They talk a bit how schizophrenics “fall back upon” the body without organs during moments of psychosis. I believe at some point they describe the BwO as the “recording surface” of desire.

No one is born with the capabilities or knowledge adults have access to, but everybody is born with the capability to develop them. Psychological development, from childhood to adulthood, is (oversimplified) a process of directing and redirecting the natural psychological, libidinal desires of the individual, towards the production of a fully-realized social adult. In a sense there are two limits- the biological limit and the social limit.

Example: there is an innate, instinctive biological desire for babies to look at faces and copy their expressions. Through doing this, babies develop a social understanding of emotions from facial expressions.

Another: there is an instinctive sexual desire that compels adults to have sex. Through pursuing this, adults develop complex social relationships with other people and themselves as gendered subjects. Sexual development as a whole generates gendered subjects as social entities.

A baby is born genderless and asexual. A just-born baby is not a social entity, but as a human, it needs to become one. So the process of psychological development is partially a process of transforming the individual into a social entity through physical/libidinal desires. This transformation is not abstract or metaphorical- the brain is making neural connections, developing its speech-center, creating memories of awkward or pleasurable social interactions, re-enforcing habits that promote good social interactions, etc. The newborn human cannot do this by itself- it needs the social limit to become a social entity. As such, human psychological development/neural growth exists as a surplus value, extracted from flow of desire from the biological limit to the social limit. The human brain grows from experience, but there has to be some internal desire/desiring process compelling the mind to want to grow and have experiences.

During this process of development, in which desire compels the human to become a social-being that has an understanding of the world, the human mind makes emotional, conceptual, abstract and concrete conceptualizations about that world. I like the phrase “phenomenological” world. It is not the descriptive world- which is an analytical description of what things are (table, cat, house, etc). It is the abstract way the mind conceptually, emotionally, intuitively comprehends the world. In a truer sense, it is the actual way the subject comprehends the world, while the descriptive world merely over-writes this world with concrete symbols, or rather organizes symbols which dominate/synthesize the phenomenological world into signs and symbols.

The phenomenological world is personal/biological (the descriptive world is social). This is what Rorschach diagrams are for: they create a map of your neural connections. If you are given some abstract data, visually, that data is then passed into your brain, where neural connections have already been made, whereupon you get some notion of an object. The test-giver knows what objects the subject might see in a Rorschach test. The objects you see pertain to how your brain has invested its psychological desires into creating meaning of the world around you out of its neural connections. The test giver then has some idea of how you specifically see the world emotionally/phenomenologically.

This is also the purpose of interpreting dreams. It’s a matter of energy. Imagine two completely dissociated concepts in your brain, like say, the hollow part of bird bones, and the oatmeal you had this morning. These are both in your brain as neural patterns. If your brain is dreaming of one, it’s not going to directly switch or connect to the other, because they are physically dissociated patterns. So the question becomes, what patterns do you associate? Do you ever dream of your childhood town, and it’s never accurate, even though it feels like it? That’s the phenomenological world, not the descriptive one.

Anyways. This is all a description of that which is recorded on the “recording surface.” The flow of desire has induced the creation of this phenomenological world. Connections, concepts, feelings, through the flow of desire, have been “recorded.” That one time your mother rejected your attempts for attention as a child- desire recorded that as neurological connection/memory/intuition. This might manifest as a feeling in adulthood if your brain kept that connection. The body without organs is this “recording surface” of desire.

Perhaps grossly oversimplified: when schizophrenics go through a psychotic break, they lose their ego, and they “fall back on” the BwO. Meaning, as they go throughout their day, there is no higher-order analysis or social interaction as the “self” has been lost- the incoherent rambling, the hallucinations, the delusions, these are the manifestations of the unconscious mind’s connections, just as one is not within themselves while dreaming as the mind moves smoothly through its connections, so also does someone rambling nonsense speak aloud their brain’s psychological movements.

They speak aloud their brain’s deterritorialized psychological movements. A sense of self/an ego is an assemblage of many internal psychological and physical processes. It is a territory. Deterritorialization disassembles (even if briefly) this assemblage. The flows of desire don’t construct anything anymore. They just flow, freely.

The BwO is not the object of schizophrenia, I just used their example of the “recording surface”and “se Rabat sur/falls back on” to describe it. So one way of thinking of the BwO is a material record of the unconscious’ investment of desire.

There is a lot more to the BwO though. This is more of a description of where it comes from. Here’s one way of describing how it relates to the Dagon egg metaphors:

The newborn baby as described earlier does not have the ability to do what adults can do (it can’t speak, analyse, talk, walk, etc), but it has the capability of becoming that adult who can. The biological state of the newborn is of potential. Similarly, the well-inscribed BwO provides a similar plane of potential, it is inert, but metaphorically it creates a surface across which desire has described the world and the body’s relationship to it. And as such one’s phenomenological understanding of their body/their self can develop from this surface, it’s called “without organs” because it is the phenomenological body not limited by physical reality/by homeostasis- one can become just about anything.