Psycho-politics: Neoliberalism and new technologies of power (2017) Byung-Chul Han

​Psycho-politics attempts to understand how power works under neoliberalism and in our world of network technologies. Foucault’s biopower analyzes a disciplinary society with industrial modes of production—subjects under industrialization were subjectified into norm-following, obedient units of production to be fitted into a machine (e.g., Chaplin’s Modern Times). Under these conditions, biopolitics regulated the population, or specifically, “reproductive cycles, birth and death rates, levels of general health, and life expectancy” (p. 21). However, while the disciplinary society stretched into the subject’s physical and mental sphere, it did not reach into the unconscious, the psyche.
 
Han’s Psychopolitics addresses a new regime of power under neoliberalism that reaches into the psyche—psychopolitics. We move from the disciplinary society with its prohibitions (cannot’s), repressions, and allo-exploitation to the neoliberal achievement society, where achievement subjects auto-exploit themselves, motivated to fashion themselves into projects. The latter subjects are better suited to the post-industrial, immaterial, and networked forms of production of our contemporary world.
 
Technology plays an important role in this transformation and the longest chapter in the book is devoted to an analysis of Big Data. Contrary to discourses of “dataism,” which predict the end of theory and the end of ideology under the absolute illumination of massive quantities of data, Han points out that Big Data does not think, it only offers correlations, which are a lower mode of analysis than relationships of causation and reciprocity. As such, Big Data is blind to the future as it is blind to the Event; it cannot comprehend contingencies and unknown-unknowns that are wholly outside of its purview.
 
Despite writing this, Han has a certain respect for the psychopolitical potential of Big Data. With the Internet of Things, 5G technology, and as processing power continues to advance, Big Data will continue to quantify human bodies and store the data in a permanent database. With massive amounts of data, Big Tech is able to make targeted micro-interventions (Zuboff details these interventions in length in Surveillance Capitalism), predicting and perhaps steering behaviours through the unconscious. Han provokes the reader: “digital psychopolitics manages to intervene in psychic processes in a prospective fashion. Quite possibly, it is even faster than free will. As such, it could overtake it. If so, this would herald the end of freedom” (p. 63).
 
Han ends by considering human freedom in our psychopolitical times through the figure of the idiot. The idiot is outside the realm of communicability and is unable to be integrated into the smooth flows of communication in a network. The idiot is a source of negativity in Han’s terms. Only the idiot has access to the Other, and as a “modern-day heretic,”—Han notes that “heresy means ‘choice’” (p. 83)—only the idiot can exist without becoming a subject under neoliberal, psychopolitical structures of domination.
 
Additional note: The essay also contains interesting discussions on emotional capitalism and gamification, which occupy a chapter each.
 

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