Dissolution identitaire dans Sérotonine de Michel Houellebecq

"Sérotonine, Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, can be read as the account of a case of identity dissolution, at both an individual and a collective level, the two levels intersecting each other. The author proposes the reader a chaotic trajectory through the despondency-ridden universe of the narrating character, who travels across a given geographic, cultural, social, professional space representative of today’s France, in keeping with the free will of a whimsical memory and a type of writing that follows a continual chronological and emotional disruption. Our analytic approach lies at the crossroads of self hermeneutics and group psychology, while intending to show how the field of literary imagination and imagery capitalizes on the present-day world’s insecurity identity-wise."

A Science So-Called

H.G. Wells’s life extends the radical evolution of psychographics outlined in the Introduction, but his oeuvre also proves the inherent difficulty in aestheticizing the emergent age of social psychology—a point evinced when producer Alexander Korda demanded Wells revise the script version of his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come three times to make it “filmable.” While Wells’s novel imagines a peaceable future wherein social psychology becomes the “whole literature, philosophy, and general thought of the world,” the film adaptation instead symbolizes this philosophical transformation by starring a sole philosopher-king who, against the people’s will, seeks to control and colonize the universe. This chapter argues that the conflict between these two Wellsian visions is prefigured by his intimate and conflicted relationship to sociology and group psychology. As early as 1906, Wells sought out the position as the first British chair of sociology at the University of London. But Wells was immediately to become a gadfly in academia: he engaged in scathing critiques of sociology for denying its utopian impulses and refuted theories of group dynamics put forward by Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter. Incorporating readings across Wells’s literary career—including Anticipations, An Englishman Looks at the World, and In the Days of the Comet—this chapter contends that Wells’s writing captures a life-long effort to reprise the scope of sociology from outside academia, and captures the writer’s foundering efforts to aestheticize the institutional promise of social psychology—efforts that inevitably succumb to Wells’s fetishization of pseudo-authoritarian technocracy.

Introduction

After staging the stakes of the mid-century turn towards psychography in W.H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen,” the Introduction provides a pre-history of “psychography,” a term coined in the Victorian Era to describe a series of disparate practices of recording and materializing individual psychology. These practices—including telepathic communication, automatic writing, and the literary methods of Stracheyan psychobiography—demonstrate “mind-writing” as an emergent literary concern long before the invention of modern polling. Even in this protean stage of psychography, writers worried these new practices might empower malignant actors to weaponize psychographic power against the nation. Invoking Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an exemplar of this phenomenon, I highlight that the vampire frightens not only because he will feed on London’s “teeming millions,” but also because his infectious power will “create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons.” In effect, Dracula weaponizes his telepathic power to execute psychological control over the masses. At the time Stoker was writing his novel, the science of public opinion was understood by sociologists only through such tropes of spiritualism, disease, and contagion. The chapter traces the transformation of this early modernist vision of psychographics to its reprisal in the mid-century institutionalization of public opinion polling, using Auden as a touchstone to demonstrate the radical and rapid institutionalization of group psychology into everyday discourse and institutions.