Resurfacing Baroque in post-bourgeois Semiocapitalism Indust-reality and the mechanization of labour have shaped the perception of the modern world, culminating in the aesthetics of Modernist Avant-garde. The effect of coincidence of the Avant-garde, industry and the media is the art-object proliferation, the overlapping of art and production, and therefore the aestheticization of the daily environment, distinctive features of late modernity. Aesthetics has invaded mass production, and every real object, losing its singularity, appears as the reproduction of a model. By this point of view late modernism can be viewed as a process of replacement of the original reality by the artefact. Art is dead, says Jean Baudrillard, not only because critical transcendence is dead, but also because reality itself is being confused with its image. Then, the process of digitalization has transformed things in signs, objects in messages. The proliferation of semiotic goods is producing the effect of a saturation of social attention, a neo-Baroque effect. The passage from Modern capitalism to Semiocapitalism is marked by the end of measure and by the come-back of the Baroque spirit. In the book Vuelta de siglo, Bolivar Echeverria argues that the spiritual and immaterial power of the Church of Rome has always been based on the ideological control of the imagination, but this influence was hardly considered by the pragmatic ethics of industrial culture. Catholic Spain of the golden centuries was the harbinger of a non-industrial brand of accumulation, based on massive robbery of the Americas. This strain of modernity was marginalized after the military defeat of the “Invincible Armada� in the naval war with the British Empire, which started the economic and political decline of Spain. Protestant modernity defined the canon, but the Baroque strain of modernity was not erased: it went underground, tunnelling deeply into the recesses of the modern imaginary only to resurface at the end of the twentieth century, when the capitalist system underwent a dramatic paradigm shift towards post-industrial production. Semiocapital is centred on the creation and commodification of techno-linguistic devices that have by their very nature semiotic and deterritorialized character.
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