AI & Big Brother

Published in June 1949 while the author was slowly dying of tuberculosis, the novel 1984 is now more than 70 years old. The book entered the public domain in Europe in January 2021 and will enter the US public domain in 25 years (2046).

How should one read this novel now? Internal reading? External reading? Is it still contemporary? What does it tell us? What are the right tools for understanding what it says, beyond first appearances. Since its publication, and particularly during the Cold War, the novel has mainly been read as a description of everyday life in the Soviet Union. Back then, Joseph Stalin was the central figure, with his mustache and his smile: he was Big Brother, the dictator of the country according to 1984, the boss of the one and only party and the chief of police (GPU, NKVD which managed the Gulags, etc.).

The novel more or less mirrors reality. The past reality first: the character Emmanuel Goldstein¹, “the Enemy of the People” represents Leon Trotsky, whose book, The Revolution Betrayed. What is the Soviet Union and where is it going? was published in 1936… The other inspiration is Nazi Germany (1933–1945) and, perhaps, Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf, published in July 1925.

This picture, reduced to just the face, is what Winston Smith sees everywhere, with the caption “BIG BROTHER WATCHING YOU”. “The face of Big Brother, black-haired, black mustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm” was “on coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet — everywhere.”

And now? People still quote George Orwell². For instance, in French: in a very recent re-edition of an essay by Jean-Paul Sartre on intellectuals, the preface quotes George Orwell³.

Artificial Intelligence, or more precisely Machine Learning, contributes to numerous fields such as medicine and healthcare, computer vision, speech recognition, multilingual translation and more. Many other applications are becoming decisive too, completing the vast ArtificiaI Intelligence family. We count an increasing number of subsets of AI and machine learning: biometric and facial recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP), robotics companies, chatbots (conversational AI), etc. NLP, for instance, is present in many fields: hospital management, healthcare, life science, law or finance. Can computers understand human language? How well?

No-code software is for non-specialists, so we might go from data scientists to field-specialists. Not to mention other technologies: new blockchain startups, quantum computing companies and companies that might be developed tomorrow (metaverse, NFTs, etc.). None of these types of companies were present or even mentioned in 1984. At most, we note television, which appeared just after the war, with the BBC in the UK or the major stations and networks in the USA. George Orwell may possibly have had an idea of the role television would come to hold in our societies. The “telescreen”, omnipresent and symbolic in 1984, is always on. TV as it is mentioned in 1984, has only one channel and uses Newspeak, the political language of Oceania, the country where 1984 is supposed to take place. One TV, one channel, one language: it is supposed to be mass media. How important is TV for us today? It is considered to be a mass media, although it increasingly targets only people who watch it: its targeting is mainly for advertising purposes. YouTube, Weibo (微博), etc.,“social media” may become the media of the near future, media which targets people who want it. Television is a media which wants to be wanted. It may become a part of social media: television seduces.

How different is it from what we observe nowadays in countries where political and economic competition exists? Can we count on Artificial Intelligence to validate the news? Artificial Intelligence may not be powerful enough to remove hate speech and violent contents. In the novel, there is a program, “Two Minutes Hate”, that no one can avoid. That kind of program does exist in our societies but we can always turn off the TV, and people could choose to watch, or not, such a program. And although we have so many different programs, are they really so different? Karl Popper, the Austrian-British philosopher and the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu both see television as a danger for our societies⁴.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), aka Machine Learning, is already our present; it may very well become our future. Out of the companies in our database of companies around the world (n = 27 600), at least 1800 use Artificial Intelligence and / or Machine Learning. Obviously, Artificial Intelligence is one of the most important technologies used by tech companies.

Should we also mention the socio-psychological effects of social media? Our language and speech are continually analyzed by linguists to improve the production and reception of news programs as well as to enrich advertising for the products they promote. In both cases, the objective is to improve the precision of targeting, to refine it, to make it more effective, at the lowest cost.Targeting affects everyone, young and less young, in an effort to optimize the frequency and duration of people’s engagement. Social media especially treats the very young as commodities, looking to manipulate them and promote longer screen time engagement, thereby enabling more and more data extraction. Not to mention an effort to promote affiliation and, finally, action: buying and consuming the advertised products. Then, is GRP still king? Probably: but is frequency times reach still the right definition? In that case what is the effective frequency⁵? TV might now be more a macluhanian tool than an orwellian one.

In order to analyze 1984, we are going to use SunFish, a tool we developed at Weborama. Why? We are going to exploit this tool to study a decisive work, historically speaking, a work which was science-fiction: a dystopian novel describing England after a nuclear war: 1984 (the initial title was The Last Man in Europe).

A global view of the 1,298 most relevant words of the novel “1984”, classified into bubbles by SunFish, depending on their semantic proximity, calculated thanks to Machine Learning algorithms.

As a new kind of company, Weborama can be observed from two perspectives: first as an already mature company, founded more than twenty years ago, which deals with the traditional advertising market, while evolving and adapting to this ever-changing market in order to survive. But it is also a very young company, methodologically inventing its new path every single day. While looking for new paths, Weborama has always depended on research, to solve new problems and find new solutions.

For many years, Weborama has invested in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning in order to understand how the new socio-economic science is developing. Weborama not only works on media speeches or advertising strategies but also on literary works to understand how they are built, how they produce sense, how to better understand them, much more precisely than traditional literary analysis which is — at best — mostly intuitive. So, with SunFish, a semantic artificial intelligence tool, we try to better appreciate the way an author organizes their poetry or novel. This is the Weborama tool that we will use.

According to Weborama, the story takes place in 48 locations and 9 dates.

Our analysis will cover a few major points selected from the novel. First, “Newspeak” which one day will be the language spoken and written by the heroes of 1984. We will then look at the situation of a class of people in the novel, the “proles” (proletariat). What kind of social class is this? Do they have a future? Finally, we will examine two new tools of power, among the new inventions of the people which govern this new country: the “Telescreen” and the “Speakwrite”.

Searching the word “Newspeak” in 1984: the word appears 75 times in the novel, all mentions are ranked according to their order of appearance. Among its semantic neighbours: “telesecreen”, “prole”.

What will become Newspeak ?

Newspeak is “the official language of Oceania” that meets “the ideological needs of Ingsoc or English Socialism”. For example, The Times, the official newspaper in the novel, is written “entirely in Newspeak”. The Appendix of 1984 gives the main principles of Newspeak (13 pages in three parts).

Newspeak is to supersede Standard English (Oldspeak) by 2050. An Eleventh Edition of the dictionary is supposed to be published before long.

80 sentences are associated with “Newspeak” ; positive sentences appear in green, negative ones appear in red.

Only 2 are identified by SunFish as positive, including: “It’s fascinating.”

A SunFish view of the 523 words of 1984 that are related to Newspeak.

Newspeak will permit speakers to express themselves and will thereby preclude other forms of expression. It offers ideal control from the source of the language to the thinking. Censorship would therefore become useless.

Looking for the word “mental” in the SunFish view centered on Newspeak.

Here’s a verbatim from the book, found thanks to SunFish (searched word in bold). The first number indicates the location of the passage in the book:

6478 ( 96.7% ) The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.

Can one describe Newspeak as a habitus? It is certainly a “habit-forming force”, as some sociologists would call it⁶, which focuses on primary socialization. It is said that habitus has two major characteristics: its durability (it lasts forever once acquired) and it works for all fields of social praxis. Here, we are in the presence of “mental habits”: they permit some expressions but forestall others.

In the novel, there are people like Syme who are philologists, specialists in Newspeak (Syme soon disappears from the novel, he is “vaporized”). But they are not “Philologen” as Friedrich Nietzsche⁷ called himself when he was teaching classical philology at the Basler University (Switzerland, 1869); they are the exact opposite of those who learn and like languages. The Newspeak philologists want to make vocabulary more limited, they want to get rid of as many words as they can. They dislike language since language can help people think. For these specialists, to improve the language is to make it much simpler, more circumscribed. Words should not permit various kinds of thinking. But they might use the same tools as Friedrich Nietzsche, only with a different goal.

If we were to follow Saussure, we could say that “Newspeak” tends to become a pure “lexicological” language (versus “grammatical”), more like Chinese (“ultra-lexicological”) and less like German. Newspeak, the new English, is more “immotivated” or arbitrary than German. It is thus easier to simplify English than German⁸. “Le trésor mental de la langue⁹” is created and enriched (or impoverished) by “improvisation”.

In the novel, Newspeak will gradually forge a new habitus. This new habitus will not only “provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but also make all other modes of thought impossible”, as explained by the author of 1984. So, its vocabulary is, little by little, more circumspect.

As we said before, we will use a tool from Weborama, SunFish, to better understand the multiple dimensions of Newspeak. We type “Newspeak” in the box (top, left). What do we get on the top right part of the screen, in the “Preview” or “All Documents”?

929 ( 14.4% ) Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?
907 ( 14.1% ) Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well.
914 ( 14.2% ) Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them.
‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?
943 ( 14.6% ) ‘Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. Ingsoc is “English Socialism”.

6474 ( 96.6% ) It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak.6475 ( 96.6% ) Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech.6476 ( 96.6% ) The version in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later.

In time, as we said earlier, Newspeak will become the new English spoken by the people in the novel, as they give up Oldspeak.

It’s interesting to note that some of the words of Newspeak are part of common language, and have been recognized as such by SunFish. But SunFish includes a Name Entity Recognition software that allows us to spot new words that are not part of common language — words that we may add to the bubble view for analysis:

On top, a list of words recognized by Sunfish as common language, related to Newspeak in 1984, below a list of words coming from the same source but not recognized as common language.

The grammar of Newspeak

Newspeak grammar is mainly explained in the Appendix of 1984. Newspeak becomes simple and regular with a few exceptions. Let’s look at some examples produced by SunFish:

6521 ( 97.3% ) The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its regularity.6523 ( 97.3% ) Thus, in all verbs the preterite and the past participle were the same and ended in — ED.6524 ( 97.3% ) The preterite of STEAL was STEALED, the preterite of THINK was THINKED, and so on throughout the language, all such forms as SWAM, GAVE, BROUGHT, SPOKE, TAKEN, etc., being abolished.6525 ( 97.4% ) All plurals were made by adding — S or — ES as the case might be.6526 ( 97.4% ) The plurals OF MAN, OX, LIFE, were MANS, OXES, LIFES.6527 ( 97.4% ) Comparison of adjectives was invariably made by adding — ER, — EST6528 ( 97.4% ) The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularly were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs.

What are the effects of these simplifications? What do we lose with this new grammar? We lose the history of the language. But we make it easier for people to learn and use the language (see the example of Chinese¹⁰).

The vocabulary of Newspeak

Reduction of the vocabulary is the main rule of Newspeak. It should be simpler to speak the new English. Any trace of the old grammar, the old vocabulary should disappear. But this process will be slow; the authorities foresee the year 2050… And it ignores the creation of new vocabulary by those new generations who speak it.

6480 ( 96.7% ) Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.6483 ( 96.7% ) The word FREE still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’.6485 ( 96.8% ) Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive.6486 ( 96.8% ) Newspeak was designed not to extend but to DIMINISH the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum6491 ( 96.9% ) The A vocabulary consisted of the words needed for the business of everyday life — for such things as eating, drinking, working, putting on one’s clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening, cooking, and the like.6492 ( 96.9% ) It was composed almost entirely of words that we already possess words like HIT, RUN, DOG, TREE, SUGAR, HOUSE, FIELD- but in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary their number was extremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined.6494 ( 96.9% ) So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simply a staccato sound expressing ONE clearly understood concept.

As in some languages (Chinese, for instance), verbs can be adjectives or nouns. This depends on a word’s place in a sentence and on its complements.

The new reform does not take etymology into account: it does not refer to the history of the language.

6500 ( 97.0% ) Between the verb and the noun form, when they were of the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms.6501 ( 97.0% ) The word THOUGHT, for example, did not exist in Newspeak.6502 ( 97.0% ) Its place was taken by THINK, which did duty for both noun and verb.6503 ( 97.0% ) No etymological principle was followed here: in some cases it was the original noun that was chosen for retention, in other cases the verb.6504 ( 97.1% ) Even where a noun and verb of kindred meaning were not etymologically connected, one or other of them was frequently suppressed.6506 ( 97.1% ) Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix — FUL to the noun-verb, and adverbs by adding — WISE.6509 ( 97.1% ) Certain of our present-day adjectives, such as GOOD, STRONG, BIG, BLACK, SOFT, were retained, but their total number was very small.6511 ( 97.2% ) None of the now-existing adverbs was retained, except for a very few already ending in — WISE: the — WISE termination was invariable.6514 ( 97.2% ) In addition, any word — this again applied in principle to every word in the language — could be negatived by adding the affix UN-, or could be strengthened by the affix PLUS-, or, for still greater emphasis, DOUBLEPLUS-.6615 ( 98.7% ) Almost invariably these words — GOODTHINK, MINIPAX, PROLEFEED, SEXCRIME, JOYCAMP, INGSOC, BELLYFEEL, THINKPOL, and countless others — were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last.6635 ( 99.0% ) Only a very few words were common to all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of its particular branches.6531 ( 97.5% ) A word which was difficult to utter, or was liable to be incorrectly heard, was held to be ipso facto a bad word, occasionally therefore, for the sake of euphony, extra letters were inserted into a word or an archaic formation was retained.6543 ( 97.6% ) To take a single example: the word GOODTHINK, meaning, very roughly, ‘orthodoxy’, or, if one chose to regard it as a verb, ‘to think in an orthodox manner’.6544 ( 97.6% ) This follows: noun-verb, GOODTHINK, past tense and past participle, GOODTHINKED, present adjective,6548 ( 97.7% ) The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan.6549 ( 97.7% ) The words of which they were made up could be any parts of speech, and could be placed in any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy to pronounce while indicating their derivation.6564 ( 97.9% ) The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.6583 ( 98.2% ) In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it WAS heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent.6611 ( 98.6% ) In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning.6637 ( 99.0% ) From the foregoing account it will be seen that in Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible.6647 ( 99.2% ) In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one might remember their original meanings.6649 ( 99.2% ) A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that EQUAL had once had the secondary meaning of ‘politically equal’, or that FREE had once meant ‘intellectually free’, than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to QUEEN and ROOK.6651 ( 99.2% ) And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced — its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing.6668 ( 99.5% ) Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc.6672 ( 99.5% ) It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050.

A non-social class: the proles

In English, proles is a “derogatory” term, if we are to believe the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition). It designates the proletariat. In Ancient Rome, the proletariat was a class which “contributed nothing to the state but offspring”.

Normally, according to a Marxist view, the proletariat that 1984 probably refers to, becomes a major player in the class struggle (“Klassenkampf)” of modern times. According to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels : “The bourgeoisie produces its own grave-diggers. The fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848 ). In the end, the proletariat will win, since it is the most numerous and is becoming the most powerful class. This is, however, not what we see in the novel: the proles have no future, even though Winton Smith sees it differently.

When we enter the word “prole” in the top left box, we see three main ideas concerning this social class : first, its members are, at best, “a leisure class” (drinking and betting, and they are “not human beings”), nevertheless, in Winston Smith’s opinion at least, they are the only hope for the world. The Proles are seen to be both wise: for O’Brien they are not “human beings” but a sort of animal, whereas Winston Smith sees them as the future of society. The proles are given “panem et circenses¹¹” in the form of gin, the lottery, “a game of darts”, etc. (“the principle, if not the only, reason for remaining alive” p.75).

A SunFish view with the word “prole” selected, and associated documents displayed.

948 ( 14.7% ) ‘The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly.1662 ( 25.3% ) The proles were supposed not to drink gin, though in practice they could get hold of it easily enough1597 ( 24.3% ) The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention1526 ( 23.3% ) ‘If there is hope,’ he had written in the diary, ‘it lies in the proles.’4381 ( 65.6% ) The future belonged to the proles1597 ( 24.3% ) The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention.

Society regularly produces the tools necessary for the proles (“das Opium des Volks”, as Karl Marx would call them¹²). The “versificator” composes the different kinds of the media products needed: “There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally”.

68 ( 12.0% ) Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.

If we dive deeper with SunFish, what we get is not very different.

1292 ( 19.8% ) ‘If there is hope,’ wrote Winston, ‘it lies in the proles.’ If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.4381 ( 65.6% ) The future belonged to the proles.

“Proles and animals are free” (p. 64). And proles represent 85% of the total population of Oceania.

But “Only the proles use scent” and they sing too. Signs of potential happiness which the other classes do not share.

4394 ( 65.8% ) The birds sang, the proles sang.368 ( 50.6% ) The proles had stayed human.1327 ( 20.3% ) But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules.

597 ( 24.3% ) The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention.1598 ( 24.3% ) It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive.1662 ( 25.3% ) The proles were supposed not to drink gin, though in practice they could get hold of it easily enough.3367 ( 50.6% ) For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world.3905 ( 58.5% ) Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter — set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call ‘the proles’.1883 ( 28.6% ) The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else.2920 ( 43.9% ) One never saw a double bed nowadays, except in the homes of the proles.

Love, music (singing): the proles stay human.

A new technology?

The Telescreen

The word “Telescreen” is one of the most important words in the book. The telescreen is the eyes and ears of the government, of the police. It is omnipresent all the time, in all rooms, in all habitations but not those of the proles (or rarely).

Is this a prediction? Nowadays, it would probably be a computer screen and all its tools. According to current measurements, some of our households almost always have the TV on. In 1984, it cannot be turned off except for the members of the party elite¹³ and even then for only half an hour. And, if is not TV, it may be a phone or a tablet where someone watches a program or TV or participates in social media (so-called “interactivity”). And given the measurement systems, “the Nielsen’s”, one will know more and more about what people watch, what they may think of it, how they interact with it. But, if TV viewers agree to cooperate!

The Speakwrite

Close to the “versificator” which produces media content for the proles, the “speakwrite” is a very common tool for bureaucrats. They use it to “rectify”, for instance, the daily newspaper The Times. Dictation is an active media experience; it is an action. Close to this writing tool is a memory hole where they can discard obsolete texts. Thanks to these two tools, “all history was a palimpsest” (p. 35). This description reminds us of the way books and newspapers were censored in the USSR¹⁴: As David King, the British historian, writes, “physical eradication” was followed by “obliteration of their pictorial existence¹⁵”.

The speakwrite is a kind of dictation machine. Since it continuously updates its content, it lies all the time. That is what 1984 says.

3783 ( 56.7% ) In so far as he had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie.

But is it always a lie? This is not so sure: history is a human science and is always evolving and improving (new facts, new hypotheses, new theories).

If we compare the two schemas for the “speakwrite” (cf.supra), we observe that there are two families of references: the top one mentions the social usage and the second one refers to the material and technical environment of the tool. This demonstrates the rich power of SunFish and the importance of using it.

How to conclude?

What did we learn with this quick re-reading of 1984 using Weborama’s tool, SunFish? It was a new and extremely interesting reading experience. To sum things up, we noticed:

• The absolute exhaustivity of what we are looking for. We do not miss anything.

SunFish puts the book in a new order, an order determined by the reader’s questioning. This questioning is not necessarily universal; it changes with the reader and can change with the way he or she reads. But the answer to the questions is always true.

• The rich variety of results, according to what we use from among the multiple possibilities that SunFish provides. How to explain this? How to improve these results and show (demonstrate) their dependence on the way we use SunFish?
• What we can do is incredible. There is no comparison with the usual text analysis that we perform in traditional literature classes, not to mention journalists’ book reviews. SunFish proposes a number of ways to analyze the text. How can we compare them? Which one shall we use? When?
• Internal or external reading? Is SunFish able to sublate this opposition in history analysis? Or is it just a question of internal reading?

This is our first use of SunFish (a very modest use), a new Weborama tool. We are clearly conscious of our limitations. Now, we should perhaps further test this software on different books, newspaper or magazine articles.

This article has been written by François Mariet, researcher at Weborama, with the support of Stéphane Lévy, Head of Data Science at Weborama.

Bibliography (recent books on “1984)

Dirian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth. A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, 2019, London, Picador, Index, 369 p.

Richard Bradford, ORWELL. A Man of Our Time, London, Bloomsbury Caravel, 2020, Bibliography, Index, 294 p.

Hilary Spurling, The Girl from the Fiction Department. A Portrait of Sonia Orwell, Hamish Hamilton, 2002, 193 p.

D.J. Taylor, On Nineteen Eighty-For. A Biography, New York, Abrams Press, Chronology, Index., 2019, 194 p.

Notes

[1] Leon Trotsky’s real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein. Emmanuel is the romanization of the Hebrew first name, Immanuel.

[2] Concerning a recent controversy involving a tennis player: “The Serbian president criticized the Australian government, denouncing the process as “harassment” and “Orwellian,” and saying that Djokovic would be welcomed home”. The New York Times, Monday Briefing, January 17, 2022.

[3] Gérard Noiriel, Préface au Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels, Paris, Gallimard, 2020, p. 38. Gérard Noiriel ends his preface by quoting George Orwell as saying that intellectuals are those who are able to tell people “what they do not feel like listening to”. Or, CNBC, “Tennessee school board bans Holocaust graphic novel ‘Maus’ — author Art Spiegelman condemns the move as ‘Orwellian’, Jan 26 2022.

[4] cf. from Karl Popper, Television a danger to democracy, (1993 and later), to Pierre Bourdieu, Sur la télévision, (1996).

[5] cf. Michael J. Naples, Effective Frequency. The Relationship between Frequency and Advertising Effectiveness, 1979, Association of National Advertisers, New York, 140 p.

[6] Erwin Panofsky, Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, 1951, Meridian (Penguin Books USA, 1957), 157 p. + illustrations, or translated into French, Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique, traduction et postface de Pierre Bourdieu, Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, deuxième édition revue et corrigée, 1967, 211 p., glossaire, bibliographie, Index, Illustrations

[7] Nietzsche, Wir Philologen, Kröner, Dritter Band, p. 323.

[8] Ferdinand de Saussure : “l’anglais donne une place plus considérable à l’immotivé que l’allemand ; mais le type de l’ultra-lexicologique est le chinois, tandis que l’indo-européen et le sanskrit sont des spécimens de l’ultra-grammatical”. cf. Cours de linguistique générale, Payot, Paris, p.183.

[9] Ferdinand de Saussure : “Toute innovation arrive par improvisation, en parlant, et pénètre de là soit dans le trésor intime de l’auditeur ou celui de l’orateur, mais se produit donc à propos du langage discursif”, Ecrits de linguistique générale, Paris, Gallimard, 2002, p. 95

[10] Constantin Milsky, Préparation de la réforme de l’écriture en République populaire de Chine 1949–1954, Paris, Mouton & C°, 1974, 507 p., glossaire. Or for a simpler approach, Viviane Alleton, L’écriture chinoise. Le défi de la modernité, Paris, 240 p., Albin Michel, 2008.

[11] Juvenal (first years of the first century) thought that Roman people only wished for two things, “bread and games”, (Satires, X, 81). See also Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome, London, Cambridge University Press, 1994, 202 p., Bibliogr., Index

[12] Cf. Karl Marx : “Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend. Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüt einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volkes”, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, Marx Engels Werke, Band 1, Dietz Verlag Berlin, 1964, pp. 378.

[13] We will see O’Brien admitting : “Yes, said O’Brien, we can turn it off. We have that privilege”.

[14] In 1922 was created the Glavlit (Главлит) which was the Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs under the People’s Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR (Главное управление по делам литературы и издательств при Наркомате просвещения РСФСР). In 1946, it became the Administration for the Protection of Military and State Secrets in the Press under the USSR Council of Ministers. (управление по охране военных и государственных тайн в печати при СМ СССР).

[15] David King, The Commissar vanishes. The falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia, New York, Metropolitan Books, 192 p. Illustrations.