Byung-Chul Han: the critique of achievement society

(by Andrew White)

Byung-Chul Han is a Korean-German philosopher, of high notoriety in Germany and the Spanish-speaking world, the author of over twenty books on topics from aesthetics to political philosophy and East Asian philosophy. His work focuses on changes in subjective experience in the transformation from post-industrial to digital society. Han was born in Seoul, South Korea, where he studied metallurgy before moving to Germany to study to philosophy, German literature, and theology. In 1994 he received a PhD with a thesis on mood in Heidegger. His approach to philosophy reflects both his training in German philosophy and his cultural roots in East Asian thought.

A subset of Han’s work critiques neoliberal society, power, burnout, freedom, subjectivity, and digital technology and all these themes connect in varying degrees to the philosophy of work. The books of most interest for the study of work are: The Burnout Society (2015); The Transparency Society (2015); In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (2017); Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and new technologies of power (2017); Topology of Violence (2017) and Capitalism and the Death Drive (2021). In these books, Han defines modern society as a condition of excess positivity and an obsession with achievement, performance, and self-optimization. This, he explains, is a consequence of new power relations that harness freedom as a means of control. We have all become achievement subjects, according to him, as we try to extract the maximum benefit from all our activities because achievement has become an expression of freedom. This creates a society of hyper-active individuals who pressure themselves to constantly perform, resulting in passivity and exhaustion. Work (and society) for Han is turned into a state of bare life and labouring in which the inability to engage or manage negative experiences means we are no longer able to appropriate thought for meaningful change and as constitutive elements of real freedom. Han is therefore not against work as such, but critical of neoliberal modes of work and subjectification that enslave us to economic imperatives.

Pathologies of Modern Work

Byung-Chul Han’s dystopian analyses in The Burnout Society (2015) should not be read as a call to abandon work but rather as a sign that neoliberal instrumental rationality has produced an ideology of work activity which has engendered numerous social pathologies leading to individual disorders, such as neuronal disorders, depression, burnout, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and borderline personality disorder. Burnout and depression have their genesis in new power relations that hijack freedom for productive means. Neoliberal ideology has produced a culture obsessed with achievement and performance as ends in themselves.

Han’s diagnosis does not give support to post work theory but rather illuminates the current agenda of maximizing efficiency as something that stands in the way of making work more meaningful and less exploitative. While Han does not make a serious attempt at a positive theory of meaningful work or a good society, he does provide a method of critique and ways of thinking about our current situation that invites us to ‘linger’ with him as he diagnoses the social problems facing modern society.

The pathologies of neoliberal work are not immunological conditions, he argues, like infections that come from outside of the self, but rather, they are infarctions (blockage or saturation) caused by an excess of positivity and an inability to engage in negative experiences. The excess of positivity is where “everything grows and proliferates beyond its goal, beyond its purpose, indeed, beyond the economy of use” (Topology of Violence, 90). Pathologies such as burnout do not result exclusively from the structures of work, or from work itself, but rather have their genesis in the internal demand for freedom that manifests as over-achievement, over-performance, and self-optimization.

The way we work, Han argues, has fundamentally changed. Rather than doing what we must do out of a sense of duty or obligation, we are pressured, often by ourselves, to do as much as we can, and to always do more, out of a cultural obsession with achievement and self-optimization. This obsession governs how we educate ourselves, the life plans we make, how we optimise our leisure time and how we engage with others. We are always trying to extract the most instrumental value out of all our activities. When we are not successful, we blame ourselves, feel anxious, burn out, or become depressed. The sad truth, Han explains, is that we voluntarily surrender to this new regime of work and consumption, or more accurately we have been co-opted by “psychopolitics”, a new form of governmentality, into always trying to outperform ourselves and to accumulate more material goods, because our identities are linked to the belief that we are acting freely. This is what Han calls compulsive and paradoxical freedom, a form of freedom based on new power relations in which the freedom of achievement and performance become the positive affirmation of agency and power. However, because achievement and performance are indefinite, are instrumental and have no ends, they become compulsive and produce self-exploitation. As Han explains:

‘The disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. The achievement subject gives himself over to compulsive freedom—that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation.’ (The Burnout Society, 11).

Hyper-individualism is the main target of this critique, and according to Han, we have all become entrepreneurs of the self, which he calls “achievement subjects”. We are always trying to refashion or re-invent ourselves to make ourselves more competitive and to garner the most benefit or value out of our activates and relationships. This is a form of subjectivity that, through its own activity of self-optimisation, has come to represent the condition of an absolute slave—both a slave who wants to be a master and a master who has become enslaved.

‘The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave.’ (The Burnout Society, 19).

This does not mean Han is against work in general, rather he describes the pathological consequences of a society in which work is defined by principles of achievement, performance, and self-optimization and not by human emancipation and flourishing. The achievement subject seeks to emancipate themselves through the freedom implied in these principles but in the process, eventually optimises itself to death. As Han argues,

‘Burnout is not a sickness caused by work but by the pressure to perform. The human soul is affected not because of work but because of performance, this new neoliberal principle.’ (Capitalism and the Death Drive, 77).

These principles have become like a drug addiction, distilled, and normalised in the social consciousness. Even when the amount of work carried out is not that great, the constant pressure to perform, both from others and the pressure that we place on ourselves, can have an immobilizing and pathological affect. We have surrendered to these principles under the guise of freedom, and we all freely participate in what Han calls the “digital panopticon”. In Foucault's panopticon there was a clear system of control, we knew who the guards were and who were the prisoners, but the digital panopticon is aperspectival, you cannot distinguish between inside and outside, and we freely participate in its surveillance and monitoring. We are simultaneously prisoners and guards, or perpetrators and victims and we do this freely. Neoliberalism, according to Han, is a highly advanced system of domination. Exploitation accompanied by a sense of freedom becomes a more effective means of productivity than exploitation by others.

‘The term ‘neoliberalism’ captures well the condition of today’s society as one that exploits freedom. The system wants to constantly increase productivity, and it switches from exploitation by others to self-exploitation because the latter is more efficient and more productivity—and all this under the guise of freedom.’ (Capitalism and the Death Drive, 128).

Neoliberal smart power employs other interlinking technologies of power to enhance productivity. Among these is transparency, a neoliberal tool of domination that has infiltrated modern society and the workplace for purpose of smoothing things out, shedding them of negativity, so they can become ‘calculable, steerable, and controllable’ (The Transparency Society, 1). If we only connect transparency to the freedom of information and corruption, then we have failed to understand its scope. ‘The demand for transparency takes hold of all social processes in order to operationalize and accelerate them.’ (The Transparency Society, 2). Communication and production reach their maximum efficiency when purged of the negativity of alterity, foreignness, or the resistance of the Other. They operate most efficiently when ‘like’ responds to ‘like.’   

‘Today’s compulsive transparency no longer has an explicitly moral or biopolitical imperative; above all, it follows an economic imperative. People who illuminate themselves entirely surrender to exploitation. Illumination is exploitation. Overexposing individual subjects maximizes economic efficiency ... the social degrades into a functional element within the system of production and undergoes operationalization.’ (The Transparency Society, 48-49).

No community, or cohesive ‘we’ can form in a society of transparency. Rather, according to Han, we have become functional elements within a system in which transparency, achievement, and performance are producing positive forms of violence. Burnout and depression are systemic and result from this cultural obsession. They have become a substitute for revolution. The reaction against exploitation is no longer directed outwards towards forms of transgression but instead manifest internally and is directed towards the self. Therefore, the modern subject does not represent what Nietzsche called the sovereign man, but rather what he called, the last man, an animal laborans ‘who does nothing but work’ (The Burnout Society, 10), and who exploit themselves voluntarily without external limitations forcing them to work. They stand exposed and defenceless in the face of an excess of positivity because they have been stripped of all sovereignty.

‘Burnout, which often precedes depression, does not point to a sovereign individual who has come to lack the power to be the ‘master of himself.’ Rather, burnout represents the pathological consequences of voluntary self-exploitation.' (The Burnout Society, 44).

Han’s conclusion is that the modern project of freedom has failed. Modern society now absolutizes survival and is not concerned with the good life. We live and work under the illusion that more capital means more life and concern for the good life, or for any higher value, evaporates and yields to a hysteria for survival. For Han, the society of achievement and transparency is not a free society but one that displays deficient social rationality. It has lost sight that the purpose of human activities should be for producing human emancipation and flourishing.

‘The loss of all ideal values leaves, other than the exhibition value of the ego, only health value behind. Bare life makes all teleology vanish—every in-order-to that would give reason to remain healthy. Health becomes self-referential and voids itself into purposiveness without purpose.’ (The Burnout Society, 45).

Image

Byung-Chul Han, by Actualiité, cropped by MRCLD . At Prix Bristol des Lumières 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=126839347