News from the Collective

Happiness is a hot topic. We own self-help and colouring books; our workplace offers mindfulness training; we are cultivating our hygge and contemplating our ikigai; Australia ranks among the top ten countries on the global happiness index. Do we really need to talk about happiness? We do.

These days happiness is largely in the hands of health and social sciences. Once in the domain of philosophy, theology and arts, our perception of happiness has shifted: “the science of happiness” is increasingly invoked in public conversations. We entrust our personal wellbeing to orchestrated efforts from psychology, biochemistry, neurosciences and social welfare in conjunction with the practice of secularised spiritual techniques, such as meditation and yoga. The humanities and the arts are currently sidelined in the public and academic conversation on happiness. Although the “affective turn” has inspired several academic Centres for the History of Emotions at the Max-Planck-Institute in Berlin, at Queen Mary College in London and at Melbourne University in Australia, only the London Centre has a focus on positive emotions and wellbeing. Its excellent interdisciplinary work is conducted in collaboration with health sciences. Generally, we find a wealth of work on shame, trauma and anger, but much less on positive emotions like joy, contentment and satisfaction. The leading periodical for new research on happiness, the Journal of Happiness Studies, invites contributions from the “alpha-sciences, philosophy in particular” on its website; however, the overwhelming majority of articles published by the journal discusses happiness as a matter of social sciences and psychology. Similarly, the World Happiness Summit 2019, hosted by the University of Florida, does not list any keynote speakers from the humanities on its website.

This lack of representation in academic forums has practical consequences. Sonja Lyubomirski, Professor of Psychology at the University of California and keynote speaker at the World Happiness Summit, for example, is on the board of the newly founded Global Happiness Council (GHC), a “global network of leading academic specialists in happiness” with close links to the United Nations. The list of council members on the GHC websites includes “key practitioners in areas ranging from psychology, economics, urban planning, civil society, business and government”, but it does not count a single philosopher, historian, artist or literary critic among its ranks. The GHC’s research is situated in “education, workplace, personal happiness, public health, city design and management”. It publishes the Global Happiness Policy Report, which “provides evidence and policy advice to participating governments on best practices to promote happiness and well-being”. The potential impact of platforms like the GHC can be seen in political initiatives like New Zealand’s new “living standards framework”. This framework underpins what is currently promoted as the country’s first “societal well-being” budget (Parker, 2019). These are interesting and potentially beneficial initiatives. Their aim to promote welfare is inspired by the Utilitarian tradition of aiming for the “greatest good for the greatest number”.

So, what can we—as writers and artists, as cultural critics and researchers in the humanities and the arts—offer to the cross-disciplinary conversation on happiness? In order to understand what we might contribute, we need to look at the role of critique as a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricoeur) across the humanities and social sciences[1]. Although the “post-critical turn” (Felski & Anker 2017) is by now well underway, suspicion as a mode of enquiry continues to shape our work and our ethos as cultural critics. This has immediate implications for the study of happiness. As one of the earliest texts of the “post-critical turn”, Eve Sedgwick’s seminal essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” can help us understand the (dis)connect between critique and happiness studies. In her essay Sedgwick notes that the “hermeneutic of suspicion” is “a theory of negative affects” (2002, 136)—“hatred, envy, and anxiety” (128) among them. For the cultural critic this is relevant in two ways. First of all, it fosters a particular orientation towards the text or culture at hand. The paranoid critic speaks from a position of suspicion or distrust, and accordingly seeks to unmask, deconstruct and dissemble the object of analysis in order to get at a hidden (and usually negative) truth. Secondly, this affective stance privileges the analysis of negative states of being. Freud, the most enduringly powerful godfather of critique, had much more to say on shame, anger, melancholia, disgust and fear than contentment, joy or satisfaction. Accordingly, our analytic toolbox is much better equipped for enquiries into negative feelings, which has had a direct effect on affect studies and studies of the history of emotion.

That critique can and must play a central part in the conversation on happiness is clearly evidenced by Sarah Ahmed’s seminal The Promise of Happiness (2010), which is the most-quoted study in this issue. Ahmed’s ground-breaking examination of the exclusive and prescriptive aspects of happiness studies and the public discourse on happiness indicates the potential contribution that critique might offer to the conversation on happiness. However, it seems to me that the immediate success and influence of Ahmed’s study, in fact the affective attachment that scholars display to her work, is not just fuelled by the righteous anger that inspires Ahmed’s analysis. Rather, I read it as evidence of another important point Sedgwick makes on the relationship between paranoid and reparative positions: “it is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices” (150). Ahmed’s critical impulse is deeply reparative in that it makes visible, gives voice and space to those who are marginalized and silenced by the dominant discourse of happiness. In that sense, Ahmed’s book is liberating and restorative, which central to the great appeal of her writing. Turning our backs on the oppressive imperative to be happy in the right ways, “is to open a life, to make room for life, to make room for possibility, for chance” (Ahmed 2010, 20). To make room for chance, for possibility and even delight is in Sedgwick’s view one of the key characteristics of reparative readings:

“Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. […] Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did” (2002, 146).

The paranoid and the reparative impulse can both be grounded in an ethics of care, in “the subject’s movement toward what Foucault calls ‘care of the self’,” as Sedgwick puts it (137).

The first three essays of this issue are closely aligned with an examination of happiness from a perspective of critique fuelled by a reparative ethics of care. It is a form of care in which the personal informs and inspires the political drive of analysis, be it through teaching, personal or professional experience. These essays open up and make visible the complicated and unruly conglomerate of affects, emotions and attitudes surrounding happiness that otherwise might get reduced, simplified, and silenced.

Sarah Ahmed’s work underpins the opening essay by Shane McCoy. McCoy reads Lucy, the protagonist of Jamaica Kincaird’s eponymous novel, as one of Ahmed’s “melancholy migrants”, who refuse to be co-opted into white middle-class notions of happiness. In this reading, Lucy’s resistance is crucial not to her happiness, but her growing sense of self-determination. To McCoy, the novel’s lessons on damaging colonial legacies unfold their full potential in the classroom. In his teaching, he invites students to explore Lucy as a novel about the forces of a colonial past as they affect the quest for personal happiness in a neoliberal present.

B Lee Aultman’s essay on the “Trans Ordinary” turns to phenomenology for a personally inspired critique of the assumed link between happiness and health in normative accounts of the “good life”. Examining the common narratives of trans life as suspended between an injurious present and the promise of a better future, Aultman discusses the act of cutting as a non-normative practice to achieve a momentary sense of grounding and relief. Aultman reads happiness as an affect—a rush, unruly and unsustainable, but no less powerful for that. What’s more, in Aultman’s reading the gendered practices of self-inflicted cutting offer a starting point for interrogating normative gender performance, thereby raising the question of what makes a life worth living in the supposedly never-ending meantime of trans experience.

Sadie Slyfox’s examination of the Happy Hooker is also grounded in the author’s personal experience as a sex worker. Slyfox examines the public discourse on the Happy Hooker as a fantasy figure of liberal feminism—alternatively glamorised in the media as a stylish high-end escort with expensive tastes, or condemned by a zealous alliance of radical feminists and conservatives seeking the abolition sex work altogether as invariably demeaning and damaging to women. Slyfox directs our attention to sex workers’ own artistic takes on the Happy Hooker: witty, articulate and contradictory, at best these artworks defy easy categorization and raise questions about our expectations of happy faces across all sectors of the service industry – from tertiary education to sex work.

However, it is obvious that in spite of the shared terrain between suspicious and reparative reading—both can be born out of love and an ethics of care—there remain important differences between them, which have immediate effects when trying to write about happiness. Reparative reading entails a conscious affective shift in our perception, in how we look at the objects of our enquiry. “In the paranoid Freudian epistemology,” Sedgewick argues, “it is […] inconceivable to imagine joy as a guarantor of truth” (138). This, however, is what reparative reading asks us to do. Although as writers and critics we are all familiar with the rush of endorphins when an idea, an argument or a metaphor fall into place; when we recognise aspects of ourselves in a text, an artwork or a song; when we are getting it and the text is getting us; when we see and feel seen—in our critical writing these moments of recognition often remain unacknowledged and they are certainly undertheorized. They are, as Rita Felski (2008) argues, relegated to the nether spheres of lay reading and remain associated with an unreflected, middle-brow consumption of culture, open to accusations of being “sappy, aestheticizing, defensive, anti-intellectual or reactionary” (Sedgwick, 2002, 150). Felski’s neo-phenomenological concern with experience resonates with Bruno Latour’s encouragement to get closer to our objects of enquiry: “‘Yes, please, touch them, explain them, deploy them!’” (2004: 284) and Susan Sontag’s famous dictum that “In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art” (1969, 10). Rather than maintaining our distance, we are invited to write from a place of erotically charged proximity.

That such proximity is not to be confused with naivety or uncritical gullibility is demonstrated by the essay which opens the second part of this issue of Writing from Below. Lynn Jagoe’s short memoir “‘I’ll eat you up!’ Fears and Fantasies of Devouring Intimacies” about the pleasures and dangers of love and hunger. Jagoe examines the giddy childhood delight of devouring monsters through reflections on her own family stories, her mother’s disordered eating and lack of affection, and the reparative love she shared with her siblings.

An affective shift in our perception changes not only how we look at the objects of our enquiry, but also it also enables changes to what we look at. Latour demonstrates this in “Why has Critique Run Out of Steam?” (2004) by outlining how the redefinition of our critical method inevitably leads us to reorganize our areas of study. With regard to happiness, we may see a similar phenomenon in the “eudaimonic turn”, which Pawelski & Moores describe as “an increased interest in well-being, human flourishing, and thriving” (7) in literary studies. Such a turn is founded on nothing less than a full acknowledgment that “that the good things in life are just as real as the bad things” and “that positive emotions are just as real as negative emotions and are not just the relief from or transformation of negative emotions” (8). In other words, in our study of happiness, we have to tune our critical sensors into the frequencies of positive affect and emotions. Just as we have trained ourselves to perceive and examine even faint tremors of fear, shame, anger and melancholy in a text, we need to learn how to sense, describe, examine the reverberations of joy, contentment, satisfaction and happiness, which “are just as mysterious and labyrinthine as […] anguish and despair” (39).

Rachel Walerstein performs this affective shift in her essay on Kirsten Lepore’s video Hi, Stranger (2016). In Lepore’s short animation film, a friendly naked figure tells us, “It’s okay, you can look at my butt”, offers affirmation, and finally tells us, “I love you”. Walerstein looks not only at our cultural responses to the queer pleasures of the butt, but also pays attention to the intimate yet anonymous space of social media where we meet with strangers and might even become stranger(s) to ourselves by virtue of our pleasures and desires. Walerstein discusses “Hi Stranger” as an invitation to a friendly encounter—disarming, seductive, slightly uncomfortable—and draws out the political and personal potential of this, hopefully pleasurable, experience.

Finally, reparative reading may lead to very different styles of interpretation. In principle at least, “the paranoid aesthetic […] is one of minimalist elegance and conceptual economy. The desire of a reparative impulse, on the other hand, is additive and accretive” according to Sedgwick (149). This is not necessarily a sign of lacking analytic acumen, but an acknowledgment of the messiness and complexity of most texts and cultures. Latour points in a similar direction when he works with terms like “gathering” and “association” to define both the objects of our enquiry and the critical methods used to examine them. Sedgwick’s reparative critic embraces plenitude and excess in celebration of the material at hand. With reference to happiness, the linear logic and probing drive of much academic writing may not be able to capture all there is to say about positive affect and emotion.

The final contribution to this issue demonstrates the creative and analytic potential of accretive forms of interpretation. Heather Schell and Katherine Larsen have conducted interviews on the happy ending in romance fiction with a range of scholars, writers and publishers working in the field. Their voices form a tapestry of opinions, perspectives and stories on a much-maligned, yet persistent narrative convention. Examined in this way, the happy ending loses much of its aesthetic and ideological terror and instead turns into a complex, nuanced and much-loved narrative trope that can speak to and satisfy some of our deep cultural and personal desires for lasting interpersonal connection. Their essay is an important contribution to an element in fiction that for all its ubiquity remains extremely under-researched.

Writing about happiness opens up new territory. As the essays in this issue show, it both enables and requires shifts in thinking and practice, but the rewards can be substantial. The essays stand in conversation with each other. Sarah Ahmed’s work runs like a thread through most of them. As these essays demonstrate, in mining our histories for creative representations of happiness, we might start creating our own. While thinking about positive affect & emotion in our cultural contemporary, we find manifestations of happiness that resist attempts at being measured, managed or prescribed. Writing about happiness may push us to develop different critical vocabularies, strategies and creative practices and invite cross-disciplinary research. It may lead us to see different affective, critical and creative genealogies and trajectories in our work and our cultural archives. We are currently still mapping out our potential contributions as academic writers, critics and artists to the current discourse on happiness. Let’s continue the conversation.

Works Cited

Felski, Rita. 2008. The Uses of Reading, Hoboken NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

Felski Rita, and Elizabeth S. Anker. 2017. Critique and Postcritique, Durham: Duke University Press.

Journal of Happiness Studies, https://link.springer.com/journal/10902

Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, Critical Enquiry, 30 (Winter): 25-248.

Parker, Ceri, “New Zealand will have a new ‘well-being budget,’ says Jacinda Ardern”, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/new-zealand-s-new-well-being-budget-will-fix-broken-politics-says-jacinda-ardern/

Pawelski, James O., and D.J. Moores. 2013. The Eudaimonic Turn. Well-Being in Literary Studies, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Sedwick, Evie. 2003. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You”, in Touching Feeling Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 123-152. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Global Council for Happiness and Well-Being. 2019. Global Happiness and Well-Being Policy Report, http://www.happinesscouncil.org/

Sontag, Susan.[1964] 1969. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Penguin.

“What is the World Happiness Council?”, http://www.happinesscouncil.org/council

World Happiness Summit 2019, https://worldhappiness.com/

[1] Critique as a theoretical framework is, of course, not reducible to suspicion alone. However, as a critical stance, suspicion remains the fundamental mood and attitude towards the object of enquiry. For the role of suspicion as a mode of critique, see Rita Felski The Limits of Critique (1915) and Rita Felski & Elizabeth S. Anker, “Introduction” in Critique and Post Critique (2017), pp. 1-28.

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