Deleuze is the founding father behind a lot of post-modernist thought, whose work spread extremely wide within the philosophical and academic community. I found out about him in my dorm room in Guildford, a room so small the damp clung to the window frame and the bass from the neighbour’s speakers bled through the wall like a second heartbeat, my laptop propped on a pile of textbooks, the screen alive with the spiralling feedback of the Ueda attractor, and through the tinny headphones the voices of Acid Horizon unfolded a map of the self as a territory without a centre, a rhizome, a body without organs, and I understood that the chaos I was generating with equations was not noise but a method, a way to dismantle the rigid organisation that trauma had inscribed into my nervous system, a nervous system that, as Porges would later articulate in his Polyvagal Theory, had been locked into a state of sympathetic overdrive and dorsal vagal shutdown, a binary that my whole body knew long before I had the words for it, the heart pounding in my chest like a wild animal in a cage while my gut lay paralysed, the two states Deleuze would call the striated and the smooth, and what I was attempting in that room was nothing less than a deterritorialisation of my own autonomic profile, a flight from the striated space of the clinic and the diagnosis and the fixed identity of the traumatised subject into the smooth space of a sonic continuum where I could recompose myself as a body without organs, a body that was not a collection of malfunctioning parts but a surface of intensities, a fluid rhythm, a becoming that had no destination because the destination was the very thing that had imprisoned me in the first place[^1][^2].
The Body without Organs
The BwO is a practice, a limit-experiment in which you subtract the organising grid of the organism, the face, the subject, the social machine, and you arrive at a field of immanence where desire flows without being channelled into the Oedipal triangle or the capitalist demand, and in that dorm room I built my BwO with the materials at hand: the Ueda attractor on the screen, a pair of headphones, a tab of acid, the forgotten textbooks on music therapy, and the research paper I had printed out, Breit and Kupferberg and Rogler and Hasler on the vagus nerve as the modulator of the brain–gut axis, a paper that confirmed for me that the vagus nerve was the physiological correlate of Deleuze’s plane of consistency, the anatomical cable that translated the unformed matter of the body into the coded messages of the brain and vice versa, the nerve that, when stimulated, released acetylcholine to inhibit the cytokine storm of inflammation, the same inflammation that Felger and Lotrich had linked to the neural circuits of depression, the same depression that had followed me from London to Köln and now to this damp room on the edge of the Surrey hills, and if the vagus nerve could be stimulated by an electrode, I reasoned, it could be stimulated by a sound, by a binaural beat whose carrier frequencies were modulated by a chaotic attractor, a beat that would never settle into a predictable rhythm, that would keep the nervous system on its toes, that would entrain the heart rate variability into a fractal, healthy pattern, the pattern Goldberger had found in the interbeat intervals of a healthy heart and which was absent in the monotonous, metronomic rhythm of the sick, the pattern that was nothing less than the sign of a body that had not yet been fully striated by stress[^3][^4].
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