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The Freudian robot : digital media and the future of the unconscious / Lydia H. Liu.
De Gruyter University of Chicago Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013 Available online
View online- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Liu, Lydia He.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Conscious automata--Moral and ethical aspects.
- Conscious automata.
- Cybernetics--Moral and ethical aspects.
- Cybernetics.
- Robotics--Moral and ethical aspects.
- Robotics.
- Robotics--Human factors.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (315 p.)
- Place of Publication:
- Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2010.
- Language Note:
- English
- Summary:
- The identity and role of writing has evolved in the age of digital media. But how did writing itself make digital media possible in the first place? Lydia H. Liu offers here the first rigorous study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious. Liu's innovative analysis brings the work of theorists and writers back into conversation with one another to document significant meetings of minds and disciplines. She 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, she 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. Ranging across information theory, cybernetics, modernism, literary theory, neurotic machines, and psychoanalysis, The Freudian Robot rewrites the history of digital media and the literary theory of the twentieth century.
- Contents:
- Introduction: the psychic life of digital media
- Where is the writing of digital media?
- Why civilization matters
- Postmodernity and new media
- Conceptual lacunae
- Fundamental challenge to literary theory
- The techne of the unconscious
- The invention of printed English
- How the English alphabet gained a new letter
- What is printed English?
- The genetic code and grammatology
- The ideographic turn of the phonetic alphabet
- The number game in the empires of the mind
- Sense and nonsense in the psychic machine
- Finnegans wake: a hypermnesiac machine?
- Ispace: Joyce's paper wounds
- Schizoprenic writing at Bell Labs
- The cybernetics group
- The psychic machine
- The cybernetic unconscious
- French theory or American theory?
- Lacan reading Poe: "the seminar on "The purloined letter""
- Les jeux: game and play on the symbolic chain
- Return to sender
- The Freudian robot
- The uncanny in the automaton
- The psychic life of media
- What is the medium of das Unheimliche?
- The uncanny valley
- The neurotic machine
- Minsky and the cognitive unconscious
- The future of the unconscious
- The missed rendezvous between critical theory and cybernetics
- The ideology machine
- Our game with the little "letters."
- Notes:
- Description based upon print version of record.
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)
- ISBN:
- 9786613134394
- 9781283134392
- 128313439X
- 9780226486840
- 0226486842
- OCLC:
- 727649608
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