Just over a year ago, I started reading through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I never finished it. I began chronologically, but upon getting to The Geology of Morals with its stratums and substratums, I then skipped around, roughly covering maybe 5 - 7 chapters in total. Regardless, I loved the idea of the body without organs and grabbed a loose (but useful to my own work) definition of it.
there is a lot of memes about this online
In this post I want to try to explain my understanding of The Body Without Organs, perhaps as a kind of ground level reasoning, rather than anything complicated or exhaustive. I want to really highlight that this isn’t supposed to be definitive, over the course of A Thousand Plateaus, the concept shifts and changes to embody pretty much whatever it needs to for the analogy they are making. This is more just something to maybe start with and build off of, if you are working with the term for the first time, or trying to make your own attempt at reading it.
To start The Body Without Organs despite its allusions to the material, is more of a lens and less of a tangible ‘thing’ or ‘infrastructure’. It operates more as a thought exercise, through which one can encounter interesting relations. The Body Without Organs is a form of open ontology. Pulling from container theory, it’s a way of gathering and ringfencing information. As an exercise, get a piece of blank paper and write say; land, suncream and portraits. Leave lots of space between them and lots of room at the sides.
example
Now, as randomly as you can, add to it with some other elements, trying to not work with the words already there but bringing in new material. What you’ve formed is a Body Without Organs. A set of information, not pre formed around their relations but instead through somewhat random inference. Now that they’ve been brought into conversation with one another, you can start building loose relationships, and through that make a form of meaning. Lets take suncream and portraits. Both are often oil based, there is an almost painterly way that sunscreen is applied and both centre somewhat around the idea of masking the self, either through interpretation or physically. We can keep going but the idea is that there is no concrete or one logic to the grouping, it’s open to discovery and curiosity.
A Body Without Organs, is literal, its a structure that has no binding or core framework, something where information is prioritised equally, regardless of how tangential it may be. This idea was building in contrast to the rigidity of Freudian analysis. In Freud’s conception of Psychoanalysis, everything is rooted by core archetypes (eg. the mother and the father), which then define their surroundings. But in the Body Without Organs, we want to break out of those constraints to find other connections and forms of knowledge, mimicking communism’s drive to equalise people through their labour, Deleuze and Guattari seek to equalise information in its analysis.
In the Body Without Organs, relations are not hard bindings but instead something to loosely tease out and explore. There is also no true border for this information, as it requires that one can bring anything in from outside that space, and in so find relationships between information already present. All conceptualisations have some form of link, but the point of this exercise is to try to shake off easy or socially constructed relations, to instead find something ‘new’. To ‘think outside the box’ so to speak.
It’s a helpful exercise to do when you are feeling trapped by cultural or social contexts, to pull the information all together into one space, let it breathe before starting to build some meaning out of it. Umberto Eco extols a similar philosophy in his book The Name Of The Rose, where his protagonist, William of Baskerville, admitting to the potential of false relations, addresses our POV character and states “ instead of conceiving only one, I imagine many, so I become the slave of none.” It’s a similar philosophy, instead of searching through information, seeking a ‘true’ relation between different data points, we can instead open ourselves to the potential of a diverse set of relations.
23.06.2026 - my body without organs