Body without organs


The "body without organs" is a concept used by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It is a "body without an image", a structure or zone without imposed organization that can be sentient or inanimate. In Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia, it is the raw product of social alienation and destabilization.
Deleuze began using the term in The Logic of Sense, while discussing the experiences of playwright Antonin Artaud. "Body without Organs" later became a major part of the vocabulary for Capitalism and Schizophrenia, two volumes written collaboratively with Félix Guattari. In these works, the term took on an expanded meaning, referring variously to literal bodies and to a certain perspective on realities of any type. The term's overloaded meaning is provocative, perhaps intentionally.

Early uses

The term originates from Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God :

When you will have made him a body without organs,

then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions

and restored him to his true freedom.

Deleuze first mentions the phrase in a chapter of The Logic of Sense called "The Schizophrenic and the Little Girl", which contrasts two distinct and peripheral ways of encountering the world. The Little Girl, explores a world of 'surfaces': the shifting realm of social appearances and nonsense words which nevertheless seem to function. The Schizophrenic is by contrast an explorer of 'depths', one who rejects the surface entirely and returns instead to the body. For the Schizophrenic, words collapse, not into nonsense, but into the bodies that produce and hear them. Deleuze refers to "a new dimension of the schizophrenic body, an organism without parts which operates entirely by insufflation, respiration, evaporation and fluid transmission." This body is also described as "howling", speaking a "language without articulation" that has more to do with the primal act of making sound than it does with communicating specific words.

''Capitalism and Schizophrenia''

In Deleuze and Guattari's collaboration, the term describes an undifferentiated, unhierarchical realm that lies deeper than the world of appearances. It relates to the proto-world described in the mythology of many different cultures. Deleuze and Guattari often use the example of the Dogon egg, based primarily on anthropological reports from Marcel Griaule. Describing the Dogon story of the origins of the cosmos, Griaule writes:
These primordial movements are conceived in terms of an ovoid form—'the egg of the world' —within which lie, already differentiated, the germs of things; in consequence of the spiral movement of extension the germs develop first in seven segments of increasing length, representing the seven fundamental seeds of cultivation, which are to be found again in the human body...

According to Griaule, the basic patterns of organization within the egg reappear within all domains of Dogon life: kinship structures, village layout, understanding of the body, and so forth. The egg metaphor helps to suggest the gestation of a formation yet to come, and the potential formation of many actualities from a single origin.
In chapter three of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari remark that the "body without organs is the deterritorialized socius, the wilderness where the decoded flows run free, the end of the world, the apocalypse", and is the eternally renewable product of alienation from the "civilized" world.

''Anti-Oedipus''

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari express the body without organs' image by comparing its real potentials to the egg's:
The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors.

For Deleuze and Guattari, every actual body has a limited set of traits, habits, movements, affects, etc. But every actual body also has a virtual dimension: a vast reservoir of potential traits, connections, affects, movements, etc. This collection of potentials is what Deleuze calls the BwO. The full body without organs is "schizophrenia as a clinical entity". This drop in intensity is a means of blocking all investments of reality: "the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable". Unlike other social machines such as the Body of the Earth, the Body of the Despot or the Body of Capital, the full body without organs cannot inscribe other bodies. The body without organs is "not an original primordial entity" nor what is remains of a lost totality but is the "ultimate residue of a deterritorialized socius". To "make oneself a body without organs," then, is to actively experiment with oneself to draw out and activate these virtual potentials. These potentials are mostly activated through conjunctions with other bodies that Deleuze calls "becomings".
Deleuze and Guattari use the term BwO in an extended sense, to refer to the virtual dimension of reality in general. In this sense, they speak of a BwO of "the earth". "The Earth," they write, "is a body without organs. This body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles". That is, we usually think of the world as composed of relatively stable entities. But these bodies are really composed of sets of flows moving at various speeds. This fluid substratum is what Deleuze calls the BwO in a general sense.

''A Thousand Plateaus''

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari eventually differentiate between three kinds of BwO: cancerous, empty, and full. Roughly, the empty BwO is the BwO of Anti-Oedipus. This BwO is also described as "catatonic" because it is completely de-organ-ized; all flows pass through it freely, with no stopping, and no directing. Even though any form of desire can be produced on it, the empty BwO is non-productive. The full BwO is the healthy BwO; it is productive, but not petrified in its organ-ization. The cancerous BwO is caught in a pattern of endless reproduction of the self-same pattern. They give a rough recipe for building yourself a healthy BwO:
Deleuze and Guattari suggest restraint here, writing that drug addicts and masochists may come closer to truly possessing bodies without organs—and die as a result. The 'healthy BwO' thus envisions the actual body without organs as a horizon, not a goal.