clockwork orange

English

Etymology

From the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess, in which the main character is programmed to be incapable of antisocial behavior.

Noun

clockwork orange (plural clockwork oranges)

1. A person or organism with a mechanistic morality or lack of free will.
   • 1996, Mark Dery, Escape Velocity:

     Contrarily, he may be saying, “Look what your computerized, commodified society has made of me—a clockwork orange, for all appearances organic but mechanical."

   • 1998, Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction:

     The telos of the pathologization of crime is the perfected robot or “clockwork orange” of present-day behaviorism and sociobiology, descendants of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century associationists like Jeremy Bentham.

   • 1999, Diederik Aerts, Jan Broekaert, Ernest Mathijs, Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection: The White Book of "Einstein Meets Magritte:

     This one took reality to be a large machine, a ‘clockwork orange', an automaton.

   • 2004, Enoch Brater, Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change:

     Under the archbishop's ceiling, the self is not a clockwork orange programmed by the state but something more unnerving: Peer Gynt's onion, layers of performance without a core.

Related terms

• queer as a clockwork orange