Moose

i thought about this one for a long time because it is a little trickier than the last one despite the overlap and i want to be helpful and clear. some of my examples are going to focus on sex, also, just because i think it's illustrative, but i'm not going to be terribly explicit. just a heads-up if reading about that sort of thing can be difficult for you!

so, like the rhizome, the body without organs (BwO) is an image or metaphor used by Deleuze (and Deleuze and Guattari) to suggest not a literal thing in the world but a certain mode of looking at/thinking about/apprehending the world and stuff in it. it is trickier because the form it describes, however, ends up seeming more obscure (rather than the straightforward structural bent of the rhizome) because it's a bit more wiggly overall in terms of what it does/can describe. a clearing gesture i can make right now is that, like the rhizome, the BwO is not necessarily good or bad, but something that can contribute to good or bad outcomes. but the question still stands: what the hell is it?

the term comes from Deleuze's readings of the French playwright Antonin Artaud, and looking at the lines where this shows up can be a helpful starting point:

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.

the "him" here is the generalized man/mankind/humankind. and it sure seems like becoming a body without organs would be good for "him"--Artaud sees this as liberatory, and this is also a potential case for Deleuze. so let's unpack what Artaud is saying first: the BwO is positioned as being free from the "automatic reactions" that plague a body with organs (you'll never be hungry if you don't have a stomach!). Deleuze takes up this image to interrogate, in some sense, our tendency to default toward universalized biological determinism, the recurring feature of our discourse and thought where we look at human social behaviors and trace them back to some innate functioning of the body and a predetermined way that functioning expresses itself.

so let's play with the image: how would we explain the world and the creatures in it if we dispensed with their organs, dispensed with understanding things as being composed of a bunch of little systems of flesh and fluid and innate want and need that exist "below" the surface level and determine their expressions, and instead granted things the capacity to be bodies unto themselves? an easy example is human sexuality: once we dispense with the idea that human bodies have particular organs that are made by nature for a singular purpose (procreation) we can focus on sex as all the potential experiences of actual living and historical bodies in erotic contact, even and especially those arrangements that are nonprocreative (including queer sex but also, say, an S&M scene where whipping or bondage is the focus, where bodies are certainly experiencing things, but the genitive organs might not ever be brought into the equation).

"but hold up," you may be saying, "aren't the penis and vagina ultimately actually meant for procreation, isn't sex in the evolutionary sense a product of the necessity of procreation?" this is the exact attitude we are trying to get around, the way of thinking the world we're trying to challenge. it's a specific attitude called teleology, where one potential outcome of an arrangement is taken to be the core reason for why that arrangement exists in the first place. one of its consequences here is it opens the space for all nonprocreative sex to be marked as deviant, conceived of as some sort of peculiar human excess (or perversion) where we've taken a "natural" form and distorted it. speaking frankly, fuck that! speaking in terms of biology: evolution is not a thinking process! it, or nature, do not 'plan' or 'intend' things; we did not evolve opposable thumbs because nature "meant" for us to pick up sticks in a certain way, it was simply beneficial for our ancestors (or rather, sufficiently non-detrimental) to the extent that all the things with proto-opposable thumbs didn't die out and then we homo sapiens got to discover thousands of wonderful use cases (building doors with knobs) and not-so-wonderful use cases (holding guns).

so while one potential outcome of sex is procreation, that is not the full story. there are plenty of examples of sexual contact in humans and other animals that do not result in procreation, one of the most common being traditional p-in-v intercourse where conception simply doesn't happen. if a cishet man and woman have sex and the woman doesn't get pregnant, have they "failed" at having sex? or is it possible that the pleasure of sexual contact itself is enough to justify sexuality's existence? the BwO provides a way for us to think about the parties involved as more than mere systems or appetites, as things which undeniably exist and whose reality and experience must be accounted for without resorting to saying "this is an imperfect version of a more perfect thing." i'm running long but maybe this fairly tepid example of the unrealized potential of vanilla m/f boning under the paradigm of comphet can suggest exactly how we might rethink our modes of social organization and acceptance if we can get out from underneath teleological thought.

at its core, then, the BwO is a way of thinking about things in their full potential, not only in what their apparent output is but what their output could be. a recurring image for D&G in describing the BwO is an egg--specifically, the cosmic mythological egg present in the lore of many cultures that hatches and produces the first god, or the universe, or whatever. the "or whatever" is crucial here, because it's a way of saying that until an egg hatches you don't know what's growing inside it. and just because you've seen one egg hatch and a baby chicken came out, don't be surprised if you see another egg hatch and a little lizard comes out, or the first god, or the universe, or whatever!

BUT.

i said earlier the BwO isn't necessarily good or bad!!! and i just said a lot of words gesturing at the good, so where's the bad? well, early in Anti-Oedipus D&G claim that "Capital is indeed the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capitalist being." given what i've said above, you can perhaps see where this is going:

[Capital as the BwO of capitalist being] is not only the fluid and petrified substance of money, for it will give to the sterility of money the form whereby money produces money. It produces surplus value, just as the body without organs reproduces itself, puts forth shoots, and branches out to the farthest corners of the universe. It makes the machine responsible for producing a relative surplus value, while embodying itself in the machine as fixed capital. Machines and agents cling so closely to capital that their very functioning appears to be miraculated by it. Everything seems objectively to be produced by capital as quasi cause.

a slight detour: in historical Europe, the mode of production was different (feudalism) and the body without organs that centralized it was a bit more literal: it was the body of the monarch, who nominally owned all lands and goods in a kingdom. under feudalism, the monarch's body was mystified as having a divine aspect. monarchs were often spoken of as having a body natural, their physical body, and the body politic, an idealized form that passed from ruler to ruler and thus ensured continuity of the throne in a kind of religio-mystical sense even as specific rulers died or were usurped. but it was precisely this idea of a numinous royal body--floating vaguely somewhere in heaven without organs--that allowed feudalism to continue, it was the thoughtform that allowed the whole social arrangement to purchase itself.

we might understand D&G as saying that under capitalism, it is capital itself that has taken the monarch's position. it "owns" everything and eats up the position of the BwO as a source of experience and potential: capital comes to conceptually hoard and distort all possibilities for production, development, change, emergence, etc, to the extent that (as we all by now know) it is extremely difficult to imagine or implement ideas for a world outside of it. so instead of, say, you or me being a BwO (in other words, a kind of full and expressionistic intensity of being interested in experience and contact, growth and change, hatching new eggs forever) capital takes over the motive force of our social world and reduces us to its listless servants, all in the name of reproducing itself. if the BwO is about looking at a system and asking what its various outputs are but also crucially could be, capital as a BwO always has a single answer: more capitalism!