Byung-Chul Han, the Korean-German philosopher, says that narration is in crisis because we now live in a time marked by excess positivity, hypertransparency, and digital immediacy, where the depth, duration, and continuity required for meaningful storytelling have eroded.
1. The Crisis of Narration = The Crisis of Meaning
In works like The Expulsion of the Other and The Burnout Society, Han argues that:
Narration is the temporal form in which meaning unfolds.
But in our current era—dominated by speed, information overload, and performative self-display—meaning doesn’t unfold; it evaporates.
2. Why Is Narration in Crisis?
A. The Collapse of Temporal Depth
• Narration needs time: inner time, durée, unfolding, memory.
• Our digital lives operate in frantic immediacy—endless updates, swipes, and data points.
• We live in “nows” without before or after, eroding the narrative arc of the self.
Han: “The digital regime reduces being to pure presence.”
B. From Story to Profile
• The narrated self (rooted in memory, transformation, and reflection) is being replaced by the curated self—flattened into images, likes, and metrics.
• Instagram, LinkedIn, dating apps: the self becomes a data object, not a subject of narrative depth.
The self becomes a project, not a pilgrimage.
C. The Overexposure of the Private
• Narration requires interiority, silence, and withholding.
• Today, we are caught in a regime of hypertransparency—everything must be seen, shared, and rated.
• In this climate, nothing can ripen—every thought is tweeted before it becomes a story.
D. Information Displaces Meaning
• Narratives reveal meaning through sequence and reflection.
• But today, information floods us in isolated bursts—facts without context, fragments without arcs.
• This leads to what Han calls the “terror of the same”—repetition without development.
3. The Result: A Post-Narrative Culture
• No more memory → Everything is instantly archived and instantly forgotten.
• No more character development → Only mood, image, performance.
• No more silence → Only the noise of expression.
So Han writes:
“Today, narration is in crisis because we no longer inhabit time in a way that allows for narrative.”
4. Philosophical Roots and Influences
• Han draws from Heidegger’s notion of being-in-time, lamenting the loss of poetic dwelling.
• He also echoes Walter Benjamin’s concern in The Storyteller: that storytelling dies when experience is no longer shared in time, but consumed in fragments.
• There are resonances with Bergson’s duration, Buddhist impermanence, and the fading of the self in data capitalism.
5. What Does This Mean Ethically and Spiritually?
Without narration:
• We lose the arc of becoming.
• We forget how to suffer meaningfully, because suffering no longer fits a story—it’s an error to delete or a mood to medicate.
• We become burned out, not just by work, but by the weightless speed of a life without narrative grounding.
Final Thought:
Narration is the soul’s way of enduring time.
In Han’s view, we’re forgetting how to endure—because we’ve lost the art of narrating.
Would you like to explore how this crisis of narration relates to trauma, psychotherapy, or the philosophy of van life as a recovery of narrative?
