ABSTRACT
The contemporary ‘politics of happiness’ is critically analysed as an aspect of modern bio-power. First, in asserting itself as both a scientific and a political discipline, the new utilitarianism attempts both to naturalize and to ethicize human feelings. From illogical and pseudo-scientific premises, it leaps to the bold claim that it should guide public policy. Secondly, we can trace the double movement by which the disciplines of economics and psychology, over the course of the twentieth century, oblated and then rediscovered subjectivity and happiness. Happiness now propels the ‘free’ subject towards unlimited choices and maximized performance in the face of uncertainty and social insecurity. This revision of political subjectivity is concerned not only with acting upon what others do, but also upon what others can feel – a power of the immaterial. The personal imperatives underpinning contemporary political economy – the duties to perform, to enjoy and hence to consume – are bundled into the paradoxical injunction ‘be happy!’ The emergence of a supposed ‘science’ of happiness seeks to convert this injunction into a political obligation to maximize the happiness of the masses, or a new utilitarianism for the age of consumer capitalism and immaterial labour.
