Includes bibliographical references (p. 267-286) and index
Introduction: the psychic life of digital media -- Where is the writing of digital media? -- Why civilization matters -- Postmodernity and new media -- Conceptual lacunae -- Fundamental challenge to literary theory -- The techne of the unconscious -- The invention of printed English -- How the English alphabet gained a new letter -- What is printed English? -- The genetic code and grammatology -- The ideographic turn of the phonetic alphabet -- The number game in the empires of the mind -- Sense and nonsense in the psychic machine -- Finnegans wake: a hypermnesiac machine? -- Ispace: Joyce's paper wounds -- Schizoprenic writing at Bell Labs -- The cybernetics group -- The psychic machine -- The cybernetic unconscious -- French theory or American theory? -- Lacan reading Poe: "the seminar on "The purloined letter"" -- Les jeux: game and play on the symbolic chain -- The cybernetic unconscious -- Return to sender -- The Freudian robot -- The uncanny in the automaton -- The psychic life of media -- What is the medium of das Unheimliche? -- The uncanny valley -- The neurotic machine -- Minsky and the cognitive unconscious -- The future of the unconscious -- The missed rendezvous between critical theory and cybernetics -- The ideology machine -- Our game with the little "letters."
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
