That makes escaping dominant power structures impossible

Post-queer rhizomatic politics is one that is directed outwards rather than inwards. The continuous flows of dialogical-becomings--_-the indefinite breaks and connections—are always moving forward where something new is always created out of something given. Unlike the arborescent-subject that is directed inwards, rhizomatic dialogical-becomings are always deterritorialized as they maintain an ongoing state of becoming a body without organs (BwO). The complex flows of desiring-machines described above persistently strive to become a BwO as their connections try to reach pure deterritorialization. In this section, I want to consider how the BwO is a virtual affect of dialogical-becomings. It does not encapsulate desiring-machines but is an additional (anti-)production together with desiring-machines. The BwO is a fundamental aspect of post- queer politics because it speaks to the production of intensities that emerge when the flows of desiring-machines stop. Deterritorializations are not finalized states or binary oppositions. They offer an important strategy for contemporary politics because they do not directly oppose a structure (such as the queer/ heteronormative dyad) but instead remap a system through creative lines of flight (the plateauing of queer and post-queer). We can think of the BwO as a limit that continuously seeks to deterritorialize without ever reterritorializing (even though, as you will see belo reterritorializations are often coupled with deterritorializations). As Brian Massumi writes: Think of the body without organs as the body outside any determinate state, poised for any action in its repertory; this is the body from the point of view of its potential, or virtuality. Now freeze it as it passes through a threshold state on the way from one determinate state to another. This is a degree of intensity of the body without organs. It is still the body as virmality but a lower level of virtuality, because only the potential states involved in the bifurification from the preceding state to the next are effectively superposed in the threshold state. (1992, 70) The BwO is therefore not opposed to desiring-machines but is instead in a constant tension with them. The term itself—Body without Organs—is not in opposition to the organism. It is against what the organism stands for: organization. We can think of the subject as such an organization where all meaning refers back to a central core and all movement corresponds with a central tendency. The BwO not only challenges the arboreal structures of life but also works within a different realm as that of the rhizome where it does not break flows (rhizomatic breaks and connections) but desires continuous flows. Unlike the subject that requires external agencies for meaning such as language structures or discursive realms, the BwO is pure intensity: The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product: the schizophrenic table is a body without organs. The body without organs is not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is it what remains of a lost totality. Above all, it is not a projection; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without an image. This imageless, organless body, the nonproductive, exists right there where it is produced, in the third stage of the binary-linear series. It is perpetually reinserted into the process of production. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 8) We can think of the BwO as a plane of immanence rather than stratification.’3 It may seem as if desiring-machines and BwO are a part of two different systems. They are in fact two forms of the same principle: desiring-machines and BwO are both a part of the productions of productions of life. It is through the tension that they share that every production becomes an anti-production because dialogical-becomings, for instance, can not maintain a multiplicity of desiring-machines and are unable to fully become a BwO. Dialogical-becomings are schizo. Capital is perhaps the most widely referenced example of a BwO. It is the becoming-BwO of capitalism that creates the illusion that everything is produced through it. Although capital can be transformed into something concrete (i.e., money can purchase goods) it can not do anything on its own. Capital is a miraculating machine that creates the desire for a BwO to overcome the flows of desiring-machines: the BwO deterritorializes the organization of capitalism by opting for flows and smooth spaces. The capitalist machine transforms desiring- machines into BwO by creating the ultimate schizophrenic that “plunges further and further into the realm of deterritorialization, reaching the furthest limits of the decomposition of the socius on the surface of his own body without organs” (35). The capitalist-schizo becomes the surplus product of capitalism as it seeks the limits of capitalism itself. Although the BwO is unachievable, it becomes a seemingly preferred state: “You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 150). It is not a heightened awareness of the self, nor is it a fully embodied self. Unlike in significations, representations, and identifications, the BwO is no self at all. In fact, the BwO is prior to such a subjective capacity The tension between desiring-machines (reterritorializations) and BwO (deterritorializations) works within a different realm than, say, the subjective limits of identities categories where subjects become intelligible through their associations with identity norms. Everything for desiring-machines and BwO is pure difference. The intensities involved in such a relationship are before the coding structures of subjectivity that stratify subjects. It is the abovementioned intensities that make post-queer politics so creative because they challenge the structured organization of organs and biologically defined bodies. Desiring-machines and BwO offer a new language for thinking about life itself without reducing the experiences of such relationships to the stratification of language. The creativity of post-queer dialogical-becomings rests in the potential to deterritorialize stratified structures that limit life to predetermined organizations. Despite the BwO existing prior to the subjective capacities of, say, psychoanalysis and discursive norms, this certainly does not imply that deterritorializations can not offer strategies for rethinking life as it is accounted for through representations, significations, and identifications. We can, for example, think of the various codings of subjectivity that have permeated identity politics and subsequently the queer/heteronormative dyad as territorialized stratifications that are in concert with BwO. Stratifications, or strata, take hold of intensities by territorializing them. For instance, they appropriate the BwO’s flows of pure difference by organizing dialogical-becomings as subjects of reiterative norms. The strata codes and territorializes such becomings but the BwO constantly attempts to deterritorialize these territorializations. Despite queer’s interest in a politics of identity that seeks to consider bodies as mobile and fluid, these movements can never escape the territorializations of identity norms because they are always in relation to heteronormative coding and the overall arboreal organization of bodies that are directed inwards. Deleuze and Guattari describe three types of strata that help to think through the territorializations of the queer/heteronormative dyad: the organism, signifiance, and sub jectification. The surface of the organism, the angle of signiflance and interpretation, and the point of subjectification or subjection. You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body—otherwise you’re just depraved. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpreted—otherwise you’re just a deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement—otherwise you’re just a tramp. To the strata as a whole, the BwO opposes disarticulation (or n articulation) as the property of the plane of consistency, experimentation as the operation on that plane (no signifier, never interpret!), and nomadism as the movement (keep moving, even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification). (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 159) This call to dismantle the organism does not imply that we just get rid of the subject or cut the body from stratification. We recall from above that the BwO and all its intensities comes before the subject and the organization of the body as an organism and so a politics of becoming calls for a return to these productive flows of desire: “opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor” (160). Post-queer dialogical-becomings seek to deterritorialize the three great strata that territorialize life through significations, representations, and identifications. This project is but one line of flight that can plateau subjugated sub jectivities. Its intent is to map various intensities so as to smooth these assemblages by moving towards a plane of immanence. The first step is to identify the strata involved and then consider the assemblages that constitute such strata. For example, the organism codes an aboreal life by creating various assemblages that define what it means to be “human”; sigmflance codes meaning through discourse where language has become the primary means for thinking about experience; and subjectification creates subjects by coding them through social norms. The purpose of this is to locate flows of intensities—not by discovering a BwO but by creating one in the process of deterritorializing the strata. The queer/heteronormativity dyad has resulted in an arboreal dyad. The extensions of an arboreal tree go through its central root that supports the whole tree. The queer/heteronorrnative dyad is such a root where all politics emerge from it. Post-queer rhizomatic politics, in contrast, do not strictly move or extend from a main root such as the queer/heteronormative dyad. With that said, dialogical-becomings can engage this binary by plateauing it through its rhizomatic connections that can spout from any point. The arboreal organization of queer/heteronormativity prohibits a politics of becoming because movement stops when there is a need to refer back to this dyad. In other words, the queer/heteronormative dyad halts queer politics when the politics of queer is predominantly concerned with disrupting heteronormative structures. Post-queer rhizomatic politics is about deterritorializing politics itself rather than opposing an a priori structure. This project is one line of flight amongst many that can remap contemporary politics as we know it today. Despite queer’s keen investment in a conceptualization of identity through mobilities and fluidities, its politics can only go so far because of its arboreal references to heteronormativity. Let me be clear that I am not demanding an outright rejection of the queer/heteronormative strata for, as we recall from above, this can result in further territorializations. I am also not suggesting an absolute denunciation of this relationship nor am I disputing the important developments that queer politics have made. I am instead calling for the production of different lines of flight and new assemblages that can smoothen the strata so as to not be limited by structural organizations.