I initally posted this essay to Tumblr on February 1, 2011. There it was liked or reblogged 13 times—it practically went viral!—and it was also cited in a few artworks and even in an academic book or two. Tumblr is no longer what it was then, so for all intents and purposes this piece of writing disappeared from the open web. I decided to resurrect it here. If all goes well, it will still be accessible via its erstwhile URL.

For those not capable of reading German, a summary of Byung-Chul Han’s worthwhile essay on “fatigue society” (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2010):¹

Chapter 1 is entitled “The Neuronal Power” and sets out with the claim that frames the entire essay: “Every age has its main maladies.” Han differentiates the bacterial age that ended (at the latest) with the discovery of antibiotics, the viral age that ended with the advance of immunology, and finally the present age: the neuronal age. Its dominant maladies are neurological illnesses like depression, ADHD, borderline personality syndrome and burnout syndrome. The crucial difference between maladies of the viral age and the neuronal age is that between infection and infarction. An infection is caused by the negativity of the immunological other, whereas an infarct is the result of an excess of positivity. Unlike a virus, neuronal illnesses cannot simply be warded off like an outside attacker.

The immunological paradigm which dominated the past century is based on a clear differentiation between friend and enemy or inside and outside. During the cold war, everybody knew who the enemy was, and Han points out an affinity between immunological and military rhetoric. Just like the models underlying medical thinking, social and political organization in the viral age is predicated on the need to defend the inside (an organism, a society, a bloc) from outside foreign invaders (a virus, a stranger, an oppositional ideology), regardless of whether they pose a threat or not. The otherness of the outside element is sufficient justification for its expulsion.

Han’s central claim is that, since the end of the cold war, social formations have moved away from this immunological paradigm (and so has medicine). The central categories of immunology, otherness and foreignness, are disappearing, and a new category is taking their place: difference. Difference, unlike otherness, does not trigger a response from the immune system. Difference is to otherness as the tourist is to the foreign intruder. It can roam across a terrain without necessarily evoking a violent response.

The immunological paradigm is based around a dialectic of negativity. The virus breaks into the organism and tries to negate it, and the organism in turn tries to negate the intruding virus. Each player, to survive, must negate its negation. A weaker version of this process occurs in immunization; the formation of antibodies is the outcome of the organism’s negation of a controlled amount of negativity. 

The disappearance of otherness means that we now live in a time bereft of negativity. Neuronal maladies may still involve a dialectic, but it is a dialectic of positivity, not negativity. Hyperactivity or burnout are the result of an excess of positivity. The violence/power (Gewalt) of positivity stems from over-producing, over-achieving or over-communicating. It is not based on anything alien to the system, it is immanent to the system. As such, neuronal violence can no longer be responded to like viral power. (For this reason, though he finds some of his ideas useful, Han ultimately rejects Baudrillard for hewing too closely to the viral conception of power.)

Chapter 2 is called “Beyond Disciplinary Society” and continues Han’s engagement with what in Germany are often called sociological diagnoses of the present (Gegenwartsdiagnosen). “Disciplinary society” evokes the work of Michel Foucault, whose notion of discipline accurately describes the working viral power. However, disciplinary society with its clinics, asylums and factories has since been displaced by the society in and around spaces like malls, airports, gyms and office towers. What, exactly, has taken the place of disciplinary society? Han finds that the notion of control society still retains too much negativity (presumably because it suggests that somebody is doing the controlling). Instead, he proposes that we live in an achievement society (Leistungsgesellschaft). Achievement society has replaced the “Thou shalt not” of disciplinary society with the affirmation: Yes we can! The entrepreneurial subject of achievement society does not need commandments—it has projects. Han writes: “Disciplinary society is dominated by the No. Its negativity creates the insane and criminals. Achievement society, in contrast, gives rise to depressives and failures.”

These shifts notwithstanding, Han points out one important aspect of continuity that persists in the social unconscious: the drive to maximize production. This drive is also at the root of the transition from disciplinary to achievement society. A society founded upon positivity and affirmation is simply more productive. In other regards, the transition is not a break. He does not argue that everything is different or that we are free of disciplinary commandments. When we say, Yes we can! we already have learned that we shall.

Thus, the entrepreneurial subject of achievement society is in a situation of “paradoxical freedom.” Drawing on Alain Ehrenberg (whose work on depression also informs Malabou’s What Shall We Do with Our Brain?), Han notes that a society in which status is no longer strictly prescribed on the basis of class or gender but which instead propagates the norm of individual initiative (or, as the say in the States, “personal responsibility”) unleashes a new kind of systemic violence. The entrepreneurial subject is put in a position of self-exploitation, since the compulsion to labor no longer emanates from outside of it. It freely becomes an animal laborans. This form of systemic violence leads to “psychic infarctions” that affect not just the self—the self, Han points out, is still an immunological category—but the soul, by which Han means something like the capacity to form social bonds. In achievement society, this capacity is dissipated by the incessant command to produce. In other words, the paradox can be expressed like this: We may be free to undertake any conceivable venture, but as a result, we lose our soul—or rather, we burn out our soul. The illnesses mentioned above are the pathological manifestations of this paradoxical situation.

The paradox of freedom is nicely captured in this observation: “The complaint of the depressive individual, Nothing is possible, is only possible in a society that believes, Nothing is impossible.” 

Chapter 3, “A Deep Boredom,” turns from over-production to over-communication. Specifically, Han is concerned with multitasking as a technique to accommodate the new economy of attention that has arisen alongside the new forms of productivity. Unlike some commentators, however, Han does not take multitasking to be a radically new technique. “Multitasking is widespread among animals in the wild,” he writes. “It is an attention technique that is indispensable for wilderness survival.” Newer social developments are actually making human society more like the wilderness, where predators must ensure they aren’t eaten while eating their prey. Han points out that mobbing matches this pattern (and one might add other forms of bullying).

Human culture, on the other hand, arose from a different kind of attention technique. Multitasking is a form of hyperattention, but culture (including philosophy) requires the deep attention of contemplation. The contemplative life had a bad rep in modern philosophy; consider Arendt’s The Human Condition (which she wanted to name Vita Activa), or Lukács’s opposition to “the contemplative duality of subject and object.” Han wants to build up the vita comtemplativa‘s reputation once again.

Thus, the fourth chapter is called “Vita Activa” and is dedicated to a critique of Hannah Arendt. Against Arendt’s assumption that modern development leads ever further down the road of massification and degradation of humanity, Han notes that the hyperactive, hyperneurotic individual of contemporary society is anything but animalistic. It is an animal laborans, but not the sort of animal that Arendt envisioned. It is, rather, ceaselessly engaged in individualized activity. Why?

Borrowing from Agamben, Han describes our lives as “naked.” They are naked because of what sociologists call secularization. Divested of faith, our lives have become fleeting. The religions—techniques that once gave our lives duration and embedded them in a wider narrative—have been lost. We react by being hyperactive; “Bare life and bare labor are contingent upon each other,” Han notes. Arendt’s case for the vita activa unwittingly aligns itself with the hyperactivity of the late-modern subject.

In the fifth chapter, “Pedagogy of Seeing,” Han seeks to develop the preconditions for the contemplative life. According to Nietzsche’s Götzendämmerung, vision, or the activity of seeing, is the faculty through which to learn deep attention. Vision requires selecting stimuli and impulses to reacts on and resisting others. In other words, learning to see means learning to say no. Seeing, like contemplation, is not a passive act. It does not simply say yes to all that transpires. Likewise, our eyes are actually more active when we keep them focused on something rather than letting them respond to every single stimulus. It takes practice to resist grabbing your smartphone every time its blinking LED alerts you to a new email or a new mention on Twitter. “The hyperactive intensification of activity makes activity change into hyperpassivity,” Han writes. 

How does one escape the “hyperactive intensification of activity”? The answer is a verb, zögern, that translates both as “hesitate” and (with the prefix ver-) “procrastinate.” Is this really a philosopher recommending we procrastinate? Yes, in a way. By procrastinating, we introduce the negativity of interruption into the infinite succession of one-damn-thing-after-the-other. Another example Han mentions is anger. Anger has its own temporality, because it puts the present into question, thus opening up the possibility of ushering in a new state of affairs. (What better example than the current “anger in Egypt”?)

In closing this chapter, Han differentiates two forms of capacity (Potenz): negative capacity and positive capacity. The latter is the capacity to do something, whereas the former is the capacity not to do. Negative capacity is the eye’s capacity not to see the blinking LED on your smartphone. It is the capacity to say no. Negative capacity is not incapacity. 

When Han states, “It is an illusion to believe that the more active one becomes, the freer one is,” he points out that freedom requires more than just positive capacity. An activity that stems solely from my positive capacity is hyperactivity, which turns into hyperpassivity. To be truly, freely active, I must exercise my negative capacity, that is, I must be contemplative.

The next chapter I will skip, not just because I want to exercise my negative capacity, but also because it does not do much to advance Han’s argument. It is called “The Case of Bartleby” and discusses Melville’s Bartleby along with Deleuze’s and Agamben’s readings of it.

The final chapter is the titular chapter in which Han finally develops the concept of “fatigue society.” It is also the densest chapter, so pardon me if my summary is not entirely lucid. Setting out from the observation that achievement society with its one-sided focus on activity produces profound fatigue, Han draws heavily on an essay on fatigue by Austrian playwright Peter Handke. Handke makes a distinction between divisive and conciliative fatigue. Achievement society gives rise to the first kind, which isolates individuals. It’s the kind of fatigue that makes you want to say, “Shut up! I’m very tired and I just want to sleep!”—if you can speak at all. Conciliative fatigue, in contrast, opens up a space of communication by loosening the grip of the ego and making it porous. It is hard for me to think of an example of this kind of fatigue since it has probably been years since I felt it. Handke emphasizes that it is inspiring: It inspires a certain composure and playfulness. Interestingly, Handke speculates that the crowd assembled during the first Pentecost experienced exactly this kind of fatigue. When the crowd received the Holy Spirit and started communicating across language barriers by speaking in tongues, onlookers believed they were drunk. Handke’s immanent interpretation of this scene suggests they were experiencing a fatigue that made this kind of community without kinship possible. 

Fatigue society, then, is not a sociological Gegenwartsdiagnose. Rather, it is Han’s hopeful assessment of the immanent possibilities of our achievement society. It is a prophetic concept before it is an analytic or diagnostic concept, evoking the prospect of a society in which the productivity drive in the social unconscious is overcome through the inspiration of our negative capacity—inspiration not-to-do.