Does Raoul Peck’s political arithmetic add up?
As far as I can recall, the audience laughed just three times at the Perth preview of Raoul Peck’s new documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5: once when the cinema manager, introducing the film, almost said ‘Enjoy!’, before correcting course and wishing us ‘a meaningful experience’; once on hearing Orwell confess his desire to give Sartre ‘a kick up the arse’ in his review of Antisemite and Jew; and once at some footage of a Trump supporter batting away a reporter’s questions on the basis that any criticism of her President was fake news. (‘I don’t believe it’ was her stock response to statements about the Donald’s conduct that not even the man himself would contest.) All three laughs came as a welcome relief to what was otherwise an exhausting and dispiriting experience. Only the last one, however, has any particular bearing on its status as a documentary, and the political arithmetic at its core.
That the movie is a powerful one, and expertly made, is not in question. As in his previous documentaries, I Am Not Your Negro (2016) and Exterminate All the Brutes (2021), Peck is determined to spare us nothing, weaving together major themes from George Orwell’s key political writings and footage of atrocities in Burma, Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza (inter many alia), in a way that recalls us to the raw dynamics of state power and political violence that Orwell did so much to delineate. More suggestive collage than propositional treatise, it also references Orwell’s own life as a colonial policeman and soldier against fascism, and his final months on the Hebridean island of Jura, where he completed Nineteen Eighty-Four while battling the tuberculosis that would kill him. Other-worldly images of TB bacteria and audio of people struggling to breathe turn this last detail into a framing metaphor for political authoritarianism in general, with the implication being that even the democracies of the liberal West may be about to succumb. Meanwhile, footage of actual deaths at the hands of regimes, Western and otherwise, and images of Black Lives Matter protestors holding up signs reading ‘I can’t breathe’ keep the metaphor appropriately grounded.
Though all of this adds up to a visceral experience, there is nevertheless something slightly unconvincing about Orwell: 2+2=5. This has nothing to do with the criticism, lightly sprinkled amidst the plaudits, that Peck is cramming too much in and that the movie trips over itself as a consequence. On the contrary, I think it has to do with one of the key tasks it sets for itself: framing the current political crisis as a crisis of truth and information. As the title of the film makes clear, its principal subject is political indoctrination and its reality-distorting effects—a phenomenon to which Orwell returned many times, and never so strikingly as in his final novel. Peck seeks to generalise that phenomenon, entering phrases such as ‘pacification’, ‘collateral damage’, ‘admirable profits’ and even ‘antisemitism’ into the Newspeak lexicon, while deploring as well the unholy alliance between reactionary populism and the broligarchy. But while these points are well worth making, they seem to me to somewhat mischaracterise the crisis in which we find ourselves—a crisis to which Orwell’s (justifiably feted) ‘power of facing unpleasant facts’ may be increasingly irrelevant.
The mistake, I believe, is to think that ‘post-truth’ and its representative maladies—conspiracy theories, alternative facts, barefaced and even performative lying—are rooted in the old dynamics of active propaganda and ignorance. Of course, there is plenty of propaganda and plenty of ignorance to go around, but the deep causes of the post-truth crisis have to do with the changing role of knowledge and information in Western societies. The past half-century has seen the steady expansion of a cohort of information workers, whose experience of tertiary education, policymaking and cultural production places them decisively outside the world of those whose practical skills and/or upper-body strength once gave them economic centrality, if not always economic justice. Whether or not we call this cohort a class is a question for another time; the point is that this social grouping, whose members might once have attached themselves to union-dominated centre-left parties, is now of sufficient power and size to have a politics of its own, and that it is this politics, along with the ‘superior’ knowledge on which its advocates claim it is based, that is the principal target of the populist wave. When reactionary leaders and their media proxies claim to be waging a war on ‘woke’, it is this politics they are rejecting—travestied, yes, but invested nonetheless in behaviour-shaping, cultural change and the primacy of expertise. The problem for the public sphere, whose ruin is documented in Peck’s documentary, is that the expertise is rejected along with it.
This is something qualitatively different to twentieth-century-style propaganda, the ‘totalitarian’ iteration of which is delineated in Nineteen Eighty-Four. O’Brien’s attempt to make Winston Smith not merely concede that two plus two equals five but to actually believe it is fundamental to Orwell’s satire, in that it goes to the ruling Party’s desire to radically remake Oceania’s citizens. But the Trump-supporting woman in Peck’s documentary is not (I’ll warrant) particularly concerned with the truth or otherwise of her interlocutor’s claims. That is why the audience laughed. As I’ve argued in this arena before, Trump himself reflects this shift: he is not a liar in the Richard Nixon sense but a bullshitter in the Harry Frankfurt one. A liar cares enough about the truth to want to hide it from other people, but the bullshitter is not interested in the truth at all. Notwithstanding its increasingly authoritarian character, the key register of contemporary populism is not propaganda; it is epistemic vandalism.
This seems to me to place the audience for Peck’s movie in a perilous position. That audience will be a progressive one; and if it takes away from the documentary the lesson that the current populist wave is founded, first and foremost, upon lies, as opposed to a fundamental shift in material, social and class realities, it will misunderstand the nature of the challenge confronting it politically, and do so in a way that may even flatter (at some level) its own ‘knowledge class’ position. Indeed, and instead of the Two Minutes Hate that keeps Oceania’s citizens keen, Orwell: 2+2=5 might become a sort of Two Hours Despair: not propaganda, obviously, but a fundamentally affirmative experience masquerading as a hopeless one.
To be clear, there is much to recommend this movie. Peck is certainly not wrong to emphasise the new and virulent strain of autocracy working its way around the planet, and not wrong either to draw connections between this outbreak of tyranny and earlier ones. But in placing O’Brien’s tortured logic at its centre, it threatens in some ways to lead us astray. Orwell’s insights will forever have currency, but they don’t always get us to the correct solution.
Comments
Supremely acute review. ‘Epistemic vandalism’ needs to enter the sociological lexicon – except that modern sociology is itself one of the chief carriers and spreaders of this nihilist pandemic.
If the intellectual Left has a single vital project in the early twenty-first century, it is checking the spread of epistemic vandalism in the only way that is possible. Individual knowledge workers need to re-solidify the meaning of their abstract progressive words by living their individual material lives in empirical accordance with them. It’s awkward, and it’s uncomfortable, and it almost certainly will not happen because knowledge workers like to be as rich, comfortable and admired as the rest of us.
But it’s simply no longer possible to claim to support public education while sending your own children to private schools; to argue housing tax policy needs to be radically recalibrated as a matter of moral and civic fairness while accumulating geared and CGT-rebated investment properties yourself; to attack the sexual bullying of President Trump, but defend it in President Clinton; to demand more public funding be directed to university academic careers, while trousering a million-dollar public salary as a Vice Chancellor.
All these and many many more examples of ‘progressive’ cognitive dissonance aren’t merely the usual hypocrisies of the social climbing middle classes. They are examples of the epistemic vandalism that has been underway since the Baby Boomers decided they really rather quite liked being both morally and politically the most admirable generation of humans ever to live, but also the richest, most comfortable and most privileged that ever will.
What is needed for 2+2 to once more equal 4 is, as a starter, for the alleged progressive Left to stop telling themselves sophisticated, convenient lies. It’s so easy that a child can do it, and so hard that even our very smartest, most successful brainiacs find it daunting.