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The two most outstanding dystopian novels of the mid-twentieth century observe and anticipate technological development in relation to questions of human nature and culture, individual identity and close social relationships, matters of privacy and private life.
In his last novel, 1984, George Orwell envisions the potential of interactive audio-visual media (the “telescreen”) to supervise and destroy individual freedom and social relations under the sway of a totalitarian regime. In this context, intimate sexual affairs and maternal love are perceived as the last but powerless sanctuaries of revolt and resistance against the grip of an oppressive military dictatorship – to be overwhelmed and crushed in the end – without hope.
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley draws the image of a libertarian, benevolent and even caring society under no less totalitarian governance. Among many other blessings of technological progress (amenities and gadgets like individual flight devices), Huxley (fore-)sees the possibilities of chemicals (drugs) to “liberate” sexuality from procreation, to reduce pain and induce pleasure, in short, to enhance life and its “lovely progress,” while, at the same time, fulfilling the dream of authoritarian rule: the nightmare of artificially produced individuals who are sired in petri dishes and born into their α, β-, γ-, Δ- type places, roles and functions in a stratified society – without escape.
Orwell and Huxley portray two different types or stages of human domination over human beings: Orwell’s novel exemplifies the ancient strategy of sovereign rule based on the oppression of life through the construction of guilt under the permanent threat of capital punishment. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault describes this strategy as follows:
The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the ‘power of life and death’ was in reality the right to take life or let live.
(Foucault, 1978)
Though death is the climax in the drama and the ultimate proof of power, it is the second alternative, to refrain from killing, which turns out to be more “fruitful” in the long run. If the sovereign lets the subject...