Keď sa príbeh mení na tovar: Byung-Chul Han o spoločnosti obrazoviek

Jakub Betinský

Byung-Chul Han (*1959) je juhokórejský filozof a kultúrny teoretik, v súčasnosti pôsobí v Berlíne. Venuje sa témam digitalizácie, moci, slobody, kapitalizmu a vplyvu neoliberálnej spoločnosti na psychiku človeka. Kritizuje súčasnú spoločnosť výkonu, ktorá kladie dôraz na neustálu produktivitu a sebavystavovanie, čím prispieva k vyčerpaniu, depresii a strate schopnosti hlbokej kontemplácie. Jeho myslenie je podnetným mostom medzi západnou a východnou filozofickou tradíciou. Cieľom tohto kurzu je spoločne si prečítať a rozdiskutovať Hanovu nedávnu knihu The Crisis of Narration (2024). Knihu vám pošleme poštou, pred začiatkom kurzu. O knihe: Narratives produce the ties that bind us. They create community, eliminate contingency and anchor us in being. And yet in our contemporary information society, where everything has become arbitrary and random, storytelling becomes storyselling and narratives lose their binding force. Whereas narratives create community, storytelling brings forth only a fleeting community – the community of consumers. No amount of storytelling could recreate the fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories. That fire has long since burnt out. It has been replaced by the digital screen, which separates people rather than bringing them together. Through storytelling, capitalism appropriates narrative: stories sell. They are no longer a medium of shared experience. The inflation of storytelling betrays a need to cope with contingency, but storytelling is unable to transform the information society back into a stable narrative community.

Rather, storytelling as storyselling is a pathological phenomenon of our age. Byung-Chul Han, one of the most perceptive cultural theorists of contemporary society, dissects this crisis with exceptional insight and flair.