Electroshock is disciplinary negativity while neoliberal power governs through positivity

Evidence

Klein’s theory of shock blinds her to the actual workings of neoliberal psychopolitics. Shock therapy is a genuinely disciplinary technique. Violent psychiatric interventions of this kind are employed in disciplinary society alone: they number among the biopolitical measures of coercion. As psycho-disciplines, they are orthopaedic in nature. In contrast, the neoliberal technology of power does not exercise disciplinary coercion. Electroshock’s mode of operation differs fundamentally from that of neoliberal psychopolitics. Electroshock owes its efficacy to paralyzing and annihilating the contents of the psyche. Its essential trait is negativity. In contrast, neoliberal psychopolitics is dominated by positivity. Instead of working with negative threats, it works with positive stimuli. Instead of administering ‘bitter medicine’, it enlists Liking. It flatters the psyche instead of shaking it and paralyzing it with shocks. 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. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 86

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines SmartPolitics and distinguishes the two Doctor Shocks’ techniques by their negativity/positivity polarity.
• XREF: Extends the ch4/ch5 observation that neoliberal power pleases and exploits rather than forbids — Cameron’s electroshock is the non-neoliberal foil. — connects to: Emotionality replaces rationality when disciplinary reason hits a productivity limit; Repressive power operates by forcing expression, not by silencing it. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 190; Criticism and negativity secrete a phantom of reality that power needs — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 91 (+3 more)
• ADDENDUM: The ‘seduces the soul instead of opposing it’ mechanism echoes how sacrifice/grief controls by love, and immodesty moral panics control by shame — power working through feeling rather than force.

Related

• Neoliberal power governs by seduction and anticipation, not by shock or repression (similarity 0.88)
• Neoliberalism is a capitalism of Like rather than of prohibition (similarity 0.79)
• Neoliberalism governs through guilt and debt rather than the body (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism is a capitalism of Like rather than of prohibition #corroborates (0.82) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 48
• Criticism and negativity secrete a phantom of reality that power needs #complicates (0.78) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 91
• Neoliberal power works by interiorizing relations that subjects read as freedom #expands (0.75)
• Neoliberalism governs through guilt and debt rather than the body #corroborates (0.72) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 53