The Crisis of Narration

h/t - Woodsterman

Alexander Carmele, Byung-Chul Han: "The Crisis of Narration" (Google translated from German)

Models of Interpretation (4): As part of the series Models of Interpretation, of which there is already a first part with Theodor W. Adorno's Skoteinos, a second with Jacques Derrida Law Force and a third based on Franz Kafka's The Trial on this blog, I am now dealing with a much-discussed and globally received philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, and the way in which he describes in his text The crisis of narration deals with texts, quotes, references and content.

Han's text is closely linked to Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Knowledge, in which something similar was diagnosed more than forty years ago, namely that we were in a time after the end of great narratives and that only self-transparent, or undead little narratives existed, full of interwoven and irrelevant details that could no longer lure anyone out from behind the stove. In contrast to Lyotard, who argues his diagnosis along the lines of the natural sciences, Byung-Chul Han tries to prove the same in literature and in the lack of modern storytelling. In the following, why Han's ten-chapter booklet contributes more to the symptom than to the diagnosis.

Reasoning logic:

1. From narrative to information. Han begins The Crisis of Narration with the difference between customer and information, two manifestations of communication. The customer contains something strange, unknown, mysterious. The information, on the other hand, clarifies and leads back. It explains, whereas the customer transfigures. In the wake of modernity, which consists above all in the dismantling of distance and distance, a form of decay of narrative emerges, according to one of Walter Benjamin's theses: the novel that is read by individuals where a communal experience was previously communicated. According to Han, the narrative includes self-oblivious listening in the narrative community, whose fateful power creates a "we" in secret.

The customer, on the other hand, is characterized by an unavailable remoteness. It heralds a historical event that eludes availability and predictability. We are at the mercy of him like a force of fate.

-Byung-Chul Han from: "The Crisis of Narration"

However, the information is isolated in the course of the competitive society. Individuals forget how to listen. They become isolated and lose conscious control in the accelerated exchange of information and dive into an externally controlled, algorithm-controlled communication process.

>In the age of storytelling as storyselling, narrative and advertising are indistinguishable. This is the current crisis of narrative.<We are at the mercy of the algorithmic black box.

Strangely enough, there is no contradiction in Han's argumentation between the customer and the information, both of which, in a certain form of reception, either by eavesdropping or rapid clicking, lead to blind obedience. The only difference would be that the one, the customer, establishes a religious, eschatological telos, salvation, but information establishes a secular event, success. Byung-Chul Han's conceptual apparatus, which he derives undialectically from Walter Benjamin's writing The Narrator, is unable to clearly differentiate between the two. One

2. Poverty of experience occurs. In the next chapter, Han pits problem-solving strategies against wisdom. Wisdom does not need a narrative, a tradition, problem solving. Wisdom requires a historical continuum, from which, however, technology, the culture of the new barbarian, emancipates itself:

[The new barbarian] is animated by the pathos of the new. First of all, he clears the table. He does not see himself as a narrator, but as a 'constructor'. Benjamin [in his essay Experience and Poverty] generalizes the new barbarism to the principle of the new.

According to this quote, the hope for the new is lost in the managed world. A spirit of optimism has turned into consumption. The lack of alternatives is spreading. Wisdom becomes technology. Han diagnoses acceleration:

Information fragments time. Time is shortened to a narrow gauge of the current. It lacks temporal breadth and depth. The compulsion to update destabilizes life. The past is no longer effective in the present.

It is not clear in terms of what, according to Han, the time is shortened in postmodernism. How can information fragment time? What time? He writes that the past is no longer effective in the present, but how do past and present differ? Han alludes to memorylessness.

3. The narrated life. After a brief anthropological sketch from Marcel Proust to Walter Benjamin to Martin Heidegger, according to which man is not a momentary being, Han distinguishes his memory from a database. Human memory is sequestering, the database is not.

Memory is not a mechanical repetition of what has been experienced, but a narrative that has to be told again and again. Memories are necessarily sketchy. They presuppose proximity and distance. When everything experienced is present, i.e. available, without distance, the memory disappears. A complete reproduction of the experience is also not a narrative, but a report or protocol.

Han does not clarify how a complete reproduction of the experience is possible. Even a film camera has a perspective or observation plane – and frequencies are also cut away in audio processing. Each data fragment results from a decision, a selection. The only question is to what extent the decision is carried out consciously or not. For Han, modern information technology forces an unconscious twilight:

On digital platforms, a reflexive-narrative processing and condensation of what is lived is neither possible nor desirable. Even the technical dispositif of digital platforms [introduced by Michel Foucault] does not allow for time-consuming, narrative practice.

As a tool, information technologies only offer behaviors. They can only facilitate or complicate certain practices, but they cannot force anything, nevertheless Han concludes, in connection between smartphone and homo sapiens:

The Phono sapiens apparently leaves behind Homo sapiens, who is in need of redemption.

4. The naked life. Han repeats the motif that only narrative brings order to the world and that everything that is not perceived as part of a narrative, i.e. a basic structure of order, appears naked. For him, information exposes the world. She offers them undisguised to the greedy gaze, while the narrative obscures, conceals and thus protects life:

The information as such is pornographic, because it is without cover. The only thing that is eloquent, narrative is the cover, the veil that weaves itself around things. Concealment and obfuscation are essential to the narrative.

However, veiling or obfuscating implies an instance that does not put all the cards on the table, that cannot be seen into them, i.e. a power motive. It is only on the basis of an interpretive sovereignty that filters, decides what may be seen, said, heard, that narrative, customer, mystery and meaning arises, according to Han, and thus directs the observation, experience and reflection of the individual. This becomes clear in the next section using a metaphor chosen by Han.

5. Disenchantment of the world. It tells the story of a boy who cannot tell a story and is therefore sent by his parents to an old woman to learn it. This gives him an impossible task that he cannot solve. She scolds him and sends him back. It is only through failure, through rebuke, through experiencing defeat that the boy's imagination is fired and thus enabled to tell his parents something.

Paul Maar's story reads like a subtle social critique. She seems to accuse us of forgetting how to tell stories. The loss of narrative power is blamed on the disenchantment of the world.

However, the enchantment here is only possible through an instance, that of the mysterious woman, who leads the boy around by the nose like in the hare and hedgehog fable. The old woman sends the boy astray. Its failure is calculated and decided in advance. The impossibility of assessing and understanding the situation motivates a substitute action: the narrative. Once again, Han pits information against narrative.

Today, we perceive the world primarily through information. Information has neither distance nor vastness. You can't keep the harsh gusts of wind or the glittering sunshine in you. They lack auratic spaces. In this way, they detauratize and demystify the world. Language completely loses its aura the moment it atrophies into information. The information represents the absolute degree of loss of language.

Han introduces information as a perceptual practice, which, however, decouples itself from the perceivers and, strangely enough, destroys the magic of language through this decoupling. How the layers are connected to each other remains hidden. It simply says:

The pile is the antithesis of the narrative. Events only condense into a story if they are layered in a certain way. The pile of data or information is without history. It is not narrative, but cumulative.

The juxtaposition is lost in the void. Data is not somehow generated and falls from the sky from somewhere. Data is created from measurements. However, those who do not know the measurements, do not know how they are carried out, do not understand the context of the data. Since, according to Han, the lack of understanding would have to lead to meaning-making processes, the pile of data would be an ideal starting point for a story. The distinction does not work, but leads:

6. From shock to like. Han reads the destruction of mystery and the perception of the world as a pile of information in parallel with the triumph of the smartphone, which he regards as a re-imagined mirror stage of humanity by means of a psychoanalytic par force ride from Sigmund Freund to Jacques Lacan:

The smartphone accelerates the expulsion of the other. It is a digital mirror that brings about a post-infantile reissue of the mirror stage. Thanks to smartphones, we remain in a mirror stage that maintains an imaginary ego.

In the wake of information theory, Han even speaks of a "change in our psychic apparatus" that leads to a blunting and sliding down into the inorganic. The only way to counter this is to go back to the narrative:

7. Theory as narrative. Big data and artificial intelligence are not enough to create a narrative order, a meaning. Real theory, according to Han, explains the world:

Theory as a narrative outlines an order of things that relates them and thereby explains why they behave the way they do. She develops conceptual contexts that make things comprehensible.

Here, in The Crisis of Narration, Han performs a somersault mortale at the beginning of his text. At the beginning he writes that narration takes place without explanation, even consists in the absence of explanations, in order to claim at the end that a theory only represents knowledge if it tells, i.e. explains. Neither the end fits the beginning nor the beginning fits the end. Even the oath of revelation of Byung-Chul Hans, who works as a philosopher, does not help:

Thus, the current crisis of narration also takes hold of philosophy and prepares for it. We no longer have the courage to be philosophical, we no longer have the courage to think about theory, that is, we no longer have the courage to tell stories.

Memoryless, unaware of his own contradictions, he nevertheless invokes the:

8. Narrative as healing. One reason for the narrative crisis lies in poor listening. As a good listener, Han cites Momo from Michael Ende's novel of the same name. As in a psychoanalytic or deep hermeneutic therapy session, the speakers are allowed to tell themselves freely:

Listening is not a passive state, but an active doing. It inspires his counterpart to tell stories and opens up a resonance chamber in which the narrator feels meant, heard, even loved.

In fact, however, there is a lack of will to listen and is opposed to the rampant logic of efficiency. Storytelling and listening lose all community-building effect:>>

In the age of storytelling as storyselling, narrative and advertising are indistinguishable. This is the current crisis of narrative.

This is also the crisis of Byung-Chul Hans Büchlein, because it only has the goal of distinguishing between the two, namely in the successful one:

9. Narrative community. Han evokes a community without communication in silent harmony, which tells but does not mean, which hears but does not communicate, which is formed from a non-exclusive identity narrative, and quotes Novalis:

The individual lives in the whole and the whole in the individual. Poetry creates the highest sympathy and co-activity, the most intimate community.

-Novalis from: "Art Fragments" [Link]

It is necessary to stir up a new community-building force in the narrative, the 'power of fate' mentioned at the beginning, which is prepared for the future and does not allow itself to be frightened by 'rampant private opinions', which only consist of

10. Pass story selling. According to Han, private opinions and fast-moving information do not stabilize life. They do not provide orientation or support. In this way, the prevailing social system suppresses any critical reflection from the outset and robs man of his nature as an animal forans, which distinguishes him from animals.

Communicative summary:

Key to Han's text The crisis of narration lies in the distinction between information and customer, narrative and story, history and data, order and heap, individual and community, human and animal. He establishes these differences, permutes them, but does not give them any distinctiveness. For example, he describes information as something that decomposes time, but elsewhere history as something self-contained and information as something continuous, so that both lose every distinguishing feature from each other.

Or, he describes narrative as a selection process, since a narrative does not tell everything, but finds that data does not mean anything because it lacks explanation. Explanation now again must be missing in a narrative, which is what distinguishes her, according to Han, quoting Walter Benjamin. Nevertheless, data is far from being a narrative, and databases are not memory, and big data is not knowledge. It boils down to the fact that everything is one, even the dreaded storyselling and storytelling, as evidenced by the quote above. It seems as if Han has occupied himself with his so ostracized and condemned modernity for so long that Friedrich Nietzsche's saying applies:

Whoever fights with monsters may see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And if you look into an abyss for a long time, the abyss also looks into you. [Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146]

-Friedrich Nietzsche from: "Beyond Good and Evil" (§146)

What Byung-Chul Han's text The Crisis of Narration ironically lacks is its order, which is so often complained about. There are 96 quotes on only 92 pages. Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Niklas Luhmann, Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Novalis and Andreas Reckwitz are discussed in rapid megalomania, without relating them to each other and in their conceptualization, e.g. the completely different concept of time of Benjamin and Kant, or of Novalis and Luhmann. Not to mention the respective philosophy of language.

So what Hans lacks in The Crisis of Narration is a selection criterion, something that motivates the differences from which Han starts, but also dynamically continues and unfolds them. He doesn't add anything to his quotes. Basically, it merely obscures by not conceptually distinguishing between information and communication, i.e. information and customer, narrative and data. They merge congruently into each other. One possible criterion would have been connectivity, which distinguishes narrative and information precisely in the extent to which this or that written or spoken word gives rise to further thinking, further imagining, further communicating. Radical judgments such as 'that's good' or 'that's bad' end the conversation. They do not open up any new scope.

From this and with this criterion behind them, narration, information, data and facts could now be linked together and examined for communicability. Byung Chul-Hans The Crisis of Narration has been content with a critique of current conditions and successfully emulates these strategies and practices, which, absurdly according to its own description, are deplorable, in word and gesture.

tl;dr ... a short version of the reading review can be found here.

From time to time, I will post reviews of classics or theoretical texts. In the course of this, my canon should gradually gain life and content and comprehensibility.

Other current and classic short reviews can already be found here.