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Hiperculturalidad
A través del pensamiento de diversos filósofos modernos y contemporáneos, el presente libro discute la idea cambiante de cultura y muestra hasta qué punto es necesaria y posible una orientación del todo diferente del mundo que habitamos. La globalización, acelerada por las nuevas tecnologías, acerca los espacios culturales entre sí y genera un cúmulo de prácticas sociales y formas de expresión. Esto tiene un efecto aglutinante en el campo cultural: los contenidos culturales heterogéneos se superponen y se atraviesan. Sus límites o fronteras, cuyas formas están determinadas por un aura de autenticidad, se disuelven. Así, las culturas se liberan de todas las costuras, limitaciones o hendiduras y se abren paso hacia una hipercultura: tienen que proceder a su desfactifización para volverse genuinamente culturales, hiperculturales. ¿Vivimos finalmente en una cultura que nos da la libertad de dispersarnos como alegres «turistas» por todo el mundo? Si así fuese, ¿estamos asimilando bien este cambio de paradigma? En esta obra, Byung-Chul Han utiliza el concepto teórico de hiperculturalidad para distinguirlo de los conceptos normativos y mal empleados en el debate actual como multiculturalidad y transculturalidad.
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
About the author
Byung-Chul Han
58 books5,316 followersByung-Chul Han, also spelled Pyŏng-ch'ŏl Han (born 1959 in Seoul), is a German author, cultural theorist, and Professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK) in Berlin, Germany.
Byung-Chul Han studied metallurgy in Korea before he moved to Germany in the 1980s to study Philosophy, German Literature and Catholic theology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich. He received his doctoral degree at Freiburg with a dissertation on Martin Heidegger in 1994.
In 2000, he joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of Basel, where he completed his Habilitation. In 2010 he became a faculty member at the HfG Karlsruhe, where his areas of interest were philosophy of the 18th, 19th and 20th century, ethics, social philosophy, phenomenology, cultural theory, aesthetics, religion, media theory, and intercultural philosophy. Since 2012 he teaches philosophy and cultural studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK), where he directs the newly established Studium Generale general-studies program.
Han is the author of sixteen books, of which the most recent are treatises on what he terms a "society of tiredness" (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft), a "society of transparency" (Transparenzgesellschaft), and on his neologist concept of shanzai, which seeks to identify modes of deconstruction in contemporary practices of Chinese capitalism.
Han's current work focuses on transparency as a cultural norm created by neoliberal market forces, which he understands as the insatiable drive toward voluntary disclosure bordering on the pornographic. According to Han, the dictates of transparency enforce a totalitarian system of openness at the expense of other social values such as shame, secrecy, and trust.
Until recently, he refused to give radio and television interviews and rarely divulges any biographical or personal details, including his date of birth, in public.
Han has written on topics such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, borderline, burnout, depression, exhaustion, internet, love, pop culture, power, rationality, religion, social media, subjectivity, tiredness, transparency and violence.
Byung-Chul Han studied metallurgy in Korea before he moved to Germany in the 1980s to study Philosophy, German Literature and Catholic theology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich. He received his doctoral degree at Freiburg with a dissertation on Martin Heidegger in 1994.
In 2000, he joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of Basel, where he completed his Habilitation. In 2010 he became a faculty member at the HfG Karlsruhe, where his areas of interest were philosophy of the 18th, 19th and 20th century, ethics, social philosophy, phenomenology, cultural theory, aesthetics, religion, media theory, and intercultural philosophy. Since 2012 he teaches philosophy and cultural studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK), where he directs the newly established Studium Generale general-studies program.
Han is the author of sixteen books, of which the most recent are treatises on what he terms a "society of tiredness" (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft), a "society of transparency" (Transparenzgesellschaft), and on his neologist concept of shanzai, which seeks to identify modes of deconstruction in contemporary practices of Chinese capitalism.
Han's current work focuses on transparency as a cultural norm created by neoliberal market forces, which he understands as the insatiable drive toward voluntary disclosure bordering on the pornographic. According to Han, the dictates of transparency enforce a totalitarian system of openness at the expense of other social values such as shame, secrecy, and trust.
Until recently, he refused to give radio and television interviews and rarely divulges any biographical or personal details, including his date of birth, in public.
Han has written on topics such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, borderline, burnout, depression, exhaustion, internet, love, pop culture, power, rationality, religion, social media, subjectivity, tiredness, transparency and violence.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 92 reviews
March 8, 2024
Byung-Chul Han continues to shape my impulses. Always the mark of an important thinker, one who can give me the precise words to my buried intuitions. I walk around while reading, very rarely seated. I have mentioned this before. I only bring it up again to mention that a few of the parts here had me very close to jumping up and down with excitement (I am thinking of chapters like Interculturality, Multiculturality and Transculturality, Appropriation, Culture of Friendliness, and The Wanderer).
Here are a few quotes from the book. I adore these:
- “An ironic distance from one’s own final vocabulary certainly makes it possible for people to exist side by side without engaging in mutual ‘humiliation’. It creates a noble self that does not insult other selves. But irony has no networking effect. It does not create connections or alliances. Rather, it produces a community of considerate monads who possess the skill of ‘imaginative identification’, that is, the ‘ability to envisage ... the actual and possible humiliation of others’. The ironic monads are not creatures of nets, even with their sensitive feelers. The ironic culture remains a culture of monadic selves. There is much inwardness in this culture. It is therefore unable to capture the blend of cultural vocabularies that lacks this inwardness. One could also put it like this: the spices and smells that are interculturally blended, multiplied, are not ironic. Is there such a thing as an ironic sense of smell? We can only say that, at its deepest level, culture is not ironic.”
- “Politeness, too, accomplishes a formal external adaptation by providing a space for mutual self-presentation. It is a communicative technology that makes sure that words and acts do not cause hurt feelings. However, it is characterized by very limited openness. Politeness, after all, is often used to minimize contact with others, with their otherness. It keeps others at a distance. Moreover, politeness is bound up with a cultural code. Where differently coded cultures meet, it loses its efficacy.”
- “Toleration also exhibits very little openness. The other, or stranger, is merely tolerated. What is tolerated is that which deviates from the expectations that are produced by a system of norms. Toleration has a stabilizing effect on fixed systems of rules. Neither toleration nor politeness is characterized by an unregulated openness towards what is other. Irony does not involve this openness either. These three are thus not friendly.”
- “In a ‘multicultural’ society, toleration is mainly something practised by the majority, which represents normality. What is tolerated is whatever deviates from this normality, from the rule, and what constitutes minorities. In this way, toleration perpetuates the distinction between one’s own and the other. It is not the majority but the minority that is tolerated, and there is something base and inferior about minorities. Toleration thus tacitly solidifies the status quo. For everyone involved, what is their own is what is decisive. There is no contact with the other beyond toleration. A form of openness in which what lies outside is not just ‘tolerated’ but actively affirmed, appropriated, lifted up and made a part of one’s own is not proper to toleration. Toleration preserves what is one’s own. Like politeness, it is a rather conservative concept.”
Here are a few quotes from the book. I adore these:
- “An ironic distance from one’s own final vocabulary certainly makes it possible for people to exist side by side without engaging in mutual ‘humiliation’. It creates a noble self that does not insult other selves. But irony has no networking effect. It does not create connections or alliances. Rather, it produces a community of considerate monads who possess the skill of ‘imaginative identification’, that is, the ‘ability to envisage ... the actual and possible humiliation of others’. The ironic monads are not creatures of nets, even with their sensitive feelers. The ironic culture remains a culture of monadic selves. There is much inwardness in this culture. It is therefore unable to capture the blend of cultural vocabularies that lacks this inwardness. One could also put it like this: the spices and smells that are interculturally blended, multiplied, are not ironic. Is there such a thing as an ironic sense of smell? We can only say that, at its deepest level, culture is not ironic.”
- “Politeness, too, accomplishes a formal external adaptation by providing a space for mutual self-presentation. It is a communicative technology that makes sure that words and acts do not cause hurt feelings. However, it is characterized by very limited openness. Politeness, after all, is often used to minimize contact with others, with their otherness. It keeps others at a distance. Moreover, politeness is bound up with a cultural code. Where differently coded cultures meet, it loses its efficacy.”
- “Toleration also exhibits very little openness. The other, or stranger, is merely tolerated. What is tolerated is that which deviates from the expectations that are produced by a system of norms. Toleration has a stabilizing effect on fixed systems of rules. Neither toleration nor politeness is characterized by an unregulated openness towards what is other. Irony does not involve this openness either. These three are thus not friendly.”
- “In a ‘multicultural’ society, toleration is mainly something practised by the majority, which represents normality. What is tolerated is whatever deviates from this normality, from the rule, and what constitutes minorities. In this way, toleration perpetuates the distinction between one’s own and the other. It is not the majority but the minority that is tolerated, and there is something base and inferior about minorities. Toleration thus tacitly solidifies the status quo. For everyone involved, what is their own is what is decisive. There is no contact with the other beyond toleration. A form of openness in which what lies outside is not just ‘tolerated’ but actively affirmed, appropriated, lifted up and made a part of one’s own is not proper to toleration. Toleration preserves what is one’s own. Like politeness, it is a rather conservative concept.”
July 23, 2022
The borders or enclosures that convey a semblance of cultural authenticity or genuineness are dissolving. Culture is bursting at the seams, so to speak...It is becoming unbound, un-restricted, un-ravelled: a hyperculture.
***
Vilém Flusser reflects on the temporality that characterizes the information society. He distinguishes between three forms of time: the time of the image, the time of the image, the time of the bit - in geometrical terms, plane-like time, linear time and point-like time. The time of the image belongs to mythical time. Mythical time is a perspicacious order in which every thing has its fixed place. If something moves away from its place, it is put back. The time of the book belongs to historical time. Historical time is the linearity of history. It is a stream flowing from the past into the future...Today's time, by contrast, possesses neither a mythical nor a historical horizon. It lacks any comprehensive horizon of meaning. It is de-theologized, or de-teleologicized, into an 'an atom-like' 'universe of bits', a 'mosaic universe' in which possibilities 'buzz' like points, or 'sprinkle' like 'grains', as 'discrete sensations'...
***
Homi K. Bhabha's concept of hybridity questions the purity or originality of culture itself. According to him, cultures are not fixed, unchanging entities that could be the subjects of hermeneutic understanding. Hybridity marks the 'interstitial passage' that creates identity, a culture's image of itself, as an effect of differences. The boundary, as a liminal space of transition, does not simply delimit or exclude; it engenders. It is an interstitial space that keeps the process of re-articulating the differences, and thus also the identities, going.
***
The bridge is a symbol for the idea that, in a certain sense, the relation precedes the things it relates.
***
...what is specific about the world of hyperculture is the expansion of spaces that can be accessed not according to an economy of power but according to aesthetic principles, that is, spaces that are part of the realm of play and semblance...
***
Dialectical is precisely that figure of thought that says that identity is always already mediated by difference.
***
The 'rhizome' denotes a non-centred plurality that cannot be subjected to any comprehensive order...a rhizome is an open structure whose heterogenous elements constantly play into each other, shift across each other and are in a process of permanent 'becoming'. The rhizomatic space is a space not of 'negotiation' but of transformation and blending. Rhizomatic distribution, even dispersal, de-substatializes and de-internalizes culture and thereby turns it into hyperculture.
***
The only decisive criterion is 'aesthetic sensibility'.
***
Walter Benjamin, in his 'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility', derives the aura of a natural or artificial object from its 'unique existence in a particular place'. The aura is the resplendence and radiance of a specific 'here and now' that cannot be repeated 'there'.
...globalization de-auratizes culture and turns it into hyperculture.
***
For Zygmunt Bauman, the modern human is a pilgrim. Modernity, Bauman says, gave the pilgrim 'a seminally novel twist'. Modern humans, as pilgrims, walk across a desert-like earth, giving 'form to the formless', lending 'continuity to the episodic' and making 'a whole out of the fragmentary'.
Hyperculturality creates a particular kind of tourist. Hypercultural tourists are not on their way to a counter-world, to a 'There'. They rather inhabit a space that does not contain an asymmetry between 'Here' and 'There'. They are 'fully here'. They are 'at home in a space of immanence'.
***
A world with a hypertextual structure consists of countless windows, so to speak, but none of the windows open on to an absolute horizon.
***
In a discontinuous space, or a space that keeps changing its structure, power is hard to establish.
***
Unlike politeness, friendliness acts without rules. Precisely because of this irregularity, it can have far-reaching effects. It produces maximum cohesion with minimum connectedness...Perhaps friendliness takes the place of Leibniz's God, who helps the windowless monads establish a harmonious being-with. Friendliness gives the monads windows.
***
Time puts everything in the place it deserves. If a thing leaves its place, then time puts it right: it rights it. The world is therefore full of meaning: full of Gods. This righting of the world by time is just because it again and again puts everything in order.
- Vilém Flusser
***
Vilém Flusser reflects on the temporality that characterizes the information society. He distinguishes between three forms of time: the time of the image, the time of the image, the time of the bit - in geometrical terms, plane-like time, linear time and point-like time. The time of the image belongs to mythical time. Mythical time is a perspicacious order in which every thing has its fixed place. If something moves away from its place, it is put back. The time of the book belongs to historical time. Historical time is the linearity of history. It is a stream flowing from the past into the future...Today's time, by contrast, possesses neither a mythical nor a historical horizon. It lacks any comprehensive horizon of meaning. It is de-theologized, or de-teleologicized, into an 'an atom-like' 'universe of bits', a 'mosaic universe' in which possibilities 'buzz' like points, or 'sprinkle' like 'grains', as 'discrete sensations'...
***
Homi K. Bhabha's concept of hybridity questions the purity or originality of culture itself. According to him, cultures are not fixed, unchanging entities that could be the subjects of hermeneutic understanding. Hybridity marks the 'interstitial passage' that creates identity, a culture's image of itself, as an effect of differences. The boundary, as a liminal space of transition, does not simply delimit or exclude; it engenders. It is an interstitial space that keeps the process of re-articulating the differences, and thus also the identities, going.
***
The bridge is a symbol for the idea that, in a certain sense, the relation precedes the things it relates.
***
...what is specific about the world of hyperculture is the expansion of spaces that can be accessed not according to an economy of power but according to aesthetic principles, that is, spaces that are part of the realm of play and semblance...
***
Dialectical is precisely that figure of thought that says that identity is always already mediated by difference.
***
The 'rhizome' denotes a non-centred plurality that cannot be subjected to any comprehensive order...a rhizome is an open structure whose heterogenous elements constantly play into each other, shift across each other and are in a process of permanent 'becoming'. The rhizomatic space is a space not of 'negotiation' but of transformation and blending. Rhizomatic distribution, even dispersal, de-substatializes and de-internalizes culture and thereby turns it into hyperculture.
***
The only decisive criterion is 'aesthetic sensibility'.
***
Walter Benjamin, in his 'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility', derives the aura of a natural or artificial object from its 'unique existence in a particular place'. The aura is the resplendence and radiance of a specific 'here and now' that cannot be repeated 'there'.
...globalization de-auratizes culture and turns it into hyperculture.
***
For Zygmunt Bauman, the modern human is a pilgrim. Modernity, Bauman says, gave the pilgrim 'a seminally novel twist'. Modern humans, as pilgrims, walk across a desert-like earth, giving 'form to the formless', lending 'continuity to the episodic' and making 'a whole out of the fragmentary'.
Hyperculturality creates a particular kind of tourist. Hypercultural tourists are not on their way to a counter-world, to a 'There'. They rather inhabit a space that does not contain an asymmetry between 'Here' and 'There'. They are 'fully here'. They are 'at home in a space of immanence'.
***
A world with a hypertextual structure consists of countless windows, so to speak, but none of the windows open on to an absolute horizon.
***
In a discontinuous space, or a space that keeps changing its structure, power is hard to establish.
***
Unlike politeness, friendliness acts without rules. Precisely because of this irregularity, it can have far-reaching effects. It produces maximum cohesion with minimum connectedness...Perhaps friendliness takes the place of Leibniz's God, who helps the windowless monads establish a harmonious being-with. Friendliness gives the monads windows.
***
Time puts everything in the place it deserves. If a thing leaves its place, then time puts it right: it rights it. The world is therefore full of meaning: full of Gods. This righting of the world by time is just because it again and again puts everything in order.
- Vilém Flusser
May 21, 2024
Met tussenpozen lees ik graag een essay van Byung-Chul Han. De ideeën van de Duits-Koreaanse filosoof, stevig met één been in onze (neoliberale) maatschappij en met het andere in zowel de oosterse als westerse filosofische tradities, spreken me aan. Analytisch ontledend, doorspekt met citaten uit de literatuur en andere kunstvormen, met veel oog voor taal en de etymologische oorsprong en vaak met een scherp kritische ondertoon betreffende de negatieve uitwassen van het bovengenoemde neoliberalisme, bevestigt, verbreedt en verdiept hij mijn eigen bescheiden blik op de wereld en onze westerse denkbeelden.
Het neoliberalisme kwam in dit essay niet voor en ook de kritische ondertoon ontbrak. Dit was eerder een verwachtingsvolle, zelfs hoopvolle Byung-Chul Han, wat me halverwege even de eerste publicatiedatum deed checken: 2005. De meeste andere essays die ik las zijn een pak recenter. Ik kon niet anders dan de conclusie trekken dat de globalisering en de hypercultuur waarover hij hier schrijft, geënt op het toen ontluikende voorbeeld van het internet waar je via hyperteksten eindeloos kan blijven klikken, Hans hoopvolle verwachtingen niet heeft ingelost en dat wellicht onder de invloed van het neoliberale denken dat ons louter tot functioneel produceren en consumeren aanzet.
In 'Hyperculture' vond ik een aantal denkbeelden terug die ik ooit ook bij Alessandro Baricco las, in zijn De barbaren (2006). Het oppervlakkige, via hyperteksten (door)klikken en -scrollen langs de meest diverse sites, als hypertoeristen die zonder de diepte op te zoeken van de ene cultuur naar de andere surfen, werd ook door Baricco eerder als iets nieuws en uitdagends gezien, dan als een verlies of teloorgang. Baricco kreeg toen ook het verwijt dat hij filosofisch wilde zijn, maar geen kritisch standpunt innam. Misschien was dat omdat we toen op de drempel stonden van iets wat nu pas duidelijk begint te worden. De media staat momenteel bol van de artikels over wat een toenemend online leven en weinig of niet gecontroleerde sociale media met ons doen, zowel met onze hersenen als met onze mentale gezondheid.
Het zou voor een review te ver gaan om hier over door te bomen. Maar mijn conclusie luidt: zelfs een achterhaalde, of beter: vroege Byung-Chul Han kan aanzetten tot denken en doordenken. Net zoals dat met de meeste andere filosofen gaat. Dus alsnog 3,5*.
Het neoliberalisme kwam in dit essay niet voor en ook de kritische ondertoon ontbrak. Dit was eerder een verwachtingsvolle, zelfs hoopvolle Byung-Chul Han, wat me halverwege even de eerste publicatiedatum deed checken: 2005. De meeste andere essays die ik las zijn een pak recenter. Ik kon niet anders dan de conclusie trekken dat de globalisering en de hypercultuur waarover hij hier schrijft, geënt op het toen ontluikende voorbeeld van het internet waar je via hyperteksten eindeloos kan blijven klikken, Hans hoopvolle verwachtingen niet heeft ingelost en dat wellicht onder de invloed van het neoliberale denken dat ons louter tot functioneel produceren en consumeren aanzet.
In 'Hyperculture' vond ik een aantal denkbeelden terug die ik ooit ook bij Alessandro Baricco las, in zijn De barbaren (2006). Het oppervlakkige, via hyperteksten (door)klikken en -scrollen langs de meest diverse sites, als hypertoeristen die zonder de diepte op te zoeken van de ene cultuur naar de andere surfen, werd ook door Baricco eerder als iets nieuws en uitdagends gezien, dan als een verlies of teloorgang. Baricco kreeg toen ook het verwijt dat hij filosofisch wilde zijn, maar geen kritisch standpunt innam. Misschien was dat omdat we toen op de drempel stonden van iets wat nu pas duidelijk begint te worden. De media staat momenteel bol van de artikels over wat een toenemend online leven en weinig of niet gecontroleerde sociale media met ons doen, zowel met onze hersenen als met onze mentale gezondheid.
Het zou voor een review te ver gaan om hier over door te bomen. Maar mijn conclusie luidt: zelfs een achterhaalde, of beter: vroege Byung-Chul Han kan aanzetten tot denken en doordenken. Net zoals dat met de meeste andere filosofen gaat. Dus alsnog 3,5*.
December 5, 2019
Creo que es el más complejo que eh leído de Byung-Chul. Son varios ensayos cortitos sobre el tema de la cultura. Entiendo que avanza intentando eliminar rastros dialécticos en Heiddeger, hacia una sociedad sin antagonismos. Toda cultura se relaciona con otra formando una hiperculturalidad.
November 10, 2019
Mais um ótimo livro deste filósofo sul-coreano radicado na Alemanha que é o Byung-Chul Han. Agora em finais de novembro de 2019 comprei este livro que completou minha coleção de livros dele lançados no Brasil pela Editora Vozes. Me faltam, então, aqueles não publicados por esta editora. Os textos teóricos de Byung-Chul Han são acessíveis e incrivelmente atuais para um filósofo, como o tema da hiperculturalidade, que é a maçaroca, a muvuca de elementos culturais em que nos encontramos envolvidos na pós-modernidade. No livro, Han deixa bem claro que a hiperculturalidade excede as fronteiras e cria novas formas de iterações culturais, sempre hiperbólicas, sempre superpostas. Ele demonstra como ela é diferente da interculturalidade, da multiculturalidade e ainda da transculturalidade, temas que já foram caros para gerações anteriores. Agora, a forma de mirar para as transformações e imbricações do cultural em nossa sociedade é pensar as suas misturas e sobreposições, sem limites, sem número em que tudo pode acontecer. Alguns dos textos contidos neste livro são alguns exemplos dessa hiperculturalidade.
May 2, 2022
En plena era de la globalización y en un momento de la historia en la que parece que se vive una de las grandes revoluciones de la Historia -la feminista-, Byung-Chul Han se adentra en cómo nuestros días están creando una nueva cultura, un nuevo concepto. El cambio constante trae como consecuencia el nacimiento de nuevas realidades, y este pequeño ensayo se adentra en una de ellas.
En Hiperculturalidad se explora, usando grandes pensadores y su visión de la cultura, en cómo las conexiones instantáneas alrededor del planeta está mutando la "independencia" de cada cultura y presentando un horizonte no muy lejano en el que no se distinguirán las unas de las otras. El filósofo alemán lo hace desde un punto de vista optimista, creyendo firmemente que cuando eso ocurra, muchas cadenas que nos atan se habrán roto para siempre.
En Hiperculturalidad se explora, usando grandes pensadores y su visión de la cultura, en cómo las conexiones instantáneas alrededor del planeta está mutando la "independencia" de cada cultura y presentando un horizonte no muy lejano en el que no se distinguirán las unas de las otras. El filósofo alemán lo hace desde un punto de vista optimista, creyendo firmemente que cuando eso ocurra, muchas cadenas que nos atan se habrán roto para siempre.
March 18, 2023
Benedico l’esistenza di Byung-Chul Han su questa terra.
February 8, 2019
Ciento veinte páginas de puro optimismo. El Han de 2005 no sabía lo que se venía.
April 30, 2023
2,5 Sterne
Es zeigt sich, dass man Han's ältere Werke gelesen haben sollte, um die neueren zu durchdringen.
Für mich ein Schlüsselbuch zum Verständnis von Agonie des Eros.
Allerdings ist das auch mein erster Kritikpunkt an den kurzen Büchern, die ehr in essayistischer Form von ihm dargeboten werden. Er liefert keine sauberen Definitionen, nimmt sich meist irgendeinen Philosophen heraus und versucht daran einen Übertrag auf das Thema, das ihn beschäftigt, in diesem Fall Hyperkultur, abzuliefern. Das wirkt meist sehr sprunghaft. Eine schlüssige Argumentationskette sucht man bei ihm vergeblich. Seine Prämissen und Schlussfolgerungen wirken willkürlich.
Trotzdem liefert er einige interessante Punkte, die ich bedenkenswert finde.
Habe verstanden warum für viele die Hyperkultur mit einem Identitätsverlust einhergeht. Hier spielen die Begriffe verortung und entortung eine entscheidende Rolle.
Er spricht über Deleuzes Rhizom, über den hyperkulturellen Touristen, der nirgends ankommt und über die Zeit, die in der Hyperkultur nur im Präsens vorhanden ist.
Die Gedanken zu Kafkas Odradek fand ich mega spannend.
Er ist in diesem Buch weniger essayistisch unterwegs, als in Agonie des Eros. Meist stellt er am Ende des sehr kurzen Kapitels ein paar Fragen. Das ist insofern angenehmer, da seine Schlussfolgerungen, sowieso durch die fehlende schlüssige Argumentation nur bedingt nachvollziehbar sind. Ist natürlich für die, die im beipflichten easy zu schlucken und alle andern werden wie dumme Schulkids stehen gelassen und haben wenig Möglichkeiten ihm was entgegenzusetzen, da kein ausreichendes Material außer der beispielhaften Aussage: "Hyperkultur ist keine Erinnerungskultur", "das Internet ist kein uferloser Ozean sondern eine touristische Vergnügungsreise eines Konsumenten", geliefert wird.
Den größten Zitatanteil und Gedanken an denen er sich abarbeitet, bekommt Heidegger. Was aber passt, da er den Antagonisten zur Hyperkultur darstellt. Er hatte wenig Sinn für Vielfalt. In seiner stummen fensterlosen Welt, spiegeln sich die Dinge schweigsam vor sich hin. Dafür ist der Schwellenübergang äußerst dramatisch und schmerzhaft. Bei dem muss der Eros ja mächtig präsent gewesen sein, folgt man Han's Logik.
Walter Benjamin, Zygmunt Baumann, Schiller, Leibniz, Kant, Nietzsche, Richard Porty, Hegel und zum Schluss Handke werden außerdem zitiert und verwurstet.
Eine wirkliche Leseempfehlung kann ich nicht aussprechen. Dafür ist das alles zu sehr zusammengestoppelt. Für mich war das ne Ergänzung des Beitrages von Reckwitz aus Das Ende der Illusionen: Politik, Ökonomie und Kultur in der Spätmoderne
Es zeigt sich, dass man Han's ältere Werke gelesen haben sollte, um die neueren zu durchdringen.
Für mich ein Schlüsselbuch zum Verständnis von Agonie des Eros.
Allerdings ist das auch mein erster Kritikpunkt an den kurzen Büchern, die ehr in essayistischer Form von ihm dargeboten werden. Er liefert keine sauberen Definitionen, nimmt sich meist irgendeinen Philosophen heraus und versucht daran einen Übertrag auf das Thema, das ihn beschäftigt, in diesem Fall Hyperkultur, abzuliefern. Das wirkt meist sehr sprunghaft. Eine schlüssige Argumentationskette sucht man bei ihm vergeblich. Seine Prämissen und Schlussfolgerungen wirken willkürlich.
Trotzdem liefert er einige interessante Punkte, die ich bedenkenswert finde.
Habe verstanden warum für viele die Hyperkultur mit einem Identitätsverlust einhergeht. Hier spielen die Begriffe verortung und entortung eine entscheidende Rolle.
Er spricht über Deleuzes Rhizom, über den hyperkulturellen Touristen, der nirgends ankommt und über die Zeit, die in der Hyperkultur nur im Präsens vorhanden ist.
Die Gedanken zu Kafkas Odradek fand ich mega spannend.
Er ist in diesem Buch weniger essayistisch unterwegs, als in Agonie des Eros. Meist stellt er am Ende des sehr kurzen Kapitels ein paar Fragen. Das ist insofern angenehmer, da seine Schlussfolgerungen, sowieso durch die fehlende schlüssige Argumentation nur bedingt nachvollziehbar sind. Ist natürlich für die, die im beipflichten easy zu schlucken und alle andern werden wie dumme Schulkids stehen gelassen und haben wenig Möglichkeiten ihm was entgegenzusetzen, da kein ausreichendes Material außer der beispielhaften Aussage: "Hyperkultur ist keine Erinnerungskultur", "das Internet ist kein uferloser Ozean sondern eine touristische Vergnügungsreise eines Konsumenten", geliefert wird.
Den größten Zitatanteil und Gedanken an denen er sich abarbeitet, bekommt Heidegger. Was aber passt, da er den Antagonisten zur Hyperkultur darstellt. Er hatte wenig Sinn für Vielfalt. In seiner stummen fensterlosen Welt, spiegeln sich die Dinge schweigsam vor sich hin. Dafür ist der Schwellenübergang äußerst dramatisch und schmerzhaft. Bei dem muss der Eros ja mächtig präsent gewesen sein, folgt man Han's Logik.
Walter Benjamin, Zygmunt Baumann, Schiller, Leibniz, Kant, Nietzsche, Richard Porty, Hegel und zum Schluss Handke werden außerdem zitiert und verwurstet.
Eine wirkliche Leseempfehlung kann ich nicht aussprechen. Dafür ist das alles zu sehr zusammengestoppelt. Für mich war das ne Ergänzung des Beitrages von Reckwitz aus Das Ende der Illusionen: Politik, Ökonomie und Kultur in der Spätmoderne
March 29, 2026
The De-Siting of the Soul
A time not able to carry much meaning - this is how many people in the West experience the age we inhabit. In the past years there was a lot of discourse about the 'Meaning Crisis' - the collective inability of most people in Western societies to answer the question "Why does any of this matter?"
While the phrase 'Meaning Crisis' started to be used only in the last seven years or so, the idea itself can probably be traced back at least to Nietzsche's 'death of God' and so it's no wonder that Byung-Chul Han, already in 2005, was able to write such a striking analysis of the cultural situation we find ourselves in - a cultural situation which explains the even stronger rise of perceived meaninglessness of people's lives that could be seen in the last decades.
The term that Han used for our cultural situation is "Hyperculture". He defines it as being "based on a dense side by side of different ideas, signs, symbols, images and sounds". What this effectively means is that cultural space is de-distanced first of all by globalization, but maybe even more by the adoption and use of the internet. A few decades ago, one needed to travel far away to experience different cultures - today there is a dense side by side and overlapping of all kinds of different cultures in most places. The cultures are not tied to specific sites any more - they don't really have a center. Even when travelling far away, one is bound to find the same side by side of cultures there too (McDonald's, Hollywood, etc.) Today, more than 20 years after the book was written, social media platforms increase this effect even more: global trends, expressions, memes, and countless similar phenomena.
Han observed and predicted that hyperculture triggers resistance in those for whom this muddling of cultures means the trauma of loss, of the 'pure' cultures they inhabited and that grounded them. Han calls the common reaction to this "fundamentalism of sites", which can include re-theologization, re-mythologization and re-nationalization.
An example for the last category can be seen in the well-documented right shift of politics in Europe, especially since 2015. These movements advocate for a return to the 'pure' culture of their nation and inversely for a rejection of any immigration. As Herder shows, European culture itself is "a plant sprung from Roman, Greek and Arabic feed", and Hegel wrote that the ancient Greek culture itself was anything but pure, but owes its existence to a "conflux of the most various nations".
Hegel's insight is as true on a personal level, as it is on a cultural level: "Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another". Psychologically speaking, developing a self-model requires an Other to mirror yourself back at you - we only truly exist in relationship. Han notes that the Chinese sign for 'human being' includes the sign for 'between' - which points at the same fundamental truth: the human being cannot be taken for a substance - but must rather be understood as a relation. Hegel makes the same point in relation to the Greek spirit / culture. According to him it is "a superficial and absurd idea that such a beautiful and truly free life can be produced by a process so incomplex as the development of a race keeping within the limits of blood-relationship and friendship."
The point is clear: the presence of the foreign is necessary for the formation of one's own.
An important aspect of this is the concept of 'appropriation'. While this term is mostly used negatively in today's discourse (think 'cultural appropriation') - for Han it is an essential part of education and identity: "Only an idiot or a god could live without appropriation" - and one's identity is, he adds, in a sense nothing more than the result of successful appropriation.
But what happens when the frameworks one appropriates from have themselves lost their footing? The 'Meaning Crisis' can be traced back to a series of historical 'decentering' events: the Copernican revolution removed humans from the center of the cosmos, Darwinian evolution removed our sense of special design, and Nietzsche's "God is dead" declaration signaled the collapse of the transcendent framework that had long supplied people with meaning, morality, and a sense of belonging. The ripples of the last of these events came to be felt more definitively only much more recently with the rise of people identifying as non-religious or atheistic. But even most of such people are still 'site fundamentalists' in the sense that Han defines it. Western culture produced a range of 'surrogate gods' (The Nation, ideological progress, science and reason, consumer capitalism, etc.) that took the place of the old God and performed the same psychological function.
Hyperculture spells out the decentering of these 'surrogate gods'. Being confronted with the side by side of these manifold cultures, it becomes harder and harder not to notice their arbitrariness. The de-siting of the cultures means people are less embedded in them and experience an increasing individualization. There is a new practice of freedom, as people follow their own inclinations and cobble together an identity from the expanding pool of practices and forms of life offered by the hyperculture - but at the same time these practices are not able to provide the same meaning once they are taken out of their cultural and communal context.
The 'Patchwork Religion' people create for themselves is missing the interpretative frame needed to provide actual meaning. One possible step towards a solution for this problem might be found in Bernardo Kastrup's idea of myth as "any interpretive frame used to ascribe meaning to perceptions and sense experiences". In his view, today's dominant myth (scientific materialism) fails to satisfy the deep human need for transcendence that myths have always served and as a solution he proposes a new myth based on his analytical idealism, which I will cover more in-depth in a future text about Kastrup's book 'More Than Allegory'.
My reading of Han tells me that he would critique this approach as a regression - a 're-mythologization' that tries to respond to modernity's groundlessness by imposing a new absolute, by attempting to fill the void instead of learning to inhabit it. Peter Rollins, who has written about this existential void extensively, put it beautifully: "While the yoke of lack might appear too heavy to bear, in truth it is only crushing when we refuse to bear it - when we force others to carry it instead."
What seems to be core to Han's solution for our current predicament is Heidegger's concept of Gelassenheit - a different relationship with time, silence and otherness. He does not promise a new horizon, but rather a posture - a way of standing in the open without flinching at the nakedness.
There is no longer the sort of fulfilling time that is due to a beautiful structure of past, present and future, that is, to a story, to narrative suspense. Time becomes naked, that is, devoid of narration. A point-like time, or event time, emerges. Because it is poor in horizons, this kind of time is not able to carry much meaning. (Byung-Chul Han)
A time not able to carry much meaning - this is how many people in the West experience the age we inhabit. In the past years there was a lot of discourse about the 'Meaning Crisis' - the collective inability of most people in Western societies to answer the question "Why does any of this matter?"
While the phrase 'Meaning Crisis' started to be used only in the last seven years or so, the idea itself can probably be traced back at least to Nietzsche's 'death of God' and so it's no wonder that Byung-Chul Han, already in 2005, was able to write such a striking analysis of the cultural situation we find ourselves in - a cultural situation which explains the even stronger rise of perceived meaninglessness of people's lives that could be seen in the last decades.
The term that Han used for our cultural situation is "Hyperculture". He defines it as being "based on a dense side by side of different ideas, signs, symbols, images and sounds". What this effectively means is that cultural space is de-distanced first of all by globalization, but maybe even more by the adoption and use of the internet. A few decades ago, one needed to travel far away to experience different cultures - today there is a dense side by side and overlapping of all kinds of different cultures in most places. The cultures are not tied to specific sites any more - they don't really have a center. Even when travelling far away, one is bound to find the same side by side of cultures there too (McDonald's, Hollywood, etc.) Today, more than 20 years after the book was written, social media platforms increase this effect even more: global trends, expressions, memes, and countless similar phenomena.
Han observed and predicted that hyperculture triggers resistance in those for whom this muddling of cultures means the trauma of loss, of the 'pure' cultures they inhabited and that grounded them. Han calls the common reaction to this "fundamentalism of sites", which can include re-theologization, re-mythologization and re-nationalization.
An example for the last category can be seen in the well-documented right shift of politics in Europe, especially since 2015. These movements advocate for a return to the 'pure' culture of their nation and inversely for a rejection of any immigration. As Herder shows, European culture itself is "a plant sprung from Roman, Greek and Arabic feed", and Hegel wrote that the ancient Greek culture itself was anything but pure, but owes its existence to a "conflux of the most various nations".
Hegel's insight is as true on a personal level, as it is on a cultural level: "Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another". Psychologically speaking, developing a self-model requires an Other to mirror yourself back at you - we only truly exist in relationship. Han notes that the Chinese sign for 'human being' includes the sign for 'between' - which points at the same fundamental truth: the human being cannot be taken for a substance - but must rather be understood as a relation. Hegel makes the same point in relation to the Greek spirit / culture. According to him it is "a superficial and absurd idea that such a beautiful and truly free life can be produced by a process so incomplex as the development of a race keeping within the limits of blood-relationship and friendship."
The point is clear: the presence of the foreign is necessary for the formation of one's own.
An important aspect of this is the concept of 'appropriation'. While this term is mostly used negatively in today's discourse (think 'cultural appropriation') - for Han it is an essential part of education and identity: "Only an idiot or a god could live without appropriation" - and one's identity is, he adds, in a sense nothing more than the result of successful appropriation.
But what happens when the frameworks one appropriates from have themselves lost their footing? The 'Meaning Crisis' can be traced back to a series of historical 'decentering' events: the Copernican revolution removed humans from the center of the cosmos, Darwinian evolution removed our sense of special design, and Nietzsche's "God is dead" declaration signaled the collapse of the transcendent framework that had long supplied people with meaning, morality, and a sense of belonging. The ripples of the last of these events came to be felt more definitively only much more recently with the rise of people identifying as non-religious or atheistic. But even most of such people are still 'site fundamentalists' in the sense that Han defines it. Western culture produced a range of 'surrogate gods' (The Nation, ideological progress, science and reason, consumer capitalism, etc.) that took the place of the old God and performed the same psychological function.
Hyperculture spells out the decentering of these 'surrogate gods'. Being confronted with the side by side of these manifold cultures, it becomes harder and harder not to notice their arbitrariness. The de-siting of the cultures means people are less embedded in them and experience an increasing individualization. There is a new practice of freedom, as people follow their own inclinations and cobble together an identity from the expanding pool of practices and forms of life offered by the hyperculture - but at the same time these practices are not able to provide the same meaning once they are taken out of their cultural and communal context.
The 'Patchwork Religion' people create for themselves is missing the interpretative frame needed to provide actual meaning. One possible step towards a solution for this problem might be found in Bernardo Kastrup's idea of myth as "any interpretive frame used to ascribe meaning to perceptions and sense experiences". In his view, today's dominant myth (scientific materialism) fails to satisfy the deep human need for transcendence that myths have always served and as a solution he proposes a new myth based on his analytical idealism, which I will cover more in-depth in a future text about Kastrup's book 'More Than Allegory'.
My reading of Han tells me that he would critique this approach as a regression - a 're-mythologization' that tries to respond to modernity's groundlessness by imposing a new absolute, by attempting to fill the void instead of learning to inhabit it. Peter Rollins, who has written about this existential void extensively, put it beautifully: "While the yoke of lack might appear too heavy to bear, in truth it is only crushing when we refuse to bear it - when we force others to carry it instead."
What seems to be core to Han's solution for our current predicament is Heidegger's concept of Gelassenheit - a different relationship with time, silence and otherness. He does not promise a new horizon, but rather a posture - a way of standing in the open without flinching at the nakedness.
November 23, 2019
Aunque hablamos frecuente de la globalización en términos económicos, este fenómeno también incide en la interacción cultural que hoy en día se da entre todas ellas. Este libro habla del turismo, del contacto entre comercios e ingredientes de distintas naciones, y cómo no, de Internet. Desde un punto de vista totalmente filosófico, Han analiza cómo distintas nociones culturales se mezclan y se superponen, con resultados impredecibles.
Por el texto desfilan autores como Nietzsche, Deleuze, Kant y Heidegger, y se habla frecuentemente de conceptos tales como cultura, ser o lugar. También se debate acerca de si hay culturas que imponen o que se aúnan. En su conjunto, me parece que el libro pierde el horizonte que se marca en la premisa de descubrir si hoy en día somos turistas o peregrinos en este mundo. Todo se confunde en referencias que no concluyen nada claro, se exponen distintos modelos y dejan abiertas todas las interpretaciones.
Por el texto desfilan autores como Nietzsche, Deleuze, Kant y Heidegger, y se habla frecuentemente de conceptos tales como cultura, ser o lugar. También se debate acerca de si hay culturas que imponen o que se aúnan. En su conjunto, me parece que el libro pierde el horizonte que se marca en la premisa de descubrir si hoy en día somos turistas o peregrinos en este mundo. Todo se confunde en referencias que no concluyen nada claro, se exponen distintos modelos y dejan abiertas todas las interpretaciones.
April 5, 2024
Un bucle infinito que va rodeando y recitando la misma idea: la cultura ya no pertenece a la tradición, pertenece a la industria.
June 23, 2022
We are all cultural tourists wearing “hawaiian shirts” wherever we go; the landscape is flat; our destination and home are one in the same; culture is plural and hyper appropriating everything like the Far East which classically didn’t recognise the term; the possibility of freedom and unity is greater if we can transcend the fundamentally Othering concept of home, Byung-Chul writes.
Hyperculture seems to, by the slightest notch, coin the surrounding zeitgeist better than multiculture.
Surprisingly utopian writing from ma boi Byung. Radical departure from the tech skepticism of “psychopolitics”.
Hyperculture seems to, by the slightest notch, coin the surrounding zeitgeist better than multiculture.
Surprisingly utopian writing from ma boi Byung. Radical departure from the tech skepticism of “psychopolitics”.
March 5, 2026
POR FIN ME LO ACABÉ, LO LLEVO LEYENDO COMO UN AÑO. Tiene conceptos interesantes. Personalmente me interesó por mi background de diferentes culturas y mi fascinación por internet como medio para la globalización. Tomó un enfoque un poco distinto a lo que esperaba, pero está bien.
February 12, 2023
Interesting work regarding the effect of the internet and globalisation on culture - Byung Chul Han depicts it positively and charged with potential. The closing of distances and increase in connectivity disrupts boundaries in interesting ways and is the driving force of culture. He responds to the philosophy of Heidegger(among other philosophers) which was strongly rooted in the phenomenology of the home world(also he was a nazi which wasn't surprising) - and concludes with an affirmation of the new breed of homo liber, the liberated man. Wish he responded to Baudrillard's ideas - hyperreality and media is literally his home turf. For that I feel this book is lacking - a little too utopia and positive, and didn't engage with Baudrillard's work at all.
August 17, 2022
Estoy de acuerdo con el autor en uno de los puntos que creo que él critica: que el capitalismo haya tomado baza en la dimensión cultural humana, así como la tecnología (aunque la misma ayuda, son preferibles las experiencias en persona) y en su crítica al colonialismo. No obstante, estoy en desacuerdo en todo lo demás. La salida del espacio y del tiempo por parte de la cultura no implica en absoluto una pérdida de aura ni tampoco ninguna catastrofe que arruine el verdadero ser, pues en todo caso hablamos de una transformación en la que pasamos de un pequeño grupo a uno grande; la cultura se complementa y evoluciona en un proceso dialéctico que puede ser positivo para todos. Asimismo, habla de un ser desunido que ha perdido el horizonte, la dirección y yo personalmente no lo veo así por lo que respecta a la cultura, que es a lo que él se refiere, no hay nada de malo en vagar, pues ello es un fin en sí mismo. Además, tampoco estoy de acuerdo en que la tolerancia sólo se extiende hacia la minoría.
Por otro lado, el autor parece defender un ser individual diferenciado, lo cual no es que sea malo, pero pienso que es más beneficioso que exista una heterogeneidad a la par que respeto. No creo que critique el intercambio cultural, pues no veo clara su postura contraria a ello, pero pienso que ha creado un problema donde no lo hay.
Para terminar tengo que decir que no pretendo, con mi crítica, desalentar la lectura del libro, pues cada uno tiene que juzgarlo por sí mismo. Es un tema que da lugar a demasiadas subjetividades, es complejo de valorar.
Por otro lado, el autor parece defender un ser individual diferenciado, lo cual no es que sea malo, pero pienso que es más beneficioso que exista una heterogeneidad a la par que respeto. No creo que critique el intercambio cultural, pues no veo clara su postura contraria a ello, pero pienso que ha creado un problema donde no lo hay.
Para terminar tengo que decir que no pretendo, con mi crítica, desalentar la lectura del libro, pues cada uno tiene que juzgarlo por sí mismo. Es un tema que da lugar a demasiadas subjetividades, es complejo de valorar.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Read
October 20, 2022This is a short but confusing read. To me, at least. Perhaps if I were more familiar with philosophical writing, Heidegger in particular, I could have enjoyed my reading experience more. The writer chiefly explains his ideas when comparing to other philosophers: if he just poses his own he uses too many one-liners that could have been poetic, had he focussed on style rather than ideas.
The central premise also confuses me: it seems like Han sums up negative aspects of today's detached, interchangeable cultures where we are all tourists in our own and others' cultures, yet he seems to applaud the idea of people transcending cultures to being friendly hyperpeople.
The central premise also confuses me: it seems like Han sums up negative aspects of today's detached, interchangeable cultures where we are all tourists in our own and others' cultures, yet he seems to applaud the idea of people transcending cultures to being friendly hyperpeople.
September 15, 2024
"La hipercultura no crea una masa cultural uniforme, una cultura única, monocromática. Antes bien, provoca una creciente individualización. Siguiendo las propias inclinaciones, uno arma la identidad a partir del fondo hipercultural de formas y prácticas de vida. De esta forma, emergen figuras e identidades de tipo patchwork. Su variedad de colores hace referencia a una nueva práctica de la libertad, que tiene lugar gracias a la desfactización hipercultural del mundo de la vida."
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
June 10, 2021
O livro, que se propõe a falar da hipermodernidade e do mundo globalizado, até tem coisas interessantes. Dialoga com Heidegger, Nietzsche, Flusser, caracteriza o espaço contemporâneo saindo das mônadas fechadas. Seus vários capítulos de 4 páginas em média, no entanto, não aprofundam os temas e os diálogos que inicia. Se quiserem ler um livro do tema, leia Palácio de Cristal.
December 25, 2023
„Before he was famous“ - hier tut Han wenigstens noch so als seien seine Sophismen Produkte eines argumentativen Spannungsfelds.
Nonetheless: instructions are unclear, dick is stuck in regressive conservatism. [moans in heideggerian]
Nonetheless: instructions are unclear, dick is stuck in regressive conservatism. [moans in heideggerian]
June 28, 2024
really good and really readable. i finished it like an hour!
December 3, 2021
"A World Wide Web, a rede mundial de computadores, em certo sentido, transformou o mundo em uma paisagem marítima. Quando se clica no navegador do netscape, aparece um mar noturno com estrelas e farol claro. Navega-se pelo mar infinito de informações. No Word Wide Web as pessoas zarpam, portanto, como se estivessem em alto-mar. Em vez de 'se logar', as pessoas poderiam dizer 'embarcar'."
October 16, 2022
A 100 page definition of the trends shaping our modern culture. Sheds light on the idea of multiculturalism as something which has been superseded by hyperculturalism. If I’m being honest, it is not all that engaging for the casual reader, try Agony of Eros or the Burnout Society instead.
My top takeaway from his essay is the idea that tolerance, tact, and politeness as glues for society in such a varied cultural environment can be replaced by promoting friendliness to a higher moral ideal. In friendliness the other is appropriated, that is, incorporated into oneself, not for domination but for understanding and for the generation of something new both in oneself and in the other.
What did I learn? That I’m a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt who smiles serenely when passing through thresholds. Whatever that means.
My top takeaway from his essay is the idea that tolerance, tact, and politeness as glues for society in such a varied cultural environment can be replaced by promoting friendliness to a higher moral ideal. In friendliness the other is appropriated, that is, incorporated into oneself, not for domination but for understanding and for the generation of something new both in oneself and in the other.
What did I learn? That I’m a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt who smiles serenely when passing through thresholds. Whatever that means.
November 5, 2023
Unfortunately the writing style was pretty high brow and the concepts beyond my comprehension. I had hoped this would be an accessible insight into modern perspective on culture but it was anything but. If you are hoping to gain new insights this is not the book for you. If you already have a deep understanding of the philosophy behind culture maybe you will get more from it.
August 20, 2024
derivative. a mere collection of other people’s ideas.
May 1, 2023
In a style that would make T.S. Eliot crack a smile for the first time in his life, German philosopher Byung-Chul Han shores together fragments of Hegel, Heidigger, Neitzche, Rorty, Bauman, and Babha to describe our contemporary "hyperculture".
----------
Hegel describes the notion of a well-defined "sited" culture, one that has settled upon what foreign concepts it despises and what native aspects it cherishes. This sort of culture quiets the dissonant voices in our heads and is happily "at home with oneself" [3-5].
According to Ted Nelson, the advent of the internet has "de-distanced" our once-sited cultures. In its place, "culture has increasingly lost the kind of structure familiar to us from conventional texts or books. There are no stories, no theology, no teleology to give it the appearance of a meaningful, homogenous unity" [8]. Rather, many ways of living tangle together before us.
This hyperculture -- this rhizome of stories and customs and values -- is "not an oversized monoculture" [15] where McDonalds is on every street corner and everyone buys stepladders for $11.99 at Walmart. Rather it is a world of Japanese whisky, BLM protests in London, weird east bay polycules, and of competitive chess. It is in my own words a dense, vibrating core of ways of life and preferences, pushed together by the impossibly fast information relay of the internet. It is an Amazon.com of life-ways: humanity's every possible preference, visible from where we stand in front of aisle 5.
A hyperculture is a "hyphen culture" [30]. It simply adds to the array of possibilities in the water we swim in. And it accommodates all newcomers. It says nothing but "yes, and".
Hyperculture might best be emblematized by Hearst Castle. Umberto Eco noted its disharmonious union of aesthetic styles; that it draws near numerous distant cultural elements makes it an excellent emblem of our hyperculture [36-37]. It may be beautiful depending upon your tastes.
Hyperculture is jarring in some ways. There can be no pilgrimages or even directional travel: everyone can buy spam musubi at their local supermarket; the Hajj is colocated with a Netflix fanatic who finally visits Jiro. In absence of linear travel, we browse [56]. It is all visible to us, all at once.
How ought we feel about hyperculture? Neitzshe describes the archetypal "wanderer", one who traverses the earth to SEE the possibilities and OBSERVE [74-75]. There is no telos because God has long since died. Heideigger in a later reflection laments this loss of sitedness [83].
Han does not. His implicit prescription is that of the Homo Liber, the tourist in a Hawaiian shirt, floating in hypercultural space, consuming all in a deafened bliss. [83] It is Homo Liber in his post-opinionated bliss that is presently winning the world.
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I find the notion of hyperculture to be at once accurate and repulsive.
Man was born with a yearning to explore and a desire to create. A hyperculture robs us of either of those possibilities: everything is on offer at once. To Heidigger's point, it is positively emasculating.
I don't believe man was meant to contemplate every possible way of of living in ecumenical harmony either. If we must enjoy all combinations of our hyperculture we have opinions about nothing.
There are some life ways that are better than others. Just because the cost of sending bits is approaching zero, it doesn't mean we should abjure our freedom of association and doesn't imply that we should forever have no home, and forever just chill out, man, because broken car windows and fentanyl are part of living in a city!
----------
Hegel describes the notion of a well-defined "sited" culture, one that has settled upon what foreign concepts it despises and what native aspects it cherishes. This sort of culture quiets the dissonant voices in our heads and is happily "at home with oneself" [3-5].
According to Ted Nelson, the advent of the internet has "de-distanced" our once-sited cultures. In its place, "culture has increasingly lost the kind of structure familiar to us from conventional texts or books. There are no stories, no theology, no teleology to give it the appearance of a meaningful, homogenous unity" [8]. Rather, many ways of living tangle together before us.
This hyperculture -- this rhizome of stories and customs and values -- is "not an oversized monoculture" [15] where McDonalds is on every street corner and everyone buys stepladders for $11.99 at Walmart. Rather it is a world of Japanese whisky, BLM protests in London, weird east bay polycules, and of competitive chess. It is in my own words a dense, vibrating core of ways of life and preferences, pushed together by the impossibly fast information relay of the internet. It is an Amazon.com of life-ways: humanity's every possible preference, visible from where we stand in front of aisle 5.
A hyperculture is a "hyphen culture" [30]. It simply adds to the array of possibilities in the water we swim in. And it accommodates all newcomers. It says nothing but "yes, and".
Hyperculture might best be emblematized by Hearst Castle. Umberto Eco noted its disharmonious union of aesthetic styles; that it draws near numerous distant cultural elements makes it an excellent emblem of our hyperculture [36-37]. It may be beautiful depending upon your tastes.
Hyperculture is jarring in some ways. There can be no pilgrimages or even directional travel: everyone can buy spam musubi at their local supermarket; the Hajj is colocated with a Netflix fanatic who finally visits Jiro. In absence of linear travel, we browse [56]. It is all visible to us, all at once.
How ought we feel about hyperculture? Neitzshe describes the archetypal "wanderer", one who traverses the earth to SEE the possibilities and OBSERVE [74-75]. There is no telos because God has long since died. Heideigger in a later reflection laments this loss of sitedness [83].
Han does not. His implicit prescription is that of the Homo Liber, the tourist in a Hawaiian shirt, floating in hypercultural space, consuming all in a deafened bliss. [83] It is Homo Liber in his post-opinionated bliss that is presently winning the world.
----------
I find the notion of hyperculture to be at once accurate and repulsive.
Man was born with a yearning to explore and a desire to create. A hyperculture robs us of either of those possibilities: everything is on offer at once. To Heidigger's point, it is positively emasculating.
I don't believe man was meant to contemplate every possible way of of living in ecumenical harmony either. If we must enjoy all combinations of our hyperculture we have opinions about nothing.
There are some life ways that are better than others. Just because the cost of sending bits is approaching zero, it doesn't mean we should abjure our freedom of association and doesn't imply that we should forever have no home, and forever just chill out, man, because broken car windows and fentanyl are part of living in a city!
January 1, 2023
I'm not gonna lie, I didn't understand most of this shit I feel mainly out of an unfamiliarity with many of the philosophers that Han was responding to and working from. So that being said, this is definitely a book I'm gonna have to come back to after more reading - but for now, I still actually feel really strongly about the bits I could understand.
In general, I hate making evaluations on philosophical works when rating them based on the amount of knowledge they presuppose their audience to have - sometimes lack of explication IS a genuine mistake on the part of the author, but at the same time you have to balance this against not expecting the author to cater their work to too wide of an audience. In this case, while the expected knowledge I felt was quite high, to expect any LESS I think would have severely hampered the methodology and style of the writing that I thought went really perfectly with the actual type of philosophy being done. It felt really appropriate that in a discussion of a hyperculture that transcendes the concept of linearity (don't ask me to re-explain this point lmao), the way the philosophy was done was in itself short snapshots or quick thoughts that often themselves flouted a linear presentation of ideas.
As for ideas themselves, I think that despite (I think?) ultimately disagreeing with the much of the actual positive endorsement of hyperculture as a new positive form of culture, I still appreciated much of the insights that were gained from the hypercultural perspective; pointing out the ways in which multi or transculturalism both continue to conceptually reify norms and hierarchies of values even when trying to flout them was pretty sharp, and while I'm not sure how I feel about the chapter on appropriation it certainly was a novel perspective on the phenomenon that I appreciated reading! Ultimately, I think this is sort of a work that'll be subject to a lowering of rating as I become more familiar with its content, I was VERY surprised at how much it's conciseness and poetic style really spoke to me and felt really insightful when presented in such a compact book (although that last one might just be because I'm mainly familiar with analytic philosophy...).
TL;DR - I have no idea what the fuck I just read, but it was really interesting, thought-provoking, scratch my brain, and make me feel nice :)
In general, I hate making evaluations on philosophical works when rating them based on the amount of knowledge they presuppose their audience to have - sometimes lack of explication IS a genuine mistake on the part of the author, but at the same time you have to balance this against not expecting the author to cater their work to too wide of an audience. In this case, while the expected knowledge I felt was quite high, to expect any LESS I think would have severely hampered the methodology and style of the writing that I thought went really perfectly with the actual type of philosophy being done. It felt really appropriate that in a discussion of a hyperculture that transcendes the concept of linearity (don't ask me to re-explain this point lmao), the way the philosophy was done was in itself short snapshots or quick thoughts that often themselves flouted a linear presentation of ideas.
As for ideas themselves, I think that despite (I think?) ultimately disagreeing with the much of the actual positive endorsement of hyperculture as a new positive form of culture, I still appreciated much of the insights that were gained from the hypercultural perspective; pointing out the ways in which multi or transculturalism both continue to conceptually reify norms and hierarchies of values even when trying to flout them was pretty sharp, and while I'm not sure how I feel about the chapter on appropriation it certainly was a novel perspective on the phenomenon that I appreciated reading! Ultimately, I think this is sort of a work that'll be subject to a lowering of rating as I become more familiar with its content, I was VERY surprised at how much it's conciseness and poetic style really spoke to me and felt really insightful when presented in such a compact book (although that last one might just be because I'm mainly familiar with analytic philosophy...).
TL;DR - I have no idea what the fuck I just read, but it was really interesting, thought-provoking, scratch my brain, and make me feel nice :)
November 14, 2024
La tesis del libro consiste en decir que la cultura se ha separado de los lugares. A través de la globalización, la cultura se ha convertido en una hipercultura global que conecta retazos de culturas locales, combinadas fuera de su origen y tradición. Las reflexiones en este punto son bastante interesantes, y te hacen pensar en cómo, hoy en día, no existen realmente diferencies culturales muy significantes entre la mayoría de países ricos. Existe el folclore, por un lado, que es más un vestigio artificial preservado para celebraciones o museos, y la hipercultura global que está muy centrada en opciones de consumo. Esto conecta con la tendencia a fijarse en estéticas y conexiones, y no tanto en significados y tradiciones. La cultura se convierte en una serie de combinaciones azarosas entre lo que antaño eran diferentes escuelas, tradiciones, tendencias.
Si bien es una tesis interesante y la lectura es recomendable, el libro es a menudo demasiado obtuso. A menudo, parece que el autor no puede expresar de forma clara y específica lo que quiere decir. A veces, se podría decir incluso que hace uso de la obra de filósofos de forma algo torpe, sin explicar demasiado cuál es la relación con el tema del libro, y sin argumentar ni el porqué ni el cómo. Sinceramente, a veces el tono y el lenguaje empleado intenta sugerir una profundidad de ideas que el texto como tal, a nivel de ideas, no alcanza. A pesar de todo, el libro es una buena forma de pensar en qué es la cultura en un mundo globalizado, y en qué implicaciones tiene en la vida diaria.
Si bien es una tesis interesante y la lectura es recomendable, el libro es a menudo demasiado obtuso. A menudo, parece que el autor no puede expresar de forma clara y específica lo que quiere decir. A veces, se podría decir incluso que hace uso de la obra de filósofos de forma algo torpe, sin explicar demasiado cuál es la relación con el tema del libro, y sin argumentar ni el porqué ni el cómo. Sinceramente, a veces el tono y el lenguaje empleado intenta sugerir una profundidad de ideas que el texto como tal, a nivel de ideas, no alcanza. A pesar de todo, el libro es una buena forma de pensar en qué es la cultura en un mundo globalizado, y en qué implicaciones tiene en la vida diaria.
November 5, 2024
ข้อเสนอของฮันในเล่มนี้คือข้อเสนอว่าโลกาภิวัตรและความก้าวหน้าทางเทคโนโลยีการสื่อสารโดยเฉพาะการขยายตัวของพื้นที่ hyperspace ได้สลายสิ่งที่เรียกว่าวัฒนธรรมอย่างที่เข้าใจกันมา เพราะวัฒนธรรมหรือ culture เป็นสิ่งที่สัมพันธ์กับสถานที่อันจำเพาะเจาะจงบนโลกวัตถุที่การมีระยะห่างคือเงื่อนไขสำคัญ ชณะที่โลกาภิวัตรคือโลกที่มิเพียงแต่ก้าวข้ามพรมแดน แต่ด้วยเครื่องมือที่ทำให้การสื่อสารเป็นไปได้แบบทันทีทันใด ทำให้โลกดังกล่าวเป็นโลกที่ปราศจากระยะห่าง ซึ่งส่งผลต่อความจริงแท้หรือ authentic ของวัฒนธรรมที่จะหายไป โลกาภิวัตรจึงเป็นเงื่อนไขของการเปลี่ยนให้ culture กลายเป็น hyperculture หรือก็คือการที่ culture แต่ละที่หลุดลอยจากผืนดินและสถานที่ที่ก่อร่างตัวมันเองไปเป็น image ในโลกของการสื่อสารที่หมุนเวียนโดยปราศจากระยะห่าง วัฒนธรรมของโลกาภิวัตร จึงเป็น hyperculture ที่มิได้มีความลุ่มลึกและมิได้มีไว้เพื่อฟูมฟักกระบวนการใช้เหตุผล แต่คือ image ที่ทุกคนเข้าถึงได้ ซึ่งย่อมเปลี่ยนให้ตัววัฒนธรรมกลายเป็นสถานที่สำหรับท่องเที่ยว ที่ทำให้มนุษย์ในโลกแบบนี้ให้กลายเป็นนักท่องเที่ยว ขณะที่โลกในโลกาภิวัตรเองก็จะกลายเป็นโลกของหน้่าต่างซ้อนหน้าต่างที่ให้เสรีภาพกับมนุษย์ในการมองสิ่งต่างๆที่เคยเข้าไม่ถึงในฐานะนักท่องเที่ยวในโลกไซเบอร์ที่ดูทุกอย่างผ่านหน้าต่างคอมพิวเตอร์โดยมิได้ตระหนักถึงระยะห่างทางกายภาพระหว่างสถานที่ที่ตัวเองอยู่กับสถานที่ในหน้าต่างที่ตนกำลังดู
เล่มนี้เหมือนทุกเล่มของฮันคืออ่านง่าย อ่านสนุก แต่ก็แอบผิดหวังนิดหน่อยที่เนื้อหาในเล่มไม่ได้มีอะไรใหม่นัก เอาจริงๆถ้าใครสนใจเรื่องโลกาภิวัตร อ่านงานคลาสสิกของอัปปาดูรัย หรือ มาร์ค โอเยต์น่าจะดีกว่า
เล่มนี้เหมือนทุกเล่มของฮันคืออ่านง่าย อ่านสนุก แต่ก็แอบผิดหวังนิดหน่อยที่เนื้อหาในเล่มไม่ได้มีอะไรใหม่นัก เอาจริงๆถ้าใครสนใจเรื่องโลกาภิวัตร อ่านงานคลาสสิกของอัปปาดูรัย หรือ มาร์ค โอเยต์น่าจะดีกว่า
April 25, 2025
ok starting off my goodreads grind here. why does it have a spellcheck that doesn't give you corrections.
Actually, I read this at least 10 times last year for my thesis but I'm counting it because I feel like I definitely gave it another skim read right before my thesis defense at the start of January. It wasn't on kindle- I don't know why it says that- I'm only allowed to buy a kindle when I read all the unread books in my room, which I have an insane quantity of- the books I have are great too, and educational and brainy, but I'm jealous of anaiya and madison with their illegally downloaded novels. This copy wasn't on a kindle, instead it's destroyed from carrying it around for a year and a half, filled with notes that were written with religious zeal yet completely incomprehensible a month later, like for "This global Here cannot be grasped on the basis of the concepts of inter-, multi-, or trans-culturality" I wrote <> or other good stuff like <<???? read heidigger??>>. I was going to say some insightful and interesting things about this book, considering I disected it for a year but I don't want to anymore because my meds just kicked in thank god- I'd delayed taking them for like an extra hour because this chick hit me with a 'wyd tonight' right when I was ready to hit the hay- then didn't reply- but now I choose to be good, to go to bed.
Actually, I read this at least 10 times last year for my thesis but I'm counting it because I feel like I definitely gave it another skim read right before my thesis defense at the start of January. It wasn't on kindle- I don't know why it says that- I'm only allowed to buy a kindle when I read all the unread books in my room, which I have an insane quantity of- the books I have are great too, and educational and brainy, but I'm jealous of anaiya and madison with their illegally downloaded novels. This copy wasn't on a kindle, instead it's destroyed from carrying it around for a year and a half, filled with notes that were written with religious zeal yet completely incomprehensible a month later, like for "This global Here cannot be grasped on the basis of the concepts of inter-, multi-, or trans-culturality" I wrote <> or other good stuff like <<???? read heidigger??>>. I was going to say some insightful and interesting things about this book, considering I disected it for a year but I don't want to anymore because my meds just kicked in thank god- I'd delayed taking them for like an extra hour because this chick hit me with a 'wyd tonight' right when I was ready to hit the hay- then didn't reply- but now I choose to be good, to go to bed.
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