Hi!
Today, I'm sharing some ideas from contemporary continental
philosopher Byung-Chul Han's book, The Burnout Society.
What is the inevitable result of a society that is so obsessed with achievement and
productivity that enough is never enough?
For Byung-Chul Han, the answer is burnout.
Han thinks that one of the hallmarks of contemporary society is an excess of
positivity and a collapse of negativity.
While, in previous ages, it might have been fair to say that what most
threatened society was the intrusion from outside others, or at least that's
what society liked to tell itself.
Right?
There was a fear of the outside intruding, nowadays, there is an excess of
positivity from within, what he calls an infarction, rather than an infection.
we are now living in an age
where there is an infarction or kind of blockage of the artery,
um, from within right with that is characterized by neuronal illnesses,
such as burnout and depression.
Our age, he says is marked by the disappearance of
otherness and foreignness.
Everything becomes like everything else.
Otherness is replaced,
he says, with difference.
Instead of the foreigner, we have the tourist, we have the consumer.
And in making this argument, Han is resisting a Foucauldian analysis of the
disciplinary world that Foucault talks about in his work on disciplinary power.
For Foucault,
a disciplinary society is premised on making subjects obedient and on othering
those figures within the society that are not obedient, such as criminals and mad
men and the disciplinary societies also
identified with a negative.
You may not do this.
So it's governed by a no.
Han says that this is not the way that society works today.
Instead of a disciplinary society, we have an achievement society where
subjects are included not to be obedience subjects, but to be achievement subjects.
We each are pressured to be
entrepreneurs of ourselves and have an unlimited "can."
Right?
So instead of this "you may not" that we find in disciplinary society,
there is a "you can do this," right.
You can stay an extra hour at work, right.
You can have a job as a professor, but also do these YouTube videos and
a podcast and a zillion other things.
See, that's, that's my achievement subject on the line, right?
We're obsessed with neuro enhancement and performance, right.
We become performance machines and it doesn't require an outside eye to
discipline us and to make sure that we are entrepreneurs of ourselves.
We start doing that ourselves, right.
We encourage ourselves to achieve.
We say, oh, I can, I have time to content create and do all of
these other things in my life.
I have time to pack in an extra reading for class, even though
I'm sort of at my max, right now.
We're encouraged to maximize ourselves at all times, even when
it feels like we've hit the maximum.
and he thinks that depression is the natural result of this.
So he doesn't see depression as just a personal issue of the self let
alone, as just a biomedical issue, but as a social result of the pressure
to achieve that is characterized by creative fatigue and exhausted ability.
He thinks that depression is symptomatic of the excess positivity
that we find in achievement society.
Because what the achievement subject is encouraged to do,
as we said, was maximize themselves, achieve, be productive, et cetera.
But this manifests in a compulsive freedom, such that
we end up auto- exploiting.
We give ourselves that pressure to maximize, and that pressure to
maximize is figured as the pressure to become freer and freer, even as it
actually constrains us more and more.
He calls it the free constraint of maximizing achievement.
And he says that, you know, one of the things that happens in this achievement
society is that things also become a lot more efficient because it's much more
efficient to have an achievement subject.
Who's constantly saying "I can do this," than it is to have a
disciplinary society where you say to another person, "you should do
this," or "you should not do that."
Right?
This auto exploitation and excess of positivity that we find through
the I can of achievement society is maximally efficient, which is
of course what capitalism loves.
And from a subjective standpoint, when we're thinking about not only
the things that we're doing, but also the way that we're relating to the
world more generally, Han thinks that
achievement society results in hyper attention, which is a broad
but flat mode of attention that actually gets in the way of deep
attention or contemplative immersion.
So by being encouraged to scroll through 30-second TikTok after 60-second TikTok,
after 30-second TikTok, etcetera, we cultivate a hyper attention.
Maybe we're not just on TikTok.
Maybe we're like also watching TV or talking to a friend or eating
dinner, right, at the same time.
We prevent ourselves from developing the skills of contemplative immersion,
really dropping into experience.
We have an excess of stimuli at all times, and this " radically changes
the structure and economy of attention.
Perception becomes fragmented and scattered."
he says that multitasking does not represent civilizational.
In fact multitasking happens all the time among wild animals.
He, so he thinks multitasking and this hyperattention is
actually a form of regression.
What marks humans is our capacity for contemplative immersion,
but our contemporary society encourages us to constantly forgo
that contemplative immersion.
He uses video games as an example of hyper attention to this broad,
but flat mode of attention.
And he says that actually playing a video game is, is very similar to
quote "the vigilance of a wild animal."
Whereas with contemplation, this contemplative immersion, the
basic mood is marveling at the way
things are.
Taking things as they come.
And, and also in a way that involves a deep kind of focus.
one thing that Han wants to preserve is the ancient notion of the vita
contemplativa, the life of contemplation that comes through such immersion,
such wonder at the way things are.
Because what happens with hyper attention and also with hyperactivity is that we
become passive.
And this might seem paradoxical at first, and it is indeed paradoxical at first, to
associate hyperactivity with passivity.
But Han thinks that that's precisely what happens.
We have such a lack of interruption or between times that we don't have time to
regroup and decide how we want to act,
let alone actually act.
We're kind of caught in this cycle, this rat race of pseudo
action that renders us passive.
He says, very vividly, that each of us comes to carry a work camp inside.
In being our own workers, we forgo not only contemplative
immersion, but also freedom and the chance for genuine activity.
And one other thing that I wanna address here is that Han also talks about two
different forms of tiredness here, which he draws from the work of Peter Handke.
Specifically, um, Handke's work an essay on tiredness.
The two types of tiredness are first solitary tiredness, and second eloquent
seeing, or reconciliatory tiredness.
Solitary tiredness is divisive.
It makes me feel separate from the world around me.
It's a kind of tiredness that makes me wanna just veg out.
It destroys, Han says, all common and shared world.
It is an I-tiredness.
It's the tiredness of the exhaustion brought about by the achievement society.
But there's another kind of tiredness that he thinks we've lost sight of
in the contemporary age, which is the second form of tiredness, right?
Eloquent seeing or reconciliatory tiredness, which is also known as we
tiredness-- again, he's drawing this at least in part from the Handke piece.
We tiredness is a fundamental tiredness that is associated with being worn
out at the end of the day, especially if you've spent that day with others,
perhaps engage in collective action, um, doing the same thing, right?
Whether it was playing a team sport together or working the land
together or protesting, perhaps he doesn't use that example.
But one thought that comes to mind here, this kind of tiredness is inspired and
it involves not doing in the sense, not relaxing on the couch and Netflix and
chilling, but actually releasing the activity that one has done and having a
moment of between a moment of regrouping.
He says that this kind of tiredness helps found communities.
So it's not only collective, but it also generates further collectivity today.
So it's not only collective, but it also helps generate further collectivity
and collectivity in a deep sense.
And you can see how this is kind of similar to the contemplative immersion
that we talked about a moment ago, although the focus is more collective.
So these are just a few ideas from this text, which is actually
quite short, it's only 60 pages.
Um, but yes, check it out if you haven't already.
Thanks.