The Freudian Robot

The Freudian Robot
Author: Lydia H. Liu
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2011-05-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0226486842

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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.

The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence

The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence
Author: Isabel Millar
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 3030679810

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This book examines the crucial role of psychoanalysis in understanding what AI means for us as speaking, sexed subjects. Drawing on Lacanian theory and recent clinical developments it explores what philosophy and critical theory of AI has hitherto neglected: enjoyment. Through the reconceptualization of Intelligence, the Artificial Object and the Sexual Abyss the book outlines the Sexbot as a figure who exists on the boundary of psychoanalysis and AI. Through this figure and the medium of film, the author subverts Kant’s three Enlightenment questions and guides readers to transition from asking 'Does it think?' to 'Can it enjoy?' The book will appeal in particular to students and scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, film and media studies, critical theory, feminist theory and AI research.

Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory

Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory
Author: Mathew R. Martin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2022-08-30
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000638359

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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.

Anatomy of a Robot

Anatomy of a Robot
Author: Despina Kakoudaki
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2014-07-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813572762

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Why do we find artificial people fascinating? Drawing from a rich fictional and cinematic tradition, Anatomy of a Robot explores the political and textual implications of our perennial projections of humanity onto figures such as robots, androids, cyborgs, and automata. In an engaging, sophisticated, and accessible presentation, Despina Kakoudaki argues that, in their narrative and cultural deployment, artificial people demarcate what it means to be human. They perform this function by offering us a non-human version of ourselves as a site of investigation. Artificial people teach us that being human, being a person or a self, is a constant process and often a matter of legal, philosophical, and political struggle. By analyzing a wide range of literary texts and films (including episodes from Twilight Zone, the fiction of Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, Metropolis, The Golem, Frankenstein, The Terminator, Iron Man, Blade Runner, and I, Robot), and going back to alchemy and to Aristotle’s Physics and De Anima, she tracks four foundational narrative elements in this centuries-old discourse— the fantasy of the artificial birth, the fantasy of the mechanical body, the tendency to represent artificial people as slaves, and the interpretation of artificiality as an existential trope. What unifies these investigations is the return of all four elements to the question of what constitutes the human. This focused approach to the topic of the artificial, constructed, or mechanical person allows us to reconsider the creation of artificial life. By focusing on their historical provenance and textual versatility, Kakoudaki elucidates artificial people’s main cultural function, which is the political and existential negotiation of what it means to be a person.

Poor Technology

Poor Technology
Author: Levi Checketts
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 443
Release: 2024-01-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506482325

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In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has moved in popular discourse from the purview of science-fiction imaginings to the key financial sector of the twenty-first century. As world powers, trillion-dollar companies, and public intellectuals emphasize the importance of AI, the general concerns people raise relate to economic movement, control, bias, and safety.?? This book adds a further concern, namely the way our approach to AI reinforces assumptions about dignity and personhood tied to the sort of thinking that is characteristic of bourgeois capitalists. The experience of poverty reveals that people who are poor do not think the same way as the upper classes--their experience of the world must be understood through the reality of survival within resource-scarce settings and the attendant domination and discrimination that come with being poor. These experiences do not fit well with the "ideal choice" selection model that underlies AI modeling, and numerous failures of AI to help the poor demonstrate that those who benefit primarily from AI are those who already live well.?? As a result, the fervor surrounding AI often serves to dehumanize the poor by eliminating employment opportunities, automating social work, reinforcing biases, and prioritizing profit over stability. Worst of all, however, AI functions to satisfy a psychological need for us to have "others" against whom we can distinguish ourselves without having to feel guilty about the reality of the struggle of the poor. Taking seriously the theological perspective of the "preferential option for the poor," this work contends that to avoid relegating poor people to nonhuman status, we must be willing to put aside the fantasy that AI is "intelligent" and focus rather on the all-too-human embodied reality of the poor.

Robo Sapiens Japanicus

Robo Sapiens Japanicus
Author: Jennifer Robertson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2018
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0520283198

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Japan is arguably the first postindustrial society to embrace the prospect of human-robot coexistence. Over the past decade, Japanese humanoid robots designed for use in homes, hospitals, offices, and schools have become celebrated in mass and social media throughout the world. In Robo sapiens japanicus, Jennifer Robertson casts a critical eye on press releases and public relations videos that misrepresent robots as being as versatile and agile as their science fiction counterparts. An ethnography and sociocultural history of governmental and academic discourse of human-robot relations in Japan, this book explores how actual robots—humanoids, androids, and animaloids—are “imagineered” in ways that reinforce the conventional sex/gender system and political-economic status quo. In addition, Robertson interrogates the notion of human exceptionalism as she considers whether “civil rights” should be granted to robots. Similarly, she juxtaposes how robots and robotic exoskeletons reinforce a conception of the “normal” body with a deconstruction of the much-invoked Theory of the Uncanny Valley.

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis
Author: Janet Malcolm
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2011-06-08
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 030779783X

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From the author of In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer comes an intensive look at the practice of psychoanalysis through interviews with “Aaron Green,” a Freudian analyst in New York City. Malcolm is accessible and lucid in describing the history of psychoanalysis and its development in the United States. It provides rare insight into the contradictory world of psychoanalytic training and treatment and a foundation for our understanding of psychiatry and mental health. "Janet Malcom has managed somehow to peer into the reticent, reclusive world of psychoanalysis and to report to us, with remarkable fidelity, what she has seen. When I began reading I thought condescendingly, 'She will get the facts right, and everything else wrong.' She does get the facts right, but far more pressive, she has been able to capture and convey the claustral atmosphere of the profession. Her book is journalism become art." —Joseph Andelson, The New York Times Book Review

Freud

Freud
Author: Frederick Crews
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Total Pages: 768
Release: 2017-08-22
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1627797181

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From the master of Freud debunkers, the book that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creator Since the 1970s, Sigmund Freud’s scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin—but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who in fact never cured anyone, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud’s fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers. A monumental biographical study and a slashing critique, Freud: The Making of an Illusion will stand as the last word on one of the most significant and contested figures of the twentieth century.

The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Technology

The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Technology
Author: David Goodman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 597
Release: 2023-08-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000895246

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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.

Experimenting the Human

Experimenting the Human
Author: G Douglas Barrett
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2023-01-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0226823407

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An engaging consideration of 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 have challenged the centrality of the human amid the uneven temporality of postwar capitalism. Experimental music addresses this condition, Barrett contends, not by adhering to the formal strictures of musical modernism but by producing extra-formal meaning through its immanent transdisciplinary involvements with postwar science, technology, and art movements. Hear Alvin Lucier use his brain waves to play percussion. Picture Pamela Z sculpting the sound of her voice using her wearable BodySynth system. Imagine Pauline Oliveros reflecting her voice off of the moon using radio signals. What these musical artworks have in common is an engagement with the notion that the human has been increasingly challenged through cultural, biological, medical, economic, and technoscientific means. This book brings together music studies, art history, and media studies to provide new perspectives on cybernetics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, robotics, and radio astronomy. Through a unique meeting of experimental music, posthumanism, and contemporary art, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into the perennial question of what it means to be human.