Byung Chul Han’s The Crisis of Narration

And what it means for modern education

Jul 05, 2025

"The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.”
Walter Benjamin - The Storyteller (from Illuminations)

Byung-Chul Han: Critic of Neoliberal Society

Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean-German philosopher renowned for his critiques of neoliberal society and concerns about the digital age and its societal impact. In many of his works, Han has expressed concerns about the currents and malaise of a neoliberal techno-world, in which individuals increasingly view themselves as “achievement-subjects” or individuals that have become “projects: always refashioning and reinventing themselves”1 in their striving for success, omnipresence and status in the online world.

Han’s essays draw on the German philosophical tradition. In particular Heidegger, Arendt and Benjamin have been influential on his thinking, including in The Crisis of Narration, a philosophical discussion.

Although a philosopher at heart, Han claims to be more popular amongst artists than philosophers. This emerges from the English translation of a German interview in ArtReview that discusses his work as a new ‘narrative against prevailing doctrine’ in which art is the saviour, not philosophy, resonating with the ideas expressed in The Crisis of Narration, one of Han’s more recent works, discussed below.2

"Effectively more artists than philosophers read my books. Philosophers are no longer interested in the present. Foucault once said that the philosopher is a journalist who captures the now with ideas. That's what I do. Moreover my essays are on their way to another life, to a different narrative. Artists feel addressed by that. I would entrust art with the task of developing a new way of life, a new awareness, a new narrative against the prevailing doctrine. As such, the saviour is not philosophy but art. Or I practise philosophy as art."3

The Crisis of Narration

The Crisis of Narration, a short and highly recommended essay that highlights a paradox of our time in which storytelling and narrative surround us, yet in which we find ourselves in a crisis of narration.

According to Han, the not so distant past was alive with stories. They gave people’s lives meaning and direction. They made sense of the complex world in which they lived. Unfortunately, in our modern age stories have been reduced to fleeting commercial narratives that no longer bind and connect us, but lead to isolation.

The power and magic of narration and story has eroded into the fashionable storytelling, that permeates marketing and consumer society reliant on storyselling and the grabbing of our attention, pillars of neoliberal capitalist online society. The author equally highlights how contemporary society is increasingly reduced to online and social media storytelling. These accelerate societal and community erosion. Caused by floods of fragmented information, the antithesis of “narration of stories” has led to an impoverished sense of community, social cohesion and isolation of individuals.

In this recommended short essay, Han calls for a renewed appreciation and revaluation of the true and unifying power of stories and narration.

Demise of Narration

Han’s critique of the modern world, manifests strong views on the societal impact of today’s digital world. Witnessing a profound societal and technological transformation, contemporary digital and digitised society expects to be connected anywhere and at all times. We expect to constant access to social media and the Internet. Big Tech, advertising and marketeers compete for our attention. Eyeballing is meant to fulfil the instant gratification we aspire to. Our attention-span increasingly weakens, our hunger for information increasingly gets stronger, but less fulfilled as we are encouraged to view the next post.

Clickbait, the use of ‘likes’ and emojis underpins the online social communities and information-sharing, have introduced a transience of engagement, hunger for the next post on TickTock, Snapchat, Facebook, X…

Han argues that this has led to the demise of narration and the communal experience of stories, making place of information driven by data, often atomised, that lack ‘story arcs’ and a shared experience of story. According to the author, today’s world of marketing and corporate storytelling has become a world of “storyselling”, stripped of the power of narration and shared experience.

Deeply influenced by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin and his essay, The Storyteller, Han accentuates this argument. Benjamin did not witness the rise of the digital world. He witnessed rise of fascism and Nazism in Germany forcing him, as a Jew, to flee. To him, noteworthy stories were disappearing, being replaced by information that lack psychological connection.

"Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . .

The most extraordinary things, marvellous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks."

Narrative Fragmentation to Information Fragmentation

Han argues that in the age of the Internet and relentless appetite for information, we live in a state of hyperactivity and never-satiated hunger. In fact being disconnected from the constant information stream makes us even more relentless, feeling we might be missing something.

According to Han and Benjamin, this makes information only momentary, unable to transcend beyond time. Its inherent need for newness makes that impossible. The author goes even further. Experiencing the world of data-driven information and information as a representation of fact, whether fact is true of fake, not as narration, not only leads to narrative fragmentation, but a fragmentation of information itself. In other words, narration appears to have ceased to exist and information too vanishes beyond its moment.

What stories give us

Han argues that data provide us with facts and that in current society numbers talk for themselves. Data don’t explain anything nor do they have memory. They only provide us information and allow for correlations. Too often we interpret them as reality and accept their truthfulness. They drive our digital world and our digital truth, manifested on our phone screens.

We live in a world of Phone Sapiens, a digital panopticon devoid of narration, devoid of synthesis and personal and social memory. Social and self-knowledge have become one of bits and bytes and numbers in which narration plays no role.

Yet to Han, story and narration make us deeply human as social beings, encouraging reflection and nurturing our collective memory. Story allows us to imagine and reflect in and on a social context of shared values and mutual cultural understanding. They help us make sense of our world and imagine our humanity in it.

Han believes fervently that this is what narration gives us; a binding thread that links us as human communal beings. Today’s digital and AI world is becoming increasingly devoid of the power of shared narration, reflection and experience of time and space that Han believes, we seem to have lost,

Turning to AI, the author argues that AI knows or has no passion and is incapable of creating passionate narration. He argues that even philosophy as science has lost its original narrative nature and discursive character, being mired in bureaucracy. For him, philosophy too has lost its courage for narration, prominent in centuries of dialogues.

Considering Heidegger, Arendt, Freud, Proust and especially Benjamin, Han calls for the healing hand of narration that does not always need explanation, but achieves

“a psychological connection of the event that is not forced upon an individual, but allows for interpretation, allowing the narrative to achieve and amplitude the information lacks.”4

Lessons for Education?

The Crisis of Narration does not focus on education. Yet, aren’t there any lessons we can draw for education? Too often experienced by learners as boring and irrelevant, education lacks sense, relevance and meaning for them. Han’s short essay may give us some clues.

Education’s heavy focus on the imparting and standardised measuring of curriculum knowledge, even going as far as predicting grades, accentuates strengths and weaknesses of learners rather than their potential. This risks further accentuation through the entry of GenAI epistemic agents into the classroom. Focused on efficiencies and claiming improvement of learning outcomes (a valiant objective in itself) in education, this exponential technological evolution could easily reduce learners and their teachers to datasets and statistical predictions that serve efficiency and serve the system.

Yet unless carefully considered and embedded in narration that promotes curiosity and passionate exploration, this technological evolution risks losing what matters most: creating learning narrations between learners and their teachers in socialised contexts. Galvanising learning dialogue with peers, teachers, their learning spaces and cultural context, in human and even human:ai relationships, may create new opportunities for learning narration. These are opportunities I believe Han may well endorse.

Perhaps education can become the healing hand for narration?

Carla Aerts’ TrAIn of Thought

Discussion about this post