Introduction
In our first chapter we committed to a description of the history of modern day Korea, focussing on how the particular sociohistorical trajectory of the country led to a situation in which the K-Pop idol system could come to exist. We subsequently analyzed what it is that the idol represents and what the relation is between the idol and the broader K-Wave. If the K-Wave is indeed a government-sponsored global media apparatus, then the idol system is only a sub-part of the broader circuit of global export that fits under the hallyu umbrella. Yet, as I have said, there is a reason why this series specifically focusses on K-Pop and the idol.
As we have explained in the previous chapter, it is the rigid training under Korea’s specific compressed modernity with its fusion between capitalism and confucianism, past and present, a variety of colonial and occupational histories locking into one another which allows for the idol to become hyperhuman. We have argued that this rigid training, downstream from Korea’s compressed modernity, leads to the idol’s prominence in the K-wave circuit. But although we have described what the idol is and what we think it represents, we have not yet gotten into how that representation ultimately leads to the K-Wave becoming a global phenomenon beyond saying that that there is something seemingly human about the idol and that this enamors people. Thus before we get to the discussion of the broader K-Wave we must deepen our understanding of what exactly it is that makes the idol human and how that humanness entices people.
This chapter will then begin with a further elaboration of what exactly the human element in the idol is, as there is certainly an argument to be made that the idol system is not one of human intensification but rather one of dehumanization. Not denying such claims, this chapter will elaborate and describe the way in which the idol is paradoxically made human through the seemingly inhuman training process, and argue that this provides it with a uniqueness among humanity in our contemporary world that provides the opportunity for something specific to arise. We will subsequently use that analysis to look at the opportunity that resides within this.
Anthropotechnics and the K-Pop training system
In his famous book You Must Change Your Life, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk discusses the concept of anthropotechnics. In its most simple form, anthropotechnics is the notion that the human is always defined by its relation to and with technology; always already augmenting both his surroundings and himself via technology. As we have seen in our brief discussion of the human in the previous chapter, humanity in our definition is specifically defined by its ability to utilize technology to bring forth more complex states. Sloterdijk uses the “technics” part of anthropotechnics not just to refer to technology in the colloquial sense but rather to the complete system of practices that humans use to augment themselves, that is to say, the practices that humans engage in to change themselves.
Anthropotechnics then refers to an underlying vertical will-to-practice that has always existed as an intrinsic part of humanity. This practicing is one of repetition and training in an almost obsessive fashion. But repetition here is used not as a means to stay within a static horizontal state of equilibrium but rather to climb vertically, so that practice or training through repetition always has a further stage to be reached, as there are always further heights to climb. According to Sloterdijk, while this practicing paradoxically aims both forward and upward, it is simultaneously a primordial drive, something which continuously returns in humans to various degrees.
Via Nietzsche, Sloterdijk argues that “[a]ntiquity has no need of repetitions enacted in subsequent periods, because it returns constantly on its own strength. In other words, antiquity is not an overcome phase of cultural development but rather a constant present that continues underneath the theatre of memory and innovation that occupies cultural time”. As they are eternal, Sloterdijk argues that such practices ultimately define humanity and thus that to practice is to be human, stating that “it is not walking upright that makes humans human [but] rather the incipient awareness of the inner gradient that causes humans to do so”.
What distinguishes humans in greatness is what they aim this practicing reality towards. It is this which creates hierarchy within men and distinguishes men from animals. Being content with remaining at “base camp” or to maintain a stasis that never overcomes the self is to succumb to “swinishness”. The virtuous human is thus the person who constantly breaks with their own situation through habit formation and through that process negates the habit itself in a continuous drive for the better. Not being content with one’s surroundings, these humans constantly propel themselves to unforeseen heights of greatness.
The human of the future is then always the homo artista; exemplary practitioners who go beyond being merely a rational being (homo sapien) or a working being (homo faber) and make life into an art work which can be shaped into something better, demonstrating how all humans could live. The artistes have trained their bodies and/or their minds to do things that should naturally be “impossible” or “improbable” for a regular human. Such a process is itself almost always in need of a trainer that shows them the way, telling them how to train and what to aim for.
“The trainer leads the way into improbability. In systemic terms they have the task of making invisible the paradox of advanced civilization, where precisely that which is impossible to imitate is employed as an incentive to the most intense imitation.” The constant practice, repetition and training through systemic means to overcome one’s own skills, combined with the virtue that Sloterdijk ascribes to these artistes, strongly mirrors the K-Pop idol as laid out in the first chapter.
It was also in the first chapter that we discussed how it is a dream of future greatness that creates prospective idols in the first place. Their goal of becoming a world-famous idol gets them into the habit of overcoming themselves from a young age; as Sloterdijk says, the promise of attaining such a reward functions like a magnet itself, leading to the goal of obtaining such a reward becoming intertwined with the path towards greatness. To reach their goals, idols step into an excruciating training system and train themselves into something which seems to maintain this sense of practice, thus becoming an intensification of the primordial human drive towards self-improvement and greater heights.
In itself such a system corresponds closely to the early modern dream regarding pedagogy described by Sloterdijk in his work. He mentions that as modernity moved towards notions of equality, where greatness was seen as not something just for a select few but rather for an increasingly large group, the early modern dream of the school became one of an integrated machine producing perfect humans as students (this machinic description of humanity as something produced is of course familiar terrain in our discussions regarding the idol as the continuation of the factory model).
Sloterdijk gives the example of Renaissance thinker Comenius, who saw his typesetting apparatus as one that would populate the world with masterpieces of human print. According to Sloterdijk, this has been the real meaning of the renaissance all the way up to the modern age: to produce ever more perfect humans. In modernity, this productive logic becomes heavily interlinked with capitalism, but Sloterdijk argues that one should instead observe the universe of practicing behavior (training and routines) behind this logic. That is to say that behind Capitalist production as it exists in the K-Pop system, the production of “perfected” humans is ultimately predicated on a system of practicing inherent within man.
It is here that anthropotechnics does take on a technological scope. While Sloterdijk defines the term as the entire arsenal of practices which humanity makes use of to improve themselves, he argues ultimately that humanity has always produced and utilized technology to do exactly this. According to Sloterdijk, technology is not merely a tool but rather something that we have always co-existed with, positing that advancements in technology have the potential to redefine human capabilities and even what it means to be human. Thus, he argues, “humans encounter nothing strange when they expose themselves to further creation and manipulation, and they do nothing perverse when they change themselves autotechnologically”.
Of course, if the human has always lived with technology, then we again witness in the idol perhaps the most perfect culmination of human existence in this sense, where the human drive and will towards a higher goal is coupled with the idol literally becoming technology through practicing so as to become ever greater. Still, one could wonder whether such a practicing regime is not itself inhuman; whether the idol becoming cultural technology is the same as utilizing technology for practice-oriented self-overcoming and whether, anyhow, all of this is not much too individualistic and ultimately the intensification of the inhuman element of Capitalism.
While these are all valid questions, it would be good to remind the reader that we are occupying ourselves here not with the question of whether any of this is normatively good but rather with the question of what is, and to analyze whether we can extrapolate any possible future for humanity from what is. While in later chapters we will get to the questions rhetorically posed above, our first goal in describing such a process is merely to show that both the intensive training pipeline of the idol and the technologization of the human have predecessors in ideas of human becoming. In this sense, while one can argue regarding the merit and the end results of such a drive and whether the idol truly embodies it or is a cheap simulacrum, we can say at the very least that, in being produced, the idol seems to embody an intensification of a deeply human drive; one that seems increasingly absent from the broader world.
Indeed, Sloterdijk says that while practicing is universal, not every practice is made equal. For Sloterdijk, the modern age, despite its early ambitions, becomes the age of de-verticalization. Where in the pre-modern world practicing as self-overcoming to the point of reaching unforeseen heights - and with this the transformation of society, which eventually followed suit - was the preserve of distinct individuals, such habits are socially horizontalized in modernity. Such horizontalization has a paradoxical opposite effect in that instead of taking all humans in society to higher planes of existence, which the early moderns attempted to do, it turns into the eradication of distinction between the great and the non-great.
In the modern age the vertical is instead driven into the private sphere. As differences on a social level are eradicated, any form of distinction becomes private competition between the individuals, ultimately benefiting the individual but never being able to change society at large or take it to higher planes. This leads to ascension remaining solely centered around private goals such as gaining more status and more riches without the vertical tension that would historically come along with those goals. Instead, everyone remains at basecamp and there is as such an increasing absence of guiding figures who leave basecamp and become guides for the rest of society. Without any metaphysical orientation around which select humans orient themselves and these select humans serving as “vertical attractors” for the rest of society, practice does not lead to transformation but only to an enhancing of comfort, ultimately turning society flat and static. The dream of early modernity, of producing perfect humans, turns into inertia as collective condition.
Dehumanization as destiny and the possibility of reversal
Despite humanity being ever more enthusiastic about the idea of reform, the contemporary age and its relentless drive to flatten everything turns society into a “cybernetic optimalization system” where we are guaranteed rights only if we remain within the realm of the already existing. While the history of technological use, especially throughout modernity, has been one of humanity attempting to control nature through technology, it is now increasingly humans who are controlled by technology, being moulded by the outside instead of moulding ourselves. Quoting Sloterdijk, “the ensoulment of the machine is strictly proportional to the desoulment of humans”.
In this combination of self-steered technological collapse and having the self steered by forces outside it we might see a relation to Fisher’s Cybernetic realism. Through Fisher’s lens, we can interpret Sloterdijk’s idea of the human always co-evolving with technology as being literal, that is, as technology always already being inside the human; modernity being the event of its revelation and of the human becoming moulded by the technology that is inside him. In pure Fisherian fashion, Sloterdijk says that humanity becomes increasingly android in the modern age.
As humanity is inherently a technological being, the answer for Sloterdijk is not in a move away from technology but rather in altering our relation to it and utilizing it to overcome the problems of today. This move can best be described via an earlier conceptual distinction made by Sloterdijk, namely that between allotechnics and homeotechnics. The former, characterized as our dominant mode of engaging with technology (especially in modernity) is the utilization of technology to pillage nature, and our attempt to control it. The latter is, instead, the ability to interact with nature in a non-domineering fashion; finding new ways to utilize the technology we are always already co-constituted with and to harmonize the two.
Of course, the above sounds incredibly vague. Without taking this Sloterdijkian detour further still, we can point beyond the vagueness which has been commented on by a variety of scholars to Bernard Stiegler’s critique, which argues that Sloterdijk’s solution is an example of “hybris” - a prideful overreach in our engagement with technology - by seeing solutions within the catastrophe, with Sloterdijk’s later thought increasingly moving to a borderline certainty that our technological nature and the nature of the crisis will be the wake up call humanity needs to find a reason to transform ourselves again through anthropotechnical (in both the practicing and the technological sense) means, forming global “co-immune” spheres that overcome our current day crises by once again allowing for such anthropotechnical practices to exist.
Sloterdijk envisions such a global co-immune structure as intertwined but separate spheres which allow for hierarchy without this hierarchy being enforced. Instead, in such spheres he envisions that hierarchy will be the product of mimetic repetition of the qualities of stars who arise naturally, not as leaders but as those who overcome and who are followed because of their overcoming. The difference that exists here between Stiegler and Sloterdijk largely comes down to how they view modernity. Sloterdijk, despite his criticism, is ultimately a Nietzschean. He sees in modernity a tremendous opportunity to allow for further movement upwards, seeing the horizontalization of today as humanity’s attempt to control the process; Sloterdijk wants to let this top-down control go, as he believes this will allow the current crises to “change our life”, with those most prone to do so ultimately inspiring others to do so.
Stiegler argues that Sloterdijk’s idea is naive and underestimates the danger of the crisis, by putting his trust in the existential threat itself to resolve itself. Certainly, Stiegler seems to have a point here. Fisher showed us that the recognition of technology as a part of the self does not result in some form of liberation but rather in an intense horror where the human, in pure Cronenbergian fashion, becomes produced by technology. Furthermore, per Fisher’s description, this circuit is mediatized and global; any escape from it then seems doomed to fail.
Stiegler also sees Sloterdijk as lacking in pharmacological analysis. He argues that technology is a “pharmakon”; something that can function as both cure and poison. Based on this concept he argues that technology is currently acting as a poison and that Sloterdijk lacks a plan to turn it into cure. Instead, Stiegler argues not against technology as such, but rather makes the argument that we have to organize in bodies of experts which will find new ways to restructure technology, its place in society and our relation to it.
While Stiegler might be partially correct that Sloterdijk overlooks the extent to which technology can turn into poison - as Sloterdijk, despite his brilliant analysis of technology’s ills in modern society, does seem to put his faith in the technological process as such - seen through the lens of Fisher’s cybernetic realism, Stiegler’s critique in many ways misses the point. The problem with Sloterdijk is not the lack of top-down restructuring of humanity by some sort of body of humans but rather that his solution still relies on humanity “waking up”, changing its relationship vis-a-vis technology and consciously organizing into homeotechnical spheres. In other words, the problem is that Sloterdijk’s solution is not yet fully immanent to the process.
Sloterdijk’s process of overcoming the self ultimately relies on secession. The artiste secedes from basecamp by catapulting themselves to new heights through practice. But if the world has globalized and technology is now hollowing out the human, how could such a secession ever happen via the conscious choice of humanity? The existential threats that Sloterdijk points at as a definite wake-up call to humanity seem unconvincing. Throughout the entirety of the cold war humanity had constant anxiety that the world was about to end, yet it did little to offset our trajectory. Ever since, the system has become much more total, technology much more controlling, and humanity much more used to the comfort and stability that the system provides. While that stability seems to be cracking at the seams as of late, none of the fallout of this seems to point towards a re-arranging of the relationship between humanity, technology and nature.
The belief in a humanity waking up from its slumber seemingly falls back onto the “weak” reading of the Deleuzo-Guattarian imperative to go further in the direction of the market; the idea that if things would just accelerate far enough, the lack of structures could lead to the building of the new earth (a tendency which Fisher himself suffered from in his later work to some degree). Yet, if we live in the global cybernetic circuit that Fisher points to in his early work and have been witness to the lack of change throughout so called revolutionary times, the chance for change via humans altering their relationship with technology in opposition to the negative tendencies of the process seems nonexistent.
The problem is not that it is impossible for people to create any sort of bodies that try to oppose the process, but rather that, if the system is as total as both Fisher and Stiegler admit, it seems impossible for a body of experts to reverse anything through external bodies. Universities are captured by KPI’s, politics is captured by control and companies while companies themselves are inherently capitalist (which always already means techno-capitalist). In fact, every opposition to techno-capital depends on techno-capital. That is to say that to do anything efficiently (which includes the opposition Stiegler envisions), one already has to do techno-capital. As such techno-capital loves when people try to oppose it, as to oppose it is to feed it.
If the earlier remarks on Sloterdijk were still too little, Stiegler’s own ars Industrialis and its lack of success sadly shows that any idea of external restructuring is doomed to fail and is in fact further away from offering any kind of solution than Sloterdijk is. This is because external restructuring cannot capture the process without capitulating to it, without doing what it already wants. Any opposition then can only come to arise from within the system, taking the totalization of the process seriously and looking at what emerges from that totalized system that can oppose it, while being embedded in these circuits.
While Sloterdijk seems all too hopeful about the horrors of the process, we will argue that there does remain a particular potential within the process itself. The fact that the modern system is now total does not mean that there is no variation in modernity. Rather, as we have shown in chapter 1 and in other articles, modernity’s socio-historical trajectory strongly differs between regions and countries depending on the conditions it found at its onset. It is at this point that we can finally make our return to the question of Korea and the idol. We will argue throughout this work that, just as it is Korean compressed modernity that produces the idol as hyperhuman, it is that same idol as hyperhuman, understood through Sloterdijk’s definition of anthropotechnics, that provides the potential for a reversal which is fully immanent, precisely because it is integrated within a specific local form of the capitalist cybernetic circuit.
Korea retains a semblance of the past, even in its advanced, hyper sped-up compressed modern state. Its particular configuration of various pasts coming together, with Confucian Capitalism at the head, intensifies capitalism but refuses to destroy the former’s vertical tendency, instead putting both beside each other and thus negating the horizontalization that Sloterdijk discusses while simultaneously allowing for an even more intensified speeding up of the modern process. If we take the notion that the human is ultimately a practicing being that is meant to propel itself to greater heights through the setting of goals, then this already shows that something with potential emerges immanently to the capital process, within the particular form it took in Korean society.
We have already discussed how this provides us with a drive that seems to point at the intensification of this primordial human drive. Through the subversion of cybernetics’ original idea into “we are patterns that perfect ourselves”, this engineered perfecting of the self, which we have mapped onto Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnics, then emerges from within the system instead of as external opposition. Here one might object to the idea that it makes the idol genuinely human, but even so, this does not negate the emergence of the drive itself- it only raises the question of whether that drive, when engineered in the form of the idol, can ultimately lead to the spread of that vertical drive upward instead of being utilized for the growth of the system itself, which is exactly the question that this book attempts to tackle.
Let us make a start in answering that question by looking at the other side of the equation, the inhumanness of the system, to give an insight into why we focus on the idol when such opposition has yet to be fully answered. Though we argue that the practicing idol at the very least mimics the intensification of this human drive from within the system, the opposition to this is understandable. It could very well be claimed that the inherent inhumanness of the system would seem to lead to the impossibility of it offering potential for the re-instatement of such a drive, precisely because the idol being turned into technology to make a profit makes it so that what is happening is, in its essence, at most a crude mimicry, not something genuinely human. And yet, if we understand the broader system as total, then it is exactly because the idol becomes technology integrated in the system (and thus functions not in opposition to but in tandem with the system) that it can allow for the immanent reversal.
To make this argument, let us first look at what happens to humanity in the absence of such an immanent reversal, as doing so will provide us the insight that any difference being made between man and idol is in fact not at all that clear. Our contemporary age has been marked by an increasingly pervasive feeling of nothing ever changing and no future ever arriving, in spite of the fact that things are obviously happening all the time, with large events in domains ranging from technology to geopolitcs becoming, if anything, more common in the last decade or so. This feeling is in part what underlies Fisher’s later work, his ideas of lost futures and hauntology having become staples within the realms of cultural philosophy and online theory circles as explaining it.
But while Fisher’s later work is certainly onto something with regards to this sentiment - his comments on culture, art, technology etc. all feeling like constant cycles of the same returning - it would be preposterous to argue that recent events - whether in the geopolitical realm with the onset of Trump’s second term and the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran or in the realm of technology with the onset of mass LLM content and influencer-culture - cannot be described as something happening. Things are happening all the time, and in a way, they are changing all the time.
A fundamental flaw being made in these analyses, however, is the mistaking of societal change in a human sense for things happening. Indeed, no matter how post-humanist one’s position is, we are always understanding change from our own perspective as humans, in terms of what is changing for us. And what is changing for us seems to be very little- that is to say, things happen, but our lives seem to continue in the same way, and there seems to be no structural change and no future story or paths offered anymore by these new developments, or at least none for us. This lack of a future is not just about the lack of novelty but the lack of any sort of human development upwards.
If we return to Fisher’s early work in Gothic Flatlines, the answer for why this is is, ironically enough, already there. As the process begins to take over our environment, our media and indeed our bodies, we become a constituted part of the techno-media circuit; becoming controlled, and thus increasingly overtaken, by it, revealing an interior that is pure technology, having been hollowed out of anything human. In Fisher’s terms, technology doesn’t extend us but rather invades us; the network is plugged into us and uses us as an interface. The revelation of modernity for Fisher then becomes that mankind has no interior left and that machines and media start to invade our bodies via the logic of capital. We are thus not merely worked upon by this environment but rather hollowed out and overtaken by it.
As it increasingly overtakes us, the need to “lure us in” or sell us a story disappears proportionately as we simply become another component in the system, with capital making us part of the broader circuit that propels itself. If we are already part of the system, worked upon by other parts of the system, turning into zombies to be controlled (and thus having become “as (un)dead as the machines”, as Fisher says), then there is a decreasing need for the system to sell us a story. We do not need to buy into it anymore; there is no longer any need for a future to be sold to us. From this perspective, when we argue that developments lack change, they lack change not because everything stays the same but because change no longer needs to appeal to us. Things are indeed changing all the time; they are just not changing for us. It is this lack of change for us (as opposed to lack of change in general) that leads to the pervasive sentiment of nothing ever happening.
However, what does it mean for things to change but not for us? We have mentioned that change offers no story legible to us anymore, no future path that we can see. Yet if we were to put it in Sloterdijkian terms and in our broader definition of what the human is, we might say that the drive towards self-growth within broader society has been removed from humanity - something which Sloterdijk himself already notes in his critique of horizontalization. Instead we have chosen the optimization of life, for everything to become as pleasant as possible, and through that have chosen to become components in the machine. Thus, where the drive for increasing complexity was particular to humans and what distinguished them from the non-human, this drive for increasing complexity is put into the techno-capital process in our contemporary age. That is to say, that process which separated human from animal and all that is non-human is now something which has moved from humanity to technology; the latter is consistently becoming more complex, more intricate, more diverse, utilizing humanity as fuel for its own growth.
If mankind is already part of the system, already hollowed out and already a node, then the idol becoming technology through a deliberate regimen and scheme of practice is the human within that circuit insisting on the re-establishment of training, practices and development towards higher goals. If, from an Anthropotechnic perspective, these goals are specifically human, then the idol’s move within the circuit (and the idol becoming cultural technology) is paradoxically a renewed insistence on something human within that circuit, and a partial reclaiming of the drive towards complexity and those higher goals, refusing to become only acted upon and instead utilizing the circuit to fulfill that human drive towards greater heights. Even if the claim is that the technologization of the idol is dehumanizing, it shows us, within this total system where the anthropotechnical drive seems to become impossible, a place where that drive, no matter how partial, seemingly remains.
What is supposed to be the idol’s dehumanization via technological integration is thus paradoxically the maintenance of its humanity, as by becoming cultural technology it re-enters the channels in which complexification still happens, thus becoming not merely worked upon but working in tandem with the process itself. In this sense, the idol provides an immanent reversal of the process, turning itself into technology not by being worked upon but by actively working within it, aligning its personal goals of growth and stardom with the broader goals of the totalized project which has historically seemed impossible to oppose.
These two sides of the idol that we have discussed show the ways in which the idol brings dehumanization and humanization together, by truly becoming technology while also truly remaining the human anthropotechnic drive. If we have said that Stiegler’s analysis of technology as pharmakon is insufficient in the sense that it argues that technology can become either cure or poison based on how it is managed, then the idol offers a glimpse of what an immanent pharmakon might look like.
Instead of being an external managing of technology, the two sides of the pharmakon become the two sides of the idol: it being a poison because it is part of the techno-capital circuit and it being a cure through its intensification of humanization. By embodying the pharmakon within itself and entering the circuit, the idol offers the potential for cure in its ability to re-embed the human within the process of complexification that has been outsourced to techno-capital.
Still, one might continue to question whether what we have described above is truly a human reversal of the technological process at all. Whether the idol is not, in fact, the most poisonous example imaginable and whether what we have called “human” is simply a further stage of the human being worked upon by capital, literally becoming product. If we return to the idea of growth being based on practice and repetition, anthropotechnical practices are, for Sloterdijk, specifically about “repetition that negates repetition”.
Instead, he argues that the true great men and those who drive history are those that secede from society and “go off to do their own thing”, longing for higher stages of being that are almost alien to mankind. While the idol certainly has some overlap with the anthropotechnical practices Sloterdijk discusses, couldn’t it also be said that the idol is merely a copy: a product, something which constantly gets repeated and crafted by the company and which thus does not secede at all but rather consistently remains the same?
Although this is a valuable objection, we said in our earlier discussion of humanity that the human drive consists of two elements, namely the ordering of civilization and the use of that order to create new forms of complexity. In anthropotechnical terms, we might see the latter as the secession and the former as the spread of practice by the artiste. Indeed, Sloterdijk himself argues that the artiste forces the rest of the society to go to great heights.
Furthermore, an opposition against the external engineered nature of the idol negating its anthropotechnical drive already finds the kernel of an objection in Sloterdijk’s own work. There, Sloterdijk gives the example of L. Ron Hubbard, the creator of Scientology. He argues that, within the modern age, Hubbard’s Scientology is a prime example of someone who established a contemporary version of the vertical drive, after the old monastic systems and the early modern dream lost its grip on the world. Hubbard’s scientology hijacks the desire for this old drive and uses it to spread his own teachings, driving adherents to constantly improve themselves.
It would of course be absurd to argue that Hubbard’s adherents were “free” in any sense. But as per Sloterdijk, this does not negate that an anthropotechnical drive that was captured by Hubbard. While Sloterdijk would indeed say that this drive gets hijacked by an authoritarian system, none of what he says negates his analysis that this anthropotechnical drive exists, even if it is worked upon by something else. The question is, instead, whether, within such a system, the anthropotechnical drive can be saved. Here we would of course argue that the idol does what scientology does much better, as we have attempted to show above.
In chapter 7, we will return to the notion of secession to build out the ways in which the idol can and cannot lead to secession. For now we can then say that, even if we argue that the idol does not secede, the idol does still engage in almost unfathomable forms of practice to attain what we have called kalokagathia and subsequently spreads this idea of kalokagathia to the onlooker. If the horizontal has replaced the spread of the vertical drive, the idol’s practice-mechanisms re-introduce this drive as something important and tenable, which remains even if one would argue that this does not ultimately lead to secession.
With this human drive having been systematically hollowed out by the system and put into the techno-capital process itself, the idol, as technology, can spread this drive via channels that usually always turn poisonous, again showing its status as an immanent pharmakon. Indeed, it is this spreading that provides us with the best notion of why the idol might carry a cure within itself and why its humanness does not just remain an internal individual phenomenon but instead uses the circuit it is embedded in to spread itself.
The idol entices by being beautiful, by seeming almost perfect; its humanness not negated by the fact that it is crafted to seem as such. We have seen the effect of this when describing the fans and their description of idols akin to the virtues of kalokagathia. Of course, another argument one could make here, which is perhaps related to the idea that the idol does not lead to secession, is that the popularity of the idols has not yet led to the intense beautification, let alone broader humanization, of the world. Again, this is certainly a good argument. But we would equally argue that it misses the point of the idol as the first step of a reversal from within the project.
In his work, Sloterdijk already makes the argument that the the exemplar is held up as something inimitable and yet that inimitability is precisely what’s used to provoke the most intense imitation in everyone watching. The impossible becomes the spur. Sloterdijk mentions that “look[ing] at someone who seems perfect, from whom one receives, incredulous and credulous at once, the message that one could be the same one day…has set armies of practising humans in motion over millennia”. By becoming ingrained in the circuits of techno-capital and media and beamed into the minds of millions as virtuous, beautiful and borderline perfect, the idol appears on the screens that have zombified the humans as the torso of Apollo as described by Rilke: that perfection that tells its onlookers: “you must change your life!”.
The sacralization of the idol
If, as Sloterdijk says, society is increasingly becoming a “cybernetic optimalization system” where technology is used not to produce greatness but rather to produce an egalitarian sameness, then the idol is an anomaly. It appearing as the torso of Apollo harkens back to an earlier era where such anthropotechnical forces would capture and compel people. It brings with it the idea that something higher and greater is still a possibility, that there is a cure to the stasis of modernity.
Such technological and produced humans are not entirely without precedent in modernity. In the first chapter we briefly discussed Edgar Morin’s view on stars and the separation between the early Hollywood stars of the Classical Era and the stars of the later period, with the Monroe era being in many ways a pivot point from the aristocratic star, one who remained in many ways above the human, far removed from day to day life, and the later star, who showed themselves to be as human as the fan, becoming more relatable and through that, more accessible.
The anthropotechnical nature of the idol as part of the process of turning them into a star that remains in many ways akin to the disappeared Hollywood star of old in the West then raises the question of whether the unrelatable nature of the idol does not raise a barrier in the process of imprinting itself upon society. But it is precisely through the idol’s sacralization that it does so. As we have seen, the anthropotechnical drive of humanity is being led by artistes who are seen as largely separate, of a much higher category; it is exactly their separate nature that allows them to become archetypes for pulling humanity up to new heights.
In his Mythologies, Roland Barthes offers an analysis of the face of Greta Garbo as still belonging to that earlier period, a period where the face of the actress caused feelings of intense terror and yearning, not because of its relatability but because of it being seemingly unreachable. And yet that unreachability does not make it any less human- rather, as Barthes argues, the face of Garbo caused “the deepest ecstasy” in audiences because it offered a kind of Platonic ideal of humanness.
Barthes described Garbo’s face as almost sacred: “descended from a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light”. It is this that the idol production process attempts to create by arousing in fans the same feeling of awe and wonder, not of relatability but of something beyond the self that imprints itself upon you. Similar to the face of Garbo, the point of the idol is to create the appearance of a human archetype in its perfection.As Barthes says, in the early Hollywood era, the encounter of such stars gave rise to almost mystical experiences because of this archetypal nature. That this mystical experience was an engineered sacralization is then as true for the stars of the classical Hollywood era, whose production was equally tightly run, as it is for the K-Pop idol.
The K-Pop production process as anthropotechnical process is then a sacralization of the human being by turning that human being into a technology which can inspire these feelings in an era where such mystical experiences have all but disappeared for modern man. This is, in a way, already confirmed by Sloterdijk. While his statue of Apollo maintains the phenomenological structure of the sacred, it strips away the metaphysical structure. It is thus a secular sacred, the command of the old structures after these structures have disappeared coming from the perfection of the form. What the idol adds is that the sacred here becomes a living being, showcasing the ideal not within dead art but within living human: it is the statue of Apollo made flesh.
In the words of Roger Caillois, the sacred is that which is separated from the profane, or from day to day life; that which stands apart. Yet he argues that while it is true that society moves towards an increasingly profane world, the sacred remains in secular societies in whatever stimulates respect, fear and trust. It always appears as that which separates man from his fellow-men. In this sense the sacred is wholly separate from the profane and yet needs the profane, just as the profane needs something sacred to hold onto to believe in the possibility for an existence upwards, for a world that goes beyond the day to day.
The disappearance of the anthropotechnical drive within broader society functions as the further profanation of the world. The idol functions then as its opposite, as its possibility for sacralization. This is because the anthropotechnical drive does not maintain itself merely to the idol but, as we saw in our discussion of the statue of Apollo, impresses itself upon the onlooker. Like Garbo, the idol functions as an archetype providing an insight into what lies beyond, or what lies higher. As it is produced by a hypercapitalist system, this archetypal nature becomes cure in the sense that it can break through the profanation that cybernetic optimization creates.
The sacralized archetypal human excellence that was experienced through the face of Greta Garbo, which disappeared with Hollywood’s move away from the old system, then finds its continuation within the K-Pop system. As the idol is sacralized, it inspires devotion and, like both the numinous and Garbo, both terror and awe. In this sense, as Caillois argues, the sacred always creates communities of devotion that attempt to create a sacred environment around themselves that is separated from the profane world. Thus the idol is engineered to be unreachable and that very unreachability is the engine that drives millions of people towards them, not too dissimilar to Sloterdijk’s description of Scientology, but on a far larger and more viral scale.
When it comes to K-Pop, the sacred environments are to be found within the various fan communities. Returning to the discussion between Sloterdijk and Stiegler, might we then say that the co-immune structures which Sloterdijk envisions - where hierarchy will be the product of the mimetic repetition of stars ultimately pushing humanity to greater heights - need such an engineered sacred environment to reach fruition in an utterly engineered world? In other words, can such an engineered sacred environment, with the idol at its centre, ever turn to cure? Or is it precisely the case that the engineered nature of the sacred space, ultimately created for the benefit of capital, can only ever turn to poison? Answering these questions will require the rest of this work.
For now, this chapter has provided us with two particular concepts. We have come to understand the trainee-to-idol pipeline as an anthropotechnical exercise on the one hand, and on the other hand we have, through use of the pharmakon concept, argued that the idol’s existence within the system as something genuinely human offers the potential for an immanent reversal. These two concepts in turn leave us with the two questions that will form the rest of the work and which will ultimately tell us whether the idol can turn to fruition. Knowing the anthropotechnical nature of the idol and its function as the statue of Rilke leaves us with the question of how the idol spreads, while its status as pharmakon and potential for immanent reversal asks us to distinguish the ways in which the idol turns to cure and the ways in which it turns to poison.
Indeed, nothing hereabove should be taken as us saying that the idol is currently functioning as a cure, or that the hyperhuman is capable of spreading to others. What we have maintained is solely that the idol offers a potential within the system to turn to cure where that potential should not realistically exist. To understand both of these concepts we are then compelled to look at the ways in which the idol spreads, where it currently turns into poison and where its potential lies for turning to cure- that is, for spreading the hyperhuman from within the system of capital.
These two questions will guide the rest of this work. As we will start to move through an understanding of how the idol spreads, we will come to see the possibility that the idol offers as a human within these systems. Simultaneously, the description of the spread will take us through some of the most vivid ways in which the idol, in our contemporary moment, turns to poison, before we can come back to the hard question of whether the position that the idol has a latent potential that can turn into cure holds and, if it does, whether that potential can be actualized. Here, the concept of the sacralization of the idol already provides us with a first step, namely the fan communities that are the environments where the K-Pop system engineers new forms of the sacred. Using this as a starting point, our next chapter will start by returning to the concept of hallyu. Starting with the move from hallyu 2.0 to hallyu 3.0, we will analyze how the K-Wave came to be dominated by K-Pop specific platforms which in turn served as the sacred environments that allowed the idol to spread to fans and which would come to show the poisonous side of K-Pop in some of its most extreme forms.