houllebecquerie
I guess we should have called our blog "Hegemony." Or just "hegemon." Which sounds like the name of a Transformer.
Anyhoo, thanks to Staci and Jon for keeping us on track. Below is a presentation I did on Houllebecq's Platform for a seminar on Francophone literature. Feel free not to read this until after you read Houellebecq -- in fact, it's probably better that way. You might end up considering the whole piece a waste of time, but not unentertaining. Here's what I'll do -- I'll bury the presentation in a comment to this post, and if you want to read it, you can.
Is anyone interested in reading Niall Ferguson on Empire? (British Harvard historian w/joint appointment in business school.) Although I disagree with what I've read of him, and I find his "longue duree" approach to history annoying, he is one of the big historians of the day and I feel like I should know what he's all about. I'm sure Alex can correct me on this. It might be a nice counterpart to the Said novel Staci suggested. Also, Jon recommended a book on math to me a while ago (for non-mathematicians, more cognitive-y) -- that might be cool as well. This is all heavy-hitting stuff, so I'm also up for a children's book month, mainly to get everyone to read, love, and cry over Philip Pullman.
If anyone is interested, here is what's on current (dissertation) reading list. In fact, I'd love to hear what you all are reading as well.
-- Beckett's Trilogy (now out in a new edition w/intro by Coetzee and Rushdie, among others)
-- Woolf's The Years (and The Pargiters, the accompaniment to The Years), Orlando, Three Guineas; Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf
-- Coetzee's The Lives of Animals
-- and a bunch of lit theory that no one else is probably interested in.
Anyhoo, thanks to Staci and Jon for keeping us on track. Below is a presentation I did on Houllebecq's Platform for a seminar on Francophone literature. Feel free not to read this until after you read Houellebecq -- in fact, it's probably better that way. You might end up considering the whole piece a waste of time, but not unentertaining. Here's what I'll do -- I'll bury the presentation in a comment to this post, and if you want to read it, you can.
Is anyone interested in reading Niall Ferguson on Empire? (British Harvard historian w/joint appointment in business school.) Although I disagree with what I've read of him, and I find his "longue duree" approach to history annoying, he is one of the big historians of the day and I feel like I should know what he's all about. I'm sure Alex can correct me on this. It might be a nice counterpart to the Said novel Staci suggested. Also, Jon recommended a book on math to me a while ago (for non-mathematicians, more cognitive-y) -- that might be cool as well. This is all heavy-hitting stuff, so I'm also up for a children's book month, mainly to get everyone to read, love, and cry over Philip Pullman.
If anyone is interested, here is what's on current (dissertation) reading list. In fact, I'd love to hear what you all are reading as well.
-- Beckett's Trilogy (now out in a new edition w/intro by Coetzee and Rushdie, among others)
-- Woolf's The Years (and The Pargiters, the accompaniment to The Years), Orlando, Three Guineas; Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf
-- Coetzee's The Lives of Animals
-- and a bunch of lit theory that no one else is probably interested in.
posted by Jeannie | 6:22 PM
1 Comments:
Houellebecq Presentation
Biography
Described in one periodical as a “sad and disturbing smurf.” Born in Réunion in 1958. He was raised by his paternal grandparents in Paris; Houellebecq is the name of his favorite grandmother. He received a degree in agricultural engineering, worked as a computer analyst for the government, hospitalized at one point for severe depression. A couple of important authors for him are H.P. Lovecraft and Auguste Comte. He’s received many prestigious awards. Four Islamist groups, including the Ligue islamique mondiale, brought a suit against him for declaring in an 2002 interview that Islam was the “religion plus con”; the suit was dismissed by the French courts because blasphemy is not illegal. The Ligue islamique mondiale’s response was that "le +talent+ relativement limité et la médiocrité intellectuelle de cet auteur à scandale n'ont aucun impact sur les relations cordiales entretenues par les musulmans et les Français". He lives with his wife in Ireland.
Houellebecq’s Platform follows the narrator, a tourist, through Thailand and Cuba. The narrator and his friends initiate a chain of resorts devoted to sex tourism, a package with the slogan “Eldorado Aphrodite: Because pleasure is a right.” The general purpose of the resort is to revive the libido and the will to live of the millenially weary Western tourist. The project fails due to, apparently, an Islamist terrorist attack on the their resort in Thailand. The novel is set between the years 2001 and 2002, with the omission of any reference to 9/11. Houellebecq seems to set up oppositions only to dissemble them, so my presentation is more of an effort to elaborate some questions generated by the text.
At the beginning of the novel, Michel declares, “What I really want, basically, is to be a tourist.” So first I’d like to turn to the question of tourism, and exactly what kind of tourism the narrator is. Michel is of course a tourist in the conventional sense, the target of all of those attractive brochures and travel packages at his local travel agency. The constant references to sociological research on the topic of tourism, as well as the detailed description of tourism development that take up most of Part II of the novel, seems to support this. On the other hand, Michel’s tourism seems to parody these sociological categories and prescriptions, especially when these categories and prescriptions go beyond the mere consumer aspect of tourism, and extend toward the cultural or moralistic or even ethical aspect of tourism. The kind of mobility or being-in-transit that characterizes tourism extends toward all aspects of experience; historically, when he speaks of Cuba’s touristic appeal as an “endangered regime,” (thus tourist as time-traveller), sexually, through his erotic adventures within and outside of France, etc., and psychologically, as a way of escaping the trap of what he calls “aggressive Western masochism.” On page 38, he cites Racid Amirou, Le Tourisme locale: une culture de l’exoticisme, “tourism, as a search for meaning, with the ludic sociability it favours, the images it generates, is a graduated encoded and untraumatising apprehension system of the external, of otherness.” And it seems to me that for Michel, despite what seem to be his insatiable sexual appetites, it is precisely the “ludic sociability” of tourism that leads to a decoded, traumatising and desystematizing (deterritorializing) experience of otherness. This experience, I would say, undermines the sunny emancipatory experience that is voiced in the character Lagarrigue, a tourism consultant, who claims that tourists are “nomads” rather than sun-worshippers, seeking “ethical, individual fulfilment, solidarity, passion”: “Being affluent …we want [our travels] to bear witness to a certain sense of solidarity” (167).
Rather, the kind of solidarity that Michel experiences is not a nostalgiac kind of we-are-the-world, but rather a paradoxical solidarity or connectivity made possible by what Manuell Castells would call “glocality” or “splintering networks.” This brings up the question of how we are to understand the platform of the title: platform in the technological sense, as a common computer application structure; platform as in a manifesto, a set of beliefs, as on page 249 with the Eldorado Aphrodite project; platform as an artificial space from which to observe the goings-on of the earth below, a space that creates spaces, spaces that are moreover asymmetrical spaces, as in the childhood experience described on page 322; and I would suggest, platform as a general metaphor for a late capital, perhaps neoimperial? world. On page 131, Michel predicts that the “whole world would come to resemble an airport.” And in a sense he is a tourist in his own home, in Paris, he is nothing but a tourist, because the world he lives in has already become transformed. According Manuel Castells’s elaboration of “the logic of splintering networks” or “glocality,” cities become spaces or territories polarized between “glocal nodes”and the “hinterland”, where the glocal nodes are connected to similar glocal nodes throughout the world, as opposed to the neighborhoods in their immediate vicinity. The logic of splintering networks creates an urban dualism between affluent suburbs (and their corresponding sophisticated informational/technological infrastructure) and impoverished metropolitan centers.
The logic of splintering networks is demonstrated to be a global trend throughout the world, at work in a cosmopolitan center such as Paris, kind of reworking the notion of home, and in the countries Michel visits such as Thailand and Cuba. The character Jean-Yves draws an analogy between Sao Paulo and Paris: outside Aurore’s office complex in Paris “are the predators, the savage world,” that is, the underprivileged and gang-ridden suburbs (198). Stylistically, Houellebecq will dramatize this splintering or disjunction by juxtaposing events that seem to have no relation to one another. The sentence, “two teenagers from the Courtilieres housing estate were smashing in a sixty-year-old woman’s head with a baseball bat” is followed immediately by the narrator’s order at a business lunch, “I ordered maquereau au vin blanc to start.” In Thailand and Cuba, Michel becomes in a sense a tourist through history and through socio-economic formations: the first part of the novel devoted to Thailand evokes the history of a country negotiating its sovereignty through European imperialisms, and becoming transformed by its dependence on the tourist industry, suffering a severe economic crisis due to its dependence on global finance capital (the first in two centuries, according to Michel). Cuba is to Michel a failed socialist project: “this was no utopia, nor some environmentalist recreation: it was the reality of a country which could no longer sustain itself in the industrial age” (213?), and again, his comment on the regime’s decline is directly followed by the phrase, “Valerie slipped on a short skirt” (236).
The Cuba brings up another important issue in the novel, the question of humanism or posthumanism. In Cuba, Michel reads the failed socialist experiment to create the “new man,” but what does that term entail? What kind of potentialities are indicated by that term? The narrator, Valerie, and Jean-Yves all manage the movement of information, and as themselves in a sense tourists along these information networks, they exemplify the kind of late-capital subjectivity that inhabits these glocalities. Michel speaks of European ancestors who believed in the “superiority of their civilization” and had a “taste for work”: “they had invented dreams, progress, utopia, the future” (298), in contrast to himself, a self-described “decadent European.” The decadent European is atomised, individualised, a collection of erotic desires with no sense of political commitment, which creates what the narrator describes as a democracy based on “weak consensus”: he writes, “I was finding it more and more difficult to understand how one could feel attached to an idea, a country, anything in fact other than an individual” (330). Deracinated, unaffiliated, mobile, in transit, atomised. On page 225, the narrator describes himself and his companions as people who don’t make things, they only manage information and capital: “We lived in a world made up of objects whose manufacture, possible uses, and functions were completely alien to us.” The narrator panics at this realization, and responds by touching Valerie’s body.
This anthropological question, the question of who is the new human or who or what comes after the human, of course relates to the most obvious aspect of the novel, its treatment of sexuality and racism. This aspect could memorably summed up in such catchphrases as, “All the rich or moderately wealthy world was here, all answering ‘present!’ to the gentle and constant roll-call of Asian pussy” (108). Or “What is really at stake in racial struggles…is neither economic nor cultural, it is brutal and biological; it is competition for the cunts of young women” (114). In a sense, the narrative of erotic awakening as concomitant with political awakening and revolutionary affect that we found in such various authors as Yacine, Genet, Djebar, etc. is turned on its head into a parody of Enlightenment cosmopolitan values. The narrator describes the decadent European as almost dying for contact, for relation; he suffers from what Michel refers to as the “sin of cutting oneself off from all warm and living human contacts” (in ref to Agatha Christie), or what Valerie describes as the necessity to re-educate Westerners to love and to experience pleasure (190). But the half-dead, half-alive, sex tourist of the novel feeds almost vampirically on prostitutes. The democratic egalitarian ideal is parodied in the perfect equivalence promised by money: in passages reminiscent of Marx’s famous analogy of the prostitute to the commodity in his Grundrisse, “the best solution was probably to involve money, that universal mediator which already made it possible to assure an exact equivalence btw intelligence, talent and tech competence; which had already made it possible to assure a perfect standardisation of opinions tastes and lifestyle” (297). (Did money ever assure such an exact equivalence?)
In a way, the narrator’s posthumanism looks like same old humanism, with its theological and androcentric prejudices, as in this scene with Valerie: “To truly arrive at the practical poss of happiness, man would have to transform himself – transform himself physically. What can one compare with God. In the first place, obviously, a woman’s pussy…sth, at any rate, in which spirit becomes possible…when the pleasure in her body mounted, I felt like a god” (162). Perhaps the more interesting musings on posthumanism occur on pages 234-5, where he explains that “all humanity instinctively tends towards misgenation, a generalised undifferentiated state, and it does so first and foremost through the elementary means of sexuality” (234), thus the thesis that cyborgs and celebrities (especially Michael Jackson) test the limits of the human (235). In a sense, this developmental narrative follows Auguste Comte’s philosophy and sociology, which is periodically cited in the novel. Comte proposed that mankind passes through three stages of interpreting phenomena – theologically, metaphysically, and finally, positivistically, and the “decadence” that Michel describes can be seen as a movement toward greater and greater particularity, that is, phenomena or events that don’t fit within theological or metaphysical notions or any other meta-discourses, but can only be described positivistically, through what he calls the “universal mediator” money.
Which brings me finally to the question of the attitude toward Islam in the novel, where we find the tired cliché of the “clash of civilizations” between the Islamic East and the liberal democratic West. Houellebecq has been (rightly) criticized for putting prejudicial statements about Islam in the mouths of Muslim characters as a kind of alibi for his own opinions. See for example the Jordanian banker’s comment that capitalism would triumph over Islam (a strange opposition) on page 350, which seems to endorse the narrator’s vision of migratory flows: “I had a vision of migratory flows crisscrossing Europe like blood vessels; Muslims appeared as clots that were only slowly reabsorbed” (22), the implication being that the clots would be reabsorbed if Muslim women had sex with Western tourists (plot of Lanzarote).
Given all of this, I’m not sure how I feel about the ending. If a novel is trying to be offensive, amoral, sexually and morally perverse, I like the novel to go all the way, for purely formal reasons. By the end of the novel, we find the novel retracting its bold posthumanist claims: sex tourism has not rejuvenated the decadent European and taught him how to love; sex tourism is sought not for its revivifying exposure to the other, but because it “brings back no memories. If sex has to be paid for, it is best that, in a certain sense, it is undifferentiated…one of the first things you feel in the presence of another race is that inability to differentiate… [sex] simply constitutes a means of combating the crushing boredom of life in the heart of nature” (364). Pattaya, described in the beginning of the novel as a hedonistic utopia, is described at the end of the novel as “a sort of cesspit, the ultimate sewer where the sundry waste of western neurosis winds up” a place “to end [life] in tolerable conditions” (353). It almost seems that Houellebecq can’t bring himself to follow his repugnant lifestyle to the end. The epigraph in the book is from Balzac: a repugnant lifestyle as a protest. But his lapse at the end, as a protest against his own repugnant lifestyle, may be the only interesting part of the book.
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