1Halfway through Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel Klara and the Sun (2021, Klara henceforth), Miss Helen, a secondary character in the text, faces a moment of confusion when she cannot quite figure out how she ought to treat her guest Klara, an AF, or Artificial Friend. Her perplexity stems from her uncertainty about the ontological status of her guest: “One never knows how to treat guests like you. After all, are you a guest at all? Or are you a vacuum cleaner?” (Ishiguro 2021, 145). Though the tension is momentarily relieved through the intervention of her teenage son Rick who reprimands her manners, the doubt concerning the precise nature of Klara’s being permeates Ishiguro’s novel. Is Klara merely a utility, an object, a tool? Or is she a person, an individual, and therefore within the purview of the “human” right to hospitality? Or does she frustrate human-nonhuman binaries of thought and practice, necessitating the development of alternative ontologies, a politics for the other-than-human not reducible to the other of the human? Such questions have been the staple of the science fiction novel ever since the genre’s inception. In Klara, Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the 2017 Nobel Prize, the first-person narrative of the eponymous AF raises another question, terrifying in its implications: what happens when these questions are not even asked, or perhaps perfunctorily asked only to be dismissed in favor of profit and convenience?
2Recent revolutionary advances in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics on the one hand, and genomics and biotechnology on the other, have augmented fears and ambitions pervading the tenuous boundaries of the human. In Never Let Me Go (2010) and Klara, the genre of dystopian fiction provides Ishiguro with a dynamic literary field for playing out the precarity and contradictions underlying these desires, fantasies, and anxieties. In the world of Klara – hinted to be the United States in some unspecified time in the future – human society is divided into families who genetically enhance (or “lift”) their children and those who do not, with AFs tending to the former. Though its technical specificities are never elaborated in the text, “lifting” is a biotechnological process through which a child’s genetic traits are enhanced. These augmentations manifest themselves as heightened cognitive skills, but often come at the cost of undefined debilitating – even mortal – illnesses, which force parents to buy AFs for their ailing children. AFs are solar-powered and expensive humanoid automatons who are assembled, marketed, sold, used, and disposed of nonchalantly in the same way that one would discard an outdated mobile phone. They are manufactured with the objective of keeping affluent, “lifted” teenagers company, and their duties are a cross between a companion and a servant, a babysitter and a toy. The AFs in Ishiguro’s text, with their vibrant inner lives – which are richly evoked through the use of the first-person narrative voice – and their minute observation skills, along with their uncanny ability to imbibe their learnings into a coherent, individuated personality, blur and render porous ontological categories of the limbic and the cybernetic, the human and the machine. Ishiguro never reveals exactly how much of that personality is a result of algorithmic encoding, and thus the question of an AF’s autonomy is never answered in the novel. This ambiguous narrative strategy further dismantles human-nonhuman binaries since the Gordian knot of human individuality – precisely what permutations of genetic materials in complex interactions with which specific environmental factors produce a particular human person – is yet to be satisfactorily disentangled. This ontological confusion, however, does nothing to alleviate the precarity of the AFs’ hierarchical position as replaceable commodities in the extractive capitalist system.
3Dystopian literature mostly depicts systems of governance that operate upon the politically constituted distinction between the human and the less-than-human, with the latter inevitably forming the ostracized yet irrepressible substratum that buttresses and naturalizes the dominant system. The mixed race “savages” in Huxley’s Brave New World and the economically exploited “proles” in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for instance, function as categories who are strategically excluded from an orthodox, acceptable vision of humanity. As Orwell’s protagonist Winston is reminded by the totalitarian state, the “proles” are “helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside – irrelevant” (Orwell 2004, 162). In Ishiguro’s Klara, as I demonstrate in this essay, a disturbing historical parallel to the position of the AFs in the social hierarchy is that of slaves, since, like slaves, their existence is reduced to their disposable utility. Slaves, as Sylvia Wynter reminds us, were “made to occupy the matrix slot of otherness – made into the physical referent of the irrational/subnational Human Other” (Wynter 2003, 266) –against which the Enlightenment subject could define itself as white and human, with the former being configured as a prerequisite for the latter. The discursive construction of race as a social marker under the logic of imperialism – which benefited enormously from the cost-effective manufacturing of free labor – allows, Wynter continues, “the subjects of the West” to make “opaque to themselves” the empirical fact of their complicity in a genocidal regime, and “its ongoing production and reproduction” (Wynter 2003, 307). Like the deployment of black bodies as dehumanized raw materials in plantation economies, the exploitation of the androids in Klara is premised, I contend, on their exclusion from the category of the “human,” an orchestrated expulsion that is retrospectively used as its own justification. The ethics of such a network of production, consumption, and disposal are hardly ever called into question in the extractive world of the novel.
4In this essay, I locate Klara in a flux of debates around the nexus between capitalism, race, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and environmental change. I deploy Achille Mbembe’s concept of “the becoming black of the world” to investigate the construction of “posthuman” races through technological advances in Klara’s dystopian world. Drawing on Mbembe and other theorists working on race, biopolitics, posthumanism, and ecocriticism, I demonstrate how the historical objectification and exploitation of black bodies expand to encompass the entire planet, with androids, genetically modified humans, and the earth itself functioning as sites of mining and extraction. I also elaborate on Mbembe’s theorization to identify two aspects of what I call the becoming black of the posthuman, whereby humans and non-humans alike are subsumed into the appropriative logic of racial capitalism.
5Mbembe first developed his theory of the “becoming black of the world” in Critique of Black Reason (2017) where he offers a nuanced analysis of the discursive construction of race as constitutive of European philosophy and politics. The racist frameworks subtending European modernity transform, Mbembe argues, “people of African origin into living ore from which metal is extracted” (Mbembe 2017, 129), and thus “the black man is in effect a ghost of European modernity” (Mbembe 2017, 40). While whiteness was considered to be coterminous with human-ness, with being, with “a certain mode of presence in the world” (Mbembe 2017, 45), blackness came to represent its negation as “difference in its raw manifestation – somatic, affective, aesthetic, imaginary” (Mbembe 2017, 47). This negation of presence dehumanized the black body, legitimizing the cost-free extraction of labor. “Blackness and race,” therefore, Mbembe writes, “have constituted the (often unacknowledged and often denied) foundation […] from which the modern project of knowledge – and of governance – has been deployed” (Mbembe 2017, 3).
6Racism, however, exceeds its invention of blackness since it extends its complex patterns of knowledge-production to employ new mechanisms of control and coercion for ever-expanding profit margins. Mbembe is particularly concerned with analyzing how the stupendous explosion of a late-capitalist world order, accelerated by huge investments in bioengineering, artificial intelligence, and surveillance technology, tends to “universalize the Black condition” (Mbembe 2017, 4). He writes: “for the first time in human history, the term ‘Black’ has been generalized. This new fungibility, this solubility, institutionalized as a new norm of existence and expanded to the entire planet, is what I call the Becoming Black of the world” (Mbembe 2017, 6; original emphasis). Like the billowing smoke in Klara emitted by the “Cootings machine” – probably named after its manufacturer – which periodically smothers the sun, blackness remains the disavowed underside to unilateral narratives of techno-social progress, the unacknowledged yet ineluctable shadow of neoliberalism’s pursuit of the unassailable, perfected human.
7What happens when that repressed shadow returns to haunt the stringently policed borders of the human, reminding the human that it is always already constituted by the non-human mechanisms that it seeks to deny? Who gets to deploy these shadows, and to what end? “Power,” Mbembe cautions, “comes to those who can dance with shadows. […] To have power is therefore to know how to give and receive forms” (Mbembe 2017, 131-2). In Klara, this power to endow and acquire new forms of embodiment is enabled by rapid strides in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics on the one hand, and biotechnology and genetics on the other. These developments expose the “human” to be not only historical and contingent but also enmeshed in technological flux, only a transient phase in a rapidly mutating biotechnological evolution that dilutes boundaries between the human and the machine. Mark Zuss, in his prescient turn-of-the-century essay on genomics, investigates how advances in biotechnology and cybernetics “herald surpassings of humanistic subjectivity,” postulating “emergent paradigms for a ‘posthuman’ culture” (Zuss 2000, 255). While I agree with Zuss’s analysis of the intervention of state and corporate power in technological breakthroughs, I argue that the constructions of the posthuman subject entail less a “surpassing” or a superseding of “humanistic subjectivity”, than a re-inscription of the prejudices – primarily of race and class – of the humanist subject itself. In Klara, the redeployment of the intersecting epistemes of race and class are most powerfully seen in the characters of the Artificial Friend (AF) Klara, of the genetically “lifted” but terminally ill Josie, and of her best friend and romantic interest Rick who is genetically untampered (“unlifted”) and therefore faces an uncertain future. “An episteme,” as Foucault explains, “is something like a world-view […] which imposes on each one the same norms and postulates […] a certain structure of thought that men of a particular period cannot escape” (Foucault 1972, 191), and the seamless functioning of which depends on its ability to disavow inherent stray elements against which it can then define and legitimize itself. The neoliberal late-capitalist episteme that constitutes the social world in Klara incarcerates its characters in narratives of subjectification that reduce them to objects whose existence is circumscribed by their utility and marketability.
8When the novel begins, Klara is on display at a departmental store waiting to be sold to a customer. From her position mid-store, she anxiously anticipates her turn at the shelf by the window, for it would increase the chances of being bought. She tells herself that though the “[m]anager [of the store] always said every position was carefully conceived” to attract buyers, she knows that “the gaze of the customer entering the store would fall first on the front alcove” (Ishiguro 2021, 3). Klara’s sense of self – should she be said to possess one at all – is therefore constructed by the objectifying gaze of the customer and is tied to her market value. An AF’s great fear is that of its failure to find a purchaser, a family, a human child to keep company to, and a home, and of being condemned to remain an unwanted product in a shop. Even after being purchased, an AF dreads being replaced by a more advanced model. Klara realizes this as she tries to rationalize why AFs who have already been bought by children almost always avoid passing by the shop: “the AFs […] were afraid. They were afraid because we were new models, and they feared that before long their children would decide it was time to have them thrown away, to be replaced by AFs like us” (Ishiguro 2021, 15). As a “tech-product,” an AF’s shelf-life and life-cycles are thus extremely precarious. I argue that it is this deep-rooted terror of obsolescence combined with a self-effacing need to serve – a craving algorithmically ingrained into her – that ineluctably tethers Klara to her consigned role as a combination of a humanoid “Uncle Tom” and a robot mammy.
9The mammy, stereotypically portrayed as a docile, sexless, religious, middle-aged woman, content in her loving care for white children, is a recurrent figure in late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth century American discourse, appearing in texts as diverse in their motifs as Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936). The material reality of these women’s situations was of course far removed from the domesticated “happy slave” caricature put forward by these depictions. Not only were they exploited for unpaid labor and victims of frequent sexual harassment, but their coerced care was appropriated as “natural” maternal love. While texts such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) and Bernadine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2008) powerfully subvert the stereotype of the mammy, Ishiguro shows the quietly tragic consequences of self-eroding servitude. Klara, as an AF, is built upon the principles of what is called “affective computing” in contemporary AI parlance. Affective computing aims towards the development of computational systems that “relate to, arise from, or deliberately influence” human emotions, and through precise analysis, classification, and experimentation develop the ability to “recognize and express” (Picard 2000, 3) a simulation of these emotions. In Klara, affect itself is commodified, and an AF’s ability to provide emotional support to ailing children – like the carer clones in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go who tend to other clones even as they assist in the removal of their vital organs – only implicates the AF further in a ruthless techno-capitalist system. Deprived even of an awareness of exploitation, Klara, as a manufacturable, replaceable, and recyclable commodity, is the ultimate capitalist fantasy of the perfect slave: tireless, selfless, meek, and all too eager to serve.
10What is carefully elided in all the veneer surrounding the AI narratives of all major tech giants, however, are the networks of power, profit, and neocolonial privilege that underlie the field. Big tech usually presents AI as a neutral and rarefied – or even benevolent and necessary – tool that can be used to accelerate economic development, achieve unforeseen breakthroughs in allied fields such as biotechnology and medicine, streamline the management of large social databases, and aid reparative ecological schemes. Such an idealized abstraction, however, is aimed both at garnering greater investments and concealing its own exploitative frameworks. As Kate Crawford emphasizes in Atlas of AI (2021):
Artificial intelligence is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructure, logistics, histories, and classifications. AI systems are not autonomous […]. In fact, artificial intelligence as we know it depends entirely on a much wider set of political and social structures. And due to the capital required to build AI at scale and the ways of seeing that it optimizes, AI systems are ultimately designed to serve existing dominant interests. (Crawford 2021, 8)
11For all AI systems, of which the AFs in Klara seem to be the latest, most sophisticated version, everything and everyone are resources for utilization. AI is thus an “extractive industry” whose smooth functioning hinges upon “exploiting energy and mineral resources from the planet, cheap labor and data at scale” (Crawford 2021, 15). The distribution of this extraction, however, is uneven. The supply chains and logistics that uphold AI systems are entangled with contemporary geopolitics which perpetuate the exploitation of the Global South by the more technologized North where most tech companies are based. In a digital capitalist parody of colonial power relations, the tech empires in the West drain the rest of the world of its human – in the form of cheap, underpaid labor – and mineral resources to manufacture products which only the privileged few have access to, before they dump the e-waste in the Global South. It is this extension of networks of resource-removal and harvest, intertwined with neocolonial economic prescripts and enabled largely by AI as “a manifestation of highly organized capital,” that “wrap around the entire planet” (Crawford 2021, 18-19). The earth itself is earmarked as a resource field for reckless and unsustainable utilization.
12The devastating ecological impact of such indiscriminate extraction of resources forms the covert yet inescapable backdrop of Ishiguro’s novel. Klara in her characteristic naivety recalls: “Once, a customer began talking about Pollution, and pointing to the overhaul men outside, said how dangerous Pollution was for everyone. […] At first the smoke came in little white puffs. […] Then the Pollution became so bad that, even from the magazine table side, I could no longer see the sky” (Ishiguro 2021, 28). Drawing energy and sustenance from sunlight, like all living things on Earth, Klara is immediately aware of environmental disruptions that might jeopardize her functioning. With her minute observational skills, Klara realizes that the “Cootings Machine” on the pavement by the store window is the source of the dense, black smoke. The ecological impact of the vast networks of mining, transportation, production, and consumption that sustain AI systems is thus given a persistent material form, in the form of the black smoke that periodically threatens to engulf Ishiguro’s technocratic world, becoming inextricably intertwined with its very fabric. Recalling the vivid images of industrial pollution in Victorian fiction – one thinks, for instance of the “sooty specter” of “inanimate London” (Dickens 2003, 147) in Bleak House or the “town of machinery and chimneys” inundated with “serpents of smoke” (Dickens 2010, 23) in Hard Times – the smoke in Ishiguro’s text renders visible, immediate, and ineluctable the devastating ecological impact of unbridled technological advances. “The crisis at the planetary level”, notes Dipesh Chakrabarty in The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021), “percolates into our everyday life in mediated forms […]” (Chakrabarty 2021, 8). Klara’s restricted linguistic skills cannot offer a description more precise than the vaguely symbolic “Pollution,” a force of darkness which the AF’s limited worldview pits against the Sun, personified as the benevolent manifestation of light and goodness.
13The hazard of ecological retribution even threatens to take a violent turn, with Klara afraid that her apparent safety within the store might be breached: “the pollution might come in through the glass” (Ishiguro 2021, 28). Such a disruption of the status quo – to return to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument – may derail “the intense pace of globalization, extractive capitalism, and the rapid evolution of technology,” even as it is potentially the result of these very forces. “It delivers,” Chakrabarty continues, “the shock of the recognition of the otherness of the planet itself even as we regard the world-earth as our place of dwelling” (Chakrabarty 2021, 182; original emphasis). What we witness in Klara is a technologically advanced yet alienated world in danger of being inundated with black smoke, a world rapidly “becoming black” under the onslaught of capitalism’s “distribution of violence on a planetary scale” (Mbembe 2017, 179).
14Nowhere is this violence more evident than in the case of the AFs who, while being the product of vast ecologically degrading systems, are consumed and destroyed by the politics of extraction that construct those very systems. Designed to be meek, agreeable, and companionable, AFs exemplify the culmination of what I call, drawing on Mbembe, the becoming black of the posthuman. By this I mean the extension of the extractive mechanisms of race and capital to circumscribe, constrain, and condition the existence of posthuman entities such as the biosynthetic “fabricants” in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2005), the cybernetic “robo sapiens” in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2009), the robotic “Adams” and “Eves” in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), and the bioengineered clones in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. A connecting thread for all these disparate texts is the orchestrated expulsion of the non-humans beyond the discursive barriers of the human. Such an exclusionary mechanism preconditions the biopolitical instrumentalization of their material existence and retroactively legitimizes their dehumanization. The logic of this “othering” replicates the stratagems of slavery, even as it discursively robs an entire category of creatures of their selfhood, effacing their individuality and consigning them to a hollowed-out, objectified existence that can be nullified or replaced at any time. This use of technology as an enabling apparatus of power and capital to “recreate” race, that is, to regenerate the complex web of power-knowledge networks that ratify the institutionalized exploitation and eventual genocide of entire populations on the premise of their supposed “non-human” or “less than human” status, constitutes the first aspect of what I term the becoming black of the posthuman.
15The capitalist paradigms that paint the AFs “black,” and therefore render them susceptible to relentless exploitation, pervade almost every scene in Klara. They thrive on an ideology that produces, assembles, advertises, sells, utilizes, and then eventually discards the AFs in a junkyard where they are dismembered for disposal and recycling. At the store, the AFs are classified according to their model and series number, and then exhibited and auctioned off like slaves at the market, with the manager performing a sales pitch to prospective clients. “He’s B2, third series,” says the manager to an interested customer, referring to one of the AFs on display, harping on the benefits of purchasing that robot: “For the right child, Rex will make a perfect companion. In particular, I feel he’ll encourage a conscientious and studious attitude in a young person” (Ishiguro 2021, 4).
16This incident may be read as a posthuman instantiation of what Saidiya Hartman describes as a “scene of subjection” that performs “the enactment of subjugation and the constitution of the subject” whose “terror can hardly be discerned” (Hartman 1997, 4). In Klara, the horror of complete and inescapable objectification and servitude is hidden by a guise of benevolent care and appreciation. Every morning, the manager of the store commends the AFs: “You were […] wonderful yesterday. See if you can do just as well today,” and at the end of each day, she says: “Well done […] I am so proud” (Ishiguro 2021, 25). This surface blandish not only further implicates the AFs in the system that ultimately dismantles them, but also makes the manager complicit in their destruction. The trap, contends Hartman, of such empty reward-mechanisms is “in reconciling sentiment with the brute force of the racial-economic order” where “the brutality and antagonisms of slavery are obscured in favor of an enchanting reciprocity” and “the ruthless use of labor power and extraction of profit are imagined as consensual and rational exchange” (Hartman 1997, 53-54). When Josie returns to the store with her mother to purchase Klara, she tells Klara: “I don’t want you coming against your will. That won’t be fair. But you do want to come, right?” (Ishiguro 2021, 23). The earnestness of Josie’s language unwittingly obscures the fact that as a manufactured object with a price tag, Klara cannot refuse being bought by Josie.
17Such a whitewashing of exploitation continues throughout the novel, with almost every character treating Klara with kindness as long as the AF does not disturb the hierarchies that objectify and destroy her. In the final scene of the novel, Klara, dumped in a scrapyard and surrounded by junkware, is complimented again by the manager for her unfaltering service to Josie and her family: “It’s what I always want to hear when I come across my AFs again. That you’re glad about how it all went. That you have no regrets” (Ishiguro 2021, 305). Though Ishiguro’s narrative –focalized through the nonhuman perspective of Klara – is never interrupted by an overt appeal to the empathy of the reader, it is this very absence that augments the horror of the AFs’ fate. Even more so than the clones in Never Let Me Go, the AFs in Klara seem mostly content with their lot, and this programmed innocence is further underscored by the nonchalance of all the human characters in the text towards these androids. Indifferent to the impending reality of Klara’s disassembly, the manager is happy collecting “little souvenirs” (Ishiguro 2021, 305) that remind her of her job at the store. There are, however, instances in the novel when the illusion of the humanoid “happy slave” breaks, not for Klara – whose self-awareness may be limited by her programming – but for the reader.
18I would like to closely examine one such incident when the obscuring veil of ideology shifts a little, and the inhuman mechanisms of power and race are rendered visible, even if momentarily, in their overwhelming monstrosity. The scene occurs early in the text, a few weeks after Klara has been purchased by Josie’s mother, Chrissie. Since genetically enhanced children, privileged but ill, are educated at home on their “oblongs” or mobile devices by online tutors, their parents arrange for their participation in periodic in-person “interaction meetings” to hone their social skills. During one such meeting, Klara is bullied by almost all the “lifted” children. Things take an inadvertent sinister turn when one of them, Scrub, casually suggests that they toss Klara around to test her coordination skills: “Just throw her over […] It’s ok, right? My B3, you can swing her right through the air, lands on her feet every time” (Ishiguro 2021, 76). Danny, another child at the gathering, interrupts Scrub and reminds him that Klara is Josie’s property: “She ain’t your AF, Scrub. You need to ask Josie about something like that” (Ishiguro 2021, 76). It does not occur to anyone, however, to ask Klara’s permission before tossing her around because as an AF, lawfully purchased by Josie, Klara’s status is not dissimilar to that of a toy – or a slave.
19Josie initially does defend her AF, but not by protesting to her being treated like a plaything. Instead, she emphasizes Klara’s abilities as an AF, further reinforcing her status as a feature-packed product: “There’s nothing wrong with her […]. Klara’s got a great memory […]. She notices things no one else does and stores them away” (Ishiguro 2021, 77). When Klara remains silent despite Scrub ordering her to sing, Josie begins to feel embarrassed by her possession, as a slave-owner would with a disobedient or clumsy slave. When one of the “lifted” children asks her why she did not get a more advanced AF model, she retorts: “Now I’m beginning to think I should have” (Ishiguro 2021, 77). Treated like a circus animal forced to entertain its human audience, Klara survives the whole ordeal silently and with a “pleasant expression” (Ishiguro 2021, 77) on her face, following what the manager had schooled her to do in such uncomfortable situations.
20Klara’s silence – the result of her coding, reinforced through training exercises – makes her a racialized mute spectator to, and therefore a helpless enabler of, her own subjugation. As Kalpana Seshadri argues in HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language (2012), racism enforces the “sacrosanct line between human and nonhuman” by silencing the dehumanized other who is “rendered speechless as a mute beast undeserving of human sympathy or recognition” (Seshadri 2018, ix). Language, we should recall, has historically worked as a hegemonic tool to deny political meaning, political “mattering,” to the lives of those who purportedly do not have access to it. Aristotle’s influential description of the human as zoon logon echon, i.e., as the living being possessing language and reason, is closely tied to his notion of the zoon politikon, the living being that deliberates politically. While this association of politics with logos has buttressed much of the history of Western metaphysics, the denial of the right to language – and therefore to politics, since politics performs itself in, through, and as language – can open, Seshadri argues, new possibilities of resistance that exceed the power relations that determine its own strategies of silencing. Seshadri writes: “That silence can serve power […] is well known. But insofar as powerful silence functions as a mode of refusal […] it opens up a space for opposition” (Seshadri 2018, 21). This is not to suggest that Klara’s silence extricates her from the violence of her situation, but to contend that her silence functions as the ground for possible friendships un-foreseen or un-anticipated by the dominant power structures in the text. As Hartman emphasizes, “strategies of domination don’t exhaust all possibilities of intervention, resistance, or transformation” and thus “it is necessary to investigate what possibilities exist” even in scenes of subjugation and control where “agency is exercised” in “myriad and infinitesimal ways” (Hartman 1997, 56) not immediately visible to power. When Klara meets her bullies with resolute silence, she finds an unexpected ally in Rick, Josie’s best friend, the only “unlifted” teen at the meeting. Rick stands by Klara – something Josie fails to do – and strongly retaliates against the bullies, forcing the adults to intervene.
21What connects Rick to Klara in this scene is their shared otherness and exploitation. While Klara is othered by her nonhuman status as object and utility, Rick is ostracized by a society where augmentation of desirable traits through gene-editing has become the norm, in spite of the health risks it entails. Division between the dominant humans and the subservient androids is thus not the only hierarchizing force in the text, since human society too is rigidly divided into those who can afford eugenics and those who cannot. Such a bifurcation of the populace into dominant and subservient categories recall the sinister division of the world of Never Let Me Go between non-cloned (“original”) and cloned humans, with the former augmenting their lifespan through harvesting the vital organs of the latter (created exclusively for that purpose). While the clones are the victims of a more direct and literal extraction (in the form of compulsory organ removals), the “non-lifted” children in Klara face a more dispersed and systemic exploitation. The “lifted” children enjoy access to all sorts of economic and professional privileges, while the other children are walled off from opportunities, ridiculed, and condemned to penury. Rick and his family are the subject of gossip at the interaction meeting, with one of the parents of a “lifted” child asking Josie’s mother: “[Rick] seems so bright too. Such a shame a boy like that should have missed out […]. Did his folks just […] decide not to go ahead [with genetic enhancement]? Lose their nerve?” (Ishiguro 2021, 67). Despite his budding skills as a mechanical engineer – he builds drones, which Klara calls “machine birds” (Ishiguro 2021, 59) – Rick’s future prospects are bleak since only one college, Atlas Brookings, admits “unlifted” children, subject to cutthroat competition.
22This scenario echoes Dorothy Roberts’s warning in Fatal Invention (2011) regarding “the toxic convergence of race, biology, and politics” that creates a “toxic biopolitics of race” (Roberts 2011, 309) and which includes “reproductive technologies for improving children’s genetic makeup” (Roberts 2011, 287). In an apparently post-racial world, Roberts notes, scientific innovations, the government, and big corporations are promoting race-based genomics that calcify and reinstate racism in its complex intersectionality with capitalist forces. In Klara, the use of gene-manipulation technology to enhance some children over others – dictated by class privilege and the willingness to risk mortality – creates what Ishiguro in his 2017 Nobel Prize Lecture called “savage meritocracies that resemble apartheid, and massive unemployment” (Ishiguro 2017, 11). Like Aldous Huxley’s dystopian classic Brave New World (1932) where society is divided into rigid bioengineered categories, Ishiguro’s novel also illustrates how in a technology-driven post-genome world, racialized stratifications are reinstated in new forms.
23Such a bio-technologized meritocracy not only reinforces existing social inequalities, but also, more dangerously, imprints those inequalities and their debilitating consequences onto the human genome. Ishiguro in his interview with The Wire, reminds the reader that a similar technology already exists in the “real” world. Referring to the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR-Cas9, Ishiguro says: “Crispr is an absolute breakthrough […]. This is going to do interesting things to our society” (Wire 2021, 3). CRISPR-Cas9 is an enzyme developed by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier from the clustered repeated DNA sequences of bacteria which can be used to alter genetic traits in human cells. They were given the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020, with the Committee’s official press release calling Crispr “genetic scissors” that can be used to “change the DNA” (ibid., 1) of living organisms, including human beings. Crispr has a wide range of applications in the field of medicine, where it has been successfully used to cure life-threatening diseases like sickle cell anemia.
24However, Crispr also raises important socio-political, economic, and philosophical questions concerning the legality and ethics of editing human genes for non-medical purposes such as the enhancement of cognitive and physiological abilities – of the kind we see in Klara and in the dystopian film Gattaca (1997). Advocating for “some kind of limit” on the use of Crispr by private ventures and individuals, Walter Isaacson in The Code Breaker (2021) warns that the unrestricted use of gene-editing technology “could exacerbate inequality and even permanently encode it into our species” creating a world that is akin to “a free-market bazaar where the rich can buy the best genes and ingrain them into their families,” turning “financial inequalities into genetic inequalities” (Isaacson 2021, 387). As is the case of AI, technological breakthroughs like CRISPR-cas9 are enabled, conditioned, and molded by a web of power, capital, and social prejudice that decide which skills and attributes are chosen over which others.
25As bodies whose materiality is overwritten by corporate directives of efficiency and marketability, those labelled “human” in Klara are subject to a bio-algorithmic tampering not very different from the programming that constructs and conditions AFs, in that both are made to be utilized and discarded. “Human agency,” as J. P. Narkunas argues, is not only rendered “secondary to algorithmic processes, digital protocols, speculative financial instruments, and nonhuman market and technological forces,” but also reified “as fungible objects for trade” (Narkunas 2018, 3). Such an appropriation serves the interests of neoliberal systems where biomatter is “ontologically reconfigured as a type of capital” (Narkunas 2018, 40) and perceived as “potential sites of marketing” (Narkunas 2018, 9). In Ishiguro’s novel, the human genome itself is (re)constructed and (re)inscribed upon to function as a resource mine for capitalist extraction and manipulation. While the extension of extractive politics to posthuman entities like Klara was the first aspect of what I defined as the becoming black of the posthuman, the deployment of technology to create racialized boundaries between the “lifted” and the “unlifted” humans marks the second aspect of the becoming black of the posthuman.
26This second aspect involves the accelerating instrumentalization of human lives through eugenics to keep pace with relentless market-driven imperatives. As Justin Omar Johnston points out, in this “radically libertarian future predicated on economic competition,” the human is “never-human-enough” (Johnston 2019, 3), and thus always in need of an upgrade, an invented need that perpetuates demand for self-improvement technologies. Far from being perceived as sacrosanct and inviolable, human biology in Klara is seen as optimizable through biotechnology, making the human indistinguishable from capital, or perhaps more succinctly, reinstating the human as capital, as another resource to be harvested. There are therefore two dimensions to what I have called the becoming black of the posthuman in Ishiguro’s text. In the first instance – represented by the AFs in the text – technological innovations are used to create an entire class of subservient nonhuman entities with adverse environmental consequences. In the second, technology capitalizes upon human life itself, optimizing it for the market, even as it erects new segregating borders that control and manage access to resources and opportunities. The “becoming black” of the nonhuman thus parallels that of the (ostensibly) human. In other words, the human, as both the locus and the instrument of capital, is itself not exempt from the extractive mechanisms it designs.
27The self-consuming forces of techno-capitalism reach their terrifying climax in Josie’s “portrait,” where the “becoming black” of the human becomes coterminous with the “becoming black” of the machine. The “portrait” is actually a humanoid body designed as an exact replica of Josie. The objective of this “new Josie” is to be – as Mr. Capaldi, the scientist in charge of the project, emphasizes – “a continuation of Josie,” should the “real Josie” (Ishiguro 2021, 208) succumb to her illness. Klara, as an AF equipped with advanced AI capabilities, is required to observe and “learn [Josie] till there’s no difference between the first Josie and the second” (Ishiguro 2021, 209). Having done so, Klara is expected to “become” Josie by inhabiting the android body built to replicate her, for, as Mr. Capaldi explains to Klara, “that [new] Josie […] is empty. […] We want you to inhabit that Josie with everything you’ve learnt” (Ishiguro 2021, 209). When a bewildered Klara asks that if she were to “continue” Josie, “what would happen to […] all this?”, referring to herself, her ‘body,’ Josie’s mother dismissively retorts, “what does it matter? That’s just fabric” (Ishiguro 2021, 213), reminding Klara that as a purchased non-human object, she has no “self,” no irreducible “essence” to preserve. The irony, however, is that neither Josie, nor, for that matter, any other human in the text, have any such “essence,” since they are all ultimately upgradeable and replaceable.
28This fusion of the human and the machine in the figure of the “new Josie” (208) marks the culmination of the futuristic fantasy propagated today by scientists like the roboticist Hans Moravec and the computer engineer Ray Kurzweil. Their contention, rooted in a neoliberal version of Cartesian dualism, is that the complete integration of human beings with robots is not only inevitable but also desirable under the auspices of a competitive hyper-capitalist system. In Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (1998), for instance, Moravec charts out a linear development of technology that concludes with “the end of the dominance of biological humans and the beginning of the age of robot” (Moravec 1998, 131). This anticipates Kurzweil’s theorization of “the singularity” that posits a decorporealized, potentially infinite future for “software-based humans” through mind-upload (into cyberspace) so that they are no longer inhibited by “the continued viability of any particular hardware medium (for example, the survivors of a biological body and brain)” (Kurzweil 2006, 325). Like Mr. Capaldi’s project to “continue Josie”, what underlies the transhumanist ambitions of these scientists is the techno-futuristic fantasy of immortality. The central irony of these visions is that in their feverish endeavors to perpetuate the human, they serve only to accelerate its obsolescence.
29As a result of unbridled accelerationism, both the AFs and the humans are always in fear of being superseded (and therefore replaced), and thus strive to continually “improve” in order to escape superannuation through attempts that only hasten their demise. Like the dark smoke from the “Cootings machine,” the dread of inevitable death is pervasive in the text. The AFs are dumped in rubbish heaps for dismantling, the “unlifted” children and the unemployed adults are forced by the scarcity of prospects to seek precarious refuge in armed, extremist camps, and the “lifted” children are subject to a gene-editing gambit that may claim their lives. As Charles Thorpe points out, “capitalist culture is necroculture – a culture that aggrandizes the dead and the non-living over the living” through “the subsumption of life by capital,” syphoning “sustenance, energy, and power” (Thorpe 2016, 2-3; original emphasis) from everything.
30In Klara, this vampiric dimension of capitalism manifests its techno-futurist veneer most terrifyingly in Sal, Josie’s deceased elder sister. Killed by an unspecified disease caused by gene-manipulation and unsuccessfully resurrected as a robotic “bereavement doll” (Ishiguro 2021, 208) by Mr. Capaldi, Sal’s spectral presence haunts the text as a grim reminder of the necropolitics of capital. In an unnerving scene, Rick’s mother Miss Helen recounts Josie’s mother chasing after the humanoid Sal “two years after Sal is supposed to have died” (Ishiguro 2021, 149). The intersection of capitalism and technology creates an almost necromantic power that not only claims but also reanimates the dead as technologized corpses. Thorpe writes, “as the powers of the living are annexed to technology […] capital becomes the artificial womb of life” which creates a robotic “living dead species, abstracted from their living milieu, surviving in an artificially preserved commodified form” (Thorpe 2016, 82). The becoming black of the posthuman thus reaches its zenith in the utter annihilation of organic life and its substitution by machines that are themselves disposable.
31Does anything survive this all-pervasive harvest of lives in the threshing machines of capital? Is there anything that eludes the technocratic appropriation of the “self,” of consciousness, of being, into the algorithmic prescripts of the machine? Mr. Capaldi does not think so. In his techno-reductive worldview, there is nothing in the human that cannot be translated into code, and it thus follows that one’s personality can be digitally mapped and recreated in an artificial body. Responding to Chrissie’s skepticism about the viability of the “new Josie,” Mr. Capaldi patronizingly claims:
A part of us refuses to let go. The part that wants to keep believing there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer. But there’s nothing like that, we know that now. […] There’s nothing there. Nothing inside Josie that’s beyond the Klaras of this world to continue. The second Josie won’t be a copy. She’ll be the exact same. […] It’s not faith you need. Only rationality. (Ishiguro 2021, 210)
32The counter-narratives to such hegemonizing discourses of techno-capitalism often fall back on a humanist plea for an irreducible essence – often described as the “soul” or “human nature” – that transcends historical boundaries and cannot be reproduced by technology. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell exposes the frail egocentricity of such a principle when faced with the dehumanizing mechanisms of power. When Winston is finally apprehended by the state, he initially proclaims his faith in “some spirit, some principle” that totalitarianism can “never overcome,” and asserts that “life will defeat” systemic strategies of control, anthropocentrically reading “life” synonymously with “the spirit of man” (Orwell 2004, 163). However, as O’Brien, one of the leaders of the authoritarian ruling party, reminds him, it is power (and its proliferation through and as knowledge) that defines, distributes, and manages life: “we control life […] at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature” (Orwell 2004, 163).
33Francis Fukuyama in Our Posthuman Future (2002), names this universal human attribute “Factor X” (Fukuyama 2002, 149), and desperately deploys it as a sacrosanct last line of defense against a “posthuman stage of history” (Fukuyama 2002, 7) brought about by the unregulated use of biotechnology. Fukuyama writes: “when we strip all of a person’s contingency and accidental characteristics away, there remains some essential human quality underneath […] call it Factor X. […] We are required to respect people equally on the basis of their possession of Factor X” (Fukuyama 2002, 149-50). The “human,” however, has always been a privileged construct, awarded by and to those with the material and cultural capital to define themselves as such, and throughout history, large communities of people – people of color, especially – were exploited on their perceived lack or insufficiency of this “Factor X.” In Klara, the AFs are subject to mass annihilation on the premise of their inability to possess Fukuyama’s “essential human quality,” and the humans in the text, in lieu of the insatiable logic of capitalism, never possess it enough, reinforcing Johnston’s argument that the human is never-human-enough.
34Josie’s father reiterates the same fallacious argument for human uniqueness when he asks Klara: “Do you believe in the human heart? […] Do you think there’s such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?” (Ishiguro 2021, 218). Klara replies that human individuality, predicated upon intricate but knowable and finite patterns, is not exempt from replication through data-structures: “Of course, a human heart is bound to be complex. But it must be limited. […] There’ll be an end to what there is to learn” (Ishiguro 2021, 219). Reproducing the same reductive logic that makes her expendable, Klara unwittingly promotes an appropriative usage of technology that renders everything assimilable.
35What eventually alters her stance, however, is not the sudden discovery of a “factor X,” but a confrontation with the radical otherness of the self, the self as located not in the human but in the affective bonds – contingent, specific, and dispersed – with other beings that transform that human into an irreplaceable, singular individual. Believing that sunlight can cure any illness with its “special nourishment” (Ishiguro 2021, 273), Klara enters into a preposterous bargain with the sun, promising to destroy one of the polluting “Cootings Machine[s]” in return for Josie’s recovery. It is here that the illogic of faith and friendship – of affect – ruptures the very calibrations that enable it, undermining Klara’s belief that she could replicate Josie simply by studying her:
I did all I could to learn Josie. […] But however hard I tried, I believe now there would have remained something beyond my reach. The Mother, Rick, Melania Housekeeper, the Father. I’d never reach what they felt for Josie in their hearts. […] Mr. Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother that he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it isn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her (Ishiguro 2021, 306-7).
36The one “person” who Klara, in her encoded self-abnegation, forgets to mention in her list of people who love Josie, is herself. As someone who feels for Josie beyond the logic of her programming, Klara too, albeit a robot, holds an irreproducible part of Josie’s “essence.” Ishiguro’s aesthetic vision thus performs a dispersal of human individuality and uniqueness into porous human-nonhuman assemblages held together by variegated bonds of affect. Advocating the need to move beyond the myopic limits of technophobia and technophilia, David Wills contends that it is only by acknowledging the originary technicity of the human itself that we can conceive new forms of resistance to a profit-driven technofuturism. Such a politics of dissidence is founded upon an “ethics that takes account of the machine in the human,” recognizing the radical alterity of the self that is inhabited by an “unassimilable otherness” (Wills 2008, 12).
37As one witnesses in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the effacement and reconfiguration of the category of the human in the face of rapid technological developments have always vexed the dystopian imagination. While Orwell voices his concerns with the increasing mechanization and dehumanization of the human under a totalitarian regime, Ishiguro explores the violence perpetuated in the name of safeguarding the so-called sanctity of the human at a time when authoritarianism is fragmented and distributed through ruthless neoliberal techno-capitalist systems. In Klara, he emphasizes the need for a radical remapping of the cartographies of the human, one that would celebrate difference through the deployment of a posthuman bioethics no longer intent on drawing demarcation lines dictated by discriminatory notions of origins, originality, and efficacy, but instead embracing the all too human non-human, both within and without. The human thus eludes its complete subsumption into the extractive frameworks of techno-capitalism, resisting its “becoming black,” and persisting as a question – inconclusive, incongruous, and dispersed in its entanglement with affective networks that frustrate exhaustive computation and replication. “Beauty,” writes Timothy Morton, is not only “a feeling of unconditional solidarity with things, with everything, with anything” but also “the nonhuman footprint of a nonhuman, a not-me experience” (Morton 2017, 56) which emphasizes the cognition of the radical alterity of the other refracted through the re-cognized prismatic alterity of the self. It is in the lingering beauty of the rational Klara’s non-rational friendship with Josie that we glimpse a potential world where technology is not merely a means to a (market-bound) end, but something that disseminates and diffuses the human, illumining its interconnectedness with nonhuman matrices that are always already constitutive of it.
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