Baroque Period

I am not used to resorting to the web for source materials, but I found an interesting paper by Angela Ndalianis, presented at a University of Melbourne conference in 2000, which helped me to relate to professor Ulmer's reference to Deleuze's work The Fold (which I haven't read, unfortunately) in the context of the Baroque stand. The Baroque stand, I learned in a class lecture, is "as obscure and complex as the real" and is intimately related to the digital image in electracy:

We tend to view the digitally driven effects of contemporary entertainment forms like blockbuster films and amusement park attractions as products that are particular to our postmodern age. The research this paper is based on, however, is very much the result of my increased frustration at numerous film critical and theoretical models to come to terms with the games of perception that current entertainment media engage the spectator in. I want to argue that entertainment spectacles of the last two decades are reliant on a baroque perceptual regime that sensorially engages the spectator in ways that recall baroque art forms of the seventeenth century.

The seventeenth century and our own era are epochs that reflect wide-scale baroque sensibilities that, while being the product of specific socio-historical and temporal conditions, reflect similar patterns and concerns on formal levels. While specific historical conditions differ radically, both epochs underwent radical cultural, perceptual, and technological shifts that manifested themselves in similar aesthetic forms. While these cultural transformations are beyond the scope of this article, I want to introduce some central features of the baroque perceptual regime in the context of the seventeenth century and our current epoch's shared fascination with spectacle, illusionism, and the baroque formal principle of the collapse of the frame. And I want to go back in time before I move to the present.

In his book The Fold, Deleuze suggests that the baroque offers an "architecture of vision" that situates the viewer in a spatial relationship to the representation (1993, 21). Rather than providing a statically ordered perspectival arrangement, the 'center' continually shifts, the result being the articulation of complex spatial conditions. Classical systems are characterized by closure. Such closed systems remain centered, ensuring narrative clarity and symmetry of organization. (Ndalianis, Baroque Perceptual Regimes)

I would recommend reading the entire essay at the link above.

This idea of a center that is constantly shifting and changing in an expanding, almost organic, body of thought, or virtual space, is already familiar (see The Task).  I imagined this space in Derrida's essay from Writing and Difference "Structure, Sign, and Play" when I read it for the first time.  I was fascinated by the idea of a center existing as a function outside of the thing it defines, a "totality [that] has its center elsewhere” (352), and the whole idea of surrogate centers providing the space for the perspective of material experience.  I imagined Derrida's "center of totality" as this space of infinite distance in all directions.  I made an interesting, rather depressing, analogy of that image as it relates to some of the effects of contemporary life (in my personal writing), that has bearing, in a different context, to the task of this digital English course--and which I won't share.  It's interesting that I find myself slipping into my personal writing voice when I write here (I'm not quite sure how I feel about it, actually)--it's a restrained version of that voice that I'm not used to.  Anyway, back to the Baroque: the Baroque is of interest to this project because it upturns the classical view of truth.  The following points on the classical view of truth are taken from my class notes (each bullet represents the classical stand on truth):

Classical Stand on Truth

1. Truth / Cartesian cogito
2. A certain way of presenting the truth. Truth as experienced through a window.
3. A scene where the truth takes place.
4. There's a cast (participants).  Cogito: reader/writer.  Everybody can "get" the truth.
5. The relationship between language and thought: thought comes first and is then put into language.  Language is adequate to thought (like thought through a window)

Because we no longer buy the classical view of truth, we need a new measure for understanding truth.  Deleuze and Guattari explain:

In the classical image, error does not express what is by right the worst that can happen to thought, without thought being presented as "willing" truth, as oriented toward truth. It is this confidence, which is not without humor, which animates the classical image--a relationship to truth that constitutes the infinite movement of knowledge as diagrammatic feature. In contrast, in the eighteenth century, what manifests the mutation of light from "natural light" to the "Enlightened" is the substitution of belief for knowledge--that is, a new infinite movement implying another image of thought: it is no longer a matter of turning toward but rather one of following tracks, of inferring rather than grasping or being grasped. Under what conditions is inference legitimate? Under what conditions can belief be legitimate when it has become secular? This question will be answered only with the creation of the great empiricist concept (association, relation, habit, probability, convention). But conversely, these concepts, including the concept of belief itself, presuppose diagrammatic features that make belief an infinite movement independent of religion and traversing the new plane of immanence (religious belief, on the other hand, will become a conceptualizable case, the legitimacy of illegitimacy of which can be measure in accordance with the order of the infinite). (What is Philosophy? 53)

Baroque Stand:

1. Takes an attitude towards truth
   
   
   • Depends on the order of MOOD (and truth)
   • The TONE of MOOD for the Baroque is disquiet, unease, anxiety
   • MOTIVE: how TRUTH relates to an individual situation (singular) - concetto
2. Understanding of the presentation of truth
   
   
   • Metaphor of presentation (lists of data, information)
   • Topic is not a thing (as in classical stand) but an EVENT (a thing happened)
   • Presentation is not seen with clarity (it comes out of the dark - it is draped with folds)
   • Plenasm: rhetorical figure for redundancy
   • Deleuze and Guattari: Chaos. Philosophy, Art, and Science intersect in chaos
   • The way you get out the chaos is with redundancy (lots of it)
   • Digital imaging/redundancy
3. Seeing this truth
   
   
   • The scene: instead of conversation (classical), the image of a sleeper twisting in a mattress
   • Focus: not to inform but to create novelty
   • Pose: not authenticity but hallucination
4. Caste
   
   
   • Human beings are nomads (Leibniz): self-enclosed, isolated individuals
   • Leibniz introduced the idea of probability - possible worlds
   • Various possible worlds, but the world has to be compossible
   • Compossibility: An event, but what follows has to be entailed
5. The Relationship between Thought and Language
   
   
   • Reject predicate structure and replace it with holistic amplitude--a pattern but not one that is syntactically controlled
   • Moving down a path: thought into language
   • Holistic amplitude: sixth sense, into the apprehension
   • Have feelings of disquiet, not otherness. Obscurity - monad - intuit what is real

The task of this course is to develop a practical way of thinking in electracy using the basis of the Baroque stand.