Consuming Happiness: Aspirational Practices in Global Perspective
These complex aspects of happiness are explored in this special issue, which argues that it is equally important to consider, as Sara Ahmed asks, how happiness operates, as “wish, will and want” (Ahmed, 2010: 2). In other words, what are the practices, modalities and experiences of the injunction to, and indeed quests for, happiness? How is happiness exercised both by individuals in their everyday lives and the institutions of neoliberal power, expressed as they are through religious, media, and consumer apparatus? And how, in turn, can these practices of happiness, be they bottom-up or top-down, be understood within the framework of critical theories of consumption? The works collected in this issue explores happiness, in some of its complexity including of course its deprivation, from the analytical standpoint of consumption, markets and culture. Almost every economy in the world is organised to some extent or another around market exchange, the acquisition of services and commodities, and individualistic practices directed towards personal advancement and fulfilment. These are the neoliberal aspects of happiness, its encoding into a limited set of options and experiences that are emphasized as defining successful subjecthood in the age of late capitalism. Happiness has been understudied and under-theorised from the perspective of scholarship working on markets and material cultures; at the very least its place in the matrix of consumer culture has perhaps been taken for granted. The pleasures offered by consumption have been well documented and studied from both critical and administrative perspectives; and the political dimensions of pleasure especially as experience by marginalised people have received critical attention. But what specifically happiness might mean for consumption practices, especially those taking place at the margins, remains opaque.
Edited by
Mehita Iqani(Stellenbosch University)