The Body without Organs (BwO)

The other day I started writing a story about a late 20-something woman who loses her body during the course of a walk through Manhattan (look to my soon-to-hopefully-launch fiction blog for more). Where one might conventionally interpret this as a sure calamity, it needn't be so. It sounds ridiculous, but all through my travels in the City I felt that the City itself was actively replacing my body parts with its own, turning me into what Deleuze and Guattari might call a "body without organs", wherein I was losing exclusive identification with this organistic bag of skin and beginning to conceive of myself more and more as the City itself, if not the Kosmos as a whole.

Perhaps this reflects what CCRU member Anna Greenspan indicated when she spoke of "the core of the earth [being] made of iron, and blood contains iron... [our goal is to] hook up with the Earth's metal plasma core, which is the Body-Without-Organs." In a long discussion on neurobiology, Spinoza, and addiction, mark k-punk makes the argument for the BwO as humanity's best hope for transcending the parasitic, self-destructive entities that our organism bodies (what Ken Wilber would call the "gross body") have become.

As I walked, my fresh air Boulder lungs suffered waves of inner-city smog invasion. My body rippled under the weight of many urban heat island temp-blasts and tidal waves of mechano-noise. The constant flux of people, faces, images, logos, buildings, historical relics: all catalyzed a queer sort of inner calm (when you're exposed to everything but can't hold on to anything, this becomes easier than it seems). Strange foods came in and out, money flowed forever outward, desires were confused, overloaded, and annulled, and my entire being became cohabitated to the subway maps I rode through and beyond.

Manhattan isn't so much a city as a cess-pool of mutation, a Precambrian filth-pond injected with electricity, triggering an explosive evolution (perhaps misidentified as "jaded pushy New Yorker-ness") in all those who run its gauntlets with their awareness fully exposed and turned outward. You can't help but let yourself be erased. Appropriately enough, Howard Bloom, a denizen of the city itself -- Brooklyn no less -- perhaps puts it best:

However a strong case can be made for the possibility that human biology has continued to evolve during the ten thousand years since Jericho's builders erected the first city walls. Genes change far more speedily than most evolutionary psychologists realize. Natural selection has had 400 generations to rework our bodies and our brains since the days when Catal Huyuk, Suberde, and Tepe Yahya joined Jericho's mesh of intercity trade. Four thousand years before the rise of the Sumerian cities of Ur, Uruk, and Kish, Stone Age metropolises from Anatolia to the edges of India were already rich in challenges and opportunities. These urban traps and niches may well have been selectors forming much of what we are today. Homo urbanis has not only arrived, he has long since elbowed Homo tribalis far off to the side.

While he may not have realized the full extent of this evolutionary process-- indentification with the Nature/God/Cosmic body itself (the supreme BwO), ol' Bloomy may be on to something....

[Dear readers: shall I post this to GenSit? Any comments/contributions?]

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