Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

by Carole Sweeney

  If we want the individual to become master of his own destiny and free to take an increasing number of decisions, here is what should not be done: increase the powers or the dimensions of an already multi-tentacled administration; nationalize enterprises which do not perform a public service – to do so would be either to deliver them to the technocracy, or to ‘étatize’ them and have them be directed by a small number of bureaucrats of the central administration not responsible to anyone; planify the economy, which would be the same as to give a few men the power to decide for several millions; suppress initiative and competition.54

  In his examination of what comprises the ‘spirit’ of capitalism, Weber suggests that the moral dimension motivating and sustaining capitalism in its earlier manifestations was provided by the external moral and psychological system of Protestantism. Without such a clear religious doctrine on which to call, neoliberalism has drawn on the increasingly secular aspects of Western society, presenting the benefits of the free and unregulated market – freedom, authenticity, flexibility, autonomy and self-actualization – as moral and philosophical ones and in doing so has substituted the market for religion; indeed, it offers the market as religion.

  Central to this ‘new spirit of capitalism’ is a diminishment of any sense of a viable exteriority or opposition to this system summed up of course by Margaret Thatcher’s evangelical apophthegm ‘There is no Alternative’ that has been deployed in French as la pensée unique. This overpowering sense of a lack of an outside, of any kind of elsewhere, is the topography of Houellebecq’s novels as they articulate the sense of entrapment within an infernal circuit of individualism and materialism, one that denies any possibility of an outside to the logic of the neoliberal cultures, that is, the complete disappearance of any opposition to this process. Houellebecq shows that the process itself can endlessly assimilate and use this resistance, now in its weak, non-ideological form, to ensure its continued smooth working. The success of ‘standard neoliberal toolkit’ has transformed political thinking, says Susan George, successfully inverting theories of political economy in less than fifty years. ‘The transformation of thinking has been dramatic’, she argues, and its most troubling aspect is the lack of any viable opposition to the idea that ‘… the market should be allowed to make major social and political decisions, the idea that the state should voluntarily reduce its role in the economy, or that corporations should be given total freedom […] that citizens be given much less rather than more social protection’, all of this has been neutralized as the only political, cultural and economic reality of our times.55 Resistance is futile. Metaphysical resistance is particularly ineffectual as the possibility of a philosophical alternative is equally shattered, as Martin Crowley notes, ‘… we have locked ourselves into a reductive materialism of performance and profit which relentlessly pulls the rug out from under our metaphysical impulses’. Any aesthetic or cultural solace is even less tenable; at every turn, Houellebecq’s work narrates the futility of culture to offer anything other than a stark reminder of the state of things.56

  Neoliberalism as biopolitics

  Michel Foucault’s series of lectures from 1978 to 1979 on ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’ at the Collège de France are highly persuasive accounts of what he termed the governmentality of everyday life. The lectures develop his ideas on the mechanisms of biopolitical subjectification, providing an explanation of how neoliberalism seeks to govern subjectivity or mentalities, thus reaching much further into the processes of subject formation than any previous forms of capitalism have ever managed. Foucault’s focus here, then, is how this neoliberal subject is produced through increasingly non-ideological (in the traditional sense of the word) forces. While there are obvious philosophical discontinuities between Marx and Foucault, there is nonetheless a productive relationship to be harnessed between the two, and one which, as Bob Jessop argues, may help us to understand via Marx ‘the how of economic exploitation and political domination’ and ‘the why of capital accumulation and state power’ provided by Foucault’s ‘analyses of disciplinarity and governmentality’.57 In his analytics of power offered in these lectures, Foucault moves away from his earlier genealogical approach to an analysis of the modern sovereign state that encompasses the Ancient Greeks to modern neoliberalism. Any analysis of the subject in Western civilization, Foucault argues, has to acknowledge not ‘only techniques of domination but also techniques of the self’ and, crucially, the interaction between these two. Such an explanation would:

  … take into account the points where the technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to processes by which the individual acts upon himself […] The contact point, where the individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves, is what we can call, I think, government. Governing people, in the broad meaning of the word, governing people is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflict between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself. 58

  In Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality, neoliberalism is understood, as Thomas Lemke explains, not just as the ‘extension of economy into the domain of politics, the triumph of capitalism over the state’ but as an altered state of the political where the apparent retreat of the state is in reality an expansion of government that acts on the private body – the self – rather than the body politic. Foucault further suggests that neoliberalism, despite its outward appearance to the contrary, is a form of anti-humanism that has profoundly negative social and affective consequences for human society through its demotion of the importance of ‘traditional’ experiences in favour of individualism and the promotion of ‘flexibility, mobility and risk taking’ that endangers ‘collective bonds’ and threatens ‘family values and personal affiliations’.59 Many affective and kinship relations are replaced by relations of utility and rationalization and in this way a population comes to be defined as human capital rather than as a society. Acknowledging the severing of institutional and familial ties and filiations in the later stages of modernity, Foucault describes this as the beginning of the reign of homo œconomicus marked by, among other things, the political investment of the body as capital. Houellebecq’s work, then, examines the possibility of any intimate bonds in such a scenario. Specifically, he asks what happens when love and sex are no longer protected by the taboos and prohibitions that marked earlier generations but are now determined by the logic of commercial transaction. Sexual liberation was simply ‘another stage in the rise of the individual’ that allowed sex and desire to be fully opened up to market forces.60 The destruction of collectivism at the level of the workplace is mirrored, then, in the domestic and personal domain where the collective of the family has been assailed by the incitement to pursue individual pleasures and desires that are incompatible with the ethos of the family unit. Paradoxically, just at the moment that sexuality is liberated from demands for restraint and moral compliance, especially for women, it is folded into an economic dynamic of exchange which has also become increasingly unworkable for those who are failing to profit through a new sexual entrepreneurialism. Sexual desire is no longer spontaneously or freely given (if indeed it ever truly was) and has moved away from any sense of the ‘natural’ into the realm of the cultural and the economic. Thus, sex and sexuality function as a kind of yardstick with which to measure the effects of neoliberalism on the private body.

  Hardt and Negri refine Foucault’s concept of biopower as that which seeks to regulate ‘social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it. Power can achieve an effective command over the entire life of the population only when it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and reactivates of his or her own accord’ and further state that it is, in essence, the culmination of capitalism’s long-term project in which ‘… the increasingly int
ense relationship of mutual implication of all social forces that capitalism has pursued throughout its development has now been fully realized’.61 The individual subject is produced by the ‘invisible’ biopower of neoliberalism in which the idea of any outside or exteriority is almost unthinkable; it is now nigh on impossible to separate capital from any idea of the superstructure beloved of old-school Marxist critique, as Jason Read notes: ‘Capital production today has either directly appropriated the production of culture, beliefs, and desires or it has indirectly linked them to the production and circulation of commodities’.62

  Situating his work in a longer literary tradition, Houellebecq’s work is not, as some critics have suggested, a direct heir to the politically engaged French novel that has offered critiques of commodity fetishism and reification in ways seen, for example, in Georges Perec’s Les Choses (1965) or de Beauvoir’s Les Belles images (1966).63 Neither is it a contemporary incarnation of Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem’s Situationist ethos that fulminated against the ‘extension of commodification’.64 Houellebecq’s vision is exponentially bleaker, more despairing, than that of his predecessors, as in his view there exists no point of exteriority to the system as any outside is always already in the process of being assimilated into the all-encompassing logic of consumer materialism. As Maurizio Lazzarato notes of neoliberalism, ‘We are here far beyond the various theories of domination (e.g. Frankfurt school, Situationism, Bourdieu’s sociology)’.65 For better or for worse, all the metanarratives really have died this time; religion, family, nation state and ideology have been replaced with promises of individual happiness and freedom delivered by the invincible forces of the market. Without God, Marx or the Father, the human subject is thrown back on itself only to find that the ways of living under such conditions seem to boil down to a stark choice between joining in or withdrawing, hedonism or melancholic asceticism. Houellebecq’s response lies caught somewhere between these two seemingly paradoxical stances – his is an ascetic hedonism, one might say, or otherwise put, depressive anhedonia. The results of such an annihilation of any political, ontological or philosophical alternatives are registered in Houellebecq’s characters who struggle with living in a world with no sense of any outside or elsewhere, one in which human responses are reduced to the simple binaries of participation or withdrawal, a dynamic reminiscent of Baudelaire’s ‘spleen and ideal’ responses to modernity as Kolakowski notes:

  A hypothetical world from which the sacred had been swept away would admit of only two possibilities: vain fantasy that recognizes itself as such, or immediate satisfaction which exhausts itself. It would leave only the choice proposed by Baudelaire, between lovers of prostitutes and lovers of clouds: those who know only the satisfactions of the moment and are therefore contemptible, and those who lose themselves in otiose imaginings, and are therefore contemptible. Everything is contemptible, and there is no more to be said. The conscience liberated from the sacred knows this, even if it conceals it from itself.66

  Describing in detail the total subsumption of society by capital, Houellebecq’s writing probes the workings of these processes and demonstrates the ways in which the ‘incorporation of all subjective potential, the capacity to communicate to feel, to create, to think’, is turned into ‘productive powers for capital’.67 Stated differently, and in post-structuralist terms that Houellebecq himself would doubtlessly abhor, his work is an engagement with what Deleuze and Guattari have described as capitalism’s ability to affect the micro-spaces of the psyche.68 Absolutely nothing, according to his novels, is able to avoid the reach of neoliberalism and its promotion of flexibility, differentiation and freedom. Houellebecq’s work, then, speaks to a very particular set of historical moments which witnessed not only the ‘hegemonic victory of consumer capitalism’,69 but more specifically a fundamental, even irreversible, realignment of the relationships between labour, capital and the social order.

  The 1990s witnessed a new era of largely unobstructed neoliberalism that is described in the beginning of Atomised as the point at which the ‘rise of the global economy’ made competition much fiercer among nations (and indeed within them) and perhaps even more significantly put a definitive end to France’s political dream of ‘integrating the populace into a vast middle-class with ever-rising incomes’. It was also an era, Houellebecq notes, in which ‘whole social classes fell through the net and joined the ranks of the unemployed’,70 a historical point at which the French model of state was being threatened, if not exactly superseded, by the Anglo-Saxon free market model, what Pierre Bourdieu described as ‘the new global vernacular’ of neoliberalism.71 It would be misleading, of course, to suggest that neoliberalism has been experienced homogenously across the globe and it is important to note that in France it has operated on a different chronological plane and to a different degree to the US and Britain. In many ways, as Alain Touraine has pointed out, it is rather mistaken to ‘talk of extreme neoliberalism in a country […] where the state still controls half its resources, either through the welfare system or by intervening in economic life’.72 Due in part to public support for the need for state-run industries and utilities across the whole political spectrum France was, to a large extent, sheltered from the more aggressive aspects of the earlier phase of neoliberalism and initially it had nothing like the overall impact that it did on Britain and the US. However, as the 1980s wore on into the 1990s France saw an expansion of privatization which became, as Monica Prasad observes, ‘the most noticeable feature of French neoliberalism’.73

  In their authoritative account of the changing workplace practice and managerial discourse in the periods 1968–75 and 1985–95, Boltanski and Chiapello describe the new workplace in the France of the 1990s as a restructured post-Fordist space emphasizing flexibility, immateriality and affective input from its workers who are asked to emotionally ‘invest’ in their jobs. Situating their arguments within the wider neoliberal directives of deregulation – privatization and the shrinking back of the state – they demonstrate that the qualities of flexibility, labour immateriality and affective cooperation are crucial to the new neoliberal workplace:

  The flexible network is presented as a distinct form between market and hierarchy, whose happy outcomes include leanness of the enterprises, team-work and customer satisfaction, and the vision of leaders or coordinators (no longer managers) who inspire and mobilize their operatives (rather than workers). The ideal capitalist unit is portrayed as a self-organized team that has externalized its costs onto sub-contractors and deals more in knowledge and information than in manpower or technical experience.74

  In their analysis, gone is the Taylorist figure of the mass worker along with the certainty of long-term contracts and jobs for life as expectations of job security are whittled away by the idea that mobility and flexibility represent increased freedom and creativity for workers whose labour is now another commodity to sell on the open market. Boltanski and Chiapello argue that this new, infinitely more precarious, white collar workplace is one in which ‘the bureaucratic prison explodes’ as the chains of command are fractured into several ‘networks with a multitude of participants’. Post-Fordist workers, all ‘self-organized, creative beings’, have their labour dispersed over several projects in shifting teams that are led by ‘line-managers’, rather than the old-fashioned, top-down model of a boss, all possessing the necessary vision and innovative skills to ‘mobilize’ their workers: ‘Now no-one is restricted by belonging to a department or wholly subject to the bosses’ authority, for all boundaries may be transgressed through the power of projects […] With new organizations, discovery and enrichment can be constant.’75 Thus, one might say that post-Fordism in the workplace is the parole to the langue of neoliberalism.

  The time of the neoliberal or post-Fordist worker is rather paradoxical, as on the one hand it is compelled to be as efficient as possible, organized to squeeze speed and effectiveness out of every last minute of the flexible working day, a day that often ex
tends into ‘free’ time. On the other, there is a compulsion to treat this free or leisure time as if it were a job and to maximize the pleasure and the intensity of the non-working hours; as Gilles Lipovetsky notes of both work and non-work, ‘what counts is self-transcendence, a high-voltage life’ in a social domain that is effectively an ‘extension of the private sphere’.76 Conversely, Houellebecq’s characters are remarkable for their complete lack of interest in their own surplus value and thus they are, as we shall see in the next chapter, all bad subjects of neoliberalism. His characters are not remotely interested in any form of cultural capital and their failure to achieve what Marcuse calls a ‘libidinal cathexis’ to any merchandise or services is their one truly distinctive attribute. In a society that depends on ‘uninterrupted production and consumption’, the bad subject of neoliberalism’s failure to cathect to ‘the services he has to use (or perform), the fun he has to enjoy, the status symbols he has to carry … ’ results in its permanent malfunction.77 While they are nominally exemplary beneficiaries of this neoliberal system, no matter how hard they try Houellebecq’s characters are unable to raise sufficient interest in investing in the concept of the self as entrepreneurial project but soon learn that there is nothing outside of this idea and are faced with a choice between an empty Dionysian hedonistic participation played out through sexual pursuits, the choice of the would-be libertine, or ascetic withdrawal. Demonstrating the undesirability of each of these two options, le monde houellebecquien is one suffused with a deep sense of despairing anguish over the lost possibility of plenitude and transcendence. With only minor variations, Houellebecq’s writing repeats this thematic in each of his novels, but it is in his first novel, Whatever, where this thesis is first articulated.