REVIEW ESSAY
The Crisis of Narration
by Byung-Chul Han
translated by Daniel Steuer
Polity, 2024, 100 pages
Byung-Chul Han is one of most popular figures in contemporary German philosophy. More a derivative than an original thinker, he applies ideas of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, etc., to such facets of modern life as professional burnout, dating apps, and social media. His work appears mostly in the form of short booklets, in which he announces the disappearance, decline, or death of some previously cherished aspect of human existence—eros, meaningful work, and now, in his latest, The Crisis of Narration, “storytelling.” It would be surprising, at this point, if Han were to announce that there was anything in our poor world of late capitalism that is not in crisis.
“Everyone is talking about ‘narratives,’” Crisis of Narration begins. Han offers no specifics about this “everyone,” or about what they may have said in their discussions about narration. He adds merely that everyone’s discourse “betrays a crisis of narration.” Our ability to make sense of our own personal experiences within the framework of an autobiographical life story, and of our collective identity and aspirations within the framework of a political history, he declares, is being degraded—as love, labor, etc., are said to have been degraded in Han’s other texts—by modern technology.
Before considering Han’s claim about technology in more detail, it should first be noted that there is a crisis of narration within his own minimal “story” about the conditions in which we find ourselves and how we got here. Although we are not perhaps in the habit of thinking of them in these terms, prefaces and introductions typically take the form of an odd kind of “story,” catching us up with what has been said by various parties about the topic at hand, in order to let us know what is already known (or believed to be known) about it, and to underscore the novelty of what the author is saying. These rhetorical strategies, often talked about in academia as giving “potted histories,” explaining the “state of the field,” or setting up “They say . . . , I say . . . ,” are, however minimally, narrative in nature, insofar as they lead up to the present through a series of events performed by characters over time (first Weber said x, then Schmitt said y, then . . . ) to form a whole. Such a conceptual unity (the story of the discourse on stories, in this case) is, crucially, open to the near future: the next section of the book, in which the author, presumably, will say something new.
Even the driest academic monograph or most threadbare opinion piece usually begins with some act of storytelling, whether we hear how a previous generation of scholars has mishandled the question at hand, or are treated to a columnist’s anecdote about what his taxi driver told him. We are placed, through such discursive maneuvers, in a world of other people and perspectives, which has been changing and will change again (we hope for the better, through the insights about to be given by the author). Thus, there is always not only an ineluctable element of narration, but a certain necessary faith in progress, or even an attenuated messianism, in any such account, which is premised on the usually unspoken belief that what has been said can be first recounted and then added to and surpassed.
It can, of course, be simultaneously true that there is an element of storytelling at work whenever one person tries to communicate something to another; and that our ability to tell stories, and thus communicate, is being degraded, particularly, Han warns, by technologies of distraction like the smartphone and social media. But his lack of attention to the narrative dimensions of his own text—his carelessness with history, and reluctance to name interlocutors—reminds us that, if storytelling is a skill, it is still one that some people possess more than others, and that we would do well to learn how to better exercise it.
Unreliable Narrators
Intellectuals, after all, are very much in the business of narration, offering stories in which they themselves are characters, battling the misguided views thought up by past villains, and attempting to open new futures for thought. Being as explicit and honest as possible about the rhetorical, imaginative, and narrative dimension of intellectual life helps orient our attention to the fact that even the most pessimistic accounts of the state of storytelling (or the stupidity of the public, the inability of intellectuals to get a hearing, etc.) depend on the very capacity which they claim is undergoing a crisis. This requires, too, that we foreground how the stories we tell are always part of a broader conversation—indeed, that our stories are, in part, tales about the narrators who have preceded us (and, if we are critical intellectuals, how they have gotten things so wrong).
Han tells his readers, barely, that there is a conversation in which “everyone” is already saying something about stories and how we tell them. But we are given no information about how this conversation began, who its participants are, or what possibilities exist at present to contribute something novel, interesting, pertinent, true, etc., to the ongoing discussion. Readers are not told, for example, that narrative, and the relationship between personal capacities for telling the story of one’s life and political capacities for rallying others to undertake action by convincing them that they belong to a collective entity (a nation, a class, or indeed the human species) with a history and destiny, was the central theme of some of the most important philosophers of the second half of the past century.
Consider, for example, Paul Ricoeur. For this postmodern French thinker, the Western state after the prolonged crisis of the 1970s could no longer effectively manage national economies (let alone, as he had once hoped, their eventual transition to socialism). The political class at its helm, therefore, would need to prioritize, alongside market-based reforms, the production of collective loyalties through symbolic appeals to history, which Ricoeur understood on the model of his own previous research on the essentially narrativized nature of personal identity (we are, as it were, our ability to tell stories about ourselves).
What Ricoeur’s theories—and their influence on the French political center from Prime Minister Michel Rocard in the 1980s to President Emmanuel Macron today—might teach us about narrative (or reveal about the conceptual poverty of “narrative” as a topic for philosophy and a prop of economic-liberal politics) goes unconsidered in Han’s account. Han’s theoretical framework relies almost entirely on Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Storyteller,” a text that, like Crisis of Narration and all of Han’s other work, is characterized by alternations of abrupt declarations and meandering, dreamlike examples. Neither Benjamin nor Han is much interested in the elaboration of a “story” through careful dialogue with past and current thinkers—“story” for both has rather vatic, authoritative (even authoritarian) dimensions as something declaimed by a mysteriously compelling voice to an enraptured audience. It is not a tale told by an equal to equals, much less a tale that enrolls those equals in a believable common project by showing how they are already connected with the speaker in a world of shared realities and common references.
Nor does Han tell readers anything about the—admittedly often cynical and venal—political consultants and pundits who for the past two generations have made the notion of “narrative” a key aspect of our understanding of how political campaigns (and even administrations) function. Political image-makers get, and perhaps deserve, little respect from intellectuals. Yet, in an age of mass media—and in our new, post–mass media age of fragmented internet-based economies of attention—they play an updated version of the vital role once played by speechwriters, rhetoricians, court poets, and other propagandists. With a great deal of self-consciousness about the importance of telling stories, they try to align potential voters’ interests, values, desires, and identities with a particular candidate or political program, allowing the electorate to imagine itself as a collective actor embarked on a shared adventure toward a known goal.
That this often involves a great deal of simplification, or deceit, and that it is often performed for the sake of unworthy candidates and agendas is obvious, but also trivial. Whether for good or ill, important shifts in American political history have been attempted, and in some cases enacted, over the past decades through the creation of collective narratives. Trump’s first campaign, for example, told a story about American economic decline that, however rambling, heated, and overloaded with unbelievable villains, expressed many Americans’ quotidian experiences, condensing and organizing them through an exercise of rhetoric that enabled them to imagine a way out of the long, steady degradations of deindustrialization and neoliberal globalization. Ironically, the latter were precisely the forces for which Ricoeur, in his capacity as political philosopher of the French center, gave a complicated sort of apologia by arguing that narrative could replace economic management as a central task of politics.
We ought to consider with caution both how the concept of narrative has been a troubled instrument of the now tottering post-Fordist economic order in Europe and North America (a bit of hermeneutic razzle-dazzle meant to obscure worsening material conditions), as well as how that concept, employed by political actors, has also been an instrument for the coalitions seeking to dismantle or reform that order. There are, in other words, real political stakes to how we conceive “narrative” and how we employ it—stakes concerning our possible political and economic futures. If, rather than attend to the affordances of narrative, politically and philosophically, from our recent past to our alternative futures, we remain fixated on sweeping critiques of an undifferentiated “crisis of narrative,” we risk failing to see how a more exacting analysis of narrative might help us transition beyond our current sclerotic system and the programs of its increasingly irrational opponents.
Han, however, acknowledges the existence of rival political and philosophical efforts to wield narrative to secure or transform our society only indirectly and dismissively, writing them off as symptoms of storytelling’s decay into “storyselling,” a commercialized (and for Han thus inevitably degraded) sort of narrative. Again, Han fails to provide any information about the industries of advertisers and image-makers who have made narrative central to our everyday interpretations of contemporary politics and business.
Han, in fact, uses “information” as a pejorative term; in Crisis of Narration, it refers to isolated bits of data, deprived of meaningful context, and explained through graphs, charts, formulas, and predictions generated by the algorithms of technical experts. From his perspective, the traditional human power to make sense of an individual life and to constitute a collective, transpersonal agent (a group) through the telling of stories has been sundered into, on the one hand, the manipulative capitalist art of “storyselling” (marketing) based on nothing more than empty images stirring fantasy, and, on the other, supposedly objective “information” of the sort by which tech companies and governments track our behavior (which they can then manipulate without our even being aware of it, much less without their having to create convincing stories).
The fear that modern political thinking and behavior is being divided into two disconnected domains, one of “rational” but meaningless rules applied to data, the other of irrational, charismatic authority invested in singular personalities, has run through the last hundred years of Western philosophy and social science, articulated with particular clarity in the work of Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault. The latter two attempted, in various ways, to identify forms of what Arendt in The Human Condition (1958) called “speech” and “story,” or what Foucault in his 1983 Berkeley lectures called “truth,” i.e., rhetorical practices by which speakers are able to connect with their listeners and convince them to undertake some common course of action, without this conviction depending either on logical calculation (in the manner of a mathematical equation or a syllogism) or swells of unreasoning emotion. They sought to legitimate, in other words, the role of rhetoric and narrative in political life, in order to overcome the looming division of the latter into a technical, bureaucratic, impersonal, value-less sphere of routinized administration and a subjective, affective, hysterical sphere of outsized “personalities” and populist demagogues.
The Persistence of Modernity
While Han gestures toward Arendt’s comments on the importance of story to politics, he gives no indication of being aware that she was attempting to rescue or revive political narration by appealing at once to the ancient past and to a range of controversial strategies in the recent past and present (from Lenin’s policies in the early Soviet Union to the cultural politics of minorities in the United States). Far from giving in to fatalism, Arendt was attempting to restore the conditions for politics, with ideas that (as I’ve discussed elsewhere) drew on her experience of political Zionism and inspired gay activism. Han, however, is ultimately uninterested either in actual politics (the creation of collective identities and the making of collective choices) or even in narration. These topics are for him only a pretext for the latest of his extensions, vulgarizations, and sanitizations of Heidegger’s critique of technology.
Scrubbing Heidegger’s reactionary, anti-Semitic, and otherwise politically incorrect views, Han has made his career making the philosopher’s bleak view of modern science, inventions, and commodities accessible in works that college sophomores with a spare hour can easily understand (Crisis of Narration’s actual text fills only seventy-six wide-margined pages). His writing resonates with a large audience, doubtless, because there is, obviously, much wrong with the way we live, and much about the way we live has to do with what we might call “technology.” This term, however, seems both to name a historical and social horizon too vast for nonempirical thinking to grapple with (referring as it might to every human-made object we use, i.e., to the entire context in which we live and have as a species lived for millennia) and, by a persistent slippery synecdoche, to fall into something as frustratingly banal as complaints about smartphones.
Both global critiques of the human relationship to the products of our labor, and specific observations about this or that new technology, of course, have their place (and are standard fare of stand-up comedy). It is difficult, however, to imagine what, after decades of discourse on both headings, can be added by a philosopher with no scientific, historical, sociological, or other sort of expertise concerning the artifacts and systems in which the life of our species is enmeshed. And indeed, those of Han’s comments about technology that are not warmed-over from Heidegger are often recapitulations of episodes of Black Mirror or similar fare.
Han does not even rise to the level of Slavoj Žižek, who illustrates his interpretations of Hegel or Lacan with quirky analogies drawn from popular culture. Rather, even as he bemoans the omnipresent distracting power of “screens,” Han tells us, with apparently unironic earnestness, about the plot of some particularly illuminating television show. This does not appear to Han as an opportunity to begin thinking more carefully about technology and its associated cultural products (such as shows about technology that we watch on pieces of technology—in fact a television show itself could well be described as a technological object).
Technology, in Han’s thought, is paired with “modernity,” an era that began at no particular time and has few objectively verifiable attributes. Indeed, rather than a historical period notable for certain definite economic and social arrangements (which might be on their way out, or already over, replaced by something else), modernity is a moral trajectory, an expanding desert, in which social norms are steadily eroded, and individuals ever more baffled, disoriented, and miserable. Han’s account of modernity relies mostly on German thinkers from a century ago, who described the drifting, panicked society they saw in terms often calculated to precipitate its crisis and bring in a new era of nationalist/fascist or Marxist holism. They aimed to restore, at a supposedly higher level, the organic unity that modernity, with its individualism, capitalism, legalism, liberalism, etc., had shattered.
Many readers today must find such an account of our own modernity (or postmodernity, or post-postmodernity) accurate or at least appealing. Doubtless, numbers of our contemporaries, particularly students, do experience themselves as living in an age of anomie and may yearn for structure. Surely this is part of the affective and intellectual appeal of extremisms of the Right and Left, as it has been for at least a century. Part of what is remarkable, in fact, about “modernity” is that it has already lasted so long—not least, perhaps, through the stabilizing power of recurring periods of what we might call renormativization, or moral and epistemic closure, in which social order is temporarily reasserted through the production of loyalty to collective identities and codes.
If we take seriously the idea originally proposed by Henri Bergson, then debated by Leo Strauss and Karl Popper, that moderns, at least those of us in liberal democracy, live in an “open society,” characterized by a loosening of social bonds and moral-epistemic norms, enabling or condemning individuals to “think for themselves” and threatening them with a degree of existential anxiety previously known only to a philosophically inclined minority, then we might also imagine that such a society can remain more or less open by regularly contracting in certain ways before opening again, in a rhythm not dissimilar from the one Karl Polanyi took to characterize modern economic history’s cycles of deregulation and reregulation.
This is by no means a conservative or right-wing phenomenon. The New Deal and its decades-long Democratic majority was one manifestation of it. It established—in part through storytelling, linked with action that transformed the circuits of economic production—a new political common sense of mass support for a welfare state that served, and enforced, a certain vision of the American family (with characteristic exclusions of immigrants and minority groups). Nor are such phases unambiguous, such that it would be obvious which are eras of relative closure and which of relative openness. The rise of the Christian Right in the late 1970s and ’80s, for example, could be plausibly understood as much as an expression of antinomian opposition to that aging hegemony, prying open its political-moral compact between people and state, as it was an attempt to ground America in the certainty of religious values.
The above story about modernity is admittedly sketchy. But it has at least the virtue of suggesting that, just as contemporary technologies such as television, and indeed narration itself, can be used and interpreted in multiple ways that might move us toward different possible futures, so too can modernity be understood not as a singular entity that can only be more intensely itself (that is, for Han, worse and worse) but as an unstable system that, over the past generations, has tilted in one direction or another, and that may have survived—may continue to survive—by being periodically rebalanced in an always shaky equilibrium. The work of intellectuals, as storytellers, would be to sharpen our understanding of the power (and limits) of narratives to maintain, correct, or overthrow this system, not least by sharpening their own awareness of the narrative dimension of their own thinking and writing, which cannot be understood or practiced rightly by remaining in the exhausted mode of Heideggerian prophet.
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VIII, Number 3 (Fall 2024): 153–60.
