Notes on: Buchanan, I (1997) 'The Problem of the
Body in Deleuze and Guattari, Or, What Can a Body
Do?'. Body and Society, 3(3): 73-91.
Dave Harris
Both bodies and BwO are assemblages, but there are
crucial distinctions between them. In
particular, the BWO should not be taken as some
kind of 'baseline for all that Deleuze and
Guattari subsequently say about bodies'(73).
Instead, the BWO is a consequence of their
understanding of bodies, so we should start with t
their accounts of what the body is, or in
philosophical terms, what a body can do.
This is part of the whole project 'to replace
etiology (cause and effect) with ethology (action
and affect), Freud with Spinoza' (74).
Obviously, we need to turn to the books on Spinoza, and Nietzsche and also Hume,
to get the 'actual system or logic of their
thought', which includes work on the body.
We can also look at the more 'practical'works on
drug addicts, alcoholics and masochists—and
anorexics. These are cases where strangely,
the self is actually trying to destroy the
body. In this sense 'Anorexia is then
a philosophical problem even as it is a medical,
psychological or social one'. We need to
remember that concepts are responses to problems,
so we need to get at the originating
problem. This involves rethinking
conventional notions of the body and mind.
The body is also not just a 'a cultural object'
that is just inscribed with our desires: it has
desiring of its own.
Take bulimia. A particular quote suggests
that bulimics enjoy the taste and food in the
abstract, but feel discussed when it enters their
bodies. Anorexics feel happy when other
people say how pale and ill they look.
Masochists actually enjoy being hurt and
anticipating further hurt [actually citing Sacher Masoch].
The body should be seen as 'the sum of its
capacities' (75) not a list of functions.
This means we can start to think about 'practices
of self', but pragmatically rather than as
symptoms of some privileged medical account.
In this perspective, the BWO is not the primary
term, 'not even a problem properly
speaking... [But]... A proposed
solution'(76), implying an inaugurating
problem. We have to trace the work on the
BWO back to the wider philosophical project,
expressed in the earlier texts: these at least
helped Deleuze 'work out his problem positions so
that he could go on to create concepts'.
We can start with the books on Spinoza. The
body is presented as knowledge. It is not to
be subordinated to the intellect, nor should
mental actions be separated from bodily actions,
mental passions isolated from bodily passions,
there corporeal expression. Body and mind
are parallel and must be thought in parallel,
hence Spinoza's 'parallelism' so that if we know
about the powers of the body, we can go on to
discover the powers of the mind that elude
consciousness.
However, what happens to our body is 'only an
effect, which means it is outside our
control'. We can register the results of
encounters with other bodies, in the form of joy
or sadness, but we do not control them. The
thing about these encounters is they produce
compounds which extend the body and its range of
activity, or decompose it: we can never understand
'real causes' in this way, but form only
inadequate ideas. For example, it is an
illusion to think that we eat because we are
hungry, as an act of free will. Similarly,
it is illusory to believe that 'a judgment of god
or bad precedes our actions. It is false to
think we want something because it is good'(77):
it must already be good [do our bodies
good]. It would be a mistake similarly to
think that obvious appetites can be understood as
instincts producing actions. It is true that
it is difficult to say no to some obvious actions,
like eating when we are hungry, but this does not
prove that an instinctual appetite exists.
It would be even more mistaken to treat such
instincts as causes. This is really Freud's
mistake: it is true that the things that seem to
be driven by instincts can never be suppressed
completely, and they might even be 'essential to
all living beings for their continued existence',
but even here it would be wrong to conclude that
instincts are independent causes of action.
In particular, the important issue of relations is
being avoided. If we define appetite as
'"the effort by which each thing strives to
persevere in its being"', as in Spinoza, relations
are actually implied. For example, we can
act differently when confronted with different
objects. In this sense, appetite is actually
'"determined by the affections that come from the
objects"'. A story by Kafka, A Hunger
Artist, can help explain. The hunger
artist did not will himself to ignore his hunger:
rather 'he was unaffected by food' (78), could not
find the food that he liked [so the food caused
the starvation in Spinozan terms—this is clearly
supposed to be connected to real cases of self
starvation as in anorexia].
Artaud's remark about
the freedom that follows becoming a BWO aligns
with Spinoza who says that freedom is only
possible 'when full possession of the power to act
is taken, "from which active affects
follow"'. Buchanan renders this as: 'we are
not free to eat, we are caused to eat, which means
our hunger is the product of the relation with
food... relations... are separate from
their terms ...and... are also eternal
[virtual?] ...[they]... passively await
realization'. If we are somehow unaffected
by food we will experience no 'hunger - affect,
and will not be induced to eat'. In this
sense, anorexia can be seen as a similar attempt
to break with an 'insupportable burden of
automatic reactions [and is]... An attempt
to produce a body without organs'. Normally,
the desire for food, as a relation between
body and food is 'involuted'and becomes 'a desire
for the desire for food', an affect being desired
for itself and in itself. The actual food
can then be 'subject to profound disgust'.
This is 'a reinvention of self', designed to
liberate ourselves from 'the sometimes intolerable
pressure that food places on us'. Since we
cannot change this pressure, we must change
ourselves and develop 'a new way of being, which
effectively means a new way of becoming.
This is what the body without organs really is, a
new way of becoming'(78-9).
This produces in Deleuze 'a philosophy of affects
and relations... transcendental empiricism'.
Deleuze and Guattari go on to call this ethology,
asking what can a body do rather than 'what is a
body'. The latter involves organicist
notions of the body, a genealogy, and we know that
D and G develop concepts like the rhizome as
'precisely an anti-organic concept'(79). We
should not think of functions or parts, but
affects. This explains strange remarks like
whether or not drug users or masochists might use
different means to pursue their desires, just like
drinkers can be drunk on pure water. What
can a body do, without devices and
contraptions? This helps to see what
masochists or addicts are actually trying to
do. Clearly what a body can do has physical
constraints, but this question does point to a
beyond, 'beyond the physical limits of the
physical body' and it is that that the BWO
'articulates'. Thus the problem of the BWO
is secondary to the issue of what a body can do
and what its limits are [it is introduced in ATP as not a
concept but a limit state].
A deeper theoretical shift is implied.
Ethology 'looks forwards'[to consequences], and
'outwards'[to relations outside the body].
There's also 'a move away from organisms to
machines with these new priorities 'relations and
qualities over terms and quantities' (80).
Hence remarks like the fact that a racehorse is
more different from a workhorse than a workhorse
is from an ox, when we consider affects and
relations.
Affect is 'the capacity that the body has to form
specific relations'. There are multiple
affects dispersed around bodies. They are
not controlled by the mind. This is where
the example fits of the tick and its three basic
affects. However, bodies conform relations
as 'virtual links' if they possess particular
affects. These relations have to become
actual by being connected to bodies, thus they are
inseparable from the capacity to be affected
[Buchanan says this is a point of agreement
between Spinoza and Hume]. In this way too,
the material of a body 'is equivalent to its
practical abilities' in Spinoza. Healthy
bodies have 'a multiplicity of affects and a
correspondingly multitudinous complex of
relations'. [As with all multiplicities] we
have to think these out not by trying to find some
origin but by thinking '"with AND"'. This is
central to transcendental empiricism, and also
shows the importance of Hume to Deleuze's whole
project.
It is clear that affect and relations depend on
each other and cannot really be discussed in
isolation. However, we can talk about two
additional terms, 'health' and 'assemblage', to
refer to the quality of a body or its quantity
[Buchanan implies that this is linked to
Nietzsche's discussion, or at least Deleuze's
discussion of Nietzsche, but wants to avoid making
Nietzsche too particular or dominant].
Nietzsche argues that we should see bodies as
combinations of qualities and quantities of
force. The quantity involves the relation
between the forces, but it is difficult to be
concrete about this, especially if 'the body's
substances in a constant state of flux'. The
term assemblage helps overcome this problem,
especially if we see it as combining both active
and passive senses [seen better from the French
term agencement], a way of assembling or
arranging itself, as well as what results in an
arrangement. This describes what is going on
in bodies, hence 'the body is a multiple
phenomenon, its unity is that of a multiple
phenomenon, a "unity of domination"'(81) [citing
Deleuze on Nietzsche]. This is a shifting
form of unity, and it depends on qualities.
We can see the affect of qualification by using
the term health, meaning here 'the actual
measurable capacity to form new relations'(82):
suitable relations will help form new compounds in
health. This lies behind D and G and their
secular ethics, where open-ended proliferating
relations are considered healthy [or
joyful]. [Impossibly abstract and idealized,
of course].
So a healthy assemblage between body and nutrition
preserves life, but note that it is not the
preservation of life that causes the
assemblage. However, if we're going to do an
adequate ethology, we must consider relations like
this as parts of the definition of a body [again
ludicrous because it would be endless, and, very
soon, speculative. In practice, it would be
limited to functional prerequisites?].
Health becomes an achieved fact. The desire
for health 'must be intrinsic to affect' because
[classic philosophical argument coming up...
'If it were not, desire would be restored to the
charge of the mind and hence the Cartesian split
so famously overcome by Spinoza would again be
instituted']. Nor can health be defined as a
lack, because once satisfied, the desire would be
extinguished [but we know that'll never happen
because the notion of health used here is
infinite]. Health is therefore a continuing
process not an end, 'a lacking, not a lack'
(83). This argument is also used to discuss
desire against Freud, of course. Finally,
the body is best understood as a machine,
constantly forming new relations with no external
desires or ends.
D and G say that everything is a machine, but they
of course do not mean humans are turning into
automata. They use the term emphatically not
as a metaphor, but as something that harnesses
forces, that is always doing something, activating
relations, including those between body and food
['the alimentary machine']. As machines are
always linked to other machines, they 'must
constantly engage new relations'. This is
how the body has affects [ But some of us have
more machines? More effective or productive
machines? Philosophers most machines of
anyone? I suspect there's elitism in here
somewhere].
This may be a 'somewhat bleak abstraction', but it
is better than the 'stark reductions of
psychoanalysis. Exploring the difference helps
focus on the difference between etiology and
ethology, schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis.
These are not just binary opposites.
Abstraction can be understood as 'a form of
decoding', but reduction 'is a form of
encoding'(84). Coding is not used in the
usual sense of translation or encryption, since
that would assume that some universal information
exists somewhere and can be recovered. This
was once thought true of the word of God, but, as
Foucault argues, the shift turned from how God
encoded his meaning into how man could decode it,
and these were seen as not identical: codes are
irreducible. Decoding and encoding are both
functions of codes, or in the terms of D and G,
'codes are effectuations'. The point then
becomes to find out how they work, not what inner
meaning they conceal. However, some academic
traditions preserve the notion of encoding as 'a
wholly mystical process' where some phenomenon is
inaccessible, 'not able to be understood for
itself' [D&G come close with their
virtual/actualsplit?].
Psychoanalysis 'is probably the greatest and most
extensive secular example of encoding', and it is
this process that D and G focus on in
criticism. Thus oedipalization is an
encoding process, 'and a priestly one at
that'. To abstract means to break with this
process and discover 'new universes of reference'
rather than restore 'a Universal referent'[taken
from Chaosmosis].
In the case of the Wolfman, for example the point
is not to find out what the wolf means, but to
discuss how 'wolfing'actually works. The
processes agree that the key is to find 'isolable
relations between heterogeneous parts' (85), and
thus both can be understood as
'hermeneutic'. But abstraction heads for
complexity not reduction [so complexity is seen as
a jolly good thing? It is the usual claim of
philosophy to overcome the idiotic restrictions
of social science. Again, complexity
is either infinite, or is restricted in practice
by some undisclosed criterion]. The wolves
'"designate an intensity, a band of intensity, a
threshhold of intensity on the Wolfman's body
without organs"'[citing AO --good
chapter in ATP too].
There is a process of becoming a wolf which is not
at all symbolic or metaphorical but results from
affect. By insisting that wolves stand for
the father, we solve the problem in advance, we
have reduced it, and have learned nothing:
'psychoanalysis is legislative not
inventive'(86). Schizoanalysis by contrast
involves 'interrogation', 'the actual technique
for realizing abstractions', asking what a body
can do [how affects work, having abstracted them
first?].
An example from practice at La Borde shows
what might be done, where a paranoiac announces
that he might become interested in driving, and
Guattari sees this as a way of opening 'the
locked doors of the psychotic mind outwards to new
vistas' [transversals are the key here].
This will return the psychotic to affect, to a
social web. What might look like something
trivial can be 'utilized in its naked singularity,
as a catalyst'. The whole thing depends, for
Guattari, in isolating various affects and
partial objects and exploring their complex
interrelations, which can take the form of '"
harmonies, polyphonies, counterpoints, rhythms and
existential orchestrations"'. The point is
to encourage the patient 'to invent a new self',
not to achieve some standard stabilization between
instinct and culture. Nor is this a
celebration of 'postmodernist
"indeterminacy"'(86), because the emphasis is not
on the fragmented self [interesting—the self as a
multiplicity is present instead, though?] but on
'"autopoeisis"', self invention, 'becoming
for itself'.
How can affects be isolated? Everything
turns on becoming 'as an analytic device'.
Becoming refers to 'the intensity of an attribute,
and not its characteristics', process, 'wolfing
not wolf'(87) [I suspect a bit of circular
definition here --'analytic device' means a
further exposition?]. For Spinoza,
'intensity is a measure applied to active acts; it
applies when the body is the cause of its own
affect'. Thus the hunger of the anorexic is
intensive, meaning it is not caused by food or its
absence, but operates as 'a pure continuum of the
affect... a plateau of intensity: the BWO in
other words'. We can gauge intensity
'following the same procedures by which the
quality of "whiteness" might be
established'. We need to look for an
essence. However, we achieve freedom by
intensifying these essences [the old idea of
pushing to limits?]. In anorexia, intensive
hunger can eliminate extensive demands. Such
intense hunger is 'not determined by the demands
of the body', but exists 'now for itself', and can
be described as '"hungering" not hunger'[I don't
find this terribly helpful, but I think that
everything depends on the intensive being the
source and origin of everything that's extensive,
as argued in Difference
and Repetition. In this sense,
the intense is the essence, and pursuing the
essential means stepping back from all the obvious
extensive actualizations which can then be put in
perspective. What we're left with is the
process, without being attached to any actual
objects?]. Once we have intensified a
particular essence, we risk subsequent limited
actualizations, however, 'a becoming other of a
specific type'. This can be a further
deformation, a subsequent 'gross delimitation of
becoming itself', a state of bliss which is really
another kind of passivity, 'of the already
become'. This is 'the inherent danger of all
self motivated becoming'[that which is uninformed
by Deleuzian philosophy?].
This is why the BWO can display 'profound
morbidity', and why it should not be taken as a
model for the body in general. We have to
maintain 'healthy becoming'which cannot be
predetermined by a form. Unhealthy becomings
tend 'toward the local, where local means
fixed'. The result might be 'a deadly
illness', a madness which is '"a stopping of the
process"'. Becoming must not be halted by a
fixed becoming-other, but must continue to
progress, as in 'the active or
joyous...states'. The BWO is not productive
[I always thought it was the source of all
productivity, the potential for
productivity]. In the active, 'cause and
affect are united. An active body is
responsible for its own affects', not dependent on
the external stimulus but on internal desire:
'desire in this sense is like Nietzsche's will to
power'. This desire 'is radically
intransitive', not focused on specifics.
[A final attempt to sort out these different
terms]. If desire is to be utilized by the
body, it must be mediated by another device.
The BWO is 'desire itself', but ordinary bodies
are not capable of reaching it even though 'we are
hooked up to it' (88). The mediating devices
are the desiring machines, which take intransitive
desire and make it transitive. There is a
danger of totally internalizing a desiring
machine, making it a self sufficient end instead
of a mediation. This produces involution, an
end to relations outside itself. This may
offer 'the purest form of intensity, the pure
intense stasis of the BWO', but 'it is also
death'. This is the mistake made by
masochists or addicts, and this mistake has to be
understood. Outward- facing capabilities are
abandoned [this is very much based on Chaosmosis!],
the capacity for additional affections is replaced
by 'an irrevocable hardening'. [The black
hole beckons]. To be active 'one must
affirm', not resort to judgements of good and
evil, but pursue 'the union of force with
what it can do... Increase [the body's]
capacity to be affected'. The BWO is the
limit of capacities and must be pushed further
away [but what is the source of the energy for
pushing beyond a BWO?]. To seek to be
affected increasingly is to develop the force of
the body, and masochism or addiction reduces the
capacity for affection. This produces a
plateau of intensity, but it is 'reactive,
deadly', incapable of making new connections.
Overall, the point is not to turn our bodies into
BWOs, but rather to 'grapple with the BWO as its
conduit to the real'[I still think this confuses
particular types of BWO with the notion of the egg
or spatium—but who am I?]
Note 7 reminds us that the term assemblage is used
instead of designing machine in the later work and
'as such, it similarly substantivizes
"multiplicity"'(89)—but it is convenient for
Buchanan and D and G to preserve the notion of
machinic functioning of assemblages? The
machine can also stand for the diagram, as a
virtual machine?
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