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

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