Chronicles of a Liquid Society by Umberto Eco
And we allow Baudelaire all his artificial paradises, provided he gives us Les fleurs du mal.
2000
The mission of the crime story
Bernard Benstock was a fine American expert on James Joyce. After his early death, his wife gave his Joyce collection to the Scuola Superiore Interpreti e Traduttori at Forlì. This year another of his collections has been donated: nearly seven hundred volumes devoted to crime fiction. Last week, while we were commemorating him, someone asked why so many thinkers, critics, and scholars in general cultivate a passion for the detective story. Of course, those who have to read serious literature like to sit back in the evening with something more relaxing. But why do they often do so with such devotion? There are, I think, three reasons.
One is purely philosophical. The essence of the crime story is eminently metaphysical, and it’s no coincidence that the English call this kind of story a whodunit, which was the question that the pre-Socratics posed, and which we haven’t stopped asking. The five ways to demonstrate the existence of God, studied in the writing of Saint Thomas Aquinas, were also a masterpiece of crime investigation: with his nose to the ground like a truffle hound, he works from the evidence we find in the world of our existence back to the first beginning of the chain of causes and effects, or to the prime mover of all movements . . .
Except that we now know, from Kant on, that if working back from an effect to a cause is acceptable in the world of experience, the procedure becomes doubtful when working back from the world to something that is outside the world. And here comes the great metaphysical consolation provided by the crime story, where even the ultimate cause, and the hidden mover of all movements, is not outside the world of the story, but inside, and is part of it. And so, each evening, the crime story offers the consolation that we are denied by metaphysics, or much of it.
The second reason is scientific. Many people have shown that the investigation procedures used by Sherlock Holmes and his descendants are similar to those used in research, in both the natural and human sciences, where the quest is for the secret key to a text or the original forebear of a series of manuscripts. Holmes, who was notoriously ignorant about almost everything, wrongly described this activity, divinatory in appearance only, as “deduction,” while Charles Sanders Peirce called it “abduction,” and this, with a few differences, was also the logic of Karl Popper’s explanation.
Lastly, a literary reason. Ideally every text should be read twice, first to know what is said, second to appreciate how it is said, and from there to obtain the full aesthetic enjoyment. The crime story is a limited but exacting model of a text that, once you have discovered who the killer is, invites you implicitly or explicitly to look back, either to understand how the author has led you to build up false ideas, or to decide that after all he hadn’t hidden anything, only that you had failed to observe with the keen eye of the detective.
It’s a reading experience that entertains and at the same time offers metaphysical consolation, stimulates research, and provides a model for questioning far more impenetrable mysteries, and is therefore of valuable assistance in the Mission of the Scholar.
2001
Bin Laden’s allies
The debate regarding not so much censorship as caution by the mass media is troubling the Western world. To what extent can the broadcasting of news items favor propaganda actions or even help in spreading coded messages sent out by terrorists?
The Pentagon urges newspapers and television stations to be cautious, and this is natural, since no army at war likes to have its plans, or appeals from the enemy, broadcast. The mass media are now accustomed to absolute freedom and cannot adapt to wartime strictures: in times gone by, anyone spreading news against national security ended up before a firing squad. It’s difficult to unravel this knot. In a communication-dense society that now also has the Internet, there is no confidentiality.
The problem, in any event, is more complex than this. It’s an old story: every act of terrorism is carried out to send a message, a message that itself spreads terror, or at the very least anxiety and instability. It was ever the same, even in those bygone times when terrorists, who now seem like amateurs, limited themselves to killing a single person or planting a bomb on a street corner. If the victim is relatively unknown, the terrorist message brings insecurity even if the impact is minimal. But it brings greater insecurity if the victim is well known and is some kind of symbol.
The qualitative leap can be seen with the Red Brigades when, after the killing of journalists or political advisers who were relatively unknown to the public at large, they moved on to the capture, traumatic detention, and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
Now, what is Osama bin Laden’s purpose in attacking the Twin Towers? To create “the greatest spectacle on earth,” something never imagined in disaster movies, to give the visual impression of striking at the very symbols of Western power, and showing that the greatest sanctums of this power could be violated. Bin Laden wasn’t aiming to cause a particular number of deaths, which, from his point of view, brought added value. He was prepared to make do with half the number of victims provided the towers were hit, and all the better if they collapsed. He wasn’t waging a war that counted the enemy casualties, he was launching a message of terror, and what mattered was the image.
If bin Laden’s aim was to strike at world public opinion with that image, what has happened? The mass media had to broadcast the news, which is obvious. Likewise, they had to report news of the aftermath: the rescues, the excavations, the mutilated Manhattan skyline.
Did they really have to repeat this news every day and for at least a month, with photos, films, endlessly recycled eyewitness accounts, repeatedly bringing the image of that trauma before everyone’s eyes? It’s difficult to say. Newspapers boosted their sales with the photos, television channels boosted their ratings with those repeated film clips, the public itself was demanding to rewatch those horrific scenes, perhaps to fuel their personal indignation, perhaps at times through some unconscious sadistic impulse. Perhaps it was impossible to do otherwise. The emotion of the days following September 11 prevented the world’s television stations and newspapers from reaching some form of agreement to limit coverage. None of them alone could remain silent without losing their position in the ratings.
In this way the mass media have handed bin Laden billions of dollars of free publicity, inasmuch as each day they have shown the pictures that he himself had created, and precisely so that everyone would see them, to stir feelings of disorientation in the West, to stir pride among his fundamentalist followers.
There again, the process continues and bin Laden can still reap advantage at little expense, considering that anthrax attacks are producing a negligible number of victims compared with those of the Twin Towers, but are terrorizing many more, since everyone feels threatened, even those who don’t fly in airplanes and don’t live near symbols of power.
And so the mass media, while they condemn bin Laden, have been his best allies, and in this way he has won the first round.
Yet as consolation for the bewilderment caused by this apparently irresolvable situation, we should remember that when the Red Brigades raised their game with the capture and killing of Aldo Moro, the message was so devastating that it backfired on its own perpetrators: instead of causing political turmoil, it produced an alliance between the parties, popular condemnation, and for the Red Brigades terrorists it marked the beginning of their decline.
Only time will tell whether the spectacle created by bin Laden has unleashed a process that will lead to his ruin, for the very reason that he went too far, beyond what was tolerable. In that case, the media will have won.
2001
Going to the same place
We’re always saying it: much of our time is spent in virtual reality. We know the world through television, which often doesn’t portray the world as it is, but reconstructs it. Television reconstructed the Gulf War using archive f
Yet people are traveling more than ever these days. People whose parents had never been farther from home than a nearby city tell me they’ve seen places that I, a compulsive and professional traveler, still only dream about. No exotic beach, no lost city, lies beyond the reach of most; they spend Christmas in Kolkata and August in Polynesia. Should we therefore regard this passion for tourism as a way of escaping from virtual reality to see “the real thing”?
It’s true that tourism, however superficial, is a way of learning about the world. Except that travel at one time was a special experience, and people would come back changed, but all you meet now are seasoned travelers who have not been affected at all by the bustle of Elsewhere. They come back, and think only of the next holiday. They have no life-changing experiences to tell you about.
Perhaps this happens because the places of real pilgrimage now strive to look like places of virtual pilgrimage. An expert once told me that in a circus a whole day is spent cleaning and smartening up the elephant, a naturally messy and disorderly animal, so that in the evening it looks like the elephants previously seen at the cinema or in photographs. Likewise, the tourist resort strives only to resemble its glossy media image. Naturally, tourists have to be taken to the places that fit the virtual image and don’t see the rest, so they visit temples and markets but not the leper colonies, they visit ruins made to look like new rather than those pillaged by tomb robbers. Sometimes the place of pilgrimage is created ex novo, as seen on television, so that people can pay Sunday visits to the rustic water mill exactly like the one seen on the biscuit commercial, not to mention Disneyland, or Venice as reconstructed in Las Vegas.
But all places are now beginning to look like each other, and this, for once, is the real effect of globalization. I’m thinking of several magical districts of Paris such as Saint-Germain, where the old restaurants, dusky bookshops, and old craft workshops are gradually disappearing, to be replaced by the shops of international designers. They are identical to those you find on Fifth Avenue in New York, or in London or Milan. The main streets of major cities now resemble one another, with exactly the same shops.
Yes, great cities may look alike, but they still retain their own particular features: the Eiffel Tower, the Tower of London, Milan Cathedral, or St. Peter’s. This is true, but even so, there’s a tendency to illuminate towers, churches, and castles with bright multicolored lights that obliterate their architectural features beneath an electric glare, so that great monuments are in danger of looking the same, at least in the eyes of the tourist, and have become a mere backdrop for international-style light shows.
When everything comes to resemble everything else, tourism will no longer be about exploring the real world. Wherever we go, we will always find what we’ve already seen, and what we could have seen from home, sitting in front of our television.
2001
Mandrake, an Italian hero?
Art Spiegelman has been to Milan to present his magnificent collection of New Yorker covers. Spiegelman became famous with his extraordinary graphic novel Maus, in which he demonstrated that comics could talk about the Holocaust with the force of a great saga. But he continues to be topical, commenting on the events of our time with stories that can bring together current affairs and serious argument, with affectionate references back to the earliest comics. In short, I consider him a genius.
He came to my home for drinks, and I showed him my collection of comic books from long ago, some that are dog-eared originals and others good reprints, and he was amazed to see the covers of old Nerbini albums of The Phantom, Mandrake, Tim Tyler’s Luck, and Flash Gordon, amazed not so much at Flash Gordon, who is still legendary on the other side of the Atlantic, but at the other three. If you look at an American history of comics you’ll find references to The Phantom and others, but it’s apparent, even on the Internet, that the great remakes are more interested in Superman, the brigade of superheroes such as Spider Man, and postmodern updates of Batman, or they rediscover the origins of the oldest superhero, Plastic Man, as Spiegelman has also done in a magnificent book. Try looking for Tim Tyler’s Luck: you’ll find plenty of references to a bad film or a television series made from it, in the same way that a terrible TV series was made out of Flash Gordon, which now has trash cult status, but there’s very little mention of the original comics.
Spiegelman told me that The Phantom, Mandrake, and the rest still seem more popular in Italy than in America. He wondered why, and I gave him my explanation, which is that of a historical witness who saw their emergence and first publication in improbable and ungrammatical Italian translations very soon after they appeared in America. Among other things, the covers of some of the Nerbini albums bore the title Mandrache, perhaps to make it seem Italian. In Italy, we had Fascist comics like Dick Fulmine (Dick Lightning), Romano il legionario (Romano the Legionary), and the adolescents of Corriere dei piccoli, who were taking civilization to Abyssinia or performing astounding feats with the Falangists against cruel Red militiamen. But then Flash Gordon came along to show Italian children that they could fight for freedom on planet Mongo against a ruthless and bloodthirsty autocrat like Ming, that the Phantom was fighting not against colored people but with them to put down white mercenaries, that a vast Africa existed where the Patrol roamed around arresting ivory smugglers, that there were heroes who didn’t wander about in black shirts but in tailcoats and wore what the Fascist leader Achille Starace called “stovepipes,” ending with the revelation of press freedom through the adventures of Mickey Mouse the journalist, even before Humphrey Bogart arrived on our screens, though this was after the war, saying, over the telephone: “That’s the press, baby. The press! And there’s nothing you can do about it.” Such memories bring tears to the eyes—Oh, for the return of Mickey Mouse the television reporter!
In this way, during those dark years, the American comics taught us something and had an influence on us, even on our adult lives. And while we’re on the subject, let me make a forecast and give some advice to newspapers, magazines, and television programs. Every year we celebrate an anniversary, an author, a book, a remarkable event. Well, let’s get ready to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of that fabulous year 1934.
In January, the first Flash Gordon adventure appeared in America, as well as Jungle Jim, also created by Alex Raymond. Two weeks later, by the same cartoonist, Secret Agent X-9 with text by Dashiell Hammett! The first Flash Gordon adventure would appear in Italy in October, in L’Avventuroso, except that the hero was depicted not as a polo player, which was too bourgeois, but as a police chief. Leaving aside March, when Red Barry and Radio Patrol first appeared, in June we have the arrival of Mandrake by Lee Falk and Phil Davis, and in August Li’l Abner by Al Capp, which didn’t reach Italy until after World War II. In September Walt Disney made his debut with Donald Duck—do you realize Donald Duck is now seventy years old? In October it was Terry and the Pirates by Milton Caniff, which made its tentative debut in Italy over the next few years in installments of Albi Juventus, under the title Sui mari della Cina (On the China Seas). And in the same year, Le Journal de Mickey appeared in France with the stories of Mickey Mouse.
Now tell me if that year doesn’t offer us enough nostalgic interest.
2002
Are viewers bad for television?
A call came from Madrid, from my colleague and friend Jorge Lozano, who teaches semiotics and communication theory at Complutense University: “Have you seen what’s happening here? It confirms all you wrote decades ago. I’m getting my students to read that paper you gave with Paolo Fabbri, Pier Paolo Giglioli, and others at Perugia in 1965, the paper you gave in New York in 1957 on semiological guerrilla warfare, and your 1973 essay ‘Does the Audience Have Bad Effects on Television?’ It had all been predicted.”
It’s very nice to be heralded as a prophet, but I pointed out that we hadn’t been making prop
Here is what happened. In the 1960s and early ’70s, people were saying that television and the mass media in general were a powerful instrument for controlling what were at that time called “messages,” and that by analyzing those messages it was evident that they could influence viewers and shape the way they responded. But it was clear that what the messages intended was not necessarily how viewers read them. Two obvious examples: the picture of a procession of cows is interpreted differently by a European butcher and an Indian Brahmin, and the advertisement for a Jaguar car stirs a feeling of desire in a wealthy viewer and one of frustration in someone who is poor. In short, a message seeks to produce certain effects but can conflict with local contexts, with other psychological propensities, desires, and fears, and can have a boomerang effect.
This is what happened in Spain. The government messages sought to say, “Trust us, the train bombings were the work of ETA,” but, for the very reason those messages were so insistent and dogmatic, the majority of viewers read them as, “I’m afraid to say it was Al Qaeda.” And here another phenomenon came in, which was known at the time as “semiological guerrilla warfare.” This said: if someone is controlling the television networks, then there’s no way you can occupy the prime seat in front of the television cameras, but you can occupy the prime seat in front of every television set.
In other words, semiological guerrilla warfare had to consist of a series of interventions not where the message is sent from, but where it arrives, causing viewers to discuss it, criticize it, not receive it passively. In the 1960s, this “guerrilla warfare” was still perceived in an old-fashioned way, as a leafleting operation, as the organization of television forums on the model of the cinema forum, as flying visits to bars where most people still congregated around the district’s only television set. But in Spain, what made a difference in the tone and effectiveness of this guerrilla warfare is that we live in the age of the Internet and cell phones. And so the guerrilla warfare was not organized by elite groups or activists or a “spearhead,” but grew spontaneously, like a bush telegraph, spread from mouth to mouth, from citizen to citizen.