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Deleuze
for the Desperate #4 The body-without-organs
(BwO)
Dave Harris
This
is the fourth one in the series so far. Like the
others, this one recommends we use a technique
designed to get some sort of initial
understanding from the difficult texts written
by Deleuze and Guattari. It is an approach for
those who might not have time to read the whole
texts in a suitable leisurely way, stopping to
look things up, going off to think of
implications and so on. Instead, we focus on
sections in the text, which we find using the
index, which discuss the particular key concept
we are interested in. We read around the entries
a bit, then bring in some additional issues.
This time it is the body-without-organs or BwO.
All
references and a transcript are available – see
the link at the end.
As
before, the main focus is going to be on the
discussion in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and
Guattari, 2004) The BwO
warrants a whole plateau to itself here,
fortunately a fairly brief one. There is also an
extended discussion in Anti-Oedipus, and
more discussion in Deleuze's books Logic of
Sense, (Deleuze 1990) and Proust and
Signs (Deleuze
2000) (references in the transcript,
cited at the end). As before, a second voice
introduces some additional issues from this
wider discussion – the voice of Maggie Harris.
M.
Harris
My
first section introduces a brief account of some
main themes in the work of Carlos Castenada, who
appears a few times in A Thousand Plateaus.
He was a
cult writer in the 1960s and 1970s, but is
perhaps less well-known these days. The second
section introduces some issues from Anti-Oedipus,
where the Body-without-Organs is also discussed.
End
MH
The
body without organs (BwO) is another popular
concept which attracts some attention, and some
people have insisted that it has application for
the education system, people like St Pierre or
Guttorm et al. I suppose it came to the
attention of social scientists as well, given
their interest in bodies as well as minds. A lot
of the work in this 'turn to the body' in
Sociology refers to the way in which bodies are
marked by social forces of various kinds, and
how people read off the social forces by the
ways in which people hold and display their
bodies. Bourdieu (1984), for example, refers to
characteristics of working class bodies or
middle class bodies, and notes that bodies are
conventionally gendered as well. He goes on to
say that one major way to teach people about the
power of social forces is to constrain and
discipline their bodies, to make female children
adopt particular deferential stances in the
presence of men, for example. Foucault's (1977)
work on prison regimes is also about
disciplining bodies with the intention to
discipline minds, as in a behaviour-shaping
regime. Schools do that too, of course.
As
the first clue to what the plateau on the body
without organs is all about, we can think about
ways to escape these disciplines exerted on our
bodies, to achieve some state where the body is
not heavily socialized or controlled. The body's
full potential will then be released – the
potential to express desires of all kinds in a
creative way, to be affected, in deleuzian
terms. This will liberate us from major forces
of social discipline and help us think and act
in alternative ways. It is simply assumed that
we would want to do this in the very title of
the plateau: how do you make yourself a body
without organs?
The
body without organs is one of these things that
exist in reality, but in virtual reality
(discussed in the video on the rhizome) At least
we give the virtual body a separate name, not
just call it the body, so this is a welcome
break from previous practice with concepts like
the rhizome or the haecceity that refer to both
actual and virtual states. However, we are told
quite early on that the BwO is not exactly a
concept in the strict sense, unlike the rhizome
and the haecceity, but rather a limit state,
something that we can perceive when we push to
the limits of conventional bodies to see what
might remain or lie beyond them. We get to it by
stripping away the effects of various practices,
not just by thinking, the practices which
constrain conventional bodies. We have to be
very careful, though, to ensure that we do not
get just an empty body, or one that can easily
be re- occupied by harmful forms.
Let's
proceed straight away to the examples we have in
ATP, Plateau 6.
On
p 167 (of my edition) we have a list of ways to
escape from the demands of conventional bodies:
In
a number of cases, the body shows that it has
'had enough of organs [and the conventional
pains and pleasures they bring] ' the
hypochondriac body' is one example [citing a
French psychiatrist who had a patient who
literally thought that they no longer possessed
any organs]. The 'paranoid body' is another
example, where the organs are continually under
attack but constantly renewed [the reference is
to the case of a famous paranoid, Judge
Schreber, much discussed in Anti-Oedipus].
There is the 'schizo body' struggling with the
organs and risking catatonia. [more on this case
later] The 'drugged body' is a kind of
experimental schizo state [with a reference to
W. Burroughs]. There is also the 'masochistic
body' which is not just about the enjoyment of
pain, but an attempt to stop the organs from
working in conventional ways and develop
alternatives. All these examples should also
remind us of the need for caution. We should
also avoid attempts just to empty bodies, rather
than releasing them to pursue 'gaiety, ecstasy
and dance' (167). That promise leads us to keep
experimenting, until we have 'sufficiently
[my emphasis] dismantled our self', our
conventional self, that is.
The
most familiar example, perhaps involves
experimenting with drugs. We can withdraw into
our body. The practice is sometimes called
'escapism', escape from the body and its
responsibilities and demands, but there is a
positive side, new pleasures to discover and
experience. William Burroughs is discussed
briefly. The reference to Castenada later on,
about p.180) also involves experimenting with
drugs, this time, mind-expanding ones found in
peyote buttons. Artaud experimented with peyote
too.
MH
Carlos
Castenada, is the author of best-selling 60s/70s
hippy texts allegedly about the life and times
of a (probably mythical) [yah-key] Yaqui
sorcerer, “Don Juan”. Castenada claimed to be an
anthropology student. “Don Juan” sets out to
rock the foundations of Castenada’s world with a
series of disorientation techniques, including
long walks, starvation, odd and frightening
behaviour, isolation in the desert and
(eventually) taking peyote. The first volume was
aimed at making us all realize our ‘scientific’
conventions were arbitrary and close to magic
themselves, and that people we thought of as
'noble savages' had a lot of wisdom too. After
that, the books got stranger still, more and
more obsessional/paranoid. There were more
characters, more improbable alleged concepts
central to Don Juan’s belief system. There was a
fair bit of repetition, and a general 'eco'
philosophy supposedly emerging from a series of
‘critical incidents’ (as we would call them
now). It all sounded so hippy that a few people
began to say that the whole thing was made up.
Deleuze and Guattari say it doesn't matter if it
was.
D&G
discuss the issues raised in Book 4 of
Castenada's epic, where sorcerers apparently
construct two views of the world, one based on
appearances and empirical relations, a bit like
science as D&G see it, while the other
operates with flows and fluxes underneath the
surface, dissolving all that seems to be actual.
This is pretty much like deleuzian philosophy.
The two worldviews are discussed with quite a
notable seriousness.
Castenada
crops up quite a bit in A Thousand Plateaus
in fact, not least in Plateau 10 on becoming,
where Deleuze and Guattari refer to themselves
as 'sorcerers', and, at one stage, refer to
human bodies being connected to everything else
through a series of 'fibres'. This is a
reference to one of those critical incidents
described by Castenada, when Don Juan shows him
how his friend, another sorcerer, is able to
make a hazardous crossing of a waterfall by
extending, and making visible, white fibres
which snake from his abdomen and connect him
securely to neighbouring rocks and trees.
End
of MH
We
can liberate ourselves from normality, perceive
the world in a new way, and deepen our
understandings with drugs or traditional
techniques of sensory deprivation. Of course
this has been claimed by generations of artists
and cultural rebels as well. Even ecstasy, once
highly popular among clubbers was said to
liberate users from normal bodily desires,
subduing impulses to predatory sex or violence
in favour of developing friendship and
sociability.
The
other examples might require a bit of context.
Take masochism first. We are given graphic
details of a masochistic practice, or maybe a
fantasy, from the casebook of a French
psychiatrist about a man who requires that his
conventional sex organs are heavily restrained,
to put it mildly. This looks like excessive
discipline of the body, but we are told that the
idea is to 'destroy the instinctive forces in
order to replace them with transmitted forces'
(172), and then that there is the intention of
experiencing [a kind of culturally induced] fear
and suspense, instead of being dominated by
lust, e.g. at the sight of women's legs. Legs
have ceased to be conventional organs [body
parts really] and have been replaced by signs
such as boots, and as a result they are now a
zone of intensity or a zone on the BWO...that is
they produce or channel desire, but not with the
same conventional socially accepted results and
effects.
Once
the conventional pleasures have been denied, the
masochist is free to experience unconventional
even unformed pleasures, including 'becoming
horse'. There is more than a hint that these are
somehow 'higher' pleasures detached from the
'normal' body, which reminded me of Bourdieu's
(1984) work on elite tastes.
This
is far from the usual conception of masochism as
involving simply the pleasures of pain, the
inverse of sadism. Deleuze argues this much more
extensively in a book on masochism, at least on
the work of Sacher-Masoch. I have the 1991
version of Deleuze's book which also includes a
famous novel by Sacher-Masoch – Venus in
Furs. Deleuze
pursues
some very interesting criticisms of Freud on
masochism and on the centrality of the father.
Instead, Deleuze says, Sacher-Masoch was
offering a very cultured view of sexual
activity, wanting to revive mythical versions of women in ritual
performances, a kind of sexual theatre. It was
important to exclude what passed for sexual
reality, and this involved contracting a
female partner to learn to play a consistent and
plausible part, sexual role-play in modern terms: she
was to be the cold but caring woman.
This account helps
explain the sudden leap in ATP from masochism to 'courtly love', the
heavily ritualised activity of courtship that
also involved very
little actual sexual contact as we would
understand it, but which culturally sexualised normal
behaviour instead – a meaningful glance,
gentlemanly behaviour. A caress is 'as
strong as an orgasm: orgasm is a mere fact, a
rather deplorable one' (173). Incidentally
Proust's novel (I have a summary
on my website Harris, nd.) gives some good
examples of highly stylised bourgeois love and
courtship in Paris.
The same apparently goes for Daoist
love [can't
help you here]. We can examine D&G's description, and
note how they return us to philosophical
concepts:
Again, men should not
ejaculate, both parties should not see desire as
a lack or simply a delaying of pleasure to gain
some 'externalizable surplus value' (174), but
constituting an intensive BwO, again with
nothing external or transcendent. This energy
can be directed towards procreation, but this is
only 'one side of the assemblage of desire, the
side facing the strata, organisms, State,
family'.
The 'strata' here
can be thought of as solidified forms of
energy or creativity that have been compacted
and then made rigid, just like geological
strata, an argument pursued in Plateau 3. We
are told there are three main forms of them: ‘ the ones that
most directly bind us: the organism,
signifiance and subjectification...you will
articulate [discipline] your body
–otherwise you’re just depraved. You will be
signifier and signified, interpreter and
interpreted – otherwise you’re just a deviant.
You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a
subject of the enunciation recoiled into a
subject of the statement –otherwise you’re
just a tramp’ (176-7).
Each of these constraining strata need a bit more explanation:
Organisms, 'the
organization of the organs'….Conventional
organisms are subject to the judgement of God.
We will see the origin of this phrase in a
minute. It refers to Christian doctrines about
bodily functions, riddled with undertones of
guilt, hatred of the body, bodily pleasure as
sin and so on. Christianity, God, wants to
constrain or destroy the creative liberated
body, the BwO, and so do scientists and doctors
-- both reduce us to animal-like organisms. The
animal parts of us are seen as defining us. The
organism is therefore a stratum on the BwO,
something that has accumulated, coagulated and
sedimented 'in order to extract useful labour'
by imposing particular forms and functions and
organizations on the BwO. So, taking the obvious
example, manual labour especially reduces us to
'organic muscle power', as if we were horses or
oxen.
We counter it by 'articulating' our organs differently, rearranging the
priorities and connections, as in some of the experimental practices above. That is to refuse
dominant notions of the human organism,
refusing to be judged by our 'natural' bodies,
as
brutes or beasts of burden, as mere
'specimens' by doctors, or as fleshy robots
by scientists.
Signifiance (NB not
significance) refers to the operation of
conventional language systems, the translator's note
tells us. Roughly, it is the capacity to
signify or make sense using conventional language and its approved
techniques. Mostly, this is heavily conventional and we are forced
to use language 'properly', in a form of deep
socialisation which 'clings to the soul'. Plateau 5 discusses
this best, when you are ready – for example we are told that
language contains implicit 'order words' which
imply social hierarchies. Experimenting with
signifying is the only way out – hence the general admiration for experimental
language and art.
And the individual
subject. We become subjects only by accepting
discipline – elsewhere, Deleuze and
Guattari expresses some admiration for Althusser's marxist
account of this process. Again Plateau 5
awaits. We are offered an apparently individual
identity in social life and we learn to accept it, and our place. Incidentally,
Althusser (1977) saw the school as a major mechanism
here. This
discipline is heavily reinforced every day and
is very difficult to resist. We counter it with experiment again, with nomadism,
nomadic subjectivity, insisting we are
several selves.
The
mental disorders, especially paranoia and
schizophrenia had already been discussed in some
depth in Anti-Oedipus and again the BwO
emerges as a key term. Annoyingly, the copy I
have does not offer a full index of concepts. So
we can't really use the study strategy that we
have been advocating with this particular
volume, which is to use the index to collect
examples of the term in use. As before, as I
read through my copy of Anti-Oedipus, I
noted down a few page numbers where the body
without organs is discussed. My notes on Anti-Oedipus
are not as full as I would've liked, because it
was the first book by Deleuze and Guattari that
I read, more than 20 years ago, and I wasn't
quite into them by then. Nevertheless, we can
summarize a few themes and try to see how the
body without organs fits.
MH
Anti-Oedipus
is openly political in its condemnation of
capitalism and the way in which it controls
people. A dominant feature is the critique of
approaches to mental illness and mental health
which end up by constraining the creativity of
human beings and making them much more
malleable. Indeed, at its worst, analyses of
matters such as desire can imply that a healthy
orientation will actually require levels of
political oppression or social repression. Some
do not undergo the stages of being disciplined
successfully and they end up with neuroses,
things like obsessional disorders or hysteria,
or even psychoses. The psychoses are serious
mental illnesses that dominate the life of the
sufferer, such as paranoia or schizophrenia.
Other
Freudians have developed these arguments about
psychosis in particular, and the work of Klein
is discussed in Anti-Oedipus as well. To
be very brief, the argument is that all infants
have a traumatic experience when they first
encounter the outside world, and discover
objects, including people, other than
themselves. Indeed, some of these other objects
are positively threatening, claiming the
attention of parents, and increasingly intruding
into the safe and secure world of the infant.
There seem to be two responses to this trauma in
Klein. First, children can get very depressed at
realizing that they are no longer the centre of
the world, and this depression can develop into
psychosis. It takes the form of a paranoid
suspicion and hatred that the outside world is
determined to crush or extinguish them
altogether. Second, they can try to protect some
inner self, by splitting up their identity, and
insulating the inner one from outside reality
altogether, for example. This split self can
turn into schizophrenia.
If
we can summarize the main critical thrust of Anti-Oedipus
in a few words it would be to suggest that this
whole schema is far too rigid and driven by an
interest in control. Infants are far more
creative than Freud and Klein believe. We saw
this in the session on the rhizome with the case
of Little Hans, who stars in Anti-Oedipus too.
Hans was trying to make sense of his world and
to join together all the elements that
interested him in the world outside his parental
home, especially those he could observe from his
window, which was situated opposite a loading
bay. His early attempts to make sense of these
events in his own way were interpreted by Freud
in the classic terms of Oedipal anxiety. The
lad's agoraphobia could be explained ultimately
by his anxiety that his mother would have
another child – the box-wagons stood for wombs.
The structure of the 'normal' family as Freud
saw it was imposed, as a mechanism to control
'natural' but anti-social sexual forces. No
violence was required, although his mother did
make the routine threat that she would castrate
him if she caught him masturbating.
That
was an historical case producing a lot of
speculative analysis, but Guattari himself
worked with adult psychotics in his experimental
clinic. Many had already had the usual
treatments for their disorder, often confinement
in an institution with compulsory treatments
like electro-shock therapy. Guattari treated
them instead with group therapy with every
effort made to reconnect people, 'transversally'
or rhizomatically, with the real world, not the
paranoid or schizophrenic one. The regime tried
to open out experience and build on creativity,
to break the barriers between staff and inmates.
Patients were encouraged to participate in new
forms of work, or new contacts with the arts.
End
MH
Both
Guattari and Deleuze had a particular interest
in a famous figure in the bohemian artistic life
of Paris -- Antonin Artaud. Artaud was seen as a
wildly creative figure, experimenting with
drugs, writing experimental texts and inventing
a new kind of theatre -- the theatre of cruelty
(cruel or uncompromising toward the audience,
that is). Artaud had been confined in an asylum
for a decade, away from Paris, diagnosed as a
schizophrenic, and had suffered a great deal. He
was treated with a behaviour-shaping regime
including ECT, severe diets, and deprivation of
social contacts. He was finally rescued after a
campaign by Parisian intellectuals and others,
but had clearly suffered: he was in ill health,
a drug addict, and had lost all his teeth. He
was regarded as a bit of a martyr, and there are
two long documentaries available on YouTube
telling his story. (refs at the end
He
wrote a play outlining his personal philosophy
and defending himself against charges that he
was mad. The title of the play was To Have
Done With the Judgement of God – the origin of the
terminology in Deleuze and Guattari.
It included scurrilous mockery of the catholic
church, made all sorts of allegations about
Americans, and advocated drug taking. It was due
to be broadcast on French radio on November 28,
1947, says Brian Holmes (2009) but was banned:
alert readers will see that that date appears
under the main title of Plateau 6 on BwO.
The
play was not broadcast, but it probably
circulated among the intellectual underground.
It finally surfaced in the form of a heroic
reading of the transcript in English on YouTube
(Vaughan-Johnstone,
nd) ,
and finally, the whole thing became available on
the web [see Surrealism-Plays, nd). It is a very
strange piece, and you can read it yourselves.
The bit about body without organs occurs right
at the end:
Man is sick
because he is badly constructed. We must make
up our minds to strip him bare in order to
scrape off that animalcule that itches him
mortally, god, and with god his organs.
For you can
tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing
more useless than an organ.
When you will
have made him a body without organs, then you
will have delivered him from all his automatic
reactions and restored him to his true
freedom.
They you will
teach him again to dance wrong side out as in
the frenzy of dance halls and this wrong side
out will be his real place.
OK we have done the main thrust of
the argument I think, except for Spinoza. He
crops up elsewhere as we have said, and here
is he being rendered as offering 'the great
book of the BwO'.
Spinoza
drew
attention to bodies long before Bourdieu or
Foucault. He argued that an action in the mind is
necessarily an action in the body, or a
passion in the body is necessarily a passion
in the mind...that consciousness is actually
an illusion, which merely registers effects.
We have hinted at this in the earleri videos
when discussing
affects.
In
general,
Spinoza, according to Deleuze (1988) is
famous for the idea that there is a single
substance with an infinite number of attributes,
uniting God and nature. This denies the
transcendental God, and implies a number of
‘practical theses that made Spinozism an object
of scandal’ (17).
Roughly, existing things
are just modes of the attributes of universal
substance. Modes represent degrees of power to
affect and to be affected, which they get from
their origins in 'universal substance', so to
speak.
I don't know if this is
helpful or not. I think it means that the BwO is
something like the universal substance, and
specific organisms, or organisations of its
organs, are modes. In other words, we have two
levels of reality again, an actual and a
virtual. This is seen perhaps in philosophical
asides throughout ATP Plateau 6:
[The BwO is] a
distribution of intensities in a spatium
[something which is intensive itself], and not
space. ..non-formed, non-extensive matter,
'intense matter', something where 'intensity =
0" , and zero is not to be taken as negative,
simply as a sign that there is no energy at work
except that which matter itself possesses. (169)
...the full egg before the extension of the
organism and the organization of the organs',
before the formation of the strata' (170 )
This notion of the egg,
full of potential and as yet not fully formed
into separate organs and conventional bodies
also appears in AO, linked to the
specific paranoid and highly detailed fantasies
of Schreber:
The
body without organs is like the cosmic egg, the
giant molecule swarming with worms, bacilli,
Lilliputian figures, animalcules, and homunculi,
with their organization and their machines,
minute strings, ropes, teeth, fingernails,
levers and pulleys, catapults: thus in Schreber
the millions of spermatazoids in the sunbeams,
or the souls that lead a brief existence as
little men on his body....The socius [existing
social system] is not a projection of the body
without organs; rather, the body without organs
is the limit of the socius, its tangent of
deterritorialization, the ultimate residue of a
deterritorialized socius. The socius—the earth,
the body of the despot, capital-money—are
clothed full bodies, just as the body without
organs is a naked full body; but the latter
exists at the limit, at the end, not at the
origin. (281)
That is, existing
societies are not the natural production of the
creative potential of human bodies, but
stratified, 'filled' and 'clothed' versions of
it. If we can work back from these added forms
of organization we can get to the BwO, as we
will see in a minute.
There are several more
asides but I will leave you to find them. Two
final implications remain, divided rather
artificially into political and philosophical –
as you will see, both are connected:
1. Political. We are in
a social formation and need to see how it is
stratified. Then we can trace the strata back to
the deeper assemblage. Then 'tip the assemblage'
towards the plane of consistency [that is treat
it as a plateau, to see how it connects at the
virtual level]. This reveals the BwO as a
connection of desires, flows and continuum of
intensities. This will provide each of us with
'your own little machine, ready when needed to
be plugged into other collective machines'
(179). BwO is therefore a place and the plane of
consistency, a collectivity - 'my' body is a
location on it, 'what remains of me, unalterable
and changing in form, crossing thresholds'.
However, we have to be
very careful before abandoning conventional
bodies altogether in radical experiments, and
D&G get rather conventional here: We have to
keep enough of our organism to carry on with
every day life and enough signifiance and
subjectification if only to be able to criticize
them as systems, 'to respond to the dominant
reality'(178). We can 'mimic the strata'. We
should beware excessive destratifying which will
lead to 'empty and dreary bodies' [the catatonic
drug addict, the seriously ill schizophrenic,
or, in terms of the body politic, the absence of
democratic bodies in fascist dictatorships].
Patience is required, a temporary dismantling of
the organs. It is easy to 'botch' it, failing to
produce it, or producing it as something empty.
Heading towards the plane of consistency and
experimentation will end in death, a black hole
or catastrophe unless you take precautions.
Better to stay stratified rather than provoke an
even heavier stratification. Hence 'lodge
yourself on a stratum, experiment with the
opportunities it offers, find an advantageous
place on it, find potential movements of
deterritorialization, possible lines of flight,
experience them, produce flow, conjunctions here
and there... [but] have a small plot of new land
at all times'. We need a 'meticulous relation
with the strata'. [In short we need philosophy
to 'connect, conjugate, continue: [produce] a
whole"diagram"as opposed to still signifying and
subjective programmes'. Philosophy is the safest
way to experiment.
And finally general
philosophical implications
How does the BwO (and
the haecceity as well) relate to the whole of
virtual reality, or rather what we can
understand of it, the 'plane of consistency'? We
find a bit of indecision here, a problem yet to
be solved – eg:
...masochism, Tao and
courtly love are [not] interchangeable, but they
are locations on a field of immanence or plane
of consistency, which we must construct [by
philosophizing, of course]. This runs through
different social formations and assemblages and
shows itself in different types of BwO. 'The
plane of consistency would be the totality of
all BwOs, or pure multiplicity of immanence, one
piece of which may be Chinese, another American,
another medieval, another petty perverse, but
all in a movement of generalized
deterritorialization in which each person [sic]
takes or makes what she or he can, according to
tastes she or he will have succeeded in
abstracting from a Self... According to a
politics of strategy successfully abstracted
from a given formation' [sounds a bit like
Foucault on strategy here]. (174)
But later ...So the plane of
consistency is not the sum of BwOs, but rather
the sum of elements that have been selected,
full and creative BwOs, leaving out cancerous or
empty bodies. Is this just a logical
construction, or does each BwO actually produce
effects which are 'identical or analogous to'
those of others? If so, we might be able to get
the same effects from drug use or masochism from
other BwOs, like 'being soused on pure water' as
in an experiment by Henry Miller. Or perhaps
there is a real exchange of substances, an
intensive continuum of substance. 'Doubtless,
anything is possible' (184). [Guattari doesn't
really care, if this is indeed him -- it is
therapy and politics that attracts him]. In any
case, we need 'an abstract machine capable of
covering and even creating [the plane of
consistency],... assemblages capable of plugging
into desire' which will ensure there are
connections and pursue 'transversal tie-ins'. If
we don't do this, all the BwOs will remain
separated from each other marginalised, and
cancerous and emptied doubles 'will triumph'.
We still haven't covered all the
examples – there are more in the books on
Proust, Kafka and in Deleuze's The
Logic of Sense.
You will have
to read this for yourselves – I've
given page numbers for relevant sections in the
references.
The idea is that you can achieve a BwO by
developing a particular writing technique -- a
machine that does not write about the normal
bodily sensations and emotions or from normal
subjective positions. Both Kafka and Proust
manage to do this, after normal subjective
writing. Bogue's
book is really good on this.I also have
notes on a useful article by Buchanan on the
BwO.
Deleuze had an early interest in
cinema as also offering a chance to develop
non-human 'machinic 'perspectives through
cameras and sound recording equipment, and
the books (especially Cinema
2) show how modern film-makers detach from
the normal 'sensori-motor' perspectives of
conventional human subjects.
STOP PRESS: I have also discovered a bit on the
BwO in the paintings by Bacon: Deleuze, G. (
2005) Francis Bacon. Trans. Daniel
Smith.London: Bloomsbury Press, pp. 34--6.
References
Althusser, L. "Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an
Investigation)" in Althusser L (1977) 'Lenin
and Philosophy' and Other Essays, London,
New Left Books. My notes: http://www.arasite.org/nalt2.htm
Bourdieu,P. (1984) Distinction.
A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
Deleuze, G. (2008) [1964] Proust
and Signs, trans. by Richard Howard,
London: Continuum. See p. 117. My notes:
http://www.arasite.org/delproust.html
Deleuze, G (1990) The Logic
of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, edited by
Constantin Boundas, New York: Columbia
University Press. See pp.87–93. My notes: http://www.arasite.org/logofsense.html
Deleuze, G. 'Coldness and
Cruelty', (published with Sacher-Masoch, L.
'Venus in Furs'). Both are combined in a volume
called Masochism (1991) New York: Zone
Books. My notes: http://www.arasite.org/delmaso.html
Deleuze G and Guattari F (2004)
[1987] A Thousand Plateaus, London:
Continuum. My notes to Plateau 6: http://www.arasite.org/TPch6.html
Deleuze G and Guattari F (1984) Anti-Oedipus.
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: The
Athlone Press. See pp: 281, 283, 327–9, 338,
364. My notes:
http://www.arasite.org/antioedipus.html
Foucault
M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: the birth
of the prison, London: Penguin Books Ltd.
My notes: http://www.arasite.org/foucpris.htm
Guttorm,
H. et al. (2013) Encountering Deleuze:
Collaborative Writing and the Politics of
Stuttering in Emergent Language.
International review of Qualitative Research,
5 (4) 377--98.
Harris, D. (nd) The Dave Harris
Entry in the Summarize Proust Competition, http://www.arasite.org/summarizeproust.html
Holmes, B. (2009) Guattari's
Schizoanalytic Categories. https://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/guattaris-schizoanalytic-cartographies/
St Pierre,
E. (2004) ‘Deleuzian Concepts for
Education: The subject undone’, in Educational
Philosophy and Theory, 36(3)
:283-96. My notes:
http://www.arasite.org/educationstudies/StPierre.html
Surrealism-plays (nd) A. Artaud:
To Have Done with the Judgement of God. http://www.surrealism-plays.com/Artaud.html
Vaughan-Johnston, T. (nd) A
Artaud: To Have Done with the Judgement of God.
http:
www. youtube.com/watch?v=0jj98AOeqws
Films:
My Life and
Times with Artaud https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn-IvqV36jg
Artaud the Momo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG-iBzA3b14
(director Mordillat, Laura Productions, USA,
1995).
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