Sarah Ahmed. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 315 pp.

Excerpt: The Promise of Happiness begins with a discussion of what Sara Ahmed called “the happiness turn” in economics and positive psychology. Books with titles like The Happiness Formula and Happiness and Economics offer to measure the happiness of individuals, groups, or entire nation-states. According to Ahmed, these books expose the performativity of happiness. As both a word and a desired state, happiness does things. Positive psychology, for example, involves “the instrumentalization of happiness as a technique” (10), reifying certain routes to happiness; economic happiness data locates and stratifies the happy over and in relation to unhappy others. Both discourses are presided over by some “generalized culture of expertise” (9), contributing to the self-work that Nikolas Rose (Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self; London: Free Association Books, 1999) describes as the government of the soul. “A happy life, a good life,” Ahmed argues, “involves the regulation of desire. It is not simply that we desire happiness but that happiness is imagined as what you get in return for desiring well” (37). A key objective of The Promise of Happiness is to describe how this desiring well functions as a technology of social regulation through the privileging of, and steering of persons toward, certain objects (the family; children), certain lifestyles (monogamy), and certain life-narratives (citizenship; marriage), even if the happiness promised by the proximity to those objects always remains in some elusive or unobtainable future. The promise of happiness encourages us to want certain objects and to prioritize our desires in particular ways. This prioritization is something of an affective habitus, a “technology of self-production” (43).