Modern Post-modernvs.

Modern• Original • Innovative • Beautiful• Good tokens• Everlasting type• Provocative proposal of

a new world vision

Post-modern• Pleasurable• More or less successful

tokens• A given model or type• Product of industry• Alien to artistic

invention

Ultimately mass-media was judged as pleasurable but non-artistic. This “excessive pleasurability, repetition, lack of innovation” equated mass-media to the products of industry and “serial production” which “wasconsidered . . . alien to the artistic invention” (Eco 162).

A clarification of terms:

• Repeat: to make a replica of the same abstract type

• Serialize: a continued succession of similar things

Although Eco’s distinguishes between repetition and serialization – he does write that “serialize means, in some way, to repeat” (166).

However, Eco is interested in the repetition and the serilaity of mass-media products “that at first glance [do] not appear the same as (equal to) something else” (267).

• The Retake

• The Remake

• The Series

• The Saga

• Intertextual Dialogue

Repetition in Mass-media

The Series incorporates:

• A fixed situation;

• A restricted number of pivotal

characters;

• Pivotal characters are an axis for

secondary characters;

• Secondary characters give the

impression the story is new;

• The narrative does not change (167-

168).

Eco writes “the saga differs from the series insofar as it concerns the story of a family and is interested in the‘historical’ lapse of time. It’sgenealogical” (169).

Ultimately, the Saga is a series in disguise that appears to celebrate the passage of time through the repetition of the same story; however, the story is repeated through a either a continuous or tree-like lineage of characters (169).

The Saga incorporates:

• A fixed, yet linear, situation;

• A restricted genealogy of pivotal characters;

• Pivotal characters are an axis for the passage of

time;

• Aged Pivotal and Secondary characters give the

impression the story is new;

• The narrative does not change

Eco acknowledges that “[a]ccording to modern aesthetics, the principal features of the mass-media products were

repetition, iteration, obedience to an established schema, and redundancy (as opposed to information)” (162).

Eco derives two main characteristics of aesthetically well-done work based on the “modern” conception of aesthetic value (173).

1. The text must achieve a dialectic

between order and novelty-in other

words, between scheme and innovation;

2. The dialectic must be perceived by the

consumer, who must not only grasp the

contents of the message, but also the

way in which the message transmits

those contents (174).

Eco writes “This being the case

[the two main characteristics],

nothing prevents the types of

repetition listed above from

achieving the conditions

necessary to the realization of

aesthetic value” (174).

Ultimately, Eco proves there is a role for post-modern mass-media in culture as well as an inherent,

aesthetically pleasing, artistic value to post-modern mass-media.

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto. “Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-Modern Aesthetics.” Daedalus 114.4 (1985): 161-84. The MIT Press. Web. 11 Jan 2011.

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