It’s rare now to find a woman who feels pleasure and who wants to give pleasure. On the whole, seducing a woman you don’t know, fucking her, has become a source of irritations and problems. When you think of all the tedious conversation you have to put up with just to get a girl into bed, only to find out she’s a second-rate lover who bores you to fuck with her problems, goes on at you about her exes – incidentally giving you the impression that you’re not exactly up to scratch […] it’s easy to see why men might prefer to save themselves the trouble by paying a small fee […] they find it easier just to go and find a whore. Actually, not a Western whore, they’re not worth the effort, they’re real human debris. (P, 145–6)
Presented as the age of no return for female sexuality and beauty, Houellebecq’s novels systematically condemn women over 40, particularly those who have grown up with the feminist movement, to a de-sexualized decrepitude. Charged with having brought this sexual obsolescence on themselves by their allegiance to feminism, such women are depicted as pitiful losers in the new libidinal economy, living out their remaining years in isolation and unrequited sexual longing. While the male clientele of the Thai brothel bars are described in sympathetic, even tender terms, middle-aged women who seek similar paid sexual encounters are described as repugnant and wretched figures. Sitting in a Cuban bar, a group of ‘fifty-something québécoises’ with their ‘aged, worn-out bodies’ are seen as grotesque, even lethal, in their hideous sexuality: ‘… they were thickset and tough, all teeth and blubber, talking incredibly loudly; it wasn’t difficult to understand how they had buried their husbands so quickly […] As the ageing hunk approached the table, they shot him amorous glances, almost becoming women again in the process’ (P, 215).
Far from liberating individuals from the dynamics of consumer capitalism, Houellebecq suggests that ’68 merely intensified the opportunities for the commodification of sexuality. While Platform does offer a compellingly splenetic, and at times fiercely original, account of the affects of neoliberal consumerism on sexuality, it is one finally compromised by its failure to achieve real complexity in both its logic and range. In short, the novel fails as critique as its vision of gender politics is finally too limited, resorting to an intellectually spurious concept of the ‘natural’ to articulate the concerns of culture. Standing metonymically for a more general sense of what Houellebecq has called the ‘spineless political correctness’ of culture, feminism can only be argued away back to the natural by a facile process of gender re-essentialization.53 It may well be, however, as many have argued, that this failure of ideological complexity in the novel is precisely the point and that Houellebecq’s writing points up the collapse of meaningful critique in a system so totally reified that no speaking position exists outside of its contaminated heart. Such a textuality would require a narrative and ideological balancing-act in which the text is simultaneously complicit with, and critical of, its own subject. The enthusiasm with which the idea of the ‘natural’ woman is evoked in Platform effectively compromises the novel’s satirical intentions and points up the lack of any ideological distance from the subject matter which is essential for the production of real critique.
If, in Houellebecq’s view, ’68 destroyed the possibility of a natural, essential femininity, replacing it with a calculating economic subject, then in a broader sense sex has also been destroyed as it was encouraged to move increasingly away from its traditional moral and emotional constraints. Thus, we read in Atomised it is only natural that ‘having exhausted the possibilities of sexual pleasure, it was reasonable that individuals, liberated from the constraints of ordinary morality, should turn their attentions to the wider pleasures of cruelty … ’ (A, 252–3). It is to that downward trajectory of post-’68 sexuality that I now turn.
Notes
1Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 184–5.
2Michallat, 314.
3Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Company, 1920, orig. pub 1847), 33.
4Philippe Sollers, Éloge de l’infini (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 902. See also Armine K. Mortimer, ‘The Third Closet: Sollers’s War’, Yale French Studies ‘Turns to the Right?’, 16, 117 (2009) 169–82.
5Serge Halimi, ‘France: Sarkozy’s Old Familiar Song’, Le Monde diplomatique, http://mondediplo.com/2007/06/02france [accessed 8 July 2012]. On the use of ’68 in French politics, see Daniel A. Gordon, ‘Liquidating May ’68? Generational Trajectories of the 2007 Presidential Candidates’, Modern and Contemporary France, 16,2 (2008), 143–59.
6Gilles Lipovetsky, ‘May ’68, or The Rise of Transpolitical Individualism’, in A New French Thought Political Philosophy, ed. Mark Lilla (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), 216).
7See Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, ‘The Philosophy of Restoration: Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May’, Boundary 2, 36, 1 (2009), 27–46, 29.
8François Noudelmann and Andre Piggott, ‘A Turn to the Right: “Genealogy” in France since the 1980s’, Yale French Studies, 116/117 (2009), 7-19, 9.
9Noudelmann, 8.
10‘Turns to the Right?’, Yale French Studies, Michael Johnson and Lawrence Schehr (eds), 116/117 (2009), 1–4, 2.
11Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, trans. Mary Schakenber Cattap (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), xxxiii, 19. See also Alain Minc’s L’Avenir en face (Paris: Seuil, 1984) and his notion of ‘le capitalisme soixante-huitard’.
12Works on the meaning and legacy of May 1968, particularly around its fortieth anniversary in 2008, are too numerous to be listed in full here. On the specific connections between Sade and May 1968 in Houellebecq’s writing see Liza Steiner, Sade-Houellebecq, du boudoir au sex-shop (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 2009), (36–6); Robert Gildea, ‘Forty years on: French writing on 1968 in 2008’, French History, 23, 1 (2009), 109–18; ’68, Une Histoire collective, Philippe Artières and Michel Zancarini-Fournel (eds) (Paris: La Découverte, 2008); Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May ’68 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); Mai-Juin ’68, Dominique Dammam et al. (eds) (Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 2008); and Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004). For a perspective on ’68 as primarily a youth revolt see Edgar Morin, ‘Mai ’68: Complexité et ambiguïté’, Pouvoirs, 39 (1986), 71–80, and Raymond Aron’s seminal reactionary reading in The Elusive Revolution, trans. Gordon Clough (New York: Praeger, 1969). See also processes of a conference ‘Mai ’68 en quarantaine’ by Boris Gobille et al., http://colloque-mai68.ens-lsh.fr/ [accessed 15 May 2008]; and Keith Reader (with Khursheed Wadia), The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993).
13It is important to note that the for and against ’68 involves a complex set of debates that ranges right across the ideological spectrum. Just as there was no such thing as a unique and singular ‘pensée ’68’ there really cannot be said to be a unified ‘anti-’68 thought’. Serge Audier notes that many of the intellectuals who have been dubbed as adherents of la pensée ’68 have varying responses to it. ‘Pierre Bourdieu’, Audier notes, ‘spoke of a “failed revolution” that sparked a reactionary counter-attack […] As for Jacques Derrida, he was wary of spontaneity. As he put it in an interview: “I was not a sixty-eighter”. Roland Barthes was critical of the riots and Claude Lévi-Strauss literally detested them. One exception was Gilles Deleuze in Lyon.’ http://www.france24.com/en/20080427-may-%E2%80%9968-multitude-ideas-essay-philosophy [accessed 14 August 2012].
14Serge Audier, La pensée anti-’68: Essai sur une restauration intellectuelle (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2008), 21.
15Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai ’68, ou l’héritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 2006) 20.
16Le Goff, 457.
17Régis Debray, ‘A Modest Contri
bution to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary’, trans. John Howe, New Left Review. 115 (1979), 46.
18Ross, Afterlives, 3. Her notion of the ‘afterlives’ of ’68 attempts to reinvest the moment with some of its original progressive intentionality that has been lost, she believes, in a general rightwards turn in French culture.
19Ross, Afterlives, 6.
20Kristin Ross, ‘Establishing Consensus: May ’68 in France as Seen from the 1980s’, Critical Inquiry, 28, 3 (2002), 650–76, 652.
21Boltanski and Chiapello, xxxv.
22Sebastian Budgen, A New ‘Spirit of Capitalism’, New Left Review (Jan–Feb 2000), http://newleftreview.org/II/1/sebastian-budgen-a-new-spirit-of-capitalism [accessed 30 July 2011].
23Boltanski and Chiapello, 29.
24Ibid., 28.
25Boltanski and Chiapello, xxxvi. Houellebecq’s example of this is seen in the figure of the soixante-huitard Jacques Maillot, the founder of Nouvelles Frontières who made an effortless switch from barricade to boardroom.
26Gilles Lipovetsky, ‘“Changer la vie” ou l’irruption de l’individualisme transpolitique’, Pouvoirs, 39 (1986), 99, 98.
27Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rebel Press, 2010), 114.
28Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 63.
29Crowley, ‘Wreckage’, 18.
30Cruickshank, 141.
31Abecassis, 284.
32Gopnik, 61.
33Public Enemies, 41. Houellebecq adds that his hatred of psychoanalysis is based upon an ‘extraordinary overestimation’ of his own character ‘which leads me to believe that no confession can ever exhaust the indefinite richness of my personality, that one could draw endlessly on the ocean of my possibilities’.
34Pierre Rosanvallon, La démocratie inachevée: Histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France (Paris: Gallimard, 2000, 2003), 386–87.
35Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 149.
36See Sheila Rowbotham’s remark on the ‘prevailing culture of masculinity’ in most of the counterculture until the middle of the 1970s in Promise of a Dream: A Memoir of the 1960s (London: Allen Lane, 2000).
37Ben Jeffery, Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), 9.
38Crowley, ‘Wreckage’, 21.
39Dominique Noguez, Houellebecq, en fait (Paris: Editions Fayard, 2003) and Fernando Arrabal, Houellebecq (Paris: Cherche Midi, 2005). See also Gavin Bowd, ‘Michel Houellebecq and the Pursuit of Happiness’, Nottingham French Studies, 42 (2002), 28–39.
40Jerry Varsava, ‘The Dialectics of Self and Community in Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon’, Contemporary Literature, 4 (2002), 794–803, 803.
41Ralph Schoolcraft and Richard Golsan, ‘Paradoxes of the Postmodern Reactionary: Michel Rio and Michel Houellebecq’, Journal of European Studies, 37 (2007), 349–71, 365, 366. On the question of Houellebecq’s ideological complicity with his subject matter see also Michel Waldberg, La Parole putanisée (Paris: La Différence, 2002) and Nancy Huston, ‘Writers and Writing: Michel Houellebecq: The Ecstasy of Disgust’, Salmagundi, (2006), 20–39.
42Marie Redonnet, ‘La Barbarie postmoderne’, Art Press, 244 (1999), 60–4, 62.
43Crowley, ‘Wreckage’, 19.
44Ibid., 20.
45Ibid., 22.
46Schoolcraft and Golsan, 365.
47Morrey, ‘Sex and the Single Male’, 110.
48Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 162–3.
49Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Ecliptic of Sex’, in Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (London: Macmillan, 1988), 8.
50Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974), 59.
51Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 3.
52On post-ideological feminism deploying consumption as a strategy and the depoliticization of feminism in the 1990s see Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism (London: Sage, 2009); Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York, Routledge, 2000); Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women (London: Routledge, 1991); and J. Baumgardner and A. Richards, ‘Feminism and femininity: Or how we learned to stop worrying and love the thong’ in All About the Girl, A. Harris and M. Fine (eds) (London: Routledge, 2004), 59–69. See also Nancy Fraser’s ‘Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler’, New Left Review, 1/228, (March–April 1998), 140–9.
53Interventions, 75.
5
Sex: ‘a second system’
On every floor, human beings were improving, or trying to improve, their social, sexual or professional skills or find their place within the cosmos.
(Atomised, 154)
With a take-no-prisoners declaration in the prologue that the ‘latter half of the twentieth century’ was a ‘miserable and troubled’ age, Atomised wrestles with what Julian Barnes has called, in perhaps in a somewhat overstated way, ‘big game’. Moving at a substantial narrative clip through the last hundred years or so of French history, the novel takes in a broad chronological palette, at times reading like an extended, if somewhat partisan, philosophical–sociological essay on late twentieth-century history. Its starting point is the grandparental generation of late nineteenth-century France, then hastens on to the first two post-World War Two decades, particularly attending to the major cultural, economic and social changes that took place between the 1950s and the 1990s; the post-industrial decline in manufacturing and agriculture; the post-’68 ‘sexual revolution’; New Age ‘philosophy’; the decline of organized religion; the concept of the ‘body beautiful’ and the subsequent rise in the popularity of cosmetic surgery; the collapse of the nuclear family and rise of single person living; Max Planck’s theory of quantum energy; the rise of Minitel and the advent of the internet. Leaping forward in great chronological jolts, the narrative concludes in the near future, 2079, where technical advances in biogenetics have solved the ‘problem’ of human sexuality as cloned human beings are able to fully auto-eroticize. Thus, they are rid of the troubling vicissitudes of sexual desire and the need to engage with other bodies for either pleasure or reproduction.
Written in what one critic describes as ‘overwrought declinist rhetoric’, Atomised presents the history of the West (exemplified here by France) as one of deterioration, an unstoppable downward movement towards social and ontological disintegration that inexorably moves towards its eschatological conclusion in the novel where the last human beings have vanished from the face of the earth.1 As noted earlier, the discourse of déclinisme, a particularly although not uniquely French phenomenon, holds that France is in terminal cultural and social decline, living in the shadow of its faded national glory, and in danger of losing its much-cherished exceptional status.2 The France of Atomised, and indeed of all Houellebecq’s novels, is a culturally and intellectually diminished space; a politically troubled nation state staring down its own reactionary nature in the reluctant knowledge that it has not fully addressed its colonial past and post-colonial present. No longer the nation of Racine, Molière and Proust, France is a country, as Houellebecq mischievously points out, more culturally influenced by the rap of Snoop Dog than by the Duchess of Guermantes. Atomised registers France’s ineluctable sliding, whether imagined or real, into the ‘ranks of the less developed countries’ and into what Emily Apter describes as a kind of cultural and socio-economic ‘neo-Medievalism’, a regressive social and geographic segregation that is, she claims, incipient in many Northern European countries which are fast becoming spaces of ‘abrogated sovereignty, atrophied national consciousness, and barbaric cultural atavisms’. Apter regards the déclinisme of Houellebecq’s writing ‘… with its images of existential bleakness and anarchic regionalism’ and ‘Dark Age version of global culture’ as one of t
he most striking contemporary articulations of this ‘new medievalism’.3
The most significant part of this declinist discourse in Atomised and elsewhere in Houellebecq’s work coheres, however, not around national identity or cultural disintegration but around sex; specifically, the changed nature of sexual desire as it becomes liberated from repressive societal strictures and religious interdiction and floated on the free market in an ‘authentic free enterprise culture’ of neoliberalism (W, 15). Most of Houellebecq’s male characters spend their lives maneuvering themselves towards some sort of sexual inclusion. Alternately thinking about, looking for and paying for sex, they are all, however, finally expelled from this sexual domain into a desireless, monadic isolation that is without sexual difference or social distinction. Houellebecq’s frequently quoted declaration on the ‘strictly equivalent’ relationship between sex and commerce in Whatever is central to his thesis that sexual liberalism unleashed a ‘violently hierarchical’ logic dividing people into either sexual paupers or princes. This thesis is, as we have seen, rehearsed in all of his novels but nowhere so strikingly as in Atomised.4 Sex, the narrator muses, operates ‘as a second system of differentiation’ that can produce the ‘phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never […] It’s what’s known as “the law of the market”’ (W, 99). The thesis that ‘economic liberalism’ is the ‘extension of the domain of the struggle’ to ‘all ages and classes of society’ extends most agonizingly into the sexual domain, and is explored in Atomised through the antithetical responses of Bruno and Michel to the commodifed sexual economy that exists around them. Tracing the effects of the liberalization of sexuality in post-’68 France, examined in detail in the previous chapter, Atomised describes a culture in which sex, far from being either an ecstatic erotic union or a meaningful human connection, has become simply another product to be obtained and consumed. In this way, then, sex is little more than an onanistic gesture of individuation and narcissism, consonant with the entrepreneurial view of the self as human capital that makes any engagement with another individual part of a calculated transaction rather than an organic relation. Sex becomes, then, part of the desublimated monde houellebecquien in which imitate relations between humans are another type of currency and investment under the new biopolitical conditions of neoliberalism, a proposition illuminated for the reader in one of Houellebecq’s helpful explanatory aside: ‘Pleasure and desire, [which] as cultural, anthropological, and secondary phenomena, explain little about sexuality itself; far from being a determining factor, they are in fact themselves sociologically determined’ (A, 292).
Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair Page 20