What

is a ‘Body without Organs’?

by FT
November-December 2018

Patreon Edition





































Two of my favorite thinkers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, wrote a few books together. One of the main
concepts that recurs in their books is something called a
or the “body without organs.” Deleuze & Guattari
weren’t the first to use the phrase, but it’s widely
associated with them, and in contemporary theory, the
use of this term most frequently has Deleuzian
connotations, or at least implications. But…what is a
“Body without Organs”?

This text isn’t meant to be definitive or authoritative. It
just tries to summarize my own observations and
reflections after thinking about this concept for a while.
























I.
Everything: The Concept As Limit


“You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it,
you are forever attaining it, it is a limit. People ask, So what is
this BwO? – But you’re already on it, scurrying like a vermin,
groping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic.”

“The BwO is what remains when you take everything away.”

- Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus



What does it mean to think about “everything”?

What does “everything” even mean?

We might say, “Everything is all the things that are.” That would make “everything”
an “it” in itself, a kind of collective noun.

We could also say, “Everything is being itself,” in this case elevating the same set of
objects to the status of a principle, giving being a kind of magical independent
existence.

The weird thing about “everything” is this: the more you think about it, the more it
recedes. In our two short examples, almost before we could blink we reduced
immeasurably the concept of everything. In the first instance we reduced everything
immediately to a referent, an “it,” in the second we reduced it to a metaphysical
principle, losing sight of infinity almost immediately. When we try to pin down what
“Everything” is, we end up deflecting our inquiry to adjacent questions: What does it
mean ‘to be’? Is the set of all things itself an element without a set? (The problem
known as Russell’s Paradox).

The pre-Socratic philosophers (or “pre-Platonic,” as Nietzsche prefers to call them)
didn’t deflect, they faced everything directly: “Everything is flux,” said Heraclitus.
“Everything is atoms,” said Democritus. “Everything is One,” said Parmenides. Then
Plato came along with his bullshit: “But how do you know? But how can you tell? But
what if it’s not? But how can we be sure?” And that’s how things have proceeded
more or less since, with a few vital exceptions.

In the Middle Ages, Moses Maimonides and his stan Thomas Aquinas pioneered an
approach called negative theology, also known as apophatic theology or the via
negativa. Maimonides and Aquinas took for granted that God was something greater
than anything we could grasp as Being, and thus more than everything. God’s own
(non)Being is unfathomable to the human mind, which means that we can only try
to understand God by looking at Being and rejecting its qualities and attributes as
not what God is, without ever arriving at true knowledge. We can’t understand God’s
infinite power, we can only understand finite human power and grasp that God’s
power is unfathomably greater; we can’t understand God’s substance, we can only
look at the substance of existents and grasp that God’s substance is unfathomably
different. And so on. There is an equivalent or analogous process in Hinduism,
described in the Upanishads as neti neti, “Neither this nor that.” In the via negativa
we find both echoes of Plato and a foreshadowing of Hegel’s dialectic.

Then came Spinoza. Spinoza decided to tackle the problem head-on, and announced
that everything was a single substance of infinite attributes, indivisible and infinite
in itself, or else that substance was that which was the cause of itself. Spinoza’s
approach was the opposite of negative theology, it was pure positivity: Spinoza was
determined to state what everything is, not just what it isn’t. But even in Spinoza,
the mind is never adequate to actual knowledge of that positivity. We can deduce
inferentially and positively what it must be, rather than assuming that we can never
know it, but we only grasp fragments of it, pieces we are able to fathom with our
limited minds, which have a finite degree of power. In this regard Spinoza remains
true to Maimonides, whose work he knew well.

The concept of “everything” is a kind of strange loop, because it never has an
adequate referent. The opposite problem is much more common in language – we
see or picture something, and we lack the right word for it. With “everything” we
have a word that perfectly encapsulates its own meaning, but no object or referent
to attach to it. That’s because “everything” is a function or a modifier – a particular
kind of concept: a limit. It’s a limit because it continually recedes, or changes into
something else. You can try to imagine everything by imagining one thing then
another and trying to keep adding things until you’ve caught them all; but then
you’re thinking of a whole bunch of things, not of “everything.” You could also go the
other way: think of a whole bunch of stuff, then slowly subtract all the individual
concepts and ideas until you’re left with…what? (“The body without organs is what
remains when you take everything away”). Or you can try imagining some kind of
abstract totality, a void, the universe, anything; it still won’t be everything.

The strange part of all this is that even though you can’t formulate a clear and
distinct reference for the concept of everything, the concept itself is exceedingly
clear. Nobody would suggest that there’s no such thing as “everything”; how can
you, it’s right in front of your face! Everything, an incredibly difficult concept for
metaphysics, is a very simple one for grammar: grammatical concepts are the
simplest and most common ones in any language. We can express the metaphysical
problem of everything like this: “How do we define or describe or discuss the whole
of all the possible things we can conceive without reducing that whole to any
particular thing with which it is necessarily not equivalent?”

The body without organs is Deleuze & Guattari’s way of explaining or expressing a
specific positive concept of “everything.” That doesn’t mean that the body without
organs is simply “the same as” everything, they’re two different concepts. As we’ll
see, a better synonym for the BwO would be “everything else.” But understanding
the difficulties of “everything” can help us understand the difficulties of “the body
without organs.” Like Spinoza, Deleuze & Guattari exclude negation from their
conception. And like Spinoza, they don’t assume that we will ever be able to grasp
everything adequately, as a concept with a clear and distinct referent (“You never
reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a
limit.”). Like Spinoza’s “substance,” the “body without organs” is a kind of horizon
for thought, a limit, as opposed to a threshold that can be crossed, or a relation that
can be adequately conceived. Like Spinoza’s substance, the body without organs is
what all things are in some fundamental way, but it is not the truth of things, nor is it
the latent content of things, waiting somehow inside or behind them.

My best and only effort at a concise definition for this concept would look something
like this: “The limit-concept of everything that results from our immanent
understanding of how things actually are.” But our understanding of “how things
actually are” is historical and contingent, which means that our understanding of
“everything” is also historical and contingent…which is actually a really strange idea
if you think about it. Aristotle thought the universe was finite; Spinoza and Epicurus
thought that it was infinite. Only one of those things can be the case, right? Those
are two different ideas of “everything.” However you happen to perceive or
understand the world, however your reality or existence happens to be organized,
there will always be a limit, an outer boundary to your comprehension that is not
simply the same as everything you actually know; it’s the rest of reality. The body
without organs is a kind of everything, or maybe a kind of everything else.


*

Concepts are always a response to specific problems; a slight shift in the framing of
the problem can produce an entirely different concept. New concepts are born when
the existing concepts are no longer satisfactory – that is, when old concepts no
longer adequately respond to new problems. In the case of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, when Deleuze & Guattari looked around in the early ‘70s to see which
concepts were inadequate to the problems they were trying to address, they decided
the answer was “pretty much all of them.” So they made new ones.

Rather than starting slowly and building one concept or argument at a time,
Capitalism and Schizophrenia plunges you immediately into an entire framework,
and into a strange and unfamliar language. The opening of Anti-Oedipus, especially,
can feel like being dropped into ice-cold water. Everything is so alien and different,
but it’s supposed to feel that way, like entering a cocoon, letting the strangeness of it
close and wrap around you and enfold you. A slimy, throbbing, ice-cold cocoon.
Mmmmmm.
I’ll come back to this comparison, but Anti-Oedipus is a lot like Spinoza’s Ethics: it’s a
three-dimensional machine that works by making connections, rather than a two-
dimensional machine that works by making sequential arguments. The arguments
go backwards and forwards. An argument about the family might starts in Chapter II
and conclude in Chapter III. The section on the family and the section on social
formations are two sides of the same coin, that’s the whole point. Anti-Oedipus is an
enormously complex book that looks again and again and again at the same basic
problems – the problem of desire, the problem of repression, the problem of the
family – from a multitude of angles and through a multitude of lenses. Unfamiliar
terms hit you immediately, but it can take a long time, sometimes years, for you to
connect that term to all the other relevant pieces scattered through the book. Rather
than trying to understand every sentence and argument in order, it’s often more
helpful to try and understand which parts connect to which other parts, and how.
How does it work? What does it do?

We encounter the body without organs almost immediately, in the second section of
the text, but it’s quite hard to really grasp until much later, which is exactly as
annoying as it sounds. It puts the reader and the teacher both in a vexed position: do
we stay stalled on this one difficult concept almost immediately, for as long as it
takes to understand, or do we move on and hope clarity will come later? It’s really
up to you and your inclinations. The first time you read the text, I suggest you try to
push past the concepts you don’t understand, and then stop and rest on them the
second-read through. Either way, don’t let any one concept, not even the body
without organs, become a block in your journey through the book. There are many
valuable and useful ideas in Capitalism and Schizophrenia even if you never fully
understand exactly what a body without organs is. You’re not trying to pass a test,
you’re trying to learn a new language: you’re going to make a lot of mistakes in the
process, and when you start there are certain things you just have to accept as rules,
even if you don’t quite understand them.

It’s fine.
Don’t worry about it.
Try to relax.













First Exercise:
Eggs



“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
becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along
these particular vectors. Nothing here is representative; rather,
it is all life and lived experience: the actual, lived emotion of
having breasts does not resemble breasts, it does not represent
them, any more than a predestined zone in the egg resembles
the organ that it is going to be stimulated to produce within
itself.”

- Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, I.3, “The Subject and
Enjoyment”



Imagine a chicken egg.

Do you see it? A large chicken egg, with a smooth and uncracked shell.

Imagine only this egg, a three-dimensional object floating against a dark
background. Imagine the egg slowly spinning on its vertical axis. Where is the
beginning of this egg? Where is its end? If there are no markings on the egg, even a
sharp eye would struggle to say when the egg has completed one full turn. On the
surface of the egg there is only continuity. You can start at any one point and reach
any other point by going in any direction; you can start at any one point and touch
every other point on the surface without interruption or break. Moreover, you can
start at any point and keep going and going and going forever even though the egg
isn’t infinite. In this way finitude gives birth to the concept of infinity.

The egg has a shape, and most of us would say that the narrow part of the egg is the
“top,” but that isn’t the case for long if you put an egg on the table and let it go. The
egg seems to think it’s top is on the side, strangely enough. The egg also has a limit –
if you have an egg on the table in front of you, you can tell what’s egg and what’s not-
egg. But the surface of the egg doesn’t have intrinsic lines or discreet segments.
What Deleuze & Guattari call “geodesic lines” (the shortest line between two points
on a curved surface) are not inherent to the surface of the egg: you can draw such
lines on it, but they aren’t there until you do. It is precisely the seamlessness of this
smooth, unmarked surface that makes it so amenable to any coordinate or gradient,
so amenable to inscription. If the surface were covered in other images the grid of
coordinates would fade to the background; if the surface were uneven, then the
planar surface of coordinates would give way to the jagged science of topography,
an entirely different field.

So that’s the surface of the egg.

Now imagine yourself inside of the egg, still with the same smooth unbroken shell,
but this time from within. Here too we find vectors and paths and thresholds, but
not parts. There is the division of the white and the yolk, yes, but again, are these
“parts” or just thresholds? The differences between the white and the yolk –
viscosity, density, molecular content – are really differences in kind. But let’s accept
that there’s a line between the egg white and the egg yolk. So decide what part of the
egg you want to be in for this next part.

We’ve already seen that an egg doesn’t properly or necessarily have a top or a
bottom or a side. So the shell is a kind of limit, but within that limit you’re being
swept in literally any and every direction. Flows, pulsions, shifts inside the egg are
never the product of individual interior motions – the insides don’t shift of
themselves. Every single motion of the stuff inside the egg is a motion of the egg as a
whole. There’s nothing but an unbroken shell full of stuff. You can’t take out any part
without breaking the shell, you can’t add anything in without breaking the shell, and
you can’t affect only one part of it without affecting the rest. You can’t shake the egg
in a way that will only cause the yolk to move but not the white, for example. You
shift the egg, the whole egg shifts. Every movement and shift is a movement and
shift of the entire egg. All of the parts move together, or none of them move.

There’s an old anti-McDonalds ad from the ‘80s, I believe, which I saw in a
documentary once and have never forgotten, even though I’ve forgotten what actual
documentary it was in. It’s a picture of a chicken, and the copy says something like
“Which part of this chicken is the nuggets?” It’s such a brilliant ad, and it might help
you understand what D&G mean when they write that no “predestined zone in the
egg resembles the organ that it will be.”

What part of the chicken egg is going to be a chicken wing? What part is the beak?
These are meaningless questions, because development doesn’t work that way. “The
actual lived emotion of having breasts does not resemble breasts.” The absurdity is
deliberate, but D&G are also not joking. A feeling isn’t “shaped” like the organ that
produces it; a feeling is an idea in the mind, it doesn’t have a shape. Our belief that
chickens grow out of eggs attributes to the egg a capacity to produce things that are
completely unlike any part of itself. It’s not an unreasonable belief – I do think we
can safely assert that full-grown chickens start as eggs, just as full-grown people
start as eggs. But what an incredible idea, that an egg has a beak and a wing and a
gizzard somehow waiting inside it. Where do they come from? How do they happen?
You can start to see why the discovery of DNA was such a milestone in the history of
science, and you can begin to understand some of the absurdities that were posited
as the origin and mechanism of life before DNA was discovered.

The most powerful formula ever discovered for the body without organs is not by
Deleuze & Guattari, but rather takes the form of an ancient riddle: “What came first,
the chicken or the egg?” What’s remarkable is that such a question is even possible,
that it would even be possible for us to attribute to a smooth, small egg the entire
potential of a fully-developed chicken. What makes the egg a body without organs is
not the fact that it caused the chicken, or the fact that it came before the chicken.
What makes the egg a body without organs is that in itself, we are able to attribute
to it the full potential of a chicken, of literally any kind of chicken, of a beautiful
healthy chicken and of a diseased and mutant chicken, of a big chicken or a small
chicken, or a multi-colored chicken or an entirely red chicken. What makes the egg a
body without organs is its capacity to recapture, to “fall back on” a vast range of
entities neither contained within it nor directly caused by it except in some mystical,
unfathomable way.

Obviously, an egg is not an explanation; it does not actually account for the process
by which a chicken develops – no amount of studying, eating, or observing eggs by
themselves will give you any insight into the actual mechanism by which eggs
produce chickens. But that linear chain of causes, the actual process, is distinct from
the idea of the process in the mind, or at least distinct enough from it that we are
comfortable attributing to the egg the full range of the chicken’s potential even
when we don’t actually understand it. In some fundamental way that we can
mutually comprehend and agree on, the responsibility for every chicken somehow
lies with an egg. The egg is an adequate reason for any possible future chicken, and
this wondrous power even extends back in time, to account for every past chicken!
This despite the evident historical fact that at some point, somehow, both egg and
chicken must have come from somewhere.

The mystical, unfathomable transmutation by which a blank surface of inscription is
made responsible for a vast array of forces that are actually distinct from it and
sometimes even prior to it is a process Deleuze & Guattari call “miraculation.”
Miraculation is how capitalism, which we know is a historically finite period and not
a transhistorical given, manages to find within itself the explanation and
justification for things that came long before it, and vice versa. “What’s wrong with
imperialism? Didn’t Alexander the Great conquer the whole known world?” Yes, he
did. In 350 BC, on horseback. It’s 2018 AD now and we have nuclear bombs and cell
phones. What are you even talking about.

We’ll come back to all that.
For now, just imagine an egg.









II.
Positions: The Body without Organs in The Logic of Sense

Anti-Oedipus was the first text I ever read by either Deleuze or Guattari, and for a
long time I didn’t even realize that the phrase “body without organs” appears in
Deleuze’s writing three years before Anti-Oedipus, in his amazing, strange, difficult
book The Logic of Sense (1969). The Logic of Sense was Deleuze’s last major work
before the collaboration with Guattari. Different from anything he had produced
before, it shows us just why Deleuze was so ripe for collaboration with Guattari, and
why Guattari’s radical experiences both in psychiatry and in political action were
such a perfect foil for his concepts. To be honest, before I read The Logic of Sense I
assumed it was Guattari who introduced the BwO to their collaboration; it felt more
like one of ideas.

Deleuze himself takes the phrase “the body without organs” from the work of
Antonin Artaud. Artaud was an iconic figure of European modernism (you can read
about him on-line and easily find many of his texts and recordings). The phrase
appears in a legendary poem-slash-radio play that Artaud wrote shortly before his
death, usually called in English “To Have Done With The Judgment Of God.” These
are some excerpts, but the entire work is immensely powerful and its relationship
with Deleuze & Guattari’s later work is palpable in every line:


the void,
time,
magnitude,
becoming,
future,
time to come,
being,
non-being
me,
not-me,
are nothing to me;

[…]

I was pushed so far that
the idea of a body
and being a body
was stifled
in me,

and it is then I felt disgust

 […]

for you may bind me if you wish
but there is nothing more useless than an organ.

When you have given him a body without organs
then you will have freed him from all his automatisms
and returned him to his true freedom.

(These excerpts are translated by Victor Corti, who calls his translation “To End
God’s Judgment”; Tulane Drama Review, Spring 1965).

The Logic of Sense explores the way sense is produced in thought and in language.
It’s clear that sense is not the same as meaning, because we can derive some sense
from words whose meaning is unfamiliar and even deliberately nonsensical.
Deleuze starts with Lewis Carroll, whose poem “Jabberwocky” is full of invented
words that nonetheless evoke some meaning, some image, and obey the rules of
syntax. How does that work? Deleuze’s answer, rooted in Stoic thought and other
unexpected philosophical sources, is that “sense” is a play of events, a “state of
affairs.” This is a wry rejection of contemporary paradigms: in 1969 French
academia was dominated by phenomenology, hermeneutics, and semiotics, all
taking in various ways for granted that truth and meaning were latent inside or
behind the surface of things, and that critique was primarily a process of revelation
or exposure. Deleuze rejects the obsession with representation, and with it the logic
of the signifier from Saussure to Lacan, insisting that sense is always on the surface.
In these strange, unexpected notions we see clearly the groundwork for the project
Deleuze would soon undertake with Guattari, the concentrated effort to put aside
hermeneutics and phenomenology and structural linguistics and deconstruction and
semiotics and Lacanianism and just try to see how things work. Not beneath or
below, but right on the surface.

Philosophical concepts are responses to particular problems, and in a striking
passage at the beginning of The Logic Of Sense, Deleuze lays out the problems that
motivate his intellectual production for the next few years:

The question is as follows: is there something, aliquid, which merges neither with
the proposition or with the terms of the proposition, nor with the object or with
the state of affairs which the proposition denotes, neither with the ‘lived’ or
representation or the mental activity of the person who expresses herself in the
proposition, nor with concepts or even signified essences? If there is, sense, or
that which is expressed by the proposition, would be irreducible to individual
states of affairs, particular images, personal beliefs, and universal or general
concepts. The Stoics said it all: neither word nor body, neither sensible
representation nor rational representation [Deleuze’s italics]. Better yet, perhaps
sense would be ‘neutral,’ altogether indifferent to both particular and general,
singular and universal, personal and impersonal. It would be of an entirely
different nature. But is it necessary to recognize such a supplementary instance?
 Or must we indeed manage to get along with what we already have: denotation,
manifestation, and signification?

In this passage, in the search for “aliquid” (Latin for “something”) or “the indifferent
neutral” we see both a link to the concept of “everything-as-limit” that we explored
earlier, and to the body without organs of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.

Legible in this paragraph is not only Deleuze’s dissatisfaction with the then-
dominant paradigms of linguistic and literary analysis (denotation; signification),
but with the hermeneutic-phenomenological tradition inherited from Kant and
Hegel, which seeks to grasp both the truth and the being of things in terms of
contradictions which supposedly structure these things. Derrida spent literally his
entire career showing over and over again how #problematic these supposedly
structuring contradictions were. Deleuze instead took one look, said, “This is
bullshit,” and started to look for another approach. Although the BwO of The Logic of
Sense is not the same as the BwO in the books by Deleuze & Guattari, it clearly
crystalizes a similar set of intellectual investments. For example, the opposition
between “sense” and “nonsense” doesn’t satisfy Deleuze. What is the “something”
that is itself organized by this opposition? What is the “stuff” of language or logic
that waits as a kind of potential to be turned either into sense or nonsense? And
what is the raw stuff of desire that waits as a kind of potential to be turned either
into a good drive or a bad drive?

The argument Deleuze makes here is not entirely unlike the argument Foucault
makes in his History of Madness: if “sanity” is opposed to “insanity,” but “insanity” is
something sane people can somehow grasp, diagnose, and respond to, then
“insanity” is not the “outside” of sanity; there must be another madness out there,
some other “itself” of incoherence. The same goes for “sense” and “nonsense”: if we
can derive some meaning, some conceptual value from “nonsense,” then “sense” and
“nonsense” must both be expressions of manifestations of some other linguistic
something that can take on the function either of sense or of nonsense. The “body
without organs” designates this something, first appearing in a section that contrasts
the sense/nonsense of Lewis Carroll to the schizophrenic language of Artaud:

The duality of the schizophrenic word has not been adequately noted: it comprises
the passion-word, which explodes into a wounding phonetic values, and the
action-word, which welds inarticulate tonic values. These two words are
developed in relation to the duality of the body, fragmented body and body
without organs. They refer to two theaters, the theater of terror or passion and the
theater of cruelty, which is by its essence active. They refer to two types of
nonsense, passive and active: the nonsense of the word devoid of sense, which is
decomposed into phonetic elements; and the nonsense of tonic elements, which
form a word incapable of being decomposed and no less devoid of sense. Here
everything happens, acts and is acted upon, beneath sense and far from the
surface. Sub-sense, a-sense, Untersinn – this must be distinguished from the
nonsense of the surface…Although a sign, it is a sign which merges with an action
or a passion of the body. This is why it seems entirely insufficient to say that
 schizophrenic language is defined by an endless and panic-stricken sliding of the
signifying series toward the signified series. In fact, there are no longer any series
at all; the two series have disappeared. Nonsense has ceased to give sense to the
surface; it absorbs and engulfs all sense, both on the side of the signifier and on
the side of the signified[…] In the surface organization which we called secondary,
physical bodies and sonorous words are separated and articulated at once by an
incorporeal frontier. This frontier is sense, representing, on one side, the pure
“expressed” of words, and on the other, the logical attribute of bodies. Although
sense results from the actions and the passions of the body, it is a result which
differs in nature, since it is neither action nor passion. It is a result which shelters
sonorous language from any confusion with the physical body. On the contrary, in
this primary order of schizophrenia, the only duality left is that between the
actions and the passions of the body. Language is both at once, being entirely
reabsorbed into the gaping depth. There is no longer anything to prevent
propositions from falling back onto bodies and from mingling their sonorous
elements with the body’s olfactory, gustatory, or digestive affects […] It is for this
reason that we can oppose Artaud and Carroll point for point – primary order and
secondary organization.

Believe it or not, that was only about half the paragraph!

Deleuze begins the book with a mocking commitment to the play of events on the
surface, but suddenly, some “gaping depth” has opened. Are we back in the realm of
hermeneutics, despite ourselves? Not quite; the movement here is opposite to that
of hermeneutic discovery. Hermeneutics finds truth and essence inside of things,
below the surface. For Platonic or Hegelian inquiry, the more of the surface you
carve away, the closer you come to the real truth, the real sense of things. Deleuze is
saying the opposite: cut open the body of language and all you find are its guts, not
its truth, just like when you cut into any other body. There’s no truth there waiting
to be read, only organs and pieces and fluids and secretions. For hermeneutic
thought, the manifest – the surface – is the secondary outgrowth of a primary form.
In psychoanalysis, a “primal repressed” builds around itself the depths of the
unconscious so that the superego can float above; in Marxism “labor” somehow
constructs around itself the ideological edifice of capitalism. A seed and a plant that
grows from it. Deleuze says Nope. There isn’t a seed and a plant that grows from it,
there’s a radio that’s playing a live music broadcast. And psychoanalysis is tearing
apart the radio, trying to find which circuit the music is in. The music isn’t in the
radio. The music is the body without organs. The radio is just capturing it,
channeling it, translating it, bringing it into the domain of sense and nonsense.

It’s important here that the music isn’t exclusive to that one radio. Each radio
express a particular and unique translation of that music, slightly different from any
other radio, just as every single copy of the same vinyl album has slightly different
scratches and pops; but the music isn’t in one radio any more than language is in
one person. It’s not even clear that “the unconscious” is in one person, but that’s a
whole other essay. That’s not to say that there is no relation between the nature of
the music and the organization of the radio’s circuit-organs. In fact, the radio was
built to the specifications of that kind of transmission – not that particular song,
necessarily, but that kind of transmission. That still doesn’t mean the transmission
is “in” radio, nor does it mean that the transmission is the cause or the origin of the
radio. It does mean that there’s a basic functional correlation between the nature of
radio waves and the nature of the radio, not unlike the functional correlation
between the subject and the social field.

Note Deleuze’s assertion that “it seems entirely insufficient to say that schizophrenic
language is defined by an endless and panic-stricken sliding of the signifying series
toward the signified series.” In Freud, psychosis is a misfunction of the reality
principle, which can no longer help the pathological mind use reality as a basis for
assigning affective value to individual ideas. For Deleuze, this “psychosis/neurosis”
distinction reproduces the problem of sense/nonsense, leaving “psychosis” as
something fundamentally graspable in terms of the post-oedipal organization of the
“normal” mind. But what is beyond that organization? What is being organized by
that organization? The body without organ[ization].

In Deleuze, and later in Deleuze & Guattari, “schizophrenia” is the overdetermined
and problematic analogy for the breakthrough of the body without organs into its
own organization, even though that breakthrough continues to be visible only in and
through the organization. It’s not that the schizophrenic doesn’t have a body,
obviously. It’s not that they aren’t producing sounds and utterances with the same
vocal cords as other people. It’s just that the music coming out of their radio isn’t
comprehensible to anyone around them as music; it just sounds like noise, or
sometimes is entirely inaudible, entirely beyond our hearing range, like a radio
playing recordings of dog whistles. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a response to
it; that doesn’t mean you can’t be affected by it, or it affected by you. You can be
unnerved by silence. Except…if the music isn’t in the radio, then the noise probably
isn’t “in” the radio either, right? Psychiatry responds to the schizophrenic radio by
tearing it apart to see why it doesn’t make the same music as other radios. The radio
is left in a sorry state. If you’ve ever owned a cheap transistor radio, you probably
know it’s cheaper to get a new one than to pay someone to fix the old broken one.

In The Logic of Sense the BwO is not yet explicitly linked to capitalism, but you can
see how the pieces in play here already itch for that connection, how the circuits of
these concepts are laid out to allow this concept of “schizophrenia” to plug into the
later concept of “capitalism.” For now, the BwO hovers in the orbit of linguistics, of
epistemology, and of psychoanalysis. In France of the 1960s the line between
psychoanalysis and linguistics was heavily blurred thanks to Lacan’s relentless
garbage factory; I think that’s why the introduction of signification into the
conceptual plane of psychoanalytic ideas is not particularly marked by Deleuze,
which seems surprising in retrospect. While Deleuze’s writing is always amazing
and fascinating, I find his treatment of Freud here to be the weakest part of the book
and not entirely convincing. I think it shows a fairly limited grappling with Freud
himself and a fairly extensive reliance on assertions about Freud ultimately drawn
from Lacan but filtered through the writings of people like Serge Leclaire, who
Deleuze cites. You can see this in the “Thirty-Fourth Series of Primary Order and
Secondary Organization,” for example, where Deleuze writes that “It is certain that
sexual organization is a prefiguration of the organization of language…The phallus
plays an important role in the stages of the conflict between mouth an brain.” Is that
really certain though? I’m not sure. Freud doesn’t talk about “entry into language” or
anything like that, and he doesn’t link the oedipal crisis with language itself the way
Lacan does. I think it’s pretty obvious that children use language to signify before
they reach the oedipal stage, and I also think women can use language. If you take
those two things for granted a lot of what Lacan has to say stops making sense.

What Freud does talk about is something he calls “primal repression.” repression,
sometimes called “primary repression,” is a vexed concept in psychoanalysis
because it’s both Very Important and extremely vague. Freud wrote about it many
times beginning with the Schreber analysis of 1909 and insisted that it was central
to the mechanism of repression. But he was also pretty unspecific about what it was
or how it works. Primal repression was one of Freud’s placeholder concepts: it’s a
concept generated by necessity through the principles of the theory, but one for
which he doesn’t yet have an adequate explanation. Freud said that repression is
one of several defense mechanisms of the psyche, and that it isn’t inborn; the mind
has to learn how to repress. Repression is a dynamic process that requires two
opposing forces. An external or internalized policing mechanism pressures you not
to think about something, causing the desire (“libido”) invested in that object to be
set free or “de-cathected” from it. This freed libido is instead drawn towards
negatively-invested ideas and reinvested with that libidinal value instead (“counter-
cathected”). A simpler way of putting this is that when some external agency (or the
internalized superego) designates an idea or a desire as BAD, that idea is
automatically drawn towards other ideas and desires that have also been designated
BAD, clustering together in the psyche and forming the kernel of the unconscious.
You can’t start repressing things until you have that basic kernel of repressed stuff
which draws towards it other similar kinds of ideas and part-drives. The question
designated by Freud’s placeholder concept is, how does that first kernel of stuff
form? What kick-starts the process? Or, to put it a little differently, how is the
immanent production of drives in the body first transformed into a differentiated
system that graphs values onto particular affects and ideas? Freud first uses the
term “primal repression” in 1909, but he doesn’t try to elaborate or diagram its
operation until the Metapsychological Papers of 1915. The concept is necessitated
by the theory before it’s actually theorized itself.

Despite the appearance of Freud, the main avatar of psychoanalysis in The Logic of
Sense is Melanie Klein. Klein, one of Freud’s most famous successors, was an
influential member of the third generation of psychoanalysts, and significantly
revised many of Freud’s ideas. She is the founding figure of object-oriented
psychology, though she herself did not use the term for her work. In Klein’s work,
the inside-out pressure of Freud’s “part-drives” (Partialtriebe), which find
expression in whole external objects, is replaced with the outside-in pressure of
“part-objects,” which are unified internally into whole objects in the process of
development. Klein replaces Freud’s “stages” with what she calls “positions.” I
personally prefer the term “libidinal organization” to “libidinal stages” for the same
reason Klein prefers “positions”: it indicates a current state that can change but can
also repeat later under different circumstances, as opposed to a teleological stage-
based model in which you only progress in one direction.

For Klein, an infant begins life in something she calls the “paranoid-schizoid
position,” in which objects, beginning with the mother’s breast, are split between
their good and bad aspects: the Good Breast is the one that appears and feeds the
child; the breast is Bad when it fails to appear, making the child feel persecuted. Less
than a year after it’s born, though, the child enters the “depressive position,”
characterized by repression and ambivalence, during which it learns to recognize
that the Good Breast and the Bad Breast are actually The Same Breast, and somehow
sutures these objects into one whole Mother. The degree to which the infant
successfully resolves the persecutory opposition between good and bad objects into
the ambivalence of whole objects determines its personality to a large degree. If the
infant is not successful in resolving the part objects into a whole object and coping
with the anxiety of potential loss, it will continue to revert to the persecuted
paranoid-schizoid position later in life when attempting to resolve the possibility of
loss in new relationships. (I’m not a Kleinian, I’m just telling you what I’ve read).

One of Klein’s clearest explications of the paranoid and depressive states can be
found in “Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant,”
collected in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works: 1946-1963. There Klein writes that
“The first external source of anxiety can be found in the experience of birth…It
would appear that the pain and discomfort he has suffered, as well as the loss of the
intra-uterine state, are felt by him as an attack by hostile forces, i.e., as persecution.
Persecutory anxiety, therefore, enters from the beginning into his relation to objects
in so far as he is exposed to privation.”
















Second Exercise:
The Body without Organs and the Desiring-Machines


From a certain point of view it would be much better if nothing
worked, if nothing functioned. Never being born, escaping the
wheel of continual birth and rebirth, no mouth to suck with, no
anus to shit through…What would be required is a pure fluid in
a free state, flowing without interruption, streaming over the
surface of a full body. Desiring-machines make us an organism;
but at the very heart of this production, within the very
production of this production, the body suffers from being
organized in this way, from not having some other sort of
organization, or no organization at all.

- Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, I.1, “Desiring-Production”



Think of an infant in the womb, shortly before birth.

Right before birth, the unborn baby is fully-formed; from our outside perspective, it
has all the same physical parts that it’s going to have in a day or a week once it’s
born. Is the baby “without organs”? Not in the literal physical sense. Yes, Deleuze
and Guattari are aware that a baby has organs, a heart and eyes and a brain. And yet.

Think of that unborn baby’s temporality (its “phenomenology,” if you must). The
unborn baby is plugged directly into a source of nutrients; it “eats” exactly when it
wants, as often as it wants, for as long as it wants. It moves when it wants, it sleeps
when it wants. The unborn baby has no “desire,” because its existence does not
include any delay between impulse and action; there’s never a time when an unborn
baby in the womb needs sustenance but has to wait an hour until a parent gets
home. The exchange of nutrients is smooth and continuous, the same connection
bringing in and taking out; there is nothing except a continuous system of motions
and flows, the baby’s body flowing, the amniotic fluid flowing, the umbilical
nutrients flowing. Inside the smooth surface of the womb, the baby experiences a
continuous, unbroken time, without desire; even if it needs, it never needs to wait.

Birth breaks the smooth continuity of this temporality and divides time itself into
segments that correspond with pulsions and organs – these are the desiring-
machines. Freud himself says that what differentiates the drives from each other is
nothing but rhythm. A mouth-machine plugs into a breast-machine – a flow of milk
meets a flow of spit and air. But these are things that have to happen. A machine is
always an effect. The breast isn’t always in the mouth – it appears only in breast-
time, and it works only after being connected to the mouth-machine. These are the
productions of machinic desire – something new is made. Suddenly the mouth is
linked to a breast and milk flows – a new flow has been produced. But the condition
of that flow’s production is precisely its coming-into-being; until it is an effect, it is
nothing. And its coming-into-being allows us to differentiate it from everything else
that it isn’t: milk-swallowing time is discrete from air-inhaling time, which is
discrete from scream-emitting time.

This is what Deleuze & Guattari call “disjunctive synthesis”: every new connection is
also a break – the machines that link screaming and crying to the affect-flow of
hunger have to be shut off in order for the machines that suck and swallow milk to
be switched on and produce an affect-flow of pleasure. It’s not that the baby
magically develops need out of nowhere. A baby is alive; every living thing takes in
nutrients and excretes waste products. That’s true of an unborn baby, and it’s true of
a 1-month-old baby. The difference between the “need” of an unborn child and the
“need” of a post-natal child is that the post-natal child’s needs are not always,
permanently, and immediately met: the affective phenomena of need and need-
satisfaction, pleasure and unpleasure, each now corresponds both to discrete
machinic connections and to discrete blocks of time. The baby’s desires, affects, and
machines have become differentiated. A single unified duration is broken into the
overlapping time of countless simultaneous machines – not only the feeding
machine and the digesting machine but seeing machines, hearing machines, feeling
machines, new connections formed with every new object the infant experiences.
Klein correlates the Good and Bad Breast with the breast being there and not being
there, but a child isn’t an on-off switch – even when it’s not eating, it’s still doing
something. It’s looking, it’s smelling, it’s yelling, it’s hearing, it’s turning, it’s
vomiting. Klein’s concepts can’t account for the already-vast range of even an infant
body’s capacities and activities, but D&G’s “desiring-machines” can and do. We can
say that the breast-mouth-anus series of machines is more important or central or
more heavily invested with desire, but we don’t in the process negate all the body’s
other functions and needs and actions.

The baby has obviously not magically sprouted a mouth and an anus after birth. We
know a child in the womb just before birth already has a mouth and an asshole, just
like we know a chicken’s egg can produce a beak and a wing. But suddenly, these
physical features of the flesh are triangulated into a new relation: a physical place on
the infant body (mouth) is joined to a need or impulse (hunger) that then links up
either with the presence or absence of a food source: a new binary machine has
been formed (on/off, feeding or not feeding, flow or no flow). It’s not that a good
need suddenly becomes a bad need; it’s not that the feeding used to be pleasurable
and now feeding is unpleasurable. It is rather that before, “feeding” was not a
distinct state or a distinct action, and therefore did not have a value. It did not need
to be “undertaken,” just as you don’t need to “find oxygen” until you suddenly find
yourself deprived of it. As long as air is just there, “breathing” is a continuous,
undifferentiated state. It’s the differentiation itself which the body suffers from, the
distinction between states rather than the temporary presence of one binary state.
And it is in the differentiation itself that value becomes possible, the determining
and assigning of relative values. “Which is Good and which is Bad: eating, and not-
eating?” That question doesn’t mean anything if you can’t fathom the distinction
between eating and not-eating. That’s why D&G will assign the BwO to the
secondary order of recording-production: it doesn’t resist while there’s nothing to
resist, and after there’s something to resist it is still the desiring-machine
themselves that organize and distribute values, not the body without organs. The
BwO wants no organization, and therefore no values.

If the unborn baby takes in nutrients constantly, the positive or pleasurable pole
(food is here, I’m happy) is just as impossible as the negative or unpleasurable pole
(food is absent, I’m unhappy). Freud and Klein both seem to agree that the first and
primal trauma is the trauma of birth. But is being shoved out of a narrow passage
necessarily more traumatic than discovering that your nutritional needs, all of
which previously flowed seamlessly and constantly in and out of a single umbilical
link to the mother’s body, are now splintered in time and space? Not only do you
suddenly have to breathe and eat separately, and one at a time, you also discover
that what you take in now flows through your body and comes out the other side!
Honestly, what kind of mind-fuck. Is it any wonder that the body without organs
resists and repels the desiring-machines? Every birth is a David Cronenberg movie.

What used to be a seamless, continuous system of flows, uninterrupted,
differentiated only to an external observer, becomes partial, fragmentary; the
continuous duration of the womb is split up into an eating time with an eating place,
a shitting time with a shitting place, a grabbing time with a grabbing place, a seeing
time with a seeing place. It’s not that the unborn infant’s body does not contain a
digestive system. But look at the very name – “digestive system.” If the organ is
defined by its function, then the absence of that function makes it a bunch of cells or
a lump of flesh, but not an organ: every machine is defined by its function. It is only
the production of a mouth-breast machine that gives rise to the digestive machine
which turns the anus into a shitting machine. We can begin finally to understand
these lines by Artaud quoted above, and what Artaud means by “automatisms”:

When you have given him a body without organs
then you will have freed him from all his automatisms
and returned him to his true freedom.

For Klein, the infant is born through an originary trauma into a partial and
fragmentary state; only later does this fragmentary state turn into a totality. Deleuze
begins one step earlier: only the undifferentiated flows of the body without organs
make possible the partial objects and splits of the paranoid-schizoid position. What
comes before objects? They can’t appear out of nowhere, not if we want an
explanation rather than a metaphor. Good and bad are not transcendental values
plugged into the baby’s brain: they are differentiations, disjunctions of value made
possible by the advent of desiring-machines on the body without organs, which the
body without organs continuously tries to repel. Wouldn’t you? The good machine
and the bad machine are equally undesirable to the body without organs, which has
no desire; all value, all disjunction is an interruption – every new connection is also
a break, that’s what disjunction means: either this or that. The occasional and partial
pleasure of a good meal or a decent shit can hardly compare to the unfathomable
trauma of having a passage torn right through the middle of an undifferentiated
body, of having a continuous flow of predigested everything transformed into an
awkward and stuttering process of digestion. Imagine the horror of waking up one
day to discover you had a colon.









































III.
Capitalism & Schizophrenia, Volume One


My main source for the concept of the Body without Organs is Anti-Oedipus, the first
volume of Deleuze & Guattari’s two-volume magnum opus, Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. This was the first D&G text that I read, it’s the one I’ve read most
often, and the one that I reach for most quickly even today. My preference isn’t
universal: we often encounter the BwO in discussions of A Thousand Plateaus, the
second volume of the work. Many people prefer ATP to its predecessor, and ATP
lends itself better to the kind of “interdisciplinary” borrowing that academic
encourages. But for now, we’re here, with Anti-Oedipus.

The concept appears early in the book, and I think that a lot of people get stuck on it,
because it’s weird as hell:

We are of the opinion that what is ordinarily referred to as “primary repression”
means precisely that: it is not a “countercathexis,” but rather this repulsion of
desiring-machines by the body without organs. This is the real meaning of the
paranoiac machine: the desiring-machines attempt to break into the body without
organs, and the body without organs repels them, since it experiences them as an
over-all persecution apparatus…The genesis of the machine lies precisely here: in
the opposition of the process of production of the desiring-machines and the
nonproductive stasis of the body without organs.

It’s fine if you’re confused. We’ve already mentioned that the language of the book is
supposed to feel like plunging into unfamiliary, icy water. Swim around a little, get
your bearings. My hope is that after the first couple of exercises, this word salad
feels less obscure and alarming.

What is “nonproductive stasis”? A continuous, unchanging condition that is
differentiated and organized by desiring-machines, just like the one we
hypothesized for the fully-formed but pre-natal infant, or the one we imagined for
the enclosed interior of the egg. Desiring-machines operate by connecting: a mouth
connects to a breast, a turd pushes open a sphincter. This is what “production”
means, all of what “production” means: a new connection, a new yes/no switch. It is
not enough to assert that eating is pleasurable for the child and associated with a
Good Breast and being hungry is unpleasurable for the child and associated with a
Bad Breast. How did this yes/no switch get installed in the first place? What makes
pleasure Good and unpleasure Bad? There’s no clear explanation; the distribution of
values (good/bad) just seems to appear on the smooth, undifferentiated surface, just
as the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable ideas just seems to appear
in Freud (how do the very first ideas rejected by consciousness know where to go?).

In various ways, Freud and Klein and Lacan’s versions of psychoanalysis all require
some kind of magic origin or transubstantiation. Freudian repression begins with
“countercathexis”: when the idea of something you want is pushed out of your mind
by a stronger outside force (parental disapproval, say, or physical violence), it isn’t
just pushed away from consciousness, it’s also drawn towards a mysterious
cosonant investment in what is not-yet “the unconscious.” Kleinian paranoid
persecution begins when a newborn child organizes its Self by unifying the Good
and Bad part-objects, but this unifying process somehow already demands a subject
to distinguish the Good from the Bad. And in Lacan the child looks in the mirror one
day and decides to chop off its phallus and give it to its father so it can one day be a
lawyer, or something like that, I’m not exactly sure. By any path, we come back to
the same tired opposition of the manifest and the latent, the hermeneutic distinction
between the lost seed and the unaccountable thing that grew from it, the very model
Deleuze rejected in The Logic of Sense.

Here’s the thing with all these versions of psychoanalysis: how are all these children
being born in a void?

Think back to the egg and the chicken. Following D&G, we called the relationship
between the egg and the chicken “miraculating” because each concept was somehow
able to account by itself for the existence of the other. Where do chickens come
from? Eggs. Where do eggs come from? Chickens. What needs to be excluded for this
relationship to obtain? Everything. Literally everything except the chicken and the
egg. History, evolution, nutrition, environment. The relationship between the
chicken and the egg demands for its coherence implicit exclusion of everything else.
What if we add even one factor, even one element and say that for an egg to make a
chicken you need two chickens, and not one? This one additional element into the
set of concepts complicates things immensely. Before we only really had two
possibilities: egg=chicken, no egg=no chicken. Now suddenly we can have one
chicken and egg, or two chickens and egg. But…if we can have either one chicken or
two chickens, then we can presumably have no chickens, right? Otherwise we can’t
get to a concept of one chicken being there and one chicken not being there. If we
then specify that one chicken has to be male and one has to be female, we’ve again
broadened immensely the range of relational possibilities.

We quickly see two things. First, the metaphysical difficulties multiply exponentially
the more entities you try to account for at once, which is probably why Ockham
cautions us not to multiply terms without necessity. And second, no matter how
many terms we add and how many relations we account for, there still lurks beyond
that accounting the limit of everything else. It doesn’t matter how broadly you
spread your explanatory apparatus: everything is the limit of, well, everything. It’s
always there. Every explanation, every cause, requires a reduction of elements until
one or more concepts and relations acquire adequate explanatory weight, and
therefore every explanation, every cause, carries with it the limit of everything else
that is excluded. It doesn’t actually carry all of “everything” with it, the unconscious
isn’t a hard drive. Everything is always just there, actually operating. But any
particular set of relations only expresses or “covers” a given proportion of
everything, a given magnitude.

Freud, Klein, and Lacan’s attempts to explain the organization of human desire all
require that the component parts of desire be reduced to only the components
necessitated by the theory; Deleuze & Guattari are basically saying that all of those
thinkers’ concepts are placeholder concepts, marking the operations of desire that
they can see but not quite undersatnd. What determines adult desire? “The oedipal
crisis and its resolution.” For this to be the case, all the component parts of desire
have to be either reduced to the mother, the child, and the father, or eliminated as
irrelevant. What determines adult desire? “The infant’s ability to resolve the Good
Breast and the Bad Breast into a single ambivalent object.” OK, and what if the baby
rubs its genitals on a soft fleecy blanket and later becomes a furry, what does that
have to do with breasts or mothers?

One way to summarize D&G’s general critique of psychoanalysis in this early part of
Anti-Oedipus is just to say, “Look, there’s just always more stuff around than that.”
The everything that these theories exclude is just too much, too powerful, it
continues to invade these relations despite themselves, to de-organize them. It’s not
enough, there are too many other desires, and why shouldn’t we take those desires
seriously? Why should every desire outside the family be secondary, or be a
metaphor for desire in the family? Psychoanalysis tries to reduce desire to a
triangular relation between the father, mother, and child: “Oedipus” is the name for
this relation. But what child actually grows up like that? What child grows up
without siblings and without visitors to the house and without relatives and without
one or more baby sitters and without going to school and without having neighbors
and also never rubs its genitals on anything or plays with itself while experiencing
something completely unrelated to its mother or its father? Here we see a basic
problem: psychoanalysis idealizes a functional, non-neurotic sublimated subject as
the normal subject of modern life, the ordinary or unmarked outcome of the process
of development. But the hypothetical conditions needed to produce that subject are
completely unlike the unmarked or normative conditions in which the modern
subject actually grows or develops. Many children have some private corner where
they fantasize desires that have nothing to do with parents, or explore their body
purely for their own gratification. Many children form attachments and relations
with people other than the parents from a very early age. The theory strains to
account for the sheer weight of the evidence against it; everything else exerts too
strong a pressure on the few available elements.

To be fair, I think D&G exaggerate somewhat Freud’s insistence that nothing matters
except Oedipus. In almost every text he leaves room for heterogeneous factors and
components, many of which he frankly admits his theory can’t account for. But it
remains the case that in his case studies he continually reduces the components and
elements of desire to the oedipal triangle, and we can probably assume he did the
same in his analytic practice. What Delezue & Guattari help us see is that once you
introduce even one additional element to the equation, there’s no convincing reason
to exclude many other things from the equation. Nobody is saying that the
relationship with the mother and the father in childhood don’t have a significant
influence on the child’s development. What they are saying, I think, is that while all
of these theories include some mechanism of exclusion to limit the number of terms,
none of them includes a compelling reason why the mechanism should select those
particular components and not any or every other. We find in Oedipus a kind of
miraculation: a boy undergoes Oedipus and eventually becomes a Father whose boy
undergoes Oedipus and eventually becomes a Father. Is this really any different than
telling a child who wants to know where babies come from that they come “From
inside Mommy’s stomach?” It’s the chicken and the egg all over again. If we agree
that an infant is able to invest desire in people and things in its environment, why
can’t it invest in multiple people and things? Why does there have to be only one
plot line, from birth to Oedipus?

Instead, D&G see a field of desiring-machines, each producing its own overlapping
narrative. Yes, you have a relationship with your mother, which is intimately linked
with feeding and other bodily needs, and yes, that relationship has a lot of psychic
weight. But what does the quiet, repetitive pleasure of rocking back and forth have
to do with your mother? When you were a kid, did you ever play that game where
you hold a finger out in front of your face, closing first one eye and then the other,
making the finger disappear and reappear? If that game brings you a little pleasure,
does that pleasure come from your fear of your father or your secret love for your
mother? We are constantly making new connections, inventing new machines,
constructing new pleasures by building new pleasures on and with and through the
body. If it causes you pleasure to clap the palm of your hand against something, you
can clap your hands against each other, using only your body, or you can slap the
wall next to you, making a circuit between you and the wall. Is one kind of sensation
more “real” because it only involves your own body?

Here’s another analogy we could try. Let’s say that the general kind of food you
prefer is a product of your upbringing. I’m not sure it is, but let’s just say. Let’s say
you generally prefer high-spice, low-carb food because that’s how you were raised.
What does that have to do with the fact that right now, at this particular moment,
you crave something cold and sweet? What you see here is precisely a failure of the
general, miraculating theory to account for an actual state of affairs. Let’s say that,
sure, every authority figure is a version or an imago of your Father. Why does one
paranoiac start to look for stalkers and experience anxiety when they’re outdoors
walking around, while another one becomes convinced that their enemies are
Online and create twenty Facebook sock puppets to track and test and prod their
imagined foes? Are we really supposed to believe that none of these differences
matters? Even if we accept that, yes, OK, the origin, the seed or tendency behind the
pathology is familial or oedipal, that still doesn’t account for the specificity of desire,
for the way that every neurotic’s symptoms are intimately entwined with the
specific material expressions of the world around them. Everything that the theory
or explanation fails to account for or imagine is that theory’s body without organs,
and every desire that a particular social formation fails to account for or imagine is
that society’s body without organs.

Deleuze & Guattari don’t solve the problem of the origin, nor do they try to construct
an analytic machine that will successfully reduce the possibilities of desire to the
correct number of fixed elements. Instead, they replace the whole question of origin
like a leaky faucet and install in its place a Spinozan fount of pure positivity: the
number of components in desire is always more, and therefore desire’s horizon of
possibility is always everything and beyond. That’s why desire is “inscribed” or
“coded” onto the surface of the BwO, which is the everything else of any and every
organization. It doesn’t matter whether you live in an isolated tribal world with no
steel and no electricity or in a globalized modern world: what else is there? What
does your world exclude that your desire still somehow reaches out toward?

I think this is the primary sense in which desire is “revolutionary” in Anti-Oedipus: it
continuously pushes against the limit of what we assume is possible and necessary,
making room for more things, not all of which we can predict or expect. That’s what
it means to say that desire pushes against organization itself, that the Body without
Organs resists its organization and “falls back on” desiring-machines. Desire is
radical because it destabilizes organization as such, rather than any particular
organization: that’s why every social formation has a mechanism for coding and
selecting, for including and excluding, for shaping and directing desire, and this
organization requires constant investment and reinvestment to maintain, because
everything else is constantly pushing against it and threatening to undo it. Desire is
leaks out of the pipes which have been constructed to channel the flows of the body
without organs, and any given socius or social formation has to constantly expend
energy and resources to keep sending teams out to patch the pipes and plug the
leaks. The danger of desire is that nobody knows exactly what effects exposure to
leaked desire will have, which is why society always tries to contain those leaks in
institutions and hospitals and prisons.

It’s important to understand that desire isn’t a malevolent force, or a minor god, or a
conscious spirit, or anything like that. It doesn’t have agency beyond its own will to
power. Desire doesn’t “make you do things” in order to realize itself and it’s not the
devil taunting you at night while you sleep. It’s just a pressure in a particular
direction. Desire doesn’t want to destroy society. It just wants what it wants, and
often society wants something different. The inscribing socius wants to organize
and evaluate all bodies, all entities. The body without organs is always too vast and
nebulous to fully inscribe or fully organize. What remains, what’s left over beyond
inscription, pushes against the limits of the organization, which has no room for it,
no word for it, no machine to connect with its flows. Desire has no conscious agency,
so it doesn’t mind destroying the desiring-machines that are supposed to contain
and direct it, and in the process new machines are built and new connections are
made, forever and ever. Nothing but machines and desire, connecting and flowing
on the surface of the BwO.

*

In my opinion, as best I understand the text, it would be an error to grasp the Body
without Organs as negation, as the negative, or as any kind of negative utopian end.
In fact, I think misunderstandings of this type led to the shifts in the concept that we
will see later in A Thousand Plateaus; in that text, D&G are careful to distinguish
between the BwO and death or nothingness, and even say that death is one of the
consequences of misfiring desire, of a badly-constructed BwO.

When Deleuze & Guattari write that “From a certain point of view it would be much
better if nothing worked,” it takes a very particular kind of mind to read that as
“Let’s hasten the decline of society as we can all become organless machines.” Wait,
what? Are we reading the same text? Deleuze & Guattari are pointing out that having
a differentiated body sucks sometimes. Have you never thought to yourself, “Man, I
wish I could eat but never had to shit?” Or “I wish I could drink as much as I want
without getting a hangover?” Sometimes having a body is the worst, yes. But
experiencing the finitude and organization of the body as occasionally inconvenient,
or fantasizing sometimes about an infinite or unorganized body, isn’t really the
same thing as wanting not to have a body, or wanting not to be at all. I mean, it’s OK
if that’s what you want for yourself, but it’s hard for me to see how negative utopian
visions spring from a text so insistent on pure positivity. You see what you want to
see, I guess. I have no way to prove it, but I’m not sure it’s what D&G had in mind.

Certain authors focus on the dark and nihilistic implications of the BwO; they evoke
it to conjure nothingness, a non-apocalypse, a dead state without subjectivity. I don’t
think that’s what D&G mean. I think Deleuze & Guattari are Spinozists and that their
BwO is a positivity, a full body. It’s not simply the absence of social organization. It’s
not what you would be left with if society was destroyed. It’s not what you would
have if we all devolved somehow into crawling, unconscious maggots or uploaded
our consciousness into computers. It’s called the BODY without organs, not the
“nothing without organs”; even on a purely syntactic level the “without organs” part
is anchored by the positivity of the body. I think using the BwO as a dramatic
synonym for any kind of absence or ontological negativity is an error.

Imagine if we were in a room full of people and I said to you “Which of these people
is your brother?” and you said, “With the short hair.” Now, if there are very few
people in the room or if your brother looks a lot like you, I might be able to guess
which person he is even from that short, ambiguous statement. But again, look at the
grammar: “with the short hair” is a sentence fragment, it’s missing the positivity or
the body to which that quality would be linked: “That tall guy in the corner with the
short hair” or “The short guy next to the table with the short hair” or “The one with
short hair and a huge grey coat.” The same applies to “body without organs”; if all
you hear is the “without organs” part, you’re focusing on a quality, an aspect of the
thing. You’re not making it easy for yourself or for others. Sure, once in a while in a
particular context this negative misconception of the BwO will resonate or graze the
mark, just as once in a while in a particular context “with the short hair” will be
enough information to identify a particular person in a room. But I don’t think
you’ve adequately expressed the idea of what you’re talking about.
Third Exercise:
The Full Body of the Earth

Imagine a planet.

Imagine a planet with a perfectly spherical core, entirely covered by an
undifferentiated ocean. A surface of water with no consistent features, markers, or
divisions. A scintillating sphere of water.

We don’t need magic to imagine our planet: it can be held together by familiar forces
like gravity and inertia: we’re told our own spherical planet was once entirely
covered in water. Yes, the planet you’re imagining is imaginary, but it’s within the
condition of possibility of our own universe as we currently understand it.

The surface of the water isn’t still or frozen. It’s dynamic, shifting, mobile. Wind,
rain, tide, roiling storms throw bolts of lightning onto the vast expanse of surface.
But the surface of the water is undifferentiated. You can start anywhere on the
planet, and in a continuous line reach any other point on the planet while still
moving across fundamentally the same surface, just like on the shell of an egg. A
single, vast, dynamic ocean over an entire planet. If there were continents, waves
would be broken by a coast, but there aren’t, so a wave can hypothetically traverse
the entire planet, if its magnitude is great enough. If you got into a boat on Earth and
just sat there, letting the current take you, there are places you just wouldn’t end up,
right? There’s no real model for how sitting in a boat ends with you in the
landlocked Himalayas, for example. But if you sat in a boat on our imaginary water
planet, there’s no part of the planet you couldn’t hypothetically end up in. On this
vast and dynamic surface, there are only intensities and magnitudes; water flowing
one way encounters water flowing another way and changes, joins, shifts, pushes it.
There are stronger, larger waves, and weaker, smaller waves, but there are only
waves and flows of different intensities and different magnitudes. One part of water
is the same “stuff” as the other parts of water.

Is this nothingness? Who could mistake this vast, endless dynamism for an empty
void? Who could mistake the relentless motion of water for mere absence or
negation? There’s so much happening here, even if it’s just on the surface, even if
that surface is undifferentiated.

Now imagine continents slowly rising out of this vast undifferentiated surface, as we
are told the continents once did on our own planet. The water is the same water; the
ocean is the same ocean. Its nature hasn’t changed, the dynamism of the waves
hasn’t changed, the substance of the water hasn’t change, but now it’s organized
differently. The waves can’t roll across the entire surface of the planet anymore;
they’re channeled, directed. They’re not strictly speaking “limited”; there’s no higher
power issuing rules about what the waves can and cannot do. Rather than limits, we
can speak of thresholds. If before a wave was exactly as large as it could be and went
as far as it could before collapsing into water, now the wave crashes against the
shore and becomes something different. If a wave is big and strong enough it can
still cross the threshold and sweep over the land, sometimes for miles in the case of
a tsunami.

In and of and for itself, the endless primordial ocean is still the same “stuff”; it’s just
channeled, directed. The Atlantic Ocean isn’t a different kind of substance than the
Pacific Ocean; there’s just a continent in between them. Continents rise; they move
slowly, they shift; they break apart and they come together again. None of this is the
ocean’s fault, but the ocean is directly affected. It is channeled, differentiated,
hemmed in. This is one way to think of the body without organs and desire. If you
took away the continents, the water would return to its smooth, undifferentiated
continuity. But once the water is organized by the continents (desiring-machines),
the water becomes the BwO of that organization, because it’s the everything else left
unorganized by that organization and constantly resisting it. If those continents
sank and new ones rose, the exact same water would be the BwO of a different
organization. Taking geological history as a metaphor for the human mind, the key
thing to remember is that human consciousness always evolves after the continents
emerge. We can know or assume on a speculative level that once long ago the planet
was covered only in water; but there have been continents for as long as humans
have been around and there will probably be continents after humans are gone.

To understand how the organization of the continents affect the water, and to
imagine a surface of water before organization, you don’t need to know why the
continents rose. Was it an earthquake? A volcano? A meteor? The gods got bored of
surfing? I’m not saying this question isn’t interesting or shouldn’t be asked, I’m just
saying that this question isn’t necessary to a diagrammatic understanding of the
relations here. The full surface of the water is the body without organs, the
continents are the desiring-machines it strains against. Do the waves care why the
shore is there? No, they just crash against it, slowly eroding it, cutting apart its
rocks, spitting random objects back out, full of unexpected life and strange
surprises. All you need to know to understand how the body without organs tries to
“throw off” or “resist” the desiring-machines is that our planet once had a surface
which was nothing but roiling ocean and endless sky, and that surface was broken
by the arrival of continents. Every since, the waves have been crashing against the
shore, tearing at the continents. There were waves on the shore when the world was
Pangea and there are waves on the shore now. It doesn’t matter what shape or
organization the continents take, or what caused them to take that particular shape.
The waves don’t care. They are always there, crashing against every shore.

*

What if our imaginary water planet was earth, post-continents?

If you compare the size of the Panama Canal to the total surface area of land on
Earth, you’ll see that the total size of the canal is really tiny compared to, say, the
size of Australia or the size of Canada. We can’t really say that by digging up the
Panama Canal and turning it back into water humans have chipped away very
dramatically at the total continental organization of the planet. We’ve only affected a
very small fragment, a very small piece of the total land mass. And yet the
implications for the ocean are huge – suddenly, there’s a link between the Atlantic
and the Pacific in a place where there was no link. The amount of earth that was
actually moved, the degree to which the overall organization of the continents was
affected, is miniscule. But the range of new movements, new possibilities, and new
connections is vast, entirely out of proportion with the degree of reorganization.

In psychoanalysis, a repressed memory is kind of like the Panama Canal: digging it
up won’t change the entire plate tectonics of your mind, but it can open up vast
possibilities for movement and investment and trade. Who knows what exchanges
might be initiated, what flows circulated, what new machines formed? The return of
one single repressed memory can trigger a vast emotional crisis in an individual,
affecting them for days or week or even years, radically redistributing the
investments of their mind’s economy. This single, individual memory’s return
doesn’t greatly or even significantly change the mechanism of repression itself, the
process by which ideas are organized and censored in the mind. That’s the
difference between the “total system of organization” and the entity we consider to
be organized.

What is “thought”? Whatever “stuff” the mind is made of seems to be shared by all
our minds. We all have ideas in some fundamentally similar way. The mind
organizes thoughts in a particular way. If the mind had no form and no limit and no
specificity or differentiation – if it was completely unorganized – it wouldn’t be a
mind at all. The mind is always organized, just as society is always organized. That’s
why the body without organs isn’t some kind of nihilistic horizon. We can’t unravel
the organization of the mind without producing a new organization in the process.
The earth you dig up to make the Panama Canal has to go somewhere. We can’t
unravel society without producing a new organization in the process. But
sometimes, by recoding the desiring-machines, by throwing them into disarray and
striving for the body without organs and ultimately organizing them differently, we
can dig ourselves our very own Panama Canal, a small break in the current
organization that dramatically redistributes the possibilities for movement across
the surface of the water.

Even to move one tiny fragment of land, what an apparatus you’d need! What heavy
machinery, and so much labor. What Freud calls “resistance” is the water rushing
back in to try and push you away even when all you’re doing is trying to dig a
channel for it to go through. Even if you want to liberate desire, even if you want the
best for desire and just want to set it free, the waves will crash against you while
you dig, soaking you and distracting you and annoying you. Desire, like any wild,
caged thing, can accidentally hurt the people trying to set it free.



Fourth Exercise:
The Market


Here’s a fact that I find absolutely insane: it costs 1.5 cents to make a penny.

(A penny, for readers in other times and places, is an American one-cent coin, worth
1/100 of a dollar).

It costs 1.5 cents to make a penny. I first learned this about ten years ago and ever
since then I think about it every single time I see or touch a penny. When I say that
this fact is “insane,” do I mean it makes no coherent sense? No, it does make
coherent sense. I understand every separate part of that idea, I understand the idea
as a whole, I even understand, more or less, the process by which the US Mint buys
raw metals and uses various means to turn them into little coins that cost 1.5 cents
each to make but are worth only one cent. But the fact that it costs 1.5 cents to make
a penny feels insane to me. It’s not a question of rationality, or logic or reason or
even sense: it’s a question of affect. It just…feels wrong. Not “How does that make
sense?” as in, “I don’t understand the rational connection between these
components of the assertion,” but rather “How does that make sense?” as in
“…what? Huh?,” the kind of bewilderment that always comes with a facial expression
and stiffening response in the entire body.

There are certain questions for which capitalism always has answers. Why? Because
it’s cheaper. Why? Because it’s more efficient. Why? Because growth is inevitable.
Why? Because there’s no demand for it. Why? Because there’s a bubble.

But if you respond by asking Why not do it another way? the algorithm sputters and
stalls. “What…do you mean do it another way?” The capitalist’s response to the idea
of an economy not driven by growth is exactly like the socialist’s response to the
idea that money is worth more than human life: it’s not an actual incomprehension,
it’s not a failure of rationality or signification or meaning, it’s an affective response, a
stutter, a sputter, a break in the machine of reason. “What do you…mean?” Except
you already understand the meaning. You understand the meaning and still it
strikes you as a kind of madness, a kind of impossibility. When a fascist tells you that
white supremacy is “necessary for the survival of the white race,” it’s not that you
don’t understand what they mean; it’s just that this meaning is so alien to the
organization of your mind that you viscerally reject the assertion. The wave of affect
that courses through you in that moment is not a break in the reality principle, it’s a
response to reality. You’re not in denial; you’re not refusing to see what’s in front of
you. You’re just refusing to accept that what’s in front of you is all of reality, the only
reality. And with good reason: that reality is like paint on the inside of a giant
membrane – the body without organs. What you’re responding to are the pulsions
on the other side of the membrane.

*
Just as the gods of antiquity often presented themselves with two faces, one
wondrous and one terrible, so too does the body without organs of capital present
itself with two faces. In its terrible incarnation it is nothing but a series of numbers,
a grid of quantification stretching across the entire surface of inscription, all the way
to the limit and beyond, like the Matrix after Keanu Reeves comes back to life the
first time: behind everything, an endless, scrolling screen of code. Or maybe a better
analogy is that scene in Fight Club where there are IKEA price tags on everything.
Over every penny hangs a small astral sticker that says “1.5 cents” on it. The terrible
face of capitalism is an endless, dissonant array of values, constantly shifting and
colliding, graphed inadequately onto the material world.

The wondrous face of capitalism is a mask thrown over these roiling, mutating
numbers, a bag with a smiley face painted on it that is actually filled with a swarm of
angry hornets. In its wondrous incarnation, capital presents itself to us as a
miraculating divinity called The Market.

“Why did prices rise?”
The Market.

“Why isn’t there enough supply?”
The Market.

“What determines the organization of society?”
The Market.

“How should we decide what kind of buildings to build in our city?”
The Market.

“Why do I need to buy a new phone every 18 months?”
The Market is driven by a need for innovation.

“Why are schools doing so poorly?”
The Market isn’t interested in education.

All hail the Market, origin and source of all meaning and value! The munificent face
of John Calvin’s God, the miraculous voodoo doctor of Reaganite economics, the
chairman of the Union of Rational Actors.

The Market too is a kind of “everything.” Is there a room somewhere, build in the
17th century, full of steam pipes and levers and gyroscopes, from whence the
fluctuations and variations of The Market are directed? No, obviously not. When
people talk about “The Market” they don’t usually think it’s a person. They don’t
usually even mean that it’s an active agency or an actual actor. Rather, “The Market”
is a general name for the total state of a vast system of values and exchanges and
relations, a fluctuating system in which every value is somehow simultaneously the
product of every other value. “The Market” is a single concept that unifies the
infinite variables of value into a single miraculous force, a single concept or
description for the vast, endless operations of production – an enclosing membrane
on the inner surface of which are painted, gigantic and hideous, a bear and a bull.

For the magic, miraculating membrane of The Market to work, it has to cover the
entire world: how can every value be the product of every other value
simultaneously, if some values are excluded from the equation? So when by some
accident The Market learns something new or discovers some new idea, when it
expands to cover some new corner of the world, it just smiles munificently and
pretends that it knew all along, that it’s always been here, that this is what it
planned all along.

*

There aren’t two different membranes, one painted with the terrifying coordinates
of value and the other wearing the wondrous face of The Market. It’s all the same
membrane, the same body without organs, the same limit. It’s more like going to a
fancy hotel room and turning on a UV light so you can suddenly see all the cum
stains on the mattress and sheets. It’s the exact same mattress that it was a second
ago, but suddenly revealed in a different light. Or, if you prefer, compare it to
Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit: it’s the same drawing either way, completely
transformed by a shift in your focus. Neither the terrifying grid of coordinates nor
the wondrous painted beasts are more real; neither of them is closer to the truth;
neither expresses reality better or more accurately than the other. Neither one is
closer than the other to substance itself, or to whatever something is organized by
reality; neither one of them is closer than the other to the undifferentiated pulsions
throbbing under reality, straining forever to break the grid and rip the beasts to
shreds.


















IV.
Recording-Production



Pick any object that you see.

Your phone, a book, a sandwich. How was it made? The sandwich may have been
made in front of you. But in the case of most objects around you, there’s a good
chance they were made somewhere else and shipped to you finished. Chances are
high that most of the objects around you are mass-produced – they are made in a
place that does nothing but make objects of that kind, and makes a lot of objects of
that kind. Nowadays, most of the places where a lot of things are made aren’t near
the places where a lot of things are consumed, so chances are high that the thing had
to be transported to you somehow. Chances are also high that any place which
mass-produces object doesn’t source its raw materials on-site, but rather has them
brought in from near or far, which also demands a chain of transport and supply.
These materials must in turn be harvested or gathered or collected.

This entire, multi-tiered chain of production, along with many other similar chains,
forms a kind of total system, with a multitude of components. Factories, cars, planes,
post offices, mailboxes, stores, and throughout this system humans and automated
machines that collaborate on the labor the system requires. Material change hands,
are transformed, are moved around, are “consumed.” Here we’ve reached yet
another version of our old friend everything: one kind of everything is the abstract
totality of all productive relations within a particular social formation.

You may know more about this system and you may know less, but however much
you know about capitalism and mass production in general, you have some
understanding of the fact that there is some kind of system of this sort. Most people
can grasp the fact that the stuff they use and consume has to come from somewhere
and has to get here somehow. If you were living in 1640, or in 940, or in 300 BC,
your concept of how “everything” is made would necessarily be very different. You
wouldn’t have a concept of mass production in the modern sense. You would have
no concept analogous to our “factory” or “delivery service” or “Amazon.” The closest
analogue to “mass production” for most of human history was a place were a
particular good or service was highly concentrated – a city known for its
blacksmiths, or a country whose climate made it rich in oranges and could afford to
export a lot of those oranges. Similarly, for much of human history people were
much more likely to have an understanding of processes closer to home, because the
ways in which things were made, and the things that were made, varied so much
from place to place. When we look at older texts, it often seems that the further
away something was made, the more likely it is to be attributed to a magical or
miraculous process of production (farted out by a phoenix, dug up by gnomes,
collected from the petals of a magic flower just after sunset).

Just like us, a person in 1640 or 940 could and very likely did have some general
concept of “how things are made,” however vague or local. This is a kind of
everything, a kind of limit-concept. Deleuze & Guattari follow Marx, more or less, in
asserting that every historical formation, every particular socius, has its own limit-
concept of production, its own particular overall concept of how things are made,
what things are worth, and how value is determined. This is the social body of
production; the body without organs is always the BwO of a particular social body.
Like every kind of “everything,” this concept of the total relations of production in a
given social formation is always a limit, because you’re not actually counting and
adding up every single form of production everywhere throughout a society at a
given moment. It’s a general conception. Your concept of capitalism as an overall
mode of production does not involve actual and adequate knowledge of every
factory and billionaire any more than a medieval blacksmith’s concept of feudalism
as an overall mode of production involved actual and adequate knowledge of every
foundry and armory and kingdom. And everything your conception excludes is the
everything else of that conception, the water that surrounds the continent.

As soon as we assert that “capital” is the concept of everything corresponding
particular to our social formation (capitalism), we imply or assert that there are
other concepts of everything corresponding to other social formations. A blacksmith
in 322 AD doesn’t understand “production” in general the way a steel magnate in
1922 does. Not too controversial. But here’s where it gets tricky: the concepts of
everything seem to shift seamlessly. If capitalism wasn’t always, capitalism had to
start somehow or somewhere, right? Humanity didn’t take a week off and stop all
production while someone somewhere replaced the planet’s operating system with
Capitalism and then rebooted it. In some way, some how, capitalism must have
begun in a different social formation, its machines must have begun assembling and
connecting before it became the dominant mode of everything. We find the same
problem here that we saw with the Kleinian infant: how are the values Good Breast
and Bad Breast first assigned? How does any particular system of value-distribution
start? That’s what it means to say that capitalism can never contain an adequate
explanation for itself; the same is true for every social formation, which is why every
social formation has an everything else that is its body without organs.

If a mode of thinking corresponds in time to a particular social formation, it can’t
also be the cause or the origin of that formation, because then it would need to be
before that social formation and hence not corresponding to it. “How did capitalism
start?” “Well, when people had accumulated enough surplus value to invest it, they
invested it and it grew into more surplus value.” The formation of capitalism is
attributed to the accumulation of capital, but what does “the accumulation of
capital” even mean outside the context of capitalism? In fact, we find all the
component pieces of capitalism in earlier formations. More than 500 years before
Christ we find the first Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus, growing rich by
speculating on olive futures. Greek and Roman coins have been found in India:
global trade has existed for thousands of years. We find ethno-colonialism as early
as the Hellenes, we find “mercantile” relations between colony and motherland as
early as the Romans, whose empire was fuelled by North African grain. Debt, private
property, the Law: every component of capitalism precedes it.

This is where the Body without Organs again appears as a limit or a placeholder
concept, perhaps even a form of practical skepticism. We can find an anchor in the
fact that even capitalism itself admits that it wasn’t always. Whether it’s creation in
seven days or evolution over millions of years, capitalism has always invested
heavily in some form of fantasy of its own Before. This means that even within the
ambit of capitalist ideology, we can ask what this Before looks like as a concept, how
it’s theorized as a concept, what it does as a concept. If the undifferentiated womb-
state of constant nourishment is (approximately) the body without organs of the
newborn baby’s desiring-machines, what is the “undifferentiated womb-state” of
capitalism? What is there before “everything” becomes capital, and divisions of
capital, and value, and divisions of value? We can’t access this Before from inside
capitalism any more than we can access the thoughts and feelings of an infant in the
womb to know whether it actually experiences temporality as a seamless,
undifferentiated duration the way I suggested. But who ever made such a claim?
Who ever promised you that history was a form of time travel and not a form of
storytelling? We do what we can with what we’ve got.

Even if we assume a worst case scenario – even if we assume that capitalism is an
airtight box, that all thoughts of freedom are an ideological trap created for us by
capitalism, even if we assume that all thought and language can only reinscribe the
purposes of capitalism and serve its ultimate ends, even if we assume that there’s no
escape – even then we can still take pleasure in extended speculation on this Before.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that worst-case scenario is the case. I do think that
capitalism is a historical formation, that it wasn’t always, and that it won’t be
forever, if only because the sun will burn out eventually! I think there will be a
beyond of capitalism, and I think there will still be humans alive to see that beyond,
even if not for very long after that. I think a dramatic transformation of society is
inevitable, not just possible. But let’s say it’s not. Let’s assume the worst and say that
we’re trapped forever in an perpetually-expanding capitalism and all our ideas of
revolution are just fantasies to distract our minds from the grim fact of our eternal
servitude while we wait for the world to end. OK…so what? If we’re trapped forever
in eternal bondage, wouldn’t you rather be trapped with pleasurable fantasies of
revolution than without? That’s what I always find so funny about the melodrama of
nihilism. If you truly believe all political action is the narcissistic masturbation of
trapped, self-deluding drones, would you really begrudge those drones their small,
sad pleasure? If you really think nothing means anything and nothing matters and
nobody can ever change anything then why not join the fantasy circle jerk and have
some fun while you’re stuck here?

On the one hand, it’s clear that however you choose to conceive or understand
history, historical change, and social formations, there is always in some
fundamental way the same stuff underpinning all of history, the same material
substrate. Scientists tell us the elements were trapped on our planet as it formed, an
accumulation of cosmic dust. We understand that the planet has been in some
fundamental way the same planet throughout time, that wood is wood whether it’s
used to crucify Jesus or make an IKEA chair. In some basic way, “everything” is
always the same. But at the same time, it’s also not. I just offered the atomic
elements of the planet as evidence for a historical continuity. Would a person in the
1200s even understand what that means? No, because they didn’t conceive
“everything” in terms of atoms. Neither would a tribe that lived in a secluded valley
at the dawn of history have understood what I even mean by “planet,” even though
they were born and lived and died on it. The Body without Organs is situated
between these two parameters, a membrane separating two evident assertions. On
the outside of the membrane is the “itself” of everything, whether we want to call it
God or atoms or the full face of the universe. On the inside of the membrane are all
the things we are able to actually conceive and imagine, whether or not we assign to
any of those things the status of truth. Both of these things are the case at once;
neither is “latent” behind the other. The parts of the world you aren’t conscious of
don’t stop existing just because you aren’t thinking about them. The affective weight
of material evidence, the feeling that there must be a Beyond, is the body without
organs straining to break through the organization of the desiring-machines and
occasionally visible between them. It marks the limit of what we can conceive and
feel, but the very existence of the limit tells us that there has to be something more.

There is always a body without organs – Deleuze & Guattari are very clear on that:
“Some kind of full body, that of the earth or the despot, a recording surface, an
apparent objective movement, a fetishistic, perverted, bewitched world are
characteristic of all types of society as a constant of social reproduction.” In every
social formation, in every psychic organization, there is always a full body. The
primitive tribe’s world may not include a concept of a spherical planet floating in
space, but it includes some kind of “everything”: every world is organized, every
existence is mapped onto some actual territory. Nobody lives alone in thin air,
everybody’s reality has parameters and some kind of structure. In their standard
reference work The Presocratic Philosophers, Kirk and Raven begin their survey of
the earliest Greek philosophy with the prepositional logic of mythic cosmology: the
world is surrounded by water, the souls of the dead are below. Abrahamic logic too
starts with organization and differentiation, the Spirit of God hovering above the
void, from which are differentiated the sky and the water. The void is the Abrahamic
God’s Body without Organs. Every single reality is organized, somehow.

*

We’ve already discussed how Deleuze & Guattari plunge you directly into a new and
strange conceptual language, and how new concepts emerge when old concepts
aren’t quite satisfactory anymore. One strategy for getting a handle on these new
concepts is to try and figure out which concept they’re replacing. Anti-Oedipus is a
kind of hot-rod philosophy: they take a familiar and standard chassis and add weird
new home-made parts to it. It might look like a demon skull, but it’s just a headlight.
D&G are building a machine, replacing the familiar parts with unfamiliar parts that
serve a similar function. What part is being quietly replaced by any given unfamiliar
concept? For example, in the section on The Logic of Sense, we saw how Klein
replaced Freud’s “stages” with “positions.”

There are two strange new verb-forms that Deleuze & Guattari create for Anti-
Oedipus: “to miraculate,” and “to fall back on.” Both of these verbs occur throughout
the book, and often in proximity to the body without organs. Both of these verbs, I
think, correspond to concepts drawn the 48th chapter of Capital, vol. III, which
Deleuze & Guattari quote in the section on the BwO.

At first glance, “miraculation” seems like some form of transcendence, especially
when Deleuze & Guattari start to talk about “the Numen” and “transformation of
energy.” But it’s not, that’s exactly the point. “Miraculation” is the process by which
transcendence is reintroduced into the socius as a kind of constant; a kind of
transcendence is introduced into the socius to paper over the cracks where the body
without organs shines through between the desiring-machines. Deleuze & Guattari
are not encouraging or advocating transcendence, they are tracking it down. Marx
talks about capital as “a very mystical being.” What is the operation of this mystic
power? That which intervenes between being and consciousness to produce the
effect of incomprehension characteristic of “mysticism” is the process of
miraculation. But every effect is still in the world, even the experience of the sublime
and the mystical, and we must account for the corporeality of those affective
experiences if we want to historicize them.

Deleuze & Guattari quote Marx from the 48th chapter of Capital III, the volume
subtitled The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, which is very much what
D&G are concerned with. Here’s a different excerpt from the same chapter:

Capital – profit (profit of enterprise plus interest), land – ground-rent, labour –
wages, this is the trinity formula which comprises all the secrets of the social
production process[…]

Capital, land, labour! However, capital is not a thing, but rather a definite social
production relation, belonging to a definite historical formation of society, which
is manifested in a thing and lends this thing a specific social character. Capital is
the not the sum of the material and produced means of production. Capital is
rather the means of production transformed into capital, which in themselves are
no more capital than gold or silver in itself is money[…] It is not merely the
products of labourers turned into independent powers, products are rulers and
buyers of their producers, but rather also the social forces form of this labour,
which confront the labourers as properties of their products. Here, then, we have
a definite and, at first glance, very mystical social form, of one of the factors in the
a historically produced social production process[…]

We have already pointed out the mystifying character that transforms the social
relations, for which the material elements of wealth serve as bearers in
production, into properties of these things themselves (commodities) and still
 more pronouncedly transforms the production relation into a thing (money). All
forms of society, in so far as they reach the stage of commodity-production and
money circulation, take part in this perversion. But under the capitalist mode of
production and in the case of capital, which forms its dominant category, its
determining production relation, this enchanted and perverted world develops
still more[…] With the development of relative surplus-value in the actual
specifically capitalist mode of production, whereby the productive powers of
social labour are developed, these productive powers and the social interrelations
of labour in the direct labour-process seem transferred from labour to capital.
Capital thus becomes a very mystic being since all of labour’s social productive
forces appear to be due to capital, rather than labour as such, and seem to issue
from the womb of capital itself[…] In Book II we naturally had to present this
sphere of circulation merely with reference to the form determinations which it
created and to demonstrate the further development of the structure of capital
taking place in this sphere. But in reality this sphere is the sphere of competition,
which, considered in each individual case, is dominated by chance; where, then,
the inner law, which prevails in these accidents and regulates them, is only visible
when these accidents are grouped together in large numbers, where it remains,
therefore, invisible and unintelligible to the individual agents in production. But
furthermore: the actual process of production, as a unity of the direct production
process and the circulation process, gives rise to new formations, in which the
vein of internal connections is increasingly lost, the production relations are
rendered independent of one another, and the component values become ossified
into forms independent of one another.

I think the process Marx describes here is analogous to the process Deleuze &
Guattari call miraculation.

Think back to every time you’ve heard or read that a new drug or a piece of
technology is “the outcome of billions of dollars of research dollars.” But like…what
the hell does that actually mean? That is literally an example of “miraculating” logic.
How exactly does money turn into a pill? Is there a magic machine at the
GlaxoKlineSmith or the BurroughsWellcome headquarters, some kind of special
room they invented where you put money in on one side and 10 years later a new
medicine pops out the other side? This is exactly what it means to say that the body
without organs is “a recording surface, an apparent objective movement, a [fetish]”:
the body without organs, or the recording surface of production offers itself –
miraculously, always miraculously – as the cause and the meaning and the source
and the explanation. How was the drug made? Money. How was the research
conducted? Money. How was the lab built? Money. All of the actual processes and
connections and syntheses – all the desiring-machines – become invisible and
secondary in the process. But like…have you ever seen a pile of money build a lab
and conduct experiments? Does the money have agency? Does it have opposable
thumbs? The centuries of archival research and knowledge, the labor, the materiel,
the actual bodies, the accumulated expertise and technical know-how; all these
things disappear behind the BwO of capital. The total cost of a thing, the total cost of
the lab and the research and the labor and knowledge, is the endpoint of the process
– it’s only after you make the thing that you know exactly what the total bill was,
exactly how many hours it took, exactly how many people were involved. The value
is abstracted from the labor and material costs, supposedly. And yet this lump sum
of “research dollars,” whatever the fuck a “research dollar” even is, is made to be the
cause and the origin of the things that came before it. The lump sum is only a
metaphor or a stand-in for the total sum of resources and activity required to create
the new drug or the new piece of tech; “miraculation” is the process by which capital
is made to be the meaning and the origin of something for which it is in fact only a
metaphor.

Another example of the same “miraculating” process is when natural disasters or
other catastrophes are measured in terms of their cost. “How serious of an
earthquake was it?” “Oh, man, it was a $30 billion earthquake!” But again…what
does that even mean? Is that how much someone spent to cause the earthquake? Is
that a fee the earthquake was promised in exchange for a solid performance? We
can’t even take this figure as the dollar amount required to physically repair the
damage caused by the earthquake, because when economists calculate the cost of
things like that, they factor in “lost potential income” and “productivity” lost to
workers having to stay home, and all kinds of other phenomena ranging from the
incredibly concrete to the entirely imaginary.

We could spend all day listing all the actual and material effects and consequences
of an earthquake – the highway buckled, a bridge fell, the Gunderson’s grain silo
collapsed, the diner couldn’t open because the cooks couldn’t get to work, a student
in the school became hysterical, a hibernating bear was woken up, whatever. How
do all these events and phenomena become 30 billion dollars? Miraculation. To say
that capital is the recording surface of all these actual processes and events isn’t just
to “reduce” all these events to a single monetary figure – that’s just metonymy.
There’s something more happening here – there’s a fundamental assumption that all
things of any kind can and should be translated into a quantified dollar value, a
fundamental assumption that the “truth” of things is in their quantified abstract
value (“The body without organs…serves as a surface for the recording of the entire
process of production of desire, so that desiring-machines seem to emanate from it
in the apparent objective movement that establishes a relationship between the
machines and the body without organs”). Capital is the recording surface of all these
actual events precisely to the extent that the meaning of things only becomes legible
in and through their transcription into the particular code of the capitalist socius,
that is, precisely to the extent that it seems self-evident for us to record and evaluate
them in terms of capital.

That’s not because capital is the only way to record or evaluate or encode: quite the
opposite, we’ve already seem that different social formations have different bodies
without organs and different ways of thinking about everything. That’s because the
miraculating operation is always a reduction of elements, an abstraction of new
totalities away from the actual operations of the desiring-machines. Just as
psychoanalysis has to reduce all actual connections and components to mommy-
daddy-child in order for its logic to work, so too does capitalism have to reduce all
actual connections and components to growth-cost-surplus value in order for its
logic to work. And in both cases, everything else, the weight of the BwO, continually
threatens this logic. Everything else isn’t negation, it isn’t void: it’s all the rest of the
things you aren’t actually including in your general conception or overall picture.
The system of distributed values doesn’t actually cover every single thing on
earth…yet.

Deleuze & Guattari suggest that a distinctive feature of capitalism relative to other
kinds of socius is that it is constantly expanding, compulsively, irrationally. It
constantly seeks to spread its grid of values and coordinates wider and further.
Every socius is a kind of inscription, a kind of translation, mapping itself onto the
raw “stuff” of existence. And every socius has an everything else, its body without
organs. But not every socius continually exerts energy to try and reach out beyond
itself, to translate more things.

Think of the Sentinelese tribe that recently came into the news when they killed a
Christian missionary. Does their existence have a particular organization, a
particular socius? Absolutely. They live a certain way, their world has certain
parameters, they have certain habits and kinship structures, as well as a collective
imaginary of some kind (how they understand where they came from, what they
think the world is, whether they think animals have souls or not). And does their
socius have a particular BwO? Absolutely. In fact, a lot of what to us are clearly
differentiated features of modern life are to them part of their everything else,
beyond their imagination. And you know what? They don’t seem to want to expand
their socius. They don’t seem to want to code more things. They seem fine with the
socius and the body without organs that they have. I don’t want to be too
sentimental about that existence: for all we know the Sentinelese may impose brutal
punishment on anyone who wants to leave the island or make contact with
outsiders, we have no idea. But for whatever reason, the machinery of their socius
as a whole just doesn’t seem to include an expanding component. That fact tells us
nothing about what individual members of their society may or may not want.

Capitalism, as a whole, isn’t like that. Capitalism always wants to expand. Capitalism
always wants more. Capitalism always wants to find out, to sail to the horizon, to
colonize Mars. Who knows, maybe there’s oil there? Only by relentless expansion
can capital continuously bring new commodities and new concepts and new habits
into the membrane of the socius where value, and hence surplus-value, are
inscribed, and hence fulfill its Primary Main Objective: growth. Capitalism, like
cancer, produces and expands compulsively. Capitalism is marked by a particularly
violent relationship with its BwO, because the BwO is both the unorganized horror it
shields itself against and the infinite well from which it draws new machines and
new values and new surplus-values. Other social organizations maintain stability by
trying to stifle innovation and avoid change. Capitalism plays a more exciting and
delirious game: it constantly oscillates to the point of instability, letting desire cut
through the membrane in the hope that it might bring back something valuable.
That’s why Deleuze & Guattari say that the distinctive feature of the capitalist socius
is the constant process of decoding and recoding. We’ve already seen that all the
individual pieces of capitalism lurked in the background of history long before they
cohered into a hegemonic social formation. To be able to expand relentlessly, the
capitalist socius has to shed itself or decode all the component pieces that keep it
locked in place, all the pieces we might find in a society like that of the Sentinelese,
powerful forces of anti-production that keep a social formation in place. And in fact,
the last few centuries since the “Enlightenment” have been just such a process, a
relentless series of increasingly-rapid convulsions in which constraining elements of
the socius that limit production – religion, distance, ethics – are slowly decoded and
recoded as productive machines.

When we think about “traditional” societies, what we’re actually thinking about is a
constancy or stasis of value. Old religious Jewish men thought the Torah scroll was
the most precious thing in the world in 1000 AD and they think the same thing now,
1000 years later. “Traditonal” men thought women were property 5000 years ago
and they still think that now. Compare that to the culture-workers of capital, the
gatekeepers whose labor constantly assigns new values to new phenomena. Think
how often literally the same person will write a thinkpiece about how something is
Good and then four years later write a thinkpiece about how that same thing is Bad,
without apologizing or even acknowledging the fact. Think of the shelf life of a
cultural fad, how quickly it goes from “What the actual fuck” to “Oh, this is
everywhere now” to “That’s so boring.” These aren’t accidents. Capitalism operates
this way, by expanding and stretching the grid of values to cover new objects and
new relations, to expand the range of entities it can diagnose and quantify and sell.

This is both the danger and the possibility of our socius: it conjures the BwO, opens
up to it, dares and risks it, but then pulls back from it to reweave the grid of
coordinates and reorganize the flows of desire. On the face of it, that means that
capitalism offers all of us boundless new options for experiencing and learning our
desires. Factory food, organic food, big houses, small apartments, solo living,
country living, collective living, digital living, paleo living, do whatever the hell you
want as long as someone makes money off it and you show up for work on time.
Polyamory, Fleshlights, chastity, puppy play, fisting: capitalism can learn to
accommodate anything, it’s the ultimate pig bottom. The inverse side of that
boundless expansion are all the bodies killed or burned out or made useless in the
process of experimentation. We can always make more people – we have the
money! Capitalism trains us to experiment with ourselves, makes it possible for us
to set ourselves off on delirious new lines in order to see where we’ll end up, in
order to see if maybe there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I don’t think the
association between great art and madness comes from an intrinsic link between
madness and talent; rather, I think the link between great art and madness comes
from the sheer strain of having to realize a desire for something unimaginable,
something the world around you continually tells you is literally insane. There’s a
long, long list of people who created something great, or invented something great,
or did something great, but died penniless or alone or both only to have their work
recognized as “genius” decades or even centuries later. Poor Nietzsche.
Today, in 2018, Deleuze & Guattari’s concepts are much more legible than they were
almost 50 years ago. The reinscription of everything in terms of flows of capital, in
terms of capitalist desiring-machines, has escalated to a dizzying rate. Everything is
quantified now, in a way that I don’t think most people were remotely able to grasp
in 1972. It’s incredible to me how far ahead D&G were able to see. The full body of
capital has put a dollar price on pretty much everything now, virtually every
moment, every place, every affect and movement, have been translated. In 1972,
many of the organs in the social body that seemed healthy and essential to the
people around them already looked to D&G like rotting, necrotic tissue.

The “full Body without Organs of capital” is the membrane, the grid of coordinates,
the miraculating surface on which all values are inscribed, the constantly-expanding
everything of capitalism. Obviously, nobody ever has an adequate conception of the
actual values of every single thing in order to actually understand how a particular
value is produced. That’s the con here – hypothetically it’s all rational, but no
evidence or demonstration can actually marshal adequate evidence to prove
something’s value one way or another. Value always comes down to belief. That’s
the miraculating property of the socius. It’s a kind of organization that is always its
own logic, its own explanation. The socius is miraculating because it has to account
for everything without actually being everything, which is not an easy job, and can
only be accomplished with the help of magic.

*

What does the body without organs of social and material production have to do
with the body without organs of desiring-production? Quite simply, they are the
same body without organs, because desire is historical. If desire opens up onto the
entire social field – if the set of all things you can desire is the full range of
possibilities encompassed by the socius – then the set of things you can desire is the
same as the set of things that exist at any given moment in history, at least
hypothetically (as a limit, the BwO is always a limit).

The socius (society, the whole of our material existence) organizes our existence in a
particular way. Not consciously, not as a single entity, but as the collective and
simultaneous outcome of all its operations. Those operations include all the things
in our environment, people and inanimate objects and forces and effects and states
of affairs and relations. We never adequately conceive all of these effects; instead,
we attribute them collectively to the socius itself, which is nothing except all of these
operations and machines. The operations of the socius normally produce particular
kinds of machines, particular kinds of connections. There’s no “should” or “supposed
to” here, not really, there are just operations that resemble other operations to a
greater or lesser degree.

The socius has miraculating powers, but it’s not actually God: it doesn’t create
substance ex nihilo, it doesn’t produce something from nothing: it produces new
machines by constantly operating on the same “stuff” of existence that every socius
operates on, like a factory transforming raw materials into finished products. Not
every piece of wood they send into the factory comes out an IKEA table. Some pieces
break during production, some pieces are rotten on the inside, some pieces
accidentally get ruined when they’re left in a mildewy storage room. It’s nobody’s
fault, it’s just the cost of production. A factory needs a certain kind of raw materials.
If all the furniture factories in the world only wanted one kind of tree, then the value
of that tree would increase and fewer of other trees would be planted. What if
someone then invented a process that made amazing furniture out of a different
kind of wood? Then suddenly the distribution of values across the system would
shift. Same earth, same existence, same reality, different organization. The old trees
that nearly went extinct because everyone thought they were useless garbage are
suddenly more valuable than gold. So it goes.

The factories of the capitalist socius need certain kinds of raw materials, and certain
kinds of outputs to continue functioning. This applies to a factory that produces
telemarketing calls just as it applies to a factory that produces tires or a factory that
produces workers, also known as a family. You need a certain kind of rubber to
make tires with that particular tire-making operation; you need a certain kind of
worker to make telemarketing calls with that particular call-making operation.
Deleuze & Guattari insist that the motives, means, and methods by which human
bodies are transformed into certain kinds of workers are exactly the same as the
motives, means, and methods by which tree bodies are transformed into certain
kinds of furniture. All of society is a factory, constantly producing. All that changes is
the organization of this production, and every particular organization always leaves
out everything else, which falls back on it and pushes in on it from the limit. Every
socius has its body without organs.




















V:
Delirium, Schizophrenia, and the Cosmic Egg


Think all the way back to the egg from our first exercise.

Remember how we explored the smooth, continuous surface, and then imagined
ourselves inside the egg, as a little speck or microbe?

If you were born and died in that egg and everyone you ever knew was born and
died in that egg, would any of you ever have a reason to try and leave the egg?

Most of you would probably never even realize you were in an egg; you’d just think
the egg was the whole universe. Not only would you be content to stay put, it might
not even occur to you that there was another option. But imagine that after a
lifetime of living in that egg with no change, suddenly the egg cracked? How would
your microscopic egg civilization respond? Imagine the terror that a microscopic
egg civilization would experience if their universe-egg cracked, and you’ll start to
understand the sense in which Deleuze & Guattari consider desire to be
“revolutionary” or “radical.” Society doesn’t organize and constrain desire because it
knows what desire is and does; rather, society organizes and constrains desire
because of its sheer terror at the thought of what desire could do. This is the sense in
which desire is the “opposite” of society, or its inverse, the sense in which desire is
society’s everything else: not because it’s inherently Bad, like Klein’s absent breast,
but because it threatens to destabilize the entire system by which we determine
what is Good, society’s entire distribution-grid of values. Desire is explicitly not
limited to sexual desire in Anti-Oedipus. Quite the opposite: desire is a movement, a
shift in intensities, a direction. The entire point is that sexual desire and social desire
(“I want to fuck men”; “I want to get rich”) are both produced in exactly the same
way, at exactly the same time, and share both a socius and a BwO.

What if one day some nerd in the microscopic egg civilization stands up and says,
“Hey, I think there’s something outside the universe-egg, and not only that, I have a
plan for cracking it open to find out!” Everyone else in the egg civilization would
think that nerd is insane. The rest of society would probably do everything they
could to stop that nerd. Not because they know what the consequences will be, but
precisely because they don’t, because the consequences lie entirely beyond that
society’s conceptual abilities.

What form will the egg civilization’s response to its one insane member take? That
probably has a lot to do with the ways in which that nerd’s madness expresses itself.
Do they walk around all day, talking about cracking open the egg of the universe but
otherwise mostly functioning OK? In that case maybe the individual can still be a
part of society; maybe it’s the one weird guy in the office at Egg Corp, always
muttering to himself but otherwise not hurting anyone. If the nerd who wants to
crack open the egg of the universe spends all day building an actual machine to
crack the universe open, and punches or even kills anyone who tries to stop them?
Well, in that case the microscopic civilization might have to take more serious
measures. Maybe a group of egg policemen take down that person and restrain
them. Maybe they get accidentally shot in the process. Maybe they survive and are
put in an egg-microbe institution where they get injected with egg-microbe drugs to
calm them down.

We see at last that the universe itself is just another concept, just another
placeholder or limit. And here, where the universe is exposed as a mere concept, we
can finally glimpse what Deleuze & Guattari mean by delirium, and by
schizophrenia. The less comprehensible the expressions of your desire are to the
socius, the more delirious they are; and the less functional the expressions of your
desire are in the socius, the more schizoid they are.

Of all the ways in which Capitalism and Schizophrenia has been critiqued, one of the
most consistent and significant has revolved around D&G’s use of schizophrenia as a
general metaphor. In general, using any illness or disability as a metaphor is risky
and potentially appropriative. You always risk replacing a general and diverse
condition of existence with your own personal experience, you always risk
appropriating someone else’s genuine pain to describe an experience bearing no
relation to that pain. I do think it’s true that D&G repeatedly use “schizoid” or
“schizophrenic” in an idealized way that implies you want or should want to
experience schizoid affect or schizoid conditions. If you are yourself schizophrenic,
or have ever cared for a loved one that is schizophrenic, or are a doctor, it might
make you understandably angry that some random French dude is using medical
diagnoses as metaphors.

I’m not going to defend or apologize for D&G’s use of the word “schizophrenia” and
its derivatives. I think the critiques of that usage are valid, but it’s not for me to
apologize for two dead men. I do think, though, that their use of the concept goes far
beyond mere metaphor. While it might be a stretch to describe desire in terms of
schizophrenia, it’s absolutely not a stretch to describe desire in terms of diagnosis
and treatment and illness, because our society literally and actually regiments
bodies that way. We do diagnose people as ill or abnormal based on their sexual
preferences. We do lock up and penalize people for the things they want if the things
they want aren’t comprehensible to and functional in the socius. We do put people in
institutions if the expressions of their desire are too incomprehensible or too
dysfunctional. It’s hard to deny that desire and illness are powerfully intertwined
concepts in our social formation.

We saw earlier that while an infant body has a binary switch between eating and
not-eating, not-eating isn’t an empty or null state; it’s not a negation, it’s just a state
in which the infant is doing things other than eating. By the same measure, the full
body of society has binary switches between sense and non-sense, between healthy
and not-healthy, between functional and dysfunctional. But none of these non-states
is an absence or a void. The absence of function is catatonia, what D&G call the
“clinical” or “institutional schizophrenic” (many people with schizophrenic
symptoms are not in institutions or catatonic, and it’s worth remembering that).
“Dysfunction” is more properly labeled other-function, because the machines are
always doing something. Walking, counting, muttering, drooling, moving rocks from
one pocket to another in a constantly-shifting pattern. There are never no machines.
There’s only machines that are more and less legible to the socius as a whole, closer
or further to the body without organs that is everything else, all the things that are
not legible to the current organization. And in fact we find that symptoms once
considered perverse or pathological or dysfunctional, like homosexuality, can
become newly legible to the ever-expanding regime of capital. If these non-states
were void or nothing, what would exist to become legible? There has to be
something. That something is undifferentiated, the everything else of every society.
There’s a clear affinity here with the way Foucault describes the operations of
power and knowledge, for example the shift in homosexual activity from a kind of
sodomy to a kind of subjectivity.

The universe itself is a kind of everything, and the whole of the universe also has a
body without organs. Aristotle once thought the universe was a series of concentric
spheres; now astro-physicists seem to think that the universe is donut-shaped. What
does that even mean? What could possibly be outside the donut of the universe?
What could limit the universe? That limit is imaginary, if only because we have
literally zero conception of what could be outside or beyond that limit. Beyond the
limit of our apparently donut-shaped universe is the BwO.

What would Aristotle had thought if you’d told him that not only does the Earth
orbit the Sun, but there are countless suns each with its own planets? What would
Aristotle have thought if you’d shown him a cell phone? What would Aristotle have
thought if you’d played jazz for him? Would any of these things be legible to him in
any way, or would they all be noise in the radio, symptoms of madness? The
Inquisition literally tortured Galileo for his theories about the universe, that’s how
powerfully the socius works to restrain and organize itself against the BwO.

Where do we think we are?
“The universe.”
What is that?
“It’s where we are.”
OK, but I’m in Manhattan on my couch, that’s where I am.
“No, no, the universe is ‘where we are’ in a bigger sense, in a fuller sense, in a total
sense.”

What actually is a universe? I mean referentially. What is the referent of the word?
What is the thing itself? Without looking it up, pause for a second and try to define
the word “universe.” Or try to think how you’d explain the concept of universe to
someone who had never heard it before. It’s tricky, right? Really you can only
imagine the universe in relation to other things: we can go back to our old friend
“everything,” or “all that exists,” or “where everything is including the planets and
the stars.” Google defines universe as “all existing matter and space considered as a
whole.” In every one of these attempts at definition, the actual referent or object is
something other than the universe – space, or matter, or being, or place. If you think
about it, the entire universe is just a modifier, it’s not even a thing. No concept or
definition of “universe” is ever referring to the thing itself; in Spinoza’s terms, we
never have adequate knowledge of the universe. The word “universe” itself just
means revolving together in Latin.

And yet, despite being a mere modifier, an extended abstraction, we somehow
consider “the universe” as a superior order of thing to the entities within it, even
though any definition we could ever produce for “universe” is contingent on these
very things that are supposedly secondary to it. That’s a perfect example of a
miraculating effect, the sleight-of-hand by which the full body which is secondary to
machinic production becomes the source and cause and meaning and value of that
production. We attribute to “the universe” the same, well, universal nature that the
Middle Ages attributed to one God and that antiquity attributed to many gods. How
do things happen? Why do things happen? Where do things happen? “The universe”
and “God” are both equally valid answers to these questions, because neither
concept, neither limit, neither body without organs is actually an explanation of any
kind. And yet, in some fundamental way, this attribution of power or causal agency
is mutually comprehensible to us.

When two capitalists agree that “Money is power,” when two religious
fundamentalists agree that “God is great,” when two physicists agree that “the
universe doesn’t work that way,” they are not agreeing on an explanation, they are
constructing a plane of immanence together on the same BwO – they are sharing
coordinates on the same grid. “Here’s where I am subjectified – are you subjectified
in the same place?” “Oh, yes, here’s my BwO, it’s the same as yours!” In this sense, all
psychosis is just a disagreement – it’s a conversation between two people with
different BwOs, who don’t know how to plot their grids together. One of you is using
Google Docs and the other is tracking changes in Word. One of you is on a PC and
one of you is on a Mac. You know that legendary meme where Kelly Rowland is
trying to send a text message with Excel and then gets mad when she doesn’t hear
back? That’s what psychosis is. What Deleuze & Guattari insist is that we can’t ever
adequately grasp psychosis by understanding it only in terms of a lack, or a failure,
or a dysfunction relative to normative function (“Loss of the reality principle,” for
example). Rather, we have to understand it in terms of what it actually does, what its
BwO actually is, how its desiring-machines actually work. Because there are always
bodies without organs and desiring-machines/assemblages – it that wasn’t clear
enough from Anti-Oedipus, definitely it’s clear after Deleuze & Guattari double down
on that insistence in A Thousand Plateaus.

Like “everything, “the universe” is really not a thing, except insofar as all ideas are
things – it’s not an explanation or an essence or even a concept. It’s an abstract
modifier. At best, it’s a conceptual limit – but a null limit, an absolute limit, because
beyond the limit of the imaged universe we cannot imagine anything except nothing.
That’s why the body without organs is sterile and unproductive. Not because it is
the death drive, not because nihilism is Good Actually, but simply because of its very
conceptual nature. The body without organs is sterile because it is what remains
when we exclude the idea of all production, and therefore includes the idea of no
production, even if there never is an actual state of no production, because
production is always differentiation. No “all” can be differentiated. There is no
production without differentiation, and without production only sterility and anti-
production. But this is not negation, and this is not corruption, and this is not
destruction, and it’s certainly not nothingness.

When I say that the universe is a full body without organs, one of the things I mean
is that every single thing we imagine and conceive and believe to exist is held to be
equally within this same universe. Presumably, all of these things are bound by the
same laws and principles – if you traveled to the edge of the universe there would
still be gravity and atoms and energy, same as in any other part of the universe. This
limit is conceptual. Even if we take for granted that there is an actual physical place
that is the edge of the universe, nobody has even been there or even been close to
there or even attempted to get anywhere near there. So we imagine that the edge of
the universe follows the same laws of nature as our corner of the universe; we
imagine that everything within the concept of “universe” is in some fundamental
way the same. And when we reach the limit of our capacity to imagine that
sameness, we have reached the surface of the body without organs.

In Deleuze & Guattari’s terms, a schizophrenic is in another universe. Not because
their physical body isn’t in the same universe as ours, but because their entire
geography, their entire cosmology, every coordinate that they use to orient
themselves – in short, their reality – is simply inscribed into a different body without
organs than ours. Just as the child in the womb has physical division of parts but no
function-motive to inscribe them as differentiated organs, so too does the
schizophrenic share our physical world but orient themselves towards entirely
other flows and rhythms that we can neither imagine nor relate to.

A long time ago on a blog far, far away, I casually said that “The opposite of
capitalism isn’t Communism, it’s madness.” I got a lot of flak for that statement. I
think people thought I was implying it makes no sense to resist capitalism, or that
it’s crazy to want something other than capitalism, or even that communists are all
nuts. Which…aren’t they? From inside the logic of capitalism, isn’t it literally insane
to want to reorganize the entire socius? To the oedipalized, normalized, regularized
capitalist subject, the communist’s “Abolish private property” sounds exactly as
insane as Judge Schreber’s “I have sunbeams coming out of my ass.” Both statements
are delirious: not “non-sensical,” just plain nuts. Both statements orient themselves
towards an entirely different grid of coordinates, an entirely different universe than
the one the capitalist subject inhabits. Not metaphorically. Literally and actually.

A strange, ironic twist in Capitalism and Schizophrenia is that the more radical your
line of flight, the more radically you are able to reconstitute your body without
organs and repel the desiring-machines, the less intelligible and “social” your
experience of the world will be. This is why Capitalism and Schizophrenia can never
truly be a manifesto for “mass liberation”: because it is designed to grasp and
analyze a self outside or before the very conditions that make any mass phenomena
possible. Deleuze & Guattari’s work is deliberately, stubbornly idiosyncratic both in
its style and its effect. It affects one person at a time. How can you make yourself a
body without organs? By shedding intelligibility and the very social conditions that
make collective understanding possible. If capital is a full body without organs – if,
in Marxist terms, everything we can think and say and do is determined by our
economic structure – then as long as capitalism persists, anything outside or beyond
capitalism is a delusion, a schizophrenic position. And what Deleuze and Guattari
are saying is – that’s fine. That’s OK. That’s how social realities work, that’s how
oppressive and repressive power (or political economy and libidinal economy)
produce a single hegemonic conception of reality. But that will be true of every social
formation. If we get to Full Communism, then Communism will presumably be the
full body of all social production, and anything outside Communism will be delusion
and delirium, just like an Ayn Rand story.

Whether or not this understanding of schizophrenia coheres with contemporary
psychiatric understanding is not entirely the point. Guattari was a practicing
physician and psychoanalyst who worked directly with schizophrenics, so his
assessment is experiential and not just metaphorical, unlike Deleuze’s engagement
with the concept in The Logic of Sense. Nonetheless, Guattari was a practicing
psychoanalyst more than 50 years ago, which is an eternity in the study of the mind
and in clinical practices of mental health. Even without any research, I can easily
imagine that schizophrenia is understood very differently today.

If you believe categorically that it’s wrong to make any analogic or metaphorical use
of an illness or unwell state, then there’s no excuse I can offer you for Deleuze &
Guattari’s. I accept the logic of that position and I’m not here to argue with you. But
if you’re willing to accept the use of the concept, perhaps you’d like to meet the final
iteration of the body without organs, which appears in A Thousand Plateaus.

But first, three short exercises.












Three Short Exercises:
An Orgasm, A Bump, and a Quick Nap


It’s become a cliché of both literature and philosophy to equate the orgasm with
death, la petit mort. I think that’s ridiculous and melodramatic. Sure, sometimes it
takes you or your partner so long to come that you wish you were dead, but nobody
ever died from an orgasm that wasn’t already on the verge of death for other
reasons. If you have a weak heart or if you’re coked to the gills and an orgasm away
from overdose, wouldn’t you rather go out on a high note anyway? None of us has
experienced death, but many of us have experienced orgasm and are still around to
talk about it, sometimes to everybody’s regret.

The link between orgasmic pleasure and death has to do, I think, with the
dissolution of the subject. It’s a form of false equivalence: I’m me, so if I lose my Self,
I won’t be anymore. This is selfhood as subjectivity, subjectivity as the epitome of
the Cartesian-Hegelian subject whose existence is proven and affirmed by self-
consciousness and not by consciousness itself, as in Spinoza. But in Capitalism and
Schizophrenia D&G show us that subjects – or rather, the process of subjectification
– is a third-order process, a consumption-production, and that before subjectivity
are the desiring machines, and in the cracks between the desiring-machines writhe
the miraculating larvae of the body without organs.

An orgasm probably won’t kill you, but maybe it brings you a little bit closer to
making yourself a body without organs, if that’s the kind of thing you’re into.
Sometimes for half a second, sometimes for a few seconds, the encoding of the
organs onto the body vanishes; pure rushes of affect swirl through your limbs from
one side to another, as if they were waves in a hollow chamber, intensities in an egg.
Not every time; some orgasms can be miserable or self-conscious or painful. But
other times there’s a rush, a sensation, and not much else, even the senses seem to
shut down and your entire existence is inside your own body. Your body is your
own body’s body without organs, a ridiculous sentence, I realize that, but one which
might just make some sense by this point in the text. Your body is not your BwO in
the moment of orgasm because you are returning to some primal state, or because
of the sublime, or because you are accessing a pre-oedipal language. Rather, it is
your BwO because it becomes the limit-concept of your existence: nothing is outside
our body, so no meaning or perception informs your conscious experience except
the body itself – it is the only reference point, the only set of coordinates, the only
source of value, even if only for a split second. Then the grid of intensive coordinates
collapses and the body recodes, the desiring-machines start pumping in the seeing
place and the hearing place and the peeing place and that’s when you realize, wow,
you’ve needed to pee for the last twenty minutes. Different people have different
desiring-machines: some people forget they have a bladder while they orgasm and
in the moment after orgasm the need to pee hits them, and some people forget
they’re Catholic while they orgasm and in the moment after orgasm the guilt hits
them. Everyone has their own machines.

What Deleuze & Guattari teach us is that both of these organs, the bladder and the
guilt, are equally inscribed onto the very same body without organs, which is
equally social and psychic and which organizes our subjectivity as its tertiary
function. Even Freud’s economic model with its part-drives doesn’t offer us any
model for how the mind can ignore certain desires and needs to focus on others: he
explicitly says that most “ego drives” (Ichtriebe), like hunger and thirst, can’t be
repressed. It’s obviously not the case that your kidneys stop working while you’re
having sex; your bladder doesn’t disappear. Nor is repression at play here;
repression is not the reason that you can consciously jerk off to something when
you’re aroused but then feel embarrassed and ashamed of it five minutes later and
delete your browser history. Deleuze & Guattari’s concepts help us understand what
it means for “the subject” to break down or rupture during orgasm: it’s not death,
it’s not nothingness, it’s not any kind of absence. It’s just a set of intensive
coordinates, arrayed on your own body as a body without organs. The pee-machine
stops coding the body’s flows, stops making those flows coherent in terms of actual
machines. A normative human subject is self-conscious and has a working urinary
system; for that moment of orgasm you’re something a little bit different than a
normative human subject.

Is that worth anything?
Depends how hard you come, I guess.

Once we understand how orgasm can temporarily make yourself a body without
organs, it’s not a huge leap to see how drugs help you make yourself a body without
organs.

Deleuze and Guattari are fascinated with the work of William Burroughs, which is
often about addiction to opioids. They talk about the junkie’s need for cold as a kind
of limit or degree zero. But there are other kinds of drugs than opioids, and not all of
them have coldness as their threshold or limit. The first time I took ketamine, I
became convinced that the entire world was made of rubber, including my body.
This belief didn’t take the form of a passing sensation: I was genuinely and truly
convinced that the world was made of rubber, and I was very worried about how to
fix it until some friends sat me down and helped me relax. Drugs make you feel like
your sensations and perceptions have extended beyond the limits of your own body.
Drugs can help you feel like you and another person are the same person. These too
are ways of interrupting the organs coded by the desiring-machines, or recording a
body without organs for yourself; these too are ways of shifting the entire grid of
existence, with all its lines of longitude and latitude, all its established values and
miraculating transformations.

Finally, think about the experience of waking up.

Not the groggy, stretching in bed part where you don’t want to get up, but before
that. The very first seconds, the experience of regaining consciousness. In those first
seconds of waking, you don’t really have a body, not yet – there’s just a blurry
whirlpool of sensation. Then reality rushes back in – time, direction, vision, your
operating system booting back up. Sleep is one example of how you make yourself a
body without organs. It is perhaps the easiest example of a body without organs,
because it’s accessible to most of us, and most of us are familiar with it.

Obviously, you have a body while you sleep, and that body has organs, just as the
infant in the womb has discrete, functioning body parts even while it’s in an
undifferentiated space-time free of desire. But those organs don’t organize your
consciousness, not in the way they do when you’re awake, nor do they organize the
capacities of your body relative to your consciousness. In fact, the distinctive feature
of sleep-consciousness (i.e., dreams) is that we imagine our capacities to extend far
beyond the limits of the body: in dreams we can fly, contort our body, perform feats
we are incapable in waking. In sleep, according to Freud, the libido withdraws from
the organs and organization in which it is invested and becomes available for new
formations. The dream-formation is a world in any sense, with its own rules, its own
body without organs which recalibrates the desiring-machines in its own image.
There are desiring-machines in the dream (or “assemblages,” as they are now
called), but they don’t follow the division of the organs as inscribed by capitalist
subjectification.

There’s always a body without organs, that much is clear both in Anti-Oedipus and in
A Thousand Plateaus. But to the extent that even our conception of our own organs
is miraculated by capital, then the dream-formation is a body without organs
different than the capitalist body without organs. For an instant or an hour or
however long the dream lasts, you make yourself a body without organs, in the
second sense discussed above: you have made for yourself a body without organs,
one that may or may not correspond to the inscriptions of the capitalist socius.
Maybe you just dreamed of making a lot of money, I don’t know. But maybe not.
Maybe you traversed a line of flight, maybe you zoomed through new intensities and
thresholds.

Then the alarm goes off and reality rushes in, re-coding your body and your organs
and your desiring-machines into the codes of the socius – the full body without
organs of capital “falls back on” the organs and the desiring-machines, and you are
once again a legible, proper subject. I try to philosophize from general examples
rather than personal anecdotes, but in this case I can admit I’ve had the experience
several times of taking enough/the right drugs in the right environment to feel like
the worlds was somehow “recoded,” as if the meaning and value of everything had
shifted. When you suddenly don’t notice things you normally obsess over, when you
focus on things you normally don’t care about, when you can’t stop repeating a
particular motion, these are all breaks in the ordinary subjectification of the body.

None of this means a frontal attack on capitalism. It’s important to understand that,
it’s important to understand what you’re doing when you make yourself a body
without organs, and also why you’re doing it.

VI.
A Thousand Plateaus: Liberation and Other Pastimes


I’ve got to be honest – I find A Thousand Plateaus less incredible than Anti-Oedipus.
Partly it’s because I’m a nerd and I like big systems. But also, remember when I
suggested that getting used to Anti-Oedipus was like learning a language? As a
sometime high school language teacher, when I look at the two volumes of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, one seems like a textbook, and the other an exercise
book, exactly like you often find in language classes. The exercise book is important
for teaching, and practice does make perfect, but if you have an aptitude for
language you can teach yourself the rules from the textbook alone and then go talk
to people or read books.

The BwO in The Logic of Sense isn’t quite the same as the BwO in Anti-Oedipus, and
the BwO in Anti-Oedipus isn’t quite the same as the BwO in A Thousand Plateaus. In
fact, we find in ATP a conceptual language that is analogous to the language of AO,
rather than directly copied from it. “Desiring-machines” have become
“assemblages.” The “syntheses” have become “strata.” And the BwO becomes a BwO.
This shift is deliberate; D&G discuss it in terms of response to the first book which
they wanted to avoid or improve on in the sequel. For example, I think that the
concept of “desiring-machines” was intended explicitly to de-anthropomorphize
desire, to show that the river “desires” to smooth the rocks in the riverbed just as
the human “desires” to kill his father and sleep with his mother. But rather than de-
anthropomorphize, many people took the concept as a kind of animism, as if desire
was Bergson’s elan vital, flowing through all things and joining nature and humans.
That’s not quite what D&G meant, and in ATP they replace the desiring-machines
with the word “assemblage,” which risks erring in the opposite direction, towards
brute mechanism. You can’t please everybody.

I do think that A Thousand Plateaus is in some basic way more “accessible,” if only
because the chapters are more or less self-contained theoretically, and you can
digest it in much smaller chunks. But beyond that internal division, Deleuze &
Guattari said in interviews that Anti-Oedipus was not a book written for academics,
but they were still criticized for its inaccessibility, and I think that A Thousand
Plateaus is deliberately more open. Certainly the imagery is more accessible: more
people can understand a geological stratum than can understand an abstract
synthesis, more people can understand an “assemblage” than a “desiring-machine,”
and so on. I don’t think ATP is “easy” and I don’t think that D&G sacrificed the
integrity of their concepts to deliberately make them easier, I just think it ends up
being a little easier for whatever reason, and I think this explains why ATP is so
much more popular in the arts, where people are inclined to take little fragments of
theory and spin them into something else than they are to rigorously follow the
theoretical lines of a big, dense text.

If Anti-Oedipus is an explanation for the conditions of our existence under
capitalism, A Thousand Plateaus is more like a book of activities you can do while
you’re here. In Anti-Oediups the question was primarily How does this work? AO is a
book of causes and effects. A Thousand Plateaus asks What does this do and where
does it go? It’s a book of actions and activities, of journeys and maps (but not
tracings). It’s still part of a two-volume work called Capitalism and Schizophrenia, so
we can’t say that the “capitalism” has disappeared, but it’s certainly receded. That’s
not because D&G suddenly don’t care, it’s because they’re following different lines,
digging through different layers. Anti-Oedipus taught us schizo-fluid dynamics and
schizo-topography; now we learn schizo-archaeology, schizo-ornithology, schizo-
botany, and all the other disciplines we might need to study the strange new self-
enclosed biospheres we discover at the top of the mountain or deep in one of the
valleys our own personal topography has plotted for us. Each chapter in the book
(each “plateau”) develops a different core concept or opposition. There’s a chapter
on “becoming,” there’s a chapter on “the ritornello,” there’s a chapter on “the war
machine,” there’s a chapter on “smooth and striated space,” and there’s a chapter on
“bodies without organs.”

One thing it might help to point out: the chapter is called “November 28th, 1947:
How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs,” which I think implies to most
English readers “How to turn yourself into a body without organs.” But there’s a
second sense in which we can read this phrase: “How do you make [for] yourself a
body without organs,” just as you might explain “How do you make yourself a stiff
drink” or “How do you make yourself more comfortable.” How to fashion for yourself
a body without organs, not how to become one yourself.

At any rate, you have one (or several). It’s not so much that it preexists or comes
ready-made, although in certain respects it is preexistent. At any rate, you make
one, you can’t desire without making one. And it awaits you; it is an inevitable
exercise or experimentation, already accomplished the moment you undertake it,
unaccomplished as long as you don’t. This is not reassuring, because you can botch
it. Or it can be terrifying, and lead you to your death. It is nondesire as well as
desire. It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices. You
never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining
it, it is a limit…

The BwO: it is already under way the moment the body has had enough of organs
and wants to slough them off, or loses them. A long procession…The paranoid
body: the organs are continually under attack by outside forces, but are also
restored by outside energies…The schizo body, waging its own active internal
struggle against the organs, at the price of catatonia. Then the drugged body, the
experimental schizo…The masochist body: it is poorly understood in terms of pain:
it is fundamentally a question of the BwO.

The language here is very different from the language in the opening sections of
Anti-Oedipus, where the Body without Organs seems like a vast and miraculous
membrane. You have one? You make one? Drugs? What?

What do all these “bodies” have in common? They each desire in a way doesn’t
correspond to the normative organization of desiring-subjects in the socius. They
each construct a different universe.

Why do you both already have one but still have to make one? Because desire
learns; it’s motile and agile. Maybe you’ve never taken drugs in your life but want to.
Maybe you’ve never taken drugs in your life and don’t want to. Maybe neither of
those possibilities has anything to do with the effects drugs will have on you if you
start taking them.

There are many different ways of initiating the process of making yourself a Body
without Organs. Maybe you’ve never even considered doing that one thing in bed
until someone suggested it during a casual hookup; you tried it once and now you
can’t stop thinking about it. Maybe you’re at a party and someone offers you a little
bit, just to try, and that’s how you learn you like it. Maybe you’ve always wanted it,
from the day you were born, could always feel the incompatibility between the
organization of your affects and the organization of normative affective standards.
Maybe you’ve been waiting your whole life to make yourself a Body without Organs.

We come to the gradual realization that the BwO is not at all the opposite of the
organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism. The BwO is
opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the
organism…The BwO is not opposed to the organs; rather, the BwO and its “true
organs,” which must be composed and positioned, are opposed to the organism,
the organic organization of the organs…The organism is not at all the body, the
BwO; rather, it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of
accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor
from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and
hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences. The strata are bonds,
pincers. “Tie me up, if you wish.” We are continually stratified. But who is this we
that is not me, for the subject no less than the organism belongs to and depends on
a stratum? Now we have the answer: the BwO is that glacial reality where the
alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an
organism – and also a signification and a subject – occur…It is in the BwO that the
organs enter into the relations of composition called the organism.

I think that “We come to the gradual realization…” is D&G’s version of “Oops.” They
do in fact say in Anti-Oedipus that the BwO is opposed to the organs, but I think this
passage clarifies that by “organs” they don’t mean the physical parts of the body.
Since in our earlier discussion of the BwO we were careful to distinguish the
physical flesh of the body from the system of functions by which and through which
the organs are differentiated, we don’t need to modify our conception that much to
adjust for this change in vocabulary.

To understand the difference between the physical flesh of the body and the
subjective organization, think of the appendix.

I’m a little amazed as I type this, because less than five minutes ago I discovered that
as recently as 2007, researchers plausibly proposed an actual function the human
appendix. I’m amazed by this fact, because for most of my life the standard medical
wisdom was that the appendix serves no function and that it must be a vestigial
remainder. I was literally about to give the appendix as an example of a piece of
flesh that is one of the physical organs, but is not part of the subjectifying system of
organization. Why? Because it serves no function in “extract[ing] useful labor from
the BwO.” Until 2007, scientists believed that taking out the appendix did not
affection your functioning or capacity in any way. You could conceivably take out
someone’s appendix without them knowing and have them never realize it.

Apparently, now researchers think the appendix might play a role in the regulation
of stomach bacteria. I’m glad I decided to fact-check myself! You really do learn
something new and amazing every day. But this actually doesn’t change my
argument at all, because instead of having to invent a hypothetical scenario in which
the appendix becomes newly-legible to “science” and to processes subjectification, it
turns out there actually is one. The appendix might help you regulate your digestion,
and in fact it seems that people who’ve had theirs removed have a much higher
incidence of a particular kind of inflammatory bacterial diarrhea. (Sorry). Suddenly,
a piece of flesh assumes the role of a function-organ in the total system of the ideal,
normative body.

Now let’s take reality one step further (this is literally the thought experiment I was
just about to write down when I decided to do a quick search just to make sure the
appendix doesn’t in fact have a known function). At the moment, it seems that not
having an appendix increases the chance of certain persistent digestive issues. Not
great, maybe, but obviously an inconvenience minor enough that nobody noticed it
for centuries. The range of capacity (productive intensity) of a worker with or
without an appendix doesn’t vary too much.

But imagine that in the near future scientists invent a little implant that they can
place in your appendix to significantly regulate your digestive process. You never
have diarrhea, you have perfect bowel movements every day, and you have them at
exactly the same time every day. The only catch is that the implant has to be in your
appendix. People who have had appendicitis are shit out of luck, so to speak.
Suddenly, the difference in functional capacity of a person with an appendix differs
much more significantly from the functional capacity of a person without one than it
did before. Suddenly, prospective employers want to know if you’ve had your
appendix removed before they hire you. A workforce that shits like a Swiss watch at
7:30 every morning before they get to work is more efficient than a workforce that
takes random bathroom breaks at all times of the day, necessitating a higher
number of toilets and making office space more expensive per square foot.
Remember the egg? Remember how you couldn’t move one part of the egg’s inside
without moving the whole? In the system of stratified subjectification, all the parts
move together. To make yourself a body without organs, you reorient your
processes, your organs, your desires and affects, away from this miraculating
system and towards your own miraculating system that gives its own relative values
and its own distribution of intensities to your body and to the world around you.

This is what it means for the socius to code reality. If the function of the appendix is
suddenly “discovered,” that doesn’t mean the appendix wasn’t doing its job before.
But it has become newly legible, newly meaningful. It becomes part of the apparatus
of power-knowledge by which society organizes the body. Where was this function
lurking? It was beyond, in the everything else of the body without organs.

One kind of body that Deleuze & Guattari don’t mention is the rich body. The rich
body is the body that incarnates so much personal wealth it becomes its own little
miraculating divinity. The rich body is able to make every single aspect of its
existence the outcome of its own will and corporeality, just as the egg is responsible
for every possible chicken. “Just tell me how much it will cost” is the credo of this
ego-divinity’s faith. The temperature is regulated according to the rich body’s
wishes; the music starts and stops as they like, the volume set to their convenience.
Food appears when they want, whatever kind of food they ask for. Anything that
breaks is replaced. Anything that ages is renewed. Anything that sags is tucked. All
these effects seem to proceed from the miraculating divinity’s own will: the rich
body reinvents a world for itself no less extreme and no less perverted than the
elaborate bondage rituals of the masochist. When it has run out of amusements on
Earth, the rich body will demand to be taken to space. What is more insane, more
outrageous, more perverse: the masochistic body’s decision to set aside a few hours
each weekend for the exploration of pleasures that most people don’t share, or the
literal reorganization of material resources and labor to serve the whims of the rich
body? We find again the same problem we found in Freud: what is offered to us as
normal and normative (the wealth of the uber-wealthy, the exclusion of all siblings
and relatives and friends of the family so that the child can relate exclusively to the
mother and father) in fact seems horrific and incomprehensible when we encounter
its manifestation in daily life. The same goes for many other facets of existence, like
“sobriety” or “abstinence.” Some people avoid marijuana like the plague because it
makes them paranoid and anxious; some people are too scared to leave the house
unless they’re stoned. Some people experience abstinence as a calm respite from
society’s relentless demand for sexualization, other people experience abstinence as
an intolerable distraction that overcomes them until they can get laid.

What do you want? Your own personal desiring-machines, what are they?

The rich body wants Beyoncé to play at its wedding. The drugged body wants to feel
nothing, to eliminate sensation, or to heighten sensation, to drive it up to
undreamed-of intensity. The masochistic body wants to command its own suffering.
The nihilistic body wants not to desire, and is continuously outraged that wanting
not to want involves wanting. None of these desiring-activities has much to do with
rationality or logic in any abstract or a priori sense. They each have a rationality
intrinsic to them, the rationality of desire’s organization, and the “countercathexes”
that strain against that organization, the something else that you want and need.
None of these things is completely beyond or outside the logic of the capitalist
socius; we’re still within the Big BwO that is the full face of the socius. There’s room
for a certain amount of drugs, a certain amount of masochism, a certain amount of
Beyoncé in any normal and normative life. But that’s what it means to reorganize, to
make yourself a Body without Organs, rather than just trying to wear the pre-
fabricated one that was given to you. You reinvest your desire, you create new
feedback loops and new habits that reorient your life and your existence and your
affects away from the normative demands of the socius and towards your own
desired intensities. The revolutionary reorganization of desire doesn’t mean going
from liking something to not-liking something; we’ve already seen why that’s not
enough. Rather, it means removing the liking/not-liking machine and replacing it
with a jumping/not-jumping machine, or a screaming/whispering machine, or any
other kind of machine you need to produce the effects that you want, whether that
means getting an extra hour of sleep in the morning or taking down the government.

You do this more or less successfully. You can botch it, as D&G say. You can go too
far; you can stop too early. You can end up with entirely unexpected affects and
experiences, like a bad drug trip.

Think back to our exercise about the market. I suggested that there is a visceral
response to certain assertions that is not a rejection of the rationality of these
assertions but a rejection of a world in which that rationality is possible. I think
different people have those affective irruptions more or less frequently. Some
people move through the world and find most of it acceptable. I think there really
are people who move through life rarely experiencing that feeling of rejection, that
feeling that the parameters and coordinates laid out for them are simply not the
right ones. Other people move through the world constantly rejecting various facets
of it. Is this “denial”? I don’t think so. Disavowal, maybe. It’s not that the mad and the
perverse and the radical move through the world without seeing it. They see a
different world. They see a world organized differently. They make themselves a
BwO not because they’re in denial but because the two available options of the
existing circuit are not adequate to the desire they experience. They need something
else. They need a different machine. Desire is an itch. It doesn’t need recognition
from the desire of another; it just needs to be scratched.

If the affective pulsion of refusal is the BwO rejecting the desiring-machines, seeking
to rewrite the organization of the machines, then what kind of pulsions correspond
with an acceptance? How do you make the BwO shut up? How do I tolerate the
world? A less solipsistic form of the same questions is, What kinds of affects
correspond to a world I find acceptable? What kind of world corresponds to the affects
I need? The BwO is organized between those two facets of the question.

Why does that matter? Why is “desubjectification” important? Why not be normal
and normatively functional, walking through the world in a borrowed body with
borrowed organs organized by social ideals? The honest answer is that it doesn’t
matter. Those are the wrong questions. If it doesn’t matter to you then don’t. If it
doesn’t matter to you, you finish reading A Thousand Plateaus and shrug and put it
aside. That’s the beauty of immanent philosophy – it doesn’t matter to you unless it
matters to you. If you don’t have an itch, you don’t need to scratch. It’s that simple.

I do think that A Thousand Plateaus is “anti-capitalist” in the sense that it teaches
you ways to think against the grain, and the grain is capitalist ideology. I don’t think
the book offers a coherent political program of any kind, and I think that’s
deliberate, because when Anti-Oedipus came out a bunch of Italian Marxists tried to
treat it like a program. I think A Thousand Plateaus offers activities, opportunities,
techniques, strategies, and ideas. It’s an intellectual toolkit. If your intellectual or
personal project is anti-capitalist, I think you’ll find A Thousand Plateaus relevant to
the same degree that you find those kinds of techniques and strategies useful in
general. I think it’s a manual for life, for surviving, for thriving, for changing, and yes
for resisting, but not in the lame sense of the word.

The limit of capitalism isn’t madness because it’s crazy to think of capitalism not
being there. Quite the opposite: it’s entirely rational to think of capitalism not
always being there, because it’s clear that it hasn’t always been there, and therefore
it will probably not always be there in the future. Rather, the limit of capitalism is
madness because capitalism is the limit of its own rationality. Just as “nonsense” is
comprehensible in relation to sense and the disjointed utterances of the
schizophrenic are incomprehensible to both, so too are “capitalism” and “anti-
capitalism” accounted for by the capitalist socius, but “something entirely different
from capitalism” simply does not compute.

In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze explains that bodies are radios, and not every radio
plays pleasant and recognizable music all the time. In Anti-Oedipus D&G explain how
radios are made, and what the relationship is between radios and the rest of history.
In A Thousand Plateaus, D&G explain how to hotwire your radio so it can pick up
new sounds. Is that going to bring down capitalism and alter the course of history?
Probably not, but at least you’ll get to hear some cool new shit.

Why make yourself a body without organs? Well, why not? Your imagination is
driven by the affections of the body, new affections drive the imagination in new
directions. Why make yourself a body without organs? Because who knows what
you’ll want on the other side.

People make the same mistake about “the body without organs” as they do about
the concepts of “construction” and “performativity” as Judith Butler uses them. The
fact that gender is “a performance” doesn’t mean you can wake up every morning
and freely shift between genders, any more than it means that gender can be
“ended” with a simple act of will. Similarly, it’s true that D&G describe how to “make
yourself a BwO” in A Thousand Plateaus. But that doesn’t mean you can decide to be
a body without organs for the duration of a performance piece and then stop.

What you can do is move in a certain direction. Push in that direction. Invent the
machine you need to scratch your itch. In that sense, telling someone to “become a
body without organs” is the same as telling someone to “use drugs to expand your
perception.” Hopefully, unless the person giving you that advice is an asshole, what
they mean is “Carefully use chemicals to enhance and broaden your perception and
thinking”; they aren’t suggesting that you go overdose on heroin. Similarly, Deleuze
& Guattari link the body without organs to schizo-affective states. Do they want you
to become a blubbing, dysfunctional puddle of flesh? I don’t think they do. At least, I
don’t think they’re proposing such an extreme state as a useful strategy. They’re
careful to oppose self-destruction and death to the process of discovery that
accompanies a new BwO. They’re careful to warn that drugs can spiral into
addiction and masochism can spiral into permanent physical damage. They aren’t
saying that’s bad, they’re just saying make sure that’s what you want before you
start. Making yourself a body without organs means making new feedback loops,
new habits, new machinic binaries, installing new yes/no switches along the path of
your desire. It’s not always possible to dig the old binary switches out of the trash
and reinstall them. Make sure you know what you’re doing first.

At the end of the day, “Make yourself a body without organs” is about as useful as
“Make sure you eat properly” or “Make sure you get enough sleep” or “If you don’t
have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all.” Each of these injunctions is
useful to the degree that you are able or willing not only to follow them, but to make
them habits, to care about them, to invest in them.

Should you make yourself a Body without Organs? I don’t know. It’s up to you. It’s
your Body without Organs, do whatever the hell you want with it.



















Afterwards:
Concepts and Their Uses, or, Does Anyone Really Need This Text?


Is it really possible to use a concept “wrong”?

And especially a concept by Deleuze & Guattari?

Here’s a passage by Deleuze that kind of makes me look like an asshole. It’s from his
incendiary and incredible response text, “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” which opens the
collection Negotiations:

We wouldn’t of course claim that Anti-Oedipus is completely free of any scholarly
apparatus: it’s still pretty academic, fairly serious, and it’s not the Pop Philosophy
or Pop Anlysis we dreamed of. But I’m struck by the way it’s the people who’ve
read lots of other books, and psychoanalytic books in particular, who find our
book really difficult. They say: What exactly is a body without organs? What
exactly do you mean by “desiring machines”? Those, on the other hand, who don’t
know much, who haven’t been addled by psychoanalysis, have less of a problem
and happily pass over what they don’t understand. That’s why we said that, in
principle, at least, the book was written for fifteen- to twenty-year-olds. There are,
you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something
inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you’re even more perverse
or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the book like a box
contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and
question and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there’s the other
way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is
“Does it work, and how does it work?” How does it work for you? If it doesn’t
work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of
reading’s intensive: something comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to
explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It’s like plugging into an
electric circuit. I know people who’ve read nothing who immediately saw what
bodies without organs were, given their own “habits,” their own way of being one.
This second way of reading’s quite different from the first, because it relates a
book directly to what’s Outside. A book is a little cog in much more complicated
external machinery.


Drag me, senpai.

There’s a lot to unpack there. Let’s start with the most obvious, which is that you
don’t have to read this if you don’t want to. You’re not obligated to understand what
a body without organs is; you’re not even obligated to read Anti-Oedipus. A certain
writer said on Twitter recently that they’d rather drink drain cleaner than read or
understand Deleuze. That’s totally fine. Deleuze doesn’t care, he’s dead, and as you
can see if you read the “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” he didn’t really care when he was
alive, either.

I think you can get a lot out of Capitalism and Schizophrenia even if you don’t really
understand what a “body without organs” is. Just as Deleuze says, people who aren’t
trained to worry about that kind of thing just accept that they don’t understand
certain references and terms and move on. It’s also perfectly OK to form your own
conception of what that term could mean and cling to it. Here’s Deleuze describing
his method of working with Guattari in his 1984 “Letter to Uno”:

Gradually a concept would acquire an autonomous existence, which sometimes we
continued to understand differently (for example, we never did understand “the
body without organs” in quite the same way). Working together was never a
homogenization, but a proliferation, an accumulation of bifurcations, a rhizome.

If Deleuze & Guattari don’t even understand the BwO the same way between them,
there’s certainly no room to appeal to any orthodox or dogmatic definition of the
concept. That’s part of the reason this text is so long: I don’t think trying to briefly
define the BwO the way I do many other concepts would be very productive. In fact,
I think the concept is deliberately constructed and introduced in a way that makes
pinning it down like that extremely difficult.

People have been asking me for years to write about Anti-Oedipus. It’s taken me a
long, long time to even approach the task: it took me years to even write my text
about Foucault’s preface to the book, much less the book itself. And I’m still very
wrestling with how to write about that book as a whole. But that’s why the current
text is not “a book about the book,” as Deleuze dismissively puts it. It’s an attempt to
trace a particular concept’s connections and evolutions, to put it in perspective and
offer my own particular take on it. I start before Anti-Oedipus and go beyond it in
time and space, or at least I try to. I share with Deleuze a suspicion and dislike of
“secondary literature.” I think “secondary literature” is just primary literature that
you want to cite but don’t want to read. Any book of speculative or philosophical
writing that you choose to take seriously is primary literature. Deleuze himself
wrote extensively about other philosophers; he tracked concepts, he followed lines
of flight, he showed where connections shift and appear. And in the process, he
produced his own concepts in response to the text. The current text is not a
response to the first imperative Deleuze describes, the urge to identify the Content
of a book and put it in a box, but a response to his second question, “How does it
work for you?”

The way Deleuze & Guattari’s work has worked for me is that ever since I picked up
their work for the first time more than a decade ago it has never left my mind. I hope
to show some of the concepts their work has provoked me to create, rather than
claiming to have identified the truth of their concepts. I want to share with you some
of what I’ve learned. My motive, as usual, is pedagogical rather than critical: I want
to use the primary text to make connections, rather than claim critical authority
over its contents. I don’t care to demonstrate authority, but I hope this text
demonstrate sincere devotion.