The Body Without Organs
Understanding the Contemporary Self
As I stated in my series on The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, the contemporary self is not identical to the self of intellectual modernism. Seeing as postmodernism almost unanimously denounced that concept of the self and, what is more, thereby greatly influenced many intellectuals, artists, and cultural movements it is plain to see that the postmodern self had — ironically enough — a substantial role to play in how the West thinks about the individual, the body, and society. Additionally, given that the rise of identity politics owes its origins to the widespread influence of the postmodernists, one cannot credibly argue that the self of our current era is that of the modernist era, nor that it is entirely disconnected from the postmodernists.
How, then, is the self viewed in contemporary Western culture?
In line with postmodern philosophy, the contemporary self is treated not as the individual’s instrument of self-expression but as a more or less arbitrarily determined assemblage. The mind and the body are constructed from bits and pieces from what is at hand and suits the moment. As for what suits the moment, that is determined by whatever is at hand and, well, suits the moment. In other words, the self is a biological and social “bricolage.”
The concept of bricolage,
according to Chris Barker,
…refers to the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signifying objects to produce new meanings in fresh contexts. Bricolage involves a process of re-signification by which cultural signs with established meanings are re-organized into new codes of meaning. That is, objects that already carried sedimented symbolic meanings are re-signified in relation to other artefacts under new circumstances. For example…the boots, braces, cropped hair, Stayprest shirts and Ska music of Skinheads during the 1970s was read as a stylistic symbolic bricolage which communicated the hardness of working class masculinity.
[…]
This kind of bricolage as a cultural style is a core element of postmodern culture and is observable in architecture, film and popular music video. Shopping centres have made the mixing of styles from different times and places a particular 'trade mark' while MTV is noted for the blending of pop music from a variety of periods and locations.1
Think of the present self-contradictory assertions regarding sexual identity that we have seen in the West over the past several years, and you will begin to understand bricolage at a more concrete level (e.g. “Some women have penises. Get over it.”2). In this way of thinking, the body is not a naturally or divinely constructed whole whose parts have a set of fixed forms, functions, and, therefore, correlated biological and social meanings. Rather, “the” body is a shorthand way of referring to the parts we just so happen to have, and these can come in an nearly infinite variety of forms, with a nearly infinite variety of functions unrelated to those forms, and, therefore, with a nearly infinite variety of unrelated biological and social meanings.
Decolonization & The Body Without Organs
Because of postmodernism’s attack on essentialism,3 we not only hear about contradictory identities like “women with penises” or “men with vaginas,” but also hear about “non-binary” and “asexual” sexual identities. Gender, in postmodernism, is a form of colonization, the imposition of form on an otherwise amorphous reality — in this case, the body, its parts, their functions, and the meanings which they are thought to possess “naturally” or by divine decree — by a foreign institutional power (e.g. religion, philosophy, science, etc). This is why “misgendering” someone is viewed as an attack, a way of trying to assert dominance over another, a form of oppression.
Additionally, the imposition of order on that which is otherwise amorphous is viewed by postmodernists, by and large, as an attempt to control what is culturally other. The other, it is argued, is viewed as a threat to one’s dominant culture. Thus, “l’autre” (French for “the other”) is seen as a threat that must be controlled. While Freud’s thinking about sexuality certainly has a part to play in terminology like “homophobia” and “transphobia,” the language of fear with regard to “the other” was already dominant in the writings of proto-postmodernists who began to turn on the modernist belief in universal realities (e.g. man-kind, human-kind), as well as epistemic and ethical absolutes (e.g. truth/falsehood, righteousness/evil).
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere,4 the language of the postmodernists differed widely, but their concepts were very similar. We see this in the writing of Deleuze and Guattari, two philosophers who were, ironically, more clear in their description of the body as an assemblage of parts than were their peers who spoke of the body metaphorically as a land that had been colonized by religion, philosophers, scientists, and so on. Deleuze and Guattari did not necessarily disagree with such a description, but their writing viewed the matter more abstractly in an attempt to move farther away than their peers did from traditional ideas about the body.
These philosophers promoted the idea that what one should aim for is to become a “body without organs.”5 The language was, of course, meant to be provocative, but it wasn’t mere babble. A body without organs is a body which lacks any definitive organization, whose parts are really nothing more than machines that just so happen to interact with one another and produce what we now experience as “the” body. In principle, in other words, one can rearrange and reorganize the parts of one’s body. There is no underlying unity or meaning to the organs of the body; their unity is a historical development that has changed, and will continue to change. There is no overarching unity of thought or meaning regarding the body’s parts either; they are nothing more than machines that can, and do, connect and disconnect to and from one another. Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari one’s body is neither male for female. Male and female bodies are merely different names given to different, transitory arrangements of the parts of the body, and those parts are merely machines that can be connected or disconnected from one another at will.
Where We’re At
If you’ve been following the LGBTQIA+ attack on biology, psychology (properly understood), morality, and society, then this should all sound familiar. The contemporary self is not individualistic; it is a body without organs, a bricolage, a hodge-podge assemblage that has no inherent value or lack of value. The individual can appreciate the experiences afforded to him by his body’s particular assemblage at this time, but that has no bearing on its inherent unity or inherent meaning. The individual’s desires, feelings, and thoughts are likewise historical accidents which can be appreciated in the moment. What is more, these temporary valuations can be overturned in an instant if one merely engages in more experimentation, unorthodox thinking about what the body can or can’t do, and what is or is not valuable.
Is this a foolish notion? Absolutely. However, to the man or woman who desires to sin without having to face repercussions, thinking of one’s body as having no unity, organic functionality, essence, or meaning is ideal — for if one is nothing, then he cannot be the subject of God’s everlasting judgment. The last thing man truly wants to be is an individual who can be held responsible eternally for the thoughts of his heart and, consequently, the words of his mouth and practices of his body.
-h.
The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies (London: Sage Publications, 2004), 17.
See “Some Women Have Penises. Get Over It.,” Trans and Caffeinated, https://transandcaffeinated.com/trans-some-women-have-penises/; Kirkup, James. “Some Women Have Penises. If You Won’t Sleep With Them You’e Transphobic,” The Spectator, July 1, 2019, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/some-women-have-penises-if-you-won-t-sleep-with-them-you-re-transphobic.
A very helpful and basic intro to the concept of the body without organs can be found here: http://www.theturnips.net/body/2018/4/22/deleuzes-body-without-organs-explained-to-children.