Surveillance, Language and the Suppression of Individual Freedom in 1984

Abstract

There is no doubt that Nineteen Eighty-Four, (1949) by George Orwell is one of the sharpest fictional instances of exploring the totalitarian dominion of power over the state, its surveillance of individuals, and its denial of personal free will. This paper explores how the Party of Oceania stifles individual freedom by looking at three interconnected systems of control in order to establish this: pervasive surveillance, intentional manipulation of language and the psychological enslavement of citizens. Using the ideas of Michel Foucault about the disciplinary power, panopticism and the power/knowledge nexus developed in Discipline and Punish (1975), this paper, through textual analysis of Orwell as a novelist, will illustrate the use of telescreen as a panoptic machine, called to ensure self-control; the stipulation of newspeak as a mechanism of cognitive containment, by erasing the linguistic potential of dissent; and how the phenomenon of doublethink and the Thought Police internalize state ideology had the deepest or furthest-rooted foundations in the human mind. The analysis also takes into account the Ministry of Truth as an institutional means of historical revisionism and holding onto collective memory and Winston Smith as a result in his diary as a form of resistance to disciplined space. Results indicate that the dystopia that Orwell foresaw predicts the main finding of Foucault, namely that contemporary power does not solely exist in the form of overt violence. The overlap between Foucauldian theory and literary imagination of Orwell enlightens on how totalitarian governments produce consent, dissent, and ultimately kill the free subject.

Keywords: Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, Michel Foucault, panopticism, surveillance, Newspeak, disciplinary power, power/knowledge, totalitarianism, individual freedom.