ENGL/COMM/WRDS: The Rhetoric of Fear » March 28th: Nineteen Eighty-Four

March 28th: Nineteen Eighty-Four

I think registration begins next week on April 4th…notice Winston’s diary’s first entry.

Online Symposium: The Rise of Neo-Fascism
Where: University of Houston (online)
When: Friday, March 31, 2023, 1:00pm—5:15pm*
*This is Noon for Houston, which is in the Central Time Zone

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) is a classic because, as with other classics, it’s not done telling us what it has to say. I’m writing a chapter for an edited collection about teaching Orwell’s works, and I happen to be focusing on using Nineteen Eighty-Four in the Technical Communication classroom (lots on surveillance). Our discussion will focus more on the rhetoric of fear, and Orwell’s novel, obviously, has lots to say.

While the mid-20th century context in which Orwell wrote is important, since 2016, Orwell has had a renewed value for contemporary propaganda and misinformation. We should remember our F/fascism and totalitarianism material when discussion this. I have some quotations below, but I’m ready to hear what you have to say! But, first, I always mention this story when discussing Nineteen Eighty-Four. I was at a summer job and justifying why I was an English major to a coworker. He was basically telling me science fiction was useless and can’t predict* the future. He pointed out, “Orwell got it wrong in Nineteen Eighty-Four…it’s not like we have huge screens in our homes with people on the other side telling us what to do.” Yep. That’s exactly what he said.

*Good science fiction isn’t about predicting the future. Although that can happen, good social science fiction reflects on an author’s time period and projects a story into a speculative setting (future, alien civilization, alternate history, etc.).

  • roman à clef (French): a story with a key; characters are thinly veiled people in the real world.
  • bildungsroman (German): a high-brow coming-of-age story.

Fromm “Afterword” (1961)

Erich Fromm wrote an “Afterword” for Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1961 that reiterates Orwell’s warning about civilization losing its humanity. Unfortunately, Fromm’s “Afterword” fails to recognize that humanity is the reason for despair. It does a good job comparing Nineteen Eighty-Four to two other important dystopian novels: Yevgeny “Eugene” Zamyatin’s We (1921) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Winston makes reference to animals and losing one’s humanity, but animals (rarely and not even as close to the scale of humans) rarely kill for sport, they never go on shooting rampages, and their “societies” are governed by natural selection. You’ve probably heard someone refer to another person as an “animal” for an act of senseless violence. As you read and reflect on Nineteen Eighty-Four, consider the comments on language, and consider a higher-level, “metacritique” that questions Orwell’s and your own assumptions about who/what causes violence.

  • p. 261: “…in Orwell’s1984 it is the completely unlimited use of torture and brainwashing. None of the three authors [Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell] can be accused of the thought that the destruction of the humanity within man is easy. Yet all three arrive at the same conclusion: that it is possible, with means and techniques which are common knowledge today.”
  • p. 262: “…[Orwell] shows the economic significance of continuous arms production, without which the economic system cannot function. Furthermore, he gives an impressive picture of how a society must develop which is constantly preparing for war, constantly afraid of being attacked, and preparing to find the means of complete annihilation of its opponents.”
  • p. 262: “Orwell demonstrates the illusion of the assumption that democracy can continue to exist in a world preparing for nuclear war, and he does so imaginatively and brilliantly.”
  • p. 267: “…1984 teaches us, the danger with which all men are confronted today, the danger of a society of automatons who will have lost every trace of individuality, of love, of critical thought, and yet who will not be aware of it because of ‘doublethink.'”

Newspeak and Other Nineteen Eighty-Four Vocabulary

The way Orwell deals with language has always fascinated me. Naming is a way of identifying something—democracy, freedom, oppression—and the Newspeak campaign is to reduce the words in the English language.

  • crimestop: the ability to self-censor any unorthodox thought
  • doublethink: holding contradictory beliefs simultaneously
  • ownlife: individualism and eccentricity
  • thoughtcrime: thoughts against Party orthodoxy

Syme is a tragic figure, an expert on Newspeak and orthodoxy. Winston notes, “Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly” (p. 47). Perhaps there’s a comment on anti-intellectualism here.

  • p. 45: “‘We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day….’It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.'”
  • p. 46: “‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.'”
    • But is the goal to get rid of thoughtcrime completely? O’Brien’s role is to implant thoughtcrime, right?
  • p. 47: “‘Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.'”

Select Quotations from Nineteen Eighty-Four

By the way, Orwell’s working title before settling on Nineteen Eighty-Four was The Last Man in Europe. Although the setting is London, England is Airship One, a province of the country Oceania. The nation is a conglomerate of Great Britain, the United States, Australia, and South Africa. I should also mention Anthony Giddens structuration theory, which explains “social systems shape individuals, even though these structures do permit degrees of freedom” (Barker and Jane 81).
Barker, Chris and Emma A. Jane. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 5th ed. Sage, 2016.

  • p. 16: The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in.
  • p. 32: “‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”
    • p. 32: “It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control,’ they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink.'”
  • p. 37: “…the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled.”
    • The Party of Oceania kept people barely at the threshold of starvation, rationing goods and services.
    • Contemporary American society has an overabundance of wealth and goods. Could we possibly draw comparisons between the two societies?
  • p. 42: “…the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances.”
  • p. 60: “If there is hope [wrote Winston] it lies in the proles.“
  • p. 73: “It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant.”
  • p. 176: “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
    • “This process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision. But it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.”
  • pp. 176-177: “Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty.”

Technology Concerns

Langdon Winner (1986) recognizes this apparent contradiction to freedom when he points out

In our times people are often willing to make drastic changes in the way they live to accommodate technological innovation while at the same time resisting similar kinds of changes justified on political grounds. If for no other reason than that, it is important for us to achieve a clearer view of these matters than has been our habit so far. (39)

Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts have Politics?” The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986: 19-39.

What Critical Theorist Jodi Dean Can Tell Us

These quotations come from Dean, Jodi. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Duke UP, 2009.

  • p. 2: Communicative Capitalism: “the materialization of ideals of inclusion and participation in information, entertainment, and communication technologies in ways that capture resistance and intensify global capitalism.”
  • p. 93: the irony of democracy winning out over socialism’s “costly, deadly, failed experiment in the 1990s” because of the “extensions in communication have been accompanied by, indeed rooted in, amplifications of capitalism.”
  • p. 22: Her “concept of communicative capitalism designates the strange merging of democracy and capitalism in which contemporary subjects are produced and trapped.”
    • Furthermore, “the deluge of screens and spectacles coincides with extreme corporatization, financialization, and privatization across the globe. Rhetorics of access, participation, and democracy work ideologically to secure the technological infrastructure of neoliberalism.”
  • p. 77: Dean’s comments on deliberative democracy requiring “deliberation” are relevant in light of the RNC not wanting to debate…Presidential debates aren’t really about deliberation.

Next Week

Keep up with the syllabus! You have two films and an article:

  • The Birds. Alfred Hitchcock (1963) {Check Canvas for availability}
  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Don Siegel (1956) {Available free on Kanopy}
  • Robinson, Tom, Clark Callahan, and Keith Evans. “Why Do We Keep Going Back?” 10.15133/j.os.2014.004

And don’t forget that your Weekly Discussion Posts are back, so make sure to do Weekly Discussion Post #9, which is on Nineteen Eighty-Four. Please respond in at least 250 words by March 31, 2023, 11:08 pm.