All we know are assemblages. And the only assemblages are machinic assemblages of desire and collective assemblages of enunciation. No significance, no subjectification: writing the the nth power (all individuated enunciation remains trapped within the dominant significations, all signifying desire is associated with the dominated subjects).

Of course they* are antipsychiatrical. Of course they would push it all a step further, or to the side, or off a cliff. Of course we are inhabiting a singularly antipsychiatrical moment. "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self" ("BwO" 151).* In a time frame which evidences the dismantling of numerous entities, so many identities, could this be relevant? Witness the Balkans. Witness (the former) Czechoslovakia. Witness the (former) Soviet Union. Witness the Republican National Convention (1992). Witness Academia, in general. Witness the Department of English Studies, in specific. Witness Orlan,* RuPaul,* and To Wong Foo .* "Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/ Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world".* What recourse, then, in the face of such re-alignments, such re-identifications, such re-significations, such anarchy? To sew shut the rends? or snip the straggling stitches?

"Substitute forgetting for anamnesis" ("BwO" 151). That most used of phildickian* terms, that most coveted of modernist fictions: to remember the world entire. But herein lies a tension: to remember one's ethnicity, to reclaim one's physical space, to assert one's heritage, or, to let it all slip away into meaninglessness? To recover that memory, or to forget? The BwO demands forgetting.

The three dangers, the three "great strata": "the organism, significance, and subjectification" ("BwO" 159). It should not be at all surprising that the Victorians, Carlyle and Macauley et cetera., and their critics, Welleck and Lovejoy et cetera., valorized the organism and the organic perception of the world. And as such, with a Jamesonian will to totalization,* a will to power, as it were, fixed on controlling the organism. With surgical masks and gloves they set-to. Unlike the dominatrix and the masochist, Queen Victoria's men, Jeremy Bentham* et al., set about putting all the stitches in a line, set about "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" (Altick). But the antipsychiatrist and the dominatrix will have none of it. Tie them up, tie them down.*

"Significance clings to the soul just as the organism clings to the body" ("BwO" 160). Significance clings to the text as the Alien* clings to a life-form. Symbolism, archetype, depth, verticality, significance, mainstays all of the death-like vice-grip of modernist writer/reader. Enter the BwO. Enter the PoMo. Enter the Dragon ;* the dragon which slinks across the bared shoulder blade of Kathy Acker.* The ur-würm which consumes its own tail. Symbollessness, stereotype, surface, horizontality, insignificance wrap their own prehensile tail about the BwO, inseminating the host, to gestate a new monster to rip from the host's chest.*

And subjectification. The third strata to be mined away, another natural resource spent in an orgasmic flood. "How can we unhook ourselves from the points of subjectification that secure us, nail us down to a dominant reality?" ("BwO" 160). Gibson's cyberpunks* and Haraway's cyborgs* blast subjectivity to a white space, a cyberspace and back. Neurons firing across social synapses; flesh and metal bonding in white-hot flashes; machine indistinguishable from organism. The Lawnmower Man * engages in frantic sex with a cyberlover, orgasming in another real-time space. Carlos Fuentes shatters the Artemio Cruz subject into multiplicities;* Philip K. Dick builds simulacra and posits alternate-time realities;* Lyotard crumbles metanarratives into a pile of rubble and random letters* only to be shovelled into Kathy Acker's cement mixer.* Ad infinitum, ad astra,* ad nauseum. A "response," then, to the three dangers/strata: Assemblages, rhizomes, BwOs. If an assemblage is "territorial," if it lays claims to, maps out a space-discursive, physical, filmic, psychic, generic-for a stratum wherein the lines of connection converge, convert, what manner of assemblages are possible? Any? All. "Discover the territorial assemblages of someone, human or animal" (Deleuze and Guattari, "Conclusion" 503). "Becoming Intense, Becoming Animal."* Shelley's Frankenstein ; Haraway's Cyborgs; Schwartzenegger's Terminator ; Stelarc's Self.* And rhizomes?... Are rhizomes in contrast to trees, the received arboreal mode of instruction, of lineage, of structure, of knowledge? Do they constitute another binary: rhizome/arboreal? Never. Trees converge with, are already inscribed within, rhizomes. Instead, rhizomes are multi-pli-cities; convergences of points, where all points connects to all others, seemingly sense-defying feats, though utterly logical-Buckyballs,* destined to oscillate perpetually, always in motion; lines of movement, of velocities, Tau factors, and Speed. * And Bodies without Organs?...

And a "BwO of the State, army, factory, city?" ("BwO" 163). William Gibson's Sprawl?* A nightmare vision of Gotham City,* a Megalopolis * gone awry. The endless proliferation of concrete and steel, the endless proliferation of vice and crime, the endless proliferation of cybernets and cyberpunks, the endless proliferation of cyberminds and cyberidentities shooting off into the Rhizome\Sprawl, all magnificently captured, to the last sputter and gasp, by the unblinking eye of Ridley Scott.* Superimpose, if you will, the masochist's phantasy/non-phantasy onto the city without organs. Beaten and tied, flogged and fucked, stitched and stuffed, coerced into desirelessness. A City/Body without Organs. "We must also take into account cancerous BwO's in a stratum that has begun to proliferate" ("BwO" 163). The cybernetic CwO will doubtless irradiate itself.

And closer. Closer still. "There are not organs in the sense of fragments in relation to a lost unity" ("BwO" 164-5). To once again dis-assemble the modernist totalizing urge. "Nor is there a return to the undifferentiated in relation to a differentiable totality" ("BwO" 165). Différance.* Transculturalism, hybridization (multiplied to the nth power), artificial insemination, genetic manipulation. Toss the salad and the bowl, the nitrites have gone bad, the lettuce leaves wilted and browned. Nor the mosaic, newest icon of the politically glib, with its inherent individuality, and larger, totalizing unity of shape and form.* "There is a distribution of intensive principles of organs, with their positive indefinite articles, within a collectivity or multiplicity, inside an assemblage" ("BwO" 165). The BwO and the CwO proliferate, unheeding, unchecked. And it is the process, the act, the event of becoming which stands central stage. And like the nightmare of scientifiction,* the computer/organism takes over, consuming energy and resources, appropriating anything necessary, anything to become self-actualized. The BwO exists/creates (in) a "continually self-constructing milieu" ("BwO" 165).

Anything necessary.*