Positive psychology and the enhancement of happiness: A reply to Binkley (2018)

Abstract

The following is a reply to Sam Binkley’s (2018) critical commentary, “The Work of Happiness: A Response to De La Fabián and Stecher (2017)”. In our paper, “Positive Psychology’s Promise of Happiness: A New Form of Human Capital in Contemporary Neoliberal Governmentality” (De La Fabián & Stecher, 2017), we showed that the kind of transformative work on oneself fostered by positive psychology should be understood as a transcendence of the Calvinist work formula of deferred pleasure. Binkley argues that this is a reductionist hypothesis, which risks turning into a deterministic conception of the processes of subjectivation. We argue that while we share this concern, we do not believe that the Calvinist formula is the right one to call upon to avoid this problem. Our main hypothesis is that positive psychology has created a new game of truth, in which the normative frame of justification that used to give sense to any kind of self-transformative task has been radically changed.

Keywords

happiness human enhancement neoliberal governmentality positive psychology work on oneself

Lately, many authors have shown the central role that the “psy” knowledges have played in the contemporary dissemination and cultural legitimation of neoliberal rationality and entrepreneurial subjectivity (Cabanas, 2016; De Vos, 2013; Illouz, 2008; Papalini, 2015; Rose, 1998, 2005; Sugarman, 2015). Within this larger context, our work has a narrower research focus in seeking to analyze the impact of the recent emergence of positive psychology on contemporary technologies of governing others and oneself (Binkley, 2011, 2014; De La Fabián & Stecher, 2013, 2017; Stecher & De La Fabián, 2017).

Since the late 1990s, this sub-discipline has had a growing presence both in academic and professional circles as well as among the general public. Viewed from the analytics of governmentality, we can say that the cultivation of the happy life project fostered by positive psychology is a process of self-transformation that aligns with the neoliberal normative horizon of entrepreneurial subjectivity.

In this context, our dialogue with Sam Binkley began with a paper (De La Fabián & Stecher, 2017) in which we critically analyzed Binkley’s brilliant book, Happiness as Enterprise: An Essay on Neoliberal Life (2014). Our debate continues with Binkley’s (2018) response to our paper, published in this issue of Theory & Psychology. In what follows, we shall comment on Binkley’s response. We seek to emphasize what we consider to be some of the major innovations that positive psychology has contributed to neoliberal governmentality, which in our opinion Binkley’s work does not do full justice to.

Going straight to the point, our argument is about the different ways in which we and Binkley understand the work on oneself that positive psychology enables. For us, its main characteristic is that it problematizes the irreconcilable subjective division of classical Calvinism between production—associated with sacrifice and effort as the actual experience of work— and consumption, expressed in pleasure and happiness as the possible future state that is work’s reward. In other words, positive psychology would foster affirmatives technologies of the self. Rather than negating or “fighting against” hardwired personal characteristics, such technologies seek to mitigate them by enhancing the capital of happiness that we are supposed to possess already. In this sense, happiness is no longer only a future reward for present effort, but also the affective disposition required to start working to become even happier.

Binkley claims to be in partial agreement with this hypothesis. He recognizes that somehow positive psychology’s discourse entails a “celebratory refusal of deferred pleasure and the ‘negativity’ of traditional psychology” (2018, p. 408). Nevertheless, he argues, like any project of self-transformation it happens “in time,” and therefore is not like “flipping a switch” but must have a future orientation, a telos that is experienced by the subject as a gap between who she is, and who she ought to become. In other words, for Binkley, the telos would be becoming a fully entrepreneurial subjectivity, which implies working on oneself to dispense with old “welfarist habits,” such as institutional trust, interpersonal dependency, etc. This distance between the welfarist and the entrepreneurial self operates as an obdurate substance that the subject must laboriously transform in trying to reach her telos. So, Binkley claims that rather than choosing between these conceptions of work—the neoliberal or the Calvinist—positive psychology can be characterized as a “productive ambivalence”: “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” (2018, p. 408).

To reply to the important questions raised by Binkley we will begin by rebuilding the core of our argument, putting special emphasis on the distinction between the Calvinistic notion of work on oneself and contemporary technologies of self-enhancement as a new rationality for neoliberal governmentality.

From Calvinistic work on oneself to technologies of self-enhancement

For enhancement we understand the sort of technologies of the self that pursue a telos of radical transformation, meaning that they have moved away from the traditional axis of abnormality and normality to one of normality and extraordinariness. To achieve this, as Nikolas Rose (2007) points out, enhancement technologies seek to manipulate the normative limitations in which present life takes place. For example, a person wanting to develop more muscles can go to the gym and work hard to achieve that goal. This kind of traditional work on oneself supposes at least two things: first, that there is a strict correlation between present effort and future results, and second that any “productive” work must respect certain unchosen normative parameters, such as a specific relationship between work, rest, and energy supplies. All these assumptions, however, must be reconsidered if the subject decides to take anabolic steroids—the relationship between effort and results is disrupted and the drug alters the normative parameters in which actual life takes place—enabling the exerciser to dream of a muscular future without precedent.

In other words, in the traditional Calvinistic example, the subject has to “fight against” much personal and physical resistance, and it is the quality and quantity of these efforts that determines the results. In the second example, by contrast, the subject’s present existence becomes only a strategic capital, fully available to be transformed into something radically different, and it is the recognition of this capital that opens the possibility for the subject to transform herself in a radical way. So, we are no longer dealing with the kind of work that goes “against” something, but rather with work that goes “through” something, seeking to unleash the unimaginable ontological possibilities that our present existence harbors. Therefore, the passage from work to enhancement supposes a process in which all kind of determinisms—whether of the body or personality—are dematerialized and transformed into a present capital that opens the possibility of an extraordinary future.

Positive Psychology as a technology of self-enhancement

it is not really work that positive psychology enables… but enhancement, that is the affirmative process of increasing a positive ethical substance. (De La Fabián & Stecher, 2017, p. 616)

Our hypothesis is that positive psychology’s discourse shares the same onto-ethical fiction—who we are and who we can become—with the technologies of enhancement.

As we showed in our paper, positive psychology is clearly situated on the normal/extraordinary axis. It does not address someone who lacks health, promising that she will return to normality. On the contrary, positive psychology hails individuals that already have an initial capital of happiness and are willing to enhance it. We argue that positive psychology addresses a first world individual, someone who “has made it.”

Regarding the kind of work on oneself encouraged by positive psychology (Seligman, 2002), we divided our analysis into three different temporal perspectives. To deal with past and future experiences, it offers a set of practical exercises which seek to reduce them to the status of cognitive interpretations that are fully available for transformation into more positive and enjoyable ones. Past child traumas or anxieties about the future are dematerialized, ceasing to be external parameters for the project of self-transformation. Again, following Seligman (2002), we showed that the only kind of work on oneself that is truly transformative—in the view of positive psychology—happens when the subject is fully absorbed in the present, when she is no longer working to escape from the ghosts of the past, nor planning to avoid future dangers, but just because she wants to be and cannot stop being so absorbed. This is the “flowing” state of mind in which you start enjoying your work. In fact, Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) distinguish “pleasure” from “enjoyment.” The former happens within the “comfort zone” and is a conservative emotion, while the latter is the result of going beyond the “comfort zone,” transcending the preset normative parameters of one’s present life, being the emotional experience of a process of self-transformation. Moreover, these authors say that pleasure only produces episodic wellness, while enjoyment entails lasting happiness.

Therefore, our hypothesis is that the work on oneself enabled by positive psychology supposes these two moments: first, the negative one, which seeks to dematerialize the past and the future and to create an absolute present. In our original paper (De La Fabián & Stecher, 2017), we argue that this is a very specific kind of negativity which has to be distinguished from the Calvinist effort of “fighting against” something. It is a negation that negates the negativity of the object, that does not work against its obduracy, but through it, negating its resistance. Second, once this process of dematerialization is complete, the task of self-enhancement can begin. Only a happy worker, someone who is not spooked by the past or the future, can be fully absorbed by the task, flow with it, and become happier without effort.

Effort, enjoyment, and the new temporality at work

Now that we have rebuilt the core of our argument, we would like to address the highly relevant questions raised by Binkley’s (2018) response. If the transformative process happens only when the subject is fully absorbed by the present, what happens with those personality traits that come from the past and with the subject’s future orientation? How are we going to understand its temporality to avoid “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” (pp. 408–409), critiqued by Binkley (2018) as a major problem in some contemporary analyses of neoliberal governmentality?

In the first place, we think that between positive psychology’s discourse and the real practices it enables, there is an initial “on–off switch.” Any process of subjectification (Papalini, Córdoba, & Marengo, 2012; Rose, 1998) implies a power frame that precedes and restrains the agency of the subject—the process of subjection—and the active ways by which individuals collaborate in the process of self-transformation—the process of subjectivation. As Foucault (1982) says, power relationships presuppose that individuals could refuse them. This means, in De La Boétie’s terms (1548/2015), that there is no subjection without an amount of “voluntary servitude,” without a certain collaboration of the individual through the process of subjectivation. We identified this binary moment, following Althusser (1970/2014), with the acceptance or refusal of an initial interpellation: either you have, or you have not the capital of happiness that allows you to play the game.

Moreover, it is important to consider that positive psychology hails individuals whose relationship to temporality, sense of work, and to the disjunction between production and consumption, has been developed within a neoliberal rationality. Therefore, we should not consider positive psychology’s governing strategy as a new matrix of intelligibility that will have to “fight against” an old one. To a certain extent, its contemporary hegemony and legitimacy is already a sign of this secret connivance between positive psychology’s power frame and the subjects that accept to “play the game.”

In the second place, regarding work on oneself, Binkley (2018) calls this very particular relationship between actual and future happiness “looped resourcing,” which can be expressed as follows: only if you are happy today, can you be happier tomorrow. Nevertheless, for Binkley, the promised future entrepreneurial happiness infiltrates the present moment of production in two ways: as something that the subject lacks and must work hard to get, and as a justificatory frame that gives sense to present efforts. In other words, future not-yet-attained happiness solidifies the substance to be worked upon. By contrast, if the work on oneself is fully centered in the present, the future telos no longer infuses the actual moment of production, dematerializing the object, and following Binkley, preventing us from understanding the temporality and sense of concrete processes of self-transformation. From our point of view, these are the main reasons why Binkley stays attached to the “deferred pleasure” formula.

Even if we completely agree with his concerns about sense and temporality in self-transformative tasks, we do not think that the Calvinist formula is the one to call upon to avoid those problems. In fact, even though the work of dematerialization of the past and the future could be considered tough, it is an effort that seeks to avoid effort, or to introduce a discontinuity between the effort and the results. Second, the effort is no longer a “fight against” something obdurate. On the contrary, it is a process in which the substance to be worked on is dematerialized, potentially triggering its ontological possibilities. So, even though the effort happens in time and is still oriented to the future, it does not need nor want to anticipate it. Third, the effort does not coincide with the productive moment, which happens when the worker flows. This means that for positive psychology the sense of work on oneself is no longer an extrinsic future reward, such as becoming happier, but an intrinsic one that is down to the simple joy of working: “We are now at the point where the biggest gains will come from systematically improving intrinsic rewards making the work itself more fulfilling and energizing so that workers don’t want to leave it” (Thomson, 2000, p. 9).

Does this mean that someone seeking to enhance happiness cannot dream of a better and happier future? Of course not: he can dream about it, only not while he works, for if he does so he will stop flowing and become less happy.

Conclusion

Our main hypothesis is that positive psychology has created a new game of truth, in which the normative frame of justification that used to give sense to any kind of self-transformative task has been radically changed. More than just a new psychological theory focusing on happiness and positive emotions—or just a new technology of the self that seeks to transform negative cognitive patterns—positive psychology could be considered a new radical way of problematizing human life.

Besides, as we said above, we think that its contemporary popularity is a sign of some relevant subjective transformations which make people sensitive to its interpellation. In other words, even though we are aware that the practices of subjectivation are never the automatic and linear effect of hegemonic power frames, we contend that an analysis of positive psychology’s discourse allows us to understand some major transformations in contemporary subjectivity.

What we can know from an analysis like the above is that an individual who accepts to “play the game” of positive psychology shares an initial congruity with it. So, we do know something about its subjectivity. But, on the other hand, what we cannot know or anticipate in any way, are the productive effects—convergences, divergences, “hybridations”—of everyday processes of subjectivation enabled by positive psychology in different situated contexts.

Finally, we believe that this dialogue with Professor Binkley shows that there is still much work to do to understand the role played by “psy” knowledges and technologies in the program of neoliberal governmentality, and in the production of this new regimen of subjectification based on the “onto-ethical fiction” of the happy, enhanced, and entrepreneurial self.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Rodrigo De La Fabián is a psychologist, psychoanalyst, and doctor in Fundamental Psychopathology and Psychoanalysis, Université Paris-Diderot, France and Associate Professor, Faculty of Psychology, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago-Chile. His main research fields are: the ethical-political dimensions of the psychoanalytical clinic; new subjectivities and neoliberal governmentality.

Antonio Stecher is a psychologist and doctor in Social Psychology, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain and Associate Professor, Faculty of Psychology, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile. His main research fields are: work transformations and labor subjectivities in the new capitalism; “psy” knowledge, critical theory and subjectivation processes.

References

Althusser

(2014). On the reproduction of capitalism: Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. London, UK: Verso. (Original work published 1970)

Binkley

(2011). Happiness, positive psychology and the program of neoliberal governmentality. Subjectivity, 4(4), 371–394.

Binkley

(2014). Happiness as enterprise: An essay on neoliberal life. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Binkley

(2018). The work of happiness: A response to De La Fabián and Stecher (2017). Theory & Psychology, 28, 405–410. doi: 10.1177/0959354318761210

Cabanas

(2016). Rekindling individualism, consuming emotions: Constructing “psytizens” in the age of happiness. Culture & Psychology, 22(3), 467–480.

De La Boétie

(2015). The politics of obedience: The discourse of voluntary servitude. Auburn, AL: Mises Institute. (Original work published 1548)

De La Fabián

Stecher

(2013). New discourses on happiness and neoliberal governmentality: “Dedicate yourself to being happy and everything else will follow”. Sociedad Hoy, 25, 29–46.

De La Fabián

Stecher

(2017). Positive psychology’s promise of happiness: A new form of human capital in contemporary neoliberal governmentality. Theory & Psychology, 27, 600–621. doi: 10.1177/0959354317718970

De Vos

. (2013). Psychologization and the subject of late modernity. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

10.

Foucault

(1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795.

11.

Illouz

(2008). Saving the modern soul: Therapy, emotions, and the culture of self-help. Berkeley: University of California Press.

12.

Papalini

(2015). Guarantees of happiness: Study on self-help books. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Adriana Hidalgo.

13.

Papalini

Córdoba

Marengo

(2012). Governmentality studies: Subjectivity as a category of the political. Astrolabio, 8, 190–208.

14.

Rose

N. S.

(1998). Inventing ourselves: Psychology, power, and personhood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

15.

Rose

N. S.

(2005). Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self. London, UK: Free Association Books.

16.

Rose

N. S.

(2007). Politics of life itself: Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

17.

Seligman

M. E. P.

(2002). Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfilment. New York, NY: Atria Paperback.

18.

Seligman

M. E. P.

Csikszentmihalyi

(2000). Positive psychology: An introduction. American Psychological Association, 55(1), 5–14.

19.

Stecher

De La Fabián

(2017). Happiness as a promise and as an injunction in contemporary society: Notes for a research program on happiness, neoliberal governmentality and positive psychology. Ayvu, Revista de Psicologia, 3(2), 26–56.

20.

Sugarman

(2015). Neoliberalism and psychological ethics. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 35(2), 103–116.

21.

Thomson

K. W.

(2000). Intrinsic motivation at work: Building energy and commitment. San Francisco, CA: Berrett Koehler.