“The clue for understanding BwO is to be found in the distinction that Deleuze makes between the vital (physical life) and the organic (biological life). The former may be fragmented and molecular, and the latter totalized and molar… BwO thus involves a schizo-critique of totality…” Frans Maññali
Out of all the responses I gotten to this particular post (or rhizome (this is the one I’m most sympathetic with. Now, first of all, I use the term “sympathetic” because to say that “it seems most accurate” would be to contradict the main point of what I said: that the meaning to be derived from it comes from the discourse that goes on around it. But this not to say that everyone is perfectly free to just offer whatever interpretation they happen to have and all will be considered equal. This assumption seemed to be at work in a lot of the other responses I got. But as Yonathon Listik wrote of Derrida in his article “Derrida’s Performance” in Philosophy Now (which I think can be applied to Deleuze as well:
“The purpose of his performance in writing is to call our attention to the spectacle. For this reason, he is serious about joking, and joking about being serious. We may say that Derrida’s argument is precisely that seriousness and foolery have no clear demarcation.”
In other words, we can assume Deleuze to be meaning something, even if he does it in a playful way. But, as with Derrida, you always have to start with Deleuze’s terminology (the BwO in this case (in terms of how it feels or the sense of it. Still, at some point or other, you will always have to play it against the reality of the text Deleuze actually wrote.
As concerns Frans’ point, I would first admit to a bias in that, whether he intended it or not, it actually complimented my point concerning the FEEL of the BwO. I’m thinking here of Ronald Bogue’s book, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, and the first section on Music which focuses on Deleuze’s preoccupation with a composer who attempted to utilize birdcalls as compared to the more classical preoccupation with “the music of the spheres”.
We get a sense here that when it comes to Deleuze and his focus on the biological that it is primarily about FEEL (that of biology as compared to the music of the spheres (and is confirmed by the various amorphous and biological imagery he tends to use in his writing such as his and Guattarri’s use of Dali images, in A thousand Plateaus, of folds of skin with hairs poking out of it like spikes or the description that starts The Anti-Oedipus:
“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the Id. Everywhere it is machines –real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other ones, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating machine, a talking machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy machine: all the time, flows and interruptions.”
And let’s not forget the biological sense of the rhizome.
Once again: FEEL and the meaning we extract from it through discourse.
And if you think about it, Continental philosophy (especially of the French kind (is, more than anything, about adopting a new style of philosophizing. And I cannot help but feel that most attempts to present what Deleuze wrote, and the BwO, as having some kind of fixed and final meaning are basically guilty caveats to the analytic tradition: the desire to justify it by their standards when that really isn’t necessary. True, as Yonathon argues in behalf of Derrida, Deleuze wrote to mean. But I would also note a point made by Deleuze in the intro to Difference and Repetition:
“We write at the edge of what we know.”
He may well have been writing to mean. But it was also a struggle to put into words that which eluded words. The only thing he could have possibly hoped for was to somehow get across the FEEL of what he was experiencing: the biological one described by Frans. As Yonathon said of Derrida:
“Similarly, when Derrida describes the university in Mochlos (1980) and The University Without Conditions, he is not just performing in the sense of being on a stage, he is describing a university as if what he is saying were possible, and so performing an idea into being.”
:I think that we can equally say that Deluze performed his ideas into being in an oblique manner that, paying tribute to the elusive reality he was trying to describe, defied any hope of a final and authoritative interpretation.