Forever 1984

Seventy years ago, George Orwell released a novel that would transcend time and remain forever contemporary, though not necessarily for a good reason. 1984 is a political dystopia, but one that is multifaceted as its details grow in depth and anguish at a Kafkaesque pace, yet no less distinctively authored.

Written in the final years of World War II, the novel was questioned by the author himself when, in an essay published in 1943, he reflected that perhaps the book was an “infantile or morbid act of terrorizing oneself with visions of a totalitarian future.” With the great war and the subsequent Cold War behind us, what might seem like a distant past to younger generations is nothing less than yesterday to historians: these great events of the 20th century remain alive and woven into our present, much more than we might like them to be. Hence the relevance of 1984 to this day.

In an article for the Telegraph, Robin McGhee reflects precisely on the relevance of this book, which imagines an England crushed by an unprecedented dictatorship. “The ruling party, Ingsoc, rewrites history so that it has never made a mistake, creates a new language to make free thought inexpressible, and seeks eternal power solely for itself.”

McGhee draws on an analysis by journalist Dorian Lynskey, in which he combines literary research with critical commentary on the intellectual origins and subsequent interpretations of the science fiction classic. According to Lynskey, “Orwell’s fear was the ‘very concept that objective truth is fading out of the world,’ which is at the heart of Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

As the Telegraph article describes, the starting point for Orwell’s experience was the Spanish Civil War, when he volunteered to fight against Franco’s fascism in 1936. The writer, still young and idealistic, even joined the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), a small faction of dissident communists. Since control was in the hands of the Stalinists, Orwell was eventually arrested, and it was precisely there that his experience in a totalitarian system began to be shaped and envisioned.

“The violence of the war did not shock Orwell, but its lies did. The demonization of the POUM and the unfounded repetitions of Stalinist lies told by English intellectuals hardened his mind to what would happen when there is no consensus on reality.”

Upon returning from Spain in 1938, Orwell was already able to state that “we are descending into an age in which two and two will make five when the Leader says so,” an emblematic phrase that was immortalized in the pages of 1984 and has reverberated through pop culture, for example through the song 2+2=5 by the English band Radiohead.

Around this same time, Orwell also worked in radio, and one of his ideas was precisely to edit Churchill’s speeches to make them sound as if the Prime Minister were declaring peace. With his knowledge of how media—in this case, radio—functions, Orwell was already able to see the power of communication to create alternatives to what we have only recently come to know as post-truth. For Lynskey, it is precisely the point that a tyrant is capable of shaping reality solely for their own convenience that gives 1984 its full rhetorical force. And this is evident in the book’s own description and narration: “not even the reader can understand how to navigate the lies of Ingsoc.”

“When released, at the dawn of the atomic age, the novel could easily be read as a satire of contemporary events, with a god-like, satanic Big Brother as a thinly veiled imitation of Joseph Stalin. To his dismay, Orwell’s work was immediately adopted by anti-communists as an example of what could happen if the ‘red menace’ went too far. His American publishers even spoke with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover for a quote. (Hoover’s response was to open a file on Orwell.)”
The book was banned in many communist countries, while in the United Kingdom, the eccentric communist activist Rajani Palme Dutt disparaged the work as “the lowest essence of the commonplace of anti-socialist Tory propaganda by an ex-Etonian and colonial policeman.”

However, Orwell’s pessimism about the prospect of nuclear war and subsequent social catastrophe was a sentiment shared by his contemporaries, as McGhee writes. “His particular brilliance was to combine them with his fears about the prospects for democracy, language, and culture.” And when the fateful year arrived, there was no shortage of advertising efforts to sell the work, which, incidentally, was priced at $19.84. As early as December of the previous year, Apple released a commercial directed by Ridley Scott, in which an interpretation of the book gains a new character, an anonymous heroine who, with her clothing, hinted that she was a personification of the arrival of the Macintosh computer.

It is curious to think how a book that was born as a critique and a denunciation of something so terrifying became part of the cool imagery of pop culture as the publication aged, but the concepts have always remained imminent. As Lynskey argues, “the book was seen as a satire on the destruction of private life through technology. This aspect of the novel had a particularly powerful resonance in the post-9/11 era. Technology aligned with the dystopia and, in fact, dominated it.”

Authors like Philip K. Dick, Bruce Sterling, and William Gibson, however, made this critique even more evident long before the September 11 attacks. Blade Runner, as a film adaptation also directed by Ridley Scott, was nothing more than a sublimation of Dick’s novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", which took on even more dystopian tones through the brutalist architecture and noir aesthetic the director brought to the screen. In this sense, the technological critique made by 1984 became even more apparent with the arrival of cyberpunk as a technological reinterpretation of the 1980s from a pessimistic, yet "cooler" perspective than Orwell’s somber and austere book—see "Neuromancer," for example, which became an iconic publication and was, coincidentally, released in 1984.

As Thomas Pynchon wrote in a 2003 preface, the internet is "a development that promises social control on a scale that those old 20th-century tyrants with their goofy mustaches could only dream of."
In 2019, however, this is what our leaders have chosen to do with such seemingly important technology. And for all subsequent interpretations, Nineteen Eighty-Four remains firmly rooted in the intellectual and technological climate of the early 20th century.
Lynskey could have spent more time examining what this book means in 2019. Characters under suspicion are able to move about with the prospect of going unnoticed—something that a 21st-century Ingsoc would certainly be capable of keeping electronically identified.

For McGhee, the Party in 1984 believes it is immortal because it controls human minds; there is also a description that seems to predict the possibilities of genetic editing when it mentions the desire to remove people's sexual drive. But we don't need to go that far: biopolitics can already explain the issue of controlling the body and sexual impulses as a form of domination.

For Giorgio Agamben, however, when we deal with biopolitics, we are moving much closer to a "thanatopolitics"—that is, a politics of death rather than of the body. For Michel Foucault, disciplining the body is the primary goal of modern societies as they form their masses: disciplinary power is different from the condition in which the body is born, as it is trained to extract time and labor, generate profit, and thus establish the capitalist system of industrial economies dating back to the 16th century. These bodies, therefore, must be "both useful and docile," so that power is dissociated from the body to become a vehicle of "aptitude" and "capacity" to generate a specific product or purpose.

Finally, McGhee concludes his reflection by bringing up a last point raised by Lynskey, when he declares that 1984 is, above all, a book about a totalitarianism so comprehensive that it is capable of affecting every aspect of life and politics. And because it brings reflections so intrinsic to the human condition and contemporary politics, it is still possible that future generations will have much to add with new interpretations of this mid-20th-century novel as new technologies arrive, such as facial recognition, social credit, or even the more extensive use of decoded DNA, as McGhee suggests. Perhaps we will no longer talk about paper notes and radio broadcasts or television sets, but Orwell’s critical essence will likely endure for many decades to come, for better or for worse.