Burnout Society excerpt

Ehrenberg’s main thesis reads: “the success of depression lies in the decline of conflict as a reference point upon which the nineteenthcentury notion of the self was founded.”18 According to this view, conflict performs a constructive function; both personal identity and social identity are formed from elements that stand “in relationship because of their conflict”19; in political and private life, conflict represents the normative core of democratic culture. Depression, Ehrenberg continues, conceals how relationships emerge from conflict; now conflict no longer founds personal identity. The conflict model dominates classical psychoanalysis. Healing involves recognizing, that is, raising the existence of intrapsychic conflict to the level of consciousness. However, the conflict model presupposes the negativity of repression and negation. Therefore, it cannot apply to depression, which lacks all negativity. Although Ehrenberg recognizes that depression is characterized by an absent relation to conflict, he still holds to the conflict model. Depression, he maintains, has a hidden conflict at its basis, which the use of antidepressants further obscures. Conflict no longer offers a sure “guide”: Deficit filled, apathy stimulated, impulses regulated, compulsion tamed —all of this has made dependency the flipside of depression. With the gospel of personal development on the one hand and the cult of performance on the other, conflict does not disappear; however, it loses its obvious quality and can no longer be counted on to guide us.20 In fact, depression defies the conflict model—that is, depression eludes psychoanalysis. Ehrenberg attempts to rescue psychoanalysis even though its conditions have disappeared. The “deconflictualization”21 that Ehrenberg connects with depression must be seen in light of the general positivization of society, which entails its de-ideologization. Sociopolitical events are no longer determined by the clash between ideologies or classes—the very idea has come to sound archaic. But for all that, the positivization of society does not abolish violence. Violence does not stem from the negativity of clash or conflict alone; it also derives from the positivity of consensus. Now, the totality of capital, which seems to be absorbing everything, represents consensual violence. Struggle no longer occurs between groups, ideologies, or classes, but between individuals; still, this fact is not as important for understanding the crisis of the achievement-subject as Ehrenberg claims.22 What proves problematic is not individual competition per se, but rather its self-referentiality, which escalates into absolute competition. That is, the achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow. This self-constraint, which poses as freedom, has deadly results. In the transition from disciplinary society to achievement society, the superego positivizes itself into the ego ideal. The superego is repressive. Above all, it prohibits. It rules over the ego with the “harshness and cruelty” of the “dictatorial ‘Thou shalt’” and its “harshly restraining, cruelly prohibiting quality.”23 In contrast to the repressive superego, the ego ideal seduces. The achievement-subject projects itself [entwirft sich] onto the ego ideal, whereas the obedience-subject subjects itself [sich unterwift] to the superego. Subjection and projection are two different modes of existence. Negative compulsion issues from the superego. In contrast, the ego ideal exercises a positive compulsion on the ego. The negativity of the superego restricts the freedom of the ego. Projecting oneself into the ego ideal is interpreted as an act of freedom. But when the ego gets caught in an unattainable ego ideal, it gets crushed altogether. The gap between the real ego and the ego ideal then brings forth auto-aggression. The late-modern achievement-subject is subject to no one. In fact, it is no longer a subject in the etymological sense (subject to, sujet à). It positivizes itself; indeed, it liberates itself into a project. However, the change from subject to project does not make power or violence disappear. Auto-compulsion, which presents itself as freedom, takes the place of allo-compulsion. This development is closely connected to capitalist relations of production. Starting at a certain level of production, auto-exploitation is significantly more efficient and brings much greater returns [leistungsstärker] than allo-exploitation, because the feeling of freedom attends it. Achievement society is the society of self-exploitation. The achievement-subject exploits itself until it burns out. In the process, it develops auto-aggression that often enough escalates into the violence of self-destruction. The project turns out to be a projectile that the achievement-subject is aiming at itself.

...Ehrenberg’s theory of depression overlooks the systemic violence inhabiting achievement society. For the most part, his analyses are psychological, not economic or political. Therefore, he does not observe capitalistic relations of self-exploitation in the achievement-subject’s psychic maladies. According to Ehrenberg, only the imperative to belong to oneself entails depression; depression is the pathological expression of late-modern man’s failure to become himself. Ehrenberg equates this type with Nietzsche’s “sovereign man,” but he fails to notice the identity between sovereign and homo sacer, master and slave, that actually holds. For Nietzsche, it is not “sovereign man” but the “last man” who exploits himself as his own vassal. Counter to what Ehrenberg claims, Nietzsche advanced “sovereign man” in the name of cultural criticism, as a countermodel to the exhausted achievement-subject.

Byung-Chul Han