Hyperculture. Byung-Chul Han

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СКАЧАТЬ it is with the Greeks.’⁷ Happiness is conceived as a phenomenon associated with the family, the homeland and household. It originates from a ‘not outside, not beyond’, from the site. In this sense, site is a synonym for ‘spirit’ [Geist].

      Given his genealogical-historical realization that the formation of Greek culture was owed to the arrival of foreigners, or to heterogeneity in itself, Hegel’s emphasis on the native home is disconcerting. It seems as though history does not coincide with that historical moment which produces one’s own: the site in the proper sense. There is no longer any mention of the fact that ‘blood-relationship’ or ‘friendship’ leads to an impoverishment of spirit. Rather, Hegel evokes images of home, family and fatherland. What matters is being ‘homely and contented’ in oneself. As far as European culture is concerned, Hegel’s ‘spirit’ has apparently rid itself of that ‘heterogeneity in itself’ which once provided it with ‘the power of realizing itself as Spirit’. There is no longer any foreign culture, no ‘arrival of foreigners’ that would pull the Europeans out of their happy ‘not outside, not beyond’. Thus, European culture becomes self-contented. It is satisfied with itself. There is no heterogeneity in itself to irritate it. According to Hegel’s own theory, however, this would lead to a spiritual rigor mortis.

In his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, Herder remarks that ‘all the cultivation of the east, west, and north of Europe, is a plant sprung from roman, greek, and arabic feed’.⁸ In this view, European culture is anything but ‘pure’. It is a bastard culture. Herder does not set out to produce a theory that has impurity as the constitutive element of culture, but at least he arrives at a concept of culture according to which any judgemental comparisons between cultures are dubious. In Another Philosophy of History, Herder remarks that the ‘good’ is ‘distributed among a thousand shapes’ and ‘dispersed throughout the earth’.⁹ Thus, ‘all comparison becomes futile’.¹⁰ But every culture tends to take its particular perspective as absolute and is thus incapable, Herder says, of seeing what goes beyond its own position. It responds with ‘contempt and disgust’ to the foreign, which is ‘already sickness’. But it is precisely this ‘blindness’ that makes it ‘happy’; that is, the formation of a happy identity requires a blindness. ‘National happiness’ emerges because the ‘soul’ forgets the ‘manifold dispositions’ that dwell within it and elevates a part of itself to the status of the whole. Out of some ‘awakened tones’, Herder says, ‘the soul soon creates a concert’, and it no longer senses those that are not awakened, even though ‘they support the ringing songs silently and in the dark’. Thus, the happiness of the ‘soul’ depends on a deafness.¹¹

      Are we today approaching a culture that is no longer characterized by the deafness and blindness on which happiness depends, a culture that, expressed in acoustic terms, has become a boundless, even site-less, hypercultural acoustic space in which the most diverse sounds are jammed together side by side? The hypercultural condition of the ‘side by side’, of simultaneity and of the ‘as well as’, would change the topology of happiness.

‘National happiness’, the ‘song’ of the ‘soul’ that creates happiness, is probably unknown to the tourists in Hawaiian shirts. Their happiness is of an altogether different kind; it is a happiness that emerges from an abolition of facticity, a removal of the attachment to the ‘here’, the site. In their case, the foreign is not ‘sickness’. It is something new to be appropriated. The tourists in Hawaiian shirts inhabit a world that unbounds itself, a hypermarket of culture, a hyperspace of possibilities. Are they less happy than the souls that make up a nation or populate a homeland? Is their form of life less desirable than that of the others? Does the abolition of facticity not lead to an increased freedom? Is the tourist in the Hawaiian shirt not the embodiment of the future happiness of homo liber? Or is happiness a phenomenon associated, ultimately, with boundaries and sites? And if it is, should we also expect the emergence of a new age of natives, hermits, ascetics and site fundamentalists?

Notes

      1 1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, London: G. Bell and Sons, 1914, p. 237.

      2 2. Ibid., p. 236.

      3 3. Ibid., p. 235.

      4 4. Ibid.

      5 5. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. I, trans. E. S. Haldane, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1892, p. 149 (transl. amended).

      6 6. Ibid.

      7 7. Ibid., p. 150.

      8 8. Johann Gottfried v. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill, New York: Bergmann Publisher, 1800, pp. 489–90.

      9 9. Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind’, in Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind and Selected Political Writings, trans. Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2004, pp. 3–97; here p. 30.

      10 10. Ibid., p. 28.

      11 11. Ibid., pp. 29–30.

Hypertext and Hyperculture

Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, does not see hypertext as a phenomenon limited to digital text. The world itself is a hypertext. Hypertextuality is the ‘real structure of things’.¹ ‘Everything is’, as Nelson’s famous phrase has it, ‘deeply intertwingled’.² Everything is tied up, networked with everything else. There are no isolated beings: ‘In an important sense there are’, Nelson holds, ‘no subjects at all’.³ Neither the body nor thinking follows a linear pattern: ‘Unfortunately, for thousands of years the idea of sequence has been too much with us … The structure of ideas is never sequential; and indeed, our thought processes are not very sequential either.’⁴ The structure of thought is an ‘interwoven system of ideas (what I like to call a structangle)’.⁵ A tangle is something jumbled up or tied into a knot. Despite its complexity, the net-like structure of reality is not chaotic. This is what the ‘struct’ in structangle expresses: it is a structured tangle. Linear and hierarchical structures or closed, unchanging identities are the result of compulsion: ‘Hierarchical and sequential structures … are usually forced and artificial.’⁶ Hypertext promises a liberation from compulsion. What Nelson imagines is a hypertextual universe, a network without centre, in which everything is wedded together: ‘The real dream is for “everything” to be in the hypertext.’⁷

      Nelson calls his hypertextual system ‘Xanadu’, the name of the legendary place in Asia where the powerful ruler Kubla Khan created a magnificent pleasure palace in the middle of a glorious garden. The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes this mythological place in his unfinished poem Kubla Khan. Nelson must have been fascinated by Coleridge’s vision. In CompLib/ Dream Machines, he explicitly refers to Coleridge’s fragment of a dream.⁸ Nelson’s hypertext, his ‘Xanadu’, thus has something dreamlike about it.

      Nelson also drew sketches of his Xanadu palace. In front of the entrance to the monumental castle-like building, an oversized X stretches up to the sky. The golden X in front of every Xanadu branch bears a certain resemblance to McDonald’s golden arches. The users who enter it are tellingly called ‘travellers’, and they are hungry: ‘The Golden X’s welcome the mindhungry traveller.’⁹ The hungry travellers are greeted with a ‘hyperwelcome’ in the hypermarket of knowledge and information.

The ‘intertwingularity’ and the ‘structangle’ are also characteristic of culture СКАЧАТЬ