Performing Escalations

I was having lunch at a pub one day with a friend, and the discussion turned on the tendency in online platforms to have discussions deteriorate via the domination of keyboard warriors making comments that either have little to do with the original conversation, or steer the conversation towards a battle of increasingly extreme claim and counterclaim.

While I had been wondering about why this was the case, prior to this conversation, I had not the foggiest about the drivers behind it. In that conversation, however, we both turned to our common interest in the work of Byung-Chul Han, and one possible explanation emerged.

The take-home for us was that it had everything to do with performance. Not so much in the sense of putting on a show for although (although it does play a part), but in the sense that it was a function of what Han described as burnout in his The Burnout Society.

For context, Han thought that burnout was the outcome of the shift in society from a society of “should” (Foucault’s disciplinary society), to the society of “can” (in which all barriers towards self-realisation or self-maximisation). At first glance, this might seem like a positive development, until one realises, as Han did, that when the removal of should did not necessarily remove the place of imperatives. Instead, it became buried under the guise of entrepreneurship of the self. As such, a coercive power is still hidden under the seemingly neutral “can”, and it comes in the form of a question “If you can, why do you not”? In other words, why do you not make more of yourself? Hence his observation that “…the can does not revoke the should. The achievement-subject remains disciplined.” (9)

Han furthers observes that this is more coercive precisely because there are actually no limits to the scope of improvements that could be made. This is a manifestation of what he calls elsewhere “pure positivity”. Furthermore, this kind of pure positivity does not stipulate the criteria of improvements, only that more be done. The result, Han argues, is what he calls an “excess of the increase of performance [which then] leads to the infarction of the soul." (31)

This then lays the foundations towards the movement towards extremity, where more extreme versions of argumentation are made under the guise of the search for truth. For in a post-truth society, even those who want to search for truth could only do so as a refraction of Han’s performance society. As such, truth gives way to the “increase of performance”, that is towards escalation. In a post-truth performance society, success then is measured by the rate of increase rather than the degree of alignment to the true.

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