Psychopolitics. Byung-Chul Han
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be sure, power can express itself as violence or repression. But it is not based on force. Power need not exclude, prohibit or censor. Not does it stand opposed to freedom. Indeed, power can even use freedom to its own ends. Only in its negative form does power manifest itself as a violence that says ‘no’ by shattering the will and annulling freedom. Today, power is assuming increasingly permissive forms. In its permissivity – indeed, in its friendliness – power is shedding its negativity and presenting itself as freedom.
Disciplinary power is still commanded by negativity. Its mode of articulation is inhibitive, not permissive. Because it is negative, it does not describe the neoliberal regime – which beams forth in positivity. The neoliberal regime’s technology of power takes on subtle, supple and smart forms; thereby, it escapes all visibility. Now, the subjugated subject is not even aware of its own subjugation. The whole context of domination (Herrschaftszusammenhang) remains entirely hidden. Consequently, the subject thinks itself free.
Inasmuch as it expends a great deal of energy to force people into the straightjacket of commandments and prohibitions, disciplinary power proves inefficient. A significantly more efficient technology of power makes sure that people subordinate themselves to power relations on their own. Such a dynamic seeks to activate, motivate and optimize – not to inhibit or repress. It proves so effective because it does not operate by means of forbidding and depriving, but by pleasing and fulfilling. Instead of making people compliant, it seeks to make them dependent.
Power that is smart and friendly does not operate frontally – i.e., against the will of those who are subject to it. Instead, it guides their will to its own benefit. It says ‘yes’ more often than ‘no’; it operates seductively, not repressively. It seeks to call forth positive emotions and exploit them. It leads astray instead of erecting obstacles. Instead of standing opposed to the subject, smart and friendly power meets the subject halfway.
Smart power cosies up to the psyche rather than disciplining it through coercion or prohibitions. It does not impose silence. Rather, it is constantly calling on us to confide, share and participate: to communicate our opinions, needs, wishes and preferences – to tell all about our lives. Friendly power proves more powerful, as it were, than purely repressive power. It manages not to be seen at all. Today’s crisis of freedom stems from the fact that the operative technology of power does not negate or repress freedom so much as exploit it. Free choice (Wahl) is eliminated to make way for a free selection (Auswahl) from among the items on offer.
Smart power with a liberal, friendly appearance – power that stimulates and seduces – is more compelling than power that imposes, threatens and decrees. Its signal and seal is the Like button. Now, people subjugate themselves to domination by consuming and communicating – and they click Like all the while. Neoliberalism is the capitalism of ‘Like’. It is fundamentally different from nineteenth-century capitalism, which operated by means of disciplinary constraints and prohibitions.
Smart power reads and appraises our conscious and unconscious thoughts. It places its stock in voluntary self-organization and self-optimization. As such, it has no need to overcome resistance. Mastery of this sort requires no great expenditure of energy or violence. It simply happens. The capitalism of Like should come with a warning label: Protect me from what I want.
Disciplinary society consists of settings and institutions of confinement. The family, schools, prisons, barracks, hospitals and factories all represent disciplinary spaces that confine. The disciplinary subject changes from one milieu of confinement to the next. In so doing, it moves within a closed system. The inhabitants of milieus of confinement can be ordered in space and time. The animal of disciplinary society is the mole.
In his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Deleuze diagnoses a general crisis affecting all milieus of confinement.1 Their closedness and rigidity pose a problem: they are no longer suited to post-industrial, immaterial and networked forms of production. The latter push for more openness by breaking borders down. But the mole cannot bear such openness. Accordingly, the snake takes the mole’s place. The snake is the animal of neoliberal control society, to which disciplinary society has yielded. In contrast to the mole, the snake does not move in closed spaces. Rather, it makes space by means of its own movement. The mole is a labourer. In contrast, the snake is an entrepreneur. The snake is the animal of the neoliberal regime.
The mole moves through predetermined spaces; as such, it subordinates itself to spatial restrictions. The mole is a subjugated subject. But the snake is a project inasmuch as it creates space through the course it steers. The passage from the mole to the snake – from subject to project – does not amount to setting out for an entirely new way of life; instead, it represents a mutation, indeed an intensification, of capitalism, which remains one and the same. The mole’s restricted movements impose limits on productivity. Even when it labours in disciplined fashion, it cannot exceed a certain level of productivity. The snake eliminates such limitations through new forms of movement. Accordingly, the capitalist system is switching from the mole-model to the snake-model in order to generate more productivity.
According to Deleuze, the disciplinary regime organizes itself as a ‘body’. It is a biopolitical regime. The neoliberal regime, in contrast, seems like a ‘soul’.2 As such, psychopolitics is its form of government: it is ‘constantly introducing an inexorable rivalry presented as healthy competition … wonderful motivation’.3 Motivation, projects, competition, optimization and initiative represent features of the psychopolitical technology of domination that constitutes the neoliberal regime. Above all, the snake embodies the guilt and debts (die Schuld, die Schulden) that the neoliberal regime employs as instruments of domination.
Since the seventeenth century, Foucault claims, power has ceased to manifest itself as the godlike sovereign’s capacity to deal death and instead taken the form of discipline. The power of sovereignty is the might of the sword. It threatens with death and exploits the ‘privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it’.1 In contrast, disciplinary power is not a power to deal death, but a power over life: its function is no longer to kill but to ‘invest life through and through’.2 Hereby, the ‘old power of death’ yields to the careful ‘administration of bodies’ and ‘the calculated management of life’.3
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