kraup becoming baroque carpentier
TRANSCRIPT
Becoming-Baroque: Folding European Forms into the New WorldBaroque with Alejo Carpentier
Kaup, Monika.
CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 5, Number 2, Fall 2005,pp. 107-149 (Article)
Published by Michigan State University PressDOI: 10.1353/ncr.2005.0043
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● 107
Becoming-BaroqueFolding European Forms into the New World Baroque
with Alejo Carpentier
M O N I K A K A U P
University of Washington, Seattle
How to account for the Neobaroque—the return to the
Baroque by twentieth-century intellectuals, writers, and artists? The
twentieth-century resuscitation of the Baroque—after having been vilified in
the nineteenth century as decadent art informed by a retrograde ideology—
is both a European and a trans-American phenomenon: it begins with the art-
historical studies of Heinrich Wölfflin; from there it spreads in nonlinear
rhizomatic fashion across borders between national languages and litera-
tures, disciplines, and continents. Thus, the movement implicates universal-
ist historians of ideas of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Spengler, Worringer,
and Catalan philosopher Eugenio d’Ors; writers of the historical avant-garde
of the 1920s, such as novelists William Faulkner and Djuna Barnes, poets
T. S. Eliot and Octavio Paz, and Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade; Cuban
essayists and writers of the mid-century Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima,
and Severo Sarduy; French philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze;
and contemporary writer-critics such as Mexican Carlos Fuentes,
Martinican Edouard Glissant, and Brazilian Haroldo de Campos. (I should
add that this list, though long, remains reductive.)1
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What is at stake in the modern and postmodern resuscitation of the
Baroque? I argue that the recovery of the Baroque is linked to the crisis of
the Enlightenment and instrumental reason. The twentieth-century crisis
of Enlightenment rationality opens the way for the rediscovery of an ear-
lier, alternate rationality and mode of thought (Baroque reason) that had
been repressed and vilified as an aberration beginning in the eighteenth
century and continuing through the nineteenth. In the first decades of the
twentieth century, both European and American theorists and writers
rediscovered the modernity of the Baroque, that is, its response to the episte-
mological and religious crises of the Scientific Revolution and the
Reformation. In the wake of the twentieth-century crisis of metanarratives,
the Baroque, stigmatized by the positivist faith in technological and social
progress, newly appears to offer a viable alternative.
A nonexclusive, decentering principle, the historical seventeenth-
century Baroque constitutes the West’s first modernity. Preceding the
Enlightenment, and unlike classical reason, Baroque reason conjoined the
contradictory impulses of the premodern and the modern, faith and rea-
son, the scientific and the mythic, marking the crisis and outer limit of
modernity—a crisis and outer limit which reappears in the twentieth
century under the term “the postmodern.” Two examples of such hybrid
seventeenth-century thinkers who sought to reconcile premodern knowl-
edge and modern reason are German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz and
Mexican scholar Carlos Siguenza y Góngora. Leibniz was not only one of
Europe’s leading rationalists and scientists—the coinventor (with Isaac
Newton) of the differential calculus; he was also the author of a theodicy,
and of the claim that “this is the best of all possible worlds.” The fame of
Leibniz’s doctrine is mainly due to Voltaire’s biting satire of Leibniz
through the model of the foolish philosopher Doctor Pangloss, who per-
sists in his faith despite all evidence to the contrary ( Jolley 1995, 1).
Leibniz’s ridicule by Voltaire marks the dismissal of the Baroque by
Enlightenment reason. In turn, Deleuze’s 1988 study of Leibniz, The Fold,
marks the revindication of Baroque reason following the twentieth-
century crisis of the Enlightenment project.
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B A R O Q U E A N D T H E
Q U E S T I O N O F E M E R G E N C E
In this essay, I want to pay special attention to the cultural ideology of the
Baroque, and differences between the European and the New World
Baroque. Surveying the recuperation of the Baroque in twentieth-century
Latin American literary and cultural history in her recent study Barroco y
modernidad, Brazilian critic Irlemar Chiampi claims: “The Baroque . . .
reappears to bear witness to the crisis/end of modernity and the very con-
dition of a continent that could not be assimilated by the project of the
Enlightenment” (Chiampi 2000, 17).2 “It is no accident,” she continues,
that precisely the Baroque—pre-Enlightenment, pre-modern, pre-bourgeois,
pre-Hegelian—should be re-appropriated from this periphery, which only
enjoyed the leftovers of modernization, as a strategy for inverting the histori-
cist canon of the modern. (37–38)
If the [European and seventeenth-century] Baroque is the aesthetic of
the Counter-reformation, the Neo-Baroque is the aesthetic of counter-
modernity. (37)
Chiampi’s notion of the Neobaroque as a manifestation of a New World
countermodernity rests on the fact that, in the Americas, the twentieth-
century recuperation of the Baroque has had a very different impact. Latin
America, where the Enlightenment never really took root and where the
discourse of dominant European modernity has remained an alien imposi-
tion, adapted the Spanish Baroque to local purposes, using indigenous arti-
sans and material in ways that produced the idiosyncratic structures and
styles now known as the New World Baroque. The pioneering work of colo-
nial historians of the 1940s (Mariano Picón-Salas, Pedro Henriquez Ureña,
Irving Leonard) first established the lasting impact of the Baroque in Latin
America, whose “long” seventeenth century lasted into the eighteenth until
the expulsion of the Jesuit order from Spain’s and Portugal’s overseas
colonies. These historians of the colonial period reopened the question of
the ideological function of the historical American Baroque. Was the
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American Baroque nothing but an instrument of the Counter Reformation
and Absolutism—in other words, a reactionary force affirming Spanish
conquest and colonialism? Or was the American Baroque something new
and different from the European Baroque, an expression of a new, still
uncertain, but rebellious identity? These questions immediately evoke the
fundamental problem of emergence: given the stability of institutional
structures such as the monumental official European Baroque—the dra-
matic display of absolutist and religious power—how is it possible to con-
ceive of agency, or the ability of humans (i.e., colonial American subjects)
to effect transformation and change in such structures? The Baroque, as
frequently associated with crisis and transgression as with anti-modern
social conservatism, offers a unique solution to the structure/agency debate
and for the conceptualization of emergence.3
Inspired by cultural nationalism, since the 1950s Latin American and
Caribbean intellectuals (Cubans Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima,
Mexicans Octavio Paz and Gonzalo Celorio, Brazilians Haroldo de Campos
and Irlemar Chiampi, Martinican novelist Edouard Glissant) have turned
the Baroque into an instrument of contraconquista (counterconquest), a
decolonizing form distinct from European influences and an expression of
Am(é)rican cultural autonomy. They contend that the European Baroque
was transformed into the American Baroque, a transculturated, syncretic
New World Baroque—product of the confluence of Hispanic and pre-
Columbian cultures, mixing (however unequally) during the peaceful sev-
enteenth century, and into the eighteenth, in Spain’s viceroyalties in the
New World. This period saw the emergence of creole and mestizo lifestyles
and cultural expressions after the initial phase of conquest and coloniza-
tion. In one of the key manifestos proclaiming the singularity of the New
World Baroque—a 1975 essay entitled “The Baroque and the Marvelous
Real”—Cuban novelist-critic Alejo Carpentier affirms,
. . . [W]hy is Latin America the chosen territory of the Baroque? Because all
symbiosis, all mestizaje, engenders the Baroque. The American Baroque
develops along with criollo culture, . . . with the self-awareness of the Ameri-
can man, be he the son of a white European, the son of a black African or an
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Indian born on the continent [ . . . ]: the awareness of being Other, of being
new, of being symbiotic, of being a criollo; and the criollo spirit is itself a
Baroque spirit. (100)
Carpentier’s formulations of becoming-other, becoming-new reveal an
awareness that the art known as the American Baroque embodies the
process of emergence, of a new beginning, of the genesis of new forms of
expression and social life. Surprisingly, and despite his learned display of
art-historical expertise (in references to the Spanish Baroque styles such as
Churrigueresque and Plateresque and theories of philosopher Eugenio
d’Ors), Carpentier speaks about Baroque art not as the re-presentation of
something preexisting, but as an engineering device, a “machine” that pro-
duces (as well as a product that embodies) new historical products in the
New World. And here we encounter the central claim I propose to discuss:
that Carpentier and other theorists of the New World Baroque seize on it
not as a mimetic mode of representation, but rather as a device for the cre-
ation of new worlds, new collective identities, and new forms of expression.
The New World Baroque is neither primarily nor exclusively about
signification (such as post-Tridentine Catholic iconography and its sym-
bolic conventions), but rather a means of producing things, a blueprint or
mechanism for (and result of ) the transformation of social, linguistic, and
political structures. More than just “naming” certain imperial ideologies,
doctrines of faith, or stages in the life of Christ, for example, the New World
Baroque creates, as Deleuze and Guattari claim language does, worlds of
“sense,” where language interacts with other material worlds, such as laws,
bodies, and institutions. Deleuze’s “mobilization of language away from
propositions,” writes Claire Colebrook, is “the event of sense, . . . [which
has] the power to transform bodies” (Colebrook 2000, 110). This power of
creating new regimes of meaning and thereby allowing material change
(which Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “incorporeal transformation”) is
exactly what is intended in Lezama Lima’s 1957 concept of the New World
Baroque as the “art of counterconquest,” and in art historian Angel Guido’s
earlier 1944 description of the same as the “American reconquest in the
arts,” which in fact inspired Lezama’s theory.4
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Carpentier and affiliated theorists of the New World Baroque thus
anticipate significant aspects of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory
of becoming-minor, and their description of structure-generating
processes by means of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in their
magnum opus, A Thousand Plateaus (1987), and in their earlier book on
minor literature, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986). Deleuze and
Guattari’s much-discussed theory is best understood as an immanent the-
ory of morphogenesis. According to Manuel DeLanda, they offer
an alternative model of the genesis of form . . . in which form is not imposed
on matter from the outside. . . . In A Thousand Plateaus, in particular, Deleuze
and Guattari develop theories of the genesis of two very important types of
structures: strata and self-consistent aggregates (or “trees” and “rhizomes”).
Basically, strata emerge from the articulation of homogeneous elements,
whereas self-consistent aggregates . . . emerge from the articulation of het-
erogeneous elements as such. (DeLanda 1999, 120)5
The dichotomy of strata-trees and aggregate-rhizomes (which Deleuze and
Guattari discuss in a wide range of contexts including biology, geology,
socioeconomics, linguistics, literature, and music) distinguishes central-
ized, hierarchical, and homogenizing structures such as social classes or
human institutions from decentralized and heterogeneous networks such
as ecosystems or the Internet. In our context, strata and rhizomes also
describe the two types of Baroque: on the one hand, the homogenizing and
hierarchical official European Baroque of Absolutism and Counter Re-
formation, and on the other, the decolonizing and racially, culturally het-
erogeneous New World Baroque. Most theorists of the decolonizing New
World Baroque agree on one major point of difference between the official
European Baroque and its rebellious American offshoot: that the New
World Baroque is a structure composed of culturally and racially diverse
(rather than uniform) elements, and that it was generated from the
European Baroque by a destratifying process that deterritorialized its colo-
nizing hierarchical order.6
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While I stop short of claiming that Carpentier, Lezama, Glissant, and
others are outright Deleuzoguattarians,7 I do want to suggest that a
Deleuzian reading of theories of the New World Baroque emerging at mid-
twentieth century can disclose a critical part of their claims that is usually
misrecognized as a merely stylistic or formal (that is, a discursive or tex-
tual) feature: so-called “Baroque dynamism” (see Carpentier’s “art in
motion, a pulsating art, an art that moves outward and away from the cen-
ter, that somehow breaks through its own borders” [1995, 93]) and “ten-
sion” (as in Lezama Lima’s “tensión,” or a conflictive adhesion between
fragments [1993, 82]).8 Baroque expansive mobility describes not only a dis-
cursive but a partly discursive, partly material process that Deleuze and
Guattari call “becoming,” the production of new and still-uncertain identi-
ties, social institutions, and cultural expressions. Given the above claims,
several questions immediately arise, which I will engage further: Why do
Carpentier, Lezama, De Campos, and others summon the European
Baroque at all if their project is not the imitation of preexisting European
models, but “becoming” and revolutionary newness? Why hide their
invention of rebellious New World cultural forms behind a European art-
historical term, suggesting imitation rather than originality—the Baroque?
Theorists of the New World Baroque understand the irony of engaging
the expressive forms of the Spanish colonizers to construct a postcolonial
identity—after all, the Baroque was also an articulation of the Counter
Reformation and was imported to the Americas to consolidate the political
authority of the Spanish empire and the religious orthodoxy of the Counter
Reformation. But, as the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima argues, through
the superposition of two cultures in the new reality of the Americas, the
authoritarian Baroque is transformed into a counterhegemonic instru-
ment: in the Americas, “the Baroque was an art of counterconquest. It rep-
resents . . . an American [un americano] who has settled here to his benefit,
living and dying in a normal way” (1993, 81). In his 1957 study La expresión
americana (“American Expression”)—a meditation on the theme of Latin
American identity of stature parallel to Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude
(1950), yet which still remains untranslated into English—Lezama Lima
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invents the figure of a “señor barroco,” a paradigmatic Baroque criollo,
arising from all classes and races (and even genders, since Lezama includes
Sor Juana in his account of the señor barroco’s avatars). This figure embod-
ies the first American-born generation of Spanish settlers to develop self-
awareness as Americans that begins to supplant their European
identity—“auténtico primer installado en lo nuestro” [the first to have
really settled in our world] (Lezama Lima 1993, 81).
What will interest me for the remainder of this essay is this transfor-
mation, as posited by Carpentier, Lezama Lima, and affiliated theorists, of
the Baroque from the alien European to the “authentically” American.
What would be the nature of a process that can invert the expression of an
official colonial ideology into its diametrical opposite? And why would
New World intellectuals invested in opposing Eurocentrism choose a his-
torical European phenomenon—the Baroque—to think from the American
colonial difference in the first place? Their conceptual choices suggest that
not only is there more than one Baroque, but that all the different “baro-
ques”—New World hybrids and European originals—are connected,
despite and across the divergence of the New World Baroque from its
European antecedent. The same Baroque form or style—ornate, dynamic,
extravagant, decentered—links antithetical ideological and cultural expres-
sions. How is it possible that this does not amount to relapsing into the
same Eurocentric universalisms and teleologies that these postcolonial
thinkers strive to delegitimate?
A first and general response refers to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987)
counterargument to the Marxian notion of ideology as a set of ideas merely
reflecting prior economic and political conditions. Rather than being
repressive, power is productive in generating ever new and more systemic
combinations of bodies and codes (forming what Deleuze and Guattari call
“assemblages,” such as strata and rhizomes), so that the social and eco-
nomic “matter” sorted and consolidated into new structures is in fact
inseparable from “representational” processes of coding and recoding.
Rather than viewing the Baroque either as an ideological “misrepresenta-
tion” of hidden interests of oppression (the Spanish Baroque as Counter
Reformation ideology), or as a metaphor or vehicle of social liberation (the
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New World Baroque as counterconquest), a Deleuzian approach (which
corresponds, as I will show, to the understanding of Carpentier, Lezama
Lima, Glissant, and others) regards the interests otherwise known as “ide-
ology” as coproduced with the social and material assemblages they cement
and encode. Thus, the surprise is less in the coincidence of antithetical ide-
ologies underpinning the “same” aesthetics (the Baroque), than in the
twentieth-century recovery of the seventeenth-century Baroque as a freshly
creative mode of becoming, capable of morphogenesis, of producing new
assemblages of people, social forms, and identities.
A L E J O C A R P E N T I E R
A N D T H E B A R O Q U E M A C H I N E
The European Baroque’s “becoming-minor” in the New World Baroque
challenges notions of fixed and stable identity and essence, and assump-
tions that cultural and historical expressions such as the Baroque can be
studied like closed systems, hermetically sealed against an exterior and
ruled only by internal dynamics (say, of post-Tridentine Catholic ortho-
doxy). What makes theories of the New World Baroque so interesting is
that they challenge standard assumptions in postcolonial discourse about
the dichotomy of cultures of colonizer and colonized: in the New World
Baroque, the expressive forms of decolonization are folded from the colo-
nizer’s forms. In his book on Leibniz, Deleuze singles out the Baroque fold
as a device for the creation of worlds: “The Baroque refers not to an essence
but rather to an operative function. . . . It endlessly produces folds” (1993,
3). Unfolding and refolding is a mode of becoming, multiplying the existing
number of bodies and worlds by generating new ones. As Carpentier has
insisted, the Baroque is neither a period term nor a historical style: “[A]
fundamental error is to be erased from our minds: [ . . . ] that the Baroque
is an invention of the seventeenth century.” Instead of a historical essence,
Carpentier adds, invoking Catalan philosopher Eugenio d’Ors, “the
Baroque must be seen as a human constant” (1995, 91). Carpentier’s formu-
lation here is unfortunate in that, in his search for an understanding of the
Baroque as transhistorical and transcultural becoming—and an alternative
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to essentialist definitions of the Baroque—he reverts to idealist metaphors
such as “human constant” or “spirit” borrowed from early twentieth-
century universalist philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, and his fol-
lower d’Ors. In “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” Carpentier explains:
Eugenio d’Ors . . . tells us in a famous essay that what the Baroque displays
is, in fact, a kind of creative impulse that recurs cyclically throughout his-
tory in artistic forms, be they literary or visual, architectural or musical;
and he gives us a very fitting image by saying that there is a Baroque spirit,
just as there is an imperial spirit. That spirit, arising through the centuries,
can be equally attributed to Alexander, Charlemagne, or Napoleon. There is
an eternal return to the imperial spirit, historically speaking, just as there is
an eternal return of the Baroque in art through the ages, and this Baroque,
far from signifying decadence, has at times represented the culmination,
the maximum expression and the richest moment of a given civilization.
(1995, 90–91)
Notice Carpentier’s slippage between universalist metaphors of a fixed
identitarian Baroque (a “constant” or “spirit” that “recurs cyclically”) and
a groping towards something very different—what he calls a “creative
impulse” representing a “maximum expression” that breaks the bound-
aries of various artistic genres and preexisting discursive formations. He
conveys this sense of emergence most clearly in the claim that the Baroque
“arises where there is transformation, mutation, or innovation” (98). And
d’Ors himself, as we shall see, comes very close to conceptualizing the
Baroque as Deleuzian becoming. Through the juxtaposition of “Baroque”
and “imperial” spirits, Carpenter also implies that this “creative” Baroque
principle destratifies imperial, homogenizing forms.
My point is that Carpentier’s theory of the New World Baroque is best
understood through the Deleuzian notion of becoming-minor—of a
European form becoming other, becoming new, a majoritarian form
becoming minoritarian, articulating an emergent, provisional, yet uncer-
tain identity. Carpentier’s theory of the New World Baroque approximates
Deleuze and Guattari’s notion, in Kafka and in A Thousand Plateaus, of
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minor literature as a majoritarian language appropriated by a minority.
“Major” and “minor” don’t refer to
two kinds of languages but two possible treatments of the same language.
Either the variables are treated in such a way as to extract from them con-
stants and constant relations or in such a way as to place them in continu-
ous variation. . . . (1987, 103)
A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that
which a minority constructs within a major language. (1986, 16)
According to Deleuze and Guattari, minority expression (which covers the
literature of oppressed minorities as well as of small nations) should not be
understood as representations of preexisting identities or models (this
would be the majoritarian or dominant mode), but as the active creation of
new identities, as the transformation of already given forms and identities,
as a voice producing a “people to come” (Deleuze 1989, 216).9 Neither major
nor minor modes are essences, but two types of structure-generating oper-
ations that produce respectively hierarchies (“strata”) of homogeneous
elements and rhizomes of heterogeneous elements. Strata are produced by
a double operation (what Deleuze and Guattari call “double articulation”),
first sorting material and then coding it (which Deleuze and Guattari refer
to as “content” and “expression”).10
While it is beyond the scope of this essay to explore the subtleties of
Deleuzoguattarian theory, for our purposes it is helpful to understand more
clearly just how the majoritarian mechanism generates homogeneity out of
the unformed, unstructured matter-flow from which both strata and rhi-
zomes emerge (which Deleuze and Guattari call “the body without organs”
or, alternatively, “the plane of consistency”).11 Recall that the originality of
Deleuzoguattarian theory consists in its being an immanent (that is, mate-
rialist) theory of the genesis of form that can be applied in a range of con-
texts as different as geology, sociolinguistics, and genetic evolution.
(Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari borrow from geological terminology to
describe the genesis of hierarchical structures—“strata”—in the chapter on
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“The Geology of Morals” in A Thousand Plateaus.) The differences between
the two consecutive operations “content” and “expression” (or, alterna-
tively, “sedimentation” and “folding”, or also “territorializing” and “cod-
ing”) is “not between substances and forms” (1987, 41). Rather, as DeLanda
explains, elaborating Deleuze and Guattari’s example of the spontaneous
morphogenesis of sedimentary rock like sandstone or limestone:
Content and expression each involves substance and form: sedimentation
is not just about accumulating pebbles (substance) but also about sorting
them into uniform layers (form); while consolidation not only effects new
architectonic couplings between pebbles (form) but also yields a new entity,
a sedimentary rock (substance). (DeLanda 2000, 290 n. 82)12
The novelty of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is to identify one single
“abstract machine” (or “engineering diagram,” as DeLanda calls it) that
yields hierarchical structures in a range of contexts. Like sedimentary rock,
social strata are “stacked layers (classes and castes) of human material,”
which are produced by a “sorting mechanism” analogical to the river flows
that deposit pebbles of variable size and weight in different places, to the
effect of producing distinct (and new) layers of homogeneous size and
weight (DeLanda 1999, 122). Like pebbles in rivers, human bodies of vari-
able races and genders are “sorted” and accumulated into different ranks of
status and prestige, which perform different social roles and to which
access is limited (social strata or classes).
Of course, cultures “sort” human bodies very differently. Think of the
different “sedimentation” of the three core races (black slaves, white set-
tlers, indigenous peoples) involved in state-building in the American hemi-
sphere after European colonization: blacks and indigenous peoples were
“sorted” in disparate ways by the white laws of the European powers that
colonized New World territories that would later become the present-day
Canada, United States, and Latin American nations such as Mexico and
Carpentier’s native Cuba. The effects of divergent “territorializations” of
races by Spanish and English colonial law still shape present-day Latin and
North American nations. The Americas have shared a common triracial
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makeup since colonial times; yet Spanish settlements adopted structures of
racial integration and inclusion (however subordinate), whereas English
settlements implemented structures of racial purity and racial segregation
(such as removal and extermination of Indians).13 The resulting differences
are felt, for example, in the opposite “canonicity” of Afro-Cuban poet
Nicolás Guillén and U.S. black poet Langston Hughes: whereas the former’s
“mulatto” poetry could come to embody the official discourse of Cuba’s
national multiculturalism, the latter’s poetry could not, given the official
U.S. discourse of whiteness, or the lack in the United States of a national,
official discourse of mestizaje.14 To give legitimacy and long-term perma-
nence to the social sorting of people and bodies (which Deleuze and Guattari
call “content” or “sedimentation”), institutional discourses (which Deleuze
and Guattari call “expression” or “coding”) are needed to “consolidate” the
social strata. Cuba’s twentieth-century national discourse celebrating mesti-
zaje and racial diversity is one instance of consolidation by “coding”; the
official U.S. discourse of “whiteness” (presently challenged as never before,
partly as a result of new demographic developments) is another.
Thus, the key in stratification is this generation of hierarchies through
the “double articulation” of sorting of (human) material and (discursive)
cementing (i.e., the subsequent consolidation of homogenized bodies
through legitimizing discourses). These historical processes are also well
documented in Foucault’s work on disciplinarity and state power, and the
massive expansion of social strata as a result of modernization and the rise
of the nation-state. Yet some of Foucault’s followers fail to conceptualize
emergence and creative transformation adequately: in his analysis of the
Latin American Baroque as pure “strata” in his study The Lettered City,
Angel Rama (1996) claims that the imported authoritarian Spanish Baroque
was implanted faultlessly in Latin America:
[T]he American continent became the experimental field for the formulation
of a new Baroque culture. The first methodical application of Baroque ideas
was carried out by absolute monarchies in their New World empires, apply-
ing rigid principles—abstraction, rationalization, and systematization—and
opposing all local expressions of particularity, imagination, or invention. (10)
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Rama describes how what we might call the letrado-machine “sorts” writing
and writers into an exclusive and homogeneous caste of letrados, or urban-
elite intellectuals in the service of the colonial state; how it limits access to
the letrado group by reserving higher education for training state and church
officials; and how it “consolidates” this new institution by legitimizing dis-
courses of civilization vs. barbarism. Indeed, scholars of the Baroque (such as
José Antonio Maravall or Lewis Mumford) generally agree with Rama that
the European Baroque was the period of the unprecedented expansion of the
power of the centralizing Absolutist state through planned systems such as
the bureaucracy.15 Rama’s Lettered City shows how the letrado’s (or lettered
state servant’s) monopoly over writing placed literature firmly under state
control, territorializing literature in the service of the viceregal administra-
tion, its courtly entertainments, and transatlantic communication.16
Rama’s Lettered City offers a historical instance of Deleuze and
Guattari’s hierarchy-generating strata-machine by exposing the Baroque
institution of the lettered city as a homogenizing and hierarchizing mech-
anism. But in the end, he tends to objectify the elite letrado order as fixed
and changeless, as if all avenues to rebellious appropriation (or “deterrito-
rialization”) had been shut down (“Servants of power, . . . the letrados
became masters of power” [1996, 22]). In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari
insist that hierarchies give rise to rhizomes and rhizomes to hierarchies,
since both are open systems bleeding into each other (and on the unstruc-
tured, unformed “stuff” of life, or “the body without organs”). They thus
do not occur in pure form, and are subject to the constant flow of matter
and energy from the outside.17 As depicted in Kafka and A Thousand Plateaus,
language and literature (like structures in any context) are subject to ongo-
ing transformations in both directions: stratification and destratification,
territorialization and deterritorialization, becoming-major and becoming-
minor.18 Indeed, the more “major” the language, the more likely it is that it
will be appropriated and transformed by colonials and minorities living
within its reach, who will set it back into variation:
[T]he more a language has or acquires the characteristics of a major lan-
guage, the more it is affected by continuous variations that transpose it into
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a “minor” language. . . . For if a language such as British English or Ameri-
can English is major on a world scale, it is necessarily worked upon by all
the minorities of the world, using very diverse procedures of variation.
Take the way Gaelic and Irish English set English in variation. Or the way
Black English and any number of “ghetto languages” set American English
in variation, to the point that New York is virtually a city without a lan-
guage. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 102–3)
In Kafka and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari do not explicitly
link the process of linguistic destratification (linguists would say pidginiza-
tion and creolization) of a standard language to the Baroque. But intrigu-
ingly, they choose Baroque figures of proliferation to describe the operation
that introduces heterogeneity into a standardized language:
Two conjoined tendencies in so-called minor languages have often been
noted: an impoverishment, a shedding of syntactical and lexical forms; but
simultaneously a strange proliferation of shifting effects, a taste for overload
and paraphrase. This applies to the German of Prague, Black English, and
Québecois. But with rare exceptions, the interpretation of the linguists has
been rather malevolent, invoking a consubstantial poverty and preciosity. . . .
The poverty is not a lack but a void or ellipsis allowing one to sidestep a constant
instead of tackling it head on, or to approach it from above or below instead of
positioning oneself within it. And the overload is not a rhetorical figure, it is
a mobile paraphrase. . . . From both sides we see a . . . dissolution of constant
form in favor of differences in dynamic. (1987, 104; my emphasis)
What is elided? The single center. When Deleuze and Guattari mention
“sidestepping a constant” through “overload” and “mobile paraphrase,”
they can be understood as invoking the ellipse, a stretched or squeezed—
deformed—circle generated by rotation around two centers. We can recast
Deleuze and Guattari’s comments: a minor language is an elliptical rerout-
ing of the hierarchical institutionalized linguistic standard. The substitu-
tion of the ellipse for the circle, classical symbol of perfection exalted by
the Renaissance, in Baroque art and architecture, is also a major topic in
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canonical European art-historical discussion—for example, of the archi-
tecture of Borromini and Bernini.19
The ellipse’s omnipresence in any Baroque is a symptom that dynamic
transgression characterizes all modes of the Baroque—the dramatic and the-
atrical Roman Baroque of the Counter Reformation as well as the decoloniz-
ing New World Baroque. For the ellipse is best understood not as a finished
form, but as an operation modifying another (the circle)—a structure-
generating device, or what Deleuze and Guattari call an “abstract
machine.” This claim is based on the geometry of ellipses: Whereas a circle
is produced by tracing a line around a single center at a constant distance
(radius), an ellipse can be constructed by splitting the center into two poles,
attaching the ends of a string to both points, and drawing a line at the end
of the loop thus formed. The ellipse’s eccentricity is a variable function of
the distance between the two poles; it “ranges between 0, in which case the
ellipse becomes a circle, and 1, in which case it forms a straight line” (Crowe
1992, 8).20 Thus, elliptical redirection is both the circle’s dilation (of the
orbit) and its decentering. As Cuban Neobaroque writer-critic Severo
Sarduy points out in his essay on Kepler’s Baroque cosmology (1994), it is
generated by a displacement and doubling of the single center of the sun,
hierarchical symbol of God and King; the destratifying ideological conno-
tations are obvious. (Sarduy’s essay discusses how post-Tridentine Baroque
art by Caravaggio, Velázquez, and others, by incorporating the ellipse,
acknowledges the decentering of premodern beliefs and thus constitutes a
modern response to it.)21
To illustrate Deleuze’s comment on minor language as the elliptical
dilation and decentering of a linguistic standard: minor speech is circulat-
ing around two poles rather than one. In addition to the formerly single
pole of the elite or national standard, minor speech also gravitates around
a second and new center: the pole formed by “strangers” living within this
language—ethnic minorities, colonial subjects—seeking to make it their
own. The greater the social distance separating the location of this minor-
ity (i.e., mestizos, Indians, slaves) from the location of the dominant cen-
ter (i.e., the royal colonial administration), the greater the ellipse’s
“eccentricity” or dilation. We may thus easily transfer Deleuze and
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Guattari’s comments to the Spanish Baroque transplanted into the
Americas, and thereby return to Carpentier’s comments on the “creative
impulse” of the creolizing, mestizo New World Baroque.
Carpentier’s New World Baroque is a minoritizing appropriation of a
“major” language and expressive form—the “Spanish plateresque [that]
arrives in the ships of the conquerors” (1995, 100)—on the part of non-
standard users, practitioners of low prestige, the Indian hands that built the
churches designed by Spanish architects and friars:
An Indian work force . . . adds to the Spanish plateresque its New World
Baroque materials, Baroque imagination, Baroque zoological motifs,
Baroque botanical motifs and floral motifs, and so we reached the heights of
glory of Baroque architecture, the American Baroque whose most prodi-
gious examples are the church of Tepotzotlán in Mexico . . . , the façade of
San Francisco de Escatepec in Cholula . . . ; the famous chapel in Puebla,
Baroque in white and gold. . . . (100)
Carpentier’s comment that “[t]he Baroque . . . arises where there is trans-
formation, mutation, or innovation” (98) clarifies that the Mexico Baroque
of churches like Tepotzotlán or the Capilla del Rosario in Puebla is anything
but an imitation of European models. These are, in Deleuze and Guattari
terms, new structures emerging from the intervention of Indian, black, and
mestizo workmen, who have set the “frozen” standard of the European
Baroque into variation. The façade of the church of San Lorenzo in Potosí,
for example, the work of El Indio Kondori—an eighteenth-century sculptor
working in the mestizo Andean style—is discussed by almost every theorist
of the New World Baroque.22 It emblematizes the minoritarian appropria-
tion of the elite Spanish Baroque. Better than Carpentier, who offers no
more than a brief mention, Lezama Lima describes El Indio Kondori’s
transposition of the original European Baroque into the hybrid American:
En los preciosos trabajos del Indio Kondori, en cuyo fuego originario tanto
podrían encontrar el banal orgullo de los arquitectos contemporáneos, se
observa la introducción de una temeridad, de un asombro: la indiátide. En
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la portada de San Lorenzo, de Potosí, en medio de los angelotes larvales, de
las colgantes hojas de piedra, de las llaves que como galeras navegan por la
piedra labrada, aparece, suntuosa, hierática, una princesa incaica, con todos
sus atributos de poderío y desdén. En un mundo teológico cerrado, con
mucho aún del furor a lo divino tan medieval, aquella figura, aquella temeri-
dad de la piedra obligada a escoger símbolos, ha hecho arder todos los ele-
mentos para que la princesa india pueda desfilar en el cortejo de las
alabanzas y las reverencias. . . . (1993, 83–84)
[E]l indio Kondorí representa la rebelión incaica, rebelión que termina
como con un pacto de igualdad, en que todos los elementos de su raza y de
su cultura tienen que ser admitidos. . . . (104)23
[In the precious works of the Indio Kondori, in whose originary fire one can
find so much of what constitutes the banal pride of contemporary archi-
tects, one observes the introduction of a moment of boldness, of astonish-
ment: the indiátide [a caryatid made of an Indian figure]. On the portal of
San Lorenzo in Potosí—in the middle of angel masks, of hanging stone
leaves, of capstones that sail like galleons across the carved stone—appears,
sumptuous and hieratic, an Indian princess with all her attributes of power
and disdain. In a theologically closed world, still full of medieval furor for
the divine, this figure, this temerity of stone obliged to select symbols, has
set ablaze all elements so that the Indian princess can participate in the pro-
cession of praise and reverence. . . .
[T]he Indio Kondori represents the Inca rebellion, a rebellion which ends as
if in a pact of equality, by which all the elements of his race and culture must
be admitted. . . .]
Kondori’s transformation of the caryatid into an indiatid (indiátide) is one
of the best historical products of the mestizo transformation of the
European Baroque: rather than passively imitating the European female
figures of the anthropomorphic column—the caryatid—Kondori adapts
the caryatid to his Andean setting by sculpting the column after the model
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of an Indian princess. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the indiatid is the
product of decentering, an elliptical deviation of focus: it evokes two cen-
ters of reference—the original caryatid and the Indian “stranger” who,
working within the foreign language of the European Baroque, has
deformed and translated the European model into a new expression. The
indiatid and other mestizo “transcreations” of the sculptor Kondori’s
Andean Baroque—such as elements of indigenous flora and fauna, and
Inca cosmic symbols of the sun and moon that are found next to Christian
saints and putti on the façade of San Lorenzo in Potosí—are much more
than mere “signifiers” or allegories. That is to say, they don’t merely refer-
ence social facts such as the oppression of Indians in tribute slavery, or
perhaps Inca pride and the composition of the Inca cosmos. They generate
a whole new world of “sense” in terms of creating a new regime of mean-
ing, thereby allowing material change—the inauguration of New World
mestizo identities. This, at least, is the argument of Carpentier, Lezama
Lima, and Argentine art historian Angel Guido, from whom Lezama bor-
rowed the term indiátide as well as his decolonizing analysis of Kondori’s
work.24 By framing their conceptualization of the New World Baroque in
terms of “counterconquest” (Lezama Lima) and “creole reconquest”
(Guido), they open a path to viewing indigenous peoples not merely as
passive and imitative colonials, but as creative subjects capable of origi-
nality and transformation.
B A R O Q U E B E C O M I N G A N D T H E S O C I O H I S T O R Y
O F M E S T I Z A J E O N T H E M A I N L A N D
A N D I N T H E C A R I B B E A N
Deleuze and Guattari write that minor (literary, artistic) expression and
identities are co-constitutive insofar as they mutually and actively create
each other. Kafka’s Prague German, a deterritorialized, deformed German
that “stops being representational in order to move towards its extremi-
ties,” is not a representation of a pre-given and independent ethnic identity
(i.e., of Prague’s urban German-speaking Jews); on the contrary, Kafka
forms himself as an urban German-speaking Prague Jew through writing
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(1986, 23). In The Metamorphosis, Gregor turns into a cockroach. But
Gregor’s becoming-animal is not allegorical; it is rather an opening
towards new styles of being that help Gregor escape the bureaucratic
world of power:25 “Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism,
all signification. . . . Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor” (22).
Written by a “stranger within his own language,” Kafka’s work “tear[s] a
minor literature away from its own language” by finding “points of non-
culture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World zones by which lan-
guage can escape” (19, 27).
Now, let me sketch the massive population change that forms the bio-
logical basis of the inauguration of new identities posited by the mestizo
New World Baroque. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial Latin
America experienced enormous internal ethnic transformations: a racial
chaos resulting from the massive expansion of mixed-race unions and their
mestizo offspring. Given that in most Latin American nations mestizos are
the majority population today, it is hard to imagine the explosive challenge
the castas (as various racial intermixtures of blacks, whites, and Indian
ancestry were known) presented to viceregal society. Spanish colonial law
protected indigenous peoples as independent “nations” with their own
rights within the colony, as it protected the distinct rights of the white rul-
ing caste composed of peninsular Spaniards and American-born creoles
(blacks of course were enslaved until abolition after the independence of
mainland colonies in the 1820s). Mixed-race castas, however, fell outside
the classifications of the colonial social system that “sorted” bodies of vari-
able ethnicity into uniform groups by the law of “purity of blood”—a
stratification of whose privileges Indians were no less conscious than
whites. “The whole history of Mexico is the history of the growing role of
the castas,” writes historian James Lafaye.26 (Mestizo and mestizaje are only
the broadest possible terms for all the possible interracial combinations of
black, white, and Indian classified and named by the Baroque colonial tax-
onomy of the sistema de castas. This “caste system” was a tool of social con-
trol invented by the colonial elite to control the increasing interracial chaos
by hierarchizing the various interracial unions to promote “whitening”
and, conversely, to discourage “darkening” as well as unions between
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blacks and Indians—by using graphic terms such as zambo and zambaigo
[“knock-kneed,” for black-Indian combinations] or salta atrás [“backlash,”
for “darkening” combinations where the child’s racial status was lesser
than the parents’]).27
In the colony, mestizos were quintessential pariahs, social outcasts
forced to make a living as bandits, beggars, and vagrants. Their exclusion,
the result of colonial social stratification, ended only when the colonial
social order of separate pure-blood castes was replaced with the new and
modern concept of the nation, which defined the Mexican people as the
“children of the Virgin of Guadalupe,” unifying all people born on Mexican
soil, independent of ancestry, mixed or pure-blood. As their numbers grew
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (surpassing those of the white
ruling minority around 1800), mestizos were forming a political and cul-
tural consciousness of their own, denied them under New Spain’s colonial
law; the mixed-race castas are thus a dramatic embodiment of Deleuze and
Guattari’s “people to come.” Bastards born on an internal racial frontier,
mestizos are “foreigners within” (especially before the rise of the Mexican
nation-state), an emergent social group without a stable pre-given identity.
“Minor authors are foreigners in their own tongue . . . [who] experience
themselves as bastards,” write Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 105). Because
they could not appeal to a social place or identity of their own, these “new
people” born of the union of colonizer and colonized had to actively invent
themselves as a group and create a voice of their own, by a transformative
appropriation of the “major” social structure which oppressed them.
In his memorable passage celebrating the New World Baroque as the
“awareness of being new, being symbiotic, of being a criollo,” Carpentier
(1995) treats mestizos as synonymous with creoles. In the Latin American
sociohistory of mestizaje on which Carpentier founds his theory of the
Baroque, however, creoles, legally full Spanish subjects, were not born into
a social void like mestizos. As Lafaye (1976) points out, American-born
whites (creoles)—not mestizos—were the true beneficiaries of independ-
ence, which amounted to the transfer of power to the creole bourgeoisie.
But because in practice, creoles had been treated as second-class whites in
viceregal society (and were excluded from the highest administrative
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offices), creoles as early as 1700 behaved as a group discriminated against
by the colonial regime and thus symbolically identified with mestizo dif-
ference (even as they carefully protected their racial purity).28 Over time,
this “minor voice” of the mestizo condition became one of the two major
stances for Latin American artists (like Carpentier) to adopt in their strug-
gle to break free from metropolitan standards. (The other stance—only
available to indigenous artists and writers like Rigoberta Menchú—was to
take an indigenous perspective, and reveal the historic victimization of
Indians by all the other castes, especially mestizos. The indigenous case
against exploitive mestizos—mestizos turned majoritarian— is, however,
beyond the scope of this essay.)
The impulse to deform, to metamorphose, to assimilate the “alien” in
the absence of “proper” being and thereby produce new identities and
styles—the identities and expressive forms of the new and growing mes-
tizo population—signals this: the mestizo New World Baroque is not about
product, but process. Baroque dynamism, disruption, and excess should be
read as a symptom that the Baroque embodies the process of genesis of
new forms and identities. Carpentier almost had it right: the Baroque is
neither a historical period or style, nor a genre, nor a human constant that
recurs throughout history, but rather the process of becoming-minor.
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-minor as the inauguration of
new identities through writing captures the radical meaning of
Carpentier’s observation that “[t]he American Baroque develops along
with criollo culture, with the meaning of criollo, with the self-awareness of
the American man, be he the son of a white European, the son of a black
African or an Indian born on the continent. . . the awareness of being
Other, of being new, of being symbiotic, of being a criollo” (1995, 100).
Carpentier’s becoming-Baroque and becoming-criollo are about metamor-
phosis, not metaphor: like Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka, Carpentier’s
New World Baroque produces “a people to come,” provisional cultural
identities and perceptions that are still in the process of formation. It is
this production of decolonizing difference and of new, rebellious worlds,
identities, and expressions from hegemonic European forms—on the part
of strangers living within its reach—that Carpentier is trying to express.
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As a method of dealing with the legacy of foreign European input in Third
World cultures, the Deleuzoguattarian notion of becoming-minor offers
an alternative—indeed, opposite—method to the complete rejection of
the European in polarizing postcolonial movements such as Négritude,
black nationalism, or Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Calibanism (which all
appeal to a native “outside” of the imposed colonial strata). European
material is far from denied; it is assimilated and transformed (or
“devoured” and digested, as the Brazilian anthropophagist Oswald de
Andrade put it). It is therefore not a return to habits of passive imitation
that the minoritizing operation proposes in the ingestion of hegemonic
European culture, but active re-creation and reinvention.
Carpentier founds his argument on the d’Orsian Baroque, a disruptive,
transformative force of “life” that recurs through history as the Mani-
chaean counterpart of the ordering force of “reason.” D’Ors’s 1935 treatise
Lo barroco (“Of the Baroque”) defined the classic and the Baroque as oppo-
site eones (ages) of the human spirit, independent not only of the period of
the historical European Baroque, but also of European culture as a whole.
(D’Ors famously proposed 22 species of “barrochi,” appearing in contexts
such as Buddhism.) According to d’Ors, the dualism between “reason” and
“life” corresponds to the dualism between the classical and the Baroque.
“Broken, absurd, like nature . . . and not logical and united, like reason. The
‘age’ [eon] that inspires that gesture is the Baroque ‘age,’ in which the mind
imitates natural processes, far from the classical ‘age,’ in which the mind
imitates mental processes” (2002, 88). D’Ors’s eon (from Greek “age” or
“lifetime”) is a term taken from Gnosticism and the Alexandrine school,
where it refers to “orders of spirits, or spheres of being, that emanated from
the Godhead and were attributes of the absolute.”29 Eon is thus a category of
the absolute that also embodies itself as concrete historical and material
forms. The translation of eon as “historical age” may be the best possible
option, but remains somewhat problematic, since what d’Ors intends by
this term is a timeless morphological power, as well as its historical prod-
ucts. By generalizing the Baroque into an abstract life force that forever gen-
erates new forms, d’Ors approximates the Deleuzian notion of becoming,
a term that he uses himself (see below).
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That the Baroque may embody the power to produce new forms by
deterritorializing established models, rather than simply constituting a lit-
erary or art-historical period, a fixed stylistic principle (Baroque antitheti-
cal style, horror vacui), or a cultural ideology with a fixed system of beliefs
(Counter Reformation and Absolutist Baroque) is an insight lurking under
the surface of many essentialist theories of the European Baroque. Since
Wölfflin’s recovery of the Baroque, these have been produced by two
camps: 1) analyses of the historical Baroque, or of seventeenth-century art,
architecture, literature, and culture (extending to eighteenth-century in
Latin America), and 2) analyses of the Baroque as an ahistorical constant or
spirit. Analyses of the first camp are the work of period specialists, such as
art and architectural historians (including Wölfflin himself, or Erwin
Panofsky, Christian Norberg-Schulz, John Rupert Martin, and Roy
Harbison), and literary critics (such as Mariano Picón-Salas, René Wellek,
Frank Warnke). Analyses of the second camp, in contrast, detach the
Baroque from its historical and cultural context and discuss it as a univer-
sal spirit. The latter are the products of early twentieth-century German
philosophers and art historians Wilhelm Worringer and Oswald Spengler,
whose thought was transmitted into Spanish contexts by Ortega y Gasset
and Eugenio d’Ors.30 The two camps have generally played opposite roles
in the twentieth-century return of the Baroque: the universalist philoso-
phers have helped enable it (by severing the connection between the
Baroque and the style of a specific period of European art). Historical spe-
cialists, for their part, have raised questions about the legitimacy of the
Baroque’s transhistorical “return” in twentieth-century cultural produc-
tion, while at the same time supplying much of the scholarly content used
to make transhistorical connections.
For a good reason, most period-specific art-historical analyses consis-
tently note that the Baroque always follows the classical, never preceding
it: the epithet “late style” marks the Baroque’s destratifying function
towards what precedes it—the classical. (When “Baroque” was still syn-
onymous with degeneration and decadence throughout the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, before its twentieth-century reevaluation, the
Baroque’s vilification stressed its deterritorializing operation even more.)
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Typological theories of the Baroque as ahistorical spirit by Worringer,
Spengler, and d’Ors tend to offer the boldest articulations of the Baroque’s
disintegrative energies—such as Worringer’s and Spengler’s disruptive
“Faustian” pursuit of the “infinite.” To the Apollinian spirit of limited
form, Spengler opposes the modern “Faustian spirit, whose ur-symbol is
pure limitless space,” and whose desire for transcending the given and
concrete reappears throughout history. “Romanticism, the Gothic, the
Renaissance, the Baroque, the Rococo are merely stages of one and the same
style,” writes Spengler (1972, 234, 261; my translation). The dynamic, dis-
ruptive Baroque spirit recurring through the ages—as conceptualized by
philosophers Worringer, Spengler, and d’Ors—bears all the characteris-
tics of a destratifying mechanism. Take, for example, the contrasting
definitions D’Ors offers of the classical and Baroque (which, as we have
seen, emanate from the opposite forces of “reason” and “life” respec-
tively): these bear uncanny similarities with Deleuze’s notion of two
abstract machines, a hierarchy-generating machine that produces uniform
strata, and a dehierarchizing machine that produces heterogeneous rhi-
zomes. For d’Ors,
The tendency toward unity, the need for discontinuity, characterize, then,
the formal repertoires of a rational mind, a classical mind. In reverse fash-
ion, the Baroque mind can be recognized by its adoption of multinuclear
patterns that exclude reason’s two demands; multinuclear instead of single-
centered patterns; merged and continuous, not discontinuous and cut
up. . . . [I]t’s the same when a biologist claims: “We aren’t concerned with
species, which are just conventions: we’re interested in the stream of life
that passes from one being to another, linking them in the mobility of
‘Werden,’ of becoming.” (2002, 87)
In contrast to the classical tendency towards uniformity and orderly seg-
mentation, D’Ors’s Baroque is a multipolar and decentered structure,
“multinuclear instead of single-centered patterns; merged and continuous,
not discontinuous and cut up” (87). What could be more blatantly
Deleuzian without being Deleuze’s work?
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Finally, why is the Baroque hardly ever discussed without reference to
the classical—ex-negativo, as it were—as a so-called “anti-classical style”?
Spengler, Worringer, and d’Ors—modeling the Baroque as “ahistorical
forming power”—share this comparative habit with historians of art and
literature who want to limit the Baroque to a specific period in European
and Latin American art history. And this is a pattern that persists into the
present: Roy Harbison begins his 2000 study, Reflections on Baroque, with
the observation that the “Baroque is set apart from what precedes it by an
interest in movement above all, movement which is a frank exhibition of
energy and escape from classical restraint” (1). Doubtless, theories of the
Baroque from d’Ors to Harbison recognize the Baroque as a “machine” that
disrupts preceding norms and therefore presupposes the existence of
another structure to change and deform.
Consider for a moment Heinrich Wölfflin’s well-known stylistic gram-
mar that distinguishes the linear classical from the painterly Baroque: in
each case, the Baroque is folded from the classical by deforming it: in the
development from linear to painterly, from plane to recession and depth,
from closed to open form, from multiplicity to unity, from absolute to rel-
ative clarity. The classical is perfect, self-sufficient, closed form; the
Baroque is its deterritorialization: the classical becoming-minor. Classical
formal perfection yields to the “confusion” of Baroque dynamic expres-
sion: the Baroque blurs sharp edges and contours; it breaks the picture
plane and thrusts the composition towards the viewer, creating drama and
mystery; the clarity and independence of parts is subordinated to overall
effect; the dominance of contour and line yields to atmospheric effect
through color and light.31 “The Baroque uses the same system of forms, but
in place of the perfect, the completed, it gives the restless, the becoming, in
place of the limited, . . . the limitless, the colossal” (Wölfflin 1950, 10; my
emphasis). As Marshall Brown points out, Wölfflin considered himself a
Romantic morphologist in the tradition of Goethe, rather than a classic tax-
onomist, practicing “not the study of forms but of forming powers” (Brown
1989, 380). For Wölfflin, “history is always moving toward the Baroque and
away from the classical. This means that each age serves as the Baroque to
some earlier age and as the classic to the later” (401). Of course, Principles
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of Art History is first and foremost a scholarly analysis of two specific his-
torical European styles of art. But Wölfflin’s underlying sense—akin to
d’Ors’s—“of the pullulation of things” (in Brown’s words [381]), of the
Baroque as a destratifying device for tearing art away from its own language
(as Deleuze might say) could not be stated more clearly.
Let me close my reflections by turning to Carpentier’s essay on the
Cuban Baroque, “La ciudad de las columnas” (“The City of Columns”) via
Deleuze’s The Fold.32 In his The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988), Deleuze
discusses the Baroque through the immanent and materialist theory of
morphogenesis he developed with Guattari, and which they published
together in Kafka and A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze’s fold is, therefore, not
an essence, but a process (we should refer to it not as “the fold” but as “to
fold”): “The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative
function. . . . It endlessly produces folds. It does not invent things: there are
all kinds of folds coming from the East, Greek, Roman, Romanesque,
Gothic, Classical folds. . . . Yet the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds,
pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque
fold unfurls all the way to infinity” (3). A mechanism for generating new
structures from existing ones (“it does not invent things”), Deleuze’s fold
describes a becoming not grounded in being: folding and unfolding do not
refer to the linear development of an organism (“from cradle to grave”),
but to the creation of new worlds and identities by foldings or contractions
from the unstructured matter-flow or the “stuff” of life (“the plane of
contingency”). Deleuze views the Baroque fold as a multiplication
device (“fold over fold”), a creative principle—or rather, a mechanism for
re-creation, for it creates not out of nothing, but by disrupting and prolif-
erating existing structures.33
Creationism, emergence, and generative metamorphosis are the keys to
Deleuze’s reading of the Baroque philosophy of Leibniz that is the subject
of The Fold: in the historical crisis of modernity, resulting from the delegit-
imation of medieval Christian beliefs by rationalism, the Scientific
Revolution, and the Reformation, the Baroque offers a unique solution.
“[W]hat happened in this long history of ‘nihilism,’” Deleuze asks, “before
the world lost its principles?”
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At a point close to us human Reason had to collapse, like the Kantian refuge,
the last refuge of principles. It falls victim to “neurosis.” But still, before, a
psychotic episode was necessary. A crisis and collapse of all theological
Reason had to take place. That is where the Baroque assumes its position: Is
there some way of saving the theological ideal at a moment when it is being
contested on all sides, and when the world cannot stop accumulating its
“proofs” against it, ravages and miseries, at a time when the earth will soon
shake and tremble . . . ? The Baroque solution is the following: we shall
multiply principles—we can always slip a new one out from under our
cuffs—and in this way we will change their use. We will not have to ask what
available object corresponds to a given luminous principle, but what hidden
principle responds to whatever object is given, that is to say, to this or that
“perplexing case.” [ . . . ] A case being given, we shall invent its principle.
(Deleuze 1993, 67; ellipses in the original)
For Deleuze, Leibniz’s philosophy represents an alternate rationality
because it pursues the multiplication, rather than the reduction, of princi-
ples—in contrast to systematic Enlightenment rationality. “The Baroque is
just that,” Deleuze argues, “at a time just before the world loses its princi-
ples. It is the splendid moment when Some Thing is kept rather than noth-
ing, and where response to the world’s misery is made through an excess of
principles, a hubris of principles . . .” (68). Deleuze’s notion of the excess of
principles pitched against the threat of nihilism evokes one of the most
common Baroque topoi, the horror of the vacuum (horror vacui), or the
impulse to fill all empty spaces. Baroque abundance and proliferation
breaks the form of stratified, ordered classical space (which uses empty
spaces to create harmony in relation to filled space, as Carpentier points
out) by addition rather than subtraction. Later on, Deleuze clarifies fur-
ther: “We can better understand in what way the Baroque is a transition.
Classical reason toppled under the force of divergences, incompossibilities,
discords, dissonances. But the Baroque represents the ultimate attempt to
reconstitute a classical reason by dividing divergences into as many worlds
as possible, and by making from incompossibilities as many possible bor-
ders between worlds” (81).
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Facing the impossibility of settling for one single and universal truth (be
it God or Reason), the Baroque solves the conflict by sorting the inconsis-
tencies into parallel worlds. The Baroque thereby offers an ontological solu-
tion to an epistemological impasse. The epistemological questions, “What
is there to be known? How it is known, and with what certainty?” having
been exhausted, the Baroque responds ontologically, with the creation of
new worlds for each of the conflicting possibilities. Thus, questions posed
are no longer factual (What is the objectively right answer to the cosmic
mystery?), but rather hypothetical (What if? What would the world gov-
erned by this particular belief look like? How can I project a world to match
this particular given case?). According to Deleuze, the Baroque is like sci-
ence fiction, projecting the creation of multiple and alternative worlds. “For
with Leibniz the question surges forth that will continue to haunt
Whitehead and Bergson [two twentieth-century philosophers of “emer-
gence”]: not how to attain eternity, but in what conditions does the objec-
tive world allow for a subjective production of novelty, that is, of creation?
. . . The best of all worlds is not the one that reproduces the eternal, but the
one in which new creations are produced, the one endowed with a capacity
for innovation or creativity . . .” (Deleuze 1993, 79).
Of course, the Leibnizian Baroque, as a mechanism for what Brazilian
concrete poet-critic Haroldo de Campos has called “transcreation,” is
highly relevant to the creationist New World Baroque. I want to close this
essay with a discussion of the Cubanness of Carpentier’s (as well as Lezama
Lima’s) New World Baroque, and differences between the sociohistory of
mestizaje on the mainland and on the Caribbean islands, or between Mexico
and Cuba. We know that it was Cuban essayists—and more precisely,
Habaneros—Lezama Lima and Carpentier who offered the first compre-
hensive theories of a decolonizing and mestizo New World Baroque. Cuban
writers (and here we include the poststructuralist Sarduy) are also among
the major proponents of Neobaroque theorizing since the mid-twentieth
century.34 If we recall that Carpentier and Lezama Lima are actually Cubans,
we recognize a disconnection between the mainland location of their art-
historical examples of the New World Baroque (mainly Mexico and the
Andean highlands) and the Caribbean location of intellectual production in
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Havana, Cuba. It is striking how much Cuban theorists need the Mexican
and Andean Baroque to make their arguments.
What are the implications of this disjunction? Carpentier’s 1964 essay
about the Cuban capital and the Cuban Baroque, “La ciudad de las colum-
nas” (“The City of Columns”), makes this mainland/Caribbean displace-
ment a main subject of discussion. For the New World Baroque emerged
from a sociohistory of mestizaje in a mainland—not a Caribbean—context.
In contrast to the splendid monuments of the mainland Baroque in
Mexico’s Puebla, Tepotzotlán, Tonantzintla, Taxco, Oaxaca—or South
America’s Potosí and Cuzco—Cuba (as well as Puerto Rico, for example)
lacks a rich Baroque architectural heritage. Baroque cathedrals and
churches were constructed wherever colonizers found impressive pre-
Columbian architecture, and in densely populated pre-Columbian urban
areas (examples are the Andean Inca cities and the pyramid-cities of
Mexico’s central Highlands, such as those of the Aztecs or the Mixtecs of
Oaxaca). As an institutional colonial ideology, American Baroque art and
architecture arose as a popular visual culture imposed “from above” by the
church in the express service of eradicating the old “idolatries” and con-
verting the Indians. The official colonial Baroque was part of a “guided cul-
ture” (as José Antonio Maravall puts it in the context of the peninsular
Spanish Baroque), the instrument of Baroque Counter Reformation peda-
gogy designed to “move and amaze” the illiterate indigenous and mestizo
masses.35 To oversimplify, monuments of the American Baroque were built
for Indians, and by Indian and mestizo hands; they arose in the service of
their conversion—the stereotypical friars building cathedrals on top of pyr-
amids—and they were in turn reconquered (as Lezama Lima put it in his
“contraconquista” thesis) from “below,” appropriated by Indian and mes-
tizo artisans, the “hands” that actually built the churches, that carved and
painted the devotional artifacts.
Unlike on the mainland, in the Caribbean none of the indigenous lan-
guages and peoples survived: Arawak and Taino speakers had almost com-
pletely been exterminated in the first half-century after contact and
conquest.36 This is why—as Caribbean theorists such as Michael Dash rou-
tinely observe—in the Americas, the Caribbean is the epitome of hybridity:
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there are no “pure” indigenous origins to refer back to. The origin of
Caribbean cultures is hybrid, in the confluence of races, in the mixing of
immigrant peoples in plantation society composed of white masters and
black slaves that dominated in the Caribbean.37 Here is one reason why
Cuban writers would come up with a decolonizing theory of becoming-
Baroque: given the lack of a pre-Columbian architectural heritage and lan-
guages, postcolonial thought had no alternative but to work from within the
colonizer’s forms and language, folding the master’s tools into minor cul-
tural uses. According to Cuban critic Antonio Benítez-Rojo,
It was precisely the Indian’s tenacious cultural resistance that motivated the
Spanish crown to undertake a vast and intense campaign of Christiani-
zation, which was unlike the mass baptisms that the Antillean Indians had
uncomprehendingly received. . . . [I]n these great colonies, . . . ‘civilizing’
the existing settlements was of greater importance than exploiting the land.
(1992, 56–57)
The creole in the Spanish Antilles was not the same as the one on tierra
firme. In the Antilles it was not necessary to deculturate the Indian, because
he disappeared with servitude on the encomienda. (55)
I here want to observe an intriguing distribution of labor in the formation
of the New World Baroque. It is the mainland sociohistory of mestizaje that
produces the material artifacts of the historical New World Baroque:
churches, paintings, statues, and portals were crafted for the religious
indoctrination of Indians conscripted in peonage in mines (as in El Indio
Kondori’s silver city, Potosí) and haciendas. In contrast, it is another kind
of transculturation process (to evoke Benítez-Rojo’s theory of differences
between mainland and island creole), the Caribbean plantation machine of
agricultural-economic exploitation based on black slavery, that first gener-
ated the creative concepts to retrospectively understand the material
process on the mainland.
For the most part, we do not perceive becoming, such as the becoming-
mestizo of the New World Baroque; we only perceive the finished products
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these processes have generated. Perception of the world in terms of
extended and finished objects favors a “classical” view (if one may) of com-
pleted structures, rather than a “Baroque” or dramatic apprehension of
structure-generating forces. Perhaps it is therefore the very absence of
splendid Baroque cathedrals, such as those of Mexico and the Andes, that
opened Carpentier’s eyes to the destratification processes that generated
the mestizo New World Baroque. “The City of Columns” is a discussion of
the urban and domestic architecture of the Cuban capital, Havana, “a city
apparently without a style.” Carpentier’s historical perspective—if in
essayistic mode—is conducive to envisioning the spontaneous processes of
transformation by which Havana escaped the control of centralized urban
planning. Carpentier’s familiarity with modern architecture stems from
being the son of an architect and having studied architecture in the 1920s,
which made him aware of the deviation of Havana’s “third style” from the
classicism of International style modernism.38 This essay also defines an
“urban” Baroque complementing the primarily telluric examples of the
New World Baroque Carpentier offers elsewhere. Attempting to capture
“una cualidad esencialmente esquiva” [an essentially evasive quality]
(Acosta 1984, 42) of the city of Havana, Carpentier writes:39
Cuba is not Baroque like Mexico, Quito, or Lima. Havana is closer, archi-
tecturally, to Segovia and Cádiz than to the prodigious polychromes of San
Francisco Acatepec in Cholula. Except for one or two altars or altarpieces
from the beginning of the eighteenth century, . . . Cuba did not achieve
compelling Baroque carvings, images, or buildings. But fortunately, Cuba
was mixed blood, as was Mexico or Upper Peru, and as with all hybridism,
through a process of symbiosis, the Baroque is engendered. The Cuban
Baroque consisted in accumulating, collecting, and multiplying columns and
colonnades in such an excess of Doric and Corinthian, of Ionic and com-
posite capitals, that they ended up making the pedestrian forget . . . that he
was accompanied by columns . . . that measured his stride. . . . The multi-
plication of columns was the result of a Baroque spirit that did not manifest
itself except occasionally in spiraling Salomonic pilasters dressed in golden
vines that shaded sacred niches. The Baroque spirit, legitimately Antillean,
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mestizo, forged by processes of transculturation in these islands of the
American Mediterranean, is translated into an irreverent and offbeat
replay of classical forms to create the illusion of orderly and tranquil cities.
(1998, n.p.; my emphasis)
Notice Carpentier’s eagerness to affirm the historical reality of a Cuban
mestizaje, which (in contrast to mestizaje on the mainland) left few visible
traces in public art and architecture. In Cuba, the need to affirm becoming-
other was greatest—hence the intervention of Lezama Lima’s,
Carpentier’s, and Sarduy’s Neobaroque theories and fictions between the
1950s and the 1970s.40 It is true that Carpentier’s Baroque remains married
to the realist project of “naming” New World realities, such as the socio-
history of mestizaje, or the naming of the “strange” and unfamiliar reality
of American landscape in an imported Spanish language. The 1964 essay
“Questions Concerning the Contemporary Latin American Novel” clearly
states Carpentier’s realist position on the Baroque: “the Baroque is engen-
dered by the need to name things” (26).41 Carpentier’s example is the ceiba
tree: the word ceiba “does not suffice to give people of other latitudes an
appreciation of the resemblance of that colossal tree to a rostral column:
upright, austere and solitary, of sacred lineage, like an apparition from
other times, whose horizontal, almost parallel branches, offer a handful of
leaves to the winds . . .” (24). Only a Baroque prose of abundant, sensual
detail that conveys its objects in an expressive way, that gives an impression
of how they would appear to a live observer (Wölfflin) is capable of con-
veying unfamiliar aspects of American reality in a convincing way.
But in the passage quoted above, describing the urban Baroque of
Havana (rather than the rural American landscape of the ceiba tree),
Carpentier seems to capture the Baroque as the structure-generating mech-
anism itself, Deleuze and Guattari’s “abstract machine” that generates new
minor forms from existing hegemonic standards. Carpentier speaks about
classical columns (Doric, Corinthian, etc.) being fed into a procedure of
accumulation and multiplication that dehierarchizes them—“an offbeat
and irreverent replay of classical form.” A “result of a [hidden Cuban]
Baroque spirit,” this accumulation-multiplication mechanism yields a new
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product, which Carpentier very aptly—not at all awkwardly, as some might
think—calls “a style without style”: “The superimposition of styles, the
innovation of styles good and bad, more bad than good, created in Havana
a style without style that in the long run, through a process of symbiosis
and amalgamation, became a peculiar kind of Baroque that functioned as
style and inscribed itself in the history of urban behavior” (1998, n.p.). This
“styleless style” is, of course, the Cuban Baroque, and it is a rare kind of
Baroque because its finished product preserves the traces of the algorithm
by which it was generated: the deformation, by accumulation and multipli-
cation, of the classical model. Notice how this decentering morphological
mechanism, abstract as it may be (symbiosis, amalgamation, accumula-
tion, multiplication) remains akin to the social processes of mestizaje that
Carpentier believes are the historical forces driving these transformations.
Still, in this essay, Carpentier’s apprehension of the machinic processes
behind the New World Baroque is at its clearest. He describes another
transformation generating Havana’s characteristic “style without style”
where the classical column, originally an “interior column, born elegantly
in shadowy patios,” travels across the threshold between home and street
and “appears in the city” (1998, n.p.). In
the 19th century, . . . the column propelled itself into the street, thus creat-
ing . . . one of the most extraordinary constants of the Havana style: the
incredible profusion of columns in a city that is an emporium of columns, a
jungle of columns, an infinite colonnade. . . . It is unnecessary to recall here
that, in Havana, a pedestrian could leave the perimeter of the harbor’s
fortresses and walk to the city’s outskirts by crossing through the center of
town, . . . following the same, constantly moving colonnade, where all the
column’s styles are represented, conjoined or hybrid ad infinitum. Half
Doric and half Corinthian, dwarf Ionics, cement caryatids. . . . (n.p.)
In this essay, Carpentier writes as an engineer rather than an artist or critic.
He rejects the majoritarian function of the artist as state servant, accepting
the risk of being labeled a “dilettante” for describing nonstandard objects
such as a “style without style.” In his essay on the unsightly, chaotic urban
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Baroque of Havana, Carpentier speaks the dilating, deviating, deforming
language of the fold: he exposes the operational code that also underlies the
creative appropriation that gave birth to the splendid cathedrals of the New
World Baroque.
I
N O T E S
1. In the interest of economizing endnote text, I cite only selected works from the large
list of Neobaroque writers and theorists: See Wölfflin (1950), Spengler (1972),
Worringer (1957), d’Ors (2002), T. S. Eliot (1975a, 1975b), de Andrade (1991),
Carpentier (1995, 1998), Lezama Lima (1993), Sarduy (1980, 1974), Foucault (1973),
Deleuze (1993), Glissant (1977), and de Campos (1986). As a poet, Octavio Paz paid
homage to the historical Baroque in his poem “Himno entre ruinas” (1948; “Hymn
among the Ruins”), dedicated to the seventeenth-century Spanish poet Luis de
Góngora. As a theorist of the avant-garde, Paz traces the transgressive formalism of
the Spanish-language avant-garde to the historical Baroque, juxtaposing the distinct
seventeenth-to-twentieth-century continuity of Hispanic poetry to the alternative
tradition of Anglo-American modernism, which goes back to Romanticism, continu-
ing the Romantic “tradition of rupture” (Paz 1984). Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and
Djuna Barnes’s major works after 1928 all display a transgressive style of narrative
excess that is hyperbolic, circular, and ornate (Kaup 2005). Carlos Fuentes diagnoses
Faulkner’s style as Baroque (Fuentes 1970). This bibliographic note is restricted to
Neobaroque theory and does not include novels and poetry by authors such as Sarduy,
Carpentier, and Lezama Lima. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of Spanish-
language essays are taken from Zamora and Kaup (forthcoming); translators’ names
are mentioned in the order of appearance. Page references to all unpublished transla-
tions follow the pagination of the original.
2. I am citing from a translation by William Childers, forthcoming in Zamora and Kaup.
3. These antithetical faces of the Baroque (display of religious and political power, art of
crisis) are already apparent in the European Baroque. The Baroque’s transposition to
the New World only exacerbates this duality. In their study on Deleuze and self-organ-
ization theory, Mark Bonta and John Protevi write that “emergence . . . to our point of
view is the biggest question in social science, implicated as it is in all the controversies
surrounding methodological individualism, the structure/agency debate. . . . [W]e can
more easily define emergence than demonstrate its existence” (2004, 32).
4. In the introductory chapter, Guido develops a historical theory of the development
of Latin American art since Europe’s conquest of the Americas in 1500, where peri-
ods of European colonization of American arts alternate with periods of American
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“reconquest” of its arts from European hegemony. In Guido’s schema, the historical
New World Baroque constitutes “the first creole reconquest” of the arts from Euro-
pean hegemony imposed during the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century conquests
(1944, 33).
5. In his brilliant study A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Manuel DeLanda (2000)
develops his reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus through the
findings of the emergent science of self-organization theory. The result is a com-
pelling illustration of Deleuzoguattarian immanent theory of the genesis of forms
through examples of historical change in the past millennium taken from linguistics,
biology, and economics.
6. For the sake of overview, I am here oversimplifying a wide field of conflicting posi-
tions on the New World Baroque, highlighting how, in the wake of World War II,
many theorists, inspired by art historians such as Angel Guido and Pal Keleman, and
following the lead of Lezama Lima and Carpentier, shifted towards a decolonizing
theory of the American Baroque. For a detailed discussion of the post–World War II
intellectual climate that fostered this reappraisal of the Baroque art of Spain’s viceroy-
alties in the Americas, see Salgado (1999).
7. I borrow the term “Deleuzoguattarian” from Bonta and Protevi (2004).
8. Characteristically, Lezama denies the European Baroque such generative tension: “un
barroco europeo, acumulación sin tensión” [a European Baroque, accumulation with-
out tension] (1993, 79). Translations from Lezama Lima’s “Curiosidad barroca” are
mine.
9. For illuminating discussions of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature
and of their distinction between the minoritarian and the majoritarian, see Colebrook
(2002), and Bogue (2003, 91–114.)
10. “The first articulation concerns content, the second expression” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 44; see also 40–43).
11. “The BwO [Body without Organs] is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedi-
mentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and
also a signification and a subject—occur” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 159).
12. It is to DeLanda’s credit that he has offered a convincing clarification (and one involv-
ing a slight correction) of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the double operation
(“double articulation”) that produces sedimentary rock formations (and other hierar-
chical structures such as social classes). The note just quoted continues: “Actually, here
Deleuze and Guattari incorrectly characterize the two articulations involved in
rock production as ‘sedimentation-folding.’ The correct sequence is ‘sedimentation-
cementation.’ Then, on a different spatial scale, ‘cyclic sedimentary rock accumulation-
folding into mountain.’ In other words, they collapse two different double-
articulations (one utilizing as its starting point the products of the previous one) into
one. I believe this correction does not affect their underlying argument and indeed
strengthens it” (DeLanda 2000, 290 n. 82). This reader agrees without reservations.
13. On comparative history of racial structures in the Americas, see Chevigny and
LaGuardia (1986), and Pike (1992).
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14. On Guillén and Hughes, see Ellis (1998) and Kutzinski (1993).
15. For the European Baroque, see Maravall (1986), Martin (1977), Mumford (1961), and
Norberg-Schulz (1979). The list of scholars of the American Baroque who agree with
Rama’s position that Baroque is the art of authority—that is, pure “strata”—remains
long, despite the intervention of the theorists of the rebellious New World Baroque I am
discussing in this essay. See, for example, Beverley (1993), who also treats the American
Baroque, Cuban cultural critic Acosta (1984), and art historian Sebastian (1990).
16. Universities were established very early in the Spanish territories in the New World
(both the University of Mexico and Lima’s University of San Marcos were founded in
1551; Santo Domingo’s university dates from 1538) to educate creole officials for the
church and royal bureaucracy. In contrast, primary education for the masses was neg-
lected. In the United States, the pattern was the reverse, with primary education hav-
ing priority, although Harvard was established in 1636 (see Burkholder and Johnson
1994).
17. I rely here and throughout on DeLanda’s extremely helpful reading of Deleuze in his
various works cited in this essay.
18. Strictly speaking, Deleuze and Guattari deny that there is a process of becoming-
major: all becoming is minor. That is because “becoming,” in the strong
Deleuzoguattarian sense, means to break away from established standards and create
new identities and expression, whereas the “major” by definition refers to a stable
and unchanging standard. “There is no becoming-man because man is the molar
entity par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular”; “There is no becoming-
majoritarian; majority is never becoming. All becoming is minoritarian” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 292, 106).
19. Both Italian architects chose elliptical floor plans for their major works in Rome:
Bernini’s elliptical design for the Piazza of St. Peters and the Church of Sant’Andrea al
Quirinale, and Borromini’s elliptical plan of S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. See, for
example, Norberg-Schulz (1979). In the chapter “La cosmología barroca: Kepler”
(“Baroque Cosmology: Kepler”), in his study Barroco, a manifesto of the Neobaroque
in its postmodern incarnation of radical anti-realism, Cuban novelist-critic Severo
Sarduy offers a discussion of Kepler’s 1609 laws of planetary motion (1974, 55–93). He
points out parallels between Kepler’s discovery of the eccentricity of Mars’s orbit and
the discovery of elliptical design by Baroque artists, arguing that there is an episte-
mological solidarity between cosmology and art he calls “retombée.” I am quoting
from a translation by Christopher Winks, forthcoming in Zamora and Kaup.
20. See also Sarduy (1974, 55–58).
21. “Pre-Baroque urban discourse . . . always operates in terms of ‘centering’ . . . ; the
Baroque city, on the contrary, presents itself as an open argument, not referable to a
privileged signifier that magnetizes and confers meaning upon it” (Sarduy 1974,
60–61).
22. See, for example, Guido (1944), Keleman (1951), Picón-Salas (1962).
23. As Lezama’s editor Irlemar Chiampi and others have observed, Lezama owes his infor-
mation about Latin American colonial art and architecture to a (post–)World War II
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generation of art historians, who, in light of the catastrophe into which European civ-
ilization had descended, became receptive to the creative independence of American
practitioners of the Baroque. One key text is Keleman (1951), on whose analysis of the
portal of San Lorenzo, Lezama Lima modeled his. Another is Guido (1944), whose dis-
cussion of an American creole “reconquista” of the colonial arts in the seventeenth
century inspired Lezama Lima to coin the term “contraconquista” as a definition of the
New World Baroque, a portmanteau word formed from reconquista and contrareforma
(Counter Reformation)—or, the two contrasting positions on the cultural ideology of
the New World Baroque. On the significance of mid-century and wartime Latin
American art histories, see Salgado (1999), Pauly (1993), and Zamora (2006).
24. Drawing explicit parallels between indigenous political insurrection and the New
World Baroque, Angel Guido writes: “Mientras Tupac-Amarú hizo temblar una parte
de América sublevando sus huestes quichuas y aymaras, el indio quechua José Condori
esculpía el sol y la luna, elementos de la flora indígena y sus extraordinarias indiátides,
en el frontispicio de San Lorenzo de Potosí” (1944, 33). [While Tupac-Amarú caused
part of America to tremble by rousing his Quechua and Aymara supporters to rebel-
lion, the Quechua Indian José Kondori sculpted the sun and the moon, indigenous
flora, and his extraordinary indiatids (indiátides) on the façade of the San Lorenzo
Cathedral in Potosí.] (The translation is mine.)
25. “To the inhumanness of the ‘diabolical powers,’ there is the answer of a becoming-
animal: to become a beetle, to become a dog, to become an ape, . . . rather than lower-
ing one’s head and remaining a bureaucrat, inspector, judge, or judged” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1986, 112).
26. On the genesis of the Mexican nation-formation from the colonial ethnic caste sys-
tem, see Lafaye’s canonical Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican
National Consciousness (1976). My account of Mexican colonial caste society follows
Lafaye’s. Concepts of racial purity in Latin America (pureza de sangre) are not equiva-
lent with “whiteness.” Historians of race (in colonial New Spain) Lafaye and Ilona
Katzew affirm that the “Spanish system admitted the existence of an Indian republic
within the colony, which meant that Spaniards recognized the existence of an internal
hierarchy for Indian society” (Katzew 2004, 1).
27. See Katzew, “’A Marvelous Variety of Colors?’: Racial Ideology and the Sistema de
Castas,” in Katzew (2004, 39–62).
28. In her study on casta painting (an eighteenth-century genre depicting the iconography
of mixed-race combinations, usually in a family setting of mother, father, and child),
Katzew argues that initially, casta painting responded “to the larger discourse of cre-
ole pride in Mexico” (2004, 93).
29. See “Aeon” (Encyclopedia Britannica 2004). In a section entitled “Los ‘Eones’”
(“Eons”), D’Ors explains the hybrid (both metaphysical and historical) character of
“eon” in this way: “For the School of Alexandria, an eon signifies a category which
despite its metaphysical character—that is to say, despite its constituting a category in
the strict sense of the word—had a development inscribed in time, had itself a type of
history” (2002, 67; this translation is mine).
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30. See González Echevarría (1978). For an excellent overview of the complex intellectual
network of twentieth-century theories of the Baroque, see Pauly (1993).
Unfortunately, Pauly’s impressively researched study is written to make the case for
the outright dismissal of the Neobaroque. As I hope to show here, to view the Baroque
through a Deleuzian morphogenetic approach resolves many of the inconsistencies
which lead Pauly to dismiss the Neobaroque. Consider, for example, Carpentier’s con-
tradictions: how can the Baroque be both—via d’Ors—a constant of the human spirit
and something uniquely American, the process of becoming-mestizo? (see Pauly 1993,
43). Deleuze would answer Pauly that if the Baroque embodies the mechanism of
becoming-minor, this mechanism will generate new and heterogeneous structures of
different kinds in the diverse locations where it operates (so that the New World
Baroque need not be identical with a minoritizing structure elsewhere). Secondly,
since rhizomes give rise to strata and vice versa, the decentering minor Baroque may
well be restratified into a hierarchical structure such as the Baroque that served as the
pedagogical instrument of the Absolutist state and the Counter Reformation.
31. Wölfflin outlines his principles in the introduction and goes on to examine each of
them in separate chapters, moving from painting to architecture.
32. The essay first appeared in 1964 and was written to accompany 120 photographs by
Paolo Gasparini. I am quoting from a translation by Michael Schuessler, to be pub-
lished in Zamora and Kaup (forthcoming). The 1998 Instituto Cubano del Libro edi-
tion of Ciudad de las columnas, on which the translation by Michael Schuessler is
based, is unpaginated; quotations here are therefore without page numbers as well.
33. Existing beings and worlds are formed by actualizing (folding) from the “world,” the
virtual plane of totality: “We thus go from the world to the subject, at the cost of a tor-
sion that causes the monad to exist currently only in subjects, but that also makes sub-
jects all relate to this world as if to the virtuality that they actualize” (Deleuze 1993, 26).
34. Another group of Neobaroque poet-critics is found in Argentina; they call their
Neobaroque neobarroso, after the mud of the River Plate on which Buenos Aires was
founded. This group includes gay poet Néstor Perlongher; the recent collection
Medusario offers a wide selection of their work (see Echevarren et al. 1996). Further
Neobaroque writer-theorists are found in Brazil and Mexico. In Argentina, as in Cuba
and the Caribbean, the indigenous population is very small (due to extermination
campaigns in the nineteenth century). Brazil shares the Caribbean’s condition of
hybrid origins in the Baroque.
35. In the chapter “A Guided Culture,” Maravall describes the authoritarian mechanism
through which official Baroque culture is calculated to “move and amaze,” producing
certain planned emotions in the spectator (1986, 57–78).
36. See Benítez-Rojo (1992): Iberian chroniclers Las Casas and Oviedo place the aborigi-
nal population in the Caribbean “in 1492 at between 200,000 and 300,000. By 1508 the
number was reduced to 60,000. . . . In 1548 Oviedo doubted whether five hundred
Indians of pure stock remained” (56).
37. Michael Dash writes that “because they are marked by an extermination of the origi-
nal population, were subjected to repopulation, and became totally dependent on the
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metropole because of their plantation economies, the Caribbean archipelago . . . pro-
duc[ed] Pérez Firmat’s cultural crossroads in a more intense way than is possible in a
larger landmass or where the indigenous population manages to survive” (1998, 5).
38. “City of Columns” begins by contrasting the “poor layout of the streets” of Havana
with the utopian urban rationalism of Le Corbusier. For a discussion of Carpentier’s
essay on Havana’s “third style” and Havana’s literary “invention” by Cuban writers
since the nineteenth century, see Alvarez-Tabío Albo (2000, 179–89).
39. Acosta offers perceptive comments that highlight Carpentier’s morphogenetic under-
standing of the Baroque as emergence. Acosta’s unwillingness to allow Carpentier’s
transformative Baroque to change his own notion that any Baroque—including the
New World variety—is an authoritarian and colonial strata, however, impedes further
development of these insights.
40. In the 1980s, the Cuban Neobaroque was continued by writer-critic Antonio Benítez-
Rojo in the cultural study, The Repeating Island (1992).
41. I am quoting from a translation by Michael Schuessler, to be published in Zamora and
Kaup (forthcoming).
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