Onanistic Subject’s Death

In his book Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues, that the new surveillance society that has arisen since 1984 is more “elegantly totalitarian and oppressive than anything described by Orwell or Bentham”. According to him, the neoliberal era made capitalism realise that seduction is a better way of dealing with its subjects than toughness. He calls this “smartpolitics”. I would call it seductivepolitics and understood it as an exterior and distinct feature of his concept of psychopolitics. As opposition to the toughpolitics of classical totalitarian “no”, which was more or less inherent in the political logic of the market in the times of biopolitics hegemony, psychopolitics embodies its opposite, a yes-ness of governmentality absolutely incapable of refuting. It’s based on the immediate gratification of all needs and desires that every single subject could dream of:

Instead of forbidding and depriving it works through pleasing and fulfilling. Instead of making people compliant, it seeks to make them dependent.

Being-dependent became, according to Han, a constitutional element of neoliberal subject’s existence. Be they useless objects, redundant services, impotent ideas, capitalism somehow succeeds to present its products — through sophisticated portrayals and garish slogans — as revolutionary achievements…