The key way station on Winston Smith’s journey toward “victory over himself” (Orwell 308) is his encounter with Goldstein’s book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. The book is the explanation Winston has been seeking—the textual embodiment of “the place where there is no darkness” (25). Yet the experience is not satisfying, for when he finally reads it, Winston is impatient and skips over sections, telling himself, “The best books . . . are those that tell you what you know already” (205). This is a problem, for while he seeks affirmation of what he already knows of Goldstein and Big Brother, he is haunted by the basic operation of paranoiac knowledge—that “truth” comes from outside the self (and threatens its imagined unity). Hence, after his initial reading Winston thinks:

Winston is a “paranoid reader” who represses his anxieties by placing his faith in the possibility of a book where there is no darkness.

As one expects of the novel central to the dystopian genre, Nineteen Eighty-Four embodies and explores the relationship between reading and power. Paranoia defines this relationship, either implicitly or explicitly, in various interpretations of the novel. Paranoid reading may be “productive,” as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari show in their radical exploration of the way paranoia characterizes our activities as, what they call, “desiring machines” bound to a model of endless production (5). As productive as paranoid reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four has been, its desires, habits, and forms have certain effects that demand analysis. This essay explores the power and limits of paranoid readings of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the context of Eve Sedgwick’s commentary on paranoia, and, in the second half, via Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, and especially Michel Foucault’s guide to non-fascist ethics from the preface to that book.

I.

With attention to the habits of paranoid reading, I will describe the formal symmetry between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Franz Kafka’s The Trial, arguably the twentieth century’s most important meditation on the human subject’s entanglement with power and paranoia in the bureaucratic state. Though distinct in their dramatic contexts, these novels share and engender an orientation toward “paranoid reading” produced by a disjuncture between the “how” and “why” of power. As Sedgwick explains, “Paranoia tends to be contagious; more specifically, paranoia is drawn toward and tends to construct symmetrical relations, in particular, symmetrical epistemologies”—that is to say theories of knowledge that are linear and unified in their arrangements (126). This desire for a grand unifying theory or closed reading is paranoia’s goal and driving energy. Exploring the promise and peril of this approach, Sedgwick describes five practices of the paranoid position:

The “anticipatory” quality is a defensive posture; paranoia wards off the bad-thing-to-come by imagining it. In this way, it is “reflexive and mimetic” to the extent that, “Paranoia seems to require being imitated to be understood, and it, in turn, seems to understand only by imitation” (Sedgwick 131). Positioned as anticipatory, reflexive, and mimetic, paranoia presupposes and seeks a “strong theory,” offering, “An explanatory structure that a reader may see as tautological,” but which “may be experienced by the practitioner as a triumphant advance toward truth and vindication” (Sedgwick 135). In this sense, and to explain “negative affect,” the paranoid position represses desires, feelings, or impulses by turning toward an “objective” truth outside of the subject. This orientation suggests the centrality of the faith the paranoid places in “exposure.” To ground Sedgwick’s theory in Orwell’s language, when the “ultimate secret” of “why” is exposed and bound to the “how,” the paranoid reader asserts, and at once confirms, his “strong theory.” Hence, the paranoid, as in Winston Smith’s dream of the Brotherhood, indulges a fantasy of coherence and cause to ward off madness.

To understand the implications of paranoid reading in Orwell’s novel, or to give his “how” a speculative “why,” consider Kafka, whose writing is haunted by the reader’s desire for symmetry between form and content. His enigmatic “Before the Law” parable offers itself to the paranoid reader as the puzzle at the heart of The Trial. This strange allegorical section, presented during the “In the Cathedral” chapter, depicts an old man seeking “The Law”—that definite but ever-absent name of power and reason that is simultaneously denotative in form but only ever connotative in meaning. “Before the Law,” the priest tells Josef K., “stands a doorkeeper,” the device that prevents the old man, and the reader, from accessing the ultimate secret of “The Law” (which we suspect describes the novel’s primary mystery—Josef K.’s unnamed crime).

“Before the Law” barely hides the relationship between the old man’s quest for The Law and the reader’s interpretive desires and impediments. As the old man peers into the interior when the doorkeeper steps aside, so too does the reader, on the threshold of the story, peer in, wondering what is to come. Nowhere is this parallel made more literal than in the conclusion, when the doorkeeper roars into the man’s failing ears, as he dies after years of waiting, “No one else could gain admittance here, because this entrance was made solely for you. I am going to shut it now” (Kafka 217). With that, the parable is closed; all that remains is an interpretive struggle between Josef K. and the priest. Hence, the paranoid reader is shown that, like the old man, he has put himself “Before the Law.” Readers, as David Foster Wallace explains, regarding the problem of “getting” Kafka, find themselves, “Coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it” (27). Wallace shows that in Kafka’s dark comedy, the truth of the experience is the reading experience itself, wherein metaphor and readerly desire unite. This insight is both satisfying and troubling for the paranoid reader, for it converts the how into the why, the form into a meaning that is only felt.

The conclusion of Nineteen Eighty-Four, or at least the dramatic conclusion (the desire to read this as the end of the novel, though it continues in the essential appendix, sheds light on this paranoid reading), bears an important formal and thematic symmetry with the conclusion of “Before the Law.” The reader simultaneously loses Winston, our partner in this reading of Big Brother, and discovers the truth of power as the dramatic narration ends. The book declares its conclusion and its truth in one moment. As Winston gazes at Big Brother, the narrator reaches into his mind and reports, “But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother” (Orwell 308).

In the light of this comparative paranoid reading, we arrive at a strange irony of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Like Winston Smith, the reader, in a way, “loves” Big Brother, even though the book is commonly imagined as a long-form “Two Minutes Hate,” through which we expel authoritarianism from our own desires and thoughts. The book certainly may, as David Brin argues, make us “anti-Cassandras” (230), inoculated by a dose of terror against totalitarianism, but it also orients us toward power and specifically toward the meaning of Big Brother—in the book and the world. Winston’s fundamental orientation is toward exposing the meaning of Big Brother and the long-deferred truth of the “place where there is no darkness,” and so is the reader’s—at least in the dominant, and here strategically assumed, paranoid position. Both Winston and the reader approach Big Brother as the metaphor that should bind the “why” to the “how,” if only we could “decipher” him properly. He, like Kafka’s “Law,” is the thing that gives our reading coherence. Aaron Rosenfeld suggests that a paranoid approach to the novel is the “poetic principle governing” Nineteen Eighty-Four (339).

As Rosenfeld observes, this principle does not stop at form, but touches on a range of cultural tensions that surround the novel in an age oriented toward grand modernist theories but still longing for the romantic ideal of the sublime—that which may not be resolved to a closed reading. We must ask of both paranoid and reparative readings of Nineteen Eighty-Four: What is the function of Big Brother in the imagining of power within the novel and in its cultural adoption as the master sign of totalitarian power? Does this sign limit or help us to imagine the struggle for human freedom? Does it mirror a set of ideological conditions and our orientation toward them? Big Brother, in the popular and critical imagination, has long served as the personification of power, standing in as an organizing metaphor in the discourse on power and conformity. Orwell’s novel, with its looming image of Big Brother, is commonly framed as a critique of cult-of-personality dictatorships and totalitarianism; yet the question of the meaning of Big Brother, too readily resolved to Stalin’s mustache, is persistently disappointing, perhaps because of the anticipatory nature of paranoid reading. There must, we suspect, be more to the matter.

This suspicion has driven critical production in predictable, but also critically useful, ways. In a characteristic late-Cold War era essay, political scientist Robert C. Tucker writes: “Winston Smith is obsessed by an overwhelming question. As a functionary of the Ministry of Truth, he knows how the system works, but he can’t puzzle out why it does the things it does . . . Winston suspects that the mystery of the why is bound up with the answer to a further question: Does Big Brother really exist?” (99). Tucker argues that the mistake Winston makes is to imagine Big Brother as a “him” rather than as an “it” (100). Situating the novel as Orwell’s response to the modern totalitarian or “nightmare state,” he writes:

Tucker recognizes the crucial aspect of Big Brother, its abstract character, but then, assuming the paranoid position, re-imagines this abstract “it” as the symptom of the collective narcissistic id of the totalitarian state. This reading has productive features within the context of Cold War politics and the related theories on Stalin and Hitler, especially, as Tucker suggests, Hannah Arendt’s work on the subject. Yet, herein lies a critical irony: Big Brother is simultaneously the sign of total power and the sign of power’s diffuse, de-centered, and abstract nature.

Set within this irony, the paranoiac quest for the “ultimate secret” behind Big Brother in the novel and the world may, in fact, be a means of loving Big Brother and loving the notion that power is organized and “pyramidal” (like the Ministry of Truth). When used this way, either as “him” or “it,” as historical reality or fantasy, Big Brother is the sign that blots out the novel’s satire of the neurotic worship of a paranoid order through which the subject achieves “victory over himself.” The paranoid reading is important, but as Sedgwick establishes, may obscure other readings that go beyond Big Brother.

Sedgwick recognizes that paranoid reading, though haunted by problems, is part of the reparative critical process. She does not reject the paranoid position altogether in light of its value to critical theories of the last forty years, especially queer theory, feminism, deconstruction, and New Historicism:

In this context, a strategic rereading of the novel via both the paranoid model and the theoretical turn against the paranoid position is imperative. In an age when the conspiracy theory has become the preeminent cultural form, any study of reading practices, especially within the dystopian genre, must confront paranoia’s uses and hazards in tandem. Paranoia is an oddly comforting and, perhaps, inevitable idea within the bewildering landscape of modernity from which the genre emerges. What paranoia offers is narrative continuity, the illusion of agency, or a bulwark against madness. This is also its gift to power. Paranoia supplements power with order and symmetry, masking its chaotic, opportunistic, and reactive practices. Big Brother is both supplement and threat to the state’s coherence.

II.

This second or alternate section explores alternatives to Winston’s paranoid position and our “love” of Big Brother through Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and, especially, Foucault’s introduction to the book. My primary aim is to illuminate the text as an experience that moves us to confront what Foucault describes as, “The fascism within us all, in our heads, in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (xiii). This love of power is entangled in paranoid readings directed by the love of Big Brother.

Anti-Oedipus is a signal moment in the left’s post-1968 rethinking of Freud and Marx. Reframing the neurotic and paranoid subject as a product and producer of the order of things in Western cultures rather than simply as an unfortunate byproduct of the costs of “civilization” (as Freud imagines), Deleuze and Guattari relentlessly attack a world of “desiring machines” and their role in describing, compartmentalizing, penetrating, and controlling the body. The aim of their “schizoanalysis” is, “To analyze the specific nature of libidinal investments in the economic and political spheres, and thereby show how, in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression” (105). Paranoia is the defining mindset of this condition—seeking the singular link between latent and manifest, labor and capital, depth and surface. Against this condition they set the “schizo,” that position which energizes contingent, multiplying forms of difference and desire.

In Foucault’s equally important preface that celebrates Anti-Oedipus as a repudiation of the “correct thinking” that dominated the period from 1945–1965 and as a guide to “the art of living counter to all forms of fascism” (xv), he arrives at an uncharacteristically succinct ethics for what he terms a “non-fascist life”:

Taken as a theory demanding practice, Foucault’s list is a tool for freeing Nineteen Eighty-Four from “unitary and totalizing paranoia.” It is a means to do something other than loving Big Brother—that master sign of pyramidal power—and for activating the “schizo” position Deleuze and Guattari juxtapose against totalizing paranoia.

Take the second directive as a start: “Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization” (Foucault xiii). This seems difficult due to the forceful nature of Orwell’s narrative structure, but as Sedgwick shows in theory and as Rosenfeld, Brin, and Tucker show in approaches to the novel, the paranoid reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the difficult or marginal one; the paranoid reading is the orthodox one, and it tends to produce, but also organize and centralize, more such readings. At this point, you are likely seeking a reading that is part of that pyramidal system, an elegant assemblage that will invert your expectations while honoring the goal of exposure. But is that not more paranoia? Is that not yet another quest for a “strong theory” that will ward off difference?

If we throw off this position in pursuit of “proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction,” we may begin practically anywhere. I will, as an example aimed at reparative or generative reading, address three issues or sites of critical difference:

The first highlights the value, but also the limits, of paranoid reading, while the second two explore seemingly marginal elements of the text by showing aspects of subversion overlooked in the paranoid struggle for stable truth. At a crucial turn in his interrogation, O’Brien asks Winston: “Do you remember writing in your diary, ‘I understand how; I do not understand why?’ It was when you thought about ‘why’ that you doubted your own sanity. You have read, the book, Goldstein’s book, or parts of it, at least. Did it tell you anything that you did not know already?” (Orwell 271). O’Brien’s inquiries typically incite paranoia in Winston. He imagines that in every moment, “O’Brien was at his elbow, just out of sight. It was O’Brien who was directing everything” (252). Throughout the interrogation, O’Brien plays the role of God to Winston’s Judge Schreber [the subject of Freud’s classic study of paranoia, central to Anti-Oedipus, of a man who repressed homoerotic ideas, imaging a divine plan, communicated directly by God, to turn him into a woman] by appearing to know, not only the content of Winston’s diary, but his reading processes and doubts. Yet the question he asks, “Did it tell you anything that you did not know already?” has a life of its own. It is a question for, not only this scene, but Orwell’s text and its critical genealogy. Is the cultural power of this book simply a product of the fact that it tells us what we already know? That Big Brother is evil? That we must remain vigilant? That we should fight to be “a minority of one”? That “who controls the past, controls the future”? That language determines the scope and character of thought? What remains beyond these things that we always already know? It would be profoundly reductive and flawed to say that these ideas control all readings of the novel, but they have a persistent power over its reception, precisely because they affirm the operative theories of oppression and freedom in modernity.

Does the novel have counter-trends that resist and satirize paranoiac reading? Possibly, but the gravity of the book, particularly its late chapters, suggests otherwise. Here, we should recall Sedgwick’s assertion that, “Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly” (130). In considering the second item from my list above, it is remarkable that neither the narrator nor Winston pays much attention, other than to revel in the perversity, to the fact that Julia has had clandestine sex with Party members “hundreds” or at least “scores of times” (Orwell 127). Winston is filled with “wild hope” (128) by this, readily converting it into an imagined syphilitic weapon (anticipating the Brotherhood’s similar directives); yet he ignores the way Julia’s actions speak of the very community or collusion for which he longs. Julia has been participating in a sexual sub-culture that challenges the state. But perhaps this does not get much attention because it appears in the context of the book telling us something we already know. For example, Julia’s perversity is set in relation to problematic and oppressive Victorian myths about feminine sexuality (women are hysterical, feeling bodies and not reasoning minds, etc.). This consciously or unconsciously informs Winston’s “wild hope” and even his ability to consummate their sexual relationship (since, in the first try, he is impotent), but it seems to stop there, rather than serve as a desire that, as in Foucault’s ethics, Winston and Julia might use as a “multiplying force.”

Winston enjoys sex but cannot conceive of it as an authentic source of revolution, perhaps because, on a deep level, he treats it as a dirty activity that anesthetizes proles and offers only desperate release to Party members. This does not account for the authentically revolutionary aspect of Julia’s actions. The Party apparently tolerates sex with proles and prostitutes to some degree, but “the unforgiveable crime” is “promiscuity between Party members” (Orwell 67). To the extent that Winston grasps this, he still unconsciously treats sex as a “duty”—even if that duty is the inverse of the one imagined by the state.

This leaves Julia’s own stunning insight into the Party languishing, rather than serving as what Foucault calls an “intensifier of thought.” Simultaneously explaining and containing Julia’s critical power, via both Victorian and Freudian visions of female sexuality (and, perhaps, “Crimestop”), Orwell writes:

Even this passage is part of the containment. Winston swiftly turns Julia’s insight into a means for thinking about the family romance, playing the Freudian Oedipal subject. Both protagonist and narrator ignore key elements of Julia’s actual statements, resolving her criticism to an “always already known”—the production of the family, the mommy-daddy-me triangle, as an alternative to the state. Yet Julia’s theory of sex is that it is unproductive, and, in Deleuzian terms, a refusal to be a programmed “desiring machine” that produces the desires of the state over and over again.

When her voice does puncture the narration, she explains, “When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you bursting with energy all the time” (Orwell 136). Winston, in contrast with Foucault’s fourth axiom, imagines that he “has to be sad in order to be militant” (xiii), constantly defining himself as dead: “We are the dead,” he tells her. But Julia resists, insisting on pleasure, happiness, and life: “Oh, rubbish!” she declares. “Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don’t you enjoy being alive? Don’t you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m alive! Don’t you like this?” (Orwell 139). She then presses her breasts against him, and Winston admits he enjoys being alive. Why then, even before torture, does Winston eagerly volunteer to abandon concrete pleasure to become an already dead operative for the Brotherhood?

Orwell’s depiction of Winston is ambiguous. Winston’s inability to imagine Julia as anything more than a “rebel from the waist downward” (159) shows us that he is both our hero and the subject of bleak satire. Like Kafka’s Josef K., Winston is a man seeking and producing his own guilt on behalf of the state, the subject who, as Deleuze and Guattari show, in his desires, desires his own oppression. Recall that the dystopian genre, from its utopian origins, is based on satire—depicting the present world in defamiliarized form. This discourse on sex is important to the effects of the book and to its more open-ended critical uses that attend to this satire. Sexuality, and the possibility that a clandestine tryst might be part of the math of a revolutionary orgy, is one site for multiplying desire and resisting duty and power. It is, as Foucault suggests, this effort to connect “desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation)” that “possesses revolutionary force” (xiii-xiv).

Like sex, boredom is also part of state power. Whereas Oceania harnesses repressed sexual energy as a tool, boredom is an essential component of ideological practice and not simply a byproduct of oppressive conditions. It is key to “Crimestop”:

This “protective stupidity,” a mechanism that contains thought, is what fails Winston, making his interrogation process longer; it also explains Julia’s inattention to Goldstein’s book. While it is not the central feature, boredom constitutes a site of difference, since it is an unproductive feeling that is at odds with the state. It is also a form of desire—undifferentiated desire without any specific site of fulfillment or object-orientation. Boredom is an affect produced by lack. It appears at crucial moments in the novel, as noted in the behaviors of Julia and Winston, but also in the comically orthodox Parsons and even in O’Brien. As O’Brien imperiously debates Winston during interrogation, Winston notices a weariness:

O’Brien quickly contains this betrayal in his affect, but the moment is suggestive. Is this tiredness Crimestop in action? Or is O’Brien’s weariness a symptom of his own alienation, his breakdown before the inhuman flow of beings with minds that resemble his own but which are insane? Is his boredom hence both a defense and a subversive, even revolutionary doubt? The paranoiac reading would insist that we arrive at a decision. Yet in the context of Foucault’s model and in the service of generative and “mobile” Deleuzian arrangements of readings, we should treat it A) as both, thus recognizing its critical power, implicating the system in the system’s own contradictions—i.e., as a remedy and poison at the same time, and B) as part of a matrix of other readings that have similar dynamics, be it sexual hysteria, the obsession with the “minority of one” (rather the “de-individualization” that Foucault calls for), uncanny racial presence, the value of stupidity, the state’s exhortation of enjoyment, the meaning of criminality, the centrality of the black market in Oceania, or a range of critical readings with an eye to the world beyond Big Brother. What other readings might we find if we look around in this world without seeing through Winston’s paranoid position? Any such seeking might presuppose a paranoid finding, but within a matrix of readings without “subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization,” we grasp something new in the novel: a sense of possibilities within its bleak hopelessness. We may even find a palpable explanation, both a “why” and “how,” for the collapse of this state, which was supposedly eternal, “a boot stamping on the face of humanity—forever” (Orwell 277), but which, by the appendix, is spoken of in the past tense. Such an approach to Nineteen Eighty-Four cannot be aimed at a closed reading, enamored of power and loving Big Brother. Perhaps the future of reading this novel is aimed at difference and weakness, not symmetry and strength.

Works Cited