BwO from
Christian Hubert's project
The "body without organs
" and the "organs-partial objects" are concepts that Deleuze and Guattari mobilize in opposition to the
organism
and its organization, in opposition to the functional specificity of
organs, so as to release the decoded and deterritorialized flows of
desire . The BwO is the "anorganism of the
body" a bundle of
virtual affects in a non-organic and non-organized
multiplicity, "molecular" rather than "
molar."
Rather than an undifferentiated "Pre-Oedipal" body, (a retrospecive
illusion projected back onto the infantile body by psychoanalysis) the
BwO is a hyperdifferentiation, Individuation at its most intense. (cf
subject)
Deleuze and Guattari use the expression "body without organs" to describe what they call the "
plane of consistency of
desire ". (with desire defined as a process of production without reference to any exterior
agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it) It is the
field of
immanence
of desire, as opposed to its surfaces of stratification, where the
judgement of God makes it
an
organism, a signification, a subject. The
body without organs is a site of non-coded flows, like the full body of
the earth.
The BwO is an extreme rejection of a Helmolzian mechanical psychology
that would, for example. treat the eye as a measuring device which the
brain uses in constructing a practically efficient
map
of the external world. In the BwO "No organ is constant as regards
either function or position,...se
x organs sprout everywhere,...rectums
open, defecate and close,...the entire organism changes color and
consistency in split-second adjustments" (William Burroughs, Naked
Lunch, p. 9) It is an anti-armor, the polar opposite of the armored body
studied by Wilhelm Reich and Klaus Theweleit (Male Fantasies). As an
external sign of their internalized character armor, the men of the
Freikorps
fortified themselves with hard leather body armor to assert their
solidarity against the threat of fluid women. (although even Fascism is
desire)
The BwO is a fusion of internal and external which must be constructed.
It can take place in very different social formations, through very
different assemblages.
Deleuze and Guattari refer to the BwO "not as a notion or concept but a
practice or set of practices" (A Thousand Plateaus, pp 149 - 150) and
advocate the careful dismantling of the organism through practices that
include the hypochondriac body, the paranoid body, the schizo
body, the drugged body, and the masochist body. (Since the degree of
freedom is also a degree of danger, all the more reason to make the
escape with the utmost sobriety. --Massumi, p.85) "Think of the body
without organs as the body outside any determinate state, Massumi, p.70)
"Where psychoanalysis says 'Stop, find your self again,' we should say instead, "Let's go further still, we havn't found our BwO
yet, we havn't sufficiently dismantled our self." (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 151) (see also
identity)This
ideal status is ultimately unattainable. "You never reach the Body
without Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a
limit." (p. 150) The BwO is the opposite of the body image
For Deleuze and Guattari, the
bachelor machine "forms a new alliance between
desiring machines and the body without organs to give birth to a new humanity. The
subject,
which is produced as a mere residuum alongside the desiring machines
confuses himself with the bachelor machine, and thus the autoeroticism
of the bachelor machine gives birth to the subject. The bachelor machine
produces pure intensive qualities.
The Body without organs is a a chastised body. In his radio play of 1947,
To Be Done with the Judgement of God, Antonin Artaud proposed a kind of "Dionysian castration":
-By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy.
I say, to remake his anatomy.
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally,
god,
and with god
his organs.
For you can tie me up if you wish,
but there is nothing more useless than an organ.
When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic
reactions and restored him to his true freedom.
Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.
(in Artaud, Selected Writings, pp 570 -571)
The wrong side out also relates the BwO to Blanchot's concepts of
thought from the outside. (see Foucault / Blanchot ) Like Foucault, and
Bataille before them, Deleuze and Guattari find in Artaud's discourse of
madness the inspiration for a anthropological / psychoanalytic
discourse
of excess and transgression. Artaud saw the organs as functional
articulations forced on the body, as restrictions entailing separation,
determination, and
representation.
Subject to epilepsy and eventually madness, Artaud's thinking is an
expression of his torment and suffering. (see James Miller's biography
of Foucault, The Passion of Michel Foucault, pp 275-276.)
An organon, an obsolescent word in English for organ, is defined as "an
instrumentality
for the aquisition of knowledge, a "body of methodological doctrine."
(Webster's) Is the "body without organs" a resistance to method?
"The organ is a restriction, not the cause, of the activity of the
formative impulse." (G.R. Treviranus, Biology, 1802 - 1822 vol. 4)
The body without organs has been an object of feminist criticism. For Luce Iragaray (
Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un,
p.140) the notion is reminiscent of a condition of dispossession of the
bodily self. She points out that the emphasis on the machinic, the
inorganic, as well as the notions of loss of self, dispersion, and
fluidity are all too familiar to women: Is not the body without organs
women's own historical "The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and
thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed
by
gradients marking the transitions and the
becomings,
the destinations of the subject developing along these particular
vectors."
Anti-Oedipus, p. 19 CH NOTE Use this quote in relationship to
Fuller Domes, Kieler Endless House, Kaufmann's diagrams of
morphogenetic areas.
In Terminal Identity, Scott
Bukatman considers Deleuze and Guattari as
"Cyberpunks, too, constructing fictions of terminal identity in the
nearly familiar language of a
techno-
surrealism." (p. 326) For him, the
BwO "is the state in which we aspire to dissolve the body and regain the
world." Bukatman compares Vaughn's quest in Ballard's Crash to attain
the body without organs. In "The Technology of Death and Its Limits: the
Problem of the Simulation
Model" (in Rethinking Technologies, p.
156-170) Scott Durham traces the relationships between death and
technological planning in Crash as well as in Siegfried Giedion's
Mechanization Takes Command. For Giedion, the not altogether successful
attempts at the mechanization of death in the slaughterhouse is the
point where industrial
techniques find their limit in the organic world.
In Crash, according to Durham, "the 'accident' of death itself emerges
as a product of triumphant industrial planning and technology". He
describes the universe of Crash as very much like the Baudrillardian
model of a world in which the "real" has become dependent on
reproduction, and in which the subject withers away as a consequence of
the death of the auratic object, persisting only as a condemned and
useless vestige alongside the
simulacra that precede and envelope it.
_______________________________________
