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rax"Desire flows through an endless, recursive circuit of desiring-machines. Desire produces reality." (188) Deleuze later said it was a mistake to talk about the id, and that everything was a machine, various parts of the body. He even talked about things having processors, which I find really interesting, because if there's a processor then does everything break down to logic gates? I'm also left wondering about whether or not the circuits of desire operate without resistance, whether these recursive circuits are lossless. Lodder suggests (mostly summarizing D&G here, I think) that we are all caught up in the apparatus of desire and "our biological specificity facilitiates the oppresive potential of oppressive types of desiring production." (189) That is, the way we are organized (and thus organ-ized into a body with organs) lends itself naturally to suffering.
The idea of rearranging the body in order to counter this potential flows very naturally for me. The BwO remains "within the confines of the production circuit" but "disrupts the authority of desire." (189) When I think about it this way --- and I can't help but think about a literal circuit --- I'm both skeptical and interested in the idea of full de-organ-ization. If the body is a set of gates that manage the flow of desire, altering that set of gates could cause desire to move in different ways, and possibly rhizome-ize the circuit by causing desire to flow in directions not previously part of the circuit. (This circuit thing is basically the way I understood this whole article; I'm working on some diagrams that I will bring to class and scan and make available at some point. Unless I go really crazy and make them in OmniGraffle.
The autopsy sort of creates a body without organs, but there's no reconstruction --- it's just death and that's it. "There needs to be a remaking following the dismantling," (190) Lodder says, and I agree. He gives the example of "Andrew," who has a large number of piercings, scarifications, and tattoos --- using the technologies of the autopsy to create a reconfigured body that still lives. So is this how you create a body without organs? [1]
Deleuze offers, potentially, a type of freedom that is not tied to subjectivity. (Page 192 explains this better than I can without just copy-typing page 192.) People are not necessarily free to engage in body modification in a Foucauldian sense, but perhaps we are in "an existentialist sense" a la de Beauvoir? (193) That is, we have the "essential capacity for self-determination" and have "infinite potentials for becomings." (194)
The body can offer a site for resistance to power. Lodder, reading Deleuze, says: "The imposition of organization, subjectivity, and signification on the body is at the heart of desiring-production's continued, recursive hegemonic influence, and the BwO's principle power comes from its antagonism to these three quite specific demands." (196) This is the plane of consistency --- which I would read as replacing a series of logical gates, an organized body, with a simple wire. (I'd argue that the junkie's empty BwO replaces the series of logical gates with someplace that makes desire just ground out and not flow at all --- also a subversive act in some sense but not opening up new lines of flight, just collapsing extant patterns.)
So, one of the things I'm a little unsure about here is whether or not the modified body resists signification. Lodder does talk about "the modified body's inability or unwillingness to articulate itself fully," (199) but I think there's also reterritorialization that occurs with any given body modification in order for the body-modified to continue to operate in society as part of the system of desiring machines. However this is still potentially good along Deleuzo-Guattarian lines, as in my reading at least, the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization is not a zero sum game. He turns to Sullivan to explain how the tattooed body resists signification, and reminds us that the BwO "must redeploy significance to its own ends." (200) So what about subjectivity? Lorber suggests the practice of flesh-hook suspension. (I'd actually really like to read this against the character who engages in this practice in Chris Abani's The Virgin Of Flames, literature person that I am, but I don't have time to go there right now.) I can think of other practices, particularly in an S/M context, that could mirror this (although most are not so bodily disruptive).
He comes to my argument against Heidegger, sort of, on page 203 --- "in a capitalist society that uses the image of the tattooed body to sell designer perfume, [is] body modification itself ... simply another desiring-machine? Is the BwO wholly unobtainable precisely because to seek to obtain it would involve complicity in the desiring-production assemblage?"
The junkie has a "taut, resistant surface" (203) which uses the language of electricity --- resistant --- in the way I've been rethinking this. But is there potential for the body modified to become the cancerous BwO? Yes, Lodder says, but one can also resist that impulse, and should. It should "gleefully redirect, scatter, and pollute" the flows of "the structural framework of desiring-production." (205)
[0] Personally I feel that they provide some reasonable examples, although I see the BwO as something to be approached asymptotically and not achieved, anyway.
[1] He argues that Deleuze argues that masochism is useless and would have to be reclaimed. That wasn't my reading of Deleuze. Maybe I was being too optimistic?