On 1984 and Power, Revised and Extended--now 30% more pretentious!
"Power is not a means; it is an end. 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".
--George Orwell, 1984
"Power is tearing human minds apart and putting them back together in new shapes of your own choosing."
--O'Brien, (Richard Burton), 1984 (1984)
"KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!"
--Schoolhouse Rocky, School House Rock
Power is as power does--it is, according to George Orwell, its own object, a means to its own end; power is only as good or bad, real or imagined, as it is allowed to be: power--the power of people, places, systems, governments--can take no greater hold than it is given.
That is, until it becomes powerful enough, in and of itself, to take.
Such is the issue at the center of Orwell's 1984 : Big Brother, a power so great, so terrible and foreboding, takes and creates an essentially co-operational, comprehensive power where none but the most individualistic, rudimentary powers should exist; the power allowed by the population has been extended from that of a typical government to a totalitarian, vaguely socialist dystopic thing wherein all but the most useless, typically observational nonsense is controlled and manipulated as those in power see fit: Big Brother shapes and creates "truth" as a means of asserting near-total power, revising and updating history in order for self-gain, destroying and developing the English language and linguistic constructs in order that this power not be questioned.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the implementation and use of Newspeak; in basing language on concepts, instead of conceptual knowledge and the “known” (e.g., in substituting "unwhite" for "black"), concepts themselves are eradicated--limiting what should be essentially limitless, knowledge based on conceptual constructs: language becomes, instead of a series of representative sounds and symbols, a symbolic ideology (Todorov 82). This, the author seems to suggest, is certainly disturbing, creating new means for totalitarianism through words and ideas. Indeed, according to the German linguist and philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a word cannot exist without an idea to make it concrete; by eradicating an idea (i.e., the concept of “black”), the word for that idea becomes essentially meaningless; although the word “black” may exist, it can’t mean anything so long as the conceptual “unwhite” continues to exist in its place. Although the two seem to be different names for the same thing—here, a simple color—the basic constructs behind them are different, the second of which is certainly troubling; a word based on the opposite of a concept, as opposed to a concept in and of itself, is based on a preconceived ideology (namely, that one must understand and know white in order to understand and know unwhite) that will not necessarily follow typical constructs and will, as such, entirely replace the latter concept. This is, of course, not limited to the fictional world of Oceania; language is constantly evolving, adding and eradicating words—and, thusly, concepts—while changing and shaping the meanings of others; language, in itself, means differently based on the way it is used—which, in turn, is based on the ways in which society uses it, which is largely based on authority.
This is true of Orwell’s Oceania, and the totalitarian government that runs it. The assertions that “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Knowledge is Ignorance.” Certainly, denying any sort of metaphor in the slogans presented by Big Brother, the word presented ("Freedom"), through the word "is," becomes its opposite ("Slavery")--that is, the term itself takes on a new meaning, in direct opposition to what the reader understands it to mean, and, thusly, the binary presented by the word[s] (Freedom/Slavery) disappears: the two words now mean one and the same.
Indeed, Wittgenstein, in his On Certainty, suggests that, in order for a concept to exist, it must have some sort of word that means it ; there can be no freedom is the word freedom does not exist, because, without the word to define it, the concept itself can mean nothing; by changing the very concept of the word "freedom," (here, to mean "slavery"--to the residents of Oceania, Freedom IS Slavery) freedom itself cannot exist--indeed, it has taken, through language rules/tactics as theorized by Wittgenstein, a contradictory meaning that, eventually, will be the only meaning--Freedom, through the power of language, will itself eventually come to be Slavery: any knowledge concerning “freedom” as a concept in itself disappears, existing, now, only as the absolute opposite of a concrete concept—that is, slavery. It is with this, then, that knowledge constructs, and the overall capacity for and, perhaps, ultimate understanding of knowledge, diminishes; the ability to know falls short.
By limiting the overall ability for knowledge, the capacity to learn, too, diminishes; man becomes what he is told. This is certainly evident in Radford's film adaptation of Orwell's novel, wherein Winston, upon being tortured, submits to Big Brother's gospel, admitting that “2+2=5,” when, throughout the film, he has been adamant about the fact that the correct answer is, indeed, four; as his will is broken, Winston becomes an extension of the system he so loathes; as he is tortured into submission, he becomes a part of Big Brother and totalitarianism.
Indeed, by the end of Orwell’s novel, Winston has become everything he has despised: another arm of a corrupt, totalitarian system, drowned by the power he has finally been forced to accept.
Bibliographia
Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish (1975), Panopticism. November 1, 2008.
http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.panOpticism.html.
Howe, Irving. 1984 – Utopia Reversed: Orwell’s Penetrating Examination of Totalitarian
Society. November 1950. November 1, 2008.
http://marxists.anu.edu.au/history/etol/writers/howe/1950/11/1984.htm.
Orwell, George. 1984, New York: Signet Classic, 2004.
Orwell, George. Why I Write. London: Gangrel, Summer 1946.
Rorty, Richard. The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on cruelty. University of Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Todorov, Tzvetan. Symbolism and Interpretation, (transl. by R. Carter). Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1982.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty, (eds.) G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, (tr.) D. Paul & G. E. M. Anscombe, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1969.
