Filozofski vestnik Letnik/Volume XXII • Številka/Number 2 • 2001 • 87-110 
PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND 
THEORY OF THE BAROQUE 
A N T H O N Y J . CASCARDI 
I begin with an image, exceptionally famous and, by overwhelming consensus, 
baroque: Las Hilanderas by Velasquez (fig. 1). In the foreground is a homely 
workshop scene, with five women shown working around a spinning wheel, 
fashioning the threads that will go to make a decorative tapestry. In the 
background hangs the very kind of tapestry that is the result of this work: the 
stuff of nature, transformed into a thing of beauty by tools and human skill. 
But there is a curious doubling between the two scenes. The "background" 
tapestry illustrates a scene from the myth of Arachne, a mortal who became 
so skillful at weaving that she ventured to challenge the goddess Athena to a 
1. Velásquez, "Las Hilanderas" 
A N THONY CASCARDI 
tapestry making contest. As Ovid tells the story, Arachne wove a picture of 
Europa, who was deceived by Jupiter when he disguised himself in the shape 
of a bull. And because Arachne's work was found to be so perfect, she was 
transformed by the jealous Athena into a spider: "her hair fell out, and with it 
both nose and ears; and the head shrank up; her whole body also grew small; 
the slender fingers clung to her side as legs; the rest was belly. Still from this 
she ever spins a thread; and now, as a spider, she exercises her time-old weaver-
art" (Metamorphoses, VI, w. 140-145). 
As with a number of Velasquez' works, The Spinners can be taken as part 
an aesthetic reflection upon culture and the arts. On the one hand the painting 
identifies "culture" with the made artefact, the tapestry, which alludes to Ovid's 
Metamorphoses as well as to Titian's painting of the Rape of Europa, which hung 
in the royal collection in Madrid. But on the other hand it identifies "culture" 
with the processes and tools by which those artefacts are fashioned. We can 
see the work as an analysis of art in terms of the productive processes and 
materials that form it; or, as I'll suggest over the course of what follows here, 
we can see it as engaged in a more critical questioning of the paradigm of 
production itself. After all, it turns out that although the tapestry scene in 
Velasquez is produced, it also pre-exists its artefactual production, as myth; 
this is, moreover, a myth that incorporates a reflection upon the relationship 
among the different kinds of art (Arachne's spinning and tapestry weaving 
on the one hand; Athena's warfare and practical wisdom on the other). As for 
Velasquez' painting, it seems also to reflect a conscious awareness of some of 
the differences between myth and art: whereas myth is given or handed down, 
art involves technique, which is to say, the knowledge of how to produce that 
which does not independently produce itself.1 
The figure of weaving is an especially rich topos for an extension of 
aesthetics to cultural theory because culture has long been thought of in 
figurative terms as a woven fabric. The notion is as old as Plato and as modern 
as Deleuze and Guattari, who devote one section of Mille Plateaux to a discussion 
of textiles.2 As for Plato, there is an important passage in the Statesman where 
the Young Socrates and the Eleatic Stranger discuss the art of weaving as a 
way of thinking about the relationship between two kinds of arts: those that 
go directly to form the products of "culture" (the so-called "productive" arts), 
and those "contributory" arts that in turn prepare the tools for the productive 
arts, "arts without whose previous assistance the specific task of the productive 
'Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 
1994), p. 25. 
2 Along with Plato, the locus classicus on weaving is Aristophanes, Lysistrata, w . 567-87. 
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PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND THEORY OF TIIE BAROQUE 
arts could never be performed."11 This distinction in turn leads Socrates to 
identify a still more fundamental division within each of these categories: the 
arts of combining and those of separating. Within the art of weaving, for 
instance, there is the activity of carding, which pulls the strands of raw material 
apart, and then there is the twisting and plaiting that forms the threads and 
entwines them in a pattern of warp and woof. As a philosophical dialogue, 
the Statesman is itself an example of the arts of separating and combining: 
through the method of diaresis, it works to separate the statesman from other 
functionaries, including soothsayers, clerks, politicians, orators, judges, and 
priests. But philosophical dialogue is also synthetic, and statesmanship requires 
the combination of the preparatory and productive arts.4 
I want to reserve comment on the fact that Plato's thinking about culture 
in relation to weaving considers the making of a garment, while Ovid and 
Velasquez are interested in tapestries. Much modern thinking follows Plato 
to the extent that it regards culture not just as a kind of fabric, but as a text 
and, moreover, as one that can be understood in terms of the paradigm of 
produc t ion . Likewise, it distinguishes among different kinds of things 
produced. But it is not so clear that the modern division of things produced 
conforms to Plato's, and still less so that the modern statesman can be thought 
of as responsible for weaving together the various arts, or the different strands 
of human nature, into a harmonious whole. In a recent essay, for instance, 
the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben characterized modern thinking 
about production in terms of the difference between poiesis and praxis. He 
suggested that the split between the two was solidified in relation to the 
development of machine technology during the industrial revolution: "With 
the development of modern technology, starting with the first industrial 
revolution in the second half of the eighteenth century, and with the 
establishment of an ever more widespread and alienating division of labor, 
the mode of presence of the things produced by man becomes double: on 
the one hand there are things that enter into presence according to the statute 
of aesthetics, that is, the works of art, and on the other hand there are those 
that come into being by (techne), that is, products in the stricter sense."5 One 
s Plato, Statesman, 281 e. The latter are the arts that "manufacture spindles, shuttles, 
and all the other instruments of clothes manufacture" (281e). 
4 In addition, Plato views statesmanship as requiring the ability to weave together the 
different strands of human nature into a harmonious social fabric. The statesman's job is 
to combine vigorous and aggressive traits, which provide the warp of society, with the 
quiet and moderation, which are its weft. 
5 Giorgio Agamben, Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford 
University Press, 1994), pp. 60-61. 
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A N THONY CASCARDI 
series of things produced would include tapestries, statues, works of music, 
paintings, pottery, and buildings, while the other would include things that 
we only sometimes think of as having been produced at all and that we seldom 
associate with art-things like judicial systems and codes, customs and manners, 
educational institutions, political structures, economic a r rangements , 
strategies of war, scientific practices, and religious beliefs. It is of course true 
that Jacob Burckhardt suggested that the Renaissance state could be regarded 
as a work of art, and that Michel Foucault proposed that the self could itself 
be fashioned, and fashioned aesthetically. But both Burckhardt and Foucault 
regarded themselves as advancing alternatives to the prevailing ways in which 
cultural production was conceived. 
What Agamben does not sufficiently stress is the relationship between 
these two series as it has been understood in post-romantic thought. By his 
account, "the particular status of the works of art [i.e. their status among the 
things that do not contain their own telos] has been identified with originality 
(or authenticity)." But this seems to credit the ideal of genius-like originality 
with quite a bit more than it is due. It would be more accurate and important 
to say that the division of production into poiesis and techne has led to the 
assumption that the elements of first of these series (poems, paintings, 
sculptures) are dependent upon causal or explanatory factors that can be 
located in the second series (in economic arrangements,judicial systems, etc.). 
This is equally true whether it is said of individual works of art or of large-
scale tendencies such as genres or period-related styles. Think of Lucien 
Goldmann's venerable Sociology of the Novel, which argues for a "rigorous 
homology" between the novel as a genre and the "daily life of an individualistic 
society born of market production,"1' or of the writings of Spain's "Generation 
of '98" as rooted in a consciousness of crisis associated with the loss of Spain's 
American colonies. Borrowing a phrase from the political theorist Roberto 
Mangabeira Unger, I call such a model "deep structure" theory. Basic to it is 
the notion that effects at the level of a superstructure can be explained by 
their relation - implicitly or indirectly causal - to a base.7 Some form of deep-
structure analysis is at work in many contemporary theories of culture, even 
where they focus, as is increasingly the case, on issues of cultural contact and 
" Lucien Goldmann, "Sociology of the Novel," Telos, no. 18 (Winter, 1973-74), p. 127. 
Cf. FredricJameson, Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 44. 
7 In its roots, the model is Platonic. An archaic society described in the Timaeus reflects 
a strict division of labor, with the priestly class and its functions held separate f rom the 
artisans, and the artisans from the soldiers, while the shepherds, hunters, and farmers 
likewise perform their functions in isolation from one another. Plato's task in thinking 
about culture was to find their common measure and to rank them accordingly. 
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PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND THEORY OF TIIE BAROQUE 
exchange, or on a reading of culture as a kind of text. Two principles, borrowed 
from Freud and Marx, inform this work. The first says that what happens in 
between the formative processes and their surface "effects" is determined by 
a series of sub-conscious or un-conscious mechanisms (ideology, repression, 
etc.). The second says that while the forces of power and desire driving 
production may be quite real, they are themselves either invisible, or visible 
only through their effects. In between cause and effect lie the mechanisms of 
distortion-the ideological distortions of power, desire's deflection of conscious 
aims, various other forms of méconnaissance. Thus it is not surprising to find 
that con tempora ry theories of cultural product ion so often lead to a 
hermeneutics of suspicion. Their goal is either to unmask the ideologies that 
act as screens for power and make its operation desirable, or to disclose the 
self-deceptive mechanisms of desire, the ones that make repression not just 
tolerable but also pleasurable. Fredric Jameson's well-known account of the 
"political unconscious" in his 1981 book of that title is meant to explain just 
these things. 
But suppose we were to refuse the model of deep structure theory and 
the hermeneutics of suspicion to which it leads. Suppose we were to reject the 
view that art acts as a mask for power or desire. What might a theory of culture 
look like then, and what might its links to aesthetics be? While it is relatively 
well-established that the Platonic view of poiêsis leads us to think of art as a 
kind of shadow-play, it is seldom recognized that modern versions of deep 
structure theory can have equally undesirable effects, leading us to see art 
either as an ideological formation or as a kind of symptom-structure. When 
one reads in the Hungarian psychoanalyst Ferenczi that "all aesthetics has its 
root in repressed anal eroticism,"8 or when the contemporary Marxist critic 
Terry Eagleton argues that the very notion of the "aesthetic artefact" is 
dependent upon the ideological forms of modern class society, the reductivist 
tendencies of deep-structure thinking become breath takingly clear.1' 
There is no denying that deep-structure theory meets certain needs. The 
paradigm of production in particular can be useful in stabilizing a distinction 
between "things made" and "things found" or "given." But there maybe other 
ways to deal with that distinction, and it may in the end need overturning, 
particularly after Duchamp, who staged a kind of aesthetic coup d'état-when 
he showed that the "thing made" could be treated as if it were a "thing found," 
and that art could be found already made. I think a more important concern 
8 Sandor Ferenczi, "On the Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money," in Sex in Psycho-
analysis, trans. E.Jones (NewYork: R Brunner, 1950), p. 325. 
0 Terry Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 3. 
9 1 
A N THONY CASCARDI 
is that deep-structure theory tends to substitute an account of formative 
processes for an aesthetic interpretation of culture, presenting us with an 
explanation of the way in which things are made as an account of what kind 
of sense they make, and how. (The relevant distinction can be exemplified 
again by reference to Las Hilanderas, albeit though through a schematism 
that the painting eventually undoes: the fo reground shows a scene of 
production, while the background points through style and allusion to Ovid 
and Titian.) Moreover, as soon as one recognizes that the modes and 
mechanisms of p roduc t ion we th ink of as ac t ing u p o n the cu l tu ra l 
superstructure stand in need of interpretation just as much as culture's material 
artefacts need to be explained, then we can see that something beyond deep-
structure theory is required of any theory of culture that would take the claims 
of art seriously into account. For this purpose, we might begin by regarding 
the whole gamut of productive processes and mediating forces, including 
"power," "interest," "desire," and the like, as no more "fundamental" than the 
forms they go to shape and as standing equally in need of interpretation. The 
expectation of a theory of culture that would take its model from aesthetics is 
not just an account of productive processes, mechanisms, and tools, or a 
semiosis of forms, but an account of how materials are organized so as to 
make a world of sense. Such a theory's ideal would be a full account of the 
role of sensation in the making of sense. Contemporary theories that regard 
culture as a kind of text have relatively little to say about culture in its material 
sense; moreover, they give no account of what Hegel saw as a crucial task of 
aesthetic theory: an explanation of meaning as embodied. What we need for 
this is neither a deep-structure view of the processes of production, nor a 
hermeneutics of suspicion, but something closer to an aesthetic account of 
the relationship between the two senses of "sense." 
It is here that a turn to the example of the baroque can prove especially 
valuable, for as the example of Las Hilanderas may suggest, the arts of the 
baroque were themselves engaged in a critical reflection about deep-structure 
models of culture. To this they add an acute awareness of the interplay between 
material texture and textual sense. But there are special challenges that one 
encounters when dealing with the baroque that raise the stakes in this endeavor 
several-fold. One of them is implicit in the very question "What is (the) 
baroque?" At once the description of a set of stylistic markers that can be 
recognized independent of history and the designation of a particular period 
in history, there has always been something elusive about the very notion of 
the "baroque." The term has all the pretense of a category-concept but none 
of the orderliness we would expect such a category to contain. By what 
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PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND THEORY OF TIIE BAROQUE 
particular logic could one link Baltasar Graciân's theory of wit (ingenio) with 
Bernini's sinewy columns in the Vatican, or the oratory façade of St. Philip 
Neri in Rome with the poetry of Milton? The play of reflected light and space 
in Las Meninas is said to be baroque, but so too are the emblem books and, on 
some accounts, the Aritmologia of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, the 
second volume of Don Quixote, and the German Trauerspiel. To invoke 
Wittgenstein's phrase, there is no obvious "family resemblance" among these 
things - either that, or the term "baroque" names so many different families 
that the resemblances among them are anything but clear. 
The temptation to turn to history for an explanation of the baroque is 
thus quite powerful. The hope is that an account of historical factors can 
demonstrate a coherence at the deep-structure level that a description of the 
phenomena or a review of examples can't achieve. And yet the chronological 
markers that one might invoke in order to explain the baroque are anything 
but stable. This becomes embarrassingly apparent as soon as one confronts 
such anomalies as the "Hellenistic Baroque," the "Romanesque Baroque," or 
the "Late Gothic Baroque,"IH i.e., cultural and aesthetic constellations that 
can ' t reasonably be explained by the same historical principles that are 
operative in the baroque (perhaps one should say the "historical" baroque or 
the "baroque" baroque) .Just limiting oneself to the post-Renaissance (1500) 
world, one hardly knows whether to identify the baroque with the late 16"' 
and 17'1' centuries (as might be the case for poetry and the visual arts), or with 
the late 17'1' and early 18'1' centuries (as might be the case for music). Historians 
of architecture and the visual arts impose a set of still finer distinctions among 
"mannerism," "baroque," and "rococo," as well as between their "northern" 
and "southern" variations. These distinctions have on occasion been adapted 
by literary historians. But even this does not always help. The period of the 
baroque in Spain corresponds to what is most often called "classicism" or 
"neo-classicism" in France." Indeed, Foucault's Les mois et les choses moves from 
the end of the Renaissance in Cervantes to the "classical age" in Descartes 
without so much as a hiccough and with nary a nod in the direction of anydiing 
particularly baroque. Such is the view from La Tour Eiffel. For some, the 
answer is simply to dislodge the "baroque" from history altogether, granting 
it the right to migrate across the centuries and to traverse the seas. For the 
10 Ervin Panofsky, "What Is Baroque?" in Three Essays on Style (Cambridge, MA: MIT 
Press, 1995), p. 20. 
11 The issue has been discussed by, among others, Louis Marin in his essay on Versailles, 
"Classical, Baroque: Versailles, or the Architecture of the Prince," in Yale French Studies, 
80: Baroque Topographies: Literature/ History/ Philosophy," ed. Timothy Hampton (1991), 
167-182. 
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A N THONY CASCARDI 
Catalan critic Eugenio D'Ors, anything that is marked by exuberance or excess, 
including much of what we would call Romanticism, may count as an example 
of the baroque.12 D'Ors' "baroque" is a constant of human nature that seems 
to manifest itself at periodic intervals in history. The novelist Alejo Carpentier 
could link the baroque to the conditions of mestisaje characteristic of Latin 
America, whose exotic literature, flora, and fauna, he saw as "naturally 
baroque." Never mind the cultivated gardens of Schônbrunn, Aranjuez, or 
Versailles: the Latin American baroque counts the ancient cosmogonies of 
Chilâm Balâm and the Popol Vuh.1:1 
Some 25 years ago, in a book called La Cultura del barroco ( The Culture of 
the Baroque), the Spanish social historian José Antonio Maravall attempted to 
put an end to some of this confusion by declar ing "baroque" to be a 
circumscribed historical phenomenon with strict chronological limits.14 His 
goal was to be both historical and deep-structural. Anything in Europe between 
1600 and 1675 (but especially between 1605 and 1650, and especially in Spain) 
was decreed to be "baroque" and any theory of the baroque would have to 
explain it, granting of course sufficient latitude to take certain national and 
regional differences into account. Moreover-and this was the audacious part 
— Maravall de-coupled the notion of the "baroque" from any essential relation 
to art. The formalism that allowed art historians like Wolfflin and Panofsky to 
make some sense of the baroque by reference to a grammar of style was 
banished with a single stroke.15 On Maravall's account, the culture of the 
baroque emerged when and as it did as the consequence of a crisis in the 
economic order of society. More specifically, Maravall argued that the 
development of pre-capitalist economic formations produced in response a 
culture that (1) was controlled by hegemonic institutions, particularly those 
of political absolutism; (2) was a culture of the masses; (3) was predominantly 
urban; and (4) was conservative in its political outlook. Maravall was by no 
12 Eugenio D'Ors, Lo Barroco (Madrid: Tecnos, 1993). 
l s Alejo Carpentier, "Lo Barroco y lo real maravilloso" (1975), in Obras complétas, 13: 
Ensayos (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1990), pp. 167ff. 
14 Compare the pragmatist view that would regard the baroque as a kind of "lump," 
and in response to which we would identity "the place of the lump, or of that sortoi lump, 
in somebody's view of something other than the science to which the lump has been 
assigned (for example, the role of gold in the international economy, in 16'1' century 
alchemy, in Alberich's fantasy life, in my fantasy life, and so forth, as opposed to its role in 
chemistry)." Richard Rorty, "Texts and Lumps" in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: 
Philosophical Papers, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 86. 
15 For Maravall, art was merely the way in which a change in epoch related to a 
consciousness of crisis was noted by Burckhardt and Gurlitt. See José Antonio Maravall, 
La Cultura del barroco (Barcelona: Ariel, 1975), pp. 29-30. 
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PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND THEORY OF TIIE BAROQUE 
means the first to attempt a sociological understanding of the baroque. Critics 
before him, notably Werner Weisbach, had suggested important links between 
the baroque and Counter-Reformation religious practices, and Arnold 
Hauser's Social History of Art took considerable pains to understand the baroque 
in the context of broad-scale changes in the social landscape of early modern 
Europe. But Maravall was among the first, perhaps the first , to neutralize the 
differences among various domains of culture (religion, politics, philosophy, 
literature, the visual arts, etc.) in an effort to see them as an inter-linked whole 
springing from a common source: 
it's not that baroque painting, the baroque economy, the baroque art 
of war, [and so on] don't resemble one another.... but rather, given the 
fact that they develop in the same circumstances, under the same 
conditions, answering the same vital needs, responding to the modifying 
influence of all the other factors, each one of them finds itself thus 
transformed, and comes to depend on the epoch as a whole.... These 
are the terms in which one can ascribe the definitive character of a 
period-in this case its character as baroque-to theology, painting, the 
art of war, physics, to an economy in crisis, monetary upheaval, the 
uncertainty of credit, and economic wars, along with which came the 
growing control of agricultural property by the nobility and an increase 
in poverty among the masses; these factors created a feeling of 
uncertainty and instability in personal and social life, which was 
dominated by repressive forces that in turn shaped baroque man and 
that allow us to call him by this name (Culture of the Baroque, pp. 28-29). 
The observations about "baroque man" notwithstanding, Maravall's 
remains an impressive account for the sheer breadth of territory it attempts 
to cover. And yet it raises questions that very nearly undermine the claims it 
wants to make, to wit: what, if anything, is "baroque" about this particular 
constellation of cultural forms? What is "baroque" about the politics of 
absolutism, Loyolan spirituality, or etiquette at the court of Philip II?11' If 
questions of style are not themselves at issue, then why characterize this urban 
culture of masses and its underlying crisis in aesthetic terms at all? One could 
well answer that the dominant cultural institutions of this period all relied 
upon the arts to establish and project their power, that baroque theatre was 
one of the means by which an absolutist court was able to secure and extend 
its reach, and that baroque painting was a way in which Counter-Reformation 
beliefs were disseminated. Maravall himself admits that it was in the realm of 
I discuss this particular question in Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age 
(University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1997). 
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A N THONY CASCARDI 
the arts that the historical transformations of the baroque were first noted. 
But we can expect more of a theory of culture than this one-fold set of 
inversions will allow. For if the challenge is to present an account of culture as 
including both the series of "things produced" as well as the materials and 
tools that contribute to their production, then the goal should be no t jus t to 
discover the way in which, e.g., baroque theatre was driven by political 
absolutism or the way in which baroque painting helped inculcate Counter-
Reformation beliefs, but also to see the ways in which Counter-Reformation 
spirituality was pictorial and political absolutism theatrical. Examples of this 
sort could well be multiplied, but the limit-cases are probably the notions of a 
"baroque economy," or of "baroque society," which we (or Maravall) want to 
treat both as effects (i.e. as among the phenomena to be explained) and as 
causes (i.e. as offering us explanations for other effects). 
Rather than invoke theories of cultural production or textuality in order 
to interpret the culture of the baroque, my suggestion is the reverse: to take 
the baroque as a model for the kind of analysis that a philosophy of culture 
ought to provide. The reasons for foregrounding the arts in this particular 
enterprise are compelling. Above all, they help model culture as a self-positing 
set of practices that are related to one another in ways that deep-structure 
theory may be unable to recognize. The model is not one of surface and depth 
but one of effects that are answered by other effects, none of which can be 
traced back to a determinate cause.17 The quesdon "What were the underlying 
factors that can explain the baroque?" as a phenomenon within the history of 
culture can be answered best if we recognize that this is a moment when art 
strove to establish itself as reaching just as "deep" as anything that we might 
wish to identify as its cause-and, I would add, as existing just as much on the 
surface. The point of baroque illusionism is that the model of surface and depth 
turns out to be of limited use unless we can somehow account for the energy of 
the surface and for the density of forms involved in the making of sense. This is 
one reason why I think it would also be right to see the arts of the baroque as 
undermining the difference between "ornament" and "essential line" rather 
than as establishing a view of art as ornamental. Think of the pillars of Bernini's 
baldachino in St. Peter's in Rome as an example (fig. 2). In comparison to 
columns that merely are decorated or embellished by an accretion of detail on 
the surface, Bernini's pillars mark a moment when o rnament turns the 
difference between "inside" and "outside" on its head, for the structure and 
function of the inside are themselves enfolded in the surface. 
17 Cf. the stoics, who relate causes to causes; and cf. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 
trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 
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P H I L O S O P H Y O F C U L T U R E AND T H E O R Y O F T H E B A R O Q U E 
2. Bernini, St. Peter's, Rome, baldachino 
More often than not, complaints 
about the "decadence" or "bad taste" of 
the ba roque mask ethically-charged 
concerns about the loss of a necessary 
connection between an interior "essen-
ce" and its exterior face. But the matter 
of that connection is something that 
baroque art itself worried about to a 
notable degree. It has often been said 
that in baroque architecture the façade 
is freed from any essential connection 
to interior volume. The result is not so 
much an ornamented exterior, or even 
the layering of one surface on top of 
another, but the creation of an auto-
nomous interior space, which is to say, 
of an interiority that is not obliged to 
3. Emmanuel de Witte, "Interor with a Woman at a Clavicord" 
9 7 
ANTIÍONV CASCARDI 
face the external world18 (fig. 3). This is the problem of the "empty inside." 
Dutch painting specializes in the cultivation of just this sort of autonomous 
inside, where the expansion of the interior proceeds by virtue of seemingly 
limitless re-framings; within there stands (or sits) a virtually windowless self, 
inscrutable and monad-like. The Leibni tz ian-monadis t ic c r i t ique of 
mechanistic explanations of perception and thought gives us a grand tour of 
the empty inside: "Perception, and that which d e p e n d s u p o n it, a re 
inexplicable by mechanical causes," writes Leibnitz in the Monadology, "suppose 
that there were a machine so constructed as to produce thought, feeling, and 
perception, we could imagine it increased in size while retaining the same 
proportions, so that one could enter it as one might a mill. On going inside 
we should see only the parts impinging upon one another; we should not see 
anything that would explain perception."19 
The problem of the empty inside in turn leaves us with a structure and 
a skin. I think of the way Caravaggio depicts peeling (fig. 4), but even more so 
4. Caravaggio, "Boy 
Peeling a Fruit" 
,s Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 29. 
19 Leibnitz, Monadology, sec. 17, in Philosophical Writings, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson, trans. 
Mary Morris and G. H. R. Parkinson (London: J. M. Dent, 1997), p. 181. 
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PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND THEORY OF TIIE BAROQUE 
of the special interest that Ribera takes in martyrdom by flaying, or by 
emaciation, as in his paintings of St. Bartholomew and St. Andrew. Such images 
register the attempt to redeem the emptiness of the inside by exerting a moral 
force at the very surface of things. But how surprisingly difficult it can be to 
tell aestheticism and asceticism apart! One is just as likely to find ascetic 
practices as a kind of aestheticism that counts on the most candid display of 
flesh, as in some of Caravaggio's works (e.g. Cupid, Bacchus). But think also of 
the grea t popular i ty of fireworks in the baroque,2 0 which have been 
characterized by none other than Adorno as a pure aesthetic "effect," as 
"apparition par excellence ... [as] empirical appearance free of the burden of 
empirical being."21 
While there may always be a risk of aestheticism associated with the 
baroque, always a question of why press the materials to yield this much and 
not more, why add this much ornament and not more, or less, why include 
just this many members in a series-and never an entirely satisfying answer, I 
also think that the art of the baroque works especially hard to bring such 
aesthetic questions to the level of critical self-consciousness. (It is also the 
quest ion of why jus t this much asceticism and not more.) This critical 
questioning sets it apart from other forms of illusionistic play or from other 
instances of aesthetic exuberance, embellishment, or ornamental excess. And 
so if the baroque can be associated with certain emphases of style, it is also the 
moment when style is raised to such a level of self-consciousness that it comes 
to serve as an organizing principle for culture itself. 
Take Annibale Carracci's Dead Christ as a case in point (fig. 5). The 
painting is as much "about" the ability of style to create the forced perspective 
from which the suffering Christ is viewed as it is about the redemptive powers 
of that suffering. An intensity of pain is transferred, through the power of 
style, into an intensity of point of view; the universal meaning of the Crucifixion 
is subsumed under a radical foreshortening that everywhere bespeaks the 
ability of art to compete with the power of belief. The result is not so much 
the expression of a universal religious truth from a subjective point of view as 
20 See for example Kazimierz Siemienowicz, Grand art d'artillerie, (1651). For historical 
accounts see Eberhard Fahler, Feuerwerke des Barock (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974); Alan St. 
Hill Brock, A History of Fireworks (London: Harrap, 1949); Henry Burnell Faber, Military 
Pyrotechnics (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919); and George Plimpton, 
Fireworks (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984). 
21 T h e o d o r Adorno , Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 120. This description is surprisingly close to 
Enrique Lafuente Ferrari's characterization of "Las Hilanderas" as "pure appearance, 
pure visuality," as "reality subjectivated to the extreme limit, to the point where it seems 
about to vanish." Lafuente-Ferrari, Velásquez (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), p. 94. 
9 9 
AN THONY CASCARDI 
5. Caracci, "Dead, Christ" 
the creation of an organized surface wherein perspective is a prior condition 
for the appearance of any truth. Perspective implies the necessity of seeing 
things from a finite place, but here "place" implies both the definiteness of 
physical location and something like the focus of conscious attention. Panofsky 
gets close to this idea when he argues that spatial tensions in baroque art 
produce a "subjective intensification,"22 but I think he misses the point that 
such intensification registers the fact that subjectivity is a condition for viewing 
surfaces that in turn creates an intensity in the surfaces. 
As for the wider range and ramifications of such efforts, architecture 
and painting place the powers of line, plane, and sphere in the service of a 
broad-gauge reappraisal of the hierarchies between the "upper" and "lower" 
worlds, both of which are seen as indispensable facets of "culture" in spite of 
the fact that they may be incompatible. The results are visible in the complexity 
of surfaces characteristic of the baroque. In Velasquez's Kitchen Scene showing 
Christ in the house of Mary and Martha framed through a window in the 
background, for instance, the eye is forced to shift constantly between two 
22 See Panofsky, Three Essays on Style, p. 51. 
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PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND THEORY OF TIIE BAROQUE 
scenes; these echo o n e a n o t h e r but never quite connec t . They are 
discontinuous, or merely adjacent, and yet we are unable to say exactly how 
or why. Is the background scene a painted image meant to be read as 
temporally disjunct from what we see in the foreground? Or are we meant to 
be looking through a window onto a biblical scene, in which case the two 
moments coexist in time but are spatially disjunct?29 The work says something 
about the relationship between different forms of life: Mary or Martha? The 
vita activa or the vita contemplativa? Those questions are articulated in the 
context of a critique of the relations between sacred and secular worlds that 
no longer counts on a cosmos divided into evaluatively distinct upper and 
lower realms. Such divisions, inherited from Plato and from Christian neo-
platonism, may persist in the baroque. The neo-Platonic tradition in particular 
imagined many floors, or levels, of Being, which were linked from beginning 
to end in a "Great Chain" of essences. But the arts of the baroque took it 
upon themselves to question the underlying structure and order of those 
links,24 and posed the question of whether they could be re-established on 
some other grounds.25 One of the most often overlooked sites for the work 
involved in such questioning is the stair. If a staircase connect levels -
architectural, spiritual, or otherwise - then what connects the steps within 
the stairs? One worry is that such "connections" may depend upon a logic of 
adjacency and nothing more, and it remains far from clear just how strong a 
bond adjacency can provide. 
If one of the concerns of the baroque was to build a rich and meaningful 
surface from the juxtaposition of material forms, then we might well want to 
know how the elements comprising the surface are bound. What degree of 
disruption can they sustain? Take Hans Holbein's most famous painting, "The 
Ambassadors," as a case in point. The painting shows the world of "culture" 
23 "Whether this is meant to be an actual scene glimpsed on the wall is not clear. The 
ambiguity is intentional on Velasquez's part," Lafuente-Ferrari, Velasquez, p. 35. Leibnitz 
might describe them as "incompossible," i.e. they belong to two equally possible but 
incommensurable worlds (see also Deleuze, The Fold, p. 60). 
24 Or to break their connections to magic bonds. Cf. for example Giordano Bruno, 
"General Account of Bonding." 
25 It is Kant's explicit project in the Critique of Judgment to repair the breach between his 
own version of these "two worlds"; this is the role of aesthetic reflection: "The realm of 
the concept of nature under the one legislation, and that of the concept of freedom 
under the other, are completely cut off from all reciprocal influence ... by the broad gulf 
that divides the supersensible f rom phenomena... . This faculty [judgment] ... provides us 
with the mediating concept between concepts of nature and concepts of freedom - a 
concept that makes possible the transition f rom the pure theoretical [legislation of 
understanding] to the pure practical [legislation of reason]." Critique of Judgment, trans. 
James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 37-38. 
1 0 1 
A N THONY CASCARDI 
rendered with meticulous care. The two statesmen in the picture - Jean de 
Dinteville, French ambassador to the English court, and George de Selve, 
soon to be named Bishop of Lavaur - have succeeded in combining many 
different arts, if not in a weave of warp and woof, as in Plato, then by a logic of 
adjacency that helps to create the semblance of a meaningful world. In the 
objects of the painting we recognize music and poetry, but also science, and 
so mathematics, navigation, and astronomy. And yet there is a tension in the 
painting between the arrangement of identifiable things - their more or less 
coherent formation as a legible "scene" of diplomatic statecraft - and the 
anamorphic skull, which cannot be woven into this scene and is not "adjacent" 
to anything else within the image-space. It has come as if from some other 
place. Seen from the perspective of the artefacts of "culture," the skull remains 
a blur; to attempt to bring it into the world of diplomatic culture requires the 
efforts of twisting, flattening, and compression. But by the same token, if you 
attempt to read the world of culture from the perspective of the skull then 
culture becomes an indecipherable blur. The statesman-like ideal of diplomacy 
as a peaceful linkage among territories around the globe is inconsistent with 
the force of a perspective whose dis-location is irreconcilable with the cultural 
order that statesmanship and the arts provide.21' 
One response to this unnerving challenge to culture is to re-order the 
world around the skull, to meet the force of its distortion with that of an 
equally intense aesthetic concentration. Such is the ambition of certain types 
of "devotional" painting. Their hope is to transpose an unidentifiable force 
into an intensely organized play of light and dark. But another response is 
simply to accept the fact that there are limits to the level of organization that 
we might ever expect to find within the cultural field. In Walter Benjamin's 
study of German baroque drama, for instance, the Trauerspiel depends upon 
a semiotics of "allegory" in which "any person, any object, any relationship 
can mean absolutely anything else."27 The implication is that "culture" amounts 
to a constellation of things that are neither similar nor dissimilar in nature, 
much less vitally or logically linked, and only tenuously adjacent. In Benjamin's 
view, the space "in between" things is filled with neither desire nor power nor 
force but with a melancholia that records their absence. ("The only pleasure 
the melancholic permits himself... is allegory," p. 185). In an image sometimes 
20 Moreover, the skull is not just death but a distortion of death, a memento mori that, 
unlike the tapestry in Velasquez' work, is so displaced f rom the context of its original 
sense as to be nearly unrecognizable - assuming that it can be associated with something 
like a context of origination at all. 
27 Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 
1977), p. 175. 
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PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND THEORY OF TIIE BAROQUE 
attributed to Caravaggio, dead birds are related to one another by a logic of 
parataxis and not much more (fig. 6). And, whether it is a matter of globes 
and telescopes, teacups and combs, or a string of dead birds, it may be the 
case that mere adjacency in time and place will never yield more than an 
association of "this" and "that," or of "this" and "this."28 The effect is to equate 
the work of art with its minimal requirement, composition; just putting things 
together becomes a goal in itself. 
If there is nothing at the deep-structure level that holds the series of 
"made things" together from beginning to end, it will be little surprise to find 
that the arts of the baroque flaunt discontinuity and disarray as a condition of 
culture itself.2'-1 "Culture" is imagined as a kind of collection, usually of disparate 
things, and sometimes with maximum disregard for the organizing force of 
thei r or iginal social or geographical contexts. Hence the interest in 
"composite" architectural scenes featuring buildings - usually in the form of 
ruins - whose relationship to one another may be independent of their location 
in time a n d / o r place. Hence also the great interest in the adjacency of the 
different arts and in the production of "synaesthetic" forms. Already in Las 
6. "Still Life with Birds " (Caravaggio ?) 
28 If this is the case, then what is taken apart can also be put back together in new and 
different combinations. Hence the function of wit as a form of invention that works by 
yoking two otherwise unrelated things together. The greater the distance between the 
terms involved, the more powerful the example of wit. 
20 Cf. Benjamin on '"The Confused Court'" as a model for allegory, "subject to the law 
of 'd ispersal ' and collectedness,'" Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 188. 
1 0 3 
A N THONY CASCARDI 
Hilanderas painting "incorporates" tapestry making, and tapestry in turn 
incorporates other painting and myth. But baroque architecture incorporates 
sculpture, and baroque painting incorporates architecture, while painted 
buildings can likewise incorporate paintings of painting. Karsten Harries 
observed that the pictorialization of architectural ornament was central to 
Bavarian Church design in the 17'1' and 18th centuries, and that such ornaments 
eventually grew into the pictorialization of architecture itself: ceilings that 
begin as support and shelter against the sky eventually became representations 
of the heavens.30 As each of the arts extends its reach, the result is a "composite" 
realm, which is to say an aesthetic domain whose organization expands upon 
the same principle that appears to be at work within each of the individual 
arts. Composition, the technique of putting things together in a place, yields 
a fusion of media and forms; the series becomes the pile or the heap. Bernini, 
the architect of St. Peter's in Rome, is credited with having been the first to 
idealize such a goal as "beautiful"; most interesting of all, perhaps, the 
Berninian ideal of the bel composto was conceived as independent of anything 
inherent in the relations among materials, techniques, design, color, form, 
etc.31 
Ideals of "com-position" and effects of synaesthetic "fusion" can be useful 
in modeling culture's quality as an aggregate, lump-like thing with quite a bit 
less consistency than deep-structure theories tend to expect. The question is 
whether these notions can provide some of the most basic things we would 
expect of a philosophy of culture, such as a description of how the arts and 
practices stand together or in relation to place. If the baroque is an urban 
p h e n o m e n o n then what does this mean for cul ture ' s re la t ionship to 
cultivation? If it is cosmopolitan and transhistorical then what role does it 
play in the process of defining, dividing, and relating different territorial 
regions or historical or political sites? While these questions may be too large 
to answer here, I would nonetheless recall that Plato's image of weaving in 
the Statesman occurs in relation to the fashioning of a garment meant to protect 
the body from the weather, while Ovid and Velasquez are interested in the 
weaving of tapestries. Deleuze and Guattari in turn characterize these two-
30 Karsten Harries, The Bavarian Rococo Church: Between Faith and Asceticism (New Haven: 
Yale University Press, 1983), p. 21. 
31 See Irving Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, II (New York: Oxford University 
Press for the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1975), p. 143. Filippo Baldinucci and Domenico 
Bernini (the artist's son) wrote: "It is the general opinion that Bernini was the first to 
attempt to unify architecture with sculpture and painting in such a way as to make of 
them all a beautiful whole [un bel composto], and that he achieved this by occasionally 
departing f rom the rules, without actually violating them" (cited in Lavin, p. 6). 
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PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND THEORY OF TIIE BAROQUE 
clothes-fabric and tapestry-fabric-as the paradigmatic types of textiles, at least 
among cultures that define themselves in relation to a fixed location (i.e. 
sedentary cultures). This is because clothing and tapestries "annex the body 
and exterior space, respectively, to the immobile house: fabric [in these two 
forms] integrates the body and the outside into a closed space."32 The house 
in turn transforms a number of biological functions, such as procreation and 
eating; already for Vitruvius it was the basis of the public sphere. But lest 
these notions of territory and house leave us with an understanding of "culture" 
in functional terms, it may be useful to bear in mind that, at least as Deleuze 
sees it, already, prior to the house, "the territory implies the emergence of 
pure sensory qualities, of sensibilia that cease to be merely functional and 
become expressive features, enabling the transformation of purely pragmatic 
purposes into what we would be satisfied to call culture or art."33 Within the 
baroque Leibnitz recognized the limitations involved in thinking about place 
in terms of structure or function, much less as the cause of whatever happens 
in it. Place for Leibnitz was also quality, and, finally, an expression of the 
reversibility of active and passive modes of being in the world. To quote just 
briefly from the essay on the principle of indiscrenibles, "that which has a 
place must express place in itself; so that distance and the degree of distance 
involves also a degree of expressing in the thing itself a remote thing, either 
of affecting it or of receiving an affection from it.... in fact, situation really 
involves a degree of expressions" ("On the Principle of Indiscernibles," in 
Philosophical Writings, p. 133). 
Following Leibnitz, Gilíes Deleuze proposed a theory of the baroque 
that abandons the model of deep structure in favor of the notion of an 
expressive "operation" directed to an account of surfaces. The specific nature 
of the baroque operation is folding: "[The baroque] endlessly produces folds. 
The baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over 
fold, one upon the other."34 The fold serves as both figure and concept, and 
it has a value that is at once descriptive and analytical. The interest in works 
like Caravaggio's Narcissus or El Greco's Burial of the Count of Orgaz is to show 
that all that is needed in order to begin the operation of folding is a single 
division or echo in space; everything else follows from it. Indeed, the problem 
32 Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University 
of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 476. 
33 Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy ? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell 
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 183. 
34 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 3. 
1 0 5 
A N THONY CASCARDI 
is not so much how to initiate the process of folding but how, once begun, to 
get the folding to stop35 (fig. 7). 
The Leibnitz-Deleuze notion of the fold replaces that of the Platonic 
weave. Moreover, it concentrates in ways that deep structure theory does not 
on the texture of the material in question. Remember thatwhile the Leibnitz-
ian monad is a "simple substance" there is within it a mani-foldedness that 
allows it to take on distinctive attributes and to change: "There must be 
differentiation within that which changes ... [this] must involve a plurality 
within the unity of the simple ... And consequently the simple must contain a 
large number of affections and relations, although it has no parts" (Monadology, 
sees. 12, 13, in Philosophical Writings, p. 180). One of the great attractions of 
this notion for an aesthetic theory of culture is that it allows us to account for 
7. Pilgrimage Church, Wies (Bavaria), statue 
35 On this point, Deleuze thinks exactly the reverse: "The problem is not how to finish 
a fold, but how to continue it, to have it go through the ceiling, how to bring it to infinity" 
{TheFold, p. 34). 
1 0 6 
PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND THEORY OF TIIE BAROQUE 
the qualities of things and not merely for their essence, or rather to see quality 
as itself essential. At the limit of the calculus of the series lies the science of 
characteristics, or at least this is the great Leibnitzian hope.30 Qualities are 
determined less by the nature of their component parts or by their underlying 
causes than by the manner in which simple substances are folded (hence the 
connection between the style known as "mannerism" and the baroque): "That 
is what Leibnitz stated when he invoked the 'paper or the tunic.' Everything 
is folded in its own manner, cord and rod, but also colors distributed according 
to the concavity and convexity of the luminous rays... Texture does not depend 
on the parts themselves but on strata that determine its 'cohesion'" (Deleuze, 
The Fold, pp. 36-37). 
The operation of folding envelops "deep structure" causes, mechanisms, 
and motives in the surface, at least until such time as they may become 
submerged or shadowed by some other fold. Among the principles that enable 
this thinking is the Leibnitzian notion that "the predicate lies in the subject" 
(Leibnitz, Philosophical Writings, p. 135). This aesthetic concept of agency can 
provide a useful modification of deep structure models of production and 
can likewise help guard against the reductivism that takes culture as grid-like 
surface to be deciphered. Deleuze may be right to say that the abandonment 
of the ideal of art as a "window on the world" eventually yielded to that of the 
surface as a plane on which "lines, numbers, and changing characters are 
inscribed" (The Fold, pp. 3, 27). Deleuze has the work of Robert Rauschenberg 
in mind, but I believe it would be fairer to think of the informational grid, or 
even the combinatorial matrix, which results from a flattening of the fold and 
the elimination of the texture of the weave. 
By contrast, the baroque arts suggest a view of culture as a textured 
surface that is neither the (ideological) effect of a deep structure cause nor a 
grid of information. Whatever lies down "deep" must somehow be understood 
to act not just through its power to organize and produce surfaces, but by 
means of its own envelopment in them.37 The result is a view of culture as a 
realm of effects for which there is no determinate, underlying, deep structure 
cause, but as a domain in which motives and cause are themselves transposed 
3li "The art of combinations in particular is, in my opinion, the science which treats of 
the forms of things or of formulae in general (it could also be called generally the science 
of quality in general, or, of forms). That is, it is the science of quality in general, or, of the 
like and the unlike, according as various formulae arise from the combination of a, b, c, 
etc., whether they represent quantities or something else. It is distinguished from algebra, 
which is concerned with formulae applied to quantity, i.e. with the equal and the unequal." 
Of Universal Synthesis and Analysis, in Philosophical Writings, p. 17. 
37 See Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 124. 
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A N THONY CASCARDI 
to the surface and energize it. There is a grammar and a mode of agency that 
can be associated with these effects, but it is not one that we are accustomed 
to recognize from the models of causality that work in the physical world. 
Consider the example of façades that curve (St. Philip Neri Oratory, San Carlo 
aile Quattro Fontane), of columns that twist (Bernini), or of trees that bend 
in response to no identifiable force in nature (fig. 8). Insofar as these torsions 
are effects standing in need of causal explanation at all, we might do best to 
describe them as self-caused. They are phenomena of the sort that we might 
associate with a psychology of subjective consciousness, were it possible to 
ascribe subjectivity to such things. Building on Leibnitz' not ion of the 
"predicate in the subject," one can locate the rough equivalent of this logic 
within the field of "characterology," which takes a special interest in passions 
that overwhelm whatever causal account of them we might be able to provide. 
(Rosalind Krauss's observations on Rodin's Adam move in a similar direction: 
"What outward cause produces this torment of bearing in the Adam? What 
internal armature can one imagine, as one looks on from the outside, to 
explain the possibilities of their distention? Again one feels backed against a 
wall of unintelligibility. For it is not as though there is a different^iewpoint one 
could seek from which to find those answers. Except one; and that is not 
8. Hobbema, "Middleharnis Avenue" 
1 0 8 
PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND THEORY OF TIIE BAROQUE 
9. Villabrille, 
"Head of St. Paul" 
exactly a place from which to look at the work - any of Rodin's work - but, 
rather, a condition. This condition might be called a belief in the manifest 
intelligibility of surfaces, and that entails relinquishing certain notions of cause 
as it relates to meaning, or accepting the possibility of meaning without the 
proof or verification of cause. It would mean accepting effects themselves as 
self-explanatory - as significant even in the absence of what one might think 
of as the logical background from which they emerge."38) In such cases the 
result is a surface that can't be characterized as either active or passive, shallow 
or deep. It is at once a "pure effect" and the result of indeterminate causes. 
Even where the aesthetic surface is organized as a grid, there is what Deleuze 
describes as a "surface tension" at work in it,39 which is to say that one must 
reckon with effects that follow from its organization as a surface that appeals 
to sense. The culture of the baroque excels in the cultivation of just this kind 
of surface tension, producing energies that can't be reduced to any underlying 
cause. And so it is with "culture" itself, which is neither a formative process 
38 Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking, 1977), p. 26 
3'' Deleuze, Logic of Sense, pp. 124-125. 
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ANTIIONY CASCARDI 
nor a collection of things produced, and as much like a lump as a text (fig. 9). 
But lest the image of the lump make culture sound too inert, I should add 
that it is a lump whose self-positing and expressive qualities are everywhere 
foregrounded in the baroque. The energy that gathers in its surfaces provides 
an aesthetically rich model for thinking about culture as such. 
1 1 0