Comments may or may not be added later. One comment I’ll make now is: it surely looks as if we have, with the BwO, an incredibly creative reemergence of Spinoza’s concept of substance.
Body without organs We perceive and live the world as though it were composed of organised bodies. Our notion of man, for example, privileges certain organs: the brain that thinks, the eye that judges and the phallus that holds social power. But we also necessarily presuppose some disorganised ‘life’ or ‘ground’ from which different bodies emerge. The body without organs is the life we imagine as underlying our forms of organisation, so the body without organs varies historically. In capitalism, for example, we imagine that there is some basic flow of capital which we then exchange and manage in order to produce ourselves as social and political individuals. Prior to capitalism, societies imagined that it was the earth that formed the basic substance or substrate of life, such that primitive tribes imagined their distinct orders as distinctions of the whole or totality of the earth. The body without organs is the undifferentiated that we imagine underlies the differentiated or organised bodies of life. –Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze p. xxi
Finally, since what truly defines the real world (according to this way of viewing things) are neither uniform strata nor variable meshworks but unformed and unstructured flows from which these two derive, it will also be useful to have a label to refer to this special state of matter-energy information, to this flowing reality animated from within by self-organizing processes constituting a veritable nonorganic life: the Body without Organs (BwO)…The label itself is, of course, immaterial and insignificant. We could as well refer to this cauldron of nonorganic life by a different name. (Elsewhere, for instance, we called it the “machinic phylum.”) Unlike the name, however, the referent of the label is of extreme importance, since the flows of lava, biomass, genes, memes, norms, money (and other “stuff’) are the source of just about every stable structure that we cherish and value (or, on the contrary, that oppresses or enslaves us). We could define the BwO in terms of these unformed, destratified flows, as long as we keep in mind that what counts as destratified at any given time and in any given space is entirely relative… Human history has involved a variety of Bodies without Organs. –Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History p. 260-1
The BwO is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one desires. And not only because it is the plane of consistency or the field of immanence of desire. Even when it falls into the void of too-sudden destratification, or into the proliferation of a cancerous stratum, it is still desire. Desire stretches that far: desiring one’s own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate. Money, army, police, and State desire, fascist desire, even fascism is desire. There is desire whenever there is the constitution of a BwO under one relation or another. It is a problem not of ideology but of pure matter, a phenomenon of physical, biological, psychic, social, or cosmic matter. That is why the material problem confronting schizoanalysis is knowing whether we have it within our means to make the selection, to distinguish the BwO from its doubles: empty vitreous bodies, cancerous bodies, totalitarian and fascist… –Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus p. 165
The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors. Nothing here is representative; rather, it is all life and lived experience: the actual, lived emotion of having breasts does not resemble breasts, it does not represent them, any more than a predestined zone in the egg resembles the organ that it is going to be stimulated to produce within itself. Nothing but bands of intensity, potentials, thresholds, and gradients. A harrowing, emotionally overwhelming experience, which brings the schizo as close as possible to matter, to a burning, living center of matter… –Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus p. 19
