Byung-Chul Han

Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.

The Burnout Society

Landen Angeline

Today, even the so-called immigrant is not an immunological Other, not a foreigner in the strong sense, who poses a real danger or of whom one is afraid. Immigrants and refugees are more likely to be perceived as burdens than as threats. 

The violence [Gewalt] of positivity that derives from overproduction, overachievement, and overcommunication is no longer viral." Immunology offers no way of approaching the phenome- non. Rejection occurring in response to excess positivity does not amount to immunological defense, but to digestive-neuronal abreaction and refusal. Likewise, exhaustion, fatigue, and suffocation — when too much exists — do not constitute immunological reactions. These phenomena concern neuronal power, which is not viral because it does not derive, from immunological negativity.

Viral violence cannot account for neuronal ilnesses such as depression, ADHD, or burnout syndrome, for it follows the immunological scheme of inside and outside, Own and Other; it presumes the existence of singularity or alterity which is hostile to the system. Neuronal violence does not proceed from system-foreign negativity. Instead, it is systemic — that is, system-immanent — violence. Depression, ADHD, and burnout syndrome point to excess positivity. Burnout syndrome occurs when the ego overheats, which follows from too much of the Same. The hyper in hyperactivity is not an immunological category. It represents the massification of the positive.

Doug Belshaw

Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society 

. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves. The walls of disciplinary institutions, which separate the normal from the abnormal, have come to seem archaic. Foucault’s analysis of power cannot account for the psychic and topological changes that occurred as disciplinary society transformed into achievement society. Nor does the commonly employed concept of “control society” do justice to this change. 

Prohibitions, commandments, and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives, and motivation. Disciplinary society is still governed by 

. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.

In reality, it is not the excess of responsibility and initiative that makes one sick, but the imperative to achieve: the new 

The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.” No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression. The achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.

Human beings in the late-modern society of work and information are not the only ones capable of multitasking. Rather, such an aptitude amounts to regression. Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness.

In the wild, the animal is forced to divide its attention between various activities. That is why animals are incapable of contemplative immersion—either they are eating or they are copulating. The animal cannot immerse itself contemplatively in what it is facing [ Gegenüber ] because it must also process background events. Not just multitasking but also activities such as video games produce a broad but flat mode of attention, which is similar to the vigilance of a wild animal. Recent social developments and the structural change of wakefulness are bringing human society deeper and deeper into the wilderness.

Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention. A rash change of focus between different tasks, sources of information, and processes characterizes this scattered mode of awareness. Since it also has a low tolerance for boredom, it does not admit the profound idleness that benefits the creative process.

If sleep represents the high point of bodily relaxation, deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation. A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available.

The general denarrativization of the world is reinforcing the feeling of fleetingness. It makes life bare. Work itself is a bare activity. The activity of bare laboring corresponds entirely to bare life. Merely working and merely living define and condition each other.

Nietzsche already observed that, after the death of God, health rose to divine status.

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