THE DIGITAL WASTE LAND

This post has two parts. Click here for the FIRST part, “GAME SHOW”.

ThIS POST IS THE SECOND IN the DIALECTICS OF LOCKDOWN series. CLICK HERE FOR THE FIRST POST, “ASYLUM POLITICS”. CLICK HERE FOR THE THIRD POST, “CONCENTRATION CAMP WORLD”.

8. 1 Thess. 4:13.

9. Georg Lukács, “Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?”, Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle, trans. John and Necke Mander (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).

10. Primo Levi, “Appendix” (1976), If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf, in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, ed. Ann Goldstein (1947; New York: Liveright Publishing, 2015), vol. 1, p. 174.

11. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, in The Omnibus Homo Sacer (1995; Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), p. 102.

12. Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler (London: Verso, 2017).

13. Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021) p. 26.

14. Ibid.

II
THE POLITICS OF HOPE

Christianity and Marxism both place enormous importance on the rejection of despair and the cultivation of hope. It is vital to believe that the future will bring better days, whereas despair, which means lack of hope, is anathema. Saint Paul urged the Thessalonian Christians to be strong in faith “that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope”.⁸ The profound weight of the western tradition means that the value of hope isn’t easily questioned. Yet in times of disaster, such as perhaps we are living through, it might be just as important to be able to live with hopelessness as to keep hope endlessly and even falsely alive.

The Marxist critic György Lukács might have objected to such a conclusion. In an essay published in 1963,⁹ he disparaged Kafka’s work for its angsty emphasis on individuals who are foiled in their every attempt to make sense of the hostile and absurd world around them, let alone act effectively in it. For Lukács, Kafka wasn’t any kind of prophet or even a critic of his times; he was merely an astute documenter of the defunct Hapsburg ancien régime. Lukács didn’t accept that the novelist had any kind of prophetic vision: Kafka merely used his great artistic skill to peddle a defeatist pessimism, which Lukács traced back to Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard and which he lambasted with equal vehemence in the work of Heidegger and the existentialists. There was no room in Kafka’s fictional world for representation of what Lukács celebrated as the honest and purposeful struggle that potentially brings about social change. Whereas Thomas Mann’s “sane” novels consistently depicted the dynamic relationship between the social order and its potentially rebellious inhabitants, Kafka’s “morbid” fables pictured people as inevitable victims of mysterious forces. Lukács considered this nothing but escapism and an abdication of the artistic responsibility to uphold the ideal of community by reflecting how the world was, in fact, changeable for the better.

Writing in 1976, Primo Levi thought differently—or rather he cautioned those who presumed that “the idea of prison is immediately linked to the idea of escape or revolt”. The reason was that young people often asked him in his later years why there were so few escapes from, and uprisings in, the Nazi concentration camps. In a comment which could also have been directed at Lukács, Levi wrote: “Perhaps it’s good that the condition of the prisoner, non-freedom, is felt as unjust, abnormal: as an illness, in other words, that must be cured by escape or rebellion. But, unfortunately, this picture bears very little resemblance to the reality of the concentration camps.”¹⁰ The conditions there—the captors’ vicious mind games, the torture and starvation, the extreme and unceasing violence, the inexperience of most prisoners in both the theory and practice of revolt—made both flight and insurrection all but impossible (with a few remarkable exceptions).

It seems a great leap from that ultimate horror to today’s walled-in, networked world, but Giorgio Agamben for one makes the jump (“the camp … will appear as the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity”¹¹), and the philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s claims are disturbing in a similar way because they ask us to notice how menacing and overpowering—how potentially unchangeable—is the environment of violence disguised by our society’s propaganda of achievement and well-being (as a Korean, presumably Han isn’t bound to the western hopeful tradition).

The main starting point of Han’s work is the way social media have normalised what Étienne de La Boétie long ago called voluntary servitude. Han sees the paradox of the infamous Facebook business model—which persuades people to work for free by posting the content needed to sell advertising—as the spearhead of a process of increasing subjugation in the digital era. It is the strange genius of neoliberalism to have inculcated entrepreneurialism and self-help as all but unquestionable ideals to such a degree that people act subserviently in the name of freedom, so much so that freedom becomes a meaningless concept—or perhaps rather the philosophical equivalent of that ingenious trap which tightens with every attempt to break out. We conform to the incessant injunction to seek success, achieve, be our best. Horrified by any sign of weakness or failure, we learn crude techniques to stamp out negative feelings (in the name of “mental health”). The cult of self-management with a strange and tragic efficiency abolishes the need for actual disciplinarians. The supermarket self-checkout and the banking app are the models of captured subjectivity today, and for Han this willing subjection to commercial technology empties freedom out until freedom has become its opposite. “Although the achievement-subject deems itself free, in reality it is a slave. In so far as it willingly exploits itself without a master, it is an absolute slave.”¹²

Han quotes Büchner’s play Danton’s Death: “We are puppets, our strings are pulled by unknown forces; we ourselves are nothing, nothing!”¹³ On rare occasions Han proposes a fightback through collective action—“It is time to organize a collective resistance to the looming digital totalitarianism” (26)¹⁴—or, more obscurely, through what he calls de-psychologising. But are these convincing let alone actionable suggestions? They seem more like afterthoughts protecting against panic. For the most part, the Kafkaesque force of Han’s work lies in its philosophical depiction of a coercive, confining and above all deceptive world which controls its inhabitants seductively rather than brutally. It is a world of techno-enchantment rather than regimentation, in which a surreal law of reversal operates, turning rebellion into compliance, and freedom into slavery until no safeguard can any longer be trusted. In Squid Game one of the rules of the tournament is that it can be abandoned by majority vote. But as in the world at large, democracy here is a mere empty ritual. It is part of the game not any means of ending it.