Friedrich Nietzsche does not close the shutters when he hears the cries of "solitary and agitated minds", Nietzsche listens to the shrieks and bellows of madmen,"'Ah, give me madness, you heavenly powers! Madness, that I may at last believe in myself! Give deliriums and convulsions, sudden lights and darkness, terrify me with frost and fire such as no mortal has ever felt, with deafening din and prowling figures, make me howl and whine and crawl like a beast...'" No Nietzsche does not close his shutters, he knows that, "Almost everywhere it was madness which prepared the way for the new idea."1 Nietzsche knows that traversings through destruction and tragedy seem almost always embedded in the lives of exemplary individuals. He knows how the madman turns on his squeaky heals, to merge with another circle, always widening and furthering his departure.But he knows also of the dangers, the threats - madness, depression, addiction, anorexia, sado-masochism. The dangers which he himself, Vincent Van Gogh, Antonin Artaud, Jackson Pollack, Charles Baudelaire and William Burroughs, to name only a few, have had to struggle against, which has been as much their source of brilliance as a threat to it.The pertinent question then is, how to avoid an impending collapse? This is the question that all fervent bodies face, how to destroy the wall that confines and trammels their desire, without simultaneously falling into a black hole and a hole of self-destruction, that is no longer productive.
This is what confronts the central character in Werner Herzog's Woyzeck, what makes this character exceptional is his oblivious incomprehension of any thing to do with marriage, money, fatherhood and the law. It is his insensible indifference to these social codes that is at the core of his rebellion. He is forced to endure the ridicule, from those that enforce them, so he instead continually scurries away on a line of flight, into a vast space. But those that taunt him, push his escape out too far, it becomes cornered, and blocked on all sides, it cannot be maintained, and so it reaches its collapse.The fervent body, or as Deleuze and Guattari call it, "a full Body without Organs," is a body that is permeated with a deterritorializing force, a feverous and inflamed kind of desire, it is a cathartic body that utilises and engages with a very specific kind of intensified energy. Deleuze and Guattari describe this type of body in terms of individuals like Nietzsche, Artaud, Kafka and Van Gogh, but there are many different types of these bodies.Fervent bodies are also like the music-bodies of Jimi Hendrix, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Ian Curtis and Nick Cave, they are also the film-bodies like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Jan Svankmajer and Andrei Tarkovsky. The fervent body exists by its degrees of movement and rest, speed and slowness. But all this only exists at a later point, the fervent body must be formed, from a body that is stationary and immobile. The fervent body is a deterritorialized surface, it is a line of flight, but what is important is what this body encounters, what its line of flight always intercepts, for it reaches a kind of wall, which determines its success or failure.What is critical is whether the fervent body succeeds in smashing apart this wall, both traversing it and undermining it. The task is to smash this wall, to break through it, to upturn the barricades. Smashing through this wall engenders the collapse of subjectivity; the face is shattered, leaving no longer a rigid "face" defining and categorising the subject politically, historically, sexually, familiarly and aesthetically.
All these precepts become supple and fluid variables, unknown before, and unknown after. Smashing the wall engenders the collapse of the signifier; expression is no longer delimited by the rigidities of grammaticality, notation and signifiance. Intensities existing outside the wall engender spaces where the formations no longer abide by these imposed rigidities. The language system instead outsteps itself, it begins to stumble, and waver, the entire system gives way to allow movements of flux and deterritorialization, it becomes imbued by flows and continuums, and is no longer divided into discrete units of definition. The music-machine similarly overstrains itself, by reaching the limit that borders the outside, where it will confront intensities of silence, and brut noise. The image is no longer bounded by pictorial objectification, it moves into spaces outside; a minimalist space, a dada machine, a Pollack swirl. The artwork becomes no longer an objective representation but a frantic form, an abstraction that integrates disparate elements, joining and merging them together. The art work instead advances to a scream, a wail of despair, an accusation against the system.The fervent body is always the furtherest, the outermost, it will succeed if it breaks through the wall, otherwise it fails and turns into a breakdown, wallowing in self destruction, suicide and overdose. But the breakthrough and the breakdown are not necessary opposite, indeed they seem almost inseparable, almost indistinguishable. In any case venturing beyond this wall is no simple task, few men or women have ventured beyond this limit. To pass outside or beyond this wall demands a certain disembodiment, a becoming incorporeal, an abstract metamorphosis. Venturing to intensities beyond this limit necessitates and consequences a careful and prolonged process, risking self destruction. But there are still other ways of conceiving this barrier to our line of flight. Antonin Artaud conceives of this wall as "a huge malleable sheet in osmosis with all the rest of reality."2 Reverse osmosis is a process which effectively filters a liquid by passing it through a semi-permeable membrane, it is commonly used to separate salt from sea water. For Artaud, this wall is then a filter on reality, situated at the interface between the body and reality, that allows only the passage of specific segments of reality to pass through, and blocks the passage of other segments. This wall is simultaneously the skin, the bodies sensors and the logic motors. Antonin Artaud is a body-sieve, all that he does is multiply the number of his little holes, or similarly alter their size - allowing the passing through of that externality, that meta-reality which was previously blocked. What we must do is to meddle with our filters, find and connect up those flows more subtle and anomalous, smash our walls, and connect with the alterity.
Body arts convulsive engrossment in castration, crucifixion, sexual perversion, suicide, state oppression and mental illness has been a long and insistent attack against the current institutions of authority. Many of the these artistic events have aimed at exposing and outwardly enacting the crisis of the individual, subjected to exploitation and organised and oppressed by prevailing authorities.Their methods employ unremitting and shocking depictions of pain. Of many performances perhaps some of the most notorious include; Chris Burden's Shoot (1971), where the artist had himself shot through the left arm by a friend facing him from a short distance; Vito Acconci's "semen(al)" public masturbation in Seedbed (1972); the infamous Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who in 1969 fabricated a spectacular simulation of castration; Otto Muehl's scathing attacks against the debilitating and alienating sensibilities embodied in bourgeoisie social and sexual aesthetics; and the dionysian animal sacrifices performed by Hermann Nitsch.
Austrian born artist Gottfried Helnwein's work is also of exemplary value, beginning with bandage action events (documented by the artist appearing in cafe's and lying in the street with his "wounded" head and face bandaged).His work depicts physical injuries which are metaphors for far deeper existential, psychological and human tragedies. Medical injuries, facial deformities and abused children proliferate throughout his work evoking primary internal anxieties. The inhumane acts of violence (child abuse, war atrocities, state oppression) and frightening images of familial estrangement that are presented in his work, constitute events which are preferred forgotten, like the nazi era, or preferred left unspoken such as familial traumas like child abuse.Helnwein also conducts a probing analysis of the individual and the self through an abundance of self portraits, each obscured by hideous facial bandages, his facial muscles, lips and eyes are stretched apart, torturingly, by varied medical instruments, now made famous by the Rammstein covers. All his images in some way evoke associations with mutilation, anguish or internal alienation.The works (frequently paintings appearing remarkably like photographs), boldly put forward social unacceptabilities never before portrayed so lucidly and so confrontingly. The many intensities produced in the work are profoundly disturbing, the impressions - uncomfortably eerie, electrocuting the eyes with a rush of haunting spatiality.
The performance group Coum Transmissions, featuring members of Throbbing Gristle, brought into the art gallery the underground, in the same way that Warhol cinema had a decade earlier, but managed to once again challenge the previous subversions, with their explicit and confrontational approach to crime, prostitution, pornography and sado-masochism.Their performances seemed to draw straight out of the pages of a Marquis de Sade novel. Genesis gives a description of their performances, "Then I got a 10-inch nail and tried to swallow it, which made me vomit. Then I licked the vomit off the floor and Cosey helped me lick the vomit off the floor... And each day it got heavier, so that on Easter Sunday I was crucified on a wooden cross, whipped with 2 bullwhips, covered in human vomit and chicken wings and chicken legs... And then I urinated down Cosey's legs while she stuck a lighted candle up her vagina... Just ordinary everyday ways of avoiding the commercials on the television..."3The work is innovative and commendable for its intentional disruption of authority, especially censorship and aesthetics; its stretching of, or redefining of the enclosing limit, a limit which defines specific activities outside or beyond it, as pornographic or obscene; and the performance of acts exposed to public view (as opposed to private view) which might otherwise bring police arrest. These masochist bodies are also releasing the surging, bellowing flows of schizo desire, flows of urine, wax, vomit, dismembered flesh and corporeal asignifying expressions. These are the flows that potentially exceed the socius own degrees or limits and thus threaten the equilibriums established by the system.
Jill Scott's early San Francisco performances, Taped (1975), Boxed (1975), Tied (1976) and Strung (1976) demonstrate aspects of the human condition and perhaps form a specific female condition. In Taped Jill Scott's body was constrained in an elevated position against the vertical exterior of a city building, precariously secured against the wall by lengths of adhesive tape stretching across her back and limbs. Tied involved the artist being gruesomely tied to a telephone pole, by reams of cord encircling her body from foot to head. Strung was again similar, wherein her body was confined against the Golden Gate Bridge.These works are not bound within the gallery space and for this reason enable the confronting of a public audience who may not normally encounter such artistic practices. The performances express the bodies incarceration within the city's architecture, alienated to it and oppressed by it. The organic body becomes immured within the cities inorganic structures: fences, parking spaces, walls, power lines, freeways that criss-cross like shadows over the body.
The artist Stelarc has for some time been intensely involved in rearticulations of the body, and the discourses surrounding the bodies emerging takeover by machines. Stelarc's performances are frequently challenging, he describes one of his early experiences, "Leading up to the first suspension event I had done some sensory deprivation pieces that were demanding. I occupied a gallery for a week in Japan. I sewed my lips and eye lids shut with surgical needle and thread. I was tethered to the gallery wall with a pair of cables which connected to two hooks in the back of my body."4He is most renowned for his suspension events which entail the body being gorily suspended above ground by multiple cords connected to his naked body by hooks which penetrate beneath the skin. The raw, intense confrontation is a bodily transformation, seeking the disembodiment of subjectivity, to eject from the body and make blurry the distinctions between what is part of the body and what is not part. It entails the dismantling of the organism, "opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity..."5 The suspended body becomes a body without organs, obsolete and dysfunctional, the body is forced to plug into alterier realms. Stelarc experiences the body as raw, in it's most molecular form, as networks of veins, blood pressure and stretched cells.Stelarc is the frontiersman of the assimilation, hybridisation and connection of the body into the arrays of multiple and unfixed corporeal capacities facilitated by technological advances. The artist's previous ingenuity has involved sound amplifications of his body (muscle movements, bloodflow, heartbeat and brainwaves), the development of a robotic arm attached at his elbow, laser attachments to his eyes, and the filming of the interior of his stomach. With each machinic-attachment the body becomes further adaptable, extendable and mutable, merging with the tools and machinery, which become integral parts of the body.It can be deliberated that the invention of the tool, disengaged the body from any conventional biological evolution. The forklift, the diving suit, the horseman's stirrup all enable the body to engage with, perform and move within its environment, in ways that the uncoupled, untooled body itself cannot. Development thus becomes independent of biological evolution and the tool becomes an extension, and component of the body. Originally, evolution transformed the human bodies two forward limbs effectively from feet to hands, developing the bodies bipedalism, or two legged upright movement. This effectively freed up the two forward limbs to be used as tools, feelers and mechanisms of interaction. Stelarc's own performances appear to extrapolate from our present evolutionary plane into post-evolutionary planes. A way of speeding and tangling things up. His suspension events where the body effectively floats, may then be described as a-pedal, states of zero gravity. His third robotic arm events similarly represent a further artificial extrapolation of evolution, the development of further multiple limbs of interaction. The characteristic significance of the third arm is the way that the body becomes unbalanced and asymmetrical. Stelarc's artistic practices can easily be described as processes which deterritorialize the body; too many arms become wings, that draw lines of flight.The fixed organic bodies immersion and incorporation within expanding technological terrains, increasingly engenders the bodies obsolescence. The body, because of it's redundancy and ineffectiveness in comparison with machinic and robotic capabilities becomes substitued by machines. The body becomes idle. With the obsolescence of the body, the subjectivity of the individual is increasingly disengaged and moved to places outside the physicalities of the organic body. The "I" becomes uncontained by the body, separated from it. A still further consequence of the obsolescence of the body is an apparent imploding of the two poles of masculinity and femininity.The technology-machine which engenders the obsolete body and the disembodiment of subjectivity, arises from outside the state apparatus and is continually reabsorbed and appropriated into the state, to neutralise its deterritorializing force. If the technology-machine remains external to the socius, it threatens to destabilise the system as a whole. A consequence of this effect, was the engendering of a technology race, which seeks to avoid the threat of superior technological advancement arising in a rival, which would threaten and potentially disrupt a socius's existing coagulations of power. Technology is therefore not generically a component of the state used against its citizens, as is commonly thought. It instead originates from outside and against the state. It is only found within the state apparatus, as a result of its appropriation and absorption. The deterritorializing effects of the technology-machine; relinquishing of the states absolute need for workers, surplus production and mass information and cultural exchange are then always reterritorialized through levels of bureaucracy, demands for full employment, internet regulation, monopolisation and regulation of the means of information exchange. The state is therefore forced to appropriate, and reterritorialize the technology machine, to minimise its propensity to disruption. We will not position technology onto an apocalypse/utopia styled dichotomy, technology is neither generically oppressive nor liberating, nor is it generically masculine, it is only under specific regimes and uses that it can become either. What is paramount is enabling individual manipulation and reconfiguring of its modes of production, engagement and activation. To elicit its capacities for multiplicity and to configure its deterritorializing effects in modes counter to the state.Mike Parr is another performance artist who has endured a turbulent trajectory, winding amidst pathways of the subconscious, in pursuit of a forever elusive self. For an artist with a congenitally unformed arm, his most representative performance has to be his Cathartic Action: Social Gestus No.5 (1977). In this performance the artist sitting at a table, raised a meat cleaver in one hand and hacked off an arm-like prosthetic attached at his shoulder. The dismembered arm spewed forth blood and flesh, causing a traumatic response in the audience. The performance sought to invoke a fragmenting of the body, a dissociative state similar to how the body exists before it is conditioned and manipulated into a structured and cohesive whole by authority. Other performances involving members of his own family, especially his father, entailed the decapitation of roosters in the performance space, which both alluded to Mike Parr's upbringing on an isolated poultry farm, and again confronted symbolically, anxieties of castration associated with the absence of his arm. The acts of butchery elicited the splattering of the blood, entrails and feathers of the birds. In this way the performance confronted the tensions and oppressions located within the family structure, and sought to viciously release and therefore disrupt the patriarchal structures. His performance piece, The emetics: primary vomit. I am sick of art (red, yellow and blue) (1977) engaged the artist first consuming coloured food dye and then disgorging the contents of his stomach in the performance space. It characterises the artists distaste of dominant aesthetic values and artistic codes. The vomitory act seeks the release of unobstructed flows, that invade the cleansed, quiet and cordial spaces of the gallery. The event muddles the flows; the signifying enunciation is replaced with an outpouring of vomit; he egests a foul vomit of words, and thus empties and voids himself. The enunciation becomes the gesticulatory motions of an anorexic, "to speak" and "to eat" are merged and no longer segregated, both at once. To speak with your mouth full!Mike Parr is keenly perceptive of how the body is socialised and organised into a form. Through his Self Portrait Project,6 he attempts to counter the dominance of the face over the body. The portraits taking after the automatistic drawings of Antonin Artaud, scatter the embodied memory, disgorging it onto the page and dissociating its traces, stammering all the traces of reflection. The present is always disassembled by an absence of memory, the self always merging in another direction, fragmenting and eddying the contours of the formation. It is evident that the face as socially constructed dominates the body, this is most exemplified in the media and advertising where the mask dominates the body like a commanding despot forming a paranoiac and despotic relationship with the remaining torso, limbs, organs and genitalia. This remainder is exiled, concealed behind clothing, plasticised and nullified against the omnipotent facial mask. What is left is the body reduced to a face, the facial mask. Mike Parr counters all of this by developing a body with faces, a plurality of unrecognisable and unperceived faces. He submerges everything in a mire of heavy blackened streaks, tremulous smudges and abrasive outlines. The portrait becomes a facial-surface, a face merging with the landscape, a face obscured and unreachable, a face that is a black monochromatic void. There is no origin connected to this face, it is the dissolution of the self, the self without origin, that is unmappable and imperceptible. He stammers everything producing not images of pictorial clarity and exactness, but inundating them with splutters, upheavals and flurries.
In Deleuzian/Guattarian terms the convulsive, scarifying, burning and masochistic nature of these various artistic probings can then be read as a process of scribbling over and decoding the inscriptions that are impressed by social institutions onto the body and into our minds. Such work implies that the inscriptions cannot be simply and painlessly erased, implying the tattoo nature and permanence of the inks. Nor can one succeed by over-inscribing the institutionalised inscriptions with textual and signifying codes (as opposed to asignifying scribbles) as this would result in the artists themselves still remaining trapped and entangled within orthodox slogans, leaving the body still bounded and composed of singularities and bi-linearities. The abject and purgative directions of these artists are then justified due to their engendering of a body composed of continuum's, of flows and intensities, or what Deleuze and Guattari term the Body without Organs, the organism without parts. This Body without Organs, is understood as a surface or plane upon which organs, machines, limbs, part(ial) objects and so forth, interconnect and assemble in a multiplicity of formations and regimes. Both fascist and anti-fascist or similarly paranoiac and schizophrenic Bodies without Organs are possible. But what differentiates the fascist from the anti-fascist or similarly the paranoiac from the schizophrenic Body without Organs is the manner and degree in which the regime or assemblage is capable of multiple interconnections; of engendering multiple and continuous conjunctions and disjunctions, connections and reconnections; of effecting multiple arrangements and continuous rearrangements between the organs, machines, objects and adjacent planes. It is the fascist body that is incapable of multiple connections, it is a sterile and unproductive body: "no mouth, no tongue, no teeth, no anus". The fascist rejects the organs in the same manner as the priest, while the schizo body attracts the organs, moulding them over his/her surface, interchanging them and reforming them. Further differences unravel, the Body without Organs of the fascist is clothed, differing from the schizo body which is naked. On this point, the said "nakedness" of the schizo body should not be interpreted as affiliated to the plasticised images typical of pornography, such images are in various senses still clothed. The fascist body remains repulsed at its corporeality, its physicality and especially its genitalia. The fascist remains horrified at the bodies capacities and functions: defecation, urination, bleeding, ejaculation, breast feeding, birth and menstruation. See for example the quaint inversion of the aesthetics and mannerisms associated with the seemingly opposite bodily functions of defecation and ingestion in Luis Bunuel's, Phantom of Liberty.The Body without Organs that is developed, even if ephemerally, through these artistic pursuits is one that is capable of forming a multiplicity of connections. Deleuze and Guattari have delineated various revolutionary pathways, or "becomings" for cultivating the schizo Body without Organs, including; becoming woman, becoming child, becoming animal... and becoming imperceptible. Becomings are methods for engendering the abstract metamorphisis of the body. In Franz Kafka's The Transformation the body of Gregor Samsa awakes one morning from troubled dreams to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. Gregor is certainly one such body, a Body without Organs having engendered a veritable becoming animal. Einstürzende Neubauten's Zum Tier Machen (Changing to animal) is a similar instance of a becoming animal. One might even say that the animated objects in the films of the Czechoslovakian filmmaker, Jan Svankmajer demonstrate so many examples of becomings. Each object "comes to life", developing an alterity through miraculous becomings that cumulate into a chimerical assemblage or Body without Organs.
"For you can tie me up if you wish,but there is nothing more useless than an organ.When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered himfrom all his automatisms and restored him to his true freedom.Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side outlike in the frenzy of dance hallsand his wrong side out will be his real place."- Antonin Artaud
The becomings of the Body without Organs are revolutionary since they are always dominated by dismantlings of signifiance (grammaticality and the regime of signs), disassemblings of subjectification (the self, memory and consciousness), and deterritorialization of the body. While the Body without Organs has in part its origins with Antonin Artaud's, To Have Done with the Judgement of God, a text by William Burroughs is perhaps most demonstrative, "but no organ is constant as regards either function or position... sex organs sprout anywhere... rectums open, defecate and close... the entire organism changes colour and consistency in split second adjustments... "7 But it should be noted as it is in Deleuze and Guattari's writing that like the masochist, the paranoiac and the hypochondriac, the drug addict forms what is called an emptied or fascist Body without Organs. This type of Body without Organs is unable to connect in a multiplicity of combinations, it is empty rather that full. The junky develops the experimental Body without Organs which is "botched", in this instance the body falters in the attempt to effect a full body populated by multiplicities. What remains is a fascistic and empty Body without Organs. The junky's body is instead reduced to a single organ - the vein. The masochist uses suffering to force a Body without Organs into existence, a body that is consequently incapable of accommodating anything other than the sole intensities and waves characteristic of pain, and for this reason is also, likewise botched. The full Body without Organs does not exist unless it productions are multiplical.The artist navigates through the unexplored plateaus and planes of the Body without Organs forming full Bodies without Organs, but also at times, forming botched Bodies without Organs. The task is phenomenally difficult, the map, the inclination is always fluctuating, continuously assembling into new unpredictable anamorphic formations. It is in this way that I believe the schizo artist can inadvertently fall into botched Bodies without Organs, but at other times it appears that the artist deliberately enters drugged or masochistic bodies, ephemerally with various intentions; to experiment, to examine potentials of passing onto still other plateaus, to use it as an intermediate for projecting oneself onto a full Body without Organs, to gain from one plateau experience or knowledge that can be of benefit in another. Intermittent fallings into botched Bodies without Organs may even be unavoidable.It is a problem which Deleuze and Guattari are very much aware of, "It is a struggle and as such is never sufficiently clear. How can we fabricate a BwO [Body without Organs] for ourselves without its being the cancerous BwO of a fascist inside us, or the empty BwO of a drug addict, paranoiac, or hyperchondriac? How can we tell the three bodies apart? Artaud was constantly grappling with this problem"8. What remains is a degree of uncertainty and confusion of how to discern the full Body without Organs from its empty doubles. One may yet be able to avoid emptying and botching the productions of the Body without Organs, by simply maintaining ephemeral and perpetually transitory movements. So long as what is produced remains multiplical then the Body without Organs has not been botched. But it is apparent that the Body without Organs is nearly always threatened by this cancerous collapse, that its existence remains perpetually unstable, it appears to be always warding off its own collapse. "We have to move quickly, we mustn't linger on something that might bog us down",9 like a death-fixation, a drug dependence, sadism, phallocentrism. Deleuze and Guattari's position is however not a value laden strategy, the Body without Organs will traverse and encounter all of the these disparate forms, what is important is that it will avoid always being drug addicted, or always masochistic, or always self-destructive. The Body without Organs is always moving on a line of flight that continually re-groups and assimilates diverse features.The process of becoming is described as an individuated undertaking, it is a solitary task, but it is one that inevitably leads to the collective, to the crowd. On this matter, Deleuze describes the solitude or reclusivness of Jean-Luc Godard as "an extraordinarily populous solitude"10. This populousness is manifested in the diversity of components that enter each of his films; literature, film history, art, documentary, music, political theories - all broken and blurred within interspersed clusters.It must also be affirmed that the formation of the Body without Organs in no way concerns itself with biological evolution. The Body without Organs is not defined by any physicality, it is defined conceptually; by modes of engagement and degrees of multiplicity. The body without Organs and its construction, implies actions that are here and now, possibilities that always exist in the present.The wall and filter that I spoke of previously are inextricably linked to the formation of the Body without Organs. In order to traverse onto or reach this Body without Organs, one must first shatter the barricading wall. You will never find your Body without Organs unless you dismantle the wall, or similarly meddle with your filter. Vincent Van Gogh is certainly one of the dissociated individual who has run up against this wall, Artaud another. The crucial question is how does one destroy this wall, without plummeting into despair? How does one deterritorialize without collapsing into a cancerous inertness. Deleuze and Guattari assert that one cannot succeed in bursting through this wall by violently impacting against its surface. A too sudden deterritorialization can be fatal, even suicidal, a too sudden deterritorialization will also botch the Body without Organs. They provide the advice of Vincent Van Gogh, "How does one get through this wall, for it is useless to hit it hard, it has to be undermined and penetrated with a file, slowly and with patience, as I see it"11. Vincent Van Gogh's dejected life, cumulating in his own tragic ending only points out that there are no certainties and no assured methods. Antonin Artaud's attempt is also similar, an opium addict for most of his life and an eventual death in an asylum at Ivry outside Paris. The task of schizophrenization as described by Deleuze and Guattari certainly proceeds by way of destruction, the task necessitates the destruction of the molar assemblages, the structures and organisations of power, both within and outside the body. But it is however certain that there are imminent dangers, risks and consequential cautions that must be taken - there is always the risk of too much damage, achieved too quickly, leaving only a cancerous, emptied body.Deleuze/Guattari's explanation of the Body without Organs revels that it is not at all organless but forms a very distinct relationship to the biological organism. The Body without Organs remains opposed to territorialized formations of the body, fixed stable structures that are typically binary as opposed to the multiplical connections privileged by the Body without Organs. The Body without Organs "is not at all the opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organisation of the organs called the organism...[what is opposed is] the organism, the organic organisation of the organs."12 For this, the Body without Organs attracts and arranges all the organs; eyes, tails, ani, wings... deterritorializing them; attracting and connecting, releasing and searching. What is formed and produced through the Body without Organs becomings is no less real because it is unreal, or rather it is real to the individual as the real itself. Becomings are perfectly real even if what one becomes is not.What is then the outcome, what is asked of us? Make for yourself a Body without Organs, find your Body without Organs. "Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment..."13
Robert Lort
Notes1. Hollingdale, R J (ed and Trans) referencing Nietzsche's "Daybreak": 14 in A Nietzsche Reader Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1977, pp. 88-902. Antonin Artaud, Artaud Anthology, ed. Jack Hirschman, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1965, p. 333. Throbbing Gristle interviewed by Re/Search, "Throbbing Gristle," Re/Search Industrial Culture Handbook, issue #6/7, San Francisco, 1983, p. 174. Stelarc Interviewed by Martin Thomas: "Just Beaut to Have Three Hands," Continuum, Electronic Arts in Australia, Vol 8, No.1, Ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg, Perth, 1994, p. 3835. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 1606. Graham Coulter-Smith and Jane Magon, "Mike Parr's Self Portraits: Unma(s)king the self" in Eyeline #5, Brisbane, p. 227. William Burroughs Naked Lunch, Hammersmith London, Paladin, 1992, p. 22 or New York, Grove Press, 1966, p. 8, quoted by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia p. 1538. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia p. 1639. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, Sydney, Power Publications, 1995, p. 8410. Gilles Deleuze, "Three Questions About "Six Fois Deux,"" in Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy (Eds), Jean-Luc Godard, Son + Image 1974-1991, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1992, p. 3511. Vincent Van Gogh, "Letter of September 8, 1888", cited in Antonin Artaud, Artaud Anthology, ed. Jack Hirschman, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1965, p. 150, and quoted by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia p. 136.12. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 15813. ibid p. 161Copyright © 2000 Robert Lort. All rights reserved------------------------------------------------------------------------Published by Azimutehttp://home.pacific.net.au/~robertl/azimute.html