# The Seminar of Félix Guattari #2 │ The Four Unconsciouses

**Channel:** Schizoanalytic Onion
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r14ocZaAq5U
**Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/r14ocZaAq5U

## Chapters

- 0:00 — Introduction to the Unconscious Dimensions
- 4:13 — Material and Territorial Unconscious
- 7:51 — Assemblages, Deterritorialization, and Thresholds
- 11:03 — Machinic Phyla and Abstract Machines

## Transcript

**[0:00]:** how's it everyone is watching this this is my 60 second video on the channel and today we're going to be looking at another of the seminars for the social held between 1980 and 1988. before unconsciouses as the name suggests this lecture deals with the role of the unconscious in schizo analysis introducing many ideas that would be echoed in later works like his Infamous Cassandra to cartographies for this episode I'm using the translation By the Fantastic Taylor Adkins over at fractal ontologies although I unfortunately can't use page numbers for each quote I'll link their Source in the description below without further Ado let's get into it gold tree Begins by outlining four dimensions pattern assemblages as they apply to the unconscious be subjective material Territorial and machine the first of these is organized around what he calls components of expression a rather nebulous term that contains all sorts of things from

**[0:58]:** words and clothing to symptoms and communication on the molecular level when it comes to what it's attached to I think Walter puts it best this type of unconscious is that of the personal subject of the individuation of the assemblage of enunciation or potentially of a collective assemblage subject of enunciation actually as I said in my series on the three ecologies a subject is a little like a ridge formed from the Collision of tectonic plates individuals are constantly being extracted from these Arrangements of components of expression with pronouns being the most obvious example of the linguistic front from a whole arrangement of voices you select a specific identity when you use the pronoun I however this self isn't an island built on language alone instead all sorts of other components come into play like the aforementioned clothing symptoms and so on and so on going even further the resulting ridges often don't line up needy with

**[1:57]:** specific people a wide range of hetrogenous things are implicated under subjectivity regardless though quality's Focus here is more on individual patients has its black holes something shown in this diagram these are essentially traps which in the subjective unconscious manifest themselves as things like obsessional neurosis and Hysteria in the first case which is similar to OCD something that leads to the subject losing consistency can cause what Watry calls a retardorialization of components of expression in other words certain ways of expressing Things become fixated which shows up in the repetitive actions that characterize the disorder territorialization isn't necessarily a bad thing though it's simply a process that slows components down without which there would be no consistency or subject to even speak of in the first dimension of the unconscious we find a system of territorialized signs the metastable components that make up our subjectivity this can be both negative and positive on the one hand the

**[3:06]:** system can collapse in on itself due to something of linguistic black hole the result being hysteria characterized by psychosomatic symptoms on the other hand there's the blossoming of a heterogeneous components discussed earlier in quality's own words this first dimension of expression of the assemblage in the unconscious field can therefore pass into a register of the black hole but it can also pass into a diagrammatic register this diagrammatic register is also called that of components of Passage as the latiname suggests entering the register can lead to creative Transformations then modify how expression surfaces culture refers to the subject of unconscious as both neurotic and artistic for this reason since falling into obsessional hysterical black holes is just as possible as generating novel forms of expression the addition refuses to play a zero-sum game both neurotic and diagrammatic processes can intermingle in the same subjective unconscious B1 doesn't exclude the other it's with this that we arrive

**[4:13]:** at the second dimension the material the defined characteristic of this level is the fact that is organized around components of content rather than those of expression which it functions independently from pathologically these components surface as hallucinations and delusions in psychosis however quality doesn't really elaborate onto the dimension further instead moving directly into what he calls the territorial or corporeal unconscious this is the level of things like family networks relationships and collections of partial objects to illustrate how it works is the third that he focuses on In classical psychoanalysis partial objects are usually considered to be well parts of a whole most often they apply two organs Omega people like in the case of Melanie Klein's notion of a bad and good breasts however godreji takes a wildly different approach as he himself puts it the partial object is not partial in relation to a totality that would be that of the body or that of

**[5:14]:** an entire libidinal topography but it is the partial object of a dimension of an assemblage in this unconscious as the name suggests the focus is on territories however no process of territorialization is free from the destabilizing force of deterritorialization in this way partial objects can never become something fully totalized or static to baragwati's own wording we find a politics of semiotic collapsia which characterizes its black holes when you get too close or push them too far territories basically fall into themselves dissolving in the process it's on this note that we arrive at the loss of the four dimensions the Machining unconscious to give a quick recap of the other 3 the first and second levels or I seek a kind of stability in their respective expressions and contents even if that can lead to neuroses and psychosis likewise the third despite always undergoing the territorializations also aims at what she calls a pseudo-identity is with

**[6:20]:** this in mind that the machinic unconscious becomes so unique here is a question of far from equilibrium systems which escape the stratifications of the other dimensions in his eyes it can be described as carrying a set of possibles that inhabit and cause every level of assemblage to mutate as he says if you like an example for those of you who have read anti-edipus this would be a dissociation of the notion of the schizo unconscious discuss at the heart of one of the biggest misunderstandings that surround the losing World tree's Infamous capitalism and schizophrenia duology when they consider the latter to be revolutionary they are talking about psychosis as such which exists on the level of the material unconscious instead the invoking this machinic processual dimension linked as it is to a kind of radical branching out that keeps the many facets of the assemblage from closing in on themselves however as Gloucester is quick to

**[7:19]:** add black holes like cure too in fact just as its possibles can proliferate through every other level these black holes can accumulate similar phenomena from across a diverse range of domains his example is the machine gun conscious of Christianity which carry capitalism as a black hole something that has proven itself to implicate each of qatari's dimensions it's at this point they takes a step back to address relationship between before unconsciousnesses as dimensions of assemblages they are

**[7:51]:** always articulated together you can't have one and not the others nor is there any sort of fundamental priority amongst them however it's also true that there's a tendency while sitting by calls to leave a dance in a given situation the components of expression from the subjective level might overpower the components of content promise material counterpart in any case you can't draw a thin line between where one ends and another begins something that he seeks to illustrate using the example of a TV and a remote listing a few other heterogeneous elements to make up this assemblage gothri says in my example there is a formal or formalized Surface of representation a mechanical or electromechanical process and what happens at the level of a particular object alongside these there's also what's going on in the operator's mind when it comes to the First Dimension expression appears to be acts of Passage that occur between the different elements

**[8:51]:** or levels of the assemblage here we find a process of deterritorialization that splits content and expression this is followed by a second deterritorialization which constitutes the Traverse levels as belonging to the second dimension that is as being content the third deterritorialization is where it gets particularly interesting where acts of Passage to limit certain regions to produce territorialities at first glance such a claim might sound a bit outlandish how can a territory be generated out of deterritorialization leaving the remote assemblage behind Kochi offers an example of transference which involves a passage of things like emotions between an analyst and an analyze and here detectoralization extracts aspects from things like the face linking them to past relationships traumas and so on and so forth the transparential assemblage these faciality traits are essentially generated before the analyzing method analyst they didn't exist however they were turned into a territoriality through their very extraction through deterritorialization the question now

**[10:03]:** is how far faciality traits can be pushed before falling into a black hole this is the politics of semiotic collapse that we talked about earlier assemblages have a certain territoriality that they can work in outside of it they break down as Godfrey says concerning an assemblage and pulling faciality traits in a photograph there are certain thresholds it's fine it'll still work I'll be able to change the grain of the photo and then it'll be even better and then at some point it won't work at all with this we now have a set of three detectoralizations the quarter describes as autogenetic corresponding to a set of three dimensions linked to the existence of assemblages to go over them quickly the first detectoralization by symmetization or expression possible next the second deterritorialization brought elements into the assemblage finally the third give it a certain scope outside which it can't function however we haven't yet spoken about before

**[11:03]:** machinic dimension this is what gotchi calls the phylogenetic implicating so-called Machining phyla these are fields of possibles that involve both the past and the future implying certain kind of smoothing of time to illustrate this he offers the example of Christianity once again as comes sema's diagram it essentially mutated all the religions that came before it retroactively their problems were taken up in a new way throwing a different light on them back through time this is something that is always going on with new discoveries always shifting with possibles after father carry the development of a microprocessor for instance changes the phylum it is linked to however this isn't all there is we've been discussing the actual which involves things that are directly represented and involved in the situation is also a realm of abstract machines that interlaces all four dimensions of the assemblage and puts the virtual interplay they keep things like phyla from being static

**[12:05]:** adding an almost creative element into causality that saves God tree from critiques of a possible made by people like books andalus in his words abstract machinisms are incarnated in various dimensions of the assemblage or conversely various assemblages transform abstract machinisms mutate them it works in both directions in a way albeit against godrey's wishes abstract machines can be described as something similar to Essences or platonic ideas however they are fundamentally distinguished by the fact that they are not Transcendent nor static if you have seen my series on Mineral delander's intensive science and visual philosophy quarter is almost similar to Duluth in insisting that the relationship between these machines and sandwiches goes both directions few virtual possibles are to form a carry can be actualized into the latter in the same way their new virtual possibles can come out of those actualizations it's with this that I would like to conclude with gochi getting cut off by

**[13:09]:** the tape recorder before it can rally elaborate further although this has been a bit of a dense video I truly hope you enjoyed and learned something and if you feel I got anything wrong wasn't as clear as I could have been please do feel free to let me know in the comments so I can do better next time we'll likely be doing something a bit different until then bye