Francisco Peña was a Spanish canon lawyer. He was born in Villarroya de los Pinares (Spain) in 1540 and dies in Rome (Italy) in 1612. He is kown for his writings about inquisition and the relationship between the Catholic Church and governements.

Inquisition

The Inquisition was a group of institutions within the government system of the Catholic Church whose aim was to combat heresy. It started in 12th-century France to combat religious dissent, in particular the Cathars and the Waldensians. Other groups investigated later included the Spiritual Franciscans, the Hussites (followers of Jan Hus) and the Beguines. Beginning in the 1250s, inquisitors were generally chosen from members of the Dominican Order, replacing the earlier practice of using local clergy as judges. The term Medieval Inquisition covers these courts up to mid-15th century.

During the Late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, the concept and scope of the Inquisition significantly expanded in response to the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. It expanded to other European countries, resulting in the Spanish Inquisition and Portuguese Inquisition. The Spanish and Portuguese operated inquisitorial courts throughout their empires in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (resulting in the Peruvian Inquisition and Mexican Inquisition). The Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions focused particularly on the issue of Jewish anusim and Muslim converts to Catholicism, partly because these minority groups were more numerous in Spain and Portugal than in many other parts of Europe, and partly because they were often considered suspect due to the assumption that they had secretly reverted to their previous religions.

With the exception of the Papal States, the institution of the Inquisition was abolished in the early 19th century, after the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the Spanish American wars of independence in the Americas. The institution survived as part of the Roman Curia, but in 1908 it was renamed the “Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office.” In 1965 it became the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Definition and purpose

The term Inquisition comes from the Medieval Latin word inquisitio, which referred to any court process that was based on Roman law, which had gradually come back into use during the late medieval period. Today, the English term Inquisition can apply to any one of several institutions that worked against heretics (or other offenders against canon law) within the judicial system of the Roman Catholic Church. Although the term Inquisition is usually applied to ecclesiastical courts of the Catholic Church, it has several different usages:

–An ecclesiastical tribunal

–The institution for combating heresy

–A number of historical expurgation movements

–The trial of an individual accused of heresy.

“The Inquisition, as a church-court, had no jurisdiction over Moors and Jews as such.” Generally, the Inquisition was concerned only with the heretical behaviour of Catholic adherents or converts.

“The overwhelming majority of sentences seem to have consisted of penances like wearing a cross sewn on one’s clothes, going on pilgrimage, etc.” When a suspect was convicted of unrepentant heresy, the inquisitorial tribunal was required by law to hand the person over to the secular authorities for final sentencing, at which point a magistrate would determine the penalty, which was usually burning at the stake although the penalty varied based on local law. The laws were inclusive of proscriptions against certain religious crimes (heresy, etc.), and the punishments included death by burning, although usually the penalty was banishment or imprisonment for life, which was generally commuted after a few years. Thus the inquisitors generally knew what would be the fate of anyone so remanded, and cannot be considered to have divorced the means of determining guilt from its effects.

The 1578 edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum (a standard Inquisitorial manual) spelled out the purpose of inquisitorial penalties:

“[…]quoniam punitio non refertur primo & per se in correctionem & bonum eius qui punitur, sed in bonum publicum ut alij terreantur, & a malis committendis avocentur”

(translation: “[…] for punishment does not take place primarily and per se for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit”).

Origin

Before 1100, the Catholic Church suppressed what they believed to be heresy, usually through a system of ecclesiastical proscription or imprisonment, but without using torture, and seldom resorting to executions. Such punishments were opposed by a number of clergymen and theologians, although some countries punished heresy with the death penalty.

In the 12th century, to counter the spread of Catharism, prosecution of heretics became more frequent. The Church charged councils composed of bishops and archbishops with establishing inquisitions (the Episcopal Inquisition). The first Inquisition was temporarily established in Languedoc (south of France) in 1184. The murder of Pope Innocent’s papal legate Pierre de Castelnau in 1208 sparked the Albigensian Crusade (1209/1229). The Inquisition was permanently established in 1229, run largely by the Dominicanss in Rome and later at Carcassonne in Languedoc.

Medieval Inquisition

Historians use the term Medieval Inquisition to describe the various inquisitions that started around 1184, including the Episcopal Inquisition (1184/1230s) and later the Papal Inquisition (1230s). These inquisitions responded to large popular movements throughout Europe considered apostate or heretical to Christianity, in particular the Cathars in southern France and the Waldensians in both southern France and northern Italy. Other Inquisitions followed after these first inquisition movements. The legal basis for some inquisitorial activity came from Pope Innocent IV’s papal bull Ad extirpanda of 1252, which explicitly authorized (and defined the appropriate circumstances for) the use of torture by the Inquisition for eliciting confessions from heretics. However, Nicholas Eymerich, the inquisitor who wrote the Directorium Inquisitorum, stated: ‘Quaestiones sunt fallaces et ineficaces’ (“interrogations via torture are misleading and futile”). By 1256 inquisitors were given absolution if they used instruments of torture.

In the 13th century, Pope Gregory IX (reigned 1227/1241) assigned the duty of carrying out inquisitions to the Dominican Order and Franciscan Order. By the end of the Middle Ages, England and Castile were the only large western nations without a papal inquisition. Most inquisitors were friars who taught theology and/or law in the universities. They used inquisitorial procedures, a common legal practice adapted from the earlier Ancient Roman court procedures. They judged heresy along with bishops and groups of assessors (clergy serving in a role that was roughly analogous to a jury or legal advisers), using the local authorities to establish a tribunal and to prosecute heretics. After 1200, a Grand Inquisitor headed each Inquisition. Grand Inquisitions persisted until the mid 19th century.

Early Modern European history

With the sharpening of debate and of conflict between the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, Protestant societies came to see/use the Inquisition as a terrifying Others, while staunch Catholics regarded the Holy Office as a necessary bulwark against the spread of reprehensible heresies.

Witch-trials

While belief in witchcraft, and persecutions directed at or excused by it, were widespread in pre-Christian Europe, and reflected in Germanic law, the influence of the Church in the early medieval era resulted in the revocation of these laws in many places, bringing an end to traditional pagan witch hunts. Throughout the medieval era mainstream Christian teaching had denied the existence of witches and witchcraft, condemning it as pagan superstition. However, Christian influence on popular beliefs in witches and maleficium (harm committed by magic) failed to entirely eradicate folk belief in witches.

The fierce denunciation and persecution of supposed sorceresses that characterized the cruel witchhunts of a later age were not generally found in the first thirteen hundred years of the Christian era. The medieval Church distinguished between white and black magic. Local folk practice often mixed chants, incantations, and prayers to the appropriate patron saint to ward off storms, to protect cattle, or ensure a good harvest. Bonfires on Midsummer’s Eve were intended to deflect natural catastrophes or the influence of fairies, ghosts, and witches. Plants, often harvested under particular conditions, were deemed effective in healing.

Black magic was that which was used for a malevolent purpose. This was generally dealt with through confession, repentance, and charitable work assigned as penance. Early Irish canons treated sorcery as a crime to be visited with excommunication until adequate penance had been performed. In 1258 Pope Alexander IV ruled that inquisitors should limit their involvement to those cases in which there was some clear presumption of heretical belief.

The prosecution of witchcraft generally became more prominent throughout the late medieval and Renaissance era, perhaps driven partly by the upheavals of the era—the Black Death, Hundred Years’ War, and a gradual cooling of the climate that modern scientists call the Little Ice Age (between about the 15th and 19th centuries). Witches were sometimes blamed. Since the years of most intense witch-hunting largely coincide with the age of the Reformation, some historians point to the influence of the Reformation on the European witch-hunt.

Dominican priest Heinrich Kramer was assistant to the Archbishop of Salzburg. In 1484 Kramer requested that Pope Innocent VIII clarify his authority to prosecute witchcraft in Germany, where he had been refused assistance by the local ecclesiastical authorities. They maintained that Kramer could not legally function in their areas.

The bull Summis desiderantes affectibus sought to remedy this jurisdictional dispute by specifically identifying the dioceses of Mainz, Köln, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen. Some scholars view the bull as clearly political. The bull failed to ensure that Kramer obtained the support he had hoped for, in fact he was subsequently expelled from the city of Innsbruck by the local bishop, George Golzer, who ordered Kramer to stop making false accusations. Golzer described Kramer as senile in letters written shortly after the incident. This rebuke led Kramer to write a justification of his views on witchcraft in his book Malleus Maleficarum, written in 1486. In the book, Kramer stated his view that witchcraft was to blame for bad weather. The book is also noted for its animus against women. Despite Kramer’s claim that the book gained acceptance from the clergy at the university of Cologne, it was in fact condemned by the clergy at Cologne for advocating views that violated Catholic doctrine and standard inquisitorial procedure. In 1538 the Spanish Inquisition cautioned its members not to believe everything the Malleus said.

Spanish Inquisition

Portugal and Spain in the late Middle Ages consisted largely of multicultural territories of Muslim and Jewish influence, reconquered from Islamic control, and the new Christian authorities could not assume that all their subjects would suddenly become and remain orthodox Roman Catholics. So the Inquisition in Iberia, in the lands of the Reconquista counties and kingdoms like León, Castile and Aragon, had a special socio-political basis as well as more fundamental religious motives.

In some parts of Spain towards the end of the 14th century, there was a wave of violent anti-Judaism, encouraged by the preaching of Ferrand Martinez, Archdeacon of Ecija. In the pogroms of June 1391 in Seville, hundreds of Jews were killed, and the synagogue was completely destroyed. The number of people killed was also high in other cities, such as Córdoba, Valencia and Barcelona.

One of the consequences of these pogroms was the mass conversion of thousands of surviving Jews. Forced baptism was contrary to the law of the Catholic Church, and theoretically anybody who had been forcibly baptized could legally return to Judaism. However, this was very narrowly interpreted. Legal definitions of the time theoretically acknowledged that a forced baptism was not a valid sacrament, but confined this to cases where it was literally administered by physical force. A person who had consented to baptism under threat of death or serious injury was still regarded as a voluntary convert, and accordingly forbidden to revert to Judaism. After the public violence, many of the converted “felt it safer to remain in their new religion.” Thus, after 1391, a new social group appeared and were referred to as conversos or New Christians.

King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile established the Spanish Inquisition in 1478. In contrast to the previous inquisitions, it operated completely under royal Christian authority, though staffed by clergy and orders, and independently of the Holy See. It operated in Spain and in all Spanish colonies and territories, which included the Canary Islands, the Spanish Netherlands, the Kingdom of Naples, and all Spanish possessions in North, Central, and South America. It primarily targeted forced converts from Islam (Moriscos, Conversos and secret Moors) and from Judaism (Conversos, Crypto-Jews and Marranos)—both groups still resided in Spain after the end of the Islamic control of Spain—who came under suspicion of either continuing to adhere to their old religion or of having fallen back into it.

In 1492 all Jews who had not converted were expelled from Spain; those who converted became nominal Catholics and thus subject to the Inquisition.

Inquisition in the Spanish overseas empire

In the Americas, King Philip II set up three tribunals (each formally titled Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición) in 1569, one in Mexico, Cartagena de Indias (in modern-day Colombia) and Peru. The Mexican office administered Mexico (central and southeastern Mexico), Nueva Galicia (northern and western Mexico), the Audiencias of Guatemala (Guatemala, Chiapas, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica), and the Spanish East Indies. The Peruvian Inquisition, based in Lima, administered all the Spanish territories in South America and Panama.

Portuguese Inquisition

The Portuguese Inquisition formally started in Portugal in 1536 at the request of King João III. Manuel I had asked Pope Leo X for the installation of the Inquisition in 1515, but only after his death in 1521 did Pope Paul III acquiesce. At its head stood a Grande Inquisidor, or General Inquisitor, named by the Pope but selected by the Crown, and always from within the royal family. The Portuguese Inquisition principally targeted the Sephardi Jews, whom the state forced to convert to Christianity. Spain had expelled its Sephardi population in 1492; many of these Spanish Jews left Spain for Portugal but eventually were targeted there as well.

The Portuguese Inquisition held its first auto-da-fé in 1540. The Portuguese inquisitors mostly targeted the Jewish New Christians (i.e. conversos or marranos). The Portuguese Inquisition expanded its scope of operations from Portugal to its colonial possessions, including Brazil, Cape Verde, and Goa. In the colonies, it continued as a religious court, investigating and trying cases of breaches of the tenets of orthodox Roman Catholicism until 1821. King João III (reigned 1521/57) extended the activity of the courts to cover censorship, divination, witchcraft, and bigamy. Originally oriented for a religious action, the Inquisition exerted an influence over almost every aspect of Portuguese society: political, cultural, and social.

The Goa Inquisition, which began in 1560, was initiated by Jesuit priest Francis Xavier from his headquarters in Malacca, originally because of the New Christians who were living there and also in Goa and the region whose population had reverted back to Judaism. The Goa inquisition also targeted Catholic converts from Hinduism or Islam who were thought to have returned to their original ways. In addition, this inquisition prosecuted non-converts who broke prohibitions against the observance of Hindu or Muslim rites or interfered with Portuguese attempts to convert non-Christians to Catholicism. Aleixo Dias Falcão and Francisco Marques set it up in the palace of the Sabaio Adil Khan.

According to Henry Charles Lea, between 1540 and 1794, tribunals in Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra, and Évora resulted in the burning of 1,175 persons, the burning of another 633 in effigy, and the penancing of 29,590. But documentation of 15 out of 689 autos-da-fé has disappeared, so these numbers may slightly understate the activity.

Roman Inquisition

With the Protestant Reformation, Catholic authorities became much more ready to suspect heresy in any new ideas, including those of Renaissance humanism, previously strongly supported by many at the top of the Church hierarchy. The extirpation of heretics became a much broader and more complex enterprise, complicated by the politics of territorial Protestant powers, especially in northern Europe. The Catholic Church could no longer exercise direct influence in the politics and justice-systems of lands that officially adopted Protestantism. Thus war (the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years’ War), massacre (the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre) and the missional and propaganda work (by the Sacra congregatio de propaganda fide) of the Counter-Reformation came to play larger roles in these circumstances, and the Roman law type of a “judicial” approach to heresy represented by the Inquisition became less important overall. In 1542 Pope Paul III established the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition as a permanent congregation staffed with cardinals and other officials. It had the tasks of maintaining and defending the integrity of the faith and of examining and proscribing errors and false doctrines; it thus became the supervisory body of local Inquisitions. Arguably the most famous case tried by the Roman Inquisition was that of Galileo Galilei in 1633.

The penances and sentences for those who confessed or were found guilty were pronounced together in a public ceremony at the end of all the processes. This was the sermo generalis or auto-da-fé. Penances (not matters for the civil authorities) might consist of a pilgrimage, a public scourging, a fine, or the wearing of a cross. The wearing of two tongues of red or other brightly colored cloth, sewn onto an outer garment in an “X” pattern, marked those who were under investigation. The penalties in serious cases were confiscation of property by the Inquisition or imprisonment. This led to the possibility of false charges to enable confiscation being made against those over a certain income, particularly rich marranos. Following the French invasion of 1798, the new authorities sent 3000 chests containing over 100,000 Inquisition documents to France from Rome.

Ending of the Inquisition in the 19th and 20th centuries

The wars of independence of the former Spanish colonies in the Americas concluded with the abolition of the Inquisition in every quarter of Hispanic America between 1813 and 1825.

By decree of Napoleon’s government in 1797, the Inquisition in Venice was abolished in 1806.

In Portugal, in the wake of the Liberal Revolution of 1820, the “General Extraordinary and Constituent Courts of the Portuguese Nation” abolished the Portuguese inquisition in 1821.

The last execution of the Inquisition was in Spain in 1826. This was the execution by garroting of the school teacher Cayetano Ripoll for purportedly teaching Deism in his school. In Spain the practices of the Inquisition were finally outlawed in 1834.

In Italy, after the restoration of the Pope as the ruler of the Papal States in 1814, the activity of the Papal States Inquisition continued on until the mid-19th century, notably in the well-publicised Mortara Affair (1858/1870). In 1908 the name of the Congregation became “The Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office,” which in 1965 further changed to “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” as retained to the present day.

Statistics

Beginning in the 19th century, historians have gradually compiled statistics drawn from the surviving court records, from which estimates have been calculated by adjusting the recorded number of convictions by the average rate of document loss for each time period. Gustav Henningsen and Jaime Contreras studied the records of the Spanish Inquisition, which list 44,674 cases of which 826 resulted in executions in person and 778 in effigy (i.e. a straw dummy was burned in place of the person). William Monter estimated there were 1000 executions between 1530/1630 and 250 between 1630/1730. Jean-Pierre Dedieu studied the records of Toledo’s tribunal, which put 12,000 people on trial. For the period prior to 1530, Henry Kamen estimated there were about 2000 executions in all of Spain’s tribunals. Italian Renaissance history professor and Inquisition expert Carlo Ginzburg had his doubts about using statistics to reach a judgment about the period. “In many cases, we don’t have the evidence, the evidence has been lost,” said Ginzburg.

Appearance in popular media

Series 2 Episode 2 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus is entitled The Spanish Inquisition, and features Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Terry Gilliam as an inept—not to mention anachronistic—team of Inquisitors attempting to menace 20th-Century Britons, who seem unfazed by their inane torture implements (such as the rack, which was taken out of a dishwasher, or even the dreaded Comfy Chair) and woefully unpolished theatrics (Palin’s character discovers to his horror that having more chief weapons rather than fewer seems to take some of the punch out of his diabolical monologue). Their signature gimmick is bursting into the room whenever someone says they “didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition,” and declaring that “nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” a line which has itself inspired numerous homages and parodies since.

The 1982 novel Baltasar and Blimunda by José Saramago, portrays how the Portuguese Inquisition impacts the fortunes of the title characters as well as several others from history, including the priest and aviation pioneer Bartolomeu de Gusmão.

The 1981 comedy film History of the World, Part I, produced and directed by Mel Brooks, features a segment on the Spanish Inquisition.

Inquisitio is a French television series set in the Middle Ages.

In the novel Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, there is some discussion about various sects of Christianity and inquisition, a small discussion about the ethics and purpose of inquisition, and a scene of Inquisition. In the movie by the same name, The Inquisition plays a prominent role including torture and a burning at the stake.

In the novel La Catedral del Mar by Ildefonso Falcones, there are scenes of inquisition investigations in small towns and a great scene in Barcelona.

Milos Foreman’s Goya’s Ghosts, released June 9, 2007 in the US, brings to light the stories behind some of Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s paintings during the Spanish Inquisition, particularly one of a priest condemning and imprisoning a beautiful woman for his own profit. Her family retaliates, but cannot save her.

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.

Bentham defined as the fundamental axiom of his philosophy the principle “that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated for individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexual acts. He called for the abolition of slavery, of the death penalty, and of physical punishment, including that of children. He has also become known as an early advocate of animal rights. Though strongly in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights (both of which are considered divine or God-given in origin), calling them nonsense upon stilts. Bentham was also a sharp critic of legal fictions.

Bentham’s students included his secretary and collaborator James Mill, the latter’s son, John Stuart Mill, the legal philosopher John Austin, as well as Robert Owen, one of the founders of utopian socialism. He “had considerable influence on the reform of prisons, schools, poor laws, law courts, and Parliament itself.”

On his death in 1832, Bentham left instructions for his body to be first dissected, and then to be permanently preserved as an auto-icon (or self-image), which would be his memorial. This was done, and the auto-icon is now on public display at University College London (UCL). Because of his arguments in favour of the general availability of education, he has been described as the spiritual founder of UCL. However, he played only a limited direct part in its foundation.

Utilitarianism

Bentham’s ambition in life was to create a Pannomion, a complete utilitarian code of law. He not only proposed many legal and social reforms, but also expounded an underlying moral principle on which they should be based. This philosophy of utilitarianism took for its fundamental axiom, it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong. Bentham claimed to have borrowed this concept from the writings of Joseph Priestley, although the closest that Priestley in fact came to expressing it was in the form the good and happiness of the members, that is the majority of the members of any state, is the great standard by which every thing relating to that state must finally be determined.

The greatest happiness principle, or the principle of utility, forms the cornerstone of all Bentham’s thought. By happiness, he understood a predominance of pleasure over pain. He wrote in The Principles of Morals and Legislation:

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think…

Bentham was a rare major figure in the history of philosophy to endorse psychological egoism.

Bentham was a determined opponent of religion. Crimmins observes: “Between 1809 and 1823 Jeremy Bentham carried out an exhaustive examination of religion with the declared aim of extirpating religious beliefs, even the idea of religion itself, from the minds of men.”

Bentham suggested a procedure for estimating the moral status of any action, which he called the Hedonistic or felicific calculus. Utilitarianism was revised and expanded by Bentham’s student John Stuart Mill. In Mill’s hands, Benthamism became a major element in the liberal conception of state policy objectives.

Bentham’s critics have claimed that he undermined the foundation of a free society by rejecting natural rights.

In his exposition of the felicific calculus, Bentham proposed a classification of 12 pains and 14 pleasures, by which we might test the happiness factor of any action. Nonetheless, it should not be overlooked that Bentham’s hedonistic theory (a term from J.J.C. Smart), unlike Mill’s, is often criticized for lacking a principle of fairness embodied in a conception of justice. In Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, Gerald J. Postema states: “No moral concept suffers more at Bentham’s hand than the concept of justice. There is no sustained, mature analysis of the notion…” Thus, some critics object, it would be acceptable to torture one person if this would produce an amount of happiness in other people outweighing the unhappiness of the tortured individual. However, as P. J. Kelly argued in Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law, Bentham had a theory of justice that prevented such consequences. According to Kelly, for Bentham the law “provides the basic framework of social interaction by delimiting spheres of personal inviolability within which individuals can form and pursue their own conceptions of well-being.” It provides security, a precondition for the formation of expectations. As the hedonic calculus shows expectation utilities to be much higher than natural ones, it follows that Bentham does not favour the sacrifice of a few to the benefit of the many. Law professor Alan Dershowitz has quoted Bentham to argue that torture should sometimes be permitted.

Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation focuses on the principle of utility and how this view of morality ties into legislative practices. His principle of utility regards good as that which produces the greatest amount of pleasure and the minimum amount of pain and evil as that which produces the most pain without the pleasure. This concept of pleasure and pain is defined by Bentham as physical as well as spiritual. Bentham writes about this principle as it manifests itself within the legislation of a society. He lays down a set of criteria for measuring the extent of pain or pleasure that a certain decision will create.

The criteria are divided into the categories of intensity, duration, certainty, proximity, productiveness, purity, and extent. Using these measurements, he reviews the concept of punishment and when it should be used as far as whether a punishment will create more pleasure or more pain for a society. He calls for legislators to determine whether punishment creates an even more evil offence. Instead of suppressing the evil acts, Bentham argues that certain unnecessary laws and punishments could ultimately lead to new and more dangerous vices than those being punished to begin with, and calls upon legislators to measure the pleasures and pains associated with any legislation and to form laws in order to create the greatest good for the greatest number. He argues that the concept of the individual pursuing his or her own happiness cannot be necessarily declared right, because often these individual pursuits can lead to greater pain and less pleasure for a society as a whole. Therefore, the legislation of a society is vital to maintain the maximum pleasure and the minimum degree of pain for the greatest number of people.

Economics

Bentham’s opinions about monetary economics were completely different from those of David Ricardo; however, they had some similarities to those of Henry Thornton. He focused on monetary expansion as a means of helping to create full employment. He was also aware of the relevance of forced saving, propensity to consume, the saving-investment relationship, and other matters that form the content of modern income and employment analysis. His monetary view was close to the fundamental concepts employed in his model of utilitarian decision making. His work is considered to be an early precursor of modern welfare economics.

Bentham stated that pleasures and pains can be ranked according to their value or dimension such as intensity, duration, certainty of a pleasure or a pain. He was concerned with maxima and minima of pleasures and pains; and they set a precedent for the future employment of the maximisation principle in the economics of the consumer, the firm and the search for an optimum in welfare economics.

Bentham advocated Pauper Management which involved the creation of a chain of large workhouses.

Law reform

Bentham was the first person to aggressively advocate for the codification of all of the common law into a coherent set of statutes; he was actually the person who coined the verb to codify to refer to the process of drafting a legal code. He lobbied hard for the formation of codification commissions in both England and the United States, and went so far as to write to President James Madison in 1811 to volunteer to write a complete legal code for the young country. After he learned more about American law and realized that most of it was state-based, he promptly wrote to the governors of every single state with the same offer.

During his lifetime, Bentham’s codification efforts were completely unsuccessful. Even today, they have been completely rejected by almost every common law jurisdiction, including England. However, his writings on the subject laid the foundation for the moderately successful codification work of David Dudley Field II in the United States a generation later.

Animal rights

Bentham is widely regarded as one of the earliest proponents of animal rights. He argued and believed that the ability to suffer, not the ability to reason, should be the benchmark, or what he called the insuperable line. If reason alone were the criterion by which we judge who ought to have rights, human infants and adults with certain forms of disability might fall short, too. In 1789, alluding to the limited degree of legal protection afforded to slaves in the French West Indies by the Code Noir, he wrote:

The day has been, I am sad to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing, as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

Earlier in that paragraph, Bentham makes clear that he accepted that animals could be killed for food, or in defence of human life, provided that the animal was not made to suffer unnecessarily. Bentham did not object to medical experiments on animals, providing that the experiments had in mind a particular goal of benefit to humanity, and had a reasonable chance of achieving that goal. He wrote that otherwise he had a decided and insuperable objection to causing pain to animals, in part because of the harmful effects such practices might have on human beings. In a letter to the editor of the Morning Chronicle in March 1825, he wrote:

I never have seen, nor ever can see, any objection to the putting of dogs and other inferior animals to pain, in the way of medical experiment, when that experiment has a determinate object, beneficial to mankind, accompanied with a fair prospect of the accomplishment of it. But I have a decided and insuperable objection to the putting of them to pain without any such view. To my apprehension, every act by which, without prospect of preponderant good, pain is knowingly and willingly produced in any being whatsoever, is an act of cruelty; and, like other bad habits, the more the correspondent habit is indulged in, the stronger it grows, and the more frequently productive of its bad fruit. I am unable to comprehend how it should be, that to him to whom it is a matter of amusement to see a dog or a horse suffer, it should not be matter of like amusement to see a man suffer; seeing, as I do, how much more morality as well as intelligence, an adult quadruped of those and many other species has in him, than any biped has for some months after he has been brought into existence; nor does it appear to me how it should be, that a person to whom the production of pain, either in the one or in the other instance, is a source of amusement, would scruple to give himself that amusement when he could do so under an assurance of impunity.

Gender and sexuality

Bentham said that it was the placing of women in a legally inferior position that made him choose, at the age of eleven, the career of a reformist. Bentham spoke for a complete equality between sexes. Bentham nevertheless thought women inferior to men regarding such qualities as strength of intellectual powers and firmness of mind.

The essay Offences Against One’s Self, argued for the liberalisation of laws prohibiting homosexual sex. The essay remained unpublished during his lifetime for fear of offending public morality. It was published for the first time in 1931. Bentham does not believe homosexual acts to be unnatural, describing them merely as irregularities of the venereal appetite. The essay chastises the society of the time for making a disproportionate response to what Bentham appears to consider a largely private offence-public displays or forced acts being dealt with rightly by other laws. When the essay was published in the Journal of Homosexuality in 1978, the Abstract stated that Bentham’s essay was the "first known argument for homosexual law reform in England."

Privacy

For Bentham, transparency had moral value. For example, journalism puts power-holders under moral scrutiny. However, Bentham wanted such transparency to apply to everyone. This he describes by picturing the world as a gymnasium in which each "gesture, every turn of limb or feature, in those whose motions have a visible impact on the general happiness, will be noticed and marked down." He considered both surveillance and transparency to be useful ways of generating understanding and improvements for people’s lives.

Fictional entities

Bentham distinguished among fictional entities what he called fabulous entities like Prince Hamlet or a centaur, from what he termed fictitious entities, or necessary objects of discourse, similar to Kant’s categories, such as nature, custom, or the social contract.

Source: wikipedia.com

Panopticism is a social theory named after the Panopticon, originally developed by French philosopher Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish. The panopticon refers to an experimental laboratory of power in which behaviour could be modified, and Foucault viewed the panopticon as a symbol of the disciplinary society of surveillance.

Background

Jeremy Bentham proposed the panopticon as a circular building with an observation tower in the centre of an open space surrounded by an outer wall. This wall would contain cells for occupants. This design would increase security by facilitating more effective surveillance. Residing within cells flooded with light, occupants would be readily distinguishable and visible to an official invisibly positioned in the central tower. Conversely, occupants would be invisible to each other, with concrete walls dividing their cells. Due to the bright lighting emitted from the watch tower, occupants would not be able to tell if and when they are being watched, making discipline a passive rather than an active action. Strangely, the cell-mates act in matters as if they are being watched, though they cannot be certain eyes are actually on them. There is a type of invisible discipline that reigns through the prison, for each prisoner self-regulates, in fear that someone is watching their every move. Although usually associated with prisons, the panoptic style of architecture might be used in other institutions with surveillance needs, such as schools, factories, or hospitals.

Foucault’s Discipline and Punish

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault builds on Bentham’s conceptualization of the panopticon as he elaborates upon the function of disciplinary mechanisms in such a prison and illustrates the function of discipline as an apparatus of power. The ever-visible inmate, Foucault suggests, is always "the object of information, never a subject in communication." He adds that:

"He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection" (pp.202/203).

Foucault offers still another explanation for the type of anonymous power held by the operator of the central tower, suggesting that, "We have seen that anyone may come and exercise in the central tower the functions of surveillance, and that this being the case, he can gain a clear idea of the way the surveillance is practiced." By including the anonymous public servant, as part of the built-in architecture of surveillance, the disciplinary mechanism of observation is decentered and its efficacy improved.

As hinted at by the architecture, this panoptic design can be used for any population that needs to be kept under observation or control, such as: prisoners, schoolchildren, medical patients, or workers:

"If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents."

By individualizing the subjects and placing them in a state of constant visibility, the efficiency of the institution is maximized. Furthermore, it guarantees the function of power, even when there is no one actually asserting it. It is in this respect that the Panopticon functions automatically. Foucault goes on to explain that this design is also applicable for a laboratory. Its mechanisms of individualization and observation give it the capacity to run many experiments simultaneously. These qualities also give an authoritative figure the "ability to penetrate men’s behavior" without difficulty. This is all made possible through the ingenuity of the geometric architecture. In light of this fact Foucault compares jails, schools, and factories in their structural similarities.

Examples in the late 20th and early 21st centuries

A central idea of Foucault’s panopticism concerns the systematic ordering and controlling of human populations through subtle and often unseen forces. Such ordering is apparent in many parts of the modernized and now, increasingly digitalized, world of information. Contemporary advancements in technology and surveillance techniques have perhaps made Foucault’s theories more pertinent to any scrutiny of the relationship between the state and its population.

However, while on one hand, new technologies, such as CCTV or other surveillance cameras, have shown the continued utility of panoptic mechanisms in liberal democracies, it could also be argued that electronic surveillance technologies are unnecessary in the original organic or geometric disciplinary mechanisms as illustrated by Foucault. Foucault argues, for instance, that Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon provides us with a model in which a self-disciplined society has been able to develop. These apparatuses of behavior control are essential if we are to govern ourselves, without the constant surveillance and intervention by an agency in every aspect of our lives. The Canadian historian Robert Gellately has observed, for instance, that because of the widespread willingness of Germans to inform on each other to the Gestapo that Germany between 1933-45 was a prime example of Panopticism.

Panoptic theory has other wide-ranging impacts for surveillance in the digital era as well. Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson, for instance, have hinted that technological surveillance solutions have a particularly strong cultural allure"in the West. Increasingly visible data, made accessible to organizations and individuals from new data-mining technologies, has led to the proliferation of dataveillance, which may be described as a mode of surveillance that aims to single out particular transactions through routine algorithmic production. In some cases, however, particularly in the case of mined credit card information, dataveillance has been documented to have led to a greater incidence of errors than past surveillance techniques.

According to the tenets of Foucault’s panopticism, if discursive mechanisms can be effectively employed to control and/or modify the body of discussion within a particular space (usually to the benefit of a particular governing class or organization), then there is no longer any need for an active agent to display a more overtly coercive power (i.e., the threat of violence). Since the beginning of the Information Age, there exists a debate over whether these mechanisms are being refined or accelerated, or on the other hand, becoming increasingly redundant, due to new and rapid technological advancements.

Panopticism and capitalism

Foucault also relates panopticism to capitalism:

"[The] peculiarity of the disciplines [elements of Panopticism] is that they try to define in relation to the multiplicities a tactics of power that fulfils three criteria: firstly, to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economically, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its discretion, its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses); secondly, to bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, without either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this economic growth of power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial or medical) within which it is exercised; in short, to increase both the docility and the utility of all elements of the system." (p.218)

"If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power (i.e. torture, public executions, corporal punishment, etc. of the middle ages), which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection. In fact, the two processes—the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital—cannot be separated; it would not be possible to solve the problem of the accumulation of men without the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital… The growth of the capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, political anatomy, could be operated in the most diverse political régimes, apparatuses or institutions." (pp.220/221)

Panopticism and information technology

Building onto Foucault’s Panopticism and Bentham’s original Panopticon, Shoshana Zuboff applies the Panoptical theory in a technological context in her book, In the Age of the Smart Machine. In chapter nine, Zuboff provides a very vivid portrayal of the Information Panopticon as a means of surveillance, discipline and, in some cases, punishment in a work environment. The Information Panopticon embodies Bentham’s idea in a very different way. Information Panopticons do not rely on physical arrangements, such as building structures and direct human supervision. Instead, a computer keeps track of a worker’s every move by assigning him or her specific tasks to perform during their shift. Everything, from the time a task is started to the time it is completed, is recorded. Workers are given a certain amount of time to complete the task based on its complexity. All this is monitored by supervision from a computer. Based on the data, the supervisor can monitor a worker’s performance and take any necessary action when needed.

The Information Panopticon can be defined as a form of centralized power that uses information and communication technology as observational tools and control mechanisms. Unlike the Panopticon envisioned by Bentham and Foucault, in which those under surveillance were unwilling subjects, Zuboff’s work suggests that the Information Panopticon is facilitated by the benefits it offers to willing participants.

In chapter ten of In the Age of the Smart Machine, Zuboff provides the example of DIALOG, a computer conferencing system used at a pharmaceutical corporation in the 1970s. The conferencing system, originally intended to facilitate communication among the corporation’s many branches, quickly became popular with employees. Users of DIALOG found that the system facilitated not only innovation and collaboration, but also relaxation, as many employees began to use the system to joke with one another and discuss non-work related topics. Employees widely reported that using the system was a positive experience because it created a culture of shared information and discussion, which transcended the corporation’s norms of formality and hierarchy that limited the spread of information between divisions and employees of different ranks. This positive culture was enabled by the privacy seemingly offered by the conferencing system, as discussion boards could be made to allow access only to those who were invited to participate. The Panoptic function of the conferencing system was revealed, however, when managers were able to gain access to the informal discussion boards where employees posted off-color jokes. Messages from the discussion were posted around the office to shame contributors, and many of DIALOG’s users, now knowing there was a possibility that their contributions could be read by managers and fearing they would face disciplinary action, stopped using the system. Some users, however, kept using the system, raising the question of whether remaining users modified their behavior under the threat of surveillance, as prisoners in Bentham’s Panopticon would, or whether they believed that the benefits offered by the system outweighed the possibility of punishment.

Zuboff’s work shows the dual nature of the Information Panopticon—participants may be under surveillance, but they may also use the system to conduct surveillance of others by monitoring or reporting other users’ contributions. This is true of many other information and communication technologies with Panoptic functions—cellphone owners may be tracked without their knowledge through the phones’ GPS capabilities, but they may also use the device to conduct surveillance of others. Thus, compared to Bentham’s Panopticon, the Information Panopticon is one in which everyone has the potential to be both a prisoner and a guard.

It is argued by Foucault that industrial management has paved the way for a very disciplinary society. A society that values objectivity over everything else. The point of this is to get as much productivity from the workers as possible. Contrasting with Bentham’s model prison, workers within the Information Panopticon know they are being monitored at all times. Even if a supervisor is not physically there, the computer records their every move and all this data is at the supervisor’s finger tips at all times. The system’s objectivity can have a psychological impact on the workers. Workers feel the need to conform and satisfy the system rather than doing their best work or expressing concerns they might have.

The Information Panopticon diverts from Jeremy Bentham’s model prison by adding more levels of control. While the Bentham’s model prison system is made up of inmates at the lowest level monitored by a guard, the Information Panopticon can have various levels. A company or firm can have various satellite locations, each monitored by a supervisor, and then a regional supervisor monitoring the supervisors below him or her. Depending on the structure and size of a firm, information Panopticons can have several levels, each monitoring all the levels beneath it.

Now, the efficiency of the Information Panopticon is in question. Does it really lead to a better work place and higher productivity, or does it simply put unnecessary stress on the people being monitored? A major criticism of the system is its objectivity. It is solely based on numbers, therefore not allowing for human error. According to Zuboff, some people find the system to be highly advantageous, while others think it is very flawed because it does not account for the effort a worker puts into a task or things outside of a worker’s control. Furthermore, the lack of direct supervision only adds to a potentially precarious situation.

Post-panopticism

Theoretical arguments in favor of rejecting the Foucauldian model of Panopticism may be considered under five general headings:

1. Displacement of the Panoptical ideal by mechanisms of seduction.
2. Redundancy of the Panoptical impulse brought about by the evident durability of the self-surveillance functions which partly constitute the normal, socialized, Western subject.
3. Reduction in the number of occasions of any conceivable need for Panoptical surveillance on account of simulation, prediction and action before the fact
4. Supplementation of the Panopticon by the Synopticon
5. Failure of Panoptical control to produce reliably docile subjects.

The first point concerns Zygmunt Bauman’s argument that the leading principle of social order has moved from Panopticism to seduction. This argument is elaborated in his 1998 essay On postmodern uses of sex. The second argument concerns surveillance redundance, and it is increasingly relevant in the age of Facebook and online self-disclosure. Is the metaphor of a panopticon appropriate for voluntary surrender of privacy? The third argument for post-Panopticism, concerning action before the fact, is articulated by William Bogard:

The figure of the Panopticon is already haunted by a parallel figure of simulation. Surveillance, we are told, is discreet, unobtrusive, camouflaged, unverifiable—all elements of artifice designed into an architectural arrangement of spaces to produce real effects of discipline. Eventually this will lead, by its means of perfection, to the elimination of the Panopticon itself […] surveillance as its own simulation. Now it is no longer a matter of the speed at which information is gained to defeat an enemy […] Now, one can simulate a space of control, project an indefinite number of courses of action, train for each possibility, and react immediately with pre-programmed responses to the actual course of events […] with simulation, sight and foresight, actual and virtual begin to merge […] Increasingly the technological enlargement of the field of perceptual control, the erasure of distance in the speed of electronic information has pushed surveillance beyond the very limits of speed toward the purest forms of anticipation.

This kind of anticipation is particularly evident in emergent surveillance technologies such as social network analysis.

The Synopticon concerns the surveillance of the few by the many. Examples of this kind of surveillance may include the theatre, the Coliseum, and celebrity tabloid reporting. This “reversal of the Panoptical polarity may have become so marked that it finally deconstructs the Panoptical metaphor altogether.”

Finally, the fifth point concerns the self-defeating nature of Panoptical regimes. The failure of surveillance states is illustrated by examples such as “prison riots, asylum sub-cultures, ego survival in Gulag or concentration camp, (and) retribalization in the Balkans.”

In their 2007 article, Dobson and Fisher lay out an alternative model of post-panopticism as they identify three panoptic models. Panopticism I refers to Jeremy Bentham’s original conceptualization of the panopticon, and is it the model of panopticism that Foucault responds to in his 1975 Discipline and Punish. Panopticism II refers to an Orwellian Big Brother ideal of surveillance. Panopticism III, the final model of panopticism, refers to the high-technology human tracking systems that are emergent in this 21st century. These geographical information systems (GIS) include technologies such as cellphone GPS, RFIDs (radio-frequency identification tags), and geo-fences. Panopticism III is also distinguished by its costs:

"Panopticon III" is affordable, effective, and available to anyone who wants to use it. Initial purchase prices and monthly service fees are equivalent to cell-phone costs. In less than five years, the cost of continuous surveillance of a single individual has dropped from several hundred thousand dollars per year to less than $500 per year. Surveillance formerly justified solely for national security and high-stakes commerce is readily available to track a spouse, child, parent, employee, neighbor, or stranger.

The Cornell University professor and information theorist Branden Hookway introduced the concept of a Panspectrons in 2000: an evolution of the panopticon to the effect that it does not define an object of surveillance more, but everyone and everything is monitored. The object is defined only in relation to a specific issue.

Paris School academic Didier Bigo coined the term Banopticon to describe a situation where profiling technologies are used to determine who to place under surveillance.

Paul-Michel Foucault, generally known as Michel Foucault, was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic.

Foucault’s theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge , and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels, preferring to present his thought as a critical history of modernity. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, sociology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, and critical theory. Activist groups have also found his theories compelling.

Born in Poitiers in France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Madness (1961). After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), publications which displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called archaeology.

From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970, Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also became active in a number of left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods which emphasized the role that power plays in society.

Foucault died in Paris of neurological problems compounded by HIV/AIDS; he became the first public figure in France to die from the disease. His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory.

Madness and Civilization (1960)

In West Germany, Foucault completed in 1960 his primary thesis (thèse principale) for his State doctorate, entitled Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Madness and Insanity: History of Madness in the Classical Age), a philosophical work based upon his studies into the history of medicine. The book discussed how West European society had dealt with madness, arguing that it was a social construct distinct from mental illness. Foucault traces the evolution of the concept of madness through three phases: the Renaissance, the later 17th and 18th centuries, and the modern experience. The work alludes to the work of French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud, who exerted a strong influence over Foucault’s thought at the time.

Histoire de la folie was an expansive work, consisting of 943 pages of text, followed by appendices and a bibliography. Foucault submitted it at the University of Paris, although the university’s regulations for awarding a State doctorate required the submission of both his main thesis and a shorter complementary thesis. Obtaining a doctorate in France at the period was a multi-step process. The first step was to obtain a rapporteur, or sponsor for the work: Foucault chose Georges Canguilhem. The second was to find a publisher, and as a result Folie et déraison would be published in French in May 1961 by the company Plon, whom Foucault chose over Presses Universitaires de France after being rejected by Gallimard. In 1964, a heavily abridged version was published as a mass market paperback, then translated into English for publication the following year as Madness and Civilization.

Folie et déraison received a mixed reception in France and in foreign journals focusing on French affairs. Although it was critically acclaimed by Maurice Blanchot, Michel Serres, Roland Barthes, Gaston Bachelard, and Fernand Braudel, it was largely ignored by the leftist press, much to Foucault’s disappointment. It was notably criticised for advocating metaphysics by young philosopher Jacques Derrida in a March 1963 lecture at the University of Paris. Responding with a vicious retort, Foucault criticised Derrida’s interpretation of René Descartes. The two remained bitter rivals until reconciling in 1981. In the English-speaking world, the work became a significant influence on the anti-psychiatry movement during the 1960s; Foucault took a mixed approach to this, associating with a number of anti-psychiatrists but arguing that most of them misunderstood his work.

Foucault’s secondary thesis (his thèse complémentaire written in Hamburg between 1959 and 1960) was a translation and commentary on German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s 1798 work Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (the title of his thesis was "Introduction à l’Anthropologie," "Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology"). Largely consisting of Foucault’s discussion of textual dating—an archaeology of the Kantian text—he rounded off the thesis with an evocation of Nietzsche, his biggest philosophical influence. This work’s rapporteur was his old tutor and then director of the ENS, Hyppolite, who was well acquainted with German philosophy. After both theses were championed and reviewed, he underwent his public defense, the soutenance de thèse, on 20 May 1961. The academics responsible for reviewing his work were concerned about the unconventional nature of his major thesis; reviewer Henri Gouhier noted that it was not a conventional work of history, making sweeping generalisations without sufficient particular argument, and that Foucault clearly "thinks in allegories". They all agreed however that the overall project was of merit, awarding Foucault his doctorate "despite reservations".

The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things (1960/66)

In October 1960, Foucault took a tenured post in philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, commuting to the city every week from Paris, where he lived in a high-rise block on the rue du Dr Finlay. Responsible for teaching psychology, which was subsumed within the philosophy department, he was considered a fascinating but rather traditional teacher at Clermont. The department was run by Jules Vuillemin, who soon developed a friendship with Foucault. Foucault then took Vuillemin’s job when the latter was elected to the Collège de France in 1962. In this position, Foucault took a dislike to another staff member whom he considered stupid: Roger Garaudy, a senior figure in the Communist Party. Foucault made life at the university difficult for Garaudy, leading the latter to transfer to Poitiers. Foucault also caused controversy by securing a university job for his lover, the philosopher Daniel Defert, with whom he retained a non-monogamous relationship for the rest of his life.

Foucault maintained a keen interest in literature, publishing reviews in amongst others the literary journals Tel Quel and Nouvelle Revue Française, and sitting on the editorial board of Critique. In May 1963, he published a book devoted to poet, novelist, and playwright Raymond Roussel. It was written in under two months, published by Gallimard, and would be described by biographer David Macey as "a very personal book" that resulted from a "love affair" with Roussel’s work. It would be published in English in 1983 as Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. Receiving few reviews, it was largely ignored. That same year he published a sequel to Folie et déraison, entitled Naissance de la Clinique, subsequently translated as The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Shorter than its predecessor, it focused on the changes that the medical establishment underwent in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Like his preceding work, Naissance de la Clinique was largely critically ignored, but later gained a cult following. It was of interest within the field of medical ethics, as it considered the ways in which the history of medicine and hospitals, and the training that those working within them receive, bring about a particular way of looking at the body—the medical gaze. Foucault was also selected to be among the "Eighteen Man Commission" that assembled between November 1963 and March 1964 to discuss university reforms that were to be implemented by Christian Fouchet, the Gaullist Minister of National Education. Implemented in 1967, they brought staff strikes and student protests.

In April 1966, Gallimard published Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (Words and Things), later translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Exploring how man came to be an object of knowledge, it argued that all periods of history have possessed certain underlying conditions of truth that constituted what was acceptable as scientific discourse. Foucault argues that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, from one period’s episteme to another. Although designed for a specialist audience, the work gained media attention, becoming a surprise bestseller in France. Appearing at the height of interest in structuralism, Foucault was quickly grouped with scholars Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes, as the latest wave of thinkers set to topple the existentialism popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre. Although initially accepting this description, Foucault soon vehemently rejected it. Foucault and Sartre regularly criticised one another in the press. Both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir attacked Foucault’s ideas as bourgeois, while Foucault retaliated against their Marxist beliefs by proclaiming that "Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else."

University of Tunis and Vincennes (1966/70)

In September 1966, Foucault took a position teaching psychology at the University of Tunis in Tunisia. His decision to do so was largely because his lover, Defert, had been posted to the country as part of his national service. Foucault moved a few kilometres from Tunis, to the village of Sidi Bou Saïd, where fellow academic Gérard Deledalle lived with his wife. Soon after his arrival, Foucault announced that Tunisia was blessed by history, a nation which "deserves to live forever because it was where Hannibal and St. Augustine lived. His lectures at the university proved very popular, and were well attended. Although many young students were enthusiastic about his teaching, they were critical of what they believed to be his right-wing political views, viewing him as a "representative of Gaullist technocracy", even though he considered himself a leftist.

Foucault was in Tunis during the anti-government and pro-Palestinian riots that rocked the city in June 1967, and which continued for a year. Although highly critical of the violent, ultra-nationalistic and anti-semitic nature of many protesters, he used his status to try to prevent some of his militant leftist students from being arrested and tortured for their role in the agitation. He hid their printing press in his garden, and tried to testify on their behalf at their trials, but was prevented when the trials became closed-door events. While in Tunis, Foucault continued to write. Inspired by a correspondence with the surrealist artist René Magritte, Foucault started to write a book about the impressionist artist Édouard Manet, but never completed it.

In 1968, Foucault returned to Paris, moving into an apartment on the Rue de Vaugirard. After the May 1968 student protests, Minister of Education Edgar Faure responded by founding new universities with greater autonomy. Most prominent of these was the Centre Expérimental de Vincennes in Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris. A group of prominent academics were asked to select teachers to run the Centre’s departments, and Canguilheim recommended Foucault as head of the Philosophy Department. Becoming a tenured professor of Vincennes, Foucault’s desire was to obtain "the best in French philosophy today" for his department, employing Michel Serres, Judith Miller, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, François Regnault, Henri Weber, Étienne Balibar, and François Châtelet; most of them were Marxists or ultra-left activists.

Lectures began at the university in January 1969, and straight away its students and staff, including Foucault, were involved in occupations and clashes with police, resulting in arrests. In February, Foucault gave a speech denouncing police provocation to protesters at the Latin Quarter of the Mutualité. Such actions marked Foucault’s embrace of the ultra-left, undoubtedly influenced by Defert, who had gained a job at Vincennes’ sociology department and who had become a Maoist. Most of the courses at Foucault’s philosophy department were Marxist-Leninist oriented, although Foucault himself gave courses on Nietzsche, The end of Metaphysics, and The Discourse of Sexuality, which were highly popular and over-subscribed. While the right-wing press was heavily critical of this new institution, new Minister of Education Olivier Guichard was angered by its ideological bent and the lack of exams, with students being awarded degrees in a haphazard manner. He refused national accreditation of the department’s degrees, resulting in a public rebuttal from Foucault.

Collège de France and Discipline and Punish (1970/75)

Foucault desired to leave Vincennes and become a fellow of the prestigious Collège de France. He requested to join, taking up a chair in what he called the "history of systems of thought," and his request was championed by members Dumézil, Hyppolite, and Vuillemin. In November 1969, when an opening became available, Foucault was elected to the Collège, though with opposition by a large minority. He gave his inaugural lecture in December 1970, which was subsequently published as L’Ordre du discours (The Discourse of Language). He was obliged to give 12 weekly lectures a year—and did so for the rest of his life—covering the topics that he was researching at the time; these became "one of the events of Parisian intellectual life" and were repeatedly packed out events. On Mondays, he also gave seminars to a group of students; many of them became a Foulcauldian tribe who worked with him on his research. He enjoyed this teamwork and collective research, and together they would publish a number of short books. Working at the Collège allowed him to travel widely, giving lectures in Brazil, Japan, Canada, and the United States over the next 14 years. In 1970 and 1972, Foucault served as a professor in the French Department of the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York.

In May 1971, Foucault co-founded the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP) along with historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet and journalist Jean-Marie Domenach. The GIP aimed to investigate and expose poor conditions in prisons and give prisoners and ex-prisoners a voice in French society. It was highly critical of the penal system, believing that it converted petty criminals into hardened delinquents. The GIP gave press conferences and staged protests surrounding the events of the Toul prison riot in December 1971, alongside other prison riots that it sparked off; in doing so it faced a police crackdown and repeated arrests. The group became active across France, with 2000 to 3000, members, but disbanded before 1974. Also campaigning against the death penalty, Foucault co-authored a short book on the case of the executed murderer Pierre Rivière. After his research into the penal system, Foucault published Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish) in 1975, offering a history of the system in western Europe. In it, Foucault examines the penal evolution away from corporal and capital punishment to the penitentiary system that began in Europe and the United States around the end of the 18th century. Biographer Didier Eribon described it as "perhaps the finest" of Foucault’s works, and it was well received.

Foucault was also active in anti-racist campaigns; in November 1971, he was a leading figure in protests following the perceived racist killing of Arab migrant Dejellali Ben Ali. In this he worked alongside his old rival Sartre, the journalist Claude Mauriac, and one of his literary heroes, Jean Genet. This campaign was formalised as the Committee for the Defence of the Rights of Immigrants, but there was tension at their meetings as Foucault opposed the anti-Israeli sentiment of many Arab workers and Maoist activists. At a December 1972 protest against the police killing of Algerian worker Mohammad Diab, both Foucault and Genet were arrested, resulting in widespread publicity. Foucault was also involved in founding the Agence de Press-Libération (APL), a group of leftist journalists who intended to cover news stories neglected by the mainstream press. In 1973, they established the daily newspaper Libération, and Foucault suggested that they establish committees across France to collect news and distribute the paper, and advocated a column known as the Chronicle of the Workers’ Memory to allow workers’ to express their opinions. Foucault wanted an active journalistic role in the paper, but this proved untenable, and he soon became disillusioned with Libération, believing that it distorted the facts; he would not publish in it until 1980.

The History of Sexuality and Iranian Revolution (1976/79)

In 1976, Gallimard published Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualité: la volonté de savoir (The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge), a short book exploring what Foucault called the repressive hypothesis. It revolved largely around the concept of power, rejecting both Marxist and Freudian theory. Foucault intended it as the first in a seven-volume exploration of the subject. Histoire de la sexualité was a best-seller in France and gained positive press, but lukewarm intellectual interest, something that upset Foucault, who felt that many misunderstood his hypothesis. He soon became dissatisfied with Gallimard after being offended by senior staff member Pierre Nora. Along with Paul Veyne and François Wahl, Foucault launched a new series of academic books, known as Des travaux (Some Works), through the company Seuil, which he hoped would improve the state of academic research in France. He also produced introductions for the memoirs of Herculine Barbin and My Secret Life.

Foucault remained a political activist, focusing on protesting government abuses of human rights around the world. He was a key player in the 1975 protests against the Spanish government to execute 11 militants sentenced to death without fair trial. It was his idea to travel to Madrid with 6 others to give their press conference there; they were subsequently arrested and deported back to Paris. In 1977, he protested the extradition of Klaus Croissant to West Germany, and his rib was fractured during clashes with riot police. In July that year, he organised an assembly of Eastern Bloc dissidents to mark the visit of Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev to Paris. In 1979, he campaigned for Vietnamese political dissidents to be granted asylum in France.

In 1977, Italian newspaper Corriere della sera asked Foucault to write a column for them. In doing so, in 1978 he travelled to Tehran in Iran, days after the Black Friday massacre. Documenting the developing Iranian Revolution, he met with opposition leaders such as Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari and Mehdi Bazargan, and discovered the popular support for Islamism. Returning to France, he was one of the journalists who visited the Ayatollah Khomeini, before visiting Tehran. His articles expressed awe of Khomeini’s Islamist movement, for which he was widely criticised in the French press, including by Iranian expatriates. Foucault’s response was that Islamism was to become a major political force in the region, and that the West must treat it with respect rather than hostility. In April 1978, Foucault traveled to Japan, where he studied Zen Buddhism under Omori Sogen at the Seionji temple in Uenohara.

Final years (1980/84)

Although remaining critical of power relations, Foucault expressed cautious support for the Socialist Party government of François Mitterrand following its electoral victory in 1981. But his support soon deteriorated when that party refused to condemn the Polish government’s crackdown on the 1982 demonstrations in Poland orchestrated by the Solidarity trade union. He and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu authored a document condemning Mitterrand’s inaction that was published in Libération, and they also took part in large public protests on the issue. Foucault continued to support Solidarity, and with his friend Simone Signoret traveled to Poland as part of a Médecins du Monde expedition, taking time out to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp. He continued his academic research, and in June 1984 Gallimard published the second and third volumes of Histoire de la sexualité. Volume two, L’Usage des plaisirs, dealt with the techniques of self prescribed by ancient Greek pagan morality in relation to sexual ethics, while volume three, Le Souci de soi, explored the same theme in the Greek and Latin texts of the first two centuries CE. A fourth volume, Les Aveux de la chair, was to examine sexuality in early Christianity, but it was not finished.

In October 1980, Foucault became a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, giving the Howison Lectures on Truth and Subjectivity, while in November he lectured at the Humanities Institute at New York University. His growing popularity in American intellectual circles was noted by Time magazine, while Foucault went on to lecture at UCLA in 1981, the University of Vermont in 1982, and Berkeley again in 1983, where his lectures drew huge crowds. Foucault spent many evenings in the San Francisco gay scene, frequenting sado-masochistic bathhouses, engaging in unprotected sex. He would praise sado-masochistic activity in interviews with the gay press, describing it as "the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously." Foucault contracted HIV and eventually developed AIDS. Little was known of the virus at the time; the first cases had only been identified in 1980. In summer 1983, he developed a persistent dry cough, which concerned friends in Paris, but Foucault insisted it was just a pulmonary infection. Only when hospitalized was Foucault correctly diagnosed; treated with antibiotics, he delivered a final set of lectures at the Collège de France. Foucault entered Paris’ Hôpital de la Salpêtrière—the same institution that he had studied in Madness and Civilisation—on 10 June 1984, with neurological symptoms complicated by septicemia. He died in the hospital on 25 June.

On 26 June, Libération announced his death, mentioning the rumour that it had been brought on by AIDS. The following day, Le Monde issued a medical bulletin cleared by his family which made no reference to HIV/AIDS. On 29 June, Foucault’s la levée du corps ceremony was held, in which the coffin was carried from the hospital morgue. Hundreds attended, including activists and academic friends, while Gilles Deleuze gave a speech using excerpts from The History of Sexuality. His body was then buried at Vendeuvre in a small ceremony. Soon after his death, Foucault’s partner Daniel Defert founded the first national HIV/AIDS organisation in France, AIDES; a pun on the French language word for help (aide) and the English language acronym for the disease. On the second anniversary of Foucault’s death, Defert publicly revealed that Foucault’s death was AIDS-related in The Advocate.

Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. He was known for his works of science fiction and popular science. Asimov was a prolific writer who wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. His books have been published in 9 of the 10 major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification.

Asimov wrote hard science fiction. Along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov was considered one of the Big Three science fiction writers during his lifetime. Asimov’s most famous work is the Foundation series; his other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series. The Galactic Empire novels are set in earlier history of the same fictional universe as the Foundation series. Later, with Foundation and Earth (1986), he linked this distant future to the Robot stories, creating a unified “future history” for his stories much like those pioneered by Robert A. Heinlein and previously produced by Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson. He wrote hundreds of short stories, including the social science fiction novelette Nightfall; in 1964, it was voted the best short science fiction story of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.

Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much nonfiction. Most of his popular science books explain concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. Examples include Guide to Science, the three-volume set Understanding Physics, and Asimov’s Chronology of Science and Discovery, as well as works on chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, history, and William Shakespeare’s writings.

He was president of the American Humanist Association. The asteroid 5020 Asimov, a crater on the planet Mars, a Brooklyn elementary school and a literary award are named in his honor.

Overview

Asimov’s career can be divided into several periods. His early career, dominated by science fiction, began with short stories in 1939 and novels in 1950. This lasted until about 1958, all but ending after publication of The Naked Sun (1957). He began publishing nonfiction in 1952, co-authoring a college-level textbook called Biochemistry and Human Metabolism. Following the brief orbit of the first man-made satellite Sputnik I by the USSR in 1957, his production of nonfiction, particularly popular science books, greatly increased, with a consequent drop in his science fiction output. Over the next quarter century, he wrote only four science fiction novels. Starting in 1982, the second half of his science fiction career began with the publication of Foundation’s Edge. From then until his death, Asimov published several more sequels and prequels to his existing novels, tying them together in a way he had not originally anticipated, making a unified series. There are, however, many inconsistencies in this unification, especially in his earlier stories.

Asimov believed his most enduring contributions would be his Three Laws of Robotics and the Foundation series. Furthermore, the Oxford English Dictionary credits his science fiction for introducing into the English language the words robotics, positronic (an entirely fictional technology), and psychohistory (which is also used for a different study on historical motivations). Asimov coined the term robotics without suspecting that it might be an original word; at the time, he believed it was simply the natural analogue of words such as mechanics and hydraulics, but for robots. Unlike his word psychohistory, the word robotics continues in mainstream technical use with Asimov’s original definition. Star Trek: The Next Generation featured androids with positronic brains and the first-season episode Datalore called the positronic brain Asimov’s dream".

Science fiction

Asimov became a science fiction fan in 1929, when he began reading the pulp magazines sold in his family’s candy store. His father forbade reading pulps as he considered them to be trash, until Asimov persuaded him that because the science fiction magazines had Science in the title, they must be educational. At age 18 he joined the Futurians science fiction fan club, where he made friends who went on to become science fiction writers or editors.

Asimov began writing at the age of 11. His first published work was a humorous item on the birth of his brother for Boys High School’s literary journal in 1934. In May 1937 he first thought of writing professionally, and began writing his first science fiction story, Cosmic Corkscrew (now lost), that year. On 17 May 1938, puzzled by a change in the schedule of Astounding Science Fiction, Asimov visited its publisher Street & Smith Publications. Inspired by the visit, he finished the story on 19 June 1938 and personally submitted it to Astounding editor John W. Campbell two days later. Campbell met with Asimov for more than an hour and promised to read the story himself. Two days later he received a rejection letter explaining why in detail. This was the first of what became almost weekly meetings with the editor while Asimov lived in New York, until moving to Boston in 1949; Campbell had a strong formative influence on Asimov and became a personal friend.

By the end of the month Asimov completed a second story, Stowaway. Campbell rejected it on 22 July but—in "the nicest possible letter you could imagine"—encouraged him to continue writing, promising that Asimov might sell his work after another year and a dozen stories of practice. In October 1938, he sold the third story he finished, Marooned Off Vesta, to Amazing Stories, edited by Raymond A. Palmer, and it appeared in the March 1939 issue. Asimov was paid $64 (equivalent to $1114 in 2017), or one cent a word. Two more stories appeared that year, The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use in the May Amazing and Trends in the July Astounding, the issue fans later selected as the start of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. For 1940, ISFDB catalogs seven stories in four different pulp magazines, including one in Astounding. His earnings became enough to pay for his education, but not yet enough for him to become a full-time writer.

Asimov later said that unlike other top Golden Age writers Robert Heinlein and A.E. Van Vogt—also first published in 1939, and whose talent and stardom were immediately obvious—he "(this is not false modesty) came up only gradually." Through 29 July 1940, Asimov wrote 22 stories in 25 months, of which 13 were published; he wrote in 1972 that from that date he never wrote a science fiction story (except for two special cases) that was not published. He was famous enough that Donald Wollheim told Asimov that he purchased The Secret Sense for a new magazine only because of his name, and the December 1940 issue of Astonishing—featuring Asimov’s name in bold—was the first magazine to base cover art on his work, but Asimov later said that neither he himself nor anyone else—except perhaps Campbell—considered him better than an often published third rater.

Based on a conversation with Campbell, Asimov wrote his 32nd story in March and April 1941, which Astounding published in September 1941. In 1968 the Science Fiction Writers of America voted Nightfall the best science fiction short story ever written. In Nightfall and Other Stories Asimov wrote, "The writing of Nightfall was a watershed in my professional career. […] I was suddenly taken seriously and the world of science fiction became aware that I existed. As the years passed, in fact, it became evident that I had written a classic." Nightfall is an archetypal example of social science fiction, a term he created to describe a new trend in the 1940s, led by authors including him and Heinlein, away from gadgets and space opera and toward speculation about the human condition.

After writing Victory Unintentional in January and February 1942, Asimov did not write another story for a year. Asimov expected to make chemistry his career, and was paid $2600 annually at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, enough to marry his girlfriend; he did not expect to make much more from writing than the $1788.50 he had earned from 28 stories sold over four years. Asimov left science fiction fandom and no longer read new magazines, and might have left the industry had not Heinlein and de Camp been coworkers and previously sold stories continued to appear. In 1942, Asimov published the first of his Foundation stories—later collected in the Foundation trilogy: Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953). The books recount the fall of a vast interstellar empire and the establishment of its eventual successor. They also feature his fictional science of psychohistory, in which the future course of the history of large populations can be predicted. The trilogy and Robot series are his most famous science fiction. In 1966 they won the Hugo Award for the all-time best series of science fiction and fantasy novels. Campbell raised his rate per word, Orson Welles purchased rights to Evidence, and anthologies reprinted his stories. By the end of the war Asimov was earning as a writer an amount equal to half of his Navy Yard salary, even after a raise, but Asimov still did not believe that writing could support him, his wife, and future children.

His positronic robot stories—many of which were collected in I, Robot (1950)—were begun at about the same time. They promulgated a set of rules of ethics for robots (see Three Laws of Robotics) and intelligent machines that greatly influenced other writers and thinkers in their treatment of the subject. Asimov notes in his introduction to the short story collection The Complete Robot (1982) that he was largely inspired by the almost relentless tendency of robots up to that time to fall consistently into a Frankenstein plot in which they destroyed their creators.

The robot series has led to film adaptations. With Asimov’s collaboration, in about 1977, Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay of I, Robot that Asimov hoped would lead to "the first really adult, complex, worthwhile science fiction film ever made." The screenplay has never been filmed and was eventually published in book form in 1994. The 2004 movie I, Robot, starring Will Smith, was based on an unrelated script by Jeff Vintar titled Hardwired, with Asimov’s ideas incorporated later after the rights to Asimov’s title were acquired. (The title was not original to Asimov but had previously been used for a story by Eando Binder.) Also, one of Asimov’s robot short stories, The Bicentennial Man, was expanded into a novel The Positronic Man by Asimov and Robert Silverberg, and this was adapted into the 1999 movie Bicentennial Man, starring Robin Williams.

Besides movies, his Foundation and Robot stories have inspired other derivative works of science fiction literature, many by well-known and established authors such as Roger MacBride Allen, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Donald Kingsbury. At least some of these appear to have been done with the blessing of, or at the request of, Asimov’s widow, Janet Asimov.

In 1948, he also wrote a spoof chemistry article, The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline. At the time, Asimov was preparing his own doctoral dissertation, and for the oral examination to follow that. Fearing a prejudicial reaction from his graduate school evaluation board at Columbia University, Asimov asked his editor that it be released under a pseudonym, yet it appeared under his own name. Asimov grew concerned at the scrutiny he would receive at his oral examination, in case the examiners thought he was’t taking science seriously. At the end of the examination, one evaluator turned to him, smiling, and said, “What can you tell us, Mr. Asimov, about the thermodynamic properties of the compound known as thiotimoline.” Laughing hysterically with relief, Asimov had to be led out of the room. After a five-minute wait, he was summoned back into the room and congratulated as “Dr. Asimov.”

Demand for science fiction greatly increased during the 1950s. It became possible for a genre author to write full-time. In 1949, book publisher Doubleday’s science fiction editor Walter I. Bradbury accepted Asimov’s unpublished Grow Old With Me (40,000 words), but requested that it be extended to a full novel of 70,000 words. The book appeared under the Doubleday imprint in January 1950 with the title of Pebble in the Sky. Doubleday published five more original science fiction novels by Asimov in the 1950s, along with the six juvenile Lucky Starr novels, the latter under the pseudonym of "Paul French". Doubleday also published collections of Asimov’s short stories, beginning with The Martian Way and Other Stories in 1955. The early 1950s also saw Gnome Press publish one collection of Asimov’s positronic robot stories as I, Robot and his Foundation stories and novelettes as the three books of the Foundation trilogy. More positronic robot stories were republished in book form as The Rest of the Robots.

Books and the magazines Galaxy, and Fantasy & Science Fiction ended Asimov’s dependence on Astounding. He later described the era as his “mature period.” Asimov’s The Last Question (1956), on the ability of humankind to cope with and potentially reverse the process of entropy, was his personal favorite story.

In 1972, his novel The Gods Themselves (which was not part of a series) was published to general acclaim, and it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the Locus Award for Best Novel.

In December 1974, former Beatle Paul McCartney approached Asimov and asked him if he could write the screenplay for a science-fiction movie musical. McCartney had a vague idea for the plot and a small scrap of dialogue; he wished to make a film about a rock band whose members discover they are being impersonated by a group of extraterrestrials. The band and their impostors would likely be played by McCartney’s group Wings, then at the height of their career. Intrigued by the idea, although he was not generally a fan of rock music, Asimov quickly produced a treatment or brief outline of the story. He adhered to McCartney’s overall idea, producing a story he felt to be moving and dramatic. However, he did not make use of McCartney’s brief scrap of dialogue, and probably as a consequence, McCartney rejected the story. The treatment now exists only in the Boston University archives.

Asimov said in 1969 that he had “the happiest of all my associations with science fiction magazines” with Fantasy & Science Fiction; “I have no complaints about Astounding, Galaxy, or any of the rest, heaven knows, but F & SF has become something special to me.” Beginning in 1977, Asimov lent his name to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (now Asimov’s Science Fiction) and penned an editorial for each issue. There was also a short-lived Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine and a companion Asimov’s Science Fiction Anthology reprint series, published as magazines (in the same manner as the stablemates Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine’s anthologies).

Due to pressure by fans on Asimov to write another book in his Foundation series, he did so with Foundation’s Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986), and then went back to before the original trilogy with Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1992), his last novel.

Popular science

During the late 1950s and 1960s, Asimov substantially decreased his fiction output (he published only four adult novels between 1957’s The Naked Sun and 1982’s Foundation’s Edge, two of which were mysteries). He greatly increased his nonfiction production, writing mostly on science topics; the launch of Sputnik in 1957 engendered public concern over a science gapy. Asimov explained in The Rest of the Robots that he had been unable to write substantial fiction since the summer of 1958, and observers understood him as saying that his fiction career had ended, or was permanently interrupted. Asimov recalled in 1969 that:

the United States went into a kind of tizzy, and so did I. I was overcome by the ardent desire to write popular science for an America that might be in great danger through its neglect of science, and a number of publishers got an equally ardent desire to publish popular science for the same reason."

Fantasy and Science Fiction invited Asimov to continue his regular nonfiction column, begun in the now-folded bimonthly companion magazine Venture Science Fiction Magazine. The first of 399 monthly F&SF columns appeared in November 1958, until his terminal illness. These columns, periodically collected into books by Doubleday, gave Asimov a reputation as a "Great Explainer" of science; he described them as his only popular science writing in which he never had to assume complete ignorance of the subjects on the part of his readers. The column was ostensibly dedicated to popular science but Asimov had complete editorial freedom, and wrote about contemporary social issues[citation needed] in essays such as Thinking About Thinking and Knock Plastic!.

Asimov’s first wide-ranging reference work, The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science (1960), was nominated for a National Book Award, and in 1963 he won a Hugo Award—his first—for his essays for F&SF. The popularity of his science books and the income he derived from them allowed him to give up most academic responsibilities and become a full-time freelance writer. He encouraged other science fiction writers to write popular science, stating in 1967 that “the knowledgeable, skillful science writer is worth his weight in contracts,” with “twice as much work as he can possibly handle.”

The great variety of information covered in Asimov’s writings prompted Kurt Vonnegut to ask, “How does it feel to know everything?” Asimov replied that he only knew how it felt to have the reputation of omniscience: Uneasy. Floyd C. Gale said that “Asimov has a rare talent. He can make your mental mouth water over dry facts,” and “science fiction’s loss has been science popularization’s gain.” Asimov said that “Of all the writing I do, fiction, non-fiction, adult, or juvenile, these F&SF articles are by far the most fun.” He regretted, however, that he had less time for fiction—causing dissatisfied readers to send him letters of complaint—stating in 1969 that “In the last ten years, I’ve done a couple of novels, some collections, a dozen or so stories, but that’s nothing.”

Coined terms

Asimov coined the term robotics in his 1941 story Liar!, though he later remarked that he believed then that he was merely using an existing word, as he stated in Gold (The Robot Chronicles). While acknowledging the Oxford Dictionary reference, he incorrectly states that the word was first printed about one-third of the way down the first column of page 100, Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942 printing of his short story Runaround.

Asimov also coined the term spome in a paper entitled, There’s No Place Like Spome in Atmosphere in Space Cabins and Closed Environments, originally presented as a paper to the American Chemical Society on September 13, 1965. It refers to any system closed with respect to matter and open with respect to energy capable of sustaining human life indefinitely.

Asimov coined the term psychohistory in his Foundation stories to name a fictional branch of science which combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire. It was first introduced in the five short stories (1942/1944) which would later be collected as the 1951 novel Foundation. Somewhat later, the term psychohistory was applied by others to research of the effects of psychology on history.

Other writings

In addition to his interest in science, Asimov was interested in history. Starting in the 1960s, he wrote 14 popular history books, including The Greeks: A Great Adventure (1965), The Roman Republic (1966), The Roman Empire (1967), The Egyptians (1967) The Near East: 10,000 Years of History (1968), and Asimov’s Chronology of the World (1991).

He published Asimov’s Guide to the Bible in two volumes—covering the Old Testament in 1967 and the New Testament in 1969—and then combined them into one 1300—page volume in 1981. Complete with maps and tables, the guide goes through the books of the Bible in order, explaining the history of each one and the political influences that affected it, as well as biographical information about the important characters. His interest in literature manifested itself in several annotations of literary works, including Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare (1970), Asimov’s Annotated Paradise Lost (1974), and The Annotated Gulliver’s Travels (1980).

Asimov was also a noted mystery author and a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He began by writing science fiction mysteries such as his Wendell Urth stories, but soon moved on to writing pure mysteries. He published two full-length mystery novels, and wrote 66 stories about the Black Widowers, a group of men who met monthly for dinner, conversation, and a puzzle. He got the idea for the Widowers from his own association in a stag group called the Trap Door Spiders and all of the main characters (with the exception of the waiter, Henry, who he admitted resembled Wodehouse’s Jeeves) were modeled after his closest friends.

Toward the end of his life, Asimov published a series of collections of limericks, mostly written by himself, starting with Lecherous Limericks, which appeared in 1975. Limericks: Too Gross, whose title displays Asimov’s love of puns, contains 144 limericks by Asimov and an equal number by John Ciardi. He even created a slim volume of Sherlockian limericks. Asimov featured Yiddish humor in Azazel, The Two Centimeter Demon. The two main characters, both Jewish, talk over dinner, or lunch, or breakfast, about anecdotes of George and his friend Azazel. Asimov’s Treasury of Humor is both a working joke book and a treatise propounding his views on humor theory. According to Asimov, the most essential element of humor is an abrupt change in point of view, one that suddenly shifts focus from the important to the trivial, or from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Particularly in his later years, Asimov to some extent cultivated an image of himself as an amiable lecher. In 1971, as a response to the popularity of sexual guidebooks such as The Sensuous Woman (by “J”) and The Sensuous Man (by “M”), Asimov published The Sensuous Dirty Old Man under the byline “Dr. A” (although his full name was printed on the paperback edition, first published 1972). However, by 2016, some of Asimov’s behavior towards women was described as sexual harassment and cited as an example of historically problematic behavior by men in science fiction communities.

Asimov published three volumes of autobiography. In Memory Yet Green (1979) and In Joy Still Felt (1980) cover his life up to 1978. The third volume, I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994), covered his whole life (rather than following on from where the second volume left off). The epilogue was written by his widow Janet Asimov after his death. The book won a Hugo Award in 1995. Janet Asimov edited It’s Been a Good Life (2002), a condensed version of his three autobiographies. He also published three volumes of retrospectives of his writing, Opus 100 (1969), Opus 200 (1979), and Opus 300 (1984).

In 1987, the Asimovs co-wrote How to Enjoy Writing: A Book of Aid and Comfort. In it they offer advice on how to maintain a positive attitude and stay productive when dealing with discouragement, distractions, rejection, and thick-headed editors. The book includes many quotations, essays, anecdotes, and husband-wife dialogues about the ups and downs of being an author.

Asimov and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry developed a unique relationship during Star Trek’s initial launch in the late 1960s. Asimov wrote a critical essay on Star Trek’s scientific accuracy for TV Guide magazine. Roddenberry retorted respectfully with a personal letter explaining the limitations of accuracy when writing a weekly series. Asimov corrected himself with a follow-up essay to TV Guide claiming that despite its inaccuracies, Star Trek was a fresh and intellectually challenging science fiction television show. The two remained friends to the point where Asimov even served as an advisor on a number of Star Trek projects.

In 1973, Asimov published a proposal for calendar reform, called the World Season Calendar. It divides the year into four seasons (named A–D) of 13 weeks (91 days) each. This allows days to be named, e.g., "D-73" instead of December 1 (due to December 1 being the 73rd day of the 4th quarter). An extra ‘year day’ is added for a total of 365 days.

Eric Arthur Blair (25.06.1903/21.01.1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic, whose work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism.

Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. He is best known for the “allegorical novella” Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, are widely acclaimed, as are his essays on politics, literature, language and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.”

Orwell’s work continues to influence popular and political culture and the term Orwellian—descriptive of totalitarian or authoritarian social practices—has entered the language together with many of his neologisms, including Big Brother, Thought Police, Room 101, memory hole, newspeak, doublethink, proles, unperson and thoughtcrime.

Early years

Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bihar, British India. His great-grandfather, Charles Blair, was a wealthy country gentleman in Dorset who married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of the Earl of Westmorland, and had income as an absentee landlord of plantations in Jamaica. His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, was a clergyman. Although the gentility passed down the generations, the prosperity did not; Eric Blair described his family as “lower-upper-middle class.”

His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (born Limouzin), grew up in Moulmein, Burma, where her French father was involved in speculative ventures. Eric had two sisters: Marjorie, five years older; and Avril, five years younger. When Eric was one year old, his mother took him and his sisters to England. His birthplace and ancestral house in Motihari has been declared a protected monument of historical importance.

In 1904 Ida Blair settled with her children at Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. Eric was brought up in the company of his mother and sisters, and apart from a brief visit in mid-1907, the family did not see their husband or father, Richard Blair, until 1912. His mother’s diary from 1905 describes a lively round of social activity and artistic interests.

Before the First World War, the family moved to Shiplake, Oxfordshire where Eric became friendly with the Buddicom family, especially their daughter Jacintha. When they first met, he was standing on his head in a field. On being asked why, he said, “You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up.” Jacintha and Eric read and wrote poetry, and dreamed of becoming famous writers. He said that he might write a book in the style of H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia. During this period, he also enjoyed shooting, fishing and birdwatching with Jacintha’s brother and sister.

Aged five, Eric was sent as a day-boy to a convent school in Henley-on-Thames, which Marjorie also attended. It was a Roman Catholic convent run by French Ursuline nuns, who had been exiled from France after religious education was banned in 1903. His mother wanted him to have a public school education, but his family could not afford the fees, and he needed to earn a scholarship. Ida Blair’s brother Charles Limouzin recommended St Cyprian’s School, Eastbourne, East Sussex. Limouzin, who was a proficient golfer, knew of the school and its headmaster through the Royal Eastbourne Golf Club, where he won several competitions in 1903 and 1904. The headmaster undertook to help Blair to win a scholarship, and made a private financial arrangement that allowed Blair’s parents to pay only half the normal fees. In September 1911, Eric arrived at St Cyprian’s. He boarded at the school for the next five years, returning home only for school holidays. During this period, while working for the Ministry of Pensions, his mother lived at 23 Cromwell Crescent, Earls Court. He knew nothing of the reduced fees, although he “soon recognised that he was from a poorer home.” Blair hated the school and many years later wrote an essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” published posthumously, based on his time there. At St Cyprian’s, Blair first met Cyril Connolly, who became a writer. Many years later, as the editor of Horizon, Connolly published several of Orwell’s essays.

While at St Cyprian’s, Blair wrote two poems that were published in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard. He came second to Connolly in the Harrow History Prize, had his work praised by the school’s external examiner, and earned scholarships to Wellington and Eton. But inclusion on the Eton scholarship roll did not guarantee a place, and none was immediately available for Blair. He chose to stay at St Cyprian’s until December 1916, in case a place at Eton became available.

In January, Blair took up the place at Wellington, where he spent the Spring term. In May 1917 a place became available as a King’s Scholar at Eton. At this time the family lived at Mall Chambers, Notting Hill Gate. Blair remained at Eton until December 1921, when he left midway between his 18th and 19th birthday. Wellington was beastly, Orwell told his childhood friend Jacintha Buddicom, but he said he was interested and happy at Eton. His principal tutor was A.S.F. Gow, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who also gave him advice later in his career. Blair was briefly taught French by Aldous Huxley. Steven Runciman, who was at Eton with Blair, noted that he and his contemporaries appreciated Huxley’s linguistic flair. Cyril Connolly followed Blair to Eton, but because they were in separate years, they did not associate with each other.

Blair’s academic performance reports suggest that he neglected his academic studies, but during his time at Eton he worked with Roger Mynors to produce a College magazine, The Election Times, joined in the production of other publications—College Days and Bubble and Squeak–and participated in the Eton Wall Game. His parents could not afford to send him to a university without another scholarship, and they concluded from his poor results that he would not be able to win one. Runciman noted that he had a romantic idea about the East, and the family decided that Blair should join the Imperial Police, the precursor of the Indian Police Service. For this he had to pass an entrance examination. In December 1921 he left Eton and travelled to join his retired father, mother, and younger sister Avril, who that month had moved to 40 Stradbroke Road, Southwold, Suffolk, the first of their four homes in the town. Blair was enrolled at a crammer there called Craighurst, and brushed up on his Classics, English, and History. He passed the entrance exam, coming seventh out of the 26 candidates who exceeded the pass mark.

London and Paris

In England, he settled back in the family home at Southwold, renewing acquaintance with local friends and attending an Old Etonian dinner. He visited his old tutor Gow at Cambridge for advice on becoming a writer. In 1927 he moved to London. Ruth Pitter, a family acquaintance, helped him find lodgings, and by the end of 1927 he had moved into rooms in Portobello Road; a blue plaque commemorates his residence there. Pitter’s involvement in the move “would have lent it a reassuring respectability in Mrs Blair’s eyes.” Pitter had a sympathetic interest in Blair’s writing, pointed out weaknesses in his poetry, and advised him to write about what he knew. In fact he decided to write of “certain aspects of the present that he set out to know” and “ventured into the East End of London—the first of the occasional sorties he would make to discover for himself the world of poverty and the down-and-outers who inhabit it—. He had found a subject. These sorties, explorations, expeditions, tours or immersions were made intermittently over a period of five years.”

In imitation of Jack London, whose writing he admired (particularly The People of the Abyss), Blair started to explore the poorer parts of London. On his first outing he set out to Limehouse Causeway, spending his first night in a common lodging house, possibly George Levy’s ‘kip.’ For a while he went native in his own country, dressing like a tramp, adopting the name P.S. Burton and making no concessions to middle-class mores and expectations; he recorded his experiences of the low life for use in The Spike, his first published essay in English, and in the second half of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

In early 1928 he moved to Paris. He lived in the rue du Pot de Fer, a working class district in the 5th Arrondissement. His aunt Nellie Limouzin also lived in Paris and gave him social and, when necessary, financial support. He began to write novels, including an early version of Burmese Days, but nothing else survives from that period. He was more successful as a journalist and published articles in Monde, a political/literary journal edited by Henri Barbusse (his first article as a professional writer, La Censure en Angleterre, appeared in that journal on 6 October 1928); G.K.’s Weekly, where his first article to appear in England, A Farthing Newspaper, was printed on 29 December 1928; and Le Progrès Civique (founded by the left-wing coalition Le Cartel des Gauches). Three pieces appeared in successive weeks in Le Progrès Civique: discussing unemployment, a day in the life of a tramp, and the beggars of London, respectively. “In one or another of its destructive forms, poverty was to become his obsessive subject—at the heart of almost everything he wrote until Homage to Catalonia—.”

He fell seriously ill in February 1929 and was taken to the Hôpital Cochin in the 14th arrondissement, a free hospital where medical students were trained. His experiences there were the basis of his essay How the Poor Die, published in 1946. He chose not to identify the hospital, and indeed was deliberately misleading about its location. Shortly afterwards, he had all his money stolen from his lodging house. Whether through necessity or to collect material, he undertook menial jobs such as dishwashing in a fashionable hotel on the rue de Rivoli, which he later described in Down and Out in Paris and London. In August 1929, he sent a copy of The Spike to John Middleton Murry’s New Adelphi magazine in London. The magazine was edited by Max Plowman and Sir Richard Rees, and Plowman accepted the work for publication.

Teaching career

In April 1932 Blair became a teacher at The Hawthorns High School, a school for boys, in Hayes, West London. This was a small school offering private schooling for children of local tradesmen and shopkeepers, and had only 14 or 16 boys aged between ten and sixteen, and one other master. While at the school he became friendly with the curate of the local parish church and became involved with activities there. Mabel Fierz had pursued matters with Moore, and at the end of June 1932, Moore told Blair that Victor Gollancz was prepared to publish A Scullion’s Diary for a £40 advance, through his recently founded publishing house, Victor Gollancz Ltd, which was an outlet for radical and socialist works.

At the end of the summer term in 1932, Blair returned to Southwold, where his parents had used a legacy to buy their own home. Blair and his sister Avril spent the holidays making the house habitable while he also worked on Burmese Days. He was also spending time with Eleanor Jacques, but her attachment to Dennis Collings remained an obstacle to his hopes of a more serious relationship.

Clink, an essay describing his failed attempt to get sent to prison, appeared in the August 1932 number of Adelphi. He returned to teaching at Hayes and prepared for the publication of his book, now known as Down and Out in Paris and London. He wished to publish under a different name to avoid any embarrassment to his family over his time as a tramp. In a letter to Moore (dated 15 November 1932), he left the choice of pseudonym to Moore and to Gollancz. Four days later, he wrote to Moore, suggesting the pseudonyms P.S. Burton (a name he used when tramping), Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, and H. Lewis Allways. He finally adopted the nom de plume George Orwell because “It is a good round English name.” Down and Out in Paris and London was published on 9 January 1933 as Orwell continued to work on Burmese Days. Down and Out was modestly successful and was next published by Harper & Brothers in New York.

In mid-1933 Blair left Hawthorns to become a teacher at Frays College, in Uxbridge, Middlesex. This was a much larger establishment with 200 pupils and a full complement of staff. He acquired a motorcycle and took trips through the surrounding countryside. On one of these expeditions he became soaked and caught a chill that developed into pneumonia. He was taken to Uxbridge Cottage Hospital, where for a time his life was believed to be in danger. When he was discharged in January 1934, he returned to Southwold to convalesce and, supported by his parents, never returned to teaching.

He was disappointed when Gollancz turned down Burmese Days, mainly on the grounds of potential suits for libel, but Harper were prepared to publish it in the United States. Meanwhile, Blair started work on the novel A Clergyman’s Daughter, drawing upon his life as a teacher and on life in Southwold. Eleanor Jacques was now married and had gone to Singapore and Brenda Salkield had left for Ireland, so Blair was relatively isolated in Southwold—working on the allotments, walking alone and spending time with his father—. Eventually in October, after sending A Clergyman’s Daughter to Moore, he left for London to take a job that had been found for him by his aunt Nellie Limouzin.

Second World War and Animal Farm

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Orwell’s wife Eileen started working in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in central London, staying during the week with her family in Greenwich. Orwell also submitted his name to the Central Register for war work, but nothing transpired. “They won’t have me in the army, at any rate at present, because of my lungs,” Orwell told Geoffrey Gorer. He returned to Wallington, and in late 1939 he wrote material for his first collection of essays, Inside the Whale. For the next year he was occupied writing reviews for plays, films and books for The Listener, Time, Tide and New Adelphi. On 29 March 1940 his long association with Tribune began with a review of a sergeant’s account of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. At the beginning of 1940, the first edition of Connolly’s Horizon appeared, and this provided a new outlet for Orwell’s work as well as new literary contacts. In May the Orwells took lease of a flat in London at Dorset Chambers, Chagford Street, Marylebone. It was the time of the Dunkirk evacuation and the death in France of Eileen’s brother Lawrence caused her considerable grief and long-term depression. Throughout this period Orwell kept a wartime diary.

Orwell was declared “unfit for any kind of military service” by the Medical Board in June, but soon afterwards found an opportunity to become involved in war activities by joining the Home Guard. He shared Tom Wintringham’s socialist vision for the Home Guard as a revolutionary People’s Militia. His lecture notes for instructing platoon members include advice on street fighting, field fortifications, and the use of mortars of various kinds. Sergeant Orwell managed to recruit Fredric Warburg to his unit. During the Battle of Britain he used to spend weekends with Warburg and his new Zionist friend, Tosco Fyvel, at Warburg’s house at Twyford, Berkshire. At Wallington he worked on England Your England and in London wrote reviews for various periodicals. Visiting Eileen’s family in Greenwich brought him face-to-face with the effects of the Blitz on East London. In mid-1940, Warburg, Fyvel and Orwell planned Searchlight Books. Eleven volumes eventually appeared, of which Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, published on 19 February 1941, was the first.

Early in 1941 he began to write for the American Partisan Review which linked Orwell with The New York Intellectuals who were also anti-Stalinist, and contributed to Gollancz anthology The Betrayal of the Left, written in the light of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (although Orwell referred to it as the Russo-German Pact and the Hitler-Stalin Pact). He also applied unsuccessfully for a job at the Air Ministry. Meanwhile, he was still writing reviews of books and plays and at this time met the novelist Anthony Powell. He also took part in a few radio broadcasts for the Eastern Service of the BBC. In March the Orwells moved to a seventh-floor flat at Langford Court, St John’s Wood, while at Wallington Orwell was digging for victory by planting potatoes.

One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten.

In August 1941, Orwell finally obtained war work when he was taken on full-time by the BBC’s Eastern Service. He supervised cultural broadcasts to India to counter propaganda from Nazi Germany designed to undermine Imperial links. This was Orwell’s first experience of the rigid conformity of life in an office, and it gave him an opportunity to create cultural programmes with contributions from T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, E.M. Forster, Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, and William Empson among others.

At the end of August he had a dinner with H.G. Wells which degenerated into a row because Wells had taken offence at observations Orwell made about him in a Horizon article. In October Orwell had a bout of bronchitis and the illness recurred frequently. David Astor was looking for a provocative contributor for The Observer and invited Orwell to write for him—the first article appearing in March 1942. In early 1942 Eileen changed jobs to work at the Ministry of Food and in mid-1942 the Orwells moved to a larger flat, a ground floor and basement, 10A Mortimer Crescent in Maida Vale/Kilburn—“the kind of lower-middle-class ambience that Orwell thought was London at its best.” Around the same time Orwell’s mother and sister Avril, who had found work in a sheet-metal factory behind King’s Cross Station, moved into a flat close to George and Eileen.

At the BBC, Orwell introduced Voice, a literary programme for his Indian broadcasts, and by now was leading an active social life with literary friends, particularly on the political left. Late in 1942, he started writing regularly for the left-wing weekly Tribune directed by Labour MPs Aneurin Bevan and George Strauss. In March 1943 Orwell’s mother died and around the same time he told Moore he was starting work on a new book, which turned out to be Animal Farm.

In September 1943, Orwell resigned from the BBC post that he had occupied for two years. His resignation followed a report confirming his fears that few Indians listened to the broadcasts, but he was also keen to concentrate on writing Animal Farm. Just six days before his last day of service, on 24 November 1943, his adaptation of the fairy tale, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes was broadcast. It was a genre in which he was greatly interested and which appeared on Animal Farm’s title-page. At this time he also resigned from the Home Guard on medical grounds.

In November 1943, Orwell was appointed literary editor at Tribune, where his assistant was his old friend Jon Kimche. Orwell was on staff until early 1945, writing over 80 book reviews and on 3 December 1943 started his regular personal column, As I Please, usually addressing three or four subjects in each. He was still writing reviews for other magazines, including Partisan Review, Horizon, and the New York Nation and becoming a respected pundit among left-wing circles but also a close friend of people on the right such as Powell, Astor and Malcolm Muggeridge. By April 1944 Animal Farm was ready for publication. Gollancz refused to publish it, considering it an attack on the Soviet regime which was a crucial ally in the war. A similar fate was met from other publishers (including T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber) until Jonathan Cape agreed to take it.

In May the Orwells had the opportunity to adopt a child, thanks to the contacts of Eileen’s sister Gwen O’Shaughnessy, then a doctor in Newcastle upon Tyne. In June a V-1 flying bomb struck Mortimer Crescent and the Orwells had to find somewhere else to live. Orwell had to scrabble around in the rubble for his collection of books, which he had finally managed to transfer from Wallington, carting them away in a wheelbarrow.

Another bombshell was Cape’s reversal of his plan to publish Animal Farm. The decision followed his personal visit to Peter Smollett, an official at the Ministry of Information. Smollett was later identified as a Soviet agent.

The Orwells spent some time in the North East, near Carlton, County Durham, dealing with matters in the adoption of a boy whom they named Richard Horatio Blair. By September 1944 they had set up home in Islington, at 27B Canonbury Square. Baby Richard joined them there, and Eileen gave up her work at the Ministry of Food to look after her family. Secker & Warburg had agreed to publish Animal Farm, planned for the following March, although it did not appear in print until August 1945. By February 1945 David Astor had invited Orwell to become a war correspondent for the Observer. Orwell had been looking for the opportunity throughout the war, but his failed medical reports prevented him from being allowed anywhere near action. He went to Paris after the liberation of France and to Cologne once it had been occupied by the Allies.

It was while he was there that Eileen went into hospital for a hysterectomy and died under anaesthetic on 29 March 1945. She had not given Orwell much notice about this operation because of worries about the cost and because she expected to make a speedy recovery. Orwell returned home for a while and then went back to Europe. He returned finally to London to cover the 1945 general election at the beginning of July. Animal Farm: A Fairy Story was published in Britain on 17 August 1945, and a year later in the US, on 26 August 1946.

Jura and Nineteen Eighty-Four

Animal Farm had particular resonance in the post-war climate and its worldwide success made Orwell a sought-after figure. For the next four years, Orwell mixed journalistic work—mainly for Tribune, The Observer and the Manchester Evening News, though he also contributed to many small-circulation political and literary magazines—with writing his best-known work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949.

In the year following Eileen’s death he published around 130 articles and a selection of his Critical Essays, while remaining active in various political lobbying campaigns. He employed a housekeeper, Susan Watson, to look after his adopted son at the Islington flat, which visitors now described as bleak. In September he spent a fortnight on the island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides and saw it as a place to escape from the hassle of London literary life. David Astor was instrumental in arranging a place for Orwell on Jura. Astor’s family owned Scottish estates in the area and a fellow Old Etonian Robin Fletcher had a property on the island. In late 1945 and early 1946 Orwell made several hopeless and unwelcome marriage proposals to younger women, including Celia Kirwan (who later became Arthur Koestler’s sister-in-law), Ann Popham who happened to live in the same block of flats and Sonia Brownell, one of Connolly’s coterie at the Horizon office. Orwell suffered a tubercular haemorrhage in February 1946 but disguised his illness. In 1945 or early 1946, while still living at Canonbury Square, Orwell wrote an article on British Cookery, complete with recipes, commissioned by the British Council. Given the post-war shortages, both parties agreed not to publish it. His sister Marjorie died of kidney disease in May and shortly after, on 22 May 1946, Orwell set off to live on the Isle of Jura.

Barnhill was an abandoned farmhouse with outbuildings near the northern end of the island, situated at the end of a five-mile (8km), heavily rutted track from Ardlussa, where the owners lived. Conditions at the farmhouse were primitive but the natural history and the challenge of improving the place appealed to Orwell. His sister Avril accompanied him there and young novelist Paul Potts made up the party. In July Susan Watson arrived with Orwell’s son Richard. Tensions developed and Potts departed after one of his manuscripts was used to light the fire. Orwell meanwhile set to work on Nineteen Eighty-Four. Later Susan Watson’s boyfriend David Holbrook arrived. A fan of Orwell since school days, he found the reality very different, with Orwell hostile and disagreeable probably because of Holbrook’s membership of the Communist Party. Susan Watson could no longer stand being with Avril and she and her boyfriend left.

Orwell returned to London in late 1946 and picked up his literary journalism again. Now a well-known writer, he was swamped with work. Apart from a visit to Jura in the new year he stayed in London for one of the coldest British winters on record and with such a national shortage of fuel that he burnt his furniture and his child’s toys. The heavy smog in the days before the Clean Air Act 1956 did little to help his health about which he was reticent, keeping clear of medical attention. Meanwhile, he had to cope with rival claims of publishers Gollancz and Warburg for publishing rights. About this time he co-edited a collection titled British Pamphleteers with Reginald Reynolds. As a result of the success of Animal Farm, Orwell was expecting a large bill from the Inland Revenue and he contacted a firm of accountants of which the senior partner was Jack Harrison. The firm advised Orwell to establish a company to own his copyright and to receive his royalties and set up a service agreement so that he could draw a salary. Such a company “George Orwell Productions Ltd” (GOP Ltd) was set up on 12 September 1947 although the service agreement was not then put into effect. Jack Harrison left the details at this stage to junior colleagues.

Orwell left London for Jura on 10 April 1947. In July he ended the lease on the Wallington cottage. Back on Jura he worked on Nineteen Eighty-Four and made good progress. During that time his sister’s family visited, and Orwell led a disastrous boating expedition, on 19 August, which nearly led to loss of life whilst trying to cross the notorious Gulf of Corryvreckan and gave him a soaking which was not good for his health. In December a chest specialist was summoned from Glasgow who pronounced Orwell seriously ill and a week before Christmas 1947 he was in Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride, then a small village in the countryside, on the outskirts of Glasgow. Tuberculosis was diagnosed and the request for permission to import streptomycin to treat Orwell went as far as Aneurin Bevan, then Minister of Health. David Astor helped with supply and payment and Orwell began his course of streptomycin on 19 or 20 February 1948. By the end of July 1948 Orwell was able to return to Jura and by December he had finished the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In January 1949, in a very weak condition, he set off for a sanatorium at Cranham, Gloucestershire, escorted by Richard Rees.

The sanatorium at Cranham consisted of a series of small wooden chalets or huts in a remote part of the Cotswolds near Stroud. Visitors were shocked by Orwell’s appearance and concerned by the short-comings and ineffectiveness of the treatment. Friends were worried about his finances, but by now he was comparatively well-off. He was writing to many of his friends, including Jacintha Buddicom, who had rediscovered him, and in March 1949, was visited by Celia Kirwan. Kirwan had just started working for a Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department, set up by the Labour government to publish anti-communist propaganda, and Orwell gave her a list of people he considered to be unsuitable as IRD authors because of their pro-communist leanings. Orwell’s list, not published until 2003, consisted mainly of writers but also included actors and Labour MPs. Orwell received more streptomycin treatment and improved slightly. In June 1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four was published to immediate critical and popular acclaim.

Final months and death

Orwell’s health had continued to decline since the diagnosis of tuberculosis in December 1947. In mid-1949, he courted Sonia Brownell, and they announced their engagement in September, shortly before he was removed to University College Hospital in London. Sonia took charge of Orwell’s affairs and attended him diligently in the hospital, causing concern to some old friends such as Muggeridge. In September 1949, Orwell invited his accountant Harrison to visit him in hospital, and Harrison claimed that Orwell then asked him to become director of GOP Ltd and to manage the company, but there was no independent witness. Orwell’s wedding took place in the hospital room on 13 October 1949, with David Astor as best man. Orwell was in decline and visited by an assortment of visitors including Muggeridge, Connolly, Lucian Freud, Stephen Spender, Evelyn Waugh, Paul Potts, Anthony Powell, and his Eton tutor Anthony Gow. Plans to go to the Swiss Alps were mooted. Further meetings were held with his accountant, at which Harrison and Mr. and Mrs. Blair were confirmed as directors of the company, and at which Harrison claimed that the service agreement was executed, giving copyright to the company. Orwell’s health was in decline again by Christmas. On the evening of 20 January 1950, Potts visited Orwell and slipped away on finding him asleep. Jack Harrison visited later and claimed that Orwell gave him 25% of the company. Early on the morning of 21 January, an artery burst in Orwell’s lungs, killing him at age 46.

Orwell had requested to be buried in accordance with the Anglican rite in the graveyard of the closest church to wherever he happened to die. The graveyards in central London had no space, and fearing that he might have to be cremated against his wishes, his widow appealed to his friends to see whether any of them knew of a church with space in its graveyard. David Astor lived in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, and arranged for Orwell to be interred in the churchyard of All Saints’ there. Orwell’s gravestone bears the simple epitaph: “Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25th 1903, died January 21st 1950;” no mention is made on the gravestone of his more famous pen name.

Orwell’s son, Richard Horatio Blair, was brought up by Orwell’s sister Avril. He maintains a public profile as patron of the Orwell Society. He gives interviews about the few memories he has of his father.

In 1979, Sonia Brownell brought a High Court action against Harrison when he declared an intention to subdivide his 25 percent share of the company between his three children. For Sonia, the consequence of this manoeuvre would be to have made getting overall control of the company three times more difficult. She was considered to have a strong case, but was becoming increasingly ill and eventually was persuaded to settle out of court on 2 November 1980. She died on 11 December 1980, aged 62.

Trevor Paglen is an American artist, geographer, and author whose work tackles mass surveillance and data collection.

Sean O’Hagan, writing in The Guardian, said that Paglen, whose “ongoing grand project (is) the murky world of global state surveillance and the ethics of drone warfare,” “is one of the most conceptually adventurous political artists working today, and has collaborated with scientists and human rights activists on his always ambitious multimedia projects.”

In 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and he has also won The Cultural Award from the German Society for Photography. In 2017, he was a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant and is nominated for the 8th Artes Mundi award.

Life and work

Paglen earned a B.A. in 1998 from the University of California at Berkeley, a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2002 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in geography in 2008 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he currently works as a researcher. While at UC Berkeley, Paglen lived in the Berkeley Student Cooperative, residing in Chateau, Rochdale, Fenwick, and Convent co-ops.

Paglen has published a number of books. Torture Taxi (2006), (co-authored with investigative journalist Adam Clay Thompson) was the first book to comprehensively describe the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (2007), is a look at the world of black projects through unit patches and memorabilia created for top-secret programs. Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (2009) is a broader look at secrecy in the United States. The Last Pictures (2012) is a collection of 100 images to be placed on permanent media and launched into space on EchoStar XVI, as a repository available for future civilizations (alien or human) to find.

Sean O’Hagan, writing in The Guardian, said that Paglen, whose “ongoing grand project (is) the murky world of global state surveillance and the ethics of drone warfare,” “is one of the most conceptually adventurous political artists working today, and has collaborated with scientists and human rights activists on his always ambitious multimedia projects.” His visual work such as his Limit Telephotography and The Other Night Sky series have received widespread attention for both his technical innovations and for his conceptual project that involves simultaneously making and negating documentary-style truth-claims.

He was an Eyebeam Commissioned Artist in 2007. Paglen is featured in the nerd culture documentary Traceroute.

Art in the age of mass surveillance (interview)

The artist tells how his work provides a map of the digital world’s hidden landscapes and forbidden places

Trevor Paglen describes himself as a landscape artist, but he is no John Constable. The landscapes Paglen frames extend to the bottom of the ocean and beyond the blurred edges of the Earth’s atmosphere. For the last two decades, the artist, a cheerful and fervent man of 43, has been on a mission to photograph the unseen political geography of our times. His art tries to capture places that are not on any map—the secret air bases and offshore prisons from which the war on terror has been fought—as well as the networks of data collection and surveillance that now shape our democracies, the cables, spy satellites and artificial intelligences of the digital world.

There is little abstract about this effort. Paglen has spent a good deal of his artistic career camped out in deserts with only suspicious drones for company, his special astro-telescopic lenses trained on the heavens or distant military bases. (“For me, seeing the drone in the 21st century is a little bit like Turner seeing the train in the 19th century.”) He trained as a scuba diver to get 100ft beneath the waves in search of the cables carrying all of human knowledge. He recognises few limits to his art. In April, he will launch his own satellite and, with it, the world’s first space sculpture, a manmade star that should be visible from most places on the Earth for a few months, “as bright as one of the stars in the Big Dipper.”

I meet Paglen in Berlin, in a prewar studio apartment, which is his current home and the centre of his operations. We sit in a high-ceilinged room among banks of computer screens and bookcases of art monographs. Two of his assistants, Daniel and Eric, are at work on an artificial intelligence project. Paglen is mostly either here directing that and five other projects with them, or “on airplanes trying to figure out how to pay the rent.” In the week that we meet, that latter process has become a little easier as he is named one of this year’s recipients of the MacArthur genius grant, with its stipend of 625,000$ (470,000£) over five years.

Paglen likes to joke that the airy apartment itself is probably one of the most surveilled spaces in western Europe. It was formerly home to the documentary-maker Laura Poitras, Paglen’s friend, who was instrumental in helping CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden go public about the staggering level of state-sponsored monitoring. Paglen’s footage of National Security Agency bases was included in Citizenfour, Poitras’s Academy award-winning documentary about Snowden. In some senses, being watched goes with the territory. The apartment is also a couple of hundred yards from the archives of the old East German Stasi: millions of pages of paper records in manila files that until recently would have represented the most comprehensive data collection in human history, before Facebook and Google, the NSA and the rest upped the ante.

Sitting on the edge of his seat, Paglen talks slightly reluctantly about his journey here. He is by turns animated and wary, excited by his projects but careful not to make them seem anything more than they are. “I am not a journalist or an academic,” he says, “I don’t feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything. What I am saying is, This is an image of something in our world. You might think you know what it is, but I am going to tell you something different…”

He resists autobiographical interpretations of his work, though you can’t help but feel that a psychologist might at least see them as worthy of mention. Paglen was born at Andrews air force base, in Maryland, where his father was an ophthalmologist. As a boy, he lived on bases in Texas and California, before his family settled when he was 12 at the US army airfield in Wiesbaden, Germany, where he stayed with his father until university after his parents separated. His first experience of the ways in which politics can shape geography was in this divided country; he had not long started school here when the Wall came down.

Paglen’s academic career, too, looks in retrospect like a perfect primer for his artistic practice. He studied the philosophy of religion, then fine art, then did a PHD in geography (“looking at the ways humans shape the surface of the Earth and how that in turn shapes us”). He also drifted a little, played unhinged bass in a punk band called Noisegate, and was into Californian surf culture.

Paglen first became interested in hidden places while studying at Berkeley with a project he did on the architecture of the American prison system, during the years in which mass incarceration became America’s unspoken political philosophy (“a form of revenge against the civil rights movement,” he says now). He photographed the enormous prisons out in the Californian desert and came to think of them as places that were both inside and outside American society. After 9/11, when it became clear that the US was setting up secret prisons around the world, the most visible symbol of which was Guantánamo Bay, he started to see a resonance between his project and the war on terror.

That set him thinking about the history of secret places. In 2003, he made the first of many camping trips to the blueprint of all these off-grid locations, Area 51, the highly classified air force base in Nevada, pitching up on snow-topped Tikaboo Peak to see what he could see. That started him on his artistic odyssey into the world of “rendition and drones and extra-judicial spaces.”

“I think a lot of that work was animated by a kind of anger,” he says. “But also equally by curiosity—what did these places look like?” When the Snowden files were released, he homed in on the fact that “nearly all the documents were about infrastructure—and they gave addresses.” He did a lot of work pinpointing the key underground and undersea junctions of cabling, where much of the listening took place, and photographing them. “Just trying to learn how to see the landscape of the internet as it were,” he says.

How often does his quest for this language brings him up against the authorities?

“Well, every time,” he says, with a laugh. “The military is quite predictable in a way though. What I am more wary of in the desert is coming across crazy people doing drugs or whatever. Those encounters are often the most disconcerting.”

In some ways, I suggest, it as if he is engaged on a postmodern right to roam protest, making a physical argument against official secrecy. What have been the personal highlights?

“I think the first time I worked out how to predict where a certain surveillance satellite would be and then went out and looked and it showed up,” he says—his ethereal photographs of the sky are traced with tell-tale dots and lines. He also recalls learning to see lethal Reaper drones in the Nevada desert air. They would watch him watching them. “It was one of those situations where you realise that if this was anywhere else in the world, that would probably be the last thing I would see,” he says.

His pictures, often shot at distances of many miles, are snapshots of the known unknowns of our world. As he explains his practice to me over the course of an afternoon, he runs through a dizzying sequence of illustrative images on his desktop computer. It is a slideshow punctuated by my asking: “What’s that?” and him patiently explaining what we can see: a speck of a drone on the face of the sun; the white domes of the largest NSA station outside the US—at Menwith Hill near Harrogate; the beach at Bude in Cornwall under which a cable carrying the world’s data makes landfall.

Paglen’s most recent work is another departure into that digital landscape, this time into the terra incognita of artificial intelligence. He is developing a program that can take, say, the algorithm that controls a laser-guided missile or a self-driving car and recreate what it “sees” of the world. Or he has deconstructed the Facebook intelligence that seeks to scan our uploaded photos for evidence of what we wear and what we buy (to sell to advertisers) and repurposed it as an intelligence that only looks at photographs in terms of objects important to Freudian psychoanalysis or late-stage capitalism.

He sees this in some ways as a new way of looking, one entirely appropriate to the times. “We live in a political moment where it seems reason has gone out the door,” he says. “And at the same time we have these incredibly predatory institutions being created, whether it is white supremacy on one hand or Facebook on the other. It is kind of a surrealist moment. Everything is like Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Nothing is what it seems.”

In some ways, there is a kinship in Paglen’s work to the paranoid surfaces of Adam Curtis’s documentaries, or perhaps Don DeLillo’s fiction, but he is also at pains to imagine how an alternative world might look.

A recent installation, Autonomy Cube, saw him demonstrate an internet with “the opposite business model,” one that would still give you access to all the world’s information, but would preserve anonymity and not collect your data. He is also looking at ways in which art might take that utopian principle into space.

In this sense, the forthcoming satellite project, what he calls the Orbital Reflector, is a kind of antidote to all he photographs. It will be followed in June by a major retrospective of Paglen’s work at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC. The plan, a decade in the making, is to launch the first ever satellite “that has no military value, no scientific value, no commercial value, only aesthetic value”. A satellite that is the opposite of what we have come to expect. Not something that observes our every move, but something that we can gaze up at in old-fashioned wonder, a little diamond in the sky.

The project is being sponsored, fittingly, by the Nevada Museum of Art. The sculpture will piggyback off a Space X rocket before being ejected. Once in low orbit, a simple mechanism is designed to open up an inflatable Mylar structure, about 100ft long and 6ft high, with highly reflective planes, which he insists will be visible to the naked eye as a twinkle in the night sky.

And what does he want people to think when, in April, hopefully, they gaze up at it?

“I just hope people enjoy it,” he says. “There is no message behind it. Apart from the idea that maybe there are sometimes different ways of thinking about the world.”

Text: Tim Adams, 25.10.2017; wikipedia.org (introduction)

In his 1996 essay Designer as Author, Michael Rock traces the evolution of authorship by hop-scotching through postmodern literary, critical and film theory to land on director François Truffaut’s la politique des auteurs. This was a strategy that Truffaut used to elevate cinema to a high art by attributing authorship to a film’s director, rather than to the studio.¹ Rock argues that auteurship is an aspirational model for design, one whereby designers might occupy a position of creative agency rather than follow traditional client/provider business models. Just two years later, in 1998, Ellen Lupton wrote The Designer as Producer, an essay which brightly suggests that the multiskilled, technology-enabled designer might use the collapsing of disciplinary lines in contemporary design practice to work as an author, editor and publisher. Lupton cites Walter Benjamin’s 1934 essay The Author as Producer, which identified interdisciplinarity as one of the central outcomes of film, radio and other then-novel forms of communication.²

In the years since Rock and Lupton’s essays, public access to the internet became widespread, enabling anyone to dismantle the idea of singular authorship through self-publishing and peer-to-peer file sharing. Web 2.0 placed all manner of people in direct dialogue with typography, photography and other visual elements traditionally associated with graphic design, suggesting that we might also dabble as citizen designers while blogging, chatting, uploading and posting our way to a new social paradigm. The fallout from Web 2.0 has been nothing short of astounding. The internet that once seemed open and free has been transformed into a dystopia of double meanings and commercial and political dealings. Ingrained psychological dependencies have developed out of brightly blinking user friendly experiences, monitored by businesses and government agencies. These dark post 2.0 conditions—and the economic, social and political superstructures that help create and enforce them—motivate the work of Metahaven, a research-focused design studio founded by Amsterdam-based Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden.

Metahaven are difficult to define—knowingly and obstinately so—not simply as a collective, whose ranks have expanded and changed over the years to include any number of collaborators, but to locate altogether on the spectrum of graphic design (or pedagogy, theory, journalism, art or any other number of things). The studio can certainly be understood using the conventional terms that define success in the international design community: institutional affiliations, awards and exhibitions.³ Echoing Rock and Lupton’s can-do optimism, they could be considered auteur-producers: tenacious visionaries who work across multiple platforms to create a broad variety of functional objects, as well as a prolific amount of insistent, manifesto-like critical and self-referential writing.

A sense of the uncanny pervades much of Metahaven’s work, which draws on the heavily mediated visual detritus that defines the corporate and government worlds. Microsoft’s pre-installed font package, drop-shadow effects, garish colours, pirated logos and other dated graphic elements are the marks that make the work feel vaguely familiar yet perfectly pitched. Playing on the form of manuals that guide corporations in the application of graphic and branding identity systems, Uncorporate Identity (2010) is, at 608 pages, the studio’s most formidable publication to date. The book traces the connections between corpo­rate and nationalist aesthetics and those of separate-seeming, yet visually related, subcultures including black metal, diy ’zines and the military. Chock-a-block with essays and other didactic materials, and authored by a long list of contributors from a variety of disciplines, the book is visually jarring, which suggests its critical potential as a design object. Uncorporate Identity actively frustrates the reading experience while accurately reflecting the cognitive effects of the information glut that corporate brands force on consumers. Paradoxically, however, this also poses the question: who can use a book that intentionally breaks the conventions of readability?

While the history of independent publishing suggests the revolutionary political potential of the small press, the current state of digital distribution leaves much to be desired. Massive corporate entities—Amazon, Apple, Google—exercise the highest levels of algorithmic and censorial control over the material we find online, and how we discover it. The journalistic non-profit organization Wikileaks first ignited a public outcry in 2010 with the release, on its website, of footage from a 2007 us military strike in Baghdad in which Iraqi journalists were killed (now known as the Collateral Murder video). The same year, Wikileaks released over 75,000 documents relating to the war in Afghanistan. Intrigued by the visual language that came to light through these data dumps, Metahaven performed a volunteer branding exercise of sorts for the group in 2011. The project comprised a series of grey T-shirts printed with the organization’s name, along with a set of scarves whose camouflage-like pattern suggested they could be used for disguise while their silky texture mimicked that of a luxury good. Sold as part of the Dark Store presentation by the New York gallery Artists Space at the 2012 Art Berlin Contemporary fair, the proceeds from sales were passed on to Wikileaks. (When once asked in an interview how surveillance might impact their design process, Metahaven’s response was provocative: ‘Design is basically high-res censorship.’⁴)

The true use-value of these objects may be debated by anyone with a passing interest in Marxist politics. Does the world need another T-shirt with a slogan on or faux-luxury scarf? (Answer: No.) Can the T-shirt-as-anti-capitalist-statement possess any real humour or potency when it is a limited-edition good sold at an art fair or gallery? In their eBook Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? Memes, Design and Politics (2013), Metahaven cite us media activist and scholar Ethan Zuckerman’s Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism (2008), which identifies digital platforms as prime locations for political action. Zuckerman argues that citizens would surely protest if the state began to infringe upon their sovereign right to post banal pictures of their pets—and that they would easily find somewhere else to post such images should an online platform such as Facebook dissolve. ‘Is it possible’, Metahaven ask, ‘that graphic design has only one thing left to do, which is to post itself on the internet?’

Suggesting that recursive jokes—memes, cat-based and otherwise—might have untapped political power, they wonder: ‘Could the leftovers of graphic design be turned into jokes? Might—through this re-allegiance—design rediscover actual societal impact?’ However self-aware it may be, Metahaven’s dark-yet-playful sense of humour is most bouyant when freed from physical form and posted across a variety of digital platforms. For instance, in a 2014 music video collaboration for Home, a piece by San Francisco composer and sound artist Holly Herndon, the studio generated a cheerful-looking data rain of patterns fashioned from the logos that symbolize the various National Security Administration programmes. In the video, these images are overlaid onto Herndon’s face like a veil of cartoon camouflage, as if to protect her from the government surveillance infractions her song laments. In the project’s documentation, Metahaven assert their belief in pop music as ‘a force that can change the critical mass of a politically stagnant cultural field’.⁵

Yet, while Herndon may be immensely talented, she can hardly be considered a pop star in the conventional sense. Even with the disseminatory clout of the internet, niche performers like Herndon struggle to achieve broad legibility and audience reach, just as is the case with limited-edition objects and smaller publishing houses or galleries. For all of their engagement with power structures and other systemic failings, Metahaven can’t allow their work, in practice or in scale, simply to be what it is; they cannot resist telling a visual joke through design and then explaining it again, as if to assure themselves of the punch line. At times, in fact, they could even be perceived as coming close to undermining their own critical potential in a feedback loop of self-description and analysis. They publish their work to Tumblr, for instance: a platform for rampant, often anonymous, image-sharing. They also choose to explain their work through the didactic texts they publish when they could, instead, perform an effective meta-commentary by simply allowing their images to exist without comment.

The recent whistleblowing actions of Private Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and others have revealed that an NSA PowerPoint slide template uses the same visual design forms as the mainstream software we use in our everyday lives. Given that, perhaps design’s greater potential for social change lies not in its theoretical implications but in its functional ones: what, for instance, can design do to help people recognize political ideology at work? If Rock’s auteurist invocations helped create the critical conditions in which studios like Metahaven thrive, then it is Lupton’s consistent, if seemingly prosaic, demand for a design ethos that is intelligible to everyone, which suggests a different possibility for design’s continued relevance. The most effective visual joke for Metahaven to tell would be one so banal that it registers everywhere—or nowhere at all.

¹ Michael Rock, Designer as Author, 1996, in Multiple Signatures: On Designers, Authors, Readers and Users, Rizzoli, New York, 2013; ² Ellen Lupton, The Designer as Producer, in The Education of a Graphic Designer, ed. Steven Heller, Allworth Press, New York, 1998, pp.159/62; ³ For a list of the studio’s professional accomplishments see: metahaven.net; ⁴ James Chae, Hi-Res Censorship: Metahaven on Edward Snowden and rebranding Wikileaks, The Verge, 19 December 2013; ⁵ Metahaven, Data Rains: Holly Herndon and the Defiant Power of Pop: tinyurl.com/kezcstl

‘It’s raining facts!’

They’ve explored pollution in the Urals, freight trains in China, and daily life in the world capital of fake news. Now the Dutch art crusaders have imagined Europe’s future—and it’s very medieval.

In the way to meet the Dutch film-makers Metahaven, I have a very Metahaven experience. The Eurostar from London to Amsterdam grinds to a halt almost as soon as it crosses the border into the Netherlands. It sits stranded on the high-speed track for two hours before smoke starts billowing from the train. A voice is heard over the intercom: “Don’t worry,” it says, “it’s just the brakes.”

The scene could come from the duo’s own work, which these days focuses on late capitalism in which traditional forms of authority have broken down, online platforms have stolen our attention and seemingly advanced systems—like rail networks—are forever glitching.

I text Metahaven’s Daniel van der Velden to tell him what’s going on and mention that I’d always imagined the Netherlands operated smoothly and efficiently. “Yes, that is the myth!” he texts back.

Metahaven comprise just Van der Velden and Vinca Kruk, although the duo prefer the flexibility of the term collective. Created in 2007 as an Amsterdam-based graphic design studio, they have since gravitated towards film-making, through which they send dispatches from a world in which we live in a “medieval haze of information.” It is a world, they tell me, where “we are passionately arguing on Twitter with bots,” and where we’re subject to all kinds of cognitive distortions, such as fake news and post-truth.

Metahaven’s transmissions from our dystopian present have long been venerated in art circles. Now they are starting to reach a wider audience. The Institute of Contemporary Art is hosting a Metahaven solo exhibition, Version History, which features a new film, Eurasia—shown on a vast video wall—alongside their previous works Information Skies (2016) and Hometown (2018). (It runs concurrently with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s Metahaven retrospective.)

A sense of uncertainty pervades Metahaven’s films. Post-Soviet spaces feature heavily and the work of the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky is an enduring influence. Animations created by the collective bleed on to the screen and the kind of dropdown menus and sidebars normally found on YouTube videos pop up, satirising the online experience.

The first line of Information Skies captures Metahaven’s view of the absurd moment we live in: “Something happened this morning on our way to work. It began raining facts from the ceiling.”

The background photo of the collective’s Twitter account is a still from Hometown, in which you can read the text: “revolving doors and mirroring walls.” With Metahaven, you’re never quite sure where you are.

My train pulls into Amsterdam Centraal two hours late and so I meet the duo at an place inside the station that manages to be a cafe, record store, online radio station and craft beer bar. Van der Velden was born in 1971 and grew up in Rotterdam, while Kruk is nine years younger and was raised in nearby Leiden. They each have a degree in graphic design. As well as working together, they live with each other and have a five-year-old daughter.

“I worry about publicly stating we are a couple, because there’s a tendency to really romanticise that,” Kruk says.

“Or not!” chimes in Van der Velden.

“If you work and live together like we do, there’s always this curiosity about role division,” continues Kruk. “It’s extremely liberating to work under one name because you can change what you do within the collective.”

Alongside The Sprawl (2015), Information Skies and Hometown make up Metahaven’s “truth futurism” trilogy. Subtitled “propaganda about propaganda,” The Sprawl was a more traditional piece of documentary. Talking heads popped up, including Peter Pomerantsev, whose account of 21st-century Russia, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, introduced western readers to Vladislav Surkov, an aesthete and Putin ideologue who’s been described as “the arch-puppeteer of Russian politics.”

“Propaganda techniques now no longer work from the idea that they are promoting a centralised perspective,” Van der Velden says. “They are trying to create doubt, trying to intervene in cognitive space where we don’t have the facts but we can create stories.”

The group wanted to explore this idea further in Eurasia, which is still being edited when we meet. The film, says Van der Velden, will be set in a “fictitious, not-so-fictitious future Europe that resembles something like a medieval map of fiefdoms.”

There is archival footage of Nigel Farage and the Italian comedian-turned-politician Beppe Grillo. Farage, the artists say over email after, is “exercising his now-familiar bit, ‘I’m a political outsider, I’m actually a comedian’—which is really a Trojan horse destroying politics itself and becoming some kind of quasi-amicable figure whom we have to trust because he is funny.” He is also a creator of fictions about the past—as Van der Velden points out, Europe was not a land of nation states before the European Union came along, it was a land of empires. This ties in with the collective’s central idea for the film, which is how by “manipulating the past you can actually shape futures—by retrofitting the past to an outcome that’s in the future.”

To make Eurasia, Metahaven travelled to sites that hold significant meaning in our 21st-century dystopia. They visited the Sak-Elga river in the Ural Mountains, on the geographical border between Europe and Asia, where the water is red from copper pollution. They travelled south looking for signs of the new Silk Road between China and the west, eventually filming Chinese exports travelling on Soviet-made railways through 18th-century landscapes.

And in Macedonia, they went to Veles, a town that became known as the world capital of fake news during the 2016 US election because a significant number of pro-Trump sites were being run from there. Hillary Clinton blamed her defeat on such places, but what Metahaven found was “sort of nothing. You find a town in which people have no work, there is an old factory that’s abandoned and there are guys with computers and a sense politically that there is not a very strong tendency toward liberal worldviews.”

There’s no room for irony in Metahaven’s work. “Irony is dead,” Van der Velden says. “It was effective in the 1990s but it’s not something that really works at the moment. You see that with someone like Sacha Baron Cohen—the form of it still resides on the idea that we have a perspective outside from which we can laugh. This type of outside is what is being undercut or taken away.”

Indeed, Metahaven are very much part of the world they critique. They cite their own “YouTube addictions” as an influence on their work, and they’re not about to start throwing their devices away just yet. “We’re not really into this idea of, Go back to a 96 Nokia and enjoy reality,” says Van der Velden. Instead, they want to look forward.

Although unpicking what the future might have in store will have to wait for another time. My train back to London is waiting—if it ever makes it out of the Netherlands.

Text(s): Sarah Hromack, 01.06.2015; Oscar Rickett, 11.10.2018