For Deleuze and Guattari, every actual body has a limited set of traits, habits, movements, affects, etc. But every actual body also has a virtual dimension: a vast reservoir of potential traits, connections, affects, movements, etc. This collection of potentials is what Deleuze calls the BwO. The full body without organs is "schizophrenia as a clinical entity" (Anti-Oedipus, p. 310). This drop in intensity is a means of blocking all investments of reality: "the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable" (Anti-Oedipus, p. 9). Unlike other social machines such as the Body of the Earth, the Body of the Despot or the Body of Capital, the full body without organs cannot inscribe other bodies. The body without organs is "not an original primordial entity" (proof of an original nothingness) nor what is remains of a lost totality but is the "ultimate residue of a deterritorialized socius" (Anti-Oedipus, p. 309). To "make oneself a body without organs," then, is to actively experiment with oneself to draw out and activate these virtual potentials. These potentials are mostly activated (or "actualized") through conjunctions with other bodies (or BwOs) that Deleuze calls "becomings".

Deleuze and Guattari use the term BwO in an extended sense, to refer to the virtual dimension of reality in general (which they more often call "plane of consistency" or "plane of immanence"). In this sense, they speak of a BwO of "the earth". "The Earth," they write, "is a body without organs. This body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles" (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 40). That is, we usually think of the world as composed of relatively stable entities ("bodies," beings). But these bodies are really composed of sets of flows moving at various speeds (rocks and mountains as very slow-moving flows; living things as flows of biological material through developmental systems; language as flows of information, words, etc.). This fluid substratum is what Deleuze calls the BwO in a general sense.

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