The Burnout Society is a 2015 work of social theory by the Korean-German author, Byung-Chul Han. It analyses the ‘achievement society’ in which we all now allegedly live, where too much positivity leads to serious mental health problems but also constitutes a universal social requirement.
It consists of eight short chapters – the entire book is only 72 pages long, and the final chapter accounts for roughly half of it. Chapter one is called ‘Neuronal Power’, and attempts to distinguish between the ‘immunological age’, which is supposed to have preceded ours (and was characterised by attempts to resist an invasive, hostile ‘other’), and the present age of ‘neuronal violence’, which “does not proceed from system-foreign negativity. Instead it is systemic – that is, system-immanent.” The difference between the two ages is the difference between infection (the immunological age) and infarction (the age of neuronal violence).
The book’s second chapter attempts to refute Michel Foucault’s claim in his 1975 Discipline and Punish that we live in a ‘disciplinary society.’ According to Han, Foucault’s society of “hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks and factories … has long been replaced by another regime, namely fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports shopping malls and genetic laboratories.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.”
Disciplinary society, says Han, is characterised by prohibitions, by the modal verb ‘may not’; achievement society is characterised by ‘should’, and eventually by ‘can’, which “is much more efficient than the negativity of should.” What this ultimately leads to is self-exploitation: “The depressive human being is an animal laborans that exploits itself – and it does so voluntarily without external constraints. It is predator and prey at once… Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.”
Chapter 3 analyses boredom. Part of the problem is multi-tasking. Boredom has also led to a pandemic in bullying. Han sees the antidote in a restoration of the vita contemplativa. “The term vita contemplativa,” he says, “is not meant to invoke, nostalgically, a world where existence originally felt at home. Rather, it connects to the experience of being in which what is beautiful and perfect does not change or pass – a state that eludes all human intervention. The basic mood that distinguishes it is marvelling at the way things are, which has nothing to do with practicality or processuality.”
This leads on to the next chapter, ‘Vita Activa’, which discusses Hannah Arendt’s 1958, The Human Condition, a sustained comparison of the relative virtues of the active and the contemplative modes of life. In some ways, this is the weakest part of The Burnout Society; it feels as if Han wants Arendt to say that the active life is superior to the contemplative, but in fact, that isn’t what she does say (unless one reads certain passages out of context), a fact of which he seems to be uncomfortably aware.
Yet, on a positive note, chapter 4 does introduce Han’s notion of homo sacer, a concept he takes from the contemporary Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. “Originally, homo sacer refers to someone excluded from society because of a trespass,” Han says. “One may kill him without incurring punishment. According to Giorgio Agamben, homo sacer stands for the absolutely expendable.”
And yet, far from being excluded from modern society homo sacer is integral to it.
“If late modern achievement society has reduced us all to bare life, then it is not just people at the margin, or in a state of exception, but all of us, without exception who are homines sacri. That said, this bare life has the peculiarity of not being absolutely expendable; rather it cannot be killed absolutely. It is undead, so to speak. Here, the word sacer does not mean ‘accursed’ but ‘holy’. Now bare, sheer life itself is holy, and it must be preserved at any cost.”
The fifth and sixth chapters – ‘The Pedagogy of Seeing’ and ‘The Bartleby Case’, respectively – add very little to Han’s thesis, such as it is. The fifth is an appeal to Nietzsche by way of reinforcing the value of the vita contemplativa; the sixth is a discussion of Herman Melville’s 1853 short story, ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’, which Han thinks has been misinterpreted as an accurate depiction of modernity. On the contrary: “The society that Melville describes is still a disciplinary society… [Bartleby] does not face the imperative to be himself that characterises late-modern achievement society.”
The next chapter. ‘The Society of Tiredness’, is an examination of the contemporary Nobel Prize-winning Austrian author, Peter Handke, on the subject of tiredness. Han, like Handke, thinks there are two forms of tiredness: a negative (with is associated with burnout), and a positive. “Tiredness in achievement society,” he writes, “is solitary tiredness; it has a separating and isolating effect. Peter Handke calls it ‘divisive tiredness’.” Against this, we need to set ‘fundamental tiredness’, which
“allows spirit/ intellect to emerge … For Handke, deep tiredness rises to become a form of salvation, a form of rejuvenation… Handke’s tiredness is not ‘I-tiredness’: it is not the tiredness of an exhausted ego. He calls it ‘we-tiredness’. I am not tired ‘of you’, as he puts it, but rather I am tired ‘with you’. Handke conceives of an immanent religion of tiredness. ‘Fundamental tiredness’ suspends egological isolation and founds a community that needs no kinship.”
The final chapter – ‘Burnout Society’ – chiefly reiterates the earlier claims of the book. So, the narcissistic modern subject is incapable of achieving closure; it has a “lack of character and definition”; it suffers from “an excess of positivity”; it is “incapable of intensive bonding”, and so on.
“The depressive disorder of the modern achievement-subject does not follow upon a conflicted, ambivalent relation to the Other that has now gone missing. No dimension of alterity is involved. Depression – which often culminates in burnout – follows from overexcited, overdriven, excessive self-reference that has assumed destructive traits.”
The book’s last chapter is partly a discussion of Freud. “The Freudian unconscious … is a product of the disciplinary society, dominated by the negativity of prohibitions and repression, that we have long since left behind. The work performed by the Freudian ego involves the fulfilment of duty … [but] the late modern-achievement subject does not pursue works of duty.”
What distinguishes the late modern-achievement society, from a Freudian point of view, is that it has moved from foregrounding the Superego to foregrounding ‘the ego ideal’. This is a change is which the self is transformed from a subject into a project. But that project is inherently self-destructive: it “turns out to be a projectile that the achievement-subject is aiming at itself.”
Behind all this, and responsible for it, is capitalism. “The capitalist economy absolutises survival. It is not concerned with the good life. It is sustained by the illusion that more capital produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living.”
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The Burnout Society is interesting as a description of certain features of modern life, but it is more a collection of unrelated. highly abstract observations than a useful analysis. The closest it comes to discovering a culprit for the malaise it identifies is capitalism, but it doesn’t even mention capitalism until the very end of the book, and even there, the discussion is absurdly cursory.
Philosophically, much of the book’s interest lies in its claim that we have passed from Foucault’s ‘disciplinary society’ to what Han calls an ‘achievement society’, but arguably, “fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports shopping malls and genetic laboratories” are as much expressions of a disciplinary society as any of Foucault’s own examples. In a society modelled on the Panopticon, surveillance is key, but so are rewards. “In discipline,” as Foucault himself puts it, “punishment is only one element of a double system: gratification-punishment.” Consistently and lastingly applied, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the Panopticon would drive some prisoners to seek a surplus achievement beyond the strict requirements of the system, and that they would perhaps ‘burn out’ as a result.
It would still be a disciplinary society in other ways too, because it would only be some prisoners. In the real world, “fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports shopping malls and genetic laboratories” are not merely visitor-centres: they are run on a day-to-day basis by managers and workers, many of whom are probably paid peanuts. There is no evidence that the majority are suffering from a self-imposed toxic positivity. In any case, they will be remunerated according to their rank in the company, and they will be monitored by institutionalised appraisal techniques; their performance will be graded, and the grade, and any accompanying written comments, will be stored for future reference. All this belongs firmly within Foucault’s disciplinary society.
Arguably, only a vocal minority of well-paid aspirational middle-class workers suffer the excess positivity that results in Han’s burnout. But we cannot know that for sure, because Han produces nothing in the way of evidence. His assertions mostly begin and end in the realm of dogma. What we get instead of evidence is an interesting, but brief, trawl through parts of Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Herman Melville, etc. at the end of which we are left none the wiser about whether the world really is the way The Burnout Society says it is.
Even so, most of Han’s readers will be predisposed to agree with him, if only because they are likely to occupy an inherently receptive position in the division of labour: they will be university students and lecturers, people working in an environment characterised by pressure to endorse their conditions, and where burnout from excess positivity is a real possibility. But not everyone in society is in that position.
When they are, it is usually because of external expectations: their boss’s demands, or the competitiveness of their colleagues, or their family’s expectations. But Han tells us that “No dimension of alterity is involved.”
The problem is that, given that Han identifies ‘capitalism’ as the root cause of the malignity, the excess positivity must be imposed from outside.
In that case, we need a proper discussion of its causes. Just saying ‘capitalism’, especially at such a late stage in the analysis, is not helpful. More importantly, what does Han propose doing about ‘capitalism’? Because not everyone can adopt the vita contemplativa.
Some people can, of course. And so we are back to where we were a moment ago: The Burnout Society explores the modern predicament of middle-class creatives. Low-paid menial workers may struggle to recognise themselves.
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