Neo-Baroque
Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment
by Angela Ndalianis
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
336 pp., illus. Trade, £22.95
ISBN: 0-262-14084-5.
Reviewed by Jan Baetens
Jan.Baetens@arts.kuleuven.ac.be
With Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary
Entertainment Angela Ndalianis has written
an important book. Although the relationships
between neo-baroque and postmodern culture
(here represented by the entertainment
industry) have been stressed by many scholars
(Calabrese 1992 still being the best-known
of them), Ndalianis succeeds in broadening
the discussion in various significant
ways. But how does the author "outperform"
(to quote one of her favorite expressions)
the achievements of the existing scholarship
on the neo-baroque/post-modern issue?
One the one hand, one might have the impression
(which is false) that Ndalianis’
book offers nothing more than a systematic,
complete, up-to-date, popular culture
oriented view and reworking of the baroque’s
posterity in today’s mass culture:
She documents thoroughly issues such as
"polycentrism and seriality",
"intertextuality and labyrinths",
"hypertexts and mappings", "virtuosity,
special effects, and architectures of
the senses", "special-effects
magic and the spiritual presence of the
technological", without saying anything
that Calabrese and others hadn’t
already said. Yet on the other hand, Ndalianis
also introduces a set of very new insights
and approaches, which transform dramatically
the very terms of the discussion, and
this is what makes Neo-Baroque Aesthetics
and Contemporary Entertainment a real
landmark publication.
Ndalianis, who accepts the use of baroque
and classic as transhistorical categories
and who accepts equally the current definitions
of both concepts (following Wölfflin
and others, she thus opposes both as open
versus closed, or dynamic versus static,
etc.), emphatically rejects any binary
analysis of their opposition. First, the
author theorizes the relationship between
the two poles of classic and baroque in
terms of continuity, instead of split:
The neo-baroque era in which we are living
is neither the result of a refusal of
the classic, nor the outcome of a degenerative
process. Neo-baroque’s "chaos"
is not the contrary of classicism’s
"order"; the first is, on the
contrary, to be analyzed as a complexification
of the latter. This reconsideration of
the relationships between the two major
tendencies in our culture is a crucial
shift that Ndalianis transfers also to
other dichotomies, such as modernism versus
postmodernism, in which the author manages
to break with the too easy identification
of postmodernism and neo-baroque: Neo-baroque
is, for her, part of the larger whole
of postmodernism, not a simple synonym
of it.
Second, and this is a very logical step
in the author’s argumentation, Ndalianis’
refusal to oppose in an absolute way classic
and baroque helps her to reestablish the
fundamental historicity of each form taken
by both tendencies. In a more concrete
manner, Ndalianis, while permanently foregrounding
what links contemporary entertainment
to 17th century baroque, illustrates
no less systematically the differences
between those two cultures. Taking her
inspiration from Bolter and Grusins’
remediation theory (Bolter and Grusin
1999), Ndalianis demonstrates convincingly
that given the differences at economic,
social, political, ideological, and scientific
level, baroque culture and neo-baroque
culture cannot be the same, despite of
all the forms, techniques, and goals they
undoubtedly share (baroque’s Catholicism,
for instance, is something very different
of neo-baroque’s New Age sympathies).
Yet, the renewing force of Ndalianis’
book is not limited to the discussions
on the meaning, use, and scope of the
notions of (neo-)baroque and classic.
Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary
Entertainment also makes an important
contribution to the field of cultural
semiotics as well as to the theory of
contemporary culture as visual culture.
In this sense, it is not exaggerated
to claim that the stances defended by
the author deserve to complete the theoretical
attempts to define "visual culture"
in the wake of WJT Mitchell’s famous
visual turn (Mitchell 1994). Taking here
as a starting point the cultural semiotics
of Lotman (1990), Ndalianis tries to give
a more concrete interpretation of his
very abstract boundary theory of culture.
Culture, for Lotman, is based
on a double mechanism of inclusion and
exclusion (before anything else, the semiotic
mind shapes a universe by tracing a limit
between an inside and an outside)
that Ndalianis interprets in terms
of culture as "spatial formation"
(one may hear correctly an echo of Foucault’s
discursive formations) and finds illustrated
in the tension between classic and baroque,
the latter being fundamentally a culture
oriented towards the lack or the break
of limits (for instance the limits between
inside/outside, real/fictitious, spectacle/spectator,
etc.).
A fourth major achievement (besides the
overcoming of the classic/baroque dichotomy,
the re-historicization of these transhistorical
categories, and the valorization of the
semiotic framework in cultural theory)
is the healthy polemical tone of many
pages of the book. How refreshing
to read that one can embrace postmodernism
and popular (and thus reject any nostalgia
of a mythical high-art and unadulterated
modernism), while at the same time attack
the cultural pessimism of what is called
here the postmodern "Holy Trinity"
(Baudrillard, Jameson, Lyotard). The
very positive interpretation of notions
such as seriality, copy, repetition, etc.,
that are for Ndalianis signs of
vitality and instruments of (re)invention,
provide a good example of the author’s
independent thinking. Another
good example is the polemics with the
defenders of the "classic Hollywood
paradigm" in film studies such as
Kristin Thompson (1999), whose work tends
toward a negation of the neo-baroque in
contemporary mainstream cinema.
Of course, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and
Contemporary Entertainment is not a perfect
book. One may regret that quantitative
information (and even information overload!)
sometimes takes the place of qualitative
analysis. Ndalianis overwhelms
her reader with everything he or she wants
to know about this or that aspect of 17th
century history of contemporary film production,
but she fails sometimes in offering her
reader what a good book of this sort cannot
do without: close reading.
Although all the information on, for
instance, the technical or financial underpinnings
of trompe-l’oeil ceilings or Spiderman
tie-ins is very useful as such (Ndalianis
book has encyclopedic qualities that
every reader interested in the genealogy
of the neo-baroque will really need when
tackling the subject from a different
viewpoint), some pages of the book do
not always adequately stress what is really
at stake behind some figures. There
are fortunately many counterexamples of
this, among which Ndalianis’
brilliant analysis of the opening sequence
of Star Wars, with fine and subtle remarks
on the modifications of Hollywood’s
off-screen paradigm (Ndalianis shows very
well how, thanks to its new use
of surround sound, Star Wars revolutionizes
the classic relationship between on-screen
and off-screen, which ceases to be a diegetic
opposition in order to introduce a kind
of blurring of the boundaries between
the images on the screen and the space
of the audience in the theater: a typically
neo-baroque move.) From time to
time, Ndalianis also has the unfortunate
habit of quoting rather than truly
reading. One has, of course,
to forgive the author for that, but this
kind of second-hand quotation sometimes
produces a lack of subtlety in her argumentation.
To give just one example:
In the discussion on literary baroque,
I would have welcomed a more cautious
presentation of Jorge Luis Borges (whom
Ndalianis strangely happens to call
Luis Borges) since Borges’ work,
often praised for its forsaking all South-American
baroque at the level of its style, is
definitely something else than, for example,
the very "wild" and definitely
baroque writing of Severo Sarduy or Lezama
Lima. Corollarily (but this is
a problem with many Anglo-Saxon interpretations
of the modernism/postmodernism debate),
the coupling of Borges and Derrida, which
can be defended at a strictly theoretical
level if one considers that both writers
take poststructuralist stances, is seriously
challenged by the stylistic and rhetorical
differences between them. But
these are minor flaws, compared to the
major qualities of a book that sheds
much new light on very old problems.
Works Cited
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999).
Remediation. Understanding New Media.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Omar Calabrese (1992). Neo-Baroque:
A Sign of the Times. Princeton: Princeton
UP.
Yuri Lotman (1990).
Universe of the Mind: a Semiotic Theory
of Culture. London: I.B. Taurus.
WJT Mitchell (1994). Picture Theory.
Chicago: Chicago UP.
Kristin Thompson (1999). Storytelling
in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical
Narrative Technique. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP.
This review appears by kind permission
of Image and Narrative; http://www.imageandnarrative.be/
