Signs of the T : Aldous Huxley , High Art , and American Technocracy

Although the question of Aldous Huxley’s attitude towards the state systems depicted in Brave New World (1932) remains the stuff of fierce debate, the technocratic features of that state have long been recognized by scholars, students, and general readers alike. Indeed, Brave New World is often grouped with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) as one of the twentieth century’s most compelling representations of ‘the threat posed by technocracy and totalitarianism to civil society’, Huxley’s grey future reminding its readers of the power of technology and the allure it holds for those who seek to use technical expertise for political goals.1 As this quotation indicates, scholars tend to interpret this future as a scenario depicting the systematic and objectionable purging of individual liberty. Evelyn Cobley, for instance, writing about Brave New World in relation to the Ford Motor Company, proposes that Huxley’s text ‘associates the assembly line with the utopian dream of the perfect society that devolves into the dystopian nightmare of the totalitarian state.’2 Technocracy—rule or government by a class of technical specialists—is in these terms an object of Huxley’s satire, something the text queries rather than celebrates. And yet at other times Huxley’s support for illiberal sentiments comes to the fore. Hence David Bradshaw’s claim that for ‘all its hideousness, the hierarchical, aseptic, colour-coded world of A.F. 632 is not aeons away from the scientific utopia Huxley was promoting elsewhere before, during and after he wrote Brave New World in 1931’ (BNW xxii). This approach foregrounds the text’s ambivalence. It asks us to decide whether Huxley’s apparent mockery of a politics based on scientific knowledge co-exists with an approval of technocratic authority. In other words, different readings of Huxley’s account of technocracy diverge on the nature of his response to technocracy, yet agree that a response exists. Brave New World may analyse technocracy this way or that. Analyse technocracy, however, the text unarguably and unforgettably does.

established, particularly as one who provides a liberal perspective in contrast to Scott, Hubbert, and those with similarly anti-aesthetic tendencies, but the broad connections between Brave New World and Life in a Technocracy have yet to be recorded. 8 Although it is a commonplace that Huxley took a qualified interest in technocratic ideasamong them scientific managerialism, Fordian industrialism, eugenicism, and Wellsian socialismbefore, during, and after the composition of Brave New World, placing his work specifically in relation to the American Technocracy movement allows us to formulate a new perspective on the tension between art and technocratic control that Loeb and Huxley diagnosed as a key problem of post-Fordian modernity. Brave New World conceives the relationship between technology and the arts relationally. It suggests that if the machine age tends to subordinate aesthetic beauty to rhetorics of efficiency and central planning, such rhetorics may also be a necessary counterpart to more creative spaces hived off from, yet at the mercy of, technocratic systems (as those who are exiled to Iceland and elsewhere prove). Life in a Technocracy takes a comparable line, imagining technocracy as a means with which to make the arts flourish and thus to create a society that would transform By the time Huxley made this remark he had long doubted the 'mechanic' as a criterion for socio-political engineering. In a 1926 letter to John St. Loe Strachey, for instance, he outlined his anxieties regarding the 'prestige of science' and the concomitant view that 'the measurable', rather than qualitative, 'aspect of the world is [its] total reality' (AHSL 186). Huxley had also by this point established many of his concerns about the evermore rationalized qualities of machine-age society and the purpose of art within it. When he wrote Brave New World his disquiet at such issues was still evident. Yet he had also become convinced that the ethic of the machine called democracy into question. At this point in time, Huxley openly favoured caste-based social models that preserved intellectual aristocracies and embraced autocratic governance, and was increasingly drawn to eugenics (see HH viixxiii). He suggested in 'Machinery, Psychology, and Politics' (1929) that the age of the machine demanded an efficient 'factory-like political organization', but he remained uncertain about the long-term effects of such proposals upon 'the psychology of the individual human being' (HCE3 220), and, consequently, upon the creative spirit. Huxley was similarly torn about science, which after the Wall Street Crash he was keen to see 'applied by humanists' (HCE 155), as he put it in 'Science and Civilization ' (1932), in order to bring civilization back from the brink of chaos, even though he suspected that science was more likely to be used by 'economists' to standardize the world and 'to train up a race […] of perfect mass-producers and mass-consumers' than it was to be used to create a 'deliberately progressive' society, 'consciously tending towards the realization of the highest human aspirations' (HCE3 150). Brave New World dramatizes these antagonisms: it charts the systematic purging of finely wrought aesthetic forms in a society where benevolent dictatorship has generated political stability by jettisoning the 'waste' of art and liberal democracy, and by limiting the use of science to functional applications as opposed to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. As a fictional narrative, therefore, the text is profoundly unresolved. Indeed, the text's formal contradictions imply that Brave New World designates the high arts as a source of value, and this gesture, as I will show, registers Huxley's closeness to Loeb's account of technocracy, a philosophy from which many modern commentators would want to distance him. even if such sanity, virtue, and happiness come at the cost of many individuals' psychological uniqueness. 9 'Gratuitous' art is a danger, a source of personal expression that threatens the standardizing logics of collective life. As such it must be destroyed, concealed, or adapted to other purposes. New, functional things are better than old, beautiful things, bluntly put, despite the fact that from its title onwards Brave New World heralds the moral relevance of old things -Shakespeare, in this caseas a possible counter to the technocratic undertakings that have so drastically transformed humankind.
How we understand Huxley's attitude towards these complexities depends in large part on how we approach the text's account of the cultural forms produced under technocracy and the high art to which certain characters, such as Mond, oppose it. And as with much else in Brave New World, here ambiguities proliferate. Mond states that the price paid for stability in A.F. 632 is the loss of all those cathedrals, Renaissance plays, requiems, and symphonies (BNW 29) that Mond himself seems to respect, but which, like the philosophical, religious, and historical tomes kept in the cabinet in his study, are forms of 'smut' (BNW 207) that must be hidden from a world with rather different scruples. Theoretical science has suffered the same fate, its abstractions jettisoned in favour of disciplines fixed on 'the most immediate problems of the moment' (BNW 200). Utility has taken the place of beauty, commercialism has deposed individualism, and here Brave New World arguably channels the Huxley who in 1930 bemoaned the influence of American culture upon its European counterparts, the latter falling prey, in his view, to the former's standardizing advance. Indeed, the 'religious respect for culture' that Huxley sought to save from an 'age of abounding rubbish' (HCE3 49) parallels Mond's dutiful preservation of high culture, both Huxley and Mond amounting in this regard to cognoscenti finding solace in art forms inaccessible to the common run of people. This is the reading of Brave New World offered by John Carey, who argues that the text implies 'that mass happiness is inherently inferior. Only the solitary individual can experience happiness that is significant or profound.' 10 The physical remnants of high art are locked away to contain their harmful teachings and thereby to maintain the hierarchies upon which social stability depends, those same hierarchies rendering high art unintelligible in an ahistorical society in which most people feed on entertainments that do little to challenge the mind. Only an aristocratic World Controller such as Mond has the necessary refinement to appreciate truth, beauty, and knowledge. Yet this very privileging of a certain kind of culture makes more noticeable the value of the high art that is not to be had. And in this respect the text queries the function of imagination and creativity in a world in which high art is dangerous enough to be put under lock and key but not so threatening as to be altogether obliterated.
So while on the one hand Brave New World presents an elitist viewpointhigh art is a thing of the past opposed to modern mass entertainments that can be treasured only by those intelligent enough to appreciate iton the other it defensively suggests that under technocracy the fate of high art is to be something that can only be understood, but never openly revered, by a self-interested minority. High art is a sign of privilege (the elite lording it over the masses from their technocratic bastions) in the first instance, and a sign of besiegement (the elite being displaced by the masses) in the second. The only other option the text explores is for those who enjoy high culture or pure intellectualism, such as Helmholtz Watson, to be contained as exiles in places where the World State's priorities have been abandoned and people maintain civilization in less regimented ways (see BNW 209).
Mond, as a former, 'pretty good' (BNW 198) physicist who once questioned the dominant theories upon which science rests, represents the type of inquisitive mind interested in things for their own sake. In this sense he is an envoy of the realm of pure creativity, that place where things are made or explored with no subsequent goal in mind other than to relish the creative act itself. Yet rather than enjoy such things in the margins, or in exile, Mond chooses to serve the World State as one of its controllers, and therefore to safeguard the world's collective, technocratic happiness despite the fact that such public loyalty negates his private contentment. Hence when Mond affectionately recalls his time as a physicist he sighs repeatedly at the memory (BNW 199-200), his attachment to the culture of the past echoing his fondness for his scientific training and the intellectual autonomy it facilitated.
Mond's predicament focalizes the text's broader investigation of the relationship between high art, 'pure' imagination, and technocracy. Of course, Huxley's response to technocracy can, as we have seen, be construed divergently. Brave New World satirizes but is also something of a billet-doux for technocracy, a system of government to which Huxley was in many ways attracted during the text's composition. However, Brave New World seems less undecided when it addresses, implicitly or otherwise, the value of high art in the face of technological modernity. In the World State the language of Shakespeare is firmly out of place, its profound sense of difference confusing and ostracizing John the Savage, rather than helping him decode his surroundings. In this way the text invites us to debate whether Shakespeare has any relevance at the end of a modernity featuring 'the full flush of scientific utopia', and to ask, if we think he does: 'To whom does he speak?' 11 But even if Brave New World investigates the relevance of Shakespeare in a future that seemingly has no use for Renaissance-era moralities, the text nevertheless invests in Shakespeare as an allusive resource (or artistic point of comparison). Huxley thereby very clearly signals Shakespeare's appositeness as a cultural cipher with which to conceptualize the nature and potential problems of technocracy, despite the fact that the narrative queries at the diegetic level of its story the reliability of a Shakespearean moral compass. More interestingly, the very ambivalence of Brave New World on the matter of technocratic value might itself be read as a counter to technocratic utilitarianism, the lack of a snappily quotable moral message going against technocracy's striving for usefulness, and matching Shakespeare's lack of moral tubthumping in his plays (a characteristic for which they are so often revered).
Or consider the role played by classical music, which in the World State appears to have been 'whisk[ed]' (BNW 29) into oblivion by those who, like Mond, have accepted the Fordian logics that proscribe its existence. Classical music is 'bunk', nonsense, incomprehensible to a world that no longer has any use for it. Synthetic music machines and scent organs manufacture the indulgences that classical compositions once facilitated, their imitation melodies 'reassuringly' (BNW 97) calming and 'delightfully refreshing' (BNW 145) their audiences rather than evoking a problematic but superseded cultural yesteryear. Jazz provides similar fulfilments, the synthetic music played by Calvin Stopes and his Sixteen Sexophonists at the Westminster Abbey Cabaret exemplifying Huxley's aversion to what in 'Silence is Golden' (1929) he saw as jazz's 'loud vulgarity of brassy guffaw and caterwauling sentiment' (HCE2 20). Yet by means of a very precise linguistic strategy Brave New World contradicts, and implicitly rejects, such destructive 'whisking', again disclosing a tension between the diegetic and extra-diegetic levels of the text. When at the level of narrative plotting classical music is ostensibly side-lined, Huxley reintroduces classical musical terminology at the level of narrative vocabulary. As a result, he locates synthetic and olfactory 'music' in historical and lexical contexts that re-authorize the high artistic past at exactly those moments when it seems most thoroughly obscured. In the cabaret scene the gradual sounding of an erotically charged chord takes the form of 'a diminuendo sliding gradually, through quarter tones, down, down' (BNW 66), whereas later in the text a fragrant 'Herbal Capriccio' conveys its aromas with 'rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender' (BNW 145, emphases added). Shortly afterwards a music machine emits a high note far above the most extreme capacities of the human voice, thereby diminishing the achievement of even Lucrezia Aguiari, who once famously impressed Leopold Mozart with her vocal dexterity (BNW 145). History is in such moments anything but 'bunk', anything but erased by the modern machineries with which it is said to have been replaced. Indeed, these formal conflicts foreground classical music and its vocabularies even as Brave New World registers their absence 'within' the story, repossessing high art from the technocratic doctrines that elsewhere claim its desuetude.
All of which is to say that the relationship between high art and technocracy in Brave New World is fraught with complexity, and that the connections between Huxley's thoughts on culture and society and the values he explored in this text are far from straightforward.
What seems clear, however, is that in the late 1920s and early 1930s Huxley was disturbed by the influence of the machine upon humanity in the postwar period, and that he was uncertain about what sort of role the creative individual might meaningfully play in a post-Fordian epoch. As Huxley's essay 'The Outlook for American Culture' demonstrates, he accepted the labour-saving benefits of the machine yet bemoaned the fact that a more leisured age meant a more passive, increasingly standardized, more easily manipulated, and generally less cultured world. During the Depression these problems had become even more distinct. As Huxley wrote in 'The Victory of Art over Humanity' (1931), the 'tragedy of the machine' was that it had liberated the world from 'the intolerable load of mere drudgery' while simultaneously depriving 'the overwhelming majority of men and women of the possibility, the very hope, of even the most modest creative activity' (HCE3 282). Humanity had become its own rival, 'staggering under the blows received in the course of this disastrous conflict with the organized forces of its own intelligence' (HCE3 283). Brave New World adopts a conflicted position in response to this scenario. Depending on how one reads the text (and here I am simplifying things somewhat), Huxley either seems to be satirizing such a predicament as a questioner of hierarchical models of society, inviting his readers to free themselves from the standardizing effects of the machine age in the process; or to be outlining a technocratic, profoundly hierarchical, and nerve-jangling solution to that same quandary in which, within certain predetermined limits, and to return again to 'The Outlook for American Culture', the Committee on Technocracy, whose goal was to address 'the inability of businessmen to curb their quest for profit in the interest of social harmony' and to empower engineers to 'take up the responsibility of reorganizing supply and demand.' 14 The Committee on Technocracy lasted until January 1933, by which time it had claimed that the socio-economic planning of the day was backward-looking and unsatisfactorily scientific. More precisely, the Committee urged that the links between the market, labour, and social change should be understood quantitatively by charting patterns of energy consumption rather than by debating supposedly antiquated 'principles of right, equity, propriety, duty, belief and taste as stabilized in the days of the handicraft guilds of Central Europe.' 15 Scott's ambition was to look past such archaic standards, as he saw them, in order to locate what he thought was a more clear-sighted and more equitable set of attitudes towards labour and social structures. He stated that the Committee offered 'no solution' to America's economic crises, but nevertheless proposed that the way forward lay in abandoning the price-system, with its concomitant 'wish-fulfilling thought and romantic concepts of value', which would be replaced by a physicalist account of wealth as a conversion of 'available energy into use-forms and services.' 16 Put another way, energy consumptionrather than monetary exchangewas to become the basic measure of labour interactions, which would be reduced to a minimum. Such claims were inseparable from the Committee's insistence that American society was inadequately calibrated to the laboursaving potential of modern industrial machines, whose deployment, for Scott and his allies, proliferated rather than eliminated waste, increased rather than reduced unemployment, and threatened a catastrophe that would dwarf the upheavals wrought by the Wall Street Crash.
The answer was to calibrate technology more precisely in line with human needs and, so the logic implied, to place an engineering class in charge of the American nation, whose ailments would be cured by scientific judgement. 17 Many commentators agreed that the Technocrats had identified several highly important problems. Scott certainly found his admirers. Theodore Dreiser, for instance, wrote in a 1932 letter to Scott that there was 'something amazingly iron and powerful' about him, and that he gave Dreiser 'the feeling of a titan made of bronze.' 18  Understanding the movement's 'finer shades of meaning' was made even more problematic when Scott attempted to silence his critics in a radio address but instead delivered 'a rambling, confusing, and most uninspiring address'. 22 Scott's performance prompted Rautenstrauch to leave the Committee on Technocracy and was a factor in the movement's splitting into two opposed factions. The first group, the Continental Committee on Technocracy, was initially loyal to Scott but in time came to be dominated by Loeb, who published Life in a Technocracy in 1933 (having written it three years beforehand). 23 Scott formed Technocracy, Inc. in March 1933, at which point this branch of the movement started to adopt the grey-toned partisan regalia that later in the 1930s adorned its offices and many of its publications, giving it a paramilitary, quasi-fascist temperament, and opened and closed its meetings with a gesture based on the hand salute used by the American armed forces. 24 Huxley had long been interested in comparable symbols of office, as his depictions of  29 Loeb thus differed from Scott, who stated that 'useless art forms' could be supplied by machine-produced replacements (another link to Huxley's World State, in which music is created synthetically), and echoed Huxley's contemporaneous commitment to the high arts within the scope of a wider, yet short-lived, attraction to technocratic principles, a position with which he wrestled throughout his work of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and above all in Brave New World. 30 Loeb followed Scott by maintaining that capitalism should 'make way for a more efficient and more just system of distribution' (LT 30), one that would drop the profit motive, adopt a universal unit of work (the erg), force industry to utilize fully the principles of science, and eliminate the injustice of accidental and hereditary privilege. 31 The system Loeb had in mind would divide itself between a technocratic industrial infrastructure, on the one hand, and a sphere within which man's creative urges could be 'deflected to the production of non-essentials' (LT 52), on the otherthe latter being dependent on, but not coterminous with, the industrial sectors that would allow its existence. Such a framework would force all citizens to work for a minimum of sixteen hours per week (just as Scott had suggested; see LT 37 and 62), and give them a guaranteed income and satisfy their material wants and needs (LT 84), in exchange for 'ample scope' (LT 60) to pursue self-bettering activities without allowing any one person to 'acquire more goods than everyone is entitled to' (LT 64). Certain individuals within the system would, on top of their minimum working week, opt to devote themselves to improving the industrial infrastructure. Others, by contrast, would be 'marvelously released' (LT 69) to 'seek self-realization outside the producing system' (LT 64) via imaginative and artistic efforts. The goal was to 'utilize man's egoism for getting the necessary productive work done, and his vanity for continuing the experimentation required if the technique of living is to go on developing' (LT 71).
Art in such a utopia of plenty would enjoy government protection but remain free from state control (LT 127). Its function would be to allow citizens to express themselves unhindered by capitalist logics ('the outrageous Mysticism of Money'; LT 138). Loeb acknowledged that capitalism generated art, but he was far from sanguine about the long-term benefits of such cultural and architectural forms as 'metropolises, jazz, advertisements, success epics, girl shows, comic strips, sporting pages, the movies, [and] the talkies' on the grounds that he deemed capitalism 'a hothouse' that 'fosters growth' while producing fruit that 'lacks taste' (LT 133). Although Loeb contended that the capitalist era had made possible innovations, such as the cinema and radio, that could be counted among 'the greatest boons' (LT 134) ever given to humanity, he argued that capitalism itself was not 'conducive to a good life' and thus that it was incapable of enabling 'expressions' that 'satisfy' (LT 137). Population?' (1934) that 'a nation in which the number of halfwits is steadily growing is a nation whose potential efficiency is being steadily impaired' (HCE3 400), thereby echoing the more uncompromising rhetorics of productivity used by Scott  Leaving technocracy in Loeb's account means leaving the system as a whole. In Brave New World, by contrast, independence is available to those who '"have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life"' (BNW 200), as Mond puts it; is not unpleasant (though it appears so in prospect); and structurally supports the technocracy to which it is notionally opposed. The exile that Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson face represents not exile from the World State per se but signifies another form of containment within it, and which is, presumably, still within the power of the World State as a governing agency. Artistic freedom is for Loeb a product of the system. For Huxley, artistic freedom comes about despite the system. Yet in both instances technocracy facilitates a realm in which imagination (and presumably the creation and enjoyment of high art) is possible, and in this sense the reciprocal distinction 'between mechanic and liberal occupations' that Brave New World examines approximates at least in part to the bond eulogized by Life in a Technocracy.
It's worth reiterating that Loeb and Huxley wrote in very different ways, and that Brave New World could hardly be called a socio-political manifesto in the way that Life in a Technocracy more easily can be, despite Loeb's insistence that the text was meant as a rough outline of a possible future. Huxley described Brave New World in a 1931 letter to G. Wilson Knight as 'a Swiftian novel about the Future' that would delineate the 'strange and appalling effects on feeling, "instinct" and general weltanschauung of the application of psychological, physiological and mechanical knowledge to the fundamentals of human life' (AHL 353), so it would be a strange reading indeed that sought uncomplicatedly to equate the text with a technocratic account of the human condition when technocracy is one of the very phenomena that Brave New World satirizes. Brave New World is certainly more nuanced in its questioning attitude towards technocracy than such texts as Michael Arlen's Man's Mortality (1933), in which technocratic systems that seek 'to dragoon the nations of the world into a colossal scheme of tidiness' are rebuked more candidly. 36 What is intriguing here is that in Brave New World, a text routinely characterized as one of the twentieth century's most powerful invectives against technocratic thinking, we find a relationship between artisticintellectual creativity and technocracy within whose terms the former can be preserved, rather than annihilated, by the latter.
A brief comparison of Huxley's writings with those of the American Technocrats shows from a new angle how Brave New World appeared in the midst of an international debate regarding the roles played by technology and by non-utilitarian high art in sociopolitical life, and that the similarities between Huxley's and Loeb's interventions into this debatebetween their respective 'signs of the T', in effectshould prompt us more precisely to discuss Brave New World in relation to the American cultural-historical contexts with which it resonates. Despite Huxley's well-known concerns about Americanization, and notwithstanding their incorporation into Brave New World, the parallels between Huxley and Loeb suggest a more complex cultural-historical state of affairs than has hitherto been acknowledged. Given the timings, Huxley is unlikely to have based Brave New World on the activities of the American Technocrats in particular (though we know he corresponded with Loeb in the early 1920s), but it seems that he wrote the text partially to find some way to reconcile his interest in technocracy with his commitment to, and desire to preserve, the high arts from the more reductively quantitative ideologies of the period. 37