Review of Byung-Chul Han’s 𝑁𝑜𝑛-𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠: 𝑈𝑝ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑣𝑎𝑙 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐿𝑖𝑓𝑒𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑
The material world is slowly fading away as humans transition to the ghostly space of the infosphere. Composed of hyper information and digitization, the infosphere circumscribes our experience of the world and diminishes our humanity. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s book Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld is an aesthetic call to “re-romanticize” and “re-materialize” our relationship to the world.
Byung-Chul Han, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. Translated by Daniel Steuer. Cambridge, UK/Medford, MA: Polity, 2022.
Martin Heidegger suggests that what makes us human is Dasein, the way in which we handle things; however, the infosphere abolishes Dasein and shapes us into handless “inforgs,” “infomaniacs,” and “datasexuals” unmoored from the world. The handless human of the future instead exists in the disembodied and impoverished space of the infosphere. Coupled with non-things, which is information, the infosphere deprives humans of freedom, agency, silence, community, knowledge, care, and history.
Even though the infosphere might offer us freedom to some degree, non-things such as smartphones, for instance, exploit and become “informatons,” that surveil and control. We freely produce information and consume non-things imbued with prescribed ways of being, (which is not unlike Guy Debord’s critique of the spectacle). Moreover, as we continually share our thoughts, we lose our capacity for silence, stillness, and resistance amidst the “roaring tsunami of information.” We become condemned to loudly lay bare our secrets and connect constantly rather than withdraw and become No-sayers to ubiquitous permissiveness.. Ironically, hypercommunication and (dis)connection only deepen our isolation, depression, and loneliness. As such, we lose our communal ties and relations as well.
Instead of forging community, Han suggests that inforgs become trapped in a continuous play of self-exhibition, self-referentiality, and self-fashioning. We hear echoes of our own voices, rather than listen to the other. This “hell of the same is inhabited by ghosts” where the Other has disappeared. Deprived of the Other’s presence, voice, touch, and affection, Han maintains digital communication weakens community and anesthetizes us from embodied experience.
Aside from losing our freedom, agency, and the ability to resist, Han warns that human thinking may adapt to AI and likewise become mechanical and intelligent. This sort of being excludes Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “faire l’idiot” whereupon the philosopher creates a new idiom and traverses “untrodden paths.” Han maintains that we gain knowledge and create meaningful narratives through lingering and listening rather than merely accumulating information. The idiocy of philosophy, however, has no place for the inforg who merely accumulates data without knowledge.
Han also illustrates how non-things strip another aspect of Dasein, which is our ability to care. Artificial intelligence, for example, provides a smooth presence, and takes away our ability to care for the future. Ungrounded from struggle, resistance, and “future’s contingencies,” non-things have prepared the conditions of a predictable, digital social order stripped of materiality. The handless humans of the future have no future or history. We live in a “post-factual information society”— a post-history whereupon we become unburdened by distinctions between truth and lie, time, the terrestrial, and memory.
Post-history is the stuff of unadorned, non-things that merely function — AI, smartphones, social media, e-books, and selfies. Art is likewise “seized by a forgetfulness of things” insofar as it puts itself in the service of information, communication, and the “drudgery of having to produce meaning.” In contrast to accessible and shared non-things, our possessed, discreet things are filled with a history of emotions. Han explains “the history that things acquire in the course of being used for a long time gives them souls and turns them into things close to the heart.” E-books, for instance, merely contain information whereas the “tactile element in the turning of a book’s pages” “is constitutive of every relationship. Without bodily touch, no ties can emerge.”
In the past, we were subject to the “villainy of things” insofar as things didn’t mistreat humans, but were unpredictable with wills of their own residing in “interstitial spaces.” Han points to instances in literature in which things had gravity, independence, and “waywardness.” Now, however, non-things circumscribe safe, de-realized, immaterial realities for us.
In their text “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,” rhetoricians Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin contend that invitational rhetoric does not aim to persuade, but invites readers “to enter the rhetor’s world, and see it as the rhetor does.” Upon first reading Han, it might be simple to rush to predictable, dismissive counterarguments; however, Han’s rhetorical style invites us to pause, listen, and dwell at length to consider his nuanced thoughts and how he intricately weaves a continuity of concepts from previous sections into the book’s final one, “Excursus on the Jukebox.” Han invites us to widen our perspectives of the world and prompt our own thoughtful, digressions similar to Nietzsche’s “many meanderings and secluded hermitages” in Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality.
Han’s discussion of things prompts me to consider “interstitial” yōkai from Japanese folklore — particularly tsukumogami, which are everyday objects/tools. In his text The Book of the Yōkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore, Michael Dylan Foster explains, after long use, they either turn into “benevolent kami or maleficent yōkai” depending on whether humans respected or viewed them as garbage. Author Matthew Meyer, for instance, explains that a “dragon-like spirit” of knowledge called the kyōrinrinwill materialize from forgotten books and ornate scrolls only to “assault” their neglectful owners. Imbued with history and memories, such tsukumogami suggest that without knowledge, history, and “bodily touch, no ties can emerge” (Han). As such, we become unmoored from not only things, but knowledge and history.
If we hold Han’s text next to our heart, smell the pages, and listen to the gentleness of its voice, we can remember connection and care for the world rather than transform into senseless beings at the service of extractive neoliberalism. Han maintains, “we exploit the world with such brutality because we have declared matter to be something dead and the earth to be a mere resource.” Rather than reside in the ghostly infosphere, where memory lies dead, things imbued with history teach us to remember and affirm our sensuous, aesthetic experience of the world.
Talitha May is an adjunct Assistant Professor in the English department at Portland State University where she teaches writing and rhetoric. She holds a PhD in English specializing in rhetoric and has affection for aesthetics.