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

by Byung-Chul Han

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.

Today, perception itself takes the form of ‘bingewatching’. This refers to the consumption of videos and films without any temporal restrictions. The consumers are continuously offered those films and series that match their taste, and therefore please them. Like consumer livestock, they are fattened with ever-new sameness. Binge-watching can be generalized as the contemporary mode of perception. The proliferation of the Same resembles not a carcinoma but a coma, and does not meet with any immunological defences. One goggles oneself into unconsciousness.

One travels everywhere, yet does not experience anything. One catches sight of everything, yet reaches no insight.

Big Data renders thought superfluous. We surrender ourselves without concern to the it-is-so.

Insight6

It is impossible to play with the naked flesh. Play requires an illusion, an untruth. Naked, pornographic truth permits no play, no seduction. Sexuality as functional performance likewise drives out all forms of play; it becomes entirely mechanical.

The proliferation of the Same is ‘the full through which only the empty appears’.

Today, even play is transformed into a form of production; work is gamified. Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion film Anomalisa mercilessly depicts today’s hell of sameness;

Anomalisa.

The violence of the global as the violence of the Same destroys the negativity of the Other, of the singular, of the incomparable, which impairs the circulation of information, communication and capital.

The originator of the term ‘neoliberalism’, Alexander Rüstow, had already noted that a society governed entirely by the laws of the neoliberal market would become inhumane and create social fractures. Accordingly, he points out that neoliberalism must be augmented by a ‘politics of vitality’ [Vitalpolitik] that brings about solidarity and community spirit. Without this politics of life as a corrective, neoliberalism results in insecure, fear-driven masses that can easily be co-opted by ethno-nationalistic forces.

The xenophobic masses may be against North Africans, but they go to their countries for package tours.

The violence of the global is ‘a viral violence, that of networks and the virtual’.

The freedom which neoliberalism purports to be is an advertisement.

‘What seaman does not take for granted / The undivided trinity / Of war and trade and piracy?’

For Nietzsche, it is an expression of the ‘over-abundant soul’. It is capable of harbouring all singularities within itself: ‘And let all that is becoming roaming searching fleeing be welcome here! Henceforth the friendship of hospitality will be my only friendship.’15 Hospitality promises reconciliation. Its aesthetic manifestation is beauty: ‘We are always rewarded in the end for our good will, our patience, our fair-mindedness and gentleness with what is strange, as it gradually casts off its veil and presents itself as a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality.’16 The politics of beauty is the politics of hospitality.

Anxiety has highly varied aetiologies. It is first of all the foreign, the uncanny, the unknown that triggers anxiety.

The later Heidegger also refers to death as the ‘shrine of the Nothing, of that which in every respect is never something that merely exists, but which nevertheless presences, even as the mystery of Being itself’.9 Death inscribes into the beings the negativity of the mystery, of the abyss, of the complete Other.

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.

Today’s boredom, which goes hand in hand with hyperactivity, is speechless, mute. It is eliminated by the next activity.

the human being is to find his way once again into the nearness of being he must first learn to exist in the nameless.’

As a place of transformation, the threshold hurts. The negativity of pain inheres in it: ‘If you feel the pain of thresholds, you are not a tourist; the transition can occur.’1 In our time, a threshold-based transition gives way to a threshold-less transit. On the internet we are tourists more than ever. We no longer inhabit thresholds as homo doloris. Tourists do not have experiences that imply a transformation, a pain. Thus they remain the same. They travel through the hell of sameness.

(Were I like you. Were you like me. Did we not stand under one tradewind. We are strangers.) The tiles. Upon them, close together, the two heart-grey pools: two mouthfuls of silence.

The digital screen increasingly shields us from the negativity of the foreign, the uncanny.

Today’s working conditions can no longer be described in terms of Marx’s theory of alienation. Alienation from labour means that, for the workers, the product of their work is an alien object. They identify neither with their product nor their activity. The more wealth the workers produce, the poorer they become. Their products are snatched away from them. The workers’ activity causes their own derealization: ‘So much does labour’s realization appear as a loss of reality that the worker loses reality to the point of starving to death.’3

Today, we live in a post-Marxist age. 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. Hence the first stage of a burnout is euphoria: I plunge into work euphorically until I finally collapse. I realize myself to death. I optimize myself to death. Neoliberal domination hides behind the illusion of freedom. The domination is complete at the moment when it coincides with freedom. This feeling of freedom is disastrous insofar as it does not enable any resistance, any revolution. Where should resistance direct itself? There are no longer any Others from whom any repression originates.

The world is increasingly losing the negativity of the Against. The digital medium hastens this development. The digital order is the opposite of the terrestrial order, the order of the Earth. Heidegger’s late philosophy in particular is concerned with the earthly order; time and again, he invokes the ‘gravity of the mountains and the hardness of their primeval rock’.1 He also speaks of the ‘heavy sled’ of the ‘young farmboy’, the ‘resistance of the towering firs against the storm’ or the ‘steep slope opposite’. Heaviness and the Against dominate the earthly order. The digital, on the other hand, lacks any heaviness that weighs against us. It does not appear as an unruly, rebellious, resistant counterpart.2 Images, too, are increasingly losing the character of the counterpart. Digital images lack any magic, any enchantment, any seduction. They are no longer counter-images with a life of their own, a force of their own, that confuse, bewitch, perplex or intoxicate the viewer. The ‘like’ is the absolute zero grade of perception.

The digital order causes an increasing disembodiment of the world; today, there is less and less communication between bodies. It also does away with counter-bodies by robbing things of their material heaviness, their mass, their own weight, their own life, their own time, and makes them available at all times. Digital objects are no longer an obicere. They do not weigh against us. No resistance emanates from them. The disappearance of the Against now occurs at every level. The ‘like’ is the opposite of the obicere; today, everything craves one. The total absence of the Against is no ideal state, for without an Against one falls hard on oneself. It leads to an auto-erosion.

It is thus in the gaze and the voice that the entirely Other manifests itself.

Thomas the Obscure by Maurice Blanchot,

diegetic,

Thorwald’s gaze is the stain that stands out from the picture. It embodies the Other’s gaze.

For Sartre, too, the Other announces their presence as the gaze. Sartre does not limit the gaze to the human eye; rather, being gazed upon is the central aspect of Being-in-the-world. World is gaze. Even the rustling of branches, a half-open window or the slight movement of a curtain is perceived as a gaze.5 Today the world is sorely lacking in gaze. We rarely feel gazed upon or exposed to a gaze. The world presents itself as a pleasurable sight that seeks to please us. The digital screen also lacks any quality of gaze. Windows is a window with no view. What it does is precisely to shield us from the gaze.

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.

Most of all, digital media elide the Other as a counterpart. They actually rob us of the ability to think about someone far away and to hold on to someone nearby. They replace closeness and distance with gaplessness.

‘patinate’

The ‘truth’ of language lies not in ‘its functionality (clarity, expressivity, communication)’,14 however, but in voluptuousness and seduction.

Daniel Paul Schreber, author of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,

Morality consists in rejecting happiness and all sensual inclinations, and submitting completely to the moral law, the ‘voice of reason’, the ‘heavenly voice’, which ‘makes even the boldest evildoer tremble’.

‘Investigations of a Dog’,

‘The Grain of the Voice’

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,

The sculpture Balloon Venus, with a figure in a birthing position, even gives birth to a new saviour: its belly contains a bottle of champagne, Dom Pérignon Rosé, vintage 2003.

Someone who perceives the world as anything other than foreign is not perceiving it at all. A negative tension is essential to art; for Adorno, there was therefore no such thing as feel-good art. Likewise, estrangement from the world is an aspect of philosophy. It inheres in spirit itself. Thus spirit, by its very nature, is critique. In the society of the ‘like’, everything becomes likeable – art too. Thus we are unlearning wonder:

Art – and herein lies its paradoxical existence – is at home in the uncanny.

The noise of communication makes it impossible to listen

Benjamin’s essay on Kafka – “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.”’

; to be attentive is to ‘recognize the mastery of the other’.

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity:

Martin Buber, ‘Distance and Relation’,