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[carvalhais]

In recent times, the paradigm of the ‘Other’ or the ‘radically Other’ has been introduced into many humanities disciplines, and since then appropriation gas come to be seen as something rather sinful. The claim is that appropriation reduces the Other to the Same. Seeking to understand the Other is also suspect, because it involves forcing the Other into the categories of one’s own thinking. In this way, the Other or the alien comes to be something that evades all appropriation. The boundless exploitation of the Other is followed by either the Other’s mythical tabooization of the apotheosis of the Other. Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

Hyperculture produces a singular here. If heterogeneous contents lie adjacent to one another, there is no need for the ‘trans’. Contemporary culture s marked not by the trans, the multi or the inter but by the hyper. The cultures between which an inter or a trans would take place are un-bounded, de-sited, and de-distanced: they have been turned into a hyper-culture. Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

This ontology of culture as substance is alien to the Far East, which does not see humans as individual totalities with clearly delineated contours, that is, as persons. The human being does not have a ‘soul’. The Chinese sign for ‘human being’ already reveals that the human being is not taken for a substance. The word for ‘human being’ includes the sign for ‘between’. The human being is thus a relation. Western categories such as intersubjectivity or interpersonally, which serve to establish a relation after the persons or subjects are already there, would be alien to the thinking of the Far East. Before any ‘inter’, the human being is a between. Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

Hyperculture does not produce a homogenous, monochrome, uniform culture. Rather, it triggers increasing individualisation. Individuals follow their own inclinations, cobbling together their identities from what they find in the hypercultural pool of practices and forms of life. In this way, patchwork structures and identities emerge. Their multicoloured nature points towards a new practice of freedom, one owed to the hypercultural de-facticization of the lifeworld. Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

Our present age is characterised by the collapse of horizons. Contexts that provide meaning and identity are disappearing, and the symptomatic results are fragmentation, a kind of pointillism, and pluralization. This also applies to the way we experience time. There is no longer the sort of fulfilling time that is due to a beautiful structure of past, present and future, that is, to a story, to narrative suspense. Time becomes naked, that is, devoid of narration. A point-like time, or event time, emerges. Because it is poor in horizons, this kind of time is not able to carry much meaning. Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

Ted Nelson conceives of the idea of the hypertext as an exercise in freedom. The hypertext can be interpreted as a symbol for general emancipation. According to Nelson, the production of a linear-hierarchical order is based on compulsion, on a ‘destructive process’. Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

In the space of hyperculture, There is only another Here. It is symmetrical. There is no asymmetry of pain. The hypercultural tourist moves from one Here to another Here. Hyperculture is a culture of Being-Here. Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

Hyperculturality creates a particular kind of tourist. Hypercultural tourists are not on their way to a counter world, to a There. They rather inhabit a space that does not contain an asymmetry between Here and there. They are fully here. They are at home in a space of immanence. Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

William Randolph Hearst’s Xanadu-like castle near San Simeon in California, now a museum, is perhaps a site of hyperreality, a site of sitelessness. Cultural goods from all over the world, of all ages, styles and traditions, are condensed into a side by side. Forgeries seamlessly combine with genuine articles, thus sublating fake and genuine into a third category of Being, into hyperreality. Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

Contemporary globalisation effects a change in the site as such. It de-internalizes it, takes away the ‘tip’ which gives the site its soul. When, in the process of de-siting, cultural forms of expression detach themselves from their original sites and join together, putting themselves on offer in a hyper cultural simultaneity in which the here and now gives way to a site-less repetition, aura deteriorates. Culture in the age of its global reproducibility is not a culture of an auratic here and now. But the de-auratization of the site should not be lamented, in a one-sided fashion, as a loss of ‘depth’, ‘origin’, ‘essence’ or ‘authenticity’ not to mention as a loss of Being, as Heidegger’s critique of culture would have it. If anything, hyper cultural sitelessness is another shape of Being. And might, in the end, depth and origin even be a specific effect of the surface? Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

Walter Benjamin, in his The Work oof Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, derives the aura of a natural or artificial object from its ‘unique existence in a particular place’. The aura is the resplendence and radiance of a specific ‘here and now’ that cannot be repeated there. If the site were the ‘tip of the spear’ which gathers everything into itself, the aura would be the expression of the site’s inwardness. Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

This rhizomatic, non-dialectiral, even friendly And deserves a lot of attention. The rhizomatic ‘logic of the AND’ generates a ‘nonsignifying’ connection, that is, a connection of the unconnected, a side by side of what is different, a closeness of what is distant. It hyphenates culture, turning it into hyperculture. A hyphen connects, reconciles, even without any ‘deeper’ or ‘inner’ connection. Hyphae, incidentally, is also the name of the fungal filaments. Originally, hyphen (Greek: hyphé) means woven. It is a net, a web. By fusion, hyphae forms a net-like mesh (mycelium). The mesh of hyphae has no centre. It is not properly rooted. It can only spread around or grow into the air (aerial hyphae). Under certain conditions a mesh can produce generative hyphae. It possesses little inwardness. It is de-sited. In many respects, a hyperculture is a hyphen-culture. Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Translated by Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

A rhizome has no ‘memory’. It is scattered, so to speak. This is another feature of rhizomatic culture that resembles hyperculture, which is not a culture of inwardness or remembrance. Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Translated by Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

Hyperculture is a rhizomatic structure. The rhizomatic proliferation and spread reflect the hyper (hyperculturality), and they cannot be captured by the inter (interculturality) or the trans (transculturality). Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Translated by Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

This relationship between orchid and wasp is only apparently governed by ‘mimicry’. What is actually going on is a ‘veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp’. Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Translated by Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

Thus, a rhizome is an open structure whose heterogeneous elements constantly play into each other, shift across each other and are in a process of permanent ‘becoming’. The rhizomatic space is a space not of ‘negotiation’ but of transformation and blending. Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Translated by Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.

[carvalhais]

The feeling of hyper-, rather tha the feeling of trans-, inter- or multi-, is the most precise expression of today’s culture. Cultures implode; that is, they are de-distanced into a hyperculture. Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Translated by Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005.