concrete rules and abstract machines

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Take an example from the history of painting, the very bizarre history of the Venetian School: it is marked very late by the so-called Byzantine style, while Venice itself was already very advanced in mercantile capitalism, but this merchant and banking capitalism remained entirely nestled in the pores of the old despotic society. And all of Christianity at that time finds something like its pictorial form in these pyramidal structures, literally, in hierarchical mode, which respond to despotic overcoding. These Byzantine paintings of the Venetian school continue until the middle of the 15th century. Here you have this beautiful Byzantine style, and what do you see? - overcoded Christianity, Christianity interpreted according to the style and the manner of overcoding: there is an old despot, there is the father, there’s Jesus and there are the tribes of the Apostles. In one of Delphiore’s paintings, there are rows of pyramids which are spread in fine rows facing straight ahead. It is not just the people who are coded and overcoded in Byzantine art, it is also their organs which are coded, coded and overcoded, under the great unifying influence of the despot, whether this despot is God or the father or whether he is the great Byzantine Emperor. We get the impression that their organs are the object of a collective hierarchic investment. It would be mad for a Virgin to be looking to the right while baby Jesus was looking the other way. You’ve got to be mad to invent something like that; you couldn’t do something like that under a regime where organs are collectively invested, are coded by the collectivity and are overcoded. Under Christianity, the codes are mixed up, but this is because despotic codes coexist with territorial codes, and the colours themselves enter into the pictorial code. And if, in a museum, you change rooms, you will discover something else altogether, it is a great joy and a great anxiety too, for they are in the process of decoding the flows, a process which doesn’t coincide with the explosion of capitalism, but comes quite a bit later. The great decoding of the flows of painting takes place around 1450, right in mid-15th century, and it’s a kind of radical break: all of a sudden we see the hierarchy of overcoding breaking down, the ruin of the territorial codes, the flows of painting go insane too, destroying all of the codes, a flow passes. We get the impression that painters - occupying their usual position amongst artists in relation to the social system - create Christs that are totally queer, they are totally mannerist Christs, it’s all sexualized, they create Virgins who stand in for all women, and baby boys who have just nursed, little boys pooping, they really play at this process of decoding flows of colour.

And how does this happen? Everything happens as if, for the first time, the characters represented became the owners of their own organs: the collective hierarchic codification of organs, the social investment of organs is done with; from now on the Virgin and every other character will, literally, start to run their own affair; in fact the painting escapes on all sides: the Virgin looks to one side, there are two guys looking at baby Jesus, a third is looking on as if something were happening, there are scenes in the background and the picture explodes in all directions so that every one starts possessing their own organs. They are not insane, there is one member of the Venetian School who makes a creation of the world that is incredible: generally the creation of the world ‘a la Byzantine’ was done according to a hierarchy; there was a kind of cone or big pyramid of the despotic order and at the very bottom, the territorial codes. The creation of the world that interests me is a departure from this: there is God the Father up in the sky in the position of a runner, and he gives a starting signal; in front of him are ducks and chickens who are racing away as fast as they can, and in the sea there are fish who are also racing away, and God is the one who sends it all away, it is the end of all the codes.

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