Without God
Page 4
The materialist worldview is central to the ways in which Houellebecq’s characters live, suffer, and die, just as it is central to the decline and end of Western civilization that The Elementary Particles tracks. In much the same way that realism and naturalism inform Flaubert’s and Zola’s work, respectively, materialism represents the principal experimental condition of Houellebecq’s fiction.1 Much, if not all, of the pathos of the author’s major characters—Bruno’s sexual obsession and loathing for his mother, Djerzinski’s antihumanist and antihuman creed, Daniel’s fear of aging and impotence, the sexual alienation of the narrator in Whatever and of Michel in Platform, and even the resigned morbidity of the character Houellebecq in The Map and the Territory—is informed by a terror of separation, physical decline, and death in turn fueled by an obsessive awareness that “this is all there is.” It is worth noting that Houellebecq participates in his characters’ malaise. As he writes to Lévy in Public Enemies: “it’s true that a world without God, with nothing, is enough [to] make anyone freak out completely” (2011, 139). The first reading of Houellebecq’s work must therefore be a materialist reading, for outside of this basic assumption about the nature of reality, it becomes difficult to identify a sense of thematic and intellectual unity in his work.
As a philosophical concept, materialism denotes two methodologically distinct but formally and ideologically related domains. The first, attached to the continental tradition and most specifically to Marx (though also to Hegel and to Nietzsche’s “genealogical” approach to history), evokes class struggle and the notion that human consciousness is determined by material and historical conditions beyond our immediate control. The second, which hails from the analytic tradition that emerged in the twentieth century in the work of philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, but which may be traced all the way back to Descartes, relates strictly to the nature of the mind itself and forgoes the historical and economic considerations of Marxian theory. It is this second theory, which may be referred to as mind-body materialism or physicalism (a term first introduced in the 1930s by the Vienna Circle philosophers Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap), that is of interest in regard to Houellebecq. In the physicalist view, “immaterial” entities, such as spirit, soul, and gods, are premodern, prerational fantasies, and we have Descartes and his disastrous substance dualism to thank for them.2 For the mind-body materialist, Descartes’s immaterial mind is nothing more than the product of the brain: as the brain dies, so does the mind. As a consequence, mind-body materialism explains away traditionally immaterial entities as no more than complex arrangements of “elementary particles,” and in doing so rules out all talk of such optimistic phenomena as spirit, soul, and the survival of physical death.
Houellebecq has denied in Public Enemies and elsewhere that he is a materialist in the sense described above, even while his novels are in large part explorations of the social and psychological consequences of the physicalist worldview. For example, in a 1998 interview with Lire, he says, “There’s good news in [The Elementary Particles], no? The first is that materialism has had its day. It’s disappearing, pulverized by something else that’s yet to be defined” (Houellebecq 1998, n.p., my translation). Elsewhere in his nonfiction, Houellebecq has claimed that the very concept of matter is a metaphysical fantasy that came to replace God with the arrival of modern science (Houellebecq and Lévy 2011, 144), adding that discoveries that emerged in the twentieth century from quantum physics (phenomena such as action at a distance, nonseparability, and complementarity) require abandoning the notion of matter entirely. He writes in Interventions II, “The twentieth century will also remain that paradoxical era during which physicists refuted materialism, renounced local determinism, and as a matter of fact totally abandoned this ontology of objects and properties, which at the same time was spreading among the public as the basis of a scientific vision of the world” (2009, 155, my translation). As is often the case with Houellebecq, these public claims take on a performative aspect in his fiction, with The Elementary Particles serving as something of a mise-en-scène of these views. More important still, Houellebecq’s second novel suggests that the remedy to the West’s existential malaise may lie in an “ontological reconfiguration” brought on by the surpassing of materialism, accompanied and indeed facilitated by the application of quantum physics to the domain of molecular biology. Near the end of The Elementary Particles, Houellebecq writes apropos of the new civilization of clones and their rupture with their materialist past:
So, we now can listen to this story of a materialist era
As an ancient human story.
It is a sad story, but we will not be saddened by it
Because we are no longer like these men.
Born of their flesh and their desires, we have cast aside their categories and their affiliations,
We do not feel their joys, neither do we feel their sufferings,
We have set aside
Indifferently
And without the least effort
Their universe of death. (247)
This finale, however, gives rise to a potentially serious confusion in the mind of the reader: How exactly is materialism surpassed, if the basis for doing so lies in the merely physical alteration of the human genome? In other words, does The Elementary Particles really deliver the goods—escape from spiritual and existential despair—that it promises to serve up? My contention is that it does not, and, if anything, the novel’s finale even reinforces the materialism it seeks to subvert. This is not to say that the novel fails to offer a vision of a better world, or that the supposed science of “perfect reproduction” that the reader finds at its conclusion does not possess deep metaphorical significance. But an escape from materialism, Particles is not.
Quantum Uncertainties
Houellebecq’s stance on materialism might seem of secondary interest to the literary scholar but for one thing: it deeply informs the scientific and philosophical discourse encountered in The Elementary Particles, if not throughout Houellebecq’s writing. In his “Lettre à Lakis Proguidis,” published in L’Atelier du Roman in 1997 as a response to an article on poetry and the novel by Proguidis, the founder of the review, Houellebecq describes the prevailing worldview of his time as “a materialist ontology” grounded in a concept of “local determinism” (2009, 152, my translation). In this perspective, material reality is describable in terms of rigidly mechanistic laws, which, if ascertained and applied with rigor, can be used to generate an exhaustive portrait of the universe. This is essentially the Newtonian view of reality inherited from the scientific revolution, with its attendant thermodynamic laws, natural constants, and Laplacian demon overseeing the entire operation. Elsewhere, however, in both his fiction and nonfiction, Houellebecq has contrasted the classical Newtonian view with a kind of quantum materialism—the notion that the laws of quantum physics and in particular the Copenhagen interpretation,3 which suggests that physical reality has only a probabilistic, virtual existence, point in the direction of an altogether new ontology, which replaces the unbending, atomistic determinism of the Newtonian model.
And it is precisely this transition from a Newtonian to a quantum ontology that The Elementary Particles explores, with the latter being represented as a genuine remedy to the coldly deterministic, mechanical, and materialist worldview that supposedly prevails in our era. As I demonstrate below, the science supporting these developments is somewhat problematic; indeed, the novel even appears to grant its implausibility. For example, the novel’s narrator claims near the book’s end that Djerzinski’s discoveries in genetics, which led to the creation of a new race of humans freed from the biological limitations of their forebears, rely at base on certain “risky interpretations” (251) of the principles of quantum physics. Nonetheless, Houellebecq’s use of quantum physics in the novel furnishes him with the means of evoking the social and psychic pitfalls of contemporary materialism, as well as humanity’s collective hopes for deliverance
under the auspices of an altogether new understanding of reality.
From a philosophical point of view, quantum theory is interesting because it appears to radically reorient the relationship of the mind with the external world. The mind organizes experience in accordance with fundamental intuitions of space, time, and linear causality. But quantum wave functions—the “stuff” of quantum physics—exist in a dimension beyond what experience can capture. In his book Taking the Quantum Leap, philosopher Fred Alan Wolf describes the quantum universe:
This [quantum] reality is a bridge between the world of the mind and the world of matter. Having attributes of both, it is a paradoxical and magical reality. In it, causality is strictly behaved. In other words, the laws of cause and effect manifest. The only problem is that it isn’t objects that are following those laws (at least, not the ordinary kinds of objects we usually refer to), but ghosts! And these ghosts are downright paradoxical, able to appear in two or more places, even an infinite number of places, at the same time. When these ghosts are used to describe matter, they closely resemble waves. And that is why they were first called “matter waves.” In modern usage, they are called “quantum wave functions.” (1989, 184–86)
The basic posits of quantum theory are twofold. First, we cannot observe an electron wave/particle without interfering with it (and thus changing its state): the better we can see the electron (particle) in the microscope, the less we are able to say where it (the propagating wave) is going; yet, the better we can see where it is going, the less able we are to say where it is. This observational limitation is known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and it has to do with the fact that the tool we use to look at electrons—light, which mediates our observation of objects—does things to the wave function that alter its state. Just what exactly is our observation doing? This brings me to point number two. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, our observation is literally bringing the “physical” electron into existence. Quantum wave functions are virtual entities, which, explained in terms we can make sense of, exist as a series of probabilities of an electron’s location. When we shine a light on the wave function, it collapses and the electron appears at a specific location. When we are not looking, the wave reemerges and begins to propagate through space as a virtual entity.
It is important to keep in mind that terms like “virtual” are more metaphorical than anything else. Human observation does not actually call the world into being; what is happening is rather that the world is appearing to us in a way determined by internal intuitions that do not represent the external world as it really is—that is, as it is “quantumly.” To experience the world as we do is to experience electrons as waves collapsing into particles. But what such objects (or waves or functions) do on their own time is their business, and our access to those activities is purely mathematical.
In some respects, the quantum theorists confirm scientifically what philosophers such as Kant already knew: the external world is not just “given” to the senses, but the mind has a way of representing it that may not do justice to actual, quantum states of affairs. As Kant writes in Critique of Pure Reason, “What may be the nature of objects considered as things in themselves and without reference to the receptivity of our sensibility is quite unknown to us. We know nothing more than our own mode of perceiving them, which is peculiar to us, and which [ . . . ] is so to the whole human race” (1990, 135). More important, quantum physics tells us that the seeming weirdness of quantum phenomena only manifests at the level of elementary particles. Theoretically, the wave functions of the electrons in the moon could suddenly cause the satellite to reorganize itself as a hulking mass of kitchen appliances. Such an occurrence is, in other words, a quantum possibility. But of course such things never happen, and never could happen, for it would take an eternity for the wave functions of such a large object to propagate to the point where even the most microscopic changes in the physical structure of the moon, or of any other object, could take place. Classical mechanics, though technically mistaken in light of quantum theory, therefore allows us to predict macrophysical events as if they were ruled by rigidly deterministic laws.
The Elementary Particles is eager to infer a causal link between the quantum uncertainty associated with the behavior of electrons, and the chemical and electrical events in macrophysical systems, such as the human brain. While Djerzinski may claim, for instance, that “the sheer number of neurons [ . . . ] statistically cancels out elementary differences, ensuring that human behavior is as rigorously determined [ . . . ] as any other natural system” (77), in the next moment he suggests that quantum events in the brain—specifically, “a different harmonic wave form [that] causes changes in the brain”—may give rise to acts of free will (77). In other places the novel focuses on the quantum wave function itself, more specifically on the notion that material reality may in fact be described as an infinity of ever-propagating, interpenetrating waves, which taken together weave all the particles of the universe into an inseparable whole. Houellebecq writes, “In an ontology of states the particles are indiscernible, and only a limited number are observable. The only entities which can be identified and named are wave functions and, through them, state vectors—from which arose the analogous possibility of giving new meaning to fraternity, sympathy and love” (248–49). This suggestion that the quantum behavior of elementary particles could have anything to do with fraternity, sympathy, and love is understandably confusing. Physical reality may be describable in terms of wave functions, but the careful reader will no doubt wonder how this description is expected to heal the wounds of physical separation that afflict the characters of Particles. Human beings are not electrons, and one wonders what possible relevance to human relationships and social organization quantum wave theory could possibly hold, beyond the purely metaphorical, especially when the link between the two domains is so evidently tenuous.
But here is precisely the moment to distinguish between Houellebecq’s use of the quantum wave as an aesthetic metaphor for the social organization of his posthuman utopia, and the implementation of quantum principles in the creation of the novel’s race of clones. In the second instance, the narrator explains, “Hubczejak rightly notes that Djerzinski’s great leap lay not in his rejection of the idea of personal freedom [ . . . ] but in the fact that he was able, through somewhat risky interpretations of the postulates of quantum mechanics, to restore the conditions which make love possible” (251). Naturally, Houellebecq never discusses the science that would render these comments more intelligible—for presumably such science does not exist. How quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of subatomic particles, could literally be brought to bear in the fabrication of a new human species is left splendidly unclear, and for this reason the novel’s conclusion may strike some readers as disingenuous. In her monograph Michel Houellebecq, le plaisir du texte, Sabine van Wesemael writes, “[W]e can above all reproach Houellebecq for not furnishing the elements of a solution [in The Elementary Particles]. Clownish and absurd utopias, inspired by futuristic Nietzschean theories of the Superman (the clone) and by science fiction, offer no real resolution” (2005, 186, my translation). To make sense of the finale, it is instead necessary to regard Houellebecq’s treatment of quantum physics less as scientific prognostication and more as a metaphor for improved human relations that, when understood correctly, takes Particles out of the domain of the clownish and offers a conclusion that is at once moving and serious. Houellebecq’s concern in Particles is to make a point not about the exciting implications of quantum physics for biology, but rather about the horrors of social atomization, as this passage at the end of the novel bears out: “Having broken the filial chain that linked us to humanity, we [the clones] live on. Men consider us to be happy; it is certainly true that we have succeeded in overcoming the forces of egotism, cruelty and anger which they could not [ . . . ]. To humans of the old species, our world seems a paradise. We have even been known to refer to ourselves—wit
h a certain humor—by the name they so long dreamed of: gods” (263).
The metaphorical scheme that Houellebecq has in mind finds expression in Particles in numerous places, perhaps the most important being Djerzinski’s reaction to the rite performed during Bruno and Anne’s wedding. Struck by the priest’s depiction of “two bodies becoming one” in holy matrimony, Djerzinski quips,
“I was very interested by what you were saying earlier . . .” The man of God smiled urbanely, then Michel began to talk about the Aspect experiments and the EPR paradox: how two particles, once united, are forever an inseparable whole, “which seems pretty much in keeping with what you were saying about one flesh.” The priest’s smile froze slightly. “What I’m trying to say,” Michel went on enthusiastically, “is that from an ontological point of view, the pair can be assigned a single vector state in a Hilbert space.” (144)
Here the novel suggests a metaphorical connection between the linking of human lives, as in marriage, and the discovery that electrons with the same vector in a “Hilbert space” will act instantaneously on each other even over immense distances (the principle of nonseparability).4 Houellebecq no doubt intends the exchange between scientist and priest to be humorous, but we should not ignore the metaphorical depth, indeed the religious significance, of Djerzinski’s remarks. Later, after Djerzinski is reunited with Annabelle, he has a dream: “he saw the mental aggregate of space and its opposite. He saw the mental conflict through which space was structured, and saw it disappear. He saw space as a thin line separating two spheres. In the first sphere there was being and separation, and in the second was nonbeing and the destruction of the individual. Calmly, without a moment’s hesitation, he turned and walked toward the second sphere” (194). The first sphere is the world of determined physical interactions, the domain of mechanical cause and effect, where human minds and bodies are separated by immutable barriers of space, time, and embodiment. The second sphere is the quantum dimension: there, where all is woven together in an infinitely interpenetrating universe of quantum wave functions, the illusion of physical separation has been lifted.