Don’t get me wrong, Byung-Chul Han’s ‘The Burnout Society’ is an insightful and trenchant analysis of “the systemic violence inhabiting achievement society, which provokes psychic infarctions.” It was personally relevant because it gave me new understanding of the forces that pushed me out of Bury. So I approached his ‘The Crisis of Narration’ with great anticipation. The opening chapter ‘From Narration to Information’ is a satisfying application of his Burnout Society thesis, the “cause of the narrative crisis in modernity is the deluge of information. The spirit of narration is suffocated by the flood…Information pushes to the margins those events that cannot be explained but only narrated.” (p3). “No amount of storytelling could recreate the fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories. That fire has long since burnt out. It has been replaced by the digital screen, which separates people as individual consumers. Consumers are lonely. They do not form a community. Nor can the ‘stories’ shared on social media fill the narrative vacuum.” (p.ix)
“Through storytelling, capitalism appropriates the narrative and submits it to consumption. Storytelling produces narratives in a consumable form.” Han coins the phrase ‘storytelling has become storyselling.’ But that cute wordplay begins to hint at some serious problems in this book. Just on face value you could challenge it simply noting an economic imperative implicit in storytelling/selling since the invention of the printing press, but the general lack of rigour in this book locates it at the level of a bloke at a dinner party moaning about young people’s use of social media. It took me a while getting started with this review, because Han’s analysis is so confused, ill-researched and just plain wrong on virtually every aspect, from clichéd takes on digital media, slippery incoherent use of the word ‘narrative’, ontological conflation of memory as personal narrative and a cursory reading of modernity, the novel, with inexplicably selection of key texts.
“Instagram or Facebook… have no narrative duration.” “Selfies are momentary photographs.” Okay. Er… “Ultimately they announce the end of the human being as someone with a fate and a history.” That’s quite a leap. “TikTok and Snapchat...approach the degree of zero narration. They are media of information, not narration.” This may seem obvious at first but, whether social media even claims a narrative function or not (and Corecore could certainly be said to function as a narrative space), Han’s thesis is limited by his exclusion of any other digital media. If Han had read any actual Narrative Theory, he might know that there is a considerable volume of said theory interrogating domains of narrative activity in digital media. Marie-Laure Ryan in ‘Narrative and Digitality” observes, for instance, “The most distinctive narratological feature of Interactive Fiction, when compared to either print narrative or to the other digital forms... is the construction of the story through a movement that leads in and out of the diegesis– in and out of the fictional world. Standard narrative fiction adopts a unified, world-internal point of view. But in IF, some utterances can be attributed to a narrator situated within the fictional world.” It could be argued that this is an unfair criticism of Han whose claim is limited to the damaging effect of social media, but this assumes that digital identities are only constructed within that limit. I’m no fan of AI, but “Artificial intelligence can do without the conceptual. Intelligence is not spirit. Only spirit is capable of a reordering of things, of creating a new narrative,” doesn’t cut it. And what does he mean by spirit? Again “Data drive out spirit. Data-knowledge marks the degree zero of spirit. In a world saturated with data and information, our narrative capacity withers.” Presumably the reader is supposed to feel this spirit moving in mysterious ways sufficiently to have a scale on which it is measured. What number does scale of spirit go up to? Maybe its a Probability: Spirit is either zero or one.
Sometimes ‘narration’ is proffered as an immanent structure of human history, from the cave-fireside to post-modernity but with huge gaps in chronology. In other times it is interchangeable with the history and the modernist novel. Sometimes it is represented as an ontological imperative, the absence of which leads to near-apocalyptic consequences… “Once philosophy claims to be a science, an exact science even, decay sets in. Conceived as a science, philosophy denies its original narrative character and it loses its language. Philosophy falls silent…We lack the courage for philosophy, the courage for theory, this is, the courage to create a narrative.” No example of a philosophy claiming to be a science. Was philosophy’s original character narration? When, when has philosophy fallen silent? I see no evidence that there is a lack of courage for philosophy or theory. Further on, Han addresses the possibility of Theory – “The end of theory ultimately means the end of concept as spirit.” There’s that spirit magic again. “Fewer theories are therefore formulated – no one wants to take the risk of putting forward a theory.” Putting aside the fact that he is putting forward a theory, he goes on to articulate psychoanalysis as narrative… “[Freud’s] psychoanalysis is a narrative that offers a model for explaining the workings of our psychic apparatus.” (p.51). While that may be arguable in this context, in his “The Burnout Society”, he demonstrates that psychoanalysis “offers no way of approaching these phenomena [depression, burnout and ADHD]… the unconscious plays no part in depression. It no longer governs the psychic apparatus of the depressive achievement-subject.” Make your mind up.
Then there’s literature. The chapter ‘Bare Life’ opens with a quotation from Sartre’s Nausea, and then weaves Sartrean existentialist crisis into an argument analogous to the narrative crisis. Specifically focusing on Sartre’s then imperative “you have to choose: live or tell.” But Han’s summing up of the choice is that “Life, it seems can no longer be narrated.” This is plainly a non sequitur, suggesting that Han reads Sartre as “Live and tell” – with telling/narrating no longer possible. (Han doesn’t seem to have noticed that Sartre revoked his earlier separation of art, the irréel, from real life).
The choice of Sartre is interesting in relation to Han’s outdated, superficial analysis of narrative with respect to literature. In addition to Sartre, his literary references are mostly limited to Baudelaire and Proust, strangely historicist for a contemporary discussion of narration. Indeed Proust seems to be the only acceptable narrator of memory – “Whoever narrates in the Proustian sense delves into life and inwardly weaves new threads between events.” (p33). Okay, Proust is Proust, but can you really base a theory on the nature of memory on him in the 21st Century? My mind turned to ‘Last Year at Marianbad’ – the book as well as the film; Alain Robbe-Grillet observes in ‘Towards a New Novel’: “Flaubert wrote the new novel of 1860, Proust the new novel of 1910. The writer must be proud to bear his own date, in the knowledge that there is no masterpiece that exists in eternity, but only works that exist in history, and that they only outlive themselves in so far as they have left the past behind them and heralded the future.” And as soon as the Nouveau Roman comes to mind, there’s Claude Simon, of course. Or Magic Realism, the opening line of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Though poetry rather than fiction, I swear by Lyn Hejinian’s “Writing as an aid to Memory.” Anyway, returning to Han’s use of Sartre, later he writes that because the smartphone “removes reality’s gaze, it is a most efficient tool for screening us off from reality. Reality’s gaze is the gaze through which the other addresses us. Reality as something facing us disappears entirely behind the touchscreen.” (Tell that to the lamppost). Glossing over the suggestion of reality as transcendence, I am struck by his apparent ignorance of Sartre’s later work. Specifically ‘Modern Times’: “So solitude is a project. Moreover, as such, it is relative to particular individuals at particular moments: cutting oneself off in order to read the newspaper [read smartscreen] means using the national collective and ultimately the totality of living humans, in so far as one belongs to it and depends on all, to isolate oneself from a hundred people where waiting for or using the same public transport system. Organic solitude, involuntary solitude, experienced solitude, solitude-as-behaviour, solitude as the social status of the individual, solitude as the exteriority of groups conditioning the exteriority of individuals and solitude as a reciprocity of isolations within a society that creates masses: all these types and all these oppositions can be found at once in the little group under consideration, to the extent that isolation is an historical and social behaviour of man in the midst of gathering of men.” I certainly find Sartre’s version more empowering for thought than Han’s, which burdens with passivity.
This leads us back to something quoted earlier - “Consumers are lonely. They do not form a community.” If he is defining readers as consumers of narratives, aren’t readers always alone? Even in book clubs, readers read alone. So who are Han’s readers? “Narrating presupposes close listening and deep attention. The narrative community is a community of attentive listeners.” But hasn’t this always been the case? Nabokov: “I don’t wish to touch hearts and I don’t even want to effect minds very much, what I want to produce is that little sob in the spin of the artist-reader” or Claude Simon: “What if Van Gogh and Picasso had worried about whether the man in the street was going to be able to contemplate their paintings without any difficulty? I think a writer should not ask himself this sort of question. If you try to bring yourself down to the level of the general public, you’ve had it!” So who are the narrators for Han? It would appear to be everyone, the book refers throughout to ‘we’, ‘our’ and ‘us’, except that in digital late modernity “we conceal the nakedness – the absence of meaning in our lives – by constantly posting, liking and sharing.” “Under conditions of accelerated communication, we do not have the time, or even the patience, to tell stories.” An unsustainable claim of universality for the particular.
And, “The ultimate decline of narration comes not with the novel but with the rise of information under capitalism”, was similarly addressed by Mark Fisher, “there is nothing which, by its very nature, resists incorporation into capital. So it is not then a matter of creativity versus capitalism – or rather of capitalism as the capturing of the creativity of the multitude. Instead, the enemy now could better be called creative capitalism and overcoming it will not involve inventing new modes of positivism, but new kinds of negativity.” Interestingly, Han shares this position in ‘The Burnout Society’ - “Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.” (p11) but ‘Crisis’ real feels like a book from someone who has the big idea but doesn’t know how to develop a new kind of negativity from it.
