Body without Organs
I’m Explaining Deleuze to You Right Now
These are notes I took for a reading group on the concept of the body without organs (BwO). I’m not going to bother editing them to make them more suitable for a blog post, you’ll just get them as written. The texts read were Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3, and Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, chapter 7
General notes
Once you’ve read all the texts and these notes, pick one text/passage (or all of them if you want, idc), ideally one you found difficult or didn’t really get, and reread it; hopefully, it’ll be clearer
Deleuze’s early career (roughly until 1968’s Difference and Repetition, but he continued doing it all the way through to 1988’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque; he died in 1995, for context) consisted of a series of books about other philosophers. His method for those texts was to read the philosopher’s work and put forward an interpretation; this interpretation was always unusual, deliberately unorthodox and not what the philosopher had intended, but he always took care to read the philosopher carefully. He always studied them thoroughly and knew what they were trying to say (and therefore what the traditional readings were) before he developed his own interpretation. In What is Philosophy? (1984), he and Guattari put forward the idea that philosophy is the creation of concepts, which are like tools, to be used at will for whatever purpose and discarded if they’re not helpful. This creation is not an easy process; they even said (I forget where) that the only concept they ever created was that of the refrain (chapter 11 of A Thousand Plateaus), that all their other concepts were perversions (my word) of ideas from other people. I mention all of this because it helps frame the way we want to approach the idea of the body without organs, which is the focus of these readings, if we want to take the text on its own terms. As Deleuze did with other philosophers, we want to view the concept as something to be used if it’s helpful, and we want to be able to take it in new, unintended, creative directions. But, as Deleuze recognised, we must first of all understand what was intended by the authors before we can do that. An infamous quote from Deleuze, cited in Brian Massumi’s ‘Translator’ Foreword’ to A Thousand Plateaus and in Andrew Culp’s introduction to his book Dark Deleuze (Culp, 2016:Introduction), goes as follows: “What got me by during that period was conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous” (Massumi in Deleuze and Guattari, 2019:vii-viii). That’s how we should approach this concept, at least in my opinion
Some definitions (feel free to skip, these are just in case you want them)
“A body is not defined by either simple materiality, by its occupying space (‘extension’), or by organic structure. It is defined by the relations of its parts (relations of relative motion and rest, speed and slowness), and by its actions and reactions with respect to both its environment or milieu and to its internal milieu.” (Baugh, 2010:35)
“Since a body is a relation of parts corresponding to an essence, or a degree of physical intensity, a body need not have the hierarchical and dominating organisation of organs we call an ‘organism’. It is rather an intensive reality, differentiated by the maximum and minimum thresholds of its power of being affected.” (Baugh, 2010:37)
“Body without Organs (BwO) refers to a substrate that is also identified as the plane of consistency (as a non-formed, non-organised, non-stratified or destratified body or term)” (Message, 2010:37)
“The BwO is the proposed antidote (as well as precedent, antecedent and even correlate) to this articulate and organised organism [...] The BwO does not exist in opposition to the organism or notions of subjectivity, and it is never completely free of the stratified exigencies of proper language, the State, family, or other institutions [...] the BwO exists within stratified fields of organisation at the same time as it offers an alternative mode of being or experience (becoming); secondly, the BwO does not equate literally to an organ-less body.” (Message, 2010:37-38)
“It is not produced as the enemy of the organs, but is opposed to the organisation of the organs. In other words, the BwO is opposed to the organising principles that structure, define and speak on behalf of the collective assemblage of organs, experiences or states of being.” (Message, 2010:38)
Chapter 7 of Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981)
The following quotes are the clearest definition of the BwO you’ll get in Deleuze:
“Beyond the organism, but also at the limit of the lived body”
“The body without organs is opposed less to organs than to that organization of organs we call an organism. It is an intense and intensive body. It is traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to the variations of its amplitude. Thus the body does not have organs, but thresholds or levels. Sensation is not qualitative and qualified, but has only an intensive reality, which no longer determines with itself representative elements, but allotropic variations. Sensation is vibration. We know that the egg reveals just this state of the body “before” organic representation: axes and vectors, gradients, zones, cinematic movements, and dynamic tendencies, in relation to which forms are contingent or accessory. [...] Likewise sensation, when it acquires a body through the organism, takes on an excessive and spasmodic appearance, exceeding the bounds of organic activity.”
“[T]he body without organs is flesh and nerve; a wave flows through it and traces levels upon it; a sensation is produced when the wave encounters the forces acting on the body, an “affective athleticism,” a scream-breath. When sensation is linked to the body in this way, it ceases to be representative and becomes real”
It should become obvious that the BwO is opposed to the organism, as in the organisation of desiring-machines. “[I]ntense and intensive” are meant sort of in the sense Spinoza uses the words. The analogy I almost always use is to temperature; we can’t quite say that temperature takes up space (technically we can, but ignore that, it’s an example), yet we can still map it in space (heat maps, of course, represent it with colour gradients). It’s a property of space, organised within space, but that doesn’t take up space by itself; it’s only ever positive (negative temperatures are impossible, we’ve just chosen to set 0 above the minimum for the sake of convenience) and, as it increases in magnitude it doesn’t necessarily get larger, rather it increases or decreases intensively. That should, at least, help with the idea of thresholds and levels, and it’ll give a little more meaning to the idea of the BwO as an egg; a fuller understanding of that requires Deleuze’s ontology, but for now think of the various intensities (roughly mixing to make zones) in the egg as fields of limited potentialities. The thing about axes and vectors is another topic altogether, don’t worry about that just yet (perhaps another week should be dedicated to lines of flight?). A few key things result from the BwO: firstly, there’s no such thing as representation at this ontological level, it’s only ever produced as secondary; secondly, “forms” are also never primary (what he means by “forms” is specifically related to painting, for general purposes think of a form as any given mode of organisation); thirdly, sensation is excessive — that excess is essential to the way desiring-machines work
The BwO is beyond the organism, since it’s never the same as any given organism (or organisation); it’s the limit of the lived body, since it’s always there, and the decodings and deterritorialisations pull the body towards it, without ever arriving at the pure BwO
Of course, the BwO is always entangled with the desiring-machines, lines of flight, becomings-minority, the socius, de..., ontological difference, the virtual/actual/possible/real, etc., I’m trying to separate it out as much as I can
Anti-Oedipus, 1.1
“What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones [...] The one produces a flow that the other interrupts.” (2009:1)
This, along with the rest of the beginning, is a self-explanatory statement about the nature of desiring-machines. Freud’s id is roughly the same as the unconscious, so they’re saying the unconscious is a plurality of machines, which produce and interrupt flows. Take none of this metaphorically, it’s all literal
“Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass” (2009:2)
Hang on to that one, and read the footnote to it in the text
“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” (2009:8)
How and why does the body suffer? It tends towards disconnections, it takes apart the machines, but when organised it can’t do that. This is where we get the first hint to Oedipus being stultifying, as a pre-ordained organisation. How Oedipal organisation is created and maintained will be the topic of later chapters, and a large focus of the book. The body suffers from organisation, no matter what that organisation is. This tendency to take apart connections will be crucial soon
“The full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable [...] The death instinct: that is its name, and death is not without a model. For desire desires death also, because the full body of death is its motor, just as it desires life, because the organs of life are the working machine” (2009:8)
This passage simply clarifies the role of the body’s de-organisational trends. What Freud identified as the death drive, the drive towards death and nothingness, is the function of the BwO. Freud was wrong in calling it a death drive, however, since it doesn’t aim at death, it aims at disorganisation (on which, they’ll claim later, death is modelled). The “full” BwO is that which is full of machines, connections, and recordings. Note the complement they mention; the organs, aka desiring-machines, are the impetus for life since they work, which is to say they create connections. We might think that the BwO is the opposite of the organs, but this is not the case, as we’ll see later
“The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product: the schizophrenic table is a body without organs. The body without organs is not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is it what remains of a lost totality. Above all, it is not a projection; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without an image. This imageless, organless body, the nonproductive, exists right there where it is produced, in the third stage of the binary-linear series. It is perpetually reinserted into the process of production. The catatonic body is produced in the water of the hydrotherapy tub. The full body without organs belongs to the realm of antiproduction; but yet another characteristic of the connective or productive synthesis is the fact that it couples production with antiproduction, with an element of antiproduction.” (2009:8)
The BwO is produced. How? By the connection of desiring-machines. To put it more clearly, the BwO doesn’t exist prior to the desiring-machines, the creation of connections between the organs creates the space (or, more accurately, non-space) which is the BwO. A desiring-machine presupposes connections with other desiring-machines, which presupposes a non-space in which they’re positioned, but also that produces that non-space. It’s the chicken or the egg. The fact that the BwO is produced by the organs is only explainable if we recall that it’s an intensive thing, not an extensive one. The catatonic body is a BwO without any desiring-machines connected (the paranoiac is different, but similar at first glance). Note that the full BwO (wherein the breakdown tendency is most prominent) is related to anti-production, whereas the desiring-machines are purely productive. This, though it seems to be oppositional, is how they end up not being opposites, but instead being complementary, the cyclical chicken-egg process again. The connective synthesis “couples production with antiproduction”; more on this later
Anti-Oedipus, 1.2
“In order to resist organ-machines, the body without organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier. In order to resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows, it sets up a counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluid. In order to resist using words composed of articulated phonetic units, it utters only gasps and cries that are sheer unarticulated blocks of sound. [...] 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 paranoiac machine is “a result of the relationship between the desiring-machines and the body without organs, and occurs when the latter can no longer tolerate these machines.” (2009:9)
A lengthy quote, but an important one, since it sets up both the idea of desiring-machines breaking into the BwO and of the BwO resisting these attempts from the desiring-machines. One cannot forget, however, that this is the paranoiac machine. They’re beginning to describe a process of ontological development; what that means is that the paranoiac machine is more basic than the usual BwO, even though the usual BwO doesn’t grow out of the paranoiac machine historically. The paranoiac machine is one principle according to which the BwO functions, and they’re describing it independently for clarity, but it’s only isolated in cases of pure paranoia (if such a thing ever exists)
“[F]orms of social production, like those of desiring-production, involve an unengendered non-productive attitude, an element of antiproduction coupled with the process, a full body that functions as a socius [...] It falls back on all production, constituting a surface over which the forces and agents of production are distributed, thereby appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi cause. Forces and agents come to represent a miraculous form of its own power: they appear to be “miraculated” by it. In a word, the socius as a full body forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface.” (2009:10)
They’re careful not to overextend the comparison between desiring-production and social production, so we should use caution too, but such a comparison is legitimate within certain constraints. The BwO of social production is the socius, upon which are organised machines of social production (technological machines, humans, plants in both senses, etc.). They don’t go into much detail about how production incorporates antiproduction here, because it depends on circumstances, but in the case of capitalism we can consider consumption as an example of antiproduction; consumption is used partly to make room for more products, and partly to incorporate one product in the creation of another. The point they want to make here, however, is that the BwO, through recording, appears as if it causes production, when it’s really opposed to a production it can never escape
“As Marx observes, in the beginning capitalists are necessarily conscious of the opposition between capital and labour, and of the use of capital as a means of extorting surplus labor. But a perverted, bewitched world quickly comes into being, as capital increasingly plays the role of a recording surface that falls back on all of production. [...] What is specifically capitalist here is the role of money and the use of capital as a full body to constitute the recording or inscribing surface. But 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.” (2009:11)
In this way, capital appears to be the source of social production within capitalism. In other social modes, the miraculating process will differ, as will the precise thing identified as the social BwO (the socius), but there will always be a socius and a miraculating process. They examine social production in significantly more detail in chapter 3
“The body without organs now falls back on desiring-production, attracts it, and appropriates it for its own. [...] An attraction-machine” now coexists with the paranoiac machine, and the “organs are regenerated, “miraculated” on the body of Judge Schreber, who attracts God’s rays to himself”. “The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, 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.” (2009:11)
This is why I told you to remember Schreber. As it was with social production, so too it must be with desiring-production. The BwO appropriates desiring-production through its recording process, and thus appears to be the source of desire. When the BwO is organised according to the Oedipal model, desire will then seem to be the product of Oedipus, but what’s actually going on is a matter of the desiring-machines, which are exactly what psychoanalysis seems desperate to avoid at times
“[A]ll sexuality is a matter of economy” (2009:12)
This is more literal than it seems; since sexuality is a product of the arrangement of the desiring-machines, which (as we’ll see) is intimately related with the organisation of the BwO, which is itself determined in large part by social production, the mode of social production is inextricably part of sexuality. The word “economy” is being used not in the traditional sense, but in the broader sense of investments and distributions of any kind, so it here includes all social institutions and roles, and even the desiring-machines themselves
“Production [...] is not reproduced within the apparent objective movement in the same way in which it is produced within the process of constitution. In fact, we have passed imperceptibly into a domain of the production of recording, whose law is not the same as that of the production of production. The law governing the latter was connective synthesis or coupling. But when the productive connections pass from machines to the body without organs (as from labor to capital), it would seem that they then come under another law that expresses a distribution in relation to the nonproductive element as a “natural or divine presupposition” (the disjunctions of capital). Machines attach themselves to the body without organs as so many points of disjunction, between which an entire network of new syntheses is now woven, marking the surface off into co-ordinates, like a grid. [...] The disjunctive synthesis of recording therefore comes to overlap the connective synthesis of production.” (2009:12-13)
The connective synthesis of production governs the behaviour of desiring-machines, the production of production. The disjunctive synthesis of recording governs the production of recording, the way those connections are distributed on the BwO. The third and final synthesis, which we’ll get to in the next section, is my personal favourite
I won’t be saying much, if anything at all, about the discussion of schizophrenia, because I simply couldn’t discuss everything in this text and still give it all the proper attention
Anti-Oedipus, 1.3
“[R]ecording falls back on production, but the production of recording itself is produced by the production of production. Similarly, recording is followed by consumption, but the production of consumption is produced in and through the production of recording. This is because something on the order of a subject can be discerned on the recording surface. It is a strange subject, however, with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs, but always remaining peripheral to the desiring-machines, being defined by the share of the product it takes for itself” (2009:16). This production of consumption is the “third synthesis of the unconscious: the conjunctive synthesis “so it’s . . . ,” or the production of consumption.” (2009:17)
This is the first mention of the third and final synthesis, the conjunctive synthesis of consumption-consummation. This particular passage isn’t a clear explanation of what this is, it’s instead an outline of what is to come, and an attempt to relate it to what has already been discussed. The idea that helps the most with this passage, for me at least, is that of surplus production. They mention elsewhere that the desiring-machines always produce a surplus of flow (which is what causes new connections, and so on); the production of production, which is the connecting of desiring-machines, produces an overall surplus which becomes the production of recording, as in the second (disjunctive) synthesis. Similarly then, the disjunctive synthesis produces a surplus itself, this time of forces occurring between the paranoiac machine and the miraculating machine, which produces intensities and the third synthesis, the production of consumption (their use of the word “consumption” is unusual, there’s a good footnote on it from the translator). The paranoiac machine was a byproduct of the first, connective synthesis, and the miraculating machine was a byproduct of the second, disjunctive synthesis; now, the third, conjunctive synthesis produces the subject as a byproduct
“We must examine how this synthesis is formed or how the subject is produced.” The paranoiac machine “gave way to an attraction” machine, but “the opposition between attraction and repulsion persists. It would seem that a genuine reconciliation of the two can take place only on the level of a new machine [...] Let us borrow the term “celibate machine” to designate this machine that succeeds the paranoiac machine and the miraculating machine [...] This is tantamount to saying that the subject is produced as a mere residuum alongside the desiring-machines, or that he confuses himself with this third productive machine and with the residual reconciliation that it brings about” (2009:17)
Note that the subject is not the celibate machine. Their point here is that the celibate machine reconciles the forces of attraction and repulsion, and that the subject is produced as a byproduct of that; they aren’t attempting to explain how this happens just yet
“[T]he celibate machine first of all reveals the existence of a much older paranoiac machine, with its tortures, its dark shadows, its ancient Law. The celibate machine itself is not a paranoiac machine, however. Everything about it is different: its cogs, its sliding carriage, its shears, needles, magnets, rays. Even when it tortures or kills, it manifests something new and different, a solar force. In the second place, this transfiguration cannot be explained by the “miraculating” powers the machine possesses due to the inscription hidden inside it, though it in fact contains within itself the most impressive sort of inscriptions [...] A genuine consummation is achieved by the new machine, a pleasure that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic” (2009:18)
I felt it was worth including this, given that it emphasises the distinction between the machines and given the emphasis they give to the fact that the celibate machine produces pleasure, but I don’t really know why they emphasise the latter so much (unless it’s simply to explain why Schreber “feels something”?)
“The question becomes: what does the celibate machine produce? what is produced by means of it? The answer would seem to be: intensive qualities” (2009:18). These products are “intensities, becomings, transitions. Where do these pure intensities come from? They come from the two preceding forces, repulsion and attraction, and from the opposition of these two forces. It must not be thought that the intensities themselves are in opposition to one another, arriving at a state of balance around a neutral state. On the contrary, they are all positive in relationship to the zero intensity that designates the full body without organs. And they undergo relative rises or falls depending on the complex relationship between them and the variations in the relative strength of attraction and repulsion as determining factors. In a word, the opposition of the forces of attraction and repulsion produces an open series of intensive elements, all of them positive, that are never an expression of the final equilibrium of a system, but consist, rather, of an unlimited number of stationary, metastable states through which a subject passes” (2009:19)
And here we see why the conjunctive synthesis made it in my notes at all. These are notes on the idea of the BwO, and this is where the third synthesis relates to the BwO, in a crucial manner. I’ve tried to explain what an intensity is above, but it’s a tough idea, so if you don’t get it then just go with it as best you can and eventually you will. The easy bit of this passage is getting that intensities are produced by the opposition of attraction and repulsion (and that’s half the task). The difficult bit is getting what it means for them to all be positive, and why that’s the case. I’ve tried to explain the former above; they don’t expand on the latter here, but I’ll give it a shot. For Deleuze, and presumably Guattari also, quantity is not something one should measure when talking about forces. Forces are always greater or lesser than one another, which defines the way they act (quality comes from quantity), but this “one another” refers only to the forces they’re struggling against. The quality (type) of the force, what it does, is always tied up with the question of what forces it’s struggling against, and with their comparative magnitude. To measure the force would abstract away that context of struggle, and so we’d no longer be able to say what type of force it is. For more on that, see Nathan Wigger’s lectures on Deleuze and Nietzsche (GIAN - MHRD, IIT Kharagpur 2020)
“The breasts on the judge’s naked torso are neither delirious nor hallucinatory phenomena: they designate, first of all, a band of intensity, a zone of intensity on his body without organs. 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 designations of the subject developing along these particular vectors [...] 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. Nothing but bands of intensity, potentials, thresholds, and gradients.” (2009:19)
This is a passage that’s hard to grasp in its nuance without Deleuze’s ontology, but for now just keep in mind the idea of potentiality. The egg has all sorts of zones, intensities, etc., and each intensity is of a different magnitude, which gives it different potentials for development. The bit about the lines also requires extra context, but I haven’t done that reading thoroughly enough, so I guess just ignore it?
We can’t yet say how Oedipus occurs, we “merely see how very little the consumption of pure intensities has to do with family figures” (2019:20). They will critique Oedipus far more thoroughly through the book, the purpose of chapter one is to set up the key ideas and their perspective
To sum up the progression: “the points of disjunction on the body without organs form circles that converge on the desiring-machines; then the subject — produced as a residuum alongside the machine, as an appendix, or as a spare part adjacent to the machine — passes through all the degrees of the circle, and passes from one circle to another. This subject itself is not at the center, which is occupied by the machine, but on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered, defined by the states through which it passes [...] without the family having anything whatsoever to do with this. Or, to follow a path that is more complex, but leads in the end to the same thing: by means of the paranoiac machine and the miraculating machine, the proportions of attraction and repulsion on the body without organs produce, starting from zero, a series of states in the celibate machine; and the subject is born of each state in the series, is continually reborn of the following state that determines him at a given moment, consuming-consummating all these states that cause him to be born and reborn (the lived state coming first, in relation to the subject that lives it).” (2019:20)
Here they offer two ways of explaining the same process; I find the second much clearer, so I’ll focus on it. Essentially, the paranoiac and miraculating machines produce attractions and repulsions, which combine through the celibate machine to create zones of intensity. These intensities are of differing magnitudes, or thresholds, and each threshold has its own state of being for the subject, who is constantly going from one state to another. The state itself, with which the subject will confuse itself (hence identity as an illusory product), is produced and comes around before the subject, in the ontological sequence of development. The fact that the subject is always moving from one state to another, from one threshold to another, is why they will (in A Thousand Plateaus especially) emphasise becoming as a process, rather than being as a fixed identity
“The forces of attraction and repulsion, of soaring ascents and plunging falls, produce a series of intensive states based on the intensity = 0 that designates the body without organs” (2019:21)
This last one isn’t super important, I just wanted to note that, as far as I know, this is the first use of the phrase “intensity=0”, which Land picks up a lot
Bibliography:
Baugh B (2010) ‘Body’, in Parr A (ed) The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, UK.
Culp A (2016) Dark Deleuze, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, USA.
Deleuze G and Guattari F (2019) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Massumi B trans), Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., London, UK.
— (2009) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Hurley R, Seem M, and Lane HR trans), Penguin Group, New York, USA.
Message K (2010) ‘Body without Organs’, in Parr A (ed) The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, UK.
Wigger N (26 February 2020) ‘Deleuze’s Reading of Nietzsche’ [video], GIAN - MHRD, IIT Kharagpur, YouTube, accessed 1 August 2021.