İnsanın Devredilmesi: Bradbury’nin “The Veldt” ve Forster’ın “The Veldt” eserlerinde Postinsan Öznellik ve Teknolojik Vekilik

Abstract

Özet Bu makale, Ray Bradbury’nin “The Veldt” (1950) ve E. M. Forster’ın “The Machine Stops” (1909) adlı eserlerini aynı sürecin iki farklı anlatımı olarak ele almaktadır. Her iki metin de ebeveynlik, bedensellik, bellek ve duygulanım gibi insani kapasitelerin, önce hizmetkâr olarak başlayıp sonunda ikame unsuruna dönüşen otomatik sistemler tarafından aşamalı biçimde nasıl devre dışı bırakıldığını işlemektedir. Makale, N. Katherine Hayles’in posthüman özneyi bedensel altyapısından koparılmış bir enformasyon örüntüsü olarak kavramsallaştırmasına (Hayles, 1999), Donna Haraway’in insan/makine sınırına ilişkin teorisine (Haraway, 1991) ve Bernard Stiegler’in üçüncil bellek tutma ile teknolojik dışsallaştırma kavramlarına (Stiegler, 1998) dayanarak her iki metnin de aynı yapısal krizi farklı tarihsel mesafelerden sahnelediğini ileri sürmektedir. Forster’da dışsallaştırma süreci henüz tamamlanmamışken Bradbury’de bu süreç sonuçlanmış durumdadır. Bir arada okunduğunda bu iki öykü, posthümanist kuramın ilerleyen dönemde soyut bir dilde ifade edeceği şeyin izini sürmektedir: İnsan özne, teknoloji tarafından tek bir olayda yerinden edilmez; aksine, rahatlık vaat eden bir vekillik mantığıyla, işlev işlev yıpratılarak aşınır, ta ki geri alınacak hiçbir şey kalmayana dek.

Keywords

• posthümanizm
• teknolojik vekillik
• distopik kurgu

Delegating the Human: Posthuman Subjectivity and Technological Surrogacy in Bradbury’s “The Veldt” and Forster’s “The Machine Stops”

Abstract

The following article reads Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt” (1950) and E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) as two accounts of the same process. They both concern a gradual replacement of human capacities such as parenting, embodiment, memory, and affect by automated systems that begin as servants and end as substitutes. Drawing on N. Katherine Hayles’s account of the posthuman subject as an informational pattern severed from its bodily substrate (Hayles, 1999), Donna Haraway’s theorisation of the human/machine boundary (Haraway, 1991), and Bernard Stiegler’s concept of tertiary retention and technological exteriorisation (Stiegler, 1998), the article argues that both texts stage the same structural crisis at different historical distances. In Forster, the process of exteriorisation has not quite finished; in Bradbury, it has. Read together, the two stories trace what posthumanist theory would later describe in abstract terms. The human subject is not displaced by technology in a single event but eroded by comfortable delegation, one function at a time, until there is nothing left to reclaim

Keywords

• posthumanism
• technological surrogacy
• dystopian fiction

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