ABSTRACT
Every year, the Oxford English Dictionary announces its ‘word of the year’. In 2012 it was ‘omnishambles’; in 2013 it was ‘selfie’; and in 2014 it was ‘vape’. In 2015, it wasn’t a word at all, but a picture of a smiling face with tears running down the cheeks; the word of the year was actually an emoji. According to one linguistics expert, emoji is ‘the fastest growing form of language in history based on its incredible adoption rate and speed of evolution’ (Bangor University, 2015). Other forms of shorthand digitally mediated communication of emotions have arisen, such as ‘TFW’ (That FeelingWhen) and humorous images of animals accompanied by statements such as ‘me when I oversleep’ or ‘me right now’. Thanks to these types of expression, social media platforms often serve as arenas for the parade of emotions to be graphically performed rather than discursively reported. The rise of emoji offers one example of how the representation, commu-
nication and detection of emotions are being transformed by digital media. It is a manifestation of what has been described as the ‘decline of symbolic efficiency’; that is, a perceived crisis in the capacity of verbal languages to adequately convey meaning and truth (see Žižek, 2000; Dean, 2009; Andrejevic, 2013). Coupled to this is the rise of ‘empathic media’ – technologies that detect emotion algorithmically via the movement of the face and eyes, bodily signals such as pulse rate or use of particular words (McStay, 2014, 2015a, 2015b). With the growth of wearable technologies, smart cities, smart homes, data mining, and so on, emotional states are becoming objects of measurement and calculation. The use of emoji is the more playful complement to the growth of this ‘affective computing’ complex that renders emotions visible. Together with advances in the neurosciences, such technological and cultural
developments might appear to be leading us towards a situation in which inner subjective moods can be treated as matters of fact. As Poovey (1998) explores, facts have a contradictory epistemological status whereby they are both independent of their context yet slot seamlessly into broader frameworks of knowledge and calculation. Thanks to the use of numbers to represent them, facts can appear ‘preinterpretive or even somehow noninterpretive’ (Poovey, 1998: xii). To appeal to facts is therefore to hasten the ‘crisis of symbolic efficiency’ inasmuch as it seeks to circumvent semiotic (and therefore cultural)
forms of representation via apparently non-cultural or metacultural transmission systems. Objectivity surrounding emotion – one’s own or that of another – is now a plausible stance to take. This technological context provokes enthusiasm and optimism within fields
of psychology, psychiatry, economics, management and market research, which aim to render happiness an object of empirical knowledge (Davies, 2015a). Together, these make up a subdomain of psychological governance that is growing in profile and power in many societies today. Since quantitative data on happiness first started being produced in the 1960s, the science of happiness has tended to be heavily reliant on subjective reports of emotions, using survey questions such as ‘how did you feel yesterday?’ and ‘how satisfied are you with your life?’. The introduction of affect scales and questionnaires into psychiatry, for purposes of measuring depression, also relied on introspection on the part of the patient. The notion that an emotion might be detectable and measurable without recourse to introspection and self-reports (for instance, through fMRI, sentiment analysis algorithms, or some such) might seem to avoid methodological problems of cultural relativism. By focusing on the brain, the face or physical behaviour, scientists may be able to distinguish what someone is ‘really’ feeling in distinction from what they say they are feeling – a methodological hope that has generated particular excitement in the field of market research (e.g. Lindstrom, 2012). Happiness would become a simple matter of fact. The spread of affective computing and empathic media into our everyday
lives is therefore working in tandem with the expansion of positivist discourses surrounding human happiness. While the surging interest in happiness, positive emotion and wellbeing since the 1990s cannot be entirely explained in terms of advances in and spread of detection methods (cf. Ehrenreich, 2010; Ahmed, 2010; Binkley, 2014; Cederström and Spicer, 2015), the capacity to speak objectively and factually about happiness is dependent on the ability of certain experts to observe and monitor brains, bodies and behaviour. In that sense, this new regime of knowledge is an artefact of behaviourist and panoptical structures on which new methodologies can be built. What can begin as gimmicky demonstrations of computer wizardry can become normalised as tools of management, science and policy within a short space of time. The technical frontiers of psychological governance are moving rapidly thanks to new entanglements of the digital, behavioural and physiological. To be sure, the project of rendering the inner self or subject empirically
knowable is far from new as copious histories of the ‘psych’ sciences testify (Rose, 1990, 1996; Danziger, 1994, 1997; Rieber, 1980). ‘Psychological government’ has always involved experts with the authority and capacity to report the truth about the psychological lives of others. Meanwhile, behaviourists have been striving to circumvent subjective reports since the early twentieth century (Mills, 1998). We should be cautious of claiming some great epistemological breakthrough in the contemporary moment, the kind of which is only likely to fuel exuberance for techniques such as neuromarketing even
further. My goal in this chapter is not to suggest that current empiricist perspectives on the psyche are historically unprecedented, but to highlight some of the continuities and discontinuities between the past and present. I do, however, want to suggest that the fixation on happiness represents a distinct branch of psychological government, with its own privileged status within liberal politics and its own uneasy relationship to linguistic expression. This chapter argues that the ideal of circumventing language is very long-
standing, predating the birth of modern psychology in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, it should first and foremost be understood as a governmental ideal and only subsequently as a methodological ideal. For this reason, my account starts with Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century, for whom an objective science of pleasure might rescue society from the threat of political and moral discourse. The question is what type of utilitarian infrastructure might support this in governmental practice. I then consider two ways in which this infrastructure has emerged: via the price system and via physiological indicators. In each case, I argue, epistemological optimism regarding happiness is based upon a combination of technological optimism and semiotic pessimism. In conclusion, I look at the limits of these forms of ‘political physics’, which can work so long as they narrow the field of public deliberation, but are ultimately dependent on this silencing in order to maintain their veneer of facticity.
