Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture

The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture

This page intentionally left blank

The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture

Gregg Lambert

continuum

Continuum The Tower Building 11 York Road London, SE1 7NX

80 Maiden Lane Suite 704 New York, NY 10038

www. contmuumbooks. com Gregg Lambert 2004 Reprinted 2006 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. The illustrations on pages 16 and 80 are reproduced by permission of the copyright holders as follows: The Conversion of St Paul © Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome/Bridgeman Art Library Las Meninas Prado, Madrid/Girandon/Bridgeman Art Library British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-8264-6648-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lambert, Gregg, 1961The return of Baroque in modern culture/Gregg Lambert. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8264-6648-6 1. Modernism (Literature) 2. Modernism (Aesthetics) 3. Postmodernism. 4. Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. I. Tide. PN56. M54L36 2004 809'. 911-dc22

Typeset by BookEns Ltd, Royston, Herts. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction: Why the baroque?

1

Part One: Renovations of the Seventeenth-Century Baroque 1 Historical antecedents in baroque criticism and theory 2 The baroque mechanism: Jose Antonio Maravall 3 The baroque eon: Eugenio d'Ors

17 28 39

Part Two: Baroque and Modern 4 Baroque and anti-baroque: Octavio Paz 5 The rhetoric of baroque temporality: Paul de Man 6 The baroque angel of history: Walter Benjamin

51 59 67

Part Three: Baroque and Postmodern 7 The baroque thesis: Michel Foucault 8 Un recit baroque: Gerard Genette 9 From baroque emblem to postmodern panoramagram: Yury Lotman and Jacques Derrida

79 91 97

Part Four: Baroque and Postcolonial 1 0 The baroque conspiracy: Jorge-Luis Borges 1 1 Literature, taxonomy and "The New World': Severo Sarduy 12 The baroque return: Alejo Carpentier's Concierto Barroco

111 120 130

Conclusion: One or many baroques?

139

Notes

150

Bibliography

159

Index

162

Acknowledgments

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 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 this 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 Gonzalez Echevarria, 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, Tristan Palmer and Gabriele Schwab - all of whom contributed their generous support and enthusiasm at different stages of this project. Syracuse, New York, 8 January 2004

For D.

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

Introduction: Why the baroque?

Baroque, Barroco. pearl.

1. A jeweller's term: an irregular shaped, or flawed,

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 barroco 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 does not equal A. '1 (This is also the primary source that Borges cites in the 1954 preface to Universal History of Iniquity. ) 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 eta barocca in Italia (1929) - the term barroco probably reaches the rest of the world from a Portuguese jeweller's term, perrola barroca, which refers to a flawed and imperfect pearl.2 As Severo Sarduy later wrote, '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.3 This study is no exception. 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 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 of Baroque and Mannerism - as in, which came first, or which could be understood in reaction to the other - dissipates in favour of seeing them as

2

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

expressions of two dominant and opposing styles in artistic expression that run from antiquity through modernity.4 (Although, the idea of the baroque as a universal constant in opposition to classical forms could be said to be the late invention of a little-known Spanish art historian, Eugenio d'Ors, whom I will take up later on. ) It is this last observation that is crucial for this study, particularly since most of the critics I employ are drawn from this period, or immediately precede it. However, it is the view of two fundamentally opposing currents of cultural form - one emphasizing unity, the other multiplicity and 'vitalism' - that sets the stage for understanding the contemporary opposition between the modern and the postmodern according to a similar logic and, therefore, in a certain sense as the 'return' of this earlier Baroque-Mannerist opposition. Such a 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 turn to read Jameson's major opposition proposed in his study Post-modernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism (1991) according to the terms of opposition earlier developed in the arguments concerning Baroque and Mannerism, 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 Mannerist styles.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 be a 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, mannerist, high baroque, precocious or metaphysical, neo-baroque and 'colonial 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', concerning 'a certain Chinese encyclopaedia' 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

This infamous table of representation appears again in the preface of Foucault's The Order of Things, where Foucault speaks of the absurdity, humour and dizziness that occured when he first encountered 'the exotic charm of another system of thought'.7 As Foucault recounts in the passage that immediately follows, however, this feeling of dizziness and pleasant vertigo is soon followed by a visible torpor, and this laughter is sobered by

INTRODUCTION

3

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 encyclopaedia to such a degree that the knowledge derived from this other arrangement of 'words and things' (les mots et les choses), in fact, might simply be organized by a different fabula. s 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 factor 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

Taking up the question of representation that is implied in Foucault's reaction to this passage, we might notice that the form of Borges' encyclopaedia entry resembles so closely a classical table of knowledge common to Western encyclopaedic knowledge, that its repetition in Borges' tale might be categorized as a distinctly baroque style of parody. The Borgesean encyclopaedia inserts the empty surface of a mirror between the form of knowledge and its contents, a mirror that reflects the 'no-place' 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 Encyclopaedia' ('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 encyclopaedia 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 parody of the subject of European knowledge; that is, it transplants the empty frame of this knowledge outside the confines of die 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 19. 54 preface to his Universal History of Iniquity, Borges first identifies this technique by the concept of 'baroque'. T would define the

4

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

baroque, ' he writes, 'as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. '10 According to a Kantian understanding, if knowledge is derived from the representation of concepts with the subject, concepts which are ordered by the categories of reason, then we might ask what occurs when these categories are taken up by the literary process? When, instead of being ordered by the principles that submit cases of experience to concepts, the representation of knowledge is suddenly transformed by literary operations such as citation, pastiche, allusion, parody and irony? Of course, the rhetorical modes and genres already presuppose the possibility of this kind of transformation; however, the mode of '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 design', which is often associated with the figural device of the mise-en-abime ('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 signalling a decline of the literary, the return of the 'baroque design' 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 'inter-textuality', and narratologist Gerard Genette as the function of the 'palimpsest'. 11 Foucault, in effect, stressed this epistemological transformation more than any other 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 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, and not only syntax with which we

INTRODUCTION

5

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 offer us a partial explanation as to why the concept of the baroque has historically been the perfect candidate for such an obtuse discussion? (Although this is a question that, unlike in North America or on the continent, that 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 this process of cultural parody or pastiche of European forms of knowledge and culture. ) 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 les querelles des anciens et les modernes. Of course, 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^"

For this reason, the concept has come to be suspected by many as an elaborate hoax, pure artifice, or as a historical and cultural fiction. However, 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 its perpetuation as a topic of discussion and debate. In fact, 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 discursive 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 baroque works. If this were true, mere would be very little difference between the work of baroque criticism and the form of the novel, or a story that begins routinely with the phrase 'Once upon a time For all these reasons, this treatise on the subject of the baroque - the

6

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

latest instalment 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 labour 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. ) Therefore, a discussion of the baroque will not stop any wars (much less cause them), will not feed any peoples (much less starve them or burn their crops); it will not stay the hand of the corporate boss from signing the next deal for cheap labour, nor the governor from signing the next order of execution. The principle underlying this other type of discussion 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. 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 as a 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, in other words, 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 baroque could be classified as belonging to neontology, the science concerning non-existent entities. In a very humorous move, Deleuze performs a phenomenological epoke of the baroque (that is, he reduces or brackets its meaning with regard to the question of its existence), so that the question of its existence can no longer be simply reduced to 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

INTRODUCTION

7

ground of the argument concerning the existence of the 'baroque as such', 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 the 'baroque does not exist' or 'it has never existed', which would only amount to simple negation, and even worse, an error 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 to render the Baroque non-existent; one only has to stop proposing its concept. (My emphasis)L)

In terms that are essentially descriptive 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 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, 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, precocite, Gongorism, 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 Valery's Monsieur Teste). I would argue that such a history would surpass even the best rendering of

8

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

Borges' apocryphal constructions of Western knowledge, and the biographies of these scholars' lives could be understood as characters of discourse (in the sense 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'. The mirror that 'reflects' this other reason is neither secret or 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 literary critic, Eugenio d'Ors, to whom I will refer to below and who could be called the inventor of the 'modern baroque'. Although many critics have 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 baroque rhetoric: a pure fiction. 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, love of categorization and the example and, finally, 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 not provide the logic of a history or of reason in perpetual progress, but rather the 'logic of culture' (or what he calls a 'Morphology of Culture') 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 Gongora, Marino, Spinoza and others. )

INTRODUCTION

9

These exceptions produce a counter-version to a history that becomes, rhetorically, much more monolithic and unified than it actually was. (And if the present moment appears confused and 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 even today continues to be the dominant myth that structures 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 for 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 below). Consequently, d'Ors, 'baroque eon' finds its logic echoed by other modern 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 history - unofficial, censored, repressed or 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 Emile, 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 vitalism associated with the excessive nature of the modernist impulse, one which bears the abstract figure of the primitive as its most 'sublime expression'. However, this baroque primitive will not resemble the 'real primitive', but rather the partly mythic and apocalyptic figure that belongs to the modernist narrative of the European emancipation from the straitjacket of its own history and the arrival of a new principle of culture allied with postEuropean revolutionary' movements and the 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 baroque, barroco and neo-barroco. 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 Gerard 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'. 1*

10

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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. What Genette here refers to as 'typically baroque' already prefigures the generic quality that the epochal, or historically determined, 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 concept. What is 'typical' or 'exemplary' is the baroque expression (earlier 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? Of course, there is no public, no people, to speak of; however, there is the pure category of an 'Open' (Offendlichkeit, as Kant called the basis of a publicity) which forms the basis, not of any real public, but of a popular rhetoric. 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 in the field of history. Behind the argument of Genette, consequently, there is a rhetorical appeal to a rather 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 regime'). 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 'signs'. What is important for us to remark here is that this logic of cultural forms (or morphogenesis), which has determined the fundamental gesture

INTRODUCTION

11

of the postmodern cultural work, becomes a frequent topic and even an 'allegory of reading' (de Man) within modern critical and theoretical debates that take up the baroque as a recurrent 'sign of history'. This 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 contemporary7 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' (the French revolution is 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 ol 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 modern sensibility, moreover, an aesthetic mode of presentation has a better chance of producing, from a range of empirical phenomena, durations and events than other modes of presentation (such as ethical, descriptive, rational or deductive). According to Spanish historian Jose-Antonio Maravall, whom I will discuss below in Chapter 2, 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 Part of this development was the result of the progression of Christian moral and

12

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

biographical historical 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, 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 below in the discussion of Maravall's concept of the baroque sublime (furor). 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 centres 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. On the one hand, 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. (We should recall that much of this dislocation was the result of the Thirty Year War, which raged through the European continent between the years 1618 and 1648. ) On the other hand, such an expressive vehicle could also serve as a powerful 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; and for instituting a kind of collective forgetting which would both precede and accompany the intense re-socialization that this period of early industrialization and nationalization might have demanded. '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 culture of the baroque can be understood as the production of a form of anonymity, accompanied by the privilege accorded to the consciousness of the stranger, and which corresponded to the new social and economic relationships that now belong to the life of the city, relationships which are prerequisite to the more abstract, corporate entities of a mass, a general populace, nation or 'people'. Consequently, from its inception in the seventeenth-century Baroque, the concept of popular and national culture evolving 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

INTRODUCTION

13

work. Within the more primitive and didactic formation of the 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 which prepares for a distinctly modern 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 public, the crowd, the consumer) in the generation of a historical or political event is thus first situated on the level 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. 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; whereby, the affective or convulsive body of the hysteric would be evoked to 'simulate' the agitated movements of the crowd, or where the 'body of the text', charged with the affective play, and the poetic figures that derive from the status of a language 'unbounded' (following the Freudian hypothesis of the primary processes) from the restrictions of meaning and signification, would in turn simulate a form of publicity in analogy with an 'openness' (Offendlichkeit) that would be instituted by a new concept of community (sensus communis). II there is the presence of a '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 constitutionally links the 'body' of the text to bodies of the spectator, to a 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. The meaning of phantasm is conceptually and etymologically linked to the classical sense of simulacrum referring to the process of simulation, to the production of effects by simulating, or through 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 critic-philosopher or writer could think that by tickling the language of the text (which, itself, simulates the appearance of the female body animated by attributes of eroticism), he could produce the distant 'effects' of change (i. e. convulsion, laughter, revolution) within the bodies of the crowd, could stimulate a movement in the body politic and effect a change in the meaning of history. Of course,

14

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

this is only possible if the specific context that determines the position of the writer's own discourse remains abstract, paralleling the allegory of the baroque itself as being without 'context', 'unbounded', 'OPEN' (a pure and indeterminate 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 genre that designates it as an object of culture, bear more than a passing resemblance to more recent definitions of postmodernism. Since the first history appears within the pedagogical framework of an academic or classical discourse, the history of the modern baroque appears in scattered modes, more overtly rhetorical, polemic, lyrical; and it usually bears, as we have seen, a symbolic appeal to an open publicity, or open forum of history, that is inscribed in its rhetoric and forms the basis of its politics as a lyrical invocation of the community to come. For our purposes, these developments around the name of the baroque indicate problems concerning the establishment of its historical referent, which now may be comparable to an extravagant fiction, or artifice; it is precisely this effect of an artificialization of the natural, this fabulous or deceptive construction, that typifies most of the constructions of the baroque sensibility. The very loss or displacement of a historical referent for the name of the baroque forms the condition of its more generic usage, as well as for its geographical displacement from Europe to America (in Borges, Carpentier, Sarduy, Lezama and Jose Marti). Without any clear and recognizable form or traditional or natural signification, the principles that underlie the notion of a 'modern baroque' must now be constructed inductively, by means of the example - following Genette's emphasis upon the status of 'exemplarity' and rhetorically, by means of the argument or polemic, the apology or manifesto. In the above introduction to what could be called - not without a certain humour, of course - 'the history of a modern baroque in Literature and Philosophy', I have briefly summarized the various descriptions offered by several key authorities that have established its modern sense. However, this method will not allow us to judge whether the descriptions of modern aesthetic and cultural phenomena with the baroque are accurate or true to its historical European antecedent. It is not a question of whether the modern notion is a true and correct copy of its predecessor, but rather why similar versions of the European baroque and rococo in both seventeenthcentury architecture and painting, and in French and Spanish verse, have been employed by many critics and writers to define the aesthetic sensibility and historical force behind the emergence of postmodernism. This is one of the questions that this study will attempt to answer.

PART ONE

Renovations of the Seventeenth-Century Baroque

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) The Conversion of St Paul, 1601 (oil on canvas). Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, Italy/Bridgeman Art Library.

1

Historical antecedents in baroque criticism and theory

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, sometime between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation. Many of the theorists and critics I will reler 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: • 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, Velasquez, 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 colour; a dramatic opposition between light and dark (chiaroscuro); a heightened sense of emotional drama. • The baroque style is often regarded as pathological, the result of an obsessive attraction to forms of monstrosity and to a vulgar taste. 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

18

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

resulted in its frequent comparison to the emergence of modern popular cinema.23 • 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 Wolfflin, in his Renaissance und Barock (1888). Ultimately, his judgement 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 Wolfflin's earlier study of the baroque, one which 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 judgement receives in cultural criticism that makes use of the baroque. Concerning the attributes that Wolfflin identifies with the baroque style, in his reflections on Roman architecture, he notes the following dominant traits: • the 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 • the multiplication of surfaces, contours, and folds - both to allude to a greater portion of space than what is visible, and to produce movement (often dizziness in the witness or spectator) by the suppression of right angles, or 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 cause of the spectator's anxiety before the baroque facade, a 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 extreme enjoyment, 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

HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS IN BAROQUE CRITICISM AND THEORY 19

immediately linked to the determination of movement, as Wolfflin describes it in the following statement: The Baroque never offers us perfection or fulfilment, or the static calm of 'being', only the unrest of change and the tension of transience.2-5

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, the theoretical centrality of fmitude, and of the feminine eroticism that belong to the different modern and postmodern theories of the sublime. For now, however, I wish to 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, preciosite, marinismo, conceptismo, culturanismo. We can immediately see that the weakness of this type of categorization is the tendency towards reducing disparate aesthetic phenomena to a monumental style in European cultural history, 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 disappeared altogether. (It will only reappear later from the continent of South America, under the name of Gongorism, and in the context of what is now commonly called the 'colonial baroque'. ) In recent literary scholarship (post-1950), the concept of the baroque is further subdivided and placed in confrontation with Mannerism. As a result of this classification, a controversy quickly 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 Europdischen Kunst (1957), where 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'Aubigne, Gongora and Vondel'. Consequently, it has become accepted that several of Wolfflin's baroque categories of the visual aits can now be attributed to a mannerist style, which preceded the baroque proper.26

20

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

In the final analysis, however, Warnke prefers the term 'baroque' over 'Mannerism' according to an argument which could be paraphrased as follows: that while, then, 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 the 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 scholarship associated with the name, than with history itself. ) As Warnke writes, 'the chaotic divergence in the application of the term Mannerism by its various champions makes the "querelle du mannierisme" 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 colour 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 favour. 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 at length 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 paries extra partes (or '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; as well as style which can be recognized by its excessive 'reflexivity', 'academicism' and 'artificialization of nature' (as in Marino, Gongora, or Calderon, Velasquez and Borromini). The first principle, associated with the formal technique of Mannerist art,

HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS IN BAROQUE CRITICISM AND THEORY 21

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, 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 commedie, 'and 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-enabime in modern conceptions of intertextuality as a reflective surface that incorporates - both inside and, yet, outside - a critical, or allegorical function of commentary upon the central action, or plot (as in the example of Genette's commentary on Saint Amant's Moyse sauve which I will discuss in Chapter 8 below).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 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

22

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 itself. The reference to The Conversion of St Paul, then, 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 'conversion' (from the Greek metanoia, a concept that has undergone dramatic semantic alteration with the advent of Christianity when its meaning of change and alternation is situated in the flesh, and in the emotional participation of the subject). Beyond its religious signification, this term is also intended here in a more contemporary psychoanalytic sense in which the body's agitated convulsion represents the perception of the unconscious in the discourse of the hysteric; in other words, where an absence of perception (or blindness) is converted into an 'emotional movement' that is no less a perception, in psychoanalytic terms, of a spiritual 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, 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 the rhetoric of power which belong to the new determination of the art-work from the early modern period onward. At this point, however, we need to recall that this rhetoric of visibility and the body were attached to the clerical and authoritarian aesthetic programmes associated with the Counter-Reformation; even though, for modern consciousness, this rhetorical pattern resembles more the theoretical construction of the various subject-formations - whether of ideology, the unconscious or capital - which are all drawn by this principle of conversion whose modern sense equally operates in both the Marxist and psychoanalytic 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, I'etourdissement), wonder and amazement, marvel (meraviglid), or rapture and delirium (Schwarmerei, jouissance) - all of which lie at the basis of a general baroque aesthetic. What I mean here is that 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 'the new'. As Bernardo Tasso wrote, concerning the composition of his own work, L'Amadigi, following the example set forth by Ariosto's Orlando Furioso:

HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS IN BAROQUE CRITICISM AND THEORY

23

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 w a y . . . which I find more beguiling and delightful.32

As in this passage, the basic distinction between the two versions of the 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 taste: where the Mannerist employed variety and multiplicity to achieve this feeling of something new, the High Baroque artist (as in the above example of Caravaggio) arranges the spectacle of ornamentation around a central absence, in which the 'something new' embodies 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 of this latter affect might be figured in the Lacanian construction of beance and oblivium, both of which 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; the second of which, however, extends well beyond the field of Lacanian theory, and underlines several postmodern conceptions of the 'sublime' (by Lyotard, Buci-Glucksmann and Deleuze in particular) that are still heavily influenced by European modernism. Therefore, we will want to return to interrogate these aspects below, by asking more or less in a phenomenological manner, 'what are the conditions that articulated these elements together in a concept of taste implied in the following series? • an experience of temporality marked by the themes of novelty, variety and multiplicity • a loss of 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, a heightened sense of enthusiasm, delight or marvel (meraviglia) And yet, we still have not found a sufficient explanation of the two fundamental traits behind the determination of 'the hegemony of space' itself in the two conflicting versions of the baroque. (I mean this phrase, both from a formal perspective, but also a psychological one: the principle of organization, as well as the cause of its sensibility. ) 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

24

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

'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 - what are the origin and the logic of the principle of 'novelty' (inventio) that is emphasized so acutely in both versions? 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 and psychological conditions that associate an increasing complexity and ornamentalism with a feeling of 'wonderment', 'excitement', 'admiration' and even 'awe' in the spectator? In response to all these questions, perhaps as a partial explanation, I will recall the significance of one event that often comprises a colourful backdrop in traditional commentaries; however, it is an event that is inseparable from the history of the baroque sensibility and logic of culture: the European colonial adventure that followed the discovery of the 'New World'. Therefore, 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 Returning to the question of space that is at the centre of the two opposing points of view on the '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 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 the representation of Mannerism, where the heterogeneity and textual values of design and ornamentation are neutralized by a 'flat' and homogeneous character of the surface (or facade) upon which they appear. 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

HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS IN BAROQUE CRITICISM AND THEORY

25

and set apart from the highly charged and affective body of the spectator's emotion that often characterizes the surface of perception in 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 die '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). This underlines the 'parergonaT 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 'property on display' (Darstellung), 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 judgements of vulgarism and bad taste against the baroque by many classical writers. We can support this first sense by an episode that occurred in the Italian baroque, in what 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 these assumptions evident in Pellegrino's judgement of the architecture of Orlando Furioso as being built on an 'aesthetic foundation that appeals to an unsophisticated taste'. I cite this passage, since it contains the most explicit articulation of the new, as variety, as belonging to a cultural development of the notion of popular taste:

26

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 liberata} which is a body better conceived in all its parts.35

On the other hand, the designs and ornamentation also address the influence of regional and particular cultures, statist regimes or their decline (as expressed by Spanish and Italian baroques), 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; particularly, Gongorism, marinismo and culturismo. Concluding our discussion of the two formal hegemonies that have guided a more modern conception of the baroque, Gilles Deleuze has recently organized this schism into perhaps its purest philosophical expression by coordinating these two principles within the Leibnizian concept of the monad, which itself is constructed by two principles which Deleuze incorporates 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 matiere et les pUs dans I'dme. ' 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, 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 or Philip Aries' critical observations on this period that

HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS IN BAROQUE CRITICISM AND THEORY 27

is marked, for Aries, by the emergence of the concept of the child as a separate entity in civilized morality, and for Foucault, as the 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. In essence, both these developments mark, in Foucault's theory, a modification of the meaning of the flesh, that is, a new mode of assujetissement.3* 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. But 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 remains interesting in this description is the surface that functions as the support is no longer on the canvas (to refer back to the example of Caravaggio), or even of the work, 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 art-work, which I will take up in the next chapter with the discussion of Maravall's theory7 of the early baroque sublime.

2

The baroque mechanism: Jose 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 Jose 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 his translator Terry Cochran explains, the word 'mechanism' is translated from the Spanish word resortes, which is also rendered as 'expedients', referring to an ideological end which is 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 which 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, or recursos), sometimes appearing beneath an instrumental determination of aesthetic culture and 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. '41

THE BAROQUE MECHANISM

29

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 eighteenth-century encyclopaedia 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 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 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 propagandist^ 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

30

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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.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 the postmodern concept of the sublime. This is true especially in writings (such as those by Lyotard and Deleuze) which place emphasis upon 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 sublime, our concern here is with the analogy to a postmodern notion of the sublime as a form of power, implicit in a 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 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' which cause 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 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 locates at the 'origin' 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. In the above passage, 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

THE BAROQUE MECHANISM

31

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 an extended sense of corporeality, or 'flesh', including the characteristic marks of ethnos - of nation, people or kind. Thus, the different meanings that can be ascribed to a notion of boundary are set in motion by 'the work 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 distinct and isolated 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, selffeeling, 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. In addition, 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 (Verdrdngung). Consequently, 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 lies at the basis of the baroque sublime as an early manifestation of a corresponding modern expression of force:

32

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

[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. ].%5

This new agency of force was to be located, however, not within the arrival of a new political entity or ideological apparatus of control, but within a series of cultural expedients and techniques (or technologies) and, most importandy, within the very psyche of the spectator which constituted their object. Thus, it is the energy already stored in the spring's tension that drives the baroque mechanism and causes it to operate. This accounts for die emergence of a more modern notion of popular culture which accompanies the installation of die baroque mechanism. Underlying this concept of popular culture is the recognition that the ideology of the modern state, upon die arrival of the masses, has no power of its own, but only functions as a mediator which channels the power unleashed in die spectacles of history, culture and politics. In odier words, a notion of force based upon the direat of physical violence by the state becomes less effective in die face of the massive concentration of population in modern urban centres; therefore, another means (resortes) of repression must be sought. Maravall describes diis 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 die above passage is a pathological determination of culture itself, which is given die power to alter and modify the normal affective development of the individual. We can understand this determination in two ways: first, the 'culture of die baroque' (Maravall) is a collective and sociological expression of padiology that is historically restricted to the expression of die epoch; or second, die ideological aspect of the 'Culture' becomes, from the period of the baroque onward, inseparable from its power to cultivate pathological effects in me psychological realm of the modern individual (similar to the psychoanalytic sense of neurosis). The second aspect is 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, which now corresponds to the more modern concept of alienation (which appears in both Freud and Marx). Thus, Maravall's description of'the culture of the baroque' as a 'culture of alienation' can be taken to foreground the later descriptions diis term receives in reference to a determination of force that belongs to the

THE BAROQUE MECHANISM

33

modern concept of ideology. That the sublime presentation of nature pathologically determined as an aesthetic experience which corresponds to the sociological and psychological effects of alienation and selfestrangement - is at the centre of the baroque intentionality and taste, only serves to underscore the significance of this baroque 'discovery' to the crisis of subjectivity, which Hegel described as the process of alienation involved in the death of the natural man and rebirth as a subject of ideology. Let us 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 - can be understood to comprise the extended materiality of the art-work itself. We might recognize in this spiritual, symbolic element of participation an image of force that Maravall characterized as the ideological function of the baroque mechanism. 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 which is no less real than the perception of an external object. Thus, we might use Caravaggio's representation of Paul's conversion to illustrate the entrance of another category of visibility which appears a central topic - in the rhetorical sense of the baroque culture: the entrance of a command 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 which is central to the logic of the sublime. The event of the sublime represents the subject being opened to a higher power of visibility, to another category of nature, which is signified in dramatic terms by the plot of conversion itself. Thus, the sublime links the presentation of this 'hidden nature' with the experiences of alienation and death that 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 mis object, therefore, would not correspond to the object of external perception, however, but rather to an emotional perception closer to mood, anxiety or a feeling of dread. On the simple level of narrative, 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. In Caravaggio's The Conversion of St Paul, this presence is 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

34

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 art-work itself, or at least of the 'nature' of the presence that stands behind it. Restricting my discussion to the region of painting for the moment, the aesthetic presentation that results in 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 (Wolfflin), 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 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 openendedness 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 'inside' and 'outside'. For instance, 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 techne 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 techne andpoiesis,

THE BAROQUE MECHANISM

35

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 labour is the nature (essence, substance or even 'subject') of the spectator himself or herself. Because the body of 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 which conceals 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 Consequently, 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. / 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 as well: 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, I should recall that the original narratives of early Christian communities were essentially 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,

36

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 techrie 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 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. Thus, Lopez Pinciano defines the concept as follows:

THE BAROQUE MECHANISM

37

'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, Pinciano again: 'Furor is an alienation in which the understanding separates itself from the beaten path. '59 We might note this change in that/z/ror 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 technical 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 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 d i d . . . '60 This characterization again problematizes 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 However, this will not prevent us from determining this very state of 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.6-

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 episteme (Foucault), bearing with it a virulent

38

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

eschatological myth that emerges in the baroque culture alongside two other ideological adventures of Europe: the birth of modem 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 analysed above. As in the Kantian determination of the sublime, which offers a later variable to what Maravall refers to under the concept offuror, 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 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 marvellous', 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.

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 Wolfflin's Fundamental Concepts in the History of Art (1915), the baroque has been consistendy accorded a morphological or formal value in die analysis of historical aesthetic and cultural phenomena. This will be die one constant mat is evident throughout die different usages it later receives. In Wolfflin's study, and later in Henri Focillon's La Vie des formes (1934), this formalism achieves die status of a mediod (which Omar Calabrese calls 'a logic of morphogenesis'), which was influenced in great part by die work of die twentiem-century Spanish critic Eugenio d'Ors, who is made responsible for die dislocation of the baroque from its identification with a unique historical period. Even earlier, however, Wolfflin announces at die beginning of his study of mosdy plastic and pictorial aesthetics of die seventeendi and eighteenth centuries that his study does not analyse die beauty of a particular art object (that is, die particular characteristics of beauty exhibited by a Rubens, a Rembrandt, or a Diirer), but the 'element' in which this beauty has taken form: 'it studies die character of die artistic conception that has been at die base of figurative art for a number of centuries'.63 Following Omar Calabrese's commentary on diis morphological function in his Neo-Baroque (1992), we might summarize Wolfflin'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 tiirough a system of differences. (The series diat Wolfflin uses in his analysis is: linear/pictorial, surface/depdi, open/closed, multiplicity/unity, clear/obscure or absolute definition/relative definition. ) • What Wolfflin calls a 'style' (for example, baroque or classical) is a specific tendency exhibited in die 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'.

40

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

• 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 is hierarchically arranged within a given epoch (which implies nothing less than a 'system of judgement', in the Kantian sense). The objective of Wolfflin's study is to collate from a range of examples drawn primarily from aesthetic phenomena - on the basis of his five formal pairs - the logical values that lie behind these types that might explain their 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, Wolfflin has no interest in demonstrating the value of an aesthetic production in accordance with the criteria of a dominant - and therefore, unreflective - system of judgement, but rather in gathering and exposing the 'element' in which this system of judgement takes form. In short, Wolfflin 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-baroque opposition that follows the rhythm of cultural cycles post-Renaissance. Focillon's formalism is even more analogical than Wolfflin'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, is 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 and Systems Theories, to recent theories of chaos science and ecology, as well as the semiotic systems of Bakhtin and Lotman 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 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 Weltanschauungen and 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

THE BAROQUE EON

41

Error that is constitutive of the concept of modern culture from the writings of Herder up to the present. In its application to aesthetic phenomena, in particular, the function of this analogy may be an accurate representation of aesthetics as what Jacques Lacan once called 'orthopedic' (a form of 'bodybuilding'). 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 judgements 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 Wolfflin 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 see where these judgements, 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 Jose Marti 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 'artificialized' trope in the rhetorical sense of vindicating minority expression. However, rather than limit our 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 baroque criticism. According to Spanish historian Eugenio d'Ors, the baroque is a historical constant, which participates in the Alexandrine definition of eon. An eon signifies a category which, 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, 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 constant of culture. According to this view, historical variation of style and content is not simply identified with the morphological variation of Culture itself, 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. '1' In one sense, therefore, we might compare d'Ors' discovery of the 'baroque eon' to the central intuition of Kant concerning the Category

42

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

of Eternity as an immutable form of change and movement, which subordinates time understood as succession, and space defined as 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 bonafide 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 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 'non-linear' 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 already inscribed within a negation of historical causality and the delimitation of place, region, geography that the culture of European modernism and the process of commodification in early capitalist cultures both 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 which 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 bourgeoise 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 regimes; however, in the rococo style,

THE BAROQUE EON

43

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 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. In this process, the scroll had entirely lost its emblematic function and had become mere background ornamentation. The disappearance of the 'symbolic element' 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 enough 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. ) For our purposes, 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 evacuated in favour 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'), 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. In William Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, for example, the universal condition for grace and beauty is what he calls 'the undulating line'. Beauty derived from the 'composed intricacy of form' has die 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. In Hogarth's description, moreover, there is a guiding motif of desire that suggestively traces the contour of these waving or serpentine

44

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 favourite 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

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 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 in 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.

THE BAROQUE EON

45

We can 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 the psychological dimension of the spectator that I have analysed 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 earlier on. 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 gradually merges with the commodity forms of early capitalism. (Thus, it is significant to note that d'Ors' writings on the modern baroque fall in 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 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 spirit, it cannot resemble its political concept in the strictest sense because it designates no particular entity, no 'people'. Even more, it appears to extend a concept of participation to include moments and events either past or too remote to qualify under the classical determination of the Greek or Latin agora. What d'Ors invokes is the concept of a hyperbolique - in the sense of 'exaggerated' and amplified, even bloated - culture. There are no cultures, but rather Culture with a capital 'K', 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 In yet another sense, d'Ors' baroque provides the allegory of a cultural style that can be identified with the view that belongs to the 'end of history', when time can no longer be represented by a natural myth (as cyclical and

46

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 the Baroque. We can see this, in part, as a nostalgic reaction to the processes that were taking place within the beginning of the twentieth century: the fragmentation and isolation of the individual's experience, the organization and specialization of the branches of knowledge, the reduction of labour into discrete units of time, the destruction of communal experience as the expression of a particular culture. At the same time, however, the metaphor of the baroque seems to embrace the proliferation of details and forms that are possibly an original intuition of the culture of early capitalism, one that runs parallel to Benjamin's later analysis of the arcades, which was organized by a similar schema. 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 prefiguration of the modern tourist who travels and brings home snap-shots to incorporate in his personal mythology. From the perspective of time, therefore, we can immediately see that 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 later on, different versions of this thesis constitute a fundamental principle of European modernity: the arrival of post-history. As I have already noted, however, 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'. Thus, 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 consensus, the announcement of the end of history is also strategic since the narrative of historical legitimation can no longer explicate the moment that is happening now, which suddenly appears, for that reason, accidental, arbitrary and contingent. That is, if the moment can no longer be explained, it must be

THE BAROQUE EON

47

justified: the field of the moment 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 later on in the vision of history offered by Benjamin. In its final determination, 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 which exemplifies a modern 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 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, alter 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 periodization is that nothing new (which may appear accidental or arbitrary at first) can take place within a chain of events which is rigidly determined by causality. Thus, d'Ors' baroque concept is, in a certain sense, a product of its age and expression of a spirit of revolt against 'Time and its "It was" ' (Nietzsche). Immediately preceding the period during which d'Ors was conceptualizing a new image of modern baroque reason, Nietzsche was expressing the affirmation of chance in the theory of the 'Eternal Return' and Mallarme 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 new text. Moreover, the new sense of 'openness' that constitutes an enlarged present, like the infinitely dilated present of a dream, also allows those wrho were repressed

48

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

or formerly elided from the official historical narratives to participate in the reorganization of Culture. (D'Ors' essays on the baroque are replete with figures and myths that belong to late Romantic and early European modernism: the primitive, the 'Ewig-weibliche' or the eternal feminine, the mystic or femme-Solitaire, the satanic figures of Mephisto and Calderon's Siegismundo. ) In the above discussion, therefore, we can trace some of the most basic principles, as well as the principal metaphors, that cut across several different versions of the baroque I will take up in the sections that follow: in which 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

This page intentionally left blank

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 Gongora nor Gracian was revolutionary7 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 'singularity that bursts upon the present and twists in an unexpected direction'. 76 Consequently, unlike in d'Ors' theory7 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 and traditional forces of stability, one which causes a momentary point of instability mat 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

52

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 non-body, 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 its 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 outiine 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 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 importandy, 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 programmes constandy 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

BAROQUE AND AN

53

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 centre' 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 which is but time which 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 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 co-existence of pasts in a present that can be defined as a field of general strife (polemos). The general default or destruction ol 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 modifications. 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 modem'. 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 selfcritic:

54

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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

These are just some of the axioms of the modernity that we have also discovered implicitly at the basis of 'the return of the Baroque': 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 modern baroque 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 modern baroque 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

BAROQUE AND ANTI-BAROQUE

55

be associated with most modern movements even though 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, 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, 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 'modern baroque', 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

56

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 judgement 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 for 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 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

BAROQUE AND ANTI-BAROQUE

57

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 below). 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 die 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 'return of the Baroque' is a topic that is perhaps utilized less frequently than by other Latin American writers such as I^ezama, 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 Gongora 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 die 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 we might 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

58

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 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 Ines de la Cruz. Her poem, El Sueno (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. Therefore, 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 Echevarria 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 baroque period 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 Lopez Velarde to explain this modern baroque tendency: 'The poetic system has turned into a critical system. '89

5

The rhetoric of baroque temporality: 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 wish to comment on this essay under the theme of 'baroque and modern', not only due to its importance for literary criticism over the past decade, but also due to the analysis of the rhetorical (or language-centred) determination of time that may clarify the frequent return of baroque figures and themes in the modern period. 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', one could easily substitute the term 'baroque' without sacrificing any coherence in de Man's argument.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, which often addressed cultural production within the metaphors of the body (health, welfare, purity, 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

60

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

poetics of language, prosthetic metaphors of technology, capital, machine assemblages, 'les corps morcele's'. Actuality, 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, since current critics draw their metaphors from earlier moments. 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 language 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. To return to our commentary, de Man 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

THE RHETORIC OF BAROQUE TEMPORALITY 61

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 (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 animal as superior, since this inability7 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 cliche, 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 cliche', 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 die 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 cliche (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 cliche of the fire, de Man elicits a fundamental problem of a modernity that founds itself upon an act of

62 THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 the present. This 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 At this point, let us 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 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

THE RHETORIC OF BAROQUE TEMPORALITY 63

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 'y°iith'. 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 (the '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 re-link the past it now occupies (in the sense of an accomplished project or programme) to the present it has prepared. This 'reflective' judgement 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 modern 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-phorem 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 Consequently, after founding a conception of modernity on the

64

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

Nietzschean and Baudelairean concept of 'vitalism' (the radical forgetting and suppression of anteriority in the instant), de Man then reveals the inherent problems of stability and the recurrence of the past that strike against this gesture - passivity, memory and history. However, 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 the 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 or duration' of modernity. Is this succession of moments 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 centre. According to de Man, these themes replace the specificity of a historical narrative of a succession of moments (dure'e) 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 subjects 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 cliches' 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 rigour in the form of historical description. The more realistic and pictorial they become, the

THE RHETORIC OF BAROQUE TEMPORALITY

65

slighter the residue of meaning that would exist outside the specificity of language which exists as a mere signifiant. All that remains of the theme is a mere outline, less than a sketch, more of a time-arabesque than a figure. Through these observations on the form of the signifier associated with the modern - and I recall here my earlier statement that 'the baroque' 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. Its specificity can be defined by its outward and back motion that follows the contours of the 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 'tres difficile a 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 toward the reality of the moment, prevails and, in its turn, folding back upon itself engenders

66

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 judgement' 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 itself, 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 judgement that substitutes the moral value of the 'new' for a position formerly held by the universal in the judgement 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 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 modern baroque 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.

6

The baroque angel of history: 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.

Although it would take a much longer study of the intellectual history that surrounds this issue, some of the historical and political themes we have just described as belonging to a critical notion of modernity directly correspond to our present analysis of the Baroque. Briefly, we might situate the concept of ideology in late European modernism in what French critic Christine Buci-Glucksmann, following the writings of Michael Lowy and Migel Abensour on Jewish messianism and liberal utopianism in modern Europe, calls a 'mystico-messianism' or die 'meta-politicaT concept in modernism. 103 The most obvious figure of this messianic concept of history has been drawn from the writings of Walter Benjamin, which 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' (hence, the French language often utilized by writers such as Blanchot, Derrida and others announce the determination of this suspension in the verbal construction of a future to come, ['a 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 into 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 wididrawal 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, or Ursprungen. According to Buci-Glucksmann, die relation between this formulation of a 'meta-political' (what we can call die politics of suspense, or the suspension

68

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 used by most theoreticians of a modern baroque is precisely this radical abolition, inversion and reversal of the past that prepares for the arrival of the 'new'. In Benjamin, this abolition is explicitly founded in the German classical baroque, where 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 writers is that Benjamin's messianism was always 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 theo-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, I would say that it may be important to determine whether those critics who have repeated Benjamin's messianic concept of history have also maintained this tension or polemic between two competing versions of modernity, or have allowed one side to vanquish the other. 105 The 'interruption' of history is the intervention into the continuum within which is the everyday and profane image 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, the call for revenge. This 'interruption' can be represented by a divine violence that founds the

THE BAROQUE ANGEL OF HISTORY

69

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 labour 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 'new5 political subject. 106 The originary-mythical violence of Marxist revolution is transported into the region of culture, where this image of general strike is coloured 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 theatre, and the theatre into a trial. The identities of the dead and historically vanquished who return through the rift opened in the present can be illustrated by the following citation of Gryphius that recognizes them as the victims of history, as '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 vengeanceseeking tyrant of the kingdom of Messina. 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.107

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', the recent inventions of technology (the photograph, the cinema, the telephone) are particularly vulnerable to capture, 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. 108 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 avantgarde; their significance as vehicles of commerce and expansion can be

70

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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', 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 Culture. The categorical imperative of modernity's unfinished project can be found in a formula that Benjamin first ascribes to Kafka: 'Act in such 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, a rift or crack in time, through which the dead return to seek revenge on the living. Consequently, 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 action, to 'doing' something, only when there is an offence, a crime, a scandal (a public spectacle, the sacrifice or the execution of the tyrant-king). Within Benjamin's strategic cultural programme of modernism, 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 marvellous land and its inhabitants, then returns to 'develop' them; placing them in a book, on display on ceremonial occasions, he shares his experience with others by creating the narrative testimony to accompany and to verify what he 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 experience as the story 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 a point of 'intervention' - although this is often obscured by those who fail to read Benjamin's writings on technology strategically, rather than 'nostalgically', as

THE BAROQUE ANGEL OF HISTORY

71

if in the loss of aura Benjamin was mourning the loss of the 'moment of return into experience' that belongs to the first definition of Culture. According to the myth of progress, 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 labour 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 a I'ordre du jour - and that day is Judgment Day.110

We can 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 judgement, ' 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 judgement. 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 forensicsense 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 legal sense, against the dominant vehicle of History (the narrative of progress) is nothing else than to put Time itself on trial: 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 to a new cultural narrative of time (where the

72

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

technological and modern urban effects that display this shock value function as the exhibits 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 judgement, 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 arret de mort). Following the legalistic gesture that found Benjamin's conception of the early baroque theatre, therefore, 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' We might perceive in this account the institution of another narrative of culture that corresponds to the expression of late-modernism in Europe, but also to the formation of postmodernism in the Americas. At the commencement of the schism between a classical concept of Culture and the institution of a more modern propagandist^ 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 which martyrs utter.

As Benjamin further comments:

THE BAROQUE ANGEL OF HISTORY

73

The language of Pre-Shakesperian Trauerspiel has been apdy described as 'a bloody legal dialogue'. The legal analogy may be reasonably taken further and, in the sense of die mediaeval literature of litigation, one may speak of the trial of the creature whose charge against death - or whoever else was indicted in it - is only partially dealt with and is adjourned at die end of die Trauerspiel [my emphasis].112

In these passages we can readily see the resemblance of this essentially baroque theatre (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 the 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 intellectuals of the avantgarde 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 die origin of Modernity. Following Derrida, here 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 die culture of death, as if the expression 'the culture of deauY 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 deadi, each culture treats the end according to a different partition. The partition would remain at all times human, and inrra-anthropological.113

At this point we are concerned with the partition that informs the conflicting borders of European modernist culture. It is this partition that concerns us most because it has become, in a certain sense, 'monumentalized' within the expression of 'Western Culture'. Thus, 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 ouher 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

74

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

modern period has been fundamentally altered by the sheer number of other cultural narratives (also, necessarily entailing other treatments of the partition between life and death) which have been subsumed under one 'culture of death', and thus one 'infra-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': One must go further: culture itself, culture in general, is essentially... a history of death [histoire de mart - 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 mourning and sacrifice. We have seen the logic of this absolute border installed within a cryptic identification with the other's testimony (martyriori); 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, also addresses the indefinite duration of this 'time of suspense' we are still engaged in. (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. Of course, 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? Therefore, to return to the earlier elements we

THE BAROQUE ANGEL OF HISTORY

75

found at the basis of the baroque culture (the spectator, enthusiasm, the body, the schism, the form of space), we find their new configuration within a modernist logic of cultural resistance, 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, what do 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 which appears 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 discussion of Genette. 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 die 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'. 11' Rather the body of the crowd, or the masses, only constitutes an architectural principle (like the open and major boulevard, the piazza, the forum, the star), as the platform upon which the modern critic stages his or her conflict over the 'signs' of history. (Consequently, one of the principal statements mat 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 often acts out a 'spectacle of rage and anger' that seems the equivalent of the 'Other's' suffering. At the same time, this sense of 'acting out' entails,

76THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

almost hysterically, the animation of the 'Other's' body' (voice) which is offered as evidence of the 'Other's' martyred existence. 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' which has been variously figured as woman, the child, the insane, the primitive, or the colonized and racialized subject. They will only appear within the text of the modern as pure voices 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, one that has become 'exemplary', thoroughly and 'all too postmodern'.

PART THREE

Baroque and Postmodern

This page intentionally left blank

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 Velasquez, 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 argument against a, more or less, familiar opponent 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 judgements of 'taste', the negation of a notion of temporality that is founded upon historical teleology or a narrative of perpetual progress, the rejection of Vertically' (or transcendence), and the ludic and transgressive strategies of opposition staged against a bourgeois commodity culture and, 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) 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 which several baroque theorists often cite as authority for the concept of a new or modern episteme. The place these critics - including Gerard Genette and Severo Sarduy whom I will discuss later on - refer to is where Foucault describes this 'new arrangement of visibility' that he discerns in his analysis of the composition of the figures in Las Meninas, where the relationship between the gazes of spectator, subject, and painter -

80

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez (1599-1660), Las Meninas or The Family of Philip IV, c. 1656 (oil on canvas). Prado, Madrid/Giraudon/ Bridgeman Art Library. distributed around a blank or hollow point - radically breaks with classical tables of representation and signals 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 its reception and the gradual legitimation and assimilation of a certain representation of the postmodern, based on the premise of a singular break or cataclysm that took place sometime in the seventeenth century around the same time that Velasquez was composing his masterpiece, and that this rupture is what inaugurated the long duration of modernity. Moreover, Velasquez's Las Meninas, itself, often functioned as the

THE BAROQUE THESIS

81

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 epoke, 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 Holderlin'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 episteme, in his Neo-Baroque: A Sign of 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 context(s) to become the name for a collection of generic traits (or styles) that can be reassembled in a 'morphology', as in the argument of d'Ors. This analogy also explains why our previous description of the modern (or neo-} baroque does not link these traits to a specific historical causality (and here, we might also 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,

82

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 (i. e. its significance within the programme of modern gesture) 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 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 below, at a critical point of an argument that attempts to establish the temporal logic of 'un baroque recit by Saint Amant in continuity with, even 'exemplary' of, modern narrative principles, Gerard Genette authorizes this reading by the following claim to the significance of Velasquez'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 Velasquez's Las Meninas, and to recall the date of this painting: 1658.119

Of course, 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 Velasquez is gathered under 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 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 (revenant, as Derrida later thematized as a spectral figure of past's 're-sistence'}, as well as the illumination of its trace that glows in the

THE BAROQUE THESIS

83

passivity of material retention in memory - specifically, in the materiality of Language which frustrates any attempt to extinguish the past. As Proust once remarked, 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 complete '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 die 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

Foucault's term 'dispersion' characterizes the nature of this break in the following way: • 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

84

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

epistemological inquiry and specialization (grammar, philology, literature, economy, history, anthropology); • finally, 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 'un-said', an opacity of sense that is now attached to its being. Consequently, as Foucaults 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 recit) 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 Holderlin'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 of the sign in Sein und Zjeit 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' (^uhandeln) but becomes, like the stubborn persistence of the knot in the hankercheif that has lost its signifying value as a 'sign', pure 'present-to-hand' ( Vorhandlen). 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, and 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 being and its existence becomes a

THE BAROQUE THESIS

85

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' 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 signalled 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 newy episteme, the condition of a positive transformation in which a new arrangement between words and things would 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

86

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 analysing this principle for understanding the 'return of the Baroque' at the heart of Foucault's argument, we will keep separate the figure of 'representation of representation' and 'inter-textuality' for the moment. That is to say, neither must be understood in the vacuous sense that they are today by most critics of postmodernism. 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 tide, recopying it in a reduced form, describing it, employing any of the known procedures of the mis-en-abime. These tautologists forget that if these procedures were efficacious in Shakespeare or Velasquez, 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

We will return to the 'repetition' implied here by Sarduy's phrase 'a more vast content than had been explicitly figured' to open the question of the type of narrative that is being evoked by this process: specifically the literary, or critical, practices of intertextuality that I will describe in Part Four on the 'Baroque and the PostcoloniaT. 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 principle of reception can be seen to underlie Foucault's initial observations of Las Meninas: Perhaps there exists in this painting of Velasquez, the representation as it were, of Classical Representation, and the definition of the 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

THE BAROQUE THESIS

87

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 doublere) of the producer. This is accompanied by several modern developments in cultural aesthetics where die role occupied by the spectator-reader-audience-consumer increases in its activity to the point of eclipsing die position occupied by the authorproducer-originator. Consequently, it is significant that Foucault's 'flat' description, or 'literal reading', of Las Meninas ends widi an 'empty space' diat is absent from the picture itself and where the roles of the king, the model, the painter and die spectator are constantly changing positions. No figure of sovereignty truly determines die 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 odier baroque commentators such as Sarduy and Genette, all of whom see diis as die liberation of a pure representation, or of different interpretations diat are not given a natural legitimation or arranged into a hierarchy. Again, this is die import of the last sentence in the passage cited above: 'And representation, freed finally from die 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 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 himsell 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 die rhetoric of this passage, both the principles of 'representation of representation' and 'intertextuality' can be located within

88

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

the gaze of the spectator. If we could schematize the 'lines' 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 the 'play' along with the model which 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. 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 abime as the pale and ghostly reflection that lies upon a mirror's surface at the 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 of 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 Velasquez 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 all in attendance 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 Velasquez 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 BAROQUE THESIS

89

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 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 Velasquez 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 die so-called 'modern spectator' in that blank and 'neutral' space before Velasquez'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 labour, 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 turn 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': 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

90

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 I am this language that I 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 Velasquez 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 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.

8

Un recit baroque: Gerard Genette

Recalling the critical importance of the function of inter-textuality in baroque criticism, let us now turn our attention to the notion of intertextuality that emerges from the reception of Foucault's thesis of 'rupture. ' In his reading of the baroque poem Moyse sauve by Saint Amant, narrative critic Gerard Genette seems to establish a correspondence to the principle of representation behind Velasquez'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, which is five years later than the date of Saint Amant's Moyse sauve, 1653. Consequently, it is important to notice that Genette will discover textual or poetic figures and processes equivalent to the pictorial figures of Velasquez'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 its actors); • the presence in Moyse sauve 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 recit itself is organized by the form of a picture. Moyse sauve, 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 constructed, for example, in the form of a catachresis. Thus, it will be important to determine the principle of comparison behind this analogy which Genette qualifies as being 'exemplary' or 'typically baroque'.

92THE RETURN OF THE BARQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

On an immediate level, 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', metadiegesis) that is shown here to be illustrated by Saint Amant 'in his own manner and according to means available to his Moyse sauve 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 sauve can be catalogued under the heading of a mode of literature that is distinctly modern. 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 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 (by 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 sauve, which mostly includes harsh indictments against the poem itself as 'unreadable' and the author as a 'madman'. Principally, these judgements 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

UN RECIT BAROQUE 93

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 sauve. '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 judgements 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 differend, that is, the tangible evidence of a rift in human sensibility and a reorganization of the system of judgement: What was impossible to perceive in one moment would become perceptible in another - that is to say, the scintillating presence of a figure. The confrontation of these two judgements 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 unreadability: 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 a certain 'confusion' cannot be, as Pascal said, 'without design'.134 The baroque, then, marks a 'place' 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 judgement in direct confrontation with one another. Or, 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 re'cit 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

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

94

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

provides more exact dates to this gap or disappearance: 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. Thus, Genette's phrase, 'We can read', is posed against the judgements of Boileau and others that Moyse sauve was, at that earlier moment, 'unreadable', either because it was horribly botched (according to the criteria of judgement), or utterly without design. According to Genette's analysis, however, the principle of organization - literally, the triptychal organization - was actually 'foreclosed', 'unreadable', and 'unrecognized'. Again, this implies much more than a series of 'bad 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', in other words, 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 'meta-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

UN RECIT BAROQUE 95

dream work. All of these 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 little design, which he noticed floating just under the surface of' Moyse sauve, a 'schema'. Therefore, we must not take the figure of a 'picture', or even 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 which embody or realize relations that are purely conceptual. We can see that this is precisely how Genette's picture functions in his reading of Moyse sauve: 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, all schema presuppose a synthesis. (We can call this synthesis a unity or order - such as the unity or order of Moyse sauve. } In turn, even7 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 see 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 elements 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, dialogues, allusions that had no form. Consequently, we can perceive in the example of Moyse sauve, 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 re'cit. As Genette writes about the apparent static quality of this picture or schema: 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 recit 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

96

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

This last remark by Genette clearly places us 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 postmoderns 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 sauve. 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 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 re'cit, sometimes from the character, sometimes from the position of the narrator. 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 judgement, in the sense that it excavates and confronts the judgements of 'beauty' and 'good' and invents its own values to replace these earlier categories, such as 'the open' or 'the infinite'.

9

From baroque emblem to postmodern panoramagram: Yury Lotman and Jacques Derrida

A city no longer inhabited, not simply left behind, but haunted by meaning and culture. Jacques Derrida 137

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 language-structure. The result of the first argument would no longer conceive, or determine, the generation of meaning in a cultural text by a mechanism modelled 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 the '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 Iparole), the structuralist analogy posited a 'deep' universal grammar against which to measure the resemblances and variations of structure within different fields of experience, but also within different cultural formations. 139

98

THE RETURN OF THE BQROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 text-code 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 theories. 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 centre of the theme 'the text within the text'. 141

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

FROM BAROQUE EMBNLEM TO POSTMODERN PQNORAMACRAM

99

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 textuality (the semiotic khora, or what Lotman refers to as the 'mother text') that is closely modelled after the Freudian description of the 'primary processes'; • second, a principle of homeostasis which is moulded 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 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 modelled 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); finally, 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

100

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 Given the above problem, therefore, 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, therefore, 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 language structure, for example), and seeks to deploy this code universally to account for specific events of significance. This problem is at the centre 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. Bakhtin recalls 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), one 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 favour 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

FROM BAROQUE EMBLEM TO POSTMODERN PANORAMAGRAM

101

Lotman illustrates the function of the 'text-code' by referring to the example of Tolstoy's glass of water, where the purity of the water becomes perceptible only due to the small deposits of detritus, or the chips that fall 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 lustre 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 of 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 which 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: In the simplistic nature of the concepts established by Voltaire in his Essai sur les moeurs de I'esprit des nations, by Condorcet in his Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de I'esprit humain 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

102

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

'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 each case, the emergence of a dominant 'text-code' (ratio, esprit) 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); but 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, the 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, perhaps Lotman'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 widi the text, the culture within the culture. '1-52 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: 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 fulfil another function, however. In duplicating, the mirror deforms and thus it reveals how its representation, apparently natural, is in fact a projection using specific modelling language.153

Here, 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 modelling language', 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

FROM BAROQUE EMBLEM TO POSTMODERN PANORAMAGRAM

103

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'.134 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). We have seen different version of this new anamnesis in Genette, who both conceived it from the perspective of 'inter-textuality' and who signalled 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 criticism? That is, what is literary 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 die 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', the structuralist 'object', 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, inferiority, latency and secrecy), and its displacement onto another schema of depth constituted by the object's distance, its horizontal depth. At this point, structure, the framework of construction, morphological correlation, becomes in fact, and despite his 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

104

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTUR

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? 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 modelled 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, Lotman'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, 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

FROM BAROQUE EMBLEM TO POSTMODERN PANORAMAGRAM

105

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 favour 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 're-structuration' [perestroika] which privileges, as we will see in Borges, the position of secondariness occupied by the reader who reconstrues 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. L™ 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 a '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 baroque expression corresponds to the principle of 'representation of representation' (the mise-en-abime, 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 Velasquez), or when the structure of one medium is applied analogically to organize another (as in Genette's reading of Moyse sauve). 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 principles of intermedia that were referred to above as a fundamental device of mannerist and baroque art. "'1 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 the 'logo-centric construction of knowledge situate this isomorphism in the priority assigned to the series of

106

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 Levi-Strauss 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 Levi-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 Eurocentric, or phallocentric perspective? 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 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 "correspondent" or 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

FROM BAROQUE EMBLEM TO POSTMODERN PANORAMAGRAM

107

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 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 baroque, as well as for the sensibility that could exemplify most of the critiques noted above: 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

This state of constant Error also 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 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 labour), 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 essential confusion. 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

108

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

constitution in one of several areas of experience (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 harbour 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 'baroque' tradition. 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 in which the European author (the genius, the sovereign principle of representation) assumes a patently comic and stereotypical role in the postcolonial detective genre.

PART FOUR

Baroque and Postcolonial

This page intentionally left blank

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 a resume - as the 'musical postulation of reality'. This is a 'technique' that occurs in two distinct stages: first, to create a resume of the important facts or a summary recit; 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. Thus, there is first a pastiche of the 'library' (of European knowledge) in its transformation into a text (into the various apocryphal texts that Borges constructs by citing them); and this transformation entails a parody of the discursive forms of knowledge and their submission to a status of 'minor literature'.164 The procedures of archivization 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 of this transformation, two readers 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 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 they can always be found by everyone) now must include the points of confusion, misunderstanding and the formal 'blindness' that are the result of what the God-reader misses and therefore constitute his 'non-knowledge'.

112

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

The first figure of the reader in Borges fiction appears in the disguise of the detective whose criminal scene is always in the heart of the library itself ('Garden of Forking Paths', 'Death and the Compass'). This also corresponds to the second postulate in that the 'referent' is detected only by 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 an '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 'occulted' and 'kept secret' by some other who appears as the double of the author (the God-reader). 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 second as the more superior). This is not without its political designation; the reader begins his detection of the crime scene in the heart of the library and ends by inscribing the plot onto the streets of Buenos Aires. If philosophy, since 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, for even a murder produces something: a corpse, an 'object' of the investigation, a livelihood for the police. Rather, 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 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 hide and seek. 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 self-caricature. 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

THE BAROQUE CONSPIRACY

113

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 labour is humorous. This humour 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 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 pure consumption, in the sense that it uses or exhausts all its resources). • Finally, the baroque is purely intellectual, which is to say humorous. 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 by the 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 spells the end of any vital movement of artistic process. Exhaustion is die trait of an academic style that has spent all of its possibilities and begins to turn 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 mis moment - the end of the Romantic conception of die artwork, die 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 diat Eugenio d'Ors defined the one constant of the 'baroque eon by die opposition 'classical v. baroque'. Of course, in this schematization, die baroque completely absorbs the Romantic and d'Ors relays all its energy and enthusiasm according to this new classification. In Borges, on die odier hand, the baroque has become completely classical, to an almost hyperbolic degree, and its dominant traits are those oudined above: exhaustion, parody, consumption and intellectual humour. In each of these traits one can find a fundamental character of repetition diat 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 die 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.166

114

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 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. ' However, the difference that governs and determines the undertaking for Menard is defined as 'impossible'. But, '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 necessity. Thus, 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 counsellor.

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 counsellor. 168

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 of 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; this could be said to be Borges' relation to the 'tradition of all of Western literature', which is established by the

THE BAROQUE CONSPIRACY

115

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. 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'. 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 on, 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 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 Sorgel again. '172 In the end, not able to suffer the ambiguity any longer, he passes the gift (the poison) along to a child he had randomly dialled up on the telephone. Thus, 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 Sorgel; 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 Sorgel illustrate a certain mysterium tremendium that has become the hallmark of much of Borges' fiction. Yet, the anxiety - over personal identity, experience, personality - in each case is haunted by the character of repetition that comes from living

116

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

their whole lives in the Library. In particular, each character is haunted by an idea of originality, often a figure of genius, that 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 Sergei's ear, and it is interesting to remark that even in his attempt to rid himself of 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 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, is analogous to the representation of 'Absolute knowledge' in Borges' work. In another story, the character who lives in the Library exclaims: 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 honour 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 (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 regard to the present) - who has read the book and for whom the universe is completely and perfectly known. 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 suena (Life Is a Dream), where human drama is likened to a play, or later in Shakespeare's As Ton 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,

THE BAROQUE CONSPIRACY

117

however, about Borges' adaptation (or repetition, if you wish) of this baroque theme, as well as his use of the baroque emblem or device (miseen-dbime, 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 an 'Other' 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 place of his 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 Lonnrott straight to his death, in fact, to the exact spot where the bullet from Scharlach's gun will enter Lonnrott'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 the war; the conspiracy of Scharlach to lead the solitary Lonnrott to his death at Triste-le-Roy; the conspiracy that surrounded the death of the Irish revolutionary Fergus Kirkpatrick in a Dublin theatre 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 referenced by Borges' various 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 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 basic plot. As Borges writes, 'The idea that history might have copied history seems mind-

118

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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. 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 theatre is already prefigured by Nolan's version thirty years beforehand, and by 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 centre of these recorded events is 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, however, the literary or contrived (and crafted) series of events is set into 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 centre 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

THE BAROQUE CONSPIRACY

119

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 diviner 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, until perhaps, another reader discovers this mystery as well. In a certain sense, this is 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

11 Literature, taxonomy and 'The New World': Severo Sarduy

Cuba is a text. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria

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 marks 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 oppose two dynamic principles that are traditionally associated with the baroque polemic: classical and romantic, order and disorder, stability and movement. The Baroque, then, would signify in the sphere of culture what the intuition of the 'Big Bang' brings to cosmological theories of the 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 CubanAmerican 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 As 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. In this cosmological metaphor, Sarduy redefines and modernizes the meaning of both movement and change in the baroque

LITERATURE, TAXONOMY AND THE NEW WORLD'

121

construction. Moreover, like d'Ors' theory of the Baroque as a historical constant, here there is a scientific principle of explanation to which the baroque corresponds - as a constant force of change and innovation - as to a law of nature. In 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 both Marti 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 Echevarria 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 Marti'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 Marti and Lezama - though in decidedly non'structuralist' terms in their case - 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 Marti and Lezama, these metaphors remain organic and can be understood as the extension of a romantic conceptual system - where text and body are interchangeable under the notion of hybridity and monstrosity (hence the importance of Gongora and Calderon 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, four different levels (cosmological, cultural, linguistic, psychological), 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 from Lacanian representative, aphanasis (that is, the subject elided beneath a signifying chain). In turn, these fields are all allied to a thesis of intertextuality that results from the point where literature, language or culture renounce die denotative level

122

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

and its linear expression to produce both displacements, doubling up and proliferation of metonymic surfaces. At the centre of Sarduy's system is the belief that psychoanalysis constitutes the modern epistemology; 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 (Verdrangung}, 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 defence. In cosmological terms, the movement of the stars (glimpsed as signifiers) covers the 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, to cover over and to restitute, to forget and to remember in the same figure. 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 (Verdrangung j refoulement), a 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 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 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'. However, in the above passage 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 Echevarria 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,

LITERATURE, TAXONOMY AND THE NEW WORLD'

123

this notion of hybridity is further explored through the figure of transvestisms, as in the case of his novel Cobra. Of course, 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 subjects of this part of the novel's plot is Sarduy's allusion to the freewheeling student movements that took place at the end of this 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 'metaphor' 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), 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 displacements 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 Tibet by the characters in the novel echo and even 'double' for Columbus's earlier journey to 'the 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 accurate (or true) to say

124

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

that 'India is 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 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 recobrd) 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 Cobra, is only the effect of an original absence that sets the process of writing and culture in motion. As Echevarria 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 remarked 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 the baroque 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, the hybridty of East and West. Hence, Cobra 'plays' at being a novel of recovery, the rediscovery of original Latin American identity, that is, 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 Senora to find the right drug to shrink her 'over-sized feet', which she remarks as her only natural flaw, making her appear too masculine. 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 Echevarria 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 thirty years before the emergence of 'Queer identity', Sarduy invents a theory of gender that is based upon its pure performativity.

LITERATURE, TAXONOMY AND THE NEW WORLD' 125

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, and the identification of these values with the performativity of literature, or more precisely, Writing (L'ecriture). Several key principles of this ideology of Writing 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 • the analysis of ideology, based in part on a combination of Marx's writings on the symptom and Lacan's theory of the objet petite a that was facilitated principally by Althusser, which reveals the discrepancy between the real and its phantasmal image (presence, identity, imaginary capitation) • finally, the identification of the primary7 processes in the discourse of the 'psychoanalytic angels' (the hysteric, the pervert, the schizophrenic) and their application to a rhetorical conception of literary performativity and practices 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) 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, from the perspective of several 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, Lautreamont, Sade, and Mallarme appeared as the permanent prophets inscribed at the heart of Western writing. 189

Already we can see in this list the literary and philosophical cosmology of many other French writers and philosophers. We might remember the name of Sade in the works of both Lacan and Deleuze, and of Artaud in the writing 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; particularly two extremely

126

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

critical essays that would set both the task, but also forge a new reception of psychoanalytic conceptuality into 'a science of writing'. Derrida's essay 'Freud and the Scene of Writing' was published by the journal in 1966, where a reading of Freud was developed around the notions of trace, fray and effraction. 'Through it, 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 Derrida's essay on Bataille could form the principal programme of the Tel Quel 'Programme': 'the revolutionary theory of Western writing'. Derrida's former student, Philippe Sellers, was the principal architect of the journal and the groups. From the events that took place in May of 1968, he modelled an 'event' that definitively marked a rupture of history and culture in which before and after no longer rhymed. He took the principal figures of L'Ecriture feminine from Helene Cixous, Catherine Clement, Michelle Montralay and Luce Irigaray, and combined them within a textual and political practice of writing that borrowed many of its key concepts from semiology and linguistics of structuralism. (This will be heavily inflected in both the general strategy and style of Sarduy's essay, 'Baroque and NeoBaroque' referred to above. ) From Foucault, he took the concept of 'rupture' to signal the textual rupture that was emerging as a prominent figure in literary and cultural space. Finally, from Derrida, Sellers adapted the Derridean concept of proto-trace that appeared to underline the thesis of Of Grammatology (as well as the Freudian primary processes that were inscribed in a notion of archi-ecriture), and transformed it into a deliberative programme that sought to liberate 'a repressed ecriture. These were synthesized in a principle of cultural criticism that was already a practice of writing, which was allied to a proletariat avant-garde, and which at the same time through its utilization of structuralist concepts, established itself under a regime of 'scientificity' that, in its approach to the historical and cultural phenomenon under the metaphor of texts, established a new 'science of the subject'.191 In themselves, these principles do not constitute Sarduy's entire work. What I want to note in particular, is his choice in the essay 'The Baroque and the Neo-baroque' to produce a taxonomy of literature in specific application to the use of these terms in Latin American traditions. Moreover, it is important to see that the baroque 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 inrra-textuality. Sarduy's literary system, or baroque system, can be defined as a tropological process, or the 'artificialization of culture'. Here we might recall Eugenio d'Ors whose invention of critical terminology in many ways already forecasts the themes of 'hybridity' and 'creolization', including the textual processes of pastiche and citation, in the composition of cultural works. With a high value placed on the principles of 'texture' and 'in-mixing', d'Ors invented a unique and innovative set of terms to describe these processes in his art criticism. Often, he borrowed

LITERATURE, TAXONOMY AND 'THE NEW WORLD'

127

culinary terms such as picadillo ('minced meat'), puckero espanol ('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 criteria. 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 melange of different elements within a total composition. As d'Ors' biographer, Pilar Saenz, 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, 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 - 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 judgement in terms that often evoked their gustative sense, which was not simply metaphorical - which cannot be divorced from the environmental elements that condition the subject's cultural and social 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 materials. In both critics, therefore, we have 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 cultural phenomena. One way of understanding this impulse might be to employ the terminology of a 'minor usage' as this was defined by the French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, particularly in application to the fiction of Kafka. A 'minor' form is not static (a type, or a genre), but rather must be understood by the process

128

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

of 'becoming minor', that is, as a variation of a major language or form caused by the introduction of a minor variable. In the case of d'Ors, for example, the technique of Rembrandt is described as 'picadillo3 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 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 use of the term 'barroco' as a minor form as part of 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 that remains eternally bound up with Europe's universality and, instead, placing this tension in service of the specifically regional and cultural dialects of Cuban and Latin American expressions of nuevo 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. 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 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 other geographical and cultural regions (Africa, India, Europe, North America) and a kind of co-existence of different styles (modern, pre-modern, surrealist, neoclassical, primitive). Consequently, Alejo Carpentier defines Latin American culture by the melange of different styles that inhabit its region, and by the fact that it has been named many times and by different colonial traditions (including its own cultural resistances, which have often created an interest in recovering the original influences of cultural expression, such as Indian or African art). For all these reasons, the baroque becomes a perfect category to describe the multiple and conflicting principles of culture. As we have already seen in the earlier historical revisions of the term, at the basis of the Baroque itself there has always been the specific tension associated with its definition as a degradation of Renaissance and classical ideals of beauty and, at the same time, with the infusion of popular and more local expressions of taste (for example, associated with the several minor forms that were later supplanted by the dominant term of the baroque, such as marinismo, conceptismo, culturanismo and gongorismo). Concerning the appropriation of the baroque as 'Third Style', one that is itself characterized by its own negativity as 'stylelessness' (that is, as a lack of

LITERATURE, TAXONOMY AND THE NEW WORLD'

129

any particular style of its own), Echevarria summarizes its meaning in the following passage written on Carpentier's early description: The haroque as new metaphor, a new conceit designating that which 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 the principle of intertextuality ('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 intertextuality issues from the absolute negativity of writing itself, or the ruse of a beginning that never was, as the lack (or a 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. '19''

12 The baroque return: Alejo Carpentier's Concierto Barroco

In his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), Heidegger points at the essential definition of Greek, proto-European, man as 'a stranger', but also at 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 stranger] sets sail on the frothing waters / amid the south winds of winter / tacking through the mountains / and furious chasm of the waves.197

Here, I will cite in full Heidegger's commentary on this proto-European stranger to show its essential relation to the economy of the travel narrative. 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, the secure. The 'unhomely' prevents us from making ourselves at home and therein it is overpowering. But man is the strangest of all, 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 t o . . . ; path.198

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: 'he', 'one'). Consequently, it is through the Institution 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 by the very entrance of a 'third': the position occupied by the stranger as also representing 'the best one' to judge, to make decisions that are 'fair' and not conditioned by native

THE BAROQUE RETURN

131

preferences or biases that belong to constitutive identities. Only through the event of 'strangeness' (by extension, the social being of the stranger) do all knowledge and power reach their limits - they exhaust or spend themselves - and, in turn, must yield to the power of the 'strangest thing of all'. The basic definition that Heidegger gives to the essence of 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 privilege an Indo-European economy enjoys over other social economies, which explains why the constant expansion of its imperium has been an essential part of its form. For example, only by losing one's being-forthe-family, 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 by Humboldt's Cosmos). For the modern imagination, the 'overpowering power' 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. We can understand, therefore, that the project of colonialism cannot be separated from the narrative biography of European man. It was the narrative power of this economy (oikonomia, which can also be translated as 'home economy') which proved to be superior to all other economies (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 provided by the new science. This was accompanied, as we have outlined, by a pedagogical and moral installation of order that is well known and a virulent accumulation of the 'collector'. Europeans may travel in their mind's eye because they 'possess' - as a condition of their consciousness - as Alexandra von Humboldt said, '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 which 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 which link him to home. 199

132 THE RETRUN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 Pratt's version of 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 (polls), the state, or the empire through the media of language and economy. One aspect of this sedentary economic structure is that no experience can be completed outside a process of its return and incorporation into 'the Same' (Derrida), a structure which underscores Indo-European societies and finds itself inscribed in every region of its economy. It is this principle that poses an insurmountable problem to contemporary European ethics as exemplified in the writings of Derrida and Levinas: once the Other appears as Other, it is already destined to be the Same, that is, to be incorporated, digested, reduced to an artefact of its economy. 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 "centres of calculation", museums, laboratories, botanical gardens [and I would add theatres] 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 a content of experience. The movement represented by the very form of narrative, as a distinctly European diegetic structure, is the very condition of 'travelling beyond the limits'. At the basis of this notion of economy is there not also a fundamental determination of the imagination that appears in fiction? At the basis of the aesthetic possibility 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 traveller 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 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 traveller himself, who begins to become reflective, a mirrored surface, scintillating with glimpses of the

THE BAROQUE RETURN

133

environment that surrounds him. We can catch a glimpse of this 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. 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 traveller'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 wras incorporated into die economy of European consciousness. Without the spectacle, the theatre, the dream - the reality of the New World could not exist for the European. Opposite to a narrative of immigration, or a cultural project that begins in Europe (even only to shipwreck the culture and history of Europe within an emancipatory narrative), 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 mood of Carpentier's story is melancholy - the separation of the loved object from the shadow that falls across the beloved ego (Europe). Thus, Carpentier's Concierto Banoco has a deep melancholy mood that it draws in its resonance with a baroque mass or dirge, underscoring the primary theme of return; thus, its passage is also a work 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 identified with as his own, only to find a new perspective upon his identity and the history of his own culture. At the level of genre,

134

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

the 'novel' (narrative mode) is generically an opera, as the tide indicates; Carpentier compiles and combines the text of music, historical documents, travel diaries, the carnival and other fictions in a richly ornamented framework designated by the 'baroque'. 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 come to Sant' 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 Mexico, by Solis, upon which the original libretto is based. What is more significant perhaps, 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. 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 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: Cortes 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 after the performance, the Mexican interrogates Maestro 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. '

THE BAROQUE RETURN

135

'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?' '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 theatre to be amused. '202

Most of all, the Mexican is shocked when he learns that Montezuma's role was played onstage by a woman, that women sing male parts, and that two of the women singers are, in reality, offstage lovers. This could either be Carpentier's commentary on neocolonial machismo, or a reading of the feminization of the primitive that often took place from the European perspectives of other cultures, which returns several times as a foundation trope of modernism and underlies the relationship between the allegorical incorporation of colonial narratives, and other 'narratives of the periphery'. 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 marvellous 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

136

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

a capacity for artistic flight, and 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 theatre. '204 Taken aback by the intensity of the production, he quickly finds himself identifying more with the Indians than 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 travelled to Europe to find his origin 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 world-view that has exhausted itself so completely that it must infuse itself with elements of the New World, disguised as masks in the theatre. 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 Worlds. 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 theatre. '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 anamnesis, the transformation of his own memory, although now from the perspective of a new spectator of history. Returning to Carpentier's theory of history discussed in the last chapter, 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 (the year in which the novel is set). Consequently, Carpentier chooses precisely this moment to effect his own 'baroque return', that is, a return to this fabulous moment in the creation of Mexico, by installing a modern

THE BAROQUE RETURN

137

witness at the centre 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 centred 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 frames, 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. 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 Philomene'. (As he says, 'In Havana, they'll just call me "the Negro, Filorneno". ') 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 neocolonial perspective as more literal to the meaning of their own flesh, as thoroughly modern and thus racialized subjects. '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?' 'That would be the Day of Resurrection/ answered the criollo. 'I don't have the time to wait all that time, ' said the black..,208

And yet, throughout the final chapter, there are trumpets sounding everywhere: Filomeno's trumpet; the whistle of the train leaving the station in Venice drowning out the last word on Filomeno'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

138

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

begins - with the postcolonial traveller departing on a journey in order to return to the source of his identity; although there are now variations as there are in any baroque concerto. Over here is now Europe, and over there is now America. Europe is the past, America the future. And the future is, in the final account, entirely fabulous.

Conclusion: One or many baroques?

Throughout this study, I have implicitly posited an analogy between two principal categories: baroque and postmodern. I have developed an immanent critique of the function of analogy within this critical and literary tradition as well, as perhaps the weakest and most formally strained of all logical relations. Consequently, it may strike some as odd that I would posit a relation only to tear down (or to 'deconstruct', perhaps) the very mechanism for establishing this relation in the first place. If this appears like a contradiction, perhaps this is because it is. In my own defence, I can only solicit a statement once made by Nietzsche: 'Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. ' But then, in my view, which is a Marxian view as well, the representation of the field of Culture is made up of such contradictions, particularly concerning the representation of the genesis of cultural forms by a causality identified with the ebb and flow of material processes. Therefore, I find it perfectly cogent and acceptable to offer the following contradictory propositions: 1. there is no relation between the baroque and the postmodern; or 2. the relation between the baroque and postmodern cannot be established purely by means ol analogy or resemblance; or 3. there is a certain relation between the baroque and the postmodern, but one that is strained and purely artificial (following the earlier logic of the barroco syllogism: 'If every A=B and some C does not equal B; then, some C does not equal A'). If some find these statements represent a kind of 'kettle logic', I would recall that it was Borges who first identified the baroque as style that deliberately exhausts (or attempts to exhaust) its own possibilities, as well as by the intellectual traits of self-caricature and humour. And yet, 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 humour as exhaustion. As Borges writes, 'I would venture to say that the baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources. '209 Perhaps

140

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

this is why even in the famous mantra of high modernist aesthetics, I3art pour I'art, one can easily detect at bottom a certain baroque spirit of hatred and self-caricature. If, as Paz says, '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 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, it follows that 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 principal meanings of the tide of this book, which is written at the end of the current tradition of modernity that has been named, for better or worse, though usually for the worse, the postmodern. ) Does this mean, however, that the baroque of Benjamin is the same baroque for Foucault, or Lotman; or that of Sarduy or Carpentier, or even of Borges himself? Absolutely not! Rather, each to their own baroque! And if only because they did not share the same tradition of modernity, which is to say, they did not share the same sense of humour. Although I 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 passage from Borges' baroque encyclopaedia. Some might argue that here I am simply conflating the term baroque with a generally accepted and 'canonical' form of modernity, defined by a spirit of self-negation, as being 'a tradition against itself (Paz), as a result of which the term would be destined to always serve as modernity's Other, whatever this happens to be at the moment. I will return to this possible objection below. Aside from the similarity, if not the uncanny identity, of the various problems that have beset both terms respectively 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 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

We might compare this statement to a later passage by Foucault from The Order of Things:

CONCLUSION

141

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 descriptions of the postmodern echo - in an uncanny manner, perhaps - this strange anxiety that hails from the original seventeenth-century Baroque: the anxiety over 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 interesting to remark further that Foucault makes this 'baroque thesis' even more relevant in that he locates this event sometime in the mid-seventeenth century - Genette is even more precise, 1653 - but 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 present moment. On the basis of this argument, could we see something here that runs parallel to the recent development of the eighteenth century as a historical period concept, and suggest - not without humour, of course - a new field of study in 'the Long-Baroque Century'? 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 a '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 any one 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 throughout the course of the study. (After all, what is the principle of 'intertextuaJity' 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

142

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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 relation to Segel and Maravall, as well as in my commentary on Eugenic d'Ors' theory of the 'baroque eon', one of the key features of this frequent comparison can be derived from the early 'international' (or '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 returns to in his allegory). If there has been a fundamental distortion within the category itself, this is often due to the representation of the early Baroque only within the context of one national tradition. In fact, it is already 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 these projects of national culture, as described above in the discussion of Maravall. Consequently, it would be a platitude to say that there are 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 or the linguistic particularity of a people ('the song of the people' after Herder), the concept is already fated to become confused when it is viewed from this later 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 modern'. Ironically, what this reductive gesture betrays is perhaps the same 'thirst for a single reality behind disparate experiences' that Warnke diagnosed above with regard to the sensibility that was characteristic, even 'typical', of early Baroque period. However, 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 imposing and monumental form, which is the 'single reality' of late capitalism.212 However, to echo an earlier statement by Foucault, we could say that the notion of 'a singular Modernity' (Jameson), or even earlier, of a single and unified field of Culture that is bound to the origin and destiny of the nation-state is of very recent origin,

CONCLUSION

143

and that today in view of the emergence of 'globalization' as a new theme with which to rehearse all the old questions of modernity, that this origin is already showing signs of vanishing just as suddenly as it appeared, along with the figure of a Subject who Foucault once described as merely a face drawn in the sand in the interval between two great historical tides. Concerning this thirst for a single reality behind a multiplicity of disparate appearances, it would seem odd to apply this statement to the postmodern as well, which is known for its celebration of heterogeneity, fragmentation, multiplicity and especially its hatred of unity and of the universal. And yet, behind this celebration there is still a tangible feeling of longing for 'one reality', and this is something that can be ascribed to the major concepts concerning a hidden core of 'the Real' (or 'Totality') operating behind appearances, whether this core is identified by Language, Ideology or the Unconscious. One wonders 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 yet another hidden plane of organization. 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 the significance of this passage, Sarduy goes on to frame its significance in psychoanalytic terms of 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 own description of the multiple and 'non-unified' figures of schizophrenic desire. 213 Whether this 'thirst for a single reality' assumes the form of 'the One' or 'the Multiple', one wonders if the all too frequent characterization of the rift or conflict between what Derrida once called the two forms of play, or Lyotard the opposition between 'Grand narrative' and 'multiple language games', is and always has been a patently false opposition, one which hides the essential and underlying identity between these two critical representations of the modern age. In fact, this recalls the criticism that French philosopher Alain Badiou has made of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of multiplicity, which is that it hides the good old category of scholastic philosophy, in its ancient taste for 'the One'. 214 Again, as WarnkeZ diagnosed, this was also an underlying factor of the early Baroque, that '[tjhe compulsive search for the One enmeshes the poet [the philosopher, and the critic] in the complexities and contradictions of the Many'.215 This returns us once more to the question that opens this study: 'Why the baroque?' But then, I would 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 age under the name of literature? Could it not be said, as I have hinted many times

144

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

throughout the course of this study, that what had earlier been understood as a mere device, an artifice, a mechanism or a trope has 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 earlier been an aspect of neoclassical rhetoric has metonymically come to signify the genus of 'literature' in the classification of 'modern 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 two very different things, or 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 simply implies that the early invention of this mechanism that has been found to be absolutely emblematic or even 'characteristic' 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. However, rather than announcing the liberation of Language from Representation, or rather the 'freeing up' of representation itself (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 out onto the order of things (which, according to Foucault, are suddenly found to belong to another order that is located beyond the powers of representation). Far from being a story of Language's transcendence over 'the Real', as has usually been associated with Foucault's triumphal 'post-structuralist' narrative of the emergence of 'language-centred' epistemology, it is the exact opposite! In fact, Foucault states quite explicitly that what he is narrating is the story of Language's 'demotion'.216 In the so-called'modern period', it is 'the Real' itself that assumes the position of transcendence over language. This movement of transcendence becomes the condition for us today to distinguish 'the Real' from 'reality', even though Foucault himself would not employ this opposition; rather, 'the Real' would be designated by what Foucault names as the 'empirico-transcendental doublet' that now corresponds to the position from which reality is ordered beneath or outside the powers of representation, and which 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' defined as ens creatum, which precisely limits its powers and instead destines it to repeatedly, if not obsessively, represent the withdrawal of

CONCLUSION

145

things into their own stubborn density. Thus, the mise-en-dbime, the 'baroque mechanism', 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 sedimentations, all the way to its ever receding and inaccessible origin. It is by no accident that Foucault pinpoints this moment as occurring late in the nineteenth century, and precisely around two principle figures: Nietzsche and Mallarme. 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 occur first at the level of representation, on its surface, the determination of which comes to designate, from the nineteenth century onward, 'a form of language that we now call "literature" '. ^'8 Thus, I return to continue the citation of the earlier passage I quoted in order to illustrate what Foucault means by the term 'baroque': 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 'modern age', or the age of 'modernity' that we are just now in the process of quitting, but still have not quite 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 and our own, 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 through the invention of 'the baroque mechanism' ('the text within the text'), which today has come to resemble a little too much a game. In short, the game is over. Or, is it?

146 THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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. 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 (I'ecriture). Of course, representation is no less of a game for us today, but one whose rules are now in the process of being rewritten, and 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 - 'modernite", modernismo, modernism, symbolism, futurism, 'ultraismo', and, of course, 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, even the more recent tradition of 'LANGUAGE poetry' in the US - emerged around the programmatic re-inventions of a mode of writing identified by the different modern notions of 'literary representation', broadly defined also to include other forms of discourse in the postmodern theoretical traditions that followed.220 This is true from the period of Mallarme and Baudelaire (or Rimbaud) all the way through more contemporary writers discussed here such as Sarduy and Carpentier (at least, the Carpentier who was the inventor of the tradition of'Magical Realism'). Consequently, it is by 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. In the end, what this allegory reveals however is perhaps the most severe '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 the theatre of Vivaldi, in order to learn once more '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 ultra-academic, 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 by again modernizing the baroque, as Sarduy and Lezama before him, but rather by referring the notion of the 'modern' to the path that Philomene ('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. It seems fitting that I would conclude this study of 'The Return 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 writings of Sarduy, these movements began with the hope of inventing a 'revolutionary theory of writing' in alliance with the political conflagrations of postcolonial

CONCLUSION

147

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, or tribal and family alliances; militarization and global capitalism, environmental devastation of resources and the widening of poverty, famine and hunger. As Elizabeth Roudinesco has observed, what followed the jubilant and exalted period of post-1968 that spiralled through the culture of the 1970s, marking perhaps the most fertile period of its cultural and intellectual criticism, and which was 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 period of the Counter-Reformation. ) This would also encompass the same period that Lyotard first designated as the 'period of slackening' - again, the theme of 'exhaustion'! Here we might discern in both these assessments something that marks the entrance of a second 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 texts 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, and the 'rhetoric of visibility' in terms of MerleauPonty's chiasme and the Lacanian concept of 'feminine jouissance. 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 regime, and perhaps her comment is an implicit reference to the 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 in the following passage by Julia Kristeva, written in 1983 after her period of participation in the Tel Queh 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 moments when one tradition of modernity exhausts 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

148

THE RETURN OF THE BAROQUE IN MODERN CULTURE

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; in particular, by the 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 great credit, this is something that 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 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 perhaps 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 In this phrase, we can find another iteration of Borges' famous formula that the baroque designates the moment at the end of a tradition, an exhaustion of all of its possibilities and its possible resources. And yet, finally, to say that 'literature', like 'the baroque', has become a purely academic form of culture - the historical artefact of the culture (s) of modernism that reproduced it obsessively as a recurrent 'theme' (in de Man's sense) - is easy enough. One can easily say 'no more literature', perhaps even 'no more modernity', just as easily as one might say 'no more baroque'. All these things have been said before, and more recently, with a frequency and even a redundancy that marks our contemporary moment as being one of profound Repetition, of having nothing 'new' to say, except that we have heard it all before and have become dreadfully bored (and perhaps boring as well). Have we lost our sense of humour? That is, our

CONCLUSION

149

capacity for 'literature'? In either case, this is the curious mood in which we find ourselves today, as if we are just now realizing, following Derrida's observation, that 'we have been expelled from the site. Perhaps this is the final meaning we might attribute to 'The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture', as being the last sign of our own fading modernity, which, in or at the end, can also be compared to a flawed and imperfect pearl.

Notes

Introduction 1 Rene Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 119. 2 On the above etymology of the term, see Harold B. Segel, The Baroque Poem: A Comparative Study (New York: E. P. Button, 1974), pp. 15ff. 3 Severe Sarduy, Barroco (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 31. 4 The Baroque Poem, Segel, p. 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), p. 142. 7 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), p. xv. 8 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xv. 9 Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. xv-xvii. 10 Jorge-Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York and London: Penguin, 1999), p. 4. 11 See Gerard Genette, Palimpsestes (Paris: Seuil, 1992), and also Introduction a I'architexte (Paris: Seuil, 1979). 12 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. vxiii. 13 Robert Harbison, Reflections on Baroque (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), p. 221. 14 Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 4. 15 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 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 licence 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 defence that in some sense Baroque invites this kind of treatment and thus to some degree deserve what it got'. See Harbison, Reflections on Baroque, pp. 220-1. 17 This underscores a fundamental contradiction that continues to structure

NOTES

151

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 the lines of expressive causality, which has now come to function, more or less, as a 'necessary fiction'. 18 Gerard Genette, Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), p. 222. 19 See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, §27. 20 Jose Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 100. 21 Wlad Godzich, The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 199,5), p. 69. 22 Godzich, The Culture of Literacy p. 67. Chapter 1 23 On this comparison, see Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 24 Heinrich Wolfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. iv. 25 Wolfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, p. 14. 1 am indebted to Harold B. Segel for many of these observations on Wolfflin. See Segel, The Baroque Poem, pp. 16ff. 26 Frank Warnke, Versions of the Baroque (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 12. 27 Warnke, Versions of the Baroque, p. 9 28 Segel, The Baroque Poem, p. 29. 29 Segel, The Baroque Poem, p. 27. 30 See my discussion of 'the baroque emblem' or 'the text within the text' in Chapter 8. 31 Segel, The Baroque Poem, pp. 30-1. 32 Quoted by Segel, The Baroque Poem, p. 24. 33 Segel, The Baroque Poem, p. 29. Here, I place the word 'discovery' in inverted commas following die practice of historian Anthony Pagden in his remarkable European Encounters with the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 58. 34 See Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 35 Quoted by Segel, The Baroque Poem, pp. 25-6. 36 Deleuze, The Fold, pp. 3-13. 37 Segel, The Baroque Poem, pp. 64-5. 38 See Foucault, The Order of Things, p. x. 39 Segel, The Baroque Poem, p. 29. Chapter 2 40 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 220. 41 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 210. 42 See Godzich, The Culture of Literacy, p. xi. 43 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 215. 44 William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and

152

NOTES

the Question of Modernity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), p. 155. 45 Godzich, The Culture of Literacy, p. 69. 46 See Kant, Critique of Judgement, pp. 28-9. 47 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language and Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 83. 48 Heidegger, Poetry, Language and Thought, p. 83. 49 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 212-13. 50 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 36. 51 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 215. 52 See Hans Blumenburg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 53 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 210. 54 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 220. 55 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 212. 56 Wayne Meeks, The Origin of Christian Morality (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 4. 57 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 213. 58 Quoted by Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 214. 59 Quoted by Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 213. 60 Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of Renaissance and the Origins of Modern Art (London: Belknap Press, 1985), p. 110. 61 Candamo, quoted by Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 214. 62 Hauser, Mannerism, p. 110-11.

Chapter 3 63 Wolfflin, quoted by Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque, p. 17. 64 Eugenio d'Ors, Barroco (Madrid, n. d. ), p. 94. 65 D'Ors, Cultura, quoted by Pilar Saenz, The Life and Works of Eugenio d'Ors (IBP, 1983), p. 89. 66 lean Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty: 1700-1789 (Geneva: Skira, 1964), p. 22. 67 Quoted by Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty, p. 23. 68 Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty, p. 23. 69 Quoted by Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty, p. 23. 70 D'Ors, Barroco (Madrid, n. d. ), p. 90. 71 D'Ors, Barroco (Madrid, n. d. ), p. 90. 72 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 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 73 Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde, trans. Rachel Phillips (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 19. 74 Paz, Children of the Mire, p. 1. 75 Paz, Children of the Mire, p. 3. 76 Paz, Children of the Mire, pp. 3-4.

NOTES

153

77 Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990), pp. 138-9. 78 This image of the modern corresponds to what Holderlin 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 Lacou-Labarthes, La Fiction du politique (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1987), p. 71. 79 Paz, Children of the Mire, p. 6. 80 Paz, Children of the Mire, p. 17. 81 Paz, Children of the Mire, p. 26. 82 Paz, Children of the Mire, p. 9. 83 Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Celestina's Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 231. 84 Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions, pp. 110-11. 85 Echevarria, Celestina's Brood, p. 231. 86 Paz, Children of the Mire, p. 161. 87 Paz, Children of the Mire, pp. 161-2. 88 Paz, Children of the Mire, p. 151. 89 Octavio Paz, Conjunciones y disjunciones, quoted from Echevarria, p. 229 (translation modified).

Chapter 5 90 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 147. 91 De Man, Blindness and Insight, pp. 146-7. 92 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 147. 93 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 150. 94 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 151. 95 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 150. 96 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 158. 97 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 159. 98 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 159. 99 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 160. 100 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 161. 101 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 162. 102 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 165.

Chapter 6 103 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La Raison baroque: de Baudelaire a Benjamin (Pans: Galilee, 1984), p. 58. 104 Buci-Glucksmann, La Raison baroque, p. 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

154

NOTES

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), pp. 12ff. 106 See 'Critique of Violence' in Walter Benjamin, Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), pp. 277-300. 107 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), p. 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 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 109 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 254. 110 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 254. 111 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 261. 112 Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, pp. 136-7. 113 Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 43. 114 Derrida, Aporias, p. 43. 115 At the same time we might notice that the figure of 'a people', while constituting architectural and rhetorical principles in the modern 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 7 116 W. G. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Bailie (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 496; also see Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction a la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), pp. 108-9. 117 We might further establish this emblematic function of Velasquez'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 1980s. 118 Calabrese, Neo-Baroque, p. 7. 119 Genette, Figures II, p. 210. 120 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 43. 121 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 43. 122 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 306. 123 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xv. 124 Severo Sarduy, 'Baroque and Neo-Baroque' in Latin America in Its Literature, ed. Cesar Fernandez Moreno, (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), p. 128. 125 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 16. 126 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 308. 127 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 325.

NOTES

15. 5

Chapter 8 128 Genette, Figures II, p. 21 On. 129 Genette, Figures II, p. 221. 130 See the above discussion of this reference in Chapter 7, p. 86. 131 Genette, Figures II, p. 222. 132 Genette, Figures II, p. 221. 133 Genette, Figures II, p. 221. 134 Genette, Figures II, pp. 221-2. 135 Genette, Figures II, p. 220n. 136 Genette, Figures II, p. 220n.

Chapter 9 137 Jacques Derrick, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 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, 'The Text within the text', p. 378. 141 Lotman, The Text within the text', p. 380. 142 Lotman, 'The Text within the text', p. 377. 143 Lotman, 'The Text within the text', p. 379. 144 Lotman, 'The Text within the text', p. 377. 145 Lotman, 'The Text within the text', p. 377. 146 Lotman, 'The Text within the text', p. 377. 147 Quoted from Amy Mandelker, 'Semiotizing the Sphere: Organicist Theory in Lotman, Bakhtin, and Vernadsky', PMLA: 109(3)(May 1994), 386. 148 Lotman, 'The Text within die text', p. 379. 149 Lotman, The Text within die text', p. 378. 150 Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 376-7. 151 Lotman, The Text within the text', p. 379. 152 Lotman, The Text within the text', p. 380. 153 Lotman, The Text widiin die text', p. 381. 154 Lotman, The Text within the text', p. 379. 155 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 5. 156 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 15. 157 Lotman, The Text widiin die text', p. 380. 158 Lotman, The Text widiin the text', p. 376. 159 Of course, diis is a kind of postmodern Utopian expression, one diat must presuppose that die different texts and interlocutors ttiat make up a cultural sphere are capable of entering into a kind of 'free indeterminate accord' from the spontaneity of an inaugural gesture; dierefore, one must also ignore die fact diat Culture 'is not a chaotic collocation of texts but a complex, hierarchical functioning system' (Lotman, The Text within die text', p. 380). 160 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xi. 161 As the principle of the art of combining different aesdietic media, this

156

NOTES

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 (Mallarme, 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), p. 40. 163 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 65.

Chapter 10 164 I employ this concept from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. See Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 165 Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 4. 166 Lisa Block de Behar, The Passion of an Endless Quotation, trans. William Egginton (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), pp. 2-3. 167 Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1962), p. 44. 168 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 43. 169 Borges, Labyrinths, p. 42. Appropriately, the above passage is cited from my earlier commentary on Borges, 'The Baroque Detective', in The NonPhilosophy of Gilles Deleuze (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 79. 170 Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 510. 171 Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 512. 172 Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 514. 173 Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 515. 174 Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 307. 175 Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 145. 176 Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 144. 177 Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 145. 178 Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 146.

Chapter 11 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189

Echevarria, Celestina's Brood, p. 218. Echevarria, Celestina's Brood, p. 218. Sarduy, Barroco, p. 74. Echevarria, Celestina's Brood, p. 228. Severo Sarduy, Cobra (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), p. 147. Echevarria, Celestina's Brood, p. 232. Sarduy, Cobra, p. 147. Sarduy, Cobra, p. 139. Echevarria, Celestina's Brood, p. 232. Echevarria, Celestina's Brood, p. 236. Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-85, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 529.

NOTES

157

190 191 192 193 194

Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., p. 527. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., p. 529. Saenz, The Life and Works of Eugenic d'Ors, p. 114. Saenz, The Life and Works of Eugenia d'Ors, p. 115. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 223. 195 Echevarria, Alejo Carpentier, p. 224. 196 Echevarria, Alejo Carpentier, p. 224-5.

Chapter 12 197 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 123. 198 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 128. 199 Pagden, European Encounters, p. 31. 200 Pagden, European Encounters, p. 31. 201 Quoted from Pagden, European Encounters, p. 37. 202 Alejo Carpentier, Cornier to Barroco (London: Andre Deutsch, 1991), pp. 102-3. 203 Carpentier, Concierto Barroco, p. 104. 204 Carpentier, Concierto Barroco, p. 103. 205 Carpentier, Concierto Barroco, p. 110. 206 Carpentier, Concierto Barroco, p. 111. 207 Carpentier, Concierto Barroco, p. 111. 208 Carpentier, Concierto Barocco, p. 115.

Conclusion 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222

Quoted above, see pp. 3-4. Warnke, Versions of the Baroque, p. 22. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 51. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), p. 101. Sarduy, Barroco, p. 36. See Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Warnke, Versions of the Baroque, p. 23. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 299. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 336. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 300. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 51. I do not include the area of painting and the plastic arts here since this area of modern culture has become separated off as an autonomous tradition, in many ways, and would constitute the subject of another study. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., p. 530. Quoted from Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., p. 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 Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy; both Blanchot's La Communaute inavoublenient (1984) and Nancy's reply in La Communaute desoeuvree (1990) examined the notion of'literary communism' in

158

NOTES

the writings of Georges Bataille. One could say, however, that the notion of 'polities' 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 modernism 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' (d-venir). Part of this meditation is influenced by Derrida's lyrical reflections on fmitude; 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 Mallarme), and especially the earlier writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard from the 1970s and early 1980s on the concept of the sublime. 223 Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 4-6. 224 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 5.

Bibliography

Badiou, Alain (1999) Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, trans. Louise Burchill, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 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. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine (1984) La Raison baroque: de Baudelaire a Benjamin, Paris: Galilee. (1987) La Folie du voir: de I'esthe'tique----- baroque, Paris: Galilee. Calabrese, Omar (1992) Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times, trans. Charles Lambert, Princeton, NJ: Princeton LJniversity Press. Carpentier, Alejo (1974/1991) Concierto Barroco, Madrid: Siglo/London: Andre Deutsch. Deleuze, Gilles (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis: LJniversity of Minnesota 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. Denida, 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 (n. d. ) Barroco, Madrid. Echevarria, 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.

160

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Egginton, William (2003) How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. 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, Gerard (1969) Figures II, Paris: Editions Seuil. -----(1979) Introduction a I'architexte, Paris: Editions Seuil -----(1992) Palimpsestes, Paris: Editions Seuil 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. Bailie, New York: Harper & Row. Heidegger, Martin (1979) Poetry, Language and Thought, New York: Harper & Row. -----(1986) Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim, New Haven: Yal 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. Kant, Immanuel (2000) The Critique of Judgement, ed. Paul Guyer (ed. ), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kojeve, Alexandre (1947) Introduction a la lecture de Hegel, Paris: Gallimard. Lacou-Labarthes, Philippe (1987) La Fiction du politique, Paris: Christian Bourgeois. Lambert, Gregg (2002) The Non-Philosophy ofGilles 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 Lotman, Bakhtin, and Vernadsky', PMLA: 109(3)(May), 385-96. Maravall, Jose Antonio (1986) Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 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: LIniversity of Chicago Press. Saenz, Pilar (1983) The Life and Works of Eugemo d'Ors, IBP.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

161

Sarduy, Severe (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. 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, Rene (1963) Concepts of Criticism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Williams, Raymond (1997) The Politics of Modernism, London: Verso. Wolfflin, Heinrich (1966) Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Index

Abensour, Migel 67 'acceleration of history' (Paz) 53, 54, 65, 94 action 62, 83 Adams, A.: History of French Literature 93 adornment, see ornamentation Africa 128 allusions 60 Almeida, Francisco de 24 Althusser, Louis 125 America 57, 58, 121, 126, 138, 147 anamorphosis (incompletion or distortion) 34-5 anti-baroque 51-8 anxiety 18-19, 22, 107 architecture 17, 18 Aries, Philippe 27, 74 Ariosto, Ludovico: Orlando Furioso 23, 24, 26 Aristides 36 Aristotelian form 21, 23 Armstrong, Louis 137, 146 art 37, 105, 121, 127, 128, 140 see also painting Artaud, Antonin 125-6 'artificialization of culture' 126 Augustine, Saint 36 Badiou, Alain 143 Bakhtin, Mikhail 40, 97, 100, 106 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language 98 Balboa, Vasco da 24 baroque and anti-baroque 51-8 concept as 'fiction' 5-6

definitions of 3-4 derivation of 1 descriptions of 17-18, 112-13 and history 11-12, 41-2 as a period 9, 17 and postmodernism 139 'pure concept' (Deleuze) 6-7 as a Third Style' (Spengler) 128 see also baroque style 'baroque design' 4 'baroque effect' 23 see also spectators/readers 'baroque eon' (d'Ors) 8, 9, 41-8, 113, 142 'baroque mechanism' (Maravall) 28, 36 baroque style 9-10, 20, 41, 113, 139, 144 in art and architecture 17-18 in literature 19-20 Barthes, Roland 4 Bataille, Georges 125, 126 Baudelaire, Charles 53, 62, 68, 69, 82, 94, 146 Les Fleurs du mal 45 beauty 43-4 Beckett, Samuel 55 Bembo, Pietro 26 Benjamin, Walter 9, 41, 42, 45, 66, 67-76, 83, 94, 140, 147, 154 'Critique of Violence' 69, 154 Bergson, Henri 55 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 17, 20, 24, 45 St Theresa 18 Bible 100 Big Bang thesis (Sarduy) 120-1, 123, 127, 148

INDEX

Bishop, Elizabeth 57 Blanchot, Maurice 55, 67, 72 Block de Behar, Lisa 113, 156 Blumenburg, Hans 33, 152 body 13-14, 22, 35, 59-60, 121 Boileau, Nicolas 93, 94, 95 Booth, John Wilkes 118 Borges, Jorge-Luis 2, 6, 7-8, 14, 57, 85, 105, 108, 111-19, 140, 145, 150, 156 'Death and the Compass' 112, 117 'Garden of Forking Paths' 112, 117, 123 'Library of Babel, The' 116 'Shakespeare's Memory' 115, 116 'Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, The' 117, 119 Universal History of Iniquity 1, 3-4, 111, 112-13 Borromini, Francesco 17, 20 boundaries 30-1 Breton, Andre 13 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 7, 23, 67-8, 153 La Folie du voir 147 La Raison baroque 147 Buddha 56 Calabrese, Omar 39 Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times 81, 154 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro 20, 48, 121 La vida es suena 116 Candamo 37, 152 capitalism 42, 46, 142 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 17 The Conversion of St Paul 16, 21-2, 27, 33, 133, 142 Carducho, Vicente 37 Carpentier, Alejo 14, 57, 129, 140 Concierto Barroco 133-8, 146 Explosion in the Cathedral 120 Carroll, Lewis 125 Category of Eternity (Kant) 41-2 Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote 114-15 Chesterton, G. K. 118 chiaroscuro 17, 18 Chomsky, Noam 97

163

Christianity 35-6, 56, 147 Cixous, Helene 126 classicism 1, 17-18, 27, 83, 128 and romanticism 51, 113, 128 Clement, Catherine 126 Cochran, Terry 28 code 97, 100-1, 102 Columbus, Christopher 123 commedia 21 Condorcet, Marquis de 101 conspiracies 117, 118, 119 consumer culture 90 conversion 35-6 Corinthians 35, 137 Counter-Reformation 17, 23, 27, 147 criticism 8, 54, 75 Croce, Benedetto: Storia della eta barocca in Italia 1 Cuba 123, 127 culture 'advanced' and 'backward' 101-2 'artificialization of 126, 127 concepts of 70, 71, 73, 122, 142 criticism of 75, 103, 126 'of death' 73-4 'feminization of 68 forms of 11-12, 42 history of 42, 53 inner coherence of 99 as a living organism 40-1 narratives of 75 plurality of 45 see also consumer culture; popular culture Dante Alighieri 125 d'Aubigne, Theodore-Agrippa 19 de Man, Paul 59-66, 81, 82, 83, 153 De Quincy, Thomas 115 death 72, 73-4, 76, 124 deconstruction 81 decoration, excessive 43 see also ornamentation Deleuze, Gilles 23, 30, 114, 125, 128, 155 Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque 6-7, 26-7, 150, 151 Delillo, Don 55 Dernda, Jacques 25, 67, 74, 102, 105, 132, 143, 149, 151, 154, 155

164

INDEX

'Force and Signification' 148 'Freud and the Scene of Writing' 126 'Genesis and Structure' 103 Writing and Difference 126 Descartes, Rene 101, 106, 108, 141, 143 'dispersion' (Foucault) 83-4, 85 Donne, John 19, 113 d'Ors, Eugenic 2, 8-9, 41-8, 81, 94, 113, 120, 126-7, 142, 152 Duras, Marguerite 55 Echevarria, Roberto Gonzalez 58, 121, 122, 129, 153, 156, 157 Egginton, William 29, 151 Eliot, T. S. 57 emblems 97, 98, 103, 107 enthusiasm 52 entr'acte 21 episteme 81, 83, 85, 88, 89 eroticism 125 error 107-8 estrangement 35, 36, 37-8 'Eternal Return' 47, 56 Europe 121, 128, 133, 136, 138, 147 European colonialism 24, 42, 131 European man 131

Galileo 143 gaze 79, 87, 88, 89, 90 Gelley, Alexander 106, 156 Genette, Gerard 4, 9-11, 14, 21, 45, 60, 75, 79, 82, 87, 91-6, 103, 120, 141, 154, 155 Ginsberg, Allen 57 Giusti, Girolamo: Montezuma 134, 135 globalization 143 Godzich, Wlad 13, 30, 151, 152 Gongora y Argote, Luis de 19, 20, 51, 57, 121 Goya, Francisco de 127, 128 Gracian, Baltasar 51, 113 grammar, deep universal 97 Gryphius, Andreas 19, 69 Guattari, Felix 128, 155 Guy, Constantin 82

Harbison, Robert 5, 150 Hauser, Arnold 37, 152 Hegel, W. G. 33, 101, 112, 131 Phenomenology of Mind 70, 79, 154 Heidegger, Martin 30-1, 60, 82, 84, 152 Introduction to Metaphysics 130, 158 Sein und %eit 84 Herbert, George 19 Herder, Johann Gottfried 41 fashion 61 'feminization of culture' 43, 68, 135 heterotopia 4-5, 9 figure 44, 93 'hidden God' (Blumenburg) 33 High Baroque 19, 21, 23, 34 Fleming, Paul 19 Focillon, Henri: La Vie des formes 39, historic consciousness 54 history 45-8, 52, 56, 66, 72 41 'acceleration of (Paz) 53, 54, 65 fold 65-6 end of (post-history) 45-7 forms 39, 40, 94 interruption of 68-9, 71 Foucault, Michel 73, 79-90, 92, 93, and literature 118, 119 96, 105, 106, 140, 143, 144, and narrative 64, 136 146 and plot 117-18 The Order of Things 2-3, 4-5, 27, see also messianism 47, 101, 107, 140, 141, 145, 150, history of modern baroque 14 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157 Hjemslev, Louis 97 France 125, 147, 148 Freud, Sigmund 8, 13, 40, 47, 67, 81, Hocke, Gustav: Die Welt als Labyrinth: Manier und Manie in der 83, 126 Europaischen Kunst 19 furor 28, 29, 36-7 Hogarth, William: Analysis of future 53 Beauty 43-4, 136 see also time/temporality

INDEX

Holderlin, Fnednch 81, 84 homeostasis 98, 99, 120 human animal 61 Humboldt, Alexander von 131, 132 Relation historique 133 Huygens, Christian 19 ideology 33, 37, 48, 67, 12, 5, 143 India 124, 128 individualism 79 intermezzi I intermedia 20-1, 105 'inter-textuality' 82, 85, 86, 87, 91, 92,

129 Irigaray, Luce 126 isomorphism 97, 105-6, 107 Italy 24 Jameson, Frednc 142, 153, 154, 157 Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism 2, 42, 150 jouissance feminine (Lacan) 18, 147 Joyce, James: Ulysses 60 Juana Ines de la Cruz, Sor: El Sueno 58 Judgment Day 71, 137 Julius Caesar" 117, 118 Kaika, Franz 53, 70, 128 Kant, Immanuel 4, 8, 11, 25, 27, 30, 38, 40, 41, 95, 127, 151, 152 Critique of Judgement 106-7 and language 106-7 Kepler, Johannes 121, 143 Kirkpatrick, Fergus 117, 118 knowledge 103, 105-6 and concepts 4 and literature 111 Kqjeve, Alexandre 79, 154 Kristeva, Julia 98, 105, 147 Lacan, Jacques 18, 23, 41, 121, 122, 124, 125, 147 Lang, Andrew 112 language 47, 60, 64, 82, 83-5, 106, 143 and literature 58, 84, 144 logic of 105 and meta-language 102 and text 99 'LANGUAGE poetry' 146

165

Latin America 57, 58, 108, 121, 124, 126, 128, 129 Lautreamont, Isidore Ducasse 125 Leibniz, G. W. 26, 114 Leitch, Vincent 154 Levi-Strauss, Claude 106 Levinas, Emmanuel 112, 132 Lezama, Jose 14, 41, 57, 120, 121, 146 'life' 60-1 Lincoln, Abraham 118 literary criticism 59, 60-1 literature 4-5, 19, 47, 64-6, 84, 85, 94, 148 and High Baroque 19 and history 118, 119 and knowledge 111 and language 144 and mannerism 19 modern 92, 104, 145 postmodern 104 Livet, M. C. L. 92 Locke, John 107 logic of language 105 logo-centricism (Derrida) 102, 105-6 Lotman, Yuri 40, 140 'The Text within the text' 97-105, 106, 155, 156 Lowell, Robert 57 Lowy, Michael 67 Luther, Martin 36 Lyotard, Jean Francois 6, 23, 30, 93, 147 Magellan, Ferdinand 24 Mallarme, Stephana 47, 125, 145, 146 Mankelker, Amy 155 mannerism 1-2, 19-20, 23, 25, 27 in art 37, 105 derivation of the term 20 in literature 19, 20 Maravall, lose-Antonio 11, 12, 27, 45, 73, 142, 151 Culture of the Baroque 28-34, 151, 152 Marino, Giambattista 19, 20 Marti, Jose 14, 41, 121 Marvell, Andrew 19 Marxism 68, 69, 84, 144

166

INDEX

materialism 56, 68 meaning 100, 104-5 Meeks, Wayne 36, 152 memory and forgetting 60-1, 63, 82, 83, 115 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 147 messianism 67, 68-9, 83 meta-language 102 Mexico 134, 135, 136, 137 Michelangelo: Victory 24 migration in Europe 36 minimalism 42 mirrors 102 mise-en-abime 21, 86, 105, 117, 145 modernity/modernism 13, 23, 42, 53, 56, 59-66, 68, 140, 148 and history 63, 64, 68 and postmodernism 2, 14, 66, 104 monad 26 Monegal, Emir Rodriguez 2, 150 mono-textuality 98 Montralay, Michelle 126 myth 53, 67 narrative 94, 129 and culture 75 and history 64, 75, 136 travel narrative 131, 132 nature, return to 38 'new', the 23, 24, 38, 42, 55, 66 New World 133, 134, 136 Nietszche, Friedrich 40, 47, 55, 60, 61, 62, 84, 139, 145 nouveau roman 125, 146 Nunc Stans 71 Odyssey 131 Olson, Charles 57 'Orientalism' 3, 56-7, 123-4 originality 121 ornamentation 25-6, 42, 45 otherness 53, 54, 75, 76, 117, 132, 140 Oulipo 746 Pagden, Anthony 135, 157 painting 87, 127 anamorphosis 34 pan-syncretism 58 panoramagram 103-4

parody 112-13 Pascal, Blaise 93 past 53, 54-6, 62-3, 72 abolition of 68 Paul, St 35 Paz, Octavio 51-8, 94, 123, 140, 146, 152 Conjunctions and Disjunctions 52, 153 Pellegrino, Camillo 26 phantasm 13 Pierce, Charles 97 Pinciano, Lopez 29, 37-8 place, negation of 57 Plato 71, 105, 133 plot and history 117-18 Plutonism 120 Poe, Edgar Allan 117, 119 poetry and language 58, 84 Pope, Alexander: Odyssey 112 popular culture 10, 11-13, 17-18, 26, 32 post-history 46-7 post-structuralism 80, 147 postmodernism 14, 42, 72, 79-81, 86, 87, 97, 103, 107 and baroque 139 and knowledge 106 and modernism 2, 13, 66, 104 Pound, Ezra 57, 58 Pratt, Mary Louise 132 present (time) 46, 53, 54-5, 62-3, 72, 124 progress 71 Propp, Vladimir 98 Protestantism 56 Proust, Marcel 82-3 psychoanalysis 121, 122 Quevedo, Francisco de

19

racism 60 're-structuration' (Lotrnan) 105 reading 94, 96, 111-12 Reid, Alastair 2, 150 Rembrandt 17, 127, 128 Renaissance 1, 18, 20, 41, 128 repetition 54-5, 61, 86, 113, 115, 149 representation 80, 81, 83, 86, 87, 144

INDEX

'representation of representation' (Foucault) 82, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92, 105 repression 83, 122 resemblance 116, 117 resortes (Maravall) 28, 29, 34 responses 23, 24, 27 emotional 17, 18, 23, 24, 29 psychological 28, 29 and vertigo/dizziness 44, 53, 54, 95 return 51-2, 56, 82, 132, 136 Robinson Crusoe 9 Rococo 42-3, 44, 45 romanticism 57 and classicism 51, 113, 128 Ronell, Avital 154 Roudinesco, Elizabeth 125, 147, 156, 157 Rousseau: Emile 9 Roux, Wilhelm: The Struggle of the Parts in an Organism 40 Rubens, Peter Paul 17 'rupture' (Foucault) 81, 126 Rushdie, Salman 55 Sade, Marquis de 125 Saenz, Pilar 127, 157 Saint Amant, Marc-Antoine de

Moyse same

82

91-6, 105

un/readability 93-4 Sarduy, Severo" 1, 5, 14, 24, 57, 79, 86, 87, 92, 120-9, 140, 143, 146, 154 'Baroque and Neo-Baroque' 126 Cobra 57, 123-4, 156 Saussure, Ferdinand de 47, 97, 98, 106 'schema' 120 seeing as power 85 Segel, Harold 1, 20-1, 142, 150 The Baroque Poem 20, 27, 151 self-knowledge 63 semiotics 100, 101, 104 sexual identity 124-5 Shakespeare, "William 86, 115, 118 As You Like It 116 Shaw, George Bernard 6, 113 signs 47, 65, 84 and events 62 'simulacrum' (Deleuze) 13, 114 social/political context 25

167

Solis: Historia de la conquista de Mexico 134 Sollers, Philippe 126 space 23, 24, 27, 55 Spain 11, 57, 58 spectators/readers body of 35 as critics 75 and originator 87, 88 participation of 24, 33-5, 91, 133 responses of 23, 24, 27, 28-9, 34-5 and suspense 34-5, 37 and travel narrative 132 Spengler, Oswald 102, 128, 129 Spinoza, Baruch 115 spiritual/symbolic in baroque 22 Sponde, Jean de 19 Starobinski, Jean 42, 44, 152 Stranger, Institution of (Heidegger) 130, 131 structuralism 97, 103, 148 style 39, 40, 41 'historical style' (Wolfflin) 40 see also baroque style sublime 28, 29-31, 33, 45, 96 and Christianity 36 as a simulacrum of death 35 Surrealism 125 suspense 37, 71 symbolic function 43, 45 'system of judgement' 40, 41 Systems Theories 40 Tasso, Bernardo: L'Amadigi 23 Tasso, Torquato: Gerusalemme liberata 26 taste 39, 127 technique 25 technology 69-70 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 40 Tel Quel 125, 126, 146, 147 text 97, 98-105, 121 and language 99 and the unconscious 99 'text within the text' (Lotman) 98, 102, 105 'texture' (d'Ors) 127 theatre 73 Third Style' (Spengler) 128, 129

168

INDEX

Thirty Years War 12 Thorpe, Daniel 115 Tibet 124 time/temporality 42, 46, 52-6, 71-2, 107, 123 translation 114 Trauerspiel 69, 72-3, 74 travel narrative 131, 132 un/conscious 144

62-3, 99, 108, 122, 143,

Valery, Paul: Monsieur Teste 7 Vega, Lope de 29, 37 Velarde, Lopez 58 Velasquez, Diego 17, 20, 86 Las Meninas 79-80, 82, 86-7, 88, 89, 90, 91, 105, 108, 144 Vermeer, Jan 17 Vernadsky, Vladimir 40, 97, 155 vertigo/dizziness 44, 53, 54, 95 vitalism 59, 60, 63 Vivaldi, Antonio: Montezuma 734,

135, 136, 146 Voltaire 101 Vondel, Joost van den vox populi 75

19

Warnke, Frank: Versions of the Baroque 19, 20, 140, 142, 143, 151, 157 Wellek, Rene 1, 150 Weltanschauung 27, 40 Wenders, Wim 55 West 57, 73, 124 Western Culture 73, 101, 105, 108, 114-15, 128 Western writing 126 Wilkins, John 2 Wolfflin, Heinrich 152 Fundamental Concepts in the History of Art 39-40 Renaissance und Barock 18, 19, 41,

151 Wolfson, Louis 125 writing 111, 112, 125-6, 146