Anger as a register for communicating social change: Dismantling the neoliberal trope of positive emotions
One of the most powerful tropes of neoliberal governmentality is happiness. Individualizing the anxiety, anguish, and deep sense of insecurity that are the byproducts of five decades of relentless neoliberal transformations, the owners of transnational capital and the enabling structures of the state proselytize us into happy subjects who see inequality, poverty, precarity, and struggles as personal failures. The prescription then is to turn these personal failures into successes in the competitive neoliberal order. To succeed in the marketplace, one must first and foremost be happy. One must learn to find joy and be joyful. One must be self-fulfilled so he/she can find fulfillment in the mechanisms of the market. Any failure to attain happiness, joyfulness, and a state of self-fulfillment is a personal failure. An entire industry of self-help, pop psychology, meditation, and new age spiritualism has propped up to hold us up to this state of happiness. This cluster of positive emo