PSYCHOPOLITICS: NEOLIBERALISM AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES OF POWER - BYUNG-CHUL HAN

Still on that short book kick described in the previous post, looking to get a couple more in at the end of the year before dedicating much of next year to some longer works. This time, instead of a short novel, I figured I’d knock out another Byung-Chul Han work, since all of his shit is short and sweet, almost aphoristic, which I very much appreciated. This book and THE BURNOUT SOCIETY, the last book of his I read could certainly have been one book, since he’s circling the same set of ideas. Namely, he’s trying to explain and account for the ways that capitalism has changed since the neoliberal turn in the 70’s and how this change affects our lives and alters the contours and effects of power in our society. His big insight is around the ways that power has moved inside of us. Now, instead of getting disciplined through school or the military or a corporate job, we’ve moved all of this inside and rethought ourselves as entrepreneurs, each responsible for fashing ourselves into the sorts of happy, productive, fulfilled people we’re told we can be if we just work hard enough. Once you think of the world this way, you see it everywhere, from the manosphere types imploring you to adapt a gorilla grind-set to crush your goals, to the yoga-prenur types coaching you on self-care journeys to really “find yourself,” to silicon-valley folks talking acid and gathering data to optimize their output, even to the HR racial sensitivity White Fragility types who see racism as a personal project that everyone must addressed individual (coincidentally, in the context of expensive seminars that they run), this mindset is everywhere, in every political direction and always leads to the same dead-end. Han has a bit of academic-brain when he suggests that, “In fact, no proletariat exists under neoliberal regimes at all. There is no working class being exploited by those who own the means of production,” obviously, these people do exist, they just live in the global South, this ideology came into prominence at exactly the moment they started moving these jobs away, a sort of ideology that makes solidarity and mass-action unthinkable. I’m very sympathetic to these ideas and thought this book was quite good, especially when paired with Burnout Society, I sort of wish he’d put them together, and expanded on his intriguing idea that the so-called Big Data movement of today is similar to the birth of statistics in the 18th century, which he throws out towards the end of the book but deserves a lot more consideration. It’s a great way to think about the way the world works now, I’ll keep this framework in mind for a long while, I suspect. 1 neoliberal regime

“Today we deem not ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects: always refashioning and reinventing ourselves.”

“As a mutant form of capitalism, neoliberalism transforms workers into entrepreneurs.”

“Power relations are interiorized - and then interpreted as freedom. Self-optimization and submission, freedom and exploitation, fall into one.”

“Emotional capitalism is the gamifying of life and the working world…A person playing a game, being much more emotionally invested, is much more engaged than a worker who acts rationally or is simply functioning.”