Non-things

Upheaval in the Lifeworld

Byung-Chul Han, Daniel Steuer

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781509551705, 9781509551699
• eBook ISBN: 9781509551712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

We no longer inhabit earth and dwell under the sky: these are being replaced by Google Earth and the Cloud. The terrestrial order is giving way to a digital order, the world of things is being replaced by a world of non-things – a constantly expanding 'infosphere' of information and communication which displaces objects and obliterates any stillness and calmness in our lives.

Byung-Chul Han's critique of the infosphere highlights the price we are paying for our growing preoccupation with information and communication. Today we search for more information without gaining any real knowledge. We communicate constantly without participating in a community. We save masses of data without keeping track of our memories. We accumulate friends and followers without encountering other people. This is how information develops a form of life that has no stability or duration. And as we become increasingly absorbed in the infosphere, we lose touch with the magic of things which provide a stable environment for dwelling and give continuity to human life. The infosphere may seem to grant us new freedoms but it creates new forms of control too, and it cuts us off from the kind of freedom that is tied to acting in the world.

This new book by one of the most creative cultural theorists writing today will be of interest to a wide readership.

Views of Things

Quelle étonnante servilité! Les choses sont sages comme des images. A la lettre: comme des images! Elles n’inquiètent plus du tout les hommes. Aussi, même du coin de l’oeil, ne les considerènt-ils plus.

[What an astounding submissiveness! The things are tame, like pictures. Literally like pictures! They no longer worry people at all. And thus they are no longer noticed by them, not even out of the corners of their eyes.¹]

D’abord la chose est l’autre, le tout autre qui dicte ou qui écrit la loi, … une injonction infiniment, insatiablement impérieuse à laquelle je dois m’assujettir.

[Beforehand, the thing is the other, the entirely other which dictates or which writes the law, … an infinitely, insatiably imperious injunction to which I ought to subject myself.]²

The Villainy of Things

In the Mickey Mouse cartoons, representations of material reality change over time.³ In the earlier episodes, things behave treacherously. They take on a life of their own, even a waywardness. They are unpredictable actors. The hero is constantly grappling with them. He is literally thrown around by them, and they take pleasure in tormenting him. It is not at all safe for him to be near them. Doors, chairs, folding beds or vehicles can at any time turn into dangerous objects and traps. Mechanical things are diabolical. There are constant crashes. The hero is exposed to the vagaries of things. They are a permanent source of frustration. The cartoons are entertaining to a large extent because of the villainy of things.

In his early films, Charlie Chaplin is also hopelessly at the mercy of the villainy of things. They fly around him, and they block his way. His battles with things create the films’ slapstick humour. Torn out of their functional context, the things lead lives of their own. The films present an anarchy of things. In The Pawnshop, for instance, Chaplin, the pawnshop owner, examines an alarm clock with a stethoscope and a hammer, as if it were a body, and opens it with a manual drill and a can opener. The mechanical parts of the disassembled alarm clock then begin to move around as if they were alive.⁴

The villainy of things is now probably a thing of the past. We are no longer maltreated by things. They are not destructive; they do not offer any resistance. The sting has been taken out of them. We do not perceive them in their otherness or as alien. This weakens our feeling for reality. In particular, digitalization intensifies the de-realization of the world because it de-reifies it. Derrida’s remark about the thing as the ‘entirely other’ (le tout autre), as dictating a ‘law’ to us to which we need to subject ourselves, now sounds strange. Things are submissive. They are submitted to our needs.

Today, even Mickey Mouse leads a digital, smart and immaterial life. His world is digitalized and informationalized. In the new series Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, the representation of material reality is markedly different from that in the early episodes. Things no longer have an independent life; they are obedient tools for solving problems. Life itself is seen as problem solving. The handling of things no longer involves conflict. Things no longer appear as unruly actors.

For example, when Mickey and his friends end up in a trap, they need only to shout ‘Oh, Tootles’ and the ‘Handy Dandy machine’ appears. The screen of the machine, which looks like a round smartphone, displays a menu of four ‘Mouseketools’, that is, four objects from which they can choose in order to solve the problem. The Handy Dandy machine has a ready solution for every problem. The hero no longer collides with physical reality. He does not have to deal with the resistance of things. In this way, children are fed the idea that there is nothing that cannot be done, that there is a quick solution, an app, for everything and that life itself is nothing but a series of problems to be solved.

The Reverse of Things

Sinbad is shipwrecked. He and his comrades find themselves on a small island that, to Sinbad, looks like the garden of paradise. They stroll around and hunt. When they light a fire to cook their kill, the ground suddenly warps. Trees collapse. The island is, in fact, the back of a giant fish, which has been resting for so long that fertile soil has formed on its back. The heat of the fire has disturbed the fish. It dives down into the deep sea, and Sinbad and his comrades are thrown into the water. In Ernst Bloch’s reading of the fairy tale, it becomes an allegory for our relationship with things. Bloch objects to the instrumental treatment of things. He sees human culture as a very fragile institution built on the ‘reverse of things’: ‘We know only the front or right side of their technical subservience, their benign incorporation’, but we see neither their ‘underside’ nor ‘what it all floats in’.⁵

Bloch considers the possibility that the subservience of things is only their front, the part of them that is turned towards us, and that they actually ‘belong to another world, one only interspersed into this one’.⁶ He suspects that, behind their subservience, things lead an irrational life of their own that runs counter to human intentions:

The fire in the stove burns even when we’re not around. Therefore, we say, it must have been burning in the meantime, since the room is now warm. Yet that is not certain, and what the fire was doing before, what the furniture was doing during our absence, is obscure. No proposition about it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• From Things to Non-things
• From Possessing to Experiencing
• Smartphone
• Selfies
• Artificial Intelligence
• Views of Things
• Stillness
• Excursus on the Jukebox
• End User License Agreement