The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics (review)

Egginton's philosophical contribution to the much-debated relationship between the twentieth-century Neobaroque and the Early Modern Baroque argues that the baroque is an aesthetic counterpart to a "problem of thought" (2) that is coterminous with "modernity" from the sixteenth century to the present. He builds on his earlier book, How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality and the Question of Modernity (2002), in which he posited a virtually causal relationship between Renaissance development of theatrical space and modern epistemology and subjectivity. Modernity's fundamental problem, says Egginton, is that the subject of knowledge can only approach the truth of the world through a deceptive veil of appearances perceived by the senses. Employing terminology with which Kant would formulate the dilemma two centuries later, Egginton suggests it permeated every level of Baroque culture. The Baroque put that problem on center stage by means of two strategies that yielded very different results.

Using a distinction introduced by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Egginton describes a "major strategy" and a "minor strategy." Both, he says, can and should still be distinguished in Neobaroque cultural practices. The major strategy suggests a possible space where truth resides beyond the assumed veil of appearances through the use of techniques such as trompel'oeil, anamorphosis, or other tropes of incompleteness that draw one in toward an illusory depth with the lure of fulfillment beyond the surface. Focusing on this strategy, José Antonio Maravall qualified the Baroque as an enormous propaganda apparatus that manipulated a newly mobile populace into identifying with the interests of power elites through the use of dazzling spectacle and the promise of spiritual fulfillment in another life, Egginton finds a contemporary parallel to the political effects of the major baroque strategy in the Bush regime's use of the media to rally support for the "war on terror" and the Iraq war—a television show like the Fox series 24 could draw viewers into accepting the torture of detainees to prevent imminent catastrophe. The baroque "minor strategy," in contrast, refusing to make a distinction between representation and some other reality independent of it, reminds the viewer of works like Cervantes' El retablo de las maravillas that we are subject to mediation at all levels. Egginton studies a variety of cases of both major and minor strategies in canonical works in a variety of genres, Baroque and Neobaroque.

In his first chapter, Egginton adopts T.S. Eliot's formulation "dissociation of sensibility" or dissociationism to describe the separation of the world of the senses from the interior world of the knowing subject, of appearance from corporeal substance. Continuing to emphasize the formative importance of theatrical space, he develops that distinction as a separation between the spaces of representation and of spectatorship, exemplified in the theater within theater in Lope's Lo fingido verdadero, As spectators learned to separate their own external space from that of internal spectators of the drama of Roman actor Ginés's conversion to Christianity, a whole culture learned to conceptualize the world like theater spectators, a model that Egginton claims operant as well in Descartes's contemplation of his own ideas in the Meditations, The paradox of such representation is that it catches spectators up, assigning them a privileged but inescapable place within its play of power, as Foucault's reading of Velázquez's Meninas demonstrated. The major solution to bridging the separation was, says Egginton, the atomistic worldview of Cartesian holes (like window or doors in a house), between incompatible substances and independent worlds. The minor solution envisioned the structure of the world and of human knowledge like the endogenous and exogenous folds of the Deleuzian monad. In literature, that solution could also be theatrical: witness Gracian's prescription of cultivating one's caudal or intimate...