A Brief Intoduction to Neoliberal Psychopolitics

 On Neoliberal Psychopolitics:

Under neoliberalism, power takes on a much more subtle form. It doesn’t lay hold on the bodies of individuals directly. Instead, this form of power ensures that individuals act on the themselves so that power relations are not only internalized and turned into ideology (one’s second nature), but then interpreted as “freedom” by the subject. Under neoliberalism, workers are no longer exploited by a direct class above them, no. Workers voluntarily turn themselves into projects and exploit themselves. This form of power is what Byung-Chul Han calls psychopolitics. Neoliberal psychopolitics take on their material form with the countless self-managemrnt workshops in and outside of work, motivational retreats instead of vacations, and seminars on personality. These are all forms of therapeutic mental training that makes sure the subject takes part in boundless self-optimization (and maximum efficiency). They subject the individual to the objectification of their own soul, where things like desire, personality, and communication are tied down to what is economically optimal and allows for the most economic growth. Here then, the neoliberal imperative of self-optimization serves only to reproduce the cultural and economic status quo. Inhibitions, weaknesses, and mistakes are supposed to be eliminated therapeutically so that performance and economic output are maximized. This creates a world where everything is made comparable, measurable, and subject to the laws of the market.

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Moving on, we can look at self-help literature which obsesses over the word “healing”. Healing is the term that describes the process of therapeutically eliminating all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance. The subject internalizes an obsession over productivity and voluntarily subjects themselves to rigorous self-critique, comparison, and quantification to maximize their life performance. Here then, the laws and words of the market produce the very way contemporary subjects objectify and exploit themselves.
What happens is disasters. Subjects who endlessly work at self-improve, who engage in tireless self-examination and self-monitoring, end up psychologically burning out on the mental level. To explain how, let me first offer the necessary hypothesis: engaging in self-crtique necessitates an image of the self based upon social norms. Freud calls this the "ego ideal"... the ideal image of self. To garner an ideal image of self, one must first internalize social norms, and then place those norms upon their own very image of themselves. To do so, they must have a referent. This referent comes from the "other". The other here is all that isn't the self. The other in this phenomenon represents all those who internalize and perform these social norms better than the subject who is trying to improve. To engage in self-critique then is to engage in a ruthless competition not only in the form of your self vs. the ego-ideal, but also your self and ego-ideal against the bodies of the other.

Three subjective mental states are inherent to this rigorous self-critique that subjects partake in under the neoliberal regime then. First, a voluntary isolation is necessary to do so. You must isolate yourself mentally from the bodies and minds of the other to treat them as competition. Second, anxiety is innate to self-critique, since to self-critique is to presuppose a lack of something in yourself versus the other. Here then, the desire to consistently critique produces a feeling of constant anxiety, with a result of necessary depression that comes with the feeling of unfulfillment (more on this later).

Bifo Berardi shows us that competition implies a risky narcissistic simulation, because in a highly competitive context, many are called but only a few are chosen to win. In any society where competition is the base of subjective desire and economic growth on the macro level, social norms cannot acknowledge the possibility of failure, since the failure would be assigned to a psychological context that to fix, systemic change would be necessary. Yet, there is no competition without failure, and thus society necessitates the systemic forgetting of losers. Losing becomes a clouded ideology that isn’t remembered. From there, we can see the form of power that resides here. Neoliberalism convinces the self to voluntarily engage in competition with others on the mental level. Where Berardi showed us that losing cannot be recognized on the mass level, society needs just a couple of winners to point at to show proof that competition works, this competition is even worse in the sense that it cannot be won by anybody. The subject cannot ever be satisfied with their conception of self. To do so would be to opt out of the competition, and to be satisfied. Yet now, self-satisfaction is internalized not only as inefficient, but as unproductive, and “lazy”. This indefinite self-critique then, can never end. The constant anxiety, necessary isolation, and depression (since you can’t win) that coincide with this phenomenon then, can’t end either.

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