A very brief Explanation of the Body without Organs
The Body without Organs (BwO) is one of the most interesting, yet most often misunderstood, concepts to emerge out of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s astonishingly imaginative ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. This article attempts to provide a brief outline of the idea for those approaching their ideas.
In order to understand the Body without Organs, it is necessary to have a basic understanding of a few other Deleuzian concepts. Firstly, desiring-production is, according to Deleuze, what makes us an organism — it is the fundamental component through which Deleuze characterizes human ontology. It exists within all desiring machines (which includes almost everything — humans, animals, institutions, organizations etc., and which are made up of ‘flows’) and is characterized by exchanges and expenditures which occur through multitudinous connections and flows: breaking down of parts (or partial objects), brakes, which allow new flows to emerge simultaneously, connections etc. Desiring-production also displays an inherent tendency towards its own disillusionment: its drive to thrive is inseparable from its drive to its own disintegration (similar to Freudian death drive). In this way, insofar as the body is organized, we suffer from desiring-production’s tendency towards its own breaking down.
The dissolution of flows which is inherent to desiring production has a limit — this is what Deleuze refers to as the Body without Organs: it is the limit of disorganization, or deterritorialization, that desiring-production engenders when entirely disorganized. It is the metaphysical body which desiring machines push against, and the counter-flow to the production of connections. It is what constitutes desire, and it cannot be penetrated by desiring-production. The Body without Organs is not productive in the same way desiring machines are; it does not seek connections or new flows. However, its ebbing and flowing, repulsing and attracting nevertheless informs the production of connections. It is the surface upon which uncontrollable desires flow without organization, but with consistency. It is purely virtual and contains all a body’s potential connections and flows. As such, it tends the desiring-machines which characterise it, and which move around it in a kind of “Brownian motion”, towards disorganisation — it works against the desiring-machines’ efforts to define it through the BwO’s relation to desiring machines.
As desiring machines break down, deterritorializing and deorganising, they attempt to break into the BwO. These incessant, unsuccessful attempts produce a paranoiac “machine”, characterized by the BwO repelling desiring-production and its tendency to create connections, and anti-producing them. This production of anti-production is the production of a Body without Organs. This entails the repulsion of the paranoiac machine, and results in the non-producing aspect of the BwO falling into the domain of the production of connections so that it becomes ‘deliberate’ and part of a machine’s becoming. It is no longer reactionary but constructive.
One way of understanding the Body without Organs as well as a key expression of it can be seen through the metaphor of capitalism, through which Deleuze also expands the meaning and implications of the idea of the BwO. In this case, capital is the BwO, and social production (a society’s production of productive machinery — workers, languages, customs; social relations) is desiring-production; the formless viscous fluid of flows and connections which the Body without Organs falls back on. Deleuze also refers to capital in this instance as the “socius”, which is the non-productive attitudes of social-economic formations, and the BwO of capitalism — the socius is the BwO as it relates to social production, as opposed to desiring-production.
The socius is the domain upon which the new organs of social production are constituted, or as Deleuze expresses it, it is the surface upon which production is ‘recorded’ and ‘distributed’. As the BwO (or socius) ‘falls back’ on production (which it organizes, but which is also necessary for the socius’ existence) it “records” a grid of intersecting lines in the social field, producing social stratification through repressing some and valorizing others. It assigns coordinates to all its agents (structures, organizations, processes etc., many of which it creates) in order to direct flows of desire, and in this way conditions social production into its own formation. Through this, it produces qualitative aspects for desiring-machines, conditioning us to capital’s tendencies. In other words, due to capital being the socius, machines capture flows of desire and reorganize them to proliferate capital into everything. In this way, our acceptance of capitalism is not the result of ‘false consciousness’, as Marx argued, but a false but seemingly objective movement inscribed within the socius of our socially-productive reality. As a result, capital has a productive veneer, as it appears to miraculously emanate production, and seems absolutely necessary for it, when in fact it exists within production; It becomes a quasi-cause of productive relations.
Critically, The Body without organs functions to create the condition for capitalism’s survival by preserving the modicum of stability needed for it to exist — it is the deterritorialized socius. This is why, although capitalism constantly approaches its BwO, it never reaches it. Other metaphors, though significantly less important and developed by Deleuze, may help to understand the BwO and socius: the body of the king is the socius of feudalism and the earth is the socius for the tribe.
Deleuze also differentiates between three kinds of BwO: cancerous, empty, and full. Roughly, the empty BwO is completely de-organ-ized; all flows pass through it freely, with no stopping, and no directing. The empty BwO is non-productive. The full BwO is the healthy BwO; it is productive in constantly organising changing flows according to changing patterns. The cancerous BwO is caught in a pattern of endless reproduction of the self-same pattern.
To “make oneself a body without organs,” then, is to actively experiment with oneself to draw out and activate the virtual potentials, connections, actions etc. which are stored within the Body without Organs. These potentials are mostly actualised through conjunctions with other bodies (or BwOs) that Deleuze calls “becomings”.
