The Freudian Robot

Author: Lydia H. Liu
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226486842
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Book Description
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.

Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory

Author: Mathew R. Martin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000638359
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory introduces the key concepts, figures and movements of both psychoanalytic theory and the history of literary criticism and theory, engaging with Freud, Zizek, Plato, posthumanism, and beyond. Divided into two parts - concepts and movements – the structure of the book is clear and accessible. Each chapter builds upon the one before, allowing the reader to progress from little or no background in psychoanalysis, philosophy, or literary theory to the ability to engage actively with the relatively sophisticated ideas presented in later sections of the work. Mathew R. Martin consistently directs attention to the task of interpreting texts by illustrating abstract theoretical points with literary texts and at apposite moments provides brief readings of selected texts. This book will be essential reading for academics and students of psychoanalytic studies, literary criticism, and literary theory.

Digital Innovation and the Future of Work

Author: Hans Schaffers
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000796965
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
The concept of digitalization captures the widespread adoption of digital technologies in our lives, in the structure and functioning of organizations and in the transformation of our economy and society. Digital technologies for data processing and communication underly high-impact innovations including the Internet of Things, wireless multimedia, artificial intelligence, big data, enterprise platforms, social networks and blockchain. These digital innovations not only bring new opportunities for prosperity and wellbeing but also affect our behaviors, activities, and daily lives. They enable and shape new forms of production and new working practices in sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, logistics and supply chains, energy, and public and business services. Digital innovations are not purely technological but form part of comprehensive systemic innovations of a sociotechnical and networked nature, requiring the alignment of technology, processes, organizations, and humans. Examples are platform-based work, customer driven value creating networks, and urban public service systems. Building on widespread networking, algorithmic decisions and sharing of personal data, these innovations raise intensive societal and ethical debates regarding key issues such as data sovereignty and privacy intrusion, business models based on data surveillance and negative externalization, quality of work and jobs, and market dominance versus regulation. In this context, this book focuses on the implications of digitalization for the domain of work. The book studies the changing nature of work as well as new forms of digitally enabled organizations, work practices and cooperation. The book sheds light on the technological, economic, and political forces shaping the new world of work and on the prospects for human-centric and responsible innovations.

The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Technology

Author: David Goodman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000895246
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 597

Book Description
The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Technology uniquely provides a comprehensive overview of human subjectivity in the technological age and how psychoanalysis can help us better understand human life. Presented in five parts, David M. Goodman and Matthew Clemente collaborate with an international community of scholars and practitioners to consider how psychoanalytic formulations can be brought to bear on the impact technology has had on the facets of human subjectivity. Chapters examine how technology is reshaping our understanding of what it means to be a human subject, through embodiment, intimacy, porn, political motivation, mortality, communication, interpersonal exchange, thought, attention, responsibility, vulnerability, and more. Filled with thought-provoking and nuanced chapters, the contributors approach technology from a diverse range of entry points but all engage through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, practice, and thought. This book is essential for academics and students of psychoanalysis, philosophy, ethics, media, liberal arts, social work, and bioethics. With the inclusion of timely chapters on the coronavirus pandemic and teletherapy, psychoanalysts in practice and training as well as other mental health practitioners will also find this book an invaluable resource.

Digital Media in East Asia

Author:
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621968227
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description

Actionable Media

Author: John Tinnell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190678070
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
In 1991, Mark Weiser and his team at Xerox PARC declared they were reinventing computers for the twenty-first century. The computer would become integrated into the fabric of everyday life; it would shift to the background rather than being itself an object of focus. The resulting rise of ubiquitous computing (smartphones, smartglasses, smart cities) have since thoroughly colonized our digital landscape. In Actionable Media, John Tinnell contends that there is an unsung rhetorical dimension to Weiser's legacy, which stretches far beyond recent iProducts. Taking up Weiser's motto, "Start from the arts and humanities," Tinnell develops a theoretical framework for understanding nascent initiatives--the Internet of things, wearable interfaces, augmented reality--in terms of their intellectual history, their relationship to earlier communication technologies, and their potential to become vibrant platforms for public culture and critical media production. It is clear that an ever-widening array of everyday spaces now double as venues for multimedia authorship. Writers, activists, and students, in cities and towns everywhere, are digitally augmenting physical environments. Audio walks embed narratives around local parks for pedestrians to encounter during a stroll; online forums are woven into urban infrastructure and suburban plazas to invigorate community politics. This new wave of digital communication, which Tinnell terms "actionable media," is presented through case studies of exemplar projects by leading artists, designers, and research-creation teams. Chapters alter notions of ubiquitous computing through concepts drawn from Bernard Stiegler, Gregory Ulmer, and Hannah Arendt; from comparative media analyses with writing systems such as cuneiform, urban signage, and GUI software; and from relevant stylistic insights gleaned from the open air arts practices of Augusto Boal, Claude Monet, and Janet Cardiff. Actionable Media challenges familiar claims about the combination of physical and digital spaces, beckoning contemporary media studies toward an alternative substrate of historical precursors, emerging forms, design philosophies, and rhetorical principles.

Digital Uncanny

Author: Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190853999
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
We are now confronted with a new type of uncanny experience, an uncanny evoked by parallel processing, aggregate data, and cloud-computing. The digital uncanny does not erase the uncanny feeling we experience as d j vu or when confronted with robots that are too lifelike. Today's uncanny refers to how non-human devices (surveillance technologies, algorithms, feedback, and data flows) anticipate human gestures, emotions, actions, and interactions, thus intimating that we are but machines and that our behavior is predicable precisely because we are machinic. It adds another dimension to those feelings in which we question whether our responses are subjective or automated - automated as in reducing one's subjectivity to patterns of data and using those patterns to present objects or ideas that would then elicit one's genuinely subjective-yet effectively preset-response. In fact, this anticipation of our responses is a feedback loop that we humans have produced by designing software that can study our traces, inputs, and moves. In this sense one could say that the digital uncanny is a trick we play on ourselves, a trick that we would not be able to play had we not developed sophisticated digital technologies. Digital Uncanny explores how digital technologies, particularly software systems working through massive amounts of data, are transforming the meaning of the uncanny that Freud tied to a return of repressed memories, desires, and experiences to their anticipation. Through a close reading of interactive and experimental art works of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Bill Viola, Simon Biggs, Sue Hawksley, and Garth Paine, this book is designed to explore how the digital uncanny unsettles and estranges concepts of "self," "affect," "feedback" and "aesthetic experience," forcing us to reflect on our relationship with computational media and by extension our relationship to each other and our experience of the world.

The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Consciousness, Free Will, Language, and Reason

Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000880184
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 84

Book Description
The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Consciousness, Free Will, Language, and Reason examines the ways in which we can use psychoanalysis in order to better understand humanity and explores the question of what makes us human. For thousands of years, thinkers have been trying to define what makes us human. Some of the main questions they have asked is: What is consciousness? Do we have free will? Do animals use language? And what does reason mean? Samuels argues that we need to better understand the psychoanalytic approach to human nature in order to answer these questions, as well as using it to provide a new way of understanding issues such as addiction, political conflict, ideology, and destructive personal relationship. This book will be of vital interest to psychotherapists, as well as students and researchers across the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and psychology.

Experimenting the Human

Author: G Douglas Barrett
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226823393
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Book Description
An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human. In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we’re already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences of never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements. Rather than pursuing the human's beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier’s neurofeedback music, Pamela Z’s BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik’s musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros’s experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human.

Transmitted Wounds

Author: Amit Pinchevski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190625600
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
In Transmitted Wounds, Amit Pinchevski explores the ways media technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, Pinchevski reveals the technical operations that inform the conception and experience of traumatic impact and memory. He offers a bold thesis about the deep association of media and trauma: media bear witness to the human failure to bear witness, making the traumatic technologically transmissible and reproducible. Taking up a number of case studies--the radio broadcasts of the Eichmann trial; the videotaping of Holocaust testimonies; recent psychiatric debates about trauma through media following the 9/11 attacks; current controversy surrounding drone operators' post-trauma; and digital platforms of algorithmic-holographic witnessing and virtual reality exposure therapy for PTSD--Pinchevski demonstrates how the technological mediation of trauma feeds into the traumatic condition itself. The result is a novel understanding of media as constituting the material conditions for trauma to appear as something that cannot be fully approached and yet somehow must be. While drawing on contemporary materialist media theory, especially the work of Friedrich Kittler and his followers, Pinchevski goes beyond the anti-humanistic tendency characterizing the materialist approach, discovering media as bearing out the human vulnerability epitomized in trauma, and finding therein a basis for moral concern in the face of violence and atrocity. Transmitted Wounds unfolds the ethical and political stakes involved in the technological transmission of mental wounds across clinical, literary, and cultural contexts.