Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair
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Houellebecq’s solution to the problem of sex and love, in fact to that of all human affect, that he has been exploring in all of his work is a definitively post-anthropological view of humanity. If, as he has suggested, capitalism has made human affective relations entirely unworkable the only solution must be to re-make humans as entities free from the unpredictable contingencies of desire and love. In short, he has given up wholly, politically, ethically and philosophically, on how to be human now and thrown his hand in with the technicians and the scientific solution. This chapter, then, considers this scientific solution presented as the cure for the metaphysical problem of human suffering caused by the disappearance of love in a commodifed world. As noted, the solution involves the elimination of desire, and all forms of difference from the human schema and, as such, can be regarded as a continuation of Houellebecq’s ongoing attack on ’68 thought, especially on the intellectual sovereignty of post-structuralist theory. The ‘global ridicule’ heaped upon the works of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida Deleuze and other philosophers of difference whose work has suddenly ‘foundered after decades of inane reverence’ is the starting point for a discussion of the ‘dominance of the scientific community’ and, what might be tentatively called, a post-political notion of identity and difference (A, 376–7). Examining both Atomised and The Possibility of an Island, I consider here this scientific solution as a riposte to an era in which philosophy and ethics have an increasingly limited influence.
In Atomised, Michel Djerzinski’s ‘biophysical work’ produces a radical change in the genetic make-up of the human being that evacuates the ‘useless’ and ‘regressive’ function of sexuality out of the human body. This is described as a bioethical ‘paradigm shift’ in which twentieth-century humanism, already in its ontological death throes, is superseded by the technocratic supremacy of biotechnology that opens up ‘a new era in world history’ (A, 4). This ‘new rational species’ of posthumans has ‘outgrown individuality, individuation and progress’ and, with the ability to self-eroticize, no longer needs the presence of others for the fulfilment of desire (A, 214, 371). Possessing no genetic distinctiveness and, more importantly for Houellebecq’s recurring thesis, no sexual differentiation or real sense of desire, these clones are no longer dependent upon the serendipity of sexual encounters for the fulfilment of affective life as they are now able to fully auto-eroticize and thus, are no longer tied into the ‘Darwinian struggle of sex.’ All of this may facilitate, Michel hopes, the possibility of love. While such a proposition may seem somewhat outlandish in the context of a ‘literary’ novel, when situated in the tradition of utopian and science fiction writing, this proposition seems somewhat less incongruous. As noted in Atomised, ‘the Utopian solution from Plato to Huxley’ has consistently regarded human desire as the stumbling block to utopia and, over the centuries, writers have envisaged a myriad of solutions to ‘do away with desire and the suffering it causes’ (A, 192).
Before the ‘paradigm shift’ of cloning, desire had long since left the realm of the ‘natural’ (as much as it ever really resided there) and become bound into the mechanisms of commodity exchange. No longer transgressive or sacred in the way that Bataille might view it, desire is easy to satisfy through prostitution, pornography or promiscuity; as Lacanain psychoanalytic critic Charles Melman puts it, ‘it is no longer a psychic economy centered on the lost object and its representatives that is being legitimized [by our society]. Quite the opposite – it’s a psychic economy organized by the presentation of an accessible object and by the ultimate accomplishment of jouissance’.10 In Houellebecq’s work, only the most mechanical and perfunctory sense of jouissance is now available as sexuality has become part of a rationalized system of investment and exchange. Given Houellebecq’s near-compulsive working over of the idea of contemporary sexuality as a corollary to the neoliberal modality of late capitalism, one might plausibly expect the erasure of sexual difference and the ability to self-eroticize to produce a perfect technical solution to the problem of commodification, and this is indeed the case in Atomised where the clones live peacefully and happily, free from the attachment to otherness hitherto required to fulfil desire (A, 32). However, such a solution is taken much further in Possibility in which the cloned neohumans do not even possess all-over erogenous zones with which they can auto-eroticize and have been deprived of any actual ability to desire and thus to feel.
Send in the clones
Around the time Houellebecq began writing Atomised there was much intellectual interest in posthumanism and the idea of a post-theological world. If, as Feuerbach argued, ‘the task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God’, a movement which effected ‘the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology’, then it might be said that one the main tasks of the postmodern era (a term used here with all the usual caveats) has been, and continues to be, the technological transformation of anthropology into the post-anthropological.11 Rapid developments in biotechnologies, in particular genomic sciences, have nudged the twenty-first century ever closer to what might plausibly be called a posthuman or post-biological era.12 Certainly, it is clear from the extensive body of critical work in this area, most of it produced in the humanities the 1990s, that the moment of the posthuman is no longer the future vision of science fiction but has already begun.
As one might expect, both within the academy and without, posthumanism is a prospect welcomed by some, dreaded by others and approached with a mixture of guarded optimism by still others. Some thinkers regard the dissolution of the boundaries between the human and the non-human as a move towards an emancipatory anti-essentialism, greeting the possibilities of extending, altering and adapting the physical limits of the human body as a new opportunity to circumvent restrictive notions of the ‘natural’. In contrast, fearing a kind of unchecked Frankensteinism over both the creation and destruction of human life, others have warned against any premature celebration of posthumanism. Counselling a politically vigilant approach that is mindful of the potentially hazardous effects of the artificial acceleration of human evolution, these critics have warned of the consequences involved in the human assumption of messianic powers and of the coercive commercial pressures that inevitably surround the issue of biotechnology.13 Of these critics, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner offer one of the most persuasive critical surveys of the intellectual landscape of posthumanism marked by profound disagreements between pro- and anti-humanists over its merits and menaces in The Postmodern Adventure (2001), which counsels a non-sectarian, politically cautious approach using a ‘supradisciplinary critical philosophy’ capable of addressing the vast field of bioethics and particularly that of transgeneticism and molecular nanotechnology.14 No longer the fantasy so beloved by science fiction writers but now a scientific reality (at least in theory), the question of human cloning assumes a central position in many of these debates. Cloning is fascinating for many reasons. Not only would it allow the thwarting of the biological sweepstake and its ‘random shuffling of genes’, it also raises the possibility of ‘a return to asexual reproduction’, throwing into radical doubt the idea of human character itself. In the next few decades of the twenty-first century, Best and Kellner argue, the ability to replicate humanity through genetic engineering will represent as immense a change as the invention of the Gutenberg press: ‘Rather, much as the printing press replaced the scribe, cloning allows mass reproduction of a devised type, and thus opens genetic engineering to vast fields of commercial possibilities.’15
Creator of the figure of the cyborg, biologist turned philosopher of science Donna Haraway was among the first critics, and remains the most well-known, to offer a systematic examination of the posthuman subject. Initially conceptualized in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985), Haraway’s ideas were developed in more detail in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), which rapidly became a seminal work with widespread cross-disciplinary influence.16 Interestingly, however, at no point in either of these works does
she use the term posthuman; rather, the arguments consider the implications of breaching the nature and culture binary by cloning or otherwise. Elsewhere, Katherine Hayles (1999), Eugene Hacker (2003), Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingstone (1995), Rosi Braidotti (1993), Bruno Latour (1999) and Keith Ansell-Pearson (1997) have all contributed to the rich seam of critical inquiry on what constitutes, in cybernetic, AI and pharmacological terms, the subject and limits of the posthuman.17 Outside of the academy, the debates around the biotechnical posthuman have assumed a vaguely apocalyptic tone, warning of immense, possibly disastrous, social, sexual and ethical changes. Economist, political commentator and prolific chronicler of the biotechnological revolution, Jeremy Rifkin, typifies this strain of commentary when he outlines what he sees as the reach of biotechnology into every facet of human life:
The biotech revolution will affect every aspect of our lives. The way we eat; the way we date and marry; the way we have our babies, the way our children are raised and educated; the way we work; the way we engage in politics; the way we express our faith; the way we perceive the world around us and our place in it […] each of us [will be forced] to put a mirror to our most deeply held values, making us ponder the ultimate question of the purpose and meaning of existence.18
A persistent and largely understandable anxiety over the threat posed to the idea of a core or essence to human subjectivity features in many of these discussions; what happens to the idea of humanity under, what Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose have called, the ‘molecular gaze’ of biotechnologies?19 This ‘gaze’, already active in many areas of life sciences and medical research, is a rather startling prospect for those outside of the techno-scientific industries, particularly for those who see the advent of the biotechnically enhanced or engineered posthuman as a threat to an often hard-won twentieth-century humanism: ‘Over the last thirty or forty years, we have invested an enormous amount of thought, emotion, treasure and blood in what we call human values, human rights, the defence of human dignity and of human life. Over the same period, quietly but devastatingly, science and philosophy have combined to undermine our traditional concept of humankind.’20
In Our Posthuman Future (2002), a follow-up to his highly contentious work The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Francis Fukuyama has expressed similar worries, although from a different ideological perspective: ‘What is ultimately at stake with biotechnology is the very grounding of the human moral sense’, arguing that human nature remains a powerfully meaningful concept which along with religion ‘defines our most basic values’.21 Citing Brave New World (1932), a text that haunts Houellebecq’s Possibility, Fukuyama believes that Huxley was correct to satirize the slavish chemical ‘happiness’ of the clones. We must remain vigilant, he says, of the dangers of human cloning as it threatens to eliminate that ‘Factor-X’, an incommunicable semi-Aristotelian essence that defines the concept of the human and one that must be defended at all costs from the mechanistic control of scientists who, intoxicated with the potential of pharmacological and genetic change, must be carefully monitored.22 Speaking to the disquiet provoked by the term posthuman and addressing some of the ethical and philosophical concerns over the fate of the Benjaminian ‘tiny, fragile human body’, Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingstone offer the reassurance that the advent of the posthuman era ‘… does not necessitate the obsolescence of the human’, neither does it, they insist, ‘represent an evolution or devolution of the human. Rather it partakes in re-distribution of difference and identity’.23
So what interests Houellebecq, a writer best known for his tetchy accounts of the more ignominious aspects of contemporary Western life, tedious office work, sexual disappointment, masturbation and ready meals-for-one, in the idea of the posthuman? Simply stated, science, and in particular biotechnology, might be the only cure for the social and affective misery wreaked by capitalism. In Houellebecq’s work sex assumes, as we have seen, a metonymic role standing for all affective feeling and experience in a more general sense; thus his work is necessarily ‘over-sexualized’ as social relations are reduced to sexual relations and ‘sexuality and sex itself become the only register of anything like the political’.24 The biopolitical subsumption of every aspect of human life to the principles of free-market exchange allows certain atavistic behaviours to re-emerge in both sexual and affective life, returning humanity to a less evolved, even primitive, way of living in which a pitiless division of winners and losers emerges. ‘In this sense’, Bülent Diken suggests, ‘the biopolitical element is explicit in Houellebecq’s work, in which the Communist Manifesto is restaged as a spectacle of bare life’ and where ‘the physical body appears, through sexuality, as a pure political element’.25 No less than the death or the withering of the political is at stake here as the body and its sexuality assumes a centrality as part of what Agamben describes as the ‘unpolitical primacy of sex in our unpolitical age’.26
In its biopolitical grip on the subject, neoliberalism portends, as Comaroff and Comaroff argue, ‘the death of politics’ – [a] diminution of the political to the pursuit of self or single interests disassociated ‘from anything beyond themselves’.27 In his work, Houellebecq seems then, to propose no less than an annihilation of the political and the ethical, replacing them with the determinism of science and technology, which will finally reduce us all to a monocultural, homogeneous community of one. Building on Plato’s ideas of the ancient polis in Politikes, Peter Sloterdijk’s ‘Rules for the Human Zoo’ (2009) articulates similar views to these, in particular the loss of faith in finding any humanist solution to the problem of the human condition. Arguing that we are at the end of an anthropocentric stage of history, Sloterdijk sees the advent of genomics as the dawn of a new era of biopower that will alter drastically the course of human evolution. No longer dependent on what Foucault calls the anthropotechnologies of literature, art and philosophy to understand the socio-cultural world, humanity now turns to a post-cultural world of biotechnologies for self-understanding and improvement.28 Of course, Foucault said much the same when he described humanity as an endangered species which could disappear just as easily as ‘a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.29 The posthuman vision of Atomised and Possibility is positioned, then, somewhere between this dissolving face in the sand and Nietzsche’s Übermensch overcoming of man, a view expressed in the final words of Atomised: ‘Having broken the filial chain that linked us to humanity, we live on […] it is certainly true that we have succeeded in overcoming the monstrous egotism, cruelty and anger […] vile, unhappy race of humans’ (A, 379).
A former science student at the Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon, Houellebecq was very likely au courant with the debates on genetic cloning that were in circulation at the time of writing both Atomised and Possibility. Indeed, many of the most significant advances in biotechnology are present in these two novels. While every detail of the science used is not consistently reliable, there is, as one scientist from the CNRS has noted, a remarkable level of technical accuracy in each of the novels.30 However, as is often the case in Houellebecq’s work, the representation of the scientific solution is far from unequivocal. His ‘solution’ is worked out in his trademark agonistic and contrary approach, that is to say, in ways that are every bit as troublingly contradictory and difficult to pin down as are representations of religion, race and gender in his work. While both novels take on the topic of human cloning and genetic engineering, one as an end-point, the other as a more central thematic, Houellebecq’s vision of a posthumanity dominated by scientific principles shows, at best, an inconsistent philosophical and ethical engagement with many contemporary theories of posthumanism. Rather, he uses the concept of posthumanism and the science underpinning it as a theoretical strategy with which to probe contemporary society, and in this way both novels enact what Fredric Jameson has described as science fiction’s ‘structurally unique method of apprehending the present as history’.31
In Interventions, Houellebecq
has admitted with some candour that his views on science, metaphysics and social ennui may be somewhat inconsistent and conflicted but that ‘… the only way forward is to continue to uncompromisingly express the contradictions that tear me apart, in the knowledge that they are more than likely to be representative of my times’.32 These contradictions abound in his presentation of the scientific solution. As we shall see, at one moment his depiction of a modern scientia universalis seems to half-resonate with Adorno and Horkheimer’s warning in Dialectic of Enlightenment; whereas at others, it seems as if his thought has more in common with the libertinism of de Sade and the positivism of Comte. But if his work does show some engagement with Marxism, this is simply a surface effect as the revolution chez Houellebecq is not only a cold and quiet one, it is post-ideological and entirely non-dialectical; any ideological tension is reduced to fruitless contradiction or paradox rather than any fecund clash of ideas that might bring about some synthesis.33 If there is any dialectic to be found here, it is a rotten and exhausted one, ideas reduced to ineffective contradictions and doubling-back. What if there were really no alternative or outside to the system we have created? If politics and philosophy have failed irretrievably then the only remaining position, it would seem, is complete surrender to the rational world-view of science and technology. It is far from clear, however, to what extent we, as readers, should view this technical solution as desirable. It is highly likely, I think, that just as the representations of race, sex tourism and women in Houellebecq’s work are not always straightforwardly presented; the depiction of science, or more specifically of the biotechnological solution as a cure for lovelessness, cannot be read entirely at face value. A ‘curious contradiction is detectable’ says Angela Holzer, in the position of science in the two novels. On the one hand, it is deployed as a ‘methodological model’ and ‘structural principle and theme’ and, as such, demonstrates the folly of an excessively positivist, mechanical understanding of what Houellebecq calls ‘the kingdom of intersubjective’.34 However, and this is where the contradictions become more noticeable, science also is presented as a legitimate, even desirable, ‘solution to social problems that are rooted in human biology’.35 The representation of science, as we shall see presently, in both Atomised and Possibility is something like the Derridean pharmakon, both poison and cure, vacillating between weak critique and an even weaker resignation.