My wife asked if we wanted to do another Year of Anti-Inflation. I think I’m always down for that, but especially after reading Byung-Chul Han last night, which pairs wonderfully with it.
In the passage that Mandy Brown referred to in this post, Han follows with this (all italics original):
In life, things serve as stabilizing resting points. Rituals serve the same purpose. Through their self-sameness, their repetitiveness, they stabilize life. They make life last [haltbar]. The contemporary compulsion to produce robs things of their endurance [Haltbarkeit): it intentionally erodes duration in order to increase production, to force more consumption. Lingering, however, presupposes things that endure. If things are merely used up and consumed, there can be no lingering. And the same compulsion of production destabilizes life by undermining what is enduring in life. Thus, despite the fact that life expectancy is increasing, production is destroying life’s endurance.
A smartphone is not a ‘thing’ in Arendt’s sense. It lacks the very self-sameness that stabilizes life. It is also not a particularly enduring object. It differs from a thing like a table, which confronts me in its self-sameness. The content displayed on a smartphone, which demands our constant attention, is anything but self-same; the quick succession of bits of content displayed on a smartphone makes any lingering impossible. The restlessness inherent in the apparatus makes it a non-thing. The way in which people reach for their smartphones is also compulsive. But things should not compel us in this way.
Forms of ritual, such as manners, make possible both beautiful behaviour among humans and a beautiful, gentle treatment of things. In a ritual context, things are not consumed or used up [verbraucht] but used [gebraucht]. Thus, they can also become old. Under the compulsion of production, by contrast, we behave towards things, even towards the world, as consumers rather than as users. In return, they consume us. Relentless consump-tion surrounds us with disappearance, thus destabilizing life. Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things:
The endurance of things and consumption of non-things — this under the umbrella of ritual-saturated culture as “community without communication” compared to our ritual-poor culture as “communication without community.” I’m just starting Han’s The Dissapearance of Rituals. Disclaimers about monocausal explanations notwithstanding, this is a heart-shot.