RELATED TERMS: Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Control
The question underlying this post is whether design practices are carried along by the shift proposed by Byung-Chul Han (2015), the impetus coming from elsewhere, or are they highly active proponents and drivers of the change, providing the materials for depressive evaluations of oneself, compulsive inattentiveness or hyper-attention as a scattered mode of awareness, and creative and productive burnout. Aside from this, there remains the question of how well this depicts societal processes in the period since the 1990s and whether the occurrence of Covid 19 might alter the characterisation of societal organisation so that it accommodates, perhaps in contradictory ways, the articulation of immunological and hyperpositive responses to disease and unease, a movement reinforced by the confused interaction of globalisation (hybridisation) and nationalist protectionism (immunological defence) evident in the mid-2020s.
From Immunological Organisation and Defence to the Violence of Positive Sameness
Byung-Chul Han (2015), the Korean-German philosopher, argues that the 20th century was an immunological age, an epoch in which distinctions between inside and outside, friend and foe and self and other were of paramount importance. However, in his view, a little-acknowledged paradigm shift has been underway for some time, beginning around the time of the ending of the Cold War in 1989-1991. In this emerging paradigm, contemporary society increasingly escapes the immunological scheme of organisation and defence and instead is marked by the lessening in importance of the categories of otherness and foreignness.
Han argues that otherness and foreignness are the fundamental categories of immunology: every immunological reaction is a reaction to otherness-foreignness. However, otherness is being displaced by difference, which does not entail an immunological reaction. In other words, difference is not immunogenic. As the foreign succumbs to the exotic, the tourist, as consumer, travels through it and is no longer subject to the processes of immunological reactions.
The immunological paradigm, Han argues, is incompatible with the processes of globalisation which promote the dissolution of boundaries and the encouragement of hybridisation, which is diametrically opposed to immunisation. The dialectic of negativity is the fundamental trait of immunity: the own asserts itself in the other, and against the other, by negating the other’s negativity. However, the neuronal illnesses of the 21st century follow a dialectic of positivity rather than negativity. They are pathological conditions arising from an excess of positivity.
Harm does not come from negativity alone, but also from positivity; not just from the other or the foreign, but also from the same. The violence of positivity that derives from over-production, over-achievement and over-communication is no longer ‘viral’ in character. Rejection occurring in response to excess positivity does not amount to immunological defence, but rather to digestive-neuronal abreaction and refusal. Similarly, exhaustion, fatigue and suffocation, that is, the existence of too much of the same, are not immunological reactions.
The violence of positivity does not presume or require hostility but unfolds in a permissive and pacified society, inhabiting the negativity-free space of sameness where polarisation between inside and outside, or the proper and the foreign, does not take place. The positivisation of the world allows new forms of violence to emerge which are immanent in the system itself. Such neuronal violence saturates and exhausts. Depression, ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and burnout syndrome are indicators of excess positivity. They are not the result of viral infection which follows the immunological scheme of inside and outside and ownness and otherness.
Achievement Society
Given this prescription, society in the 21st-century is no longer a disciplinary society, that is, a society of negativity, one that is defined by the negativity of prohibition and governed by the negative modal verb ‘May Not’ [You may not …], while the negativity of compulsion adheres to the modality of ‘Should’ [You should …]. For Han, the concept of ‘control society’ does not do justice to the change he is characterising because it still contains too much negativity.
Rather than being disciplinary, 21st-century society is an achievement society whose inhabitants are no longer ‘obedience-subjects’ but ‘achievement-subjects’ who are entrepreneurs of themselves. The prohibitions, commandments and the law of disciplinary society are replaced by projects, initiatives and motivation. Disciplinary society is governed by ‘no’, a negativity that produces madmen and criminals. By contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.
Beyond a certain point of productivity, disciplinary technology or, alternately, the negative scheme of prohibition, hits a limit. To heighten productivity, the disciplinary paradigm is replaced by the paradigm of achievement, the positive scheme of ‘Can’. The Can does not revoke the Should. The obedience subject remains disciplined.
Arguing against Alain Ehrenberg, Han argues that it is not only the imperative to belong to oneself that causes exhaustive depression but also the pressure to achieve, the new commandment of late-modern labour society. Predator and prey at once, the depressive human being is an animal laborans that voluntarily exploits itself. [The late-modern animal laborans, Han asserts, is anything but animalian. It is hyperactive and hyperneurotic.] Depression erupts at the moment when the achievement-subject is no longer able to be able: they can do no longer. No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression.
The achievement-subject stands free from any external instance of domination forcing it to work, much less exploiting it. However, Han contends,
“the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom — that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation.”
The psychic indispositions of achievement society are pathological manifestations of such a paradoxical freedom.
Cognition and (Hyper)Attention
Han argues that excessive positivity radically changes the structure and economy of attention. Perception becomes fragmented and scattered. The mounting burden of work makes it necessary to adopt particular dispositions toward time and attention which, in turn, affects the structure of attention and cognition.
The cultural achievements of humanity, including philosophy depend on deep, contemplative attention. Cultural practices presume an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyper-attention, a scattered mode of awareness.
References
Han, B.-C. (2015) The Burnout society. Translated by E. Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford Briefs.
Incomplete ... 