Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context

Chapter 12. Baroque/Neobaroque/Ultrabaroque: Disruptive Readings of Modernity

241  12 Baroque/Neobaroque/Ultrabaroque: Disruptive Readings of Modernity Mabel Moraña (Translated by Gerardo Garza) My song shall be a flood. —Francisco de Quevedo Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things. Hence, the baroque cult of ruins. —Walter Benjamin I am dressed in baroquism. —Jacques Lacan It seems to me that the laboratory of the future is in Latin America, and that it is there where one ought to think and experiment. —Félix Guattari From Colonization of Imaginaries to the Post-Auratic Era: The Baroque Disruption 1. Accidentalism, Difference, and the Origin Myth As it is known, attempts to explain the term baroque etymologically have coincided in a double derivation of its meaning: one aspect recovers the name assigned to one of the argumentative forms (the baroque syllogism as “the prototype of absurd formalistic and scholastic reasoning” [Corominas 88]) while the other refers to a deformity, to an unfinished desire. As an allegorical introduction for a characterization of the American Baroque, this duality could be condensed in the following image, always brought to mind: A foreign particle becomes implanted into the corporeal substance of a mollusk, and it is slowly 242 MABEL MORAÑA surrounded by layers of nacre that develop into a pearl. Nevertheless, if in the process of its formation, the emerging jewel finds irregularities in the interior walls of the oyster, its potential circularity is disrupted. Imperfect, pathological, that deformed pearl evokes a sphericity never achieved: its slightly monstrous body is affirmed in the nostalgia of totality and perfection.1 The baroque pearl is a melancholic, transubstantiated, impure being, saturated by matter. It is, at the same time, hybrid and palimpsest, a deformity conceived through the transgression of its own limits—something new, that results from the defensive struggle exercised by the body that receives the challenge of heterogeneity. As the product of a contradictory dynamics of absorption and resistance, the baroque pearl combines, in its process of formation, both the norm and its exception. This product, which is appropriated and deterritorialized by culture, is extracted from its natural habitat, turned into sumptuous merchandise, and integrated, in its doubly symbolic and real character, in the elites’ imaginaries as well as in their spaces of social and material exchange. The syllogistic meaning, as well as the one that refers to the imperfect pearl, includes the inescapable detonator of conflict: the irresistible, vainly hyperbolic, and not totally achieved rationality; and the logic of a formal existence that evokes precisely what “it lacks,” sinks into its limits, and explores its own borders. From this initial etymological digression I am interested in recovering what might be called the logic of baroque disruption, that is, its epistemological operational capacity with respect to the discourses that accompanied the entrance of Latin America to the successive instances of globalized modernity.2 This implies, in the first place, the understanding of the constitutive paradox of baroque aesthetics: the one that marks it as one of the principal mechanisms in the processes of transculturation implemented in America by Spanish colonialism , and that, at the same time, recognizes in the Baroque a fundamental piece in the process of construction of differentiated cultural identities in overseas territories. Thus, power and resistance, identity and difference, rationalist excess and sensorial extravagance are articulated, from the beginning, in the overcodi fied registry of baroque aesthetics, which was imposed on American territories as an instrument of domination and colonization on colonial imaginaries. Secondly, my research seeks to ascertain the cultural, historical, and ideological transformations of the baroque paradigm hat extends, through continuities and ruptures, from the humanistic enclaves of the viceregal period up to what might be called the post-auratic—postmodern, postcolonial—era, one that would correspond to the establishment of the Ultrabaroque.3 In this sense, I propose to read the Baroque as the allegorical reproductibil- BAROQUE/NEOBAROQUE/ULTRABAROQUE 243 ity of the struggles of power that are inherent in the process of insertion of the American world in the context of Occidentalism. Elsewhere I have referred to the processes of appropriation of the baroque code in the colonies, as well as the functions it assumes with respect to the processes of emergence of Creole consciousness in the “New World.”4 In that analysis I mainly emphasized the way in which the Baroque, which is introduced in America with the propagandistic, mass-oriented, and popular...