{"id":115104,"date":"2018-07-23T12:01:06","date_gmt":"2018-07-23T11:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=115104"},"modified":"2018-07-21T17:40:57","modified_gmt":"2018-07-21T16:40:57","slug":"the-sexual-passion-of-winston-smith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/07\/the-sexual-passion-of-winston-smith\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sexual Passion of Winston Smith"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cChristianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2013 Frederick Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cOurs is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We\u2019ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2013 D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form.\u00a0 The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one\u2019s own destruction, has become a \u2018biological\u2019 need.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>
\n\u2013 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

23 Jul 2018 – <\/em>There is a vast literature analyzing the political prophecy of George Orwell\u2019s Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em>.\u00a0 Big Brother, double-speak, telescreens, crimestop, etc. \u2013 all applied to our current political situation.\u00a0 The language has become part of our popular lexicon, and as such, has become clich\u00e9d through overuse.\u00a0 Blithe, habitual use of language robs it of its power to crack open the safe that hides the realities of life.<\/p>\n

There is no doubt that Orwell wrote a brilliant political warning about the methods of totalitarian control.\u00a0 But hidden at the heart of the book is another lesson lost on most readers and commentators.\u00a0 Rats, torture, and Newspeak resonate with people fixated on political repression, which is a major concern, of course.\u00a0 But so too is privacy and sexual passion in a country of group-think and group-do, where \u201cBig Brother\u201d poisons you in the crib and the entertainment culture then takes over to desexualize intimacy by selling it as another public commodity.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

‘He propped the book against his knees and began reading: Chapter I. Ignorance is Strength.’<\/p><\/div>\n

The United States is a pornographic society.\u00a0 By pornographic I do not just<\/em> mean the omnipresent selling of exploitative sex through all media to titillate a voyeuristic public living in the unreality of screen \u201clife\u201d and screen sex through television, movies, and online obsessions.\u00a0 I mean a commodified consciousness, where everyone and everything is part of a prostitution ring in the deepest sense of pornography\u2019s meaning \u2013 for sale, bought.\u00a0 And consumed by getting, spending, and selling.\u00a0 Flicked into the net of Big Brother, whose job is to make sure everything fundamentally human and physical is debased and mediated, people become consumers of the unreal and direct experience is discouraged.\u00a0 The natural world becomes an object to be conquered and used.\u00a0 Animals are produced in chemical factories to be slaughtered by the billions only to appear bloodless under plastic wrap in supermarket coolers. \u00a0The human body disappears into hypnotic spectral images. One\u2019s sex becomes one\u2019s gender as the words are transmogrified and as one looks in the mirror of the looking-glass self and wonders how to identify the one looking back.\u00a0 Streaming life from Netflix or Facebook becomes life the movie.\u00a0 The brilliant perverseness of the mediated reality of a screen society \u2013 what Guy Debord calls The Society of the Spectacle<\/a> \u2013 is\u00a0 that as it distances people from fundamental reality, it promotes that reality through its screen fantasies.\u00a0 \u201cGet away from it all and restore yourself at our spa in the rugged mountains where you can hike in pristine woods after yoga and a breakfast of locally sourced eggs and artisanally crafted bread.\u201d\u00a0 Such garbage would be funny if it weren\u2019t so effective.\u00a0 Debord writes,<\/p>\n

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images\u2026. Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thus sex with robots and marrying yourself are not aberrations but logical extensions of a society where solipsism meets machine in the America dream.<\/p>\n

As this happens, words and language become corrupted by the same forces that Orwell called Big Brother, whose job is total propaganda and social control.\u00a0 Just as physical reality now mimics screen reality and thus becomes chimerical, language, through which human beings uncover and articulate the truth of being, becomes more and more abstract.\u00a0 People don\u2019t die; they \u201cpass on\u201d or \u201cpass away.\u201d\u00a0 Dying, like real sex, is too physical.\u00a0 Wars of aggression don\u2019t exist; they are \u201coverseas contingency operations.\u201d\u00a0 Killing people with drones isn\u2019t killing; it\u2019s \u201cneutralizing them.\u201d\u00a0 There are a \u201cton\u201d of examples, but I am sure \u201cyou guys\u201d don\u2019t need me to list any more.<\/p>\n

Orwell called Big Brother\u2019s language Newspeak, and Hemingway preceded him when he so famously wrote in disgust In a Farewell to Arms<\/em>, \u201cI was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression in vain\u2026. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene\u2026\u201d\u00a0 This destruction of language has been going on for a long time, but it\u2019s worth noting that from Hemingway\u2019s WW I through Orwell\u2019s WW II up until today\u2019s endless U.S. wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, etc., there has been the parallel development of screen and media culture, beginning with silent movies through television and onto the total electronic media environment we now inhabit \u2013 the surround sound and image bubble of literal abstractions that inhabit us, mentally and physically.\u00a0 In such a society, to feel what you really feel and not what, in Hemingway\u2019s words, \u201cyou were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel\u201d has become extremely difficult.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

‘On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting: I love you.’<\/p><\/div>\n

Language, as the Greeks told us, should open up a clearing for the truth (Greek aleitheia<\/em>, unhiddenness) to emerge so we can grasp the essence of life.\u00a0 And so it is ironically appropriate that Orwell\u2019s Winston Smith discovers such essence, not in analyzing Crimestop, his tormenter O\u2019Brien, or Doublethink, but \u201cin a natural clearing, a tiny grass knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely\u201d where he secretly meets a young woman who had passed him a note saying she loved him.\u00a0\u00a0 Away from the prying eyes of Big Brother and his spies, amidst bluebells and a torrent of song from a thrush, they come together almost wordlessly. \u00a0\u201cWinston and Julia clung together, fascinated\u201d as the thrush sang madly.\u00a0 \u201cThe music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as if the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity\u2026He stopped thinking and merely felt.\u201d\u00a0 Here the secret lovers affirm their humanity, the truth of sexual intimacy that is the enemy of all abstractions used by the powerful to control and manipulate normal people and to convince them to participate in killing others.\u00a0 \u201cAlmost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.\u201d\u00a0 Reveling in love-making in a free space outside the Party\u2019s control, they felt they had triumphed.<\/p>\n

But as we learn in 1984 <\/em>and should learn in the U.S.A. today, <\/em>\u201cseemed\u201d is the key word.\u00a0 Their triumph was temporary.\u00a0 For sexual passion reveals truths that need to be confirmed in the mind.\u00a0 In itself, sexual liberation can be easily manipulated, as it has been so effectively in the United States. \u201cRepressive de-sublimation\u201d Herbert Marcuse called it fifty years ago. You allow people to act out their sexual fantasies in commodified ways that can be controlled by the rulers, all the while ruling their minds and potential political rebelliousness. Sex becomes part of the service economy where people service each other while serving their masters. \u00a0Use pseudo-sex to sell them a way of life that traps them in an increasingly totalitarian social order that only seems free.\u00a0 This has been accomplished primarily through screen culture and the concomitant confusion of sexual identity. \u00a0Perhaps you have noticed that over the past twenty-five years of growing social and political confusion, we have witnessed an exponential growth in \u201cthe electronic life,\u201d the use of psychotropic drugs, and sexual disorientation.\u00a0 This is no accident.\u00a0 Wars have become as constant as Eros \u2013 the god of love, life, joy, and motion \u2013 has been divorced from sex as a stimulus and response release of tension in a \u201cstressed\u201d society.\u00a0 Rollo May, the great American psychologist, grasped this:<\/p>\n

Indeed, we have set sex over against eros, used sex precisely to avoid the anxiety-creating involvements of eros\u2026We are in flight from eros and use sex as the vehicle for the flight\u2026Eros [which includes, but is not limited to, passionate sex] is the center of vitality of a culture \u2013 its heart and soul.\u00a0 And when release of tension takes the place of creative eros, the downfall of the civilization is assured.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Because Julia and Winston cannot permanently escape Oceania, but can only tryst, they succumb to Big Brother\u2019s mind control and betray each other.\u00a0 Their sexual affair can\u2019t save them.\u00a0\u00a0 It is a moment of beauty and freedom in an impossible situation.\u00a0 Of course the hermetically sealed world of 1984<\/em> is not the United States.\u00a0 Orwell created a society in which escape was impossible. It is, after all, an admonitory novel \u2013 not the real world.\u00a0 Things are more subtle here; we still have some wiggle room \u2013 some \u2013 although the underlying truth is the same: the U.S. oligarchy, like \u201cThe Party,\u201d \u201cseeks power entirely for its own sake\u201d and \u201care not interested in the good of others,\u201d all rhetoric to the contrary. Our problem is that too many believe the rhetoric, and those who say they don\u2019t really do at the deepest level.\u00a0 Fly the flag and play the national anthem and their hearts are aflutter with hope.\u00a0 Recycle old bromides about the next election when your political enemies will be swept out of office and excitement builds as though you had met the love of your life and all was well with the world.<\/p>\n

But understanding the history of public relations, advertising, propaganda, the CIA, the national security apparatus, technology, etc., makes it clear that such hope is baseless. For the propaganda in this country has penetrated far deeper than anyone can imagine, and it has primarily done this through advanced technology and the religion of technique \u2013 machines as pure abstractions \u2013 that has poisoned not just our minds, but the deepest wellsprings of the body\u2019s truths and the erotic imagination that links us in love to all life on earth.<\/p>\n

In \u201cDefence of Poetry,\u201d Percy Bysshe Shelley writes:<\/p>\n

The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We are now faced with the question: Can we escape the forces of propaganda and mind control that run so very deep into American life?\u00a0 If so, how? \u00a0Let\u2019s imagine a way out.<\/p>\n

Orwell makes it very clear that language is the key to mind control, as he delineates how Newspeak works. I think he is right. \u00a0And mind control also means the control of our bodies, Eros, our sex, our physical connections to all living beings and nature. Today the U.S. is reaching the point where \u201cOldspeak\u201d \u2013 Standard English \u2013 has been replaced by Newspeak, and just \u201cfragments of the literature of the past\u201d survive here and there.\u00a0 This is true for the schooled and unschooled.\u00a0 In fact, those more trapped by the instrumental logic, disembodied data, and word games of the power elite are those who have gone through the most schooling, the indoctrination offered by the so-called \u201celite\u201d universities. I suspect that more working-class and poor people still retain some sense of the old language and the fundamental meaning of words, since it is with their sweat and blood that they \u201cearn their living.\u201d \u00a0Many of the highly schooled \u00a0are children of the power elite or those groomed to serve them, who are invited to join in living the life of power and privilege if they swallow their consciences and deaden their imaginations to the suffering their \u201clife-styles\u201d and ideological choices inflict on the rest of the world.\u00a0 In this world of The<\/em> New York Times<\/em>, Harvard, The New Yorker<\/em>, Martha\u2019s Vineyard, The<\/em> Washington Post<\/em>, Wall St., Goldman Sachs, the boardrooms of the ruling corporations, all the corporate media, etc., language has become debased beyond recognition.\u00a0 Here, as Orwell said of Newspeak, \u201ca heretical thought\u2026should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.\u00a0 Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express.\u201d\u00a0 The intelligently orthodox, he adds, must master the art of \u201cdoublethink\u201d wherein they hold two contradictory ideas in their minds simultaneously, while accepting both of them.\u00a0 This is the key trick of logic and language that allows the power elites and their lackeys in the U.S. today to master the art of self-deception and feel good about themselves as they plunder the world.\u00a0 In this \u201cParty\u201d world, the demonization, degradation, and killing of others is an abstraction; their lives are spectral.\u00a0 Orwell describes doublethink this way:<\/p>\n

To tell deliberate lives while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality one denies \u2013 all this is indispensably necessary.\u00a0 Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink.\u00a0 For by using the word one admits one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It may sound silly to say, but language, as its etymology tells us, begins with the tongue (Latin, lingua<\/em>).\u00a0 And the tongue is a bell, tolling out its meaning.\u00a0 Indeed, all language springs from the body \u2013 is body language. And when language becomes abstract and devoid of blood, it becomes etiolated and unable to convey the truth that is the mystical body of the world.\u00a0 It becomes a viper\u2019s tongue, dividing the \u201cgood\u201d people from the \u201cbad\u201d so the good can eliminate the bad who have become abstractions.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photograph by Christopher Anderson\/Magnum Photos.<\/p><\/div>\n

When Winston Smith and Julia hid in the arbor and for once felt free and alive as they fucked \u2013 despite its transitoriness \u2013 Orwell was suggesting something that his dystopian novel denies is possible: that we can escape our own 1984 in 2018 by returning to fundamentals. Whitman told us that if anything is sacred it is the human body, and he sung \u201cthe body electric.\u201d\u00a0 This is the task of artists: to sing the words that tell the truth the propagandists try to deny.<\/p>\n

James Joyce writes in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Welcome, oh life!\u00a0 I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps we should add: in the smithy of our souls and<\/em> bodies.\u00a0 His fellow Irishman, William Butler Yeats, brings us down to earth with the words:<\/p>\n

Now that my ladder\u2019s gone\/I must lie down where all the ladders start\/In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cYes I said yes I will Yes.\u201d<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It may sound silly to say, but language, as its etymology tells us, begins with the tongue (Latin, lingua). And the tongue is a bell, tolling out its meaning. Indeed, all language springs from the body \u2013 is body language. And when language becomes abstract and devoid of blood, it becomes etiolated and unable to convey the truth that is the mystical body of the world. It becomes a viper\u2019s tongue, dividing the \u201cgood\u201d people from the \u201cbad\u201d so the good can eliminate the bad who have become abstractions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":48262,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}