Essay On Sensory Experience

Sensory experience refers to any activity that stimulates one of the five senses. It is a culturally embedded, socially collective and physically embodied phenomenon that provides an instinctive dimension to identity. Imposing directly on our day-to-day lives, sensory experience marks similarity and difference in social practice in immediate and unspoken ways. In this essay I will discuss how sexual experience in the writings of George Orwell is used to highlight a limited sensory experience in post-World War Britain. I will be focusing on the novel 1984 and his essays Boys’ Weeklies and The Art of Donald McGill. When Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, Britain was characterised by an impulse of liberation from anything that was highly controlled or limited by the government in the 15 years prior to the war. The sexual revolution, in particular, allowed people a sense of power in retaliation to an outside world of controlling politics. Thatcher’s government appeared to prolong the sentiment with market-led liberal ideology based on individualism. Orwell’s progressive novel is located in the 1980’s and tracks the consequences of a society in constant demand for quick fixes of passion, parallel to the consumerist desires of modern capitalism. I will argue that Orwell’s writings accentuate a decline in the quality of sensual encounters in the ‘New World’, producing a loss of sensory awareness and embodied consciousness. This outright condemnation of the present is encapsulated in his descriptions of sexual impulses, which are increasingly controlled and thus compromised, by the overbearing influence of modern capitalism. Towards the end of the 20th century, sexuality increasingly moves away from individual experience and t...

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...er for a ‘good society’ has been around since the 18th century. John Locke’s teaching promised an “unheard of degree of individual freedom, an unlimited opportunity to compete for material well-being, and an unprecedented limitation on the arbitrary powers of government to interfere with individual initiative." In this sort of society we would have a collective responsibility over the establishments that shape our lives and will thus have the freedom to experience life at an individual level. This is because the individual would be involved in the creation of the social, political and cultural changes that affect our laws, morals and attitudes that inevitable shape our sensual experiences. Paradoxically, the further away we move from the concept of ‘individualism,’ the more we would begin to uncover our potential for unrestrained and unique sensual experience.