Embodied Alterity as a Novel Communication Barrier in Klara and the Sun

This article suggests the potential for AI to generate more expansive worldviews that allow for new ways of seeing and communicating across difference, and the critical role of the arts and humanities in supporting that potential. Through a close reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), the article expands understandings of communication by examining novel communication barriers in science fiction (sf): novelties that impede and foreground communication. Existing work on these novelties has so far been primarily focused on alien encounters and linguistics. However, communication barriers in sf are not restricted to alien encounters, nor do they strictly offer linguistic insights. The worldwide crisis in misinformation and the polarizing political rhetoric that structures current worldviews points to a growing urgency for clarity on how barriers to communication structure reality. Attention to speculative barriers in literature is particularly overdue given sf’s ability to offer creative solutions to problems with its outside-the-box thinking. This article explores how the foregrounding of AI robot Klara’s fragmented and estranged perception calls attention to the way embodied alterity impedes communication. Engaging with posthumanist theories of agency and embodiment while invoking Heidegger’s concept of Ge-stell and Sylvia Wynter’s “Unsettling Coloniality,” the article demonstrates how embodied alterity limits communication because it is defined by anthropocentric and ideologically haunted world perceptions embedded in AI models created by humans. At the same time, an AI’s viewpoint reveals the contingency of perception and moments of incomprehension prove to be wildly generative, opening up new perceptual ground through the power of art.

Keywords: AI, posthumanism, communication, science fiction, alterity