We have seen how biocapitalism , which emerged in the last century, has found new niches for the exploitation of individuals' bodies and minds, tending to engulf ever new dimensions to shape and subjugate them to its purposes. In his essay "Psychopolitics ," the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han traces the differences between the various historical phases of modernity and the relative exercise of power.
The three forms of power
Feudalism and the dawn of industrial capitalism were characterized by a system that used physical violence to maintain order: this was the phase of disciplinary power . Only labor power was exploited. This phase was exhaustively described by Karl Marx and corresponds to a society of capitalists (owners of the means of production) and proletarians. Several decades later, Michel Foucault focused on new forms of coercion and hierarchy, which directly affected bodies and behaviors to the point of manipulating, at least in part, the mind to make people docile. This is biocapitalism and, in its socio-institutional expression, biopolitics . This type of state distinguishes between supervisors and supervised. In recent decades, we have been witnessing a new transformation of the capitalist system and its potential for exploitation and coercion. Power becomes subtle, almost invisible. It no longer threatens, it no longer directly administers bodies and behaviors, except in a few cases. Neoliberalism manipulates by flattering the consumer-producer. Unlike the previous era, this type of economic hegemony does not seek to subjugate in order to make people docile, but to flatter in order to make them dependent.
The Enlightenment Statistics
Han emphasizes how the first enlightenment, even through the voices of its most illustrious philosophers, expressed an enthusiastic faith in the statistical and quantitative method, which would make reality rational and its meaning accessible to all. Likewise, this "second enlightenment" seems to rely particularly on big data, information about our computer activities that can reveal our desires and preferences. Conducting our lives between the real and (increasingly) the virtual, we fail to realize that we are being observed, not only by a new Orwellian Big Brother, but also by our peers and ourselves, as if in a mirror. In this digital panopticon, surveillers and surveilled become one. Similarly, it is difficult to draw a line between entrepreneurs and proletarians, because in our era, everyone is an entrepreneur of themselves, relentlessly observed, manipulated, and exploited without the slightest resistance. An unaware slave to their own induced, increasingly immaterial needs, they exploit themselves to deliver themselves, entirely alienated, into the hands of the capital.
Speed and connection
We live in an increasingly interconnected world, where information circulates at breakneck speed, making rational reflection and control impossible, often escaping even our consciousness, which has slower reaction times. Engagement is experienced as a succession of momentary emotions, annihilating the feeling that requires time, meaning, and complete discourse. Han hints at a way out through reclaiming oneself, one's own rhythms, and one's own uniqueness: being the off-key note, the wise idiot, the exceptional data which distorts the statistical distribution curve.
Barbara GV Lattanzi
