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Happiness and the Program of Neoliberal Governmentality
'happiness is a muscle you can strengthen'
Businessweek article on positive psychology
Happiness, once an intangible attribute of individual temperament, has today emerged as an object of analytic clarity, measurable and actionable as never before. In recent years, new discourses on the form of happiness have come from a range of professional fields centered on the problematics of human government: in economics, management, organizational theory, marketing and public policy, happiness has appeared as a thing with distinct contours and a precise internal mechanics, and thus as a point of application for programs 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, fitness and in all facets of personal life (Hamburg-Coplan, 2009). Moreover, at the leading edge of these developments are innovations in the emerging field of 'positive psychology', wherein 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). In what follows, an inquiry into the discourse of positive psychology will situate this emergent therapeutic discourse within contemporary configurations of power and emerging technologies for the management of subjectivity. Moreover, these technologies, it will be argued, operate within a network of strategies identified with neoliberal government. Building from Michel Foucault's formulation of an analytics of governmentality, and from the works of researchers in the developing field of governmentality studies that has grown up around Foucault's influential writings, the present investigation will consider contemporary formations of happiness as implicated in a more general logic of neoliberal subjectification (Foucault, 1991, 2007, 2008; Rose, 1998, 1999a, 1999b; Rose et al , 2006; Holmer Nadesan, 2008).
Toward this end, the plan of the present study will advance two key points. First, the case will be made that the phenomenon of positive psychology and the new discourse on happiness exercises a uniquely productive effect in the shaping of autonomous, agentive neoliberal subjectivities, one that is not reducible to the obfuscations of ideology or the depersonalizing control mechanisms of the administered society typically invoked...