Signifying Nothing: Against Byung-Chul Han

by Daniel Miller

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The Burnout Society

Byung-Chul Han edited and translated. by Erik Butler, Standford University Press, 68 pp, $12.60

Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

Byung-Chul Han edited and translated. by Erik Butler, Verso Books, 96 pp, $13.78

Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy

Byung-Chul Han edited and translated by Daniel Steuer, Polity Press, 80 pp, $16.95 

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Just as political language both describes and expresses political forces, every public intellectual is both a doctor and a patient in the mental hospital of contemporary life. Defined against each other as products in a cornered market, each combines a diagnosis with a malady without it being certain which is which. Things are said or not said, topics are addressed or not addressed and allowed to be addressed by certain people and not others, depending on what an audience is prepared to think about, and think about itself. Some writers are showered with accolades, others are effectively suppressed by silence, and a handful are attacked relentlessly, yet continue to say what they believe.

Nowhere is this ambiguity better crystallized than in the case of Byung-Chul Han. Usually identified as a philosopher, Han is better characterized as a theorist of contemporary global culture: He is also its articulation and perhaps its self-critique. The most successful German-speaking intellectual export since Peter Sloterdijk, the South Korean-born Han also is the herald of a post-national German culture which seeks to downplay, if not eliminate, national reference points in favor of a global outlook. In contrast to the famous model of the mighty German thinker writing thick tomes in impenetrable prose, Han produces slim texts in a flat, anodyne style perfectly calibrated for reading on planes.

Beginning with his breakthrough success The Burnout Society in 2015, more than 20 of Han’s slim books have been published in English, each one more or less the same. Usually clocking in at 90 pages or fewer, they offer a therapeutically inflected phenomenology of contemporary malaise, wrapped around updates of Heidegger, Foucault, and Freud. Han’s books are not really books but hybrid objects, located midway between books and screens, almost the analogues of expansion packs, which recycle a small cluster of themes with tonal variation instead of critical development.

Han’s central argument is that the corporate and political “neoliberal” integration of digital technology into global society is dystopian and depressing. The society of perpetual self-reinvention is an exhausted society, the transparent society is a society of surveillance, and the world of absolute connectivity is a world of complete alienation. 

This pessimistic attitude is now more or less pervasive among the global intelligentsia, accompanied by apathetic resignation. There is nothing to be done, or even anything to say. Revolution is impossible because capitalism has already fully incorporated it into its own abstract dynamics. Counterrevolution is unthinkable. All that remains is compiling catalogues of artificial emotions, and itemizing the microtones of contemporary monotony, while waxing nostalgic for the passions of yesteryear.

Han’s persistent evasion of ideological controversy has made him one of an increasingly small number of thinkers who still retains readers across the political spectrum. Institutional art curators, cypherpunk filmmakers and traditionalist podcasters are all able to find something of value in his work, or at least something familiar. But Han’s widespread appeal is bought at an intellectual cost. Despite discussing the alienating effects of globalization, Han has nothing to say about accelerating mass migration or the liquidation of national sovereignty: Ultimately, he turns away from addressing politically critical issues in favor of neologistic cartographies characterized by a lacuna of detail. Engaged intellectuals once searched for new weapons. Han, the detached intellectual, prefers vague reifications which implicate nobody and nothing. Intent on remaining above it all, he restricts his concern to the lukewarm, and avoids more extreme manifestations intensifying across contemporary society. His books are an oasis of boredom in a desert of horror.

Han’s 2022 book Infocracy continues the trajectory of his 2017 book Psychopolitics, which signaled an intensifying regression to the midwit mean. The principal enemy is Big Data, “a highly efficient psychopolitical instrument that makes it possible to achieve comprehensive knowledge of the dynamics of social communication.” Identified as the “tool” of a “mutant” neoliberal “regime,” Big Data is described as “an intelligent system for exploiting freedom.” It “does not paint a second reality behind the given, behind the data; it is a totalitarianism without ideology.” 

But Big Data doesn’t lack for ideology. The “antiracist” surrealism of new AI products is the just the most recent iteration of a tightening silicon cage that in recent years has made internet search almost unusable and shows little sign of changing course. But Han is oblivious.

Han’s clipped style supplies a mystique of authority to consistently misplaced, and arguably dishonest pronouncements. “The information regime does not pursue a biopolitical agenda,” he writes in Technocracy. “It is not interested in the body.” The regime is more interested in the body than ever; in fact it has extended its interests from muscles to hormones and experimental vaccines. Han has nothing to say about this. “[T]he information regime has no need for disciplinary pressure. It does not impose panoptic visibility on people,” Han writes. The regime precisely imposes this. For this purpose it has established a rhizomatic repression market served by psychologically deformed activist-journalists, third-rate academics, and failed artists. Han is oblivious to this as well.

What is happening here is a form of foreclosure designed to maintain Han as a party member in good standing by ignoring the truth of contemporary political power. To avoid being targeted for ideological repression himself, Han pretends that there is none. By the end of Technocracy, this strategy has generated so much cognitive dissonance that he almost appears to be confessing his own critical failure. “The vocabulary is radically reduced,” he writes. “Linguistic nuances are eradicated in order to prevent any subtlety of thought. People are deprived of the ability to conceive of a world that is different from that projected by the Party. The total lie bends language itself and turns it into lying. Clear conceptual distinctions are made impossible.” The topic of this passage is Orwell’s 1984. But Han could be describing himself. Perhaps is not surprising that Han’s most recently published work deals with the collapse of narrative. The narrative in question is his own.

One can still find on YouTube a clip of Han reading a statement in 2021 at the Villa Massimo in Rome, where Heidegger lectured in 1936 while sporting a swastika lapel pin. Then resident in Italy on a prestigious German government fellowship, Han announces that he has lost respect for Giorgio Agamben after the Italian thinker declined to appear at the Villa Massimo to debate him. Agamben made clear his reasons: He refused to apply for a government-mandated Green Pass which would have been necessary to secure his appearance. In this way, Han claimed, Agamben had made “a political abuse of a friendly personal invitation to stubbornly demonstrate his problematic position because he sees vaccination as a purpose of political domination of the state or because, like many anti-vaxxers . . . he is simply stupid . . . I have the feeling that Agamben does not know what a democracy is.” When push comes to shove, as it did, everything anyone needs to know about Han is right here. “In a totalitarian state that is built on a universal lie, speaking the truth is a revolutionary act,” he ends Technocracy. But he is no revolutionary.