Introduction

According to Byung-Chul Han, we (in the West) have moved from a ‘control society’ to an ‘achievement society’. We have switched out the imperative ‘you should’ with the much more encouraging ‘you can’. However, whilst this might look like it frees us, it actually doesn’t, because by telling us ‘you can’ and then telling us the range of things we ‘can’ do, ‘achievement society’ creates even more pressure to conform. The price of failure? ‘Burnout’.

How did we go from control society to achievement society?

According to Michel Foucault, control society began with the Industrial Revolution. The mechanisation of labour, as exemplified by the factory, changed the way people were organised. Rather than each of us being an independent labourer - this man a shoesmith, that one a butcher - many people would work together on one production line. However, people had gotten used to their jobs. How were they to be broken in?

The answer was repression. To organise people around a machine, to get them working mechanically, you have to make their behaviour more predictable. To make it more predictable, you have to make them conform to a norm.

How do you make people conform? You make them want it. You tell them ‘normal is good, abnormal is bad’. So according to Foucault, around the time that human labour shifted up a mechanising gear, a moral cultural narrative emerged in which anything that got in the way of mechanical productivity was ‘bad’, and anything that served it was ‘good’. So any thoughts that didn’t get you out of bed and into the factory, or any sex that didn’t just replace you when you were too old to go to the factory, were deemed abnormal and bad. People, not wishing to be abnormal or bad, would try and correct their behaviour to this new, ‘normal’ good.

This is control society. You might recognise it from school, but according to Han, its dying out now. Why? Because over time, repression doesn’t work. Think of Looney Tunes when someone gets hit on the head. A bump appears, they push it back in; it pops out again somewhere else. That’s basically repression. People tell themselves ‘I’m not that’, but eventually some of them realise that they are, and if there are enough of them, which there usually are, they get together and realise that this whole normal thing has been a conceptual mistake.

Over time, resistance to Victorian normativity began to grow, reaching a particular intensity in the countercultural movements of the 1960-70s. Millions of disenfranchised people realised that they couldn’t go on defining themselves in terms of these categories, and people of various sexual identities, goths, punks and hippies all got together and expressed a general rage at this restrictive system. They wanted a different type of society in which people were organised not around mechanical productivity, but around pro-human goals, defined variously by different groups as freedom, self-expression and the right to self-determination.

The attempt to get people to repress aspects of themselves in pursuit of productivity appeared to have failed; there were too many outliers for the ‘normal’ class to be credible. Control society had failed: if the human will was to be bent once again to productivity, then something would have to be done.

‘Achievement society’ was the solution. A new narrative emerged, in which the existing social order sought to incorporate these various forms of resistance without giving up the supremacy of productivity. By abandoning repression, achievement society made participation seem like a personal choice. But it also eliminated the possibility of alternatives. It replaced repression with depression.

Achievement Society (Double Burnout)

We are no longer in Foucault’s world ‘of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories’. This world has been replaced ‘by a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories.’ We now live in a world in which we are constantly, frantically, encouraged to express ourselves. We are encouraged to talk openly of mental health and sexual identity. Improvement goals now become our goals: the current advertising campaign for MyGym bears the slogan: ’So I can feel confident. Is that ok?’, accompanied by a man pouting out his newfound ‘confidence’.

Rather than opposing itself to what you mustn’t do, achievement society says ‘look at all the possibilities; at all the things you can do! You can get fit, you can fly anywhere in the world, you can buy anything you want - you just need to pay for it. And if you want socialising, well we’ve got that: just come online, the party never ends!’

Achievement society keeps us constantly on, and makes us feel that we should want to be on. It thus burns us out, doubly. By keeping us constantly on, it keeps us in a state of ‘flat multitasking’ common to all animals. The overwhelming positivity of achievement society, the relentless incitement to do, prevents genuine thought.

It also treats any genuine thought that does occur (except that which is commodifiable) as a problem to be addressed by the individual. The lesson we learned from control society was that society creates the delinquents it opposes itself to, precisely by opposing itself to them, because it was based on a fiction of what counted as normal. This fiction is still present in our achievement society: whilst all these psychic aberrations are treated as ‘normal’, they are treated as normal in the sense that ‘it is normal for you to have this reaction to society, let me show you how to correct it’. The upsurge in discussion of mental health in social media has not led to a meaningful critique of the social causes of those issues. Achievement society thus created the depressive and the burnout. It sets the burnout outside itself, much as the madman or the pervert was set outside Victorian society.

Achievement society expects you to want to conform, and treats your failure to want to conform as your failure. Having solved the problem of repression, achievement society moves from negative control to positive. It ‘overwhelms us with positivity’: rather than telling us what we can’t do, it tells us all the things we can do, and if we don’t want to do them, then that’s our problem; we have ‘burned out’.

The modern society has incorporated the ‘freak’, the outlier. Its OK to be sexually different, or mentally imbalanced, or even do some crimes if you’ve had a ‘difficult’ past. These categories are no longer treated as ‘outsider’ categories: they are not ‘an alternative life to be lived’ but rather ‘variants of the same (normal) life that you live’. This robs these formerly countercultural groups of their challenging status: the goth is not a potential future, he’s just someone who couldn’t adapt to society. We have moved from a world that tries to push the delinquent in to a world that tries to drag the normal man out : through the encouragement to be all you can be, and the structuring of the social environment to make you want to be nothing more than fit and productive, society represses precisely by not-repressing.

wheelspin

‘Achievement society’, then, completes our enslavement. It turns the rage of the outlier, once weaponisable into a countercultural movement, into an anger which can be frozen in place. This was my worry about Juice WRLD: that if we interpret the dead artist as someone that took it too far, that failed to live within society’s rules, rather than as an expression of society’s fundamental mis-structuredness, then his only role was to encourage us to conform, to bring our raging emotions within the bounds set for us by conventional living. By freezing this anger in place, it turns it to depression.

This might make you think that ‘society’ has it all sewn up. But the important question will be whether this burnout can turn into something good: whether we can come out the other side, and imagine a genuine alternative.

Han contrasts ‘burnout’ with a positive state of tiredness, in which ‘there is less of me in me’, where after activity the ego retracts and we can sit in quiet, connected contemplation. As we react to the lockdown, we seem to be rediscovering something like this stunned connectivity. What we need to be wary of, as achievement society continues to pour in through our devices, is remaining in the constant state of on-ness it demands, which pushes us past this positive, satisfied tiredness and into burnout. Now is the time to sit back, together, and think. If you’re not feeling ‘it’ at the moment, its probably not your fault.