It is somewhat ironic that it is Bruno and not Michel who first comes up with the idea that suggests a link between science and happiness. One night, over the course of many drinks with his half-brother, Bruno opines on Aldous Huxley: ‘Everyone says Brave New World is supposed to be a totalitarian nightmare, a vicious indictment of society, but that’s hypocritical bullshit. Brave New World is our idea of heaven: genetic manipulation, sexual liberation, the war against age, the leisure society. This is precisely the world we have tried—and so far failed—to create’ (A, 187). As a libertine manqué, Bruno’s interest in Huxley’s ideas fixates upon Brave New World’s proposals to do away with the aggressive sexual competition that characterizes the contemporary sexual economy with its non-alpha male ‘losers’ pitted in an unending sexual battle with the young and the beautiful. The idea of sexual ‘instant gratification’ and an unabashedly pharmaceutical approach to depression and melancholia has much appeal for Bruno who habitually self-medicates with copious amounts of Xanax and Prozac.61 Michel’s interest in Huxley’s dystopia differs from that of his randy half-brother. Whereas Bruno is excited by the idea of unlimited sexual experience and chemically induced happiness, Michel’s interest lies in the potential of biotechnology to attend to metaphysical and philosophical questions of human consciousness. Before he refines his thinking, Michel can see no rational reason for human consciousness as it seemed to be present in certain animals ‘for no apparent reason’. Sceptical of Darwinism’s unshakeable determinism which reduces the subject to questions of natural selection, Michel wants to discover the ‘key to understanding human action and opinion’ and, more than anything, to solve the ‘completely mysterious’ realm of the consciousness which, frustratingly for his mechanistic scientific approach, does not seem to depend on any single factor such as ‘anatomical, biochemical or cellular’ causes (A, 268, 271). A theoretical impasse thus repeatedly arises in Michel’s work as he attempts, and fails, to explain scientifically the mystery of human consciousness: ‘According to Margenau’s theory, human consciousness could be reduced to a field of probabilities in a Fock space, defined as a direct sum of Hilbert spaces’. What vexes Michel, however, is that he sees no evidence in this ‘natural topography of Hilbert spaces that might give rise to free will’ (A, 267). Musing on this, he realizes that the ‘belief in the notions of reason and free will, which are the natural foundation of democracy, probably resulted from a confusion between the concepts of freedom and unpredictability’ (A, 270). The question of free will soon becomes a question of predictability and this will lead him to the area of sex and sexuality as areas to be perfected by the elimination of chance and unpredictability, particulary in human sexuality. In the course of Michel’s work, the search to define free will and the composition of human consciousness becomes less important to decipher, however, than the equally mysterious terrains of human sexuality.
Sexual desire is top of the list of human attributes to be demystified and rationalized by Djerzinski and his scientists’ research into mitochondrial DNA: ‘As soon as the genome has been completely decoded […] humanity would have complete control of its evolution: when that happened sexuality would be seen for what it really was: a useless, dangerous and regressive function’ (A, 320). In conversation with his colleague, Dupleschin, Michel gradually realizes that what he is seeking is nothing less than a new rational humanism, one that is post-political, post-ethical; ruled by the positivism and rationality of science it would do away with the centrality of culture: ‘There is no power in the world – economic, political, religious or social – that can compete with rational certainty. Western society is primarily interested in philosophy or politics […] it has also had a passionate love affair with literature and the arts, but nothing in its history has been as important as rational certainty’ (A, 322). Shown to be part of the failed avant-garde utopian project that belongs to the world of ‘theory’, culture is rendered completely redundant in Houellebecq’s brave new cloned world. In Possibility culture has been obliterated; nothing remains of human literary and artistic endeavours of which society had once been so proud. Before the advent of the neohumans, culture had descended into the mere pantomime of either the cruel humour of Daniel1’s ‘100% hateful’ stand-up routine of racism and viscous misogyny or the ‘edgy’ artist’s conceptual art in which pieces of rotting meat are placed in a woman’s underwear to make some predictable statement about cultural degeneration and sexuality. In the broad, and in many places, indiscriminate, sweep of Houellebecq’s pensée anti-’68, he views culture as fundamentally part of ’68’s Nietzschean project emphasizing transgression which, as Moore notes, has reduced philosophy to mere laughter.62 Culture has become emptily transgressive; ironic, knowing yet stupid, a hollow populist version of ‘Nietzscheanism’. As Daniel1 observes, with so many barriers and taboos broken it is now possible to ‘behave like a complete bastard with impunity’ (PI, 10–11).
The long piece of mawkish poetry with which Atomised opens sets the aesthetic tone for the new species. Penned by the new race of clones who appreciate the ‘suffering and joy’ of their ‘brave and unfortunate’ predecessors but are content now to dwell in their collective genetic similitude in the crepuscular half-light of a ‘perpetual afternoon’ (A, 379), it reads:
We live today under a new world order,
This web which weaves together all things envelops our bodies,
Bathes our limbs,
In a halo of joy
A state to which men of old acceded only through music,
Greets us each morning as a commonplace.
[…]
Leaving behind a world of division,
The way of thinking that divided us,
Immersed in a serene, fertile delight
Of a new Law
Now for the first time,
We can retrace the end of the old order. (A, 7–8)
The reference here to the joy attained though music is an obvious allusion to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) in which the knowledge and fear of the abyss is assuaged by the solace of form, that is, of culture. In the posthuman ending of Atomised, seen even more unmistakably in Possibility, there is no space whatsoever for culture; in fact, creativity is expunged as an unnecessary human characteristic belonging to a past where humans needed to experience a sense of connection through a shared history of textuality and where imagination, memory and desire were still important to life. With its emphasis on diluted cultural forms, Possibility is, as Ben Jeffery notes, like a ‘mirror-image’ of the most famous scene in Brave New World where the Savage demands the right to be unhappy through poetry.63 Creativity, in short, belongs to the world of potentiality and possibility, one that is little more than a nostalgic fetish for the neohumans. This desire to expunge the cultural is an act against the unpredictable otherness often invited in by creativity. Indeed, as Derek Attridge has suggested, creativity, in its purest form, is always an engagement with or movement towards a sense of otherness or alterity; a richly unpredictable gesture that contrasts with the technicalities of mere production and exchange which, he continues, introduce ‘no alterity’, rather they simply ‘deploy existing components according to accepted norms’. Creativity, then, is ‘both an act and an event’ requiring the blasting of the self out of its habitual methods of understanding the world.64 Central to this process is an engagement with otherness, a term that Attridge carefully separates from its psychoanalytic and semi-mystical uses, defining it thus: ‘Otherness exists only in the registering of that which resists my usual modes of understanding, and that moment of registering alterity is a moment in which I simultaneously acknowledge my failure to comprehend … ’.65 Philosophy, literature, politics and the arts in general all adhere, in one way or another, to the sphere of creativity and as such await their disappearance in the totally managed ‘rational certainty’ that is facing the cloned race. The move to a conflict-free similitude is in process. Whereas in the past, history has been full of ‘the most v
icious, the most ridiculous conflicts’ over ideas of living, be they religious, philosophical or political, the scientifically managed future of the neohumans rules out all contingency and creativity (A, 322).
Michel’s experiments are inspired by the insights of Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen Interpretation of 1927, specifically the introduction of uncertainty around the idea of an objective scientific perspective as well as casting doubt upon ‘the impossibility of any sharp separation between the behaviour of atomic objects’.66 These extraordinary scientific breakthroughs are the catalyst for different ways of thinking about the relation of philosophy to the ‘consistency and refutability’ of science, specifically the theory of coherent superposition which is the state of exiting in all possible states simultaneously (A, 215). Michel’s goal is to take the insights of quantum physics and make possible a post-sexual humanity, a process that will, he hopes, thwart the commercial aspects of sexuality that have come to define much of the misery in the West. So, ‘through somewhat risky interpretations of the postulates of quantum mechanics’, his aim is to render human desire obsolete and thus to ‘restore the conditions which make love possible’.67 Inspired by both the positivism of Comte and the Copenhagen interpretation, the world of the posthuman clones is divested of both joy and suffering, ruled rather by a disinterested ‘reasonable intersubjectivity’ in which there is no separation. ‘In this space of which they are so afraid, human beings learn how to love and to die; in their mental space, separation, distance and suffering are born […] Good binds, while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil … ’ (PI, 372).
Eschewing any modern intellectual thought outside of a strictly scientific domain, the only kind of philosophy in which Michel is interested is that of the ancient Celts and Greeks. Three Conjectures on Topology in Hilbert Space and Mediations on Interweaving and The Clifden Notes are shaped by the insights of Plato and Ancient Celtic art. In fact, we learn that a visit to Trinity College Library to see the Book of Kells is a ‘decisive moment in the evolution of Michel Djerzinski’s ideas’ (A, 360). The medieval illuminated manuscript composed of elaborate crosses and spirals in insular majuscule tells the story of the four Gospels and stimulates Djerzinski’s thinking: ‘All that exists is a magnificent interweaving, vast and reciprocal’ and that if this interweaving cannot be realized through ‘natural’ means then it must be reached through ‘biophysical means’ (A, 214, 362). This interweaving, crucially, must be devoid of the destructive forces of sexuality. Such a view of sexuality that insists upon its drives as inherently dangerous and destructive is, of course, another echo of Comte’s suggestion that sexuality is ‘the most disturbing of our propensities’.68 Sex is the force that drives us, as human bodies, most insistently into and against each other, and if that fails, as it is seen to do in Houellebecq’s fiction, then it must be expunged. Reproduction can be carried out by strictly technical means. In an eight-page work called ‘Towards Perfect Reproduction’ Michel’s theory of cloning is expounded in detail: ‘… every cell contained within it the possibility of being perfectly copied. Every animal species, however highly evolved, could be transformed into similar species, reproduced by cloning and therefore immortal’ (A, 370).69 Cloning obviates any need for sex but the problem is that because sexuality has defined us as human subjects, in Houellebecq’s unvarying thesis that is, then the eradication of sex will necessarily entail the eventual obliteration of every aspect of affective human behaviour; this is precisely what occurs in Possibility as the neohumans live an affect-free and isolated existence, completely alone with their experience of language reduced to the virtual exchange of email messages over a vast server.
In his first paradigm-altering publication, The Topology of Meiosis, Michel argues for the replacement of the ontology of objects with the ontology of states, thus enacting not only a scientific but also a ‘metaphysical revolution’ that is able to move beyond the ‘quasi-anthropological’ stage of human history (A, 355–6). In such an ontology of states, a strict quantification of life without the eccentric impulses of sexuality would have the effect of ‘restoring the practical possibility of human relationships’ and, in due course, ‘fraternity, sympathy and love’ (A, 358–9). Central to Michel’s project is the necessity for all human beings to have an identical genetic code – a prerequisite, of course, for cloning – thus posing a fundamental challenge to the notion of identity and difference so fundamental to the ‘tortured, individualistic, quarrelsome’ everyday lives of earlier humanity (A, 379). If everyone is the same, they are perfectly symmetrical and divisible creations and thus there is no longer any need for sexual difference or attraction. In this way, Michel’s work allows the creation of a new strain of humanity as part of the first ‘post-human civilization that breaks with the sex-death nexus and hence with the individualism and immorality that characterized the end of the twentieth century’.70 The clones are asexual and immortal as the sexual urge to be with another body is genetically circumvented by the rolling-out of Krause corpuscles (obtained from advances in stem-cell biotechnology) and spreading them over the entire epidermis. Michel’s ‘biophysical’ hypothesis argues that for humans to achieve happiness, then, sex must become an entirely technical and purely physiological non-event that permits the emergence of a purer form of love between human beings in which ‘individuation, narcissism, malice’ are banished. Sexual pleasure is thus radically demystified; if one can achieve orgasm through simply rubbing one body part against another then ‘the great orgasm can be as commonly consumed and experienced as a can of Campbell’s Soup’.71 With multiple potential for auto-erotic enjoyment and jouissance, the self no longer requires any physical interchange with another body for either sexual pleasure or reproduction; the self pleasures the self and is thus never rejected, disappointed or disenchanted. There is no feeling of alienation or separation, no difference and no otherness.
A young scientist called Hubczejak becomes the most zealous proselytizer of Michel’s work and devotes his life to its dissemination and popularization before taking it over as its ‘logical successor’ (A, 375). At first, he is called upon to defend Michel’s most radical implication that humanity was a ‘species that had outgrown individuality, individuation and progress’ and that sexuality was simply a regressive function that had to be eradicated. ‘One of the principal objections to his project’ which carries Djerzinski’s work into the twenty-first century, concerned, we learn, ‘the suppression of sexual difference which is so central to human identity’. To this charge Hubczejak responds that his intention ‘was to create a new, rational species, and that the end of sexuality as a means of reproduction in no way heralded the end of sexual pleasure … ’ (A, 374–5). By a media-savvy combination of compromise and strategic cynicism, Hubczejak renders these ideas more palatable by folding them into existing New Age thinking. Not possessing Michel’s sensitivity to matters of human consciousness, Hubczejak is prone to underestimating the extent of the impact of this metaphysical change and has to come up with some hackneyed slogans in order to sell it to a sceptical public. This new sexual order is marketed as soft, peaceful and, above all, feminine. The Movement for Human Potential in 2011 bears a slogan modelled on a catalogue strap-line, ‘THE FUTURE IS FEMININE’ and later ‘THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE MENTAL, BUT GENETIC’ (A, 374, 377).
Resistance gradually melts away as most people now seemed to ‘to believe in their hearts that the solution to every problem – whether psychological, sociological or more broadly human – could only be a technical solution’ (A, 371, 376). UNESCO funds the project in 2021, and in 2029 the first of this ‘new intelligent species’ is created (A, 378). The final vision of Atomised, then, proposes an end to troubling individuation, sexual difference and the pursuit of any kind of otherness, sexual or ontological, in a world where science has ‘cured’ all metaphysical suffering. This posthuman world is shaped, as Moore points up, by the ‘ethos of purely quantitative living’ that no longer has any need for the soci
ality of politics, religion or kinship, neither for the consolation of culture and still less for philosophy.72 Science alone has become the sole ‘arbiter of unique irrefutable truth’ and only science is able to restore a sense ‘of community, of permanence, of the sacred’ to a beleaguered humanity (A, 376–7). As suggested, it is not clear whether this presentation of science as metaphysically redemptive is a normative or critical one in Atomised but it is one that more fully developed in Possibility in which biogenetically engineered similitude is to the only way to achieve ‘goodness, compassion, fidelity, and altruism’ (PI, 53). The neohumans of Possibility are the direct descendants of the cloned entities at the end of Atomised who live affectless but peaceful lives in a barren, post-apocalyptic landscape.
The Possibility of an Island
Beginning almost precisely where Atomised leaves off, the narrative in The Possibility of an Island alternates between the hypertexted stories of Daniel24 and Daniel25, neohuman clones of the original Daniel, the transgressive, faux-Nietzschean comedian, ‘a sort of Zarathustra of the middle classes’, whose works include a screenplay aptly entitled Diogenes the Cynic (PI, 294). Part of the novel traces Daniel1’s disillusionment with love and sex and his gradual withdrawal from the world into the Elohimite cult (a thinly disguised version of Raëlism is also described in Lanzarote) whose biogenetic experiments in cloning are inching ever closer to perfecting the science of the exact replication of human DNA. Devastated by sexual rejection and tired of all his worldly attachments, including sex with the nubile Esther, a variety of over-priced and useless vintage cars and his millions of Euros earned from his comedy ventures, Daniel1 visits the sect of the Elohimites.73 Led by a distinctly un-spiritual prophet with a penchant for lewdly captioned T-Shirts (Lick my Balls) and an obsession with an anti-ageing Cretan diet, the Elohimite Church offers the possibility of eternal life through human cloning. Daniel’s story is being read by the neohumans two thousand years later and is intercut with that of his two clones who recount the homogenous, wholly affectless, environment of the posthuman clones living in a post-apocalyptic world ruled over by The Supreme Sister.
Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair Page 27