I saw some users on Twitter/X going off on Byung-Chul Han at the beginning of the year after someone mentioned the ‘profound depth’ of his books despite their brevity. I’ve made the argument elsewhere that what the really great philosophers do is embody in the style of their writing the central message of their philosophy. Some people get upset when I mention this, saying that writing should communicate ideas through the clarity of language rather than the nuances of style. This doesn’t surprise me, as it seems difficult for many to conceive of literature operating on multiple levels at once, or even on levels they — for whatever reason — cannot access. Likewise, I think some writing only works because readers share something of a lived experience with what the author is communicating and I’ve sometimes wondered if those people who hate on Ocean Vuong’s writing, for example, do so for no other reason than lacking similar lived experiences, perhaps? Personally, I’ve always enjoyed reading because it provides an access into different people’s experiences of the world for which I feel enormously grateful, but I suspect there are many readers today who enjoy having their preconceived notions of the world validated, rather than challenged.
I think my opinion of Rupi Kaur’s work, which I briefly touched upon in Living in Disneyland, has mellowed dramatically since applying a more sympathetic approach to my own limitations as a reader. Even so, I suspect a lot of the confrontational discourse around certain books and authors has something to do with most people not having enough time to go beyond surface readings. To say, it takes time and often multiple readings to formulate a nuanced opinion on most things, and I suspect this lack of time has been detrimental to a lot of writing that now attempts to make serious points at a surface level — which is unfortunately where a lot of popular writing begins and ends today.
As a result of this, I have seen readers take a page of Mark Fisher and think he’s criticising children who wear headphones in class, before they go onto interpret everything he ever wrote about life and philosophy through a subjective interpretation of his work which they consider to be absolutely correct and true. For a long time I thought these people were being disingenuous, or maybe wrote these things in order to adhere to the tenets of their chronically-online contrarianism, which they mistook for intellectualism, but now I wonder if they really do think the entirety of Mark Fisher’s writing should be viewed through the prism of Mark Fisher criticising children who wear headphones in class. I don’t really know anymore and I’ve given up trying to understand a lot of this. Just as I’ve given up trying to understand why David Foster Wallace gets called pretentious by comments online that read in my head as unnecessarily angry.
There’s a lot in this world that is worth getting angry about, sure, but Infinite Jest seems to inspire a unique kind of hatred that exists behind those thinly veiled accusations of David Foster Wallace’s pretentiousness. When I cast my mind back to the etymology of that word, I recall, perhaps wrongly, to it meaning something along the lines of pretending to know more than you really do which is ironic since I always thought DFW presented like he knew less than he really did.
I was brought up to always present like I knew less than I really did — especially when talking to cops. This has proven to be both good and bad for me, but mainly bad since most people, when I’m out and about that is, consider me to be as thick as shit. Wendy always assures me that I look very intelligent — but I’m not so sure. I suspect I look real stupid. For example, I remember being in a train station one time when a man passed me by, saying “oh the zombies are out today.” Anyway, this is all to say that I think Byung-Chul Han’s literary style and method of production is integral to the critique itself, and it is a critique that parallels David Foster Wallace when he said:
“Reading requires sitting alone, by yourself, in a quiet room and I have friends — intelligent friends — who don’t like to read because they get, not just bored — there’s an almost dread that comes up, I think, here, about having to be alone, and having to be quiet, and you see that when you walk into most public spaces in America — it isn’t quiet anymore. They pipe music through. And the music is easy to make fun of because it’s usually really horrible music but it seems significant that we don’t want things to be quiet ever anymore and to me, I don’t know if I could defend it but that seems to me to have something to do with when you feel like the purpose of your life is to gratify yourself, and get things for yourself, and go all the time, there’s this other part of you that’s the same part that is almost hungry for silence. And quiet. And thinking really hard about the same thing for maybe half an hour instead of thirty seconds that doesn’t get fed — at all — and it makes itself felt in the body, in a kind of dread. […] It’s true that here in the US every year the culture gets more and more hostile — and I don’t mean hostile as in angry — it just becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read, or to look at a piece of art, for an hour. Or to listen to a piece of music that is complicated and it takes work to understand because, well, there are a lot of reasons but particularly now in computer and internet culture everything is so fast and the faster things go the more we feed that part of ourselves but we don’t feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet, that can live in quiet, you know? That can live without any kind of stimulation.”
I would argue that Byung-Chul Han’s books are not only concerned with repurposing the language of transparency ubiquitous to neoliberal capitalism but are additionally concerned with talking to people who suffer from what David Foster Wallace relates here, whether that be the dread of reading, or the fear of being alone whilst reading. It is also that style of brevity that characterised the sobering lucidity of Capitalist Realism, no matter how you feel about that book.
You get with Byung-Chul Han, and perhaps to a lesser extent, Mark Fisher, that they aren’t only interested in talking to people who in part define themselves by their tremendous intellects. I suspect this is why so many of the criticisms that Byung-Chul Han faces revolve around very intellectually minded people thinking readers should just go ahead and read Martin Heidegger for themselves rather than sit with Byung-Chul Han’s half-baked regurgitations, which is itself a kind of reductive reading of a philosopher who is considered by many to be the most important thinker of our time.
The one thing I would add here is that I actually do agree, less angrily, with those Twitter/X users who claimed Byung-Chul Han’s greatest contribution to the theorising of capital lies in his ideas around Shanzhai as a form of deconstruction inherent to capitalism — but I suspect it is an idea he introduced only as an appeal to those of us who care about those things, rather than say, how exhausted we all are. For me, that single idea regarding Shanzhai, fleshed out around forms of Chinese deconstruction, is more interesting than what so many other theorists of capital are working on today.
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great stuff, but the white on blue text is . . . difficult
Which of his books might be good for readers with out a strong background in philosophy?