|
|
|
|
|
|
the "modern" aesthetics. But it is exactly on a different idea of style that Calabrese's paper is centered. In these forms of repetition "we are not so much interested in what is repeated as we are in the way the components of the text come to be segmented and then how the segments come to be codified in order to establish a system of invariants: any component that does not belong to the system can be defined as an independent variable" (29). In the most typical and apparently "degenerated" cases of seriality, the independent variables are not all together the more visible, but the more microscopic, as in a homeopathic solution where the potion is all the more potent because by further "succussions" the original particles of the medicinal product have almost disappeared. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This is what permits Calabrese to speak of the Columbo series as an "exercice de style" à la Queneau. We are thus facing a "neobaroque aesthetics" that is instantiated not only by the "cultivated" products but even, and above all, by those that are most degenerated. Apropos of Dallas one can say that "the semantic opposition and the articulation of the elementary narrative structures can migrate in combinations of the highest improbability around the various characters" (35). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Organized differentiations, policentrism, regulated irregularitysuch would be the fundamental aspects of this neobaroque aesthetic, the principal example of which is the Baroque musical variations. Since in the epoch of mass communications "the condition for listening . . . it is that for which all has already been said and already been written . . . as in the Kabuki theater, it may then be the most minuscule variant that will produce pleasure in the text, or that form of explicit repetition which is already known" (38). It seems to me that these remarks apply perfectly to a typical Baroque corpus such as Der Fluyten Lust-hof by Jacob van Eyck (first half of the seventeenth century). For every composition the basic melody is given by a psalm, a folk dance, or a folk song that contemporary listeners were supposed to know by heart. Each of the customary three or more variations follows a fixed pattern. The pleasure is given both by the recurrence of the same patterns on different melodies and by the skill with which the player is supposed to interpret the many possibilities of reinventing the pieces by a variety of portatos, nonlegatos, staccatos, and so on. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
What results from these reflections is clear. The focus of the theoretical inquiry, is displaced. Before, mass mediologists tried to save the dignity of repetition by recognizing in it the possibility of a traditional dialectic between scheme and innovation (but it was still the innovation that accounted for the value, the way of rescuing the product from degradation). Now, the emphasis must be placed on the inseparable |
|
|
|
|
|