Nadir Lahiji - Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy

Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy

Also available from Bloomsbury

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Being and Event , Alain Badiou

The Fold , Gilles Deleuze

Infinite Thought , Alain Badiou

Marx Through Post-Structuralism , Simon Choat

The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture , edited by Nadir Lahiji

The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture , Gregg Lambert

Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy

Nadir Lahiji

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The Ambassadors , Hans Holbein, 1533. London, Great Britain.

For Kiana and Sean

Contents

The Ambassadors , Hans Holbein, 1533. London, Great Britain. Credit: National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

Ecstasy of St. Teresa . Altar, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (15981680), Cornaro Chapel, S. Maria della Vittoria, Rome, Italy. Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Las Meninas , or The Family of Felipe IV. Ca. 1656. Oil on canvas. 3.18 2.76 m., by Velzquez, Diego Rodriguez (15991660), Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Credit: Copyright of the image Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY.

The chess-playing automaton of Johann Nepomuk Maezel, 1769.

The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, by Frank Gehry. Credit: Neil Setchfield/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

Walt Disney Concert Hall, from Grand and First Streets, Los Angeles, California, by Frank Gehry. Credit: Jian Chen/Art Resource, NY.

Veiled Woman (Femme drape), photography by Gatan G. Clrambault, 1918. Print on baryte paper, 17.9 12.5 cm. Inv. PP0164255. Muse du Quai Branly, Paris, France.

Veiled Woman (Femme drape), photography by Gatan G. Clrambault, 1918. Print on baryte paper, 17.9 12.7 cm. Inv. PP0164266. Muse du Quai Branly, Paris, France.

Statue of Liberty with head assembled/scaffolding. Photography by Gontrand Fernique. Location: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division, New York Public Library.

Head and torch of Statue of Liberty and metallic structure to build the bodyhalf constructed. Photography by the artist, Gontrand Fernique. Location: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division, New York Public Library.

Toward the Baroque Critique of Architectural Ideology

David Cunningham

Like all great theories of the modern, Nadir Lahijis adventures with the baroque are marked by a profound doubling. The baroque is both past and present, repetition and newness: an appropriately Benjaminian constellation of then and now that is only tenuously held together by the neo of a contemporary so-called neobaroque. The baroque is both an aesthetic sign of modernity, in which is to be first found many of those features of fragmentation and dissonance most usually associated with the modernist new, as well as the manifestation of the moderns collapse, or indeed regression, into postmodern ever-sameness. Politically, it is essentially conservative, rooted in the Counter-Reformation and the ideologies of absolutism, and yet, at the same time, it bears the promise of something radically subversive, setting in motion a scandalous disorientation and excess that might even encompass what Severo Sarduy goes so far as to term a baroque of revolution. The poison in the veins of an advanced capitalist society of the spectacle, the baroque is, as Lahiji puts it at one point in this fine book, simultaneously its own antidote.

At least something of what is at stake in this can be grasped through a return to perhaps the most extensive philosophical engagement with the baroqueprior, at least, to Gilles Deleuzes 1988 The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque that of Walter Benjamins The Origin of German Tragic Drama , written in the mid-1920s. Here, surveying the literary and artistic culture of his own time, Benjamin proposes that like expressionism, the baroque is not so much the age of genuine artistic achievement as an age possessed of an unremitting artistic will [ kunstwollen ]. This is true of all periods of so-called decadence. Denied the possibility of producing the well-wrought, self-contained individual work, not by virtue of any personal failing on the part of individual artists themselves but rather because of the historico-philosophical reality with which such artists in an age of decadence are confronted, the baroque, for Benjamin, acquires a new relevance and significance insofar as the state of disruption of the present

To the degree that tragic drama is thus, on Benjamins account, the negative imprint of the impossibility of true tragedyas the novel is for Lukcs in its similar relation to the epicthe significance of the baroque lies in the peculiarly modern sense of destruction and loss that pervades it. In the spirit of allegory, Benjamin writes, the Trauerspiel is conceived from the outset as a ruin, a fragment. It is unsurprising, therefore, that it should be Albrecht Drers genius of winged Melancholy, engraved a century before the baroque, that appears, for Benjamin, as the presiding figure of the Trauerspiel , as well as something like an emblem for the experience of modernity more generally.

If Benjamin thus recognized a certain repetition (with difference) of the baroque in not only the so-called decadence of early twentieth-century expressionism, but in Baudelaires or surrealisms more properly progressive allegorical perspectives, Lahiji identifies a rather different, historically specific return of the (neo)baroque in our own time. Here, in contrast to Baudelaires recourse to allegory as a means to resist the abyss of myth, the baroque resonances of the contemporary threaten, for Lahiji, to return us to something closer, at first sight, to the largely pejorative meaning that it had (prior to Heinrich Wlfflins late-nineteenth-century reconceptualization) of an apparently pointless excess and ornamentation; a meaning that associated it not only with artistic decadence but also with an authoritarian populism and theatricality born of a counterrevolutionary resistance to the democratic and rationalist impulses of the early modern era.

It is important in this respect that, although he is nowhere explicitly cited within it, it is widely recognized that Max Webers account of Protestantismand, more broadly, his theses concerning the secularization and disenchantment of the worldconstitutes one key backdrop for Benjamins Trauerspiel book. In Gillian Roses summary (as quoted by Lahiji), if Protestantism thus gave rise to a new ethics of worldly asceticism that was in concordance with what Weber defines as an emergent spirit of capitalism, the Counter-Reformation (in both Catholicism after the mid-sixteenth-century Council of Trent and in various strands of Protestantism itself) produced a correspondingly reactionary baroque ethic of worldly aestheticization . The latters allegorical vision of a world populated by the phantasmagoria or personification of soulless things in this way provides a central passage for the rise of those paradoxical reenchantments of the world to be found in the dreamworlds of both commodity culture and Fascism.

Benjamins account is supplemented in this respect by the great Spanish historian Jos Antonio Maravalls 1975 Culture of the Baroque, which, as Lahiji points out, without ever naming Adorno and Horkheimer, makes significant use of the term culture industry in its analysis of the seventeenth-century baroque and hence implies a connection between the early-modern absolutist use of spectacle and its later, more fully capitalist forms. What Lahiji describes therefore as a political theology of worldly aestheticism, characterized by an affective excess of signification and madness of vision characteristic of the original baroque, may help us make sense, in turn, he argues, of the so-called neobaroque of our own neoliberal times. As Peter Wollen remarks, in a key passage cited by Lahiji: Understanding the social, political and ideological humus which nourished the Baroque can help us to understand the context within which the neo-Baroque (and the postmodernism) is flourishing today.