Hyperculture
Culture and Globalization
Byung-Chul Han
Translated by Daniel Steuer
polity
Originally published in German as Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung © Merve Verlag, 2005
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
Excerpt from: Peter Handke, Am Felsfenster morgens (und andere Ortszeiten 1982–1987) © Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2019
Excerpt from: Peter Handke, Phantasien der Wiederholung © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1983. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4618-3
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021942107
Excerpt from: Peter Handke, Phantasien der Wiederholung. © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main
1983. Alle Rechte bei und vorbehalten durch Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.
Excerpt from: Peter Handke, Am Felsfenster morgens (und andere Ortszeiten 1982–1987).
© Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2019.
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But the fear of the new is often as strong as the fear of the void, even when the new is the overcoming of the void. That explains why the many only see absurd chaos where a new meaning seeks to introduce its order. Indeed, the old nomos is fading away, dragging the whole system of redundant standards, norms, and traditions with it in its fall. But what is coming is not therefore devoid of standards, is not a pure nothingness, inimical to any nomos. Even in the fiercest struggle between old and new forces just standards emerge and meaningful proportions form.
Here, too, are gods that rule.
Ample are their bounds.
Carl Schmitt1
Notes
1 1. Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea, trans. Simona Draghici, Washington, DC: Plutarch Press, 1997, p. 59 (transl. amended).
Tourist in a Hawaiian Shirt
Where do you want to go today?
Microsoft
The British ethnologist Nigel Barley once expressed the suspicion that ‘the true key to the future’ was ‘that fundamental concepts such as culture will cease to exist’. We are all, Barley said, ‘more or less tourists in Hawaiian shirts’.1 After the end of culture, should the new human being simply be called ‘tourist’? Or are we at long last living in a culture that affords us the freedom to spread into the wide open world? If we are, how might we describe this new culture?
Notes
1 1. See Der Spiegel, 44/2000.
Culture as Home
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel offers the following remark on the genesis of Greek culture: ‘We have just spoken of heterogeneity [Fremdartigkeit] as an element of the Greek Spirit, and it is well known that the rudiments of Greek civilization are connected with the advent of foreigners.’ It was thus the ‘advent of foreigners’ that constituted Greek culture. With ‘grateful recollection’, he says, the Greeks preserved the arrival of the foreigners in their mythology.1 Prometheus, for instance, originates from the Caucasus. The Greek people developed ‘from a colluvies’.2 The original meaning of ‘colluvies’ is mud, filth, hotchpotch, confusion, or muddle.
According to Hegel, it is ‘a superficial and absurd idea that such a beautiful and truly free life can be produced by a process so incomplex as the development of a race keeping within the limits of blood-relationship and friendship’. Rather, the ‘inherent heterogeneity [Fremdartigkeit in sich selbst]’ of spirit is that ‘through which alone it acquires the power of realizing itself as Spirit’.3 Still, heterogeneity by itself does not produce the ‘beautiful free Greek spirit’. For that, what is also required is the ‘overcoming’ of heterogeneity. The fact that it is necessary to overcome heterogeneity, however, does not imply that it is something purely negative that might as well have been absent, for heterogeneity is in itself part of the ‘elementary character of Greek spirit’.4 From this perspective, the presence of the foreign is necessary for the formation of one’s own.
In his description of the historical development of the Greek world, Hegel obviously tries to do justice to the fact that the foreign, heterogeneity itself, has a constitutive effect. With regard to the identity of European culture, however, he adopts an altogether different tone. Here, he emphatically invokes the idea of Europe as ‘home’. The Europeans might have taken their religion from the East, but all that satisfies their ‘spiritual life’ [geistiges Leben] they received from Greece: ‘The name of Greece evokes feelings of home in the educated men in Europe, especially in us Germans.’5 There is no longer any talk about heterogeneity in itself. The foreign is now degraded and becomes pure ‘matter’. Before, heterogeneity had been a spiritual element, a form. But once ‘European humanity came to be at home with itself’, the ‘historical and that which is
