Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

by Carole Sweeney

  Under neoliberal capitalism, the dynamics of reification penetrate more fully into the interiority of the subject so that all human life becomes incorporated into the calculable field of rationalization and totalization. This penetration has reached such a point, argues Slavoj Žižek, that we have arrived at a historical phase of capitalism necessitating a renegotiation of the classic Marxist notion of reification as extant Lukácsian terms are no longer adequate for the task of fully addressing the acceleration of the cognitive and affective reach of capitalism in its neoliberal form. Unlike liberalism’s more clearly demarcated division between the public and the private, work and leisure, self and state, the sphere of activity of neoliberal capitalism has no such obviously defined beginnings and ends. Its topography, as Catherine Chaput points up, emerges out of the ‘imploded borders’ of the formerly liberal world and is made up of ‘blurred boundaries that fold into one another’ in a psycho-economic landscape in which ‘… time accelerates, space collapses, and distinctions between such classic demarcations as agent and subject or politics and economics erode’.7 This is, Žižek argues, neoliberalism functioning as what one might call ‘cultural capitalism’ in which the very stuff of ‘social relationality’, far from being invisible is the ‘direct object of marketing and exchange’ and that ‘… one no longer sells (and buys) objects which “bring” cultural or emotional experiences, one directly sells (and buys) such experiences’.8 Writing in Acts of Resistance (1998), Pierre Bourdieu defines neoliberal capitalism as nothing less than a ‘new kind of conservative revolution’ which:

  … appeals to progress, reason and science (economics in this case) […] and so tries to write off progressive thought and action as archaic. It sets up as the norm of all practices, and therefore as ideal rules, the real regularities of the economic world abandoned to its own logic, the so-called laws of the market. It reifies and glorifies the reign of what are called the financial markets, in other words the return to a kind of radical capitalism, with no other law than that of maximum profit, an unfettered capitalism without any disguise, but rationalized, pushed to the limit of its economic efficacy by the introduction of modern forms of domination, such as ‘business administration’, and techniques of manipulation, such as market research and advertising.9

  Such ‘unfettered capitalism’ knows no limits to its subsumption and perpetually thrusts the subject into a milieu in which everything is reduced to exchange value. While this is by no means a new concern in either modern literature or political thought, it is almost exclusively the focus of Houellebecq’s writing. In a prose style commensurate with the flatness and utilitarianism of the disenchanted world of his characters, he plunges them into isolation, madness and death, as a result of their failure or refusal to invest wholeheartedly in this system of exchange that demands we accept the idea of self as a thing. Beneath the graphic descriptions of sex and the deadpan humour, lies a profoundly melancholic despair; a poignant sense of loss that something has passed away in human relations. As the subject is transformed into an economic object of exchange, his characters find the constant negotiation and exchange of the sexual market unsettling and painful. The male protagonists do attempt, for a short while at least, to go along with the pantomime of these relations, always hoping to find some kind of redemptive, authentic alternative to this process of reification through the medium of young woman’s bodies. However, in the final account, all of Houellebecq’s protagonists are very bad, botched subjects of neoliberalism as they are fundamentally indifferent to the rewards on offer to the victors in this system and have consistently failed to worship at the altar of what Walter Benjamin has called the ‘cultic religion’ of capitalism.’10

  Growing up in the 1950s in a post-war France economically and politically shaped by dirigisme (state economic control) Houellebecq entered adolescence in the post-’68 era, a beneficiary of many of the consequences and few of the pleasures of the sexual revolution. As such, his views of 1968 and the ‘breakdown’ of sexual and personal morality are, to say the least, negative. In Houellebecq’s estimation, while 1968 represented a progressive movement away from the oppressive strictures of Catholicism, it also marked the definitive end of social collectivity and enduring kinship relations and, most importantly in his view, delivered up the subject to rapacious market forces. Using sexual emancipation to stand synecdochically for 1968, Houellebecq writes: ‘The sexual revolution was to destroy the last unit separating the individual from the market’.11 With the disappearance of the nuclear family, meaningful religious rituals and older social forms of deference and politesse, the individual becomes an entrepreneurial self who operates almost exclusively on an economic plane in every sphere of life. Much of the interest of Houellebecq’s work, then, lies in the intensity of his assertion that the commodifying discourses of neoliberalism were invited in by ’68 and have subsequently colonized every last fragment of affective human existence, and in particular sex and sexuality. Liberated in the great rush of post-1968 anti-establishment cultural politics, sexuality and human desire have been drawn more systematically into the logic of the market which in its ‘permanent state of war’ is forever looking for new things to sell.12 This is a situation commented upon at some length by Jean-Claude Guillebaud who argues that sexual liberation has gone from being ‘yesterday’s fresh “subversion”’ to a pivotal part of a ‘commercial machinery’ and now ‘… far from contravening the rest of the great liberal market and the commands of money, the ambient permissiveness indisputably serves one and the other. And in a thousand ways, erotic hedonism, even unwillingly, has become part of a well-defined market’.

  In ways that are comparable to an anti-’68 school of thought epitomized in many regards by Gilles Lipovetsky (to whom I shall refer later), Houellebecq locates the origin of the inversion of ethical values in the sexual revolution of the 1960s.13 Of course a few years before 1968, Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964) had famously theorized the relationship between reification and sexuality: ‘It has often been noted that advanced industrial civilization operates with a greater degree of sexual freedom—‘operates’ in the sense that the latter becomes a market value and a factor of social mores’.14 Although this hypothesis has been elaborated upon and in many ways superseded, its central supposition is remarkably consonant with Houellebecq’s ideas in Atomised and Platform. In a world stripped of the last vestiges of religious communality, Houellebecq’s protagonists all suffer from a surfeit of freedom that, far from liberating them sexually, existentially or socially, paralyses them in the knowledge that they must regard themselves and others through the quantitative lens of consumption. This idea of an unbounded freedom, with its ‘free-floating’ and ‘unbound capital’ so crucial to the neoliberal project has scant regard for any social consequences or ethical responsibilities and, as Zygmunt Bauman says, represents the abandonment of an idea of social cohesion and an ‘unprecedented […] disconnection of power from obligations: duties towards employees, but also towards the younger and weaker, towards yet unborn generations and towards the self-reproduction of the living conditions of all; in short, the freedom from the duty to contribute to daily life and the perpetuation of the community… ’.15

  The assertion that capitalism is extending ever further into all areas of human life and particularly into relations between humans is, of course, merely an echo of Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto's declaration that capital ‘has resolved personal worth into exchange value’ and ‘… has left remaining no other nexus between person and person than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”’. Noting its capacity to engulf and replace the most sublime reaches of human spirituality, Marx and Engels also note the ability of capitalism to drown out ‘the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation […] and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Tra
de’.16 This account of capitalism as an almost infinitely resourceful energy that calculates human worth in monetary terms develops into a complex and highly influential critique of commodity fetishism that has preoccupied many Marxist and post-Marxist accounts of culture and society and, in particular, theories of reification, over the last century.17 Defining reification as a process that penetrates ‘the very depths of man’s physical and psychic nature’ and in which the ‘rationalization of the world appears to be complete’, Lukács’s seminal description of reification still remains valuable. Under the forces of reification, Lukács argues, relations between people assume ‘the character of a thing’ and within a totalized society the individual subjectivity of a person is translated into that of a ‘thing’, a commodity. This process leads to the full ‘atomisation of the individual’ which is, in fact, ‘only the reflex in consciousness of the fact that the “natural laws” of capitalist production have been extended to cover every manifestation of life in society; that – for the first time in history – the whole of society is subjected, or tends to be subjected, to a unified economic process, and that the fate of every member of society is determined by unified laws’.18

  Under neoliberalism, understood as a new and more assiduous form of reification, every subject must be made both an effective consumer and entrepreneurial manager, as the self increasingly becomes both an object to be exchanged and consumed just like any other, and also a project of personal development to be inserted into the wider corporate whole. One particularly astute review of Atomised summarizes this dynamic in Houellebecq’s work: ‘Citizens have now turned into customers, who cannot conceive of a future, let alone of an afterlife, except in terms of increasing wealth and the acquisition of consumer products for status and satisfaction […] Individualism, the antechamber to barbarism, is the grave of communal life and ultimately of civilization.’19 The world presented in Houellebecq’s writing, then, is an ideologically collapsed one in which there are no longer any clearly delineated demarcations between inside and outside, between public and private, and where the mark of a successful life is one where the subject is most fully realized as a viable and profitable entrepreneurial project; but it is a picture that refuses any kind of Marxist explanation, rather it typifies the Left-Conservative concerns of rouge-brunism. An ex-Marxist philosopher who describes himself as an advocate of a similarly ‘conservative-liberal-socialism’, Lesek Kolakowski adopts an ideological position comparable to that of Houellebecq. In deliberately non-Marxist terms, Kolakowski describes reification as the ‘transformation of all human products and individuals into goods comparable in quantitative terms’ bringing about ‘the disappearance of qualitative links between people; the gap between public and private life; the loss of personal responsibility and the reduction of human beings to being executors of tasks imposed by a renationalized system; the resulting deformation of personality; the impoverishment of human contacts, the loss of solidarity … ’.20 Many of Houellebecq’s ideas and words sound close to that of Marxist critique but his steadfast refusal of Marxism, indeed of any political understanding of this dynamic, is integral to the inconsolably bleak timbre of his writing.

  I argue here, and in the following chapter, that Houellebecq’s writing charts the transformation of subjectivity enacted by neoliberalism in which it imprints the macro-economic system on the private psycho-social domain, which then gradually permeates and subsumes every social, sexual and familial relation. With no viable effective ideological opposition to what Derrida calls its ‘manic, jubilatory, and incantatory form’, neoliberal capitalism ‘repeats and ritualizes itself’ until it becomes naturalized as the human condition and as the only possibility of living.21 This reading begins by examining how neoliberalism is distinct from earlier manifestations of capitalism, tracing its emergence out of three successive spirits of capitalism; approximately distinct eras in which the mechanisms of capitalism moved from that of industrial production to a proliferation of the economies of consumption and the exponential intensification of finance capitalism that rendered the working of the market ever more invisible and yet never more pervasive in its reach. I examine the ways in which neoliberalism is not only a theory of political economy but also, and much more importantly, an ideological project that attempts to construct a model subject who willingly submits to increasingly privatized social relations and ‘a social reality that it suggests already exists’.22

  I also suggest that the four novels considered here all, in one way or another, demonstrate the ways in which this most recent mutation of capitalism conceals its more brutishly ideological workings by giving the appearance of offering freedom and choice and the idea of personal autonomy. Houellebecq’s work thus recognizes that neoliberalism has managed to assimilate the discourse of its own critique in order to better adapt to the ethical climate of its time by disguising itself in the languages of self-actualization, personal authenticity and moral freedom that were once the very charges mounted against it by its most passionate enemies in the 1960s and 1970s. This tactic allows it to present potentially unsettling changes, for example to labour and workplace practices such as short-term contracts and outsourcing, as ‘hip’ commendably non-hierarchical, flexible and ‘connexionist’ labour practices that allow for greater freedom of the individual, all of which were the goals of post-’68 critique.23 Crucially then, once ingested in this way, critique and resistance are purged of any ideological content and are utilized to allow for the smoother working of the capitalist machine. Thus, business and entrepreneurialism are now made to appear as if they were a cosy chat between equals in an apparently democratized workplace that favours the faux-domesticated and infantilized concept of ‘dress-down Fridays’. Houellebecq is one of the first writers of his generation to address some of the implications of this new spirit of capitalism, which has restructured not only the workplace but also more generally labour patterns across a lifetime. In its most sociological mode his writing offers a commentary on the transformation of the socio-economic world and the affective changes wrought by such changes.

  First then, I consider the development of neoliberalism from its origins in the immediate post-World War Two period to its consolidation in the Chicago School and the economic thought of Milton Friedman; through its development in the 1970s in the context of the global oil crisis, then to its emergence proper in the 1980s where it was promulgated most famously by Ronald Reagan in the US and by Margaret Thatcher in Britain.24 Arguing that a particularly subjectifying type of reification lies at the heart of the neoliberal project, I examine Foucault’s ideas of governmentality and why the intensification of reification is central to neoliberalism’s biopolitics. Very briefly tracing the development of later capitalism from the end of the nineteenth century to its third and most recent mutation in the 1990s, I move on to more recent definitions of neoliberalism drawing on, among others, the influential work of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s Weber-inspired tome, The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005) which offers an analysis of these changes in a specifically French context.

  Neoliberalism: A rascal concept

  A complex concept to define with any exactitude, the debates around the term neoliberalism have been characterized, as Neil Brenner and Jamie Peck suggest, by ‘a perplexing mix of overreach and underspecification’ and marked by statements that are ‘promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested’. Unsurprisingly then, critics have often tussled over the exact meaning of the term; it has a complex doubled semantic valency in that it designates both policy and ideology or, more simply stated, it is both theory and practice. It has become, then, something of a ‘rascal concept’ as it is ‘simultaneously, a terminological focal point for debates on the trajectory of post-1980s regulatory transformations and an expression of the deep disagreements and confusions that characterize those debates’.25 Capitalism has undergone several phases of transformation and, inevitably, there are differences of opi
nion about the exact nature of these changes but for the most part economic commentators are in agreement that there have been three significant stages of development.26 Broadly speaking then, neoliberalism might be regarded as the third spirit of capitalism. As a theory of political economy, neoliberalism is, says Harvey, a revival of the eighteenth-century liberal doctrine about freedoms and individual liberties ‘connected to a very specific view of the market’.27 Historically rooted in the principles of classical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economic liberalism propounded in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in 1776 and advocated by John Locke, David Hume and Alexis de Tocqueville, it replaced the Keynesian post-war consensus of state regulated capitalism that had largely dominated Western economies from 1945–85, rising to rapid prominence with very little resistance to become, not just a dominant paradigm, but the only way of thinking about political economy. Its turning point, at which it became most strongly politically endorsed and legitimized, came in the decade of the 1980s with a process of deregulation and rapid financialization of both the UK and US economies. As noted, its most famous proselytizers and practitioners in those countries were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and then, later, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.