by Matt Lodder
in N. Sullivan & S. Murray (eds.), 2009, 'Somatechnics Queering the Technologisation of Bodies', Ashgate, pp 187 - 206
“Man is sick because he is badly constructed”, explained Artaud. “When you have given him a body without organs, then... more
“Man is sick because he is badly constructed”, explained Artaud. “When you have given him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatisms and restored him to his true liberty”.
Artaud’s exhortation inspired Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s polemic of the Body without Organs, and it is this rich theory’s application to the modified body which underpins this article . Thinking on body modification often aims to unpick the reasons behind an individual or a culture’s choice to undergo certain modificative procedures. My research, in contrast, centres on the visual and ontological consequences of invasive corporeal transformation, and seeks to further understand what I have termed ‘the post-modified body’ – that is, the modified body as object; the body produced by modificative practices including, but not limited to, tattooing, piercing, scarification and cosmetic surgery. Initially, this paper suggests that the BwO paradigm as set out in Capitalism and Schizophrenia may provide an illustrative model for understanding the modified body, and that this paradigm affords a useful philosophical account of the nature of embodiment once a subject’s body has been deliberately modified. Moreover, I contend that Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the BwO may elucidate body modification’s facility for establishing a strategy of reconstruction to provide the liberty Artaud so desired, and that body modification practice may be understood to be a mode of resistance in Deleuzian terms .
The BwO is resistant to the organism, to significance and to subjectification, and as such recasting the modified body in these terms is problematic for traditional conceptions of body technologies in a number of ways, particularly as analyses of the modified body often rely on framing it entirely in these terms. Therefore, having established that the modified body is indeed a BwO, the paper concludes by outlining how the BwO model highlights the inadequacies in other descriptions of modified bodies, and how, by extension, the methodology of the modi ied
body might be able to liberate and invigorate investigations into various forms of corporeally transformative technologies.
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