Clockwork Orange in the New Era

“A clockwork orange refers to a person who has the appearance of an organism lovely with color and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State.”

-- Anthony Burgess

In the dystopian world of A Clockwork Orange, the Government seeks to suppress individuals and individual choice by coercion method like Ludovico Technique—an aversion therapy for trails on distributed and violent citizens—largely to ensure its own power. Such a scenario is an intuitive metaphorized expression of how power is exerted on individual part of society. In the real world, though, power needs to be examined in multi-dimensional perspectives. It is, according to Manuel Castells, exercised through networks (Castells, 2009).

According to Castells, power that mainly relies on coercion is weak and is difficult to maintain in the long run (Castells, 2009). The system can only last when the subject in it is acquiescent or at least succumbed. Whereas the power imposed on the mind outweighs the power exerted on the body. The power imposed on the mind cannot be simply understood as a purely controlling mechanism, but rather as the ability of the individual to internalize and accept a particular discourse during the effective communication between the sender and the recipient. Therefore, features of the communication system is the key to understanding the formation of power and its ability to shape social actors by constructing meaningful connections between the structure and content embedded in human experience and dominant interests (Castells, 2009).

What does it mean to be a clockwork orange in today’s social network then? To figure it out, the essential step is to scrutinize how power works in today’s communication system.

Castells combs through the fundamental transformation of communication system in the information age (Castells, 2009). First, the digitization of communication has produced a new form of communication—a global network based on the Internet and interaction—where senders and recipients meet in the same flow of communication. Second, because of the global expansion of digital literacy, traditional mass media are technically integrated. Third, the horizontal communication network and the vertical mass media gradually merge into the same system, forming the so-called “the one common language”, the hypertext. Fourth, media corporations are organized by a global scale of multimedia business networks. These commercial networks focus on capital management, diversify the content and customize the audience. Fifth, although the government still maintains constraints and powers in the media system, the corporation has begun to represent mass communications both in traditional media and in the networked communication system. Sixth, the mass self-communication is dominated by millions of users who rely on communication devices and technology companies but possess certain autonomy in defining interactive content, yet, at the expense of privacy.

Within such a power flow in today’s communication system, how to truly realize the implementation of power upon mind? How does the communication go through? The answer lies in the process of encoding and decoding.

From the perspective of structuralism, Stuart Hall compares the process of communication to the production of goods, including the production, circulation, consumption, and reproduction of information. The message is composed by the coder according to certain code in the production phase and then is distributed to the decoder in the form of discourse. In the structure of the communication, the audience is placed in the phase of consumption, in which the audience decodes the meaning of the message according to the code (During, 1999).

For those in power, what they expect is to efficiently convey messages to the audience in order to achieve conformity. The ideal decoding position in Hall’s encoding/decoding typology should be dominant-hegemonic position. In simple terms, the dominant-hegemonic position refers to the case when the audience decoding position is consistent with the message sender’s coding position, and the coding and decoding are in harmony. Hall called this ideal propagation model completely transparent communication. In addition, Hall also mentioned the dominant-hegemonic position is generated by the professional code (During, 1999). We can find some circumstances in life when the sender and the audience are possibly in this position. Spokespersons appear in front of journalists from all over the world and represent the national position. Faced with various questions, they reply in a firm tone, with serious expressions and rigorous logic. From the perspective of recipient, sun as live reporters and audience in front of television, the body language and spoken language of the spokesman are unquestionable, that is, representing national authority. Tone, intonation, and voice are the elements of professional code. They reproduce the definition of hegemony in a mainstream direction through an inconspicuous way. The reproduction of ideology happens here unconsciously and inadvertently.

The concept of "ideology" is the same as that of Western classical Marxism. The state machine embeds the individual with ruling ideas, a potential structure of position or identity, which is often anonymous and invisible but defines the individual's self-identity in the country. Hall believes that the audience's understanding of the content of communication is subject to the standardization of ideology, which is every authority trying to achieve.

In practice, the most crucial step is to standardize/control language use. Regardless it is in television age or internet age, language is always the ultimate weapon to numb the audience’s thoughts. George Orwell was good at depicting the reciprocity of language and thought. In 1984, a barren futuristic society, by diminishing the language, thought can likewise be diminished. What audience received from Newspeak are words deprived from connotative meanings that suppresses thought. There are no nuances of meaning, no emotion, no abstraction. All those shades of language have been eliminated and simplified to the shallowest level. Or the meanings of some words are replaced with subversive or offensive ones. Justice, morality, honor would be associated with crimethink (Orwell, 2009). That is how ideology could be standardized, for the purpose of efficient communication, thought control, power implementation.

But the reality is more complicated. Although standardization is still the purpose, there are much more situations can happen. If the audience's decoding symbology is the same as the sender’s encoding symbology, then the meaning is implemented without bias; however, if the symbology is different, the decoding will have errors, then the communication fails. Since the decoding is relatively autonomous, the symbolic system between the coder and the audience as well as the symbology between the audiences can also be different (During, 1999). That’s why other two positions exist in Hall’s models—negotiated position and oppositional position—which will not be discussed in detail here.

Overall, our society has increasingly become the one that is completely networked by digital communications on a global scale. “The God or the Devil or the Almighty State” still exist but not as an individual or institution any more. The power is being decentralized into layers of operations and focusing of control due to the transformation of communication system. Still, every one of us in this network society could be viewed as a clockwork orange, but in different networks we social participators are controlled in different ways and the participation is largely determined by degree to which the node can contribute to the goals of the network. As for how authorities implement power in practice, the key is trying to convert the asymmetry of code used by both the coder and the decoder, which is realized by standardization of ideology.

Reference:

Burgess, A. (1972). A Clockwork Orange. 1962. Google Scholar.

Castells, M. (2009). Communication power. OUP Oxford.

During, S. (Ed.). (1999). The cultural studies reader. Psychology Press.

Hall, S. (2001). Encoding/decoding. Media and cultural studies: Keyworks, 16676.

Orwell, G. (2009). Nineteen eighty-four. Everyman's Library.