Anti-Matter

by Ben Jeffery

  ‘What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution?’ asked Wallace. His worry was over the neutralisation of one kind of rebel-art, but with the benefit of hindsight we can identify it as part of a much wider cultural trend, a process cultural theorist Mark Fisher, in Capitalist Realism (2009), termed precorporation: the apparent transformation of every gesture and meta-gesture into market-tested cliché: ‘the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture’. A state with a lack of breathing space, where the desire for authenticity has been so well-identified it becomes smothered. In the face of this, unchecked cynicism is worse than useless – it pacifies; as though the mere awareness of being ill could be substituted for a cure. A great deal of what Wallace said about writing in interviews revolved around the importance of rehabilitating ‘simple’ values in art,6 but, as he alluded to at the end of ‘E Unibus Pluram’, the basic challenge is not to renounce cynicism in favour of earnestness, but to appreciate how the present situation might require postmodernist techniques at the same time as it desperately needs to transcend them, i.e. to find a way to be earnest and sentimental while keeping one’s eyes open to the conditions that give rise to cynicism and irony, which after all didn’t come out of a vacuum.7

  ***

  Decades on from a seismic shift in the public’s perception of how art is meant to work – the ‘transition from art’s being a creative instantiation of real values to art’s being a creative rejection of bogus values’, in Wallace’s words – there’s self-evidently still no shortage of fake, hypocritical, trashy culture to oppose. The underbelly of consumer capitalism is not something hidden. And yet the durability of a culture that panders to self-centredness isn’t hard to fathom either, since, to say nothing else, it has one singular phenomenological fact on its side – the unshakable illusion possessed by everyone that they are each at the very centre of creation, alone. Fiction with a nihilist bent is (in one way) just a natural progression from postmodernist satire, pitting itself against everything except, finally, what appears undeniable: basic instincts, and the isolation of the self. Instead of any high-flown ‘making strange’, Houellebecq tries to make the reader feel the way they do already, only much worse. It’s not that all his theories are plausible. The ambience of his books is what really tells – their dull, bone-deep bitterness. Taking it as axiomatic that there’s a current of frustrated desire Western culture feeds on and intensifies, Houellebecq ramps up the resentment – at the failure of life to live up to its billing; at the distance between virtual attractions and everyday landfill; at the creeping feeling that there’s a gigantic party going on all the time somewhere that you haven’t been invited to; at a cultural nervous system toxified by wanting and not having, having and not wanting anymore; and at all (to quote Wallace once again) ‘the really rather brilliantly managed stress everybody is made to feel about staying fit and looking good and living long and squeezing the absolute maximum productivity and health and self-actuation out of every last vanishing second’. Instead of trying to fight past cynicism and weariness, Houellebecq conducts energy straight through them. The most forceful moments are always the most certain. The moral is always you know this all already.

  But Houellebecq’s books aren’t as self-assured as they seem, and this returns to the blind-spot that depressive realist art has about itself. If what the characters in Houellebecq say is true, it seems to cancel the art’s reason to be; but it’s the author’s skill, his art, that makes them sound true. If their solipsism and self-interest are compelling, it’s only because the reader can sympathise. It’s an inconsistency exhibited within the novels, too, filled up as they are with characters who constantly assert the uselessness of writing but who keep on producing it themselves. The narrator of Whatever writes philosophical parables. Bruno composes essays and poems. Michel Djerzinski completes a book of philosophy. Daniel writes love poetry. Near the end of both Platform and The Possibility of an Island the narrative is revealed to have been a written memoir. Atomised, too, turns out to be a composition – the story has been written by a neo-human. Acts of writing, as much as the disgust for writing, are everywhere in Houellebecq’s fiction. It’s interesting that almost the last thing Daniel does before he dies is send Esther dozens of useless letters, trying to win her back. A different character (commenting on Daniel’s life story) describes it as ‘a last and pathetic attempt to deny reality… this love without end he speaks of existed only in his imagination’. There is something microcosmic about this: an ineffectual message written in the name of an imaginary ideal, a compulsive attempt to deny reality.

  The rhetorical self-harm in Houellebecq’s novels is an example of depressive realism struggling with its own contradictions and impossibilities. In some respects, not only are Houellebecq’s novels unimaginative (in their reductive worldview), they are anti-imaginative too; they actively dislike the imagination. Houellebecq hammers the mantra that the engine of consumer capitalism is a terrible intensification of desire, which makes satisfaction progressively harder. He means sex, but the idea might just as well be generalised. What’s significant is its defeatism. The thought that one is enslaved by desire even in the knowledge that it’s harmful; left in thrall to the rampaging power of idiotic urges (as if to say: ‘This is what I want, whether or not I like it!’). A confusion specific to Houellebecq, rather than depressive realism in general, is that his novels capitulate to fantasy, over and over again; the same fantasies they blame human suffering on. This is the weird naivety that springs up in every one of his books, with the exception of Whatever – the moments when cynical realism seemingly dissolves into fantasy, be it sentimental love or (more usually) pornographic bliss. You get the impression that Houellebecq realises how incredible these events are, since he always returns to sabotage them afterwards, to denounce them as false promises. Nonetheless, the novels they belong to would not work if they were removed. Without the unnaturally perfect lovers in Platform, The Possibility of an Island and La Carte et le Territoire there would be no plot. Atomised pivots on a dreamlike sex scene that sets up the second half of the story. In the Nietzschian sense, Houellebecq’s books are decadent: in love with what is harmful. His ‘realism’ is fundamentally split, with cynicism on one side, and intoxication with realer-than-real fantasies on the other. But rather than giving to lie to his worldview, it is this split, this incompatibility, which attaches him so well to his time and place.

  The greatest strength of consumerism (and also it’s most unhappy aspect) is that it exists only with our complicity. There is a level at which the depthless fantasies it presents simply are what we want. Some good examples of this are the eternally-returning stories in certain parts of the media about the neuroses given to average women from a fashion industry constantly bombarding them with injunctions to be thinner, younger and more perfect. It would seem beyond doubt that the worries are justified, i.e. that fashion images really do set unattainable, anxiety-inducing norms. So why do the objections feel so feeble? Why does nothing ever change? What’s problematic about condemning the fashion industry for being unrealistic is that it never aspires to be realistic in the first place; indeed it lives off our own un reasonable desires. (The point is even more obvious now that pictures of models are digitally ‘enhanced’ as a matter of course. It is literally impossible for someone to look this way, but that’s what sells.) Consciously or not, Houellebecq’s writing exhibits the schizophrenic pull of consumption culture – how unreal it seems, and yet how enmeshed in it we remain. And one reason it’s so hard for art to exercise a grip on the modern psyche is that, in a way, consumerism has already turned our imagination against us, and taught us to distrust it. It’s interesting that whenever Houellebecq describes happiness it is, almost invariably, as a blankness. The orgasms that obliterate self-consciousness; or the passage in Platform when Michel R. recalls his brief, contented time with his lover, ‘of which, paradoxically, I have so few memories’; even
the utopia at the end of Atomised, referred to rather than described. Within their medium, the novels seem to find happiness unimaginable. Instead the imagination is the enemy, a liar – the ultimate faker. There’s a saying that misanthropy is always a disguised form of self-contempt, which, in this case, is perfectly correct. Houellebecq’s books are works of the imagination against the imagination. They hate themselves.

  4

  Everything and Nothing

  Clinical depression resembles a malign, lived paradox. The irreconcilability is between the all-consuming world the disease creates for the depressive – the inability to perceive any separate other – and the apprehension that this everything is also nothing, that the world has no ‘real’, positive content or worth. In the same way that depressive realist art is unable explain its own existence, the depressed person cannot accept hers, and this failure of processing is agony. In his novel Infinite Jest (1996), Wallace described psychotic depression as ‘probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency – sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying – are not just unpleasant but literally horrible. It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed.’ Depression is the pathological frontier of individualism – the point at which the whole world is eaten up by the self.

  The dissonance between all-important and not-important in clinical depression (its supreme but also worthless loneliness) is the background mood of Houellebecq’s novels, and it is a key to many of the aesthetic and ethical problems they distil. Whatever else you think of him, it’s hard to fault Houellebecq for his ambition. He certainly doesn’t shy away from the most fundamental themes of love, loss, death and so forth. So it’s striking that this seriousness of purpose also correlates with a kind of self-negation, a total unseriousness. Not only is it hard to understand what good it possibly does, if we’re taking the novels at their word, to see the universe in such a merciless fashion, there’s also the performative contradiction of depressive realist art, and beyond that the simple pettiness of so much of Houellebecq’s philosophy. Is it really the most significant thing – not getting enough sex and being angry about it?

  But there are real, macro-scale phenomena behind the reductive individualism Houellebecq peddles. Jean-François Lyotard described the postmodern era as the end of ‘metanarratives’, a judgment that’s been debated, but which is true insofar as it spells out the logical consequence for fiction-writing in a world grown too broad and various for literature. To borrow Fredric Jameson’s term, novelists seem unable to ‘totalise’ the world any longer: the big story, such as it is, isn’t one they are equipped for. But this is true largely because the big story isn’t one that anybody is equipped for. In his essay ‘Cognitive Mapping’ (1988), Jameson noted how personal experience is an increasingly unreliable guide to the truth of our time and place, given that everyday reality is now entwined with bewilderingly huge systems of finance and information, and crucial first-hand realities – the price of goods, for example – are set in place by forces almost completely beyond first-hand awareness. In these conditions, wrote Jameson, ‘the phenomenological experience of the individual subject, traditionally the supreme raw materials of the work of art, becomes limited to a tiny corner of the social world, a fixed camera view of a certain section of London or the countryside or whatever. But the truth of that experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong…’ It’s not only the defining conflicts of the era (the War on Terror, climate change, etc.) that are difficult to appreciate from ground-level in the West. Even our limited, daily, ground-level experience is shaped by almost unfathomably complex, man-made networks of capital and exchange, the structural coordinates of which ‘are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and… often not even conceptualizable for most people’.

  Which is to say, although the workings of the world – the reasons how and why our society is arranged the way it is – could perhaps be represented using scientific or mathematical models, there is no non-abstract way of seeing for yourself where the explanation lies. ‘There comes into being, then,’ continued Jameson, ‘a situation in which we can say that if individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true; and that if a scientific or cognitive model of the same content is true, then it escapes individual experience. It is evident that this new situation poses tremendous and crippling problems for a work of art.’ That it does, but even before that it places a huge burden on any individual’s sense of identity. When Bruno declares, in Atomised, that the modern world reduces a man ‘to the sum of his own experience’, it’s more than just an excuse for self-indulgence. The difficulty of relating local experience to any social totality tends to reduce identity to personalised anchors: the everyday work you do, your friends, family, close community, etc. It’s not that we have no stories to tell, but that our stories have fallen drastically out of synch with the processes making the world what it is.

  A well-known irony of globalisation is that the incredible expanse of activity and interconnection it reveals to us inspires nothing, on a personal level, so much as feelings of isolation, impotence and insignificance. But then again, in another way, it also makes everyday problems feel like the only real problems there are, being the only issues we experience directly or exercise any real degree of control over. You end up with the weird feeling that your own private concerns are both the most important things and not important at all – an echo of the clinical depressive paradox. Just as our personal affairs increasingly seem like the only absolutes we have, they are also made permanently, inchoately under threat from this unseen global totality that trivialises them by comparison. As such, to paraphrase one of Wallace’s stories, the defining struggle of the modern psyche has become the management of insignificance: how to reconcile the subjective centrality of our life with its objective meaninglessness? Whenever it becomes hard to tell ‘a good story’ about the place we occupy in the world, our sense of ourselves is undermined. And given that so much of the modern world seems unimaginably sophisticated, beyond us on a macro-level, but also just in many everyday respects (Slavoj Žižek’s example: who can really picture the inner workings of a computer?), it’s not difficult to feel a want of support. Again, only a brief scan of the daily news is needed to realise just how much data there is out there, the vast areas of knowledge of which you have only the faintest inkling; the sum total of which nobody is remotely qualified for, and never could be. It may be that the great shared sensation of the information-age is simple incomprehension, bafflement.

  One fascinating thing about Houellebecq’s books is that they don’t seem to be blind to their own contradictions, but are in fact aware in a tangled-up sort of way. Their ‘realism’ entails the thought that novels (and, by extension, stories) are inadequate and delusory, but obviously this is an impossible idea for any novel to hold consistently, and self-hatred is what emerges from the deadlock. It’s as though Houellebecq’s books were trapped inside narrative. Stuck doing something they know is wrong, but inescapably wrong, the wrongness of which cannot even be expressed properly because there’s no way out of story-telling. Something similar is true with respect to identity under globalisation. It’s impossible for me to abandon the stories that give my life shape – that is ‘who I am’ – but it’s also impossible to completely escape the awareness that these stories are flimsy and simplistic and nugatory in relationship to the real, overwhelming complexity and scope of the world. Nietzsche made the point that psychic health demands a minimum of thoughtlessness (what he called ‘oblivion’). Too much thinking is bad for you, in other words.8 So maybe the way to put it is that there are things that can inspire altogether too much consciousness, and globalisation is one of them.

  Modernism, as an aesthetic style, was born from the feeling that the old ways of telling stori
es and making sense of the world had become insufficient. Kurt Vonnegut phrased it perfectly in Slaughterhouse 5 (1969) when one of his characters says that ‘everything there was to know about life’ could be found in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. ‘But that isn’t enough anymore.’ What is there to add? The modernist’s project was haunted, and driven, by the idea that it was possible to construct some authentic response to the new circumstances, a better way of living and thinking. Postmodernism could be interpreted as the dismissal of this possibility. There is no authenticity, only various preferences. But here the spectre of depression returns, with its excess of self-consciousness and deficit of self-worth – because if art is nothing more than the gratification of preferences, it’s also ‘merely’ the gratification of preferences. The artistic disorientation discussed in Chapter 2 is a malaise generated by the (real or perceived) absence of external criteria for measuring, or even just expressing, the value of art. And part of what it confronts is the limits of using individual pleasure as a justification of value. The problem is that if art serves nothing beyond an individual’s pleasure it is also nothing better or more important than self-indulgence – a self that is, in the objective scheme of things, utterly insignificant. It isn’t a bad way of outlining what it is that’s so naggingly, fuzzily dissatisfying about so much culture at present. This sensation that, however skilfully made a novel or a song or whatever it may be, it’s still – in some imprecise way – trivial, peripheral, evanescent, a matter of opinion, or what have you. Joan Didion called the lack of self-respect a condition of being ‘locked within oneself… paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference’, and I think it’s a good description of the type of fidgety anxiety that infects contemporary aesthetics. The cloudy feeling that artistry ought to be important, is important somehow, but the how and why is unclear.