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a moment of understanding
Mar. 4th, 2020 06:33 pmVia ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
star-anise, the following excerpt from Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (Byung-Chul Han):
Until reading this, I'd always found this kind of argument baffling and alienating, but for some reason this iteration-articulation of it has, I think, made things click into place.
The gap in my understanding arises, I think, from the fact that I was making myself actively ill with perfectionism, with stress, with Getting Everything Done, up until the end of my first year of university, when I did very well in my exams and therefore, as best I can tell, proved to my hindbrain that I Could Do This, and abruptly started prioritising... well... self-care and healing, instead. I read the stuff about self-optimisation, I took it to heart, and I decided that the thing I wanted to do was get better and so I... did.
It has been slow and occasionally faltering, but now I eat regular meals and I sleep approximately regular hours at night and I (try to) listen to my body about when I need to stop and then I do that...
... and this means I did worse in all my subsequent exams and I can't even pretend to hold a full-time job and I take naps during the day and I have slowed way, way down. I recognise that I am lucky that (for now) I live in a country where the social security net is such that I can do that, such that I have the material option of not working myself to death --
-- but the disconnect is around the crux of the thing, the definition that "self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance". I'm just... working toward a different definition of "efficiency" and "performance", I think, and for whatever reason the self-care advice actually worked for me, actually practically directed me towards my own health as centre and priority, rather than my output.
I'm not sure how much of that is down to the precise disability activism context I found myself in, but -- it itched at me, to not understand why so many people were finding so harmful a broad genre of advice I had found intensely -- well -- healing.
There's also, of course, the part where I curate my reading intake fairly heavily, so probably a lot of what they're talking about is not in fact at all what I think of given the keywords in question -- but still. It's a relief to have puzzled it out.
... psychic maladies such as depression and burnout define our times. In contemporary American self-help literature, the magic word is healing. The term refers to self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance. Yet perpetual self-optimization, which coincides point-for-point with the optimization of the system, is proving destructive. It is leading to mental collapse. Self-optimization, it turns out, amounts to total self-exploitation…the only pain that is tolerated is pain that can be exploited for the purposes of optimization. But the violence of positivity is just as destructive as the violence of negativity. Neoliberal psychopolitics, with the consciousness industry it promotes, is destroying the human soul, which is anything but a machine of positivity (Positivmaschine). The neoliberal subject is running aground on the imperative of self optimization, that is, on the compulsion always to achieve more and more. Healing, it turns out, means killing.
Until reading this, I'd always found this kind of argument baffling and alienating, but for some reason this iteration-articulation of it has, I think, made things click into place.
The gap in my understanding arises, I think, from the fact that I was making myself actively ill with perfectionism, with stress, with Getting Everything Done, up until the end of my first year of university, when I did very well in my exams and therefore, as best I can tell, proved to my hindbrain that I Could Do This, and abruptly started prioritising... well... self-care and healing, instead. I read the stuff about self-optimisation, I took it to heart, and I decided that the thing I wanted to do was get better and so I... did.
It has been slow and occasionally faltering, but now I eat regular meals and I sleep approximately regular hours at night and I (try to) listen to my body about when I need to stop and then I do that...
... and this means I did worse in all my subsequent exams and I can't even pretend to hold a full-time job and I take naps during the day and I have slowed way, way down. I recognise that I am lucky that (for now) I live in a country where the social security net is such that I can do that, such that I have the material option of not working myself to death --
-- but the disconnect is around the crux of the thing, the definition that "self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance". I'm just... working toward a different definition of "efficiency" and "performance", I think, and for whatever reason the self-care advice actually worked for me, actually practically directed me towards my own health as centre and priority, rather than my output.
I'm not sure how much of that is down to the precise disability activism context I found myself in, but -- it itched at me, to not understand why so many people were finding so harmful a broad genre of advice I had found intensely -- well -- healing.
There's also, of course, the part where I curate my reading intake fairly heavily, so probably a lot of what they're talking about is not in fact at all what I think of given the keywords in question -- but still. It's a relief to have puzzled it out.