CONCEPT
Psychopolitics
Han's 2014 name for the neoliberal mode of power that operates not through repression but through the production of positive affects — motivating the subject to exploit himself and calling the exploitation freedom.
Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (2014) is Han's most sustained analysis of how contemporary power operates at the level of the psyche rather than the body. Where Foucault's biopolitics regulated populations through the management of bodies — their health, reproduction, mortality — psychopolitics operates on the psyche through the production of motivational affects. The subject is not coerced; he is motivated. He is not punished for failure; he is rewarded for success. And the rewards — dopamine hits of achievement, social validation, the subjective experience of meaning — are the instruments through which power shapes the psyche without the psyche recognizing the operation as power.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Psychopolitics succeeds where biopolitics reaches its limits. The disciplined body can be identified and therefore resisted; its disciplining occurs at a material register available to political struggle. The motivated psyche offers no such handhold. The subject who experiences his self-exploitation as self-realization cannot identify the system exploiting him because