Header image: KF in Dall-E
Han, B. (2017). Psycho-Politics. Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso.
1. The Crisis of Freedom [Reddit commentary]
- Freedom is felt when passing from one way of living to another – until this too turns out to be a form of coercion. Then, liberation gives way to renewed subjugation.
- KF – Iterative? A momentary “third space” in the transition? Momentary “non-coincidence”?
- Today, we do not deem ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects: always refashioning and reinventing ourselves.
- All the same, this projection amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint – indeed, to a more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation.
- the I is now subjugating itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization.
- KF – the branded self: “be your own brand”
- The freedom of Can generates even more coercion than the disciplinarian Should, which issues commandments and prohibitions. Should has a limit. In contrast, Can has none…freedom is now switching over into manifold forms of compulsion.
- As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose.
- In the process, individuals degrade into the genital organs of Capital. Individual freedom lends it an ‘automatic’ subjectivity of its own, which spurs it to reproduce actively.
- KF – Social media posts as our spores, where we seek to reproduce and spread ourselves across the infosphere
- industrial capitalism has now mutated into neoliberalism and financial capitalism, which are implementing a postindustrial, immaterial mode of production – instead of turning into communism.
- As a mutant form of capitalism, neoliberalism transforms workers into entrepreneurs. It is not communist revolution that is now abolishing the allo-exploited working class – instead, neoliberalism is in the course of doing so. Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.
- KF – to CM??
- I am the means of production: I must seize myself.
- ‘proletarian’ means someone whose sole possessions are his or her children:
- People who fail in the neoliberal achievement-society see themselves as responsible for their lot and feel shame instead of questioning society or the system. Herein lies the particular intelligence defining the neoliberal regime: no resistance to the system can emerge in the first place.
- under the neoliberal regime of autoexploitation, people are turning their aggression against themselves. This auto-aggressivity means that the exploited are not inclined to revolution so much as depression.
- Do we really want to be free? Didn’t we invent God so we wouldn’t have to be free? Before God, we are all debtors: guilty (schuldig). But debt – guilt – destroys freedom.
- KF -functioning best when under obligation to someone else, our debt to God provided motivation and purpose. Absent God, our financial debt – to faceless, unreachable, powerful, merciless capitalist deities – compels us to action, conform – work/spend – build your brand, subjects of mammon
- voluntary self-illumination and self-exposure
- data is not surrendered under duress so much as offered out of an inner need. That is why the digital panopticon proves so efficient.
- The transparency demanded of politicians today is anything but a political demand: spectator democracy.
- An essential component of freedom is informational self-determination. The 1984 ruling on the census made by the German Federal Constitutional Court already declared: ‘If citizens cannot know who knows what, when, and on what occasion about them, the right to informational self-determination is incompatible with social order and the legal order facilitating the same.’
- Such a time is long past. Today, we voluntarily expose ourselves without any external constraint at all – without an edict commanding us to do so. Of our own free will, we put any and all conceivable information about ourselves on the internet, without having the slightest idea who knows what, when or on what occasion.
- For human beings to be able to act freely, the future must be open. However, Big Data is making it possible to predict human behaviour. This means that the future is becoming calculable and controllable.
- Devotion and related words mean ‘submission’, or ‘obedience’. Smartphones represent digital devotion – indeed, they are the devotional objects of the Digital, period. As a subjectivation-apparatus, the smartphone works like a rosary – which, because of its ready availability, represents a handheld device too.
- Like is the digital Amen (of the church of Facebook)
2. Smart Power
- The greater power is, the more quietly it works.
- Instead of making people compliant, it seeks to make them dependent.
- The capitalism of Like should come with a warning label: Protect me from what I want.
3. The Mole and the Snake
4. Biopolitics
- The transition from the power of sovereignty to disciplinary power followed from changes in forms of production, specifically the shift from agrarian to industrial production.
- Disciplinary power is normative power. It subjects the subject to a set of rules – norms, commandments and prohibitions – and eliminates deviations and anomalies.
- Bentham’s Big Brother only observes inmates from the outside. His panopticon is bound to the optical medium. It has no access to inner thoughts or needs.
- Biopolitics is the governmental technology of disciplinary power.
5. Foucault’s Dilemma
- Disciplinary power discovered ‘population’ as a productive and reproductive mass to be administrated carefully. Biopolitics is devoted to this task.
- Biopolitics is the governmental technology of disciplinary power.
- Neoliberalism…is not primarily concerned with ‘the biological, the somatic, the corporal’. It has discovered the psyche as a productive force. This psychic turn – that is, the turn to psychopolitics – also connects with the mode of operation of contemporary capitalism.
- Physical discipline has given way to mental optimization.
- 1980s, Foucault turned to ‘technologies of the self’ – The self as- a-work-of-art amounts to a beautiful but deceptive illusion that the neoliberal regime maintains in order to exhaust its resources entirely.
6. Healing as Killing
- Yet perpetual self-optimization, which coincides point-for-point with the optimization of the system, is proving destructive. It is leading to mental collapse. Self-optimization, it turns out, amounts to total self-exploitation.
7. Shock
- Re Shock Doctorine: When people are still paralyzed and traumatized by disaster, they can become the objects of neoliberal conditioning:
- Neoliberal psychopolitics is SmartPolitics: it seeks to please and fulfil, not to repress.
8. Friendly Big Brother
- cf. 1984: Today’s society of information is not characterized by destroying words, but by multiplying them without end.
- Big Brother now wears a friendly face. His friendliness is what makes surveillance so efficient.
9. Emotional Capitalism
- Emotions are not constative, but performative. They refer to actions and deeds. Furthermore, they are intentional and goal-oriented. Feelings, on the other hand, do not necessarily display an intentional structure.
- Emotions are dynamic, situative and performative. Emotional capitalism exploits precisely these qualities. Feelings, in contrast, cannot be readily exploited inasmuch as they have no performativity. Finally, affects are not performative so much as eruptive; they lack performative directionality.
- The neoliberal regime deploys emotions as resources in order to bring about heightened productivity and achievement. Starting at a certain level of production, rationality – which is the medium of disciplinary society – hits a limit. Henceforth, it is experienced as a constraint, an inhibition. Suddenly, it seems rigid and inflexible. At this point, emotionality takes its place, which is attended by the feeling of liberty – the free unfolding of personality. After all, being free means giving free rein to emotions. Emotional capitalism banks on freedom. It hails emotion as the expression of unbridled subjectivity. Neoliberal technologies of power exploit this same subjectivity mercilessly.
- Rationality is defined by objectivity, generality and steadiness. As such, it stands opposed to emotionality, which is subjective, situative and volatile.
- Accelerated communication also promotes its emotionalization. Rationality is slower than emotionality; it has no speed, as it were. Thus, the pressure of acceleration now is leading to a dictatorship of emotion.
- All in all, today we do not consume things so much as emotions. The former cannot be consumed without end – but the latter can. Emotions assume dimensions beyond the scope of use value. In so doing, they open up a field of consumption that is new and knows no limit.
10. Gamification
- Games exhibit a specific temporality marked by immediate experiences of success and reward. But what matures over time cannot be gamified. Whatever is long, anything that lasts a long time, proves incompatible with the game’s temporality.
- The corollary of the gamification of communication is its commercialization. That said, this process is destroying human communication.
- re free time: The transcendence of Capital stands in the way of life as immanence.
- As a means of production, gamification is destroying play’s potential to set free. Play should make it possible to use things in wholly different ways; it should liberate them from the theology and teleology of Capital.
- KF – Hobbies!
- Agamben understands religion in terms of the Latin relegere. Accordingly, it means being attentive and alert: watching over things that are holy and taking care that they remain separate from other things. Such setting-apart is essential to religion.
11. Big Data
- Will Big Data also prove to be Columbus’s egg for the contemporary society of digital control – a system even more effective than Bentham’s panopticon?
- Quantified Self ~ Life Logged in Full
- We are caught, so to speak, in the total memory of the Digital.
- Forgetting
- Storage and retrieval are fundamentally different from remembering, which is a narrative process.
- Memory constitutes a dynamic, living process; here, different levels of time intersect and influence each other. Memory is subject to constant rewriting and rearrangement. Freud understood human memory as a living organism too:
- Freud: As you know, I am working on the assumption that our psychic mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory traces being subjected from time to time to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a retranscription. Thus what is essentially new about my theory is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over, that it is laid down in various kinds of indications.16
- KF ~ deformed stratigraphy; geological uplift/warping
12. Beyond the Subject
- épistémè – In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.
- Mo dhia: Being a subject means being subjected, being cast under, by a higher instance. Experience tears the subject out from subjection – out of its downcast state. It signifies the opposite of the neoliberal psychopolitics of experiencing or emotion, which only ensnares the subject deeper and deeper in the state of subjection and subjugation.
13. Idiotism
- Etymologically, heresy means ‘choice’. Thus, the heretic is one who commands free choice: the courage to deviate from orthodoxy.
- Intelligence means choosing-between (inter-legere). It is not entirely free in so far as it is caught in a between, which depends on the system in operation. Intelligence has no access to outside, because it makes a choice between options in a system. Therefore, intelligence does not really exercise free choice: it can only select among the offerings the system affords. Intelligence follows the logic of a system. It is system-immanent.