More on baroque natures

Fernando R. de la Flor’s “On the Notion of a Melancholic Baroque” provides multiple points of convergence between Benjamin’s thesis on German Tragic Drama and the new historiography of the Spanish Baroque, as evidenced in J. Antonio Maravall.  Each work, at once large in scope, but in tune to digging into the human trash heaps of empire, asserts that even if we cleanse our hands of the Baroque, it perpetually returns through a plurality of “ontological crises”. 

This final term deserves clarification.  It is not so much the disappearance of things that shifts in the Baroque, but rather the qualities commonly associated to them.  After an epigone of human reason’s domination of the world, in which science and mathematical formulae not only represent but also encapsulate the world, quotidian objects become weird in their own right.  In the 17^th century, this created a rift between world and the prison cell of human thinking. 

Nature, for instance, was seen as a kind of corollary to the internal mechanisms of human politics.  Alongside “forgotten empires” nature provides some sort of foundational harmony for human actors.  It was a backdrop for predication.  Yet, as R. de la Flor notes, the baroque turns nature into a play of shadow puppets:

Here, one’s attention is directed toward the search for a superior evidence of the mutability of things in nature which is the true ideal “theater” where great changes are worked through, and where nothing ever remains as it is for a long time.  In the words of a modern poet nature is the “temple of caducity”.  (15)

If nature’s world is kept as some sort of corollary for human behavior or psychology, here we find the instability of natural entities demonstrating the rift between human expectation of how a world should function and its actual ontological status. 

Yet a rift does not simply imply complete isolation between the human mind and world but simply a complication in interactions.  For instance, the power of nature’s shadow puppets no longer relies on the hands manipulating shards of light but rather dim personae it creates on distant walls.  That is to say, imaginary crises become as real as real ones.  R. de la Flor suggests as much in his discussion of the imago, which, in my view, projects esthetic objects onto an ontological plane alongside real ones.