The Unconscious of the Unconscious (of the Unconscious)

Avant-Coup: How to Do Things with Things'What is Therapy?', 'What are Things?' 1 Both of these terms are crucial in the shift from Lacanian psychoanalysis to Félix Guattari's schizoanalysis that I will trace in this essay.Concerning 'therapy', while the perimeter of the psychoanalytic talking cure is drawn closely around individual patients and the divan-chair arrangement, schizoanalysis widens this therapeutic perimeter to include the larger social and natural milieu, creating a resonance between the cure of individual patients and what Martin Heidegger calls cura as 'care for the world' [Sorge um die Welt].The term 'sculpture in the expanded field' that Rosalind Krauss used in 1979 to describe land art might be modulated to formulate this difference.2 Psychoanalysis is to modern sculpture what schizoanalysis is to land art.Or, more pointedly, schizoanalysis is 'psychoanalysis in the expanded field'.Concerning 'things', while things are crucially important in the theory of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the only things he uses in the therapeutic setting are words, or, more specifically, signifiers as the things language consists of.Guattari, in contrast, integrates technical monitoring and recording devices into the therapeutic scene as one element in his overall expansion of the therapeutic field.Both Lacan's notion of things and Guattari's integration imply comprehensive re-conceptualizations and re-evaluations of things that are framed by the philosophical distinction between the thing in itself and the phenomenal Thing for us.Similar re-interpretations also lie at the center of the recent philosophical schools 7