Notes
1Jerry Varsava, ‘Utopian Yearnings: Dystopian Thoughts: Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles and the Problem of Scientific Communitarianism’, College Literature, 32, 4 (2005), 145–67, 155.
2Amelia Gentleman defines déclinisme as a pervasive sense of ‘nostalgia for a lost era of French greatness’, and more specifically, ‘… France’s loss of its position as a global power, its weakening role within Europe, its failure to integrate its immigrant population, its exhausted public services and its stumbling industry … ’ in ‘Summertime, and living is not easy for French racked with self-doubt’, The Guardian, 10 August 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/aug/10/france.ameliagentleman [accessed 1 July 2012]. See also Perry Anderson, ‘Dégringolade’, London Review of Books, 26, 2 (2004), 3–9; Donald Morrison and Antoine Compagnon, Que reste-t-il de la culture française?, suivi du Le souci de la grandeur (Paris, Éditions Denoël, 2008), and France is Falling, The Great Waste, The War of the Two Frances and The Middle Class Adrift; and Nicolas Baverez, La France qui tombe (Paris: Perrin, 2004). For a counterpoint to this rhetoric of déclinisme, see Michel Wieviorka, Le printemps du politique: Pour en finir avec le déclinisme (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2007).
3Emily Apter, ‘Mobile Citizens, Media States’, PMLA, 117,1 (2002), 79–83, 82.
4Crowley, 18.
5See Keith Reader, The Abject Object, 106.
6Bourg, 30.
7Guillebaud, Jean-Claude, La tyrannie du plaisir (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 69.
8Ibid., 71.
9Margot Weiss, ‘Gay Shame and BDSM Pride: Neoliberalism, Privacy, and Sexual Politics’, Radical History Review, 100 (2008), 86–101, 89.
10Cruickshank, 123.
11Varsava, 149.
12Shannon Winnubust, ‘The Queer Thing about Neoliberal Pleasure: A Foucauldian Warning’, Foucault Studies, 14 (2012), 79–97, 92.
13James Wood, ‘Love Actually’, The New Republic Online, 14 September 2006, http://www.powells.com/review/2006_09_14 [accessed 18 April 2012].
14Hervé Juvin, The Coming of the Body (London: Verso, 2010), 35, 37.
15David Bennett, ‘Libidinal Economy, Prostitution and Consumer Culture’, Textual Practice, 24, 1 (2010), 93–121, 110, 112.
16Ibid., 112.
17Juvin, 82.
18Winnubust, 92.
19Dany-Robert Dufour, trans. David Macey, The Art of Shrinking Heads: On the New Servitude of the Liberated in the Age of Total Capitalism (London: Polity Press, 2008).
20Morrey, 2004, 5.
21Abecassis, 812.
22Houellebecq, 2001, 234; 2003, 242.
23It is significant, of course, that contraception for women became widely available in France during this time. Introduced in December 1967, the Neuwirth Law legalized all forms of contraception in France. The law was amended in December 1974, removing the requirement for parental consent to provide contraception to minors. The Veil law legalizing abortion was passed soon thereafter in January 1975.
24Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 11.
25See both Abecassis and Varsava on the resonance with the moralistes in Houellebecq’s writing. See also Bruno Viard who insists that Houellebecq is not so much a misogynist as a moralist: Houellebecq au laser: La faute à Mai 68 (Nice: Editions Ovadia, 2008), 83.
26See also Liza Steiner, Sade-Houellebecq, du boudoir au sex-shop.
27On Houellebecq’s reference to comic books (bandes dessinées) in Atomised, see Wendy Michallat, ‘Modern Life is Still Rubbish: Houellebecq and the Refiguring of “reactionary” Retro’, Journal of European Studies, 37, 3, 313–31.
28Interventions, 72, my translation.
29Abecassis, 809.
30It is striking that despite their traumatic experiences of their childhoods, Houellebecq has little time for psychoanalytical explanations of either Bruno’s or Michel’s unhappiness.
31Morrey, ‘Sex and the Single Male’, 145–6.
32Ibid., 142.
33Shannon Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 11.
34There is a complex ongoing debate across several disciplines on the question of sex work. See Kathleen Barry, The Prostitution of Sexuality (New York and London: New York University Press, 1995); Ursula Biemann, ‘Remotely Sensed: A Topography of the Global Sex Trade, Feminist Review, 70, 1 (2002), 75–88; Jo Doezema, ‘Ouch! Western Feminists’ “wounded attachment” to the “third world prostitute”’, Feminist Review, 67, 1 (2001), 16–38; Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Christa Wichterch, The Globalized Woman: Reports from a Future of Inequality, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Zed Books, 2000); Jan Jindy Pettman, ‘Body Politics: International Sex Tourism’, Third World Quarterly, 18, 1 (1997), 93–108; and J. Seabrook, Travels in the Skin Trade – Tourism and the Sex Industry (London: Pluto Press, 1996). In Sex and Social Justice Martha Nussbaum makes the case for sex work to be treated as a job like any other and, as such, not be stigmatized (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
35Patricia Green, ‘Thailand: Tourism and the Sex Industry’, Women, 54 (2001), 20.
36Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex’ in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 158.
37Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 120.
38For a detailed discussion of the representation of travel and tourism in Platform see Aedín Ní Loingsigh’s ‘Tourist Traps Confounding Expectations in Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme’, French Cultural Studies, 16, 1 (2005), 73–90, which argues that the novel has ‘something vital to tell us about modern-day France, the legacy of colonialism in contemporary global travel practices and the uneven nature of cultural exchange in the modern world’, 87.
39Žižek, 53. This is quoted from an advert in USA Today, 4 May 2009, 9.
40Morrey, ‘Sex and the Single Male’, 143
41See Stefan Mann, ‘From Friendly Turns Toward Trade – On the Interplay Between Cooperation and Markets’, International Journal of Social Ethics, 35, 5 (2008), 326–37.
42Pierre Bourdieu, ‘La Domination Masculine’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 84 (1990), 2–31, 30. It is no accident that the most highly venerated sexual skill in Houellebecq’s novels is fellatio where women, sex workers and lovers, worship tenderly at the temple of phallus. This female worship has its obverse, as Keith Reader has pointed up, in scenes of phallic revulsion and the private abjection of the phallus (The Abject Object, 122–3).
43Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 166.
44Crowley, ‘The Wreckage of Liberation’, 23.
6
The End of Affect
… deep down, I am with the utopians, people who think that the movement of History must conclude in an absence of movement. An end to History seems desirable to me.
Michel Houellebecq
Planning the extinction of desire in Buddhist-like terms, the [Elohimites] had banked on the maintenance of a weakened, non-tragic energy, purely conservative in nature, which would have continued to able the functioning of thought […] This phenomenon had been only produced in insignificant proportions, and it was, on the contrary, sadness, melancholia, languid and finally mortal apathy that had submerged our disincarnated generations. The most patent indicator of our failure was that I ended up envying the destiny of Daniel1, his violent and contradictory journey, the amorous passions that had shaken him …
(The Possibility of an Island, 313)
A precious and elusive experience, love is a ‘scarce, artificial and belated phenomenon’ in Houellebecq’s work. Possessed of an ‘ontological fragility’ and a ‘prodigious operative energy’, love can onl
y ‘flower under certain historical conditions’ which are ‘absolutely opposed to the freedom of morals’ characterizing ‘the modern era’ (W, 93, 113). Houellebecq’s characters struggle to find love in a world where, in his view, sex has become the only signifier for all human interaction and where desire has been so comprehensively marshalled by commercial interests that it now brings only suffering. In such a world then, ‘human relationships become progressively impossible’ (W, 14). All of his writing describes in one way or another the failure of generational transmission, what might be called the disintegration of patrimony. There are no children or parents to speak of in Houellebecq’s work, thus love can only be experienced in the context of romantic or erotic relationships which are underwritten by the dynamics of commercial exchange in which attraction becomes ‘… a simple numerical calculation that involves attractiveness, novelty and value for money’; love and intimacy become, therefore, virtually impossible in contemporary society.1 In the wake of sexual liberation, the body has become an important, even crucial, part of social capital, a commodity among others and desire has become so comprehensively reified that it has irreparably damaged our ability to form intimate human bonds and has thus made impossible the conditions in which love, based on altruism and compassion rather than exchange and transaction, might flourish. Therefore, after a brief but finally doomed attempt at love, each of the male protagonists in Whatever, Atomised and Platform continue their lives, in different ways, in a state of unrelenting atomized misery and affective deprivation. In their reflection on the difficulty of human relations, and in particular sexual ones, these three novels remain open to the possibility, however slight, of some kind of human or social ‘solution’ to the problem of affective alienation. Whether by sexual murder in Whatever, sex tourism in Platform or the biogenetic extension of the body’s erogenous zones in Atomised, these novels still attach themselves to the idea of human striving even in the context of increasing depressive isolation. Indeed, right up to the last few pages of Atomised there is the hope of love, or something like it. The Possibility of an Island is the death of this hope.2
Beginning where Atomised leaves off, Possibility ponders at first the problem of sex but it has become clear that it is not sex that is at issue but the difficulty of all human affective attachment and, in particular, love. Sex is overdetermined in Houellebecq’s work. Being a meaningful human is almost always defined as being successfully bound into networks of sexual belonging in one way or another and when sex fails, as it does in all of these novels, this failure represents not only the failure but also the impossibility of all human relations under neoliberal capitalism. As Christian Moraru notes, sexuality is the most stubbornly embodied of all affective dimensions and remains ‘the only dimension in which our bodies still need and seek out relationships, remains something to contend with, nudging us toward each other’.3 The problem of sexuality, and by extension all human affect, has not been ‘fixed’ by the provocative, but still recognizably human, solution of sex tourism in Platform so it is science to which Atomised and Possibility turn to find a cure for an anomie which is as much emotional as it is sexual. Love, a ‘skill for epitomizing the whole of the opposite sex in a single loved one’, had been possible only under ‘certain historical conditions’ (W, 14). With the absolute hegemony of capitalism, these conditions have passed away, and now only science can help us.
Simultaneous with the incitement to define oneself by sexual desire, have more sex, with more partners, all the time, is the drastic falling away of active social bonds and of affective relations. Defining affect as a capacity for bodily and emotional potential, that is, ‘a body’s capacity to affect and to be affected’ that extends into a continuum of encounter and belonging, Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg observe that ‘affect marks a body’s belonging to a world of encounters or; a world’s belonging to a body of encounters but also, in non-belonging, through all those far sadder (de) compositions of mutual in-compossibilities’.4 Elsewhere, Bruno Latour has essayed a definition of the affective body: ‘… to have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning “effectuated”, moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or nonhumans’.5 Houellebecq’s characters struggle to find a place in a society in which the logic of exchange is extended to the affective body; where the entire communicative world of the neoliberal subject is defined by the ethos of production; more specifically, where the relations of labour reproduce themselves in personal and affective sexual relations. Assailed at every turn by the libidinal energies of pornography and popular culture, Houellebecq’s characters move around in their diminishing atomized spaces in a ‘miserable and troubled’ age in which people live out ‘lonely, bitter lives’ and where feelings of ‘love, tenderness and human fellowship have all but disappeared … ’ (A, 3). Abandoning any possibility of either social or political intercession, both Atomised and Possibility, then, suggest a post-political, biotechnical solution to the problem; a solution that is inherently apocalyptic: ‘If there is to be breakthrough, it will be apocalyptic or not at all’.6 The solution to the disenchantment of capitalism is the eradication of the hope for affective renewal or regeneration.
Posthumanity
After a swift diversion via the markedly less accomplished work Lanzarote (2000, 2002), an unconvincing and largely unnecessary reiteration of Atomised, Houellebecq turns to the question of posthumanity. If sexual murder was not the answer in Whatever, and neither was the sexual tourism of Platform, then in Atomised and Possibility it is the discourses of science in the form of a ‘third metaphysical mutation’ that might be able to ‘restore the practical possibility of human relationships’ (A, 249). Science is humanity’s only hope for an ‘ontological overhaul’ of human nature and for finding a cure for its anomic ‘suffering of being’. Thus, in Possibility, the bioengineered neohumans Daniel 24 and 25 have been ‘cured’ of the vexing irregularities of all human emotion. For them, feelings of happiness, love and sadness remain only as something to read about, a nostalgic story of the old human species, recorded in the book of the original Daniel that the cloned Daniels are reading. While the neohuman bodies in Possibility are still recognizably organic entities, they have been purged of any eating, excreting and reproductive functions, in short, of their entire human corporeality. Perfectly self-sufficient organisms with no need for a social whole or indeed any sense of outside to the self, their environment is devoid of any sense of otherness as they exist in pristine technical contentment in their disconnected monads. The predictable and regulated affect-free lives of the neohumans represent the end of what Raymond Williams has called the ‘structures of feeling’, the lived quality of life, the ‘affective elements of consciousness and relationships’ embodying the fluctuations, the ebbs and flows of ‘… a particular sense of life, a particular community of experience’.7 Such a movement away from the contingency of everyday life with its continual possibility and potentiality of otherness towards a posthumanism characterized by ontological homogeneity and stasis is, of course, deeply antithetical to the intellectual legacy of ’68 thought that privileged multiplicity, heterogeneity, difference and desire. In Atomised desire is technically exterminated through the rearrangement of molecular genetic matter – the eponymous elementary particles – in order that there might be a restoration of a ‘world of feelings’ (A. 360). In The Possibility of an Island, however, this ‘world of feelings’ is also eradicated. What are we to make, then, of a proposition that suggests that there is no hope for a different world; one that suggests that the only hope for humanity is in cloned ‘happiness’? Is this a dystopian warning of what might happen if we fail to staunch the march of materialism and the concomitant collapse of the political and civil sphere?8 Or is it, perhaps, a kind of utopian suggestion?
Moving more decisively into the territory of science encountered at the end of Atomised, The Possibility of an Island effectively discards any human solution to this loss of poignancy produced by ‘capitalism’s web of sufferi
ng’. If there is no longer any hope of an ethical, philosophical or political way out of this situation then the solution is a wholly technical one, achieved through the positivist, über-rational phenomenon of eugenic science. The neo-humans exist in a bio-engineered existential ‘web of joy’ in which life is wholly pain-free but affectless, indistinct and undifferentiated. In this posthuman vision, all humans are cloned multiples, exact genetic replicas of the same; neither identity nor difference has survived the great ‘paradigm shift’ with which Atomised concludes. In such a bio-technically managed totality defined by genetic similitude and asexual reproduction, there is no longer any need for the somatic presence of the body or any encounter with other bodies. Both Atomised and Possibility, then, propose that the only cure for ruined human affect is a biotechnical one: that is, the creation of new species of posthuman with ‘a radically new biological constitution’ in whom the organic desire for physical sexual relations is bioengineered out of their genetic schema. This new neohuman species has sidestepped the long, and occasionally unreliable, processes of Darwinian evolution through wholly technical means, which permits the eradication of the destructive egotism of erotic competition, thereby restoring ‘the possibility of love’ (A, 363). The ‘passing away’ of the old human order allows a new species to be created that is no longer hostage to the capricious mechanisms of either affect or desire. As Richard Bauckham sardonically notes, love is now genetically ‘rooted in the post-human DNA’ and therefore ‘… now comes naturally’.9
Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair Page 24