“Psycho-Politics” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Erik Butler)

Han’s short treatise is a rumination on modernity and the digital age. He covers his usual well-trod themes through the lens of neo-Hegelianism. First, he takes on twenty-first century labor practice. “Today everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself…. Conditions are defined by the solitude of an entrepreneur who is isolated and self-combating and practices auto-exploitation voluntarily…. When production is immaterial, everyone already owns the means of production him- or herself.”

Han is worried about dig data and the end of intimacy, subjectivity, and uniqueness. He is wary of a humanity ruled by averages and correlation without causation. He fears the commoditization of the soul. “Today, we are entering the age of digital psychopolitics. It means passing from passive surveillance to active steering…. Big data is a highly efficient psychopolitical instrument that makes it possible to achieve comprehensive knowledge of the dynamics of social communication. This knowledge is knowledge for the sake of domination and control (Herrschaftswissen): it facilitates intervention in the psyche and enables influence to take place on a pre-reflexive level…. Digital psychopolitics transforms the negativity of freely made decisions into the positivity of factual states (Sachverhalte). Indeed, persons are being positivized into things, which can be quantified, measured and steered.”

For Han, each individual has become an optimizing machine. “Now productivity is not to be enhanced by overcoming physical resistance so much as by optimizing psychic or mental processes. Physical discipline has given way to mental optimization…. The neoliberal regime utterly claims the technology of the self for its own purposes: perpetual self-optimization — as the exemplary neoliberal technology of the self — represents nothing so much as a highly efficient mode of domination and exploitation…. The self-as-a-work-of-art amounts to a beautiful but deceptive illusion that the neoliberal regime maintains…. The neoliberal imperative of self-optimization serves only to promote perfect functioning within the system…. It is not concern for the good life that drives self-optimization. Rather, self-optimization follows from systemic constraints —from the logic of quantifying success on the market.”

The idiot stands opposed to psychopolitics. “Every philosopher who has brought forth a new idiom, — a new language, a new way of thinking — has necessarily been an idiot. Only the idiot has access to the wholly Other…. The history of philosophy is a history of idiotisms. 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…. The idiot is a modern-day heretic. Etymologically, heresy means ‘choice’. Thus, the heretic is one who commands free choice: the courage to deviate from orthodoxy. As a heretic, the idiot represents a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus. The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider…. Idiotism stands opposed to the neoliberal power of domination: total communication and total surveillance.”