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

by Lydia H. Liu

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.

320 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2011

About the author

Lydia H. Liu 劉禾 is the W.T. Tam Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She teaches in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Professor Liu also holds a joint professorship at the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University 清華大學 in Beijing.

(from http://www.columbia.edu/~ll2410/)

Reviews

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two short passages from The Freudian Robot:



Lacan does not dismiss the belief in chance, number and randomness as superstition but sees it as the path toward the unconscious. Following this insight, we might draw some conclusions about the political unconscious of an electoral democracy based on number games and see it as the latest divinational technology of the ruling class in modern guise.


*


This neo-Freudian view leads to his dismissal of rationality as “a kind of fantasy.” Minsky argues that “our thinking is never entirely based on purely logical reasoning” and predicts that “most of our future attempts to build large, growing Artificial Intelligences will be subject to all sorts of mental disorders.

[boocia]

okay i really overshot my limits trying to read this book but that's a-okay. definitely requires/assumes a foundation in Lacan primarily, Freud, etc.

but the goal here is very cool, to excavate a historical relationship between the development of Lacan's theories on the unconscious and the development of cybernetics and information theory in the wake of empire-building technological and theoretical advancements for wwii and coldwar. so the approach was something i found pleasurable, of like, who was talking to who at which conferences between these psychoanalytical theorists and structuralist philos and these cyberneticists and computational linguists. all in all i think psychoanalysis is just not my field of choice and so this book felt like a really long circuitous and confusing walk, when there are more straightforward walks towards "the development of technology is fundamentally changing the development of the human individual as well as culture". but there were as i mentioned fun moves made. i liked how Liu dedicated sections to close readings of fiction, specifically fiction that Freud and Lacan also did close readings of. I liked how, because she also conducts her research on Chinese literature and culture, she is able to bring Chinese linguists who also end up at these conferences and the Chinese influences on Lacan (he learned Chinese at some pt i guess?) to light.

because i don't know what the hell is going on - actually frankly, i still don't understand why there are so many arms of philosophy that involve taking Freud seriously and build a lineage off of him i guess? so maybe i also just refuse to understand what's going on sometimes - the psychoanalytical approach was very hard to track. i really liked this materialist unfolding on the origin of 'Printed English'; at how the fact that digital media is built off of not English (C, python, binary), but something that looks like it, that is purely written and never spoken out loud, that is essentially *ideographic* and its relationship with attempts to create a global, explicitly colonialist, "Basic English". and then i got pretty lost at like, what 'symbolic' language or language being 'stochastic' has to do with building out the universalist human unconscious or the origins of a universalist pre-civilization, both things i guess Lacan and Levi-Strauss etc. were very interested in. the thread i could hang on to was that computational linguistics changed the game for psychology and the interest in how language develops in the human mind. there was apparently a lot of discourse at the time about how words are formed, if maybe language development isn't random but part of the unconscious (? maybe?), and the idea that like, there is a finite space and a calculable probability for words (stuff like, the likelihood of 'e' following 'g' is xyz percent) suggested a structure where before there was an assumption of total chaos? and the idea of an underlying structure to the human unconscious/conscious was already trucking pretty hard w cyberneticists interested in AI (think turing test type shit). we all know that computer scientists were part of a cultural movement to believe the human mind was akin to a networked system, can literally be hosted on one; the idea that philosophers were explicitly influenced by computer science to consider if the unconscious was structured like a computer program is the new part this book is pushing.

the most concrete thing to hold on to here was the sections on the uncanny valley. of course freud had a lot of takes about the uncanny valley as the repression of the death drive or something i again willfully just cannot follow, but the fact that the uncanny is an object of study for psychologists and roboticists alike was cool. and the idea that our distaste for almost-human things says something about either our fear of death, fear of the other, repression of the subjectivity of others, etc makes sense to me. so Liu raising the idea of okay, well as we build chatbots and robots and give our tech female names, what does that do to the uncanny valley reaction, and what does the uncanny valley reaction changing suggest about a modern unconscious? was pretty cool. i could not follow an answer, if one was presented at all. i get the sense maybe it wasn't :)

because this book is more about pointing out this uninvestigated approach in the field, right? which is the Freudian robot, defined as "any networked being who embodies the feedback loop of human-machine simulacra and cannot free her/him/itself from the cybernetic unconscious". Liu opposes this to Haraway explicitly, which I thought was fun. Haraway's cyborg i think accepts our cyborg existence and tries to re-mythicize it as something we can grab the reins of, use things like wiggly boundaries between man and machine to our advantage to better think about wiggly boundaries with gender and bodies and race etc. Liu's robot is more observational, just pointing out - much more materially i think - that our brains are probably all weird and fucked up and it's probably Apple's fault or whatever and someone should really look into that, psychoanalytically. i will say her definition made me immediately think of TIkTok first, alas. tiktok pushes me content i want to see but i tell tiktok what i want to see but tiktok is sort of training me to like the things it tells me to see as much as i am training it to show me good things. also this book reminds me of Fondly Fahrenheit, of course, and that synergy is fun.

so all in all wow i really understand like 5% max of this book, but it definitely smells like something really cool and special and game-changing to the people it was actually written for.

[Ruo Jia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a difficult read, many thanks for my reading group for the push. What I’m most interested in is the general promise of a new techne of the unconscious with cybernetics and psychoanalytic, but specifically how Lacan and French theory was reinventing game theory, information theory and others of its American prehistory/exchange.