In reviewing a book by Zizek, only the most painstaking accounting of notations, examples and arguments would enable an effort to be comprehensive. My effort here is not to present a synopsis of the journey that Slavoj takes us through (a task I believe is best left to himself alone). Also, this being a work of philosophy, or at least - theory, what I may analyze isn’t exactly a narrative as with fiction, journalistic accounts, or histories. As a young student of literature I was excited by the prospect of approaching the genre of philosophy as the historiography of ideas. My task, I believed then, was to unearth the living contradictions within which the concepts developed by thinkers gained the unique valency and potency they did. In this sense, I saw myself as an archeologist of philosophy - much in the same vein as Foucault, whose thought in literature departments in the early 2010’s was still very much in vogue.
That is a trajectory that I followed with some sincerity, and I confess that trying to historicize thought, in trying to place it within a context that makes it understandable, that presents it as merely reasonable - is effectively to nullify it’s potency to the point where what would be left of such a work would be nothing more than an excavation of a tomb, from whose stones the spirit has long since left and gone.
If there is a vital impulse in conceptual works, it is precisely in their capacity to serve ends for which they may not have been originally designed, not that a concept is necessarily created with a telos in mind - sometimes the conditions prevalent do not even permit the declaration of a purpose, in which case a concept can do no more than a shine a light onto the darkness of the lived moment.
I would hence like to honor the rigor of thought that, in Deleuze’s words ‘a pickup artist’ would deploy - in appropriating a language to serve his or her own ends, this in fact is precisely what makes it common - and I can think of no directer trajectory to communism.
The concept of an organ without a body is a mutation. An aberration of a kind made at least in good natured mockery at Deleuze’s conception of a body without an organ. What does an organ do? It facilitates a function which is necessary for the reproduction of the body which it is a part of. The word organ, does not necessarily have to be read in the biological register. We speak of ‘organs of government’ for example - being the judiciary, legislature and the executive, which in turn carry out their respective duties to permit for the well functioning of the state. Instituted bodies, from school clubs to the United Nations can have organs designed to accomplish certain tasks. But before we get any further - a word on how Deleuze originally uses the concept.
A body without organs is principally, for Deleuze a mode of thought. A mode which isn’t locked onto a pre-established, track, function, or is not directed by a telos - understood as end goal or destination. In his diction we encounter utterances such as ‘becoming-machine’, or ‘becoming-woman’ referring to affective tendencies that that are sensed by bodies, or perhaps better yet - expressed by them in their creative negotiation with a field they find themselves in. This has been a useful metaphor as it provides a vocabulary to describe practices which do not rely explicitly on the enunciated word as their medium, such as dance for example. This mode of thought, does bear strong impressions of Deleuze’s commitment to vitalism - a strain distinctly discernible throughout his corpus.
What then would an organ without a body be? There are moments when the necessity of a function, or act presents itself yet the body which may reap the result has yet to be formalized. To draw a historical example - the First War of Independence in 1857 in India was an attempted insurrection without even an idea of the modern nation state that may replace the crown. It was an anti-imperialist struggle to be sure, but it still required the legitimacy of a titular Mughal monarch to galvanize it into a unit.
The first act of rebellion that a student demonstrates in school, maybe as basic as a refusal to comply with a certain definition or interpretation advocated by a teacher - prior to the formation of any student-teacher council, or perhaps better yet - the labour pains of bringing such a body into existence. These are moments, photographs if you will which frame in my mind the political content of the concept ‘organ without body’.
Yet this is not merely a vitalistic snapshot of a fiery moment, a ‘becoming-rebel’ as it were in Deluzean lingo. Remember Fight Club (1999) the Hollywood blockbuster directed by David Fincher based on the novel of the same name by Palahniuk. What is fight club but a group of young men who seek to escape the nihilism of their white collared existence in a ritualized form of underground combat sport which effectively functions beyond the prescribed norms of the society they serve? Or in other words, a form of organization which is formally outside and perhaps beneath the social body. This is an example Zizek plays on quite nicely, and with far greater acuteness.
Analogous to the way the stimulation of genital organs produce orgasms in humans. The input of labour into the means of production, lets say you work at an office computer, produces surplus value for the company. This is the ‘libidinal economy’ that French theorists along the lines of Baudrillard and his ilk describe, the phenomenon thatcapitalism draws on to incessantly revolutionise itself. The human hand here, is the partial object (in psychoanalytic terms) par excellence. It’s efforts work on and stimulate the substance that constitutes the product of one’s labour, a product which is appropriated only so long as its task is disciplined within the coordinates set by capitalism.
The aspect of the partial object as an organ without a body, I shall leave to Zizek and your curiosity to discover. I would want to focus on another instantiation of this idea which I believe is pertinent to a milieu often created with the collapse of militant organizations.
I sadly would not be able to sufficiently cover the full range of interventions this book (first published in 2004) attempts to make in contemporary discourse. Suffice to say, that like almost all other books by Zizek, it includes interludes on Kant, Hegel, history, Hitchcock, and politics.
What I would like to do however is pitch the central concept of this tome against the site at which it encounters its prime intellectual adversary. Deleuze’s account of fascism. An extract which I believe sufficiently represents this is -
“Deleuze’s account of fascism is that, although subjects as individuals can rationally perceive that it is against their interests to follow it, it seizes them precisely at the impersonal level of pure intensities: “abstract” bodily motions, libidinally invested collective rhythmic movements, affects of hatred and passion that cannot be attributed to any determinate individual. It is thus the impersonal level of pure affects that sustains fascism, not the level of represented and constituted reality.”- “Organs without Bodies.”
I remember watching the Pakistan vs India T20 Cricket World Cup semi-finals in 2011 in Delhi. We were huddled in front of the television in the common room of Hans Raj hostel in the north campus of the University of Delhi. Games of machismo to demonstrate solidarity with the national sporting team aside, the aftermath which constituted the ‘celebrations’ of the victory of the Indian cricket team are etched in my memory. A mob assembled in front of Kamala Nagar crossroad outside the gate constituting students from various colleges, and the form of celebration that was resorted to was violence. Shops were looted, as young bucks were joy riding drunk on motorcycles, and a gang thought it would be fun to light the fern on the walls of the Faculty of Management Studies on fire. Crackers were burst to ensure that the spectacle did not escape anyone’s notice. Similar scenes were witnessed in other parts of Delhi and in other cities as well - none of this was obviously planned.
It is in moments such as these where I feel it is most important to soberly reflect on the enthusiasm with which the unorganized left advocates ‘spontaneous’ organizations and protests. For the danger that Deleuze speaks of is very apparent here. Behind the ‘joy’ of celebratory triumph lurks a brooding communal hatred against Pakistan (and by default - the muslim) that is invariably expressed in forms of violence either personal or public.
The point of organs without bodies in a political sense as I read it is that the left still has the opportunity to engage at a relatively autonomous level of organization where we can express repressed affects. The form of this engagement will necessarily vary - be it via groups on social media, small clubs, hobbyists getting together or maybe just bloggers. But we still have the ability to articulate what it is that we enjoy about cultural products, food, music, cinema, and each other is a space which is not entirely regulated by the logic of capital. More importantly perhaps, to share what we do not appreciate about them. The point of this is not to valorize ‘communication’ which is surely already subsumed in the logic of the commodity. The purest kind of activity that I would cherish is being able to work together while joining in threads of our struggles elsewhere into the fabric of the product we create. Perhaps this may be a conversation, an archive, a photograph, a love letter, a drama - I don’t know; the form varies but it requires to be free of immediate re-inscription into hegemonic norms of thought, be it a national allegory, a graded meritocracy, or a clannish protectionism. It is up to us to create such opportunities - and organs without bodies provides us with a way of imagining them.
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