The Wisdom Letter #218
4 quotes from Byung-Chul Han (1959)
✹ For today’s Wisdom Letter, we have carefully curated three bite-sized quotes from the philosopher and cultural theorist, Byung-Chul Han (1959), each paired with a philosophical question meant to provoke deep reflection:
Quote № 01:
“Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves.”
— Byung-Chul Han, “The Burnout Society”
~ Follow-up Question:
If modern society has shifted from a disciplinary model to an achievement-based one, does this transformation offer greater freedom, or does it introduce new forms of pressure and self-exploitation?
Quote № 02:
“The acceleration of contemporary life also plays a role in this lack of being. The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination.”
— Byung-Chul Han, “The Burnout Society”
~ Follow-up Question:
If individuals in a modern achievement-based society both exploit themselves and act as their own enforcers, does this mean that external systems of oppression have become internalized, and if so, how can true liberation be achieved?
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Quote № 03:
“Depression—which often culminates in burnout—follows from overexcited, overdriven, excessive self-reference that has assumed destructive traits. The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down, so to speak. It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears itself out in a rat race it runs against itself.”
— Byung-Chul Han, “The Burnout Society”
~ Follow-up Question:
How does the paradox of self-exploitation—where one both drives and exhausts oneself—challenge traditional notions of personal freedom and autonomy in a performance-driven society?
Quote № 04:
“If sleep represents the high point of bodily relaxation, deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation. A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available.”
— Byung-Chul Han, “The Burnout Society”
~ Follow-up Question:
If deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation, could it be an essential state for creativity and self-discovery, rather than something to be avoided in a productivity-driven culture?
✽ Thank you for reading today’s Wisdom Letter.
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I don't agree with Byung-Chul Han's analysis.
"Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories." Really? It's all in a name. Hospitals have become madhouses, the privately-owned prison business is booming and looking for more customers (inmates) by lobbying for the criminalisation of ever more minor offences, the factory mentality of the boss 'overseeing' you on the production-line is now overseeing you digitally counting your keystrokes on the computer as you work from home, and the barracks which have been silently built in America across all states the last 20 years are waiting to be filled by those who protest against the growing tyranny.
We might have added "fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories" and now call people "achievement-subjects" but this is a subset of "obedience-subjects" in new physical set-ups. The base-line of the few ruling the many hasn't changed one iota; it's just morphed into a different constellation with a different language and a different physical environment.
"Self-improvement" and "human potential" are the new religion replacing moralistic Christianity, and no less intolerant. People trying to be 'good upright christian citizens' is no different from achievement-oriented entrepreneurs of the self.
"If deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation, could it be an essential state for creativity and self-discovery, rather than something to be avoided in a productivity-driven culture?"
As an artist, I preach sleep and procrastination as essential components of the creative process. Not sure if it's possible to be bored when you have an innate creative drive (that's the problem!) - but procrastinating on an artistic task by doing other stuff (whether creative or practical or nonsensical, doesn't matter) is a great way to gather the right kind of energy for The Task.