control society

Jackson Pollock’s Flight from Law and Code:Theses on Responsive Choice and the Dawnof Control Society

Ronnie Lippens

Published online: 15 August 2010

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

1 Control Society

In his ‘‘Postscript on Control Societies’’ [published in French originally in 1990] the

late Gilles Deleuze made a most succinct attempt at outlining the transition from the

disciplinary society [or societies] to a control society [societies]. Disciplinary

societies operate according to ‘precepts’, i.e. ‘order words’ around which territories

and populations are formed, ordered, striated, aligned, made productive. Control

societies on the other hand are much more fluid. They generate outcomes

[‘products’] in situations that are operated by ‘passwords’. Unlike ‘order words’,

‘passwords’ merely regulate situations [and no longer territories and populations] by

situationally accepting, ignoring or rejecting particular qualities in ‘dividuals’

[individuals, in control societies, are no longer in-dividual]. Control societies

operate by way of fluid modulation of situations and passwords [10, pp. 179–181].

In 1990 Deleuze’s insight which itself flowed from a thorough engagement with the

later Foucault’s work did add to a burgeoning governmentality literature. Two

decades on one may perhaps hope to be able to add to Deleuze’s reading of control

societies, not so much because Deleuze’s reading would have been incorrect or too

limited, but, rather, because control societies have since developed to such an extent

that they have made visible a particular mode of operation, or an operational ‘logic’

if you wish, which prompts further reflection. It is here, at this point, that this essay

hopes to provide a contribution, however small.

The operational ‘logic’ of advanced control societies, we will argue below, is one

whereby the will to absolute sovereignty [i.e. the will to absolute independence from

all code] has become paramount. This will to absolute sovereignty, this will to go

beyond all code, is a will to absolute choice. It is a will to be able, anywhere and

anytime, to keep all options open, and to always have options at one’s disposal. This

R. Lippens (&)

School of Sociology and Criminology, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK

e-mail: [email protected]

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Int J Semiot Law (2011) 24:117–138

DOI 10.1007/s11196-010-9179-4

will is not to acquire or maintain the capacity to choose between the either/or. This

will is about the capacity to choose both/and, anywhere and anytime. This will to

absolute sovereignty, to absolute choice, goes far, far beyond mere consumer

choice. Consumer choice is code-driven. Whoever chooses a consumer item,

chooses a particular code, and allows him or her self to be built up by the particulars

of this code. In ‘very late’ control societies the will to absolute, sovereign choice is

the will to be able to move beyond all code, including consumer code. It is a will to

be able to move into a zone [however imaginary this zone, however illusory this will

may be] which, codeless, somehow resides before all codes, before all code. This

zone is a zone of pure, that is: un-coded potential [the notion of Body withoutOrgans may now come to mind to Deleuzians].1

Late, very late control societies are thus no longer, from a governing point of

view, simply about regulating or controlling coded qualities of ‘dividuals’ to or in

particular coded situations or contexts, nor is it, from the point of view of the

governed, about controlling one’s access, or, more broadly, one’s relation to those

codes and those coded situations. Control, in today’s control societies, is much more

about the will to inhabit a space of pure potential. It is about being able to capture or

harness the energies in an un-coded zone [however imaginary, however illusory]

where one is able to choose any code, at any time, anywhere, and where any choice

made could never be to the detriment of other choices, but all potential for choice

would remain intact [however imaginary, however illusory all this may be]. The

‘control’ in late, very late control societies, then, is about acquiring and maintaining

the pure potential for absolute choice. Choice, absolute choice, sovereign choice,

un-coded choice is, in today’s control societies, what control is about. It is this late,

very late will to absolute sovereign un-coded choice [again: however imaginary,

however illusory] which we will explore in this essay in quite some depth.

2 Pollock’s Choice

The broad contours of such advanced control societies in our view emerged in

embryonic form in the work of Jackson Pollock [1912–1956], particularly in his

mature works in which, sometime between 1945 and 1955 [that is: some four

decades before Deleuze’s ‘Postscript’], he perfected his drip-painting technique.

Pollock wrote very little. Almost nothing. But the very few words he did write, or

‘utter’ [to use a more appropriate word], do shed an interesting light on the

emergence, in his work, of an imagined ‘form of life’ and ‘form of governance’

1 Gilles Deleuze and his co-writer, Felix Guattari, used the term ‘body without organs’ in diverging

contexts and attached a variety of meanings to it [see e.g. but not exclusively Deleuze and Guattari, [11],

and Deleuze and Guattari, [12]. Very schematically, it represents the virtual, un-coded space before social

organization and subjectivity. This un-coded zone is a zone of pure potential, a ‘plane of immanence’,

that is, the un-coded energies in it flow freely, and have ‘zero intensity’. Flows however, will then,

immanently, produce assemblages that give rise first to virtualities which in turn, as soon as they travel

through matter, will give rise to actual, that is, extensive [albeit distorted] form. The notion that forms of

life form first in the sphere of the virtual before they do so in actual matter and in actual social

relationships is derived from the vitalist work of Henri Bergson, one of Deleuze’s sources of inspiration

[on Bergson, see later in this essay].

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[both phrases are, for the purpose of this essay, mutually interchangeable] in which

the capacity and the ability to choose, and to choose in absolute sovereignty, come

to stand for ‘control’.2 In this emerging form of life/governance, ‘control’ of life,

and ‘control’ of governance, gradually becomes a matter of sovereign, un-coded

choice. ‘Control’ here is choice, i.e. the capacity and the ability to choose otherwise,

anywhere and anytime. ‘Control’ no longer is first and foremost the mobilization

and application of code. Slowly but surely ‘control’ has become about being able to

elude all code through un-coded choice.

Pollock’s work did not just simply or mechanically express the outlines of an

emerging, yet-to-come form of life/governance which has control as choice at its

heart. We consider Pollock to have been the first scholar to have noticed, reflected

upon and then explored this emerging form of life/governance. Pollock’s work is

prophetic3 because, on the one hand, it does seem to express, via the painter’s eyes

and hands, a form of life/governance that had hitherto remained virtual, rather than

actual, but also because, on the other, the artist himself, in his reflections, referred to

the need for a new form of life/governance to actually emerge. In his work, Pollock

actually tried to help bring about, to actualize this novel form of life/governance.

One could of course argue that the vitalist neo-Nietzscheans such as Georges

Bataille [1897–1962], with their focus, during the decade before the war in e.g. the

College de Sociologie, on sovereignty as unrelenting transgression [a theme which

Bataille would go onto explore after the war4], predated Pollock. But Pollock’s

reading of a newly emerging form of life/governance is one that announces ‘control’

and ‘choice’ [and control as choice] at its very centre. That is important: someone,

or something, controls. Someone, or something, makes choices. Choices are made

by singularities. Control is exercised by singularities. Some would even go so far as

to claim that control and choice presuppose selves, even if those selves’ will to

control as choice would then translate as the will to flee all code, and therefore also

the self itself. Indeed, a self is a collection of codes. To flee or abandon all code

[however imaginary, however illusory], one must also flee or abandon one’s self. To

be sovereign, one must abandon one’s self. Pollock’s work has therefore much more

in common with another strand of neo-Nietzschean thought, i.e. existentialism.

Existentialism rose to the fore almost exactly at the time when Pollock was

contemplating his final artistic change of tack. Existentialism in a way rediscovered

the self as a dynamic, modulating singularity [not just a mere effect of vital

energies, that is] that actively and indeed inescapably surveys potentialities,

contemplates options, and agonizes over dilemmas and impossible [or ‘absurd’]

choices. The indeterminacy, openness and ‘nothingness’ that dwells at the heart of

2 Whenever in this essay we will discuss the emergence of a new ‘form of life’ or’form of governance’

[or, in shorthand: a new form of life/governance] we will take it for granted that it is understood that no

form of life/governance can completely dominate an age. It could never be anything more than a trend, a

tendency, an inclination which, inevitably, could never crystallize fully. All forms of life/governance are

inextricably intertwined, through relations of opposition, resistance, coagulation and/or hybridization,

with other forms of life/governance.3 On ‘prophetic painting’, see Lippens [19], [20] and [21].4 In his La Part Maudite [1949] in particular, published in English as The Accursed Share [in 1988 and

1992] [1].

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Sartre’s existentialist self [and that allows it to constantly re-invent and re-make

itself] has a singular shape.5 Unlike Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs—

the ground of possibility and impossibility of all virtualization and actualization—

Sartre’s nothingness, dwelling, as it does, at the pumping heart of being, has a

singular shape. Human being [human life, human governance] comes about through

choice, that is, through someone, or something singular deciding to make a choice.

Pollock’s work betrays an emerging singularity, in Pollock himself, as well as in the

emerging form of life/government announced by and in his work, that agonizes

about all codes [including the code of agony itself], and that aims to dwell before all

code, in sheer un-coded, un-formed potentiality [however imaginary this dwelling,

however illusory the hope of ever achieving this aim].

This aim of this essay, then, is threefold. First we hope to be able to show how,

shortly after the Second World War, a new form of life/governance emerged. It did

so initially in the work and thought of abstract expressionists such as Jackson

Pollock. Secondly, we will attempt to outline the broad contours of this form of life/

governance, and situate it in the drift towards what we would like to call a post-constructive modernity. In post-constructive modernity singularities are no longer

prepared to allow choice to be determined or selves to be captured by codes. Codes

are instituted by and developed within constructive and therefore inevitably future-

oriented, goal-oriented aims and restrictions. In post-constructive modernity such

aims and restrictions are no longer accepted. The capacity and ability to choose, and

to choose in a sovereign manner, that is, totally responsively, have now become of

paramount importance. Governing, singularities now aim to place themselves in a

zone of absolute sovereignty before all construction, before all code. Governed,

singularities now tend to govern their predicament by fleeing all code, by attempting

to make immediate [that is: un-coded] responsive choices, ad hoc, in the here and

now. Thirdly, in this paper we hope to be able to illustrate the tectonic shift towards

a post-constructive modernity by exploring two phenomena that have been reported

widely in governance studies literature, i.e. the governance of self in edgework [i.e.

extreme risk-seeking] activities, and the governance of others in a growing

precautionary [i.e. extreme risk avoiding] culture. However contradictory, both

phenomena, in our view, relate to the aforementioned shift towards a post-

constructive modernity. Risk has become a matter not just of choice, but of

sovereign choice. Sovereign choice is choice that, however imaginary, and however

illusory the aims, will and desire in it, rejects all code. Sovereign choice is choice

that wants to be absolutely, totally responsive.

In Sect. 3 and 4 below, we will first make an effort to theorize emergence—the

emergence of the new post-constructive form of life/governance in particular. If, as

we shall argue, post-constructive modernity generates singularities who have

abandoned all interest in constructive code, and who even have relinquished interest

in their own coded self, then this does not necessarily mean we now have arrived in

an age of pure, free-flowing vital energies. It is, above all, and quite paradoxically

so, an age of control. It is an age of control as choice. In order to think through this

issue we will explore Henri Bergson’s later writings on vitalism and law and

5 Reference is made here to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness [34] and to his Saint Genet [33].

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morality [or code, if you wish] whilst making an attempt to marry these writings to

some of existentialism’s basic tenets. We realise that, setting such a goal, we may

have bitten off much more than we can chew in the space of just one essay. But such

an undertaking is indispensable if we want to get to grips, in Sect. 5 and 6, with the

emergence of, and, perhaps more importantly, with the emergence in Jackson

Pollock’s work, of a new form of life/governance. In Sect. 7 we will make the

connexions between the form of life/governance announced by Pollock, and

phenomena such as edgework and precaution, more explicit. In a very succinct coda

we will leave on one final thought.

3 Code as Fabulation

In his book Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion [4] Henri Bergson

makes a final attempt at integration of his thought. He uses the book to apply this

thought to the problem of law and morality. The engine of life, according to

Bergson, is what he calls the ‘elan vital’, or life force, which, inevitably, and

unstoppably, takes life beyond itself. In a way this notion is a variation on the more

generic idea that all life is unrelenting becoming [for instance, Nietzsche—rarely

mentioned by Bergson- considered will to power to be the fuel of becoming]. Where

the human condition is concerned the ‘elan vital’ constantly, incessantly takes

human being beyond itself, indeed it unrelentingly takes human beings beyond

themselves. In philosophical terms this is a restatement of an older philosophical

insight that defines human being as split between the mere in-itself and the for-itself.It is in this very split, through this very gap, that human being ever becomes. In

Bergson’s vitalist philosophy human life is characterized by the fact that human

beings [unlike other beings] have the capacity to imagine the world around them as

it could be. They have, in other words, the capacity to imagine that which is not, or

that which is not yet, or indeed: future. Human beings have the capacity to imagine

themselves as they could be. They have the capacity to imagine their own future. All

this, it should be noted in passing, is shared ground with existentialism. Bergson

goes on to argue that to imagine that which is not [e.g. future] is to imagine a

distance between what is, and what is not [e.g. what could be, or what could have

been, what should be, and so on]. This distance imbues all human action with a

certain level of goal-orientedness, and makes all action technological. The human

condition is technological. But distance and goal-orientedness also instil openness,

indeterminacy, and uncertainty in human being. This distance, or openness, is then

immediately—and functionally, claims Bergson- filled with imagination, with

‘fabulation’ [to use Bergson’s exact terminology] so as to provide [at least] a

semblance of certainty. The ‘elan vital’ thus incessantly opens up human being,

cracks it open, strikes a gap between what is and what is not, between present and

future, and, in one and the same move, fills up this very gap with fabulation.

That which is fabulated, that which fills the distance, the gap of uncertainty, is

code [Bergson says: morality and religion]. The fabulations, provided by the ‘elan

vital’ to fill up the gaps which itself continuously and relentlessly strikes in human

being, take a variety of different shapes and can include, e.g. totemic idols, religious


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ritual, moral code, laws [laws of physics, or legal norms], and so on. In primitive

cultures these forms tend to be inextricably linked [the code is simultaneously

totemic, religious, scientific, moral, and legal]. These fabulations too are techno-

logical. They are created by an ‘elan vital’ that, in cracking open human being, and

in generating distance between what is and goals ‘outside’ [however broadly

defined], simultaneously generate technologies destined to bridge the very gap

whence they came. But, as technologies, the fabulations created by the ‘elan vital’

in human being also, and again simultaneously so, add to the mere ‘in-itself’ of

human being, and are then immediately available for further strikes of the ‘elan

vital’. The ‘elan vital’ is unrelentingly creative. In human being [indeed, in human

beings] it constantly creates distance, openness [or ‘nothingness’, as Sartre would

later claim], and in nothingness, it constantly creates ‘being’. It creates indetermi-

nacy in determinacy, and it creates determinacy in indeterminacy. It creates

openness in closure, and closure in openness. All this it does so simultaneously.

That which is human, in Bergson’s view, fabulates, and fabulates creatively. That

which fabulates, creates what is human. But as we have seen, fabulations are codes,

or, to be more precise, they are code [i.e. ever-modulating collections of codes].

They ‘code’ the gap between what is and what is not. But only temporarily they do

so. The ‘elan vital’ will strike again, generating further codes whenever and

wherever a mismatch between ‘goal’ and ‘technology’ is experienced. The code,

then, is a fabulated and responsive piece of technology. Its fabulated determinacy

results from, and fills imagined indeterminacy. Its fabulated determinacy is then

inevitably going to be shot through with the indeterminacy of its origins. This

indeterminacy at the heart of the fabulated determinacy is the point at which the

‘elan vital’ will strike again, unsettling the determinacy of the fabulated code,

making the code respond, yet again, to a distance imagined by the ‘elan vital’. The

fabulated code, as technology, is created by the ‘elan vital’. In it, in the code, the

‘elan vital’ unrelentingly creates [fabulates] further. This basic insight would much

later be expanded upon by legal theorists such as Peter Fitzpatrick. In his

Modernism and the Ground of Law [14] for example, Fitzpatrick, without using

Bergson as a source of inspiration though,6 defines law—i.e. that which so often is

deemed to be rock-hard rigidity—as the ‘‘mute’’ interstitial space that incessantly

modulates in-between determination and responsiveness. The determination of and

in law presupposes, indeed rests upon responsiveness. The responsiveness of and in

law presupposes, indeed rests upon determination.

The ‘elan vital’ is inherently creative. In constantly taking life beyond itself, it

produces the new, i.e. that which was not. In human being, it never stops striking

distances through which newness, at least potentially, may then appear. Creation, in

Bergson’s view, takes place at two levels. The first, more superficial—or

extensive—level is the one where social combinations are shaped and re-shaped.

This is the level where extensive social arrangements are merely re-arranged, e.g. in

processes of attempted universalization, that is, in processes of inclusion and

corresponding, foundational exclusion. Since all inclusion inevitably rests upon

exclusion, any code that emerges in the process of attempted universalization could

6 But Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo [1913] instead.

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never be fully universal. Authors such as Zygmunt Bauman would later rehearse

that theme and be very specific about it: order, or code, is simply not

universalizable.7 Creativity at the level of social combination is, according to

Bergson, only quasi-creativity. It only re-arranges that which already is. Real

creativity, creation of the really new, can only take place if and when human being,

struck by the ‘elan vital’, flees all existing code in order to withdraw into a mystical,un-coded zone. There is a resemblance here between Bergson’s mysticism and

Buddhist meditation [and Bergson admits as much]. However, whereas the Buddhist

withdrawal from code is at heart an entropic undertaking, the mysticism proposed

by Bergson is of the kind that aims to prepare the deep mystical awareness of

interconnection of all immanence, and the potential that resides therein, for the

productive assemblage of the really new. In other words, in mystical, un-coded

awareness resides the potential for intensities—un-coded, far away from code—to

connect and re-connect in completely novel ways. All this takes place, if it does, at

the deeper level of intensities, the level of pure potential, not then at the level of

actualized extensities. New connections of intensities generate, out of sheer

potentiality, virtual newness first. This virtual newness is basically an assemblage of

intensities that, as an assemblage, combines potentialities from the infinite reservoir

of potentiality, into a number of not-yet-actualized possibilities. In his sympathetic

critique of Foucault’s work Deleuze would later name such emerging virtual

assemblages diagrammes.8 Virtual newness will then, eventually, traverse matter

[or extensities] and ultimately actualize [more or less deformed by the very process

of traversing through matter] into new forms of life. Actualization of new forms of

life takes place in the sphere of the material, the sphere of code [e.g. social

combination and arrangement, the symbolic, language, concepts, and so on].

4 Code as Chosen Fabulation

It is important to note that Bergson notes that the production of the new, first in the

space of the virtual, then in the space of the actual, is a vital process. It occurs

through ‘‘aspiration, intuition, and emotion’’ [4, p. 63]. It takes place before all code.

It takes place before language, before the concept, before the codes of logic and

reason. Be that as it may, the question remains, who, or what, aspires, intuits, and

emotes? In one of his first major works, L’imagination [32] the young Sartre took to

task Bergson’s earlier work on imagination. Imagination, according to Bergson, it

should be recalled, is what the ‘elan vital’, in human being, does. It is what the ‘elan

vital’, in human being, is. The ‘elan vital’, in human being, generates images of

code. The code, in Bergson’s view, is, first and foremost, an image. It is an image

before it actualizes as a word, or a concept. Now, claims Sartre, imagination asimage could only ever be a matter of storage, retrieval, assemblage, re-assemblage,

synthesis, dissolution [and so on] of images that, somehow, must be located,

7 E.g. in Bauman [2, pp. 8–15, and 212].8 In Deleuze [8, pp. 34–44]. On Deleuze’s notion of virtual emergence, see also Jamie Murray’s fine

papers on ‘emergent law’: Murray [26] and [27].


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somewhere, as things. Using Husserl’s notion of intentionality9 however, Sartre,

after painstaking analysis and contemplation, concludes: ‘‘L’image est un acte et

non une chose. L’image est conscience de quelque chose’’ [32, p. 162]. The image,

then, is an active fabrication [or fabulation, to use Bergson’s words] by an

intentional something, that is, by something that has consciousness, by something

that acts intentionally. The image is intentional action. It is perpetual movement. It

is not a thing. Code is intentional, ever-moving action. It is not a thing. Sartre would

later go onto write, in his Being and Nothingness [33], that the image is what the

self, the singular self, produces when it surveys and contemplates the distance

thrown up by its intentional ‘for-itself’, as it surveys and contemplates its mere ‘in-

itself’.

Sartre’s critique is slightly unfair in that he did not discuss Bergson’s Les DeuxSources de la Morale et de la Religion which was published only a few years before

his L’imagination. Indeed, Bergson had meanwhile located the emergence of

genuine newness in particular locations. The emergence of the genuine new,

Bergson claims, is much more likely to occur in the open genius of those who,

mystically, manage to withdraw from all existing image, from all existing code. He

uses the word ‘intelligence’ [4, pp. 56–85] to denote this particularity. ‘Intelligence’

is about conceptual contemplation and assemblage, and it thus usually deals with

extensive materials [language, concepts, ideas, and so on. But ‘intelligence’ also

integrates ‘‘l’infra-intellectuel’’ [habit, routine, nature an-sich, and so on] as well as

‘‘le supra-intellectuel’’ [aspiration, intuition, and emotion, as mentioned above]

which are ‘‘indefiniment resolubles en idees’’ [4. p. 85]. Genius is the soul

[‘‘l’ame’’] that manages or conducts such integration through a movement which, in

abandoning all code, mystically explores human being’s [or humanity’s, if you

wish] ‘‘tres grand corps inorganique’’, that is, ‘‘le lieu de nos actions eventuelles et

theoriquement possibles’’ [4, p. 275]. The soul of genius, in other words, is the soul

that opens up to, withdraws into, and subsequently explores, the non-organic, non-

organized, un-coded zone of pure potential [the ‘‘theoretically possible’’]. The only

way for such a soul to be able to do that, then, is to actively withdraw from all code.

Bergson’s ‘‘tres grand corps inorganique’’ is this zone which authors such as Gilles

Deleuze and Felix Guattari would later go on to call the Body without Organs. For

real, genuine newness to be able to come about [e.g. a newly imagined, novel form

of life] a process of ‘‘becoming minor’’, or indeed ‘‘becoming imperceptible’’

should first take place.10 The actor should, in other words, flee all code, should free

itself from all code, not in the least the code, or combination of codes, that underpin

it. On the way to becoming ‘‘minor’’ or ‘‘imperceptible’’ it can then no longer be

captured by existing code, and becomes free [at least to some extent] to tap into

sheer potential, and to generate novel forms of life, first virtually [intensively], then

actually [extensively]. There is a paradox involved here: it takes singularities who

intentionally withdraw from the extensive—and therefore also from their very

singularity- in order for real creativity to emerge. In other words, wherever and

9 Action, including perception, including imagination, is always intentional, that is, it always is the result

of a relation between an intentional something and the world.10 Mentioned by translator Daniel W. Smith in Deleuze [9, pp. xxxiv and xliii].

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whenever singularities will not intentionally withdraw from the codes embedded in

the extensive actual in order to mystically explore yet-unrealised potential in the

sphere of the intensive, new forms of life, new law, or simply newness will not

emerge. Only combinations and re-combinations in the sphere of the extensive

actual, and within the bounds of codes embedded in the already existing, will then

be possible.

Genuine newness though, as soon as it takes shape, is again image, and code, and

could never be anything else. Nietzsche’s ‘‘tragedy of life’’ and ‘‘eternal recurrence’’

could never be transcended.11 In generating newness, human being—or the

surveying and contemplating consciousness of a singular self, according to

Sartre—on the one hand, and inevitably so, transgresses existing code, and at some

point it will have to produce ‘non-code’ [if you wish], but, on the other, and equally

inevitably, it immediately and in one and the same go, produces code. It could do

nothing else: religion and morality [or code] ‘‘est une reaction defensive de la nature

contre ce qu’il pourrait y avoir de deprimant pour l’individu, et de dissolvant pour la

societe, dans l’exercice de l’intelligence’’ [4, p. 211]. Human being needs openness

and transgression away from code, but it can simply not be without the closure of

code either. The only split-second moment when there is codelessness, is the moment

in the ‘‘tres grand corps inorganique’’, in the un-coded Body without Organs of full

potential, where a climate of ‘‘zero intensity’’ [say Deleuze and Guattari] reigns.

It is this moment, we believe, that was first expressed in Jackson Pollock’s work

and scholarship. It is, in our view, not just the case that Pollock was the first to

recognize [better perhaps: become aware] of the need for creativity to go beyond

coded actuality, indeed to go beyond even the virtual of emerging possibility, and to

dwell in the un-coded immanence of pure potential. Pollock’s work was itself, at

least in our view, the result of such an awareness, and of a serious attempt to move

beyond all code into the realm of sheer potential. Pollock’s work expresses this

awareness. It expresses this agonizing attempt. The result of Pollock’s undertaking

was the emergence, through the flesh and bones of the genius, painter and the

scholar Pollock, of a completely new image, of a completely new code. This

newness constitutes a new form of life/governance where life and governance are

about absolute, complete, and total control. Absolute, complete and total control is

control exercised with absolute sovereignty. Absolute sovereignty is sovereignty

that, having become totally ‘‘minor’’, totally ‘‘imperceptible’’, dwells in sheer,

codeless potentiality. Pollock’s sovereignty is mystical sovereignty. Dwelling in

sheer potentiality, the mystical sovereign keeps all options and potential open, and

harbours the illusion [however much in vain] that choice or that control as choice,

will be possible. The mystical sovereign however, is aware that choice [e.g. the

choice to flee code, or the choice to swerve codeless, or the choice to choose

between alternatives] will in turn produce code. The mystical sovereign realizes that

control, and that control as choice, could never be anything else than fleetingly

unstable. He realizes, with Nietzsche, Camus,12 and with existentialists such as

11 See e.g. Nietzsche’s autobiography [28], Ecce Homo, written in 1889–1890, but published

posthumously in 1908.12 Especially Camus’s Le Mythe de Sisyphe [5].


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Sartre, without even having read them, that the absurd is inevitable. To choose is to

act; it is to decide, to exercise control. To choose however, is also to lose control.

But to have the potential to choose is to be in control. His natural home, therefore, is

the un-coded, or the [as yet] un-chosen. To be able to have, and keep, the full

potential to act, decide, or choose, one must flee all image, all code, and indeed one

must abandon one’s own coded singular self, and indeed, quite paradoxically so,

one’s capacity to act, to decide. But if one does that, if one abandons one’s own

coded singularity, one immediately loses the full potential to act, decide, choose and

exercise absolute control. To be absolutely sovereign, one must, mystically,

abandon all sovereignty. But to abandon all sovereignty, is to lose the potential to

exercise control as choice; it is to lose absolute sovereignty.

It is this agonizing form of life/governance which emerged during and shortly

after the Second World War in Pollock’s work. The genius of the singularity called

Jackson Pollock is that his work expresses not just the search for mystical

sovereignty, but also, and simultaneously so, its attainment. The search is the

attainment, and vice versa. The distance between the mystical sovereign’s ‘‘for-

itself’’ and the [or his] ‘‘in-itself’’, is very ‘‘minor’’, almost ‘‘imperceptible’’. The

mystical sovereign rides the ‘elan vital’ as close to the waves as possible, not unlike

Spencer Tunick’s human beings who, below the coded cityscape, disappear quite

literally into a mere wave of flesh. The image, or the code in Pollock’s work, is the

image, or the code, that says: flee all image, flee all code, keep the potential for

choice alive. The agony in Pollock’s work is the agony of the mystical sovereign

who, in order to be able to act as a sovereign, has to abandon all capacity to act,

indeed all sovereignty by diving into the ‘‘grand corps inorganique’’ of pure

potential. It is to Pollock’s form of life/governance that we now turn.

5 Autumn Rhythms: Second Nature

Jackson Pollock, one of the so-called abstract expressionists, achieved his signature

style a few years after the Second World War. His Autumn Rhythm: Number 30

(Fig. 1) was completed in 1950. Although Pollock had experimented with the

‘dripping’ technique before, this painting is one of the first where the drippings

appear fully-fledged, on a massive scale, next to brush strokes and patches of paint

that were daubed onto the canvas. Like many, if not most of Pollock’s paintings, this

painting is huge. Whoever stands in front of it may well feel being enveloped by its

autumnal mood, indeed climate. Autumnal colours dominate: black, grey, brown,

and white. Since other colours were not used here by the painter, the autumnal ones

form a more or less undifferentiated expanse of autumn. Autumn is the season when

nature sheds all its outward, colourful but coded signs and statements [e.g. ‘fertilize

this’, ‘avoid that’, ‘look here’, and so on] and withdraws into itself, onto its own

undifferentiated Body without Organs, as it were.

Pollock never made a sustained effort to write [or even talk] about his work.

Much of what we know about his thoughts derives from a few scattered statements.

Those form, what I would call, his scholarship. The following string of words is

perhaps the most telling piece of scholarship:

126 R. Lippens

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‘‘Technic is the result of a need … new needs demand new technics … total

control … denial of the accident … States of order … organic intensity …energy and motion … made visible … memories arrested in space … human

needs and motives … acceptance’’.13

Let us explore this statement, and the work, in quite some detail. Pollock used the

then quite novel ‘dripping’ technique [‘‘new needs demand new technics’’] to paint

his massive canvases which were placed on the floor when the artist was working on

them. He allowed, in other words, the laws of physics –sheer and utter nature- to do

much of the work. But that does not mean he relinquishes control.14On the contrary:

Pollock’s work is all about achieving and maintaining ‘‘total control’’. Nothing in

his painting is mere accident [‘‘denial of the accident’’] or chaos. Pollock’s painting

is certainly not about chaos. Pollock once [i.e. in 1950] sent a telegram to the editors

of a piece that characterized his work as pre-occupied with chaos: ‘‘SIR: NO

CHAOS DAMN IT. DAMNED BUSY PAINTING AS YOU CAN SEE …’’.15

Pollock wants to achieve total control in and through his very engagement with

sheer, physical nature. Such engagement should allow one to acquire some level of

mastery, not just over nature, but also over oneself. Explorations in sheer ‘‘organic

intensity’’ [this sounds very much like Bergsonian or Deleuzian language], and the

immersion of oneself in the sheer physical laws of ‘‘energy and motion’’, should

provide one with the capacity and with the abilities to exercise control over one’s

life conditions. ‘‘I am nature’’, Pollock replied to the painter Hans Hofmann who

once openly wondered about Pollock’s lack of interest in working after nature.16 In

immersing himself in the physics of nature [the sheer size of his canvases allowed

Fig. 1 Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 (1950). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.� The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2010

13 Written probably in 1950 or in 1951, this statement was published posthumously, and cited e.g. in

Emmerling [13, p. 69] and in Varnedoe and Karmel [35, p. 56].14 On precisely this point, see Cernuschi and Herczynski [6].15 Cited in Emmerling [13, p. 68–69].16 Quoted in Emmerling [13, p. 47].


123

for such ‘immersion’], Pollock however still maintains, or attempts to maintain

‘‘total control’’ over the painting process. He [i.e. the singularity Jackson Pollock]

wants to decide and choose himself where and how the dripping paint is going to

fall, and how it will leave traces of trajectories on the canvas. It is Pollock, the un-

coded singularity Pollock, and not physics or nature, who is to make the choices and

the decisions. ‘‘Total control’’ here is about having the capacity and ability to

choose, to decide in the sheer, naked presence of the raw physics of nature. It is

about having the capacity and ability to put even those very laws of physics to one’s

use of choice. Pollock’s painting technique thus betrays his will to ‘‘subvert’’ even

the laws of physics. It suggests ‘‘a defiant refusal to conform, a stubborn resolve to

‘outwit’ the very natural order with which his own abstractions were meant to be

consonant’’.17 Pollock’s mystical sovereign wants to position himself in a zone of

sheer potentiality that exists [however imaginary, however illusory] even before the

code of physical law. Seen in this light it might be rather problematic to read his

work as a form of surrealist peinture automatique whereby the unconscious is

allowed to break through freely.18

This capacity and this ability can be acquired, and trained even, if one is prepared

to venture into this naked physics of nature [e.g. in the sheer Rhythm of Autumn],

that is, if one is prepared to abandon all human law, or code. Human code, indeed all

code, only capture, harness, guide, or steer singularities’ capacity and ability to

exercise ‘‘total control’’ as choice. In order to be able to acquire and maintain the

capacity and ability to choose and decide in ‘‘total control’’, one must first relinquish

all code. ‘‘Total control’’ cannot be achieved or exercised if one is still in the realm

of code. Control here is not about subscribing to, or adopting particular forms of

human organisation. Control is not about territorialising and codifying a particular

space. It is not about mobilizing the force of particular laws and codes in particular

territories. Control is, on the contrary, about giving up all belief in, and all

dependency on, coded territories. Omri Moses sees in Pollock’s work an attempt to

‘‘return to primordial experience’’. Pollock’s paintings are spaces ‘‘in which all

things are folded into’’.19 In such spaces all potential is still intact.

One does not just abandon law and code with a measure of control. Control, or at

least the potential for control, resides precisely in this very move away from all

coded territory. It is, in other words, about achieving and exercising responsiveness[‘‘new needs demand new technics’’]. Responsiveness can only be achieved if one is

prepared to abandon all rigid code. One should even give up, or flee from one’s

inner self. The inner self, insofar as it is organized, or coded, diminishes one’s

17 Cernuschi and Herczynski [6, p. 635].18 Thanks to Claudius Messner for reminding me of Breton’s ecriture automatique. Now Pollock was,

during his earlier career, that is, in his ‘mythological work’ of the 1930s and early 1940s, inspired by

surrealism. But during the war—and probably because of the war—he distanced himself from surrealism,

from mythology, and from [Jungian] psychoanalysis, and moved, after a period of artistic ‘agony’, to his

signature style which, I argue, is much more about sovereign control than it is about the [archetypal]

subconscious.19 Moses [25, p. 17].

128 R. Lippens

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capacity and ability for control. One should even give up one’s gender, or indeed

any other biological code [in e.g. transgender choice, or in a choice to undergo

body-modification in e.g. plastic surgery, and so on]. It is worth noting that Pollock

used to begin his paintings by drawing the outline of human figures on the canvas.

This figure would then be washed away under the unrelenting, energetic dripping of

the painter’s natural, physical but ‘‘totally controlled’’ choices and decisions.20 Such

‘‘working away from the figure’’, Kirk Varnedoe claims, was, in Pollock, not so

much ‘‘suppression’’, as ‘‘opening-up’’ of potential.21 Only in the ‘‘total’’

relinquishment of all code [and that includes the self itself], away from all that is

not sheer nature, can one hope to find ‘‘control’’, i.e. the capacity and the ability to

choose and decide properly, responsively. Only there can one find, ‘‘accept’’ and

deal with real ‘‘human needs and motives’’. ‘‘Total control’’, i.e. absolute choice and

decision, requires utter and complete de-codification. Pollock’s paintings, then, are

the actual, physical representation of such explorations in the free, un-coded zone of

autumnal, withdrawn nature. ‘‘Memories’’ of what happened during such explora-

tions, and of what was chosen and decided, are to be seen, ‘‘arrested in space’’, on

Pollock’s canvas.

This form of life/governance implies a turning away from all code, and indeed,

from the self [a coded territory in its own right] itself. Selves, as long as they are

coded, cannot acquire ‘‘total control’’. As long as they are coded, it will be

impossible for them to even control themselves. The coded self is a self controlled

by code [not by itself]. The coded self could never be responsive. It could never be

sovereign. Life and governance, in Pollock’s work, are no longer about producing,

fashioning, steering, or guiding other singularities’ inner contemplative selves

either. They are, instead, about allowing and stimulating the free circulation of

choice. In this form of life/governance those who govern and those who are

governed are no longer interested in the construction of coherent [that is: coded]

selves. Not in themselves. Not in others. Selves no longer need to have a coded core.

They have, in fact, already turned into collections of mere trajectories of choices. In

consumer societies, they have been de-codified already, at least partially [consum-

erism being itself a code]. Echoing existentialism, one could say that selves are now

their choices, nothing but their choices. They are what they have chosen

[‘‘memories arrested in space’’] and what they choose. To be in control means to

circulate freely, away from all code, and to exercise choice. To be in control means

to have the capacity, and to be able to keep de-codifying. It is to have the capacity

and the ability to keep choosing otherwise. That goes as much for those who govern

as for those who are governed. In this perspective Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm does

not so much represent the unconscious [whether repressed, or disciplined, or set

free] as, rather, natural, responsive, total control.

This form of life/governance is not about a return to natural, biological animal

life. Mere biological life is coded life. The late modern form of life/governance is

about choice. It is about control as choice. It would also be wrong, in our view, to

read Pollock’s mysticism, or his mystical sovereignty, as being of a mere Buddhist,

20 See e.g. in Varnedoe and Karmel [35, pp. 87–137].21 In Varnedoe and Karmel [35, p. 54].


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entropic, meditative kind.22 It is geared towards creation. The choices made by

Pollock’s mystical-yet-singular sovereigns are choices that aim at creatively

bringing about newness, and that are about creating or bringing to life new forms of

life. Let us have a closer look at another painting of his, i.e. Number 4, 1948: Grayand Red (Fig. 2), completed in 1948, 2 years before Autumn Rhythm. This is a much

smaller painting. It is actually one of the smaller paintings on which Pollock

practised his dripping technique. The size of the painting and the sperm-like

appearance of the drippings suggest [as has been remarked earlier by Pollock

scholars23] embryonic emergence, indeed seminal creation. The explorations

conducted by Pollock’s mystical un-coded sovereign in the sphere of pure potential,

in the Body without Organs of nature, will, eventually, lead to creation. The

mystical sovereign will choose to create, to bring something new [in] to life. And

indeed, one look at a painting such as Autumn Rhythm shows how the sovereign’s

un-coded, but highly controlled choices have produced, and unrelentingly continueto produce, new forms of life. The painting does show us particular locations on the

canvas where a certain level of structure seems to have crystallized out of the

‘‘totally controlled’’ choices of the sovereign painter. But not sooner had this

crystallization taken place, or, in other words, not sooner had the emerging structure

betrayed its own, unavoidable code [however modulating this code may be], than

the painter was on the move again, fleeing from all code. This ‘tragedy’ of life, to

use Nietzschean words, is unavoidable. Mystical sovereigns know this. They accept

it [‘‘acceptance’’], for in accepting it, they believe they will be able to retain ‘‘total

control’’, able to choose from a position of pure, un-coded potential. Whether

Pollock’s work constitutes a typically modern movement of, or towards liberation,

or, on the contrary, a relapse into Dionysian romanticism, is not the issue, says Kirk

Varnedoe.24 Pollock’s sovereign aims for a zone of ambivalence, a zone where the

Fig. 2 Number 4, (1948): Gray and Red. Courtesy of the Estate of Frederick R. Weisman. � ThePollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2010

22 The entropic aim of Buddhism refers to its dissolution of all boundaries and the abandonment of all

singularity. See Ken Wilber’s classic No Boundary [36] on this point. .23 E.g. Emmerling [13, p. 71].24 In Varnedoe and Karmel [35, pp. 74–76].

130 R. Lippens

123

choice between modernism and romanticism has yet to be made. That is a zone

where all potential is still intact.

6 Beyond Construction

Much in this emerging form of life/governance chimes with the post-constructive

dimension of the post-war era. On the ruins of the war many in the immediate post-

war era may have shared in the forward-looking mood, brimming, as it was, with

expectation of the new. But the disillusionment with code –with totalitarian code in

particular—will have led others [more on that later] to feel quite reluctant to invest

much in the ‘absurdity’ of particular projects and other coded constructions.

Pollock’s sovereign ‘‘total control’’ mystic is, in fact, diametrically opposed to

anyone or to anything that strives for, or expresses, totalitarian control. In Western

societies this tension was put on hold or superseded by the construction of the

welfare state, but as soon as that construction too eventually collapsed [around

1970], the post-constructive form of life/governance surfaced with quite some force.

It might be possible to locate the origins of this form of life/governance in a

particular demographic, i.e. the highly educated, or professional post-materialsegment of western publics.25 The overall [if perhaps not only] ‘logic’ amongst this

segment may have sounded something like this: We have already arrived. There no

longer is any need for projects. There no longer is a need for future. That which is,

i.e. the present, will suffice. All coding that stems from future-oriented projects [e.g.

‘work hard’, or ‘don’t forget to relax once in a while’, or ‘contribute’, or

‘collaborate’, or ‘invest in others’, or ‘depend on others’, and so on, and on] is

suspect. The present is complete. Future-oriented codes, that is, codes that help

bring about future newness, in whichever form or shape, are suspect. They are to be

avoided, relinquished, or abandoned. The present form of life is complete. It has

become second nature. Indeed, it has now become like nature. We have, as was

claimed,26 arrived ‘beyond history’, into nature; second nature. The present, post-

material, post-constructive form of life is one that thrives on ‘natural’ responsive-

ness to whatever offers itself in the present. It’s almost like nature itself. Natural

responsiveness however requires the capacity and ability to choose, that is, to

choose responsively, immediately [i.e. un-coded], indeed: ‘naturally’. This secondnature then presupposes sovereign control as choice. All code that stands in the way

of this is suspect. Codes that restrict us, or limit us, in the name of future in

particular, are suspect. Codes that are rigid, and that do not allow for flexible

responsiveness are suspect. Such codes are un-natural. Even biological codes [e.g.

DNA, gender code, physical appearance, and so on], in so far as they are rigid, are

suspect. They hinder responsive choice in the moment of the natural present. Nature

knows no future. Nature is where immediate, un-coded responsiveness ultimately

25 This point was first elaborated in 1977 by Ronald Inglehart [18].26 Fukuyama [15].


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leads to harmonious, homeostatic outcomes.27 It comes naturally there. It should

also come naturally in our post-constructive second nature. Since there are no

ultimate goals in future, or in construction, responsive choices could not be

accidental. ‘‘Denial of the accident’’, Pollock uttered. There is no accident, not just

because all that happens results, or should result from control as choice, but also

because accidents are events whereby a particular dominant code in ‘‘a world of

purposes’’, as Omri Moses calls it,28 is not followed. In the post-constructive form

of life/governance there are no ‘accidents’ since there is no dominant code. There

could, or should only ever be responsive choice in the immediate present.

The post-constructive ‘logic’ might have gone on as follows. Since future is no

longer important, codes that support a future-oriented project that promises to bring

change –unnatural change- should be rejected. Our second nature is an end, not a

new beginning. It is not unlike Autumn Rhythm. This form of life [i.e. living totally

responsively in the present] needs no strategies, at the most only immediate tactics.

To be able to choose responsively, immediately, one must abandon as many codes

as possible. Ideally one should abandon all code. Ideally one should even abandon

the collection of codes which we tend to call by the name ‘self’. We should abandon

our own self, quite naturally. Equally: the self of others is no longer important. In

the age of construction, before we became second nature, the self of others,

particularly the inner self and its contemplations and deliberations, its half-hidden

plans for the future, were important. Those inner selves had to be coded, or better,

recoded to align them with the code of future-oriented projects, just as we had to

divine the contemplations, deliberations and plans in them in attempts to make use

of those in our own. But in nature, in the second nature of the eternal present, all this

has become obsolete. Here, there is only Autumn Rhythm. It is as if the distance

between what is and what is not, or might be, struck, as it is, according to Bergson,

by the workings of the ‘elan vital’, is filled here with the fabulated rhythms of a fully

completed, responsive nature. That which is not, or might be, could and should then

never be anything else than that which is. If there is a need for newness [‘‘new needs

demand new technics’’] then this is about mere responsiveness, and not necessarilyabout the need to create new forms of life [unless of course creation of the new is

the responsive thing to do]. The needs arise organically. They simply emerge

naturally; we only need to respond to them.

The self of others is now also part of nature, and should be dealt with

responsively, as one would deal responsively with all other physical or biological

mass. Selves that operate according to rigid, unresponsive codes [or that are

perceived as such] should, in particular, be dealt with accordingly. That is, they

should be dealt with as one would deal with other unnaturally rigid codes.

There is no longer any need for communication. Responsive, immediate choice

and control need no communication. Nor do we need communication in order to

re-code others, or to allow ourselves to be re-coded. Re-coding is no longer

desirable in a post-constructive society. De-coding is. The aim –if aim there must

27 However problematic such a statement or assumption may be. Ecosystems collapse—quite naturally—

and often need external intervention, planning, indeed future, to remain viable.28 In Moses [25, p. 17].

132 R. Lippens

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be- is to dwell, codeless but sovereign, in a natural zone without code, however

imaginary and illusory such a zone might be.29 It might be noted in passing that

Pollock’s reluctance to express his ideas or, if at all, do it in sparsely uttered strings

of words, is perhaps no coincidence. The zone which Pollock wants to inhabit is a

zone utterly devoid of codes. Pollock’s move was one that attempted to move

beyond all code, and that includes the symbolic code of language. The features of

Pollock’s zone then do not easily translate into symbolic codes. The experience of

and in that zone is ineffable. It is a zone of experience, of ‘‘organic intensity’’, much

more than it is a zone of symbolic exchange and communication. ‘‘DAMN IT.

DAMNED BUSY !’’, Pollock shouts. And why would one want to communicate

beyond the mere uttering of sounds that come naturally? A totally responsive,

sovereign self has no fixed code, has no fixed language. And since it is involved in

no project whatsoever, there is no point in communicating with other selves. To

borrow language from Peter Fitzpatrick and Colin Perrin30: muteness is the ground

on which events and responses happen.

The post-constructive form of life/governance is, finally, also a post-confessional

one. It no longer recognizes the dominance of cultural codes [apart from the code

that says: you shall be totally responsive]. Sovereign choosers no longer generate, or

even accept, shame or guilt [apart from the shame and guilt that result from being

less than totally responsive]. Confession no longer makes sense here. There is

nobody to utter confessions. There is nobody to confess to. There is nothing to

confess. More importantly, there no longer is a dominant code which one could

judge from. What confession there remains envisages not so much redemption, as

tactical responsiveness and control as choice. More often than not confession here is

only a thinly disguised declaration of sovereignty.

7 Edgework and the Culture of Precaution

The post-constructive form of responsive life/governance is not an inherently risk-

averse one. Indeed, risk is often sought, exploited or even created for the purpose of

practicing responsive control as choice. Authors such as Stephen Lyng31 have been

able to show how much in what we now know as ‘‘edgework’’ [i.e. voluntary risk

29 The form of life announced by Pollock’s work—codeless, responsive sovereignty—may be an

impossible dream indeed, if only because [as we shall see below in this paper] codeless, responsive

sovereignty, quite paradoxically so, rests upon a code that says: you shall be dependent on the codedexclusion of all rigid, unresponsive code [in your self, and in others]. In practice however, this form of life

surfaces only partially, and fragmentary, in spheres such as e.g. neo-liberal deregulation, consumption

[‘freedom’ of choice of consumer codes], the ‘society of the spectacle’ [Debord, 7] [i.e. non-

communicative consumption of circulating commodity-image], ‘neo-tribal’ consumerism [Maffesoli, 24]

[i.e. non-communicative, mute sharing of Dionysian hedonistic experience], ecology and conservationism

[the coded exclusion of code from allegedly pure, un-coded and hence totally responsive nature];

edgework [the attempt at gaining total control in an allegedly un-coded yet controlled risk zone; see

below]; precautionary governance [the coded attempt at excluding all code perceived to be rigid and thus

presenting a risk to sovereign control; see below]; and so on.30 Fitzpatrick [14], see supra. See also Perrin [30].31 E.g. Lyng [22] and Lyng et al. [23].


123

seeking behaviour such as base-jumping, high speed motorcycling, bare knuckle

fighting, Ray Mears32 type of jungle survival experience, and so on], particularly

since about the 1970s, is precisely about the search for a completely code-free

natural zone where the edgeworker then hopes to be able to build up his or her

capacity, ability, and skills of responsive control. In edgework, Lyng claims, the aim

is to immerse the ‘contingent body’ into sheer nature with an eye on mobilizing its

embodied capacities, abilities and skills of responsiveness that are lurking in an un-

coded, un-colonized ‘lifeworld’ [Lyng follows Jurgen Habermas here]. In a recent

paper on edgework [as represented in the 1991 cult classic Point Break] Karl Palmas

uses Bergson to describe edgework.33 Edgeworkers, he claims, don’t just struggle

with the elements. ‘‘Fleeing the Law’’ while immersing themselves head on in the

physical law of nature, they move beyond the actual, and develop a sense for that

which is emerging in the virtual, and, even beyond that, on the plane of pure

intensity. Another way of putting this is to say, with Palmas, that edgeworkers, like

Pollock, attempt [however imaginary or illusory this attempt] to directly access

what Bergson, in his book Creative Evolution [1911, French original of 1907] [3]

once termed ‘duration’, i.e. the infinite multiplicity of incessant, indivisible

becoming. Duration exceeds all consciously produced code. It cannot be grasped by

any code produced by consciousness which is destined to merely choose, select,

code, and draw boundaries that are constantly overflowed by the infinite multiplicity

of becoming. In attempting to dive into pure duration, one might say, the

edgeworker, like Pollock, also flees from the code that divides up time in past,

present, and future. In duration there is only multiplicity, pure potential and

becoming. The dive into duration is a dive into pure, un-coded potential. It is a dive

fit for a post-constructive age.

There is then not much difference between Pollock’s agonizing attempt to move

beyond code, and the edgeworker’s. In a way both are desperate to move even

beyond the sheer laws of physics in an attempt [however imaginary, however

illusory] to control, if not bend the latter through responsive choice. Edgeworkers,

like Pollock, in his Autumn Rhythm, go to nature –responsive nature- to achieve all

this. In nature, others are nature, one’s self is sheer nature. In nature, sovereign

choice comes naturally [or so it should].

But if the late modern form of life/governance has emerged around sovereign

responsive choice, indeed around the de-codification of choice, then it has also

generated quite paradoxical effects. If code is to be avoided, fled even, in attempts to

achieve natural responsive control, then the potential for de-codification must not

just be stimulated and maintained, but also safeguarded or protected. That which is

to be kept at bay, neutralised, or, if necessary, destroyed, is unresponsive rigidity,

or, more precisely, that which is perceived as unresponsive rigidity, or simply code.

And that can only happen, paradoxically, through coding. Moreover: the life of an

aspiring sovereign is a life shot through with codeless indeterminacy. Anything that

emerges on the sovereign’s swerving path might, just might, prove to be not so

32 British TV presenter (of survival and outdoors programmes).33 See Palmas [29].

134 R. Lippens

123

much an opportunity for responsive choice, as a rigidly coded block on the path.

Aspiring sovereigns tend to perceive rigid code everywhere, anywhere.

Two years after Autumn Rhythm, Pollock completed his Blue Poles: Number II(Fig. 3). Here, suddenly, the natural rhythm of sovereign responsive choice seems to

be hemmed in by straight, forbidding lines. Admittedly, it is unclear whether the

‘blue poles’ represent older forms of coded organisation that are disappearing under

or washed over by an emerging new, late modern way of life, or whether it is this

new way of life that, quite naturally, or organically, produces newly emerging

protective ‘‘poles’’. The fact that this painting was completed only after a series of

signature Pollock drip paintings may arguably lend support to the second

hypothesis.

This could be related to the emergence, in late modernity, of what has been called

the precautionary principle34 in life and governance. That which is deemed to be

potentially unresponsive or rigid often tends to be prohibited, or blocked off, out of

sheer precaution. The precautionary principle has made quite some headway in our

post-constructive age. Whereas in an earlier age one might have been prepared to

calculate possible risks in order to deal with them in a number of ways, all with an

eye on the construction or completion of overarching projects and end goals,

‘‘beyond history’’ such calculations are now in the process of being abandoned. That

which, in all its potential rigidity, might [just might] pose a threat to the free and

responsive circulation of sovereign choice, should, indeed must be blocked off

before it even emerges, however paradoxical such precautionary measures may be.

There is no longer a need to calculate risks.

There is no longer any need to tolerate even the mere whiff of potential far-away

risk, since post-constructive nature no longer needs constructive risk, and responsive

sovereignty only accepts risk that comes naturally. We have already arrived

‘‘beyond history’’, into sheer nature. There is no need to develop, to construct

anything. There is then no need to tolerate risk. All potential for risk, that is, all

Fig. 3 Blue Poles: Number II (1952). Courtesy of National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. � ThePollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2010

34 A fine overview of the features and ramifications of the precautionary principle is to be found in the

work of Dutch sociologist Roel Pieterman [31].


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potential for rigid code, should simply be blocked off. Calculations of risk serve

little purpose in post-constructive nature.

The late modern form of life/governance may be one that thrives on de-

codification, it cannot, of course, escape its own codifications. In a precautionary

culture such codifications tend to be [paradoxically so] quite extensive and rigid.

The code in them goes like this: ‘All code that might pose a threat, however

imaginary, however illusory, to our sovereign responsiveness, should be neutralized

and, if possible, pre-emptively blocked off’. This code is itself quite rigidly codified

around perceptions of rigid, unnatural, unresponsive code. But a code as rigid as this

one will of course eventually undermine all attempts at achieving responsive

sovereignty. It is not uncommon for aspiring sovereigns to agonize, like Pollock,

over the consequences of their earlier precautionary choices. Precautionary

measures do not only block off potential risks or threats, they also block off sheer

potential, and that includes potential to choose in a totally, utterly unrestricted way.

The draconian measures which the aspiring sovereign endorsed so enthusiastically

yesterday in a bid to safeguard his capacity to choose utterly responsively now

hinders him in his attempts to choose in all sovereignty. This in turn will, more often

than not, urge him on an even more precautionary path whereby the earlier

precautionary measures will, however paradoxically, in turn be included in a

precautionary attempt to move beyond, or better: to move before the coded

strictures of both original risk and precautionary measure. But that tends to lead into

a zone where sovereign responsiveness, so desperately sought after, is even more

imaginary and illusory. Nietzsche’s ‘tragedy of life’, in late modern life/governance,

appears here as the ‘eternal recurrence’ of paradoxical sovereignty [to gain

sovereignty, one needs to abandon it; abandoning it, one gains it]. Mysticalsovereignty, Bergson might have said.

However, a solution of sorts is available in late modern control societies.

Perceptions of rigidity tend to modulate according to the fluctuations of circulating

flows. To hark back to Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, with

which we began this contribution, circulation and flows are regulated by

‘passwords’ according to local or localised necessity. Their goal is no longer to

order, or structure populations at their very core [i.e. at the level of the complex

inner self]. Passwords merely regulate mass and organism according to specific,

local circulatory exigencies. Those passwords also change over time. Whereas

financial wizardry, for instance, before 2007 may have been looked upon benignly

[it exemplified pure, abstract responsiveness] now, after the fall, it is in the process

of ending up in a precautionary maelstrom not because it is deemed a manifestation

of excessive responsiveness, but, rather, because it spells rigid, unresponsive code,

i.e. the code of unquenchable, animal-like greed and fleshy desire.

8 Coda

In a way one could look at the post-constructive form of life/governance, with all it

entails, as deeply tragic. In his quest for total control, and for a mystical capacity to

choose with all his potentiality intact, the aspiring sovereign capitulates to the late

136 R. Lippens

123

modern code that shouts: Submit to the code of de-codification! Submission to

codification, then, could here be seen as an act of resistance.35

In one of his essays [it was originally published in 1956] the art historian Ernst

Gombrich once wrote, with slight contempt, about ‘‘the vogue of abstract art’’ [he

didn’t target abstract expressionism in particular]: ‘‘It is a commonplace of

psychology that nothing is harder to bear than complete freedom from any

restraint’’. Imagine the artist’s ‘‘state of mind in front of his canvas, really facing

that existentialist nightmare, the responsibility for every decision, every move,

without any convention to guide him, without any expectation to live up to except

the one of creating something recognizably his own and yet significantly

different’’.36 After a long series of drip paintings, and having exhausted his

signature style to the point of turning it into a code, Pollock died in an alcohol-

fuelled car crash in that very same year, 1956.

Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank Leslie Powner, Tony Kearon and Evi Girling for

offering highly valued comments on the occasion of a seminar at Keele University where some of the

ideas in this paper were first presented. Many thanks to Claudius Messner for the very incisive discussion

on the topic of this paper. Many thanks also to Luis Lobo-Guerrero. Thanks to IJSL’s reviewers for

comments on an earlier version of this paper. All remaining errors are the author’s.

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