Alienation as Death: Technology, Capital, and the Degradation of Everyday Life in Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine

Abstract

Elmer Rice's 1923 play The Adding Machine is an exploration of the human effects of the replacement of workers by machines and a commentary on capitalist rationalization. It has continuing relevance to the disciplining and displacement of workers by information technology and robotics in the contemporary workplace. But Rice also develops a more far-reaching critique of the dehumanizing features of everyday life under capitalism. His portrayal resonates with Marx's understanding of alienation as the domination of the living by the dead. The Adding Machine suggests that everyday life under capitalism is the expression of this domination and the play explores the possibility of transcending such domination and self-alienation.

Keywords:

• Alienation
• death
• automation
• utopia
• Elmer Rice

Notes

‘Shrdlu’ is nonsense, somewhat similar to ‘QWERTY’. ETAOIN SHRDLU were the first two vertical columns on the right side of a Linotype keyboard (La Jolla Playhouse, 2007).

The usually omitted Scene V portrays Zero, following the guilty verdict behind bars in a prison-cum-zoo, with parties of sightseers gawking at him. Mrs Zero visits him in his cage and there ensues a brief moment of rapprochement between the couple in which Zero expresses some tenderness for her and Mrs Zero laments ‘If we only had another chance’. This moment of tenderness quickly passes and the two begin arguing before Mrs Zero storms off in a rage.