"Happiness, Governmentality and Neoliberal Life: a Temporal Perspective"

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 9, Monument Building
Room: 
Popper Room
Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - 5:20pm
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Date: 
Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - 5:20pm to 7:10pm

The Department of Gender Studies

2012-2013 Public Lecture Series

presents

 Samuel Binkley

 "Happiness, Governmentality and Neoliberal Life: a Temporal Perspective"

 5:20 p.m., Wednesday 27 March 2013, Popper Room

 Recent decades have seen an explosion of interest in the phenomenon of happiness spanning a range of popular media from self help books, popular psychology, new therapeutic practices and talk shows, spiritual mentoring, business management, education and relationship counseling.  At the center of this development is an influential new field of positive psychology, whose scientific and medical credential has placed the concern with happiness in a new position of professional respectability while opening it to up a wide range of institutional applications. As such, this presentation argues, happiness has come to define a rationality of government that extends the logic of economic neoliberalism into the sphere of emotional self-management, and into the very temporalities of every conduct.  As neoliberal governmentality, happiness induces subjects to engage their emotional lives in a spirit of enterprise, entrepreneurial endeavor and self-interested agency, within the horizon of an unfolding emotional telos.  Combining theoretical argumentation, cultural analysis and historical explanation, this inquiry seeks to bring the new discourse on happiness into a critical encounter with the field of governmentality studies.  Examining the new discourse on happiness from the perspective of the everyday temporalities it sets out to govern, it is possible to rethink governmentality research in a manner more sensitive to the mundane practices and everyday tasks of governmental conduct itself.

***

 Sam Binkley is Associate Professor of Sociology at Emerson College. His research focuses on the formation of subjectivity in the context of contemporary social life.  Employing theoretical tools derived from the works of Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu and others, he has investigated formations of selfhood in a variety of sites, from the counterculture lifestyle movements of the 1960s and 70s, to contemporary psychological and self help discourses. He is the author of Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Duke University Press, 2007), and his articles have appeared in History of the Human Sciences, Rethinking Marxism, Cultural Studies, Foucault Studies, Subjectivities, Time & Society.