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Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Human Rights and Media

Human Rights and Media

Anil Pinto

Dept of Media Studies, Christ College (Autonomous), Bangalore

Media has been entrusted with the responsibility of guarding the rights of the people in a democratic political system. This points towards the pivotal role that media can play in ensuring that the people who make a political system enjoy its positive outcome. However, it is important to come out of the visionary discourse of media and critically look at its role and function in our present socio-political context.

This paper tries to focus on three issues: role of media in protecting and promoting human rights, media as the cause for violation of human rights, and lastly, media as the mediator in rethinking human rights. The paper will also attempt to problematise the existing discourse of human rights and media. The word ‘media’ in this paper refers largely to mainstream media.

Media as the promoter of human rights in India

Since media are the eyes and ears of any democratic society, their existence becomes detrimental to the sustenance of all democratic societies. Unless a society knows what is happening to it and its members, the question of protecting or promoting rights does not emerge. Hence, it is in fulfilling this function that media justifies its existence.

No doubt in India, media especially the print, has played an important role in educating and informing citizens of their rights as well as the violations of such rights. One cannot forget that the origin of newspapers in India itself lay in challenging the denial of rights. Hicky’s Bengal Gazette was begun in 1780 to challenge the autocratic rule of the East India Company. Of course, James Augustus Hicky paid dearly for fighting for the rights and against their violations. In South India, The Hindu, we are given to understand, constantly attracted the wrath of the then British government, because it drew attention of the readers to the gross violation of people’s dignity and rights. In the post – independence India too the newspapers have constantly attracted the anger of and harassment by the governments for trying to take the truth to the people. Significant section of the national press has dared to oppose events that have changed the course of history in India – Emergency, Babri Masjid demolition, murder of Graham Steins and his children, the Godhra carnage, and recently Nandigram.

However, one cannot forget that for much of the press, the rights of the dalits, women, rural poor, urban poor, and workers in the unorganised sector increasingly remained outside the purview of human rights. Further, only the human rights violations by the state against the middle class became violations of human rights for media.

Media as promoter of human rights violations

Although it sounds paradoxical, it is true that contemporary media driven by numbers is increasingly becoming a cause for violations of human rights. Media is not only a witness but also a promoter of violence. The then India Today reporter Shyam Tekwani involved in covering Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) operations in Sri Lanka took photographs of the Indian soldiers captured and killed by the LTTE only to realise they used to mutilate the bodies because he would click the photographs. During the 1992 riots, ‘mobs’ burnt more houses and other building in order to create spectacle for the photographers. The Taliban in Afghanistan has also gone on to burn the dead bodies and mutilate them in order to get better publicity through the so called foreign journalists. A lot of child welfare NGOs in India have spoken about how European and American documentary film makers have subjected street children to inhuman conditions to get better visual impact.

Communally insensitive reporting in the name of truth has not only claimed a number of innocent human lives, but also created and perpetuated numerous stereotypes.

The way media harassed and treated Sabeel’s pregnant wife in Bangalore calls for serious reconsideration of media as fourth estate.

The above instances demand a close and serious questioning of numerous media practices which violate or cause human rights violations.

Rethinking human rights and the role of media

Contrary to the belief that human rights are an uncontested terrain, there is a vibrant history of challenging them. The questioning has been there right from the time of the conception of human rights to the post-globalised world. The momentum perhaps built up with signing of trade related treaties by the ‘developing and third word countries’ which expedited the process of globalisation and the emergence of postnational societies.

The most important critique of human rights has been, what Upendra Baxi calls, ‘authorship,’ in other words human rights have been seen as ‘the gift of the West to the rest’. He says that the while such a metanarrative has disabled ‘any intercultural, multi-civilisational discourse on the genealogy of human rights, it has also imparted ‘a loss of reflexivity in the terms of intercultural learning, for the Euro American traditions (Baxi, 2002).

Post-GATT, many thinkers see human rights as the strategy of neo-colonialism to further the economic and political interests of the ‘first’ world countries. As Susan Kosy argues “Neocolonial strategies of power are increasingly articulated … through a new universalist ethics of human rights, labor standards, environmental standards, and intellectual property rights (Koshy, 1999).”

While such claims are valid one needs to pay attention to the politics of claims which have significant consequences in the modern-day postcolonial societies. I wish to draw attention to only three such issues.

First, there are conceptual problems in the ‘authorship’ metanarrative. Such a conceptualisation denies the historical experience to a society and does not acknowledge that the present is transformed and acted upon by modernity, thereby proposing a sanitised and linear culture, denying the plurality of culture and societies. By so doing, such claims also land them into the same trap of non-self-reflexivity that they accuse the West of. Through such claims there is also a greater danger of hampering inter-cultural learning for a culture. The claim also does not take into account the fact that with the eleventh hour exit by the US from being a part of shaping UDHR, the UDHR became socialist in its outlook, incorporating many a concern of the third world nations.

Second, it is important to see who is articulating such claims. In the last two decades one notices that such claims have been increasingly voiced by Hindutva organisations in India, and dictatorial regimes in the neighbouring countries in Asia and Africa which have a record of human rights violations themselves. Baxi says, “the originary stories about human rights equip dictatorial regimes in the Third World to deny wholesale, and in retail, even the most minimal protection from human rights violations and serves such regimes with an atrocious impunity of power (Baxi, 2002). In India such claims hide the pre- and post - independent nationalist politics of creating a homogenous Hindu identity, at the cost numerous communities and cultures within the subcontinent. This also masks the larger political equation that Nandi and many other scholars have pointed out of -Indian =Hindu = upper caste male Hindu.

Third, human rights discourse emerges in the mid-twentieth century in the background of the experience of the two World Wars, the fear of nation-states exploiting their subjects. However, with globalisation multinational corporations becoming more powerful than nation-states, shouldn’t there be a serious rethinking of human rights? If one has a look at the instances of protest against violations of human rights in India, they have largely been against the violations of human rights by the state. However, there is hardly any protest against the violation of human rights by the MNCs, who are mostly invisible in our imagination of human rights violations.

It is in this context that I propose for the media a newer role. Media needs to develop a critique of existing frameworks human rights, and develop a plural and more nuanced discourse of human rights in the public domain.

Rethinking media

Media has largely become mass information rather than mass communication. Media needs to communicate with the governments, NGOs, human rights activists and the public the critical discourse of human rights and the violations. May be a paradigm shift is required to look at media communication as community interaction rather than mass communication. Such a shift would then justify the sacred role that media has been called upon to play. If the media does not take up the role of enabling protection of human rights of the citizens, then it would become an accomplice to the violation of human rights.

However, since media cannot be completely trusted, thanks to the changes brought about by the economic and political developments, especially post liberalisation, we need to strengthen advocacy groups, citizen groups and media watch groups.

Due to various historical reasons our imagination of media has largely been dominated by print media. With print media increasingly losing its foothold in forming public opinion, there is a pressing need to look at recent developments in new media, especially the cyberspace, and mobile phone convergence and the consequent possibilities, to engage with discourses of human rights through these media.

Media is increasingly getting concentrated in the hands of a few. While such a concentration will reduce media spaces for plural voices, they also make such voices look non-significant. With media becoming and industry, and profits becoming a priority, audience, who are increasingly referred to as ‘eyeballs,’ become merely numbers to determine the amount of advertisement revenue that will flow into the organisation.

While media has played a significant role in the promoting the cause of human rights in India, it has largely been by the print medium. There is an increasing need for the various other media which have emerged post-independence to also engage with the discourse of human rights. This calls for a departure from our own obsession with print medium as the medium, with marginal inclusion of news-based television channels. There is also a critical need to engage with and problematise the present binary discourse of human rights as well as the conception of mass media. An inquiry and experimentation with alternative ownership and communication patterns of media are also the need of the hour.

Reference

Baxi, Upendra. “Two Notions of Human Rights: ‘Modern’ and ‘Contemporary’” in The Future of Human Rights. New Delhi: OUP, 2002. 24-27

Koshy, Susan. “From Cold War to Trade War: Neocolonialism and Human Rights” in Social Text No 58 (Spring, 1999) Duke University Press. 1-5

Monday, January 21, 2008

How to upload your assignments to /www.turnitin.com/

1. Go to /http://www.turnitin.com/
2. Click on New Users button on the left hand top corner of the page.
3. Select the option Student and click Next
4. Enter your respective class id and password which is given in the blog post below and click Next
5. Enter your email address which you normally use and click Next
6. Enter a password for your turnitin account. Re-enter it and click Next
7. Select your Secret Question. Write an Answer to the question.
8. Enter your First Name and Last Name
9. Click on I Agree – Create Profile
10. Click on End Wizard and Login, if you do not want a demo
11. Click on your respective class
12. Click on the submit icon
13. Enter your First Name, Last Name, and Submission Paper Title and click on the Browse button to upload the file. After uploading click Submit.
14. Check your write up and if it is ok, click on Yes, submit. If not click No, go back
15. Copy your submission id. A digital copy of it will also be sent to your regular email account.
16. Click Logout

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Turnitin Assignment Submissions

website to upload your assignments is http://www.turnitin.com

Logins and Passwords
I year FEP: class id: 2153237
password: fepied

I year BA Additional English- class id: 2153254
Password: addenged

III BA Cultural Studies- Class id : 2153257
Password : autonomied.

for clarification you may approach your respective classreps or email me.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Panel discussion on Post-globalisation Media Scene in India

Date: 15 Jan 2008
Time: 10 am to -12.30 pm
Duration: Two and a half hours
Venue: 802, Auditorium Block, Christ College
Participants: Communication Students of Santa Barbara College, California and
Christ College, Bangalore

The panel discussion will have presenters on print, film and television, and radio addressing the post-globalising developments in these media and their consequent impact on the socio-political and cultural imagination of and context in India. Each presenter makes presentations for 20 minutes. There will be two interactive sessions.

Schedule
Introduction : Dr William da Silva (5-10 min)
Print : John Thomas (15 min)
Film and television : Prakash Belawadi (20 min)
Internet : Nishant Shah (20 min)
Discussion (20 min)
Break (10 min)
Postglobalisation and media : Dr William da Silva (20 min)
Overall discussion (30 min)
Conclusion : Dr William da Silva (5-10 min)

Chairperson
Dr William Da Sliva, /wrdsilva at gmail.com/ has taught at Christ College; Universities of Mangalore, Goa and Manipal, India; Universities of Hamburg, and Osnabruck, Germany. He has written and translated over 24 books. Currently the Director of Sandesha Bharati, School of Communication and Konkani Studies, Mangalore. His translation of the Bible from original tongues into Konkani has won the best Bible Translation Award.

Speakers/discussants
John Thomas /john.thomas at christcollege.edu/ is a Professor of Journalism at Christ College, Bangalore. Formerly, Dean, Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media, Bangalore, and Editor (operations) of Vijaya Times. Has worked form major Indian Newpapers and Reuters.

Prakash Belawadi /prakashbelawadi at yahoo.com/ is a journalist, writer, stage & TV director and filmmaker. Presently also the director of the Centre for Film and Drama, Bangalore . His film Stumble won the National award for the best feature film in English in 2003.

Nishant Shah /itsnishant at gmail.com/ is researcher on cyberculture at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore. He has worked as a cybercultural consultant for multinational companies and as an information architect for academic and political organisations in India. He is an expert on Asian Cybercultures.

Anil Pinto
Coordinator

Thursday, January 10, 2008

On pedagogy and knowing - Responses to BA II sem Additional English students

I found the discussion that was perhaps fuelled by my remarks about combinations interesting and useful. I must thank all those who contributed to it.

In order not to take the classroom time for clarification from my side and also since we have limited number of hours, I wish to engage with the discussion and questions here.

For me, the debate has thrown up a lot of curious questions on the purpose of English, the purpose of Additional English, pedagogic practices, nature of learning and classroom dynamics.

Let me take up one by one.

What is the objective or purpose of Additional English as a subject? At one level it replaces the so called ‘second’ language – for those who cannot or do not want to take up Kannada, Hindi, French or Tamil. In such a case, the paper fulfils merely the structural requirement. If we accept that as given, then the next question is what is the objective of additional English? The only source for the ‘official’ version is the Book of Syllabus. The objectives as laid down in that book are:
1. To introduce the students to contemporary literature
2. To inculcate literary sensibility/taste among students across curriculum
3. To improve language skills both verbal and written
4. To make students read the text critically (Page 34)

The objectives of the II Semester are “To read the text critically; To be aware of the socio-political and cultural aspects of the text; To enable the students to compare and contrast the different cultures.” (Page 36)

I see that the objectives of the course and the paper clearly indicate that the texts are only contextual to discuss other things and to build the language skills of the students. To that extent my three-hour lectures on notions of text and texualities, growth and development of theatre, student presentation and discussion on travelling, on tense, articles, and alphabet, pronunciation are very much in line with the course and paper expectations.

I use a text to bring out the subtexts in the given text by locating it in contexts. From there I try to introduce and challenge the literary, linguistic and critical abilities of the students. It is important for me that I do not prepare you for exams but take you beyond them. The exam needs are taken care of in the process.

I ask questions, problematise the given answers, delay my own answers so that I can inculcate a sense of questioning in them. It is also an attempt to help students to take charge of their learning rather than looking up to teacher as the repository of all knowledge and learning. Towards this end, I use numerous and subtle techniques. Most importantly, I constantly experiment.

There is always a scope to ask questions. I have tried various ways to make you ask questions, and respond, mostly in vain. But I am not disappointed. Since one is trying these things in a system/structure that has different covert demands, it is an uphill task, and one has to do it because one believes in it, and not because one wants to change the world, or one is hopeful of seeing any significant changes or one is going to be recognised or appreciated for it.

With these clarifications let me assure you that should there be any clarification required you are free to seek it any point of time in the class.

However, I have some expectations from the students’ side. Since you know the syllabus and have all the prescribed texts with you, do come to class having read them. In this semester I have not seen it happening. But do it at least in the rest of the semester. When you read please take the help of a dictionary to find out the meanings of words. Despite that if the meanings are not clear do ask me in the class. However, although I welcome questions, if the student does not do the basic required coursework then it does not speak well of that student.

As far as possible raise your questions in the classroom so that they benefit all your classmates.

If you have any suggestions to me or expectations from my side please email them to me or post them in my blog. I will be quite open to look at them.

This apart, the discussion was interesting because it made me look at more closely the questions like what is learning? What is knowing? What is to understand? How does one know that he/she has understood or learnt or knows something? How are learning, knowing constructed for us? Do we have one construction of it or we keep participating in multiple constructions?

Such moments, as the one I encountered in the last class, make me reflect on my own pedagogic and academic practices. I am grateful to you for that as well.

I wish to see your responses to what I have said above and to the discussion we had in the classroom. So email on … or comment on ....

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

II Semester BA Additional English - CIA 3

Write a critical analysis of a poem, short story, novel, anthology, play, critical essay, or biography (any one) published not earlier than July 1, 2007. The analysis may be linguistic, literary, semiotic or interdisciplinary. The text has to be in English. If you are analyzing a poem, please submit it along with your assignment. In other cases please keep the book/text ready. I may ask for it, if required.

The write up should be typed in not less than 500 words and printed on A4 size paper with one and a half line space and 12 font size. You may use anyone of the following fonts only: Times New Roman, Garamand, Book Antiqua.

Please write your name, registered number, class, subject, teacher-in-charge on the right hand top corner of the first page. Please do not attach a cover sheet.

The non-extendable date to submit your assignment is 20 January 2008. You may however submit before the last date. In order to avoid confusion please send your assignment through your respective class representatives. Class representatives please maintain a list of all those who submit their assignments.

Please avoid plagiarism. If you are using ideas or lines from books or online sources please cite them. To know how to cite please refer to the post on bibliography writing in my blog (http://anilpinto.blogspot.com/2008/01/bibliography-writing.html). You may however use other formats or evolve your own provided there is consistency and is logical.

Late submissions may not be entertained.

Evaluation Criteria :Critical engagement, language, writing skill.

For any clarification email to anil.pinto at christcollege.edu or enter your questions in the comment section of the blog post below.

Anil Pinto
Dept of Media Studies 09 Jan 2008

Bibliography writing

Bibliography

Recording Essential Publication Information
Book
1. Authors full name (last name first)
2. Full title (including subtitle)
3. Edition (if the book is a second or later numbered edition or a revised edition)
4. Number of volume and total number of volumes (if the book is a multivolume work)
5. City/place of publication
6. Shortened form of the publishers name
7. Year of publication
E.g.:
Budden, Julian. The Operas of Verdi. Rev. ed. 3 vols. Oxford: Claredon, 1992.

Article in a scholarly journal
1. Authors full name (last name first)
2. Title of the article (including subtitle)
3. Title of the journal
4. Volume number
5. Year of publication
6. Inclusive page of the article (i.e. the number of the page on which the article begins, a hyphen, and the number of the page on which the article ends)
E.g.:
Frith, Simon. “The Black Box: The Value of Television and the future of Television
Research.” Screen 41 (2000):33-50.

Newspaper or magazine article
1. Authors full name (last name first)
2. Title of the article
3. Title of the periodical
4. Date of publication
5. Inclusive page of the article

Hoover, Eric. “New Attacks on Early Decision.” Chronicle of Higher Education 11 Jan. 2002: A45-46.

Internet resource:
1. Author’s full name
2. Title of the document
3. Full information about any previous or simultaneous publication in print form
4. Title of the scholarly project, database, periodical, or professional or personal site.
5. Name of the editor of the scholarly project or database
6. Date of electronic publication or last update
7. Name of the institution or organization sponsoring or associated with the site
8. Date when you accessed the source
9. Network address, or URL


E.g.:
Bitel, Lisa M. “St . Brigit of Ireland: From Virgin Saint to Fertility Goddess.” Matrix. Ed. Katherine Gill and Bitel. Feb. 2001. Boston Coll. 23 Jan. 2002 .

Single author
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1991.

Edited book
Baker, Mona. ed. The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies. London/ New York: Routledge, 1998.

Two authors
Bassnett, Susan, and Harish Trivedi. eds. Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 1999.

More than three authors
Gilman, Sander, et al. Hysteria beyond Freud. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Two books by the same author
Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. The Age of Voltaire. New York: Simon, 1965.
---. A Dual Autobiography. New York: Simon, 1977.

Work in an anthology
Allende, Isabel. “Toad’s Mouth.” Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. A Hammock beneath the Mangoes: Stories from Latin America. Ed. Thomas Colchie.

Dictionary ref.
“Noon.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989.

Encyclopaedia ref
“Mandarin.” The Encyclopaedia Americana. 1994. ed.

An edition
Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. Ed. Claudia Johnson. New York: Norton, 2001.

Second or subsequent edition
Bonderella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. 3rd ed. New York: Continuum, 2001.

A Film
It’s a Wonderful Life. Dir. Frank Capra. Perf. James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, and Thomas Mitchell.

A Performance
Hamlet. By William Shakespeare. Dir. John Gielgud. Perf. Richard Burton. Shubert Theatre, Boston. 4 Mar. 1964.

Musical composition
Beethoven, Ludwig van. Symphony no. 7 in A, op. 92.
A painting, sculpture or photograph
Rembrandt van Rijn. Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

A cartoon or comic strip
Chast, Roz. Cartoon. New Yorker 4 Feb. 2002:53.

Online source
“Fresco Paintings” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. 2002. Encyclopaedia Britannica. 8 May 2002

CD-ROM
“Ibn Hamdis.” Encyclopaedia of Islam. CD-ROM. Leiden: Brill, 1999.


Endnotes

Notes share the same information with bibliography but in different form with four main divisions: The author’s name in normal order, followed by a comma; the title; the publication data in parentheses; and a page reference. There is a period only at the end. Notes are numbered consecutively.

E.g.:
1. Debora Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (New York: Morrow, 1990) 52.

Note:
1. Bibliography is written in the alphabetical order.
2. I have taken most of the examples and explanations from MLA Handbook, 6th edition. If you have any further doubts you may please consult the book or get back to me.
3. If you find any mistakes, as they are likely to be there since I typed them myself, please inform me via email.

This is one useful thing you will have leant at the College.
If you find it useful even after you are done with this paper or later in life, do drop a line to tell me so. I will be happy.



Anil Pinto
05 October 2007

Monday, January 07, 2008

Certificate Course in Introduction to Cultural Studies

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Certificate Course in Introduction to Cultural Studies

Duration: Jan to early March

First Class on 12 Jan 2008

Time: 2 pm

Venue: Room 109

You can take the course along with other certificate courses

if it does not clash.

For Further information

Contact: Naresh Rao, or Anil Pinto - Dept of Media Studies

Mail to: anil.pinto at christcollege.edu



Details

Introduction to Cultural Studies




General Introduction:

Cultural Studies is an emerging area of research and teaching that brings in new perspectives to the study of culture and society.


Topic titles:

The paper covers ten topics, listed below. Each topic requires the student to log on to the course material and also do the required exercises, which will be discussed during the contact programme. The following are the titles of the lessons. The course begins with the introductory session on 12.01.08.


1. The Concept of Culture 12.01.08 Introduction and Registration – Anup Kumar Dhar and Zainab Bawa


2. Cultural Studies 19.01.08 Ashwin Kumar AP


3. Theorizing Culture 25.0108 Zainab Bawa


4. Orientalism 02.02.08 Nitya Vasudevan


• 5. Uses of History in Contemporary India 09.02.08 Ashwin Kumar AP

5.. Imagining the Nation 15.02.08 Nitya Vasudevan


7. The Identity Question 16.02.08 Zainab Bawa


8. Femininity – Masculinity 22.02.08 Nitya Vasudevan


• 9 .The Country and the City 23.02.08 Nishant Shah

• 10. Legal Identity and Culture 01.03.08 Geetanjali Srikantan



2 Day Workshop on ‘Cultural Studies’ at CSCS on the 8th and the 9th of March (10 am – 6 pm):

Possible Speakers: Tejaswini Niranjana
Vivek Dhareshwar
S. V. Srinivas
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Sitharamam Kakarala
Rochelle Pinto
Prasanta Chakravarty
Sruti Chaganti



Sunday, January 06, 2008

Screen Play writing / Film Analysis Homework / Assignment 1

Hi
As mentioned in the class today when you come on next Sunday please come with the following work done.

1. Pick two favorite films
  • Identify the three acts
  • State protagonists state of mind at the start of the story and state of mind at the end of the story.
Example to get you going - Casablance: A tough American expatriate rediscovers an old flame only to give her up so that he can fight the Nazis.

2. Identify a couple of sequences within a film
  • Describe them
  • Identify character values at start and end (talk about state of mind)

3. Pick a film and identity at least three to four elements of the seven steps form within it.

4. Describe an antagonist (from a film or book) that fascinates you. Explain why.

For any clarification please mail to Darshin Naidu on <darshscript at gmail.com>.

Anil

Monday, December 31, 2007

Cultural Studies Student Presentation

Sejal – Myth Today

Prerna – Introduction: Folk tales of India

Bharat – The postmodern condition

Dhivya – Ideology

Lijoy – Femininity – Masculinity

Aditya – Legal Identity and Culture

Ajay – Imagining the nation

Sudhanva – The Identity question

Amrita – Introduction from CS Reader 3rd edition

Sheena – Encoding – Decoding

Karuna – The metropolis &mental strife

Nivrithinath – Long bus rides

Glenn – Violence and Translation

Manju – Imagining the nation

Divya – Hyper Architecture

Sinto Mon – The face of the future

B Chacko – Everyday Surveillance: ID cards…

Anu – Blind Intelligence

Thomas – Surveillance after Sep 11, 2001

Ignatius F – The back and white (and grey) of copyright

Aivinor - Urban Transformation & Media Piracy

Prashanth – Obscenity decency and morality

Vineet – Screen Culture

Lily – Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Noby - Urban Action Films

Marina S – Introduction: Indian Popular Cinema as Slum’s…

James – Cine-politics: On the political Significance of Cinema …

Sera Kim – Cyberculture

Harina – Postmodern Virtualities

Jeevan – The network society and organizational change

Rahul M – Identity in the Network Society

Rahul Giri – Thinking Cyber Subjectivity: Ideology and the subject

Nelson – The Network Society and Organizational change

J Kiran

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Change in Film Analysis Course dates

The course will begin on 9 December rather than on 2 Dec.

anil

Cultrual Studies Testing pattern and evaluation criteria

Testing Pattern

CIA 2: Research paper proposals (Submission by Dec 8)

CIA 3: Presentation of essays and discussion

Mid Semester Examination: Submission of paper. Should have the first draft, two peer reviewed papers and the final paper (Length: 7-10 pages) At least 40% of the paper (To be submitted by 23 January)

End semester examination: Submission of paper. Should have the first draft, two peer reviewed papers and the final paper (Length: 15-20 pages) At least 40% of the paper (To be submitted by March 12)

The paper should strictly adhere to the standard formats of writing research papers.

Plagiarism will not be tolerated under any circumstance. The student plagiarising will be failed the submission concerned.

Evaluation Criteria:

CIA 2: Understanding of research problem, clarity, structure, language

CIA 3: Understanding of the essays, clarity of presentation, critical reading of the essay

Mid semester: Exploration of the research problem, adherence to research format, originality, language, presentation.

End semester: Exploration of the research problem, adherence to research format, originality, critical insights, language, presentation, extent of research engagement, publishability of the paper is refereed journals.

Extra weight will be given to evaluation if the students manage to publish papers in research journals.


Standard research formats are MLA, APA, Chicago Manual, Harvard. They have specific formats in terms of citation, layout, etc. You need to incorporate them in your writing. You need to follow any one format.

Following links will help you understand it better.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/ (Has guidelines on MLA, Chicago and APA styles - Very good source)

http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html (for Chicago)


http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/training/referencing/harvard.htm (Harvard)
http://www.library.uq.edu.au/training/citation/harvard.html (Harvard)


Should you have any suggestions, please email them to me.


Monday, November 26, 2007

The Prevention of Literature - George Orwell

The Prevention of Literature

1946

About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P.E.N. Club, the occasion being the tercentenary of Milton's Aeropagitica -- a pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defense of freedom of the press. Milton's famous phrase about the sin of "killing" a book was printed on the leaflets advertising the meeting which had been circulated beforehand.

There were four speakers on the platform. One of them delivered a speech which did deal with the freedom of the press, but only in relation to India; another said, hesitantly, and in very general terms, that liberty was a good thing; a third delivered an attack on the laws relating to obscenity in literature. The fourth devoted most of his speech to a defense of the Russian purges. Of the speeches from the body of the hall, some reverted to the question of obscenity and the laws that deal with it, others were simply eulogies of Soviet Russia. Moral liberty -- the liberty to discuss sex questions frankly in print -- seemed to be generally approved, but political liberty was not mentioned. Out of this concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose. Significantly, no speaker quoted from the pamphlet which was ostensibly being commemorated. Nor was there any mention of the various books which have been "killed" in England and the United States during the war. In its net effect the meeting was a demonstration in favor of censorship.

There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. But in struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side; that is, there is no large body of opinion which will assure him that he's in the right. In the past, at any rate throughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic -- political, moral, religious, or aesthetic -- was one who refused to outrage his own conscience. His outlook was summed up in the words of the Revivalist hymn:

Dare to be a Daniel
Dare to stand alone
Dare to have a purpose firm
Dare to make it known

To bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a "Don't" at the beginning of each line. For it is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity. "Daring to stand alone" is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous. The independence of the writer and the artist is eaten away by vague economic forces, and at the same time it is undermined by those who should be its defenders. It is with the second process that I am concerned here.

Freedom of thought and of the press are usually attacked by arguments which are not worth bothering about. Anyone who has experience of lecturing and debating knows them off backwards. Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. Although other aspects of the question are usually in the foreground, the controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers. In saying this I may seem to be saying that straightforward "reportage" is the only branch of literature that matters: but I will try to show later that at every literary level, and probably in every one of the arts, the same issue arises in more or less subtilized forms. Meanwhile, it is necessary to strip away the irrelevancies in which this controversy is usually wrapped up.

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background. Although the point of emphasis may vary, the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, of either wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege. The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. Each of them tacitly claims that "the truth" has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of "the truth" and merely resists it out of selfish motives. In Communist literature the attack on intellectual liberty is usually masked by oratory about "petty-bourgeois individualism," "the illusions of nineteenth-century liberalism," etc., and backed up by words of abuse such as "romantic" and "sentimental," which, since they do not have any agreed meaning, are difficult to answer. In this way the controversy is maneuvered away from its real issue. One can accept, and most enlightened people would accept, the Communist thesis that pure freedom will only exist in a classless society, and that one is most nearly free when one is working to bring such a society about. But slipped in with this is the quite unfounded claim that the Communist Party is itself aiming at the establishment of the classless society, and that in the U.S.S.R. this aim is actually on the way to being realized. If the first claim is allowed to entail the second, there is almost no assault on common sense and common decency that cannot be justified. But meanwhile, the real point has been dodged. Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings. The familiar tirades against "escapism" and "individualism," "romanticism," and so forth, are merely a forensic device, the aim of which is to make the perversion of history seem respectable.

Fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the intellect, one had to defend it against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some extent -- for they were not of great importance in England -- against Fascists. Today one has to defend it against Communists and "fellow-travelers." One ought not to exaggerate the direct influence of the small English Communist Party, but there can be no question about the poisonous effect of the Russian mythos on English intellectual life. Because of it known facts are suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of our times can ever be written. Let me give just one instance out of the hundreds that could be cited. When Germany collapsed, it was found that very large numbers of Soviet Russians -- mostly, no doubt, from non-political motives -- had changed sides and were fighting for the Germans. Also, a small but not negligible portion of the Russian prisoners and displaced persons refused to go back to the U.S.S.R., and some of them, at least, were repatriated against their will. These facts, known to many journalists on the spot, went almost unmentioned in the British press, while at the same time Russophile publicists in England continued to justify the purges and deportations of 1936-38 by claiming that the U.S.S.R. "had no quislings." The fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine, the Spanish civil war, Russian policy in Poland, and so forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but any writer or journalist who is fully sympathetic for the U.S.S.R. -- sympathetic, that is, in the way the Russians themselves would want him to be -- does have to acquiesce in deliberate falsification on important issues. I have before me what must be a very rare pamphlet, written by Maxim Litvinoff in 1918 and outlining the recent events in the Russian Revolution. It makes no mention of Stalin, but gives high praise to Trotsky, and also to Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. What could be the attitude of even the most intellectually scrupulous Communist towards such a pamphlet? At best, the obscurantist attitude of saying that it is an undesirable document and better suppressed. And if for some reason it were decided to issue a garbled version of the pamphlet, denigrating Trotsky and inserting references to Stalin, no Communist who remained faithful to his party could protest. Forgeries almost as gross as this have been committed in recent years. But the significant thing is not that they happen, but that, even when they are known about, they provoke no reaction from the left-wing intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that to tell the truth would be "inopportune" or would "play into the hands of" somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books.

The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary. Among intelligent Communists there is an underground legend to the effect that although the Russian government is obliged now to deal in lying propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth, it is secretly recording the true facts and will publish them at some future time. We can, I believe, be quite certain that this is not the case, because the mentality implied by such an action is that of a liberal historian who believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one's senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at this date, menaced to anything like the same extent. This partly accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind their respective governments.

To keep the matter in perspective, let me repeat what I said at the beginning of this essay: that in England the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all. It may seem that all this time I have been talking about the effects of censorship, not on literature as a whole, but merely on one department of political journalism. Granted that Soviet Russia constitutes a sort of forbidden area in the British press, granted that issues like Poland, the Spanish civil war, the Russo-German pact, and so forth, are debarred from serious discussion, and that if you possess information that conflicts with the prevailing orthodoxy you are expected to either distort it or keep quiet about it -- granted all this, why should literature in the wider sense be affected? Is every writer a politician, and is every book necessarily a work of straightforward "reportage"? Even under the tightest dictatorship, cannot the individual writer remain free inside his own mind and distill or disguise his unorthodox ideas in such a way that the authorities will be too stupid to recognize them? And in any case, if the writer himself is in agreement with the prevailing orthodoxy, why should it have a cramping effect on him? Is not literature, or any of the arts, likeliest to flourish in societies in which there are no major conflicts of opinion and no sharp distinction between the artist and his audience? Does one have to assume that every writer is a rebel, or even that a writer as such is an exceptional person?

Whenever one attempts to defend intellectual liberty against the claims of totalitarianism, one meets with these arguments in one form or another. They are based on a complete misunderstanding of what literature is, and how -- one should perhaps say why -- it comes into being. They assume that a writer is either a mere entertainer or else a venal hack who can switch from one line of propaganda to another as easily as an organ grinder changing tunes. But after all, how is it that books ever come to be written? Above a quite low level, literature is an attempt to influence the viewpoint of one's contemporaries by recording experience. And so far as freedom of expression is concerned, there is not much difference between a mere journalist and the most "unpolitical" imaginative writer. The journalist is unfree, and is conscious of unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him important news; the imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind; he cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his creative faculties will dry up. Nor can he solve the problem by keeping away from controversial topics. There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature, and least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are near to the surface of everyone's consciousness. Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet, at any rate a lyric poet, might possibly find it breathable. And in any totalitarian society that survives for more than a couple of generations, it is probable that prose literature, of the kind that has existed during the past four hundred years, must actually come to an end.

Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always liable to be altered on a moment's notice. Consider, for example, the various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or "fellow-traveler" has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous stew about "the horrors of Nazism" and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned against than sinning, and the word "Nazi," at least as far as print went, had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o'clock news bulletin on the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch. Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in an "age of faith," when the prevailing orthodoxy has long been established and is not taken too seriously. In that case it would be possible, or might be possible, for large areas of one's mind to remain unaffected by what one officially believed. Even so, it is worth noticing that prose literature almost disappeared during the only age of faith that Europe has ever enjoyed. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages there was almost no imaginative prose literature and very little in the way of historical writing; and the intellectual leaders of society expressed their most serious thoughts in a dead language which barley altered during a thousand years.

Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy -- or even two orthodoxies, as often happens -- good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society. To begin with, bureaucrats and other "practical" men usually despise the poet too deeply to be much interested in what he is saying. Secondly, what the poet is saying -- that is, what his poem "means" if translated into prose -- is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether. It is therefore fairly easy for a poet to keep away from dangerous subjects and avoid uttering heresies; and even when he does utter them, they may escape notice. But above all, good verse, unlike good prose, is not necessarily and individual product. Certain kinds of poems, such as ballads, or, on the other hand, very artificial verse forms, can be composed co-operatively by groups of people. Whether the ancient English and Scottish ballads were originally produced by individuals, or by the people at large, is disputed; but at any rate they are non-individual in the sense that they constantly change in passing from mouth to mouth. Even in print no two versions of a ballad are ever quite the same. Many primitive peoples compose verse communally. Someone begins to improvise, probably accompanying himself on a musical instrument, somebody else chips in with a line or a rhyme when the first singer breaks down, and so the process continues until there exists a whole song or ballad which has no identifiable author.

In prose, this kind of intimate collaboration is quite impossible. Serious prose, in any case, has to be composed in solitude, whereas the excitement of being part of a group is actually an aid to certain kinds of versification. Verse -- and perhaps good verse of its own kind, though it would not be the highest kind -- might survive under even the most inquisitorial regime. Even in a society where liberty and individuality had been extinguished, there would still be a need either for patriotic songs and heroic ballads celebrating victories, or for elaborate exercises in flattery; and these are the kinds of poems that can be written to order, or composed communally, without necessarily lacking artistic value. Prose is a different matter, since the prose writer cannot narrow the range of his thoughts without killing his inventiveness. But the history of totalitarian societies, or of groups of people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature. German literature almost disappeared during the Hitler regime, and the case was not much better in Italy. Russian literature, so far as one can judge by translations, has deteriorated markedly since the early days of the revolution, though some of the verse appears to be better than the prose. Few if any Russian novels that it is possible to take seriously have been translated for about fifteen years. In western Europe and America large sections of the literary intelligentsia have either passed through the Communist Party or have been warmly sympathetic to it, but this whole leftward movement has produced extraordinarily few books worth reading. Orthodox Catholicism, again, seems to have a crushing effect upon certain literary forms, especially the novel. During a period of three hundred years, how many people have been at once good novelists and good Catholics? The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition. Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts, such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have no choice between silence or death. Prose literature as we know it is the product of rationalism, of the Protestant centuries, of the autonomous individual. And the destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order. In the future it is possible that a new kind of literature, not involving individual feeling or truthful observation, may arise, but no such thing is at present imaginable. It seems much likelier that if the liberal culture that we have lived in since the Renaissance comes to an end, the literary art will perish with it.

Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend on several other recreations. Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.

It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with the innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments. Even more machine-like is the production of short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines. Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself. Others have packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination -- even consciousness, so far as possible -- would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.

Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own society is still, broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.

It is possible that the Russophile intelligentsia, if they had not succumbed to that particular myth, would have succumbed to another of much the same kind. But at any rate the Russian myth is there, and the corruption it causes stinks. When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example, are the uncritical admirers of the U.S.S.R. They appear to think that the destruction of liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment unaffected. The U.S.S.R. is a large, rapidly developing country which has an acute need of scientific workers and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons. Writers, on the other hand, are viciously persecuted. It is true that literary prostitutes like Ilya Ehrenburg or Alexei Tolstoy are paid huge sums of money, but the only thing which is of any value to the writer as such -- his freedom of expression -- is taken away from him. Some, at least, of the English scientists who speak so enthusiastically of the opportunities to be enjoyed by scientists in Russia are capable of understanding this. But their reflection appears to be: "Writers are persecuted in Russia. So what? I am not a writer." They do not see that any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought.

For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it needs him. Even in Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were relatively well treated and the German scientific community, as a whole, offered no resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history, even the most autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly because of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because of the need to prepare for war. So long as physical reality cannot altogether be ignored, so long as two and two have to make four when you are, for example, drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the scientist has his function, and can even be allowed a measure of liberty. His awakening will come later, when the totalitarian state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if he wants to safeguard the integrity of science, it is his job to develop some kind of solidarity with his literary colleagues and not disregard it as a matter of indifference when writers are silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers systematically falsified.

But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting and architecture, it is -- as I have tried to show -- certain that literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against "individualism" and the "ivory tower," no pious platitudes to the effect that "true individuality is only attained through identification with the community," can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact -- and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial -- is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.

http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/preventlit2.html

Why I Write - George Orwell

Why I Write

1947

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious -- i.e. seriously intended -- writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had "chair-like teeth" -- a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake's "Tiger, Tiger." At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished "nature poems" in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.

However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote vers d'occasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed -- at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week -- and helped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous "story" about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my "story" ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: "He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf," etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The "story" must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.

When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost --

So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.

which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling "hee" for "he" was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in -- at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own -- but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

  1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen -- in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all -- and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money .
  2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
  3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
  4. Political purpose -- using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature -- taking your "nature" to be the state you have attained when you are first adult -- I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision. I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date, expressing my dilemma:

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;
 
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.
 
And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.
 
All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.
 
But girl's bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.
 
It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.
 
I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;
 
And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.
 
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, "I am going to produce a work of art." I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My book about the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia, is of course a frankly political book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts. But among other things it contains a long chapter, full of newspaper quotations and the like, defending the Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with Franco. Clearly such a chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect read me a lecture about it. "Why did you put in all that stuff?" he said. "You've turned what might have been a good book into journalism." What he said was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should never have written the book.

In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write. Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.