Neoliberal power exploits the psyche, which biopolitical statistics cannot reach.

Evidence

Biopolitics is devoted to this task. Reproductive cycles, birth and death rates, levels of general health, and life expectancy provide the objects of regulation. Foucault explicitly discusses the ‘biopolitics of the population’. Biopolitics is the governmental technology of disciplinary power. However, this approach proves altogether unsuited to the neoliberal regime, which exploits the psyche above all. Biopolitics, which makes use of population statistics, has no access to the psychic realm. It can deliver no material for drawing up a psychogram of the population. Demography is not the same thing as psychography. It cannot tap into or disclose the psyche. On this score, statistics and Big Data lie worlds apart. Big Data provides the means for establishing not just an individual but a collective psychogram – perhaps even the psychogram of the unconscious itself. As such, it may yet shine a light into the depths of the psyche and exploit the unconscious entirely. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 58

Categorization

• SEED: Han’s ‘demography is not psychography’ contrast is an essay-sized critique of how Big Data claims access to a collective unconscious that biopolitics never had — worth keeping alongside surveillance-capitalism article angles.
• QUESTION: Worth verifying whether Han fairly characterizes what ‘Big Data psychograms’ actually can measure, and whether the claim that demography and Big Data ‘lie worlds apart’ really holds.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that Big Data may produce ‘the psychogram of the unconscious itself’ — that surveillance now targets depths even disciplinary power never reached — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting inversion of Foucault’s whole analytics of power, the chapter’s central load-bearing thesis.
• XREF: connects to: Neoliberal capitalism exploits the psyche rather than the body as its central productive force — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 63; Neoliberal governance rules the psyche rather than the body — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 53; Biopolitical population statistics cannot reach the psyche that Big Data exploits — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 58 (+2 more)

Related

• Biopolitical population statistics cannot reach the psyche that Big Data exploits (similarity 0.91)
• Neoliberal capitalism exploits the psyche rather than the body as its central productive force (similarity 0.79)
• Neoliberal governance rules the psyche rather than the body (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal capitalism exploits the psyche rather than the body as its central productive force #corroborates (0.95) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 63
• Neoliberal governance rules the psyche rather than the body #corroborates (0.90) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 53
• Biopolitical population statistics cannot reach the psyche that Big Data exploits #corroborates (0.85) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 58
• Neoliberalism decomposed political collectivities through privatising the mind. #corroborates (0.80) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 536
• Neoliberalism exploits the total person, not merely working time #corroborates (0.80) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 70