Deleuze & Guattari, "A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia"

1. Summarize main points
What an intriguing piece! Ties in really well with Deleuze's piece on immanence. It's like he took the idea of A LIFE arising in the space when a person is dying, and broadened that idea into other realms of human existence. It's a private, intimate feeling I get from this piece, like peeking into the collective bedchamber of humanity as they struggle to eradicate their individuations and become nothing but flows of desire...

2. Develop some points...

"The BwO is the egg. But the egg is not regressive; on the contrary, it is perfectly contemporary, you always carry it with you as your own milieu of experimentation...the egg is the milieu of pure intensity."

The Body without Organs is neither a body without its organs nor organs without a body. Either of those would be dead. Rather, it's a beautiful concept of taking one's internal organs and symbolically (or literally) rearranging them. To get rid of "you" and your attachment to "you" and become an existence. As is the case for the masochist who,

"constructs an entire assemblage that simultaneously draws and fills the field of immanence of desire...[he says,] 'Results to be obtained: that I am kept in continual expectancy of actions and orders, and that little by littler all opposition is replaced by a fusion of my person with yours...Thus at the mere thought of your boots, without even acknowledging it, I must feel fear. In this way, it will no longer be women's legs that have an effect on me, and if it pleases you to command me to receive your caresses, when you have had them and if you make me feel them, you will give me the imprint of your body as I have never had it before nd never would have had it otherwise.' Legs are still organs, but the boots now only determine a zone of intensity as an imprint or zone on a BwO."

The point is, nothing is actually taken away or changed, except the BwOs perception, perspective. Rather than being somebody, I would be a feeling, unbridled, a reaction to a cause at all times. Here's why it's like peeking into the bedchamber - for those lucky enough to seek it or stumble upon it, sex can be powerful enough to erase those internal organs, the grasp on oneself. To exist as a bubbling, a swelling, inspiration and exhalation, a powerful enveloping of yourself and your partner. Such a coupling, while rare, would be as close to being one with someone else there is, at least that I can think of. Maybe having a baby exceeds that...

Finally, I had an A-HA! moment while I was reading the tail end of this piece. They write,

"Thus the BwO is never yours or mine. It is always a body. It is no more projective than it is regressive. It is an involution, but always contemporary, creative involution. The organs distribute themselves on the BwO, but they distribute themselves independently of the form of the organism; forms become contingent, organs are no longer anything more than intensities that are produced, flows, thresholds, and gradients. "A" stomach, "an" eye, "a" mouth: the indefinite article does not lack anything; it is not indeterminate or undifferentiated, but expresses the pure determination of intensity, intensive difference."

From a biological perspective, this is how we learn physiology! Currents, volts, signals, chemical gradients; we de-stratify the body in order to learn about how the body works. There is a difference in that we draw the attention to an organ, but the organ for the purpose of study exists within the body, but frequently out of context of other organs. Rather, it's demonstrated as hypothetical processes, movements and changes in response to some stimuli. When they use the word "Involution" there are several defnintions that might be applicable, but I suspect they mean the one in terms of medicine, such as "a decrease in the size of an organ, or a degeneration of normal physiological functioning," or from that of embryology, "the ingrowth and curling inward of a group of cells." The idea is that this body is every body, having deconstructed its individuality and re-assigned its singularities to correlate only to the given moment, the given feeling of intensity...it's another way of existing, in connection to all life.