Postscript
on Happiness: The Paradox of “Authentic” Happiness
“Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect
freedom, […] that is, his life, liberty and estate[…]” – John Locke, Two Treatises of Government
“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.” –
Thomas Jefferson, American
Declaration of Independence
“In a strict Lacanian sense of the term, we should thus posit
that "happiness" relies on the subject’s inability or unreadiness
fully to confront the consequences of its desire: the price of happiness is
that the subject remains stuck in the inconsistency of its desire. In our daily
lives, we (pretend to) desire things which we do not really desire, so that
ultimately, the worst thing that can happen is for us to get what we
"officially" desire. Happiness is thus inherently hypocritical: it is
the happiness of dreaming about things we do not really want.” - Slavoj Žižek, Welcome
to the Desert of the Real, Pg. 59
I would like to briefly return to
our conversation on happiness during last week’s class to address two point;
first, an examination of what happiness is from the perspective of Lacanian
psychoanalysis, and second, the rhetorical privileging of happiness in the
national mythology of the United States.
As we noted in our discussion last week, happiness and (disciplined[1])
consumerism, or wealth, are almost directly conflated in the logic of late
capitalism. But as countless works of literature, film, and music reveal[2],
the opposite sentiment has been a central part of modern thinking; there is an authentic happiness available
exclusively to the poor, who access it both in spite of and because of the
misery of their daily existence: poverty represents the purge of banal luxuries
that would distract them from their primal connection to family, the landscape,
little joys, God, and so on. Our regimented consumer happiness is obsessively
engaged with a return to this primal authenticity; from New Age spirituality
(and its associated international travel and luxurious meditation resorts
culminating in visits with Indian gurus, the purchasing of self-help books
advocating simple living [especially simple eating, the rejection of vaccines
as a modern sullying of natural purity, etc.]), to archetypal “Hipster”
affectations reliant on the integration of working class iconography into the
daily lives (clothing bought in thrift stores, Pabst Blue Ribbon, etc.) of
these former suburbanites.
Perhaps most perversely, this is something we can openly
acknowledge; is it not easy to imagine the prototypical upper-class college
freshman, the child of a plastic surgeon or a hedge fund manager, remarking on
the enthusiastic happiness of the impoverished masses they encountered while volunteering
for a week in Haiti during the previous summer, and the inspiring effect this
had on them (as they return to study business, law, advertising; in other
words, precisely the skills that will make it impossible for them to end up in
a similar situation)? Even our apocalyptic fantasies highlight this paradox;
the end of the world is both a terrifying tragedy, but one that will finally
allow us to escape modernity and return to a simpler time that allows for us to
regain something that we are missing in our opulent contemporary lives; as the
back cover of the comic The Walking Dead,
Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye notes:
“The world we knew is gone. The
world of commerce and frivolous necessity has been replaced by a world of
survival and responsibility. An epidemic of apocalyptic proportions has swept
the globe, causing the dead to rise and feed on the living. In a matter of
months society has crumbled: no government, no grocery stores, no mail
delivery, no cable TV. In a world ruled by the dead, the survivors are forced
to finally start living.” (Link)
This
notion of two happinesses, the happiness of consumer pleasure and of its renunciation, hints at the
rhetorical function of the latter; it serves as a vital disavowal of our own
excesses that enables us to enjoy them; because we acknowledge them as (unnecessary) luxury, and claim that they
are not central to our sense of pleasure in general, they cease to be something
dangerous to our symbolic construction of the self. We are authentically happy
(or authentic happiness is obtainable through
our pursuit, through transcendental meditation, overturning the ban on raw milk[3],
etc.) and we can enjoy these trivial indulgences as well.
“Everything is permitted to today's
hedonistic Last Man - you can enjoy everything, BUT deprived of its substance
which makes it dangerous. This is why Lacan was right to turn around
Dostoyevski's well-known motto: "If God doesn't exist, everything is
prohibited!" God is dead, we live in a permissive universe, you should
strive for pleasures and happiness — but, in order to have a life full of
happiness and pleasures, you should avoid dangerous excesses, be fit, live a
healthy life, not harass others... so everything is prohibited if it is not
deprived of its substance, and you end up leading a totally regulated life. And
the opposite also holds: if there is God, then everything is permitted — to
those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of His
will. Clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any "merely
human" constraints and considerations (as in Stalinism, where the
reference to the big Other of historical Necessity justifies absolute
ruthlessness).” (Link)
This fundamental principle of disavowal
may help explain the substitution of “property” in John Locke’s original
outline of liberal freedom with the “pursuit of happiness” in Jefferson’s
declaration; the centrality of economic inequality for maintaining the basic
pre-revolutionary social order in the conservative American liberal project is
on the one hand intertextually recognized, but only insofar as it is deprived
of its transgressive components.
[1] What
is Hoarders if not an instructional
video warning of the perils of undisciplined consumption, driven by a literal
conflation of the abject byproducts of consumer behavior (piles of packaging, filthy
clothes, used single-use items, disposable items such as newspapers and bags,
etc.) with the abject byproducts of actual consumption (spoiled leftovers,
feces, etc.)?
[2] To
list only a few examples: in film, the various Mexican characters in Crash (2004), who are charitable,
satisfied in their family life, and forgiving in contrast with the
money-obsessed, corrupt, urbane and romantically unstable white characters; 3 Idiots (2009), an Indian film centered on a brilliant engineering student whose New Age pseudo-philosophy
transforms the lives of his friends, and who is revealed to have gleaned these
insights from his upbringing as a servant boy, and, in a classic case of having
one’s cake and eating it too, is revealed to have chosen to live in an agrarian
pseudo-commune in spite of becoming fabulously wealthy and being courted by
international businessmen. In music, “Sitting in the Midday Sun” (1973) by the
Kinks, in which a tramp observes that: “I'd rather be a hobo walking round with
nothing/ Than a rich man scared of losing all he's got. […]Oh listen to the
people/ Say I'm a failure and I've got nothing/ Ah but if they would only see/
I've got my pride/ I've got no money/ But who needs a job when it's sunny.” (Preservation Act 1); Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet
Home Alabama” (1974), which contrasts the band's authentic Southern working class
persona against the urbane Northerner Neil Young. In literature, far-ranging
examples from Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know
Our Velocity (2002) to, in a medium-crossing example, pastoralism as a
thematic concern from Hesiod to Spenser to the Romantics.
[3] “Happiness
is thus - to put it in Alain Badiou's terms - not a category of truth, but a
category of mere Being, and, as such, confused, indeterminate, inconsistent
(take the proverbial answer of a German immigrant to the USA who, asked: 'Are
you happy?' , answered: 'Yes, yes, I am very happy, aber gliicklich bin ich nicht
.. .'). It is a pagan concept: for pagans, the goal of life is to be happy (the
idea ofliving 'happily ever after' is a Christianized version of paganism), and
religious experience and political activityare considered the highest forms
ofhappiness (see Aristotle)no wonder the Dal; Lama has had such success
recently preaching the gospel of happiness around the world, and no wonder he is
finding the greatest response precisely in the USA, the ultimate empire of the
(pursuit of) happiness.... In short, 'happiness' belongs to the pleasure
principle, and what undermines it is the insistence of a Beyond of the pleasure
principle.” (Slavoj Žižek, Welcome
to the Desert of the Real, Pg. 59)
No comments:
Post a Comment