Friday, September 17, 2010

A very different sort of talk

The Departments of Comparative Literature and English Literature at the University of Michigan present:

The Freudian Robot
Lecture by Lydia H. Liu
4pm, Thursday September 30, 2010
3222 Angell Hall

What is the psychic life of digital media? Lydia Liu will speak on digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious. Her new research demonstrates how the evolution of alphabetical writing into the ideographic system of digital media alters the threshold of sense and nonsense for the mind and compels a new understanding of human-machine interplay at the level of the unconscious.

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I really like the phrase "alters the threshold of sense and nonsense for the mind". We don't get to talk like that in economics! Actually I like the whole thing, just as words.

On the other hand, I received a good dose of Frederik Crews in graduate school (thanks Nat!) and so anything that appears to take Freudianism seriously necessarily crosses my threshold of nonsense.

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