Flatline_Constructs 2.2 The Body without Organs and Intensive Quantities

If Gothic Materialism utilizes Deleuze-Guattari as the principal theorists of Horror, it is because Deleuze-Guattari insist on reading Horror in terms of the body without organs. Gothic Materialism apprehends Horror not merely negatively but as one face of an abstract erotics whose program is the opening up of the organism into desiring-circuits: the production of what Cronenberg calls “New Flesh”. The body without organs is simultaneously the “object” of Horror - “it can be terrifying” (TP 149) “[a]s the authors of horror stories have known so well” (AO 329) - and the model of desire : “it is that which one desires and by which one desires.” (TP 165)

When Deleuze-Guattari introduce the body without organs early in Anti-Oedipus, it is by contrast with the body (as) image: “’body image’,” they write, is “the final avatar of the soul, a vague conjoining of the requirements of spiritualism and positivism.” (AO 23) What is encountered out on the flatline - what you become there - is the body without organs, which “has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an an image of the body. It is the body without an image.” (AO 8) Body-image, they suggest, is an overcoding of the body by the subject, a representation of the organism rather than an expression of the body’s potential, which is always abstract and always unknowable: in Deleuze’s favourite Spinozist formula, no-one knows what a body can do. The Spinozistic body can never be correlated with an image because it is always in process, defined ultimately only by its abstraction, but an abstraction that never ceases to be utterly material. The Spinozist body is not defined topologically, by extensive limits, but intensively, by the set of affects of which it is capable.

Along with related, but not equivalent, concepts such as the plane of consistency and the machine phylum, the body without organs points to what is the primary Gothic Materialist intuition: anorganic continuum. The qualification “anorganic” here is perhaps unnecessary, since, properly pursued, the concept of continuum already signals an apprehension of Spinozist single substance that immediately moves beyond the “wisdom and limits of the organism”. What the essentially Spinozistic concept of the BwO - “when it is a matter of the body without organs it is a matter of Spinoza”[110] - allows is a radical dissociation from the organism that cannot be conceived of in terms of Cartesian dualism. The experience of the body as container for subject breaks down, allowing not an escape of the subject from physicality, but an exploration of the body as depersonalised potential; abstract matter. Abstraction without empathy. “The name ‘body without organs’ is itself sufficient clue to what is at stake in the thought, that is to say: the reality of abstraction. The body without organs is an abstraction without being an achievement of reason.”[111]. The body without organs is what stands in for any transcendental ground in conditions where “everything is produced, nothing is given”[112] ; it “is what remains when you take everything away”. (TP 151) In no way connoting lack, it is the degree zero of any possible assemblage, the baseline from which all intensities are immanently differentiated: “The body without organs is the matter that always fills space to given degrees of intensity, and the partial objects are these degrees, these intensive parts that produce the real in space starting from matter as intensity = 0. The body without organs is the most immanent substance, in the most Spinozist sense of the word.” (AO 329)

“A BwO is made in such a way that it can only be populated by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate,” Deleuze-Guattari insist. (TP 153) The Gothic is essentially exercised by what Deleuze, in his discussion of expressionism, calls “the subordination of the extensive to intensity”[113] but, as the above passage from Anti-Oedipus makes clear, the Deleuze-Guattari theorization of intensity is not to be understood by opposition with extension thought of simply as occupation of space. It is a different type of occupation of space that is at issue. The crucial thought is one of continuum, and is derived in part from Kant’s discussion of “intensive quantities” in the first Critique. For Kant, it is the notion of degree that is crucial to an understanding of intensive scaling. All intensities are measured in (infinitely divisible) degrees, counted up from zero, which operates not as a lack, but as a baseline that is itself an intensity (= 0). “Every sensation, therefore, and likewise every reality in the [field of] appearance, however small it may be, has a degree, that is, an intensive magnitude which can always be diminished. Between reality and negation there is a continuity of possible realities and of possible smaller perceptions. Every colour, as for instance red, has a degree which, however small it may be, is never the smallest; and so with heat, the moment of gravity, etc.”[114] One of Deleuze-Guattari’s best examples of intensive-becoming as infinite divisibility comes not from Horror but pulp SF, Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man. No matter how small he becomes, it is always possible for Matheson’s character to shrink yet further. While being shrunk to a particular size would still only be an extensive matter, shrinking is an encounter with becoming-in-itself, a becoming-intense (See “Becoming Intense..”, TP 279: “Matheson’s Shrinking Man passes through the kingdoms of nature, slips between molecules, to become an unfindable particle in infinite meditation on the infinite.”) Intensive magnitudes can populate the same - extensive - space to different degrees. “For we [...] recognise that although two equal spaces can be completely filled with different kinds of matter, so that there is no point in either where matter is not present, nevertheless every reality has, while keeping its quality unchanged, some specific degree (of resistance or weight) which can, without diminution of its extensive magnitude or amount, become smaller and smaller in infinitum, before it passes into the void and [so] vanishes [out of existence]. Thus a radiation which fills a space, as for instance, heat, [...] can diminish in its degree in infinitum, without leaving the smallest part of this space in the least empty. It may fill the space just as completely with these smaller degrees as another appearance does with greater degrees.”[115] Deleuze-Guattari follow Kant in offering heat and temperature as examples of intensive magnitudes; the individual characteristics of a particular temperature, they say, cannot be adequately apprehended as the metric chunking-up of homogeneous quantities: “intensities of heat are not composed by addition” (TP 243). Degree of intensity correlates directly with a particular type of individuation, since each intensive quantity designates a particular quality. [116] “A degree of heat is a perfectly individuated warmth distinct from the substance or the substance that receives it [...] A degree, an intensity is an individual, a Haecceity that enters into combination with other degrees, other intensities, to form another individual.” (TP 253)

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[110] Nick Land, “Making it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring-Production”, Journal of

the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol 24, No 1, January 1993, 69

[111] Nick Land, “Making it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring-Production”, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol 24, No 1, January 1993, 70

[112] Deleuze, Cinema 1, 110

[113] Deleuze, Cinema 1, 111

[114] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan, 1976, A 169/ B 211, 203-204;

[115] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 174/ B 216, 207

[116] Intensity is closely connected with what Deleuze-Guattari call “the germinal”. In the discussion of Worringer in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze-Guattari characterise the body without organs as “inorganic, germinal, and intensive” (TP 499) - the unformed or the non-formed. It is important that the germinal in no way connotes a developmental stage on the way to formation; the germinal is not a pre-existent or primordial state from which form is produced. On the contrary, the germinal is always alongside “formed matters”, utterly contemporary with them. As Deleuze-Guattari write of the egg, “the egg is not regressive; on the contrary, it is perfectly contemporary [...] The egg is the milieu of pure intensity; spatium not extension, Zero intensity as principle of production.” (TP 164) Intensity here carries the sense of being in-tension, i.e. becoming, so that process is flat with production, whereas extension (ex-tension) (always only ostensibly) divides products from the process of their production.