[Winston Smith] gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O, stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
(George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four )
An Introduction to Pre-Civilizational Post-Totalitarianism
In stark contrast to the other two “great negative utopias of the twentieth century”—Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1922) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)—George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) dramatizes what Hegel famously theorizes as “the master/slave dialectic.” I read this anti-utopian master/slave narrative via Orwell’s use of the tropes of family and power throughout the novel, both in terms of plot and various aesthetic elements. Orwell’s narrative speculates about the sort of world that would evolve if the Enlightenment idea of rational scientific government were abandoned (rather than running unabated as Zamyatin and Huxley anticipate) in favor of a return to “family” as the principal trope for understanding government and power. Orwell suggests that family—in the form of Sigmund Freud (Totem and Taboo 182-185; Group Psychology 69-77) and Charles Darwin’s prehistoric “primal horde”—will come to replace what Michel Foucault describes as the discourse and practices of “governmentality” in terms of how power is used to organize the many “things” that constitute the “population” of the state (93-94).
Zamyatin and Huxley argue that power will be thoroughly, rationally governmentalized equally for each citizen, effacing family as a metaphor for “the problem of population” that now preoccupies modern government (Foucault 97). Orwell, by contrast, envisions a world using technologies that could make people equal instead to fuel a transgressive return to the state of the primal horde, a single family with power for all running through one, utterly profane primal father (ironically named Big Brother). Returning to the trope of the family for the exercise of power demonstrates a troubling symbiotic relationship between subjective desire and power. In this way, Orwell’s novel is a critique of power itself, especially the manner in which certain sovereign, “oligarchical” subjects enjoy power in familial and master-slave relationships.
Although he reads the first two-thirds of the novel as representing the liberal democratic critique—or lack thereof—of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism, Richard Rorty points to something extra -totalitarian about Oceania, something he credits to Irving Howe’s (52-53) reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four as “post-totalitarian”:
But in the last third of 1984 we get something completely different [. . .]. After Winston and Julia go back to O’Brien’s apartment, 1984 becomes a book about O’Brien, not twentieth-century totalitarian states. This part of the book centers on the citations from The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (co-authored by O’Brien) and on O’Brien’s explanation of why Winston must be tortured rather than simply shot [. . .]. (171)
Not only does Oceania mandate that Winston should be tortured prior to being shot, O’Brien must also tell Winston why this is so and what value may be had from it with respect to enhancing the experience of power. According to Rorty, in the last third of Nineteen Eighty-Four , “[Orwell] convinced us that there was a perfectly good chance that the same developments which had made human equality technically possible might make endless slavery possible. He did so by convincing us that nothing in the nature of truth, or man, or history was going to block that scenario” (175). Rorty’s point resonates with the very paradox that makes the American experiment in democracy possible: the founding of a popular democracy in the context of the institution of race-based chattel slavery, a paradox which has vexed America and the New World since the beginning of European colonialism.
Modernity commences, according to Freud’s argument about the formation of “group psychology,” after the murder of the all-powerful primal father by the sons of his horde, making the rise of civilization and the adoption of the social contract possible (Group Psychology 69-77, Totem and Taboo 182). In the Enlightenment paradigm of governmentality, power operates through a series of checks and balances, advances and reversals; power is deeply diffused across social space. Orwell imagines anti-modern revolutionaries returning the world to the primal father. In this sense, Orwell’s novel is a perverse love story. By way of love, all those who submit themselves to the primal father’s cruel power can share in it. This brings us to the two most important characters in the novel apart from Winston: Big Brother and the only representative of his power that we get to know, O’Brien. Rorty underscores the significance of O’Brien to understanding the novel: “Orwell did not invent O’Brien to serve as a dialectical foil [. . .]. He invented him to warn us against him, as one who might warn against a typhoon or a rogue elephant” (176). Given its savage, crude existence there is a comparison to be made between the primal horde and a force of nature, as Rorty suggests. Unlike a hurricane or an elephant, however, Orwell’s O’Brien introduces the motivations of “rogue,” primal savagery into a technologically modern scene, using scientific developments to leverage savage power on an industrial scale.
Defining Power and Refining it Among the Primal Horde
We understand how power functions in Oceania by way of Winston’s experiences and thoughtful ruminations, his memories and everyday life, his reading of Oligarchical Collectivism , and his point of view—particularly after he has been arrested and sent to the Ministry of Love under the care of his one-time Ministry of Truth (and Brotherhood) colleague, O’Brien. After he has supervised Winston’s torture for some time, O’Brien asks him about the psychology and motives underlying the Party’s exercise of power: “‘Now tell me why we cling to power? What is our motive? Why should we want power?’” (Orwell 262). O’Brien’s question for Winston, and for the reader, implies the following additional questions: What is power used for, and is it worth the sacrifice necessary to wield it? What end could be worth the means used to operate the power required to rule Oceania? Even though Winston understands how power works in Oceania, he seems not to expect O’Brien’s seemingly candid answer:
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. The answer is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. [. . .] Power is not a means; it is an end. (Orwell 263)
Power is not a political tool so much as it is the currency of everyday life in Oceania. For those who exercise power in Oceania—from Big Brother to O’Brien and the Inner Party down to the lowliest Party member, and even among the proles themselves—the exercise is itself a utopian act, making Oceania a “powertopia.”
Speaking for the Party and Big Brother, O’Brien rejects happiness as a motive for taking power, one of the most common of all motivations cited for the utopian impulse. O’Brien’s refusal to distinguish ends and means with respect to exercising power is evocative of how power would be viewed by Freud’s primal horde and its ruler, the primal father. O’Brien seems to suggest just this when he elaborates on what it means to exercise power for its own apolitical sake: “‘One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?’” (Orwell 263). It is perhaps understandable that Winston is having trouble seeing O’Brien’s point, given that the world has seen very few real examples of this model of power since before the advent of civilization and the social contract. One of the hallmarks of civilization is that power shifts from being an end in its own right, as it would be for Sigmund Freud’s “primal horde,” to being a means to an end, a political end in the form of progress.
In order to put his theory of the primal horde into the context of progress, Freud notes that he is using the speculative work of Darwin in his own speculations on psychic and social life among primitive human beings prior to the development of civilization and the social contract. In Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego , the primal horde constitutes the earliest form of “savage” social organization, where the first individual—the “primal father”—meets the first group. Freud’s description of aspects of the primal horde that are found in modern groups is evocative of the Party in Oceania:
Human groups exhibit once again the familiar picture of an individual of superior strength among a troop of equal companions, a picture which is also contained in our idea of the primal horde. The psychology of such a group, . . . the dwindling of the conscious individual personality, the focusing of thoughts and feelings into a common direction, the predominance of the affective side of the mind and of unconscious psychical life, the tendency to the immediate carrying out of intentions as they emerge—all this corresponds to a state of regression to a primitive mental activity, of just such a sort as we should be inclined to ascribe to the primal horde. (69-70)
Eradicating individual desire and pleasure, socializing hate for a common enemy in an endless war, the near-omnipresence of telescreens and Thought Police, all of these characteristics and more point to a Party seeking, not slipping into regression toward the primal. Freud argues that even modern groups carry within them the psychical vestiges of the primal horde, which can resurface from time to time: “Thus the group appears to us as a revival of the primal horde. Just as primitive man survives potentially in every individual, so the primal horde may arise once more out of any random collection, in so far as men are habitually under the sway of group formation we recognize in it the survival of the primal horde” (Group 70). While the universal project of modernity and progress since the Enlightenment is for groups—especially governmental groups—to mitigate and repress this primal heritage by diffusing the sovereign power of the murdered primal father equally among its members, O’Brien makes clear in his re-education of Winston that the Party consciously, purposefully seeks to pursue and cultivate primal regression in every aspect of its operations as a group.
O’Brien’s contempt for all previous modern totalitarian systems points to the Party’s embrace of a comprehensive return to the state of the primal horde:
We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. (Orwell 263)
O’Brien argues that whatever primal motives the Nazis and the Communists practiced, they were unconscious and, hence, the product of a civilized (and utopian) mind and ideology. That is—despite conventional wisdom—O’Brien argues that the Nazis and Communists, even Hitler and Stalin, had good motives, at least consciously. The Party’s primal motives are entirely conscious, though—like those of the primal horde—not at all the product of any one individual.
A crucial aspect of Oceania’s embrace of a return to the primal horde is the omnipresence of representations of Big Brother, the return of Freud’s primal father in its purest form. Freud describes the leader of the primal horde in terms similar to those O’Brien uses regarding Big Brother:
the primal father had prevented his sons from satisfying their directly sexual impulsions, he forced them into abstinence and consequently into the emotional ties with him and with one another which could arise out of those of their impulsions that were inhibited in their sexual aim. He forced them, so to speak, into group psychology. His sexual jealousy and intolerance became in the last resort the causes of group psychology. (Group Psychology 72)
Freud’s description of the leader of the primal horde echoes the stated goals of Big Brother’s Oceania. As O’Brien teaches Winston, “The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except for love of Big Brother” (Orwell 267). Like the primal father, Big Brother’s “sexual jealousy” leads him to seek control over the sexuality and desires of his subjects in support of his own power. In Oceania, the “impulsions” of all—Party member and prole alike—shall be harnessed, consumed by and through Big Brother. O’Brien refers to Big Brother as both a singular individual and as a collective incarnation.
When he has completed the first stage of reintegration, “learning,” O’Brien invites Winston to ask a few questions about anything he would like. After he asks two questions about Julia, Winston chooses to ask several about Big Brother: “‘Does Big Brother exist?’” Seemingly without guile, O’Brien responds: “‘Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.’” Unsatisfied, Winston elaborates on his existential question: “‘Does he exist in the same way as I exist?’” O’Brien’s answer, “‘You do not exist,’” suggests that, while Big Brother may not physically live, he—unlike Winston, who is destined to be “vaporized” as if he had never existed—will remain alive forever, powering and empowered by the Party. Winston insists: “‘I think I exist. I am conscious of my own identity’” (Orwell 259). O’Brien dismisses this key tenant of (Western) civilization, the Cartesian cogito —I think, therefore I am—with a most primal declaration in response to Winston’s justification of his existence: “‘It is of no importance. He exists’” (260). Like the primal horde, Big Brother’s existence is assured in the continuing existence of the body of the horde he leads, the Party. As with the horde, which effaces the existence of any free individual but that of the primal father (Freud, Group Psychology 71), Winston’s (social) body, his existence in Oceania, has been vaporized despite his weary declaration: “‘I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously. In that sense, does Big Brother exist?’” (Orwell 260). Big Brother exists in the same sense that the primal father once existed in Freud’s theory of the primal horde, as a necessary theoretical “point” Freud uses to understand neurotic, irrational behaviors in (modern) individuals and groups.
Given that all power in Oceania is invested in the name and image of Big Brother, it seems intuitive to argue that power moves from the top down, exercised by a strong one over weak others. How else would Big Brother rise to rule the Party and lead the “revolution” that would effectively make him the last “dictator”? But Freud’s description of relationships within the primal horde points to power being a group dynamic rather than a static, one-way relationship, as O’Brien teaches Winston: “‘We are the priests of power,’ he said. ‘God is power. [. . .] It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. [. . .] But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal’” (Orwell 264). O’Brien sounds as if he could also be talking about himself here (even if in the third person) and how he derives his own power over the mind and body of others (especially Winston, at this particular moment). O’Brien is saying to Winston something akin to this: like you I am a slave, but, unlike you, I understand and accept this fact regarding power with respect to freedom and slavery. O’Brien’s submission to Big Brother gives him access to tremendous, primal power. Remarkably, O’Brien is asking Winston to identify with him, which, given Winston’s feeling early on that O’Brien was with him, makes sense. As a corollary to saying that power is a collective force, O’Brien makes a point about what constitutes the object of real power: “‘The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body—but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter—external reality as you would call it—is not important’” (264). In Oceania, the ultimate expression of power is represented in motifs of slavery and family. As with the primal horde, everything in Oceania is about power, a power that stems from the primal father’s own power over every member, or cell, making up the body of the horde, which is his own family since he exerts his power over all women.
Refining Power Through Slavery and Family
Although O’Brien vehemently distinguishes Oceania from previous modern totalitarian systems, there is a modern precedent for a return to the social order of the primal horde: the chattel slavery of black Africans on New World plantations. In his The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South , John Blassingame describes the relationship between “planters” (plantation owners) and enslaved peoples in a manner evocative of O’Brien’s teachings on power: “Whatever their treatment of slaves, most planters worked consistently to make them submissive and deferential. While the lash was the linchpin of his regime, the slaveholder adopted several practices to assure the slave’s submissiveness. A master started early trying to impress upon the mind of the young black the awesome power of whiteness” (256). The planter seeks to develop power over his slaves in a manner suggestive of O’Brien’s arguments about the purpose, means, and motivations for taking power. Like Oceania’s Party, the planter seeks power over his slaves’ bodies and minds:
Many masters tried first to demonstrate their own authority over the slave and then the superiority of all whites over blacks. They continually told the slave he was unfit for freedom, that every slave who attempted to escape and sold further South, and that the black man must conform to the white man’s every wish. The penalties for non-conformity were severe; the lessons uniformly pointed to one idea: the slave was a thing to be used by the “superior” race. (Blassingame 257)
As it is for O’Brien’s Party and its primal power grid, total power over the mind and the body of the slave is the planter’s expressed purpose and motivation. In the planter’s view, it is not enough that enslaved peoples simply obey and show deference to him personally—those are a given in chattel slavery—enslaved peoples must also be taught to understand and accept their inferiority to all whites as a natural fact, multiplying the planter’s own power.
Opposing what Foucault argues is the aim of modern governmentality—managing its citizens and their economies for the good of the entire “population” (94-95)—O’Brien describes the Party in these terms: “‘The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things but power over men.’” And, O’Brien will add, over what constitutes family. This is the personal power that typifies social life in the primal horde, each against the other with total victory possible for only one sovereign subject (the primal father). O’Brien asks, “‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’” While Winston has badly misjudged the motives and means of the Party regarding power, at this point in his re-education, he has learned the answer: “Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer.’” O’Brien confirms and elaborates on this: “‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing’” (Orwell 266-267). O’Brien’s argument for how to maximize power echoes the mentality of chattel slavery. Just as Oceania remakes its citizens by way of suffering, so also does the planter seek to remake his slaves, to fashion them for the task at hand and to make them suffer for the sake of absolute power. Unlike simple obedience, suffering links the body to the mind, with the hand of the master marking both. O’Brien’s reflection on power helps to explain the central role of the lash in chattel slavery, which Blassingame also points to: “Nowhere does the irrationality of slavery appear as clearly as in the way slaves were punished” (261). In the cases of both Oceania and chattel slavery, this refinement of power through punishment extends to the family.
Like the planter with his slaves, O’Brien explains the relationship between punishment and family:
We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. [. . .] There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except for love of Big Brother. (Orwell 267)
The Party looks to eliminate all family and intimate relationships, except for the one between the citizen and Big Brother. Whether in the primal world, in Oceania, or on the plantation, power means nothing if it is not exercised vigorously; obedience without punishment or torture is not enough to make power incarnate.
While the planter is not the primal father, he does share many characteristics with his primeval forebear. For the planter, enslaved peoples represent not just property but also an extended family; he desires not just their obedience but also visible expressions of love from those he enslaves (Blassingame 265-266). Just as the planter is a patriarch to his entire plantation, Big Brother is the patriarch of all Oceania. The climax of “The Two Minutes Hate” Winston joins helps to dramatize Big Brother’s primal paternal power (despite his horror for the “subhuman chant”): “At this moment the entire group of people broke out into a deep, slow, rhythmic chant of: ‘B-B! . . . B-B! . . . B-B!’ over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first ‘B’ and the second—a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms” (Orwell 16). This scene in Oceania evokes that of the prehistoric, “savage” horde worshipping its primal father. Fraternal symbols abound throughout the novel. Perhaps the most curious of them all is “Big Brother,” the true master and patriarch of Oceania. Why not name him “Big Father” (or even “Big Daddy,” a name evocative of the paternal kinship between the planter and his plantation)? The name “Big Brother” reinforces the fraternal, filial relationship between himself and every citizen.
Foreclosing Subjectivity
Unlike the conclusion of either Zamyatin’s We or Huxley’s Brave New World , Orwell’s novel forecloses all possibility of a real utopia or free subjectivity. Despite the dead-ends of D-503 and I-330, Zamyatin offers some hope in O-90’s escape with her baby beyond the Green Wall. Despite the suicide of John Savage, Huxley points to some hope in the “exiles” from World State. In winning the victory over himself and loving Big Brother, Winston affirms the submission of all possible subjectivities to suffering enslavement as a member of his collective, primal family.
Works Cited
Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South . Oxford UP, 1979.
Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures and an Interview by Michel Foucault , edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. U of Chicago P, 1991.
Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego . 1921. Edited and translated by James Strachey, Norton, 1959.
__________. Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics . 1913. Translated by A. A. Brill, Random House, 1946.
Howe, Irving. “1984 : History as Nightmare.” 1957. Hynes 41-53. Prentice-Hall, 1971.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World . 1932. HarperCollins, 1998.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four . 1949. Signet, 1977.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity . Cambridge UP, 1989.
Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We . Translated by Clarence Brown, Penguin, 1993.