Playing with baroque

Well, I've been in two minds over whether I can be bothered blogging or not recently. Not that I don't want to but I haven't really had much to say and I've been getting various concepts pumped through my brain in order to write my next paper. And since I'm in the process of writing it, and since I'm an expert in the dubious art of procrastination, I thought I'd write something about it here so I can jabber about a few things.

The book that I have just finished reading is Omar Calabrese's Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times. I'm finding it very pleasant after a month of Bataille and Heidegger to be reading something where everything is pretty much straight forward and which I can relate to pop-culture. What's nice about Calabrese is that he has no problem comparing cultural objects (or 'texts' as he calls them) to scientific and philosophical theory. For example, there's a wonderful chapter that he dedicates to 'monsters' in which he compares John Carpenter's 'The Thing' to Catastrophe Theory by examining the underlying structures of both. There's also a nice discussion of 'E.T.' and 'Gremlins' in which he explains them as being exemplary of the neo-baroque aethetic as they suspend any form of aesthetic judgement.

Perhaps it the combination of being taught philosophy by a theoretical physicist and reading Michel Serres that has caused me to get so interested in scientific theories and how they relate to philosophy and culture. There's definately something about systems that gets me all excited (something I didn't think I'd ever grow up to say). Complex and dissipation systems are fascinating, especially when a complex system forms a singularity and they tie in very much with human interaction as we are the most complex of systems.

Anyway, there's a moment in Calabrese's book that particularly stuck out where he's discussing details and fragments and in which he describes them as participating in in the loss of totality.

'We are not simply dealing with a decay of models in the face of modernism (or postmodernism). The fact is that detail and fragmentation of systems become autonomous facts; valorised independently, they make us "lose sight" of our general frames of reference.'

I wonder if 'New Labour' (what a horrible term) could be described as one of these newly autonomous fragments. It was ruptured from the original Labour Party and it can certainly be seen as an autonomous (relatively) system now. But that's just a wondering and nothing I want to go into.


Anyway, that was a random babbling post ( on re-reading it I've found it even more fleeting and jilted but I'll post it anyway for postings sake). Once I've finished writing my paper I may post more on this or I may not. It depends how excited I get about fractals.

|