is the body in abundance of its (biological, psychical, and signifying)
organization and organs...[It is an] attempt to denaturalize human bodies and
to place them in direct relations with the flows of particles of other bodies or
things...[and it] refers indistinguishably to human, animal, textual,
sociocultural, and physical bodies.
(Grosz 1994:168)‘Beyond’ the organizations and stratifications of subjectivity and culture, the BwO,
operative at multiple levels, ‘refers indistinguishably’ to both individual and
communal bodies such that Jordan can contend that
the BwO of raving is the undifferentiated state that supports the connections
that the rave-machine makes between its different elements. This
undifferentiated state is a collective delirium produced by thousands of people
jointly making the connections of drugs to dance, music to dance, dance to
drugs, drugs to time, time to music and so on, thereby gradually constructing
the state of raving and so the BwO of raving. The delirium is non-subjective
and smooth, as all the connections and functions of the [rave-] machine give
way to simple intensities of feeling.
(Jordan 1995:130)Attempting to collapse the stratifications of subjectivity ravers are trying to
reconstruct themselves as Bodies-without-Organs, as ‘smooth’, fiction-less spaces
across which intensities and pleasures may flow unhindered:
as we negotiated the stairs down to the dancefloor, we began to slide into the
contours of the rhythm, becoming immersed in it, the bass curling around the
spine which felt like it had been loosened of its inhibiting rigidity, like it had
slipped the bounds of all that was holding it—us—back, and could just flow,
loose, warm, alive.... And in a second we were amongst the throng, synched
right into the matrix of bodies and sound.
(Collin 1997:3)With his body free of ‘inhibiting rigidities’, Matthew Collin evokes here the
autonomy and collectivity inspired by Jordan’s analysis. Similarly, another raver,
speaking specifically about the chemical component of the assemblage, explains that
ecstasy ‘heightens all five senses to the point that the music becomes hypnotic and
the sense of touch becomes so pleasurable that a crowd is comforting. It’s sensory
overload...It’s totally sensual. Touching becomes so intense’ (McPhee 2000).
Frequently catalysing synaesthesia with the help of MDMA, the rave-assemblage
embodies a relationship where the greater the sensory intensities—whether tactile,
aural or visual—the greater the degree of desubjectification.
‘Measuring’ these intensities through a ‘physics’ of efficiency Deleuze and
Guattari’s functionalist approach subsequently asks not ‘what does it mean?’ but
112 JAMES LANDAU