The Instrumental Rationality Crisis and its Representation in Stanley Kubrick's Cinema

This article tries to analyze the concept of instrumental rationality in Stanley Kubrick’s cinema. In order to perform the analysis, the idea has been got from German sociologist, Max Weber’s theories. In the first step, the meaning of the instrumental rationality has explained with the help of Weber’s theories. He believed that instrumental rationality plays a significant role in the formation of modern societies. Max Weber, one of the greatest sociologists, gave a detailed explanation for the causes of emergence and propagation of instrumental rationality. By introducing the concept of iron cage, he developed different aspects of instrumental or formal rationality so that this concept nowadays is a significant metaphor for understanding the modern world, even beyond the social sciences. The most important achievement of Weber in differentiating between rationality’s types is the emphasis on formal rationality. Formal rationality’s guideline, gains its legitimacy from referring to rules, laws and orders which have common functionality. He believed formal rationality is developed and matured in modern societies only because of using rationally functioning instruments in their most effective manner in modern societies. Weber believed that bureaucracy, the substantial part of modern management, is an example of instrumental rationality. He believed that the disenchantment and the total dominance of formal rationality in social life, and the decline of the other types of rationality and social interactions, is an irreversible path which permanently increases its own complexity from inside and places limitations on variety of options for the subject. He uses the iron cage metaphor to explain the captivity into the instrumental rationality frame works. He believed that in bureaucratic systems, mankind is inevitably imprisoned in the iron cage and no escape can be imagined. The development of the iron cage technically makes mankind more confined to boundaries. In contemporary art, along with the emergence of social crisis and tension, the instrumental rationality has been widely criticized. In the contemporary intellectual cinema, we can see the representation of critique of instrumental rationality. But only a few filmmakers have chosen the representation of instrumental rationality in modern world as their main focus and concern, one of these filmmakers is Stanley Kubrick. We can consider Max Weber’s metaphor of iron cage as the central and fundamental element of meaning in Stanley Kubrick’s cinema. By looking into Kubrick’s works, we can say that the problem which contemporary intellectuals call it instrumental or technological rationality or iron cage, is the pivotal issue in his mind and works. His films show an obvious difference between his approach and Weber’s toward the instrumental rationality crisis, Weber thought instrumental rationality is an inevitable and indispensable fate, but Kubrick strongly believes the destructive aspects of unconscious mind and claims that organizing and regulating human consciousness is impossible. Because of his different views on the subject, Kubrick has achieved different results.