Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair
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Notes
1Whatever, 99.
2David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.
3Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Polity, 2008: orig. pub. 1848), 13.
4Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Boston: MIT Press, 1971), 93, 100.
5Timothy Bewes, Reification, or, the Anxiety of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002), ix, 3.
6Gajo Petrović, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, (eds) Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V. G. Kiernan and Ralph Miliband (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 411–13.
7Catherine Chaput, ‘Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 43, 1 (2010), 1–25, 2.
8Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 139.
9Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance (New York: Free Press, 1998), 35.
10Walter Benjamin, ‘Capitalism as Religion’ in Selected Writings: 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 288.
11Atomised, 206.
12Platform, 28.
13Jean-Claude Guillebaud, La Tyrannie du plaisir (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 67.
14Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 74.
15Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 9–10.
16Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 3.
17The genealogy of important work here includes Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923); the whole of the Frankfurt school Herbert Marcuse Jürgen Habermas; Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (1991) and Everyday Life in the Modern World (1994); Guy de Bord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967); Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’. Social Text 1 (1979), 130–48; Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects 1968 (1996), The Consumer Society 1970 (1998), For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign 1972 (1981) and from the standpoint of biopolitical power and governmentality Michel Foucault’s Lectures at the College de France, 1978–79: The Birth of Biopolitics (2008).
18Georg Lukács, ‘Reification and the Consciousnesses of the Proletariat, in Cultural Theory: An Anthropology Imre Szeman and Timothy Kaposy, (eds) (London: Wiley–Blackwell, 2011), 177.
19David Coward, Times Literary Supplement (16 September 2005), 21–2.
20Lesek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 334–5.
21Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 38.
22Thomas Lemke, Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique (London: Paradigm Books, 2012), 13.
23For ways in which this has most recently been examined see Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) and One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Random House, 2000).
24It is a widely held belief that the first truly neoliberal regime was established in 1973 after Augusto Pinochet’s coup against the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile.
25Neil Brenner, Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore, ‘Variegated Neoliberalization: Geographies, Modalities, Pathways’, Global Networks, 10, 2 (2010), 182–222, 283–4.
26On the history of capitalism in the twentieth century and the rise of neoliberalism see Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times (London: Verso, 1994); Krishan Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society: New Theories of the Contemporary World (London: Blackwell, 1995); Ash Amin, Post-Fordism: A Reader (London: Blackwell, 1994); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Gilles Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times (2005), and Le Crépuscule du devoir: L’Ethique indolore des nouveaux temps démocratique (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). See also Bob Jessop, ‘Post-Fordism and the State’ in Bent Gaeve, Comparative Welfare Systems (London: MacMillan, 1996), 165–85; Radical Thought in Italy, (eds) Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On the relationship between pedagogy and neoliberalism see Henry Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2008).
27Sasha Lilley, ‘On Neoliberalism: An Interview with David Harvey’, Monthly Review (June 2006), http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/lilley190606.html [accessed 2 October 2012].
28Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 2005, first pub. 1944), 231–3.
29Neoliberalism and Everyday Life, Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton (eds) (McGill: Queen’s University Press, 2010), 10.
30Harvey, 168.
31Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2005, first pub. 1930), 53.
32There are important differences between these three stages in the US/UK and French contexts. On the latter see Richard Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Harvey Feigenbaum and Jeffrey Henig, ‘The Political Underpinnings of Privatization: A Typology’, World Politics, 46, 2 (1994), 185–208; Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas and Sarah Babb, ‘The Rebirth of the Liberal Creed: Paths to Neoliberalism in Four Countries’, American Journal of Sociology, 108, 3 (2002), 533–79; Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas and Bob Hancke, ‘Revisiting the French Model: Coordination and Restructuring in French Industry’, in Varieties of Capitalism, Peter A. Hall and David Soskice (eds) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 307–34; Chris Howell, Regulating Labor: The State and Industrial Labor Relations Reform in Postwar France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left: Studies in Labour and Politics in France, 1830–1981 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986); Michel Marian, ‘France 1997–2002: Right-Wing President, Left-Wing Government’, Political Quarterly, 73, 3 (2002), 258–65; Timothy Smith, France in Crisis: Welfare, Inequality and Globalization since 1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Bruno Théret, ‘Néo-libéralisme, inégalités sociales et politiques fiscales de droite et de gauche dans la France des années 1980’, Revue Française de Science Politique, 41, 3 (1991), 342–81; Viven Schmidt, From State to Market? The Transformation of French Business and Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
33Boltanski and Chiapello, 195.
34In Britain, the opening up of the City to outside investors in October 1986 was so momentous that it was named ‘The Big Bang’. Many critics and economic historians have argued that financial deregulation has been absolutely crucial to neoliberalism. Deregulation began on 15 August 1971 with the abolition of the Bretton Woods Agreement ending the system of fixed international exchange rates and thus paving the way, as Boltanski and Chiapello argue, for ‘The deregulation of financial markets, their decompartmentalization, and the creation of “new financial products”’ which has ‘multiplied the possibilities of purely speculative profits, whereby capital expands without taking the form of investment in productive activity’.
35Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 275.
36Stuart Hall, ‘Brave New World’, Socialist Review 91, 1 (1991), 57–84, 57–8.
37Ronald Butt, ‘Mrs Thatcher: The First Two Years’, Sunday Times, 3 May 1981.
38Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labour’, http://www.g
eneration-online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.html and in M. Hardt and P. Virno (eds), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 133–47, 30. See also ‘From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life’, Ephemera. 4, 3 (2004), 187–207, 187. For an insightful overview of the Italian laboratory thinkers and autonomous Marxism, see Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, ‘In the Social Factory: Immaterial Labour, Precariousness, and Cultural Work’ Theory, Culture & Society 25.7/8 (2008), 1–30.
39Harvey, 69.
40Ferruccio Gambino, ‘A Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation School’, thecommoner, 12 (2007), 39–62, 44, http://www.commoner.org.uk/12gambino.pdf [accessed 27 July 2012].
41Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 4.
42Jason Read, ‘A Genealogy of homo œconomicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity’, Foucault Studies, 6 (2009), 25–36, 26.
43Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (London: Zero Books), 9.
44Harvey, 2.
45Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), xiii.
46Wendy Brown, ‘Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy’, Theory & Event, 7, 1 (2003), 1–21, 3.
47Harvey, 3.
48Whatever, 99.
49Bewes, 122.
50Žižek, 65.
51Read, 26.
52Iain Boal and Michael Watts, ‘The Liberal International’, Radical Philosophy, 140 (2006), 40–4, 41.
53Paul Treanor, ‘Neoliberalism: Origins, Theory, Definition’, http:/web.inter.nl.net.users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism [accessed 13 July 2011].
54Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Democratie française (Paris: Arthème Fayard, [1976] 1979), 16–17.
55Susan George, ‘Emerging Opportunities for Structural Change’ (1999), www.globalexchange.org/compaigns/econ101/neoliberal.html [accessed 24 July 2012].
56Martin Crowley, ‘Low Resistance’, in On Bathos, Sara Crangle and Peter Nicholls (eds) (London: Continuum, 2010), 148.
57Bob Jessop, ‘From micro-powers to governmentality’, Political Geography, 26 (2007) 34–40, 40. Emphasis added.
58Michel Foucault: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 203–4.
59Lemke (2012), 6, 11. See also ‘“The Birth of Bio-Politics”: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality’, Economy and Society, 30, 2 (2001), 190–207.
60Atomised, 135–6.
61Empire, 23–24.
62Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (New York: SUNY Press, 2003), 2.
63Ruth Cruickshank argues that Houellebecq updates Georges Perec’s ‘critique of nascent consumption’ in his 1965 novel Les Choses, 128.
64Bowd, 31.
65Lazzarato, ‘From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life’, 191.
66Lesek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 74.
67Read, 33.
68‘… civilisation is defined by the decoding and deterritorialisation of flows in capitalist production’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 244.
69Crowley (2010), 148.
70Atomised, 74.
71‘La nouvelle vulgate planétaire’ (my translation). Pierre Bourdieu, Interventions 1961–2001: Science sociale et action politique (Marseilles: Agone, 2002) 443–9. Here, Bourdieu describes Tony Blair and his chosen scribe of neoliberalism, Anthony Giddens, as epitomizing this new global economic order.
72Alain Touraine, Beyond Neoliberalism, trans. David Macy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 20.
73Monica Prasad, ‘Why is France so French? Culture, Institution, and Neoliberalism, 1974–1981’, The American Journal of Sociology, 111 (2005), 357–407, 358. Prasad notes that the reforms of Alain Juppé, while opposed by mass strikes against the reform of private sector pensions and healthcare, succeeded in carrying out significant privatization of the financial sector: ‘80% of the banking sector and 50% of the insurance sector’ as well as carrying out major restructuration of the public sector out of which 12.6% of the total workforce were moved into the private sector’, 367.
74Sebastian Budgen, A New ‘Spirit of Capitalism’, New Left Review, 1 (2000), http://www.newleftreview.org/II/1/sebastian-budgen-a-new-spirit-of-capitalism [accessed 15 June 2011].
75Boltanski and Chiapello, 73, 75, 90.
76Gilles Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times (London: Polity 2005), 9.
77Herbert Marcuse, ‘Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society’ (1967), in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), http://www.wbenjamin.org/marcuse.html [accessed 30 June 2011].
3
(Bad) Subjects of Neoliberalism
I don’t like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me.
Whatever, 831
‘Neoliberalism is not’, says Nicholas Kiersey, ‘just an authoritative discourse; it is a way of life’ and central to this are the twin objectives of free enterprise and private ownership which are the ‘essentials of freedom’.2 As we have seen, under neoliberalism’s exhortation to a new ‘way of life’, modified forms of behaviour and thought are encouraged, both in terms of public and private behaviours, ones that are more thoroughly interpellated by a third spirit of capitalism which sets the subject adrift in a deregulated network of social, cultural and labour relations. Thus, a new form of subjectivity is brought into being. In Thatcher’s terms, this is the changed soul, and in Foucault’s, the homo œconomicus – the ‘eminently governable’ individual who is willing to regard him or herself as human capital and who is capable of responding ‘systematically to systematic modifications artificially introduced into the environment’.3 The view of the subject as human capital requires individuals to ‘invest’ in themselves as private individuals rather than social entities and to accept that they are, as workers, no longer dependent on a company, or on a job for life with clearly defined hierarchies and roles, ‘but are autonomous entrepreneurs with full responsibility for their own investment decisions and endeavouring to produce surplus value; they are the entrepreneurs of themselves’.4 Houellebecq’s writing, and in particular his first novel, Whatever, describes this new biopolitical paradigm of subjectification that produces its subjects within a societal regime of internal control rather than external discipline.
Reading this first novel, then, this chapter examines how the spirit of neoliberal capitalism with its model subject of the homo œconomicus has inserted itself into everyday life, into both the physical and the affective domains of human existence. Houellebecq’s writing demonstrates a new modality of power – biopower – which has successfully displaced ‘the disciplinary modality of power that is associated with social formations of governmentality’.5 Articulating the ways in which culture, beliefs and desires are subsumed by neoliberalism’s relentless belief in the moral values of ‘market society’, his writing speaks to an altered context of human relations, one described in Rester Vivant as a ‘… form of civilisation where the entirety of human relations, and equally the entirety of relations between man and the world, are meditated through a simple numerical calculation that involves attractiveness, novelty, and value for money’.6 Stated otherwise, as Antonio Negri has observed, this is a society in which ‘the factory spreads throughout the whole of society […] production is social and activities are productive’.7 However, as we shall see in this chapter, Houellebecq’s protagonists are all, without exception, bad subjects of neoliberalism. Failing to extract any surplus value from their lives by eschewing any interest in the accumulation of any cultural or material capital, they are devoid, one might say free, of any ambition or aspiration. The world around may urge him to compete, consume and to extract the maximum d
egree of personal freedom from the range of choices of goods and services, but for the protagonist of Whatever his ‘only real ambition’ is to carry on chain-smoking. Unexcited by money and work, bored to tears by the idea of free time, and utterly indifferent to exhortations to distinguish himself professionally or culturally, he is wholly indifferent to the ethos of the ‘enterprise society’.
The antithesis of the Foucauldian homo œconomicus, the ‘man of enterprise and production’8 who busily makes his entrepreneurial mark on the world, the narrator has a life that seems both ‘empty and short’, one negatively defined by the almost imperceptible impression that he makes on his world: ‘The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory’ (W, 46). Incapable of being devoured by the seductive lure of consumer products or by consumerism itself, Houellebecq’s characters are unmoved by the idea of the production of themselves as an entrepreneurial project. ‘Good’ neoliberal subjects are those who can be defined by the sum of their choice of goods and services to most fully realize themselves in ‘the pursuit of a form of capital’.9 If a subject is utterly indifferent to most forms of capital, in particular to the gradations and distinctions of cultural capital, as are Houellebecq’s characters, then they cannot function easily, or at all, in such a society; they have failed to have their souls altered. I trace here then, the processes and effects of neoliberal subjectification that interpellate individuals as rational units networked into a society in which the boundaries between commodity and non-commodity no longer exist and where those between work and non-work have become blurred. This is a society where all human relations have become subject to the logic of exchange and where we all become buyers and sellers entering into negotiations over the ‘numerical calculation’ of the ‘quality-price relation’.10