Byung-Chul Han’s primary observation, the elimination of all negativity in modern beauty, led him to examine the aesthetics of the smooth as the manifestation of this imperative of modern society. Then he started to examine some of the missing aesthetics. The first missing aesthetic he wrote about was the aesthetics of veiling: how the veil actually makes beauty possible and/or intensifies it.
The next negativity, the aesthetics of injury, which is missing in the modern world, deals with the fact that the world is harmful. First, there is an innumerable number of things that can harm you. Second, the negativity of harm can be a good and beautiful thing. Third, the excessive avoidance of harm can be a bad and impoverishing strategy. Being open and exposed to the possibility of injury is both necessary and erotic. The expression “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” by Alfred Lord Tennyson reminds us that suffering some injuries is better than not risking the injury in the first place. But a more modern example “If I never loved I never would have cried” from Simon and Garfunkel’ I am a Rock suggests it is better to avoid the possibility of injury. “Today’s society of positivity forever reduces the negativity of harm. This also applies to love. Any major commitment that might lead to injury is avoided. Libidinal energies are distributed across many objects, like capital investments, in order to avoid a total loss.”
Being open and exposed to the possibility of injury is also necessary for thinking and understanding. Consider that, “Perception also increasingly avoids negativity. It is dominated by the Like. But seeing in the emphatic sense always means seeing differently, namely experiencing. It is impossible to see differently without exposing oneself to injury. Seeing requires vulnerability. Otherwise the same keeps on repeating itself. Sensibility is vulnerability. One might also say that injury is the moment of truth in seeing. Without injury there is no truth, not even perception. There is no truth in the hell of the same.” If one is unwilling to consider that perhaps one is wrong then one is protecting oneself from the injury of being wrong; of having been mistaken; of the uncomfortableness of having to change.
In modern digital photoshopped photography no risk of injury is supposed to occur because changes are designed to make things more likeable; more smooth. Han, describing Rolland Barthes theory of photography, laments the end of both information (the studium) and the subtle gap that injures and disturbs (the punctum). The only thing left in digital photographs is an affectum. “The affectum does not know of any patience for studium, or any receptivity for the punctum. It lacks the eloquent stillness, the communicative silence, which accounts for the punctum. The affectum shouts and excites. All it produces are non-verbal excitement and stimuli, which cause an immediate liking.”
In the aesthetics of disaster, Han describes Immanuel Kant’s and Friedrich Hegel’s approach to the elimination of disaster as autoerotic. “Hegel’s ‘spirit’ as well as Kant’s ‘reason’ represent incantations against disaster, against the outside, against the wholly other.” The problem is the taming of the world under a self-created comfortable understanding: the world has not been tamed (even though we think it is) and we still do not really know it (even though we think we know it). In other words, taming gives us false but real feeling of comfort, that is, the pleasure of overcoming the fearful or anxious. “The aesthetics of disaster contradicts an aesthetics of pleasure where the object of the subject’s enjoyment is the subject itself. The aesthetics of disaster is an aesthetics of the event. Inconspicuous events…can also be disastrous events, namely events of emptiness which empty the ego, de-subjectify it and take away its inwardness, thus making it happy. These events are beautiful because they expropriate the ego. A disaster means the death of the autoerotic subject which clings to itself.”
The most disastrous event is death and in the modern world death is what needs to be avoided at all costs. The healthy is the avoidance mechanism. Whatever is healthy is cherished. “Today’s kalocracy which considers the healthy, the smooth as absolute values, eliminates beauty. And the mere healthy life, which today takes the form of a hysterical survival, turns into something dead, into the undead. Thus, we are today too dead to live, and too alive to die.”
Today all that is left for the smooth is consumption. The aesthetic of consumption is the last aesthetic Han writes about. The Aesthetic of consumption is a culinary disposition in which there is no permanence, solidity, or character; there is only stimulus-response. The aesthetic of consumption makes the ideal of beauty disappear. Quoting Kant, “[T]he ‘ideal of beauty’… is the ‘visible expression of moral ideas, which inwardly govern human beings’.” The ideal of beauty is a disinterested pleasure apprehended only with a moral education. The ideal of beauty is a unification of reason and the good. It requires maturity, contemplation, and distance to be discerned. “Historically, for a long time, beauty was only relevant to the extent that it expressed morality and character. Today, the beautiful character gives way entirely to sexiness”.
Comprehending the ideal of beauty was supposed to be emancipatory because one would grasp both the reasonable and the good thus giving clarity to life’s actions and purposes. “The sexualization of the body does not follow the logic of emancipation…because it takes place alongside the commercialization of the body. The beauty industry exploits the body by sexualizing it and making it fit as an object to be consumed. Consumption and sexiness condition each other. [like a circle of stimulus and response] The self that is based on sexual desire is a product of consumer capitalism. Consumer culture more and more submits beauty to the schemata of stimuli and excitement.” This is the culinary disposition that Han calls the aesthetic of consumption. Consumption, like eating, requires that both the subject consuming and the object being consumed are impermanent. We eat because we need to to survive; yet eating gold (the most permanent element) does nothing for a human: what is permanent is not meant for consumption.
“Sexiness is opposed to moral beauty or beauty of character. Morality, virtue and character have a specific temporality. They are based on duration, solidity and permanence. The original meaning of character is the sign that is burnt-in, the irremovable branded sign. Its main trait is its immutability…. Solidity and permanence are not conducive to consumption. Consumption and duration exclude each other. The impermanence and fleetingness of fashion, by contrast, accelerate consumption. Thus, the culture of consumption removes duration. Character and consumption are opposites. The ideal consumer is a person without character. Lack of character enables indiscriminate consumption…. the less character and shape someone has the smoother and slicker someone is, the more Friends he or she has. Facebook is a characterless market.”
The networked digital order accelerates the move away from permanence to consumption. “Digital networks dissolve clans, tribes and neighbourly relations. The sharing economy also makes ‘ownership’ superfluous by substituting it with access…. Stable characters are difficult to network. They lack connectivity and communication….The digital order celebrates another ideal. It is called the man without character, characterless smoothness.” Beauty in this world is pornographic. It is the beauty of a consumable product for sale on a display rack. And the ranking of this beauty is the number of sales generated, or shares, or Likes received.