Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

by Carole Sweeney

  According to David Harvey, neoliberalism in its contemporary guise had been ‘lurking in the wings of public policy’ since the late 1940s when its origins can be traced back to the Austrian political philosopher Friedrich von Hayek’s creation of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947. In The Road to Serfdom (1944) Hayek writes of the moral basis of this new type of economic thought that is arranged around the central importance of personal freedom. Together with the economist Milton Friedman and a group of like-minded philosophers, historians and academics, Hayek elaborated a new version of liberalism fashioned from existing versions of classical liberal economic theory which had at its heart the core doctrine that insisted on ‘individual freedom from coercion and servitude’. Hayek further posited that there is a natural moral link between economic freedom and individualism:

  Only where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests […] has our decision moral value. Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.28

  Notable here is the vehemence of the moral pitch, which although articulated in more secular tones than the earlier Weberian Protestant capitalist spirit, nevertheless continues the quasi-evangelical belief that the free market is the ‘well spring of freedom’, both moral and physical, which can only be obtained through completely unfettered competition. This idea of unencumbered capital as crucial to moral freedom will become one of the key aspects of neoliberal discourse which urges the individual to be free by plugging into the circuits of choice and self-differentiation in which one can turn oneself into an entrepreneurial project with endless accumulation potential, which in turn guarantees maximum freedom.29 It is crucial to appreciate fully this emphasis on the importance of freedom that stands at the centre of neoliberal ideology. Its devotees believe that human freedom is achieved by the shrinking back of all state intervention and, further, that this is not ideological but natural as the declining power of the state liberates the ‘natural’ laws of the market which in many parts of the world had been held in check since the 1920s by either Fascism or Communism.

  In its most basic theoretical sense, neoliberalism can be understood as the most recent version of global market capitalism. Unlike the liberal capitalism of the post-war Keynesian era however, it is capitalism with the welfare gloves well and truly off. ‘Neoliberalism’, Harvey notes, ‘seeks to strip away the protective coverings that embedded liberalism allowed and occasionally nurtured.’30 Neoliberal policies advocate a radical shrinking back of the state in all matters of national governance save for fiscal ones where it actively encourages policies favouring free trade, financial deregulation and the unfettered flow of transnational capital that seeks the lowest possible costs as it roams across the planet looking for cheap labour. There is an economic emphasis on consumption rather than on production and on a global scale, a shift of financial power away from accountable, democratically elected national governments into organizations such as the WTO, the IMF and the Federal Reserve. Above all, neoliberalism advocates the importance of private property and the private rights of the individual and particularly encourages, therefore, strong private property rights among citizens.

  Lasting roughly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the first stage of capitalism was a mercantilist one that would develop into the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, located in the workshop and the factory. This first spirit of capitalism was, as Max Weber writes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5), guided by Protestant principles that placed a central importance on thriftiness, patrimony and inheritance and especially on the deferral of pleasure in favour of saving. The summum bonum of this capitalist ethic was ‘… the strict earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life’ is regarded as ‘purely as an end in itself’; a goal with such self-discipline and self-denial is ‘closely connected with certain religious ideas’.31 Hence prudence, avoidance of any hedonism or extravagance around either body or capital, was central to this earlier stage of capitalism where saving for the future was consonant with strong religious beliefs.

  This first phase developed gradually into the Fordism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a model favouring large centralized bureaucratic corporate structures in which capital produces on its own the means of production. The site of Fordist production was the large-scale factory that produced increasingly standardized goods through a very strict division of the workers’ labour. Lasting until the Great Depression of the 1930s, this phase ended when the speculative financial bubble burst provoking an intense crisis of financial confidence and significantly altered attitudes towards the moral mission of capitalism. Thus, a second stage of capitalism emerged which would last roughly from the 1930s though to the 1970s. Largely based on the thinking of British economist John Maynard Keynes, this model involved increased state intervention, a strong commitment to social welfare provision and a commitment to full employment.32 In North America, the recession and oil crises of 1972–3 were the stimuli for the post-war Western economies’ movement away from Fordism with its four principle tenets of production: standardization, mechanization, Taylorist scientific management and assembly line, to post-Fordism. Boltanski and Chiapello summarize how the ‘ponderous, rigid industrial systems inherited from the Taylorist era, with its concentration of workers, its smoking, polluting factory chimneys, its unions and welfare states’ were condemned to ‘inevitable decline’ around this time by, not only the oil crisis, but also by the emergence of ‘… new technologies, changes in consumer habits, diversification of demand, increasing rapidity of the life-cycle of products … ’.33 The late 1970s also began to see the dual characteristics that would come to characterize much of neoliberal policy: the retrenchment of the state and a deregulation of finance capital, both increasingly underpinned by a strong commitment to the free market monetarist zeal that reached its apogee in the post-Cold War Reagan–Thatcher era.34 At this point, there was a discernible turn away from a managed Keynesian economic policy based on clear boundaries between nation states to increasingly borderless global trade that developed into a more settled ‘third way’ neoliberalism of the mid-1990s in which the ‘third machine age’ and the more cognitive aspects of the information economy gradually replaced the Fordist industrial model.

  Central to neoliberalism, then, is a shift from industrial capital to an economy serviced by the less visible, even spectral forces of finance capital, which has resulted in, as Fredric Jameson has noted, ‘the gradual disappearance of the physical marketplace’ and the escalation of activity, often circumventing national politics, around a wider range of financial services, investment, accumulation, hedge funds, futures and derivatives, as creators of wealth rather than the previously used GDP yardstick of goods and industrial production.35 Alongside this increasing spectrality of capital is the proliferation of avenues of consumption and a growing differentiation in the range of cultural products and the emergence of the knowledge economies. Describing the transition from production to post-Fordist consumption as one of the most important changes in a neoliberal economy, Stuart Hall suggests this involves ‘a greater emphasis on choice and product differentiation, on marketing packaging and design, on the “targeting” of consumers by lifestyle, taste and culture rather than by category of social class; a decline in the proportion of male, skilled, manual working class, the rise of the service and white-collar classes’.36

  Crucially, neoliberalis
ts do not regard their policies as ideological per se but as a return to the ‘natural’ order of things, an order often fraught with insecurity and anxiety as it is only minimally shored up by the social safety-net of the welfare state; under neoliberal policies public projects such as social housing, unemployment and sickness benefits and socialized medical care are whittled back to a bare minimum. In the post-Fordist workplace, there is a insistence on flexibility, a reduction of worker’s benefits, sub-contracting, part-time labour, short-termism and (ostensibly) non-hierarchical management structures and a repeated affirmation of the positive potential of this set-up that transforms what might be regarded as undesirable social atomization and labour instability into the illusion of individual choice. Workers become encouraged to interpellate themselves, not as workers in any collective sense, but as individual entrepreneurs of their own labour; private companies of one. In this way, the precariousness of fixed-term contracts and limited workplace rights is sold to them as an opportunity to work on their business spirit and to sharpen their spirit for competition. What is required from the ‘restructured’ worker in this increasingly precarious workplace, says Maurizio Lazzarato, is that his or her ‘personality and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organization and command’. Thus, what is at stake here is the demand that the whole of the human being be transformed into capital, hence Margaret Thatcher’s claim in her précis of Chicago neoliberalism: ‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.’37 What Thatcher articulates here is an apposite description for the construction of the neoliberal subject as the logic of political economy is restructured as biopolitics. Post-Fordist labour becomes not only increasingly immaterial but in its strategy of subjectification neoliberalism makes the worker’s ‘soul become part of the factory’ and capitalism is permitted to shape a life-world from the inside out.38 This reduction of the worker to a singular competitive entity is understood in neoliberal doctrine as the ultimate in individual freedom and autonomy but in practice it is, says Harvey, a ‘dissolution of social solidarities’ producing a pervasive sense of uncertainty and instability and contributes to the wider sense of anxiety and the dynamics of ‘crisis formation’ within capitalism.39

  The production and transfer of knowledge becomes central to much neoliberal economic activity as labour, mostly for the middle classes, moves towards more intangible activities. Central to the radical reorganization of labour, was the rapid development of information technology in the 1980s and 1990s and in particular, of course, the coming of the World Wide Web in 1992. The electronic revolution, as Ferruchio Gambino notes, radically restratified labour, dividing it into ‘a relatively restricted upper level of the super-skilled, and a massive lower level of ordinary post-Fordist doers and executors’.40 Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979) presciently outlined the crucial role that the transformation of knowledge into information would play in the new era of Western capitalism where ‘learning’ and ‘knowledge’ can ‘fit into the new channels and become operational’ only if they can be ‘translated into quantities of information’.41 Thus, as Jason Read argues, neoliberalism is unique as an ideological structure as it is not generated by the state or by a dominant class, but ‘from the quotidian experience of buying and selling commodities from the market, which is then extended across other social spaces, the “marketplace of ideas”, to become an image of society’.42All of this, then, contributes to the transition to a post-industrial paradigm that entails a shift to not only immaterial goods, but also to immaterial labour and it is this idea of immateriality that will be important for a biopolitical understanding of neoliberalism.

  Neoliberalism has evolved in other very particular ways outside of the purely economic or labour-based concerns that allow its penetration into the affective domain of the individual to shape the corporeal and sensorial spaces of everyday human life. As Mark Fisher states: ‘What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture.’43 What, then, are the effects of these changes on the subject? How did neoliberalism as an ideology that seemed to be ever-retreating from the realm of the political become, in Foucault’s terms, a form of governmentality? And how did the advocates of neoliberalism convince its citizens that ‘human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skill within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’?44 In short, how did neoliberalism go from a theory of political economy to a biopolitical advocation on the care of the self? The most comprehensive post-Foucauldian exposition of this new form of decentred and deterritorialized global capitalism is to be found in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s millennial work Empire (2000). The definition offered of neoliberalism (although it is notable that Hardt and Negri rarely use that term) is one that suggests its focus is as much on ‘the production of social life’ as it is on the economic, and further that it has created a life where the ‘economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another’.45 It is the overlapping and blurring of these boundaries, in particular between the economic and the affective, that might be regarded as one of the most important characteristics of neoliberalism.

  While many commentators have pointed up the aggressive rationalizing economic logic of neoliberalism and its broadening of the idea of what constitutes the market, it is not, as political theorist Wendy Brown notes, ‘simply a set of economic policies’ as it is ‘not only or even primarily focused on the economy’. Neoliberalist policies, Brown continues, certainly believe in ‘facilitating free trade, maximizing corporate profits, and challenging welfarism’ but the deeper incursion of neoliberalism at the level of subjectivity represents a new form of biopolitical governmentality that ‘reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject’ and ‘involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action … ’46 As much concerned with the psycho-social internalization of this logic at the level of the subject as with fiscal policies promoting deregulation and the separation of the economy and the state, neoliberalism is distinctive from the laissez faire economic liberalism characterized by Adam Smith’s self-regulating, invisible hand of the market. In its operation everything – the state, culture, the social world and the psyche – is open to market forces and a new kind of subsumption through entrepreneurialism. Subsumed too, is ideology in any meaningful political sense; in such a comprehensively ‘marketized’ environment the mantra of ‘personal freedom’ and ‘individual choice’ replaces any systematic understanding of the political. The neoliberal exhortation to believe in the importance of individual freedom and choice concomitantly urges the subject to view itself not as part of a wider human collective that might share communal rituals based on kinship and belief but as a site of self-organization; a mini-enterprise that invests its energies into maximizing personal and monetary profit. The severing of the subject from the fabric of the social is central to neoliberalist ideology, mirroring the ways in which capital is encouraged to disembed itself from social and political constraints.47 As noted, one of Houellebecq’s most quoted lines effectively functions as the determining hypothesis of his whole oeuvre, namely that ‘unrestrained economic liberalism’ (he never calls it neoliberalism as the French interferes in the translation) and the ‘extension’ of the ethos of the market ‘to all ages and all classes of society’ that ‘seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market’ produces little but alienation and anxiety.48 The focus of Houellebecq’s work, however, is clearly not the economic or fiscal aspects of neoliberalism, but rather the ways in which the biopolitical processes of neoliberalism produce subjects in whom the idea of the self as a privatized entrepreneur, culturally, emotionally, professionally, and sexually, has become naturalized and in the process leaches away feelings
of sublimity and pathos. In Houellebecq’s novels it is in the realm of affective human intimacy, particularly sexuality, that this process of desublimation is most intensely felt, thus, we see in his work a focus on the synergies between the sexual and material economies.

  Under neoliberalism, then, we are compelled to be free; an obligation that generates something of a paradox as the stronger the insistence on the importance of individual choice, distinction and freedom the more homogenous, standardized and thoroughly monocultural the fabric of everyday life becomes; any sense of otherness must either assimilate or disappear. Naturally, this has serious consequences, not only for the relationships between one human being and another but also for both culture and religion as both have traditionally, in different ways, offered a sense of transcendence or sublimity that escapes administered life. As Bewes notes, ‘a society in […] which no non-administered reality exists any longer – in which there is no sublimity, no aura is possible – is one in which art becomes untenable except purely as an institutional, instrumental or commercial pursuit’.49 Again, while this is scarcely a ground-breaking revelation, it is nevertheless something to which Houellebecq’s writing continually gestures.

  It is crucial to the neoliberal mission in a society in which everything is open to the forces of the market, to emphasize that privatization and individualism are understood by its subjects not as disintegrative or negative moral forces prising apart the deep vertical structures of kinship, collectivity and cooperation, but as an intensification of freedom, the calling card of neoliberalism. Indeed, one might argue that it neoliberalism’s ability to present itself as utterly non-ideological, to produce the ‘appearance of ideology as its own opposite’, that could be called, in its own commercial vernacular, its unique selling point (USP).50 Neoliberalism is not then, simply a ‘new ideology’, as Jason Read points up, but rather ‘a transformation of ideology in terms of its conditions and effects’, a process whereby the ideological content is wholly concealed by its transposition into an ethical discourse.51 Such a transformation is at the core of the neoliberal hegemony as it eradicates all sense of itself as ideological by its seductively normative veneer that has allowed it to become the most ‘successful ideology in history’.52 As noted at several points so far, central to what might be called the ethical dimension of the neoliberalist project is the quasi-evangelical conviction that human freedom can only be achieved through economic competition and that competition is one of the greatest goods. In this way then, neoliberalism becomes ‘an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human emotions and substituting for all previously held beliefs’.53 Thus, the withdrawal of the state from vast areas of public life through increased privatization is presented not as a regressive movement but rather as the opportunity for greater personal freedom and individual self-governance. In a speech from 1976 in which he emphasizes the moral, even philosophical, imperative behind the idea of freedom and private choice, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing declares that the free market can ‘deepen […] the new liberties of everyday life’ and that society should ‘decentralize boldly in enterprise’ and in everyday life: