We present an analysis of the consumer society in the face of pain, from the essay “The Palliative Society” by the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han.
In the consumer and performance society the imperative is to be happy. Positivity makes pain turn negative. Pain is the opposite of the demands of the neoliberal device: triumph, success, possessions, optimism, are the premises. Pain and failure are canceled out by being considered an annihilating counterpart. In reality, it is a ruse that hides the most stimulating essence of the human being: suffering.
Byung-Chul Han’s “palliative society” is a frontal criticism of neoliberalism’s domination strategies: pain must be avoided. Nothing should hurt. It is imperative to be positive. “The new formula for domination is ‘be happy’. The positivity of happiness supersedes the negativity of pain ”.
Pain, Jünger said, “is one of those doors with which we open the world.” The contemporary subject flees him, avoids him, ignores him. We live in a society of painkillers: pain became a matter of medicine, and not of society and the individual. Leaving it in that sphere prevents it from becoming “language and even criticism.”
Pain, unlike what optimists proclaim, purifies. There is no major transit in life that is not punctuated by a painful experience. Pain makes you feel. Pain becomes reflective. I think because it hurts, it hurts because I think. Pain intensifies existence. I feel pain, therefore I exist.
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Pain brings happiness and sustains it . Suffering happiness is not an oxymoron. All intensity is painful. In passion , pain and happiness merge. Deep bliss contains a factor of suffering ”.
In the depth of being there is pain: the shadows overshadowed by the lights project uncomfortable truths: contradictions, inconsistencies, accumulated emptiness. True introspection involves pain. An honest dialogue submerged to the bottom of the uncertain becomes painful.
“The spirit” only reaches its truth by being absolutely torn from itself, “says Hegel. “In every experience there is a time when you have to suffer and go through that. In that the experience is distinguished, which does not cause any change of state. Have fun instead of transforming ”, complements the author of En el enjambre .
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Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsWhy is this the algofobia society? Because in the performance society, positivity overshadows the place of the other . Even what is not positive should be pleasant. In the society of Like all expression must please. It must be legitimized by the Like .
Everything must be exposed. Everything must be uploaded. Everything is content. My self is so privileged before the other that my self ends up being lost to myself. We are the creators and producers of our appearances. We premeditated them. But in the society of happiness there is no room for negative versions: the negative must turn out to be positive. (Sophisticated by filters).
The problem with logophobia is that it creates hypersensitivities: today we suffer more for less. The pain of the hypersensitive subject is based on banalities. Letting medicine take care of this, not the journey to the depths of himself, causes the individual to lose his combative character. The causes of the discomfort are not addressed, it is resolved with painkillers.
“Higher expectations placed on medicine, coupled with the senselessness of pain, make even minor pain excruciating.”
The commodification of art does not escape this. Art went from causing “strangeness with respect to the world”, as Adorno thought, to supplying entertainment needs. Analgesics are also used in artistic expressions: there are no emancipated spectators, as Rancière thought, but rather a public eager for effects.
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“The general anesthesia of society makes the poetics of pain disappear completely. Anesthesia supersedes the aesthetics of pain ”.
Art went from being critical and problematic to consumable. A good artist is not one who interrogates, but one who entertains. A good book is so as long as it “can” be read: not as long as it “seeks” to question, discuss, interpret. The artist does not offer the visions —before his work— overlooked by others, the artist amuses himself with his performance; He went from displeasing to the most fatuous condescension of the show.
“Art has to be able to shock, annoy, disturb, and even be able to hurt,” says Han. Art doesn’t hurt. Art, although with some nuances, is consumption.
Romantic relationships have also been penetrated by positivity. “The other as pain disappears. Love as consumption, which objectifies the other by degrading him to a sexual object, does not hurt. He opposes eros as a longing for the different ”.
The bodies became merchandise. The immediacy of the pleasure sought overrides the pain of the transit. The waiting, the longing for the other disappears, the bodies do not correspond: they are consumed.
Love, then, should not hurt. The other is not pain. It is valued – and used – as happiness. The sufferer of love is suspect: it is negativity. Love does not hurt, it is consumed. You don’t have to suffer for love, you have to look for positivity, or the immediacy of pleasure.
Immediacy is a telling symptom of the digital age. In this the neoliberal subject is his own marketing agent. We go from being exploited to our own exploiters, we are victims and executioners. Failure to meet performance indices — positivity goals — creates disgust. Social networks encourage the device: they make you believe that everything is possible, #you can do everything. The human seeks, then, to pay off his personal debt and with the world: he can also do everything. He works in search of satisfying the desire to be able to “power everything”. His narcissism is his barren.
Thus, you do not live, you surrender. You don’t grow, you advance. You are not, you have and something is exhibited.
It is eloquent, incidentally, the phrase “Study, lazy people!”, Because there the capitalist axiom is condensed: education as production, not as capacity to arouse social annoyance, not as thinking interaction with the established, not as a struggle of a country that generates pain.
Precisely, one of the political fears in these times is to avoid making deep changes. The fundamental reforms, the drastic transformations, everything that implies the suffering of the status quo.
“Palliative policy does not have the courage to face pain . In this way everything is a continuation of the same ”.
The quintessential politician prefers painkillers over paradigmatic adjustments. The center offers a few small variations, not the change of depth.
In short, neoliberalism takes advantage of its cunning to control based on positivity, and leave the other as unnecessary, cumbersome, “negative.” We are the society that boasts of its freedoms, man figures himself as sovereign, but in reality what exists is new forms of slavery and idealism.
Pain is “negativity”, but it is what makes the encounter between anguish and the ontological nothingness possible, as thought by Heidegger. That which being reveals to us. It makes us exist.
To renounce “negativity” is to renounce life, its weights, its fractures; a life without pain is a life without meaning.
* Postgraduate thesis on Pain in literature, philosophy and cinema.
