Dystopia, Power and the Subject : Orwell meets Foucault

It’s a deep, all encompassing, pitch black darkness that stems out of the core of the human being. You can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, can you ? Or even the tunnel itself ?

George Orwell made the world sit up and take notice, and notes. Having lived through a number of political systems, from an India under the imperialist British, to a communist-fascist Spain, his writings, severely critical in nature, morbid in essence, and ominous in conjecture, drew him to the chaotic and the rotten at the foundation of societies. A vocal critic of capitalism, a stout supporter of democratic socialism — yet he could not shed off the ideological inconsistencies that sprouted from his desire for an egalitarian utopia, and his deep aversion to the totalitarian impulses of the Socialist States. His exploration of the mechanisms of institutional power inevitably carries one to Michel Foucault’s work on the subject. Foucault acutely laid bare the ‘power-knowledge’ compound that underpins the fabric of modern societies, the banal routine that is central to the disciplining of the material body and the wider population, and his intellectual products pick up the analysis where Orwell’s fiction left off.

The course will wade through the later works of Orwell, which are a commentary on the dystopia that is twisted out of a revolution ; after all, the best of men with the best of intentions give in to the draw of power. Supplemented with selected readings from Foucault’s seminal works, primarily Discipline and Punish, the focus will be on a thematic reading of the allegorical, political satire – Animal Farm along with Nineteen Eighty Four, which was inspired from a Trotskyist critique of the Soviet Union, and was a vehement attack on the all powerful, oppressive State apparatus in the guise of being a saviour. Bringing together the ‘literary’ and the ‘critical’, our journey through the Orwellian world will lay bare the tensions between the individual and the group, power and freedom, and the idea of absolute and subjective truths.