Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

by Carole Sweeney

  The rapid development of the information economy in the 1990s – we must recall here the Copernican changes instanced by the appearance of the first internet search engine between 1990 and 1995 – signalled the end of the material production of physical commodities for a whole stratum of workers, not only in France, but also across the world, as a new machine age began. Although immaterial labour actually only accounts for a relatively small proportion of employment in developed economies, it has nevertheless become, as Hardt and Negri say, a hegemonic form of labour that now plays ‘a foundational role in production processes’.40 Originating in the thought of Italian Marxists Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato, immaterial labour is a term describing the central importance of information, communication and symbolic or analytical activities in the production and circulation of commodities, summarized in Empire as the ‘informatization of production’.41 In Whatever, then, labour has become completely immaterial. As a well-paid ‘analyst programmer’ in the newly emergent informational economy, the narrator works with intangible data relating to French agriculture that are moved around between networks setting up ‘… the possibility of establishing various interconnections between individuals, projects, organizations and services’ (W, 38). A very familiar model to us now, at the time of writing this was a new modality of labour; computers would, as the narrator warns the bored secretaries attending his talk on integrated software, completely ‘change their lives’ (W, 55). Hardt and Negri similarly articulate this radical transformation in working practices when they assert that ‘In the passage to the informational economy, the assembly line has been replaced by the network as the organizational model of production […]’42 This reduction of visible, audible, tangible communication to invisible and intangible information extends into the domain of personal relations. ‘… Most people vaguely admit’, says the narrator in Whatever, ‘that every relationship, in particular every human relationship, is reduced to an exchange of information’ (W, 41). It is certainly true that any human interactions experienced by the narrator are at best etiolated, shrunk down to the most perfunctory exchanges with co-workers and managers in his office and impersonally dry speeches at colleagues’ leaving dos. His outlook on the world is boiled down to a set of negativities couched in the language of existential nausea: ‘… computers make me puke. My entire work as a computer expert consists of adding to the data, the cross-referencing, the criteria of rational decision-making. It has no meaning, it is […] a useless encumbering of the neurons. The world has need of many things, bar more information’ (W, 82). Communication, then, becomes reduced to information and, in turn, there is a depreciation of an essentially felt quality to human interaction, both factors that cause the narrator finally to stop speaking altogether shortly after an encounter with a particularly exasperating example of language reduced to the banalities of management discourse.

  Just before undergoing a complete mental breakdown, the narrator visits a colleague in his department and is confronted head on with the ludicrous, obfuscating language of management-speak in a passage worth quoting in its entirety:

  In the afternoon I was due to see the head of the ‘Computer studies’ department. I don’t really know why. As far as I was concerned I had nothing to say to him […] Before installing myself in this office I’d been handed a voluminous report called Directive on the Ministry of Agriculture Data Processing Plan […] It was devoted, if the introduction was to be believed, to an attempt at the predefinition of various architectural scenarii, understood within a targeted objective. The objectives, which themselves warranted a more detailed analysis in terms of desirability […] I quickly leafed through the opus, underlining the more amusing phrases in pencil: The strategic level consists in the realization of a system of global information promulgated by the integration of diversified heterogeneous sub-systems. Or indeed: It appears urgent to validate a canonic relational model with an organizational dynamic leading in the medium term to a data-based-oriented project. (W, 27)

  Meaning is utterly debased as language breaks down into nonsensical syntactic structures and verb phrases that continue to function within a whole as if an invisible consensus operates within which no one will point out the complete loss of meaning. For the ‘bad’ subject, that is, one who refuses the logic of the system, it is literally maddening, causing the narrator to malfunction within the system; he can no longer make meaning or produce output and can thus only follow Lyotard’s dictum ‘Be operational […] or disappear’.43 Increasingly alienated from the smooth-working of this meaningless language machine, in which language is made to serve the ‘aims and objectives’ culture of neoliberalism, a culture where ‘targets’ assume an unrivalled importance in immaterial labour, the narrator breaks down and contemplates a literal severance from the world. Later, he tells the psychiatrist of his desire to cut off his genitals and to gouge out his eyes and blind himself, to render himself an unsexed, emasculated, unseeing creature that would ‘inspire repugnance in other men’ (W, 145). This desire to maim his body, particularly his genitals, is of particular significance here, as it is the body and its attendant sexuality that will become the focus of the most intensive marketing in these new ‘habitats of subjectification’ and will be more explicitly the focus of Houellebecq’s next novels, Atomised and Platform. The body is an important part of one’s physical or corporeal capital, and as such must be managed and invested in ways that maximize its potential for social profit. ‘One manages one’s body’, Baudrillard notes; ‘one handles it as one might handle an inheritance’.44 The narrator is blithely spending his inheritance, routinely abusing his body with bottle after bottle of alcohol, copious amounts of cigarettes and erratically self-medicating with prescription drugs. For him, both sedation and intoxication are outside of any useful or operational purpose and, as such, offer a kind of way out of living a purely functional existence.

  Following the death of Tisserand after a disastrous drunken evening on the beach where the narrator unsuccessfully urges him to murder, the narrator undergoes a devastating mental breakdown. Diagnosing him as suffering from ‘ideational decline’, his psychiatrist informs him, in a rather uninsightful conclusion, that he is lacking any social connection and is in definite search for identity (W, 134). Paradoxically, madness appears as a rational course of action for the narrator and he is able to talk lucidly to the psychiatrist about his desire for self-erasure. In his madness, then, he has become what Zygmunt Bauman calls the ‘dirt of postmodern society’, a failed subject of neoliberalism who cannot be incited by the seductions of the ‘infinite possibility and constant renewal promoted by the consumer market’, nor by ‘rejoicing in the chance of putting on and taking off of identities’ and least of all by the endless ‘chase after more intense sensations and even more exhilarating experience’.45 He is the antithesis of the rationally consuming subject desired by neoliberal governmentality as he fails to produce within himself any governable sense of ambition, interest or aspiration.

  The narrator’s recovery from the brink of total physical breakdown is accompanied by a kind of resurgence, however tentative, of the urge to re-invest the body with a materiality, a solid quiddity of being to oppose the ‘frightening possibility’ of seeing life stripped of its metaphysical dimensions; a life entirely ‘without substance’ – ‘… I don’t understand, basically, how people go on living’ – is attenuated by a frenetic bike ride into the Forest of Mazan where nature, fulfilling a kind of primitivist rejuvenating function, gives him ‘… the impression of being present at a new departure’ (W, 147, 154). Activity, nature, being outdoors, the feel of his muscles working, sunlight on his embattled body stretched out in a forest meadow, all bring the narrator an epiphany of sorts at the novel’s close. Understanding that there is no ‘sublime fusion’ to be found; that any sense of authentic self outside of an economically dominated reality can never be found, he is reconciled to separation and that despite nature’s ‘profoundly reassuring’ pr
esence there is no sublimity to be had in commune with the natural world (W, 154–5). The best he can expect is to become as weightless as digital information, ‘an item in a file’, compressed and explicable ‘between the pages’, his reduction or transformation to a text as entry in a textbook of psychiatry brings him solace; he has become information himself (W, 150). He is, however, without shame at this thought. Having obtained some clarity of vision out of the process of breakdown, he sees the extent to which some spirit of life, a Spinozan striving (conatus), persists:

  A great mental shock restores me to the deepest part of myself. And I take stock, and I ironize, but at the same time I have great respect for myself. What a great capacity I have of grandiose mental images, and of seeing them through! How clear, once more, is the image I have of the world! The richness of what is dying inside me is absolutely prodigious; I needn’t feel ashamed of myself; I shall have tried. (W, 154)

  While the narrator of Whatever escapes with his life if not his sanity, the protagonists of Houellebecq’s next and most famous novel, Atomised, are not quite so fortunate. A more detailed elaboration of the thesis of the extension of the ‘free’ market into the affective, specifically the sexual, life of the individual, Atomised follows the lives of two half-brothers who are even more firmly entrenched in the neoliberal regime and, as such, are driven to find alternatives that are even more drastic. The novel takes in a broad historical panorama of France in the twentieth century and beyond, and one of its central concerns is what happens to the body, sex and love under a biopolitical regime that seeks to subsume all sensual and sexual human experience. This failure, or reluctance, to be the neoliberal homo œconomicus takes two distinctive paths. On the one hand, there is an attempt to enjoy the spoils of libidinal hedonism, as attempted by Bruno in Atomised, Daniel 1 in The Possibility of an Island and, to a certain extent, by the Michel of Platform, all of whom attempt to plunge headlong into the libertine world of erotic indulgence and the promise of jouissance. Disconnected from any real social relations and unable to derive any pleasure from their material affluence, these characters search for realization and fulfilment in erotic experience, a search inevitably doomed to failure because, as they come to realize, sexual desire has become one of the most thoroughly commodifed domains of affective human life. There is no longer a ‘natural’ eroticism or sensuality but simply an extension of the market principles of exchange into sexual relations. On the other hand, and in contrast to this quest for meaning through sexual activity, there is the anti-hedonist, ascetic response involving a Spartan-like withdrawal into monadic isolation away from any sensual pleasures of life, most readily identified with Michel in Atomised and with the narrator in Whatever.

  Notes

  1Hereafter, references to Whatever will be given in parentheses within the body of the text using the abbreviation W.

  2Nicholas J. Kiersey, ‘Everyday Neoliberalism and the Subjectivity of Crisis: Post-Political Control in an Era of Financial Turmoil’. Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, 4 (2011), 23–44, 35–6. Hayek cited in Karl Polyani’s The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954), 258.

  3Foucault, ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’, 258.

  4Thomas Lemke, ‘The Birth of Bio-Politics: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo Liberal Governmentality’, http://www.thomaslemkeweb.de/engl.%20texte/The%20Birth%20of%20Biopolitics%203.pdf [accessed 5 April 2013], 9.

  5Beverley Best, ‘“Fredric Jameson Notwithstanding”: The Dialectic of Affect’, Rethinking Marxism, 23, 1 (2011), 60–82, 61.

  6Michel Houellebecq, Rester vivant et autres textes (Paris: Librio, 2001), 43. Translation my own. Abbreviated henceforth as RV.

  7Antonio Negri, ‘Interpretation of the Class Situation Today: Methodological Aspects’ in Open Marxism, Vol. 2: Theory and Practice (eds) W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn and K. Psychopedis (London: Pluto, 1992), 85.

  8Foucault, ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’, 147.

  9Kiersey, 35–6.

  10Houellebecq, Interventions (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 27.

  11Martin Crowley, ‘Low Resistance’, 149.

  12Crowley, 150.

  13Michel Biron, ‘L’Effacement du personnage contemporain: l’exemple de Michel Houellebecq’, Études françaises, 41, 1 (2005), 27–41, 33.

  14Atomised, 74. The description is here loosely attributed to President Giscard d’Éstaing.

  15Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Blackwell: Oxford, 1991), 128.

  16Juan Martin Prada, ‘Economies of affectivity’, http://www.vinculo-a.net/english_site/text_prada.html [accessed 9 June 2009].

  17Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 56.

  18Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out that capitalism produces a very special kind of delirium that has ‘… its extreme cases, i.e. schizophrenics who decode and de-territorialize themselves to the limit’ (Anti-Oedipus, 121).

  19Jack Abecassis, ‘The Eclipse of Desire’: L’Affaire Houellebecq,’ Modern Language Notes, 115.4 (2000), 801–26, 811, 13.

  20Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Utopia of endless exploitation’ in Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1998, http://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu [accessed 17 April 2011].

  21Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 66.

  22Bourdieu, ‘Utopia of endless exploitation’.

  23Le Flunch is a cafeteria-style restaurant chain in France offering reasonably priced fast food in brightly coloured dining rooms. Houellebecq’s characters are often devotees of la malbouffe, that is, ‘fast’ and pre-packaged food.

  24Martin Crowley, ‘Low Resistance’, 150–1.

  25See Biron, 27–41.

  26Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 167.

  27Svend Brinkmann, ‘Literature as Qualitative Inquiry: The Novelist as Researcher’, Qualitative Inquiry, 15,8 (2009), 1376–94, 1379–80.

  28John Banville, ‘Futile Attraction: Michel Houellebecq’s Lovecraft’, Bookforum (April/May 2005), http://www.bookforum.com/archive/apr_05/banville.html [accessed 18 March 2012].

  29Interventions, 79, my translation.

  30Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on A Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005, originally pub. 1951), 63.

  31Abecassis, 807.

  32Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 178.

  33Each of the streets in this area, Marcel-Sembat, Marcel-Dassault, Émile-Landrin and Ferdinand-Buisson, is named after a prominent figure in the Third Republic.

  34On the image of the flâneur in Houellebecq’s writing see Katherine Gantz, ‘Strolling with Houellebecq: The Textual Terrain of Postmodern Flânerie’, Journal of Modern Literature 28.3 (2005), 149–61, 2.

  35Empire, 293.

  36Platform, 53, 55.

  37Empire, 293.

  38Atomised, 242.

  39Platform, 225. The gradual immaterialization of labour is the focus of Jed Martin’s artistic work in The Map and the Territory (2010). As a student at the École de Beaux Arts de Paris, Martin notes ‘from what he had been able to observe, the existence of men was organised around work, which occupied most of life, and took place in organisations of variable dimension’ (65). He sees that the ‘long historical phase of increased productivity’ is reaching an end in the West and begins taking photographs of the world’s entire stock of manufactured objects, including ‘handguns, forks, printer cartridges, diaries and suspension files’ with the aim of compiling an objective and encyclopaedic catalogue of these ‘objects that formed the backbone of Europe’s industrial success’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (70). The project lasts a full six years and produces more than eleven thousand photographs, all of which fit into a hard disk weighing ‘a little under 200 grams’ (21). The virtual weightlessness of these products, the result of over two hundred years of manufacturing, leads on to his next project in which he takes close-up photographs of a series of
Michelin maps of provincial France for an exhibition titled ‘THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY’.

  40Empire, 289.

  41Ibid., 289–94.

  42Ibid., 295.

  43Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 27.

  44Baudrillard (1998), 131.

  45Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (New York: NYU Press, 1997), 14.

  4

  Liquidating the Sixties

  Poor imbeciles. You thought you were acting in conflict against capitalism, but […] your efforts were a – if not the – key step in accomplishing the peaceful synthesis of all social relations, be they economic, political, or cultural, under the aegis of the market.1

  Kristin Ross

  Temporarily released from a psychiatric institution in which he had been confined following an incident of gross sexual impropriety in a lycée classroom, failed libertine and disgraced teacher, Bruno, sits by his estranged mother’s death-bed and whispers into her ear: ‘You’re just an old whore […] You deserve to die […] I’ll make sure they incinerate you. I’ll put what’s left of you in a little pot and every morning when I get up, I’ll piss on your ashes’ (A, 307). Mental illness notwithstanding, Bruno’s macabre fantasy envisages a symbolically apposite gesture for the denigration of both his mother’s body and the generational values that she represented. Using his omega-grade phallus to degrade his hippy mother’s remains in this grotesque act expresses a profound sense of both bodily and moral abjection which encapsulates the intense antipathy expressed in Houellebecq’s work towards the ‘spirit’ of 1968, in particular, towards its sexual spirit and the perceived effects of this on women. Houellebecq’s writing is compulsively focused on the damaging extension of ‘capitalist ethics into the erstwhile sheltered domain of sexual intimacy’ with Whatever, Atomised and Platform all variations on this thematic.2