We begin with The Burnout Society because this book is an entry point for so many readers of Han. It is a stark theoretical statement. The author understands the task of theory as “highly selective narration” that “cuts a clearing of differentiation through untrodden terrain” (The Agony of Eros, 49). The Burnout Society draws from Han’s earlier philosophical studies of boredom, friendliness, otherness, and power, but the book makes new clear-cut distinctions between “allo-exploitation” and “auto-” or “self-exploitation,” as well as between negative violence and positive violence (BS, 47). For Han, positive violence means self-inflicted harm. Positive violence is synonymous with the “violence of positivity” (Topology of Violence, 90). Although positive is a technical term for Han, its meaning is consistent with the ordinary-language sense of a “positive attitude” [positive Einstellung] shared by German and English.
Critical theorists trained to scan for internalized violence, or otherwise subtle negative operations of power, will miss the violence of positivity. And since our achievement projects are genuinely experienced as free, at least initially, the self-compulsive element is invisible as well. (Han has the tall order of breaking critical theory’s habits of deconstructing, demystifying, and unmasking hidden structures of negativity.) Han’s insistence on the absoluteness of positive violence, while it often seems exaggerated to dystopian levels, renders self-inflicted violence visible. He elaborates his theory of positive violence and the paradigm shift underway at greater length in Topology of Violence, originally published in 2011. This theoretical statement, certainly a clearing of differentiation, marks an interventionist turn in Han’s body of work. Many of his subsequent books refine and nuance the account of how positive violence operates in specific domains such as art, digital media, markets, and so forth.
Even Han’s sympathetic readers tend to agree that he exaggerates the extent to which we have undergone a clear paradigm shift to a post-disciplinary world. After all, slavery, human trafficking, internment camps, and mass incarceration remain problems of global concern. Cronies have not absented themselves from crony capitalism. Legacies of injustice continue to shape racial and class divides. COVID-19, viral videos of police brutality in the United States, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 so thoroughly belie the claim that pathogens, the disciplinary apparatus, and foreign enemies are no longer of great concern that some readers may struggle to make it through the first two chapters of The Burnout Society. With the benefit of some of this hindsight, we have criticized Han for overlooking how discipline and self-exploitation interact in complex ways. Positive and negative violence may form a continuum. For example, self-exploitation in the wealthy global “core” (e.g., self-expression through fast fashion) may intensify repression in the impoverished “periphery” (e.g., bosses wringing productivity from garment workers in sweatshop conditions). Another example is how the surveillance state might exploit teenagers’ self-expression on TikTok.
While Han focuses on developed societies, he is not cataloguing problems that affect a narrow elite. His examples in The Burnout Society are white-collar workers who compulsively check their email and “fitness zombies,” but similar dynamics play out across class lines, often in ways that bring together discipline and achievement to deepen inequalities. Achievement and happiness become compulsory for everyone (The Palliative Society, 10). This can take crude forms with wage workers in service industries. Seemingly happy sandwich shops are more profitable, placing a premium on affective labor. Mike Judge’s 1999 cult-classic comedy Office Space parodies this. Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) is a waitress at a burger restaurant who festoons her uniform with only the minimum number of tacky buttons and corny pins that represent her “flair.” She exasperates the manager (Judge) because she has no interest in “expressing herself.” He admits that the restaurant chain, Chotchkie’s, is trying to facilitate her self-expression to create a fun atmosphere that drives profit. Predictably, she burns out. The invitation to self-expression is a thinly veiled command, but opportunities also beckon: tips, a career in management, etc. In the movie, these cringeworthy humiliations are played for laughs. In the real world, executives at Pret a Manger reportedly surveil their sandwich-makers incognito to see if they radiate “authentic happiness,” offering bonus pay or docking wages accordingly. This is not for laughs, but only for money.
When some saw utopian possibilities in an economics of sharing, Han foresaw the pressures of the gig economy. He predicted that it would lead to endless compulsions to work and to pursue high ratings. Han sensed that distinctions between work and life would further erode: “the sharing economy ultimately leads to the commercialization of all aspects of life.” He remains particularly insightful about how the gig economy needs buy-in from workers themselves to thrive. Workers need to take pride in their ratings, to embrace achievement on some level, for the system to work. Han is also attentive to similar dynamics in traditional productive sectors; what others call digital Taylorism takes the form of firmware that “gamifies” performance goals with interactive leaderboards. Sometimes employee monitoring is introduced for safety reasons. This is particularly marked in the trucking industry, where drivers are now digitally micro-managed in a way that gives basically no leeway for their judgment and agency.
As these examples show, achievement society is not for the privileged alone. There are no gatekeepers. Everyone can be (quietly: should be) entrepreneurs of themselves. Connections from elite business schools are not necessary to become an Instagram influencer. TikTok creators make videos about how to generate revenue by working from home. Any number of Facebook and YouTube ads, for social media users stuck in the digital Mesozoic of the mid-2000s, can alert you to easy “side hustles.” Our devices reveal a world to us that lies open to our projects. The new freedom is for all of us: workaholics increasing our value on the job market, Twitter accounts amassing “followers,” fitness-obsessed gym rats, academics compulsively checking citation indexes, smartphone users playing gamified apps that reward them for daily goals. All of this generates returns to capital. At the end of The Burnout Society, Han broaches the possibility of the disappearance of negativity altogether, including pain, which is the theme of his 2020 book The Palliative Society. Han argues, “The inner logic of achievement society dictates its evolution into a doping society. Life reduced to bare, vital functioning is life to be kept healthy unconditionally. Health is the new goddess. That is why bare life is holy” (BS, 51).
This last reference is to Friedrich Nietzsche’s prophecy of the Last Man in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Pain is an obvious form of negativity that has become meaningless in achievement society (PS, 19–24). Pain reduction and the curing of diseases are goods, but the problem is that they can never be fully eliminated. In denying pain any meaning, we turn the inevitable pain that remains into a nihilistic void. Pain becomes a black hole. We deny the value of pain that leads to substantive growth, such as wrestling with difficult ideas in school or learning to cope with failure, or, in a much different way, the pain that comes with love and loss in meaningful relationships. As achievement society removes obstacles to achievement, it also dismantles the adversity that creates the sometimes-painful feelings we associate with a meaningful life. Many medical professionals are especially aware of the bad effects of the popular belief that modern medicine can eliminate suffering altogether. A pain-free life, or the hope of a pain-free life, is another bill of goods. It is in high demand and generates massive profits. The opioid crisis in the United States has ravaged working-class Americans and the rural poor especially. Han notes how “Analgesics, prescribed by the dozen, mask the social conditions that create the pain in the first place” (PS, 11). Analgesics make pain an individual, rather than a social, phenomenon: “The palliative society depoliticizes pain by medicalizing and privatizing it” (PS, 12).
In the final stage of the abolition of negativity, not only pain but even rivalry disappears. “Do what makes you happy.” “Do your best.” “Your personal best is all that matters.” These are the cautious slogans of achievement society, meant to console those who might burn out because of envy or some other rivalrous passion. Han argues that the disappearance of rivalry only locks the achievement subject within itself. He writes,
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 (BS, 46).
Achievement society encourages us into an endless competition, not with others, but with ourselves, an endless process of self-optimization. Han’s critique of directionless power becomes clear at this point. There are no external sources of the self, only the self in endless competition with itself. Our capacity for this absolute competition is limited, hence burnout.
Han concedes that the pursuit of projects is a basic part of our experience of freedom. In psychoanalytic language, he argues that, while obedience-subjects subject themselves to the superego, “the achievement-subject projects itself [entwirft sich] onto the ego ideal,” which “is interpreted as an act of freedom” (BS, 46). Moreover, this is registered viscerally. One simply feels a pleasant sense of freedom when one sets goals and achieves them. However, the ego ideal is not our embodied self. The body is not capable of absolute freedom of action. It can reach the limit of exhaustion. The intra-psychic relationship between myself and my ego-ideal, furthermore, is self-contained. This relationship does not involve the world beyond my goals and plans. My interiority may be characterized by self-love or self-hatred, but it remains absolutely in Hegel’s realm of “spirit” (Hegel und die Macht, 65). No Other appears except as can be enjoyed, used, or simply conceived in the terms of my power to act. In Hegel there is no remainder to our experience of the world, Han would say (at least in his early works), that is not mediated by our projects.
Is there more to the world than can be assimilated into projects? There is a receptive aspect of being, which a critic of Hegel’s ontology of spirit such as Charles Taylor would say is “porous” to the world. Things, mysterious Others, and even adversity vitalize us and fill our lives with new meanings, if we are receptive to them. Yet this starts with a passivity, a mood not-to-do. Passive moods are anathema in achievement culture; ironically, however, achievement society cannot help but produce tiredness. Han finds hope in certain kinds of tiredness, or, perhaps if we are receptive to tiredness in a certain way, we shall find an “aura of friendliness” in tiredness (BS, 33). Han’s preferred term for receptivity to otherness is friendliness.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is adapted with permission from Chapter 1 of Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction (Polity, 2024). All rights reserved.
