The Promise of Happiness (review)

The Productive Economies of Happiness—Margaret Denike

If you are out to find a bit of happiness or to get some pointers on how best to attain it, Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness is not the book for you. As a reflection on the many affects that the pursuit of happiness has had in Western cultures, and the damage that such pursuits have done, Ahmed's project concerns itself not with what happiness is but, rather, with what it does. It attends to how the persistence of the aspiration to happiness and the pervasiveness of its idealization serve to cultivate norms, manage behaviour, and alienate those who fail to identify with it or who have the audacity to betray it, defy it, or, worse yet, to kill it for others, as feminists, queers, and racial minorities have been known to do. Among its central questions: what does the promise of happiness do to those who are left out and to those whose exclusion from this promise is the very condition of the promise itself? And what alternatives remain possible—or what possibilities remain as alternatives—for such "affect aliens"?

Tracking the ways that it "circulates" within Western social, cultural, and philosophical archives, Ahmed leaves no doubt as to the pride of place that happiness occupies. As a cherished telos of philosophical reflection, a primary objective of self-help industries, a subject of scientific inquiry, and a basis for "happiness studies" and their attendant technologies of assessment and measurement, happiness has long been a cultural obsession, linked to prosperity and the attainment of the "good life," however elusive this life may be.¹ Encountered through daily invocations that define the dreams of the presumptively functional heteronormative "family" and well-adjusted immigrants, happiness is, in Foucauldian terms, a "technology" of the self and of society—a way of constituting subjects, regulating populations, and, as such, bringing folks "in line." It is held out as a phantasmatic, never-really-achievable reward for those who "do the right thing" in towing the lines of patriarchal, racist, and nationalist social ideals.

Thinking about happiness—at least in the way that Ahmed does—is a matter of thinking about how norms become "affective," especially for those who fall outside of them. Her book provides a model for analyzing the processes and affects of normative sexualization and racialization. It is an approach to considering how the coddling of certain social and cultural objectives or ideals facilitates racial, ethnic, and gender formations, among others, and to understanding the underlying logic of discrimination and alienation. It welcomes us to consider how, in attending to the different positioning of certain individuals or groups to cultural imperatives and social ideals—in this instance, "being happy"—we can appreciate how "certain forms of personhood" are made valuable,² while others are rendered expendable, or how some persons/objects come to be seen as "good" (by virtue of their affirmation of appropriate objects of "happiness") and others as "bad" (by virtue of their refusal to do so or by finding happiness in the wrong places by not adjusting or accepting the promise, as given).

Situating her work in the context of feminist and cultural studies of affect,³ Ahmed describes her project in genealogical terms as one of offering "an alternative history of happiness" conducted through a consideration of "those who are banished from it, or who enter this history only as troublemakers, dissenters, killers of joy."⁴ In part, her task is to assess how the performative and constitutive work of banishment serves to entrench the cultural values from which such dissenters are alienated—how is happiness/unhappiness or inclusion/exclusion distributed and "'who' and 'what' gets seen as converting bad feeling into good feeling and good into bad?"⁵ To map this distribution, she organizes the three central chapters of the book around three figures that have been alienated from the promise of the happy family and/or nation: feminists, who...