Saba: Contextual Reading
Prompt:
Talk about the following excerpts/quotes at length. First as texts embedded within larger conversations (books, broader discussions, living and perhaps contested traditions, etc) and then treat their selection and public posting as communicative acts that may be completely divorced from that contextual reading. What might someone posting these texts on social media be trying to say?
“Sovereign is he who commands the shitstorms of the Net.”
- Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (2013)
Alone on a screen, "sovereign is he who commands the shitstorms of the Net" reads as admiration — Machiavellian, almost a playbook. It sounds like advice. A diagnosis of the impotence of digital outrage becomes, decontextualized, a maxim for engagement farming. I would be surprised if it has never been posted approvingly by someone selling a growth strategy.
There's a positional claim embedded in posting it at all. To name the swarm is to stand outside the swarm; the post buys its author a spectator's seat above the thing it describes. This is a claim to a small, borrowed sovereignty — not over the storm, but over its interpretation. And it's usually made during a storm, as an unnamed comment on an event everyone can identify, which gives the poster the two things subtweeting always wants: an accusation and deniability. Citation is armor. Han said it, not me, and in 2013, before any of this was about you.
Someone who says something foolish, receives 50,000 hostile replies and loses their job has experienced a shitstorm. They certainly do not command it.
Someone who repeatedly makes statements that cause supporters and enemies alike to spend days discussing him, whose opponents amplify each provocation while believing themselves to be resisting it, is much closer to what the sentence describes. The distinction is between being the object of attention and controlling the allocation of attention.
And that produces one of Han's more disturbing insights: hostility can become a resource.
“Those who saw him would say: ‘Brother Dryhthelm’—for that was his name—‘it is amazing that you have the strength to bear such bitter cold for any reason!’ And he responded simply—befitting a man with a plain disposition and a humble nature—‘I have seen colder.’ And when they said, ‘It is amazing that you wish to endure such a harsh way of life,’ he responded, ‘I have seen harder.’”
- “Dryhthelm Returns from the Dead,” The Penguin Book of Hell (2018)
Dryhthelm has been a respectable Northumbrian householder, already described as devout. He falls ill, is thought to have died, and sits up again at dawn. His first important statement is not a description of what he has seen but a declaration of discontinuity: he has been permitted to return, but he must no longer live as he previously lived. He divides his property among his wife, his children and the poor, then enters the monastery at Melrose and submits himself to an exceptionally severe ascetic life. Bede’s point is that the truth of the vision is demonstrated by the alteration it produces. Dryhthelm’s life becomes his testimony: even had he remained silent, Bede says, his bodily discipline would have shown that he had encountered things hidden from ordinary people.
That background makes “I have seen colder” entirely literal. During his otherworldly journey, Dryhthelm is shown a vast valley divided between raging fire and violent cold. Souls are blown back and forth between its two sides: when the heat becomes intolerable, they leap into the snow and hail; when the cold becomes intolerable, they return to the flames. Dryhthelm initially thinks that this must be Hell, only to be told that the true Hell lies farther on.
So when Dryhthelm later stands in the freezing Tweed and answers that he has “seen colder,” the remark contains an entire cosmology in three words. His companions are measuring the cold by the ordinary limits of the human body. Dryhthelm is measuring it against an eschatological landscape. Their scale is meteorological; his is infernal.
The same compression governs “I have seen harder.” The line does not mean merely that Dryhthelm has endured an unusually difficult earthly life. He has seen realities that have permanently recalibrated his conception of hardship. What his fellow monks regard as extreme deprivation appears to him as a minor and temporary discomfort when compared with posthumous punishment, judgment and the possible loss of heaven.
This is why the sentence is more than an early-medieval version of “I’ve had worse.” His present suffering is voluntary, finite and purposive. The sufferings he witnessed were involuntary, terrible and bound up with the ultimate condition of the soul. His asceticism is not simply an attempt to prove toughness. It is an attempt to bring temporal life into proportion with eternity.
A quote this laconic functions as a Rorschach test: the wounded read endurance, the ironists read deadpan, the devout read eternity. And the poster, like the monk in the river, is under no obligation to tell you which valley they've seen.
“All it takes is not laughing, not smiling, to appear to be complaining.”
- Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (2021)
Sara Ahmed's Complaint! is built out of testimony. Over several years she conducted interviews with students, lecturers, and administrators who had tried to complain within universities — about harassment, bullying, exploitation, the ordinary abuses that flow downhill through supervisory relationships. She had left Goldsmiths in 2016 over precisely such a failure, so the book is not written from a neutral distance. It is a work of institutional phenomenology assembled from the accounts of people who came up against something and then had to describe it to someone who couldn't see it.
The sentence about laughing and smiling belongs to a strand running through the whole book: the observation that complaint is assigned before it is made. In Ahmed's account, the complainer is not someone who has complained. The complainer is a figure, a type, a slot in the institution's social imagination, and people get placed in it by mechanisms that have nothing to do with any grievance being lodged. You can be a complainer before you open your mouth. You can be one because you didn't.
Sometimes the easiest way to discover how much happiness is compulsory is simply to stop performing it.
And perhaps that is the most powerful thing someone can communicate by posting it alone.
Not:
I am complaining.
But:
Notice how quickly you decided I was.
