It's a Good Life? Adorno and the Happiness Machine

Marx famously begins Capital with the claim that “the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities.’” Debord pays homage to this in the first sentence of Society of the Spectacle, replacing “wealth” with “life” and “commodities” with “spectacles.” Today, we might contribute to this theme by saying that the psychological or emotional wellbeing of the world in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of happy individuals. In various places we encounter a veritable cult of happiness, a socially mandated optimism, and a “pathologization” of persistent negativity or reluctance to participate as sickness to be treated. The pedagogy of “positive thinking” (by means of books or seminars) has become a hugely lucrative enterprise. Academics receive sizable grants to study “the science of happiness.” In many of today’s corporations, “chief happiness officers” monitor the relation between “positive attitudes” and employee productivity. If an overwhelming feeling of sadness keeps you out of work for fourteen days, you may be diagnosed with a mental disorder and prescribed mind-altering drugs. Observing all this, I cannot help but think that obligatory positivity resembles nothing so much as political discipline, that the staggering torrent of anti-depressant medication recalls the mollifying narcotic “soma” in Huxley’s Brave New World, and that the entire institutionalized apparatus of mass-produced happiness amounts to an ideological mechanism that functions to sanctify the status quo and stifle dissent. In this essay, I develop a critical perspective on this hegemonic happiness through an engagement with the thought of Adorno. It acts, I argue, as ideology in his sense of the term. After situating the discussion in the context of the broader philosophical project of Negative Dialectics, I elaborate the sustained critique of “the doctrine of inner health” laid out in Minima Moralia. Then, as an expansion and update of this critique, I consider in more detail the prevailing form of the inner health discourse — what I call “the happiness machine.” As a brief excursus into popular culture, I read an episode of The Twilight Zone as an apologue for this ideological mechanism and its functioning. Finally, I suggest a way of articulating refusal of the happiness machine rooted in Adorno’s conception of critical theory.