The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis (Semiotext

by Félix Guattari, Taylor Adkins (Translator)

We certainly have the unconscious that we deserve, an unconscious for specialists, ready-made for an institutionalized discourse. I would rather see it as something that wraps itself around us in everyday objects, something that is involved with day-to-day problems, with the world outside. It would be the possible itself, open to the socius, to the cosmos...--from The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in SchizoanalysisIn his seminal solo-authored work The Machinic Unconscious (originally published in French in 1979), Felix Guattari lays the groundwork for a general pragmatics capable of resisting the semiotic enslavement of subjectivity. Concluding that psychoanalytic theory had become part and parcel of a repressive, capitalist social order, Guattari here outlines a schizoanalytic theory to undo its capitalist structure and set the discipline back on its feet. Combining theoretical research from fields as diverse as cybernetics, semiotics, ethnology, and ethology, Guattari reintroduces into psychoanalysis a -polemical- dimension, at once transhuman, transsexual, and transcosmic, that brings out the social and political--the -machinic---potential of the unconscious.To illustrate his theory, Guattari turns to literature and analyzes the various modes of subjectivization and semiotization at work in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, examining the novel as if he were undertaking a scientific exploration in the style of Freud or Newton. Casting Proust's figures as abstract (-hyper-deterritorialized-) mental objects, Guattari maps the separation between literature and science, elaborating along the way such major Deleuze-Guattarian concepts as -faciality- and -refrain, - which would be unpacked in their subsequent A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.Never before available in English, The Machinic Unconscious has for too long been the missing chapter from Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus project: the most important political extension of May 1968 and one of the most important philosophical contributions of the twentieth century.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, France

367 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2010

About the author

Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy. Guattari is best known for his intellectual collaborations with Gilles Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Reviews

[Micah · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Today all instances of semiotic production and all systems of value weave a gigantic net composed of points of potential signification from which it is impossible to escape without a radical reevaluation of every assemblage of enunciation."

Guattari's stated aim is to subvert the dominant significations and "escape from language," and I must say he succeeds. For me a lot of the first part is like a fever dream, although I could probably follow it better if I were more versed in linguistics and semiotics. Guattari is surely using terms from those fields in his own unique way, however. Maybe in a general way, we can say that he sees processes of reduction, simplification, rigidification, and redundancy operating in a way that closes off the vectors that, in a potential (and "more real") way, connect the otherwise distant and disparate and create surprising configurations that escape the same old power formations. Schizoanalysts are always looking for the singularities and components of passage that give new consistency to assemblages building new worlds, new lives and subjectivities.

Guattari is proposing a new way of thinking, feeling and perceiving, a way to overcome the limits of personhood and alienation. I have to say I feel my machines connecting to the ones he's throwing out here. The second part, on Proust, makes his emissions more graspable and shows how faces, landscapes and refrains can be the machines that make time and space work.

[Basho · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another difficult philosophy book. The first half of this was mostly impenetrable for me. And that considering I have read other Deleuze and Guattari books. The second half was more accessible being about Proust’s books and in particular the musical refrain that occurs in them. But even here, understanding a bit more of what was being said, I didn’t really find it to be very exciting. Maybe for me Guattari is better in combination with Deleuze. I’ll have to read more solo stuff to find out.

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only read a few chapters out of it as Guattari’s jargon is just so complex and way over my head. If he could just break it down in layman’s terms (and be like Wittgenstein), I could get a better idea of what’s up. But what I can get, I feel; and the main point (I guess) is that capitalistic societies have the tendency to limit pragmatics to the point where it’s very easy to come off exotic forms of mentally ill. As it were in Anti- Oedipus.

[Devon · Rating 4 out of 5]

ughh…the first part was such a slog…mostly because of the jargon…surprisingly worse than either volume of “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”. perhaps serious students of psychoanalysis or linguistics would not find it so much so…

still, ultimately quite rewarding.. the second part- which is a brilliant, psychedelic examination of Proust- utilizes the concepts and terminology of the first part to produce a schizoanalytic reading of the text…or more precisely, unpacks and illustrates how Proust’s masterpiece is itself a schizoanalytic monograph.

i enjoyed it much more than Deleuze’s “Proust and Signs”…

4 stars for the second part, barely 3 for the first (though i suppose it’s necessary)

[Dinah Verleun · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are all part of a machine. Extraordinary book to understand systems of control including ourselves and everything around any system.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

would probably serve as a bad intro to Guattari’s solo work (chaosophy might be the best for that? need to re-read), but this is an excellent companion piece to the two volumes of capitalism and schizophrenia. ends with a super compelling reading of Proust, but unfortunately now i think i need to read the other six volumes of the Recherche… (i thought we all silently agreed to just read Swann’s Way!)

[Lucia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly dense, quite clearly unintelligible at times, undoubtedly charismatic read (but could not really gauge its level of consistency since I understood a very basic level of it).
The analysis of Swann was very interesting, and almost made sense to me. On the other hand, it left me wondering whether, despite the overt criticism on psychoanalytic ‘orthodoxy’, the heavy reliance on the author’s own trademark language was actually liberating or hindering the analysis from its own brand of orthodoxy.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Therefore, the question is not simply knowing if a pragmatic transformation intervenes on different levels: semantic, syntactic, phonological, prosodic, etc., but one of studying how it intervenes on a micropolitical plane. And when we do not notice its incidence, this is because the analysis has not been fully carried out!”

[Harald Wenk]

Tzher mosrt "exopert technical" book of Guattrai at all,weŕitten at the samre time as "THousand Plateaus" and th rtewal part two of thr Anti-Oedpe for "psy"professionals,a Guattri called them at last.