A new tag for Deleuze. I should've done it long ago.
For all I've written, about the Baroque, narrative, Modernism, Mannerism and the fading of the ideal, I've never read The Fold.

The decadence of mannerism presents as the self-narrativizing of a concrete idealism, attempting to inoculate itself against increasingly dominant narrative (relativist) culture. Mannerism is the model of aristocratic art in an age of incipient democracy. The baroque is the same model of conservatism in the age of a fully ascendant democracy: the age of theater.

I referred to it in passing, but it belongs here and I've never bothered to do it.  Now that I'm reading it, it's everything I assumed and more. All I have to do is put in a few references.  He imagines he's creating concepts but he's following a path.

Philosophers are so predictable.  That they insist on seeing themselves as apart from other writers of fiction is more absurd as time goes on. As always, for philosophers and theologians, history is bunk.

Historians win. Vesely Chapter 4, p. 176

The most significant change in the representation of reality took place in the period traditionally associated with the formation and development of modern science and with the beginning of its dominant role in modern culture. Though a connection between the two is plausible, it could be misleading if by "science" we understand the context-free, mathematically structured knowledge that was developed later within new disciplines generally called "natural science." The science of the transitional period between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth is instead closely linked with philosophy, metaphysics, theology, and, in a less obvious sense, with the culture as a whole.1

The transitional period overlaps significantly with the period generally termed "Baroque," and the science of this era unquestionably shares many of the characteristics of Baroque culture. We don't usually think of prominent figures such as Sir Isaac Newton or Christiaan Huygens as Baroque scientists, yet we would probably agree that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. the great philosopher and mathematician who was involved in a serious metaphysical and theological argument with Newton, is a Baroque thinker par excellence. Architecture was similarly involved in these issues. The works of Christopher Wren, Claude Perrault, and Guarino Guarini represent not only different tendencies in Baroque architecture but also different trends in Baroque science. The affinity between science and Baroque culture hints at deeper dimensions of representation, not yet fully acknowledged.

Because we usually see Baroque science as an independent domain of knowledge, we tend to overlook the fact that science was then an integral part of the general intelligibility of culture and that it becomes autonomous or independent only under particular and more precisely defined conditions. Indeed, such conditions had never existed before, and their emergence was one of the main characteristics of the transitional period. They were created in unique historical circumstances, by attempts to over-come a deep cultural crisis. I shall say more about that process later. In the meantime, it is important to describe the tendencies that shaped the transitional period as a whole. If we look at the politics, philosophy, literature, visual arts, and everyday life of that time, we find a common search for order and certainty in an environment dominated by fragmentation, relativism of values, skepticism, and pessimism. The radicality of the response, which was based on a dogmatic faith in the mathematical nature of the world order, created for the first time in human history a mode of representation that could claim both that it was fully independent and. at the same time, that it could be universally applied. Because any representation, despite its claims to universality, is inevitably partial, there is always a residuum of reality left out, which has to define its own mode of representation. The result is a duplication that may best be described as "divided representation." A classic example of divided representation is the double standard of truth that has plagued the history of modern science and theology. In architecture, divided representation finds its first clear manifestation in Claude Perrault's distinction between positive and arbitrary beauty, a division that foreshadowed later tensions and conflicts between experience, based on the continuity of tradition, and artificially constructed systems. More recently, divided representation reveals itself as a painful conflict between primary cultural values and technology, which is governed by economic imperatives.

continuing