The work of happiness: A response to De La Fabián and Stecher (2017)

As the author of a recent book (Binkley, 2014) that attempted to draw parallels between positive psychology, the contemporary “happiness movement,” and neoliberal capitalism, it was with great interest that I read Rodrigo De La Fabián and Antonio Stecher’s recent article, “Positive Psychology’s Promise of Happiness: A New Form of Human Capital in Contemporary Neoliberal Governmentality” (2017) in a past issue of Theory & Psychology. What’s more, I was intrigued by the crucial place allotted to my own book in this article, which appears throughout the study as a guide and a benchmark against which the authors’ own arguments unfold, if only by way of a critical response to what the authors allege to be key oversights contained within my book.

At first blush, our projects seem to have much in common, most apparently, a concern with the ways in which positive psychology, through its exhortation to the personal cultivation of happiness, opens a window on new subjectivities associated with neoliberal capitalism. Both works converge on the notion that the contemporary psychological focus on happiness as a personal accomplishment extends certain individualistic faiths central to capitalist ideology itself. Moreover, for both of us, the relation between happiness and capitalism is not only a coincidence of ideological themes, but one that extends to the practical rationalities, or the everyday ways of doing things prescribed by both neoliberal capitalism and the program of happiness optimization. Drawing on Foucault’s writings on neoliberalism and on recent developments in the field of governmentality studies, both studies derive from popular positive psychology an inducement to self-reliance and a call to optimize one’s own happiness potentials that has a very contemporary resonance. The psychological individual, like the contemporary corporation, is urged to be opportunistic and enterprising, an entrepreneur of themselves in a manner that resonates with the economic and political discourse of neoliberalism. Happiness, by this token, entails an effect of what Foucault called neoliberal governmentality, or more precisely, of neoliberal subjectification—the coaxing of individuals into a remaking of themselves as self-interested, market-driven actors through a reflexive taking stock of one’s own assets and capacities (Foucault, 2008).

Like my own book, the authors of this interesting article consider the ways in which positive psychology refigures emotional life as a resource, or a form of capital which is realized through self-directed psychological techniques which include positivity exercises, gratitude lists, intentional acts of generosity, and so on. But where we differ is in our understanding of the specific kind of work happiness involves. To argue that the work of making oneself happier is fundamentally neoliberal is to insist that this effort is more than capitalist labor in the traditional Weberian or Protestant sense of rational planning and deferred gratification. For happiness to be neoliberal it must transcend the old categories of effort and reward, production and consumption that characterized traditional forms of work associated with industrial capitalism. For the traditional laborer under a Fordist regime of production, there is a separation between effort and its rewards: happiness is experienced in the private realm of leisure, after the fulfillment of one’s public responsibilities, and operates as an incentive for the renunciations required under a capitalistic regime of control. Under more flexible and satiating neoliberal regimes, where control more deeply penetrates personal and private life and workers effectively become their own bosses, there are no renunciations per se, and workers are invited to seek out and optimize every variety of personal capacity they might identify within themselves, including happiness itself. Neoliberalism collapses the distinction between public and private selves, and by doing so draws more personal attributes and qualities into the marketplace, as forms of human capital. For the work of positive psychology to be neoliberal, De La Fabián and Stecher argue, happiness must not follow from a work regime as a deferred reward: it must precede and infuse work itself—including the work one performs on oneself as one seeks to make oneself happier.

Does Happiness as Enterprise meet this bill? The argument of my book, very briefly, describes positive psychology’s capitalization of happiness as largely a cognitive undertaking. It involves the cultivation of uniquely opportunistic, optimistic cognitive patterns from which, it is alleged, happiness results. In this way, positive psychology takes a page directly from Norman Vincent Peale (1952; though positive psychologists themselves would emphatically deny this): happiness derives from thinking positively about the world, though these thoughts do not necessarily occur by themselves, and must be stimulated by containing and suppressing opposing patterns of negative thinking. To do this we must counter a certain downward, pessimistic spiral that is hardwired into our everyday affective patterns, and which certain cultures and institutions (traditional psychotherapy, for one) tend to encourage. We must train ourselves to see the world through the lens of a certain enterprising optimism, in which environments, objects, and circumstances are read as opportunities and possibilities, as an unfolding horizon of potential happinesses. Once we have learned to bring about this cognitive shift, happiness will follow, and once it does, we will feel the flush of enthusiasm which will drive us to higher levels of achievement, which will in fact make our circumstances more bountiful and rewarding, which will in turn make us happier, thereby stimulating higher levels of productivity and enterprise, and improved circumstances, and so on. In discussions of the book followings its publication, the phrase “looped resourcing” emerged to describe this process, but the phrase itself did not make its way into the book.

As I interpret it, positive psychology does entail a kind of work: a labor of transformation practiced on a deeply habitualized pattern of pessimism and negativity. Indeed, this tendency, while hardwired, is also historical: it is a residue left from a previous moment of social and economic life, derived from neoliberalism’s indelible nemesis: the welfare state. Welfarism, as I call it, is a way of being that stresses repeated habit, trust in institutions, dependence on others, and the programmed shrinking of the very horizons of enterprise and opportunity that neoliberalism seeks to expand. Therefore, when it comes to describing how positive psychology, as a mode of neoliberal governmentality, induces subjects to transform themselves, it is important to consider how the happy subject is brought to undo, transform, and negate that obstruction inherited from the welfare state—“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” (Binkley, 2014, p. 2). I describe this process as a kind of labor, a work one performs on oneself.

Happiness as Enterprise is treated by De La Fabián and Stecher with thoughtfulness and insight, its critical horizons expanded through careful elaboration and nuanced reflection on some of its limitations and failures. Yet the authors allege that, in its pages, the work of making oneself happy remains wedded to the traditional utilitarian temporality of work that belongs to another rationality of capitalist labor and another rationality of self-government, one that derives from industrial or Fordist capitalism, with its roots, as Max Weber (1930) tells us, in the Protestant inclination to postpone gratification until work is done. Or as our authors put it: “Binkley still operates with a classic Calvinistic conception of work” (De La Fabián & Stecher, 2017, p. 608), in which hard work and deferred pleasure confirm that differentiation between effort and happiness that positive psychology sought to displace. There is a sense in which this charge is quite true: while my focus is on positive psychology as a distinctly neoliberal rationality, with a focus on the development of the workers’ intrinsic capacities, my consideration of the work of happiness preserves, on some level, a sense of the meaning of work itself as an activity or a practice that is embedded within a sense of futurity, a temporality of unfolding potentiality and the need to negate, or transform some obdurate, resistant matter (in this case, an embodied emotional/cognitive habit). The authors are correct to point out that this work motif runs up against positive psychology’s celebratory refusal of deferred pleasure and the “negativity” of traditional psychology. But I don’t see that this futurity necessarily leads to the cul-de-sac of Calvinist labor, as the authors contend. Instead, I think the tension between the celebratory emergence of spontaneous happiness operates in a certain tension with the work motif of the program of positive psychology, and it is this paradox that I try to engage in my book.

De La Fabián and Stecher (2017) undertake a careful reconstruction of Martin Seligman’s critique of traditional psychotherapies, which he characterizes as “fighting the mountain,” the dismal work of returning to one’s past in order to uncover the roots of trauma, misery, and unhappiness. Insisting on the immanence of existing happiness as an alternative to the infinitely postponed happiness of traditional therapy, positive psychology invites us to transcend traditional rationalities of work. Or, as our authors put it: “positive psychology teaches different techniques that do not seek to ‘fight against’ negative past experiences, but to fight against the idea that there is something we have to fight against” (De La Fabián & Stecher, 2017, p. 613). This makes a lot of sense, and it well captures positive psychology’s antipathy toward the longue durée of traditional psychotherapeutic labor. But here is the ambivalence that positive psychology seeks to negotiate: the subject is both already happy, more happy than they realize, but also in some crucial way failing to properly realize how happy they are, and thus desiring greater happiness, and willing to undergo a regime of self-modification to achieve it—an ambivalence I tried to describe in a section devoted to “flow,” as a “temporality within a temporality,” or the “re-timing of time.” In place of the Calvinist/neoliberal dichotomy, I would suggest that positive psychology can be productively read for its articulation of a productive ambivalence between the two.

Nonetheless, whether true or not, the charge of an implicit Calvinism is a useful one as far as it allows us to clarify precisely what we mean by psychological work in neoliberal times. One of the aims which both works seek to address is the need to consider psychological programs, and self-help regimes in particular, as practical undertakings, as rationalities of conduct which are not simply reducible to their stated ideological goals. If modern subjectivity is an increasingly reflexive endeavor, and if popular psychologies are more and more part of the way subjectivity is formed in late modernity, the problem of psychological identity as a practice would seem quite relevant to students of psychological cultures. But if we dispense entirely with the view of psychological self-formation as a labor of production and consumption, or the self-helping subject as a person working to change themselves in the hope of one day living a better life, what’s left of this practice perspective on popular psychology? To me this is a very important question. This is precisely the question to which Happiness as Enterprise is directed, and it is the problem which the embrace of the labor motif was meant to resolve. By considering the effort, the work that goes into neoliberal self-fashioning, and by highlighting the obdurate, resistant character of the Welfarist habitus upon which this labor is applied, it is possible to escape what I consider to be a determinism that operates in much of our scholarship on culture and psychology, and in particular in much governmentality scholarship (Dean, 1999; Rose, 1999). Implied in research on governmentality is a deep strain of textual reductionism, in which the shaping of neoliberal subjects is presumed to flow directly from neoliberal policy discourses to the hearts and souls of neoliberal subjects themselves. Against this tendency, I attempted to highlight the everyday mediations, the efforts, temporalities, the agencies, and the forms of work involved in psychological self-work as an active laboring process. But can this be done without betraying the very character of neoliberalism, by invoking a rationality of work that is alien to neoliberalism itself?

De La Fabián and Stetcher’s (2017) criticism suggests that it cannot. In place of my account of the (Calvinist) negativity of work focused on the negation of vestiges of Welfarism lodged in individual habits, the authors argue that positive psychology asks its subjects not to anticipate greater happiness as a consequence of their work but to acknowledge and to celebrate existing happiness already operative in the present: “The first task for someone who wants to work on oneself in order to be subjectified by positive psychology would not be to start producing happiness, but to recognise the internal happiness one already has” (De La Fabián & Stecher, 2017, p. 602). This is true. But if happiness is rooted in our habits of thinking (as even Peale would acknowledge, and as positive psychologists well understand), then the work of recognizing the “internal happiness one already has” is not like flipping a switch. It is a task to which one applies oneself in the hope of a gradual transformation of our habits. It takes time, effort, and only emerges in an anticipated and hoped-for future. Any account of how the program of happiness functions to shape people’s lives, particularly one that hopes to escape deterministic assumptions and to address the textured, everyday practices by which this program is pursued by socially embedded subjects, has to engage with some notion of work, on some level. The trick, then, is not to choose one’s work paradigm, Calvinist or neoliberal, but to look for the ways in which the two are folded into each other, and through this folding to consider how we are induced to work to produce something that we already have: ourselves. It is my sense that there is still much valuable work to be done in examining the everyday rationalities by which the work of psychological self-production is undertaken.