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 It has been replaced by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.
