Yes, naturally the ‘Like’ button, the ‘Hell of Sameness’ and Martin Heidegger as the earthbound antithesis to our affirmative, virtually defined world are topics he returns to here. It’s these types of positions that have earned Han the reputation of being a cultural pessimist – of being a moaning, reactionary romantic who loves to quote himself. The atmosphere that develops in real space through relations to others and to, as he puts it, ‘things close to the heart’ disappears in favour of fleeting swipes on screens, which suggest brief, disembodied experiences. Han speaks of an infosphere, which has settled over the objects. This is how information develops a lifeform: inexistant and impermanent.’ We accumulate friends and followers, without encountering others. We save masses of data, without keeping track of memories.
We communicate constantly, without participating in a community. We take note of everything, without gaining insight. ‘Today we chase after information, without gaining knowledge. For Han, our postfactual stimulus culture is one that edges out time-consuming values such as loyalty, ritual and commitment. Effectiveness replaces truth,’ he writes here. It deforms it, levelling the boundary between true and false. Information on the other hand does not illuminate the world, according to Han. The fleeting quality of virtual information and communication, which obliterates, through amplification, any deeper meaning or stillness, displaces the object – whether it be the jukebox in the author’s apartment, or the telephone receivers of Walter Benjamin’s childhood, famously ‘heavy as a dumbbells’ – in whose physical presence resides a humane component, or even an aura, that makes the object mysterious and alive. From The Burnout Society (2010) to The Disappearance of Rituals (2019), he describes our current reality as one in which relations to the other – whether human or object – are being lost as one in which the tap of finger on smart- phone has replaced real contact and real relationships. This type of critical stance towards the present, written in clear, zenlike sentences, is a feature of all Han’s books. The world is becoming progressively untouchable, foggy and ghostly.’ We no longer inhabit heaven and earth, but the Cloud and Google Earth. ‘It’s not objects but information that rules the living world. ‘The digital order deobjectifies the world by rendering it information,’ he writes. Objects – especially well-designed, historically charged objects, and which are not necessarily artworks – can develop almost magical properties. Living matter and its history bestow on the object a presence, which activates its entire surroundings. ‘Objects stabilise human life insofar as they give it a continuity,’ Han writes. (As is the way of things with philosophy books, English-language readers might need to wait some time for its appearance in translation).
‘Things are points of stability in life,’ the South Korean-born, Swiss-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in his new book, Undinge (Nonobjects), which is just out in German. And yet the experience leaves me wondering: why have I unravelled in this way? Now I find myself waiting impatiently for its return, filled with dread that, when it arrives, it will no longer be the same. I suffered sleepless nights until I found a silversmith who promised me she could fix it. The dent was huge, and so was the measure of my grief. The other day I accidentally dropped a silver art-deco teapot, which has been my constant companion for the past 20 years.
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