I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
In The Spirit of Hope (2025), philosopher Byung-Chul Han revisits his idea of how, in the neoliberal regime, we act as both master and slave, driving ourselves towards greater and greater achievement:
To be free means to be free of compulsion. In the neoliberal regime, however, freedom produces compulsion. These forms of compulsion are not external; they come from within. The compulsion to perform and ehte compulsion to optimize oneself are compulsions of freedom. Freedom and compulsion become one. We voluntarily submit ourselves to the compulsion to be creative, efficient, authentic.
Neoliberalism is a 20th-century economic and political ideology that advocates for free-market capitalism, privatization of services that may have formerly been handled by government, deregulation, and reduced government spending to drive economic growth. It is DOGE in action.
For Han, with neoliberalism, you are no longer a worker exploited by an external boss. You become an entrepreneur of yourself. You are your own brand, your own manager, and your ongoing optimization and perfection project.
This is Han’s achievement society a.k.a. burnout society from his seminal essay-book The Burnout Society (2015). He contrasts it with older disciplinary societies — factories, prisons, rigid hierarchical corporations — where individuals were controlled by authority figures, rules, and discipline.
In the neoliberal regime, you hear over and over again “Yes, you can.” Everything feels possible. Failure reflects personal inadequacy. If you burnout, it’s your fault. You didn’t manage yourself well.
What must you do in this achievement society?
- Optimize your body
- Make yourself relevant
- Build an audience (not of subjects but of “followers” who exist only to reflect and validate you)
- Scale your platform
- And, crucially, monetize your creativity
In The Spirit of Hope, Han tackles the concept of creativity:
The often-invoked concept of creativity, in particular, prevents the emergence of something radically different, something unheard of. Creativity is associated with a new form of production. The society that promotes creativity, the performance society, is a service society. It is the successor to the disciplinary society, which belonged to the era of industrialization. Creativity establishes itself as a neoliberal dispositif that, like any dispositif, has a compulsive character. Its purpose is solely to increase productivity. The new at the heart of the creative disposif is not something altogether other. Paradoxically, it continues the same. It therefore does not bring forth a new form of life that goes beyond production and consumption. In the neoliberal performance society, the new, novelty, is ultimately a form of consumption.
I had to look up dispositif. This term, borrowed from Foucault, refers to a network of institutions, norms, practices, discourses, technologies, and forms of knowledge that shape how people think, behave, and experience themselves. When Han talks about the creativity dispositif under neoliberalism, he means that creativity is no longer spontaneous, mysterious, or resistant. It doesn’t transgress or transcend. It has become a part of the performance structure.
Under the neoliberal creative dispositif, you are not expressing yourself and innovating with your creative output. You optimize your visibility, manage your image, feed platforms, respond to algorithmic incentives.
Is there a form of creativity that unsettles and disrupts the neoliberal system instead of reinforcing it? If so, Han says, it would be something that sought to create the radically new:
Classical modernity’s emphasis on the radically new is alien to the postmodern creative dispositif. In classical modernity, people strove to be ‘starting from the very beginning’, to ‘begin by clearing a tabula rasa’. Walter Benjamin mentions a number of modern artists and writers who were inspired by ‘starting from the very beginning’. They resolutely turned away from the musty bourgeoisie and turned instead ‘to the naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the dirty diapers of the present’.1 The postmodern creative dispositif is nto on its way towards a new birth. It lacks the pathos of the new, the passion for the new. It produces only variations of the same.
I see this online — variations of the same — “creators” producing newsletter articles and YouTube videos and TikToks that merely reproduce what other creators have found will go viral.
How does a creative (that is, anyone or more particularly, me) “start from the beginning,” “create a tabula rasa”? How do I create something that is not just a varation of the same? And is that even worth pursuing? Or in pursuing it as a goal am I necessarily subjecting myself to the self-exploitation of the achievement society?
- From Walter Benjamin’s essay “Experience and Poverty” 1933. ↩︎