File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/d-g_Jun.96, message 44


Date: Tue, 4 Jun 1996 10:53:10 +0100 (BST)
From: D Hugh-Jones <dash2-AT-hermes.cam.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: BwO Definition


On Mon, 3 Jun 1996, Aden Evens wrote:

> 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,
> 
> 
> 
> $$$$$$$$$$$
>    Aden
> $$$$$$$$$$$
> 
Having thought about this I would like to ask some questions. First of 
all, someone suggested to me in a private communication that the 'escape 
from the judgment of god' was to do with, put simply, 
anti-foundationalism. If so then would it be right to say that flows can 
never be ultimate constituent units of the world, because a flow is 
always across something else, and defined by what interrupts it? If so, 
is the BwO, as a limit, an impossible totality? And if so, as it is 
always deflected by capitalism, what would be a possible ideal for 
practice - if you don't mind me going back to that so soon?

Second, is schizophrenia the experience of the BwO? 

More later 



Dave Hugh-Jones
A Rush and a Push and the Land is ours
dash2-AT-cam.ac.uk



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