Research Information System
SELCUK UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF FACULTY OF LETTERS, no.51, pp.65-84, 2024 (ESCI)
This article examines the state of extreme mechanization in modern
industrial societies, which leads to a strict separation of the various
spheres of life and ultimately to the exclusion of the human element.
The philosophers of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse and
Jürgen Habermas in particular, have rigorously analyzed the
inherently ideological function of technology in late capitalist
societies. In Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut’s critical depiction of the
extremely technologized and automated social world in a near future
America slightly predates and even heralds the above-mentioned
critical theorists’ analyses of the ideological nature of technology
under corporate capitalism. This study scrutinizes how the
technocratic state in Vonnegut’s novel utilizes technology to pacify
and disempower the masses, challenging the notion that technology
is merely a value-free accumulation of know-how. The devalued
human subject and dehumanized society depicted in Vonnegut's
anti-utopian narrative are discussed with reference to Marcuse’s
notion of 'one-dimensional society' and Habermas’s theory of
'communicative action' to provide the critical framework for the
analysis of the impoverishing and colonizing effects of technological
rationality on the lifeworld.