Deleuze's Body Without Organs: A Gentle Introduction (with Appendix)

Some time ago, I wrote this medium-sized primer to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the 'Body without Organs'. I'm still pretty chuffed with it, because I think the person who it helped above all to grasp this concept is none other than myself. This is not a comprehensive or 'complete' guide by any means, but it does tackle the concept from a few different and related angles that when taken together, give a relatively clear view of the whole, I think. At the end of the post I have added a rather haphazard 'appendix' of sources for the BwO. This is mostly for trivia reasons, and again, for my own self-edification. But hopefully someone finds it interesting. Anyway, without further ado...

What is the Body without Organs?

Part I: A Thousand Plateaus I

The simplest way to understand the BwO is as a pluripotential or equipotential body. That is, a body that has the capacity to settle on a range of different functions and forms in potentia, without yet taking on any one function or form. Hence the rather straightforward pronouncement that "the body without organs is an egg". The egg being that which is brimming with potential to develop into this or that organ or set of organs:

"We treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities" (ATP153).

Artaud is usually cited as the source of this idea - and he is, mostly (more on that in the appendix) - but, to my mind, the more interesting (and clarifying) reference is to Raymond Ruyer, from whom Deleuze and Guattari borrow the thematics of the egg. Consider the following passage by Ruyer, speaking on embryogenesis, and certain experiments carried out on embryos:

"In contrast to the irreversibly differentiated organs of the adult... In the egg or the embryo, which is at first totally equipotential ... the determination [development of the embryo -WJ] distributes this equipotentiality into more limited territories, which develop from then on with relative autonomy ... [In embryogenesis], the gradients of the chemical substance provide the general pattern [of development]. Depending on the local level of concentration [of chemicals], the genes that are triggered at different thresholds engender this or that organ. When the experimenter cuts a T. gastrula in half along the sagittal plane, the gradient regulates itself at first like electricity in a capacitor. Then the affected genes generate, according to new thresholds, other organs than those they would have produced, with a similar overall form but different dimensions" (Neofinalism, p.57,64).

The language of 'gradients' and 'thresholds' (which characterize the BwO for D&G) is taken more or less word for word from Ruyer here. D&G's 'spin' on the issue, however, is to, in a certain way, ontologize and 'ethicize' this notion. In their hands, equipotentiality becomes a practice, one which is not always conscious, and which is always in some way being undergone whether we recognize it or not: "[The BwO] is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices. You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit" (ATP150). You can think of it as a practice of 'equipotentializing', of (an ongoing) reclaiming of the body from any fixed or settled form of organization: "The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism" (ATP158).

Importantly, by transforming the BwO into a practice, D&G also transform the temporality of the BwO. Although the image of the egg is clarifying, it can also be misleading insofar as an egg is usually thought of as preceding a fully articulated body. Thus, one imagines an egg as something 'undifferentiated', which then progressively (over time) differentiates itself into organs. However, for D&G, this is not the right way to approach the BwO. Instead, the BwO are, as they say, "perfectly contemporary, you always carry it with you as your own milieu of experimentation" (ATP164). The BwO is not something that 'precedes' differentiation, but operates alongside it: a potential (or equipotential ethics) that is always available for the making: "It [the BwO] is not the child "before" the adult, or the mother "before" the child: it is the strict contemporaneousness of the adult, of the adult and the child". Hence finally why they insist that the BwO is not something 'undifferentiated', but rather, that in which "things and organs are distinguished solely by gradients, migrations, zones of proximity." (ATP164)

Part of why this is confusing is because D&G treat what 'should' be a verb ('a set of practices') as a noun ('a' BwO). This mixing of grammatical categories is pretty disorienting, but the whole issue is that reality itself is a kind of process anyway for D&G, so the noun-verb distinction doesn't really track anything of too much significance. Hence you have a kind of collapse of ontology, ethics, and even aesthetics into a noun. Hence sometimes why it is even spoken about in experiential terms: "[The BwO is] a harrowing, emotionally overwhelming experience, which brings the schizo as close as possible to matter, to a burning, living center of matter" (AO19). If this wasn't tough enough, issues are further complicated by the fact that the very notion of the BwO does not remain stable throughout D and D&Gs writings either. While this part has primarily focused on the BwO as it appears in ATP, the next part will focus on its role in Anti-Oedipus.

Part II: Anti-Oedipus

In Anti-Oedipus, the BwO play a far more technical role than they do in ATP. Where in ATP, the BwO functions far more in an ethical vein, in AO, there is a far heavier emphasis on their 'ontological' role. In this part, we're going to encounter alot of technical terms, and it will primarily be of interest to those who want to understand where the BwO sit in the overall 'architecture' of AO. As a point of orientation, we'll begin by noting that the BwO play a key role in the movement from what D&G call the 'depths', to the 'surface'. As we'll see in fact, the BwO are themselves surfaces. There is however, a kind of three-step process involved, in which the BwO play the role of 'paranoic', 'miraculous', and 'celibate' machines, respectively. These can be understood as the three syntheses of the BwO (no accident that this sounds like the three syntheses of time from D&R...). At the end of this three step process, we'll find ourselves right back at the beginning of Part I. To begin with however, we'll start with seeing how the BwO begin life as a 'paranoic machine'. As a first step, we need to understand how the BwO work as moments of 'anti-production', and what this means.

Recall that in AO, in a certain sense, all of reality is a matter of 'production'. If one were to ask the Quineian question of 'what is'?, D&G's answer would be: there is production: "everything is production: production of productions" (AO4). Among all this production, however, one particular entity is produced as well: the body without organs. The BwO is peculiar however, in that it functions like a wrench in this endless system of production: once it is produced, it creates eddies or hollows of nonproduction, or even anti-production: "the body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced... the full body without organs belongs to the realm of antiproduction" (AO8). One way that D&G characterize this 'anti-productive' character of the BwO is that the latter is a 'paranoiac machine': paranoid because it "repels" all efforts at production: "the body without organs repels [the desiring machines], since it experiences them as an over-all persecution apparatus" (AO9). This is the first synthesis of the BwO: as paranoiac machine.

In keeping with the above, D&G write that BwO form a surface of non-production: "In order to resist organ-machines, the body without organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier" (AO9). This 'surface' is distinct from the 'depths' of the productive process. Insofar as the BwO forms a 'surface', however, it gains another characteristic: it becomes a recording surface. One should think here in terms of memory (2nd synthesis of time in D&R: memory). As a recording surface however, the BwO now begin to attract desiring production. Attract not in the sense that the BwO become productive, but in the sense that they appear as though they are: as though they themselves are the source of production, even though that source still remains the primary production of the 'depths'. D&G refer to the BwO as 'appropriating' and 'arrogating to itself' "both the whole and the parts of the process [of production], which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi cause". This second synthesis marks the shift of the BwO from paranoiac (repelling) machine to miraculating (attracting) machine.

A quick example of how the BwO functions as a recording surface: Marx's account of capital. For Marx, the source of value is labour: it is the labour put into the production of goods that gives those goods their value. Labour here is the productive process. Capital, however, 'appropriates' this productive effort. It 'records' the labour put into production ("this is how much your labour is worth"), and then in a strange reversal, it is capital itself that looks to be the source of value, rather than the labour which it 'merely' records. D&G quote Marx: "in the specifically capitalist mode of production ... the social interrelations of labour in the direct labour-process seem transferred from labour to capital. Capital thus becomes a very mystic being since all of labour's social productive forces appear to be due to capital, rather than labour as such , and seem to issue from the womb of capital itself." And they comment: "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" (AO11).

Given this, the 3rd synthesis of the BwO - as a celibate machine - follows easily. It is celibate insofar as all production seems to proceed from itself, back to itself. D&G refer to this as a process of 'genuine consummation' in which there is "a pleasure that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic: the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth" (AO18). At this point the BwO become immanent bodies par excellence. Most importantly, in the mode of the celibate machine, the BwO appear productive of a very specific product: "intensive qualities". It is at this point that we need to cast our mind back to how this all started in Part I: in ATP, the BwO was characterized as nothing other than 'the intense egg': "the full egg before the extension of the organism ... the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds". Compare now AO19: "the body without organs in an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitude and longitudes ... traversed by gradients marking the transitions and becomings". In effect, what we've just done in Part II is to come full circle, and trace the genesis of the full BwO, from the depths to the surface, populated by intensities.

Part III: A Thousand Plateaus II

Having given a basic sketch of what the BwO 'are' (Part I), as well as having followed the three syntheses which bring them into (full) being (Part II), it's worth returning again to ATP, where the BwO are made more complex yet again. Specifically, there are different kinds of BwO. What does this mean? Well, recall the basic understanding of the BwO - as a pluripotential body. Now, in ATP, this pluripotential body comes in (at least) three 'grades', was it were: full, empty, and cancerous. Each corresponds to a certain 'healthiness' or robustness of the BwO. The full BwO are BwO at their most 'healthy', most able to retain their potentiality for transformation and the forging of (new) connections. Here, the ethical status of the BwO come into view, especially when it is recalled that the BwO are a kind of practice. Consider the questions that D&G pose at the end of ATP, in the book's conclusion:

“To what extent do the bodies without organs interconnect? How are the continuums of intensity extended? What is the order of the transformational series? … The mode of connection … provides the means of eliminating the empty and cancerous bodies that rival the body without organs … What is retained and preserved, therefore created, what consists, is only that which increases the number of connections at each level of division or composition” (ATP508).

This passage can be read as a set of questions pertaining to the ethics of the BwO: in what way can we practice the art of pluripotentialization so as to render us more open to creation(s), to forge new connections between things, to make life more intense? Standing against the full BwO, however, are the empty and cancerous BwO. The empty BwO are BwOs of low intensities: they are the least amenable to creation, offering the least potential for novelty. Hence the examples of drug addicts, paranoiacs, or hypochondriacs. These pathological BwOs get 'stuck' on things, whether it be drugs, or the perpetual feeling of being monitored, or the perpetual anxiety over illness. D&G speak of these things as 'roadblocks', they 'capture' the potentials and channel them into self-destructive patterns.

Cancerous BwOs, on the other hand, are unhealthy BwOs of a different kind. Unlike empty BwOs which are 'low intensity' BwOs, cancerous BwOs 'proliferate and take over everything' (ATP163). They are unhealthy insofar as what proliferates is a kind of homogeneity: they too 'block any circulation of signs' (ATP163), and do not allow different BwOs to 'connect' with one other. Here, potentiality is channeled into one or a limited set of functions and forms without being able to diversify. Hence the association of the cancerous BwO with fascism, where the 'line of flight immediately turns into a line of death and abolition' (ATP285). Both empty and cancerous BwOs are ways of 'botching' the BwO: they are what happens when the practice of the BwO goes wrong. It's worth noting here that the tripartite distinction between full, empty, and cancerous BwO are not very well fleshed out in ATP, and the reconstruction here makes use of only very scanty and passing references to each. The BwO can probably be grasped quite independently of these distinctions, which are more of an extension of an already well-formed concept that can be understood without reference to it.

That all said, a very important qualification to the above is worth mentioning here. While I've spoken about BwOs in term of their 'healthiness', a healthy BwO (i.e. a full BwO) is not necessarily a 'good' BwO. It's worth remembering that the three 'full bodies' detailed in the AO are nothing other than the 'full bodies' of the Earth, Despot, and Capital, respectively. Each of these 'full bodies' are bodies which have constrained and controlled desire in a certain manner. A healthy capitalism is still capitalism. Perhaps even all the worse for it. This should alert us to the fact that the distinctions between BwOs are first and foremost analytic distinctions only; that a BwO is 'full' only tells us that it maintains the most potency for transformation. Exactly how those transformations and connections play out is a whole different question. Hence the importance, everywhere emphasized throughout ATP, for experimentation. The full BwO are, at it were, nothing but the minimal baseline requirement for an ethics, nothing more:

“This is how it [making oneself a BwO] should be done: 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, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs” (ATP161).

In other words, 'making oneself a BwO' isn't a cure-all. In the same way that we should "never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us" (ATP500), neither will simply making ourselves a BwO. The real work takes place after that.  [End of Main Post]

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Long Appendix: The Origin(s) of the Body Without Organs 

So much for the gentle introduction! Here I just want to quote a couple of 'sources' of the Body without Organs, some well known, some less so. This will seem a bit haphazard, but what interests me here is the thematics of the BwO, which I think Deleuze really likes playing with. This is going to be long and not every well articulated, but I want to collect this all in one place, because I don't think I've ever seen it done elsewhere. If you're just after a quick and dirty introduction to the BwO, you can stop reading here. If you're a Deleuze tragic like me, by all means, go on. Anyway - above, I already cited Ruyer and while mentioning Artaud along side him, so it's worth quoting the now-canonical radio-play from which Deleuze, in the Logic of Sense, first makes reference to the BwO. Here are the relevant lines from Artaud's To Have Done with the Judgement of God:

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.

Now, this is cool and all, but this is relatively well known. What I would like to remember above all is the title of the play, which speaks of 'having done with the judgement of God'. We'll come back to this. Before that, I want to cite the other canonical reference that D&G make, to the 'Dogon Egg' as an image of the BwO. It's an image that opens the "How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?" plateau of ATP, and is pretty well known in its own right:

In ATP, the image description reads: "The Dogon Egg and the Distribution of Intensities". But the image itself is taken from a study of Dogon cosmology by the anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germain Dieterlen, The Pale Fox. The Dogon, as it happens, are an ethnic group native to the area in and around Mali in West Africa. As might be expected, in the study itself, the issue of 'intensity' is nowhere to be found. Instead, the image bears the caption: "First yala of 'Amma's egg', amma talu" (roughly: "First image of 'God's egg', amma talu").  Now, out of a sheer interest in trivia, let's read how Griaule and Dieterlen write about "Amma's egg":

In the beginning, before all things, was Amma, God, and he rested upon nothing. "Amma's egg in a ball" was closed, but made of four parts called 'clavicles,' themselves ovoid and attached, as if welded together. Amma is four joined clavicles; he is only these four clavicles. It is said: "Amma's four joined (stuck together) clavicles form (are) a ball' ... This egg, in its entirety... simultaneously evokes unity and multiplicity, for it is also said: 'Amma's clavicles were stuck together; Amma's four clavicles were like four eggs'. In their original sense, the four clavicles are also the prefiguration of the four elements, kize nay, 'things four:' water (di), air (ono), fire (yau), earth (minne); likewise, the ideal bisectors which separate them will mark the collateral directions, sibe nay, 'angles four,' that is to say, space. Thus, all the fundamental elements and future space were present in the morphology of the primordial 'egg'. (The Pale Fox, p.81)

And then a little further down:

The first figure is called: yala [image -WJ] of Amma's egg (amma talu yala) or 'yala of Amma's egg with 266 (signs),' and denotes the original thought of the creator. It is composed of dots that are undifferentiated, yet of an exact number, corresponding, one to one, with the bummo ['primordial traces' - WJ] traced in his womb at the beginning, emphasizing the intrinsic value of number in the realization of the universe. for it is said: 'The thing that Amma created, that he sent into the world, that is what one has counted.' In this figure, the 'egg of the world,' still closed, is divided into four sectors, prefiguring the four divine 'clavicles' which will open when the world is cast out of Amma's bosom.... (The Pale Fox, p.117-121)

Awesome right!? I've never seen anyone actually cite the actual source material from where D&G borrow the idea of the Dogon egg. Turns out, it's cool as hell. There are two other... not exactly sources, but precedents to the BwO that I also want to add to this disorganized appendix, and I call them precedents because they come from Deleuze himself. Again, I'm just focusing on thematics, but in the Logic of Sense, one of the more intriguing connections that Deleuze makes is with the BwO and liquid or 'fluid'. The following is how he writes of the emergence of the BwO among the depths of bodies. I'm going to patch together a few sentences, but what I want to take away is just how prevalent the theme of liquidity and water is among all this:

To these values a glorious body corresponds, being a new dimension of the schizophrenic body, an organism without parts which operates entirely by insufflation, respiration, evaporation, and fluid transmission (the superior body or body without organs of Antonin Artaud). ... One is thus never sure that the ideal fluids of an organism without parts does not carry parasitic worms, fragments of organs, solid food, and excremental residue. In fact, it is certain that the maleficent forces make effective use of fluids and insufflations in order to introduce bits of passion into the body. The fluid is necessarily corrupted, but not by itself. It is corrupted only by the other pole from which it cannot be separated. ..

In schizophrenia, there is a way of living the Stoic distinction between two corporeal mixtures: the partial mixture which alters the body, and the total and liquid mixture which leaves the body intact. In the fluid element, or in the insufflated liquid, there is the unwritten secret of an active mixture which is like the "principle of the Sea," in opposition to the passive mixtures of the encased parts. It is in this sense that Artaud transforms Humpty Dumpty's poem about the sea and the fish into a poem about the problem of obedience and command. ... It is a question of transforming the word into an action by rendering it incapable of being decomposed and incapable of disintegrating: language without articulation. The cement here is a palatalized, an-organic principle, a sea-block or a sea-mass. ... These howls are welded together in breath, like the consonants in the sign which liquifies them, like fish in the ocean-mass, or like the bones in the blood of the body without organs. A sign of fire, a wave "which hesitates between gas and water," said Artaud. (The Logic of Sense, p.88-89)

I don't really have any comment here other than to be stuck by all the watery, liquidy thematics that permeate these passages that discuss the BwO. It's not something that shows up again later on in D&Gs extended discussions of the BwO elsewhere, other than in the idea that the BwO are 'slippery', and correspond to a certain sense of 'anti-production', as mentioned above. But the specific imagery of liquid is far less pronounced, if not simply absent.

Ok, so that's the first precedent. Now, the second and last one. This one's a quotation from Deleuze's early (and disavowed) essay on Johann Malfatti, "Mathesis, Science and Philosophy". Now, this essay is wildly interesting for all sorts of independent reasons, but check this out:

What will be the human concept par excellence, then? God, unity of essence and existence, is conceptualized by the circle: equivalence and rest, indifference of the interfocal zone, and pregenesthetic life. With the ellipse, however (or rather the ellipsoid, always in movement), we will rediscover separation, duality, the sexual antithesis of foci. Space is the passage from the unlimited circle to the limited ellipse, time the passage from the unity of the centre to the dualism of foci: the three dimensions are born. We might define this passage as the birth of the equivocal, with the ellipsis defined as an equivocal circle. ... We will see Malfatti insist on the fact that the genesthetic and the pregenesthetic are inseparable because one describes the other in negative relief: ‘Before I was round. Now, I am extended in the form of an egg.'

(!!!) Deleuze wrote this in 1946. He was 21 years old. The Logic of Sense will not be published for almost another two decades after this. Yet already the thematics of the egg - and the egg as that which breaks with God (To Have Done With the Judgement of God ??) - is already in place. I think this is so cool. Anyway, that's it for the appendix. Hopefully someone out there finds this an interesting as I do. If you do, or have anything to add, let me know!