The language that we hear spoken today is full of words of a special type: These words we will call amoeba-words, and the vocabulary that they constitute, Uniquack. Amoeba-words all possess at least three fields of usage; let “energy” serve as an example of such a word. “Energy” has an initial meaning that is traditional. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1599, it means “vigor of expression,” and later the impressive capacity of an utterance or of organ music. The term energy is still widely used in this first sense of vigor. During the nineteenth century, energy also became a technical term. At first, it was used quite generally by physicists to denote the body’s ability to perform work. Then, precisely at the same time that Marx ascribed “labor force” to the proletariat, several German physicists ascribed to Nature a general potential to perform work, and called it “energy.” For the last hundred years, the term has been used in physics to verbalize an increasingly abstract alternative energy, or energy needs. We must be forever conscious of the fact that we do not know what those terms mean. We use the words like words from Scripture, like a gift from above. Furthermore, we gratefully transfer the power to define their meaning to an expertocratic hierarchy to which we do not belong. The word “energy” in this context is used neither with common sense, nor with the senseless precision of science, but almost like a sublinguistic grunt—a nonsense word. Energy, like sexuality, transportation, education, communication, information, crisis, problem, solution, role, and dozens of other words, belong, in this sense, to the same class.
HEN ORWELL wrote about Newspeak, no computer language had as yet been named or published. Our theme therefore will not be computer language, but Orwell’s attempt to caricature what happens when speakers of ordinary language treat it as if it can be reduced to a code. This perception of Newspeak is not made by Orwell, of course, but by a pair of latecomers, who see the unfolding of a cipher Orwell created over thirty-five years ago.
Newspeak and Uniquack are two-egged twins. In the fifties, when the computer was a novelty and UNIVAC the trade name of the only machine that could be purchased, James Reston created Uniquack in an editorial aside. We adopted the term Uniquack for the jelly formed of amoeba-words, words that are neither “significant and binding for certain activities” nor “indicative of certain forms of thought”—the two characteristics that together determine Raymond Williams’ choice of Key-Words, although like Williams’ Key-Words, amoeba-words are often strong and difficult and persuasive in everyday language, and serve to indicate wider areas of experience. As the years went by, Newspeak and Uniquack became useful to name two characteristics that make late twentieth-century, everyday English, French, or German, alike and distinct from ordinary languages in former times.
Newspeak is a transparent neologism. For Orwell, it is the fictional portrait of the deliberate distortion of an Oldspeak that never was. In this age of computers, which Orwell did not live to see, his Newspeak is an ominous parody of the intent to use English as a “medium of communication.” This tendency is fostered by the spread of Uniquack: the degradation that results from the fallout of scientific discourse into ordinary speech. Newspeak thus refers—in our usage—primarily to an attitude of the speaker toward what he does, while Uniquack refers to the predominance of a special kind of vocabulary in his speech. By using the two terms in conjunction when speaking about certain features of contemporary language, we hope to escape the objections that literal-minded professors have raised repeatedly against Orwell: Namely, that we engage in shallow and uncritical linguistics. It is not our intention to oppose a paranoiac vision of today’s communication to the romantic utopia of a virgin vernacular that mirrors a factual truth.
Newspeak and Uniquack are neologisms of very different status. As a foundling, Uniquack can be adopted to our purposes. Newspeak is well-worn. Orwell conceived it as a caricature of his own abandoned belief in a world language and used it as a literary device to make a fable stick. Since his death, it has become the label for a muddled complex of beliefs. Today, it is mostly used to promote the nonsensical belief that language has become useless.
Orwell used the term on two different levels—as a parody and as an element of his world of 1984. The two main sources for his linguistic parody are Basic English, proposed by Ogden, and Interglossa, conceived by Hogben—both of which had their heyday in the early thirties. Both are attempts to create a world language based on English and containing less than 850 words. In 1939, Ezra Pound praised Basic as “a magnificent system for measuring extant works … an instrument for the diffusion of ideas … with advantages … obvious to any man of intelligence.” In the 1940s no less a person than William Empson praised Basic as an instrument to understand poetry and as a vocabulary for pithy poetic creation. Winston Churchill had the British government purchase the copyright to Basic. And H. G. Wells, in The Shape of Things to Come, pictures a utopia in which the rapid diffusion of Basic as the lingua franca of the world is “one of the un-anticipated achievements of the twenty-first century.”
Orwell describes the world that Wells saw coming as a “vision of humanity, liberated by the machine, a race of enlightened sunbathers, whose sole topic of conversation is their own superiority to their ancestors.” If he too had once believed in Basic, his parody of it is part of Orwell’s lampoon, as Wells describes it, of a “glittering, strangely sinister world, in which the privileged classes live a life of shallow, gutless hedonism, and the workers … toil like troglodytes in caverns underground.”
The satirical force with which Orwell used Newspeak to serve as his portrait of one of those totalitarian ideas that he saw taking root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere can be understood only if we remember that he speaks with shame about a belief that he formerly held. Just as he had to go to Spain, to Catalonia, to be disabused of his left-wing do-goodism, he had to join the BBC to promote Basic before he understood that it could only be used as a deadly, mechanical substitute for thought.
From 1942 to 1944, working as a colleague of William Empson’s, he produced a series of broadcasts to India written in Basic English, trying to use its programmed simplicity, as a Tribune article put it, “as a sort of corrective to the oratory of statesmen and publicists.” Only during the last year of the war did he write “Politics and the English Language,” insisting that the “defense of the English language has nothing to do with the setting up of a Standard English.”
Basic is an ultimate effort to standardize speech according to a written model: To put “language,” which has come into existence by recording speech sounds through the alphabet, and which then has been corrected by the grammarian, back into the mouths of the people in this new form. The attempt to make people use this artifact whenever they speak has a history. At this point, it seems helpful to look back at this origin. Orwell stumbled on the title for his novel by reversing the date, 1948, when he had completed writing. Taking an Orwellian liberty with 1942, the year that Orwell began broadcasting Basic English on the BBC, we arrive at 1492, the year that Nebrija suggested to the Spanish royalty that they might control their subjects through the use of a taught mother tongue. Six years before the publication of 1984, Orwell found a descendent of Nebrija’s monster in Ogden’s Basic English, which he could broadcast through the BBC. The image is one of Orwell setting sail for the Brave New World. Finally, he dropped Basic for its parody in Newspeak. From Nebrija to Orwell: From Spaniards who would speak taught mother tongue, to Proles who are tongue-tied.
In this movement from the parody of Basic English to the parable of the speechless horror of meaningless utterances, Orwell reveals a new dimension in writings on the future. Orwell was steeped in the genre of Utopian literature; from his own statements, it is clear that he was well aware of the place that Utopian writers had assigned to language. Swift has the people of Laputa fed by their “political projectors” with “invented, simplified language, [who] write books by machines and educate their pupils by inscribing the lesson on wafers … causing them to swallow it.” In the year that he left the BBC, Orwell comments that the “one aim of intellectual totalitarianism cannot but be to make people less conscious.” Jack London, whose imagery surfaces frequently in 1984, describes his “proles” (Orwell uses the same term) as “phrase-slaves” who consider the coinage of such Utopian phrases as “an honest dollar” or “a full dinner pail” strokes of genius. London too has loudspeakers establish and anchor the regime. All the isolated elements out of which Orwell constructed the parable called Newspeak he took either from Ogden or the Utopians.
What is unique about Newspeak is the same thing that makes the whole of 1984 into a new kind of horror story. To quote Herbert Read: “1984 is a Utopia in reverse: Not an Erewhon, which is utopia upside down. Erewhon is still written after the ameliorative pattern of utopia itself: You may paradoxically be punished for being ill, but the ideal is health. In 1984 the pattern is malevolent …” The malevolence of this pattern is implicit in the existing state and does not result from abuse or the self-serving manipulation by an elite. In Jack London’s Iron Heel, as in Zamyatin’s Zero, power is still a means; in 1984 the power implicit in the State is the ultimate reason for everything that happens. And the State has turned into a book that is constantly rewritten. Power is no longer at the service of the elite; the elite itself is at the service of power, which is a book. The worst that H. G. Wells could imagine was inequality—albeit a monstrous kind. According to Orwell, Wells “was too sane to understand the modern world.”
Orwell’s predecessors who wrote upside-down utopias invented horrible abuses of language. Orwell describes communication that takes place after the extinction of language itself. Newspeak is not the language of dystopia, but of the speechless utterances of Kakitopia 1984. Orwell created the parable of human beings compelled to communicate—mostly through organized hatred—and to do so without human language.
Literary critics and those who use Newspeak as an English word in ordinary conversation usually mean either the corrupt English of propagandists and the ambiguous language of politicians and broadcasters, or the neologisms coined by the adversary. In this imprecise fashion they imply terminological inflation, effective sloganeering, or the antonym of English before the Fall. Orwell’s Newspeak, however, is something more sinister than the proliferating idiotikon of technical terms that make conversations in the real 1984, and after, so “noisy.” We see Newspeak as a cipher for something that is now called “interpersonal communication‚” for the belief that the terms by which we describe the operations of computers are fit to tell what is going on between you and me. By Newspeak we mean one particular way of thinking and speaking about language—an approach or an attitude that treats language as a system and a code.
The equation between man and machine was not entirely unknown to Orwell. He knew Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1816) and probably also T. H. Huxley’s hypothesis that animals are automata (1874). But the new wave, according to which digital-analog computers meaningfully model human “brains” did not hit the press until Orwell was dead. As a novelist, he invented a parable for a scientific hypothesis that hovered in the air. He created the idea of communication without sense or meaning, before he could use the computer to model it on. O’Brian from the Thought Police says to Smith, whom he tortures: “we do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them … we convert, we shape them … We make our enemy one of ourselves before we kill him … make the brain perfect before we blow it out … the command of old despotisms was ‘thou art’ … what happens to you here is forever….” Smith, the novel’s antihero, still believes that what happens makes sense to O’Brian. He has to accept that O’Brian’s world is senseless and that he must join O’Brian in this powerful nonsense. “There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for you [Smith] to enter upon the second stage … tell me, why we cling to power … speak.” Strapped to the rack, Winston answers: “You are ruling over us for our own good.” He gives the answer that would have satisfied Dostoyevski’s Grand Inquisitor: “You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves and therefore….” As his only response, O’Brian turns the lever to thirty-three degrees of torture. A pang of pain contorts Winston. And then O’Brian instructs Winston: “We seek power entirely for its own sake.” And the State, which O’Brian represents, creates and recreates Winston’s human nature, according to its own text, and allows Winston to exist only in the context of the State.
Today, we would say that O’Brian programs Winston for his role in 1984. Orwell knew these two words only in their theatrical sense: The schedule of performance sold by an attendant, and the text studied by an actor. “To program” was first used in 1945 for the act of expressing an operation in the terms appropriate for the performance of a computer. And “role theory” was then a new trend in sociology. Neither word had fallen from its specialized orbit into ordinary speech to become amoeba-words. Turing’s idea of an algorithm that adapts its state according to the outcome of its last calculation was well understood by Wiener and Neumann, who created a machine that made such a formula autonomous from human calculation, but the general public still saw in the computer nothing but a more perfect adding machine. The concept of “role” had been introduced in the same year as Turing’s idea by independent publications of Margaret Mead, Ralph Linton, and Murdock, and by 1950 was considered basic to all sociology by Parsons and Merton; but its implied assumption that all social relations can be reduced to power or the interchange of information between individual role-players had certainly never occurred to George Orwell. And yet, as a novelist, he has O’Brian force Winston to become what role-theory and the cybernetic model of human communication assume as “human nature.” Kakitopia fits these assumptions: “Power is (precisely) in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” O’Brian says to his pupil. Newspeak assumes the existence of plastic human individuals who can be written and rewritten into any role. Thus the Kakitopia of Newspeak, the exchange of communication between nonhuman entities, and the reduction of social action to mere exchanges became thinkable about the same time.
The proponents of a cybernetic model of social analysis assume that human beings fit their assumptions, but Orwell knows that to fit, each one has to accept what is done to him. And O’Brian knows that no one can perform this acceptance for you. Winston, who had worked in the Ministry of Truth, knew what Newspeak was. Under torture, he understood what nonhuman communication was: mere know-“how” without meaning or “why.” O’Brian asked him to understand his message, not him, to abandon the urge to understand what he, the speaker, meant and to let his mind be dictated to—and to be nothing but the result of this dictation. The reduction of an encounter with another person into an exchange of information between two elements of a system—what we today call “system-theory”—Orwell called “collective solipsism.”
Winston understood what O’Brian asked him to do, and he tried hard to do it: He learned to register how things were supposed to be and to spell them out without asking “why,” but he did not accept being part of the system, not until he had gone through Room 101. Only there he accepts himself as part of “a fantasy world in which things happen as they should”—namely, on a blank page, that is, as dictation. And to accept being a part of this fantasy of pure senseless power, Winston had to erase his self. But no violence that he inflicted on himself could break his common sense—which Orwell often calls “decency.” To turn himself into non-sense he has to betray his love. Not torture, but only self-betrayal could make him like O’Brian. In O’Brian’s words, Winston’s own acts are “the things from which you could not recover. Something is killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.” And this is what Winston does to himself when he has to face the rats in Room 101 and he begs his torturers: “Do it to Julia.” This betrayal transformed his habit of Doublethink into a conditioned reflex. Later on, he and Julia meet again, as two burnt-out hulls, knowing that in Room 101 they had both meant what they had said. Self-betrayal was the last thing that Winston meant. By becoming the torturer of his last love, in his own mind Winston had become as self-less as O’Brian. Henceforth, the unique mutual intimacy between the executioner and the victim integrated both him and Julia into the system, the solipsism of meaningless communication.
What we are retelling and commenting on here is a fable, not a mere parody of Esperanto, or a cautionary tale, or linguistic theory dressed up in metaphor. This fable shows a society that survives the radical renunciation of language on the part of its members. We shall not be seduced by Orwell’s journalistic genius to take it as something that could happen, or that he himself thought could happen. Newspeak remains an “ideal type,” a cipher for language that never could be because its speakers would be totally unlike the men and women we know. And yet, Newspeak has the power to evoke a strange sense of deja vu, because it is modeled not only on Basic English, which has never been spoken, but also on the language of science, which also stands for something that never could be.
When a physicist writes “E” on the blackboard, he proves himself one of the boys. He shows off his competence in using an algorithm, which over several generations, has incorporated all the rules according to which it may be put into a formula. When “E” is used this way, it has no meaning outside the context of theoretical physics. The physicist’s ability to pronounce the written “E” as energy, however, is not the result of a conspiracy, but of careful training, part of which consists in keeping the formalism of theoretical physics apart from the meanings of ordinary life. The difference between the two has often been compared with bilingual existence; but this comparison fosters a mistake. Spoken English, Japanese, and Kwakiutl—all three are meaningful in everyday, sensual life. The so-called “language” of physics is a code, a system of signs, a formal theory, an analytic tool that derives part of its value from its near-independence from ordinary speech. A physicist limited to the use of his technical vocabulary would be totally speechless in a bedroom or kitchen, but his gibberish would not be Newspeak. The tour de force accomplished by Orwell consists in the invention of a malevolent conspiracy that imposes the use of that kind of code in everyday life. Paranoiac assumptions are essential to Orwell’s cipher. If we were to call the language of physics a form of Newspeak, that would only frustrate our attempt to reserve this term as the name for an attitude toward ordinary speech.
There is, however, an important, indirect way by which the proliferation of special codes contributes to our growing tendency to speak at dinner as if we were in the psychology or sociology lab. We increasingly use ordinary words that have been picked up by one or several “codes” and to which technical meanings have been attached. And we tend to use them indiscriminately, giving the impression that their technical meaning is somehow connoted in our use of the term. While we mean to say “screw,” we say “having sex” and we imply “sexuality,” a scientific construct we had no intention of implying. Good strong words used in this technical way in ordinary speech generate a following of amoeba-words, which can be made to mean anything, like a mathematician’s “E.” And this fallout then fosters the attitude toward language that we have called Newspeak. These waste products from technical word-factories are akin to pollution. Just as the unintended by-products of industry have penetrated, reshaped, and degraded most anything that we see, touch, breathe, or eat, so have these waste products of terminologies affected ordinary language. Much of this terminological waste merely generates noise in everyday conversation and can be compared with the dull expanses of cement that economic growth has produced. But within this waste, many terms are potential amoeba, blown up with hot air, brandished, and loaded with ominous connotations, while losing all denotation. The prudent person who wishes to make sense is often forced to declare a moratorium on their use.
Again, we are speaking in terms that hardly could have been Orwell’s. “Pollution” was as unknown to him as the vocabulary of the computer. Its meaning was “seminal emission apart from coition.” The counterpurposive effects of technical decisions were not discussed in the forties. Rachel Carson had not yet published her Silent Spring. “Fallout” meant the deferred effects of the Hiroshima bomb, and not the exhaust from belching chimneys. Though he wrote an upside-down utopia, Orwell, like Wells or Huxley or Zamyatin, was still primarily concerned with the intentional misuse of the new powerful means. He went beyond these predecessors because, unlike them, he deciphered and lampooned a new logic inherent in the intellectual project that generated computer, bomb, role-theory. He explored the destructive implications of high-sounding ideals; his witches were intellectual do-gooders and their totalitarian projects. His originality lay in the parody of their intent. He was a prophet, in the Hebrew sense—one who sees clearly into the present—because he discovered the forties. He could not foresee that in the eighties so many people—without having passed through Room 101—would try to convince themselves that they “communicate”—and, in addition, mostly in Uniquack.