Abstract
Sam Binkley’s timely book is a provocative, complex, but lucid application of the analytics of governmentality to the contemporary emergence of “happiness” as an individual and political pursuit. The tone of urgency with which the book delivers its arguments turns on what Binkley recognizes as an “intensification” of the discourse of happiness in recent times, a change in its form and technique that has resulted in an ever-tightening stranglehold on the conduct of our everyday lives. The main argument of the book is that the subjectivity cultivated in happiness discourse, particularly as it is articulated in the discipline of positive psychology, is precisely that inculcated under neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is here seen as the characteristic political-economic and social imaginary of our time, a form of governmentality that takes market relations as its model for social relations.
The book is one of the latest of several critical accounts of the “new” happiness movement that have come out of the social sciences and philosophy over the last 15 years. However, Binkley’s work is distinctive, and in my opinion, especially thought-provoking and effective in understanding on the one hand, its historical conditions of possibility, and on the other, its articulation in everyday subjectivity. Binkley draws chiefly on Foucault’s work on governmentality to read happiness discourse, but in doing so he also identifies a problem with governmentality studies that is also highly relevant to critical psychologists concerned with the psychologization of society. To properly interrogate happiness discourse, Binkley argues, Foucauldian analysis must engage with the messiness and polysemy of contemporary popular culture, in order to produce alternative critical accounts, “new forms of telling,” that can help to shift our everyday experience. As Pettit (2015) has recently remarked, the subjectifying effects of psychological discourse are often taken for granted by its critics, whereas some empirical-historical work suggests that the process is far more heterogeneous and ambivalent than some critical psychologists might assume. Binkley is similarly concerned that accounts of psychologization that are found in landmark works such as those of Nikolas Rose (1990), depict the process in overly deterministic, unmediated ways. In contrast, the book engages with the task of happiness as an everyday practical problem for people: something that requires effort, or “practice,” over time. The book’s focus on the temporal dimension of subjectification is critical to its account of happiness discourse as an intensification of neoliberal subjectivity, for it is in this discourse that we are taught that happiness is to be achieved through a reordering of time, a change in our relationship to time. In order to open up this kind of reading, Binkley brings Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus into productive engagement with Foucauldian thought.
Despite its brevity, the arguments are dense and historically and theoretically rich. Through analyses of discourse in a variety of sites, including popular articulations of positive psychology and the self-help genre, as well as a genealogy of the neoliberal subject, the book develops a characterization of the “new subject of happiness.” Neither sick nor abnormal, “happiness is the problem for people who don’t have a problem” (p. 18). It is the democratization of psychological health; happiness is a problem that can be worked on anywhere and everywhere, by anyone, and thus the knowledge by which to achieve it can be extended to everyone. Happiness is an uncertain state, something to be hoped for and strategized about—it involves an orientation to future possibilities that depend on one’s own competencies, cultivation of habits, and decisions. To maximize one’s chances for happiness, one shouldn’t waste time, nor pass over opportunities to improve oneself. This, Binkley argues, is also the enterprising subject of neoliberalism, under which happiness has come to mean what “one feels when one has acted on one’s own, in one’s own interest, at some risk and according to some calculus of probability—and succeeded” (p. 103). It is here that the focus on the temporality of subjectification is most helpful—Binkley writes of a lag or interval between political rationalities and their realization in individual subjectivities. This lag consists in the clash between the “habits of the happy” prescribed in happiness discourse and the obdurate and embodied habitus of our everyday proclivities towards unhealthiness or unhappiness, which are not instantaneously transformed, but must be gradually worked upon and changed. In this respect, to pursue happiness one must agentically “own” the discourse of happiness and freely become its subject. As Foucault demonstrated, this is also precisely the moment of one’s most complete subjectification. On the other hand, Binkley argues that, it is the time and work required to close this gap that also make the process of subjectification most ambivalent, uncertain, and prone to resistance. Here, the book offers an intriguing alternative to the temporal structure that happiness discourse attempts to impose. Citing Foucault’s studies of demonic possession and convulsion as forms of resistance to the sweeping Christianization of Europe in the 16th century, Binkley suggests that we may already be engaged in convulsive refusals of neoliberal time in our tendencies toward procrastination; when we delay, or actively refuse those pursuits that would lead to maximizing future material or psychological gains. The book invites us to imagine, if only in a very preliminary way, how rethinking our relationship to time can be a form of resistance. For busy post-Fordist laborers in the academy, where success and presumably, happiness, are so closely tied to the optimal use of time, this must surely strike close to the bone. On the question of producing “new forms of telling,” the book most definitely succeeds; it is an important intervention in the continued critique of the pursuit of happiness. Its accessibility to non-academics or those unfamiliar with Foucauldian thought, on the other hand, might be more limited.