Book Review | Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power
Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso Books, 2017.
“Although the achievement-subject deems itself free, in reality, it is a slave.”
– Byung Chul Han, Psycho-Politics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power
Byung-Chul Han descends from the Frankfurt school of critical theory. His observances rely on radical social engagement. A Korean-born German Philosopher, he describes the neoliberal as someone who cannot have a purpose-free relationship, which is an easily agreeable concept. Knowing your why and connecting with your tribe based on your purpose will always be an associative denominator in the social makeup, resulting in the rarity of relationships being purposeful should they happen. Otherwise, connections are just briefly emancipated encounters and engagements to things that serve a self-fulfilling prophecy or a short-lived experience intended to liberate human interaction by receiving what they desire when desired with an immediacy of gratification. In that subtext, social liberty is assumed––however, the opposite conforms to the lack of neo-liberalism in the new age—an era of enslavement appears under the blanket thought of free speech or free action.
Han’s work focuses on the digital era, whereby power is kept by controlling mass minds through digital media. The state of mind is so consumed by the antithesis of remoteness illusioned by the algorithm of connectivity that the immediacy then carries a whole new meaning where it can be repeated again and again even after it was already seen or captured, removing the elective spectator from the controlled presence of a time and place, but rather a time-lapse of a theoretical time and place that coincides with the person’s location, social benefits, mindset, and emotional setting ahead of the viewer that then sets in with the electronic medium at that moment of being seen, and not when sought. This electronic medium almost extends the illusion of time and space.
Focusing on the artificial state of need due to the disconnect from an actual society and an interconnect with an absolute society, also referred to as the absolute slave. Han opens his first chapter with the statement that freedom is in crisis. He further defines the crisis as an enslavement of socially demanded procurement accompanied by an increase in social disconnect, resulting in enslavement and oppression. This applies to all forms of electronic obsession, whether smartphones, entertainment platforms such as social media, gaming platforms, and other event or product-obsessive platforms that drown the mind in meaningless tweets, scrolling feeds, and talking to strangers, with the further desensitizing of the mind to a trolling effect of things that do not concern the self, but the other’s centrification, and things that do not concern the other beyond their self-centered attention to being identified or recognized in the procurement of multiplicity––mass attention. Han plays off of the Heideggerian school of thought that is practically reborn from Being and Time (1) and his later thoughts on Deconstruction, where the meaning between two things is almost challenging to interpret due to their depth of comprehension or a common lack, hence eliminating the school of tradition from trying to understand or explain the action, radical change, or simply the social encounter. Explanation, in that case, no longer has a significant value or meaning.
Han refers to the digital age as the neoliberal era. He re-identifies capitalism's placement (act informed but lacking the element of actual knowledge) – aka. Smart Politics or Smart Power where you learn not to say no but to say yes to everything and eliminate the essential functions of discipline instead of giving in to the system where you can consume what you want when you want to re-identify with the sense of freedom that lost its liberation when capitalism agreed to subside to the traditional, orthodox foundation and not the emancipated, social shift. Is it a ‘nodding heads’ dilemma?
“This enables power-holders to impose their will against the will of those subject to power – by violence if need be” (2). It resulted in the contemporary crisis of power not being negated or repressed but instead exploited.
As the new age of life coaches, yogis, and meditation guides preach the latest trends of reconnecting with yourself, seeking self-fulfillment, self-enlightenment, and pleasing the self, the self comes first before you can help someone else, you must love yourself and your favorite ownership of rhetoric by creating greatness in summing up individual gains and partnering by exploitation. I always go back to the air steward as they guide passengers in a demonstration to put on their oxygen masks first before attempting to help someone else. Otherwise, you’re useless to those around you in times of need. This is not to be misconstrued as selfishness but simply logical support to the community by grappling with your immediate needs first to help others. However, in the age of new technologies of power, what comes with that self-love is also the desire to constantly please yourself in the essence of pleasing your community in the absolutism of happiness which will not exist in those around you, eliminating the community, but only to your own, by your creation and selectivity as a biopower individual and their selective production of the psyche, and not as a group or a people. So, the definition of the nation is now in question under this neo-technological era of power. Is “I” the formidable function of the neoliberal nation?
The definition of neoliberalism is almost a further extension of neorealism since it does provide structural cooperation in managing problems and continues to support anarchy, rationality, and positivism as central to traditional critical theories. However, neorealism continues to constitute its consequences and decline its affectionate actions or, in simpler terms, emotional intelligence (EQ). In our intelligent politics or era of ‘big data,’ a guide of calculated risks vs. the fulfillment of immediate desires at any cost comes into play. Who’s the slave of capitalism now?
Capitalism is identified by free competition, and in that freedom, Han refers explicitly to capitalism as the copulation of individual freedom and its exploitation. Since Han descends from the Frankfurt school of thought, where critical theory is engaged in a constant re-adaptation to change whereby change is also a radical following from the Marxist school of thought, but then escapes the orthodox theory of understanding and explanation of the social theory (3) to better capitulate to the situation at hand. It is as though the communist working force has been replaced with the “fake it until you make it” culture, where anyone can be a businessman, entrepreneur, or financial capitalist not in the age of communist anarchy but rather a bourgeoisie or nouveau riche condominium-type of housing era – where the interior of the condominium is owned. At the same time, the solicitor has been reversed to an Air-BnB of temporary and high-cost living because location is everything. In contrast, the real estate ownership can be shared with other landowners, a timeshare, if you will, for the common-minded. The Other is at the detriment of the service and no longer the service is to the buyer's detriment.
Han coined smart politics in the digital era under the subtext of “neoliberalism,” as did Foucault for biopolitics in the industrial age under the subtext “capitalism.” For those unfamiliar with Foucault’s social theory in the modern era, biopolitics refers to the strategies and mechanisms through which authorities in power manage and regulate human life processes. This concept extends beyond traditional forms of governance, encompassing practices related to public health, heredity regulation, and risk management. Biopolitics explores how regimes of knowledge and power exert control over populations, shaping and influencing how individuals are subjectified and nation-states organize their lives. This can include generating foods chemically not designed to fit human consumption and generating pharmaceutical companies to treat diseases created by such unaligned consumption. Meanwhile, the workforce, rather than thriving in good physical health and an excellent work-life balance, is instead overworked and occupied with worry about generating wealth to cover bills, whether the cost of living, education, utilities, or medical; through these regulatory mechanisms, biopolitics addresses the intersection of biological life with political authority, highlighting how life becomes a focal point of governance and control.
Walter Benjamin reminds us of the mass productivity of a human-based workforce in creating a manmade, mechanically robotic system of manpower during the industrial era, reducing the thought process, and effectively using the workforce on an assembly line to increase the productivity rate. The enforcement of power, though, during the industrial or mechanical age is very different from the enforcement of power under the digital era, where the notion of power has softened and tenderized to less physical strain and an increased mental strain referred to as “data smart” or “big data” or Artificial Intelligence, which wasn’t quite public when this book was published in 2017. All still qualify to be at play in the name of biopolitics, capitalism, and the learner’s guide to social gamification.
Doesn’t this mean we are all superpowers? Do we hold the ability to be decentralized from the expected status quo through further isolation and self-empowerment rather than self-governance? Shouldn’t this suggest we are all masters of our enslavement?
The individual takes a turbulent rise and fall in a much shorter period. But wasn’t time also an illusion, and does time even matter if the rulers and servants of their political agenda lay mercy on socio-political consumption? Their absolutism is laid to be consumed by a neoliberal society. Like to be liked, follow to be followed, generate revenue, and gain sponsorship to guarantee your place on the checkerboard. An easy influencers’ guide to the virtual survivalism our masses fall prey to––and then there is the question of substance, even in politics. Since mankind is still in its primal ego, a call to nature that has not yet been entirely replaced by the robotic program, though artificially intelligent and can easily replace the human genome, it is still required to hold some substance to human reasoning and moral values. There are alternatives to the regime of technological domination.
Find out, and add Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power to your library.
1 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York, 1962. HarperCollins Publishers.
2 Han, pp.13.
3 Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory Selected Essays. New York, 1982: Continuum Publishing.