I believe that in the age of fast consumption and the loss of pondering, it is useful for myself to occasionally take my time and write a small review on what I read so that I can sort my thoughts. This is especially the case for philosophical books since it isnt uncommon for me to read something just to forget about it in a couple of months. Or worse, I could sense myself vaguely grasping the idea but then being too lazy to actually formulate them.
Minus the part in which I kept reading the title of the book with a Brummie accent, Han really blew my mind. Did I understand everything? No. but that is ok, I felt like when I reread the first chapter I started to actually understand his arguments a lot more and it is one of those books that I will keep thinking about for a very long time.
BASIS
I am not going to lie, originally I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about when he was discussing immunological reactions. It was only later that I realized that it was an analogy to Hegelian dialectics. Therefore, let us start with dialects because this is the basis of the book.
Han essentially argues that society in the 21st Century does not align with the Hegelian dialectic because the negation of the negation has ceased to exist.
Han never actually says this and I know it is a classic oversimplification of Hegel but what helped me understand his logic is that loosely speaking the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triangular process is broken in today’s society.
Instead of having triangular process, today’s society has fallen into thesis + thesis + thesis + thesis…. There is no negation of the original thesis, which then means that the antithesis also does not get negated again. This rupture is the basis of all of Han’s arguments: the loss of negative dialectics and its replacement of positive dialects leads to a society based on a can-do attitude that is just thesis + thesis + thesis, etc….
Importantly, Hegel’s dialectic is an infinite spiral, Han seems to loosely argue this has come to a stop now because there is no antithesis which then leads to synthesis. There is only the mindset that I can improve my current position, I need to work harder, gain new skills, etc. To Han, this eventually leads to modern problems such as burnout, depression, and ADHD.
He uses society’s response to bacteria as an analogy of the 20th Century and more importantly, to highlight how this relationship of negation functions:
Society exists (initial position), a bacteria arrives (negation/ the other), antibiotics are created (negation of the negation). The 20th century clearly has an inside and outside, friend and foe, self and other relationship. There is a constant negation which then helps define the self through negating the negation. That is the importance of negative dialectics.
With the end of the Cold War, the rise of neoliberalism, and globalization, a paradigm shift occurred. Namely, the disappearance of otherness and foreignness. He says “Otherness represents the fundamental category of immunology. Every immunoreaction is a reaction to Otherness.” In the postmodern age Otherness is replaced with difference which is not identical because it actually represents the Same. This makes the logic of Self vs Other disappear. As he puts it “the Alien is giving way to the exotic”. Now the exotic is a positive difference while before it used to be a potential negative Other.
Othering does not make sense within the logic of globalization and the dissolution of boundaries and this is where he starts entering his dialectical argument.
The “dialectic of negativity is the fundamental trait of immunity”. The Other is the negative that intrudes into the Own and seeks to Negate it. The Own asserts itself in– and against– the Other by negating its negativity. The fragments of the Other are introduced into the Own in order to provoke an immunoreaction. That is the dialectic of negativity.
Now for Han the problem is that in the 21st century Otherness is disappearing which stops this dialectical process. We now live in the dialectic of positivity. Using the immune system analogy again, the immune system needs the bacteria (Other/negate) to create antibodies (negation of the negation). If there is no bacteria (negation/Other) you only get the Same which does not create antibodies. “In a system dominated by the Same, it is meaningless to strengthen the defense mechanism”. And that is the main problem, negativity has stopped playing a role.
New forms of violence have emerged due to the positivization of the world and they do not stem from the (negative) Other. They do not involve immune defenses, but they become neurological. It is the Self that sees mistakes in itself with no reaction to some Other.
Depression, ADHD, and burnout do not fall within the system-foreign negativity, instead it is systemic, they form due to having too much of the Same (positivity). The ego eventually overheats. Essentially, we do not blame structural problems such as the effects of neoliberalism but we blame ourselves. The explosion of therapy goes hand in hand with these changes. Maybe I am stressed out because I know that I will never be able to buy a house, that I am working too much, that I am not paid enough, that I am not achieving enough. All of these things are structural external factors that influence your existence but the solutions are always positive self-help tips in which one needs to focus on mindfulness, yoga, jogging, and ‘putting myself first’.
THE ACHIEVEMENT SOCIETY
Throughout the book Han critiques many philosophers because they are not aware of this paradigm shift. The shift is essentially going from Foucault’s Discipline Society towards the Achievement society
Discipline society = obedience-subjects = May Not.
Achievement society =achievement-subjects = Can.
The logic is actually pretty straight forward. Foucault’s analysis of power and the ‘control society’ do not do much justice to today’s world because “[I]t still contains too much negativity”. Foucault’s society focused on the negativity of prohibition, while in the Achievement society the unlimited “Yes, we can” is the modal verb of today’s age. Therefore, Foucault’s world is fundamentally different than the one we now live in.
WHY PSYCHONALYSIS DOES NOT WORK IN TODAY’S AGE
Han then looks at Freud’s psychoanalysis and argues that it is not relevant to today’s society because it presupposes the negativity of repression and negation which does not make sense in the age of positivity. ADHD, burnout, depression are outcomes from this positive world while Freud’s theories are based on negation. You cannot negate the negation when there is no negativity. This dialectical thinking therefore does not function in the achievement society and explains why we have struggled with finding solutions to for example burnout.
LAST CHAPTER + OWN INTERPRETATION
Excess positivity leads to eventual grinding oneself down because you keep pushing yourself thinking eventually it will get better. I need to work harder, learn more languages, take extra courses, network, and eventually I will get what I want to do. All of my shortcomings are my fault. Over time this starts to wear you down. Within the discipline society you were more aware of your place within society because quickly you would’ve walked into a negation. That is something I have found incredibly interesting about the past. You would be born the son of a baker and you’d probably become a baker as well and that is just the way things were. Nowadays you are born the son of a baker, well that does not mean you need to stay a baker. If you keep working hard enough then eventually you can become say a Senior Officer at an international organization. While this is not bad in itself, the problem is that the contemporary baker’s son will never realize there are many other factors at play here as well. Class differences, nepotism, wealth, competing against people who have been molded since birth to fit that specific position. All of these factors play a role in eventual success. But for the baker’s son he will just beat himself up for not working hard enough, not having done x or y. He will get depressed or burned out. That is why Han believes that negative dialectics are important. If the baker’s son would’ve realized that ”oh actually I do not live in a meritocratic society” then his negation to the negation would be that he’d lower his expectations.
“What proves problematic is not individual competition per se, but rather its self-referentiality, which escalates into absolute competition. That is, the achievement subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow. This self-constraint, which poses as freedom, has deadly results.”
We exploit ourselves until we burn out and even worse, we consider ourselves free during the process. When the expectations one places on itself are not met, the ego starts waging war with itself and this leads to depression or burn out.
Final thoughts
It is really challenging to simply explain the loss of Hegelian negation in today’s society in a couple of words. I have only scratched the surface on what Han has argued in the Burnout Society and due to its multifaceted nature of his topic, I feel like I jumped over many bits.
Just as the Hegelian dialectic is everywhere, the loss of its negation aspect means that the ‘positive dialectical’ has incredibly far reaching consequences.
So from my humble perspective. The rise of the burnout society is due to the loss of negation. We stopped living in Foucault’s “discipline society” ever since the end of the Cold War. The paradigm changed into the logic that you can become whatever you want to be if you put your mind to it. For Han this is problematic because it is essentially not realistic. We have become so delusional in this idea that it has dangerous consequences. But then instead of blaming it on the systems or structures of the world we live in– which I guess means negating the negation– we end up only blaming ourselves because negation does not exist anymore. So what do you do? You keep working even harder and blaming yourself for your mistakes until you burn out and eventually get depressed.