Reading Thoughts and Notes
How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs, Deleuze and Guittari
Opposed to psychoanalysis which turns everything into fantasy
BWO “takes everything away”
A way of destroying the self and becoming part of the external such that there is no longer an external at all
Replace discrete parts of the whole with waves of emotion (pain, cold… why only unpleasant ones?)
Pain in order to destroy the idea that pleasure and desire are externally fulfilled
Inversion of signs??
Desire is in itself fulfilling and pleasure destroys pleasure by ending desire
Very anti-Buddhist
Three laws of the priest 1) lack, 2) desire and exteriority, 3) transcendence
Planes of consistency compose the organism??
Organism wrongfully imposed on BWO??
You will be a signifier and signified else deviant, will constrict yourself to meaning as constructed societally??
Strata organism, signifier, subjectification
BWO disarticulates, nomad / moves freely and not a subject, experimentation is not interpretable??
There is no BWO without the organism (cancerous must be stratified for survival)
Flows of desire
How can everything have a gradient of 0, be uninterpretable? Isn’t that useless?

Summary
We form strata within ourselves in order to define an evolutionarily fit existence – though they confine (literally) our being, we need our organs – but might systematically approach the limits of the strata which they define. This process is known to Deleuze and Guittari as the Body Without Organs. It is not an object; it is not a body without organs. The name, as in much of philosophy, was probably purposefully misleading and unclear. If they had wanted to clearly communicate their concept they might call it “Process of Dismantling the Self”, or something similar, but that loses its poetry and doesn’t alienate and confuse the reader nearly enough. At any rate, it is a methodology of breaking constraints, symbolized and actualized first by our organs and embryogenesis. Moreover, the BWO is not just a process, it is a directed process, trending toward less and less definition. Yet the limit of this process is unattainable, and perhaps not desirable. Deleuze and Guitarri instead suggest a less radical process of dismantling the self by “swinging between strata” – perhaps suggesting not to break that which we understand as ourselves completely but continually question and challenge it.

Compelling Points
The world can be analyzed as flows of desire
It is dangerous to resist the structures that formed and form you but also necessary to see the world more clearly without predetermined constraints
Cancer is a BWO that has broken strata too fast and thus destroys the self completely (in many cases)
As survivors of heart attacks and near death experiences attest, the perspective afforded by dismantling the bounds determined by the safety of our bodies can radically alter worldviews

Implications
How necessary binaries are formed from continua and when and why and how we can do that effectively

New definition of the self:
A powerset of all groupings of points in space compared to the similarity with all other powersets of points in space, where, if this similarity reaches a certain threshold which is evolutionarily determined, we recognize it as a self. The similarity function of matter can be derived from the similarity of the functionality of the grouping of points. What is a function? A function is a mapping of a state to a particular next state. Functionality is important because it considers how objects reactions’ to all possible states are similar and different, not just the similarity of their matter at time t. A banana and an almond may not share many exact molecular structures and configurations, but we recognize that within a context of stomach acid they function similarly. Functionality similarity can be calculated through the following: For all configurations of matter which contact or interact with the given groupings at time t, find s_1’. Similarly, find s_2’ for the second grouping. Now, for every grouping of points in s_1’, check every possible grouping of points in s_2’ and sum those which are exactly the same. Note that these groupings need not have the exact same locations, as an object can be rotated or translated and still remains the same object.

Of course, a point is an arbitrarily small chunk of space. This does not exist. So you must also, if actually performing a similar calculation, choose a granularity of points.