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The Transparency Society
Transparency is the order of the day. It is a term, a slogan, that dominates public discourse about corruption and freedom of information. Considered crucial to democracy, it touches our political and economic lives as well as our private lives. Anyone can obtain information about anything. Everything—and everyone—has become transparent: unveiled or exposed by the apparatuses that exert a kind of collective control over the post-capitalist world.
Yet, transparency has a dark side that, ironically, has everything to do with a lack of mystery, shadow, and nuance. Behind the apparent accessibility of knowledge lies the disappearance of privacy, homogenization, and the collapse of trust. The anxiety to accumulate ever more information does not necessarily produce more knowledge or faith. Technology creates the illusion of total containment and the constant monitoring of information, but what we lack is adequate interpretation of the information. In this manifesto, Byung-Chul Han denounces transparency as a false ideal, the strongest and most pernicious of our contemporary mythologies.
Yet, transparency has a dark side that, ironically, has everything to do with a lack of mystery, shadow, and nuance. Behind the apparent accessibility of knowledge lies the disappearance of privacy, homogenization, and the collapse of trust. The anxiety to accumulate ever more information does not necessarily produce more knowledge or faith. Technology creates the illusion of total containment and the constant monitoring of information, but what we lack is adequate interpretation of the information. In this manifesto, Byung-Chul Han denounces transparency as a false ideal, the strongest and most pernicious of our contemporary mythologies.
70 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
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5099 people want to read
About the author
Byung-Chul Han
54 books4,333 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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September 12, 2018
It invariably surprises me how much this guy can cram into so few pages – in this review I try to cover as many of the ideas he presents as I can, but it is a fool’s errand, I’m afraid. This is perhaps his most counter-intuitive book – well, of those I’ve read. This could have been called ‘Against Transparency’ – and perhaps it would have attracted more attention.
I think we struggle with the idea that transparency might be a bad thing. Like so many other notions – positive psychology, optimism, extroversion, freedom – we seem to be naturally drawn to these as ‘unconditionally good’ even if we don’t necessarily consider their opposites as being fully bad. But the author wastes no time in letting us know that he has concerns with transparency – on the first page of the preface he says, ‘Today the word ‘transparency’ is haunting all spheres of life’ (vii) in an interesting echo of the Communist Manifesto. And while we assume that a society dedicated to transparency is one that is open and best suited to enabling us to be free, he says it is just the opposite. That we only have such extremes of transparency because we lack trust and that as such, ‘The society of transparency is not a society of trust, but a society of control’ (vii).
He equates the shift to a transparent society with the shift towards a ‘neoliberal dispositive’ – because it is seeking to force ‘everything inward in order to transform it into information’ (viii). This is interesting because one of the major themes of neoliberal economic theory is that the market isn’t really just a useful means of economic distribution, but rather a remarkable information processor with money value being the key unit of information that allows conversions of all other forms of value. Transparency, then, is essential for this information processor to work, and so, transparency is seen as central to the neoliberal project.
But the author isn’t interested in just focusing on economic theory, but also how this has spilt over onto the social and specifically into social media too – which he says is ‘coming to resemble, more and more, digital panoptica that discipline and exploit the social’ (vii).
That needs a bit of an aside. The panopticon was a model prison conceived by Jeremy Bentham that allowed individual and isolated prisoners in their cells in a circular prison to be potentially watched over by a prison guard, but one who could not be seen by the prisoners and who might not be watching at all. This way the prisoners were forced to always behave as if they were being watched and that was the point because eventually that way of behaviour would become second nature. That is, the prisoners would became self-regulating. Saying that social media is a form of panoptica is hardly a new observation – however, it is important to notice the difference here from Bentham’s original model, which will be made more of later in the text, that is, that we willingly enter this relationship and that we do so of our own free will.
He ends the preface by saying ‘Transparency is an ideology. Like all ideologies, it has a positive core that has been mystified and made absolute. The danger of transparency lies in such ideologization. If totalized, it yields terror.’ (viii)
He pulls quite a few ideas together in his attack on transparency – one of the more surprising, to me at least, was to link it with pornography. As he says, ‘Pornography is unmediated / contact between the image and the eye’ (1-2). And goes on to discuss this at more length later – particularly in relation to eros and desire and therefore the limits to both that pornography imposes. He then immediately links the transparent with money since this is the mediator of all value and exchange and therefore that which makes the value of everything transparent to everything else. This endless transparency not only leaves us nowhere to hide, but also nowhere to be. He stresses that ‘Love without something hidden to sight is pornography’ (5) and later that psychology has long argued that our subconscious selves are fundamentally hidden from our conscious ourselves – and that this is essential rather than a flaw in the human condition, since this is due to the need for negativity (as well as positivity) for us to be whole persons. The problem is that positive science (and neoliberal economics in particular) does away with negativity and so we are condemned to a world of transparent positivity. He makes the point that this is universal in our new society, that ‘It is telling that Facebook has consistently refused to introduce a ‘Dislike’ button.’ (7)
Our ‘will to positivity’ is interesting since it is presented as also a will to truth – but he makes the point that ‘Truth is a negative force insofar as it presents and asserts itself by declaring all else false’ (8). In a world dominated by ‘fake news’ – where the true can be made the false purely by enthusiastic personal assertion, I’m not sure what to make of this.
We are getting to see now how he is proposing to play this game – transparency is a visual metaphor, and so we are taken into the nature of the visual arts and how they have changed with various innovations in technology. Any society is brought into focus by the technology it produces, and we live in an age where the image is more central than it has been previous ages. He mentions Walter Benjamin – famous for saying that photography diminishes the aura of works of art by making them ubiquitous, in the sense that it is hard from something to have an aura if it is everywhere, including hanging behind the door in people’s toilets. But even here we (today) have moved beyond even this profane nature of the image in the era of mechanical reproduction – mostly today, images aren’t mechanically reproduced anymore, but rather they sit as ephemera on our devices. And the images we see are not just the best of human artistic endeavour, but more often than not are used by us to display ourselves and to document our lives in ways that put us in the best possible light. We do this as a means of collecting likes – again, an over-abundance of positivity.
He refers back to the history of photography here to stress his point – saying that there was a time when images required a negative (and he means this quite literally), but that digital photography has done away with the negative and with all negativity at the same time. We become images and those images become objects of exchange so that their value is ‘measured by its exhibition value. The society of exhibition is a society of pornography’ (11). And the problem with pornography is that it ‘destroys not just eros, but also sex’ (12). He means this because he defines the obscene as ‘hypervisibility’ – that is, he feels that the lack of any hope of covering kills eroticism such that all that is left is the obscene. I think he means this in the sense that the compulsion to exhibit leaves no room to be one’s self other than as a constant exhibition as outer-directed towards the pleasure of the viewer and that this so leaves no space for the self or even for otherness as more than the immediately apparent. To put that perhaps too plainly, you don’t get depth from what is immediately and superficially seen. As he says in the next chapter, ‘the negativity of the secret, the veil, the concealment incite desire and make pleasure more intense’ (15) and to stretch this point further, ‘Unmediated enjoyment, which admits no imaginative or narrative detour, is pornographic’ (16).
I kept thinking of the story of Diana and Actaeon in this part of the book. Actaeon was a hunter who stumbled into a clearing as Diana was undressing. Rather than turn away, he stood and watched her – he became the voyeur watching pornography – only to be discovered and punished (the hunter becomes hunted and killed by his own dogs). Beauty has its costs and is veiled for a reason. And if beauty needs a veil, then the sublime, being beyond representation, is essentially permanently veiled. But this veiling or permanently covered is the very opposite of what capitalism seeks to achieve – ‘Capitalism heightens the pornographication of society by exhibiting everything as a commodity and handing it over to hypervisibility’ (24).
He then shifts his gaze to the photograph and has some interesting things to say regarding Barthes – particularly Barthes’ ideas of the studium and punctum (basically, the studium is the construction of the photograph as an image – how it has been staged, while the punctum is something elusive in the image that pricks us, that stops us and forces us to consider and reflect upon it). His point is that pornography has no punctum, it is all and immediately apparent and certainly not ‘troubling’ in the sense Barthes means, that is, as having ‘semiotic intensity. They have nothing that might take hold and wound’ (27). This semiotic intensity, when it exists, is something hidden in plain sight – in fact, we might not feel the piercing of the punctum of an image when we first see it, but rather only after we stop looking at the image, the punctum becomes a kind of itch under the skin that tells us we have been scratched and infected. Again, this is not the point of the pornographic, which, by definition, leaves nothing hidden, nothing to be guessed at or obscured.
Before reading this I’d have taken transparency to mean something close to narrative – that is, for something to be truly transparent you would need to be able to tell its story – but again, he argues the exact opposite. He sees the world today as being based on counting, rather than recounting. This additive nature of our existence (again, linking back to the neoliberal notion of the world as information) sits outside of traditional ritual and ceremony which ‘have their own temporality, their own rhythm and tact’ (30). He makes this point in relation to pilgrimages – which require a progression and narrative force in ways that ‘being a tourist’ simply doesn’t. As he says, the ‘tourist sticks to the present’ but the pilgrim never forgets the point of the journey – all journeys are about reaching the point of transcendence, directing one’s self towards that end, something denied the tourist. And that transcendence is hidden and only available if the journey is connected to the narrative of a pilgrimage. As he says at one point, endings only make sense if they are tied to a narrative.
He stresses this point further when he says, ‘The world today is no theatre where actions and feelings are represented and interpreted, but a market on which intimacies are exhibited, sold, and consumed. The theatre is a site of representation, whereas the market is a site of exhibition.’ And to link this again back to the theme we have already established ‘Today theatrical representation is yielding to pornographic exhibition’ (34).
He makes the same point in relation to politics and the public sphere, which also have become dominated with the personal habits and choices of politicians rather than with political action – and this personalisation of politics shifts it from political action towards (again) exhibition and therefore pornography too.
The next chapter shifts focus to Plato’s cave – but makes the point that the cave allegory is a narrative world constructed on the metaphor of theatre, literally constructed as such, with a captive audience and a light and shadow show. But the point again is the opposite of transparency – for Plato the world of appearance, the world that is ‘transparent’ to us – is a world of lies. The truth is beyond this world and is fundamentally beyond our ability to comprehend it in its ideal form, as such, truth is the very opposite of transparent. Or as Han concludes the chapter by saying, ‘Only emptiness is entirely transparent’ (40).
It is here that Bentham’s Panopticon comes back with full force. The point of the panopticon was to discipline and we generally assume that to enact discipline requires a centre – someone who will correct inappropriate behaviour by disciplining. That is someone who metes out the punishment for infractions. This centre no longer exists – rather, we are all the centre and we are all self-disciplining. We willingly put ourselves on display and so we have become both the centre and periphery of the panopticon – the watcher and the watched. And so, we imagine, since we perform this pornographic act of auto-display / auto-observation upon ourselves, that it must be an expression of our freedom and our will. However, ‘Such total surveillance degrades ‘transparent society’ into an inhuman society of control: everyone controls everyone’ (47). That is, while we think we are being self-creating, we are in fact self-regulating.
We live in a world of KPIs – and assure ourselves that all that can be known can be counted and measured – but this form of transparency is really little more than another aspect of the total surveillance society – and since it is transparent, such a society is one where trust is impossible. Trust is only necessary if we are in a state ‘between knowing and not-knowing’ (47) – you don’t need to trust if you already know – but transparency means you can know everything – ‘Instead of affirming that ‘transparency creates trust’, one should instead say, ‘transparency dismantles trust’ (48).
Philosophers have long presented the way out of the despair of the human condition – particularly after the death of God – as involving us making a project of our lives. This has been true of Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault – in fact, one of the great current pieces of advice we give to young people is that in the future ‘One is the master and entrepreneur of oneself’ (48). But he questions this as well. The projects we choose are not out of freedom, but forced choices by the illusion of freedom where ‘The illusory freedom of consumers lacks all negativity. They no longer constitute an outside that might question the systemic inside’ (49).
This is a dark vision of the nature of transparency – one all the more troubling since transparency seems to be ‘bathed in light’. But if we have nowhere to hide, we have nowhere to grow either. Like I said, I’ve skipped bits of this – whole chapters in places – but like I also said, he fits an awful lot into 50 odd pages.
I think we struggle with the idea that transparency might be a bad thing. Like so many other notions – positive psychology, optimism, extroversion, freedom – we seem to be naturally drawn to these as ‘unconditionally good’ even if we don’t necessarily consider their opposites as being fully bad. But the author wastes no time in letting us know that he has concerns with transparency – on the first page of the preface he says, ‘Today the word ‘transparency’ is haunting all spheres of life’ (vii) in an interesting echo of the Communist Manifesto. And while we assume that a society dedicated to transparency is one that is open and best suited to enabling us to be free, he says it is just the opposite. That we only have such extremes of transparency because we lack trust and that as such, ‘The society of transparency is not a society of trust, but a society of control’ (vii).
He equates the shift to a transparent society with the shift towards a ‘neoliberal dispositive’ – because it is seeking to force ‘everything inward in order to transform it into information’ (viii). This is interesting because one of the major themes of neoliberal economic theory is that the market isn’t really just a useful means of economic distribution, but rather a remarkable information processor with money value being the key unit of information that allows conversions of all other forms of value. Transparency, then, is essential for this information processor to work, and so, transparency is seen as central to the neoliberal project.
But the author isn’t interested in just focusing on economic theory, but also how this has spilt over onto the social and specifically into social media too – which he says is ‘coming to resemble, more and more, digital panoptica that discipline and exploit the social’ (vii).
That needs a bit of an aside. The panopticon was a model prison conceived by Jeremy Bentham that allowed individual and isolated prisoners in their cells in a circular prison to be potentially watched over by a prison guard, but one who could not be seen by the prisoners and who might not be watching at all. This way the prisoners were forced to always behave as if they were being watched and that was the point because eventually that way of behaviour would become second nature. That is, the prisoners would became self-regulating. Saying that social media is a form of panoptica is hardly a new observation – however, it is important to notice the difference here from Bentham’s original model, which will be made more of later in the text, that is, that we willingly enter this relationship and that we do so of our own free will.
He ends the preface by saying ‘Transparency is an ideology. Like all ideologies, it has a positive core that has been mystified and made absolute. The danger of transparency lies in such ideologization. If totalized, it yields terror.’ (viii)
He pulls quite a few ideas together in his attack on transparency – one of the more surprising, to me at least, was to link it with pornography. As he says, ‘Pornography is unmediated / contact between the image and the eye’ (1-2). And goes on to discuss this at more length later – particularly in relation to eros and desire and therefore the limits to both that pornography imposes. He then immediately links the transparent with money since this is the mediator of all value and exchange and therefore that which makes the value of everything transparent to everything else. This endless transparency not only leaves us nowhere to hide, but also nowhere to be. He stresses that ‘Love without something hidden to sight is pornography’ (5) and later that psychology has long argued that our subconscious selves are fundamentally hidden from our conscious ourselves – and that this is essential rather than a flaw in the human condition, since this is due to the need for negativity (as well as positivity) for us to be whole persons. The problem is that positive science (and neoliberal economics in particular) does away with negativity and so we are condemned to a world of transparent positivity. He makes the point that this is universal in our new society, that ‘It is telling that Facebook has consistently refused to introduce a ‘Dislike’ button.’ (7)
Our ‘will to positivity’ is interesting since it is presented as also a will to truth – but he makes the point that ‘Truth is a negative force insofar as it presents and asserts itself by declaring all else false’ (8). In a world dominated by ‘fake news’ – where the true can be made the false purely by enthusiastic personal assertion, I’m not sure what to make of this.
We are getting to see now how he is proposing to play this game – transparency is a visual metaphor, and so we are taken into the nature of the visual arts and how they have changed with various innovations in technology. Any society is brought into focus by the technology it produces, and we live in an age where the image is more central than it has been previous ages. He mentions Walter Benjamin – famous for saying that photography diminishes the aura of works of art by making them ubiquitous, in the sense that it is hard from something to have an aura if it is everywhere, including hanging behind the door in people’s toilets. But even here we (today) have moved beyond even this profane nature of the image in the era of mechanical reproduction – mostly today, images aren’t mechanically reproduced anymore, but rather they sit as ephemera on our devices. And the images we see are not just the best of human artistic endeavour, but more often than not are used by us to display ourselves and to document our lives in ways that put us in the best possible light. We do this as a means of collecting likes – again, an over-abundance of positivity.
He refers back to the history of photography here to stress his point – saying that there was a time when images required a negative (and he means this quite literally), but that digital photography has done away with the negative and with all negativity at the same time. We become images and those images become objects of exchange so that their value is ‘measured by its exhibition value. The society of exhibition is a society of pornography’ (11). And the problem with pornography is that it ‘destroys not just eros, but also sex’ (12). He means this because he defines the obscene as ‘hypervisibility’ – that is, he feels that the lack of any hope of covering kills eroticism such that all that is left is the obscene. I think he means this in the sense that the compulsion to exhibit leaves no room to be one’s self other than as a constant exhibition as outer-directed towards the pleasure of the viewer and that this so leaves no space for the self or even for otherness as more than the immediately apparent. To put that perhaps too plainly, you don’t get depth from what is immediately and superficially seen. As he says in the next chapter, ‘the negativity of the secret, the veil, the concealment incite desire and make pleasure more intense’ (15) and to stretch this point further, ‘Unmediated enjoyment, which admits no imaginative or narrative detour, is pornographic’ (16).
I kept thinking of the story of Diana and Actaeon in this part of the book. Actaeon was a hunter who stumbled into a clearing as Diana was undressing. Rather than turn away, he stood and watched her – he became the voyeur watching pornography – only to be discovered and punished (the hunter becomes hunted and killed by his own dogs). Beauty has its costs and is veiled for a reason. And if beauty needs a veil, then the sublime, being beyond representation, is essentially permanently veiled. But this veiling or permanently covered is the very opposite of what capitalism seeks to achieve – ‘Capitalism heightens the pornographication of society by exhibiting everything as a commodity and handing it over to hypervisibility’ (24).
He then shifts his gaze to the photograph and has some interesting things to say regarding Barthes – particularly Barthes’ ideas of the studium and punctum (basically, the studium is the construction of the photograph as an image – how it has been staged, while the punctum is something elusive in the image that pricks us, that stops us and forces us to consider and reflect upon it). His point is that pornography has no punctum, it is all and immediately apparent and certainly not ‘troubling’ in the sense Barthes means, that is, as having ‘semiotic intensity. They have nothing that might take hold and wound’ (27). This semiotic intensity, when it exists, is something hidden in plain sight – in fact, we might not feel the piercing of the punctum of an image when we first see it, but rather only after we stop looking at the image, the punctum becomes a kind of itch under the skin that tells us we have been scratched and infected. Again, this is not the point of the pornographic, which, by definition, leaves nothing hidden, nothing to be guessed at or obscured.
Before reading this I’d have taken transparency to mean something close to narrative – that is, for something to be truly transparent you would need to be able to tell its story – but again, he argues the exact opposite. He sees the world today as being based on counting, rather than recounting. This additive nature of our existence (again, linking back to the neoliberal notion of the world as information) sits outside of traditional ritual and ceremony which ‘have their own temporality, their own rhythm and tact’ (30). He makes this point in relation to pilgrimages – which require a progression and narrative force in ways that ‘being a tourist’ simply doesn’t. As he says, the ‘tourist sticks to the present’ but the pilgrim never forgets the point of the journey – all journeys are about reaching the point of transcendence, directing one’s self towards that end, something denied the tourist. And that transcendence is hidden and only available if the journey is connected to the narrative of a pilgrimage. As he says at one point, endings only make sense if they are tied to a narrative.
He stresses this point further when he says, ‘The world today is no theatre where actions and feelings are represented and interpreted, but a market on which intimacies are exhibited, sold, and consumed. The theatre is a site of representation, whereas the market is a site of exhibition.’ And to link this again back to the theme we have already established ‘Today theatrical representation is yielding to pornographic exhibition’ (34).
He makes the same point in relation to politics and the public sphere, which also have become dominated with the personal habits and choices of politicians rather than with political action – and this personalisation of politics shifts it from political action towards (again) exhibition and therefore pornography too.
The next chapter shifts focus to Plato’s cave – but makes the point that the cave allegory is a narrative world constructed on the metaphor of theatre, literally constructed as such, with a captive audience and a light and shadow show. But the point again is the opposite of transparency – for Plato the world of appearance, the world that is ‘transparent’ to us – is a world of lies. The truth is beyond this world and is fundamentally beyond our ability to comprehend it in its ideal form, as such, truth is the very opposite of transparent. Or as Han concludes the chapter by saying, ‘Only emptiness is entirely transparent’ (40).
It is here that Bentham’s Panopticon comes back with full force. The point of the panopticon was to discipline and we generally assume that to enact discipline requires a centre – someone who will correct inappropriate behaviour by disciplining. That is someone who metes out the punishment for infractions. This centre no longer exists – rather, we are all the centre and we are all self-disciplining. We willingly put ourselves on display and so we have become both the centre and periphery of the panopticon – the watcher and the watched. And so, we imagine, since we perform this pornographic act of auto-display / auto-observation upon ourselves, that it must be an expression of our freedom and our will. However, ‘Such total surveillance degrades ‘transparent society’ into an inhuman society of control: everyone controls everyone’ (47). That is, while we think we are being self-creating, we are in fact self-regulating.
We live in a world of KPIs – and assure ourselves that all that can be known can be counted and measured – but this form of transparency is really little more than another aspect of the total surveillance society – and since it is transparent, such a society is one where trust is impossible. Trust is only necessary if we are in a state ‘between knowing and not-knowing’ (47) – you don’t need to trust if you already know – but transparency means you can know everything – ‘Instead of affirming that ‘transparency creates trust’, one should instead say, ‘transparency dismantles trust’ (48).
Philosophers have long presented the way out of the despair of the human condition – particularly after the death of God – as involving us making a project of our lives. This has been true of Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault – in fact, one of the great current pieces of advice we give to young people is that in the future ‘One is the master and entrepreneur of oneself’ (48). But he questions this as well. The projects we choose are not out of freedom, but forced choices by the illusion of freedom where ‘The illusory freedom of consumers lacks all negativity. They no longer constitute an outside that might question the systemic inside’ (49).
This is a dark vision of the nature of transparency – one all the more troubling since transparency seems to be ‘bathed in light’. But if we have nowhere to hide, we have nowhere to grow either. Like I said, I’ve skipped bits of this – whole chapters in places – but like I also said, he fits an awful lot into 50 odd pages.
May 28, 2017
"Enformasyon elde etmenin günümüzdeki gibi çok kolay olduğu durumda toplum düzeni güvenden kontrole dönüşür.Şeffaflık toplumu bir güven toplumu değil kontrol toplumudur." Ayrıca; "Günümüz dünyası eylem ve duyguların temsil edildiği ve yorumlandığı bir tiyatro değil;mahremiyetlerin sergilendiği,satıldığı ve tüketildiği bir pazardır."
Bu kısa kitapta Byung Chul Han, içinde bulunduğumuz toplumun ne denli içine dönüp bir o kadar da tepkisizleştiği hatta izleniyor olmanın dahi umursanmazlığını gösteriyor. Her tür bilgi ve birikimin dolaşımda olması ne gibi sonuçlar doğurur sorusuna odaklanıyoruz bir yandan da..
Bu kısa kitapta Byung Chul Han, içinde bulunduğumuz toplumun ne denli içine dönüp bir o kadar da tepkisizleştiği hatta izleniyor olmanın dahi umursanmazlığını gösteriyor. Her tür bilgi ve birikimin dolaşımda olması ne gibi sonuçlar doğurur sorusuna odaklanıyoruz bir yandan da..
November 27, 2017
Ένα από τα βιβλία που σε συνταράσσουν. Αυτή η συθέμελη συντάραξη δεν λαμβάνει χώρα σε ένα πεδίο πλήρους αποδοχής των προταγμάτων του συγγραφέα, όσο σε ένα πεδίο γόνιμης διαλεκτικής με αυτά.
February 28, 2024
This will probably be upgraded to a 5 when I come back and read it again after going around and getting a better grasp on Byung-Chul Han’s works. His ideas seem to be a system that feeds itself, and so reading more will allow you to understand more, and there will be less of a need of defining and setting the boundaries of specific terms and phrases. An exploration, this book is, as opposed to a societal praxis. Here are some standout quotes:
- “Clearly the human soul requires realms where it can be at home without the gaze of the Other. It claims a certain impermeability. Total illumination would scorch it and cause a particular kind of spiritual burnout. Only machines are transparent. Eventfulness and freedom, which constitute life fundamentally, do not admit transparency.”
- “What is more, a transparent relationship is a dead one, altogether lacking attraction and vitality. A new Enlightenment is called for: there are positive, productive spheres of human existence and coexistence that the compulsion for transparency is simply demolishing.”
- “It has been demonstrated that more information does not necessarily lead to better decisions. Intuition, for example, transcends available data and follows its own logic. Today the growing, indeed the rampant, mass of information is crippling all higher judgment. Often less knowledge and information achieves something more. It is not unusual for the negativity of omitting and forgetting to prove productive. The society of transparency cannot tolerate a gap [Lücke] in information or of sight. Yet both thinking and inspiration require a vacuum.”
- “It follows that a society that no longer admits the negativity of a gap would be a society without happiness. Love without something hidden to sight is pornography. And without a gap in knowledge, thinking degenerates into calculation.”
- “The society of positivity has taken leave of both dialectics and hermeneutics. The dialectic is based on negativity. Thus, Hegel’s “Spirit” does not turn away from the negative but endures and preserves it within itself. Negativity nourishes the “life of the mind.” Spirit has “power,” according to Hegel, “only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it.” Such lingering yields the “magical power that converts it into being.” In contrast, whoever “surfs” only for what is positive proves mindless. The Spirit is slow because it tarries with the negative and works through it. The system of transparency abolishes all negativity in order to accelerate itself. Tarrying with the negative has given way to racing and raving in the positive.”
And these are just from the first 5 pages alone!
- “Clearly the human soul requires realms where it can be at home without the gaze of the Other. It claims a certain impermeability. Total illumination would scorch it and cause a particular kind of spiritual burnout. Only machines are transparent. Eventfulness and freedom, which constitute life fundamentally, do not admit transparency.”
- “What is more, a transparent relationship is a dead one, altogether lacking attraction and vitality. A new Enlightenment is called for: there are positive, productive spheres of human existence and coexistence that the compulsion for transparency is simply demolishing.”
- “It has been demonstrated that more information does not necessarily lead to better decisions. Intuition, for example, transcends available data and follows its own logic. Today the growing, indeed the rampant, mass of information is crippling all higher judgment. Often less knowledge and information achieves something more. It is not unusual for the negativity of omitting and forgetting to prove productive. The society of transparency cannot tolerate a gap [Lücke] in information or of sight. Yet both thinking and inspiration require a vacuum.”
- “It follows that a society that no longer admits the negativity of a gap would be a society without happiness. Love without something hidden to sight is pornography. And without a gap in knowledge, thinking degenerates into calculation.”
- “The society of positivity has taken leave of both dialectics and hermeneutics. The dialectic is based on negativity. Thus, Hegel’s “Spirit” does not turn away from the negative but endures and preserves it within itself. Negativity nourishes the “life of the mind.” Spirit has “power,” according to Hegel, “only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it.” Such lingering yields the “magical power that converts it into being.” In contrast, whoever “surfs” only for what is positive proves mindless. The Spirit is slow because it tarries with the negative and works through it. The system of transparency abolishes all negativity in order to accelerate itself. Tarrying with the negative has given way to racing and raving in the positive.”
And these are just from the first 5 pages alone!
March 28, 2020
Ας μου επιτραπεί η υπερβολή να πω ότι πρόκειται για σπουδαία ανακάλυψη ο Μπιουνγκ-Τσουλ Χαν. Η βαθιά γνώση που έχει για τα πράγματα που γράφει, γίνεται αισθητή από την πρωτότυπη και πυκνή σύνθεση των αναφορών του (Πλάτων, Αριστοτέλης, Χέγκελ, Νίτσε, Χάιντεγκερ, Μπένγιαμιν, Μπαρτ, Μποντριγιάρ Σένετ, Μπάουμαν, Αγκάμπεν), την άνεση με την οποία τους ασκεί κριτική, αλλά και από τα υπόγεια ρεύματα σκέψης που διατρέχουν το κείμενο, με χαρακτηριστικότερη περίπτωση εκείνη των αισθητικών θεωριών του Αντόρνο.
Ο Μπιουνκ-Τσουλ Χαν ακροβατεί ανάμεσα σε έναν κλασικό ακαδημαϊκό λόγο, που γίνεται κάποιες λίγες φορές στριφνός αλλά ποτέ ιλιγγιώδης, και σε ένα αισθησιακό παιχνίδι αφορισμών, το οποίο όμως δεν παρατείται καθόλου από την αναστοχαστική θέση του για χάρη του τσιτάτου. Ο Χαν στέκεται διαρκώς απέναντι στον λόγο περί θετικότητας που ξεγυμνώνει τα πράγματα από τον αφηγηματικό χαρακτήρα τους και στεγνώνει τον κόσμο από τη φρεσκάδα της αμφισημίας και του υπαινιγμού, κι αυτό το βρίσκω αναγκαίο και αναζωογονητικό.
Ο Μπιουνκ-Τσουλ Χαν ακροβατεί ανάμεσα σε έναν κλασικό ακαδημαϊκό λόγο, που γίνεται κάποιες λίγες φορές στριφνός αλλά ποτέ ιλιγγιώδης, και σε ένα αισθησιακό παιχνίδι αφορισμών, το οποίο όμως δεν παρατείται καθόλου από την αναστοχαστική θέση του για χάρη του τσιτάτου. Ο Χαν στέκεται διαρκώς απέναντι στον λόγο περί θετικότητας που ξεγυμνώνει τα πράγματα από τον αφηγηματικό χαρακτήρα τους και στεγνώνει τον κόσμο από τη φρεσκάδα της αμφισημίας και του υπαινιγμού, κι αυτό το βρίσκω αναγκαίο και αναζωογονητικό.
August 18, 2018
Superfluous in light of having read two of his other works. The thesis remains the same: contemporary Western society has lost an essential dialectic of negativity and fallen into a de-eroticized, fully visible 'inferno of the same'. Contradictions arise with the companion Burnout Society: there BHC located a new dispositif beyond Foucault's "society of discipline" and Deleuze's "society of control" but here he retreats towards the very terminology of Bentham claimed as insufficient in describing the emerging state of pure positivity. One also grows weary of the omnipresent recourse to an unhistorical and sweeping hic et nunc ("Today there is no longer...", "Today the entire world is...")—this is ultimately an aesthetical project, not a properly political.
February 17, 2022
هذا الكتاب وصفٌ للمجتمع الراهن. مجتمع الشفافية. ويقصد بالشفافية انكشاف المعلومة.
من هذا الانكشاف تنطلق صور متعددة للمجتمع، من الإيجابية بمعنى انعدام المقاومة، ومرورًا بالعرض والبورنوغرافيا، إلى التواصل المفروض والحميمية المفرطة والاقتراب الشديد، وانتهاءً بالتحكم الكامل.
فما بدأ شفافاً انتهى محكومًا بعد أن تمّ انكشافه كاملاً وتعريته تماماً.
كلّ فصل يناقش وجهاً من وجوه الشفافية. وفي كلّ فصل تتكرر بعض المعاني والعبارات، لتصبّ في مكانٍ واحد.
الكتاب صغير، لكنه يحتاج إلى وقتٍ وتفكّر، وأهمّ دروسه أنّ لكلّ مفهوم وجوهه الكثيرة وبعضها مريب ومتناقض. فحتى شفافية الزجاج تستطيع إخفاء وجه السلطوية المظلم.
من هذا الانكشاف تنطلق صور متعددة للمجتمع، من الإيجابية بمعنى انعدام المقاومة، ومرورًا بالعرض والبورنوغرافيا، إلى التواصل المفروض والحميمية المفرطة والاقتراب الشديد، وانتهاءً بالتحكم الكامل.
فما بدأ شفافاً انتهى محكومًا بعد أن تمّ انكشافه كاملاً وتعريته تماماً.
كلّ فصل يناقش وجهاً من وجوه الشفافية. وفي كلّ فصل تتكرر بعض المعاني والعبارات، لتصبّ في مكانٍ واحد.
الكتاب صغير، لكنه يحتاج إلى وقتٍ وتفكّر، وأهمّ دروسه أنّ لكلّ مفهوم وجوهه الكثيرة وبعضها مريب ومتناقض. فحتى شفافية الزجاج تستطيع إخفاء وجه السلطوية المظلم.
August 15, 2017
Şeffaflık toplumun niteliğine göre farklı biçemlerde karşımıza çıkıyor. Yıllar boyu siyasetçilerin ağzında pelesenk olmuş bu kelime altında derin bir sosyolojik boyut varmış da haberimiz yok. Kitap beni baya zorladı. Okurun çabası kitabı anlamlandırabilmek için gerekli. Yazar bizleri direk bilgilendirmiyor.
Toplumbilimciler toplulukları bir kelime altında nitelemeye başladı : Olumluluk Toplumu, teşhircilik toplumu, ivme toplumu gibi. Bu alt topluluk içerinde şeffaflık tanımını açıklıyor yazar . Şeffaflık teşhirciliği ortaya çıkarıyor. Yani yazarın deyimiyle nesne kült olmaktan çıkıp sergi niteliğine bürünüyor. Kült olan gizemlidir, değerlidir. Sergi biçiminde olan nesne metadan öte değildir. Tam da kapitalist sistemin istediği düzene çanak tutuyor şeffaflık. Güven konusu şeffaflıkla günümüzde değişime uğradı. Güvenmek için eskiden bilinmeyenliye teslim olmak vardı. Şimdiyse her şey ayan beyan içinde olmalı. Ama gizemli olmayan bir şeyin tadı tuzu olmaz bence. Ruhsuz bir dünya tadı ağzınıza gelmiyor mu? Merak duygusunu öldürdük. Şeffaflık içinde giderek pornografik bir toplum olduk. Sosyal medyada bu şeffaflık voyörizm gibi hastalıkların türemesine sebep oldu. Kontrolcü bir yapıya da büründük. Dijital panoptikon yapıda özgürlük, kontrol altında olmakla eş güdümlü oldu. Kısacası şeffaflık bizleri bir sistemin çarkı haline getirdi.
Toplumbilimciler toplulukları bir kelime altında nitelemeye başladı : Olumluluk Toplumu, teşhircilik toplumu, ivme toplumu gibi. Bu alt topluluk içerinde şeffaflık tanımını açıklıyor yazar . Şeffaflık teşhirciliği ortaya çıkarıyor. Yani yazarın deyimiyle nesne kült olmaktan çıkıp sergi niteliğine bürünüyor. Kült olan gizemlidir, değerlidir. Sergi biçiminde olan nesne metadan öte değildir. Tam da kapitalist sistemin istediği düzene çanak tutuyor şeffaflık. Güven konusu şeffaflıkla günümüzde değişime uğradı. Güvenmek için eskiden bilinmeyenliye teslim olmak vardı. Şimdiyse her şey ayan beyan içinde olmalı. Ama gizemli olmayan bir şeyin tadı tuzu olmaz bence. Ruhsuz bir dünya tadı ağzınıza gelmiyor mu? Merak duygusunu öldürdük. Şeffaflık içinde giderek pornografik bir toplum olduk. Sosyal medyada bu şeffaflık voyörizm gibi hastalıkların türemesine sebep oldu. Kontrolcü bir yapıya da büründük. Dijital panoptikon yapıda özgürlük, kontrol altında olmakla eş güdümlü oldu. Kısacası şeffaflık bizleri bir sistemin çarkı haline getirdi.
March 4, 2016
"El mundo no es hoy ningún teatro en el que se representan y lean acciones y sentimientos, sino un mercado en el que se exponen, venden y consumen intimidades"
June 25, 2015
Imprescindible lectura para entender cómo la sociedad actual en aras a la transparencia ha suprimido el "valor cultual" de la misma, para elevar a los altares la exhibición frente a la existencia. Una sociedad que evita la dicotomía de lo negativo/positivo para realizar un tamiz efectivo de la información y poder transformarla en conocimiento.
Es un grito contra la uniformidad del único discurso del "Me Gusta" de la sociedad digital. Una sociedad que invita a la transparencia a través de la desconfianza y de la sospecha permanente, elevando el "control" como garante de la eficacia de la gestión de la transparencia. Una advertencia de la dictadura que viene, que supera el concepto del panóptico de Bentham, instaurando un modelo panóptico digital al que nos entregamos libremente y que carece de una construcción filosófica de un imperativo moral social que implique límites al poder omnímodo que ejercita, gracias a los procesos de hiperinformación e hiperacelaración de la red.
Un aviso, ante la sociedad de la exhibición de la red, frente a la sobriedad y asentamiento que necesita el conocimiento y el juego democrático para crear alternativas y proyectos a largo plazo. La sociedad de la transparencia es la sociedad de la inmediatez y ello supone una amenaza implícita para la sociedad.
Es un grito contra la uniformidad del único discurso del "Me Gusta" de la sociedad digital. Una sociedad que invita a la transparencia a través de la desconfianza y de la sospecha permanente, elevando el "control" como garante de la eficacia de la gestión de la transparencia. Una advertencia de la dictadura que viene, que supera el concepto del panóptico de Bentham, instaurando un modelo panóptico digital al que nos entregamos libremente y que carece de una construcción filosófica de un imperativo moral social que implique límites al poder omnímodo que ejercita, gracias a los procesos de hiperinformación e hiperacelaración de la red.
Un aviso, ante la sociedad de la exhibición de la red, frente a la sobriedad y asentamiento que necesita el conocimiento y el juego democrático para crear alternativas y proyectos a largo plazo. La sociedad de la transparencia es la sociedad de la inmediatez y ello supone una amenaza implícita para la sociedad.
March 7, 2019
Sayfada hafif, içerikte ağır bu kitabı, her türlü teknolojik ve iletişimsel yeniliği düşünmeden kabullendiğimiz bu zamanlarda okumanızı kesinlikle tavsiye ederim. Bol bol altını çizdim, benim için toplum yaşamı eskisi gibi görünmeyecek artık.
July 21, 2022
أعتبر أن هذا الكتاب تكملت لسلسلة السوائل وخاصة كتاب المراقبة السائلة والحداثة السائلة ،فإن تحدث المراقبة السائلة عن هيمنة الرقمنة والتحكم .هذا الكتاب يتحدث عن هيمنة بالاسم الشفافية.
شفافية الولوج للمعلومة. لا استطبع اقول أنني فهمت الكتاب فهما ممتازا لانني كنت اشعر بتفكك فقرات .حسب صديقي أحمد هناك مشكلة في الترجمة تلمسها في محاولاتك للالتقاط المعنى.لكن الذي أجزم به أن فصل مجتمع العرض وفصل الشفافية في العلاقات يحكي عنا .
وطريق تفسيره وتعبيره عن مفهوم السلبية والإيجابية وأن الإيجابية هي السليية وان هدف مجتمع حالي طمس السلبية التي تفرض عمق ونقد واعتراف بالخزي والتقصير وكل العيوب. الذي يسعى المجمتع الحالي لطمسها .ابتداء كما قال من تجميل الصور الى تجميل الواقع .لدرجة تجعلك تعيش وهم الجمال ووهم الحقيقة لان الجمال الحقيقي بحتاج شئ من سلبية وينبذ التسارع الذي هو سمة هذا العصر.
كتاب كما قلت تكمل لكتب الحداثة ونعم أشجع على قراءته.
عسى أن نكون اكثر وعي ونحن نسمع جمل على غرار الديمقراطية والشفافية.
فكما يمكن بالاسم الديمقراطية (اختارني الشعب) أن تقمع ذلك الشعب .ممكن بالاسم الشفافية تستبد بالشعب.
21/7/22
شفافية الولوج للمعلومة. لا استطبع اقول أنني فهمت الكتاب فهما ممتازا لانني كنت اشعر بتفكك فقرات .حسب صديقي أحمد هناك مشكلة في الترجمة تلمسها في محاولاتك للالتقاط المعنى.لكن الذي أجزم به أن فصل مجتمع العرض وفصل الشفافية في العلاقات يحكي عنا .
وطريق تفسيره وتعبيره عن مفهوم السلبية والإيجابية وأن الإيجابية هي السليية وان هدف مجتمع حالي طمس السلبية التي تفرض عمق ونقد واعتراف بالخزي والتقصير وكل العيوب. الذي يسعى المجمتع الحالي لطمسها .ابتداء كما قال من تجميل الصور الى تجميل الواقع .لدرجة تجعلك تعيش وهم الجمال ووهم الحقيقة لان الجمال الحقيقي بحتاج شئ من سلبية وينبذ التسارع الذي هو سمة هذا العصر.
كتاب كما قلت تكمل لكتب الحداثة ونعم أشجع على قراءته.
عسى أن نكون اكثر وعي ونحن نسمع جمل على غرار الديمقراطية والشفافية.
فكما يمكن بالاسم الديمقراطية (اختارني الشعب) أن تقمع ذلك الشعب .ممكن بالاسم الشفافية تستبد بالشعب.
21/7/22
July 2, 2025
3,5
Byung-Chul Han’ın Şeffaflık Toplumu dijital çağın ruhunu felsefi bir dille çözümlemeye çalışan özlü bir deneme. Kitap neoliberalizmin, dijital gözetimin ve bireysel ifşa kültürünün insan ruhunu ve toplumsal yapıyı nasıl dönüştürdüğüne dair güçlü tespitler sunuyor.
Han, günümüzde “şeffaflık” ideolojisinin bir erdem değil, aksine baskıcı bir norm haline geldiğini savunarak, mahremiyetin, içselliğin ve gizemin hızla yok olduğuna dikkat çekiyor.
Kitabın ana temalarından biri, “pornografik şeffaflık” ve “performans toplumu” gibi kavramlar aracılığıyla bireyin artık sadece gözetlenen değil, aynı zamanda kendi mahremiyetini gönüllü şekilde pazarlayan bir varlığa dönüştüğünü vurgulaması. Foucault’nun panoptikon metaforunu güncelleyerek sosyal medya çağının gönüllü gözetim kültürünü oluşturduğunu öne sürüyor. Han' a göre “Panoptikon korkutuyordu, Şeffaflık Toplumu özendiriyor.”
Han’ın anlatımı son derece yoğun ve zaman zaman tekrarlara dayanıyor; argümanlarını kısa ama kesin ifadelerle sunuyor.
Öte yandan kitapta sunulan gözetim toplumu veya neoliberalizm eleştirisi Foucault, Debord, Baudrillard gibi düşünürlerden bu yana dile getiriliyor. "Şeffaflık”, “pozitiflik”, “pornografik şeffaflık” gibi kavramlar geniş alanlara uygulanıyor fakat ampirik verilere dayanmıyor ve derinlemesine analiz edilmiyor. Kitabın iddiası elbette bu olmayabilir, kısa ve anlaşılabilir bir felsefi metin olması öncelenmiş olabilir.
Sonuç itibariyle, dijital çağın görünürlük, mahremiyet ve performans ekseninde nasıl yeniden biçimlendiğini sorgulayan, günümüzün “her şeyin paylaşıldığı” kültürüne eleştirel bir mesafeyle bakmak isteyen okurlar için derli toplu bir metin.
Byung-Chul Han’ın Şeffaflık Toplumu dijital çağın ruhunu felsefi bir dille çözümlemeye çalışan özlü bir deneme. Kitap neoliberalizmin, dijital gözetimin ve bireysel ifşa kültürünün insan ruhunu ve toplumsal yapıyı nasıl dönüştürdüğüne dair güçlü tespitler sunuyor.
Han, günümüzde “şeffaflık” ideolojisinin bir erdem değil, aksine baskıcı bir norm haline geldiğini savunarak, mahremiyetin, içselliğin ve gizemin hızla yok olduğuna dikkat çekiyor.
Kitabın ana temalarından biri, “pornografik şeffaflık” ve “performans toplumu” gibi kavramlar aracılığıyla bireyin artık sadece gözetlenen değil, aynı zamanda kendi mahremiyetini gönüllü şekilde pazarlayan bir varlığa dönüştüğünü vurgulaması. Foucault’nun panoptikon metaforunu güncelleyerek sosyal medya çağının gönüllü gözetim kültürünü oluşturduğunu öne sürüyor. Han' a göre “Panoptikon korkutuyordu, Şeffaflık Toplumu özendiriyor.”
Han’ın anlatımı son derece yoğun ve zaman zaman tekrarlara dayanıyor; argümanlarını kısa ama kesin ifadelerle sunuyor.
Öte yandan kitapta sunulan gözetim toplumu veya neoliberalizm eleştirisi Foucault, Debord, Baudrillard gibi düşünürlerden bu yana dile getiriliyor. "Şeffaflık”, “pozitiflik”, “pornografik şeffaflık” gibi kavramlar geniş alanlara uygulanıyor fakat ampirik verilere dayanmıyor ve derinlemesine analiz edilmiyor. Kitabın iddiası elbette bu olmayabilir, kısa ve anlaşılabilir bir felsefi metin olması öncelenmiş olabilir.
Sonuç itibariyle, dijital çağın görünürlük, mahremiyet ve performans ekseninde nasıl yeniden biçimlendiğini sorgulayan, günümüzün “her şeyin paylaşıldığı” kültürüne eleştirel bir mesafeyle bakmak isteyen okurlar için derli toplu bir metin.
September 17, 2020
Cuarto libro que leo de Byung-Chul Han, y lo que antes criticaba de su obra, ahora es lo que más rescato. En libros anteriores sentía que muchas de sus conclusiones partían de premisas que resultaban arbitrarias, sin embargo, ahora creo que si comenzara a justificar el porqué de haber elegido "x" premisa, y no "y" o "z", sus libros se harían más extensos, y las ideas más novedosas y polémicas se verían diluidas. Si esto lo hace para vender más, o como un gesto genuino, me es indiferente; lo importante son las ideas, y las de este libro son muy interesantes, especialmente por la relevancia que han cobrado las redes sociales en época de pandemia.
January 6, 2020
لقد أصبحت سلعةً يا عزيزي وكونك موجود في هذا العالم هذه الأونة فقد فرض هذا عليك.....
يناقش الكتاب فكرة الشفافية وأهميتها في العالم الاستهلاكي الحالي وافقادها للمعاني والقيم الآخرى فعلى ما يبدو أننا الآن لم نعد نملك شيء بالرغم من امتلاكنا الكثير ولم تعد هناك خصوصية ولا حرية أنت مجبر ومقيد الآن وإن لم تظن ذلك....
من يقرأ هذا الكتاب يبدأ في مقارنته مع تعاليم الدين ليعلم أن العبودية لله وحدة هي الحرية الأكيدة وما دونها ذل
أنصح بقراءته بشدة لفهم الكثير من مجريات الأمور الحالية
لكنه يتطلب إن يكون عندك خلفية مسبقة عما يتحدث عنه في مجالات الحداثة
يناقش الكتاب فكرة الشفافية وأهميتها في العالم الاستهلاكي الحالي وافقادها للمعاني والقيم الآخرى فعلى ما يبدو أننا الآن لم نعد نملك شيء بالرغم من امتلاكنا الكثير ولم تعد هناك خصوصية ولا حرية أنت مجبر ومقيد الآن وإن لم تظن ذلك....
من يقرأ هذا الكتاب يبدأ في مقارنته مع تعاليم الدين ليعلم أن العبودية لله وحدة هي الحرية الأكيدة وما دونها ذل
أنصح بقراءته بشدة لفهم الكثير من مجريات الأمور الحالية
لكنه يتطلب إن يكون عندك خلفية مسبقة عما يتحدث عنه في مجالات الحداثة
February 19, 2020
Şeffaflık ötekini, yabancıyı devre dışı bırakarak sisteme istikrar ve hız kazandırır. Bu sistemik zorlama şeffaflık toplumunu hizaya getirilmiş bir toplum haline getirir. Totaliter yanı da buradadır: "Hizaya getirmenin yeni adı: Şeffaflık.
Günümüz toplumunu sarmış olan şeffaflık tutkusu karşısında mesafe tutkusunu hayata geçirmeyi öğrenmemiz elzemdir. Mesafe ve utanç sermayenin, enformasyonun ve iletişimin hızlandırılmış dolaşımına dahil edilemez.
Şeffaflık ile hakikat özdeş değildir. Hakikat, diğer her şeyi yanlış ilan ederek kendini ortaya koyar ve kabul ettirir. Daha fazla enformasyondan ya da enformasyon yığınından ortaya hakikat çıkmaz. Bunlarda yön, yani anlam eksiktir. Tam da hakiki olanın barındırdığı olumsuzluğun eksikliğinden ötürü olumlunun urlaşması, yığınlaşması söz konusudur. Aşırı-enformasyon ve aşırı iletişim hakikat eksikliğinin, dahası varlık eksikliğinin belirtisidir. Daha fazla enformasyon, daha fazla iletişim bütünün temel belirsizliğini ortadan kaldırmaz. Hatta daha da artırır.
Teşhir etmenin aşırılığı her şeyi "tüm sırlarından arınmış olarak derhal tüketilmeye açık" bir meta haline getirir. Kapitalist ekonomi her şeyi sergilenme mecburiyetine tabi kılar. Sadece sergilemeye yarayan sahnelemedir değer yaratan, şeylerin her türlü kendine özgülüğü feda edilmiştir. Şeyler karanlığın içinde değil aşırı ışık altında ortadan kaybolmaktadır: "Daha genel olarak bakıldığında görünür şeyler karanlık ya da sessizlik içinde kaybolmaz, görünürden daha görünür olanda yitip giderler: Müstehcenlikte."
Günümüzün kontrol toplumu özel bir panoptik yapıya sahiptir. Bentham'ın panoptikonundaki yalıtılmış mahkûmların aksine günümüz panoptikonunun sakinleri birbirleriyle yoğun bir şekilde iletişimde bulunur ve ağlar kurarlar. Teşhircilik ve röntgencilik, dijital panoptikon niteliğindeki interneti besler.
Günümüzde yerkürenin bütünü bir panoptikon durumuna doğru gelişme gösteriyor. Panoptikonun dışı diye bir şey mevcut değil. Bir topyekûnlük söz konusu. İçerisini dışarıdan ayıran bir duvar yok. Kendilerini özgürlük alanları olarak sunan Google ve sosyal ağlar panoptik biçimlere bürünüyorlar. Bugün gözetleme, genelde sanıldığı şekliyle özgürlüğe saldırı şeklinde gerçekleşmiyor. İnsanlar kendilerini daha ziyade gönüllü olarak teslim ediyor panoptik bakışa. Kendilerini soyarak ve teşhir ederek dijital panoptikonun oluşuna bilerek katkıda bulunuyorlar. Dijital panoptikondaki mahkûm aynı zamanda hem kurban hem faildir. Özgürlüğün diyalektiği işte budur. Özgürlüğün kontrol olduğu ortaya çıkıyor.
Günümüz toplumunu sarmış olan şeffaflık tutkusu karşısında mesafe tutkusunu hayata geçirmeyi öğrenmemiz elzemdir. Mesafe ve utanç sermayenin, enformasyonun ve iletişimin hızlandırılmış dolaşımına dahil edilemez.
Şeffaflık ile hakikat özdeş değildir. Hakikat, diğer her şeyi yanlış ilan ederek kendini ortaya koyar ve kabul ettirir. Daha fazla enformasyondan ya da enformasyon yığınından ortaya hakikat çıkmaz. Bunlarda yön, yani anlam eksiktir. Tam da hakiki olanın barındırdığı olumsuzluğun eksikliğinden ötürü olumlunun urlaşması, yığınlaşması söz konusudur. Aşırı-enformasyon ve aşırı iletişim hakikat eksikliğinin, dahası varlık eksikliğinin belirtisidir. Daha fazla enformasyon, daha fazla iletişim bütünün temel belirsizliğini ortadan kaldırmaz. Hatta daha da artırır.
Teşhir etmenin aşırılığı her şeyi "tüm sırlarından arınmış olarak derhal tüketilmeye açık" bir meta haline getirir. Kapitalist ekonomi her şeyi sergilenme mecburiyetine tabi kılar. Sadece sergilemeye yarayan sahnelemedir değer yaratan, şeylerin her türlü kendine özgülüğü feda edilmiştir. Şeyler karanlığın içinde değil aşırı ışık altında ortadan kaybolmaktadır: "Daha genel olarak bakıldığında görünür şeyler karanlık ya da sessizlik içinde kaybolmaz, görünürden daha görünür olanda yitip giderler: Müstehcenlikte."
Günümüzün kontrol toplumu özel bir panoptik yapıya sahiptir. Bentham'ın panoptikonundaki yalıtılmış mahkûmların aksine günümüz panoptikonunun sakinleri birbirleriyle yoğun bir şekilde iletişimde bulunur ve ağlar kurarlar. Teşhircilik ve röntgencilik, dijital panoptikon niteliğindeki interneti besler.
Günümüzde yerkürenin bütünü bir panoptikon durumuna doğru gelişme gösteriyor. Panoptikonun dışı diye bir şey mevcut değil. Bir topyekûnlük söz konusu. İçerisini dışarıdan ayıran bir duvar yok. Kendilerini özgürlük alanları olarak sunan Google ve sosyal ağlar panoptik biçimlere bürünüyorlar. Bugün gözetleme, genelde sanıldığı şekliyle özgürlüğe saldırı şeklinde gerçekleşmiyor. İnsanlar kendilerini daha ziyade gönüllü olarak teslim ediyor panoptik bakışa. Kendilerini soyarak ve teşhir ederek dijital panoptikonun oluşuna bilerek katkıda bulunuyorlar. Dijital panoptikondaki mahkûm aynı zamanda hem kurban hem faildir. Özgürlüğün diyalektiği işte budur. Özgürlüğün kontrol olduğu ortaya çıkıyor.
September 10, 2017
Alguns livros conversam conosco! Esse foi um deles! Auxiliou (incomodou positivamente) na compreensão de como nessa rotina massificada normalizamos alguns valores - transparência é ponto de partida e chegada do livro, passando por exposição, evidência, pornografia, aceleração, intimidade, informação, desencobrimento e controle - em contraposição ao que é realmente caro a cada um de nós! Segundo livro do autor e, apesar do grande número de citações-empréstimos de pensamento, continuou agradando! Recomendo!
June 27, 2017
More a set of assertions than a discussion. Sadly the blurb at the back does a better job for the questions the book is meant to raise than the book itself. There is no real discussion of what transparency entails and simply that other philosophical concepts are related to it. In addition these concepts are not really explained either so it requires previous knowledge to be understood. The book could really be summarised in a set of bullet points.
December 6, 2021
Bu kitabı ilk nerede fark ettim, radarıma girdi hatırlamıyorum (belki de not almak lazım referans olması açısından). Uzun süre okunmadan kaldı bir kenarda. Sevgili Ümit Gurbanov'dan Byung-Chul Han ile alakalı peş peşe 2 video çevirisi gelince tamam artık okumalıyım dedim. Topu topu 70 sayfa zaten. Dingin bir kafayla okumak şart. Dingin bir kafayla okumaya başlayıp uykusuz, kafası dağınık bir şekilde tamamladım (bu ikinci durumun kitapla ilgisi yok, sadece okuma sürecindeki halimi belirtmek istedim).
Ön koşullu okunmuş/bilinmesi gereken kavramlara az çok hakim olmadan okumamak lazım. Çarpıcı tespitleri var kitabın. Üzerinde haylice düşündürüyor. Katılsanız da katılmasanız da. Yazar, önemli düşünürlerin görüşleri ile destekliyor fikirlerini sık sık.
İfşa toplumu konusunda pek aynı fikirde değilim. İfşa toplumunun toplumsal sonuçları konusunda yeterince bilgi sahibi değiliz, ya da sonuçlarını henüz tespit edebilmiş değiliz diye düşünüyorum. Kısa vadede bu sonuçları almak pek mümkün değil bence. Bir sürekli değişen, dönüşen ve evrilen bir yapı var. Bu dinamizmi görmezlikten gelmeyi ve püriten bir varoluşta ısrarcı olmaya karşıyım ben.
Elbette bir insanın dönüp dolaşıp döndüğü yer belli ama belli bir yaştan sonra olan bir şey bu. Ya da çok çok büyük trajik vakalar sonrası bilinçlenişler sonrasında olan bir şey. Bunun dışında kontrol edilemez bir dinamizm var çok çok uzun zamandır ve katastrofik bir hadise olmadığı sürece de durmayacak ya da duraklamayacak. Bir de kendi çok uzun yıllara dayanan deneyimimi aktarayım: son derece demokratik, köklü, şeffaf olduğunu iddia eden bir kurumda çalışıyorum ama ben bu kurumun şeffaf olduğuna hiç denk gelmedim bunca yıldır. Şeffaflık konusu benim açımdan çok tartışmalı bir kavram. ifşa ve şeffaf kelimeleri ortak harfleri çok olduğu için ilk bakışta aynı kökten geldiği düşünülse de aslında değiller, farklılar. Bir ifşa toplumunda yaşadığımıza katılırım ama şeffaf bir toplumda yaşadığımız düşüncesine katılmıyorum.
Ön koşullu okunmuş/bilinmesi gereken kavramlara az çok hakim olmadan okumamak lazım. Çarpıcı tespitleri var kitabın. Üzerinde haylice düşündürüyor. Katılsanız da katılmasanız da. Yazar, önemli düşünürlerin görüşleri ile destekliyor fikirlerini sık sık.
İfşa toplumu konusunda pek aynı fikirde değilim. İfşa toplumunun toplumsal sonuçları konusunda yeterince bilgi sahibi değiliz, ya da sonuçlarını henüz tespit edebilmiş değiliz diye düşünüyorum. Kısa vadede bu sonuçları almak pek mümkün değil bence. Bir sürekli değişen, dönüşen ve evrilen bir yapı var. Bu dinamizmi görmezlikten gelmeyi ve püriten bir varoluşta ısrarcı olmaya karşıyım ben.
Elbette bir insanın dönüp dolaşıp döndüğü yer belli ama belli bir yaştan sonra olan bir şey bu. Ya da çok çok büyük trajik vakalar sonrası bilinçlenişler sonrasında olan bir şey. Bunun dışında kontrol edilemez bir dinamizm var çok çok uzun zamandır ve katastrofik bir hadise olmadığı sürece de durmayacak ya da duraklamayacak. Bir de kendi çok uzun yıllara dayanan deneyimimi aktarayım: son derece demokratik, köklü, şeffaf olduğunu iddia eden bir kurumda çalışıyorum ama ben bu kurumun şeffaf olduğuna hiç denk gelmedim bunca yıldır. Şeffaflık konusu benim açımdan çok tartışmalı bir kavram. ifşa ve şeffaf kelimeleri ortak harfleri çok olduğu için ilk bakışta aynı kökten geldiği düşünülse de aslında değiller, farklılar. Bir ifşa toplumunda yaşadığımıza katılırım ama şeffaf bir toplumda yaşadığımız düşüncesine katılmıyorum.
December 12, 2022
imagina que tienes un abuelo con tal privilegio de clase que estudió en la universidad en la primera mitad del siglo pasado y que ahora, aburrido en casa de no hacer nada (ni limpiar, por supuesto) se pasa el día quejándose del mundo y gritando a las nubes por la ventana, pues bien este libro es el libro que escribiría ese abuelo si le pusieras durante un segundo cualquier contenido audiovisual hecho a partir de los 90
October 4, 2023
A diferencia del libro anterior, la sociedad del cansancio, este libro me pareció mucho mas claro y con una base más solida por la cuál elaborar las conclusiones.
En la era de la información en la que nos encontramos, en la que la cultura predominante trata de establecer la transparencia como un imperativo moral, una realidad a la que debemos moldearnos, acomodarnos y aceptar como correcta y deseable.
Las redes sociales y el hecho de que las plataformas digitales sean de propiedad privada, con un incentivo en que seamos sus clientes y sus productos, dónde se espera que moldeemos nuestra identidad, nuestros lazos sociales de forma transparente, pública, para que la información, los datos que damos sean usados contra nosotros mismos, para usarnos como fuente de información de como explotarnos monetariamente mejor.
Todos estos temas son encarados de forma levemente oscura y con un paralelismo a la pornografía, o sea, a la transparencia total de la sexualidad, lo cual me pareció una forma rara de abordarlo, pero supongo que funciona para darle el enfoque desde el punto de vista psicológico, y no tan solo materialista (aunque este último me parece mucho mas fácil de abordar y de demostrar).
Cuando toca el tema final de las sociedades de control, y de ese panoptico descentralizado en el que nos terminamos convirtiendo, no puedo no encontrar el claro ejemplo de la llamada cultura de la cancelación, y el Wokeismo, y antiwokismo totalitarios que están degradando la capacidad crítica en las redes sociales (los separo en dos concepto contrarios, pero son básicamente el mismo fenómeno visto desde 2 perspectivas ideológicas opuestas).
Es un libro interesante, más cuando se lee junto al anterior, ya que refuerza las mismas ideas, pero a la vez las aclara un poco.
En la era de la información en la que nos encontramos, en la que la cultura predominante trata de establecer la transparencia como un imperativo moral, una realidad a la que debemos moldearnos, acomodarnos y aceptar como correcta y deseable.
Las redes sociales y el hecho de que las plataformas digitales sean de propiedad privada, con un incentivo en que seamos sus clientes y sus productos, dónde se espera que moldeemos nuestra identidad, nuestros lazos sociales de forma transparente, pública, para que la información, los datos que damos sean usados contra nosotros mismos, para usarnos como fuente de información de como explotarnos monetariamente mejor.
Todos estos temas son encarados de forma levemente oscura y con un paralelismo a la pornografía, o sea, a la transparencia total de la sexualidad, lo cual me pareció una forma rara de abordarlo, pero supongo que funciona para darle el enfoque desde el punto de vista psicológico, y no tan solo materialista (aunque este último me parece mucho mas fácil de abordar y de demostrar).
Cuando toca el tema final de las sociedades de control, y de ese panoptico descentralizado en el que nos terminamos convirtiendo, no puedo no encontrar el claro ejemplo de la llamada cultura de la cancelación, y el Wokeismo, y antiwokismo totalitarios que están degradando la capacidad crítica en las redes sociales (los separo en dos concepto contrarios, pero son básicamente el mismo fenómeno visto desde 2 perspectivas ideológicas opuestas).
Es un libro interesante, más cuando se lee junto al anterior, ya que refuerza las mismas ideas, pero a la vez las aclara un poco.
February 21, 2021
گامهای چولهان با پاهای فلسفه، وسط تهران!
معرفی کتاب جامعه فرسودگی|جامعه شفافیت؛ اثر بیونگ چولهان؛ ترجمهی محمد معماریان؛ نشر ترجمان
تا حالا به ازدحام یک کلانشهر مثل تهران از نگاه یک شهرستانی نگاه کردهاید؟ تا حالا توی مترو یا اتوبوس، با نگاهی کنجکاو و زیرچشمی، آدمهای مختلف را خصوصا در ساعتهای پایانی روز کاری تماشا کردهاید؟ از دید کسی که خیلی به آن حجم عظیم اشتغال، تجمع، دوندگی، چهرههای خسته و فرسوده و میزان بالای از اشباع فرسودگی و آلودگیهای مختلف عادت ندارد، شهری مثل تهران(نه همهجایش البته) شهری است شبیه به تصویری که تاد فلیپس در فیلم جوکر از گاتهامسیتی خلق میکند! شهری آشفته، پر از زباله و سرشار از خستگی! آدمها تک و تنها و جدای از هم، وسط آشفتهبازاری از تجمع، دستهدسته و با سرعت به محل کار میروند، دستهدسته و به کندی از محل کار برمیگردند و گوشهی دنجی از اتوبوس یا مترو را با التماس انتظار میکشند برای لحظهای چرتزدن، برای دقایقی مات و بیهدف به فضای خالیای خیره ماندن و البته برای فراموشی خستگی ��ا غرق شدن در صفحهی نورانی موبایلشان. خیلی از شهرهای بزرگ و خیلی از قسمتهای چنین شهرهایی، محل به هم رسیدن فرسودگی و تلاش برای بقاست. آدمها انگار با تنی رنجور و خسته، تمام توش و توانشان را صرف زندهماندن و بقا میکنند و از آن توان و انرژی چیزی باقی نمیماند که خرج زندگی(نه زندهماندن) کنند. توگویی عمر انسان معاصر، صحنه زمانمند به تعویق انداختن فرسودگی نهایی و ابتلا به افسردگی عمیق باشد.
بیونگ چولهان(فیلسوف کرهای-آلمانی) انگار آمده باشد وسط تهران، در اوج شلوغی، در منطقهای آشفته از مرکز شهر، لابهلای آدمهایی از قشر متوسط. انگار آمده باشد توی مترویی، در ساعتهای عصر یا آخر شب، زُل زده باشد به چهره جمعیتی که از سر و کول هم بالا میروند، همدیگر را هُل میدهند، برای نشستن روی صندلیهای داخل واگن، برای وا رفتن از فرط خستگی! جمعیتی که گاه و بیگاه کسی از بینشان چیزی توی دستاش گرفته، و با ترفندهای مختلفی از جمله جلب ترحم و دلسوزی، به قصد فروش داد میزند. و بعد همه اینها را شب، رفته باشد در مسافرخانهای ارزان قیمت در نزدیکی توپخانه، توی کتابی با عنوان جامعه فرسودگی و با زبان فلسفی و به شدت تلخی برای همان آدمهای آن شهر دودگرفته و خستگیزده نوشته باشد. کتاب انگار برای انسان خستهی تهران نوشته شده باشد. اصلا نه فقط تهران، همه شهرهای این کشور، همه مردم بیشتر جاهای دنیا انگار! خستگی دارد به هنجاری غالب در موقعیت بشر امروز تبدیل میشود. برای همین است که مخدر محبوب انسان امروز، کافئین سنگین قهوه است و مواد محرکی چون شیشه و کوکائین و البته پورن! انسان عصر حاضر بیش از گذشته مشغول خستگی است. بیشتر از گذشته با گامهای کمتوان به سمت فرسودگی خودش قدم برمیدارد. اگر یک فیلسوف متولد کره که بیش از نیمی از عمرش را در آلمان زندگی کرده با این دقت از فرسودگی و جامعهای تنداده به نوع عمیقی از وارفتگی و اضمحلال حرف میزند، میشود با درصدی از اغماض این را بسط داد به وضعیت بشری. میشود چول هان را فیلسوف وضع بشری نامید. فیلسوفی تلخ، کمی بدبین ولی به شدت قابل توجیه و دفاع.
بیونگ چول هان با کتاب جامعه فرسودگی، انسان معاصر و ارزشهای غالب دنیای او را به چالش میکشد. دنیای انسان امروز را دنیایی آکنده از “تورم ایجاب” معرفی میکند. دنیایی سرشار از چیزهایی که میشود و باید تصاحبشان کرد. دنیای “تو میتوانی”های بیپایان. دنیای ارضای بیوقفه میل، دنیایی فقیر شده از منفیت و امور سلبی. دنیای تبدیل شدن دیگربودگی دیگری و مشابهسازی آدمها. دنیایی پُر از اشیا، پُر از چربیهای اضافه و پُر از خستگی و فرسودگی! چول هان و جامعه فرسودگیاش را میتوان نقدی صریح به موج مثبتگرایی و روانشناسی ِ موفقیت عصر حاضر دانست. “سوژه دستاوردخواه” یکی از محوریترین مفاهیم چول هان در جامعه فرسودگی است. سوژه دستاوردخواه یعنی من و شما، یعنی باوری عمیق به “من میتوانم” برخواسته از جامعهای دستاوردمحور که در آن “تو میتوانی” و یا “تو باید بتوانی” شعار و ارزش محوری است. به باور چول هان سوژه دستاوردخواه مشغول استثمار خویشتن است. مشغول ترسیم خود ایدهآلی است که همیشه باید برای رسیدن به آن تلاش کند. مشغول با دیروز خودش جنگیدن، برای پیشی گرفتن از چیزی که اکنون هست. مشغول فرسودن خود از طریق انبوهی از هدفها و خواستهها و میلها!
انسان عصر حاضر در عصری پُر از ایجاب، پُر از اسارت ناشی از تورم شبهآزادیهای مختلف در شکل دادن به خویشتن، پُر از شعارها و ارزشهای مثبت و به ظاهر در دسترس به سر میبرد. چولهان معقتد است عصر ما دوران بیشانفعالی ناشی از بیشفعالی است! تناقض این جمله در این واقعیت نهفته است که تلاش برای هردم مشغولیت داشتن باعث آن میشود که در عمل هیچ هدفی به درستی مشخص و پی گرفته نشود. که این یعنی احساس استیصالی ناشی از سردرگمی و ناکامی و دست آخر پناه بردن به انفعالی بیشگستر و تندادن به افسردگی و فرسودگی ناشی از کنشهای بیفرجام. چولهان به نحوی شاید به این پرسش میپردازد که چرا با آنهمه رشد و ترقی تکنولوژیک و راحتسازی روزافزون زندگی و وفور تندرستی و بهبود وضع معیشت، انسان امروزی در مقایسه با گذشته، شادتر و خوشبختتر نیست و افسردگی روزبهروز در حال افزایش است.
برای مطالعه ادامه این یادداشت:
http://www.saeedsedghi.ir/?p=275
معرفی کتاب جامعه فرسودگی|جامعه شفافیت؛ اثر بیونگ چولهان؛ ترجمهی محمد معماریان؛ نشر ترجمان
تا حالا به ازدحام یک کلانشهر مثل تهران از نگاه یک شهرستانی نگاه کردهاید؟ تا حالا توی مترو یا اتوبوس، با نگاهی کنجکاو و زیرچشمی، آدمهای مختلف را خصوصا در ساعتهای پایانی روز کاری تماشا کردهاید؟ از دید کسی که خیلی به آن حجم عظیم اشتغال، تجمع، دوندگی، چهرههای خسته و فرسوده و میزان بالای از اشباع فرسودگی و آلودگیهای مختلف عادت ندارد، شهری مثل تهران(نه همهجایش البته) شهری است شبیه به تصویری که تاد فلیپس در فیلم جوکر از گاتهامسیتی خلق میکند! شهری آشفته، پر از زباله و سرشار از خستگی! آدمها تک و تنها و جدای از هم، وسط آشفتهبازاری از تجمع، دستهدسته و با سرعت به محل کار میروند، دستهدسته و به کندی از محل کار برمیگردند و گوشهی دنجی از اتوبوس یا مترو را با التماس انتظار میکشند برای لحظهای چرتزدن، برای دقایقی مات و بیهدف به فضای خالیای خیره ماندن و البته برای فراموشی خستگی ��ا غرق شدن در صفحهی نورانی موبایلشان. خیلی از شهرهای بزرگ و خیلی از قسمتهای چنین شهرهایی، محل به هم رسیدن فرسودگی و تلاش برای بقاست. آدمها انگار با تنی رنجور و خسته، تمام توش و توانشان را صرف زندهماندن و بقا میکنند و از آن توان و انرژی چیزی باقی نمیماند که خرج زندگی(نه زندهماندن) کنند. توگویی عمر انسان معاصر، صحنه زمانمند به تعویق انداختن فرسودگی نهایی و ابتلا به افسردگی عمیق باشد.
بیونگ چولهان(فیلسوف کرهای-آلمانی) انگار آمده باشد وسط تهران، در اوج شلوغی، در منطقهای آشفته از مرکز شهر، لابهلای آدمهایی از قشر متوسط. انگار آمده باشد توی مترویی، در ساعتهای عصر یا آخر شب، زُل زده باشد به چهره جمعیتی که از سر و کول هم بالا میروند، همدیگر را هُل میدهند، برای نشستن روی صندلیهای داخل واگن، برای وا رفتن از فرط خستگی! جمعیتی که گاه و بیگاه کسی از بینشان چیزی توی دستاش گرفته، و با ترفندهای مختلفی از جمله جلب ترحم و دلسوزی، به قصد فروش داد میزند. و بعد همه اینها را شب، رفته باشد در مسافرخانهای ارزان قیمت در نزدیکی توپخانه، توی کتابی با عنوان جامعه فرسودگی و با زبان فلسفی و به شدت تلخی برای همان آدمهای آن شهر دودگرفته و خستگیزده نوشته باشد. کتاب انگار برای انسان خستهی تهران نوشته شده باشد. اصلا نه فقط تهران، همه شهرهای این کشور، همه مردم بیشتر جاهای دنیا انگار! خستگی دارد به هنجاری غالب در موقعیت بشر امروز تبدیل میشود. برای همین است که مخدر محبوب انسان امروز، کافئین سنگین قهوه است و مواد محرکی چون شیشه و کوکائین و البته پورن! انسان عصر حاضر بیش از گذشته مشغول خستگی است. بیشتر از گذشته با گامهای کمتوان به سمت فرسودگی خودش قدم برمیدارد. اگر یک فیلسوف متولد کره که بیش از نیمی از عمرش را در آلمان زندگی کرده با این دقت از فرسودگی و جامعهای تنداده به نوع عمیقی از وارفتگی و اضمحلال حرف میزند، میشود با درصدی از اغماض این را بسط داد به وضعیت بشری. میشود چول هان را فیلسوف وضع بشری نامید. فیلسوفی تلخ، کمی بدبین ولی به شدت قابل توجیه و دفاع.
بیونگ چول هان با کتاب جامعه فرسودگی، انسان معاصر و ارزشهای غالب دنیای او را به چالش میکشد. دنیای انسان امروز را دنیایی آکنده از “تورم ایجاب” معرفی میکند. دنیایی سرشار از چیزهایی که میشود و باید تصاحبشان کرد. دنیای “تو میتوانی”های بیپایان. دنیای ارضای بیوقفه میل، دنیایی فقیر شده از منفیت و امور سلبی. دنیای تبدیل شدن دیگربودگی دیگری و مشابهسازی آدمها. دنیایی پُر از اشیا، پُر از چربیهای اضافه و پُر از خستگی و فرسودگی! چول هان و جامعه فرسودگیاش را میتوان نقدی صریح به موج مثبتگرایی و روانشناسی ِ موفقیت عصر حاضر دانست. “سوژه دستاوردخواه” یکی از محوریترین مفاهیم چول هان در جامعه فرسودگی است. سوژه دستاوردخواه یعنی من و شما، یعنی باوری عمیق به “من میتوانم” برخواسته از جامعهای دستاوردمحور که در آن “تو میتوانی” و یا “تو باید بتوانی” شعار و ارزش محوری است. به باور چول هان سوژه دستاوردخواه مشغول استثمار خویشتن است. مشغول ترسیم خود ایدهآلی است که همیشه باید برای رسیدن به آن تلاش کند. مشغول با دیروز خودش جنگیدن، برای پیشی گرفتن از چیزی که اکنون هست. مشغول فرسودن خود از طریق انبوهی از هدفها و خواستهها و میلها!
انسان عصر حاضر در عصری پُر از ایجاب، پُر از اسارت ناشی از تورم شبهآزادیهای مختلف در شکل دادن به خویشتن، پُر از شعارها و ارزشهای مثبت و به ظاهر در دسترس به سر میبرد. چولهان معقتد است عصر ما دوران بیشانفعالی ناشی از بیشفعالی است! تناقض این جمله در این واقعیت نهفته است که تلاش برای هردم مشغولیت داشتن باعث آن میشود که در عمل هیچ هدفی به درستی مشخص و پی گرفته نشود. که این یعنی احساس استیصالی ناشی از سردرگمی و ناکامی و دست آخر پناه بردن به انفعالی بیشگستر و تندادن به افسردگی و فرسودگی ناشی از کنشهای بیفرجام. چولهان به نحوی شاید به این پرسش میپردازد که چرا با آنهمه رشد و ترقی تکنولوژیک و راحتسازی روزافزون زندگی و وفور تندرستی و بهبود وضع معیشت، انسان امروزی در مقایسه با گذشته، شادتر و خوشبختتر نیست و افسردگی روزبهروز در حال افزایش است.
برای مطالعه ادامه این یادداشت:
http://www.saeedsedghi.ir/?p=275
June 2, 2017
Tercer libro al hilo que me aviento de este autor, y creo que ya le voy pescando mejor por dónde va. Sigo sin compartir muchos de sus hallazgos, y ahora me queda un poco más claro que lo mejor es partir de sus primeros textos, y de ahí tomar rumbo a los más nuevos. Esto ayudará a que el lector comprenda mejor las ideas atomizadas en cada una de sus frases.
Y es que, no fue sino hasta que comencé a leerlo como párrafos construidos con frases aforísticas que pude ir hilando mejor el curso de las ideas que va desarrollando en sus breves, pero densos, libros.
En este, se va de lleno con lo que se propone como “la sociedad de la transparencia”, y se vale de capítulos o apartados denominados con distintos apellidos como la sociedad positiva, la sociedad de la exposición, de la evidencia, porno, entre otros, para ir construyendo una estructura de pensamiento que fundamenta y ahonda en su lectura de la sociedad actual, como una que tiende hacia la transparencia.
Para definir este concepto se vale de esos otros elementos como los que mencioné arriba, así como también habla de la aceleración (y ahora veo una estrecha relación entre estas ideas y las que Concheiro expone en su libro), la intimidad, la información, revelación y control.
Los puntos en que más choqué con lo aquí expuesto fue su lectura de la sociedad pornográfica, íntima y del control. Ya que, a pesar de que siento que da en el blanco en más de un punto, su lectura muy generalizada de esos asuntos, siento que caen nuevamente en saco roto. Me queda claro que su lectura benjamiana de la belleza comprendida por medio de la sutileza del velo, de lo oculto choca de lleno con la pornografía de la transparencia, de lo abierto, de lo expuesto con luz como si fuera el flash de un fotógrafo de los años 50, o peor aún, con luces más potentes y que logran más “claridad” que esos flashes, siendo más directo su contacto con nuestra mirada.
Sin embargo, de ahí a explorar que la política requiera del ocultamiento y no de la transparencia para funcionar, pues, hay un gran abismo, ¿no? Han no se mete con WikiLeaks, con los Panama Papers del mundo contemporáneo, con la necesidad del pueblo de saber qué, cómo, dónde, con quién, cuándo, pactan sus dirigentes a nombre de ellos, de nosotros. Su idea de que una sociedad de la información es más dominada por el poder no la puedo compartir, no, porque el poder sigue teniendo la sartén por el mango, no importa que nos bombardeen con más datos y muestras de corrupción, el poder sigue teniendo el poder, no porque se exponga a los Duarte y Zerones del mundo, el poder se debilita, para nada. No porque el PRI se valga de artimañas que quedan descubiertas las instancias electorales hacen algo que los afecte para elecciones presentes y futuras, en pocas palabras, siento que Han vive en una burbuja teórica que, no es mala, es, por ponerlo en sus palabras, negativa, y ello ayuda a evitar que caigamos en la sociedad cansada y transparente y acelerada que tan bien señala en sus libros.
Me gusta su división entre positivo y negativo, y sus ideas al respecto de la aceleración, creo que construye muy bien las estructuras textuales con las cuales expone sus ideas, pero, hasta ahí. Aunque, en el fondo me temo que termine estando de acuerdo con lo que escribe en unos años más, cuando esté alejado del mismo medio que con tanta visceralidad y lucidez señala.
Y es que, no fue sino hasta que comencé a leerlo como párrafos construidos con frases aforísticas que pude ir hilando mejor el curso de las ideas que va desarrollando en sus breves, pero densos, libros.
En este, se va de lleno con lo que se propone como “la sociedad de la transparencia”, y se vale de capítulos o apartados denominados con distintos apellidos como la sociedad positiva, la sociedad de la exposición, de la evidencia, porno, entre otros, para ir construyendo una estructura de pensamiento que fundamenta y ahonda en su lectura de la sociedad actual, como una que tiende hacia la transparencia.
Para definir este concepto se vale de esos otros elementos como los que mencioné arriba, así como también habla de la aceleración (y ahora veo una estrecha relación entre estas ideas y las que Concheiro expone en su libro), la intimidad, la información, revelación y control.
Los puntos en que más choqué con lo aquí expuesto fue su lectura de la sociedad pornográfica, íntima y del control. Ya que, a pesar de que siento que da en el blanco en más de un punto, su lectura muy generalizada de esos asuntos, siento que caen nuevamente en saco roto. Me queda claro que su lectura benjamiana de la belleza comprendida por medio de la sutileza del velo, de lo oculto choca de lleno con la pornografía de la transparencia, de lo abierto, de lo expuesto con luz como si fuera el flash de un fotógrafo de los años 50, o peor aún, con luces más potentes y que logran más “claridad” que esos flashes, siendo más directo su contacto con nuestra mirada.
Sin embargo, de ahí a explorar que la política requiera del ocultamiento y no de la transparencia para funcionar, pues, hay un gran abismo, ¿no? Han no se mete con WikiLeaks, con los Panama Papers del mundo contemporáneo, con la necesidad del pueblo de saber qué, cómo, dónde, con quién, cuándo, pactan sus dirigentes a nombre de ellos, de nosotros. Su idea de que una sociedad de la información es más dominada por el poder no la puedo compartir, no, porque el poder sigue teniendo la sartén por el mango, no importa que nos bombardeen con más datos y muestras de corrupción, el poder sigue teniendo el poder, no porque se exponga a los Duarte y Zerones del mundo, el poder se debilita, para nada. No porque el PRI se valga de artimañas que quedan descubiertas las instancias electorales hacen algo que los afecte para elecciones presentes y futuras, en pocas palabras, siento que Han vive en una burbuja teórica que, no es mala, es, por ponerlo en sus palabras, negativa, y ello ayuda a evitar que caigamos en la sociedad cansada y transparente y acelerada que tan bien señala en sus libros.
Me gusta su división entre positivo y negativo, y sus ideas al respecto de la aceleración, creo que construye muy bien las estructuras textuales con las cuales expone sus ideas, pero, hasta ahí. Aunque, en el fondo me temo que termine estando de acuerdo con lo que escribe en unos años más, cuando esté alejado del mismo medio que con tanta visceralidad y lucidez señala.
August 14, 2022
Los textos de Han resignifican el sentido de “ensayo” como género y refrescan la “filosofía” como reflexión sobre la vida. Así, en mi pausada lectura de “La sociedad de la transparencia”, pensaba en si necesito ser visto, qué necesito ver de los otros, cuáles son las historias de mi vida que me hacen un otro a la vez que me permiten reconocer al otro no como espectador ni personaje, sino como trascendencia.
La escritura de Han, en su brevedad, constituye el intento necesario para cultivarnos en la lentitud de lo narrativo a pesar de la vivencia veloz de lo calculado por los algoritmos de las redes sociales.
¡Cuánta confianza hemos perdido por el afán de la transparencia!
La escritura de Han, en su brevedad, constituye el intento necesario para cultivarnos en la lentitud de lo narrativo a pesar de la vivencia veloz de lo calculado por los algoritmos de las redes sociales.
¡Cuánta confianza hemos perdido por el afán de la transparencia!
December 16, 2021
Hace veintidós años se estrenó Matrix. Aquella película absolutamente visionaria, que cambió el modo en que vemos la realidad e impuso una nueva razón para pensar a filósofos y a la gente que cree que debe haber algo más allá que aquello que experimentamos a través de nuestros sentidos.
Una de las cosas más llamativas de la película en su momento, eran los diálogos de Morfeo, ese moreno enigmático, de hablar pausado y frases lapidarias; aquel que pone a Neo a escoger entre la pastilla azul y la roja y le muestra el mundo que existe por fuera de la realidad simulada por máquinas que resultó ser la Matrix.
Una de aquellas frases, que bien puede ser sencilla, pero no lo es tanto en boca de Morfeo, es la que dice algo parecido a “la ambigüedad es parte de la naturaleza humana”. Leon Festinger, en un lejano 1957 había dicho lo mismo con otras palabras e incluso le puso nombre a su teoría: se trata de la disonancia cognoscitiva, que ocurre cuando (palabras más, palabras menos) el hombre es consciente de las consecuencias negativas de alguno de sus actos y, aun así, los ejecuta. El ejemplo más sencillo de esto es fumar. Usted sabe que fumar le hace daño, pero de todos modos lo hace, incluso lo disfruta. La ambigüedad, pues, es parte de la naturaleza humana.
En años más recientes y con el advenimiento de la Internet y la irrupción de las redes sociales como una especie de sistema operativo humano, arreciaron las preocupaciones de los pensadores más prolijos del mundo y se reavivaron los temores de aquellos que veían la ciencia ficción no como la posibilidad de desarrollo de la ciencia y la tecnología, sino como la raíz de la posible extinción de la raza humana, por sí misma.
Una de las primeras voces que se escuchó en ese sentido es la de Nicolas Carr, quien inicialmente escribió ¿Google nos vuelve estúpidos? Y después ¿Qué está haciendo Internet con nuestras mentes? Sus preocupaciones resultaron ser válidas; por un lado, sin duda, Google y las redes sociales nos han vuelto (más) estúpidos (hay estudios que dicen que desde que hacemos uso intensivo de las TIC y el Internet la productividad mundial ha descendido) y en colegios y universidades los resultados, demuestran que somos menos inteligentes que hace unos años. Y eso ocurre porque nos hemos vuelto ultra dependientes de la tecnología.
Ya no nos preocupamos por recordar datos, porque cargamos en el bolsillo un Aleph, ese sueño delirante de Borges que tomó forma de Smartphone. Hace unas semanas me sorprendí cuando, privado de ese aparato, intenté hacer una sencilla división de dos cifras y no pude hacerlo; la tecnología sostiene gran parte de nuestra vida actual (un 83% diría yo… hoy uno puede lanzar cifras como esa al azar y nadie lo va a cuestionar, da igual).
Nos hemos vuelto muy dependientes y, como consecuencia, mucho más estúpidos. Pero las redes sociales, no tienen en absoluto la responsabilidad, solo se aprovechan de ello en tanto manifestación del capitalismo de la vigilancia en el que nosotros somos el producto y creemos erróneamente, ser el consumidor al que le satisfacen necesidades.
Pero volvamos a la discusión inicial, antes de abrir otra caja de Pandora.
Entonces, somos seres ambiguos y cada vez menos inteligentes. Pero esta oprobiosa nueva realidad debía describirse y teorizarse y es allí donde aparece Byung Chul Han, uno de los filósofos más esclarecedores de los últimos años y quien se ha dedicado en más de una decena de libros, a describir con precisión quirúrgica, las características, rasgos y condiciones de la época que nos tocó vivir.
En La Sociedad de la Transparencia, Han desarrolla la idea del panóptico de Bentham del Siglo XVIII, donde el vigilante podía observar sin ser observado y la pone en los términos de la sociedad del consumo desenfrenado actual: hoy no se requiere vigilancia por el simple hecho de que todos nos entregamos abierta y voluntariamente a la mirada panóptica.
Es curioso, pero si alguien nos detuviera en la calle y nos preguntara cuántos hermanos tenemos o cuál es nuestro color favorito, saldríamos despavoridos. Por el contrario, exponemos esa información y más, de manera voluntaria y (como Han la llama) pornográfica en las redes sociales. Allí mostramos sin reparos nuestra cotidianidad, nuestras penas y emociones a una cantidad de “conocidos” que no lo son tanto; y lo hacemos con una suerte de regodeo, de temeridad: yo publico lo que se me da la gana porque son mis redes, y es cierto, pero es de esa información de la cual se alimenta el sistema y nosotros exponemos y entregamos a diario, cada minuto de nuestra vida como si se tratara de un animal en plena disección.
Que lo que se muestra sea real o no, es otra discusión, la mayoría es solo apariencia, como lo llama la sociología: los cruces categóricos.
René Girard dijo hace unas decenas de años que el mundo se mueve por imitación. El hombre es mimético, quiere lo que tiene el otro, desea lo que tiene el otro. Para Girard, los humanos no queremos nada realmente, lo que queremos es lo que el otro tiene y así, terminamos construyendo una sociedad sobre las endebles bases de la apariencia, una sociedad transparente, según Han, o “el infierno de lo igual”:
Las cosas se tornan transparentes cuando se despojan de su singularidad y se expresan completamente en la dimensión del precio. El dinero, que todo lo hace comparable con todo, suprime cualquier rasgo de lo inconmensurable, cualquier singularidad de las cosas. La sociedad de la transparencia es un infierno de lo igual. La transparencia estabiliza y acelera el sistema por el hecho de que elimina lo otro o lo extraño.
Hay una frase que muchos le endilgan a “El Club de la Pelea”, la película, porque leí el libro y no la vi por ningún lado y dice: “Compramos cosas que no necesitamos, con dinero que no tenemos, para impresionar a gente a la que no le importamos”. Esta frase también sirve para ejemplificar parte de las ideas de Han, aunque él siempre se aleja de lo trivial y se mantiene en lo ontológico. Sin embargo, esta sentencia se sintoniza muy bien con lo que hemos venido hablando hasta acá.
La Sociedad de la Transparencia, heredera, o más bien complementaria de La Sociedad del Cansancio , se aleja cada vez más de la idea de lo privado, desdeña el tiempo necesario para la contemplación y se deleita en la velocidad y en la recompensa inmediata del like. Se olvida de la distancia y se expone a tales niveles, que termina por aniquilar el Eros.
El porno no solo aniquila el eros, sino también el sexo. La exposición pornográfica produce una alienación del placer sexual. Hace imposible experimentar el placer. La sexualidad se disuelve en la ejecución femenina del placer y en la ostentación de la capacidad masculina.
Es una sociedad positiva, que no le da cabida a la negatividad. La economía capitalista lo somete todo a la coacción de la exposición. El placer expuesto, puesto ante la mirada, no es ningún placer. La coacción de la exposición conduce a la alienación del cuerpo mismo.
Y voy a detenerme aquí, sobre todo porque sé que ya nadie lee (todo lo queremos en 140 caracteres) y que ahondar en la exposición significaría reducir el placer de la lectura de este libro.
Valdría la pena pensar si existe aún la posibilidad de sustraerse así fuera momentáneamente de la sociedad transparente y entregarse a la contemplación, a la lentitud y la negatividad. Luciano Concheiro dijo que sí, hace unos años en Contra el Tiempo.
Lo cierto es que, sin duda, la exposición destruye la sublimidad. En palabras de Han: En contraposición al mundo de la verdad en Platón, a la actual sociedad de la transparencia le falta aquella luz divina que implica una tensión metafísica. La transparencia carece de trascendencia.
Así pues, a pocos días del estreno de Matrix Resurrections, reivindicamos las sabias palabras de Morfeo. Por lo pronto, aquí termina este instante de contemplación reflexiva y volvemos a la sociedad hiperinformada e hipercomunicada, que, no obstante, no inyecta ninguna luz en la oscuridad.
Una de las cosas más llamativas de la película en su momento, eran los diálogos de Morfeo, ese moreno enigmático, de hablar pausado y frases lapidarias; aquel que pone a Neo a escoger entre la pastilla azul y la roja y le muestra el mundo que existe por fuera de la realidad simulada por máquinas que resultó ser la Matrix.
Una de aquellas frases, que bien puede ser sencilla, pero no lo es tanto en boca de Morfeo, es la que dice algo parecido a “la ambigüedad es parte de la naturaleza humana”. Leon Festinger, en un lejano 1957 había dicho lo mismo con otras palabras e incluso le puso nombre a su teoría: se trata de la disonancia cognoscitiva, que ocurre cuando (palabras más, palabras menos) el hombre es consciente de las consecuencias negativas de alguno de sus actos y, aun así, los ejecuta. El ejemplo más sencillo de esto es fumar. Usted sabe que fumar le hace daño, pero de todos modos lo hace, incluso lo disfruta. La ambigüedad, pues, es parte de la naturaleza humana.
En años más recientes y con el advenimiento de la Internet y la irrupción de las redes sociales como una especie de sistema operativo humano, arreciaron las preocupaciones de los pensadores más prolijos del mundo y se reavivaron los temores de aquellos que veían la ciencia ficción no como la posibilidad de desarrollo de la ciencia y la tecnología, sino como la raíz de la posible extinción de la raza humana, por sí misma.
Una de las primeras voces que se escuchó en ese sentido es la de Nicolas Carr, quien inicialmente escribió ¿Google nos vuelve estúpidos? Y después ¿Qué está haciendo Internet con nuestras mentes? Sus preocupaciones resultaron ser válidas; por un lado, sin duda, Google y las redes sociales nos han vuelto (más) estúpidos (hay estudios que dicen que desde que hacemos uso intensivo de las TIC y el Internet la productividad mundial ha descendido) y en colegios y universidades los resultados, demuestran que somos menos inteligentes que hace unos años. Y eso ocurre porque nos hemos vuelto ultra dependientes de la tecnología.
Ya no nos preocupamos por recordar datos, porque cargamos en el bolsillo un Aleph, ese sueño delirante de Borges que tomó forma de Smartphone. Hace unas semanas me sorprendí cuando, privado de ese aparato, intenté hacer una sencilla división de dos cifras y no pude hacerlo; la tecnología sostiene gran parte de nuestra vida actual (un 83% diría yo… hoy uno puede lanzar cifras como esa al azar y nadie lo va a cuestionar, da igual).
Nos hemos vuelto muy dependientes y, como consecuencia, mucho más estúpidos. Pero las redes sociales, no tienen en absoluto la responsabilidad, solo se aprovechan de ello en tanto manifestación del capitalismo de la vigilancia en el que nosotros somos el producto y creemos erróneamente, ser el consumidor al que le satisfacen necesidades.
Pero volvamos a la discusión inicial, antes de abrir otra caja de Pandora.
Entonces, somos seres ambiguos y cada vez menos inteligentes. Pero esta oprobiosa nueva realidad debía describirse y teorizarse y es allí donde aparece Byung Chul Han, uno de los filósofos más esclarecedores de los últimos años y quien se ha dedicado en más de una decena de libros, a describir con precisión quirúrgica, las características, rasgos y condiciones de la época que nos tocó vivir.
En La Sociedad de la Transparencia, Han desarrolla la idea del panóptico de Bentham del Siglo XVIII, donde el vigilante podía observar sin ser observado y la pone en los términos de la sociedad del consumo desenfrenado actual: hoy no se requiere vigilancia por el simple hecho de que todos nos entregamos abierta y voluntariamente a la mirada panóptica.
Es curioso, pero si alguien nos detuviera en la calle y nos preguntara cuántos hermanos tenemos o cuál es nuestro color favorito, saldríamos despavoridos. Por el contrario, exponemos esa información y más, de manera voluntaria y (como Han la llama) pornográfica en las redes sociales. Allí mostramos sin reparos nuestra cotidianidad, nuestras penas y emociones a una cantidad de “conocidos” que no lo son tanto; y lo hacemos con una suerte de regodeo, de temeridad: yo publico lo que se me da la gana porque son mis redes, y es cierto, pero es de esa información de la cual se alimenta el sistema y nosotros exponemos y entregamos a diario, cada minuto de nuestra vida como si se tratara de un animal en plena disección.
Que lo que se muestra sea real o no, es otra discusión, la mayoría es solo apariencia, como lo llama la sociología: los cruces categóricos.
René Girard dijo hace unas decenas de años que el mundo se mueve por imitación. El hombre es mimético, quiere lo que tiene el otro, desea lo que tiene el otro. Para Girard, los humanos no queremos nada realmente, lo que queremos es lo que el otro tiene y así, terminamos construyendo una sociedad sobre las endebles bases de la apariencia, una sociedad transparente, según Han, o “el infierno de lo igual”:
Las cosas se tornan transparentes cuando se despojan de su singularidad y se expresan completamente en la dimensión del precio. El dinero, que todo lo hace comparable con todo, suprime cualquier rasgo de lo inconmensurable, cualquier singularidad de las cosas. La sociedad de la transparencia es un infierno de lo igual. La transparencia estabiliza y acelera el sistema por el hecho de que elimina lo otro o lo extraño.
Hay una frase que muchos le endilgan a “El Club de la Pelea”, la película, porque leí el libro y no la vi por ningún lado y dice: “Compramos cosas que no necesitamos, con dinero que no tenemos, para impresionar a gente a la que no le importamos”. Esta frase también sirve para ejemplificar parte de las ideas de Han, aunque él siempre se aleja de lo trivial y se mantiene en lo ontológico. Sin embargo, esta sentencia se sintoniza muy bien con lo que hemos venido hablando hasta acá.
La Sociedad de la Transparencia, heredera, o más bien complementaria de La Sociedad del Cansancio , se aleja cada vez más de la idea de lo privado, desdeña el tiempo necesario para la contemplación y se deleita en la velocidad y en la recompensa inmediata del like. Se olvida de la distancia y se expone a tales niveles, que termina por aniquilar el Eros.
El porno no solo aniquila el eros, sino también el sexo. La exposición pornográfica produce una alienación del placer sexual. Hace imposible experimentar el placer. La sexualidad se disuelve en la ejecución femenina del placer y en la ostentación de la capacidad masculina.
Es una sociedad positiva, que no le da cabida a la negatividad. La economía capitalista lo somete todo a la coacción de la exposición. El placer expuesto, puesto ante la mirada, no es ningún placer. La coacción de la exposición conduce a la alienación del cuerpo mismo.
Y voy a detenerme aquí, sobre todo porque sé que ya nadie lee (todo lo queremos en 140 caracteres) y que ahondar en la exposición significaría reducir el placer de la lectura de este libro.
Valdría la pena pensar si existe aún la posibilidad de sustraerse así fuera momentáneamente de la sociedad transparente y entregarse a la contemplación, a la lentitud y la negatividad. Luciano Concheiro dijo que sí, hace unos años en Contra el Tiempo.
Lo cierto es que, sin duda, la exposición destruye la sublimidad. En palabras de Han: En contraposición al mundo de la verdad en Platón, a la actual sociedad de la transparencia le falta aquella luz divina que implica una tensión metafísica. La transparencia carece de trascendencia.
Así pues, a pocos días del estreno de Matrix Resurrections, reivindicamos las sabias palabras de Morfeo. Por lo pronto, aquí termina este instante de contemplación reflexiva y volvemos a la sociedad hiperinformada e hipercomunicada, que, no obstante, no inyecta ninguna luz en la oscuridad.
May 1, 2022
İlk Byung Chul Han okumam. Son olmayacağı da yıldızlarımdan belli olsa gerek :) Ne acayip ve ne olağanüstü bir bakış açısı.. Filozof olmak pekala böyle bir şey olmalı..
Hayattaki en büyük derdi "şeffaflık" olan kendime iyi bir okuma armağan ettim diye düşünüyorum. Şeffaflık fikrine dair bakış açımı Rousseau'nun "yüreğini açmak" talebi ile beraber derinden sarstı ve başka bir yol açtı zihnimde.. Kendi sosyal hayatımdaki kişisel bakış açıma kattıkları dışında toplumsal düzeyde de şu cümlelerin altını çizmişim; "Şeffaflık toplumu, güven kalmadığında yüksek sesle dile getirilmeye başlar. Yüksek sesle dile getirilen şeffaflık talebi toplumun ahlaki temelinin kırılganlaşmış olduğunun ve dürüstlük, doğruluk gibi ahlaki değerlerin giderek önemini yitirdiğinin göstergesidir." Ne kadar da son yıllardaki biz! değil mi?...
Bentham'ın "Panoptikon"u ile tanışmamı da sağladı bu kısa ama derin okuma.. Bu denli "gözetleniyor" hissinde yaşadığımız zamanlardan geçerken, özgürlük fikrimizin nasıl bir esaret manasına geldiğini de kafamda daha net biçimlendirdim.. Sanırım post-truth dönemi içinde bu tip düşünürlerin fikirlerine, en azından yaşama daha net bir tavır ile bakabilmek için ihtiyacımız büyük... Zira anlamak, hatta anlamaya çabalamanın bile zor süre gittiği günlerdeyiz.. Hele ki bizim gibi bir coğrafyada...
Hayattaki en büyük derdi "şeffaflık" olan kendime iyi bir okuma armağan ettim diye düşünüyorum. Şeffaflık fikrine dair bakış açımı Rousseau'nun "yüreğini açmak" talebi ile beraber derinden sarstı ve başka bir yol açtı zihnimde.. Kendi sosyal hayatımdaki kişisel bakış açıma kattıkları dışında toplumsal düzeyde de şu cümlelerin altını çizmişim; "Şeffaflık toplumu, güven kalmadığında yüksek sesle dile getirilmeye başlar. Yüksek sesle dile getirilen şeffaflık talebi toplumun ahlaki temelinin kırılganlaşmış olduğunun ve dürüstlük, doğruluk gibi ahlaki değerlerin giderek önemini yitirdiğinin göstergesidir." Ne kadar da son yıllardaki biz! değil mi?...
Bentham'ın "Panoptikon"u ile tanışmamı da sağladı bu kısa ama derin okuma.. Bu denli "gözetleniyor" hissinde yaşadığımız zamanlardan geçerken, özgürlük fikrimizin nasıl bir esaret manasına geldiğini de kafamda daha net biçimlendirdim.. Sanırım post-truth dönemi içinde bu tip düşünürlerin fikirlerine, en azından yaşama daha net bir tavır ile bakabilmek için ihtiyacımız büyük... Zira anlamak, hatta anlamaya çabalamanın bile zor süre gittiği günlerdeyiz.. Hele ki bizim gibi bir coğrafyada...
July 11, 2021
Kitapta yazar bize, olumluluk toplumu, teşhircilik toplumu, apaçıklık toplumu, porno toplumu, ivme, teklifsizlik, enformasyon, ifşa, kontrol toplumu başlıkları üzerine her biri ile ayrı ayrı kitaplar yazılabilecekken 5-6sayfalık özet, hap bilgiler ile fikirlerini sunmuş. Tam da bu sebeple okumaya başladığımda karşı çıktığım çok fazla şey oldu. Sonlara doğru -ki kitap zaten 70 sayfa- yazarın dilini ve ne yapmak istediğini kavradığımda dingin bir okumaya eriştim. Sonra bazı başlıklara geri döndüm. Bazı görüşlerine katılmasam da en hoşuma giden düşünce güven alanımızın nasıl kontrol alanına evrildiği idi. Her şeyi bildiğimizde güven gereksizleşir. Şeffaf olmak güven yaratır, yerine şeffaflık güveni ortadan kaldırır diyor yazar. Şeffaflık toplumunda kontrol devreye girer, bu da aslında özünde güvensizlik ve şüphecilik getirir. Artık kontrol listeleri ile hareket etmek üzerinden ilerleyen toplum, buyruk gibi sunulan şeffaflık talebine uymak zorunda bırakılır. Bu da çok tekrara düşen birbirimizi kontrole iten işin içinden çıkılmaz bir hale sürükler.
Kitabın başlıkları üzerine konuşmak istediğiniz birileriyle zaman zaman okuyup tartışabilirsiniz. Yazarın kısa ve öz anlatımı sizin daha çok soru sormanıza ve tartışmanıza fırsat sunuyor.
Kitabın başlıkları üzerine konuşmak istediğiniz birileriyle zaman zaman okuyup tartışabilirsiniz. Yazarın kısa ve öz anlatımı sizin daha çok soru sormanıza ve tartışmanıza fırsat sunuyor.
April 16, 2018
This work is a counter-cultural one, pushing back against the tide of “transparency”, revealing the subtle poison in unveiling. While there is much to consider and learn from, Han does not ever define how he is using the term “transparency”, leaving his readers to assume their own definition in its place. Assuming his usage is the same as mine (which I’m sure it is not), Han presents the concept as an all-or-nothing practice, leaving no example of how transparency could function in a healthy and beneficial way, since he presents it as a merely destructive force within society at large and even within interpersonal relationships of close and intimate proximity. Overall, I was in a constant tug of war between agreement and disagreement with the philosophies and ideas presented within this short work. I found it (as a person with scant philosophical background and understanding) to be a very challenging read that I had to work through slowly and painstakingly, but with much reward of beneficial thought.
December 11, 2021
کتاب کمی سختخوان است.
مدتی بعد ریویوی کاملی خواهم نوشت.
مدتی بعد ریویوی کاملی خواهم نوشت.
January 22, 2025
Very good. Development from his Burnout Society. The transparency society is a development from Bentham’s panopticon. As in the achievement society master-slave becomes one through auto-exploitation; so too does surveillance become more efficient through auto-illumination since it is not from external constraints. People exhibit themselves freely online because of the feeling of freedom that attends to it. This is not Heideggers gestellen which principally seeks new forms of power through the use of Bestand via Techne. No, this exhibition doesn’t seek power but attention. Thus all humans contribute to the digital panopticon through the pornographic display of themselves which makes everything transparent, see through, and admits no negativity.
The digital panopticon doesn’t seek moral reform like in Foucault’s disciplinary society. The main driver is capital. Capital loves the transparency because it proves more efficient. Humans devolve into self-exploiting consumers who participate in companies’ construction and maintenance of the panopticon and the exploitation of themselves. Human beings congregate around “product lines” and “brand communities” but this is not a real community. Community necessitates trust. In the transparency society there is no need for trust because all things are known and on display beforehand. Indeed, the call for transparency rises commensurate with the level of distrust in a person or entity. Values like honesty, integrity, and kindness have no importance or prominence in the transparency society and indeed slow down the acceleration of capital. Thus, the moral fabric of society has broken down and turned into a society of mistrust and suspicion.
The light of Plato’s republic is absent. The self-radiation of the damned mass of information makes everything transparent, see-through, thin, and smoothed. Society becomes homogenized. All things become the same because there is no room, space, in-between to set an opposition. The in-between exists in mystery, darkness, and is opaque. This has been abolished by the transparency society. Thus value which relies on reason (Logo, Ratio) and moves slowly devolves into opinion which relies on emotion and proves more efficient for capital to exploit. Thus opinion becomes Public Opinion and all opinions must conform to the same. For this reason the society of transparency is a violent society, one of tyranny that destroys any negativity, opposition, or tarrying in difference or alterity. This is why politics has disappeared. Dialogical modes of the body politic have devolved into mere chatter, blather, and ultimately find expression as entertainment. What is expedient here and now is prioritized over a careful consideration and legislation based on a logical point of view, a seeing and a gazing toward, a contemplative viewing.
Social media has proved a key mechanism, as has the data aggregation of Google, Meta and other Big Data industries. Watching this unfold in real time is horrifying. While I have removed myself as much as possible, we cannot go back to a primitive state of nature. Living a Vita Contemplativa, not only slowing down life, but keeping a rich interior life through deep thinking, contemplating, publicatio sui and journaling and venturing through the psychological depths of one’s soul. This is fundamental to the Socratic “Know Thyself.” None of this should be on display because this interiority and negativity is necessary in order to become who you are. Would that we seek ourselves truly. I pray that my kids will do the same.
As Nietzsche said, “All great spirits need a mask.”
-b
The digital panopticon doesn’t seek moral reform like in Foucault’s disciplinary society. The main driver is capital. Capital loves the transparency because it proves more efficient. Humans devolve into self-exploiting consumers who participate in companies’ construction and maintenance of the panopticon and the exploitation of themselves. Human beings congregate around “product lines” and “brand communities” but this is not a real community. Community necessitates trust. In the transparency society there is no need for trust because all things are known and on display beforehand. Indeed, the call for transparency rises commensurate with the level of distrust in a person or entity. Values like honesty, integrity, and kindness have no importance or prominence in the transparency society and indeed slow down the acceleration of capital. Thus, the moral fabric of society has broken down and turned into a society of mistrust and suspicion.
The light of Plato’s republic is absent. The self-radiation of the damned mass of information makes everything transparent, see-through, thin, and smoothed. Society becomes homogenized. All things become the same because there is no room, space, in-between to set an opposition. The in-between exists in mystery, darkness, and is opaque. This has been abolished by the transparency society. Thus value which relies on reason (Logo, Ratio) and moves slowly devolves into opinion which relies on emotion and proves more efficient for capital to exploit. Thus opinion becomes Public Opinion and all opinions must conform to the same. For this reason the society of transparency is a violent society, one of tyranny that destroys any negativity, opposition, or tarrying in difference or alterity. This is why politics has disappeared. Dialogical modes of the body politic have devolved into mere chatter, blather, and ultimately find expression as entertainment. What is expedient here and now is prioritized over a careful consideration and legislation based on a logical point of view, a seeing and a gazing toward, a contemplative viewing.
Social media has proved a key mechanism, as has the data aggregation of Google, Meta and other Big Data industries. Watching this unfold in real time is horrifying. While I have removed myself as much as possible, we cannot go back to a primitive state of nature. Living a Vita Contemplativa, not only slowing down life, but keeping a rich interior life through deep thinking, contemplating, publicatio sui and journaling and venturing through the psychological depths of one’s soul. This is fundamental to the Socratic “Know Thyself.” None of this should be on display because this interiority and negativity is necessary in order to become who you are. Would that we seek ourselves truly. I pray that my kids will do the same.
As Nietzsche said, “All great spirits need a mask.”
-b
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