Happiness as Enterprise

Sam Binkley

Description

Recent decades have seen an explosion of interest in the phenomenon of happiness, as evidenced by self-help books, talk shows, spiritual mentoring, business management, and relationship counseling. At the center of this development is the expanding influence of "positive psychology," which places the concern with happiness in a new position of professional respectability, while opening it to institutional applications. In settings as diverse as college education, business, military training, family, and financial planning, happiness has appeared as the object of a new technology of emotional self-optimization. As such, happiness has come to define a new mentality of self-government—or a "governmentality" as the concept is developed in the work of Michel Foucault—one that Sam Binkley demonstrates is aligned closely with economic neoliberalism. Happiness as Enterprise blends theoretical argumentation and empirical description in an engaging and accessible analysis that brings governmentality theory into contact with sociological theories of practice and temporality, particularly in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. This book invites readers not only to consider the new discourse on happiness for its relation to contemporary formations of power, but to rethink many of the assumptions of governmentality theory in a manner sensitive to the mundane practices and everyday agencies of government, and the unique and specific temporalities these practices imply.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The New Happiness

Part I: The Hinge of Power

1. To Govern Happily

2. The Emotional Fold

Part II: When Will I be Happy?

3. Time Within Time

4. Habits of the Happy

Part III: The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality

5. The Happiness of All and Each

6. Interiorities of Social Government

7. The Alchemy of Neoliberalism

Conclusion: Against Asphyxiation

Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Santé et bien-être
• Bien-être émotionnel
• Bien-être émotionnel
• Bien-être
• Bien-être
• Bien-être
• Bien-être
• Psychology
• Assertiveness
• Sociology
• motivation

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 19 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438449852
• Langue: English

Extrait

Happiness as Enterprise
Happiness as Enterprise
An Essay on Neoliberal Life
SAM BINKLEY
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Eileen Nizer Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Binkley, Sam. Happiness as enterprise : an essay on neoliberal life / Sam Binkley. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Examines the contemporary discourse on happiness through the lens of governmentality theory”—Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-1-4384-4983-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Happiness. 2. Self-culture. 3. Neoliberalism. 4. Power (Social sciences) 5. State, The. I. Title. BF575.H27.B476 2014 302.5—dc23
2013008686
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Tomoko, and Kai
To increase your positivity you’ll need to “un-numb” your heart.
—Barbara Frederickson
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The New Happiness
Part I: The Hinge of Power
Chapter 1 To Govern Happily
Chapter 2 The Emotional Fold
Part II: When Will I be Happy?
Chapter 3 Time Within Time
Chapter 4 Habits of the Happy
Part III: The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality
Chapter 5 The Happiness of All and Each
Chapter 6 Interiorities of Social Government
Chapter 7 The Alchemy of Neoliberalism
Conclusion: Against Asphyxiation
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Books are hard to write. They take a long time and require that you miss a lot of fun things in life. While it is difficult to say precisely when this book started, it is clear that a lot of people contributed to it in both direct and indirect ways. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my colleagues along the East Coast corridor of Foucauldian scholarship that runs from Boston to New York City: Jeff Bussolini on the New York end, Ed McGushin in Boston. I am doubly grateful to the members of the Foucault Circle in New York and to a reading group of Foucault scholars that formed in Boston and sustained for long enough for me to do some important thinking. I am grateful to my colleagues on the editorial board of Foucault Studies who at every editorial meeting teach me how to read Foucault, in particular Sven Opitz, who offered important comments at an early stage of this manuscript. I am grateful to my colleagues and students at Emerson College, and for the support shown for this project in the form of a Faculty Advancement Fund Grant, and for the help of Rita Ifepe, who threw me a lifeline when I needed it most. I am particularly grateful to that student a few years back who, as I was tearing through a lecture on ideology, false consciousness, and rationalization, in which I declared modern happiness to be a form of repressive desublimation, leaned forward and gently asked, “Professor, are you all right?” She inspired this book, whoever she was. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to audiences and organizers of various panels and invited lectures, who provided valuable opportunities to develop my ideas and refine my concerns while tolerating missed flights, lost luggage, and incessant requests for more water at the lectern. These include: the department of Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapest; the department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, London; the departments of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Alberta; The Foucault Society in New York; Bard College, New York; the New York University Campus in Paris; the Schulich School of Business at York University, Toronto; the department of Sociology at University College, Dublin; the Social Theory Forum at the University of Massachusetts, Boston; The Telos Institute in New York; The Cultural Studies Association, and the American Sociological Association. I am of course grateful for all the work of my editor at SUNY Press, Andrew Kenyon, and to the anonymous reviewers who offered powerful guidance at a key stage in the development of this manuscript. I am very grateful for my brothers Peter and Paul, who will never really understand any of this stuff but I love them anyway. And most importantly, I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to my wife Tomoko, and to my son Kai, nearing his second year. Kai’s ruthless criticism of everything existing inspires us all, and probably delayed this publication by at least a year.
Included in this manuscript are excerpts drawn from the following previously published works: “The Government of Intimacy: Satiation, Intensification, and the Space of Emotional Reciprocity,” Rethinking Marxism 24, no. 4 (Oct. 2012); “Happiness and the Program of Neoliberal Governmentality,” Subjectivity 4, no. 4 (Dec. 2011); “Psychological Life as Enterprise: Social Practice and the Government of Neoliberal Interiority,” Journal of the History of Human Sciences 24, no. 3 (July 2011); “Governmentality, Temporality, and Practice: From the Individualization of Risk to the ‘Contradictory Movements of the Soul,’ ” Time and Society 18, no. 1 (March 2009); “The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality: Temporality and Ethical Substance in the Tale of Two Dads,” Foucault Studies 6 (Feb. 2009); “Governmentality and Lifestyle Studies,” Sociology Compass 1, no. 1 (July 2007); “The Perilous Freedoms of Consumption: Toward a Theory of the Conduct of Consumer Conduct,” Journal for Cultural Research 10, no. 4 (Oct. 2006).
Introduction
The New Happiness
You get natural bursts of happiness throughout the day and these moments of energy you can spend on the job, the spouse, and other areas you care about. That’s right! Happiness is liquid, in the same way that monetary instruments such as stocks are liquid. Humans are built with emotional systems that include happiness, and that happiness is intended to be spent. It is a type of emotional currency that can be spent, like money, on the outcome in life you truly value, such as your health, your relationships and success at work.
—Robert Biswas-Diener
These words are taken from a manual on positive psychology titled Practicing Positive Psychology Coaching; Assessment, Activities and Strategies for Success , authored by Robert Biswas-Diener. It describes an emotion, happiness, in a way that is entirely novel in the history of statements on this topic. Happiness, for this author as for the many others whose works compose what I term the new discourse on happiness, is not a state of being nor a relation sustained responsibly with others, but a life resource whose potential resides at the disposal of a sovereign, enterprising, self-interested actor. Through the lens of this new discourse, life is viewed as a dynamic field of potentials and opportunities, and happiness is presented both as a goal and a “monetary instrument,” realized through a strategic program of emotional well-being. In other words, the new discourse on happiness proposes a certain transformation in one’s relation to the world and to oneself: as one incorporates the new program into one’s outlook, one abandons the world of static states and stable ontologies for one of dynamic possibilities, risks and open horizons. It is this transformation that the present study seeks to investigate.
Happiness, once an intangible quality of individual temperament, has today emerged as an object of analytic clarity, measurable and actionable as never before. In the wake of this new object, a discourse on happiness has taken shape across a range of professional fields centered on the problematics of human government: in economics, business management, organizational theory, marketing, and public policy, happiness is a thing with distinct contours and a precise internal mechanism, and thus a point of application for programs and policies aimed at the optimization, coordination and integration of human behaviors (Layard 2005, Ben-Shahar 2007). Today it is not unrealistic to speak of a “technology of happiness” in human resource management, education, business and executive leadership, in family and marriage therapy, in career coaching, physical fitness, and in all facets of personal and organizational life. (Hamburg-Coplan 2009) And at the vanguard of this new discourse is an influential movement in contemporary psychology directed at the study and production of what it considers optimal emotional states—a “positive psychology” whose influence is felt across a plethora of institutional and cultural settings. Through the new discourse on happiness, individuals are invited to assess and transform their respective levels of well-being as a life opportunity. And this process, it will be here argued, is principally described as one of subtraction: it involves a peeling back or stripping away from our private and interpersonal lives of the dead weight of habit, negativity, routine, and a sense of obligation to others, so that we might liberate the vital drives and forward thrust that constitute emotional existence itself—a task open to anyone with the capacity to weave the elementary lessons of popular psychology into the warp and woof of their daily round.
Of course, none of this is entirely new: human civilizations have always assumed that different kinds of lives could be compared by the relative measures of happiness they yield, and in different ways have prescribed conducts, truths, loyalties, or salvations more likely to render states of well-being. Yet what sets the present concern with happiness off from its historical predecessors is its reduction of happiness to a purely plasti