Lydia H. Liu
On her book The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious
Cover Interview of June 13, 2011
philosophy /
art /
literature /
psychology /
cold war /
language /
representation /
mathematics /
joyce james /
hausmann raoul /
Editor’s note
Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline
“How human-machine relationships can be rethought at the level of the unconscious.”
We highlighted two quotes.
On the first page:
“James Joyce was the first to coin ‘iSpace,’ a curious ideograph that anticipated ‘iPod,’ ‘iPhone,’ and many other such novelties by many decades.”
On the second:
“Claude Shannon invented a 27th letter for the English alphabet—the letter ‘space.’ The addition of the letter ‘space’ has transformed English writing into a statistical system of symbols. Our good old English has become ideographic through Shannon’s mathematical work. Yes, ideographic, rather than phonetic.”