A Jukebox Jive

Mark K. Spencer, "A Piano, a Jukebox, and a Life of Contemplation"

t the end of his recent book, Non-Things: Upheaval in the Life-World, Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han tells the story of buying a vintage jukebox after he crashed his bicycle in front of the Berlin shop where it was being sold. He took it home to “a flat that contained only an old grand piano and a metal desk from a doctor’s surgery.” “I needed to be in an empty flat,” he explains, and “neither the grand piano nor the desk detracted from the emptiness; they intensified it.” By “emptiness,” Han “does not mean that there is a space with nothing in it. It is an intensity, an intense presence. It is the spatial appearance of stillness, which is an intense form of attentiveness.”

Like his desk and piano, the jukebox also intensifies Han’s attentiveness. Han is fascinated by the sounds and movements the machine makes, and by how it makes listening to music a tactile, bodily experience: putting coins into it, watching its lights and interior movements as it warms up and prepares a record for playing, listening to its ancient valves and speakers. Listening to music in this way, unlike listening to a streaming service, requires lingering in the presence of a physical thing. This story sums up many key themes that make Han one of the most interesting and unusual cultural critics of our time. (Readers of Law & Liberty have already been introduced to Han’s distinctive work in an article and a review by Scott Beauchamp and a review by Emina Melonic.)

Han’s choice of furniture alone clearly shows him to be something of an eccentric, which is also borne out by his criticisms of modernity. Indeed, his assessment of contemporary life is at times so negative, that one might be tempted to dismiss him as a reactionary Luddite. One of my students, reading Han for the first time, said he gave off vibes of an angry old man shouting at people to get off his lawn. My student wasn’t entirely wrong: Han’s writing is suffused with resentment of modernity, and that gives rise to some sloppy argumentation and gross over-generalizations about recent history. But even so, his work has extraordinary value. His pessimism may be overwrought at times, and his reasoning loose, but Han has been, for me, a writer who holds up a mirror to my life, such that, page after page, I say, “Yes, that is how things are.” For me and many other people, he has captured the mood of our times with impeccable accuracy.

As a philosopher, Han is interested in figuring out what conditions are needed for human persons to reach fulfillment. His philosophical approach is shaped by many influences: a range of thinkers from Plato to Walter Benjamin, medieval Christian mystics, Zen Buddhists, but above all, Martin Heidegger (though he is also highly critical of many of Heidegger’s ideas). Heidegger and Han are deeply interested in how human persons exist. By this, they mean the basic ways that we fit into our surroundings, ways that color all of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. For example, if my basic stance toward the world, my way of existing, is fundamentally shaped by technology, then I will tend to approach everything—material things, other persons, myself, God—as objects controllable by human beings. Our basic, subconscious stances towards the world are shaped by the sort of political and economic society we live in and the sorts of artifacts we use. As a cultural critic, Han applies these ideas to our current technology. He wants to show how using Snapchat, Tinder, and ChatGPT (for example)—and smartphones and the internet more generally—yields a way of existing that is detrimental to human flourishing.

Han is famous for writing short, almost aphoristic texts. Few of his books are more than 100 pages. My interest here is in four of his most recent books: Infocracy, Non-Things, The crisis of narration, and Vita contemplativa. While these are published as separate books, they are one continuous meditation on the deficient ways in which we exist in the information age, and a proposal of a solution of sorts centered around contemplation. These are themes that have marked Han’s work since he rose to prominence with The Burnout Society (2015) and even before, but these four books give what is probably his most focused treatment of these themes. They are marked by a much more positive assessment of the Western, Christian tradition than some of his earlier work. While deeply influenced by the Buddhist tradition, Han is himself a Catholic. His understanding of religious ritual and the contemplative life as expressed in these books is a fascinating mix of the two traditions. This mix will be of interest to practitioners of both religions, I think, even if, as with many aspects of Han’s thought, they would rather observe than imitate his idiosyncratic blend of two traditions.

The story about the jukebox sums up a central theme for Han: the contrast between the analog and the digital. Digital technologies treat things as composed of manipulable, rearrangeable bits of information. In the world as mediated to us through the smartphone’s touchscreen, things are treated as so much information, effortlessly available at a single touch of a finger.

This situation leads, as Han sees it, to the possibility of a particularly insidious form of control over human persons by political and economic powers. In earlier stages of human history, those powers had to use means external to their subjects in order to control behavior. In totalitarian regimes, for example, the government has to use external surveillance means (like cameras and spies), prison systems, centrally produced propaganda, and workplace discipline to control citizens’ behavior. By contrast, our society, centered on information technology, does not explicitly forbid much and does not use totalitarian, disciplinary controls. Rather, a wide range of products and experiences are made available to us, and a very wide range of actions are permitted. Technology encourages us to see ourselves as producing ourselves autonomously by our actions, leading lives that can be summed up in the data that is collected about us. This leaves us prey to a deeper form of control than was available to the totalitarians: using big data, governments and corporations can effectively nudge people’s desires, while allowing us to believe that we are acting entirely autonomously. This situation leads, in turn, to the anxieties and sense of burnout that plague our contemporary world, including the exhaustion of always having to produce our own identity.

Analog things, represented by the jukebox, appear as wholes that are not entirely subject to our effortless manipulation. Analog things exist more stably in the material world, and so can provide some stabilization for our lives: Han delights in the fact that his jukebox will likely last longer than he does, whereas digital information is, in many ways, ephemeral. In an analog world, we understand ourselves not in terms of big data, but through narratives. Just like physical things, narratives—like religious stories about our relation to the divine, or early modern stories about hope in progress—give stability and meaning to our lives. This meaning is not reducible to bits of information; rather, stories give meaning to data, by incorporating data into a wider whole. That wider whole is best grasped through rituals, in which narratives are conveyed in ways that involve us as wholes, body and mind.

Han recommends activities like religious festivals and rituals, listening to and telling stories, and spending time looking at and listening to beautiful things, as an antidote to the compulsion to producing one’s own identity that plagues us today. 

Han observes that the world of data and information aims to be entirely transparent: in another image repeated across all these books, Han sees our world as fundamentally pornographic. Like in a pornographic film, many people feel a compulsion to show too much about themselves online, because they think that it is through this showing that they construct themselves. Digital technology is oriented to constantly make us feel good effortlessly. Han sees the digital economy as too smooth; our contemporary world has lost a necessary sense of effort, of melancholy, of being wounded by others. In an analog world, we often suffer when we run up against other material things or persons. This suffering gives us a sense of their otherness, their difference from us; grappling with what is other than me—what cannot be reduced to information that I can manipulate—is good for me especially because it forces me to take my attention off of my egotistical self.

Han’s solution to these perceived problems is to engage in contemplation. This is his focus especially in his recent Vita contemplativa. Han’s critique of modernity primarily consists of helping the reader feel how we exist in the information age, and also feel what is missing in that world from a flourishing human life. Han’s proposals for solving these problems also are aimed at helping us feel the desire for contemplation—that is, focused attention on what is other than us. Some of what Han says about contemplation is redolent of the famous work of Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture. Like Han, Pieper understands a major part of the problem with the contemporary world to be a focus on productivity, on justifying actions entirely through their utility. Leisure activities are done entirely for their own sake; they bring us to flourishing by themselves, without needing to attend to their results. Like Pieper, Han recommends activities like religious festivals and rituals, listening to and telling stories, and spending time looking at and listening to beautiful things, as an antidote to the compulsion to produce one’s own identity that plagues us today.

But as the story about the jukebox indicates, Han’s emphasis is not so much on Pieper-style leisurely activities, as much as it is on inactivity. If we’re going to compare Han to a twentieth-century Catholic philosopher, he is more like Elizabeth Anscombe, who, when asked to state her recreation activities for Who’s Who, wrote “sitting around.” For Han too, the world would be a far better place if we all just spent time sitting around. A haiku that he quotes sums up his vision:

Sitting peacefully doing nothing
Springtime is coming
and the grass grows all by itself.

The economy of the information age is good at absorbing all of our activities into itself. It can make anything—other people, ourselves, the stories we tell, political acts, ideologies—into a commodity, and into a source of data that can be further used to nudge our desires, while making us temporarily feel freer and happier. Han wants to find a way of existing that stands outside this system of potential control, leaving us truly free to flourish as human persons. He finds this way of existing in silence, stillness, emptiness, and waiting—in a stance of receiving whatever happens as a gift.

Religious festivals and contemplating beauty are valuable to him when they are pursued not for the sake of personal fulfillment, but for the sake of forgetting ourselves and attending to other things. When one does nothing, and just intensely pays attention to other things, everything “converges in friendliness.” This contemplative state requires effort, and it is the happiest of ways of existing—paradoxically, we are happiest when we do not pursue our own happiness, but respond to what is important in itself for its own sake. Han does not promote inactivity for therapeutic reasons: he does not recommend being inactive and attentive because it will make you a more productive person, more rested, or more aware of your own fulfillment. Rather, this contemplative state will remove you from egotistic attention to yourself altogether; it will lead you to stop caring about self-production, usefulness, and pornographic transparency.

I admit that I find this vision of human life deeply attractive. I also readily grant that it will be repellent to a lot of people; all the more, when it is coupled to Han’s sweeping indictments of contemporary life and his preference for aphoristic assertion over careful argumentation. It will be off-putting to many who might otherwise be his allies. What value does this apparently romanticized, mystical, hippie, or Buddhist vision have for us today, especially for Christian conservatives? Most of us value action and hard work, and many conservatives would like to retain many aspects of our current technological, economic, and political systems, seeing a lot of practical benefit in them, of a sort that may facilitate human flourishing. While most conservatives eschew the visions of self-production that underlie a lot of sexual politics today, self-production as such is key to many conservative visions of work and action. To such views, Han’s criticisms will seem deeply misplaced, and his preferred mode of inactivity may look like nothing but laziness or self-absorption, an unwillingness to practically engage in improving society.

I’d suggest that Han’s work is valuable to conservatives first because it helps us make sense of current crises in conservatism, in religion, and in society more broadly. Every conservative should constantly ask him or herself: what am I trying to conserve? If conservatism is worthwhile, what we are trying to conserve must surely be something having to do with what is genuinely human; it must have to do with preserving a human way of life that is valuable in itself and does not see everything that we do as a mere expression or pursuit of power or results. Many conservative thinkers have advocated a life in which we do not impose our rationalistic plans on human life, but instead are attentive to what is given to us. Han’s contemplative life, while perhaps not the best life for everyone, is a powerful witness to that vision. He is also a master at helping us attend to features of human life that even those of us who care about culture, religion, art, and so on, generally overlook. He is a master at helping us see how, even when we feel freest, we might be enslaved, and even when we don’t seem to be doing anything worthwhile—like when we are just staring at a jukebox, waiting for it to play some music—we might be engaged in what is most human of all. Even if we end up disagreeing with some of his critiques and some of his solutions, Han’s work is worthwhile for the sheer education in attention it yields.

It’s also important to keep in mind that Han offers no policy prescriptions. He has outlined no systematic program of inactivity. You can’t market inactivity; you can’t have a course of training in the attention he recommends. If we read Han as offering practical, society-level prescriptions, he could only be read as naïve and deeply uninformed. The prospects he seems to hold out for societal improvement are rather bleak: pretty much all current political and economic activities (including the very marketing of his books and the writing of this review) fail to be fully human in his view, because they have all succumbed to the vagaries of the information regime. But, at the level of personal life, Han offers a lot of hope—and that focus on the personal, as opposed to the societal, is itself a deeply conservative theme. We can all become more inactive, perceive more attentively, linger more, contemplate stories, and engage in festive rituals with others. We can all submit to digital technology a little less, even if we don’t go as far as Han, and that will likely make us all a bit happier. So long as we don’t do these things for the sake of societal improvement, but do them for their own sake, we’ll be on the path Han recommends. I can’t see how doing all of those things a little more would be bad for any of us.