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Performance - Blog Posts
Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. The society of the 21st century is no longer disciplinary, but a society of the performance. Nor are its inhabitants called ‘subjects of obedience’, but ‘subjects of performance’. These subjects are entrepreneurs of themselves.
Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation. This is much more effective than the exploitation by the others, because it is accompanied by a feeling of freedom. The exploiter is the same exploited. Victim and executioner can no longer differentiate. This self-referentiality generates a paradoxical freedom, which, because of the structures of obligation immanent to it, becomes violence […] In this society of obligation, each one carries with him his forced labor field.
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..
No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression. The achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.
Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.
― Byung-Chul Han, extracts from The Burnout Society
Nightwing aerial silk routine to this song. Might add a part 2
Please comment even if its criticism. I need the motivation