Episode #232 ... Byung Chul Han - The Crisis of Narration

everyone, I'm Stephen West.

This is Philosophize This.

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Philosophical Writing on Substack at Philosophize This on There.

I hope you love the show today.

So Byung Chil Han is a bit of a fan favorite on this podcast.

Lots of emails sent almost two years ago when we did a couple episodes on his work.

And since then, he's released a couple more books.

The one today is called The Crisis of Narration.

And as your philosophical Sherpa, here's my take on how to best approach this book.

To me, it seems there's two big pieces of his argument.

One is a description of something big that's changed about the world we live in, and the other is the existential cost that people have to pay living in this new world, the people there being us.

That's how I'm going to structure this episode today.

I'll kind of swap between first describing the world he depicts, and then I'll explain the cost of it.

Just know that throughout all of this, Byung Chil-han is setting his sights on what he sees as an absolutely sickening decline of storytelling, a decline that has changed what it is to be a person in today's world, hence the name of the book, The Crisis of Narration.

So out of respect to your time, I'll get right into it.

Human beings are often described as narrative creatures.

We've all heard this before.

For our entire history, stories have been a huge part of the way we relate to the world around us, from tribal elders that would pass wisdom down from generation to generation, to the stories they tell about the origins of their tribe, where their people descend from.

Fast forward, and you have religious stories that root people in their place in the universe and the afterlife.

You can see this in polytheism, all the way up to the Abrahamic religions.

We even have stories of the lore that binds a particular area of people together under one heading.

I am a Spartan, people will say, for example, and that means something to me in terms of where I come from and what I am now.

Stories have been, and still are, a critical piece of what it is to be a person, but something happened to our stories right about the beginning of the 20th century.

Byung Chilhan, whenever he writes a book, usually has a philosopher that he's deeply reading at the time, turning the volume up on their work, and then reinterpreting their ideas to better understand the present time.

The one in this book in particular is Walter Ben-Hamin, who we've also done a few episodes on for this podcast.

And for any of you out there who maybe don't remember perfectly something you listened to five years ago, Walter Ben-Hamin is one of these philosophers who's looking at the modern world that's emerging in the 1930s.

And much like Hahn, he's trying to describe it and then talk about the changes that are going to go on in the lives of people that are living in it.

Modern industrialized life has changed what it is to be a person, to Ben-Hamin.

So has the explosion of people moving into cities and city life.

So has the rise of newspapers and mass media more generally with cinema and radio.

Now, all of these things, he noted, train people to engage with the world at a particular depth.

For example, city life tends to make people more reactive.

It has more anonymous social encounters, for example, horns honking all the time, overstimulation.

It's all very immediate and sensory when you live in a city.

And the point is, it takes a real effort by an individual to form deep connections in this new kind of environment.

When it comes to mass media, he says people are trained to jump from headline to headline, not necessarily getting a deep connection with what's going on in the world, but just seeking novelty.

Again, stimulation.

Same thing goes for cinema and radio.

And he has a famous quote that Byung Chilhan uses in the book to describe this situation in modernity.

Walter Benhamin says that people are more interested in a fire in a Paris attic than they are a revolution that's going on in Madrid.

What he's doing there is marking a distinction between two different kinds of very human experiences.

One is more immediate and superficial.

The other requires more narrative context and reflection.

The fire in the Paris attic.

It's a fire.

It's really hot.

Oh my God, someone's about to lose their home.

How scandalous and horrible that is.

It's an immediate emotional reaction that takes basically no thought at all.

But the revolution in Madrid?

Well, that one's a bit slower to appreciate and understand.

You have to appreciate the history there, the politics that are going on, the struggle of the people involved to understand the significance of this moment.

It takes work, reflection, and it takes an understanding of this moment in terms of a story.

Real stories, for Byung Cho Han, are a critical access point that human beings have to a deep, meaningful connection with the world we live in.

Nothing quite does this like a story does it, for Han.

And that's because real stories for him are things that are always linking past, present, and future together in a way that is significant to us.

A story is something that helps the person receiving it make sense of who they are, what might still be possible in their life.

A story is something that a person lives through, he says.

And he's not saying that life is a story, but that story structures the events of our lives.

Stories require listening, a bit of patience to hear them.

They require time and reflection.

And maybe the most important thing about a story is that it can be shared with others.

A story is something that binds people together into a tradition in a way that helps give people direction.

Now, whatever it is that we just described there, Han thinks we have far less of it today than we ever have had before.

And this is the slow-moving arc of what has changed in our world since the beginning of the 20th century to Byung Chil Han.

We have far less time where we stop, listen to a story, think about it, reflect in terms of our place within it, consider what it means for us and our lives.

In other words, we don't have real stories anymore.

We have cheap alternatives.

In fact, the situation is actually far more serious than that for Byung Chil Han.

Because the world's no longer like the world of Walter Bin-Hamin, where it just trains us to not reflect deeper about what's going on, the point he's making is that the world we live in in 2025 is deliberately hostile to this whole process of storytelling, to that slower, deeper understanding of the events around us.

Think about what it's like to live today and be someone on one of these social media apps.

You have Instagram stories.

Hey, what do you mean we don't got stories, Byung Chil Han?

It's right there in the name, stories.

But these aren't stories.

Stories for Han, again, meaningfully linked together the past, present, and future.

And stories are selective, by the way, when they do this.

Meaning stories are just as much about what's not said in them as what's said in them.

That's because stories require an element of mystery or tension.

It's about not saying certain details to give more meaning to the things that are said.

But Instagram stories, there's no past, present, and future there.

They disappear after 24 hours.

And think of the prompt that these tech companies give you when asking you to create this content for them.

Tell me what's going on right now.

Give me exactly what's happening to you with no context.

What you get are not stories then, but a bunch of fragmented present moments, usually with someone filming themselves in the middle of some vanity project they're on.

Look at how smart I am.

Everybody listen to me and what I have to say right now.

Look how good I look.

Look at this, look at this ex-Benedict that was made just for me right now.

Also something to consider is when someone records their life like this, it's all right there, just like the fire in the Paris attic.

There's no selection, there's no thought required, just in your face data about your life where you take a bunch of separate present moments and never link them together into any sort of meaningful whole.

And that's because these apps, transparently for Han, are not designed for you to discover a story you fit into.

These apps are designed to generate data out of the events of your life.

The goal of these platforms is to keep people operating at a level where they don't stop to reflect on anything.

Consider how the next video just auto-plays.

I mean, heaven forbid, you'd have 10 seconds to think about what you just saw and what it means within a larger story.

This is the antonym to storytelling.

Consider that the ideal customer for one of these apps is someone who sits around scrolling.

They have an emotional reaction to what they see.

Don't stop to think about it at all, but just keep on scrolling to the next thing they're going to have an emotional reaction to.

The algorithm will happily serve up what they know you're going to endlessly scroll through to minimize the amount of time you're spending off the app.

And if you dare to go off the app, well, good luck going five minutes without them sending you a notification to come back, further fragmenting your attention.

This is the climate that tech companies want people living in, stuck in an overly emotional state, incapable of reflecting deeper, passively reacting to videos all day long in a way that makes you the most trackable and exploitable for them.

And again, this isn't just training people to value shallow bits of novelty every day.

That would be bad enough.

This is actively hostile to reflection and developing a deeper connection with things through story.

But there's another element of storytelling that slowly atrophies in a climate like this, memory.

To have a story that is so meaningful to you that it lives inside your memories.

To be able to recall a story from memory and tell other people around you, these are things that don't exist in the same way that they used to, for Han.

I mean, memory used to be how stories were passed down from generation to generation, but today, there's no need to fully remember a video you saw, for example, when you could just save it on your phone and play it for the person you want to show it to.

There's no need to be fully present in a moment, taking in a scene, remembering what's meaningful about it, when you can just take a picture and supposedly relive that moment on your digital photo album.

This is outsourcing, something our memory has always done for us, to file storage on a phone, to a filing cabinet.

Now, what could be wrong with that?

I mean, I'm sorry, Han, that this isn't 1945 anymore.

This is a new world.

Well, the problem with it is that it's an entire piece of our lives that's now being handled by something that we may think is providing the same service, but it isn't providing the same service.

Memory, Tahan, like stories, is selective.

You don't remember everything about an experience you had.

You have to be there in a moment, interpreting it, and you're always linking very selective events to some kind of narrative that is meaningful to you.

This is work we do that helps us feel connected to the events of our lives, but it's a very different thing than saving a picture on your phone.

A picture on your phone is a type of total recall.

Meaning, the picture of the moment is always just there, right in front of you, fire in an attic.

There's no distance.

There's no storytelling.

This is a fragment of a moment that is just stored in an archive as data with no context.

And the norm of cataloging our memories this way changes the way that people experience memories, for Han.

In the book, he uses the example of that show Blackmir in the episode called The Entire History of You.

Maybe you've seen it before.

It's where people have these implants that record everything they see and hear.

So in the episode, there's never any reason for them to remember anything.

They can just play it back whenever they want to.

The point is that we're living in a pseudo-version of this right now with the way that people outsource their memories to some archive on the internet.

What you'd expect to see if he's right here are people that do a lot of stuff.

But if you ask them to recall what they did, they wouldn't really have that strong of a memory of the stuff that happened.

They can remember what they did, but it's a little hazy.

And when they talk about it, they just sort of list the things that happened that day, but don't feel a deep connection to any of it really.

Couple this with the lack of real stories more generally.

And what you'd expect to see are people that that get a lot done at work, they do things with their family, but the feeling is they don't really have any idea what any of this is all about, how this connects to me and who I am, how I'm connected to anything else but me.

The fear is, I'm just going to keep doing stuff, lots of stuff, undeniably every day, until one morning I wake up and I'm 60, and I've just strung a lot of these days together without them feeling like they make any sense in terms of a story that my life was.

The crisis of narration, then, for Byung Chul Han, is a crisis of the the self as well.

And we'll get back to the existential dreads section of this.

Don't you worry if you're craving some more of that right now.

I feel the need, though, to give a counterpoint here that at least a few of you out there must be thinking.

What if I do feel like I'm living in the middle of an amazing story?

Look, I live in a world that has pandemics and rocket ships and political events that would put Julius Caesar in the fetal position, doing that

anxious rocking motion where he's having a manic episode.

World War III is actually something people are talking about.

There's that doomsday clock thing.

I don't know how many seconds are left on that thing, but it's not many.

In other words, I don't get my meaningful stories from social media, Bye-ung Chil Han.

I get them from the news.

And there's plenty of events going on there that I don't need any other way to connect my identity to a story.

Han would probably answer this person in two parts.

The first part of it, he'd say, is that what you're consuming there as you're following the news is mostly information, not stories.

Most of it is people getting a piece piece of information about something going on somewhere in the world, then emotionally reacting to it, and then moving on to the next story that tells them something else that's going on.

Now, does that sound at all familiar to what we were just talking about?

Most news, especially in its 24-7 digital form, is a bunch of fragmented bits of information.

What we can expect is that just like a social media post, it will be great at giving you an emotional reaction in the moment if that's what you're looking for.

But it'll become difficult for you to link this information to any sort of meaningful narrative.

The news to Han just scares people mostly.

It exposes them to the problem of every person in the entire globe.

Their body reacts to hearing the news.

And then 15 minutes later, when they're still anxious, their body's still reacting to the news they just read, well, they've already moved on in their head to five other fragments of information that are designed to try to get an emotional reaction out of them as well.

Once again, part of the problem here is that there's not enough distance for Han.

He calls this a gaplessness we experience.

When information is just thrown in your face, and when there's no time to let let the experience settle and to reflect on what it means before the app is suggesting yet another thing for you to emotionally react to, how is anyone supposed to link these events to a story that involves them?

Now, for the second part of this answer, to the person that says, I do feel like I'm a part of these events, Han might ask you to consider this.

Is this your story?

Like, is this a story that really involves you?

Or is this a story you've been sold by people that benefit from you believing in it?

It's not meant to be harsh.

It's meant to get us examining our standards because of the sad reality of the poverty we all live in when it comes to stories in today's world.

We crave stories, and brands, for the sake of advertising, will tell stories to people that they glom on to.

News outlets will tell stories, just optimizing for clicks.

Politicians will tell stories that satisfy this urge that people have for a story, but it's just so they can get elected.

They don't do most of the stuff once they get into office anyway.

They just take advantage of how badly you want a story to believe in.

In fact, the rise of a certain kind of story in conspiracy theories can be explained by there being such a lack of real stories coming from the political space.

When you have an establishment that tells the same BS story for decades to their population and more or less just installs a new version of the same person every single election, Well, people stop believing in that story.

I mean, even things like the moon being hollow or time-traveling lizard people, these start to sound a lot better than just getting raked over the coals for the rest of your life by fake politicians.

Hans says we've gone from storytelling to story selling.

And you can can always tell the difference between a real story you're living through and a story you've been sold.

Because the stories you've been sold start to resemble other things we've talked about so far in this episode.

Stories you've been sold start to look like data.

Whenever you believe in a story, ask yourself, is this story something that's short-lived, where it's going to expire at the end of this election cycle or when this new product comes out?

Is this story easily replaceable?

You know, far from stories that ground someone's identity for their entire lifetime, is this story something that you could pretty easily replace tomorrow with yet another story these people are telling you as they revise it in real time?

Is this story something that gets you to react emotionally and doesn't ever ask you to think critically about the world or reflect on how valid the story is?

We have to ask ourselves these things, he thinks, because real storytelling as a form of communication is uniquely capable of challenging the limited ways people are seeing things.

To Han, a story told well gets people to think.

It's risky, he says.

It's part of the process of any significant transformation that goes on.

See, this is why storytelling makes up a crucial piece of how we understand our identities.

Story selling, on the other hand, it does something of the opposite.

It's about consumption or emotional manipulation.

It just takes the narrative structure, the feel of a story, and usually uses it to reinforce the existing economic or political system.

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And now, back to the podcast.

There's another layer to this that may be useful to mention here.

Because maybe you're someone who says, look, I don't get my stories from social media.

I don't get my stories from the news.

Where I get my stories...

is from where they tell stories, from movies and TV shows.

That's an area where I find things that I connect with.

And for whatever it's worth, you can always find exceptions to this kind of macro-level social commentary.

But I think Hahn would share a criticism that's fairly common about most things that go on in Hollywood these days.

He'd probably say something like, the stories are mostly gone from movies and TV shows, and that many shows turn into something like an emotionally manipulative soap opera.

Should be said, this mirrors the other things we've talked about today because it's the same exact trend.

You watch a show, and it mimics the structure of storytelling.

It looks like you're being told a story.

And just like a social media post or a news article, it feels good as you're watching it.

It does everything you want it to do in that moment.

But eventually what happens when you're watching it is you realize there's no real story here.

It's just an elaborate series of relationships between the characters, you know, who all these characters are and their history together.

And then one of them dies in an episode, or one of them has an affair in another.

It's just a soap opera of immediate emotional manipulation, but no real storytelling, just story selling.

Now, this story selling doesn't just go on at the level of media and politicians.

Story selling is something that almost all of us end up doing about ourselves as well.

This is going to be connected to his ideas we talked about in his book, The Burnout Society.

So quick recap for the sake of context.

Bye-gun Chilhan thinks that people in the modern world are controlled by what he calls positive power.

Meaning, you're not controlled by a king or a queen that tells you the things you can't do, negative power.

People in neoliberal Western society are told that they can be anything they want to be as long as they're willing to self-improve, optimize themselves, and increase their market value.

Hahn thinks what this produces are a lot of people that are narcissistic, depressed, and anxious.

Several reasons for this.

I mean, first of all, this whole setup practically forces people to focus on themselves at an almost biblical level.

I mean, what else do they have to focus on in the absence of outside narratives?

More than that, they're told that the reason you're not a billionaire or exactly where you want to be in life is because you haven't put in the work to become valuable enough yet.

Every shortcoming you have is your fault, in other words.

So people either live in a constant state of inadequacy or they work really hard to achieve their wildest dreams, then they run into actual macroeconomic hurdles that they can't control, then they burn out, get depressed for a while, only to start back up again when they can summon the inner strength to try again.

This is the picture of Hans Burnout Society.

But when everyone becomes their own little narcissistic personal brand they have to promote, in the absence of real stories to connect with at a deep level, stories end up becoming the way that each of these personal brands weaves a fiction about who they are.

Hahn says that narration has been replaced by narrative performance.

And just think about the inversion that's gone on there in our societies if Hahn's right here.

Instead of stories being the thing that helps us discover our identities within a larger unified whole, Now what we do is by curating things on social media, we create stories about ourselves that look like the way we want other people to think we are.

You can start to see the picture coming into focus of what Han fears will become an ever more common sight in the world we're living.

Innocent people, with very limited access to real stories that help them feel deeply connected to the world, will progressively reduce more and more pieces of their life to data and information.

Knowing themselves will just become about tracking steps, monitoring their body fat percentage.

Events in their life will be reduced to pictures of things they can hardly remember doing.

Being informed will be an anxious haze of articles that they can't ever quite make sense of.

Their life will be reduced to metrics and data, not quite sure who they are, but they'll sell people around them whatever story they think is best for their career or their love life right now.

All of this, with us being almost incapable of talking to each other, because we have no mutual stories that bind us together.

Referencing Giorgio Agamben's work, Byeong Chou Han calls this a kind of bare life that many modern people are at high risk of falling into.

And to Byeong Chou Han, this is a view of the self that is missing something absolutely critical as well.

See, much like stories are selective and memories are selective, selfhood is also an incredibly selective process.

Who you are is not something that is efficient or trackable by metrics.

It's a collection of experiences, memories, reflections, relationships, all a bunch of things that are lived in relation to a story you have about yourself.

And without the story, you literally lose yourself to Han.

Again, the days start blending into each other.

You don't feel like you know what any of this is even about.

Also, when bad times come your way inevitably, when you're hurt by a relationship ending or traumatized by an event, how do we heal?

asks young Chul Han, other than with a story that helps us integrate these painful experiences into a meaningful whole.

More data and more information about yourself, he says, cannot give a form to the ways that you're suffering.

For that, we're going to need something that makes the suffering coherent, and that, for Han, is going to be a story.

Yet again, so many people out there are living lives doing things every day that are actively hostile to story and deeper connection.

He did an interview surrounding the release of this book, and he was answering a question, and he talks about how he thinks people don't even listen to each other really anymore.

He cites this as yet another piece of evidence that something real has changed in our world.

You walk down the street, he says, and basically everyone has headphones in.

He tried to stop someone and ask them for directions one day, apparently, and they just kept walking.

And at first it seemed like they just ignored him, but then he realized, oh, they just just had headphones in.

I don't know why that scene is so funny to me to think about.

Not only someone missing an opportunity to talk to someone brilliant like Byung Chilhan, but just imagining him standing there, holding his L in the middle of the street as someone ignores him

and then writing a philosophy book about it.

It's just funny to me.

I'm sorry.

Anyway, his point is that this person, like millions of other people like him, have absolutely no chance of ever connecting with anything deeper during the time they have those headphones in.

And this change and the existential problems that the modern person has to find a solution to is part of the reason why he says we're not even Homo sapiens anymore.

He calls us phono sapiens, but again, a very different set of problems than a Homo sapien had.

In the book, he references an article that was written in Wired magazine in the year 2008 by a guy named Chris Anderson.

The title of the article was The End of Theory.

And the point of it, Hans says, was that, look, We've had human beings trying to explain stuff for thousands of years at this point.

Everyone comes up with a theory that tries to help us understand things like human behavior.

But his point was, with the rise of data metrics and algorithms, AI being on the horizon in 2008, we don't need people theorizing about stuff anymore.

We can just predict what they're going to do next, given the data we have about their behavior.

Let's do away with all the speculation.

I mean, who cares about why I'm doing the things I'm doing?

Who cares about an explanation when you can just predict exactly what people are going to do?

Well, Byung Chil Han, to put it lightly, disagrees with this entire article.

He thinks that theory is absolutely crucial for what we're doing.

In fact, theory, he says, is just another word people use for a story that links things together in a meaningful way.

The same way a person that reduces their life to data is missing something important about what it is to be a human, the world will be missing something important without theory being used as a map.

Because, he says, data does a lot of stuff well.

It can tell you that two things are happening together.

but it can't tell you what they mean.

On the other hand, theories, like stories, are selective in that regard.

A theory doesn't just describe the world, just like a story doesn't just present a list of events.

A theory selects which parts of the data matter, then arranges them into a logic that's meaningful to us.

And then, most importantly, a theory invites people in to see themselves within a piece of the world.

This is an important part of what stories do.

They help link us to the world we live in.

And Han thinks it runs the risk of being eliminated as people put more and more faith into things like AI to be able to fully describe things.

See, after reading the article to Hahn, AI becomes something like the poster child for the technology that's going to allow us to supposedly do all this.

AI becomes a symbol for the idea that as long as we collect enough data and optimize for what our statistical models tell us, who needs reflection or stories?

Or better yet, AI will just be able to reflect for us and then create our new stories if we need them.

But Hahn thinks this is impossible, especially with the current form of AI that we have.

Hahn draws the distinction between two concepts from German idealism here.

You have intelligence and geist.

Intelligence is essentially information processing, and Geist is more along the lines of spirit or creativity.

And to Byung Chil Han, artificial intelligence is pure intelligence at this point.

It processes information at crazy levels.

It's wonderful at doing that.

But it is incapable of doing several things that allow for real creativity or storytelling.

If it helps, this is along the same lines as the argument we talked about from Noam Chomsky, that AI has nothing to do with language.

It is basically glorified autocomplete.

That it's a probability engine that uses its training data to mimic human conversations and find the next word that's most likely to follow given patterns in the conversations it's seen.

And because of this, it's said, that despite how much work people do on their own to make these things seem more human than they are, they are not human.

They don't really create anything.

They just rearrange things that have already been said by humans before in a way that appears novel to the people that have never read the ideas before.

But real storytelling for Hahn, the way we've lived through stories throughout our collective history, real storytelling involves risk.

It involves having an imagination and thinking of new ways of living that haven't been conceived of yet.

More than that, it requires a deeper connection with the world at an existential level in the first place than just processing data could ever give to an AI.

Hahn predicts that the more an individual or a society relies on AI, the less imagination they will have.

It'll become harder for them to arrive at truly new ways of thinking or living.

Or in other words, it'll be harder for them to write new stories.

Anyway, you'll notice all these examples that Han gives throughout the book have a theme.

We're caught in a tech-fueled state of momentum that invites billions of people to reduce a potentially deep connection they may have with the world to data or information processing.

And Han, far from being someone that wants to offer a prescription to people to solve it, you know, he's not hawking a seminar that he wants you to come to.

No, he just thinks we don't need to be living necessarily in a constant state of disenchantment about the world we live in.

That there are ways to create distance in your life from these things that are hostile to you having a narrative connection with things.

And again, while he'd never say that he knows how to fix this, maybe one thing near the top of his list, if he had to give one gun to the head, is to make space in your life for a little more boredom.

Walter Benhamime once said that storytelling happens in the warm gray fabric of boredom.

And what he means is, you have to be bored sometimes and have a little of that constructive negativity that Han talks about if you ever want to slow down enough to let your experience settle into a place where information can be integrated into a story.

Because without that space, without being able to reflect on what something truly means or to connect a moment to something larger than just right now,

stories will never be able to form, memories can't form, because you never slow down long enough to know what's even going on.

A little bit of boredom is an invitation to explore who you truly are.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this episode.

Let me know if you want, or strongly don't want, more Byung Chul Han on this podcast.

There's a couple more books we could do of his that are very important to understanding his full project, if that's what you wanted.

If you value the show as an educational resource and want to help keep it available for everyone, patreon.com slash philosophize this.

And as always, thank you for listening.

I'll talk to you next time.