nirvana/ deleuze: bodies without organs

7/29/2019 Nirvana/ Deleuze: Bodies Without Organs

1/11

Nirvana/ Deleuze: Bodies without Organs.

Leigh David Cobley.

"As my bones grew they did hurt, they hurtreally bad..."

Listening in hindsight to Nirvana's In Uterokick off with Serve the Servants brings tomind the notion that it could not have startedin any other way. It is one of the most unusualbeginnings to a major record one can imagineand at the time certainly didn't seem to startwith the instant impact offered byNevermind's Smells Like Teen Spirit. It'salmost an anti start which hesitates and jitters

into existence like an unborn fetus in thewomb. It's very easy to interpret in this, thetypical idea that Nirvana were, as always,trying not to be commercial by beginning inan obscure discordant way. Much as RichardWagner had often refused to resolve cord sequences in order to raise our feeling ofanxiety and bringing added tension to his work.

Serve the Servants doesn't really begin the record. It sets the stage for what is coming inthe culmination of Kurt Cobain's genius. One of the rock industry's most artistically purerecordings. However, why do we continue to talk about musicians such as Cobain asgenii? Does it really mean anything tomake such a claim beyond the usualblindness of fan/ idol worship?

Cobain's work is the work of genius, butnot of a musical brilliance in the way ofsomebody like Mozart. Cobain's gift is notspecically musical, although it certainlydoes connect on a musical level in termsof song craft. His gift is more in the vein of

a visual artist or poet. We all know ofCobain's various literary inuences whichwe shall look at later. rstly his work isvery visual. It follows its own inner logicand is consistent from his rst songs rightthrough until the end. His is a deeplyartistic vision of the body and itsfunctions. The songs t together like theorgans of the body. They jump and stutter,like the famous "eay" moment of SmellsLike Teen Spirit or Negative Creep. They

break down as often as they ow, but thebreakdowns are part of how they function. The visual language of the songs is that ofbreaks and ows/ health and sickness. This is, of course, most obviously apparent in the,

Nirvana/ Deleuze: Bodies Without Organs.


2/11

always talked about, fast/ slow, loud/ quiet structures that he was sometimes criticized fornot being able to escape from as a formula. This is not merely a copy of the Pixies way ofdoing things as he so often modestly said. It is integral to understanding his art. Theseows are of the body. Flows of spit, shit, sperm, blood and territorial pissings. Themenstrual cycle of the female is clearlyimplicated in the art work he always made and

that which accompanies In Utero's sleeve. Thebreaks and ows are constantly functioning aswhat the French philosopher Gilles Deleuzecalled deterritorializations. Our bodies areoperating on many plateaus "I'm on a plain, Ican't complain..." They are bodies withoutorgans. Organs are machines which areconnected/ unconnected/ reconnected invarious different combinations. Nirvanadeterritorialize music in a way that no otherartist has been able to within the pop songformula. They were often dismissed as "just anoise band" yet the noise has its own place in the music beyond the mere need forloudness expressed by most rock/ metal bands. The typical responses that the songs are

just as good acoustically as shown on the MTV unplugged show is besides the point andwon't be repeated here. The noise is the sound of the body as it spasms between healthand sickness, "She keeps a pumpin' straight to my heart", as Courtney Love quite literallydid once upon nding that Cobain had overdosed.

We are so used to seeing rock musicians smashing up their equipment that it is hardlysurprising to nd such behaviour in a group such as Nirvana. We could pull them up for

their acts here. Doing something that is such a rockstar cliche. If Nirvana were beinghonest when they spoke with such scorn for the typical rock star antics of bands like Guns'n Roses, why did they so joyously engage in these acts? The smashing up of equipmentis something quite different with Nirvana than it usually is with other groups. It is usually arock concert spectacle, somethingbands do as an extra, somethingquite separate to the actual music.With Nirvana it is integral to themusic. The noise and destructionof guitars is always a part of theirdistinct sound. When we listen toEndless Nameless the feedbackcreates a new world ofphenomenal experience.

We cannot understand Nirvana'smusic in purely musical terms.Cobain is using sound to create aow of bodily functions. If we onlylook at his musical inuences weget a very limited picture. His trueinuences were more literary. It is no mistake that he was an avid reader of such writers asSamuel Becket and William Burroughs (anything with a B as he dismissingly said of hisliterary interests) Take for example the schizoid/ manic behaviour of the character fromBecket's trilogy. Molloy is obsessively creating a system of ows. A dysfunctional



3/11

distribution of stones throughout his pockets. They forma machine consisting of pocket/ mouth/ stone interconnections. The stones are constantly de/ reterritorialized in various combinations so that they caneach be sucked for an equal period of time. The mouthis a machine which is connected to the stone, just as

guitars/ cables and leads are connected to drum kits, or just as Cobain's mouth is connected to the microphone.Cobain still fascinates us owing to the fact that such aquiet, introverted person, hardly audible in conversationor TV interviews, is suddenly transformed when hisvoice is, as it were, plugged into the machinic assemblyunit that constitutes the band Nirvana. We do not knowif Cobain was familiar with the work of the Frenchauthor Artaud, but he would certainly have recognised aparallel between his and Becket's views. Artaud's"shitting machine" or "schizoid out for a walk" evoke similar breakdown/ recovery dynamicsas present in the work of Becket.

Samuel Beckets Molloy:

a store of sucking stones on Vimeo

Cobain, just like Artaud and Becket, drawsour attention to the fact that our bodies area combination of machines that work moreor less in synchronization, at times better

or worse than others. They are susceptibleto disease and can function with varyingdegrees of intensity, depending on ourinput, or on which other machines w e linkthem to. Social connections family/ transport. We work well when surroundedby people with whom we are alike, yet canfail tragically if we are trapped in the wrongsocial environment. Similarly, a bike doesn't move of its own accord, human legs areliterally included in its part count. We can see the same thing clearly in songs such asAneurysm or Heart Shaped Box, or otherwise on the cover of Nevermind. The baby is alead which is being plugged into the capitalist system even before it is born. Aneurysmshows us the decoded ows of intensity, the musicascends as the body deterritorializes and nallyexplodes as the disease breaks out. "Overdo it andhave a t..." These are ows of body uids. "Love youso much it makes me sick..." Cobain humorouslycompares love to disease in that it is something thattakes over the body corpus and can consume its vitalenergies for better or worse. These are the spasmswhich the body undergoes when subjected to illness.

This is even more clearly apparent in I Hate Myself andI Want to Die, an important song to understanding whatIn Utero is all about, even though it is only an outtake.

https://vimeo.com/1012078https://vimeo.com/1012078https://vimeo.com/1012078


4/11

This time the ows are of mucuse, "runny nose, runny yoke, even if you have a cold, youcan cough on me again." Here coughing serves to extend the connections between thevarious bodies without organs. The passing of illness from one machinic part to another,

just as kissing is sometimes considered to be swapping spittle. This is how the variousbodies interact dis/ connect with each other, in an effort to escape from the reterritorializedmachinic overow that is the society which we live

in. We are all parts of that very machine. The samegoes for sex. Cobain's approach to love is clinical,it is another function of the body. Various machinesare dis/ connected in order to reproduce. Nomachinic part can reproduce alone, apart from ahermaphrodite. Just as with Deleuze. The bee isan integral part of the ower's reproductive system.It is not that the ower lacks a reproductivesystem, it uses the bee to deterritorialize itsexternal ows. The same goes for other machines(in the more common understanding of the termwith machines such as computers or washingmachines.) The assembly men on the productionline form part of the computer's reproductivesystem. These are ows of intensity which"produce production."

Richard Linder: Boy With Machine.

Humans are also such machines. Just as in the famous song Them Bones. "The foot boneis connected to the ankle bone." With the human machine the penis machine is connected

to the vagina machine to produce ows of sperm, "I prefer her to any other..." In MoistVagina, Cobain compares the sexual act to that of inhaling marihuana. These are all typesof ows that have effects on the body. We can see this more clearly in Heart Shaped Box."I've been locked inside your heart shaped box..."The vagina/ heart apparatus is a machinicassemblage which produces the ows of desirewhich fascinate/ disgust the male machinic partwhich completes the circuit. Dave Grohl'sdrumming even adds to this intensity with hisregular pounding, which speeds up/ slows down asthe heart does when subjected to strain/ illness/ lust/ longing. "I wish I could eat your cancer whenyou turn black." Illness is spread through thecollective assemblage of human kind throughdeterritorialized connections. The spread ofdisease is part and parcel of the decoded ows ofdesire in late capitalist society. The ows are nolonger coded by family arranged connections, thehierarchical ows of caste/ class which limiteddesire production in previous societies is replacedby what Deleuze called rhizomatic ows, meaningthat they are not connected in any specic way.This is what Nirvana's music does. All theconnections are rhizomes. The leg bone is stillconnected to the ankle bone, but also the neck



5/11

bone which in turn is connected to the entire body corpus. Just like the Internet, which hasno hierarchy/ no order/ beginning/ end, it is all interconnected.

The apparent chaos of Nirvana'smusic contains this logic of therhizome. They are all interrelated

parts. All know how nirvanaswept away all of the pompousover bloated rock'n roll thatpreceded them, yet the reason ismore apparent if we consider themusic as an art form. Nirvanadiffer from other groups in thattheir music forms an overalltotality. It creates a parallel worldas Andre Breton said all truepoetry must do. They are not justa collection of pop/ rock songs,there is an overall artistic visionbehind it all. Most groups go onwriting songs because that isexactly what they need, but the songs do not usually explore a specic theme as Cobain'shave of the body dialectic. This is not to say that other singer song writers have no artisticcredit, but rather that their work is about expressing other things. They produce songs onvarious topics and there is no need tospeak of contradiction. However Cobain'smusic, even when he appears to be

writing about other issues, such asreligion/ society, are still of the bodypolitic. Lithium tells us of the comforts ofreligion, but it is a religious experienceonly through the body's reaction to anopium. The spirit is nowhere to be found.

This parallel world is one in the Deleuziansense. The pounding of Grohil's drums onour ears is like that of the mother's heartto the unborn baby. It is the world of theinterior, where our umbilical cords havenot been severed and we are all stillconnected to the machinic totality ofhumankind. These are the invisible cordsof connection that we have not only to themother/ family, but in all social ties/ obligations that we make and break."Married, buried... Yeah, yeah, yeah,yeah..." as Cobain makes painfully clear inAll Apologies. It is no mistake that In Uteroends with the severing of the umbilical cord which ties him to his safe world of the womb,recoding his body without organs through the marital traditions on towards furtherrecodings. As he makes plain in Heart Shaped Box, "Throw down your umbilical noose soI can climb right back..." This has a double meaning, it is partially about the need to



6/11

reconnect to the mother/ feminine side of identity, as if he were somehow able toreconnect the umbilical cord and return to the innocence of unborn existence. On the otherhand if this proves impossible the umbilical"noose" gives him another way out of life,by using it to ritually hang himself. Theumbilical cord then is a clear symbol of

the connection between the bliss (orbuddhistic Nirvana) of none existence anda reminder that once it has been severedwe have entered into the realm of decay/ regeneration which can only nd itssolution in death. Cobain's umbilicalnoose then is a potent symbol of theearthly situation in which we ndourselves.

Cobain may long for a return to an archaicmatriarchal/ feminine society, but heknows it is too late. All Apologiesaddresses his passive acceptance of hisnew role in which he is so uncomfortable.What we deterritorialized through non-hierachicized relations, we reterritorialize byupholding, consciously or not, ingrained social customs. In two words "Married, buried..."Cobain, the feminine Pisces of Been a Son, is suddenly reconstituted as the patriarchalfather gure.

The feminine revenge of woman's subjection to male

hierarchical society expressed in Francis Farmer WillHave Her Revenge on Seattle is the refusal offeminine desire to t into the position left for it by manas fetish object.Society is made up of an intricately wovenassemblage of connections, social ties and traditions.We constantly un/ plug ourselves into/ out of varyingmachinic assemblages. The arse/ toilet, eye/ television, hand/ pencil, mouth/ spliff machines etc.Cobain saw this clearly in the works of WilliamBurroughs, whom he greatly admired, and openlyemulated with his literary "cut up" approach to lyricwriting. Let us take The Soft Machine for example.The Soft Machine is a Machinic assemblage made upof bodies without organs. It is the time travel devicepar excellence, as it has no need of the typical form oftime travel "machines" that frequent the more literalthinking of science ction literature. The body is amachine in itself. The protagonist is able to travelback to the times of the ancient Maya through abodily connection with one of their present daydescendants. This connection takes the form of a decoded ow of sperm. As bothparticipants simultaneously hang themselves they ejaculate, thus enabling him, throughthe decoded sperm ow, to traverse the genealogical machinic wirings back to their Mayanroot. He nds himself back in the times of the Maya and proceeds with his project which is



7/11

to cause the destruction of the despotic machine assemblage that is the Mayan calendar.It is clear here that we have two notions of time, that of the organic "body clock" of thehuman organism and that articial imposition of the "universal clock". The Mayan calendaris despotic in that its purpose is toregulate the actions of Mayan citizens,

just as our own conception of time is

recoded through the twenty four hour,sixty minute/ second clock. what wouldhappen to society without the despoticpower of the clock? Burroughs shows usprecisely this when his protagonist gainscontrol of the calendar and proceeds tospeed it up/ slow it down at his will. TheMayan citizens react, at rst, as parts ofthe machine, who act in synchronicitywith the machine. Just like anymechanical part assemblage, the "soft"machines that are human bodies speedup/ slow down in accordance with thedictates of the calendar. The Maya werean astronomically obsessed society, just as our own has a similarly narrow vision whichdoes not extend beyond the central importance of the economy. The Mayans cannot doubtthe infallibility of their calendar and act as cogs in its machine. They are part of itsfunctioning. They work in accordance with its logic, just as we do with the dictates of thestock exchange, the importance of GNP for our own personal benets and our relegationof other needs to the effect that we are barely aware of them at all. Burroughs makes clearthat which Deleuze says when he describes society as a coding of emotional/ physical/

psychological ows into machinic connections. When the machine needs to adapt in orderto save itself, from its own contradictions, through its constant schizoid breaks, people,who are integral parts of the machine operate accordingly. As Deleuze says, capitalism isa system which works all the better for having broken down. It's contradictions do notdestroy it as with all other systems.Thus, when harsh measures are takento prop up a broken machine, themajority adapt to their newimpoverished conditions, for the mostpart, without protest. The cogs in themachine merely take on more strain asits functioning is intensied.

In the rest of the novel, Burroughsproceeds to decode these ows. Whenthe despotic machinic calendar isnally speeded up beyond its limits, itdoes not break down as such. Ratherit deterritorializes its constituent partsinto new arrangements of machinicassemblages. Once it has "planted ahouse and built a tree", as Cobain says in Breed, the despotic machine ceases to codifyour forms of desire. New forms of social/ familial/ economic connections are not onlypossible but obvious.



8/11

Cobain's best known literary inuence is his homage to Patrick Suskind's Perfume in thesong Scentless Apprentice. Beyond the usualobservations made about Cobain feeling himself a gifted/ misunderstood outsider from society (consider theinteresting parallel between his life and how the novelends. The man who could have dominated the world, but

in abject disgust for humanity, prefers to throw it away ina deant nal act of nihilistic glory.) The protagonist ofSuskind's novel, named Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is aperson gifted with an amazing sense of smell, whichgives him powers of observation and an insight intonature and man that most of us are oblivious to. Forinstance we assume that love is "at rst sight" due to ourunder developed nasal capacities. However Grenouillekeenly observes that it is really how a person smells thatattracts us. Let us look at how Cobain uses this inScentless Apprentice. " Like most babies smell likebutter..." Again, the relation of childbirth. "Electrolytessmell like semen..." ows of human uids likened to thoseof machines. "Throw me in the re, I won't throw a t..."Again, ts and spasms, just like the girl who "over did it" inAneurysm. We should also consider the ts and spasms of any machinic assemblage,Nirvana's music builds and breaks down until it is reassembled, just as the body doesunder social pressures which it is subjected to. The breakdowns are part of the internallogic of the songs and function despite their apparentcontradictions. It is here in Scentless Apprentice'schorus that Cobain's primal wail of a voice achieves

its crescendo in its structural break down of "goaway" pleadings juxtaposed over an ascending lineof high pitched notes. We can interpret this either inthe literal fashion, in the sense that Cobain did notwant his fame and just wanted to be left alone (likeGrenouille in Perfume who retires to a cave a onepoint) or we could hazard the hypothesis that this isin fact the birth cries of the gifted machinic part thatwill not t/ does not plug into the social body politic.There is a price to be paid for having a gift, as allsupposed genii show us. "This one was bornscentless and senseless..." Grenouille has no scentof his own and is thus condemned to stealing thoseof others. Cobain himself was forced into the positionof marketing himself and thereby turning grunge intoa style/ fashion. In a way, by pretending to be who hereally was, he became even more unreal. Grenouillepretends to be normal by hiding behind a humanscent that is not his own. "What is wrong with me..."As Cobain soliloquises in Radio Friendly Unit Shifter.When Grenouille manages to capture pure humanscent in its most rened quality through the distillingof a beautiful girl's smell, he uses it to send the restof society, who are against him, into frenzy. Again, allof the ows of desire that polite society codes



9/11

through established relationships and social positions are broken, enabling desire todeterritorialize itself in the rhizomatic structure of a public orgy. The monogamy ofnineteenth century French civilized behaviour is broken and its citizens sexual vitality issuddenly able to re codify itself.

Cobain was a particular master of the

restraint/ frenzy duality. There issomething more at work here in theway he plays the guitar, as the musicis not merely "heavy" in the typicalfashion. He is literally plugged into theguitar, with which he forms asymbiosis. He attacks it more thanplays it and even though he had nointerest in inciting the crowd to frenzy(he said plainly in his suicide note thatthis left him quite cold) he is rather inhis own world when he stumbles/ sways and jutters along with theguitar. Yet instead of merely watching,the audience too are sucked into thisfrenzy. Cobain had the same ability assomebody like Freddy Mercury, theability to plug into the entire crowd. Incontrast to Mercury though, without even trying or desiring to do so. We may remember allof the crowd pleasing tricks employed by these other types of performers. None of that ispresent here. Cobain barely notices them. They are plugged into his machinic assemblage

not vice versa. If we watch him in action during a solo such as that from School, we seethat it is an open ow of notes. He uses music more in the vein of a painter than that of amusician. In manyways the work of KurtCobain is more visualand painterly thanmusical. He alwayspainted and theimages that he hasleft us form a part ofthe same world asthe music. The setdesign for the InUtero tour was noexercise in typicalrock star egoism, it isa part of the centralconcept that all oftheir musicexpresses.

Cobain's artistic vision reaches its purest form of expression with the song Milk It. Again, ishe "milking" the loud/ quiet dynamic for all that it is worth? Or is the milk another ow ofbodily uids? He starts off "I am my own parasite, I don't need a host to live, we feed off ofeach other, we can share our endomorphins..." The health /illness duality is clearly present



10/11

here. We infect each other, just like in I Hate Myself And I Want to Die with "You can coughon me again..." Our infection is part of the cure. We need the infection of being a part ofsociety. This is how capitalism's very victims come to thrive off of it. When we cutourselves off, like Grenouille (or ultimately Cobain himself) did, we feel nothing but disgustfor the pathetic wretches that human beings usually are. Just like capitalism, the disease ispart of the cure, working all the better the more it breaks down. Milk It takes the juttering

start/ stop, fast/ slow, loud/ quiet dualities to theirmost devastatinglyeffective conclusion. Itrecovers from its owninternal illnesses in theverses while it is psychingitself up for the nextchorus (or like in thesecret track where hesarcastically sighs "onemore solo...") we knowthat Cobain is a master ofdecoding the ows thatsociety always tries tomake us recode. When we"feed off of each other" we are both killing and resuscitating each other and ourselves. Incapitalism we are all leaches sucking each others blood as well as draining limited naturalresources, but the system cannot survive without this decoding and redistributing of blood/ money/ capital. However, if we "share our endomorphins" the ows operate equally in alldirections, spreading out across the planet and into other plains of consistency, in this way

the lm The Matrix is correct in accessing that humans are not mammals, rather we arethe virus itself. Later in the song he says "lack of iron and / or sleeping" everything is to dowith the body. He continues, "I get to pet and name her, Her milk is my shit/ my shit is hermilk..." This is the most directly articulated example of what Cobain's art was capable ofdoing, and essentially, what it is all about. All of the ows of the body are deterritorializedinto arbitrary liquids. They are ows inside the body without organs. There are no more"organs" in the body assuch, rather a de-hierachicized rhizome. All ofthe ows are freed up andrandomly reconstitutethemselves. Milk becomesshit, which turns into spittle/ blood/ piss/ water/ spermetc.

Although Cobain oncestated that he had tried toread Nietzsche butunderstood nothing, his music shows very Nietzschean characteristics. Everything is to dowith and explainable in terms of the body. As Nietzsche said, Buddhism is more a result ofdiet than ideology. It is how we constitute (or allow society to constitute) our body thatdetermines our psychological states. When we go up to the heights or down into thedepths through excess or regulate ourselves by cutting a medium path, we positionourselves in regards to that which we consider to be benecial to whatever we consider to



11/11

be our physical/ mental well being. The deterritorialized machine that we know as Nirvanashows us that we can gain access to all of these states, through drugs, or other naturalstimulants.

"Look on the bright side suicide, left wing/ right wing/ brokenwing..."

Death is, as Socrates would have put it, a recovery from thelong illness of life. Death is not a part of life, it is its negation.It is when we cease dying/ compromising/ feeding off ofeach other. "Obituary birthday, you'll still be down here in myplace of recovery." When Kurt's body was found on that Aprilday of nineteen ninety four we can at the very least, despitethe pain of those he left behind, take solace in the fact that itwas a very "Socratic recovery" indeed.

Postscript: "The wires are all tangled up!"

In brief, humans are desiring machines. When we are bornwe are severed from the mother by the cutting of theumbilical cord, but we retain a psychic umbilical cord.Throughout life we use it to plug in/unplug ourselves to/ from various other machines.Toilet/ phone/ computer etc. people- relationships etc. Mouth to mouth spittle ows, arse totoilet shit ows, not forgetting the blood ows of warfare. War is in fact as much a part ofsociety and its hierarchies as anything else. It is one more exchange of ows, this timethose of blood over real territories. These combinations of dis/ reconnections create whatwe call civilization. Throughout life the connections become ever more complexed. If we

want to disconnect from the entire social body politic (i.e. capitalism) we nd that wecannot rid ourselves of it. Although many today want to do precisely this, they ndthemselves ever complicit in capitalism's functioning. Through the habits of a life time,even when we unplug from all of the machines, we nd that all of the proverbial wires aretangled up and this is exactly why we cannot easily form a new society. Our physicalenergy is still invested in the up keeping of the machinic body of the system.

In other words the chain of our collectiveneeds/ obligations/ social connections tie usto the machine which we want to unplugourselves from. It is necessary to somehowdisentangle the wires/ umbilical cords thathold our true desires in check. Nirvana'smusic shows us how we can do this. If webuild new social structures based on thepattern of the rhizome we can bring out alevel plain of consistency, a non-hierarchicalworld in which there is no need for socialcodings and we can do as Cobain suggested,"share our endomorphins"

NIRVANA - HEART SHAPED BOX on Vimeo

https://vimeo.com/38332349https://vimeo.com/38332349

nirvana/ deleuze: bodies without organs

Documents