The Promise of Happiness

Ahmed develops the book’s concern with the future by examining how hope becomes attached to particular visions of what should continue and survive. Her reading of Children of Men brings this question into dialogue with queer theorist Lee Edelman’s concept of “reproductive futurism”—the idea that political hope is channeled through the figure of the child. The film’s investment in the miraculous pregnancy of the refugee Kee allows Ahmed to question how the future can become organized around reproduction even within a narrative of social crisis and political change. The film’s protagonist, Theo, is an “affect alien,” whose detachment from the collective response to infertility initially takes the form of cynicism and withdrawal rather than political consciousness. His involvement in Kee’s survival gradually draws him into action and into caring about what happens, even though he does not gain certainty that the Human Project, toward which he is travelling, actually exists. Ahmed therefore shows how investment in what happens next does not require certainty that a hoped-for future will arrive. At the same time, the film’s revolutionary possibilities remain shaped by reproductive futurism and by Theo’s eventual position as a symbolic father to Kee’s child. Ahmed’s reading therefore holds together two aspects of futurity: the possibility of acting without certainty about what the future will bring, and the risk that hope for the future can remain attached to familiar objects, particularly reproduction and the child.

Ahmed develops the concept of revolutionary consciousness by examining how becoming conscious of alienation can acquire political significance. Drawing on Marx and Fanon, she distinguishes experiencing suffering from recognizing the conditions that produce it. Consciousness of alienation involves recognizing that suffering has causes within the social world rather than simply experiencing oneself as alienated from that world. Herbert Marcuse’s concept of “happy consciousness” helps Ahmed examine the other side of this process: Acceptance of existing conditions can make the “misdeeds” of society easier to accommodate and restrict the possibility of recognizing alternatives. Ahmed does not, however, treat unhappiness or alienation as sufficient for revolutionary consciousness. Theo’s initial cynicism and despair in Children of Men are accompanied by withdrawal and apathy, showing that his alienation from the prevailing social mood does not necessarily lead to political action. His later involvement with Kee shows how someone initially withdrawn from the world can become invested in what happens and act without certainty about the future. This develops Unhappiness as Political Resistance by clarifying the conditions under which unhappiness can become politically significant: Suffering can contribute to resistance when its causes become recognizable, while unhappiness by itself does not guarantee either political consciousness or action.

Ahmed uses the term “happiness dystopias” for works that examine what happens when happiness becomes an organizing principle of social life. Works like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Ursula Le Guin’s “The People Who Walked Away from Omelas” allow her to examine different problems produced when happiness becomes an agreed social good. In Brave New World, happiness works through conditioning subjects to accept and desire their assigned social conditions; in “Omelas,” collective happiness depends upon the suffering of another. These different arrangements allow Ahmed to question the assumption that the presence of happiness is sufficient evidence of a good society. Le Guin’s story provides the starkest illustration of this principle, revealing that an entire city’s flourishing is predicated on the misery of a single child. This develops The Exclusionary Nature of the Good Life by showing how the happiness of a collective can depend upon the “localization” of suffering in those excluded from that happiness. Ahmed’s “freedom to be unhappy” develops from this refusal of indifference (195): It means remaining open to being affected by unhappiness and being free to deviate from established paths of happiness rather than accepting happiness as the agreed endpoint of human action.

In her conclusion, Ahmed returns to the history of happiness as an ethical concept to question how happiness came to be understood as an endpoint of human action. Her discussion of Seneca and Adam Smith shows how attempts to separate happiness from fortune or chance—to remove the “hap” from happiness—place greater emphasis on virtue and conduct understood to be within a person’s control. Ahmed reads this removal of the “hap” as an attempt to secure happiness against contingency: What happens to us, and what lies beyond our control, is excluded from the conditions through which happiness is understood. This concern also informs her critique of a theoretical hierarchy in which positive affects are associated with activity and increased capacity and negative affects with passivity or diminished capacity. Her discussion of the contemporary “affirmative turn” extends this critique by questioning whether positive feelings should be privileged in advance as sources of possibility and action. Ahmed instead resists establishing either happiness or unhappiness as inherently politically valuable. By proposing to “put the hap back into happiness” (222), Ahmed returns contingency to happiness and opens it to forms and objects that cannot be determined beforehand. Her final description of feminist, queer, and antiracist struggles as “hap movements” connects this principle to political struggle. These movements “make happen” by opening possibilities for “being in other ways” and for a world in which things can happen differently (223). The book therefore ends not by abandoning happiness but by distinguishing happiness as a necessity from happiness as a possibility: Political struggle can challenge prescribed paths of happiness while leaving open what other forms of living and happiness might become possible.