Dystopia

(20.04.2016)

1984 – George Orwell

Communism and Fascism

- The work is not pure fiction, some things happened in the past
- Centralised State:
- Foucault – „Discipline and Punish“ (1976):
- The Renaissance coincides with the rise of centralised state (it is not about the rise of
Man only)
- Jeremy Bentham's „Panopticon“ (1785) – a perfect prison

External Institutions of Discipline

- Military
- Police
- Prisons
- Hospitals (for physically & mentally sick)
Internalized Means of Control
- MORE effective
- Family
- Education
- Religion (politically tainted sermons)
- Confession (state demanding confession from its citizens):
It came to exist in the Middle Ages;
-they started issuing pardons
People are expected to talk to authorities
Communism and Fascism
- Results of WW1 (it exposed the weaknesses of Enlightenment)
- Provide theoretical challenge to liberalism
Liberalism & Mass Politics
- The West created mass society but didn’t know how to organize it
- No success in organizing people into politics
Challenge of Post-WW1 Politics:

- How to organize masses without dissolving into chaos?

Group instead of Individual
- Groups of communities, classes or nations
 - Politics of individualism is dead
The Objective of New Politics

- To protect the group (class or nation) rather than the individual

New Objectives for the masses
- Working for a greater good  Ideology
- (presents losses as gains)
Mobilizing the masses

- A leadership cadre
- They know what the future of a class or a nation was
- To draw the masses into that project
One Party Leadership
- Mussolini: a dynamic minority
- Lenin: the vanguard party
The Sense of Belonging
- Liberal government failed to create the sense of belonging
- No common project
Secularization

- No religion to give the sense of belonging

Proletariat

- The importance of working class at the international level

Nation

- Belonging to a great nation

- E.g. fascist group identity
Reason and Emotion in Politics
- How to get people involved in politics? Appeal to their emotions
- Reason: the language for the communication of the individual
- Emotions: language of the masses  how to reach their hearts, not their minds
The Primacy of Will

- Human agency can make history through a heroic effort

Vitalism
- Instead of steady progress of reason both Communism and Fascism opt for higher
drama  doing things quickly, Blitzkrieg style
THE POLITICS OF THE SPECTACLE
- Both partners used it and turned it to rituals
- The cult of Pavlik Morazov 1918-1932
- A patron saint of “young Pioneers”
- Denounced his own father to Stalin’s Secret Police
Citizens as informers: a new ideal

- Loyalty to the leader vs. love & family ties

New Loyalties

- Communism – class loyalty

Tools of Mass Society

- Mass media
- Public rituals
- Spectacles
Pageantry

- Parades, uniforms, salutes, banners

The Visual Culture
- Militarist imagery (sense of uniformity)
- Symbolism
Populism

- movement of equals
Elitism
Charismatic Leader – a symbol of nation

- a concrete object of mobilization

- the embodiment of national identity
…
(21.04.2016)
A Clockwork Orange

Avant-Garde Art

- a new reality, a new society, a new man

- D.H. Lawrence: studies in classic American Literature
- “Whatever else you are, be masterless”
(paragraph from the book)
Liberty is all very well, but men cannot live without masters. There is always a master. And
men can either live in glad obedience to the master they believe in, or they live in a frictional
opposition to the master they wish to undermine. In American this frictional opposition has
been the vital factor. It has given the Yankee his kick. Only the continual influx of more servile
Europeans has provided America with an obedient labouring class. The true obedience never
outlasting the first generation.
But there sits the old master, over in Europe. Like a parent. Somewhere deep in every
American heart lies a rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe. Yet no American feels
he has completely escaped its mastery. Hence the slow, smouldering patience of American
opposition. The slow, smouldering, corrosive obedience to the old master Europe, the
unwilling subject, the unremitting opposition.
Whatever else you are, be masterless.

- .
- Name from Shakespeare’s “Tempest”: “Ca ca Caliban, / Get a new master, be a new
man”
- (Caliban’s “freedom song”)
- DADAISM – 1918 – Tristan Tzara
- Dada = a nonsense word expressing the nonsensical nature of the world
To shock rational thought

- Only uninhibited irrational acts made sense in an insane world

- Nietzsche on Dadaism: “the desire to destroy the false order that exists in order to
unleash other forces”
- Spontaneity & identity “everything that issues freely from ourselves, without the
intervention of speculative ideas…represents us”
- [Tzara elevated spontaneity above reason
- For Dadaists, the world was nonsensical, and reality disordered; hence they offered no
solutions to anything - - from book Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics, and Society
By Marvin Perry, Myrna Chase]
- .
- Nietzsche – spontaneous actions, emotions, sensations are more representative of
human beings than intellect
Futurism
- Music: cacophony of industrial noise
- Visual arts: objects in motion
- A desire to shock, to destroy the past, to build a new world, to exalt in irrational
nature
F. T. Marinetti – denounced traditional art, including Dante & Michelangelo
- Campaigned for abolition of museums
- Manifesto 1909 – “Futurist Manifesto”
- “Let us leave good sense behind….let us enrich the unplumbable wells of Absurdity!”
- Flinging oneself into the void:
o Not an act of honour – it is an act of joy
o An act of passion
o With sexual imagery
A revolt against the mundane bureaucratisation of present day society
Worship of technology
- Driving shiny cars for inspiration
- Instead of rational progress technology stands for speed, brute force and danger
The will to power

- Erotic language when describing machines

- The beast – the image of the beastly nature
- Racing death: “And we pursued, alike to young lions, Death of the dark fur spotted
with pale crosses that slipped ahead of us in the vast mauve sky, palpable and alive”

Futurism, the caffeine of Europe

1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of danger and of temerity.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, daring, and revolt.
3. Literature having up to now magnified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and sleep, we want
to exalt the aggressive gesture, the feverish insomnia, the athletic step, the perilous leap, the
box on the ear, and the fisticuff.
4. We declare that the world's wonder has been enriched by a fresh beauty: the beauty of
speed. A racing car with its trunk adorned by great exhaust pipes like snakes with an
explosive breath ... a roaring car that seems to be driving under shrapnel, is more beautiful
than the Victory of Samothrace.
…
9. We want to glorify war -- the only hygiene of the world --
militarism, patriotism, the anarchist's destructive gesture, the fine Ideas that kill, and the scorn
of woman.
10. We want to demolish museums, libraries, fight against moralism, feminism, and all
opportunistic and utilitarian cowardices.
Exam questions

- 1984 – focus on politics of emotions & group identity

- Clockwork Orange – language used in the book (some words of Slavic origin, coin
words etc.)
- Attitude towards:
o Sports & music: what kinds are present
o Sexuality and love
o History and culture

- Dystopian languages (both living and dead, dictionaries…)

- Reflections of mas society in dystopian worlds

- Phenomenon of violence, the savage and the primitive

o a savage = the person who doesn’t fit, an outcast

- Different types of apparatuses the state uses