A Post-Lacanian and Postmodern Interaction with the Utopian Project of Modernity: Ideology and Power in Brave New World, or, How Slavoj Žižek, Michel Foucault, and Aldous Huxley Demonstrate the Evolution of Shared Utopian Consciousness

Michael O’Brien A Post-Lacanian and Postmodern Interaction with the Utopian Project of Modernity: Ideology and Power in Brave New World OR How Slajov Žižek, Michel Foucault, and Aldous Huxley Demonstrate the Evolution of Shared Utopian Consciousness Michael O’Brien University of Glasgow 30th April 2015 1 Michael O’Brien Huxley wrote Brave New World (1931) to define and satirize the social conditions of England at the end of the Second World War, writing a novel which was both personal and social in its examination of the dark and oppressive cultural environment of the period. Bernard Marx, the central character, is symbolic of the shared experience of a coerced proletariat. Searching for the ends and means to creating utopia, Huxley wrote Brave New World to satirise the function of ideology and power in post-Fordian liberal society. Huxley examined desire, ideology and power throughout his oeuvre to find how real-life agents could harness their potentialities to transform real-world societal structures and processes. This paper will use the most recent post-Lacanian and postmodern theory to expose Huxley’s examinations of ideology and power. Using Lacan, Deleuze, Foucault, and Žižek, I will highlight how the World Controllers of Brave New World harness ‘hidden forces’ and ‘secret desires’ to coerce the proletariat to maintain a shared system of enjoyment.1 I will highlight Huxley’s satirical use of ‘disciplinary mechanisms’,2 such as language and power, to impose ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault 1991, p.74) in the facilitation of ‘obscene enjoyment’3 for a technocratic aristocracy, arguing that the proletariat are both coerced and complicit in the facilitation of obscene enjoyment. Huxley’s utopian project highlights isomorphic correspondences between the satirical methodologies of dystopian literature, and the psychoanalytic/genealogical approaches of post-Lacanian and Postmodern ideology critique. Isomorphic correspondences between utopian literature and Marxist-inspired ideology critique point to ‘the fundamental hybridity of human cultural activity’, a hybridity Huxley was aware of and made use of.4 This fundamental cultural hybridity, witnessed by stimulating interactions between Brave New World and Lacan, Deleuze, Foucault, and Žižek, highlights the dialectical interactions of simultaneously divergent and convergent, cultural and 1 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (London: Flamingo, 1994), pp.62-69. Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1991), p.211. 3 Slajov Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso Books, 2009), p.86. 4 Charles Orzech, Dr Charles Orzech (Glasgow: Glasgow University, 2015), p.1. 2 2 Michael O’Brien intellectual, epistemologies and ontologies. It is my contention that these divergentconverging spheres naturally interact in consciousness to synthesise new emergent spaces and potentialities. These emergent spaces allow for the evolution of shared human consciousness towards the perfect human system. As Darwin states with regards to material evolution, ‘although we have no good evidence of the existence in organic beings of an innate tendency towards progressive development’ it ‘necessarily follows […] through the continued action of natural selection’.5 With regards to the spiritual evolution of humanity, I propose that the fundamental methodological hybridity of Brave New World and Postmodern/post-Lacanian ideology critique is a facet of the evolution of shared utopian consciousness. Definitions Huxley wrote in Brave New World Revisited (1959) that ‘during his long career as an agitator, Hitler had studied the effects of herd-poison and had learned how to exploit them for his own purposes’ (Huxley 1994, p.61). Huxley defined herd-poison as ‘an active extraverted drug’ whereby ‘the crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, intelligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal madness’ (Huxley 1994, p.61). He argues that Hitler could ‘appeal to hidden forces which motivate men’s actions’ (Huxley 1994, p.61). Huxley tells us that these ‘hidden forces’ are equitable with ‘secret desires’, and ‘inadmissible instincts’ (Huxley 1994, p.62). He argues that ‘it is by manipulating hidden forces that the advertising experts induce us to buy their wares’ such as a brand of ‘toothpaste’ or ‘cigarettes’ or ‘a political candidate’ (Huxley 1994, p.62) stating ‘it was by appealing to the same political forces […] that Hitler induced the German masses to buy themselves a Fuehrer, an insane philosophy and the Second World War’ (Huxley 1994, p.62). Huxley was concerned then, throughout his oeuvre, with how the ruling elite have 5 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Herts: Book Club Associates, 1973), p.200. 3 Michael O’Brien come to harness ‘hidden forces’ and ‘secret desires’ to control the masses. In Brave New World Revisited Huxley argues that Hitler’s ‘hidden forces’ are ‘unconscious desires and fears by which so much of men’s conscious thinking and overt doing is determined’ (Huxley 1994, p.70). He argues that the art of selling something to someone, be it a tyrannical regime, such as the Third Reich, or a commercial product, such as toothpaste, relies upon harnessing ‘psychological and […] physiological satisfaction’ (Huxley 1994, p.72). Huxley suggests that it was the ‘contagious’ and ‘strong emotion’ of Hitler’s oratorical presentations which caused the audience to ‘groan and sob and scream in an orgy of uninhibited passion’ (Huxley 1994, pp.72-73). He suggests that it was because ‘these orgies were so enjoyable that […] those who had experienced them came back for more’ (Huxley 1994, p.73). Huxley’s notion that desires are hidden forces which can be harnessed to produce enjoyment in an audience member or pleasure in a consumer links him closely to such psychoanalytic concepts as Freud’s notion of the pleasure principle or Lacan’s idea of jouissance. For Freud the pleasure principle states that ‘all psychical activity is directed towards the procurement of pleasure and the avoidance of unpleasure’.6 For Freud unpleasure ‘results from increased excitation, and the pleasure principle […] serves to reduce tension and to return the psyche to a state of equilibrium’ (Macey 2000, p.300). Freud makes the point that there are ‘death drives’ residing ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ which aim to ‘reduce psychic tension to zero’ (Macey 2000, p.300). Lacan, also projecting ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, argues ‘the pleasure principle is an obstacle to the jouissance that takes the subject to that extreme point where the erotic borders upon death and where subjectivity risks extinction’ (Macey 2000, p.300). Huxley’s characters in Brave New World are often operating ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ in the Lacanian domain of jouissance. Jouissance is defined simply in the Shorter OED as ‘enjoyment’. In his seminars of 1953-4 Lacan defines 6 David Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Penguin, 2000), p.300. 4 Michael O’Brien jouissance in relation to the master-slave dialectic ‘in which the work of the slave provides objects for the master’s enjoyment’ (Macey 2000, p.210). This is a mode less overtly visible in Brave New World, because while the proletariat provide ‘stability’ for the World Controllers they do share in the enjoyment of the system as much as the World Controllers do.7 It is Lacan’s later treatment of jouissance as ‘a degree of intensity that takes the subject beyond the pleasure principle’ that is most visible in Huxley’s Brave New World (Macey 2000, p.210). Jouissance in this mode ‘takes the subject to that extreme point where the erotic borders upon death’ (Macey 2000, p.210). Death of the subject in the erotic experience is witnessed many times in Huxley’s text. Lenina Crowne functions in bad faith as nothing more than a sex object, more-or-less everyone loves an ‘orgy-porgy’ (Huxley 2007, p.228), and the oedipal John’s desire for his mother results in his death. Bernard Marx’s revolutionary potential is drastically damaged by his inability to stop interfacing with the erotic flow of the system. However, while jouissance in relation to the master-slave dialectic is less visible in Huxley’s text, it is entirely relevant to an analysis of Brave New World if desire becomes the master, and the technocrats and the civilians, the slaves. In combining psychoanalysis with Marxist theory Žižek takes Lacan’s notion of jouissance and exposes how it has come to be used as a political tool. Jouissance for Žižek, becomes part of the materiality of ideology as it is embodied in institutional practices in the form of ‘obscene enjoyment’. So while the mass sexual behaviour of the proletariat in Brave New World results in the death of the subject within the ‘desiring machine’8 of society, the populace primarily acts this way as a function of the ‘obscene enjoyment’ at the core of the World State’s applied use of ideology. 7 8 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Vintage, 2007), p.1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p.11. 5 Michael O’Brien Oeuvre Huxley was concerned with jouissance from an early stage in his career. Hena Maes-Jelinek argues that in his early novels, Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923) and Those Barren Leaves (1925), Huxley ‘exposes the spiritual disease of the post-war generation’ highlighting ‘the futility and immorality of a social class which seeks oblivion in pleasure’.9 Huxley takes a cynical stance on human behaviour through most of his novels, the most cynical being Point Counter Point (1928), Brave New World (1932), After Many a Summer (1939), and Ape and Essence (1949). This cynicism however, is often mixed with a strong sense of idealism. In Point Counter Point for example there is ‘the beginning of Huxley’s quest for meaning in life and in art’, and as with the first three early novels, the overarching theme is, ‘the refusal of man to face his own nature’, however this time Huxley indicates, ‘men might be reconciled with their condition if only they realized that they are parts of an organic whole to whose nature they contribute unconsciously’ (Maes-Jelinek 2013, p.18). Some of his more optimistic texts such as Eyeless in Gaza (1936), Time Must Have a Stop (1944), and Island (1962) still do contain levels of cynicism. In Island for example Huxley is an advocate of, ‘religious mysticism, humanistic science, decentralized democracy, hallucinogenic drug use […], natural resource conservation and sustainable development […], and Deweyan liberal education’ however denounces over-industrialisation in the West.10 Ultimately it is Huxley’s cynicism towards industrialisation that cause his utopian project to fail in this, his definitive island utopia. Theory In Brave New World then, as part of his cynical search for the ideal, Huxley builds a state capable of harnessing the hidden forces and secret desires of pleasure-seeking technocrats 9 Hena Maes-Jelinek, Criticism of Society in the English Novel Between the Wars, 22 (May 2013), p.1. William M. Curtis, ‘Rorty’s Liberal Utopia and Island’, Philosophy and Literature, 35: 1 (April 2011), p.95. 10 6 Michael O’Brien and civilians. It is my position these secret desires that Huxley is harnessing can be spoken about in both Lacanian and Deleuzian terms. In Lacanian terms the desire to be harnessed is ‘the desire of the other’ (Macey 2000, p.95). In Deleuzian terms this ‘desire […] is an assemblage fundamentally libidinal and unconscious’.11 In Brave New World then, in Lacanian terms, secret desires are often the subject’s desire to possess someone or something else. In Deleuzian terms though, secret desire often composes the object exterior to the subject, where the object becomes desire itself, where ‘the objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2012, p.39). Ideology and power function in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, as products of desire, produced and sustained in ‘socio-symbolic formations’12 instituting coercive structures of control and domination in the facilitation of ‘obscene enjoyment’ for a technocratic aristocracy. That is to say: ideology and power are visible in Brave New World through the symbolic order in which the technocrats have come to deploy institutional processes and language. Institutions and language are used to serve enjoyment. Žižek’s search for a Politics of Truth by focusing on ‘the ideological privileging of the fetish object’ can be combined with Foucault’s discourse analysis to fully undermine the collective action of Brave New World.13 Foucault’s discourse analysis provided ‘historicist frameworks which conceptualized epistemic practices and technologies of power as historically situated and contingent’ aiming to ‘reveal a positive unconscious of knowledge’.14 Discourse analysis ‘reveal(ed) the historical a priori of ideas, rationalities and knowledge systems, their mute ground or unconscious condition of possibility’ (Vighi and 11 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2004), p.40. Slajov Žižek, ‘Psychoanalysis and Society: The Big Other Doesn’t Exist’, Journal of European Psychoanalysis, (Spring-Fall 1997), p.1. 13 Benjamin Day, ‘From Frankfurt to Ljubljana: Critical Theory from Adorno to Žižek’, in Studies in Social and Political Thought, 9 (January 2004), p.13. 14 Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner, ‘Ideology Critique or Discourse Analysis?: Žižek against Foucault’, in European Journal of Political Theory, 6 (2007), p.141. 12 7 Michael O’Brien Feldner 2007, p.144). For Foucault truth is always bound to the ‘interplay of power and knowledge’, and truth never resides outside of power (Vighi and Feldner 2007, p.144). Žižek sees the value in discourse analysis, because, ‘every ideological stance we assume is always already parasited by an intricate network of discursive devices whose function is to structure our point of view in advance’ (Vighi and Feldner 2007, p.148). For Žižek the diagnostic nature of discourse analysis measures how ideology emerges as part of discursive formations. However Žižek argues that earlier ideology critique has been premised on the assumption that ideology is a false reality obscuring the real. Žižek rejects the assumption that ideology is a ‘distorted representation of truth’ (Vighi and Feldner 2007, p.147). Discourse analysis assumes it is not possible ‘to draw a clear line of demarcation between ideology and actual reality’, Žižek however reject this aiming to reach the core of ideology through subjectivity (Vighi and Feldner 2007, p.147). Ideology for Žižek is the ‘generative matrix that regulates the relationship between visible and non-visible, between imaginable and non-imaginable’ (Vighi and Feldner 2007, p.145). For Žižek the domain of ‘obscene enjoyment’ at the core of ideological action is visible in the outward ideological manifestations of institutional practice. Analysis I - Symbolic Violence In Chapter One the reader is introduced to the ‘CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE’ (Huxley 2007, p.1). Arguably there is the opportunity to reach for the core of ideology through subjectivity with this sign. The ‘objective or symbolic’ violence of the World State, and how this violence is ‘embodied in language and its forms’ is visible in the sign.15 Objective/symbolic violence is not composed of physical acts, it is rather a violence that appears to be ‘the non-violent zero-level [...] a perturbation of the “normal” peaceful state of things’ but is in actual fact ‘invisible objective violence’ (Žižek in Valentić 15 Tonči Valentić, ‘Symbolic Violence and Global Capitalism’, in International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2:2 (2008), p.2. 8 Michael O’Brien 2008, p.2). The symbolic violence of the technocrats is immediately visible in the imposing capital letters and the technical word-choice of the sign. This sign is purposed to dominate the psyches of the civilian populace. ‘CENTRAL’ and ‘CENTRE’ are words imbued with desire/power, symbolically displaying a rationalistic will-to-order over the natural universe, ordering the perceiver’s thoughts. The word ‘centre’, necessarily, semantically, denotes/connotes ‘kernel’, ‘nucleus’ and ‘source’ in the mind of the perceiver. The technocrats have purposefully constructed the physical conditioning centre as the kernel/nucleus/source of all activity in Brave New World. ‘HATCHERY’ in its symbolic violence dominates, and is objectively symptomatic of the pathological will-to-order over the human-race held by the technocrats. The symbolic power of ‘HATCHERY’ necessarily produces master/slave connotations signifying the subjugation of the populace to the level of animal-like sub-human beings in the mind of the perceiver. Enjoyment at the core of the technocratic ideological will-to-order is symbolised subjectively through the manifest content of objective violence in the form of the capitalisation of the scientific sign: the libido of the technocratic fantasy is visible in the forceful penetration of language. The motto of the World State is a Huxleyan rendition of ‘objective violence’ in the guise of ‘the non-violent zero-level’, the words ‘COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY’ (Huxley 2007, p.1), suggesting The World State’s proclaimed function of stability is the objective non-violent zero-level. However this non-violent zero-level is imposed through discursive formations. This non-violent zero-level is an ideological position which structures the world-citizens’ viewpoints before they structure their own. ‘Stability’ is therefore a shared ‘ideological fantasy’ supported historically through discourse. Analysis II – Obscene Enjoyment through Power in Discourse The environmental descriptions of the laboratory are renditions of a ‘pallid’ and ‘pale’ space, as ‘dead’ as a ‘ghost’, engaging the reader in the judgemental condescension of a perversely 9 Michael O’Brien imagined, symbolic and real technocratic fantasy (Huxley 2007, p.1). As the perverse Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning enters the perverse environment of the Fertilising Room he clearly loves dominating, and gives a tour of the facility, the reader witnesses the disciplinary language used to support the shared ‘ideological fantasy’ of ‘stability’ that interpellates subjects’ minds and bodies. The disciplinary use of language directly betrays the ‘obscene enjoyment’ symbolized in the rationalistic will-to-order of the signs. Here, obscene enjoyment is observed directly through the objectively violent manner in which the Director delivers his speech. Both the content of the Director’s speech to the Students and the method of its delivery highlights ‘the power/language relationship’, which plays out as ‘power in discourse’.16 In Language and Power, Norman Fairclough analyses language to highlight how power relations operate in contemporary social institutions. Fairclough discusses ‘Power in face-to-face spoken discourse’, and analyses, ‘discourse where participants are unequal’, using the example of a doctor overseeing a group of medical students at a premature baby unit (Fairclough 1993, pp.43-44). This is almost identical to the situation between the Director of Hatcheries and the students. In Fairclough’s text the Doctor controls the student in the following ways: 1) interrupts the student to control the contributions 2) announces what is happening 3) makes explicit instructions 4) evaluates contributions 5) puts the student on the spot. The interaction in Brave New World is more dominative. It is immediately clear who is in control as the students ‘followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director's heels’, equipped with notebooks, ‘desperately’ scribbling (Huxley 2007, p.2). The Director loves the sound of his own voice, so rather than interrupting students, he lectures almost non-stop. He announces ‘smiling at them with a menacing geniality’, ‘you will be settling down to serious work, you won’t have time for generalities’ his menacing smiles showing his obscene pleasure in controlling what is going on while making explicit instructions (Huxley 2007, 16 Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (London: Longman, 1993), p.43. 10 Michael O’Brien p.2). This is the ‘obscene enjoyment’ of Žižek, the enjoyment of the pathological ‘want to rule’ (Žižek 2009, p.89). He evaluates students’ contributions, patronizing, ‘My good boy! [...] Can’t you see? Can’t you see?’ insulting, ‘Ass!’, and condescending, ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you [...]?’, when students ask questions and make statements putting students on the spot (Huxley 2007, pp.4-7). The negative form of these questions along with the sneering and derisive tone in which they are posed suggests the student ‘ought to know’ and his contributions are ‘silly’ (Fairclough 1993, p.46). The obscene enjoyment at the core of the technocratic ideology is visible through the manifest content of the objective violence in the form of the Director talking all the time, telling everyone what to do, menacing, condescending, insulting, sneering, deriding, and being negative. Analysis III – Enjoying Regimes of Truth Face-to-face spoken interactions in discourse, such as the Director’s speech to the students on the operations of the Conditioning Centre, represent the larger discourses/regimes of truth, which make up the larger ideological frameworks for Brave New World. These regimes of truth function with a kernel of obscene enjoyment, evidenced by the rationale in which they are imposed. Three main Regimes of Truth are used by the World State Controllers to provide a foundation for ‘stability’: the ideas of Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud, and J. B. Watson. In Chapter 3, The Resident Controller for Western Europe, Mustapha Mond talks of the abolition of the family which allows for more efficient control of the individual consumer. In Brave New World Fordism and Freudianism are combined in one ultimate regime of truth, their ideologies becoming the means by which true and false statements are judged, inscribing higher statuses to those with more knowledge of them. Merging Fordism and Freudianism effectively merges capitalism with psychology to harness humanity in a hivecollective of desiring machines, where the family is destroyed to integrate individuals directly into the consuming collective, both consuming and producing the larger desiring machine 11 Michael O’Brien that is society itself. Ideology and power then become the means and ends of desiring (re)production through the use of Ford/Freud and Watson, where desire is inextricably linked to ideology as obscene enjoyment in commodity consumption and omnipresent promiscuity, with power becoming the eternal justification of the ideological manifestation of enjoyment. Mond, as a scientist, was capable of rebelling against the World State, however chose power and status instead. Mond embodies the technocratic agent desiring power and controlling regimes of truth for obscene enjoyment, as evidenced when he says ‘we believe in happiness and stability’, ‘happiness’ clearly being enjoyment and ‘stability’ facilitating it (Huxley 2007, p.195). He later states, ‘We don't want [...] change’, meaning that what society should be, is what the technocrats want (Huxley 2007, p.198). This want necessarily being the ‘want to rule’, obscene just like fascism, ‘in so far as it perceives directly the ideological form as its own end, as an end in itself’, ergo the ideological form of enjoyment (Žižek 2009, p.89). Conclusion In Brave New World, Huxley harnesses the subject’s secret desire of sexing the other, and, displays objective reality as desire, by highlighting how consumer society acts as a hivecollective of desiring machines that run on the spiritual death-energy of libido. Huxley displays the use of violence in signs and spoken discourse to satirise libidinal enjoyment and erotic power-seeking. Discourse is strongly implicated in the genealogical tree of desire for pleasure. The fundamental cultural hybridity of Postmodern/post-Lacanian ideology critique and Huxley’s utopian project, allows for intellectual emergence beyond their divergences into the domain of shared utopian consciousness, which highlights the spiritual potentiality of humanity, and the evolutionary impulse towards the perfect organizational system. 12 Michael O’Brien Bibliography Primary Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Vintage, 2007), p.1. Secondary Curtis, William M, ‘Rorty’s Liberal Utopia and Island’, Philosophy and Literature, 35: 1 (April 2011), pp.91-100. Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species (Herts: Book Club Associates, 1973). Day, Benjamin, ‘From Frankfurt to Ljubljana: Critical Theory from Adorno to Žižek’, in Studies in Social and Political Thought, 9 (January 2004), pp.1-20. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2004). Fairclough, Norman, Language and Power (London: Longman, 1993). Foucault, Michel, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1991). Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World (London: Vintage, 2007). Macey, David, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Penguin, 2000). Maes-Jelinek, Hena, Criticism of Society in the English Novel Between the Wars, 22 (May 2013) [28/04/2015] <http://www.books.openedition.org/pulg/880> Orzech, Charles, Dr Charles Orzech (Glasgow: Glasgow University, 2015) [28/04/2015] <http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/staff/charlesorzech/> Valentić, Tonči, ‘Symbolic Violence and Global Capitalism’, in International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2:2 (2008) [28/04/2015] <www.zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/140/214> Vighi, Fabio, and Heiko Feldner, ‘Ideology Critique or Discourse Analysis?: Žižek against Foucault’, in European Journal of Political Theory, 6 (2007), pp.141-159. Žižek, Slajov, ‘Psychoanalysis and Society: The Big Other Doesn’t Exist’, Journal of European Psychoanalysis, (Spring-Fall 1997) [28/04/2015] <www.psychomedia.it/jep/number5/zizek.htm> Žižek, Slajov, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso Books, 2009). 13 Michael O’Brien Copyright All works published by Michael O’Brien are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivativess 4.0 International License and Michael O’Brien reserves the right to be named as the author of this article in any citation. To view a copy of this license, follow the link below. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 14