jottings down
Just a quick note to myself about a possible future research project: consider the phrase “rhetoric of happiness.” I tend to eschew “rhetoric of” projects (the recent “rhetoric of the closet” thing is kind of an aberration) but I’m increasingly interested in the question of how happiness has come to be understood as something people (admittedly, within wealthy postindustrial societies) think they have a right to. Note that the Declaration of Independence, a wonderfully Enlightenment document, only speaks to “the pursuit of Happiness.” Hmmmmm.
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6 Responses to “jottings down”
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When you figure this out (“why happiness has come to be understood as something people think they have a right to”), let me know. I’d like to be finally put in my ‘entitled’ place.
I guess my suggestion would be to look at “the rhetoric of pursuit” — we’re not entitled to happiness outright, but the freedom to pursue it. That, to me, is a biggie. I don’t have to be happy, nor do I ever have to seek it, but I can, which I don’t think is bad or elitist quality of this county/postindustrialist nations.
Kim: I take your point, and I didn’t really go into enough detail in this point to flesh out my interest in this subject. My interest is more in a critique of psychotherapy, oddly enough, and the institutionalization of the belief that unhappiness is a pathology. In this regard, what I’m really curious about, I suppose, is not so much the rhetoric of the pursuit (which is a helpful idea, by the way, but oddly for a separate project) but the rhetorical forms through which unhappiness becomes pathologized and happiness becomes normative. I guess really the project should be thought of as a genealogy of happiness rather than a rhetoric of.
As it turns out, in 1993, Adam remarked on exactly this problem in Season 5 (Disc 3, in an episode entitled “A Bolt From the Blue”) of the most awesomely philosophical series in TV history, Northern Exposure. In it, he says exactly what you say: why do we assume we are entitled to actual happiness when we are only granted the “freedom” to pursue it? He says this to Ed who had just been struck by lightning and had been contemplating the ole “why me?” thing. Adam’s point was that unhappiness and danger are always waiting for you around the corner. They are inescapable. So to pursue happiness is futile because the world sucks and is only out to get you. This is why Adam lives in depressive, paranoid misery all the time; it’s his/our natural state.
But, isn’t it rather that happiness is pathologized…the intense desire to have it, and the inability to attain it; therefore the normative is in being unhappy? Unhappy is the status quo; otherwise, why would we need drugs to make us happy, and why would we seek external validations to “make” us happy?
Just watched this episode and, of course, thought of you b/c of this post! Wonderful coincidence.
CS: First, I love that even love you’re a married woman now I don’t have to bother learning new initials for you.
Second, I wouldn’t agree with Adam that to pursue happiness is folly. Nor do I think, I suppose, that depressive, paranoid misery is our natural state. (It’s mine, certainly, but not everyone’s.)
Third, I would still disagree with your description of the pathology here. The very fact that drugs are given to make people happy is kind of the point: unhappiness is pathologized and must be “treated” through regimes of pharmaceuticals or therapy or whatever. There is something to be made out of what you’re saying in the sense of, say, persons with manic personalities, who ostensibly we do want to be less “happy.”
I don’t know. The idea just came to me the other day and I’m still figuring it out. Your comments are making me probe the contours of the idea, though, so thanks for that.
I like that you say probe and contours in the same sentence.
It’s a worthy topic and one I’m interested in as well, seeing as though I’m perpetually derailing myself for purposes of avoiding unhappiness and attempting to more accurately pursue its sometimes elusive alter ego.
So, probe away. We’ll stay tuned!