The Palliative Society. Byung-Chul Han
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society does not permit pain to be enlivened into a passion, to be given a language.
The palliative society is also the society of the like [Gefällt-mir], increasingly a society characterized by a mania for liking. Everything is smoothed out until it becomes agreeable and well-liked. The like is the signature, even the analgesia, of the present. It dominates not only social media but all areas of culture. Nothing is meant to cause pain. Not just art but life itself should be instagrammable, that is, free of rough edges, of conflicts or contradictions that could cause pain. What has been forgotten is that pain purifies. It has a cathartic effect. The culture of the likeable and the agreeable lacks any opportunities for catharsis. We are thus suffocated by the residues of positivity which accumulate beneath the surface of the culture of likes.
A report on an auction of modern and contemporary art reads: ‘Whether Monet or Koons, whether Modigliani’s popular reclining nudes, Picasso’s female figures, or Rothko’s sublime colour-block paintings – even, at the top end of the market, excessively restored pseudo-Leonardo trophies – apparently all these need to be assignable upon first sight to a (male) artist and to be so likeable as to border on the banal. At least now a female artist has begun to break into this circle: Louise Bourgeois set a new record for a gigantic sculpture – thirty-two million for her work from the nineties, Spider. Even a gigantic spider can apparently be more decorative than threatening.’6 In the works of Ai Weiwei, even morality is presented in such a way as to inspire likes. Morality and likeability enter into a happy symbiosis. Dissidence decays into design. Jeff Koons, by contrast, creates like-worthy art that is morality-free, and ostentatiously decorative. The only adequate response to his artworks, as he himself states, is ‘Wow’.7
Art today is vehemently forced into the straitjacket of the like. The old masters are not spared by this anaesthetization of art either. They are even linked up with fashion design: ‘The exhibition of selected portraits was accompanied by a video demonstrating how well historical paintings by, for instance, Lucas Cranach the Elder or Peter Paul Rubens could be colour matched with contemporary designer clothes. And of course the video did not fail to mention that historical portraits are a precursor of today’s selfies.’8
The culture of likeability has manifold causes. First of all it follows from the economization and commodification of culture. Cultural products have increasingly become subject to the compulsion of consumption. They have to assume a form that makes them consumable, that is, likeable. This economization of culture runs in parallel with the culturalization of the economy. Consumer goods come to bear a cultural surplus value. They promise cultural and aesthetic experiences. Design therefore becomes more important than use value. The sphere of consumption enters into the artistic sphere. Consumer goods are presented as works of art, and this leads to a mingling of the artistic and consumer spheres which, in turn, means that the arts come to draw upon the aesthetics of consumption. Art becomes likeable. The economization of culture and the culturalization of the economy are mutually reinforcing. The walls between culture and commerce, between art and consumption, between art and advertisement, break down. Artists are forced to become brands. They begin to conform to the market, to be likeable. The culturalization of the economy also affects production. Post-industrial, immaterial production incorporates artistic forms of production. It has to be creative. But creativity as an economic strategy only permits variations of the same. It does not have access to what is wholly other. It lacks the negativity of a break which hurts. Pain and commerce are mutually exclusive.
When the cultural sphere was sharply delineated from the sphere of consumption, when it followed its own logic, it was not expected to be likeable. Artists steered clear of commerce. Adorno’s catchphrase about art’s ‘[f]oreignness to the world’ was still valid.9 Art that aims to serve human well-being is, accordingly, a contradiction. Art must be able to alienate, irritate, disturb, and, yes, even to be painful. It dwells somewhere else. It is at home in what is foreign. It is just this foreignness that accounts for the aura of the artwork. Pain is the tear through which the wholly other can enter. It is precisely negativity that enables art to provide a counter-narrative to the dominant order. Likeability, by contrast, perpetuates the same.
‘Goosebumps’, Adorno says, are ‘the first aesthetic image’.10 They express the dawn of the other. A consciousness that is unable to shudder is a reified consciousness. It is incapable of experience, for experience ‘is in essence the suffering in which the essential otherness of beings reveals itself in opposition to the tried and usual’.11 A life that rejects all pain is also reified. Only ‘the act of being touched by the other’ keeps life alive.12 Or else it remains a captive in the hell of the same.
NOTES
1 1. Ernst Jünger, On Pain, Candor: Telos Press, 2008, p. 32.
2 2. See Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, London: Verso, 2013.
3 3. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, London: Granta, 2010.
4 4. See Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz, Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control our Lives, Cambridge: Polity, 2019.*
5 5. David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, p. 71.
6 6. Marcus Woeller, ‘Gefälligkeiten machen sich bezahlt’, Die Welt, 18 May 2019.
7 7. See Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, Cambridge: Polity, 2017, p. 2.
8 8. Astrid Mania, ‘Alles wird Pop’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 8/9 February 2020.
9 9. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, London: Continuum, 2002, p. 183.
10 10. Ibid., p. 331.
11 11. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992, pp. 166f.
12 12. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 331.*
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