Three Things Thursday: Reading Byung-Chul Han

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve read some Byung-Chul Han particularly his book The Scent of Time (2017). This was prompted by my reading of Arturo Ribeiro’s article in Shadow Archaeology which cites Han pretty extensively.

Han’s arguments about fragmentation and time will be particularly useful for the revisions of my book, Archaeology, Photography, Oil. Workforce Housing in the Bakken. 

Here are three things that I’m finding useful in Han.

Thing the First

Han agrees with any number of other commentators that the modern world is fragmented. He calls this “dyschronicity”. For Han, time literally is falling out of sync with itself. The absence of rhythm or structure to time causes events, experiences, and moments to “whizz about” randomly and in fragments that lack duration. The result is that time loses character; much in the way that scholars have noted the rise of modern non-places (e.g. shopping malls, hotels, airports, et c.), time has lost what makes it distinct or, in Han’s terms, its scent. The reasons for this are varied and complex, but mostly have to do with the collapse of narrative. Because there is no narrative, there can’t be goals or purpose to the passage of time. It moves endlessly and aimlessly causing modern humans to no longer work collectively (motivated, say, by a shared narrative) toward or goal but to work constantly as it is no longer possible to discern when a task is complete (or even the nature of a task itself). In fact, the absence duration and narrative is crucial for the expansive view of the contemporary that characterizes archaeology of the contemporary world. The time of the archaeologist, the event, the experience, and the object are all discrete and distinct. The flattening of time into an ontologically indistinct present opens the future to new relationships with the present and past.

Thing the Second

The decline of narrative is particularly useful for my work because I was drawn to Benjamin’s skepticism surrounding narrative as a motivating agent for contemporary life. Benjamin saw narratives, particularly those wielded by the fascist right, but also embedded in capitalism, as particularly toxic. They resulted in not only narrow minded determinism characteristic of totalitarianism, but also the “cruel optimism” (to use Berlant’s term) of capitalism that drives the worker to an individual future that no amount of work will ever achieve. 

For Han, the fragmentation of time isn’t a cure to the potential domination of the narrative, but the result of narrative collapsed (which perhaps has a parallel with the collapse of authority). Narrative collapse means that it is unlikely that new narratives will emerge that are compelling or meaningful. (And the current political landscape seems to confirm this observation). Instead, we are left with a world devoid of narrative and therefore incapable of any sustained notion of time as duration. As a result, the contemporary becomes an all encompassing space for the juxtaposition of endlessly fragmented presents. Work, data points, information, and images do not lead anywhere but whizz about in the continuous contemporary. 

Thing the Third

Han regards the collapse of narrative and the fragmentation of time and experience not as a crisis that we must overcome through the imposition of a new narratives. There is also no way to “work” ourselves out of this situation through more frenetic efforts to organize or arrange experiences as they whizzed about. Instead, Han proposed that we embrace the potential of fragments as objects of contemplation. Each fragment contains its own time, its own experience, and its own “scent.” Through contemplation, one can recognize the “scent of time” and restore duration as well as our capacity to recognize the relationship between moments and objects. This allows us to subvert the endless and pointless activity of work which leads nowhere and accomplishes nothing and replace it with a renewed connection to existence. Han leans on Heidegger’s notion of dwelling here.

For my work as an archaeologist, the value of Han’s notion of contemplation three fold. First, my project focuses on images — the quintessential expression of modern fragmentation — and Han offers a lens through which to produce meaning from photographs without reducing them to evidence for an argument or points in a narrative. 

Second, this allows me to understand the images as contemporary with the situations that they produce (that is the objects, relationships, and conditions present in the photographs), with the time that they were taken, and with the viewer. This expansive view of the contemporary creates a temporal space for the interplay between fragments and restores a sense of duration to the present without re-engaging with the notion of narrative. It allows for more open-ended and expansive juxtapositions that produce not just meaning, but significance and understanding. This process encourages us to slow down. 

Finally, by presenting images as fragments of experience, it deliberately undermines narratives of production which serve to obfuscate the profoundly unproductive routine of work. Photographs capture the fragmented experience of the cycle of booms and busts, the endless demands of extraction, the experience of life in a workforce housing site in the Bakken oil patch, the sense of precarity, displacement, and contingency. Photographs not only express the material reality of non-narrative existence, but by encouraging contemplative study subverts extractive practices that produce (or assume) narrative.