If you read AntiOedipus
and Thousand
Plateaus first, the references to
the body without organs are a bit puzzling.I
did my best with it here (from Thou Plats)
:
‘The body’ in the
BWO seems to operate in a number of ways, I
reckon.
Literal bodies.
Drug addicts and perverts discover new and
unconventional erotic pleasures by sidelining
the conventional routes (but see below).
Masochists get a good press (sic) here – they
sidestep the usual routes to pleasure by
exploring their identities in perverse
rituals, even if it causes real pain. There is
a weird echo of the first chapter and
‘becoming-horse’ since one of the masochists
described gets pleasure out of being treated
like a horse, bridled, whipped and bound etc,
which is described as ‘becoming–horse’ here
too. Was this what they would have wanted for
Little Hans?
Theoretical bodies.
This metaphor can be applied to social bodies,
which can be configured differently (eg not
Oedipalised). Artists show us the way here.
Describing their work as ‘micropolitics’ fits
this sort of level. This is individual
deviance as politics, so it is liable to be
seen as politicising deviants to defend their
identity (and assuage their guilt?), and it is
also functionalist (or gloomily determinist)
since the only oppositional politics comes
from groups of deviants – no room for
’serious’ conventional politics.
Philosophical
bodies. The BWO stands for Spinozist notions
of matter as some sort of universal substratum
which acts as the potential for actual
material to be instantiated by it via various
(structuration?) activities based on desire.
Once instantiated, the ‘organs’ can become
subject to coding and despotism and all that
stuff –territorialized. No doubt this is of
interest to those who wish to rescue Spinoza
for modern philosophy, but it leaves me cold,
I fear. I could see the point when Althusser
(and Balibar?) wanted to import Spinoza to
develop some kind of ‘structural causality’ to
avoid the determinist stuff in Marx.
The enemies are the
3 strata – ‘ the ones that most directly bind
us: the organism, significance and
subjectification...you will articulate 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’ ( 177)
There is another
classification used by D&G themselves
(apart from all the rhubarb of AntiOedipus
about full, naked variants etc] –
empty bodies (violent self-destructive
attempts to get to a BWO via drugs or
masochism); fascist bodies (cancerous bodies)
where one of the strata takes over and
destroys all the rest – the conventional
identity or the Freudian unconscious. Instead
we should proceed cautiously to get in touch
with our BWO:
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 flows of
conjunctions here and there, try out
continuums of intensities segment by segment,
have a small plot of new land at all times
(178)
Reading the Logic of Sense
gives you a different set of implications
though.The
body without organs seems to be a construction
specifically mentioned by famous schizophrenics
like Antonin Artaud,
and the idea of having no organs appears in the
Schreber case as well.Schreber
seems
to regard God’s attack on his internal organs in
a rather paranoid way (!), but Artaud takes a
more positive line: ' At my
autopsy they will need to remake
anatomy. Man needs to be scraped off, of
the residue of god and therefore of his
organs. We need to make a man into a
body without organs to remove automatic
reactions and restore freedom. Then he
will be able to 'dance wrong side out', and
this will restore his true place' [My
paraphrase] .Having
a body without organs is a way of defending
yourself against the painful business of
introjection and projection of external objects,
as in Klein.The Wikipedia quote from Artaud describes
it as a form of liberation, gaining freedom.This
helps add something to the political argument,
of course, especially if we project it on to
debates about consumerism and the strong desire
for, followed by guilt and dissatisfaction
about, buying consumer goods.The
depressive stage which follows the
schizoid/paranoid position in 'normal
'development is also important in preparing the
scene for the oedipal triangle.So going back to
the BWO is a way of shifting things back before
the oppressive Oedipal hang-ups – cf the
semiotic chora of Kristeva and others trying to
do the same thing re Lacan. (although full
schizophrenic fixation or relapse arrests
development at an earlier stage?)
Here are my notes from L
of S:
For Artaud,
the classic schizophrenic symptoms included
the absence of surface, especially with
bodies. Apparently Freud also noticed
this tendency for schizophrenics to see
their body as ‘punctured by an infinite
number of little holes’ (87). The body
therefore incorporates everything into its
depths, everything becomes corporeal and
physical. The surface no longer limits
the extension of the body. ‘Hence the
schizophrenic manner of living the
contradiction: either in the deep fissure
which traverses the body, or in the
fragmented parts which encase one another
and spin about’ (87). The world loses
its meaning and sense [because it can no
longer split sensation into a signifying and
signified separated by a surface?] Words
become physical and affect bodies, or they
burst into components [which relates back to
the Wolfson example]. Schizophrenics
experience ‘a pure language–affect’ (88)
[sic --affect not effect].
Schizophrenics manage
this by overcoming the effects of language,
as in the strange translation activity in
the Wolfson example. In Artaud’s case
the solution was to create special words
expressing ‘values which are exclusively
tonic and not written’ (88). ‘To these
values a glorious body corresponds, being a
new dimension of the schizophrenic body, an
organism about parts which operates entirely
by insufflations, respiration, evaporation,
and fluid transmission (the superior body or
body without organs of Antonin Artaud)’
(88). This solution can never be
complete because there can never be a total
separation between suffering [‘passion’] and
[remedial] action, and passion can be
reintroduced, and the body corrupted-- a
schizophrenic body is therefore a constant
mixture of two actions or principles.
...So two sorts of
words related to two sorts of bodies, one
fragmented and one without organs.
There are also two theatres or two types of
nonsense implied here: one where ordinary
words are decomposed into nonsense, and one
where tonic elements alone form nonsensical
words. They are produced by things
happening beneath the surface, unlike
Carroll's playful superficiality. The
two signifying and signified series
disappear, and non sense engulfs signifiers
and signified. There is no surface
division to separate the expressivity of
words and the attributes of actual bodies
[which regulates ordinary language]. In
schizophrenic language there is no grammar
or syntax either, although both are
preserved in Carroll. Nevertheless, it
is Artaud who has ‘discovered a vital body
and the prodigious language of this
body… He explored the infra sense
which is still unknown today’ (93).
However, Caroll has explored those important
surfaces, on which ‘the entire logic of
sense is located’ (93).
...Everything starts
with ‘an oral – anal depth—a bottomless
depth’ (188). However, there are
problems with introjection of good
objects—apparently it is not easy, even in
Klein, for the infant to split good from
bad. As a result, the schizoid
position is always unstable. Instead
of opposing bad objects with good ones,
‘What is opposed is rather an organism
without parts, the body without organs, with
neither mouth nor anus, having given up all
introjection or projection, and being
complete, [but] at this price’ (188).
To add to the mixture of solid fragments of
objects, a more liquid mixture is offered,
without parts, capable of melting.
Solid excrement represents [aggressive
expulsion of] organs and morsels, but urine
offers a smooth mixture, ‘surmounting such a
breaking apart in the full depth of the body
(finally) without organs’ (189). [note
3, 351, says that Klein does not distinguish
between the body substances in this way,
fails to grasp the significance of ‘urethral
sadism’, and thus misses the importance of
the theme of the body without organs, which
is connected to this notion of ‘liquid
specificity’.
...[Roughly],
schizophrenics split the introjected and
projected normal body with the more peaceful
and empty body without organs which does
neither.
It’s possible to see some
normal political and personal implications as
well, possibly not surprisingly since we have
all had experience of schizoid states according
to Klein.Yearning
for liberation from the body is actually rather
common, surely, wanting liberation from the
decay of our organs, or liberation from our
drives, including sexual drives.This
is the reverse (?) of the argument in Zizek that our organs
become liberated from us, as when the phallus
becomes the most important symbolic signifier in
its own right.
This yearning is
detectable in some of the enthusiasm for online
interaction?The body without organs might be
Haraway’s cyborg, interacting in a pure
way, away from the possession of a
gendered body with all its tedious social
limitations and stereotyped interactions.Electronic
interaction
is another possible way at least of attempting
to navigate back to the body without organs in
order to become something else? See Land in Fuglsang on this. See
also Buchanan in Fuglsang on the political role of the BWO
when it acts as a socius and takes part in the
illusion that it is the natural origin of all
the labour that goes on on the surface of it.
There is a diff take again in Alliez (in
Fuglsang) where it marks a crucial stage
in Deleuze's later work, especially the
collaborations with Guattari, in the
concretisation or embodiment of concepts.
There is also a section in
Deleuze's Essays
in the context of a discussion about judgment. Obscure stuff on the BWO emerges
(130—1) -- non-Divine judgment acts on bodies
and their organs [here meaning something which
is organized], especially sense organs[so
slippage back to biological organs?]. We escape
from the eternal guilt and obligation of
(Christian) judgment through not being an
organism made for God’s purposes but one which
is active and living – ‘God has made us into an
organism, woman has turned us into an organism’
[Artaud's view?] (131). We should recapture
original BWO as ‘affective, intensive, anarchist
body that consists solely of poles, zones,
thresholds, and gradients’ (131). Implied in DH
Lawrence too, and in the powerful organic
dimensions in his characters –they gain intense
vitality from relation of body to ‘imperceptible
forces and powers’ (131) . For Artaud it leads
to becomings. Becoming a BWO is the will to
power in Nietzsche. It informs the contrast
between official justice bureaucracy and more
vitalist justice in Kafka. [Surely
over-philosophized here? Lawrence had the
conventional notion of
'natural' irrepressible sexuality in mind?]
All this is fine, except
that the schizophrenic body without organs is a
fantasy, and the cyborg a utopian figure.Anti
Oedipus represents the militant hopes of
1968 and of Guattari. Maybe this works
politically as a counterfactual?Again
it seems very 60s, and indicates, as does Negri,
the curious absence of real politics in Deleuze.In the
background, there is a shadowy and dominant
capitalism, but almost no specific analyses of
ideological apparatuses: instead, the oedipal
triangle stands for this analysis.Strangely,
there is not even any serious Foucault, although
power and desire may well complement each other
as Baudrillard suggests.Maybe
in Deleuze we get the idealised version of
Foucault suggestion that power is everywhere,
and, having said that, we don’t really need to
analyse it in any detail or actual
circumstances?
Finally, and even further
back, we find a reference to the BWO in
Deleuze's book on
Proust, right at the end in a bizarre
piece which begins with summarizing Deleuze's
view of Proust's text as a machine. The text
itself denies all normal kinds of integrative
devices in telling its enormous and complicated
story and offers instead dispersed themes
connected by transversality. We can think of it
as schizophrenic in the general sense
Specifically, the theme of madness is addressed
here, the different types of madness (paranoia
and erotomania) illustrated by two main
characters. Thus (and this dead witty)
schizophrenia acts as a machinic structure to
evoke, even create other kinds of madness.
Then we shift metaphors to consider spiders and
their webs. Deleuze tells us that spiders have
no sense organs (only true when considering
ears) but detect tensions (on the web) which
spring them into action. Then we discuss the
narrator (not the hero - the narrator speaks for
several people and sometimes explains even the
hero's actions). Here, we are told, the
narrator 'has no organs insofar as he is
deprived of any voluntary and organized use
of such faculties' (117), a 'spider body',
reacting to signs without filtering them
through organs. Deleuze cites a passage in
Proust's text to begin this account of
narrators, where the hero is overwhelmed
by his first kiss with his girlfriend, and, as
he closes in, the narrator talks about the
inadequacy of his organs to report the
sensations: the
'narrator there is an enormous Body without
organs'.
I have said in my sceptial notes that this
is amisunderstanding of spider
anatomy, and of the role of the narrator in
a realist text -- who has to expound the
views of each character and also comment on
them, and address the viewers, sometimes
directly, as does Proust himself off-stage,
or as a disembodied voice. Deleuze needs a
good commentary on realism here!