Enlightenment Ideology Awry in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Abstract
Though regarded as a philosophical movement of the 17th and
18th centuries, in the words of Adorno and Horkheimer, the idea of
Enlightenment has represented throughout the history of mankind
man’s effort to control nature. In today’s world, the control and
manipulation of nature has reached the point of self-annihilation
with the use of advanced mass deception apparatuses and creation of
simulacra replacing and surpassing reality. Philip Dick’s Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep is a science-fiction novel depicting a future
post-apocalyptic society in which the humanity’s effort to control
nature through science, technology, and mass deception ends with an
almost total extinction of animal life, fatal damage of our planet, and
great difficulty to distinguish between the real and the simulacrum.
This article proposes that, with its over-kipplized setting, physically
and psychologically defective citizens, powerful mass deception
apparatuses and with its simulacra surpassing their real counterparts,
the post-human world of the novel represents the malfunctioning
of Enlightenment ideals and the self-annihilating end that the
Enlightenment ideology brings humanity to. The article studies these
issues within the theoretical framework of Horkheimer and Adorno’s
idea of Enlightenment and Jean Baudrillard’s idea of the hyperreal,
simulation and simulacra.
Keywords
References
- Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster, Stanford UP, 2001, pp. 169-187. (Google Scholar)
- Brittain, Christopher C. “Horkheimer, Religion, and the Normative Grounds of Critical Theology.” Analyze & Kritik, 2015, pp. 259- 280, https://doi.org/10.1515/auk-2015-1-216. Accessed 12 Mar. 2021.
- Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Phoenix, 2012 (first published in 1968).
- Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. Picador, 2002. (Google Scholar)
- Galvan, Jill. “Entering the Posthuman Collective in Philip K. Dick’s ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’.” Science-fiction Studies, vol. 24, no. 3, 1997, pp. 413–429. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/4240644. Accessed 26 Mar. 2021.
- Horkheimer, Mark and Adorno, Theodore W. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Edited by G. Schmid Noerr and translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford UP, 2002.
- Introna, Lucas, D. ‘On Cyberspace and Being: Identity, Self, and Hyperreality.” Philosophy in the Contemporary World, vol. 4, 1997, pp. 1-10. Accessed 5 Mar. 2021.
- Suvin, Darko. “On the Poetics of Science-fiction.” College English (published by NCTE), vol. 34, no: 3, 1972, pp. 372-382. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/375141. Accessed 12 Mar. 2021.
- Suvin, Darko. Positions and Presuppositions in Science-fiction. Macmillan Press, 1988. (Google Scholar).
- Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment.” What is Enlightenment? ed. and trans. J. Schmidt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 58-64. (Google Scholar)