Revisitations

Josh Tuitahi

Byung-Chul Han's 2015 book The Burnout Society begins with these words:

Every age has its signature afflictions. Thus, a bacterial age existed; at the latest, it ended with the discovery of antibiotics. Despite widespread fear of an influenza epidemic, we are not living in a viral age. Thanks to immunological technology, we have already left it behind. From a pathological standpoint, the incipient twenty-first century is determined neither by bacteria nor by viruses, but by neurons.

Han is not an epidemiologist but a philosopher whose thesis, that neurosis is the affliction of the age, still has some heft to it.  But I'd be surprised if he wouldn't take an opportunity to re-do the opening if it presented itself.  

With respect to its emphasis on mental health in the late stages of neoliberal capitalism, Han's work bears a lot of similarity to Mark Fisher's as expressed in Capitalist Realism.  Both Han and Fisher accurately describe how, in an age in which  the burden of improving or acceding to our own discrete individual predicaments is on each of us, the proletariat at the end of history has been made obsolete by neoliberalism's implication of the individual in his or her own exploitation.  In light of this atomization, the magnitude of what each of us is up against, and how inadequately armed our alienation from each other prepares us to face it, is illuminated in both writers' works with crystal clarity. 

In stark contrast to the ineffectuality of left-wing movements for the past many decades,  nothing has challenged the fetid neoliberal status quo quite like right wing populism.  Fisher's book is cited in journalist Ece Temelkuran's 2019 work How to Lose a Country, an extended meditation on the ways in which civil society has been and continues to be usurped by illiberal pseudo-populist movements. It has of course happened again and again since the end of history-- in Hungary, in Poland, in the Philippines, in Italy, in India, in Brazil, in Brexit era Britain, and of course in the USA and in Temelkuran's own Turkey.  I started reading Temelkuran's book the year it came out after listening to a talk she gave about it on some internet video site.  (Yes, you know the one.). I'm not sure why I stopped--it's beautifully argued, and I always meant to finish it-- but looking recently for something to read that I didn't have to buy, it appeared among my choices.  Knowing that my original impetus for buying it was as a coping mechanism for understanding how life in the age of Trump related to global concerns, I wondered if it would have any relevance at all now, or if it would just seem even with its cosmopolitan perspective like just so much quaint liberal bellyaching (not unlike Han's unfortunate opening paragraph taken way out of context).  

It has relevance.  Obviously it is a reminder of how things like Turkey's Erdoğan, Hungary's Orbán and our own Trump happen, endure and can happen again.  The chapter titles compose the story she wants to tell:

1 Create a Movement
2 Disrupt Rationale/Terrorise Language
3 Remove the Shame: Immorality is 'Hot' in the Post-Truth World
4 Dismantle Judicial and Political Mechanisms
5 Design Your Own Citizen
6 Let Them Laugh at the Horror
7 Build Your Own Country

 Illustrating the second step, Temelkuran re-imagines a classic Aristotelian syllogism with a right wing populist interlocutor: 

ARISTOTLE: All humans are mortal.
POPULIST: That is a totalitarian statement.
ARISTOTLE: Do you not think that all humans are mortal?
POPULIST: Are you interrogating me? Just because we are not citizens like you, but people, we are ignorant, is that it? Maybe we are, but we know about real life.
ARISTOTLE: That is irrelevant.
POPULIST: Of course it’s irrelevant to you. For years you and your kind have ruled this place, saying the people are irrelevant.
ARISTOTLE: Please, answer my question...
POPULIST: See? You can’t prove it. ... If it were left up to you, you’d kill everybody to prove that all humans are mortal, just like your predecessors did.
ARISTOTLE: (Sigh) All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human …
POPULIST: ... Socrates is a fascist... You cannot deceive the people any more. You were going to say, ‘Therefore Socrates is mortal,’ right? We’re fed up with your lies.

ARISTOTLE: You are rejecting the basics of logic.

POPULIST: I respect your beliefs.

ARISTOTLE: This is not a belief; this is logic.

POPULIST: I respect your logic, but you don’t respect mine. That’s the main problem in Greece today.

Sound familiar?  Temelkuran constructed her dialogue to purposely illustrate the various rampant logical fallacies that are enthusiastically and powerfully embraced by right wing populist movements, and her deconstruction of it is worth the price of the book.  But even more than that, in this post Trump respite I'm appreciating her critique of neoliberal vacuity even more.  Viewed through the lens of Temelkuran's thesis, dynamically bad Trumpism gives weak-tea ineffectual Bidenism and its ilk its only meaning.  If not for the stimulus of right wing populism's purposely immoral extremes to react against,  vapid neoliberalism would barely have the strength to clasp onto the status quo.  I don't know what saying this out loud portends in the way of an opening for a leftist resurgence of any kind, but the way things are going, I will view any handle on the composition of our current predicament as nourishment, and if nourishment is life, I will take it as I would any sliver of hope I can get.