Ahmed - The Promise of Happiness

HAPPINESS IS COSSISTENTLYDESCRIBED as the object of human desire, as being what we aim for, as being what gives purpose, meaning and order to human life. As Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer argue, Everybody wants to be happy. There is probably no other goal in life that commands such a high degree of consensus (2002: vii). What they are describing is perhaps a consensus that happiness is the consensus. Do we consent to happiness? And what are we consenting to, if or when we consent to happiness?

Even a philosopher such as Immanuel Kant, who places the individuals own happiness outside the domain of ethics, argues that to be happy is necessarily the wish of every finite rational being, and this, therefore, is inevitably a determining principle of its faculty of desire ([1788] 2004: 24). And yet Kant himself suggests rather mournfully that unfortunately, the notion of happiness is so indeterminate that although every human being wishes to attain it, yet he can never say definitely and consistently what it is that he really wishes and wills ([1785] 2005: 78). If happiness is what we wish for, it does not mean we know what we wish for in wishing for happiness. Happiness might even conjure its own wish. Or happiness might keep its place as a wish by its failure to be given.

Happiness: a wish, a will, a want. In this book I wonder what it means for happiness to be thought in such terms. The question that guides the book is thus not so much what is happiness? but rather what does happiness do? I do not offer a definition of happiness, or a model of authentic happiness. Nor do I offer a set of instructions on how to achieve happiness: I do not have one to offer, and if anything I write from a position of skeptical disbelief in happiness as a technique for living well. I am interested in how happiness is associated with some life choices and not others, how happiness is imagined as being what follows being a certain kind of being. The history of happiness can be thought of as a history of associations. In wishing for happiness we wish to be associated with happiness, which means to be associated with its associations. The very promise that happiness is what you get for having the right associations might be how we are directed toward certain things.

Happiness shapes what coheres as a world. In describing happiness as a form of world making I am indebted to the work of feminist, black, and queer scholars who have shown in different ways how happiness is used to justify oppression. Feminist critiques of the figure of the happy housewife, black critiques of the myth of the happy slave, and queer critiques of the sentimentalization of heterosexuality as domestic bliss have taught me most about happiness and the very terms of its appeal. Around these specific critiques are long histories of scholarship and activism which expose the unhappy effects of happiness, teaching us how happiness is used to redescribe social norms as social goods. We might even say that such political movements have struggled against rather than for happiness. Simone de Beauvoir shows so well how happiness translates its wish into a politics, a wishful politics, a politics that demands that others live according to a wish. As she argued: It is not too clear just what the word happy really means and still less what true values it may mask. There is no possibility of measuring the happiness of others, and it is always easy to describe as happy the situation in which one wishes to place them ([1949] 1997: 28; second emphasis added). I draw on such critiques of happiness as a way of asking questions about the happiness wish. We need to draw on such critiques now, as a way of responding to the worldliness of this now. Why happiness, why now? We could certainly describe this now as a happiness turn. The Promise of Happiness is written in part as a response to this turn.

What do I mean by the happiness turn? It is certainly the case that numerous books have been published on the science and economics of happiness, especially from 2005 onward. It is now common to refer to the happiness industry: happiness is both produced and consumed through these books, accumulating value as a form of capital. Barbara Gunnell (2004) describes how the search for happiness is certainly enriching a lot of people. The feel-good industry is flourishing. Sales of self-help books and CDS that promise a more fulfilling life have never been higher.