A Future Without Psychoanalysis - Houellebecq and Watts

I finally got around to reading Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles this week, inspired both by my friend’s confession that it made him feel “extremely uncomfortable” and by the ambitious comparisons to Beckett and Céline on the back of the most recent American edition. I’m writing my undergraduate thesis on Beckett and have been seeking out contemporary authors—John Banville, Thomas Bernhard and Maurice Blanchot are often cited—who supposedly work in the literary terrain that he initially pioneered. While I enjoyed The Book of Evidence, Gargoyles, and Death Sentence on their own merits, these novels come nowhere near the radical stylistic and theoretical innovations of Beckett’s Trilogy, or even of an early “developmental” novel like Watt. Beckett’s best novels are so programmatically ahistorical—so hermetically sealed in their complete indifference to banal consensual reality, to the “offal of existence” as he put it—that comparisons to novels that try to represent social issues with some degree of authority seem misguided. Comparing Banville to Beckett is like comparing Chingy to Nas.

Needless to say, I do not think that one can justifiably place Houellebecq alongside Beckett, except perhaps at the inane and facile level of “dissatisfaction.” But this post isn’t about Beckett. (I’m prone to florid digressions when it comes to him, I’m afraid.) This post is actually about science fiction and its attitude toward post-structuralism. The Elementary Particles doesn’t appear to be a science fiction novel until the last twenty pages, when the narrator reveals that he is a member of the “post-humanity” that emerged as a result of one of the protagonists’ breakthrough in genetics and cloning. We suddenly realize that the voice describing the incredibly miserable and frustrated lives of brothers Michel and Bruno is not of the same species—it has transcended the petty weaknesses and limitations that Houellebecq portrays disturbingly well. From this evolved vantage, the narrator makes a startling claim that seems to come out of left field: “The global ridicule in which the works of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Deleuze had suddenly foundered, after decades of inane reverence, far from leaving the field clear for new ideas, simply heaped contempt on all those intellectuals active in the ‘human sciences.’ The rise to dominance of scientists in all fields of thought became inevitable” (262). Through the adroit manipulation of DNA, this new race no longer has need for theories of power, desire, language or ontology. There are no more divisions of class or sexuation; reproduction has become an entirely technical affair and sex reduced to a vague androgynous interaction of pure pleasure. Science has found a cure for every problem; humanity has reached the end of history (“now that we have come at last to our destination / Leaving behind a world of division” (4) proclaims the post-human poem that prefaces the novel). For what has been widely touted as a great “novel of ideas” (Wall Street Journal), The Elementary Particles seems violently totalitarian in its recourse to the panacea of science and its perhaps rash dismissal of the great ideas of our time. This, of course, assumes that this is not a completely ironic novel, which is actually a big possibility and a problem that I’m still trying to figure out. After all, the satirist doesn’t have to believe in the ideas in which he or she trades. I find it hard to believe, however, that Houellebecq completely discounts the possibility or legitimacy of a revolutionary scientific breakthrough like the kind described here. Countless passages of the novel seem to be lifted directly from scientific articles and textbooks. He seems especially to resort to scientific jargon at moments when the pathos of the story seems to resist or escape the free indirect discourse he usually prefers. Whatever his ultimate attitude towards science, it remains that it provides him with an accessible and legitimate supplement to traditional literary language, with its own truths, rules, and possibilities for the narrative.

This abrupt rejection of the “big four” of twentieth-century continental theory reminded me of another sci-fi novel I read recently, Blindsight, by the Canadian writer Peter Watts. This is a more standard sci-fi fare: a diverse, quirky crew is assembled to explore an alien ship that has entered earth’s vicinity. I’m not going to talk about all the subtleties of this interesting novel (Steven Shaviro gives a very perceptive analysis here, for those who are curious), but want instead to refer to a single three page rant against psychoanalysis that has only tangential relevance to the plot. The rant comes when the usually transparent narrative voice slips into the role of a scientist-savior and proudly declares that science has “mapped” the human mind to the extent that it has solved all mental illness, unhappiness, and even inefficiency. The narrator unleashes his vitriol for twentieth-century attempts to address these problems, focusing his criticism on Freud (a “witchdoctor”) and psychoanalysis (“voodoo”). Again, the assumption here is that desire and power are no longer problems. Science has discovered how to provide man with what he wants, in a sense. And yet it has also managed somehow to convince man to continue to produce and fulfill his duty in the face of complete satisfaction. Watts seems to sidestep Civilization and its Discontents completely.

It is bizarre that a novel so preoccupied with demonstrating the inadequacy of psychoanalysis would also be so fraught with problems with Otherness and desire (it’s a First Contact novel, duh), altered states approaching on psychosis (note the almost psychedelic passages when the humans attempt to enter the alien ship), and unconscious motivation (the title refers to an automatic behavior or innate response that exists underneath conscious, rational discourse). The content of Blindsight belies the ostensible mastery and transparency that it extols. The fact remains that humans in the future still use language to communicate with each other—this much must be totally clear—and, as such, they are subject to the very aporias and problems articulated by those notorious thinkers so vehemently denounced by scientists and analytic philosophers. To use Lacan’s neologism, both the post-human narrator of The Elementary Particles and the advanced human narrator of Blindsight are still parlêtres, that is, beings constituted in language. They exist only insofar as they use language; for Lacan, ontology belongs to the symbolic order. Language for Lacan can only provide a tortuous limitation and barring off of satisfaction for the subject, a self-sustaining circuit to assure that objects of desire remain perpetually out of reach. The radical freedom and sophistication that these two novels fantasize will require a much more drastic change than science or drugs can ever provide.

This is all very adumbrated and cursory, I know. Houellebecq especially resists this kind of succinct exegesis. And for those who jump at my reduction of ontology to language, know that my thesis is going to address precisely this problem. Right now, I want to address Alain Badiou’s supposed break with Lacan in light of Beckett’s oeuvre, which I think invites both psychoanalytic and anti-psychoanalytic readings. More to come soon. This was my first post in over a year. Cool!