Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [830]

In this place, he knew instinctively, the lights would never be turned out. It was the place with no darkness: he saw now why O’Brien had seemed to recognise the allusion. In the Ministry of Love there were no windows. His cell might be at the heart of the building or against its outer wall; it might be ten floors below ground, or thirty above it. He moved himself mentally from place to place, and tried to determine by the feeling of his body whether he was perched high in the air or buried deep underground. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 830

Note

‘The place with no darkness’ — the panoptic perpetual light that erases all external markers of time or position, dismantling the subject’s sense of spatial and temporal orientation. The telescreen, the unvarying light, and the windowless walls together strip away every external referent, leaving only bodily sensation as a broken compass. The architectural logic of the panopticon pushed to its extreme: constant, total visibility as a form of torture in itself.