Henry A. Giroux
Cultural Critic and Public Intellectual

Diminishing Returns. Image: Michael Kerbow courtesy via thecreatorsproject.vice.com.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n spite of their differing perceptions of the architecture of the totalitarian superstate and how it exercises power and control over its residents, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley shared a fundamental conviction. They both argued that the established democracies of the West were moving quickly toward a historical moment when they would willingly relinquish the noble promises and ideals of liberal democracy and enter that menacing space where totalitarianism perverts the modern ideals of justice, freedom, and political emancipation. Both believed that Western democracies were devolving into pathological states in which politics was recognized in the interest of death over life and justice. Both were unequivocal in the shared understanding that the future of civilization was on the verge of total domination—or what Hannah Arendt called “dark times.”

While Neil Postman and other critical descendants have pitted Orwell and Huxley against each other because of their distinctively separate notions of a future dystopian society,¹ I believe that the dark shadow of authoritarianism that shrouds American society like a thick veil can be lifted by re-examining Orwell’s prescient dystopian fable 1984, as well as Huxley’s Brave New World, in light of contemporary neoliberal ascendancy. Rather than pit their dystopian visions against each other, it might be more productive to see them as complementing each other, especially at a time when, to quote Antonio Gramsci, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”²

New order of authoritarianism

Both authors provide insight into the merging of the totalitarian elements that constitute a new and more hybridized form of authoritarian control, appearing less as fiction than a threatening portent of the unfolding twenty-first century. Consumer fantasies and authoritarian control; “Big Brother” intelligence agencies and the voracious seductions of privatized pleasures; the rise of the punishing state, which criminalizes an increasing number of behaviors and invests in institutions that incarcerate and are organized principally for the production of violence; the collapse of democratic public spheres into narrow, market-driven orbits of privatization—these now constitute the new order of authoritarianism.

Orwell’s Big Brother has more recently found a new incarnation in the revelations of government lawlessness and corporate spying by whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond, and Edward Snowden.³ All of these individuals revealed a government that lied about its intelligence operations, illegally spied on millions of people who were not considered terrorists or had committed no crime, and collected data from every conceivable electronic source to be stored and potentially used to squelch dissent, blackmail people, or just intimidate those who fight to make corporate and state power accountable.⁴ Orwell offered his readers an image of the modern state in which privacy was no longer valued as a civil virtue and a basic human right, nor perceived as a measure of the robust strength of a healthy and thriving democracy. In Orwell’s dystopia the right to privacy had come under egregious assault, but more than that, such ruthless transgressions of privacy pointed to something more sinister than the violation of individual rights. The claim to privacy, for Orwell, represented a moral and political principle by which to assess the nature, power, and severity of an emerging totalitarian state. Orwell’s warning was intended to shed light on the horrors of totalitarianism, the corruption of language, the production of a pervasive stupidity, and the endless regimes of state spying imposed on citizens in the mid-twentieth century. Orwell opened a door for all to see a “nightmarish future” in which everyday life becomes harsh, an object of state surveillance, and control—a society in which the slogan “ignorance becomes strength”—morphs into a guiding principle of mainstream media, education, and the culture of politics.

Huxley shared Orwell’s concern about ignorance as a political tool of the elite, enforced through surveillance and the banning of books, dissent, and critical thought itself. But Huxley believed that social control and the propagation of ignorance would be introduced by those in power through the political tools of pleasure and distraction. Huxley thought that this might take place through the use of drugs and genetic engineering. But the real drugs and social planning of late modernity are found in an entertainment and public pedagogy industry that trades in pleasure and idiocy—most evident in the merging of neoliberalism, celebrity culture, and the control of commanding cultural apparatuses extending from Hollywood movies and video games to mainstream television, news, and the social media.

Orwell’s Big Brother of 1984 has been upgraded in the 2015 edition. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, if the older Big Brother presided over traditional enclosures such as military barracks, prisons, schools, and “countless other big and small panopticons,” the updated Big Brother is concerned with not only inclusion and the death of privacy but also the suppression of dissent and the widening of the politics of exclusion.⁵Keeping people out is the extended face of Big Brother, who now patrols borders, hospitals, and other public spaces in order to spot “the people who do not fit in the places they are in, banishing them from … ‘where they belong,’ or better still never allowing them to come anywhere near in the first place.”⁶

This is the Big Brother that pushes youthful protests out of the public spaces they attempt to occupy. This is the hypernationalistic Big Brother clinging to notions of racial purity and American exceptionalism as a driving force in creating a country that has come to resemble an open-air prison for the dispossessed. This is the Big Brother whose split personality portends the dark authoritarian universe of the 1 percent, with their control over the economy and use of paramilitarized police forces on the one hand, and on the other their retreat into gated communities manned by SWAT-like security forces. Fear and isolation constitute an updated version of Big Brother. Fear is now managed and buttressed by normalizing the neoliberal claim that it be accepted as a general condition of society, dealt with exclusively as an individual consideration, disassociated from the politics and moral panics endemic to an authoritarian society, and used to mobilize the individual’s fear of the other. In the surveillance state, fear is misplaced from the political sphere to the personal concern with the fear of surviving, of not getting ahead, of unemployment, and of the danger posed by the growing legions of alien others. As the older order dies and a new one struggles to be born, Gramsci’s vision rightly identifies a liminal space that has given rise to monsters, all too willing to kidnap, torture, and spy on law-abiding citizens while violating civil liberties.⁷ He is also right in suggesting that while such an interregnum offers no political guarantees, it does provide, or at least gestures toward, reimagining “what is to be done,” how it might be done, and who is going to do it.⁸

Orwell’s 1984 continues to serve as a brilliant and important metaphor for mapping the expansive trajectory of global surveillance, authoritarianism, and the suppression of dissent that has characterized the first decades of the new millennium. The older modes of surveillance to which Orwell pointed—including his warnings regarding the dangers of microphones and giant telescreens that watch and listen—are surprisingly limited when compared with the varied means now available for spying. Orwell would be astonished by this contemporary, refashioned Big Brother given the threat  that the new surveillance state poses because of its reach, and the alleged “advance” of technologies that far outstretch anything he could have imagined, technologies that pose a much greater threat to both the personal privacy of citizens and the control exercised by sovereign power.

Individual freedom and privacy

As Marjorie Cohn has similarly indicated, “Orwell never could have imagined that the National Security Agency (NSA) would amass metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200 million of our text messages every day. Orwell could not have foreseen that our government would read the content of our emails, file transfers, and live chats from the social media we use.”⁹ Snowden, Cohn, and other critics are correct about the dangers of the state’s infringement of privacy rights, but their analysis should be taken further by linking the issue of citizen surveillance with the rise of “networked societies,” global flows of power, and the emergence of a totalitarian ethos that defies even state-based control.¹⁰ For Orwell, domination was state imposed and bore the heavy hand of unremitting repression and a smothering language that eviscerated any appearance of dissent, erased historical memory, and turned the truth into its opposite. For Orwell, individual freedom was at risk under the heavy hand of state terrorism.

In Orwell’s world individual freedom and privacy were under attack from outside forces. For Huxley, in contrast, freedom and privacy were willingly given up as part of the seductions of a soft authoritarianism, with its vast machinery of manufactured needs, desires, and identities. This new mode of persuasion seduced people into chasing commodities, and infantilized them through the mass production of easily digestible entertainment, disposable goods, and new scientific advances in which any viable sense of agency was undermined. The conditions for critical thought dissolved into the limited pleasures of instant gratification wrought through the use of technologies and consuming practices that dampened, if not obliterated, the very possibility of thinking itself. Orwell’s dark image is the stuff of government oppression, whereas Huxley’s is the stuff of distractions, diversions, and the transformation of privacy into a cheap and sensational performance for public display. Neil Postman, writing in a different time and worried about the destructive anti-intellectual influence of television, sided with Huxley and believed that repression was now on the side of entertainment and the propensity of the American public to amuse itself to death.¹¹ His attempt to differentiate Huxley’s dystopian vision from Orwell’s is worth noting:

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.¹²

Echoes of Huxley’s insights play out in the willingness of millions of people who voluntarily hand over personal information whether in the service of the strange sociality prompted by social media or in homage to the new surveillance state. New surveillance technologies employed by major service providers now focus on diverse consumer populations who are targeted in the collection of endless amounts of personal information as they move from one site to the next, one geopolitical region to the next, and across multiple screens and digital apparatuses. As Ariel Dorfman points out, “Social media users gladly give up their liberty and privacy, invariably for the most benevolent of platitudes and reasons,”¹³ all the while endlessly shopping online, updating Facebook, and texting. Indeed, surveillance technologies are now present in virtually every public and private space—such as video cameras in streets, commercial establishments, workplaces, and even schools, as well as the myriad scanners at entry points of airports, retail stores, sporting events, and so on. They function as control mechanisms that become normalized through their heightened visibility. So, too, our endless array of personal devices that chart, via GPS tracking, our every move, our every choice, our every pleasure.

At the same time, Orwell’s warning about Big Brother applies not simply to an authoritarian-surveillance state but also to commanding financial institutions and corporations that have made diverse modes of surveillance a ubiquitous feature of daily life. Corporations use the new technologies to track spending habits and to collect data points from social media so as to provide us with consumer goods that match our desires, to employ facial recognition technologies to alert store salespersons to our credit ratings, and so it goes. Heidi Boghosian points out that if omniscient state control in Orwell’s 1984 is embodied by the two-way television sets present in each home, then in “our own modern adaptation, it is symbolized by the location-tracking cell phones we willingly carry in our pockets and the microchip-embedded clothes we wear on our bodies.”¹⁴ In this instance, the surveillance state is one that not only listens, watches, and gathers massive amounts of information through data mining, allegedly for the purpose of identifying “security threats.” It also acculturates the public into accepting the intrusion of commercial surveillance technologies—and, perhaps more vitally, the acceptance of privatized, commodified values—into all aspects of their lives. In other words, the most dangerous repercussions of a near total loss of privacy involve more than the unwarranted collecting of information by the government: we must also be attentive to the ways in which being spied on has become not onlynormalized but even enticing, as corporations up the pleasure quotient for consumers who use new digital technologies and social networks—not least of all by and for simulating experiences of community.

Authoritarian-surveillance state

Many individuals, especially young people, now run from privacy and increasingly demand services in which they can share every personal facet of their lives. While Orwell’s vision touches upon this type of control, there is a notable difference that he did not foresee. According to Pete Cashmore, while Orwell’s “Thought Police tracked you without permission, some consumers are now comfortable with sharing their every move online.”¹⁵ The state and corporate cultural apparatuses now collude to socialize everyone—especially young people—into a regime of security and commodification in which their identities, values, and desires are inextricably tied to a culture of commodified addictions, self-help, therapy, and social indifference. Intelligence networks now inhabit the world of major corporations such as Disney and the Bank of America as well as the secret domains of the NSA, FBI, and fifteen other intelligence agencies. As Edward Snowden’s revelations about the PRISM program revealed, the NSA has also collected personal data from “the world’s largest Internet companies—Facebook, Yahoo!, Apple, Google—as well as extensive efforts by Microsoft to provide the agency with access to its communications platforms such as Outlook.”¹⁶ According to a senior lawyer for the NSA, the Intenet companies “were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data.”¹⁷

The fact is that Orwell’s and Huxley’s ironic representations of the modern totalitarian state—along with their implied defense of a democratic ideal rooted in the right to privacy and the right to be educated in the capacity to be autonomous and critical thinkers—have been transformed and mutilated almost beyond recognition by the material and ideological registers of a worldwide neoliberal order. Just as we can envision Orwell’s and Huxley’s dystopian fables morphing over time from “realistic novels” into a “real-life documentary,” and now into a form of “reality TV,” privacy and freedom have been radically altered in an age of permanent, nonstop global exchange and circulation. That is, in the current moment, the right to privacy and freedom has been usurped by the seductions of a narcissistic culture and casino capitalism’s unending desire to turn every relationship into an act of commerce and to make all aspects of daily life subject to market forces under watchful eyes of both government and corporate regimes of surveillance. In a world devoid of care, compassion, and protection, personal privacy and freedom are no longer connected and resuscitated through its connection to public life, the common good, or a vulnerability born of the recognition of the frailty of human life. Culture loses its power as the bearer of public memory, civic literacy, and the lessons of history in a social order in which the worst excesses of capitalism are left unchecked and a consumerist ethic “makes impossible any shared recognition of common interests or goals.”¹⁸ With the rise of the punishing state along with a kind of willful amnesia taking hold of the larger culture, we see little more than a paralyzing fear and apathy in response to the increasing exposure of formerly private spheres to data mining and manipulation, while the concept of privacy itself has all but expired under a “broad set of panoptic  practices.”¹⁹ With individuals more or less succumbing to this insidious cultural shift in their daily lives, there is nothing to prevent widespread collective indifference to the growth of a surveillance culture, let alone an authoritarian state.

xxxxxxxThe worst fears of Huxley and Orwell merge into a dead zone of historical amnesia as more and more people embrace any and every new electronic device regardless of the risks it might pose in terms of granting corporations and governments increased access to and power over their choices and movements. Detailed personal information flows from the sphere of entertainment to the deadly serious and integrated spheres of capital accumulation and policing as they are collected and sold to business and government agencies who track the populace for either commercial purposes or for fear of a possible threat to the social order and its established institutions of power. Power now imprisons not only bodies under a regime of surveillance and a mass incarceration state but also subjectivity itself as the threat of state control is now coupled with the seductions of the new forms of passivity-inducing soma: electronic technologies, a pervasive commodified landscape, and a mind-numbing celebrity culture.

Underlying these everyday conveniences of modern life, as Boghosian documents in great detail, is the growing Orwellian partnership between the militarized state and private security companies in the United States. Each day, new evidence surfaces pointing to the emergence of a police state that has produced ever more sophisticated methods for surveillance in order to enforce a mass suppression of the most essential tools for democratic dissent: “the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse.”²⁰ As Boghosian points out, “By claiming that anyone who questions authority or engages in undesired political speech is a potential terrorist threat, this government-corporate partnership makes a mockery of civil liberties.”²¹ Nowhere is this more evident than in American public schools, where youth are being taught that they are a generation of suspects, subject to the presence of armed police and security guards, drug-sniffing dogs, and an array of surveillance apparatuses that chart their every move—not to mention in some cases how they respond emotionally to certain pedagogical practices.

Whistleblowers are not only punished by the government: their lives are also turned upside down in the process by private surveillance agencies and major corporations, which now work in tandem. For instance, the Bank of America assembled fifteen to twenty bank officials and retained the law firm of Hunton and Williams in order to devise “various schemes to attack WikiLeaks and Greenwald whom they thought were about to release damaging information about the bank.”²²It is worth repeating that Orwell’s vision of surveillance and the totalitarian state look mild next to the emergence of a corporate-private-state surveillance system that can tap into every conceivable mode of communication, collect endless amounts of metadata to be stored in vast intelligence storage sites around the country, and potentially use that data to repress any vestige of dissent.²³

Discontents

As Huxley anticipated, any critical analysis must move beyond documenting abuses of power to addressing how contemporary neoliberal modernity has created a social order in which individuals become complicit with authoritarian practices. That is, how is the loss of freedom internalized? What and how do state- and corporate-controlled institutions, cultural apparatuses, social relations, and policies contribute to making a society’s plunge into self-generating dark times, as Huxley predicted? Put differently, what is the educative nature of a repressive politics, and how does it function to secure the consent of the American public? And, most important, how can it be challenged and under what circumstances?

The nature of repression has become more porous, employing not only brute force but also dominant modes of education, persuasion, and authority. Aided by a public pedagogy produced and circulated through a machinery of consumption and public relations tactics, a growing regime of repression works through the homogenizing forces of the market to support the widespread embrace of an authoritarian culture. Relentlessly entertained by spectacle, people not only become numb to violence and cruelty but also begin to identify with an authoritarian worldview. As David Graeber suggests, the police “become the almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture … watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view.”²⁴ But it is not just the spectacle of violence that ushers individuals into a world in which brutality becomes a primary force for mediating relations as well as the ultimate source of pleasure; there is also the production of an unchecked notion of individualism that both dissolves social bonds and removes any viable notion of agency from the landscape of social responsibility and ethical consideration. Absorbed in privatized orbits of consumption, commodification, and display, Americans vicariously participate in the toxic pleasures of the authoritarian state. Violence has become the organizing force of a society driven by a noxious notion of privatization in which it becomes difficult for ideas to be lifted into the public realm. Under such circumstances, politics is eviscerated because it now supports a market-driven view of society that has turned its back on the idea that “humanity is never acquired in solitude.”²⁵ This violence against the bonds of sociality undermines and dissolves the nature of social obligations as freedom becomes an exercise in self-development rather than social responsibility. This upending of the social and critical modes of agency mimics not just the death of the radical imagination but also a notion of banality made famous by Hannah Arendt, who argued that at the root of totalitarianism is a kind of thoughtlessness, an inability to think, and a type of outrageous indifference in which “there’s simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing.”²⁶

By integrating insights drawn from both Huxley and Orwell, it becomes necessary for any viable critical analysis to take a long view, contextualizing the contemporary moment as a new historical conjuncture in which political rule has been replaced by corporate sovereignty, consumerism becomes the only obligation of citizenship, and the only value that matters is exchange value. Precarity has replaced social protections provided by the state, just as the state cares more about building prisons and infantilizing the American public than it does about providing all of its citizens with quality educational institutions, health care, and other social rights. America is not just dancing into oblivion, as Huxley suggested; it is also being pushed into the dark recesses of an authoritarian state. Orwell wrote dystopian novels, but he believed that the sheer goodness of human nature would in the end be enough for individuals to develop modes of collective resistance that he could only imagine in the midst of the haunting specter of totalitarianism.

Huxley was more indebted to Kafka’s notion of destabilization, despair, and hopelessness. For Huxley, the subject had lost a sense of agency and had become the product of a scientifically manufactured form of idiocy and conformity. Progress had been transformed into its opposite, and science needed to be liberated from itself. Where Huxley fails, as Theodor Adorno has pointed out, is that he has no sense of resistance. According to Adorno, “The weakness of Huxley’s entire conception is that it makes all its concepts relentlessly dynamic but nevertheless arms them against the tendency to turn into their own opposites.”²⁷ Hence, the forces of resistance are not simply underestimated but rendered impotent.The authoritarian nature of the corporate-state surveillance apparatus and security system, with its “urge to surveil, eavesdrop on, spy on, monitor, record, and save every communication of any sort on the planet,”²⁸ can be fully understood only when its ubiquitous tentacles are connected to wider cultures of control and punishment, including security-patrolled corridors of public schools, the rise in supermax prisons, the hypermilitarization of local police forces, the justification of secret prisons and state-sanctioned torture abroad, and the increasing labeling of dissent as an act of terrorism in the United States.²⁹ This is part of Orwell’s narrative, but it does not go far enough.

Neoliberal dreamworld of babbling consumers

The new authoritarian corporate-driven state deploys more subtle tactics to depoliticize public memory and promote the militarization of everyday life. Alongside efforts to defund public and higher education and to attack the welfare state, a wide-ranging assault is being waged across the culture on all spheres that encourage the public to hold power accountable. If these public institutions are destroyed, there will be few sites left in which to nurture the critical formative cultures capable of educating people to challenge the range of injustices plaguing the United States and the forces that reproduce them. One particular challenge comes from the success of neoliberal tyranny to dissolve those social bonds that entail a sense of responsibility toward others and form the basis for political consciousness. Under the new authoritarian state, perhaps the gravest threat one faces is not simply being subject to the dictates of what Quentin Skinner calls “arbitrary power,” but failing to respond with outrage when “my liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that someone is reading my emails but also by the fact that someone has the power to do so should they choose.”³⁰ The situation is dire when people seem no longer interested in contesting such power. It is precisely the poisonous spread of a broad culture of political indifference that puts at risk the fundamental principles of justice and freedom that lie at the heart of a robust democracy. The democratic imagination has been transformed into a data machine that marshals its inhabitants into the neoliberal dreamworld of babbling consumers and armies of exploitative labor whose ultimate goal is to accumulate capital and initiate individuals into the brave new surveillance/punishing state that merges Orwell’s Big Brother with Huxley’s mind-altering soma.

Nothing will change unless people begin to take seriously the subjective underpinnings of oppression in the United States and what it might require to make such issues meaningful in order to make them critical and transformative. As Charles Derber has explained, knowing “how to express possibilities and convey them authentically and persuasively seems crucially important” if any viable notion of resistance is to take place.³¹ The current regime of authoritarianism is reinforced through a new and pervasive sensibility in which people surrender themselves to both the capitalist system and a general belief in its call for security. It does not simply repress independent thought but constitutes new modes of thinking through a diverse set of cultural apparatuses ranging from the schools and media to the Internet. The fundamental question in resisting the transformation of the United States into a twenty-first-century authoritarian society must concern the educative nature of politics—that is, what people believe and how their individual and collective dispositions and capacities to be either willing or resistant agents are shaped.

What will American society look like in a hundred years? For Huxley, it may well mimic a nightmarish image of a world in which ignorance is a political weapon and pleasure a form of control, offering nothing more than the swindle of fulfillment, if not something more self-deluding and defeating. Orwell, more optimistically, might see a more open future and history disinclined to fulfill itself in the image of the dystopian society he so brilliantly imagined. He believed in the power of those living under such oppression to imagine otherwise, to think beyond the dictates of the authoritarian state and to offer up spirited forms of collective resistance, being willing to reclaim the reigns of political emancipation. For Huxley, there was hope in a pessimism that had exhausted itself; for Orwell optimism had to be tempered by a sense of educated hope. History is open and only time will tell who was right.

References; 

[1] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985, 2005).

[2] I take up elsewhere, in great detail, the nature of the surveillance state and the implications that the persecution of these whistleblowers has for undermining any viable understanding of democracy. See Henry A. Giroux, “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State,” Truthout, February 10, 2014, available at www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state.

[3] For an excellent description of the new surveillance state, see Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide (New York: Signal, 2014); and Julia Angwin, Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance (New York: Times Books, 2014).

[4] Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).

[5] Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives (London: Polity, 2004), 132–133.

[6] Heidi Boghosian, Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance (San Francisco:<>City Lights Books, 2013).

[7] Instructive here is Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

[8] Marjorie Cohn, “Beyond Orwell’s Worst Nightmare,” Huffington Post, January 31, 2014.

[9] See, for example, Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996); and Zygmunt Bauman, Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).

[10] Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, xix–xx.

[11] Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

[12] Ariel Dorfman, “Repression by Any Other Name,” Guernica, February 3, 2014.

[13] Boghosian, Spying on Democracy, 32.

[14] Pete Cashmore, “Why 2012, Despite Privacy Fears, Isn’t Like Orwell’s 1984,” CNN, January 23, 2012, available at www.ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-770499.

[15] Greenwald, No Place to Hide, p. 108.

[16] Spencer Ackerman, “US Tech Giants Knew of NSA Data Collection, Agency’s Top Lawyer Insists,” The Guardian, March 19, 2014, available at www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/19/us-tech-giants-knew-nsa-data-collection-rajesh-de.

[17] Boghosian, Spying on Democracy, 22.

[18] Jonathan Crary, 24/7 (London: Verso, 2013), 16.

[19] Mark Karlin, “From Spying on ‘Terrorists Abroad’ to Suppressing Domestic Dissent: When We Become the Hunted,” Truthout, August 21, 2013.

[20] Ibid., Boghosian, Spying on Democracy, 22–23.

[21] Arun Gupta, “Barrett Brown’s Revelations Every Bit as Explosive as Edward Snowden’s,” The Guardian, June 24, 2013.

[22] Bruce Schneier, “The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership,” Bloomberg, July 31, 2013.

[23] David Graeber, “Dead Zones of the Imagination,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2012): 119.

[24] The quotation by Karl Jaspers is cited in Hannah Arendt, The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2013), 37.

[25] Ibid., 48.

[26] Theodor W. Adorno, “Aldous Huxley and Utopia,” Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 106–107.

[27] Tom Engelhardt, “Tomgram: Engelhardt, a Surveillance State Scorecard,” November 12, 2013, available at Tom Dispath.com.

[28] I take up many of these issues in Henry A. Giroux, The Violence of Organized Forgetting (San Francisco: City Lights, 2014), The Twilight of the Social (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012), and Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).

[29] Quoted in Quentin Skinner and Richard Marshall, “Liberty, Liberalism and Surveillance: A Historic Overview,” Open Democracy (July 26, 2013). Online: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/quentin-skinner-richard-marshall/liberty-liberalism-and-surveillance-historic-overview

[30] Charles Derber, private correspondence with the author, January 29, 2014.

Originally published by the Sri Lanka Guardian.
Opening Photo: Oregon Dept of Transportation SWAT team. Photo: Smallman12q.

Henry A. Giroux, Contributing Editor

Currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His books include: Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Peter Land 2011), On Critical Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011), Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm 2012), Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (Routledge 2012), Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future (Paradigm 2013). Giroux’s most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), are Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, America’s Disimagination Machine (City Lights) and Higher Education After Neoliberalism (Haymarket) will be published in 2014). He is also a Contributing Editor of Cyrano’s Journal Today / The Greanville Post, and member of Truthout’s Board of Directors and has his own page The Public Intellectual. His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

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We offer several takes on a film with some of the most thought-provoking premise in a long time. By touching upon the taboo issue of class, director Blomkamp parts ways with the vacuity and silliness of most action flicks, or Hollywood fare in general, but there’s still too much frantic movement devoid of substance in this blockbuster to make Elysium a truly great film. See what four perceptive critics, Dave Walsh, Rob Kall, Chris Mandel, and Jonathan Kim, have to say.—PG

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(1) By David Walsh, wsws.org
Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium: To have or have not

The principal challenge in writing about a film like Elysium is to make neither too much nor too little of it.

Neill Blomkamp, the South African-born director (District 9, 2009), sets out certain provocative premises for his new film. By 2154, according to a title, the earth’s “wealthiest inhabitants” have “fled” to an orbiting space station, Elysium, some twenty minutes away by space shuttle. There, under sunny skies, gleaming mansions with luxuriant lawns and swimming pools prevail. Everything is light and elegant and clean. Medical science has developed equipment (Medi-Pods) that repair broken bones and cure even the most lethal diseases instantly.

The earth (whose scenes were shot in Mexico City), on the other hand, resembles a giant polluted, overcrowded slum. Its inhabitants are prevented, as undocumented “non-citizens,” from entering the paradise in the sky. They have little or no access to elementary social services such as health care. Police-state methods prevail, with armed robots controlling and brutalizing the seething, poverty-stricken population.

Max Da Costa (Matt Damon) works in a factory owned by Armadyne, the conglomerate that has built Elysium. An industrial accident, due to the company’s ruthless speed-up and drive for profits, results in his being contaminated by radiation and given five days to live. Much of the film is taken up by Max’s attempts to reach Elysium and provide himself with a cure for his condition.

Max’s predicament and his struggle to stay alive intersect with a crisis on Elysium, where Delacourt (Jodie Foster), a fascist-minded government official in charge of “Homeland Security,” who uses a vicious mercenary (Sharlto Copley) to liquidate “illegal immigrants” arriving from earth, is planning a coup that will place her in power. She justifies her plan on the grounds of the need to “protect our liberty.” At a certain point, Delacourt has a powerful motive for getting hold of Max and the information he (literally) carries in his head.

Max also encounters a childhood friend and former sweetheart, Frey (Alicia Braga), with whom he shares important memories. She too has compelling reasons for reaching Elysium: to obtain medical care for her daughter, suffering from an advanced stage of leukemia.

The events unfold in a violent, dense fashion.

There are numerous interesting things here: in particular, the focus on social inequality and its connection to political reaction and repression. In Elysium, as in life, the defense of the elite and its immense wealth requires intense violence against the disenfranchised, impoverished mass of the people. The references to Homeland Security, “Big Brother”-type surveillance, mercenary-like contractors, the plight of the undocumented, industrial murder, corporate corruption and malfeasance and anti-democratic conspiracies have an obvious significance. The events of the past two decades did not pass unnoticed, even in artistic circles.

Blomkamp grew up in South Africa during the latter stages of the struggle against the apartheid regime and attended film school in Vancouver, his current home. He seems a bit distant from the contemporary American film industry and its stifling, stagnant atmosphere, and thus capable of allowing realistic elements to enter into his work. A colleague explained, “He [Blomkamp] grew up in a racist, fascistic empire, watched it be overthrown, collapse into chaos, all while walking to school every day. Imagine the impression that leaves on you.”

Elysium has elicited a well-deserved venomous response from ultra-right commentators, who have referred to it as “Matt Damon’s Sci-Fi Socialism” and “socialist trash,” along with other insulting phrases. A spokesman for the right-wing Media Research Center told Fox News, “This is just the latest of several Hollywood movies this year to try and co-opt Occupy Wall Street plotlines into their films.”

Other media outlets have somewhat more objectively registered the film’s concerns. The Associated Press headlined a piece, “In Elysium, a cosmic divide for rich and poor.” The Los Angeles Times wrote of “Inequality at the movies.” In its review, Variety asserted that Elysium advances “one of the more openly socialist political agendas of any Hollywood movie in memory, beating the drum loudly not just for universal healthcare, but for open borders, unconditional amnesty and the abolition of class distinctions as well.” When was the last time Variety used the word “socialist” in reference to a major studio film?

Blomkamp told the LA Times that sections of contemporary Johannesburg, along with Bel-Air and Beverly Hills in the Los Angeles area, inspired his vision of Elysium. He commented to ScreenCrave, “I don’t think the film is speculative science-fiction. It’s so much more a metaphor for today in my mind.”

In an interview with Reuters, Matt Damon noted that the film’s premise was not far-fetched: “If you look at the difference between the bottom billion people on planet Earth and the top 10 million, the contrast is as stark as living on a space station and living in a third world urban centre.”

It is to the filmmaker’s credit that he has his eyes open and thinks about the way the world is. (An ominous score, by Ryan Amon, and some impressive special effects make their contribution as well.)

Elysium, as a result, has some genuinely moving moments. The factory sequence in which Max receives his fatal dose of radiation is effective and convincing. The unfairness of Frey’s situation, her child dying while the affluent receive the most advanced medical treatment without having to think about it, is compelling.

However, such moments are the exception. Much of Elysium takes the form of a relatively tedious action film, dominated by a great deal of noise and mayhem, to no great effect. There is hardly a single figure who deviates from his or her predictable course. The dialogue is largely uninspired, and uninspiring. The exposition of the complicated plot, given at top speed by the characters, often seems awkward and unconvincing.

Spider (Wagner Moura), a Che-like figure, and his entourage seem almost entirely extraneous, except as a device to move the unlikely story forward. Foster’s Delacourt and Armadyne chief John Carlyle (William Fichtner) are so icy, villainous and without nuance that they might well have stepped out of a comic book. The scenes of the Los Angeles slums have, at times, that almost hysterical, inauthentic look one associates with a dark and skeptical view of humanity. Generally speaking, cartoonishness never helped anyone.

Perhaps most damagingly, Max is transformed from an individual whose situation shows dramatic promise into, alas, a conventional, unreal “superhero,” possibly the most boring of all fictional creations. As a consequence, one loses a good deal of interest in his particular fate, and even his final act of self-sacrifice is largely unmoving.

One of the difficulties is that Blomkamp has chosen to reproduce identifiable social and political elements of contemporary life without seriously turning his attention to the content of everyday life, to the drama of it, to its relationships and emotions. Elysium presents a peculiar combination of accurate physical and institutional facts, on the one hand, and contrived, overblown, schematic relations between its human figures, on the other.

Both Blomkamp and Damon have gone out of their way to deny any particular social message in the film. “The first order of business for a big summer popcorn movie is to make a kick-ass movie with great action,” says the actor. Blomkamp told the LA Times, “To be pigeonholed into political films, I would put a gun in my mouth if that’s how my career ended up.” No artist wants to be pigeon-holed, but the director’s over-reaction reflects an accommodation to a retrograde industry climate.

It is not astonishing, one supposes, given the pressures that a $100 million budget inevitably generates, that the filmmakers seek to “reassure” potential audience members that nothing much will be asked of them. Not astonishing, but not terribly worthy either. Elysium’s marketing is some reflection of its production: there is a pandering here to preconceptions about what an audience will or will not accept. In my own view, Blomkamp has weakened his film and made it less appealing to audiences through his insistence on dull, pumped-up action sequences. Hollywood at one point made enormously popular and insightful films that were something other than “big summer popcorn movies.”

Without offering excuses for the filmmakers’ failings, who, after all, do present some intensely intriguing material, one has to take into account as well the general political situation. Although many are only waiting for the other shoe to drop, there has not yet been a major social explosion in response to the catastrophic social inequality and attacks on the lives and livelihoods of millions. That remains the decisive issue, both for social development as a whole and art in particular.

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(2) By Christopher Mandel

The Future According to Elysium

Neill Blomkamp’s blockbuster, Elysium creates a disturbingly realistic vision of the future.

The citizens of Elysium are a ruling class.  They enjoy monopolistic control the political bodies, military, and police.  They are also the primary movers and shakers in the market place.  Nevertheless, their primary relationship to the non-citizens stuck on Earth is not based on exploitation, but avoidance.  Blomkamp’s world is not based on a Marxist critique of capitalism where the owners exploit the workers. 2154 is even worse.  The majority of Earth dwellers simply aren’t needed in the marketplace at all, and most Elysium citizens would prefer to be shielded from the sad ugliness far below them.

One of Elysium’s many robots. by PatLoika

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author’s Website: http://www.cloudlessrain.net/

Christopher Mandel is a writer, activist, musician, and Sunday school teacher in Denver, CO. He was a dedicated organizer in the Occupy movement and published his memoirs of that experience as MY OCCUPY: AN ACCOUNT OF ONE PERSON’S ADVENTURES IN THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT.

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(3) Rob Kall, OpEdnews

By Rob KallI watched Elysium last night. It was successful. It made my blood boil and my teeth clench.  The movie delivers a powerful message. We are already living in a hellish world where the elite and powerful are living lives of luxury off the backs, off the deaths of the 99.9 percent. It’s no wonder that this movie has been panned by so many mainstream critics. To be honest, this is not a perfect movie. It is made to pander to the tastes of today’s movie-goers, with far more violence than necessary to support the story. But this is a movie worth seeing. Without spoiling the plot, I can tell you that this movie shows the banal evil of the ruling, moneyed class, the brutal treatment of workers, the dehumanization and, beyond militarization, robotization of the police– police programmed to be cruel and inhuman. The defense secretary, played by Jodie Foster, is a brilliant but lethal psychopath. The head of a military manufacturer is a despicable sociopath who sees worker fatalities as annoying production line slow downs. But they hire an earthbound psychopath to do their dirty work. In the movie Elysium, the people on earth are a down-trodden, hopeless lot. The people of Elysium live on an orbiting habitat that supports 250,000 people, with houses selling for $250 million and up. As you’ve probably concluded , the movie Elysium throws some futuristic trappings on the actual situation that exists in the world right now. Watching the contrast between the lives of the elite and the rest of the people on earth is what made my blood boil and my teeth gnash. Spoiler alert. Reading beyond this point will give away some of the plot developments. Matt Damon plays the hero of this story– a reluctant hero who accepts “the call” because he has no other choice. He has been exposed to radiation that will kill him in five days. Because of his dire situation, he seeks a very high risk solution with very low odds for success. That solution involves violating all kinds of laws of Elysium. As he embarks on this journey we learn that the elites who live on  Elysium, a massive space station  with green verdant lawns, waterways and clean air, control the laws and life on the surface of the planet. I’ve long believed that it will take heroes and heroines who are literally dying, people who know they have a short time to live, to engage in revolutionary acts of courage, standing up to the machine, fighting for justice and humanity. That’s what Matt Damon’s character does in this movie. There are many wisdom sources that say that it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. That’s true for this movie. The end is not really realistic or satisfying. It does show that the people take the tools for healing the sick back from the billionaires on Elysium. It does show that the people of earth are all made whole, treated equally. But as most Hollywood stories go, this one also portrays the solution as one resolved by a lone hero. Showing a courageous soul who is willing to sacrifice his life is a good example. But Howard Zinn and Woodie Guthrie have both said that it will take millions of small acts to save the world. Here’s what Zinn said in an interview I did with him: “How could you predict that four students,in 1960, would do is sit in Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and this would spark dozens and dozens of sit-ins and this would lead to freedom rides? In other words, there’s no way of predicting how a movement develops. All you can do really – you do your part, you do whatever you can, you organize with other people, you try to get some kind of change, and if enough people do enough things, even if they’re little things, they will add up. Because that’s what happens in movements: just millions of people doing small things which they cannot predict in it’s results. And Woodiy Guthrie said, “A lot of little things, millions of little things is what will save this world.” Last year, I interviewed, for my Bottom Up Radio Show, Chris Vogler, a movie consultant who wrote THE book, The Writer’s Journey,  on incorporating Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey into movies. I invited him on my radio show to discuss whether it was  possible to make a movie in which there is an Occupy Wall Street, horizontal version of the hero’s journey, in which there are many people who come together, from the bottom up, to save the day. He jumped at the idea and opportunity to discuss it and came up with the term  “collective hero.” Here’s an excerpt from the interview: Chris: This reorientation you’re talking about of getting it off of this hierarchical, leave everything to the secret elite team at the top, which is the idea of “The Avengers” and rewriting this or redefining this is. No, this has to be from the people. The people in “The Avengers” movie are like sheep.  There’s one woman who’s given a couple of lines and she’s supposed to represent all the people but she’s just like a big sheep looking up at, “Oh, the heroes they’re saving us. Oh, that Iron Man. He’s so cool,” or whatever it is.  It’s a very weak attempt to acknowledge the power of the people. So, that’s something that I think we could grow more of this kind of consciousness in our story. Rob: Of course the Marvel Comics brand is built upon this kind of superhero and I know Disney spent billions to buy the brand, right?  Chris: That’s certainly true yeah. Rob: They’re investing in maintaining that kind of hero archetype, but I wonder, this is a question I’ve been meaning to discuss with you and we haven’t hit all the archetypes but I think we hit enough of them.  Chris: Yeah. Rob: What’s the chance of a major movie company doing something like this? Chris: Well, I think that the very fact that you have so many of the certain kind of the elite team of the G.I. Joe’s or whatever it is or exceptional heroes like Indiana Jones, the very fact that those have such dominance creates a hunger for the other thing, so then you can get back to more grounded collective things. And to be fair with Marvel Comics, the original idea of many of these things was more like the Spiderman model, where it’s just a kid and he’s put together a costume out of stuff from the junk store and old athletic equipment. Rob: It’s true and actually some of the commenters from my article observed that many superheroes start out as average people who are victims of chemical spills or radiation or things like that. Chris: Yeah, that’s a very interesting thing. Yes, there is some working out of maybe collective guilt about that or trying to show that there’s an interaction between these environmental choices and what happens.  They’re very positive that way that usually the environmental change is positive. Not always, because some of the Batman villains, for example, are horribly deformed by it, like Two Face. It poisons their nature, but sometimes it brings out something good.  Spiderman has these powers, but the whole point of Spiderman is the powers have to be used responsibly. So, if you’ve got this wonderful new tool of tablet computers and e-mail and so forth that has to be used responsibly as part of this hero contract. Rob: When it comes down to making a blockbuster movie, underneath it there has to be a great story that people are going to care about and be able to relate to. Chris: Um-hum. Rob: Where the story will be able to lure them into the story trance. Chris: Yes, that’s true and a couple of things may happen along these collective lines we’ve been discussing.  One is that you present the collective hero like a village or a tribe or a street or a family or something like that and then the audience picks one or two that they like the best or that they relate to the most and so they kind of turn those into the heroes of the peace.  The other thing you can do, and I like this idea, is to really spend some time creating a character that is that village or that street or that family so that the filmmakers use their tricks and techniques to create the sense of the community as a real entity that has its own consciousness and its own goals and settings, and that those need to be adjusted a little bit and that can be a great movie of material; a great piece of material. Something that shows us, here’s a microcosm of your society in one family or one street. Rob: Has that been done? Chris: Well, I think that this is what Spike Lee was after in “Do the Right Thing.”  He was giving you of a sort of Charles Dickens view of this is a whole array of different types of people in this one location.  I thought that was a successful effort there and you could pick out certain people and say, “Okay, it was really this guy’s story or that’s guy’s story.”  But I think he did the right job there of creating the sense of the collective and that that itself can be a character. So I like things like that.  Or another example from far a field from that, there was a movie about U-boats, “Das Boots,” and very clearly the intention there was the boat itself. The crew of the boat is a collective and this is the main character; not the captain, not anybody on the crew. It’s that boat.  So, I think there are plenty of examples that show how you can do that very effectively.  John Ford did it during the war a number of times.  He took movies like “They Were Expendable,” where he was studying a certain unit and giving you the story that collective military unit. So, there’s lots of precedent for this.   It takes courage to make movies like this– for the studio, the actors, the director, the distributors. This is one movie I encourage you to watch. You’ll enjoy it, and you’ll show, financially, that movies with this kind of message can be economic successes too.  By the way, the Elysium official movie website has a number of interactive features, like an application to become a part of Elysium– that no matter what you answer, you fail. Of course, anyone seriously interested in such an elite program would not get in through an on-line application– they’d be invited, or would communicate with a real person. The application would just be for show. Think of the millions who applied for foreclosure relief.  ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and website architect of OpEdNews.com, Host of the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), and publisher of Storycon.org, President of Futurehealth, Inc, and an inventor . He is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com

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