Sovereignty of Mental States: An Approach to Byung-Chul Han

Sovereignty of Mental States: An Approach to Byung-Chul Han

The history of philosophy, and therefore of a part of human knowledge, is full of paradoxes. Let's think for a second about the foundation of modern philosophy, the cogito of Descartes, immortalized in the formula cogito ergo sum, or "I think, therefore I am." Descartes set out to doubt reality, mathematical truths, the goodness of God. But he cannot doubt that he is doubting. Thus, the foundation of modern philosophy rests on a paradox: a doubt that cannot doubt itself.

Think of Plato, perhaps one of the most influential thinkers in the discipline, who racked his brain searching for the essence of things -- that which we cannot remove from something without completely altering it. After a lifetime of work, reflection, and searching, Plato concludes that essences exist on another plane of reality and remain distant from the corruption of matter. The essence of things lies outside of them.

Let's fast-forward a few centuries to Kurt Godel, one of the most brilliant mathematicians in human history. Godel proved that our most solid system of knowledge, mathematics, contains -- as a product of that very solidity -- statements that can be neither proved nor refuted. I could keep citing examples, but that's not why we're here today.

The Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in his concise book "Psychopolitics," structures his entire argument around a paradox: freedom has become a tool of domination. And that's what I'm going to talk about today.

1

Byung-Chul Han is a philosopher from South Korea, educated in Germany. For him, stress, anguish, depression, and anxiety are symptoms of the mode of production in which we live. The result of a paradox: our own "freedom" is the new coercion.

We could debate for hours whether conditions of production come first and ideology after. The answer to what takes ontological priority will place us in different academic and political positions. What cannot be denied is that both phenomena coexist simultaneously. Foucault was known for thinking about how the transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production affected people's lives. He called his theory "Biopolitics" because he determined that the strongest coercion was exercised over the body and the ways of managing, naming, and controlling it. We can say that Foucault characterized the exercise of power during classic capitalism under the logic of what another giant, Max Weber, called "the Protestant work ethic." In very schematic terms, we can define it as the notion of work as duty, a moral or ethical duty. So we have the triad: classical capitalism, Protestant ethic, and biopolitics.

Byung-Chul Han makes a leap and throws us into thinking about the present, hence his importance and vitality. Now, capitalism changed, the Protestant ethic changed, and biopolitics mutated into "psychopolitics." The mutation of capitalism has to do partly with the shift from capitalism linked to production toward capitalism linked to financial power. This occurred as a consequence of the United States' abandonment of the gold standard in 1971 under the Nixon administration. While in classical capitalism currency had a convertible value (it could be exchanged for a precious metal), today money is also strictly subject to supply and demand. Its value depends solely on a state's power to convince its inhabitants through coercion to use it.

Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen coined the term "hacker ethic" at least fifteen years ago to explain a new phenomenon: the transition from the Protestant ethic of work as duty to the hacker ethic (born within programmer communities, hence the name) of work as passion and enjoyment.

The interesting thing is that when Himanen set out to say that the hacker ethic is a kind of subversion of the foundation of work (because one would be enjoying rather than fulfilling a duty), he didn't contemplate the possibility that it might completely replace the Protestant ethic and become the new hegemonic ideology of turbo-neo-post-trans-capitalism.

What could be more perfect for an employer than having employees who work not just out of duty but out of passion?

Byung-Chul Han describes this new ideology as smart power. It's the shift from the logic of imposition to the logic of seduction. A way of life is no longer imposed on us; instead, capitalism sells us a dream that we make our own. We long to be something self-determined, a "free project," to choose our career, find our passion, and succeed at it. To travel the world, be your own boss, have your own company. To be free, entrepreneurial, independent. But when that doesn't work, the side effects appear: depression, anguish, frustration, stress... Because the responsibility of being a "successful" subject (according to the parameters of the hegemonic ideology) falls entirely on ourselves. And if it doesn't happen (I don't start my own company, I'm not a successful freelancer, I don't land my "dream" job), then the responsibility for failure is totally and absolutely mine. Byung-Chul Han says:

“Quién fracasa en la sociedad neoliberal del rendimiento se hace a sí mismo responsable y se avergüenza, en lugar de poner en duda a la sociedad o al sistema. En esto consiste la especial inteligencia del régimen neoliberal. No deja que surja resistencia alguna. En el antiguo régimen de explotación ajena es posible que los explotados se solidaricen y juntos se alcen contra el explotador. Este es todo ‘el truco’ de Marx. Sin embargo, esta lógica presupone relaciones de dominación represivas. En el régimen neoliberal de la autoexplotación uno dirige la agresión hacia sí mismo. Esta agresividad no convierte al explotado en revolucionario, sino en depresivo”.

It's like when you're overweight and the sizes in the dressing room don't fit, and a thousand similar situations. Like when there's a plane crash and the first response is to blame the human in charge rather than expose the flaw in the system. That's why the new battlefield of capitalism is the mind.

2

The present crisis of freedom consists in the fact that we face a technique of power that does not deny or subjugate freedom but exploits it. Let's look at a concrete example. This Movistar ad: a hippie-chic girl, dancing amid colored smoke, with a certain apparent happiness and a slogan: "Choose everything."

The current face of capitalism is the one that allows you everything, that forbids nothing, that "empowers" the consumer. Choose what you want to watch, what you want to eat, choose, choose, choose, everything. Everything goes, everything's the same. There's something for every taste, every option, every political tendency: vegans, nerds, gays, freaks, fascists, liberals, Trotskyists. There's something for every taste. Capitalism doesn't allow "outsides" because that's one less segment of market. That's the only possible space of choice: consumption. As long as you buy or sell, no matter what, what we need is to reproduce capital to infinity.

And so the famous "gig economy" is born, under the logic of capital optimization. Within capitalism, a car sitting parked and wasting production time is an unforgivable sin. So Uber appears. The empty room? AirBnB appears. The stock market closes? Are you crazy! And cryptocurrencies appear: a market of global free financial exchange that works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Curiosity became a business with Google, friendship with Facebook, sex with Tinder, stupidity and cleverness with Twitter, vanity with Instagram. Every human attitude is a new way to make money.

Everything falls under the logic of optimization. And so we live in an explosion of what Foucault calls "technologies of the self": devices for improving performance. Coaching, CrossFit, mindfulness, motivational talks. All practices aimed at "sustaining" the psychic-biological apparatus of workers so they don't have problems performing. That's why it's no longer just individuals who submit to these practices -- companies themselves pay for their employees' coaching courses or gym memberships. They need them happy and productive.

It's the "Google model" applied on a global scale. And it's a damn nightmare.

Even leisure and play fall under this same logic. As Zizek says in a text, "people no longer play tennis, they practice their cross-court backhand." Think for a second about esports: it's nothing but the logic of play subjected to the absolute performance demands of capital. Years ago I published a piece in NAN magazine asking this very question: are esports a triumph of leisure over work or of work over leisure? It's the latter. Play is subjected to the logic of performance. It's not enough to play -- you have to compete, be a streamer, gain followers, be an influencer.

3

"We no longer work for our own needs but for capital. Capital generates its own needs that we, mistakenly, perceive as our own. Capital represents a new form of transcendence, a new form of subjectivation."

That is, as long as our interests align with those of capital, we're in trouble. But as Byung-Chul Han says, this isn't a matter of capitalism versus socialism -- where work is also a form of transcendence -- but of immanence versus transcendence. That's why he proposes a return to two aspects of life: on one hand, freedom cannot be based on competition because freedom is not individual but a collective act. To the extent that only I am free and the rest are not, we have a problem. So returning to forms of collective participation is essential. On the other hand, he proposes a return to immanence -- that is, doing things for the joy of doing them. Making what we do ends in themselves.

The most valuable aspect of Byung-Chul Han's philosophy is that he offers us an immediate way out of the current situation. The recovery of freedom isn't placed behind a general objective like a political revolution. Instead, it's something much more attainable: cultivating local communities and doing things that connect us with ourselves. A barbecue with friends, tending our own garden, painting the games in a neighborhood park with your neighbors. Doing something. In an era where doing means opining, Byung-Chul Han proposes that doing should mean doing.

That's the fundamental difference between two versions of the same activity: Zen meditation and mindfulness. While the first is a practice of immanence and an end in itself, we do mindfulness for something else. "I meditate to feel better, to reduce stress, etc." -- and that's precisely what you shouldn't do. In the Zen tradition, there's a key saying: "I don't meditate to become Buddha; when I meditate, I am Buddha." It's like that old New Testament paradox that says "seek the kingdom of God and everything else will be given to you as well." Focus on what matters and everything else comes as a bonus. Now, if we focus on the bonuses, we're screwed, because we fall back into the logic of transcendence.

And it's not that we can't engage in transcendental activities -- in fact, we're condemned to do them. The point is that we need to do at least one immanent activity because that's the only thing that guarantees the sovereignty of our mental states, and therefore our freedom.