George Orwell – The Spoilers

THE NEW MAN: EUGENICS AND HUMAN ENGINEERING IN A “BRAVE NEW WORLD”

Welcome to a long delayed post on another classic dystopian novel. Today I’ll be introducing you in a general way to Brave New World, and we’ll be examining the relationship, if any, between biology and destiny. This post will also lay the foundation for a later post on the 1997 movie, Gattaca.

Crossing the Frontier into Huxley’s Brave New World

Huxley Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is, I think, a departure from most of the dystopian fiction we’ve encountered or are likely to encounter. Huxley’s description of a dystopian society, for example, lacks the grime and poverty evident in 1984. Instead of describing rundown apartments and outdated technology, Huxley depicts a society at that is technologically advanced, that possesses a range of commodities, and that can only be described as decadent. This departure from Orwell’s grim vision of dystopian society can perhaps be understood when one realizes that the World State was modeled, in part, on Huxley’s perception of the United States. As David Bradshaw points out in his introduction to Brave New World, the feelies (an advancement on Hollywood movies), the over consumption of goods, the references to Ford and the Model T, and the depiction of amoral men and women living life in the present were all meant to be caricatures of life in the United States in the early 20^th century.

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Can We Believe Huxley’s Vision of America?

Great Gatsby

For those of us who might wish to protest that life in America in the ’30s couldn’t have resembled life in Huxley’s World State, it might be wise to reread F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which was published in 1925. The characters of that novel, with their lavish parties and decadent lifestyles, would have undoubtedly felt just as at home in the World State.

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The difference between Orwell’s dystopic vision and Huxley’s extends, of course, beyond simply the physical descriptions of their respective societies. More surprisingly, where Orwell describes a citizenry that wears an “expression of quiet optimism” because it fears Big Brother, Huxley presents a citizenry that at least thinks itself happy, even if that happiness is illusory (Orwell 5). Indeed, Huxley’s World Controllers are also very different from Orwell’s Big Brother and Zamyatin’s Benefactor. For one, we, the readers, can be sure that, unlike the other “leaders”, the World Controllers actually exist. Their function is also different. Where Big Brother acts as a deterrent for bad behavior by creating fear, the job of Mustapha Mond is, according to himself, “to serve happiness. Other people’s — not mine” (209). Unlike O’Brien in 1984, Mond clearly does not have to rely on torture to control his citizens. By comparison to 1984 and We, the apparatus of governmental control in Brave New World is virtually invisible. Huxley dispenses with the Thoughtpolice of 1984 and the Guardians of We. Spies apparently are not necessary in this “utopian” dystopia. Of course there are police, but far from using the violent methods described in 1984 and We, these police use the calming influence of drugs and soothing voices to quell a rioting mob (195-196). The results of this mob control are quick and effective:

Two minutes later the Voice and the soma vapour had produced their effect. In tears, the Deltas were kissing and hugging one another — half a dozen twins at a time in a comprehensive embrace. Even Helmholtz and the Savage were almost crying. A fresh supply of pill-boxes was brought in from the Bursary; a new distribution was hastily made and, to the sound of the Voice’s richly affectionate baritone valedictions, the twins dispersed, blubbering as though their hearts would break. “Good-bye, my dearest, dearest friends, Ford keep you! Good-bye, my dearest, dearest friends, Ford keep you. Good-bye, my dearest, dearest …” (196-197).

This description of the rioters parting would be starkly out of place in either Zamyatin’s or Orwell’s novels. Nothing here suggests the violence implied by the Guardians and the Thoughtpolice.

Perhaps more striking than the absences of a police apparatus and a totalitarian regime are the things that are present in Huxley’s society. Sexual activity, far from being discouraged, like it is in Oceania, or being controlled, like it is in The One State, is permitted and, indeed, actively encouraged. Where Winston and Julia have to slip away Brave New World names surreptitiously for a rendezvous in the countryside, Lenina and Bernard can simply take his plane for a romantic weekend. Where the young women of Oceania join the Junior Anti-Sex League, the children of the World State engage in erotic play, and Lenina gets scolded for being too monogamous.

Religion, absent from the two prior novels, is also present, but it appears to be a religion that lacks dogma or condemnation of any sort. The religion of the World State combines the fetishization of Ford with religious elements from Christianity. The following passage shows how the World State has mimicked the Eucharist in its Solidarity Services:

The President made another sign of the T and sat down. The service had begun. The dedicated soma tablets were placed in the centre of the dining table. The loving cup of strawberry ice-cream soma was passed from hand to hand and, with the formula, “I drink to my annihilation,” twelve times quaffed. (72)

The soma tablets at the center of the table are meant to stand for the wafers offered during communion, and the cup of strawberry ice-cream soma replaces the cup of wine traditionally passed around among Catholic celebrants.

In addition to sex and religion, the World State differs from Oceania and the One State in that it provides a range of leisure activities. These activities include visits to the feelies, games and, of course, the use of the drug soma.

Given Huxley’s sharp departure from the model established by earlier dystopian authors, we might ask if this novel can fairly be characterized as dystopian. Part of the ambiguity that readers experience when reading Brave New World is a consequence of Huxley’s own ambivalence about the society he had described. While he seems to decry much of what he describes, Huxley actually had a much more complicated relationship to the themes discussed in his novel. He was, at least up to the time of writing Brave New World, partially convinced that in order for humanity to be saved, a dictatorship might have to be imposed and eugenics (the act of selectively breeding humans for certain traits) might be necessary in order to save the European race (Bradshaw 1994). For all of his implicit criticism of the United States and American technology, Huxley actually applied for American citizenship, and, although it was denied, lived for many years in America. While Huxley’s description of the drug soma seems disturbing, Huxley actually used psychedelic drugs such as peyote, mescaline and LSD. His experiences with the drug mescaline are described in his book The Doors of Perception. All of this background information obscures any facile interpretation of Brave New World. If the novel is dystopian, then it presents a complicated dystopia, more in line with the Ursula Le Guin’s Omelas than with Oceania or the One State.

Losing Human Freedom: Predestinating and Conditioning

If law enforcement seems remarkably absent in Huxley’s Brave New World, it is because the World State does not require force and violence to control its citizenry. Clearly, the abdication of violent means took some time. In describing the evolution of society to the students at the hatchery, Mond notes that in the early years, “[e]ight hundred Simple Lifers were mowed down by machine guns at Golders Green” and “[t]hen came the famous British Museum Massacre [where] [t]wo thousand culture fans [were] gassed with dichlorethyl sulphide” (44, 45). It was only after these violent attempts to regulate the citizenry that the World Controllers came to realize that violence was a highly inefficient way of controlling the population (45). In essence, the World Controllers recognized what John Locke, the British philosopher, had argued in the 17th century: rulers only rule with the consent of the ruled. The problem was that the World Controllers did not want their citizens to have any choice in giving their consent to the social structure. Fortunately for the Controllers, science offered solutions to the nagging problem of free-will and individuality. The solution that the Controllers would take was premised on the same ideas that would be developed by the American psychologist and writer, B. F. Skinner who, in his novel Walden II, argued that “man is determined by the state” (1957, 276). For the Controllers, the means of determining the destiny of humanity resided in two areas: 1) biology and 2) conditioning.

The biologic aspect of control in the World State is premised on the assumption that biology is destiny. If a person inherits certain genes, he or she will excel at certain activities and do poorly in other activities according to this theory. While Huxley could not have foreseen the genetic manipulation that is available today, he was able to foresee the concept of “designer babies”. All of the babies in the World State are, in fact, designer babies inasmuch as they are created to specifications determined by the state. To begin, experts at the haterchery carefully screen genetic material. The best genetic material is reserved for manufacturing upper caste members of society. Less desirable material is reserved for the lower castes. After the material is selected, it is carefully manipulated to produce or enhance specific characteristics. The fetuses destined to be lower caste citizens are injected with alcohol to create brain damage, thus ensuring lower levels of intelligence. As Mr. Forester explains to the students at the hatchery, “in Epsilons […] we don’t need human intelligence” (12). Using this pragmatic approach, the World State only gives to its citizens what they will need to fulfill their predestined existences. For example, citizens destined for a life in the tropics are acclimatized to hot conditions and are immunized against tropical diseases before they are even “decanted”. The state’s tampering with these humans/products effectively narrows the possibilities available to each of them. Even if an Epsilon could possess the desire to be an engineer, for example, she would never possess the intelligence required for the job.

The production of humans is carried on along the same basis as a production line. Indeed, Henry Ford’s automobile plant is clearly the inspiration for the assembly line at the hatchery. Among the stages involved in this assembly line are quality control and the tailoring of each product to, as I’ve already indicated, fill specific social needs. As Mond points out, the task of mass producing these humans is made infinitely easier by Bokanovsky’s Process, a process which allows for the creation of clones. The result of the process is “[s]tandard men and women; in uniform batches [so that the] whole of a small factory [can be] staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg” (5). Humans, then, become interchangeable cogs maintaining the social machinery. Individual identity is sacrificed in favor of caste identity. One of the consequence of this mass production is that citizens are also “plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about” (201). These roles are abolished, both because they are unimportant to the continuation of the World State and because everyone is replaceable. If a woman loses the man she was sleeping with, she can always get an identical product to replace that man. In theory, at least, nothing distinguishes him from any of the men produced from the same bokanovskified egg. Given that each caste member is also conditioned to have the same likes and dislikes, it is possible that the substitute product male would be identical to the original. Who needs to worry about the concept of a boyfriend when you can date an identical individual whenever you want to?

Given the fact that the World State designs and produces its citizens, it is easy to understand why citizens like Lenina are willing to accept the hypnopaedic proverb, “Everyone belongs to everyone else”. In the case of the World State, this is very nearly true. This proverb echoes the law in Zamyatin’s One State: “Each number has a right to any other number, as to a sexual commodity” (Zamyatin 1972, 21). In both societies, the individual is viewed as a product of the state. However, where in the One State a law has to be made to the effect that each citizen has the legal right to any other citizen’s body, no such law is necessary in the World State. After all, the World State doesn’t merely claim to own its citizens, it actually manufactures them.

Biologically predestinating individuals determines the likely future of each citizen; conditioning makes them happy with that lot. As the Director of the hatchery explains, “All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny” (13). This conditioning occurs through a number of different techniques. There is both physical conditioning, as when Delta children are electrocuted to make them dislike and fear books, and verbal conditioning, as in hypnopaedia. The point of hypnopaedia is to shape the mind of the child through repeated suggestions, until, according to the director at the hatchery,

at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too — all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides —- made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions! [….] Suggestions from the State. (25)

The director’s point is made even more cogently by Mond when he explains to John Savage the role of Epsilons in the World State:

Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren’t sacrifices; they’re the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he’s got to run. He can’t help himself; he foredoomed. Even after decanting, he’s still inside a bottle — an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course […] goes through life inside a bottle. (203)

A very similar view of the power of conditioning is presented in B. F. Skinner’s Utopian novel, Walden II. In Walden II, the spokesperson for the society, Frazier, explains to his guests:

Our members are practically always doing what they want to do—what they “choose” to do—but we see to it that they will want to do precisely the things which are best for themselves and the community. Their behavior is determined, yet they’re free (Skinner 1976, 279).

Frazier’s assertion that citizens can be free even when their behavior is predetermined presents a paradox. To a certain extent, the citizens of Huxley’s World State have a more accurate understanding of the limits of freedom and predestination. Thus, when Lenina observes to Henry that perhaps Epsilons, whom she personally finds revolting, don’t mind being Epsilons, he responds, “Of course they don’t. How can they? They don’t know what it’s like being anything else. We’d mind, of course. But then we’ve been differently conditioned” (66). Henry goes on to explain to Lenina, “if you were an Epsilon […] your conditioning would have made you no less thankful that you weren’t a Beta or an Alpha” (66). Evidently Henry recognizes that he and Lenina aren’t in fact free; more disturbingly though, this lack of freedom doesn’t bother either of them. To a certain extent, these two products of the World State are far closer to the machine-men envisioned in Zamyatin’s One State. After all, Henry and Lenina can’t help but be happy. The state has won, not because it has shaped reality to suit its citizens, but because it has shaped its citizens to suit its reality. Unlike the rebels in Zamyatin’s One State and Orwell’s Oceania, far from rebelling, these citizens of the World State cannot even grasp the concept of rebellion.

Although upper caste members of society seem to lack choices just like their lower caste counterparts, they do, in fact, have some capacity for rejecting the conditioning that they have experienced. Perhaps they require an element of rationale thought and free will to ensure that society continues to operate smoothly. The possibility of bucking this system is revealed by the Director’s criticism of Bernard Marx, “Alphas are so conditioned that they do not have to be infantile in their emotional behavior. But that is all the more reason for their making a special effort to conform. It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination” (88). As I shall show in my next post, the inclination to remain infantile is encouraged by promoting unconstrained consumption and instant gratification.

Works Cited

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Perennial, 1998.

Skinner, B. F. Walden Two. MacMillan, 1976.

Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. Penguin Books, 1972.

FORNICATING FOR FREEDOM: SEXUAL SUBVERSION IN THE TOTALITARIAN STATE

Michael D. Amey

I’m back with yet another post on 1984. In this post I’m focussing on a major recurring theme in dystopian fiction: the power of sexual acts to liberate and enslave individuals. This theme is also evident, of course, in We, Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale.

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Controlling Sex, Controlling Citizens

1984 cover When we think of sex, many of us envision an activity that occurs fairly much the same way among people everywhere. We generally do not imagine, unless we’re thinking very carefully about sex, that sex is somehow a culturally mediated activity. Put more simply, we often think that sex is natural—stripped of culture and simply a response to biologic urges and hormones. As various scholars have shown, however, this is a misconception. In her essay, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”, Gayle Rubin uses an analogy to question the idea that sex is devoid of cultural content:

Hunger is hunger, but what counts as food is culturally determined and obtained. Every society has some form of organized economic activity. Sex is sex, but what counts as sex is equally culturally determined and obtained. Every society also has a sex/gender system – a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention and satisfied in a conventional manner, no matter how bizarre some of the conventions may be. (538)

The point that Rubin is making is absolutely relevant to the depictions of sex that we have seen in 1984 and in We. The sexual activities in both of these novels are sharply delineated into licit and illicit behavior, acceptable relationships and unacceptable relationships. These divisions undoubtedly seem alien to many of you, and this partially because behind these divisions are not grounded on a simple distinction between the natural and the unnatural, but rather upon the will of society determining what citizens should “accept” as natural or unnatural. In the case of these novels, the will of society is, in many respects, distinct from the will(s) of our own society.

But why, we might ask, do Zamyatin and Orwell spend time discussing sexual relationships, and why do the States in both of their novels place such a premium on controlling sexual behavior? Part of the answer to this question can be found in another of Gayle Rubin’s essays, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”. She argues in the introduction to this essay that:

The time has come to think about sex. To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic, a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine or nuclear annihilation. But it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality. Contemporary conflicts over sexual values and erotic conduct have much in common with the religious disputes of earlier centuries. They acquire immense symbolic weight. Disputes over sexual behavior often become the vehicles for displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant emotional intensity. Consequently, sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social stress.

The realm of sexuality also has its own internal politics, inequities, and modes of oppression. As with other aspects of human behavior, the concrete institutional forms of sexuality at any given time and place are products of human activity. They are imbued with conflicts of interest and political maneuvering, both deliberate and incidental. In that sense, sex is always political. But there are also historical periods in which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized. In such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated. (4-5)

Dystopian fiction, by nature of its fundamental character, tends to depict historical periods when sexuality is contested and sexual codes are redrawn to enhance the state’s control over individuals. The amount of control that the One State exercises in We, for example, is evidenced by the Lex Sexualis: “Each number has a right to any other number, as to a sexual commodity” (Zamyatin 1972, 21). This law functions on a two-fold level: first, it serves as an express reminder to the citizens that they are commodities to be consumed both by each other and by the state, and secondly, it serves to remind them that in this absolute Communist society, the state owns everything, including bodies, reproduction and sexual enjoyment.

Lest we be too quick to criticize this control of sexuality in the One State, it might be wise to consider the control of sexuality in our own society. First, while, in most states in the United States the traffic in sex is illegal, “sexiness” is a hot commodity that both sells all manner of goods and is itself sold in a wide array of forms. The fact that sexuality and sexiness are marketed and consumed in our society is evidenced by pornography’s status as one of the largest online industries. Perhaps the primary difference between us and the numbers of the One State is that while we and the citizens of the One State both agree, for the most part, that sex is a desirable commodity, the citizens of the One State, in accordance with their standards of equality, are unable to profit from the exchange of sexual favors. By contrast, many Americans make a great deal of money from sexual activity. What is interesting, however, is the fact that while many of the states legalize the sale of sexuality and sexiness in the form of pornography, most states have outlawed prostitution, thus denying, as it were, many women and some men the right to earn money by using and selling what is theirs—their bodies. In a sense then, our government has determined who can profit from sex, perhaps to the detriment of the majority of sex workers, who work illegally.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, another effect of the Lex Sexualis is to end marriage and families. This is desirable because it allows the state to create absolute bonds of loyalty with its citizenry. No longer does a woman think about her husband, or a man think about his wife. Instead they focus on the relationship with the state. This substitution of the state for a loved one occurs in both We and 1984. For example, as I noted in the previous post, the woman who works next to Winston is involved in “tracking down and deleting from the press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore never considered to have existed. There was a certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years ago” (42). She can do this both because she has developed the capacity for doublethink and because her relationship to Oceania takes precedence over her relationship to her husband or any other individual.

The fact that the woman working next to Winston is single best suits the needs of the Party. Her loyalty, however, is suspect because she may not have willingly chosen to be single. By contrast, Comrade Ogilvy, represents the untainted devotion desired by the state because he “had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty” (47). Yet surpassing even Ogilvy in his loyalty, is Winston’s estranged wife, Katharine, who has sex with Winston, but only as part of “our duty to the Party” (67). Katharine, perhaps as a consequence of conditioning, perhaps through the will of doublethink, has invested the symbolism of sex, not with lust, certainly not with love, but with patriotism. Her reconstruction of the meaning of sex is evidenced by how she experiences it: “She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating, but submitting” (67). This description of how she experiences sex significantly aligns, as we shall see, with the experiences of Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale.

In addition to having sex with Katharine, Winston also has sex with an older prole prostitute and with Julia. These sexual encounters are distinctly different in nature. For Winston, the prostitute represents nothing more than simple sexual release—I choose not to use the word “satisfaction” because it scarcely seems satisfactory. This encounter is not particularly dangerous either, for, as Orwell explains,

Tacitly the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution, as an outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed. Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless, and only involved the women of a submerged and despised class. (65)

Furthermore, while the act of sleeping with a prostitute is certainly punishable in Oceania, it is generally not a capital offense.

Significantly, while debauchery is tolerated when it involves Proles, debauchery with Party members is punished much more severely. Orwell goes on to clarify why the Party opposes relationships within the Party:

The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it.… The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema.… The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. (65-66)

Later Orwell, notes that the “sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account” (133). The Party’s success in distorting sex is evidenced both in Katharine’s submission during sex and in Winston’s revulsion with the sexual experience he has with the prostitute. This revulsion prevents Winston from regularly frequenting prostitutes. As a consequence, his own sexual desires remain constantly thwarted. This sexual repression is “turned… to account” by creating “sexual privation [that] induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship” (133). Orwell illustrates the relationship between frustrated sexuality and the attitudes of citizens by describing a Party rally in sexual terms: the mob’s mood is like a “great orgasm […] quivering to its climax” (180).

While Winston’s sexual liaisons with the prostitute cannot be counted an act of rebellion—after all “the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution”—his relationship with Julia is, in his and her minds, an entirely different matter. A number of differences seem to exist between the relationship Winston has with the prostitute and the one he has with Julia. Unlike Winston’s low risk encounter with the prostitute, Julia’s and Winston’s liaison risks their freedom and their very lives. This risk severs any ties they have to the Party and creates a situation where their loyalties, by necessity, are redirected towards each other. For a comparable modern example, we might consider the relationships of homosexuals during much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Because homosexuality was illegal in America and most European countries, homosexuals found themselves, by the very nature of their desires and activities, outside the law and, to a certain extent, alienated from society. Given these facts, we should expect that homosexuals, like Winston and Julia, would formulate ties that largely ignored the claims of their societies. That social commentators are aware of the subversive nature of sexuality becomes apparent when one examines modern conservative commentators, like Maggie Gallagher, who argue that homosexuality threatens society by undermining the institution of marriage. Marriage (and having children), in other words, becomes a “duty to society” in a way that is not dissimilar to Katharine’s conception of sex as doing one’s duty for the Party. This permits those in power to cast the offenders as sexual traitors.

Winston’s relationship with Julia also differs from this relationship with the prostitute in that it permits them together to create a reality separate from the Party. As Orwell explains, “the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control” (133). By contrast, Winston’s furtive, and unsatisfactory sexual involvement with the prostitute merely confirms the control that the Party exercises over all aspects of life.

Winston’s sexual encounter with the prostitute also acts to dehumanize and degrade both the prostitute and Winston. She, after all, is a shoddy, forbidden commodity for which he pays two dollars. He is a desperate man who pays for something that has been Winston and Julia labeled perverted by his society. By contrast, Orwell emphasizes the fact that Julia and Winston freely engage in sex. To ensure that this is not a transaction, Winston specifically asks Julia if she enjoys sex, to which she responds, “I adore it” (126). Her response stands in contrast to Katharine’s philosophy of sex as social duty and the prostitute’s philosophy of sex as commodity. Julia is having sex in part simply because she enjoys sex. This free exchange of sex helps humanize Julia and Winston and perhaps even ennobles them.

While their sexual encounter is a free one, it is not an uncontaminated one. After all, as Orwell points out “you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred” (126) Beyond being about desire, then, their sexual activity becomes a denial of the Party’s power. Winston’s revels in her sexuality because, “the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: …was the force that would tear the Party to pieces” (126). As Orwell explains, “Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act” (126). In light of the Party’s determined effort at either wiping out or subverting the sexuality of the citizens of Oceania, it is indeed difficult to interpret this act as anything other than an assault on the Party’s control.

“FROM THE AGE OF UNIFORMITY, FROM THE AGE OF SOLITUDE”: BEING ALONE BECAUSE OF THE CROWD

Michael D. Amey

Welcome to my second post on Orwell’s 1984. In this post I’m going to focus on isolation, collectivism and surveillance. These themes are essential aspects of a number of dystopian novels and movies, and are present in We, Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Matrix, Feed and Jennifer Government, to name a few examples.

“Every Breathe You Take, Every Move You Make, Every Bond You Break, Every Step You Take, I’ll Be Watching You”

(Lyrics from “Every Breathe You Take” by the Police)

woman being watched advertisement Michel Foucault, the philosopher who provided us with the concept of the Panopticon, would have reveled in the abundant irony of a rock band called the Police singing the lyrics of “Every Breathe You Take”. The song, apparently intended as a romantic gesture, chronicles the jealous, obsessive voyeurism of a jilted lover. In a particularly revealing moment, the speaker in the song laments, “Oh, can’t you see, you belong to me”.

Implicit in the lyrics of this song is the relationship between an individual who is watched and the institution or individual doing the watching. The ownership that the lovelorn singer claims is based on his ability to spy on the object of his love constantly, even as she does mundane things like breathe and walk. This, in itself, however, is not enough to ensure his claim on her. For him to own her, she must be aware of his vigilant gaze: “oh, can’t you see, you belong to me”. In other words, she must see him seeing her for the power of the gaze to be operative. A similar approach to this use of the gaze as means of control and ownership is suggested in the lyrics of the traditional Christmas song, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”. The addressee, in this case a child, not a woman, is told:

He sees you when you’re sleeping.
He knows when you’re awake.
He knows if you’ve been bad or good,
So be good for goodness sake!

Surely, if a child ever believed these lyrics, then he would assume that Santa had ownership over him in as much that nothing the child did would ever escape the gaze of Santa and all behavior could be subjected to rewards and punishments by Santa. He would regulate his behavior to suit what he imagined Santa desired, and thus would, ironically NOT “be good for goodness sake”. As with “Every Breathe You Take”, surveillance in “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” depends for its success on the fact that the child is aware that he is being watched. If the child is unaware of Santa’s all pervasive gaze and ability to dole out rewards and punishments, then Santa’s power ceases to function.

George Orwell’s Oceania functions on a similar premise. Party members are subjected to constant visual and auditory scrutiny via telescreens, listening devices and the spying eyes of neighbors, friends and family. Significantly, these instruments of scrutiny do not function independently of each other; rather, they are merely hundreds of eyes and ears working for the face of the Party, Big Brother.

For the most part, there is nothing covert in this surveillance. Just as the lyrics from “Every Breathe You Take” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” would suggest, surveillance, by itself, is not enough. Instead, the citizens are kept constantly aware of the fact that they’re being watched. They are informed by posters that “BIG BROTHER IS Uncle Sam WATCHING YOU”. The “YOU” at the end of the sentence is imperative, because the citizen is left with no doubt that he or she has been personally sought out as the object of attention. Furthermore, the fact that each citizen is being constantly inspected is driven home by the ubiquity of the image of Big Brother. Orwell illustrates this by describing Winston looking at a coin:

He took a twenty-five-cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrapping of a cigarette pack—everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape. (27)

These images serve as a constant reminder of the fact that every aspect of life is under continuous scrutiny.

In discussions that I have led with students in classes on the wide sweeping surveillance powers granted the United States government by the Patriot Act, most students have seemed unconcerned by this potential invasion of privacy. They remind me that if I’ve done nothing wrong, I have nothing to be afraid of. Presumably it is only terrorists and evil-doers who need worry that the NSA might be eavesdropping. Perhaps my students are right. It is worth noting, though, that in Oceania, the citizens also, technically, have nothing to fear from the watchful eyes of Big Brother. After all, Orwell, in discussing Winston’s use of a journal, notes that “This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws) ….” (6). In theory, then, it is impossible for Winston to break the law. Nevertheless, he is concerned because if he were “detected it was reasonably certain that [his use of the journal] would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp” (6).

Implicitly then, the abolition of the laws (in itself a paradoxical exercise of law) does not guarantee greater freedom for the citizens or the absence of crime and criminals. Indeed, as Orwell makes clear when he describes show trials in Oceania, the absence of laws does not even prevent the exercise of a corrupt legal system. Consequently, instead of reassuring the citizens that no crime can be committed because there are no laws to break, this “lawless” society creates the potential for anything and everything to be considered a crime. The crime, however, which is fundamental to all crimes is Minority Report thoughtcrime (19). Some of you will remember from my earlier posts about We that in the One State freedom is believed to be root cause of all crime. Orwell takes Zamyatin’s logic one step further by realizing that crime occurs because people think. Machines are incapable of committing crimes specifically because they cannot think. By contrast, all humans are, by the very fact that they are incapable of maintaining complete control of their thoughts, thoughtcriminals. This unfortunate flaw in human nature is revealed to Winston by the usually loyal Parsons. He explains to Winston (for the benefit of the unseen watchers) that thoughtcrime is

insidious. It can get a hold of you without your even knowing it. Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep! Yes, that’s a fact. There I was, working away, trying to do my bit—never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying? […] ’Down with Big Brother!’ Yes, I said that! Said it over and over again, it seems. (233)

The fact that Parsons, a man who diligently “tries to do his bit” is capable of thoughtcrime indicates that no one is innocent.

As I indicated earlier, part of the power of the surveillance in Oceania is linked to the fact that it is, for all intents and purposes, incessant. In the first few pages Orwell informs us that:

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, could be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any moment. How often, or on what system, the Though Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. (3)

Of course, what Orwell describes matches the operation of Foucault’s Panopticon where surveillance is “visible and unverifiable”. The broader consequence of this unverifiable but visible surveillance is that,

he who is subject to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles, he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault 203)

In other words, “You had to live—did live from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized” (3).

The guilt that rests on all citizens, even those, like Parsons, who truly strive to remain innocent, has its impact on ever aspect of how they lead their lives. Early on, Orwell describes Winston moments before he takes the risky decision to write in his journal: “He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen” (5). The point that this description makes is that citizens like Winston “wear” expressions instead of having them. This learned expression is a disguise meant to conceal the “illegal” activity going on in the mind of the citizen. This expression is, in particular, a means of keeping the one last possession available to the citizens of Oceania: “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull” (27). Of course, the Party has taken steps to penetrate this last place of concealment. Those watching are trained to spot any gesture or expression that might be indicative of thoughtcrime. Thus, on a deeper level than Winston realizes, “in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one’s own body” (102-103). The body becomes the traitor of the mind.

The unblinking gaze of Big Brother also has an impact on the larger community. This gaze creates conformity among members, as illustrated by the group activities and even by the enforced exercises. In spite of the fact that these group activities are compulsory—though this is never explicitly stated—the activities also become genuine. Orwell explains that the “horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary” (14). What this suggests, is that a process is in Lynching place of control that is initially coercive, but then becomes less coercive as the individual enacts the role assigned to him or her. Thus, while Winston may initially be acting because he is aware of the judgmental gaze of others and Big Brother, he eventually ceases to act and embodies, instead, the desired behavior. His conformity is tied to the well documented concept of mob mentality, an unthinking mentality that the Party fosters through emotional events like Hate Week and Two Minutes Hate.

The importance of collectivism to the functioning of Oceania is further illustrated by the fact that:

In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreations; to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. (82)

It is worth noting that the expectation of constant communal activities in Oceania bears a striking resemblance to how cults operate. Time alone allows people to form independent opinions that are more than mere reactions to the emotions and opinions of other people. Such independent opinions are dangerous to the cohesion of most groups.

Ironically, for all of the communal activities that citizens of Oceania participate in, each of them remains separated from each other, from citizens of the past and from citizens in the future. Parsons, for example, has a wife and children, but this does not mean that he has a family. After all, it is his own daughter who turns him in for saying, “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep. (We should pause here to consider one of the dilemmas that faces Parson…. Because he was asleep, he doesn’t know what he was saying or if he was even saying anything at all. His daughter may have made up the whole story and reported him for the excitement of the experience and the approval she would receive from her peers. At the same time, he can’t doubt her claim because to doubt her claim would be illustrate his own disloyalty to Big Brother. As Parson tells Winston, “You don’t think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?” (233).

The fact that families do not function according to traditional expectations is further highlighted by Winston’s reflections on his family life:

Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. (30)

Indeed, this failure of the family is represented by one of Winston’s colleagues:

He knew that in the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in, day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore never considered to have existed. There was a certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years ago. (42)

Replacing the traditional family structure is the relationship of the individual to the state. For this reason, the Party wisely personifies itself as, appropriately enough, Big Brother. Of course, although Big Brother is a term derived from a familial relationship, Big Brother is not a family member. No one has a relationship with Big Brother, even though Winston believes, on the final page that Big Brother loves him and he loves Big Brother.

Winston’s reflections on tragedy highlight the fact that it is not merely the institution of the family that has broken down. Love and friendship have also ceased to be meaningful. The “friends” Winston has are clearly not friends; they barely deserve the term acquaintances. Even his relationship with Julia, which is the most intimate relationship he has, is not one that ends his isolation. While Julia cares for him, she does not understand him or share his desire to rebel for the sake of greater freedom. The ultimate tragedy for these two characters is in the fact that having promised not to betray each other, they are unable to avoid the betrayal that their change in feelings for each other entails.

Lastly, we must note the irony involved in Winston’s greeting in his journal:

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:

From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink—greetings! (28)

Winston, of course, cannot address the past both because the past is the past and because, in Oceania, the past doesn’t exist. Furthermore, he can’t hope to address the future because the future will either be controlled by the Party, in which case Winston —as part of the undesired past—will be obliterated from history, or the future will be so different from Winston’s present that nobody will understand what he is describing. Thus, he is cut off from both the past and the future and exists only in the terrible present.

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Penguin Books, 1991

DESTROYING THE PAST TO CREATE THE PRESENT: IDEOLOGY AND TRUTH

Michael Amey

With this post I’m commencing a three part discussion of 1984. This first post will briefly introduce you to George Orwell and to 1984, and will focus on the role of history in creating the present. The concepts of epistemology, ideology and “Truth” will play a critical role in this first discussion. The next post will focus on isolation, collectivism and surveillance. The final post on 1984 will ask us to examine the role of sexuality as an instrument of power and control.

The Man Who Knew Big Brother

Eric Blair, better known to most of us as George Orwell, wrote books and essays, many of which were social and political commentaries. His two best known books, 1984 and Animal Farm, exemplify these social and political themes.

Orwell’s prescient depiction of totalitarianism in 1984 arose out of the historical conditions surrounding his life, as well as from his own store of personal experiences and ideas. Orwell emphasized the value of understanding this background in his essay, “Why I Write” by noting:

“I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.”

Orwell was unquestionably shaped by the age in which he lived. His earliest inspiration for the totalitarian regime represented by Big Brother may well have come as a consequence of serving with the Imperial Police Force in Burma and India. As a member of the privileged English race, he witnessed first-hand the inhumanity of an oppressive regime and the injustice inherent in imperialism; themes which he touched upon in his novel, Burmese Days and in his essay, “A Hanging”. His experiences working to expand and maintain imperialism, combined with the rise of totalitarianism in both Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union, provided him with a pessimistic view of authority. He explained in “Why I Write” that,

First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc.

The real transformative moment, however, came for him, when, in 1936, he went to Spain to fight in the civil war against fascism. That period in his life was the catalyst for his writing:

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity. (“Why I Write”)

Indeed, in reflecting on his motives for writing in general, Orwell produced two that are specifically relevant to the shape of 1984:

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude. (“Why I Write)

1984 is very clearly a text created with a political purpose. Throughout the novel, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is keenly aware of the political nature of all acts, including, as I will discuss in the last post, the sexual act. In this post, however, I will focus more on the combination of the historical impulse, the “desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity” and the relationship of this impulse to politics.

In describing the writing process, Orwell explains that,

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us. (“Why I Write”)

In the case of 1984, the source of injustice that inspired Orwell was Stalin’s repressive Communist regime. His critique of Stalinism was essential for two reasons. First, while awareness of Stalin’s ruthless acts was infiltrating Western consciousness, many leftist intellectuals still either sympathized with or supported Stalinism. As a leftist intellectual, Orwell saw the importance of separating the foundations of socialist idealism from the excesses of Stalinism. Secondly, in 1948, as Orwell was composing 1984, there was no reason to believe that the Soviet Union would lose the Cold War, or, for that matter, that the war would remain cold. Orwell’s novel helped explain in this uncertain time why it was important that Stalinism not succeed. 1984 remains, however, a valuable book because while it is rooted in the rise of 20th century totalitarianism, it provides a critique of power that is not limited to one historical point in time.

The Benefactor and Big Brother

As you read 1984, you may have started noticing similarities to We. Orwell had read We and acknowledged his indebtedness to Zamyatin’s novel. The following similarities are particularly worth noting:

At the beginning of 1984, Winston starts keeping a journal. In We, D-503 keeps a journal.
Oceania, the nation in which Winston lives, is policed by the “Thought Police”. In The One State, the police force are called the Guardians. Both groups operate through surveillance and by gathering information from “concerned” citizens.
Oceania is governed by Big Brother, while The One State is governed by the Benefactor. Both leaders are probably fictitious constructs meant to maintain the power structures of each society. For a similar example, watch the role of Father in the movie Equilibrium.
The states in both novels carefully regulate and monitor sexual activity. In 1984 citizens have to apply to a committee for permission to get married. Sex is discouraged by the “Junior Anti-Sex League”. The purpose of this control, in part, was “to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which [the Party] might not be able to control” (65). In We, marriage has been outlawed for similar reasons, and the frequency of sexual activity is “scientifically determined”.
Both Winston and D-503 begin to actively resist their respective regimes in part because of the elicit affairs they have.
In 1984, the proles are predominantly excluded from the working of the Party. In We, the Mephi, or those outside the Green Wall are excluded from The One State.
In 1984, Winston develops a deadly relationship with a government agent, O’Brien. In We, D-503 develops a relationship with the Guardian, S.
In both states, control is extended to everyday activities. Winston, for example, if forced, along with everyone else, to do calisthenics, while the number of time that D-503 chews his food is prescribed.
In 1984, Winston finds a place where he and Julia can meet in the Prole section of town. This house, with its old furnishings, is like a museum of the past. Similarly, D-503 meets with I-330 at the “Old House”, a museum from a previous time.
In We, D-503 comments on the absurdity of the human head and how it conceals ideas. Likewise, Winston notes that “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull” (26).
Winston and D-503 are both eventually broken by the state and come to “love” their oppressors.

There are undoubted more similarities than these. Feel free to post them as you find them!

History and the Present

A critical component of the Party’s power structure is its ability to control the present by continually changing the past. Significantly, the present has no enduring quality. As we move through time, each second of now slips into the past. The Party’s control of the past extends, as Winston explains, to the immediate past: “Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? … History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right” (155). It is unsurprising then that Julia, Winston’s young lover, cannot remember the fact that a mere four years ago Oceania was at war with Eastasia instead of Eurasia (154). She, as a product of the Party, has been taught to forget the past and to engage in the “doublethink” that allows for two contradictory facts to both be true.

Furthermore, unlike the unreformed Winston, Julia sees no reason to worry about the fact that she can’t remember the past. Her concerns are located in the present and in her immediate personal interests: “she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her” (153).

Given that her memory does not extend past four years, we have to even question how extensively she rebels against the teachings of the Party that touch upon her own life. After all, imagining that she was forcibly separated from Winston, four years later, would she remember that she had ever been with him? Early in her relationship she tells Winston that she has had sex “[hundreds] of times—well, scores of times, anyway” (125). Is her uncertainty about her sexual activities a consequence of the numerous times she has had sex, her desire to impress Winston with her rebellious behavior, or, possibly, her actual inability to remember her own past? Significantly, Orwell tells us nothing tangible about Julia’s past. We are left to imagine the nature of her sexual relationships. Were they all acts of rebellion? Has she known other men like Winston? It would seem that Winston might want to know the answer to this last question if only to locate other potential subversives, but he does not probe her vague statement of promiscuity.

As for Julia’s disregard for the past, this disregard is the logical consequence of the Party’s control. In Oceania, “the past not only changed, but changed continuously” (79). Any attempt to follow the oscillating changes of the past would lead to insanity. As Winston comes to realize,

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. (156)

Winston is, of course, partially wrong in suggesting that the Party has instituted an endless present. The present, even more than the past, is unstable and open to reconstruction because it continually slides into the past. Indeed, past, present and future are, from one perspective, concurrent events. From this perspective, the Party Slogan, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” (35), is absolutely correct. Orwell provides the basic outline by which this control is exercised: “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth” (75). This control of time, through the efficient erasure of past thoughts and the forgetting of that erasure, guarantees a form of control over not merely time but all reality, or as the Party calls it “Reality Control”. The paradox of reality control is explained, in part, by Winston’s realization: “If both the past and the external world exist only in the Mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?” (80).

The possibility that the external world merely exists in the mind is one that cannot be completely ignored. The philosopher Descartes realized that he could not trust any of his senses to correctly inform him about the external world. Think of it this way—we usually take for granted that the things we see and feel are “real”. Descartes, however, knew that he saw things in dreams, but he was sure that either the reality in what he called dreams or in what he waking must be false. In his opinion, both the dream world and the waking world couldn’t mutually be real. He also recognized that the use of drugs, say opium, could also change an individual’s perception of reality. Simply put we receive conflicting messages from our senses. Even when we are awake and not “hallucinating” our senses trick us into seeing things like mirages. The problem was that while each of these states of reality appeared to be mutually exclusive, for a person undergoing a dream or a hallucination, the perceived reality seems as real or more real than what we typically consider reality. Descartes also thought that it was possible that mathematics and logic, things which apparently don’t rely on senses but on reason, were tricks. We assume, like Winston, that 2 + 2 = 4. By contrast, Descartes points out that “We may think that mathematics is self-regulating and testable, but there might just be an invisible demon who continuously hypnotizes us into thinking that our mathematics is correct” (Robinson & Garratt, 46). What this means is that essentially all of what we accept as “Truth” and “reality” is vulnerable and open to debate and negotiation.

There is a difference, of course, between Descartes’ dilemma and Orwell’s description of reality in 1984. The primary difference is that where Descartes suspects his senses and believes that they could be inaccurate (they could also be, of course, entirely accurate), Winston knows for a certainty that the reality he lives in is a construct. Descartes speculates that an “invisible demon” could be toying with his perceptions of logic and mathematics. Winston, by contrast, knows that the Party is deliberately manipulating his logic. He is aware that:

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. (80)

The suggestion that a control of the past also dictates a control of reality seems at first glance nonsensical. How can the past control what we take to be real? The only way to understand this is by returning to what we learned about Marxism in our last lecture. Marx, as you will recall stated in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.” As I noted, Marx was arguing was that our society, including how our society produces and uses things, determines to a large extent how we view the world. If our society could be restructured without our awareness of it, and then that restructuring erased from our minds, what we would “see” in the world, would differ radically from what we now see.

And, of course, such restructuring of society actually do occur. Michel Foucault notes, for example, that prior to the 19th century, the word and the concept “homosexual” did not exist. Of course there were men who had sex with men and women who had sex with women prior to the 19th century, but these individuals were not seen as belonging to a different category than any other individual. Their sexual practices did not define their identities. Because the concept of homosexual didn’t exist, it follows that the concept of the heterosexual also did not exist prior to the 19th century. In our own society, however, we have these terms and we tend to define people by these terms. Not only do we define our contemporaries by their sexual preferences, we assign those labels posthumously to individuals of the past. Thus, a favorite pastime of some supporters of homosexuality has been to identify and “out” famous people, like Leonardo da Vinci, as homosexuals. The problem with this approach to history is that it takes our world view and applies it indiscriminately to people who did not possess our mental framework.

As a final note, I want to return us again to the idea of “Truth” being vulnerable. Most of us probably assume that reality and the “Truth” are fixed entities—that reality is what is real and that the “Truth” is what is true. While it is possible that these exist, as Descartes makes clear, being certain about these forms of knowledge is impossible. Added to that, our favourite philosopher, Michel Foucault, points out that reality and “Truth” will always be highly contested areas because of the fact that they serve to create power. He goes on to state:

There is a battle ‘for truth’, or at least ‘around truth’—it being understood once again that by truth I do not mean ‘the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted’, but rather ‘the ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true’, it being understood also that it’s not a matter of a battle ‘on behalf’ of the truth, but of a battle about the status of truth and the economic and political roles it plays. (132)

Winston is a phenomenal character precisely because he is aware of this battle. Arguably, this makes him a far greater risk to the Party than Julia or, for that matter, most anyone else referenced in the novel.

Works Cited

Orwell, George. 1981. 1984: A Novel.

Orwell, George. “Why I Write.” http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw Accessed 28 June 2017.

Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshal, John Mepham and Kate Soper. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Robinson, Dave and Chris Garratt. 1999. Introducing Descartes. Cambridge: Icon Books

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Michael D. Amey

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