Hyperculture. Byung-Chul Han

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Tourist in a Hawaiian Shirt

      Where do you want to go today?

      Microsoft

      The British ethnologist Nigel Barley once expressed the suspicion that ‘the true key to the future’ was ‘that fundamental concepts such as culture will cease to exist’. We are all, Barley said, ‘more or less tourists in Hawaiian shirts’.¹ After the end of culture, should the new human being simply be called ‘tourist’? Or are we at long last living in a culture that affords us the freedom to spread into the wide open world? If we are, how might we describe this new culture?

Notes

Culture as Home

      In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel offers the following remark on the genesis of Greek culture: ‘We have just spoken of heterogeneity [Fremdartigkeit] as an element of the Greek Spirit, and it is well known that the rudiments of Greek civilization are connected with the advent of foreigners.’ It was thus the ‘advent of foreigners’ that constituted Greek culture. With ‘grateful recollection’, he says, the Greeks preserved the arrival of the foreigners in their mythology.¹ Prometheus, for instance, originates from the Caucasus. The Greek people developed ‘from a colluvies’.² The original meaning of ‘colluvies’ is mud, filth, hotchpotch, confusion, or muddle.

According to Hegel, it is ‘a superficial and absurd idea that such a beautiful and truly free life can be produced by a process so incomplex as the development of a race keeping within the limits of blood-relationship and friendship’. Rather, the ‘inherent heterogeneity [Fremdartigkeit in sich selbst]’ of spirit is that ‘through which alone it acquires the power of realizing itself as Spirit’.³ Still, heterogeneity by itself does not produce the ‘beautiful free Greek spirit’. For that, what is also required is the ‘overcoming’ of heterogeneity. The fact that it is necessary to overcome heterogeneity, however, does not imply that it is something purely negative that might as well have been absent, for heterogeneity is in itself part of the ‘elementary character of Greek spirit’.⁴ From this perspective, the presence of the foreign is necessary for the formation of one’s own.

In his description of the historical development of the Greek world, Hegel obviously tries to do justice to the fact that the foreign, heterogeneity itself, has a constitutive effect. With regard to the identity of European culture, however, he adopts an altogether different tone. Here, he emphatically invokes the idea of Europe as ‘home’. The Europeans might have taken their religion from the East, but all that satisfies their ‘spiritual life’ [geistiges Leben] they received from Greece: ‘The name of Greece evokes feelings of home in the educated men in Europe, especially in us Germans.’⁵ There is no longer any talk about heterogeneity in itself. The foreign is now degraded and becomes pure ‘matter’. Before, heterogeneity had been a spiritual element, a form. But once ‘European humanity came to be at home with itself’, the ‘historical and that which is СКАЧАТЬ