On the (New) Baroque 9781935790389, 9781888570977

Citation preview

ON THE (NEW) BAROQUE

Critical Studies in the Humanities Victor E. Taylor, Series Editor This open-ended series provides a unique publishing venue by combining single volumes issuing from landmark scholarship with pedagogy-related interdisciplinary collections of readings. This principle of cross-publishing, placing scholarship and pedagogy side by side within a single series, creates a wider horizon for specialized research and more general intellectual discovery. In the broad field of the humanities, the Critical Studies in the Humanities Series is committed to preserving key monographs, encouraging new perspectives, and developing important connections to pedagogical issues. Proposals for submission should be directed to the Series Editor, Victor E. Taylor, Department of English and Humanities, York College of Pennsylvania, York, PA 17405-7199. Sander L. Gilman, Nietzschean Parody: An Introduction to Reading Nietzsche Sharyn Clough, ed., Siblings Under the Skin: Feminism, Social Justice and Analytic Philosophy Dominick LaCapra, Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher Gregg Lambert, Report to the Academy (re: the NEW conflict of the faculties) Michael Strysick, ed., The Politics of Community Dennis Weiss, ed., Interpreting Man Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text David D. Roberts, Nothing But History Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard, After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis Gregg Lambert, On the (New) Baroque Neil Hertz, The End of the Line

ON THE (NEW) BAROQUE

A new revised edition of The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (2004) with appendix and author’s foreword

Gregg Lambert

The Davies Group, Publishers Aurora, Colorado USA

Copyright © Gregg Lambert 2004, 2008. An earlier version was published as The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture, London: Continuum, 2004. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lambert, Gregg, 1961On the (new) Baroque / Gregg Lambert. -- Rev. ed. p. cm. -- (Critical studies in the humanities) Rev. ed. of: The return of the Baroque in modern culture. 2004. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-888570-97-7 (alk. paper) 1. Modernism (Literature) 2. Modernism (Aesthetics) 3. Postmodernism. 4. Baroque literature--History and criticism. 5. Literature, Modern--20th century--History and criticism. I. Lambert, Gregg, 1961- . Return of the Baroque in modern culture. II. Title. PN56.M54L36 2008 809’.91--dc22 2008027580

Cover illustration: Las Meninas or The Family of Philip IV, c.1656. Oil on canvas by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez (1599–1660). Prado, Spain/Bridgeman Art Library. Printed in the United States of America 0123456789

To My Mother, Rosemary D(enver). Sliger This Baroque is for you

It is quite characteristic of baroque style that anyone who stops thinking rigorously while studying it immediately slips into a hysterical imitation of it. Benjamin to Scholem 16 September 1924

Contents Author’s Foreword to the 2008 Edition viii Author’s Foreword to the 2004 Edition xxii Introduction: Why the Baroque? xxiii Part One: Major renovations of the Seventeenth-Century Concept 1 The Baroque Style: Heinrick Wölfflin, Frank Warnke, and Harold Segel 1 2 The Baroque Mechanism: José Antonio Maravall 17 3 The Baroque Eon: Eugenio d’Ors 31 Part Two: Baroque and Modern 4 Baroque and anti-Baroque: Octavio Paz 5 Baroque and Modernity: Paul de Man 6 The Baroque Angel: Walter Benjamin

45 56 67

Part Three: Baroque and Postmodern 7 A Baroque Thesis: Michel Foucault 8 Un récit baroque: Gérard Genette 9 The Baroque Emblem: Yury Lotman and Jacques Derrida

81 96 104

Part Four: Baroque and Postcolonial 10 The Baroque Conspiracy: Jorge-Luis Borges 11 The Baroque and el neobarroco: Severo Sarduy 12 Concierto barroco: Alejo Carpentier

121 133 145

Conclusion: One or many Baroques?

159

CODA (2008): On the New Baroque Construction

173

Appendix: The Baroque Detective (from The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze [Continuum Books 2004])

185

Notes

207

Bibliography

221

Index

227

Author’s Foreword to the 2008 Edition As I recount in the preface to the original 2004 edition of Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture published by Continuum Books, I completed this study in the period of the early 1990s as part of a little-known field of scholarship in North America at that time, which included such works as Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s La Raison Baroque (1984), Omar Calabrese’s L’Età Neo-Barocca (1987), and Roberto González Echevarría’s study of Spanish and Latin-American “Colonial Baroque” in his remarkable Celestina’s Brood (1993). While writing the first complete draft of the manuscript in the winter of 1994 at Lake Gregory, a remote location of the San Gabriel mountains outside Los Angeles, I often thought then of the description in Borges’ “Library of Babel” of lone researchers working in a series hexagonal chambers with two small closets, one for sleeping and the other for depositing waste, and also of the following description: “The Library is a circle whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.”1 After finishing the first draft of the manuscript, I placed it in the drawer after realizing that my choice of such an obscure and somewhat eccentric topic for a dissertation would not increase my chances in securing a position in the university, and that I may have been unconsciously identifying with the biography of another researcher whose choice of a similar subject during the 1920s in Germany never led to a university post in his lifetime, which ended rather badly. It was not until ten years later, after receiving tenure, upon hearing the faint stirrings of renewed interest in the Baroque from other hexagons that I decided to publish my study in 2004. I have provided these biographical details to explain to the reader why my study, at least upon first glance, might already appear somewhat dated, since it corresponds to an intellectual tradition of Neobaroque scholarship that took place, in Europe and in the Americas, mostly between the 1970s and the early-1990s.2 Nevertheless, even if we choose to date it the year it was published in 2004, Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture still represented one of the first book-length studies on the inter-relationship between the original European Baroque, Modern Baroque (or Neobaroque), and Neobarroco to appear in English. What distinguished my approach from the

Author’s Foreword

ix

earlier studies by Buci-Glucksmann and Calabrese was my coverage of traditional Baroque criticism (Heinrick Wölfflin, René Wellek, Frank Warnke, and Harold Segel), which is expanded to include chapters on the Spanish critics Eugenio d’Ors and José Antonio Maravall (as well as some discussion the French tradition represented by Starobinski, Focillon, and Gérard Genette), in addition to the standard commentary on modern and postmodern figures such as Benjamin, Deleuze, and Foucault. The most important factor, however, is the attention I give to the larger international scope of Neobaroque traditions by the inclusion of such various figures as Mexican poet Octavio Paz, Russian formalist critic Yury Lotman, as well as the last section on “Baroque and Post-Colonial” that includes Jorge Luis Borges and Severo Sarduy, and ends with a commentary on Alejo Carpentier’s late novel Concierto barroco (1974). Still, my own itinerary of the New Baroque does not end in Latin America with the “New World Baroque,” but rather in “Old Europe” on the occasion of an academic colloquy on the Baroque organized by Buci-Glucksmann that took place in Paris in 1989, which was dominated either by discussions of Gracian, or by a more melancholy and Germanic (i.e., Benjaminian) determination of its modern incarnation.3 In other words, I conclude my study with what I perceived in 1994 to be the last “return of the Baroque” up to that moment historically, which I read under the sign of “exhaustion,” that is, as the dissipation of the cultural energies belonging to a certain tradition of European postmodernism that began in the late 1950s with the frenetic energy of burst structures, and which enlisted the Baroque as a fundamental and genetic category.4 It is not by accident that the Italian postmodern critic Omar Calabrese subtitles his 1987 treatise on Neo-Barocca as “the sign of the times,” even though my earlier argument was that by the time Calabrese issued this proclamation the particular cycle of the “Return of the Baroque” he was referring to a phenomenon that was already dissipating as a cultural moment. Of course, I did not foresee a new “return of the Baroque” in the North American universities and among Latin American academics that is taking place today, mostly inspired by an earlier cycle of the Cuban and Latin-American neobarroco that occured during the same period as the European counterparts, that is, between 1950 and 1980. For example, in Irlemar Chiampi’s recent study, Barroco y modernidad (2000), the Mexican critic revitalizes many of the features of earlier Neobaroque writers,

x

On the (New) Baroque

particularly those of Sarduy and Lezama; although she draws on many of the same critical sources as European modernists and postmodernists, she attempts to forge a uniquely Latin American “return of the Baroque,” based on the narrative of “counter-modernity” (contramodernidad). In this sense, Chiampi seems to echo the position of Lezama in the earlier ideological debates over the originality of the Latin American Baroque. 5 And yet, this latest cycle also corresponds to my thesis concerning multiple Baroques, borrowed partly from Octavio Paz’s earlier description of the multiple cycles of avant-garde traditions that make-up the history of Modernism, where the category of the Baroque has been employed strategically to recast and to over-turn the dominant relations between culture and history within expanded and globalizing processes of lateModernity. According to this thesis, therefore, I would read the more recent return to the category of the neobarroco, proclaimed mostly today by academics and literary critics in the university under the banner of an authentic Latin-American tradition of counter-modernity, as signaling an end of literary and intellectual tradition of Latin-American culture inaugurated in the 1950’s by such figures as Lezama and Carpentier. Even by the mid-1970’s the specific term el barroco was already being employed ironically and highly rhetorically by Cuban-born theorist and writer Severo Sarduy during his period of involvement with the Parisian avant-garde movement Tel Quel. By this time, in other words, Sarduy’s selfdescribed strategy of neobarroco was to transform some of the characteristic expressions of his Latin-American contemporaries into a cosmological theory of the Baroque universe based on the opposition between a “steady state” system and the “big bang” system, which also corresponded to the de-centered processes of globalization and post-colonial representations of culture in which Europe becomes the “absent center” of a new order of words and things.6 Sarduy’s argument explicitly draws a parallel between the current debates over the meaning and the historical (if not cosmological) significance of the “return of the Baroque” and the original querelle des Anciens et des Moderne that took place in the original Baroque period, almost according to the identical terms that were earlier announced by Perrault in “The Century of Louis the Great” (1687): La docte Antiquité dans toute sa durée A l’égal de nos jours ne fut point éclairée.”

Author’s Foreword

xi

[The entire expanse of learned Antiquity was nowhere enlightened to equal our times.]

However, according to a new division between ancient and modern announced in Sarduy’s manifesto, Barroco (1974), and even more prominently today in the counter-modernity discourses belonging to the LatinAmerican Neobarroco, Europe now assumes the position occupied by former antiquity, and Latin America has come to occupy the position of the modern, a position frequently characterized as belonging exclusively to the future. In response to this latest cycle of “the return of the Baroque,” ironically more pronounced by literary critics in the North American academy (who I would simply classify as being our “New Modernists”), I would say only that it is still possible to imagine that “Old Europe” has a future too, and it would be an error to consign its reality exclusively to the past, alongside the “Old Baroque.” Turning to the frequency of “the return of the Baroque” in different cultural locations of modernity, in Part One I argue that this is primarily owed to an instability that already belongs to the category itself, which was already present in the seventeenth century, though primarily in the eighteenth century academic debates concerning the term’s incoherence as a distinct historical period, as well as arguments concerning whether it should be classified as a sub-species of Mannerism. What results is the suspicion that the Baroque itself is a strangely perverted category, a pure fiction composed of real cultures, so much so that any attempt to occupy the Baroque and to lay claim to its category as an authentic expression of historical culture, is constantly undermined by the fabulous history of the category itself, and by the marvelous reality this history seems to portray. It is this instability that haunts the original European Baroque that provides the conditions for both modernist and postmodern appropriations; consequently, I argue that in understanding the specific flaw in the category itself, or the process of categorization that determines the Baroque historically, we might better understand the logic behind its reappearance in different traditions of modernist and late-modernist culture, even alongside the processes of globalization. The motivation for my argument concerning multiple and inter-national cycles of Neobaroque stems from my observation that even though cultures cannot be constructed in isolation from one another, given the complexity of the processes of

xii

On the (New) Baroque

modernization and the permeability of national and intellectual traditions of artists and writers, there has been a tendency more recently in academic representation (particularly in the North American university) to construct critical and historical narratives of cultural history along nationalist and/or highly culturalist assumptions that seem to posit cultures as windowless monads. What I am identifying as “the return of the Baroque” in several different cultural traditions and different geo-political locations, therefore, might be one way of tracing cultural transmissions that occur between these monads in order to create a more accurate “world picture” of modern culture, to borrow a phrase from Heidegger, although my method was primarily inspired by Raymond Williams’ The Politics of Modernism (1989). The title phrase of my study, of course, also contains an allusion to the Freudian “return of the repressed” in which the different expressions of the New Baroque can be compared to a “primal scene” in modern culture; consequently, each new emergence instigates a revision of its predecessors. Just as in the case of arguments concerning the historical reality of the original representative in Freudian theory, I also highlight the tradition of debates in historical Baroque criticism concerning whether the original European Baroque actually ever existed. This question is fundamental to the history of the category itself, as one of the conditions of its displacement along a historical path that moves forward all the way to the postmodern. As the most recent “return of the Baroque,” however, the exact status of the contemporary analogy between “Baroque” and “postmodern” is not one of my own making, nor is it something I was actually that interested in myself, but was often posited by critics who belonged to the European tradition of Neobaroque I was primarily studying. For my part, I was more interested in the function of these analogies in the history of culture, and in how and why the Baroque category has been employed so frequently as a fulcrum in this process. In the conclusion, I return to this analogy precisely in order to finally reject it as strained and artificial. However, what I was actually rejecting was Fredric Jameson’s influential thesis concerning the postmodern (as “an ideology of the text”) by restoring an accompanying tradition of the Neobaroque to its actual multi-national connections, precisely by taking an account of the different appearances of the New Baroque in each national tradition of late-modernism. Actually, the postmodern is a meaningless category—

Author’s Foreword

xiii

it is precisely through its purported lack of actual historical content that it can be made into the expression of a Universal, primarily for strategic (or ideological) purposes—and it is only through the perspective of the Baroque that each tradition can begin to communicate with one another through their difference, un-tethered from the centrality of the category of the postmodern that makes them only abstract and de-localized expression of the same “Logic of Late-Capitalist Culture.” This is the very Leibnizian principle of my study: it is only at the point where things begin to differ that can they be said to begin to resemble one another. Turning to the text itself, in preparing this new edition I could not help but to touch up the façade of the earlier version in a few places. One of the early descriptions of Baroque style, often associated with seventeenth century Baroque mannerism, was that of being “spare, witty, and ornamental.” These descriptors became the guiding principles in constructing my own style of approaching the subject: economy, a sense of humor, and most of all, excessive ornamentation. The effect I wanted to achieve in employing this style was often an effect that is described by many early Baroque commentators and art historians where the viewer’s attention is drawn from the centrality of action being represented, or from the center of the picture, by the proliferation of superficial details that comprise the work’s periphery or frame. Here, one might be reminded of those Baroque works hanging in museums where the frame itself, with all its beautiful and intricate motifs and multiple serifs, rivals the representation of the interior content, producing a disorienting and distracting effect in the spectator whose attention is constantly drawn away from the center of the work to a point where inside and outside fall into confusion and cannot be clearly distinguished (chiaroscuro). Somewhat humorously, an earlier British reviewer of my book describes his experience of reading exactly in the same terms—as distracting, confusing, overwrought by detail, and finally, as completely “extravagant.” 7 Clearly, this reviewer had no idea of the intentionality of this design, but rather thought I was simply trying to pull the wool over his eyes. In my own defense, I will again recall the description of the Borgesian library: there we find a series of hexagons, each containing twenty shelves, five shelves to a side (except where there is a hallway leading either to a closet or to the next chamber); each shelf contains thirty five books, each book is 410 pages long, each page contains forty lines and each line

xiv

On the (New) Baroque

is eighty characters in length. Although inspired from this architectural detail description in Borges fiction, the actual structure I employed in this book is taken from Genette’s description of the poem by St. Amant discussed in Chapter Eight: each of the four sections contains a triptych of three authors belonging to the corresponding sub-category of Baroque or Neobaroque phenomena; thus, each chapter on an author must be viewed as a panel of this tryptichal presentation. (The brevity and elliptical nature of each chapter, which some have judged to be a major flaw in my account of this or that episode of the New Baroque, is part of this overall design.) Such an arrangement gives the impression of an order of symmetry ideal for presenting a dispersed and largely chaotic phenomena, but here the reader must be reminded that this impression is a fiction, or an imaginary order imposed upon the real relations in order to make them more presentable as knowledge. Accordingly, the act of framing is metaphorically the equivalent of the act of categorizing, and the history of the Baroque category, impressed upon actual locations and the cultural expressions, is just such an Order in my view. Still, does this imply a purely formalist argument, typical of a postmodern approach to the subject of representation; one in which the real historical content disappears in favor of the multiple acts of framing it, or is vanquished in favor of its ideological trends? According to Kant, a category refers to something that cannot be represented but is known to exist, such as Causality. Rather than seeing this effect as the point where Language assumes a force of causality over reality in the order of representation (i.e., language comes first, reality becomes an effect), which is often argued concerning formalist approaches or in describing a postmodern sensibility, I argue that it is the effect of something in the category itself that assumes a position of transcendence over language and first produces this effect of disorientation. In short, my intention was to highlight in the history of the category of the Baroque the multiple manners in which it has been framed and re-framed; thus, each “Return of the Baroque” can be understood according to this same principle of ornamentation, which produces the same characteristic of disorientation and dizziness with regard to its proper historical location or coherent cultural determination. Frame upon frame, my image of Neobaroque constructions would very much resemble those elaborate and ornamentally framed Baroque paintings I have seen in the Metropolitan where the frame itself,

Author’s Foreword

xv

so grossly overwrought with ornamental details and heavy to the degree that one immediately fears that it is about to tumble from the wall of the gallery, overcomes the central detail of the dark canvass which appears about the same size as a postage stamp, giving the same impression that Leibniz once used to describe the interiority of the Monad: a “squirming of fishes.” My principle argument, however, has to do with the fact that this effect of multiple and inconsistent categories of Baroque that were already clearly present in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century academic debates is given a more strategic determination, beginning with the Spanish art historian Eugenio d’Ors, and it is this change in principle that becomes the fundamental characteristic of various Neobaroque constructions by which artists and critics have used this principle of disorientation in order to intervene directly into the dominant representations of culture and history to cause these representations to become “re-staged” (even in a theatrical sense). Thus, if d’Ors first discovers this strategy in his invention of “the Baroque Eon” as a universal constant that is present in all stages of culture, which he deploys in his effort to overturn the dominance of Classicism in the European arts, we can find a version of this same strategy in Foucault’s use of the Baroque the classical order of representation, in Sarduy’s version of neobarroco, and even in Lezama’s or Carpentier’s early constructions of a distinctly Latin-American or “New World Baroque.” In each case, the Baroque is deployed as a category to cause a dominant representation of culture to fall into a state of confusion, as a stage that is preliminary to reconstruction under a new principle that is designated by “the return of the Baroque.” In the more recent scholarship on Neobaroque and neobarroco constructions, this strategic determination has been identified with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming minor”; however, I have preferred to maintain the original figural relationship to what I define as “the Baroque emblem” to describe this principle of Neobaroque representation.8 (In part, this is because I believe that the Neobaroque has developed enough strategies in its own arsenal and does not benefit much from the importation of a new conceptual apparatus to name them.) Therefore, it is owed to this newly established strategic determination that I continue to identify the term Baroque, as well as its modern variants, with this mechanistic or instrumental determination: as a simple device or conceit that is used in representation.

xvi

On the (New) Baroque

The Baroque figure of mise-en-abîme can be described as one method of producing this effect, which is most famously illustrated by Velásquez’s portrait Las Meninas. Velásquez achieved this effect simply by placing a frame within the frame, revealing at the center of the canvass, or just off-center to the left, the scaffolding of the back of the canvass itself. At a remote point of the central scene which appears in the back of the royal apartment being depicted, the figure of the royal personages are placed en abîme, since their appearance violates the laws of perspective and constitutes a point where the sense of representation vacillates between a mirrored reflection of reality (or mimesis) and patently falsified or artificial convention of portraiture. It is this effect that appears as a central motif of my study, and I return to it at many points to interrogate its underlying logic in relation to the categories of Baroque and Neobaroque. For example, in Chapter Three on José Antonio Maravall, it becomes the basis for what he defines as the “Baroque mechanism” (resortes) of seventeenthcentury Spanish absolutist culture, in which the subjective effects of disorientation and wonderment that define the Baroque spectacle of culture are given an ideological function that prefigures modern characterizations of mass cultural spectacle within early-capitalism. In the chapter on Gérard Genette, it is precisely the ability to discern the logic of this method of representation that determines different historical judgments about St. Amant’s Moyse sauvé—from earlier judgments by Boileau, among others, who did not perceive the narrative’s triptych framework and thus characterized this work as being “formless” and “disorganized,” to later judgments in scholarship on the poem in which this plan becomes evident and thus identified as “typically Baroque.” Therefore, what begins as a simple device, a technical means (resortes) in the field of pictorial representation, but also in the realm of Baroque architecture, gradually expands to include the entire fields of culture and history as well, as the category of the Baroque gains more solidity and historical density in its use by critics, artists, historians and philosophers in the modern period. In each case, I highlight the fact that it is on the basis of this simple figure, sometimes called a device, a mechanism, a trope, a technique, a trick or lure (e.g., trompe-d’oeil)—what I call the “Baroque emblem”— refers to something that appears in the field of representation in the Baroque period, but gradually becomes identified with the historical condition of literary representation at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Author’s Foreword

xvii

In The Order of Things Foucault returns to the appearance of this Baroque figure in Las Meninas and makes it a central point of manifestation in his argument of an epistemological shift that occurs historically between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and even names the condition for the emergence of the enigmatic being language that forms the condition of literary representation from the nineteenth century onward. This is what I call Foucault’s Baroque thesis, which many have found to be too fantastic to be believed, but which I have always found to be fascinating. As in the example of the disorienting effect of the ornamental Baroque frame on the spectator offered above, it is the figured presence of the act of representing that disturbs the function of representation itself, and this could be said to be one of the characteristic marks of the modern epistēmē, to use Foucault’s quasi-epochal designation. Whether this effect is determined ironically, critically, or humorously, it is one of the staples of our experience of representation. Foucault’s critical conceit of defining it as the “enigmatic being of language” that appears at the basis of a modern experience of literary representation (but which is also present in other arts as well), is simply to call our attention to what he elsewhere refers to the “stubborn density” that belongs to certain regions of representation. In a certain sense, therefore, if we are drawn to these regions of representation where this density emerges to hold us captive and to fascinate us, this might be described in terms of the disorienting and distracting effects I used above to describe the experience of the Baroque spectator. Hence, the modern work of art constantly distracts us and causes our perception of the object represented to fall askew, to move toward the edges of the picture where reality bleeds through, creating a darkened stain or splotch in the corner of our vision of reality. Here also, following the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, I would point out that Leibniz’s construction of the Monad can be considered as a philosophical instance of the “Baroque emblem,” according to the contradictory principles that it has no doors or windows, yet already includes everything inside. In his 1988 study of Leibniz and the Baroque, The Fold, Gilles Deleuze simply translates this emblem according to a different figure, that of the fold, and particularly in the principle of “a fold that unfolds all the way to infinity.” And yet, what are the figures of mise-enabîme or anamorphosis that have often been associated with the Baroque except particular manners (or techniques) of folding representation upon

xviii

On the (New) Baroque

itself, or of unfolding representation in a manner that includes the act of representation itself as an internal perspective (or point of view)? The fact that they are techniques implies that they do not belong to an order of Nature, but rather occur by a kind of invention that must have an historical origin, which can then be reproduced or imitated by other artists or writers in the same historical period, or even find analogous applications in the other arts (such as music, or drama), in the end becoming a generalized designation of a style of expression that is determined by the concept of the Baroque. Therefore, Deleuze does not choose to employ the technical terms from the domain of the pictorial arts or literature, but instead chose to explore the very condition of this Baroque manner of expression through the philosophical concept of the fold, which is derived from Leibniz’s Monadological construction. Deleuze also defines the concept of the fold according to a tendency he also finds in the Baroque to establish a continuity and inner teleology between all the arts that leads toward a higher unity (or finality), which is expressed in the Leibnizian notion of harmony. It is not by accident that this teleology leads to the purest expression of the concept of the fold that takes place the region of music, which is the principle subject of the conclusion of Deleuze’s treatise on the Baroque philosophy of Leibniz, and which I will return to comment in the “coda” (itself a musical term derived from Italian meaning “tail”) that I have added to the original conclusion. As Deleuze writes, “perhaps Music is at the apex, while the theater that has moved in that direction is revealed as opera, carrying all the other arts toward this higher unity.”9 Again, this tendency is clearly illustrated in the chapter on Genette, which recounts an occasion where St. Amant folds together the conventions of epical narration with a triptichal convention drawn from Baroque pictorial arts, employing a technique that was at first “indiscernible,” until a later point when it is found to express a principle that is then judged to be “typically Baroque.” The tendency to draw different media together in a new form that expresses their correspondences and their analogies, hence an expression of their harmony, is a characteristic that has been identified beginning with the Baroque period in the arts. Deleuze’s argument is that this tendency can be found at the basis of Leibniz’s philosophy as well (and it is important to note that, according to Deleuze, Leibniz derives his principle of Harmony more from the music of this period than from either pure logic or

Author’s Foreword

xix

mathematics). As a result of the discovery of this new Baroque principle of Harmony, something has changed! A new principle of ars combinatoria emerges that will have profound repercussions in all domains of the arts and philosophy throughout the modern period. In my attempt to trace the repercussions of this event, I have highlighted the manner in which the different occurrences of the New Baroque have been dominated by either new techniques or discussions of this same principle of ars combinatoria, even to the point of including entire histories and even real bodies as materials of a recognizable Neobaroque composition. For example, we can find this same principle of the Latin-American barroco in the discussions of the hybrid character (criollo or mestizaje) of different races that comprise the “new American identity,” or even in Carpentier’s own method of narrating the history of Latin-American identity through the device of the overlapping narrative perspectives in Concierto barroco, as well as in his technical use of dissonance in Baroque harmony to foreground the arrival of modern jazz as a uniquely American art form that expresses the unity of the above principles. It is clear that Carpentier’s technique participates in a Neobaroque strategy of establishing continuity (harmony) between different registers of representation, including literary, historical, musical, religious, even mythological or cosmological sources; it is this condition of harmony that becomes the basis for the expressions of divergence and dissonance in the creation of different points of view on the same melody (in this case, the same Libretto on the Mexican conquest by Cortez.) In other words, Carpentier adapts the earlier Baroque tendency to establish a continuity between the arts, or a teleology in the passage from one art-form to another (e.g. from Baroque chamber music to the modern jazz quartet) to reveal a historical destination of this teleological principle in the Americas: in the musical invention of Mambo (which surpasses North American jazz by combining a modern form of popular dance), in the Latin-American novel (which utilizes earlier Baroque techniques to produce a narrative of Universal History from dual perspectives, or points of view, East and West, Europe and the Americas), and; finally, in the figuration of a creolized or uniquely American identity, which surpasses the segregated and racialized identities of the European hordes. Nevertheless, despite this utopian thesis, one is left to wonder if this final principle of neobarroco harmony is descriptive of actual socio-historical processes

xx

On the (New) Baroque

of cultural hybridization or whether it is the unfolding of a dominant tendency that belongs to the history of Baroque constructions. In the end, Foucault’s earlier “Baroque thesis” that in the modern period, beginning around the nineteenth century, the name of Literature comes to designate what at first was discovered as a simple technique of folding representation with the act of representing itself is not so fantastic after all, nor have all the problems that this determination of the fields of representation has produced in the periods that followed, in which all representation is made vulnerable to the encroachment of “an almost hallucinatory presence” (Deleuze)—a perspective, or point of view, that undermines the direct apprehension of reality. As far as this enigmatic Being of Language that has come to be designated by the name of “Literature” is concerned, I would also suggest that this once mechanical technique of folding representation upon itself has also exhausted all its possibilities, and its pretension of sovereignty over the relation between culture and history is also coming to the end of a long Baroque epoch inaugurated in the middle of the seventeenth century—in a five year period between 1653 and 1657, to be exact! Yet, if my own Baroque thesis can be understood to exemplify, perhaps even to champion, Borges’ earlier definition of the Baroque as the expression of “exhaustion,” an argument directed against his contemporaries who wanted to make of it an authentic vehicle of what Octavio Paz described as a misplaced neo-Romanticism, I see no hint of melancholy in Borges’ position, nor in his seeming alliance with Classicism in the querelle des Anciens et des Moderne. In conclusion, we should recall that the fourth characteristic of the Baroque that Borges defines is that it is “humorous, which is to say purely intellectual.” The problem, as I continue to see it today, is that much of our critical literature and philosophy continues to be invested nostalgically in the sovereignty of a certain manner of folding representation upon itself that might also be identified as “typically Baroque,” which is to say that we have not yet exhausted what are essentially a set of modernist strategies for determining the relationships between Culture and History. And yet, to exhaust all possibilities and possible resources that belonged to this earlier idea of modernity is to be capable of a sense of humor and an intellectual energy that no longer requires nostalgia, nor any of the old sentiments associated with the cult of European Literature. If there is to be any future to the dream of a “Universal Culture” that is first

Author’s Foreword

xxi

expressed in the Baroque period, then it first belongs to the arts and especially to the new technical possibilities discovered by the various modern media, that is, to the discovery of a new principle of Baroque harmony itself: one in which the various possibilities offered by dissonance emerge as a vital means in forging new accords. * * * Adding to those originally acknowledged in the 2004 Continuum edition, first of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all the colleagues and friends who sent e-mails of encouragement to my octagon after reading my book, and to the many nameless souls who actually took the time to take it out on loan, since the original edition was certainly more than any mortal could afford and would otherwise be destined to be lost in some dusty corner of the Total Library. I would especially like to underscore my thanks to William Egginton, whose writings on the seventeenth century Spanish Baroque and on José Antonio Maravall, in particular, have been a continued source of inspiration and learning; and to Monika Kaup for the many “correspondences” that took place around “the Baroque and Post-Colonial,” which served as a pre-text for clarifying some key aspects of my original argument that were no doubt missed due to some mistaken assumptions concerning style. I would again like to express my gratitude to professors Ronald Bogue and J. Hillis Miller for their comments on the original manuscript published by Continuum. I would like to express my gratitude to Cathryn Newton, Dean of the College of A & S at Syracuse University, for her generosity in allowing me to keep to my writing schedule during my tenure as Chair of English, and to my colleague Dympna Callaghan for her enthusiastic support.. I would also like to thank Sarah Campbell of Continuum International Publishing Group for assisting me in securing the rights and permissions for this new edition, Keith Davies and B.J. Davies of Davies Group Publishers, and Victor E. Taylor, the editor of the series “Critical Studies in the Humanities,” for allowing me the freedom and flexibility to expand and to improve upon the original, and; finally, to Aaron Levy, executive curator of Slought Foundation (Philadelphia, PA) for attending to the re-design of the cover art for this edition. Above all, I would like to express my love for Meera Lee for the newfound joys and

xxii

On the (New) Baroque

challenges in sharing my future with someone else, something I never thought to hope for again in this lifetime. Syracuse, New York, 8 January 2008

Author’s Foreword to the 2004 Edition The first complete version of this book was drafted during the winter of 1994 in the San Gabriel Mountains near Lake Arrowhead, California, after which I placed it in a drawer upon realizing that I would need to engage in more learning on the subject of the Baroque. It seems fitting, therefore, that the final version of this study was submitted ten years later. During the intervening period, I have been guided and cautioned by several people whom I would now like to thank. Above all, I wish to thank my best friend and former colleague Joel Reed, who first brought to my attention, perhaps as a warning, the passage from a letter from Benjamin to Scholem, which now appears as the epigraph to my own study. My understanding of the original European Baroque has been informed by two principal scholarly sources: Harold Segel’s substantial introduction to The Baroque Poem (1974) and Frank Warnke’s Versions of the Baroque (1972). My discussion of the “Colonial Baroque” has been guided and greatly influenced by the works of the Hispanist critic Roberto González Echevarría, particularly his remark­able Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature (1993). I wish to acknowledge these sources here to underscore my debt and my esteem for their authors. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to Jacques Derrida, Ronald Bogue, Alexander Gelley, J. Hillis Miller, Gabriele Schwab and Tristen Palmer, the editor of Athlone Press who first commissioned the manuscript for publication by Continuum Books—all of whom contributed their generous support and enthusiasm at different stages of this project. Syracuse, New York, 8 January 2004

Introduction: Why the Baroque? Baroque, Barroco. 1. A jeweler’s term: an irregular shaped, or flawed, pearl. As the Cuban writer Severo Sarduy once observed, “every essay on the Baroque opens by considering the origins of the term itself,” as if the term could be described as a proverbial bone in the throat of traditional Baroque criticism.1 This study is no exception. After a near-century of bickering with one another, literary critics and historians have reached a provisional agreement: the French adjectival term, la baroque, is derived from the etymology of the Portuguese (not Spanish) word, barroca, which means “an odd and irregular-shaped pearl.” In 1962, Rene Wellek, the American literary critic, recanted the earlier position he propounded in his 1946 article, “The Concept of the Baroque in literary Scholarship,” where he derived the term baroco from the fourth mode of the second figure in the nomenclature of syllogisms in Scholasticism, a type of syllogism considered strained and artificial: “If every A=B and some C does not equal B; then, some C docs not equal A.”2 (This is also the primary source that Borges cites in the 1954 preface to La historia universal de la infamia.) However, as Baroque historian Harold Segel later observes, Wellek later qualified his earlier statement, stating that while this syllogistic derivation may be true for Italy—after Croce first applied it to the concept of Baroque sensibility in Storia della età barocca in Italia (1929)—the term barroco probably reaches the rest of the world from the Portuguese jeweler’s term, perrola barroca, which refers to an irregular shaped, or flawed and imperfect pearl.3 Beyond this common etymological derivation, there has been little consensus in the history of Baroque criticism as to what this term might signify across the different fields and disciplines of architecture, the plastic arts, literature and cultural criticism. From its very appearance in works of art criticism from the nineteenth century onward, this term was often confused with Mannerism, or simply as the exaggeration of traits already found in the works of the Late-Renaissance; thus, it was often reduced to a period concept that occupies the middle ground between Renaissance and Classicism. After the 1960s, as Segel writes, the chronological value

xxiv

On the (New) Baroque

of Baroque and Mannerism—as in, which came first, or which one could be understood in reaction to the other—dissipates in favor of seeing both as expressions of two dominant and opposing styles of artistic expression that run all the way from antiquity through modernity.4 (However, the idea of the Baroque as a universal constant in opposition to classical forms is owed to a little-known Spanish art historian, Eugenio d’Ors, whose writings I will take up in Part One.) It is this last observation that is crucial for this study, particularly since most of the critics I discuss are drawn from this period—between 1960 and 1993—or immediately precede it. It is the view of two fundamentally opposing currents of cultural form—one emphasizing unity, the other “vitalism” and multiplicity— that sets the stage for understanding the contemporary opposition between the modern and the postmodern as an uncanny “return” of this earlier Baroque-Mannerist opposition. Such an hypothesis would have enormous implications, the most provocative of which is that there is nothing particularly modern about the postmodern, but that it could be understood, in a certain sense, as a “return of the Baroque.” For example, we might read Jameson’s major opposition proposed in his study Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism (1991) according to the terms of opposition earlier developed in eighteenth century arguments concerning Baroque and Mannerist styles, where a certain taste for the unity and the monumental that is associated with the “High Baroque” is cast in a direct confrontation with the spare, witty and superficial style associated with Mannerism and rococo.5 The Baroque, then, names a topic (in the rhetorical sense of a topos, a common place or theme in a certain class of arguments), one that returns quite often in critical representations of historical change in the concept of Culture. One might already infer from this state of affairs that the history of Baroque scholarship could easily become the subject of one of Borges’ parodies of an arcane and esoteric style of “academicism.” The various taxonomies of the different “species” of the Baroque (rococo, mannerismo, high Baroque, precocious or metaphysical, Alexandrine, Modern Baroque, Neobaroque or el neobarroco, Colonial Baroque or New World Baroque, de-colonizing or post-colonial Baroque, and most recently, the “TransAtlantic Baroque”) and the tables of classification that have been generated by this field of scholarship could even be compared to the now famous passage from Borges’ “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,”

Introduction

xxv

concerning “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” in which animals are classified according to the following categories: (a) belonging to the Emperor; (b) embalmed; (c) tame; (d) suckling pigs; (e) sirens; (f) fabulous; (g) stray dogs; (h) included in the present classification; (i) frenzied; (j) innumerable; (k) drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush; (1) et cetera; (m) having just broken the water pitcher and; (n) that look like flies from a long way off.6

It is not by accident that this infamous table of representation appears again in the preface of Foucault’s The Order of Things, where Foucault speaks of the absurdity, humor and dizziness that occurred when he first encountered “the exotic charm of another system of thought.” 7 As Foucault recounts in the passage that immediately follows, this initial feeling of dizziness and pleasant vertigo is soon followed by a feeling of disquietude and visible torpor, and his laughter is sobered by the reflection that this “monstrous” form of this classification (a series of blank spaces neatly divided by semi-colons and little letters) resembles our own encyclopedia to such a degree that the knowledge derived from a systematic arrangement of “words and things” (les mots et les choses), in fact, might simply be organized by a different fabula.8 Of course, Foucault is playing with another classical topic in these statements: that of the mirror placed between words and things. It is the recognition of an uncanny presence of a fictionalizing agency at the basis of the organized tables of knowledge that suddenly threatens to overturn all the categories and to place the possibility of representation itself into crisis (even if this crisis, as in the account offered by Foucault, is only experienced as a moment of laughter). “In the wonderment of this taxonomy,” Foucault observes, The thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. […] The monstrous quality that runs through Borges’ enumeration consists, on the contrary, in the fact that the common ground on which such meetings are possible has itself been destroyed. […] Where else could they be juxtaposed except in the non-place of language? Yet, though language can spread them before us, it can only do so in an unthinkable space.9

xxvi

On the (New) Baroque

Taking up the question of representation that is implied by Foucault’s reaction to this passage, we might notice that the form of Borges’ encyclopedia entry resembles so closely a classical table of knowledge common to Western encyclopedic knowledge, that its repetition in Borges’ tale might be categorized as a distinctly Baroque style of parody. The Borgesean encyclopedia inserts the empty surface of a mirror between the form of knowledge and its contents, a mirror that reflects the non-place (non-lieu) of a structure that is common to both fiction and reality: On one side of this mirror’s surface, there is an incongruous clarity one often associates with myth or fantasy; on the other, one finds a list of quotidian objects that seem to belong to the light of day (water pitchers, flies and cattle). Of course, we could also add to this the binary opposition of East-West that already informs the fabulous space of Borges’ depiction of “a certain Chinese Encyclopedia” (“the exotic charm of another system of thought,” as Foucault describes it), which provides the reader with the code to comprehend that the place this encyclopedia refers to is just as fantastic and magical as the animals it describes, a product of the Western Oriental gaze. Ultimately, this fictional technique of Orientalism, which is a recurrent feature in much of Borges’ work, represents a strategic parody of the subject of European knowledge; that is, it transplants the empty frame of this knowledge outside the confines of the known world and installs it within a fiction and, in so doing, transforms the measure of certainty that is implied by the form of Western knowledge into a subject of literature. In the 1954 preface to La historia universal de la infamia, Borges first identifies this technique by the concept of “Baroque.” “I would define the Baroque,” he writes, “as that style that deliberately exhausts (or at least tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on selfcaricature.”10 According to a Kantian understanding, if knowledge is derived from the representation of concepts of the understanding, concepts that are first ordered by the categories of reason, then we might ask what occurs when these categories are taken up by the literary process? In other words, instead of being ordered by the principles that submit cases of experience to concepts, the representation of knowledge is suddenly transformed by such citation, pastiche, allusion, parody and irony? Of course, the different rhetorical modes and genres already presuppose the possibility of this kind of transformation; however, the mode of

Introduction

xxvii

“literature” names something distinctly modern that both exceeds the space of classical rhetoric (that is, exceeds discourse or the intentional strategy of the rhetor, the speaker) even though it enlists these modes and genres and perfects their usage in the dialogic space of narration. I will argue that, in the modern period, what I will call the “Baroque emblem,” which is often associated with the figural device of the miseen-abîme (“the picture within the picture,” or “the text within the text”), comes to represent the particular “Being of Language” we now identify with the name of “literature.” In other words, rather than signaling a decline of the literary, the “return of the Baroque” can be associated with the becoming-literary of the principle behind knowledge itself, which the French critic Roland Barthes first defined as the principle of “intertextuality,” and narratologist Gérard Genette as the function of the “palimpsest.”11 Foucault stressed this epistemological transformation more than any other contemporary philosopher when he wrote that in the modern period the limit of truth can no longer be defined classically around the statement, “I am lying,” but rather around the statement “I am speaking.” The name of literature exceeds the genre of classical rhetoric to also include or encompass the tables of modern scientific knowledge. Consequently, we have a form of modern knowledge that is constantly exposed to being undermined by the very rhetoric in which this knowledge is embedded; at the same time, we have a literature that constantly grows to enlist the discursive vehicles of reason so much so that it either begins to resemble them, or the “experience” upon which reason founds its concepts comes closer and closer to resembling the experience of a fiction. This is the experience one typically has when reading Borges, but also a number of other modern writers. In short, this mirror inserted between the word and the thing becomes a surface of “reflection,” which casts a backward glance toward the very power to name, much less actually know, an objective reality. It is in this second sense that Foucault refers to the place of Borges’ fable as a modern heterotopia, because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names (e.g., animal), because they destroy syntax in advance,

xxviii

On the (New) Baroque

and not only syntax with which we construct sentences but also the less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and opposite one another) to ‘hold together’.12

Might this sense of heterotopia, therefore, offer us a partial explanation as to why the concept of the Baroque has historically been the perfect candidate for such a fabulous discussion? (Although this is a question that, unlike in North America or on the Continent, still bears a certain gravity in the context of Hispanic and Latin American literature, criticism and philosophy, where the name of the “Baroque” [barroco] has often been situated within a larger cultural process of reversing the priority of European forms of knowledge and culture, often overtly through the literary techniques of parody or pastiche.) Moreover, its peculiar status as a modern heterotopia might explain why a near-century of criticism has not been able to determine whether, or not, the Baroque ever existed as a definite historical or cultural phenomenon, but only found existence in “the non-place of language,” that is, in the rarefied air of academic debates belonging to art history and aesthetic criticism, and in various polemics around the “grand unities of culture,” or concerning the querelle des Anciens et des Moderne. The crisis that any discussion of the Baroque introduces concerns the category of “expressive causality” that underlies the theory of periodization, that is, the belief in the unity of phenomena that makes of any cultural form a unique expression of its time and historical location. But, as art historian Robert Harbison observes, At the end of the century we occasionally hear that we live in a Baroque age, meaning that rules of taste are impossible to enforce and forms have gone haywire in the various arts—but from lack of conviction than revolutionary enthusiasm—and that much of culture smacks of theatre. The old name gives the confusion of the present a shape: we have been here before.13

Is it any wonder that the concept has come to be suspected by many as an elaborate hoax, pure artifice, or as a historical and cultural fiction? Yet, this question must be considered in relation to the volumes that have already been produced on the subject, to the scholarship that has been devoted to it” perpetuation as a topic of discussion and debate. In fact,

Introduction

xxix

recalling Sarduy’s statement cited above that every work of criticism of the Baroque begins in exactly the same way—with the definition of the term “Baroque” in the manner that this study begins as well—this opens the question of whether the critical literature on the Baroque could itself be considered as a distinct genre, a literary form defined repeatedly by its own rhetorical conventions, by which we could characterize the works of Baroque criticism by the repetition of form, or by certain conventions that appear to underlie the identification of certain Baroque traits. If this were true, there would be very little difference between the work of Baroque criticism and the form of the novel, or a fable that begins routinely with the phrase: “Once upon a time….” Consequently, this treatise on the subject of the Baroque—the latest installment among a number of others I will refer to throughout this study—will necessarily bear more than a passing resemblance to the pages from Borges cited above. As Borges once wrote, “The Baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has said that all intellectual labor is humorous.”14 And yet, perhaps this book affords the space for just such a fantastic debate: an imaginary table ringed with chairs that are occupied by several more or less fictional interlocutors for a debate over the meaning of the Baroque in modern literature and philosophy. And perhaps it is possible to engage in such an innocuous debate on the meaning of the Baroque because, unlike the issues of a more serious and weighty nature, there do not seem to be the same criteria of “performativity” (Lyotard) applied to this kind of discussion in order to judge the outcome. (In fact, if this were so, someone would have put a stop to the conversations on this subject long ago.) A discussion of the Baroque will not stop any wars (much less cause them), will not feed any peoples (much less starve them or bum their crops); it will not stay the hand of the corporate boss from signing the next deal for cheap labor, nor the governor from signing the next order of execution. The principle underlying these other occasions is what the French call un pouvoir: a power that establishes, institutes, authorizes, disseminates and transforms a nominative reality into a social order (the word “order” implying both a description of relations that constitute a social reality and a command). On the other hand, the type of discussion that we seem to be involved in here can appear to withdraw to the ineffectual realm that often belies the derogatory value of the term “merely academic,” encompassing the domains of cultural aesthetics, literature, and contemporary theory.

xxx

On the (New) Baroque

Regarding the concept of Baroque itself, in Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque (1988), Gilles Deleuze brings this process of allegoresis to its highest form of expression. Instead of deploying the Baroque as a period or the term “Baroque” as an historical style, Deleuze determines the Baroque as a “pure concept,” in analogy to a pure concept in philosophy. In other words, the consistency of the Baroque is not made from the compilation of historical facts that attest to it existence, but rather by the persistence of the concept that gives it a sufficient reason to exist, that is to say, a sufficient cause. For Deleuze, therefore, the Baroque concept could be said to belong to the same class of concepts as the concept of God; in fact, in his arguments concerning the existence of the Baroque, he often employs the same ontological proofs classically associated with the existence of God. Like God, the concept could be classified as belonging to neontology, the science concerning non-existent entities. In a very humorous move, Deleuze performs a phenomenological bracketing of the Baroque as belonging to a nominative order of reality (that is, he isolates its meaning with regard to the question of its existence), so that the question of its existence can no longer be simply reduced to an empirical proof. Henceforth, it is not a matter of proving the existence of the Baroque by the revelation of empirical evidence (as one might reveal the existence of “irregular pearls” by finding examples), but rather of rendering its reason by inventing an explanation that is sufficient to express (or not) its necessary existence. Here, Deleuze shifts the ground of the historical arguments concerning the existence of the Baroque quid factum, which has been raging in academic circles for more than a century, to the register of a scholastic theology that judges the logical consistency and coherence of the ontological arguments concerning the existence of God. Consequently, it is no longer enough to say that “the Baroque does not exist” or “it has never existed,” which would only amount to simple negation, or a tautological line of reasoning. As Deleuze writes: It would seem strange for one to deny the existence of the Baroque as one would deny Unicorns or Pink Elephants. Because in these cases the concept is given, while in the case of the Baroque it is rather one of knowing whether one can invent a concept capable of giving (or not) its existence. Irregular pearls exist, but the Baroque has no reason to exist without a concept that forms this reason itself. It’s easy

Introduction

xxxi

to render the Baroque non-existent; one only has to stop proposing its concept (my emphasis).15

In terms that are essentially inductive rather than deductive, Deleuze points out here that the direction of the Baroque existence runs opposite to a phenomenon (e.g., irregular pearls), which finds its final term expressed in “empirical evidence.” In the case of the Baroque, it has no other mode of existence than that of expression, particularly by those who persist in expressing or evoking its name, even if only to deny it. Because the Baroque is potentially an “empty category,” it has often played havoc with the empirical assumptions as the basis of historical narration.16 It is on this basis, due to this peculiar and special status that belongs to the category of the Baroque, that it can be used to examine other categories, such as postmodern, which have been similarly plagued by the uncertainty with regard to its relation to a definite historical period of modernity. Clearly, the Baroque is fantastic. It appears even more so when one considers the lives of those specialized in the Baroque debate, who ferreted out case by case, document by document, to establish its validity or to police its uses by others who were less informed; or those others, its detractors, full of vehement disdain for such an abuse of knowledge, who spent an equal time rebutting the findings of its proponents, or qualified its universal application to all fields of culture (architecture, painting, sculpture, lyric, drama), and who sought to limit its universal scope by national indices (German, Italian, French, Spanish, English, Polish) and by refining a list of other names to characterize its variables (such as Mannerism, Rococo, Metaphysical, precocité, Góngorism, among others). In fact, if I were to compile a history of the “Baroque in Modern Culture,” I would also have to compile the details of every life dedicated to its perpetuation as a category of thought; including their tawdry desires, their dreary and mundane routines, their most intimate conversations and private testimonies. The result might constitute the anonymous biography of what Christine Buci-Glucksmann has called La Raison Baroque (a biography that might bear more than a passing resemblance to Borges’ “Pierre Menard,” or Valéry’s Monsieur Teste). I would argue that such a history would surpass even the best rendering of Borges’ apocryphal constructions of Western knowledge, and the biographies of these scholars’ lives could be understood as characters of discourse (in the sense

xxxii

On the (New) Baroque

of Freud’s use of the term “vicissitude”). In this last sense, perhaps the criticism that surrounds the Baroque reveals something like a kernel of madness in the form of Western critical reason that once again challenges its power to name, to call into existence, and to describe nominative reality. We could even speculate as to its source in the desire it procures or reproduces in the individual reason (as Kant called the other “end of man”)—as what motivates the individual reason with a desire to “know.” Thus, the Baroque mirror that “reflects” this other reason is neither secret nor esoteric, nor even hidden for that matter, but is a madness that occurs in the full light of day. It is a form of madness without the style of madness—lucid, reasonable, clear, and logical to a nearly hyperbolic degree. One such biography would be that of the early twentieth-century Spanish art critic, Eugenio d’Ors, to whom I will refer to below and who could be called the inventor of the “Neobaroque” strategy that I will later discuss in Chapter Three. Although many critics, including Latin-American writer José Lezama Lima, have later dismissed d’Ors as an “obscurantist” and a minor art historian, what often escapes notice is the strategic principle behind d’Ors’ excessive academic and scholarly style, that this “academicism” was the manner in which, similar to Borges’ technique of constructing fields apocryphal and esoteric scholarship, d’Ors created with his “Baroque Eon” a parody of the subject of academic discourse, which is raised to the level of new Baroque rhetoric. This explains the manner in which d’Ors exaggerates all the traits that are common to academic discourse as well as the field of knowledge and the social form that this knowledge implies: its sovereign agents, its debates and polemics, its pedagogical and colonizing force of reason, its excessive qualification, its love of categorization and fetishism of the example and, above all, its rage for perfection. What d’Ors reveals by his pastiche is a discourse that is informed by an image of perfection that occurs at the end of history, a counter-historical or mythical force of permanence and reminiscence: Eternity. In its classical form, according to d’Ors, the work of criticism participates in an image of history as perpetual progress, a cultural energy of conservation, by rendering to reason the examples of history, by establishing its major concepts, by baptizing cultural and aesthetic phenomena as “exemplary” of this idea of progress or of achievement, and by instituting the myth of perpetual progress within a pedagogical instrument of cultural Bildung. D’Ors’ “Baroque Eon,” on the other hand, does

Introduction

xxxiii

not provide the logic of a history or of reason in perpetual progress, but rather one that is open and in perpetual revolt: a culture, or cultivation, of either new forms that are the result of what he called the “a­tectonic” nature of real historical processes (including imperialism, colonialism and capitalism), or which represent the excavation of the “states of exception” that have been elided from any official history. Of course, these states of exception bear many heretical names, including Góngora, Marino, Spinoza and others. These exceptions produce a counter-version to an official history that is often much more monolithic and unified than it actually was. (And if the present moment appears confused an through glass darkly, how could a past moment suddenly come to express a relation to all other past moments in a unifying vision of time, which continues to be the dominant myth that structures current historical representation?)17 Their primary function is to pose the question at the level of heterotopia noted above, in the sense that these states of exception are also exceptional states that cannot be accounted fix by the traditional images of reason or history (thus, they would also include forms of madness, ecstasies, mysticism and the figures of evil I will outline in the section “Baroque and Modern”). Consequently, it is not accidental that d’Ors’ “Baroque Eon” finds its logic of cultural revolt echoed by other modernist writers and critics, such as German aesthetic critic Walter Benjamin, as well by writers and theorists of postmodern cultural philosophies, for whom these states of exception represent the re-telling or the excavation of a completely Other Modernity—unofficial, censored, repressed, colonized. More importantly, since its concept is hostile to any pedagogical novel (or Bildungsroman), the Baroque narrative of History will constantly invert the experience of Culture founded by the principles of education, accumulation, and progress. Its figures will overturn the pedagogical novel (Rousseau’s Émile, or the eighteenth-century Robinson Crusoe) upon which the colonial project is founded as well. What emerges in d’Ors’ conception of “Baroque Eon,” therefore, is a new figure of vitalism associated with the excessive nature of the modernist impulse, one that bears the abstract figure of the primitive as its most sublime expression. This Baroque primitive will not resemble the “real primitive,” however, but rather a being, partly mythic and apocalyptic in origin, who belongs to the modernist narrative of emancipation of Europe from the straitjacket

xxxiv

On the (New) Baroque

of its own history and the arrival of a new principle of culture allied with post-colonial expressions of counter-modernity as well as the cultural politics of the avant-garde. Turning our attention to the Continental context associated with the frequent analogy between the Baroque and the Postmodern, the term “Baroque” has gradually come to designate, rather than a particular historical period in European art history, an effect that results from the composition of specific traits around the adjectival terms Neobaroque or el neobarroco. In other words, it designates less a particular historical duration than a manner or style of composition. As an example of this use of the term, I quote a passage from Gérard Genette, to which I will often return during the course of this study: The Baroque, if it exists, is not an island (much less a private hunting-ground), but a crossroads (or nexus, un carrefour), a ‘star’ and, as is very evident in Rome, a public place. Its genius is syncretism, its order is its very openness, its signature is its very anonymity and pushes to an absurd degree its characteristic traits which are, erratically, found in all places and in all times. It hardly matters to us what belongs exclusively to this name, but rather what is ‘typical’ of it—that is to say, ‘exemplary.’18

According to Genette’s account, what the Baroque has come to signify is established by means of analogy, of its “exemplarity,” which is not limited to its original historical context, since its very exemplarity, which is pushed to an absurd degree, is now to be found in all places and in all times. In the above passage, Genette is particularly eager to protect the name of the Baroque from any exclusive determination (as the private property of a class, signature or brand-mark, stamp, specialized idiolect or even historical “date”). This illustrated a certain modern citation of a Baroque “gesture” (gestus) in direct opposition to all these signs of exclusivity or rarity that would rob the Baroque of its popular significance by assigning it an ornamental value of Culture, or by isolating its relevance to the remote past Accompanying these descriptions we find a barely concealed argument ad populum: like a star or a major boulevard, the Baroque’s visibility, significance or meaning is accessible to everyone; it is a “public place” in addition to being “anonymous” and quasi-universal.

Introduction

xxxv

What Genette here refers to as “typically Baroque” already prefigures the generic quality that the epochal, or historical Baroque, has assumed in its various modern receptions: it is not what the concept of the Baroque signified then, but what it expresses today, that determines its reality. What is “typical” or “exemplary” is the nature of Baroque expression (earlier on referred to as a style), which must be considered apart from its historical determination. After all, what does the appearance of a “public,” or “populus,” signify within the fairly private hunting grounds of an academic discourse where there exists no public, no people, to speak of? In place of the people (“who are missing” according to the mantra of High Modernism) there remains the pure category of an “Open” (Öffentlichkeit), as Kant called the basis of a publicity which forms the presence, not of any real public, but rather of a rhetorical topic of popular appeal. This constitutes a kind of “Open Sesame!” of the academic presentation, by which this discursive appeal mimes a popular force as the basis of its authority to institute a change in meaning of signs and to simulate a movement within the field of history itself. Behind Genette’s argument, in other words, there is a rhetorical appeal to a popular or cultural revolution around the very name of “the Baroque,” by which its significance would be the result of a type of democratic opening that would rob the authority of nomination from the cultural experts (who, here, are posed in terms of an “ancien régime”). Therefore, despite its original significance, which is known by cultural experts and specialists of the European Baroque, if its sign is invoked frequently enough to characterize contemporary aesthetic phenomena, then effectively a variation will be created in the meaning of the term itself. This characterizes a more recent concept of popular culture as having the ability of effecting historical change that can be ascribed to theories of postmodernism and accompanies the development of the position of the spectator (consumer) in capitalism as the base, or the cause (Grund), by which history is set in motion through a change in the meaning of its various “signs.” What is important to notice is that this logic of cultural forms (or morphogenesis), which has determined the fundamental gesture of the postmodern cultural work, becomes a frequent topic and even an “allegory of reading” within modern critical and theoretical debates that take up the Baroque as a recurrent “sign of the times” (Calabrese). This

xxxvi

On the (New) Baroque

allegory underscores the performative and popular values associated with the principles of “change” and “novelty” that have often been ascribed to the Baroque, which has been described as the forerunner and even as the origin of modern popular culture. To invoke the name of the Baroque, as in the example of Genette, is already to usher in a “spirit” (or Geist) of a people or popular culture in order to transform the private path into a major boulevard and the prestige (or authority) of the cultural expert into a star whose light touches everyone, equally and anonymously, from every corner of the past. Within French philosophy, in particular, and most of the cultural criticism belonging to a post-Baudelairean modernity, the appeal to a popular concept of culture is accompanied by the feminization of the body of the spectator (the crowd, or a people), which is often simulated by the metaphors of a charged poetic or textual body, replete with affective images that symbolize the political and cultural performativity of the academic discourse that invokes these entities as witnesses to the “symbolic event” of history. Both the concept of popular culture that underlies the modern and contemporary usage of the Baroque, as well as the centrality of the body as an “affect-image” (Deleuze), address the concept of enthusiasm that determined the role of the Kantian “spectator of history” (although the French revolution is the source of the Kantian example). This already signals a change in the determination (Bestimmung, also meaning “attunement”) of the spectator’s participation in the generation of an “event” that would become a veritable sign of history. Moreover, both this participation and the quality of the “event” it produces would privilege an aesthetic presentation, since: “aesthetically, enthusiasm is sublime, because it is a tension of forces produced by ideas, which give an impulse to the mind that operates more powerfully and lastingly than the impulse arising from sensible representa­tions.”19 In other words, the passage of an empirical phenomenon from the status of a fact, or a perception, to a duration that could characterize the sense of an “event” (for example, a crisis that initiates a historical duration or period that follows it) can be accounted for by the difference in “intensity” it expresses. For Modernist sensibility, an aesthetic mode of presentation has a better chance of producing, from a range of different empirical phenomena, intensive durations and events than other modes of presentation (such as ethical, descriptive, rational or deductive).

Introduction

xxxvii

According to Spanish historian José-Antonio Maravall, whom I will discuss below in Part One, from its original historical appearance onward, the institution of a powerful cultural apparatus in the Baroque period, particularly in Spain during the middle of the seventeenth century, brings in its wake a new function of culture as an “operative concept” involved in shaping the historical experience of the modern masses.20 Partly an extension of the principle announced in the Council of Trent in 1563, this development was the result of the progression of Christian moral and pedagogical narratives that were taken up and emulated as the popular vehicles of education and propaganda by the modern European states. The concept of Culture, understood here in its active, verbal sense, is the production and communication of social values—the good, beauty, ugliness or vulgarity, truth, justice. The cultural spectacle actualizes within the experience of the spectator a quantity of identifications, memories, associations, as well as agreements in the element of taste (sensus communis aestheticus) and, most importantly, a subjective accord brought about in the experience of collective enthusiasm, to which I will return to in the discussion of Maravall’s concept of the Baroque sublime (furor). Following Maravall, I argue that this “Baroque mechanism” of culture emerged during a time that also saw the emergence of the politics of masses, resulting from greater mobility, intense urbanization and the decline of the aristocratic and landed classes of European society. In many cases the spectacle of culture immediately took on the form of a popular appeal directed to a new subject of politics: the anonymous mass of potentially disruptive individuals that were migrating into the urban population centers of Europe. That the ideological function of this cultural mechanism took the form of an expression of alienation can be understood as a partial effect of the disorientation brought about by this period of intense urbanization. A cultural vehicle that grounded itself in expressions of estrangement and the loss of reality (for example, the frequent Baroque themes of “the world upside-down” and “life is a dream”) might well have served as the reflective surface for the pathological effects that resulted from such mass movements of dislocation and migration. In other words, such an expressive vehicle could also serve as a powerful ideological narrative of cultural experience, useful for dissolving the previous distinctions of ethnic, social and cultural identity, rural and provincial characteristics of collective life and subjectivity; finally, for instituting a kind of collective

xxxviii

On the (New) Baroque

forgetting which would both precede and accompany the intense re-socialization that this period of early nationalization might have demanded. According to Marvall, “It was precisely to meet these challenges that the Baroque world of the seventeenth century … organized its resources along lines that were openly repressive or more subtly propagandistic.” 21 In this sense, the 17th Century culture of the Baroque can be understood as the production of a new form of social anonymity, accompanied by the privilege accorded to the consciousness of the stranger, which corresponded to the new social and economic relationships that now belong to the life of the city, and which prefigure the more abstract, corporate entities of a mass, a general populace, nation or “people.” Consequently, from its inception in the seventeenth-century Baroque, the new formations of popular and national culture that evolved alongside the modern state can be found to relate to the earlier propagandistic and pedagogical formations that have in the modern period become institutionalized in the function of the cultural work. Within the more primitive and didactic formation of the early Baroque period, however, “the idea of culture was to captivate minds through the use of theatre, sermons, emblematic literature, and so forth, and to cause admiration and suspense through these and other, more overt, displays of power: fireworks, fountains, fiestas.”22 The emotional body of the Baroque spectator, animated by anxieties and the creative violence of the producer, becomes a central topic and even a primary ground, one that prepares for a distinctly modernist conception of aesthetic experience. Hence, the question of legitimating the experience of culture, as well as the question of possessing culture as a primary means of collective expression, becomes inseparable from the technical and rhetorical strategies employed to possess and manipulate the emotional body of the spectator. The participation of the spectator (symbolic of the crowd) in the generation of a historical or political event is, thus, first situated on the level of a poetics of the body. It is well known that the culture of modernism constructs both a poetics, as well as a psychology, of the body from which it generates its affective force in order to intervene into politics and history. It is from this rhetorical construction of the body that the surrealist appropriation of the psycho­analytic concept of the unconscious as a poetic figure (or trope) becomes commonplace; hence, the affective or convulsive body of the hysteric would be evoked to “simulate”

Introduction

xxxix

the agitated movements of the crowd, and the “poetic body of the text,” charged with the affective play that are derived from the status of a language “unbounded” (following the Freudian hypothesis of the primary processes), would first appear in the field of culture as the prefiguration of a new sensus communis. If there is the presence of magical thinking here, as Freud called it in his rejection of the surrealist appropriation of psychoanalytic constructions by Breton and others, then it can be found in this chain of causality that links the “body” of the text to bodies of the spectator, the public (or to the crowd), and finally, to the spheres of politics and history. If the same magical thinking can be found in modern representations of the Baroque as well, I will argue that it is because these metaphors belong to a distinctly modern understanding of culture that articulates these different ontological-social-political-sexual regions together within the notion of the body-as-phantasm, which is first outlined in Maravall’s theory of Baroque enthusiasm (furor). The meaning of phantasm is conceptually and etymologically linked to the classical sense of simulacrum that refers to the process of simulation, to the production of effects by simulating, and to the power of the copy (the icon, or Bild). Thus, it is only because of the series of associations conditioned by this phantasm that the Modernist critic-philosopher or writer could think that by tickling the language of the text (which simulates the appearance of female eroticism as a commonplace trope within the Modernist canon), he could produce the distant “effects” of change (i.e. convulsion, laughter, revolution) within the bodies of the crowd, and could even stimulate a movement in the body politic and effect a change in the meaning of history. Of course, this is only possible if the specific context that determines the position of the writer’s own discourse remains abstract, paralleling the new definition of the Baroque itself as being a category without “context,” “unbounded,” “OPEN” (a trans-historical category). As I will return to take up below, this form of openness describes the very mode of postmodern theory’s critical relation to other, more contextual and historical, or empirically bound, discourses (to philosophy, sociology, anthropology, ethnography). Consequently, it is not accidental that both the generic qualities of the Baroque, and the theoretical tradition that designates it as a site of transformation that first appears in the field of culture, bear more than a passing resemblance to many of the recent claims of postmodernism.

xl

On the (New) Baroque

Because history first appears within the pedagogical framework of an overtly academic or classical discourse, the history of the New Baroque appears in scattered modes, more overtly rhetorical, polemic, lyrical. For our purposes, these developments around the name of the Baroque indicate problems concerning the establishment of its historical referent, which now may even be comparable to an extravagant fiction, or artifice. And yet, the very loss or displacement of a historical referent for the name of the Baroque becomes the condition of its more generic usage, as well as for its geographical displacement from Europe to the Americas (in Carpentier, Sarduy, Lezama, and José Martí). Without any clear and recognizable natural signification, the principles that underlie the reality of the Neobaroque or neobarroco must be constructed anew, by means of the example—following Genette’s emphasis upon the force of its “exemplarity”—­but also rhetorically, by means of the argument or polemic, the apology or the manifesto. Therefore, in introducing what could be called—not without a certain humor, of course—“the history of the New Baroque from its literature and philosophy,” I have brief1y summarized the various descriptions offered by several key authorities that have established its various significations, if not its distinctly modern sensibility. However, this method will not allow us to judge whether the descriptions of modern aesthetic and cultural phenomena in terms of the Baroque are accurate or true to its historical European antecedent. In the end, I will argue, it is not a question of whether this or that appearance of the New Baroque is a true and correct copy of its predecessor, but rather why similar versions of the European Baroque and the rococo in both seventeenth-century architecture and painting, and in French and Spanish verse, have been employed by many modern and postmodern critics and writers, in Europe and in the Americas, to define both the aesthetic sensibility and historical force behind the emergence of the more globalized forms of late-modernist culture. This is one of the questions that my study will try to answer.

PART ONE Major renovations of the Seventeenth-Century Concept

Chapter 1 The Baroque Style: Heinrick Wölfflin, Frank Warnke, and Harold Segel

Let us begin by recounting several formulas that have been associated with the term “Baroque,” all of which refer to the historical and European Baroque which took place, depending on how one chooses to define its origin, roughly between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation. Many of the theorists and critics I will refer to in the course of this study presuppose or assume that the reader is both familiar with the significance of a Baroque style, or aesthetic philosophy, which is outlined in the following definitions drawn mainly from earlier Baroque criticism: The Baroque is a phenomenon of which the period of its birth, decline or end can be situated somewhere between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its concept is relevant only to the West, since a certain stage or version of the Baroque sensibility could only prosper in reaction to the solemn eroticism and “world-weariness” (Weltschmerz) of the Counter-Reformation. It is proper mostly to the Roman architecture of Borromini, the sculpture and architecture of Bernini, as well as to certain recurrent traits in sculpture and painting (Caravaggio, Rubens, Velásquez, Vermeer, Rembrandt). These traits are: an attraction to movement through ornamentation, producing a dizziness in the spectator, as well as a sense of unity, through the cumulative unfolding of surfaces; an emotionalism of wonder and admiration, producing both tension and release in the spectator or reader; a richer and more sensual use of color; a dramatic opposition between light and dark (chiaroscuro); a heightened sense of emotional drama or pathos. The Baroque style is often regarded as pathological, the result of an obsessive attraction to forms of monstrosity and to a vulgar taste.

4

On the (New) Baroque

It is for this reason (because of its sensuality, its attraction to movement and its emotionalism) that its appeal is supposedly directed toward a larger, more common public than either the Renaissance, before it, or Classicism that followed. It is this “populism” as inspiration that has resulted in its frequent comparison to the emergence of modern popular cinema.23 Finally, the Baroque is sometimes regarded as the visible “decomposition” and “decay” of the classical style of the Renaissance.

To follow this last point, the most influential definition of the Baroque sensibility, which lasted until its re-invention in postmodernism, was that presented by the German art historian, Heinrich Wölfflin, in his Renaissance und Barock (1888). Ultimately, his judgment was still under the influence of the Classicist view that the Baroque period marked a lapse in taste and a bastardization of Renaissance principles of composition. This prejudice even marks the thesis of Wölfflin’s earlier study of the Baroque, one that is clearly stated in the preface to the first edition: The subject of this study is the disintegration of the Renaissance; [...] to investigate the symptoms of decay and to discover in the “capricious return to chaos” a law that would vouchsafe one an insight into the intimate workings of art.24

For our purposes, the above statement is extremely important for the inversion and variations this judgment receives in cultural criticism that makes use of the Baroque. Concerning the attributes that Wölfflin identifies with the Baroque style, in his reflections on Roman architecture, he notes the following dominant traits: Supplanting of a linear style, which produced a sense of movement A heightened sense of transience through the mixing of light and shadow (chiaroscuro) Monumentality—a love for the grand, the massive, the colossal, the sublime and overpowering An expressive tendency toward the multiplication of surfaces, contours, and folds—either as a technique to allude to a greater portion

The Baroque Style

5

of space than what is visible, or to produce a sense of movement (often dizziness in the witness or spectator) by the suppression of right angles and linear contours Finally, a preference for movement in place of repose, often in a vertical direction, which is technically produced by creating a sense of height, a sudden rapturous movement accompanied by a feeling of vertigo

The first and the fifth aspects of Baroque style bear an important element for reading the feeling of anxiety that underlines an apprehension of the power of the artwork which the Baroque, at this stage of its conception, places to the foreground. This feeling of anxiety, or emotional intensity, can also be understood as a form of the sublime, which is why the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan later defined his conception of jouissance feminine in reference to Bernini’s sculpture of St Theresa. Both senses are immediately linked to the determination of movement, as Wölfflin describes in the following statement: The Baroque never offers us perfection or fulfillment, or the static calm of ‘being,’ only the unrest of change and the tension of transience.25

I will return to discuss many of these notions below (monumentality, height, anxiety, the feminine figure of enjoyment, the restlessness of change and the tension with mortality); they often re-emerge as the poetic figurations of the modernist principles of change and innovation. For now, I will remain with the earlier conception of the Baroque in literature. As a literary category, the Baroque has gradually displaced several other styles that emerged within the same period: metaphysical, préciosité, marinismo, conceptismo, culturanismo. Here, we might immediately see that the category of the Baroque is a product of tendency towards reducing disparate aesthetic and cultural phenomena to a monumental style, which subordinates or swallows up divergent contexts of region, political and historical causality. (Hence, the first applies mainly to England, the second to a French development, the last three to Italy. Spain, possibly the most important region for historical reasons, has

6

On the (New) Baroque

disappeared altogether and will only reappear later under the name of Góngorism, and in the context of what is now commonly called the “Colonial Baroque.”) In recent literary scholarship (i.e., post-1950), the concept of the Baroque is further subdivided and placed in confrontation with Mannerism. As a result of this classification, a controversy ensued over the propriety of these two terms. Opposing perspectives have ranged from the one held by Gustav Hocke, in his Die Welt als Labyrinth: Manier und Manie in der Europäischen Kunst (1957), in which the concept of Mannerism completely eclipses the Baroque, to Frank Warnke’s Versions of the Baroque, where the Baroque achieves the more plastic and synthetic form of Weltanschauung (world-view), one that incorporates the characteristic traits that belong to Mannerism as a stylistic trend. In literary phenomena, Warnke identifies two “recurrently perceptible” tendencies that can be found in the Baroque defined as a historical period concept, tendencies which he defines in the following way: Mannerist, which is characterized by the “spare, witty, academic, paradoxical” forms of Marvell, Donne, Herbert, Spondee, Quevedo, Huygens and Fleming High Baroque, expressed in the “ornate, exclamatory, emotional, and extravagant tendencies of Gryphius, Marino, d’Aubigné, Góngora and Vondel.” Consequently, it has become accepted that several of Wölfflin’s Baroque categories of the visual arts can now be attributed to a mannerist style, which preceded the Baroque proper.26

In the final analysis, nevertheless, Warnke still prefers the term “Baroque” over “Mannerism” according to an argument which could be paraphrased as follows: that while, the term Baroque is certainly an imperfect category in unifying a diversity of literary trends, it is still much better than Mannerism and already has the advantage of a significant body of scholarship attached to its name. In other words, it may occupy the position of a “necessary fiction” that has more to do with continuity of the historical fields of academic scholarship associated with the name, than with history itself. (I will return this argument below in relation to Eugenio d’Ors.) As Warnke writes, “the chaotic divergence in the application of the term Mannerism by its various champions makes the

The Baroque Style

7

querelle du mannièrisme far outstrip the querelle du Baroque in the proliferation of mutually exclusive individual formations.”27 Mannerism is a term derived from the Italian maniera, meaning ‘”style.” In his introduction to The Baroque Poem (1974), Harold Segel describes the principle traits of Mannerism in the following crucial passage: Beginning in Rome about 1520 [the period of Bernini’s architecture], artists began concentrating more emphatically on technique. Manner, or style, was becoming a thing unto itself. In their search for novelty, for new ways to create a sense of awe, wonder, and admiration in the spectator, painters began making a freer use of ornamentation and design. Works not only became richer in design, but richer in color as well. To heighten the viewer’s appreciation of the skill and ingenuity behind the conception and execution of the work of art, the artist drew attention to the units or parts of the whole. The unity and simplicity of impression sought by the Renaissance no longer enjoyed the same favor. Quite the contrary, the Mannerist artist sought to divert and distract the eye by making it aware of the totality of the work. This elevation and embellishment of the segment often at the expense of unity acted in a centrifugal way: the viewer’s eye was deflected away from the centre to the periphery that, instead of contributing to and supporting unity, detracted from it. Centrality of interest dissolved and the relationship of parts to whole became so tenuous that the parts grew in autonomy.28

I have quoted Segel’s description because of its importance in illustrating a growing conception of the Baroque, which has been gradually organized around what I will call a polemic of space. What is revealed is an extreme schism and ongoing tension, within the concept of the Baroque itself, between two spatial organizing principles, what Segel calls, in a very interesting phrase, two conflicting “hegemonies of form.” One principle, which has come to be expressed by Mannerism, is an organization of space partes extra partes (“expansion through fragmentation”), the expression of novelty through the heterogeneity of the composition, an excessive and deliberate distortion of the centrality of the foreground (figura serpentina), or figure of monstrosity and hybridism. A mannerist style can also be recognized by its excessive “reflexivity,” “academicism” and “artificialization of nature” (as in Marino, Góngora, or Calderón, Velásquez and Borromini).

8

On the (New) Baroque

This first principle, associated with the formal technique of Mannerist art, can be illustrated in the development of the intermezzo, as an autonomous genre in theatre, gradually displacing (or “distracting,” to use Segel’s term) the central unities of Aristotelian form, or the rigid and mechanical framework of the commedia. Intermedia, interludia, or entr’acte originally developed from the secular interpolations of dance, short recitations and allegorical subjects within miracle plays. Gradually, as Segel observes, “the penchant for novelty grew” and the attention drifted from the fixed texts of the commedia; consequently, “those charged with mounting court entertainment so enriched the visual, musical, and linguistic aspects of the intermezzi that they succeeded in transforming them into spectacles that outstripped the appeal of the central form.”29 Later, I will show that the function of the Intermedia gradually emerges in the principle that underlies the function of the mise-en­-abîme in modern conceptions of inter-textuality as a reflective surface that incorporates—both inside and, yet, outside—a critical, or allegorical function of commentary upon the central action, or plot.30 The second principle, which has come to characterize the “High Baroque,” or Baroque proper, still exhibits variety or multiplicity in textures and forms, but incorporates the ornamental attributes of surface and design as corporeal predicates that unfold to express the presence of an underlying unity—a presence that is not represented by the work, but implied, or embodied as an emotional effect produced in the spectator or witness. As Segel shows, the operation of the second principle can be interpreted as a reaction and recuperation of the first principle, as in a well-known canvas by Caravaggio, which treats a theme common to mannerist art as well, The Conversion of St Paul (1600): A Mannerist treatment of a religious theme may at first glance occasionally appear to exhibit involvement in the spiritual. The usual Mannerist treatment of the subject ... manages to include some spiritual apparition in the heavens or beside the stunned, unhorsed figure of St Paul. Now there is no such apparition or vision in Caravaggio’s Conversion of St Paul. The figures of Paul and the horse dominate the canvas and are so grouped to heighten the dramatic impact of the scene. Where heavenly figures appeared in Mannerist paintings, Caravaggio has only the darkness of night; yet in this darkness, the

The Baroque Style

9

presence of the spiritual and the mystery of unknowable beings and forces are made to be felt.31

The fundamental distinction that operates here in Segel’s description of the two principles is that while a Mannerist treatment of the subject appears to represent the spiritual element of Paul’s conversion, this appearance is a mere semblance, a false and intellectual surface, a somewhat distant and flat tableau with no proportion or drama that would arrange the elements into a narrative theme, but rather an artificial heaven filled with apparitions that distract the spectator’s immediate involvement On the other hand, Caravaggio, by emptying this “false heaven” and filling it with a darkness that vanquishes all surface, produces its presence by a very absence that embodies, from the position of spectator, the feelings of anxiety and foreboding. This is the element of a pure movement that directly involves (or throws) the spectator before the painting—both by the proximity and dominance of the two figures in the foreground—propelling him or her into the drama of the conversion. The reference to The Conversion of St Paul is not accidental, since the very emotion that is constructed as the linchpin of the “High Baroque” aesthetic is constantly described by critics in terms of the drama of spiritual and emotional conversion, which is later interpreted as an ideological effect of the artwork (as in Maravall’s treatment of the Spanish Baroque spectacle). From the Greek metanoia (meaning change of mind or soul) this concept has undergone dramatic semantic alteration, particularly after the advent of Christianity when the sense of change and alternation is situated in the flesh, and in the emotional participation of the subject. Beyond its religious signification, this term can also be intended in a more contemporary psychoanalytic sense in which the body’s agitated convulsion represents the expression of an unconscious symptom; in other words, where the absence of perception (or blindness) is converted into an emotional or even physical movement that is no less a perception, in psychoanalytic terms, of an unconscious presence that causes this effect. In Caravaggio, for example, this presence is revealed in the anxiety produced by the dark and mysterious force of night, with its swirling shadows, or by a pure implication of height (heaven) that strikes the spectator by its emptiness, or blankness. We can see this narrative, the centrality of the spiritual or symbolic element in the Baroque artwork,

10

On the (New) Baroque

which I will return to discuss in the next chapter. The modalities of affection will be important in understanding the psychology of the spectator and of a rhetoric of power (i.e., Ideology) that belong to the new determination of the art-work from the Baroque period onward. Early on, this ideological determination of the Baroque artwork was attached to the clerical and authoritarian aesthetic programs associated with the Counter-Reformation; however, for modern consciousness, this comes to be determined by the theoretical construction of the various subjectformations – whether that of ideology, or of unconscious desire —whose modern sense operates in both the Marxist (Althusserian) and psycho­ analytic conceptions of the “symptom.” In their historical periods, both Mannerist and high Baroque expressions were linked by this “Baroque effect” produced in the apprehension of the spectator—a feeling of dizziness (vertigine), swooning (im Ohnemacht setzen, létourdissement), wonder and amazement, marvel (meraviglia), or rapture and delirium (Schwärmerei, jouissance)—all of which can be found at the basis of a general Baroque aesthetic. On one level, this “Baroque effect” is presented as the intentional and technical objective of the artist, as well as being a description of an appeal to an emergent definition of “popular taste,” both of which are associated with the concept of modernity. As Bernardo Tasso wrote, concerning the composition of his own work, L’Amadigi, following the example set forth by Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso: In the beginning I had decided to make it one unified action [following Aristotelian theory] ... but then it occurred to me that it did not have that variety that customarily gives delight and is desired in this century, already attuned to the Romance; and I understood, then, that Ariosto neither accidentally nor for want of knowledge of the art (as some say) but with the greatest judgment accommodated himself to the taste of the present century and arranged his work in this way … which I find more beguiling and delightful.32

As in this example, the basic distinction between the two versions of the Baroque (Mannerist or High Baroque) would appear to be the techniques employed, the sensible conditions of different modifications of the same effect, and the different subjective aspects of this concept of

The Baroque Style

11

taste: where the Mannerist employed variety and multiplicity to achieve this feeling of novelty, the High Baroque artist (as in the above example of Caravaggio) arranges the spectacle of ornamentation around a central absence, in which perception is embodied in the movement of a physical presence that either spreads itself out in an impenetrable height or swells up in the emotions of the spectator. Both senses are defined by a gaping presence of a central lack in the order of desire and by the installation of the subject within an indefinite time of suspense. Therefore, we may want to interrogate these aspects by asking in a phenomen­ological manner, what are the conditions that articulated these elements together in a concept of taste that is implied in the following series? An experience of temporality marked by the themes of novelty, variety, and multiplicity The loss of any distinct perception of the central figure or action The physical participation of the spectator in the presentation of the art­work through an emotional feeling of dizziness or swooning (literally, of being overpowered by the spectacle) Finally, by a heightened sense of enthusiasm, delight or marvel (meraviglia)

Nevertheless, we still have not found a sufficient explanation of the two fundamental traits behind the determination of “the hegemony of space” itself in these two conflicting versions of the Baroque aesthetic. In other words, what is the causality behind the tendency expressed by this sudden expansion and enlargement of space, like a moment of exhalation—“A Big Bang,” as Severo Sarduy would later call this cosmological moment at the origin of the Baroque universe—accompanied by a proliferation of details, a swarming of surfaces, and followed by an inverse tendency toward increased inwardness, like an “inhalation”? What is the origin of these two “psychological states of suspense,” their tension and their irresolution? Moreover—and this is perhaps linked to the same question above—what is the origin of the principle of “novelty” (inventio) that is emphasized so acutely in both versions? In other words, what are the social transformations behind the linking of attributes such as variety and multiplicity to cultural expressions of the “new”? What are the subjective

12

On the (New) Baroque

and psychological conditions that associate an increasing complexity and ornamentation with a feeling of “wonder­ment,” “excitement,” “admiration” and even “awe” in the position of the spectator? In response to all these questions, perhaps as a partial explanation, I will recall the significance of one event that often only provides a colorful backdrop in traditional commentaries; however, it is an event that is inseparable from the history of the early Baroque sensibility: the European colonial adventure that followed the discovery of the “New World.” As Segel has already pointed out, it should come as no surprise that the point of commencement usually assigned to the Baroque (in Italy, between 1516 and 1527, when Orlando Furioso was published, Michelangelo unveiled the statue, Victory, and Bernini was putting the finishing touches on the colonnade in the piazza before St Peter’s) corresponds exactly to the most fervent period of “discovery” and colonization of the “New World.” (Francisco de Almeida breaks the Moslem monopoly on Far East trade in 1509 by sinking the combined fleets of India and Egypt off the coast of Diu; Vasco de Balboa crosses the isthmus of Panama in 1513 and “discovers” the Pacific; Magellan circumnavigates the globe between 1519 and 1521.)33 The synchronicity of both historical events provides the necessary context for Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s fictional tale of Concierto Barroco, set early in the eighteenth century, which explores the captivation of the European imagination of the Americas as one of the sources of inspiration of the Baroque spectacle. Returning, however, to the question of space that is at the center of the two opposing points of view surrounding this “Baroque explosion,” the weakness of traditional Baroque criticism is that this opposition is posed by the more pedestrian terms of the art historian, or literary critic, for whom the effects are reduced to questions of the technique of an artist who appears, not surprisingly, divorced from the social processes that may have determined the shape, as well as the range of material psychological possibilities, of these techniques. Although the social, political and religious events are sometimes given an important context for the discussion of Baroque aesthetics, they often only form the backdrop against which the aesthetic sphere appears neutral and disinterested; they do not enter fundamentally to determine the sudden transformations in formal boundaries that seem to be indicated by the new psychology of the emotions in the perception of the Baroque work, or to

The Baroque Style

13

engage the notions of “novelty,” “ornamentation,” “artificial v. natural,” and the subjective principles of “wonderment and amazement” that are said to appear at the basis of both the Baroque and Mannerist styles. This is particularly true of many of the critical representations of Mannerist style in which often the textual values of design and ornamentation are neutralized by a “flat” and homogeneous character of the surface (or facade). As we have already seen in the earlier description of Mannerism by Segel, this characterization figured as the abstract and reflective surface of a frigid intellectualism, distinguished and set apart from the highly charged and affective body of the spectator’s emotion that often characterizes the “High Baroque.” Is this not an allegory of the separation of the mind and the body, which should make us all the more suspicious of the validity of these characterizations? One reason for the neutralization of the ornament’s heterogeneity by a homogeneous characterization of the facade is already addressed above in the neutrality of the aesthetic sphere itself, divorced from the social and material processes that are, of course, essentially determining. This characterization of the aesthetic field has been responsible for the very determination of the “ornament” as mere residue, a phantom or ghost effect: the vestige of a symbolic function or value, whose decline situates the very place of the ornamental object (or design) as being outside the work (not essentially related to the work’s essence or function). And yet, perhaps this underlines the “parergonal” status of the ornament and the detail, as Derrida later commented on this function in his famous commentary on the aesthetic of the sublime in Kant.34 The appearance of the ornament qua ornament is usually conditioned by the evacuation of any distinct social meaning, any origin; in short, the ornamental detail is shorn of any “context” that would function as a surface and prevent its incorporation into the facade. If we wanted to partially reconstruct some of these contexts by dismantling the facade, we could make the following observations. On the one hand, these ornaments and designs were, in fact, the symbols purloined from aristocratic classes in decline during this period (the emblems and motifs of authority, luxury, wealth and “charisma”), reduced to mere pleasantries by the burlesques and parodies that were common to the rococo style, evacuated from their symbolic function, and sent into circulation among a larger and more indiscriminate “public.” This development raises an important question of “cultural

14

On the (New) Baroque

capital,” since the Mannerist facades expose the ornaments and designs that were once concealed within the private chambers and estates of the aristocracy, so that anyone who passes by may enjoy them much like a modern window shopper. In part, the function of ornamentation in a Mannerist style already implies the seed of a “popular culture” (that is, the rise of the mercantile class, and later the bourgeoisie) and explains the judgments of vulgarism and bad taste against the new Baroque by many classical writers. We can support the above by referring to episode that occurred in the Italian Baroque, concerning a style that was called Bembismo, after Pietro Bembo, the most influential stylist of Italian Mannerism in the sixteenth century whose vernacular elements provoked charges of a vulgar spirit of populism. We can also find the same charge in Pellegrino’s judgment of the architectural composition of Orlando Furioso as being built on an “aesthetic foundation that appeals to an unsophisticated taste.” Thus, I quote this passage by Pellegrino, since it contains the most explicit articulation of novelty as belonging to a cultural development of the notion of popular taste: The architecture of the palace [Orlando Furioso], with more numerous, more beguiling and visually richer rooms, gives complete pleasure to the simple­minded, not to the understanding; where the experts in art discover in it the faults, the false ornaments and enrichments, they [the understanding] remain dissatisfied, and what gives them greater delight is the architecture of the smaller structure [i.e. Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberat] which is a body better conceived in all its parts.35

Moreover, the increasing heterogeneity and exaggerated ornamentation also address the influence of regional and particular cultures, as well as the incorporation of ethnic and racial subjects, folk elements, dialects and popular (non-Hellenic) legends. We have already seen this aspect addressed in the list of literary styles that were eclipsed under the general appellation of the Baroque proper, such as Góngorism, marinismo and culturismo. Concluding my discussion of the two formal hegemonies that have influenced a more modern conception of the Baroque, Gilles Deleuze has

The Baroque Style

15

recently organized this opposition into perhaps its purest philosophical expression by coordinating these two principles within the Leibnizian concept of the monad, which itself is constructed by two opposing tendencies which Deleuze will incorporate into his concept of the fold. In place of resolving the extreme contradiction between these two principles, Deleuze sets them apart in creative confrontation between the exterior and the interior, which he separates into two distinct orders or types of folds: “ les replis de la matière et les plis dans l’ âme.” In other words, instead of placing one as the organizing principle of the other, he follows the Leibnizian architecture of the Monadology, and assigns each to a different level of the monad (which he calls “the Baroque allegory”) and makes them incommensurable with one another.36 Consequently, the relationship of tension between these two principles can be resolved neither by succession, nor by analogy or logic (even that of a strained or artificial syllogistic reason). Deleuze’s manner of resolving this opposition by affirming it and making it essential to his concept of the Baroque construction already reflects a schizophrenic reception that is evident in the history of the Baroque concept, where its protagonists and detractors have taken up either principle of organization, often in violent exclusion of the other. In Segel’s account, for example, the Baroque proper returns to vanquish and incorporate within its formal mechanism the principle of a space that is organized partes extra partes that he finds operating in Mannerism.37 This account is not without its value, as we will see later on, and Segel’s narrative of the Baroque as a Weltanschauung can be interpreted on three distinct levels. On the first level, this narrative is an allegory of the reasserting of the ecclesiastical and state forms of authority in the Counter-Reformation, and yet seems to reflect a new presence that unifies the social field. The task would be to determine what shape this presence takes concretely in social, political and ideological constellations. As a partial response, we might refer to Michel Foucault’s critical observations on this period when the sexual determination of the individual’s body undergoes a perceptible transformation leading to its modern understanding as one of the fundamental sites of subjectivity. This development entails, according to Foucault’s theory, a modification of the meaning of the flesh, that is, a new mode of assujetissement.38

16

On the (New) Baroque

On the second, and perhaps the most literal level, this narrative does little more than duplicate the opposition between Baroque and classical, subdivided between a “good” Baroque characterized by an erotic sensibility of unity, naturalism, emotion and sensuality, and a “bad” Baroque characterized by a mannerist sensibility defined as intellectual, artificial, formal, particularistic, fragmented. Finally, on a third level, this narrative represents nothing more than a reduction of the sensible coordinates of this distinct spatium, as described in the principle of the Baroque operation, to a mere analogy with an ideal plane of perception, in the Kantian sense of a “synthesis of the manifold” (a comprehensive gathering together into a unity effected by the faculty of the imagination). We can figure this analogy in Segel’s description of the “cumulative technique of piling surfaces, design and ornament that all support a central unity.”39 What I find interesting in this description is the fact that the surface that functions as the support is no longer on the canvas (to refer back to the example of Caravaggio), or even on the artwork itself, but rather is installed in the position of the spectator—the affective surface produced in the emotional perception. In the above example of The Conversion of St Paul, it is for this reason that the night remains dark, impenetrable and without content (a black hole), since its only sensible mirror is produced in the affective response of the spectator. This already implies a partial direction in response to the question concerning the function of psychological or subjective element of the Baroque artwork, which I will take up in the next chapter with the discussion of Maravall’s theory of the early Baroque sublime.

Chapter 2 The Baroque Mechanism: José Antonio Maravall Beauty is the enjoyment of a happy people, whereas those who are not happy seek to attain the sublime. — Schiller

In La cultura del Barroco (1975), the Spanish Baroque historian José Antonio Maravall situates his entire analysis of the seventeenth-century Baroque as “a guided culture” upon the intricate and powerful effects produced by the modification of an earlier species of the sublime, the classical notion of furor, which Maravall calls the “Baroque mechanism.” As Terry Cochran explains, the word “mechanism” is translated from the Spanish word resortes, which is also rendered as “expedients,” referring to an ideological end as the implicit aim that determines the modern spectacle of culture. This determination constitutes the conceptual uniqueness of Maravall’s use of this term to describe the inner workings of the Baroque sublime, since resortes also describes the way in which this mechanism actually operates. In other words, the concept of resortes represents that element of aesthetic experience that is “operative,” “instrumental,” “guiding” (dirigir), but also describes the way in which culture as a whole becomes instrumental and directive within the spectator’s own life-history. Situated in between both these senses, the newly invigorated notion of furor, or the Baroque sublime, refers to both the inner mechanism of the cultural work (in the sense of its creative technique), as well as the physical and psychological descriptions of the “movement” which takes place in the consciousness of the spectator. As Maravall writes, “it was not a matter of attaining the public’s intellectual adherence so much as moving it; therefore, a state of suspense was used as an expedient [resortes] to launch a more firmly sustained movement. And that was the question: to move.”40 The psychological torsion that now belongs to this “activity” captures the precise sense of “media” (medios, recursos), sometimes appearing beneath an instrumental determination of aesthetic culture and

18

On the (New) Baroque

sometimes as a new form of agency itself. “Expressionist art, art of the extreme: this was one means of psychological action on people, one that was bound up with the assumptions and goals of the Baroque.4l Maravall employs the term resortes, therefore, as a technical metaphor to unfold an analysis of the sublime from the psychological effects it releases in the experience of the Baroque spectator: feelings of wonder and amazement, dizziness, swooning (a passion that results from the feeling of being overpowered), delight and marvel, or awe. The technical and mechanistic determination of resortes refers to the function of a spring or coil that operates by the force of tension. The origin of this concept can be derived from the technical vocabulary of physical mechanics and must be understood in the context of the mechanical determination of the human will, which underscores the psychological and rhetorical language of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus, an eighteenthcentury encyclopedia defines the action of the resortes as “the reaction of a machine part that causes it to move by the effort it makes to become slack.”42 Maravall’s analysis attaches this mechanical sense to various descriptions of the psychological state of suspense found in Baroque art and literature (which he refers to under the “technique of alienation”), particularly in the effects of awe and astonishment that occurred in the emotional response of the Baroque spectator. According to early Baroque commentaries on aesthetics, such as those by Pinciano and Lope de Vega, the Baroque cultural spectacle is described as producing in the spectator a suspended or interrupted emotion that is violently “cut short,” a perception that is temporarily inhibited or repressed, “violently debilitating the senses and weakening his strength.”43 To recall again the image of resortes as a spring, the more the spectator resists, the more powerful the affective determination of the experience becomes—almost as if the power that the spectacle holds over the consciousness of the spectator is entirely drawn from the psychological reaction of the spectator himself or herself. For example, in his study of the Baroque period William Egginton has described this new form of “psychological manipulation” as a central aspect of the cultural spectacle: The methods of the new alliance [between the fields of politics and culture) were, in fact, akin in many ways to the kind of psychological manipulation we encounter today in everything from advertising to

The Baroque Style

19

nationalist propaganda, in that their purpose is to have their target audience form a ‘passionate attachment’ to a particular version of the world.44

In his own analysis, Maravall notes that the ‘semantic alteration” that the classical notion of Furor undergoes in the Baroque period can be partially accounted for by the arrival of a concept of “force” influenced by the rise of modern propagandistic technologies of the state, which subsequently modified the rhetorical basis of the Aristotelian concept of “enthusiasm” to correspond to new media and cultural spectacles set on a more massive scale. Thus, for example, in addition to the use of various agents and means of terror—­particularly the Inquisition and the private armies of nobles—or the state’s attempt to mold the Church into an instrumentum regni directed toward the repression of individual consciences, there was the massive propaganda campaign staged by those who possessed the instruments of culture or by their surrogates [my emphasis].45

We might note here that the psychological and energetic traits of heightened intensity and the overpowering nature of the sublime experience can also be found to highlight the descriptions belonging to what Kant called the sublime’s “dynamic representation” where the sublime evokes sensible and volitional images of an extreme, terrible, violent, gigantic and overpowering “Nature.”46 By taking up the example of the “Baroque mechanism” as the most primitive appearance of the aesthetic phenomenon of the sublime, our concern here is with the analogy to a form of power, implicit in the modern concept of ideology, which is set into and released from the “aesthetic intuition” (or ais-thesis) of the cultural work. The belief that the earlier Baroque sublime actually refers to this “installation” of a mechanism of force within the affective life of the spectator is implicit in all of Maravall’s assumptions about its “inner workings,” causing the aesthetic presentation to appear in the manner we have described (including how it appears, or more importantly, how it works). It also describes the manner by which this mechanism (or spring) is first “installed” within the psychological realm of the spectator, which now

20

On the (New) Baroque

functions as a part (in the mechanical sense) of the work’s total mechanism (representation). Both senses draw on the original sense of thesis (meaning “to place,” “to set up,” “to install” or “fix in place”), which Heidegger also defines as an essential aspect of the work of art. Thus, we can also find Maravall’s hypothesis on the relationship between the aesthetic presentation and a notion of power supported in the following passage from Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”: ‘Fixed’ means outlined, admitted into boundary (peras), brought into the outline. […] The boundary in the Greek sense does not block off; rather, being itself brought forth, it brings to its radiance what is present. Boundary sets free in the unconcealed [a setting free which can also be understood as a ‘springing forth’]; by its contour in the Greek light the mountain stands in its towering and repose. The boundary that fixes and consolidates is in this repose—repose in the fullness of motion—all this holds of the work in the Greek sense of ergon, this work’s ‘being’ is energeia, which gathers infinitely more movement within itself than do modern ‘energies.’47

Here, we might see a corresponding notion of the energeia released by the primitive manifestation of the Baroque sublime, its peculiar nature, the modifications it undergoes in the cultural experience, and the psychological effects that are the result of its appearance. Heidegger’s interpretation of the work of art is related to the manner in which the perception of boundary itself (peras) is first brought forth, fixed in place— that is, the manner in which it is “put within the sphere of subjectivity of consciousness.”48 The function of the aesthetic presentation, as it is described by both Maravall and Heidegger, addresses conflicting senses that belong to the “working over of boundaries”—perceptual, linguistic, cultural, existential, and including the absolute boundary of death as such. Moreover, in the presentation of the sublime, a perception (even a proto-perception) of a boundary or limit-experience is dramatically installed within the same position occupied by the spectator’s body, which can be understood in the phenomenological sense of corporeality, or “flesh,” which can be extended to include the characteristic marks of ethnos—of nation, people, or race. Thus, the different meanings that can be ascribed to a notion of boundary are set in motion by “the work

The Baroque Style

21

of art,” and it is from the ontico-existential notion of boundary (peras) that this work draws all its energy. In other words, the mechanism of the sublime draws all its power from the confusion of those boundaries whose appearance and meaning are normally kept separated and distinct in conscious life. Like the outline of the mountain “in Greek light” which stands “in its towering and repose,” the sublime gathers together the boundaries that belong to the limit-experience of human consciousness: the sensible and affective limits of visibility and perception, the stark limitations of individual will, self-feeling, movement and repose. From the spectator’s perspective, moreover, the experience of the sublime entails an aporia in the nature (or the cause) of its presentation, since although the aesthetic presentation of the sublime is the result of a human action, its particular affect arrives from the spectator’s inability either to understand the nature that causes it—the “what”—or even the “who,” which ‘stands behind” its presentation in the sense of being its ground or immanent causality. It is precisely this state of incomprehension that causes the subjective responses of wonder, marvel and astonishment; and these affects must be understood in all their force as what the sublime itself produces (brings forth, lays out) as a distinct form of experience. The above descriptions of the “Baroque mechanism” of the sublime also evoke a form of subjective apprehension similar to the revelation of a secret to consciousness or to a notion of force found in the psychoanalytic concepts of trauma and repression (Verdrängung). In other words, the more the subject loses perception and lapses into a state of dependence signified by the emotions of wonder and astonishment, the more commanding the significance of the event becomes. As Maravall writes, “this sublime is a manifestation of sensibility; it belongs to a class of terribleness, extremeness; the feeling of unhappiness (in Schiller’s fine observation), not inevitably one of misery, would provide the impetus for it—a feeling provoked by a state of crisis and instability in the Baroque epoch.”49 Maravall situates his analysis in the context of the problems faced by the historical Baroque monarchies as a result of an intense period of urbanization and the emergence of the modern phenomenon of the masses. Thus, Maravall presents the notion of power that he disovers at the basis of the Baroque sublime as an early manifestation of a corresponding modern expression of force:

22

On the (New) Baroque

[Baroque culture) included aspects all the way from physical constraint, based on military force, which is the ultima ratio of the political supremacy, to psychological expedients [resortes] that acted on the consciousness and created within it a repressed psyche, which in its classical Aristotelian definition would encompass the emotional body—[m.e.].50

This new agency of force was to be located, however, not within the arrival of a new political entity or institutional apparatus of control (ISA), but within a series of cultural expedients and techniques (or technologies) and, most importantly, within the very psyche of the spectator which constituted their object. It is the energy already stored in the spring’s tension that drives the Baroque mechanism and causes it to operate. This partially accounts for the emergence of a distinctly modern notion of popular culture premised on the technologies of mass cultural spectacles. Underlying this concept of popular culture is the recognition that the ideology of the modern state, with the arrival of the masses, has no power of its own, but only functions as a kind of mediator that channels the power unleashed in the spectacles of history, culture and politics. In other words, a notion of force based upon the threat of physical violence by the state becomes less effective in the face of the massive concentration of populations in modern urban centers; another means (resortes) of repression must be sought. Maravall describes this new means as the effort to cut short a feeling [which] at once provokes a reaction and alters the normal course of the person’s affective development; [in short, it would] provoke the reaction of a more energetic affection. This procedure functioned as if it contributed to fixing and encouraging the forces of the psyche that follow its representation, making it part of an event that takes place in the psychological realm.51 What is presented in this passage is a pathological determination of the cultural work, which is given the power to alter and modify the normal affective development of the individual. We can understand this determination in two ways: first, the “culture of the Baroque” (Maravall) is a collective and sociological expression of pathology that is historically restricted to the expression of the epoch; or second, the ideological aspect of the “Culture” becomes, from the period of the Baroque onward,

The Baroque Style

23

inseparable from a power to cultivate pathological effects in the psychological realm of the modern individual (similar to the psychoanalytic sense of neurosis). The second aspect is already implicit in Maravall’s attempt to trace the sensible appearance of a notion of force whose particular manifestation in the Baroque spectacle indicates an alteration of the experience that underlies the classical topic of furor, and now corresponds to the more modern concept of alienation (as this also appears in Freud and Marx). Maravall’s description of “the culture of the Baroque” as a “culture of alienation” can thus be understood to foreground the later descriptions this term receives in reference to a determination of force that belongs to the modern concept of ideology. The sublime presentation of nature —pathologically determined as an aesthetic experience, often corresponding to the sociological and psychological effects of alienation and self-estrangement—is at the center of the Baroque intentionality and taste. This only serves to underscore the significance of the relationship between the Baroque technique of alienation and the crisis of subjectivity, which Hegel described as the process of alienation involved in the death of the natural man and his rebirth as the subject of ideology. Let us now imagine, for a moment, the Baroque spectator: gripped by the state of suspense initiated in the aesthetic realm, the affective surface of the spectator’s body functions as the equivalent of this mechanism. Hence, the body of the spectator—meaning both the physical and emotional surfaces of the aesthetic representation itself—can be understood to comprise the extended materiality of the art-work total representation. Returning to Caravaggio’s treatment in The Conversion of St Paul, for example, the very emotion which functions as the linchpin of the Baroque spectacle is often described in terms of the spectator’s dramatic participation in the process of “conversion.” Where there is an absence of external perception, the affective experience that belongs to the image of being blinded becomes an emotional movement that is no less real than the perception of an external object. Thus, I am using Caravaggio’s representation of Paul’s conversion to illustrate the entrance of another category of visibility which appears a central topos—in the rhetorical sense —and concerns the entrance of presence which presents, and at the same time, forbids (or prohibits) the object of the presentation. I would argue that this opens the aesthetic presentation to an ethical dimension of seeing that is central to the logic of the sublime. According to Kant,

24

On the (New) Baroque

the event of the sublime represents the subject being opened to a higher power of visibility, to another category of nature, which here is signified in dramatic terms by the plot of conversion itself. Moreover, the Baroque sublime links the presentation of this “hidden nature” with the experiences of alienation and death whose subjects are central to the Christian narrative of conversion. This poses, at the level of the subject’s own perception, the problem of the “hidden God,” which Hans Blumenburg has stressed as one of the most fundamental causes of modernity and the forerunner of the modern notion of ideology.52 The appearance of this object, therefore, would not correspond to the object of external perception, but rather to an emotional perception closer to the feelings anxiety and dread. Returning to Carravaggio’s tableau, which I have been using to illustrate this new determination of perception, on a narrative level the cause of Paul’s blindness is represented by the visitation of God’s command; what is revealed causes the transformation of Paul’s own nature, in which the event of his blindness functions as the simulacrum of his death-experience. However, this presence is actually revealed in the terror and anxiety produced by the image of a dark and mysterious force of night, with its swirling shadows, or by a pure implication of height (i.e. heaven), which strikes the spectator by its blinding effect. On the level of the aesthetic spectacle itself, however, the “drama of this conversion” is presented as the symbolic equivalent of the power of the artwork itself, or at least of the “nature” of the presence that stands behind it (the artist, who is identified by Maravall above as a surrogate of the State). Restricting my discussion here to the region of painting, the aesthetic presentation that results in an emotional experience of astonishment is brought about by anamorphosis (the technique of in-completion, or the distortion of the figure) which calls for the spectator’s direct intervention and participation in the completion of the picture-event.53 Thus, the technique of anamorphosis differs in painting from the rhetorical distortion of the figure. In painting, distortion can include the subtraction or absence of figures or perspectives, as well as their in-completion through stains, splotches, fuzziness of detail, and intentional awkwardness in design. In what has been characterized as “High Baroque” art (Wölfflin), this procedure takes the form of a central absence or a violent and dramatic content (for example, darkened landscapes, fierce postures, a gargantuan and stormy event of nature, ruins that tell us of the corrosive

The Baroque Style

25

force of time upon human work, affective images of incredible sadness and suffering). Other techniques, associated more with the Mannerist phases of Baroque culture, produced an anamorphic effect through a studied carelessness in the style of construction (“splotches” and “smears” in painting, an open-­endedness and obscurity in the styles of writing). The effects of this style often resulted in an enforced confusion between the representation of the movement that occurs upon surface of the work and the emotional and perceptual movement that takes place in the apprehension of the spectator—blurring the boundaries between the “inside” and “outside,” or the cause and effect of representation. For example, in response to a fuzziness in perception, or an emotional dizziness that can bear an ambiguous reference as to its source, the spectator might be led to wonder whether it is there in the work, or here within “me.” Maravall writes: The receivers of the Baroque work, being surprised at finding it incomplete or so irregularly constructed, remained a few instants in suspense; then, feeling compelled to thrust themselves forward [a movement that recounts another definition of the resortes as a ‘trigger’] and take part in it, they ended up finding themselves more strongly affected by the work, held by it. In this way they experienced an incomparably more dynamic influence of the work being presented, with much greater intensity than when other tacks were taken.54

The anamorphic technique also addresses the work’s essential representa­tion as concealed and secret, which can be revealed by the spectator’s active participation in “working-over” the surface of the aesthetic presentation (as in the operation of dream-work) to arrive at the inner core of its truthfulness (alethea). This sense of participation echoes a fundamental determination of technē that is implicit in the work of culture as cultivation, coordinating and unifying the positions between “creator” and “creature” within a common task. We might note, however, that the Greek concepts of technē and poiesis, both implying a transformation of nature through human intervention, appear rather strange in their application to this context, since the material surface that both the spectator and the creator appear to be bent over in their labor is the nature (essence, substance or rather “subject”) of the spectator herself. Because the body of

26

On the (New) Baroque

the spectator becomes the extension of the cultural work, the experience of the sublime entertains an essential relation to myth. Gripped by the sublime experience, the flesh itself forms the dramatic figure of a sensible veil conceiling the true significance of the event. Hence, the spectator appears adrift, struck by dizziness, without companion­ship or guidance, a floating consciousness unmoored to any “origin” or point of reference. It is by this image of confusion brought on by a loss of perception and, in a certain sense, by the unconscious itself, that the experience of the sublime presents a simulacrum of death. Maravall writes: “the condition of that which terrifies and to a certain extent blinds, as it happens in the spectacle of death that occurs at a time when the experience of death had greatly changed.”55 Maravall’s statement allows us to better understand why the sublime, understood in a more mythic sense as a simulacrum of death, entertains an essential relation to the drama of conversion. I would argue, moreover, that it is only within this drama that the Baroque appetite for novelty and change can be properly understood. In other words, this common Baroque topic is not accidental and contingent to the modern concept of culture. In narrative terms conversion is the plot whereby the mechanism of culture propels itself. It is the inherent psychological power of this narrative plot that accounts for the universal and proselytizing characteristic of the Christian conversion, a mechanism that, through its peculiar simulacrum of death, could dissolve the attributes of race, regional and ethnic identities, as well as social and gender constructions that existed in the family and polis. Thus, contrary to the Greek concept of conversion (metanoia, or “transformation of Mind”), the Christian experience of conversion directly involves the transformation of the body; by simulating a death experience, the Christian becomes a stranger to his or her former race, kind, family, even sex (although these “new bodies” may very well be racialized and gendered, or at least, prepared for fresh inscriptions like the surface of a canvas). As Paul writes: “These earthly bodies make us groan and sigh, but we wouldn’t like to think of dying and having no body at all. We want to slip into our new bodies so that these dying bodies will, as it were, be consumed by everlasting life” (2 Cor. 5:2). Following this newly invigorated sense of “estrangement” that is implicit in the Baroque topic of conversion, here we should recall that the original narratives of early Christian communities were essentially

The Baroque Style

27

migrant narratives. For example, when Aristides first encountered Christians in the city of Athens, he compared them to other races like Greeks, Babylonians, Egyptians, and perceived that “becoming a Christian meant something like an immigrant who leaves his or her native land and assimilates to the culture of a new, adopted homeland.”56 It was only later, specifically after the writings of Augustine and Luther, that the original immigrant language was recast into the metaphors of spiritual pilgrimage in order to appeal to the more sedentary consciousness of the European classes. And yet, as Maravall has shown, the emergence of the Baroque culture occurs precisely at a time of massive immigration and the mobility of peoples across the European continent, driven into the cities by wars and famine. At the same time, the Baroque occurs during an equally intense period of emigration and exploration of new continents (as I will return to discuss below). The context of these dramatic movements—both incursion into the cities, and excursion into the “New World”—might explain a certain re-vitalization of the Christian immigrant narrative of conversion to appeal to the feelings of alienation and estrangement that mediate the social and cultural process of transformation which might have accompanied these movements, Because of the proximity of the body to ethnos (kind, race, perhaps even sex), as well as the processes of assimilation and acculturation that were taking place through urbanization, the body of the spectator would immediately participate in the cultural drama of conversion that underscored the function of the “Baroque mechanism.” In addition, this mechanism would provide the germ for modern cultural formations around national, cultural and racial identity that would very much determine the “operative function” of culture in the modern period. Installed within the place of the spectator, unleashed in the emotional perception and identification with the power of the spectacle of death, the sublime plays along the border of the Christian topoi: “blindness,” antagonism (anger), alienation (or change of identity). The resulting narrative of experience, although it does not subscribe to the classical notion of experari as a passing through or passing over, still sets this place in a movement to an indeterminate telos. Thus, a narrative notion of culture itself as a project and “work” (again recalling the intervention of human technē into the partition between nature and culture) was attached to a version of experience that has no better “media” and “means” than the aesthetic and cultural events. It is only in

28

On the (New) Baroque

this mythic narrative, that the terribleness of the experience of the simulacrum of death can be understood as being preparatory to “an alteration in the normal affective development of the spectator.” Yet, what does the spectator see in the experience of a Baroque event of furor? This repeats Maravall’s question, “how does this force operate upon whoever undergoes it?” The answer to both these questions relates together the experience of “estrangement” (of being outside oneself) and a certain idealization of the nature of the stranger at the basis of the Baroque aesthetic. Although this notion of furor that lies at the heart of the Baroque mechanism was drawn from classical sources, as Maravall argues, “it came to acquire a greater force and underwent semantic alteration.”57 I will take the following descriptions from Maravall’s illustration of seventeenth-century Spanish sources. First, López Pinciano defines the concept as follows: “Furor draws one forth as if out of oneself; … one is elevated and enthralled to such an extent that it is possible to say that one is outside oneself and has no knowledge of the self.”58 Carducho characterized it as “an original, spontaneous factor, contrary to learning, that moves the artist”; finally, I quote Pinciano again: “Furor is an alienation in which the understanding separates itself from the beaten path.59 We might note in all these passages an alteration of the technical meaning of the term: furor is not longer simply determined as a formal topic, or “technique,” from the artist’s perspective, but rather is situated in an experience and form of activity about which neither the spectator nor the creator has any knowledge. Both are equally unconscious as to the cause of furor, which is why Lope de Vega defined the experience of furor in terms that closely resemble a form of grace. As Arnold Hauser has written concerning this determination in the context of Mannerist art: “But to the extent that men thought and acted in a fashion the motivation of which remained unknown and inscrutable to them, they became alienated from themselves. They did not know what they did….”60 This characterization, again, argues against any strictly instrumental or ideological determination of the sublime, since what deliberative effect it may produce within the field of politics remains, from the perspective of the producer as well as the spectator, strictly unconscious. “Seized by furor, they [the poets] pronounce sentences and things exceeding human study, which, once tranquil, not even they understand.”61 On the other hand, this will not prevent us from determining this very state of

The Baroque Style

29

suspense shared by both the artist and spectator as being susceptible to an ideological interpretation, as another passage from Hauser illustrates: But never was ideology more obscure and alienation, consequently, deeper.… Never were men less aware of what lay behind their actions than the Protestants, who believed themselves to be battling solely for freedom of conscience, the artists, who believed themselves to be struggling to liberate themselves from the guilds solely in the name of free and unfettered creativity, or the thinkers and scientists, who believed their war on dogma and superstition to be based purely on rational grounds. They did not know their aims, though unobjectionable in themselves, were the ideological cloak for economic interests and social aspirations.62

Finally, in another but still related sense, we can note the difference in the apparent opposition between inspiration and learning, nature and culture, which are situated in a narrative drama of becoming “estranged,” outside oneself (ekstasis), and “of having no knowledge of the self, as Pinciano says. It is in this last characterization that we can establish most clearly the inflection of a religious narrative of conversion within the experience of the early Baroque sublime. Its experience bears the moral authority and the heroism of the process of estrangement, of going outside oneself, as well as one’s social determination, to separate oneself from the world in search for the “new.” Thus, the new authority of nature cannot be grounded by a previous epistēmē (Foucault), bearing with it a virulent eschatological myth that emerges in the Baroque culture alongside two other ideological adventures of Europe: the birth of modern science and the entry into the colonial project. Ultimately, these adventures also will entail a rebirth, in the sense of a Return to Nature in the centuries that follow, and will introduce a semantic alteration into the psychological effects of wonder and admiration that we have analyzed above. As in the Kantian determination of the sublime, which offers a later variable to what Maravall refers to under the concept of furor, the identity of this nature itself remains ambiguous and schematic. This poses the greatest problem for Kant who sees in this extreme emotion the potential threat to an image of human understanding that is self-legislating and ruled by reason. The spectator might refer this image of nature to the power of the creator of the spectacle itself, bestowing upon him the admiration and

30

On the (New) Baroque

awe that only belongs to genius who attains a new authority and prestige as a modern “creator.” On the other hand, the spectator can also liken the image of nature presented in the aesthetic experience to the creative agency of a power that is defined by “the new, unusual, the marvelous,” or to a figure of the “terrible” which bears an analogy to the terrible power of the early modern state. In both cases the spectator will tend to identify this image of nature, in its creative violence and promise of redemption, with a dark and powerful being who might prefigure the new identity of the nation itself after a long period of creative transformation at the end of the Baroque age.

Chapter 3 The Baroque Eon: Eugenio d’Ors An idea with a biography

—Eugenio d’Ors

As we have already seen, from its first principal usage in Wolfllin’s Fundamental Concepts in the History of Art (1915), the Baroque has been consistently accorded a morphological or formal value in the analysis of historical, aesthetic, and cultural phenomena. This will be the one constant that is evident throughout the different usages it later receives in the various traditions of the Neobaroque. In Wolfllin’s study, and later in Henri Focillon’s La Vie des formes (1934), this formalism achieves the status of a method (what Omar Calabrese calls “a logic of morphogenesis”), which was influenced in great part by the work of the twentieth-century Spanish critic Eugenio d’Ors, who is largely responsible for the dislocation of the Baroque from its historical period. Even earlier, however, Wölfflin announces at the beginning of his study of mostly plastic and pictorial aesthetics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that his study does not analyze the beauty of a particular art object (that is, the particular characteristics of beauty exhibited by a Rubens, a Rembrandt, or a Dürer), but the “element” in which this beauty has taken form: “it studies the character of the artistic conception that has been at the base of figurative art for a number of centuries.”63 Following Omar Calabrese’s commentary on this morphological function in his Neo-Baroque (1992), we might summarize Wölfflin’s own morphological method in the following manner: Each work or series of works is a complex manifestation of certain elementary “forms” that can be defined in a series of oppositions, since form is perceptible only through a system of differences. (The series that Wölfflin uses in his analysis is: linear/pictorial, surface/ depth, open/closed, multi­plicity/unity, clear/obscure or absolute definition/relative definition.)

32

On the (New) Baroque

What Wölfflin calls a “style” (for example, Baroque or classical) is a specific tendency exhibited in the selection of basic categorical values, which usually correspond to principles of individual, psychological, collective, epochal, cultural and even ethnic and gendered constructions that are aligned with the principles of “taste.” Finally, a “historical style” is the totality of ways in which choices have taken form and the institution of those choices into aesthetic and cultural types are hierarchically arranged within a given epoch (which implies nothing less than a “system of judgment,” in the Kantian sense).

The objective of Wölfflin’s study was to collate a range of examples that are drawn primarily from aesthetic phenomena—on the basis of his five formal pairs—and to determine the logical values that might explain the emergence as a “historical style” in the sense that this style can be shown to cohere with other logical or moral values that exist within the culture of that time. As a Kantian, Wölfflin has no interest in demonstrating the value of an aesthetic production in accordance with the criteria of a contemporary—and therefore, unreflective—system of judgment, but rather in gathering and exposing the “element” in which this system of judgment takes form. In short, Wölfflin wanted to construct a code for deciphering a set of dominant cultural and aesthetic values, or the logic behind the evolution of one set of values into another; an evolution which was already programmed by the alternation of the classical-romanatic opposition that follows the rhythm of cultural cycles post-Renaissance. In some aspects, Focillon’s formalism is even more analogical than Wölfflin’s, especially when he compares the system of cultural and aesthetic forms to the evolution of an organic system. Thus, the famous ages of history, or even the progress of culture within each historical period, are compared to the succession of birth, generation, achievement, perfection, decline and degeneration. The idea of culture as a living organism has grown in influence from Kant’s earlier reflections in Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), to Nietszche’s “psychology of forces” (conceived, in part, on the model offered in Wilhelm Roux’s The Struggle of the Parts in an Organism: A Contribution to the Perfection of the Doctrine of Mechanistic Teleology). We can also note this foundational metaphor, or analogical doctrine, in the biological philosophy of Freudian psychoanalysis

The Baroque Style

33

and Systems Theories, to recent theories of chaos science and ecology, as well as the semiotic systems of Bakhtin and Lorman that were both influenced by the cosmological organicism (Gaia) of Teilhard de Chardin and the Russian biologist, Vladimir Vernadsky. It is this analogy that has guided, in part, the categorization of cultural processes around the opposition between dynamism and stasis, growth and decadence, between youth and vibrancy, and between regression and senility. Some might conclude that the organic metaphors drawn in analogy to cultural and intellectual processes are specious examples of a certain stage of European knowledge at the turn of the century, which belong to the past in the same sense as discussions of Phrenology and the Libido. However, because this analogy is formative for a stage of European knowledge that continues to influence our present moment, the analogy of culture as a living system cannot immediately be dismissed as a specious allegory, or an imaginary construction. If this analogy is in error, then in some ways it is an Error that is constitutive of the concept of modern culture from the writings of Herder up to the present. Moreover, the predominance of this analogy addresses a certain development in modern societies which could be called the general aesthetization of biology, following Benjamin’s observations in particular; however, what is more important is that this trend addresses those modern sites where aesthetics is politicized precisely around the psychological phantasms that pertain to the body’s fragmented image. The polemics that have historically concerned the “Baroque style,” in light of this organicism, have usually concerned judgments of a decadent and degenerate art. The charges of vulgarity of its popular expression and bad taste that have been the recurrent themes of the critical viewpoint, like that expressed by Wölfflin cited earlier, of those who see the Baroque as symptomatic of the decay of Renaissance principles are almost always charged with metaphors of the body, figured either in scatological or orthopedic imagery. In the case of the colonial and postcolonial Baroque, we will sec where these judgments, as well as the scientific ideology of nineteenth-century biologicism, become the rhetorical tropes used to vindicate the position of a marginalized cultural, or minority expression (as in the writings of José Martí and Lezama, for example). It is here that the critical function of the Baroque use of analogy is most evident: the conversion of an ideological and “naturalized” expression of culture into a tactical and highly

34

On the (New) Baroque

“artificialized” trope in the rhetorical sense of vindicating minority expression. However, rather than limit my discussion to the significance of organicism as a common Baroque metaphor, I wish to address the more critical issue of the function of the analogy and history, form and content, in the Baroque criticism of Eugenio d’Ors. According to d’Ors, the Baroque is a historical constant, which participates in the Alexandrine definition of Eon. An Eon signifies a category that, despite its metaphysical character, has a development inscribed in time, and something of a history. In the “Eon,” eternity has a history, and the permanent knows its vicissitudes. 64 And yet, in d’Ors this history is not “historical” in the usual sense that is accorded to the term (which means that it is not recuperated into a history of styles following a table of periodization) and the name of the Baroque Eon testifies to a category of the spirit that has been ripped from any historical narrative and is made to stand on its own as what d’Ors defines as “a universal constant of culture.” According to this view, historical variation of style and content is not simply identified with the morphological variation between one cultural style and the next, since variation itself is a constant that is found in all historical periods. Thus, the Baroque is a living and archetypal category inserted into the fabric of History, into the contingent flow of events, as an eternal idea having an almost individual biography.65 Consequently, in one sense we might compare d’Ors discovery of the “Baroque Eon” to the intuition of Kant concerning the Category of Eternity as an immutable form of change and movement, which subordinates time, understood as succession, and space defined as a field of co­existence. This discovery, which some have determined as the beginning of modern consciousness of temporality, has had the greatest currency in modernist theories to the point where the destruction of “linear models of time” appears self-evident as a bona fide good (as we will see in the case of Walter Benjamin). Two dominant traits that result from this theory of cultural history, which are relevant to modern critical theories and to theories of the Baroque alike, are the following: first, the proliferation of the example and the analogy to describe this “immutable form of change and movement” (i.e. “the new”), and; second, the amplification and “spatialization” of narrative patterns of greater complexity and co-envelopment, or conversely, an abstract conceptual simplicity (or “minimalism”) somewhat

The Baroque Style

35

like Borges’ labyrinth which is “composed only of a single straight line.” As I have already argued, both traits or tendencies of the cultivation of “new forms of experience” and the development of complex and “nonlinear” frames for relating this experience of the modern subject belong equally to modernist and postmodern narratives, and neither could have emerged without the, essentially “new,” horizons that were installed by the combination of early capitalism with the diversity of cultural forms that flowed back to the European continent from the colonies. With regard to the first trait, the proliferation of detail and ornamentation, the architectural decor of classical European Baroque, will appear as a vital metaphor with its swarming of surface and detail around an unperceived interior. In the second trait, concerning the spatialization of temporal representations, we might recognize that a certain “return of the Baroque” is inscribed within a negation of historical causality and the delimitation of place, region, geography that both the culture of European modernism and the process of commodification in early capitalist cultures entailed. In fact, both forms presuppose a certain negation of historical causality, as well as an accumulation of the signs of wealth and culture that no longer radiated from a central authority of a unified cultural tradition, or class experience. In order to understand the underlying structure of the first aspect, we might highlight the value of ornamentation that appears to describe the economic character of “accumulation” that gradually comes to reflect modern expressions of culture. For example, the determination of “culture as process of ornamentation,” or “culture as adornment,” are tendencies that came to be associated with the rococo style in the eighteenth century of European—particularly, French—societies. The Rococo was known as a period when the symbols and emblems of the aristocracy were evacuated by the appropriation of an ascending bourgeoisie society, aping aristocratic manners. As Jean Starobinski has observed, the concept and the sign of luxury is transformed in the eighteenth century, which took advantage of the various forms of ostentation and “charism” in which the cultural authority of class had been voiced in the ancien régimes; however, in the rococo style, these forms became pompous and devalued, signifying nothing beyond the tangible presence of wealth converted into mere goods whose cultural and class significance no longer corresponded to their original contexts. For example, heraldic scrolls, traditionally intended for

36

On the (New) Baroque

mottoes or devices, would be left blank, at the artist’s disposal, twisted into elegant patterns and arabesques, and surrounded liberally by prolific and complex motifs. Through this process the scroll had entirely lost its emblematic function and had become mere background ornamentation. The disappearance of the “symbolic element” thus caused a corresponding profusion of lines and patterns, and with the absence of meaningful content the observer was left with a superfluousness of decoration whose gratuitousness might be viewed as either enthralling or completely scandalous.66 Of course, the reader should be familiar with many of Starobinski’s descriptions, since they have often been used, in exactly the same way, to describe the process of accumulation underlying modern mass culture and the rise of the commodity form. (For example, it is the same logic that governs Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism as the expression of late-Capitalist culture.) In my view, what is interesting in the application of the same analysis to different historical moments is the essential relationship to the spatial logic that each critique seems to employ. What Starobinski describes as the “disappearance of a symbolic element” is immediately determined as having a causal relationship with a proliferation of surfaces, a profusion of lines and patterns, and the multiplication of sinuous and twisting arabesques and complex motifs whose “symbolic function has been completely evacuated in favor of their decorative value. In the absence of this ‘symbolic element,” somehow the very form of space in which the cultural work is situated uncoils, expands, and exfoliates, as if released from an inexorable repression and concealment, and explodes into a spectacle of hyperbolic visibility. The proliferation of pure facades and surfaces already prefigures the modern ascendancy of surfaces and masks, the cultural ideologies of social transgression (or “the feminization of culture” in Modernism), including the vindication of the grotesque, the monstrous and the excessive. At the origin of this new organicism, as Starobinski shows, the rococo style of culture must first be produced as a spectacle that constitutes an exaggeration of tendencies already found in the culture of the Baroque; moreover, “the element of beauty” must be gendered as a feminine nature and, thereby, given motion and sinuosity. For example, in William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty the universal condition for grace and beauty is what he calls “the undulating line.” Beauty derived from the “composed intricacy

The Baroque Style

37

of form” has the power “to lead the eye in a kind of chase.”67 An imaginary ray, leading from the eye, is drawn into a continuously varied movement. The variations help us to escape from dullness of repose; the continuity imposes order on the appearance of variety. In this endless movement the observer is never disorientated or bewildered. Throughout Hogarth’s description of this phenomena, moreover, there is a guiding motif of desire that suggestively traces the contour of these waving or serpentine lines, such as a pretty curl of hair, or a ribbon entwined round a staff. The pleasure is increased, says Hogarth, when the object is in motion: I can never forget my frequent strong attention to it, when I was very young, and that its beguiling movement gave me the same kind of sensation then, which I since have felt at seeing a country dance; particularly when my eye pursued a favorite dancer, through all the windings of the figure, who then was bewitching to the sight, as the imaginary ray, we were speaking of was dancing with her all the time.68

Here, Hogarth’s description of the origin of the feeling and sensation for a certain “imaginary ray” that had the power to lead the eye into a chase provides the logic of the rococo figure—suggestively, “a curl of hair, a ribbon entwined round a staff.” We can see a double usage of figure represented here: the first follows from the Greek sense of schemata (as gestures, or dance) which underlines the principle perspective from which space is organized in relation to both attention (consciousness) and movement; the second sense of figure corresponds to the gendered distinction that functions as a “lure” and draws the organization of phenomena (and subjective interest) into a tale of desire, or intrigue. Of course, this is a sketch of a masculine gaze, which describes its power of attention and its discrimination of the swarming elements that constitute the visual field in an analogy to the figure of a dancer followed through the hubbub of the country dance. The spectator does not become dizzy, disoriented, or lose consciousness from the business of detail and the bustling of surfaces in the rococo spectacle, because there is a constant discrimination fixed upon one figure, like a central plot or intrigue of desire that guides the eye along in a continuously varied movement, creating an attention that pushes everything else into the background. (This is, in fact, one of the origins of the figural dimension as such.) As Hogarth writes, “The grace

38

On the (New) Baroque

and dignity of the undulation suggest the swaying movement of a dancing form and so reveal its feminine essence.69 By the tracing of this figure through Hogarth, Starobinski suggests another organization of space, no longer organized in terms of depth/ surface as it had when an expression of authority radiated throughout appearances. A High Baroque surface implied the presence of a great depth, which was inferred or concealed in the grandeur of the design, or in the dramatic and theatrical narrative gesture, which caused the spectator to witness the narrative of the painting in silence and awe. The narrative referred to the depth of tradition and memory, the power of history and providence, the beauty of nobility and the richness of experience that belonged to the aristocratic classes. In rococo or mannerist constructions, on the other hand, there is a swirling of different surfaces that are traversed by a “wandering eye of the spectator” in pursuit of a small figure, an arabesque, that flickers like a flame and links all these surfaces into one spectacle, one plot or pursuit This figure, or arabesque, is what links and articulates all these surfaces onto the same plane of consistency; it is an endless movement whose motion prevents the spectator from losing consciousness and falling into a state of vertigo. To conclude, we might see in this discussion of the figure of adornment the underlying presence of the same spatial rhetoric we have found in both the “hegemony of form” that belongs to traditional discussions of the Baroque concept, as well as in the psychological dimension of the spectator that I have analyzed above in relation to Maravall’s theory of the Baroque sublime. Thus, the new function of adornment that is often ascribed to the culture of Baroque, and the twisting arabesques and contorted figures that define the rococo style, are just two more surfaces of the same Baroque-Mannerist opposition we found operating in traditional Baroque criticism in Chapter One. And yet, here we also find an image of the hidden causality that governs the transformation of the very “element” in which the aesthetic (including the psychological) experience of the cultural work takes place: the absence of an earlier “symbolic function” (Starobinski) that bound the cultural work to a distinct location and class experience is suddenly “unbounded” as the meaning of cultural work gradually merges with the form of a commodity that circulates in a wider and more indiscriminate public sphere. Consequently, d’Ors’ concept of the Baroque Eon also traces the evolution of a logic of culture that

The Baroque Style

39

gradually merges with the commodity forms of early capitalism. (It is significant to note that d’Ors’ writings on the New Baroque occur between the publication of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal and Benjamin’s arcades project.) He describes this “immutable form of change and innovation” as a virulent assimilating form, a diamond collector, that assembles and displays the refraction of things, events, people within a spectacle, negating their remoteness and distance in both time and place (geographical specificity, regionalism, character). As in the passage of Genette cited in the Introduction, this takes the architectural form of a “syncretism”—that of a public forum or modern shopping mall—where all the distinct events converge into a central place like Bernini’s colonnade in the piazza before the Vatican. But from where, one might ask, is this spirit of great generosity and openness to be derived? Although d’Ors might lyrically invoke the name of democracy for this New Baroque spirit, it cannot resemble its political concept in the strictest sense because it designates no particular entity, or “people.” Even more, it appears to extend a concept of participation to include moments and events either in the past or too remote to qualify under the classical determination of the Greek or Latin agora. Rather, what d’Ors invokes with the concept of the Baroque Eon is a hyperbolic—in the sense of “exaggerated” and amplified, even bloated—sense of Culture. There are no cultures, but rather Culture standing for the multiplicity of civilizations included therein. Thus, “Babel” is the name given in d’Ors system for an Eon that is a complement of the Baroque, standing for the principles of nationalism and internationalism, and the forces of dispersion, politics and the plurality of cultures that mark the beginning of the twentieth century.70 Yet, in another sense, d’Ors’ New Baroque Eon provides the allegory of a cultural style that can be identified with the view that belongs to the “end of history,” thus running parallel to Benjamin’s later analysis which was organized by a similar schema. The Baroque Eon is defined by a time can no longer be represented by a natural myth (as cyclical and permanent), or by the dialectical alteration of classical and romantic, but as the continual unfolding and evolution of one “constant of culture” that d’Ors defines by one term: Baroque. On the one hand, perhaps we might see this, in part, as a nostalgic reaction to the processes that were taking place at the beginning of the twentieth century: the fragmentation and

40

On the (New) Baroque

isolation of the individual’s experience, the organization and specialization of the branches of knowledge, the reduction of labor into discrete units of time, the destruction of communal experience as the expression of a particular culture. On the contrary, the metaphor of the Baroque Eon seems to embrace the proliferation of details and forms that belong to every moment of History, an image of Eternity that corresponds to the accumulating energies that define the culture of early capitalism. Again, this determines the force of the present as the architecture that results from the assimilation of heterogeneous elements from different periods or cultures. Some might envisage the collector of antiquities and rare oddities; others might see in this the pre-figuration of the modern tourist who travels and brings home snap-shots to incorporate in his personal mythology. From the perspective of a pure temporality, d’Ors’ notion of the Baroque Eon envisages the whole of time converging and emptying out into a present that, because this present contains the possibility of extending throughout to include all the elements of past epochs that have taken place, grows larger and increases its magnitude. Time itself stretches out, expands and speeds up; it produces more than any discrete interval can contain. As we will see in the following section, different versions of this thesis constitute a fundamental tenant of European modernity: the arrival of post-history. Thus, d’Ors theory of the Baroque already participates in this schema in the manner in which isolated elements that are normally kept distant and events that are normally incommunicable, within a diachronic ordering of history, now return in communication with the present through his theory of “types.” Cartography replaces linear time and graphology distinct regions or cultures. As d’Ors writes: “It is not a question in this moment of believing in the existence of necessary historical laws, or of denying that one such necessity exists: we do not relate ourselves to laws when we speak of constants, but of types. Contingence and predetermination are equally compatible the affirmation of the existence of types.71 Of course, the concept of a post-history is a specific one, since its meaning is not that history suddenly ends, but rather its concept was completed in a legalistic sense, that is, those that had invented it had achieved the ends they sought. History was perfected in the sense of an instrument that could now be used principally to educate and to persuade. Therefore, for those like d’Ors who do not share the

The Baroque Style

41

consensus, the announcement of the end of history is also strategic since the linear narrative of history can no longer explicate the moment that is happening now, which suddenly appears, for that reason, accidental, arbitrary and contingent. That is, if the present can no longer be explained, it must be justified: the field of the present and the now is no longer within the province of reason and its principle of expressive causality, but rather has been turned over to the dominion of “justice” (that is, to the violence of interpretation), as we will see below in the vision of history offered by Benjamin. Finally, the concept of post-history marks the emergence of Language as the principle mode of representing the relation between the different dimensions of time and the material of history like the dream, which “works-over” the text of the previous day, the principal mode of anamnesis becomes identified with the mode of literature. Hence, d’Ors describes this process as transformative, as amplification, and substitution of previous elements in a manner that is exemplified by a modernist literary process of inter-textuality. (I will take this up again later on in the discussion of Genette and Sarduy.) In a humorous passage, d’Ors critiques the principle of causality since it fails to explicate the relation between “Cleopatra’s nose” and the fatality of Egypt, to show that while this sign appears arbitrary and non-causal in connection to the events of ancient Egypt, it has become over-determined to the point where it has become a veritable “sign” of history. It is by means of this over-determination or repetition that a certain event or figure becomes expressive; moreover, it is primarily through a process of literature (or rhetoric) that signs become expressive. In the modern period, consequently, the name of “literature,” like the name the “Baroque,” loses much of its historical specificity (that is, the laws or rules that compose its specificity and restrict its change) and becomes more abstract and generic as a result. This event closely corresponds to Foucault’s thesis that literature, after the nineteenth century, “breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to the order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language that has no other law than to affirm [ ... ] its own precipitous existence.” 72 Concluding our discussion of d’Ors, perhaps a final reason for dislodging the concept of Baroque from its place in historical periodicity is that nothing new (which may appear as accidental or arbitrary at first) can take place within a chain of events that is rigidly determined by a

42

On the (New) Baroque

linear view of causality. Thus, the negation of the historical period is a revolt against what Niezsche first defined as “the past and its ‘It Was.’” Therefore, d’Ors’ Baroque concept is, in a certain sense, a product of its age and the expression of a spirit of revenge against History. Consequently, it is not merely by chance that immediately preceding the period during which d’Ors was conceptualizing a new image of New Baroque reason, Nietzsche was expressing the affirmation of chance in the theory of the “Eternal Return”; Mallarmé developing a poetic system mixed with chance elements; Freud was developing an analysis of historical narrative based upon dream work; Saussure was defining a linguistic system that was based upon no necessary or causal relation between the two component elements of the sign. What happened to the relation between the elements of the past and the content of the present can be described in analogy to Freudian dream work: where the residues of the day “return” in the condensation of a distinctly new text. Does this not also account for “the return of the Baroque” as well? A new sense of “openness” belonging to an enlarged present, like the infinitely dilated present of a dream, which also allows those who were repressed or formerly elided from the official historical narratives to participate in the reorganization of culture? It is also not by accident, therefore, that d’Ors’ essays on the Baroque are replete with figures of the primitive, the “Ewig-weibliche” or the eternal feminine, the mystic or femme-Solitaire, the satanic figures of Mephisto and Calderón’s Sigismundo. In my discussion of d’Ors I have only traced a few of the most basic principles, and principal metaphors, that will reappear again and again in the different versions of the Neobaroque that I will discuss in the sections that follow. Basicially, I can account for d’Ors’ Baroque Eon by saying that it provides us with a new and distinctly modern image of Eternity: when the field of history, unhinged from both its providential scheme and its principle of causality, merges with the field of the dream.

PART TWO Baroque and Modern

Chapter 4 Baroque and anti-Baroque: Octavio Paz

In every society generations weave a web of repetitions and variations. In one way or another, explicitly or tacitly, the ‘quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’ is renewed in each cycle. […] If modernity is simply a consequence of the passage of time, to name oneself ‘modern’ is to resign oneself to losing it very quickly.73

The Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz has provided us with what is arguably the most succinct formulation of “the modern” when he defined it as a tradition against itself. He writes: “Modernity is a polemical tradition which displaces the tradition of the moment, whatever it happens to be, but an instant later yields its place to still another tradition which in turn is a momentary manifestation of modernity.74 In many of Paz’s most overt statements on the subject of modernity, the relationship between the modern and the Baroque has been founded upon this love of novelty and otherness. It is here, Paz notes, that one discovers a special distinction that belongs to the modern alone. “Neither Góngora nor Gracian was revolutionary in the sense that we use the word today; they did not set out to change the ideas of beauty of their time—although Gongora actually did!” 75 Accordingly, what distinguishes our notions of modernity from other ages—that is from the semi-cyclical alteration between classical and romantic, between imitation and invention—is that the “new” of modernism is determined by forces of rejection and negation. It is marked by an essential interruption of the immediate past (registered in an experience of change that is expressed in its shock-value) and the rejection of any continuity between the two moments—the “before” and “now”—that are constitutive of experience. Thus, “something has changed name and shape in the course of the past two centuries”; the modern is a “singularity that bursts upon the present and twists in an unexpected direction.” 76 Unlike in d’Ors’ theory of the “Baroque Eon,” for Paz this resemblance can no longer be a matter of a simple “return” of a romantic force of change that alternates with the classical

46

On the (New) Baroque

and traditional forces of stability, one which causes a momentary point of instability that is quickly assimilated into the beginning of the next age. On the contrary, as it is described in Paz’s account of modernity, the character of this return has changed and has little resemblance to the eternal combat between Apollonian and Dionysian principles, or to the movement of a pendulum that maintains Time’s image of eternal balance and equilibrium. Rather, the pendulum has become a medulla, a spiral, a cyclone; the image of time itself has become “unhinged” from its earlier image of eternity (or Aion), and now appears essentially linked to a moment (the present, or the now). This thesis is stated most clearly in the closing passages of Paz’s Conjunctions and Disjunctions: Modern time—linear time, the homologue of the idea of progress and history, ever propelled into the future, the time of the sign nonbody, of the fierce will to dominate nature and tame instincts, the time of sublimation, aggression, and self-mutilation—is coming to an end. I believe that we are entering another time, a time that has not yet revealed it” form and about which we can say nothing except that it will be neither linear time nor cyclical time. Neither history nor myth […] the time that is coming will be defined by the here and now. It will be the negation of the sign non-body in all its Western versions: religious or atheist, philosophical or political, materialist or idealist. The present doesn’t project us into any place beyond, any haphazard, other-worldly eternities, of abstract paradisios at the end of history. It projects into a medulla, the invisible centre of time: the here and now. A carnal time, a mortal time: the present is not unreachable, the present is not untouchable. How can we reach it? How can we touch it? How can we penetrate into its transparent heart? I don’t know. I don’t think anybody does. But perhaps the alliance of poetry and rebellion will give us a glimpse of it.77

In order to outline a definition of the “modern” that underlies many modern theories of the Baroque, I will examine the notion of modernity announced in the above passage by Paz, in which the axioms of this form are stated in the most direct and universal of terms. The principal object of this clarification is the role played in several modernist theoretical accounts of cultural and political spectacles by what was referred to earlier around the Kantian notion of enthusiasm. This is important

Baroque and anti-Baroque

47

because the “emotional intensity” (pathos) has increasingly come to determine our sense of the “experience” that grounds the concept of the political valence of cultural works: in the privilege accorded to cultural expressions of iconoclasm, scandal, spectacle, offence that often frequents the image of a radical or critical analysis of culture. Most importantly, this “enthusiasm” has determined a form of cultural production as capable of producing deliberative effects within society; it is this belief that conditions a definition of culture itself that must, in turn, be placed in question precisely around this image of rebellion and pathos to which the deliberative strategies of modernist and postmodern aesthetic programs constantly appeal.78 The change announced by the gesture of modernity consigns the repetition between the forces of tradition (imitation, memory, culture, age) and the forces of novelty (youth, vibrancy, change) to another variability that no longer resembles itself across the epochs, histories or cultures. It inaugurates the idea of the future as an Other epoch, one that consigns the past to a complete destruction and the present itself to the feeling of greater and greater instability as the result of what Paz defines as “the acceleration of history.” As Paz describes this new form of cultural historiography, “the opposition between the past and present vanishes because time passes so quickly that the distinction between past, present and future evaporates.” 79 What is distinctively modern about this development in the West is that modern notions of history make the disappearance or evaporation of this distinction between past, present and future the absolute foundation of historical temporality, even its metaphysical basis. The primary emphasis on the future as the explicit goal of all duration and experience of temporality casts the future itself into the middle of every lived duration, as the “absent center” of every past and every present moment, which causes them to negate themselves in a movement both toward and away from the non-being that inheres in every temporal agent “Difference, separation, plurality, novelty, evolution, revolution, history—all these words can be condensed into one: future. Neither past nor eternity, not time that is but time that is not yet or to come: this is our archetype.” 80 What makes this relevant to our discussion of “the return of the Baroque,” is that because of what Paz refers to as the acceleration of time itself, we can conceive that the present opens to a multiplicity of pasts; in

48

On the (New) Baroque

other words, opposition is no longer adequate to figure a univocal substitution of the past by the present, such as the linear substitution of cultural history from Renaissance to Classicism, since there is a coexistence of pasts in a present that can be defined as a field of general strife (polemos). The general default or destruction of a linear concept of time that modernity supposedly inaugurates, moreover, is also accompanied by the default of mythic (or cyclical time), since myth reassures us that after the end of time, the times that follow will still approximately resemble the present, with some slight variations. Thus, while linear or historical time races headlong into the future, mythic time (represented by the public character of ritual or spectacle, festival or sacrifice) returns to bathe itself in the aura of an immemorial past. For Paz, as well as for Baudelaire before him, the poetic project of modernity opposes the “ancient present” of myth (which functions in a bourgeois society as the value of redemption, or as projected earnings in a culture of merchandise); consequently, the future must no longer resemble the present nor redeem the past. This becomes the categorical imperative of “the modern.” On the contrary, the future must appear as Other, that is, as the radical abolition of prospective memory provided by myth, a dizziness or vertigo of a present that, because it is not “oriented” toward the past, spins on itself as a point of confusion, similar to what Kafka called the “hesitation before birth.” Henceforth, reason can in no way be called ‘sufficient” (which breaks its marriage with theological forms of thought founded upon faith or belief, as well as a concept of truth that is founded upon “revelation”), but becomes a reason that acts as its own “grave-digger,” borrowing a metaphor from Marx and Engels: It governs itself insofar as it sets itself up as the object of analysis, doubt, and negation. It is not a temple or a stronghold, but an open space [and I might underline the similarities here between this passage and the passage of Genette cited earlier on], a public square, a road, a discussion, a method—a road continually making and unmaking itself, a method whose only principle is the scrutiny of all principles. Critical reason, by its very rigor, accentuates temporality. Nothing is permanent; reason becomes identified with change and otherness. We are ruled not by identity, with its enormous and monotonous tautologies, but by otherness and contradiction, the dizzying manifestations of criticism. In the past the goal of criticism was truth; in the modern age truth is criticism…the truth of change.81

Baroque and anti-Baroque

49

These are just some of the axioms of the modernity that we have also discovered implicitly at the basis of the Neobaroque tradition of modernity: difference founded upon negation and rejection of the past (which, of course, support a critical and ironic glance over forms of cultural authority and received notions of beauty); otherness, which expresses the new image of time that results from what Paz calls the acceleration of history and the proliferation of co-existent pasts: “The meaning of the ‘modern tradition’ emerges more clearly: it is the expression of our historic consciousness. It is a criticism of the past, and it is an attempt, repeated several times throughout the last two centuries, to found a tradition on the only principle immune to criticism: change, history.82 Here, we might compare Paz’s central notion of the “acceleration of history” to the recurrences of a distinctly Neobaroque representation. There is a feeling of dizziness (vertige) or of a swooning (what Leibniz called im Ohnemacht setzen to describe the state of vertigo brought on by death or rage) that forms the concrete expression of modern sensibility. For Leibniz, the meaning of this dizziness is an image of reason that is struck by its own “animality”—that is, by the vicissitudes of its desire (volans), by its own passivity to the senses and its vulnerability to the emotions— which causes the “clarity” of reason to become confused, and consciousness itself to swoon. Such a feeling might also be likened to Paz’s use of the metaphor of acceleration: “all times and all spaces flow together in one here and now.” Images of dizziness or vertigo, resulting from a loss of any distinct bearing in space and the blending of several directions or perspectives, and the metaphor of acceleration where we have an image of the production of more and more space within a finite and historical frame—both aspects bear an architectural significance for the resurgence of many Neobaroque constructions, particularly those that occur in the field of “textuality,” in philosophy and literary criticism (examples of which I will offer below). The Baroque construction schematizes this dizziness and vertigo, spatializes time within a structure, and arranges the multiple schisms or conflicts between the different “moments” (or “points of view” that could also correspond to the perspective occupied by actual subjects of history) that comprise the surfaces of time’s quantitative volume. Thus, the distinction between the past and now corresponds to a rhetoric of temporality that can be associated with most modern movements even though

50

On the (New) Baroque

the substantive dimension of this “splitting” is itself not temporal. Paz’s definition of modernity as a project that has been “repeated several times” over the course of two centuries, and a repetition that has accelerated over more recent history, reproduces the course of modern history in the shape of the cyclone or spiral, which reaches its point of tightest convolution and speed as it approaches the present moment. Of course, this retains the “image of cyclical time,” but converts it into an image that corresponds to the feeling of time in a modern Cosmopolitan setting, or globalized village. What gives Paz’s description an architectural and experiential density is that while time is described in its tightening and circuitous loop (like the interval traced by a circuit on a transistor), Paz retains a static image of the “form of space” that seems to remain an empty frame within which increasingly actual spaces and perspectives (“points of view”) are produced. The reason for this is in the modernity that Paz himself outlines: in its absolute rejection of the past, the modern retains a present that, although never ceasing to be past, never quite becomes wholly present either. We have then a concrete image of the reproduction of aborted “pasts” for which each repetition signifies a multiplication of conflicting pasts that co-exist alongside incomplete or partial presents. “Modernity” defines an act whose desire is to cause the past to pass in its entirety, without trace or residue; to evoke the arrival of a new moment that inaugurates the re-commencement of time from this moment onward. “Now” can be identified as a dietetic sign, referring to “this” moment, “here”—exceptional, superlative, incomparable, and new. (This characterization of the entrance of the “new” into time follows a popular Kantian description of freedom as an act that begins a new series; it can also be found in a Bergsonian description of the qualitative change that is introduced by a new duration.) However, modernity according to Paz also describes this act as one that has been “repeated over the past two centuries” that underscores its obsessive, repetitive, pathetic and even addictive character. It can be figured in the literary themes and techniques that dominate modern literature: amnesia or forgetting in the characters of Duras and Blanchot, or the isolation of elements, and their repetition in a series as in Beckett’s fictions. This addictive structure, as it has been connected to narrative and story, can also be perceived in the recent films of Wim Wenders (such as Paris, Texas and ‘Til the End of the World) as well as the contemporary novels by Don Delillo and Salman Rushdie,

Baroque and anti-Baroque

51

where the characters are described as suffering a state of limbo, or falling through a vast chasm or abyss. Here, I am not seeking to categorize these various works as “Baroque,” or even as “Neobaroque,” by the recurrence of this obsessive character of repetition, on the one hand, and limbo or oblivion, on the other. Nevertheless, I would argue that at the basis of many modern appeals to Baroque sensibility is precisely this image of temporality as a state of exception or suspense (limbo). From Paz’s descriptions, therefore, we might perceive the problem of a modernity that was earlier diagnosed by Nietzsche as bearing the psychology of revenge against time and its—“it was.” The modern project launched against the past bears the psychological determination of the subject as the “offended party” before an event that appears sometimes as a crime, a bad encounter or, at other times, as the judgment of fate. However, what constitutes the greatest offence that scandalizes the modern consciousness is the “non-being” of the past against which it rails in its incessant attempt to wipe away the traces of a past that never stops passing back into the present through associations of its resemblance, that is, through its “signs.” (We can see that there is a natural analogy between Paz’s spiral and cyclone of time and what Nietzsche called time’s vicious circle, “the Eternal Return of the Same.”) Modern or critical consciousness can be defined, following Paz, as hyperbolic, as a present that grows in proportion to its multiplicity and its anachronism: as the multiplication of moments (a greater activity marked by a critical) and as a growing retention of pasts (a greater feeling of passivity). Time itself is marked by a sense of accumulation, of density, of an increase in quantity. (One might recall here that Benjamin’s essential image of historical duration was like the “piling up” of moments, events, objects and dates in a static heap or junk-pile.) This expresses the change in its organization: no longer assembled as a diachronic of instants or moments that can be seen to substitute fix one another in a vertical series, it becomes a synchronic field that grows by accretion, analogy and resemblance. To follow Paz’s most important observation, if moments are linked to acts that are “repeated,” to a character of repetition—that is, to recognition and resemblance— then time loses its univocal expression of the date, and the moment itself becomes a theme (a process that describes an underlying principle of inter-textuality in many modern works). In short, the manner in which time falls from its diachronic axis and returns in repetition has a direct

52

On the (New) Baroque

correspondence to the relation between the residues of the day that return—displaced by memory, disguised by desire—veiled in the space of historical anamnesis opened by the secondary revisions of dream-work, or by a process of bricolage. It is this very space of the dream, and the utopian language that accompanies its poetic revelry, that addresses the presence of the Orient in Paz’s argument. In Paz’s account of modernity, the earth is suspended between a kingdom of air (language) and the “kingdom of flesh and of objects bearing number, weight, and measure.” 83 It is the space between the sign as “non-body” and the body as incarnated sign that has been torn asunder by Western traditions of idealism, Protestantism (Calvinism most of all), and the gross materialism that defines the present. As Paz writes: [T]hese sublimations, included under the sign non-body, also lead societies into blind alleys when the relationship with the sign body is broken or debased. This is what happens in the West, not in spite of our materialism but because of it. Ours is an abstract materialism, a sort of Platonism in reverse, as disincarnated as the emptiness of Buddha. It no longer even provokes a response from the body: it has slipped into it and sucks its blood like a vampire.84

Thus, Paz adopts the topic of “the Orient,” if not a certain trope of “Orientalism” that has been a staple of Latin American letters: “the East is utopia, America is its historical manifestation.”85 However, this is not the imaginary Orient of Lezama, nor the entirely fabulous and essentially parodistic East of Borges or, later on, Severo Sarduy (whose critical treatment of this Latin American topic in the novel Cobra I will return to later on). For Paz, the East remains literal and sincere, an alternative to the mind-body split and to the social neurosis that is wreaking havoc on Western societies, another origin and a possible future, but one that is anchored (or re-sutured) to the present embodied in the poem and in the lived body that rebels against the vampires and zombies that attempt to entomb the body in the sign of the non-body. Yet, if “the East is utopia” and “America is the manifestation” of this possible future, then the Baroque functions as the historical shadow and intermediary toward the East, Of course, the neobarroco is a topic that

Baroque and anti-Baroque

53

is perhaps utilized less frequently than by other Latin American writers such as Lezama, Borges, Carpentier and others—and Paz himself often aligns his reading of the Baroque with the traditional association of neo-classicism—nevertheless, there remains the constant appeals to Góngora and to a Spanish Baroque tradition that has been overshadowed by the great fog of the North, that is, by the cosmopolitanism and Anglo­ American modernism of Eliot and Pound, or by the failures of the different avant-gardes on the Continent after Surrealism. Nevertheless, if the Baroque still functions as an intermediary in Paz’s account of modernity, that is, as an alternative Romanticism that belatedly emerges in the poetry of the Americas, this is largely because the original Spanish Baroque tradition was mutilated and forgotten by the dominant language of modernism that originated in Europe. As a result of this tradition, Paz relates, in the case of most of his North American contemporaries (Lowell, Olson, Bishop, Ginsberg), that “their lack of communication with Spain was almost total, not only because of political circumstances but because post-war Spanish poets lingered in the rhetoric of social or religious poetry.”86 Whereas, for Paz and the poets he identifies with his generation of Latin American poets, “Between Cosmopolitanism and Americanism, my generation made a clean and permanent break: we are condemned to be Americans as our fathers and grandfathers were condemned to seek America or to flee from her. Our leap has been within ourselves.”87 At this point, let’s return to a central observation that belongs to Paz’s diagnosis of modernity in order to locate the strange rationale that accounts for the “return of the Baroque” as well: “all places and all times flow into one.” This is what allows us to explain how a cultural formation that existed sometime between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century in European and Spanish verse could suddenly reappear in the Americas as the basis for “post-avant-garde poetry.” It is the very force of a modernity that hyperactively negates both place and time that makes the Baroque both possible and necessary in another place and another time. However, the significance of this return cannot be reduced to the caprice of a half-forgotten resemblance or to the arbitrary pleasantries of cultural allusion, since the fundamental trait that this new Baroque shares with its predecessor is a “pan-syncretism” and “internationalism” that is the true language of poetry (for the original Baroque phenomenon was also identified with the dispersal and migration, and with the multi-lingual

54

On the (New) Baroque

vulgarization of the classical origin of culture). Thus, the language of the poem is a language spoken by all and by no one; it is only poetic language that qualifies as truly historical, for Paz, since it describes the actual situation encountered by the North American poet who speaks in English, as it does a Latin American poet who speaks Spanish. Both are equally distanced from language, and no one can claim to be a native speaker, since everyone speaks with a borrowed tongue. As Paz writes, The similarity between the evolution of Anglo-American and Spanish American literature results from the fact that both are written in transplanted languages. Between ourselves and the American soil a void opened up which we had to fill with strange words. Indians and mestizos included, our language is European. The history of our literatures is the history of our relation to the place that is America, and also with the place where the words we speak were born and came of age. In the beginning our letters were a reflection of European ones. However, in the seventeenth century a singular variety of Baroque poetry was born in Spanish America that was not an exaggeration but a transgression of the Spanish model. The first great American poet was a woman, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Her poem, El Sueño (1692) was our first cosmopolitan text; like Pound and Borges later, the Mexican nun built a text as a tower—again, Tower of Babel.88

As in the passage above, the word “Baroque” is a strange word that is placed in the void between Europe and America; it is not a question of translating this strange word onto American soil, or making its meaning transparent in a new American language, but of reflecting a space and time when language itself is filled with foreign and bizarre sounds— some of which originate from the place where one is speaking, and some of which come from “elsewhere.” Thus, as Paz recounts, at the beginning of the seventeenth century Latin America adopted a Baroque poetry that was already a distortion of the original Spanish Baroque verse, already a transgression of its laws of composition and a violation of its forms. Perhaps another way of saying this would be that at the beginning of the seventeenth century Latin American poetry was already thoroughly modern, as it was characterized by repetition and by a certain ironic distance that wouldn’t occur in European forms for another two centuries. As

Baroque and anti-Baroque

55

Echevarría observes, for Paz Latin American poets are victims of a belated Romanticism because they didn’t have one at the proper historical moment; but I wonder if this is true for the neobarroco as well, which could be defined already by the characteristics of post-Romanticism, including the dominance of criticism and irony. Baroque and anti-Baroque. Or, as Paz recalls a line from the poet López Velarde to explain this Neobaroque tendency: “The poetic system has turned into a critical system.”89

Chapter 5 Baroque and Modernity: Paul de Man

In his early essay, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” Paul de Man offers us another illustration of this earlier stage of modernity and addresses the problems that Paz identifies with its critical system by installing a more synthetic concept of its actuality and by assigning its contemporaneousness to the emergence of a “new mode of being”: the Being of Literature. I include a brief commentary on this essay in the section “Baroque and Modernity,” not only due to its importance for literary criticism over the past decade, but also due to the analysis of the rhetorical (or language-centered) determination of time that may clarify the frequent return of Baroque figures and themes in late-modernist traditions of criticism. In fact, in the first part of the essay that opens with a discussion of problems associated with the usefulness of the term “modernity” in opposition to “classical,” or “traditional,” theoretically one could substitute the term “Baroque” without sacrificing any coherence in de Man’s original argument, given the frequency of the same arguments in the Neobaroque traditions I have already referred to above.90 In his essay de Man begins his discussion of modernity by addressing a problem already expounded by Paz: the apparent contradiction of “spontaneity” and “memory,” “action” and “reflection,” modernity and history. There well may be an inherent contradiction within the notion of modernity itself, which is a way of acting and behaving, and such terms as “reflection” or “ideas” that play an important part in literature and history. Of course, this may already be a false opposition since it immediately determines a notion of ‘spontaneity” or “action” with a pure habitus, “a way of acting and behaving” that emerges from an unconscious or instinctual impulse. This would be true, except that buried within this apparent opposition is the first term of de Man’s criticism of an earlier stage of modernity that was founded, or sutured, to the nineteenth-century language of biologicism, or philosophies of life characterized as “vitalism.” I have outlined this language earlier on in the chapter on d’Ors, which often addressed cultural production within the metaphors of the body (health, welfare, purity,

Baroque and Modernity

57

disease, degeneration, decadence, pollution). This version has continued to have influence up to today and can often be detected in the themes of much contemporary cultural criticism, such as: parasitism, excremental themes or figurations of otherness, common tropes that describe language in terms of the body, or the body in terms of a poetics of language, prosthetic metaphors of technology, capital, machine assemblages, “les corps morceles,” Actually, modern criticism and philosophy are replete with such figures and it is very difficult to periodize, or separate the contemporary rhetoric of organicism from earlier versions, especially since current critics draw their metaphors from the same sources. As an aside, I would say that there is a distinction of the biological metaphor as it occurs in the texts of Nietzsche and Heidegger where the “imaginary forces” that corresponded to this rhetoric were very active in shaping the fantasies of the group (as in the racism and anti-Semitism that were later to be enacted by the State); consequently, this language had a certain immediate “currency” or exchange-value within the culture it diagnosed or reflected. However, even today this metaphorical system has already become dated, poetic or literary; meaning that its referential quality refers obliquely to the current cultural formations through the power of metaphor, or indirectly through “literary allusion.” This does not mean that racism and genocide do not still exist; rather, that the terms of “the social imaginary” that sutures racism to language and power do not always correspond to those of a paranoid, or fascist, phantasm of the social body. In fact, I would say that these figures offer less of an effective analysis of a current cultural and psychological formation in that they treat it according to a code that gains an immediate “currency” with an academic or literary audience (the way, for example, a certain pleasure in “re-cognizing” the Odyssey through the segmented journey of Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses). It is the pleasure of receiving “allusion” that constitutes the experience of literature, according to Genette, and the status of the text as a palimpsest of another that could describe these phenomena of recognition that informs much modern literary criticism. These observations do not form a digression on the subject of modernity, since they offer an example of what Paz earlier referred to as the problem of repetition (inter-textuality, analogy, allusion), to which we will return below in our discussion of the principle of repetition that informs de Man’s concept of literary modernity.

58

On the (New) Baroque

To return to our commentary on de Man’s essay, his own reference to this metaphorical system is addressing something more important by noticing that the dominant cultural allegory of the nineteenth­century vitalism has now become a rhetorical, or literary, trope of the modernist tradition. In fact, he underscores how the determination of the rhetoric of temporality that corresponds to this early concept of modernity is still very strong, particularly around the thematic of forgetting. ‘Life’ is conceived not just in biological but temporal terms as the ability to forget whatever precedes a present situation…. This ability to forget and to live without historical awareness exists not only at the animal level. Since ‘life’ has an ontological as well as biological meaning, the condition of animality persists as a constitutive part of man. Not only are there moments when it governs his actions, but these are moments when he re-establishes contact with his spontaneity and allows his truly human nature to assert itself, Moments of genuine humanity thus are moments in which all anteriority vanishes, annihilated by the power of an absolute forgetting.91

De Man’s commentary in the above passage is interspersed between citations of Nietzsche on the distinction between the man who remembers and the man who acts, between the flash of spontaneity and tepid water of reflection, between life defined as absolute forgetting and non-life that defines just about anything else. Here, we find probably one of the best examples of de Manian irony. It is an irony that could be missed completely, drastically altering the meaning of de Man’s version of modernity, unless one noticed that the word life appears, each time, in quotation marks (as in so-called “life”). Otherwise, de Man repeats word for word the rhetoric of Nietzsche that corresponded to a nineteenth-century philosophical language—that is, word for word, concept for concept—but from a position that remains distant and exterior to this language (for example, “animality,” “spontaneity,” “forgetting,” “the herd,” “genuine humanity,” “our human destiny”); finally, a position that is only indicated, in the text, by the discursive citation of the principal term, so-called “life.” The human, defined by the modern, is a species whose exceptional characteristic, which distinguishes its animality from all others, is its inability to forget. We note here that, traditionally defined by philosophies of life, this exceptional characteristic also marks or brands the human

Baroque and Modernity

59

animal as superior, since this inability to forget also marks the finitude proper of this animal as well as the condition of consciousness; that is, it marks “ability to die” qua singularity that exists apart from the member of a species that can be substituted or replaced. Consequently, de Man follows this citation with an important notice on the status of the rhetoric of modernity he is using self-reflexively: We are touching here upon the radical impulse that stands behind all genuine modernity when it is not merely a descriptive synonym for contemporaneous­ness or passing fashion. Fashion (mode) can sometimes be only what remains of modernity after the impulse has subsided, as soon—and this can be almost at once—as it has changed from being an incandescent point in time into a reproducible cliché, all that remains of an invention that has lost the desire that produced it. Fashion is as the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that the fire actually took place.92

Concealed in these remarks, de Man is calling attention to a form of modernity that is already experienced as repetition, as a “reproducible cliché,” like those just cited to describe modernity with the metaphors of life, or those that he cites to describe the loss of inspiration (flames, heat, frigidity and ashes). However, in the metaphor of the ashes left from the fire is an important remark about the historical character of repetition that governs “modernity”: the finitude of language itself. That is, like the pile of ashes left behind in the wake of the fire, the “trace” that de Man compares to the linguistic cliché (the ‘sign” of what is post-modo, or “after the fashion”) cannot reveal any image of the “uniquely shaped flame,” but only attests to the bare fact that the fire took place. Within the very cliché of the fire, de Man elicits a fundamental problem of a modernity that founds itself upon an act of forgetting (a rhetoric of temporality), and yet still reconstructs this act in figures that bear too much of a resemblance to empirical forms of memory and forgetting, or the subjective rejection and denial of an element of the past, of a “past” itself that still resembles too much the past of an empirical present, that is, the problem of metaphor. With this observation, de Man notes an uncritical phase of modernity that extends and continues up to include the current moment. This

60

On the (New) Baroque

uncritical phase can be defined as a modernism that is unconscious of its own strategies of generating narratives of historical continuity, “and being part of a generative scheme that extends far back into the past.” This naivety belongs to those narratives of modernity that mistake the event itself for the “sign” used to designate it. This would necessarily include those “signs” that become habitual or that are employed “after a fashion” (mode) in defining a manner or conduct that can be associated with the prescriptive forms of modernity. (We might recall here Kafka’s imperative command of modernity, “act in such a way that you give the gods something to do.”) Thus, de Man is critical of a certain prescriptive gesture of modernity as being in “bad faith,” and envisages a “critical historian” of modernity as being able to distinguish the event from the signs that designate it, who discovers that the major trope of modernity (that is, forgetting or rejection of the past) is not really directed against the past and does not resemble forgetting in an empirical sense, but rather is an action directed against the language that a critic uses to designate or represent the past that is bound up in the earlier language used to represent it “the rejection of the past is not so much an act of forgetting as an act of critical judgment directed against himself.”93 In some ways, this observation echoes Paz’s earlier observations on modernity. For example, let’s recall the figure of “spontaneity” used in the beginning of the essay to describe the value of action as “a way of acting and behaving” that can be traditionally ascribed to the two versions of modernity which de Man cites as being “exemplary”: Nietzsche’s and Baudelaire’s. Here, action can be defined as “vital,” “creative,” “destructive,” or “youthful,” that is, representing the active forces of “ de nouveau” in opposition to the passive and regressive forces of culture and history, memory and reflection. In actuality, what de Man illustrates is the peak or crest of a “representation of the present” (Baudelaire) occupied by the gesture of modernity, which can be described as the point of a fold that bears two sides: on the first side belongs the subject of an “act” which inaugurates the new and is defined by its ahistorical spontaneity and its imperative or prescriptive command to “Forget x” (or to go unconscious in the immediacy of a present without past or future); on the other side belongs the position of a “reflective” consciousness that is occupied by a historical subject that receives this command (in other words, who makes of it an object of experience or understanding) by selecting from a range

Baroque and Modernity

61

of historical occasions something to represent the subject of this imperative. (This representative subject can easily be selected from a number of common themes such as “God,” “Man,” “The Universal,” “the Author,” “History,” or even “Literature” itself.) Here, de Man retains an image of this act or prescribed action that is determined by an uncritical immediacy, unconsciousness, and “non-knowledge” in analogy to a kind of action that decides conclusively, that divides the present from the past, and is founded upon the image of parricide that is being addressed to a mythical entity called “youth.” Hence, de Man reveals the “bad faith” implied in advocating self-knowledge to a younger generation, “demanding that it act blindly, out of self-forgetting that one is unwilling or unable to achieve oneself [which] forms a pattern all too familiar in our own experience to need comment.”94 This is a very interesting point of the argument since de Man cites the reproductive or pedagogical schema that replaces historical duration to narrate the history of modernity. At the very moment where modernism rejects all continuity with the past, it itself unconsciously invokes a narrative of continuity with the generation who will reconstruct its own actuality (its “now”) as the veritable “sign” of history. Accordingly, “modernity becomes a principle of origination and turns at once into a generative power that is itself historical.”95 In other words, the concept of modernity itself becomes identified with the foundational violence of myth, with the “origin” of time, its beginning. And yet, as to the meaning of its own act, or the historical duration within which this act is inscribed, modernity neither has nor can have any effective knowledge. This is because, with the rejection of any understanding of its own present from the historical series that has conditioned its place, this knowledge has also “foreclosed” any possible criteria of what could be called a “reflective judgment of historical duration.” This foreclosure—what could be called an epochal psychosis—is what conditions the modern critic’s inability to project the telos or outcome of any deliberative action; therefore, “modernity now appears as the horizon of a historical process that has to remain a gamble.”96 In fact, such a criterion can only be constructed afterward, by those who “interpret” and determine its meaning, who situate it within a text that evaluates its failure or its success, and who produce a fictional narrative that rejoins what it had placed asunder, and who provides the narrative of its activity that gives an intentional and causal explanation that would

62

On the (New) Baroque

re-link the past it now occupies (in the sense of an accomplished project or program) to the present it has prepared. Thus, “reflective” judgment can only be provided by the subject who arrives on the scene post-modus, by the postmodern, who occupies the present and the enthusiasm constitutive of modernist aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, we must bear in mind, as de Man himself cautions, “that terms such as ‘after’ and ‘follows’ do not designate actual moments in a diachronic succession, but are used purely as metaphors of duration,” in the etymological sense of meta-phoren: a carrying across and over, even a translation, that follows the edges of the fold that is described above, combining or reconciling the image of an act with its reflection, a “combination that would achieve a reconciliation between the impulse toward modernity and the demand of the work of art to achieve duration.”97 In other words, after establishing a conception of modernity on the Nietzschean and Baudelairean concept of “vitalism” (the radical forgetting and suppression of anteriority in the instant), de Man then turns to reveal the inherent problems of stability and the recurrence of the past that strike against this very foundational gesture—passivity, memory and history. And yet, because he observes that the relation between “modernity” and “history” can no longer be figured as an opposition between the present and the past, de Man’s solution therefore is to privilege the modern mode of “literature” as the “fictional narration of this movement,” in other words, as an allegory of modernity itself. This, at least, corresponds to the first moment of a certain mode of being, called literature. It soon appears that literature is an entity that exists not as a single moment of self-denial, but as plurality of moments that can, if one wishes, be represented—but this is a mere representation—as a succession of moments or duration.98

What de Man in the above passage calls “literature” must be distinguished from “belles lettres” or classical poetics, but more closely corresponds to ontological and rhetorical modes that are increasingly identified with the “Being of language” as such. Hence, the writer and reader become critical personages, and what de Man calls the “mode of being called literature” comes to articulate the succession of moments within the durations of modernity. And isn’t this succession of moments

Baroque and Modernity

63

captured in the “fictional narration of this movement” not also its history? In place of a narrative of history that maintains the “specificity” of its “mode of being,” the history that de Man envisages moves toward a series of “themes” that reveals the impatience with which it tries to move away from its own center. According to de Man, these themes replace the specificity of a historical narrative of a succession of moments (durée) with the various metaphors of duration itself De Man’s version of modernity runs parallel to that of Paz in conceiving of history no longer with a narrative diachrony, but as a “fictional narration of an enlarged present that contains a plurality of actual subject” which can be identified with a series of “modern themes.” De Man identifies these themes with the “points” that are actually occupied by one of several allegories of modernity that he had earlier called “the reproducible clichés” of the modern (the rhetoric of life, convalescence, deliberative rhetoric of forgetting the past, the destruction of history and culture). In short, these themes usher in the prescriptive phrases that a certain movement associated to modernity would define as part of its deliberative or political rhetoric of agency. What de Man calls “Literature,” therefore, loses its specificity in modern literary history: “The gap between the manifestos and the learned articles has narrowed to the point where some manifestos are quite learned and some articles—not all—are quite provocative.”99 Moreover, these themes become less and less concrete and substantial even while they are being invoked with increasing realism and mimetic rigor in the form of historical description, especially when it is defined as a form of “counter-modernity.” The more realistic and pictorial these themes become, the slighter the residue of the phenomena that might exist outside the language that already exists to frame its reality. All that remains is a mere outline, less than a sketch, more of a time-arabesque of the alternation between modern and anti-modern, or between Baroque and anti-Baroque. Through these observations on a number of traditions that can be associated with the modern—and I recall here my earlier statement that the Neobaroque can be substituted as one of the themes listed above—de Man is sketching the movement of modernity that, through its repetition, becomes at the same time more realistic and mimetic at the same time as it becomes less concrete and substantial. Therefore, its specificity can be defined by its outward and back motion that follows the contours of the

64

On the (New) Baroque

fold; a movement that links or narrates several “fictional points” in a performative or allegorical sense that is generative of history. In an echo of what Paz referred to as the “acceleration of history,” de Man refers above to the process whereby the original figures of a modern project become, in their historical reception, mere outlines of a steno (a form of writing approaching “shorthand”). Hence, the historical reception of modernity can be identified with the figure of a secretary who takes shorthand; the meaning of the original gesture has disappeared since its motion, or shape, is “très difficile à stenographer.” De Man repeats the earlier figure of the “original shape of the flame” that bears no resemblance to the traces it leaves behind in the pile of its ashes. In essence, what remains of the “new,” the sign, the school, the party, or movement, bears little resemblance to the “form of the new itself.” De Man comments on the error committed by those who mistake the sign for what it designates. In the mode of being called “Literature,” he envisages a “critical” reception of the act designated by the sign, and the sign itself as “a form of language that knows itself to be mere repetition, mere fiction and allegory, forever unable to participate in the spontaneity of action or modernity.”100 In effect, a critical reception of this “sign” must first situate its meaning rhetorically, as a form of writing, in order not to confuse its efficacy with an “act” that belongs to any historical agency, or subject, since “history is not a fiction.” In the end, the specificity of what de Man calls “the mode of literature” cannot be reduced to a series of positive marks or empirical facts, but rather to a duration that comprises the three moments of the outward and back movement characterized earlier on in our discussion of the metaphor of the Fold. This describes the attraction of modern art for what is not-art (for example, history, action, the moment or “now”) by which literature moves away from itself to posit a moment of “real action” and ‘spontaneity,” and then returns to itself through the history of its reflexive interpretation. From this movement, “literature” would become a process that cannot be defined exclusively by the activity of the writer, or positivist indices of a text or literary tradition, but must also include the series of “readers”—both naive and critical—who will provide this movement with its representation of actual, historical duration. Nevertheless, this representation of duration will remain, in the last analysis, metaphorical. “The continuous appeal of modernity, the desire to break out of literature

Baroque and Modernity

65

toward the reality of the moment, prevails and, in its turn, folding back upon itself engenders repetition and the continuation of literature.”101 What de Man is describing could very well be the process through which literature contracts what is non-literary into itself, to the point of losing its own specificity, until it is folded back and becomes a moment of literary history. This is why de Man seems to question whether this movement, since it is neither historical action nor history itself, exceeds or remains outside this movement if only because “history itself is composed of texts, “even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars and revolutions.”102 What seems left unquestioned is this performative sense of the “allegory of modernity” that seems to imply that this “new mode of being” called literature is now in a position to suture both the past and the future into an emblem of a unified present; or, to use the Kantian diction that was cited above, to provide its own “reflective criteria of judgment” since it has abandoned the diachronic image of time and history now stands for this metaphor of duration that a strong critic can attach the unfolding of a theme. What seems ambivalent in de Man’s reading is the identity of history it “elf, which is only identified as “not-fiction”: that is, following the allegorical movement of the fold, as the region of reference, positivity and empiricity that literature is first attracted by, only to transform this same referential movement (or gesture) back into its own rhetoric, which comes to be interpreted as “History.” This long excursus on de Man’s version of modernity allows us perhaps to recognize the figure of the modern, following the de Manian concept of “history,” as essentially constructed from a series of “themes” that belong to repeated attempts to establish the modern as “now.” Moreover, we might envisage the invocation of the Baroque itself as the attempt to unify these “themes” within a synthetic narrative—or architecture— which takes modernity itself as its object, As I have noted earlier, in part it represents an attempt to construct a modern critique of judgment that substitutes the moral value of the “new” for a position formerly held by the universal in the judgment of taste; however, this critique does not take the form of an architectonic, as it did in Kant, but pertains to the partial and heterogeneous points of view that represent the current field of critical debates around the notion of modernity itself: Perhaps we can now conceive of the difference between modernism and postmodernism, or between postmodernism and cultural criticism that now occupies the

66

On the (New) Baroque

current deliberative position of academic debates, to be simply the continuation and enlargement of modernity itself that both Paz and de Man have first described. The Neobaroque would be just one version of this modernity, which is more than simply consigning its meaning to that of “mere rhetoric.” As we will see in the writings of German Baroque historian Walter Benjamin in the next chapter, it is the role of the spectator and the specific enthusiasm that solicits the Baroque as a ‘sign of history” that now needs to be situated in what is essentially a “messianic” narrative of culture.

Chapter 6 The Baroque Angel: Walter Benjamin

I shall shake thy throne, disturb thy marriage bed, thy love, and thy contentment, and in my wrath do the utmost harm to king and kingdom.

Even though it would take a much longer study of the intellectual history that surrounds this issue, many of the historical and political themes I have just described in the previous chapter as belonging to a critical notion of modernity directly correspond to our present analysis of the Baroque. Briefly, I would define the concept of ideology in late European modernism as what the Gramscian critic Christine Buci-Glucksmann, following the writings of Michael Lowy and Migel Abensour, calls a “mystico-messianism” or a “meta-political” concept in modernism. l03 The most obvious example of this messianic concept of history has been drawn from the writings of Walter Benjamin, who has had a great influence on the work of later writers and philosophers on both continents. The central tenet of this historical messianism is the solicitation of a divine concept of violence that interrupts the course of time and initiates the future in a long “suspense.” (For example, Blanchot, Derrida, and others announce the determination of this suspension in the verbal construction of a future to come [à venir].) The function of this Messianism can be recognized by the “emotional intensity” it produces in the historical witness. (To understand the status of “emotion” here, we need to recall once more that Freud considered “emotional perception” to equal, if not to exceed, the degree of reality that external perception bears in conscious life.) However, it is necessary to see that the “effect” of the political here is being inscribed on the side of its reception, in the duration of its suspense (which can be figured in both its withdrawal and its approach), from its point of vanishing distance that can no longer be crossed in the immediacy of a deliberative act. This gesture opens the determination of the political to the “allegory of its origination,” which Benjamin would define as the purity of myth.

68

On the (New) Baroque

According to Buci-Glucksmann, the relation between this formulation of a “meta-political” concept (inaugurating what we can call the politics of suspense, or as the suspension of the political as such), and the classical rhetoric of utopia, is that the subjective experience of the political that is founded upon this emotional intensity flows from a belief in an absolute break, or rupture, with the past: “to a history marked by the sign of a radical insecurity, traversed by an element of instability and catastrophe, a conscience of rupture and of utopia.”104 The relation of this Benjaminian gesture (gestus) to the formulation that underlies the concept of modernity that is later employed by many postmodern theoreticians is this radical abolition, inversion, and reversal of the past prepares for the arrival of the “new.” In Benjamin, this abolition is explicitly founded in the German classical Baroque. Benjamin allies the messianic violence inaugurated by a historical demon or “new angel of history” (whose entrance onto the stage of history is a time of suspense, or anti-history) to one of the dominant themes that belongs to a Baudelairean modernity and can be described as the “feminization of culture” (that is, to the grand and profane Baudelairean myths of universal prostitution and the heroic cult of the woman-lesbian as the “heroine of modernity”). Although Benjamin’s concept of the Baroque culture can be seen as patently Romantic, the distinction between Benjamin and later postmodernists (such as BuciGlucksmann herself) is that Benjamin’s messianic (or mythic) vision of history was always placed in direct confrontation with the materialist and Marxist conception of history (more in line with Brecht). In other words, this situates Benjamin’s concept of the political in a dialectical tension between two forces which struggle over control of the “historical present”; Benjamin constructs a theological-political concept of history in which the hyphen signals a constant polemic or struggle between the messianic angel (or theology) and the angel of materialism (or history)—a struggle that takes place in the suspended present of the modern, where the sun hangs at its zenith eternally, and neither day nor night should vanquish the other absolutely. As an aside, concerning more recent philosophy one would need to ask whether those critics who have repeated Benjamin’s theological-political concept of history, such as Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, have also maintained this tension or polemic between two competing versions of modernity, or have simply allowed the mystico-messianic angel to triumph over its demonic materialist double.105

The Baroque Angel

69

Returning to Benjamin’s concept, the “interruption” of history is the intervention into a continuum of the everyday and profane images of time, replete with the operations of commerce, religion, the state and its mechanisms of control. This describes a natural and material determination of “historical time”: of compensation, wages, merchandise, pleasure and pain, promise and happiness. This is interrupted by the entrance of another time that is “spiritual” and “ahistorical”: the spiritual realm of ghosts and demons, dream visions, prophecies, ghouls returning from the grave, the dead seeking revenge on the living. For Benjamin, the notion of “interruption” has precisely this character of turning the mechanical and economic cyclical expressed in a culture of merchandise (as accumulation of experience, the fetishes of wealth and glory) into a time of justice: the cry for the redemption, the return of the repressed, and the call for revenge. This can be best represented by a divine violence that founds the character of the “general strike” that appears as an object of reflection in Benjamin’s essay “The Critique of Violence”: the conversion of the economic and material time of labor and production into a time of justice in which the “natural” effects of economic and social violence become reflective concepts of a class experience and of a “new” political subject.l06 Here, the original mythical violence of Marxist revolution is transported into the region of culture, where this image of general strike is colored by a Baudelairean image of modernity. Hence, Benjamin finds in Baudelaire’s satanic language of sexuality and feminine archetypes the modern equivalent of a Baroque theatre of Gryphius. Like the spirits of the dead that replace the function of the deus ex machina in the German Trauerspiel, the demonic and satanic figures of culture introduce a “witching hour” into the historical present of the modern, converting the first image of time into a cultural theater, and the stage of the theater into a trial. The identities of the dead and historically vanquished who return through the rift opened in the historical present can be illustrated by the following citation of Gryphius which identifies them as the victims of history, or as being the “states of exception” within the same narrative of social progress: Alas, I die, yes, yes, accursed one. I die, but thou hast still to fear my vengeance: even beneath the earth shall I remain thy bitter enemy and the vengeance seeking tyrant of the kingdom of Messina. I shall shake

70

On the (New) Baroque

thy throne, disturb thy marriage bed, thy love, and thy contentment, and in my wrath do the utmost harm to king and kingdom.l07

We can see in this threat the apotheosis of the angelus novellus, the “angel of modernity” (who represents the other face of Benjamin’s messianic angel of history) espoused by Baudelaire’s version of the modern. Its figures of moral offence and politics of transgression, its feminine eroticism, its glorification of evil and aesthetization of the grotesque represent its revenge and “foretell the end of a tyrant.” These figures represent the spiritual world of the dead, the victims of history’s perpetual progress who are summoned to become witnesses that establish the “document of Barbarism” upon which the concept of historical progress is founded. Consequently, in Benjamin’s “imaginary archaeology of the present,” it is particularly the recent inventions of technology (the photograph, the cinema, the telephone) that are captured, becoming the expressive mediums of this “spiritual and ahistorical realm.” Since these inventions have not yet been fully determined by economic and social forces, they can receive their significance (provided by an imaginary determination that follows their “shock” effect within the consciousness of the masses) the modern equivalent of the Greek oracle; they become the phantasmatic instruments of prophecy, dreams, apocalyptic visions and auguries.l08 In a very concrete sense, their “instrumentality” is precisely what is open to being “symbolically captured” and contested and litigated by the modern poetry of the avant-garde; their significance as vehicles of commerce and expansion can be inverted into the phantasmagoric vehicles of expression and “shock.” The significance, for Benjamin, is that the imaginary forces of modernism release for the first time in history the figure of a “bloodless revolution,” whereby the positive and legal character of State and economic violence can become a “reflective” and hermeneutic concept of class conflict without “spilling a drop of blood.” In this image of a bloodless cultural revolution, moreover, we have a constellation of cultural forces that take as their goal the general destruction of Culture itself as a form of historical imagination founded by the myth of state violence, against which the creative confrontation of “divine violence” is launched in the contest over the meaning of History. The categorical imperative of modernity’s unfinished project can be found in a formula that Benjamin first ascribes to Kafka: “Act in such

The Baroque Angel

71

a manner that you give the gods something to do.” The principal reference here is to a passage from the Phenomenology of Mind, where Hegel describes the function of the Epic narrative as the invocation, or call, through the mimesis of the “voice of the dead” (mnemosyne, memory), that cuts a “ditch” in the earth, creating a rift or crack in time, through which the dead return to seek revenge on the living. It is only in such moments that the gods have “something to do”—to provide a measure of justice, victory and kudos—that there is the chance of sealing or closing up the ditch in memory and restoring order to time. Behind the “universality” of Kafka’s categorical imperative is the epic figuration of the gods as the populace (the mass of spectators, the crowd) who are roused to revolutionary action, to actually “doing” something, only when there is an offence, a crime, a scandal (a public spectacle, such as the sacrifice of a God, or the execution of a tyrant-king). Within Benjamin’s strategic cultural program of modernism, therefore, we might notice that a fundamental shift has taken place in what I will call the narrative economy of European culture-philosophy. The very determination of the concept of “Culture,” as the cultivation, accumulation and preservation of objects of experience, finds its purest expression in the tourist-explorer who takes snapshots of a strange and marvelous land and its inhabitants, then returns to “develop” them. Placing them in a book, or on display on ceremonial occasions, the cultural tourist-explorer shares her experience with others by creating the narrative testimony to accompany and to verify what she witnessed. Culture, then, is fundamentally articulated through a moment of “return of goods into circulation,” in commercium, which conditions the temporality and aesthetic value of the experience for the spectator. The operations of the tourist with his camera (but also the explorer with his maps and logbooks, the critic-ethnographer with her esoteric or aboriginal codices) are conditioned a priori by a form of temporality that “gives” the Other as the raw material for the narrative development of an experience of Progress. It is against this narrative that Benjamin launches his counter-discourse in the ghostly determination of experience in the photograph—the phantasmagoric value of the camera being its sudden point of “intervention”—however, this is often obscured by those who fail to read Benjamin’s writings on technology strategically, rather than “nostalgically,” as if in the loss of aura Benjamin was mourning the loss

72

On the (New) Baroque

of the “moment of return” into experience that belongs to the first definition of Culture. According to this first definition, all the victims of history, as well as the accumulation of cultural experience itself, are “redeemed” by the narrative of progress that guides history and provides its violence with a sufficient reason in which it appears Necessary. As Benjamin writes, “The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.”109 This “temporal index” is the rate of exchange, the med, menses (meaning, measure or mean) of economy upon which the price of experience is both fixed and paid—by which a “return” on one’s labor is guaranteed. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments, Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l’ordre du jour—and that day is Judgment Day.110

We might see in this passage an allusion to the Platonic court that appears in the Meno, the court where the dead judge the living (later taken up in the Christian account of the “last judgment,” or Dies Irae), that has been severed from its travel narrative and has been installed within another and opposing temporal definition of culture, the goal of which is to initiate history in a legal proceeding. The “temporal index” (the exchange rate established by a narrative economy) is precisely what is at issue here: the determination of the price for the past is open to litigation and judgment. This entails that the temporal economy or narrative of “culture” is no longer hinged to the same rational economy as history of progress (of commerce, or of Empire) and, thus, no longer functions as the “moment of return.” On the contrary, its operation in this sense is “suspended,” since a motion of stay is put in place until the end of the trial. This very technical and forensic sense of “suspense” or “interruption” is what Benjamin has in mind by the reference to the Nunc Stans in the famous statement that “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous empty time, but time filled by the presence of the “now” ( Jetztzeit).”111 Something quite striking occurs, however, at this point in Benjamin’s concept of the cultural work and the specific nature of the temporal experience that is attached to it, since to institute a “proceeding,” in

The Baroque Angel

73

the legal sense, against the dominant vehicle of History (the narrative of progress) is nothing else than to put Time itself on trial. Thus, the sense of cultural value is disarticulated from its economic and narrative movement, and rearticulated—strategically, or rhetorically, as in an argument from the prosecutor’s bench—along the affective axis of the second. This is supported by two constant themes in Benjamin’s work. According to the first recurrent theme, time is “presented” to experience in the moment of shock, where an affective image of this suspension is produced in the spectator of history as a feeling that establishes credibility and offers concrete evidence in which the technological and modern urban effects that display this shock value function as an exhibit for the prosecution. This notion of suspense also corresponds to the temporality instituted by the “proceeding” that lasts as long it takes to go through the processes of discovery, presentation, argumentation, and until a judgment, or decision has been made. Of course, anyone who has been involved in a legal proceeding or trial knows that time stops until the case has been decided (a suspension of time that French writer Maurice Blanchot later addressed by the phrase arrêt de mort). This same legalistic gesture can be found in Benjamin’s conception of the early Baroque theater. To place History on trial is not only to suspend its normal and economic meaning (of commerce, industry, culture and expansion as noted above in the figure of “the general strike”), or to suspend its ultimate determination in the experience of the spectator (who stands in a frozen stupor, unable to complete the experience that would provide meaning for the event), but to transform the whole of time into two constitutive moments: the present, which is defined as the “place” (the theatre, the courtroom that now encompasses the entire field of culture) from which the proceeding against time is launched, and the past, which is summoned up by the cultural critic and modernist poet by being transformed into a document that is completely “citable in all its moments”

Consequently, we might perceive in this account the institution of another narrative of culture that corresponds to the expression of latemodernism in Europe, but also to the formation of postmodernism in the Americas. At the commencement of the schism between a classical

74

On the (New) Baroque

concept of Culture and the institution of a more modern propagandistic and ideologically determined concept of popular culture, Benjamin had already discovered a “cryptic” (or “hauntological”) function operating at the basis of cultural experience, one which marked the political and juridical dimensions of modernist culture by defining the experience of memory and experience within the etymological sense that belongs to the Greek martyrion (“testimony”). Death, as the tragic form of life, is an individual destiny; however, as Benjamin observes, in the Baroque Trauerspiel it frequently takes the form of a communal fate, as if summoning all the participants before the highest court: In three days they must be judged: they are summoned before God’s throne; let them now consider how they will justify themselves. […] Whereas tragedy ends with a decision—however uncertain this may be—there resides in the essence of the Trauerspiel, and especially in the death-scene, an appeal of the kind that martyrs utter. As Benjamin further comments: The language of Pre-Shakesperian Trauerspiel has been aptly described as “a bloody legal dialogue.” The legal analogy may be reasonably taken further and, in the sense of the mediaeval literature of litigation, one may speak of the trial of the creature whose charge against death—or whomever else was indicted in it—is only partially dealt with and is adjourned at the end of the Trauerspiel [my emphasis].112

In these passages we can readily see the resemblance of this essentially Baroque theater (concerning the protest of the “creature” against death) to the cultural project of European modernism as defined by Benjamin (for whom the Baroque theatre becomes an allegory of its origin, or founding myth).What could be called a “culture of death” is instituted by the deliberative and aesthetic projects of European modernism, according to Benjamin’s understanding, in order to initiate a “bloody legal dialogue” between two opposing forces of modernity that will determine the meaning of cultural experience, in its last instance. This conflict will also determine the ultimate strategies of those who possess culture and the means of its production—on one side, the artists and modern

The Baroque Angel

75

intellectuals of the avant-garde and, on the other, the agents of the modern culture industry and the new technologists of propaganda—who will wage war over the identity and the enthusiasm of the modern spectator. Of course, the nature of this contest over the position and the consciousness of the spectator recalls Maravall’s analysis of the original Baroque in a strikingly uncanny manner, and perhaps further grounds Benjamin’s own conception of the culture of the Baroque as the origin of Modernity. Following Derrida, I am employing the phrase “the culture of death” to designate the two deaths, or economies of death, that are installed on each side of the schism that modernism introduces into the field of cultural experience. As Derrida has remarked, this schism could entail a different partition and narrative treatment of the substance of death: The very concept of culture may be synonymous with the culture of death, as if the expression ‘the culture of death’ were ultimately a pleonasm and tautology. But only such a redundancy can make legible the cultural difference and the grid of borders. Because every culture entails a treatise or treatment of death, each culture treats the end according to a different partition. The partition would remain at all times human, and intra-anthropological.113

It is this “human and intra-anthropological” partition that concerns us most because it has been monumentalized by Enlightenment Reason. Hence, the advent of modernity in the West poses itself as an absolute partition not only between nature and culture, first of all, but as the historical logic (or ratio, as Foucault called it) that informs the new partitions between “the West” and all other cultures as well. Consequently, although the meaning of culture still amounts to a “cultivation” or “culture of death,” the meaning of death (or finitude) in the modern period has been fundamentally altered by the sheer number of other cultural narratives (necessarily entailing other anthropological partition between life and death) which have been subsumed under one “culture of death,” and thus one “intra-anthropological partition” that now goes hand in hand with the determination of the cultural sovereignty of the West. As Derrida writes in response to Philippe Aries’s statement, “Death has changed”:

76

On the (New) Baroque

One must go further: culture itself, culture in general, is essentially … a history of death [histoire de mort—drawing on the resonance that the French histoire receives from ‘story’]. There is no culture without a cult of ancestors, a ritualization of mourning and sacrifice and modes of burial, even if they are only for the ashes of incineration (i.e. columbarium, tombs and crypts).114 The statement in the above passage that there is no culture without a theatre of death and mourning really defines Benjamin’s view of the modern cultural work that finds its ultimate social meaning as the ritualization of both mourning and sacrifice. We have seen the logic of this absolute border installed within a cryptic identification with the other’s testimony (martyrion); it is through the specific to the cryptic identification with the other’s “destiny” that one finds in the cultural works that mourn this destiny (of the repressed or marginalized subjects of history who have paid the price of Western progress), to quote Benjamin, “this narrative frequently takes the form of a communal fate where all the participants are summoned before the highest court” to ask how they will justify themselves. Thus, the “adjournment” and indecision that Benjamin underscores in the Trauerspiel, opposed to the moment of decision that ends the classical form of Tragedy, determines the indefinite duration of this “time of suspense” as the duration of Modernity. The end could result only in the institution of a “temporal index” by which the past is redeemed—a price in which the crime is paid off. The ultimate meaning of this indefinite time is underscored by the fact that the participants have no measure by which they could fix the limits, or the borders, of their mourning; they know neither how far their “culture of death” extends, nor the limits of the “Other’s” martyrdom. Here, we need to remind ourselves at this point that the economy of this time of indetermination is distinctly modern, and was only created within the last century as the perspective or point of view of the cultural producer who, as a social actor, no longer identifies with the dominant class interests of those who determine the meaning of History and Culture according to their own ends. Therefore, many of the terms and themes, including rhetorical prosecution of history and the overt identification with its victims and its martyrs, must be understood in light of this “bloody legal dialogue” (to employ Benjamin’s phrase again) over the sovereign agency of the cultural work—that is to say, whose interests will the meaning of cultural experience ultimately serve? To return to the earlier elements we found at the basis of the Baroque culture (the spectator, enthusiasm, the body, the schism, the

The Baroque Angel

77

form of space), we find their new configuration within a modernist metapolitical concept of culture, which can be summarized by the following two principal traits: First, the complete schism between the narratives of culture and those of history, politics, law, economy proper: culture no longer responds to the “law of sowing and reaping” that structured the notion of experience and the “temporal index” that redeemed the past in the narrative of progress; rather the culture of the modern institutes a region where the basic laws and principles are placed in limbo, and where “time is out of joint”—a time whose experience is indefinite. Second, there is a consolidation between the position of the spectator with that of the critic and judge-arbiter, which amounts to the creation of a new social subject of knowledge, the avant-garde intellectual or “the cultural critic.” Within the culture of modernism, this also includes those who will later become the “professionals of alterity” who conceive the field of knowledge itself as a crime scene and who construct the events of history by following the traces into the realm of the dead and returning with evidence and testimony of the others, who will appear as history’s new martyrs.

Finally, we must ask what these new martyrs tell the living? Nothing, but what is “beyond the limits of their experience.” Such a testimony has become bound up with the identification of “cultural difference” which has no content, but is founded upon the purely formal trait of otherness that defines a new subject who appears either as “the state of exception,” or as the new “victim of History.” This is why I have referred to the identification with the martyr as a form of encryptment; the modern encrypts the “voice of the dead,” and this is often expressed in the poetic figuration of ” the Other’s voice which has eclipsed the vox populi of the people, or the crowd, that we found operating earlier on in the Introduction. In fact, we could show that the crowd, or the public, itself has dissolved into a pure rhetorical construction, and that it is present in the very structure of the appeal ad populum (as we saw in the examples of Genette and Paz), even though the appeal is directed at no one but the abstract position of the spectator, who is not after all a “people.”115 Rather the body of the crowd, or of the masses, only constitutes an architectural principle (like

78

On the (New) Baroque

the open and major boulevard, the piazza, the forum, the star), as the platform upon which the modern critic stages her conflict over the “signs of history.” (Perhaps this is why one of the principal statements that has been espoused after modernism is that “there is no people.”) Likewise, in the situation that conditions the appearance of the “Other” as a pure figure, there must be, first and foremost, no “others” as such. Deprived of any real access to the other’s experience, the modern critic creates a new epic representation of History, a “spectacle of rage and anger” that seems the equivalent of the “Other’s” suffering. At the same time, this sense of making (poiesis) entails the animation of the “Other’s” dead voice, which is then offered as evidence of her martyred existence. Basically, this is why no “real Others” can speak in their own voices, because they are dead a priori. If they were not dead, they could not testify (martyreo) as to their death; they would have no relation to my death, bear no knowledge of my future death, of the death of my “culture of death,” or of what the world looks like after “my death” (of “Old Europe,” “the West,” “Reason,” or “Empire”). Whether we are speaking here of the “Other” who is poetically figured as woman, the child, the insane, the primitive, or the colonized and racialized subject; these will only appear within the text of the modern as pure poetry shorn of any real collective existence. That is to say, the voices of these dead and historically martyred will become identified with a new form of writing itself, one that has become “exemplary,” and at the same time, all too postmodern.

PART THREE Baroque and Postmodern

Chapter 7 The Baroque thesis: Michel Foucault

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the reception history of the Baroque in the postmodern era is also the reception of a certain tableau (picture-surface) painted around 1656 by Velásquez, Las Meninas. This painting can even be assigned the value of a topos, in the rhetorical sense of a “topic” one cites to have something to say on a given subject, or in a particular class of argumentation. The rhetorical occasion, of course, is the argument for the postmodern, or the “new.” And as we have already established, this implies a great many assumptions, some of which are disjointed and contradictory: the rejection of continuity with an earlier representation of culture or judgments of “taste,” the negation of a notion of temporality that is founded upon historical teleology or a narrative of perpetual progress, the rejection of “verticality” (or transcendence), and the ludic and transgressive strategies of opposition staged against a bourgeois commodity culture; finally, the glorification of evil, or the feminization of the cultural field itself. In The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel identified many of these traits with the somewhat mythic figure of “Womankind”—“the everlasting irony in the life of community”—which the Russian Hegelian Alexandre Kojeve later identified as the specific forms of cultural resistance that have been made possible or have emerged historically alongside the dominant values of bourgeois individualism.116 We have already seen aspects of this concept of culture employed in the writings of Benjamin and d’Ors, particularly in the last chapter concerning Benjamin’s adoption of Baudelaire’s poetic heroines of modernity. One could say, therefore, that the Baroque itself constitutes an extremely elastic, variable and mobile “topic” (or theme, following de Man) that can be enlisted at any point to serve the interests of establishing a postmodern sensibility. We can be even more specific in the location of this topic within postmodern criticism by referring to certain pages of Foucault’s monumental Les Mots et les choses, pages that many Neo-baroque theorists often cite as authority for the concept of a new

82

On the (New) Baroque

or modern episteme. The place these critics, including Gérard Genette and Severo Sarduy, refer to is where Foucault describes this “new arrangement of visibility.” It is in his analysis of the composition of the figures in Las Meninas that Foucault first discerns the relationship between the gazes of spectator, subject, and painter are distributed around a blank or hollow point, radically breaking with classical tables of representation and signaling the arrival of a distinctly modern drama of visibility. The importance of Foucault’s interpretation of the rupture between classical and modern forms of representation becomes evident when it is placed in the context of the historical premise of a singular break or cataclysm that took place sometime in the seventeenth century around the same time that Velásquez was composing his masterpiece, and that this rupture is what inaugurated the long duration of modernity. Moreover, Velásquez’s Las Meninas, itself, often functioned as the emblem of the European cultural and philosophical movements that were loosely gathered under the name of “post-structuralism” in the late-1970s through the middle of the 1980s, particularly in the United States, before this name lost its critical impact in a culture where structuralism proper never constituted a distinct event in either philosophy or the social sciences, but had already been assimilated under the name of “deconstruction.”117 This common topic is important in two ways. First, it establishes an alliance between modern and postmodern principles of representation and those supposedly introduced by the Baroque in the seventeenth century. It establishes an analogy with Foucault’s interpretation of the deep re­arrangement within the organization of the tables of knowledge—basically, in the arrangement between “words and things”—that occurs between these two epochs. This re-arrangement bears no causal relationship, however, in Foucault’s analysis, and it is often described as an rupture, or epistemic forgetting, that cuts deep into the interstices to disperse any possible historical representation of these configurations in their original form. In some ways, Foucault’s theory of the rupture of the tables of representation resembles the Freudian theory of the primal scene, which is followed by the subsequent period of latency in which the original phantasm undergoes a strange series of distortions and reversals until the original scene no longer resembles its contemporary avatars. Here, we might recognize in Foucault’s thesis of epochal rupture another, more intricate, version of modernity that was earlier associated with

The Baroque Thesis

83

Hölderlin’s of a caesura between modern and Greek notions of unity in his theory of tragedy, as the result of which the modern appears as something “uncanny” (Das Unheimliche), as fundamentally fragmented and “formless.” This will be important in the context of my discussion of Genette in the following chapter. Concerning Foucault’s concept of epistēmē, in his Neo-Baroque: A Sign if the Times, Omar Calabrese writes of Foucault’s concept of episteme: There are epochs in which change in mentality is so radical (as in the seventeenth century) that one can justifiably speak of a rupture with the past. This is a strikingly important idea that undermines one of the principles of traditional historiography, that of causality understood as a necessary relation­ship between ‘before’ and ‘after.’118

In one sense, the application of causality in the interpretation of a “rupture” between epochs would logically prohibit any such analogy, except that it speculatively accounts for the transplantation of the Baroque from its original historical contexts) to become the name for a collection of generic traits (or styles) that can be reassembled in a “morphology,” as in the argument of dOrs. This analogy also explains why our previous description of the modern (or Neobaroque) does not link these traits to a specific historical causality (and here, we might recall de Man’s reduction of history itself to a series of “themes” that are juxtaposed within a metaphor of duration, that is, periodization). What is more important, for our purposes, is that the Baroque would not be used to designate a historical period, but becomes itself the mark, the “stenograph,” or “sign” of this rupture in an allegorical sense. Again, de Man’s conception of the stenograph, taken from Baudelaire’s commentary on the “phantom” of Constantin Guy’s gestus, is perhaps the most compelling illustration of the status of the “sign” of the Baroque as being the “time-arabesque,” or the “cipher” that becomes a kind of short-hand for this “rupture.” We might also recall the passage of Genette that was cited earlier on, where the concept of the Baroque is assembled around what it exemplifies or expresses, as well what Genette calls the “typically Baroque” (a typos), which already implies a “typology” of Baroque characters or “themes” as in de Man’s reading of Baudelaire. It is enough to invoke its sign to

84

On the (New) Baroque

establish the “taking­place” of what it designates; moreover, this invocation explicitly takes the form of the citation of Foucault’s reading of Las Meninas. In an essay I will discuss in the following chapter, at a critical point of an argument that attempts to establish the temporal logic of “un Baroque récit by Saint Amant in continuity with postmodern narrative principles, Genette authorizes this reading by the following claim to the significance of Velásquez’s tableau as interpreted by Foucault: That is sufficient at this point to refer to the pages of Michel Foucault, in Les Mots et les Choses, on the ‘representation of the representation’ in Vélasquez’s Las Meninas, and to recall the date of this painting: 1658.119

In accordance with the theme of rupture, here the meaning of this “date” would not refer to a periodic or historical legend, but rather to the deep incision within time itself that divides everything into “before” and “after.” This brings us to the second sense, which appears to contradict the first in some way, since the common reference to Foucault’s reading of Velásquez is often gathered around the principle of “representation of representation,” or “inter-textuality.” This would appear contradictory in the sense that any representation (or what I have termed “anamnesis”) of an earlier mode of representation would be effectively barred by the thesis of rupture that institutes an essential “non-relation between two historical epochs, an irrecoverable forgetting (or caesura) between “before” and “after.” As Foucault describes this epochal break, “there is nothing now, either in our knowledge or in our reflection, that still recalls even the memory of that being.120 And yet, as we will immediately see, this is not entirely the case. In fact, this marks Foucault’s brilliant revision of Heidegger’s ontological thesis, and concerns one of the most problematic and naive prejudices of modernist belief: an ideal conception of forgetting which would annihilate the past—what I have referred to above as a naive or uncritical concept of modernity in the discussion of de Man— but which is continually “haunted” by the past’s return (or revenant, as Derrida later called the spectral figure of past’s “ré-sistence”), as well as the illumination of its trace that glows in the passivity of material retention in memory—and, specifically, in the materiality of Language which frustrates any attempt to extinguish the past. As Proust once remarked,

The Baroque Thesis

85

if one could imagine the figure of modern man to include the aura of his memory, one would see a gargantuan and monstrous figure, a colossus. As we have already seen, this ideal forgetting or liberation from the past has resulted in the repetition of the past without memory; or, as we have seen in de Man’s commentary, this moment results in the reproduction and suspension of the meaning of the “act” within a generational schema that corresponds to a Freudian concept of repression. Of course, one finds penultimate expression in Benjamin’s messianic “Angel of History,” who enters Deus ex machina onto the stage of Culture and engages a bloody and violent spasm of “revenge against time and its—It Was” (Nietzsche). In Foucault’s account of this rupture, however, the effect of this force of forgetting touches only the complete anamnesis of an earlier episteme, which is differentiated from the material tables of representation. Consequently, forgetting entails only the disappearance of that uniform layer in which the “visible and expressible were endlessly interwoven,” which caused things and words to be separated from one another. Of course, “things” and “words,” the seen and the spoken (or read), remained; it was only the space of their articulation, one with another, that was submitted to what Foucault often describes as a “dispersion,” which is his metaphorical representation of the “breaking-up” and “fragmentation” of an earlier epistemic form of visibility and sayability—the dispersion and dissipation of views across the surface of being, the smashing of the tables of representation, the splintering of its signs. In turn, this results in the new arrangement of the “order of things.” As Foucault describes this upheaval that lies at the origin of modernity: This involved an immense reorganization of culture, a reorganization of which the Classical age was the first and perhaps most important stage, since it was responsible for the new arrangement in which we are still caught—since the Classical age separates us from a culture when the signification of signs did not exist, because it was re-absorbed into the sovereignty of the like; but in which their enigmatic, monotonous, stubborn, and primitive was being shown in an endless dispersion [my emphasis].121

Consequently, Foucault’s term “dispersion” characterizes the nature of this break in the following way:

86

On the (New) Baroque

First, discourse loses its former position of sovereignty which “ensured the initial, spontaneous, unconsidered deployment of representation in a table” (that is, language loses its resemblance to discourse, becoming less transparent and more opaque); Second, at the same time that this occurs, language “detaches” from the representation of things and this detachment is accompanied by its dispersion into several forms which are themselves “objects” of epistemological inquiry and specialization (grammar, philology, literature, economy, history, anthropology); Third, although language no longer exists primarily as discourse attached to the truth and intentions of a speaking subject, it nevertheless expresses in all its manifestations an enigmatic core of secrecy that Foucault refers to as “the being of language” which can be designated best by the particular “manifestation” of language in modern literature. For this reason, language can no longer be thought of on the basis of signification, since there is a stubborn kernel of the “unsaid,” an opacity of sense that is now attached to its being. Finally, fourth, as Foucault claims, “It may be said in a sense that ‘literature’ as it was constituted and so designated on the threshold of the modern age, manifests, at a time when it was least expected, the reappearance, of the living being of language.”122

At this point in Foucault’s account, however, several things must be noted. First, that it is a narrative. Foucault is telling “a story” (un récit) of how language disappeared around the seventeenth century only to reappear later in the early twentieth century when Nietzsche made the central task of philosophy a radical reflection on grammar and philology. This narrative has its precedents in ghost stories, but more particularly in the critical and philosophical myth of Hölderlin’s madness in France: thus, the “enigmatic being of language” resembles a certain myth that is capable of representing the being of language itself in a tragic sense. This “account” of language would also be the account of its modern heroic daseins (the poet, the madman, the child), which have been figured as the angelic beings of both modern and postmodern reflections on the enigmatic being of language. Second, the central importance that Foucault places on language’s “reappearance” as a presence that cannot be completely absorbed by its function follows Heidegger’s critical analysis

The Baroque Thesis

87

of the sign in Sein und Zeit as “equipmentality” and the manifestation of the sign’s fundamental character when it is suddenly broken or “out of use” (like a knot in a handkerchief that suddenly appears differently when one no longer remembers what it was there to signify). This corresponds to a shift in its ontological register by which language can no longer be designated by its use as “ready-to-hand” (Zuhanden), but becomes, like the stubborn persistence of the knot in the handkerchief that has lost its signifying value as a “sign,” pure “present-to-hand” (Vorhanden). In certain states of silence and stammering where this manifestation is most present, including poetry, language appears in such a state that its “essence” is in a particular state of “disuse” or non-use. In these exceptional states, meaning is either absent or missing; either we have forgotten it, or “the meaning of meaning” can no longer be remembered (hence the importance of the poem and all the poetical reflections on remembrance and the poem as the essence of language in Heidegger’s later writings). Finally, if the “being of language” can no longer be designated by the being who speaks (that is, by discourse) then its very being-there (dasein) becomes a question of its dissemblance and non-resemblance to the subject who speaks. Here, the differential representation of language with regard to the being that speaks embodies all the problems of the “subject of enunciation” that have been taken up differently by psychoanalysis (the lie, the defiles of the signifier), and by Marxian critique of ideology. Foucault signals the last sense of this shift by noting that the proposition “I lie” posed a problem for classical representation that bore directly on the truth, whereas the modern problem can be signaled in the statement “I speak,” which introduces the essential point of dispersion or non-resemblance of the manifestation of language to the being that speaks, namely, the speaking subject. Aside from these considerations on Foucault’s theory of language, for our purposes it is important to see that what is signified by “literature” is the principle of the “representation of representation,” or “intertextuality,” a principle that governs many modernist literary practices. The dispersion of classical tables of representation was caused by the “disappearance” of the thin membrane that ran between words and things, statements and visibility. This already implies that, by its re-organization within a new episteme, the condition of a positive transformation in which a new arrangement between words and things would

88

On the (New) Baroque

be articulated by the processes associated with what Foucault calls the “duplicated representation.” This already forecasts the postmodern concept of “inter-textuality”: the co-presence of several texts in one, or the meta-narrative principle of “the text within the text.” This concept functions explicitly around the transformation that the first text undergoes in being included in another text through the operation of citation, allusion, plagiarism; or its metamorphosis through the processes of irony, parody, pastiche, satire, etc. This process works, on one level, by means of a reduplication both demonstrative and decorative, of capturing that text or name, of enclosing and concealing it, of designating it in turn by other names that were the deferred presence of the first text or name, its secondary sign, its figuration, its rhetorical panoply. As we already noted above, it is a matter of submitting the texts and tables of an earlier sovereign representation to a new organization, or the destruction of “knowledge” by literary parody. Seeing always expresses a principle of power; it implies a pouvoir, an “I am capable,” “I can see.” The interplay between a rhetoric of the Baroque that has been identified with the organ of seeing—even seeing what lies hidden or latent in the word, or what remains un-said in the text—demonstrates a resistance to those forms of visibility that prevent or prohibit sight, that eclipse the desired object from view, that isolate and separate the perspectives of different participants—a power, finally, that prevents one from saying this or that. If there is a forgetting implied in this process, then it is already in the conception of how a literary process grasps the relation between word and thing (that is, between statement and visibility) and performs an operation on this relation in such a way that it “interrupts” or forgets the grid on which words and things were first arranged and re-deploys this relation as the “effect” of its literary operation. This “strategy,” if it can indeed be called that, bears more than a passing resemblance to the considerations that surround and condition the passage of Borges which Foucault explicitly declares in the first sentence of the preface that his project was derived from: “This book first arose out of a passage in Borges.”123 For the purpose of analyzing this principle for understanding the “return of the Baroque” at the heart of Foucault’s argument, I will keep separate for the moment the figure of “representation of representation” and “inter-textuality.” That is to say, neither must be understood in the vacuous sense that they are today by most critics of postmodernism.

The Baroque Thesis

89

Rather, the concept of “inter-textuality” indicates a “formal tautology,” or repetition in the strongest, and I would even dare to say, “classical” sense. As Severo Sarduy wrote in his well-known essay, “Baroque and Neo-Baroque,” The reduced practice of this tautology is that which consists in pointing out the work within the work, repeating its title, recopying it in a reduced form, describing it, employing any of the known procedures of the mis-en-abîme. These tautologists forget that if these procedures were efficacious in Shakespeare or Velásquez, it is precisely because at their level they were not tautologists. As Michel Foucault points out, it was a matter of a representation of more vast content than had been explicitly figured [my emphasis].124

I will return later on to the repetition implied here by Sarduy’s phrase “a more vast content than had been explicitly figured” in order to rasie the question of the type of narrative that is being evoked by this process: specifically the literary, or critical, practices of inter-textuality that I will describe in Part Four on the “Baroque and the Postcolonial.” In the texts that develop these principles, they seem to have two different effects: first, as indicating the manner in which analogy becomes an important principle behind new combinations of the visible and the sayable (the picture and the statement), which has become increasingly prevalent of modern texts and influences the form of space as well as our understanding of narrative; second, particularly in Sarduy and Borges, we will see the concept of inter-textuality come to signify the articulation of European forms of knowledge (including its dominant religious and culture myths) by the processes of parody, pastiche and frequently by tautological constructions of rhetoric. For the purposes of our present subject of discussion, Las Meninas, Foucault’s concept of the break between classical and modern is used as an “emblem” to re-configure the process by which European culture is received and interpreted by the modern reader-spectator. This emblematic function can be seen in Foucault’s initial observations on the painting: Perhaps there exists in this painting of Velásquez, the representation as it were, of Classical Representation, and the definition of the

90

On the (New) Baroque

space it opens up to us. And, indeed, representation undertakes to represent itself here in all its elements, with its images, the eyes to which it is offered, the faces it makes visible, the gestures that call it into being. But there in the midst of this dispersion which is simultaneously grouping together and spreading out before us, indicated compellingly from every side, is an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation—of the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance. This very subject—which is the same—has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form.125

Both these principles (inter-textuality and “the representation of representation”) show a transformation in the position of the spectator, who now becomes an implicit double (une doublère) of the producer. This is accompanied by several modern developments in cultural aesthetics where the role occupied by the spectator-reader-audience-eonsumer increases in its activity to the point of eclipsing the position occupied by the author­producer-originator. Consequently, it is significant that Foucault’s “flat” description, or “literal reading,” of Las Meninas ends with an “empty space” that is absent from the picture itself and where the roles of the king, the model, the painter and the spectator are constantly changing positions. No figure of sovereignty truly determines the significance of the scene or spectacle of representation. This struggle or exchange of roles is the fulcrum of the theory of inter-textuality espoused by Foucault, and other Baroque commentators such as Sarduy and Genette, all of whom see this as the liberation of a pure representation, or of different interpretations that are not given a natural legitimation or arranged into a hierarchy. Again, this is the import of the last sentence in the passage cited above: “And representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form.” We can especially see this new significance attached to “the representation of representation” in the summary of Foucault’s description where this “absence” is addressed to “our gaze”: All the interior lines of the painting, and above all those that come from the central reflection, point toward the very thing that is

The Baroque Thesis

91

represented, but absent. At once object—since it is what the artist represented in copying onto the canvas ­and subject—since what the painter had in front of his eyes, as he represented himself in the course of his work, was himself, since the gazes portrayed in the picture are all directed toward the fictitious position occupied by the royal personage, which is also the painter’s real place, since the occupier of that ambiguous place in which the painter and the sovereign alternate, in a never­ending flicker, as it were, is the spectator whose gaze transforms the painting into an object, the pure representation of an essential absence. Even so, the absence is not a lacuna, except for the discourse laboriously decomposing the painting, for it never ceases to be inhabited, and really too, as is proved by the concentration of the painted thus represented, by the respect of the characters portrayed in the picture, by the presence of the great canvas with its back to us, and by our gaze, for which the painting exists and for which, in the depths of time, it was arranged.126 .

As illustrated in the rhetoric of this passage, both the principles of “representation of representation” and “intertextuality” can be located within the gaze of the spectator. If we could schematize the vectors of these gazes, or these alternating positions, and flatten them out into a formula which distinguishes, let’s say, a modernist perspective, from that which has been adopted by postmodern critics, we would say that in modernism the place of the king and painter alternate (retaining a sovereign identification and a rhetoric of power). In postmodernism, however, the position of the spectator enters into “play” along with the model who sometimes might resemble the ideal reader (spectator, audience), the ideal sovereign agency (the people, the king), or the ideal author or producer (genius). In all this, we must note the entrance of a mobile agent in Foucault’s rhetoric of an “us,” or in the solicitation of the representation of the painting before “our gaze,” which seems to link both the description of power (especially the power to see) as well as our position before the representation to a new “common sense” that Foucault designates as a distinctly postmodern episteme. Thus, we can see! The true significance of Las Meninas lies in what it portrays and what Foucault outlines in his description: the subject to which all the gazes are directed is absent from the picture, or is only figured en abîme as the pale and ghostly reflection that lies upon a mirror’s surface at the

92

On the (New) Baroque

back of the room. What the picture displays is what we noted above in the shuttling that takes place between the positions of artist-producer, royal personage (icon) and spectator (referent), is a struggle over a principle of sovereignty that marks both a transition and rupture within the agency of desire: Who desires? That is, whose desire—signified by the position if the gaze in front of the picture—is this representation made to satisfy? It is for this reason that any interpretation that immediately sees the “represented” in the mirror’s reflection is guilty of eliding the true social mechanism of the gaze that Velásquez is interrogating with his tableau, and replacing it with a simple icon of power (the royal couple). However, this would mean nothing more than reducing its function to a tautology, in the sense that Sarduy criticized above, as a stale metaphor of the “representation of representation.” In fact, even from the perspective of the social form of monarchy that would explain the selection of these figures for representation in the form of a portrait, such an explanation would tell us absolutely nothing of the meaning of that desire—that is, the desire to be seen, viewed or displayed in a representation. Even though what is seen by everyone can be grasped ironically in the portrait that appears behind them, the real drama that forms the condition of everyone’s look cannot. This is because it informs the very impulse of the eye that forms the manner in which seeing is displayed as a social form of power: the desire to see and be seen, to draw near and be present, to exist to the degree that one is recognized to be there by the central gaze of the sovereign, to be recognized in a role that unfolds within this theatre of Presence. We can see why Velásquez chose to go outside or beneath the portrait to display the relations that make it a form of representation and why this representation cannot resemble the look, or the desire, that conditioned it. (Of course, there is a certain amount of irony in the fact that, given the central interpretation of presence by the proximity to the gaze of the royal personage, the dog that lies in the foreground would be accorded a more essential place than those who are absent from the picture.) In Foucault’s description, the meaning of the gaze also underlines his calling the object that appears in the back of the painted room, not the completed portrait that would add a distracting temporal value to the scene, but a mirror because it lies in a direct line of light to the space outside and before the canvas, where “the observer and observed take part in a ceaseless exchange.” A literal reading of the proportions

The Baroque Thesis

93

of the perspectives that compose the duplication with real space would immediately discard this as a possibility; its function for Foucault’s interpretation is not meant to capture this picture in realistic terms, but to illustrate the material of the looks that Velásquez interrogates symbolically by the mirror’s substance: as a pure surface that glitters and shines, but which is also essentially formless, empty, neutral and “absent.” It is this material surface of the gaze that is the central object of Foucault’s concept of episteme since it is the thin and shiny membrane that covers everything that exists; it is the power that first causes things to be seen, or to show themselves. It is also the mirror fulcrum that displays and articulates things with words and statements that represent them, and words and statements with subject positions that reflect their arrangement in an order of visibility, and this order itself that articulates and arranges these subject positions themselves with greater or lesser degrees of visibility and social power. It is this surface itself that is subject to re­arrangement, dispersion, splintering which, again, reinforces the arbitrary appearance of the portrait (as icon) to stand for what is represented. Now, let’s place the so-called “modern spectator” in that blank and “neutral” space before Velásquez’s picture, changing roles with the model and royal personage, the focal point of everyone’s gaze, with the us or “our gaze” that is announced in Foucault’s rhetoric. What do we see? First, we see a fundamental dissemblance of the icon of power that was figured by the portrait: either it slips into the past as a historical artifact, or into the present as a fabulous scene, an emblem or ornament, a fetish of a gaze now absent from modern social relationships. This fundamental dissimilarity already fulfils the major term of Foucault’s thesis: that the point of representation of the subject’s reality no longer appears in likeness, or resemblance, to the actual position of consciousness. On the contrary, all that representation presents or exhibits is what the subject is not, or could ever hope to become—self-present, identical to its labor, its discourse or its experience—and this becomes a cause of anxiety that surrounds every act of representation that haunts consciousness from the inside, and threatens to tum every experience into its other, or its unreal double. Foucault states this thesis most dramatically in the following passage from The Order of Things, from the final section entitled “Man and His Doubles”:

94

On the (New) Baroque

This double-movement proper to the modern cogito explains why the ‘I think’ does not, in its case, lead to the evident truth of the ‘I am.’ Indeed, as soon as the ‘I think’ has shown itself to be embedded in a density throughout which it is quasi-present, and which it animates, though in a semi-dormant, semi-wakeful fashion, it is no longer possible to make it lead to an affirmation of ‘ I am.’ For can I, in fact, say that 1 am this language that 1 speak, into which my thought insinuates itself to the point of finding in it the system of all its own possibilities, yet which exist only in the weight of sedimentations my thought will never be capable of actualizing altogether? Can I say that I am this labor that I perform with my hands, yet which eludes me not only when I have finished it, but even before I have begun it? Can I say I am this life that I sense deep within me, but which envelops me both in the irresistible time that grows side by side with it and poses me for a moment on its crest, and in the immanent time that precedes my death?127

And yet, we might find that there is still a principle of sovereignty there, underlined by the direction of all the looks, and by the emergence of a consumer culture in the place that was once occupied by a feudal or monarchic arrangement of the social gaze. This is true simply because representation itself has become “machined” and ascribes the position of the spectator, in some way, as the hidden causality of the representation itself. Without the desire of the spectator, of the one who wants to see, nothing would be displayed. (This desire must be understood both in an economic and ontological sense of causality.) At the same time, however, something strange appears in that the spectator has become ignorant, or even unconscious, of his role as cause and rather often mistakes what is represented for the effective origin of the gaze. This produces a series of masks, sometimes worn by the producer to appear more attractive, sometimes by the representative who still bears a likeness to the subject that is represented (the European, cosmopolitan thinker, etc.) However, it is still for the spectator that this tableau is displayed, that everything first becomes visible and, then, becomes “present-at-hand.” In other words, what we see in the representation of Las Meninas, painted by Velásquez in the middle of the seventeenth century, is something that the painter himself could not have been aware of, even though it is already self-evident and clearly visible in Foucault’s appeal to a modern witness of the

The Baroque Thesis

95

scene of power displayed in the representation of culture: the emergence of the new sovereign figures of the spectator, the consumer and the reader. These forms of experience and translation are particularly important in a modern context where these iconic representations are transformed into units of value that are infinitely exchangeable. As in late formations of capital, the sovereign instance that was held in place by the portrait is now exchanged for the appearance that shines on the surface—it is at the moment that the being of representation is ascribed to the degree that it shines, that it becomes visible, and that it makes this visibility understood in terms of an unfathomable form of power that now underlies the postmodern spectacle of culture.

Chapter 8 Un Baroque récit: Gérard Genette

Recalling the critical importance of the function of inter-textuality in Baroque criticism, let us now turn our attention to the notion of inter­ textuality that emerges from thee reception of Foucault’s thesis of “rupture.” In his reading of the Baroque poem Moyse sauvé by Saint Amant, narratologist and postmodern critic Gerard Genette seems to establish a correspondence to the principle of representation behind Velásquez’s tableau by the proximity of the dates. We remember from the earlier citation of Foucault the central importance of the date of Las Meninas, 1658 A.C.E., which is five years later than the date of Saint Amant’s Moyse sauvé, 1653 A.C.E. Consequently, it is important to notice that Genette will discover textual or poetic figures and processes equivalent to the pictorial figures of Velásquez’s canvas, the two most important of which are: The insertion of meta- and hetero-diegetic elements that emulate the principles of “representation of representation” (which parenthetically inserts the form of the portrait within a larger frame that constitutes the process of portraiture and the social gaze that conditions its form and it” actors); The presence in Moyse sauvé of metalepsis from the position of the narrator, emulating the duality exhibited in the figure of the painter in Las Meninas: as the central gaze that witnesses the events displayed ­doubling for the spectator positioned before the painting— and as one of the “actors” who appears represented in the scene.

Given the terms of this analogy, it comes as no surprise that Genette will discover beneath the diegetic surface, that the récit itself is organized by the form of a picture. Moyse sauvé, according to Genette’s argument, is divided in the manner of a triptych: “a central panel of six songs and two wing­panels of three songs each.” 128 Of course, one could immediately object to Genette’s analogy with the reply that elements of Las Meninas are forced, and the triptychal arrangement of the poem is artificially

Un Baroque récit

97

constructed, for example, in the form of catachresis. Thus, it will be important to determine the principle of comparison behind this analogy, which Genette will later qualify as being “exemplary” or “typically Baroque.” Immediately, we can perceive the critical force of Foucault’s thesis behind this gesture. There is the recognition of a morphology that combines visibility and statements in one synthetic composition, and a tendency of one medium to refer to the other for its principle of organization. This tendency can also be located in the hybridity of forms that proliferates in the Baroque period. Buried within this recognition, however, is already an explanation of the modern premise of inter-textuality (or the “representation of representation,” or metadiegesis) that is shown here to be illustrated by Saint Amant “in his own manner and according to means available to his Moyse sauvé in 1653.”129 The continuity with the Baroque is established in the manner in which a previous narrative is no longer grasped within a resemblance to a living diachronic duration (which, for that reason, is a closed universe or totality), but rather as a static tableau or picture that can be transformed by the perspective of the spectator (who might choose to focus on one part and ignore the whole) or by a subsequent process that expands and amplifies a detail that was absent (or virtual) from the primary text Hence, a narrative that is grasped within this schema bears ‘spatial coordinates” that can be developed in supplementary episodes that are inserted into the primary diegesis; this would include also what the first narrative interrupts at its beginning or excludes at its end. As Genette writes at one point, this gives a certain licence to the poet to forge whole episodes from minor characters or invent episodes to illustrate and amplify the moral significance of a major event In effect, we can conceive of an infinite text that corresponds to the earlier observation by Sarduy that, “it is a matter of a more vast representation than had been explicitly figured.”130 All these techniques and processes of textual transformation that Genette discovers as being operative in Moyse sauvé can be catalogued under the heading of a mode of literature that is distinctly postmodern. Here, I cite Genette’s list: amplification, proliferation of episodes and descriptive ornaments, multi­plication of narrative levels and a play on this multiplicity, ambiguity and interference shared between the represented and its

98

On the (New) Baroque

representation, between the narrator and his narration, syncope, affectivity of non-completion, simultaneous search for an ‘open form’ and for symmetry.131

The cause behind Genette’s insistence on collating these traits and cataloguing them under the name of the Baroque constitutes his thesis on the historical reception of Saint Amant’s text (which, again, he finds himself offering a piece of evidence in support of Foucault’s Baroque thesis). At the close of the essay, Genette cites the history of scholarship on Moyse sauvé, which mostly includes harsh indictments against the poem itself as “unreadable” and the author as a “madman.” Principally, these judgments revolve around the confusion and disorder this poem created in its earlier readers. For example, Genette cites the Livet’s commentary of 1855, “his poem on Moses, his principal work, contains beauty of the first order, unfortunately hidden behind a badly executed plan”; in another passage from History of French Literature, Vol. 2, written as late as 1951, A. Adams writes: “It’s unreadable, we can no longer read Moyse sauvé.”132 Yet, in a manual that appeared just fifteen years later in 1966, we come across this sentence in the scholarship on Saint Amant’s work: “This kind of epic bears a style of composition that is typically Baroque.”133 Although these judgments address the concept of taste, which I will return to in a moment, they cannot be passed off as mere opinions that occur within the same historical moment. Rather, according to Genette’s argument, they mark a stronger sense closer to what Lyotard has defined as a différend, that is, the tangible evidence of a rift in human sensibility and a re-organization of the system of judgment: What was impossible to perceive in one moment would become perceptible in another, that is, the scintillating presence of a figure. The confrontation of these two judgments illustrates very well the effect introduced by the concept of the Baroque, as problematic as it is, in our system of reading: what was madness for Boileau, confusion for a sage of the second empire, has become for us “typically Baroque.” Here, there is a little more than a simple substitution of terms: it marks the place, at the very least the taking place of that which was earlier foreclosed in the shadows of un-readability. We have the implicit avowal that an order long considered natural was, in truth, only one order among others; it is the recognition that a certain “madness” cannot be without reason, that

Un Baroque récit

99

a certain “confusion” cannot be, as Pascal said, “without design.”134 The Baroque, then, marks a “topos” in modern sensibility that was formerly unreadable, imperceptible, unrecognized or simply foreclosed; moreover, the introduction of its concept marks the rupture and approach of two systems of judgment in direct confrontation with one another. In other words, to align ourselves with the position of the spectator that Genette highlights, it marks two “systems of reading” that are incommensurate with each other. Of course, it is not necessary to take the “Baroque” literally, only “typically,” in that our recognition of it typifies and exemplifies a change that has already taken place merely by the fact that we can now perceive it! Yet, what exactly do we see? Genette’s answer is that we are able to see a “design,” “a picture”; in short, “a text.” This is illustrated by Genette’s reading that presents this text in the form of the triptych: We can thus read beneath the apparent disorder of the récit a design, arranged or not: that of a text, revealed at a certain distance, which would justify the reference from Saint Amant to the art of our own time.135

Thus, this continuity established between the modern and the Baroque traces—a little mechanically, perhaps—Foucault’s thesis that the “uniform layer in which the visible and the readable were interwoven” suddenly disappeared around the seventeenth century, only to reappear at the end of the nineteenth century in the new mode of “literature.” (Again, Genette even provides more exact dates to this gap or disappearance: sometime between 1653 and 1966.) However, this event or re-emergence does not address the positive laws and rules that compose a historical understanding of literary forms, but seems to indicate, as already noted above, a much deeper reorganization of human sensibility. Consequently, Genette’s phrase, “We can read,” is posed against the judgments of Boileau and others that Moyse sauvé was, at that earlier moment, “unreadable,” either because it was horribly botched (according to the criteria of judgment), or utterly without design. According to Genette’s argument, in fact, the principle of organization—literally, the triptychal organization—was actually “foreclosed,” “unreadable,” and “unrecognized.” Again, this implies much more than a series of “bad

100

On the (New) Baroque

interpretations” unfolded in a hermeneutic in which Genette’s reading would function as the corrective. What is being argued is much more fundamental. For Boileau and the others, since the narrative would be a closed and diachronic order or totality, there could be no “place” where this other text (the design, the picture) could be “revealed in the distance.” They could not see the inter­text, the “text within the text,” that is, the logic by which Saint Amant designed his own narrative by grasping the events depicted in the Exodus passage and arranging them on a tableau that could be arranged following the coordinates of a picture that was in the process of making itself: Hence, as Genette notes, because their “system of reading” was unable to perceive this, the poem would appear as a swirling of episodes with no diegetic order, or was completely foreign to the spirit of a classical epoch. Nevertheless, this only explains why they could not see the figure of the design, but it does not explain why we supposedly can. Perhaps it is because we occupy the perspective of a present that is constantly opened to the distance of another text—that of the unconscious, of ideology or capital ­even if that other text is not immediately visible or readable. It does not matter. Genette simply remarks that this place has taken place; it marks an event that forms one of the conditions of our horizon—no longer “foreclosed” in the shadows of unreadability, it is perfectly “readable” even when it is still unread or unseen. We can also speculate that this place is what Genette calls “rneta-diegetic” (remarking an intentionality that is outside or beyond the given representation), which raises the disturbing possibility that all narratives can be organized by another perspective that, following Foucault’s formula, is “neither hidden nor immediately visible.” This last point also addresses the possibility that the processes by which this place has been constructed in a modern sensibility, which orders it and, therefore, governs both our perception and understanding of its being has come to resemble what we now call “literature.” It is important to recall what was said earlier concerning the interruption or suspension of the movement of time that marks most of the theories of modernity: the figure, as in d’Ors, of the whole of time rushing headlong into a present where it pours out like water on a plate; as in Paz, of the acceleration of the past and a moment that accumulates by spreading out horizontally; as in Benjamin and Baudelaire, of time that emerges into the present through the processes that resemble dream work. All of these

Un Baroque récit

101

could be different figures of a present whose relation to both history and culture is described in terms of its inter-textual design. Genette calls this design, which he first noticed floating just under the surface of Moyse sauvé, a “schema.” Here, we must not take the figure of a “picture,” too literally, or that of a “text,” too figuratively. We do not yet know what we see, just that we are capable of seeing it—I cannot stress this point enough! This is because what Kant called a “schema” does not constitute an image, but rather spatio-temporal relations that embody or realize relations that are purely conceptual. This is precisely how Genette’s picture functions in his reading of Moyse sauvé: as a diagram, organized triptychally (perhaps to negate any diachronic arrangement of the series of episodes he lists) where he traces and coordinates the spatio-temporal relations between episodes of the poem. Yet, according to Kant, all schema presuppose a synthesis. In turn, every synthesis presupposes the “determination” of a certain place and a certain time by means of which diversity is related to an object. Perhaps we can now begin to underastand why Boileau and others could not perceive the text: very simply, there was no “place” and no “time” for the picture of unity to develop the image (much in the same manner that a photograph develops in an acetone bath). In short, there was no movement in which all the element” of the narrative can be perceived in relation to the whole design (even though this design remains virtual). This would mean that the poem, for them, was literally “unreadable” since all narrative presupposes a mobile synthesis ruled by the temporal coordination of memory and anticipation and the spatial coordination of textual elements; this synthesis is carried along by the act of reading itself. Without such a synthesis, there could only be a disjunctive arrangement of elements, characters, and dialogue, allusions that had no form. Consequently, we can perceive in the example of Moyse sauvé, without the place from which this movement either deploys itself or hastens after (that is traced by the act of the reader or spectator), there could be neither perception nor understanding of the relations of the different episodes and literary processes that Saint Amant employed. In relation to the principles and rules that compose the movement of a diachronic narrative, the picture that Genette envisages to dynamically conduct the movement of the reader would appear static and motionless. This brings us to our final observation on Genette’s Baroque récit. As Genette writes about the apparent static quality of this picture or schema:

102

On the (New) Baroque

There is nothing more contrary to the law, essentially transitive, than these effects of equilibrium. The Baroque is known for introducing movement into the plastic arts and architecture: does it mediate, in a more secret manner still, to hide symmetry beneath the movement? It is at least as the analysis of this récit suggests, the form of which is, almost perfectly, a mirror image. But it is important to recall that symmetry is at the same time the principle of order and of dizziness (vertigine).136

This last remark by Genette clearly places us once again in the domain of the “sublime,” that is, the point where a certain perception of order (unity, synthesis) falls into a swoon and fails to grasp its relation to both a “time” and a “place” and to relate these to an object—for instance, this text, here, in front of me. Kant called this moment the point where imagination is confronted with its own limit. We might figure this confrontation in pairing off the two phrases that seem to mark the point of each of the readers figured in the text: the first reader is marked by the statement “We can read,” which is opposite the second reader, who is represented by “We can no longer read, it is unreadable.” For instance, we might imagine that text conceived as this “frozen tableau,” as I have just described it, would strike the first reader as utterly incomprehensible, since no movement would be detected beneath its static surface of signs. (And by no movement, I mean no place from which to read this text, or place from which this text could unfold in a temporal scansion.) However, this other reader—us, we, the postmodern—may be able to perceive movement, not diachronic, but laterally organized in the literary processes that transform the first text (the passage from Exodus) into the composition of Moyse sauvé. This marks a form of literary anamnesis and the centrality of this “schema” for the postmodern who understands time within the metaphor of “the text within the text.” Perhaps this marks also the place from which a reading takes place and from which the text unfolds into time (as we can now receive it) that is also, in some way, extra-diegetic, critical, interrogatory, and finally, ironic. It is perhaps in the sense that the place of Genette’s own reading is already located in a mobile position that echoes Foucault’s observations: that the “text” is perceived sometimes from the position of the witness or listener of the récit, sometimes from the character, sometimes from the position of the narrator.

Un Baroque récit

103

Yet, there is also implied in Genette’s metaphor that this text also might become static; for instance it might become too general and abstract, or it might fall into a point of imperceptibility—a point where “We can read” reconverts into the empty repetition of a “We can no longer read, it is unreadable.” Therefore, we might see from the above announcement by Genette that the Baroque topic constitutes a distinctly postmodern critique of judgment, in the sense that it excavates and confronts the judgments of “beauty” and “good” and invents its own values to replace these earlier categories, such as “the open” or “the infinite.”

Chapter 9 The Baroque emblem: Yury Lotman and Jacques Derrida A city no longer inhabited, not simply left behind, but haunted by meaning and culture. — Jacques Derrida137

Lastly, under the heading of “Baroque and Postmodern,” we can confirm the exemplary role of the Baroque emblem by referring to the work of the leading semiotician of the Moscow-Tartar school, Yury Lotman. In his essay, “The Text within the Text,” Lotman develops an approach to the cultural sphere that seeks to account for the irruption of new meanings by determining the transformation of texts and contexts in a dialogic metaphor (patterned after Bakhtin’s “logosphere”).138 Lotman’s system is extremely dense and the organicism that underlies his theory of culture as “semiosphere” bears a complex history of associations that include Vladmir Vernadsky’s notion of “biosphere.” In turn, this history is engaged in a polemic on two fronts: on the first front, against the linguistic and semiotic theories of Saussure, Hjemslev, Pierce and Chomsky; on the other, against structuralist theories that seek to account for a text from the perspective of a single code, or langue. The result of the first argument would no longer conceive, or determine, the generation of meaning in a cultural text by a mechanism modeled on the linguistic speech act. In the debates over structuralism that took place in France in the 1970s, there was the critique of the notion of a code based upon the implicit charge of isomorphism in the structuralist partition of meaning; thus, a code marks the application of one semiotic principle to govern— strictly by analogy—the regulation of a generalized or totalized Text. In its earlier pretension to become a “Royal Science” and to reorganize the human sciences (including the analysis of language, culture and even wealth) according to a new grid or taxonomy, on the basis of one artificial code (langue/parole), the structuralist analogy posited a “deep” universal grammar against which to measure the resemblances and variations of

The Baroque Emblem

105

structure within different fields of experience, but also within different cultural forrnations.139 The argument against this “mono-textuality,” however, can be most clearly demonstrated in the following passage from Lotman’s “The Text within the Text”: If Propp’s method is oriented toward the elaboration of a single textcode underlying a plurality of texts—which are presented as a bundle of variants of a single text [a phrase that echoes Saussure’s conception of a ‘bundle of signifiers’ in the concept of the linguistic sign], Bakhtin’s method, beginning with Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, is the opposite: not only is a single text composed of various subtexts but, more to the point, the subtexts are mutually untranslatable. The text is thus revealed to be internally in conflict. In Propp’s description the text tends toward panchronic equilibrium: an examination of narrative texts makes clear that there is no movement in them, only an oscillation around some homeostatic norm (equilibrium is violated and then re­established). In Bakhtin’s analysis action, change and destruction are latent even in the stasis of the text.140

For the purposes of our discussion of Lotman’s use of the Baroque emblem, or “the text within the text,” we will need to leave to the side both the philosophical considerations of the re-emergence of organicism in Lotman’s semiotic theories of culture, as well as the historical polemic with Structuralist theory. Instead, I would like to examine the very notion of “culture as text” that Lotman employs here and, more centrally, the implication of the Baroque emblem, or rhetorical construction of the “text within the text,” as a literary mode of apprehending both the generation of new meanings and the process of transformation within a dialogic and transitional space between cultures. As Lotman addresses the relevance of the original Baroque theme for developing a new model of textuality: The problem of the diverse juxtapositions of heterogeneous texts posed accurately in the art and culture of the twentieth century is, in reality, one of the most ancient issues at the center of the theme ‘the text within the text.141

106

On the (New) Baroque

In his argument, Lotman distinguishes two major definitions of a text, or two different models of textuality. The first can be characterized as a receptacle and passive container (one which is very close to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic khora), which completely absorbs all information and facilitates, to the greatest degree possible, the “complete overlap of codes between senders and receivers of messages.”142 From this perspective, the greatest emphasis is placed upon the transparency and exchangeability of subject-positions and statements in the general circulation of signs, in addition to a cultural sphere that is conceived as a closed, integral and homogeneous space. We might see that the principle that structures this first mode of textuality is based upon the principle of homeostasis. Lotman often characterizes the text of a culture that is ruled and organized by this principle both in terms of the physical metaphor of stasis, as well as in organic terms of infantilism and senility (that is, periods of non-growth and even regression in the human organism). In turn, these metaphors are related to the psychological sphere of the child’s initial (although not necessarily pre-linguistic) stage of development as well as the sphere occupied by archaic cultures that are “capable of remaining within a state of cyclic enclosure and balanced immobility for an extraordinary long time.”143 In both the descriptions, the psychological and ethnographic associations that belong to this first mode of textuality can be inferred from the influence of psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious that were prevalent at the time Lotman was writing: First, a principle of general textuality (i.e., a semiotic khora, or what Lotman refers to as the “mother text”) that is closely modeled after the Freudian description of the “primary processes”; Second, a principle of homeostasis which is molded from the speculative construction of the “death drive” which itself was extrapolated from the tendency exhibited in biological organisms to reduce the quantity of external excitation to a minimal level; Third, finally, a determination of the relations that compose the elements in this primary text as bearing the highest degree of simplicity, transparency and immediacy—all characteristic attributes of a natural consciousness that are derivative from the separation and enclosure of an “inside” that is set off against the multiplication and complexity of exterior regions. What Lotman ultimately intends by

The Baroque Emblem

107

the first mode of textuality is the ‘sphere of a structural unconsciousness” that operates within a monotone definition of a culture whose condition and telos is modeled on the “complete overlap of codes between senders and receivers.”144

In some ways, to call this first mode a “text” is already to violate Lotman’s own definition of a text as a “mechanism constituting a system of heterogeneous semiotic spaces, in whose continuum the message circulates.”145 According to Lotman, no text can be described from the perspective of a single language. We can speak of the transparency of the medium of a language only by subordinating and excising its history and sedimentation within other languages. We can speak of the homogeneity of a text by the suppression of its “heterogeneous semiotic spaces” (which includes the perspective of the reader, or by the history of its reception and institution, and by its relation to other texts); moreover, we can speak of the inner coherence and consistency of a Culture only by reducing the continuum of a text to a passive receptacle for the circulation of a message. The first mode of textuality corresponds to a “telos of the message” in which the heterogeneous semiotic space of a text is codified to facilitate the maximum quantity of information with a minimum of degradation. This follows an instrumental determination of the text (the utterance, the presentation), which disappears before the primacy of the message. It is for this reason that this form of communication would take the command or prescriptive phrase as its purest expression, in the same way that a machine or instrument would internalize this command-message in the immediate performativity of its function (that is, in which its “meaning” is determined by its function). Lotman shows that any system dominated by this mode would presuppose the suppression of “new meanings,” since they would constitute an interruption to the flow of information. Because “the complete overlap of codes between senders and receivers of messages” is virtually impossible—principally due to the very nature of texts, which require interlocutors, and therefore a degree of consciousness—Lotman notes that an intermediary is required, a “text-code,” the function of which is to control the transmission of information and to regulate speech acts. “The text code, of which the Bible is the most obvious example, has an interpretive and prescriptive role in the transmission of texts.”146

108

On the (New) Baroque

Given the above problem, we might merely resign ourselves to the fact that a certain codification is part of a generative and interpretive process; however, in this case, the code remains to be constructed or invented and is not prior to the text. The critical distinction falls around the difference between a semiotic theory that invents a text that has a certain application to different regions of semiotic activity, and another that already presupposes a master-code (that of a language structure, for example), and seeks to deploy this code universally to account for specific events of significance. This problem is at the center of semiotic debates, since it addresses the traditional uses of linguistic codes and philosophical and poetic metaphors to represent the concept of inner speech as the interval between speech and thought. Earlier, Bakhtin addressed this problem most forcefully along an ontological register between the “instrumental” function of semiotics as opposed to its conceptual or imaginative function: Semiotics deals primarily with the transmission of ready-made communication using ready-made code. But in living speech, strictly speaking, communication is first created in the process of transmission, and there is, in a sense, no code. The problem is one of changing the code in inner speech.147

In the above passage, we can see the primacy that is assigned to the text (transmission), which precedes the creation of the code. This primacy already repeats what we have seen above in Lotman’s description of meaning as the transformative explosion within a semiosphere. What he is describing in cultural terms is a process that reduplicates Bakhtin’s semiotic terms: a form of communication that is created in the process of transmission. In both cases the instrumental function of communication is bracketed, or suspended altogether, before the sheer phenomenon of the text. In other words, the text does not disappear in favor of the message (text­code); rather, it “stimulates” attention, which “shifts from the message to language as such and discovers the manifest non-homogeneous codification of the mother text.”148 Lotman illustrates the function of the “text-code” by referring to the example of Tolstoy’s glass of water, wherein the purity of the water becomes perceptible only due to the small deposits of detritus that fall

The Baroque Emblem

109

into the glass: “The detritus is the additional material included in the text that elicits the basic underlying code—“purity”—from the sphere of the structural unconsciousness.”149 The apparent translucence and transparency of the water only result when these interior but “heterogeneous semiotic spaces” are made to reflect the code that conditions our perception of a clear glass of drinking water. The clarity, homogeneity, consistency and luster of the water are produced as the “effects” of the underlying code. We can just as easily replace the code of “purity” with that of “clarity” to articulate the prescriptive and regulatory contemporary uses of this code within the heterogeneous spheres of discourse and perception. Hence, after Descartes, a “clear and distinct perception” was established as the code for judging the clarity of other semiotic regions: language, culture, character. This was attached to the emergence of scientific discourse based upon an inductive principle, and consequently, the degradation of other forms that were found to be “obscure” in proportion to the degree that scientific discourse was found to be “clear.” Of course, the notion of clarity is, itself, no less of a dominant text-code, which is materially constituted by a positive history of other texts and contexts that have established its sense; however, here its positive status and its visibility as a “text-code” have completely vanished where it functions to codify other semiotic spaces according to a determination of the perceptual sphere. Perhaps we can better illustrate this text-code, in its modern instance, with Foucault’s observations on the Western ratio (or relation) that corresponds to a structural and pedagogical function of the colonial project. As Foucault notes in the final section of The Order if Things, there is a certain position of the Western ratio that was constituted in its history and provides a foundation for the relation it can have with other societies, even with the society in which it has historically appeared.150 It is according to this ratio that other forms of society and culture begin to be articulated, even to articulate themselves in relation to this underlying code. It is this double­articulation that opened a common area in the fields of psychoanalysis and ethnology that followed this double articulation: on the first level, the articulation of individuals upon the unconscious of a culture and, on the second, the articulation of the historicity of those cultures upon the unconscious of individuals. Lotman also notes the history of this ratio in the following passage:

110

On the (New) Baroque

First we call attention to simplistic nature of the concepts established by Voltaire in his Essai sur les moeurs de l’esprit des nations, and further developed by Hegel in his idea of a unified path of the world spirit. From these points of view, world cultures in all their diversity can be reduced either to different stages in the evolution of a single reign of culture or to ‘errors’ that led the mind into wilderness. In the light of this observation, it seems natural that ‘advanced’ cultures should view ‘backward’ cultures as somewhat deficient, and the ‘backward’ culture’s desire to catch up with the ‘advanced’ and assimilate into it is also comprehensible. ‘Accelerated Development’ reduces the variety and complexity of the world civilization and, as a result, diminishes it to a monotone Text.151

In this case, the emergence of a dominant “text-code” (ratio, ésprit) marks the disappearance of the positive materiality and historicity of other text­codes, and the re-emergence of a new structure that codifies heterogeneous semiotic spheres into one Text. This Text can take the diegetic form of Culture, the Progress of Reason, World History (in the style of Spengler), even a materialist narrative of the history of capitalism (following Marx); however, it can also correspond to a more structural and analogical series of relations such as those Derrida has discovered in his conception of logo-centricism (as in the series of graphemes “voice””presence”-’self-”propriety”-”property”). It is this disappearance (or vanishing) of all those spaces that are heterogeneous to the Text that, like the small deposits of detritus in a glass of water, are suddenly made to reflect the “purity” of the Text’s monotone meaning. In other words, although this still corresponds to Lotman’s definition of a text-code, that a second “language” now functions at the level of a meta-language. But we must pause here to ask once again what a “code” is? If the answer is meta-language, or structure, then how is a structure different from “a language.” Here, Lorman’s most useful distinction between the two is that there is a structure when a certain text-code appears without an interlocutor, that is, without the presence of another consciousness. Thus, “to function, a consciousness requires another consciousness—the text with the text, the culture within the culture.152 This again addresses the analogy that Lotman establishes between the mechanism of the “the text within the text” and the function of the mirror in the Baroque universe in order to de­naturalize the act of representation. Lotman writes:

The Baroque Emblem

111

Mirrors in Baroque interiors often played the same role, refracting the architectural space by creating an illusory infinity: the reflection of the mirror in the mirror, the duplication of space through the reflection of a painting in mirrors, or the fragmentation of internal and external boundaries through the reflection of windows in mirrors. […] The mirror can fulfill another function, however. In duplicating, the mirror deforms and thus it reveals how its representation, apparently natural, is in fact a projection using specific modeling language.153

In the above passage, the figure of a literary mode of cultural transformation is highlighted by the appearance of this Baroque mechanism in the definition of a “text” as distinguished from a “specific modeling language” (i.e., text-code or structure). This emblem is captured by the appearance of the text that is already figured in relation to another text, forming a position of interlocutor that is interior, yet exterior to the structural field of the other text’s meaning. Hence, it is this “appearance” that is constituted against the “disappearance” of a code. It marks the multiplication of the levels of the primary text, the duplication of its interiors, a shift in attention from the message to the language (which echoes this “appearance”), and the emergence of various sub-texts that begin to “transform themselves according to new, alien laws, producing new information.”154 We have already noted this principle operating in a common understanding of the shift that has taken place in the form of knowledge itself, which no longer operates according to a nascent schema of natural consciousness (posited by philosophy), but is already constituted from the perspective of another text (almost in the same way the dream is constituted from the perspective of “secondary elaboration” that forbids the disap­pearance of distinction between the dream space and the process of its reinterpretation). Moreover, we have already seen a different version of this new anamnesis in Genette, who both conceived it from the perspective of “inter-textuality,” and who signaled the construction of knowledge from a literary perspective. In this process, however, we must ask whether the specificity of “literature” as such gradually disappears, only to just as suddenly reappear as the inner mechanism of the text espoused by postmodern critical philosophy and cultural theory? That is, what is literary

112

On the (New) Baroque

marks precisely a modern perception of any text that appears in at least two heterogeneous perspectives, from two types of contexts, arranged in relation to these contexts on both syntagmatic and rhetorical axes (which are opened to the field of ideology and to the unconscious, much like the example of the dream above). Hence, modern knowledge can be described as the techniques of plotting and arranging the relationship of a given text with its ‘structural” or unconscious significance, which causes the original Baroque configuration of the text within the text to be manifested as a distinct phenomenon associated with postmodernism. It is at this point we might understand that the appearance of the original Baroque emblem has changed, and that the representational function of “the text within the text” now becomes associated with the historical emergence of the postmodern panoramagram. In his influential early essay “Genesis and Structure,” Derrida evokes the invention of the panoramagram in the following quotation from Littre: “To obtain immediately, on a flat surface, the development and depth of vision of objects on the horizon.”155 If we identify the “flat surface” with the image of the “text,” or the structuralist “object” pare excellence, then we might understand its true function as the negation of the first depth that is identified with an internal content (a depth conditioned by hermetic qualities of intentionality, interiority, latency and secrecy), and its displacement onto another schema of depth constituted by the object’s distance, its horizontal depth. At this point, the notion of a structure, that is, the framework of construction, morphological correlation, becomes (perhaps even despite his own theoretical intention) the structuralist critic’s sole preoccupation. Such a change implies more than change of perspective, but seems to proceed from an epistemological break that authorizes its perception of the “text” as something entirely different, to echo the arguments of Genette and Foucault in the previous chapters. The panoramagram, Derrida writes, is “no longer a method with ordo cognescendi, no longer a relationship with ordo essendi, but the very being of the work.”156 But again, would this transformation of the very being of the “work” be a fair description of the being that has come to be identified, in the modern period, with the name of “literature”? Can we not see in Lotman’s description a model of textuality, even of “intertextuality,” that has become identified with postmodern notions of literary performativity?

The Baroque Emblem

113

I say “certain” here, because this is not true of all national and cultural literatures of the modern period, but rather of a programmatic notion of “the literary” that has been associated with postmodernism in Europe and North America. While the ascension of this notion of the “literary mode,” which has its sources in European modernist ideologies, can be placed in question concerning its universal pretence, it would not be an exaggeration to say that as a result of this very same pretence, it is increasingly becoming understood that all knowledge is composed of texts; therefore, the techniques of criticism and investigation of cultural and social knowledge have been to demonstrate “the manifest non-homogeneous codification of the text of cultures.” Methodo­logically, of course, this new critical knowledge has borrowed many of the constitutive myths and narratives of legitimation from the literary domains of modernist experimentation, as we saw earlier in the discussion of Benjamin, and has extrapolated several techniques that first appeared in literary or fictional works. Following these observations, we can then say that the process that Lotman describes traces the application to semiotics of the principles of meaning and textuality that originally belonged to modernist literary culture. “Meaning” is increasingly understood and produced from a literary mode of production, that is “a form of communication which is created in the process of transmission,” whose outcome is unpredictable due to the diversity and number of interlocutors. However, this already signals a shift away from a traditional philosophical and hermeneutical determination of meaning as a form of agreement or consensus, to a more rhetorical and dialectical phenomenon, particularly in the analysis of cultural texts. According to Lotman, “meaning is formed just as much by the interaction between the semantically heterogeneous, mutually untranslatable layers of a text as by the complex conflicts of meaning between text and contexts.”157 From this perspective, meaning can no longer be modeled on the linguistic utterance in which the term of communication is regulated by the image of a successful reception of the message (much in the same manner that the Kantian faculties are regulated by agreement, or sensus communis.) Rather than determining the form of meaning by its end, or objective, Lotrnan’s definition seems to privilege the point where an external text (accompanied by an interlocutor) is introduced into the immanent world of another text. Meaning,

114

On the (New) Baroque

then, is the point of commencement, of conflict—real and potential, or imaginary—between at least two different perspectives that actively construct the text; the result being that each text is transformed in the process of interaction by which, according to Kristeva, “the primary logic of language is redistributed according to new logical rule.”158 Therefore, it is not the point where “I understand” that meaning is produced within the field of a social, cultural or semiotic sphere—and in fact, it as been argued that this is the point where the instance of meaning is evacuated in favor of a code or message—rather, it is the point where several “heterogeneous semiotic spaces” emerge within the same text, without their relations being prefigured by a master code, each pushing the other to its maximum point of transformation. Lotman characterizes the transformation that these techniques entail as a process of “restructuration” [perestroika] which privileges, as we will see in Borges, the position of secondariness occupied by the reader who reconstructs the text’s meaning in relation to a new, external text that it introduces into the “mother text.” The category, under which Lotman generalizes the different techniques of this textual modality of the “text within the text,” is neo-rhetoric. 159 As Foucault once observed, “one finds in the Classical sciences isomorphisms that appear to ignore the extreme diversity of the objects under consideration.”160 Because “isomorphism” is an analogy established at a deep and structural level between objects that belong to two different systems or registers, a certain function of analogy conditions the very possibility of “morphology” in general (as the study or knowledge of forms). However, there are two senses of isomorphism that need to be sharply distinguished. In the first sense, the species of isomorphism that we have found to be symptomatic of the Neobaroque expression corresponds to the principle of “representation of representation” (the mise-en-abîme, allegorical emblem, rhetorical ellipsis or tautology) in which an aesthetic presentation is grasped and organized from at least two formal perspectives (as in the tableau of Velásquez), or when the structure of one medium is applied analogically to organize another (as in Genette’s reading of Moyse sauvé), It is precisely through this principle of hybridity that forces of variation and change enter to modify an aesthetic or cultural form, by affecting a kind of transformation that happens when it is organized by a heterogeneous perspective. This basically amplifies and extends the

The Baroque Emblem

115

principles of intermezzi that I referred to in Part One as a fundamental device of mannerist and Baroque art.161 But this principle of analogy has not functioned in aesthetics alone, since Derrida has shown that Platonic philosophy operates essentially by a certain species of isomorphism: catachresis, that is, the reduction of different discursive genres, as well as the objects of perception, to the “idea” or “concept” that is generated by the formal code that the philosopher uses to interrogate other forms of discursive knowledge. It has only been recently, that is since the collapse of the sovereignty of the philosophical discourse in the modern age, that this expression of isomorphism has increasingly become the object of criticism within different regions of Western knowledge. Doesn’t Derrida’s critique of a “logo-centric” construction of knowledge situate this isomorphism in the priority assigned to the series of philosophemes based on “presence” (logos, voice, speech, consciousness, self)? Doesn’t Foucault’s analysis of the history of knowledge critique a virulent isomorphism (which he calls “resemblance”) that functioned in classical philosophy up to Descartes, one which derived the object of discourse and knowledge from the form of visibility that belonged only to the object of perception? (Again, this critical principle addresses the derivation of the idea and its application to regulate other regions of culture and knowledge from a principle of clarity that is derived from the organization of the perpetual field.) Didn’t Benveniste and Lévi-Strauss, even earlier, each develop principles of structural distinction that prevented a continuation of a philosophical isomorphism in the analysis of other languages and social forms? Did not Bakhtin and Lotman, in turn, criticize the presence of an isomorphism, or a “deep form,” in the structural sciences of the early twentieth century (including that of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss), which organized all other disciplines and branches of knowledge on the basis of a linguistic code? Finally, are not the basic principles of feminist and postcolonial critiques launched against isomorphic constructions of knowledge and culture from either an overtly phallocentric perspective, on the one hand, or Euro-centric perspective, on the other? It is important to remark at this point that what has made all these recent transformations in the objective and form of cultural knowledge possible is the ascendance of a language-based epistemology that has been ascribed to the advent of postmodernism. As a result, the very analogies

116

On the (New) Baroque

that used to function as component parts of a natural consciousness have now become visible as “objects of discourse.” This addresses the very possibility of analogy, which Kant assigned to a symbolic function of figurative language, which he called “symbolic hypotyposis.” The very materiality and structure of language (constantly shifting sense in its contact with region, dialect, technical and specialized idioms, and other languages) often produces the very tendency toward this form of analogy. As Alexander Gelley has written concerning the function of schematism, “where there is no natural model, one must be found, drawn from elsewhere, by way of transposition or metaphorization (in its etymological sense).”162 Translation, therefore, is the very principle of symbolic hypotyposis; thus, the application of this principle to textuality extends and amplifies the meaning of “isomorphism” in purely linguistic phenomena (Helmjslev), when structures are identical at the level of expression and content. Kant further amplifies the meaning of this type of analogy when it is applied as a “sensible presentation” (Darstellung) of concepts that have no intuitive apprehension or intuition drawn from experience. In §59 of The Critique of Judgement, Kant goes on to discuss this form of analogy in detail: Our language is full of indirect presentations of this sort, in which the expression does not contain the proper schema for the concept, but merely a symbol for reflection. Thus, the words ground (support, basis), to depend (to be held up from above), to flow from something (instead of to follow), substance (as Locke expressed it, as the support of accidents) and countless others are not schematical but symbolical hypotyposes and expressions for concepts, not only by means of direct intuition, but only by analogy with it, i.e. by transference of reflection upon an object of intuition to a quite different concept to which perhaps an intuition can never directly correspond.

The principal object of this function of analogy for Kant was a direct presentation of an inner sense of time, which could never become an object of representation. If we take the meaning of time not as a simple object, or unit of subjective experience, but as the material constitution of the subject in all its relationships (including life, knowledge, society, power, culture, gender, pleasure or enjoyment, etc.), then we might see that a major preoccupation of postmodern critiques has been directed at

The Baroque Emblem

117

those species of isomorphism, or symbolic analogies of the indirect type, particularly those that have been presented as schemata, or analogies of the direct type. What is revealed is a certain “artificial” and metaphorical construction of experience that must now be contested within a total system of representation. Finally, what does the Baroque have to do with the problem of isomorphism that we have been discussing? I will respond to this question by citing a passage from Foucault’s The Order of Things, which has been one of the principle themes of the New Baroque, as well as being exemplary of the sensibility that would characterize many of the figures discussed in relation to “the Baroque and the Postmodern” : At the beginning of the XVII Century, in this period that has had the fortune or misfortune of being called the Baroque, thinking ceased to move in the element of resemblance. The Same was no longer the form of knowledge, but rather the occasion of error, the danger to which one exposes oneself when one examines the space muddled with confusion.163 In short, it is this state of constant Error which describes a feeling of anxiety that, although it appears rather ancient, is also rather new. If the Baroque emblem also becomes emblematic of this anxiety, it is only in the sense that certain postmodern literary and rhetorical constructions have come more and more to shape the subject of critical knowledge. Foucault’s comment seems to suggest something that corresponds to a concrete feeling experienced by many today: that the very moment when experience appears most closely to resemble itself, which is to say to become identical to its representation (whether of my perception, my opinion, my work, my labor), that it is precisely at this moment that this experience is least likely to approximate its own essential being. I only have to present this experience as an object of discourse—that is, to address it from the position of another text—in order to expose its meaning to the most profound confusion and dissemblance. The appearances of similitude, resemblance, self-presence and identity have, in the postmodern period, become the possibility of extreme Error. Thus, the position of a natural and unreflective consciousness has become the Subject of Error, whether this subject takes the form of the Unconscious or in the ideological constitution in one of several areas of experience

118

On the (New) Baroque

(of race, gender, class, history and political identity). This marks the distinction between a distinctly postmodern form of Error and the minor “epistemological errors” that Descartes sought to purge by installing a rational mechanism of doubt, or by submitting the field of consciousness itself to the sovereignty of Representation. In fact, it is the place of Representation itself that has been shown to harbor the power of the Western subject’s “will to knowledge” (Foucault), which duplicates the drama surrounding the “place of the King” in Foucault’s description of Las Meninas that we commented on at the beginning of this section on “Baroque and postmodern.” It would seem fitting, therefore, that the final destination of the Baroque emblem, and of the underlying principles of the “text within the text,” will assume a prominent place in the Latin American neoborroco tradition. As exemplified in the writings of Borges, in particular, the sovereignty of the Western subject’s “will to knowledge” is submitted to a style of parody and critique whereby the European author (the genius, the sovereign principle of representation) assumes a patently comic and stereotypical role in a postcolonial detective genre.

PART FOUR Baroque and Postcolonial

Chapter 10 The Baroque conspiracy: Jorge-Luis Borges

In the preface to the first edition of The Universal History of Iniquity (1935), Borges wrote: “I often think that good readers are rare kinds of birds, more tenebril and singular than good authors. To read is, for the moment, an act posterior to the one of the writer—the reader comes after the writing, and is therefore more superior, and much more modest and evolved for that reason.” In this passage, Borges presents writing in the act of reading—as the effect of résumé—as the “musical postulation of reality.” This technique occurs in two distinct stages: first, to create an account of the important facts or a summary récit: second, to imagine a reality that is much more complex than that previously accounted for, and therefore to interrogate the effects of its absence from the given text. This technique also has a relation to the determination that “knowledge” undergoes in its metamorphosis into literature. First, there is a pastiche of the “library” (of European knowledge) in its transformation into a second “text” (into the various apocryphal texts that Borges constructs precisely by citing them). Second, this transformation entails a parody of the discursive forms of knowledge and their final submission to a status of “minor literature.”164 The procedures of rearchivization and critique that an act of reading entails, therefore, constitute the architecture of Borges’ work; the “Library” becomes, following the second postulate, a labyrinth. As a result, two readers are opposed in a direct confrontation: God, the former author, who sees everything at once through a giant telescope and gathers all perception into a central eye, and; the reader in the labyrinth who follows a trail that may eventually lead through the labyrinth, but must also necessarily include in his or her trajectory points of impasse, detours, traps, blind alleys, wrong turns and dead ends. This is an important consideration, since “knowledge” (i.e. both the form of its presupposition and the material organization or architecture of the “library” which classifies, separates into distinct locations, and creates a taxonomy of memory traces which have a pure and non-individual repetition to insure that

122

On the (New) Baroque

they can always be found by everyone) must now also include the various points of confusion, misunderstanding, as well as the formal “blindspots” that result from what the God-reader misses and which constitute his Unconscious. The first figure of the reader in Borges fiction appears in the guise of the detective whose criminal scene is always in the heart of the library itself (“Garden of Forking Paths’, “Death and the Compass’). The technique employed corresponds to the second postulate; the presence of the Real is detected only through the “effects of its absence from the library” (for example, in the same way that the word “time” is absent from the garden of forking paths). But what leads the perception of this effect to its place in the real, like a trail through the labyrinth, is precisely the signification which expresses its relation as “absent,” “unknown,” “secret” It is not essentially unfamiliar, but rather merely “occulted” and “kept secret” by some other who appears as the double of the author (the Godreader). Therefore, Borges’ declaration of the rarity and superiority of the “good reader” over the author is an expression of power (the possibility of discernment or the decipherment of the position that comes onto the scene of knowledge afterwards and thus is the more superior). Of course, this is not without its political designation; the reader-detective begins his detection of the crime scene in the heart of the European Library and concludes by inscribing the hidden plot onto the streets of Buenos Aires. If philosophy, after Hegel, has developed its concepts in an atmosphere of crime, it is only due to the inability to determine the identity of a being that tends to withdraw, to displace itself infinitely within itself, or to disguise itself perpetually in every series it inaugurates. Even the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas first develops the significance of the concept of the “trace” by sifting through the residues of a crime scene, only to point out that a crime, in fact, does not disturb the essential order of Being. Even a murder produces something: a corpse, an “object” of investigation, a story for public consumption, a livelihood for the police. Consequently, a crime scene always bears a strange double-impression, a gesture of leaving traces in the very act wiping them away. The criminal arrives wearing a mask that he must leave behind (even as “he,” which is only masks an indeterminate gender); although, this does not mean that he first arrives clothed and leaves naked, “fleeing into the night” like

The Baroque Conspiracy

123

the youth in the garden. He simply exchanges masks as the signs of his sudden departure, the furniture or objects he bumped into and knocked over in his hasty retreat become the contours of a new mask he wears. In order to determine the “identity of the individual behind the mask,” the law ends up assigning the mask that he left behind as his own property, not as his sole creation, but rather as his assigned role in an eternal game of hunt the slipper. I return once more to the preface of the The History of Iniquity to clarify Borges’ use of the Baroque to name a technique of his fiction, the technique of parody. I would define the Baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) . its own possibilities, and that borders on selfcaricature. In vain did Andrew Lang attempt, in the eighteen-eighties, to imitate Pope’s Odyssey; it was already a parody, and so defeated the parodist’s attempt to exaggerate its tautness. “Baroco” was a term used for one of the modes of syllogistic reasoning; the eighteenth century applied it to certain abuses in seventeenth-century architecture and painting. I would venture to say that the Baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources. The Baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has said that all intellectual labor is humorous. This humor is unintentional in the works of Baltasar Gracian, but intentional, even indulged, in the works of John Donne.165

On the basis of this passage, we might derive a series of four propositions, in a purely artificial manner, to characterize Borges’ use of the term “Baroque.” The Baroque is a style that exhausts its own possibilities, or at least tries to. It can be identified as a form of parody. It represents the final stage of all art, a stage of exhaustion or pure expenditure (although, one might also say final consumption, in the sense that it uses or exhausts all its resources). Finally, the Baroque is purely intellectual, which is to say humorous.

124

On the (New) Baroque

Both the first and the third of the above propositions can be examined together. What does Borges intend by defining the nature of Baroque style in terms of exhaustion, but also as the last stage of all art-work? In one sense, what Borges may be referring to is the exaggerated and extreme sense of “academicism” that often marks the end of any vital movement of artistic process. Exhaustion is the trait of an academic style that has spent all of its possibilities for invention and begins to turn its resources into a purely formal reiteration of past conventions. Here, one might notice that the extremes of both Classicism and Romanticism share a common fate—a purely rhetorical and intellectual vapidity that is the hallmark of academic periods. So why is Borges so interested in this moment—the end of the Romantic conception of the art­work, the return of classical and academic styles which usually signal a loss of energy, and an exhaustion of knowledge to the point where it becomes “merely literature” or rhetoric? Earlier on we saw that Eugenio d’Ors defined the one constant of the “Baroque eon” by the opposition “classical v. Baroque.” By means of this schematization, the Baroque completely absorbs the Romantic and d’Ors relays all its energy and enthusiasm according to this new classification. In Borges, on the other hand, the Baroque has become completely classical, to an almost hyperbolic degree, and its dominant traits are those outlined above: exhaustion, parody, consumption and intellectual humor. In each of these traits one can find a fundamental character of repetition that will become the hallmark of Borges’ literary process. As Lisa Block de Behar has observed: Repetition is a phenomenon that lacks novelty, as is known; in any case—and this has also been said—novelty is rooted only in the return, which suggests that the recognition of the quotation is especially appropriate. […] If, for Borges, quotations reveal that authors are readers who re-write what has been written, those turnings are what found and shape his poetics.106

Perhaps the best exemplar of this process is the figure of Pierre Menard, whose affirmation can be read in the context of the following sentence: “He dedicated his scruples and his sleepless nights to repeating an already extant book in an alien tongue.”167 The principle that

The Baroque Conspiracy

125

governs Menard’s process, which Borges comments on in detail, is neither translation nor copying, but rather corresponds to the creation of what Deleuze calls a ‘simulacrum.” What differentiates the simulacrum from the simple copy is a principle that returns to the Leibnizian axiom that only what differs can begin to have a resemblance. The “difference” one finds in the tale of Menard is the following: “To compose the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable undertaking, necessary and perhaps unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible.” However, the difference that governs and determines the undertaking for Menard is defined as “impossible.” Impossible in what sense? The answer to this question is given earlier in the sentence which describes the composition of the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century as a natural act, perhaps even one that was “necessary and unavoidable.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, we must determine this act to be something unreasonable, that is, completely avoidable. In other words, Menard’s gesture is an act that runs against the grain of his time—it is impossible a priori. On the other hand, according to Borges, Cervantes’ “genius” was something thoroughly inscribed in the possibility of his time, almost to the extent that this negates Cervantes’ singular importance as the author of the Quixote, since if he didn’t write it then someone else certainly would have, by a law of necessity. In order to establish this law, we need only take the comparison of the two passages that Borges gives us to substantiate his claim of their fundamental difference, passages that on first inspection appear to be exactly identical. Cervante’s passage reads: […] truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and future’s counselor.

And Menard’s: […] truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and future’s counselor.168

126

On the (New) Baroque

Upon first glance, both versions appear identical; however, Menard’s version highlights the importance of history as the mother of truth. In other words, in Menard’s version history is not identified with what happened, but rather what we judge to have happened. As a result of this change in emphasis, the difference between Menard’s passage and that of Cervantes is profound—they don’t even mean the same thing! In other words, between these two statements, something has changed and this change of “origin” is historical, “the mother of truth.” What is different for us is that, today, there can be no Quixote without Menard. Moreover, this could be said to be Borges’ relation to the “tradition of all of Western literature,” which is established by the principle of repetition. No Quixote without Menard!! That is, only what differs can begin to have resemblance, but this “resemblance” will only appear from the second instance that repeats the first, just as now Quixote will resemble Menard, more than Menard will resemble Quixote. Thus, “Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is infinitely richer.”169 In the story “Shakespeare’s Memory,” the main character is a scholar who happens upon an amazing discovery, the existence of the young Shakespeare’s personal memory in the personal memory of another critic, one Daniel Thorpe. “What I possess,” Thorpe explains, are still two memories—my own personal memory and the memory of Shakespeare which I partially am. Or rather, the two memories possess me. There is a place where they merge, somehow. There is a woman’s face … I am not sure what century it belongs to.170

Later, the narrator explains: De Quincy says that our brain is a palimpsest. Every new text covers the previous one, and is in turn covered by the text that follows—but all-powerful Memory is able to exhume any impression, no matter how momentary it might have been, if given sufficient stimulus. To judge by the will he left, there had not been a single volume in Shakespeare’s house, not even the Bible, and yet everyone is familiar with the books he so often repaired to: Chaucer, Gower, Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Holinshed’s Chronicle, Florio’s Montaigne, North’s Plutarch. I possessed, at least potentially, the memory that had been Shakespeare’s; the reading (which

The Baroque Conspiracy

127

is to say the re-reading) of those old volumes would, then, be the stimulus I sought.171

Soon, however, the narrator learns that the magical gift he is seeking will also lead him to his own inimical season in hell. It is already too much of a burden to bear one memory, but to bear the burden of two is an unimaginable torment. “The wish of things, Spinoza says, is to continue to be what they are. The stone wishes to be a stone, the tiger a tiger—and I want to be Herman Sörgel again.172 In the end, not able to suffer the ambiguity any longer, he passes the gift (like poison poured into the ear) to a child he had randomly dialed up on the telephone. The story ends with this coda: P.S. (1924)—I am now a man among men. In my waking hours I am Professor Emeritus Hermann Sörgel; I putter around the card catalogue and compose erudite trivialities, but at dawn I sometimes know that the person dreaming is the other man. Every so often in the evening I am unsettled by small, fleeting memories that are perhaps authentic.173

Both the story of Menard and that of Herman Sörgel illustrate a certain mysterium tremendum that has become the hallmark of much of Borges’ fiction. Yet, the anxiety—over personal identity, experience, and personality—in each case is haunted by the character of repetition that comes from living their whole lives in the library. In particular, each character is haunted by an idea of originality, often in the figure of genius who outstrips the protagonist or narrator and leaves his own identity blank and barren, a copy of a copy. The character of Pierre Menard seems the lightest of these, since in copying the genius of Cervantes, he comes upon a discovery: rather than yoking himself to the impossible idea of originality, which may not exist in the manner it is often imagined, he discovers that by copying the original exactly and precisely in every detail, he is capable of introducing a maximum degree of difference between the text of Cervantes and his own. Less triumphant characters, however, are more frequent in Borges’ fictions. In “Shakespeare’s Memory,” the idea of Shakespeare’s genius is a poison that is poured into Herman Sörgel’s ear, and it is interesting to remark that even in his attempt to rid himself of

128

On the (New) Baroque

the phantom of Shakespeare’s unique experience by pouring it, in turn, into the ear of a child, the memory of Shakespeare he possessed leaves an indelible trace (like original sin) that causes him to doubt his own authenticity, whether his dreams belong to him or to “the other man.” Sometimes its is the character of genius, of a kind of originality that causes everything familiar and known to enter into a process of variation and to begin anew, that is analogous to the representation of “Absolute knowledge” in Borges’ work. In another story, the character who has spent his entire existence in the library is heard to exclaim: In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years. It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe. [Borges adds the following axiom: “it simple suffices for such a book to be possible for it to exist.”] I pray to the unknown god that a man—just one, even though it were thousands of years ago!—may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for the others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for just one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified.

In this passage from “The Library of Babel,” we can detect the cry of a man of faith, even though his place is in hell. He is haunted by the possibility that there is one creature who may have existed thousands of years ago, or who may not yet exist—since the library contains all possible times and it is possible to posit his existence for all these times, regardless of past or future with regard to the present, this does not matter— who has read the book and for whom the universe is completely and perfectly justified. All of these examples seem to illustrate an anxiety that is specifically modern, discussed earlier in relation to Foucault and the Baroque, which is the specific anxiety over resemblance. Of course, the idea of resemblance as a Baroque problem is clearly announced early on in Calderon’s La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream), where human drama is likened to a play, or later in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, where the problem of resemblance, or the fictional nature of reality, is immortalized in the famous line, “All the world’s a stage and men and women merely players.” What is specifically modern, however, about Borges’ adaptation (or repetition,

The Baroque Conspiracy

129

if you wish) of this Baroque theme, as well as his use of the Baroque emblem or device (mise­-en-âbime, or the “play within the play”) is that it is stripped of its classical topic of theatricality and inscribed into that most modern and political of narratives: the conspiratorial plot, or the detective genre. In this sense, the idea of resemblance itself takes on the character of a trap, a decoy or a stratagem invented by a notorious author to conceal the traces of a great crime. The master detective (for example, the figure of Dupin that Borges adapts from the detective stories of Poe) is often ambushed by a fiction created to lead him directly to the moment of his own death. In “Death and the Compass’, the criminal genius of Scharlach devises a cryptic sentence in the series of three murders he performs in order to lead the hapless detective Lönnrott straight to his death, in fact, to the exact spot where the bullet from Scharlach’s gun will enter Lönnrott’s brain. How do we account for the form of conspiracy that Borges employs to renovate the classical Baroque problem of resemblance? Of course, conspiracies abound in Borges’ fictions, and there are many different kinds: the conspiracy of the narrator in “The Garden of Forking Paths” to commit a murder in order to secretly communicate the name of a town that is to be bombed by the Germans during WWII; the conspiracy of Scharlach to lead the solitary Lönnrott to his death at Triste-le-Roy; the conspiracy that surrounded the death of the Irish revolutionary Fergus Kirkpatrick in a Dublin theater in 1824, which is later unearthed by his great-grandson in “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”; finally, the conspiracy that led to the assassination of Julius Caesar at the hands of his closest friend, a conspiracy that is frequently referred to by all of Borges’ narrators. Of course, this last conspiracy in some ways functions as the archetype of all the others. In a short fragment entitled “The Plot,” Borges ponders whether all plots are merely variations upon the same one, as he narrates the story of a gaucho in the streets of Buenos Aires who falls at the hand of his godson. The fragment ends with the statement: “He dies, but he does not know that he has died so a scene can be played again.174 Here, we see an adaptation of the earlier Baroque metaphor of theatrum mundi, although the figure of the playwright is replaced by the author of a vast conspiracy in which everyone plays an unwitting role. This is most clearly illustrated in a passage from “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” which concerns the conspiracy surrounding the murder of the

130

On the (New) Baroque

Irish rebel Kirkpatrick: “Kirkpatrick was murdered in a theater, yet the entire city played the role of a theater, too, and the actors were legion, and the play that was crowned by Kirkpatrick’s death took place over many days and many nights.”175 The key to the above mystery is Borges’ frequent use of the term “plot” in order to designate both its conspiratorial and literary senses. History is narrated by Borges’ scholarly detectives as a series of plots that always lead to the murder of a God or a hero; likewise, literature can be understood as possibly the limitless number of versions of the same fundamental plot, as so many variations on a theme. As Borges writes, “The idea that history might have copied history seems mind-boggling enough; that history should have copied literature is inconceivable …”176 In fact, “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” is itself an ingenious variation on this theme that history copies literature, as the scholar detective discovers that the hero Kirkpatrick himself was the traitor to the revolution and his execution was staged in order to turn the traitor’s execution into an instrument of political emancipation. The plot is explained: And so it was that Nolan (the playwright) conceived a stage plan. […] He had no time to invent the circumstances of multiple executions from scratch, and so he plagiarized the scene from another playwright, the English enemy Will Shakespeare, reprising scenes from Macbeth and Julius Caesar. The public yet secret performance occurred over several days. The condemned man entered Dublin, argued, worked, prayed, reprehended, spoke the words of pathos— and each of those acts destined to shine forth in glory had been choreographed by Nolan. Hundreds of actors collaborated with the protagonist; the role of some was complex, the role of others a matter of moments on the stage. The things they did and said endure in Ireland’s history books and in its impassioned memory.177

In Borges’ account, history is motivated by a single murder that has unfolded in countless different versions. The conspiracy that resulted in the betrayal and murder of Caesar functions as the original plot, but there are endless variations, including the murder of Christ (in the vast plot arranged by his Father), Kirkpatrick (who, like Christ, turns out to be a willing victim), and even Abraham Lincoln (whose assassination in a theater is already prefigured by Nolan’s version thirty years beforehand, and by

The Baroque Conspiracy

131

the fact that Booth was an actor playing a role that had already been written for so many others before him). History unfolds, murder by murder, but in the center of these recorded events we find the lonely figure of the reader and scholar, an avatar of Borges himself, who connects these murders together into a vast and overarching design. In Borges’ Baroque design, unlike in Calderon, the literary or contrived (and crafted) series of events is set into actual historical time, although this does not result in History becoming itself fantastic, merely more Baroque (that is, more complex, part contrived and the other part made up of a series of pure accidents). It is a truism that the motives for any conspiratorial plot never equal the outcome. There are always errors, unforeseen circumstances, mishaps, and this is the stuff of Borges’ fiction. Above all, it is important to note that the solution to the mysteries that Borges’ fiction sets out to resolve always obeys one primary rule that Borges himself discovers in the works of Chesterton (“the inventor of elegant mysteries”): the rule that each solution proposed must never take the form of the fantastic, but must always be comprised of plain historical events and characters. This makes Borges perhaps the most rigorous of materialists, in one sense, since the actors who are discovered at the center of any secret conspiracy or plot are always human and are driven by common motives (for power and for revenge especially). In fact, it usually turns out that the reason that these conspiracies have remained so mysterious for centuries afterwards is that the identities of their true inventors are so little known, and this is partly Borges’ love for the obscurity of the proper names that populate his works. Like the figures of the police in much of Poe’s detective fiction, who often play the roles of idiots and dupes, the reason that mystery has shrouded these figures is that historians and ideologists were always looking in the wrong place, or were deceived by the myth that History was created from the motivations of great men, when, in fact, the opposite is true. In Borges’ work, therefore, history and literature converge in the great European library, where a murder unfolds, even though the plot that runs through the library is only visible from the vantage point of a lonely reader in Buenos Aires named Borges, for whom the true nature of the crime at the centre of the Library is revealed. Perhaps this makes Borges the greatest modern philosopher of conspiracy, even though, as a writer of mere fictions, he would receive no fame for this and his identity would remain concealed and little known, much like his narrators.

132

On the (New) Baroque

In a certain sense, this fate already foreshadowed by the ending of “The Theme of the Hero and the Traitor”: In Nolan’s play, the passages taken from Shakespeare are the least dramatic ones; Ryan suspected that the author interpolated them so that someone, in the future, would be able to stumble upon the truth. Ryan realized that, he too, was part of Nolan’s plot […] After long and stubborn deliberation, he decided to silence the discovery. He published a book dedicated to the hero’s glory; that too, perhaps, had been foreseen.178

Chapter 11 Baroque and el barroco: Severo Sarduy “Cuba is a text.” —Roberto González Echevarría

Unlike d’Ors, who sees the Baroque as the sign of an epistemic shift in European notions of culture and history, or Genette who sees the emergence of the Baroque “schema” as the ascendancy of a literary mode as the human faculty that rules the categories and provides the inner sense to human perceptions of time, Severo Sarduy’s use of the term is much more restrictive in that it refers specifically to its colonial origins in Spanish and Latin American literary and cultural traditions. Of course, the concept of barroco in Sarduy’s system still represents a cosmological view of culture; in fact, he borrows from the modern vocabulary of science and technology the metaphors of the “Big Bang” and the “Solid State” to stand for the two dynamic principles traditionally associated with the Baroque polemic: classical and romantic, order and disorder, stability and movement. Barroco, then, would signify in the sphere of culture what the intuition of the “Big Bang” brings to cosmological theories of an ever expanding universe. Sarduy’s use of the cosmological metaphors—particularly, “The Big Bang” v. “the Solid State” universe—is partly an allusion to the central image of Carpentier’s Explosion in the Cathedral, as a symbol of the eschatology of Cuban­A merican culture which is created from an explosion and then fusion of different traditions and origins (Greek, African, Indian and Spanish colonial). As Lezama describes this telos of new American identity, given in reference to the image of a neoclassical structure that is set ablaze, “First, there is tension in the Baroque; second, there is Plutonism, an originary fire that tears apart fragments in the act of uniting them.”179 However, like d’Ors’ theory of the Baroque as a universal constant, there is also a scientific principle of explanation to which the Baroque corresponds—a constant force of change and innovation—as if bound to a law of nature.

134

On the (New) Baroque

Illustrated in the image of an original conflagration that marks the birth of universe, there is a constant rate of expansion and amplification of space within every artificial (or cultural) system—a growth and proliferation, “superabundance and overflowing”—which defies and makes impossible any concept of culture, history or time that is still based on the principle of homeostasis. By employing this cosmological metaphor, Sarduy redefines and modernizes the meaning of both movement and change in the Baroque construction. In its the application of its term to the fields of cultural production and aesthetics, however, Sarduy appears much more restrained and guarded to apply the Baroque specifically to the art of Latin America. In this sense he follows borh Martí and Lezama, in particular, who rejected the cultural theories that based the origin of the American identity upon an indigenous and primitive origin, or in a certain simplicity of the spirit that seemed in complete contradiction to the variety and complexity of the virulent regionalism in American cultures. As Echevarría writes, “Lezama proposes a complex and excessive origin,” a creative and violent confrontation of the different events and cultural identities found here, and the dominant anxiety of innovation.180 Like Martí’s image of the hybridity or creolization of the “natural man,” which replaces the amorphous universal humanity of the European horde, both Lezama and Sarduy conceive this image under the banner of Baroque multiplicity. Barroco, then, describes the process of displacement, as the movement in which Europe is caught up in a general transmigration initiated by the discovery of the new world (i.e, the “Big Bang”), and the process of cultural assimilation as the confrontation and creative disfigurement by which European culture is grafted onto the American, like the piling of surfaces in the Baroque structure. As it was also true for Martí and Lezama—though in decidedly non­ structuralist terms in their cases—Sarduy describes this process of grafting and cultural translation in terms of a certain inter-textuality common to Baroque compositions, which multiply levels of narration through citation, allusion, repetition, pastiche and parody. For example, I cite this passage from Lezama as an example: “the original invents its citations, charging them with more meaning in the new body on which they are grafted than what they had on the body from which they were extracted.” In the works of Martí and Lezama, these metaphors remain organic and can be understood as the extension of the Romantic conceptual system—where

Baroque and el barroco

135

text and body are interchangeable under the notion of hybridity and monstrosity (hence the importance of Góngora and Calderón for both critics). Sarduy renovates these earlier figures (or tropes) within the conceptual systems of a structuralist semiology and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In Sarduy’s Baroque system, there are four different levels (cosmological, cultural, linguistic, psychological), each of which correspond to the primary metaphor of the Baroque. This correspondence, or analogy, is conceived within the figure of the ellipse (the deformed circle with two centres), which is derived from several of these fields: from the astronomy of Kepler, from the cosmology of the European Baroque, from literature and; finally, from Lacanian figure of aphanasis (that is, the subject elided beneath a signifying chain). In turn, these fields are all allied to a thesis of intertextuality that results when literature, language, or culture renounce the denotative level and its linear expression to produce both displacements, doubling up, and proliferation of metonymic surfaces. At the center of Sarduy’s system is the belief that psychoanalysis constitutes the modern epistemology of the Subject; on each different level there is a fundamental interpretation of the subject that is based upon the Lacanian conception of desire. Therefore, the subject is based upon the primacy of a repression (Verdrängung), which Sarduy interprets as the suppression of an origin, experienced by the subject as a lack, around which meaning (writing, culture, language) is constructed as a form of defense. In cosmological terms, the movement of the stars (glimpsed as signifiers) covers a black hole (metaphor) created by the original explosion; in cultural terms, the form of Culture itself consists in covering up the lack that is produced from the loss of an identity that is posited at its origin. Thus, metaphor (or writing) is erected in the place of a repressed origin; although, in Sarduy’s system, metaphor is no longer characterized as an imperfect or weak analogy, but rather as a “return of the repressed” signified, that is, as the very creative act of the work of culture to return and to recover, both to cover over and to restitute, to forget and to remember in the same movement of signification. In the following passage from Barroco, Sarduy explains this process in psychoanalytic (primarily Lacanian) terms: The Baroque metaphor would identify itself with a mode radically different from suppression: repression (Verdrängung/refoulement), a

136

On the (New) Baroque

mode that consists of a change of structure. It is at the level of the system of the Unconscious that the process unfolds. Through it the representation of representations, which are tied to certain drives (pulsiones), are pushed away or kept at a distance. In the measure in which repression is identified with the organization of an “original” deficiency or lack, repression sets off a sort of metonymic reaction which itself implies an indefinite flight of the object of the drive. But, in the measure in which, through the symptom, it allows a glimpse of the return of that which has been repressed—in the economy of neurosis the symptom is its signified—it blends exactly into metaphor.181

Although the meaning of the last statement is itself difficult to glimpse beneath the technical rhetoric that is employed to describe the process, the precision that the scientific language emulates is part of the epistemological claim concerning the unfolding of the “Baroque system.” In the above passage, however, we have one simple assertion: that the “original repressed” is partly recovered through the process of metaphor, which allows a glimpse of its return under its metonymic representatives. Thus, the concept of Culture is fashioned from what Echevarría calls a “hypostasis of rhetoric” that “is wrought within the zero that encircles the beginning.” In Barroco, this zero is described as an echo chamber situated at the beginning of writing, which sets out to annihilate this subject with a profusion of figures. Thus, it is interesting to note that, in Sarduy’s view, language itself is regulated by a principle of homeostasis, “the autonomous and tautological code,” to which the process of literary language would be opposed. In Sarduy’s own fiction, this notion of hybridity is further explored through the figure of transvestism, especially in the case of his novel Cobra. Sarduy was writing this from Paris at the end of the sixties and the early seventies. Cobra, his principal novel, was written in 1972. It was a time when the abstract flame of 1968 was just entering into print as a visible “sign” of history. The final section of Cobra, entitled “The Indian Diary,” intentionally reflects this period; “The Chinese revolution, the invasion of Tibet […] are events that articulate the plot, that fix its place in historical time.”182 The gang of motorcycling drug dealers that form the primary subject of this part of the novel’s plot is Sarduy’s allusion to “the free­wheeling student movement” that took place at the end of this

Baroque and el barroco

137

period, to the travel, experimentation with drugs and mind-expansion, and to the wholesale (“new age”) appropriation of other religious systems and rituals, particularly from the Orient. Sarduy himself is not an Orientalist and even pokes fun at the romanticism associated with these social movements; at one point, he emphatically declares through the character of the Maharishi, “I travel by plane, not by elephant.183 Consequently, the multiplicity of the fragments and symbols torn from other cultures and world-views that circulate throughout the final section of the novel must be understood as an illustration of the Baroque thesis of the “Big Bang.” Literally, the world itself at this moment in history explodes, peoples and cultures are dispersed in this conflagration, and it is through the process of “metaphorization” that cultures are united again into one form. To recall the passage by Paz cited earlier on, the present is projected into a medulla, into a time that is neither linear nor cyclical, governed neither by history nor myth. “The Indian Diary,” the final part, is written as a palimpsest on Columbus’s diary “The Indies” (several passages of which are excerpted and appear in the novel), marking Sarduy’s intention that the novel’s metaphorical process is a return of the origin of contemporary Cuban culture. However, this is not a return of native and autochthonic culture of the Caribbean, which is marked by an initial absence, a blank and empty void, in Sarduy’s system of writing. In fact, it is the emptiness of this “origin” that sets off the chain of metaphorical substitutions and displacement” of other origins (Africa, the Orient, Europe), which, for Sarduy, constitute the true form of Cuban culture as a figure of Paz’s medulla. It is the initial lapsus calumni of Columbus’s discovery of “East India” that constitutes the origin of Cuba, the erroneous and fatal marriage of East and West in one historical place, that in Sarduy’s novel, irrevocably links New Delhi and Havana in a metonymic substitution: the contemporary journey to Eastern Tibet by the characters in the novel echo and even double for Columbus’s earlier journey to “the West Indies.” Here, Sarduy interprets the unconscious figure of “the Orient” that is strongly figured in Latin American literary traditions, and can be illustrated in the fiction of Borges (for example, “The Garden of Forking Paths’) and especially in the essays and poetry of Octavio Paz. However, while “for Paz, the East is a possible nirvana; for Sarduy, it is merely Columbus’ initial mistake.”184 As a result, it is no longer historically

138

On the (New) Baroque

accurate (or true) to say that “India is in India,” but rather it is also somewhere east of a sprawling and modern metropolitan Mexico city—i.e. India is also in the Caribbean. Therefore, the novel’s characters’ journey to “ancient Tibet” to visit the Grand Lama, who giggles in response to the question “What is the path of liberation?” while his children in the next room play on a red telephone made of plastic.185 Moreover, the central statement in the novel appears as both an echo and inversion of Paz’s earlier vision of the present as “the here and the now”: “Death is neither here nor there. She’s always beside us, industrious, infinitesimal.186 What Cobra recovers (se recobra) is the initial cut of language from which both history and culture originate. The principle of “artificiality” already occupies the beginning, and the image nature itself, like the missing phallus of the character of the transvestite Cobra, is only the effect of an original absence that sets the process of writing and culture in motion. As Echevarría observes: “The origin is always multiple, contradictory, and deceptive; its truth, the truth of Columbus’ India, of Cipango, is being founded on that mistake.”187 Lacan once claimed that “the truth is caught up in the defiles of the signifier.” In one sense, Sarduy’s writing process deployed in Cobra is a supreme exemplification of this statement, precisely because it is made to apply to a problem that is central to Latin American literary tradition— the problem of separating history and culture from the defiles of its imaginary projections by the West, and from its own specific “Orientalism.” If el barroco surfaces as the supreme concept of this problem, it is precisely because it shares the same vicissitudes as its Latin-American counterparts: the problem of multiple origins, multiple periods, both present and past, primitive and modern, aboriginal and artificial, the hybridity of East and West. Hence, Cobra only “plays” at being a novel of recovery, the rediscovery of original Latin American identity; however, it rejects any naive impulse for nostalgia and mimetic realism and instead reveals a process of recovery that is much more complex and artificial—it challenges the simplistic laws of mimesis that the traditional novel is based upon, and brings them to the surface. Consequently, there is an implicit irony in the quest for identity that occupies both the main characters: the quest of the male transvestite Cobra to recover “her” true sexual identity; the quest of the Señora to find the right drug to shrink her “over-sized feet,” which she remarks as her only natural flaw, making her appear too masculine.

Baroque and el barroco

139

Thus, male and female counterparts are linked through their search to fashion a missing piece of the real, which is revealed only as an artificial supplement, made up to cover or recover the inherent flaw of nature. In fact, both characters exhibit two exaggerated traits of machismo, which Sarduy reveals as an accident of language, a product of colonial history that is embodied in the Cuban psyche. As Echevarría writes, “Cobra does not denounce machismo, but exposes its artificiality, its being founded on the transvestism inherent in language.”188 (As an aside, it is interesting to note that more than twenty years before the writings of Judith Butler and the emergence of “Queer identity” in North American universities, Sarduy invents a theory of gender that is founded upon performativity.) As exhibited in the psychoanalytic figures that are implicit in the above descriptions, many of Sarduy’s concepts, in conversation with the Tel Quel group of the 1970s, avow a certain jubilatory rhetoric that announced the liberation of the Unconscious primary processes and the speculative power of the death drive into the fields of culture and politics, as well as the identification of these values with the performativity of literature, or more precisely, Writing (L’Écriture). Several key principles of this ideology can be listed as follows: A notion of eroticism, based for the most part on the writings of Bataille, which sees transgression as an expenditure, squandering, play and loss of the reproductive desire that regulates modern notions of culture and economy An analysis of ideology, based in part on a combination of Marx’s writings on the symptom and Lacan’s theory of the objet a, which was facilitated principally by Althusser and his followers, revealing the discrepancy between the Real and its phantasmal image (presence, identity, imaginary capitation) An identification of the primary processes in the discourse of the hysteric, the pervert, and the schizophrenic; contributing to a new psychoanalytic conception of literary performativity in the sphere of culture and politics (for example, the critical importance for members of the Tel Quel group of the key figures and writings of Artaud, Carroll, the schizophrenic Wolfson and the psychotic Dr Schreber)

140

On the (New) Baroque

Until 1964, the journal Tel Quel had only been interested in the figures of the French Nouveau Roman. After this time, however, it announced itself as an avant-garde journal and established a principal inquiry into the status of Writing (L’Écriture) from the perspective of four distinct fields: literary criticism, linguistics, ethnography and psychoanalysis. As biographer and intellectual historian Elizabeth Roudinesco writes: In order to differentiate itself from its Surrealist ancestors, the journal sought models among dissidents: Bataille and Artaud were invoked as the vanguard representatives of a radical anti-Surrealism—one because of his Nietzschean mythology, his mystical atheism, and his cult of eroticism, and the other for his experience of the monumental prose of madness. Beyond those references, Dante, Lautréamont, Sade, and Mallarmé appeared as the permanent prophets inscribed at the heart of Western writing.189

Already here, we might glimpse in this list the literary and philosophical cosmology of many other French postmodern writers and philosophers. For example, we might remember the name of Sade in the works of both Lacan and Deleuze, and the frequency of Artaud in the early writings of Foucault, and, most importantly, Derrida (who also wrote on Bataille in the earlier essays of Writing and Difference). Derrida’s influence was especially pronounced in the earlier stages of the group in which Sarduy participated. Derrida’s essay “Freud and the Scene of Writing” was published by the journal in 1966, in which a reading of Freud was developed around the notion of “grammatology.” As Roudinesco recounts, “Through it [this critical essay], the writers of Tel Quel could become Freudians; they read Freud in light of Lacan, Lacan under the banner of Derrida, and Derrida according to guerrilla-like strategies of the written.”190 Also, Derrida’s essay on Bataille would provide the basic plank of the “Tel Quel Programme”: the revolutionary theory of Western writing. Derrida’s former student, Philippe Sollers, was the principal architect of the journal and the groups’ ideological agenda. From Derrida, Sollers adapted the Derridean concept of the “proto-trace” that appeared to underline the thesis found in Of Grammatology and transformed it into a deliberative program that sought to liberate an “archi-écriture” (or original writing). These principles were synthesized in a form of cultural criticism that was already a practice of writing, which at through its utilization of structuralist concepts, established itself under a regime of

Baroque and el barroco

141

“scientificity” that, in its approach to the historical and cultural phenomenon under the metaphor of texts, claimed to establish a new ‘science of the subject.”191 Returning to Sarduy’s system in Barroco and the later novels, these principles do not constitute Sarduy’s entire work. However, in the essay “The Baroque and the Neo-Baroque” they outline the program to produce a taxonomy of literature in specific application to the use of these terms in Latin American traditions. It is also important to see that Barroco responds to the question of cultural forms in America by promoting a process of “artificialization.” The terms developed under this process are as follows: substitution, proliferation, condensation, parody, inter-textuality and intra-textuality. Sarduy’s Baroque system can thus be defined as a tropological process, or as an “artificialization of culture.” Here we might again recall Eugenio d’Ors whose invention of critical terminology in many ways already forecasts the themes of hybridity and mestizaje, including the textual and organic processes of grafting and citation in the composition of cultural works. With a high value placed on the principles of “texture” and “in-mixing,” in his own criticism d’Ors invented a unique and innovative set of terms to describe these processes, particularly in his art criticism. Often, he borrowed culinary terms such as picadillo (“minced meat”), puchero español (‘spanish stew”), or andrajo (“tattered”) to characterize the “texture” of different compositions according to what he called an architectonic analysis which belonged to his general theory of morphology, and to the concept of the Baroque in particular.192 Thus, paintings from different periods were defined no longer on the basis of period or style (Romantic v. Classical, for instance), but rather on the basis of their morphological differences in the composition of textured surfaces—a technique that no longer views the work from its representational function, but as a process of artificialization. For example, in his study of Rembrandt and Goya, two painters from different periods, both are revealed to be “Baroque” by means of this criterion. D’Ors discovers in Rembrandt’s paintings the use of three architectonic techniques (tatter, minced meat and emulsion); whereas Goya’s compositions are described as a mélange of different elements within a total composition. As d’Ors’ biographer, Pilar Saénz, observes “this technique is called by d’Ors olla podrida (or paella), for “the similarity in texture for those dishes where the meat and fish, vegetables and sausage, bones and broth,

142

On the (New) Baroque

whole and carved pieces’, mix together producing a thick consistency that is both “amusing” and an appetizing multiplicity. Consequently, according to d’Ors, Goya offers a plato fuerte (a strong dish), one that attracts and repels the sensibility at the same time, and “will be difficult to digest.”193 What is important to highlight in d’Ors’ inventive and very peculiar terminology is its origin in Spanish taste and culture—which itself is significant in avoiding the terms that a more generally drawn from European aesthetic philosophy—and which seems to view the principle of Culture itself in a manner that resembles Herder’s concept of ethnic culture, as being more of an artificial and highly determined assemblage of climate, custom, cuisine, milieu or environment. D’Ors’ aesthetic terminology also offers a corrective to the gradual abstraction of the concept of taste itself—even Kant described judgment in terms that often evoked their gustative sense, which was not simply metaphorical, but rather fundamentally subjective—a concept that cannot be divorced from the environmental elements that condition the subject’s cultural, social, and even psychological sensibility. In Sarduy’s case, of course, we have observed more of a borrowing from the terminology of psychoanalysis, linguistics and Derridean philosophy. However, this is more descriptive of his criticism than of his novels, where there is a highly innovative and specific engagement with the cultural and linguistic resources of Cuban and Latin American traditions. In both critics, therefore, we bear witness to an odd tension between the craving of universalizing phenomena (or what d’Ors calls “the morphology of culture” and what Sarduy sets into the framework of cosmology, or “The Big Bang”) and, at the same time, an insistence on the invention of provincial and culturally specific critical terminologies to describe Latin American phenomena. One way of understanding this impulse might be to employ the terminology of a “minor usage” as defined by the French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, particularly in application to the fiction of Kafka. By comparison, a “minor” form is not static (a type, or a genre), but rather must be understood in the process of “becoming minor,” that is, as a variation of a major language or form caused by the introduction of minor variables. In the case of d’Ors, for example, the technique of Rembrandt is described as “picadillo” or as “andrajo” (more in line with the blotchy compositions of folk art or provincial painting), whereas Goya is revealed as a European painter, preoccupied as he is with

Baroque and el barroco

143

certain universal concerns that belong to a major tradition, and no longer as merely a Spanish painter as he had been classified in the early part of the century. In the same way, we might understand Sarduy’s term “barroco” as a minor usage which is employed strategically in the process of subordinating the dominant cultural tension that structures the European concept of culture—that of Classicism and Romanticism (or Gothic), which always maintains a cyclical version of cultural history— and, instead, placing this in service of the specifically regional and cultural dialectic of Cuban and Latin American expressions el barroco. Thus, the cyclical and recurring opposition of Classical and Romantic, when pictured within the metaphoric movement announced in Sarduy’s use of the “The Big Bang,” no longer contains the moment of a return, but rather is cast in the form of an infinite dispersion outward that causes the origin to become empty and void. Earlier on, Spengler had already defined the Baroque as a “Third Style” borne from the tensions between classical art and the Gothic, and Sarduy and other Caribbean writers—including Carpentier whose late novel we will discuss in the final chapter—appropriate this definition to name “the style of Latin America.”194 However, what made this nomination specific to the Latin American context was that barroco now comes to represent something that is completely absent from Western Culture. It represents a complex and over-determined site of cultural contact, an amalgamation of styles and tastes that have been imported from various geographical and cultural regions (Africa, India, Europe, North America), producing a unique co-existence of different styles (modern, pre-modern, surrealist, neoclassical, primitive). Consequently, Alejo Carpentier defines Latin American culture by the mélange of different styles that inhabit its region, and by the fact that it has been named many times and by different colonial traditions and “contact cultures,” including its own cultural resistances to colonial forms, which have often created an interest in recovering the original influences of indigenous cultural expression, such as Indian or African art. For all these reasons, el barroco becomes a perfect category to describe the multiple and conflicting principles of culture. Moreover, as we have already witnessed in the earlier historical revisions of the concept, even in the original Baroque there has always been the specific tension associated with the infusion of popular and more local expressions of taste (for example, associated

144

On the (New) Baroque

with the several minor cultural forms that were later supplanted by the dominant term Baroque, such as marinismo, conceptismo, culturanismo and gongorismo). Concerning the Baroque as a “Third Style,” one that is itself characterized by its own “stylelessness” (that is, as a lack of any particular style of its own), Echevarría summarizes its meaning in the following passage written on Carpentier’s early description: The Baroque as new metaphor, a new conceit designating what is particularly Latin American […] provides for a writing that purports to name, for the first time, even while it is conscious of naming for the second time, of being a renaming. The text is a context, which is already inscribed in the hybrid reality issuing from previous conceptions; the text, in other words, is a ruse, an evasive gesture that points to itself as a beginning that never was, but instead knows itself to be the future of that beginning, its ultimate end. Latin American writing will then be that third style that is the future of all styles; their degradation in heterogeneity, when their codes lose their referentiality.195

In the above description of a process of “naming for the first time even while conscious of naming for a second time” we find again the principle of inter-textuality (“the text is a context”), one which is no longer abstracted from a historical process of naming, but actually describes the manner in which history is inscribed in the process of renaming that which was already named, the fulcrum of representation around which both colonization and revolution revolve. For Sarduy, the principle of inter-textuality issues from the absolute negativity of writing itself, or the ruse of a beginning that never was, as the lack (or cut) introduced into history itself that will henceforth be the incessant site of naming and renaming. This becomes the new (thoroughly Baroque) principle of narrative: “If narrative must go beyond itself to contexts and at the same time constitutes, in a sense, those contexts, then the text is an empty space opened by that negation; it is the point at which things cease to have a style and the locus where they shift from one level to another.”196

Chapter 12 Concierto Barroco: Alejo Carpentier “It is sometimes necessary to distance yourself from things, to put an ocean in between, in order to get a close look at them.” —Alejo Carpentier “Utopia’s not a good concept, better fabulation, the mutual fabulation of a people and of art.” —Gilles Deleuze

Over Here… In Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), Heidegger points to the essential definition of Greek, proto-European, man as one of being “a stranger,” but also to the process of “becoming a stranger,” of estrangement, that is fundamentally tied to the sense of movement described as a casting out from and casting—in the sense of making, or poiesis—of himself from the limits of place (poria). In the “midst of the overpowering,” following the chorus of Antigone: He [to deinotaton—the violent one, or the stranger] sets sail on the frothing waters Amid the south winds of winter Tacking through the mountains And furious chasm of the waves.197

I will quote Heidegger’s commentary on this proto-European stranger to show its essential relation to the economy of all travel narratives. As Heidegger writes: We are taking the strange, the uncanny (Das Unheimliche), as that which casts us out of the homely, i.e, the customary, the familiar, and the secure. The uncanny prevents us from making ourselves at home and therein it is overpowering. But man is the strangest of all,

146

On the (New) Baroque

not only because he passes his life amid the strange understood in this sense but because he departs [he sets out and travels] from his customary, familiar limits, because he is the violent one, who, tending toward the strange in the sense of the overpowering, surpasses the limit of the familiar. […] Pantoporos aporos ep’ouden erchetai.… The essential words are pantoporos aporos. The word poros means: passage through…; transition to…; path.198

It is precisely because man is “the strangest of all beings,” his consciousness must always be represented in relation to the position of the “stranger” (i.e. the third­person impersonal: “one”). Consequently, it is through the Institutions of the Stranger (the law, theology, politics, science; the judge, the priest­confessor, the emissary-advisor, the ethnographer or the anthropologist) that another culture will be actively re-configured from the perspective of a “Third”: the position occupied by the stranger also represents “the best one” to judge, to make decisions that are “fair,” not conditioned by native preferences or biases that belong to constitutive or indigenous interests. Only through the event of estrangement (and by extension, before the social being of the stranger) do all local knowledges and powers reach their limits—they exhaust or spend themselves—and must, in turn, yield to their power to the “strangest thing of all”—Death. The essential definition that Heidegger gives to the European man is the being of the stranger, in the sense that all other definitions find their source and origin in the strangest and the most placeless; it is precisely this original economy that sets these other definitions (such as the customary, the familiar, the secure) in motion. This is the power an IndoEuropean economy of identity enjoys over other social economies, which explains why the constant expansion of its Imperial domain has been an essential part of its form. For example, only by losing one’s being-for­thefamily, can one appear as a being-for-the-others (e.g. the tribe, the group); only by losing this definition as a member of the tribe, can one be defined as a citizen of the city, the nation. By extension, this process would lead to an absolute or world citizen very close in resemblance to Hegel’s “Absolute Imperium,” eventually achieving the expression of a “cosmic consciousness” (as might be depicted, for example, in Humboldt’s Cosmos). For the modern imagination, especially, the “overpowering power”

Concierto Barroco

147

that drives the human to leave his place and abandon the city cannot be divorced from the sense of curiosity that motivated the series of imperial adventures into foreign and unknown territories—first by the Greeks, Romans, the Christian Imperium, and ultimately by Europe itself in the New World’s exploration, discovery and colonization. Hence, the project of colonialism cannot be separated from the narrative biography of European stranger; it was the power of his native economy (oikonomia, which can also be translated as “home economy”) that dominated to all other narratives of home (myths, fabula, stories) and was able to incorporate them as finite episodes belonging to one path of civilization (story of a journey-toward, or telos). To the mythic narrative of journey and exploration, the European travel narrative, a narrative of empirical experience and knowledge is furnished by the New Science. This was also accompanied by a pedagogical and moral installation of another order, which is the virulent accumulation of the “collector.” Europeans may travel in their mind’s eye because they “possess” as a condition of their consciousness, as Alexander von Humboldt said, a “finer sensibility toward works of art” and a “cultivated spirit.” The reflective, informed, and sensible being possesses the ability to be, in this way, literally in more places than one. And it is precisely this capacity for cognitive travel that constitutes his power of scientific understanding. For all scientific knowledge, and the power that knowledge brings with it, demands just such movement. And all movement follows the same trajectory. It begins as a going out and ends as a coming back. The Odyssey, as Auerbach noted long ago, is an image of our mental worlds. The discoverer carries out with him his lexicon of names, his repertoire of classifications, his knowledge of the invisible isolines and parallels that link him to home.199

It is this fundamental capacity for productive imagination that raises the possibility for the European to become, one day, perhaps already—if we are to believe Humboldt—a “cosmic consciousness.” This ability, determined by the very structure of European societies, founds the sedentary principles that unite the interiors of the family and tribe (ethnos) to the interiors of the city (polis), the Nation-State, and the Empire through the media of language and economy. One aspect of this sedentary economic structure

148

On the (New) Baroque

is that no experience can be completed outside a process of its return and incorporation into “the Same,” a mythical structure which underscores Indo-European societies and finds itself inscribed in every region of its Life. It is the very going out and coming back, the itinerary of Ulysses, all narrative revenant, which at the bottom of everything is fundamentally a ghost story (lyric, epic, dramatic). Nothing can exist without return; there is no there, without a corresponding here. Thus, the accumulation and exhibition, the commercial processes that accompanied the initial stages of colonization, essentially belonged to the narrative economy of the European imagination. Once contact is made, “the name given, the species seemingly identified, the resultant mobile artifact still had to be brought back home … to those “centers of calculation,” museums, laboratories, botanical gardens [and I would add theaters and novels] where the experience can be made intelligible to those who never left Europe.”200 Without the moment of return, these elements would never enter into possession, as contents of experience. The movement represented by the very form of narrative, as a distinctly European diegetic structure, is the very condition of “traveling beyond the limits.” And yet, at the basis of this notion of economy is there not also a fundamental determination of the imagination that appears as the basis of fictional representation? As a condition of an aesthetic sensibility that shapes the very form of fiction (whether dramatic or epic), there must be the spectator who remains in place, sedentary, at home, here, but whose imagination can trace the path of the traveler and, therefore, can also be there. It is ironic to find that the very capacity for narrative, defined as the capacity to be oneself here and to be with the other there—more importantly, the crucial capacity of synthesis, which is to remain, to survive as oneself after the experience—is the basis for the narrative that informs the structure of knowledge in science (after Descartes), as well as the translation of goods and empirical data within the circulation of a commercium, which accompanies and, later, replaces the early militaristic stages of colonialism. The accumulation and incorporation of ornaments, exhibits, names and descriptions all function like snapshots, “scenes of the new world” that the spectator as witness gathers on the journey. What the spectator watches is the figure of the traveler himself, who begins to become reflective, a mirrored surface, scintillating with glimpses of the environment that surrounds him. We can catch a glimpse of this

Concierto Barroco

149

in Seigismundo’s monstrosity, or Cruso’s unshaven figure, with wild slippers and hairy shirt. As Humboldt wrote: the character of a wild or cultivated nature, lies either in the obstacles which oppose the traveler or in the sensations which he experiences of it as he whom one wishes to see ceaselessly in contact with the objects which surround him, and the more his local color is suffused through his account of the landscape and its inhabitants, the more it will interest us.201

Thus, the sense of movement exhibited by the affective state of the spectator that we perceived as the basis of the Baroque aesthetic—recalling that “emotion” is a form of external perception as well—finds a speculative analogy with the enthusiasm of the spectatorship that belongs to the project of colonialism. It is a form of “participation” that both echoes and amplifies the Platonic concept of participation, which explains why narrative was the essential component added by Platonic philosophy, as the form in which the listener participates in the anamnesis of the Idea itself. In order not to remain static, motionless, ignorant, stuck to natural positions of consciousness, knowledge needs the vehicle of movement provided by narrative (whether this narrative vehicle takes the form of myth, science, history or culture). As in the earlier example of The Conversion of St Paul, the spectator’s participation in the moment of blindness finds a natural analogy in the experience of disorientation, dizziness and vertigo produced by the proliferation of detail—without form at first, monstrous and grotesque (unrecognized and new symbols, patterns and shapes)—that the spectator “participates” in the awe and wonderment of the traveler’s first sight of the New World. Moreover, it is the spectator who provides the form of this experience and the manner in which this experience was incorporated into the economy of European consciousness. Without the spectacle, the theater, and the dream—the reality of the New World could not exist. Over There… Opposed to an earlier itinerary that begins in Europe (even only to shipwreck the culture and history of Europe within a narrative),

150

On the (New) Baroque

Carpentier’s narrative situates the moment of return from a reverse perspective, when the native returns—not to his own indigenous or authentic culture (which simply corresponds in its value to a linear narrative), but rather to Europe itself. The initial mood of Carpentier’s story is, therefore, melancholic—the separation of the Mexican landlord from his beloved object, the shadow of the distance that falls across his own Ego. Thus, Carpentier’s Concierto Barroco has a deep melancholy mood that it draws in its resonance with a Baroque mass or dirge, underscoring the primary theme of nostalgic return; its passage is also a Passagenwerk of mourning for the European origin of the New World. It is a story of a wealthy Mexican landowner who “returns” to Europe to bathe himself in the culture he has early on identified as his own origin, only to find a new perspective upon his identity and the history of his own culture. At the level of genre, the “novel” (narrative mode) is generically an opera, as the title indicates; Carpentier compiles and combines the text of music, historical documents, travel diaries, the carnival and other fictions in a richly ornamented framework belonging to the “Baroque spectacle.” Consequently, the libretto that Carpentier chooses to harmonize these different forms is Montezuma, written by Girolamo Giusti, which formed the basis of Vivaldi’s opera of the same name. Montezuma represents, for Carpentier, a moment in the history of European culture when the symbol of “the New World” emerged as a foundational metaphor, a well as a metaphor of “adornment” (wealth, natural beauty, the heroic spirit of the noble races, etc.). Hence, Carpentier telescopes this event within the production of Vivaldi’s opera, and has the main character and his servant Filomeno corne to Saint Angelo in Venice to watch the dress rehearsal of the original production. That is, he situates the character of the Mexican as the first witness to judge the European enthusiasm over the cultural spectacle set to Mexico’s violent history. This constitutes the first document of the “New World,” and Carpentier chooses the creative and “natural genius” of Vivaldi to overshadow the original historical document Historia de la conquista de México, by Solis, upon which the original libretto is based. What is more significant, for Carpentier, is the process of the distortion and transformation of the original text, or even the actual historical account of Mexico’s colonization, whereby Vivaldi creates and establishes the symbolic articulation of the “new” with figures drawn from the European colonial imagination.

Concierto Barroco

151

Consequently, Vivaldi perceives in the figures of “the New World” a chance to break out of stale and mechanical figurations of classical mythology and invent a thorough modern mythology that would correspond to this “other place.” This reveals, then, one of the original motives for the early narratives of the New World, as well as explains the forms of hybridity that these new legends were to take on by incorporating attributes and legends from the Greeks in order to provide the European audience with the possibility of analogy and reminiscence. Of course, as an expert witness, the Mexican discovers his own history is open to a surprising number of modifications and quickly finds himself engaged in a polemic not only over the interpretation that Vivaldi makes of Solis’ account of the conquest, but also of the representation of the native cultures of Mexico itself. For example, the opera introduces new characters not present in the Historia and changes the role of others: Cortés had a younger brother named Ramiro, and Teutile was not an Aztec general but rather Montezuma’s daughter. In a dialogue engaged with “Prester Antonio” offstage and after the performance, the Mexican interrogates Vivaldi on a number of factual distortions in the following exchange: ‘And what about the god Uchilobos?’ ‘It’s no fault of mine that you people have gods with names that nobody can pronounce. The conquistadors themselves, in their efforts to imitate the Mexican language, called him Huchilobos or something like that.’ ‘Now I get it! You mean Huitzilopochtli.’ ‘And do you believe it’s possible to sing a word like that? Everything in Solis’ chronicle is a tongue-twister. Nothing but tongue twisters all the way through: Iztlaplapa, Goazocoalco, Xicalango, Tlaxcala, Magiscatzin, Qualpopoca, Xirotencatl … I learned them by heart to use as an articulation exercise. But … to whom, dammit, did it ever occur to invent such a language?’ ‘And what about Tuetile being turned into a female?’ ‘He had a pronounceable name that we could use for a female part.’ ‘And what happened to Guatimozin, the real hero of all this?’

152

On the (New) Baroque

‘He would have broken the unity of action ... I can use him in another drama.’ ‘But … Montezuma was stoned to death.’ ‘Very unpleasant for the finale of an opera. Well, perhaps not for the English, who end their stage plays with murders, slaughters, funeral marches, and grave-diggers. Here, people come to the theater to be amused.’ 202

Here, the concept of enthusiasm is presented in the transformation that the event undergoes from the perspective of the “the creator,” Vivaldi, who is more interested in cultivating and developing the events for their reception by the Venetian audience, providing them with both a marvelous and richly textured, erotic spectacle of the Other, as well as the creative transformation of stale and outmoded classical conventions of the Opera. Vivaldi infuses the representation of Mexico’s history with a distinctly new and invigorating cultural aura and, at the same time, incorporates the highly exotic figures that are drawn from colonial romance into the historical evolution of the operatic form. As he defends himself in a conversation with the Mexican after the staging of the Opera, In America everything is fantastical: tales of El Dorado and Potosi, fabulous cities, talking sponges, sheep with red fleeces, Amazons with only one breast, big-eared Incas who eat Jesuits … I’m sorry you didn’t like my opera … Next time, I’ll try and find myself a more Roman theme. 203

The Mexican, on the other hand, quickly reveals himself to be a literalist, which gradually places him at a distinct disadvantage in the debates with Vivaldi and others, who immediately accuse him of lacking imagination and a capacity for artistic flight, and for remaining a vulgar creature of his origins. “Stop giving me that history crap,” Prester Antonio yells at one point in their dialogue, “poetic illusion is what counts in the theater.”204 Taken aback by the intensity of the production, he quickly finds himself identifying more with the Indians than the Spaniards. This, of course, introduces a profound schism within his own cultural identification, which immediately produces effects of disorientation and estrangement in his character. Although he traveled to Europe to find his origin

Concierto Barroco

153

and source, he soon begins to develop every perception, every thought from two distinct perspectives: Europe and America, the Old and New World. He compares sights, a particular angle of the landscape, the smell of the piazza, “the curl of a young girl’s hair” (recalling the passage by Hogarth cited earlier). He gradually begins to perceive Europe as a worldview that has exhausted itself so completely that it must infuse itself with elements of the New World, disguised as masks in the theater. Europe is a parasite, according to his newly acquired and much more critical (that is, “doubled”) point of view. What originally began as the movement of “return to the source” of his cultural identity gradually inverts itself into a moment of profound melancholy, and the Mexican soon finds himself somewhere in between the Old and the New World. As he discovers, the culture of his own land has been shaped by the mythical fabula of the European natural genius (the artist being an infusion of both active creation and passive spectatorship into one despotic and cult personality represented by the genius of Vivaldi); however, the culture of Europe was now a stranger’s culture, and he finds himself lacking in the resources to imagine his own culture, except as the negation of the representation just offered to him in the theater. “And all at once, I felt unrelated, foreign, out of place, far removed from myself and what is really mine …”205 In the end, the Mexican confronts the fact that neither version of his history is true; his only true resources, he soon finds, are in the power of comparison and analogy: “It is sometimes necessary to distance yourself from things, to put an ocean in between, in order to get a close look at them.” 206 Consequently, the Mexican abandons his earlier literalism, and begins to avow a process of fictional anamnesis, the transformation of his own memory, although now from the perspective of a new spectator of history. Returning to Carpentier’s theory of the New World Baroque discussed in the last chapter in relation to Sarduy, Concierto Barroco exemplifies the process of a narrative that goes beyond its own contexts to establish new ones, to install an empty space in the past by means of negation. It is through this negation, moreover, that the future enters into history. As the Mexican exclaims: “They don’t understand that the fabulous is in the future. The future is entirely fabulous.…”207 Thus, it is significant that Carpentier chooses Vivaldi’s Montezuma as the centrepiece of his narrative return, since it is this opera that first announces the entrance of America as the scene of dramatic action on the European stage in 1733

154

On the (New) Baroque

(the year in which the novel is set). Carpentier chooses precisely this moment to stage his own “Baroque return,” that is, a return to this fabulous moment in the creation of Mexico, by installing a modern witness at the center of the drama who “sees things differently.” If Vivaldi’s drama marked the beginning of a certain fabulated history of Mexico, Carpentier’s journey marks the end of this history through its negation in the eyes of the novel’s protagonist. The real dramatic action of the novel, however, is centered on the power of fabulation itself, the creative act of naming and renaming discussed above. In the passages I have cited, we perceive a gap through the Mexican’s own experience in which the names of things, events, and people begin to fall away from their mythical frameworks, revealing the arbitrariness and distortion that surrounded the original act of naming. In fact, it is because Vivaldi cannot call things and people by their original names (“to whom, dammit, did it ever occur to invent such a language?”) that the origin is elided by an act of renaming characters and figures more suitable for the stage, more pronounceable for a Venetian audience, or more appropriate for the operatic actors to sing. For Carpentier, however, it is not a matter of restoring the original names, in a more romantic sense, or restoring their historical and true identities, in a more literal sense, since even the literal names betray a fabulous origin of naming and being named. Consequently, it is important to note that throughout the novel, the protagonist is referred to as “the Mexican,” and by the end of the novel, becomes “the criollo.” Philomene, his Moorish and Cuban hand-servant, becomes at the end of the novel simply “the Black” as he leaves his Master and travels to Paris to become “Monsieur Philomène.” (As he says, “In Havana, they”ll just call me “el negrito Filomeno.””) “There is a Baroque Concert this evening.” Just as the beginning, or opening movement, of Carpentier’s novel is announced in a passage from the Psalms, “let the concert begin,” the end of the novel is opened with the blast of a trumpet (which turns out to be Filomeno’s, or Louis Armstrong’s) announcing the “Judgment Day”: “And the trumpet shall sound” (Corinthians 1:52). History comes to an end. But what makes this notion of history “typically Baroque” is that the ending is a new beginning; as Filomeno, “the black,” comments before departing to attend a concert by the jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, “It’s a funny thing, … but I always hear about the end of time. Why not talk about the beginning of time?”

Concierto Barroco

155

“That would be the Day of Resurrection,” answered the criollo. “I don’t have the time to wait for that,” said the black … 208

And throughout the final chapter, there are trumpets sounding everywhere: Filemeno’s trumpet; the whistle of the train leaving the station in Venice drowning out the last word on Filemeno’s lips, “yesterday”; the incomparable trumpet of Louis Armstrong exploding in variations on “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby!” Thus, the novel ends as it begins—with a new variation on an old melody of a postcolonial traveler departing on a journey in order to discover the source of his identity. Of course, there are even more variations as there are in any Baroque concerto or modern jazz improvisation. Over here is now Europe, and over there is now America! Europe is the past, America the future. And the future (el futuro) is, in the final account, entirely fabulous ( fabuloso)! * * * There is a New Baroque Concert this evening. But, in conclusion, we must ask: whose concert and what is the basis for this new music? Ironically, the mood that dominates the ending can be defined as a kind of “neo-Weltschmerz,” and I think this more accurately defines Carpentier’s own mood in the early 1970’s six years before his death. As an expert musicologist, Carpentier was well aware of this somber tone as one dominant of 17th Baroque music, and he employs this mood in all the references to the day of judgment toward the end, as well as in the cross cultural references to the African American spirituals such as “Go Down Moses” and “Jonah and the Whale.” The African-American Spiritual has one chorus: Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt’s Land. Tell ol’ Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go.’

The first verse of the Negro spiritual “Jonah and the Whale”:

156

On the (New) Baroque

The Lord commanded Jonah one day, ‘Jonah, goin’ into an inner land!’ But he went contrary to his God’s command; He went on down to the Spanish sho’; He finds one ship, she was boun’ to go, He pays his fare, and he gets on bo’d, And the ship done journey ‘long on de ro’d

Moreover, it was Carpentier’s thesis that seventeenth-century Baroque music and African-American spirituals are combined as the basis of St. Louis jazz, and we can clearly hear this somber melody clearly in Armstrong’s “I can”t give you anything but Love, Baby (because love is the only thing I”ve got plenty of).” Therefore, knowing what we know about Carpentier’s own views on the cultural destination of jazz in North America, Filemono’s departure to Paris cannot be read without some degree of ambivalence. We can even discern autobiographical presence of Carpentier himself in the novel’s allusion to the prophecy of Daniel in the court of Nebuchadnezzar concerning the release of God’s chosen people from the kingdom of the East. But this was a prophecy foretold from a point of Diaspora, and Daniel was a member of a member of the upper-class intelligentsia, a cultural diplomat who was living in Babylon-Paris. The people themselves were in the West, or migrating to the North via Miami to New York, just as Daniel’s people migrated via Turkey to Old Europe. Both Ezekial and Daniel were prophets of the period after the second destruction of the Temple; both foretold the coming of Elijah and a forerunner to the Messiah. However, both were also writing in the form of the apocalypse, which entails a secret knowledge of current events that will determine the future, or the end of days. If read according to the code of an apocalypse, therefore, the dominant line that runs between East and West, or between Latin America and Europe, that is traced from the beginning of the novel has been replaced by a line that runs North-South, between Venice and Paris, or between Cuba and New York. We might even discern in the separation of the criollo and el negrito Filemeno that occurs at the end of the journey as figurative of the separation of the two races that will determine the fate of the earlier aspirations Carpentier had for Cuban-Caribbean

Concierto Barroco

157

hybridity (mestizaje). As history moves on into the twentieth century in the last chapter of the novel, their identities have been renamed again and they now appear from this neo-colonial perspective as more literal to the meaning of their own flesh, as thoroughly modern and thus racialized subjects of identity. Instead, the criollo returns “home,” becomes a patriot or a nationalist, and awaits the end of history (“the day of resurrection” when all the dead rise again to be judged); barred from returning to Cuba, “the black” travels North to Paris-New York, impatient to await the end of history. “A revolution will be necessary,” says “the black.” But, which revolution? The revolution of Castro? The cultural revolutions of Latin America or African-Americans? The actual political and social revolution that were taking place in all the Americas by the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s? The ending is ambiguous on all this. In fact, there is even an indication in the text that the criollo is likely to return home to become a patriotic nationalist, because he has money, and according to Filemeno, “those with money don’t like revolutions.” Along with the reference to Armstrong’s lyric, this dialogue points to a separation of the two races on economic lines (rather than in terms of a shared culture or ethnic mestizaje), which continues to enflame the racial politics of the Americas up to this day. In the end, as I see it, Carpentier’s Concierto Barroco signals a transformation of the principle of his fiction, from the early position of lo real maravilloso in 1949 to one of el futuro fabuloso in 1974. However, I do not see “utopian” as being a sufficient term to describe this new principle, and here I am simply following the earlier comment made by Deleuze: “Utopia’s not a good concept, better fabulation, the mutual fabulation of a people and of art.” *

*

There is a New Baroque Concert….

*

Conclusion One or many Baroques?

Throughout this study I have proposed an implicit analogy between two principal categories: Baroque and postmodern. At the same time, I have developed an immanent critique of the function of analogy within the tradition of Neobaroque criticism as being the weakest and most formally strained of all logical relationships. It may strike some as odd that I would posit a relation only to tear down (to “deconstruct,” perhaps) the very means used to establish this relation in the first place. If this seems like a contradiction, perhaps it is. But then, in my view, which can be compared to a fairly garden variety Marxian view as well, any representation of the field of modern culture is made up of such contradictions, particularly concerning the genesis of cultural forms. Therefore, I find it perfectly cogent and permissible to offer the following contradictory propositions following the strained logic of the barroco syllogism, that “If every A=B and some C does not equal B, then, some C does not equal A”: 1. There is a relation between the Baroque and the postmodern; 2. The relation between the Baroque and postmodern cannot be established purely by means of analogy or resemblance; 3. Therefore, any relation between Baroque and postmodern is strained and purely artificial. If some find these statements represent a kind of “kettle logic,” I would recall that it was Borges who first identified the Baroque as a style that deliberately exhausts (or, at least, attempts to exhaust) its own possibilities, and by the intellectual traits of self-caricature and humor. However, Borges also draws our attention to one crucial difference: that for the “man of the Baroque” this was unintentional, whereas for “the modern” it becomes a kind of weapon against the accumulated knowledge and energy of culture itself, which is why he identifies the principal objective of this kind of intellectual humor as exhaustion. As Borges writes, “I would venture to say that the Baroque is the final stage in all art, when

160

On the (New) Baroque

art flaunts and squanders its resources.” 209 Perhaps this is why even in the famous mantra of high modernist aesthetics, l’ art pour l’art, one can still detect at bottom a certain Baroque spirit of exhaustion. If, as Paz says, “Modernity is the polemical tradition that displaces the tradition of the moment, whatever this happens to be, but an instant later yields its place to another tradition which, in turn, is a momentary manifestation of modernity,” we might conclude that the Baroque can be located precisely at the end of modernity—or rather, in the middle, between the tradition of modernity that precedes “the return of the Baroque” and tradition that inevitably comes after it. Therefore, because there has been more than one tradition of modernity, there have been just as many Baroques. (This can be understood as one of the major arguments of this book, which is written at the end of the current tradition of modernity that has been named, for better or worse—usually for the worse—the postmodern.) Does this mean, however, that the Baroque of Benjamin is the same Baroque as that of Foucault, Genette, or Lotman; or that of Sarduy or Carpentier, or even that of Borges himself? Absolutely not! Rather, each to their own Baroque! If only because they did not share the same tradition of modernity, which is to say, they did not share the same sense of humor; even though we might recall that Foucault’s magnum opus of postmodern sensibility, The Order of Things, first arose from a moment of anxious laughter in response to an earlier quoted passage from Borges’ Baroque encyclopedia. Some might argue that here I am simply conflating the term Baroque with a generally accepted and “canonical” form of critical modernity, defined by a spirit of self-negation, being “a tradition against itself ” (Paz), as a result of which the term Baroque would be predestined to serve as modernity’s Other. I will return to this possible objection below. However, aside from the similarity, if not the uncanny identity, of the various problems that have beset both term in naming distinctly coherent historical phenomena, if there is one principal trait that could be found to link both terms closely with one another, we can find a hint of this in Frank Warnke’s description of a fundamental mood that characterized the artists and poets of the original Baroque period. For the artists of the Baroque period, [the] relationship between appearance and reality has broken down. The old symbolic cast of

One or many Baroques?

161

mind, with its assumption of an ordered and hierarchical cosmos, operates well into the second half of the seventeenth century, but an irritable doubt as to the precise relationship between seen and unseen worlds informs the Baroque, in both its typical works and its masterpieces. A thirst for a single reality behind disparate appearances of experience is characteristic; no longer content with a double vision of reality, the Baroque poets and prose writers seek not to reconcile the two worlds, but to reduce them to one.210

Here, we might compare this statement to a later passage by Foucault from The Order of Things: At the beginning of the seventeenth century, during the period that has been termed, rightly or wrongly, the Baroque, thought ceases to move in the element of resemblance. Similitude is no longer the form of knowledge, but rather the occasion of error, the danger to which one exposes oneself when one does not examine the obscure region of confusions. ‘It is a strange habit,’ says Descartes, in the first lines of his Regulae, ‘when we discover several resemblances between two things, to attribute to both equally, even on points in which they are in reality different, that we have recognized to be true of only one of them.’ The age of resemblance is drawing to a close. It is leaving nothing behind it but games. Games whose power of enchantment grows out of the new kinship between resemblance and illusion.211

By the dint of sleepwalkers, many of the critical themes of postmodernism echo — in an uncanny manner, perhaps — this strange anxiety that hails from the original seventeenth-century Baroque: an anxiety over the powers of resemblance itself. We should recall at this point Foucault’s thesis concerning the shattering of the tables of representation as a point of comparison with the above statement regarding the original Baroque. It is even more interesting to remark further that Foucault makes this “Baroque thesis” more contemporaneous in that he locates this event sometime in the mid-seventeenth century — Genette is even more precise, 1653 A.C.E.! — although he then argues that its real effects would not fully emerge until late in the nineteenth century and would continue to dominate several traditions of modernity all the way up to the current moment.

162

On the (New) Baroque

What is interesting about Foucault’s passage is that it reveals something quite striking concerning “the return of the Baroque” as a modern category in cultural history, which is that it continues to move within an element of resemblance and is a product of this “strange habit” that Descartes first refers to, of comparing two very different things on the basis of resemblance, even though we have already recognized the analogy to be baseless — that is to say, it cannot be grounded historically, but only textually — in so far as this analogy truthfully reflects only one of the objects being compared. We could apply this observation to anyone of the modern representatives of the Baroque, and even to the very mechanism of “the text within the text” (or “inter-textuality”) that has been championed by many of the writers and philosophers discussed in the section on Baroque and postmodern. (After all, what is the principle of “intertextuality” but the product of a strange habit of establishing a relationship between two very different things on the basis of resemblance that truthfully belongs to only one object?) This would imply that Foucault’s historical break would apply to everything but the Baroque itself, or that the Baroque (as “a strange habit”) resists a manner that has become “typical” or “characteristic”. We might even infer from this description a certain Marxist (specifically, Althusserian) determination of “uneven development” that might account for the history of the concept in modern scholarship, but would also explain the incredible amount of anxiety and conflict around the term “Baroque”. But we must ask, first of all, what is this strange habit that has assumed the name of the Baroque? What is this strange element of resemblance that still attracts us to this moment as a point of comparison with the contemporary moment and in such wildly different contexts — Berlin and Madrid in the 1930s, Buenos Aires in the 1940s and 1950s, Paris, Havana and Mexico City in the 1960s, Moscow and New Haven in the 1970s and 1980s? As I have discussed in Part One, particularly in my commentary on Eugenio d’Ors’ theory of the “Baroque eon,” one of the key features of this frequent comparison can be derived from the “pan-European” character of the original Baroque period itself, as well as the primary relation that was installed between Europe and the former colonies (something that Carpentier later returns to in his allegorical treatment of the Baroque). If there has been a fundamental distortion within the category itself, this is often due to the representation of the early Baroque only with-

One or many Baroques?

163

in the context of one national tradition. Moreover, it is highly inaccurate to speak of the Baroque in terms of modern nation-state, since it properly belongs to a period that immediately precedes the nation­building projects on the Continent, even though it could said to correspond to an early phase of national culture, as described above in the discussion of Maravall’s theory of the Baroque as an ideological expression of Spanish Absolutism. It would be more imprecise to say that there are simply several conflicting definitions of the Baroque as a period concept, or as a style of cultural expression, since, given that its origin itself is multifaceted and precedes a certain determination of Culture as reflective of national, ethnic, or the linguistic particularity of a people (“the song of the people” following Herder), the concept is already fated to become confused when it is viewed from this later Romantic definition of Culture. At the same time, one cannot simply ascribe these multifaceted appearances of the Baroque concept in all of its modern contexts — something that this study has attempted to illustrate by selecting examples from extremely divergent cultural and national traditions — as being only “a symptom of the dynamics of the international capitalistic system,” as Jameson has argued recently concerning the complimentary notion of the postmodern. Ironically, what this reductive gesture betrays is perhaps the same “thirst for a single reality behind disparate appearances” that Warnke diagnosed above with regard to the sensibility that was characteristic, even “typical,” of early Baroque anxiety. Simply put, in place of the single reality in the Baroque period being the theological drama of the creature oppressed by the impenetrable and blinding power of God, as dramatically illustrated in Caravaggio’s The Conversion of St Paul, today this theological reality has been replaced by no less an aweinspiring and monumental form: the “single reality of late capitalism.” 212 However, to echo an earlier statement by Foucault, we might observe that the notion of “a singular Modernity” (Jameson), or even earlier in the nineteenth century, of a single and unified field of Culture that is bound up with the origin and destiny of the nation-state, are of very recent origin. Today, with the emergence of “globalization” as a new theme with which to rehearse all the old questions of modernity, these previous origins are already showing signs of vanishing just as suddenly as they appeared, along with the figure of a Subject who Foucault once described as a face drawn in the sand in between two great historical tides.

164

On the (New) Baroque

Regarding this thirst for a single reality behind a multiplicity of disparate appearances, it would seem odd to also apply this statement to the postmodern, which is known for its celebration of heterogeneity, fragmentation, multiplicity and especially for its avowed hatred of unity and the Universal. And yet, behind this celebration of fragmentation there is still a tangible feeling of longing for a hidden plane of organization, something that can be ascribed to the major concepts concerning a hidden core of the Real operating behind appearances, whether this core is identified by Language, Ideology or the Unconscious. One can wonder, therefore, if the postmodern celebration of fragmentation is secretly nostalgic, and its desire is to reveal, in all the disparate phenomena and shifting identities it takes up, simply a more immanent version of the same Totality. Even in Sarduy’s treatise Barroco, the primary movement of a Baroque cosmology is described as the passage from the One to the Many. “The passage from Kepler to Galileo is that of the circle to the ellipse, the passage of that which is traced around the One to that which is traced around the plural: from classicism to the Baroque.” In his description of this passage from the One to the Many, Sarduy goes on to frame its significance in psychoanalytic terms concerning the displacement of the “paternal function” (where the One would be identified with the “Name of the Father”) by a textual body that is fragmented and multiplied. Thus, the figure of an ellipse, as a line traced by multiple and partial bodies (“sexual relations where the bodies are always at least two”), already prefigures Deleuze and Guattari’s later descriptions of the multiple and “non-unified” figures of schizophrenic desire. 213 Nevertheless, whether this “thirst for a single reality” assumes the form of “the One” or “the Multiple,” we might now be led to wonder if the all too frequent characterization of the rift or conflict between what Derrida once called the two forms of play—only one of which is said to be nostalgic—or Lyotard, the opposition between “Grand narrative” and “multiple language games,” is and always has been a patently false opposition, one that hides the essential and underlying identity between these two dominant critical apparitions of our modernity. In fact, this recalls the criticism that French philosopher Alain Badiou has recently made of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of multiplicity, which is that it hides the good old category of scholastic philosophy along with its ancient taste for “the One.” 214 In Deleuze’s defense, as Warnke has already observed concerning a similar predilection

One or many Baroques?

165

in Baroque literature, it is often the case that “[t]he compulsive search for the One enmeshes the poet [and the philosopher] in the complexities and contradictions of the Many.”215 Finally, this returns us to the question that opens this study: “Why the Baroque?” In response, I would simply ask, what is this “strange habit” of resemblance that Descartes refers to, or what Foucault calls the game of representation, if not something that has emerged in the modern period under the name of literature? Could it not be said, as I have hinted many times throughout the course of this study, that what had earlier been understood as a mere device, an artifice, a mechanism, or a trope has gradually come to be identified in the modern period as the very principle of literary representation, the principle of resemblance that is established by “the text within the text”? This would imply that what had been an aspect of neoclassical rhetoric has metonymically come to signify the genus of “literature.” And what is literature in the modern period but the very “being of Language,” a being that continues to swim in an element of resemblance — that is to say, a being that continues to establish its relationship to real things and events by means of that strange habit of producing resemblance between the order of words and representations and the order of things and events. Suddenly, Foucault’s “Baroque thesis” is not so mysterious or obscure, as many have defined it, since it merely implies that the early invention of this mechanism that has been found to be absolutely emblematic of a certain Baroque style — much in the same way that Las Meninas could function in Foucault’s work as exemplary of this style, or as “typically Baroque” in Genette or Sarduy later on — could suddenly return at the close of the nineteenth century to represent, according to Foucault’s argument, “the Being of Language” itself. And yet, rather than announcing the liberation of Language from Representation, in a moment of freedom and playfulness, this introduces a force of finitude into language and announces the moment when Language withdraws into itself and no longer opens to the order of things (which, according to Foucault, are suddenly found to belong to another order that is located beyond the powers of representation). Therefore, far from being a story of Language’s transcendence over the Real, as has often been associated with Foucault’s so-called “post-structuralist” narrative, it is the exact opposite! Foucault states quite explicitly at several points that what he is in fact narrating is the story of Language’s “ demotion.”

166

On the (New) Baroque

Accordingly, in the so-called “modern period,” it is the Real itself that assumes the position of transcendence over language.216 This movement of transcendence becomes the condition for us today to distinguish “the Real” from “reality,” even though Foucault himself would not employ this distinction; rather, the Real would designate what Foucault calls the “empirico-transcendental doublet” that now corresponds to the position from which reality is ordered beneath or outside the powers of representation. This position would also correspond in Foucault’s analysis to the position of the “mode of production” in Marxist theory or to “the Unconscious” in Freudian theory (understood as the two historically dominant representatives of the “empirico-transcendental doublet” in the modern age). 217 This is the precise meaning of Foucault’s use of the term “finitude,” which now applies to Language and no longer to Man (who is defined as ens creatum), which precisely limits its powers and instead destines it to repeatedly, if not obsessively, represent the withdrawal of things into their own stubborn density. Thus, the mise-en-âbime, or the “Baroque emblem,” would be the precise figure of this withdrawal whereby representation suddenly discovers that external to itself are not things themselves, but rather another order of representation that is consequently much older and more dense. The window of language opens to a mirror that reflects back into the enigmatic space language itself, at least into the depth of its historical sedimentation, all the way to its ever receding and inaccessible origin. Thus, it is not by accident that Foucault pinpoints this moment as occurring late in the nineteenth century, and precisely around two principal figures: Nietzsche and Mallarmé. Perhaps this is also why Foucault seems to mock the category of the Baroque even while employing it to designate the historical origin of an event that comes to determine the mode of “literature” in the modern period. This is because, rather than employing it in its usual and most contested sense as a historical period concept, he merely uses it as an index to designate the invention of a certain series of transformations that first occur in the game of representation, at first as purely superficial phenomena or inventions, the determination of which comes to designate, from the nineteenth century onward, “a form of language that we now call ‘literature.’”218 Here, I return to the earlier passage I quoted in order to illustrate what Foucault means by the term “Baroque”:

One or many Baroques?

167

The age of resemblance is drawing to a close. It is leaving nothing behind it but games. Games whose powers of enchantment grow out of a new kinship between resemblance and illusion; the chimeras of similitude loom up on all sides, but they are recognized as chimeras; it is the privileged age of trompe-l’oeil painting, of comic illusion, of the play that duplicates itself by representing another play, of the quid pro quo, of dreams and visions; it is the age of the deceiving senses; it is the age where the poetic dimension of language is defined by metaphor, simile, and allegory.219

But we must immediately ask what age is Foucault referring to here if not what is loosely called the Baroque age, which it seems we have not yet left? After all, we are still caught up in games whose powers of enchantment grow out of what is now for us a very old and steadily aging “kinship between resemblance and illusion.” And yet, something has changed between the time of Foucault’s pronouncement (1970) and our own (2004), which we may be now in the position to notice: that “literature” no longer occupies the privileged place of our attention; or, in Foucault’s words, it no longer “shines in the brightness of its being.” This is not only because it no longer gives us access to the “Being of Language,” but because it is a form of language that perhaps, to paraphrase Borges, has finally managed to exhaust all its possibilities, including I might add, the possibilities and the powers first introduced into Representation during the period of the Baroque, which today have come to resemble a little too much of a game. In short, the game is over. Or, is it? In a certain sense, what I am announcing should come as no surprise to anyone and seems so obvious as to require little argument — I even feel a little embarrassed in having to say it! — that a certain tradition of modernist experimentation is no longer possible for us. This tradition begins precisely in the period that Foucault announces, late in the nineteenth century, and as Paz observed, has continued to reinvent itself all the way through to the period when literature itself dissolves into the pure gesture of writing (l’ écriture). Of course, representation is no less of a game for us today, but one whose rules are now in the process of being rewritten. Most importantly, it now appears that the literary process is not the privileged place where these rules will first emerge into being. This just reflects the fact that the historical traditions of modernity — including “modernité,”

168

On the (New) Baroque

modernismo, modernism, symbolism, futurism, “ultraismo,” the various French avant-garde movements from Surrealism to Nouveau Roman, but also the postmodern traditions that followed these such as Tel Quel and Oulipo, and even the more recent tradition of “LANGUAGE poetry” in the US — have all emerged around the programmatic re-invention of a mode of writing broadly defined to also include other forms of discourse (particularly in the postmodern theoretical traditions that followed). 220 This is true from the period of Mallarmé and Baudelaire all the way through more contemporary writers discussed here, such as Sarduy and Carpentier (at least, the Carpentier who was the inventor of the literary tradition of lo real maravilloso). Consequently, it is no accident that I end my study of the different incarnations of the “Baroque mechanism” with the late novel of Carpentier, which functions in the classical tradition of allegory; however, what this allegory reveals is perhaps the most telling “literary renunciation of literature itself.” The “criollo” (Carpentier himself?) returns from the former source of his cultural identity, after having discovered the allegorical bastardization of his country’s own history, in order to learn again “the literal names of things.” If Carpentier chooses to name his novella Concierto Barroco, perhaps it is to call attention to its overtly artificial structure, to the tinny and antiquated, and even ultraacademic, style. It comes off as exactly what a Baroque concerto would sound like today, a historical “curiosity,” an artificial piece of chamber music performed for a highly selective audience. Thus, it is significant that Carpentier does not end his novel with the gesture of modernizing the Baroque, as Sarduy and Lezama, but rather by referring the notion of the “modern” only to the path that M. Philomène (“the black”) chooses to follow alone — to a concert hall in Paris where he listens to the first stirrings of a thoroughly modern music through the trumpet of Louis Armstrong. In other words, my final reading of the moral of Carpentier’s allegory—a genre that was originally adapted for pedagogical purposes by the Church—it is that if there is to be a “fabulous future,” then it will only arrive through a New Baroque music, and no longer through a New Baroque literature. It seems fitting that I would conclude this study of the many “Returns of the Baroque in Modern Culture” by making some reference to its last historical incarnation in the post-structuralist traditions in France between the 1970s and the 1980s. If, as I commented in relation to the

One or many Baroques?

169

writings of Sarduy, these movements began with the hope of inventing a “revolutionary theory of writing” in alliance with the political conflagrations of postcolonial uprisings in the Third World, it goes without saying that this hope was repeatedly placed in crisis with the arrival of neocolonial formations, new forms of racism, the resurgence of old feudal models, tribal, and family alliances; militarization and global capitalism, environmental devastation of resources and the widening of poverty, famine, and hunger. As the intellectual historian Elizabeth Roudinesco has observed, what followed the jubilant and exalted period of post-1968 that spiraled through the culture of the 1970s in Paris, marking perhaps the most fertile period of its cultural and intellectual criticism, and which was later transplanted to the United States and other First World countries during this period as well, became by the mid-1980s in France what she defines a general re-conversion to the “somewhat Christian ideals of an antiquated Europe.”221 (It is clear that Roudinesco is referring here to the general pessimism and world-weariness that belongs to a version of the Baroque associated with the culture of the Counter-Reformation.) This would also encompass the same period that Lyotard first designated in The Postmodern Condition (1979) as the beginning of a “period of slackening”— again, the theme of “exhaustion”! Here we might discern in both these assessments something that marks the entrance of another phase in “the return of the Baroque,” which emerged more prominently in France during the 1980s. In 1983, a colloquium was conducted in Ceresy on the Baroque, which combined both Christian and ancient Baroque hermeneutics with the language and stylistic analysis of deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The Gramsci and Benjamin scholar, Christine Buci-Glucksman, published two works on the Baroque aesthetic in modernism: La Raison Baroque (1984), and La Folie du voir (1991). In these works Buci-Gluckman analyses Benjamin’s Baroque ideology of modernism in terms of Merleau­ Ponty’s chiasme and the Lacanian concept of “feminine jouissance.” The mood is both melancholy and sublime, like Carravaggio’s ecstatic vision of St. Theresa, which becomes emblematic of the return of a dark god to rule our desire, a god of lack and mysterious femininity. Roudinesco would certainly evaluate this emergence of the Baroque as a visible evidence of her thesis of the resurgence of Christian ideals and the return of an ancien régime, and perhaps her comment is an implicit reference to the

170

On the (New) Baroque

style of criticism that was taking place during this period. But perhaps we can best illustrate a general feeling of capitulation and loss of hope that was prevalent during this period in the following passage by Julia Kristeva, written in 1983, following her brief participation in the Tel Quel: At a time when Latin American Marxist revolution threatens at the gates of the United States, I feel closer to freedom in the space of that contested giant who is about to turn into a David in the face of the growing Goliath of the Third World. I dream that our children will prefer to join that David, its errors and its impasses, armed with our own wanderings, linked to Ideas, to Logos, to Form: in brief, to Old Europe.222

Earlier on I defined the Baroque as occupying the exact middle of modernity, in the sense that it can be understood to recur historically precisely in the moment when one tradition of modernity exhaust its own possibilities and transitions into another, and even as the symptomatic principle of this exhaustion. It is important to note, however, that the signs of exhaustion and decay — which have been ascribed to the term “Baroque” from the very beginning — are not marked by attrition and lethargy, but rather by the sudden burst of frenetic and frenzied creativity and by the tendencies that Foucault refers to in the passage above; and by a taste for metaphor, simile and allegory. According to Sarduy’s metaphor, the end is always announced by “a Big Bang”; it is the beginning that is actually silent, empty, or utterly “blank,” and which first moves by a slow and almost imperceptible pace of accretion. To his credit, this is something that Jacques Derrida first observed in his early essay “Force and Signification,” specifically in reference to the sign of the Baroque that had emerged in the 1950s in France as a theme identified with the early structuralist concept of literature: By way of analogy: the fact that universal thought, in all its domains, by all its pathways and despite all its differences, should be receiving a formidable impulse from an anxiety about language — which can only be an anxiety of language, within language itself — is a strangely concerted development; and it is the nature of a development not to be able to display itself in its entirety as a spectacle for the historian, if, by chance, he were to attempt to recognize in it

One or many Baroques?

171

the sign of an epoch, the fashion of a season, or the symptom of a crisis. […] It is during the epochs of historical dislocation, when we are expelled from the site, that this structuralist passion, which is simultaneously a frenzy of experimentation and a proliferation of schematizations, develops for itself. The Baroque would only be one example of it. Has not a ‘structuralist poetics’ founded on rhetoric been mentioned in relation to the Baroque? But has not a ‘burst structure also been spoken of, ‘a rent poem whose structure appears as it bursts apart?’223

As Derrida comments elsewhere in this brilliant and even prophetic early essay (first published in Critique in 1963), “the Structuralist poetics,” which “has been mentioned in relation to the Baroque,” is remarkable not for its bravado and modernity, but for introducing a thoroughly weak form of repetition into History, for a critical force of weakness and impotence that “separates, disengages, and emancipates.”224 Here, in this phrase, “a critical force of weakness and impotence that separates, disengages, and emancipates,” we might find another iteration of Borges’ famous formula that the Baroque designates the moment at the end of a tradition, as “an exhaustion of all of its possibilities and its possible resources.” And yet, to say that “literature,” like “the Baroque” before it, has become a purely academic form of culture — the historical artifact of the many cultures of modernism that have reproduced it obsessively as a recurrent “theme” (in de Man’s sense) — is easy enough. One can easily say “no more literature!” and perhaps even “no more modernity!” This is just as easily said as the number of times we have heard the statement: “no more Baroque!” All these things have been said before, and more recently, with a frequency and even a redundancy that marks our own contemporaneous moment as being one of profound Repetition, of actually having nothing “new” to say, except that we have heard it all before and have become dreadfully bored—and perhaps we have become boring as well! Have we lost our sense of humor? That is, our capacity for creating a new “literature”? Regardless, this is the curious mood in which we find ourselves today, as if we are just now realizing, following Derrida’s earlier observation, that “we have been expelled from the site.” Therefore, perhaps the final meaning I might attribute to “The Return

172

On the (New) Baroque

of the Baroque” is that of being the last sign of our own fading modernity, which, in or at the end, might also be compared to a flawed and imperfect pearl.

Coda 2008 On the New Baroque Construction

But then, let us return one last time to consider the existence of a flawed and imperfect pearl. Certainly, there are more examples of these than so called “perfect pearls.” In fact, were it not for the former, the latter would not exist as a possible phenomenon. This realization led me to my first hypothesis concerning the category of the Baroque: that it was precisely the imperfection of the category itself that rendered a certain idea of perfection possible in the region of Culture, by means of a retrograde and negative effect introduced into the historical relationship between the Baroque and the Renaissance. (In this relationship, the category of the Baroque would function as what Kant defined as a “negative presentation”; in other words, the more imperfect the existence of the Baroque, the more perfect the idea of the Renaissance culture became, that is, as an expression of nostalgia.) In this regard, I was primarily thinking of those early judgments of Baroque culture that saw it as a degeneration of Renaissance style, like a wart growing on the testicle’s of Michelangelo’s David, as a degradation, and exhaustion, or as an anomaly. One could look to any number of the arguments concerning the Baroque and the Renaissance, even as late as Wölfflin, to show that the discussion of the Baroque is employed to make the latter appear more unified an expression of cultural perfection than perhaps it was historically speaking. And yet, this does not account for the function of the Baroque category in criticism at the beginning of the twentieth century, beginning with Eugenio d’Ors, when imperfection itself was revealed to express a contingent and culture-bound expression of taste, when the Baroque became associated with a new idea of cultural perfection, freed from all the trappings of European classicism, in which the imperfect and the example would turn about in their own categories. Henceforth, imperfect pearls no longer need to refer to the idea of perfection for their form, but exist in themselves. Can we imagine holding in our hand an imperfect pearl, without being able to refer to the value of perfection in order to judge

174

On the (New) Baroque

or evaluate its beauty—the degrees of its roundness, its smoothness, its color, its translucence? In the absence of the category of perfection, the actual pearl would be no less or no more imperfect than any other pearl. How would we be able to judge the quality of the pearl without the category of perfection? What would be the concept of the pearl in which all pearls are united by the degree of perfection or imperfection that they express with regard to an ideal unity? Here, I will turn to a passage from the final paragraph of The Fold that recounts what was described above in Leibnizian terms, and which Deleuze defines as the principle of the New Baroque construction. According to Deleuze: Leibniz’s monads submit to two conditions, one of closure and the other of selection. On the one hand, they include the entire world that does not exist outside them; on the other, this world takes for granted a first selection, of convergence, since it distinguished from other possible but divergent worlds, excluded by the monads in question; and it carries with a second selection of consonance, because each monad in question will fashion for itself a clear zone of expression in that world that it includes (this is the second selection that is made by means of differential relations and adjacent harmonics). Now the selection is what tends to be disappearing, first of all and in every way. If harmonics lose all privilege of rank (or relations, all privilege of order), not only are dissonances “excused” from being resolved, divergences can be affirmed, in a series that escape the diatonic scale where all tonality dissolves. But when the monad is in tune with divergent series that belong to incompossible monads, then the other condition is what disappears [i.e., closure]: it could be said that the monad, astraddle over several worlds, is kept half open as if by a pair of pliers.225

Immediately preceding this passage, we find another description of the New Baroque construction, which I have always found to be somewhat enigmatic, but also extremely suggestive: Solutions no longer pass through accords. It is because the conditions of the problem itself have now changed: we have a New Baroque and a neo-Leibnizianism. The same construction of point of

On the New Baroque Construction

175

view over the city continues to be developed, but now it is neither the same point of view nor the same city now that figure and ground are in movement in space. Something has changed in the situation of the monads, between the closed chapel with imperceptible openings, and a new model invoked by Tony Smith, the sealed car speeding down the dark highway. 226

In order to understand what Deleuze means when he says that solutions no longer pass through accords because the conditions of the problem have now changed, let’s take up the stock metaphor often employed to depict Leibniz’s theory of pre-established Harmony: the multiple points of view over the city which are resolved in the form of a conical apex, representing the perspective of the central Monad. Just as the same city viewed from different sides appears to be multiplied into many divergent perspectives, so the infinite multitude of simple substances are nevertheless the perspectives of a single universe according to the convergence of possible points of view already placed into each monad from the beginning. Here, the plurality of different perspectives are resolved by the positing a spiritual point of view as their absolute summit, and this provides us with the condition of closure on the basis of an a priori selection; however, this point of view is spiritual only because it is absent from each horizontal perspective, which also entails this viewpoint being somewhat illusory, even hallucinatory. In other words, the notion of a pre-established Harmony cannot be adequately represented by the image of a birds-eye view that supposedly unifies all these perspectives in a perfect sphere, as if we could unfold a different view of the city from the point of view of each monad in order to arrive at a 380 degree of the city in one glance. Rather, the true notion of Harmony consists in the degree of conviction expressed by each monad to share the same reality as all the other monads, so that it would be possible for one monad to conceive of another monad approaching the city from the opposite side and would still be approaching the same city. Thus, pre-established harmony refers to the selection of a shared reality that has been placed into each monad in advance by God, which Deleuze defines as a condition of closure. This is what allows the idea of a city to emerge from the sheer chaos of different perceptions, and divergent points of view. 227 The absence of this condition would not result in

176

On the (New) Baroque

something like setting off to Mexico City and finding oneself in Minsk, but rather the impossibility of Mexico City itself, or any city for that matter, because without it each perspective would open out to an entirely different city (or possible world) that would not correspond to the perspective of any other monad, producing an infinite chaos of perceptions or a thousand forking paths. It is for this reason that the notion of preestablished Harmony cannot be likened to the bird’s eye view, or even to a multidimensional representation of multiple points of view of the same thing, since neither provides the function of a selection of the same reality—it is the point of view which forms the condition for which all other points of view can converge within a shared reality—but here we also see why this point of view is hallucinatory (as Deleuze calls it) since it can never be actually given as a perspective. It is, according to a formula that Deleuze frequently employs, “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.”228 Therefore, if Mexico City can exist at all, then such a point of view must actually exist as what Deleuze calls a “hallucinatory presence” of the same reality that all the monads must contain within them. Each perspective is only a limitation of this pre-established point of view, which is why the conditioned perspectives are finite (or partial) and do not resemble that which conditions them. Michel Serres has perhaps explained this best in his magisterial Le System de Leibniz et ses modeles mathematique: Let’s suppose in effect a plurality of mathematical objects in an apparent disorder: a circle, two right angles, a point, an ellipse, hyperbola, etc. The science of conic sections shows the existence of a point from which the apparent disorder is organized into a real harmony. It is the summit of the cone of which the curves in question are only sections; whether or not they infinitely branch out, multiply their points or not, each developing characteristics that strongly differentiate them from one another, this has nothing to do with the state of affairs; they all obey a unique law. The difficulty resides in the fact that, for a given plurality, for an actual disorder, there only exists one point from which everything is an order: this point exists and it is unique. From every other perspective disorder seems to reign, as well as indetermination. Therefore, to understand a given plurality of things (best understood as different degrees of our knowledge concerning the given) will consist in discovering this point where

On the New Baroque Construction

177

their disorder is resolved, uno intuitu, in the law of a unique order. Reciprocally, in as much as there is an appearance of disorder, we have not yet found this point. Disorder, or rather, the degree of disorder, is only the measure of our distance from this point.229

According to Serres, the most crucial thing to notice is that Leibniz also said that when we choose to represent a model of this unique point (in geometry, but also in graphic figures) we tend habitually to choose the sphere (or rather, the projected intersection of the cylinder and the sphere, which in certain conditions, produces a circle, a half-circle, and an oval). Thus, the most common understanding of the unity of all perspectives is that of a sphere in which each is individual perspective constitutes a degree. It is this selection that becomes what Deleuze calls “a condition of closure.” And yet, as Deleuze argues above, it is precisely the condition of selection “is what tends to be disappearing, first of all and in every way.” In geometrical terms, following Serres, what this means is that the projected point, or “the unique point,” from which all perspectives receive their position in an order no longer intersect at the epicenter of the sphere. In other words, all micro-perceptions still tend to incline toward the apex or summit of a cone, but the cone itself has become tilted (or “oblique”) like headlights from an automobile speeding down a dark highway. Ultimately, what this means, to take up our example of Mexico City again, is that all monads still project a point that constitutes a shared reality, but these points no longer intersect in a Euclidean space, but rather occur on a hyperbolic plane in which the lines only “touch” at the limit of infinity (indicating an infinitely small proximity that never intersects, even at infinity). It is only under this new condition, which Deleuze identifies with the principles of a New Baroque and of a “Neo-Leibnizianism,” that we are now prepared to understand the statement that “now it is neither the same point of view nor the same city now that figure and ground are in movement in space.” However, what interests me most is the statement that immediately precedes this one, where Deleuze that “the same construction of point of view over the city continues to be developed.” In other words, our sense of the city has not yet changed, but rather the conditions of closure and selection that belong to each monad. In effect, what this means is exactly what Leibniz earlier said concerning the

178

On the (New) Baroque

possible models for representing the “point unique” we continue to select the sphere, the semi-sphere, or the oval. However, given the conditions we have just described above in terms of the image provided by Tony Smith of a beam of light on a dark highway where both the figure and the ground are in movement, this selection can no longer provide a sense of closure, producing two distinct phenomena that Deleuze identifies with the New Baroque construction. The first phenomenon, of course, occurs in the region of music, which Deleuze privileges over mathematics as an expression of the New Baroque construction of perspective. In fact, the entire argument he undertakes in The Fold, which concludes with the discussion of music, is that the Leibnizian theory of Harmony has been understood too metaphorically, rather than as an exact reflection of what was already happening in Leibniz’s time, “as if Leibniz were attentive to the innovations happening in Baroque music all the while his adversaries remained stuck to older conceptions.”230 The phenomenon in question is that of dissonance (which, as we know, does not exist in absolute terms, but only in relative terms of a selected order, such as the diatonic scale). In other words, somewhat equivalent to our tendency to still develop a point of view over the city in Euclidean terms, likewise we continue to posit the idea of Harmony in terms of chords, consonances, and adjacent harmonics. That is to say, we continue to think in terms of accords even though the reality of our music has changed through a great quantity of dissonance, which at first was perceived as disorganization and even painful sensation, until, as Deleuze remarks, gradually dissonance was “excused” from being resolved in the tonic form. Here, we can perceive the change in the condition of closure that has gradually evolved into what Deleuze defines as “new Baroque harmony.” Of course, music still remains an “order” within what Rameau first defined as a “science of sounds,” but here this order now appears to be in movement, or at least is no longer anchored to the diatonic scale. Music moves horizontally, serially, that is to say, in temporal extension in which its units can be measured from one tone to the next. Nevertheless, it is also true that while a certain degree of dissonance is excused from being resolved, it is also true that extreme dissonances are is still judged by an earlier notion of Harmony as being imperfect, chaotic, or disorganized, in exact analogy to our tendency to conceive of the ideal perspective mathematically in terms of the sphere. It seems, therefore,

On the New Baroque Construction

179

that our understanding of the point unique, or the Order of order, has evolved only very slowly, and is limited by the physical and culturally determined sensations of pleasure and pain of the organism that belong to the total phenomena of music. If Deleuze argues that the Leibnizian conception of Harmony was a reflection of what was already happening in the Baroque music of his time, for Deleuze it is the composer Pierre Boulez who becomes the primary theoretician of what is happening in music today. In an extremely important and interesting comment, Boulez himself characterizes this precisely in referring back to Leibniz’s metaphor of the city. The work [musical composition] has not really changed in principle: we give it a certain flexibility, but that does not change its signification, nor even fundamentally the perception we have of it. I have often compared it to the map of a city: one cannot change the map, which must be perceived such as it is, but one has different means of driving through, different manners of visiting. This comparison is extremely significant for me. The work is like a city or a labyrinth. A city is also a labyrinth: one visits it or one chooses ones own directions, ones own route, but it is evident that in order to discover a city one needs a precise map, and certain laws of circumnavigation. Personally, I have never been a friend of chance. I think that chance does not produce anything great as such. Thus, my project has not been to change the work at every instant, nor to cause a complete novelty to appear, but rather to change between points of view, between different perspectives, even while its sense fundamentally remains the same. 231

Here, I think we have discovered the second phenomenon of the New Baroque construction in the figure of the labyrinth that appears in Boulez’s description of the character of dissonance as changes in different perspectives or points of view within a musical composition (or order). For example, we already have an image of the monad described as the sealed car speeding down a dark highway, and this provides us with an of a labyrinth when we consider that all perception is constructed horizontally and, thus, there is no possibility of occupying a point outside a labyrinth from which one could grasp one’s own perspective in a total representation. It is this image that gives our sense of the world today as

180

On the (New) Baroque

constructed by an infinite series of networks and flows that are no longer represented in the form of the sphere or from a birds-eye view. Moreover, it is the principle of the labyrinth (that is, of the sense of existence itself) that is expressed in a to a greater degree from the Baroque period onward in all the domains of music, painting, architecture, philosophy and literature. In figural terms, therefore, the labyrinth would be the exact equivalent of the dissonance in music, both of which express the new conditions of closure and selection that define the New Baroque construction. Naturally, when speaking of this principle in the domain of literature, it is Borges who occupies a position that is corollary to Boulez in Deleuze’s own account of the Neobaroque. (Borges would certainly qualify under the heading of a “neo-Leibnizianism.”) As in “The Library of Babel,” the Borgesian narrator always sets his aim on the discovery of a “unique point” (recalling Serres’ description above) that will lead outside the labyrinth; the fact that this point may itself be an illusion, he chooses to affirm the existence of this point in any case, and “to realize something [of a single reality] within the illusion itself.” However, the same principle can equally be found in Carpentier’s vision of the New World Baroque as well, with its taste for combining primitive, classical and modern in a new form that corresponds to the principles of modern jazz improvisation. (Would not improvisation also express a labyrinthine principle of a purely horizontal movement no longer anchored to one scale, almost exactly in the same way that Boulez describes as finding one’s own route into a city, or of different routes equaling changes between different points of view?) Just as Boulez retains a certain order of music as a precise map, likewise Carpentier retains the order of the European Baroque as a map, but only to insert into this order a labyrinthine method of discovering new routes and new points of view without regard to the old unities of place and time, again, by a method of literary representation that most closely approximates modern jazz improvisation. Thus, the Baroque “concert” begins in 18th Century Mexico with the preparations made by a wealthy Mexican landowner owner and his black Cuban servant for their trip to Venice; it ends at the turn of the 20th Century with Monsieur Philomène’s departure to Paris to participate in the legacy of a distinctly modernist and European cult of jazz, which is also imported from the creolized quarters of New Orleans and the black slums of St. Louis. Consequently, el negrito Filemono’s itinerary into the

On the New Baroque Construction

181

cosmopolitan capital of the twentieth century—from the colonial New World via eighteenth-century Spain and Italy—can be seen to illustrate another route into Modernity. Is it possible to extrapolate a theoretical conclusion from the same metaphor in order to understand the proliferation of the New Baroque as so many different routes into the former center, just as the many divergent traditions of Neobaroque have come to radiate outward from the multiple new centers of late-modern and postmodern cultures in both Europe and the Americas? The multiplication of New Baroque traditions—including the postmodern traditions of Neobaroque as well as the New World traditions of el barroco (and there are several!)—can also be understood as the figure of a ground in movement. Severo Sarduy comprehended this well when he compared the neobarroco to the effect of an ever-expanding universe caused by “the Big Bang”; however, he also discerned the problem of the perception of this change from the fact that our fundamental metaphors still belong to a “steady-state” universe, making it difficult (if not impossible) to grasp this change in the form of novelty, but instead, as a deformation or a disfiguration that first appears in the original Baroque model. The moving ground thus first appears as displacement and metaphor in language, figural distortion (or anamorphosis) in representation, and as a dizziness or hallucinatory vision. This is what differentiates the situation of the Neobaroque from that of High Modernism. Any claim to absolute novelty is always haunted by the return of the original Baroque category to name the phenomenon. That is to say, according to my earlier thesis, every example of the New Baroque can also be seen as a “return of the original Baroque.” Therefore, each Neobaroque tradition can be characterized by a fundamental trait of repetition, which can be understood as a purely passive repetition, rather than the active repetition of the typical modernist gesture, “make it new!” And yet, many critics have sought to deny this characteristic of passive repetition, even by denying the existence of repetition altogether and laying claim to the absolute originality and the uniqueness of the new Baroque phenomenon. My only response is that these critics are still too modernist in their assumption that the greatest changes appear through absolute novelty. This belief can easily be refuted from a Leibnizian observation that absolute novelty or maximum difference are merely incompossible and, therefore, bear no relation to the minimum

182

On the (New) Baroque

of difference that required to introduce a maximal change within any system of culture (or “semiosphere” to employ again the term coined by Lotman in his description of this process). Like Boulez, and building upon Deleuze’s great refrain, I would suggest that the greatest change does not occur through novelty, which occurs almost by chance, but rather through the powers of repetition itself. It was Borges who discovered in repetition a method to raise the false (the fictional) to a higher power in order to refute the priority of “the before” and to submit the original to a new condition of closure and a new principle of selection; thus, by means of this method, the copy will become infinitely more rich and more verisimilar than the original model, which is made to appear more primitive and “artless” as a result. In this regard, the method employed by Borges and the one employed by Carpentier in his later “Baroque phase” are not diametrically opposed as some critics would have it; each sought, utilizing the means and the resources they had immediately at their disposal, to effect a change in perspective or point of view by introducing infinitely small variations into the relation between model and copy, as if to cause the ground itself to suddenly appear to be moving away from its former center and steering a new course, perhaps even toward a “fabulous future” (el futuro fabuloso). It is around this final observation that I will conclude by returning to Deleuze’s exclamation concerning the conditions of closure and selection that determine the New Baroque that something has indeed changed! In place of an innate sense of a shared reality which organizes all perspectives on the basis of a priori convergence, each perspective begins to become differentiated from the next; nevertheless, all perspectives still remain proximate, even “touching” at infinity, and do not completely diverge into incompossible worlds (in which case they could never be said to share the same reality with other monads). Instead, according to the poetic description given by Deleuze, each monad appears “astraddle over several worlds, kept half open as if by a pair of pliers.” However, to say that the selective principle of consonance has simply been replaced by dissonance does not really solve the problem either, because each monad must still fashion a “clear zone of expression”; although, as we have seen, Deleuze compares this zone of clarity to the beam of light from a sealed car on a remote dark highway, and I have determined this metaphor to represent a kind of perspective that belongs to a labyrinth. Nevertheless,

On the New Baroque Construction

183

extending this metaphor, we must not imagine this stretch of road to be completely deserted; there are other cars, other beams of light, some very distant, others just passing, some ahead or approaching from behind. Thus, we can imagine a world as a thousand points of light on somber or obscure background, each of these lights tending or veering in a unique direction. What has disappeared is the total view of the city itself, which has been replaced by an obscure background illuminated by all the particular routes toward, but also away from, the former hub. This is the new condition of closure that has replaced the previous one, since each monad innately knows that its own point of view is unique, and it is only on the basis of its own uniqueness that it can be said to share a common reality with others. Perhaps this is how we might understand Deleuze’s earlier statement that “solutions no longer pass through accords,” but rather through those “unique points” where monads begin to differ from one another. Difference has become the new condition of closure and the principle of selection by which each monad must learn to create a new sense of music—and, I will add, a new sense of literature as well! And yet, how does our knowledge of unique difference first appear except as a form of dissonance, which can sometimes be judged as imperfection? This, at least, is a beginning (as Filemeno says). Therefore, it is not by accident that the perfect pearl assumes the expression of a sphere, or that imperfection can also be compared to a dissonant effect. And yet, as I asked in the beginning, what would be a perfect pearl that no longer had the sphere as its expression? In answering this question, finally, I would simply say, as I have been arguing all along, that it is New Baroque.

Appendix The Baroque Detective Borges as Precursor

In 1988, Deleuze published Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque which I have argued signals a radical turning point in the philosopher’s oeuvre; or, at least a solution had been found concern­ing a problem that had preoccupied him for more than twenty years since the publication of Différence et Répétition in 1968. The problem can be posed in the following manner: How does one live in a world without principles, a world in which all principles have been shattered to bits? Another way of posing the same question, although more in the terms of classical or Platonic philosophy, is how does one live in a world amidst the ruins of “the Good”? In other words, the problem that preoccupied Deleuze during this period concerned nothing less than the default of “the Good” as the highest principle of Reason—something that can be situated under the modern critique of the Enlightenment—in the sense that the “Good” by a kind of default can no longer function as the highest principle of reason and that the nature of reason itself is suspected of harboring a much more malevolent nature which would include the possibilities of treachery and deceit, a suspicion that today can be ascribed to the concepts of “Ideology” and “the Unconscious.” “But what happened in this long history of ‘nihilism,’” Deleuze asks in 1988, “before the world lost its principles?” At a point close to us human Reason had to collapse, like the Kantian refuge, the last refuge of principles. It falls victim to ‘neurosis.’ But even before, a psychotic episode must have been necessary. A crisis and collapse of all theological Reason had to take place. That was where the Baroque assumes its position: Is there some way of saving the Theological ideal at a moment when it is being contested on all sides, and when the world cannot stop accumulating its ‘proofs’ against it, ravages and miseries, at a time when the earth will soon shake and tremble … ? The Baroque solution is the following: we

186

On the (New) Baroque

shall multiply principles—we can always slip a new one out from under the cuff—and in this way we will change their use. We will not have to ask what available object corresponds to a given luminous principle, but what hidden principle corresponds to whatever object is ‘given,’ that is to say, to this or that ‘perplexing case.’ … A case being given, we shall invent its principle.1

In order to understand this passage, we need to define what Deleuze means by a “principle”; perhaps the best way to define a principle is to say that it is a rule not unlike those found in games. Let us take the example of chess, which Deleuze resorts to many times in order to address the function of principles. Chess is defined, literally carved out of time and space, by the rules of play; as a result, “the play not only internalizes the players who serve as pieces, but the board on which the game is played, and the material of that board.” 2 At the same time, all of the little pieces that serve as players have been endowed with singular characteristics. (We might even call them personalities.) A knight can only move two squares forward, then one square left or right. If it moved any differently, then it would no longer be a knight. It would be a bishop, a pawn or a queen. Here, we can see that the clearest definition of a principle, or a rule, is what pro­vides the possibility of identity, that is, for a knight to be a knight. Therefore, a rule cannot be understood as a kind of command, or coercion, which would force each piece to correspond to its identity, which would put into these little pieces of wood a kind of homunculus, a subject of desire, a relation to freedom which is strictly impossible for wood. From this example, we might begin to infer why the loss of principles would signal the “end of the game”: the inability to make a move, the sudden or stupefy­ing moment when everything is frozen in a terrifying death grimace. First, not only would the game stop, but the board itself would become incomprehensible; differences would cease to signify the possibilities of play. Applying our analogy to the foregoing problem, for philosophy to lose its principle of Reason would imply that it could no longer go on being itself, but rather would turn into something else such as literature, poetry or ethics. Here, the “end of Metaphysics” is no longer such a lofty and impenetrable concept, but rather the simplest thing to understand: the moment when philosophy lost the rule of reason and could no longer go on playing the “game of truth” according to the same old rules. At

The Baroque Detective

187

this point our aging philosopher was faced with a stark alternative: either invent new ones, or abandon the game altogether. Briefly put, this is the fundamental problem that Deleuze’s work addresses throughout his entire work, or at least from the first pages of Différence et Répétition in 1969 to the publication with Guattari of Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? in 1991. From the earlier period of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s solution to this crisis was to couple himself to Nietzsche and to Mallarmé, for whom the end of the game is affirmed in a “throw of the dice.” The solutions offered by Nietzsche and Mallarmé, Deleuze reflects later in 1988, have rewarded us with the revelation of a Thought-World that throws dice. But for them the world lacks principle, has lost its principles. That is why the throw of the dice is the power of affirming Chance, of thinking of chance in sum, which is above all not a principle, but the absence of all principles. Thus Mallarmé gives to absence or nothingness what issues from chance, what claims to escape it all the while limiting it by principle: ‘The world is the anonymous domain of absence, from which things disappear and into which they appear … The apparition is a mask behind which no one exists, behind which nothing really exists other than nothing.’ Nothing rather than something. To think without principles, in the absence of God and in the absence of man himself, has become the perilous task of the child-player [the little demiurge, or infant God] who topples the old master of play, and who makes incompossibles enter into the same world, shattered (the board is broken to bits … ). 3

This solution represents what Deleuze earlier calls “the Ideal Game” (le jeu idéal), but it is also a solution that could be said to belong to the long history of “nihilism.” In order to understand why this is so, it is necessary to be clear concerning the meaning of nihilism that is given in the above passage. Nihilism is what happens when the subject encounters a loss of the highest principle and “Nothing” is affirmed in its place: nothing is affirmed in place of something. This can be taken as the formula for nihilism. With both Mallarmé and Nietzsche, for example, the affirmation of the “empty space of nothingness” is itself the space of freedom that is left open to Chance—to the terror of absolute play, on the one hand, or to the freedom of an absolute automaton, such as language, on the other. For Mallarmé, we might think of this “empty space” as what the absolute

188

On the (New) Baroque

poem introduces into Language; for Nietzsche, the “empty space” inserted into time is the affirmation of the Eternal Return. Yet, by affirming chance in each instant, the board (that is, the world) is also exposed to being shattered, sending all the pieces flying into chaos, which is why Deleuze would later abandon this solution as potentially false and inherently risky. Here is how Deleuze described this moment in 1968: To every perspective or point-of-view there must correspond an autono­mous work with its own self-sufficient sense: what matters is the divergence of series, the decentering of circles, “monstrosity.” The totality of circles and series is thus a formless ungrounded chaos that has no law other than its repetition, its own reproduction in the development of what diverges and decenters. 4

The above passage should immediately recall Borges’ description of “The Library of Babel,”. There we find a series of hexagons; each containing twenty shelves, five shelves to a side except two where there is a hallway (with two small closets to the left and to the right, one for sleeping and the other for depositing “one’s faecal necessities”), leading to the next hexagon which has the same exact dimensions, contents and facilities. As if this horrible symmetry is not enough, Borges adds that each shelf contains thirty—five books, each book is 410 pages long, each page contains forty lines and each line is eighty characters in length. In his account, Borges also mentions a spiral staircase that rises and descends from each passage, so that when one of the occupants of the Library dies, he is simply tossed over the rail into the void that surrounds each staircase where his body falls through an infinite and groundless space, until “it will gently decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall.”5 Here, we see many of the same elements that appear above in Deleuze’s affirmation: first, a series of divergent units (circles or hexagons, the architectural details do not matter); second, a cer­tain groundlessness (or the dissolution of all content into a great nothingness), all of which is summarized by the following principle: The Library is a circle whose exact center is anyone of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.”6 Yet, there is also a fundamental detail that distinguishes between Borges’s con­frontation with the problem of repetition and Deleuze’s early allusion. In Borges’s description of “The Total Library” (absolute

The Baroque Detective

189

knowledge), the architectural details form a kind of monotonous “Eternal Return of the Same” which seems to strike everything with an unbearable evacuation of difference. (After all, what other purpose is the installation of toilets in each cell if not to signal for us the principle of evacuation of all content?) In the final paragraph of “The Total Library,” however, we find a new principle expressed in the statement that “The Library is unlimited and cyclical.” That is, “If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order).” 7 We must ask what has just happened? That is, what is the difference between the classical principle of architecture, “the Library is a circle whose exact center is anyone of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible” (one might also say “impossible”), and the new principle announced by the second statement that “the Library is unlimited and cyclical.” The difference emerges, according to Borges, when we understand that the second principle offers a determination of the “infinity” that now belongs to the Library. If in the first proposition, the exact center of the Library is anyone of its chambers, then we might speculate that the whole (the circumference) is present but in a manner that is infinitely remote or even “inaccessible.” In the second, the whole is defined as “disorder” (which is still a kind of order, and perhaps even the Order), one that suddenly causes the Library to become de-centered and without circumference. In a footnote that Borges adds to this final sentence, he remarks that this in effect qualifies and completely changes the architectural principle of the Library, since the entire edifice could in principle be compressed into a single volume, con­taining an infinite number of infinitely thin leaves (which a seventeenth-century writer described as “the superimposition of an infinite number of planes”), each page unfolding into the next, although the inconceivable middle page would have no reverse.”8 Here, we might already see that Borges has prefigured the solution that Deleuze later discovers in The Fold, since the circumference has disappeared and in its place we have the principle of the Zwischenfalt, the middle fold, or a fold in between folds in such a way that the principle of the fold (le pli) becomes inseparable from the species of repetition that is deployed by a process of reading that now belongs to the concept of modern literature. In his famous entry on “The analytical language of John Wilkins,” Borges reveals the presence of an ideological flaw or error that structures

190

On the (New) Baroque

the former library in the arbitrariness of all universal schemes: “obviously there is no classi­fication of a universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is.”9 Still, this last statement does not cause Borges to capitulate to the position of “nihilism,” which again is the affirmation of Nothing in the place of Something. In this case, we might see that the principle of a correspondence, which relates a system of classifica­tion (the library) with the organization of the real (the universe), is broken by the declaration of a purely arbitrary or chance relation. This is the same crisis of principles that Leibniz had also encountered in the seventeenth century, which is why the Leibnizian solution holds a privileged place in Borges’s reflections as it does for Deleuze. If this correspondence is purely arbitrary, then nothing could be affirmed in the real that would henceforth be the condition of any possible knowledge; the order of language and signification would simply close upon itself as a universal automaton, a labyrinth which shares no corresponding principle that would refer outside itself to the order of nature or the universe. (To even refer to “an order” of the universe would already be a false ascription of a notion of “order” that refers only to the closed system of classification.) Here, we have a profound expression of schism, since if there is no rational element in the real, then every system of classification that pretends to find a correspondence is a simple “fiction,” an “artificial universe” which would be fore­closed from the real. If we take up one of Borges’ primary metaphors to describe this relationship, we would have the Library, and outside the Library, the universe; between them, there could be no unifying principle, no possibility of reference, no possible truth as correspondence. To illustrate this point, we might recall a similar crisis in Saussure’s announcement of the “arbitrariness that determines the relationship between the signifier and signified.” In the wake of this announcement, this led many to proclaim that the relation is total and all-encompassing in the sense that every order of the signifier is completely arbitrary; therefore, every relation is poten­tially false, and the signifier itself despotic. Such a view led to many exaggerated and naive statements concerning “the arbitrariness of the signifier” that has recurred often in the history of postmodernism, and has evolved into similar statements concerning “text” and “textuality” by those associated with deconstruc­tion early on (i.e. “there is no signified,” “no meaning,” “nothing outside the text,” etc.) most of

The Baroque Detective

191

which betrayed a certain manic polarity between jubilation and despair. Yet, much of this exaggeration might have been avoided if these same critics had chosen to read Saussure further on this point; they would discover that while the relationship between signifier and signified was “arbitrary in principle” (my emphasis), it was at the same time “absolutely necessary.” 10 Here, at this moment, Saussure affirms Something over Nothing, which takes the form of “necessity,” that is the historical unfolding of a signifying chain through time, so that “the community itself cannot control so much as a single word; it is bound to the existing language.”11 Taking up Borges’s commentary on this same crisis nearly two centuries before Saussure, it is interesting that he immediately turns to the somewhat gnostic solution by one of his baroque contemporaries, David Hume. “This world”, wrote Hume, was only the rude essay of some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance; it is the work of some dependent, inferior diety, and is the object of derision to his superiors; it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity, and ever since his death has run on ….12

In the above passage, we might notice a contradiction in Hume’s description of the little demiurge, who is simultaneously described as an infant and as “the production of old age and dotage.” This is because Hume still holds out for the possibility that the order of knowledge can be likened either to the mental production of an infantile and primitive consciousness, or to a product of senility and old age; in other words, he still leaves room for the advent of a development of reason that would be corrective and diagnostic—in a word, perfect. If there is a perceptible derision in Hume’s tone, this can be likened to gnosticism, to a spirit of criticism of and hatred for the world as it is (as a botched or “bad” creation), and to an “other—worldly” idea of reason as perfect—a presentiment of idealism is already present in Hume’s scorn. Borges says, however, we must go further than the solution that is offered by gnosticism, or its contem­porary avatar, idealism. The baroque solution still retains the minimal criteria of a rational element in the universe. To put it differently, faced with the monster of chaos, the baroque solution still chooses Something over Nothing, and this “something” can be defined as

192

On the (New) Baroque

something of a secret. Thus, Borges goes further than the gnostic solution in that while he completely rejects the notion of the universal “in the organic, unifying sense that is inherent in that word,” he still retains the idea of a hidden order that takes the form of God’s secret dictionary. Thus, contrary to the sentiment expressed by the statement “Everything is arbitrary,” or by the gnostic sentiment that everything is botched and corrupted, Borges holds up the example of Wilkins’s analytical language that does not rest upon ‘stupid, arbitrary symbols.” Rather, every letter is meaningful, as the Holy Scriptures were meaningful to the Cabalists. To summarize, while the divine scheme of the universe is impossible, says Borges, “this should not dissuade us from outlining human schemes, even though we are aware they are provisional.”13 In the last statement, perhaps we have the most direct example of affirming something in place of nothing. For Borges, this something takes on the order of a secret, of a secret that is not divine but rather a purely human design, which is to say, something that is produced by the arrangement of little letters in a signifying series. Because there is something of a secret, which is at the same time purely historical, the universe retains a relationship to truth that avoids the chaos ushered in by the statement “Everything is arbitrary,” or the nihilism of the underlying assertion that reality is generated by stupid, arbitrary symbols. For Borges, on the contrary, the exemplary system of Wilkins refers to this moment when the arbitrariness of the ‘system of grunts and squeals” is nevertheless affirmed as capable of a relation of truth; that is, despite its complete arbitrari­ness, Wilkins produces his system of classification in the “belief that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and the agonies of desire.” 14 Therefore, what was originally the profound defect of language turns out to be its condition of possibility: the possibility of expression which is only possible, finally, from the arbitrariness of its initial principle that the relation between the signifier and the signified is not fixed, not even in the mind of God, but is only provisionally determined and thus open to new expressive modulations through time. Even though this system assumes the nature of a labyrinth that is made up by the infinite combination of twenty-six letters, it is a labyrinth whose possible combinations can never be totalized, and must admit the constant quantity of new passages and new signifying relations.

The Baroque Detective

193

Perhaps the best exemplar of this process is the figure of Pierre Menard, whose affirmation can be read in the context of the following sentence: “He dedicated his scruples and his sleepless nights to repeating an already extant book in an alien tongue” (L44). The principle that governs Menard’s process, which Borges comments on in detail, is neither translation nor copying, but rather corresponds to the creation of what Deleuze calls a ‘simulacrum.” What differentiates the simulacrum from the simple copy or the translation is a principle that returns to the Leibnizian axiom that only what differs can begin to have a resemblance. The “difference” one finds in the tale of Menard is the following: “To compose the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable under­taking, necessary and perhaps unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible.” 15 However, the difference that governs and determines the undertaking for Menard is defined as “impossible.” “Impossible” in what sense? The answer to this question is given earlier in the sentence which describes the composition of the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century as a natural act, perhaps even one that was “necessary and unavoidable.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, we must determine this act to be something unreasonable, that is, completely avoidable. Menard’s gesture is an act that runs against the grain of his time—it is impossible a priori. On the other hand, according to Borges, Cervantes’s “genius” was something thoroughly inscribed in the possibility of his time, almost to the extent that this negates Cervantes’s singular importance as the author of the Quixote, since if he didn’t write it then someone else certainly would have, by necessity. To demonstrate this we can take the comparison of the two passages that Borges gives us to substantiate his claim of their fundamental difference, passages that on first inspection are exactly identical: … truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and future’s counselor

and: … truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and future’s counselor.16

194

On the (New) Baroque

Upon first glance, both versions appear identical; however, Menard’s version highlights the importance of history as the mother of truth. In other words, in Menard’s version history is identified not with what happened, but rather with what we judge to have happened. As a result of this change of emphasis, the difference between Menard’s passage and that of Cervantes is profound; they don”t say the same thing! Between them, something has changed and this change of “origin” is historical, “the mother of truth.” What is different for us is that, today, there can be no Quixote without Menard; this could be said to be Borges’s relation to the “tradition of all of Western literature,” which is established by the principle of repetition. No Quixote without Menard!! That is, only what differs can begin to have resemblance, but this “resemblance” will only appear from the second instance that repeats the first. That is, Quixote will resemble Menard, more than Menard will resemble Quixote; or “Cervantes” text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is infinitely richer.”17 Here, I want to suggest that we find the same principle that motivates Deleuze’s solution to the loss of principles, to the shattering of the tables of representation, in his turn back before this moment to the philosophy of Leibniz, although in a manner that was strictly possible for someone from our time, and this would necessarily entail both a repetition and a difference inserted into his reading of Leibniz. In short, Deleuze abandons the “ideal game,” the game of chance; instead, he affirms the principle of creation, which he later with Guattari infuses in What is Philosophy?, with the definition of philosophy itself as a creation of the first order, a creation of concepts. The relevance of Borges is that Deleuze himself solves this problem by turning to Leibniz in a manner that closely follows Borges’ own solution, even though Deleuze himself would not see the correspondence exactly in these terms. Borges also turns to the seven­teenth century in a manner that prefigures and anticipates Deleuze, so much so that I would define Borges as precursor in the same sense we find in “Kafka as precursor” and “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote.” The above can be described as the doctrine of repetition that founds Borges’s literary process, and can be discovered to underwrite every individual reflection or plot. For example, we find it again in his note on “Kafka and his precursors,” where we have another version of this uncanny repetition of “Kafka” in such figures as Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Leon Bloy and the English poet

The Baroque Detective

195

Robert Browning. “In each of these texts,” writes Borges, “we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka would have never written a line we would not perceive this quality; indeed, it would not exist.” 18 Hence, this proves that by a kind of repetition that appears only in what essentially differs, “his work modifies the conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” Moreover, it is this theory of repetition that Borges shares with Deleuze, or which Deleuze lifts from Borges as early as Difference and Repetition, which cites Menard in the preface as a supreme justification to his philosophy of difference and repetition. Like Kafka, Borges signature underwrites philosophical projects of Deleuze, Foucault (hence the citation which occurs in the preface to The Order of Things) and Derrida (can one even conceive of the process of “deconstruction” of the text of Western Metaphysics without the precursor of Borges’ “total library”?). Restricting our comments to the understanding of Borges’ process, we should not underestimate its importance for the situation of the post—colonial writer in relation to the literature of the West, and those who have entered into the field of culture too late, due to some historical accident or political fatality. However, for Borges, this subject occupies the privileged position of being the “second.” This is why Borges finds the representatives of this position less in the personage of the author than in the figures of the critical reader, the scholar or the baroque detective—that is, those figures who always arrive on the scene of knowledge second and who are, for that reason, superior to the author (in the case of the book) or the criminal (in the case of crime). In 1937 Borges was employed as a first assistant in the municipal library, where he spent “nine years of solid unhappiness,” until 1946, his “season in hell” as he would later describe it. In the account from which I read this information, the biographer quickly adds some Kafkaesque brush—strokes.19 Above him, he had not only the director but three officials. In due time, “Borges would ascend to the dizzying heights of the third assistant.” The other assistants were only interested in “pornography, rape and sports,” according to the biographer; and to avoid their hostility, Borges had to agree to catalogue no more than one hundred titles a day. (On the first day, he had ambitiously catalogued more than four hundred, and received rage and enmity from the other clerks.) Borges only acquired some status from “the women who worked there and who were interested in society gossip,” when it was soon discovered that he was a

196

On the (New) Baroque

friend of Elvira de Alvear, “a beautiful and despotic woman whom he loved hopelessly and who was at that time in Buenos Aires an arbiter elegantiarum.”20 When I first read this, I was immediately suspicious of all the Kafkaesque flairs: the director and the three assistants; the vulgar tastes of the assistants for “pornography, rape and sports”; the gossip of the women co-workers; the phrase of a “beautiful and despotic woman”; and finally, the phrase “hopelessly in love” (which, to my mind, is too much of an instance of the “Kafkaesque” to be believed). At the same time, there is other evidence to support the assertion of Kafka as precursor to this period. It was during this time that Borges read Kafka, and even edited and prefaced an edition of his stories in Spanish. It is also said that Borges, during his days in the Library, would sequester himself in the basement or on the roof to write, and in this period some of his best stories were produced including “Death and the compass,” “The library of Babel” and others in the collection of “The garden of forking paths,” and finally, the two drafts of “The (new) refutation of time,” which he penned in 1944 and 1946 respectively. Borges himself, we might conjecture, could not have failed to notice the uncanny repetition of certain details from Kafka’s work in his own experience and this must have shaped his understanding of the singularity of his own experience as precisely having the strange character of a repetition that he will pursue throughout his entire body of work. It is a species of repetition that he demonstrates in the above stories as well as in the famous “Kafka as precursor” and “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote,” which were also written during this same period. However, one conclusion that we might draw from this analogy, according to Borges’ own theory of repetition, is the identification of the Library as a problem that bears (and precisely due to its difference) a repetition of the same problem that determines the position of the Court in Kafka’s own work. This assertion, although obvious, is still undefined; and in both cases, the court and its officers, apparatus of the Law, and the Library, and its personages, apparatus of knowledge, are shrouded in a certain “mystery”—this is the exact word used by both writers to describe their respective objects of interrogation ­that is, by a certain secrecy that they both attempt to resolve in the most direct of manners, by the means of the most precise analytical instrument each has forged in his own way—the instrument of a fiction, of literature.

The Baroque Detective

197

Like the court, the Library is an infernal machine. Borges himself describes it as a kind of “minor hell.” All that is required is a series of little letters, of signifiers, to generate an infinite space and time. To illustrate this possibility, we might use the following formula that Borges cites from Leucippus: “A is different from N in form; AN from NA in order; Z from N in position.”21 Thus, following this postulation of three series of differences (that of form, order and position) we can construct an infinite library from twenty-six letters. A universe can be generated from this simple formula, since each species of difference can include others: an elephant is different from a bird or a fish in form; the relation between today and yesterday is different from the relation between today and tomorrow in terms of order; and finally, noon is different from midnight in terms of position. As Borges recounts, the Library (as some call it, the universe) includes the total combinations possible, so that in the modern period, Huxley conjec­ tured that six monkeys with typewriters could, given a few eternities, reproduce all the volumes in the British Library (although Borges provides a notation that in principle only one absolute monkey would be required). At the same time, we find another series in Borges: the series of four letters that make up the unspeak­able name of God; each letter will signify a certain point in time, a place, the first letter in the proper name of a victim, a position in the zodiac calendar. These are the four letters that Erik Lamott traces from the pages of ancient volumes in the library of one of the victims, through the streets of Buenos Aires, to the exact point of his awaited death. Or, in “The garden of forking paths,” it is the secret name of “Albert,” which also signals the target of a German bombing raid during the war. The second series is set in opposition to the first: in the first we have an infinite number of combinations which makes each seem purely arbitrary and insignificant; for the second, there is a singular combination, a ‘secret” series of letters, for which there is only one possible solution. Or rather, there is a singular arrangement of three letters, which is punctuated by a fourth, which completes the series and marks the exact and indisputable solution of a mystery. This could be the axiom of Borges’ process, the baroque detective, to resolve the mystery by the most direct of means. I would not be the first to suggest that human beings, for example, are composed of three letters as well; however, what is remarkable is that for each there is only one possible solution, or cipher. The mystery is one of singularity, which causes a life to diverge from all the others. At the

198

On the (New) Baroque

same time, because God is unconscious of this perspective, a point-of-view which is that of the Library itself, he necessarily “misses” the singular—by default. It is through this gap in the architecture of knowledge that the unconscious of God enters the universe at the same time that it is from the “absence of the singular” from his point-of-view or perspective that disorder or difference is introduced into the Library. In response to this problem, Borges deduces six axioms or codes that function as the principles of the detective genre, and in turn, applies these codes to his investigation of the European library. In other words, it is by the appli­cation of this literary machine (or process), which very much resembles Kafka’s discovery of a set of similar codes which will function to distinguish the solu­tion of the shorter works (the letters, the animal stories) from the novels, that Borges invents a discrete formula by which all of knowledge (that is, the library itself) can be submitted to an ongoing interrogation, or investigation. This investigation of the Library may well be interminable, just as Kafka’s investi­gation of the Court, its anterior and adjacent bureaucracies, its agents and its victims, which seem only to multiply and proliferate until, in the end (which, I remind you is only the end of “K.” in The Trial and of a certain abandon­ment by Kafka himself in the case of The Castle), the court is revealed to be total. In a similar manner, for Borges, the investigation in the total library will always unearth new investigations that will later be abandoned in course, or punctuated by the mystery of a given solution (e.g. “Death and the compass”), and like Kafka’s juridical apparatus, also reveals itself to be somewhat of an infernal machine. Every instance of accepted knowledge can, through Borges’ literary machine, become an item for the investigation; all that is required is the purely formal subscription to the following five axioms: (l) a discretionary maximum of six characters; (2) the resolution of all loose ends to a mystery; (3) a rigid economy of means; (4) the priority of how over who; and finally, (5) necessity and wonder in the solution. 22 There is no reason to believe that Borges could not have invented more principles (or laws) to rule on this or that occasion or in this or that story according to his needs, but here I highlight only these five in order to underline the character of what Deleuze and Guattari define as “a literary machine.” What we are dealing with here is the creation of a purely formal and somewhat arbitrary series of codes that determines the conditions of enunciation from one occasion

The Baroque Detective

199

to the next. Once this series is established, however, to violate it would result in the loss of form and, at the same time, would produce the conditions for judging the outcome as somehow botched or a failure. Therefore, each of these laws must be rigorously followed, and for each there is always a notation of illegal or bad moves, as in a game of chess. (Examples of the various illegal solutions, for instance, include the uses of “hypnotism, ingenious pseudo­scientific tricks, and lucky charms”). The fifth law is the most inter­esting one to comment on for our purposes, since it demands two things simultaneously: first, that the mystery is determined (that is, it is fit for only one possible solution) and; second, that the reader must marvel over the solution without resorting in any way to a supernatural explanation. When this law is set within the Library, the fifth law gives us a key to understand Borges’s theory of ideology: the agent, or criminal, must be found to be of purely terrestrial, one might say “historical,” origin (which, after Menard, is “the mother of all truth”). In other words, the solution itself must never take the form of (a Universal) myth or superstition to solve the problem of the “mystery.” (Consequently, Borges’s solution would be different from Freud’s for obvious reasons.) If we apply the fifth axiom to one of Borges’s most famous stories, “Death and the Compass,” what do we find? That the solution is determined, following the first of the criteria, in that the solution arrived at is the only one possible to resolve this mystery; at the same time, we might notice with marvel that the detective’s solution to the mystery of the murders at the same time means his own. It is almost as if the detective sacrifices himself to such a perfect criminal design in order to guarantee that his solution will remain that much more something to marvel at, as if the perfection of his knowledge of the mystery must make of his subject its final and summary execution. Thus, the mystery which is traced through four letters of the unspeakable name of God, in the end becomes the bullet from the revolver that finds its target at precisely that point in space and time where his solution of the mystery and the path of the bullet meet at the bull’s eye of Lonrott’s body. What it is crucial not to miss (no pun intended) in this perfect conjunction of the detective’s intellectual process and the unfolding of process that is located in the real is that they are, even for a second, perfectly symmetrical and that one proves the accuracy of the other. In other words, there is nothing arbitrary in the order of signifiers that the detective follows, but that it allows him to trace a commensurate path in the real. In

200

On the (New) Baroque

short, the detective saves the truth and certainty of his “reading,” even if he achieves this truth at the price of his own death; the detective Lonrott critiques the deadly mystery that was created by Scharlach. It is not perfect enough, he announces, looking straight into Scharlach’s eyes. He utters the now famous line: “In your labyrinth you have three lines too many.”23 At this point, some might be reminded of Kafka’s solution at the end of The Trial, where K.’s investigation of his own guilt or innocence ends with his execution. In this case, I think there is something different from what takes place in Borges, since while the “sentence” finally lands on K., nothing is determined by this, K.’s death appears like something completely arbitrary, and the law itself is still wrapped in a cloak of mystery. Thus, Kafka’s solution is indeterminate, and the reader is left not feeling “marvel,” but disgust and dread at the fact that K. dies “like a dog.” This gives us a clue concerning the nature of the ‘secret” in Borges: first, it must be entirely terrestrial (which is to say “hellish” or “infernal”); second, it leads, as in “Death and the compass,” straight to the death of the subject, although in a manner that does not leave its shroud of mystery intact. If the literary machine that Borges created has often been likened to a game, this is because it violates this order of death in a very special way. A game, by contrast, is infinitely reversible; thus it is a special case of exception that is created in time. This is what gives a false and pathetic character to all games. (For example, Baudelaire observes that gambling emerges precisely in order to restore to the game its temporal nature, which is that of irreversible loss.) In a letter to Rernond (January, 1716), Leibniz rejects games of chance for the sake of chess or checkers; games of position and games of emptiness or “void” for the inverted games of solitaire; and finally, games modeled on battle for the sake of the Chinese games of non—battle (consequently, the game of Go is preferred over the game of chess).24 In turn, we find the exact preferences repeated by Borges who, as we know, found both the game of lottery, or the principle of chance, to be indeterminate and abysmal, leading to an annihilation of the subject. Concerning the game of chess, we find this stanza in the poem of the same name: It was in the East, this war took fire. Today the whole earth is its theater. Like the game of love, this game goes on forever.

And finally:

The Baroque Detective

201

God moves the player, he in turn, the piece. But what god behind God begins the round Of dust and time and sleep and agonies.25

Borges’ preference for the solitaire of the detective and the scholar expresses the principle of a duel with an absent player, an intellectual process that must assume the position of the “Other,” whether the mind of the criminal or the figure of the author-God. Following Deleuze’s observation we can easily detect in the labyrinthine and divergent series, as well as in the line of the Orient that runs through Borges’s entire work, a preference for a Chinese principle of non­battle, “this network of times which approached one another, broke off, or forked, or were unaware of one another for centuries,” a game which embraces all possibilities at once, and different futures, where in one you are my enemy, and in another, my friend. As Deleuze writes, if Borges invokes the Chinese philosopher-architect Ts’ui Pên rather than Leibniz, it is because he wanted “to have God pass into existence all incompossible worlds at once rather than choosing one of them, the best.”26 And yet, Deleuze here would have Borges violate one of his own rules, perhaps the most important as we have seen, which is that there be only one possible solution to “a mystery,” the solution that leads most directly (one might say singularly) to the subject’s own death. How do we account for this discrepancy? That is, Deleuze makes Borges affirm Nothing over Something, even though here Nothing takes the form of all incompossible worlds, whereas Borges affirms just the opposite. Deleuze either refuses or fails to recognize that in turning back to the solution of “a certain baroque Leibniz” Borges had already been there before him, that Borges is now in a certain sense a precursor to Leibniz. In other words, no Leibniz without Borges! This could be the fundamental axiom that will determine the entire argument concerning the seventeenth-century philosopher in The Fold. In The Fold, Deleuze defines the Baroque as a kind of schizophrenic order of creation (the multiplication or invention of principles) that resolves the crisis of theological reason in his reading of Leibniz. What marks the definition of a schizophrenic order of creation for Deleuze is a litigation, even a war, over the principle of reason; the schizophrenic rages against the order of God’s creation, the closed universe of the symbolic order. Thus, Deleuze outlines the following problem as the fundamental

202

On the (New) Baroque

basis for the Baroque: “How to conjoin freedom with the schizophrenic automaton’s inner, complete, and pre—established deter­mination?”27 We might see this as the same problem that Borges takes up with regard to the determination of the Library. Yet, although I noted the passage of time, I want to underline the fact that this question was possible only in the seventeenth century; whereas its reappearance in our twentieth century bore something new, a character of repetition that will necessarily diverge from Leibniz’s solution. In a manner similar to the baroque solution that is discovered by Deleuze—that of multiplying principles, one for each case, inventing new ones for exceptional cases—we might think of Borges’ solution to the problem of the Library (i.e. the architecture of knowledge). Borges seems to move through the European library, inventing new editions (so-called fictitious volumes) whenever he runs into an impasse. It is this movement, this process of invention, or creation, that defines the concept of literature in Borges. Thus, the procedures of archivization and critique that an act of reading entails constitute the architecture of Borges’ work; by which the “Library” becomes, under the axiom of Borges’ solution, a labyrinth. Here, we have two readers which are opposed in a direct confrontation: God, the author, who sees everything at once through a giant telescope and gathers all perception into a central eye, and the reader in the labyrinth who follows a trail that may eventually lead through the labyrinth, but must also necessarily include in his/her trajectory points of impasse, detours, traps, blind alleys, wrong turns and failures. This is an important consideration, since “knowledge”—both in the form of its pre—supposition and in the material organization or architecture of the “Library” which classifies, separates into distinct locations, and creates a taxonomy of memory traces that have a pure and non—individual repetition to insure that they can always be found by everyone—must now include the points of confusion, the misunderstanding and the formal “blindnesses” that are the result of what the God-reader misses, and which constitute his profound unconscious. It is the Unconscious of God that, in turn, forms the architecture of the Library. As Deleuze shows, Leibniz creates in The Theodicy a trial in which a lawyer defends God’s principles against the evidence of reality, which can be summed up in one simple word: “misery.” However, as more recent and less pious scholars have observed, to “defend” God’s principles is not the same thing as defending God. In Leibniz et Spinoza (1975), Georges

The Baroque Detective

203

Friedman insists on Leibniz’s phi­losophy as a thinking of Universal anxiety: the Best is not a “vote of confidence in God; on the contrary, Leibniz seems to be defying God himself.”28 O. J. Simpson was not the first defendant to go down in history as an ambiguous client for the defense; Leibniz had already laid the precedent, by separating the character of God from the principle of law (i.e. what is really at issue). Consequently, today in crime dramas on TV, we often witness a scene in which the defense lawyer knows his or her client to be guilty of the prosecu­tion’s complaint—guilty to the teeth!—but must present a case to the best of his or her ability in order to salvage something from the loss of the “Good.” What is salvaged is the principle of law, that is, to save its possibility for the future. This marks what Deleuze calls Leibniz’s cry, that “Everything must be rational.” That is, for each event there must be a principle, and his entire philosophy proceeds from the insane demand that the real be rationalized, that Something rather than Nothing must be affirmed for each event and being, that in cases where the principle is not known it be created and adjudicated right down to the smallest molecules. I want to call attention to the fact that we can find exactly the same cry in Borges, although it is no longer issued by a philosopher, but by a “man of letters” (in every sense implied by this phrase, including, I might add, “a true man of the seventeenth century”), that is, a being who emerges in the heart of the Library, who spends all eternity there, who rages against its imperfect order and who dreams, deliriously, of perfecting it in the following statement: In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years. It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe. [Borges adds the following axiom: “it simply suffices for such a book to be possible for it to exist.”] I pray to the unknown god that a man ­just one, even though it were thousands of years ago!—may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for the others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for just one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified.29

Finally, here in this passage from “The Library of Babel,” we might detect the cry of a man of faith, even though his place be in hell. Like Leibniz,

204

On the (New) Baroque

his cry is that there is one creature—who may have existed thousands of years ago, or who may not yet exist (although this doesn’t matter, since the Library contains all possible times and it is sufficient to posit his existence for all these times, regardless of past or future with respect to the present)—who has read the book and for whom the universe is completely and perfectly justified. But, again I want to be clear, it is as if the whole universe (the Library) receives its entire justification in this one moment, in this one being. This is astounding, that the whole universe, in principle, can receive its justification in one singular reading; that, in principle, it is this event that becomes the condition of its possibility—even though this total sense, which excludes me (that is, Borges, Leibniz, Deleuze, you and me), assigns us all to an eternity of waiting, of leafing through all these dusty volumes in hell. The game of knowledge exists only to be completed in this one moment; in the meantime, God can be condemned a thousand times over, history can be discovered to be a farce or a nightmare, Borges, you and I can dissolve into night or be revealed as imaginary beings, simple fictions like in the dream of Chuong Tsu and the butterfly. This does not matter, because the game may not be for us, but, as Borges writes, “for the others.” (In a certain sense, this might recall for us the statement that Kafka once made to Max Brod: “There is in the universe some­thing like hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.”) What is interesting, however, is that Borges, following this pious declaration, refers to an “other,” the impious and reasonable. He writes: They speak (I know) of ‘the feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of metamorphosizing into others and affirm, negate, and confuse everything like a delirious divinity.’ These words, which not only denounce the disorder but exemplify it as well, notoriously prove their author’s abominable taste and desperate ignorance. In truth, the Library contains all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the 25 orthograph­ical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense.30

It is, of course, interesting to note for the record that the impious and reasonable author whom the narrator at this point cites and rejects as a person of “abominable taste and desperate ignorance” is none other than

The Baroque Detective

205

Borges himself, who penned these very lines a few years earlier in the essay “The Total Library.” It seems clear from the above passage that we have found the principle that Borges struggles for: the sense of sense, or the secret order of disorder. To salvage something of a “sense,” if not something of an “ultimate meaning” from the arbitrary and ignorant combinations of the signifier—that was the hidden principle in Borges’ struggle!—since for him, every signifier is filled with both tenderness and fear, and every word is, in some language, the name of God. (Thus, every word, in as much as it is expressed, is at the exact center of the universe. It necessarily supports the universe, in the same way that for Saussure each instance of speech [la parole] supports the whole of Language.) It is this hidden principle that gives him the faith and the courage to go on, even though he spends his time in hell, outraged and annihilated by the order of knowledge that exists, and which condemns him to his artificial and fictional interventions, to merely “literature” (and this, I remind you, was often Kafka’s despair as well). The principle that Borges discovers is that of “repetition,” a repetition that he creates and that must be understood as an artificial creation that is inseparable from the technique of literary creation or process he forges, whereby the library is opened to an infinite number of various readings that diverge and bifurcate. It is by means of this creation that Borges can descend into the seventeenth century, that he can correct the imperfections of Berkeley and Hume, in other words, that he can avoid the errors and false solutions of Idealism (which leads straight to Hegel) and of the subject of nihilism that comes after, perhaps in a way that prefigures something that is now possible for us as well. To conclude my discussion of Deleuze and Leibniz, what I argued is something so simple and at the same time Borgesean, that in conclusion I want to return to emphasize it again: that Borges is the precursor of Leibniz; that it was not possible for Deleuze to read Leibniz without Borges. This is something so simple and yet evident, that Deleuze himself did not often see it, or did not choose to see it exactly in that way, perhaps due to an anxiety of influence, and this caused him to locate Borges still in terms of his own earlier reading of Borges as a player in the absolute game of chance, “the game without rules.” However, this claim does not prove to slight Deleuze in any way, since he could only claim that he was not Borges, and could have seen the exact same thing in his own way. At the

206

On the (New) Baroque

same time, returning to this subject of Borges himself, let me remind you that we are talking about a man, a Jew, who received a little notoriety as an Argentinean writer of the Spanish literary tradition, whose own relation to this tradition was marked by the nebulous situation of what today is called “the post­colonial.” However, even despite this situation (and not, I would argue, because of it as with so many others who are defined by this situation in the Library today) it also describes the infamy of an author whose few books (or rather fictions) have been worthy enough to claim a place on the shelves of the Library for posterity—therefore, we must state categorically that the name of Borges may be forgotten at some point, and necessarily so! All of these things are true and could be defined as the predicates of “Borges”; however, these are not encom­passing, since there is this other Borges as well. It is this one who “went further” than the former, who claimed that there was one and only one solution to the problem of the universe, that there was in other words a straight line that ran through the labyrinth, and who took it upon himself to seek this line, and most of all, to claim that he had a right to solve the mystery of the universe. If we compared these two beings, Borges and his double, there would be nothing that could account for or justify such a delirious desire (except, that is, the somewhat arbitrary, on first glance, principle that is the condition of the Library as well). This form of repetition he creates is absolutely simple, and yet by means of it, he can create all the differences; so that we can say that Menard is the precursor to Quixote, or that today, Borges is our only true precursor. In a different universe, one or many, it may be possible to imagine a Library without the name of this “other Borges,” but I want to remind you, this is note possible for us. Therefore, our only consolation is that the Library that exists (for us)—or as some want to call it, “the universe”—is infinitely richer.

Notes

2008 Forward 1. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1962), 44. 2. In fact, a quick perusal of the Bibliography would reveal that most of the primary and secondary sources I refer to in this study originate from this period, corresponding to a two-year intensive research of the archives at University of California (Irvine and Berkeley) between 1991 and 1993. It was also during this period that I was particularly guided by the works by Warnke (1972), Segel (1974), and Buci-Glucksmann (1984) and Echevarria (1993). Any cited sources appearing after 1994 occurred during the process of revising the original manuscript. 3. See Le Baroque Litteraire: Theorie et Practiques, Actes du Colloque, Paris, 12-14th Decembre, 1989 (Foundation Colouste Gulbenkian: Centre Cultural Portugais, 1990). 4. NOTE: Given the dizzying array of Neobaroque traditions, each emerging from their own cultural and linguistic contexts, and at different historical moments and national locations (Spain, Germany, France, Russia, Cuba, Argentina, Mexico, etc.), I have decided to employ the more generic phrase “New Baroque” to refer to the larger phenomenon of “the return of the Baroque,” and where possible and appropriate, to reserve the terms Neobaroque and el neobarroco for particular cultural and historical traditions mostly in Europe and Latin America. 5. See Irlemar Chiampi, Barroco y modernidad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Ecónomica, 2000). 6. Severo Sarduy, Barroco (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1974). See also “Une Nouvelle Instability” in Le Baroque Litteraire, op.cit., 35–46. 7. See Philip Derbyshire, “Extravagance,” Radical Philosophy (Issue 132, JulyAugust, 2005), 32–35. 8. See Monika Kaup, “Becoming-Baroque: Folding European Forms into the New World Baroque with Alejo Carpentier,” CR: The New Centennial Review 5.2 (2005), 107–149; William Egginton, “The Corporeal Image and the New World Baroque,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106:1 (Winter 2007), 107–127. 9. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 147.

208

On the (New) Baroque

Introduction 1. Severo Sarduy, Barroco (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 31. 2. Rene Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 119. 3. On the etymology of the term, see Harold B. Segel, The Baroque Poem: A Comparative Study (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), 15ff. 4. Segel 1974, 20. 5. See Fredric Jameson, Post-modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). 6. Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid (eds.), Borges: A Reader (New York: Dutton, 1981), 142. 7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), xv. 8. Foucault 1970, xv. 9. Foucault 1970, xv–xvii. 10. Jorge-Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York and London: Penguin, 1999), 4. 11. See Gerard Genette, Palimpsestes (Paris: Seuil, 1992); also Introduction à l’architexte (Paris: Seuil, 1979). 12. Foucault, 1970, vxiii. 13. Robert Harbison, Reflections on Baroque (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 221. 14. Borges 1999, 4. 15. Deleuze 1993, 33. 16. Of course, Deleuze’s adaptation of the baroque concept to interpret everything from modern music to the modern paintings of Paul Klee has been called fantastic, bizarre; in other words, as being merely another expression of the baroque itself. As Harbison writes concerning Deleuze’s treatment, “he seems more and more like a mad person I know who discovered the key to the universe in car license plates, from whose random grouping of letters and numbers he receives messages meant just for him”. All the same, Harbison then concludes, “One can say in Deleuze’s defense that in some sense Baroque invites this kind of treatment and thus to some degree deserve what it got.” See Harbison 2000, 220–1. 17. This underscores a fundamental contradiction that continues to structure disciplinary knowledge, particularly in the region of culture history, since even while casting into doubt the veracity of historical periodization, academic disciplines continue to organize their knowledge explicitly along

Notes

209

the lines of expressive causality, which has now come to function, more or less, as a “necessary fiction”. 18. Gérard Genette, Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 222. 19. See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §27, 140–143. 20. José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 100. 21. Wlad Godzich, The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 69. 22. Godzich 1995, 67. Chapter 1 The Baroque Style 23. On this comparison, see Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1992). 24. Heinrich Wölfllin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), iv. 25. Wölfllin 1966, 14. I am indebted to Harold B. Segels earlier for many of these observations on Wöllflin. See especially Segel 1974, 16ff. 26.Frank Warnke, Versions of the Baroque (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 12. 27. Warnke 1972, 9. 28. Segel 1974, 29. 29. Segel 1974, 27. 30. See my discussion of “the baroque emblem” or “the text within the text” in chapter eight. 31. Segel 1974, 30–1. 32. Quoted in Segel 1974, 24. 33. Segel 1974, 29. Here, I place the word “discovery” in inverted commas following the practice of historian Anthony Pagden in his remarkable European Encounters with the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 58. 34. See Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 35. Quoted in Segel 1974, 25–6. 36.. Deleuze 1993, 3–13. 37. Segel 1974, 64–5.

210

On the (New) Baroque

38. See Foucault 1970, x. 39. Segel 1974, 29. Chapter 2 The Baroque Mechanism 40. Maravall 1986, 220. 41 Maravall 1986, 210. 42 See Godzich 1995, xi. 43. Maravall 1986, 215. 44. William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), 155. 45. Godzich 1995, 69. 46. See Kant 2000, 28–9. 47. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language and Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 83. 48. Heidegger 1979, 83. 49. Maravall 1986, 212–13. 50. Maravall 1986, 36. 51. Maravall 1986, 215. 52. See Hans Blumenburg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press, 1985). 53. Maravall 1986, 210. 54. Maravall 1986, 220. 55. Maravall 1986, 212. 56. Wayne Meeks, The Origin of Christian Morality (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 4. 57. Maravall 1986, 213. 58. Quoted in Maravall 1986, 214. 59. Quoted in Maravall 1986, 213. 60. Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of Renaissance and the Origins of Modern Art (London: Belknap Press, 1985), 110. 61. Candamo, quoted in Maravall 1986, 214. 62. Hauser 1985, 110–11. Chapter 3 The Baroque Eon 63. Wölfflin, quoted in Calabrese 1992, 17. 64. Eugenio d’Ors, Du Baroque (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), 94. See also original Spanish edition: Lo barroco (Madrid: Editorial Tecnos, 2000).

Notes

211

65. D’Ors, Cultura, quoted in Pilar Saenz, The Life and Works of Eugenio d’Ors (IBP, 1983), 89. 66. Jean Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty: 1700–1789 (Geneva: Skira, 1974), 22. 67. Quoted in Starobinski 1974, 23. 68. Starobinski 1974, 23. 69. Quoted in Starobinski, 1974, 23. 70. D’Ors 1935, 90. 71. D’Ors 1935, 90. 72. Foucault 1970, 300. Nevertheless, according to d’Ors’ thesis (a version of which can also be found later in the works of Foucault, de Man and Derrida), throughout the periods that constitute our objects of study, what is called “literature” gradually becomes one of the primary modes of what I have referred to as historical anamnesis. Chapter 4 Baroque and anti-Baroque 73. Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde, trans. Rachel Phillips (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 19. 74. Paz 1991, 1. 75. Paz 1991, 3. 76. Paz 1991, 3–4. 77. Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990), 138–9. 78. This image of the modern corresponds to what Hölderlin called the “caesura of epochs” that means, after the turn of modernity, the alternation of “before” and “after” that occurs in the oscillating forms of classical and romantic, ancient and modern, no longer rhyme. As Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthes writes: “Caesura would be that which, in history, interrupts history and opens the possibility of another history, or even closes all possibility to history.” Phillipe LacouLabarthes, La Fiction du politique (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1987), 71. 79. Paz 1991, 6. 80. Paz 1991, 17. 81. Paz 1991, 26. 82. Paz 1991, 9. 83. Roberto González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 231.

212

On the (New) Baroque

84. Paz 1990, 110–11. 85. Echevarria 1993, 231. 86. Paz 1991, 161. 87. Paz 1991, 161–2. 88. Paz 1991, 151. 89. Paz, quoted in Echevarría 1993, 229 (translation modified). Chapter 5 Baroque and Modernity 90. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 147. 91. De Man 1971, 146–7. 92. De Man 1971, 147. 93. De Man 1971, 150. 94. De Man 1971, 151. 95. De Man 1971, 150. 96. De Man 1971, 158. 97. De Man 1971, 159. 98. De Man 1971, 159. 99. De Man 1971, 160. 100. De Man 1971, 161. 101. De Man 1971, 162. 102. De Man 1971, 165. Chapter 6 The Baroque Angel 103. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La Raison baroque: de Baudelaire à Benjamin (Paris: Galilee, 1984), 58. 104. Buci-Glucksmann 1984, 34. 105. I would say that the tension or conflict between these two versions of modernity continues up to the present day, and one can easily find it underlying Jameson’s recent reassertion of a Marxian conception of modernity precisely against what could be defined as a theological, or messianic version of modernity (in the writings of Derrida, for example). See Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, (London: Verso Books, 2002), 12ff. 106. See “Critique of Violence” in Walter Benjamin, Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), 277–300. 107. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John

Notes

213

Osbome (London: Verso, 1977), 135. 108. A good contemporary example of this logic of “capture” is Avital Ronell’s application of Benjamin’s ghostly rhetoric in The Telephone Book (Blooming­ ton: Indiana University Press, 1991). 109. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 254. 110. Benjamin 1969, 254. 111. Benjamin 1969, 261. 112. Benjamin 1977, 136–7. 113. Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 43. 115. At the same time we might notice that the figure of “a people”, while constituting architectural and rhetorical principles in the modem discourse of culture, also reappears as one of history’s martyrs (as in the repression of a working-class, or proletariat subject of culture, along with the emergence of a popular or mass culture). Chapter 7 A Baroque Thesis 116. W. G. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baille (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 496. See also Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 108–9. 117. We might further establish this emblematic function of Velásquez’s Las Meninas by noting that a reproduction of its image first appeared on the covers of two significant English publications that were, in part, responsible for introducing “post-structuralist thought” to audiences in the United States and the United Kingdom: the Random House edition of The Order of Things (1970), and the cover of Vincent Leitch’s Deconstruction: An Advanced Introduction (1982), a text that was often used in introductory graduate courses in Critical Theory throughout the early 1980s. 118. Calabrese 1992, 7. 119. Genette 1969, 210. 120. Foucault 1970, 43. 121. Foucault 1970, 43. 122. Foucault 1970, 306. 123. Foucault 1970, xv. 124. Severo Sarduy, “Baroque and Neo-Baroque” in Latin America in Its Literature, ed. Cesar Femandez Moreno, (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), 128.

214

On the (New) Baroque

125. Foucault 1970, 16. 126. Foucault 1970, 308. 127. Foucault 1970, 325. Chapter 8 Un récit baroque 128. Genette 1969, 210n. 129. Genette 1969, 221. 130. See also the above discussion of this reference in Chapter 7. 131. Genette 1969, 222. 132. Genette 1969, 221. 133. Genette 1969, 221. 134. Genette 1969, 221–2. 135. Genette 1969, 220n. 136. Genette 1969, 220n. Chapter 9 The Baroque Emblem 137. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 5. 138. See Yury M. Lotman, “The Text within the text”, trans. Jerry Leo and Amy Mandelker, PMLA 109(3) (May 1994), 377–85; also see the article by Amy Mandelker in the same issue for an excellent discussion of Lotman in the context of the Moscow-Tartar School. 139. I have borrowed the term “royal science” from Deleuze and Guattari. See their chapter “On Several Regimes of Signs” in A Thousand Plateaux, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 140. Lotman 1994, 378. 141. Lotman 1994, 380. 142. Lotman 1994, 377. 143. Lotman 1994, 379. 144. Lotman 1994, 377. 145. Lotman 1994, 377. 146. Lotman 1994, 377. 147. Quoted in Amy Mandelker, “Semiotizing the Sphere: Organicist Theory in Lotman, Bakhtin, and Vernadsky”, PMLA: 109(3) (May 1994), 386. 148. Lotman 1994, 379. 149. Lotman 1994, 378. 150. Foucault 1970, 376–7.

Notes

215

151. Lotman 1994, 379. 152. Lotman 1994, 380. 153. Lotman 1994, 381. 154. Lotman 1994, 379. 155. Derrida 1974, 5. 156. Derrida 1974, 15. 157. Lotman 1994, 380. 158. Lotman 1994, 376. 159. Of course, this is a kind of postmodern utopian expression, one that must presuppose that the different texts and interlocutors that make up a cultural sphere are capable of entering into a kind of “free indeterminate accord” from the spontaneity of an inaugural gesture; therefore, one must also ignore the fact that Culture “is not a chaotic collocation of texts but a complex, hierarchical functioning system” (Lotman 1994, 380). 160. Foucault 1970, xi. 161. As the principle of the art of combining dillerent aesthetic media, this mechanism can also be found in many modern examples that find their origin in the baroque emblem, where the poem is organized by a picture (Mallarmé, Cummings) or the elements of description in a novel by an architectural diagram (Perec), a story by a string of DNA in an electron microscope (Calvino). This is particularly true of modern and postmodern literature and cinema, which use this vehicle in a much more generic and experimental manner; for instance, a novel or a story is recounted as a film (Delillo, Duras): or a film is recounted as a dream (Wenders); or the theatre is presented as radio (Beckett). 162. Alexander Gelley, Narrative Crossings: Theory and Pragmatics of Prose Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 40. 161. Foucault 1970, 65. Chapter 10 The Baroque Conspiracy 164. I employ this concept from me work of Deleuze and Guattari. See Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 165. Borges 1999, 4. 166. Lisa Block de Behar, The Passion of an Endless Quotation, trans. William Egginton (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), 2–3. 167. Borges 1962, 44. 168. Borges 1962, 41.

216

On the (New) Baroque

169. Borges 1962, 42. Appropriately, the above passage is a direct quote from my earlier commentary on Borges, “The Baroque Detective”, in The Non­Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (London: Continuum, 2002), 79. See the appendix to this edition. 170. Borges 1999, 510. 171. Borges 1999, 512. 172. Borges 1999, 514. 173. Borges 1999, 515. 174. Borges 1999, 307. 175. Borges 1999, 145. 176. Borges 1999, 144. 177. Borges 1999, 145. 178. Borges 1999, 146. Chapter 11 The Baroque and el neobarroco 179. Echevarría 1993, 218. 180. Echevarría 1993, 218. 181. Sarduy 1975, 74. 182. Echevarría 1993, 228. 183. Severo Sarduy, Cobra (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), 147. 184. Echevarría 1993, 232. 185. Sarduy 1995, 147. 186. Sarduy 1995, 139. 187. Echevarría 1993, 232. 188. Echevarria 1993, 2:16. 189. Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–85, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 529. 190. Roudinesco 1990, 527. 191. Roudinesco 1990, 529. 192. Sáenz 1983, 114. 193. Sáenz 1983, 115. 194. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 223. 195. Echevarría 1977, 224. 196. Echevarría 1977, 224–5.

Notes

217

Chapter 12 Concierto barroco 197. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 123. 198. Heidegger 1986, 128. 199. Pagden 1993, 31. 200. Pagden 1993, 31. 201. Quoted in Pagden 1993, 37. 202. Alejo Carpentier, Concierto Barroco (London: Andre Deutsch, 1991), 102–3. 203. Carpentier 1991, 104. 204. Carpentier 1991, 103. 205. Carpentier 1991, 110. 206. Carpentier 1991, 111. 207. Carpentier 1991, 111. 208. Carpentier 1991, 115. Conclusion 209. Quoted in the Introduction. 210. Warnke 1972, 22. 211. Foucault 1970, 51. 212. Jameson 2002, 101. 213. Sarduy, 1975, 36. 214. See Alain Badiou, Deleue;e: The Clamour of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 215. Warnke 1972, 23. 216. Foucault 1970, 299. 217. Foucault 1970, 336. 218. Foucault 1970, 300. 219. Foucault 1970, 51. 220. I do not include the area of painting and the plastic arts here since this area of postmodern culture has become separated off as an autonomous tradition, in many ways, and would constitute the subject of another study. 221. Roudinesco 1990, 530. 222. Quoted in Roudinesco 1990, 530. The period that followed, generally referred to as the postmodern, is principally marked by a “negative presentation” of the political itself exemplified in the writings from the mid-1980s of Alain Badiou, Maurice Blanchet and Jean-Luc Nancy; both

218

On the (New) Baroque

Blanchot’s La Communauté inavoublement (1984) and Nancy’s reply in La Communauté  désoeuvrée (1990) examined the notion of “literary communism” in the writings of Georges Bataille. One could say, however, that the notion of “politics” invoked by both of these works is not the political as such, which may or may not correspond to this interrogation, but rather the cultural politics of European postmodernism that found its apotheosis earlier in such writing as Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti­Oedipus, and its death knell in the aforementioned works, which announce the loss of the notion of the political that founds modern representations of community and offers, in its place, a fairly lyrical meditation on the fate of the political aspirations of the community “to come” (á-venir). Part of this meditation is influenced by Derrida’s lyrical reflections on finitude; the other part, by Heidegger’s more hymn-like later reflections on poetry (particularly the essay “Language in the Poem”, which appears in the English translation of On the Way to Language, and constitutes, possibly, the most religious expression of European modernism.) This trend in the political concept is also reflected in the negative aesthetics of Badiou (following Mallarmé), and especially the earlier writings of Jean-François Lyotard from the 1970s and early 1980s on the concept of the sublime. 223. Derrida 1974, 4–6. 224. Derrida 1974, 5. CODA 225. Deleuze 1993, 137. 226. Deleuze 1993, 136. 227. In The Monadology, Leibniz describes this a priori principle in terms of music, as a fundamental tone on the basis of which the monads can produce harmonies. For a more in-depth discussion of this principle, see Lambert 2002, 42–69. 228. For another version of this principle of perspective, see Deleuze’s early commentary on Proust in Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans, Richard Howard (London: The Athlone Press, 2000). 229.Michel Serres, Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématique (Paris: PUF, 1968), 244. 230. Deleuze, 1993, 130. 231. Pierre Boulez, Par Volunté et par hazard (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 106–107.

Notes

219

Appendix 232. Deleuze 1993, 67. 233. Deleuze 1993, 67. 234. Deleuze 1993, 67. 235. Deleuze 1994, 69. 236. Borges 1962, 52. 237. Borges 1962, 52. 238. Borges 1962, 58. 239. Borges 1962, 59. 240. Emil Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid (ed), The Borges Reader (New York: EP Dutton, 1981), 142. 241 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehayle (ed), Wade Baskin (trans), (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 69. 242. Saussure, 71. 243. Quoted in Borges 1981, 142. 244. Borges 1981, 143. 245. Borges 1981, 143. 246. Borges 1962, 52. 247. Borges 1962, 43. 248. Borges 1962, 42. 249. Borges 1962, 201. 250. These biographical details are provided by Monegal and Reid in their notes to “The Total Library,” in Borges 1981, 346ff. 251. Borges 1981, 346. 252. Borges 1981, 142. 253. Borges 1981, 72. 254. Borges 1962, 84. 255. Quoted in Deleuze 1993, 152n. 256. Borges 1981, 182–83. 257. Deleuze 1993, 62. 258. Deleuze 1993, 69. 259. Quoted in Deleuze 1993, 152n. 260. Borges 1962, 57. 261. Borges 1962, 57.

Bibliography

Badiou, Alain (1999) Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, trans. Louise Burchill, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Le Baroque Litteraire: Theorie et Practiques, Actes du Colloque, Paris, 12-14th Decembre, 1989 (1990) Foundation Colouste Gulbenkian: Centre Cultural Portugais. Benjamin, Walter (1969) Illuminations, trans., Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken. ———. (1977) The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, London: Verso. ———. (1978) Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York: Schocken. Block de Behar, Lisa (2003) The Passion of an Endless Quotation, trans., William Egginton, Albany: SUNY Press. Blumenburg, Hans (1985) Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Borges, Jorge Luis (1962) Labyrinths, New York: New Directions. ———. (1999) Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, New York and London: Penguin. Pierre Boulez (1975) Par Volunté et par hazard, Paris: Seuil. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine (1984) La Raison baroque: de Baudelaire à Benjamin, Paris: Galilee. ———. (1987) La Folie du voir: de l’esthétique baroque, Paris: Galilee. Calabrese, Omar (1992) Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times, trans. Charles Lambert, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Carpentier, Alejo (1974/1991) Concierto Barroco, Madrid: Siglo/London: André Deutsch. Chiampi, Irlemar (2000) Barroco y modernidad, Mexico City: Fondo de 221 Cultura Ecónomica. Deleuze, Gilles (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

222

On the (New) Baroque

______. (2000) Proust and Signs, trans, Richard Howard. London: The Athlone Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1986a) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (1986b) A Thousand Plateaux, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques (1974) Writing and Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1986) The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1993) Aporias, trans. Tom Dutoit, Stanford: Stanford University Press. de Man, Paul (1971) Blindness and Insight, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. d’Ors, Eugenio (1935) Du Baroque, Paris: Gallimard. ______. (2000) Lo barroco, Madrid: Editorial Tecnos. Echevarría, Roberto Gonzalez (1977) Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. (1993) Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Egginton, William (2003) How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ______. (2007) “The Corporeal Image and the New World Baroque,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106:1, 107-127. Focillon, Henri (1943) La Vie des Formes, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Random House. Gelley, Alexander (1986) Narrative Crossings: Theory and Pragmatics of Prose Fiction, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Genette, Gérard (1969) Figures II, Paris: Éditions Seuil. ———. (1979) Introduction à l’architexte, Paris: Editions Seuil. ———. (1992) Palimpsestes, Paris: Editions Seuil.

Bibliography

223

Godzich, Wlad (1995) The Culture of Literacy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harbison, Robert (2000) Reflections on Baroque, London: Reaktion Books. Hauser, Arnold (1985) Mannerism: The Crisis of Renaissance and the Origins of Modern Art, London: Belknap Press. Hegel, W. G. (1967) The Phenomenology of Mind, trans., J. B. Baille, New York: Harper & Row. Heidegger, Martin (1979) Poetry, Language and Thought, New York: Harper & Row. ———. (1986) Introduction to Metaphysics, trans., Ralph Manheim, New Haven: Yale University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1991) Post-modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. (2002) A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, London: Verso. Kaup, Monika (2005) “Becoming-Baroque: Folding European Forms into the New World Baroque with Alejo Carpentier,” CR: The New Centennial Review 5.2, 107-149 Kant, Immanuel (2000) The Critique of Judgement, ed. Paul Guyer (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kojève, Alexandre (1947) Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, Paris: Gallimard. Lacou-Labarthes, Philippe (1987) La Fiction du politique, Paris: Christian Bourgeois. Lambert, Gregg (2002) The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, London: Continuum, 2002. Lotman, Yury M. (1994) ‘The Text within the text’, trans. Jerry Leo and Amy Mandelker, PMLA: 109(3) (May), 377-85. Mandelker, Amy (1994) ‘Semiotizing the Sphere: Organicist Theory in Lorman, Bakhtin, and Vernadsky’, PMLA: 109(3) (May), 385-96. Maravall, José Antonio (1986) Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans, Terry Cochran, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

224

On the (New) Baroque

Meeks, Wayne (1995) The Origin of Christian Morality, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Monegal, Emir Rodriguez and Reid, Alastair (eds) (1981) Borges: A Reader, New York: Dutton. Pagden, Anthony (1993) European Encounters with the New World, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Paz, Octavio (1990) Conjunctions and Disjunctions, New York: Arcade Publishing. ———. (1991) Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant­-Garde, trans. Rachel Phillips, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ronell, Avital (1991) The Telephone Book, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Roudinesco, Elizabeth (1990) Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-85, trans, Jeffrey Mehlman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sáenz, Pilar (1983) The Life and Works of Eugenio d’Ors, IBP. Sarduy, Severo (1974) Barroco, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. ———. (1975) Barroco, Paris: Gallimard. ———. (1980) ‘Baroque and Neo-Baroque’, in Latin America in Its Literature, ed. Cesar Fernandez Moreno, New York: Holmes & Meier. ———. (1995) Cobra, Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Segel, Harold B. (1974) The Baroque Poem: A Comparative Study, New York: E. P. Dutton. Michel Serres (1968) Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématique. Paris: PUF. Starobinski, Jean (1964) The Invention of Liberty: 1700-1789, Geneva: Skira. Warnke, Frank (1972) Versions of the Baroque, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wellek, René (1963) Concepts of Criticism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Williams, Raymond (1997) The Politics of Modernism, London: Verso.

Bibliography

225

Wölfllin, Heinrich (1966) Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Index

Abensour, Migel, 67 “acceleration of history” (Paz), 47, 49, 64, 100 Adams, A., History of French Literature, 98 adornment, see also ornamentation, 35, 38 Almeida, Francisco de, 12 A1thusser, Louis, 10, 139, 162 anamorphosis (incompletion or distortion), xviii, 24, 181 anxiety, 5, 128, 134, 161–163, 203–205 architecture, xvi, xxxi, xl, 3–7, 14–15, 40, 65, 102, 121, 180, 189, 198, 202 Aries, Philippe, 75 Ariosto, Ludovico: Orlando Furioso, 10 Aristides, 27 Aristotelian form, 8, 10, 19, 22 Armstrong, Louis, 154–157, 168 Artaud, Antonin, 139–140 “artificialization”, 7, 141 assujetissement (Foucault), 15 Augustine, Saint, 27 Badiou, Alain, 167, 218 Balboa, Vasco da, 12 Baroque and El barroco, x, 133, 143, 181; and anti–baroque, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 63, 73; concept as “fiction”, xl, 6; definitions of, 2–6; as a period, xx, xxvii, xxx, 2–6, 18–19, 32–34, 41–42, 83–84,

141; and colonialism, 12, 27; and Mannerism, 10; and modernity, xxxi, 21, 45–80; and modern literature, 112–113, 183; and Neo–baroque, viii–xxx, 3, 49, 51. 55, 56, 63, 66, 81, 114, 159, 180– 181, 207; and postmodernism, 81– 120, 113, 117, 169; “pure concept” (Deleuze), xvii–xix, xxx, 15; as “Third Style” (Spengler), 143; “baroque design”, 98, 100, 131; “baroque effect”, xiii–xvii, 8–10, 183; “baroque eon” (d’Ors), 32– 34, 41–42; “baroque mechanism” (Maravall), 15–30; High Baroque”, xxiv, 6, 813, 24, 38 Barthes, Roland, xxvii Bataille, Georges, 139–140, 218 Baudelaire, Charles, 39,48,60, 70, 83, 100, 168 Les Fleurs du mal, 39 Beckett, Samuel, 50 Bembo, Pietro, 14 Benjamin, Walter, vi, xxxiii, 33–41, 67–80; “Critique of Violence”, 69 Bergson, Henri, 50 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 3, 7, 12, 39 St Theresa, 39 “Big Bang” (Sarduy), 11, 133–143, 170, 181, 189 Bishop, Elizabeth, 53 Blanchot, Maurice, 50, 67, 73, 218 Block de Behar, Lisa, 124 Blumenburg, Hans, 24 Boileau, Nicolas, xvi, 98–101 Booth, John Wilkes, 131

228

On the (New) Baroque

Borges, Jorge–Luis “Death and the Compass”, 122, 129, 196–200 “Garden of Forking Paths”, 122, 129, 137, 196–197 “Library of Babel, The”, viii, 39, 54, 128, 180, 203 “Shakespeare”s Memory”, 126– 132 “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, The”, 132 Universal History of Iniquity, 121, 123 Borromini, Francesco, 3, 7 Breton, Andre, xxxiv Buci–Glucksmann, Christine, viii, ix, xxxi, 67–68, 169, 207, 212 Calabrese, Omar, viii–ix, 31, 83 Neo– Baroque: A Sign of the Times, viii Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 7, 42, 128, 131, 135 La vida es sueño, 128 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 3, 8–11, 23; The Conversion of St Paul, 8–11, 163 Carpentier, Alejo, ix–x, xv, xix, xl, 12, 53, 133, 143–144, 145–157, 160, 162, 168, 180–182 Concierto Barroco, 12, 150–157, 180–182 Explosion in the Cathedral, 133 Carroll, Lewis, 139 Category of Eternity (Kant), 34 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 125–127, 193–194 Chesterton, G. K. , 131 Chiaroscuro, xiii, 3–4 Christianity, 9 Classicism, xv, xx, xxiii, 4, 48, 53, 164, 173; and romanticism, 124, 143

Cochran, Terry, 17 Commedia, 8 Conversion, 8–16, 26–17, 33, 69, 169 Counter-Reformation, 3, 10, 15, 169 Croce, Benedetto: Storia della eta barocca in Italia, xxiii Cuba, 133, 137, 207 Culture “advanced” and “backward”, 110; “artificialization of ”, 4,141; consumer, 94–95; “of death”, 74– 78; “feminization of ”, xxxvi, 36, 81; as a living organism, 32, 106; popular, xxxvi , 22, 33, 74, 143 Dante Alighieri, 140 D’Aubigne, Theodore-Agrippa, 6 De Man, Paul, 56–66 Deconstruction, 82, 169, 190, 195 decoration, excessive, 36; see also ornamentation Deleuze, Gilles, ix, xi, xv, xvii–xx, xxx–xxxvi, 14–15, 125, 140, 142, 145, 157, 164, 174–182, 183–204, 218; Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque, xvii–xx–xxxvi, 14–15, 174–182 Delillo, Don, 215 Derrida, Jacques, 13, 67, 75, 102– 118, 171, 195 Descartes, Rene, 109–118, 161–165 “dispersion” (Foucault), 39, 85–93, 143 Donne, John, 123 D’Ors, Eugenio, ix, xv, xxiv, xxxii–xxxiii, 6, 31–42, 124, 133, 141–142, 162, 173 Duras, Marguerite, 215 Echevarria, Roberto Gonzalez, viii, xxii, 55, 133–142, 144, 207 Egginton, William, xxi, 18

Index Enthusiasm (Kant), xxxvi, 46–47; Baroque (furor), xxxix, 11, 19, 47; And Colonialism, 151–152; Modernist, 62, 66, 75 episteme (Foucault), xvii, 29, 82–93 estrangement, xxxvii, 26–28, 145–152 European man, 145–152 Fleming, Paul, 6 Focillon, Henri: La Vie des formes, ix, 31–32 Foucault, Michel, xx, xxv–xxviii, 15, 29, 41, 81–93, 101–102, 109, 112, 160–161, 165–167, 170, 195; The Order of Things, xxv–xxviii, 81–93, 161, 195 Freud, Sigmund, xxxiv, 23, 32, 42, 67, 82, 106, 140, 166, 199 Furor, xxxix, 17–29 Genette , Gerard, ix, xiv–xvi, xxvii, xxxiv–xxxvi, xl, 39,41, 48,57, 77, 82–83, 90, 96–103, 133, 160–161, 165 Giusti, Girolamo: Montezuma, 150 Gongora y Argote, Luis de, xxxiii, 6–7 Goya, Francisco de, 141–142 Gracian, Baltasar, ix, 45, 123 Hauser, Arnold, 28–29 Hegel, W. G., Phenomenology of Mind, 23, 71, 81, 110, 122, 146, 205 Heidegger, Martin, xii, 20, 57, 84, 87, 145–146; Introduction to Metaphysics, 145–146; On the Way to Language, 218; „Origin of the Work of Art“, 20; Sein und Zeit, 87

229

Herder, Johann Gottfried, 33, 153, 163 Heterotopia (Foucault), xxvii–xxviii, xxiii “hidden God” (Blumenburg), 24 History “acceleration of …” (Paz), 47–49, 64, 100; “end of …” (post–history), 40–41; as conspiracy or “plot” (Borges), 129–132; see also messianism Hjemslev, Louis, 104 Hocke, Gustav, Die Welt als Labyrinth, 6 Hogarth, William: Analysis of Beauty, 36–38 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 83, 86, 211 Humboldt, Alexander von, Cosmos, 146–149 Huygens, Christian, 6 Ideology, xii, 10, 19, 22–24, 29, 67, 87, 100, 112, 139, 164, 169, 185, 189 India, 12, 133, 137–138, 143, 152 intermezzi / intermedia, 8, 115 inter–textuality, xxvii, 8, 41, 51, 57, 44, 87–90, 97, 111, 134, 141, 144, 164 Isomorphism, 104, 114–117 Italy, xxiii, 5, 10, 181 Jameson, Fredric, xii, xxiv, 36, 163, 212; Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late–Capitalism, xxiv; A Singular Modernity, 163, 212 jouissance féminine (Lacan), 5, 10, 169 Joyce, James: Ulysses, 57 Juana Ines de la Cruz, Sor: El Sueño, 54

230

On the (New) Baroque

Judgment Day, 74, 154 Julius Caesar, 129–130 Kafka, Franz, 48, 60, 70–71, 142, 194–205 Kant, Immanuel, 32–34, 36, 50, 65, 101, 113–116, 142, 173, 185; Critique of Judgment, 32, 113–116, 142 Kepler, Johannes, 135, 164 Kirkpatrick, Fergus, 129–130 Kojève, Alexandre, 81 Kristeva, Julia, 106,114, 170 Lacan, Jacques, 5, 135, 138–140, 169 LANGUAGE poetry, 168 Leibniz, G. W., xii–xix, xxx, 15, 49, 125, 174–183, 185–202, 218 Lévi–Strauss, Claude, 115 Levinas, Emmanuel, 122 Lezama Lima, José, x, xv, xxxii, xl, 33, 52–53, 133–134, 168 Lincoln, Abraham, 130 Livet, M. C. L., 98 Locke, John, 116 Lotman, Yuri, ix, 104–120 “The Text within the text”, 104 Lowell, Robert, 53 Lowy, Michael, 67 Luther, Martin, 27 Lyotard, Jean Francois, xxix, 98, 164, 169, 218; Libidinal Economy, 218 Magellan, Ferdinand, 12 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 42, 140, 166, 168, 187, 215 Mannerism, xxiv, xxxi, 6–7, 13–15 as spatial term, 13–15; derivation of the term, 7; in literature, 6; Italian Mannerism, 14

Maravall, José–Antonio, xi, xvi, xxi, xxxvii, xxxix, 9, 16, 17–30 ; La cultura del Barroco, 17 Marino, Giarnbattista, xxxiii, 6–7 Marti, José, xl, 33, 134 Marvell, Andrew, 6 Marxism, 105 Materialism, 52, 68 Materialist, 46, 68, 102, 131 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 169 Messianism, 67 meta-language, 110 Mexico, 138, 150–151, 152, 154, 162, 176, 180, 207 Michelangelo: Victory, 12, 173 Minimalism, 34 mise-en-abîme, xvi, xviii, xxvii, 8, 114, 129, 166 Modernism, modernist, 35, 45, 53, 60–61, 74–78, 91, 161, 168–169, 171; late-modernism, xiii, 73; and history, 60–61; and postmodernism, ix, xxxv, xxxix, 4, 36, 73, 88, 91, 112–116, 190 monad (Leibniz), xii, 15, 174–183 mono–textuality, 105 Myth, xxvi, xxxiii, 26, 28, 29, 39, 67, 74, 89, 113, 131, 147, 148, 154 Of cyclical time, 48, 137 Of genius, 153 Of Hölderlin’s madness, 86 Of journey, 147, 149 Of perpetual progress (modernity), xxxii, 46 Of state violence, 70 Of universal prostitution, 68 Of “Womankind” (Hegel), 81 And future, 48 And “mystery”, 199 And youth, 60–61, 81

Index Nature, return to, 29 New World, 12, 27, 147, 149, 150–151, 153, 181; “New World Baroque”, ix, xv, xxiv, 153, 180–181 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 42, 51, 57–58, 60, 62, 85, 140, 166, 187, 188 Nunc Stans, 72 Odyssey, 57, 147 “Orientalism”, xxvi, 52, 138 ornamentation, xiii–xiv, 3, 7, 11–14, 35–36 Oulipo, 168 Pagden, Anthony, 209 pan–syncretism, 53 panoramagram, 112 parody, xxvi, xxviii, xxxii, 88–89, 118, 121, 123–124, 134, 141 Pascal, Blaise, 99 Paul, St, 26; The Conversion of St. Paul (Caravaggio), 8–9, 16, 23–24, 149, 163 Paz, Octavio, ix–x, xx, 45–54, 137– 139, 160, 169 Pellegrino, Camillo, 14 Perrault, “The Century of Louis the Great,” x Phantasm, xxxix, 33, 57, 70–71, 82, 139 Pierce, Charles, 104 Pinciano, López, 18, 28–29 Plato, 52, 72, 115, 149, 185 Plutonism, 133 Poe, Edgar Allan, 129–131 poetry and language, 43, 53–54, 70, 78, 87, 137, 168, 186 Pope, Alexander: Odyssey, 123 post–structuralism, 82 postmodernism, ix, xxxv, xxxix, 4, 36, 65, 73, 88, 91, 112, 113,

231

115, 161, 190, 218; and baroque, ix–xxxv; and modernism, 65 Pound, Ezra, 53–54 Propp, Vladimir, 105 Protestantism, 52 Proust, Marcel, 84, 218 Psychoanalysis, 32, 87, 109, 135, 140, 142, 169 “querelle des Anciens et des Moderne”, x Quevedo, Francisco de, 6 Racism, 57, 169 Rembrandt, 3, 31, 141–142 resortes (Maravall), xvi, 17–25 Robinson Crusoe, xxxiii Rococo, xxiv, xxxi, xl, 13, 35–38 Romanticism, xx, 53, 55, 124, 137, 143 Ronell, Avital, 213 Roudinesco, Elizabeth, 140, 169 Rousseau: Émile, xxxiii Roux, Wilhelm, The Struggle of the Parts in an Organism, 32 Rubens, Peter Paul, 3, 31 “rupture” (Foucault), 68, 82–85, 92, 96, 99 Rushdie, Salman, 50 Sade, Marquis de, 140 Sáenz, Pilar, 141 Saint Amant, Marc-Antoine de, Moyse sauvé , xvi, xviii, 84, 96–101 Sarduy, Severo, xv, xxiii, xxix, xl, 11, 41, 52, 82, 90, 133–142, 169–170, 181 “Baroque and Neo–Baroque”, 89, 92, 97 Cobra, 137–139 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 42, 104– 105, 115, 190–191, 205

232

On the (New) Baroque

“schemata” (Kant), 37, 116–117 Segel, Harold, The Baroque Poem, ix, xxii, xxiii, 3–16 Semiotics, 108, 113 sexual identity (in Cobra), 138 Shakespeare, William, 89 “Shakespeare’s Memory” (Borges), 126–132 As You Like It, 128 Shaw, George Bernard, xxix, 123 “simulacrum” (Deleuze), xxxix, 125, 193 Solis: Historia de la conquista de México, 150–151 Sollers, Philippe, 140 Spain, xxxvii, 5, 53, 181 Spengler, Oswald, 110, 143 Spinoza, Baruch, xxxiii, 127, 202 Sponde, Jean de, 6 Starobinski, Jean, ix, 34–38 “Stranger” (Heidegger), 145–147 Structuralism, 82, 104 Style, xiii, xxi, xxiv, xxiv, xxx, xxxii, xxxiv, 3–14, 83, 110, 168; “Academic”, xxxii; “Baroque style”, vi, xiii, xviii, xxvi, xxxv, 3–14, 32, 98, 165, 173; “BaroqueMannerist opposition”, xxiv, 3–14, 141; Rococo, xxiv, 3–14; “historical style” (Wölfflin), 32–34; “Third style” (Spengler), 143–144; and parody, xxvi, 118, 123–124 sublime, 23–24, 29, 102; Kantian, 24; and Christianity, 25–26; as a simulacrum of death, 24–28 Surrealism, 53, 140, 168 Suspense, 11, 17–18, 23, 25, 29, 51, 67–73 symbolic function, 13, 36–38, 116 “system of judgment” (Kant), 32

Tasso, Bernardo: L’ Amadigi, 10 Tasso, Torquato: Gerusalemme liberata, 14 Taste, xxiv, xxviii, 3, 4, 10–11, 14, 23, 32–33, 65, 81, 98, 142–143, 164, 170, 173, 180, 196, 204 Technique, xvi, xviii, xix–xx, xxvi– xxviii, xxxii, 4, 7–16, 17–28, 50, 97, 112–114, 121–123, 141–142, 205 Technology, 57, 70–71, 133 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (Gaia), 33 Tel Quel, x, 139–140, 168–170 Text, 54, 58, 61, 64, 68, 88–103, 126, 133, 190, 194; “Ideology of the text” (Jameson), xii; and the body, xxxix, 135; and dreamwork, 41–42; and palimpsest, 57; and “Third Style”, 144; and Western Metaphysics, 195; “text within the text”, xxvii, 88–103, 104–118; “Text–code” (Lotman) , 110 theater, xviii, 69, 74, 129, 149, 152– 153, 200 “Third Style” (Spengler), 143–144 translation, 62, 95, 116, 125, 134, 148, 193 Trauerspiel, 69, 74, 76 Unconscious, xxxviii, 9–10, 26, 28, 56, 60, 94, 100, 106, 109, 112, 117, 122, 136, 137, 139, 164, 166, 185, 198, 202 Valéry, Paul, Monsieur Teste, xxxi Vega, Lope de, 18, 28 Velarde, López, 55 Velásquez, Diego: Las Meninas, xvi, 3, 7, 81–94, 114 Vermeer, Jan, 3

Index Vernadsky, Vladimir, 33 vertigo/dizziness, xxv, 5, 38, 48–49, 149 vitalism, xxiv, xxxiii, 56–62 Vivaldi, Antonio, Montezuma, 150–154 Voltaire, 110 Vonde1, Joost van den, 6 vox populi, 77 Warnke, Frank: Versions of the Baroque, ix, 3–6, 163–164 Wellek, René, ix, xxiii Wilkins, John (Borges), xxiv, 189, 192 Wölffllin, Heinrich, 5, 24, 31–33, 173; Fundamental Concepts in the History of Art, 31–32; Renaissance und Barock, 4–5, 33 Wolfson, Louis, 139 writing (L’Ecriture), 139–140, 167–169

233