Deltarune, or how do you become a Body without Organs?
Video link: https://youtu.be/xz2sR0OWVAk
Note:some parts of the video were unscripted and are not reflected in this script as I was too lazy to transcribe those parts.
As silly and fun as Deltarune is, it is a game that has a whole lot going on in the background, and as a text can be read in many different ways. If you’re someone who watches Deltarune analysis videos and as terminally online as me, you’re already very much aware of that, and also very much aware of the whole pile of out-there analysis videos circulating the internet, so it’s time for me to add on to that pile. What I want to explore in particular is a connection I see between Deltarune and the work done by French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
This will not be the most cohesive or organised video, but the general things I want to develop on in this video are twofold.
- I want to explain some of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts through Deltarune in a hopefully approachable fashion
- With the knowledge of these concepts, I want to apply them to Deltarune and see how the game can be read through this lens, and if it offers any new insights
If you were looking for a cohesive or organised video, then you’ve come to the wrong place, but I will do my best to make this understandable to some degree.
Before we jump straight in, how about some background information? Who even are Deleuze and Guattari? Well, Gilles Deleuze was a french post-structuralist philosopher who was actively writing and doing philosophy from the 50s until his death in 1995. His work encompassed a lot, from larger big picture philosophical work, to explorations of past philosophers, to books on literature on cinema. To actually sum up his work in just a sentence or two would be impossible so here’s some of the books he wrote on screen.
Félix Guattari on the other hand was a lot of things. Whereas Deleuze was rooted in academia, Guattari was involved in a variety of fields. He was a philosopher, a psychoanalyst and was involved with a whole bunch of radical and militant groups. He wrote some screenplays too. Much of his writing was very unorthodox to his contemporaries and was overall a super out there and creative person.
Both of these figures have their own individual writings, but when they worked together it really sparked something in both of them. Deleuze focused Guattari’s writing, while Guattari opened up Deleuze to new ways of thinking. The two books that came out of their collaboration were Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. The contents of these books in particular is something that I see resonate with Deltarune a whole lot.
Now, I’ll probably bring in some other stuff from other theorists that I think is relevant, but it’s those two books that I want to hone in on.
—-------------------------------------------
So, what exactly brought me here?
//kris soul tears 1 and 2
In these specific moments of the game Kris becomes a Body without Organs.
If you have at all engaged with Deleuze and Guattari, these moments are so explicit in their message and their connection to their work that you’ll understand immediately why I’ve become obsessed. For the 99% of you that don’t know, one of the core concepts that is used repeatedly throughout Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus is the notion of a Body without Organs. Even just the name of the concept clarifies the connection that is present and why I am obsessed with this. It is staggeringly literal.
Obviously this could just be a fun little commonality that they share and that’s that, but actually looking at both the game, and these concepts in focus shows a lot more resonance than just something superficial.
So what actually is a Body without Organs and why does it relate to Kris?
The answer unfortunately isn’t very straightforward. It’s important to note that Deleuze and Guattari do not keep this term static and so the concept is kind of fuzzy. Deleuze first uses the term even before writing Anti-Oedipus with Guattari, in his book Logic of Sense, and throughout all of their different works the concept changes along with the passage of time. This constant state of flux is very fitting for what the concept is, but it does make learning about it a whole heap more difficult. As a result I cannot really explain what it is in its entirety, and can only really give you an approximation. I am however drawing primarily from the BwO present in A Thousand Plateaus, and largely sticking to it without bringing in a whole lot of the other connected concepts. Stuff like desiring-machines and the nitty gritty of how it functions in the psyche. It’s important stuff but for now we’ll just set it aside as I don’t want to overload this video with too much.
—----------------------------------------------------------
So, where do we start?
The best place to begin, I think, is to just throw a very loose definition out there. Very very generally, the Body without Organs can be considered a virtual body of pure potentiality. This still leaves a lot to understand but it gives us a starting place.
Now, with the loose definition of a Body without Organs thrown out there, what does it ACTUALLY mean?
What even is a body in the first place? What is an organ?
I think the best way to explain is to start from the smallest component and work up.
In their work, Deleuze and Guattari use the term organ and machine fairly interchangeably. The word machine, I think, will help clarify the concept a bit. When they use these terms, they're not referring to literal organs and machines (albeit those are good examples) but rather as a more general term that refers to a thing and its relation to the things it interacts with. An organ is something that produces and breaks off different flows and connects to other organs which in turn also create and break different flows, and so on and so forth. For example, the mouth is an eating machine, cutting off the flow of say, cake which produces a new flow of chewed up mush to the stomach which interacts with the flows of acid, and then forms a new flow into the intestines. But the mouth can also be a musical machine, and connect socially. Going even more abstract, one of the examples they give in the book is that of the orchid and the wasp. Even though they are physically quote un quote “separate”, the wasp BECOMES the reproductive organ of the orchid. This idea is even limited to purely individual things of course. Collectives can be machines too. So as you can see, there’s all sorts of organs. All sorts of machines. As they say in the very first chapter of Anti-Oedipus, “Everything is a machine.” In the book they outline a number of specific machines but the one that is most widely relevant are the desiring-machines. Desiring-machines are the machines responsible for the process of desiring-production. What Deleuze and Guattari are doing here is formulating a conception of desire that is productive, rather than based on a lack as was the case in Sigmund Freud’s and Jacque Lacan’s psychoanalytic systems. For now, just acknowledge that desiring-machines are there, doing stuff.
So, now that we know what an organ is, we can start to understand what a body is too. A body is essentially any whole composed of parts, where each part stands in a definite relation to one another and is capable of affecting or being affected by other bodies. The human body is an example. The skin, bones, muscles and everything else when all slapped together in relation to each other form the body. A school is another example; a body composed of the building, the teachers, the students, the books. A musician's discography is a body of their artistic work. What’s important to note here is that a body is defined by the relations of its parts, rather than the opposite. The body doesn’t dictate the parts, it’s the parts that when placed together, form a body. As a result, a body can take many forms and its real limits are to what capacity it can affect and be affected. The body does not have to have a hierarchical or dominant mode. The Spinoza quote “nobody knows what a body can do” is very apt.
So. We have a body that we now know is composed of organs. We know how those organs relate to each other and compose a body. But if a body can be anything, why is it that things aren’t constantly in flux?
This is because the body becomes organ-ised. D&G make a distinction between a body and an organism, in that an organism is a unified and hierarchised body. That is to say the flows between machines in a body are organised and structured. The machines, rather than flowing into one another to their full capacity, are instead directed toward their habitual forms, allowing some flows to pass, while excluding and blocking off others. As a result, an organism tries to maintain itself by blocking off flows that exist outside of its structure. All bodies are organised to some degree, it's just a matter of intensity. Some bodies are more organised than others. For example, the human body organises itself in a variety of ways such as through the immune system, but is also flexible in many ways.
It’s exactly here at this discussion of organisation that we can finally begin to look at the Body without Organs, what it is, how it works, and how it actually relates to Deltarune beyond just haphazardly slapping Kris onto the idea of one.
As I stated earlier, the BwO is a virtual body of pure intensity and potentiality. Going with what we know already, it can be said that it is a body with zero organisation. While the name may suggest the BwO is against organs, that’s not actually the case. It is against the organisation of itself. It is without organs as part of it, but organs still interact with it. Organs come and go but it rejects organisation outright. The BwO is not separate to an organism, but rather, an organism is just a constriction of the BwO. The BwO still exists underneath everything. Going to my definition, it is VIRTUAL. Much like the image in a mirror exists, but only virtually, the BwO exists virtually behind an organised or STRATIFIED body.
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari describe the BwO as an egg – an egg “crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors.”
Looking at this egg, you see these lines, these strata, which connect everywhere, go to all places on the egg, all sorts of territories. Much like a real egg, it’s just an undifferentiated goop.
But, when you hone in on those lines, on those strata, extrude them out, you start to see that the organism arises along a particular set of these lines on the surface of the BwO. An organised body is a stratified Body without Organs.
So, going back to the very beginning. What does it mean to become a Body without Organs? Plainly, it is turning an organised body into that undifferentiated mush of potential. It is about your ability to change and reshape a body. It is about deterritorialization.
—------------------------
Okay, that was a lot. That probably still made zero sense to you, but if you have followed to at least any extent, you might be wondering where it actually comes into play in Deltarune. If we look at it just a bit, we can start to see how it sounds pretty familiar when it comes to Kris.
//zoom into kris
Looking at Kris, there is a lot going on with them as a character. To keep this video at least slightly grounded, I am not going to start going into speculation about what’s truly going on with Kris, or their situation prior to the events of the game. That would quickly devolve into a mess, and frankly, isn’t even particularly important for this video. What is important is understanding Kris’ general situation. I used this word before, and I’m going to use it again now because it will become very important in the discussion. We have to look at the territory Kris is situated in. Not just physically, but every territory they inhabit. So let’s take a step back.
Unlike Undertale, which depicted its themes through a more symbolic approach, Deltarune clearly points towards very real and contemporary issues in a much more overt manner. There is no Great Barrier, there’s only blocked roads and private property. There is no King, there’s only corrupt officials and bureaucratic neglect. There are no legends, there is only organised religion. There are no mythological tragedies, there’s just bullies, homelessness, divorce and missing children. You get the point.
What glues these things together is the overarching alienation of an increasingly atomised world, even in places that you’d think would be close knit. It’s often joked about how Hometown needs a therapist, but this misses the point in that it doesn’t address the root cause of these problems, only the symptoms. The root of the issue here is not individual in nature. In Anti-Oedipus, one of the critiques of psychoanalysis that is put forward is that it entirely ignores the social and political aspects of mental illness. An individual might be mentally ill, but they don’t exist alone. They are situated in a social field and affect and are affected by it. As a result, the crux of so much of the conflict in Deltarune isn’t really individual, as it is social. Not all of it though. Definitely not all of it. //Asgore cringe// What plagues much of the residents of Hometown is a feeling of being trapped in existing social formations – formations that are flawed and end up doing more harm than good, and with seemingly no way to escape them – and the effects of those conditions.
Hometown itself expresses this sort of entrapment. Perhaps it’s my own subjective perception of small towns, but there's an overwhelming melancholy to these places. The thing that stands out, to me at least, is the relationship between the stationary town and the passage of time. The town envelopes you from both sides; on one side in nostalgia and romanticisation of a happier past, and on the other with a wall that limits you from moving into the future. The town itself acts as this black hole that captures any possibilities, and just leads you down a path of a dejected nihilism – an acceptance of the present state of things no matter how bad, locking you into inaction. “It’s just how things are.” Some people can escape the gravitational pull of this Capture by leaving the town itself (like Asriel (and now that I’m thinking about it, perhaps even Dess. Not going to delve into speculation on that though, but maybe it’s something to chew on for you folks)). There’s are the exceptions like those, but most people are stuck. This is seen in a large number of the major characters. Kris, Susie, Noelle, Berdly, they all share these insecurities, in one form or another. These four are the most obvious examples, but this anxiety runs through far more than just them, not limited to just Lightners, but even some Darkners too. No matter who, your choices don’t matter.
This is the territory Kris is situated in. Not simply a physical territory, but a social territory, an emotional territory, a political territory. And importantly, an unmoving static territory, one that is not exactly conducive to living a fulfilling or happy life. At least not for everyone.
But with the events of Chapter 1 that starts to change. A thing or two shifts and that dislodges everything else, and things start to spiral. Like throwing a pebble into a pond, one action sends ripples and difference to every other part of the lake. Here is where the BwO comes in.
This change we see IS the function of the BwO. Without the possibility for change underlying everything, nothing would happen in the first place. So the process of BECOMING a BwO is this activation of change, of deterritorialization and destratification.
How I look at it personally, is almost as a circuit breaker. When you’re in a static position, unchanging, you’re in this circuit of behaviours and functions. Things work smoothly. Or not so smoothly. What matters is that the function does not change, or doesn’t change outside of given parameters. With Kris, they wake up, they go to school, they’re kind of a loner loser, they go home and be depressed or whatever. Becoming a BwO is allowing the flows of desire to cross those wires in that circuit. Something shorts and everything starts to work differently. Everything that was there before still exists in the circuit, but it’s just been reorganised, the flows have been redirected.
With Kris, that initial switch was us being put into their body. The relationship between them and their soul was deterritorialized, shifted out from its current mode, and reterritorialized into a new form. That reterritorialization then reverberated into everything else. Just by one thing changing a whole new array of possibilities has opened up, and new lines of flight can be formed.
The second deterritorialization that we experience in-game is the quite literal change from the territory of Hometown to that of the Darkworlds. I think the point is clear at this point.
But these things were not instantiated by Kris, so is it actually the BwO at work here or something else? Well, like I said, BwOs are everywhere, underlying everything. Kris tearing out their soul is the most obvious example, but it is not the only one. However, what Kris’ case does show is the specificities of intentionally becoming a BwO, and something that struck me is the attention to detail in the way they do it.
The way Kris interacts with the soul perfectly demonstrates the care you should take while becoming a BwO. When Kris tears out their soul, they don’t just take it out and stay like that. They are careful with destratifying, and only do it briefly. They take the soul out, make the changes they want, and place the soul back inside of them. Kris clearly understands the necessity of returning back to an organised state.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari stress the necessity of being careful when becoming a BwO, as Kris demonstrates in game. They say you need to destratify, not with a hammer, but with a scalpel. You can see in the way they walk, shambling across the room, that despite the freedom they now have, to do anything, they are in a precarious, and unstable state. Becoming a BwO is a balancing act. The more you destratify yourself, the more at risk you become of just collapsing entirely.
From Guattari and Deleuze directly, quote:
“You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things , persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point at which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organisation of the organs we call the organism.”
This rings true for Kris to a T. They understand the delicate balance involved in this process. But funnily enough, we do also see what happens if we destratify too quickly in Deltarune. The Snowgrave route is an amazing example of this.
When Kris becomes a BwO, they make small gentle changes. But when we take the reins and do it throughout the duration of the Snowgrave route, we go all in. We absolutely deterritorialize and break down all the machines of the game. Everything is restructured. Instead of pacifying enemies and making them run away, that process is deterritorialized and then reterritorialized into them being frozen to death. The path that is taken is restructured; dialogue, the relationships, all are flung out from their normal formulation, broken and turned into something new, but important to note, something dangerous and non-emancipatory. When Deleuze and Guattari talk about these dangerous lines of flight, they talk about two kinds; suicidal lines of flight, and fascist ones.
Snowgrave I would consider to be the embodiment of this fascist line of flight present in Deltarune. As was said before, the BwO is the pure potentiality of a body and as a result contains ALL possibilities, including negatives ones. Moreover the body does not exist in a vacuum. Other BwOs can be present, and interact with Kris.
D&G state:
“The strata spawn their own BwO's, totalitarian and fascist
BwO's, terrifying caricatures of the plane of consistency. It is not
enough to make a distinction between full BwO's on the plane of consistency
and empty BwO's on the debris of strata destroyed by a too-violent
destratification. We must also take into account cancerous BwO's in a stratum
that has begun to proliferate. The three-body problem.”
The stratum that is present on Kris’ BwO is us. Us, the player, are the organised form of Kris in this situation, and in the snowgrave route, we become a cancerous BwO. We take over Kris, and become the dominant form of organisation, with all other flows passing through us, rather than Kris. What happens is that we overcode those flows with our own values, which in the case of the Snowgrave route is to be nasty and rude and murderous.
How the route follows a fascist line of flight is pretty self-explanatory. The overt murder, the weird uncomfortable and incredibly oedipal relationship between Kris Noelle and the Soul, and the striving for power and control. And to clarify, no Oedipus is not simply “I want to fuck my mom”, at least in this context, but rather refers to a repressive structure of desire and representation formulated by Freud, and kept to some extent by Lacan.
What I love about this example is that it is not only an ingame example, but a real one too. We are participating in an active process of breaking the game to a point where it functions, but unrecognisably so, and in such a manner that is negative or counterproductive to the well being of that body of the game. Obviously the game is programmed to do this, and so we are not REALLY breaking the game, but narratively it very much still tracks.
But getting a bit off track here, when I think about it, speedrunning is like a practical example of this process, in the way that you’re entirely reconfiguring how this organised system functions and crossing these wires of the game, sometimes even quite literally, and if you go too far with it and screw something up you can just softlock the game and have to reset. Don’t read too deep into this though, this is ACTUAL rambling, but there might be something to it.
Anyway, back on topic, D&G lay out the risks, but they also provide a safe way of approaching this process, to avoid this risk of going down a dangerous path.
Quote:
“Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.”
What they are saying here is to experiment where you can, see what possibilities you have at your disposal. But while you do it’s important to keep a little bit of yourself intact and keep some of your home in your back pocket, because then, no matter how much you experiment, there will always be somewhere you can go back to to rest.
—-------------------------
I think looking at Kris through this lens helps us understand the relationship that we (the soul) have with them. There can be an initial negative reaction to learning that we the player inhabit and control Kris; one of revulsion at the thought of being the one who takes away the control of this character. This is an understandable, and entirely reasonable reaction, and reading Deltarune through this narrative of who controls bodies, who judges what is the right way for bodies to exist, is something that is definitely present in Deltarune and should be looked at. I’m sure theres a Foucauldian reading in there somewhere. What’s great about art is that there can be simultaneous readings of the same text, and while the contents may differ, can both exist at the same time. So, contextualising the player soul as merely one form of organisation of Kris’ body, we can understand that it’s not an entirely negative relationship. The previous stratum that Kris was lodged on had long since ossified, and they could not get out of it themselves. Only after what was most likely Gaster shenanigans was Kris able to start moving themselves.
Analysing Deltarune through this way also solidifies the themes of change present in the game. It shows that the current state of things is not static, and can change. It has not always existed and doesn’t have to keep existing either. The only way for that to happen though, is to start moving. Become nomadic, experiment, see where you land.
As a parting word, here is a quote not from Deleuze or Guattari, but from an essay titled Criminal Intimacy by the Mary Nardini Gang.
“We must make ourselves bodies without organs. Within each of us is contained a virtual pool of everything we are capable of becoming—our desires, affects, power, ways of acting, and infinite possibilities. To embody and activate these possibilities we must experiment with the ways our bodies act in conjunction with others. We commit crime together so we can unveil our criminal becoming.”
—----------------
Thank you for watching!
There is a lot more that could be extrapolated on between Deltarune and Deleuze and Guattari. A lot more. However with the amount of stuff that could be talked about, I decided it would be best to really just focus on the BwO. If you are interested at all in this stuff and want to delve deeper into it I will link some channels in the description that I find super helpful. Shout outs to all the folks at Acid Horizon and the Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour podcasts, they make some extremely useful learning resources.
Before you go, I just want to mention that I am working on a cyberpunk thriller visual novel called Butterfly//Circuit. A free prologue is currently available to download on Steam and Itch, so if that sounds like your sort of thing go check it out, and make sure to wishlist it! Some of the music in this video was from the soundtrack too which is on all the streaming platforms as well as bandcamp and steam.
If you want to support my work, consider supporting me on patreon!
Baiiii
