Cybernetics and the Embodied Posthuman: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Never Let Me Go

Abstract

The arrival of posthuman was heralded by cybernetics science, which allows humans to interact with technologies through feedback mechanisms. Cybernetics helps us move beyond the traditional notion of liberal humanism to view humans being entangled with other biological and technological beings that constitute our environments. With insights drawn from cybernetics, this paper examines the human-nonhuman coupling dynamics portrayed in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go-works that epitomize our age of artificial intelligence and hybridized life forms. Both of these works incorporate the symbiotic feedback circuit that couples humans with nonhumans and dismantles the boundaries between subject and object, natural and manufactured, biological and technological, and mind and body. The paper explores the deeper implications of cybernetics while reassessing the disembodied vision of posthumanism to investigate the embodied nature of the posthuman that consolidates systems and environments and humans and nonhumans.