Professor discusses new book about digital media’s impact on psychoanalysis

Tuesday night at Book Culture, Lydia H. Liu, the W.T. Tam Professor in the Humanities in the department of East Asian languages and culture and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, hosted a lecture on her new book, “The Freudian Robot.”

The book is the first intensive study of the political history of digital writing and its relation to the Freudian unconscious.

When asked about her inspiration for the book, Liu said, “I come from a comparative literature background. I had written ‘The Clash of Empires’ about nineteenth-century communication technology and the way that it shaped the modern world order.” Liu then took those ideas and applied them to new technologies.

The event was a conversation between Liu and McKenzie Wark, the author of “Gamer Theory” and “A Hacker Manifesto” and the associate dean of faculty affairs at Eugene Lang College of the New School.

Liu explained that psychoanalysis was originally an important part of cybernetics theory and cyborg ideas.

“The common perception is that psychoanalysis has little to do with digital media and that digital media have nothing to do with psychoanalysis,” she said. Liu explained that, in light of so many books published about prosthetic limbs, eyes, and brains, the existential question arises: With all these artificial parts, are you still you?

Some may wonder what exactly a Freudian robot is. As robots are created to be more and more human, people might also become more and more robotlike. “Perhaps the robots need psychoanalysts!” Wark said.

Another key idea in Liu’s book is the “27th letter of the alphabet.” The English language gained another letter—space. Liu emphasizd the importance of noting that space is not a negative space but a positive symbol.

Without space, everything one read would be gibberish. All symbols become discrete with the introduction of the space symbol. “Nobody paid attention to this addition of space. It is an ideographic space independent of sound—a post-phonetic ideographic symbol,” Liu said.

In addition to this complex discussion of language, the lecture covered topics from James Joyce to game theory. While the talk was at times hard to follow for those not well-versed in literary criticism and theory, it was nonetheless engaging.

Liu hopes that students take these words of advice from her book: “Be careful not to turn into a Freudian robot. Read more literature and history.”

When asked if she had an iPhone, she responded, “Yes, but I don’t have an iPad. And I only have one iPhone—I have many books.” There are problems with the way “we organize knowledge in general,” Liu said.

Liu concluded with advice for Columbia students: “Don’t think your discipline gives you the truth about the world. No one discipline does.”