Barthes and Foucalt

I really regret not putting Hayek in my essay, because I think Hayek and Barney (both of whom did not make it into my essay) would have been perfect references for a review of Player Piano.

In Player Piano, Vonnegut paints a world in which the forces of production have been consolidated to very large private firms, and the decisions of production have been consolidated to the government who, with the aid of computing machines, decides exactly how much to produce of what, and at what price. Hayek would have found this a nightmare. Although the Rule of Law is maintained in Ilium, the citizens know exactly how the government will react, the rules have becomes so many and plentiful that the citizens are left with little. The most limiting rule is very simple: if a machine does your labor better than you do yourself, you will no longer exist as an economic producer. This severely limits the freedom of the people.  However, no random coercive force is used: People are able to predict the actions of the state. However, the citizens of Ilium are clearly being manipulated. They “shape and guide our daily lives,” especially in our “position as producers” (94). Since the big corporations and government are working conjointly to make all producing decisions in the economy, they have left the citizens of Ilium out of any task in the economy other than consumption. And since production is controlled, so is consumption. It greatly worried Hayek that the planners control what is consumed because it prevent us from exercising rationality and forces us to conform to the standards of a “social welfare” (96) Similarly, Ilium the citizens of Ilium have lost their ability to do and their ability to decide all in the name of the greater good. They have gained a higher standard of living and lost the reason to live.

Foucalt was also an interesting character who focused on how institutions control and discipline citizens. He focuses on the Panopticon which removes the outliers of society, those who do not fit in and are labeled a danger, into a situation where they have no control. I thought this concept interestingly applicable to Ilium. although [the Panopticon] does arranges power, it does not do so for power itself nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces - to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of morality; to increase and multiply" (208). In Ilium, the government has been more or less replaced by a select few individuals and their use of machines. These machines to not operate under a desire for power, they always and consistently make their decision for the good of society. The framework under which they have been implemented is one of a perfect society wide Panopticon, The visibility of all men is apparent in the use of card. Every member of the society has a card which reflects every action he has ever committed that is recordable: his police record, IQ, flu shots, resume... Every member of the society has become visible to all other members of the Penpticon, and are held to the standard of the machine. The member of this society are perfectly controlled. They barley realize the injustice that has been done to them, certainly not on a socity wide scale. Those who disagree with the system are easily identified, singled out, and removed. As a matter of fact, they are so easily identified, the machines can usually predict who the outcasts will be before they identify themselves. "it was no longer the offense, the attack on the common interest, it was the departure from the norm, the anomaly" (298). Focault indicated a system very similar to the society of Ilium. We, as citizens, agreed to a contract of punishment in order to protect ourselves, and this contract has been extended and exploited.