Prolefeed

Prolefeed is a Newspeak word for the mass culture and managed information with which the Party of Oceania pacifies its population. Defined in the Appendix on Newspeak as "the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses," it is one of the few terms in the regime's vocabulary that names its own function with open contempt. Where sister words such as joycamp and Minipax were euphemisms that meant the opposite of what they seemed to say, prolefeed confesses exactly what it is, and that frankness belongs to the larger cynicism on which Ingsoc is built.

Definition in Newspeak

The B vocabulary of Newspeak was made up of words deliberately constructed for political purposes, every one of them loaded with ideological implication and designed to impose a desirable mental attitude on the person using it. Most of these words were euphemisms, like joycamp for forced-labour camp or Minipax, the Ministry of Peace that waged war, or ambivalent words that meant "good" when applied to the Party and "bad" when applied to its enemies. Prolefeed, however, belonged to a smaller class that displayed "a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of Oceanic society." The word yokes the proles to animal husbandry: they are to be fed, not persuaded or addressed. It concedes that the entertainment and information supplied to the masses is refuse, and that the Party expects them to swallow it without reflection.

Manufactured Entertainment

The Ministry of Truth ran the production line for prolefeed. Among its departments for proletarian entertainment were generated "rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator"; a sub-section named Pornosec turned out the cheapest pornography in sealed packets, forbidden even to Party members except those who worked on it. A tune that had been haunting London for weeks, "It was only a 'opeless fancy," was one of countless songs issued by a sub-section of the Music Department, its words composed, as Winston Smith reflected, "without any human intervention whatever." The woman singing in the yard below the room above Mr Charrington's shop performed the "dreadful rubbish" so tunefully that it became almost pleasant, which was the design: along with heavy work, family cares, football and gambling, such amusements were meant to "fill up the horizon of their minds."

Spurious News and Managed Facts

The second half of the definition was institutionalised with equal care. The Ministry of Plenty announced that completed returns for all classes of consumption goods proved the standard of living had risen by 20 per cent in a year, and that "irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations" of gratitude to Big Brother had broken out across Oceania; the phrase "our new, happy life" was a favourite of the moment. The same ministry had issued a "categorical pledge" that the chocolate ration would not be reduced during 1984, and Winston's own job at the Ministry of Truth included converting that promise into a warning that a reduction would probably be necessary. When the ration duly fell from thirty grammes to twenty, the telescreen proclaimed the arrival of a raise to twenty grammes. Parsons swallowed the contradiction "easily, with the stupidity of an animal," the eyeless creature at the next table swallowed it with passion, and Syme swallowed it through the more complex machinery of doublethink. Spurious news also had its permanent villain: Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, figured daily in the Two Minutes Hate as the primal traitor whose shadowy Brotherhood and a forbidden text known only as the book were matters of vague rumour. Prolefeed thus worked on memory and arithmetic at once, so that the fact of yesterday disappeared into the bulletin of today.

Thought Control and Significance

Prolefeed was the complement of Newspeak's central project. Syme, who worked on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary, explained that the whole aim of Newspeak was to narrow the range of thought until thoughtcrime became literally impossible, because there would be no words in which to express it; "Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The Appendix restates the same purpose from the side of meaning: Newspeak was devised so that a heretical thought should be "literally unthinkable," with words like free purged of every political and intellectual sense. If Newspeak was to remove the vocabulary of dissent, prolefeed was to occupy the space where dissent might have grown, supplying sensation and noise instead of concepts, so that by 2050, as Syme predicted, no one alive would understand an unorthodox conversation. Yet prolefeed's own name preserves a sliver of truth inside the deception: the Party's contempt for the masses was complete enough to let the label of its propaganda speak honestly. And the novel lets that honesty resonate beyond the Party's intention—the woman in the yard keeps singing her manufactured song, and Winston, watching her, sees the proles "storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world." Prolefeed was engineered to keep the proles animal; the vitality it was meant to channel kept escaping as song.