Organ Thought

Hey Everyone! I’ve been developing my own framework for how we understand ideology, belief and knowledge for the last 3 or 4 years, and last year I finally read Deleuze & Guattari’s Capitalism & Schizophrenia cycle, which ended up giving me extra terminology for some things I was already trying to describe on my own and gave me some more analytical concepts to work from. What I call Organ thought, based in part on D&G’s Rhizome Thought, is the main framework I’ve been using for political analysis for the last few years, and if I get the chance I’d like to write a book of essays called Organ to try to formally theorise it.

As often happens when I get really really excited about a theoretical concept or project, this means I have been paralysed by perfectionism and unable to write about it in a structured manner and unable to release what I can write because I can’t stop picking over it. So in an effort to overcome that, here is a collection of some Tumblr posts I have made starting to unpack it.

From my blog Sophie From Mars:

“I think people have a fairly reflexive grasp on deleuzoguattarian rhizomatic thought, like we all get that people are like ants in a colony or bees in a hive, that our actions contribute to a larger whole with its own subjectivity.

I think that people acting as the neurons of this big brain affect the nature of the whole with their actions, which is why for example people discussing conspiracy theories are observably part of a larger whole which is observably paranoid. Likewise, Naomi Klein’s metaphor in Shock Doctrine relies on the idea that the population is like a body undergoing electroshock torture.

I don’t think it’s just a metaphor though, I really think we make giants together. I think it was Hume that said debates can be reduced to people just saying YAY or BOO and that always reminds me of how when bees are moving en masse they butt heads to try and change the direction of the overall group.

We as organisms make up organisations, formal or informal. As organs in us make up ourselves, our political institutions are sometimes organs of other organizations, or nations, which in turn can form international organisations. Even while formal institutions often have rules or constitutions or other structures to govern their behaviour, there are social organisms governed by social forces between the people who constitute the whole.

I think that our behaviours carry across scales. People acting paranoid constitute a paranoid group and so on. Because of this I think there is probably a fractal logic between orders of magnitude of groups of human beings. What I mean by that is that fractals appear the same at every scale, and I think that the interactions between people are fundamentally like the interactions between groups of people because people combine their subjectivities to make a group subjectivity”

To which user deafmangoes replied:

“I was a bit stumped by “deleuzoguattarian rhizomatic thought” but I got the gist of the rest of it. I suppose where I might disagree is the part about the interactions between people and interactions between groups: not because I think it’s wrong, I agree that they are fundamentally similar, but I think characterising groups as capable of interacting can be obfuscating.

Take a hypothetical example of two CEOs arranging a deal between their companies: they are present as representatives of those companies, with directives from their boards (and in a kinder world, workers), but their interaction is not as a group, but as individuals.

Basically I don’t think we should reify groups or organisations: decisions made by them, and interactions between them, are made by the people who comprise them.

Though at the same time, not all individuals in a group are empowered to the same degree. A CEO can choose to make a deal, a worker cannot. The CEO can choose to shape policy, the worker cannot.

It might be that this is actually exactly what you’re saying and I got the wrong end of the stick, in which case, sorry! Pissing on the poor, etc.”

To which I replied:

“So I want to pull you up on the use of a CEO and a business for a couple of points. Firstly, the fact that the company is constrained into the decision making structure that it is, where there is a CEO and there may be voting and so on, is shaped by human intervention rather than just assembling the same people into an informal organisation. The informal organisation, the social organism, also exists, but the corporation is a legal fiction to constrain the social organism to a capitalist framework.

In one sense, the material sense, the decision making of say Elon Musk is amplified by the people who work for him, allowing him to act as the brain (god help us all) of organisations he heads. In the ideological sense too, Elon as CEO is a little dictator. However, in the interplay between the ideology and material reality, the ideologico-material shared space we can call it, we need to consider the feelings and thoughts of many individuals who may work for Tesla or SpaceX or Twitter because for example if Elon Musk said that white people are the only good programmers, presumably fewer people of colour would apply to work for him and maybe some who do would quit. This is the social organism bristling within its constraint by capitalist legal construction. In this way, something like Tesla can act more decisively than an equal sized group of affiliated but disorganised people, but only at the whims of Musk.

But I think this is mostly pretty valid, which is why I’ve been working on something I want to call “blindspot analysis”.

Basically we can agree that a social organism doesn’t actually have a memory, or a center, or make decisions/have thoughts. It isn’t a conscious thing in the same way people are, but we tend to describe it in anthropomorphising terms.

For example it might seem like America has a memory - certainly it has historical records and people with individual memories - but it doesn’t actually have a memory except in metaphor. “America was remembering its temporarily forgotten chauvinism”. In this metaphor is a blindspot, ignoring the fact that America doesn’t have a memory per se. There is no perfect center of America. We could say that Donald Trump as the President, Commander-in-Chief, Big Daddy Boss Man is the center, the way we might say a king is the center of a kingdom. But the President is replaceable, and in fact was replaced every four or eight years until 2024, and even a king in a kingdom is replaced by a successor, and even the successors have successors and so on. As Derrida says “the center is elsewhere”. The construction of the group as organised structure exists in the minds of everyone in it. America doesn’t make decisions. By this I don’t mean that the ruling class manipulates American democracy although this is self evident, I mean that The Thing America doesn’t make decisions. In a very similar way to how our bodily needs drive emotional changes and urges in us that we then act upon which we rationalise as our decisions, America’s body decides for it what is being done.

In blindspot analysis we recognise these faculties that a social organism doesn’t have, and then we turn a blind eye to one of them to reify the group as a living thing.

For example, patriarchal history - patriarchy’s “memory” - tells a version of events that see men as heroes and women as property incapable of independent thought. Feminism, by contrast, doesn’t just tell the facts as they were, it creates an anti-patriarchal-history, the perfect ideological antimatter to patriarchal history. It contains patriarchal history in order to explain its deception and manipulation so that someone cannot at once believe both. I think this helps us to understand dialectics better, because we can see how the synthesis of patriarchy with its opposite happens in the moment-to-moment writing and unwriting of feminist and patriarchal histories in the brain cells of the human consciousness (that’s us)”

I think that seeing the world in social organisms and their organs helps us to understand the totality better, because we can see the ideologico-material, which is neither the material facts nor the ideological narrative but the interplay between them.

I then had an ask submitted by user Hey Zelda which I will format as a Q&A here:

1. Hey Zelda: I did always understand butler’s gender theory to be dialectical in a related sense, that a cultural sense of gender is an aggregate of categorized behaviors that shapes an individual’s relationship to it based on their individual context BUT which the individual in turn gets to contribute back into. So like, while my understanding of womanhood is shaped by the way I experienced this cultural aggregate, by being a woman I contribute something back to the aggregate understanding of womanhood. This feels like a similar understanding of interplay between individual and group subjectivities?
   
   Sophie From Mars: yes this is spot on! We make up Big Woman together and also Big Woman defines in turn how we relate to Big Woman. (I am not in the pocket of Big Woman but I really want to be). This also helps us understand the fallacy of “I’m going to change [group] from the inside” because individuals also understand things in dialectics and the side that we relate to and perhaps have some power in (these are also a bit of a feedback loop) is the side that we think we can change. Reapplying this to gender, I think eggs often start thinking about the social relations of their authentic gender a long time before coming out. This relates to what I will be discussing in The Mad & The Mentally Ill, because I think that the madness experienced by women individually both constitutes the group insanity of the social organism of all women under patriarchy and is at the same time produced by how the group (via its individuals as well as abstractions in popular discourse) is treated by the world.
2. Hey Zelda: There’s an innuendo studios video where he explains that individual ggers dodge responsibility for the kind of harassment the movement is infamous for by disavowing that behavior as the actions of individuals and not reflective of the group. I’m not sure what my point is with this, but it seems like an example of obscuring the character of a group by pretending that it is not comprised of its members. Maybe this can also be understood by POSIWID, and maybe it’s also a kind of No True Scotsman fallacy, but I’m not sure. I don’t know how you draw the line between situations where a group or movement can be allowed to disavow its most unsavory or destructive elements and when it shouldn’t be allowed that disavowal. But maybe that question doesn’t do enough to understand extant behaviors in the context of an aggregate organism, reflexively defending itself (or larger supersystems like patriarchy), for example.
   
   Sophie From Mars: Disavowal is essential to a social organism that is working toward ideological ends in an effective way. People have a much harder time intervening to stop someone who is encouraging violence but not personally perpetrating it. I like you bringing in POSIWID because this definitely all also relates to the systems theory I talk about on stream. When people are able to name and identify an ideology and its relate social organism they are able to align themselves against it. The reason Nazis were pretending not to be Nazis between 1945 and 2025 is that the social consensus was anti-fascist, that we got together and killed the giant called Nazi, but actually killing a social organism is very difficult without for example killing all the people related to it.
   Here I find it poignant to expand by thinking about American Nazis or Nazi sympathisers in the 1930s, many of whom saw very few consequences for supporting fascism except that they became wary of using that label. The Nazis, even including Hitler himself, were very open about basing their beliefs and practices in the Holocaust on the American genocide of indigenous people on Turtle Island and the previous European persecution of jews and romani people. The ideas themselves fit perfectly well with hegemonic ideas of the time and recent past, but the specific label of fascism was condemned.
   This is why I think people experience a dissonance discussing “the re-emergence of fascism”. For many people of colour, queer people, disabled people, women and others it has been clear that either the society we had in the imperial core between 1945 and 2025 was also a little bit fascist toward some people most of the time, or the term fascism isn’t a hard-boundaried concept. Personally I bristle at the idea of “neo-nazis”, because there is a very direct lineage of thought and social contact between people who were calling themselves Nazis in the first place and are calling themselves Nazis now, but as for “America has become fascist” versus “America was always fascist” I think both can be true. As many have observed, the Holocaust remains a named distinct tragedy, the emblem of genocide, because it happened inside the imperial core rather than being a naturalised part of imperial expansion or colonialism. It is at once only semantic and also a meaningful distinction, because we can all see that people feeling unafraid to call themselves fascists again is bad news.
3. Hey Zelda: This model seems to posit one of a few things maybe? On one hand, maybe groups acting as an amalgamation don’t require organs to function effectively…though maybe that on its own doesn’t promise that a society without the discrete organs of a state can function smoothly enough to substantially benefit the individuals that comprise it. Then again, maybe the organism can have a different set or organs than those that might be called a state, and maybe some organs are inevitable and will emerge if they’re not created intentionally. Then again, again, maybe those organs are being formed now, which I think leads into this last… [continues in q4]
   
   Sophie From Mars: Here I think you’re experiencing the illusion of consciousness of social organisms by trying to think what it perceives while also seeing it as a group comprising individual members. This would mean seeing the world not how the social organism sees it, which if it were like how humans process the world would be mediated by self-delusion, but rather seeing it in a state of crisis, experiencing the Real which philosophers notoriously warn that nobody should ever experience as it would be a mind shattering lovecraftian horror. Incidentally deleuze & guattari call this state of nervous meltdown where a person experiences the Real “the body without organs”. As for a social organism not having let’s say specialised organs because even if people in a group don’t have roles they are still organs of the group - most groups above a certain either deliberately assign or de facto assign roles to people in them or even to groups of people in them (for example the US government has several sense organs called the CIA, NSA, FBI, and so on, though they also have other functions) Before moving onto your last I’ll say the specific anatomy of different organisms varies I think, but their construction of a cohesive self experiencing a cohesive world obeys the same basic rules. I think. This is a part I’m working on because it’s quite tricky. Deleuze and Guattari describe these parts as the three syntheses, conjunctive, connective and dysjunctive, and their model of subjectivity is one of the big hurdles people have to get through in reading them because they chose to use a psychotic delusion as the basis for their framework
4. Hey Zelda: I guess the last obvious observation is that a class can certainly be thought of as a kind of aggregate organism, though I don’t know what we do with that model aside from informing what “class consciousness” implies about a class’s ability to act with intention towards its own liberation—the difference between having a survival instinct and leveraging a survival instinct. The implication to me seems to raise the threshold for that consciousness and the political activation needed for revolution, or at least notes that organs for nurturing that consciousness are surely necessary for getting there. And thinking of the organs from #3, maybe that’s the best way to understand something like industrial unionism, as a collection of related organs that serve as fixtures for that consciousness, both maintaining and leveraging it.
   
   Sophie From Mars: Class consciousness is at core the consciousness that you are in a class. It doesn’t require that you understand the intimate workings of that class or even you own role in it. Those are good things to figure out imo, but not needed, which is why I don’t think it does raise the activation energy. You will have a consciousness of how your class is being treated when you are aware that you exist in a class, though this will be mediated by self delusion like everything else, but that’s about the interactions that happen as it were beyond the skin of your class.

I then received an ask from a user called richardburbagehateblog which read:

“I wonder if the sensory bio/biosemiotics concept of the umwelt might be useful as you develop your organ thought. To briefly summarise, a creature’s umwelt (lit. ‘self-world’) is the unique experience it has of reality based on the limits of its particular combination of sensory and perceptual functions. Many organisms see colours we can’t, hear far more or less accurately, or have entire sensory systems that have no analogue in our human worlds. It can also be used to think about more abstract perceptual functionality like memory, time, sociality etc.

What an organism can experience and understand of the Real is constrained by the edges of the self-world it inhabits, which in turn is shaped by the context in which it exists and has evolved; we only perceive what we’ve needed to perceive to become the thing we are, and we become the product of what we are able to perceive. Love this line of thought, looking forward to reading more of your writing on it.”

My reply:

Yes this is definitely a concept I like. I’m not much of a phenomenologist but I think trying to inhabit the minds of social organisms, despite them not really having minds, is a required part of this process. fwiw I believe umwelt means environment and the um- prefix from the old german “umbi” means around, so literally your surroundings.

This is very important to what I’m talking about because I also want to bring in Donald Norman’s concepts of design philosophy from his work, most notorious The Design of Everyday Things. He talks about affordances, which are a relationship between a user and an object, or more specifically between the user’s capabilities and the object’s features. A cup affords being picked up by a person, etc. This concept is also used in ecology to talk about a creature’s relationships to its environment.

Donald Norman loves to talk about doors as a designed object, so let’s talk about a door in a zoo. If there is a door in an animal enclosure, but the animal doesn’t have the capacity to operate a door, then the enclosure does not afford leaving for the animal, but can afford entering and exiting for a human being, unless of course the door is locked and then we stop calling it a zoo and start calling it a prison.

It is worth thinking about what a social organism is capable of within the environment it inhabits, and what we are capable of within the environments of the social organisms we inhabit, our affordances and theirs.

Please let me know on here or on my Tumblr if you have thoughts about this discussion, because discussing this framework with others is both the best way I can think to get myself motivated to formalise it and finish the essays I’ve been working on and of course to find any parts that don’t hold up and need reworking