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September 30, 2008
Monika Kaup in her The Neobaroque in Djuna Barnes in Modernism/Modernity says that Michel Foucault argued in The Order of Things, that the episteme of modernity was first articulated in the seventeenth-century baroque. Foucault writes:
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.
Kaup says that according to Foucault, the Baroque was a transitional period, which saw the first articulation of modernity, and contained the emergent elements of what would become Enlightenment rationalism as well as the residual, premodern knowledge that was losing authority. If placed under the optic of Foucault's theory of the baroque as the expression of an epochal and epistemic threshold, the characteristic disharmonies of baroque representation enumerated in formalist morphologies of the baroque such as Woelfflin's are historicized and validated at the same time.
The twentieth-century recuperation of baroque representation, therefore, is not a nostalgic gesture towards lost premodern unities and beliefs, but the opposite, a critical genealogy of modernity whereby the very principles of modern knowledge and representation are subjected to a deconstructive transformation.
Well-known topoi of baroque theorizing, such as the yoking of opposites within fragmented, unbalanced, and open wholes (coincidentia oppositorum); movement; and the impulse to break up static forms and transgress boundaries, all resonate with the epistemic break posited by Foucault. The content of baroque form grapples with the crisis of modernity in an ambivalent way, which can be characterized by the inclusive logic of both/and, rather than the dualistic logic of either/or.
Kaup says that Foucault's case for the baroque as an alternate modernity is stated even more urgently by Gilles Deleuze in his 1988 study of seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. For Deleuze, the baroque offers a unique response to the modern problem of the loss of traditional principles and beliefs. According to Deleuze, Leibniz's philosophy represents an alternate rationality because his thinking enacts the multiplication, rather than the reduction, of principles—in contrast to systematic Enlightenment rationality.
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