The body without organs first appeared in Deleuze’s (1990) The Logic of Sense, then in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1984) Anti-Oedipus and then in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) A Thousand Plateaus. The term was first coined by Antonin Artaud in the 1940s, and Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 150) suggest that Artaud made himself a body without organs when …
What is a body without organs? D&G say that the BwO is full—full in the sense that it is a blank surface without the interconnected functions or parts that organs would be. It is full precisely because it lacks any depth or differentiation. D&G claim that the body suffers from being organized in a triangulated …
But how can something be full, when it is emptied out? “The mad state is, as he emphasizes over and over again, empty. Teeming with emptiness. Knotted with emptiness. Immodest in its emptiness. You can pull emptiness out of it by the handful. “I am not here. I am not here and never will be.” …
Give me an example of a BwO: “eyes closed tight, nostrils pinched shut, ears stopped up” (pp. 37-38). Why is the BwO closed off? D&G define the BwO as a paranoid machine: a machine of primary repression. This paranoiac is hypersensitive, it suffers from desiring-machines, and wishes it could turn them all off. Desiring-machines are …
What is a desiring machine? For D&G, there is no such thing as desire, only desiring-machines. It’s not a thing, but a process. Roland Bogue describes desiring machines by way of an infant feeding a the mother’s breast. Here the “mouth-machine” of the infant and the “breast machine” enter into an circuit (through the flow of …
If a BwO doesn’t produce anything, how does it function? The two aspects of the BwO that most interest D&G are its function of recording and its apparent miraculous form, that is, the appearance of miracles. “The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as a surface for the recording of the entire process …
Capital is a body without organs of the capitalist (or the capitalist being), and labor is a productive machine. Recording: Capital is thus the unproductive surface on which the production of labor is recorded. “Recording” means that the value of labor/production is determined on capital. For the miraculous aspect they refer to Marx’s concept of …
Desire and subjectivity? Where did you go? Is the BwO a real body or some sort of metaphor for capitalism? Well, D&G don’t really beleive in metaphor. No representation. No modeling or mini. For D&G, we are always “becoming.” So, in essense, we become capital and capital becomes us. It’s about the processes, the production …
So the celibate machine is a good thing? Well, sort of. Again. D&G don’t exactly like the categories of good and bad. But they do explicitly describe the residuum of the celibate machine as positive. A celibate machine takes on all kinds of different desiring-machines (thinking that these machines are his /her “true” subjectivity). However, these …
In A Thousand Plateaus (ATP), the BwO is depicted as productive – independent of goal-directed workings of the capitalist political economy, and irreducible to the Freudian mommy-daddy-me triangle. Invoking the BwO, D&G offer a different way of thinking about the body that contrasts with the notion of the organism. What do they mean by organism? …
So what’s a BwO this time? Hypochondriac body: “The organs are destroyed, the damage has already been done, nothing happens anymore. ‘Miss X claims that she no longer has a brain or nerves or chest or stomach or guts. All she has left is the skin and bones of a disorganized body. These are her words:’” (ATP, 150) …
What’s with the masochism? D&G are using this kind of program to reveal the way that desiring machines attach themselves to the BwO. Sewing the body shut, as the paranoid body does, and flogging the body (attaching “waves of pain” to the body). This pain is like an intensity (remember?). Now here’s where it gets …
This is all twisted up. It’s not. Actually the BwO is an intensification of all feeling… However, achieving these intensities is delicate. In fact, D&G warn readers of the “ever-present dangers of that empty their BwO’s instead of filling them.” (ATP 152) Creating a BwO is a task that must be attacked with caution, `since …