Byung-Chul Han remarks on a lack of “bearing” – defined as a measured stance, reserve and posture – as what sets apart digitally-mediated protestations from formations mounted by a “we who are displaying concern for a society as a whole” (In the Swarm, MIT Press 2017, 7).

Han calls “scandal society” the phenomenon particular to social media as distinct from what takes place in public spheres, observing in his three-paragraph long chapter “Outrage Society”:

“Outrage lacks the mass – the gravitation – that is necessary for action. It generates no future” (8).

Han’s thesis brings to mind lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth –

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

The reading is hardly a reach; in fact, hard to miss. Yet, to assert a grafting of these lines onto Han’s thin volume would seem to afford a dead-end view, insofar as to say so does little more than re-instantiate and extend into the digital sphere the already well-worn notion of an attenuated, conditioned response as distinct from what I’ll call for now an embodied, ‘authentic experience’.

Rather, where Han gives to the masses outrage only to take away the ground for its action, this is a move in keeping with the fun mathematicians seem to have with abstractions. It’s fine to add and subtract properties where there are no extensions like feelings, as Whitehead observed in Adventures of Ideas. Moreover, Whitehead noted, abstractions are the roots of what will become feelings as the terminus of sensations. In this sense, abstractions may be closer to an authentic experience, not to say purity of feeling, than full-blown wrath or outrage.

This doesn’t contradict Han’s claim – “The shitstorm represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication” (3) – since a different quality of consciousness is being described there. What it does do is get us away from a reading that borrows from the theorization of attenuation in the move from analog to digitized spaces which is subsequently mapped onto a human-like condition, then held to be the very basis for impotent rage. At the same time, it seems pointless these days to assert a ‘disembodied, therefore liberated’ digital space.

Perhaps the reason Han is able to make assertions about “enraged citizens” who can be controlled, directed, and manipulated by the monitoring of their own unconscious behaviors is because neither does any of that make claims on the notion of an omniscient or omnipotent creator in the metaphysical sense.

In fact, it’s not clear that Han is making any claims on human feelings in the above qualified sense. Even in his closing chapter on “digital psychopolitics,” where he compares digital surveillance society to totalitarian traits, claiming it “is handing us over to programming and control” – to read this to say we have been handed over to the consequences of mass patterns of behavior as shaping forces is not quite right, either, simply inasmuch as there is no “we” (keeping to the author’s own premise).

This isn’t to say the concept “digital unconscious” can’t be viewed as speaking to a definition of suffering as that which is beholden (individually, socially) to unconscious habits of behavior, such that the “future social behavior of the masses” may indeed look like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Yet such claims don’t seem to warrant concern (or “concern” in the Whiteheadean sense, for that matter), if it’s the case that the author took care to distinguish them from conscious human feelings and the conscious actions which may arise from them.

Such a move seems to prompt simultaneously the need for a re-evaluation of the nature of the grounds for outrage to take place. That is, if the outrage Han describes is not a feeling originating with the lived experience of a “truly distinct being” as M. Whitmore puts it, but rather a conditioned response, something like a version of what Jameson critiques in the chapter entitled, “Authentic Ressentiment,” this seems to be a less than suitable foundation (grund, Heimat, Boden) on which to build present policy or base future outcomes. It would be tantamount to touting passion as evidence of sincerity versus mathematical articulation which has a lesser degree of self-evidence, allowing for greater movement from the place.

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