Moving between the present, the near future and the distant future, the novel plots the trajectory of this new race of ‘neo-humans’ who, described in their infancy in Atomised, are now two thousand years old. While both novels offer ‘scandalously unattractive dystopias’, Possibility presents a significantly bleaker vision of posthumanity than that of Atomised.74 In the earlier novel, the bioengineered entities remain recognizably human save for their augmented auto-erotic possibilities, whereas in Possibility human life has all but vanished, reduced to a virtual existence in which all communication and connection is carried out through the medium of machines and where all ‘identity is serial’ and bare life is lived out in the ‘cold ecstasy of self-sufficiency’.75 Made up of a set of cloned DNA information, the neohumans are only nominally human. Genetically unable to form any social or sexual attachments with each other and lacking in free will of any kind, theirs are lives as ‘predictable as the functioning of a radiator’ (PI, 321). Completely undifferentiated entities, the neohumans are super-rationalized units with no superfluous functions who live in a self-incorporated environment where everything and everyone is already known and communication takes place within a closed network. Science has allowed, however, some superficial differences to the composition of the cloned DNA to permit some local variations in their genomic fingerprint. For example, the neohumans are composed of their predecessors in two important genetic respects: the mechanical transmission of memory from one generation (or more properly, incarnation) to the next and the continuity of certain genetic weaknesses or psychological tendencies are passed on between all the 25 versions of the original Daniel. This bare difference has a negligible overall effect on the Daniels and functions as a ghostly trace, a distant genetic memory, of the real differences that characterized an older humanity.
In the narrative of the original storyteller, Daniel1, we learn of the formation and success of the Elohimites, a cult who use biotechnology to freeze the DNA from the original human subjects and who will refine this process to permit full genetic cloning. Millennia later, the cloned neohumans are living out their (eternal) days in individual compounds in ‘total physical separation’, the only communication between them taking place via computers by means of mathematical codes and limited visualization (PI, 302). Consuming only water and mineral salts, their physical bodies are stripped down to the barest life functions with no recognizably human digestive system and therefore producing no waste. The neohumans experience existence as a solitary, fear-free state of consciousness characterized by an unchanging homogeny and the predictability of non-event.
They are the end result of the total determinism of biogenetic science that has been able to prove that humans are little more than ‘matter plus information’ and the human mind is little more than a mechanical collection of ‘neuronal sub-networks and dedicated synapses’ that need only ‘chemical refinement’ to activate a full human subject with a history and individual personality (PI, 171). An Elohimite lecture on DNA and embryo-genesis, ‘The Human Being: Matter and Information’, displays a container full of plastic bags of ‘unequal sizes of which the largest is water’ on the stage. These bags, the audience is told, contain ‘the exact chemical composition of the human being and it is only in a few quirky combinations of the genetic code, a ‘few basic elements of aptitude and character that constitute our individuality and our memory’ that our uniqueness as humans lies (PI, 170–1).
If science can intervene and correct these few elements that make us so distinctly and individually human then the more fugitive and unpredictable aspects of human subjectivity and intersubjectivity – sexuality, love, desire, memory and feeling – can be smoothed out into a state of serene one-ness by the application of the right kind of science, thus making human or neohuman life predictable, peaceful and utterly closed to the vagaries and possibilities of any possibility of otherness and difference. With no death, no difference and no affect, there is no longer any ‘outside’ for these self-sufficient entities. The teachings of the Supreme Sister, a nod to Auguste Comte’s feminized secular Religion of Humanity and its Nouveau Grand-Être Suprême (New Supreme Great Being), accordingly emphasize the importance of indifference and detachment for the neohumans:
… jealousy, desire, and the appetite for procreation share the same origin, which is the suffering of being. It is the suffering of being [la souffrance d’être] that makes us seek out the other, as a palliative; we must go beyond this stage to reach the state where the simple fact of being constitutes in itself a permanent occasion for joy; where intermediation is nothing more than a game, freely undertaken, and not constitutive of being. We must, in a word, reach the freedom of indifference, the condition for the possibility of perfect serenity. (PI, 267)
Set against this frictionless existence of the neohumans is the chaotic life of Daniel1 who continues to search for some workable balance between sex and love and, like all of Houellebecq’s characters, fails miserably. Simultaneously, horrified and perplexed by the ‘incredible importance accorded to sexual matters among humans’, the cloned Daniel25 realizes that in the twenty-first century such primitive behaviours encouraged humans to ‘sacrifice its happiness, its physical well-being and even its life, in the hope of sexual intercourse alone’ (PI, 231). When it comes to sexual matters, Daniel1 is marginally more successful than Bruno was in Atomised, although the two share similar proclivities in their aversion to sexual relations with middle-aged women as well as their willingness to offend by publicly transgressive behaviour. But where Bruno is finally locked away for his increasingly offensive behaviour most clearly articulated in his hateful, his right-wing pamphleteering, Daniel makes a lucrative career out of scurrilous humour as a stand-up comedian with shows such as We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts. Hugely successful, Daniel1 is spokesperson for his cynical young fans who fail to perceive that the ‘institutionalised anarchy’ of his shows is merely a symptom of a decayed ethical system ‘centered for some decades now on competition, innovation and energy, more than on fidelity and duty’. As we know from Atomised, humour will save us from nothing. Transgression offers us similarly insubstantial succour and Daniel1 is fully aware that the ‘putting to death of morality’ had become a kind of empty ritual of transgression that operated only to reassert the dominant values of the group’; what he soon comes to realize is that ‘… life, fundamentally, is not comical’ (PI, 32).
The opposite of this ‘empty pseudo transgression’ is the ‘authentic’ kitsch art of Vincent Greilsamer, a thoughtful and softly spoken young man who will become the second prophet of the sect, who Daniel meets on one of his first visits to the Elohimites.76 Vincent outlines three main trends in contemporary art: gore, humour and the virtual (PI, 102–3). The first two of these categories are predicated on a sense of irony and distantiation from any sense of earnestness that ‘leaves you doubting whether or not it has the slightest artistic value’. Then there is the concept of kitsch art which, while presenting emotion and feeling, necessitates a signalling ‘by means of a meta-narration’ on the part of the viewer that he or she is not fooled by this claim to seriousness: ‘Everything is kitsch if you like. Music as whole is kitsch; art is kitsch, literature itself is kitsch. Any emotion is kitsch, practically by definition; but any reflection also, and even in a sense any action, the only thing that is not absolutely kitsch is nothingness’ (PI, 103). What we end up with in the novel then, is an impoverished version of nothingness; a technically induced nothingness posing as life, what might be termed le néant méchanique.
Vincent’s art is the realization of a very particular view of love in Houellebecq’s work. As noted above, the cruelty of Daniel1’s art in his vicious, apolitical stand-up routines, is welcomed by a society ever more entranced by mirthless, pointless transgression; a world in which love is becoming a distant memory. Vincent’s installation art is the opposite of the transgressive gestures that have come to define modern and contemporary visual arts:
I have
chosen to create a small, easy world where you only encounter happiness. I am perfectly conscious of the regressive nature of my work; I know that it can be compared to the attitude of adolescents who, instead of confronting the problems of adolescence, dive head first into their stamp collection, their herbarium or whatever other glittering, limited, multicoloured little world they choose […] I am a tiny little invalid child, who cannot live. I cannot come to terms with the brutality of this world: I just can’t do it. (PI, 110)
The aesthetic setting for this installation is the ‘naïve’ taste in decor of the working-class of the grandparental generation, the last generation who knew how to love unselfishly and who experienced the deep bonds of familial and social attachments that, in Houellebecq’s view, irrevocably disappeared after 1968 and were particularly ruinous for women like Esther, the young Spanish actress Daniel meets and who finally proves to him that love is no longer possible in a sexually liberated world. Unprotected by his cynicism, Daniel’s rejection by the sexy but capricious Esther is the final push towards the dubious sect of the Elohimites. Esther’s cheerful willingness to have uninhibited adventurous sex with his middle-aged body (although later this enthusiasm is shown to be faked) is the source of most of his joy in the relationship. This very quickly wanes as she is shown to epitomize the sexual amorality of her generation who manifest a complete indifference to love, pointed up in a drug-fuelled orgy at her birthday party in which Daniel is excluded from the sexual action, wandering Methuselah-like among the younger people ‘like some kind of prehistoric monster with my romantic silliness, my attachments, my chains’:
As for love, it could no longer be counted on: I was undoubtedly one of the last men of my generation to love myself sufficiently little to be able to love someone else […] There is no love in individual freedom in independence […] love is only the desire for annihilation, fusion, the disappearance of the individual, in sort of what used to be called oceanic feeling, in something that anyway was, at least in the near future, condemned. (PI, 300)
For Esther and her generation there is an explicit repudiation of love and of any ‘feeling of exclusivity’ and ‘of dependence’ involved in monogamous relations. Realizing his desire to love has become hopelessly outmoded, ‘like a stigmata in ancient times’, Daniel concludes, not that Esther’s behaviour is some kind of fruition, however imperfectly realized, of female sexual emancipation but that ‘the centuries-old male project, perfectly expressed nowadays by pornographic films, that consisted in ridding sexuality of any emotional connotation in order to bring it back into the realm of pure entertainment had finally, in this generation, been accomplished’ (PI, 241). The epitome of selfless love in its ideal state is represented in Possibility by Daniel’s dog Fox. The state in which a dog apprehends the world and others in it is free, of course, from any existential anguish and crucially is not vulnerable to erotic obsolescence, affective ruin or boredom. The simplicity of canine rituals is something to which humanity might aspire. As Michel muses in Atomised: ‘Life should be simple […] something that could be lived as a collection of small, endlessly repeated rituals. Perhaps somewhat empty rituals, but they gave you something to believe in.77 With their uninterrupted capacity for consistent daily pleasure it is the endless possibility for joy that makes a dog a ‘machine for loving’; they are ideal love objects to which all three Daniels can attach themselves, ‘Through dogs we pay homage to love’ (PI, 190–1).78
In the ‘Final Commentary, Epilogue’ in Possibility there is a moment of resistance to the totally administered world of the neohumans in which all possibility of flux, flow and transformation has been stilled. Inspired, or perhaps corrupted, by reading Daniel1’s commentary detailing the painful but still attractive texture of ‘real’ human life and still possessing some residual longing for another body, that of Marie23 whom he has ‘met’ online, Daniel25 decides to take his chances outside of the gated compounds of the ‘abstract and virtual community’ (PI, 331). Driven by the need to experience a real outside, he longs for the possibility of encountering otherness and sets out on a doomed mission to find an older version of humanity who may have survived the various catastrophic events, nuclear war, droughts and so on. Finally, Daniel25 decides to travel to the sea beyond the compound and its guarantee of eternal life. Inspired by the writing of Daniel1, he leaves behind the world of the neohumans and eternal life in the hope of understanding something of the feeling and passions of humans, ‘what is best in our lives’ (PI, 319). The smooth working of the human as machine may be pain-free and predictably serene but the possibility of something infinite and mystical continues to hold him mesmerized despite his final realization that whatever the goal might be of finite life, it will never be reached.
He begins to wander among the blasted ‘ruins of a destroyed world’, a post-apocalyptic landscape decimated by climatic catastrophes, with the faithful Fox by his side. Seeing the ruins of technology all around, he concludes that what was best about ‘real’ humanity was not art or ‘philosophical or theological systems’ but ‘its technological ingenuity’ (PI, 324). This outside world is inhospitable and ultimately lethal for Daniel25, and his decision to die rather than submit to this system of affectless stasis seems to suggest that the neohuman solution is no solution at all.
Notes
1Houellebecq, Rester Vivant, 43.
2The Possibility of an Island is henceforth abbreviated to PI. All page references will be given in parentheses in the main body of the text.
3Christian Moraru, ‘The Genomic Imperative: Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island’, Utopian Studies,19, 2 (2008), 265–83, 268.
4Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’ in The Affect Theory Reader Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds) (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 2.
5Bruno Latour, ‘How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies’, Body & Society, 10.2 (2004), 205–29, 207.
6Abecassis, 824.
7Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Broadview Press, 2001 [1961]), 63–4.
8Varsava, 146. Note that the novel’s title Les Particules éleméntaires was more literally translated as The Elementary Particles in the USA.
9Richard J. Bauckham, ‘Freedom in the Crisis of Modernity’, in Public Theology for the 21st Century William F. Storrar and Andrew R. Morton (eds) (London: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2004), 80.
10Charles Melman and Jean-Pierre Lebrun, L’Homme sans gravité: fouir a tout prix (Paris: Denoël, 2002), 224.
11Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred Vogel (Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1966 [1843]), 1.
121953: James Watson and Francis Crick publish their findings on the molecular structure of the DNA-helix.
1978: The first human to be conceived by natural cycle in vitro fertilisation (IVF) is born.
1990: A consortium of researchers begins work on identification of three billion base pairs of DNA of the human genome. A first draft of the human genome is completed in February 2001.
1997: Scientists announce that they have successfully cloned a sheep called Dolly.
2003: The Human Genome Project is successfully completed on 12 April.
2009: Barack Obama overturns the ban on stem cell research opening up a new era in biotechnological research.
13For an overview of all of these viewpoints on critical posthumanism see Evelyn Fox Keller, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth Century Biology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Robert Bud, The Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Frédéric Vandenberghe, ‘Posthumanism, or the Cultural Logic of Global Neo-Capitalism’, translated into French as Complexités du posthumanisme: Pour une critique de la bio-économique politique (Paris: Harmattan, Collection Diagonale Critique, 2005). See also Bruno La
tour and Michel Serres on the sociology and philosophy of science. See Steven Connor’s ‘Introduction’, to Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (I), trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2008), 1–16.
14Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium (New York and London: Guildford Press, 2001). See especially chapter 4, ‘Technological Revolution and Human Evolution’, in which they provide an indispensable overview of a ‘number of critical mutations unfolding in the Third Millennium’, distinguishing between the radical biocentrism of ecological groups, such as Earth First! who are deconstructive posthumanists, as well as a useful critical assessment of the more moderate positions. (195–6). Among the various writers and theorists considered, Best and Kellner identify a sub-group, transhumanists or extropians, who are neither anti-human nor anti-modern, but passionate believers in the spirit of the Enlightenment, especially the ideas of Condorcet. Transhumanists ‘fervently embrace science and technology’ regarding them not as potential enemies of an essential organic humanness but as ‘positive forces’ that will allow us to make ‘quantum leaps in human evolution’ by creating ‘enhanced minds, bodies, and improved control over nature’ (197).
Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair Page 28