November Readings
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley . Aldous Huxley and Utopia (Prisms) - Theadore W.Adorno . See What You Made Me Do - Jess Hill
Brave New World - Aldoux Huxley
“Community, Identity, and Stability” this is the Brave New World’s answer to the radical bourgeois revolution, and only very few in the New World understand this deliciously illegal reference. The New World is some arrangement of highly centralised State Capitalism. Individuals are subordinate to the ‘community’ and community is mass participation in consumption and hierarchised work. Division of labour is organised by a globally established caste system. Huxley’s world is explicit. There are endless mass-produced twins, the mass of people themselves are alike to the products they produce and consume. Their culture and perception neatly standardized. The delivery of the knowledge more formalized than the casual and consensual consumption of these things in the “unfreedom in unrestrained equality”(prisms, 95) of the old world. The New World is unashamed - it would be simply inefficient to have it any other way. It’s shocking it was ever any other way. Instead of the culture industry or social mores whispering to us in our dreams, the ideas are literally whispered to infants from beneath their pillows. Instead of lower classes being inevitabbly unintelligent due to their lack of access to education and social conditions, alcohol and other poisons are poured into their blood surrogates. The lower castes are twins of absurd quantity - any idea they ever had could never be unique or important, they’re all indistinguishable in every sense, and colour coded to be sure. Everything is pneumatic especially women, but also furniture. Every element has at their core AND, OR and XOR logic gates, an appropriate and controlled dynamism is strived for.
The fertilising room is our introduction to the biological element of the three principals of the New World, then the gestation room, the hatching room and the nursery. The techniques of conditioning are explained to a tour of youths who feverishly write down useless grabs from the director’s mouth. Questions about the conditioning are met by apparently obvious non-answers. There isn’t any real reason to provide real argument or reasoning, the fact the world is the way it is now is the evidence and proof for why things ought to be that way - not that anyone would think to ask why things should be any particular way, those exercises and exchanges do not exist in the New World.
Many untidy exchanges and relations have been eliminated. To think there were once mothers and fathers! The Controller can’t ask people to imagine because they can’t:
“The world was full of fathers–was therefore full of misery; full of mothers–therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts–full of madness and > suicide.” ch 3
Freud is mentioned, albeit briefly, alongside Ford. It is not clearly discernible if Huxley is being unfair to Freud, or if this simply reflects the general unfairness with which Freud is handled. The social engineers know he identified the horrors of family life and run with that. This seems reasonable, and the rest of Freud is sanitized or destroyed like other history, perhaps.
Spending Is Better Than Mending
Our new father is Ford. That antisemitic industrialist who attempted to forge the road to ‘peace’ and consumer bliss through mass production and consumption. The characters have choice of many different perfumes at any given bathroom and there are plenty of new fashions to adorn. There are only a few sports, and the introduction of any new activity is highly regulated. Entertainment is restricted to some synthetic organ that also gives a light show and sometimes fragrances. And there’s Soma, seemingly a mix of MDMA and Valium, with no ill side effects; although characters caught off-guard without it can’t seem to cope with listening to even fascinating things. Lenina needs to be on her soma cloud when she listens to the ranger bloke at the reserve, occasionally mustering a “you don’t say!”. A Gram Is Better Than A Damn is cheerfully and neurotically expressed if someone appears tired or mildly gloomy, or when Lenina is caught without it having to feel something for once, she repeatedly mutters this jingle like a total psychiatric case. Sex is another appetite to be met regularly governed by a strict morality of non-monogamy.
At a social engagement Bernard is asked, did he play electromagnetic golf or obstacle golf earlier? He had to admit he played neither. Highly embarrassing to not be engaging in social consumption of people and games alike. The extreme lack of consumptive choice disguised as choice in BNW is not tiring, though - it’s very funny, although it’s funny in a sad way.
Many elements of the New World have a comedic effect particular to the modern audience. We see our public social media publicised lives and relationships reflected in this work from 1931. Lenina is routinely disturbed by Bernard wanting to make their plans in private, or spend time one-on-one.
“Pretty harmless, perhaps; but also pretty disquieting. That mania, to start with, for doing things in private. Which meant, in practice, not doing anything at all. For what was there that one could do in private. (Apart, of course, from going to bed: but one couldn’t do that all the time.) Yes, what was > there? Precious little” ch 6
Everything must be public, social a spectacle and it must be consumptive, and you must have fun - if you aren’t, that’s your fault or there must be something wrong with you, possibly in a clinical sense - alcohol in your blood surrogate, perhaps.
Everyone Belongs To Everyone Else
The New World sneers at Christianity, it’s archaic and illogical and worse of all it is passionate. Passion is ok, in the sense that it is utterly unavoidable (unfortunately) but it must be released in a steady trickle, a sprinkler system with multiple outlets of mist - not a powerful jet. There are routine orgys which are the closest thing to a cultural religious experience the youth encounter in the New World. We experience one through Bernard. The Soma is not enough to get him where the others (allegedly) are. He lies. We know the others are lying too. But how can Bernard? Or are they those apparently happy idiots we sometimes meet? They can’t really believe their own bullshit - why do they insist so aggressively they do? Like Lenina who rocks back and forth saying “A Gram Is Better Than A Damn, A Gram Is Better Than A Damn” these people are certainly whimpering to themselves “Good Vibes Only, Good Vibes Only, Manifest Positive Energy”. while the world today takes on a more grotesque form by the hour.
Our comfort is found in that Bernard (from the New World), The Savage (made of the new and old) and some others too - recognises this is hideous and want humanity and connection and to resist the current order.
is the choice between engineering the state of the world or an island? Or between false happiness or a total romantic regression?
The populace is not actually stable. The controller says if they read Othello or could understand what it meant - they’d decapitate them. The Alphas and Beta’s have enough critical reasoning and self-importance to think their own ideas matter, and to seek meaning and presumably the lower castes do too, and this concerns the engineers, but we don’t see it amount to anything other than a few outbursts or temper tantrums before resigning to inaction.
Both Bernard and Helmholtz go to the island in the end, Bernard kicking and screaming before resigning to his fate, Helmholtz accepts it and is intrigued by it. This is disappointing. The controller himself nearly met the same fate - he decided long ago to remain the lawmaker and indulge in breaking the laws, reading philosophy and the bible in his office. All the resistors of the New World are resigned.
The Savage - the most effortlessly courageous of all characters exiles himself after being denied exile on the island with his mates. He chooses suicide. This is his protest, at the New World and himself, for he indulged in it - it is a passionate, romantic, and tragic death, unlike the un-confronting, mundane and efficient routine deaths in the New World, which are witnessed by flocks of twins during their Death Conditioning while they enjoy eclairs. But his indulgent suffering is no better or any less grotesque than the New World. The Savage’s suicide in the lighthouse is a rejection of his regression to nostalgic romanticism, but there’s no seed for anything else.
Despite the New World seeming sometimes fragile, the careful engineering from conception, gestation and the nursery and the schooling, and even yet, in adulthood: Soma. Women take a ‘pregnancy substitute’, routinely compulsory and taken at leisure. Every effort is made to satisfy (mildly) social passion - but people are still disturbed and wary, because the elaborate efforts are in fact imperfect. The text is laced with transgressions, the head of the hatchery who admits a fondness, a memory for The Savage’s Mother, he himself a Father! But there is no politics in the world. It is sterile and consciousness seems to need to start from the beginning somehow. After all, the populace did get to see Othello in the end. And what did it amount to? Mustafa Mond is right, they can’t understand it.
Aldous Huxley and Utopia (Prisms) - Theodore W.Adorno
– Draft – notes:
adorno says huxley rather flatly equates the mind with traditional culture - Shakespeare. But I mean it’s kind of fine - Shakespeare was enjoyed by everyomne, it’s not exclusive or elitist like Opera is. and it’s flowery, it makes its own words up, it’s like actually the opposite of the BNW
agree w Adorno that Freud is use inappropriately, reduced to another efficiency expert like Ford. But does he really? maybe it’s fair. People DO misunderstand Freud. Everyone hates him.
‘All the categories examined by the novel, family, parents, the individual and his property, are already products of reification. Huxley curses the future with it, without realizing that the past whose blessing he invokes is of the same nature. Thus he unwittingly becomes the spokesman of that nostalgia whose affinity to mass culture his physiognomic eye so acutely perceives in the test-tube song: ‘Bottle of mine, it’s you I’ve always wanted! Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted? . . . There ain’t no Bottle in all the world Like that dear little Bottle of mine.’’
Adorno tells me off for laughing. binoculars in reverse, complicit.