----- Original Message ----- From: Natasa Tucev tucev@tesla.rcub.bg.ac.yu
Fiona wrote:
Frankly, once you get
down to the areas of biology that culture cannot reach, reason doesn't
enter
into it.
No, but maybe your instincts or feelings can give some feedback to your reason, when your reason cannot help or when you just don't have enough
data
to quarrel with your culture efficiently.
Fair enough, but only if you consider a fight-or-flight reaction resistance. In (sorry to bring it up, but there you go) Nazi Germany, all of the resistance that I'm aware of came from an ideological standpoint-- Catholicism, or Communism, or another religious/political area which stood in opposition to fascism. This suggests to me that resistance inherently requires thinking about.
This is why I like the story about Blake so much. Blake was brainwashed
and
his knowledge, his political philosophy, his past experience - everything that could rationally suggest to him that the Federation was wrong and
that
it should be opposed - was gone. But he was still human. The conditioning couldn't get that far. He still loved his family and was ready to
transgress
the law, go outside the dome, because of them. This was the standpoint
from
which he was able to resist his conditioning.
IIRC, what the Federation wanted in reconditioning him was somebody who was rational and reasonable, but who had apparently changed his mind-- they had to make it look natural, rather than like he was coerced. Consequently they could not have turned him into a zombie, but left him with his reason and critical faculties intact-- which evidently provided a basis from which to start questioning the state again.
Anyway, the family which he loved was a bogus one--they were killed, and the letters were faked, and his feelings for them formed part of his conditioning-- the point of the letters was to maintain for him the fiction that he had never been a rebel.
Your statement, BTW, suggests that people who have been socially or mentally conditioned by the Federation are not human-- which seems an odd thing to say about Travis, Par, Maryatt, Bellfriar, Kasabi et al.
Pure bodily resistance to a culture is I think also possible - like in the novel 'Life and Times of Michael K.', where the hero, a retarded African, throws up all the food he is given in the prison camp. The only food he
can
eat are the pumpkins he grows on his farm and which he calls 'the food of freedom'. (You can compare this to Blake who, because of his conditioning, does not recognize 'the food of freedom' and spits the water he's tasted outside the dome. This is the first sign to us that something is wrong
with
him.)
Actually, as he himself states, it suggests rather that he doesn't like the taste, as one wouldn't if one was used to drinking purified water :). I can't comment on the book as I haven't read it, but I would once again raise that dreaded term "metaphor"-- if the prison food represents captivity, then of course he's ill after eating it. This does not necessarily suggest mass nausea on Robben Island.
OK, but I wouldn't call that resistance. Again, this is *withdrawal*-- Winston's mother refuses to engage with her society, withdrawing into her family, rather than resisting it.
OK, so she isn't a Blakish-style revolutionary. But I wasn't talking about that. Before you try with revolutions, reforms, concrete attempts to
change
your culture, you have to be aware that something is wrong with it in the first place. If you are completely trapped within your social and cultural role, completely blinded by your culture's ideology, then you can't even
see
what you ought to fight against. Winston's mother found a successful way
of
resisting such complete brainwashing, such complete submergence into the system. By 'resistance' I mean resisting the attempts of your culture to possess you completely.
You seem to be making a very hard-and-fast point here. I would once again restate that the theory of the person as I understand it is that persons are a combination of influences from their culture and upbringing, biological matter and individual psychology-- what you seem to be arguing is that to be influenced by a culture is to be "completely blinded by [its] ideology." Even in a totalitarian society there is a middle ground.
To return to Winston's mother: she appears, as I recall, in a brief flashback scene, in which Winston steals food from his sister, runs away and returns a few hours later to find the house empty except for rats (establishing his phobia of the creatures). I don't see her particularly resisting anything in that scene.
Not exactly. Winston fails as a human being even before he's arrested. Remember when he declares he is ready to do anything to bring down the
Party
- kill hundreds of innocent people, distribute habit-forming drugs, spread
venereal diseases, throw acid in a child's face, if need be? He wants to fight the system, but the system has already transformed him and defeated him completely.
I don't see this as giving up his humanity. Far from it. Oceania was created by human beings, and is maintained by human beings-- many of whom are probably quite decent sorts. Violence and hatred are human behaviour-- and are practiced/advocated by the resistance in Oceania as much as by the state.
In Terry Gilliam's *Brazil,* the true horror of a similar system is shown to be that it is maintained by people who are in many ways quite decent-- the guards who chat about the discomfort of their uniforms after carrying out a raid, Jack Lint who babysits his daughter in between bouts of working as a torturer. It's not that such systems destroy one's humanity, but that they work within it-- or are you suggesting that Germany and Russia were populated by aliens?
What you seem to be doing is starting off arguing that there is some inner core of goodness to human beings which cannot be destroyed (but can be accessed through love, biological functions etc.)-- but then you go on to say that this core was extinguished in Winston Smith. You can't have it both ways, you know.
Proles, on the other hand, are incapable of starting an effective
rebellion,
but they keep the human heritage alive. For Orwell, this is a very
important
notion and therein lies the only hope in the book.
So the other members of Oceanian society aren't human? Anyway, IIRC, the proles' expression of human heritage consists in quaffing beer, reading pornography and singing pop songs, and they have no knowledge of the past.
Fiona
The Posthumous Memoirs of Secretary Rontane Available for public perusal at http://nyder.r67.net
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