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  • Four Propositions on the Limits of Control
  • Jason Wallin

Proposition I: By operationalizing a minor visual language, interpretive, representational, and identitarian strategies of control might be rendered inoperative.

In Burroughs's 1975 essay entitled "The Limits of Control," he postulates that technologies of mind-control, psychosurgery, post-hypnotic suggestion, and emerging modes of molecular warfare will constitute for the State a new means for controlling the human organism. If such a technocratic control apparatus were employed to its fullest extent, Burroughs conjectures, "it would make Orwell's 1984 seem like a benevolent utopia" (p. 339). For the field of visual studies, Burroughs's general problematic might be linked to an inquiry on the limits of control. In this task, visual studies must be approached in terms of its capacities to both survey majoritarian forces of control (interpretive, identitarian, representational) while inventing new modes of escape (the minor). Toward this task, I will attempt to relink artistic invention and visual pedagogy with the political question of art, or rather, the question of how art might palpate ways of thinking for which no form of mind control yet exists (Deleuze, 1992).

Proposition II: It is via an encounter with that which does violence to thought that the act of thinking itself is recommenced. Within the field of art, it is via a particular style no longer obsessed with recognizable objects that such a shock to thought might be forged.

In support of this propositional gambit, I would like to articulate what might be called the visual-pedagogical impulse of auteur Jim Jarmusch's film The Limits of Control. Throughout Jarmusch's filmic oeuvre, he produces what might [End Page 6] be considered an unconventional visual pedagogy. In Dead Man, Jarmusch palpates a minor counter-history to the frontier heroics/egoics of the Hollywood Western while mobilizing the untimely thought of Samurai wisdom in the urban space of Ghost Dog. In The Limits of Control, Jarmusch's lead character, the enigmatic "secret agent" Lone Man (Isaac de Bankolé), becomes sensitive to signs in a way not simply oriented to a representational logic of denotation by which the sign is thought to correspond with some external reality or ready-made hermeneutic matrix. Following Deleuze (2000), "there is no Logos; there are only hieroglyphs" (p. 101). This is not simply an appeal to the absence of truth, but rather, the necessity that truth be commenced by an encounter that demands explication, deciphering, and translation in the first place. This is the impulse that lies at the heart of a good detective who, out of the necessity of the singular case, must always be forced to think anew. In this manner, one might say that the life of the Lone Man is that of an apprenticeship in signs (Deleuze, 2000). The sign is not simply a thing one learns, or to which one attributes specific contents. Rather, as Jarmusch investigates, the sign is a block of transport through which one might begin to detect tiny molecules of difference and potentials for connection from under broad blocks of representational thought. The sign-omens encountered by the Lone Man are already marked by an excess that secretes beyond their established patterns of signification.

Proposition III: To avoid forms of habit and cliché upon which control relies, artistic practice must continue to seek out new forms of material expression.

Importantly, Jarmusch never completely renders the minor visual language of his "betrayed" spy-film meaningful, but rather, allows it to secrete into the final shots of the film where the Lone Man is figured embarking on his next line of flight. This is to say that within The Limits of Control, the sign is composed in such a way as to render perceptible its virtual-actual character, or rather, the movement of the sign between its ostensible meaning (its actuality) and its becoming (its opening upon the virtual). Importantly, such an approach steals away from a pedagogy of mind-control the transference of specific contents, positing in its place a transversal pedagogy in which learning is opened into its potential difference. Such a tactic, O'Sullivan (2010) writes, fulminates "that gap between stimulus and response from within which genuine creativity...

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