Mourning neoliberalism: emancipation in the age of precarity and digital psychopolitics

This Dissertation provides a multilayered diagnosis of the psychosocial and psychopolitical landscape of contemporary capitalism, exploring the persisting obstacles to emancipatory change despite mounting dissatisfaction and disenchantment with the order. The Dissertation comprises three parts: The first part reconstructs the structural, institutional, and cultural paths leading to the persistence of neoliberal hubris amid widespread precarity and insecurity. I describe the psychopolitical impacts of neoliberal socialization, highlighting both the soft charm of competitive entrepreneurial ideals and the hard disciplinary effects of social insecurity. This system causes individuals to experience both internal psychoneurotic anxieties and external objective ones simultaneously, which people negotiate differently depending on their subject/abject positions, most with individualizing and depoliticizing effects. The second part aims to discuss the main psychosocial symptoms of contemporary capitalism in the literature under three headings: (i) manic cultures of accelerated work and consumption, (ii) medicalized and individualized regimes of psychiatry and psycho-culture, and (iii) paranoid, populist political mobilizations. On the one hand, I demonstrate that these symptoms are not merely psychological but are also sustained by institutional norms, cultural expectations, and material infrastructures. On the other hand, drawing from object-relations psychoanalytic theories of ‘pathological organizations,’ I suggest that these formations solidify in ‘wounding attachments’ that various leverage our attachments to partial libidinal gains to perpetuate the havoc such formations wreak in our societies, psyches, and emancipatory imaginations. In the concluding chapters, I show that our addictions and attachments to such wounds must be mourned and weaned if emancipation is to be imaginable. This involves experimenting with how freely-associative and containing spaces can be reopened, both in our everyday lives and in potential counterpublics, so that stalled emancipatory visions can reemerge.