A peacebone got found in the dinosaur wing. I’ve been jumping all over but my views are slowly shrinking. I was a jugular vein in a juggler’s girl. I was supposedly leaking the most interesting colors. While half of my fingers are dipped in the sand. You progress in letters but you’re used to cooking broccoli. The other side of take out is mildew on rice and an obsession with the past is like a dead fly. And just a few things are related to the ‘old times.’ And then we did believe in magic and we did die. It’s not my words that you should follow it’s your insides. You’re just an inside. Adjust your insides. You’re just an inside.
http://www.myspace.com/animalcollectivetheband — “Peacebone”
(cf. http://www.myspace.com/yeasayer — “2080.” “Sunrise” is also good.)
And From a Bus
I am going to Hangleton. The cathedral stops outside. In the stained glass, a bowed head takes communion. A monk’s head. He is in heaven already, here and hereafter, a monk in his renunciation has gone to heaven.
I am back in the centre. It is an affront to be returned here. I am going to Hangleton, having just been to Hollingbury. I am fleeing the familiar centre, familiarity itself.
The way is along George Street. Is this Dublin or Hove. Admittedly Hove, a cause preceding the effect, patria before colony. The similarity exacted, precise and terrible. There are more women in shawls here. Fashion only progresses in the patria.
The day is too greying. Were I a monk, I would not be affected. A monk removed of covering can heat the temperature of his skin by sheer impulse of the will. A monk wears one robe of one color. A monk belongs to no legion, bears no coat of arms in emblem of no nation.
Because it is autumn, leaves. Yellow one-acts piled at the divide along. Strollers rustle over underneath. Around the cathedral, the shedding oaks. The lawn raked and pruned. The monk grins at a fallen pile, cutting out a letter.
—-
Look at that! Look there! A fresh litter at the bottom of the square. A centurion, a hundred ovaline leaves dragging a spiral downward. The willing casualties carried off by morbid enjoyment to their next home in the earth. Why, it is the coronation of a queen! It is the messenger arrived at Marathon! It is the recurrent maiden in the blossom of fairest youth, treasure of Phoenicia and muse to rhapsody’s song– and she events herself unnoticed, whisked through blindly in the commotion of this cursory, modern city.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aos0hnwiHt8
The universe is trying to sell me something.
November 12th, 2007 | #
what do you mean
November 13th, 2007 | #
I wrote this poem today. The first five stanzas, I think, are fine, but the last needs to be rewritten, reimagined, or removed. Solutions?
note: this is written about D.P. Schreber; ask me if you have questions. I can explain.
“The Body without Organs”
the body itself
demechanized
what is left
(a shoe
a bellybutton
eyelids and adenoids)
for use?
The stars
The past, too
The one
preceding
always
precedes still
The moon visits
as God,
the body within
the soul
bellows
Outside
grow breasts
that hold no milk
An unironic ray
touches the floor
the body
enjoys
Actually, I just changed the last line to ‘enjoys’ from ‘extends / in enjoyment.’ I think it’s better now. (Though it still misses the revelation Schreber has when God qua moonbeam passes through the window and, presumably, enters his asshole.) But I’d welcome anyone to rewrite this, though I understand that only Jed has even 50% of a clue of what I’m referring to, since all of it– especially the last three stanzas– allude directly to Schreber’s memoirs. If I had them with me, I’d post the section I’m alluding to.
November 13th, 2007 | #
the body without organs never fails to turn me on a little bit. surfaces, bellybuttons that never sucked sustanance from any mother. that said, i have a longstanding fear that I’m going to take a girl into my bed only to find out that they don’t have a bellybutton! what utter fear!
I once knew a girl with a bellybutton piercing. in order for her bellybutton to look good to herself, it had to be attached to a MACHINE! so i attached myself to it.
November 17th, 2007 | #
I’m sick of hearing about the body without organs. It really is a fruitless image to say something is “without.” I have a body with organs, I can hear them right now, they are rustling, squeezing, turning the shit around and around, like a carousel! They love the shit I give them, I feed them and they thank me with their piggish grunts. Thank you, we are hungry! Please substitute a new phrase every time you want to say a body without organs.
Here is something I wrote:
You can’t stop smelling yourself but
even if you could you wouldn’t.
Old cologne, such as when these rotten peaches floated
in a grassy tide. You can’t stop
smelling yourself but even if you could you wouldn’t.
And A smile A hunger A daughter A banker A onion A pastel A comfort A transient A earmark A rescue A cashew A vanguard A porno A shellac A tuber A olive A zero A vapour A inkwell A sensor A mitten A blackbird A ransom A shiner A junker A melon A mountain A candy A pencil A lighter A uncle A fencer A western A bobble A potsherd A gourmand A driveshaft A upshot A berry A zinger A seawall. You couldn’t, but it’s like
when those peaches you dropped
them into the tide
it was grassy.
And you can’t smell them but you wouldn’t if you could. They smelled strongly, as of Old cologne.
November 17th, 2007 | #
A penis without a middle
A fruitbar without a bloodbrain
A sumtotal without veracity
A popsicle without sickles
A button without pressure
A xylophone without silence
An anger without justifications
A follicle without lice
An ice cream without flavors
A birdbath without soap
A Kilimanjaro without snows
A truckstop without breakfast
November 17th, 2007 | #
Sausage inside intenstinal lining
squirts hot juice.
batcar inside batcave
suffocates Batman with monoxide
white man inside Africa
Must I say it?
yes, for me:
organs inside bodies.
Hari-Kari on the 16th Century Stage:
see: Antony and Cleopatra
Titus andronicus
etc.
and all those other plays that they don’t let us read in school because they weren’t written by Shakespeare.
(being inside is only the beginning of the end.)
November 18th, 2007 | #
I wanted to express the following in poem format, but couldn’t come up with anything off the cuff, so I am just going to wing it before it evaporates entirely.
After making that comment above about the body without organs, I had this irksome feeling that perhaps the hangover I had been nursing when making the post had betrayed my better judgment, and I had indeed gotten it all wrong. I’ve never read Anti-Oedipus of course, and in my utter ignorance the body without organs has always annoyed me as it seemed to be a phrase of poetic gloss on a concept ill-conceived and vague; it is a problem I have always had with Deleuze, to be honest… For someone who refuses to put a cap on his concepts, he certainly seems to enjoy throwing around the catch phrases. In any case, the Body without Organs always conjured images of personal identity and problems of inexistence. And I never liked that because it made me think about the soul or some immaterial essence along those lines. This of course was as stupid as it was unfounded. What is ironic, however, was that I compared in my head the Body without Organs to Artaud’s physical being and absolute hatred for the spirit (see poem “Shit to the Spirit”). Then I decided to look it all up online, and I immediately found that the body without organs is actually a quote from a radio play by Artaud, “To Be Done With The Judgment of God”:
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape
off that animalcule that itches him mortally,
god,
and with god
his 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 him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.
Then 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 had indeed gotten it wrong. Or did I? Sometimes when I read Artaud I find myself fighting to agree with him, debasing myself for not having done so all along. Anyway it really takes a lot of insomnia and drugs to even come close to where he’s at. I’m unsatisfied and uninspired with this comment so I will squeeze it off now. But before I do, I just wanted to mention something about how I had originally thought the organs were trapped by a body (and I identified with the organs). Now I think I see that Deleuze means the body is trapped by the organs or something along those lines. Interesting to be imprisoned by the internal, whatever that means.
November 21st, 2007 | #
Oh yeah and here’s a poem I found while cleaning out my computer:
And when things get dark
and the colors leave or do they
meld to mirrorsheen grey
why is that the time, why
do we feel ourselves so, feel
ourselves so, so
we feel ourselves
pardoned, excused, alleviated
and imprisoned.
November 21st, 2007 | #
If you can get through it, there’s an argument here that indicates what the body without organs is meant to represent. I’m sorry I can’t explain it well enough myself, but as it always is with this sort of material, it’s difficult to say anything about the theory without adopting its language. Might as well let D. explain it himself:
There is only one kind of production, the production of the real. And doubtless we can express this identity in two different ways, even though these two ways together constitute the autoproduction of the unconscious as a cycle. We can say that social production, under determinate conditions, derives primarily from desiring-production: which is to say that Homo natura comes first. But we must also say, more accurately, that desiring-production is first and foremost social in nature, and tends to free itself only at the end: which is to say that Homo historia comes first. The body without organs is not an original primordial entity that later projects itself into different sorts of socius, as though it were a raving paranoiac, the chieftain of the primitive horde, who was initially responsible for social organization. The social machine or socius may be the body of the Earth, the body of the Despot, the body of Money. It is never a projection, however, of the body without organs. On the contrary: the body without organs is the ultimate residuum of a deterritorialized socius. The prime function incumbent upon the socius, has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated. When the primitive territorial machine proved inadequate to the task, the despotic machine set up a kind of overcoding system. But the capitalist machine, insofar as it was built on the ruins of a despotic State more or less far removed in time, finds itself in a totally new situation: it is faced with the task of decoding and deterritorializing the flows. Capitalism does not confront this situation from the outside, since it experiences it as the very fabric of its existence, as both its primary determinant and its fundamental raw material, its form and its function, and deliberately perpetuates it, in all its violence, with all the powers at its command. Its sovereign production and repression can be achieved in no other way. Capitalism is in fact born of the encounter of two sorts of flows: the decoded flows of labor in the form of the “free worker.” Hence, unlike previous social machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field. By substituting money for the very notion of a code, it has created an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius. Capitalism tends toward a threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a deterritorialized field. Is it correct to say that in this sense schizophrenia is the product of the capitalist machine, as manic-depression and paranoia are the product of the despotic machine, and hysteria the product of the territorial machine?
A couple things. First, I think you’ve caught me in a good way — I should not have used the term as the title. If I hadn’t, you might have liked the poem. What if I called it The Popsicle without Sickles? Every term you listed was a perfect substitute. But maybe that’s the whole point of a without. Every ‘without’-pairing is, through this relation of ‘without-ness’, analogous to every other. And then there’s the ways in which ‘body without organs’ conveys a certain calibration of moral and revolutionary values: Berlin without a wall. Dollar without bills. Labor without an overlord. Breasts without mammaries. Ghosts without incorporeality (ghosts with bodies). Signifiers without signified.
Hilda Doolittle, aka H.D., a 20th century modernist, once lover of Pound and twice of Lawrence, writes in Asphodel, in a description of the roughly autobiographical protagonist ‘Hermione’:
She was caught and the recurrent symptoms made her realize that she was not so neatly a painted box, a neat coffin for its keeping. She was being disorganized as the parchment-like plain substance of the germ that holds the butterfly becomes fluid, inchoate, as the very tight bud of her germination becomes inchoate, frog-shaped small greedy domineering monster. The thing within her made her one with frogs, with eels. She was animal, reptile.
I like the idea of ‘being-disorganized.’ As in dis-organ-ized. What is it not to have organs? One doesn’t just regurgitate one’s innards. Schreber still shits. In fact, the organs don’t go anywhere. They’re still there, little desiring-machines in the abdomen, under the cranium, hanging at the crotch… just, the process of organization has somehow ceased; the mobilization, locomotion, the codification of organs within a system that acts to arrange, litanize, regularize, and mechanize scrambled in its process. Is this still ‘not putting a cap’ on a concept…? Talking around the subject too much?
“The body without organs and the organs-partial objects are opposed conjointly to the organism.
The body without organs is in fact produced as a whole, but alongside parts — a whole that does not unify or totalize them, but that is added to them like a new, really distinct part.”
It is precisely imprisonment by the internal, as you said at one point. By a stupid comparison: we think of American influence in the process of ‘globalization’ as a sort of cultural subversion — the appearance of well known American corporations and products changing values and reforming upon local convention by their very presence… this same process occurs within every individual, that is, the process is never anything except personal. All of these enormous terms — ‘mechanization,’ ‘globalization,’ ‘Californiacation,’ ‘bureacratization,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘mobilization,’ ‘organization’ — are exacted upon, by, within, and through subjects. We might hang on this ‘within’: it helps to understand the importance of the ‘without’ First, to clarify what is meant in use of the term ’subject’:
“The third type of interruption or break characteristic of the desiring-machine is the residual break or residuum, which produces a subject alongside the machine, functioning as a part adjacent to the machine.”
The subject is an alongside. It’s not a without; not a lack. I think this is what you disliked in my implications, that I was glorifying a sort of sublimated, accepted lack? No, the subject occurs next to the machines, and nothing in the body is lacking: the ‘machines,’ (I’m sorry, I know it’s such an annoying metaphor; maybe it worked better in French) the organs that intake and expunge, connecting into the flows of consumption, production, expulsion, simply do what they do, what they were and always have been meant to do. The subject is produced as a residuum alongside these organs. When you lose the one, you lose the other. Not that this is necessarily a good thing. Just a thing that happens. But it’s interesting how the subject is like the body without organs: in the long passage above, D. writes “the body without organs is the ultimate residuum of a deterritorialized socius.” I started writing this comment days ago, and it’s time to end it, though I didn’t make any particular point. Thanks for talking this out with me though.
November 25th, 2007 | #
Thanks for that. it needed to be done. Where was the first passage from D from?
Although they refuse to define concepts, I found a “BwO Is” statement hidden in A Thousand Plateaus:
“The body without organs is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and also signification and a subject—occur” (A Thousand Plateaus 159).
November 26th, 2007 | #
32-3 anti oedipus
sturgeon, i apolgize for our unabashed idolatry. just know it isn’t our fault.
November 26th, 2007 | #
I’m done with Deleuze. Two more chapters of proofreading, and I’ll be done with it. The thesis is almost ready to be Flung into Obscurity. as long as we also stay away from Foucault.
November 27th, 2007 | #
I’m taking a class on him next term
November 27th, 2007 | #
foucey, that is
November 27th, 2007 | #
Wow, that was quite an intense read. Maybe that’s the trouble I have with Deleuze - he’s too goddamn intelligent. I’ll be interested in what you have to say about Foucault. It’s been interesting coming at Deleuze from Foucault and not vice-versa. In all honesty, I kind of wish I had taken a class on Deleuze first. In Foucault, there is only the faintest glimmer of a subject - which, I suppose, is what baffles me about D. In the way that I’ve been introduced to him, he seems to add the lyric to Foucault’s epic.
Anyway, what’s interesting are the commonalities I’m seeing between the quote you posted, and what I read from Baudrillard’s “Symbolic Exchange and Death” when I was writing about Robert Bresson (by the way, saw I’m Not There tonight, it was great, I highly recommend it - plus Todd Haynes: MCM grad). SE&D came out 1976, and was obviously influenced by the failure of the ‘68 protests. It’s all about the the constant drive of capitalism towards its recodification - and how the only system apart from that is the system of immediate Death (as opposed to deferred death). I remember he likened it to “the Saussure of the Anagrams” as opposed to the Saussure of semiotics; and the Freud of the death drive, even as opposed to Freud himself.
In that essay I wrote about Bresson, I quoted from an article of Deleuze concerning the “any-space-whatever” in film. Basically I argued that the any-space-whatever was a silent, but real space, if that makes sense. Like an animal noise - something that does not signify, but is real, and adjacent to signification. It’s very interesting now to think of that in terms of the Body without Organs.
November 28th, 2007 | #
Some NJ music:
http://www.myspace.com/funmachine
I think it’s more Deleuzian than Fat Cat?
“They are an unstoppable force. They let sounds fly down their heads into their hands, and only think enough to articulate said electrical impulses as a musical construct, a machine, a blok. They move forward. Their songs tend to be strange in nature, yet suprisingly catchy. Scattered in parts, yet cohesive as a whole…a machine. T”
December 11th, 2007 | #