Body without Organs

From Capitalism and Schizophrenia

The idea of a Body without Organs (BwO) was introduced in The Logic of Sense but elaborated into a key concept in deleuzian thinking with Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. The term was borrowed from Antonin Artaud's radio play "To Have Done with the Judgment of God" (1947):

   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.

In its broadest sense, as used in A Thousand Plateaus, the BwO consists of the flows of energy powering abstract machines that give rize to form and substance in general. This makes the term closely related to Plane of Consistency but is more often used in the context of biological organisms and especially those driven by desire. However, "the organism is not at all the body, the BwO; rather it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences...the BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism -and also a signification and a subject- occur." (ATPC 176)

The BwO can be seen as a "special state of matter-energy-information, [a] flowing reality animated from within by self-organizing processes constituting a veritable non-organic life ... Immanent to the BwO are a set of abstract machines, engineering diagrams capturing the dynamics of certain structure-generating processes", for example the formation of strata and self-consistent aggregates. (Manuel DeLanda, "The Geology of Morals")

The BwO can be understood in relation and contrast of abstract machines: An abstract machine consists of a particular set of intensities, of certain types and degrees, laid out across a plane thus forming a multidimensional diagram. The difference in intensity between different points across this layout produces a flow; in its simplest form like the flow of air from one heated container into a connected compartment of cooler air. Matter caught up in the flow is assembled into form according to that diagram of the abstract machine. The BwO is a virtual body of matter and energy flowing freely in all directions, without any differences in intensity directing the flows and giving rize to form. The BwO is not yet occupied or populated by intensities, Deleuze and Guattari says: "It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity=0 ... Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero." (ATPC 169)

[edit] Examples of BwO:s significant to human history

• The sun, as an intense flow of energy driving and sustaining morphogenetic processes on Earth
• The body of lava 'conveyor belts' that drives plate tectonics
• The dynamics of the Hydrosphere/Atmosphere (wind circuits, currents, hurricane, tsunamis)
• The flow of genes through microorganisms
• The flow of solar energy through non-urbanized ecosystems
• The from the bottom up evolution of certain languages and dialects

(Manuel DeLanda, "The Geology of Morals")