Subject in the age of technological domination: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Abstract

Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is a science fiction novel, but in its picture of the world, the protagonist's encounter with the teenage girl Clarisse has the status of a fantastic event, which triggers his transformation: one of the pillars of the system becomes an outlaw and an adversary. This fact alone warns that the depicted world, technologically far more perfect than the existing one, is completely devoid of humanistic ideals. This is also revealed by the burning of books, i.e. the punishment of their owners. By reflecting on the threatening character of books, the relationship between high technology and high culture, and above all the fact that the desire to read is extinguished in the described environment, we will create a framework for exploring the problem of the constitution of human subjects in a posthumanist society. In Bradbury's novel, the subject is determined by participation in one of the most strongly confronted processes: forgetting and technology stand in opposition to memory and high culture.

Keywords

• media
• technology
• control
• posthumanism
• critical thinking