Читать книгу Interventions 2020 - Мишель Уэльбек - Страница 10

The gradual digitization of microsociological functioning, already well advanced in the United States, had lagged significantly behind in Western Europe, as the novels of Marcel Proust testify. It took several decades to completely filter out the symbolic meanings added onto the different professions, whether these meanings were laudatory (church, education) or deprecatory (advertising, prostitution). At the end of this decanting, it became possible to establish a precise hierarchy between different social statuses on the basis of two simple numerical criteria: annual income and number of hours worked.

In people’s love lives, too, the parameters of sexual exchange had long been dependent on a lyrical, impressionistic, unreliable system of description. Once again, the first serious attempt to define standards came from the United States of America. Based on simple and objectively verifiable criteria (age – height – weight – hip-waist-chest sizes for women; age – height – weight – size of the erect penis for men), it was first popularized by the porn industry, soon followed by women’s magazines. While the simplified economic hierarchy was sporadically the object of protest over a long period (with movements in favour of ‘social justice’), it should be noted that the erotic hierarchy, perceived as more natural, was quickly internalized and immediately met with a broad consensus.

Now able to define themselves by a brief collection of numerical parameters, freed from the thoughts of Being that had long hampered the fluidity of their mental movements, Western human beings – at least the youngest – were thus able to adapt to the technological changes affecting their societies, changes that in turn led to extensive economic, psychological and social transformations.