Thursday, December 19, 2024

What makes something Baroque?

It could be that when we call art, architecture, or music "baroque" we simply mean that the work was created during the baroque period.  Obviously though, this is just a nominal definition; we'd like to understand what holds together the various works of that period and what distinguishes them from the periods before and after.  In other words, we would like to understand the Baroque as a style or a concept that might apply to any artwork in any area at any time.  In fact, we already use the term colloquially in exactly this way -- something is baroque if it has a lot of curlicues and whirligigs, lotta ins lotta outs lotta whathaveyous.  When it is "bizarre, uselessly complicated ... associated with magic, complexity, confusion, and excess". It's intuitively clear that repeating the simple act of folding can produce this sort of baroque complexity.  In this third chapter, Deleuze tries to expand this intuition into a more precise definition by specifying exactly what type of fold is properly baroque.  The simple answer is that the baroque fold goes to infinity.  It appears when the focus shifts from a single fold with two sides to the unlimited process of folding that produces endless folds within folds.  This may sounds quite abstract, but one the beauties of Deleuze's approach is that we can keep in mind a very concrete image to guide us.




The single line of infinite variation or inflection, the line of the universe, curves every which way.  It forever and categorically separates one side from the other.  But at the same time, it interweaves these two sides so tightly at so many scales that they become almost indiscernible.  The convexity of one side becomes the concavity of the other, but within each convexity there is concavity and vice versa, endlessly.  And at the un-draw-able limit, the two sides even complete one another, lean on one another like the sticks of a teepee. 



This limit of the closure of the monad we saw last time -- where the world is in the monad, but the monad for the world -- is clearly the most difficult part of the image.  But while we shouldn't forget about this strange twist or "torsion" in the concept of expression, it doesn't seem to be the main focus of this chapter.  Here, the most important criteria of the baroque seem to be that: 1) the fold keeps going -- with the baroque, the fold gains an autonomy, and, if you will, becomes a verb rather than a noun, an "operative act", and 2) while the folds are densely interwoven at every scale, there are only two sides to the fold.  Together these two make up everything, achieving a kind of closure or convergence.  While Deleuze discusses these two facets of the baroque at separate points, they are really two aspects of the same idea.

What is properly Baroque is this distinction between and division into two floors. The distinction between two worlds was well known in the Platonic tradition: it knew the world through innumerable floors, following a movement of descents and ascents that confronted each other at each step of a stairway that lost itself in the eminence of the One and disintegrated in the ocean of the multiple—the stairway universe of the Neo-Platonic tradition. But the Baroque contribution par excellence is a world with only two floors, separated by a fold that reverberates on both sides in accordance with a different regime. It expresses, as we shall see, the transformation of the cosmos into a "mundus." F, 36)

If we want to maintain the operative identity of the Baroque and the fold, we must show that the fold remains limited in the other cases, whereas in the Baroque it enjoys an unlimited freedom, whose conditions are determinable. The folds seem to give up their supports—cloth, granite or cloud—in order to enter into an infinite contest (F, 48)

... the Baroque invents the infinite work or operation of the fold. The problem is not how to finish a fold, but how to continue it, how to make it pass through the ceiling, how to carry it to infinity. (F, 49)

We can think of the main concern of chapter 3 as working out all the corollaries of this definition of the baroque, and illustrating each of these ideas with examples from painting, architecture, and of course Leibniz's philosophy.  I'll explore these conclusion in roughly the order Deleuze gives them.

First, because there are two (and only two) categorically distinct floors of the baroque world, they separate into a pure interior without an exterior and a pure exterior that has no interior.  These are of course the monad, and matter respectively.  Everything is contained within the monad. It is a sealed chamber with no windows, and as a result has a "dark depth (F, 31).  If there is light within it, this must somehow come from an internal source of illumination, one that at this point remains a bit mysterious.  Deleuze mentions a number of architectural examples, the most interesting being Corbusier's final work, the chapel at Sainte Marie de La Tourette.  While the chapel technically has windows, it's clear that the light here is designed to 'just appear', and to illuminate only a portion of the interior in a very particular way by analogy to the way the monad contains everything internally, but only clearly perceives its own body.  This is a particularly interesting example because we don't usually think of Le Corbusier as "baroque", and yet his extreme formal simplicity does end up being kind of ... elaborate.



On the other side of the fold, we find a pure exterior.  Matter is a system of holes within holes, caves within caves, a sort of infinite sponge or Cantor dust.  Architecturally, this pure exterior corresponds to a facade that attains a 'life' of its own, independent of the structure it covers. 

The monad is the autonomy of the interior, an interior without an exterior. But it has, as its correlate, the independence of the façade: an exterior without an interior. The façade, for its part, can have doors and windows—it is full of holes—although there is no void, a hole simply being the place of an ever more subtle matter. The doors and windows of matter open or even close only from the outside and onto the outside. (F, 35)

Yet somehow the pure and separated interior and exterior nevertheless correspond without contact, in a sort of harmony or resonance (though Deleuze has yet to use this word).  We can see this intuitively in our initial image.  The push of one side is the pull of the other.  The labyrinth of the fold means that penetration is met seamlessly with invagination.  Is that what this is a picture of?  The two sides are inverted images of the same line.  The baroque transforms this reciprocity into a spiritual vector of high and low, rise and fall  -- souls rise towards rationality and fall towards the insensibility of pure matter.  But because these two floors are interlaced in a fractal pattern, the movement of rising or falling is never finished.  Souls move endlessly up and down unfolding towards rationality and refolding towards insensible matter upon the death of their body.  Though they are forever separated, the process of folding matter and soul together simultaneously results in the ongoing folding and refolding of each side independently.  The continuation of a single act of folding pushes these categorically distinct sides, "... to the point of their indiscernibility" (F, 52).  

At this point Deleuze introduces a distinction between "actualization" and "realization" which he returns to several times.  Though we've heard some about how the soul actualizes the virtual world or line of the universe, he has yet to make clear how realization works.  The brief mention of the concept at the end of chapter 2 (F, 30) suggests that it must in some sense be the correlate or duplication of actualization, but it's not immediately obvious why this should be needed as part of condition of the closure of the monad / the convergence of the world.  Still, I think our image gives us an intuition for the necessary reciprocity the fold introduces between the two sides -- the fold between matter and soul is always also a folding of matter and soul, respectively; the folding of either matter or soul is simultaneously an unfolding of the other term as well as a new folding between the terms.  In short, we always fold something already folded, which ensures that folding and unfolding cannot be opposites.  Thus the folding of the world which allowed it to be placed once and for all in the monad (actualization) must mean that the unfolding of the monad in time (realization) must correspond to a folding of the world.

Hence, the ideal fold is the Zweifalt, a fold that differentiates and is itself differentiated. When Heidegger invokes the Zweifalt as the differentiator of difference, he means above all that differentiation does not refer to a prior undifferentiated, but to a Difference that never ceases to unfold and refold itself on each of its sides, and which unfolds one side only by refolding the other side, in a coextensivity of the unveiling and veiling of Being, the presence and withdrawal [retrait] of beings. The "duplicity" of the fold is necessarily reproduced on both of the sides that it distinguishes, but which it relates to each other by distinguishing them: a scission in which each term stimulates [relance] the other, a tension in which each fold is pulled [tendu] into the other. (F, 40)

Deleuze illustrates this theme of the two floors by citing a number of paintings, the most amazing of which is El Greco's The Burial of Count Orgaz



It seems hard to imagine an image which better illustrates the folding of two radically distinct floors along the line of heads, as well as the repeated folds within each of the floors. 

By this point we can already start to observe that the list of consequences of our definition of the infinite baroque fold is starting to read like a "coincidence of opposites" (F, 44).  Exterior and Interior.  High and Low.  Deleuze now extends this list to include Light and Dark.  The fold is a type of Chiaroscuro (literally light-dark or clair-obscur in French).  We've already pointed out that the monad lacks windows, and thus has a dark background.  Nevertheless, it still possess a sort of internal light that illuminates its quartier or neighborhood, its 'place'.  While it obscurely contains the entire world in its dark depths, it clearly illuminates only a specific region of it, while the remainder trails off into shadow.  

More rigorously, since monads have no such slits [fentes], a luminosity that has been "sealed" within it is lit in each monad when it is raised to the level of reason, producing a whiteness through all the little internal mirrors. It produces whiteness, but it produces shadow as well: it produces a whiteness, which is coextensive with the clear area [quartier] of the monad, yet which becomes obscure or shades off [se dégrade] toward the dark background, the "fuscum," from which things emerge "through well-executed shadows and hues in varying degrees of intensity." (F, 42)

This connects to Deleuze's critique of the Cartesian notion that our ideas should be clear and distinct (D&R, 146).  With the monad, clarity is always 'shading off' into the obscurity of the background.  The micro-perceptions that compose this background are too small and infinitely numerous to be clear.  They fall outside its radius of illumination.  Yet they are an integral part of the infinite series that makes the monad a distinct individual, different from all the other monads.  Each monad expresses the whole world, but it's this ordering of light and shadow that makes it unique, that gives it a distinction without lending it a contour, just as a Chiaroscuro drawing constructs a figure from nothing more than patches of light and shade.

But as always, this light dark alternation happens on both sides of the matter-soul divide.  Rather than being made of solid and indivisible atoms, Leibniz's matter is full of holes.  In a sense, it's nothing but holes, since it's infinitely cavernous or spongy, and even the material parts of the sponge contain yet more holes inside of holes.  There shouldn't be anything here that would reflect light.  And yet there's no void in Leibniz's philosophy, and these folds of nothingness (perhaps more precisely of measure zero) give matter a texture and even a quality.

Hence texture depends not on the parts themselves, but on the strata that determine their "cohesion." The new status of the object, the objectile, is inseparable from different strata that dilate themselves, like so many occasions for detours and folds [replis]. In relation to the folds it is capable of producing, matter becomes a matter of expression. (F, 54)

This is a conception of the object [as objectile, as modulation] that is not only temporal but qualitative, inasmuch as sounds and colors are flexible and taken in modulation. The object is mannerist and longer essentialist: it becomes an event. (F, 22) 

Again like a Chiaroscuro, folding produces solid seeming form out of nothing, as if it were condensing or compressing matter from the air rather than assembling it from component parts.  In this way the fold can become a model for the distinction between emptiness and the void.  Every fold enclose only an 'empty' space, but the infinity of folds within folds prevents us from ever reaching a foundational void.  With texture, matter takes on a 'life' of its own, but without thereby becoming a substance in itself (a role which is reserved for the monad).  In this context Deleuze mentions several contemporary sculptors I'm not familiar with.

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