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Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 21:17:34 -0400
To: deleuze-guattari@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
From: aden@user1.channel1.com (Aden Evens)
Subject: BwO Definition
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Reply-To: deleuze-guattari@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
OK DHJ:
The Body without Organs is a limit. In particular, it is the limit at which
all the flows which constitute the world flow completely freely, each into
the others, so that no distinctions exist among them any longer. Flows?,
you ask. D&G describe a world in which everything flows and everything is
made of flows: not only water, air, magma, blood, paint, electricity, not
only grass, earth, sun, but ideas, people, culture, books, conversations
flow. What allows us to distinguish these flows from each other, to single
out one or another, is a threshold or a point which separates each of them.
Every flow is made by cutting off another flow, by restricting or drawing
off a flow.
But, in some sense, a flow does not want to be cut-off, to be restricted.
This desire, the desire of a flow to flow unconstrained, is the BwO. The
BwO is real, since the desire is real, in fact, the BwO just is desire. But
it is abstract, for it is a limit: flows are never free, but always
interrupted. Without the interruption and the desire, the flow and its
break, there would be no world at all.
Why "Body-without-Organs"? The absence of organs means the lack of
organization, or the fact that the BwO is not broken down into parts
distinct from each other. It remains a body, though, even if it only ever
presents itself as an attractor or repeller, a surface to slip over or
bounce off of. For no sooner does a flow return to the BwO, then it is
reconstituted as part of another flow, distinguishing itself from its
surroundings. Nothing lives in the BwO, only over its surface. Since it
allows no distinctions, no identity, it is effectively sterile, a degree
zero; the complete freedom of the BwO is also the undifferentiated of
death.
The BwO makes paradoxical (!) the problem of freedom. On the one hand,
freedom is the freedom to flow without constraint, the freedom of autonomy.
On the other hand, this same freedom is only death. What would be a limited
freedom? This paradox of freedom is studied as the paradox of capitalism in
_Anti-Oedipus_. If capitalism can make everything fall back on the BwO (of
capital), then how far can it go toward this limit?
Caveats:
(1) This definition is one among many possible. It is drawn primarily from
the concept of BwO as described in _A-O_. Its description elsewhere is
significantly different.
(2) This definition is necessarily an oversimplication. Concepts in D&G are
never hammered down into a final form; rather, they are always being
developed, always under modification, always provisional. One can never
capture the totality of a concept in its definition.
(3) To be a bit more specific about how this definition is inadequate or
different from others:
In _MP_, there are many BwO's, not just one, and the question of whether
they are all brought together in a plane of consistency is raised
explicitly.
The ontological status of the BwO is tricky, even in _A-O_. Does it exist
at all (its first mention is in a purely hypothetical tone)? Is it just a
limit? How does it attract and repel? How does it relate to the full bodies
(socius, money, etc.)? Does it exist on another ontological level, so that
it somehow coexists (insists or subsists) with the flows whose freedom and
death it represents?
The question of how to make a BwO is crucial, yet I ignore it above.
Hope this helps,
$$$$$$$$$$$
Aden
$$$$$$$$$$$
9 August 1996; updated 11 August 1996
D & G's A Thousand Plateaus