The new violences of Capitalist society are those subtle systemic and symbolic violences that most of us willingly partake in each day: overwork, overachievement, overproduction, overcommunication, hyperattention, hyperactivity, hyperreality. It is a society of Overism that is categorized by such positive violence, and it is precisely this benign violence that has leeched into our media, technology, and newsstands; it preaches the message of sameness: to talk alike, look alike (with allowed differences), and to be intolerant of the differences of the other...It is a society that demands—not merely encourages—the need to do in order to be. Thus, every metropolis that shines forth Capitalism’s glories of the same is a necropolis; the society of Overism is a society of burnout and depression; the virtual realities of news feeds, timelines, and reality television shows that we continue to be drawn to are smoothed over, opaque, overly transparent simulacra of what really is...Han is correct to see the development of this largely positive violence that is given fertile grounds in Capitalist societies (and consumes ever more territory through the spores it has sent around the world). That “progress” does continue to hide the continual wreckage that slips into the landfill that is the past....Through the discourse of positivity, Capitalism has attempted to shroud its true identity: a society and politics of death...This excess of violence in the Capitalist society—which we’ve already labeled a culture of death—could very well be the violence of positivity that Han suggests, a violence that boils just beneath the surface, a violence that burns out its victims, and even retains them as scapegoats. To run the risk of sounding obvious: our security and luxury is protected by and possible because of the system we live within; there are outside forces that threaten the equilibrium of my peaceful existence (because the system cannot be blamed itself!), and those outside forces must be those things that come to our/my land and take away the resources from us/me...However, this would miss the point that Han’s theory of positive violence is, at its core, implicitly a system of constraint. That is to say, as Han argues, Capitalist societies, because of their Overism, naturally produce burnout (depression), constraining subjects to the labor of doing, becoming a cog, working to enjoy until enjoyment runs its course and one can work no more (except as now clearly alienated to their labor). This is precisely what Capitalism (the big Other) desires: to consume its living dead, metabolizing these subjects into its ghastly body, to create an endlessly powered system that lacks a “full” signal in its brain.
Jared D. Price
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