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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
We no longer inhabit earth and dwell under the sky: these are being replaced by Google Earth and the Cloud. The terrestrial order is giving way to a digital order, the world of things is being replaced by a world of Non-things - a constantly expanding 'infosphere' of information and communication which displaces objects and obliterates any stillness and calmness in our lives. Byung-Chul Han's critique of the infosphere highlights the price we are paying for our growing preoccupation with information and communication. Today we search for more information without gaining any real knowledge. We communicate constantly without participating in a community. We save masses of data without keeping track of our memories. We accumulate friends and followers without encountering other people. This is how information develops a form of life that has no stability or duration. And as we become increasingly absorbed in the infosphere, we lose touch with the magic of things which provide a stable environment for dwelling and give continuity to human life. The infosphere may seem to grant us new freedoms but it creates new forms of control too, and it cuts us off from the kind of freedom that is tied to acting in the world. This new book by one of the most creative cultural theorists writing today will be of interest to a wide readership.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Note
From Things to Non-things
Notes
From Possessing to Experiencing
Notes
Smartphone
Notes
Selfies
Notes
Artificial Intelligence
Notes
Views of Things
The Villainy of Things
The Reverse of Things
Ghosts
The Magic of Things
The Forgetfulness of Things in Art
Heidegger’s Hand
Things Close to the Heart
Notes
Stillness
Notes
Excursus on the Jukebox
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
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Non-things
Upheaval in the Lifeworld
Byung-Chul Han
Translated by Daniel Steuer
polity
Originally published in German as Undinge: Umbrüche der Lebenswelt © by Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin. Published in 2021 by Ullstein Verlag
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
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: 978-1-5095-5171-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021949836
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
PREFACE
In her novel Hisoyaka na Kesshō, the Japanese writer Yōko Ogawa tells the story of a nameless island.1 Strange occurrences alarm its inhabitants: things disappear without explanation, and they disappear for good. Things that smell nice, and shimmering, glittering, wondrous things: hairbands, hats, perfume, small bells, emeralds, stamps – roses and birds too. And the people no longer know what all these things were once for. Along with the things, memories disappear as well.
Yōko Ogawa’s novel describes a totalitarian regime whose memory police, reminiscent of Orwell’s thought police, purge society of things and memories. The people live in an eternal winter of forgetfulness and loss. Anyone found to be reminiscing is arrested. The protagonist’s mother, who keeps threatened things in a secret chest of drawers, and in this way protects them, is chased and killed by the memory police.
There are strong analogies between Hisoyaka na Kesshō, published in 1994, and our contemporary life. Today, things are also constantly disappearing, without us seeming to notice. Because the number of things has proliferated, we do not realize that, in fact, things are disappearing. In contrast to Yōko Ogawa’s dystopia, we do not live in a totalitarian regime whose memory police brutally rob us of our things and memories. It is rather our intoxication by communication and information that makes things disappear. Information – that is, non-things – obscures things and drains them of their colour. We live not under a violent regime but under a rule of information that claims to be freedom.
In Ogawa’s dystopia, the world is gradually emptied out. Ultimately, it disappears. Everything is seized by disappearance, by a progressive dissolution. Even body parts disappear. In the end, there are just disembodied voices aimlessly floating in the air. In many respects, the nameless island of lost things and memories resembles our present. Today’s world is fading away and becoming information, information as ghostly as those disembodied voices. Digitalization de-reifies and disembodies the world. It also abolishes memory. Instead of memory, we have vast quantities of data. In the place of the memory police, we have digital media, which does its job without violence and with little effort.
Our information society is not quite as monotonous as Ogawa’s dystopia. Information creates the illusion of a series of events. Information feeds off of our attraction towards surprise. But the attraction does not last long; soon, there is a need for a new surprise. We are now in the habit of perceiving reality in terms of attraction and surprise. As information hunters, we are becoming blind to still, inconspicuous things, to what is common, the incidental and the customary – the things that do not attract us but ground us in being.
Note
1.
Yoko Ogawa,
The Memory Police
, London: Vintage, 2020.
From Things to Non-things
The terrestrial order, the order of the earth, consists of things that take on a permanent form and provide a stable environment for dwelling. They are the ‘things of the world’, in Hannah Arendt’s sense, things that ‘have the function of stabilizing human life’.1 They give stability to human life. This terrestrial order is today being replaced by the digital order. The digital order de-reifies the world by informatizing it. Decades ago, the media theorist Vilém Flusser remarked: ‘Non-things are currently entering our environment from all directions, and they are pushing away the things. These non-things are called information.’2 We are today experiencing the transition from the age of things to the age of non-things. Information, rather than things, determines the lifeworld. We no longer dwell on the earth and under the sky but on Google Earth and in the Cloud. The world is becoming increasingly intangible, cloud-like and ghostly. There are no tangible and arrestable [hand- und dingfest] things.
Things stabilize human life insofar as they provide a continuity that ‘lies in the fact that … men, their everchanging nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table’.3 Things are the calm centres of life. They have now been wholly enveloped by information. Information is anything but a calm centre of life. It is not possible to linger on information. It is relevant only fleetingly. It lives off its capacity to surprise. Information’s fleetingness alone can account for the fact that information destabilizes life. It constantly attracts our attention. The tsunami of information agitates our cognitive system. Information is not a stable, uniform entity. It lacks the solidity of being. Niklas Luhmann characterizes information thus: ‘Its cosmology is a cosmology not of being but of contingency.’4
Things are increasingly receding into the background of our attention.5 The present hyperinflation and proliferation of things are precisely a sign of an increasing indifference towards them. We are obsessed not with things but with information and data. We now consume more information than things. We are literally becoming intoxicated with communication. Libidinal energy is redirected from things to non-things. The result is infomania. We are all infomaniacs now. Object fetishism is probably a thing of the past. We are becoming information and data fetishists. There is now even talk of ‘datasexuals’.
The industrial revolution solidified and expanded the sphere of things, distancing us from nature and the crafts. But only digitalization puts an end to the paradigm of the thing. It subordinates things to information. Hardware is the subordinate base for software. Hardware is secondary compared to information; it can be made smaller and smaller. The Internet of Things turns things into information terminals. 3D printers devalue the being of things; things become merely the material derivatives of information.
What becomes of things when they are penetrated by information? The informatization of the world turns things into infomatons, that is, into information-processing actors. The car of the future will no longer be a thing that is associated with fantasies of power and possession, but a mobile ‘centre for the distribution of information’, that is, an infomaton that communicates with us: ‘The car speaks to you, informs you “spontaneously” about its general condition – and about yours (it may refuse to function if you do not function well). It gives advice and takes decisions. It is a partner in a comprehensive negotiation over how to live.’6
The analysis of Dasein in Heidegger’s Being and Time must be revised in light of the informatization of the world. Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’ involves the ‘handling’ of things that are either ‘present-at-hand’ or ‘ready-to-hand’. The hand is a central figure in Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein. Heidegger’s ‘Dasein’ (the ontological name for the human being) gains access to the environment by way of the hand. Its world is a sphere of things. But today we live in an infosphere. We do not handle things that are passively given but communicate and interact with informatons which are themselves acting and reacting. The human being is no longer a ‘Dasein’ but an ‘inforg’ who communicates and exchanges information.7
In the smart home, informatons take care of us. They make sure everything is cared for. The inhabitant of a smart home is carefree. The telos of the digital order is probably the overcoming of that care which Heidegger takes to be the characteristic trait of human existence. Dasein is care. Artificial intelligence is currently busy completely de-caring human existence by optimizing life and doing away with the future as a source of care, that is, by overcoming the future’s contingency. If we have a predictable future in the form of an optimized present, we need not care.
The categories of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, such as ‘history’, ‘thrownness’ and ‘facticity’, all belong to the terrestrial order. Information is additive not narrative. It can be counted but not recounted. As discontinuous units that are relevant only fleetingly, information does not add up to a story. Memory is increasingly beginning to resemble a storage container in which all kinds of information are crammed. Addition and accumulation take the place of narration. History and memory are characterized by a narrative continuity that stretches across long periods of time. Meaning and coherence are founded on narration. The digital, that is, numerical, order is free of history and memory. Thus, it fragments life.
As a constantly self-reinventing, self-optimizing project, the human being rises above ‘thrownness’. Heidegger’s idea of ‘facticity’ expresses the fact that human existence is based on the non-available. Heidegger’s being is another name for the non-available. ‘Thrownness’ and ‘facticity’ are part of the terrestrial order. The digital order de-facticizes human existence. It does not tolerate any non-available ground of being. The motto of the digital order is: being is information. All of being is therefore available and controllable. Heidegger’s thing [Ding], by contrast, embodies the being-conditioned [Be-Dingtheit], the facticity of human existence. The thing is the cipher standing for the terrestrial order.
The infosphere is Janus-faced. It does give us more freedom, but at the same time it exposes us to more surveillance and control. Google presents the interconnected smart home of the future as an ‘electronic orchestra’ with the inhabitant as ‘conductor’.8 In truth, however, what the authors of this digital utopia describe is a smart prison. In a smart home, we are not autonomous conductors. Instead, we are conducted by various actors, even invisible actors that dictate the rhythm. We expose ourselves to a panoptical gaze. A smart bed fitted with various sensors continues the surveillance even during sleep. In the name of convenience, surveillance gradually creeps into everyday life. The informatons that free us from so much work turn out to be efficient informants that surveil and control us. In this way, we become incarcerated in the infosphere.
In a world controlled by algorithms, the human being gradually loses the power to act, loses autonomy. The human being confronts a world that resists efforts at comprehension. He or she obeys algorithmic decisions, which lack transparency. Algorithms become black boxes. The world is lost in the deep layers of neuronal networks to which human beings have no access.
Information by itself does not illuminate the world. It can even have the opposite effect. From a certain point onwards, information does not inform – it deforms. We have long since crossed this threshold. The rapid advance of informational entropy, that is, of informational chaos, pushes us into a post-factual society. The distinction between true and false is erased. Information now circulates in a hyper-real space, without any reference to reality. After all, fake news is a kind of information, and one that is possibly even more effective than facts. What counts is short-term effect. Effectiveness replaces truth.
Like Heidegger, Hannah Arendt holds on to the terrestrial order. She thus frequently refers to stability and duration. The things of the world stabilize human life, but so too does truth. Unlike information, truth possesses a firmness of being. Truth is characterized by duration and stability. Truth is facticity. It resists any change or manipulation. It thus forms the foundation of human existence: ‘Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.’9
It is telling that Arendt places truth between earth and sky. Truth is a part of the terrestrial order. It gives human life stability. The digital order puts an end to the age of truth and introduces the post-factual information society. The post-factual regime of information elevates itself above fact-based truth. In its post-factual form, information is thing-fleeing. Where nothing is arrestable, all stability is lost.
Anything time-consuming is on the way out. Truth is time-consuming. Where bits of information come in quick succession, we have no time for truth. In our post-factual culture of excitement, communication is dominated by affects and emotions. As opposed to rationality, these are temporally unstable. They thus destabilize life. Trust, promises and responsibility are also time-consuming practices. They stretch from the present far into the future. Everything that stabilizes human life is time-consuming. Faithfulness, bonding and commitment are time-consuming practices. The decay of stabilizing temporal architectures, including rituals, makes life unstable. The stabilization of life would require a different temporal politics.
Lingering is another time-consuming practice. Perception that latches on to information does not have a lasting and slow gaze. Information makes us short-sighted and short of breath. It is not possible to linger on information. Lingering on things in contemplation, intentionless seeing, which would be a formula for happiness, gives way to the hunt for information. Today, we pursue information without gaining knowledge. We take notice [nehmen Kenntnis] of everything without gaining any insight [Erkenntnis]. We travel [fahren] across the world without having an experience [Erfahrung]. We communicate incessantly without participating in a community. We collect vast quantities of data without following up on our recollections. We accumulate ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ without meeting an Other. In this way, information develops a form of life that has no stability or duration.
There can be no doubt that the infosphere has an emancipatory effect. It liberates us more effectively from the hardship of work than the sphere of things could. Human civilization can be understood as the gradual intellectualization of reality. Humans transfer their intellectual capacities on to things so that the things can do the work for them. In this process, subjective spirit becomes objective spirit. Things that take the form of machines represent a civilizational advance, for they contain that drive – a primitive form of spirit – which enables them to act autonomously. In the Philosophie des Geistes, Hegel writes:
But a tool does not yet have the activity in itself; it is an inert thing … – I still have to work with it; I have placed cunning between myself and the external world of things – in order to preserve myself … and let the tool suffer the wear and tear … yet, I still get blisters; making myself a thing is still a necessary moment in this; the activity of my own drive not yet in the thing. My own activity also needs to be put into the tool; it has to be made autonomously acting.10
Because it is not autonomously active, a tool is an inert thing. The human being handling it turns him- or herself into a thing – develops blisters on his or her hands. With automatic machines, no one gets blisters any more, but nevertheless the liberation from work is not yet complete. It is the machine that creates the factory and the worker.
