Triangle Common Good

Come join Triangle Common Good in reading Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power from Byung-Chul Han. This is a short work of 80 pages.

Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean born philosopher whose short, punchy books focus on exploring how the era of big data and smart technology has resulted in a loss of space for narratives, rituals, and contemplation and boredom. In particular, his work Burnout Society would garner him more public attention in recent years.

In Psychopolitics, he argues that self-optimization and a regime of "positivity" are leading to a mental collapse that can be tied to the ways in which data encourages existence in flow states. We will consider this in line with our discussion of postmodernism as encouraging the experience of "kaleidoscopic flows" that don't provide space to stop and contemplate the flow of feelings or imagery.

"It is impossible to subordinate human personhood to the dictates of positivity entirely. Without negativity, life degrades into 'something dead'. Indeed, negativity is what keeps life alive. Pain is constitutive for experience. Life that consists wholly of positive emotions and the sensation of 'flow' is not human at all. The human soul owes its defining tautness and depth precisely to negativity...Now the only pain that is tolerated is pain that can be exploited for the purposes optimization. But the violence of positivity is just as destructive as the violence of negativity. Neoliberal psychopolitics, which the consciousness industry it promotes, is destroying the human soul, which is anything but a machine of positivity...Healing, it turns out, means killing"

You will find below a link to a copy of an approachable reader on his works if you want to explore more or need help understanding his ideas.

Come join Triangle Common Good in reading The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein.

Naomi Klein is an author, activist, and filmmaker who first reached public awareness for her book No Logo, which critiqued modern branding and the power logos hold as symbols today. Most recently, her book Doppelganger received attention for its unique story of the impact of epistemic rabbit holes on changing ideologies by comparing herself to a right-wing parallel she is often confused with.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism looks critically at the history of implementation of neoliberal economic reforms in countries that had recently experienced the shock of war or disaster. This includes looking at the testing of economic policies in Chile after the CIA-backed coup of their democratically elected leader resulted in the installation of dictator Augusto Pinochet. Milton Friedman would serve as an advisor to Pinochet, with several of his students serving as economists on Pinochet's administration, as Pinochet implemented a series of reforms that privatized and deregulated their economy. Pinochet would go on to be responsible for the "disappearances" of thousands of political and social critics.

In her ground-breaking reporting from Iraq, Naomi Klein exposed how the trauma of invasion was being exploited to remake the country in the interest of foreign corporations. She called it "disaster capitalism." Covering Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, and New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment" losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq...