A Hard Class with Difficult Books

Spring 2022. Boston College. Ideas in/across time: Shakespeare, Vico, Matthew Arnold, Gustave Le Bon, George Orwell, Aimé Césaire, Richard Hofstadter

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

‘Pure Orwell’: how Russian state media spins invasion as liberation https://t.co/9QxO9stgoc

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

@McG_reads 🤔 … yes.

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

What, then, to make of the fact that everyone today feels so much anxiety but there are no Ministries of XYZ who are going to haul us away. Where does such fear come from?

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

Been tracking Orwell’s uses of the words fear, terror, panic, horror, fright, etc. Pattern: sometimes references to obvious external threats (menacing Party, etc), but often to internal nervousness (Winston trembles over his crush). The outside and inside converge.

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

Passing notes.

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

@nick_popolizio It also testifies to the fact that communist society remained a class-based society in many ways. The declared goal was to “build socialism,” but it was understood the process would take time (no pain, no gain). Orwell might also be criticizing UK very classist society.

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

@liammurphyreads 😂

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

Even as an old guy, I still don’t go into pubs and ask even older guys about the good old days. That said, I grew up under the shadow of the Sixties, when Great Things were rumored to have occurred (rumors spread by actual boomers themselves).

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

@liammurphyreads Stunning page. Freedom without facts is not freedom - it is slavery. 2 + 2 as a basic equation establishing a shared truthful reality of = precondition for freedom. There is real fake news and fake fake news and shouting the word freedom does not necessarily root one in reality.

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

@deakinbooks Orwell part of anti-authoritarian generation that nevertheless rejected politics based ultimately on individual freedom/markets. Winston is looking to connect.

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

The “totalitarian” paradigm has many problems, notably glossing over key differences between fascism and communism. Still, the links among Gus, Bataille, and Orwell are unassailable.

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

@deakinbooks Except for brief Hitler-Stalin pact, USSr explicitly anti-fascist. Fascists and communists fighting from the 1920s through WWII. From today’s pov they often get conflated; hangover from 1950s Cold War paradigm = formal “totalitarian” (read: anti-liberal-democratic) qualities.

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

@bimbokarlmarxXx Some people would call mid-20th century communism a (secular) “political religion.” No question religious religion today is highly politicized.

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

@deakinbooks @nick_popolizio Yes, together with the post-Marxist irony that the workers will reject the party. Marx/Engels invented Communist Party but were vague compared to Lenin at al. Orwell seems *for* bottom-up rebellion/resistance without the trap of party-authoritarian hierarchy. #OrwellBerniebros

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

Oh right! “instinctive feeling” that conditions are “intolerable” related to feeling that “at some other time they must have been different” (73).How can we envision different futures without appreciating aspects of the past that might have been better than today?

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

Professional historian’s grumble: lack of interest in history and thinking historically reflects the certain victory of Big Bro in its constantly mutating form. #permanentpresent

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@Giovannacanread Or maybe reducing everything to homogeneity? No alt meanings or possibilities, no past or future. Big Bro remains heterog but language itself is reduced and flattened. Also: Orwell def playing on Marxist dialectics: tense opposites get synthesized in higher forms.

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@jam_vico True, but how much do we access/act on that creativity in our day to day lives?

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

1/2 I’m fascinated by the notion of “ancestral memory” (60). As if, no matter social conditions, we carry some primal impulse of expression and spontaneity. Compare Albert Camus: “to breathe is to rebel.”

[A Hard Class with Difficult Books @hardclass2020]

2/2 “mute protest in your own bones” (73). Likewise: “a fragment of the abolished past [is] like a fossil bone” (78). Of course, the baseline here is sexual desire, which can never be fully repressed or extinguished. Dark-hair Julia will be the first free subject we encounter.