Here the full significance of Gray’s misanthropic turn becomes clear. It has been ever more inseparable from a popular appeal. Gray shrewdly anticipated the populist turn in government policy in British higher education, but quickly started to give it a misanthropic complexion, as though assuming that not only a certain kind of style of thinking and writing but also misanthropy itself were likely to find a considerable public. The same would seem true of the controversial novelist Michel Houellebecq. Houellebecq is par excellence the postmodern Diogenes. In The Map and the Territory, the novel in which he turns himself into a character, he refers to his ‘strong misanthropic tendencies’, announcing that ‘I feel only a faint sense of solidarity with the human species’.34 Houellebecq has identified ‘maintaining a certain critical distance with regard to humanity’ as intrinsic to his project. He is mainly concerned, he writes, to ask ‘whether humanity is an experiment worth pursuing’.35 He has increasingly developed an excoriating critical perspective on the cultural domains attached to what, following Joe Brooker and Finn Fordham,36 we might start calling total capital, ‘advanced capitalism’ sounding as oxymoronic as ‘darkness visible’, and ‘late capitalism’ by now looking like what in fact it has long been, a pitifully obsolete piece of wishful thinking (unless we believe in the imminence of the eco-apocalypse). Houellebecq writes of capital as going ‘in step and hand in hand … with mercantilism, publicity, the absurd and sneering cult of economic efficiency’. He takes ‘the exclusive and immoderate appetite for material riches’ to have spread from the domain of economics to other domains, above all, that of sexuality, eradicating ‘every sentimental fiction’ and increasingly measuring human value solely in terms of ‘economic efficiency and sexual potential’.37 This is Houellebecq’s total capital, his ‘extension of the domain of struggle’ (the original French title of his first novel).
Thus contemporary adulthood ‘is [nothing but] hell’ – for what, predominantly, does it have to offer? ‘The reality principle, the pleasure principle, competitiveness, permanent challenges, sex and status – hardly reasons to rejoice’ (HPL, p. 31). Houellebecq matches this vision of hell with an insistent evocation of the anomic urban and metropolitan cityscapes that, for him, are a concrete embodiment of the whole ethos of the contemporary scene. One crucial problem with total capital, for Houellebecq, is that it cannot begin to see itself straight. It cannot afford to recognize the endless dreariness, the boundless mediocrity, the innumerable miseries it generates, cannot begin to bring them to light nor suffer them being brought there. After all, in Theodor Adorno’s well-known words, ‘It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces’.38 This is precisely where the novelist intervenes. The business of the novelist, as Houellebecq most persistently articulates it, is recording, observation, ‘the most precise, the most broad description’, without any attempt to go behind description and ‘assemble the machine’ (PE, p. 140). Here one might object: do recording and description, however broad, not always mean choices? But as Houellebecq understands matters, the novelist’s choice is to record and describe that which total capital refuses to acknowledge as intrinsic to its operations. He or she works to ensure that the triumph of total capital is less than total in at least one respect, in that the novelist resists any of the totalizing mythologies by which total capital seeks to justify, sustain and obscure itself.
Houellebecq’s major debts are to three French traditions: the positivists, especially Comte; the moralists of the Ancien Régime, whom he repeatedly cites, especially the misanthropic ones; and French sociology. In this context, we should note that he published his first novel in 1994, just a year after one of the major books of the nineties appeared, Pierre Bourdieu’s La Misère du Monde, The Misery of the World. Bourdieu sought to turn economic neo-liberal thinking inside out, unfashionably telling a mass of real-life stories of what, in his phrase, the ‘extraordinary and almost unbearable violence’ of neo-liberalism was actually generating,39 its vast and ceaseless production of social suffering. Houellebecq’s misanthropic project might be thought of as picking up on Bourdieu’s and transplanting it precisely to the domains into which there has been an extension of the struggle, thereby accomplishing the novelist’s business, but at the same time stripping the sociological project of any and all of the political convictions that were still Bourdieu’s in 1993, whatever the circumspection with which he was by then expressing them.
By transplantation of the project, I mean that Bourdieu is principally concerned with a social suffering clearly described as economically determined. Third-generation metalworkers find themselves brusquely left on the scrap heap and shut out of society. On the promise of returning to their villages as full post-persons, young women leave the countryside for Paris and sort letters on the night shift, only to find that they are indefinitely condemned to it. By contrast, Houellebecq refuses the terms of the sociologist’s class analysis. More than anything else, perhaps his most obvious social concern is with the clerkly class, office workers; except that the office workers are now modestly affluent, technologically proficient, often loosely associated with ‘creativity’ (a word that has become deeply depressing), and take their holidays in Thailand. Here, Houellebecq in effect retorts to Bourdieu, in this huge class too, there has been an extension of the domain of struggle, and with it an extension of social misery, a production of new forms of psychic emptiness and social affliction. It is the novelist’s task to document them, to bring them to the surface. If these new fields of social misery have emerged for the novelist’s attention, however, in Houellebecq’s terms, that is precisely because there has been, again, an extension of the domain of struggle, because it has reached spheres of life that had seemed quite separate from the sphere of economic activity and a defence against it. One might support both Bourdieu’s project and Houellebecq’s revision of it with the Benjamin-based case for misanthropy in Chapter 4, though of the three of them (including Benjamin), it is only Houellebecq who looks misanthropic.
Houellebecq’s real subject is the radical and constitutive inadequacy of life under total capital, an inadequacy that grows ever more ubiquitous and hopeless. Lives become fearfully insubstantial. ‘I’ve lived so little that I tend to imagine I’m not going to die’, says the narrator of Whatever, ‘it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little’.40 ‘They really don’t amount to much, anyway, human relationships’, says Jed Martin, ruefully, in The Map and the Territory (MT, p. 9). It is one of Houellebecq’s more misanthropic refrains, and a view of the world that he amply confirms in Martin’s life-story. Here the vexed subject of Houellebecq’s treatment of sexuality becomes key; but what is startling about Houellebecq is that there is little of the physical disgust for sexuality or bodies in themselves that one finds so often within the misanthropic tradition, as for example in the work of H. P. Lovecraft, a writer whom Houellebecq admires and on whom he has written. The fullness and abundance of sexual description in Platform, for example, might have almost been expressly designed to counter any such accusation. Nor is the point that Houellebecq’s is a loveless world; one can quickly refute this. Nor is the relevant assertion that Houellebecq hates women. He doesn’t: there is no loathing in his fiction, unlike, say, Swift’s work, of women’s organic being per se. It is not hard to cite passages where Houellebecq’s thought about women appears to be not only affirmative, but aware of the fact that women have to struggle with a world – that of total capital – the major determinants of which have been and continue to be principally masculine.
The accusations of misogyny levelled at Houellebecq, then, are untenable, and in fact disguise another disquiet. For Houellebecq – and here he resembles Lacan, but also in some measure the women writers in Chapter 5 – refuses to convert any identification with the position of women into progressive thought. What his critics cannot abide in him is the virulent and intransigent anti-progressivism of the misanthropist. Houellebecq writes that ‘the idea of
progress has come to be an indisputable and almost unconscious credo’ (PE, p. 115). Indeed, he reserves some of his most satirical passages for a peculiarly lightweight progressive chatter that by now is quite pervasive, and merely a matter of empty self-persuasion. ‘It doesn’t take long for a thinker on information technology to be transformed into a thinker on social evolution’, he notes, sardonically, and of course ‘his discourse will often be brilliant’ (W, p. 44). We need only the promise of a dinner ‘with intimate friends in their kitchens created by Daniel Hechter or Primrose Bordier’ to end up busily planning ‘to remake the world’ (W, p. 124). Houllebecq counters this kind of progressivism degree zero with a distinctive mode of historicism, distinctive in that it doesn’t produce or rely on a story. On the one hand, there is always historical change. On the other hand, it is aimless drift: ‘There is no progress’, he writes, ‘there’s no point deluding yourself, only the historical circumstances are different’ (PE, p. 220). It may be that ‘change in itself’ has become a value, but that does not imply the strength or durability of any progressive model of experience or history (TPI, p. 361). Here Houellebecq’s understanding of historical temporality is actually rather close to that of another French sociologist, Jean Baudrillard.
Thus again, like the writers in Chapter 5, Houellebecq is not so much sceptical about feminist premises as he is about any progressive assertion to which they might become attached. Houellebecq’s novels as a whole misanthropically propose that love exists, that there are beautiful bodies, that women can be affirmed … and yet that this does nothing to diminish the weight of the wholesale social catastrophe under total capital. As Bourdieu is preoccupied with the economic casualties of neo-liberal thinking, so Houellebecq is obsessed with the sexual casualties of the libertarian revolution, which he refuses to separate from the emergence of neo-liberal attitudes, or, at least, the conditions that produced them. This has been clear from his first novel, and his portrait in it of the hapless Tisserand, sexual casualty par excellence. Since then, he has broadened out his treatment of sexual relations into a devastating indictment of the sexual mœurs of the airy permissives of the sixties and the seventies, and the consequences of those mœurs, not least for parenthood. Everywhere, Houllebecq finds damaged emotional and sexual lives. What has wrecked them, above all, as he tirelessly insists, is the more or less subtle, more or less oblique extension of the market, of the domain of struggle, to sexual relations themselves. In this context, Houellebecq’s fanciful account of a globalized system of sex tourism, notably as developed in Platform, is probably best read as a hyperbolic extrapolation from the inexorable economic logic of our times to the point of monstrous parody.
Houellebecq everywhere diagnoses an ever more comprehensive extension of total capital throughout culture, coupled with an ever more imperious will within total capital to self-closure – but also an ungainsayable failure of total capital to remedy or even begin to address the problems it creates (remember Dio Chrysostom). Misanthropy is the consequence of this. Indeed, we might argue that human history even fulfils itself in total capital and contemporary misanthropy together. This proves to be the case, not least since Houellebecq takes the contemporary economic obsession to be the culmination and fulfilment of the movement in which the human organism has historically long been involved, like an unstoppable growth. ‘Of all economic and social systems’, says one of his characters, ‘capitalism is unquestionably the most natural. This already shows that it is bound to be the worst’ (W, pp. 124–5). Indeed, his characters are prone to think in terms of a kind of irremediable ontological mediocrity. ‘The texture of the world is painful, inadequate, unalterable’, says the narrator of Whatever, stating that he genuinely prefers reading to living (W, p. 12).
This misanthropic vision, however, also depends on fierce rejections. In the first instance, Houellebecq rejects the long-lived and powerful traditions of the French left. These are by now, if not discredited, defunct, irrelevant. Houellebecq is resiliently atheistic but equally indifferent to any political affirmation, claiming that he belongs with the ‘absolute atheists – not simply religious atheists but political atheists’ (PE, p. 164). His disbelief in the efficacy of any oppositional politics has less to do with the memory of Stalinism or the collapse of the Communist bloc than the death of that comic piety of the post-war European left, ouvrierisme, its assertion of the revolutionary potential of the European working class. He very deliberately travesties terms formerly of great weight for the French left, like la lutte. He repeatedly asserts that he is a materialist. But his materialist thought is very precisely, even outrageously distinct from Marxist historical materialism, still more from dialectical materialism. ‘Maybe … all I have ever written’, he tells us, ‘are materialist horror stories’ (PE, p. 275). Seen materially, as Lovecraft understood, the human world may possibly be just endlessly swept by monstrous forces. If materialism has become a necessary, even an incontrovertible thought, it has also become a stimulus to grand revulsion.
Revulsion also breeds an emphatic repudiation of the humanist tradition, particularly in its soft-centred, contemporary versions, or what one of his characters calls ‘saccharine humanist blether’ (TPI, p. 344). Houellebecq continues the great French anti-humanist tradition that runs from Beckett, Bataille and Blanchot to Foucault and Lacan to Lyotard, Badiou and Meillassoux. But he is also scathing about the idea of freedom, particularly the notion of existential freedom, because of its contemporary travesty, the free market, but also in itself. ‘Theories of freedom, from Gide to Sartre’, as his fictional alter ego puts it in The Map and the Territory, are just ‘immoralisms thought up by irresponsible bachelors’ (MT, p. 115). Beyond that, Houellebecq understands humanism, above all, in its contemporary manifestations – the discourse of human rights and other liberalisms – as, like contemporary philanthropy, a veil drawn over the brutality of total capital for the purposes of general reassurance. Indeed, in one striking passage in The Possibility of an Island, he appears to suggest that, as compared to liberalism, the revolutionary mindset had at least this to be said in its favour, that it was honest enough to take the full measure of the stupid brutality of things, ‘responding to it with [an] increased brutality’ of its own.41 That is precisely the gauntlet a serious politics throws down. Do we want to pick it up? Houellebecq’s own answer, as one would expect from a misanthropist, is a resounding no. His logic is nonetheless that of a decisive break with the humanists. ‘The disappearance of humanity would be a good thing’, a prelude to the possibility of ‘another intelligent species, more cooperative, better adapted by its original tribal organization to ascend towards moral law’ (PE, p. 169).
Convinced that progressivists, humanists and liberals have no real purchase on total capital, in his willingness to strip away the fancy dress it keeps wearing to its party, unsurprisingly, Houllebecq and his work have caused a major furore. He predicts the moment, however, ‘when the reaction to my books is [recognized] to be a symptom’ (PE, pp. 277–8). A symptom of what? It is worth noting, first, that, by and large, Houellebecq’s principal antagonists have not been intellectuals, scholars or serious novelists. Had this been the case and reflected his focus, he might have attracted less opprobrium. Those who have chiefly hounded him have been journalists, the press, the media, pundits and so-called ‘literary critics’. Recent photographs of him have made him look like a pathetic, hunted figure, and he writes of his relations with the media as having ‘reached the point of all-out hatred’ (PE, p. 188). If this is so, it is because Houellebecq contests an ideological set-up that he takes to be specious and false. His enemies hate him because he disputes the conviction they more or less consciously wish to promote, the conviction, not just that capital is the only game in town, nor merely that the triumph of total capital is logical, but that total capital can be moral, can be consistent with the good, is even the good itself, is in the process of bringing us all the necessary blessings.
With hangdog, miserable stubbornness
, Houellebecq everywhere misanthropically resists the champagne screech, the whoopee culture, the euphorics of total capital. Furthermore, he does so on his enemies’ terrain. For he is a popular novelist, and democratic in that he refuses to lift himself above the people he describes. It is impossible to dismiss him as either an old leftist long past his sell-by date or an intellectual elitist. Certainly, there is a wide range of cultural reference in Houellebecq’s fiction. But it has no particular privilege relative to his other materials, and offers his characters no Olympian position in which security from and condescension to their milieux become possible. Hugo in Atomized may teach Mallarmé in school, but Mallarmé offers him no refuge at all from what Houellebecq portrays as his class’s utter indifference to the poet. Houellebecq has a wide readership that overlaps with his enemies’ own. For this they cannot forgive him. He opens up too glaring a set of differences with them. Indeed, writers like Houellebecq are popular because, again, they express a new misanthropy, or at least one that has only newly come into the glare of the lights: a democratic misanthropy, which is partly the people’s own obscure self-hatred at not being able to do better themselves.
Houellebecq himself puts matters well: his fiction has long been drastically at odds with ‘the official version’ of things, which is ‘that everything is fine, that things are getting better and better and that the only people who deny this are a bunch of neurotic nihilists’ (PE, p. 279). At its simplest, we might hear this as a declaration of war on the social-democratic culture of spin and gestion, management, though also on the culture of ‘excitement’ (W, p. 40), ‘fantastic’ innovation, infinite ‘brilliance’, corporate buoyancy and fake solidarity. There are some tellingly caustic representations of workplace-bonding in Whatever. Houellebecq everywhere arraigns the infernally upbeat mood in contemporary life. ‘It’s not that I feel tremendously low’, says one of his characters, ‘it’s rather that the world around me appears high’ (as indeed it may well be, W, p. 135). Take this a little further, and we might detect a profound if implicit dispute with the proselytizers for the ‘good society’, particularly insofar as they suppose that it can readily and even quite promptly emerge out of this one or is reconcilable with total capital.42 Houellebecq’s misanthropic novels implacably pile up the evidence against toxic positivity above all. If the Houllebecq controversy in all its ferocity is symptomatic, it may represent a moment when some at least of the discourses of toxic positivity were forced to defend themselves, as in the case of his critics, and thereby to reveal how wanting they are.
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