The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (review)

From this book's comfortable cruising altitude of 10,000 feet, Lydia Liu—with great virtuosity, superb analysis, and wit—reveals an astonishing landscape. At this level, the work of the book is clear: the relationship between the technology of writing and the unconscious. The core argument is historical: Liu argues that there was a fertile connection between developments in psychoanalytic theory, French structuralism and post-structuralism, and cybernetics and artificial intelligence. What mediated these, Liu argues, is a shared discourse about the nature of writing.

For readers more familiar with the history and sociology of technology on one hand and social theory on the other, this is relatively new territory. Much of our field has eschewed the psychological, with scattered exceptions such as Sherry Turkle (2005) on the "second self" (influenced by her reading of Jacques Lacan) proving the rule. This eschewal is nested in a broader, absurd denial of the psychoanalytic within the fields of the history and sociology of science and technology—and indeed within the discipline of history tout court. And yet, there has been an emergent convergence for a number of years.

Liu's wonderful discussion of the twenty-seventh letter in the English alphabet, the space (canonized on the QWERTY keyboard by a bar with extension and centrality not accorded any other letter) is perhaps a place to start. In order to see the "space" as a letter, one needs to recognize that written text is both phonetic (it represents the sounds of speech) and ideographic (it has its own presence as a set of visual representations on a sheet of paper). Just as the so-called invention of zero was transformative for mathematics, so was the so-called invention of space as a letter transformative for understanding written text (in the context of the theory of communication).

Recognizing that the printed word is visual, and that this visual realm is worthy of analysis apart from the symbols and meanings attached to our semantic understanding of the spoken word, is a central move which makes sense of the book's title. From the psychoanalytic side, one can start with Freud's obsession with the technology of writing—from his "mystic writing pad" (a meditation on erasable writing pads and memory) and concepts such as imprinting. But what kind of writing is the unconscious doing? Lacan, in particular, was clear that the unconscious did not write sense and semantics (the phonic dimension) but forms of non-sense. From the technological side, Liu starts from Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver's stochastic analysis of the English language as a means for transmitting speech technologically: they analyzed language in terms of the most probable next letter statistically—they evacuated (contra the cybernetician Donald Mackay, for example) meaning from transmission. So there is a double evacuation of meaning from the analysis of text.

Following such psychoanalytic filiations, Liu moves on to discussions of nonsense syllables in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a discussion of the uncanny in E. T. A. Hoffmann's story "The Sandman," and an extended discussion of the favorite psychoanalytic text, "The Purloined Letter" by Edgar Allan Poe. A parallel track takes her through a discussion of nonsense, redundancy, and entropy in communication theory, the uncanny in cybernetic machines such as Shannon's "Ultimate Machine"whose sole function was to turn itself off, and an extended game-theoretic discussion of the prisoner's dilemma experiments by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher.

Liu weaves the two together remarkably through a close textual and historical analysis that shows the borrowing by French psychoanalytic theorists of ideas from cybernetics and communication theory. Their re-export back to America in the terms of critical theory explains the resonance that she asserts between these seemingly disparate realms. It is the same theory, often dressed up in different words ("stochastic" gets exported from American cybernetics and is re-imported from French philosophy into American literary theory as...