How Are George Orwell’s Writings a Precursor to Studies of Popular
Culture?
Abstract
George Orwell is known as an acclaimed novelist, essayist, documentary writer, and
journalist. But Orwell also wrote widely on a number of themes in and around popular
culture. However, as During (2005) observes, even though Orwell’s writings might be
considered as a precursor to some well-known themes in studies of popular culture his
contribution to this area still remains relatively unacknowledged by others in the
discipline. The aim of this paper is simply therefore to provide a basis to begin to rethink
Orwell’s contribution to contemporary studies of popular culture. It does so by
demonstrating some comparable insights on culture and society between those made by
Orwell and those found in the work of Bakhtin, Bourdieu, and Deleuze. These insights
are also related to four main areas of discussion: debates in contemporary cultural studies
about the contested pleasures of popular culture and experiences; the relationship
between language and culture; how social class needs to be defined not just economically
but also culturally; and how one might escape cultural relativism when writing about
popular culture. The paper concludes by suggesting that Orwell is a precursor to
contemporary studies of popular culture insofar that some of the cultural themes he
explores have become established parts of the discipline’s canon.
Key words: George Orwell; language; nomad; pleasure; popular culture; social class
Contact Information:
John Michael Roberts, Department of Sociology and Communications, Brunel
University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, United Kingdom
Email: John.Roberts@brunel.ac.uk
Published in Journal for Cultural Research 2014, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 216-232,
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Introduction
It is sometimes said that George Orwell stands in the tradition of a peculiarly English
conservative approach to studying popular culture, whose luminaries include writers such
as F. R. Leavis. In this tradition ‘mass’ culture is criticised for duping people, justifying
in the process the need for elite culture to overcome this herd mentality (Johnson 1979:
93-149). In his critical introduction to cultural studies, however, Simon During suggests
that Orwell actually stands in a radical twentieth century cultural tradition that attempts to
expose the manner in which certain social groups remain ‘invisible’ in dominant cultural
beliefs and practices. Orwell for example tries to show how working class culture
contains seeds of an alternative and often defiant belief system to that of dominant
cultural mores of his day. During thus claims that Orwell, ‘produced work similar in
some way to contemporary cultural studies but in different institutional settings and often
with relatively little acknowledgment’ (During 2005: 35).
Certainly some leading figures in the establishment of cultural studies hold both attitudes
towards Orwell, seeing him as a conservative cultural commentator and as a precursor to
a more sophisticated analysis of popular culture. Richard Hoggart for example chides
Orwell for having a misty-eyed view of working class culture as seen through ‘the cosy
fug of the Edwardian music-hall’ (Hoggart 1971: 17), but then later in the same book
draws approvingly on Orwell’s description of working class attitudes to the
‘purposiveness of life’, particularly their popular beliefs on free will and the individual
(Hoggart 1971: 95). Raymond Williams is arguably even more ambiguous in his attitude
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towards Orwell. In Culture and Society, published originally in 1958, Williams praises
Orwell as ‘a fine observer of detail’ (Williams 1983: 286) about popular culture, as
somebody who uses language to further the cause of liberty and truth (Williams 1983:
288) and who does so through character traits of being ‘brave, generous, frank and good’
(Williams 1983: 294). Fast forward some years later and Williams is markedly more
hostile towards Orwell. His ‘disgraceful attack’ on pacifists and revolutionaries during
the Second World War causes Williams to declare that he can no longer read Orwell
(Williams 1981: 385).1
Perhaps the ambiguous reception that Orwell has received in studies of popular culture is
one reason why there have been few attempts to explore his contribution to themes in the
discipline. Turner for instance devotes a chapter of his book to ‘the British tradition’ in
cultural studies without once mentioning Orwell (Turner 1990: chapter 2), which is true
also of a similar book by Barker (2008). Strinati (2004) mentions Orwell but only to
suggest how he is principally worried by how ‘Americanisation’ violates English popular
culture and working class communities, while Rojek (2007: 113) briefly alludes to
Orwell in relation to cartoon animation but makes no further substantive observations
about his numerous writings on popular culture.
Some writers on culture and popular culture therefore take us tantalisingly close to
explaining why Orwell might be considered to be an important forerunner to
contemporary studies of popular culture although clearly they do not take us far enough,
including During who only hints at Orwell’s achievements in this respect. But if it is the
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case, as Hartley (2003: chapter 2) notes, that early- to mid-twentieth century British
literary studies helped in the formation of contemporary cultural studies through works
that took cultural questions seriously and which were printed in affordable books, it still
remains a mystery exactly what Orwell’s contribution might be for a serious and
scholarly consideration of popular culture, or why this famous writer might be said to be
a forerunner to the investigation of popular culture.
The purpose of this discussion is to take seriously During’s claim that Orwell’s work
stands as a relatively unacknowledged precursor to later studies of popular culture by
investigating this issue in more depth than is customary amongst scholars. This task will
not however be carried out through a historical analysis, which has anyway already been
partly accomplished in different ways by Bounds (2009) and Newsinger (2001). Instead
the paper adopts a different approach. It takes three distinct but interrelated areas that
have become established in scholarly accounts of popular culture and then seeks to map
out how Orwell also explores these areas in his own unique manner. By proceeding in
this way it becomes possible to examine whether Orwell’s analysis of culture finds
unacknowledged parallels and similarities in contemporary studies of popular culture.
The paper therefore has at least one original slant to it to the extent that there has not been
a comprehensive discussion of Orwell’s contribution to some of the themes found in
popular culture studies.2 In this respect the paper has three main sections.
The first section outlines how Orwell’s approach to popular culture is similar to the idea
presented by many cultural theorists that popular culture is complexly structured by
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different social forces that in turn give rise to contested meanings in and around cultural
objects. In particular, Orwell would without doubt agree with those theorists who argue
the contested nature of popular culture is due in part to the pleasure popular culture gives
to people to create their own meanings in society.
This line of reasoning is continued in the second main section where Orwell’s views on
language and culture are analysed. By drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his
theory of language as a dialogic process, we will see that for Orwell words are always
mediated by conflicting ‘accents’ that refract and internalise various social processes. To
stabilise these dialogic conflicts a hegemonic power aims to construct ‘monologic’
language forms; forms that Orwell is alert to and indeed seeks to expose. But far from
reducing social life to language, the paper argues that for Orwell words and utterances are
always mediated through non-discursive forms such as that of social class.
This point takes us onto the third main section, which revolves around the relationship
between social class and culture. Here, we see that Orwell explores social class as a
cultural phenomenon in much the same way as is found in the work of some
contemporary cultural and social theorists. In particular, Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the
relationship between culture, the body and class will be especially relevant in fleshing out
Orwell’s insights on similar issues. Indeed, this discussion will open up a space to show
how other cultural and sociological categories apart from language, such as the body and
space, are crucial elements to his analysis of social class.
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But another important question still remains unanswered and one which has troubled
critics. To what extent can Orwell escape cultural relativism in order to make critical
observations of other social identities outside the confines of his own middle-class
context? Certainly, Orwell has been accused of simply imposing his own middle-class
sensibilities on those he writes about. By drawing on Deleuze and Guattari the fourth
section of the paper argues that one possible answer to this dilemma is to see Orwell as a
‘nomad’ who manages to assemble some of the ‘molecules’ associated with other social
identities into his own identity. The paper concludes by suggesting that Orwell is a
precursor to contemporary studies of popular culture insofar some cultural themes he
explores have become established parts of the discipline’s canon. The conclusion
therefore also rejects a common criticism which states that Orwell’s view of culture and
society is based in a naïve and simplistic empiricism.
The Contested Pleasures of Popular Culture
Storey (2012) observes that to find an agreed view about what constitutes popular culture
is a fairly arduous task because different theories abound. For example, one view
suggests that popular culture is that which is mass produced whereas high culture –
opera, Shakespeare, and the like – is endowed with more creative and aesthetic qualities.
On this reckoning, popular culture is deemed to be rather worthless next to the more
superior aesthetic moral qualities of high culture. However, there is another critical take
on popular culture which is arguably best represented by Fiske’s claim that popular
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culture is the medium where the production of abstract materials of the culture industry
are reinvested with new meanings taken from everyday life (Fiske 1989). People
therefore have a great capacity to imagine culture in innovative ways through language,
symbols, texts, and so on, and to generate new cultural meanings over and above that
which is often the preferred dominant way of using culture (see also Lewis 2002: 13).
One important attribute of popular culture is its ability to give people pleasure as they
recreate new meanings for cultural objects. Popular culture is thus enjoyable and
summons up different types of emotional encounters: love, excitement, anguish, laughter,
joy, enthusiasm, tension, and so on. Such emotions and passions are important because
they engender a fervent commitment towards cultural products by helping to arrange,
express, and manage our everyday feelings (Grossberg 1992; Street 1997). Pleasure, in
this respect, is often gained by people making consumer products functional in their daily
lives. Whereas elite culture can afford to play no function whatsoever in daily life for
those who follow it (think for example of ballet), popular culture, a typical example being
football, becomes pleasurable to the extent that it is indeed part and parcel of everyday
life (Fiske 1989: 57; see also Fiske 1993: 68).
Orwell views popular culture along comparable lines. In The Lion and Unicorn he
suggests for example that popular culture ‘is something that goes on beneath the surface,
unofficially and more or less frowned on by the authorities’ (Orwell 1970a: 78). Like
other cultural theorists discussed later in the paper, Orwell believes that part of the reason
why authorities frown on popular culture rests in the pleasurable ‘unofficial’ subversion
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that it hands to ordinary people. Seaside postcards, for example, contain bawdy humour
and yet for Orwell they also mock conservative sentiments and make sure that ‘on the
whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time’
(Orwell 1970a: 194).
But there is more to Orwell’s view of popular culture than merely taking pleasure in
everyday objects. Indeed, Orwell appreciates that popular culture operates in part through
a complex semiotic process of negotiation between audience and text. Of course, the use
of semiotics to analyse popular culture has a distinguished history in cultural studies. One
approach maintains that a text emits a series of ‘connotative’ codes that frame the way
the text is read by bringing together various meanings and certain preferred ways of
reading images or narratives. For example, in her early work conducted during the 1970s
and 1980s McRobbie (1991) found that British magazines for teenage girls embodied a
variety of codes and messages for their respective readership. One such magazine, Jackie,
embodies a code which stipulates that romance is far more relevant for girls than
sexuality. Through this code, young women in Jackie are formed into three main types:
the blonde, quiet, timid, loving, and trusting girl who either gets the boy in the end or is
abandoned; the wild, fun-loving brunette who resorts to plotting and conniving so that
she gets the man she wants; and lastly there is the non-character, the ‘ordinary’ girl
(McRobbie 1991: 101). Like McRobbie, Orwell is similarly interested in how popular
texts create specific codes how to ‘read’ them. But he is also fascinated by the way in
which audiences actively ‘decode’ messages and reinvest them with alternative
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meanings. Orwell’s approach on this matter is especially clear in his essay on boys’
weekly newspapers.
Boys’ weeklies are categorised by Orwell into two classes. The first tells stories about
public school life, while the second deals exclusively with tales of adventure. Although
there remain obvious differences between the two, a couple of messages nevertheless
recur with some regularity in both. ‘Nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny’
(Orwell 1981: 484). In a 1939 weekly called Gem Frenchman are still ‘Froggies’ and
Italians still ‘Dagoes’. Wun Lung, a Chinese boy, ‘is the nineteenth-century pantomime
Chinaman with saucer-shaped hat, pigtail and pidgin-English’ (Orwell 1981: 484). The
same is true for adventure stories. Once again Chinese characters are sinister pigtailed
opium-smugglers – ‘no indication that things have been happening in China since 1912’
(Orwell 1981: 490). Codes therefore appear to transmit conservative themes. Importantly,
though, these are not merely simple conservative messages – what Hall (2006: 171) terms
the dominant-hegemonic viewpoint – but are on the contrary messages which become
embedded in specific narratives and plotlines that boys recognise. A conservative bias is
certainly conveyed, but ‘in a completely pre-1914 style, with no Fascist tinge’ (Orwell
1981: 484). Take patriotism. This ideal is evident in the papers, explains Orwell, although
it has nothing to do with power politics or ideological warfare. Patriotism is, rather,
embodied in other codes like ‘family’ that the boys can immediately identify with. This
then is a subtle form of patriotism which is ‘more akin to family loyalty’. It is the type of
patriotism which prompts people to expect ‘that what happens in foreign countries is
none of their business’ (Orwell 1981: 485).
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For Orwell, these narratives demonstrate that the publishers of such weeklies always have
to react to the everyday lives of their readership – they have to engage in a negotiated
process with their audience. Orwell notes for example that boys’ weeklies contain traces
of alternative readings that move beyond a small ‘c’ conservatism. After all, the
magazines encourage their readers to connect with different characters and this gives
readers a space to transgress distinctive moral codes embodied in single characters in the
magazines. Instead readers enjoy the potential to rework a number of traits from a
number of characters in new ways. This contested pleasurable experience implies that the
publishers cannot necessarily expect boys to read the conservative messages as intended.
It therefore appears to be the case that Orwell is aware that texts and language provide
resources for ordinary people to create their own oppositional codes that reject dominant
narratives (see also Hall 2006: 173). Bounds goes as far as to suggest that Orwell believes
popular cultural objects like boys’ weeklies are dialogical and polysemic (Bounds 2009:
69). However, we have still yet to demonstrate this latter point in enough detail. The next
section therefore turns to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to address this issue. Bakhtin’s
ideas seem especially pertinent in this respect. As Fowler (1995) indicates, Bakhtin’s
argument that language is not an impartial abstract linguistic structure but is instead
comprised by a living and breathing collision of popular experiences and ideological
utterances chimes well with Orwell’s view of language. Moreover, Bakhtin’s work on
popular culture and language has been an important reference point for many
contemporary cultural theorists in making sense of everyday lived experiences (see
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McGuigan 1992) and they therefore provide another extremely useful perspective on how
some of Orwell’s writings fit into the canon of cultural studies.
Language, Culture and Power
One of Bakhtin’s key insights is that language is inherently dialogical, heteroglossic, and
multiaccentual. In practice, this means that everyday language use is contradictory in
scope to the extent that it refracts different points of views, different social classes,
different ideologies, different identities, and so on. And so working class speech
utterances, obviously, may not hold the same understanding of a specific word as their
middle class counter-part. ‘As a result’, claims a colleague of Bakhtin’s, Voloshinov,
‘differently orientated accents intersect in every ideological sign’ (Voloshinov 1973: 23).
For Bakhtin, this also implies that utterances exist in a structured reality and as such
obtain a specific identity at different levels of ‘stratification’ (see Bakhtin 1981: 288292). For example:
Actual social life and historical becoming create within an abstractly unified
national language a multitude of concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbalideological and social belief systems (Bakhtin 1981: 288; see also Bakhtin 1984a:
30).
Dialogue therefore operates for Bakhtin in real socially-mediated contexts alive to spoken
language and different ‘accents’, rather than in the confines of asocial linguistic sentence
structures that can be repeated ‘in completely identical form’ (Bakhtin 1986: 108).
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Orwell makes a comparable distinction between written and spoken language. In his
essay ‘Propaganda and Demotic Speech’ Orwell goes as far as to note that while the
English language has a huge array of words used in writing, many of these actually ‘have
no real currency in speech’ (Orwell 1970b: 165). His thinking on this matter is part of his
wider belief that one potential of language is to simplify our everyday practices and
experiences. Words have the capacity to streamline the complex nature of our motives
and thoughts which are derived from our everyday practices (see Orwell 1970a: 17).
But this point carries a further implication for Orwell. A group whose goal is to gain
hegemonic dominance will also endeavour to ‘streamline’ everyday practice through its
own language-forms. In more Bakhtinian terms, a group striving for hegemony must try
to ‘accent’ the dialogical nature of key utterances in a way that favour its own social and
political agenda. This ‘monoglossic’ dominant practice therefore attempts to articulate a
type of linguistic unification in and against the lived experience and heteroglossic
utterances of centrifugal local forces (Bakhtin 1981: 270; see also Voloshinov 1973: 23).
By so doing, monoglossic utterances make sure that their uniaccentual meaning conceal
and gloss over meaning alive to conflict, contradiction, and social struggle.
Even though Orwell obviously never uses the term ‘monoglossia’, an illustration of such
language forms which is extremely close to Bakhtin’s meaning can be found in his
famous essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’. Here, Orwell ruminates on the
relationship between politics, power and language. At one point he says:
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(P)olitical language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and
sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the
cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called
‘pacification’ (Orwell 1981: 741).
So, the word rebuked by Orwell – ‘pacification’ – is an ideological construct which
deceives and misinforms, and whose surface appearance helps to mask a deeper social
reality. ‘Pacification’ in this instance is a uniaccentual word devoid of heteroglossic
diversity insofar that as it seeks to ensure that people repeat its uniaccentual meaning
without critical reflection.
Linguistically, one common way that monoglossia occurs is by transforming verbs into
nouns to create nominalizations so that a sentence or statement is left naked in terms of
truth-value or tense. Nominalizations are therefore far more likely to render a process as a
‘neutral’ object or product, leading to its uniaccentual status (see also Hodge and Fowler
1979 for similar observations). Orwell explains it thus:
The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word,
such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun
or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form,
play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in
preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by
examination of instead of by examining) (Orwell 1981: 738; original emphasis).
For Orwell, nominalizations are highly ideological. They tend to elicit ways of thinking
and writing that bracket out real social processes and so engender a belief that language
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can be studied as an independent realm at some distance from its use in everyday and
ordinary social contexts. Just as Marx and Engels once said that language becomes an
ideological construct in the service of power when words are seen to exist as an
independent realm ‘in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content’
(Marx and Engels 1998: 472-3; see also Cook 1982), so Orwell similarly believes that a
language form which admits to no social or historical mediations ‘bears the same relation
to writing real English as doing a jigsaw puzzle bears to painting a picture’ (Orwell
1970b: 135).
Orwell also clearly believes that language is dialogic and heteroglossic and thus
represents an important point of struggle over how the world is represented and encoded
through particular words in different social contexts. This is graphically illustrated during
Orwell’s time fighting for the Spanish Republic against Franco’s fascists. When he joins
the Republican militia in December 1936 Orwell soon detects the embryo of a
community in which a classless society might emerge – a society where ‘the word
“comrade” stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug’ (Orwell
1989a: 83). The word – ‘comrade’ – when used as an utterance at real dialogic events in
Spain during this period subsequently reveals something truly remarkable about social
class distinctions: people fighting for freedom and the Spanish Republic no longer have
to endure ‘privilege and boot-licking’. Servile forms of speech are now reprimanded
together with other social inequalities such as unemployment and high living costs. At
last Orwell discovers a living example of socialism in practice: ‘human beings were
trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine’ (Orwell
14
1989a: 4). ‘Comrade’ is a heteroglossic utterance at this particular event because it
exposes real contradictions and class struggles evident in Spanish society during this
point in time.
‘Comrade’ is also illustrative of how utterances embody evaluative expressions that
establish hierarchical relationships and social divisions as well as relationships of
solidarity between and within social groups and social classes. So, dialogue and
utterances are not only concerned with disputes over the ‘correct’ use of language but
also convey a number of cultural and social issues such as bodily appearance, intonation,
the use of public space, social taste, and so on. Bakhtin and Voloshinov recognised as
much, which is one reason why they believed that the battle over hegemony and power
was not just a struggle over language but also part of wider struggle between classes (see
for example Bakhtin 1984b: chapter 5; Voloshinov 1973: 23).
This is also the view of Pierre Bourdieu who shares some notable similarities with
Bakhtin on these issues. He too says that language not only embodies codified
authoritative commands based on deeply engrained binary oppositions (e.g. some in
society are categorised as ‘strong’, others as ‘weak), but that language expresses social
divisions through factors such as intonation (Bourdieu 1984: 191 and 472). Furthermore,
Bakhtin and Bourdieu tell us that even though language is an inherently social
phenomenon it is still only one albeit important element of social life. For example, and
as Fiske (1989: 52-4) observes, Bakhtin and Bourdieu share a commitment to revealing
the potential of bodily excess in and against dominant power relations; for instance how
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sporting events or public carnivals enable people to momentarily engage in physical and
public acts of popular celebration and inversions of governing mores which draw on but
also go beyond convetional language forms (see Bakhtin 1984b; Bourdieu 1984).
Orwell is similarly concerned not to simply reduce the complexities of social life to
language alone. Without doubt, investigating how language operates in everyday life to
create specific identities is important to any critical analysis of society, but one must
equally grasp how hegemony moves through many other cultural and social forms. One
particular set of social relations Orwell dwells upon in this respect is that of social class.
While Bakhtin similarly explores social class, it is in fact Bourdieu who of course
devotes a considerable amount of his research time to investigating the relationship
between culture and class. This is why we now turn to see how Bourdieu and Orwell
examine the relationship between social class and culture.
Social Class and Cultural Identity
Recent years have witnessed a growing trend for sociologists to examine social class in
terms of culture. While not denying the importance of other sociological definitions, such
as Weberian accounts (see Erikson and Goldthorpe 1993) that define social class in terms
of the difference between employment conditions (e.g. promotional prospects) and
employment relations (e.g. the control one experiences at work), social and cultural
theorists have started to enquire into the cultural significance of class. For instance, they
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suggest that class divisions often operate along lines of cultural distinctions like lifestyle
and taste. Collectivities around social class thereby give way to cultural and symbolic
markers of difference, as in difference of taste. Indeed, according to Skeggs (2003), this
often leads working class people to ‘dis-identify’ with belonging to the working class.
Skeggs finds in her own study that the working class women she interviewed frequently
internalise the cultural marker of middle class ‘respectability’. By doing so these very
same women reject working-class cultural categories for themselves because they feel
these stigmatise them as not being respectable (see also Bottero 2004; Hebson 2009;
Savage 2000).
In order to draw out the cultural attributes of class relations many theorists have turned to
the work of Bourdieu. Especially useful here is Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’.
According to Bourdieu, the habitus ‘enables an intelligible and necessary relation to be
established between practices and a situation, the meaning of which is produced by the
habitus through categories of perception and appreciation that are themselves produced
by an observable social condition’ (Bourdieu 1984: 101). A habitus comprises a set of
embodied behaviours and tendencies that teach us over time how to act and react in
particular social fields (e.g. an artistic field, an economic field, an educational field, or a
religious field). Each social field offers up objective constraints and resources for people
to use and to struggle over. These resources range from economic capital (e.g. wealth),
cultural capital (e.g. qualifications), symbolic capital (e.g. prestige), and social capital
(e.g. social networks). The habitus is therefore both a ‘structuring structure’ that arranges
practices and perception of practices, and a ‘structured structure’ which internalises and
17
reproduces social constraints, divisions, and opportunities from different social fields
(Bourdieu 1984: 166).
While Orwell’s writings on social class pose some difficulties, not least his eagerness to
focus on the industrial working class to the detriment of other working class groups and
identities (see Clarke 2007: 55-62), it is nevertheless true to say that he also engages in a
cultural analysis of social class that makes some interesting connections with Bourdieu’s
work. One illustration can be located in The Road to Wigan Pier where Orwell observes:
Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor, but
socially there is a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions
learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but – this is the
essential point – generally persist from birth to death...; you find millionaires who
cannot pronounce their aiches; you find petty shopkeepers whose income is far
lower than that of the bricklayer and who, nevertheless, consider themselves (and
are considered) the bricklayer’s social superiors; you find public-school boys
ruling Indian provinces and public-school men touting vacuum cleaners (Orwell
1989b: 208-209).
This passage demonstrates that for Orwell social class is a complex mixture of economic,
social, and cultural capital which combine in distinctive ways in specific contexts, or
fields. They gain their unique identity only in relationship with one another and it makes
no sense to analyse them separately. As Orwell indicates, a working class person might
be a millionaire and therefore officially belong to the upper echelon of society and yet
still retain working-class cultural capital in how they speak in particular social fields and
18
sub-fields. They will therefore struggle to gain middle-class symbolic capital in these
fields. ‘Having a million’, Bourdieu informs us, ‘does not in itself make one a
millionaire’ (Bourdieu 1984: 374).
Orwell, like Bourdieu, therefore focuses on the vast and multiple practices employed by
ordinary people that equip them to negotiate paths around and through complex social
processes. Orwell makes five further points on these issues. First, he is aware that
ordinary people experience social class through a phenomenological experience of
something akin to a habitus (although of course Orwell does not use this exact term).
Second, he highlights how resources help people to creatively develop their own
embodied class identity in and against dominant power relations. Third, Orwell also
wants to draw attention to the way in which specific resources enable ordinary people to
spatially negotiate their way through power relations surrounding social class that
become entrenched in empirical places within specific social fields. Fourth, he is keen to
stress that these processes are contradictory and dialogic. While resources might provide
members of the working class to resist power relations, for example, they might also
encourage the very same people to accept hegemonic power relations. Finally, he is
sensitive to the ways in which resources of class (cultural capital, for example) impact on
how one is reflexive about one’s own ideological viewpoint and social position.
Arguably, these five points taken together make Orwell’s observations on social class
distinctive in cultural studies, and, indeed, sociology, because it is rare to find them being
discussed in concert by a sole author. They will now be expanded upon.
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If we turn to the first point, Orwell suggests that social class is based in part on a practical
feel for a social context that is both conscious and unconscious. Orwell draws on a
popular expression of his day – ‘to make the best of things on a fish-and-chip standard’ –
to describe these processes. For Orwell this expression sums up for him the ability of
working-class members to ‘make do’ with resources at hand in order to retain a sense of
self-worth in the face of social and economic inequalities and injustices. The long trek to
Wigan Pier shows Orwell that although their lives are on no account desirable, the
workers he met have made the best that they could in the circumstances. The Wigan
workers, Orwell announces, ‘have neither turned revolutionary nor lost their self-respect;
merely they have kept their tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a fishand-chip standard’ (Orwell: 1989b: 83).
Orwell’s observations are reminiscent of what Bourdieu suggests are some of the main
characteristics of the habitus. Over time the habitus internalises the objective constraints
and resources in different social fields while generating structured dispositions for
individuals to occupy in particular fields. A habitus thereby creates ‘classifiable practices
and works, and the capacity to differentiate and appreciate these practices and products
(taste), that the represented social world, i.e., the space of life-styles, is constituted’
(Bourdieu 1984: 166). A ‘fish-and-chip standard’ can be seen as representing a habitus
for Wigan workers. It denotes a set of relatively durable and structured dispositions that
these workers have settled into over a period of time and which enable them to make
sense of their surrounding circumstances and their own identity. And because the workers
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have made the best they can in their circumstances they have also adapted objective
structural patterns over time to fit their own lived experiences.
As Bourdieu notes elsewhere, a habitus is constantly open to daily experiences and
‘therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces or modifies its
structures’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 133). People subsequently display signs of
reasonable behaviour in as much that they are not ‘fools’ or ‘deluded’ but gain a practical
feel of what ‘unquestionably imposes itself as that which “has” to be done or said’
(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 130). Once people gain this practical feel of both their
objective circumstances and internal dispositions they will then engage in strategic
actions about how to anticipate and shape their present and future circumstances. For
example, Orwell observes that the widely held ‘fish-and-chip standard’ amongst Wigan
workers carries with it traces of ‘vague’ socialist ideals – ‘justice and common decency’
– mixed in with popular culture. In this socialist vision the worst abuses are left out but
life generally carries on much the same as before, ‘centring around...family life, the pub,
football and local politics’ (Orwell: 1989b: 164). Here, then, we see the workers being
‘reasonable’ in adapting and shaping their habitus to suit their own lived experience
within the constraints of objective relations.
Following this, and second, if we agree with Bourdieu that cultural markers of social
class are inscribed on the body, indeed they ‘help to shape the class body’ (Bourdieu
1984: 188), it is equally true to say that Orwell’s own analysis of social class takes
account of this point in graphic form. The Road to Wigan Pier is littered with discussions
21
about how social class and popular experiences are played out on the body. The most
well-known one sees Orwell on a train in Wigan. Looking out of the window he notices a
young woman kneeling on the stones poking a stick up a wooden leaden waste pipe in an
attempt to unblock it. As the train goes by the young woman glances up in the direction
of Orwell and catches his eye. The sight of her body hands Orwell the information he
requires to momentarily comprehend her experience: ‘She had a round pale face, the
usual exhausted face of a slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to
miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore for the second in which I saw it, the most
desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen’ (Orwell 1989b: 15). Destitution adorns
her body, and conscious destitution at that for she ‘knew well enough what was
happening to her’. In an oppressive atmosphere the body and its dispositions sums up a
network of unequal class relations.
Third, place, space, and power are an extremely important way of thinking about the
relationship between class and cultural identity. As some contemporary geographers and
sociologists suggest (e.g. Edensor and Millington 2009), place is often a significant
cultural sign of class taste and class distinction. Middle class residents in a particular
locality might for instance resort to certain utterances (e.g. ‘we’ live in a ‘nice’ area
compared to the ‘rough’ estate down the road) in order to symbolically mark themselves
off from other more working class localities (see Dowling 2009; Watt 2009). For
Bourdieu place is indeed a vital point of analysis in this respect but so too is social space.
Indeed, social space arguably presents a more insidious way to distribute power between
individuals because it is less visible than empirical symbolic markers of place. Social
22
spaces, or ‘schemes of action’, are expressed in the social and cultural tastes experienced
in the habitus and which then connect groups of people together in an actual place
(Bourdieu 1984: 168). These social spaces often remain implicit but they nevertheless
delineate specific social positions; ‘all the distinct and distinctive lifestyles which are
always defined objectively and sometimes subjectively in and through their mutual
relationships’ (Bourdieu 1984: 95).
Orwell likewise observes that class and power operate through place and space (Tyner
2004), and that this produces a specific cultural identity. In one episode in Down and Out
in Paris and London free tea and buns are handed out to homeless men in the place of a
small tin-roofed shed in a side-street. But a price has to be paid. The men are expected to
listen patiently to religious sermons from charity helpers, including kneeling down and
praying. They therefore not only sit in a particular place but are also momentarily
inhabiting a religious social field. At the same time different groups in this place occupy
different social spaces which are in turn dependent on their respective habitus. A middle
class lady in charge takes on a surveillance role and makes sure that all are active in the
ritual. Less than willing to comply, the homeless men, in small ways, contravene
although never totally escape these disciplining techniques. Often they resort to grinning
and winking at each other when the lady looks away and bawdy jokes are muttered in
hushed tones. Finally, when the prayers are eventually over, Orwell hears one of the men
announce: ‘Well the troubles over. I thought them f___ prayers was never goin’ to
end…you don’t get give much for nothing. They can’t even give you a two penny cup of
tea without you go down on your f___ knees for it’ (Orwell 1989b: 143). The men are
23
quite conscious that even charity demands rules to be obeyed, duties to be performed, and
social spaces to be occupied in spatial confines.
Fourth, Orwell recognises that the complexity of these processes implies that while
members of the working classes use the resources at hand to ‘resist’ power relations they
also often internalise and reproduce power relations. Indeed, Orwell accepts that social
identity is fluid so that individuals can adopt the outlook of a hegemonic power at one
moment in time while ‘resisting’ it at another moment. To give just one illustration, many
of the homeless in Down and Out in Paris and London often slipped into the discourse
operated by the power-bloc. One homeless man, Paddy, admonished Orwell fairly
severely when the latter criticised food wastage in the workhouse kitchen. ‘They have to
do it’, he said. ‘If they made these places too comfortable, you’d have all the scum of the
country flocking to them. It’s only the bad food as keeps all that scum away. These here
tramps are too lazy to work, that’s all that’s wrong with them. They’re scum’ (Orwell
1989c: 200). Some of the workers he encountered likewise agreed with severl bourgeois
convictions. Constitutionalism and legality were respected, ‘the belief in “the law” as
something above the State and above the individual...’ (Orwell 1970a: 81). Again, such
sentiments demonstrate how the habitus is a complex mechanism. On the one hand it
operates to provide resources in order to shape and sometimes ‘resist’ one’s objective
circumstances, while on the other hand it can adapt one’s dispositions to accommodate
and submit to these objective circumstances (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 24).
24
Finally, Orwell is attentive to the way in which social class offers up specific resources
which at the same time impact on how one reflects on the world. In particular, cultural
and symbolic resources reproduce and reinforce class differences. In The Road to Wigan
Pier Orwell asks his readers: ‘[I]s it ever possible to be really intimate with the workingclass?’ (Orwell 1989b: 106). He replies that it is not possible. ‘I do know that you can
learn a great deal in a working-class home, if you can get there. The essential point is that
your middle-class ideals and prejudices are tested by contact with others which are not
necessarily better but are certainly different’ (Orwell 1989b: 106). Part of the reason why
intimacy cannot be fully achieved is that class differences are bound up with distinct
cultural and symbolic attributes which are hard to shake off – they are part of one’s social
identity (Orwell 1989b: 149). Achieving full class intimacy inexorably demands
suppressing one’s own habits and traits – or habitus in Bourdieu’s language – which is
extremely demanding, if not impossible.
But if this is the case how can the middle class Orwell possibly convey to readers the
lived experiences of the working-class if he occupies a different class habitus to them?
Or, more broadly, how can Orwell escape his own habitus to make meaningful analytical
contact with any other social identities different to his own? Certainly it is a question that
has also preoccupied other writers, most notably Raymond Williams, who in the end
thought Orwell belittled the working-class a little too much for his liking (Williams
1981). It is to this question we now turn.
25
Beyond Cultural Relativism and Towards Nomadism
In Cinema 1, Gilles Deleuze makes a favourable allusion to Bakhtin’s theory of the
utterance. According to Deleuze, Bakhtin correctly states that language does not operate
through two fully constituted subjects of enunciation of the reporter and the reported.
It is rather a case of an assemblage of enunciation, carrying out two inseparable
acts of subjectivation simultaneously, one of which constitutes a character in the
first person, but the other of which is present at his birth and brings him onto the
scene. There is no mixture or average of two subjects, each belonging to the
system, but a differentiation of two correlative subjects in a system which is itself
heterogeneous (Deleuze 1995: 75).
This quote is noteworthy for two main reasons. First, it demonstrates a theoretical
continuity between the work of Bakhtin and that of Deleuze. Both reject the idea that
language is a ready-made abstract structure which is simply appropriated by an allknowing subject. They believe a more accurate description is one that highlights the nonsignificatory expressive potentials of utterances. Language exists as part of an
assemblage between at least two individuals and therefore is always in a process of
expressive becoming because it refracts the social relations surrounding and embedded in
this assemblage. These social relations include social divisions, solidarity, and
relationships of power.
Second, the quote can be taken as an apt illustration of how Orwell manages to write
about the lives of others without falling into cultural relativism. When discussing the
26
daily experiences of being homeless, working-class, a soldier in Spain, and so forth,
Orwell momentarily merges his own embodied encounters and events with those he talks
about. That is to say, he creates ‘a differentiation of two correlative subjects in a system
which is itself heterogeneous’. He speaks about their lives through his own experiences
of their lives in the persona of ‘George Orwell’. We now explore this point in more depth
through Deleuze and Guattari’s writings.
According to Deleuze and Guattari molar formations are assemblages that assume wellknown and relatively stable functions such as being a ‘woman’ or being ‘working class’
or social systems such as ‘capitalism’ or ‘the state’ (Delueze and Guattari 1988: 304-15).
In this respect a molar formation might be said to encompass the habitus and social fields,
a relatively stable set of engrained dispositions and distributions of constraints and
resources Molecular particles, on the other hand, refer to heterogeneous expressive
elements that when assembled together help to maintain a consistent identity for a molar
formation (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 357). Molecules are expressive because they
communicate to others how a molar formation is becoming in its identity. Molecules
frequently alter their relationship with one another through ‘movement and rest, speed
and slowness’ in a manner that is ‘closet to what one is becoming, and through which one
becomes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 300). At the same time molecules engage in a
process of ‘deterritorialisation’ going on here as an assemblage seeks out new molecules
to link up to within the remit of a particular molar formation, or molecules break away
from a molar formation to create a new assemblage. All of these processes lead to further
relations of in/consistency.
27
But deterritorialisation also raises the possibility that molecules have somewhat of a
‘nomadic’ existence. Far from travelling in a straight line nomads instead travel across a
number of boundaries and occupy a number of spaces. Indeed, nomads blur the
boundaries between spaces by often being in two spaces at once.
[Nomads are] without property, enclosure or measure. Here, there is no longer a
division of that which is distributed but rather a division among those who
distribute themselves in an open space – a space which is unlimited, or at least
without precise limits (Deleuze 1994: 46).
It is not too far off the mark to suggest that while Orwell believes that social class is
inscribed and embodied in what might be termed as a class habitus, he also recognises
that social identities are comprised by assemblages of different ‘molecules’. Indeed, it is
this recognition that arguably allows Orwell to escape the spectre of cultural relativism.
In Wigan Pier for example Orwell readily admits that as a middle class writer his identity
is clearly different to the working class people he has met. As he says of his daily
encounters with ‘the proles’: ‘However much you like them, however interesting you
find their conversation, there is always that accursed itch of class-difference, like the pea
under the princess’s mattress. It is not a question of dislike or distaste, only of difference,
but it is enough to make real intimacy impossible’ (Orwell 1989b: 145). For Orwell, then,
social class is an assemblage of ‘difference’ embodied in:
28
my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners,
my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body…
(Orwell 1989b: 149).
It is these ‘molecules’ of identity which imply that for a member of the middle class to
pretend to share solidarity with the working class without at the same time addressing
their different molecular assemblages simply creates a fictitious degree of sympathy.
Nonetheless Orwell also recognises that it is different molecules that go to help create
specific social identities break apart and momentarily become merged with other
‘molecules’ of social identity. Molecules that reproduce the molar formation of middle
class identity can for instance break off and momentarily connect up with molecules of
working class molar identities. What is interesting about Orwell is that he would seem to
embrace and welcome this ‘deterritorialisation’ of his social identity. In fact, it is possible
to say that Orwell paints a picture of himself as a nomad, as a traveller embarking on new
journeys. Whether he is down and out amongst the homeless, in the trenches of Spain, or
down a mine, Orwell deliberately sets out to disturb and unsettle his own middle class
identity and to enter other strange landscapes. He thus allows his own molecular habits to
be rearranged into a new assemblage. Thus the body is not merely an object upon which
molar power relations are played out, but also represents a site where negotiations for
new molecular bodily assemblages can be brought into being.
This nomadic existence can be seen at greater length through an essay written in 1929
entitled ‘How the Poor Die’. Orwell recalls a stay in a Paris hospital for treatment to his
29
‘bronchial rattle’. As he is not paying for his treatment he is reduced to the status of a
‘poor patient’ and thereby assembled by the molar formation of medical staff as a
‘specimen’. ‘It was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to
you, or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you’ (Orwell 1984: 394). Similarly as the
gaze of the student doctors glide across his body Orwell observes: ‘It was a queer feeling
– queer, I mean, because of their intense interest in learning their job, together with a
seeming lack of any perception that the patients were human beings…’ (Orwell 1984:
395). But far from accepting their status as a medical object, Orwell concludes that the
majority of the poor on the ward know the hospital is ‘a lousy place’ to visit. The attitude
of the majority is, however, one of critical acceptance. ‘If you are seriously ill, and if you
are too poor to go be treated in your own home, then you must go into hospital, and once
there you must put up with harshness and discomfort, just as you would in an army’
(Orwell 1984: 399).
Importantly, Orwell reaches his critical understanding of hospital treatment of the poor
by talking about a personal and embodied event in his life and then reassembling this into
a public issue. Orwell achieves this by situating his own embodiment within the distinct
habits, repetitions and events he encounters within the hospital. This is Orwell the
nomadic writer, entering a space that is different to his own middle class life. As such he
leaves the ‘normal’ territory of his middle-class body and opens up his embodiment to
that of the poor and to the medical profession. ‘Molecules’ of his embodied identity
momentarily merge with some of the molecules evident in the sights, sounds, tastes, and
30
smells of the hospital and, in the process, ‘reterritorialises’ the assemblage of ‘George
Orwell’, the critical socialist writer.
Conclusion
At the beginning of the paper it was noted that some see Orwell as a rather conservative
social and cultural commentator whose traditional beliefs ultimately lead him to embrace
a conformist rather than critical attitude. Wilkin for example suggests that Orwell’s
dedication towards democratic socialism is tempered by his support for English Tory
values like ‘decency, common sense and respect for custom, tradition and heritage’
(Wilkin 2012: 201). This cultural outlook is encapsulated in Orwell’s yearning for a
return to the English countryside of 1910 where social classes are no longer at war with
one another but exist in an amenable relationship. It is an image of an always in-the-past
England rather than an image of what England has actually become (Wilkin 2010: 1048). Like many conservative writers Orwell therefore adopts an empiricist ‘urgency and
need for directness about the truth of the world around him’ which is seen most readily in
his ‘plain, transparent and simple literary style’ that merely skims the surface appearance
of social relations (Wilkin 2012: 202; see also Norris 1984; Williams 1981).
This article has argued to the contrary that Orwell in fact presents a more critical,
sophisticated and less conservative exploration of culture and society. As Rae (1999)
similarly notes one of Orwell’s aims is indeed to penetrate ‘surface-truths to uncover the
31
grim realities hidden beneath’ (Rae 1999: 85). Appearances might suggest for example
that British society is one in which workers simply accept their lot in life. Beyond these
appearances, observes Orwell, lies a deeper reality, one where the exterior of what seems
to be an acceptance of their lot by workers is entwined with the deeper reality of having
to endure hard undesirable work. This more critical approach is also noticeable in his
work on culture. Orwell appreciates that the surface appearances of popular culture are
also bound up with a deeper reality which includes his own everyday experiences (see
also Roberts 2010). Orwell wants to convey to his readers how popular emotional
experiences operate at different societal levels, which also impact on his own experiences
and perceptions of the world.
Orwell therefore wishes to create a circle of meaning between himself and his readers by
turning his own political and social writing into an ‘art form’ (Orwell 1981: 753). He
does this in part by speaking about the world through his own contradictory and
dialogical embodiment. Orwell does not claim to speak for others, but claims, instead, to
speak from his own embodied experience within which he momentarily experiences the
embodied experience of others. Orwell not only therefore explores themes in cultural
studies that have since become established parts of the discipline’s canon he also shows
how cultural and social commentators might transform their own embodied experiences
into matters of public concern.
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1
There’s an echo in these criticisms of E. P. Thompson’s accusation that Orwell constantly snipes at the
radical Left (Thompson 1974: 84-6).
Coleman (1972) does take Orwell’s writings on popular culture seriously, but his original paper was
published before the advent of contemporary studies of popular culture.
2
37