What is a body without organs?

I had an initial feeling of what a body without organs is when I read that section of Artaud’s radio play which reads:

When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.

They you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.

I felt that the body without organs was related to a state of no desire.

It is similar to the Buddhist idea that desire and ignorance are at the root of all suffering.

So the body without organs is the body without desire. Without organs/desire we are free of our automatic reactions e.g. buy a car, be rich, be beautiful…

And then to be without organs/desire, you would be truly free. Because capital produces desire, to be free of desire is to be no longer subject to capital.

But I guess I got it wrong.

Deleuze and Guattari understand the body without organs in a different way.

Old faithful wikipedia puts it this way:

But every “actual” body also has a “virtual” dimension, a vast reservoir of potential traits, connections, affects, movements, etc. This collection of potentials is what Deleuze calls the BwO. To “make oneself a body without organs,” then, is to actively experiment with oneself to draw out and activate these virtual potentials. These potentials are mostly activated (or “actualized”) through conjunctions with other bodies (or BwOs) that Deleuze calls “becomings.”

A body without organs is not then a utopia, a destination, an ultimate way of being (as in Buddhist enlightenment).

A body without organs is a set of practices, everchanging, unformed, never completely knowable. It is like autopoeisis, differentiated from structure, structure that “puts into play a concept of totalisation…It is occupied by inputs and outputs whose purpose is to make the structure function according to a principle of eternal return.” (Guattari, Machinic heterogenesis p.37).

Identifying a body without organs as such does not of itself tell us anything though.

Again from wikipedia,

There are 3 kinds of bodies without organs:

• empty
• full
• cancerous

EMPTY: “completely de-organ-ized; all flows pass through it freely, with no stopping, and no directing. Even though any form of desire can be produced on it, the empty BwO is non-productive.”

FULL: “it is productive, but not petrified in its organ-ization.”

CANCEROUS: “caught in a pattern of endless reproduction of the self-same pattern”

The desire-less body without organs I described earlier. If it was possible in the first place, it would be best described as an empty body without organs.

The buffyverse might be an example of the full body without organs – the intersection of fan culture with the Buffy canon an example of how Buffy is not petrified in its organisation.

Capitalism, the ultimate body without organs is like a cancerous BwO. It can’t die, it is never knowable but it is endlessly reproducing.