Talking Tuesday: Houellebecq and the Consumer Self

I read excerpts from Michel Houellebecq's novel Submission sometime last year; my husband read the whole novel sometime in late winter or early spring and enjoyed it immensely. I think it is an important novel for the ways that it pokes at our fragile culture and brittle consumer self. 

I find myself reflecting on the modern self as primarily consumer a lot lately, as I work through my thoughts on Matthew B. Crawford, Jaron Lanier, and Charles Taylor. I dislike the idea that I am merely consumer: that I am nothing more than the sum total of my desires. I've said several times before that one of my goals in life is to recapture a premodern mindset, to thoroughly re-enchant my way of viewing the world.  If I'm to do that, I must order my passions with God's help, and learn a measure of content with the world as it is rather than what I wish it would be, or how clever advertising has made me feel it should be.

Theodore Dalrymple (a pen name) writes of Houllebecq's created world:

"In Houellebecq’s world people buy without need, want without real desire, and distract themselves without enjoyment. Their personal relations reflect this: they are shallow and no one is prepared to sacrifice his or her freedom, which is conceived of as the ability to seek the next distraction without let or hindrance from obligation to others. They are committed to nothing, and in such a world even art or cultural activity is just distraction on a marginally higher plane – though it is a natural law in this kind of society that the planes grow ever closer, ever more compressed.

For Houellebecq, the institution that best captures the nature of modern existence is the supermarket, in which people wander between stacked shelves making choices without discrimination or any real consequences, to the sound of banal but inescapable music. This music is like the leprous distilment that Claudius pours into the ear of Hamlet père as he sleeps in his garden once of an afternoon. The shoppers in the supermarket are not asleep, of course, but they are sleepwalking, or behaving as quasi-automata. At any rate, they are certainly not alert (most of them don’t even have a list of what they need, or think they need), and the drivelling music makes sure that they do not awake from their semi-slumber.

The whole of modern life is an existential supermarket, in which everyone makes life choices as if the choices were between very similar products, between Bonne Maman jam, say, and the supermarket’s own brand (probably made by the same manufacturer), in the belief that if they make the wrong choice it can simply be righted tomorrow by another choice. Life is but a series of moments and people are elementary particles (the title of a book by Houellebecq)....If you watch crowds shopping in any consumer society you cannot help but think that they represent the sated in search of the superfluous."

~Theodore Dalrymple, "Houellebecq and Call." The New English Review Blog, August 2016

Dalrymple goes on to discuss a bit about the economics of modern consumer society, and how our language is so informed by the realities of the modern consumer self.  He ends by stating that he does not seek status in labels or horsepower, but I think even that sort of side-steps the point: most of us in the West do not worry about whether there will be clothes on our backs, or food in our cupboards.  We have the economic leisure to worry about esoteric things at worst, existential things at best.  

Another of my stated goals (particularly for this blog) is to think about what it means to live in this hyper-consumer society in a simple way.  How to separate wants from needs.  How to live in a simple manner that leaves plenty of room for the spiritual life to flourish.  My experience of simple living has been hugely influenced by staying in monasteries like St. Herman of Alaska in Platina, CA, and also of living overseas in Russia, and two Habitat builds in Central Asia.  The conditions for that life are hard to replicate here, however, living as we do in great abundance and even ennui with such abundance.  I was always shopping when I lived in Russia, in part because that is how you live there: daily groceries, checking markets on the way to work for various needful things like soap and eggs that sometimes can't be found other places, and keeping eyes open in the garment stalls for a sweater or a pair of warm boots that might fit and replace something that is full of holes.  The accessibility of consumer goods is spotty, so when your sweater wears out, you can't be sure of finding an easy replacement.  I learned to keep my eyes open, even when I was just going to see a friend.  That habit has followed me here, where it serves me poorly.  

I've lately caught myself shopping either online or in stores simply because they are there, and I'm always kind of looking.  Looking for what, I don't know.  My closet is more than adequate, I make most of what I wear anyway, and I don't especially need anything ready-to-wear right now.  I think the mindless perusal is the pursuit of something that will make me feel better--shopping as anesthesia.  The clothing industry in particular is good about selling the idea that new clothing=happiness, and that the right dress is all that stands between me and a good state of mind.  Intellectually, I know that idea is total bollocks, but it still whispers in my ear enticingly.