Han’s concept of positive violence concerns itself with analyzing violence from the perspective of too much of a (normally) good thing. Where negative violence engenders an opposite reaction, positive violence does not because it is not usually viewed as violence. His notion of the achievement subject who forces him- or herself to preform to the point of burnout and depression is an example of freedom (a good thing) merging with force and violence to produce undesirable or unhealthy results. No opposing force is generated because freedom is viewed as a good thing. In our world positive violence is rampant and much more prevalent than negative violence. Consider how often force is applied to you from outside compared to how often you force yourself to do something. Externally applied force is still considered negative; but self-imposed force is considered positive because it is our choice. Our free choice to make ourselves as we wish is leading to unprecedented numbers of mental health issues especially around burnout and depression.
The violence of the consensus, as another example, has made all choices of performance into a matter of degree rather than an either/or. This means that freedom has degraded into choice of degree within an unacknowledged consensus rather than an existential choice that is properly the field of freedom. In the violence of this consensus we are essentially asked to choose how much force we are willing to self-impose as we make ourselves. But an achievement society continually encourages us to achieve more and more and thus we apply more and more violence (in the guise of freedom) to ourselves.
The violence of transparency is another notion that Han brings up. Transparency is not a bad thing in itself but when achievement society adds its compulsion to extreme positivity to transparency it corrupts transparency against itself. “As a society of positivity, the transparent society removes every threshold and every threshold experience by leveling everything to the same. The transcendence of the completely other yields to the transparency of the same. After all, thresholds block vision, which has been unleashed as hypervisibility today.” The transparency compulsion is based on the dream of eliminating all negativity. This dream manifests itself in the claim that nothing should be hidden or done behind closed doors: this is hypervisibility. Among the losses that come from the violence of transparency are the loss of trust, of thinking, of individuality, and of otherness.
Trust is a wonderful thing – it simplifies life by taking away the need for absolute knowing from continuous surveillance. It can create a type of certainly while leaving room for surprise and mystery (provided it is not imposed as unjust power relation). “The negativity of not-knowing is also constitutive of trust. Where there is certainty, trust is superfluous because it is a condition between knowing and not knowing.” Thinking is lost too because thinking and thinking through requires a whole set of techniques, such the imagination of hypotheticals, counterfactuals, and extremes that are not always socially acceptable. Thinking requires the possibility of error and offence but if all deliberations are transparent the tendency is to think only of what is acceptable. “Thinking positivizes into calculation. Unlike calculation, thinking gathers experiences by transforming and be making other…” The death of individuality: “The compulsion to total transparency reduces humans themselves to functional elements in a system. That is the violence of transparency. A person’s integrity requires ta certain inaccessibility and impermeability. Total illumination and overexposure of the person would be violence.” And finally, “…the general politics of transparency makes otherness disappear by driving it into the light of the same. Transparency is achieved by eliminating what is other. The violence of transparency ultimately expresses itself as the reduction of the other to the same, as the elimination of otherness. It draws on re-semblance. The politics of transparency is a dictatorship of the same.”
Transparency in politics puts an end to strategic action. Governance is strategy unlike administration or management which is work and more properly transparent. The end of strategy would also make playing a game impossible. “Without a sphere of secrecy, politics degenerates into theatrocracy, which can’t do without a stage and spectators.”
Transparency kills distance; the distance that allows for discretion, mystery, and majesty. “Transparency is also the nakedness and obscenity of money, which makes everything equivalent to everything else by abolishing the incommensurability and impenetrability of things. A world in which everything can be expressed in terms of price and in which everything must produce a profit is obscene.” Capitalism in its quest for more markets and profits puts everything on display. The compulsion for transparency does too. “Control society reaches its apogee when its subjects expose themselves not under outside coercion but through a self-generated need, that is, when fear of losing the private and intimate sphere yields to the need to place those spheres shamelessly on display. The society of achievement also reaches maximum efficiency when freedom and self-exploitation are indistinguishable. Self-exposure and self-exploitation merge.”
Hate speech is a form of negative linguistic violence. It has an other that is the target of violence. As always the positivization of society produces a new linguistic violence that “…arises from a mass of the same, and [over]accumulation of the positive.” Spam in the broad sense is the quintessential example. “In contemporary society, overcommunication causes spamification of language and communication. It accumulates masses of communication and information that are neither informative nor communicative. This term doesn’t refer just to spam in the narrow sense, which increasingly litters communication, but also to the masses of communication produced by practices like microblogging….Communication is a community-building act. But after a certain pint it is no longer communicative, only cumulative. Information is informative because it expresses ideas in a form. After a certain point, information is no longer in-formative but rather de-formative. It is out of form.”
“The spamification of language is accompanied by hypertrophy of the ego, which generates communicative emptiness. It has ushered in a post-Cartesian shift.” Rene Descartes was famous for his starting premise of “I think therefore I am;” an action that proves existence. In the post-Cartesian shift the process is reversed existence needs action to prove itself. With the positivization of society that shift could take the form of “I am therefore I shop” ego gratification, in the sense of confirmation of existence, results in the need for actions of some kind to prove existence. Overcommunication and overproduction are two examples of the post-Cartesian hypertrophic ego.
“Thus even garbage is positivized today. The negative garbage of appropriation repels others with its smell and noise. It creates territorial boundaries. Positive garbage is used to attract the attention of others. It must be pleasing to them. Negative garbage produces exclusion. Inclusion is the aim of positive garbage. It is not repellent. Rather, it must be appealing and attractive. Today’s post-Cartesian nightingales don’t twitter because they want to drive others out of their space. They twitter for attention instead.” Without communication there is no community or political action. The excess positivization of the world is destroying all three and it is being done through our freedom of choice.