Notes on 'The Crisis of Narration' by Byung-Chul Han (Part 3)

Byung-Chul Han pictured with the Spanish language

edition of Die Krise der Narration (2023) [a]

I. 

 

Byung-Chul Han is very good at coming up with memorable phrases and titles for his books. Arguably, indeed, that's his greatest talent and I understand why a friend of mine characterised (and dismissed) his work as merely a mix of soundbite and slogan distilled from the work of other much greater thinkers. 

That's a bit harsh, but I know what she means (even if I wouldn't wish to criticise Han for this). 

 

Anyway, on we move to section six of The Crisis of Narration [b] - 'From Shocks to Likes' ...

 

Reading Benjamin (who is in turn reading Baudelaire and Freud), Han argues that external reality impacts upon the subject as a form of shock and that consciouness is a way of registering and protecting us from stimuli that would otherwise be too much to handle: "The more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less likely they are to have a traumatic effect." [44]  

 

Having dreams and forming memories are thus delayed ways of coming to terms with things that might otherwise overwhelm us. And the modern world is profoundly shocking; "the shock aspect of individual impressions has become so intensified that our consciousness is forced to be permanently active as a shield against stimuli" [45].  

 

But that isn't good; for it means we register less and less reality and have weaker and weaker experiences (our dreams become less disturbing and our memories less vivid). We need some degree of shock in order to feel and to think and to create. 

 

Unfortunately, we don't just now act as living organisms to protect ourselves from stimuli - we employ digital technology to (literally) screen off reality. Han writes:

 

"Etymologically, a screen [Schirm] is a protective barrier. A screen bans reality, which becomes an image, thus screening us from it. We perceive reality almost exclusively via digital screens. [...] On a smartphone screen, reality is so attenuated that it can no longer create any shock experiences. Shocks give way to likes." [46] 

 

That's what we want today: a non-threatening, non-disturbing, non-shocking world that we can like. Not a world of otherness that we can gaze at and which gazes into us, but a familiar, friendly, flat, sealed-off and smoothed-off world that is pleasing to the eye and satisfies our need for safety and smartness. 

 

Nietzsche would not approve. Lawrence would not approve. Heidegger would not approve. Baudrillard would not approve. In fact, anyone who loves objects and otherness and wishes to live dangerously in a world in which dreams, memories, and disturbing artworks are still possible would not approve.  

 

For Han, this world cowardly new world is typified by Netflix and Jeff Koons:

 

"In the age of Netflix, no one speaks of having shock experiences in connection with films. A Netflix series is nothing like a piece of art that corresponds to a pronounced danger to life and limb. Rather, it typically leads to binge watching. Viewers are fattened like consumer cattle. Binge watching is a paradigm for the general mode of perception in digital late modernity." [47] 

 

"The type of artist represented by Baudelaire, someone who inadvertently causes fright, would today  seem not only antiquated but almost grotesque. The artist who typifies our age is Jeff Koons. He appears smart. His works reflect the smooth consumer world that is the opposite of the world of shocks. [...] His art is intentionally relaxed and disarming. What he wants above all is to be liked." [48][c]

 

 

II. 

 

I do agree with Han: big data does not explain anything and the numbers never speak for themselves. 

 

Having said that, if we know the how, what, where and when, perhaps it becomes a bit easier to answer the metaphysical question of why and I don't see why theory shouldn't be based upon data. 

 

Similarly, I agree that whilst AI can compute and count it doesn't really think, but that doesn't mean it can't help us conceptualise and comprehend and continue to produce narratives (be they philosophical, psychoanalytic, or artistic in character) if that's our wont. 

 

Because Han tends to think in quite stark (and oppositional) terms - narrative community contra information society, for example - his work can unfortunately become trapped in its own binaries.         

 

III.

 

I have to admit, I'm a bit dubious about the healing power of narrative, even if I quite like the idea of the philosopher as cultural physician practicing the art of critique et clinique, and even if I have in the past promoted an idea of rescripting the self. 

Obviously, Han sees himself very much as one who has come to heal (even save) mankind by helping us to come to terms with the many ills and woes of contemporary culture by embedding them in a meaningful context; if not, indeed, in what comes close to being a religious narrative that "provides consolation or hope and thus carries us through the crisis" [57]. 

 

Jesus! This reminds me of that pompous egg-headed philosopher Alain de Botton, who, thankfully, seems to be keeping a lower media profile of late. He also treated his readers like small children in need of the consoling voice or gentle touch of a loving parent when they felt bad. 

At best, it's patronising and at worst, it's philosophical mollycoddling. 

 

 

IV.

  

As a Lawrentian, I often refer to the inspiration of touch and/or the democracy of touch: click here or here, for example. 

 

Touch is one of the key terms in Lawrence's phallic vocabulary [d] and so I'm pleased that Byung-Chul Han also recognises the importance of touch: "Like storytelling, touching also creates closeness and primordial trust." [58] 

 

That's true, but I suppose it depends on who's doing the touching and in what context.        

Han goes on to suggest that we now live in a society "in which there is no touching" [59] and that this has negative consequences:

 

"The retreat of touch is making us ill. Lacking touch, we remain hopelessly entrapped in our ego. Touch in the proper sense pulls us out of our ego. Poverty in touch ultimately means poverty in world. It makes us depressive, lonely and fearful." [59-60]   

And, paradoxically, the rise of digital connectivity and social media only makes things worse. 

Again, I think that's probably true, but I understand why some would dismiss this as a series of groundless assertions, made as they are without any supporting evidence. In the end, when you read an author like Han, you simply have to take a lot on trust (those who love his work will believe every word; those who don't will adopt a more sceptical position).  

 

V. 

I mentioned above Han's notion of a narrative community. But other than being something in contradistinction to the information society, what is a narrative community? 

 

It seems to refer to a small village (with or without an ancient tree at its centre), where the villagers sit around and swap stories that reinforce values and norms and thereby ensure unity (i.e., produce a we). There's no competitive individualism in the narrative community; just solidarity and empathy.

 

But Han doesn't want his readers to mistake the narrative community for some kind of Volksgemeinschaft as conceived by the Nazis and rooted in ethno-nationalism (or blood and soil). 

 

He wants, rather, that we conceive of the narrative community as a dynamic society allowing for change and otherness and do not "cling to a particular identity" [63], embracing instead a model of universal humanism informed by Kantian philosophy [e] and the poetry of Novalis [f].  

     

Well, I'm sorry, but where Han leads I will not follow ...

 

Push comes to shove, I think I prefer even the hell of the present to a future utopia promised by Idealist philosophers and Romantic poets! And Han's optimistic political vision, based on his concept of a narrative community which "provides meaning and orientation" [68] and opens up a new order, is not one I share.      

Notes

 

[a] This image is borrowed from a review of Byung-Chul Han's La crisis de la narración, by Marco Nicolini entitled 'El regreso del storytelling' (20 Oct 2023) and published on the Arzeta website: click here (or here for the English translation).

 

[b] Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2024). The work was originally published as Die Krise der Narration, (Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2023). Page numbers given in the above post refer to the English edition. 

 

[c] Han really hates Jeff Koons. I have written on this (and in defence of the latter and his artwork) previously on TTA. See for example the post dated 16 Feb 2022: click here.  

[d] I explore this phallic vocabulary on James Walker's Memory Theatre (a digital pilgrimage based on the works of D. H. Lawrence): click here.

[e] Han refers to and quotes from Kant's 'Perpetual Peace', a philosophical sketch from 1795 in which the latter dreams of a global community in which all human beings are united and there can be no refugees: "Every human being enjoys unlimited hospitalty. Everyone is a cosmopolitan." [Han, The Crisis of Narration, p. 63.]

      Kant's essay can be found in Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 93-130.  

 

[f] Han writes: "Novalis is another thinker who argues for radical universalism. He imagines a 'world family' beyond nation or identity. He takes poetry to be the medium of reconciliation and love. Poetry unites people and things in the most intimate community." [63] 

      That Han should simply take us back to moral idealism and Romantic fantasy is disappointing to say the least. However, those readers who wish to know what Novalis has to say about the world family all living as one in a beautiful society, should see his Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar, (State University of New York Press, 1997).   

 

 

Part 1 of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

Part 2 of this post can be read by clicking here.  

Notes on 'The Crisis of Narration' by Byung-Chul Han (Part 2)

(Matthes and Seitz Berlin 2023) [a]

 

 

I.

 

Byung-Chul Han really likes Walter Benjamin - not that there's anything wrong with that.

 

He makes over a dozen references to Benjamin's work in the opening chapter of his new book and more than another dozen or so references to texts by this quirky cultural theorist in chapter two, which is where I'm picking up this commentary-cum-critical encounter ...

 

In 'The Poverty of Experience' Han - following Benjamin - mourns the fact that communicable experience passed down orally from generation to generation is "becoming increasingly rare" [10]; nothing is narrated any longer; no one tells stories drawn from their own lives any more.    

 

Folk wisdom no longer counts for much when people freed from tradition by technology look to Google for answers and download problem-solving apps: "The new barbarians celebrate the poverty of experience as a moment of emancipation." [11] 

 

And, to be fair, perhaps modernity did provide an opportunity to start from scratch and make it new ... 

 

Benjamin's thought is shot through with ambivalence on this question; as a Marxist, he believes in progress and the revolutionary spirit. But, in the end, his "deep-seated scepticism towards modernity" [13] wins out and he decides that we are ultimately impoverished (and dehumanised) by the disenchanted world of today - and not even Mickey Mouse can save us. 

And for us, in a late-modern (or post-modern) era, not only do we exist without history, but even the future has come and gone. No one even tries to make things new or dares to dream of radical social transformation; no one has "the courage to create a world-changing narrative" [14] and storytelling is now mostly "a matter of commercialism and consumption" [14]. 

 

This is quite a bleak analysis: "It is only with narrative that a future opens up, for narrative gives us hope." [15] But as a Nietzschean philosopher, I can happily do without the morally optimistic idea of hope. Indeed, let me remind readers of my new year's message for 2024:

 

Hope may be one of the great Christian virtues, but in Norse mythology it is simply the drool dripping from the jaws of the Fenris Wolf; and courage is a term for the bravery displayed by the warrior in the absence of hope [b]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Is the past something that needs salvaging - or something in need of salvation? It's an interesting question (assuming the past doesn't just need forgetting). 

 

Han - again following Benjamin - plumps for the latter: "We owe our happiness to the salvation of the past." [16] 

 

I have to say, that's not the kind of sentence I'd write. For it is just as true that we owe an awful lot of misery to the fact that people often can't (or won't) let go of the past and that far from saving the past they ruin the present and sacrifice the future with something else that "has a long tail and reaches back into the past" [16] - ressentiment and the will to revenge. 

 

Nietzsche says that the greater the plastic power of a people, the more history they can embrace and affirm as their own. But he also ties innocence to forgetfulness and insists that whilst it is Christian to forgive, it is noble to forget. So I'm not entirely convinced that we need to resurrect the past and make it a continuing influence upon the present.     

 

Having said that, I do enjoy a certain level of temporal (and personal) continuity; I like to imagine I'm pretty much the same now as I was aged six, for example. And one of the things that's nice about the theory of evolution (or, I suppose, the myth of creation in Genesis) is that it allows one to feel part of a much wider and longer story (though I'm not greatly concerned about this). 

 

 

III. 

 

When it comes to certain things - selfies, social media, and the art of Jeff Koons, for example - Han is very much like a dog with a bone; i.e., unwilling to let go and determined to get to the marrow (or essence) of the thing. 

 

Thus, no surprise to see him taking a pop at Snapchat and Instagram once more and declaring that digital photos are - if not quite the soul-stealing work of the devil - things that "announce the end of the human being as someone with a fate and a history" [20] and mark the birth of Phono sapiens - non-beings who have surrendered to the momentary actualities of experience and are unable to discriminate or be selective. 

Phono sapiens believe they are being playful on their smartphones 24/7 and that this puts them in control, but, actually, they are being manipulated and exploited. 

 

 

IV.

 

Ultimately, Han comes to the same conclusion as the protagonist of Sartre's Nausea (1938): "Only with narration is life elevated above its sheer facticity, above its nakedness." [27]

 

In other words, narrating make's the world and time's passing meaningful; it inhibits that feeling of nausea that Roquentin experiences. But, arguably, la nausée is just a Sartrean synonym for (or another aspect of) what Heidegger terms angst  - and surely the key thing about angst is that it's not something to be overcome or resolved. 

 

Narrating the world may make meaningful and be comforting - may make objects seem less alien and less threatening; may make the fact that being rests upon non-being seem less troubling - but this also insulates us from a fundamental form of freedom.      

 

Ultimately, I think I'd rather be dizzy before the void and bewildered by the (sometimes malevolent) presence of objects than fobbed off with some transcendent narrative, even if that makes the world rhythmically structured and promises blissful order. 

 

By insisting that existentialism is a humanism, Sartre transforms "frightening being-in-the-world into familiar being-at-home" [29] and such domesticity is not something philosophers should be advocating.      

    

V.

 

The thought has just occured to me: I'm Konrad - the boy who cannot tell stories [c]. 

 

For just like Konrad, I lack the inwardness that would allow me to "internalize events and to weave and condense them into a story" [34] and my world, like Konrad's, is pretty much entirely disenchanted. 

 

Perhaps that explains why my dreams of becoming a novelist came to nothing - and why I like fragments and pieces of factual information so much. 

 

But please don't send me to see Ms Leishure ... 

 

For whilst I agree that, utimately, the world is made up of events that resist explanation and that we might question causality, I don't wish to become "a member of the small narrative community" [36] if that means abandoning reason or denying the possibility of objective facts. 

 

If things have a magical aura that's great: but even things that don't possess that radiance which raises them above mere facticity, they're still astonishing and it seems to me that a scientific description of the unfolding of the universe is just as beautiful as a mytho-religious narrative such as the one found in Genesis.     

 

And finally, as readers will know, I hate full-stops and prefer to use an ellipsis whenever possible ... 

 

And that's because, in my view, there's always something left unsaid and even the most perfect of narratives can never really be sealed off in an intertextual universe; can never be a concluding form that has closure as its goal and can't wait to stamp the words The End, thereby passing a kind of death sentence. 

 

There is no end - and there is no origin; we should instinctively mistrust any book or story that opens with the words In the beginning ...       

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This is the cover of the original German edition. I am relying upon the English translation by Daniel Steuer published as The Crisis of Narration (Polity Press, 2024). All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.  

[b] See the post 'Nothing Changes on New Year's Day' (31 Dec 2023): click here. See also the much earlier but related post 'Happy to be Hopeless this Christmas' (26 Dec 2014): click here.

 

[c] Konrad is a character in a short story by the children's author Paul Maar. Han discusses this story in chapter five of The Crisis of Narration. 

 

 

Part 1 of this post can be read by clicking here.

 

Part 3 of this post can be read by clicking here.

 

 

Notes on 'The Crisis of Narration' by Byung-Chul Han (Part 1)

(Polity Press, 2024)

 

 

I. 

 

Byung-Chul Han has had a new book published in English translation: The Crisis of Narration [a]. 

 

It's another slim little work which, like Jason Alexander's Acting Without Acting (2009), is not so much a book as a pamphlet [b]. Nevertheless, I coughed up the £12.99 asking price on Amazon for the paperback and thought I would offer a running commentary on it here as I read it over dinner ...

 

 

II.   

 

Han provides a short preface that opens: "Everyone is talking about 'narratives'." [vii] 

 

And I had to smile at this assertion as I can't imagine anyone outside of academia ever using the word narrative and although the word crisis is very popular with politicians and political commentators - the cost of living crisis, the NHS crisis, Middle East crisis, etc. - I don't think they care too much about the crisis of narration. 

 

But maybe they should: because maybe Han is right to argue that narratives provide our anchor in being and furnish life with "meaning, support and orientation" [vii]. So perhaps we need the return of narration and to give back to narratives their power and gravitational force. 

But that won't be easy in an age in which narratives have lost their mystery. We all know now that they are constructed and don't possess any essential inner truth, having been revealed to be "contingent, exchangeable and modifiable" [viii].

Han is acutely aware of this. He knows that we are living in a post-narrative time - which is really just another way of saying a secular age in which God is dead. For the kind of narratives that Han values are basically religious narratives that reach into "every nook and cranny of life" [viii]. 

The problem is, I'm not sure I want to live in a new age of narrative if that means living once more in a theocratic society. Having to lose ritual and festivity is probably a price worth paying for not being ruled over by a priestly caste. And besides, I'm not convinced that being anchored in being necessitates being mired in faith and religious dogma. 

I prefer what Han terms micro-narratives over grand narratives that transform our being-in-the-world into a being-at-home; I don't want to be domesticated in the name of  truth, thank you very much. Nor do I want to belong to a concluding form that creates a closed order founded upon meaning and identity 

 

I guess this makes me a recalcitrant postmodernist in Han's eyes; still kicking against the idea of belonging to any community or returning to some past ideal. Ultimately, I'm with D. H. Lawrence who famously declared: 

 

"I don't want to live again the tribal mysteries [...] I don't want to know as I have known [...] My way is my own [...] I can't cluster at the drum any more." [c]  

 

Of course, Han also knows there is no going back: 

 

"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. They are merely forms of pornographic self-presentation or self-promotion. Posting, liking and sharing content are consumerist practices that intensify the narrative crisis." [ix]

Does that include blogging, I wonder ... 

 

I rather suspect Han would say it does; that he would dismiss the fragments of fiction-theory assembled here on Torpedo the Ark as being forgetful of being and lacking empathy; that posts such as this one simply inform and pass the word along without ever providing a meaningful narrative or creating a genuine community. 

 

The fact that the posts are typed on a laptop is, Han would argue, "already a barrier to the telling of stories" [xi]. Well, I'm sorry but the days when I would handwrite poems and leave them in public places or hidden in tree hollows for people to find by chance are long behind me.

 

Perhaps Han initially writes his books in blood and narrates them in person to a select few followers who know how to listen closely and pay deep attention: I don't know. But I do know he has also agreed to the commercial publication of over twenty works, translated into many languages, and sold all over the world, so I'm not going to take too much shit from him on this matter. 

 

Having said that, let's follow him as he traces out the long pre-history of the present narrative crisis ...   

III.

 

The first chapter of Han's new book opens with an attack on those who prefer local news rather than hearing news from afar. For Han being interested about what is happening close to home shows a form of attention deficit:

 

"The newspaper reader's attention extends only to what is near. It shrinks to mere curiosity. The modern newspaper reader jumps from one news item to the next, instead of letting her gaze drift into the distance and linger. The modern reader has lost the long, slow, lingering gaze." [1]    

 

This surprises me. And, as a Lawrentian, I obviously cannot let it pass ... 

 

One recalls, for example, that Richard Somers loved nothing more than to read bits in the Sydney Bulletin - "the only periodical in the world that really amused him" [d] - even if it didn't provide an earnest editorial narrative. The assembled bits had real vitality: "There was no consecutive thread. Only the laconic courage of experience." [e] 

 

And one thinks also of the essay 'Insouciance' in which Lawrence condemns his neighbours at a Swiss hotel - "two little white-haired English ladies" [f] - for sweeping him off his balcony with all the latest news from abroad: "away from the glassy lake, the veiled mountains, the two men mowing, and the cherry-trees, away into the troubled ether of international politics" [g]. 

 

Lawrence is curious and concerned about the immediate world that is physically present before him - that is actually there - but he doesn't care about gazing into the distance and feigning interest in what happens in every corner of the earth or in numerous abstract issues.   

 

Does this make Somers a modern reader? Does it make Lawrence less of a thinker; a lover only of information and triviality? Han seems to want the earnestness that Lawrence hates; to privilege news stories that possess a temporal breadth and the power of destiny. But we might ask if there has ever been a newspaper that never explains or informs, but only narrates in a manner that is both wondrous and mysterious. 

 

It's hard to imagine Herodotus working on Fleet Street, as much as Han may wish it. 

 

One might at this point wonder why, if Han longs for stories that are more like seeds of grain - full of germinal force - rather than specks of dust, he doesn't simply read works of literature and give the tabloids a miss. Well, it's because, like Walter Benjamin, he thinks modern novels also mark the decline of narrative; the latter is an expression of a community, whereas the novel is all about bourgeois individualism.

 

Still, as bad as modern works of fiction are, "the ultimate decline of narration comes not with the novel but with the rise of information under capitalism" [5].    

 

Information technology doesn't allow us to rest, to relax, to be bored; it "drives the dream bird away" [5] and stops us listening carefully (for Han the narrative community is one which immerses itself in what it hears). 

 

In a crucial passage, Han writes:

 

"On the internet [...] the dream bird cannot build a nest. The information seekers drive him away. In today's state of hyperactivity, where boredom is not allowed to emerge, we never reach the state of deep mental relaxation. The information society is an age of heightened mental tension, because the essence of information is surprise and the stimulus it provides. The tsunami of information means that our perceptual apparatus is permanently stimulated. It can no longer enter into contemplation. The tsunami of information fragments our attention. It prevents the contempative lingering that is essential to narrating and careful listening." [6]

 

It's a nice passage: classic Han. And I find it hard to disagree with anything he says here. His fundamental argument that in a digital era reality itself is turned into information and human beings are no more than living data sets, is quite clearly the case. 

 

And whilst some would simply shrug and ask so what, I can't help feeling, like Han, that this is not a good thing and will result in a new form of algorithmic domination which "hides behind the illusion of freedom and communication" [7]. 

   

 

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2024). The work was originally published as Die Krise der Narration (Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2023). Page numbers given here refer to the English edition.    

[b] See the season 7 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm entitled 'Seinfeld', written by Larry David and dir. Jeff Schaffer (November 2009). To watch the scene I'm referring to on Youtube, click here. 

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, 'Indians and an Englishman', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 120.  

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 269. 

[e] Ibid., p. 272

[f] D. H. Lawrence, 'Insouciance', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 95. 

 

Part 2 of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

Part 3 of this post can be read by clicking here. 

Reflections on Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han (Part One)

(Polity Press, 2024)

 

 

I. 

 

The subtitle of Byung-Chul Han's new little book is In Praise of Inactivity [a]. But it's important to understand at the outset that he uses this term in a positive philosophical sense. That is to say, he conceives of inactivity as a negative potentiality; the ability to do nothing.

 

But Han is not merely encouraging us to be idle in the laid-back and whimsical manner of Tom Hodgkinson - although, to be fair to the latter, I feel I was perhaps a little harsh on him back in 2012 [b]. Nor is he encouraging his readers to learn the art of immaculate perception so they can look at life without desire [c].     

 

He wants us, rather, to engage in a form of deep attentiveness that is central to the vita contemplativa [d]. To perform less: to consume less: to be still and silent a little more, so as to radiate in our own starry singularity and not merely keep rolling on and on like a stone subject to mechanical laws.    

 

 

II. 

 

In a line that would delight the witches of Treadwell's, Han writes: "Inactivity has a logic of its own, its own language, temporality, architecture, magnificence - even its own magic." [1] 

 

Inactivity, he goes on to say, is an intensity - an unseen power that is crucial to Dasein's existence (not a weakness, an absence, a lack, or a defect). And philosophical reflection - or thought in the Lawrentian sense of the term [e] - is born of this intensity. 

 

Only machines don't know how to rest or reflect; artificial intelligence is born of activity, not inactivity. They - the machines - may be very good at organising and coordinating chaos, but they don't know how to give style, which is why they may drive society forward, but they'll never give birth to culture:

 

"History and culture are not congruent. Culture is formed by diversion, excess and detour; it is not produced by following the path that leads straight to the goal. The essence at the core of culture is ornamentation. Culture sits beyond functionality and usefulness. The ornamental dimension, emancipated from any goal or use, is how life insists that it is more than survival. Life receives its divine radiance from that absolute decoration that does not adorn anything." [3]   

 

 

III.

 

Han is basically reviving an old set of terms and values, such as festivity and luxury, whilst rejecting those terms and values that define our present (utilitarian) world order: efficiency and functionality. Freedom from purpose and usefulness, he says, is "the essential core of inactivity" [5] and the key to human happiness. 

 

Which is fine - this remains an important teaching - but it's nothing new. And one can't help wondering if Han doesn't spend far more of his time endlessly re-reading those authors whom he privileges rather than contemplating life (and the natural world) directly. 

 

For whilst there are plenty of DWEMs in his book, there are very few live animals; even the hesitant wing of the butterfly is a reference to an elegy by Schiller (via Walter Benjamin) rather than to an actual insect and I miss the sound of bees buzzing and birds calling in his writing. 

 

Unfortunately, when you enter the space of thinking opened up by Han, it feels like one is entering a magnificent library or a cathedral rather than an "unexplored realm of dangerous knowledge" [f], or a jungle with "tigers and palm trees and rattle snakes" [g] and all the other wonders hatched by a hot sun. 

 

I think it was Sartre who once said of Bataille: 'He tells us to laugh, but he does not make us laugh.' And I kind of feel the same about Han: he tells us to dance and to play, but he fails to make us feel either lightfooted or lighthearted. Likewise, when he gathers us round the camp fire - a medium of inactivity - we are not warmed.   

 

 

IV.

 

I suppose the problem I have is that Han is just a bit too much of an ascetic philosopher. 

 

Thus, whilst he wants to revive the notion of the festival, he insists nevertheless that festivals must be "free from the needs of mere life" [7] and tries to convince us that it's better to fast than to feast; that the former is noble in character and helps initiate us into the secrets of food.  

 

What is inactivity, he suggests, other than ultimately a form of spiritual fasting. 

 

I have to admit, I don't like this idea of going to bed hungry and going to bed early; nor, for that matter, do I want to go to bed cold, as I've done that too often in the past and it doesn't make life any more vital or radiant. 

 

Nor does it make it easier to sleep - the latter being  a medium of truth for Han (as for Proust and Freud): "Sleep reveals a true internal world that lies behind the things of the external world, which are mere semblance. The dreamer delves into the deeper layers of being." [9] [h]

 

Again, that's not the kind of idea - or language - that I'm comfortable with. I simply do not believe that sleep and dreams are "privileged places for truth" [9] - even though I love a good nap as much as anyone.    

 

However, I'm a bit more sympathetic to the idea that boredom - as that state of inactivity which allows for mental relaxation - is something we should cherish (even whilst coming from a punk background in which being bored was just about the worst thing that could befall one). 

 

I understand now that boredom isn't half as boring as the distractions invented to relieve us from boredom and that the less able we are to endure boredom, so our ability to enjoy life's real pleasures or do great things decreases. As Han says: 

 

"The seed of the new is not the determination to act but the unconscious event. When we lose the capacity to experience boredom, we also lose access to the activities that rest on it." [17]

 

And so it is that now I admire those who, like David Puddy, can just patiently sit still during a flight without having to flick through a magazine, watch a film, or start a conversation [i].    

 

 

V. 

 

Blanchot, Han reminds us, places inactivity in close relation to death: as the utmost intensification of the latter. 

 

And so too does he suggest that art also requires an "intensive relation to death" [12]. It is death, for example - not the will to knowledge or self-expression - that opens up the space of literature and writers can only write thanks to their inactivity and their proximity to death.

 

And the best writers, as Roland Barthes recognised, are those who dare to be idle and do not continually affirm their authorship of a text, or constantly promote themselves: "They give up their names and become no one. Nameless and intentionless, they succumb to what happens." [15] 

 

In an interview for Le Monde in 1979, Barthes marvelled at the simplicity of a Zen poem which perfectly expresses what it is he dreams about:

 

Sitting peacefully doing nothing

Springtime is coming

and the grass grows all by itself [j]   

 

It's a nice thought that inactivity has a "de-subjectifying, de-individualizing, even disarming effect" [15]. That, in other words, it allows us to disappear and leave nothing behind us but a smile like the Cheshire Cat ...

 

 

John Tenniel's illustration of the Cheshire Cat beginning to 

vanish in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865)

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2024). The book was originally published as Vita Contemplativa: Oder von der Untatigkeit (Ullstein Verlag, 2022). All page numbers given in the post refer to the English edition. 

 

[b] See the post entitled 'How to be an Idle Cunt' (29 Dec 2012): click here. 

 

[c] See the post entitled 'The Voyeur' (29 April 2013): click here. 

 

[d] This Latin phrase - popular with Augustine and the scholastics - comes from the ancient Greek concept of βίος θεωρητικός formulated by Aristotle and later developed by the Stoics. In English it is usually translated simply as contemplative life.   

 

[e] "Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness [...] a man in his wholeness wholly attending" and not the "jiggling and twisting of already existent ideas". See D. H. Lawrence, 'Thought', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 580-81. 

      I discuss Lawrence's philosophy of mind with reference to this poem in a post published on 4 Dec 2015: click here.  

 

[f] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 53.

 

[g] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969), p. 165.  

 

[h] Click here for a post on sleep and dreams published on 6 Feb 2015. 

 

[i] David Puddy is a fictional character on the situation comedy Seinfeld, played by Patrick Warburton. He is the on-and-off boyfriend of the character Elaine Benes. Click here to watch the scene I'm thinking of in the season 9 episode 'The Butter Shave' (dir. Andy Ackerman, 1997).  

 

[j] See Roland Barthes, 'Dare to Be Lazy', in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991), p. 341. Han quotes this haiku on p. 15 of Vita Contemplativa.  

 

 

Further reflections on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa can be found in part two of this post - click here and part three: click here.   

Mourning Post: with Reference to Roland Barthes's Journal de Deuil

A favourite photo of my mother

(taken in 1947, aged 21)

 

 

"Does being able to live without someone you loved 

mean you loved her less than you thought ...?" 

 

 

I.

 

There are some books we love immediately upon first reading; and there are other books which it takes time (and several readings) to fall in love with. 

 

Then there are books like Roland Barthes's Journal de deuil (2009) [a] which one only begins to appreciate once one has lived through a similar experience as the author - in this case, the death of a mother.

 

 

II.

 

The day after his mother's death, in October 1977, Barthes began assembling notes written on quartered slips of paper in which he reflected on his sadness, sense of loss, and the fact that modern society seems to leave no time or space in which to express one's grief; as soon as someone dies, there's a frenzied attempt to move on and the bereaved are encouraged to get over it, as if they have a minor illness [b]. 

 

During the following two years, Barthes wrote over 300 of these notes, the contents of which eventually being published in the form of a mourning diary. 

 

I do not here wish to present an overview of these fragments of text, but simply comment on those ideas which most resonate with me at this time and express my agreement with Barthes that the individual should insist on their right to mourn; for it is also the right to "the loving relation it implies" [55]. 

 

In a nutshell, dear reader, don't let your suffering be stolen from you ... [c]

 

Note: the titles supplied below are mine.

 

 

III.

 

On the Corpse Bride

 

There was, I would suggest, something of the same high degree of intimacy between Roland Barthes and his mother as between D. H. Lawrence and his. 

 

Thus, for example, the opening note of the former's Mourning Diary which suggests that the first night grieving for one's mother is comparable in terms of its passion and emotional intensity to a wedding night, reminds me of the opening verse from one of the latter's early poems:

"My love looks like a girl tonight,

      But she is old.

The plaits that lie along her pillow

      Are not gold,

But threaded with filigree silver,

      And uncanny cold."

 

The same poem concludes: 

"Nay, but she sleeps like a bride, and dreams her dreams 

      Of perfect things.

She lies at last, the darling, in the shape of her dream,

      And her dead mouth sings ..." [d]

 

 

On the Maternal Body

 

This first note is followed by one written the next day in which Barthes, who was homosexual, counters the accusation that he has never known a woman's body: "I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying." [4]    

 

Me too: and it's only now that I stop to think of the strangeness of this fact; that one was fated to care for the body one was born of when that body approached its end and that from out of the death of this maternal body one is somehow issued anew. 

 

To quote from Lawrence once more: "My little love, my dearest / Twice you have issued me / Once from your womb, sweet mother / Once from your soul ..." [e]

 

 

On Posthumous Desire

 

The fifth fragment dated 29 October is one of the most astonishing: it exactly summarises my position and how I feel. No commentary is required, it just needs quoting in full:

"The desires I had before her death (while she was sick) can no longer be fulfilled, for that would mean it is her death that allows me to fulfill them - her death might be a liberation in some sense with regard to my desires. But her death has changed me, I no longer desire what I used to desire. I must wait - supposing that such a thing could happen - for a new desire to form, a desire following her death." [18] [f]

 

 

On Turning Life (and Death) into Literature 

 

I understand why Barthes didn't want to discuss his mother's life, let alone write about her death, for fear of "making literature out of it" [22]. 

 

However, as a writer, he just couldn't help himself - and neither can I. 

 

For like Barthes, I recognise that literature originates with a death - the death of a porcupine, for example, or perhaps even the death of the author - and that Walter Benjamin was right to say that what we ultimately seek in art is the knowledge of an event that is denied to us in reality. [g]   

 

 

On Last Words

 

Many people about to die do so in silence, particularly if, like my mother, Alzheimer's robbed them of their ability to communicate years earlier. 

 

And I'm not sure there's anything further to say to the dying beyond a certain point; kind gestures - such as a smile, a kiss, a squeeze of the hand - seem to matter more at the very end. 

 

Having said that, the romantic notion of last words - one which "falsely promises a final burst of lucidity and meaning before a person passes" [h] remains ingrained within our culture and even Barthes finds himself often thinking of his mother's words spoken "in the breath of her agony" [40].

 

Similarly, I find the final two words spoken to me by my mother constantly recurring; the first a word of greeting and the second one of recognition: Hello Stephen. The memory of these words will, I trust, always move me. [i]    

 

 

On Courage

 

Barthes is right: mourning doesn't require courage; the time for courage is when your mother is sick and requires care; when you witness her suffering, her sadness, her confusion and have to conceal your tears (or, as in my case, control your anger and frustration). 

 

 

On Absence [I]

 

Barthes is struck by the painful nature of absence; that it is not so much a lack, as a wound. And struck also by the fact that, with his mother gone, he no longer has anyone to announce his arrival to (or greet him) when he gets home. 

 

Again, I understand this perfectly. But, luckily, I have Cat for company and whilst cats may or may not understand what it is to mourn, they certainly know when we are sad, depressed, or anxious and act accordingly (i.e., attempt to comfort us).   

 

 

On Absence [II] 

 

Everytime I go upstairs and look into my mother's room, "there unexpectedly rises within me, like a bursting bubble: the realisation that she no longer exists, she no longer exists ..." [78] 

 

And I realise also that the dead are all equally dead and gone; it doesn't matter if they died two months ago, like my mother, 36 years ago like Barthes's maman, or two millennia ago like that Siberian princess preserved in ice. 

 

Death is a flat and timeless ontological plane upon which nothing matters and nothing changes and to know this - to know that the dead are eternally and absolutely dead - is also to know that we too "will die forever and completely" [119] [j].    

 

 

On the Truth of Mourning

 

The fragment dated 28 May, 1978, is another that is worth quoting in full:   

 

"The truth about mourning is quite simple: now that  maman is dead, I am faced with death (nothing any longer separates me from it except time)."

Unfortunately, being 60 - the same age as Barthes when he wrote this - there's not even a great deal of time any longer separating me from death (although, hopefully, I'll not be hit by a laundry van in the near future) [k].  

 

But this tragic realisation enables one to understand why it was Nietzsche taught his readers not to pray, but to bless ...

 

 

On Some Sunny Day

 

In a very brief hand-scribbled note left for me and my sister, my mother expressed her hope that, one day, we'd meet again. I don't think that's very likely (or even very desirable; the thought of personal immortality is one I find laughable and abhorrent) [l].

 

But, like Marcel Proust, Barthes is devastated by the fact his mother has died and echoes the author of À la recherche du temps perdu when he writes: "If I were sure of meeting Maman again, I'd die right away." [157]

 

 

On Acedia

 

As we know, the ancient Greeks had a word for everything, including that state of listless indifference in which the heart slowly contracts and hardens: ἀκηδία - or, as we write in Latinised modern English, acedia (or accidie). 

 

It's a concept that Christian theologians borrowed and developed in moral terms; and it's a concept that many writers in the 20th century seemed to have a penchant for, though tending to discuss it as a psychological (or existential) phenomenon. Aldous Huxley, for example, wrote an essay on the subject and concluded that it was one of the main afflictions of the modern age [m].

 

Walter Benjamin also gave acedia an important place within his literary criticism, describing it as an indolence of the heart [n]; whilst Barthes, writing in his Mourning Diary, notes that whilst he believed that following his mother's death there would be a liberation in kindness, what has actually happened is he finds himself "unable to invest lovingly in any other being" [118].

 

In a later fragment, he defines acedia as a form of desolating egoism and writes:

 

"Horrible figure of mourning: acedia, hard-heartedness: irritability, impotence to love. Anguished because I don't know how to restore generosity to my life - or love." [178]            

 

Again, it pains to me say, but I know exactly what he means ...  

Maintaining the Quotidian

 

When my mother died, I thought I'd want to flee the house; to get out as often as possible and meet as many people as possible; to get back into the world. 

 

But, two months on, I've been nowhere and seen no one and I think Barthes provides a clue as to why this is; one tries to continue living - for a while at least - as if she were still here and according not so much to her values, but her needs. 

 

By maintaining the household order (or what Barthes terms the domestic quotidian) - cooking, cleaning, shopping, etc. - one shares in the activities that shaped her life and it's a way of remembering and silently conversing with her [o].

Anti-Mourning

 

Q: What is "the furthest from, the most antipathetic to" [196] mourning in gentle silence? 

 

A: Reading Le Monde, "in its acid and well-informed tactics" [196], says Barthes, writing in 1978; checking social media, in its malevolent toxicity, say I, here in 2023.   

 

In Memory / Filial Piety

 

Like Sade, Barthes has no concern for posterity; no desire to be read and remembered after he's dead; no wish for a monument. He is, he says, perfectly content to vanish completely [p].

 

However, Barthes cannot accept that this should be the case for his mother; "perhaps because she has not written and her memory depends entirely on me" [234]. 

That's why I'm writing this post (and those related to it); I would also like my mother's kindness and modesty to be recorded. As I said at her funeral [q], if I don't speak up for her, no one will (certainly not my sister). 

 

But as Barthes's translator Richard Howard notes, perhaps the ultimate task of every son is neither to bury nor sing the praises his mother, but to show a little gratitude; "to exalt her exceptional contribution to his own happiness" [260].   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The English edition of this work by Barthes was translated by Richard Howard as Mourning Diary and published by Hill and Wang in 2010. All page numbers in the post refer to this edition. 

      Arguably, it might have been better to have come up with an alternative title. For in a note of November 30, 1977, Barthes instructs: "Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering." For Barthes, this Proustian notion of suffering is that which remains (ever present) when emotivity passes. See pp. 73 and 103-04.   

 

[b] Barthes writes in the note dated 20 July, 1978, on p. 163, that he finds the idea of taking an anti-depressant drug to help him overcome his grief shameful; as if suffering were a disease, rather than something essential. 

 

[c] In a fragment on p. 71 of the Mourning Diary, dated 29 November, 1977, Barthes writes: "I can't endure seeing my suffering being reduced - being generalized - (à la Kierkegaard): it's as if it were being stolen from me." 

      However, he later realises the importance of transforming suffering from a static stage to a fluid state. See the fragment dated 13 June, 1978, on p. 142.

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Bride', in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 65-66.  

[e] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Virgin Mother', in The Poems, pp. 66.

 

[f] See also the fragment dated 16 November, 1977 on p. 53: "Sometimes roused by desires [...] but they're desires of before - somehow anachronistic; they come from another shore, another country, the country of before."

 

[g] Later in his Mourning Diary, Barthes will admit that writing is his salvation and that depression is when "in the depths of despair, I cannot manage to save myself by my attachment to writing". 

      See the fragments dated 21 November, 1977 on pp. 59 and 62. See also the fragment on p. 105 dated 23 March 1978 in which Barthes speaks of integrating his suffering with his writing in his book on photography (Camera Lucida). And finally, see the notes dated 17 and 18 of January, 1979, on pp. 224-225, in which Barthes admits that since his mother's death he has no desire to construct anything new except in writing.    

 

[h] Michael Erard, 'What People Actually Say Before They Die', The Atlantic (16 Jan 2019): click here.

[i] Having said that, Barthes acknowledges (with horror) the possibility that the memory of a mother's last words will one day fail to move (make cry or make smile). See the fragment dated 19 November, 1977 on p. 57. 

[j] Having said that, in a thanatological fragment published back in September 2014, I wrote:

      "We shouldn't reify death, nor confuse the fact of our own individual death with non-being. At most, death might be seen as a temporary pause or refreshment before the inevitable return to what Nick Land describes as the compulsive dissipation of life." 

      

[k] On 25 February 1980, Barthes was knocked down by the driver of a laundry van while walking home through the streets of Paris. He died from his injuries one month later, aged 64. 

 

[l] I'm a little more sympathetic to the idea of metempsychosis (i.e., the transmigration of souls) and like the idea of atoms being endlessly recycled and assembled into new bodies and objects of all kinds. Seeing the swallows flying "through the summer evening air" whilst on holiday in Morocco, Barthes tells himself: "how barbarous not to believe in souls - in the immortality of souls!" See the fragment dated 13 July, 1978 on p. 159. 

 

[m] See Huxley's essay 'Accidie' in On the Margin (George H. Doran Company, 1923), pp. 25-31. Readers can also click here to read the essay online in the Project Gutenberg ebook.   

[n] See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, (Verso, 2003).

 

[o] See the fragments dated 18 August, 1978 on pp. 190 and 192. 

[p] In his will, the Marquis de Sade expressed the wish that his grave be strewn with acorns, so that it would be eventually covered with oak trees. In this way, "any trace of my grave will disappear from the face of the earth, just as I trust the memory of me will fade from the minds of everyone, save for the few who in their goodness have loved me to the last". 

      See the English translation (from which I quote) by R. J. Dent in Philosophy Now, Issue 143 (April/May 2021): click here to read online. 

[q] See the post entitled 'From a Baby in a Basket ...' (27 Feb 2023) which reproduces in full the few lines spoken at my mother's funeral: click here. 

"And so, my love, my mother,

I shall always be true to you."