To: Unleesh-AT-aol.com
Subject: BwO2
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 1998 07:29:12 EDT


The BwO permeates (or subsists alongside) the evolutionary genealogy of
organs. Genealogy of organs? Yes, well each organ has a transspecies history.
There were hearts, livers, brains, rectums long before there were humans. The
book The Prehistory of the Face shows the genealogy of the structure of the
face from the worms up to humans. The Body Without Organs as organizing /
deorganizing (transtructuring) field of bifurcations stretches back before our
particular body to recapitulate the history of all life.  This looks at the
body as flow, and organs as flows which developed out of this flow. There is a
transspecies flow of hearts, livers, stomachs, brains, rectums. Watch as they
transform through time from one species to another. Plot their chemical
constituency onto a musical staff and listen to the tonal drift. The Body
Without Organs is the process of life itself experimenting with different
organs, organisms even as it throws them off in further explorations, further
affirmations of an essentially experimental and vital process forged in the
heart of turbulence, volatility, and disequilibrium. If the earth was a
bubbling, volatile mixture of gases and minerals prior to the emergence of
life, then how was it itself in a sense "alive", pregnant with life itself?
And indeed, transformed by this birthing process as microbes transformed the
atmosphere? In this sense perhaps the earth was a BwO transforming itself in
the process of its own emergence.
  And a society can be a BwO. Everywhere we discover societies. In fact,
multicellular organisms ARE societies ; and organs are agreements as to
functional specialization and coordination within those societies. So in this
sense, the BwO, while creatively producing societal forms and institutions,
also is inherently and ever contesting them, throwing them off, resisting
their obstruction to the experimenting process of emergence and exploration.
It forms them IN PROCESS but does not want to be determined by them or get
caught in determinism. The BwO is a patternING process that does not want to
get caught in any one pattern. (Of course here is the question of rates of
change or speeds : calculus of trees and ants, rocks and hummingbirds).

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