I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
For today: some musings on Han’s The Burnout Society, which I’ve written about many times before.
In The Burnout Society, philosopher Byung-Chul Han proposes that burnout comes from hyperactivity, an over-acceleration of the self in response to the idea that you can do anything, and that you should devote yourself to constant improvement and achievement.
Burnout, then, arises not from demands made by an outside authority but rather the demands you make on yourself. He calls this neuronal violence to distinguish it from viral violence, which is when an outsider invades and does damage:
Viral violence cannot account for neuronal illnesses 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.
In other words, we are being smothered by our own drive to succeed. The result is what we call mental illness: depression, ADHD, borderline personality disorder, bipolar.
We are members of Han’s achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]:
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 It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories.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 [Leistungsgesellschaft]. Also, its inhabits are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves. [emphasis mine]
I looked up the German word Leistungsgesellschaft. Han is South Korean but works in Berlin, and writes in German.
In the German Wikipedia page, it is translated as Meritocracy, and defined as “a model of society in which the distribution of desirable goods such as power, income, prestige, and wealth is based on the specific achievement attributed to each member of society.”
The can-do society
Han writes that the disciplinary society is governed by the verb may not, and people are compelled to do things via the verb should. The achievement society, by contrast, dispenses with this negativity. Its verb is the unlimited can: “Yes, you can!” This leads individuals to look within themselves for motivation, projects, goals.
In both the disciplinary and the achievement society, there is a drive to maximize productivity. But the logic of should only goes so far:
To heighten productivity, the paradigm of disciplination is replaced by the paradigm of achievement, or, in other words, by the positive scheme of Can; after a certain level of productivity obtains, the negativity of prohibition impedes further expansion. The positivity of Can is much more efficient than the negativity of Should. Therefore the social unconscious switches from Should to Can. The achievement-subject is faster and more productive than the obedience-subject.
Han borrows a quote from Alain Ehrenberg’s Weariness of the Self: “The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself.”
Han suggests that Ehrenberg does not go far enough in diagnosing the origins of depression; it is not just a failure of someone’s efforts to become herself. It arises also from “impoverished attachment [Bindungsarmut], a characteristic of the increasing fragmentation and atomization of life in society.” And further, it’s provoked by the constant pressure to achieve we face.
You might think that in the achievement society, we are all sovereign: we all get to decide what we do. But Han says no: the achievement subject “lacks all sovereignty”: “The depressive human being is an animal laborans that exploits itself—and it does so voluntarily, without external constraints.”
To Han, depression “erupts at the moment when the achievement-subject is no longer able to be able.” It is “creative fatigue and exhausted ability.”
In the achievement society, Han says, we face compulsive freedom–the necessity of maximizing our achievement. But when we face creative fatigue and exhausted ability, that’s when we become depressed.