The Body without Organs

Are you familiar with Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the Body without Organs (BwO)?  I first learned about it a few years ago when Daniel Gustav Anderson, an Integral writer, compared it to TSK's Giant Body exercises.  I don't know where exactly I want to go with this thread, but recent posts by Edward and others on the Paradoxes of Transcendence thread inspired me to post this.  We'll see where it goes.

First, the text (in several parts, because it's long).

~*~

How do you make yourself a body without organs?
Deleuze and Guattari
 
The Dogon Egg and the Distribution of Intensities
 
At any rate, you have one (or several). It's not so much that it preexists or comes ready-made, although in certain respects it is preexistent. At any Tate, you make one, you can't desire without making one. And it awaits you; it is an inevitable exercise or experimentation, already accomplished the moment you undertake it, unaccomplished as long as you don't. This is not assuring, because you can botch it. Or it can be terrifying, and lead you to your death. it is nondesire as well as desire. It 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. People ask, So what is this BwO?—But you’re already on it, scurrying like a vermin, groping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic: desert traveler and nomad of the steppes. On it we sleep, live our waking lives, tight—fight and are fought—seek our place, experience untold happiness and fabulous defeats; on it we penetrate and are penetrated; on it we love. On November 28, 1947, Artaud declares war on the organs: To be done with the judgment of God, “for you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ.”' Experimentation: not only radiophonic but also biologi­cal and political, incurring censorship and repression. Corpus and Socius politics and experimentation. They will not let you experiment in peace.'

The BwO: it is already under way the moment the body has had enough of organs and wants to slough them off, or loses them. A long procession. The hypochondriac body: the organs are destroyed, the damage has already been done, nothing happens anymore. “Miss X claims that she no longer has a brain or nerves or chest or stomach or guts. All she has left is the skin and bones of a disorganized body. These are her own words.”2 The paranoid body: the organs are continually under attack by outside forces, but are also restored by outside energies. (“He lived for a long time without a stomach, without intestines, almost without lungs, with a torn oesophagus, I without a bladder, and with shattered ribs, he used sometimes to swallow' part of his own larynx with his food, etc. But divine miracles ('rays') always restored what had been destroyed.”)3 The schizo body, waging its own active internal struggle against the organs, at the price of catatonia. Then the drugged body, the experimental schizo: “The human body is scandalously inefficient. Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not pave one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate? We could seal up nose and mouth, fill in the stomach, make an air hole direct into the lungs where it should have been in the first place.”4 The masochist body: it is poorly understood in terms of pain; it is fundamentally a question of the BwO. It has its sadist or whore sew it up; the eyes, anus, urethra, breasts, and nose are sewn shut. It has itself strung up to stop the organs from working, flayed, as if the organs clung to the skin; sodomized, smothered, to make sure everything is sealed tight.

Why such a dreary parade of sucked-dry, catatonicized, vitrified, sewn-up bodies, when the BwO is also full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance? So why these examples, why must we start there? Emptied bodies instead full ones. What happened? Were you cautious enough? Not wisdom, cap­tion. In doses. As a rule immanent to experimentation: injections of caution. Many have been defeated in this battle. Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage, Anorexia, cutaneous Vision, Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation. Where psychoanalysis says, “Stop, find your self again,” we should say instead, “Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self.” Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it. It's a question of life and death, youth and old age, sad­ness and joy. It is where everything is played out.

“Mistress, 1) You may tie me down on the table, ropes drawn tight, for ten to fifteen minutes, time enough to prepare the instruments; 2) One hundred lashes at least, a pause of several minutes; 3) You begin sewing, you sew up the hole in the glans; you sew the skin around the glans to the glans itself, preventing the top from tearing; you sew the scrotum to the skin of the thighs. You sew the breasts, securely attaching a button with four holes to each nipple. You may connect them with an elastic band with buttonholes—Now you go on to the second phase: 4) You can choose either to turn me over on the table so I am tied lying on my stomach, but with my legs together, or to bind me to the post with my wrists together, and my legs also, my whole body tightly bound; 5) You whip my back buttocks thighs, a hundred lashes at least; 6) You sew my buttocks together, all the way up and down the crack of my ass. Tightly, with a doubled thread, each stitch knot­ted. If I am on the table, now tie me to the post; 7) You give me fifty thrashes on the buttocks; 8) If you wish to intensify the torture and carry out your threat from last time, stick the pins all the way into my buttocks as far as they go; 9) Then you may tie me to the chair; you give me thirty thrashes on the breasts and stick in the smaller pins; if you wish, you may heat them red-hot beforehand, all or some. I should be tightly bound to the chair, hands behind my back so my chest sticks out. I haven't mentioned burns, only because I have a medical exam coming up in awhile, and they take a long time to heal.” This is not a phantasy, it is a program: There is an essential difference between the psychoanalytic interpretation of the phantasy and the antipsychiatric experimentation of the program. Between the Phantasy, an interpretation that must itself be interpreted, and the motor program of experimentation.5 The BwO is what remains when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and signifiances and subjectifications as a whole. Psychoanalysis does the opposite: it translates everything into phantasies, it converts everything into phantasy, it retains the phantasy. It royally botches the real, because it botches the BwO.

Something will happen. Something is already happening. But what comes to pass on the BwO is not exactly the same as how you make yourself one. However, one is included in the other. Hence the two phases set forth in the preceding letter. Why two clearly distinguished phases, when the same thing is done in both cases—sewing and flogging? One phase is for the fabrication of the BwO, the other to make something circulate on it or pass across it; the same procedures are nevertheless used in both phases, but they must be done over, done twice. What is certain is that the masochist has made himself a BwO under such conditions that the BwO can no longer be populated by anything but intensities of pain, pain waves. It is false to say that the masochist is looking for pain but just as false to say that he is looking for pleasure in a particularly suspensive or roundabout way. The masochist is looking for a type of BwO that only pain can fill, or travel over, due to the very conditions under which that BwO was constituted. Pains are populations, packs, modes of king-masochist-in-the-desert that he engenders and augments. The same goes for the drugged body and intensi­ties of cold, refrigerator waves. For each type of BwO, we must ask: (1) What type is it, how is it fabricated, by what procedures and means (predeter­mining what will come to pass)? (2) What are its modes, what comes to pass, and with what variants and what surprises, what is unexpected and what expected? In short, there is a very special relation of synthesis and analysis between a given type of BwO and what happens on it: an a priori synthesis by which something will necessarily be produced in a given mode (but what it will be is not known) and an infinite analysis by which what is produced on the BwO is already part of that body's production, is already included in the body, is already on it (but at the price of an infinity of pas­sages, divisions, and secondary productions). It is a very delicate experi­mentation since there must not be any stagnation of the modes or slippage in type: the masochist and the drug user court these ever-present dangers that empty their BwO's instead of filling them.

Re: The Body without Organs

You can fail twice, but it is the same failure, the same danger. Once at the level of the constitution of the BwO and again at the level of what passes or does not pass across it. You think you have made yourself a good BwO, that you chose the right Place, Power (Puissance), and Collectivity (there is always a collectivity, even when you are alone), and then nothing passes, nothing circulates, or something prevents things from moving. A paranoid point, a point of blockage, an outburst of delirium: it comes across clearly in Speed, by William Burroughs, Jr. Is it possible to locate this danger point, should the block be expelled, or should one instead “love, honor, and serve degeneracy wherever it surfaces”? To block, to be blocked, is that not still an intensity? In each case, we must define what comes to pass and what does not pass, what causes passage and prevents it. As in the meat circuit according to Lewin, something flows through channels whose sections are delimited by doors with gatekeepers, passers-on.6 Door openers and trap closers, Malabars and Fierabras. The body is now nothing more than a set of valves, locks, floodgates, bowls, or communicating vessels, each with a proper name: a peopling of the BwO, a Metropolis that has to be managed with a whip. What peoples it, what passes across it, what does the blocking?

A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has noth­ing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree—to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is why 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.7 The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it changes gradient. “No organ is constant as regards either function or posi­tion, … sex organs sprout anywhere, … rectums open, defecate and close, … the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments.”8 The tantric egg.

After all, is not Spinoza's Ethics the great book of the BwO? The attri­butes are types or genuses of BwO's, substances, powers, zero intensities as matrices of production. The modes are everything that comes to pass: waves and vibrations, migrations, thresholds and gradients, intensities produced in a given type of substance starting from a given matrix. The masochist body as an attribute or genus of substance, with its production of intensities and pain modes based on its degree 0 of being sewn up. The drugged body as a different attribute, with its production of specific intensities based on absolute Cold=0. (“Junkies always beef about The Cold as they call it, turning up their black coat collars and clutching their withered necks … pure junk con. A junky does not want to be warm, he wants to be cool-cooler-COLD. But he wants The Cold like he wants His Junk—not outside where it does him no good but inside so he can sit around with a spine like a frozen hydraulic jack… his metabolism approaching Absolute  Zero.”)9 Etc. The problem of whether there is a substance of all substances a single substance for all attributes, becomes: Is there a totality of all BwO's? If the BwO is already a limit, what must we say of the totality of all BwO's? It is a problem not of the One and the Multiple but of a fusional multiplicity that effectively goes beyond any opposition between the one and the multiple. A formal multiplicity of substantial attributes that, as such, constitutes the ontological unity of substance. There is a continuum of all of the attributes or genuses of intensity under a single substance, and a continuum of the intensities of a certain genus under a single type or attribute. A continuum of all substances in intensity and of all intensities in substance. The uninterrupted continuum of the BwO. BwO, immanence, immanent limit. Drug users, masochists, schizophrenics, lovers— all BwO's pay homage to Spinoza. The BwO is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined as a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it).

Every time desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of immanence, a priest is behind it. The priest cast the triple curse on desire: the negative law, the extrinsic rule, and the transcendent ideal. Facing north, the priest said, Desire is lack (how could it not lack what it desires?). The priest carried out the first sacrifice, named castration, and all the men and women of the north lined up behind him, crying in cadence, “Lack, lack, it's the common law.” Then, facing south, the priest linked desire to pleasure. For there are hedonistic, even orgiastic, priests. Desire will be assuaged by pleasure; and not only will the pleasure obtained silence desire for a moment but the process of obtaining it is already a way of interrupting it, of instantly discharging it and unburdening oneself of it. Pleasure as dis­charge: the priest carries out the second sacrifice, named masturbation. ^ Then, facing east, he exclaimed: Jouissance is impossible, but impossible t jouissance is inscribed in desire. For that, in its very impossibility, is the Ideal, the ^manque-a–jouir that is life.”10 The priest carried out the third sacrifice, phantasy or the thousand and one nights, the one hundred twenty ^ days, while the men of the East chanted: Yes, we will be your phantasy, your ideal and impossibility, yours and also our own. The priest did not turn to the west. He knew that in the west lay a plane of consistency, but he thought that the way was blocked by the columns of Hercules, that it led nowhere and was uninhabited by people. But that is where desire was lurking, west was the shortest route east, as well as to the other directions, rediscovered or deterritorialized.

The most recent figure of the priest is the psychoanalyst, with his or her three principles: Pleasure, Death, and Reality. Doubtless, psychoanalysis demonstrated that desire is not subordinated to procreation, or even to genitality. That was its modernism. But it retained the essentials; it even found new ways of inscribing in desire the negative law of lack, the external rule of pleasure, and the transcendent ideal of phantasy. Take the interpretation of masochism: when the ridiculous death instinct is not invoked, it is claimed that the masochist, like everybody else, is after pleasure but can only get it through pain and phantasied humiliations whose function is to allay or ward off deep anxiety. This is inaccurate; the masochisfs suffering is the price he must pay, not to achieve pleasure, but to untie the pseudobond between desire and pleasure as an extrinsic measure. Pleasure is in no way something that can be attained only by a detour through suffer­ing; it is something that must be delayed as long as possible because it inter­rupts the continuous process of positive desire. There is, in fact, a joy that is immanent to desire as though desire were filled by itself and its contempla­tions, a joy that implies no lack or impossibility and is not measured by pleasure since it is what distributes intensities of pleasure and prevents them from being suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt. In short, the mas­ochist uses suffering as a way of constituting a body without organs and bringing forth a plane of consistency of desire. That there are other ways, other procedures than masochism, and certainly better ones, is beside the point; it is enough that some find this procedure suitable for them.

Take a masochist who did not undergo psychoanalysis: “program … At night, put on the bridle and attach my hands more tightly, either to the bit with the chain, or to the big belt right after returning from the bath. Put on the entire harness right away also, the reins and thumbscrews, and attach the thumbscrews to the harness. My penis should be in a metal sheath. Ride the reins for two hours during the day, and in the evening as the master wishes. Confinement for three or four days, hands still tied, the reins alternately tightened and loosened. The master will never approach her horse* without the crop, and without using it. If the animal should dis­play impatience or rebelliousness, the reins will be drawn tighter, the mas­ter will grab them and give the beast a good thrashing.”11 What is this masochist doing? He seems to be imitating a horse, Equus eroticus, but that's not it. Nor are the horse and the master-trainer or mistress images of the mother or father. Something entirely different is going on: a becoming-animal essential to masochism. It is a question of forces. The masochist presents it this way: Training axiom—destroy the instinctive forces in order to replace them with transmitted forces. In fact, it is less a destruction than an exchange and circulation (“what happens to a horse can also happen to me”). Horses are trained: humans impose upon the horse's instinctive forces transmitted forces that regulate the former, select, dominate, overcode them. The masochist effects an inversion of signs: the horse transmits its transmitted forces to him, so that the masochist's innate forces will in turn be tamed. There are two series, the horse's (innate force, force transmitted by the human being), and the masochisfs (force trans­mitted by the horse, innate force of the human being). One series explodes into the other, forms a circuit with it: an increase in power or a circuit of intensities. The “master,” or rather the mistress-rider, the equestrian, ensures the conversion offerees and the inversion of signs. The masochist constructs an entire assemblage that simultaneously draws and fills the field of immanence of desire; he constitutes a body without organs or plane of consistency using himself, the horse, and the mistress. “Results to be obtained: that I am kept in continual expectancy of actions and orders, and that little by little all opposition is replaced by a fusion of my person with yours.… Thus at the mere thought of your boots, without even acknowl­edging it, I must feel fear. In this way, it will no longer be women's legs that have an effect on me, and if it pleases you to command me to receive your caresses, when you have had them and if you make me feel them, you will give me the imprint of your body as I have never had it before and never would have had it otherwise.”12 Legs are still organs, but the boots now only determine a zone of intensity as an imprint or zone on a BwO.

Similarly, or actually in a different way, it would be an error to interpret courtly love in terms of a law of lack or an ideal of transcendence. The renunciation of external pleasure, or its delay, its infinite regress, testifies on the contrary to an achieved state in which desire no longer lacks any­thing but fills itself and constructs its own field of immanence. Pleasure is an affection of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to “find themselves” in the process of desire that exceeds them; pleasures, even the most artificial, are reterritorializations. But the question is precisely whether it is necessary to find oneself. Courtly love does not love the self, any more than it loves the whole universe in a celestial or religious way. It is a question of making a body without organs upon which intensities pass, self and other—not in the name of a higher level of generality or a broader extension, but by virtue of singularities that can no longer be said to be per­sonal, and intensities that can no longer be said to be extensive. The field of immanence is not internal to the self, but neither does it come from an external self or a nonself. Rather, it is like the absolute Outside that knows no Selves because interior and exterior are equally a part of the immanence in which they have fused. “Joy” in courtly love, the exchange of hearts, the test or “assay”: everything is allowed, as long as it is not external to desire or transcendent to its plane, or else internal to persons. The slightest caress may be as strong as an orgasm; orgasm is a mere fact, a rather deplorable one, in relation to desire in pursuit of its principle. Everything is allowed: all that counts is for pleasure to be the flow of desire itself. Immanence, instead of a measure that interrupts it or delivers it to the three phantoms, namely, internal lack, higher transcendence, and apparent exteriority.13 If pleasure is not the norm of desire, it is not by virtue of a lack that is impossible to but on the; contrary, by virtue of its positivty, in other words, the plane of consistency it draws in the course of its process.

A great Japanese compilation of Chinese Taoist treatises was made in A.D. 982-984. We see in it the formation of a circuit of intensities between female and male energy, with the woman playing the role of the innate or instinctive force (Yin) stolen by or transmitted to the man in such a way | that the transmitted force of the man (Yang) in turn becomes innate, all the more innate: an augmentation of powers.14 The condition for this circula- ' tion and multiplication is that the man not ejaculate. It is not a question of experiencing desire as an internal lack nor of delaying pleasure in order to produce a kind of externalizable surplus-value, but instead of constituting an intensive body without organs. Tao, a field of immanence- in–which desirelacks nothing and therefore cannot be linked to any external or tran­scendent criterion. It is true that the whole circuit can be channeled toward procreative ends'(ejaculation when the energies are right); that is how Con­fucianism understood it. But this is true only for one side of the assemblage of desire, the side facing the strata, organisms. State, family… It is not true for the other side, the Tao side of destratification that draws a plane of consistency proper to desire. Is the Tao masochistic? Is courtly love Taoist? These questions are largely meaningless. The field of immanence or plane of consistency must be constructed. This can take place in very different social formations through very different assemblages (perverse, artistic, scientific, mystical, political) with different types of bodies without organs. It is constructed piece by piece, and the places, conditions, and techniques are irreducible to one another. The question, rather, is whether the pieces can fit together, and at what price. Inevitably, there will be monstrous crossbreeds. The plane of consistency would be the totaity of all Bw0's, a pure multiplicity of immanence, one piece of which maybe Chinese, another American, another medieval,  another petty perverse, but all in a movement of generalized deterritorialization in which each person takes and makes what she or he can, according     to tastes she or he will have succeeded in abstracting from a Self [Moi], according to a politics or strategy successfully abstracted from a given formation, according to a given procedure abstracted from its origin.

We distinguish between: (1) BwO's, which are different types, genuses, or substantial attributes. For example, the Cold of the drugged BwO, the Pain of the masochist BwO. Each has its degree 0 as its principle of production (remissio). (2) What happens on each type of BwO, in other words, the modes, the intensities that are produced, the waves that pass (latitudo). (3) The potential totality of all BwO's, the plane of consistency (Omnitudo), sometimes called the BwO). There are a number of questions. Not only how to make oneself a BwO, and how to produce the corresponding intensities without which it would remain empty (not exactly the same question). But also how to reach the plane of consistency. How to sew up cool down, and tie together all the BwO's. If this is possible to do, it is only by conjugating the intensities produced on each BwO, by producing a continuum of all intensive continuities. Are not assemblages necessary to fabricate each BwO, is not a great abstract Machine necessary to construct the  plane of consistency? Gregory Bateson uses the term plateau for continuous regions of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow themselves to be interrupted by any external termination, any more than they allow themselves to build toward a climax; examples are certain sex­ual, or aggressive, processes in Balinese culture.15 A plateau is a piece of immanence. Every BwO is made up of plateaus. Every BwO is itself a pla­teau in communication with other plateaus on the plane of consistency. The BwO is a component of passage.

[Read the rest of the essay here]

Re: The Body without Organs

Goodness. Look at the references in the esaay: Artaud, Burroughs…
Why not add Rimbaud, Baudelaire, de Sade, de Qunicey, Henry Miller, and Bataille to the mix, and while we're at it, perhaps, Bunuel, Cronenberg, Lynch…
Do we wanna go here? :-)
Neo! (AHAHAhahahaha!)

Re: The Body without Organs

Don't forget Castaneda!

Re: The Body without Organs

So,
Kela mentions Rimbaud above and the Romanian engineer, whom Russ Volckmann is all chuffed-up on over yonder, laments the inaccessibility of Mallarme who hosted the Parisian circles through which Rimbaud briefly reeled. WBY used to visit Mallarme and I dropped one of his lines into a post not long ago. In the Rorty interview that occasionally makes a re-run through here (not counting the Article) “..poeticized” is the first word he speaks. He
picked that up I suspect from Heidegger who thought philosophy should
blend more with the poets than the scientists or mathematicians (like
Husserl whom the engineer found more understandable than Mallarme…no
surprise. So what would he think of Deleuze?) And since Heidegger was
the godfather of the pomo Parisian circles, I think–at least to some
degree–that we can lay a little of the blame for the style of  “How do
You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs” like an honorary wreath upon
his grave. Apparently not everyone knows that just because one's books
are sold off the “Philosophy” shelves of Continental bookstores one
then is inherently able to style obscurant poetry like…I don't
know…Mallarme (he's handy) or write atmospheric pomo prose like E.L.
Doctorow.

And the foregoing has been preface to:

1) the fact that I am thankful for a little poetizing of this pod even
if it had to be force fed through that hollow reed of D&G's BwO.

2) The opportunity to say that Rimbaud should not be tossed into
the BwO mix of references because although his stuff was
(understandably) immature, its sensate clarity and passion–if he were
a reference–should have rubbed off on D&G, but the absence of
those qualities tell me he had no influence on their work. (I wrote
sensate to set Rimbaud's style apart from the sensuality of Mallarme)
Although it has been years since I have read him I think the same is
true of Baudelaire. But I would agree to add De Quincey as a reference
because he tended to be boring too and his paragraphs, as I recall,
were very long.

3) The opportunity to write that part of the problem with the essay was
that it was co-written which means it was over-messaged and the
spontanaity that would have given it some life was either squeezed out
or work-hardened. K mentioned Henry Miller…Henry Miller could have pulled this essay off the way I would like to think D. first envisioned it. But then it
would have just been literature and not philosophy and subsequently
D&G would have been written off like Rorty has been written off,
but Wilfrid Sellars will never be.

4) The opportunity to write that for all the foregoing, I think D&G
had no choice but to adopt the style in which the essay appears. The
style is forced upon the essay by D's ontological adherence to the
plane of immanence which is anti-authoritarian (anti-authoritarian
writers cannot establish for themselves an authoritarian posture),
anti-dialectic, and anti-transcendence, which doesn't leave a couple of
writers very much solid ground, in fact, none at all. In short this is
written from a point of view of two who believe their own metaphysical
propaganda. D's plane of immanence is as an agreeable piece of
metaphysics as I have ever encountered. Too bad it has to be
metaphysical. And too bad it has to contain the word “plane.” A real
BwO would know a plane has really poor potential when it comes to
immanence. I wonder if D. did not use “plane” as an envisioning
expedient for his readers? It might serve for a little while like the
collected works of Ken Wilber might serve as expedients for a little
while, but then someone will have to understand that immanence has to
be an infinitely dimensional free fall, or it is nothing. In the end,
this essay is a nomad essay and the weirdness about being nomadic in
the D&G sense is that one can never say “I am a nomad” or else they
close all frontiers down around themselves as the words leave their
mouth. 

Luego
Steven

Re: The Body without Organs

Here’s an interpretation of Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of rhizome. This is the nature of the experimental structure of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, from with BwO originates.

Positioned as the introduction to the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Rhizome principally constructs a model (a new map) for apprehending the constitution and reception of a book. As Deleuze writes, “the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world” (11). This model, framed metaphorically around rhizomorphism, also extends itself within the text to the study of linguistics and politics.  

But what is a rhizome, anyway? In the words of the text: “A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes” (7). As is the potato, or any structure in which each point is necessarily connected to each other point, in which no location may become a beginning or an end, yet the whole is heterogeneous. Deleuze labels the rhizome as a “multiplicity,” rather than a “multiple,” wresting it from any relation to “the One” (8). The rhizome likewise resists structures of domination, such as the notion of “the mother tongue” in linguistics, though it does admit to ongoing cycles of what Deleuze refers to as “deterritorializing” and “reterritorializing” moments. 

Where the potato is the hero of this story, the tree becomes the villain. “Arborescent” is a dirty word. “We’re tired of trees,” writes Deleuze, “We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much” (15). Trees are genealogical, where by contrast “the rhizome is an antigenealogy” (21). The tree comes to symbolize the distinction between subject and object, between signifier and signified, encompassing the whole of dualistic logic through its branching patterns, through its definitions of set pathways between root and branch.  

As such, “Rhizome” rapidly seeks to extinguish every last trace of Hegelianism, particularly from the object of the book: “There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject.” Likewise, this essay refuses ontological thought, accepting the state of intermediacy, the logic of the conjunction, which perhaps explains the tendency in the prose toward polysyndeton.  

That the text is titled Rhizome does not amount to a statement of topic (for the essay refuses objects and signifieds) but rather a statement of identity.
 
The prose is dense and schizophrenic. The essay consists not in an argument, but in the ecstatic elaboration of a metaphor, a web of interconnected concepts, the development of a new vocabulary without a pause for explanation or so much as a simple definition. Deleuze’s metaphor applies even to the very text in which it comes into being. The text bypasses the static act of description: an enactment is at hand. Or, by the essay’s own distinction, Rhizome is a mapping rather than a tracing. Deleuze writes, “What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious” (12).