The BwO

In my last post I talked about desiring machines. I had said, briefly sketched, that DMs are process that induce different types of production and are typified by a certain sort of synthesis, in this case connective synthesis (and…and then…and). The machine connects man and nature and is a node for the production of production. By the end of their analysis on DMs, D&G bring out the Body without Organs (the BwO).

(pg 8) “The full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable … DMs work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down … nonetheless [the BwO] is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product … It is a body without an image”

The BwO is related to the DM in the fact that it brings together binary opposites. This implies that you can’t have one without the other in the same way, for Christianity, you can’t have God without the Devil. This makes sense as we have seen the anus connected to the mouth. You can’t have production without consumption and its sumptuous by-products.

(pg 9) But even weirder and wilder still is the fact that the DM needs, and tries to insert itself, into the BwO. This process of repulsion is the paranoiac-machine. The way I read paranoia and persecution is through the proliferation of connections that the clinical paranoiac produces. In clinical paranoia, the patient is forever and always connecting every sign (overcoding) to everything else (“they are out to get me, they are outside my window, they have poisoned my food, etc”) and hence the DM, through its production, is trying to connect to everything everywhere and the BwO won’t allow it. The reasons for this are many.

(pg 11) But the BwO is concerned with two things as far as production is concerned: one, the recording of production and the miraculous nature of production. "The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as a surface for the recording of the entire process of production of desire, so that desiring-machines seem to emanate from it in the apparent objective movement that establishes a relationship between the machines and the body without organs." What we see from this is that on the BwO, DMs code desire. Second that DMs become sectors of signification. What is really interesting, however, is that it seems as if DMs spring forth from the BwO (hence the miraculous). We know this can’t happen and hence the miraculous moment of the BwO; it is the appearance of an impossible production.

If we identify the BwO as capital (or sterile money) than the terms “socius” and “relative surplus value” all start circulating (miraculating) around the DM (or another term would be labor). In the capitalist machine, what labor does (as a desiring machine) is produce goods. The moment those goods are tinged with surplus value we end up getting more for less and hence the producer ends up losing (shutting off anus and mouth) their relation (value) to their work. Instead of the labor producing money and capital, the miracle (and in turn impossible production) is that it looks as if capital is producing money, not the labor itself! Socius, then, are all the factors that go into making capital assume its matriculating status—through paying people the same wage for more goods per hour (relative surplus value) to the recording of desire onto these goods (consumption). The value of labor/production is determined on capital (outside of economics, which is easy to visualize, how would the DM/BwO look like in other fields such as science, biology, etc…) Technology is implicated in this crude design as it speeds up labor for more production at the same pay.

What ends up happening to the BwO is that it institutes desire for things that you don’t necessarily need. The recording process is the right of those who control the relative surplus value. The BwO, as miraculous recorder, can be seen in concrete examples, through advertising. Advertising is a good example of the BwO because it lacks depth, is undifferentiated and falls under the anti-productive rubric of a BwO. Capital, as I said earlier, is another BwO. As Hardt says: “Capital is a body without organs in these two respects. First, production or labor is recorded or coded or really given value in capital, on the surface of the body without organs (the role of money will be central here). Second, while capital is unproductive, it appears to be productive as if through a miracle and thus masks the real productive processes. This second aspect of capital as the body without organs is precisely what Marx calls commodity fetishism: the fact that the production process is masked or eclipsed. "... we cannot tell from the mere taste of wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and the relations of production.”

Finally, the reason why the BwO is disjunctive is because of it overlaps and writes through the connective synthesis of the DM. For example, Labor is the real process of production while Capital inscribes a false writing of production: in the final analysis, we believe it is capital that created the production, not the labor. Capital can be thought of as oedipal as well as it assumes the many forms of desire. Disjunction (either/or of the tree of genealogy) has us pick between one and the other and branch out from there. Oedipus is all over that!