The Freudian Robot ─ Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious

The Freudian Robot offers the first in-depth study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious. In her innovative analysis, Lydia H. Liu brings Claude Shannon into conversation with James Joyce, Lacan with John Von Neumann, and Marvin Minsky with Freud while documenting other significant meetings of minds and disciplines. Here Liu 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, Liu argues, completed the transformation of alphabetical writing into the post-phonetic, 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.

Lydia H. Liu is the W.T. Tam Professor in the Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University. She is also professor of Chinese and comparative literature arid director of the Center for Translingual and Transcultural Studies at Tsinghua University, Beijing. She is the author, editor, or coeditor of seven books in English and Chinese, most recently of The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modem World Making.