The Pleasures of Dystopia

Abstract

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), with its frightening surveillance culture, has been the most frequently invoked dystopic fiction in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations, racing to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list some 60 years after its initial publication date. However, as much as the social policing elements of that novel seem uncannily predictive, Orwell was not particularly prescient about other aspects of the future. He was especially amiss in his forecasting for technologies of pleasure. For his characters in Oceania, trudging to and from their joyless jobs in party-issued overalls and rallying for their daily Two Minutes Hate, non-procreative sexuality and intimacy are forbidden. In between bouts of torture in Room 101, O’Brien tells Winston Smith about Big Brother’s plan for the future: ‘“The sex instinct will be eradicated. […] We shall abolish the orgasm.”’¹ While today sexual and reproductive rights are still subject to politics everywhere, the austerity and sheer greyness of Orwell’s prognosis for pleasure, even to the most cynical critic of the culture industry, have not come to pass in most of the world.

Fredric Jameson asks ‘Who will recount the pleasures of dystopia?’ in ‘Then You Are Them’ [review of Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (2009)], London Review of Books, 31.17 (10 Sep. 2009): 7–8.