Empowering Signs: Writing and e-motions in Michel Houellebecq’s Platform

Claire Lozier

doi:10.1515/culture-2018-0060

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the working of the cultural literacy concepts of rhetoricity and textuality in Michel Houellebecq’s third novel Platform through the lens of French philosopher Frederic Lordon’s affect theory, with a view to understanding the way emotions and motion operate jointly through writing in this post-travel literature text dealing with the contemporary travel industry, sex tourism, and emotional alienation. As such, it contributes to the current reassessment of the role played by emotions in human interactions. By exploring the specific layered textuality of Platform, which purposefully recycles a series of discursive cliches and tropes, I show how Houellebecq’s writing style demands to be considered not only for its literary value but also for its potent, and perhaps unexpected, moving effects, or rhetoricity, which invite readers to reconsider their perception of alterity-i.e. the world and the other-but also of the performative power of art and literature. In order to demonstrate this, the article looks first at the failure of travel writing orchestrated in the novel; it then analyses alternative textual modalities of affect mediation trialed in the text; and finally, it considers the strategies used in Platform to “empowerise” signs and, as a result, those who read them.

Highlights

This article explores the working of the cultural literacy concepts of rhetoricity and textuality in Michel Houellebecq’s third novel Platform through the lens of French philosopher Frédéric Lordon’s affect theory, with a view to understanding the way emotions and motion operate jointly through writing in this post-travel literature text dealing with the contemporary travel industry, sex tourism, and emotional alienation
In order to demonstrate this, the article looks first at the failure of travel writing orchestrated in the novel; it analyses alternative textual modalities of affect mediation trialed in the text; and it considers the strategies used in Platform to “empowerise” signs and, as a result, those who read them
Houellebecq and Platform contribute a polemical literary perspective to the current revived interest in the role played by emotions in human interactions—whether the recent inflation of emotions in the public sphere is perceived as a threat to reason or as a renewed chance for humanity

Summary

The Failure of Travel Writing

The narrator of Platform, who shares his first name with Houellebecq, works at the Ministry of Culture, where he manages financial accounts for contemporary art shows and exhibitions. Though, “the titillating soft porn scenes of such fiction are recognisable as one of the many generic styles incorporated by Houellebecq into his own writing [...] in order, no doubt, to undermine the opposition between ‘serious’ and popular literature” (Ní Loingsigh 81) For that matter, this stylistic weaving strategy is explicitly adopted by Michel, the narrator of Platform, who reveals at the end of the novel that he is the author of the story we have just read. If they cannot change lives nor reform our relationship to reality, what can art and literature do, ?

Mediating Emotions

Empowerising Signs

Works Cited