Chronicles of a Liquid Society by Umberto Eco
What caused the Aznar government crisis, Lozano tells me, is a whirl, a relentless flow of private communications that have assumed the dimension of a collective phenomenon: the people have taken action, they were watching television and reading newspapers, but at the same time they were communicating with each other and questioning whether what was being said was true. The Internet enabled them to read the foreign press, to compare and discuss the news. In a matter of hours public opinion had formed that was not thinking or saying what television wanted them to think. It was a momentous experience, Lozano stressed; the public really can be bad for television. Perhaps he was hinting, ¡No pasarán! They shall not pass!
I wasn’t joking when, a few weeks ago, I suggested in a debate that if television is controlled by a single proprietor, an electoral campaign can be carried out by people parading the streets with sandwich boards that tell us what television is not saying. I was thinking of the countless alternatives the world of communication offers us: controlled information can also be contested through text messages, instead of just texting “I luv u.”
In response to my friend’s enthusiasm, I replied that in Italy, alternative means of communication are perhaps not yet as well developed, that politics here consists of occupying a soccer stadium and interrupting a match (since, tragically, this is politics), and that in Italy the possible authors of semiological guerrilla warfare are engaged in harming each other rather than harming television. But what has happened in Spain is a lesson on which to meditate.
2004
Give us today our daily crime
I reckon that if the hurricane that destroyed New Orleans hadn’t found a landscape so heavily excavated, leveled, dredged, deforested, and plundered, its effects might have been less catastrophic. I think everyone agrees. But the point where the debate begins is whether a hurricane here and a tsunami there are due to global warming. Let me make it clear: though I have no specific scientific knowledge, I’m convinced that changes in environmental conditions are producing phenomena that wouldn’t have happened if we were more concerned about the fate of the planet, and I’m therefore in favor of the Kyoto Protocol. But there have always been tornadoes, cyclones, and typhoons—otherwise we wouldn’t have Joseph Conrad’s magnificent descriptions, or those famous disaster movies.
There have been many cataclysms in past centuries that have killed tens of thousands of people, perhaps happening as close together as the tsunami in Southeast Asia and Hurricane Katrina in America. A few have been described in writing, such as the earthquakes in Pompeii and Lisbon, while vague and terrifying news circulated about others, such as the eruption of Krakatoa. But all in all, I think it’s fair to say that hundreds of other cataclysms have wiped out coastlines and populations while we were otherwise occupied. In the globalized world, the speed of information is such that we hear immediately about every tragic event in the remotest corner of the globe, and we are under the impression that there are now many more cataclysms than there used to be.
For example, I think the average television viewer must wonder whether some mysterious virus is causing mothers to murder their children. And here it’s difficult to blame the hole in the ozone layer. There has to be something else beneath it. Indeed, there is something else, but it’s as plain as can be, and there’s nothing secret about it. Quite simply, infanticide has existed throughout history, and it was fairly widely practiced. Thousands of years back, the ancient Greeks went to the theater to cry over Medea, who as we know killed her children to spite her husband. We should nevertheless be comforted by the fact that out of seven billion inhabitants on the planet, the percentage of killer mothers has many zeros before it, and so we shouldn’t look suspiciously on every mother who passes us with a stroller.
Yet anyone watching the television news has the impression that we live in one of the circles of hell where not only do mothers kill a baby a day, but fourteen-year-olds are going around shooting, foreigners raping, shepherds cutting off ears, fathers exterminating their families, sadists injecting bleach into mineral water bottles, and fond nephews slicing up their uncles and aunts. It’s all true, of course, and within the statistical norm, and no one chooses to remember those serial killers in the halcyon years following World War II: the Soapmaker of Correggio who boiled her neighbors, Rina Fort who smashed the heads of her lover’s children with a flatiron, and Countess Pia Bellentani who disrupted the dinners of VIPs with gunfire.
Now, while it’s “almost” normal that a mother kills her child from time to time, it’s less normal for so many Americans and Iraqis to be blown up every day. And yet we know all about the children who are killed but very little about the number of dead adults. Serious newspapers devote several pages to political problems, economics, and culture, and others to the stock market, classified ads, and those death notices our grandparents used to read so avidly—and then, apart from exceptional cases, the papers devote just a few inside pages to crime stories. Indeed, at one time they gave more summary coverage than today, so that bloodthirsty readers had to buy specialty crime magazines, in the same way, let’s not forget, that they left television gossip for the illustrated weeklies found in hairdressing salons.
Today, however, after the right amount of news coverage on wars, mass killings, terrorist attacks, and suchlike, after a few judicious revelations on political affairs, but without unduly disturbing viewers, our television news bulletins move on to a sequence of crimes, matri-sorori-uxori-fratri-infanticides, robberies, kidnappings, shootings, and, for good measure, each day it seems heaven’s cataracts have opened wide upon our regions and the rain has poured as never before, in comparison to which the Great Flood was a minor plumbing incident.
And there’s something beneath this, or above it. The editors of our television bulletins, not wanting to compromise themselves too much with politically and economically dangerous news, prefer to stick to crime stories. A fine sequence of heads split open with a hatchet keeps the public satisfied, doesn’t put bad ideas into their minds.
2005
Maybe Agamemnon was worse than Bush
I’m sitting on a train reading the newspaper when the man next to me starts up a conversation:
“You see what times we’re living in? You’ll have read today about the man who’s killed his pregnant wife. And those two who killed their neighbors a few months ago because their radio was a little too loud? And the Romanian prostitute who sticks an umbrella into a girl’s eye during an argument over nothing? And how many mothers recently have killed their children? And the one who killed his daughter—a foreigner, I need hardly add, and Muslim to boot—to stop her from marrying a Christian? And that girl not so long ago who killed her mother and little brother? And those who kidnapped their neighbor’s child and killed him because he was crying? What is the world coming to?”
I point out to him that he clearly hasn’t heard it all. If he’d read carefully what I had read, perhaps on the Internet, then he’d realize the list didn’t stop there.
Had he read that story from Piacenza? To curry favor with the person who has to ensure the success of his venture, a certain Mennino lets him have his daughter, knowing full well that the man is unscrupulous and will abuse her. Then he heads off, happy as a lord, on his business trip. While he’s away, one Egido, a hopeful gigolo, sets about consoling Mennino’s wife, becomes her lover, makes himself at home, and when Mennino gets back from his trip, Egido kills him, with the wife’s help. They blame it all on someone else, are seen grieving at the funeral, but Mennino’s son returns from abroad, where he’s been on a university scholarship, kills Egido, and, not satisfied with that, kills his mother as well. And what’s more, his sister tries to save him by giving false information to the investigators. “How terrible, how terrible,” sighs the man on the train.
And what about Signora Meda from Molfetta? Her husband deserts her, and since she knows that he adores his children, she kills them in revenge. “Really, nothing’s sacred these days. This woman k
I press on. Perhaps you haven’t heard the story of Crono of Saturnia, who—I can’t remember why, something to do with a legacy—chops off his father’s testicles. Then, since he doesn’t want children, and perhaps understandably, considering his own experience as a child, Crono makes his wife abort and eats the dead fetus. “Maybe he was part of some satanic sect,” the man suggests. “Perhaps as a child he dropped rocks onto passing cars from highway overpasses, and perhaps the people where he grew up all thought he was respectable. Hardly surprising, since that same newspaper you’re reading now champions abortion and marriage between transvestites.”
Look, I tell him, most sex crimes today are committed within the family. You’ll have heard of Lai, the man from Battipaglia, who is killed by his son. Then he, the son, sets himself up with his mother until she can bear it no more and kills herself. And in a town not far away, two brothers called Tiesti first kill their stepbrother for personal gain, then one starts an affair with the other’s wife, and the other, for revenge, kills his brother’s sons, has them cooked on the grill, and serves them up, and the brother feasts on them without knowing what he’s eating.
Jesus, Jesus, sighs my interlocutor, but were they Italians or foreigners? Well, I admit, I’ve slightly changed the names and places. But they were all Greeks, and they aren’t stories I’ve read in the newspaper but in a dictionary of mythology. Signor Mennino was Agamemnon, who sacrifices his daughter to the gods to win victory on his expedition to Troy, the young Egido who then kills him was Aegisthus, and the faithless wife was Clytemnestra, who is then killed by her son Orestes. Signora Meda was Medea. Signor Crono was Cronus, whom the Romans called Saturnus. Signor Lai was Laius, killed by Oedipus, and the wife who commits incest was Jocasta. And the Tiesti brothers were Thyestes, who eats his children, and his brother was Atreus. The founding myths of our civilization are these, and not just the marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.
Such stories were used every now and then to write a tragedy or an epic poem, and newspapers today are on the lookout for any act of violence that will fill two or three pages. If we reckon that now there are seven billion of us, whereas the population of the known world at that time was just a few tens of millions, then, keeping everything in proportion, more people were killed then than now, at least in everyday life, wars excluded. And maybe Agamemnon was even worse than Bush.
2007
High medium low
In the culture supplement of last Saturday’s La Repubblica, Angelo Aquaro and Marc Augé wrote about the Italian publication of Mainstream by Frédéric Martel. They went on to look at new forms of cultural globalization and returned to a question that reemerges every so often, though always from a different perspective, namely, the dividing line between high culture and low culture.
Though the distinction may seem strange to young people who listen just as much to Mozart as to world music, I should point out that this was a live issue in the mid-twentieth century, and that in the 1960s Dwight Macdonald, in “Masscult and Midcult,” a magnificent and stylish essay, identified not two but three levels. High culture, just to be clear, was represented by Joyce, Proust, and Picasso, while what he called Masscult included the whole of popular trash, including the covers of the Saturday Evening Post and rock music. Macdonald was one of those intellectuals who never had a television in the house, while those more open to modernity had one in the kitchen.
But Macdonald identified a third level, the Midcult, a middle culture represented by entertainment products that borrowed stylistic elements from the avant-garde but were fundamentally kitsch. Among Midcult products, Macdonald named, from the past, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edmond Rostand, and from his own time, Somerset Maugham, late Hemingway, and Thornton Wilder, and he would probably have added many books published successfully in Italian by Adelphi, which alongside examples of highbrow culture has brought together such names as Somerset Maugham, Sándor Márai, and the sublime Simenon—Macdonald would have classified Simenon’s non-Maigrets as Midcult and his Maigret stories as Masscult.
Yet the division between popular culture and aristocratic culture is not as old as we might imagine. Marc Augé quotes the case of Victor Hugo’s funeral, attended by hundreds of thousands of people. Was Hugo Midcult or high culture? Even the fishmongers of Piraeus went to Sophocles’s tragedies. Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, when first published in the 1840s, had an impressive number of pirated editions, an indication of its popularity. And let’s not forget the story of the blacksmith who mangled the words of Dante’s verse, angering the poet but demonstrating at the same time that his poetry was known to illiterates.
It’s true that Romans abandoned the performance of a comedy by Terence to go and watch bearbaiting, but today too many highly cultured intellectuals are prepared to forgo a concert so they can watch a soccer match. The distinction between two or three cultures becomes clearly defined only when historical avant-garde movements set about provoking the bourgeoisie; then they choose illegibility, or the rejection of representational forms, as their value.
Has this rift survived up to our own time? No, because musicians like Luciano Berio and Henri Pousseur took rock music seriously, and many rock singers are more familiar with classical music than we might imagine. Pop art has broken cultural boundaries; the prize for illegibility today goes to many sophisticated comics; much music from spaghetti westerns is remade into concert music. One look at a late-night television auction will reveal how clearly unsophisticated viewers—anyone buying a picture via television auction is not a member of the cultural elite—are buying abstract canvases their parents would have attributed to the tail of a donkey, and, Augé says, “between high culture and mass culture there is a covert interaction, and often the second feeds on the richness of the first.” I would add to that: “And vice versa.”
Cultural levels today are perhaps distinguished not so much by their content or their artistic form as by the way in which they are enjoyed. In other words, the difference no longer depends on whether it’s Beethoven or “Jingle Bells.” A piece of Beethoven that becomes a cell phone ringtone, or airport or elevator music, is enjoyed absent-mindedly, as Walter Benjamin would have said, and therefore, for anyone using it in such a way, comes to resemble an advertising jingle. On the other hand, a tune created for a detergent commercial can become the subject of critical attention, appreciated for its rhythmic, melodic, or harmonic inspiration. It is not so much the object that changes but the way it is perceived. There’s attentive perception and inattentive perception, and an example of inattentive perception is the use of Wagner as the theme tune for the Italian television version of Survivor. In the meantime, the more cultured listener will go off and appreciate an old vinyl recording of “Tea for Two.”
2010
“Intellectually speaking”
One evening last week in Jerusalem, an Italian journalist told me it was reported at that morning’s press conference that I had said Berlusconi was like Hitler, and some leading Italian politicians declared my statement “insane” and offensive to the entire Jewish community (sic). But the press conference clearly dealt with different matters altogether, since the Israeli newspapers next morning gave it wide coverage. The Jerusalem Post did a lead article on the front page and almost the whole of page three, with no mention of Hitler, reporting instead the real questions discussed.
No reasonable person, however critical of Berlusconi, would think of comparing him with Hitler, given that Berlusconi did not spark a world war with fifty million dead, or massacre six million Jews, or close down the parliament of the Weimar Republic, or set up squads of Brownshirts and the SS, and so forth. So what had been said that morning?
Many Italians still don’t realize how poorly our prime minister is viewed abroad, so that when questioned by foreigners
When my Italian colleague told me about the news agency piece, he added: “Journalists, you know, have to pull out the news, even if it’s hidden.” I don’t agree. Journalists have to report news that really exists, not create it. But this is also a sign of Italy’s provincialism. The Italian media have no interest in talks held in Kolkata on the future of the planet unless somebody in Kolkata has said something for or against Berlusconi.
A curious aspect of the whole business, as I saw when I returned home, is that in every Italian newspaper that covered the story, my alleged statements, placed in quotation marks, all came from the original news agency piece, where I was supposed to have described my brief comment about Hitler as “an intellectual paradox,” or to have made the parallel “intellectually speaking.” Now, I might possibly, after a few drinks, compare Berlusconi to Hitler, but never in the worst state of drunkenness would I ever use meaningless expressions like “intellectual paradox” or “intellectually speaking.” What is the intellectual paradox opposed to? To the manual, the sensorial, the rural paradox? Not everyone can be expected to have perfect knowledge of the terminology of rhetoric or logic, but certainly “intellectual paradox” is the language of an illiterate, and anyone who claims that others say things “intellectually speaking” is a dimwit. This means that the quotation marks in the original piece were the effect of a crude manipulation by someone else.