In many ways, Boltanski and Chiapello’s arguments elaborate upon earlier discussions of capitalism’s unerring ability to absorb its opponent’s discourses and to use them to make itself stronger and more palatable, examined most memorably by Henri Lefebvre in the final volume of Critique de la vie quotidienne (1981).
Thus, the very criticisms levelled against society in 1968 have been subsumed and assimilated by an economic system that learned from and strengthened itself out of that very critique that ‘appealed to creativity, to pleasure, the power of the imagination’ a liberation, Boltanski and Chiapello note, ‘affecting every dimension of existence’ was stolen away from under the eyes of the ’68ers and deployed in the service of the old order, in fact, often made the buying and selling, the whole process of accumulation a great deal easier. They say: ‘The price paid by critique for being listened to, at least in part, is to see some of the values it had mobilized to oppose the form taken by the accumulation process being placed at the service of accumulation … ’.23 In short, capitalism, in all its cunning, found ways of not only surviving the downturn of the 1970s, but actually fortified itself by incorporating the rebellious energies of its enemies and finding new, mostly cultural and aesthetic, routes to its survival. Drawing renewed vigour from its detractors, capitalism thus absorbed the potency of the left’s anti-normative critique that looked for unassimilated creative life ‘under the paving stones’, packaged it up and sold it on the open market. As Boltanski and Chiapello note, when capitalism is ‘obliged to respond’ to the critique levelled against it, it must work hard to ‘maintain the support of the troops’, who are in danger of listening to its denunciations and so ‘incorporates some of the values in whose name it was criticized ’.24 The question they pose regarding the participation, often leadership, of the ‘class of ’68’ is crucial; what is it that made this group of radicals feel ‘so at ease in the emerging new society that they made themselves its spokesmen and egged on the transformation’?25 The answer seems to be that the ’68ers have found it unproblematic to accept the spirit of the ‘new’ capitalism because the demands of their generation – for authenticity, self-determination and freedom – have been recuperated to give it an attractive veneer of liberalism and non-standardization (see the niche marketing of sex tourism in Platform); thus capitalism itself is presented as an antidote to alienation.
Freedom and self-realization, cornerstones of the youthful demands of the soixante-huitards, become the highly differentiated package holidays meticulously tailored to the individual tastes of a niche demographic in Platform and in Whatever as ‘the ability to order a hot meal online at any time of the day’. One of the crop of ex-gauchiste ‘new philosophers’, Lipovetsky is unequivocal in his opinion that ‘not only is the spirit of May individualist, but in its way it contributed […] to the acceleration of the arrival of contemporary narcissistic individualism, largely indifferent to grand social ends and mass combat’.26 It was a ‘cool’ and ‘soft’ revolution lacking in any proper historical programme and in this way was ripe to be assimilated into the artistic critique. Raoul Vaneigem provides an inkling of how this manoeuvre might operate, although from a different ideological perspective, when he notes:
Power, State, religion, ideology, army, morality, Left, the Right – that so many abominations should have been sent one after another to the wrecker’s yard by the imperialism of the market, for which there is no black and no white, might seem at first glance good reason to rejoice; but no sooner does the slightest suspicion enter one’s mind that it becomes obvious that all these forces have been redeployed, and are now waging war under different colours.27
Outside of a specifically French context, David Harvey offers a very similar analysis: ‘… the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s created an environment of unfulfilled needs and repressed desires that postmodernist popular cultural production has merely set out to satisfy the best it can in commodity form … ’.28 Many Houellebecq scholars have, of course, identified the significance of the virulent attack on ’68 in much of his writing. One of the most compelling commentators on this aspect of Houellebecq’s work is Martin Crowley, who argues that for Houellebecq the sixties ‘resulted in hypocritically pro-capitalist forms of individualism’.29 Another important Houellebecq critic is Ruth Cruickshank who, while largely agreeing with Crowley’s position on Houellebecq and May ’68, defends him, at least to some degree, against accusations of uniformly ‘discrediting the generation of 1968’ by situating his work in a more historically specific fin de siècle context. His work, she says, is ‘less an attack on soixante-huitards than a reductive attribution of the ills of turn-of-the-millennium France to the model of American liberalism adopted by the youth of the 1960s’.30
I examine now the anti-’68 offensive in Houellebecq’s novels, specifically its condemnation of sexual liberation which has, according to almost all of his work, been a wretched failure and has simply succeeded in delivering sexuality into an ever more transgressive hedonism leading either to a destructive Sadean excess that reinstates a savage Darwinist struggle between humans or directly into the hands of commercial interests. Houellebecq’s work is inhabited, as Abecassis puts it, by the restricted binary logic of the Moraliste: ‘We are condemned to choose between two bleak options; repression (the Pauline regime) or self-destruction (the Sadean racism) and nothing in between.’31 The rush to a voluptuary Sadean existence leads to death, destruction and, perhaps more importantly, straight back into the very conditions that the radicals of the 1960s sought to escape; the overweening imperial power of the market. Sexual liberation is emphatically not the holy grail of political emancipation here; in fact, it is quite the opposite as it is seen to interpellate the subject more fully into Marcuse’s ‘one-dimensional society’. Further, I argue that Houellebecq’s work suggests that ’68 has led us back to a sexual primitivism in which the violent hierarchies of alpha and omega masculinity battle it out for the attention of ever-younger females in a primal scene of antagonistic sexual competition. In a sense, Michel Djerzinski’s biogenetic project, the Movement for Human Potential, is an attempt, however improbably madcap, to counter such a sexual primitivism by restoring an ‘absolute morality’ to a genetically feminized humanity. By implanting erogenous zones all over each and every human body, all humans are permitted to participate in and enjoy Freud’s ‘polymorphous perversity’; thus, the emancipatory goal of sexual egalitarianism is achieved through science and technology rather than by any ideological or philosophical means. This purifying project is achieved not through human struggle but through über-rationalist methodologies which can be seen as the final liquidation of the legacy of ’68 and the death of its ideology and ethics, both of which have been superseded by the positivism of the scientific solution, itself a logical progression of a rationalized world view.
From Rousseau to Sade
A thesis leads this novel by the nose, and the thesis, still startling France, is that the libertarian advances of the post-’68 generations have led to a sinkhole of violence and despair: that materialism and sexual liberation end inevitably in misery, violence, and hopelessness …32
In Atomised, Bruno’s appalling sexual torture at the hands of the older boys at his boarding school in Meaux functions metonymically as an example of the beginnings of the breakdown of authority in the sixties allowing institutions to revert to a ‘state of savagery’ (A, 40). One night in March 1968, eleven-year-old Bruno, discarded by his parents and on his third boarding school, finds himself ‘naked and covered in shit’ lying on the bathroom floor after an attack by some of the older pupils who are already brutish alpha males. In the absence of the authority of either family or school, the supremacy of the most obviously powerful phallic presence is central to the establishment of the masculine hierarchy; Brasseur, the oldest boy at 14, ‘takes out his prick, which seems huge to Bruno. He stands over the boy and pisses on his face’ (A, 49). This encounter is a meaningful one, not least for its prefiguri
ng of Bruno’s later desire to urinate on his mother’s ashes but also for the insight it provides as to why Bruno strives so assiduously to become a libertine alpha male in later life. In keeping with Houellebecq’s aversion to psychoanalysis detailed in Public Enemies that is based on a belief that to confess is utterly futile as it will never ‘change anything about one’s personality’, Bruno is not permitted a chance to articulate this trauma until it is far too late and he is incarcerated in a mental institution. Thus, the harrowing experience of sexual brutality is wholly glossed over, submerged in the past, never to be examined, just like the incident in which Bruno dashes out the brains of a nearby cat after masturbating over his mother’s vagina as she sleeps naked on a bed next to her young lover (A, 35).33 Inappropriate pissing, masturbating, vomiting, dreams of castration, putrefying bodies and self-blinding, are the disturbing reactions to trauma for the Houellebecquian male, all of which take place in a wider context of the explicit and vehement denunciation of the validity of any therapeutic use of psychoanalysis despite the fact that we are told that Bruno’s experiences at the hands of Michel Brasseur, an incipient Nietzschean übermensch, likely will leave him ‘psychologically scarred for life’ (A, 52). Beginning with urination, the encounter ends with the threat of castration as a razor blade is held to the terrified Bruno’s genitals, and is the last in a long line of a stream of sadistic assaults by older pupils on the younger ones, almost always sexual in nature but all predicated on staking out a crude pecking order among the boys.
The contempt for psychoanalysis is in keeping with the pensée anti-’68 comportment of Atomised and Bruno’s suffering here is presented as a direct result of ’68, in particular the demands for more freedom in the French educational system resulting in the system of autogestion being installed in many educational establishments. Autogestion is, as historian Pierre Rosanvallon explains, ‘the refusal and contestation of all centralized and hierarchical systems’ integral to the ‘emergence of a new conception of democracy’ in 1970’s France and worked on three principal levels, the first of which ‘suggested the generalized extension of democratic procedures to the governance of all of the different spheres of social life’. More generally autogestion searched for a ‘way of transcending the procedural limits of traditional representative democracy’; and ‘finally, it corresponded to a new perception of the relation between public and private life, “self-management” looking as if it were the corollary, at once legitimate and necessary, of more specifically institutional reforms […] People began speaking, in a general manner, of the self-management of everyday life [autogestion du quotidien].’34 Described in Atomised as a ‘ministerial directive taken after the riots of 1968’, autogestion is applied to Bruno’s school with negative and violent consequences and rapidly degenerates into the undemocratic violence of the natural world. As a result of the relaxation of any external authority controlling the boys, it now ‘became easier for pupils to move around at night and soon the bullies took to staging raids on the younger boys’ dormitories as least once a week’ (A, 50). A ‘natural’ hierarchy of the young boys is thus restored, reasserting the naked Darwinian struggle of the survival of fittest in the school. This is the occasion for one of Houellebecq’s trademark semi-sociological interventions underscoring the moral message where Bruno’s housemaster Cohen takes up close to two pages detailing the ‘strict hierarchy’, the alpha, beta males and so on, of animal societies in which ‘rank relates directly to the physical strength of each member’ and the brutish, bestial rituals of dominance and submission in which the ‘weakest’ suffer ‘acts of gratuitous cruelty’. Cohen’s beliefs in the righteousness of Nietzsche’s ‘rejection of passion’ and the ‘triumph of the will’, demonstrates a particularly morose spin on the use of Nietzsche in the ‘theory’-driven anti-humanism of 1968 (A, 51, 52). Just as boys will, Lord of the Flies-like, return to a ‘natural’, which is to say, primitive and murderous way of organizing their social structure, sexuality too cannot be left to the self-determining mode of autogestion as it will degenerate into a series of mechanical orgiastic performances which simply replicate the ‘survival of the fittest’ dynamic which in turn leads to unbridled sadism and even murder.
With a significantly wider historical scope than Whatever, Atomised permits a broader canvas on which the effects and consequences of 1968 can be examined and held to account. Much of the novel is concerned with sex, and in particular with the loosening of the repressive and authoritarian binds on human sexuality freeing it from its associations with sin and dirt. This leads, however, not to erotic fulfilment and contentment but to a pervasive and, for many, lifelong sexual misery and impoverishment. As Foucault’s repressive hypothesis is reconfigured, post-’68 sexuality leads to ‘an unlimited right of all-powerful monstrosity […] which itself knows no other law but its own’.35 Houellebecq’s work argues in the strongest terms that the sexual liberation demanded by the soixante-huitards led to sadism and violence as they relentlessly promoted a society ‘where the link between sex and procreation has been broken’ and human interaction is motivated by ‘… individuation, narcissism, malice and desire’ (A, 191). The liberation of sexuality does not lead to the democratic Rousseauesque eroticism of the hippy flower-children but to ever-more transgressive models of a Dionysian/Sadean sexuality incarnated in its popular form by the diabolical but seductive figure of ‘rich, adored, cynical’ Mick Jagger, described as ‘the image of evil unpunished’. Jagger, it is suggested, represents a softer version of the sexual ‘evil’ that culminates in the demented actions of Charles Manson who was not, according to Atomised, ‘some monstrous aberration in the hippy movement, but its logical conclusion … ’ (A, 248, 253). One of Houellebecq’s paramount concerns, one might even call it an obsession, is how the ideals of free love and sexual liberation central to the alternative cultures of the 1960s succeeded only in reinforcing a more exclusive sexual marketplace now dominated by the commercial discourses of mainstream hard core pornography. Sexual liberation has resulted in the direction of sexuality into an increasingly transgressive ‘sexual abandon’ that is ‘an empty experience’ in its ‘intellectual and moral’ vacuity, exacting a heavy physical toll upon bodies (particularly those of women) which sooner or later begin to gape from multiple rough penetrations, their genitals losing any erogenous sensations through over-rough use; ‘their cunts had all the sensitivity of blocks of lard’ (A, 294). This trajectory from Rousseau to Sade begins with the Californian hippy commune of Francesco di Meola, Bruno’s mother’s erstwhile lover, and ends in the satanic sexual rituals of his son, David, a failed-Jagger figure who turns to the sadism of snuff films and finally, to sexual murder.
At the beginning of the 1970s Francesco di Meola, the son of an Italian anarchist emigrant, anticipates that the kind of utopian space attempted by the Lieu de Changement would form a crucial part of a new, leisure-rich post-war economy and sets out to profit from the aftermath of 1968 that had released a ‘time bomb of resentment suffocated under the legacy of Gaullist patriarchy’. Di Meola speculates that, in the West, economic activity will broaden to encompass ever-expanding opportunities for consumption linked to both a rise in disposable income and the growing demands for self-authentication. He also predicts that ‘the idea of leisure’ and ‘free time’ will become ‘radically different’ with many activities and pursuits previously ‘considered marginal or elitist’ becoming ‘economically important’ (A, 93). The stimulation and expansion of the mind as well as of the body will proliferate into a myriad of profitable activities to occupy those now used to the idea of their right to pleasure ostensibly espoused by ’68’s demands for personal autonomy and self-determination. Riding the wave of the anti-establishment sentiment released in the immediate post-’68 years, di Meola brings the ‘flower power’ ideas of California to France and sets up an ersatz hippy commune in Haute-Provence, a copy of one in the Big Sur where he had once entertained countercultural figures like Carl Rogers and Aldous Huxley. In
theory, the commune offers a spiritual refuge from the materialistic vulgarities of the modern world, a ‘sweeping away of Western civilisation in its entirety’, but is, in reality, a place where di Meola can get high with ‘very young girls’ whom he thinks of as ‘stupid little WASP bitches’ then ‘fuck[s] them among the mandalas and the smell of incense’ (A, 94). This is strongly reminiscent, of course, of many feminist accounts that the sixties, while bringing sexual liberation for women, also meant that they were increasingly duped by men using an idealistic ‘free love’ agenda to further their own, sometimes exploitative, sexual promiscuity.36
Another version of this is the Lieu de Changement which, as Ben Jeffery notes, functions as a ‘microcosm for one of Houellebecq’s central concerns’.37 Founded in 1975 by a group of young ’68 veterans (more in spirit than in action), the year that France began to first show the effects of the permissive society, this ‘haven of humanist and democratic feeling […] inspired by the liberal values of the early Seventies’ was an attempt to ‘create an authentic utopia’, a place where the principle of self-government, respect for individual freedom and true democracy could be practised in the ‘here and now’. The Lieu is a New Age camp complete with chanting, crystal healing, angel workshops and naked Gestalt massage. With splenetic humour, Bruno attempts to join in these activities with inevitably limited success as he is really there, of course, in the hope of finding a sexually permissive atmosphere in which he can pursue his own concupiscent interests. Not strictly speaking a commune, the Lieu began as a place where like-minded people could spend their summer holidays in an atmosphere that ‘would create synergies’ and ‘facilitate the meeting of minds’ and, with a ratio of two females for every male in the camp, provide ‘an opportunity to “get your rocks off”’, at least for the men (A, 113, 114). Naturally, one of the first things Bruno does on arrival is to rummage through a plastic bin under a condom machine to see for himself if this promised sexual activity is actually taking place. In the event, he spends his first night alone, masturbating over a copy of Swing magazine, reading its small ads and realizing, not for the first time, that ‘he did not come close to the minimum size’ required by those seeking sex. Hopefully, he muses, the hippies would be more forgiving of his phallic inadequacy (A, 118).
Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair Page 17