apptioncaurie

ociablethe existence of proximate

roximity. The sociable personis paper, I want to considerratherss is hass simsame tpy byare sos of th

what is near (Ahmed, 2006: 124). It is useful to note that theetymology of happiness relates precisely to the question ofcontingency: it is from the Middle English hap, suggesting chance.One of the early meanings of happiness in English relates to theidea of being lucky, or favoured by fortune, or being fortunate.Happiness would be about what happens, where the what is

you. But I nd this original meaning useful, as it focuses ourattention on the worldly question of happenings.

What is the relation between the what in what happens and

what tastes delightful. To be affected by an object in a good way isto have an orientation towards an object as being good. Happinesscan thus be described as intentional in the phenomenological sense(directed towards objects), as well as being affective (contact withobjects). To bring these arguments together we might say thathappiness is an orientation towards the objects we come intocontact with. We move towards and away from objects throughhow we are affected by them. This does not mean there is alwaysa correspondence between objects and feelings. We have all

Contents lists availab

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els

Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) 1013* Tel.: +44 20 7717 2964; fax: +44 20 7919 7616.enjoyment of company. Happiness might generate the verycompany we like as a company of likes.

How can we think about the sociability of good feeling? Mystarting point is not to assume there is something called affect (orfor that matter emotion) that stands apart or has autonomy, as if itcorresponds to an object in the world. I beginwith the messiness ofthe experiential, the unfolding of bodies into the world, and whatI have called the drama of contingency, how we are touched by

of the grapes delights him (1997: 216). So we could say that anobject becomes happy if it affects us in a good way. For Locke, weplace our happiness in different things (246), which meansdifferent things become good for us. We turn towards those thingsthat make us happy. When thingsmake us happy, they become partof our lived horizon. The bodily horizon can thus be thought of asa horizon of likes.

Note the doubling of positive affect in Lockes example: we loveothers. Sociability implies not onlyothers, but also the enjoyment of plikes the company of others. In thhappiness as a form of sociabilitysociability. It is a truism that happinewith others. And yet does happineA social bondmight be created if theturn, those who are not made hapthreaten our happiness. If emotionsmight need to be theorised in termE-mail address: s.ahmed@gold.ac.uk

1755-4586/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier Ltd.doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2008.07.003than the happiness ofppiest when it is sharedply bring us together?hings make us happy. Inthe same things mightciable, then sociabilitye restriction as well as

the what that makes us happy? Empiricism provides us witha useful way of addressing this question, given its concern withwhats what. Take the work of John Locke. He argues that what isgood is what is apt to cause or increase pleasure, or diminish pain inus (Locke, 1997: 216). So we judge something to be good or badaccording to how it affects us, whether it gives us pleasure or pain.Locke suggests that he loves grapes it is no more, but that the tasteproximity of others. We feel with aeven be a feeling: when you feel sothers. Sociability canyou want to be with

more used to thinking of happiness as an effect of what you dorather, as a reward for hard work, rather than as what happens toEmotions are quite sociable. We are moved after all by thend for

something good. This meaning may now seem archaic: we may beSociable happiness

Sara Ahmed*

Media and Communication, Goldsmiths College, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Accepted 23 July 2008

Keywords:HappinessEmotionAffectObjectsSociability

a b s t r a c t

This paper explores how hon happiness as the restricit causes happiness, but bething. Those who are not o

Emotion, Spa

journal homepage: www.All rights reserved.iness is directed towards objects and directs us towards objects. Reectingof sociability, the paper considers the family as a happy object not becausese of the demand that we share an orientation toward the family as a goodntated in the right way become affect aliens and kill-joys.

2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

le at ScienceDirect

and Society

evier .com/locate/emospaprobably experienced what I call unattributed happiness; you feel

e anhappy, not quite knowing why, and the feeling can be catchy, asa kind of brimming over that exceeds what you encounter. Thefeeling can lift or elevate any proximate object, which is not to saythat the feeling will survive an encounter with anything. It hasalways interested me that when we become conscious of feelinghappy (when the feeling becomes an object of thought), happinesscan often recede or become anxious. Happiness can arrive ina moment, and be lost by virtue of its recognition.

I would suggest that happiness involves a specic kind ofintentionality, what I would call end orientated. It is not just thatwe can be happy about something, but some things become happyfor us, if we imagine they will bring happiness to us. Happiness isoften described as what we aim for, as an end-point, or even anend-in-itself. Classically, happiness has been considered as an endrather than as a means. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (1998: 1)describes happiness as the Chief Good, as that which all things aimat. Happiness is what we choose always for its own sake (8).

We dont have to agree with the argument that happiness is anend-in-itself to understand the implications of what it means forhappiness to be thought in these terms. If happiness is the end of allends, then all other things becomemeans to happiness. As Aristotledescribes, we choose other things with a view to happiness,conceiving that through their instrumentality we shall be happy(8). Things become good, or acquire their value as goods, insofar asthey point towards happiness. If objects provide a means formaking us happy, then in directing ourselves towards this or thatobject, we are aiming somewhere else: towards a happiness that ispresumed to follow. The temporality of this following does matter.Happiness is what would come after. Given this, happiness isdirected towards certain objects, which point towards that which isnot yet present. Happiness does not reside in objects; it is promisedthrough proximity to certain objects. So the promise of happiness ifyou do this, then happiness is what follows is what makes thingsseem promising, whichmeans that the promise of happiness is notin the thing itself.

Happiness thus directs us to certain objects, as if they are thenecessary ingredients for a good life. What makes this argumentdifferent to John Lockes account of loving grapes because they tastedelightful, is that I am suggesting that the judgment that certainobjects are happy is already made, before they are even encoun-tered. Certain objects are attributed as the conditions for happinessso that we arrive at them with an expectation of how we will beaffected by them, which affects how they affect us, even in themoment they fail to live up to our expectations. Happiness is anexpectation of what follows. For instance, the child might be askedto imagine happiness by imagining happy events in the future,such as a wedding day, the happiness day of your life.

So when we nd happy objects, we do not just nd themanywhere. The promise of happiness directs life in some waysrather than others. To share in the happiness of others is how wecome to share a certain direction. We could even say that groupscohere around a shared orientation towards some things as beinggood, treating some things and not others as the cause of happi-ness. The fan club or hobby group make explicit what is implicitabout social life: that we tend to like those who like the things we like.The social bond is thus rather sensational. If the same objects makeus happy which means investing in the same objects as if theymake us happy then we would be directed or orientated in thesame way. Happy objects accumulate positive affective value associal goods through being passed around.

Is happiness itself transmitted through such objects? If we wereto answer this question with a yes, then we might suggest thathappiness is contagious. David Humes approach tomoral emotionsin the eighteenth century rested precisely on a contagious model of

S. Ahmed / Emotion, Spachappiness. He suggests that others enter into the same humourand catch the sentiment, by a contagion or natural sympathy andthat cheerfulness is the most communicative of emotions: theame spreads through the whole circle; and the most sullenly andremorse are often caught by it (Hume, 1975: 250251, see alsoBlackman, 2008). A number of scholars have recently taken up theidea of affects as contagious, drawing primarily on the work of thepsychologist of affect Silvan Tomkins (Brennan, 2004; Gibbs, 2001;Kosofsky, 2003; Probyn, 2005). As Anna Gibbs describes: Bodiescan catch feelings as easily as catch re: affect leaps from one bodyto another (2001: 1).

Thinking of affects as contagious helps challenge the idea thataffect resides within an individual body, by showing how bodies areaffected by what is around them. A question remains: how are weaffected by what comes near? The model of affective contagiontends to treat affect as something that is transmitted smoothly frombody to body, sustaining integrity in being passed around. I want toexplore howwe are affected differently by the things we come intocontact with, which might include other bodies. To be affected byanother does not mean being affected in the same way as another,or that an affect is simply transmitted, creating a shared feeling oratmosphere.

Consider the opening sentence of Teresa Brennans The Trans-mission of Affect: Is there anyonewho has not, at least once, walkedinto a room and felt the atmosphere (2004: 1). Brennan writesvery beautifully about the atmosphere getting into the individual,usingwhat I have called an outside in model, verymuch part of theintellectual history of crowd psychology and the sociology ofemotion (Ahmed, 2004: 9). However, later in the introduction shemakes an observation, which involves a quite different model.Brennan suggests that: if I feel anxiety when I enter the room, thenthat will inuence what I perceive or receive by way of animpression. I agree. Anxiety is sticky: rather like Velcro, it tendsto pick up whatever comes near. Anxiety gives us a certain kind ofangle on what comes near. Of course, anxiety is one feeling stateamongst others. If bodies do not arrive in neutral, if we are alwaysin some way or another moody, then what we will receive as animpression will always depend on our affective situation. Thissecond argument suggests that how we arrive, how we enter thisroom or that room, will affect what impressions we receive. Afterall, to receive is to act. To receive an impression is to make animpression.

Think about experiences of alienation. I have suggested thathappiness is attributed to certain objects that circulate as socialgoods. When we feel pleasure from such objects, we are aligned;we are facing the right way. We become alienated out of line withan affective community when we do not experience pleasurefrom proximity to objects that are attributed as being good. The gapbetween the affective value of an object and howwe experience anobject can involve a range of affects, which are directed by themodes of explanationwe offer to ll this gap. If we are disappointedby something, we generate explanations of why that thing isdisappointing. Such explanations can involve an anxious narrativeof self-doubt (why I am notmade happy by this, what is wrongwithme?) or a narrative of rage, where the object that is supposed tomake us happy is attributed as the cause of disappointment, whichcan lead to a rage directed towards those that promised us happi-ness through the elevation of such objects as good. We might evenbecome strangers, or affect aliens, at such moments.

We can also feel alienated in rooms when the affective gesturesof the room do not correspond to our feeling states. Take theexample of laughter in the cinema. How many times have I sunkdesperately intomy chair when that laughter has been expressed atpoints I nd far from amusing! We do not always notice whenothers sink. One can feel unjustly interpellated on such occasions:the gestures of discomfort and alienation do not register; they do

d Society 1 (2008) 1013 11not affect the collective impression made by the laughter. To anoutsider, it may simply appear that the audience shared an

orientation towards the lm as being funny, and that the laughterwas contagious, affecting everybody.

S. Ahmed / Emotion, Space an12So when happy objects are passed around, it is not necessarilythe feeling that passes. To share such objects (or have a share insuch objects) means you would share an orientation towards thoseobjects as being good. The family, for example, is a happy object, notbecause it causes happiness, or even because we are affected by thefamily in a good way, but because of a shared orientation towardsthe family as being good, as being what promises happiness inreturn for loyalty.

So yes, we hear the expression happy families and we registerthe connection of these words in the familiarity of their affectiveresonance. Happy families: a card game, a title of a childrens book,a government discourse; a promise, a hope, a dream, an aspiration.The happy family is both a myth of happiness, of where and howhappiness takes place, and a powerful legislative device, a way ofdistributing time, energy and resources. The family is also aninheritance. To inherit the family can be to acquire an orientationtowards some things and not others as the cause of happiness. Inother words, it is not just that groups cohere around happy objects;we are asked to reproduce what we inherit by being affected in theright way by the right things.

The family becomes what we must reproduce as necessary fora good or happy life. One novel that most powerfully captures thepressure to reproduce what you inherit is Laurie Colwins FamilyHappiness. I have chosen this book as part of an unhappy feministarchive, which challenged the happiness that was presumed toreside in the gure of the housewife (see Friedan, 1963).1 So webegin with Polly, a happy housewife, who is also a good daughter,and a good mother. In the rst instance, Polly feels fortunate: shehas a good husband (Henry) and good children (Pete and Dee-Dee),as well as a loving and attentive mother (Wendy) (1989:11). Herfamily is held together by shared values, and by a shared orienta-tion towards family itself: Polly and Henry were so right for eachother, so unied in their feelings about life, family, children (13).Marriage here becomes about reproducing the family as a socialform: The kind of marriage Polly knewwas based on family, on thecreation of family, on keeping family together, on family events,circumstances, occasions, celebrations (194). The point of thefamily is to keep family as the point.

The family becomes a happy object through the work that mustbe done to keep it together. Being together means having a place atthe table, or we could say it means being occupied in the sameway:Nothing had deviated on the Solo-Miller Sunday breakfast table forso long as anyone can remember. They are in the dining-roomwithextra leaves in the table (20). The table is itself a happy object,insofar as it secures the very form of the family over time. The tableis what we could call a kinship object (Ahmed, 2006: 81), whichgives form to the family as a social gathering, as the tangible thingover which the family gathers. The table is happy when it securesthis point.

This orientation towards the family makes certain objectsproximate (tables, photographs, and other objects that securefamily intimacy), as the objects through which the family itselfbecome given. This does notmean that to be orientated towards thefamily means inhabiting the same place. After all, as we know fromLocke, pleasures can be idiosyncratic. Families may give one a senseof being on the same side or having a place at the table throughthe conversion of idiosyncratic difference into a happy object: lovehappily means knowing the peculiarity of a loved others likes anddislikes. The creation of small differences can be binding. Love1 My current project on happiness explores the relationship between feminismand the history of happiness through reecting on the affectivity of the gures ofthe happy housewife and the feminist kill-joy.becomes an intimacy with what the other likes (rather than simplyliking what the other likes), and is given on condition that suchlikes do not take us outside a shared horizon. The family providesa shared horizon in which happy objects circulate.

The family involves knowledge of the peculiar, or the trans-formation of the peculiar into habit and ritual. So you make coffeefor the family, and you know just how much sugar to put in thiscup and that. Failure to perform this just is often felt as a failure tocare. Even if we do not experience the same objects as beingpleasurable, sharing the family means sharing happy objects; bothin the sense of sharing knowledge of what makes others happy, andalso in the sense of distributing the objects in the right way. InFamily Happiness, the distribution of happy objects is described asa family ritual: It was not necessary to consult menus. Everyonealways had the same thing. A plate of steamed vegetables withgreen mayonnaise was brought for Andreya; Polly and Wendy hadthe salmon; Henry, Jr. the tournedos; and Henry Demarest thespecial. (Colwin, 1989: 181). The family reproduces itself throughthis affective distribution between things.

By living this life, Polly is living the life not only that her parentsexpected her to live, but also a life they have already lived: She andHenry set about replicating the comfort and success of theirparents lives. Polly had never been so happy (65). For Polly,happiness is what follows following her parents life. This followingis presented as a duty, as a way of being good: No-one had everasked Polly to be excellent, or to do excellent things. Rather, she hadbeen encouraged in that direction byWendy (her mother) and noweveryone was used to her (170). To be encouraging is often thoughtof as a generous; as away of energising somebody, of enabling themto be capable. But to encourage can also be forceful. Beingencouraged can be away of being directed towards somebody elseswants. And once you get to the place they want you to be, you canget stuck there. I think we know this.

Happiness means here living a certain kind of life, one thatreaches certain points, and which in reaching these points, gener-ates happiness for others. The family is after all where the child iscultivated; where the child learns the right habits, which in turn,render some objects as happy for the child. In Family Happiness,children were being brought up under the old order, whichrequired that parents inspire all manners of good habits in theirchildren (11). Parenting becomes about orientating the children inthe right way, towards what is already given as good. The childmust place their hopes for happiness in the same things, or riskcausing unhappiness.

To think about happiness is to think about the role of afr-mation. To afrm can mean to state or assert positively, as wellas to establish, conrm or ratify. To be afrmed to be givenpositive encouragement, which might be what conrmsa certain order things, or creates order out of things, or putssome things and not others within reach. Happiness involves thecomfort of repetition; of following lines that have already beengiven. For Polly, this path is described as the straight path(199). When Polly deviates, the world comes apart. She has anaffair, putting desire before the happiness duty, and disturbseverything: her place in her marriage, her place in her family,her place in herself (78). By not being orientated towards thefamily table, she becomes disorientated, losing her place in theworld. When Polly deviates from the path of being good, bymaking others happy, she upsets her world. She becomes anaffect alien for sure. The affect alien is the one who convertsgood feelings into bad; who kills the joy of the family.

By analysing the paths of happiness we learn much aboutemotions, space and society. Emotions shape what we do, how wedo things, what we do things with, and where we go. Emotions

d Society 1 (2008) 1013affect how bodies take shape in social space and how spaces coherearound bodies. Happiness involves sharing a direction towards

some things as being good. Bodies that are directed in the wrongway become causes of unhappiness, where the threat of being sucha cause is what might sustain the desire to keep on the right path.And we learn that sociability has its costs: those who dont shareour orientation towards some things as being good are read askilling our joy.

References

Ahmed, Sara, 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press,Edinburgh.

Ahmed, Sara, 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. DukeUniversity Press, Durham.

Aristotle, 1998. In: Kaufman, William (Ed.), Nicomachean Ethics. Dover Publications,New York.

Blackman, Lisa, 2008. Is happiness contagious? New Formations 63, 1532.Brennan, Teresa, 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.Colwin, Laurie, 1989. Family Happiness. Harper Perennial, London.Friedan, Betty, 1963. The Feminine Mystique. W.W. Norton and Company, New York.Gibbs, Anna, 2001. Contagious feelings: Pauline Hanson and the epidemiology of

affect. Australian Humanities Review. .

Hume, David, 1975. Enquires Concerning Human Understanding and Concerningthe Principles of Morals. Oxford University Press.

Kosofsky, Evelyn Sedgwick, 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Performativity Peda-gogy. Duke University Press, Durham.

Locke, John,1997.AnEssayConcerningHumanUnderstanding. PenguinBooks, London.Probyn, Elspeth, 2005. Blush: Faces of Shame. University of Minnesota Press,

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