Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context

Chapter 3. Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds

55  3 Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds William Egginton The purpose of this essay is to test a philosophical hypothesis about a historical period against literary evidence. The hypothesis belongs to Gilles Deleuze, and it concerns his implicit description of the Baroque, taken as a cultural and philosophical whole. The literary evidence against which I wish to test this hypothesis comes from the seventeenth-century Spanish author Baltasar Gracián, in particular from several passages of his Criticón that deal with artifice and its relation to human being. In the essay’s first section I argue for describing the Baroque in philosophical terms as a problem concerning the separation between the space of representation and the space of spectatorship. I then explain this claim historically with reference to changes in the theater and painting from the late Middle Ages to the Baroque, and support the claim by way of a discussion of baroque spatiality in literature and visual arts. In the next section I outline two philosophical strategies—which I call, with Deleuze, holes and folds respectively—for negotiating the fundamental separation of baroque space, and then indicate where these strategies are at work in a variety of baroque artifacts. In this section I also confront and ultimately reject Deleuze’s appropriation of baroque cultural production for a philosophy of folds. Finally, in the essay’s last section, I argue that baroque cultural production—and here I work specifi- 56 WILLIAM EGGINTON cally with Gracián’s writing—offers clues to another philosophical description, one that undermines the tension between folds and holes that ostensibly characterizes the Baroque. Two Spaces José Antonio Maravall famously argued that the Baroque should be considered as a historical structure, rather than more specifically as a stylistic descriptor. Moreover, for Maravall the Baroque had to be understood as an international phenomenon; analysis that remained too focused on a single national context risked missing the forest for the tree (xvii). For the purposes of this discussion, I will assume the basic truth of the these claims, but regarding the former I will expand the discussion and regarding the latter I will remain somewhat more specific. On the one hand, in respecting the notion of the Baroque as structure, I want to move beyond what for Maravall remained a mostly sociological view of the Baroque—and a largely functionalist one at that—and open up a philosophical perspective on the Baroque; on the other hand, although I will draw on some examples of baroque production outside of Spain, for the purposes of this discussion the emphasis will remain on the Spanish context.1 Insisting that the Baroque be understood philosophically means that there is at work in everything we recognize as baroque an effort of thought to deal with a common problem. This problem was not such an issue prior to the period of dominance of those artifacts we call baroque, and will have undergone some significant change in order for the dominance of baroque production to have waned. The common problem I want to identify at the heart of baroque phenomena is widely known, has been called by many names, and has been described in bewildering variety. For the moment let me borrow the term used first by T. S. Eliot and more recently by Geoffrey Thurley to describe a problem they associated more with Romanticism than with any earlier period: namely, “the dissociation-of-sensibility” (18).2 Dissociation-of-sensibility refers principally to the modernist critique of the romantic and realist tendencies of the nineteenth century, and specifically to the subordination of art to something outside of, greater than, or more important than art—such as the absolute, for romantics, or the world as it is in itself, for realists. But as Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, and Martin Heidegger, in his entire oeuvre but specifically in his classic essay “The Age of the World Picture” (115–54), have argued, dissociationism is perhaps the fundamental characteristic of a European modernity dating to more OF BAROQUE HOLES AND BAROQUE FOLDS 57 or less the beginning of the seventeenth century—to the period, in other words, known as the Baroque. As I have argued elsewhere,3 if modernity can be characterized philosophically by a sort of generalized dissociation of the world of the senses from an interior world of the knowing subject, the model of...