A Haylesian Study of Cybernetics and Self in Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021)

Abstract

This study aims to analyze Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) through Hayles’s posthuman framework to rethink subjectivity, agency, and human–machine relationality. Situated within contemporary debates on artificial intelligence, posthumanism, and ecological interdependence, the novel challenges anthropocentric assumptions by foregrounding embodied, relational, and environmentally embedded forms of selfhood. The research adopts a qualitative, interpretive methodology grounded in Hayles’s cybernetic theory and close textual analysis, focusing on Klara’s perceptual structure, narrative reflexivity, and dependence on the Sun. The findings demonstrate that Ishiguro destabilizes autonomous human-centered identity by representing subjectivity as distributed across technological, ecological, and social systems. Klara emerges as a posthuman subject whose cognition, ethical awareness, and agency are co-constituted through material embodiment and relational networks, thereby extending posthuman discourse beyond imitation-based models of artificial intelligence and emphasizing the inseparability of consciousness, environment, and technology. The study recommends integrating posthuman ethics into AI design, foregrounding ecological embeddedness in technological development, and encouraging educational frameworks that critically examine human–machine interdependence to address contemporary anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence and subjectivity.