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ISSN: 1705-6411

Volume 11, Number 1 (January, 2014)

Remote Control Society: Baudrillard and Inversive Utopia

Sean McQueen(Doctoral Student, School of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, MonashUniversity, Caulfield East, Victoria , Australia)

Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though itmay be, it is paradise. (Baudrillard 2010: 107)

I. Introduction

Baudrillard’s writing on the subject of utopia is easily mistaken for dystopian. But in

this article I want to position him as offering an ironic provocation on the

representational and socio-political aspects of utopia - what I call inversive utopia. In

this article, I will outline Baudrillard’s theses on utopia, placing him and his

contemporaries, Foucault and Deleuze, in the context of contemporary postpolitical

liberalism, and then develop an understanding of inversive utopia through a reading

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of Ray Bradbury’s science fiction classic, Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and Francois

Truffaut’s film adaptation (1966).

II. Utopia achieved.

Sylvere Lotringer begins his reflection on the 1980s thus:

The ‘80s began in 1983, with the publication of Jean Baudrillard’sSimulations, which propelled a kind of weightless nebula into culture justbefore a charge of Orwellian paranoia took over: Would 1984 keep itsappointment? The answer was no. The society of the spectacle had alreadybecome a society of spectators, and Foucault’s panopticon a Mobius strip.Everyone was waiting for George Orwell, but Baudrillard arrived instead.(2003: 194).

But the publication of Simulations was not the first time Baudrillard had anteceded

Orwell’s dystopian vision -- in fact he had dismissed it as early as 1971 in an article

for the journal, Utopie, “Requiem for the Media” (2006: 70-93). The Orwellian

telescreen, omnipotent and surveying, which rendered the masses (the Proles)

inactive, was being replaced by television and an increasingly televised voluntary

servitude: the masses could watch themselves. Neither Orwell’s Airstrip One, nor

Foucault’s Panopticon, both centralised and disciplinary models of social

engineering, could account for a society that, for Baudrillard, had already exhausted




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both models.

This brings us to the more specific concept of the science-fictional dystopia. If

Baudrillard can be considered a science-fictional writer as Douglas Kellner

suggests (2000: 299 & 1988: 248) then we might ask, to which strand of the genre

does his writing belong: utopia or dystopia? None would, I think, claim unreservedly

the former, but to consign Baudrillard to the dystopia is inaccurate. There is no clear

answer to this question, but he gives us some clues. 1967’s “Dialectical Utopia”

(2006: 31-32) is a brief, but curious forerunner to the dialectical utopianism of

Fredric Jameson (2007). But Baudrillard would come to dismiss this approach and,

in his final writings, saw only a world sworn to extremes. Indeed, it was only a few

years later in 1971’s “Utopia deferred..." that he rejected the political dialectic of the

impossible and the possible and said that utopia ‘offers no privileges to

revolutionary politics’ (2006: 61-2). Why this should be so must remain unclear for

now because, as insightful as he is on the topic, Baudrillard’s theorisation of utopia

is insufficient for my purposes; thus the concept requires some brief theorisation and

proper contextualisation.




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Utopia and dystopia exist on the same continuum of the imagining of future

possibilities, but are characteristically distinguished along the lines of political

ambition and theoretical value. Indeed, Andrew Milner observes ‘something quite

close to a distaste for dystopia’ (2012: 115) in science fiction’s most influential

critics: Raymond Williams, Carl Freedman, Darko Suvin and Fredic Jameson. In

Suvin’s foundational analysis, utopia is ‘the sociopolitical subgenre of science

fiction’, while he considers the Orwellian dystopian model ‘fashionabl[y] static’ (1979:

61 & 83). Both Jameson and Tom Moylan make the distinction, however, between

anti-utopia and dystopia. For Jameson, the anti-utopia is a reaction to the negative

connotation that utopia acquired in the Cold War, and its associations with anti-

capitalism (2007: xi) encapsulated in the Orwellian maxim “Freedom is Slavery”.

Similarly, for Moylan, the anti-utopia ‘attack[s] and refuse[s] Utopia and all that its

authors claim for it’ (Moylan 2000: 122).

For Jameson, utopia is the collective expression of an impossible desire – his

subtitle to Archaeologies of the Future, The Desire Called Utopia and Other

Science Fictions, indicates as much. But for Susan Sontag, dystopia offer a

‘collective nightmare’ of our own reality where ‘one can participate in the fantasy of




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living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of

humanity itself’ (1996: 53 & 41). In light of this, the issue is thus better reframed as

one of engagement, loosely formulated as a distinction between active (utopia) and

passive (dystopia). Jameson’s utopia is a distinctly political project, where the text is

an investment in or expression of the broader production of the utopian impulse or

desire. It is also a mode of representation: ‘The social totality is always

unrepresentable... but it can sometimes be mapped and allow a small-scale model

to be constructed on which the fundamental tendencies and the lines of flight can

more clearly read’. The utopian text is thus a ‘diagnostic intervention’ (2007: 4 & 12)

in a broader project of active engagement and critical thinking. Sontag’s dystopia,

albeit a less theoretically rigorous formulation is, at best, cathartic and, at worst, a

nihilistic, mode of passive consumption: the politically terminal massification of the

dystopian social is accurately reflected in the prevailing mode of engagement.

Having briefly outlined the representational and political dimensions of utopia,

dystopia, and anti-utopia, we can return now to Baudrillard. The question of science

fiction and utopia was raised again in Simulacra and Simulacra, in which the

political ideals of utopia are subsumed and overtaken by the problem of




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representation -- inasmuch as simulation is opposed to and distinct from

representation. ‘Representation’, Baudrillard writes, ‘stems from the principle of the

equivalence of the sign and the real (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a

fundamental axiom)’ (1994: 6). Representation, utopia and science fiction become

imbricated in the processional logic of simulacra, in which the naturalistic utopian

imaginary gives way to second-order science fiction (the third order is the Ballardian

type of science fiction, which is no longer science fiction). Utopia, for Baudrillard,

requires the cognitive apprehension of a gap or distance between the real and the

imaginary (dialectical utopia): to do so would be to identify ‘an ideal or critical

projection’. Ironically, the magnitude of this distance is inversely proportional to the

ordering of the simulacral procession: the utopian is transcendent, a maximisation of

the distance between the real and the imaginary; science fiction reduces the

distance, but is nevertheless a projection (rather than transcendental) adding itself to

real. In the final stage, the gap between the real and imaginary is not absent but,

rather, absorbed, so that it is reality that is transcendent (hyperreality), rather than

utopia, going beyond fiction (Ibid: 122).So, Baudrillard here annuls the classical

representational coordinates of utopia, rather than its socio-political dimensions.

These are another thing altogether:




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We can only simulate orgy and liberation now, pretending to continue on inthe same direction at greater speeds, but in reality, we are accelerating inempty space, because all of the ends of liberation (of production, progress,revolution) are already behind us... It is the state of accomplished utopia, ofevery utopia accomplished, but where you have to live paradoxically as ifthey had not. (2005: 104).

From this we can infer that Baudrillard was not a dystopian, nor did he consider

society as dystopian in the sense that it was the opposite to utopia. Rather, his is an

ironical utopia achieved, or what I wish to call inversive utopia: a term to describe the

“utopian” promise of liberal tolerance that Baudrillard both describes and

admonishes .

What I want to do in this paper, is develop an understanding of the inversive utopia.

But where Lotringer saw Baudrillard outbidding the Orwellian dystopia, I want to look

back to an equally famous science fiction dystopia, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

(1953) and Francois Truffaut’s film adaptation (1966), that positions Baudrillard and

his contemporaries, Foucault and Deleuze, amongst contemporary liberal

“utopianism”, and to supplement their theses with current understandings of

liberalism and biopolitics, provided by Slavoj Zizek , and Michael Hardt and Antonio

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Negri.

III. Discipline or Control?

If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to aquestion to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none - Fahrenheit451, Ray Bradbury, 1953, p. 68.

It all goes to show, law enforcement can be fun! - Fahrenheit 451, dir.Francois Truffaut, 1966.

Tolerance is turned from an active into a passive state, from practice tonon-practice (Marcuse 1969: 97).

As we have seen, Baudrillard saw in television and mass media the demise of both

the Orwellian dystopian model and the Foucauldian disciplinary Panopticon. This is

not the place to rehearse Orwell’s well-known novel, suffice to say that the Proles are

constantly aware that at any time they could be seen by Big Brother: the telescreen is

watched, but it can return the gaze, although the Proles can never know when or

where. The visual regimes in Nineteen Eighty-Four are obviously redolent of

Foucault’s analysis of Benthamite Panopticonism in Discipline and Punish, where

he observes that ‘power is exercised without division, according to a continuous




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hierarchical figure, in which each individual constantly located, examined and

distributed among the living beings’; where the subject ‘is seen, but he does not see;

he is the object of information, never a subject in communication’ (1995: 197 & 200).

Despite being the paradigmatic dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four is unusual in that it

differs from the most common architectural distribution of power in science fiction,

where the wealthy and influential members of society occupy the highest floors in the

highest buildings, whilst the disenfranchised occupy the lower floors and streets: the

spatialisation of power and the power of spatialisation. The telescreens, however,

flatten out this distribution while increasingly individualising the subjects. There is talk

on Airstrip One that Big Brother might not exist, and the Proles can never be sure

that they are not being observed. Thus Foucault’s famous formulation is that:

the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state ofconscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning ofpower... that the perfection of power should tend to render its actualexercise unnecessary... [P]ower should be visible and unverifiable. (Ibid:201)

Despite this architectural and spatial anomaly Nineteen Eighty-Four is, very clearly,

a disciplinary society. But for Foucault, power is also a contractual relation:




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He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumesresponsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them playspontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation inwhich he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of hisown subjugation (Ibid: 202-203).

The most extreme exercise of power in the novel is torture and execution, but it is

possible to see that the Proles’ relation to power fails to recognise Foucault’s

injunction, since the Proles monitor each other as much as the telescreens. It is the

inability not to be seen that leads to the arrest of the protagonists, Winston and Julia;

but this is no longer the case in our society. Now those who absent themselves from

fields of vision are no longer regarded with suspicion by governments because

these fields have changed in their topographic location and cultural significance.

Rather, such people are often regarded with suspicion by civil society. So much was

made of the fact that recent mass murderers James Holmes, Anders Behring

Breivik, and Adam Lanza lacked Facebook accounts, as though this was a way to

rationalise their actions, a vital clue, or determining factor in their psychopathy.

The movement away from a Foucauldian disciplinary society is noted by Deleuze in

“Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1992). With Bentham’s Panopticon as their




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governing metaphor, disciplinary societies are characterised by the double of

movement of the spatialistaion of power and of power of spatialisation, and how this

acts on the subject in specific institutions (schools, hospitals, prisons, factories).

While this is a keen analysis of subjectiviation, this regime also accounts for the

masses: ‘The disciplinary societies have two poles’, writes Deleuze, ‘the signature

that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that

indicates his or her position within a mass’. In this model, the subject and the mass

are distinguishable but not incompatible, since ‘power’, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four,

‘individualises and masses together’ (1992: 5). For Deleuze (as for Foucault), the

prison and the factory were the governing analogical spaces for disciplinary

societies, whereas the corporation emblematises societies of control: access to

information and communication, rather than to modes of production, is the societal

determinant. This changes the relationship between the subject and the mass: ‘We

no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have

become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks”’ (Ibid: 5).The

distinction between disciplinary and control societies has been adopted by Hardt

and Negri’s biopolitical thesis advanced in Empire (2001) and Multitude (2004).

They observe that in societies of control, ‘mechanisms of command become ever




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more “democratic”’, while there is a simultaneous ‘intensification and generalisation

of the normalising apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common

and daily practices’ (2001: 23) .

Foucault conceived of a contractual relationship of power in the scopic regimes of

Panopticonism, but here the relationship mutates into one of non-coercive,

repressive participation: a set of socio-political conditions where movements

towards liberty and oppression, and the distinction between governmental forces

and the social subject, become indistinguishable or, indeed, false distinctions

altogether. In an science fictional context, this means the loss of concrete

determinations or coordinates that would otherwise be used to distinguish utopia,

Jameson’s anti-utopia, and dystopia. This is why Baudrillard, in Simulacra and

Simulation and Forget Foucault (1987), wrote of the end of the Panopticon:

a switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance […] to a system of deterrence,

in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished. There is no

longer any imperative of submission to model, or to the gaze “YOU are the model!”

“YOU are the majority!" Such is the watershed of a hyperreal sociality. (1994: 29)

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Baudrillard argues that power has been reduced (or, perhaps at the same time,

elevated) to pure representation, and finds its purest form in television. Foucault, he

says, ‘does not tell us anything concerning the simulacrum of power itself’(1987:

40). Ours is therefore no longer a disciplinary society:

[The] myth of Big Brother, that of the total policing of visibility, has now beentaken over by the public itself, mobilised as both witness and judge. Thepublic has become Big Brother. We are far from the Panopticon, wherevisibility equals power and control... It is as if the controlling power hadbecome internalised, and human beings, no longer victims of image, wereinexorably transformed into images themselves. (Baudrillard 2008b: 39-40)

Inherent in this transition from discipline to control is a change in how the masses are

perceived, an inversion of the presumption of their passivity:

The strategy of power has long seemed founded on the apathy of themasses. The more passive they were, the more secure it was. But this logicis only characteristic of the bureaucratic and centralist phase of power[Foucault’s disciplinary society]. And it is this which today turns against it...That is why it seeks to reverse its strategies: from passivity to participation,from silence to speech... Everywhere the masses are encouraged tospeak, they are urged to live socially, electorally, organisationally, sexually,in participation, in festival, in free speech. (Baudrillard 1983: 23) [emphasisadded]




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So, if “governmentality”, as Foucault called it, is so perfectly internalised, where the

desire to go unseen is an antisocial one, so that the government need not exist, it is

in this sense that the type of power Foucault described in Discipline and Punish, for

Baudrillard, no longer exists. Many years later in the posthumous The Agony of

Power (2010), Baudrillard makes the distinction between domination and hegemony

and, while he does not cite Foucault, it is clear that Foucault’s analysis of contractual

power falls into the category of domination, for here there is a clear distinction

between dominators and dominated. Hegemony, by contrast, begins with ‘the

disappearance of the dual, personal, agonistic domination for the sake of integral

reality... where there are no longer dominators or dominated’ (2010: 33). Foucault

would later refine his analysis of power into biopolitics (2003 & 2008), gesturing both

to the dispersal and effacement of the traditional coordinates of power in liberalism

and its internalisation, in fact moving closer to Baudrillard’s assessment in Forget

Foucault (see Noys 2012). Within this context of a control society, biopolitics are

modes of governance, or governmentality, that normalise and regulate, rather than

discipline. They ‘establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of

homeostasis, and compensate for variations within [a] general population’ (Foucault

2003: 246). The question is, then, how does the work of the negative function within




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this amorphous power structure in light of what I have called repressive participation,

and what Zizek critiques as the anti-utopian politics of liberalism (2004 & 2010)?

Biopolitical thinkers Hardt and Negri advocate desertion, rather than sabotage, a

deterritorialising nomadism (clearly inspired by Deleuze) when faced with forces of

oppression so dispersed that one cannot even identify a common enemy, so that

‘desertion and exodus are powerful forms of class struggle within and against

imperial postmodernity’ (2001: 213).

This is the strategy adopted in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Truffaut’s film

adaptation. Here the wall-to-wall circuit functions much like the Orwellian telescreen.

But in ways different from Nineteen Eighty-Four, it has become domesticated rather

than institutionalised. It is the highest ambition to have all four walls in one’s living

room converted into screens: ‘why it’d be just like this room wasn’t ours at all, but all

kinds of exotic people’s rooms’ (28). The central narrative of the novel is familiar to

the totalitarian topos in which books are outlawed and burned upon discovery (often

with their possessors) and people as addicted to sleeping pills as to television. As

dystopic as this might seem, this society was in fact willed into existence by the

public, rather than the product of an hierarchical, disciplinary power structure.

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IV. Tolerating Utopia

[C]onsensus as the degree zero of democracy... the New World Order willbe both consensual and televisual (Baudrillard 1995: 85).

Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 has been the subject of various interpretations. The

burning of books is obviously redolent of Nazi Germany, but the prevailing opinion is

that it is a response to censorship in general, and to McCarthyism in America. In a

2007 interview, Bradbury maintained that the central theme of the book is a waning

interest in literature due to television (Johnston 2007). Were we to leave things at

that we would have a superficial, nostalgic and bibliophilic understanding, rather than

a socio-critical one. Unfortunately, as we shall see, it is hard to fault Bradbury’s self-

assessment, given the ending of the novel. There is certainly an inherent critique of

censorship, but it is a particularly ironic one that, at the very least, satirises political

correctness. However, I will argue for a more contemporary reading that, with

reference to biopolitical control societies, takes these two texts as satires of the

tolerance characteristic of postpolitical liberalism.

This is the fundamental departure from the disciplinary dystopia advanced in




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Nineteen Eighty-Four: in Fahrenheit 451, ‘the culprit... is not the state -- it’s the

people. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, in which the government uses television screens to

indoctrinate citizens’ (Johnston 2007), this is not so in the society Bradbury depicts.

Rather, it was in the pursuit of democracy, equality, and tolerance that the need to

burn books arose: ‘It didn’t come from the government down. There was no dictum,

no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation and

minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay

happy all the time’ (65). On the one hand, Bradbury’s bibliophilia is alleviated by a

satirising of liberal humanism: ‘We must all be alike’, says Beatty, ‘Not everyone

born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man

the image of every other; then all are happy’ (65). Each individual must have the

symbolic recognition and specificity of their own identity, each a political category in

its own right, so much so that it becomes vulnerable at the level of representation:

‘Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel

good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it’ (66). The point is put more forcefully by the

Captain of the Firemen (Cyril Cusack) in Truffaut’s adaptation:

Robinson Crusoe, the negros didn’t like that because of his Man Friday;and Nietzsche, ah, Nietzsche, the Jews didn’t like Nietzsche. Here’s a book




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about lung cancer: all the cigarette smokers got into a panic, so foreveryone’s peace of mind we burn it... It’s no good, Montag. We’ve all got tobe alike. They only way for everyone to be happy is for everyone to be madeequal, so we must burn the books, Montag, all the books [he holds up acopy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf].

But does Fahrenheit 451 offer us a view of the masses, and how are they

understood in a post-disciplinary control society? Each individual is raised to the

highest power, so much so that there is an ironic reversion into social massification.

And this was Baudrillard’s crucial insight: ‘It feels so good to disappear among the

masses! ...A dream opportunity for the individual to disappear and yet still be able to

lament his alienation and his lost subjectivity. Isn’t that just what the masses were

invented for? Because we did invent them’ (2003: 57). These are not Raymond

Williams’s masses, who famously said that ‘there are in fact no masses, there are

only ways of seeing people as masses’ (1963: 289). ‘It needs to be said’, he wrote

of Orwell, ‘however bitterly, that if the tyranny of 1984 ever finally comes, one of the

major elements of the ideological preparation will have been just this way of seeing

“the masses”’ (1984/2010: 61). Rather, the masses afford the individual symbolic

alienation, a method of retreating into the social whilst simultaneously preserving and

affirming one’s individuality.




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Hardt and Negri’s counter-concept to the masses is the multitude, an ambiguous

concept (although no less than the masses) grounded in the rhetoric of Foucauldian

biopolitics and Deleuzian micro-politics: ‘The multitude is a multiplicity of all...

singular differences’ (2004: xiv). In order to critique it, Hardt and Negri retain the

classic socio-critical conception of the masses as sublimated and homogenised by

alienation: ‘one should not say that different social subjects make up the masses.

The essence of the masses is indifference: all differences are submerged and

drowned in the masses’ (2004: xv). The multitude, however, as it finds itself within the

control society, is able to harness the power of the diversification of subjectivity and

social mobility that a control society both promotes and relies -- an affirmation of the

micro-politics of Deleuze and Gauttari’s Anti-Oedipus (2009). ‘Insofar as the

multitude in neither an identity (like the people) nor uniform (like that masses)’, Hardt

and Negri write, ‘the integral differences of the multitude must discover the common

that allows them to communicate and act together’ (Hardt & Negri 2004: xv). In short,

because the multitude is required to participate more and more in society (as

opposed to being disciplined or sublimated), they are afforded an agency

unavailable to the masses . But it is clear in Fahrenheit 451 that the multitude has4




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had its moment with the establishment of an equitable society united by tolerance; a

‘democratic nihilism’ and ‘virtual glory of everyone in terms of the absence of merit

itself’, Baudrillard writes of reality TV in Telemorphosis, which is apt here: ‘On one

hand, it is the end of democracy, by the extinction of any qualification or merit

whatsoever, but on the other hand, it is the result of an even more radical democracy

on the basis of the beatification of the man without qualities’ (2011: 26).

Kellner writes that ‘[d]efenders... see television as promoting a democratic,

egalitarian, populist culture; critics argue that it is creating a vast cultural wasteland...

as promoting ideological domination and manipulation of the masses by dominant

social groups and forces (1990: 2). But in a control society such as Fahrenheit 451,

this becomes a false distinction, since both are simultaneously true. Does this make

both the novel and film anti-utopias rather than dystopias? On the one hand, they

satirise the fundamental utopian impulses -- equality, tolerance, freedom from

persecutiom -- by taking them to ludic extremes, so that the result is an inversive

utopia rather than dystopia. Politics becomes so sanitised and accommodating that

the result is a totalitarian democracy that satirises the individualistic, liberal politics

of tolerance that strives for utopian ideals at the expense of the real (for Baudrillard




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and Zizek) and for the social totality (for Jameson):

We should abandon the democratic illusion of imagination or intelligence inpower... The naive utopias of the 1960s must be revised: “Imagination inPower!” -- “Take your dreams for reality!” -- “No limits to pleasure!” All ofthese slogans were realised (or hyperrealised) in the development of thesystem. (Baudrillard 2010: 46-47)

Zizek and Baudrillard make similar points here. In a tolerant, liberal society, Zizek

observes that ‘[e]verything is permitted, you can enjoy everything, but deprived of the

substance that makes it dangerous’; a ‘revolution without revolution’ (2004: 507) that

accurately summarises the ending to Fahrenheit 451.

In this sense, utopia, anti-utopia and dystopia exist on a Mobius strip, where to

achieve utopia is to exhaust it so much so that it implodes into one of opposites. The

unavoidable conclusion is that it is not a critique of censorship, despite this being a

common interpretation, and the obvious parallel between the book burning as a

general leitmotif for totalitarianism is thoroughly misleading. Rather, Fahrenheit 451

is a critique of pure tolerance: the Firemen burn books to maintain a social and

political equilibrium founded upon the upholding of social and racial differences, and

anti-intellectualism in the guise of a progressive social program. It is, in fact, what




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Marcuse called “repressive tolerance":

the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, themisinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides alongwith education, truth with falsehood. This pure toleration of sense andnonsense is justified by the democratic argument that nobody, neither groupnor individual, is in possession of the truth and capable of defining what isright and wrong, good and bad (1969: 108).

As in Orwell, this too is a story about the impoverishment of language and

interpersonal communication, but its topography is that of the suburb. The death of

the protagonist, Montag, is faked in a live telescreen broadcast, and the novel

concludes with him adopting a pastoral fantasy with other societal drop-out

bibliophiles, each abandoning their name for the title of a book and committing it to

memory for future posterity. It is a mawkish and coddling note on which to end what

is, with this exception, a critique of contemporary repressive participation and

internalised surveillance that renders superfluous Big Brother who, after all, might not

exist even in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Unfortunately, Truffaut retained this ending in his film adaptation, with its maudlin

musical score and nomadic bibliophiles -- the very same ‘mindless good taste’ said




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to be in the outlawed books . There is some irony in a film adaptation of Bradbury’s

hostile critique of technology, since it is one that is also critical of the process of

adaptation. Captain Beatty describes (in an almost Baudrillardian fashion) the

enthusiastic dumbing down of art and politics:

Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter.Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, thesnap ending [...] Classics cut to fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again tofill a two-minute book column [...] Do you see? Out of the nursery intocollege and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the pastfive centuries or more [...] Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline!Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! (61-62)

Form is as important as content here. Bradbury’s novel is both a negative critique of

technology, and a justification of the ennobling qualities of literature. While the

conclusion is politically unsatisfying, the broad claim is for the posterity of thought

itself, and it suggests that mass visual media are frequently incompatible with this

ambition -- hence, a similitude between the claim the novel makes and its form.

Truffaut brought a New-Wave aesthetic to the film, and the various jump cuts and

superimpositions have a Brechtian alienation effect. While formally self-aware, the

film is in fact much more concerned, at least initially, with television. This is signalled

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in the opening shots: still photographs of television antennae atop suburban homes,

the camera cutting tighter each time so that they dominate the screen. Indeed,

effacement and proximity -- the truth being obscured by looking too closely -- is one

of the overriding themes, as bibliophiles stash their forbidden books behind

hollowed out television sets, and Montag’s (Oskar Werner) “death” is, as in the novel,

a live televisual event.

The irony is that these formal devices are absorbed by their representation of

television. The public participate in live teleplays, are given lines to read and deliver

to the telescreen in a real-time ‘kitchen family fix’. But, unlike in Nineteen Eighty-

Four, the public here are informed that what they see and take part in is illusory. The

presenter tells them, ‘Naturally, in what you are about to see, any similarity with the

truth or with real life, would be purely coincidental. Do bear that in mind’. But Linda

(Julie Christie), happily ignores this in favour of social inclusion. The bilateralism of

the telescreen (unlike that of Nineteen Eighty-Four) renders useless any distinction

between scopic domination (the seen and the unseen) and between lived social

relations and the illusory televisual representations: ‘the authoritarian repressive

apparatus... wore itself out by forcefully diminishing the contradiction between the




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reality principle and the pleasure principle’ (Baudrillard 2006: 44). Linda gets a line

in a play. She sits before the telescreen, script in hand (as do 200,000 other Lindas,

Montag quips). The play freezes and a flashing light gives her cue, she hesitates and

misses her chance, so the teleplay assumes the consent her line was intended to

provide, and continues without her. It is a type of Pavlovian visual conditioning, and

she gets it right the next time, and the teleplay rewards her: ‘Linda, you’re absolutely

fantastic’. ‘I gave all the right answers!’, she beams. But the more individualism

increases, the more it disappears into the virtual and social opulence of the masses.

But how best to explain this phenomenon?

Voluntary servitude is a paradoxical statement because servitude is notexperienced passively, but actively – after all, it is willed. And anything thatis willed could be unwilled. People rather desire their own oppression.Obviously, the must get something in return: identity, privilege, security, evenpleasure, however perverse (Lotringer 2010: 28) .

While camaraderie had to be enforced by the Ministry of Love in Orwell’s dystopia,

and the Proles are addressed and address each other as “brother” and “sister", in

Truffaut’s film, the telescreen addresses its public as “cousins”. Linda says that

‘when you have your second wall screen it’s like having your family grow out all

around you’. To maintain the social equilibrium Linda eventually betrays her book-

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around you’. To maintain the social equilibrium Linda eventually betrays her book-

reading husband to the Firemen in favour of her virtual television family.

The utopian principles of tolerance and equality here intersect with what Zizek calls

our current ‘postpolitical liberal-permissive society’, in which the ‘celebration of

“minorities” and “marginal” is the predominant majority position’ (2010: 49), and one

that masks new forms of biopolitical domination: ‘There are two topics that

determine today’s liberal tolerant attitude toward Others: the respect of Otherness,

openness towards it, and the obsessive fear of harassment – in short, the Other is

okay insofar as its presence is not intrusive... This is emerging as the central “human

right” ...the right not to be harassed, to be kept at a safe distance from others’ (Zizek

2004: 508). Fahrenheit 451 calls into question the dialectic between identity and

otherness, and ultimately satirises it, for what one gains from this dialectic is,

ultimately, freedom from and protection against politics. Everyone must be free from

persecution, free from harassment and criticism, so that all that remains are

sanitised, ultimately narcissistic, individuals, indistinguishable from one another.

Tolerance is actively policed , enforced even, and perceived intolerance is

expunged. The teleplays and parlour families are the end point of this willed social

engineering, not descended from a despotic, disciplinary regime, but arising from




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the masses themselves, always a stronger force than the media itself. Here the anti-

drama of identity and difference is played out for all to see and take part.

And this is what makes the dystopian model advanced in Nineteen Eighty-Four the

most enduring: as outside observers, domination is more bearable and piteous than

complicity, for those who are complicit are bereft of alienation, and everyone is an

accomplice. This again was Baudrillard’s reformulation of the masses as an

implosive phenomenon, not a projection as they were for Williams, but a refuge.

While Williams was charitable in his objections, Baudrillard’s observation mirror the

very ambivalence of the masses: those who actually prefer media to messages: ‘you

cannot say the masses are dupes, because there is no manipulation, no objective

exploitation. It is more of a fundamental in the sense that everyone is to be finally

integrated into the circuit’ (2005: 68).

Tom Whalen praises the film’s ending, and writes that ‘Linda wishes only to belong,

not to be alone, and the only way to belong is to conform... How much of her

vacuousness is she responsible for?’ (2007: 183). The public increasingly trade

reality for social inclusion (dissenters are easily identified because their houses are




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free of television antennae) and the ambivalence of repressive participation by

means of television is reflected in changes made in the adaptation: in the novel,

Montag’s wife, Mildred, is addicted to sedatives, but in the film, Linda overdoses on

a mixture of stimulants and sedatives, much like the telecreen which both vitalises

and decerebrates, and Montag must read his stolen books by the light of the

telescreen.

The question remains: how best to locate Fahrenheit 451 within the dystopian

topoi? After all, for Deleuze and Guattari, utopia is ‘absolute deterritorialisation’

(1994: 100), and in both the novel and the film, the nomadic book people anticipate

a time when their knowledge will once again be called on. For Jameson, utopias

inevitably fail, indeed they fail by necessity, but he nevertheless insists that it is a

mapping of a totalising principle. Lauren Hayhurst reaches a different conclusion:

‘Utopia cannot be considered to exist only on a large scale; indeed, it can be argued

that on a large scale it can never exist. Utopia, is only possible on a local level.

Large-scale utopia requires the use of dystopian methods because utopia is

different for everyone’ (2010: 61). But does this concession not resign utopia to a

micro-politics that mirrors the liberal “utopia” Zizek criticises? Moreover, it is hard to

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reconcile bibliophilia with the ultimately dissatisfying flight from power. Thus, it might

be more worthwhile to disregard the ending, and focus on the inversive utopia; not

because it satirises the utopian impulse per se, for this is, for Moylan, one of the

more injurious effects of dystopian narrative, ‘all too easily been recruited into the

ideological attack of authentic utopian expression: ...a sign of the very failure of

utopia and consequently urge uneasy readers to settle for what is and cease their

frustrating dreams of a better life’ (1986: 9). But the inversive utopia signals not

entirely the foreclosure of the utopian impulse, but rather, by way of Baudrillardian

provocation, and by testing the limitations of liberal tolerance, highlights the coopting

of the utopian impulse that exists on a continuum between utopia and dystopia.

Sean McQueen is a PhD candidate in the School of Comparative Literature andCultural Studies at Monash University, Australia. His work is published in ScienceFiction Film and Television, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Colloquy:text theory critique, and an article in Science Fiction Studies is forthcoming in 2014.

References

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Jean Baudrillard (1981/1994) Simulacra and Simulation, Trans. Sheila Faria




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Glaser, Ann Arbour, University of Michigan Press.

Jean Baudrillard (1983) In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities ... or the End of theSocial and Other Essays, Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton & John Johnston, NewYork, Semiotext(e).

Jean Baudrillard (1986/2010) America. Trans. Chris Turner, London, Verso.

Jean Baudrillard (1987/2003) Cool Memories, Trans. Chris Turner, London, Verso.

Jean Baudrillard (1990/2008a) Fatal Strategies, Trans. Philippe Beitchman andW.G.J. Niesluchowski, Los Angeles, Semiotext(e).

Jean Baudrillard (1991/1995) The Gulf War did not take place, Trans. Paul Patton,Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Jean Baudrillard (2005) The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays,Trans. Ames Hodges, New York, Semiotext(e).

Jean Baudrillard (2006) Utopia Deferred: Writings for Utopie (1967-1978), NewYork, Semiotext(e).

Jean Baudrillard (2007/2010) The Agony of Power, Trans. Ames Hodges, LosAngeles, Semiotext(e).

Jean Baudrillard (2008b) “The Violence of Images, Violence Against the Image”artUS 23, pp. 38-45.

Jean Baudrillard (2011) Telemorphosis, Trans. Drew S. Burk, Minneapolis,




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Univocal.

Ray Bradbury (1953/2004) Fahrenheit 451, London, Voyager.

Malane Busk (2001) “Micropolitics: A Political Philosophy from Marx and Beyond” inPatricia Pisters (ed.) Micropolitics of Media Culture: reading the Rhizomes ofDeleuze and Guattari, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, pp. 103-123.

Gilles Deleuze (1992) “Postscript on the Societies of Control” October 59, pp. 3-7.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1972/2009) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism andSchizophrenia, Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, New York,Penguin.

(1987/2004) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophreniz, Trans. BrianMassumi, New York, Continuum.

(1994) What is Philosophy ? Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, London,Verso.

Michel Foucault (1975/1995) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Trans.Alan Sheridan, New York, Vintage Books.

Michel Foucault (2003) Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College deFrance 1975-1976, New York, Picador.

Michel Foucault (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France1978-1979, Trans. Graham Burchell, New York, Picador.




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Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000/2001) Empire, Cambridge, HarvardUniversity Press.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004/2005) Multitude: War and Democracy inthe Age of Empire, New York, Penguin.

Nicholas Harrison (2001) “Readers as Resistants: Fahrenheit 451, Censorship, andIdentification” Studies in French Cinema 1:1: 54-61.

Lauren Hayhurst (2010) “Fictional Futures vs Historical Reflections: How UtopianIdeals can lead to Dystopian Results” Foundation 109, pp. 53-64.

Denis Hollier (1996) “Fahrenheit 451 Below” Art and Architecture 16:1,unpaginated.

Fredric Jameson (2005/2007) Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire CalledUtopia and Other Science Fictions, London, Verso.

Amy E. Boyle Johnston (2007) “Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted” LaWeekly, 30 May, http://www.laweekly.com/2007-05-31/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted/

Douglas Kellner (1988) “Postmodernism as Social Theory: Some Challenges andProblems” Theory, Culture & Society 5:2, pp. 239-269.

Douglans Kelner (1990) Television and the Crisis of Democracy, Oxford, WestviewPress.

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between the modern and the postmodern, London, Routledge.

Sylvere Lotringer (2003) “Better Than Life: My ‘80s” Artforum International 41:8, pp.194-197; 252-253.

Sylvere Lotringer (2007/2010) “Introduction: Domination and Servitude”, pp. 7-29 inJean Baudrillard The Agony of Power, Trans. Ames Hodges, Los Angeles,Semiotext(e).

Herbert Marcuse (1969) “Repressive Tolerance” in Robert Paul Wolff, BarringtonMoore Jr., Herbert Marcuse Critique of Pure Tolerance, London, Jonathan Cape,pp. 93-138.

Andrew Milner (2012) Locating Science Fiction, Liverpool, Liverpool UniversityPress.

Tom Moylan (1986) Demand the Impossible: Science fiction and the utopianimagination, New York, Methuen.

Tom Moylan (2000) Scraps of the Untainted Sky: science fiction, utopia, dystopia,Boulder, Westview Press.

Benjamin Noys (2012) “Forget Neoliberlaism? Baudrillard, Foucault, and the Fate ofPolitical Critique” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 9:3, unpaginated.

George Orwell (1949/1989) Nineteen Eighty-Four, Middlesex, Penguin.

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Film, London, Kegan Paul

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Slavoj Zizek (2004) “From Politics to Biopolitics…and Back” South AtlanticQuarterly 103:2-3, pp. 501-521.

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Endnotes

1. I use the term inversive in the sense that Baudrillard uses it to describe the ‘moresocial than social’ masses: ‘a social that has absorbed all the inverse energies ofthe antisocial, of inertia, resistance and silence’ (2008a: 29).

2. Control societies are characterised by this ambivalence, so that Malane Busk




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writes: ‘Of course, this marks a liberation from the disciplinary repression and theclaustrophobia of successive closures, but at the same time it takes away thepossibilities of the small undisciplined (and somewhat subversive) “free spaces” inbetween two institutional compartments or in the breaking out from them... Todayone can hardly leave anymore, only fall through the net’ (2001: 105).

3. Denis Hollier wrties that ‘Bradbury encapsulates Nazi cultural politics in a singleimage: book burnings’ (1996).

4. It is the simultaneously nomadic and socially integrated properties of Hardt andNegri’s multitude that Zizek criticises: ‘The fashionable notion of “multitude” isinsufficient precisely insofar as it cuts across this divide [of included and excluded]:there is a multitude within the system and the multitude of those excluded, and tosimply encompass them within the scope of the same notion amounts to the sameobscenity as equating starvation with dieting’ (2004: 514).

5. Nicholas Harrison, by contrast, considers the book people’s ‘radical dissent’politically courageous, because they are ‘beyond the bounds of society, through thevery act of reading’ (2001: 56-57).

6. Deleuze and Guattari framed this question differently in terms of desire: ‘Whydoes desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? The massescertainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they “want” to be repressed, in akind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they tricked by an ideological lure’ (2004: 236-237).

7. Jameson considers this the more general nature of science fiction: that it ‘succeed[s] by failure’ by ‘bring[ing] home, in local and determinate ways and the afullness of concrete detail, our constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself: and this




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is, not owing to any individual failure of imagination but as the result of the systemic,cultural and ideological closure of which we are in all one way or another prisoners’(2007: 289).

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