The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today

by Byung-Chul Han

The negativity of the Other now gives way to the positivity of the Same. The proliferation of the Same constitutes the pathological changes that afflict the social body. It is made sick not by denial and prohibition, but by over-communication and over-consumption; not by suppression and negation, but by permissiveness and affirmation. The pathological sign of our times is not repression but depression. Destructive pressure comes not from the Other but from within.

The violence of the Same is invisible because of its positivity. The proliferation of the Same presents itself as growth. At a certain point, however, production is no longer productive but destructive, information is no longer informative but deformative, and communication is no longer communicative but merely cumulative.

Information is simply available. Knowledge in an emphatic sense, however, is a long and slow process. It displays an entirely different temporality. It matures. Maturation is a temporality that we are increasingly losing today. It is not compatible with today’s politics of time, which fragments time and eliminates temporally stable structures in order to increase efficiency and productivity.

Neoliberalism produces massive injustice at the global level; exploitation and exclusion are constitutive of it. It sets up a ‘banopticon’ that identifies those who are hostile or unsuited to the system as undesirable and excludes them. The Panopticon serves to discipline, while the banopticon provides security.

People willingly exploit themselves under the illusion of realizing themselves. It is not the suppression of freedom, but rather its exploitation that maximizes productivity and efficiency. This is the perfidious logic that underlies neoliberalism.

Today, production has totalized itself to become the only way of life. The hysteria over health is ultimately the hysteria of production. Yet it destroys true vitality. The proliferation of healthiness is as obscene as the proliferation of obesity. It is a sickness; morbidity inheres in it. If one denies death for the sake of life, life itself turns into something destructive. It becomes self-destructive. Here, too, one finds a confirmation of the dialectic of violence.

We live today in the neoliberal system, which breaks down temporally stable structures, fragments living-time and permits the disintegration of what binds us together in the interests of increasing productivity. This neoliberal politics of time creates anxiety and insecurity. And neoliberalism fragments humans into isolated entrepreneurs of themselves. This isolation, which goes hand in hand with the elimination of solidarity and total competition, produces anxiety. The diabolical logic of neoliberalism is this: anxiety increases productivity.

In the neoliberal regime, exploitation no longer takes place as alienation and self-derealization, but as freedom, as self-realization and self-optimization. Here there is no Other as an exploiter, forcing me to work and alienating me from myself; rather, I voluntarily exploit myself in the belief that I am realizing myself. This is the diabolical logic of neoliberalism.

The absence of a repressive gaze creates – and this is a decisive difference from the surveillance strategy of the disciplinary society – a deceptive sense of freedom. The inmates of the digital panopticon do not feel gazed upon, that is, under surveillance. So they feel free and expose themselves voluntarily. The digital panopticon does not restrict freedom; it exploits it.

Digital communication is highly deficient in gaze and voice. Connections and interconnections are created without the voice or the gaze. In this, they differ from relationships and encounters, which are dependent on the voice and the gaze. They are, in fact, special experiences of the voice and the gaze. They are bodily experiences.

Beauty only reveals itself to the long, contemplative gaze. Where the subject of action withdraws, where its blind compulsion to the object is broken, things are given back their otherness, their mysteriousness, their foreignness, their secret.

When all duality is wiped out, one drowns in the self. Without any duality, one merges with oneself. This narcissistic meltdown is fatal. Alain Badiou also calls love the ‘stage of the Two’.9 It enables us to re-create the world from the perspective of the Other and leave behind the habitual. It is an event that allows something entirely Other to begin. Today, on the other hand, we inhabit the stage of the One.

Listening is not a passive act. It is distinguished by a special activity: first I must welcome the Other, which means affirming the Other in their otherness. Then I give them an ear. Listening is a bestowal, a giving, a gift.

It helps the Other to speak in the first place. It does not passively follow the speech of the Other. In a sense, listening precedes speaking; it is only listening that causes the Other to speak. I am already listening before the Other speaks, or I listen so that the Other will speak. Listening invites the Other to speak; it frees them for their otherness. The listener is a resonance chamber in which the Other speaks themselves free. Thus listening can have a healing effect.

The mere ‘like’ is the absolute zero level of experience.

The noisy society of fatigue is deaf. The society to come, by contrast, could be termed a society of listeners and hearkeners. What is needed today is a temporal revolution that ushers in a completely different time; we must rediscover the time of the Other. Today’s temporal crisis is not acceleration, but rather the totalization of the time of the self. The time of the Other eludes the logic of increase based on performance and efficiency, which creates a pressure to accelerate. The neoliberal politics of time does away with the time of the Other, which it considers an unproductive time. The totalization of the time of the self goes hand in hand with the totalization of production, which affects all areas of contemporary life and leads to the total exploitation of humans. The neoliberal politics of time also does away with the time of celebration, the time of joyful bloom, which evades the logic of production. For it is concerned with de-production. Unlike the time of the self, which isolates and separates us, the time of the Other creates a community. It is therefore a good time.