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Byung-Chul Han

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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

In the wake of globalization, cultural forms of expression have become increasingly detached from their places of origin, circulating in a hyper-domain of culture where there is no real difference anymore between indigenous and foreign, near and far, the familiar and the exotic. Heterogeneous cultural contents are brought together side by side, like the fusion food that makes free use of all that the hypercultural pool of spices, ingredients and ways of preparing food has to offer. Culture is becoming un-bound, un-restricted, un-ravelled: a Hyperculture. It is a profoundly rhizomatic culture of intense hybridization, fusion and co-appropriation. Today we have all become hypercultural tourists, even in our 'own' culture, to which we do not even belong anymore. Hypercultural tourists travel in the hyperspace of events, a space of cultural sightseeing. They experience culture as cul-tour. Drawing on thinkers from Hegel and Heidegger to Bauman and Homi Bhabha to examine the characteristics of our contemporary Hyperculture, Han poses the question: should we welcome the human of the future as the hypercultural tourist, smiling serenely, or should we aspire to a different way of being in the world?

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Leseprobe

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Notes

Tourist in a Hawaiian Shirt

Notes

Culture as Home

Notes

Hypertext and Hyperculture

Notes

The Eros of Interconnectedness

Notes

Fusion Food

Notes

Hybrid Culture

Notes

The Hyphenization of Culture

Notes

The Age of Comparison

Notes

The De-Auratization of Culture

Notes

Pilgrims and Tourists

Notes

Windows and Monads

Notes

Odradek

Notes

Hypercultural Identity

Notes

Interculturality, Multiculturality and Transculturality

Notes

Appropriation

On Lasting Peace

Notes

Culture of Friendliness

Notes

Hyperlogue

Notes

The Wanderer

Notes

Threshold

Notes

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Begin Reading

End User License Agreement

Pages

iii

vii

Hyperculture

Culture and Globalization

Byung-Chul Han

Translated by Daniel Steuer

polity

Originally published in German as Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung© Merve Verlag, 2005

This English edition © Polity Press, 2022

Excerpt from: Peter Handke, Am Felsfenster morgens (und andere Ortszeiten 1982–1987)© Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2019

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4618-3

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021942107

Excerpt from: Peter Handke, Phantasien der Wiederholung. © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main1983. Alle Rechte bei und vorbehalten durch Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.Excerpt from: Peter Handke, Am Felsfenster morgens (und andere Ortszeiten 1982–1987).© Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2019.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

But the fear of the new is often as strong as the fear of the void, even when the new is the overcoming of the void. That explains why the many only see absurd chaos where a new meaning seeks to introduce its order. Indeed, the old nomos is fading away, dragging the whole system of redundant standards, norms, and traditions with it in its fall. But what is coming is not therefore devoid of standards, is not a pure nothingness, inimical to any nomos. Even in the fiercest struggle between old and new forces just standards emerge and meaningful proportions form.

Here, too, are gods that rule.

Ample are their bounds.

Carl Schmitt1

Notes

Carl Schmitt,

Land and Sea

, trans. Simona Draghici, Washington, DC: Plutarch Press, 1997, p. 59 (transl. amended).

Tourist in a Hawaiian Shirt

Where do you want to go today?

Microsoft

The British ethnologist Nigel Barley once expressed the suspicion that ‘the true key to the future’ was ‘that fundamental concepts such as culture will cease to exist’. We are all, Barley said, ‘more or less tourists in Hawaiian shirts’.1 After the end of culture, should the new human being simply be called ‘tourist’? Or are we at long last living in a culture that affords us the freedom to spread into the wide open world? If we are, how might we describe this new culture?

Notes

See

Der Spiegel

, 44/2000.

Culture as Home

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel offers the following remark on the genesis of Greek culture: ‘We have just spoken of heterogeneity [Fremdartigkeit] as an element of the Greek Spirit, and it is well known that the rudiments of Greek civilization are connected with the advent of foreigners.’ It was thus the ‘advent of foreigners’ that constituted Greek culture. With ‘grateful recollection’, he says, the Greeks preserved the arrival of the foreigners in their mythology.1 Prometheus, for instance, originates from the Caucasus. The Greek people developed ‘from a colluvies’.2 The original meaning of ‘colluvies’ is mud, filth, hotchpotch, confusion, or muddle.

According to Hegel, it is ‘a superficial and absurd idea that such a beautiful and truly free life can be produced by a process so incomplex as the development of a race keeping within the limits of blood-relationship and friendship’. Rather, the ‘inherent heterogeneity [Fremdartigkeit in sich selbst]’ of spirit is that ‘through which alone it acquires the power of realizing itself as Spirit’.3 Still, heterogeneity by itself does not produce the ‘beautiful free Greek spirit’. For that, what is also required is the ‘overcoming’ of heterogeneity. The fact that it is necessary to overcome heterogeneity, however, does not imply that it is something purely negative that might as well have been absent, for heterogeneity is in itself part of the ‘elementary character of Greek spirit’.4 From this perspective, the presence of the foreign is necessary for the formation of one’s own.

In his description of the historical development of the Greek world, Hegel obviously tries to do justice to the fact that the foreign, heterogeneity itself, has a constitutive effect. With regard to the identity of European culture, however, he adopts an altogether different tone. Here, he emphatically invokes the idea of Europe as ‘home’. The Europeans might have taken their religion from the East, but all that satisfies their ‘spiritual life’ [geistiges Leben] they received from Greece: ‘The name of Greece evokes feelings of home in the educated men in Europe, especially in us Germans.’5 There is no longer any talk about heterogeneity in itself. The foreign is now degraded and becomes pure ‘matter’. Before, heterogeneity had been a spiritual element, a form. But once ‘European humanity came to be at home with itself’, the ‘historical and that which is of foreign derivation’ was shaken off for good.6 This being-at-home-with-oneself is a happy state: ‘In ordinary life we like best the men and families that are homely and contented in themselves, not desiring what is outside and above them, and so it is with the Greeks.’7Happiness is conceived as a phenomenon associated with the family, the homeland and household. It originates from a ‘not outside, not beyond’, from the site. In this sense, site is a synonym for ‘spirit’ [Geist].

Given his genealogical-historical realization that the formation of Greek culture was owed to the arrival of foreigners, or to heterogeneity in itself, Hegel’s emphasis on the native home is disconcerting. It seems as though history does not coincide with that historical moment which produces one’s own: the site in the proper sense. There is no longer any mention of the fact that ‘blood-relationship’ or ‘friendship’ leads to an impoverishment of spirit. Rather, Hegel evokes images of home, family and fatherland. What matters is being ‘homely and contented’ in oneself. As far as European culture is concerned, Hegel’s ‘spirit’ has apparently rid itself of that ‘heterogeneity in itself’ which once provided it with ‘the power of realizing itself as Spirit’. There is no longer any foreign culture, no ‘arrival of foreigners’ that would pull the Europeans out of their happy ‘not outside, not beyond’. Thus, European culture becomes self-contented. It is satisfied with itself. There is no heterogeneity in itself to irritate it. According to Hegel’s own theory, however, this would lead to a spiritual rigor mortis.

In his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, Herder remarks that ‘all the cultivation of the east, west, and north of Europe, is a plant sprung from roman, greek, and arabic feed’.8 In this view, European culture is anything but ‘pure’. It is a bastard culture. Herder does not set out to produce a theory that has impurity as the constitutive element of culture, but at least he arrives at a concept of culture according to which any judgemental comparisons between cultures are dubious. In Another Philosophy of History, Herder remarks that the ‘good’ is ‘distributed among a thousand shapes’ and ‘dispersed throughout the earth’.9 Thus, ‘all comparison becomes futile’.10 But every culture tends to take its particular perspective as absolute and is thus incapable, Herder says, of seeing what goes beyond its own position. It responds with ‘contempt and disgust’ to the foreign, which is ‘already sickness’. But it is precisely this ‘blindness’ that makes it ‘happy’; that is, the formation of a happy identity requires a blindness. ‘National happiness’ emerges because the ‘soul’ forgets the ‘manifold dispositions’ that dwell within it and elevates a part of itself to the status of the whole. Out of some ‘awakened tones’, Herder says, ‘the soul soon creates a concert’, and it no longer senses those that are not awakened, even though ‘they support the ringing songs silently and in the dark’. Thus, the happiness of the ‘soul’ depends on a deafness.11

Are we today approaching a culture that is no longer characterized by the deafness and blindness on which happiness depends, a culture that, expressed in acoustic terms, has become a boundless, even site-less, hypercultural acoustic space in which the most diverse sounds are jammed together side by side? The hypercultural condition of the ‘side by side’, of simultaneity and of the ‘as well as’, would change the topology of happiness.

‘National happiness’, the ‘song’ of the ‘soul’ that creates happiness, is probably unknown to the tourists in Hawaiian shirts. Their happiness is of an altogether different kind; it is a happiness that emerges from an abolition of facticity, a removal of the attachment to the ‘here’, the site. In their case, the foreign is not ‘sickness’. It is something new to be appropriated. The tourists in Hawaiian shirts inhabit a world that unbounds itself, a hypermarket of culture, a hyperspace of possibilities. Are they less happy than the souls that make up a nation or populate a homeland? Is their form of life less desirable than that of the others? Does the abolition of facticity not lead to an increased freedom? Is the tourist in the Hawaiian shirt not the embodiment of the future happiness of homo liber? Or is happiness a phenomenon associated, ultimately, with boundaries and sites? And if it is, should we also expect the emergence of a new age of natives, hermits, ascetics and site fundamentalists?