readings

But big data does not explain anything. Big data merely discloses correlations between things. Correlations are the most primitive form of knowledge. They do not allow us to understand anything. Big data cannot explain why things are correlated in the way they are. It does not establish causal or conceptual connections. The question ‘why?’ is replaced with a non-conceptual ‘this-is-how-it-is’. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

The type of artist represented by Baudelaire, someone who inadvertently causes fright, would today seem not only antiquated but almost grotesque. The artist who typifies our age is Jeff Koons. He appears smart. His works reflect the smooth consumer world that is the opposite of the world of shocks. All Koons wants from his audience is a simple ‘Wow!’ His art is intentionally relaxed and disarming. What he wants above all is to be liked. His motto is ‘embrace the viewer’. There is nothing in his art that is intended to frighten or rattle the viewer. His art is located beyond the world of shocks. Its aim, Koons says, is ‘communication’. He could also have said: the watchword of my art is the like. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Etymologically, a screen [Schirm] is a protective barrier. A screen bans reality, which becomes an image, thus screening us off from it. We perceive reality almost exclusively via digital screens. Reality has become merely a section of the screen. On a smartphone screen, reality is so attenuated that it can no longer create any shock experiences. Shocks give way to likes. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Memory is a narrative practice that connects events in novel combinations and creates a network of relations. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Photographs are distinguished from memory images by their lack of narrative inwardness. Photographs represent what is there without internalizing it. They do not mean anything. Memory as narration, by contrast, does not represent a spatiotemporal continuum. Rather, it is based on a narrative selection. Unlike photography, memory is decidedly arbitrary and incomplete. It expands or contracts temporal distances. It leaves out years or decades. Narrativity is opposed to logical facticity. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Today, children have become profane, digital beings. The magical experience of the world has withered. Children hunt for information, their digital Easter eggs. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

The disenchantment of the world means first and foremost that our relationship to the world is reduced to causality. But causality is only one kind of relationship. The hegemony of causality leads to a poverty in world and experience. A magical world is one in which things enter into relations with each other that are not ruled by causal connections — relations in which things exchange intimacies. Causality is a mechanical and external relation. Magical and poetic relationships to the world rest on a deep sympathy that connects humans and things.   Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

This disenchantment can be reduced to the formula: things are, but they are mute. The magic evaporates from them. The pure facticity of existence makes narrative impossible. Facticity and narration are mutually exclusive. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Time is becoming increasingly atomized. Narrating a story, by contrast, consists in establishing connections. Whoever narrates in the Proustian sense delves into life and inwardly weaves new threads between events. In this way, a narrator forms a dense network of relations in which nothing remains isolated. Everything appears to be meaningful. It is through narrative that we escape the contingency of life. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Narrative time does not pass. This is why the loss of our narrative capacities intensifies the experience of contingency. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

The reason that people compulsively take selfies is not narcissism. Rather, it is inner emptiness. There is no meaning to stabilize the ego. Faced with its inner emptiness, the ego constantly produces itself. Selfies reproduce the self in its empty form. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Modernity’s existential crisis — a crisis of narration — is caused by the splitting of life and narrative, as summed up in the choice ‘live or tell’. Life, it seems, can no longer be narrated. In pre-modern times, life was anchored in narratives. In time as narration, there is not only Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday — but also Easter, Whitsun, Christmas — narrative points of reference. Even the days of the week have narrative meaning: Wednesday is the day of Woden, Thursday the day of Thor and so on. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Only with narration is life elevated above its sheer facticity, above its nakedness. Narrating means to make time’s passing meaningful, to give it a beginning and an end. Without narration, life is purely additive:… Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Remembrance is not a mechanical repetition of an earlier experience but a narrative that must be recounted again and again. Memories necessarily have gaps. They presuppose closeness and distance. When all experience is present and distanceless, that is, when it is available, remembrance is impossible. The gapless repetition of past experience is not a narrative but a report or record. To be able to narrate or remember, one must be able to forget or leave out a great deal. The transparency society spells the end of narrative and remembrance. There is no such thing as a transparent narrative. Only information and data are transparent. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

The self is not a quantity but a quality. ‘Self-Knowledge through Numbers’ is an illusion. Self-knowledge can be generated only through narration. I must narrate myself. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Nothing must escape the total record of a life. Everything is measured. Sensors and apps provide data automatically, without any linguistic representation or narrative reflection. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Walter Benjamin suggested that, just as psychoanalysis discovers the ‘instinctual unconscious’, the technical possibilities of the camera, such as slow motion, time lapses and close-ups, allow us to discover an ‘optical unconscious’. In a similar way, data mining acts as a digital magnifying glass that discloses an unconscious space behind the conscious one. We may call this space the digital unconscious. It allows artificial intelligence to access our unconscious desires and inclinations. This puts data-driven psychopolitics in a position to control our behaviour at a pre-reflexive level. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.