The Otherness of Communication: Systems Theory and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Abstract: This essay investigates the radical reconceptualization of communication demonstrated in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). In the novel, Ishiguro depicts communication not as a means to establish mutual understanding, but as an autonomous phenomenon independent from the participants, which I call dislocated communication. I articulate this notion of communication following from Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. In deploying this framework, I argue that Ishiguro positions dislocated communication as the reality of communication, in turn obliging readers to experience the otherness of clones as epistemologically inaccessible since the readers, too, participate in communication with the novel’s protagonist narrator, Kathy H.