Hitting the Pause Button

 

Galo Abrain, "Bastards of impatience: Byung-Chul Han and the time of postmodernity" (Google translated from Spanish)

The South Korean philosopher and essayist Byung-Chul Han is a prominent dissector of the society of hyperconsumerism.

Postmodernity overwhelmed us decades ago with an unbridled idle frenzy, from which getting rid of is as difficult as resolving debates about the origins of our existence.

The fluidity with which we experience our daily lives has been far from that modernity in which scientific, ideological, social and creative advances supported by reason, logic and human will, emancipated from the ethos oppressed in the obscurantism of the Middle Ages, they delighted in the development of knowledge.

For Byung-Chul Han, the favorite philosopher of the RR Era. SS., this ancient modernity was a “time with aroma”, since historical circumstances occurred in it that favored the idea of ​​a man projected into the future subscribed, bridging the distances of social class, to the vision of Aristotelian leisure. A leisure according to which contemplative activity, understood in the classical sense as the search for truth through the arts and knowledge, was the path to happiness, to eudaimonia.

According to the Korean, undisputed Midas of postmodern thought, we have abandoned that time of progress . We have deviated from that vision of time with a “historical sense” that gave us the ability to perceive “time with aroma”, to fall into a dissynchrony; which basically means we face an atomization of time. In other words, we have broken with the concept of linearity of time and have transcended a succession of experiences lived one after the other without transcendence . Han determines that postmodernism has pushed us into a world where nothing concludes, nothing begins, and we are going nowhere. Our only safe value has taken refuge in performance which, added to existential anguish, has led us to put an end to contemplation. Work, damn you, work! Buy, you damned ones, buy!

"And what else gives?" Some will say, "if the only contemplation I have experienced was getting lost in history class because I was lazy about the Peloponnesian War," well, Byung-Chul Han, the intellectual version of the handsome Japanese guy from Fast and Furious Tokyo Race , points to the disappearance of experience and knowledge, replaced by experience and information. We must understand that experience and knowledge are subject to a linear vision of accumulated time, to a past tied to a memory, while experience and information are elements erected on the instant and data, both elements emptied of time .

Let's see...this reminded me when reading it, and now he shares it with unfaithful humility, of Nietzsche and his vision of the “Last Man”; an individualistic, mediocre, conformist being, only obsessed with his body, his health, the evasion of death and, consequently, with the only thing he perceives as real, his self -let's be honest, who doesn't know that uncle? There are mornings when even I get scared when I see him reflected in the mirror.

And this subject, who sounds very postmodern to me, with Lutheran values ​​regarding the privilege of productive work over contemplative value, perceives a time without direction or narrative where he has become a “tourist”, in Han's terms, who experiences series of different events as equal and tends to annihilate waiting, instead of being more like a “pilgrim”, who treasures the intervals that organize his existence with a destination and a yesterday .

As we can see, Han presents us with an aesthetic ideal of beauty sustained on contemplation, on the idea of ​​a time that passes with a “historical sense”, living past, present and future and not an eternal now empty of content.

For him, leisure lived as a task is essential, and not as an excuse for the continuation of gamified work , which makes non-productive intervals mere moments of disconnection , with nothing to do with the author's claim, that of “festive time.” ”, during which a recreation and a delayed durability of time is experienced.

In other words, for this Hegelian with difficulty in reading quickly - he himself admits it -, pretending that our leisure is an excuse to produce more and better - this sounds a bit strange to me... as if it smelled like mindfulness - It is a way of eviscerating its objective of producing in us a linear memory, with history, and not a simple full stop in our lives , like a mixed sandwich at dawn that we are grateful for avoiding ending up like Joseph Roth's Holy Drinker; helping us to soak the priva, but which we will not remember even if we give it to the toilet the next morning with a bow and glitter.

In short, TIME. Time, we must keep in mind, is a sine qua non condition for beauty... The delayed durability of time is the intrinsic element of creation and the aesthetic drive of Eros . A time that requires aroma, like a good wine that illuminates with the years more and more tender and reserved nuances, and that unfortunately becomes, as humanity ages, more innocuous and perverted by the utilitarian frenzy of postmodernity.

That's why read this carefully, calmly, without rushing, letting the words violate everything you had taken for granted prior to encountering this article. Pass it on to your enemies, your friends will have already read it, and do your best to contemplate yourself and everything around you, without taking your eyes off what is important; remember that they once managed to see.