r/CriticalTheory's Thoughts on "The Disenchantment of the World" by Byung-Chul Han
I'm curious if anyone else came across this piece by Byung-Chul Han, an excerpt from his upcoming book, and has any thoughts on it. I found it very interesting and an incisive critique but also a bit nebulous in the same way I have found other works by Han that I have read.
His primary thesis that our world has lost the ability to tell stories, to "narrate," as a result with our obsession with information and the "facticity" of the world around us is compelling, but I also feel like there are some pretty obvious counterexamples. He claims that we are living in a "post-narrative" world, but I feel as though we're living in a world where stories have never been more ubiquitous. We are constantly overwhelmed by the amount of books, movies, TV shows not only being created but that are available to us at our fingertips. Stories have become content that corporations have every incentive to contintue to churn out because we love stories and we will pay them money to keep telling them to us.
And if you start to look at social media as a newfound avenue for storytelling then I think it becomes obvious that narration has become something so central to our culture nowadays. Internet culture, I think, is entirely based around the idea of narration: memes are the way we draw connections between disparate events in culture and in our lives; we have never been more attentive to how stories mimic each other; even our movies and TV shows are becoming more and more meta as an awareness of genre (i.e. the ways our stories line up along the same narrative paths) proliferates through our culture. So I guess I find the idea that narration is something we have lost in the information age fairly dubious to say the least. If anything, narratives are something we understand more intimately than ever.
And yet at the same time, I very much agree with the undercurrent of Han's thoughts. There is something about the obsession of our world nowadays with data, numbers, and facts, that has caused us to lose the childlike "enchantment" with the world that he seems to be mourning. There is a sense of the magic of the world that seems to be fading, especially among children who have grown up playing games on their parents' iPads and watching TikToks, not playing pretend with their friends. Perhaps this is me being somewhat curmudgeonly, but Han's discussion of the loss of the "aura" of the objects around us in this piece—the idea that once, objects used to speak to us in a sort of enchanted, mystical way—really makes me wonder about what it is that the information age has taken from us.
I like this idea, I just don't know if narrative and storytelling is the right framing for it. Would love to hear other thoughts about this piece or any ideas about possibly reframing it.
The author of the critique of Han's essay doesn't seem to distinguish between 1st order observational narratives and Luhmanesque 2nd order observational ones. And it is in THAT distinction where Han's critique of narrative originates. That we no longer have a 1st order observational 'Whitman-like" relationships with the natural source of narratives... in nature and the real world relationships. Instead, we wrestle with narratives based upon media-mediated narratives in the hyper-real world of internet "data and information". The new narratives are about living a life once-removed (through media) from "real" life. They're the tales of the audience observing a Greek Chorus, not the heroic protagonist. Are you the "main character" of your life, or just one observing it from a distance (Joan is Awful)? For far too many of today's narratives originate in those who have now joined the ranks of those who are dropping out of life and becoming their own Social Media profiles.
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