In an interview with Variety, self-made millionaire Kim Kardashian gave us plebian losers an enlightening wakeup call: “Get your asses up and fucking work!” the business prodigy preached. "It seems like nobody wants to work these days." The teensie weensie fact that most people don’t inherit a shit ton of wealth to waste on a failing make-up line, seemed to have slipped Kim’s mind — oops!
For a moment, our polarized society united to collectively roll our eyes at this tone-deaf statement. “How dare this privileged nepo baby give me financial advice!” cried the woke Twitter liberals. “Not everyone is willing to forgo their Christian morals to get famous!” screamed the bigoted rednecks. Amidst all the chaotic screaming, however, no one seemed to notice the more glaring issue: her patronizing speech actually holds some quiet truth.
In his book Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, author Byun-Chul Han argues in support of Kim’s argument. Nobody wants to work these days. However, the reason for our passivity isn't because we are lazy losers or brain dead slackers. Society’s widespread unmotivation, he writes, is actually a symptom of the breakdown in Foucault’s disciplinary structures.
Out of the Foucaultdian frying pan and into the fire
pictured: michel foucault looking sultry and intense
The French thinker argued that state and civil institutions were spaces that confined the body’s discursive potential to maintain capitalist hegemony. These arenas stripped us of our radical character, drilled our brains with an intert edifice, and limited our creative expressions, all so we’d become efficient workers that never question the system. In the household, it was our parents that imparted us with conforming identities and behaviour; in the school, teachers turned us into capitalism’s good little étudiants; in the penitentiary, police officers forced our submission with near-death beatings and prison confinement. Substitute these disciplinary agents with any other authority figure, and emerges is a picture of all the intricate networks of power used to fashion a productive, unresistant polity.
Fouccault’s diagnosis, however, no longer rings true. Whereas the old order was about demanding compliance, repressing individuality, and subjugating the body, contemporary society has shed these negative prohibitions.
Central to this change is the rise of neoliberalism. As Greenspan and all those republican mouth-breathers like to say, this latest strain of capitalism is about ‘enfranchising' wealth via laissez-faire economic policy in hopes of inspiring competitive innovation. But for capital to move and travel boundlessly, the rigid parameters of disciplinary societies had to be dismantled; after all, free markets aren’t free if the government is constantly interfering like an overprotective patriarch; free markets can’t spread if there are closed borders; free markets aren’t effective if people feel too constrained to think up entrepreneurial schemes.
Negativity needed to become positivity in order to support the neoliberal transition. So, thanks to the mass deregulation, globalization, and social reform policies implemented by Reagan-Deng-Thatcher-lites, we now live in a supposedly open world with endless potential. Opportunity knocks at every corner — or at least that's how the mainstream narrative goes.
In reality, the disappearance of visible control has not resulted in a better society. Gasp! What the capitalist overlords realized is that they could trick people to subordinate themselves on their own, thereby turning domination into an efficient, self-sustaining process.
To do this, power is given a cute button nose rhinoplasty, making it appear friendly and harmless. The neoliberal regime markets itself as your optimistic buddy:
It says “Yes We Can!” where the disciplinary regime said, “No You Can’t.”
It says “You can be anyone” instead of "You must conform."
“You can do anything!” cheers the ideological machine in Kim Kardashian’s nasally cadence, rather than "You must obey."
These ego-stroking narratives delude us into thinking we are participating in a new, empowering economic system. Masked by the saccharinely-sweet rhetoric, however, is the fact that this supposed freedom is a front.
“Yes We Can!” is bullshit, empty cannon fodder for improving productivity. Through a gritted smile, the technocratic state repeats this positive statement a million times until it becomes an unbearable, constant pressure to achieve. These words echo in the subconscious as you try to read. It whispers in your ear as you toss and turn in bed. It gnaws away when you refresh Linkedin. Every moment of your life starts to feel like a missed opportunity to optimize or capitalize off; this is why ‘idle time,’ which was once recognized as an intrinsically valuable part of the human experience, has now become ‘wasted time’ not spent producing.
With this constant anxiety swirling in the air, the neoliberal subject begins a never-ending, all-consuming, hysterical quest for wealth accumulation. We say “Yes!” to unpaid overtime; “Yes!” to answering emails at the dinner table; “Yes!” to productivity drugs such as energy drinks and Ritalin. Yes! Yes! Yes! With a glint in our eyes, we eagerly assume the identity of an obedient worker: always striving to do more, always looking to please the capitalist structure. Achievement has now become the obsession of our lives, even if it comes at the detriment of our fulfillment and peace.
This behaviour occurs unprompted. No longer are the days of being whipped and lashed by a master or hawkishly surveilled by the factory manager. In the neoliberal age, the subject is both a worker and a bourgeois, an exploited and an exploiter of the self. Capitalist oppression has therefore been elegantly rebranded from visibly constraining the body to invisibly corroding the psyche — a process which is misinterpreted as freedom.
Post-dialectic society (?)
pictured: wall street during the ‘08 crash
As physical manufacturing is outsourced to the Global South, money in the West is mostly made in the immaterial, service-based industries such as finance, information, or consulting. Performed mostly in the digital and communicative realms, these new jobs require less and less physical work and more of our mental capacity. Put simply, the modern economy does not rely on our bodies so much as our minds.
The implication, in relation to neoliberalism, is that our relationship to labour has radically changed. Central to the economy is now us, the service actors, rather than a physical commodity created by our labour. Personhood is the latest and hottest trend on the market.
In the most literal sense, we are a society of influencers, personalities, gurus, motivational speakers, lifestyle coaches — occupations that commodify the private human essence. But this energy extends to traditional jobs as well. Think of the way hiring works these days. While yes, your actual ability to do the work is considered, the more important evaluative factor is your marketing. How you present yourself on social media, how you speak in the interview, how you dress that day, are all considerations that often outweigh your legitimate ability to perform. Therefore, in order to even participate in the economy, one must devote themselves fully towards cultivating a ‘personal brand’ / self-optimization / the Sisyphean quest of image-making.
So not only are we working harder at our actual jobs, but we are also exploiting our identities to bolster said job performance. It's like we’ve become ‘entrepreneurs’ of ourselves; and to create the perfect product, every fibre of our being is optimized whether it be through looksmaxing with plastic surgery or microdosing for neuro-enhancement.
Burnout and depression
“Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself” — Byun Chul Han.
pictured: belgian film director Chantal Akerman, who killed herself on October 2015
Neoliberalism motivates us to do more, accomplish more, say more, make more, consume more, improve more, more, more, more, more… It bombards us with obscene amounts of positivity and stimuli. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts to catch up, the human mind is not built for this hyperactivity.
With so much excess circulating in the air, our attention gets divided between too many activities, causing our cognition to overheat and tweak. But instead of negatively limiting and streamlining the amount of things we can juggle, the neoliberal “Yes!” society encourages us to multitask.
Multitasking is presented as a positive solution; often times, you'll see stupid logic being pumped out about how multitasking is a sign of mental prowess and high intelligence — Alphas multitask! We take immense pride in being capable of it (think of all the smug assholes and RedBubble t-shirts that say "worlds best multitasker") even though, in reality, this is just another sneaky narrative designed to bolster productivity. To make us more efficient workers. To get us to pump out more for the same input. To get us to take work calls while driving and eating and hanging out with friends.
More horrifically, multitasking culture chips away at our ability to contemplate — which Plato and Aristotle saw as the highest ideal of life. No longer can we sit down and ponder an issue full heartedly; today, our attentions are constantly being tugged back and forth between all the excessive stimuli in our neoliberal society. An example of this are those crazy ADHD Tik Toks, where one corner is a subway surfers gaming montage, the other is a Family Guy clip, while a text-to-speech bot reads Bell Hooks’ Oppositional Gaze in the background. The fact that this toxic crap exists and is unironically consumed, exemplifies the tragic fragmentation of our generation's ability to focus.
Subsequently, tiredness takes over. "I have so much to do but no energy to do it," a friend said to me the other day. Facing a towering pile of schoolwork, relationships to maintain, side gigs to finish, follow-up emails to send, he became incredibly overwhelmed. He froze.
This is the natural response to excessive positivity. Neoliberalism's pervasive pressure to be productive and stimulated inevitably sucks its subject’s energy dry, leaving behind just a shell-shocked carcass. It drains us. It depletes the culture. It causes burnout. Exhausted, we react much like my friend: retreating to our rooms to binge watching Netflix as a pitiful attempt to drown out the noise.
Whereas under the disciplinary society we had a visible bourgeois to antagonize, the neoliberal 'entrepreneur' finds the enemy within themselves. Their malaise is rooted in overworking, over consuming, over-everything, actions of their own supposed doing. Hence, pent up feelings of frustration under capitalism cannot be cathartically released, but internalized as an agonizing “self-hatred." I see this everywhere: I notice it in the weary-eyed businessmen who always look like they'd just escaped a gulag. I sense it from my go-getter peers who have now become lethargic, drug-addicted bums. And I experience it in myself, as day by day my melancholy turns into a void of despair over the future. Life today feels so bleak man.
Psychic pathologies are widespread under neoliberalism. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, in 2021, 22.8% of all U.S. adults were diagnosed with a mental disorder. The system, however, refuses to acknowledge it’s contributing role in society's burnout. Today's mental health crisis is framed as an abnormal phenomenon with mysterious roots in one's own fickleness: Wait you're depressed and you don't know why? That's so weird babe. Sounds like a you thing. Just like that, responsibility is offloaded to the individual. This type of thinking, however, masks the true link between our experiences and the system that silently operates in the backdrop. Once again, neoliberalism manipulates us in its favour: this time, into believing that our psychic infarctions are an alien reality, not the telos of late-stage capitalism.
Subsequently, the ‘solutions’ pushed onto us consist of temporary (and expensive) remedies that never fix the actual cause of our malaise. We sit through hours of Jungian therapy with an obnoxious masters student, and down cocktails of prozac, benzoyl, adderall, yet we don't seem to be getting any better. All it does is turn our frowns into loopy drugged-out smiles — proof that we can work again! The system is merely biding time; through these empty ‘solutions,’ we receive another hit of energy, just enough to continue producing until we crash again, and repeat.
pictured: Mark Fisher, who hung himself on 13 January 2017
Compare this to the image neoliberalism likes to push onto us. At first glance, Western culture appears to be positively productive. The spirit of hustling is everywhere in our society, from the “Just do it” Nike billboards to the Pinterest success quotes to the Gary Vaynerchuck speeches that get millions of views online. However, behind these dazzling narratives, the people of today’s system are so bummed out and tired. It's no wonder why no body wants to work these days.
The more I read mark fisher the more I find he has written everything that I would want to and it’s better than I could have done
hii, loved this piece! first of all, very funny and smart to connect kim and han. secondly, burnout society by han has been on my mind for months now, and it has given me a lot of peace about my own depression/exhaustion because it allowed me to understand the bigger context of it all. your text adds to this, by being very relatable and timely. ugh, i wish i had the attention span and time next to uni and work to read more about this ..... ykykyk haha