Narration takes time, and thus patience: this may well be both the starting point and the conclusion of Byung-chul Han’s pamphlet The crisis of narration. Taking Peter Handke’s analogy between “patience” and “narration” as his compass, the author accompanies us on a parallel journey through the loss of orientation experienced by humans in the twenty-first century on the one hand and on the way narration has been conceived in the entire human history on the other. The impending existential crisis our species is currenly facing, the author suggests, derives precisely from a radical change in the way we conceive narration today.
While in the past, “narratives were our anchor in being”, more specifically “turning being-in-the-world into being-at-home”, thus giving us orientation and meaning both as individuals and as a community, today the proliferation of “post-narratives” on social media result in a distortion and eventually disintegration of being as well as community. What Han calls “the noise of storytelling” turns narration into an individualistic act of “pornographic self-presentation or self-promotion” creating no unity at all among individuals but only cannibalistic consumption of data by individual consumers. As the main currency of capitalism, information makes everything – including being and community – redundant, replacing the “temporal continuum” of a proper story with “a mere sequence of present moments”. Narration and information, Han points out, are mutually exclusive: while the former allows us to be part of a whole rooted in history, the latter dismantles all sense of rootedness, and without rootedness, no sense of nor responsibility for the past and the future can be possible, as reality is reduced to a meaningless landfill of present upon present. This in turn leads to a loss of empathy, because “storyselling” (as Han aptly calls present-day post-narratives) is not based on listening, attention and pathos (and thus on patience), but on the mere, selfish accumulation of contingent bits of information. In other words, what may appear be a frivolous side-effect of our fast-paced, performative society is actually – and radically – changing the way we deal with each other and ourselves, dissolving the very sense of what is means to be human.
But what exactly is “narration”? Analysing Walter Benjamin, who saw in the emergence of information on the press a possible inception of the crisis of human life as rooted in history and narrative, Han investigates the role of narration in our past, finding its most distinctive feature in an aura of indeterminacy, a “germinative force” inviting us to explore its hidden meanings, those secret, multiple layers which may require days, weeks, even years, to experience with all our senses, not just with the intellect. That’s what makes narration alive with prodigious epiphanies, likely to unfold in time and by careful listening very slowly, drop by drop, gifting us with sweet mother-of-pearls glinting in the inside-out of words and in-between lines, or in the shocking collision of characters with one another. In order to reach this higher level of understanding with our full sense of being, and in order to breathe through the pages of a work of art, though, we need to cultivate contemplation.
Also, in order for narration to be actually binding among people, it has to be able to generate wisdom into those who listen, so that one day they will turn their wisdom into experience, and transform that experience into new narration: this, which will be handed down from one generation to the next, is what allows human history to occur and to have stability across both time and space. And even those narratives which seemed to contradict this continuum of experience, like the ones Benjamin thought characterised modernity – the ones making tabula rasa of the past – can be seen as alternate shapes of the same urge to generate wisdom: in wanting to do away with the past, some artists and politicians of the early twentieth-century actually wanted to begin the world anew, inventing a future that was not there yet, thus bringing about a sense of beginning, departure and revolution right into the present.
This example set aside, narration’s main aim is to “salvage the past”, integrating it with the present and eventually granting us happiness. Quoting Proust, Han claims that a writer (and, as a conquence, a reader too) fights against “the disappearance of time”, that is against the possibility of integrating the past into the present, so as to make the self whole. A continuity in (and of) time, in other words, allows for a continuity of the self. “Narrating makes time’s passing meaningful, to give it a beginning and an end.” It is a form of utopia too, because it gives order and coherence to our experience weaving a “magical intimacy” between the self and the world, keeping them close and distant simultaneously in the wide expanse of its palace. In a way, narration functions as a veil, or a lens we use to interpret stimuli and to distance ourselves from them, because a direct contact with stimuli may alter our ability to imagine things and ultimately to tell them and pass them on to a reader, that is to the next generation. Last but not least, narration is also risk, because you engage your mind into thinking, thus into shedding new light into your perception of things, embarking on an unknown adventure, because you don’t know where it might lead: observing yourself and the world, you put forward a new vision of existence, and this creates the possibility for dialogue with others, and in the space of this dialogue, community is able to thrive, because it allows for both the self and the other to exist. It is precisely in the preservation of this difference between the self and the other, and in their contradictory or opposing view, that the harmony of society can be built.
As such, information is the denial of narration, because its pattern is “additive rather than narrative”, repetition, not modulation or variation, being its main feature. Without narration, Han explains quoting Sartre, life becoming nothing but nausée, a meaningless compulsion to perform mechanical acts with neither breath nor width. In particular, the digitalization of information has accelerated the fragmentation of time into “sequences of momentary impressions” that result in a parallel fragmentation of our sense of self: as we swipe and scroll, we lose our anchor in being because time is levelled down and reduced to fleeting moments overwritten by other moments. Even worse than that, thanks to the internet and social media information has become the perfect form of capitalistic domination: by seducing us into sharing our opinions on facts, people and knowledge (or lack of thereof), digital tools actually coerce us into subordinating our thoughts and lives to their regime made of “accelerated exchange” of frantic, volatile fragments whose pace, rhythm and content “escapes our conscious control” and cannot be stopped, because information posits itself as omnipresent, excessive, hyperactive and cannibalistic, each morsel feeding off the ecceeding flesh of the previous one. In this respect, information is also a denial of revolution, because it “lacks the courage to create a world-changing narrative”. More specifically, Han points out, information “lacks aura”, so it “lacks a future”, giving us no hope, but only a sense of mere survival devoid of history. Left in a limbo where the past has no relevance, we furiously unlearn how to read it, and the future turns into an impossible statement, erased by the ephemeral present. Thus, we fall into the trap of the “digital panopticon”: by using our phones, we accept to be constantly under surveillance, the punishment being the loss of all ability to narrate and to simply exist as humans, that is as entities anchored in a temporal continuum.
Personally, I think that information is no longer the core feature of the digitalised world: once a rich goldmine providing citizens with endless opportunities to acquire knowledge, the internet and its lethal ganglia called social media has inexorably been reduced to a landfill where useless waste piles up by the minute, and the precious diamond of truth is nowhere to be found, buried deep underground well hidden from sight because after all knowledge is the only thing that can set us free, and why should the digital panopticon want us to attain freedom? However fleeting it might look, a meagre piece of information might still help us acquire some knowledge. But can a landfill be the right place to acquire substance, instead of scraps? What social media and the internet do these days is denying us information, and thus access to knowledge, replacing it with a smokescreen, a simulacrum representing nothing. It’s like being dazzled by the Wizard of Oz’s magic, and then discovering there is no wizard at all beyond the curtain. All the supposedly dazzling magic was in fact a simulacrum re-presenting nothing but its own nothingness.
Which leads us to all the chit-chat and polarized talk, bots talking to each other and AI hallucinating: this is no information, but rather zombification. Having recently turned into dead creatures, zombies are not exactly entitiess of the past; though decaying and in most cases rotten already, their brain and entrails are still there. They do not function like ghosts of memory haunting us from the grave of history, because their deadly status is relatively new. They simply are walking flesh which refuses to go away but endlessly and mechanically roam in search of fresh food to survive: in this respect, they are the perfect token for social media and their eternal present tense, feeding off one piece of fresh meat after the other endlessly engaging in its cannibalistic ritual through posts, pictures, memes, stories, hate speech, conspiracy theories and echo chambers, until the next piece comes up, because that’s all they are able to do. Like us in the digital age, zombies are no longer humans nor citizens, but users and consumers of other people’s flesh, and metaphorically, thoughts and life. This reminds me of Hunter J. Thompson’s (often misquoted) statement on what the world might have looked like, had the Nazis won World War Two: our everyday digital (but very much real) experience has actually turned into something even worse than Las Vegas’ The Circus Circus; it has become a cartoonish parody of a fake, an imitation of an imitation. Our life is thus reduced to a zombified version of a pre-packaged replica. “Phono sapiens” has replaced homo sapiens, though not much seems to be left of the knowledgeable part of the definition: like zombies, our brains and bodies have turned into something else, merely walking on a phone’s leash. Also, zombification implies erasing the other by turning it into a commodified object for one’s own literal consumption: the other becomes nothing but a meal, which allows for the self to reproduce itself ab nauseam, without any dialogue nor dialectics. Despite what cinematic representations tell us about zombies, I tend to think of them as isolated lumps of rotten meat, not as a whole. On the outside, they might appear as an army of ravenous creatures feeding off a victim together, but this doesn’t mean they form a community: lacking empathy and discernment, they are not conscious of the other zombies surrounding them; what they do is simply a mechanical act deriving from accumulation, not from conscious participation into something experienced collectively. On the contrary, as it happens to humans/users clamoring for narcissistic attention on social media, “everyone competes with everyone else. The performance narrative does not produce social cohesion – it does not produce a we.” There’s only a horde of “cultural singularities”, not a community of individuals creating memory and history.
Like many I suspect, I often wonder why this is happening, and why AI and the digital world were created in the first place: purportedly, they were supposed to help people simplify their lives, but also to allow scientists and tech experts to understand the human mind better, and perhaps to uncover all our hidden potential, including the alleged ability to use telepathy to communicate with each other or to “feel” a person’s aura. Yet, what AI and tools like social media are actually doing is simply demanding more and more transparency of us: nothing can be kept from the panopticon, for fear of being dubbed suspicious, dangerous, or paradoxically fake, because you don’t share enough of your “self”. A solution to all this, in my view, could be that of preserving our minds and bodies from the constant demand for both inward and outward stimuli: we need to get away from the digital mirror and reclaim our psychic space, access our dreamscape and cut off the toxic ties with the panopticon whenever we feel the need to do it (provided that we are still entitled to do so). We have to reclaim our right to opacity and mystery, our right to invisibility. Our right to silence, which may germinate into something new, where active listening, respect, patience and time for pondering have a house and we can start being human again.
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