Blade Runner depicts a Los Angeles that is always deterritorializing. In the penultimate scene, a battered and exhausted Deckard flees from further encounters with the replicant, Roy Batty. Batty is the angel of death (and judgement): blond, hard (metallized), nordic, a male-model of perfection in mind and body, always leaking emotions through his steely eyes. Engineered for use in the colonies (with an abbreviated life-span as a check on his utility), he feels betrayed by daddy. Earlier he had kissed his ‘father,’ then crushed his skull in his hands. To test his waning powers, he inserts a long metal spike through his palm. Resentment of the human imperfections, undeserved freedom, is Batty’s motive. His mouth smashed, the defeated Deckard can only mumble, resilient, snake-like. In the end, nostalgia for an impossible humanity prompts Batty to spare Deckard, the latter becoming the necessary witness to epic battles eulogized in the replicant’s last words. The poetry is why the voice over works in dead-pan counterpoint.

I have begun with a diversion, establishing the fascist potentialities of the postmodern. An examination of how images inflect desire may prove an antidote. We learned from Wofflin that the Baroque adds motion to the classic forms of the Renaissance. The motion / emotion dyad is key to perception. Henri Focilon in The Art of the West theorized the ways that different styles of art inflect one another, upsetting schemata of periodization in the process. "He writes a history of art composed of differently paced but intermingling phases. An ‘experimental’ beginning seeks solutions to problems that a ‘classical’ moment discovers and exploits. A ‘radiating’ (rayonnant) period refines the solutions of the former to a degree of preciosity, while a ‘Baroque’ phase at once sums up, turns upon, contorts, and narrates the formulas of all the others" (x). Tom Conly provides this summary in his Introduction to Giles Deleuze’s The Fold. Deleuze following Focilon’s model of mixed and interactive phases offers a reading of the baroque that has striking relevance to many of the questions that engage postmodern thought.

I only want to assume for the moment that something like Focilon’s intermingled phases apply to some well known lines of development in the history of art. If, for instance. Monet represents the classical moment of Impressionism, it becomes possible immediately to see Van Gogh as its baroque. Look at how Van Gogh has transformed the wind riffling a field of poppies with the energy of his brush strokes and slashing palette knife (not that these images speak directly to one another). Of course, analogies serve only to allow us to slide around in the virtual museum of our imaginations. Indeed they are reversible, in some ways the precisions of Ma Jolie form a baroque moment with respect to the solidity of lets say Cézanne.

In several studies, Deleuze has argued that rather than being a rigid partition, the space between percept and feeling forms a fold with infinite pleats, dark zones and light zones unfurling in different intensities. He attempts to establish this quality of the fold as the signature of a baroque style, different pleats catching the light differently, different degrees of occlusion. Take the watery fold, as an instance of translucency: the figures on the east pediment of the Parthenon, or the Renaissance style of Agostino di Duccio, or the Baroque of Bernini. There is no transparency, instead translucency is a projection of the monad.

The baroque is a matter of projecting and reflected forms, a suggestion of possible compositions instead of the classical art of cylindrical or rounded forms arrayed on a grid constructed according to the principles of disappearing perspective. Renaissance forms can look so much like pasted figures in Botticelli, whereas the Baroque multiplies contours. Deleuze makes a similar point, contrasting Klee’s "active line" with Kandinsky’s angles and vectors (set in motion by an apparently external force).

Possibly the postmodern is a fourth phase of the modern, its baroque. Virtual images, for instance, like those in a fun-house mirror "are not simply substitutions of appearances for realities in the usual sense of mimesis. They are instead simulacra, appearances that make realities" (38) writes Stephen Tyler in order to contrast modernism with postmodernism. The postmodern offers a permutation of possibilities, reflections on a surface without depth. Images serve as "real/models, not models of the real, they are not approximations of some reality, they are the only reality we know" (Tyler 38). Surfaces, semi-transparent forms in overlay, suggest the reality of Ma Jolie –this painting is usually thought to represent the ‘classic’ moment of Picasso’s cubism.

On the other hand, representation needs its opacities. This is how Rosalind Kraus has taught us to read Picasso’s collages. One side of the violin is opaque because cut from newsprint, one side translucent, the rotation of forms in space, cued by the calligraphic signatures of the f-holes: shapes related to shapes in overlay as the object is turned in space and becomes available to different perspectives. Contesting this way of reading, T. J. Clark writes on Ma Jolie and The Guitar Player—as pretending that there is a perspective from which all components make coherent sense. He is probably right. We have been mislead by the semiotics of the sign, so crucial to the collage, to think that a similar mechanics of reversibility and super-position applies to Cubist paintings from 1911 and 1912. For Clark, this ‘classic’ moment proves to be far less Cartesian than had been thought.

Still, we write often as though the structure of language and the structure of perception interface in a form of reciprocal supposition: perception transferred to a sheet of lined paper, as though the partition between the felt and the seen were a window or grid as in Albrecht Durer’s Reclining Nude. Look now at the Violin of 1912, with the ornate baroque finial and the reversed cut-outs, only imaginable as a virtual fold in the newsprint. Perception, as opposed to representation or reading, involves us in an entirely different system than Krauss’s semiotics. Erase the subject, displace the forms with different degrees of urgency, set the composition in motion: postmodernism (or for Picasso the tendency of futurism, which he rejected though futurism is now more often cited as a precursor to the postmodern than cubism, for instance, by Marjorie Perloff). For Picasso, the pretense of having a subject is indispensible. His engagement with form seems to me comparable to Velasquez’s.

Michel Foucault has pointed out that in Las Meninas ‘modern’ man first began to represent himself as the subject of his own observations. In Leibniz’s Baroque calculus, two virtual spaces are folded together (the two floors or rooms of his monad). The viewer standing in the gallery before Las Meninas is in a fold of virtual spaces that have been actualized by the painting. Lines with virtual extensions create points of intersection on the floor in the gallery or hall. The eyes of both the painter and the princess watch the subject negotiate an actualization. In one possible world, Velasquez (or a Velasquez) must have stood where the subject now stands. He imagined himself in the subject position. Now he looks at the spot from which a gaze meets his. He depicts two spaces folded together: the gaze of a casual viewer inspecting the work and the world of the court (illuminated by light from a casement on the right-hand side)—all evidence suggests it is the couple in the receding virtual spaces of the mirror whom he hopes to please. There is another casual observer to the right rear. The subject in the mirror is in a world without windows. Only the world that borders the spaces of the painting contains the sum of all possible worlds. This bordering world, like the inner room of the monad, is a congeries of virtual possibilities. One is real in the process of being realized as the brush touches the canvas; one is actual, in the process of actualization as a viewer absorbs the multiple positions available to him or her. At all events, the subject is not in the painting, instead the painting offers a perception of possible positions.

What is most at stake in any of this is subject position. "For the subject to take up a position as a subject, it must be able to be situated in a space occupied by its body …. a condition of coherent identity, and, moreover, the condition under which the subject has a perspective on the world, and becomes a source for vision, a point from which vision emanates and to which light is focused." (Grosz 47) For Elizabeth Grosz, the body is a virtual entity, with shifting or fluid boundaries. For her, to isolate points of contact between bodies becomes problematic (except for the surgeon perhaps or the hairdresser, but for each the tools of their trades are extensions of their bodies). Most often the subject’s sense of his or her body is a projection resulting from habit, frame of mind, desire. The baroque (in its fullest sense, as opposed to a fascist reading) offers a calculus of such differential degrees of experiencing and expressing subjectivity.
 
 

Works Cited: