In the years immediately following 1968, sexual liberalization led to what Houellebecq calls, rather over-simplistically, a ‘totally liberated sexual system’ in which he suggests there exists a directly isomorphic relationship between economics and sexuality.5 As we saw in the previous chapter, one of the prevailing anti-’68 views that has developed since the 1980s has characterized the countercultural opposition to a technocratic and authoritarian society as a ‘psychodrama’, a ‘soft’ revolution that was merely the precursor to individualism and the incursion of a commercial ethos into the affective domain. Every decennial anniversary of May ’68 was accompanied by an upsurge in its interpretation which can be broadly speaking summarized, as Julian Bourg notes in From Revolution to Ethics (2007), as gathered around either positive or negative poles, viewing ‘May 1968 as either the sign of a marvellous new beginning, or, with increasing frequency after the mid-1970s, as the sign of nihilistic, individualistic and anti-political tendencies’.6 The compulsion to sexual pleasure is blamed, then, on the hedonism of the soixante-huitards. The demand for pleasure was part of ’68’s insistence on notions of authenticity for the masses long denied to them by the bourgeoisie, as libertinage had historically been the exclusive prerogative of the aristocracy. As Guillebaud notes, ‘in the leaflets, slogans, and proclamations disseminated during and after May 1968, one may find this insistent denunciation of the “fascistic”, “bourgeois” and “commercial” order, which prohibits the free sexuality of the masses in order to better exploit their productive force. One finds, in parallel, the denunciation of the principle of authority, presented as the principal instrument of this oppression.’7 In these terms then, sexual freedom was part of an anti-commercialism and a rejection of bourgeois capitalism – a way of cocking a snook at the ‘straights’ and the ‘squares’. According to Houellebecq, taking his cue from a substantial body of anti-’68 thought in France, this countercultural impulse gets quickly swallowed up by capitalism and becomes coterminous with the very same capitalism it had been trying to resist. Moreover ‘free sexual consumption’, as Guillebaud argues, ‘far from being prejudicial to the new established order, meets its needs and satisfies its interests’.8
In Atomised, as elsewhere in his writing, it is very clear to which of these two camps Houellebecq belongs. He unequivocally presents sexuality as an area of human life ruined by what he sees as the indisputably harmful effects of sexual liberation. This is, of course, in itself not entirely without some mileage as a proposition and, of course, many feminist and queer theorists have noted that sexuality is an affective zone in the life-world where the ‘cultural is grafted onto the economic’ in some plainly visible ways and as such emerges as ‘a highly contested and conflicted zone’.9 What Houellebecq does is intensify the relationship between culture and commerce, to conjoin, as Cruickshank notes, ‘the private crisis of failure in sexual competition to the public struggle of neoliberal economic competition’.10 Houellebecq’s oft-quoted passage cited above that posits a homological relationship between sex and economics in which the ‘sexual system stands as a perfect analogue to the economic’ is, as I have been arguing, one of the recurring premises of Houellebecq’s work, and in fact may be the most important thematic. Although independent of money per se, sexuality is profoundly affected by the economic and at every turn in the novels considered here it is depicted as a perpetual hierarchical struggle subject to the ‘law of the market’ that creates a clear division between winners and losers.11
Sex and sexual desire are not only subject to the laws of the free and deregulated market, they become an integral part of the speculative entrepreneurial project of the self. The sexual subject of neoliberalism, as Shannon Winnubust argues, is encouraged to be an ‘endlessly self-enhancing circuit of interest’; a self-sufficient space of inwardness for whom ‘the notion of “freedom” is severed from any concern with the other—much less, the Other—as a meaningful site of relationality’. The logic of the neoliberal free-market is one, Winnubust continues, that permeates all intimate relations: ‘Turned wholly towards the pleasure of maximizing one’s interests, the neoliberal subject only registers a concern with others who are “outside” of oneself insofar as they present opportunities or obstacles to that endless self-enhancement’.12 Atomised, then, turns a quasi-ethnographic gaze on the changing nature of the body as it becomes more fully interpellated as sexual capital. Once again, however, Houellebecq’s position seems to straddle two seemingly incompatible ideological poles as his critique of post-’68 sexual liberation swings from right to left, coming to rest in some indeterminate space in between. Pointing up this ideological slipperiness, James Woods notes that Houellebecq’s writing is ‘right-wing, in that unrestrained sexuality is pinned on the degradations of the 1960s and on American self-indulgence; left-wing, in that unrestrained sexuality is likened, in Marxist fashion, to the ravages of the capitalist market’.13 This indeterminancy, then, is the rouge-brun or greyish ideological timbre of Atomised that is as intriguing as it is infuriating.
The shift in France’s middle-class attitudes towards sexuality is considered at length in Hervé Juvin’s The Coming of the Body (2010) in which he describes the radical changes that have occurred in the space of ‘less than two generations’, a time during which there has been an ‘abrupt abandonment of the world of dues and bonds for the world of the self and rights’. For a large part of France’s middle class, argues Juvin, the lines of inheritance and patrimony have disappeared as vast tranches of ‘business workers’ do not live to accumulate wealth and pass it on but rather to consume and to pursue pleasure for its own sake. As the ‘morality of satisfaction’ gradually replaces the morality of repression and self-denial we move closer, Juvin says, to a scenario in which pleasure becomes a duty.14 When this is the case, the body is put to work to fulfil the criteria that accompany that duty; it is worked out, made smooth, depilated, injected and filled until it is fit for sexual purpose and able to compete in a sexual marketplace where commodification produces a greatly weakened jouissance. This is a very profitable point of convergence for capital. By realizing that ‘the desire to spend, for its own sake, could itself be marketed’, as David Bennett notes, the cultural energies of advertising and marketing in the post-’68 years began to challenge ‘the orthodoxies of neoclassical economics and its premise of homo œconomicus’ with its rational calculations of utility versus cost, and produced a subject he calls ‘homo desiderans’ or ‘homo sexualis’ in ‘whom desire exceeds reason and is always in excess of any potential object’.15 As sexuality loses its subversive allure of transgression, it becomes democratized, almost ubiquitous; a product in a market where everything has an approximately equal value but where, in the flattening drone of consumption culture, everything becomes equally value-less. Assiduously targeted by the niche marketing tactics of a post-’68 sexual liberation, Bennett goes on, ‘… “dropping out” and “turning on” became the recreational route to full integration with consumer capitalism for the middle classes, who were finally bidden to abandon their self-definition as more repressed, more self-denying, more self-disciplining than the so-called “working masses”’.16
New social divisions are thus initiated by this idea of the body as sexual, as well as cultural, capital. In the hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion produced by liberalization of sexuality, Juvin suggests that a gap opens up in which those ‘who lack the good fortune or the means to form stable, exclusive and unpaid […] relationships’ have to make do with a second-hand or borrowed sexuality that is ‘virtual, onanistic and paid for … ’.17 It is within this ‘gap’ that Bruno Clément and Michel Djerzinski live, surrounded by ever more urgent exhortations to find personal fulfilment through sex, an environment in which pleasure and desire ‘must be constantly heightened, tweaked, and intensified by ever more finely tuned tools’ and the pursuit of sexual pleasure, no longer belonging to the space of the carnivalesque or the festival, is a fundamentally commercial one that is central
to the ‘distinguishing promise of neoliberalism’. In such a scenario, then, sexuality is, as Winnubust argues:
… no longer something to be feared, avoided, moderated or domesticated. In previous ontologies of Christianity, liberalism and even Marxism, pleasures were conceptualized as tied to desire, which was driven by a lack. In the social rationality of neoliberalism, these pleasures are unhinged from fulfilling any need or lack or desire: they are detached from any register of evaluation other than that of endless self-enhancement […] Compulsive repetition, indifferent to the object, becomes the meaning of ‘enjoyment’ for the neoliberal subject, displacing any teleological story of a subject fulfilling a need.18
In this way, then, sexuality is an integral part of the self-interested struggle at the heart of affective neoliberalism, an important part of its psychological ability to produce a certain type of subjectivity, or, as Dany-Robert Dufour puts it, to ‘shrink heads’.19 Viewed through Lyotard’s idea of a libidinal economy, the yoking of sex to neoliberal economics is, as Morrey notes, to see that the workings of sexual desire are really ‘contiguous to, and often overlapping with, the flow of capital and, as such, just as impersonal … ’.20 It is worth recalling again here that this is by no means a new insight. This link between the external economic order and the sexual one has long been noted by feminism; indeed, one of feminism’s most valuable exposés has been the uncovering of the patriarchal basis of capitalism.
As I have discussed earlier, one of the most significant manoeuvres of neoliberalism is the conflation of the private and the public spheres so that gradually the personal and private domain is thoroughly occupied by what was previously external, nominally at least, to the self, that is, the economic sphere. Thus, the outside becomes inside and vice versa, a transformation that has some serious repercussions on sexuality. As Abecassis notes, every ‘detail of the private and personal occupies a place within an erotic-consumer sphere […] each detail is labelled and thus the whole fabric of the personal becomes integrated into the generalized economy driven by erotic marketing’.21 This reduction of sexual desire to a mercantile transaction, ‘an ideal trading opportunity’,22 produces very different effects on Michel and Bruno, eliciting paradigmatically contradictory responses; Michel withdraws altogether from the body into a virtually sexless world of scientific rationalism that seeks to surmount the problem of the body and sexuality through the promise of mechanical certainty while Bruno valiantly, but ineffectively, attempts to inhabit the overblown sexual system ruled over by ‘Eros-driven marketing’. Both responses end, not only in a retreat from the contingent sensuality of everyday, but also in tragedy. Michel takes his own life driving over a cliff in Ireland; Bruno ends his days locked away in a psychiatric hospital, still visiting prostitutes but wholly incapable of feeling any sexual pleasure; the Michel of Platform ends his days alone in a sweltering, seedy room on Naklua Road after his lover, Valérie, is killed by terrorist bomb. This, then, is the arc of sensual withdrawal tracing the retreat from both desire and affect, and finally from life itself. This chapter examines the trajectory of that withdrawal through the antithetical ‘solutions’ Houellebecq offers to the problem of sex; either libertine participation or a stoic acceptance of failure and subsequent withdrawal, both of which, I argue, have the same end point – a kind of pure space in which the body and its libidinal energies are silenced and stilled.
A (very) brief history of sexuality
Adumbrated in a chapter of little more than nine pages, chapter four of Atomised offers a brief overview of some the key socio-economic changes of early twentieth-century France that provides a context for the emotional and sexual difficulties of the ill-fated half-siblings Michel and Bruno. The chapter opens with a description of the life of Michel’s maternal grandfather, Martin Ceccaldi. Born in 1882 in Corsica to ‘illiterate peasants’, Ceccaldi’s movement away from the rigours of agricultural labour is used as a sociological case study; his life was to become ‘entirely symptomatic of the role played by secularism throughout the Third Republic’(A, 24–5). Ceccaldi is a ‘symptomatic individual’: ‘Carried forward by the sweep of history and their determination to be a part of it, symptomatic individuals lead lives, which are, in the main part, happy and uncomplicated’. Crucially, these types of individuals are more or less content with their levels of sexual activity within and occasionally outside of marriage. Encouraged by a sympathetic teacher who recognized the boy’s aptitude for ‘abstract thought’ and who saw that he was gifted with a ‘singular destiny’, Ceccaldi is educated out of his social class, moving from the rural labouring classes into a career in engineering via the prestigious corridors of the École Polytechnique.
Giving a set of snapshots of certain ‘symptomatic individuals’ rather than a detailed account of twentieth-century history, Houellebecq adopts a somewhat idiosyncratic, often scattershot, way of ordering these social groups: he sets the lives of particular individuals against those of another group designated as ‘precursors’. This latter group are ‘merely catalysts’ rather than ‘revolutionaries’ or ‘prophets’ whose lives are linked to ‘some form of social breakdown’ and are thus are more ‘torturous and confused’ (A, 26). Michel and Bruno’s wayward mother, Janine, belongs to this category. Unrestricted by loosening religious interdictions or moral prohibitions, she pursues a sexual trajectory which would have been unthinkable for the previous generation. Dancing le bebop in Paris with a dazzlingly ugly Sartre ‘during the existential years’, consorting with celebrities on the Riviera and enjoying a wide assortment of lovers, Janine’s sexual attitudes and behaviour prefigure the imminent sexual revolution of the 1960s. Meeting the ‘somewhat hirsute’ young surgeon Serge Clément they become a prototypical ‘modern couple’, producing Bruno in 1956 (A, 28). Very quickly, however, they realize that ‘the burden of caring for a small child was incompatible with their personal freedom’ and before long separate (A, 28). Returning from a filming trip in China to their house in St Maxime, Serge encounters evidence of shocking maternal neglect when he finds their house full of naked, drunk people and the abandoned toddler Bruno whimpering wretchedly and crawling around alone in ‘pools of urine or excrement’ (A, 31). The child is sent off to live in Algeria with his maternal grandmother. Janine’s relationship with the filmmaker Marc Djerzinski produces Michel in 1958 who is soon packed off to his grandmother as the couple go their separate ways. Not long after, she meets Francesco di Meola, the Italian–American co-founder of the Esalen hippie commune in Big Sur California, and moves to America to join this commune. She does not see her children for 15 years. Rejected and abandoned by their different sets of parents, Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Clément each grow up with the values of the grandparental rather than the parental generation.
Born at the tail end of the post-war Baby Boom in the 1950s, crucially, both boys are too young to experience the events of 1968, coming to sexual maturity in the decade of the 1970s at the end of the post-war spike in the birth rate when sexual liberalism has reached a certain apogee, in France at least, in terms of a so-called cultural permissiveness.23 The 1970s occupy an important place in Atomised. In particular, 1974 is singled out as the year in which the growing ‘moral relativism’ reaches a critical point in French culture and society, an opinion borne out to some extent by the juridical events of that year: the Veil Act legalized abortion, adultery was removed from the penal code paving the way for divorce by mutual consent and the age of consent was lowered (A, 80). Culturally, there was a discernible escalation in the importance of the ‘cult of the body’, a new idea of the body as a perfectible product that could be improved by exercise and cosmetics. The popularity of ‘exotic’ foreign locales prevalent in magazines, on television and in the cinema was bound up into an eroticized discourse epitomized in films such as Emmanuelle, Just Jaeckin’s 1974 soft porn film – ‘a manifesto for the leisure industry’. This is a moment at which the idea of ‘lifestyle’ becomes a marketable product, part of a context of an increasin
gly hedonistic sense of freedom, particularly sexual freedom, catalysed undoubtedly by the decline in the influence of Catholicism in France. Under the ‘law of the market’ in a ‘totally liberal economic system’ a materialist way of life is established in which any idea of religious or spiritual transcendence is replaced by the ascendancy of ‘determinist anthropology’ which is ‘more moderate in its ethical counsel’ than the religious beliefs of the previous two centuries (A, 80–1).
Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair Page 21