The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious
Lydia H. Liu
Abstract
The identity and role of writing have evolved in the age of digital media. But how did writing itself make digital media possible in the first place? This book offers a study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious. Its analysis brings the work of theorists and writers back into conversation with one another to document significant meetings of minds and disciplines. The book shows how the earlier avant-garde literary experiments with alphabetical writing and the word-association games of psychoanalysis contributed to the mathematic ... More
The identity and role of writing have evolved in the age of digital media. But how did writing itself make digital media possible in the first place? This book offers a study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious. Its analysis brings the work of theorists and writers back into conversation with one another to document significant meetings of minds and disciplines. The book shows how the earlier avant-garde literary experiments with alphabetical writing and the word-association games of psychoanalysis contributed to the mathematical making of digital media. Such intellectual convergence, it argues, completed the transformation of alphabetical writing into the postphonetic, ideographic system of digital media, which not only altered the threshold of sense and nonsense in communication processes but also compelled a new understanding of human–machine interplay at the level of the unconscious.
Keywords:
digital media,
Freudian unconscious,
mind,
alphabetical writing,
word-association games,
psychoanalysis,
communication
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226486826 |
Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: February 2013 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226486840.001.0001 |