Happiness as Enterprise

An Essay on Neoliberal Life

Sam Binkley

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438449852
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

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.

Part I

The Hinge of Power

1

To Govern Happily

Who is the new subject of happiness? Like other psychological personages, the happy subject is one for whom emotional well-being provides a category of identity, a biographical yardstick by which the passing of life is registered and interpreted. Indeed, such is the case for any member of that genus we know as psychological subjects. But the happy person is of a fundamentally different kind than the lunatic, neurotic, depressive, hysteric, and the paranoid—characters whose identities and life trajectories can be read in terms of the manifestations of their unique psychological anomalies. Such figures compose the teratology of what Foucault called the psy-disciplines—that network of asylums, specialists, and discourses that have, since the eighteenth century, served to consolidate formations of social power by maintaining a permanent externality to the normatively ordered population, one distinguished by unique qualitative distinctions, as the normal is from the abnormal. The subject of happiness is marked less by a state of exteriority than by a satiation and permeation of the interior of the normal population itself. As such, the notion of happiness draws on a certain egalitarianism characteristic of the enlightened West: as an expression of the psychobiological dynamic of human life itself, happiness is not an affliction or a deformity confined to the few, but is instead a future, a potential for the full development of a vital capacity shared by anyone and everyone. Indeed, the technology of happiness is best not practiced by the clinically depressed, deranged, or other persons marked for psychological marginalia (such individuals are referred back to the old disciplinary apparatus, which stands patiently on the sidelines for this purpose). Happiness is for the average, the common, the unafflicted—those who simply want more out of life.

The problem of happiness, therefore, is the perfect mechanism for inducing everyone into the psychological fold. It is the effect of a new scientific regard for emotional well-being understood less as a property of intrapsychic than of biological existence, one whose past owes more to genetic inheritance and neurochemistry than to the psychological imprint left by significant others, repressed in childhood memory. And it is by this token that happiness is held up as a universally shared propensity, not just of the psychological, but of the biological subject. Happiness is, in a sense, the democratization of psychological life—one need no longer be sick to be psychological—though this is a form of democratization that brings with it many concealed and coercive effects. Anyone who falls short of the full realization of their happiness potential, happiness experts argue, has betrayed his or her own most implicitly human capacities. Not just unhappiness, but the failure to be as happy as possible, is inexcusable. Such is the blackmail of happiness: to choose not to be happy is to choose against oneself and against the mandate of biological life, what one is and what one might become, which is an unthinkable choice (one only possible for those afflicted, not necessarily with depression, but with the malaise of everyday pessimism). Thus, the effects of happiness extend far beyond the traditional domains of the therapist and the psychiatrist, wardens of those subjects whose states of compromised mental health, contorted by disease and maldevelopment, have long held the clinical gaze of the hospital and the asylum. Happiness is the problem for people who don’t have a problem: it operates not as an abnormality one discovers within oneself through techniques of introspection and self-assessment in the closed spaces of clinics and asylums, but as a potential to be exercised in the open spaces and otherwise healthy moments of everyday life. Since the subject’s encounter with happiness is confined to its own immediate and variable experience of everyday well-being (which is, of course, readily transparent to every psychological subject on a moment-to-moment basis), the problem of happiness speaks to the forward thrust of life itself, and to the subject’s vitality and ultimate capacity for a richer, fuller, happier life. To seek after happiness is to empower oneself, in the sense that Barbara Cruikshank uses the term to signify a new technology of government and a mode of subjection that is at once voluntary and coercive: “The will to empower ourselves and others” writes Cruikshank “has spread across academic disciplines, social services, neighborhood agencies, social movements, and political groups, forging new relationships of power alongside new conceptualizations of power” (Cruikshank 1999, 72).

As such, happiness de-spatializes the closed categories of the psychological matrix: one can be happy (or not), not only in the hospital or the asylum, but at home, at work, in the mall, and not only in profound moments of self-realization, but in mundane practices of everyday existence. And this de-spatialization is accomplished through a leveling of the hierarchical ordering of the discourses of psychology itself, a blurring of expertise and laity, projecting a therapeutic endeavor that reaches to the remotest areas of the population and personal life. Just as anyone, the healthy and the sick, can be happy, so anyone, from the trained psychologist to the blogger to the self-schooled life coach can pronounce on happiness and on the methods best applicable to its realization. But most importantly, within the discourse on happiness, de-spatialization, democratization, and empowerment occur through a unique temporalization of the problem of psychological health itself. The uncertain status of happiness appeals to the unfolding dynamic of a vital process, grafting itself onto the time of our life trajectories and everyday conducts, fusing with the forward thrust of our life energies, charting a future, a hope, a potentiality, and a horizon of endlessly optimizing capacities and endlessly enriching experiences. This is not the temporality of the psychotherapist or the analyst, who searches the past for the buried causes of present dilemmas and prescribes a cure as the fixed aim of treatment. It is a temporality that looks to an open future of ongoing possibilities, that strategizes and seeks opportunities for ever greater utility and higher emotional returns on life’s investments. Today’s happiness is the temporality of enterprise.

To ask oneself if one is happy (as citizens of liberal democratic societies inevitably do, and do so repeatedly) is to ask if one is happy yet. It is to render life accessible to a set of quantifiable measures (How happy am I?), whose maximization is purely a problem of the successful management of this-worldly circumstances (How can I make myself happier?), and which might become better managed in the future (When will I be more happy?). Happiness asks us to train our eyes on a horizon of possibility and to pose the problem of our lives and our identities within an engineered trajectory of measurable risk and uncertainty, a cost-benefit analysis whose unfolding is directed by our own competencies, capacities, resources, and choices, leading to the uncertain realization of our potential for happiness. Happiness reflects a “technicization” of well-being, to be sure, but it is the most satiating kind of technicization, one that operates entirely without technocrats, for it is the individual himself who is the CEO of his own happiness. In this way, happiness reconstitutes identity and emotional well-being as a problem, not of a search for origins, but of environmental resources, opportunities, and enterprises confronted in the here and now of personal life. Moreover, happiness, as life lived to the fullest, applies a maximizing logic to those vital forces that define the very dynamism of our biological existence. Happiness is what we experience when our life forces are fully activated—to deny happiness is to deny what we are as living entities. For this reason, I will argue, the new discourse on happiness effects an intensification of the apparatus of the psy-disciplines, a shedding of its heavy institutional form enabling a penetration of power that goes beyond our bodies and behaviors, to touch on our very potentialities, futures, and temporalities as subjects.

Happiness as Potentiality

Empirically, it is possible to speak of the new discourse on happiness on a number of levels, not all of which cohere into a single genre. This new discourse is singularly interdisciplinary, spanning scientific, economic, policy, journalistic, and popular cultural genres, all of which exert a combined influence on lay and popular understandings that have become the stuff not only of business theory and self-help wisdom, but daytime talk shows, cable TV programs, and a burgeoning therapeutic cottage industry and subculture. Typically, the new happiness discourse espouses a view of emotional life filtered through the lens of economic thought, as in the influential works of Richard Layard, whose colorful global surveys of the happiness levels of countries across the world pique the curiosity of the most casual reader (Layard 2005). Indeed, Layard’s findings have proven influential, not only to a lay readership, but at the highest levels of government in some countries, influencing policy discussions in Britain, the United States, and Australia.

More precisely, it is a specific and unique formation of economic thought that inscribes the discourse on happiness with its distinctive logic, and gives it its singular, penetrating character. This is a contemporary discourse on the economic that makes broad claims for the implicitly opportunistic character of social, personal, and emotional existence as a unique enterprise—a neoliberal thought that has, as discussed in the introduction to this study, become increasingly hegemonic in civic and public discourse, as well as private and interpersonal life, while an older tradition of economic and social thought rooted in Keynesian welfarism has waned in its influence. The story of this shift can be described: where once political and economic discourse projected an overarching faith in an implicit human collectivism and in the capacity of states to manage social provisioning, regulate markets, and collectivize social risks under economies centrally planned around the shared needs for trust, reciprocity, and mutuality, today it is the need to foster the freedom of economic actors from these collective forms, to incentivize enterprising conduct, and to responsibilize individual economic risk taking that forms the nexus of governmental policy (Harvey 2005). “Whereas under Keynesian welfarism,” writes Wendy Larner “the state provision of goods and services to a national population was understood as a means of ensuring social well-being, neo-liberalism is associated with the preference for a minimalist state. Markets are understood to be a better way of organizing economic activity because they are associated with competition, economic efficiency and choice” (Larner 2000, 5). Moreover, there is within the logic of neoliberal government a specific and operative incompleteness, the quality of a problem or a problematization that is central to its functioning, and crucial to the present analysis. To apprehend this quality, we must take up the logic of neoliberalism not just as one of government, but of governmentality in the full sense.

The governmentality approach applied to the practice of neoliberalism is one that cuts across distinctions between ideology and policy to uncover the political rationalities that operate within each field, and specifically the ways in which these rationalities translate into specific practices for the self-government of neoliberal subjects (Lerner 2000; Harvey 2005). Yet neoliberal governmentality should not be equated with either of its significant historical antecedents: classical liberalism and social welfarism. Where under classical liberal government the aim was to foster subjects capable of entering into relations of exchange, and the aim of social government was to create cohesion, integration, and social trust within a population subjected to the centrifugal effects of a capitalist restructuring, neoliberal government’s methodology is uniquely negative, seeking to dispel social dependencies in the hope of activating an agentive, entrepreneurial, and enterprising spirit among its subjects. In short, neoliberal governmentality seeks to replace the subjects of exchange, adjustment, and reciprocity with one of opportunity, enterprise, and calculative self-interest. Moreover, the apparatus by which this change is effected is uniquely minimal: without acting directly on subjects, neoliberal government seeks to incite a set of specific transformations through the intentional curtailing of the apparatus of government itself, thereby effecting an indirect manipulation of the background conditions for individual conduct. Neoliberal policies typically involve the restriction of state provisions through budgetary measures designed to give subjects no choice but to adopt enterprising methods, imposing a view of the social field etched in the image of a market abundant with resources, opportunities for mutually beneficial exchanges, and competitive advantage realizable through enterprises of calculation and investment. Incentivization, responsibilization, privatization, marketization, and “desolidarisation” (Hartmann and Honneth 2006, cited in McNay 2008)—all signify a process of induced vitality through the self-limitation of a government that operates only indirectly and at considerable distance from its intended objects. The effect is one of excitation and empowerment of subjects through the removal of the constraints imposed by hierarchical institutions, and the social commitments they claim to represent. Neoliberalism is, by this token, a quintessentially productive power; it “makes live” by drawing individuals into the competitive production and maximization of their own unique attributes.

In his lectures of 1978–79, The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault takes us some distance down this road through his analysis of neoliberal thought in the work of Friedrich Hayek and the Ordoliberals and also in the more recent writings of Gary Becker and the economists of the Chicago School (Foucault 2008). His survey was necessarily general, and his treatment of neoliberalism did not attain the richness of his earlier studies, remaining focused, as it did, on its intellectual vanguard without extending to the practical texts and minor authors through which a rationality of government is disseminated. Yet he exposed the dynamic of neoliberal thought, and pointed to the ways in which a rationality of neoliberal rule becomes possible. In his discussion of the German postwar liberalism of the Ordo School, for example, Foucault described how the challenge facing liberalism in the aftermath of World War II was not to carve out a space of freedom within an existing state, as it was for classical liberalism (Foucault 2008, 183–85). Neither was the task of neoliberalism to emancipate a generic propensity for free economic conduct, one viewed as natural to human social life. Instead, the task was to devise a state capable of creating, through its own programs and initiatives, the voluntaristic, entrepreneurial and self-responsible dispositions upon which market forms depend. In other words, freedom became, for neoliberals, a specific project of government. For the neoliberals, neither the market nor the competitive conducts upon which market rationality draws were sui generis features of social life; they had to be actively fostered through the interventions of a neoliberal state, whereby individuals were brought to cultivate an entrepreneurial style within their own modes of conduct.

From this perspective, neoliberalism was seen to invert problems long attended to by the agencies of Keysianism and the welfare state; against the Schumpeterian orthodoxy whereby monopolistic tendencies of capitalism were regarded as an intrinsic consequence of capitalism’s own economic logic, Ordo liberals considered barriers to individual competition to be a fundamentally social problem, open to forms of social intervention that target tendencies toward collectivism and interdependency by purposefully creating the background conditions that necessitate competitive conducts (Foucault 2008, 185). Blockages to economic activity originating in the social fabric could be disaggregated through programs of state intervention, aimed at suppressing collectivism and stimulating entrepreneurial, market behaviors. Practices of neoliberal governmentality extend these interventionist strategies into the social field, but also into the very domain of subjectivity itself, where, as Graham Burchell has put it: “Neo-liberalism seeks in its own ways the integration of the self-conduct of the governed into the practices of their government and the promotion of correspondingly appropriate forms of techniques of the self ” (Burchell 1996, 29–30).

Neoliberal governmentality thus defines a problem-space for distinct modes of experimentation and intervention, wherein society is undone, transformed in the image of the market, and what Burchell terms an “artificial competitive game” is imposed through the planned minimization of any collectivist alternative to individual competition. The net effect of this is the activation of a distinct range of human potentials and possibilities—the production of a certain neoliberal subjectivity (Burchell 1996, 27). Indeed, the worst consequence of the welfare state’s constraining of the possibilities for individual enterprise is its failure to enable the realization of vital potentials among those it governs—potentials for qualitative differentiation among a populace through the competitive pursuit of opportunities realizable in the terrain of the unfettered marketplace. But for the subject capable of extracting himself from such dependencies (and, conversely, of extracting such inclinations to dependency from himself), the reward comes with the freedom to undertake life as an enterprising endeavor, to take up his own self-cultivation as an enterprising program, and therefore to invest in himself as would an entrepreneur—on the basis of calculations of investment and return. This figure defines the utopian horizon of neoliberalism, one that Foucault uncovers in the economistic thought of American neoliberal thinkers and in the work of the Chicago School economists, for whom neoliberalism was not a simple economic theory, but embraced “a whole way of being and thinking” (Foucault 2008, 218). These proponents, Foucault argues, shared with Hayek the sense that liberalism lacked a utopian horizon such as that possessed by socialism, and that it must therefore be reconceived as a “general style of thought, analysis, and imagination,” with the enterprising subject at its core (Foucault 2008, 219).

Neoliberal governmentality, therefore, is a term for the problematization of the role of government in a society conceived on the model of market practice, and the reshaping of individual conduct in the image of economic enterprise. The curtailing of the involvement of the state in the lives of individuals has the specific effect of summoning them to take responsibility for their own well-being—an effect Mitchell Dean terms “reflexive government” or the “government of government” (Dean 1999). And most importantly, the government of government that constitutes the neoliberal program is one that directs the individual, through the curtailing of that apparatus of support enabled by the welfare state, to assume a specific responsibility for the government of herself. For this purpose, central to any apparatus of neoliberal governmentality are those languages or critical frameworks through which individuals reflect back upon themselves, assess themselves for their potentials and aptitudes for independent conduct, and work to optimize their freedom as self-responsible actors. The inscription of reflexive self-work as a task centered on the undoing, limiting, or destruction of an inherited dependency is a subjective competency that enables individuals to exercise their own capacity for autonomous action.

In this way, happiness is neoliberal. There is an underlying economic logic that runs through the government of happiness that resonates with the worldview of neoliberal economics and disseminates languages and frameworks mandating a program of reflexive self-government. This is a relation to the self centered on the stripping away of inherited interdependencies and embedded habits formed around mutuality and reciprocal obligation, and the excitation of a previously suppressed spirit for opportunistic action and entrepreneurship. The current discourse on happiness serves as such a framework through which individuals undertake to problematize aspects of their own conduct, to expunge inherited dependencies in order to optimize personal autonomy and a capacity for self-interested initiative. Dependence on the supervision of experts, the propensity to thoughtlessly adhere to institutional protocols, a tendency toward idleness or docility, reliance on habitual behaviors shaped in consort with patterned collective life, an overinvestment in the judgment of others, or a predisposition to conceive responsibility in collective terms—all are regarded as problematic and cumbersome, as a retardation of the spirit for life, and as a result of the overextension of some other vast regime of (welfarist, social) government, and therefore as an obstruction to the voluntaristic, self-interested, enterprising conduct that is the wellspring of (neoliberal) happiness itself. Indeed, the economism of happiness lies in the very negation of the dependent, constraining, and docile attitude that is the legacy of welfare. But if inflections of homo economicus lend an implicit coloring to the contemporary form of happiness, it is without a doubt the work of maverick psychologists and therapists that have shaped its visible, public profile.

With positive psychology, personal happiness has achieved the highest level of transparency and plasticity as an object of positive science, clinical intervention, and therapeutic manipulation (Gable and Haidt 2005). Following the publication in 2000 of Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, positive psychology has mushroomed into a multibillion dollar research field and influential self-help discourse, infusing the (detached) prefix “positive” to everything from couples therapy, education, and marketing to law enforcement and corrections. In each of these scenarios, the new “positive” psychology is registered as the active, agentive, and enterprising counterpart to what it considers traditional psychology, ensconced as it is in the negativity of the disease model, in endless reflection on past relations with others, and in all that makes life a scene of suffering. In the case of positive psychology life coaching, for example, the vocation of the psychotherapist, who mollifies sadness and suffering ...