Byung-Chul Han — Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

137 published claims from this book.

• A purely data-driven human science has lost the thinking that defines it
• Activities requiring maturity and duration cannot be gamified.
• Additive data without narrative structure produces meaninglessness akin to Dadaism
• Ancient self-observation aimed at ethical truth while data self-tracking only monitors.
• Apple’s liberation rhetoric inaugurated a more powerful control society
• Atmosphere is objective; emotion arises from deviations from atmosphere
• Behavioral prediction closes the open future freedom requires
• Being un-networked and uninformed is itself a practice of freedom
• Big Data is blind to the singular event that actually shapes history
• Big Data’s correlational mode is displacing causal and spirit-driven knowledge
• Big Data’s total memory makes it exceed Bentham’s forgetful panopticon
• Biopolitical population statistics cannot reach the psyche that Big Data exploits
• Both sovereign and disciplinary power pursue the exploitation of others through obedience
• Both sovereign and disciplinary power rely on negativity and produce obedient subjects.
• Cameron treated psychiatric destruction as a precondition for creating a new self
• Cameron’s electroshock experiments were CIA-funded Cold War brainwashing
• Cameron’s experiments combined electroshock, drugs, sensory deprivation, and forced silence
• Capital acceleration requires suppressing immune defences against otherness
• Capital is a transcendent force that estranges life from itself
• Capitalism’s permanent contradiction enables endless mutation instead of revolution
• Contemporary overconsumption is coerced, mirroring the unfreedom of labor.
• Contemporary power increasingly operates through permissiveness rather than prohibition.
• Control society replaced confinement with self-created open space
• Control society replaces discipline with entrepreneurial self-direction
• Correlation knowledge without causality is, for Hegel, primitive ignorance
• Correlational knowledge lacks the necessity that causal knowledge requires
• Correlations without an encompassing concept yield no real knowledge
• Data scoring creates a ban-opticon that excludes rather than disciplines
• Data-mining reveals a digital unconscious akin to Benjamin’s optical unconscious
• Dataism disavows ideology yet constitutes a new ideology of digital totalitarianism
• Dataism masks itself as anti-ideology while functioning as a controlling ideology.
• De-psychologization disarms the psychological steering that sustains domination
• Debt is a device for evading the burden of freedom.
• Deleuze’s pure immanence is a plane no domination can colonize.
• Digital communication transmits affect rather than feeling because affect lacks narrative
• Digital consensus is more coercive than bourgeois social convention was
• Digital control operates by word proliferation, not word destruction
• Digital exclusion operates through a ban-opticon that expels rather than disciplines
• Digital memory is additive whereas human memory is inherently narrative
• Digital memory lacks the living, retranscribed temporality of real memory
• Digital memory’s fixity makes digitalized life temporally dead
• Digital networking creates a subtler but more implacable conformism than bourgeois convention.
• Digital self-tracking makes each person a self-surveilling guard and inmate in one.
• Digital storage differs in kind from human narrative memory
• Digital surveillance outdoes the panopticon by being aperspectival and blindsight-free.
• Digital surveillance works because people voluntarily expose themselves
• Disciplinary society suppresses emotion while achievement society exploits it
• Efficient power governs by pleasing and making people dependent, not by forbidding
• Electroshock is disciplinary negativity while neoliberal power governs through positivity
• Emotion gives psychopolitics efficient access below conscious reflection
• Emotional capitalism exploits emotions’ fleeting performativity, which feelings lack
• Emotionality replaces rationality when disciplinary reason hits a productivity limit
• Emotions are performative and goal-oriented while feelings need no intentional object
• Emotions are short-lived and exploitable; feelings endure and resist exploitation
• Emotions can be consumed endlessly whereas things cannot, enabling unbounded consumption
• Emotions enable limitless consumption because they are inexhaustible
• Events are reversals of power that inaugurate wholly new states of affairs
• Exploiting voluntary freedom yields higher returns than coercing labor
• Exploiting willing freedom yields greater returns than coercion
• Feeling refers to something objective while emotion and affect are strictly subjective
• Feelings are constative while emotions are performative and intentional
• Financial capitalism destroys real value and exploits the psyche
• Financial capitalism extracts value by exhausting the psyche itself
• Forced communication, not censorship, is the modern repressive force
• Freedom consists in being a singularity, not an individual person
• Freedom from domination is treated as a universal human desire
• Freedom is practiced by killing psychology to create unnamed individualities
• Freedom originally meant friendship and relational mutuality, not self-optimization
• Freedom originally meant friendship, not isolation
• Friedman’s free-market ideal rested on a pastoral myth of prelapsarian equilibrium
• Gamification boosts engagement only for rapid-reward activities, not slow maturation.
• Genuinely novel thought requires abandoning the networked horizontal plane of information.
• Greek children tearing up banknotes symbolize a liberating profanation of money.
• Industrial production modes drove the shift from sovereign to disciplinary power.
• Intelligence only chooses between options a system already offers, never inventing new ones.
• Intrinsic conformity outweighs state surveillance as a threat
• Kant used statistical regularity to reconcile free will with a lawful history
• Labor grows more superfluous while society grows more committed to it.
• Luxury originally meant freedom from necessity, not consumption.
• Marx’s free time itself becomes capital through self-development.
• Media technologies expose unconscious dimensions of perception that the eye and mind miss
• Mood is objective and expresses how things are, unlike emotion which deviates
• Negativity and pain constitute genuinely human experience
• Neoliberal capitalism exploits the psyche rather than the body as its central productive force
• Neoliberal domination works by making subjects act on themselves and call it freedom
• Neoliberal governance rules the psyche rather than the body
• Neoliberal power exploits the psyche, which biopolitical statistics cannot reach.
• Neoliberal power governs by seduction and anticipation, not by shock or repression
• Neoliberal power hides subjugation so completely that subjects believe they are free.
• Neoliberal power works by interiorizing relations that subjects read as freedom
• Neoliberal power works so invisibly that the subject believes it is free
• Neoliberalism deploys emotion as a productivity resource once rationality hits its limits
• Neoliberalism exploits the total person, not merely working time
• Neoliberalism governs through guilt and debt rather than the body
• Neoliberalism is a capitalism of Like rather than of prohibition
• Numbers provide no narrative, and meaning requires narration rather than quantification.
• Openness replaces confinement as a productivity enhancer under capitalism
• Peer-level self-surveillance outweighs state surveillance in producing conformity.
• Perpetual debt serves to escape the burden of freedom
• Politics loses its freedom once Capital becomes a new transcendent master.
• Power grows stronger the less visible it is
• Power steers emotions to govern action below conscious awareness
• Power that activates self-motivation is more efficient than coercive discipline.
• Predictive Big Data forecloses the future that freedom requires.
• Profanation returns sacred things to common, playful use.
• Psychopolitics may intervene in psychic processes faster than free will
• Repressive power operates by forcing expression, not by silencing it.
• Ritual and narrative forms defy acceleration because they are syllogistic
• Rituals and ceremonies are narrative forms that resist temporal acceleration
• Rousseau’s general will was a statistical aggregate achieved without any communication
• Self-blame converts revolutionary anger into individualized depression
• Self-exploiting subject makes Hegel’s slave-master dialectic collapse
• Self-optimization serves system efficiency, not the good life
• Self-optimization serves systemic market function, not personal flourishing
• Seventeenth-century statistical enthusiasm was religious euphoria like today’s Big Data fever
• Speech requires prior solitude and the right to stay silent
• Statistics only captures the unremarkable and misses singular greatness
• Stupidity enables openness and receptivity while unintelligence merely limits experience
• Syllogistic knowledge is narrative, while Big Data is purely additive
• The art of living requires killing psychology to create unnamed modes of being
• The crisis of freedom is that power exploits rather than negates it
• The digital panopticon fails to register as surveillance because its subjects feel free
• The distracted digital age prevents the contemplative conclusion that constitutes reason
• The Left seeks liberation of labor rather than liberation from labor.
• The most effective power operates invisibly, without coercion or open resistance.
• The neoliberal regime reappropriated Foucault’s ethics of the self into a self-exploitation device
• The neoliberal self-optimization ethic functions as a disguised form of self-exploitation
• The shift from subject to project intensifies capitalism rather than escaping it
• The smartphone operates as devotional object of digital servitude
• The willing self-exploiter is an absolute slave without a master
• Transparency compels conformity and erases deviation
• Transparency is a productivity device, not a political value
• Under immaterial production everyone owns the means of production, ending class antagonism
• Under knowledge capitalism, idleness gets absorbed into producing the person as Capital.
• Understanding is narrative closure, not cumulative addition of data
• Unlimited freedom to achieve generates more coercion than external prohibition
• Unlimited self-optimization becomes a new coercion producing depression and burnout