Smartphone

 

In the early days of the telephone, this new technology had an aura of fate-like power about it. Its resounding ringing was like an order to which one had to submit. In his Berlin Childhood around 1900, Benjamin describes how, as a child, he was helplessly at the mercy of the apparatus:

At that time, the telephone still hung – an outcast settled carelessly between the dirty-linen hamper and the gasometer – in a corner of the back hallway, where its ringing served to multiply the terrors of the Berlin household. When, having mastered my senses with great effort, I arrived to quell the uproar after prolonged fumbling through the gloomy corridor, I tore off the two receivers, which were heavy as dumbbells, thrust my head between them, and was inexorably delivered over to the voice that now sounded. There was nothing to allay the violence with which it pierced me. Powerless, I suffered, seeing that it obliterated my consciousness of time, my firm resolve, my sense of duty. And just as the medium obeys the voice that takes possession of him from beyond the grave, I submitted to the first proposal that came my way through the telephone.1The medium is the message. The resounding telephone in the dark corridor, with receivers as heavy as dumbbells, prefigures the message and lends it something of the uncanny. The noises of the first telephone conversations were ‘nocturnal noises’.2 The mobile phones we carry around in our pockets today do not possess the heavy weight of fate. They are handy and light; we literally have a grip on them. Fate is that alien power that immobilizes us. A message, as the voice of fate, does not leave us much room to manoeuvre. The mobility of the smartphone is enough to give us a feeling of freedom. No one is terrorized by its ringing. The smartphone does not force us into a helpless passivity. No one is delivered over to the voice of another.

The constant typing and swiping on the smartphone is an almost liturgical gesture, and it has a substantive impact on our relation to the world. I swipe away the information that does not interest me. I zoom in on the content that I like. I have the world firmly in my grip. The world has to accord with my desires. In this way, the smartphone amplifies self-referentiality. Through all my swiping, I submit the world to my needs. The world appears to me under the digital illusion of total availability.

According to Roland Barthes, the sense of touch ‘is the most demystifying of all senses, unlike sight, which is the most magical’.3The truly beautiful cannot be touched. It demands distance. Faced with the sublime, we stand back in awe. When praying, we fold our hands. The sense of touch destroys distance. It knows no astonishment. It demystifies, de-auratizes and renders profane what is touched. The touchscreen sublates the negativity of the other, of the unavailable. It generalizes the haptic compulsion to make everything available. In the age of the smartphone, even the sense of sight succumbs to haptic compulsion, and loses its magic. It loses the capacity for astonishment. The distance-destroying, consuming way of seeing approximates the sense of touch. It desecrates the world. To this way of seeing, the world appears only in the form of availability. For the frantically typing index finger, everything is consumable. The index finger that orders commodities or food necessarily transfers its consumerist habitus to other areas. Everything it touches takes on the form of a commodity. On Tinder, it degrades the other, who becomes a sexual object. Deprived of his or her otherness, the other becomes consumable.

In digital communication, the other is increasingly absent. Smartphones allow us to retreat into bubbles that screen us off from the other. Digital communications rarely involve salutations; the other is not explicitly addressed. We prefer to write a text message rather than ring someone up, because in writing we are less exposed to the other. Thus, the other as a voice disappears.

Communication with a smartphone is disembodied and without a gaze. Community has a bodily dimension. Because of its lack of corporeality, digital communication weakens community. The gaze stabilizes community. Digitalization makes the other as gaze disappear. The absence of the gaze is partly responsible for the loss of empathy in the digital age. When a parent stares at a smartphone, the infant is deprived of the gaze. The gaze of the mother, in particular, provides an infant with stability, self-affirmation and community. The gaze builds primordial trust. Without the gaze, a disturbed relationship to self and others develops.

What makes a smartphone different from a conventional mobile phone is that it is not just a telephone but, primarily, a medium for transmitting images and information. The world only becomes fully available and consumable once it is reified into an image:

‘Picture’ means … that which sounds in the colloquial expression to be ‘in the picture’ about something…. To ‘put oneself in the picture’ about something means: to place the being itself before one just as things are with it, and, as so placed, to keep it permanently before one.4

The smartphone places the world: it takes hold of it by placing [herstellen] it in front of us in the form of an image. The camera and the screen are the central elements of the smartphone because they intensify the becoming-image of the world. Digital images transform the world into available information. The smartphone is a ‘Ge-Stell’, enframing, in Heidegger’s sense: a Gestell, the essence of technology, unites in itself all forms of placing [Stellens] that make available, such as ordering [Bestellen], presenting [Vorstellen] or producing [Herstellen]. The next step in the process of civilization goes beyond the becoming-image of the world. It consists of the production of the world out of images, the production, that is, of a hyper-real reality.

The world consists of things as objects. The word ‘object’ is derived from the Latin verb obicere, which means ‘set against’, ‘throw against’ or ‘oppose’. The negativity of resistance is inherent in it. An object is something that turns against me, that opposes and resists me. Digital objects lack the negativity of obicere. I do not experience them as resistance. The smartphone is smart because it deprives reality of its character as resistant. Even the smooth surface of the smartphone conveys the sense of a lack of resistance. On its smooth touchscreen, everything seems tame [handzahm] and obliging. Everything is available at the tip of one’s fingers. The smartphone’s smooth surface is a digital flatterer that blandishes the hand and thus constantly elicits ‘likes’ from us. Digital media may be effective in overcoming the resistance of space and time, but it is precisely the negativity of resistance that constitutes experience. The smart environment of digital non-resistance impoverishes world and experience.

The smartphone is the main informaton of our time. It not only makes many things superfluous but also dereifies the world by reducing it to information. The material aspect of the smartphone recedes, and information takes its place; the materiality of the smartphone is not perceived in its own right. Smartphones do not really differ in their appearance. We look through them into the infosphere. An analogue watch also provides us with information regarding time, but it is not an informaton; it is a thing, even an adornment. Its material aspect is central to it.

A society that is dominated by information and informatons is unadorned. Adornment [Schmuck] originally meant splendid attire. Non-things are naked. The decorative and the ornamental are characteristic of things. They are life’s way of telling us that life is about more than mere functioning. In the baroque age, the ornamental was theatrum dei, the theatre of the gods. If we submit life fully to functionality and information, we drive the divine out of life. The smartphone is a symbol of our time. The smartphone is not embellished in any way. It is dominated by the smooth and straight. Even the communication that takes place via smartphones lacks the magic of beautiful forms. It is dominated by a straightforwardness that finds its best expression in affects. The smartphone also intensifies hypercommunication: everything is levelled out, abraded and ultimately made to conform [gleichgeschaltet]. We may live in a ‘society of singularities’, but paradoxically the singular, the incomparable, is hardly to be found.

We present our smartphones everywhere, and even delegate our perception to these apparatuses. We perceive reality through the filter of the screen. The digital window dilutes reality into information that we register. There is no physical contact with reality. Reality is deprived of its presence. We no longer perceive the material vibrations of reality. Perception is disembodied. The smartphone de-realizes the world.

Things do not spy on us. This is why we trust them. The smartphone, by contrast, is not only an informaton but also a very efficient informant that keeps its user under constant surveillance. Anyone familiar with its internal algorithmic life will rightly feel tracked by it. We are controlled and programmed by it. It is not we who use the smartphone; the smartphone uses us. The real actor is the smartphone. We are at the mercy of this digital informant, beneath the surface of which various actors steer and distract us.

The emancipatory aspects of the smartphone are not all there is to it. There is no fundamental difference between being reachable at all times and being enslaved. The smartphone is a mobile labour camp in which we voluntarily intern ourselves. The smartphone is also a pornophone: we voluntarily expose ourselves. The smartphone functions like a mobile confessional box. It is the continuation of the ‘sacral rule of the confessional box’ in another form.5Every form of rule has its own devotional objects. The theologian Ernst Troeltsch speaks of ‘devotional objects that fascinate the imagination of the people’.6 These objects stabilize rule by making it habitual and anchoring it in the body. In German, devot also means submissive. Smartphones have established themselves as the devotional objects of the neoliberal regime. As apparatuses that serve the purpose of submission, they resemble the rosary, which is just as mobile and handy. The like is the digital amen. By clicking on the like button, we submit ourselves to the context of rule.

Platforms like Facebook or Google are our new feudal lords. We tirelessly work their land and produce the valuable data that they exploit. We feel free, although we are completely exploited and controlled. In a system that exploits freedom, there is no resistance. Once it coincides with freedom, rule becomes total.

At the end of her The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff invokes collective resistance, pointing to the fall of the Berlin Wall:

The Berlin Wall fell for many reasons, but above all it was because the people of East Berlin said, ‘No more!’ We too can be the authors of many ‘great and beautiful’ new facts that reclaim the digital future as humanity’s home. No more! Let this be our declaration.7The communist system that represses freedom differs fundamentally from the neoliberal surveillance capitalism that exploits freedom. We are too intoxicated by our digital drugs, by communication, to raise the voice of resistance and cry ‘No more!’. There is simply no place here for any romantic notion of revolution. The conceptual artist Jenny Holzer’s remark ‘Protect Me From What I Want’ expressed a truth that Zuboff apparently failed to appreciate.

The neoliberal regime is itself smart. Smart power does not operate through orders or prohibitions. It does not make us docile; it makes us dependent and addicted. Instead of breaking our wills, it serves our needs. It wants to be liked. It is permissive rather than repressive. It does not condemn us to silence. Rather, we are constantly asked to share our opinions, preferences, needs and desires – even to tell the stories of our lives. Smart power conceals its intention to rule by coming across as friendly, smart. The subject is not even aware of its submission. It believes that it is free. Capitalism culminates in the capitalism of the like. Because it is permissive, it need not fear resistance or revolution.

Our almost symbiotic relationship with our smartphones has led some to suggest that they represent transitional objects, the term coined by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott to refer to those things that secure an infant’s safe passage towards reality. Only with the help of transitional objects can the infant create a play area, an ‘intermediate area’,8 in which it ‘relaxes as in a secure and uncontested resting place’.9 Transitional objects build a bridge to reality, to the other, to what escapes the fantasy of omnipotence. Young infants will grasp at the corner of a blanket or cushion, to put it in their mouth or to stroke. Later, they grasp a complete object, such as a doll or cuddly toy. Transitional objects have an existential function. They give the child a feeling of security. They take away the fear of being alone. They create trust and a feeling of being sheltered. Transitional objects allow children to slowly grow into the world. They are the first things of the world which stabilize the life of the infant.

A child has a very intense, deep relationship with the transitional object. The object must be neither modified nor washed. Nothing is allowed to interrupt the experience of closeness. The child panics if it loses the beloved object. The child possesses the transitional object, but to a certain extent it also has a life of its own. It appears as an independent, personal counterpart to the child. Transitional objects open up a dialogical space in which the child can encounter the other.

We react with uncontrollable panic when we lose our smartphones. We have intimate relationships with them. We do not like to give them to other people. Can the smartphone therefore be understood as a transitional object, a digital teddy bear? The fact that the smartphone is a narcissistic object suggests not. A transitional object represents the other. The child speaks to it, cuddles it, as if it were another person. No one cuddles a smartphone. No one perceives it as an independent counterpart. Unlike a transitional object, it is not something close to our heart; it is not irreplaceable. We regularly buy new smartphones.

The way the child plays with the transitional object is analogous to later creative activities, for instance in the arts. It opens up a free space. The child, as though in a dream, takes the position of the transitional object; it gives free rein to its fantasies. The child imbues the transitional object with symbolic value. The object becomes the vessel in which the child’s dreams are concentrated. The smartphone, by contrast, floods us with stimuli and represses our imagination. Transitional objects are poor in stimuli and therefore intensify and structure attention. The flood of stimuli that comes from the smartphone fragments our attention. Where the transitional object stabilizes the psyche, the smartphone destabilizes it.

Transitional objects create a relationship with the other. Our relationship with the smartphone, by contrast, is narcissistic. The smartphone is similar in many ways to a so-called ‘autistic object’. We could also call it a narcissistic object. Transitional objects are soft. The child snuggles up to them. When doing so, it feels not itself but the other. Autistic objects are hard: ‘The hardness of the object allows the child, when manipulating and pressing the object, to feel not so much the object but itself.’10 Autistic objects lack the dimension of the other. They do not fuel our fantasying. Our dealings with them are repetitive, not creative. Repetitiveness and compulsion characterize our relationship to the smartphone.

Like transitional objects, autistic objects are a substitute for the absent person, but they reify this person into an object. They take away the person’s otherness:

Autistic objects are the most extreme example of objects taking the place of human beings, even of serving the purpose of avoiding the imponderables and always possible separations that are an inevitable part of relations with autonomously acting human beings. To put it even more radically: they make it possible not to perceive others as independent human beings at all.11

The similarity between smartphones and autistic objects is obvious. Unlike the transitional object, the smartphone is hard; it is not a digital teddy bear. Rather, it is a narcissistic, autistic object through which we feel, most of all, ourselves. It thus also destroys empathy. We use the smartphone to retreat into a narcissistic sphere in which we are protected against the imponderables pertaining to the other. The smartphone puts the other at our disposal by reifying the other into an object. It turns the you into an it. The disappearance of the other is the ontological reason why the smartphone makes us lonely. We communicate so compulsively, so excessively, because we are lonely and empty. But hypercommunication is not fulfilling. Because it lacks the presence of the other, it only deepens the loneliness.

 Notes

1. Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 49f.

2. Ibid., p. 48.

3. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972, p. 90.

4. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Off the Beaten Track, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 67 (emph. B.-Ch. H.).

5. Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Epochen und Typen der Sozialphilosophie des Christentums’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4: Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte und Religionssoziologie, Tübingen: Mohr, 1925, pp. 122–55; here: p. 134.

6. Ibid., p. 135.

7. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, London: Profile Books, 2019, p. 525.

8. Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 2.

9. Tilmann Habermas, Geliebte Objekte: Symbole und Instrumente der Identitätsbildung, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1996, p. 325.

10. Ibid., p. 336.

11. Ibid., p. 337.

Non-things

Upheaval in the Lifeworld

Byung-Chul Han