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Page 98
scheme-variation knot, where the variation is no longer more appreciable than the scheme.
As Giovanna Grignaffini (1983:4546) observes, "the neobaroque aesthetics has transformed a commercial constraint into a 'formal principle.'" Consequently "any idea of unicity becomes destroyed to its very roots." As happened with Baroque music, and as (according to Walther Benjamin) happens in our era of "technological reproduction," the message of mass media can and must be received and understood in a "state of inattention."
It goes without saying that the authors I have quoted see very clearly how much commercial and "gastronomical" consolation there is in putting forward stories that always say the same thing and in a circular way always close in on themselves. But they not only apply to such products a rigidly formalistic criterion; they also suggest that we ought to conceive of a new audience which feels perfectly comfortable with such a criterion. Only by presupposing such agreement can one speak of a new aesthetics of the serial. Only by such an agreement is the serial no longer the poor relative of the arts, but the form of the art that can satisfy the new aesthetic sensibility, indeed, the post-postmodern Greek tragedy.
We would not be scandalized if such criteria were to be applied (as they have been applied) to abstract art. And in fact, here we are about to outline a new aesthetics of the "abstract" applied to the products of mass communication. But this requires that the naive addressee of the first level disappear, by giving place only to the critical reader of the second level. In fact, there is no conceivable naive addressee of an abstract painting or sculpture. If there is one whoin front of itasks, "But what does it mean?" this is not an addressee of either the first or second level; he is excluded from any artistic experience whatever. Of abstract works there is only a critical "reading": what is formed is of no interest; only the way it is formed is interesting.
Can we expect the same for the serial products of television? What should we think about the birth of a new public that, indifferent to the stories told (which are in any case already known), only relishes the repetition and its own microscopic variations? Despite the fact that today the spectator still weeps in the face of the Texan families' tribulations, ought we to expect for the near future a true and real genetic mutation?
If it should not happen that way, the radical proposal of the postmodern aesthetics would appear singularly snobby: as in a sort of neo-Orwellian world, the pleasures of the smart reading would be reserved for the members of the Party; and the pleasures of the naive read-

 
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