Anyone familiar with Sam Binkley's previous work on happiness, positive psychology, the reflexive self and ‘lifestyle’ will not be disappointed by Happiness as Enterprise. Combining Foucauldian scholarship with immersion in the popularising literatures of positive psychology, self-help, workplace well-being and life coaching, the book offers a new set of insights into the emergence of happiness as an object of governance, and in so doing implicates the pursuit, measurement and scientific rationalisation of happiness as part and parcel of a contemporary project of neoliberal governmentality. If that sounds like it has been done several times before, by Foucault himself or the myriad of studies committed to outlining and deploying his theories of governmentality across what is by now a vast range of social fields, then readers will be pleasantly, or even happily, surprised. Here, through the lens of happiness, Binkley manages to tread new ground in the political spaces between culture and economy – giving temporality a central place in his analysis.
The book's main contention is that happiness has become a goal to be achieved as well as a resource, an asset and source of emotional capital, essentially directed at its own achievement. This intimate emotional resource, Binkley writes, ‘becomes a figure of enterprise: it is something one pursues in a spirit of entrepreneurship and opportunity […] as an environmental circumstance to be maximized, or as an organizational resource to be exploited’ (p. 3). The introduction and first two chapters focus on power, sketching out how happiness is used in the cultivation of self-optimising subjects. The book seeks to address some of the limitations of Foucault-inspired studies by examining not the effects of power but their everyday machinations in practice. For this purpose, it is apposite to turn to popular cultural texts aimed precisely at self-cultivation or work on the self. But rather than assume that such texts are effective in producing specific kinds of subjects, the book explores how subjects themselves are empowered to self-govern through this discourse of happiness. Such power is described both as more diffuse and yet more intense; in Foucauldian terms, power famously shapes the contexts of conduct indirectly. Here much more attention is paid to how power – by reorienting our relationship with time – colonises the possibility of subjectivity itself.
The third and fourth chapters elaborate on this temporality of happiness, showing how happiness can be considered a form of biopower which brings forth a dynamic force aimed at opening up life's future potentials. The focus of positive psychologists on the science of optimism is given special attention here, in addition to influential ideas about the value of self-efficacy. Also scrutinised are the now-famous studies from the 1970s, in which children displayed their varying capabilities to defer gratification by making lab-based choices to select one marshmallow now or two later. The denial of rewards in the present came with strong moral overtones regarding personal capacities to govern temptation, which bode well for their future abilities to shape their own conduct in responsible ways. The principal forwarded through this discussion of future orientation is that the effective achievement of neoliberal governmentality relies on subjects pursuing a specific relationship with their own temporality of happiness. Happiness becomes itself ‘the anticipation of happiness, whose force is enough to make happiness real in the present’ (p. 57) – and this anticipation requires specific techniques, work and resolve in the present. However, this is not the institutionalised or statised time of planning ahead; happiness has served to democratise time by incorporating non-expert practices of rhythm, new habit formation and a personal ‘growth mindset’ into everyday life. Chapter Four further highlights the role of time in the intensification of power, recounting the movement away from the disciplinary forms associated with the emergence of industrial capitalism towards the governmentalisation of time under neoliberal regimens. If the former controlled and capitalised on time as a finite resource, Binkley shows how the latter treats time as an infinite potential. Yet through the everyday pursuit of happiness, time's potential is resolutely engineered towards the scripted and regulated formation of a planned existence. The concluding chapter describes the intensity of such power as a form of asphyxiation, denoting a sense in which the anticipatory governmental logic of happiness prescribes our future behaviour, intensively colonises our aspirations and freedoms, and chokes off alternative courses of action (p. 174–175).
Chapters Five, Six and Seven describe the work of self-transformation associated with the governmentalisation of happiness. These chapters are more firmly situated in an analytical framework inspired by Foucault. But they provide much more than the genealogy of happiness in popular cultural texts that might therefore be expected. Indeed, it is the work that happiness does that frames the material in this final part of the book. The political economic stakes of what is described as the ‘wider emotionalisation of society’ (p. 104) are examined. Chapter Five describes how happiness produces specific political and economic subjects capable of and willing to embark on personal projects of intentional self-maximisation. Much attention is paid here to the way in which neoliberal governmentality is a form of critique and problematisation. These are not terms which we often hear in descriptions of this agenda. Critical scholars are used to ‘problematising’ neoliberal governmentality, but here the way in which neoliberalisation itself is posed as a solution to the problem of welfare dependency and a large state is outlined. This reinvigorates the Foucauldian method of genealogy insofar as it sheds light on the claims made by specific neoliberal projects to provide such solutions at specific points of historical juncture.
Taking us on a detailed tour through Foucault's own interventions in analysing the arts of government across a vast span of historical eras, these chapters come to dwell on the resistance or state-phobia posed by neoliberalism to forms of social governance which relied on collective happiness and interdependence (p. 159). Showing how neoliberalism performs a kind of alchemy on the problem of social governance (and its supposed creation of incumbent bureaucratic structures and the stifling of individual liberties and autonomy), Binkley describes how contemporary happiness does the work of internalising an alternative, active, entrepreneurial and competitive spirit. In distinction to psychotherapeutic legacies of the past which relied on the submission of subjects to authoritative forms of expertise, happiness techniques appear democratised, achievable and, of course, resolutely positive. A plethora of life coaches and relationship managers provide services to support individuals to self-optimise, while new forms of de-contextualised sociability (civic-mindedness, volunteering, philanthropy, Big Society), able to sit neatly within a neoliberal framework, are forged. Arguably, it is the specific contexts and spaces in which neoliberal forms of sociability and happiness emerge and endure that are now most ripe for further investigation. Having thoroughly unpacked the way temporality is operationalised as an anticipatory form of government, we might want to ask specific questions about the way spatial formations, context-dependent social practices and technologically driven data-sets on well-being are being used to direct our attention, manage our embodied and emotional subjectivities and shape our behaviour in particular ways.