonces mis pensamientos permearán el aire. Todos podrán respirarlos.
AR Al final de Undinge, donde cita El Principito, se refiere a que los valores como la confianza, el compromiso y la responsabilidad están en riesgo. Pero, ¿no son ésos valores humanos esenciales que sobreviven cualquier era – incluso durante dictaduras y guerras?
BCH Hoy en día, todas las prácticas que consumen tiempo, tales como la confianza, la lealtad, el compromiso y la responsabilidad, están desapareciendo. Todo es efímero. Nos decimos a nosotros mismos que tendremos más libertad. Pero esa naturaleza de corto plazo desestabiliza nuestra vida. Podemos establecer lazos con las cosas, pero no con la información. Sólo tomamos nota brevemente de la información. Después es como un mensaje escuchado en la contestadora. Está destinado al olvido.
Pienso que la confianza es una práctica social, y hoy en día está siendo reemplazada por la transparencia y la información. La confianza nos posibilita construir relaciones positivas con los otros, a pesar del conocimiento faltante. En una sociedad de transparencia, uno inmediatamente pide información de los otros. La confianza como práctica social se vuelve superflua. La sociedad de la transparencia y la información fomenta una sociedad de la desconfianza.
AR Sus libros son más ampliamente leídos en las artes que en la filosofía. ¿Cómo explica eso?
BCH Efectivamente más artistas que filósofos leen mis libros. Los filósofos ya no están interesados en el presente. Foucault dijo una vez que el filósofo es un periodista que captura el ahora con las ideas. Éso es lo que hago, Además mis ensayos están en camino a otra vida, a una narrativa diferente. Los artistas se sienten abordados por eso. Yo confiaría al arte con la tarea de desarrollar una nueva forma de vida, una nueva consciencia, una nueva narrativa contra la doctrina prevaleciente. Como tal, el salvador no es la filosofía sino el arte. O yo practico la filosofía como arte.
Gesine Borcherdt es una escritora, editora y curadora asentada en Berlín
Traducido del alemán por Liam Tickner
Traducido del inglés por Sérvulo Uzcátegui Gómez
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Und hier ist für Interessierte der Originaltext, eine Übersetzung vom Deutschen ins Englische:
Byung-Chul Han: “I Practise Philosophy as Art”
Gesine BorcherdtFeatures02 December 2021ArtReview
The philosopher on how we might respond to a world of digital alienation
Byung-Chul Han is a philosopher with a broad following in the artworld, where his writings, originally in German, on such perennial modern conditions as alienation, loneliness, the fragmentation and disintegration of reality, and the role of technology in fostering so many ills have found traction as well scepticism. The South Korean-born, Berlin-based thinker’s latest book, Undinge (Nonobjects), was published earlier this year.
ArtReview Undinge revolves around our loss of connection to things in favour of digital information. What do objects have that new technologies don’t?
Byung-Chul Han Undinge proposes that the age of objects is over. The terrane order, the order of the Earth, consists of objects that take on a permanent form and provide a stable environment for human habitation. Today the terrane order has been replaced by the digital order. The digital order makes the world less tangible by informatising it. Nonobjects are currently entering our environment from all sides and displacing objects.
I call nonobjects information. Today we are in the transition from the age of objects to the age of nonobjects. Information, not objects, now defines our environment. We no longer occupy earth and sky but Google Earth and the Cloud. The world is becoming progressively less tangible, cloudier and ghostlier. Nothing is substantial. It makes me think of the novel The Memory Police [1994], by the Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa. The novel tells of a nameless island where objects – hair ties, hats, stamps, even roses and birds – disappear irretrievably. Together with the objects, memories also disappear. People live in an eternal winter of forgetting and loss. Everything is seized by a progressive disintegration. Even body parts disappear. In the end it’s just disembodied voices, floating around in the air.
In some respects, this island of lost memories resembles our present. Information dissolves reality, which is just as ghostly as those disembodied voices. Digitalisation dematerialises, disembodies and eventually strips away the substantiality of our world. It also eliminates memories. Rather than keeping track of memories, we amass data and information. We have all become infomaniacs. This infomania makes objects disappear. What happens to objects when they are permeated by information? The informatisation of our world turns objects into ‘infomat’, namely information-processing actors. The smartphone is not an object but an infomat, or even an informant, monitoring and influencing us.
Objects don’t spy on us. That’s why we trust them, in a way that we don’t trust the smartphone. Every apparatus, any domination technique, spawns its own devotional objects, which are used to promote submission. They stabilise dominion. The smartphone is the devotional object of the digital-information regime. As a tool of repression it acts like a rosary, which in its handiness the mobile device represents. To ‘like’ is to pray digitally. We continue to go to confession. We expose ourselves voluntarily, yet we’re no longer asking for forgiveness, but rather for attention.
AR Undinge emphasises the ideas, found in many of your books, that in the place of building relationships with others – or the other – humans are increasingly mirroring themselves. Nevertheless people do live in relationships and even today remain attached to objects that they don’t want to throw away. What’s the difference between then and now, then being the time before globalisation and digitalisation?
BCH I don’t know if people who spend all their time looking at smartphones still have or need objects that are close to their heart. Objects are receding into the background of our attention. The current hyperinflation of objects, which has led to their explosive proliferation, only highlights our increasing indifference towards them. They are almost stillborn.
Our obsession is no longer for objects, but for information and data. Today we produce and consume more information than objects. We actually get high on communication. Libidinal energies have been redirected from objects to nonobjects. The consequence is infomania. We are all infomaniacs now. Object fetishism is probably over. We are becoming information- and data-fetishists. Now there is even talk of datasexuals. Tapping and swiping a smartphone is almost a liturgical gesture, and it has a massive effect on our relationship to the world. Information that doesn’t interest us gets swiped away. Content we like, on the other hand, gets zoomed in, using the pincer movement of our fingers. We literally have a grip on the world. It’s entirely up to us.
That’s how the smartphone amplifies our ego. We subjugate the world to our needs with a few swipes. The world appears to us in the digital light of complete availability. Unavailability is precisely what makes the other other, and so it disappears. Robbed of its otherness, it is now merely consumable. Tinder turns the other into a sexual object. Using the smartphone, we withdraw into a narcissistic sphere, one free of the unknowns of the other. It makes the other obtainable by objectifying it. It turns a you into an it. This disappearance of the other is precisely why the smartphone makes us lonely.
AR You write, ‘Objects are resting places for life’, meaning that they are charged with significance. You cite your jukebox as an example, which holds an almost magical power for you. What do you reply when someone accuses you of nostalgia?
BCH Under no circumstances do I want to praise old, beautiful objects. That would be very unphilosophical. I refer to objects as resting places for life because they stabilise human life. The same chair and the same table, in their sameness, lend the fickle human life some stability and continuity. We can linger with objects. With information, however, we cannot.
If we want to understand what kind of society we live in, we have to comprehend what information is. Information has very little currency. It lacks temporal stability, since it lives off the excitement of surprise. Due to its temporal instability, it fragments perception. It throws us into a continuous frenzy of topicality. Hence it’s impossible to linger on information. That’s how it differs from objects. Information puts the cognitive system itself into a state of anxiety. We encounter information with the suspicion that it could just as easily be something else. It is accompanied by basic distrust. It strengthens the contingency experience.
Fake news embodies a heightened form of the contingency that is inherent in information. And information, due to its ephemerality, makes time-consuming cognitive practices such as experience, memory or perception disappear. So my analyses have nothing to do with nostalgia.
AR In your work you repeatedly circle around digitalisation for how it makes the other disappear and lets narcissism blossom, as well as facilitating voluntary self-exploitation in the age of neoliberalism. How did you initially conceive of these subjects? Is there a personal angle to it?
BCH At the core of my books The Burnout Society [2010] and Psychopolitics [2017] lies the understanding that Foucault’s analysis of the disciplinary society can no longer explain our present. I distinguish between the disciplinary regime and the neoliberal regime. The disciplinary regime works with commands and restraints. It is oppressive. It suppresses freedom. The neoliberal regime on the other hand is not oppressive, but seductive and permissive. It exploits freedom instead of suppressing it. We voluntarily and passionately exploit ourselves believing that we fulfil ourselves.
So we don’t live in a disciplinary society but in a meritocracy. Foucault did not see that. The subjects of neoliberal meritocracy, believing themselves to be free, are in reality servants. They are absolute servants, exploiting themselves without a master. Self-exploitation is more efficient than exploitation by others, because it goes hand in hand with a feeling of freedom. Kafka expressed this paradoxical freedom of the servant very fittingly in an aphorism: ‘The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master’.
This constant self-flagellation is tiring and depressing. The work itself, no matter how hard it may be, does not lead to profound tiredness. Even though we can be tired after work, it is not the same as a destructive tiredness. Work at some point comes to an end. The pressure to perform that we apply to ourselves, on the other hand, outlasts the working hours. It torments us in our sleep and frequently leads to sleepless nights. It is possible to recover from work. But it is impossible to recover from the pressure to perform.
It is especially this internal pressure, this pressure to perform and optimise, that makes us tired and depressed. So it is not oppression but depression that is the pathological sign of our times. Only an oppressive regime provokes resistance. The neoliberal regime, which does not suppress but exploits freedom, does not encounter resistance. Authority is complete when it masquerades as freedom. These are insights that lie at the heart of my sociocritical essays. They can be summarised as: the other disappears.
AR You don’t shy away from terms like magic and mystery. Would you classify yourself as a romantic?
BCH To me, everything that is is magical and mysterious. Our retina is completely covered by the cornea, even overgrown, so that we no longer perceive it. I would say that I am not a romantic, but a realist who perceives the world the way it is. It simply consists of magic and mystery.
Over three years I established a winter-flowering garden. I also wrote a book about it with the title Praise to the Earth [2018]. My understanding from being a gardener is: Earth is magic. Whoever claims otherwise is blind. Earth is not a resource, not a mere means to achieve human ends. Our relationship to nature today is not determined by astonished observation, but solely by instrumental action. The Anthropocene is precisely the result of total subjugation of Earth/nature to the laws of human action. It is reduced to a component of human action. Man acts beyond the interpersonal sphere into nature by subjecting it entirely to his will. He thereby unleashes processes that would not come about without his intervention, and lead to a total loss of control.
It is not enough that we now have to be more careful with Earth as a resource. Rather, we need a completely different relationship with Earth. We should give it back its magic, its dignity. We should learn to marvel at it again. Natural disasters are the consequences of absolute human action. Action is the verb for history. Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is confronted with the catastrophic consequences of human action. In front of him, the heap of debris of history grows towards the sky. But he cannot remove it, because the storm from the future called progress carries him away. His wide eyes and open mouth reflect his powerlessness. Only an angel of inaction would be able to defend himself against the storm.
We should rediscover the capacity for inaction, the capacity that does not act. So my new book, which I am working on at the moment, has the title Vita contemplativa or of inactivity. It is a counterpart or antidote to Hannah Arendt’s book Vita activa or of the active life (Vita activa oder vom tätigen Leben, 1958), which glorifies human action.
AR In Undinge you write, ‘We save masses of data, yet never return to the memories. We accumulate friends and followers, without encountering an other.’ Similar incantations were heard at the time of the invention of the letterpress and later newspaper and television… Could it be that you are catastrophising the situation?
BCH My aim is not to catastrophise the world, but to illuminate it. My task as a philosopher is to explain what kind of society we live in. When I say that the neoliberal regime exploits freedom instead of suppressing it, or that the smartphone is the devotional object of the digital-information regime, it has nothing to do with doom-mongering. Philosophy is truth-speaking.
In recent years I have worked on a phenomenology of information in order to make today’s world comprehensible. In Undinge I have made the proposition that nowadays we perceive reality primarily in terms of information. As a consequence, there is rarely a tangible contact with reality. Reality is robbed of its presence. We no longer perceive its physical vibrations. The layer of information, which covers objects like a membrane, shields the perception of intensities. Perception, reduced to information, numbs us to moods and atmospheres. Rooms lose their poetics. They give way to roomless networks along which information spreads. Digital time, with its focus on the present, on the moment, disperses the fragrance of time. Time is atomised into a sequence of isolated presents. Atoms are not fragrant.
Only a narrative practice of time brings forth fragrant molecules of time. The informatisation of reality thus leads to a loss of space and time. This has nothing to do with doom-mongering. This is phenomenology.
AR You are currently in Rome, the epitome of a place of patina and history, where life happens on the streets, food with friends and family is important, and the Vatican is omnipresent. Do you not have the feeling that your grievances about the isolation of man and digital substitute-satisfactions only concern certain groups or situations?
BCH What is the point when people meet and mostly just look at their smartphones? Despite interconnectedness and total communication, people today feel lonelier than ever. We turn you into an available, consumable it. The world is running short of you. This makes us lonely.
In that respect there is no difference between Rome, New York or Seoul. Rome impressed me in a different sense. For happiness we need a towering, superior other. Digitalisation gets rid of any counterpart, any resistance, any other. It smoothes everything over. The smartphone is smart because it makes everything available and removes all resistance. Rome is especially abundant in towering others.
Today I again cycled around the whole of the city and visited countless churches. I discovered a beautiful church that bestowed a now very rare experience of presence on me. The church is rather small. Once you enter, you find yourself immediately under a dome. The dome is decorated in patterns formed by octagons. These decrease in size towards the centre of the dome, so that the dome creates a strong optical upwards pull. Light bursts in through windows arranged around the peak of the dome, where the depiction of a golden dove floats. The whole forms a sublime other with a vertical pull that effectively made me float in space. I was lifted up. That’s when I understood what the holy spirit is. It is nothing other than the other. It was an exhilarating experience, the experience of presence, right inside a holy object.
AR In your opinion, what has to happen for the world to once again concern itself with real objects, charged with life – and most of all with other people? How can we learn to deal with the dilemmas of our time?
BCH Every book of mine ends in a utopian counternarrative. In The Burnout Society I countered I-fatigue, which leads to depression, with Us-fatigue, which brings about community. In The Expulsion of the Other [2016] I contrasted increasing narcissism with the art of listening. Psychopolitics proposes idiotism as a utopian figure against complete interconnectedness and complete surveillance. An idiot is someone who is not networked. In The Agony of Eros [2012] I propose that only Eros is capable of defeating depression. The Scent of Time [2014] articulates an art of lingering. My books analyse the malaises of our society and propose concepts to overcome them. Yes, we must work on new ways of life and new narratives.
AR Another book of yours is called The Disappearance of Rituals [2020]. How do rituals, people and objects help to root us in our lives? Can we not manage by ourselves?
BCH Rituals are architectures of time, structuring and stabilising life, and they are on the wane. The pandemic has accelerated the disappearance of rituals. Work also has ritual aspects. We go to work at set times. Work takes place in a community. In the home office, the ritual of work is completely lost. The day loses its rhythm and structure. This somehow makes us tired and depressed.
In The Little Prince [1943], by [Antoine de] Saint-Exupéry, the little prince asks the fox to always visit at the exact same time, so that the visit becomes a ritual. The little prince explains to the fox what a ritual is. Rituals are to time as rooms are to an apartment. They make time accessible like a house. They organise time, arrange it. In this way you make time appear meaningful.
Time today lacks a solid structure. It is not a house, but a capricious river. The disappearance of rituals does not simply mean that we have more freedom. The total flexibilisation of life brings loss, too. Rituals may restrict freedom, but they structure and stabilise life. They anchor values and symbolic systems in the body, reinforcing community. In rituals we experience community, communal closeness, physically.
Digitalisation strips away the physicality of the world. Then comes the pandemic. It aggravates the loss of the physical experience of community. You’re asking: can’t we do this by ourselves? Today we reject all rituals as something external, formal and therefore inauthentic. Neoliberalism produces a culture of authenticity, which places the ego at its centre. The culture of authenticity develops a suspicion of ritualised forms of interaction. Only spontaneous emotions, subjective states, are authentic. Modelled behaviour, for example courtesy, is written off as inauthentic or superficial. The narcissistic cult of authenticity is partly responsible for the increasing brutality of society.
In my book I argue the case against the cult of authenticity, for an ethic of beautiful forms. Gestures of courtesy are not just superficial. The French philosopher Alain says that gestures of courtesy hold a great power on our thoughts. That if you mime kindness, goodwill and joy, and go through motions such as bowing, they help against foul moods as well as stomach ache. Often the external has a stronger hold than the internal.
Blaise Pascal once said that instead of despairing over a loss of faith, one should simply go to mass and join in rituals such as prayer and song, in other words mime, since it is precisely this that will bring back faith. The external transforms the internal, brings about new conditions. Therein lies the power of rituals. And our consciousness today is no longer rooted in objects. These external things can be very effective in stabilising consciousness. It is very difficult with information, since it is really volatile and holds a very narrow range of relevance.
AR You enjoy the German language in an almost dissective way and celebrate a paratactical writing style, which gives you a unique voice in contemporary cultural critique. It is like a mixture of Martin Heidegger and Zen. What is your connection to them?
BCH A journalist from the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit once said that I can bring down thought constructs that hold up our everyday life in just a few sentences. Why do you write a 1,000-page book if you can enlighten the world in a few words? A 1,000-page book, which has to explain what the world is about, perhaps cannot express as much as a single haiku can: ‘The first snow – even the daffodil leaves bend’ or ‘Temple bells die out. The fragrant blossoms remain. A perfect evening!’ (Basho)
In my writings I do indeed make use of this haiku effect. I say: It-is-so. This creates an evidence effect, which then makes sense to everyone. A journalist once wrote that my books are getting progressively thinner, that they will at some point completely disappear. I would add that my thoughts will then permeate the air. Everyone can breathe them in.
AR At the end of Undinge, where you quote The Little Prince, you refer to values like trust, commitment and responsibility as being at risk. But aren’t these core human values that outlast any era – even during dictatorships and wars?
BCH Today, all time-consuming practices, such as trust, loyalty, commitment and responsibility, are disappearing. Everything is shortlived. We tell ourselves that we will have more freedom. But this short-term nature destabilises our life. We can bond with objects, but not with information. We only briefly make note of information. Afterwards it’s like a listened-to message on the answering machine. It’s headed towards oblivion.
I think trust is a social practice, and today it is being replaced by transparency and information. Trust enables us to build positive relationships with others, despite lacking knowledge. In a transparency society, one immediately asks for information from others. Trust as a social practice becomes superfluous. The transparency and information society fosters a society of distrust.
AR Your books are more widely read in the arts than in philosophy. How do you explain that?
BCH Effectively more artists than philosophers read my books. Philosophers are no longer interested in the present. Foucault once said that the philosopher is a journalist who captures the now with ideas. That’s what I do. Moreover my essays are on their way to another life, to a different narrative. Artists feel addressed by that. I would entrust art with the task of developing a new way of life, a new awareness, a new narrative against the prevailing doctrine. As such, the saviour is not philosophy but art. Or I practise philosophy as art.
Gesine Borcherdt is a writer, editor and curator based in Berlin
Translated from the German by Liam Tickner
ArtReview’s Power 100 – the annual ranking of the most influential people in art – is out now
Gesine BorcherdtFeatures02 December 2021ArtReview
Und hier ist für Interessierte das Original, das allerdings auch eine Übersetzung ist, nämlich vom Deutschen ins Englische:
Byung-Chul Han: “I Practise Philosophy as Art”
Gesine BorcherdtFeatures02 December 2021ArtReview
The philosopher on how we might respond to a world of digital alienation
Byung-Chul Han is a philosopher with a broad following in the artworld, where his writings, originally in German, on such perennial modern conditions as alienation, loneliness, the fragmentation and disintegration of reality, and the role of technology in fostering so many ills have found traction as well scepticism. The South Korean-born, Berlin-based thinker’s latest book, Undinge (Nonobjects), was published earlier this year.
ArtReview Undinge revolves around our loss of connection to things in favour of digital information. What do objects have that new technologies don’t?
Byung-Chul Han Undinge proposes that the age of objects is over. The terrane order, the order of the Earth, consists of objects that take on a permanent form and provide a stable environment for human habitation. Today the terrane order has been replaced by the digital order. The digital order makes the world less tangible by informatising it. Nonobjects are currently entering our environment from all sides and displacing objects.
I call nonobjects information. Today we are in the transition from the age of objects to the age of nonobjects. Information, not objects, now defines our environment. We no longer occupy earth and sky but Google Earth and the Cloud. The world is becoming progressively less tangible, cloudier and ghostlier. Nothing is substantial. It makes me think of the novel The Memory Police [1994], by the Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa. The novel tells of a nameless island where objects – hair ties, hats, stamps, even roses and birds – disappear irretrievably. Together with the objects, memories also disappear. People live in an eternal winter of forgetting and loss. Everything is seized by a progressive disintegration. Even body parts disappear. In the end it’s just disembodied voices, floating around in the air.
In some respects, this island of lost memories resembles our present. Information dissolves reality, which is just as ghostly as those disembodied voices. Digitalisation dematerialises, disembodies and eventually strips away the substantiality of our world. It also eliminates memories. Rather than keeping track of memories, we amass data and information. We have all become infomaniacs. This infomania makes objects disappear. What happens to objects when they are permeated by information? The informatisation of our world turns objects into ‘infomat’, namely information-processing actors. The smartphone is not an object but an infomat, or even an informant, monitoring and influencing us.
Objects don’t spy on us. That’s why we trust them, in a way that we don’t trust the smartphone. Every apparatus, any domination technique, spawns its own devotional objects, which are used to promote submission. They stabilise dominion. The smartphone is the devotional object of the digital-information regime. As a tool of repression it acts like a rosary, which in its handiness the mobile device represents. To ‘like’ is to pray digitally. We continue to go to confession. We expose ourselves voluntarily, yet we’re no longer asking for forgiveness, but rather for attention.
AR Undinge emphasises the ideas, found in many of your books, that in the place of building relationships with others – or the other – humans are increasingly mirroring themselves. Nevertheless people do live in relationships and even today remain attached to objects that they don’t want to throw away. What’s the difference between then and now, then being the time before globalisation and digitalisation?
BCH I don’t know if people who spend all their time looking at smartphones still have or need objects that are close to their heart. Objects are receding into the background of our attention. The current hyperinflation of objects, which has led to their explosive proliferation, only highlights our increasing indifference towards them. They are almost stillborn.
Our obsession is no longer for objects, but for information and data. Today we produce and consume more information than objects. We actually get high on communication. Libidinal energies have been redirected from objects to nonobjects. The consequence is infomania. We are all infomaniacs now. Object fetishism is probably over. We are becoming information- and data-fetishists. Now there is even talk of datasexuals. Tapping and swiping a smartphone is almost a liturgical gesture, and it has a massive effect on our relationship to the world. Information that doesn’t interest us gets swiped away. Content we like, on the other hand, gets zoomed in, using the pincer movement of our fingers. We literally have a grip on the world. It’s entirely up to us.
That’s how the smartphone amplifies our ego. We subjugate the world to our needs with a few swipes. The world appears to us in the digital light of complete availability. Unavailability is precisely what makes the other other, and so it disappears. Robbed of its otherness, it is now merely consumable. Tinder turns the other into a sexual object. Using the smartphone, we withdraw into a narcissistic sphere, one free of the unknowns of the other. It makes the other obtainable by objectifying it. It turns a you into an it. This disappearance of the other is precisely why the smartphone makes us lonely.
AR You write, ‘Objects are resting places for life’, meaning that they are charged with significance. You cite your jukebox as an example, which holds an almost magical power for you. What do you reply when someone accuses you of nostalgia?
BCH Under no circumstances do I want to praise old, beautiful objects. That would be very unphilosophical. I refer to objects as resting places for life because they stabilise human life. The same chair and the same table, in their sameness, lend the fickle human life some stability and continuity. We can linger with objects. With information, however, we cannot.
If we want to understand what kind of society we live in, we have to comprehend what information is. Information has very little currency. It lacks temporal stability, since it lives off the excitement of surprise. Due to its temporal instability, it fragments perception. It throws us into a continuous frenzy of topicality. Hence it’s impossible to linger on information. That’s how it differs from objects. Information puts the cognitive system itself into a state of anxiety. We encounter information with the suspicion that it could just as easily be something else. It is accompanied by basic distrust. It strengthens the contingency experience.
Fake news embodies a heightened form of the contingency that is inherent in information. And information, due to its ephemerality, makes time-consuming cognitive practices such as experience, memory or perception disappear. So my analyses have nothing to do with nostalgia.
AR In your work you repeatedly circle around digitalisation for how it makes the other disappear and lets narcissism blossom, as well as facilitating voluntary self-exploitation in the age of neoliberalism. How did you initially conceive of these subjects? Is there a personal angle to it?
BCH At the core of my books The Burnout Society [2010] and Psychopolitics [2017] lies the understanding that Foucault’s analysis of the disciplinary society can no longer explain our present. I distinguish between the disciplinary regime and the neoliberal regime. The disciplinary regime works with commands and restraints. It is oppressive. It suppresses freedom. The neoliberal regime on the other hand is not oppressive, but seductive and permissive. It exploits freedom instead of suppressing it. We voluntarily and passionately exploit ourselves believing that we fulfil ourselves.
So we don’t live in a disciplinary society but in a meritocracy. Foucault did not see that. The subjects of neoliberal meritocracy, believing themselves to be free, are in reality servants. They are absolute servants, exploiting themselves without a master. Self-exploitation is more efficient than exploitation by others, because it goes hand in hand with a feeling of freedom. Kafka expressed this paradoxical freedom of the servant very fittingly in an aphorism: ‘The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master’.
This constant self-flagellation is tiring and depressing. The work itself, no matter how hard it may be, does not lead to profound tiredness. Even though we can be tired after work, it is not the same as a destructive tiredness. Work at some point comes to an end. The pressure to perform that we apply to ourselves, on the other hand, outlasts the working hours. It torments us in our sleep and frequently leads to sleepless nights. It is possible to recover from work. But it is impossible to recover from the pressure to perform.
It is especially this internal pressure, this pressure to perform and optimise, that makes us tired and depressed. So it is not oppression but depression that is the pathological sign of our times. Only an oppressive regime provokes resistance. The neoliberal regime, which does not suppress but exploits freedom, does not encounter resistance. Authority is complete when it masquerades as freedom. These are insights that lie at the heart of my sociocritical essays. They can be summarised as: the other disappears.
AR You don’t shy away from terms like magic and mystery. Would you classify yourself as a romantic?
BCH To me, everything that is is magical and mysterious. Our retina is completely covered by the cornea, even overgrown, so that we no longer perceive it. I would say that I am not a romantic, but a realist who perceives the world the way it is. It simply consists of magic and mystery.
Over three years I established a winter-flowering garden. I also wrote a book about it with the title Praise to the Earth [2018]. My understanding from being a gardener is: Earth is magic. Whoever claims otherwise is blind. Earth is not a resource, not a mere means to achieve human ends. Our relationship to nature today is not determined by astonished observation, but solely by instrumental action. The Anthropocene is precisely the result of total subjugation of Earth/nature to the laws of human action. It is reduced to a component of human action. Man acts beyond the interpersonal sphere into nature by subjecting it entirely to his will. He thereby unleashes processes that would not come about without his intervention, and lead to a total loss of control.
It is not enough that we now have to be more careful with Earth as a resource. Rather, we need a completely different relationship with Earth. We should give it back its magic, its dignity. We should learn to marvel at it again. Natural disasters are the consequences of absolute human action. Action is the verb for history. Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is confronted with the catastrophic consequences of human action. In front of him, the heap of debris of history grows towards the sky. But he cannot remove it, because the storm from the future called progress carries him away. His wide eyes and open mouth reflect his powerlessness. Only an angel of inaction would be able to defend himself against the storm.
We should rediscover the capacity for inaction, the capacity that does not act. So my new book, which I am working on at the moment, has the title Vita contemplativa or of inactivity. It is a counterpart or antidote to Hannah Arendt’s book Vita activa or of the active life (Vita activa oder vom tätigen Leben, 1958), which glorifies human action.
AR In Undinge you write, ‘We save masses of data, yet never return to the memories. We accumulate friends and followers, without encountering an other.’ Similar incantations were heard at the time of the invention of the letterpress and later newspaper and television… Could it be that you are catastrophising the situation?
BCH My aim is not to catastrophise the world, but to illuminate it. My task as a philosopher is to explain what kind of society we live in. When I say that the neoliberal regime exploits freedom instead of suppressing it, or that the smartphone is the devotional object of the digital-information regime, it has nothing to do with doom-mongering. Philosophy is truth-speaking.
In recent years I have worked on a phenomenology of information in order to make today’s world comprehensible. In Undinge I have made the proposition that nowadays we perceive reality primarily in terms of information. As a consequence, there is rarely a tangible contact with reality. Reality is robbed of its presence. We no longer perceive its physical vibrations. The layer of information, which covers objects like a membrane, shields the perception of intensities. Perception, reduced to information, numbs us to moods and atmospheres. Rooms lose their poetics. They give way to roomless networks along which information spreads. Digital time, with its focus on the present, on the moment, disperses the fragrance of time. Time is atomised into a sequence of isolated presents. Atoms are not fragrant.
Only a narrative practice of time brings forth fragrant molecules of time. The informatisation of reality thus leads to a loss of space and time. This has nothing to do with doom-mongering. This is phenomenology.
AR You are currently in Rome, the epitome of a place of patina and history, where life happens on the streets, food with friends and family is important, and the Vatican is omnipresent. Do you not have the feeling that your grievances about the isolation of man and digital substitute-satisfactions only concern certain groups or situations?
BCH What is the point when people meet and mostly just look at their smartphones? Despite interconnectedness and total communication, people today feel lonelier than ever. We turn you into an available, consumable it. The world is running short of you. This makes us lonely.
In that respect there is no difference between Rome, New York or Seoul. Rome impressed me in a different sense. For happiness we need a towering, superior other. Digitalisation gets rid of any counterpart, any resistance, any other. It smoothes everything over. The smartphone is smart because it makes everything available and removes all resistance. Rome is especially abundant in towering others.
Today I again cycled around the whole of the city and visited countless churches. I discovered a beautiful church that bestowed a now very rare experience of presence on me. The church is rather small. Once you enter, you find yourself immediately under a dome. The dome is decorated in patterns formed by octagons. These decrease in size towards the centre of the dome, so that the dome creates a strong optical upwards pull. Light bursts in through windows arranged around the peak of the dome, where the depiction of a golden dove floats. The whole forms a sublime other with a vertical pull that effectively made me float in space. I was lifted up. That’s when I understood what the holy spirit is. It is nothing other than the other. It was an exhilarating experience, the experience of presence, right inside a holy object.
AR In your opinion, what has to happen for the world to once again concern itself with real objects, charged with life – and most of all with other people? How can we learn to deal with the dilemmas of our time?
BCH Every book of mine ends in a utopian counternarrative. In The Burnout Society I countered I-fatigue, which leads to depression, with Us-fatigue, which brings about community. In The Expulsion of the Other [2016] I contrasted increasing narcissism with the art of listening. Psychopolitics proposes idiotism as a utopian figure against complete interconnectedness and complete surveillance. An idiot is someone who is not networked. In The Agony of Eros [2012] I propose that only Eros is capable of defeating depression. The Scent of Time [2014] articulates an art of lingering. My books analyse the malaises of our society and propose concepts to overcome them. Yes, we must work on new ways of life and new narratives.
AR Another book of yours is called The Disappearance of Rituals [2020]. How do rituals, people and objects help to root us in our lives? Can we not manage by ourselves?
BCH Rituals are architectures of time, structuring and stabilising life, and they are on the wane. The pandemic has accelerated the disappearance of rituals. Work also has ritual aspects. We go to work at set times. Work takes place in a community. In the home office, the ritual of work is completely lost. The day loses its rhythm and structure. This somehow makes us tired and depressed.
In The Little Prince [1943], by [Antoine de] Saint-Exupéry, the little prince asks the fox to always visit at the exact same time, so that the visit becomes a ritual. The little prince explains to the fox what a ritual is. Rituals are to time as rooms are to an apartment. They make time accessible like a house. They organise time, arrange it. In this way you make time appear meaningful.
Time today lacks a solid structure. It is not a house, but a capricious river. The disappearance of rituals does not simply mean that we have more freedom. The total flexibilisation of life brings loss, too. Rituals may restrict freedom, but they structure and stabilise life. They anchor values and symbolic systems in the body, reinforcing community. In rituals we experience community, communal closeness, physically.
Digitalisation strips away the physicality of the world. Then comes the pandemic. It aggravates the loss of the physical experience of community. You’re asking: can’t we do this by ourselves? Today we reject all rituals as something external, formal and therefore inauthentic. Neoliberalism produces a culture of authenticity, which places the ego at its centre. The culture of authenticity develops a suspicion of ritualised forms of interaction. Only spontaneous emotions, subjective states, are authentic. Modelled behaviour, for example courtesy, is written off as inauthentic or superficial. The narcissistic cult of authenticity is partly responsible for the increasing brutality of society.
In my book I argue the case against the cult of authenticity, for an ethic of beautiful forms. Gestures of courtesy are not just superficial. The French philosopher Alain says that gestures of courtesy hold a great power on our thoughts. That if you mime kindness, goodwill and joy, and go through motions such as bowing, they help against foul moods as well as stomach ache. Often the external has a stronger hold than the internal.
Blaise Pascal once said that instead of despairing over a loss of faith, one should simply go to mass and join in rituals such as prayer and song, in other words mime, since it is precisely this that will bring back faith. The external transforms the internal, brings about new conditions. Therein lies the power of rituals. And our consciousness today is no longer rooted in objects. These external things can be very effective in stabilising consciousness. It is very difficult with information, since it is really volatile and holds a very narrow range of relevance.
AR You enjoy the German language in an almost dissective way and celebrate a paratactical writing style, which gives you a unique voice in contemporary cultural critique. It is like a mixture of Martin Heidegger and Zen. What is your connection to them?
BCH A journalist from the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit once said that I can bring down thought constructs that hold up our everyday life in just a few sentences. Why do you write a 1,000-page book if you can enlighten the world in a few words? A 1,000-page book, which has to explain what the world is about, perhaps cannot express as much as a single haiku can: ‘The first snow – even the daffodil leaves bend’ or ‘Temple bells die out. The fragrant blossoms remain. A perfect evening!’ (Basho)
In my writings I do indeed make use of this haiku effect. I say: It-is-so. This creates an evidence effect, which then makes sense to everyone. A journalist once wrote that my books are getting progressively thinner, that they will at some point completely disappear. I would add that my thoughts will then permeate the air. Everyone can breathe them in.
AR At the end of Undinge, where you quote The Little Prince, you refer to values like trust, commitment and responsibility as being at risk. But aren’t these core human values that outlast any era – even during dictatorships and wars?
BCH Today, all time-consuming practices, such as trust, loyalty, commitment and responsibility, are disappearing. Everything is shortlived. We tell ourselves that we will have more freedom. But this short-term nature destabilises our life. We can bond with objects, but not with information. We only briefly make note of information. Afterwards it’s like a listened-to message on the answering machine. It’s headed towards oblivion.
I think trust is a social practice, and today it is being replaced by transparency and information. Trust enables us to build positive relationships with others, despite lacking knowledge. In a transparency society, one immediately asks for information from others. Trust as a social practice becomes superfluous. The transparency and information society fosters a society of distrust.
AR Your books are more widely read in the arts than in philosophy. How do you explain that?
BCH Effectively more artists than philosophers read my books. Philosophers are no longer interested in the present. Foucault once said that the philosopher is a journalist who captures the now with ideas. That’s what I do. Moreover my essays are on their way to another life, to a different narrative. Artists feel addressed by that. I would entrust art with the task of developing a new way of life, a new awareness, a new narrative against the prevailing doctrine. As such, the saviour is not philosophy but art. Or I practise philosophy as art.
Gesine Borcherdt is a writer, editor and curator based in Berlin
Translated from the German by Liam Tickner
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Gesine BorcherdtFeatures02 December 2021ArtReview
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