Alternate Universe 07: The Long, Slow, Lingering Gaze
Reviewing Byung Chul Han's "The Crisis of Narration"
Hi there. Welcome to Active Faults.
I fully see the impossibility of reading a Chinese translation of a Korean philosopher’s works written in German and reviewing it in English. But I secured the last copy of Byung-Chul Han’s The Crisis of Narration in the bookstore yesterday, a title that’s long been in my 2024 to-read list and needed to talk about it.
A Guardian commentary on this collection of “imperious maxims” says Han writes as if “he has never been contradicted before”. It is contradiction that I’m about to attempt.
The central argument of this pamphlet-length treatise is that storytelling or “Erzahlen” is dead. Narration used to culminate a “Gemeinschaft”, a community, around the campfire in heathen and barbaric times. Back then, it carried a unifying power that awakened our humanity, trained us into empathy, and gave our existences historicity. Now, we are in the age of “storyselling”. We are encouraged to consume stories and emotions as commodities. We have become “phono sapiens” utterly alienated and atomised by digital screens, algorithms, marketisation and the endless bombardment of information instead of narratives.
Han posited these two epochs and states of being as binaries. However, as I move through his hypothesis, I cannot shake the inkling that fandom is an exception. Entertainment fandom in particular is straddling both and it is perhaps the only remaining context capable of doing so.
On the one hand, any success in entertainment nowadays predicates on selling a good story. We’d be here all day if I just keep listing them: SEVENTEEN and the underdog story. Vareihnaz and the Everyman farmer story. Fans are indeed herded into an infinitely expanding shopfront, taking out their wallet to pay for demands that weren’t there in the first place. We are possessed by our screens that serve on a platter interviews, adverts, vlogs, magazine shoots, behind-the-scene clips, concerts, fan meetings, fan signs, airport photos, Weverse updates, Weibo updates, Instagram updates, translation of all said updates. On the other hand, the power of the Idol creates a Gemeinschaft with and between the fans, a “spontaneously arising organic social relationship characterised by strong reciprocal bonds of sentiment and kinship within a common tradition” (Merriam-Webster). There’s hardly anything else that fit this description more aptly.
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