Happiness as Enterprise: An Essay on Neoliberal Life 9781438449838, 1438449836

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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

ix

Introduction: The New Happiness

1

Part I: The Hinge of Power Chapter 1 To Govern Happily

17

Chapter 2 The Emotional Fold

37

Part II: When Will I be Happy? Chapter 3 Time Within Time

57

Chapter 4 Habits of the Happy

79

Part III: The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality Chapter 5 The Happiness of All and Each

101

Chapter 6 Interiorities of Social Government

125

viii

Contents

Chapter 7 The Alchemy of Neoliberalism

151

Conclusion: Against Asphyxiation

173

Bibliography

179

Index

189

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

ix

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Acknowledgments

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, 1

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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 plastic attribute of a psychosomatic self. Happiness today owes nothing to the moral demands imposed by one’s conduct toward others, nor to one’s place in a cosmological order, nor even to the imperatives of a hermeneutics of subjectivity. Happiness is today an asset cultivated by a solitary, psychologically truncated subject, for whom emotional self-manipulation is a simple technique. Happiness has been rendered a depthless physiological response without moral referent, a biological potential of the individual that makes no recourse to psychic interiority, biography, or social relationships of any kind, however sublimated. Happiness is the pure effect of everyday mental activities and everyday practice. And it is through this reduction that the new discourse on happiness accomplishes what is perhaps its most distinguishing feat: a seeming democratization of psychological life, one that levels the hierarchies imposed through the disciplinary and institutional apparatus of psychological and medical expertise

Introduction

3

itself. Happiness, as a simple potential of life’s vital force, is everyman’s psychological problem, given over to the unskilled handiwork of everyday emotional subjectivity. “Happiness is a muscle” is a phrase repeated across dozens of happiness blogs and Web sites—a biological reduction that extracts happiness from the dynamics of interpersonal life and the jurisdiction of those professional cohorts who, under the name of a depth psychology, sought out happiness in the murky waters of a remote interiority, where the scars left by our encounters with others were thought to be preserved. But to call happiness a muscle is also a gesture of empowerment directed to those inclined to develop their happiness as they would their musculature—to maximize its force and optimize its potential in the time of everyday life, over and against the domination of the elites. Happiness, therefore, becomes an attribute of the flesh, a simple force of biological life. That the new discourse on happiness represents a “disenchantment” of emotional life cannot be denied: the shadowy realm of feeling is here stripped of the mystery and mythology assigned it by Freud and the psychoanalytic tradition, rarefied over a century of humanistic and pop-psychological therapies and techniques. But as such, this disenchantment is one that conjures new spirits, inscribing a new animism and a new life-dynamic just as quickly as it dispels an old one. Happiness brings people to life, transforming objects into subjects, exhorting us to emotional self-stewardship, empowering individuals to seize the reins of their affective potentials and transform any vestige of drabness or grey routine with the sparkle of a potentially happier existence. Happiness thus becomes a figure of enterprise: it is something one pursues in a spirit of entrepreneurship and opportunity, wherein self-knowledge derived through relations with or under the tutelage of others appears not as a purpose or an end, but as an environmental circumstance to be maximized, or as an organizational resource to be exploited. Or, more to the point: as an entrepreneurial project, happiness serves a specifically homologous function, providing an echo in emotional and personal life of a form of government that similarly envisions a life of entrepreneurship, this time played out in the realm of economic conduct. The rationality of economic neoliberalism is well known: where neoliberal states foster those conditions under which populations and organizations are induced to become more self-reliant and enterprising, to depend less on government support, and to find their own way in a social world reinvented in the image of the market, happiness as enterprise articulates this rationality on an intimate level as an intentional project of personal well-being. Neoliberalism, in essence, is a theory of political and economic governance that identifies individual livelihood as a fundamental (even

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biological) force, whose intensity can be optimized through the manipulation of environmental conditions. The transvaluation of citizens as benefactors of a benevolent state into mobile sources of human capital liberates individuals from the constraints of overweening institutions, reflected in the policies of welfarism and in the culture of dependence these policies induce. Such is the specific project of neoliberal government, one that plays out equally on the levels of social, economic, cultural, and personal life. In short, the role of the neoliberal state is to reconstitute all realms of life within a market-based framework for interaction and provision; state-subsidized industries should be privatized and rendered open to competition, just as publicly funded childcare, education, housing, medicine, media, and so on should be replaced by profit-driven providers in a competitive market. The withdrawal of such supports is accompanied by a coextensive effort of government to foster a spirit of independence and enterprise among individuals and organizations—a responsibilization that is arrived at through the cultivation of an outlook and a uniquely enterprising disposition. Thus, neoliberal governmentality is not a government of intervention per se, but precisely the opposite: it is one of constructive and intentional non-intervention that seeks to transform the behaviors of individuals and groups specifically by refraining from governing too much. And at the heart of this neoliberal strategy of government is the objective of inviting, even constraining individuals, to cultivate living capacities within themselves. Part and parcel of the conversion of state-protected provisioning systems, economies, and societies to market-based systems free of state control entails the transformation of individual subjects, made over from state dependent to empowered subjects capable of managing the freedoms of the market. Neoliberal subjects view life as a competitive game freed from troubling social obligations and cumbersome loyalties. We are all “equally unequal,” as Michel Foucault has said in his writings on neoliberalism; nothing imposes an obligation, and everything, including one’s own mind, body, and emotional state is a resource, a force to be excited, an opportunity to be developed, exploited, or leveraged for advantage in a world of competitive actors. For this reason, neoliberal government is also neoliberal governmentality—a form of power that enables the production of free, enterprising subjects, a technology and a rationality that sets individuals free, but also teaches them to govern themselves as enterprising actors. Happiness, therefore, as a technology but also as an enterprise of self-development, represents one of the chief instruments of neoliberal government, the very leitmotif of neoliberal life itself and, I would argue, its most radical extension into the realm of private existence.

Introduction

5

This book sets out to describe the spirit of this life through an account of the logic that structures the government and self-government of the happy life. It brings together a conceptual problematic surrounding the practice of government in contemporary neoliberal societies with an extended empirical inquiry into the discourse of happiness itself, as constituted by experts, psychological professionals, and in popular texts. Drawing on the work of Foucault and on the theoretical writings of researchers in a field increasingly recognized as “governmentality studies,” happiness, it is argued, instances a rationality of government whereby individuals govern themselves through the cultivation and optimization of their own emotional potentials. More precisely, governmentality describes the production of certain kinds of subjects through the doubling of a particular relation of social power. In Foucault’s brilliantly simple, yet vastly provocative phrase, government operates through the “conduct of conduct,” where the word conduct assumes two meanings: to conduct is to direct the actions of others, as in the manner of a symphony conductor, while conduct is the manner in which one acts, or expresses one’s agency through one’s own freely chosen acts, or forms of conduct. Or as Foucault himself said: “To ‘conduct’ is at the same time to ‘lead’ others (according to mechanisms of coercion which are, to varying degrees, strict) and a way of behaving within a more or less open field of possibilities. The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome” (Foucault 1982, 221). Happiness as enterprise serves precisely this doubling function: it is to be conducted, or to accept and implement a program imposed by others through a relationship that can only be described as one of power. But it is also to adopt a conduct, to incorporate this program into a form of personal practice that is singularly free. To pursue happiness is therefore both to be governed, but also to govern oneself, or to govern oneself as one is governed by others. And as such, happiness serves as a hinge of this function of power: a point of transfer or a relay (albeit one that is ambivalent, polyvalent, and open to reversals) between a strategy for the government of large groups, populations, institutions, societies, and economies, and an art of governing one’s self, one’s own subjectivity and emotional life through one’s freely chosen practices. Neoliberalism, that constellation of economic, cultural, and social rationalities that lionizes the entrepreneurial capacities of organizations and individuals, becomes governmentality, the conduct of conduct, in the figure of happiness as enterprise. In the pages that follow, this happy life will be examined in what I take to be its most influential and consequential formation: the discourse of positive psychology. Positive psychology represents the most robust penetration

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into human life and experience by a rationality of analysis, treatment, and government originating in the psychological professions. Centered not on the sick but on the healthy, and not on the closed restorative and teleological project of the therapeutic cure but the open-ended and general intensification of an encompassing state of well-being, positive psychology represents an undertaking of popular reform and personal transformation whose only limit is that of human life itself. Founded in the late 1990s by a group of psychologists under the leadership of Martin Seligman, the field has quickly moved to an influential position in a variety of therapeutic, lifestyle, policy, and organizational discussions. “Positive psychology,” reads the first line of the movement’s manifesto, “is the scientific study of optimal human functioning.” It aims to discover and promote the factors that allow individuals and communities to thrive. The positive psychology movement represents a new commitment on the part of research psychologists to focus attention upon the sources of psychological health, thereby going beyond prior emphases upon disease and disorder. (Sheldon, Fredrickson, Rathunde, Csikszentmihalyi, Haidt 2000) Mindful of its close resemblance with the more familiar and less prestigious offerings in the self-help genre, positive psychology trumpets the scientific credential upon which its claims are founded as a basis for profitability and applicability to business and other organizational enterprises, not to mention its undeniable fit with the anxieties and nervous preoccupations of millions of readers of self-help literature. “As I see it,” writes Tal Ben-Shahar, author of the positive psychology best-seller Happier: Learn the Secrets of Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment, “the role of positive psychology is to bridge the ivory tower and Main Street, the rigor of academe and the fun of the self-help movement” (Ben-Shahar 2007, x–xi). Its rapid spread and the enthusiasm of its reception from professionals and lay readers alike has earned its leaders the aura of a ideological vanguard of world-historical significance, albeit one specifically dismissive of any explicit creed beyond the simple excitation of certain psychobiological potentials. Seligman himself has endorsed this image, calling the movement’s overall goal the “increase [of the] the tonnage of happiness in the world,” or, as he stated in his address to the First World Congress of Positive Psychology in 2009, “to increase the percentage of the world population that is considered ‘flourishing’ from today’s 7–33% to 51% by the year 2051” (Lemley 2006; Seligman 2009). This expanded field of positive psychology and its dream of a technical utopia of emotional governance constitutes the new discourse on happiness, articulated through a mix of major and minor texts. At one end stand the

Introduction

7

peer-reviewed psychological reports and findings that appear in professional scholarly journals. These include prominent publications such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology or the Psychological Bulletin, and also a range of niche academic publications attending to the emerging subfield of positive psychology and happiness research, such as The Journal of Happiness Studies. Next to these are those “middle range” self-help books authored by academic researchers for lay audiences, which make loose reference to the scientific research. These include Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (2000), Sonja Lyubomirsky’s The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want (2007), and many others. Also important are the articles and blogs, written by self-styled positive psychology enthusiasts aimed at everyday life concerns, such as “The Happiness Project,” maintained by Gretchen Rubin (Rubin 2011), and the public debates on policy matters and problems of popular governance, as illustrated in the work of Richard Layard, which bring happiness into broader discussions of economic and public policy (Layard 2005). And finally, there are those many professional, strategic, and organizational manuals that apply positive psychology solutions to such fields as marketing, management, business, sports coaching, clinical therapy, and military training. In what follows, these materials will be examined and traced for the implicit governmental themes that sustain across their divergent contexts and distinct styles of prose, wherein key problematics recur and are replicated and dispersed on an increasingly intimate scale: how are emotions to be transformed into organizational resources through a project of affective self-optimization? How is happiness to be shaped, excited, and mobilized, dislodged from the constraints of one’s everyday emotional routines and interpersonal dependencies, made over as a dynamic force in one’s everyday life? How might the enterprising subject, by exercising initiative and resourcefulness, make herself happy? It is through a study of these texts and the practices they inform, read through a theory of governmentality sensitized to the subtle valences of popular texts and to the unique logics of government they impose, that it is possible to comprehend happiness as a specific figment, as the emotional and personal homolog, of contemporary neoliberalism itself.

An Essay on Neoliberal Life What kind of book is this? There is without a doubt something in these pages to disappoint nearly everyone. This is a study that pursues a more intensive engagement with a certain theoretical legacy, one identified with

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a single charismatic European author, than is typically permitted in mainstream American social science research. Perhaps, it can be alleged, this engagement is evidence of a certain intellectual romance that borders on the myopic, one that shoehorns its object into an intellectual form that obscures the varied social processes and other mediating factors that shape the new discourse on happiness. I would respond to this charge first with a confession, that, yes, in what follows, there is indeed a certain love affair with Foucauldian thought, and with a uniquely Foucauldian view on the power of texts, discourses, institutions, and technologies of government to shape people’s lives, specifically by shaping their relations with themselves. But I would contend that the end result is not just a cultural reading deformed by these intellectual preoccupations. The case presented here is not one that holds “government” or “power” as the single determining force capable of explaining many varied formations of subjectivity and culture, but instead one that, through a methodology of selection, bracketing, and prioritizing, teases out the social and semantic patterns constituted by government, which remain concealed when too many other factors are drawn into the explanation. On the one hand, while the happiness discourse is considered here as an effect of power, one that operates through a set of governmental rationalities and logics of conduct, it is also doubtless the case that in the real world, these rationalities are mediated by many processes that do not get discussed in this book, such as group memberships, local and regional cultural dynamics, the particularities of racial, gender, and ethnic identity, and the inevitable corruption through practice to which all governmental schemes are subjected. In short, this is a study that traffics in certain ideal types: it is acknowledged that these factors, while set aside for purposes of the present argument, inevitably impose some effect on the mediation of these schemes by real individuals, though it will be left for other authors to explore precisely what those effects might entail. On the other hand, this is a study that attempts to think critically with the conceptual tools developed by and associated with a great author, projecting these tools into the contemporary world to see how they resonate with those lay texts and practices that shape our daily outlooks. There is, within this method, the acknowledgment of a certain tradeoff: some generalization of theoretical explication is doubly repaid, it is hoped, by the sense of contemporaneity and the relevance to daily life gained by a methodological concentration on the seemingly “untheoretical” face of popular culture. Stated differently: as much as this is a Foucauldian romance, it is a quarrelsome one, advancing only a “weak Foucauldianism.” It is suggested that while a plethora of causal forces may have been operative in any given

Introduction

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setting, it is these discourse formations and their practical logics of government that are being selected for the present analysis. This is a claim that brings great risks for an orthodox Foucauldian, as Foucault himself was not a thinker given to weak causes. If his theories were meant to identify only some effects of power and social change that might be registered among others, such modesty was not evident in the way he formulated his arguments, which are often derided in social science literature for their reductionism and determinism, trafficking in what Eva Illouz, citing the work of Philippe Corcuff calls “bull dozer concepts”: “concepts so encompassing that they end up flattening the complexity of the social” (Illouz 2008, 4). A weak Foucauldianism is one that takes some steps toward overcoming this heavy-handedness with this methodological qualification. Moreover, if the reader will permit one further effort at conceptual self-labeling, it is my hope that this study will be read in the spirit of what I consider a “Foucauldian cultural studies,” by which a conceptual apparatus originating in Foucault’s work is applied to the everyday figments of contemporary popular culture, with a sensitivity to the textual character of popular discourse that goes beyond what one typically finds in more philosophically and theoretically driven studies. Cultural studies, whatever one might think of this term, defines a critical relationship to the contemporary world through an engagement with the quotidian contexts of knowledge production and dissemination. The popular and the semantics of popular artifacts possess the capacity to effect readers in unique ways owing to their proximity to the pretheoretical and everyday lives of authors and readers alike. To discover Foucauldian effects in the writings and practices of ancient or medieval elites is no doubt transformative, but to observe those same effects within the realm of one’s own everyday experience is something different. In this regard, it is by taking on the popular that the present study hopes to make theories of power and subjectivity often posed in abstract and technical terms dangerously and excitingly close. But this too is a risky path. Notwithstanding the many fruitful efforts of Foucauldian-inflected investigations of self-help groups, dieting fads, and sexual subcultures, I think there are good reasons why Foucault himself avoided any engagement with the popular cultures of his time (with the exception of a much-cited offhand remark he made in Berkeley concerning the “California techniques of the self ”) (Binkley 2007; Rimke 2000; Philips 2009). The cultural worlds of late capitalist societies are not like the discursive fields of Ancient Athens or Victorian science, where the institutional authority of an author gave a text a singularity and purchase on the subjectivity of a reader sufficient to shape a specific relation to truth and

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to oneself. Contemporary popular culture is, by comparison, a cacophonous field of semantic saturation and polysemy, one whose texts are far more open to varied and contextual reading than those of the comparatively more closed worlds of the past, and whose claims of veridiction and purchase on the constitution of subjectivity is significantly weakened. Readers of Foucauldian scholarship today will be well acquainted with the platitudinous figures of the yuppie read as Greek, the tattoo artist as ascetic, or the surveilled shopper as panoptic subject—nifty uses of Foucauldian theory for the study of popular culture that too casually transpose Foucault’s characterizations of broad historical processes onto the finite coordinates of a complex and uneven present. An important reason for the failure of this rather promiscuous use of the concept of a technique of the self is the prevalence today of a discursive effect that makes no appearance whatsoever in Foucault’s work, yet has for several centuries exercised an increasingly powerful influence on the way culture (textual and otherwise) circulates. That is the effect of commercially motivated persuasion directed at an audience that is at once skeptical of its truth content while complicit in its own seduction. The dominance of this mode of discourse, and of all the imaginary and semantic effects it has on its readers, makes any casual use of Foucauldian concepts difficult for the analysis of contemporary popular culture. Lots of things today look like ascetic practices, but few of them command the ethical stakes necessary to bring about the effects of a real subjectification. Moreover, these cultural conditions make particularly problematic any recourse to the effect of veridiction that is central to much Foucauldian theory: to what extent are subjects today even concerned with the truth of their own subjectivities, encountered as they are in the whirlwind of seduction and simulacra? Thus, while it is tempting (and fun) to trace the logics of certain governmental practices across the shifting and fractured terrains of commercially saturated mediascapes, from self-help to yoga, there is little to guarantee that audiences are actually effected by them in the way that stoic philosophers or nineteenth-century homosexuals might have been by their respective encounters with certain technologies of the self. Nonetheless, a Foucauldian cultural studies shares with cultural studies more generally a certain power of provocation that animates the present work: what is at stake here is not something exotic and remote like an askesis or parrhesiastic practice, but something disturbing for its proximity to our everyday experiences. I have tried to work around these problems by selecting very carefully, and remaining concentrated on a form of discourse that does retain some elements of the authority possessed by such classical texts. The discourse of

Introduction

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positive psychology is typically read very seriously by its readers, its recommendations are taken up and applied with a devotion and commitment that distinguishes this thread of discourse from those other less exacting voices closer to the cacophony of lifestyle gurus. Moreover, I have tried to stay close to these texts themselves. Great insights are often revealed in the seemingly minute turn of a phrase or choice of a word, and it is the aim of this study to capture these insights through careful attention to narrative forms through which the problem of happiness is related in those texts themselves. The purpose behind all of this is one that is more typically the objective of a literary work or a critical essay than a research monograph or a work of theoretical scholarship, properly considered. The culture of neoliberalism, and the specific governmentalities through which it insinuates itself into the fabric of our lives, is something that touches on many of the most innocuous and personal categories of self-understanding, from sexuality and embodiment to emotional self-management and intimacy. Drawing out the thread of those phenomena that pertain to happiness—a horizon of reflexive conduct so central to the biographical project of the self that few can imagine life without it—opens the possibility for a critical engagement that is as disturbing for its proximity to our taken-for-granted lives as it is invigorating for the critical possibilities it proposes. If something as mundane as our reflections on happiness can be linked to wider, global deployments of power, then what is safe? What else must we interrogate? Where can we rest our minds? Such an effect of unsettling on the part of the reader is precisely what this study aims to accomplish: to make the world, and ourselves, strange and dangerous, and by that token to excite and mobilize a new critical regard for what had once passed as safe and natural. In this way, while this study sets out to implicate an effect of power and often gestures toward a critical alternative to this formation, it is not one that offers a clear sense of what those alternatives might be. This is not a critique of happiness, much less a debunking of positive psychology (although the tone of such a project is sometimes irresistible to the author, and finds a way of insinuating itself between the lines). Nor is it a strategic guide for those wishing to combat neoliberalism. It is a story and a provocation that begins with the sense that Foucauldian thought possesses the potential to radically challenge the most fundamental view we hold of our lives. Moreover, it seems to me that Foucauldian thought has yet to find an iteration in scholarly literature that develops its potential for a distinct encounter with everyday life in the contemporary world. While it is easy to summon the image of the personal life fragmented and reassembled through such critical theories as existentialism, psychoanalysis, or Marxism,

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Foucauldian thought remains today principally an academic-theoretical discourse, lacking those derivative forms of writing, telling, and describing that allow us to reexperience our everyday lives on a new register. The present study, then, is an effort to unfold such a form of telling. In other words, this is an essay, one that seeks to produce in its readers, through the critical juxtaposition of grand theory and everyday artifact, a certain effect of defamiliarization. Indeed, this is not a “study” in the traditional sense, in which a static theoretical instrument is used to illuminate otherwise hidden features of an equally static empirical world. It is, instead, a companionate pairing of theoretical and descriptive conversations. The word essay is employed in the subtitle of this book in a manner that summons both of its principal meanings: an essay is at once a persuasive tract that pursues (if speculatively, sometimes informally, and not without some element of pleasure), a desired theme or critical purpose. But an essay is also an interrogation that involves a concerted effort, an unfolding thought experiment in search of a conclusive meaning, or an attempt on the part of an author to yield the truth of a certain object by subjecting it to a test, as conveyed by the word assay. To essay is to assay, “to try,” in the sense of an individual effort, but also to try by subjecting to a trial or forceful examination. In this regard I have sought to supply a vigorous and motivated legal counsel. While this essay goes to great lengths to honor a debt of fidelity to the empirical materials and theoretical resources from which it draws, it does not let an overattendance to that obligation narrow the critical thrust of the work. It tests theoretical against cultural resources and vice versa, bringing them into close and disharmonious proximity, in order to force each to yield truths that it would not surrender if treated in more conventional ways. At the center of this book there is no orthodoxy either to theory or to empirical methods, but instead a deeply felt sense that the logic of neoliberal life is one that is crystallized in the figure of happiness, as it is currently being discussed. Acknowledging, however, that, these days, many readers of academic books take this sort of thing pretty much for granted, and that the introductions to many scholarly books get quickly skimmed for pilferable concepts more frequently than the chapters they introduce get patiently read for such nuanced arguments, I will present more clearly the objectives of this book. First, it is argued that, while the current discourse on happiness presents an instance of the government of neoliberal subjectivity, it is a case that enables us to ask certain kinds of questions about governmentality than are not typically raised in this field. Stated briefly: where much research on governmentality has employed a methodology that can be described as deterministic (whereby, for example, a technology, rationality, or method for the government of subjects appears to produce, with little mediation or

Introduction

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ambivalence, the subjects described in governmental literatures), the problem of happiness, as it is developed here, allows us to consider the precise practical dimensions by which certain kinds of subjects embark on the project of self-government. Through a study of happiness, governmentality will reveal its doing, the efforts of subjects, and the specific temporalities—the times of practices—that define governmentality itself. Indeed, the theoretical centerpiece of the present treatment of governmentality might be said to be the temporalization of the categories of governmentality theory, and the orchestration of a certain critical encounter between governmentality theory and theories of social practice. This entails the analysis of the specific times by which authorities and institutions govern subjects, and in turn, the times by which subjects govern themselves. Or, stated differently, rather than describing a direct causal process by which neoliberal authorities summon neoliberal subjects into existence through the simple logic of their discourse, what will instead be described here is the process by which one temporal structure is imposed onto another, or the time of government endeavors to impress itself upon the temporalities of our everyday habits of getting by in the world. In other words, the conduct of conduct is here rethought as the time of time. Toward this end, this book provokes a critical engagement between governmentality theory, and a thread of theoretical work centered on everyday practice, characterized by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the temporal structure of the habitus. A second and less pronounced point that is woven into this study is the specific analysis of happiness, not just as the extension of an apparatus of power, but of a specific kind of deployment that can be described as an intensification. The Foucauldian concept of intensification is one that has developed its own significant secondary literature, and briefly characterized, describes a change in the form and effect of a certain kind of power, which includes a lightening or diminishing of the actual apparatus of coercion, a dissemination of the effects of power from privileged moments of rule into the more general fibers of everyday life, and as a result a more thorough colonization of a subject by a form of power that shapes the very freedoms of the subject herself. Happiness, it will be argued, fits the bill of an intensified form of power that is unique to the moment of neoliberalism. And finally, what this book has to offer is a treatment that brings together these two points: the temporalization of power that is affected by neoliberal forms of government secures the effect of intensification: it is as a problem, not just of the subject, but of the temporality of subjectification, that happiness, as a form of power, becomes more intense.

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

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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

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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

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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 ensur-

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ing 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

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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.

To Govern Happily

23

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

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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,

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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 through patient listening and probing questions, is scorned for stagnating emotional life in the mire of remote and indistinct psychic traumas and heavy-handed expert intervention. In her place the semiprofessional coach engages the patient, not so much through a diagnosis of past traumas as through an inspiring reflection on the future as a scene of happiness and self-designed life goals (Brock 2008).

Positive Psychology Positive psychology is a realm of expertise that has achieved broad professional acceptance in academic, public policy, and business circles, and in the space of the past decade, it has left a deep imprint on a range of popular therapeutic fields. In 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). The aim of positive psychology is to make people happy with the aid of the most current psychological knowledge and methods. Aiming to surpass the traditional preoccupation of the psychological professions with negative states (neuroses, psychoses, disorders of various kinds), positive psychology maps out, with the same measure of scientific precision applied to mental pathologies, the psychological states identified with joy, flourishing, expressive well-being, and happiness itself. It is possible to date the origin of positive psychology to 1997, when Martin Seligman, renowned for his work on depression and adaptive behavior and recently elected to the presidency of the American Psychological Association, joined forces with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, noted psychologist and originator of the concept of “flow,” the state of contemplative immersion one attains in an all consuming activity (Ruark 2009). Both sought to redress the traditional preoccupation of American psychology with familiar problems of disease, pathology, and mental illness through a novel research agenda concentrated

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on those conditions that make individuals thrive and attain states of happiness. With the intent of overcoming the vagaries and methodological flimsiness that had hampered previous efforts to treat the positive potentials of human well-being (particularly those identified with the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers), happiness, the two argued, could now be measured objectively and scientifically through empirical clinical research, and controlled through precise therapeutic techniques. Buoyed by their conversations, Seligman resolved to make positive psychology the theme for his tenure as president of the APA, and within a few years, the field had exploded. Since the publication in 2000 of Seligman’s best-selling work Authentic Happiness, the undisputed Holy Writ of this expanding field, the new discourse on happiness has developed into a dynamic cultural phenomenon, earning repute both within academic psychology and in a variety of applied fields from business and public policy to the heady world of self-help publishing (Seligman 2000). The creation of the Templeton Prizes in Positive Psychology, two special issues of the American Psychologist, a number of handbooks devoted to the topic, several summits, and a major international conference all occurred within five years of the initial conversations between the field’s founders. And in the decade since the publication of Seligman’s book, positive psychology has consolidated its hold on academic psychology. Competitive programs in positive psychology have been established at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and the University of East London; Csikszentmihalyi himself has founded a new PhD program in positive psychology at Claremont University, and course offerings in positive psychology have become the norm in leading departments worldwide. Financial support for research has also grown rapidly: in addition to recent infusions of support from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education, funding in excess of $226 million has been provided to positive psychology researchers by the National Institute of Mental Health (Ruark 2009; Wallis 2005). In addition to the $200,000 prizes it has awarded annually since 2000 for new research in positive psychology, The Templeton Foundation recently offered Seligman a six million dollar grant to encourage collaborative research across the fields of positive psychology and neuroscience. The new discourse on happiness has influenced a range of institutional, managerial, and policy conversations, variously centered on the government of individuals, communities, and organizations through appeals to their capacity to feel good about their situations by perceiving them positively. Happiness results from the cognitive outlooks of individuals: to the extent

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that people can be brought to assess their situations and themselves in a favorable light, the resulting emotional flush will move them to perform on such a superior level as produce results that actually confirm this initial positive assessment. The task, then, is to create the conditions, or to teach the specific techniques, through which circumstantial optimism and appreciative self-regard can be intentionally cultivated by individuals within their own outlooks. Significantly, this is not undertaken through a treatment regimen, counseling, or any therapeutic practice requiring the supervision of an institutional expert of any kind. The cultivation of a positive outlook is the handiwork of an organizational leader having no special background in psychology, who inspires the self-motivated individual to undertake a set of exercises and interventions into his own mundane thought processes. One example of an institutional application of positive psychology is that of “positive education,” developed by Seligman at the Center for Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, which has since been adopted by schools in the United States, Britain, and Australia (Waite 2007; Seligman, Ernst, Gillham, Reivich, Linkins 2009). Rather than castigating students for their weaknesses and flaws, the curriculum asks students to identify their unique strengths and assets, and includes specific methods by which students might cultivate and sustain this self-regard in their own lives, such as a lesson that concludes with end-of-the-day gratitude reflections designed to enhance positive outlooks. Another version of this comes with a program adopted by high schools and universities called Strengthquest. (www.Strengthquest.com) Principally available to students as an online service, Strengthquest leads students through a three-stage process of appreciative self-assessment meant to establish an attitude of purposeful learning sustaining through their educational trajectory, with the assumption that a learning outlook founded on the student’s strengths, and not her weaknesses, will enable a positive outlook that will enhance student performance all around. “Of course, this positive approach contrasts with the traditional approach of education, wherein students are explicitly and implicitly taught that they must ‘fix’ their deficiencies, and if they do not, they are flunked” (Snyder and Lopez 2007, 393–94). The program begins by having students take an assessment composed of 180 questions identifying their natural strengths and talents in such thematic areas as “Activator” (“People strong in the Activator theme can make things happen by turning thoughts into action. They are often impatient”); Competition (“People strong in the Competition theme measure their progress against the performance of others. They strive to win first place and revel in contests.”); as well as Empathy, Focus, and Belief (“People strong in the

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Belief theme have certain core values that are unchanging. Out of those values emerges a defined purpose for their life”) (55). Of the thirty-four possible themes available, students select five that identify their fundamental strengths. Next, they complete a workbook (either online or in print) titled “Discover and Develop Your Strengths in Academics, Career, and Beyond,” through which their unique signature strengths are explored in greater depth. A third exercise directs them in crafting an educational and professional future suitable to those strengths, and helps them to integrate a full knowledge of these strengths into their personal identities and self-perceptions. “Not only do students recognize their talents, they also increasingly begin to ‘own’ them” (Snyder and Lopez 2007, 395). And therein lies the happy moment: ownership of (positive) strengths, in place of the acknowledgment of (negative) deficits, is the occasion for an emotional uplift, through which the world is grasped in a new light—as one of openness, possibility, and opportunity. In short, Strengthquest, and other technologies associated with positive education, induce students to view themselves and their own characterological and affective states as “strengths,” or as resources with specific bearing on the future, and to act aggressively upon themselves to cultivate and mobilize these strengths, all in the spirit of happiness. The constant reminding of oneself of the potency and potential of this resource induces an optimism that brings one to view one’s environment as a field of opportunity—a cognitive stance that generates concrete performance enhancements. In a similar spirit, business has welcomed positive psychology and incorporated its appreciative regard for the positive functions of organizations and enterprises as a tool for management: the business school at the University of Michigan in 2002 created a program in Positive Organizational Scholarship, and in 2004, Case Western Reserve University opened a similar program in Positive Organizational Development. Business leaders are taught to view the potentials and assets of organizations and their staffs, while imparting to workers small techniques for the enhancement of such appreciative outlooks, woven into the patterns of their daily rounds. These range from keeping records of their own and others’ professional accomplishments to the ritual acknowledgment, at the start of staff meetings, of organizational successes and strengths. Graduates from these programs have brought the assets of positive psychology to firms such as Ann Taylor Stores and Toyota Motor (Hamburg-Coplan 2009). Even the U.S. military has incorporated positive psychology methods into its basic training courses, instructing soldiers to direct their thoughts to positive interpretations of events when, for example, a call is placed from the battlefield to one’s spouse, who appears to be away from home on a weekend or evening (she’s not hav-

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ing an affair; she’s working late or gone shopping). In short, happiness is a resource with unlimited organizational value, a link between the present and the future, and is therefore worth cultivating in the emotional dispositions of students, soldiers, workers, prisoners, spouses, and in the general population. Perhaps most impressive, however, is the success of positive psychology as a popular cultural and media phenomenon. Regional and national happiness rankings have proven eye-grabbing media fare for readers and viewers worldwide, and a 2005 Time Magazine cover story on positive psychology, declaring it the “science of happiness,” expanded public curiosity on this phenomenon (Wallis 2005). Professor Tal Ben-Shahar’s positive psychology class (from which he developed materials for his best-selling book Happier: Learn the Secrets of Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment) was, for a time, publicly celebrated as the most popular class at Harvard University (Ben-Shahar 2007). And on the self-help shelves, dozens of titles brandishing the scientific credentials of the new psychology strive to set themselves apart from the mushier offerings of self-help and new age gurus: a cover story in Psychology Today reports that, while in 2000 only fifty new popular nonfiction titles addressed the topic of happiness, by 2008 that number had grown to four thousand (Flora 2009). Positive psychology has also had a dramatic impact on therapeutic practices outside professional channels: a Google search of such terms as happiness and positive psychology reveals a growing cottage industry of happiness coaches, consultants, and business visionaries who have turned to the positive psychology brand as the elixir for all that ails the modern organizational soul. In the face of online services, blogs, cable TV programs, counseling and management publications, and therapeutic circles, it is not an overstatement to speak of a happiness movement, with positive psychology at its leading edge. Conceptually, the core elements of positive psychology are relatively easy to grasp, owing to the field’s penchant for the popular psychology genre. Drawing on the legacy of humanistic psychology, positive psychologists refute the pessimism of the “adaptive” tradition, and focus on the life-affirming potentials, energies, and vital forces residing within the individual psyche. Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and proponents of the movement for self-realization in the 1960s and ’70s had argued for the need to evolve a therapeutic methodology and a style of interpersonal life that transcends the self-recrimination imposed on the individual by demanding social norms, and accepts unconditionally the qualities and character of individuals in a spirit of warmth and affirmation—what became known as client-centered psychotherapy (Froh 2004). Positive psychology is similar in its optimistic portrayal of happiness as a radiant personal potential and

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the need to overcome negative self-assessments, although in this case the therapeutic task is radically disengaged from relations with others and turned over to the individual himself. The happy subject is taught to maximize happy emotions through the direct manipulation of his own thoughts understood as resources for the optimization of an emotional state—a characteristic positive psychology inherits from its other great forebear, cognitive behavioral psychology. Cognitivist approaches typically reverse the old Freudian axiom that thoughts are the expression of underlying emotional dynamics, which are themselves rooted in psychobiographical experiences. Instead, everyday thoughts are understood to determine emotional states, and where these thoughts can be directly manipulated by sheer acts of will (making oneself think about this or that), it follows that happiness can be produced by consciously directing one’s thoughts to happy subjects, with the same intentionality one might pursue in a fitness regime. Positive psychologists provide reams of advice on how this is to be done: through thought interventions one learns to switch off negative patterns of thinking. These involve planned disruptions of routine mental habits, which forestall the cyclical downward spiral to adaptive emotional states that embed us in the rhythms of daily life. Indeed, together with new clinical methodologies for the specific measurement of emotional conditions, wide authority is granted to the individual for the adjustment and manipulation of a static condition—one’s happiness, whose intensity can be determined numerically from moment to moment and by the simple and direct method of self-reporting—through the control of one’s thoughts (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000). Moreover, positive psychology proposes specific methods for the enhancement, not just of states of positive feeling in real life (hedonic pleasure) but the deeper forms of happiness that derive from the exercise of our chief potentials and unique gifts as individuals (eudaimonic happiness). This kind of happiness, termed “authentic happiness” by Seligman, occurs when a particular set of psychological strengths and virtues unique to each individual are mobilized and put into operation in everyday activities: qualities such as courage, conviction and open-mindedness, whose development through practice in everyday life induces positive self-regard, and thus happier emotional states (Seligman 2000). Seligman recounts the process by which these qualities were arrived at in the development of positive psychology: together with a colleague, Seligman combed through the “basic writings of all the major religious and philosophical traditions . . . Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Augustine, the Old Testament, the Talmud, Confucius, Buddha, Lao-Tze, Bushido, the Koran, Benjamin Franklin . . .” (132) to track

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the recurrence of distinctive positive traits. What emerged was a list of universally held “signature strengths,” which include Wisdom, Knowledge, Courage, Humanity, Justice, Temperance, and Transcendence. Seligman went on to catalog these qualities in what he termed the Character Strengths and Virtues Handbook, or CSV, which he proposes as positive psychology’s counterpart to the inventory of pathological states numbered in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (Peterson and Seligman 2004; Maddux 2002). At the foundation of positive psychology, then, is a deep belief in the incompleteness of the project of happiness itself, in the plasticity of emotional states, and in the opportunistic conduct of the happy subject as one susceptible to the suggestive power of optimistic and pessimistic thought. Negative emotional states derive from the perception of one’s own helplessness to make oneself happy, the inability to transcend one’s routines or an overdependence on the emotional patterns that develop from unexamined, shared, social life. Positive emotions, on the other hand, come with the embrace of one’s power to change one’s emotional well-being, and with the assumption of responsibility for those emotions. In the first case, one is unhappy, and believes that one cannot act to make oneself happy because one is too rooted in a way of life and in a set of dependencies on others, which makes one more unhappy. In the second, one brings oneself to see that one can escape the limits imposed by a socially embedded life by viewing people and situations, not as obligations or as externalizations of one’s own psychic predicament, but as resources for manipulation and optimization. This realization gives one a sensation of emotional exhilaration and forces a cognitive shift, which itself motivates action and brings about the very happier reality one had convinced oneself to believe in in the first place. Unhappiness is therefore synonymous with the inability to act on one’s own deriving from one’s acceptance of habitualized outlooks derived from others, tinged by inevitability. To the extent that one realizes that one can make oneself happy through one’s own actions, one becomes happy. Agency, enterprise, and responsibility for oneself are both the means for achieving and the very content of happiness itself—freedom as an attribute of individual conduct. The apprehension that happiness is within one’s reach is a perception that is realized through the taking of actions toward happiness. And by extension, the spiral of docility, resignation, dependence and the reluctance to see the world in ways that break away from the pack and therefore to act on one’s own signals, not only the absence of happiness, but the inhibition and retardation of the potential for happiness—the vital, enterprising life-spirit that is the wellspring of life’s activity, or freedom. Thus, the parallel between

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positive psychology and neoliberal economic thought is clear: the docility of social dependence, and the negative thoughts that lull us into states of torpor, must be actively uprooted and transformed through an infusion of affirming optimism. Immobility and stasis are anathema to the happiness project. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson conveys this anxiety around the inertia of dependence this way: “Gratuitous negativity can hold you hostage, as if you had cinder blocks tied to your ankles and a black hood pulled over your face. It can keep you so constrained and smothered that you are simply unable to flourish. But the good news is that you have what it takes to free yourself ” (Fredrickson 2009, 159). The logic of happiness demands that the happy subject train her efforts on these obstructive objects (cinder blocks, black hoods, negativity itself ) that suppress the agency and freedom that makes happiness possible. And this thing is found in the thoughts and habits that embed the individual in the mutualities that constitute patterned social life. Such is the productive effect of the discourse on happiness, whereby happiness is that emotional medium through which the freedom of the entrepreneurial subject is constituted. A short review of one typical text from the new happiness discourses puts these properties on display.

How to be Happy In her best-selling self-help tract, The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky, professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, defines the project of happiness as one that draws its credential from the expertise of the scientific profession while also empowering readers as lay practitioners of their own programs of therapeutic self-government (Lyubomirsky 2007). Lyubomirsky is precise in this regard: she proposes that a full 40 percent of our happiness is within our control. Using data from research on identical twins, she concludes that an additional 50 percent is determined by our genetic inheritance, while the remaining 10 percent is dictated by circumstance, such as a recent divorce or a financial windfall. The detailed program she lays out for the maximization of that 40 percent includes a range of techniques variously centered on daily mental patterns, whose gradual spiral toward negativity has to be intentionally and forcibly disrupted. These include a set of “happiness boosters” for use in a variety of treatments, such as the keeping of a “gratitude journal,” or the performance of regular altruistic acts, such as “visiting a nursing home, helping a friend’s child with homework.” Lyubomirsky’s theory is presented in the opening chapters of her book: she assumes that each of us has a certain “baseline” for

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happiness, a genetic predisposition that cannot be modified. She calls this our set point. However, the possibility of advancing beyond our set point is conditional upon our own activities of emotional self-manipulation. These entail the intentional inflation and consolidation of “positive” feelings, but also the containment of that range of emotional options that exist at the opposite end of the spectrum to happiness: negative feelings, which constantly threaten to assert themselves, making us inactive and self-absorbed, and thus keeping us unhappy. Our progress above our set point is our happiness level, which can be determined by the measures provided in an instrument whose use is nearly universal throughout the field of positive psychology: the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire, a survey that includes twenty-nine scorable statements intended to profile a subject’s general level of happiness, such as “I am very happy” and “I find beauty in some things.” On a scale that runs from 1 to 6, Lyubomirsky reports, the average happiness score is 4.3. Importantly, in Lyubomirsky’s book, happiness and the activities that produce it are described in terms of an implicit cost-benefit analysis through which the return on the time one puts in is repaid in quantities of happiness. Indeed, even the value of happiness itself is measured through its utility; in a chapter titled “Why Be Happy,” Lyubomirsky describes the “fringe benefits” that come with happiness, such as an increase in social skills, energy, productivity at work, likeability by peers, resilience, and the capacity to earn money. Happiness, therefore, is synonymous with the ability to act in pursuit of happiness. The zeal for life, or the willingness to act freely in pursuit of happiness, is both the method by which happiness is achieved and the medium through which it is experienced. The reluctance to believe in the potential for the individual to achieve happiness through her own actions is therefore symptomatic of the failure of happiness itself (pessimism, a condition that afflicts critics of the happiness discourse), a condition that expresses itself in a reluctance to act, an embrace of fatalism, and a consignment of oneself to the despondent state of mind from which negative feelings emerge. The barriers to happiness are, by this token, many, and their overcoming requires the happy practitioner to master a specific technology, not only of emotional, but of cognitive and intellectual life. To let slip one’s belief in the possibility of happiness is to open the door to negativity and the spiral of despondency. Most of the problems that obscure the path to elevated happiness levels come in the form of a reluctance to act on ones’ own, to dwell upon the deficits and historical constraints that define one’s situation instead of considering its implicit opportunities and potentials, or to settle into unreflective routines in which creativity is extinguished. This

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tendency is inevitable: the law of “hedonic adaptation” dictates that even the best of circumstances ultimately diminishes in its power to energize or to produce happiness, and for this reason one’s relationship to one’s environment must be continually stirred, refreshed, and broken up through the implementation of an ongoing happiness program. Once we set aside our genetic predisposition and our circumstances, the 40 percent remaining is determined specifically by this willingness to overcome the blindness of routine and hesitation, cognitive docility, and the habits of life, to regard life’s opportunities and to act in the interest of our own satisfactions. Lyubomirsky writes: In a nutshell, the foundation of happiness can be found in how you behave, what you think, and what goals you set every day of your life. There is no happiness without action. If feelings of passivity and futility overcome you whenever you face up to your happiness set point or to your circumstances, you must know that a genuine and abiding happiness is indeed within your reach, lying within the 40 percent of the happiness pie chart that’s your guide. Barriers to action come in many forms, among them a tendency to withdraw into one’s private thoughts. Negative thinking, or what Lyubomirsky calls “rumination,” is an obstruction on the road to happiness, and must be specifically avoided. In “Happiness Activity no. 3,” readers are advised to “avoid overthinking”—that activity that distracts us from spontaneous investment in life and immersion in the “flow” of activities, and inevitably drags us down, tangles us up, mires us, and suffocates the happy life. Her discussion of rumination is woven with references to a despicable dependence and passivity: being stuck, sinking into thoughts, burdened with pessimism, obsessively returning to the same thoughts without progress. Uprooting this tendency demands the imposition of a specific emotional regimen, illustrated by the “stop technique”: “You think, say or even shout to yourself, ‘Stop!’ or ‘No!’ when you find yourself resuming overthinking. . . . Use your intellectual powers to think about something else—like your shopping list or what you will say when you call the plumber on the phone or the steps you need to take in planning your next vacation” (120). Rumination is part of a larger cluster of mental habits through which the effect of hedonic adaptation creeps in: the gradual erosion of happiness levels as novelty becomes routine, and as enterprise becomes dependence. Happiness levels increase most measurably when we act opportunistically, discover new things and new horizons, and are stimulated by new experiences, though ultimately we

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become habituated, grow used to things, and our thoughts gradually settle into a negative pattern. Indeed, implicit within this use of the law of hedonic adaptation is a subtle transformation that is not only characteristic of neoliberalism, but operates at the heart of the happiness discourse itself. The presence of others—spouses, friends, coworkers, or siblings—is fundamentally revalued. No longer the site of reciprocal obligations, cathexis, or the scene of mutual transference, others become pure resources in the project of personal and private happiness, possessing no more profound psychological importance than as a resource for the strategic pursuit of optimal emotional life. The author describes the case of Markus, a man who reports high levels of happiness in his marriage, because he has applied a set of techniques to offset the natural tendency toward habit formation and adaptation that occurs as the routines of domestic life set in. Markus didn’t want the effects of marriage to “wear off ”; he didn’t want to adapt to the rewards of marriage and take it for granted. So he decided to dedicate himself to be the best husband he could be and not take his wife and their relationship for granted. He consciously remembers to say “I love you,” to bring her flowers, to initiate plans, trips, and hobbies, to take an interest in his wife’s challenges, successes and feelings. (65) What is striking in this passage is not just the distrust of a married life shaped around habits and shared routines (traditionally considered the wellspring of conjugal happiness and the chief objective of marital counseling), but the manner in which Markus’s wife enters into the happiness equation. She is not present as another person, a partner in emotional life, as the object of psychological projection or of desire and aggression, but as an instrument for the maximization of Markus’s happiness. While a century of psychological counsel had sought to resolve domestic tensions by mediating the interpersonal space of the conjugal bond (a program that extends the specific mandate of social government to enhance the bonds of collective membership and social dependencies within the nation-state), the spouse appears now as a pure environmental resource in the enterprise of the happiness entrepreneur. The relationship imperative requiring us to form habits of mutuality through the use of psychological expertise while seeking mutual understanding through shared introspection and self-discovery has been replaced by the mandate of self-generated happiness through strategic enterprise.

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Moreover, the task of the new psychology of happiness and the program it imposes must be measured against that of the older therapeutic conventions it seeks to replace, or supplement. While what we might call “negative” psychology sought to foster adaptation and adjustment to normatively defined social conditions through enhanced self-understanding, reciprocity, and empathy, positive psychology is remarkably devoid—even contemptuous—of the therapeutic program as one steered toward adjustment and emotional give-and-take. It is as dubious of the activity of introspection valorized by dewy-eyed therapists and psychodynamic theories as it is of the priority of interpersonal relations celebrated in humanistic psychologies. From the standpoint of the new psychology of happiness, these conventions represent the overextension of a technology of psychological government that governs too much, saddling the individual with a social objective that ultimately benefits the therapist more than the client, and whose influence diminishes the prospects for freedom and self-responsibility. They are the hallmarks of an old technology of the psychological apparatus, whose aim was to foster reciprocity, adjustment to shared norms, mutual understanding, collective well-being, and social consensus through the mechanism of supervised introspection—the socializing goals of a set of psychologies employed by social government and the welfare state, which shaped the program of social psychology for much of the twentieth century. Against this tendency, happiness seeks, if not to govern less, then to govern at a distance. Happiness is a task, a regimen, a daily undertaking in which the individual produces positive emotional states just as a fitness guru shapes a selected muscle group. “We can all reap the full benefits of the Happiness Advantage if we work at it hard enough,” writes Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage. “Happiness is not just a mood—it’s a work ethic” (Achor 2010, 50). To govern oneself through the maximization of one’s potential for happiness is to govern oneself as a subject of neoliberal enterprise: agency, autonomy, freedom from regulative authority, and the cognitive wherewithal necessary for the pursuit of self-interest are metonymically aligned with the content of the new happiness itself.

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According to conventional understanding, emotions and affective life stand in opposition both to the cold rationalities of economic processes and to the impersonal hierarchies of institutional structures. The emotions are the vulnerable, human interior of a subject hardened on the outside by the harsh, impersonal reality of an administered life. Indeed, in a society built on such rationalities, the integrity of emotion over and against bureaucratic rationality acquires the halo of a certain faith. The problem of emotion’s vulnerability to institutional protocol emerges as a topic of devotion, a generative metaphor that creates around itself its own distinct realities and self-understandings. Or, as Arlie Hochschild has put it: “The more our activities as individual emotion managers are managed by organizations, the more we tend to celebrate the life of unmanaged feeling . . . widespread acceptance of the view that spontaneous feeling is both precious and endangered has occurred only recently, in the mid-twentieth century” (Hochschild 2003, 190). Today, the productive character of emotion as the antithesis of organization acquires a unique intensity, particularly where economies and institutions face democratic challenges in the form of demands that they show greater responsiveness to the singular needs and outlooks of individual people. The requirement that authority becomes personal, that it operates across the boundary between rationality and emotion, imposes a certain humanizing imperative upon all organizations which they are quick to respond to, if only superficially. Becoming emotional, speaking not to the administrative but to the human dimension of personal life, not to the customer, employee, or citizen as merely a number but as a real human being with real feelings, represents a transformation in the way organizational authority operates today. This involves a double movement: authorities simultaneously invoke a limit to their own operation (“as a responsive authority I respect your private emotional life”) while at the same time, by drawing back from the zone of the personal, they impose specific organizing effects on the emotional realm itself, opening new channels through which power penetrates the private

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existences of those it governs, at a distance. By this token, emotional government is precisely the hinge by which a rationality of government both deploys and mediates a certain lag between its institutional face and the private moments of its members, and in the course of doing so satiates all the more thoroughly the most intimate recesses of subjectivity itself. No radical change in the distinct logic of government is necessary for this to happen; the government of an economic or organizational sphere can be conducted according to a certain set of strategies, tactics, and mechanisms, which may be transposed directly and without radical modification from work, financial planning, or institutional life to new “emotional” tasks—the control, interpretation, and cultivation of personal feeling. What is required is only that the interval be invoked as an uncrossable (and yet crossable) divide, and that it appear to be characterized by a certain qualitative break. At that singular fulcrum where cold rationality disavows itself and turns to warm emotion, the gap between macro and micro becomes manifest as a site of satiation through which the stamp of power is imposed on the face of subjectivity. In fact, this gap, so invoked, operates precisely as a hinge; its function is precisely to fold together the disjointed plans of interior and exterior, to mark the limit of a certain logic of government in order to better transfer its operation. The gap between institutional and emotional life, therefore, is articulated as uniquely inarticulable, as a pivot between the realms of public government and private experience, or conduct and conduct. An inquiry into the logic of neoliberal government reveals that the new discourse on happiness serves precisely such a function.

Horizons of Policy How happiness emerged as an instrument of neoliberal policy is a story with an unlikely starting point: Bhutan, a tiny nation nestled deep in the Himalayan Mountains. In 1972, the new king of Bhutan unveiled a new measure of popular well-being that would serve as the overarching guide for public policy: Gross National Happiness would take the place of Gross National Product in this remote but gradually modernizing society—a move that would assert national cultural values (interpreted through the veil of Buddhist theology) over and against the brute economism of other secular capitalist democracies. Since then, the term GNH has been invoked by national and international policy and research bodies as a counterpoint to the growth and market-oriented orthodoxies that permeate more conventional policy discussions. GNH (which in its Bhutanese form focuses on the eight

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general criteria of psychological well-being—(1) physical health, (2) time use, (3) education, (4) cultural diversity and resilience, (5) good governance, (6) community vitality, (7) ecological diversity and resilience, (8) living standards) is defined by its proponents as a measure of “the quality of a country in more holistic way [than GNP] and believes that the beneficial development of human society takes place when material and spiritual development occurs side by side to complement and reinforce each other” (Educating for GNH). Indeed, since the 1970s, Bhutan’s commitment to GNH as its principal policy compass has intensified, generating more and more refined research methodologies and earning the nation some small measure of global celebrity. A comment by the king in a 2004 handbook on Gross National Happiness makes clear the applicability of the Bhutanese experiment across national borders: “I believe that while Gross National Happiness is inherently Bhutanese, its ideas may have a positive relevance to any nation, peoples or communities—wherever they may be.” But the success of Bhutan’s example must be taken in context. It captured popular attention in the mid-1970s, amid a broader crisis of economic policy and a global slowdown, and at approximately the same time that Richard Easterlin published his landmark research paper, “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence.” Survey data on relative levels of happiness in advanced industrial societies suggested that happiness could not be so easily correlated with economic growth—the discovery of the “Easterlin Paradox,” which argued that governments of well-to-do nations should concentrate not on achieving higher and higher levels of growth, but instead on enhancing the emotional lives of the population. It would seem, on the face of it, that the emphasis on happiness expressed a sentiment that was in many ways hostile to the prevailing ideologies of global capitalism (Easterlin 1974). Over the course of the next few decades, the use of happiness as a policy instrument advanced with the development of research tools for the empirical measure of happiness as an objective characteristic of populations, as evidenced in comparative studies of happiness levels compiled by national context (Seligman 2002; Wallis 2005). Since the early 1990s, with the popularity of the Human Development Index (a measure that has been subsequently taken up by the United Nations as a composite source of data summarizing standard of living), a variety of instruments have emerged for the gauging of popular affective states that operate at some distance from the cold machinations of economic growth, traditionally measured. For example, from such sources as the University of Leicester (originators of the World Map of Happiness) and the New Economics Institute (whose product is the Happy Planet Index), methodologies claiming to compare subjective

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levels of well-being with quantitative and qualitative instruments such as national happiness surveys and gathered self-reports have gained increasing credibility. More precisely, happiness research typically relies upon the use of two research methods: retrospective assessment tools such as surveys, and experience sampling methods, which tap more directly into personal happiness levels at a given moment. Happiness surveys pose direct questions concerning happiness levels, asking subjects to rank the intensity of their happiness with precise numerical scores. A question from the Fordyce Emotions Questionnaire, for example, administered on the “authentic happiness” Web site maintained by Martin Seligman, asks respondents: “On the average, what percent of the time do you feel happy? What percent of the time do you feel unhappy? What percent of the time do you feel neutral (neither happy nor unhappy)? Click on the dropdown lists below and select the percentage of time that you feel happy, unhappy, and neutral. Make sure that the three numbers add up to 100%.” Similarly, a question on a Gratitude Survey asks the informant to score their agreement with statements such as: “If I had to list everything that I felt grateful for, it would be a very long list,” or a Close Relationships questionnaire asks whether: “I worry that romantic partners won’t care about me as much as I care about them,” with possible responses covering a range of options from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” “Experience sampling” methods, on the other hand, use pre-programmed stopwatches, pagers, programs downloaded to cellular phones or other hand-held devices to summon participants to take note of and report on their relative happiness levels at several points in the day, yielding data on subjective well-being in a range of live contexts. The results indicate higher levels of happiness immediately following meals and other recreational activities, but also during work time and during other activities requiring concentration and engagement. In both cases, the assumption is that happiness levels are immediately transparent and available to subjects themselves, who can be trusted to accurately report them without recourse to the interpretive powers of an expert or mediator of any kind. “The profound doubts of Marx, Sartre and Foucault notwithstanding,” writes Csikszentmihalyi, in a clear reiteration of positive psychology’s methodological antinomianism, “I think that when a person says he is ‘pretty happy,’ one has no right to ignore his statement, or to interpret it to mean the opposite” (Csikszentmihalyi 1997, 20). This is a research methodology, and by extension a logic of government, that assumes no authority over its subjects; the numbers, like the subjects freed from the monopoly of the experts, at last speak for themselves.

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Data from happiness researchers has been introduced into policy discussions in a number of settings, although it typically serves as a resource for decision-making bodies rather than as a general principle or policy guide for state planning. For example, in 2008 the French government under president Nicolas Sarkozy endeavored to measure national levels of well-being using the results of a Gallup survey poll, noting “the growing gap between statistics that show continuing progress and the increasing difficulties [French people] are having in their daily lives” (Arora 2008). The measures Gallup used included both a survey based summation of life satisfaction or “evaluative wellbeing,” as well as an experiential component. And on the basis of this data, Sarkozy commissioned Nobel Prize–winning economists Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz to study the impact of policies with a focus on such social factors as work-life balance and emotional well-being. Throughout, the results of the commission’s work were sharply critical of the mandate for growth: higher levels of expenditure on things such as consumer goods and fuel consumption, for example, would have detrimental effects on levels of well-being that exceeded the measures of traditional economic standards. Yet the government of happiness would not be like the government of other things. Throughout this new governmental discourse, the inaccessibility of this new object, the happiness of the population, would be emphasized as both a limit to the proper reach of government, while at the same time an objective the individual realization of which government could enable through indirect means. In 2010, for example, British prime minister David Cameron tested a similar policy experiment to that of the French, arguing that “well being can’t be measured by money or traded in markets. It’s about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture and, above all, the strength of our relationships. Improving our society’s sense of well being is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times” (Cameron 2011). As part of this policy, Cameron authorized the Office of National Statistics to conduct an exhaustive study of the national level of happiness. Two hundred thousand Britons were asked: How satisfied are you with your life nowadays? How happy did you feel yesterday? How anxious did you feel yesterday? To what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?” The results were not remarkable: 76 percent of adults rated life satisfaction with a score of 7 or higher out of 10. More than half rated their levels of anxiety below 4, with many “not at all” anxious over the course of the last day. Typically, the unemployed experienced lower levels of happiness than those with regular jobs. Nonetheless, for Cameron and for others, the focus on happiness signaled a world-historical shift in the policy priorities of contemporary governments, and a new level of responsiveness

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to the needs and experiences of real people, long ignored by state bureaucrats and their attendant professionals in the human sciences. At a “Ted Talk” presentation, Cameron identified three distinct phases in the history of government: “the pre-bureaucratic age, the bureaucratic age, and what we now live in, which I think is the post-bureaucratic age,” with the new concern with well-being appearing only in this third moment, at the end of a long process of democratic transformation: “A simpler way of thinking of it is that we have gone from a world of local control, then we went to a world of central control, and now we’re in a world of people control. Local power, central power, now, people power” (Ted.com 2010). Running through these conversations on popular well-being as an end of government is a common thread concerning the basic inaccessibility of the object of government—happiness—resulting from the diminishing authority of the state to act according to any ideological mandate or vision of the social good known only to government itself. Happiness belonged to the people, and as such could only be governed at a distance, across a fundamental boundary separating rational from emotional life. Such government should be limited to the barest of technical functions: don’t engineer social planning according to some exotic design, just increase the overall happiness level of the population according to measures that the populace themselves understand. Government through happiness is government that operates with a radically curtailed mandate and at a considerable distance from the objects of economy and social planning, embracing instead the modest project of the empowerment of individuals to better govern themselves. Yet as much as Cameron sought to identify his government of well-being with an emerging “people power”—the emotionally warm, popular alternative to the cold rationality of bureaucratic government—there nonetheless sustain key linkages between economy and happiness. All of this comes together to shape an infectious discourse on the promise of individual happiness that is both uplifting and operational, both enshrined by science and seemingly able to extend to the most quotidian aspects of personal life. Happiness is validated both as a task of medical intervention into the dynamics of the population whose fluctuations can be quantitatively measured, and an undertaking as intimate and ongoing as a personal hobby, expressed in the myriad exercises and routine adjustments to our subjective happiness levels spelled out in positive psychology’s emotional regimen. Taken together, the new discourse on happiness represents a dramatic new presence in the therapeutic and political culture of our time, whose effects, it can be argued, are uniquely productive of both distinct and new political and policy horizons, but also of specifically contemporary subjectivities; through repetitive intervention in one’s own patterns of daily

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thought, a new emotional and cognitive disposition is slowly cultivated. With this understanding in place, we are now ready to confront certain questions: How has the charge to maximize happiness, in recent years, become so deeply integrated into those technologies by which authorities govern individuals, and into those practices by which individuals govern themselves? What is the value of happiness from a governmental standpoint, and how have individuals become so convinced of that value as to willingly enlist themselves in its production? To answer these questions demands not only that we examine happiness and psychological life in their relation to various forms of social power and practices of government, but that we consider more closely the manner in which logics of government develop, transpose themselves from one realm to another, and replicate their rationalities across practices with no seeming connection. For this purpose, it is necessary to position my argument within the wider theoretical conversation on subjectivity, well-being, and the study of governmentalities.

The Folding of Happiness: A Polemic For a long time, the preoccupation of modern societies with the intentional production of human happiness has been maligned as a dangerous and corrosive byproduct of the march of societal modernization and its agents of social control, or symptomatic of the emergence of an ever more insidious stage of capitalist development. And at the center of this concern is an enduring anxiety around the relationship between subjectivity and economy, and the extent to which the former, as that unique domain of emotional life, is unduly deployed as the errand boy of latter. This criticism is familiar to readers in such mid-century epithets as “narcissistic character,” “repressive desublimation,” or in C. Wright Mills’s uniquely unflattering characterization of the overadministered individual as a “cheerful robot,” product of a capitalist bureaucratic society—accounts of the happy subject that see emotional life as the stamp of an economic imperative (Lasch 1979; Marcuse 1964, 59; Mills 1959, 176). Moreover, this tendency is not restricted to any ideological camp: while conservatives have long lamented the hedonistic demise of civic character brought on by rising rates of consumption (Bell 1978), those on the Left have decried the secular and psychological pursuit of happiness as an obfuscation imposed by the captains of industry, eclipsing the critical capacities that inform radical agency (Ewen 1976). Versions of this critique have been renewed in recent years as popular psychology and self-help have come to address the problem of personal happiness directly—a tendency that, it is alleged, reflects the ever deepening

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penetration of capitalist values into our personal and emotional lives. Barbara Ehrenreich’s analysis of optimism as the official ideology of capitalist growth, Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, extends the Left version of this critique, linking the compulsory optimism implicit within happiness discourse to a neoconservative political agenda with thinly veiled corporate aims, resulting in such Bush-era foibles as Enron, the invasion of Iraq, and the economic meltdown of 2007–08 (Ehrenreich 2009). Pollyannaism in the boardroom, Ehrenreich argues, is reflected in the privatization of workplace angst and the suppression of its collectivizing potential. For others, a critique of happiness is driven by the need to rescue the true content of existential well-being from the platitudes of the happiness sloganeers, hucksters of emotional well-being. A case in point comes with Eric Wilson’s Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, where melancholia serves as the threatened aesthetic and creative crucible of a romantic subjectivity. A particularly culturalist version of this tradition comes with the work of Sara Ahmed and others, whose interrogation of what Ahmed terms the “happiness turn” links happiness to the politics of identity (Ahmed 2010; 2008). Indeed, a critical reflection on happiness as neoliberal governmentality is one that poses no necessary disagreement with any of these approaches, only to point out that the problem itself—the authentic well-being of the individual as an object open to manipulation—has a double life as both an ideological ruse or enduring existential concern, but also, through the lens of a theory of governmentality, as a technology of rule, one whose effects are largely productive of those very affective subjects to whose needs they purport to attend. To be clear, these double lives pose no necessary contradiction. To say that contemporary invocations of happiness are neoliberal, and to attempt to draw out this complicity through the use of a theory of governmentality, is not to make light of the promise happiness holds for real people, nor is it to dismiss the commonsense assertion that life is better when spent happy. Neither is it to deny that happiness coerces individual life into forms more serviceable to the needs of capitalism for certain kinds of labor, certain modes of accumulation, certain patterns of consumption, etcetera. But, coextensively with all of these concerns, the governmentality approach asks us to consider how the problem of happiness circulates on its own, how it generates its own effects, and how those effects enlist the practices and efforts of people in the production of their own subjectivities. Many authors dealing with the question of happiness are content either to rely on negative definitions of what happiness is not (suffering, pain, and the like), or else to invoke unhelpful tautologies about the greater

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goods and “positive” states to which men aspire, for no other reason than such states are good and positive. Such, we are told, is the substance of this thing, happiness. A critique of happiness from a governmentality perspective is one that indulges no such evasions, but neither does it attempt any substantial definition of happiness itself. The question of what happiness is—should it in fact be anything—is passed over for the question of what happiness does, what sort of problems it poses, what kinds of possibilities it mobilizes, what kinds of interventions on the social body it validates, and what sorts of reflections on the self it occasions. Such an approach considers the category of happiness more as a problem than as a thing or a condition, one that is capable of imposing new relations of government between social authorities and others, as well as between others and themselves. As such, happiness is a category that is taken up in those arts of government that only come into existence with modern social arrangements, and as such invoke an image of the subject of government read through the prism of secular authorities and institutions, as an autonomous, rational, and self-interested individual. Any definition of happiness must therefore begin with a history of those arts of government through which the problem of the individual capacity for happiness has been shaped and deployed. For this purpose it is useful to say a little more about the notion of government as it is intended in the work of Michel Foucault and in the field of governmentality studies more generally in order to establish the proper context for the critical challenge posed in this study. The word government is used by Foucault, and by those following in his steps, in a very broad sense to include any and all of those various methods by which a dispersed assemblage of social authorities endeavor to direct the behaviors of others through a variety of more or less coordinated efforts employing rational techniques, methods, and special knowledges. As Colin Gordon has written, government defines “a form of activity aiming to shape, guide or affect the conduct of some person or persons. . . . Government as an activity could concern the relation between self and self, private interpersonal relations involving some form of control or guidance, relations within social institutions and communities, and finally, relations concerned with the exercise of political sovereignty” (Gordon 1991, 2–3). Such an inclusive meaning goes beyond traditional reflections on government as designating a set of institutions, bound together by a core set of principles and laws, characterized by a distinct essence and motivated by a certain interest, which is that of the state (or the class groupings whose bidding the state inevitably carries out). Government, also called governmental rationality or simply governmentality, emphasizes the concrete rationalities of government, and the

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institutional and methodological instruments by which these rationalities are imposed, over the ideas and justifications thought to motivate such practices from the standpoint of a general theory. To speak of governmentality is to address those actions of government that pose broad problems of popular and social order, problems addressed to large numbers of individuals, which in turn insinuate themselves into the dispositions of unique subjects as new problem-frames, through which everyday decisions, actions, thoughts, and behaviors can be judged and modified. In other words, governmentalities assume a relay that circulates from public and institutional policies to the personal awareness of self and practices of private self-monitoring, or from the government of others to the government of oneself. But there is a problem here. As a theory of social power, governmentality establishes direct homologies between micro and macro levels of rule: those rationalities by which social authorities rule over others are replicated in miniature in the intimate ways individuals set about to rule themselves. Yet from the standpoint of much governmentality literature, within this homologous relation, or in the doubling that occurs between an institutional mandate and a technique of the self, macrolevel rationalities are given pride of place. The specific hinge, or the point of transfer through which macro becomes micro, and the plans for the government of others become the temporality of one’s daily round, remains largely assumed, but seldom investigated. What we are left with is the sense that the intimate space of the government of oneself is simply a mirroring, an effect read off from the broader governmental policies and the rationalities imposed upon populations. Indeed, the sleight of hand by which governmentality scholarship obscures the temporal contingencies of governmental practice relies on a rhetorical style common to the field, in which institutional rationalities are silently transposed from the halls of policy experts to the private thoughts of subjects themselves. In a typical instance of this blurring of empirical domains, authorial voice is displaced across a series of speaking positions— moving from policy author to an institutional strategy to the thoughts of the subject herself or himself—allowing an implicit, but seldom declared, presumption of causality to slip in unnoticed. One example will do to illuminate this effect: Nikolas Rose, in his influential study Governing the Soul, takes up a discussion of a psychology that, as he puts it, “obliges us to be free.” It is an imperative discourse, shared by a disparate host of experts, policymakers, and planners concerning the need to counteract the burdensome influence of the welfare state through an appeal to the enterprising spirit of individuals. “An economy” Rose writes, “structured in the form of relations

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of exchange between discrete economic units pursuing their undertakings with boldness and energy, ever seeking the new endeavour and the path to advantage, will produce the most social goods and distribute them in the manner most advantageous to each and to all.” This imperative discourse belongs, of course, not to Rose nor to any given actor, but to a faceless, voiceless rationality embedded in a spectrum of governmental agencies. Yet in the next sentence, we see how this voice begins to colonize the outlooks of real people. Rose goes on: “But enterprise also provides a rationale for the structuring of the lives of individual citizens,” until finally, the governmental imperative becomes one that, we are invited to believe, could actually be spoken by any person about himself or herself. “Individuals are to become, as it were, entrepreneurs of themselves, shaping their own lives through the choices they make among the forms of life available to them” (230). Presumably, the proposal that individuals “are to become” something is one initially put forward by these economic theorists. Yet what grows out of this is the suggestion, which slips in unnoticed, that subjects themselves seem to feel that it is important that they become something—entrepreneurs of themselves. This narrative displacement, which slides from the ordinances of planners on the government of others to the thoughts of subjects on the government of themselves, (a device called “free indirect discourse” in literary theory), is the mediation of that gap between macro and micro, between institutional rationalities and the subjectivities of real individuals. The polemical stake advanced in the pages that follow, and an important critical thread woven through the whole argument, has to do with that gap, lag, or interval that operates between the government of others and the government of oneself. Between the plans, objectives, logics, and discourses for the government of large numbers of people, and the mundane decisions, practices, and efforts of everyday life, there operates a certain gap. To be precise: this is the gap between an abstractly conceived goal (“one should become this or that”) and a lived endeavor, between a public objective and a private striving. But it is also the gap through which a certain relay, or hinge, necessarily operates, one that, in facilitating a link that is also a negotiation of certain differences, narrows that gap ever so slightly, yet never entirely succeeds in erasing it altogether. Moreover, as this gap tightens, as the strategies for the government of individuals acquire an intensity and penetration into the very fabric of everyday awareness and conduct, a certain friction erupts. As a reflexively conceived strategy induces one to set upon and reshape a habitualized, prereflexive logic of everyday conduct, the governed subject strains in her efforts to remake some routine part of herself according to a new plan. The turn from abstract goals to personal practices

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is never easy. Habits resist government, and have to be worked. When, for example, someone responds to public health literature on the need to diet by trying to suppress his snacking habits and his cravings, perhaps by pouring a little less sugar in his coffee, there opens a gap that is defined by a specific friction between a deeply rooted habit and a reflexive project of the self. This straining to remake oneself is what I call the work of governmentality. And like all forms of work, this gap is an unstable place. It is characterized by a unique indeterminacy, a hesitancy, or a moment of uncertainty that governmentality theory typically fails to capture. As with everything anticipated but uncertain, like the arrival of a late train or an anticipated phone call, this gap is the generator of a certain temporality within our everyday conduct. It is a place in which the outcomes of governmental programs are, for a moment, hoped for but not given, planned but not enacted—always short of realization, always pending completion. It is one in which the efforts and intentions of actors to make over their emotional lives encounter some obdurate substance, some resilient affective trace or a stubborn habit of feeling that prevents the completion of a project of self work, and for this reason must be negated, removed, or worked on in some way. Will the dieting person succeed in mastering her appetites, in reducing her craving for sugar in her coffee, or in realizing other governmental objectives in her own life? This is the plan, but will it be fully carried through in practice? Such is the indeterminate element in the temporality of governmental work that results from the uncertainty of an outcome, and one that necessarily results every time we try to transform or modify some object or thing, some part of ourselves, or in this case, some deeply rooted habit. To be sure, this interval or lag between a plan and a habitualized, embodied practice external to a plan is a tricky thing. On the one hand (as I mentioned earlier about the institutional importance of emotions), the gap has a certain function in the reproduction of relations of power. It is through this gap that the effects of power are relayed from the institutional to the intimate, or from the discourse of experts to the private thoughts and affective states of individuals, as necessarily free actions. It is through the encounter with an object (a bad habit), and through the work that this encounter imposes, that government governs at a distance, that the subject truly becomes the free subject of a certain governmental rationality; it is the moment in which a governmental plan hesitates, pauses, and passes on the task of government from the institutional to the personal, or from the experts to the individual herself. Uncertain how to proceed within the confines of a specific setting, the subject steps in, takes up the plan as her own, and becomes the subject of that plan in all of its facets. Thus, the

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interval is not always an interval, or it is only seemingly so; it is an individualizing function exercised through an interval that is already systemically incorporated in the process of subjection itself. It is part of what Foucault called a dispositif, an apparatus that imposes an effect of subjectification— it is the gap that makes one over as the free subject of a certain strategy of government. Recalling the words of the designers of the Strengthquest Program discussed earlier, “Not only do students recognize their talents, they also increasingly begin to ‘own’ them”—where ownership designates the full inscription of a subject of government as a free subject. In fact, this interval is the moment of extreme saturation by power: an intensification of power’s effects that could not be realized by any other method than that of the granting of autonomy to the subject. But, on the other hand, the friction generated by this encounter with an object, and the gap it opens up in the relay of power, is also the moment at which processes of subjectification become most ambivalent, uncertain, prone to reversal, and most open to the formulation of alternatives. The temporality of the gap—the uncertain anticipation of the future that erupts when an object-to-be-governed appears—is the point at which our very horizons of possibility, our sense of the future becomes saturated with the plan, and we become, in our capacity to think through time, the subject that power wants us to be. The dieting man, as he frets about whether he really can defeat his cravings and cut down on sugar, becomes the true subject of the dieting regime—he “owns” his diet. But the temporality of this gap is also a moment of indeterminacy and potential inversion. Perhaps he will envision that future, and himself in it, according to some new register. Perhaps dieting is not enough, and he will embark on a more radical program of ascetic self work, or he will begin to interrogate other culinary practices for their wider political and personal effects. The work of governmentality is the hinge of that operation by which subjects are most governed, but as such it is also the unstable moment in which subjects are most able to govern themselves differently. A sense of the temporal character of subjectification is not absent from Foucauldian accounts of the production of subjectivity. What Gilles Deleuze, in his discussion of Foucault’s ethics, called the “fold,” or process of enfoldment, is one in which the doubling of power and subjectivity entails the inscription of a rich sense of the temporal (Deleuze 1986). For Deleuze, the fold is a metaphor for the bending of an exterior surface so as to create an enclave or unique space which is not essentially discontinuous with its exterior—a domain of subjectivity conceived not as ontologically prior to the outside, but as an effect or derivative of actions taken by the self. The fold stresses the repeated reenactment of an externally imposed

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practice (expressed in the political relations between individuals), whose pattern is “doubled,” folded, or copied in the way one relates to and acts upon oneself. Such repetition is achieved largely through practices of thought contained in the domain of memory: “The folding or doubling is itself a Memory: the ‘absolute memory’ or memory of the outside, beyond the brief memory inscribed in strata and archives, beyond the relics remaining in diagrams. . . . Memory is the real name of the relation to oneself, or of the affect of self by self ” (Deleuze 1986, 107). Indeed, the significance of memory as that device of thought through which modalities of rule are enfolded in the subjectivities of individuals is a theme woven throughout much governmentality literature. Rose’s account of the contemporary practices of subjectification, for example, describes “the grasp that modes of subjectification have upon human beings in terms of such an infolding.” “Folds” write Rose, “incorporate without totalizing, internalize without unifying, collect together discontinuously in the form of pleats making surfaces, spaces, flows and relations.” Within a genealogy of subjection, that which would be infolded would be anything that can acquire authority: injunctions, advice, techniques, little habits of thought and emotion, an array of routines and norms of being human—the instruments through which being constitutes itself in different practices and relations. These infoldings are partially stabilized to the extent that human beings have come to imagine themselves as the subjects of biography, to utilize certain “arts of memory” in order to render this biography stable, to employ certain vocabularies and explanations to make this intelligible to themselves. (Rose 1996, 143) Yet the temporality of memory, as the medium through which a biographical subjectivity is inscribed, assumes a retrospective orientation, and a rationalist, cognitivist bias. What we get from this is the ways in which a time of the past, caught in conscious memory operates in the production of subjectivity. But the case of happiness allows us to rethink the folding of power through the formation of affective dispositions shaped through practical orientations toward the future—anticipations of diets yet to be completed and objects yet to be transformed—particularly where the future is considered in terms of hopeful expectation, optimistic anticipation of desired outcomes, and the vital expression of an innate biological drive to produce a better life. Typically, governmentality literature tends to emphasize the cognitive at the expense of the affective, the plan at the expense of

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practice, the accumulated imprints of repeated exercises over the aspirational regard for future outcomes. The discourse on happiness, as the emotional homologue of a neoliberal rationality, allows us to break with this emphasis. It provides a critical opening on this point of transmutation between plan and practice by highlight the shift from a rational to an emotional register, and from a disciplinary to a futural frame. A practical, temporal orientation to the horizon of the future, understood as the happy pursuit of opportunity and good times, becomes a condition of the freedom of the subject. In other words, the emphasis here is placed on everyday agency as the mechanism of subjectification—a medium of saturation that assumes a specific temporal futurity. Judith Butler takes up the centrality of the agency of the subject in her own inquiry into the relationship of power to subjectivity: Power acts on the subject in at least two ways: first, as what makes the subject possible, the condition of its possibility and its formative occasion, and second, as what is taken up and reiterated in the subject’s “own” acting. As a subject of power (where “of ” connotes both “belonging to” and “wielding”), the subject eclipses the conditions of its own emergence; it eclipses power with power. The conditions not only make possible the subject but enter into the subject’s formation. They are made present in the acts of that formation and in the acts of the subject that follow. (14) The government of happiness, by allowing us to consider the production of subjectivity in both the moments of the “belonging to” power (governmentality’s rational moment) and the “wielding” of power (governmentality’s emotional/futural homologue), opens a view onto this space wherein power’s productivity doubles itself from the public to the intimate. A similar framing of this question is presented by Elaine Campbell in her discussion of what she terms “emotionalities of rule”—those technologies through which the government of the self and the imperatives it imposes are experienced and manifested as distinct emotional states. For Campbell, emotionalities of rule describe “discursive and material forms which propose and suppose particular ways of feeling about the world”—a methodology that describes the emotional stakes invoked by the effort to make oneself over as an entrepreneurial, forward-looking, neoliberal subject, noting that “in order for neo-liberal subjects to think differently about the choices and decisions they can make, they may also need to learn to feel differently about them” (Campbell 2010, 39–40). An inquiry into the government of

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happiness illustrates how governmental rationalities transpose themselves onto the affective dispositions of subjects as analogous emotional enterprises centered on the cultivation and maximization of particular emotional futures. In other words, government is something one does, it is something one practices on something, and the degree of intensity required of this effort shapes its time, its temporality as an effort with indeterminate outcomes. Indeed, Foucault was clear that the effect of government was not simply the production of a new subjectivity through a wholesale saturation: governmentality was only what Foucault called an unstable “contact point” between techniques of domination (or subjection), and the actual practices of self-making, or subjectification, by which subjects are brought to govern, and thereby shape, themselves. Or, as Foucault put it in his 1980 lecture at Dartmouth College: The contact point, where the individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves, is what we can call, I think government. Governing people, in the broad meaning of the word, governing people is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself. (Foucault 1993, 203–204, cited in Lemke 2002). Foucault would provide a richer account of this process and of the dynamic forms and practices enabled by this “contact point” between power and subjectivity in his later writings on the ethics of the self, particularly in his discussion of practices of self-care in the Ancient world. In this discussion, he identifies the “ethical substance” (the object or matter chosen for transformation) of a practice of self-formation (Foucault 1985, 27–28). An ethical substance is the raw material of ethical work, one whose transformation invokes a certain temporality or a practice of work, and it is this temporality that I wish to deploy as a critical rejoinder to the deterministic assumptions of governmentality theory. Government is work one does on a thing, on a substance, and therein lies its temporality. Foucault describes ethical substance in terms of “the way in which the individual has to constitute this or that part of himself as the prime material of his moral conduct. . . . In these conditions, the contradictory movements of the soul—much more than the carrying out of the acts themselves—will be the prime material of moral practice” (Foucault 1985, 26). He illustrates this idea with the example of

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marital fidelity presented as an ethical task in which the “contrary movement” of sexual desire appears as the specific substance of ethical work: “The essence of fidelity” writes Foucault, “consists of the mastery of desires, in the fervent combat one directs against them, in the strength with which one is able to resist temptations” (Foucault 1985, 26). In short, such contradictory movements appear not just as problems, or as terms within the discourse of a governmental strategy, but as “substances,” objects against which ethical practitioners apply the force of their efforts. And it is in this sense that it is possible to consider governmentality, and the production of neoliberal subjects through a relay between macro and micro levels of government, as a process entailing a specific form of work—an uncertain confrontation with a contrary movement within oneself. Such a confrontation defines the work of neoliberal governmentality, which, like all forms of work, derives its unique sense of time from the future that it mobilizes. In sum, what a study of the new discourse on happiness reveals is a strategy of government that operates through a twofold process, whose effects often work at cross-purposes. On the one hand, government is seen to operate, and is perhaps increasingly operating on a very general level, through the medium of temporality. We are increasingly asked, as we are induced to take up certain governmental relations with ourselves, to govern ourselves through time, as projects with specific futures and goals, all partially obscured by the presence of objects requiring transformation. Less often are we told that we are things, more often are we told that we might become things. This is a process of the temporalization of government that is apparent in many details of contemporary life, large and small (who has not noticed, for example, the gradual replacement of the prohibitive ‘no smoking’ signs, with the more upbeat, forward looking ‘thank you for not smoking’?). And it is one that increasingly addresses a range of emotional attachments to the future, most commonly the aspiration for happiness itself. So temporalization and emotionalization are linked processes. And on the other hand, this temporalization effects a certain intensification of power. Through the medium of time, power is able to impose its stamp upon us in ways that surpass the slower, heavier, and less efficient technologies of subjectification we have known in the past. Temporalization is intensification, to be sure, but it is an ambivalent one, which sows moments of potential and possibility in its wake. Intensification occurs through the gradual narrowing of this gap, its incorporation and capture within a logic of power that is increasingly intimate with the pace and meter of everyday emotional life, one that is increasingly mobile, flexible, and able to graft itself onto the tiniest horizons and hesitancies of our everyday practices. In fact, what

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is truly impressive about the new discourse on happiness is its familiarity with the rhythm and temporality, the ethical substances that appear in daily emotional existence. The discourse on happiness knows well the terrain of everyday emotional life, its ups and downs and the doldrums of habit, and it is this intimacy that makes it a truly and uniquely intense technology. The new discourse on happiness is one that closes off the ambivalence of the temporal even as it invokes time itself through its articulation, its coding and its emplotment as a prescriptive, technical project. Indeed, it is not the sense of happiness’ quackery nor its guile that motivates the present study: it is the unmistakable feeling of an intensification that this new discourse, and others like it, invokes—like thumbs pressing ever more forcefully down on the esophagus. In the chapter that follows, these two themes, temporality and intensification, will receive theoretical development and empirical explication.

Part II

When Will I Be Happy?

3

Time Within Time

Perhaps happiness has always implied some sort of relationship to time. Nostalgia, euphoria, anticipation, hope, or a glimpsed insight into the totality and continuity of the happy life itself are all attitudes that, in different ways, rely upon some temporal orientation. And in a general sense, this orientation typically establishes a specific relation to the future: happiness resides more in an anticipation of times to come than in a recollection of the past, much less a savoring of the present. Particularly in liberal capitalist societies where the relentless search for new sources of wealth brings a promise of future well-being, happiness is more than ever identified with the prospect of futures yet to be won. Indeed, happiness, in its contemporary form, is the emotional counterpart of expectation itself, the adoption of a specific anticipatory disposition. And in this guise, happiness assumes two distinct functions. Optimism about the possibility of happiness in the future, it is argued, infuses the subject with an emotional zeal, a happiness in anticipation of happiness, whose force is enough to make happiness real in the present. The capacity to anticipate, to keep one’s eyes trained hopefully on the future, is an aptitude and a capacity the discourse on happiness seeks to foster. It is both the temporalization of an emotional state, but also the emotionalization of a relationship with time: hedonism and optimism, the present and the future, are folded together, within the discourse of happiness into a single orientation. But this is not an effect that comes easily. Happiness, as a unique regard for the future that infuses the present with a new vitality, requires the focus and persistence of a specific technique. The temporality of happiness is therefore characterized by a certain irony. On the one hand, happiness is immersive; to live in the moment or to live in anticipation of pleasures to come is an enveloping and consuming disposition, one that brackets out negativity and pessimism. But on the other hand, as a technical enterprise, the immersive temporality of happiness also asks us to assume a specific distance upon the meter and rhythm of one’s daily life—a view from which time itself might appear as the object of a special kind of manipulation. To be happy requires that we 57

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live more fully and unreflexively, but also that we stand back from life in order to synthesize and ultimately transform life’s temporal patterns. In traditional societies, such a break from the everyday was typically arrived at through some shared ritual practice or other institutionally coded thought exercise—sanctioned moments of reflection that allowed the individual to distance herself from the mundane in order to grasp life’s significance in its temporal unfolding. One thinks of prayer and other forms of worship as enabling this function, but also civic pageants and other secular exercises, and in the modern world therapy and related practices of disclosure and reflection. For this reason, the problem of happiness has traditionally been posed through the lens of some overarching religious, national, ethnic, or ideological identity, the rudiments of which only become installed with the eventual emerging of those technologies of government. For example, I only become truly happy when I grasp my life as that of a Christian or an American, a subject of government whose everydayness can be objectified and modified according to the plans that ensue from the wider purposes of salvation, national prosperity, or security. Happiness, as a problem of time, has historically appeared as one that can only be articulated from those privileged places, those epiphanous moments from which we reflect on our quotidian existences as citizens, workers, economic or political subjects of government—lives characterized by an everyday temporality that can be assessed, changed, governed, and spent differently. Such privileged stations impose on us, or allow us to impose on ourselves, new temporalities, principally through fields of knowledge specific to their own unique governmental objectives. They make us notice what had previously been taken for granted, hold up to scrutiny the ways in which we spend our time, and suggest to us that we consider the possibility of reorganizing our temporal habits, extending their horizon or modifying their cadence. To be a better industrial or administrative worker, for example, is to consider how early one gets up in the morning and how late one stays up at night, how many vacations one takes and how much one idles on the way to work—problems that can best be considered from the boss’s office, or from the pages of the employee’s manual. Temporality, in this sense, is an irreducible function of government, one that both provides a plan for a temporal conduct (here is how you should be spending your time) while it implicates an existing temporal habit as an object to be transformed (look how wastefully you spend your time today! I hope soon you will reform these habits!). Government through time, or the temporality of governmentality, can, therefore, be considered in terms of these two figures: the time of the plan, and the time of habit.

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Yet the aim of the new discourse on happiness is somewhat different from that of these more official strategies of government, which operate from the privileged centers of planning and direction. The aim of happiness is to extract the problem of time from such temporal and spatial coordinates demarcated by institutions and traditional governmental authorities, to tear down those citadels from which daily life is observed, and to disseminate the government of time into the meter and fabric of everyday life itself. The problem of happiness today, as one of emotional self-optimization, is no longer the terrain of specialists and sacrosanct powers, or not exclusively so. It no longer depends on the knowledge practices of experts and professionals, but is instead given over to the projects and enterprises of lay individuals possessing no concrete institutional or ideological credential. Happiness, as the effort to re-time time, is a rudimentary technology practiced upon immediate and tangible beings, plastic objects apparently requiring no special skill and accessible to direct manipulation in the course of everyday life. Thus, within the new happiness discourse, and particularly in the discourse of positive psychology, the temporal dimension of happiness has been subjected to a radical new configuration in which institutionally fixed parameters give way to the handicraft of everyday self-government.

Happiness as Generative Temporality The government of future orientation is a project that comes with a lengthy moral resume. The capacity to set aside the pleasures of the moment for the good of tomorrow shapes, some argue, the very crucible of civilized conduct, the inculcation of which is the greatest gift that a society can give to its children, workers, and huddled underclasses. The psychological commitment to this moralistic trope was slow in the making, though its truly contemporary form can be traced to a famous experiment conducted at Stanford University in 1972 in which preschool children were presented with a simple choice: one marshmallow now, or two in twenty minutes—an offer that exposed relative capacities for gratification deferment among children, but also an ability to picture and plan for the future. When the same children were surveyed in adulthood for correlations between their toddler marshmallow choices and their adult accomplishments, it was discovered that those capable of delaying gratification (assuming a future orientation) in childhood scored higher on standardized tests, got into better schools, and led more stable and productive lives than those children that were not (Mischel, Ebbesen, and Raskoff Zeiss 1972; Shoda, Mischel, and Peake

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1990). Happiness, from this standpoint, rested with the ability to discipline one’s impulses through the practice of forethought and circumspection—a discovery well suited to the aims of a disciplinary society centered on Fordist orthodoxies of work, saving, institutional loyalty, deferred gratification, the need for self-control, and by extension, adjustment, reciprocity, and happy relations with others. In short, this was a linear future, the projection of a continuous sense of time in which future events could be planned and budgeted for on the same terms as the present. Because tomorrow’s marshmallow will taste as good as today’s, it is possible to plan for this reward through the denial of impulses, and with a calculus that maps the future precisely onto the present through a rational and linear path. This is a futurity that is basically conservative; it is premised upon the suppression of one’s own capacity for action according to the characterological requirements set by an institutional standard (postponed gratification). It is therefore one that proceeds through subtraction: the subject must refrain from indulging a certain act in the present so as to be better prepared to engage predictable events looming in the future. Yet with the erosion of the economic, social, and institutional basis of such Fordist orthodoxies, future orientation would begin to assume another quite different logic. In self-help discourses of the later decades of the twentieth century, for example, future orientation would evolve from an instrument of self-control to one of self-expression, or from a subtractive to an additive logic. A new experience of time as ultimately unpredictable began to suggest that the mobilization of agency through inspiration, energization, and the cultivation of capacities for autonomous conduct might be a better way to prepare for future events that would be fundamentally different from those occurring in the present. In other words, the unpredictability of the future meant one had to go beyond simple planning; one had to foster new capacities within the self for unknown struggles to come. As such, time, and the horizon of the future, became a productive technology. Indeed, even as the Stanford time studies were being conducted, the elements of this new technology were already taking shape in American cognitive psychology. Since the 1970s, in the influential work of Albert Bandura, a psychological understanding of “self-efficacy” has framed the capacity of individuals to manifest certain capacities through the formation of beliefs about their own abilities relative to future tasks (Bandura 1977). Taking into account those environmental conditions that shape the way people assess their own abilities relevant to pending challenges (such variables as previous successes in similar situations, the ability of others to serve as models for one’s actions, the capacity to imagine oneself as effective,

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and the power of one’s emotional responses to the results of one’s efforts), it is possible to predict how well individuals will ultimately perform. By this token, the power of self-efficacy becomes an asset or character attribute of varying intensity in unique persons: if you have confidence, you will do well. Individuals with a strong sense of self-efficacy tend to view future problems as challenges to be overcome; they display a stronger sense of engagement and commitment to their activities, and recover more quickly from setbacks and disappointments, while people with a weaker sense tend to avoid these same challenges, assuming tasks will be too difficult, and turn their attention instead on the historical roots of their present and future failings, and engage in blame-shifting explanations. While Bandura’s account is not purely mentalist (he does acknowledge such objective features as the difficulty levels of the goals themselves and the availability of resources that determine how we assess our performances and our capacities), he places considerable weight on positive self-assessment as the capacity not only to perform well in the face of new challenges, but, significantly, to select and designate goals appropriate to one’s abilities. “Goals increase people’s cognitive and affective reactions to performance outcomes because goals specify the requirements for personal success,” writes Bandura and his colleagues, “however, self-regulation of motivation depends on self-efficacy beliefs as well as on personal goals.” Perceived self-efficacy influences the level of goal challenge people set for themselves, the amount of effort they mobilize, and their persistence in the face of difficulties. Perceived self-efficacy is theorized to influence performance accomplishments both directly and indirectly through its influences on self-set goals. (Zimmerman, Bandura, Martinez-Pons 1992, 664–65) Bandura’s work has been broadly influential both within psychological research and in other applied fields. A theory of self-efficacy is useful for the explanation of social inequalities of various kinds, particularly inequalities originating in educational performance and career choice, but it also provides a prescriptive theory for the individual, for the development of the ability to make positive choices relative to optimistic assessments of personal abilities. While one’s habits of self-efficacy were established in childhood, Bandura argued, they could nonetheless be reshaped in adulthood through a range of techniques: the use of successful role modeling, the mastering of new tasks, the teaching of techniques for emotional self-monitoring in the face of successful or unsuccessful efforts at goal achievement, verbal

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persuasion by trusted peers, and, most importantly, the opportunity to succeed at challenging tasks. All these factors fuel the development of a strong capacity for the positive assessment of one’s talents, and thus the choice of goals appropriate to those talents. The thrust of these measures, therefore, is to ingrain within the present an affective and generative relation to the future, and by doing so to foster a happier emotional disposition. Similar invocations have, since the 1970s, permeated popular therapeutic discourse on many levels, where the emphasis has shifted from the redressing of emotional and psychological scars to the maximizing of emotional potentials. In the pages of countless self-help books, circumspection is more than just a problem of planning: it becomes an occasion for a unique form of self-work, as evidenced in Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (a self-help sensation that bears the subtitle “Restoring the Character Ethic”). One of his habits is particularly telling: Be Proactive: Be Proactive is about taking responsibility for your life. You can’t keep blaming everything on your parents or grandparents. Proactive people recognize that they are “response-able.” They don’t blame genetics, circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. They know they choose their behavior. Reactive people, on the other hand, are often affected by their physical environment. They find external sources to blame for their behavior. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn’t, it affects their attitude and performance, and they blame the weather. (Covey 1989, 71) Covey’s play on responsible/response-able is telling: a future orientation is one that not only saddles individuals with the responsibility to defer gratifications; it is one that excites potentials and evokes new productive agencies. The invitation to the responsibilities of future orientation comes with a task: one must become active in the present, one must repudiate the “reactive” habits within, which shy us from the challenges of the future. One becomes “response-able”—capable of life and action—only to the extent that one renounces the temptation to “blame genetics, circumstances, conditions, or conditioning.” And most importantly, the emotional pull of the future has a generative effect; where marshmallow-deferring children were lauded for their capacity to subordinate their impulses in the hopes of colonizing a future whose basic form could be anticipated in the terms of the present, the future orientation demanded of the most efficient, happy subjects is one that penetrates directly to the very sources of agency and conduct, exciting

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a new capacity for creativity and action in a future yet to be written. The exhortation to response-ability imposes on the subject a plan, a specific temporal outlook, which must be applied to the time of practice that fits the body to its routines. Such is the re-timing of time. By the 1990s, as the rudiments of positive psychology were coming together in Martin Seligman’s writings, a psychological treatment of future orientation as a formative technology of the emotional life was already well developed. In the work of Charles Snyder, editor of the first textbook on positive psychology and the figure most closely associated with psychological theories of hope, the uniquely aspirational character of happiness was taking form. Hopeful thinking, Snyder argued, is anchored by goals that are simultaneously valued and uncertain. Those aims, which are desirable but remain just out of reach, stimulate the development of what he terms “pathway thoughts,” or styles of innovative thinking that allow hopeful individuals to overcome apparent hurdles that discourage their less hopeful counterparts. Such barriers are not simply the effect of negative emotion, such as despondency and resignation; from a hopeful standpoint, barriers inspire new styles of thought as they stimulate the mind to seek creative alternatives evidenced by new pathways—a sentiment captured in that maxim of managerial theory: there are no problems, only challenges. Like self-efficacy and respons-ability, hope is a resource that is unevenly distributed among individuals, and is something that can be measured objectively and cultivated intentionally through therapeutic intervention and organizational planning. For this purpose, Snyder developed the Adult Dispositional Hope Scale (ADHS), a self-report questionnaire containing twelve simple questions designed to measure the capacity of individuals to manifest pathway thoughts in the face of desirable, yet inaccessible goals (Snyder et al. 1991). Snyder, together with his co-authors, describe the differences between hopeful and nonhopeful subjects: High hopers have positive emotional sets and a sense of the zest that stems from their histories of success in goal pursuits, whereas low hopers have negative emotional sets and a sense of emotional flatness that stems from their histories of having failed in goal pursuits. Lastly, high- or low-hope people bring these overriding emotional sets with them as they undertake specific goals-related activities. (Snyder, Lopez, and Teramoto Pedrotti 2010, 185) Hopeful, response-able and capable of high levels of self-efficacy, the subject of this new temporality shapes a unique recasting of the future.

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Time is grasped through a cognitive but also an emotional disposition, while emotional life itself is infused with a uniquely temporal quality. Moreover, the relation to the future they describe is one that becomes generative: it traces the effects by which futurity constitutes new forces and agencies, new powers of life and action within the psychological dispositions of subjects. Properly wielded by organizations or individuals, such effects could bring about radical changes within individuals themselves. Positive psychology’s repeated assertion of optimism as an attribute of the happy subject, and thus as a prodigious economic and organizational resource, originates with the imbrication of temporality and emotion as an orientation with singularly productive effects. Seligman, in an interview with Time magazine in 2011, ties the agenda of positive psychology and its rupture with traditional psychology to what he terms “prospection,” or the positive anticipation of an optimal future: The basic rock bottom premise of psychology for the last 150 years is that we’re driven by our past. Positive psychology has come to convince me that we’re drawn into the future. . . . To the extent that our child-rearing and therapy is based around reliving the past as opposed to making people better about thinking about the future, that’s a revolutionary thing I’m after—getting our therapists and teachers to make patients and children much better at prospection and letting go of the idea that we are prisoners of our past. We haven’t been good at teaching people to be good [evaluators] of possible futures. (Szalavitz 2011) Indeed, no one can charge the positive psychologists with reluctance to take their own medicine; throughout commentaries on the future of positive psychology as a viable academic, commercial, and policymaking endeavor, a unique and intentional optimism about the anticipated success of happiness research is invoked as itself an asset to the community of positive psychology researchers in general. In a rosy assessment of the future of the movement appearing on Sonya Lyubomirski’s faculty Web page at the University of California, Riverside, the prospects of happiness research are related through an account of the optimism of the practitioners, while its detractors, one assumes, are afflicted by precisely the emotional malaise positive psychology seeks to remedy: “Despite pessimism from the current literature that the pursuit of happiness may be largely futile, my colleagues and I believe that durable increases in happiness are indeed possible and within the average person’s reach . . . through the practice of intentional

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cognitive, motivational, and behavioral activities that are feasible to deploy but require daily and concerted effort and commitment” (Lyubomirski 2012). How is it possible, then, to read the re-timing of time as a component of government derived, as we have argued previously, from what Foucault termed the conduct of conduct? How does happiness serve as one framework through which such a form of government is exercised? If happiness is embedded in time, and if time itself can become the object of a technique designed to cultivate new capacities within subjects, how can this cultivation be understood as a new form of government, as a specific kind of work on the self ? To uncover the logic of happiness as a re-timing of time, it is necessary to look more closely at the broader question of how time consciousness is governed today, both within the discourse on happiness and in other areas. For this purpose, it is possible to trace the contemporary government of time to two principle themes, each reflective of unique, but overlapping, styles of government. On the on hand, we find a highly cognitive strategy aimed at the government of uncertainty and risk, and on the other, an embodied, somatic and affective strategy aimed the government of the vital dynamism of biological existence—a government of chance and a government of life. These two objectives will be taken up in turn.

Risk and Resilience Anxieties about the future have always plagued human life, and human societies have always mobilized against these uncertainties through collective practices of calculation, anticipation, and risk minimization, and the adoption of coordinated, anticipatory, future-oriented dispositions. But today, something truly unique is happening to the way that we respond to risk. Today we have amassed such an immense technology for the assessment and minimization of risks that the apparatus of risk assessment itself has come to operate through a double effect: the control of uncertainty on a societal level through policy and practice dovetails with the production of unique subjects possessing a certain temporal disposition centered on the anticipation of uncertain outcomes. Where discourses of financial forecasting, epidemiology, genetics, environmentalism, insurance, criminology, and public health variously predict the probabilities of disease, street violence, and economic recession, such discourses ultimately insinuate themselves into the daily attitudes and self-understandings of lay individuals, who adopt and incorporate such views into their own outlooks as subjects. We have become citizens of the risk society, ever more anxious about the future, ever

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more ready to measure and plan our futures on the basis of an increasingly sophisticated calculus of probability (Beck 1992, 1994; Giddens 1991; Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1994). Such a theory of the risk society is one that has drawn tremendous attention in contemporary social theory, particularly for the grand theoretical narrative it provides: while in traditional societies multiple threats to human and social well-being were widely in evidence, they did not lend themselves to calculation in any systematic way, and were thus attributed to such external factors as divine provenance or cosmic fate. Later, with the passage into industrial modernity, the rise of the modern state, and the emergence of an instrumentally rational relation to both nature and social organization, risks became the object of scientific measurement and assessment, subject to regimes of causality and formal calculative rationality. Such techniques of risk calculation resided, throughout the period of industrial modernity, with the responsibilities of institutional elites in industry, labor, government, and civil society—planners charged with the task of calculating and assuming responsibility for the risks that might befall the lives of others (Beck 1994, 45; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995). It was not until the onset of late or reflexive modernity, however, that several factors converged to undermine the authority of institutional risk planning and shift the burden of risk to individuals themselves—the defining feature of the risk society. With a vast expansion in the range of technologies for the identification and measurement of ever more subtle gradations of risk, the attribution of rationalist notions of causality and effect became subverted by the sheer ubiquity and mobility of societal risk itself. This effect was coupled with the curtailed influence, under the ever-expanding pressures of the market, of those collective institutions (classes, states, civic institutions, labor unions, communities) whose function it was to implement risk-minimizing policies. While under the conditions of an earlier industrial modernity it might have been possible for a corporate body of experts to specify and delineate these risks spatially and temporally, today the responsibility for calculation and preparedness has been increasingly shifted to individuals themselves. This is particularly true with regard to social inequality under the conditions of reflexive modernity, which becomes redefined in terms of an individualization of social risks, or as Ulrich Beck puts it: “The result is that social problems are increasingly perceived in terms of psychological dispositions: as personal inadequacies, guilt feelings, anxieties, conflicts and neuroses” (Beck 1992, 100). For this self-reflexive person, the insufficiently developed risk awareness exhibited in mundane life appears as an open-ended problem, framed by expert discourses and available special knowledges, or as the objects

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of personal innovation and enterprising action (Dean 1999, 176–97). The production of identity under these conditions entails the projection into the future of a trajectory of expected outcomes and events. In an effort to direct this identity and control these events, the individual is left scrambling for resources: bereft of the supports once provided by institutions such as the state, family, religious institutions, and civil society, temporalized identities are projected into a world of uncertainty and risk against which the individual has only her own resources to draw upon. The individualization of risk, therefore, orients the individual’s conduct toward the eventuality of such risks, expanding temporal horizons and “responsibilizing” conduct itself through the assumption of a calculating, anticipatory regard for the future, even as it exacerbates the anxieties and uncertainties that accompany the anticipation of incalculable liabilities. A theory of the risk society provides an account of the temporalization of subjectivity that shares many features with the argument presented here; changing social arrangements and an expanding apparatus of government affect changes in the ways subjects think about and experience time. The differences come with the manner in which, within the discourse on happiness, risk technologies, and the future orientations they inscribe, are assimilated into personal life as a generative, constitutive force. Within that constellation of research I have earlier referred to as governmentality theory, a somewhat nominalist theoretical perspective is taken, not on the general form of a specific phase of modernity, but on the specific institutions, technologies, and apparatuses that affect the temporalization of subjectivity itself. A contemporary technology for the government of risk is traced to a specific cast of agents of governmental rationality: health researchers, demographers, financial forecasters, statisticians, and environmental experts, coupled with the practical advice of therapists, consultants, legal advisors, insurance agents, real estate brokers, and investment bankers, all of which combine to form a matrix of authorities and discourses on risk, and whose rationalities of risk management are transposed, through the mechanism of governmentality, onto the outlooks and conducts of subjects themselves. For example, insurers, Francois Ewald has written, render the vagaries and uncertainties of fate in a calculable form reducible to a set of capital equivalencies. They establish corresponding investments required in the present to secure capital compensations should such improbable outcomes occur (Ewald 1991; Dean 1999, 183–88). And, importantly, insurantial risk technologies induce the individual into a sustained form of life through the adoption of practices oriented toward future risks, insured or not. “Insurance is a moral technology,” writes Ewald. “To calculate a risk is to master time, to discipline the future.”

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To conduct one’s life in the manner of an enterprise indeed begins in the eighteenth century to be a definition of a morality whose cardinal virtue is providence. To provide for the future does not just mean not living from day to day and arming oneself against ill fortune, but also mathematizing one’s commitments. (Ewald 1991, 207). Indeed, such a moral technology of insurance constitutes an important element of daily conduct, not only under earlier stages of societal modernization, but also under the present conditions of risk in advanced capitalist societies. Mitchell Dean, following Pat O’Malley, has termed this everyday conduct the “new prudentialism,” which entails the multiple responsibilization of individuals, families, households and communities for their own risks—of physical and mental ill-health, of unemployment, of poverty in old age, of poor educational performance, of becoming victims of crime. Competition between public (state) schools, private health insurance and superannuation schemes, community policing and “neighbourhood watch” schemes, and so on, are all instances of contriving practices of liberty in which the responsibilities for risk minimization become a feature of the choices that are made by individuals, households and communities as consumers, clients and users of services. (Dean 166; see also O’Malley 1996) Today, emotional well-being could well be included among those “multiple responsibilizations” for which the enterprising risk subject is implicated. Where events that might bring on a state of sadness or depression loom unpredictably in the future, it is the responsibility of the happy subject not just to plan for their possibility, but to become proactive in positively producing the capacities within oneself to deal with emotional liabilities, to assess and plan for the exigencies of future emotional states by enriching and fortifying one’s happiness in the present, and taking a productive stance in the preservation and maximization of personal well-being. Positive psychology has responded to the problem of emotional risk management through its incorporation of a theory of psychological “resilience,” a term and a field of research developed in the 1990s to investigate the capacity for endurance exhibited by certain individuals under physically or emotionally adverse conditions. Resilience is “the process of, capacity for, or outcome of successful adaptation despite challenging or threatening circumstances” (Masten, Best,

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and Garmezy 1990, 426). The identification of resilient behavior involves the singling out of the various attributes of character that have enabled individuals to show resilience in the face of challenge, most import being positive affect, or a long sustained state of happiness prior to the adverse events themselves. A concern with resilience was popularized to a general self-help readership and introduced as a concern for positive psychology by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte’s 2003 best-seller The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles. For these authors, the production of emotional assets in anticipation of traumatic events in an uncertain future is accomplished through a program of emotional consolidation, with deep roots in cognitivist theory. Indeed, resilience researchers’ emphasis more generally on the cultivation of a future orientation as a specific skill exhibits clear resonances of Snyder’s theory of hope, and Bandura’s self-efficacy: one must retool one’s sense of time and instill within one’s cognitive disposition a unique regard for potential hazards on the horizon if one is to successfully confront the problems of the future. Resilience skills enable patients to “bounce back from the adversities—recovering from addiction, coping with bereavement, dealing with job loss or divorce—that so often lead to clinical depression and anxiety” (Reivich and Shatte 2003, 11). More precisely, the book outlines several lessons the reader will undergo on the path to enhanced resilience, each of which bringing with it a specific resource in the coming confrontation with emotional risk. These lessons are identified: (1) Learning your ABC’s: “We’ll teach you to ‘listen’ to your thoughts, to identify what you say to yourself when faced with a challenge, and to understand how your thoughts affect your feelings and behavior.” (2) Avoiding Thinking Traps: “We’ll teach you to identify the ones you habitually make and how to correct them.” (3) Detecting Icebergs: “We’ll teach you how to identify your deep beliefs and determine when they are working for you and when they are working against you.” (4) Challenging beliefs: “We’ll teach you how to test the accuracy of your beliefs about problems and how to find solutions that work.” (5) Putting it in perspective: “We’ll teach you how to stop the what-ifs so that you’re better prepared to deal with problems that really do exist or are most likely to occur.” (6) Calming and focusing: “We’ll show you how to stay calm and focused when you’re overwhelmed by emotion or stress so you can concentrate on the task at hand.” (7) Real Time Resilience: “We’ll teach you a powerful skill so that you can quickly change your counterproductive thoughts into more resilient ones” (13–14). Similarly, in the field of positive psychology, the need to forcibly generate surpluses of optimistic regard as a bulwark against future emo-

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tional strain is explicitly argued by Seligman himself. In Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, Seligman describes the results of his efforts to prevent depression among school children through the teaching of specific techniques for the cultivation of positive future orientation, or optimism. Optimists do much better in school and college, at work and on the playing field. They regularly exceed the predictions of aptitude tests. When optimists run for office, they are more apt to be elected than pessimists are. Their health is unusually good, they age well, much freer than most of us from the usual physical ills of middle age. Evidence suggests they may even live longer. (Seligman 1998, 5) In short, the optimistic regard for the future is the figure of happiness, yet it is a happiness that only comes about as the result of a specific effort, and as the result of a task of self-optimization. Optimism is not a natural attribute, but must be actively mobilized within one’s outlooks, through the negation of optimism’s logical opposite and necessary antithesis—pessimism. Pessimism, Seligman argues, is also a relation to the future. It is a deeply embedded habit of thought that inevitably anticipates the worst, and forfeits any possibility of intervening in this outcome to the overwhelming forces of fate. “At the core of the phenomenon of pessimism is another phenomenon—that of helplessness. Helplessness is the state of affairs in which nothing you choose to do affects what happens to you” (Seligman 1990, 5). Futurelessness and dependency carve deep grooves in one’s mental routines, into which our thoughts, expectations, and reflections are inevitably drawn, and where they are condemned to circle endlessly. Indeed, pessimism suffers from a specific temporal sensibility that stifles a proactive future orientation, and must, for this reason, be uprooted and transformed—a project that could potentially extend to the multitudes of people who, unbeknownst to them, carry some buried trace of this disabling mental and emotional state. Seligman writes: I have learned that it is not always easy to know if you are a pessimist, and that far more people than realize it are living in this shadow. Tests reveal traces of pessimism in the speech of people who would never think of themselves as pessimists; they also show that these traces are sensed by others, who react negatively to the speakers. A pessimistic attitude may seem so

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deeply rooted as to be permanent. I have found, however, that pessimism is escapable. (Seligman 1990, 5) Drawing all this together, we observe how the societal preoccupation with risk prescribes a disposition toward the future and a logic for its government that privileges the cognitive features of temporal awareness, enshrined in the subject’s capacity to judge, calculate, and anticipate coming personal risks—a problem Jeffrey Alexander has brought up in his criticism of Beck and the theory of risk society as limited by an “unproblematic understanding of the perception of risk” as “utilitarian and objectivist” (1996, 135). Moreover, and in addition to this, woven through these technologies for the infusion of risk-consciousness in the outlooks of subjects is another theme around which the re-timing of time presents a technical problem. This is one that develops not only from policy, financial, and insurantial objectives, but from a new understanding of conduct that takes as its starting point not the cognitive features to which Alexander objects, but the fundamental dynamics and vitality of the biological subject herself. In other words, in this second thread, the problem of future orientation is not only a problem of assessing and calculating the future; it is a problem of producing a unique feeling for the future within the dynamism of one’s own somatic existence, and in the life of one’s own body. To grasp this, we must consider how time is re-timed, not only through responsibilization in the face of risk; it is objectified as a vital force within one’s own biological life as the future is increasingly viewed through a highly metaphorical alignment with a rhetoric of organic existence.

Growth, Strength, and the Temporality of the Living This effect of government, which ties the sense of the future to the feel of biological life, is accomplished through a unique formation of authority that can be briefly summarized. Biopower was the term used by Foucault to describe an operation of power that had reached a certain level of intensity, that operated through the diffusion and penetration into the bodies and subjectivities of individuals themselves. Fusing with the very categories through which life itself could be understood, biopower, or the power to “make live,” went beyond the brutal, violent range of sovereign power, even surpassing the normalizing, panoptic effects of discipline. Biopower was not just the power over life: it was power operating through life, employing the very terms, trajectories, and temporalities through which we understand all

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things to be living. As such, the origins of this new form of power, like all of those formations Foucault studied, were humble: biopower emerged from that variety of medical practices that have, since the eighteenth century, slowly developed a supplementary technology of government alongside the emerging liberal order of discipline and juridical law. Following discoveries of the ways in which environmental scarcity (as described in the influential works of Malthus) imposed limitations on economic conduct by constraining the growth of populations, the very lives of citizens themselves have steadily come to register as problems within the political realm. Through the eyes of doctors, biologists, public health officials, demographers, and epidemiologists, factors such as famine, disease, and soil depletion threatened to stunt birth rates and diminish supplies of labor, suggesting a new area of concern for government which increasingly turned to the fundamental, biological conditions of the life of society as the domain for a new set of interventions. While the realms of sexuality, family, kinship, and procreation stand out as the most suggestive fields of biopolitical intervention, a range of other problem areas can also be identified for their strategic importance to the wider aims of the government of life, areas of the population wherein forces and potentials constitutive of the very biological life of the population could be cultivated, maximized, and controlled. Or as Thomas Lemke describes it, with the appearance of a technology of biopolitical regulation, “what is at stake is no longer the juridical existence of a sovereign but rather the biological survival of a population” (Lemke 2011, 39). Biopower is the opposite of that power that controls through force and the threat of death; biopower operates by instilling agency and inducing life in its subjects—by bringing to life. Biopower sits at odds with both the centralized, decisionistic authority of the sovereign, which exercises the right, as Foucault phrased it, to “let live and make die,” and the normative effects of disciplinary societies which fold agencies into the functional objectives of institutions (Foucault 1976). As such, biopower “makes live” through the inscription of the force and dynamism of life by means of a program that opens onto a wide and various set of strategies for control, operating through such media as national health and fertility campaigns, mental health, the regulation of genetic heredity, reproduction and sexuality, nutrition, hygiene, and so on. Making live, therefore, entails the cultivation of life in order to bring forth its potentials. It is a technology of government composed of those relations that identify and operate on life’s futures, risks, and capacities. Biopower represents “a technology which brings together the mass effects characteristic of a population, which tries to control the series of random events that can occur in a living mass, a technology which tries to predict

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the probability of those events (by modifying it, if necessary), or at least to compensate for their effects” (Foucault 2003b, 249). By this token, the very means by which biopower sets out to govern the temporality of practice (or, as we have put it earlier, to retime time), varies in specific ways from the cognitively focused aims of risk management. The time of biopower’s government employs the temporality of the body, its life energies, and its biological forces. Such a retiming is apparent across a range of fields subject to the effects of “biologization,” that is, fields in which multiple social, personal, and governmental dynamics are reduced to fundamental biological tropes for the purpose of management and analysis. Important among these instruments of biologization is the new genetic science, as documented by Nikolas Rose in The Politics of Life Itself, a study of the genetic rewriting of personal health and subjectivity. For Rose, biopower today takes the form of a new “vital politics,” by which “our growing capacities to control, manage, engineer, reshape, and modulate the very vital capacities of human beings as living creatures” permeate contemporary forms of rule (Rose 2007, 3). His analysis takes in a range of developments in the life sciences, biomedicine, and genomic science, centering on a shift from the treatment of disease itself to the treatment of disease susceptibility—a practice that results in the production of a new temporality of life and health for those biopolitical subjects he calls “somatic individuals.” For such individuals, the freeing of the body from the dichotomy of health and pathology to which it had been constrained in traditional clinical discourse imposes a temporalization of the effect of power. Health and sickness are now discoverable in the past, in one’s genetic history and inheritance, and, on that basis, made predictable in the future, in one’s predispositions for illnesses one has not yet contracted, such as breast cancer or Huntington’s disease. Moreover, Ross tells us, this temporalization has an activating effect on one’s life forces: far from resignation or fatalism, genetic information gives people the tools to bring themselves to life, providing a roadmap to an alternative somatic future. Now able to identify unique potentials and latent hazards, genetic discourse enlists the somatic subject in an active engagement, aimed at the maximization of their genetic potential and the anticipation and preemptive treatment of genetic vulnerabilities. With the reconfiguration of biology from, as Rose puts it, “destiny to opportunity,” a process of biopolitical subjectification opens up to the practical work of the individual, defined by its own unique temporality. It is not difficult to detect within the discourse of positive psychology a powerful reduction of the temporality of emotional and psychological life to the biological and physiological temporalities expressed in the vital force

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of the body. Such a biologization of emotion can be traced to several currents of thought, most obviously the appeal to genetic causes of happiness. That one might be genetically predisposed to some measure of happiness is a claim that was first made in 1996, when David Lykken and Auke Tellegen published the results of their ten-year longitudinal study of thousands of middle aged twins, which demonstrated the overwhelming influence of genetic factors in later outcomes of subjective well-being. After controlling for levels of education, economic success, marital history, and several other environmental factors, it was determined that between 44–52 percent of one’s personal happiness was determined, not by environmental conditions or by one’s concrete efforts to live happy lives, but by genetic inheritance (Lykken and Tellegen 1996). This figure, modified slightly, has permeated positive psychology literature, popularized in Sonja Lyubomirsky’s characterization of a 40 percent genetic “set point,” or neutral setting in our respective levels of happiness, which forms the basic level of happiness to which we return, in the absence of any concerted effort to bring ourselves beyond that point. Another thread in the biologization of emotion comes with the increasing use of psychotropic drugs to address mood disorders such as depression, anxiety, and the like, but also with the more casual use psychopharmaceuticals to address mild, everyday conditions of unhappiness. In the ten years following the introduction of such antidepressants as Prozac, Xanax, and Zoloft in the late 1980s, the rate of prescription for these drugs has dramatically increased as primary care doctors show an increasing tendency to prescribe them in response to patient’s complaints of emotional conditions that had previously been considered outside of medical jurisdiction (Dworkin 2006). Happiness, in both cases, is described as a biological attribute, the consequence of a genetic inheritance or confounded neurotransmitters, whose effect is to recast the problem of happiness as an object of the natural sciences, while inscribing it as a uniquely biological force. However, to get at the specific manner in which positive psychology operates through the inscription of a temporality of emotional conduct metaphorically aligned with the biological temporality of the body, we have to look at the characterizations offered within positive psychology discourse itself. We observe this inscription in the complex and promiscuous usage of the concept of “growth”—a term that ostensibly applies to a psychological characteristic, or a character attribute, but which, in its usage and its valence, aligns the psychic with the physiological in a way that enables the normative content of the latter to colonize and color the dynamic character of the former. In other words, through the ambiguous use of “growth,” psychological life, the forces, and the temporalities it projects, become increasingly

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aligned with the dynamism and future orientation of biological life. The growth concept in positive psychology can be traced back to the arguments of humanistic psychologists, who similarly employed biological metaphors to link psychological dynamics to fundamental, vital processes such as organic growth, life energy, and the like. Carl Rogers’s vision of the self-actualized individual is illustrated in an anecdote related in his book On Personal Power: Inner Strength and Its Revolutionary Impact, in which he observes, on the Pacific Coast, a seaweed formation whose very existence is spent, it seemed, enduring the lashing of the Pacific waves: It seemed incredible that it was able to take this incessant pounding hour after hour, day after night, week after week, perhaps, for all I know, year and year, and all the time nourishing itself, extending its domain, reproducing itself; in short, maintaining and enhancing itself in this position which, in our shorthand, we call growth. Here in this palmlike seaweed was the tenacity of life, the forward thrust of life, the ability to push into an incredibly hostile environment and not only hold its own, but to adapt, develop, and become itself. (Rogers 1977, 237–38) That the resiliency Rogers observed was of an entirely biological character did not inhibit him or his followers in the humanistic tradition (and later positive psychologists) from transposing the vital metaphor onto the psychological subject and his relations with others, now read in terms of such a “tenacity of life,” a “forward thrust of life,” bending toward growth. And with this transposition came real consequences in the ways in which individuals were set to the task of the government of their own emotional lives: emotions “grew” toward a future, a growth that was as natural and open to manipulation as anything else in the organic world. Seligman sheds light on the metaphorical use of the growth in positive psychology in this discussion of the effect of post-traumatic growth among soldiers returning from Iraq. The accounts of soldiers are retold: the trauma of war, capture by Iraqi forces and the experience of torture, followed by release, a quick return home, and, following some adjustment, a sustained experience of emotional uplift and “growth.” Seligman refers to a module developed by a military psychologist for the measurement of post-traumatic growth, which provides the following list of changes soldiers might observe in their own lives which, when scored on a scale from 1–5, indicate growth: “I have a greater appreciation for the value of my own life; I have a better understanding of spiritual matters; I have established a new path for my

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life; I have a greater sense of closeness with others; new opportunities are available which wouldn’t have been otherwise; I put more effort into my relationships; I discovered that I’m stronger than I thought I was” (Seligman 2011, 162). More, greater, stronger—this adjustment is one that is characterized by an overwhelmingly additive logic. Rather than invoking a narrative of spiritual transformation, enlightenment, or a cosmological ordering of the self with the world, as effects of “growth,” it appears that all of these characteristics existed previously within the individual as unmanifest potentials, and that their realization as fully developed qualities is the effect of a certain direction of time, an inevitable movement of life from the suppression to the expression of force, although one cajoled through the application of a certain method of cultivation. Another alignment of the temporality of the psychological with that of the biological can be observed in positive psychology’s use of the concept of “strengths.” As we have already seen, positive psychology sets out to mollify the effects of its “negative” counterpart, a psychology of human suffering, illnesses, and weaknesses. A shift to strengths, and the development of a methodology for the identification and classification of strengths, serves as an important foundation for this new science. Psychological strengths exist, and, to the extent that humans are enabled, or enable themselves to recognize and use these strengths, they will become resilient, resourceful, effective, and successful. The use of a strength in the course of daily life is likely to produce a state of immersion, or “flow” for the individual: a deeply pleasurable condition in which the discharge of a subjective, psychological force induces fundamental rewards that bring states of happiness. Here is how one researcher describes the strength of curiosity as a psychological attribute of the happy person: “When curious, individuals are actively involved in the pursuit of personal enjoyment. Internal pressures (e.g., guilt and fear) and external pressures (e.g., the demands of other people) cannot induce an individual to appreciate and savor the beauty of a Renee Magritte painting or feel a sense of control and effortlessness while being mindful to the body positioning of an opponent and location of the ball in a tennis match” (Snyder, Lopez, and Teramoto Pedrotti 2010, 483). Curiosity, like other strengths, originates and emanates from the individual. It is a potential, animating her actions and driving her engagement with the world. In other words, the use of a strength brings about the effect of growth; strengths are potentials encrypted in the kernel of life, and to the extent that we unfold these potentials into the future, we live. Drawing all this together, it seems we have two faces of the temporalization of emotional life—the calculation of risk and the realization of

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biological potentials—that, when transposed one upon the other, describe the temporalization of subjectivity as an effect of new technologies of emotional government. Such a temporalization is, I have argued, not just a peculiarity of the technology of government represented by happiness and positive psychology; this is the temporality of neoliberalism itself, one that is variously manifested across a range of such technologies. In contrast to the disciplinary temporalities imposed by the deferral of pleasures and the control of impulse in anticipation of a predictable future, the temporality of neoliberalism inscribes a productive futurity of capacities and propensities—forms of human capital cultivated within oneself. Such a sentiment is summarized in a particularly noteworthy contribution to the field of positive psychology, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert offers a recommendation on the pursuit of well-being that takes into account the uniquely unpredictable character of the future, and our misplaced efforts to plan our happiness on the basis of an assumption of the future’s continuity with the present. “So how do we decide how we will feel about things that are going to happen in the future?” writes Gilbert. “The answer is that we tend to imagine how we should feel if those things happened now, and then we make some allowance for the fact that now and later are not exactly the same thing” (Gilbert 2006, 134). Yet given the inevitable mismatch between the present and the future, and the impossibility of planning, with any degree of precision, the occurrence of happiness in any predictable future, those pursuing happiness are better off accepting the inevitability that happiness is something one stumbles upon, rather than plans for. And for this reason, it is better to cultivate within oneself the resources that will enable one to best confront the unpredicted and unpredictable than to attempt to colonize, through forbearance, the future as such. The linear temporality of disciplinary modernity, as a future that includes two rather than one marshmallow, is supplanted by a horizon that looms as a technique of the self—one that cultivates forces and capacities that propel us forward in time. Such is the temporality of neoliberal government. Or more accurately, it is the temporality of neoliberalism’s plan for happiness, and for the happy life. The practice of that plan, however, might be something altogether different. In each of these figures, and in the profile their composite images create, important dimensions remain unexplored. The governing of oneself as a temporal subject, that is, government through one’s temporality, is, in each of these accounts, a process that originates on the institutional level, as a problem of the government of others, with the assumption that the effects on the self are absorbed, or taken up by themselves. Genetic science makes biopolitical subjects, insurance makes risk subjects, and so on.

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These are the plans of government. But to further unpack not the just the temporality of the governmental plan but the temporality of the practice to which it is applied, it is necessary to consider the re-timing of time as a unique activity performed on an object external to the plan itself. Or, to return to the problems raised in the previous chapter, if we are to consider the specific ambivalence that operates between the government of others and the government of the self—the gap or the interval between conduct and conduct—then we have to press the question of the temporality of government a little further. We have to consider government in terms of work, and we must understand work as an activity performed on an object, an obdurate thing or a stubborn habit that resists the efforts of government. And to describe this object, one must consider those features of one’s own temporal conduct, one’s ways of doing things in time, that remain ossified, embedded, deeply habituated, and thus present some difficulty to the refashioning mandated by the temporality of the plan. For it is in this difficulty, in this lag between the temporality of the plan and the temporality of practice, that we project and possess a pattern of time for ourselves that does not flush perfectly with that of the plan. To describe this object, I will ask the reader’s patience as I unpack just one more theoretical device that will prove serviceable in the pages ahead. I will suggest that significant conceptual resources for this project can be drawn from sociological theories of practice, and specifically from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus.

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Habits of the Happy

Positive Psychology Daily News is an online newsletter edited by alumni and students from various Masters of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) programs worldwide. The site features book reviews, links to resources and current research, signups for daily e-mail updates, referrals to experts, courses, coaches, positive psychology exercises and activities, and short commentaries on a range of topics within the positive psychology conversation. In an article titled “This is Your Brain on Habits,” positive psychology researcher Emily Van Sonnenberg discussed the troubled relationship between happiness and habitual life. Habits, she writes, typically carry bad associations. We think of habits as negative, destructive activities that overwhelm our free will through the force of a uniquely preconscious inertia, a quality bordering on compulsiveness. However, as much as our happiness is compromised by habits we can’t overcome, habits themselves also provide the medium through which greater happiness can be realized, provided that we can properly install new positive habits in place of bad ones. In this regard, happiness requires more than simply enlightening ourselves to the recurrence of actions that remain preconscious, although it is true that we must move through a moment of enlightened self-distance if we are to take any steps toward happiness at all. More than just reflecting on our habits, happiness requires that we dissolve the habitual while inscribing a new pattern of unconscious conduct in its place—a project that demands a specific exertion: “With concerted, disciplined effort over a period of time, frequently repeated behaviors can become automatic. By using some of the willpower lurking within you, new positive behaviors can become habits” (Van Sonnenberg 2011). Van Sonnenberg offers the following five-step plan for the transformation of a negative habit and the substitution of a positive one: 1. Identify a positive habit and congruent behavior you would like to adopt. 2. Identify the habit you want to break.

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3. Recognize the sensory impulse(s) you experience in your body or other stimuli that occur just before you usually act on the negative habit. 4. Instead of acting on the negative impulse, use your conscious attention to refocus your thoughts and behaviors on the new and positive habit you identified in Step 1. 5. Substitute the new behavior that is congruent with the positive habit you want to form for the behaviors of the negative habit. This prescription is in many ways characteristic of positive psychology methodology: concentrate on a desirable future rather than a scorned present or regretful past, redirect one’s conscious attention toward this desirable state, and the resulting affirmative vision will excite a psychological and emotional force that will propel action, bringing this future into reality. But what particularly stands out, and what points the present discussion in a somewhat new theoretical orientation, is the emphasis placed on the catching of oneself just prior to an act: “Recognize the sensory impulse(s) you experience in your body or other stimuli that occur just before you usually act on the negative habit.” This sentence suggests a high level of affective, somatic self-awareness, but it is an awareness directed not at a static condition but at a status in motion—an embeddedness in the movement of doing, in the preconscious temporality of the body itself. In other words, this is the temporality of the habit. It is those stimuli that infuse the body immediately before a negative action is taken that must be reshaped by the conscious mind, reoriented toward desirable patterns of conduct. So the reworking of bad habits into good ones is an art of government that employs the future as a productive technology, one that engages the temporality of practice and the horizons toward which it is oriented, but also those futures experienced in the deepest folds of temporal embodiment itself. Indeed, while Van Sonnenberg’s preoccupation with the production of happy habits might seem innocuous enough, other cases present the coercive dimension of this technology in greater relief. In their report, “Good Lives and the Rehabilitation of Offenders: A Positive Approach to Sex Offender Treatment,” Tony Ward and Ruth Mann exemplify positive psychology’s use of the open future as a tool for the production of a uniquely post-deviant subjectivity. Citing a long tradition of rehabilitative treatment aimed at the transformation of habitual sexual offenders, the authors decry a conventional approach that for a long time stressed the societal risks associated with the potential for relapse among sexual offenders as an effect of their incapacity

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to overcome deeply engrained desires and urges. The methodology typical of this tradition is entirely negative: unless the sex offender can learn to control dangerous impulses, society is in danger. Rehabilitation follows a risk-minimization imperative, teaching offenders to manage those cognitive and affective factors that lead to relapse, largely through avoidance of stimulation and the suppression of urges. A better approach, the authors argue, is one that embeds this deficit/risk model into a wider approach that develops a concrete image of an optimal state of life, a “good lives model” based on strengths, potentials, and invoking those desirable states of affairs that individuals might want to realize in their own futures. Assuming that all humans aspire toward certain ends in their lives (community, stability, happiness), why not frame risks, psychological deficits, or unwanted habits, in relation to these ends, these futures, as obstructions to be overcome on the way to something better? This is not to say that the pathological state as an effect of past habits disappears from the rehabilitative program entirely, but that it is deployed within a new problem frame: residues of one’s personal history are no longer simply evils to be expunged, but obstacles to be overcome in the pursuit of a more desirable set of habits. “In the good lives model (GLM),” the authors write, “risk factors are viewed as obstacles that erode individuals’ capacity to live more fulfilling lives. Essentially, risk factors function as indicators or markers that an individual’s pursuit of primary human goods is compromised in some way” (Ward and Mann 2004, 601). Therefore, what was once, under an older regime of government, a pathologizing attribute and a force to be suppressed by some concrete authority, now becomes an element or a mediating condition within a trajectory oriented toward a unique future. Bad habits are impediments to a temporality of opportunity that defines the offender’s own life-program. By this token, an inquiry into the government of conduct through time directs us to the problem of habits, understood as the momentum that propels us through our mundane lives, and to the embodied futures that orient this momentum. In what follows, the re-timing of time explored in the previous chapter will be recast as a problem of the transformation, through a specific re-futuring, of embedded, embodied habits—or, of the habitus, as theorized by Pierre Bourdieu.

Habitus and Conduct Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus is well known, and need only be discussed here in its relation to his less widely understood theory of temporality. The habitus describes a “structuring and structured structure,” a system of bodily

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dispositions through which social structures are internalized, naturalized, and lived through everyday practices, while incorporated as a transposable set of bodily logics, or a “bodily hexis,” which in turn serves as a generative set of principles for the structuring of everyday actions and conducts (Bourdieu 1977, 93). Distinguished from the rational, reflexive outlooks of individualized subjects engaged in such cognitively self-conscious tasks as the reflexive government of the self, the habitus is the prereflexive disposition of the body, a naturally felt and taken-for-granted aspect of daily conduct (Bourdieu 1977, 86; Bourdieu and Eagleton 1999). Yet habitus cannot be conceived in isolation from its social environs and the unique fields of action in which it is played out. A field, in this sense, is any context or domain in which individuals interact and respond to each other’s actions, which are judged successful or unsuccessful by some criteria implicit within that field. It is possible to speak of fields shaped by tastes and taste cultures, for example, such as opera or jazz, and the patterns of conduct adopted by aficionados and connoisseurs (or vulgarians and neophytes) as they collect music, attend events, and discuss their tastes with others. And, for Bourdieu, such fields are intrinsically competitive spaces; each symbolic affirmation of taste constitutes a strategic move within a field, although such moves are never experienced consciously as such. For some (those sharing a natural and unforced familiarity with the field and its logic), every choice, every comment, and every gesture is judged successful, yielding strategic advantage over others and enhancing that individual’s standing within that field. Successful moves succeed because they result from a natural alignment of the habitus with the logic of a given field, experienced by the actor and others as unselfconscious and easy. For others, stumbles and missteps betray the misalignment of an actor’s habitus with a certain field, a failing for which no amount of intentional preparation can compensate. Thus, the logic of the habitus is prereflexive: it is a feel for the game that comes with repeated actions undertaken within that field, from whence the logic of the field is internalized, embodied, and incorporated into the prereflexive habitus of the actor through seemingly naturalized practices (Bourdieu 1977, 80). Yet even in those optimal cases where the logic of the habitus seems intuitively matched to, and anticipates perfectly, any obstacles that might appear within a field, there is inevitably an awkward moment. Indeed, the very time of conduct itself, for Bourdieu, occurs within a field that is always unstable, always concealing unforeseen obstacles, and thus imperfectly matched to the logic of the habitus. There is always the chance that the opera enthusiast, even one with verbose knowledge, will, in the presence of others, misidentify an important aria, or come up against a composer with

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whom he is not familiar. Bourdieu’s account of the temporality of action describes that indeterminate moment in which the habitus loses its footing, struggles to find its fit or adjusts to recover its alignment with the logic of a field. This temporality is characterized by what Bourdieu calls “protension”—action involving a particular relation or a practical anticipation of a specific future outcome based on an intuitive grasp of the opportunities and obstacles presented in a given field (Bourdieu 2000). Indeed, for Bourdieu, time itself is the result of this relation between felt expectations and the uncertainty of given situations, or the lack of fit between habitus and the fields in which practices are undertaken: “Time is what practical activity produces in the very act whereby it produces itself,” writes Bourdieu: “Because practice is the product of a habitus that is itself the product of the embodiment of the immanent regularities and tendencies of the world, it contains within itself an anticipation of these tendencies and regularities, that is, a nonthetic reference to a future inscribed in the immediacy of the present” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 138). Time, therefore, is closely bound up with obstructions; it is the things that get in our way, that enter into conflict with our futures, that give us a sense of the temporality of an activity. Indeed, futures problematize objects: the right future deployed in the right way renders some thing the object of a specific problematization, as a thing to be better governed. Thus, expanding Bourdieu’s model, it is in this lack of fit, where subjects become suddenly aware of their habits as objects obstructing their access to desirable futures, that it becomes possible to study practices of governmentality on the most intimate scale. Bourdieu argues that in the anticipatory structure of agency there is a tension or ambivalence derived from the mismatch between subjective expectations and objective chances, or habitus and field. This mismatch, or misalignment, can, under certain circumstances, provide the backdrop for emergent forms of self-distancing, or what we might describe for the purposes of the present discussion as certain kinds of governmental self-work (Bourdieu 2000, 159–63). Where the expectations embodied in the habitus are precisely aligned with the limits imposed by a field, and where the mastery of those limits is naturalized in a sense practique, or embodied competence in the execution of practices, time literally flies by; unimpeded actions require little thought or reflection, life is lived on “automatic pilot,” and one’s own temporal consciousness passes as a natural fact. But when the practice of daily life is characterized by a lack of fit between habitus and field (which it always is to some degree), where the felt promise or possibility of action emerges as increasingly uncertain in relation to the objective circumstances of action, agents view their own embodied expectations and

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their own somatic orientations to the future outcomes of actions as problematic, as inadequate, as features of the self that could be better governed (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 234). Or as Lisa Atkins has put it: “When the adjustment between habitus and field is broken increased possibilities may arise for critical reflection on previously habituated forms of action” (Atkins 2003, 27). Put differently, when subjects stumble up against something, they think about themselves, about the way they do things and about the way they spend their time. They view their own temporal sensibilities as problems, and set about the task of adjusting them to avoid further stumbles in the future. It is precisely such indeterminate reflection, reproduced by the enduring mismatch, discordance, or imprecision of the fit between habitus and field, which makes the embodied temporalities of actions appear to individuals as subject to question, as problems-to-be-solved, or as objects of reflexive self-governance and ethical self-work (Bourdieu 2000, 159). It is possible, then, to use Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus to elaborate further on the problem of time as an object of government. What a technology of government does, essentially, is insinuate such a lack of fit into the alignment of a habitus and a field, constituting new problematic objects-to-be-governed. It extrapolates or expands on some existing lack of fit. It does this by pointing out certain problem objects—objects that make us stop, think for a moment, and adopt a new view on how we act, how we do things, and how we might do them differently. And it does this through the inscription of a new future. In other words, governmentality implicates the misaligned logic of the habitus as a problem to be solved, and of the habitus itself as an object to be transformed. The misaligned habitus, and the temporality of practice it embodies, becomes, through the lens of government, an “ethical substance,” the object of a reflexive program of self-government, of a reordering according to the formal temporality of the plan. Through governmentality, therefore, the time of the plan goes to work on the microfutures of practice by which habitus remains embedded within a given field. Particularly in the case of those governmental rationalities rooted in technologies of risk calculation or in the biological life sciences, where a dynamic of vital existence imposes a new temporal orientation to the future (one of growth, strength, providence, etc.), one logic of temporality is invoked and deployed as an instrument for the transformation of another, more deeply embedded, prereflexive orientation. The re-timing of time is the prising apart of the habitus from the field, and the inscription of the futures of the plan onto the futures of practice. But this inscription is not accomplished all at once. It takes time. And inevitably, in the course of this agonistic confrontation between two temporalities, one habitual and one reflexive, and in the lag

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that develops between them, some mutation occurs. A deviant temporality— a third temporality that is the product of this encounter between plan and practice—is smuggled in, and the effort to re-temporalize temporality, or to conduct conduct, shapes an instance of indeterminacy, ambiguousness, and sows a unique potential for reversal. In other words, the time of government is never the same as that of our habits, but neither is it the same as the plan. It is a time that is the always-unstable overlap, the asynchrony between our plans and our embedded lives. The friction between these two creates a permanent asynchronous lag—the inevitable lag between conduct and conduct—which a more intense form of government seeks to close. The friction of this asynchrony, and the effect of intensity it imposes, is apparent in one of positive psychology’s most pervasive temporal motifs, that of “flow,” as an attribute of daily conduct and an enduring object of government. A popular and influential thread running through the conversation on happiness is one that derives from the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his research on what he terms “flow states.” The theory of flow was originally outlined in his now classic work of the early 1990s, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, and has since been expanded in subsequent works, including Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention; Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement With Everyday Life; and Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning (Csikszentmihalyi 1991). This simple term and the relatively straightforward concept it implies has grown into a teeming field of research, policy debate, and organizational practice, centered on a catchy discourse on government and human conduct. Flow locates happiness in those moments of complete immersion that fully engage the consciousness of actors, directing all their skills, talents, and thoughts toward purposeful, hotly pursued goals—a habitus, in Bourdieu’s terms, whose orientation to the future is in direct logical coincidence with the structure of the field. To experience flow is to be consumed by a single-minded engagement with an activity that energizes and aligns one’s cognitive capacities and one’s emotional dispositions, submerging the individual in a blissful state of personal happiness. Activities most likely to induce flow, Csikszentmihalyi argues, are those that have clear goals, offer immediate feedback on the success of their accomplishment, and present a balance between a desirable outcome and a high level of skill. Csikszentmihalyi’s research on hundreds of high performing individuals from all walks of life thought to experience flow states, was conducted with a device he termed Experience Sampling Method—essentially a beeper carried by a research subject, programmed toprompt subjects to record their current activity and its degree of engagement and satisfaction at eight randomly selected points

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throughout the day. Data indicate that people experience the highest levels of happiness not in states of passive leisure, where one might expect, but in those activities that place the greatest demands upon their capacities to make independent decisions and exercise skilled actions toward goals perceived as personally and socially meaningful. Csikszentmihalyi cites a variety of settings within which flow states occur, ranging from the playing of jazz music, athletic competition, chess, meditation, software programming, the playing of bridge, or the painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—activities in which, practitioners report, total concentration comes together with high skill performance to produce rich affective rewards (Csikszentmihalyi 1997). However, there is a paradox at work in the notion of flow: flow is most likely to occur in those activities that diminish the requirement for self-distancing and reflection on the activity itself, such as rituals, games in which rules are so well known as to allow players to proceed by intuition, or tasks undertaken with such complete technical mastery as to appear automatic—or where the habitus and the field are closely aligned by intuitive, embodied synchrony. Yet the attaining of this immersive state demands that we take some reflective distance on our own attitude toward the spending of time, that we arrange the proper conditions for flow, and that we train our thoughts and behaviors appropriately. Flow activities cannot become so unreflective as to reduce to routines in which results are given in advance, or in which outcomes are detached entirely from efforts. Boredom, complacency, and apathy resulting from excessive routinization or from the perceived remoteness of meaningful goals present obstacles to flow, and therefore must be expunged from our daily rounds if the freshness and engagement of the flow state is to occur. In other words, where habitus and field are too aligned, futurity itself collapses altogether. For this purpose, a robust and precise technology bearing the stamp of Csikszentmihalyi’s popular theory has emerged, one that spans business management, educational practice, lifestyle advice, relationship counseling, and daily planning, all centered on the need to inject novelty and significance into daily habits demanding the creative investment of individual actors. The flow concept has been praised by such notables as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. In the world of business, at firms such as Toyota, Microsoft, Patagonia, and the Gallup Organization, management strategies incorporating the flow concept are celebrated for encouraging creativity and innovation among workers: “To stay competitive, we have to lead the world in per-person creativity,” says a CEO at Gallup, whose management consulting services are used by more than three hundred companies. “People with high flow never miss a day. They never get sick. They never wreck their cars. Their lives just work better” (Clifton 2005).

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Managerial efforts to refashion worker’s habits on the model of flow experiences have used extensive worker satisfaction surveys to reorganize tasks in such a way as to emphasize both the decision-making capacity of the individual worker and the meaningfulness of goals implying moral purpose. Such is the retooling of the fit between habitus in field. At Patagonia, one manager reports the development of an environmentally sensitive, biodegradable clothing line as a mechanism meant to infuse moral purpose into the work routine, bringing a payoff in worker productivity through the enhancement of levels of flow (Marsh 2005). On a blog titled Zen Habits, maintained by a lifestyle specialist living in San Francisco that claims two hundred thousand readers worldwide, the precise methods for the production of flow states in one’s own time are provided in nine steps: 1. Choose work you love. (If you dread a task, you’ll have a hard time losing yourself in it.) 2. Choose an important task. (There’s work you love that’s easy and unimportant, and then there’s work you love that will make a long-term impact on your career and life.) 3. Make sure it’s challenging, but not too hard. 4. Find your quiet, peak time. 5. Clear away distractions. (A clear desk helps immensely.) 6. Learn to focus on that task for as long as possible. (if you can keep your focus on that task, with no distractions, and if your task has been chosen well [something you love, something important, and something challenging], you should lose yourself in Flow.) 7. Enjoy yourself. (Losing yourself in Flow is an amazing thing; take the time to appreciate this feeling.) 8. Keep practicing. 9. Reap the rewards. (Babuata, undated blog entry) What flow demands, therefore, is an attitude capable of sustaining a dual temporality in which reflective and immersive conducts are mutually intertwined. In flow, a temporality of unreflective habit combines with a program of reflective planning and intentional structuring. In other words, one must be able to consciously manipulate and arrange the habits that infuse

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work, family, and leisure in such a way as to produce an experience of time in which reflection itself is subordinated to the immersive quality of the task at hand. An embedded temporality within a reflexive temporality of government, flow implies the production of a certain kind of conduct through the realignment of habitus and field, and the inscription of a new attitude toward the future. And at the center of this attitude is a specific governmental task performed on a real object. Any embodied tendency toward rote process, mental and emotional docility, disengagement, and dull-mindedness (a habitualized conduct in which futurity plays only a reduced role) must be dispelled and dissipated. Csikszentmihalyi describes this entropic state, the very opposite of flow, in starkly moral terms: “Entropy or evil is the default state, the condition to which systems return unless work is done to prevent it.” And it is the work of the government of flow to disrupt entropy by infusing tasks with more contingent outcomes and enthralling purposes, piquing individuals at the highest level of their competencies and inducing them to an entrepreneurial stance. What prevents [entropy] is what we call “good”—actions that preserve order while preventing rigidity, that are informed by the needs of the most evolved systems. Acts that take into account the future, the common good, the emotional well-being of others. Good is the creative overcoming of inertia, the energy that leads to the evolution of human consciousness. To act in terms of new principles of organization is always more difficult, and requires more effort and energy. The ability to do so is what has been known as virtue. (Csikszentmihalyi 1997, 146) Flow envisions optimal forms of happiness within a temporal disposition (or within one’s daily attitude toward the spending of time) conceived as opportunity and enterprise. Indeed, neoliberalism’s transformative work is practiced on the object of one’s intuitive sense of time with the aim of transforming embedded into enterprising temporalities (or the evil of entropy into the good of happiness); in making ourselves up as neoliberal subjects, we go to work on those stubborn, futureless temporal habits we embody in our entropic regard for time, its value, its duration, its plasticity, and its place in everyday conducts. For it is as a problem of time that happiness effects its subjects most deeply—as a practice, an undertaking, and a lived experience, happiness enables power to satiate not only our existences and our functions, but our potentialities and our futures. To be in a flow state is to excite and direct biological and psychological energies toward specific objectives, with the necessary result of an intensified emotional flush—a state

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of mind that holds operational benefits for a range of organizations and societal functions, from work and family to consumption and style of life.

Temporalization as Intensification The new discourse on happiness, in the present discussion, serves two purposes. On the one hand, it provides a lens through which we grasp government in its neglected temporal dimension, as the time of power’s inscription of subjectivity. The new discourse on happiness serves to illustrate the manner in which any technology of government inevitably employs a temporal mode, imposing its effects through time and encapsulating the time of habit, practice, and embodiment within the reflective temporality of the plan. But on the other hand, happiness also provides a window through which we can view a broad and gradual shift in the way new technologies for the production of subjectivity have evolved in recent years. The temporality of subjectification, or subjectification through the medium of time, is increasingly typical of technologies of government themselves, particularly where those technologies are incorporated into the broader strategies of neoliberal government. While there has always been a temporal dimension to the government of subjectivity, today, under the hegemony of a specifically neoliberal art of rule, technologies of the temporal are ever more incorporated into the very rationalities by which we are governed, and through which in turn we Govern ourselves. As mentioned earlier, ours is a society in which we are thanked for not smoking before we have even considered doing so. Such a temporalization of government is seldom explicit; rarely is the time of practice specifically summoned up for transformation. But, as we read carefully the minor texts and secondary authors through which we are induced to govern ourselves neoliberally, we can discern the specific manner in which new futures are imposed, drawing our everyday habits under the lens of problematization. Though in sometimes cryptic ways, what is increasingly acted upon is not a self that exists, but a self that we might be, projected forward in time. In the discourse of temporal governmentalities, time is increasingly articulated, recorded, prescribed, emplotted, and encoded within the methods by which we are set to work on ourselves. Returning to the observations of Emily Van Sonnenberg regarding her instruction that in order to reform a habit we act on that unique split second moment of protension, cognitively reframing that “sensory impulse you experience in your body or other stimuli that occur just before you usually act on the negative habit,” it is possible to observe how the new technology of happiness (as a technology of cognitive reframings), and oth-

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ers like it, have selected out and acted upon an object of uniquely intimate character—a sense of the potentiality of the self, of the movement of the self in the temporal rhythms of daily life, but also the infinitesimal futures that infuse those momentums that carry us through our daily rounds. Or, stated differently, it would seem that happiness is a technology of government capable of an unprecedented level of precision in the measurement, articulation, and compression of that gap that separates plan from practice. While previous technologies of government had for a long time sought to instill new habits largely through actions taken on sedimented routines, through repetition and the accumulation of a past of nearly identical actions aimed at inscribing the same actions in the future (this is, in a general sense, what Foucault described in his account of discipline), this new technology is one that tightens the leash on this gap through the use of a new measure, one that ensures that the point of application of the instrument of power is precisely the origin of the impulse behind conduct itself, and the future toward which habitual action is directed. As David Couzens Hoy has written, new technologies of power (he is referring to biopower and technologies of security, though the same could be same of neoliberalism and governmentality), employ a specific temporalization of their effects. Citing Foucault, he writes: “Security does not involve a static perception, but a perception that ‘will open onto a future that is not exactly controllable, not precisely measured and measurable’ ” (Hoy 2009, 6; Foucault 2007, 20). And by this same token, happiness, to the extent that it frames the government of the self as a problem of time, expresses the intensification of power, which now satiates, not just the bodies and conducts of subjects, but the very potentialities by which subjects imagine and project their capacities into the future. Happiness, and the temporalization of government, is an intensification of power’s production of subjectivity. The intensification of power is detailed in a trajectory that follows Foucault’s general historical thesis on the transformation of historical modes of domination. Foucault is often credited with having evolved a history of power that distinguishes three general figures, which include the power of sovereignty (the authority of the king to punish through direct attacks on the body), the power of discipline (the power of institutions to regulate through surveillance and the coordination of contemporaneous actions), and biopower—a figure closely related to the power of government. These figures are best understood not in terms of their unique forms nor their epochal designations, but the processes of transformation that occur between them, and the manner in which they compose “triangular” ensembles or assemblages of power (Foucault 1991, 102). Indeed, within contemporary Foucauldian scholarship, the theme of triangulation draws into relief these transformations

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between power formations and the unique constellations, combinations, and hybridizations they compose as they move gradually and unevenly in the direction of a closer regulation of human life. As Jeffrey Nealon has argued, we observe such an intensification in the opening pages of Discipline and Punish, where Damiens the regicide’s flesh is subjected to a cumbersome and unwieldy practice of torture (Nealon 2008). The power of the sovereign to inflict direct suffering on the surface of the body is without doubt an intense experience, though in the course of Foucault’s wider discussion, intensity acquires another meaning, one less limited to the singularity of a particular moment. The power to torture is transmuted into a “gentle way of punishing”—a lighter, more mobile, and less costly deployment that is at the same time more satiating, more penetrating, and capable of deeper and more thorough investments in the very potentialities of subjects themselves. To put this another way, intensified disciplinary power moves from what bodies are, in the case of Damiens, to what they do, in the case of the disciplined prisoner, the soldier, the student, the medical patient. The movement of intensity entails an increasing abstraction, generalization, and remoteness from the point of application, as well as a dematerialization of its infrastructure and a diffusion across and satiation of a social surface. And most importantly, the intensification of power is one of increasing temporalization. As Nealon contends, Foucault’s account of the principle of “exhaustive use” underpinning the significance of timetables in the emerging disciplinary apparatus was one that, in traditional use, functioned negatively to prevent idleness and the wasting of time. Under discipline, however, the control of time was subjected to a more intense form of satiation: Discipline . . . arranges a positive economy; it poses the principle of a theoretically ever-growing use of time; exhaustion rather than use; it is a question of extracting from time, ever more available moments, and from each moment ever more useful forces. This means one must seek to intensify the use of the slightest moment, as if time, in its very fragmentation, were inexhaustible or as if, at least by an ever more detailed internal arrangement, one could tend towards an ideal point at which one maintained maximum speed and maximum efficiency. (Foucault 154) But beneath what bodies did lay another dimension: what they could do, expressed in their vital potential—a domain disciplinary power left fallow and untouched. A more intense deployment is one that attains a lighter form still, shedding heavy disciplinary encumbrances to assume ever more

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satiating, abstract, and virtual forms, to better colonize the temporalities and potentialities of conduct itself. Adopting a temporal perspective, the intensification of power takes on a specific meaning. Intensification closes the lag between the temporality of government and that of the habitus, as this lag is increasingly anticipated, programmed, prescribed, and scripted in the logic of the plan itself. An intensified form of government is one that reduces the indeterminacy of the temporal, not simply by suppressing it, but more precisely by prescribing it according to a specific code, by incorporating it into the plan of a government that is ever more intimate with the everyday objects upon which it acts. More importantly, the plan understands not just the object of government (the bad habit itself ), and the time of this object (the meter and rhythm of a bad habit extended over time), but the lag between itself and its ultimate telos (the time it will take to overcome a bad habit and live a better life). This is the mutant temporality, the zone of asynchrony mentioned earlier. Where that lag between the temporality of the habitus and that of the plan is increasingly scripted within a technology of the plan itself, as it is in the discourse of happiness, an intensified power satiates all the more completely the domain of subjectivity. This is the second point of the twofold relevance of happiness in the present study indicated above: happiness provides an account of the temporality that enfolds all technologies of government, but it also provides an account of the intensifying character of power in our own age—one that increasingly, through deployment and satiation of the medium of time, penetrates to the very horizons of our existence. It is perhaps helpful to compare this formulation of the regulation of time to other more canonical accounts of similar processes. For the historian E. P. Thompson, the transition from agrarian to industrial temporalities is something that comes with the force of a direct violence. In the rich empirical discussion he provides in his seminal article “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” temporal orientation emerges as a medium for work discipline, but also for social conflict between labor and capital—one that begins as a primarily agrarian sensibility centered on task orientation is gradually subsumed and displaced by a sense of clock-measured time, as the time of industrial labor. Thompson relates in detail the breaking up of the time of peasant labor, organized around the pattern of the tides, the rising and setting of the sun, the seasons, etcetera, and the importance of the gradual dissemination of clocks, watches, calendars, and schedules. With the growing concentration of labor, increasing synchronization of tasks became necessary—a need that was met by nascent industrialists of the eighteenth century through the imposition of schedules,

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bells, and signals of various sorts, and the gradual reshaping of the temporal habits of the peasant population, well on the way to becoming the industrial proletariat. Temporal sensibility, as an embodied logic and an “inward notation of time,” is subject to a radical transformation: Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their “own” time. And the employer must use the time of this labour, and see it is not wasted: not the task but the value of time, when reduced to money is dominant. Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent. (Thompson 1966, 61) Through the lens developed in this chapter, however, there are some subjective aspects of this process that remain to be teased out of Thompson’s account. The time consciousness of the peasant was not simply transformed for him; it was to a large extent his responsibility to transform his temporal patterns himself—to retime his task orientation according to the meter and rhythm of the industrial clock. Moreover, the labor of this process was one that took place between two different kinds of temporality; task orientation, queued to the rhythms of the natural environment, was embedded in a habitus, which disciplinary time sought to transform through the imposition of a specific misalignment. Task-oriented time would be made to not-fit with other activities in other fields, such as that of the family, the village, and the extended network. Thus, habitus was intentionally misaligned from its field, intentionally constituted as a stumbling block for the peasant relative to the goals of a stable life. But for the peasant, the plan of industrial clock-time inevitably operated at some distance from the embodied time of the home and the village—there persisted a lag between these two temporalities wherein he knew he could exist, biding his time, dragging his feet, and waiting for something to do. In other words, the completion of this transformation was inevitably postponed, and a moment of perpetual asynchrony was sustained. His efforts to wake up on time for work, to take lunch at the appointed time, and to avoid absenteeism described a form of work he performed on his embodied habits and modes of conduct, seeking to close that gap between village and industrial time. But this project was never complete. Thompson provides numerous accounts of the ways in which English laborers, prior to the full imposition of the industrial work regime, preserved elements of peasant time against full incorporation into the disciplined time of capitalist production, such as the institution of what came to be known as Saint Monday: a day of hangover, a planned slackening of the work schedule to allow recovery from the weekend’s festivities.

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What these efforts imposed, therefore, was a lagging effect between the two times, and as such served both as a point of transfer between the time of the factory and the body of the peasant, but also as a third time, a vehicle of flight, an escape. Put differently, the limited futural horizons of disciplinary time—a time that seeks only to exhaust resources and extract productivity within the confines of an institutionally circumscribed labor process—describe only part of the process of intensification of which later technologies of neoliberal subjectification proved possible. The ringing of bells, the dissemination of timepieces, the imposition of schedules, the withholding of pay for lateness and absenteeism, and the positioning of public clocks were all instruments used for the coordination of bodily movements in a disciplined space. But they were not refined techniques (like self-help literatures) capable of a nuanced scripting and futuring, a detailed emplotment, close narration of the labor of self-transformation on an intimate scale and the implication of the habitus itself as a barrier to new temporal futures. The peasant, at least, owned to some extent the lag between the plan and his practices, his Saint Monday, which power remained too heavy to colonize. This was the freedom he extracted from power. The subject of happiness, by contrast, finds that lag operating on a very different register. His Saint Monday, and the freedom through which he pursues his own happiness, serves not only as a respite from power but also as a hinge for power’s intensified satiation. It is a lag that enables a moment of hesitation and possible flight, but also an intimate colonization of his potentials and futures. For, as we recall from a previous chapter, it is in the lag that the subject truly comes to “own” the aims of governmentality. In this regard, it is not completely accurate to suggest that the lag is closed, tightened, or constricted. It is more the case that the lag is incorporated, operationalized, assigned a new function that overlays its previous one. The lag becomes, or has transposed onto it, a hinge function, or a hinge effect. The incompleteness of the project of transformation becomes the vehicle by which we accept ourselves as truly the agents of this transformation itself. Under the rubric of neoliberal governmentality, the double function of ambivalent satiation that characterizes the lag is increasingly resolved in favor, not of the resistances of Saint Monday, but of Saint Monday as a pivot in the intensified inscription of power.

Convulsive Temporalities But what of this ambivalence? What mutant temporalities does the new discourse on happiness induce, and how can such a lag serve as a strategic

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site, a place of resistance under conditions of such satiation? Arguments for the strategic reversibility of clock-time as a technology of domination in the capitalist labor process are not unfamiliar. Thompson himself described the process by which, a generation after the appearance of clocks in the labor process, struggles increasingly took place within the framework of scheduled labor: “[Workers] had accepted the categories of their employers and learned to fight back within them. They had learned their lesson, that time is money, only too well” (Thompson 91). And indeed there is a rich literature on the many varied strategic uses of time as a vehicle of resistance, from the withholding of labor from the labor process itself (most obviously through the strike) through the general renunciation of the production imperative through strategies of laziness and indolence. Yet the notion of a resistance within neoliberal technologies of government through time, or what we can call, following Foucault, temporal counter-conducts, is one that requires that we move beyond notions of resistance as the effect of a specifically manifest political intentionality. We must instead consider the potentials for resistance that reside within the temporality of the habitus, and within the futures of everyday conduct itself. Perhaps the obvious way to pose this question is in terms of the most fundamental gesture of resistance itself, that of flat refusal. How does time say no? Or how do we say no through time? A useful approach to this question is one that draws from the idea of “counter-conducts,” or revolts of conduct, which Foucault elaborated in his lectures of 1977–78, and through which practices of government can be understood in terms of their own potential for reversal. Counter-conducts, Foucault explains, are distinguished from economic revolts against power (such as those described by Thompson) by their emphasis on the government of the self as the stake and point of reversal within a regime of government. Counter-conducts do not make any recourse to any originary or primary term external to relations of domination, but emerge from within the specific logics of a given mode of conduct, inverting the series that runs from the macro-level technologies of rule to the specific ethical practices by which individuals rule themselves, or from the plan to the practice of temporal government. Foucault describes the “pastoral counter-conducts” developed in opposition to ecclesiastical rule during the medieval period, illustrated by the Flagellants, for whom extreme forms of asceticism (self-inflicted beatings, sacraments, and the like) took up specific features of Christian pastoral governance, while reversing their direction, redeploying them in practices that were ultimately antagonistic to the pastoral establishment itself. Where the pastorate demanded renunciation, the Flagellants gave the authorities that much and more: accepting, intensifying, and reversing the direction of government without departing

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from the basic logic of government itself, Flagellants challenged the ecclesiastical monopoly on certain practices of the self, and ultimately fashioned new and deviant asceticisms beyond Church orthodoxy (Foucault 2007, 207). Yet for the purposes of the present discussion, which engages not just the formal practices of pastoral rule and Church doctrine but the more dispersed practices of habit and prereflexive temporality, it is necessary to consider a practice of counter-conduct embedded more in the somatic temporalities of everyday life. A window into such oppositional practices as a uniquely corporeal refusal of the investment of power receives some treatment in Foucault’s discussion of convulsion and the phenomenon of the convulsive body, described in ecclesiastical texts on possession and witchcraft. Foucault tells the story of the effects of power, spreading across the surface of society and investing the bodies of subjects in sixteenth-century Europe. As a new wave of Christianization developed new technologies of rule, the treatment of the demonically possessed body and the body of the witch emerged as a central problem of government, drawing into conflict competing governmental agencies within the expanding Christian world, particularly where the body, under exorcism, entered a state of convulsion—a problem of considerable technical elaboration and reflection for Christian government. The convulsive body of the possessed was one that enacted a fundamental refusal on an irreducibly somatic level. Foucault describes the exorcism of a possessed body in which, in an effort to drive out the devil, a sacrament is placed in the mouth of the possessed woman. Foucault cites the record of the inquisitors: “When the holy sacrament was in her mouth, the devil wanted to reject it, exhaling and roaring like a lion. Ordered not to commit any more irreverence, we saw [the devil; M. F.] stop, the holy sacrament descend to her stomach. We saw him heaving so as to vomit, but forbidden to do so, he yielded” (Foucault 2003, 212). The convulsive body, then, is the site of a battle between the imperatives of a power that seeks to invest the body, to impose obedience to the ecclesiastical rule, and a reaction to that inscription in the form of a somatic refusal. Such a body, Foucault describes, rejects all efforts at her exorcism, through vomiting, spitting, shaking, the uttering of blasphemies, fainting, choking—behaviors that exhibit, in theatrical form, the specific and unique encounter of opposing forces within the body itself. With the convulsive body, Foucault writes, “the body counters the rule of obedient direction with intense shocks of involuntary revolt or little betrayals of secret connivance.” The convulsive flesh is at once the ultimate effect and the point of reversal of the mechanisms of corporeal investment that the

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new wave of Christianization organized in the sixteenth century. The convulsive flesh is the resistance effect of Christianization at the level of individual bodies. (Foucault 2003, 213) What kind of body, operating in what temporal logic, is today capable of such reversals? Where are the convulsive bodies of neoliberal government, and how might that gap, the zone of asynchronous temporality between plan and practice, serve as the site of such a convulsive reversal? Indeed, it is possible, and what I would suggest is that such moments of convulsive counter-conduct already punctuate the everyday investments of power, the everyday habits and conducts of individuals in contemporary neoliberal societies, in ways that are not intentional or even conscious, and barely registered as refusals per se. Perhaps we are all convulsing, in our own way, in response to the inscription of always greater futures, always more productive and enterprising days, always higher yields of happiness. An illuminating example comes from the rising psychosocial phenomenon of procrastination—a cresting lifestyle affliction affecting larger numbers every year and garnering around itself an ever more verbose clinical discourse and practice, suggesting some ways in which exhortations to self-responsibilization and the persisting lags they imbibe might provoke unique temporal counter-conducts. Procrastination, recent studies have shown, is increasingly evident in public and private life, ever more present in the lives of students, spouses, taxpayers, politicians, and professionals (Steel 2007). In a 2007 study published in Psychological Bulletin, Piers Steel describes the growing prevalence of procrastination: among the general population, 15–20 percent consider themselves procrastinators, while among college students the figure is much higher, reaching 75 percent, almost one-half of whom procrastinate “consistently and problematically” (Steel 2007, 65). Within the clinical literature on procrastination, the phenomenon is defined in strictly utilitarian terms: “Procrastination is most often considered to be the irrational delay of behavior,” where rationality entails “choosing a course of action despite expecting that it will not maximize your utilities, that is, your interests, preferences, or goals of both a material (e.g., money) and a psychological (e.g., happiness) nature” (Steel 2007, 66). In procrastination, the inscription of a future, whose effect is to denature the sedentary character of the habitus, is uniquely, specifically, and categorically reversed. But as much as procrastination suggests a spontaneous upsurge against neoliberal exhortations to enterprise and future orientation, it is also the case that a rich apparatus has developed around the problem of procrastination itself—an apparatus of capture, as Deleuze described it—whose function is

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to contain this upsurge, to draw it in, neutralize its effects, and subject its movement to an ever more intense satiation. Procrastination has become a growing topic in the self-help literature category, described in books with such suggestive titles as Do It Now: Breaking the Procrastination Habit (Knaus 1997), The Procrastination Workbook: Your Personalized Program for Breaking Free from the Patterns That Hold You Back (Knaus 2000), The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Fiore 2007), and The Procrastinator’s Handbook: Mastering the Art of Doing It Now (Emmet 2000). A description of the procrastinator’s disposition is offered: The power of procrastination erupts from deep within. It often masquerades as a friend. “Let it wait,” we hear ourselves say, “for when you feel rested, you‘ll fly through these tasks to create a tomorrow that all will envy.” This is one of those procrastination paradoxes, where a soothing idea has hidden barbs. You feel relief when you think you can later gain command over what you currently don’t want to do. The barb is found in practicing a negative pattern of retreat. When you procrastinate you needlessly postpone, delay, or put off a relevant activity until another day or time. When you procrastinate, you always substitute an alternative activity for the relevant one. The alternative activity may be almost as timely or important as the one you put off. But more likely, it will be irrelevant, such as daydreaming instead of writing a report. (Knaus 8) Procrastination is just one opening into the wider question of the contemporary practice of counter-conduct within the temporal categories of neoliberal governmentality, and the potentials contained within the ambivalent relation of the hinge of happiness. It is possible to transpose neoliberalism’s invocation to choose one’s future, into the choice to “let it wait”—a choice antithetical to the neoliberal subject’s swaggering self-responsibility. Such a reversal is the convulsive expression of a specific ambivalence within the production of the neoliberal subject. The de-responsibilization of procrastination emerges as a spontaneous, convulsive response, a nonintentional reaction of a besieged habitus within the frame of neoliberal government, a neoliberal “Saint Monday” in which opportunity is differently mobilized as a daydream against the writing of reports.

Part III

The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality

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The Happiness of All and Each

The discussion thus far has centered on a highly abstract formulation of happiness as a medium of governmentality. The gap between those macro-level technologies of rule by which authorities govern populations and those micro-level techniques by which those same logics are incorporated into the personal government of emotional life has been considered both as a relay in the inscription of power, but also an ambivalent space, where reversals become possible. At the center of happiness, therefore, is an interval or a lag, one that constitutes a hinge, or a point of transfer between governmental strategies and techniques of the self, but also a site of appropriation and flight—a doing differently of temporality and emotional life. Moreover, it has been argued that the unique happiness of neoliberalism, as one logic of government among many, makes specific use of the medium of temporality that is endemic to this lag. Neoliberal happiness affects an intensification to the extent that it incorporates this lag, using it to induce subjects to go to work on themselves by invoking a horizon, an expectation, and a future that enables a certain autonomy within subjects themselves. Becoming free, for subjects of neoliberal well-being, means being set to work, in one’s own time, on some obstruction to happiness embedded within one’s habitual way of conducting oneself. With this understanding in place, we are in a position to shift now from a conceptual to a descriptive register, and to consider the specific historical and empirical identities that constitute the figures of government and habitus, of plan and practice. Within the present context and through the lens of those technologies of rule that hold sway over the current time, habitus, and the practical temporality of conduct it enables, is itself the inscribed, sedimented residue, the remainder persisting after a history of inscription under the logics of an older, now declining form of government. Habitus is the surface upon which a form of government called “social” (the governmental objective of the welfare state) has left its mark, and the very time through which the habitus acts is itself constituted by a logic

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of conduct that originates within the logic of social government. Indeed, throughout the literature on positive psychology, it will be shown, habit, as that thing to be transformed, is fundamentally social; the need to adapt to the expectations of others constitutes the basis of a habitualized pattern of thought that burdens our spirits and condemns us to cycles of unhappiness. Neoliberal government, and the time of the plan it imposes, draws its rationale from an entirely different imperative: rather than fitting in, one must distinguish oneself from others in a competitive field. Moreover, this is fundamentally a market logic, one that regards the world and its workings not in terms of a social norm to which one accommodates oneself but as a stock of environmental resources to be exploited in a program of self-optimization. Happiness, therefore, is that state that awaits those who successfully refashion their habits from a social to an entrepreneurial logic, thus adopting a view of life as pure opportunity. By this token, the gap between practice and plan is today an operative space not just between two competing temporalities, one reflexive, one prereflexive, but between two competing modes of government with concrete historical identities: the collectivizing, integrating logic of welfarism and social government, whose traces in the dispositions, routines, and in the very habitus of individuals become the object of a new form of government identified with neoliberal governmentality and the opportunistic conduct of the market. The work of neoliberal governmentality includes the effort to problematize, interrogate, and transform those residual traces of social government that persist in one’s habitualized patterns of thought and feeling. Therefore, in the present chapter and subsequently in those that follow, the lag, or the interval through which government is operationalized will be considered as one that mediates between neoliberalism’s plan for the entrepreneurial, agentive, self-interested life, and imperatives of adjustment and normification embodied in the social habitus. And, more precisely, the activity that takes place in the lag between the two will be defined in terms of work: the arduous, active labor of self-transformation. An elaboration of these two figures and of the laboring dynamic that operates between them will begin in this chapter with a short genealogy of happiness as a figure of government, and progress in subsequent chapters to detailed studies of social and neoliberal government in turn.

A Genealogy of Happiness Efforts to trace the genealogy of neoliberal government following in Foucault’s steps typically begin and conclude with the cognitive, calculating

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dimensions that constitute the subject of this endeavor. Neoliberal subjectification entails the inculcation of an enterprising disposition toward oneself and one’s environment, a specific mentality wherein what was once a normative field of social commitments and moral bonds is transformed into a terrain of risks and resources to be strategically engaged. In other words, neoliberal subjectivity is characterized by a specifically cognitive disposition. Less often do such genealogies delve into the emotional forms that appear with this new technology of government—the manner in which new kinds of feelings and affective states become possible and new emotional horizons induce individuals to undertake specific strategies of self-rule. The optimization of happiness, as a program of liberal, and, later, neoliberal self-government expresses an important aspect of governmentality that opens up to its own genealogical investigation. The gradual shaping of the subject of liberalism as one capable of autonomous and self-interested conduct is a process that involves both the gradual mastery of risk and a capacity for instrumentally oriented conduct, but also a new ability to feel relative to the outcomes of one’s wagers. This feeling is, I will argue, the origin of what we know today as happiness, particularly where a certain exuberance itself is identified from a managerial standpoint as a resource for the enabling of stronger economic and professional performances. Liberal happiness is 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. In short, there is no happiness, in the strict sense, without risk. And by this token, such a state of exuberant happiness—which is both an effect of success and a resource for further success—has served as a general and transposable motif for a new emotional topography of the neoliberal subject and neoliberal interiority, which itself doubles as a new technology of the self. Foucault himself had very little to say about emotions, preferring to remain on the terrain of the discursive, the institutional, and the ethical. However, it is reasonable to assume that, had he engaged the emotional realm more directly, he would have aligned himself in some way with a cognitivist thread of argument that runs through contemporary scholarship on this topic. From this standpoint, it is the thoughts that we hold about ourselves, our situations, and our problems that are more likely to determine how we feel than any primordial physiological, corporeal emotionality. This view has been well developed in a study of emotions and cognitions by Jerome Neu, who takes for the title of his monograph a line from a poem by William Blake: A Tear is an Intellectual Thing (Neu 2000). Blake’s poem describes the tears of a mother weeping over the death of her child, slain in

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war at the hands of tyrants—a verse that is suffused with a sorrow that turns slowly to rage. And it is the specific context of these events that frames the mother’s grief, Blake seems to suggest; loss is experienced and reinterpreted through the lens of anger—a mediation that, for Neu, allows us to consider emotions in a new light: “The tears only come to express particular emotions as we, the surrounding grown-ups, see in the tears responses to differentiated situations. Sometimes there is upset at the loss of a valued object, sometimes there is frustration at not getting what is wanted. As we come to ascribe the appropriate differentiating thoughts to the infant, these become tears of grief and tears of rage” (Neu 2000, 39). In a similar spirit, it is possible to consider how the rationalities of government disseminate frames through which emotions are registered as problems, and fundamentally reexperienced in that light. This is more typically the case with fear, which assumes ever more differentiated forms the instant it becomes the object of our efforts to govern it through the use of new intellectual or cognitive frames. Or love and sexual desire, which, as Foucault so well described, dissolve into “spirals of power and pleasure,” acquiring a new character and dynamism in response to the efforts of a new discourse on sexuality to reshape and redirect it toward proper objects (Foucault 1976, 45). All of this is to suggest that a genealogy of neoliberal government, if it is to include the emotional elements by which individual subjects set out to govern themselves, must take into account the specific forms of everyday thought—the very instruments of emotional government—that are mobilized around the problem of happiness. The story of how people slowly became happy is not enough; a broader account of how people shaped happiness through the adoption of a set of habits of thought about the world and about their own emotional states is what is required. Indeed, Mary Holmes has added to this discussion the useful concept of “emotionalization” to address the gradual process by which the increasing reflexivity of contemporary society necessarily involves the development of not just cognitive but emotional skills; with the requirements of increased responsibilization comes the demand to feel one’s way through situations with greater sensitivity and awareness (Holmes 2011). The government of happiness is therefore part and parcel of a wider emotionalization of society. By this token, tracing the arc of Foucault’s history of government in the West, while accenting that trajectory to draw into relief those technologies for the government of one’s emotional well-being through the manipulation of thoughts, it is possible to consider the slow evolution of a specific technology for the government of happiness. Shaped and reshaped over the course of several centuries, the government of happiness has variously served as a medium through which technologies for the production of unique economic and political subjects

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are transposed onto personal projects for the shaping of oneself through the intentional maximization of one’s own emotional and mental states. Moreover, one further point must be made: as much as we can understand the contemporary government of happiness as a dynamic process carried out in the specific time of its practice, one in which an object is negated and a form of work is carried out, it is necessary to trace the gradual elaboration of competing, agonistic formations of emotional well-being. Our genealogy of happiness in fact unearths two happinesses, each an object of its own distinct art of government. On the one hand, we have the happiness of the collective, a sense of well-being that derives from belonging with others, and membership in community characterized by mutuality, recognition, and shared identity. This is the happiness that was the chief object of a form of government that took all of society, its totality, and its interconnection as its object. It is a happiness that avoided risk by finding safety in one’s belonging with others. Making the people happy, from this standpoint, was the task of the welfare state; it meant making citizens interdependent, responsible to each other, capable of identifying with each other’s needs and sharing in the fostering of security and safety against threats to well-being. On the other hand we have the happiness that follows from the good fortune of the individual, wrought through calculative, opportunistic conduct. This is the happiness of liberalism, and later neoliberalism: a happiness of individual wager and personal enterprise, and thus of risk and success. A genealogical sketch of happiness as a tool of government draws out the complementary elaboration of these two meanings of happiness and their gradual diremption into competing vocations, and ultimately into the dynamic practice that we know today as the work of neoliberal governmentality. We will begin, then, with the gradual contrivance of happiness as an experience of risk avoidance through social belonging, of subordination to a rule, of a planned embeddedness within a shared pattern of normative social life. Such a happiness is one that can be traced from the Christian pastoral arts of government in the West through a series of modern secular incarnations, approaching its zenith in those collectivizing practices identified with the government of the populations of nation-states through welfare provision and social planning.

Pure Obedience and Reason of State The imbrication of happiness with the government of the free conduct of people, both as individuals and as populations, is evident in the most fundamental meanings given to the term, particularly with the emphasis it

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places on the contingencies of everyday life. The earliest appearance of any word presaging the modern “happiness” comes with the fourteenth-century Middle English happ, meaning good luck or chance, sharing the same root as happenstance. Happ refers to the state of exhilaration following the favorable outcome of an earthly endeavor whose success is not given in advance. This is a meaning that separates the concept distinctly from any of its theological equivalents: while religious notions of grace and traditionalist notions of honorific belonging describe one’s alignment with the unchanging logics of a social or cosmic order, happiness, in its modern meaning, describes a state of elation resulting from contingent, this-worldly outcomes, which might be controlled or not through effective enterprise. In this regard, Christian salvation is of an entirely different order than modern happiness as it results not from the good fortunes of one’s earthly wagers, but comes only with death, and even then only after a life spent in the repudiation of much of what today we would consider happiness. As Darrin McMahon has argued in his comprehensive history of happiness, Christian mysticism was rich with images of ecstasy, glory, and grace, yet these states, from Perpetua and Felicitas to Augustine and Saint Theresa implied the embrace of suffering as a condition of transcendence (McMahon 2006, 95). Extrapolating on Augustine’s assertion that we might “[c]all no man happy until he is dead,” McMahon summarizes the Christian view of happiness as one of pilgrimage: “In the Christian conception, happiness was death, a proposition that dealt a severe blow to the impact of earthly fortune and the vagaries of chance . . . to suffer was to suffer in righteous punishment, in expiation, in forward movement and progress along the way” (106). In short, while happiness itself was not a this-worldly possibility, assurance of our steadiness on the path to the ultimate happiness nonetheless provided a source of spiritual uplift, if only in anticipation of what was to come. Yet in spite of these important differences, an inquiry into the origin of the modern problem of happiness as an object of governmental rationality must begin with a consideration of otherworldly salvation as the end of a certain kind of practice of government. This method of government is described by Foucault in a lecture he gave in 1979 at Stanford University titled Omnes et Singulatim—All and Each, with the subtitle: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason (Foucault 1979). In it he presented an image of political governance drawn from the Christian pastorate, a figure deeply etched into those arts of statecraft we experience today in our modern institutions, at the heart of which stands the figure of the shepherd, caring for his flock. The shepherd governs, Foucault argues, according to a dual responsibility that brings together the care for

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large numbers of individuals, or populations, with that of the well-being of the solitary subject. Where on the one hand we have the juridical and legal forms of government that govern through laws and rights given to all, Foucault’s lecture draws out the other pole of that relation, one he terms “pastoral”—“whose role is to constantly ensure, sustain, and improve the lives of each and every one” (235). In his lectures on the pastoral care of the soul, Foucault described the manner in which, over the course of a millennium of European Christianity, there developed a specific foundational logic of government constituting the basis of what we know today as the modern state. The Christian notion of pastoral care, derived from its roots in Judaism, can be distinguished from other classical antecedents by the individualizing relationship it established between the ruler and the ruled, modeled on that of a shepherd and his flock (Foucault 2007, 184). The ruler must be like a shepherd, who looks out for his flock, providing for their needs through the kindness of his rule, but who, like a shepherd, also cares for and looks out for the welfare of each individual member. Foucault refers to the 27th Rule of St. Benedict, which clarifies this obligation in terms of the specific need and infirmity of each unique member of the flock. Benedict writes: “Let him follow the loving example of the Good Shepherd, who, leaving the ninety-nine sheep on the mountains, went to seek the one that had gone astray, on whose weakness He had such pity, that He was pleased to lay it on His sacred shoulders and thus carry it back to the fold” (Benedict 1949). The obligation of the pastor is therefore twofold: both to the flock as a whole, and to the individual herself, whose need for guidance along the path to salvation could not be administered under any general law for the government of all, but had to be ministered to the unique needs expressed in the spiritual weaknesses of each. As such, pastoral power does not operate through laws, nor does it appeal to the universal powers of reason possessed by individuals (as is the case with the Greek polis). It works through the mediation of the will of God as it is intended to act upon individuals themselves. It engages the government of the intimate conducts of persons composing the whole through a direct line of continuity that extends to the government of its most minute elements. Foucault demonstrates this point with the analogy of the pomegranate: “The unity of the pomegranate, under its solid envelope, does not exclude the singularity of the seeds, but rather is made up from them, and each seed is as important as the pomegranate” (Foucault 2007, 169). Central to this form of government, then, is the cultivation in each member of a complete subordination of individual to divine will as related through the pastor, and the utter dependence of the individual upon the

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pastor for guidance along the path to salvation. Such obedience is the object of a concerted cultivation that satiates the individual completely, operating not just on the level of statecraft and the government of populations who must be made obedient, but continuing directly down through a chain of governmental relations to the unique and distinct ways in which individuals stand watch over themselves as wardens of their own bodies, impulses, thoughts, and actions. Foucault finds examples of such obedience in the daily rounds of monastic life, illustrated in the subordinate relation of the monk to the abbot: in the account given by Cassian, a certain monk, upon being given a directive from the abbot, immediately abandons the copying of a manuscript the instant the order is given, not at the end of the word or even the end of a letter, but at the very middle of a single letter. Moreover, Cassian writes, the virtue of obedience is even greater when the order itself imposes an absurd action, such as that undertaken by the monk John, who dutifully watered a dead stick planted in the desert far from his dwelling on the orders of the abbott. Though the stick bore no signs of life, John’s demonstration of obedience was nonetheless taken as assurance of his saintliness (Foucault 2007, 176). Obedience, however, was only one of the objectives of government required for the soul’s salvation. Transparency before the pastoral authority in the form of knowledge of the movements of the heart and mind that might induce one to stumble on the way to salvation, had to be achieved through studied self-examination and confession. A complete knowledge of the physical constitution, the minute and insignificant transgressions, the habits of thought, and general well-being of the subject had to be available to the pastoral authority in order that his guidance be offered. Still a third feature of pastoral government came with the injunction to provide for the needs of other members of the flock, and the cultivation of a specific generosity (Dean 1999, 83). Philanthropy, alms-giving, and the performance of good works are among the most significant practices associated with Christian care understood as both atonement for the sins of the shepherd but also as necessary steps in redressing the needs of each member of the flock. Care for the frailty and weaknesses of others through concrete acts of benevolence and provision served the function of integrating and constituting the unity of the flock itself as a corporate body. In the form of alms-giving for the poor, the cultivation of Christian charity defined an important task within pastoral governance, one that worked to offset contentious divisions between groups by ensuring the universality and inclusiveness of an integrated human community. While seemingly remote from any recognizably modern practice of government, pastoral care would set in place some of the basic tenets not

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only of modern statecraft, but of a varied range of technologies and practices of government not immediately traceable to the state itself—agencies attendant to the needs of the individual that operate outside of the legal and juridical framework of government. For example, the transparency before God that was sought in pastoral rule would provide a practical template for contemporary secular practices of expertise meant to optimize the emotional life of the individual through a concerted hermeneutics of the self. What Foucault came to call the psy-disciplines are built precisely upon a logic of government embedded within Western institutions traceable to the individualizing care of the pastorate, wherein transparency and renunciation, and a somber examination of a deep interiority, emerge as effective methods of government. Also implicated in this pastoral legacy are a range of services and techniques, from medicine to the human sciences, wherein the well-being of the individual, and ultimately his happiness, are taken up as objects of government, laid bare through the application of a specific interiority. Indeed, such forms of expertise would appear in a wide variety of sciences and practices variously trained on the enigmatic movement of human life as a biological and psychological force, and for the interpretation of the subject through the lens of a biological existence that would provide key categories for knowledge and intervention. As we shall see later, where happiness is transferred from the salvation of the soul to the “happ” of everyday life, mediated by the immanent existence of the biological mind and body, an important element of the individualizing mandate of the pastoral is also projected onto modern forms of government. Another major transmutation of pastoral care into modern practices of rule would come with the injunction to obedience and dependence, which would acquire a second life in the arts of modern government under the socializing mandate of the welfare state. Where the renunciation of egoism, pride, and human will in pastoral government, and the cultivation of the willingness to give was meant to secure a total receptivity to divine intention mediated through the pastorate, modern methods of social government would similarly appeal to a folding of autonomy and agency into the collective and collectivizing programs of the state, under the rubrics of social insurance, the industrial division of labor, the social compact, and the collective provisioning of resources. These tendencies—perhaps most aggressively deployed through totalitarian arts of government but also active in the more benign collectivisms imparted in social democratic governance—similarly assumed a new place for happiness, no longer in the afterlife, but in the well-administered, this-worldly solidarities and social fabrics constitutive of the nation-state. And finally, the practice of Christian charity would undergo its own transformation as provisioning for the weak would become institutionalized in

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the bureaucracies of welfarism, and the disposition to collective beneficence would become a secular horizon of ethical conduct, a task and objective of social governance that promised to yield a margin of happiness in the material life of a society characterized by mutuality and a collective sense of well-being. All of this is to say that the problem of happiness was transposed from one of an anticipated afterlife to a quality of everyday experience embedded in the contingencies of a present life, in which the avoidance of suffering and minimization of risk was a project shared with others. “In this context,” Foucault writes, “the word salvation takes on different meanings: health, well-being (that is, sufficient wealth, standard of living), security, protection against accidents” (Foucault 1979, 215). But there is still another element to consider. Woven into this project of government was the belief that, under pastoral rule, the path to salvation demanded a specific vigilance in the control and redirection of one’s own thoughts. The malleability of thoughts, and the responsibility of individuals for maintaining purity in the content of one’s cognitive apprehensions, was firmly linked, not with the effects of emotional well-being for its own sake, but with the aims of Christian virtue, thus constituting a technique that was central to pastoral government. Returning to Saint Benedict, Chapter V, we read among the seventy-three “Instruments of Good Works,” the necessity to “dash at once against Christ the evil thoughts which rise in one’s heart.” Thoughts, as objects of an ethical technique, were of immeasurable significance, though this technique would only be linked with modern notions of happiness under a radically different configuration of well-being, and of the arts of government centered on its cultivation. The appearance of modern happiness as an object of government would come with the development in the seventeenth century of a set of discourses on statecraft, whose objective was the shaping of a concise reason of state centered on the problem, not of salvation, but of economy. In one of his best-known essays, titled simply “Governmentality,” Foucault describes how the emergence of economy in practices of government came by way of a specific rupture within European political discourse that implicated not just pastoral government but a tradition of sovereign rule embodied in a general principle of authority represented by Machiavelli. Indeed, the term governmentality is used in this essay to explain developments in the arts of government that came about following a spate of anti-Machiavellian treatises on statecraft in the sixteenth century. Machiavelli’s figure of the Prince is well known in the history of political philosophy for the style of thought it inaugurated, centered on the need for the sovereign ruler to maintain dominion over a principality or territory

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through means of direct force. For Machiavelli, power is exercised from a position external to the territory itself: the Prince, having inherited or taken his territory in a manner that did not guarantee any permanent or durable bond between himself and the territory ruled, had to defend his claim to his own principality as a possession vulnerable to threats from both inside and outside of that territory. Government, for the Prince, consisted largely of efforts to legitimate the distance separating himself from the territory by “manipulating relations of force” (Foucault 1992, 90) within the principality, or by identifying and eliminating by force any emergent threat. The modern art of government begins to take shape with the critical response to this text, and with the effort to transform this practice of government from one that is singular, transcendent, and external to the territory being ruled, to an immanent and plural practice, addressed not to the sovereign control of land but to the vitality and productivity of the population itself. With the rise in the sixteenth century of what Foucault calls “reason of state” comes an art of government whose aim is to increase the strength, integrity, and cohesion of the population constitutive of the state itself through the enhancement of economic activity. Indeed, at the core of reason of state is the primacy of economy as an object of government, one that endeavors to secure what Foucault terms the “right manner of disposing things so as to lead . . . to an end which is ‘convenient’ for each of these things that are to be governed” (Foucault 1992, 95). Economy, therefore, presupposes the interdependence of individuals, institutions, and resources (things) as the foundation for the production of wealth (a convenient end), and the role of government is therefore to increase and intensify this interdependence (the right manner of disposing) through its own interventions. Foucault writes: The things with which in this sense government is to be concerned are in fact men, but men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its special qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, etc.; men in their relation to that other kind of things, customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking, etc.; lastly, men in their relation to that other kind of things, accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death, etc. (Foucault 1992, 93) Three elements made up the problem of economy: others, thoughts, and risks. These are the contingent relations through which men were to be

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governed. Reason of state, as the government of economic activities through relations within the state, signals a significant break with political and diplomatic conventions of the Feudal period. Christian notions of the unification of the kingdoms of mankind in anticipation of the return of Christ, and any otherworldly finality posed by pastoral government, gave way to a form of government whose ends lay in the well-being and happiness of each of a plurality of distinct states (internally linked by such “relations”) with separate and competing interests—in the lives and relations of those populations composing those states, and in the interactions and economies that gave states their relative strength. Such an art of government fit the ostensibly peaceful conditions that followed the end of the Thirty Years War and the treaty of Westphalia, where the diminishing of rivalries between princes for the possession of territory gave way to ongoing competition between states through the brandishing of economic strength. Through the lens of reason of state, it was the economic strength of states themselves and their populations—not the authority of sovereign rulers or the acquisition of properties through matrimonial and other dynastic alliances, but the density, frequency, and industriousness of the interactions between people—that would ensure the holding power of states in the event of war. In other words, modern government, as reason of state, is defined by the concern for how to introduce economy, understood as “the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the family” as a central object of governance (Foucault 1991, 92). Foucault writes: “To govern a state will therefore mean to apply economy, to set up an economy at the level of the entire state, which means exercising towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behavior of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of the family over this household and his goods” (92). A strong state would be one possessing a population that is industrious, resourceful, and well integrated, and whose ability to defend itself from threats from neighboring states would derive from the security of the conditions required for frequent interactions and robust commercial enterprise. Indeed, the very notion of the security of populations only came into existence as government acquired the instruments of a certain technology and rationality of statecraft. These are the epistemological instruments of a “political arithmetick,” or “political oeconomy” consisting of census taking, statistics, and the like (Foucault 2004, 315). All these elements combine in an apparatus of reason of state that Foucault terms “police,” though the meanings implied by this term in its seventeenth-century usage are quite different from those of today. In his discussion of police, Foucault refers to von Justi’s Elements of Police, a German manual on Polizeiwissenschaft, or the science and practice of

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popular security, whose general method and technique is summarized under the heading of cameralism. Cameralism described a broad set of strategies and practices by which government might intervene in the daily doings of individuals with the aim not just of ensuring order, but of optimizing all those various activities and interactions by which individuals engaged with each other toward the pursuit of useful ends—purposes that would, directly or indirectly, increase the wealth and military strength of the state. “As a form of rational intervention wielding political power over men” Foucault writes, “the role of the police is to supply them with a little extra life; and by so doing, supply the state with a little extra strength. This is done by controlling ‘communication,’ i.e., the common activities of individuals (work, production, exchange, accommodation)” (Foucault 1979, 248). Indeed, this “little extra life” could be added through a diverse range of interventions targeting a multiplicity of sites and practices. Citing the French cameralist author Delamare, Foucault characterizes the purpose of police: “ ‘to lead man to the utmost happiness to be enjoyed in this life.’ . . . [T]he police cares for the good of the soul (thanks to religion and morality), the good of the body (food, health, clothing, housing), wealth (industry, trade, labour)” (250). The optimization of life that secures the state finds a direct affective expression in the pleasure derived from successful enterprise, or happiness. In his work on cameralism, the sociologist Albion Small, citing Von Justi, identifies, three points that constitute the goal of happiness within the objectives of cameralist rule: 1. The monarch must make use of means and measures through which the resources of the state may be preserved and expanded, and his subjects may be made happy. 2. The subjects must facilitate these measures by their obedience and diligence. From these principles another follows, viz.: 3. The welfare of the ruler and the happiness of the subjects can never be separated, and the one without the other can never permanently exist. (Small 2001, 273) As Foucault explains, to govern the strength, productivity, and disposition of a population is to govern the personal contentedness and well-being of its citizens: “Happiness is not only a simple effect. Happiness of individuals is a requirement for the survival and development of the state. It is an instrument, and not simply a consequence” (Foucault 1988, 158).

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All of this takes us some distance in understanding how an art of government introduced through pastoral power might become transposed onto a secular framework of government, through which happiness is enlisted as an instrument of social integration, economic optimization, and the strengthening of the state. Obedience, self-transparency, and charity, the pastoral aims of a governmental rationality that considered the well-being of souls as the end of the government of a population, established the framework for an art of government that set out to optimize the industriousness and happiness of individuals who take pleasure in their cooperative, productive, and profitable interactions with and interdependencies upon others. Happiness, then, is the individualizing pole in this exercise of pastoral government and reason of state, though the individuals it seeks to constitute are individual only in productive and interdependent relations with others, and in subordination to an organizing authority. It is a condition of security demanded for economic enterprise and the strengthening of the state, for the purposes of which individuals must be induced to cultivate within themselves a predisposition to integrate with others productively, and thus to make themselves happy, not only through obedience but through optimal interactions with and dependencies upon others—a dependency that expresses itself in a mutuality and trust supportive of industrious collaboration and communication. In short, this is the happiness of safety in belonging, which will, in time, become the unthought basis for the habits and temporalities of modern people, forming the obverse of the discourse on happiness to which we are exhorted today.

Liberalism and the Happiness of Each The image of happiness related so far may strike some readers as remote from that happiness to which we now aspire. Where is the freedom, exuberance, expressiveness, and vitality we associate with happiness as we encounter it in advice columns, motivational workshops, and the serene imagery of advertising? Indeed, if the care for all and each is a rationality of government that has carried over so many centuries to infiltrate the way we govern ourselves today through our happiness, it would seem from the preceding discussion that the “each” remains firmly folded under the “all,” or, to recall Foucault’s analogy, the happiness of the pomegranate is understood in terms of the subordination and integration of the seeds to the whole of the fruit. Today, these terms are reversed; it is those qualities of institutional subordination, functional integration, shared avoidance of risk, and dependence on others constituting the welfare of the all that

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one must overcome if one is to tap into the wellsprings of happiness in one’s own life—the happiness of each. More precisely, to the extent that the cultivation of one’s own happiness entails a form of work performed on oneself, it is the residue of this older form of government directed to the needs of the all that must be transformed. To take responsibility for one’s happiness, many today believe, it is precisely from the tyranny of the all that the each must be liberated, or must be taught to liberate itself, whether in politics, economics, or emotional life. To understand the origins of this sentiment, we must trace a very different rationality for the government of happiness, one centered on the agency and autonomy of an individuality that has in many ways evolved out of, but also as a reaction against, the collectivist image of happiness promoted by reason of state. This art of government emerged through a broad set of transformations identified with the rise of eighteenth-century liberalism, and the later iteration of these reforms in the liberal governments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Liberalism appears, more than anything else, as an art of power buttressed on the critique of the authority of both monarchical sovereignty and reason of state, in the name of the liberty and rights of the person. Liberal doctrines from the German Enlightenment and the French Revolution to the Constitution of the United States have all asserted that the legitimacy of government rests only with the consent of those governed, who possess inalienable civil liberties whether in the domain of juridical law or in the realm of commerce and economic conduct, and it is the responsibility of liberalism to restrain the state from violating those liberties. Yet as much as liberalism emerges as a specifically political problematic centered on the limitations of government, it is also one that implies the extension of new kinds of government controls into realms of social and personal life. Through a broad set of novel governmental strategies, liberal government applies its interventions to those very settings in which liberty, as a disposition to a certain kind of free political and economic conduct by an individual, is cultivated and fostered. While liberal government sets individuals free, it also understands that the predisposition for the correct form of freedom is one that requires a technique and a method of inculcation, one that is accomplished through intervention into the dynamic and constitutive processes of life itself. And at the center of this predisposition to correct freedom is the problem of happiness—the capacity to derive emotional affirmation from the optimal outcomes of one’s wagers. The efforts of Jeremy Bentham and other followers of Enlightenment utilitarianism to map out, with exacting precision, the very mechanisms and motivations by which happiness is pursued can

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be read as a response to the need to constitute this new human propensity for the free pursuit of one’s own ends in life, as a thing of knowledge and governance, and as an object of intervention. The problem of happiness, then, for liberalism, serves as a mechanism for the inner constitution of a disposition for free conduct that is both the negation of one form of government—a government that governed too much, through the imposition of constraining collectivist obligations—but also the affirmation of another, one that is in many ways more intense, more satiating, and capable of penetration to a depth of which previous forms of government were not capable. Indeed, a power whose ability is to produce a capacity for freedom is one that reaches the deepest recesses of subjectivity, one that touches not just upon the actions of the individual, but the very potentials invested in a unique form of personal existence. And the realization of these potentials, we have already seen, are expressed in the dimension of time; biological life, of which happiness is thought to be a direct expression, is a temporal potential that extends across a trajectory of futures spanning generations, biographies, and daily schedules. The location of happiness at the intersection of these two moments of government, which can be understood as the juridical and the biopolitical, will be described in turn. By the time of the great liberal revolutions of the eighteenth century, amid patterns of increasing liberalization both of political rule and economic conduct, reason of state itself came under fierce criticism, particularly in the domain of economy. The mercantilist system of subsidies, price fixing, tariffs, and protectionist measures that prevailed over European economies from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century and which cameralism sought to consolidate, was increasingly perceived as unresponsive to the real value of commodities deriving from environmental factors unique to each producer. Liberalism, in the works of Adam Smith, emerged both as a political doctrine and as a countervailing art of government to that of mercantilism and reason of state, contending, essentially, that the state governs too much, and that there is a unique art to the practice of governing less that modern states must learn. In the realm of economic freedom, the endeavor to regulate the very lives of men and their dispositions toward things through practices of police and the cameralist arts of regulation was doomed, the liberals contended, by the implicit epistemological limits imposed upon economic sovereignty by the ultimately unknowable character of economic processes themselves. That spirit for “barter, truck, and trade” that animates the very economic conduct states sought to shape and direct was one that operated as an “invisible hand,” permanently inaccessible to the regimes

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of government, and for this reason should be left well enough alone. The best states could do, from a liberal standpoint, was to limit themselves in their own capacities to govern, and to concentrate instead on creating those indirect conditions under which the spirit of liberal enterprise could best realize itself on its own. In the face of this limit, liberal government should govern, not through direct policies of the state, but “at a distance,” shaping indirectly the environmental conditions under which individuals are moved to cultivate within themselves the correct dispositions required for optimal economy. And it is this indirect cultivation of a capacity for self-interested economic conduct, not through programs of direct state intervention but through nonstate social authorities embedded across the social fabric (in families, schools, hospitals, and other centers for the administration of life) that a process Foucault called the governmentalization of the state occurs (Foucault 1991, 103). More precisely, technologies of liberal government assert the limitation of government on the basis of the epistemological constraints imposed by those processes that constitute economic activity, which are endemic to the science of political economy itself and to which reason of state and mercantilist policies remain blind. In Foucault’s summation, liberal government warns the cameralist state against the pursuit of its governmental ambitions: “You must not. But why must he not? You must not because you cannot. And you cannot in the sense that ‘you are powerless.’ And why are you powerless, why can’t you? You cannot because you do not know, and you do not know because you cannot know” (Foucault 2008, 283). Where economy had, under reason of state, designated a method of government and a set of procedures and strategies by which government could be imposed “economically,” by the eighteenth century economy came to designate “a level of reality, a field of intervention,” the precise character and dynamics of which would remain permanently beyond the pale of rule (Foucault 1993, 93). Thus, liberal government opens a space of freedom for the economic conduct of individuals, and puts in place a set of internal restrictions on any use of its own power that might threaten that freedom, both on the level of juridical rights and in that set of economic practices associated with laissez faire. Such is the method by which liberal government governs through universal laws, applicable to all. It is through a separate channel of influence that liberalism would pursue the government of each. The government of the individual, of the each, constitutes the second moment of liberal rule: as much as liberalism reflects a critique of the authoritarianism of reason of state and the disciplinary practices of its rule, it nonetheless incorporates into its own program many of those same

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technologies of police through which reason of state had operated. Indeed, one of the principal methods by which cameralism acted upon populations so as to regulate the conducts of individuals and maximize their industry— that of statistics and the census—would later become a chief instrument in the fixing of juridical limits on sovereignty in the name of liberties intrinsic to the dynamics of the population, which had to be protected against intrusive government. The very object identified by cameralism, the field of population wherein wealth was generated, would open up under liberal rule to a broad set of interventions that were of a fundamentally disciplinary character and aimed at a similar effect to that of reason of state—that of the production of economic security necessary for prolific economic conduct beneficial to the strengthening of the state. But if certain technologies were shared among cameralist and liberal governments, their aims could not be more distinct. Where reason of state sought economic security by restricting the course of conduct and monitoring closely the various forms of economic behavior, liberalism sought security in a very different form—in liberty itself, correctly practiced, which could be attained through the training of populations for the proper exercise of their freedoms in ways that would make them, of their own free choice and will, adequate for participation in market enterprises. Foucault writes: “Liberalism is not acceptance of freedom; it proposes to manufacture it constantly, to arouse it and produce it, with, of course [the system] of constraints and the problems of cost raised by this production” (Foucault 2008, 65). How, then, could this subject of freedom be produced? Foucault goes on to describe several measures affecting the disposition to free conduct in a population, starting with the propagation of a liberal motto, to “live dangerously” (Foucault 2008, 66). By this he refers to the efforts of liberal governments to educate their populations in the arts of calculation concerning the outcomes of wagers and investments, the quantification of risks, and those techniques by which every eventuality is made subject to a probability analysis. “The horsemen of the apocalypse disappear,” Foucault writes, “and in their place everyday dangers appear, emerge, and spread everywhere, perpetually being brought to life, reactualized, and circulated by what could be called the political culture of danger in the nineteenth century” (Foucault 2008, 66). It was through this culture that liberalism affected a certain responsibilization of the subject in the face of myriad risks and hazards for which he alone was to take charge: the taming of uncertain outcomes became the project of a calculus of personal enterprise, wherein risks and dangers are subject to constant evaluation and assessment (Foucault 2008, 68). Happiness, then, comes to define the emotional state

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required of this attitude toward uncertainty—it is the affective homologue of living dangerously. As life becomes something in which one can invest, according to specific laws of probability, it also becomes something at which one can experience lucky outcomes, or happ. Liberal happiness emerges as the experiential, most private moment of the well-formed liberal subject, the one capable of the correct practice of freedom. It is something one can produce on one’s own, through the successful negotiations of all of these risks, dangers, wagers, difficulties, and the like, each of which possesses the propensity to go badly, yet each of which brings exuberance when it turns out well. Happiness enters into the political lexicon of liberalism to designate that subject capable of free and enterprising conduct, and the resourceful pursuit of everyday gains. Happiness becomes an object, something one can have more or less of depending on the outcome of these wagers, the relative abundance of which serves as a measure of the legitimacy of any given form of government, and something one can maximize through one’s own calculated interventions. Once one asks oneself if one is happy or not, what slips in unnoticed is the implicit acceptance of a life ruled by chance and opportunity, of expectation and futurity, and an understanding of oneself as a temporalized subject possessing competence in strategizing against such odds. Invocations by John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Jeremy Bentham, who famously designated “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” as the principle aim of modern rule, placed the question of happiness as a key problematic at the heart of liberal governance, both of the all and the each. To govern effectively is to bring about the worldly conditions under which individuals apply themselves to the successful government of everyday endeavors for their own benefit. In The Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham wrote: As to ethics in general, a man’s happiness will depend, in the first place, upon such parts of his behavior as none but himself are interested in; in the next place upon such parts of it as may affect the happiness of those about him. In as far as his happiness depends upon the first mentioned part of this behavior, it is said to depend upon his duty to himself. Ethics then, in as far as it is the art of directing a man’s actions in this respect, may be termed the art of discharging one’s duty to one’s self: and the quality which a man manifests by the discharge of this branch of duty (if duty it is to be called) is that of prudence. (Bentham 1789, 312)

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Teaching such an “art of discharging one’s duty to one’s self ” would prove a challenging project of liberal, and later neoliberal, governmentality, one that would extend across a range of institutions and social authorities, just as the predisposition to prudence that is its mark would necessitate a broad apparatus of regulation and control. Yet happiness would sustain as the endpoint of such a duty to oneself. Of course, Bentham’s version of this problem was deeply rationalist, extending the appeal to reason implicit in Enlightenment thought to the personal lives and emotional dispositions of individuals themselves. In the wake of this emphasis and as a reaction against it, romantic appeals to spirit, character, feeling, and prerational dispositions for happiness would provide the other side of the utilitarian coin, and would ultimately serve equally in the shaping of a mode of governance centered on the cultivation of happiness as an intrinsic potential of life. Indeed, the problem of happiness would appear in the nineteenth century through the lens of a program of government centered on the place of everyday thought at the intersection of conscious intentionality and biological life.

Happiness as Social Life We now have in place the fundamentals of two arts of government centered on the problem of happiness: a reason of state, for which happiness derives from productive interdependencies and the shared production of safety, and a liberal government, through which happiness is equated with the free and self-interested pursuit of personal goals and the private embrace of risk—a government that privileges the government of all, and another that emphasizes the government of each. While neither of these figures survives in any recognizable sense in the political worlds we inhabit today, the logics by which they extended their rule, and the imprint of the dynamic of interdependence and autonomous agency that they established remains contemporary. Indeed, as it will be argued in the chapters that follow, this dynamic appears, in an evolved form, at the center of the problem of happiness as we are led to experience it today—as a task of self-transformation, and as a form of work one undertakes on some obdurate feature within oneself. To grasp this, it is necessary to describe the contemporary manifestation of this imperative to interdependence, as crystallized in that form of government we know as the welfare state. The production of freedom through liberal government to which Foucault referred was one that maintained deep continuities with pastoralism and reason of state, and shared many governmental characteristics with

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that distinctly twentieth-century technology of rule that would emerge to limit the excesses of liberal rule itself—that of social government and the planned society. “The social,” as a problematic of government, has a distinct character; while liberalism was implicitly critical of the state’s interventions in the doings of the population, it nonetheless found great tactical value in many of the instruments it inherited from those arts of government, specifically statistics, surveys, and other data collection instruments that rendered population itself the object of scientific knowledge, whose variations could be calculated according to norms implicit within the distributions of the population itself. While great freedoms were granted within liberal societies in the juridical realm, these technologies helped shape a supplemental domain of regulation that emerged alongside that of law, one that made no recourse to any moral or political objective external to the population but appealed only to the biological dynamics of life itself within measurable statistical distributions. This is the domain of the norm, calculated through scientifically derived averages, whose application to the population served to identify “abnormal” variations from the life of the population as new objects of government and intervention. The regulation of this domain became ever more pressing as liberalism proved itself capable of a spectacular destructiveness. Industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, as Marx observed, uprooted everything in its path, generating conditions under which the cultivation of a certain predisposition for free economic conduct was seriously compromised. Amid high levels of pauperism and the rending of the social fabric through accelerated capitalist growth, the challenge of liberalism shifted from the securing of juridical liberties and the instilling of calculative, emotional, and cognitive capacities, to the ensuring of embodied, affective dispositions suitable for formally free economic conduct. Already, in the course of the eighteenth century, abnormality had become a chief category of governance; in his lecture course of 1974–75, Foucault described the transformation of the traditional image of the monster into that of the statistically abnormal character as a figure of criminal psychiatry—one that enabled the courts to pose the question of criminality and the correct exercise of freedom in a manner that extended beyond the intellectual and moral competencies of individuals (Foucault 2003, 110). On this basis, the problem of the population in the nineteenth century would be rewritten as the problem of society—a population mapped and acted upon as a unity of normative, interpersonal relationships possessing a reality and internal dynamic of its own, wherein predispositions for certain kinds of conduct were created in the individual through normal socialization.

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As Jacques Donzelot has argued, the social represents a problem-space wherein accelerated capitalist economic growth and the overextension of market sovereignty would be held problematic, identified, and acted upon as a force eroding other forms of popular solidarity and creating fertile ground for revolutionary challenges to capitalism itself (Donzelot 1984; 1988; 1991a; 1991b). From the early nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, social government developed through a technology of rule entailing, as Mitchell Dean has described, “a set of problematizations of the liberal governmental economy (e.g., the ‘social question,’ social problems, social issues), a set of institutions and practices (e.g., social welfare, social insurance, social work), a set of laws and legal jurisdictions (e.g., the juvenile court, family law) and a variety of actors, agencies and authorities (e.g., social workers, schoolteachers, police officers, general practitioners)” (Dean 1999, 53). In other words, if liberalism had, from the eighteenth century on, posed the problem of too much government, social government addressed the problem of too much liberalism. Through the technology of welfare, the state assumed a function described by the French legal theorist Charles Gide as the “visible expression of the invisible bond”—an instrument for the fostering of a normative moral order and social solidarity amid conditions of social disintegration resulting from the atomizing effects of unchecked market capitalism and industrialization (Donzelot 1988, 403). To put this differently, society, from the standpoint of social government, sustained as an object of rule, although the unity of this object was not given in advance. It had to be actively cultivated. And the target of this intervention was the prerational domain of a disposition for conduct and social solidarity that a normative science of behavior had uncovered as a biological attribute of the individual. Society was a complex amalgam of disparate and conflictual elements that enjoyed no natural solidarity beyond that which could be cultivated through an effective government that extended into the lives of subjects themselves, into their feelings and dispositions. Yet society was of immense significance as that domain in which the propensity for freedom and free economic conduct would be cultivated, in communities, families, and institutions. As Colin Gordon writes: The existence of society is an inherently historic process, in which society is continually tearing itself apart and thereby at the same time endlessly remaking its own fabric. The activity of government, as an organic component of the evolving social bond, participates in this historic passage through a range of distinct, consecutive social forms. . . . The nineteenth century is

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haunted by a quest for a social government, a government which can elicit for itself, amid the contending forces of modernity, a vocation and functionality anchored in the troubled element of the social. (Gordon 1991, 22–23) Happiness, as a technique of such a form of government, was the product of what Gordon cites as the “disinterested interest” implicit within the social, and embodied in social government: the inclination to a sympathy and mutuality, a belonging with others, that is so fundamental to our outlooks as to escape our conscious investments. This was not a happiness of optimal outcomes but one of minimized risks, one that celebrated the safety of numbers and the security of strong social bonds. Indeed, social government of the nineteenth century and its twentieth-century counterparts would seek to foster this inclination to mutuality with increasing conviction and to ever more satiating effect, specifically by acting on the biological and emotional substrate through which certain capacities for life and conduct were generated. We have arrived now at the image of happiness as a problem of government that prevailed over much of the twentieth century, the fundamentals of which continue to operate today in many ways, and whose residue forms the backdrop of and an object for those modes of self-rule that constitute the topic of this book: neoliberal happiness, wherein emotional life is taken up and practiced as an open-ended enterprise. The happiness of social governance, as the happiness of belonging, of adjustment to social norms, is part and parcel with a Fordist plan for the integration of labor, leisure, and civil society, wrapped in a common and reciprocal function. It is the happiness of the welfare state as one of “embedded liberalism,” as David Harvey terms it; economic freedom within stable and well-sustained social limits. The departures posed by a neoliberal technology of happiness from the mold of social government would not be comprehensible without an image of happiness as a problem of social life—one buttressed on reciprocity, mutuality, adjustment, and accommodation to societal norms (Harvey 2008). For it is this form of happiness, and the embodied logic of conduct it inscribed in the dispositions of people, that shaped what we can call a “social habitus,” or an embodied mode of conduct premised on mutuality and interdependence. And most importantly, it is this habitus that will constitute the object of the work of neoliberal governmentality and the ethical work of the new discourse on happiness. Yet before approaching the wider question of neoliberalism and happiness’s function as a hinge of neoliberal rule, it is first necessary to press the question of social government and the social

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habitus further, to acquaint ourselves with the form of happiness practiced by the subject of the welfare state as one characterized by belonging and reciprocity. This requires us to consider the precise technologies of government through which the social habitus was inscribed. For this, we will turn to the realm of psychology.

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For proponents of the new discourse on happiness, well-being is an emotional state deeply interwoven with “self talk,” or the surface chatter of our everyday thoughts, so much so that the intentional adoption of specific regimes of thought is believed likely to bring about an overall enhancement of contentedness with life. While this conviction is central to the contemporary conversation on happiness, it is also a refrain that has many historical antecedents; think positively about your circumstances, if only through an act of sheer will, and you will feel better. And this better feeling will motivate you to higher levels of performance, thereby improving life conditions and generating happier situations, which, when understood as such, will occasion more positive thoughts, and so on. Or as noted by Barbara Fredrickson in her 2009 self-help book, Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3-to-1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life: “Increased optimism, however attained, should translate into an increased ability to find positive meaning and experience positive emotions in daily life. Experiences of positive emotions, in turn, should broaden habitual modes of thinking and build personal resources for coping with life’s adversity. Positive emotions are likely to be the active ingredient that energizes this upward spiral that optimizes health and well-being” (Frederickson 2000, 1). Happiness, in short, comes through the manipulation of mundane thought patterns—a form of emotional and cognitive self-management that holds tremendous organizational value across a wide spectrum of institutional settings and for a range of governmental purposes, just as it spells out a specific set of tasks and projects for those who accept happiness as a personal objective. The presumption of causality upon which this theory rests is one that has a long history. In a variety of military, religious, industrial, commercial, and civic functions, the intentional constraint of everyday thoughts toward apprehensions that stir the spirit is a commonplace undertaking, constituting the very stuff of valor, group morale, loyalty, camaraderie, and devotion. What is less often understood, particularly in sociological accounts of this

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process, is that arriving at such shared emotional states with other members of a group is something that often requires an intentional, collective effort that goes beyond the gradual adoption of a cognitive frame through more organic processes of social influence. Indeed, under conditions of high moral solidarity, the sharing of common perceptions and their attendant emotional states becomes a “fact” of social life, as Emile Durkheim would attest, though the maintenance of such frames is not only a natural byproduct of group life, but a responsibility and a technique that individuals reflexively and intentionally practice upon themselves. For citizens of nation-states, just as for members of military units and sports teams, it is the personal responsibility of each to practice those techniques of intellectual self-manipulation that infuse and perpetuate a cycle of cognition-emotion-conduct for the benefit of all. Consider, for example, the following statements on the problem of happiness as a technique of cognitive self-government. The first is from a popular Victorian manual titled Self Help, written in 1859 by Scottish author and reformer Samuel Smiles: Even happiness itself may become habitual. There is a habit of looking at the bright side of things, and also of looking at the dark side. . . . And we possess the power, to a great extent, of so exercising the will as to direct the thoughts upon objects calculated to yield happiness and improvement rather than their opposites. In this way the habit of happy thought may be made to spring up like any other habit. (Smiles 1959, 197) Another comes nearly a century later, from Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking, perhaps a twentieth-century counterpart to Smiles’s text: You can be unhappy if you want to be. It is the easiest thing in the world to accomplish. Just choose unhappiness. Go around telling yourself that things aren’t going well, that nothing is satisfactory, and you can be quite sure of being unhappy. But say to yourself “Things are going nicely. Life is good. I choose happiness,” and you can be quite certain of having your choice. (Peale 1996, 58) And two contemporary invocations of happiness, one from a 2009 article on positive psychology published in the Oxford Review of Education, a peer-reviewed academic journal, arguing the need for “positive education,” in British elementary schools:

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Well-being should be taught in school on three grounds: as an antidote to depression, as a vehicle for increasing life satisfaction, and as an aid to better learning and more creative thinking. (Seligman et al. 2009, 295) Another, excerpted from the popular self-help book The Secret, published in 2007 and sold widely throughout the world: No matter what you have manifested in regards to your body, you can change it—inside and out. Start thinking happy thoughts and start being happy. Happiness is a feeling state of being. You have your finger on the “feeling happy” button. Press it now and keep your finger pressed down on it firmly, no matter what is happening around you. (Byrne 2007, 133) Four passages from four remote moments and places, converge seamlessly, not counting minute variations in tone, on a view of the causal connection between thoughts, feelings, and performances; on the malleability of this relationship; and on the personal and organizational benefits to be derived from the successful increase of happiness. Moreover, while core elements of this practice have been in the making for a long time, it is only with the full development of the field of psychology as an instrument of self-regulation and an organizing presence in daily life that the practices of cognitive self-government associated with happiness come truly into their own. In the previous chapter, we witnessed the gradual elaboration of two contrasting, though often interwoven technologies of government, one centered on the cultivation of interdependencies and reciprocal obligations among individuals and groups culminating in contemporary forms of social government through the welfare state, the other focused on the agency, autonomy, and freedom of individuals, imparted through technologies of liberal and later neoliberal governmentality. Extending the discussion of that chapter, and drawing out the thread of that art of social government centered on the cultivation of the social bond, the present chapter will attempt to describe the government of happiness as a reflection of social government, or of the successful adaptation of individuals to normative relations with others. More precisely, this art of government will be considered for its uniquely psychological face. With the development of an art of rule centered on the psychological health of individuals, and ultimately on an image of personal happiness as a specifically psychological disposition rooted in one’s ability to

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integrate oneself successfully with a community of others, modern societies witnessed the spread of a new set of regulatory practices for the production of emotional states through the interpretation, analysis, and manipulation of surface, everyday thoughts—a technology through which happiness was understood as a refraction of a deep psychological interiority, while thoughts became the object of a certain hermeneutic, traced back to the original social relations developed in the family, where they were assessed for their social or antisocial qualities in adult life. In other words, the field of psychology as an instrument of social government subjected everyday thoughts to a regime of regulation and a specific labor of self-work founded on an art of suspicion. This psychological face of social government is one that came to dominance, not all at once, but through a gradual and conflictual process that Michel Foucault refers to as an event.

The Event of Happiness The psychologization of subjectivity is a process that has been widely discussed in a long tradition of sociological and critical scholarship, where it is variously attributed to sweeping patterns of change endemic to modernization itself: individualization, rationalization, technicization, the rise of new middle classes, and the spread of expert systems. Anthony Giddens is perhaps the most noted thinker associated with this view, which holds the dissemination of psychological discourses and authorities, or more generally “psy” (a professional-institutional-cultural effect whose broad and general impact is signaled in critical literatures by the simple prefix) as a process implicated on a deep level with the intrinsic logic of modernity itself: “The reflexive encounter with expert systems helping to reconstitute the self,” Giddens writes, “expresses some of the central dilemmas to which modernity gives rise” (Giddens 1991, 143). However, as important as it may be to see the growing prevalence of psy as embedded within other processes of structural change, it is also possible to understand psy’s growing hegemony not as a result of the unfolding of a logic of social modernization, but as instead the outcome of an uneven pattern of ruptures, gaps, critiques, negations, and “events,” as Foucault called them, within the institutional and political matrix that composes the psychological apparatus itself. An event, for Foucault is a submerged conflict between competing discourses and technologies of power, whose residues persist within organizations and practices and inscribe the individual bodies and dispositions of subjects themselves. “An event” writes Foucault, “is not a decision, a treaty, a reign,

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or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it” (Foucault 1977, 154). As such an event, the psychology of happiness must be apprehended in terms of the specific conflictual dynamism, the usurpations and appropriations within the very governmental logics of the psy-disciplines themselves that characterize its emergence. The new discourse on happiness is itself the expression of one such event, embedded as it is within well-developed patterns of sometimes concealed, sometimes visible conflicts that have characterized the growth of the institutional and political configuration of the psychological apparatus, directing its dissemination and constant renewal for almost two centuries. And in a general sense, over these years the general tendency of this event has been toward an ever greater individuation of the subject. Psychology has come to an increasing recognition of the particularity of the individual as a unique and singular psychological entity, one with irreducibly personal needs, possessing ever more nuanced agencies and demanding an ever more gentle, “person-centered” methodology of treatment. The recognition of the singularity of the individual as the bearer of a unique emotional and psychological condition and possessing distinct affective capacities demands that the psychological professional develop an ever more nuanced, ever more personal, sensitized, and humane approach to treatment. As a general rule, these ever-evolving methods must draw less on any implicit normative criteria for the government of large numbers, while applying instead an always-evolving, gentle art of tolerance, skilled listening, and nonjudgmental acceptance. Psy must become an ever more humble apparatus, prioritizing its facilitating function in enabling the subjects to treat themselves rather than imposing any single normative methodology. This turn is one that takes shape against the backdrop of psychology’s perpetual critique of its own institutional form implicated in the hierarchical nature of its method and the medicalizing thrust of its treatment, but also a rejection of psychology’s own legacy as a carceral apparatus of the state. In other words, the increasing recognition of the particular needs and capacities of the individual that shaped a trajectory of psychological development over the course of the twentieth century comes about through a humanizing, democratizing critique aimed at dismantling the curative authority of the medical institution itself. As Peter Miller has argued, this critique has retained a vanguard role in twentieth-century psychology and psychiatry, ensuring ever more capillary extensions of psy-power into ever more intimate fabrics of social and personal existence, as well as ensuring ever more refined and nuanced articulations of the psychological problematic as a feature of everyday consciousness.

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Miller points to the origins of this democratizing tendency in the nineteenth-century critique of the asylum as a segregative institution. With the asylum, the medical objectives of treatment and the curative mandate of psychiatric medicine had been largely absorbed into the carceral and disciplinary functions of containment (Miller 1986, 16). The exposure of the asylum as sister to the prison house would sustain a critical tendency that would extend throughout the twentieth century with the exposure of the dank conditions of asylum life. But if nineteenth-century psychology’s self-critique was characterized by an effort to medicalize the asylum through a breakdown of its disciplinary form, in the twentieth century this emphasis has given way to a need to medicalize society itself, by enhancing public knowledge and acceptance of uniquely psychological subjects. Through a process of “decarceration” and a turn to community mental health, particularly with the passage in the United States in 1963 of the Community Mental Health Act, the very character of psychological knowledge began to change, as the psychiatric institution gave way to successive waves of reform and to new forms of treatment deemed more humanistic in their responsiveness to the personal, emotional needs of individual subjects (Miller 1986, 21). The ingraining of psychological discourse into everyday social life, therefore, grew from and maintained this critique of psychology’s institutional past, through which an implicit appeal to the psychological individual as an everyday member of society was reinforced through commercially available therapies, social programs, and, finally, self-help and psychopharmaceutical drugs. Such a pattern of decentralization and dissemination is one that is both structural to the field of psychology and characterized by a unique friction and struggle that distributes specific effects. Borne along by a perpetual leveling trend and persistent renunciation of the hierarchical form of the medical establishment, the empowerment of the individual takes place against the backdrop of a break with the authority of the expert, the dependencies he imposed, and the frequent invocation of a psychological ailment implanted in a zone of psychic depth that only the doctor could properly proclaim upon. Thus, psychological power shifts its object of intervention from a problematics of depth and pathology (the province of experts trained in interpretation and analysis) to one of everyday thoughts, surface cognitions, mundane anxieties, moods, and a singular need for belonging and acceptance. This personalist break in the field of American psychology is apparent in this account of Carl Rogers’s groundbreaking methods, related in a 1957 article appearing in Time magazine. Rogers is identified as a maverick for whom client centered therapy is understood “as an experience, not in intellectual

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terms. We treat the client as a person, not as an object to be manipulated and directed.” While giving credit to Freud as a pioneer, Rogers vigorously resists the tendency of analysts to worship the father-figure of psychoanalysis, and the parallel tendency to put the theory and the method of treatment ahead of all else, so that every patient is fitted to a Procrustean couch. . . . As Rogers describes his method: “The therapist has been able to enter into an intensely personal and subjective relationship with this client—relating not as a scientist to an object of study, not as a physician expecting to diagnose and cure, but as person to person. The therapist has been able to let himself go in understanding this client, satisfied with providing a climate which will free the client to become himself.” (Time 1957) With this break, psychological life becomes all the more actionable in the everyday lives of individuals as psychological discourse comes to attach itself to ever more minute moments within the lives of psychological subjects. This is an intensification of psychological power, and as such becomes all the more satiating as a tool of government. In the case of positive psychology and the new discourse on happiness, the event of this recurring break with the institutional form of psychology is literalized and embodied for individual actors in the way they set out to govern themselves as potentially happy subjects. In other words, happiness reproduces precisely this break between a hierarchical and a humanistic form. Indeed, the very problematic of happiness itself as a task of self-government takes as a template the basic dichotomy upon which psychology’s own anti-institutional legacy—its democratizing regard for the individual as a subject of empowerment liberated from the hierarchies and authorities of the medical institution—is founded. The government of happiness takes place through the replaying of this event, the event of psychology, upon and within one’s own accumulated and inherited emotional disposition—what we might call one’s psychological habitus. Positive psychology organizes this task of government by dividing everyday thinking habits along the tidy dichotomy of opposing positive and negative patterns. It is not difficult to read how negative thoughts are coded as implicitly institutional: they are thoughts embedded in habit and powerlessness, in deference to sanctioning authorities, ensconced in routine and repetition resulting from immersion in the cyclical patterns of

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the daily grind, and a benign attribution of the capacity to act to those that wield power from above. Negative thoughts presuppose helplessness before the force of such routines, suspending the intentionality of subjects in endlessly deferring cycles of dependence on formal processes beyond their control. Moreover, negative thoughts are just that: thoughts about negativity, about the inevitability and deeply rooted nature of one’s depression, anxiety, traumatic past, psychological deficits, and pathological states inscribed in a deep interiority—the inwardness of the “Procrustean couch” that is the very anchor of the old institutional psychology. Positive thoughts, on the other hand, are thoughts stirred spontaneously against the grain of habit and routine, thoughts that reject helplessness and the sense of institutional inevitability, infusing conduct with a forward-looking sense of possibility and openness to the future, undoing the downward pull of sedimented anxiety and the preoccupation with deeply internalized emotional suffering. And, thus dichotomized, these two patterns of thought-feeling-performance imply a need to work on and transform a negative habit of thought according to the imperatives of a positive one. Negative thoughts, with their docile sentiments, must be dissolved, uprooted, and made over as positive thoughts, just as institutions, bureaucracies, and regimes of excessive government must be transformed by a truly vital, popular will. This dichotomization, and its resonance in the lives and experiences of so many people did not come about by accident, but developed within the conflictual history of psychology itself. Its broad popular appeal is homologous, not only with the struggle that characterizes the event and emergence of happiness, but with that fundamental logic that is operative at the heart of neoliberal governmentality. The labor of thinking positively is the same labor directed against those institutional forms identified with the state apparatus, those forms that govern too much. Thinking positively means transforming the presumed condition of dependence and docility this apparatus induces in its subjects, while infusing agency and the particularity of the personal into the heart of psychological subjectivity. In other words, the event of happiness, just as the event of psychology, are fashioned on the same logic as the event of neoliberalism itself, nested inside one another like Russian dolls. We can see the dynamic of this transformation at work in the happiness discourse itself. Fredrickson, for example, working from a background in evolutionary psychology, describes a bedrock of negative emotion rooted in our ancestral instinct for survival and our inclination to flee danger. We are biologically programmed through our evolution as a species to react to threats conservatively; unknown situations are interpreted as dangerous to our survival, and thus inspire emotional and cognitive responses centered on

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risk reduction, fear, and self-preservation at all costs in the face of threats we cannot control. Therefore, these negative emotions are genetically predisposed in contemporary everyday life to gain the upper hand owing to the fundamentally conservative spiral of everyday thinking and feeling, which increasingly brings our thoughts under the sway of a “fight or flight” emotional drift. As an effect of “hedonic adaptation,” these reactive tendencies increasingly define the daily pattern to which we are most predisposed, and to which we inevitably return. Against this pattern, positive emotions bring a “broaden and build” spirit, in which new possibilities are perceived, openings considered, new pathways are sought. While historically less significant for the survival of the species, positive emotional-cognitive repertoires have served the purposes of innovation and the creative expansion of opportunities—qualities that today are ever more essential to economic and social survival, although underdeveloped as a personal capacity of the individual. It is, therefore, through intentional and regular injections of positivity that we can break up those sedimented patterns of negative thought that are our genetic inheritance and stir ourselves to optimism and happiness. Positive psychologies, therefore, typically eschew the problematics of psychological depth and the closed, musty spaces of therapeutic treatment (which, it is argued, only dredge up negative experiences, returning us to our “fight and flight” mental repertoire, dragging us back into the spiral of dependence, reticence to act, and the closure of cognitive frontiers) for the everyday temporal dimension of our emotional and cognitive lives. For it is here, in the light of our possibilities, that our agencies as emotional entrepreneurs truly come to life. The deeply routinized time by which we think and feel according to the prescribed epistemologies of a disciplinary form, wherein we accept the dour view of experts and surrender our power to act to entrenched institutional patterns, is the source of negativity. But negativity’s gravitational pull can be undone in a spirit of awakened personal power and the incitement to enterprise. Fredrickson writes: [T]he broadened thought-action repertoire of positive emotions is psychologically incompatible with the narrowed thought-action repertoire of negative emotions. In addition . . . a counteracting positive emotion—with its broadened thought-action repertoire— should quell or undo this physiological preparation for specific action. (Frederickson 2000, 8) In short, this friction between positive and negative emotions defines the project of happiness, not as a therapeutic goal or curative task, but as a

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personal enterprise, one that replicates through homology both the recurring emergence of new psychological forms through the disavowal of its carceral legacy, as well as the anti-statist logic of neoliberal renewal itself. Martin Seligman makes visible these associations with his characterization of the emergence of positive psychology from the downcast, medicalist traditions that dominated twentieth-century psychology. This tradition can be traced to the “negative” emphasis that framed environmental explanations for personal behavior in late nineteenth-century psychology and social science. Psychology’s discovery of “social man,” Seligman argues, was one that drew heavily from such sources as Pareto’s and Durkheim’s writings on social solidarity, social interdependencies, and interaction, which formed the basis for collective moral sentiments—theories that would prove influential in a plethora of twentieth-century social programs aimed at suppressing social disintegration and repairing the social fabric by better fostering mutuality and social embeddedness across a range of settings, from the family to work to education. For Seligman, this social influence is illustrated by the response among social scientists and psychologists to the events surrounding the Haymarket riots of 1886, labor riots in Chicago whose violent outburst originated the image of the “bomb-throwing anarchist” (Seligman 2000; 2010). The flurry of social scientific responses to Haymarket established the fundamentals of social man, as one embedded in relations with others, and whose suffering is shaped by life patterns and environmental conditions beyond his control. Refuting traditional Victorian appeals to character and moral makeup, accounts of the actions of rioters and anarchists cited such environmental factors as bad housing, illiteracy, and the patterned life of large urban groups living in poverty as forces shaping individual behavior—explanations that would form the foundations of twentieth-century “negative” psychology, ensuring that “individuals are no longer responsible for their actions, since the causes lie not in the person but in the situation.” Negative psychology confined its horizons to these negative effects imposed by conditions of deprivation on individuals who are themselves helpless in the face of forces they cannot control. “Psychology-as-usual,” writes Seligman, signaling the very routine character of institutional life, “the psychology of victims and negative emotions and alienation and pathology and tragedy—is the stepchild of Haymarket Square. Positive psychology’s take on all of this is very different from psychology-as-usual. . . . [P]eople are responsible for their actions, and their untoward choices stem from their character. Responsibility and free will are necessary processes within positive psychology” (Seligman 2010, 105). Indeed, Seligman’s characterization of this negative legacy

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is telling; psychology “as usual” connotes the very sedimented routines of a bureaucratized, hierarchical profession, one incapable of innovation or self-renewal in the face of change, and one lacking the capacity to recognize individual human potential. Elsewhere, Seligman goes on to extend the Haymarket principle to the other exponents of the view of individual conduct as intrinsically social: Marx, Freud, and Darwin—architects of a theory of psychological interdependence that provided the foundation for a technology of social governance. The fate of individuals thus governed, who accept in advance their emotional and psychological states as resulting from negative relationships with environments and social forces beyond their control, is only to depend on the medicalizing apparatus itself, thus perpetuating the spiral of negativity, dependence, and preoccupation with an inaccessible psychological interiority (Seligman 2000, 127). In short, the dynamism of happiness as enterprise occurs at an interval, a specific fault line, or within what Foucault calls a “non place” that runs between these competing modes of government. On the one hand, there is an art of rule that aims at the adjustment of the individual to her social environment, to the emotional demands of group life, and to one’s responsibility to others as the principal medium through which anxiety and unhappiness are overcome. This is a psychology of reciprocity, integration, and mutuality through the functional incorporation of individuals into a normative social community, but also into the folds of a totalizing institutional plan. It is a psychology that views the individual as suffering from maladaptation to the needs and expectations of others, that locates these wounds in the realm of a deep interiority accessible only to an institutional expert, and one that seeks to shape a new kind of person capable of certain kinds of conducts by acting directly on this interiority. We can call this person the man of social government, Seligman’s heir of Haymarket, bearer of a disposition shaped by a specific discourse of psychology, or a psychological habitus. Such a habitus is the direct effect of an institutional psychology whose origin is in the asylum system, and whose twentieth-century manifestation is a social psychology that embeds the individual in environmental causes and social relations. This is how the man of social government has been taught to think about his emotions. And on the other hand, there is the power that takes all of these assumptions as the raw material of a new operation, a power that purports to liberate the individual by setting her to work upon the habits, tendencies, and patterns of negative thought that are the birthright of this man of social government, with the intention of transforming dependence into agency, inwardness into exuberance, routine into innovation, and relations to others into the entrepreneurial exploitation of environmental opportunities.

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This is the man of emotional enterprise, governed as strategic actor, seeker of advantage in all aspects of life. Between these two figures is an event—a gap, or an interval, that reflects a conflict between immense and disparate institutional arrangements, discourses, and vocabularies, but also one that inscribes bodies, that shapes a practice of the self and implies unique temporalities of conduct. It is in the non place between social and neoliberal arts of government writ small, and in the event of this confrontation of forces that the work of happiness, as the transformation of negative into positive thoughts and emotions, acquires a specific purchase on subjectivity. Toward this end, the form of social government with which we concluded the previous chapter will be considered for its uniquely psychological aspects and for the disposition it inscribes—the disposition of a social habitus, which appears, through the lens of neoliberal governmentality, as a psychological habitus, as the ethical substance of a new enterprise. What unique psychological form did social government give to the problematic relationship of thoughts, emotional states, and desirable conducts? Upon what sort of psychological interiorities did social government operate, and how were these interiorities produced? How is the project of psychological governance folded into the wider logic of social government and its concern with the reconciliation of human conducts with the demands of normative social solidarities, and what kind of habitus, what kind of temporality of conduct, did this form of government foster? We shall pursue these questions by reviewing Foucault’s account of the rise of the psychological complex in Western societies as the instance of a unique formation of disciplinary power, one that in the twentieth century became a fundamental element in a wider apparatus for the government of the social subject. And at the center of this disciplinary constellation is a docile subjectivity, the man of Haymarket and child of the tradition of social psychology to be sure, made dependent and reliant on others through the deployment of a uniquely psychological interiority. As we shall see through a reading of Foucault and his lectures on the emergence of the psy-function, the chief instrument in the fashioning of this dependency was that cell of sociality, the family unit, transposed as a scene of psychological formation, and the inscription of a psychological biography and deep interiority with intrafamilial relations at its core.

Disciplining Interiority With some exceptions, Foucauldian-inspired analyses of the psy-complex typically investigate links between contemporary psychiatric and psychological

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practices and historical formations of disciplinary power that are characteristic of a uniquely social form of government. In several works by Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, for example, Foucault’s critique of psychiatric power enables the analysis of a contemporary matrix of psychiatric institutions and public health debates, serving as policy instruments of the welfare state whose effects are those of the disciplinary production of socially embedded psychological subjects (Rose and Miller 1994; Rose 1989, 1998) Indeed, the disciplinary, social emphasis of this literature is echoed in the implicit functionalism of Foucault’s treatment of the “psy-function,” a phrase developed in his lecture course of the early 1970s, Psychiatric Power and has since shaped a broad field of critical research into historical and contemporary practices of psychiatry (2003a). To say that Foucault’s position in these lectures is functionalist is not an exaggeration; if the view he attributed to the insane in Madness and Civilization was one of heterology, or a radical exteriority to the regimes of reason that prevailed over enlightened institutions of early modern Europe, then the network of asylums and doctors that compose the psy-complex can be understood more in terms of a functional homology, in which psychiatric institutions serve the specific ends of integrating individuals into a systemic totality (Foucault 1988). And at the center of this function is the role of the family, for, as we shall see, the family is central not only to the identification and integration of maladapted persons, but to the deployment of a unique interiority that serves as an anchor-point of the psy-function, the psy-disciplines, and for those later twentieth-century figurations of psy—psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and psychology, all of which carry the imprint of discipline and, as we shall see, a disciplinary imprint imposed through the specific form of the family (Foucault 2003). To get at all of this, we must understand Foucault’s discussion of the psy-function in his lectures of 1973–74. The place Foucault gives to the family in his discussion of the early role of psychiatry in eighteenth and nineteenth-century processes of state formation is seminal. Within the psy-function, the family is the place to which dysfunctional or abnormal individuals are sent when they are no longer able to serve within disciplinary institutions owing to some psychological event of some sort, and where it is hoped they will receive characterological rehabilitation in order that they be readied once again for reintegration into the apparatuses of work, school, military service, and the like. From the standpoint of medicine and government, basic competencies for interpersonal association, reciprocity, and cooperation, or blocks and incapacities in these areas, are directly traceable to intersubjective experiences within the family, derived in early childhood. Intrafamilial relations, therefore, lie at the origin of individual well-being and maladjustment, and provide the key

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to the analysis and treatment of antisocials and a critical opening for the fostering of new social capacities. Thus, it is through this operation that the psy-complex and the family first meet. Both collaborate in the rehabilitation of individuals suffering from an abnormal psychology, determined by a normative sociability, while madness is itself conceived within the framework of intrafamilial relations. The psy-disciplines cast the mad individual as a child, regressed to a simplistic denial of fundamental realities, and seek to redress this condition by carefully replicating the form and structure of the family within the therapeutic regime itself, and by reconstituting the emotional economy of the family as a problem of interpretation, and thus as a therapeutic technique. Foucault describes the method adopted in one asylum in Mettray, in which attendants reconstituted a “pseudo-family organization,” adopting the names of father, elder brother and so on in the hopes of bringing about the cure that only the family could produce (Foucault 2003, 108–109), and another at Saint Antoine, in which the asylum head assumed the identity of father, his wife that of mother, etcetera. In both cases, a program of clinical treatment was patterned on the routines of family life with collective meals and the like. “The reactivation of family feelings,” writes Foucault, “the investment of every family function in the clinic, will be the effective agency of the cure” (113). It is this structural resonance between family and disciplinary institution that inscribes the subject of psychology: “The psychiatric, psychopathological, psycho-sociological, psycho-criminological, and psychoanalytic function, makes its appearance in this organization of disciplinary substitutes for the family with a familial reference” (2003a, 85). Such a subject, like the prisoner, the soldier, and the industrial laborer, is a subject of discipline, or as Foucault put it, the psy-function “is precisely what reveals that familial sovereignty belongs profoundly to the disciplinary apparatuses” (2003a, 86). Indeed, the implication of the psy-disciplines with disciplinary power more generally constitutes one of the most potent of Foucault’s critical discoveries: Mauro Bassaure has argued that Foucault’s attribution of psychoanalysis to the disciplinary function of power through the model of the family joins up with the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,and others, of what Bassaure calls the “anti-Oedipus movement” (Bassaure 2009). It is through the Oedipal complex—that microcosmic encapusulation of the family as precisely such an internalized cell of sovereignty in which the father retains symbolic authority—that the dispositif of psy stamps upon desire the schemes of permitted and prohibited, of normal and pathological, and thus provides one of the most contemporary points of application of disciplinary power for the normalized subject. The Oedipalized subject becomes the docile body of psychoanalysis, fabricated through its dependence on the

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authority of outside experts and institutions, characterized by the normative pursuit of a truth residing in the dark interior of a forgotten history, and relieved of direct responsibility for its own actions by recourse to the barely intelligible inner agencies originating in these shadowy recollections. Referring to Foucault’s lectures on psychiatric power, Bassaure summarizes this relationship: “Insofar as the Oedipus complex served as a code of communication working between the family and the disciplinary systems, it represents a specific kind of knowledge incorporated into a developmental process in which intrafamilial relationships become an explanatory resource and a locus of responsibility for the discipline or lack of discipline of the individual and the consequences thereof ” (Bassaure 2009, 353). Bassaure’s reading aligns Foucault with a critique, not just of the psy-function as disciplinary apparatus, but with those much more ubiquitous formations of psy implicit within everyday uses of psychoanalysis as such an “explanatory resource” for abnormal behavior. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, where they employ the family as an explanatory framework for personal conduct and well-being, stamp an interiority that only serves to reinstitute the normalizing logic of discipline. So damning was Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis that, he claimed, any other critical project invoking the family could only end by reinscribing a new disciplinary relation. In a veiled warning to those on the Freudian Left who purport to wield the instruments of psychoanalysis against disciplinary society and its institutions, whether by couch, cobblestone, or pen, Foucault writes: “By appealing to the sovereignty of the family relationship, rather than escape the mechanism of discipline, we reinforce this interplay between familial sovereignty and disciplinary functioning, which seems to be typical of contemporary society and of the residual appearance of sovereignty in the family, which may seem to me in fact to function quite directly in harmony with it” (Foucault 2003, 87). It is through this operation that a unique psychological interiority organized on the model of the family becomes a chief instrument of social government and its organizational, institutional complex—a technology for the fostering of a subject examined and exercised for his capacity to integrate himself into a normative social order with the capacity to relate productively to others at its center. Moreover, the docile body of the psychological subject, as with Seligman’s Haymarket man or the denizens of Rogers’s Procrustean couch, is one that finds natural and productive agreement with the objectives and technologies of social government itself, as Jacques Donzelot argues in his analysis of the family. In this regard, Donzelot uncovers a certain complementarity between Freud and Keynes: the latter, as is well known, was a technologist of conformity, functional adjustment through the economic and social policies that became synonymous with twentieth-century

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welfarism. And by a separate yet complimentary method, Freud, the consummate theorist of psychological interiority modeled on the family motif, provided a theory of the family as a mechanism of adjustment, integration, and functional incorporation of the individual into the normative regimes of economic and social life (Donzelot 1979, 233). “Psychoanalysis was made operational,” writes Donzelot. “Its usefulness to institutions was discerned in its ability to justify and renovate the two major frames of reference of a social order that functioned on the basis of a maximum avoidance of political issues: the social norm as a reality principle and the family, its effacement and its privileges, as the value principle” (233). Let us consider this adjustment imperative as it took hold in one particularly realm, that of industrial labor. The field of industrial psychology was largely pioneered through the efforts of Elton Mayo and his experiments in the patterns of workplace life at the Hawthorne Works in Chicago. Mayo’s studies focused on the emotional well-being of workers, and the fostering of shared loyalties in the informal social groups that inevitably took shape within organizational settings. Such bonds, Mayo argued, could offset the alienating effects of heavily Taylorized manufacturing processes, ameliorating tensions with management that were increasingly hampering the production process. Mayo’s Hawthorne studies are well known: In 1929, the Hawthorne Electric Company was a factory on the outskirts of Chicago manufacturing electrical components for Bell Telephone. Employing more than forty thousand workers, production was organized along firm Taylorist principles that included clear hierarchical structures, wage incentives, and high levels of fatigue and monotony among workers. Mayo, then a professor of industrial relations at Harvard University, was initially asked to assess the effects of lighting conditions on worker productivity, but soon became interested in the emotional lives and social relations of workers on the shop floor, elaborating a theory of worker productivity that stressed morale and solidarity over pay incentives. His findings, published in 1933 in Human Problems of an Industrialized Civilization, were circulated widely among industrialists and managers and introduced a new set of managerial criteria informed by Mayo’s deep reliance on Durkheimian theory (Mayo 1933). Mayo also enshrined notions of solidarity and anomie as central to the problems of industrial productivity; moral solidarity represented the totality of human relationships, which was greater than the sum of individual elements, and thus it was the relations between individuals that had to be cultivated through policies that were broadly therapeutic—Mayo introduced trained nurses to conduct open-ended interview sessions with workers in which every manner of emotional concern was registered with the aim of better understanding the affective states of workers, but also to enable bet-

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ter adjustment to workplace conditions. His studies revealed, for example, that workers who pursued their tasks in isolation were more prone to daydreaming, absenteeism, and turnover, while those that were encouraged to engage each other in conversation, whose personal concerns were listened to by management, were more likely to serve as productive and loyal workers. Daniel Bell summarizes Mayo’s insights: “A factory system, like any stable social system, must be conceived as tending toward an equilibrium in which its different parts are functionally adjusted to each other. When change upsets equilibrium, the function of the executive is to observe which parts need adjustment in order to redress the balance” (Bell 1956, 83). Mayo’s breakthroughs only presaged further such elaborations on the theme of the “social system,” particularly under the strong influence of Parsonian sociology and the systems perspective it proposed for application to such diverse fields as family therapy, education, race relations, and labor relations. Such notions would come to inflect methods of government in a variety of public and intimate settings, where happiness would be increasingly defined, not in terms of the realization of unique needs, personal qualities, or potentials unique to the individual, nor in terms of the capacity of individuals to act on their own toward the betterment of their situations. Happiness would be defined as the capacity of the individual to reconcile deep psychological needs originating in early childhood and projected onto her relations with the group, and to assimilate into a social system composed of well-adjusted individuals. This was the happiness of belonging: the effect, as we have seen, of a technology originating in practices of security, police, and reason of state, but here rendered through the form of the psy-function as one of a deep-seated conformity to the requirements of shared emotional life.

Intimacy as Equilibrium There is perhaps no better place to think about the disciplinary character of the familial motif than in the intimate bonds of love. For much of the 20th century, love, marriage, domestic filiation and the web of bonds that form the core of family life itself, were repeatedly taken up as problems of social government, the very foundation of society which sustained in many ways as the seminal frontier of governmental rule. As such, intimacy constituted a domain of personal life that has, for more than a century, served as an urgent object of rule, uniquely regulated by a normative psychological prescription and an economy of mutuality and reciprocity that makes broad reference to the psychobiographical heritage of its members. If we

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look into the strategies and texts by which this domain of life has appeared as the object of a concerted strategy of government over the course of the past century, we discover that operating at the center of this technology is a theoretical formation that has had broad resonance across a range of discourses and conducts, not only around the successful management of intimacy but in social life more generally. This is a theory that constitutes one of Freud’s signature discoveries, his well-known theory of transference. To understand how intimacy became such an intensive site for the production of psychological subjects, we must understand the gradual infusion of Freud’s theory across a range of governmental practices centered on the regulation of intimate relations. Transference, for Freud, designated a process by which an individual projects feelings or identifications associated with a figure from the past (most typically a parent, as recalled from childhood) onto an unrelated person in the present. Through transference, we reenact key moments of earlier, primary relationships, not as they actually were, but as we wish they had been. Moreover, the wish that propels transference is one that derives from some previously sustained psychological wound or unresolved expectation, typically an unmet need for love and recognition from an authority figure that might be expressed through erotic projections, but also through feelings of aggression and hostility. Freud discovered the operation of transference in the complex responses of attraction and aggression his patients directed toward him as the bearer of therapeutic authority, although he supposed these emotional associations also colored relationships of all sorts in indirect and subtle ways. Controlled properly by the analyst, transference could prove a powerful instrument in bringing about a therapeutic cure, enabling patients to reexperience and resolve deeply internalized psychological traumas. In essence, for transference to succeed, the analyst must take on the very function of the superego (whose origins lie in his relationship with his parents) in relation to the ego itself, enabling the analyst to correct the original mistakes of the parent that have rendered the patient neurotic. “This transference is ambivalent,” Freud wrote, “it comprises positive (affectionate) as well as negative (hostile) attitudes towards the analyst, who as a rule is put in the place of one or other of the patient’s parents, his father or mother” (Freud 1949, 53). Indeed, Freud’s discovery had implications beyond its therapeutic application. Transference revealed the very dynamics of interpersonal relationships more generally, of the impossibility of entirely escaping the original imprint of the intrafamilial relations at the core of one’s psychic constitution, and the implicit significance of others in one’s life for the purpose of one’s own emotional well-being. Transference signaled the need to engage

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the presence of others if one were to properly recuperate and correct the founding moment of one’s own psychological trauma. “Transference . . . is a universal phenomenon of the human mind, it decides the success of all medical influence, and in fact dominates the whole of each person’s relations to his human environment” (Freud 1989, 12). In short, with the discovery of transference, its coding and dissemination as a general axiom for intervention in social relations, all the elements of the psychological face of social government were present: interiority, therapeutic hierarchy, an original psychic wound, and a compulsion to repeat—all the features that shape the outlook and disposition (what I have already called the psychological habitus) that constitute the docile subject of the psy-disciplines and welfarism more generally—a subject that was fundamentally social in character. And it is through these elements that the happiness of this subject, such as it is possible, would be governed. Happiness here becomes an effect of the subject’s relations with others, which are thought to be projections of a deep psychological interiority and the submerged residue of intrafamilial dynamics. Everyday thoughts would not be wielded as tools for the production of emotional effect, so much as interpreted for their hidden meanings; buried in the symbolic structure of thoughts lay the explanatory source through which relations with others could be understood as reflections of an internalized, originary tragedy. Gradually and in indirect ways, Freud’s discovery would add a new dimension to the government of intimacy and family relations, and to the shaping of a program of happiness premised on mutuality, interdependence, and the embeddedness of the individual within shared routines of intimate life. The problem of happiness was rooted in a dynamic relationship of mutual investment, and its proper regulation would bring forth a set of strategies for the shaping of unique emotional subjectivities that would ultimately supplant or augment other methods. Perhaps the most important contribution of Freudian psychoanalysis to the government of intimacy and family life came with the image it presented of the uniquely dynamic character of intimate bonds themselves. Where the regulation of the conjugal bond had more commonly been addressed (through the lens of religious counsel, secular social work, or eugenic policy) as a problem of character, self-discipline, or biology, a theory of transference highlighted the dynamic form of the relationship itself, focusing on the function of psychological projection, rooted in a concealed psycho-biographical past. In the 1940s, Bela Mittleman, a trained psychoanalyst, was the first to apply Freud’s psychoanalytic methods to married couples, first through concurrent therapies conducted with both husband and wife individually, and later to conjoint treatment in which both spouses were analyzed at the same time by the same analyst (Mittleman 1948). Mittleman’s

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work was groundbreaking in its application of psychoanalytic method to the specific processes of transference occurring, not between patient and analyst, but through the unique relations developing between spouses themselves, although Mittleman’s work would remain within the implicitly hierarchical and individualizing focus of psychoanalytic treatment. As one account puts it, it remained the therapist’s task to “disentangle the partners’ irrational, distorted, mutual perceptions, as if he . . . ‘knew’ what was rational, and what was not” (Gurman and Fraenkel 2002, 208). Indeed, for psychoanalytic marriage counselors, it remained the individual, not the relationship, that was the locus of psychic pathology with the traditional patient-therapist transference, rather than transference between spouses remaining the principal method of analysis. Such a turn came in the 1960s, with a radical development in the marriage counseling field that emerged from squarely within the psychoanalytic tradition itself, even as it would jettison much of the analytic abstraction associated with psychoanalytic orthodoxy. What came to be known as the family systems perspective would consider not just the conjugal dyad and their repressed motives, but the whole family recognized for its relational, interactive properties. Family systems theory would evolve into what would be termed the family therapy movement, a set of therapeutic methodologies that viewed the family as an ecology of integrated roles and normatively regulated behaviors, which together combined to form what was referred to as “family homeostasis” ( Jackson 1959). While family systems theory used a psychologically truncated model of the intimate subject, characterized less by the effects of psychodynamic forces and more by the problems of adjustment within a set of systemic relations, the theory devoted careful attention to the underlying rules regulating the roles assumed by various members. Such rules, it was argued, served to ensure the ongoing balance, or homeostasis, of the family unit; redundant habits of interaction, the performance of habitual roles, etcetera, all enabled the family to reproduce its own systemic equilibrium, for better or for worse. And central to this homeostatis was what its proponents called “marital quid-pro-quo”: the implicit, unacknowledged negotiated give-and-take that shapes the daily life of the family, and principally that of the married couple. This system is described: Marriage is an interlocking, self-contained system. The behavior and the attitudes of one partner always stimulate some sort of reaction from the other. A slight half-smile, a lifted eyebrow, a quick wrinkling of the forehead, will beget some response, though not necessarily a verbal one. Even silence can be a forceful message. ( Jackson and Lederer 1968, 177)

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With family systems theory, then, we are squarely on the terrain of the social habitus—an emotional disposition framed by a certain inwardness, that prioritized one’s relations with others as the sine qua non of well-being and the happy life. Moreover, happiness, as a problem of intimate emotional life achieved broad popular attention in the self-help publishing revolution that began in the 1960s and has carried through to the present. One title in particular stands out: Thomas Harris’s 1969 self-help tract I’m Okay—You’re Okay popularized the notion of happiness as a problem of belonging with others, and of the intimate bond as the effect of reciprocal projections, and thus an object of a specific mode of psychological government. Employing the methodology of transactional analysis—an integrative psychological model combining elements of cognitive, humanistic, and psychoanalytic theory—Harris’s study offered advice on a range of interpersonal problems deriving from group life, from family to school to workplace, by embedding the psychological subject within a set of mundane exchanges, or transactions with others. Harris considered three principal ego states reflecting varying levels of approval by others: the parent, the adult, and the child. The parent, the adult, and the child each represented interwoven ego-states and states of regard for another. The attitude taken by the parent reflected one of authority, implying the denial of full recognition to the other: “I’m Okay, You’re Not Okay.” This attitude differed from that of the child, who approached the world with an “I’m Not Okay, You’re Okay,” attitude, attributing validity to others while denying it to herself. But while the position of the parent and the child are fundamentally reactive, caught in a loop of replicated scripts derived from maladaptive experiences in early childhood, there is a third option: the fully realized adult state as exploratory, spontaneous, and liberated from this psychological inheritance, and thus uniquely inclined to the life-affirming attitude of “I’m Okay, You’re Okay.” And while the state of parenthood is besieged by dogmatic and prescriptive sentiments and rehearsed statements, and that of the child emanates from a repository of memories, stored emotional scars, and latent traumas, the adult is pictured as liberated, fully actualized, and richly present in life, and thus resolutely happy. Such an adult, Harris argued, could then engage a certain return to childhood. Successful intimacy is a situation in which the “Natural Child,” is allowed to emerge in each partner. It would seem that, with Harris’s “natural child,” we are quite remote from the handshake between Freud and Keynes that Donzelot described, or from the psy-disciplines as the normative categories of disciplinary power. Yet, if we consider the fundamental logics of conduct such a government inscribes, and the specific psychological habitus it enables, the resonances between the governmental objectives of family as psychological motif and

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the objectives of social government become apparent. In a broad sense, the happiness of intimacy entails the integration of emotional life into a conjugal normality, into a mutuality and interdependence that is rooted deep in our psychological selves and variously fashioned on the family motif. Happiness is being-with—a belief that took family life as its basic template and transference as its methodology, and extended this image to other institutional and civic settings, from industry and education to the treatment of poverty, delinquency and youth, corrections, substance abuse treatment, psychiatry, business and political life. And as we shall see in the next chapter, it is precisely the subject of this deployment, whose habits were shaped by a need to resolve a deeply internalized crisis by working on one’s relations with others, that became the object of a new technique of self-rule—an attribute to be expunged. But before taking up the problem, I would like to draw this discussion back to the problem of temporality as it was developed in the first half of this study, and specifically the unique temporality of the social habitus.

Boredom and the Durational Habitus What precisely is it about the social habitus, as a conduct in time, that suggests itself as problematic, or that lends itself to the psychological problematizations of neoliberal governmentality? Of course, this docile conduct into which social government induced its members did not appear overnight with the popularization of psychologies of adjustment in the early part of the twentieth century: it was for two centuries already being relentlessly drummed into the conducts of modern people through those disciplinary institutions Foucault so well documented—the schools, prisons, hospitals, and military barracks, and those rationalities of government identified with reason of state. Indeed, there is a specific link between those forms of social government through which risk was transposed from individual conduct to the collective responsibility of the social totality, and the docile temporality of the disciplinary institution itself. Foucault has described the specific manner in which the production of docility is accomplished through technologies of temporalization, and specifically with the deployment of “duration” as a temporal frame (Foucault 1979, 151). As a durational act, the temporality of an action is not bound to its immediate horizon, to the risks and opportunities afforded by the immediate predicament. Outcomes are instead made remote from the actor, incorporated into the institutional totality within which it is executed. The time of the docile body (and by

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extension, the time of socialized risk) is measured simply as “duration”— as abstract, homogenous time, whose ultimate motivation and endpoint is unwilled, remote from the responsibilities of the actor, fixed in the distant planning schemes of the institution. Foucault’s account of the “temporal elaboration of the act” describes the precise manner in which an increasingly refined demarcation and segmentation of temporal units takes place in the marching instructions given to French footsoldiers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The simple step of the soldier is subjected to an increasingly precise division that expands from one to four basic movements in the course of a century. Or as Foucault puts it: “The act is broken down into its elements; the position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; to each movement are assigned a direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of succession is prescribed. Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power” (Foucault 1979, 152). In other words, durational time is essentially a temporality without telos: its futurity derives only from its operation as a permanent and ongoing exercise. “Exercise, having become an element in the political technology of the body and of duration, does not culminate in a beyond, but tends toward a subjection that has never reached its limit” (Foucault 1979, 162). Duration, measured by the rhythms of military training, the educational calendars of the public schools, the pension plans of union contracts, or the pay schedules imposed by the wage system, has no specific beginning and no end, and thus inscribes no agency or telos—no will. Indeed, as Donzelot has argued, such a temporality was figured profoundly in the very logic by which social government operated on the conducts of subjects. Donzelot traces the invention of social government to the extension of protectionist measures to workers meant to mitigate risks arising from the industrial labor process (principally, workplace accidents)—measures that were ultimately taken up and applied more generally to a range of social and personal uncertainties associated with health, fiscal security, and social well-being (Donzelot 1988, 400; 1991b, 256). And the principal instrument of these measures was the “insurance technique”—a system successfully applied in Germany under Bismarck, whereby regular individual payments into a common fund served to finance compensation paid to the injured in the event of accidents (Donzelot 1988, 399). Such a seemingly simple policy measure, reproduced and disseminated across a range of institutional settings, carried with it a more subtle realignment in the practice of government, and of the conduct of citizens themselves; the insurance technique succeeded in shifting culpability from individuals (workers or managers) to the institutional conditions of work itself. Donzelot writes:

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With so many cases [of workplace accidents] remaining unresolved due to the characteristic difficulty of ascribing fault to anyone, wouldn’t it be better to regard accidents as effects of an unwilled collective reality, not of an individual will but effects arising from the general division of labour which, by making all actors interdependent, results in none of them having complete control over their work, or consequently being in a position to assume full responsibility. (Donzelot 1988, 400) In other words, the institutionalization of such an “unwilled collective reality” entailed the socialization of risk and the de-responsibilization of actors, relieving individuals and management of liability for the unforeseen outcomes of their own conduct (Donzelot 1988, 398). The discussion of psychology as an instrument of social government implicates the psy-disciplines in the production of such a durational temporality. With the curative process concentrated in the authority of an expert of whose doings one has scarcely any understanding, the neurotic subject waits for a “breakthrough,” just as the industrial worker, the prisoner, the soldier, and the married couple carried out their various operations—all under the auspices of an “unwilled collective reality” determined by instituted, patterned social life. In all of these cases, individual agency is itself no longer willed, but instead suspended within a socialized horizon of expectation, futurity, and temporality. Neoliberalism’s contempt for this condition need hardly be mentioned, though it is crystallized in a phrase employed by Margaret Thatcher, neoliberalism’s unparalleled elocutionist, for whom such social measures generate “a society in which the State is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the State.” But what is important to grasp here is the part a psychology of mutual interdependence plays as a relay in the inscription of this temporality on the conduct of the habitus of subjects themselves, particularly through its framing of happiness as a problem of mutuality. The very mechanism by which this unwilled reality was inscribed in the soul and conduct of subjects was that of a psychology of social relations. Where the emotional dynamics of intimacy were attributed to the ethereal agencies of the unconscious, affective life itself became imprinted with the same durational conduct, the same plodding surrender to forces and horizons beyond one’s control, to the same sense of an unwilled collective life. In short, for the social habitus, refracted through the prism of a psychology of normative social life, the temporality of happiness itself has been refigured as one of waiting. And as we shall see in the concluding chapter of this study, in the new discourse on hap-

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piness, the task of expunging and flushing out from one’s body, mind, and everyday thoughts the last vestiges of this durational emotional condition, the happiness of Haymarket Man, becomes the center of the program of true, dynamic happiness. In other words, the embodied characteristics of the social habitus appear as effects of a specific event—the rupture of a psychology of social government and the emergence of a psychology of self-optimization and enterprise—that is historically inscribed in the body of happy subjects as a trace to be annulled within the program of happiness. In one of his most provocative statements, Foucault intonated the ways in which events, or the residues of events, leave inscriptions that penetrate the surfaces of bodies themselves: The body manifests the stigmata of past experience and also gives rise to desires, failings, errors. These elements may join in a body where they achieve a sudden expression, but as often, their encounter is an engagement in which they efface each other, where the body becomes the pretext of their insurmountable conflict. The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. (83) The body of today’s happy subject is the site of such an “insurmountable conflict,” in which the residue of social governance persists as the inscription of an event, as the effect of a “negativity” that must be made over and transformed in a happier image. For the happy subject, this conflict appears as a task, as a form of self-work, carried out in the interval that operates between a technology for the government of people, and an embodied, unreflective way of spending days. It is perhaps worth pointing out what is the most readily identifying quality of this body, conditioned by a durational temporality and a habitus inscribed by a logic of social conduct. It is one that is recognizable to readers as characterized by a unique quality of boredom. Time without agency or telos, without risk or opportunity, is quite simply boring time. And as boring, the durational habitus is inscribed through a form of subjectification that is comparatively diminished in its intensity when compared with those technologies with which we are more acquainted today. For what is boredom other than a seeming lack of intensity? Boredom represents a radical undercolonization of the time of conduct, and a particularly painful underutilization of the horizons of thought for the purposes of govern-

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ment. The requirement that we disintegrate and reintegrate our temporal processes, that we suspend the agencies and telos of our conducts and resign ourselves to the docility of duration, leaves open vast and fertile spaces for undirected thought for a subject who feels herself to be only partially subjected. Hours of time on the assembly line, waiting for public services, in the barracks, in public housing, in dreary marriages, dead end jobs, and in the classroom—and, of course, killing time between sessions waiting for the effects of therapeutic cure—all enable moments of conduct that are activated, yet insufficiently invested, and thus “unsubjected.” In these ambivalent spaces, docility and duration themselves become the objects of critical reflection and problematization, the point of departure for alternative modes of conduct, reversals, temporal counter-conducts, and flights from the logics of government itself. Why must we be so docile? This potential is evidenced in a series of vanguard aesthetic movements and bohemian lifestyle subcultures throughout the twentieth century, variously aimed at filing the spaces of boredom by infusing life with vitality and authenticity, intensity and aesthetic richness. But the departure I wish to consider here is something different: the response to the blunted intensity of social government, to the boredom of the durational habitus, is precisely a further intensification of the grip of power, and a more pervasive satiation of the process of subjection. After all, even its worst critics are compelled to admit that, compared to social government, neoliberalism is pretty exciting. Neoliberal governmentality and the problem of happiness itself, represents precisely this response, which aims to fill the vacant moments of durational time by wielding more effectively the very horizons of conduct itself as a novel instrument of government.

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The Alchemy of Neoliberalism

It has been argued that neoliberalism, as a technology of government, is characterized by a unique propensity for problematization, a capacity to hold up attributes and qualities of individual conduct and personal life for interrogation and transformation, for emancipation and optimization, but also for destruction and pure negation. But what does it mean to consider happiness through a neoliberal lens, not as a thing or an experience, but as a problem, or a problematization? It is to ask into the ways in which people have come to view themselves and their worlds as problematic with respect to the presence or absence, the adequate or inadequate manifestation, of a potential for subjective well-being understood as a direct expression of a personal life force. The problem of happiness presents a template on the basis of which institutional practices are organized, conducts assessed, subjectivities understood and governed. Or, as Foucault said of his research on sexuality, happiness is here considered not on the basis of “behaviors or ideas, nor societies and their ‘ideologies,’ but the problematizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily thought—and the practices on the basis of which these problematizations are formed” (Foucault 1986, 11). Foucault’s choice of words in this sentence is telling for many reasons, not the least of which is the correspondence it establishes between two key dimensions of a problematization: thoughts and practices. And while this sentence ostensibly situates these elements on equal footing, the present discussion has argued the underdeveloped place of the latter in this equation, and the need to more fully unfold the practical, temporal, and prereflexive element of the government of happiness through an inquiry into the problematizations that shape contemporary emotional life. Indeed, to give weight to this emphasis, it is necessary to press a certain reading of this word problematization, one that stresses its transitive character as an action that induces a specific effect. To problematize is not just to think about something: it is to act in such a way as to bring about a change in something. It is to transform

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something in its very character, and in this sense, the act of problematization is one that imposes what can be likened to an alchemical effect. Indeed, it is through the alchemy of governmentality that problematization selects out some innocuous, inconspicuous, unthought, and environmental feature of the world, some deeply embedded and deeply habitualized solution to a practical dilemma given by some well-worn, recessed regime of government, and draws it into relief by thinking and acting toward it differently. Problematizing thought remakes some background object as something conspicuous, problematic, and obstructive to a countervailing intention or concrete course of action. But to problematize is not merely to generate propositions or analytical questions through which being “offers itself to be thought”; it is to set about the work of transforming a commonplace into an object that figures into, and in some cases presents a direct obstacle to, our concrete purposes, and consequently needs to be worked on in order that some other practical goal may be realized. The temporality of problematization therefore consists of precisely this work of transformation. Neoliberal forms of government endeavor to generate their own problematizations through forms of thought and practice that break in many ways from that art of government with which we concluded the previous chapter. To say that neoliberalism problematizes welfarism and the habitus of social government is not only to say that it contradicts these things, that it thinks badly of them, negates them, or “rolls them back,” in the parlance of neoliberal policy, though these claims are also true. Neoliberalism’s problematization of social government is one that transforms it from a prereflexive logic of conduct, an embeddedness within a field of action, to the object of a reflexive awareness, or from a feature of the habitus to a problematic object of conscious intention. In doing so, governmentality disembeds the habitus and creates a specific temporality of practice; it rearranges obstacles and goals, producing a “lack of fit” between habitus and field that institutes a certain pause or hesitation, while at the same time it intensifies its hold on what the subject is and what it might become. Taking the market as a model for social conduct in all realms of life, neoliberal governmentality sets out to reinvent all social relations as market relations, and to remake individuals as market actors—profit-maximizing, calculating, self-interested individuals for whom every relation is conceived as an enterprise. To consider neoliberalism’s unique capacity to transform the givens of the habitus-field fit into reflexive problems—a power I am here calling a neoliberal alchemy—is to consider problematization for its capacity to make over the inconspicuous elements of practice established and embedded by previous regimes of social government as new obstructions

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to the aims of market enterprise. The preoccupation of social government with the embedding of market dynamics in the fabric of reciprocal social relations now appears as an obdurate object, a blockage to the program of self-responsibility and freedom that is the program of personal happiness itself. Thus, the alchemy of neoliberalism reinvents old governmental solutions as new governmental problems, reversing the very logic of the social habitus with which we concluded the previous chapter. The inclination to adjust to societal norms, to adhere to institutional protocols, to view oneself in terms of ones’ integration within systems of mutuality and interdependence, or to probe a psychological interiority fashioned from and constitutive of our bonds with others (and by extension, the capacity to wait and tolerate boredom)—all are reinvented as constraints on the freedom of the individual and resistances to be overcome on the way to enterprise. Through the alchemy of neoliberalism, it is no longer the maladjustment of the individual to the norms of the group that stifles happiness, but precisely the opposite: it is the overadjustment, the reluctance to develop those distinguishing capabilities that separate oneself from others—a condition that results from over-embeddedness in routines of emotional dependence and habit. The very aims of social government are now read not as the success of an adjustment imperative, but as a failure to manifest and produce certain distinguishing capacities within oneself, to take responsibility for one’s own actions and to regard one’s own happiness as a resource. While calls to self-reliance and expressive individualism have long been present in self-help and popular psychology literatures, it is with the new discourse on happiness that emotional and psychological well-being itself is portrayed as a figure of pure opportunity and affective self-optimization in everyday life. In other words, with emotional life transfigured as enterprise, emotional subjects become strategists of emotional opportunity, while interiorities and dependent relations with others become obstructions to be transformed. Such a flattening of emotional life is on exhibit in a recent work in the field of happiness literature: Getchen Rubin’s 2009 Happiness Project, a detailed journal of her twelve-month program of emotional optimization, consisting of targeted and measured efforts to maximize her happiness through a series of themed, month-long lifestyle and attitudinal adjustments. Rubin, a mother, retired lawyer, and established writer living in New York City with her affluent husband and children, writes in a playful tone that mimics a girlish prose style, whose effect is specifically to offset the overstuffed tone of traditional self-help experts. The book’s cover displays the title in a hand-lettered script suggestive of the school notebook of a third grader, with the unintimidating subtitle: “Or, Why I spent a year trying

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to sing in the morning, clean my closets, fight right, read Aristotle, and generally have more fun.” At the same time, Rubin’s project displays a systematic quality that recalls Benjamin Franklin’s efforts at self-improvement through detailed measurement, charts, and clearly demarcated objectives, all woven into a slightly ironic posture of innocence and wonder characteristic of an adult-child, merged in the role of housewife. For example, Rubin lists her “Secrets of Adulthood,” an itinerary of tips on living that combine insight with the humble practicalities of domestic life: “Most decisions don’t require extensive research”; “happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy”; “if you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough”; “soap and water remove most stains”; “bring a sweater”; “if you can’t find something, clean up” (Rubin 2009, 11). These themes recur in the months that compose the book’s main chapters, each one organized around a specific ethical objective: January is “boost energy,” February “remember love,” March “aim higher,” and so on, each related anecdotally through conversations with family and friends, vignettes from professional and personal life in which an accepted habit of mind is transformed through the work of happiness. Significantly, all of this takes place within the space and rhythm of the quotidian, with no mention of either the exceptional time of therapy or the repressed dynamic of a deep psychic cause. And in the background, it is not difficult to detect a deep ambivalence or even hostility for the project of therapeutic introspection and emotional depth characteristic of that other technology of emotional self-management. Rubin recalls a discussion of her project with a friend, who asked if she had thought of taking the more conventional route of going to see a licensed therapist: “No,” I asked, surprised. “Why, do you think I should?” “Absolutely, It’s essential. You have to go to therapy if you want to know the root causes of your behavior,” she answered. “Don’t you want to know why you are the way you are and why you want your life to be different?” I thought those questions over for a good while, and then I decided—well, no, not really. . . . The issues I wanted to tackle were right there for me to see, and at the point, I wanted to discover what approach I’d take, on my own. (9) And later, recalling a conversation with her husband: “I am happy—but I’m not as happy as I should be. I have such a good life, I want to appreciate it more—and live up to it bet-

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ter.” I had a hard time explaining it. “I complain too much, I get annoyed more than I should. I should be more grateful. I think if I felt happier, I’d behave better.” (13) Rubin’s book, which became a number one New York Times best-seller, includes a guide to the planning of a personal happiness project for the reader, with additional resources available on a blog maintained by the author (happiness-project.com). It has inspired dozens of local chapters of happiness project groups from Boston to Denver and Dallas. For the entrepreneurs of well-being, happiness presumes the breaking away of an agency, a creativity and a life force from a condition of docility and flaccidness imposed by a psychological regime in which the deep and mysterious residue of one’s relations with others imposes a profound reticence, and a condition of brooding introspection. Those very qualities of reflexive self-knowledge, once the hallmark of adjustment and belonging, are here transformed into obstacles. Action in the present is all that counts. How, then, is it possible to say that Rubin is governing herself neoliberally in this passage? What is the character of this obstruction that is preventing her from being as happy as she feels she should be, and “living up” to her own life more thoroughly? What is the specific alchemical effect imposed by her concern? To get at this question it is necessary to look more closely at the operation of happiness as a problem of neoliberal government, and to consider more broadly how emotions operate as problems of government—problems imposing their own uniquely alchemical effects.

Neoliberalism as Destructivist Project Throughout this discussion, we have attempted to develop the negative character of governmental self-work. Foucault’s discovery of the productivity of power, it has been argued, tells us only part of the story of governmentality as an everyday practice: to produce ourselves we must subtract from ourselves in some fashion, scrape away some substance deemed antithetical to some desired state. Nowhere is negativity more apparent than in the work of neoliberal governmentality. At the heart of neoliberal governmentality is the injunction to cultivate one’s capacities, to produce oneself as a value within a competitive field of market actors. Thus, it is a generative technology, but one that sets the individual to work in the production of qualitative differences. This point is developed by Foucault in his discussion of the Chicago School economist

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Gary Becker, whose aim was to rescue the agentive individual at the heart of political economy through a radical rethinking of the classic problem of the labor process itself. For Becker and others, there was a need to overcome the abstraction of Marxist and classical liberal labor theories, where labor is understood as a commodity, measured in time, and compensated for with a wage. Such accounts, argues Becker, do not acknowledge the autonomy and activity of the worker as a living, self-interested actor, who sells his labor on an open market (Foucault 2008, 221). In contrast, neoliberal theory understands work not in the generalized form of abstract labor, but as a form of economic behavior in which the worker takes personal responsibility for seeking the best return possible on the sale of his labor, and thus has a personal stake in extracting from every transaction a maximum profit. This exchange takes place against the backdrop, not of the abstraction of the commodity form nor of the hierarchical, disciplinary conditions of industrialized production, but in an open field of competition populated by self-governing subjects for whom the strategic positioning of one’s own human capital within an open market results from the successful differentiation of one’s assets—one’s labor power—from that of others in the same competitive field. One must stand out, Becker argued, if one is to extract optimal compensation for one’s work, and standing out meant developing the perceptual skills necessary for assessing one’s personal attributes and environmental circumstances opportunistically, as capacities to be developed and as potentials within a field of open competition. And by the same token, the critique of the theory of abstract labor is itself a critique of all those institutions of social government that have their origins in this theory, and in the political compromises between capital and labor that took shape over the course of the twentieth century—institutions that set out to govern society through a similar abstraction of social and personal life itself. Collective bargaining, for example, sought to foster solidarity and social integration by recognizing the commonality of labor power as such. Where social government sought to embed the commodification of labor in the social fabric, and institute social provisioning in general on the basis of abstract social needs, it did so by way of a theory of labor power as a quality possessing a purely abstract value. But now, neoliberals argued, these compromises could be rethought from the perspective of the worker himself (as individual, citizen, or family member) and his or her entrepreneurial efforts to secure strong returns on the investments one makes in oneself— one’s human capital—through strategic positioning in a market for human qualities. The integrating function of Fordist production and welfare provision, along with the “adjustment” ethos it proffered had, for Becker, become

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the new problem—a deadening influence in which life and happiness had become the object of a tremendous abstraction, a happiness in general, underneath which the individual capacity for the opportunistic pursuit of happiness was suppressed. And it is precisely through such a project of rethinking that neoliberalism’s alchemy does its work. Foucault characterizes this turn as one in which we “adopt the point of view of the worker and, for the first time, ensure that the worker is not present in the economic analysis as an object—the object of supply and demand in the form of labor power—but as an active economic subject” (Foucault 2008, 223). One can apprehend the trace of this same trajectory of thought, a democratizing gesture in which objects are rewritten as subjects, in the literature on positive psychology. Within the new discourse on happiness, the norm is disdained, while the exceptional is repeatedly exhorted. In his 2010 book, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology that Fuel Success and Performance at Work, Shawn Achor offers advice on the business application of positive psychology, emphasizing the need to differentiate what he describes as the average from the exceptional: “If someone asks a question such as ‘How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?’ science changes that question to ‘How fast does the average child learn to read in the classroom?’ ” writes Achor. “We then ignore the children who read faster or slower, and tailor the classroom toward the ‘average child’ ” (Achor 2010, 10), This “error of the average” is the first significant mistake of a traditional psychology rooted in the generalizations of social government, and by extension in the abstractions of a labor theory of value itself. Achor advises us: “If we study merely what is average, we will remain merely average” (10). Happiness, this formulation holds, is not social or normative, derived from the degree of one’s fit with one’s social environment, nor is it a quality abstracted from the general conditions of the population. It is statistical in a negative sense: it is the unique asset of the numerically exceptional individual possessing distinguishing strengths and qualities that set him apart from the group. Happiness enables the individual to stand out from the rest and, in the world of business (but also in other social and personal domains) puts him in a competitive position in relation to his peers. The happy subject as “outlier” is one whose optimal performances, both emotional and practical, pose valuable lessons for the average, if studied through the lens of a science that has itself broken free of the professional preoccupation with the suboptimal, and emancipated itself from the stranglehold of a governmental and scientific apparatus that sought to coerce the exceptional under a misguided preoccupation with the provision of care.

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In the last quarter of the twentieth century and continuing into the present, the subtle reversal of emphasis illustrated in Achor’s “error of the average” resonated, not just among economists, but administrators, managers, policy makers, officials, and ultimately teachers, parents, doctors, therapists, and finally nonspecialist social groups and lay individuals. Citizens, students, inmates, and patients were to be governed not as objects, under abstract generalizations of their capacities wielded by cold, institutional experts, but as subjects, motivated by a desire to cultivate within themselves some capacity, some human capital, that will strategically position them on a differentiated field. And it is happiness that stands out as a paramount attribute of such human capital. Children, workers, and consumers would all be empowered to develop and maximize, according to their own resources and judgments, their subjective capacity for affective life. Turning again to Achor’s appeal for happiness as a tool of business, we find emotional life serving precisely as that pivot between an economic rationality of opportunistic self-differentiation, and a condition of personal life as irreducibly unique. Reversing the old Protestant axiom that hard work, sacrifice, and postponed gratification are the necessary preconditions for the successes in life that bring happiness, Achor argues instead that happiness in the present is itself a characterological resource for the hard worker with distinctive aims: “The most successful people, the ones with the competitive edge, don’t look to happiness as some distant reward for their achievement, nor grind through their days on neutral or negative; they are the ones who capitalize on the positive and reap the rewards at every turn” (38). Achor supports this claim with evidence: on the sales floor, “optimistic salespeople outsell their pessimistic counterparts by 56%” (15). The neoliberal government of happiness sets individuals to work on the production of this subjectivity by invoking a limit to its own reach, by implying a boundary separating its own rationality of government from the personal lives of its subjects. But the work it invokes is conveyed with urgency. What has to be expunged in the social habitus is something that offends, that blocks and suffocates one’s own well-being. Neoliberal governmentality elicits a certain very distinctive set of visceral responses to this obstructing object, the trace of social government that threatens to thwart its vitality, and whose influence is always present on the margins of one’s thoughts, in the tissue of one’s flesh, and in the patterns that shape one’s daily habits. Neoliberalism fuels the work of neoliberal subjectification by exciting a disdain, even a disgust, not just for the averageness of the average person or the abstract character of industrial labor, but for the general, undifferentiated docility of the social through which government sought to

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regulate the life “in general” of an abstract population. Foucault described this disdain in the effect of what he called “state phobia”—a kernel of anxiety hatched in the crucible of postwar neoliberal thought, transposed onto more contemporary forms of neoliberal policy and discourse. The specific fear of the state was derived from the response of neoliberal theorists to varied forms of midcentury interventionism and welfarism, from the New Deal to the Beveridge Program to Nazism and Stalinism, all of which could be assessed for the dreary effects of their misplaced, totalizing social policies on the body of the populace. State phobia is characterized by a paranoid and contemptuous disregard for government and its interventionist policies, which attributes to the state an internally consistent and distinctive mode of being, somewhere between life and death (Foucault 2008, 76–78, 187–88). Like living things, states, the state-phobe contends, tend to grow; they possess an indefatigable power of expansion, a vocation to extend into and monopolize the very objects over which they hold dominion—civil society and its subjects. Yet the expansionism of states does not entail an organic vitalism of any sort: states don’t feed on the resources in their environment, they are driven by a distinct and generative dynamism that is strictly internal, one which derives from the various interlinking forms it carries within itself rather than through any productive relationship with the outside world. These elements predispose the state-phobe to attribute to the state an “inflationary critical value,” an image of growth that ties a vast matrix of interconnected functions to a common set of effects (Foucault 2008, 187). The nurturing mandate of the state becomes a muse for its real parasitic function—enriching itself by draining the livelihood of those it claims for its charge. The condition of the state therefore appears as an undifferentiated, life-draining substance composing such seemingly distinct branches of government as social security and concentration camps, all workings of the state’s great “dead hand,” whose effect is a common suppression of the qualitative differences and distinct potentials distributed across a population (Foucault 2008, 188). Barbara Fredrickson gives a uniquely psychological form to the anxious internal labor of state-phobia. In the pages of her book from 2009, positivity and negativity acquire a concrete somatic presence; they are discussed not as attributes of emotional states, but as physiological forces, even as substances in their own right, though precise definitions often rely on tautology. Positivity, for example, “consists of the whole range of positive emotions. . . . It includes the positive meanings and optimistic attitudes that trigger positive emotions as well as the open minds, tender hearts, relaxed limbs and soft faces they usher in” (Fredrickson 2009, 6). A definition of

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negativity is no more forthcoming: “Negativity pervades your self-talk and your judgments. . . . unchecked negativity breeds health-damaging negative emotions—anger, contempt, and depression—that seep into your entire body” (5). Yet throughout her discussion, these two emotional attributes are described and compared as singularly opposed substances composing their own internal logics, exercising distinct agencies and radiating unique effects. Positivity and negativity become things in and of themselves, no less real than bones, skin, and tissues. But the very materiality of emotional positivity itself is not directly accessible to government as it does not avail itself to direct forms of manipulation as if it were a piece of clay or stone. Positivity is separated from government by an interval: it sits somewhere between our free will, through which we simply choose to be positive, and that obscure realm by which we seek to bring about changes in our emotional habits over time through the use of complex techniques. Throughout the discourse of happiness, and particularly in the domain of positive psychology, the pure intentionality of Pollyannaism, or the reductionism of positive thinking is repeatedly refuted: “You can’t simply will yourself to feel a positive emotion,” writes Fredrickson. “You must instead locate one of several quite specific levers to turn on your positivity. Certain forms of thought and action are these positive levers” (Fredrickson 2009, 51). Positivity, then, becomes a thing and a force that is, while elusive and impossible to command at will, nonetheless accessible in indirect ways. And the technique of this manipulation centers on our own relationship to the ever-present futures of our conducts, to the awareness of our environment, and our intellectual grasp of the opportunities present in our predicaments: Turn positivity on right now. Take a moment to notice your physical surroundings. Whether you are in your living room, dorm room, or bathroom, or on the bus, subway, or train, ask yourself: What’s right about my current circumstances? What make me lucky to be here? What aspects of my current circumstances might I view as a gift to be treasured? How does it benefit me or others? (Fredrickson 2009, 49) In these sentences, it is the opportunistic relation to the future that creates a unique distance that government invokes, and does so to mark its limit. If Fredrickson’s book could simply tell us to be happy by thinking ourselves so, this would be to close the gap, and institute a direct form of rule. But the proper mechanism of happiness is in the regard for the per-

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sonal horizon of conduct—the practice of the subject—which government can only point out but cannot manipulate directly. Indeed, the inaccessibility of happiness to direct formulas and methods takes other forms as well. Just as the strictly voluntaristic version of the happiness technique is dismissed in the name of scientific rigor and intellectual integrity, so the negative cast of negativity is moderated in the discourse of happiness with an assertion of the ultimate need for cautionary, even dour outlooks on life. At certain moments, the literature suggests that a reckless positivity, or the naive or self-coerced embrace of an optimistic assessment of events, is dangerous and unnecessary, that it dispenses with a valued element of life that is reflected in a moderate amount of controlled negativity. Yet gratuitous negativity, the excessive dwelling on bad outcomes and the circular self-talk of a pessimistic mind-set, is something entirely different. In other words, the switching on of positivity entails a corresponding switching off of negativity, a shutting down of all the emotionally embedded habits that encourage us to view our situations as intractably rooted and the dynamic potentials that we embody as living actors as irredeemably constrained by, or held hostage to, the objects and persons populating those situations. This is the negativity that must be uprooted and transformed. “Gratuitous negativity is neither helpful nor healthy,” Fredrickson writes: Does it help to snap at the cashier after you’ve waited in line longer than you expected? Is it healthy to berate yourself for not getting the laundry done? What’s to be gained when you dwell on an off-the-cuff comment a co-worker made? At times your entrenched emotional habits can intensify or prolong your bad feelings far beyond their usefulness. Your negativity becomes corrosive and smothering. Like an out-of-control weed, gratuitous negativity grows fast and crowds out positivity’s more tender shoots . . . gratuitous negativity can hold you hostage, as if you had cinder blocks tied to your angles and a black hood pulled over your face. (Fredrickson 2009, 159) In this passage, negativity is tied to processes of social evaluation and self-discipline that we might also consider essential to socialization and the adoption of shared moral norms: self-castigation through the eyes of others for one’s responses to offhand remarks, or self-criticism for failure to sufficiently devote oneself to the completion of a socially beneficial task such as doing the laundry. Social blame, perhaps the chief instrument of socialization into shared moral norms, is assessed for its measure of

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“positivity,” traced to its origins in negative emotion, and held under the knife of the emotional entrepreneur who seeks out those levers through which negativity is transformed into its opposite. But the quality revealed in this passage that is perhaps most striking is its uniquely phobic anxiety: like an “out-of-control weed, gratuitous negativity grows fast,” something organic and inorganic at the same time, like an bloated bureaucracy or a smotheringly benign social policy. Viewed less as an obliging condition of moral identity and more as an opportunistic opening for the maximization of life’s irreducible organic force, the field of emotional life is cleared of negative thoughts, which are subjected to a process of interrogation and evaluation, their correspondence to reality rigorously disputed, and their value to the emotional life of the individual called into question. Under such pressures, the obstructive object, a “negative” residue of some alien form of government, is subjected to the alchemy of transformation: “Negative thoughts melt away just as the Wicked Witch of the West did when Dorothy poured that fateful bucket of water on her head in the Wizard of Oz” (Fredrickson 2009, 163). Such, I would argue, is the destructive work of neoliberalism as an emotional enterprise. Thus, at the center of the enterprising life of emotional government is a specific repudiation invoking a unique form of labor, a labor of negation, carried out against a precise image of the state as a devouring and devitalizing entity. Wendy Brown has argued that neoliberalism is what she terms a “constructivist enterprise.” It establishes conditions for autonomy through the cultivation of a specific predisposition to self-interest (Brown 2003). The fostering of these perceptions represents the constructivist work of neoliberalism, which is accomplished by way of the intentional creation of market conditions through the withdrawal of state programs and the shrinking of any feasible alternative to competition, together with the self-maximization of one’s emotional states understood as market assets, or human capital. However, I would add to this that neoliberalism is also a destructivist enterprise; it is one that directs the individual in the active destruction of the habits of dependency and social embeddedness, and the negation of any inherited disposition toward reliance on others, on institutions or on the state. Indeed, as a destructivist impulse, neoliberalism gives form to a very distinct and specific set of policies that, in many ways, employ precisely those technologies of rule which neoliberalism itself originally set out to reform. With the curtailing of social safety nets and other government policies thought to foster dependence comes an expansion of the prison industrial complex, and an intensified effort to govern through the optimization of biological life—patterns of rule that, while outwardly invoking freedom,

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also reveal a new propensity to incarcerate, and a growing willingness to “let die” through the denial of even minimal aid to the poor and homeless. Majia Holmer Nadesan, has drawn out this two-sided character of neoliberal governmentality through which the life-producing effects of biopolitical rule give way to the coercive policies of neoconservative reform. Under real neoliberalism, the shaping of self-governing market subjects passes over into a program of sovereign violence directed against the homeless and unemployed, and welfare reform invokes new strategies of community policing and disciplinary control. What I am calling the negation, or problematization, of some conspicuous dependency can, in these instances, rise to levels of state violence, particularly under the rubric of neoconservative reform: “Sovereign power is in fact the necessary supplement of the more dispersed and invisible operations of government from afar,” writes Holmer Nadesan. “Sovereign power as the underbelly of biopower supplements when biopolitical knowledge and expert authorities fail to produce self-regulating agents, but such supplementation must be legitimized with recourse of life itself ” (Holmer Nadesan 2008, 35). What I am proposing here, however, is not the imbrication of different technologies of government, disciplinary and biopolitial, but the undertaking of governmental labor, as a practice in real time. The destructivist impulse of neoliberalism is one that is performed both internally and externally, on existing institutions, collectivities and on the overextended institutions of the state, but also on an inherited habitus, and on the embodied practical logics and everyday temporalities of neoliberal subjects themselves, seeking to expunge traces of social conduct from their lives. The work of neoliberal governmentality is the work of this negation, and the problem of happiness is precisely the vehicle by which the undertaking of this work facilitates the conversion of a logic of economic policy into one of personal, emotional, and corporeal practice. The vitality, optimism, and “positive emotion” that happiness inspires in us is none other than the refraction of enterprise as enshrined in neoliberal discourse, brought to bear against the vestiges of social government that we carry within ourselves. The disposition to opportunistically pursue the happy life is a reflection of neoliberalism’s invocation to self-interested, competitive conduct. And, most importantly, the disdain and phobia for reticence, inwardness, social embeddedness, and the vaunted interiority that is the fly in the ointment of happiness is the same disdain neoliberalism directs at the dependent outlook of the welfare recipient, the tenured university professor, and the unionized public sector employee. To become happy, as any liberal will tell you, we must embrace the invisible hand of the market, but we must also bring that hand to bear on that other

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great hand, the dead hand of the state that inhabits our everyday thoughts and actions.

Incentivizing Intimacy and the Sociabilities of Neoliberalism Happiness effects neoliberal subjects only indirectly, by setting them to work on some part of the self, a hindrance to an emotional condition that is necessarily inaccessible to any direct regulation by government itself. The work, therefore, appears to be the subject’s own in a way that obscures that it is in fact the subject that has become power’s own. This is not to argue, however, that happiness is a simple individualizing technology per se. Neoliberal government does not simply fragment collective forms, atomizing society and isolating the individual—effects that have long been attributed to the force of capitalism. There exists within neoliberalism not only a powerful sense of the importance of intimate relations with others in one’s life and the happiness dividends to be derived from benevolent civic deeds, but a sense that the personal work of happiness is best undertaken as a shared task. There are, in other words, specific neoliberal sociabilities that serve as crucial resources in the process of subjectification. For example, writing in the Huffington Post, Gretchen Rubin exhorts enthusiastic readers of her Happiness Project to form groups to more effectively pursue their plans: “People could swap ideas, build enthusiasm, give each other accountability for doing happiness projects—and not only that—just the fact of joining a group, whatever the focus might be, would build happiness” (Rubin 2009). Indeed, there runs through neoliberal policy discussions a powerful invocation of a spontaneous, vital civic-mindedness, in opposition to the bureaucratized provisioning of welfare. Again, from UK prime minister David Cameron, a set of domestic policy initiatives grouped together under the rubric of a “Big Society” (a term meant to carry an implied opposition to “big government”) provides an instance in which the seemingly individualizing objectives of neoliberal government, emphasizing the autonomy and self-interested character of persons, is applied to the collective form of society itself. Cameron’s proposal for a Big Society frames a strategic withdrawal of state funding from a number of social functions as a specific, intentional, and productive act of government, while simultaneously resourcing local groups and voluntary organizations to take over provisioning responsibilities recently vacated by government. For Cameron, this is an insurrectionary proposal meant to counter the monopoly of big government with the vitality and dynamic of the population: “A bigger, stronger, more active society involves something

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of a revolt against the top-down, statist approach of recent years . . . no more of a government treating everyone like children who are incapable of taking their own decisions. Instead, let’s treat adults like adults and give them more responsibility over their lives.” This means calling on voluntary associations to take over key functions of the state: “If neighbours want to take over the running of a post office, park or playground, we will help them. If a charity or a faith group want to set up a great new school in the state sector, we’ll let them. And if someone wants to help out with children, we will sweep away the criminal record checks and health and safety laws that stop them” (Cameron 2011). Of course, such accolades have been a staple of neoconservative rhetoric or many years; George H. W. Bush made a similar appeal in his invocation of a “thousand points of light” in his inaugural address in 1989, appealing to a spirit of civic voluntarism in the face of incompetent government policies. What is important in Cameron’s case, however, is the precise character of the sociability that he proposes, and the manner in which happiness is thought to foster its own social dynamism through its fundamental opposition to what it perceives as the conformist mandate of social government. Happy people, in short, possess unique capacities for cooperation and voluntarism—potentials neoliberal policies seek to emancipate and utilize toward the end of popular well-being (Lennon-Patience 2012). In the previous chapter, we discussed the emergence of the problem of interpersonal, intimate life as the paradigmatic concern of social government. Stable relations between people, specifically intimate relations between spouses, friends, and romantic partners stemmed from the formation of a disposition toward reciprocity, empathy, and mutual interdependence. Such capacities, if properly cultivated, would form the pillars of a stable, productive, and peaceable population. Good adjustment meant the internalization of a set of rules and the formation of a habitus enabling the capacity to read the feelings of others as effects of deeper causes, but also a willingness to disclose and explore one’s own feelings through the lens of a theory of submerged psychological agencies. And at the center of this notion was the theory of transference, whereby intimate relations with others could be normatively anchored in a psychological interior thought to contain traces of long-forgotten childhood traumas, which were continually repeated in adult relationships. An emotionally transparent and reciprocal relationship with others was the way to an orderly and regular life based on mutuality and trust, and ultimately to a form of personal happiness we described as one of belonging. It is useful to return, therefore, to the problem of intimacy as one of normative reciprocity, and to those very dispositions toward mutuality cul-

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tivated by social government, in order to understand how neoliberal sociabilities transform this older sense of the social through its own unique alchemy. In the new discourse on happiness, intimacy, and the problem of relating authentically to others, is no longer the occasion for self-interrogation and self-knowledge, nor the telos of a narrative of adjustment and normative integration based on the excavation of psycho-biographical traces. The presence of the other, in the discourse of happiness, has no purchase on any core elements or dynamics within the individual psyche. The other appears as a differentiated environmental resource, ripe for exploitation. Throughout the discourse of positive psychology, relations with others are repeatedly summoned as indispensable pieces in the lifestyle puzzle, of which happiness itself is the completed tableau. It is with others that we laugh, that we have our peak moments and best experiences, and that our happiness measures are most elevated. And more than this, it is through benevolent acts carried out specifically for others that the chief rewards of the happy life are earned. Indeed, happiness itself has been found to be contagious: in 2008, a study of nearly five thousand research participants found that a variety of conditions, emotional effects and behaviors could be traced to influences communicated through social networks, from obesity and smoking to happiness. Researchers tracked happiness levels over time using survey data, and mapped social networks to pinpoint the spread of positive emotional states across a set of linked individuals. The happiness of an immediate contact, researchers concluded, increased the likelihood of one’s own happiness by 15 percent, while that of a more removed contact (the spouse of a friend, for example) increased by 10 percent one’s happiness chances, and so on (Fowler and Christakis 2008). This study was widely covered in the media, and stimulated a new discussion among psychologists and policymakers on the interwoven character of emotional and social life. That the dynamism of social networks would emerge as the focus of a discussion of happiness presents a counterpoint to traditional understandings of the role of the state, or the psychological professional in providing popular well-being: what does it mean to govern when it is acknowledged that it is the population itself that possesses the vital potentials for its own optimal life? Yet at the time this study was undertaken, the contagiousness of happiness was already an acknowledged fact within positive psychology circles. Acts of kindness, generosity, appreciation, caring, and love provide immense emotional returns for those that carry them out, even when those actions are not part of a lasting interchange of any sort. “We scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested,” writes Seligman, who goes

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on to describe a “kindness exercise” he once conducted while waiting in a long line at a post office. Following a one-cent increase in the price of a standard stamp, a long, winding line forms of frustrated patrons, waiting to spend pennies on the additional stamps needed to round out the postage on a standard letter. Reaching the front of the line, Seligman buys ten sheets of one hundred one-cent stamps for ten dollars, turns to the others in line, and calls out: “Who needs one penny stamps? They’re free!” “Within two minutes, everyone was gone, along with most of my stamps. It was one of the most satisfying moments of my life.” Seligman concludes: “Here is the exercise: find one wholly unexpected kind thing to do tomorrow and just do it. Notice what happens to your mood” (Seligman 2012, 21). What is important in both of these cases is the portrayal of sociability, and social benevolence, as possessing neither normative morality nor any theory of the ontological interdependence of individuals: acts of generosity and care emerge as purely opportunistic undertakings, in which no actor has any more elaborate comprehension of the significance of any other beyond a simple source of emotional self-optimization. Moreover, the reconfiguration of the presence of others in one’s life within the psychological government of intimacy is deeply linked with another profound shift in psychological government itself: the displacement of the institutional authority of the expert, and her replacement with a host of dispersed, capillary, and lay lifestyle technicians (Miller and Rose 1994). For Freud, and in a therapeutic tradition following in his steps, the relationship between the therapist and the patient is homologous with that more foundational relationship inscribed within our psychological constitution, one that originates in the relation between parents and children. Therapeutic authority is key; it links together repressed memory, childhood experience, contemporary life, and the therapeutic situation itself in a mutually reinforcing bond. Yet today, the authority of the therapist as the mediator of interiority and emotional life has had to contend with a democratizing challenge that has elevated a cohort of semiprofessional upstarts in the mushrooming lifestyle industries. Today, the field of life coaching has taken over much of the responsibility for the government of intimacy once held by the traditional psychotherapeutic establishment, particularly as coaches now address such aspects of intimacy as marriage, dating, and sexuality (Brock 2008). In this field, we find the general evacuation of the normative field of emotional reciprocity, mediated by the effect of transference, that a half-century of psychologically informed marriage and relationship counselors had found so useful for stabilizing intimate bonds. As the authors of one positive psychology coaching

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manual put it: “Social relationships of all kinds offer a sense of security, opportunities for growth, and even promote physical health. Trusting relations can be viewed as social capital that can improve performance at work and set the stage for a tranquil home life” (Biswas-Diener and Dean 2007, 17). The field of professional coaching today is broad and encompasses many practices and foci, ranging from professional and corporate coaching to life coaching, relationship and family coaching, wellness coaching, spiritual coaching, and so on. Historical works on this field typically cite three principal influences: psychotherapy and counseling; consulting and business leadership; and human potential exercises such as EST, Landmark Forum, and Lifespring—though inspiration also comes from such fields as education studies, the dramatic arts, athletics, and holistic and body therapies (Brock 2008). While the psychological roots of coaching lie in a mix of behavioral, humanistic, and transpersonal methodologies variously centered on Maslow’s and Rogers’s affirmative view of human potential, corporate and athletic influences have given coaching an emphasis on organizational, career, and business concerns, and a particular model of authority and expertise that is uniquely informal, horizontal, and anti-institutional. The coach is focused on the optimization of individual performance through a rigorous mentoring process with one whose knowledge is derived more from direct experience than institutional credentials. As such, coaching operates largely on the model of a cottage industry, made possible by the use of teleconferencing. Throughout the 1990s, the coaching profession saw the opening of a variety of schools and training centers, as well as conventions and conferences for professional coaches, and is today estimated to constitute a billion-dollar-a-year industry worldwide, although the field still remains without enforceable licensing or certification standards (Liljenstrand, Nebeker 2008). For the vast majority of practicing coaches, treatment is undertaken through regular weekly telephone sessions with clients paying between one and three hundred U.S. dollars for sessions of approximately thirty minutes in length (additional contact typically includes e-mail exchanges and the occasional five minute “power session”), typically for a cycle that continues for anywhere from three months to one or two years. Importantly, the coaching profession’s freedom from conventional licensing requirements stems from the field’s deeply rooted opposition to the traditions of psychotherapy and counseling—methods that are characterized by all the medicalizing, pathologizing, backward-looking, and negative views that have dogged the psychological enterprise from the beginning, and influenced clients toward docility and dependence. Indeed, it was an influential decision of the state legislature in Colorado in 2004 that established the coaching profession’s exemption from the regulatory

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oversights applied to psychotherapy, on the basis of the former’s reluctance to engage the personal history of its clients, and its emphasis instead on present and future problems. An article comparing coaching with therapy marks these differences; therapy, by its very nature, “assumes the client needs healing. . . . Works with people to achieve self-understanding and emotional healing. . . . Explores the root of problems. . . . Focuses on feelings and past events. . . . Works for internal resolution of pain and to let go of old patterns.” By contrast, coaching is forward-looking, optimistic, and opportunistic, concentrating not on past pains and their internal residues, but on potentials for future aspiration. Coaching “[a]ssumes the client is whole. . . . Focuses on actions and the future. . . . Works with the conscious mind. . . . Works for external solutions to overcome barriers, learn new skills and implement effective choices” (Hayden and Whitworth 1995). Indeed, the coach is uniquely distinguished from the therapist through a specific renunciation of the expert stature that adheres to therapy; coaches, one commentator explains, prefer to operate less as “experts” than as “thought partners” for their clients (Eggers and Clark, 2000, 67). An instructional manual on positive psychology coaching provides this record of an interaction between a coach (identified as Me) and a client: Me: Do you mind if I challenge you a bit? Client: Go ahead. Me: You call yourself a procrastinator, but that isn’t what I am seeing. Client: You’re not? Me: Not at all. If you waited until the last minute then handed in mediocre work, then maybe it would be procrastination. But I am seeing you rise to the occasion at the last minute and still hand in superior work. Client: Yeah? Me: I think you actually have a strength that we are seeing. Let’s call it “incubator.” Client: Incubator! I love it. That is exactly me! (Biswas-Diener 2010, 24)

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In other words, the life coach purports to have no special powers of interpretation, but operates purely in a service role to the client—a resource in the fixing of precise goals for the cognitive transformation of one’s perception of one’s own strengths, who charts progress toward this goal using specific measures and benchmarks. Life coaching is overwhelmingly pragmatic in this regard, disposing the individual to perceive not only the role of the coach, but her own personal attributes, her emotional states, and her unique affective capacities as potentials and resources whose intensity and magnitude can be optimized through resourceful exploitation in one’s own life. What the coachee affirms, therefore, and what she becomes through the practice of this enterprise, is a self that is an agent within a field of opportunity. For this reason, life coaching and positive psychology have proven a natural match. Coaching is an exploding field searching for institutional and scientific validation, and positive psychology appears within coaching literature as a resource for this legitimacy. Positive psychology, on the other hand, has always been defined by its mandate to circumvent the traditional channels for the dissemination of psychological knowledge and treatment, to reach directly to audiences not through institutional or medical media but through popular culture, and self-help literature in particular. In their manual, Positive Psychology Coaching: Putting the Science of Happiness to Work for Your Clients, Robert Biswas-Diener and Ben Dean are not shy about the value of linking coaching with a recognized psychological field: “Because the scientific method is so widely accepted, coaching practices that are grounded in science will be easier to ‘sell’ to a skeptical public or potential clients, and especially to organizations that want reassurances that the service will be effective. . . . Coaches who can honestly claim to work from a foundation in the latest scientific research and theory will have a tremendous market advantage over their peers” (Biswas-Diener and Dean, 6). Thus, we find a natural fit between these two methodologies; Seligman currently operates a program in positive psychology coaching at the University of Pennsylvania, and McLean Hospital, the psychiatric affiliate of Harvard Medical School, in 2008 launched a Positive Psychology and Coaching Initiative. Indeed, while positive psychology and coaching have proven productive partners, both have shown themselves to be readily adaptable to the challenges posed by the government of intimacy, through couples, dating, and relationship coaching (Gable and Gonzaga 2006; Reis and Gable 2002). Within this field, relationship, marriage, and family coaching mark an emerging concentration, drawing increasingly innovative and diverse methods in their efforts to reach out to more and more spaces of individual life.

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One example comes with a firm called Relationship Coaching Institute, the project of David Steele. Steele’s specific methodology for relationship coaching can be distinguished from the works of family therapists discussed in the previous chapter by its insistence on the intentional, cognitive, and strategic character of relationships, and its disinclination to any reference to deep emotional connections or affectively rich interpersonal processes. Relationship coaching involves the fixing of precise goals, and the adoption of a concretely strategic and intentional attitude toward the dating activity. In his account of “conscious dating,” Steele provides the following account: “Conscious Dating means: 1. Being clear about who you are and what you want, 2. Realizing that ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ and learning the information, skills and attitudes necessary to be successful, 3. Making your life and relationship choices in alignment with what you want, mindful of the long-term consequence of your choices” (Steele 2006, xiv). Here, intimacy is denuded of any pretense of an unconscious element, of the need to interrogate oneself or one’s relations with others with the hope of uncovering an underlying psycho-biographical trope. Intimacy is presented as a stark life strategy in which others are only accidentally present. The task of the subject of intimacy is to strategically navigate this landscape toward optimal outcomes in a manner that is specifically disembedded from affective bonds of any kind. The threat to this mobility comes, though it is not directly stated, from premature, unplanned affective ties themselves, which might steer the whole process off course. The maintenance of such a level of autonomy necessitates the intentional and ongoing negation of the tendency toward the spontaneous formation of these bonds—what most of us would call falling in love. The antinomianism of the coaching profession, particularly as it relates to relationship coaching and the government of intimacy, signals a shift in the way interpersonal life is conceived and an entirely new kind of subjectivity is imagined. With the transformation of the space of reciprocity from one of interdependence to opportunity and enterprise, a new kind of subject is born, and with it a new kind of problematization: life is inevitably insufficiently happy.

Conclusion

Against Asphyxiation

The stakes of the foregoing discussion can be summarized: happiness today has become a uniquely neoliberal enterprise, and the work of this enterprise is one that increasingly ensnares us in an effect of power of which we are scarcely aware. Moreover, the critical tools best suited to lay bare this process require some revision if they are to be applied to this task. The literature on governmentality tends to omit the everyday agency of governmental practice, and instead to proceed deductively from those official discourses and institutional rationalities by which large numbers of people are ruled, inferring those specific practices by which individuals govern themselves as a direct effect. To invoke a phrase frequently cited in governmentality literature, it is as if Margaret Thatcher’s famous quip, “There is no such thing as society,” conjured up instantly the kinds of subjects she imagined—individual men and women, families with no necessary tie or obligation to each other. What is missing in this account is the mediation that inevitably occurs on the level of everyday practice. By recasting the fundamental assumptions of governmentality theory in terms of a theory of practice centered on the unique temporality of conduct, it is hoped that it will be possible to think the problem of governmentality with new intellectual tools and on a new empirical register. Moreover, with the case of happiness it is possible to read the temporality of governmental practice in terms of specifically affective temporalities: happiness is the emotional homology of neoliberal time. This is a time in which the future is related as personal opportunity. It is the doubling of a specific rationality centered on the optimization of self-interested conduct as the horizon of personal endeavor. As such, happiness, held up as a problem of self-rule, is the hinge through which the satiation of a specific subjectivity is made possible. More precisely, with this attention to the practice and temporality of the government of emotional life, we discover two important things. First, a glimpse into the overarching historical logic of power within which the new discourse on happiness exposes a process of gradual intensification

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which has today reached new levels. There is a very general sense in which the present age is one of asphyxiation, an age in which one’s departures and interventions, one’s aspirations to freedom and moments of escape are already anticipated, already contained, even already prescribed and scripted. There is a general sense in which one’s futures are already captured in a tightly woven fabric of subtle domination. The sensitization of formal institutions to the needs and unique identities of the individual, the new urgency attributed to the emotional lives of private persons—these contemporary developments for which we congratulate ourselves so vehemently all serve a concealed double function: while democratizing social life, they also participate in this subtle asphyxiation, serving as an important instrument, a hinge in the dissemination and inscription of new forms of regulation. Those exhortations to overcome the old organizational forms by taking responsibility for one’s emotional life, to embrace one’s freedom as an incomplete project, and to consider happiness as one principal domain in which one’s existence might be taken back from coldhearted bureaucrats and traditional authorities—all these inducements to liberty cut in two directions. No doubt they undo certain cultural and political monopolies, but they are also part of the narrowing of life itself and the closing off of the vital possibilities for a truly dynamic existence. Such asphyxiation proceeds most ominously when it goes unnoticed, unnamed, and untheorized. It is hoped that the present study has made conspicuous that unmistakable feeling of our time, a gentle tightening around the windpipe that many feel but few can name. But there is a second point that results from the focus of the present study on the commonplace phenomenon of popular self-help and the new discourse on happiness. A study of happiness reveals how the operation of this hinge is apparent, not only in those privileged moments in which we seek medical treatment, reflect philosophically on our lives, make career choices, or vote; it is active in the most mundane conducts that make up contemporary life—when we do a friend a favor, go to a restaurant, plan our weekends. Happiness shows us the precise manner in which the logics of power are transmitted to living subjects through a mechanism that functions as a hinge, one that mediates or articulates an interval or a gap. This is a gap that separates objective plans, discourses, policies, and logics of governments from the personal ethics and everyday doings of individual people. It is also a gap that separates the old way of doing things from the new; it is one that operates between what we are in terms of the temporalities we have inherited, embodied in a durable state of habitus, woven into our preconscious ways of going through the world, and the very self-aware imperative that we make ourselves over differently, better, more efficiently,

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more autonomously, according to the new temporalities of a plan. The gap is thus the interval between an inherited time and a proposed time, but also between the prereflective and the reflective, or the habitual and the intentional. The imperative to close this gap, to make our practices match perfectly our plans, constitutes a unique form of labor that all of us carry out in our own ways. The coercing of the habitus, reshaping and infusing it with the energy of a new outlook on life (a project we undertake in the name of self-emancipation, no less) is the work of neoliberal governmentality. It is the active practice of ringing out the ambiguity from life, of choking off the potentiality of uncertainty, of indetermination, of doing things differently. In other words, we are all complicit in our own asphyxiation everyday. We do the work of asphyxiation, we call it our freedom, our enterprise, and our happiness. And we should stop. At this point, this study, which began as an essay on neoliberal life, is dangerously close to departing from the objective of provocation and critique with which we began, and of slipping into a very different literary mode, one characterized by prescription, strategizing, and, even worse, by the aims of a sort of political self help itself. So I will stop here. But before doing so I will risk one further ploy in this direction, and suggest some of the ways in which the present study might map out, hesitatingly, some strategies by which certain lessons might be incorporated into the practice of everyday life. It has been argued that the gap between plan and practice is not stable. While it is becoming increasingly contained, mapped, and scripted by an ever more intensifying form of government that comes to know with greater and more precise intimacy the details of the practice of government itself as a personal undertaking, the gap remains the site of a specific indeterminacy, a hesitation wherein the logic of government is transferred to the logic of subjection. This gap, therefore, issues an asynchronicity through which the inscription of government is perpetually thrown off kilter, however temporarily. Indeed, this asynchronicity, as the unique and irreducible temporality of neoliberalism itself, is perhaps the best place to conclude this study if we are to end on a “positive” note, as it seems fitting we should. There is an abundance of theoretical work on the unique character of time in the present age: post-Fordism, postmodernism, and the like are frequently characterized by a temporality of compression, of acceleration, of fragmentation, and so on. Asynchronicity is not here invoked as a new typification of neoliberal emotionality, temporality, or conduct. It is not a kind of time, it is a problematization of time, or time as problematized. In other words, what is offered here is less a new theory of the temporal or emotional coordinates of neoliberalism, and more an analysis of how neoliberalism, through the

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discourse on happiness but also in other areas, employs temporality and emotion as ongoing problem spaces, as unique nodes or elements in a dispositif of government within which a permanent interval between time and time is made to operate. Emotions, and the time of their transformation, are important not because they describe a new form of emotional experience or a new characterization of the temporal, but because they compose the specific problems of our age, problems that also function as the uniquely satiating points of contact, the transfers between apparatus and subject, in a new technology of government which we can variously identify with the neoliberal. Happiness, and the time of becoming happy, does not encompass a new temporal logic per se; temporality today precisely takes the form of a problem, of an incomplete project, as an enterprise. Such a treatment of neoliberal governmentality makes it possible to consider the instability and the hybridity of the apparatuses of government themselves, and to look for possible paths of flight, alternative ways of being through which such processes can be countered. We have already explored the notion of counter-conducts, and the ways in which counter-conducts invert the series that runs from the macro-level technologies of rule to the specific ethical practices by which individuals rule themselves, beginning with the insistence that subjects be allowed to govern themselves differently. Is it possible, then, to counter the temporal government of emotion through a sort of neoliberal counter-conduct, a present day Flagellantism? If we accept that today we are not going to be able to escape doing the work of neoliberal governmentality entirely, might we hope that we may be able to operate within the specific parameters of this work, reversing its direction and learning to do it differently? Perhaps not, or perhaps only convulsively, through the prereflexive recoiling of our bodies might this kind of work be possible. Whichever the case, the suggestion of a temporal-emotional counter-conduct within neoliberal governmentality requires that we consider more carefully the specific work of self-government that is implied within the new problem of time, and the specific emotional projects through which its government is framed. In short, to the extent that we take as a starting point the work of this government, that we go to work on the embodied temporalities we inherit from now moribund technologies of social rule, we might, in that ambiguous space of the lag where asynchronous temporalities operate, work, not to suppress but to conjure up certain elements of the social habitus, to intensify its logic, and to mobilize its potentials, rather than, as we are instructed to do, negate it, remove it, and dissolve it. What are the potentials within the docile habitus of social government? How can we govern ourselves by

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redeploying their potential? In his statements on countermemory and counterhistory, Foucault describes the manner in which “subjugated knowledges” are carried over from previous, now forgotten struggles, “left to lie fallow, or even kept at the margins” of the body and in everyday rationalities that shape conduct, yet which contained “the memory of combats, the very memory that had until then been confined to the margins” (Foucault 2003b, 8). In what I have described here as the residual temporalities of social conduct that appear as ethical substances in the work of neoliberal governmentality, we discover important commonalities with such subjugated knowledges; to do the work of neoliberal governmentality differently is to engage differently the sedimented memory of social time, the docile character that is the ethical substance of neoliberal governmentality, to engage this trace, not through the labor of negation, disaggregation, and responsibilization, but through one of reactivation and redeployment. This is how, I would argue, we might begin to think about governing time differently and survive the asphyxiation of our time: by mobilizing and cultivating the entropic, docile temporalities of social time, by seeking a new art of boredom and a new ethics of duration, by delving into the “negativity” that is fallow in our enterprising ways. In doing so, we might find a way to remain asynchronously happy.

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Index

Abstract labor, 156 Achor, Shawn, 36, 157 Activator, 27 ADHS, 63 Adjustment (psychological), 21, 30, 36, 42, 60, 75, 76, 84, 102, 123, 135, 137, 140, 141, 144, 146, 153, 155, 156, 165, 166 Adult Dispositional Hope Scale, 63 Alchemy (neoliberal), 152, 153, 157, 159, 162, 163, 165, 166 Alexander, Jeffery 71 All and each (government of ), vii, 101 American cognitive psychology, 60 American Psychologist, 26, 187 Anomie, 140 Anti-Oedipus movement, 138 Anxiety, 6, 65, 66, 67 Apparatus of capture, 97 Aquinas, Thomas, 30 Aristotle, 30, 153 Arora, Raksha 41 Askesis, 10 Asynchrony, 85, 92, 93, 175 Atkins, Lisa, 84 Australia, 20, 27 Avoiding Thinking Traps, 24 Bandura, Albert, 60, 61, 69, 87 Bassaure, Mauro, 138 Beck, Ulrich, 66 Becker, Gary, 22, 155 Bell, Daniel, 141

Bell Telephone, 140 Ben-Shahar, Tal 6, 29 Bentham, Jeremy, 115, 119 Best, K. M., 68–69 Beveridge Program, 159 Bhutan, 38, 39 Big Government, 164 Big Society, 164 Biology, 73, 143 Biopower, 71, 72, 73, 90, 163 Bismarck, Otto Von, 147 Biswas-Diener, Robert, 1, 168, 169, 170 Blair, Tony, 86 Boredom, 86, 146, 150, 177 Bourdieu, Pierre, 13, 78, 81–84 Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America 44 Britain, 20, 27, 41, 126 Brock, Vikki G., 25, 167, 168 Brown, Wendy 162 Buddhism, 38 Bureaucratic Rationality, 37, 42 Bush, George H. W., 165 Bush-era, 44 Bushido, 30 Butler, Judith 51 Byrne, Rhonda, 127 Cameralism, 113, 116, 118 Cameron, David 41, 164, 180 Campbell, Elaine 51

189

190

Index

Cassian, John 108 Center for Positive Psychology at the Challenging Beliefs, 69 Character Strengths and Virtues Handbook, 31 Charisma, 8 Chicago 22, 23, 134, 140, 155 Chicago School (of economics) 22, 23, 155 Christianity 58, 95, 97, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112 Christian View of Happiness, 106 Civil Society, 59, 66, 67, 123, 159 Clark, Doug, 169, 181 Client Centered Psychotherapy, 29, 168 Clifton, Jim, 86 Clinton, Bill, 86 Clock Time, 92, 93, 94, 95 Cognitive Psychology, 60 Colorado, 168 Commodity Form, 156 Community Mental Health Act, 130 Conduct: conduct of, 5, 13, 65, 85; durational, 148, 150; economic, 3, 22, 72, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121; enterprising 20, 22, 24, 38, 104–105, 119, 152; ethical 110; everyday 47, 71, 95, 174; and flow 87–88; governmentality and, 5, 13, 38, 45, 48, 52, 68, 81; habits 79, 80, 81–85, 87, 93, 101, 146; happiness and 31, 116, 161; intimate 107, 142; logic of, 8, 123, 145, 148, 152; neoliberal, 23, 151, 177; reflexive, 11; social, 122, 135, 136, 147, 149, 152, 163; temporal, 58, 59, 60, 62, 65, 67, 78, 82, 90, 136, 173, 175; and thoughts, 132 Confession, 108 Confucius, 30 Conscious Dating, 171 Conservative (politics), 60, 133 Convulsion (as resistance), 96 Corcuff , Philippe, 9

Counter-conduct, 11, 13, 48, 85, 95, 96, 97, 98, 149, 150, 176 Covey Stephen, 62 Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, 85 Cruikshank, Barbara, 18 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 6, 25, 26, 30, 40, 85, 86, 88 Curiosity, 20, 29, 76 Damiens, Robert Francois 91 Dartmouth College 52 Dating, 24, 153, 167, 170, 171 Dead Hand (of state), 159, 164 Dean, Mitchell, 23, 68, 122 Delamare, Nicholas, 113 Deleuze, Gilles, 49, 50, 97, 138 Democratization, 2, 18, 19 Desolidarisation, 21 Destructivist Project (governmentality as), 155 Detecting Icebergs, 69 Devil, 96 Discipline and Punish, 90, 91 Dispositif, 49, 138 Do It Now: Breaking the Procrastination Habit, 98 Docile Body, 139, 146, 177 Donzelot, Jacques, 122, 139 Duration, 88, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 177 Durational Temporality, 146, 147, 148, 149 Durkheim, Emile, 126, 140 Easterlin, Richard, 39 Ebbesen, Ebbe B., 59 Educating for GNH, 39 Eubank, Edward Earle Eggers, John H., 169 Ego, 142, 145 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 44 Embedded Liberalism, 123 Embodiment, 80, 89

Index

Emmet, Rita, 98 Emotions: and biologization 73–75; emotional enterprise, 135, 162; emotional fold, 37–54; emotionalization 53, 57, 104, 183; and family, 145, 165–166, 171; emotionalities of rule, 51; and Foucault 103–104; and Freud, 142–143; and genealogy 103; and government, 2–6, 19, 29, 37, 42–43, 51, 53, 77, 85, 88, 104, 110, 115, 121, 125, 126, 160, 160, 162, 167, 173; intimacy 148; negative, 31, 133– 134, 160; and neoliberalism 153–154, 158; and norm, 146; and positive psychology 31–33, 57, 63–64, 125, 159, 160; and psychology 125, 129– 132; and risk 68–69; and subjectivity, 17, 103, 136; Empirical Evidence, 39 Empowerment, 3, 19, 21, 42, 130, 131 Enterprise: Happiness as; 3, 19, 34, 35, 52, 57, 113, 123, 149, 170, 175–176; and neoliberal governmentality 4, 21, 31, 35, 47, 68, 88, 105, 112, 117, 118, 152–153, 162, 173; and rganizations 6, 28; and temporality 19, 97; and economics 23, 114; and Positive psychology, 133–136, 168, 170 Entropy, 88 Error of the Average, 157, 158 Essay, iii, 7, 11, 12, 110, 175 Ethical: conduct, x, 52, 95, 103, 110, 123, 136, 176, 177; Substance x, 52, 53, 84, 136, 177; Technique, 10, 52, 110, 123 Eudaimonic happiness, 30 Europe, ix, 8, 107, 110, 116 Event: and Foucault 128–129, 149; of happiness, 128–136 Evolutionary Psychology, 64, 75, 132 Ewald, Francois, 67 Ewen, Stuart 43 Exorcism, 96

191

Experience Sampling Method, 40, 85 Family, 2; and biopower 67, 72, 87, 88, 93; and governmentality 112, 122; and social government 128, 134–140; and psychology 141–146; and happiness 154; and coaching 156, 168, 170, 171; Homeostasis, 144; Systems Theory 144, 145 Feel for the Game (habitus as), 82 Field; and habitus; 84, 86, 93, 152; and the social 82, 83 Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement With Everyday Life; and Good Business, 85 First World Congress Of Positive Psychology, 6 Flagellantism, 176 Flow 25, 34, 35, 50, 76, 85, 86, 87, 88 Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 85 Fold, 17, 38, 49, 50, 172 Fordism, 60, 123, 156, 175 Fordist Production, 156 Fordyce Emotions Questionnaire, 40 Foucauldian cultural studies, 9, 10 Foucault, Michel; 4, 5, 9–17, 22–23; and the body 149; and convulsion, 96–97; and counter conduct, 95; and discipline, 146; and duration, 146–147; and emotions, 103–104; and event, 128–129; and genealogy, 102–104; and governmentality, 45, 49, 52–53; and intensification, 90–92; and the invisible hand, 116; and liberalism, 114–120; and neoliberalism 152–153, 155–159, 162–164, 173–174, 176; and pastoral Care, 107–110; and police, 112–114; and problematization, 151; and psy-function, 136–140; and reason of state, 112–113; and the social, 121–124; and temporality, 90–95 Fraenkel, Peter, 144

192

Index

Franklin, Benjamin, 30, 154 Fredrickson, Barbara, 6, 32, 125, 132, 133, 159, 160, 161, 162 French, 41, 133, 115, 122, 147 Freud, Sigmund, 30, 139, 143, 145 Froh, Jeffrey J., 29 Futural Frame, 51 Gable, Shelly L., 24, 25, 159, 170 Gallup, 41, 86 Gap (temporal), 38, 41, 47, 48, 49, 53, 78, 90, 93, 97, 101, 102, 128, 136, 160, 174, 175 Garmezy, M., 68–69 Giddens, Anthony, 66, 128 Gonzaga, G. C., 170 Good Lives and the Rehabilitation of Offenders: A Positive Approach to Sex Offender Treatment, 80 Good lives model, 81, 107 Gordon, Collin, 45, 122, 123 Governance, 3, 6, 7, 39, 84, 95, 106, 108, 109, 110, 112, 116, 119, 120, 121, 123, 135, 136, 149 Governing the Soul, 46, 52, 185 Government, x, 1, 3–8, 10–13, 18, 20–26, 35, 36; of emotions 38–53, 58, 59, 65–67, 71–73, 75, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82–90, 92, 94–99; neoliberal 101–124, 151–154, 159, 166–169; social 125, 131–139, 141, 143, 145 Government of Government, 23 Governmentality, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 58, 67, 83, 84, 90, 94, 98, 99, 132, 136, 146, 150, 152, 155, 163, 173, 175, 176, 177; theory of, 7; 12; 44; temporality of 13, 21, 23, 24, 44, 45, 46, 48,; neoliberal, vii, x, 4, 5, 21–23, 101–105, 110, 120, 123, 127 Governmentality Studies x, 5, 7, 102 Governmentalization, 117 Gratitude Survey, 40 Greece, 10, 107 Greek polis, 107

Gross National Happiness, 38, 39 Gross National Product, 38, 39 Growth; economic, 39–34; personal, 71–75, 122, 159, 168 Gurman, Alan S., 144 Habit, vii, 2, 13, 24, 30, 31, 32, 47, 48, 50, 54; and rumination, 34, 35; and temporality 58, 61, 62, 69, 70, 78, 79; 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86–98, 101, 102, 104, 108, 111, 112, 114, 120, 123, 124; and social government 125, 126, 131, 132, 135, 136, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150; and neoliberalism 152–154, 158; emotional habits 160; and positive psychology 160–165, and happiness 174, 175, 176 Habitus, and Bourdieu, 13, 78, 81; and Conduct, 81–85; durational habitus, 146–150; and ethical substance 84; and field, 82–88, 93, 152; and intensification 92; and lag 92; neoliberal habitus 175; and protension 83; and procrastination 97; psychological habitus, 131, 135–136, 143, 145; social habitus, 101–102, 123–124, 136, 145, 152, 158, 165, 176; and temporality 81–84, 95, 174 Haidt, Jonathan, 6, 24, 25 Hamburg-Coplan, Jill, 2, 28 Happier: Learn The Secrets of Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment, 6, 29 Happiness: as enterprise, 5, 19, 102, 135, 153; and biology 71–78; and cameralism, 112–114; and Christianity 106, 109–110; critique of, 11, 43–45; and democracy, 18; discourse on, 1–3, 6, 8, 12, 19, 20, 24, 26, 32, 38, 42, 51, 53, 54, 59, 65, 67, 89, 94, 114, 123, 125, 129, 131, 149, 153, 157, 166, 173, 174, 176; Economics of, 7, 20, 38–40,

Index

158; Event of, 128–136; Fold, 43–54; Foucault 113, 151; and governmentality of, 24, 41, 51, 53, 59, 90, 104, 105, 115, 127, 131–132, 151, 161, 163; and Governmentality studies, 5, 173; and habits 79–98; Happ, 106; and Intimacy, 143, 145–146, 164–171; Is a muscle, 3; and Liberalism 103–104, 114–120; and Neoliberalism, 8, 12, 24, 44, 77, 101, 123, 132, 150, 153, 155, 157–158, 163, 173; the new happiness, 1–7, 20, 32, 36, 54; and Optimism 70–133; and Policy 38–43; and psychology of (see positive psychology) and risk 65–71; and social government 120–124, 141, 148–150, 164–165, technology of 4, 17, 90, 123, 126, 128, 161; and temporality, 19, 53, 57–58, 89, 90, 173, 176; and Unhappiness, 18, 102, 135 and utilitarianism, 115–116, 119 Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology that Fuel Success and Performance at Work, The, 167 Happiness Project, The 42 Happiness Rankings, 29 Happiness Research Methods, 12, 25, 40 Happy Planet Index, 39 Harris, Thomas, 145 Hartmann, Martin, 21 Harvard Medical School, 170 Harvard University, 26, 29, 140, 170 Harvey, David, 20, 21, 123 Hawthorne Electric Company, 140 Hayden, C. J., 169 Hayek, Friedrich, 22 Haymarket Riots, 134–139, 149 Hedonic Adaptation, 34, 35, 133 Hermeneutics, 2, 109 Himalayan Mountains, 38 Hinge (of power), vii, 5, 15, 38, 47, 49, 94, 98, 101, 123, 173, 174

193

Hochschild, Arlie, 37 Holmes, Mary, 104 Homology, 134, 137, 173 Honneth, Axel, 21 Hope, 8, 9, 19, 21, 48, 50, 57, 58, 62, 63, 69, 137, 138, 171, 173, 174, 176 How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want, The Hoy, David Couzens, 90 Huffington Post, 164 Human Capital, 4, 22, 39, 43, 77, 156, 158, 162, 168 Human Potential, 135, 168 Human Problems of an Industrialized Civilization, 140 Humanistic Psychology, 75 Identity;: ethnic 8; happiness and, 19, 58, 105; moral 162; politics of 44; psychological 17; temporality 67 I’m Okay—You’re Okay, 145 Illouz, Eva, 9 Incentivization, 21 Insurance, 65, 67, 68, 77, 109, 122, 147 Insurance Technique, 65, 77, 109, 147 Intensification, 13, 19, 49, 53, 54, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 101, 131, 150, 173 Interval (temporal), 38, 47, 48, 49, 78, 101, 102, 135, 136, 149, 160, 174, 175, 176 Intimacy, x, 11, 54, 141–143, 145, 146, 148, 164, 165, 166, 167, 170, 171, 175 Jackson, Don, 144 Jefferson, Thomas, 119 Journal Of Happiness Studies, 17 Journal Of Personality, 7 Judaism, 107 Keynes, John Maynard, 20, 139, 145 Kindness Exercise, 167 Knaus, William, 98 Koran, 30

194

Index

Labor Process, 94, 95, 147, 156 Labor, 44, 66, 72, 92, 95, 96, 102, 109, 123, 128, 134, 140, 141, 147, 156, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163, 167, 175, 177 Lag (temporal) 38, 47, 48, 85, 92, 93, 94, 101, 102, 176 Landmark Forum, 168 Lasch, Chirstopher 43 Lash, Scott, 66 Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning, 85 Lederer, William J., 144, 184 Left (political), 3, 8, 18, 25, 43, 44, 46, 67, 91, 101, 117, 139, 177 Lemke, Thomas, 72 Lemley, Brad, 184, 6 Lennon-Patience, Siobhan, 184, 165 Life coaching, 19, 25, 167, 168, 170 Lifespring, 168 Lifestyle, x, 6, 11, 86, 87, 97, 150, 153, 166 Liljenstrand, Anne M., 168 Locke, John, 119 Lopez, Shane J., 187, 27, 28, 63, 76 Love, 188, 154, 166, 169, 171, 179 Lykken, David, 74 Lyubomirsky, 7, 30, 32, 33, 34, 64, 65, 74 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 110 Madness and Civilization, 137 Make live (biopower as), 71 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 72 Mann, Ruth, 80, 81 Marcuse, Herbert 184, 43 Marital counseling, 35 Market, 35, 102, 118, 122, 152, 153, 155, 156, 162, 163, 170 Marketization, 21 Marsh, Ann, 87 Marx, Karl, 40, 121, 135 Marxist, x, 11, 156 Maslow, Abraham, 185, 26, 29, 168

Masten, A. S., 68–69 Masters of Applied Positive Psychology, 79 Mayo, Elton, 40 McLean Hospital, 170 McMahon, Darrin, 106 McNay, Lois, 21 Mettray, 138 Microsoft, 86 Middle classes, 128 Middle English, 106 Miller, Peter, 129, 130, 132, 167 Mills, C. Wright, 43 Mischel, Walter, 59 Mittleman, Bela, 143, 144 Nadesan, Holmer Majia, 163 Narcissistic Character, 43 Natural Child, 145 Nazism, 159 Nealon, Jeffery, 91 Nebeker, Delbert M., 168 Negation (as ethical work), 70, 116, 128, 132, 151, 162, 163, 171, 177 Negative Psychology, 36, 134 Negative Thoughts, 33, 131, 132, 162 Neoconservative, 44, 163, 165 Neoliberalism: and alchemy, 151–171; and coaching 168; as destructivist project, 155–164; as economic logic, 24, 32, 155, 157, 159–160; and emotions, 103–105, 123, 165; as Governmentality, v, x, 4, 5, 7, 12, 13, 21, 23, 24, 44, 51, 53, 90, 94, 98, 99, 102, 105, 120, 1123, 127, 136, 146, 150, 155, 163, 175, 176, 177; and habitus, 123, 146, 148; and intensification, 89–90; and life, iii, 4, 7, 12; as logic of Government, 3–5 20–24, 44, 51, 53, 101–102, 120, 127, 132, 134, 136, 151, 158, 162, 173; and policy, 38; problematization, 151–153, 163; and resistance to 95, 98; sociabilities of, 164–171; spirit

Index

of/culture of, 5, 11–12; subject/ subjectification, 4, 12–13, 21, 23, 51, 53, 88, 94, 98, 103, 158, 163–164; temporality, 77, 94, 97–98, 146, 150; and work, 88, 163, 175–176 Neu, Jerome, 103, 105 New Deal, 159 New Discourse on Happiness, 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26, 32, 38, 41, 42, 46, 53, 54, 57, 59, 60, 62, 65, 89, 94, 97, 104, 123, 125, 129, 166 New Economics Institute, 39 New York City, ix,  x Nobel Prize, 41 Norm, 26, 36, 50, 102, 121, 123, 162 Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play, The, 108 O’Malley, Pat, 63 Oedipus complex, 138, 139 Office of National Statistics (UK), 41 Old Testament, 40 Omnes et Singulatim, 107 On Personal Power: Inner Strength and Its Revolutionary Impact, 75, 59 Optimism, 27, 28, 32, 44, 57, 64, 70, 125, 135, 165 Ordoliberals, 22 Organic, 71, 75, 122, 126, 159, 162 Others; acting towards, 108, 135; and habits, 102, 105, 114; and psychology, 2, 18, 24, 25, 30, 31, 35, 60, 75–76, 143–146; relations with, 111, 123, 135–142, 153–155, 162, 164–167, 171 Outlier, 157 Oxford Review of Education, 126 Paradox, 39, 86, 98 Pastoral Power, 96, 114 Patagonia, 86, 87 Pathway Thoughts, 63

195

Peake, Phillip K., 59, 187 Peale, Vincent, Norman, 128 Peasant Time, 93 Pessimism, 18, 29, 34, 57, 64, 70, 71 Philanthropy, 109 Plato, 30 Police, 112, 113, 116, 118, 122, 141 Policy, 2, 6, 7, 20, 21, 25, 26, 38, 39, 42, 46, 64, 65, 71, 85 Political Arithmetick, 112 Political Economy, 42, 117, 156 Political Rationalities, 21, 45, 104, 146 Polizeiwissenschaft, 112 Pollyannaism, 44, 160 Popular (culture), 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 25, 29, 38, 39, 42, 43, 46, 62, 69, 74, 85, 86, 113, 122, 126, 127, 132, 145, 146, 153, 165, 166, 170, 174 Positive Education, 27, 28, 127 Positive Emotions, 31, 133, 159 Positive Psychology, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 11, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 40, 42, 59, 63, 64, 69, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 80, 85, 102, 126, 131, 132, 134, 136, 157, 160, 166, 170 Positive Psychology and Coaching Initiative, 7, 170 Positive Psychology Coaching: Putting the Science of Happiness to Work for Your Clients, 170 Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3-to-1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life, 125 Power: and assemblages, 90; and biopower, 71–73, 90, 163; and cameralism, 113; and discipline, 90, 91, 136, 138, 145; and emotions 37, 104; and empowerment, 3–5, 18–19, 21, 42, 130, 131, 158; and event 129; and Foucault, 5, 8, 9; government, 4, 8, 43, 46; and habit, 97, 135; and intensification/saturation, 13, 49–50, 53, 88–89, 92, 150, 173–174; labor power, 156–157, and liberalism

196

Index

Power (continued) 115–117; and neoliberal 13, 152, 155; pastoral power, 107, 114; psypower, 17, 129–131, 137, 139; revolt against, 95; sovereign power, 71, 91, 163; and subjectivity, 9, 38, 51–52; and temporality, 13, 48, 73, 89, 91, 94, 147 Power of Positive Thinking, 126 Practice (social), 1, 87, 98125, 159 Pre-reflexive (habitus), 155 The Prince (essay), 110, 111, 112 Privatization, 21, 44 Principles of Morals and Legislation, The 129 Problematization, 21, 83, 89, 122, 150–152, 121 Procrastination, 97, 98, 169 Procrastination Workbook: Your Personalized Program for Breaking Free from the Patterns That Hold You Back, The, 98 Projection (psychological), 35, 60, 67, 142, 145 Prozac, 74 Psy-disciplines, 18, 20, 109, 129, 137, 138, 145, 148 Psy-function, 129, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 143 Psychiatry, 121, 129, 137, 146 Psychoanalysis, 11, 131, 137, 139, 140, 143 Psychobiography, 30, 141 Psychodynamic theories, 36, 144 Psychological Bulletin, 7 Psychological interiority, 128, 135–136, 139, 140, 143, 153 Psychology, 1–7, 11, 18, 24–33, 36, 40, 42, 43, 46, 59, 60, 63, 64, 69, 73–80, 85, 102, 124, 126–138, 140, 148, 149, 153, 160, 166, 167, 169, 170 Psychotropic drugs, 74 Rathunde, Kevin, 6

Rationalities, 5, 8, 21, 43, 46, 47, 52, 67, 89, 104, 146, 173, 177 Re-Futuring, 81, 94 Re-Time , x, 3, 5, 9, 13, 19, 29, 33, 37, 39, 40 Real Time Resilience, 69 Reason of State, 111–170 Reflexive Government, 82 Reis, Harry T., 170 Reivich, Karen, 27, 69 Relationship Coaching Institute, 171 Renaissance, 116 Repressive Desublimation, ix, 43 Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles, The, 79 Response-able, 62, 63 Responsibilization, 4, 68, 71, 98, 104, 118, 148, 177 Richard Layard, 7, 20 Rimke, Heidi Marie, 9 Risk Society, 65, 66, 179 Risk, 9, 20, 65, 66, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 80–84, 103, 110, 11, 114, 118, 119, 120, 123, 133, 146–149, 175 Rogers, Carl, 26, 29, 75, 130, 131, 139, 168 Rose, Nikolas 46, 47, 50, 73, 137, 167 Ruark, Jennifer, 25, 26 Rubin, Gretchen, 7, 153, 154, 155, 164 Rumination, 34 Saint Augustine, 30, 106 Saint Antoine, 138 Saint Benedict, 107, 110 Saint Monday, 93, 94, 98 Saint Theresa, 106 Samuel Smiles, 126 San Francisco, 87 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 41, 179 Science of Happiness, 29, 170 Scottish, 126 Secret, The, 16, 137

Index

Secrets of Adulthood (Rubin), 154 Self Help, 6, 7, 20, 25, 29, 32, 60, 62, 94, 98, 126, 130, 170 Self-efficacy, 60, 61, 63, 69 Seligman, Martin, 6, 7, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 40, 63, 70, 71, 75, 76, 127, 134, 135, 139, 166, 167, 170 Sen, Amartya, 41 Sense Practique (Bourdieu), 83 Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, 62 Sex Offenders, 80, 81 Sexuality, 72, 104, 151, 167 Shatte, Andrew, 69 Sheldon, Ken, 6 Shoda, Yuichi, 59 Signature Strengths, 28, 31 Sistine Chapel, 86 Smith, Adam, 116 Snyder, Charles, 27, 28, 69, 76 Social: and belonging 105; blame 161; and the body, 45; capital 168; change, 9, 128; conflict 92; control 43; government, 20–23, 35, 36, 42, 45, 101–102, 109, 110, 121–124, 127, 135, 136, 139, 140, 143, 146–147, 149, 152–153, 156, 158, 163, 165, 176; groups 140, 158; habitus 102, 123–124, 136, 145–146, 148–149, 153, 158, 176; inequalities 61, 66; insurance 109; integration 114; networks 166; norms 29, 140; order 46, 139, 140; planning 105; practice 13; psychology 134–136, 138; psychosocial 97; relations, 2, 21, 128, 135, 143, 140, 148, 152, 168; and sociabilities 164–171; and social man 134; power, 5, 17, 43, 46; welfare, 21, 24; and socialism 23; and sociality 136; socialization 36, 109, 121, 148, 161; structure 82; system 141; theory 66; work 143 Socialization, 148, 162; of risk, 148 Solidarity, 122, 126, 134, 140, 156

197

Sonnenberg, Van, Emily, 79, 80, 89 Sovereign Power, 71, 179 Space, x, 46, 102, 117, 171, 176 Stalinism, 159 Stanford University, 59, 106 State, 4, 6, 17, 22, 36, 41, 46, 66, 102, 106112, 114, 116, 122, 123, 124, 146, 163, 168 State phobia, 159 Steele, David, 171 Stiglitz, Joseph, 41 Stop Technique, 34 Strengthquest, 28 Strengths (psychological), 27, 28, 30, 31, 76, 81, 157, 170 Subject: biographical, 50; and biology/ biopower, 18, 71–74, 77; and biopolitical subjectification, 73; and convulsion 97; and discipline, 91–92, 138, 143; and emotion, 3, 37–40, 52, 57, 136, 143; and empowerment, 21; and enterprise, 4, 7, 21, 23, 32, 36, 47, 68, 153; and Foucault 10, 128; and government, 5, 7, 8, 12–13, 45, 54, 58, 94, 101–124, 151, 156, 161, 173, 176; and habitus, 83, 146, 148; and happiness, 3, 17–20, 30–33, 42–43, 57, 62–64, 68, 94, 131, 149, 157; hermeneutics of, 2; intersubjective 137; intimate 144, 171; and liberalism 116, 118, 119, 122; and neoliberalism 4, 12, 13, 21, 23, 36, 51, 88, 98, 101, 103, 158, 163–164; neurotic 148; Oedipalized, 138; post deviant, 80; and power, 9, 13, 51, 173; psychological, 2, 13, 17–20, 37–40, 64, 75, 76, 128–132, 137–139, 142–145; risk 65–67, 71, 77; Romantic 44; and social, 136; Subjectification/subjection, 10, 18, 49–50, 103, 147, 149, 150, 158, 164, 175; and temporality, 13, 20, 47, 60, 63, 67, 77, 89, 93, 94; and truth, 9–10; Unsubjected 150

198

Index

Super Ego, 142 Szalavitz, Maia, 64 Task-Orientation, 92 Taylor, Fredrick W., 28, 140 Technique of the Self, 10, 46 Techniques (governmental), 2, 8, 10, 34, 46, 50 Technology of happiness, 2, 17, 90 Ted Talk, 42 Tellegen, Auke, 74 Telos, 92 149, 150, 166 Temporalization, 13, 19, 53, 57, 67, 89, 90, 91, 146 Teramoto, Jennifer T., 63, 76 Territory, 110, 111, 112 Thatcher, Margaret, 158 Therapy, 12, 18, 35, 36, 68, 74, 131, 144, 154, 167, 169 Thirty Years War, 112, 168 This is Your Brain on Habits, 79 Thompson, E. P., 102, 103, 105 Thought(s); as objects of government, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 46, 50, 58, 69, 80, 103, 108, 110, 111, 125–128, 130, 136, 143, 158, 160, 162, 164; cognitive approaches, 102–104; duration, 147–150; and flow, 85–86; and Freud, 30; and habit, 102; pathway thoughts, 63; and pessimism, 70; and problematization, 151–154; and self talk, 125 Thousand Points of Light, 175 Time, 7, 9, 13, 15, 19, 49, 51, 60, 62, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 97, 98, 99, 101, 100, 102, 108, 114 Temporal, x, 13, 19, 20, 46, 57, 58 Tony Blair, 28, 86 Towards a Criticism of Political Reason, 86

Toyota, 28, 86 Transactional Analysis, 145 Transference, 35, 142, 143, 144, 165, 167 Twins (studies), 32, 74 UK, 74, 164 United Nations, 39 United States of America, x, 8, 20, 23, 25, 26, 27, 39, 58, 60, 115, 130 University of California, 32, 64 University of California, Riverside 32, 64 University of Leicester, 39 University of Pennsylvania, 26, 27, 170 Unsubjected, 150 Wacquant, Loic, 83, 84 Wallis, 26, 29, 39 Ward, Tony, 188 Welfare, 22, 23, 24, 36, 46, 101 Welfarism, 4, 20, 21, 102, 110, 140, 143, 152, 159 Westphalia, 122 Whitworth, Laura, 169 Wicked Witch of the West, 162 Wizard of Oz, 162 Work of Governmentality, vii, x, 4, 5, 7, 49, 102, 163 Work of Neoliberal Governmentality, vii, 99, 101, 163 Workplace Accidents, 147, 148 World Map of Happiness, 39, 79 Xanax, 74 Zeiss, Raskoff, 59 Zen Habits, 87, 179 Zimmerman, Barry J., 61 Zoloft, 74