Introduction
The popular meme above and the variations one can witness throughout the Twittersphere such as 'explain BwO to me right now' or 'the BwO is obscurantist' (@metanomad, bless his heart, deleted the Tweet here) all transmit the relatively same message - that Deleuze or more specifically the concept ‘body without organs’ is, for whatever reason - and different people will give many different reasons - obfuscatory, unclear, difficult to understand, etc. The most generous critics will attribute this to a complexity in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought while the least generous will dismiss the concept as useless jargon.
Ultimately, unless a concept's epistemic rigor is significant to a praxis, or bares a concrete and direct relationship to our every day lives - such as keeping airplanes in the air, bridges stable, etc. - we shouldn't care too much about the distinction between good and bad concepts. The need to justify a concept to an other is to fall prey to precisely what psychoanalysis and Deleuze himself would warn us about - 'get trapped in the dream of the other and you're fucked!' The need to justify a concept is all voice, no exit; symbolic, impotent linguistic debate, discussion, no exit.
Per the pragmatism of Deleuze and Guattari - mostly Guattari whom loved Peirce, James, and had a penchant for off the cuff impulsive chaotic and unpredictable behavior - if one finds an intellectual concept useless, so be it, simply move on to one you find useful. When one finds a concept useful, then it is useful and you should use it. This is in the spirit of Guattari's one-off addage - 'if nothing is happening, then nothing is happening' (or - the 'masculine urge' to say 'it is what it is...').
So why bother elaborate upon or clarify an unclear concept? Perhaps it may be useful to some whom have already dismissed it, and perhaps a clear view will give better reason to those who have rightly dismissed it. Clarifying a concept is about helping someone have sufficient information for decision making. Nothing more, nothing less.
So, just as many have tried to elaborate on the concept, so will I. Whether I succeed or fail - though irrelevant - is none the less up how you, dear reader, and how you choose to put the concept into action.
BwO
The body without organs is one of the most notable and recognizable concepts put to use by Deleuze and Guattri (even if it was ‘stolen’ from Artaud).
It’s described as an egg; often spoken in the same breath as concepts such as ‘the flow of ‘partial objects,’ (a concept borrowed from Kleinian psychoanalysis), ‘the plane of immanence’ ‘desiring machine’ ‘schizo flows’ and ‘smooth unstriated surfaces.’
These of course all require unpacking.
Partial objects are fragments of experience, affect, subjectivity, or behavior that are not predetermined. They are yet to be fully formed, or if they are fully formed they are yet to be fully comprehended by the other's sensory and intellectual faculties.
For the infant, the mother is not yet a full person; neither internally - she is devoid of an internal world of thoughts, feelings, desires, etc. - nor externally - the infant’s newly developed cognitive abilities only permit them to focus on or two sensory experiences at a time. At its best, Mom is reduced to a smiling face, a caressing hand, a warm and gentle embrace, a nutrient and gratifying breast. At its worst, a grave face, a distressing fumble, a frustrating breast.
Klein showed how the infant's crude emotional and cognitive faculties reduce these experiences to a simple 'good vs. bad' object binary. Mom’s whole internal and external - her body - is reduced to one or two partial representations that are themselves bound up with the infants fantasies and precepts.
For psychoanalysis, here lies one aspect of the genesis of most mental health issues such as personality conflicts, but especially fetishism - the partial object to which the whole is reduced. But where Klein and psychoanalysts see the partial object as a way of understanding pathology, Deleuze and Guattari de-pathologize the concept and show us that it also allows for new organizations of affect, thought, feeling, and behavior.
Seeing the world as a stream of partial objects allows us to see the many different permutations that this or that thing could connect up with this or that thing - what is described by D and G as the functions desiring machines and their flows - as opposed to viewing the world through a ‘whole object’ lens which from the start dismisses and precludes certain combinations, experiments, etc. Herein lies the ‘schizo’ in schizoanalysis; herein lies the information we need to understand: why D and G describe the BwO as (insert quote about different body parts being connected to each other from 1k plateaus).
"why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly...where psychoanalysis says 'stop, find your self again,' we should say instead, 'let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet.' ... "the BwO reveals itself for what it is... a long process of experimentation...(for it is not 'my' body without organs, instead the 'me'... is on it. or what remains of me, unalterable and changing in form, crossing thresholds." (Plateau 'How to Make Yourself a Body Without Organs,' 150-151; 160-161).
This means the BwO is a body of pure virtuality. It is undifferentiated and unexpressed potential in the form of corporeal and incorporeal material. It is a body whose vectors of effect, change, development, etc. are yet to be determined. A mass of code. A Big Bang.
The 5th Element
Not so bad, right?
Regardless, some have attempted to find concrete examples of the concept in film, culture, etc., so here’s my concrete example to add to the heap - the BwO is quite literally nothing other than the severed arm of Mondoshawans from which Leeloo is reconstructed at the beginning of the sci-fi film The Fifth Element (1997). See below.
The Mondoshawans are a race of ancient aliens who protect life and whom despite being from the deep past (see the intro scene), have incredibly advanced technology. This is likely because they have existed ‘before time’ (see CCRU and deep time, and how archaic shamanism and future alien tech converge).
The creatures appear to be inhuman, genderless (likely Lemurs beneath their armor).
When a severed arm is recovered from their crashed space cruiser, Earth scientists discover that it contains incredibly dense genetic material, thousands of times more dense and complex than human DNA; essentially a starter kit for life - an egg, a sourdough mother dough. It is incubated by the scientists who use future tech to reconstruct a body out of the material of the hand. Like Eve coming from Adam's rib, the beautiful and "perfect" Leeloo is born from the arm.
The severed arm is a quite literally a part object. A body part that performs a certain function under certain circumstances separated from a whole body. However, it’s dense, undifferentiated material does not yield another of the Mondoshawans, but a beautiful human female. Why?
This is not simply a philosophical question pulled form thin air. When watching the film I wondered to myself - 'why would a mass of alien genetic material produce a human looking creature?' Rather than answer it from a practical perspective - that the film makers wanted a badass female lead for their film, etc. - I attempted to answer the question with my best take on the film's canon, my best understanding of the logic of the film's universe, or the 'realism' or 'ontology' of the film (what Deleuze and Guattari would call a 'plane of immanence' - also see Fisher's understanding of realism, naturalism, and supernaturalism in The Weird and the Eerie).
The answer I was able to give myself, which I believe is consistent with the implied Sci-Fi logic of the film which seems to be a gritty materialist-realism, is that the laws of the environment condition the development of the undifferentiated genetic material. Or - in the different language of Deleuze and Guattari - form and expression are linked. The milieu (A Thousand Plateaus language) or the Force Field / plane of immanence (Anti-Oedipus language) influences and structures the otherwise amorphous.
When an alien body - presumably the outcome, the end product of the matrices of forces from an alien planet, an alien milieu, an alien field of forces, etc. - is broken into parts - parts which themselves are dense genetic material - and reconstructed within or on a different plane, milieu, etc., reconstructed among a different matrix or field of forces, then the body will assume a different form. Form and express may be relative, but their relativity is indicative of their influence upon one another. The milieu structures the way a body is expressed. One could take any set of genetic inputs and alter the environment and bare witness to surprisingly varied results!
This is why Leeloo is 'the 5th' element. 5 is asymmetrical. Asymmetry = Motion. Motion = Life. Or...unlife. Like the Mondoshawans, the 5th element is that which exists beneath and below the 'formal' aspects of life (earth, wind, fire, water) - it is the milieu itself, the genetic mass whose form is dependent on expression, dependent on the milieu.
So there, I've explained the BwO...
