Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power
Byung-Chul Han
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Neoliberalism makes citizens into consumers. The freedom of the citizen yields to the passivity of the consumer. As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics –in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like. Politicians and parties follow this logic of consumption too. They have to ‘deliver’. In the process, they become nothing more than suppliers; their task is to satisfy voters who are consumers or customers.”
“Now, under the neoliberal regime of auto-exploitation, people are turning their aggression against themselves. This auto-aggressivity means that the exploited are not inclined to revolution so much as depression”
“As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. Nor do entrepreneurs know what purpose-free friendship would even look like.”
“Neoliberalism represents a highly efficient, indeed an intelligent, system for exploiting freedom. Everything that belongs to practices and expressive forms of liberty –emotion, play and communication –comes to be exploited.”
“The negativity of otherness or foreignness is de-interiorized and transformed into the positivity of communicable and consumable difference: ‘diversity’.”
“The advertisement that Apple aired during the 1984 Superbowl has become the stuff of legend. In it the company presented itself as a force of liberation, which would counter the Orwellian surveillance state. In lock-step, listless workers – evidently without a will of their own – march into a vast hall and listen to Big Brother’s fanatical declamations on the telescreen. Then the ad shows a woman rushing into the assembly hall, the Thought Police in hot pursuit. Bearing a sledgehammer before her heaving breast, she dashes forward. Full of resolve, she runs straight up to Big Brother and throws the sledgehammer at the telescreen with all the force she can muster; it explodes in a dazzling burst of light. The assembled workers promptly awaken from their torpor. A voice declares: ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.’ But despite Apple’s message, 1984 did not signal the end of the surveillance state so much as the inception of a new kind of control society – one whose operations surpass the Orwellian state by leaps and bounds. Now, communication and control have become one, without remainder. Now, everyone is his or her own panopticon. 9.”
“Since there is no possibility of relieving debt and guilt, the state of unfreedom perpetuates itself: ‘A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal.”
“As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics – in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like.”
“Socrates knows only that he does not know; he is an idiot. Likewise, Descartes – who casts doubt on everything – is an idiot. Cogito ergo sum is idiotic.”
“Neoliberal psychopolitics seduces the soul; it preempts it in lieu of opposing it. It carefully protocols desires, needs and wishes instead of ‘depatterning’ them. By means of calculated prognoses, it anticipates actions – and acts ahead of them instead of cancelling them out. Neoliberal psychopolitics is SmartPolitics: it seeks to please and fulfil, not to repress.”
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