Feeling Well

Michael D. Snediker (bio)
Queen’s University
snediker@queensu.ca

It strikes me as both salubrious and unsurprising that after several decades of theorizing negative affect, melancholy, and trauma, the academy has turned its attention to the likes of positive affect, happiness, and optimism. As I’ve argued elsewhere, happiness and optimism are neither equivalent nor coextensive, but at very least metonymically equivocate around each other’s edges. Recent inquiries into happiness have engaged the latter’s capacity for fungibility and surprise. Often, theorists attached to a rictus model of happiness’s intractability argue for the latter’s ideological perniciousness. For instance, Heather Love has recently intimated that happiness arises as an ontologically risky threshold, the crossing of which threatens the integrity (or more precisely, the weathered lack thereof) of queer persons for whom disappointment and grief had hitherto been constitutive.

That arguments for or against happiness arise most provocatively in the field of queer theory suggests that queer persons bear an acutely salient relation to happiness as that from which they’ve been excluded, but furthermore, that they bear an exemplary relation to a happiness always requiring sacrifice and compromise, a shady bittersweetness from which no persons are exempt. As Lauren Berlant has noted, “at a certain degree of abstraction both from trauma and optimism the sensual experience of self-dissolution, radically reshaped consciousness, new sensoria, and narrative rupture can look similar” (46). The trauma of happiness resonates all the more acutely in Heather Love’s supposition that “sometimes it seems that the only way for queers to start being happy is to stop being queers” (62). For Love (and implicitly, for Berlant), happiness’s brutality resides in its truculent, incessant demand against being what one otherwise was, even as one flutters, mothlike, to happiness’ ideologically incinerating flame. Love suggests that happiness is non-malleable, that it will be what it always has been; and this perdurability adumbrates the implication that queer persons are far more malleable than the affective desires and constraints by which they are held, seduced, betrayed. Happiness’ danger, then, would depend on happiness existing in advance as a repertoire of what we from outset ought have been wary.

By contrast, theorists who consider happiness in terms of contingency rather than unrevisable dictum have suggested that one may well enjoy happiness, and even survive happiness, if one is willing to entertain the possibility of a happiness not already imbued with the penal inexorability of ideology. Nietzsche is a case in point: “To finally take all this in one soul and compress it into one feeling—this would surely have to produce a happiness unknown to humanity so far” (190). Or a few pages later in The Gay Science: “Are we perhaps still not too influenced by the most immediate consequences of this event—and these immediate consequences, the consequences for ourselves, are the opposite of what one might expect—not at all sad and gloomy, but much more like a new and barely describable type of light, happiness, relief, amusement, encouragement, dawn . . . ” (199). Following Nietzsche, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love insists that when “the truth comes to you, / you recognize it because / it makes you happy” (207). Sedgwick’s formulation differs starkly from Love’s, to the extent that happiness might (like queerness) only be known in the discovery of it, versus the moribund sense that happiness, as a sort of Lacanian Symbolic, inexorably awaits one’s falling into it. Sara Ahmed’s most recent work argues that one need not choose, in relation to one’s self, either an inexorable happiness or a capricious, contingent one. Rather, Ahmed importantly resituates affective phenomenology as the tension between the inexorable and the capricious, allowing both phenomena to coincide, but nevertheless insisting, even in the severe spider-web of affective ideology, that there are modes of navigation, molecules of surviving happiness, that don’t require one’s queerness, one’s prior ontological commitments, be left at normativity’s (sometimes) perversely alluring altar.

Ahmed’s pellucid new book pivots on the ubiquitous and overdetermined formulation, “I just want you to be happy.” The familiarity of the utterance only sometimes mitigates its latent perfidia. Less operatically: the utterance’s wish only barely conceals its sometimes brazen ulterior motives, shaped by cultural and political histories in excess of what otherwise might be understood as the idiosyncratic contours of solitary affective reception. Individual happiness, following Ahmed’s careful analysis, isn’t fictive. Its individuality nonetheless clings to and is snagged by larger affective narratives of which it either is willfully oblivious or from which strategically it is sequestered. The Promise of Happiness, with great dexterity and compassion, delineates the cling and snag of this ostensibly innocuous wish.

I just want you to be happy. Ahmed rightly locates the formulation’s punctum in just, an adverbial indulgence masquerading as diffidence. I just want: conflation of a desire so modest that it might otherwise not be articulated; so severely singular that it might be conceived as a cause, if not the cause, worth fighting for; so abstemious that we might give pause to so nearly a gesture of affective unidirectionality. As though the desire for another’s happiness were so great (and likewise so austere) that other desires, on the part of the speaker, were consolidated into this vitiated narcissism of mimetic felicity. As though in wishing the happiness of another (as opposed to the more Gallic desire of the Other), one’s own happiness or desire or wish were swept out to sea.

I just: a first person singular on the verge of both itself and the just, as though happiness were invariably, syntactically aligned with simultaneous conceits of self-renunciation and justice (if not ethics). The diminution of “just,” read as “only,” conceals the extent to which I just want you to be happy already circuits through a language of larger juridical pressure. By what are we allowed to feel happy? What is at stake in choosing one form of happiness over another? That there are stakes at all beyond being or not being happy—beyond what one is willing to do for the sake of happiness—intimates the textural complexity of Ahmed’s affective terrain. In querying the very terms by which we approach, contemplate, or refuse happiness, we become Antigone figures. If happiness is synonymous with the Symbolic order from which Antigone drops, then this new distance from happiness makes of us what Ahmed terms “affect aliens.” Alienated from what we might be expected to want (or even want to want), we find ourselves living extradiegetically and diegetically at once. We may or may not feel happy, even as we are interested in the phenomenon of happiness. As happiness shifts in our alineated consideration of it (imagine Maggie Verver’s hand against the beautiful and impenetrable pagoda), unhappiness likewise becomes differently inhabitable. Unhappiness, affectively speaking, becomes less a dominion of grief or disappointment, than the literal experience of being unmoored from happiness; and, as Ahmed illuminates, from the disciplining apparatus by which (even when best-intentioned) happiness is constituted.

There are many forms of happiness, and as many micro-affective events as there are fundamental-feeling affective horizons. There likewise are many forms of affective horizoning. “Happiness,” Ahmed observes, “might play a crucial role in shaping our near sphere, the world that takes shape around us” (24). In the model of a “near sphere”—as ever, Ahmed’s capacity to envision affect is as vivid, meticulous, and surprising as that of Emily Dickinson—a horizon holds what we do not wish to hold, a hazy landscape of “awayness,” (24) safely, aesthetically keeping from us the things that do not make us happy. To the extent that happiness (despite manifold efforts to the contrary) can be quantified, indexed, experienced only through obliqueness and metonymy, it—like all affects—remains an elusive abstraction. As abstractions, those things that make or do not make us unhappy are barely distinguishable (if at all) from those things we think might make or not make us unhappy. What makes us happy does so because we think it does. Even as we can be happily surprised by an object we previously had thought would not make us happy, an object cannot make us happy if we think it does not. It is partly this interlineation of feeling and intellection that produces affect’s particular temporal conundra—such that Ahmed can imagine an affective relation (happy or unhappy) to an experienced past as structurally analogous to a futural affect about which we can speculate, but haven’t yet encountered. “Nostalgic and promissory forms of happiness belong under the same horizon, insofar as they imagine happiness as being somewhere other than where we are in the present” (160-161).

Contrary to the horizon of unhappy awayness, this horizonality marks happiness at its most tenacious, in so far as “when happiness is present, it can recede, becoming anxious, becoming the thing that we could lose in the unfolding of time” (161). The near-sphere thus demarcates both the happy objects we’ve cultivated in our vicinity and the unhappy objects which entropically cramp what we imagine as some preferred but distant affective style. The horizon likewise expresses both what we’ve relegated and what, either nostalgically or promissorily, we love (or, again, think we love). We navigate this multiplicity of horizons and nearnesses without realizing it. One horizon seldom countervails the other, even as one horizon might be confused with another one—for instance, as the narrative goes, we intransigently delay and deny what we think will bring unhappiness, when in fact these protests might betray the risky necessity of a happiness so great it can’t yet be reckoned as such. Either too near or too far, affective lucidity requires a keen relation to time and space, even as these latter categories almost never are themselves affectively neutral.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In her chapter “Melancholic Migrants” (more to follow on Ahmed’s brilliant exploration of melancholy’s interpersonal valences), Ahmed considers the ideology of happiness that complicates and distorts imperialism’s subtle and non-subtle violences against migrants and colonial subjects. Ahmed, in this context, invokes Eric Stoke’s notion of “secular evangelism.” The latter formulation would describe the duplicitous zeal and dubious imperial investments in “giving” non-imperial subjects a life that is better or happier than that preceding the unhappy travails of conquest, assimilation, and multiculturalism. The Promise of Happiness suggests, more generally, that the imbrication of happiness and governance imperils persons no less than past and present theocratic agenda. Needless to say, the Declaration of Independence fosters as many forms of dependence and conditionality as it does independent agency. And we hardly need a twenty-first century optic to feel misgiving toward the self-evidence of any foundational truth. If the Declaration of Independence inadvertently converts happiness itself into a quasi-religious enterprise, then it likewise ominously prognosticates the forms of excommunication experienced by Ahmed’s “affect aliens”—”those who are banished from [happiness], or who enter history only as troublemakers, dissenters, killers of joy” (17).

The subjects (and titles) of the book’s middle chapters—”Feminist Killjoys,” “Unhappy Queers,” and “Melancholy Migrants”— deceptively suggest discrete taxonomy when in fact these demographics, as Ahmed makes clear, are heuristic placeholders. These categories hypostatically rise and fall for the sake of describing happiness’s discontents from different vantages. The hypostases, that is, might seem fixed from the perspective of an epistemically happy regime; whereas in Ahmed’s readings, the hypostases are saponifying. Ontological positions are unstable in part because affective responses to objects, others, and one’s self are nothing if not quicksilver. Even the least tractable-seeming affective situations prove to have crevices, qualities of light, differently bearable valence structures.

Ahmed’s exempla, while presented as an archive, more interestingly serve as occasions for the analyses of one of our most generous and insightful affect theorists. At this point I feel like Randall Jarrell waxing ebullient over the poetry of Marianne Moore. Moore’s punctilious, winsome poems thrill Jarrell to the extent that Jarrell is inclined in his review of the former merely to list his favorite formulations from Moore’s collection. Ahmed’s writing, at its most insightful, analogously leaves me happy in ways that feel neither tautological (in the context of a book titled The Promise of Happiness) nor counterintuitive (in the context of a book that critiques a politico-cultural system that affectively evaluates our decisions and cathexes in advance of our making them). In “Feminist Killjoys,” for instance, we find the following observation, no less sentient for its quasi-mathematical precision:

because I experience happiness in your happiness, I could wish that our feeling of fellowship in happiness amounts to being happy about the same things (a community of happiness), such that x becomes shared as a happiness wish. Of course, if the object that makes you happy is my happiness wish, then this would be precarious basis for sharing something (as wishing to be happy about x can also be an admission that one is not simply happy about x). (57)

In “Melancholic Migrants,” Ahmed’s reading of melancholy as external assessment seems as powerful as Butler’s earlier reading of melancholy as internal structure:

Rather than assuming others are melancholic because they failed to let go of an object that has been lost, I want to consider melancholia as a way of reading or diagnosing others as having “lost something,” and as failing to let go of what has been lost. To read others as melancholic would be to read their attachments as death-wishes, as attachments to things that are already dead. To diagnose melancholia would become a way of declaring that their love objects are dead. Others would be judged as melancholic because they have failed to give up on objects that we have declared dead on their behalf. The diagnosis of melancholia would thus involve an ethical injunction or moral duty: the other must let go by declaring the objects that we declare dead as being dead in the way that we declare. (141)

As the above passage implies, it would be erroneous to imagine The Promise of Happiness, when it admonishes our too quickly acquiescing to certain happiness narratives, as eschewing positive affect for the sake of what elsewhere I’ve imagined as a constellation of pessimistic inquiry. Rather, Ahmed is enough interested in happiness to wish to salvage good feeling from what sometimes passes as good feeling. The promise of The Promise of Happiness is that there are in fact forms of happiness beyond those we presently trust and mistrust. This promissory thinking occurs in both horizon and near-sphere, as variously as Ahmed’s affective geography is various. Perhaps most gratifying, The Promise of Happiness promises not only that we might differently theorize happiness, but that we might wish to be happy, without feeling theoretically unhappy in the wishing.

Michael D. Snediker is the author of Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (U Minnesota Press, 2008). He is currently at work on a new book, “The Aesthetics of Disability: American Literature and Figurative Contingency.” He is Assistant Professor of American Literature at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario.