"Finally, since what truly defines the real world (according to this way of viewing things) are neither uniform strata nor variable meshworks but the unformed and unstructured flows from which these two derive, it will also be useful to have a label to refer to this special state of matter-energy information, to this flowing reality animated from within by self-organizing processes constituting a veritable nonorganic life: the Body without Organs (BwO). As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write:
The organism is not at all the body, the BwO; rather it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences. . . . [T]he BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism — and also a sgnification and a subject — occur. . .
. . . the flows of lava, biomass, genes, memes, norms, money (and other "stuff") are the source of just about every stable structure that we cherish and value (or, on the contrary, that oppresses or enslaves us). . .
. . .The flow of genes and biomass are "unformed" if we compare them to any individual organism, but the flows themselves have internal forms and functions. Indeed, if our entire planet would itself be a mere provisional hardening in the vast flows of plasma which permeate the universe.
Plasmas, clouds of electrified elementary particles that have lost even their atomic forms, are (as far as we know) the state of matter-energy with the least amount of internal structure, and yet they are capable of supporting a variety of self-organizing processes. However, rather that identifying the BwO with the plasma that fills our universe we should think of it as a limit of a given process of destratification: plasmas may indeed may indeed be such a limit when we think of mineral structures, but not if we think of genetic materials. The more or less free and uniformed flow of genes through microorganisms may be a better illustration of what the BwO of a flow of replicators may be. . .
. . . any structure that matters as far as human history is concerned may be defined by the degree of stratification, and changes in composition between command and market components may be defined as movements of destratification and restratification."
pgs 260 - 260
"I have attempted here to describe Western history in the last one thousand years as a series of processes occuring in the BwO: pidginizations, creolizations, and standarizations in the flow of norms; isolations, constacts, and institutionalizations in the flow of memes; domestications, fertalizations, and hybridizations in the flow of genes; and intensifications, accelerations, and decelerations in the flows of energy and materials. Cities and their mineral exoskeletons, their shortened food chains, and their dominant dialects are among the structures we saw emerge from these nonlinear flows. Once in place, they reacted back on the flows, either to inhibit them or to further stimulation them."
pg. 262
"The concept of the BwO was created in an effort to conceive the genesis of form (in geological, biological, and cultural structures) as related exclusively to immanent capabilities of the flows of matter-energy information and not to any transcendent factor, whether platonic of divine.
. . . Deleuze and Guattari developed their theory of abstract machines, engineering diagrams defining the structure-generating processes that give rise to more or less permanent forms but are not unique to those forms; that is, they do not represent (as an essence does) that which defines the identity of those forms.
Attractors represent patterns of becoming that are inherent in abstract dynamical systems and may be "incarnated" in a variety of actual physical systems.
At any one moment in the system's history it is the degree of intensity of these parameters (the degree of temperature, pressure, volume, speed, density, and so on) that defines the attractors available to the system and hence, the type of forms it may give rise to. (That is, at critical values of these parameters, bifurcations occur which abruptly change one set of attractors to another.)
The two most abstract diagrams that we examined were those behind the formation of strata and self-consistent aggregates. The hierarchy-generating machine involved a process of double articulation, that is, a sorting operation that yields a homogeneous distribution of elements and a consolidation operation that defines more or less permanent structural linkages between sorted materials. The meshwork-generating machine, on the other hand, articulates divergent but partially overlapping components by their functional complementarities, using a variety of local intercalary elements as well as endogenously generates stable states."
pg. 263
"The view of human history as unfolding immersed in this cauldron of nonorganic life is one way to eliminate notions of progress or unilineal development. Indeed, the three narratives I used to approach the geological, biological, and linguistic histories of the West were framed not in terms of "man" and his manifest destiny, but in terms of stuff undergoing different kinds of intensification."
pg. 265
". . .that the creation of novel hierarchical structures through restratification is performed by the most destratified element of the previous phase."
pg. 266
". . . What use is there in moving our level of description to the BwO if we are not going to take advantage of the heterogeneous mixtures of energy and genes, germs and words, which it allows us to conceive, a world in which geology, biology, and linguistics are not seen as three separate spheres, each more advanced or progressive than the previous one, but three perfectly coexisting and interacting flows of energetic, replicative, and catalytic materials?"
". . .if we consider the plane of consistency [the BwO at the absolute limit of destratification] we note that the most disparate things and signs move upon it: a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron clashes into language.... There is no "like" here, we are not saying "like an electron," "like and interacting," ect. The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real.
Thus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, in terms of the stratified and the destratified, human history is not marked by stages of progress but by the coexistences of accumulated materials of diverse kinds, as well as by the processes of stratificiation and destratification that these interacting accumulations undergo."
pg. 268
".. . . sediment is not only an accumulation of pebbles (substance), it is an accumulation distributed in homogeneous layers (form); in turn, cementing these pebbles together establishes spatial link among pebbles (form) and creates a material entity of a larger scale, a sedimentary rock (substance). The same holds true for institutional entities, such as hospitals, schools, and prisons: Strata are historical formations.... As "sedimentary beds" they are made out of things and words, from seeing and speaking, from the visible and the sayable, from bands of visibility and fields of readability, from contents and expressions.... The content has both a form and a substance: for example, the form is the prison and the substance is those who are locked up, the prisoners... The expression also has a form and a substance: for example, the form is penal law and the substance is "delinquency" in so far as it is the object of statements."
pg. 269
"But in addition to stratified, formal power, there is power of the meshwork type, that is, destratified power operating via a multiplicity of informal constraints."
pg. 269 - 270
i·so·mor·phic: corresponding or similar in form and relations.
". . . what matters is explaining this genesis in an entirely bottom-up way. That is, not simply to assume that society forms a system, but to account for this systematicity as an emergent property of some dynamical process."
pg.270
"Certain institutional forms may indeed proliferate in a population, but even when this leads to the extinction of prior forms this should not be treated as the achievement of a new unified stage of development. Moreover, a given proliferation of institutions may be the result of an intensification of previously existing processes. . . . No doubt, an intensification may lead to the crossing of a threshold, as in the critical point of complexity at which autocatalytic loops become self-sustaining, leading to industrial takeoff. Or it may lead to the creation of truly novel types of institution. But the resulting emergent structures simply add themselves to the mix of previously existing ones, interacting with them, but never leaving them behind as a prior stage of development (although, perhaps, creating the conditions for their disappearance)."
pg. 271
". . . the world has become so greatly stratified that the only way out is to destratify it. But there are several things wrong with this knee-jerk response.
. . .To simply increase heterogeneity without articulating this diversity into a meshwork not only results in further conflict and friction, it rapidly creates a set of smaller, internally homogeneous nations. (Hence, the balkanization of the world would increase heterogeneity only in appearance.)
. . . the mere presence of an emergent meshwork does not in itself mean that we have given a segment of society a less oppressive structure.
. . .increasing the proportion of meshwork in the mix is indeed destratifying, but we still need to be cautious about the speed and intensity of this destraticiation, particularly if it turns out to be true that "the most destratified element in a mix effects the most rigid resratification" later on:
You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying....If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged towards catastrophe. Staying stratified — organized, signified, subjected — is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times."
pg. 272
". . . these warnings derive from a recognition that our world is governed not only by nonlinear dynamics, which makes detailed prediction and control impossible, but also by nonlinear combinatorics, which implies that the number of possible mixtures of meshwork and hierarchy, of command and market, of centralization and decentralization, are immense and that we simply cannot predict what the emergent properties of these myriad combinations will be. Thus the call for a more experimental attitude toward reality and for an increased awareness of the potential for self-organization inherent in even the humblest forms of matter-energy."
"In short, as our industrial, medical, and educational systems became routinized, as they grew and began to profit from economies of scales, linear equations accumulated in the physical sciences and equilibrium theories flourished in the social sciences, In a sense, even though the world is inherently nonlinear and far from equilibrium, its homogenization meant that those areas that had been made uniform began behaving objectively as linear equilibrium structures, with predictable and controllable properties. In other words, Western societies transformed the objective world (or some areas of it) into the type of structure that would "correspond" to their theories, so that the latter became, in a sense, self-fulfilling prophecies."
pg. 273
"The emergence of organic life itself, while not representing a more perfect stage of development than rocks, did involve a greater capacity to generate self-consistent aggregates, a surplus of consistency."
"And while these views do indeed invoke the "death of man," it is only the death of the "man" of the old "manifest destinies," not the death of humanity and its potential for destratification."
pg. 274
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