'What is Baroque? It's not an historical age for Deleuze, but a concept that must continually be proposed (33) N-B is another concept, but the big question is whether it is really different? In so far as the Baroque is 'the fold to infinity', N-B is the same isn't it?'

(question from Sjoerd)

'It is easy to call the Baroque inexistent; it suffices not to propose its concept. We thus have to go back and wonder if Leibniz is the Baroque philosopher par excellence or if his work forms a concept capable of making the Baroque exist in itself. [...] For our purposes the criterion or operative concept of the Baroque is the Fold, everything that it includes, and in all its extensiveness.'

Deleuze The Fold (33)


Sjoerd wrote this question to me in response to something in which I wrote that the Neo-Baroque was 'grounded' by the Baroque and I think he is right to ask this question and I think on my part it was a bad choice of words. The Baroque is non-historical in that the 'Fold to infinity' is not something that simply 'appears' but something that is exemplified in certain modes of aesthetics and philosophy that would be typically called Baroque. And yes, the Neo-Baroque is the same in that it is still 'the fold to infinity,' yet something has changed and for Deleuze it is the 'conditions' that have altered;

'The selection is what tends to be disappearing, first of all and in every way. If harmonics lose all privilege of rank (or relations, all prviliege of order), not only are dissonances excused from being "resolved," divergences can be affirmed, in series that escape the diatonic scale where all tonality dissolves. But when the monad is in tune with divergent series that belong to incompossible monads, then the other condition is what disappears: it could be said that the monad, astraddle over several worlds, is kept half open as if by a pair of pliers (137).'

I think that what is interesting here is what happens to infinity when the monad 'opens' and incompossible series/worlds are actualised in this world (the best world, that is, the best because it exists). Although the Neo-Baroque remains the 'fold to infinity' the nature of that infinity changes, or perhaps there is now more than one infinity and a multitude of divergent series that are actualised by the monad. (And if this world is the 'best' by virtue of it existing then do incompossibles and divergent series also become the best or do we find a erosion of Leibniz's pre-established harmony?)

When we look back from these few lines to the rest of Deleuze's explication of Leibniz we must see that the change of these conditions must have consequences for the nature of perception and the nature of matter. On the level of perception, Deleuze argues that 'insofar as the same world is included in all existing monads, the latter offer the same infinity of minute perceptions, and the same differential relations that yield in them strangely similar conscious perceptions (90).' But this infinity has changed and so what it yields is a different point of view (136). And the city itself has changed. The condition of the dominant and the dominated monads in matter is no longer the same; the two floors of the Baroque house appear to have fallen into one, the vertical harmonic and the horizontal melodic can no longer be distinguished; there is not only a collapse of metaphysics but the new condition of openness makes both dominant and dominated more dynamic. This, I believe, brings us to different areas in Deleuze's thought (most particularly in 'A Thousand Plateaus) as it enables far more dynamic becomings and the emergence of new assemblages (becoming-intense, becoming-animal).

Due to these changes in what is conceived as the Baroque I would argue that the Neo-Baroque is the same as the Baroque yet pushed so far to its limits that the system begins to break down and opens onto the chaosmos, a move that would have been inconceivable and perhaps even evil for Leibniz. The 'fold to infinity' is still a 'fold to infinity' but no longer one of harmony, it has become far more chaotic and no longer appears to be pre-established; a move that resonates with further aspects of Deleuze's work as a whole.

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