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3 Happiness as resource and resilience

An emotion for neoliberal times1
Sam Binkley

For a long time, conventional wisdom has understood modern economy as a

threat to emotional life. Whether in the realms of production or consumption,
such effects as rationality, repetition, commodification and alienation have been
thought to reduce emotional existence to drab and dreary states of being, in
contrast to the presumably authentic and vital forms experienced in nature or
in preindustrial life. This thesis, of course, has been rendered obsolete as new
forms capital have evolved around our personal, affective and emotional
capacities (Illouz, 2007). The diminishment of the institutional form of
bricks-and-mortar capitalism that prevailed under post-Fordist, neoliberal,
and late capitalism has not only allowed the recognition of emotion in the lives
of workers, consumer and citizens but has discovered the value of emotions in
capitalist enterprise itself, organized around the imperatives of a service industry.
Emotions now have value as a component of “human capital”: today we speak
of emotional labor, emotional capitalism and a broader “emotionalization” of
economic and social life – a process that demands that emotions be produced,
cultivated and managed opportunistically in new and aggressive ways (Holmes
2010, 2015). Emotions are not only labor commodities to be sold, but also
social assets to be refined and communicated – objectives for which new
forms of self-help and popular psychology stand ready to lend assistance.
But through emotionalization processes, emotions appear not only as eco-
nomic and cultural assets to be cultivated, but as fundamental existential
resources to be honed and mobilized in the face of the risks and uncertainties
encountered in everyday life. Emotions have become expressive instruments of
advancement and agency but also shields or defenses against threats emerging
from an uncertain and changing world. Recent critical studies of resilience
have uncovered the ways in which a reflexive shaping of emotional life aims
to cultivate a quality of durability and elasticity within the contemporary
subject through a popular self-help genre that draws on psychological
research into human resilience (Reid, 2012; Evans and Reid, 2014). In what
follows, a critical engagement with the recent focus on happiness explores
links between happiness discourse, and specifically the popular focus on
positive psychology, and the resilience imperative, as expressed in an emerging
body of self-help literature. Happiness is considered through the lens of recent
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38 Sam Binkley
critical work on neoliberalism, as taken up in studies of governmentality
where happiness appears as an instrument or resource for the enterprising
subject. Drawing on the author’s recently published work on happiness and
neoliberal enterprise, the problem of happiness is considered as a technology
of enterprise and opportunity (Binkley, 2014). However, coextensively but
also against this tendency, as the latter portion of the chapter describes, this
enterprise of emotional well-being also brings with it the defensive posture of
a vulnerable subject grasping for resilience. Emotionalization is thus revealed
as a Janus-faced process of opportunity and risk avoidance.

Happiness, resilience and neoliberal governmentality

The recent appearance of happiness as a problem of psycho-medical discourse
asks us to considerably broaden our understanding of medicine itself (Binkley,
2014; Zevnik, 2014; Ahmed, 2008). Happiness is understood as a natural
expression of human vitality – not an affliction or a deformity experienced by
an unfortunate few but a future, a potential for the full development of a vital
capacity shared by anyone and everyone. Indeed, the new technology of happi-
ness is not just something for the clinically depressed, the deranged or other
persons marked for psychological marginalia (such individuals are referred
back to the old disciplinary apparatus, which stands patiently on the sidelines
for this purpose). Happiness is for the average, the common, the unafflicted –
those who simply want more out of life. The problem of happiness, therefore,
is the perfect mechanism for ensuring that everyone becomes a psychological
subject. It is, in a sense, the democratization of psychological life – one need no
longer be sick to be psychological – though it is a form of democratization that
brings with it many concealed and coercive effects. Anyone who falls short of the
full realization of their happiness potential, happiness experts argue, has
betrayed his or her own most implicitly human capacities. Not just unhappiness,
but the failure to be as happy as possible, has become problematic. Such is
the blackmail of happiness: to choose not to be happy is to choose against one-
self and against the mandate of biological life, what one is and what one might
become, which is an unthinkable choice (one only possible for those afflicted not
necessarily with depression but with the malaise of everyday pessimism).
Thus, the effects of happiness extend far beyond the traditional domains of
the therapist and the psychiatrist, wardens of those subjects whose states of
compromised mental health, contorted by disease and maldevelopment, have long
held the clinical gaze of the hospital and the asylum. Happiness is the problem for
people who don’t have a problem. It is not an abnormality one discovers
within oneself through techniques of introspection and self-assessment in the
closed spaces of clinics and asylums but is, instead, a potential to be developed
in the open spaces and otherwise healthy moments of everyday life. Since
happiness has no other purchase on the subject than its immediate experience
of its own well-being (which is, of course, immediately transparent to every
psychological subject) and its potential to maximize this well-being, it speaks
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Happiness as resource and resilience 39

to life’s very movement, to the forward thrust of life itself, to the subject’s
vitality and ultimate capacity for a richer, fuller, happier life. To seek after
happiness is to empower oneself, in the sense that Barbara Cruikshank uses
the term to signify a new technology of government and a mode of subjection
that is at once voluntary and coercive: “The will to empower ourselves and
others,” writes Cruikshank, “has spread across academic disciplines, social
services, neighborhood agencies, social movements, and political groups, for-
ging new relationships of power alongside new conceptualizations of power”
(1999: 72).
As such, happiness imposes a fundamental transformation of the psycho-
logical problematic itself where democratization and empowerment occur
through a unique temporalization of the problem of psychological health. The
uncertain status of happiness appeals to the unfolding dynamic of a vital
process, grafting itself onto the time of our life trajectories and everyday
conducts, fusing with the thrust of our life energies, charting a future, a hope,
a potentiality and a horizon of endlessly optimizing capacities and endlessly
enriching experiences. This is not the temporality of the psychotherapist or
the analyst who searches the past for the buried causes of present dilemmas
and whose aim is the prescription of a cure. It is a temporality that looks to an
open future of ongoing possibilities, that strategizes and seeks opportunities for
ever greater utility and higher emotional returns on life’s investments. Today’s
happiness is the temporality of enterprise.
Happiness asks us to train our eyes on a horizon of possibility and to pose
the problem of our lives and our identities within an engineered trajectory of
measurable risk and uncertainty, a cost-benefit analysis whose unfolding is
directed by our own competencies, capacities, resources and choices, leading to
the uncertain realization of our potential for fulfillment. In this way, happiness
reconstitutes identity and emotional well-being as a problem not of a search
for origins but of the optimal exploitation of environmental resources,
opportunities and enterprises, confronted in the here and now of personal life.
Moreover, happiness, as life lived to the fullest, applies a maximizing logic to
those vital forces that define the very dynamism of our biological existence.
Happiness is what we experience when our life forces are fully activated – to deny
happiness is to deny what we are as living entities. For this reason, I argue
that the new discourse on happiness affects an intensification of the apparatus
of the psy-disciplines – a shedding of its heavy institutional form that enables
a penetration of power going beyond our bodies and behaviors to touch on
our very potentialities, futures and temporalities as subjects.
Empirically, it is possible to speak of the new discourse on happiness on a
number of levels, not all of which cohere around a single genre. This new discourse
is largely interdisciplinary, spanning scientific, economic, policy, journalistic and
popular cultural genres, all of which exert a combined influence on lay and
popular understandings that have become the stuff of business theory and self-
help wisdom as well as daytime talk shows, cable TV programs and a burgeoning
therapeutic cottage industry and subculture. Typically, the new happiness
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40 Sam Binkley
discourse espouses a view of emotional life filtered through the lens of economic
thought, as in the influential works of Richard Layard whose colorful global
surveys of the happiness levels of countries across the world pique the curiosity
of the most casual reader (see Layard, 2005). Indeed, Layard’s findings have
proven influential not just to a lay readership, but at the highest levels of
government in some countries, influencing policy discussions in Britain, the
United States and Australia (Oishi, 2014).
More precisely, it is a specific and unique formation of economic thought
that inscribes the discourse on happiness with its distinctive logic and gives it its
singular, penetrating character. This is a contemporary discourse on the eco-
nomic that makes broad claims for the implicitly opportunistic character of
social, personal and emotional existence as a unique enterprise – a neoliberal
thought that has become increasingly hegemonic in civic and public discourse,
as well as in private and interpersonal life, while an older tradition of economic
and social thought rooted in Keynesian welfarism has waned in its influence.
The story of this shift has become the focus of much recent critical writing.
Once, political and economic discourse projected an overarching faith in an
implicit human collectivism and in the capacity of states to manage social
provisioning, regulate markets and collectivize social risks under economies
centrally planned around the shared needs for trust, reciprocity and mutuality.
But today, it is the need to foster the freedom of economic actors from these
very collective forms, to incentivize enterprising conduct and to responsibilize
individual economic risk-taking that forms the nexus of governmental policy
(Harvey, 2005). Wendy Larner writes:

Whereas under Keynesian welfarism, the state provision of goods and

services to a national population was understood as a means of ensuring
social well-being, neo-liberalism is associated with the preference for a
minimalist state. Markets are understood to be a better way of organizing
economic activity because they are associated with competition, economic
efficiency and choice.
(2000: 5)

Yet there is within the logic of neoliberal government a specific and operative
incompleteness, the quality of a problem or a problematization that is central
to its functioning. This incompleteness is captured in recent critical work on
governmentality studies, and specifically in the concern with neoliberal govern-
mentality, as a set of discursive and institutional practices centered on the
shaping of special kinds of subjectivity (Foucault, 1991; Rose et al., 2006).
The governmentality approach applied to the practice of neoliberalism is
one that cuts across distinctions between ideology and policy to uncover the
political rationalities that operate within each field, and specifically the ways in
which these rationalities translate into particular practices for the self-government
of neoliberal subjects (McNay, 2009). Neoliberal policies typically involve the
restriction of state provisions through budgetary measures designed to give
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Happiness as resource and resilience 41

subjects no choice but to adopt enterprising methods, imposing a view of the
social field etched in the image of a market abundant with resources, opportu-
nities for mutually beneficial exchanges and competitive advantage, realizable
through enterprises of calculation and investment. Incentivization, responsi-
bilization, privatization and marketization (McNay, 2009). All of this signifies
a process of induced vitality through the self-limitation of a government that
operates only indirectly and at considerable distance from its intended objects.
The effect is one of excitation and empowerment of subjects through the
removal of the constraints imposed by hierarchical institutions and the social
commitments they claim to represent. Neoliberalism is, by this token, a funda-
mentally productive power: it “makes live” by drawing individuals into the
competitive production and maximization of their own unique attributes
(Foucault, 2007, 2008). Practices of neoliberal governmentality extend these
interventionist strategies into the social field but also into the very domain of
subjectivity itself where, as Graham Burchell has put it: “Neoliberalism seeks
in its own ways the integration of the self-conduct of the governed into the
practices of their government and the promotion of correspondingly appropriate
forms of techniques of the self” (1996: 29–30).
Neoliberal governmentality thus defines a problem-space for distinct modes
of experimentation and intervention wherein society is undone, transformed
in the image of the market, and what Burchell (1996: 27) terms an “artificial
competitive game” is imposed through the planned minimization of any
collectivist alternative to individual competition. The net effect of this is the
activation of a distinct range of human potentials and possibilities – the pro-
duction of a certain neoliberal subjectivity (Burchell, 1996). Indeed, the worst
consequence of the welfare state’s constraining of the possibilities for individual
enterprise is its failure to enable the realization of vital potentials among
those it governs – potentials for qualitative differentiation among a populace
through the competitive pursuit of opportunities realizable in the terrain of the
unfettered marketplace. But for the subject capable of extracting himself from
such dependencies (and, conversely, of extracting such inclinations to depen-
dency from himself), the reward comes with the freedom to undertake life as
an enterprising endeavor, to take up his own self-cultivation as an enterprising
program and, therefore, to invest in himself as would an entrepreneur – on the
basis of calculations of investment and return.
In this way, happiness is neoliberal. There is an underlying economic logic
which runs through the government of happiness that resonates with the world-
view of neoliberal economics and disseminates languages and frameworks
mandating a program of enterprising self-government. This is a relation to the
self, centered on the stripping away of inherited interdependencies and embedded
habits formed around mutuality, and the excitation of a previously suppressed
spirit for opportunistic action and entrepreneurship. The current discourse on
happiness serves as such a framework by which individuals undertake to
problematize aspects of their own conduct, to expunge inherited dependencies
in order to optimize personal autonomy and capacity for self-interested
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42 Sam Binkley
initiative. Dependence on the supervision of experts, the propensity to thought-
lessly adhere to institutional protocols, a tendency toward idleness or docility,
reliance on habitual behaviors shaped in consort with patterned collective life,
overinvestment in the judgment of others, or a predisposition to conceive
responsibility in collective terms – all are regarded as problematic and cumber-
some, as a retardation of the spirit for life, as a result of the overextension of
some other vast regime of (welfarist, social) government and, therefore, as an
obstruction to the voluntaristic, self-interested, enterprising conduct that is
the wellspring of (neoliberal) happiness itself. Indeed, the economism of happiness
lies in the very negation of the dependent, constraining and docile attitude
that is the legacy of welfare. These elements come together in a new way of
talking and writing about human emotional life that has raised the psycho-
medical problem of happiness to that of a legitimate scientific object – positive
psychology.
With positive psychology, personal happiness has achieved the highest level
of transparency and plasticity as an object of positive science, clinical inter-
vention and therapeutic manipulation (Gable and Haidt, 2005). Following the
publication in 2000 of Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness: Using the New
Positive Psychology to Realize your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, positive
psychology has mushroomed into a multibillion-dollar research field and
influential self-help discourse, infusing the prefix “positive” to everything from
couples therapy, education and marketing to law enforcement and corrections
(Seligman, 2000, 2012). In each of these scenarios, the new “positive” psychology
is registered as the active, agentive and enterprising counterpart to what it
considers traditional psychology, ensconced as it is in the negativity of the
disease model, on endless reflection on past relations with others and on all that
makes life a scene of suffering. In the case of positive psychology life coaching,
for example, the vocation of the psychotherapist, who mollifies sadness and
suffering through patient listening and probing questions, is scorned for stag-
nating emotional life in the mire of remote and indistinct psychic traumas
and heavy-handed expert intervention (Binkley, 2011). In her place, the
semiprofessional coach engages the patient not so much through a diagnosis
of past traumas as through an inspiring reflection on the future as a scene of
happiness and self-designed life goals (Brock, 2008). In this regard, positive
psychology provides the general theory for a set of interventions into the
dynamic of emotional life with the aim of optimizing, improving and developing
the happy subject for a life modeled on competition.

Positive psychology’s looped resourcing

Positive psychology is a realm of expertise that has achieved broad profes-
sional acceptance in academic, public policy and business circles and which,
in the space of the past decade, has left a deep imprint on a range of popular
therapeutic fields. Aiming to surpass the traditional preoccupation of the
psychological professions with negative states (neuroses, psychoses, disorders
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Happiness as resource and resilience 43

of various kinds), positive psychology maps out, with the same measure of
scientific precision applied to mental pathologies, the psychological states
identified with joy, flourishing, expressive well-being and happiness itself. It is
possible to date the origin of positive psychology to 1997 when Martin Selig-
man, renowned for his work on depression and adaptive behavior and recently
elected to the presidency of the American Psychological Association (APA),
joined forces with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, noted psychologist and originator
of the concept of “flow,” the state of contemplative immersion one attains in an
all-consuming activity (Ruark, 2009). Both sought to redress the traditional
preoccupation of American psychology with familiar problems of disease,
pathology and mental illness through a novel research agenda concentrated
on those conditions that make individuals thrive and attain states of happiness.
With the intent of overcoming the vagaries and methodological flimsiness that
had hampered previous efforts to treat the positive potentials of human well-
being (particularly those identified with the humanistic psychology of Maslow
and Rogers), happiness, the two argued, could now be measured objectively
and scientifically through empirical clinical research and controlled through
precise therapeutic techniques. Buoyed by their conversations, Seligman
resolved to make positive psychology the theme for his tenure as president of
the APA, and within a few years, the field had exploded.
Since the 2000 publication of Seligman’s bestselling work Authentic
Happiness – the undisputed Holy Writ of this expanding field – the new discourse
on happiness has developed into a dynamic cultural phenomenon, earning
repute both within academic psychology and in a variety of applied fields from
business and public policy to the heady world of self-help publishing. The crea-
tion of the John Templeton Prizes in Positive Psychology, two special issues of the
American Psychologist, a number of handbooks devoted to the topic, several
summits and a major international conference all occurred within five years of
the initial conversations between the field’s founders. And in the time since the
publication of Seligman’s book, positive psychology has consolidated its hold on
academic psychology. Competitive programs in positive psychology have been
established at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University and the
University of East London; Csikszentmihalyi himself has founded a new PhD
program in positive psychology at Claremont University; and course offerings in
positive psychology have become the norm in leading departments worldwide.
Financial support for research has also grown rapidly. In addition to recent infu-
sions of support from the National Science Foundation and the US Department
of Education, funding in excess of $226 million has been provided to positive
psychology researchers by the National Institute of Mental Health (Ruark, 2009;
Wallis, 2005). In addition to the $200,000 prizes it has awarded annually since
2000 for new research in positive psychology, The John Templeton Foundation
recently offered Seligman a grant of $6 million to encourage collaborative
research across the fields of positive psychology and neuroscience.
The new discourse on happiness has influenced a range of institutional,
managerial and policy conversations, variously centered on the government of
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44 Sam Binkley
individuals, communities and organizations through appeals to their capacity
to feel good about their situations by perceiving them positively. Happiness
results from the cognitive outlooks of individuals; to the extent that people
can be brought to assess their situations and themselves in a favorable light, the
resulting emotional flush will move them to perform on such a superior level as
to produce results that actually confirm this initial positive assessment. The task,
then, is to create the conditions, or to teach the specific techniques, through
which circumstantial optimism and appreciative self-regard can be intentionally
cultivated by individuals within their own outlooks. Significantly, this is not
undertaken through a treatment regimen, counseling or any therapeutic
practice requiring the supervision of an institutional expert of any kind. The
cultivation of a positive outlook is the handiwork of any organizational director
(teachers, human resource managers, workplace counsellors) who inspires the
self-motivated individual to undertake a set of exercises and interventions into
his own mundane thought processes. One example of an institutional application
of positive psychology is that of “positive education” – developed by Seligman at
the Center for Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania – which
has been adopted by schools in the United States, Britain and Australia
(Waite, 2007; Seligman et al., 2009). Rather than castigating students for their
weaknesses and flaws, the curriculum asks students to identify their unique
strengths and assets and includes specific methods by which students might
cultivate and sustain this self-regard in their own lives, such as a lesson that
concludes with end-of-the-day gratitude reflections designed to enhance positive
outlooks (Chen and McNamee, 2011).
In a similar spirit, business has welcomed positive psychology and incor-
porated its appreciative regard for the positive functions of organizations and
enterprises as a tool for management. In 2002, the business school at the
University of Michigan created a program in Positive Organizational Scholar-
ship, and in 2004, Case Western Reserve University opened a similar program
in Positive Organizational Development. Business leaders are taught to view
the potentials and assets of organizations and their staffs while imparting to
workers small techniques for the enhancement of such appreciative outlooks,
woven into the patterns of their daily rounds. These range from keeping
records of their own and others’ professional accomplishments to the ritual
acknowledgment at the start of staff meetings of organizational successes and
strengths. Graduates from these programs have brought the assets of positive
psychology to firms such as Ann Taylor Stores and Toyota Motor Corpora-
tion (Hamburg Coplan, 2009; Linley and Harrington, 2010). Even the US
military has incorporated positive psychology methods into its basic training
courses, instructing soldiers to direct their thoughts to positive interpretations
of events when, for example, a call is placed from the battlefield to one’s spouse,
who appears to be away from home on a weekend or evening – she’s not having
an affair; she’s working late or gone shopping. In short, happiness is a
resource with unlimited organizational value, a link between the present and
the future and, therefore, worth cultivating in the emotional dispositions of
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Happiness as resource and resilience 45

students, soldiers, workers, prisoners and spouses and in the general population
(Harms et al., 2013).
Perhaps most impressive, however, is the success of positive psychology as a
popular cultural and media phenomenon. Regional and national happiness
rankings have proven eye-grabbing media fare for readers and viewers world-
wide, and a 2005 Time Magazine cover story on positive psychology, declaring
it the “science of happiness,” expanded public curiosity on this phenomenon
(Wallis, 2005). Professor Tal Ben-Shahar’s positive psychology class (from
which he developed materials for his 2007 bestselling book Happier: Learn
the Secrets of Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment) was, for a time, publicly
celebrated as the most popular class at Harvard University. And on the self-
help shelves, dozens of titles brandishing the scientific credentials of the new
psychology strive to set themselves apart from the mushier offerings of self-
help and new age gurus. A cover story in Psychology Today reports that while
only 50 new popular nonfiction titles addressed the topic of happiness in
2000, that number had grown to 4,000 by 2008 (Flora, 2009).
Conceptually, the core elements of positive psychology are relatively easy to
grasp, owing to the field’s penchant for the popular psychology genre. Draw-
ing on the legacy of humanistic psychology, positive psychologists refute the
pessimism of the “adaptive” tradition and focus on the life-affirming poten-
tials, energies and vital forces residing within the individual psyche. Carl
Rogers, Abraham Maslow and proponents of the movement for self-realization
in the 1960s and 1970s had argued for the need to evolve a therapeutic metho-
dology and a style of interpersonal life that transcends the self-recrimination
imposed on the individual by demanding social norms and accepts uncondi-
tionally the qualities and character of individuals in a spirit of warmth and
affirmation – what became known as client-centered psychotherapy (Froh,
2004). Positive psychology is similar in its optimistic portrayal of happiness
as a radiant personal potential and its emphasis on the need to overcome
negative self-assessments, although in this case, the therapeutic task is radically
disengaged from relations with others and turned over to the individual himself.
The happy subject is taught to maximize happy emotions through the direct
manipulation of his own thoughts, understood as resources for the optimiza-
tion of an emotional state – a characteristic that positive psychology inherits
from its other great forebear, cognitive behavioral psychology. Cognitivist
approaches typically reverse the old Freudian axiom that thoughts are the
expression of underlying emotional dynamics, which are themselves rooted in
psychobiographical experiences. Instead, everyday thoughts are understood to
determine emotional states; and where these thoughts can be directly
manipulated by sheer acts of will (making oneself think about this or that),
it follows that happiness can be produced by consciously directing one’s
thoughts to happy subjects with the same intentionality one might pursue in
a fitness regime. Positive psychologists provide reams of advice on how this
is to be done. Through thought interventions, one learns to switch off
negative patterns of thinking. These involve planned disruptions of routine
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46 Sam Binkley
mental habits, which forestall the cyclical downward spiral to adaptive
emotional states that embed us in the rhythms of daily life. Indeed, together
with new clinical methodologies for the specific measurement of emotional
conditions, wide authority is granted to the individual for the adjustment and
manipulation of a static condition – one’s happiness, whose intensity can be
determined numerically from moment to moment and by the simple and
direct method of self-reporting – through the control of one’s thoughts
(Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).
Moreover, positive psychology proposes specific methods for the enhancement
not just of states of positive feeling in real life (hedonic pleasure) but also the
deeper forms of happiness that derive from the exercise of our chief potentials
and unique gifts as individuals (eudaimonic happiness). This kind of happiness,
termed “authentic happiness” by Seligman, occurs when a particular set of
psychological strengths and virtues unique to each individual are mobilized and
put into operation in everyday activities – qualities such as courage, conviction
and open-mindedness, whose development through practice in everyday life
induces positive self-regard and thus happier emotional states (Seligman, 2000).
Seligman recounts the process by which these qualities were arrived at in the
development of positive psychology. Together with a colleague, he combed
through the “basic writings of all the major religious and philosophical tradi-
tions … Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Augustine, the Old Testament, the Talmud,
Confucius, Buddha, Lao-Tze, Bushido, the Koran, Benjamin Franklin” (2000:
132) to track the recurrence of distinctive positive traits. What emerged was a list
of universally held “signature strengths,” which include Wisdom, Knowledge,
Courage, Humanity, Justice, Temperance and Transcendence. Peterson and
Seligman (2004) went on to catalog these qualities in the Character Strengths
and Virtues handbook, or CSV, proposed as positive psychology’s counterpart to
the inventory of pathological states numbered in the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (see Maddux, 2002).
At the foundation of positive psychology, then, is a deep belief in the
incompleteness of the project of happiness itself, in the plasticity of emotional
states, and in the opportunistic conduct of the happy subject as one suscep-
tible to the suggestive power of optimistic and pessimistic thought. Negative
emotional states derive from the perception of one’s own helplessness to make
oneself happy, the inability to transcend one’s routines or an overdependence on
the emotional patterns that develop from unexamined, shared, social life.
Positive emotions, on the other hand, come with the embrace of one’s power
to change one’s emotional well-being and with the assumption of responsi-
bility for those emotions. In the first case, one is unhappy and believes that
one cannot act to make oneself happy because one is too rooted in a way of
life and in a set of dependencies on others, which makes one even more
unhappy. In the second, one brings oneself to see that one can escape the
limits imposed by a socially embedded life by viewing people and situations
not as obligations or as externalizations of one’s own psychic predicament but
as resources for manipulation and optimization. This realization gives one a
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Happiness as resource and resilience 47

sensation of emotional exhilaration and forces a cognitive shift, which itself
motivates action and brings about the very happier reality one had convinced
oneself to believe in initially. Unhappiness is synonymous with the inability to
act on one’s own, originating in one’s acceptance of habitualized outlooks
derived from others and tinged by inevitability. To the extent that one realizes
that one can make oneself happy through one’s own actions, one becomes happy.
The practical logic of the happiness discourse is one that invokes the circular
effect of a causal loop, or a looped resourcing, in which agency, enterprise
and responsibility for oneself are both the means for achieving and the very
content of happiness itself. Through this loop, the apprehension that happi-
ness is within one’s reach is a perception that is realized through the taking
of actions toward happiness. And by extension, the spiral of docility, resig-
nation, dependence on the reluctance to see the world in ways that break
away from the pack and therefore to act on one’s own signals not only the
absence of happiness but the inhibition and retardation of the potential for
happiness – the vital, enterprising life-spirit that is the wellspring of life’s
activity, or freedom. Thus, the parallel between positive psychology and
neoliberal economic thought is clear: the docility of social dependence and
the negative thoughts that lull us into states of torpor must be actively
uprooted and transformed through an infusion of affirming optimism and
the diminishment of any collectivist alternative to enterprise. Dependence,
immobility and stasis are anathema to the happiness project. Psychologist
Barbara Fredrickson conveys this anxiety around the inertia of dependence
this way:

Gratuitous negativity can hold you hostage, as if you had cinder blocks
tied to your ankles and a black hood pulled over your face. It can keep
you so constrained and smothered that you are simply unable to flourish.
But the good news is that you have what it takes to free yourself.
(2009: 159)

The looped resourcing of happiness demands that the happy subject train her
efforts on these obstructive objects (cinder blocks, black hoods, negativity
itself) that suppress the agency and freedom that makes happiness possible.
And these things are found in the thoughts and habits that embed the individual
in the mutualities that constitute patterned social life.
Such is the productive effect of the discourse on happiness whereby happiness
is that emotional medium through which the freedom of the entrepreneurial
subject is constituted. Clearly, this is a subject on the move. It is one of
enterprise, opportunity and agency. What is less evident, however, is the
extent to which this is also a subject of vulnerability and anxiety, one who
also seeks in a technology of emotional life a respite from insecurity and fear.
Thus, happiness can also be understood in terms of its capacity to speak to
the need for security and safety, to provide resilience in the context of
instability and risk.
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48 Sam Binkley
Risk, resilience and emotional life
Anxieties about the future have always plagued human life, and human
societies have always mobilized against these uncertainties through collective
practices of calculation, anticipation and risk minimization and through the
adoption of coordinated, anticipatory, future-oriented dispositions. But today,
something truly unique is happening to the way that we respond to risk.
Today we have amassed such an immense technology for the assessment and
minimization of risks that the apparatus of risk assessment itself has come to
operate through a double effect; the control of uncertainty on a societal level
through policy and practice dovetails with the production of unique subjects
possessing a certain temporal disposition centered on the anticipation of uncertain
outcomes. Where discourses of financial forecasting, insurance, epidemiology,
genetics, public health, environmentalism and criminology variously predict
the probabilities of economic recession, disease and street violence, such dis-
courses ultimately impose themselves upon the daily attitudes and self-
understandings of lay individuals, who adopt and incorporate such views into
their own outlooks as subjects. We have become citizens of the risk society,
ever more anxious about the future, ever more ready to measure and plan our
futures on the basis of an increasingly sophisticated calculus of probability
(Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1992; Beck et al., 1994).
Today, with a vast expansion in the range of technologies for the identification
and measurement of more and more subtle gradations of risk, the attribution
of rationalist notions of causality and effect has become subverted by the
sheer ubiquity and mobility of societal risk itself. This effect was coupled with
the curtailed influence, under the ever-expanding pressures of the market, of
those collective institutions (classes, states, civic institutions, labor unions, com-
munities) whose function it was to implement risk-minimizing policies. While
under the conditions of an earlier industrial modernity, it might have been
possible for a corporate body of experts to specify and delineate these risks
spatially and temporally, today the responsibility for calculation and pre-
paredness has been increasingly shifted to individuals themselves. This is
particularly true with regard to social inequality under the conditions of
reflexive modernity, which becomes redefined in terms of an individualization
of social risks, or as Ulrich Beck puts it: “The result is that social problems
are increasingly perceived in terms of psychological dispositions: as personal
inadequacies, guilt feelings, anxieties, conflicts and neuroses” (1992: 100).
For this self-reflexive person, the insufficiently developed risk awareness
exhibited in mundane life appears as an open-ended problem, framed by expert
discourses and available special knowledges, or as the objects of personal
innovation and enterprising action (Dean, 1999: 176–97). The production of
identity under these conditions entails the projection into the future of a trajec-
tory of expected outcomes and events. In an effort to direct this identity and
control these events, the individual is left scrambling for resources; bereft of
the supports once provided by institutions such as the state, family, religious
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Happiness as resource and resilience 49

institutions and civil society, temporalized identities are projected into a world
of uncertainty and risk against which the individual has only her own resources
to draw upon. The individualization of risk, therefore, orients the individual’s
conduct toward the eventuality of such risks, expanding temporal horizons and
“responsibilizing” conduct itself through the assumption of a calculating,
anticipatory regard for the future even as it exacerbates the anxieties and
uncertainties that accompany the anticipation of incalculable liabilities.
A theory of the risk society provides an account of the temporalization of
subjectivity that shares many features with that attributed to the happiness dis-
course; changing social arrangements and an expanding apparatus of govern-
ment affect changes in the ways subjects think about and experience time. The
differences come with the manner in which, within the discourse on happiness,
risk technologies and the future orientations they inscribe are assimilated into
personal life as a generative, constitutive force. Within that constellation of
research I have earlier referred to as governmentality theory, a somewhat
nominalist theoretical perspective is taken, not on the general form of a specific
phase of modernity but on the specific institutions, technologies and apparatuses
that affect the temporalization of subjectivity. A contemporary technology for
the government of risk is traced to a specific cast of agents of governmental
rationality: health researchers, demographers, financial forecasters, statisticians
and environmental experts, coupled with the practical advice of therapists,
consultants, legal advisors, insurance agents, real estate brokers and investment
bankers, all of which combine to form a matrix of authorities and discourses
on risk, and whose rationalities of risk management are transposed, through
the mechanism of governmentality, onto the outlooks and conducts of subjects
themselves. For example, insurers, François Ewald (1991) has written, render the
vagaries and uncertainties of fate in a calculable form reducible to a set of
capital equivalencies. They establish corresponding investments required in
the present to secure capital compensations should such improbable outcomes
occur (Ewald, 1991; Dean, 1999: 183–8). And, importantly, insurantial risk
technologies induce the individual into a sustained form of life through the
adoption of practices oriented toward future risks, insured or not. “Insurance
is a moral technology,” writes Ewald, and:

To calculate a risk is to master time, to discipline the future. To conduct

one’s life in the manner of an enterprise indeed begins in the eighteenth
century to be a definition of a morality whose cardinal virtue is provi-
dence. To provide for the future does not just mean not living from day to
day and arming oneself against ill fortune, but also mathematizing one’s
commitments.
(1991: 207)

Indeed, such a moral technology of insurance constitutes an important element

of daily conduct, not only under earlier stages of societal modernization but
also under the present conditions of risk in advanced capitalist societies.
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50 Sam Binkley
Mitchell Dean, following Pat O’Malley, has termed this everyday conduct the
“new prudentialism,” which entails

the multiple responsibilization of individuals, families, households and

communities for their own risks – of physical and mental ill-health, of
unemployment, of poverty in old age, of poor educational performance, of
becoming victims of crime. Competition between public (state) schools,
private health insurance and superannuation schemes, community policing
and “neighbourhood watch” schemes, and so on, are all instances of con-
triving practices of liberty in which the responsibilities for risk minimization
become a feature of the choices that are made by individuals, households
and communities as consumers, clients and users of services.
(1999: 166; see also O’Malley, 1996)

Today, emotional well-being could well be included among those “multiple

responsibilizations” for which the enterprising risk subject is implicated.
Where events that might bring on a state of sadness or depression loom
unpredictably in the future, it is the responsibility of the happy subject to plan
for their possibility as well as to become proactive in positively producing the
capacities within oneself to deal with emotional liabilities, to assess and plan
for the exigencies of future emotional states by enriching and fortifying one’s
happiness in the present, and taking a productive stance in the preservation
and maximization of personal well-being. Positive psychology has responded
to the problem of emotional risk management through its incorporation of a
theory of psychological “resilience,” a term and a field of research developed
in the 1990s to investigate the capacity for endurance exhibited by certain
individuals under physically or emotionally adverse conditions. Resilience is
“the process of, capacity for, or outcome of successful adaptation despite
challenging or threatening circumstances” (Masten et al., 1990: 426). The
identification of resilient behavior involves the singling out of the various
attributes of character that have enabled individuals to show resilience in the
face of challenge, most import being positive affect, or a long sustained state
of happiness prior to the adverse events themselves.
A concern with resilience was popularized to a general self-help readership
and introduced as a concern for positive psychology by Karen Reivich and
Andrew Shatté’s 2003 bestseller The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your
Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles. For these authors, the produc-
tion of emotional assets in anticipation of traumatic events in an uncertain
future is accomplished through a program of emotional consolidation with
deep roots in cognitivist theory. Indeed, resilience researchers’ emphasis more
generally on the cultivation of a future orientation as a specific skill exhibits
clear resonances of Snyder’s theory of hope and Bandura’s self-efficacy; one
must retool one’s sense of time and instill within one’s cognitive disposition a
unique regard for potential hazards on the horizon if one is to successfully
confront the problems of the future. Resilience skills enable patients to
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Happiness as resource and resilience 51

“bounce back from the adversities – recovering from addiction, coping with
bereavement, dealing with job loss or divorce – that so often lead to clinical
depression and anxiety” (Reivich and Shatté, 2003: 11). More precisely, the
book outlines several lessons the reader will undergo on the path to enhanced
resilience, each bringing with it a specific resource in the coming confrontation
with emotional risk. These lessons are identified: (1) learn your ABCs –
“We’ll teach you to ‘listen’ to your thoughts, to identify what you say to
yourself when faced with a challenge, and to understand how your thoughts
affect your feelings and behavior”; (2) avoid thinking traps – “We’ll teach you
to identify the ones you habitually make and how to correct them”; (3) detect
icebergs – “We’ll teach you how to identify your deep beliefs and determine
when they are working for you and when they are working against you”; (4)
challenge beliefs – “We’ll teach you how to test the accuracy of your beliefs
about problems and how to find solutions that work”; (5) put it in perspective –
“We’ll teach you how to stop the what-ifs so that you’re better prepared to
deal with problems that really do exist or are most likely to occur”; (6) be calm
and focus – “We’ll show you how to stay calm and focused when you’re over-
whelmed by emotion or stress so you can concentrate on the task at hand”; (7)
real-time resilience – “We’ll teach you a powerful skill so that you can quickly
change your counterproductive thoughts into more resilient ones” (Reivich and
Shatté, 2003: 13–14). And in the field of positive psychology, the need to forcibly
generate an optimistic regard as a defense against future emotional traumas is
more explicitly argued by Seligman himself. In Learned Optimism: How to
Change Your Mind and Your Life, Seligman describes the results of his efforts
to prevent depression among schoolchildren through the teaching of specific
techniques for the cultivation of positive future orientation, or optimism:

Optimists do much better in school and college, at work and on the

playing field. They regularly exceed the predictions of aptitude tests.
When optimists run for office, they are more apt to be elected than pessi-
mists are. Their health is unusually good, they age well, much freer than
most of us from the usual physical ills of middle age. Evidence suggests
they may even live longer.
(2006: 5)

In short, the optimistic regard for the future is the figure of happiness; yet it is
a happiness that only comes about as the result of a specific effort and as the
result of a task of self-optimization. Optimism is not a natural attribute, but
must be actively mobilized within one’s outlooks through the negation of
optimism’s logical opposite and necessary antithesis – pessimism. Pessimism,
Seligman argues, is also a relation to the future. It is a deeply embedded habit
of thought that inevitably anticipates the worst and forfeits any possibility of
intervening in this outcome to the overwhelming forces of fate. “At the core of
the phenomenon of pessimism is another phenomenon—that of helplessness.
Helplessness is the state of affairs in which nothing you choose to do affects
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52 Sam Binkley
what happens to you” (Seligman, 2006: 5). Futurelessness and dependency carve
deep grooves in one’s mental routines, into which our thoughts, expectations and
reflections are inevitably drawn and where they are condemned to circle end-
lessly. Indeed, pessimism suffers from a specific temporal sensibility that stifles
a proactive future orientation and must, for this reason, be uprooted and
transformed – a project that could potentially extend to the multitudes of
people who, unbeknownst to them, carry some buried trace of this disabling
mental and emotional state. Seligman writes:

I have learned that it is not always easy to know if you are a pessimist,
and that far more people than realize it are living in this shadow. Tests
reveal traces of pessimism in the speech of people who would never think
of themselves as pessimists; they also show that these traces are sensed by
others, who react negatively to the speakers.
A pessimistic attitude may seem so deeply rooted as to be permanent. I
have found, however, that pessimism is escapable.
(2006: 5)

Taken together, the regulation of happiness serves these differentiated, though

complimentary, functions. It is at once a resource to be mobilized and applied
opportunistically to varied situations and a defense against uncertainty for a
subject made vulnerable under circumstances of social disembeddedness and
risk. However, as contradictory as these tendencies may seem, what is important
to grasp is the dynamic relation they establish in which risk exerts a specifically
vitalizing effect on subjectivity itself. As Julian Reid writes, “[t]he neoliberal
subject is not a subject which can conceive the possibility of securing itself
from its dangers, but one which believes in the necessity of life as a permanent
struggle of adaptation to dangers” (2012: 149). The happy subject is not one
that clearly differentiates opportunity from danger or vulnerability from well-
being. Indeed, happiness, as it is articulated in this new discourse, folds the
two into each other, whatever the emotional toll.

Note
1 I am grateful for having had the opportunity to present a keynote address at the
Behaviour Change and Psychological Governance, ESRC Seminar Series, at the
University of Birmingham in June of 2014. This address was titled “Happiness as
Enterprise,” and provided a summation of key themes from my recent book Happiness
as Enterprise: An Essay on Neoliberal Life (SUNY, 2014). For the purposes of this
volume, I have derived the present article drawn principally from select passages of
that book, composed here so as to highlight issues central to the focus of the
conference, particularly the theme of psychological resilience.

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Happiness as resource and resilience 53

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