The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (3/22)

Lydia H. Liu (author) in Conversation with McKenzie Wark
Tuesday, March 22, 7pm at BookCulture, 536 West 112th Street

The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious, by Lydia Liu, is the first in-depth study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious. The book shows how the convergences of literary modernism, mathematics, and psychoanalysis in the 20th century transformed alphabetical writing system into the post-phonetic, ideographic, and universal system of today's digital media. Altering the threshold of sense and nonsense in communication processes, the remarkable event has compelled a new understanding of language, human-machine interplay, and the Freudian unconscious.

Lydia H. Liu, W.T. Tam Professor in the Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University

McKenzie Wark, Associate Dean of Eugene Lang College at the New School

Thank you,
Sarah

Sarah Monks, Administrative Assistant
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
sm3373@columbia.edu
t.(212)854-4541; f.(212)854-3099