Enlightenment Ideology Awry in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Year 2021, Issue: 55, 145 - 162, 01.05.2021

Fırat Karadaş

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

Enlightenment, dystopia, simulation, simulacra, android

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