Name: Umberto Eco
Job: Profesor and author
Eco’s day job is teaching semiotics, the study of communicating through signs and symbols, at the University of Bologna. His most recent book is “The Island of the Day Before,” a romance that explores the intellectual questions of the 17th Century. But Eco is best known for his 1980 novel “The Name of the Rose,” a murder mystery set in a medieval monastery.
Q: When you study language, body language, words, as well as other forms, what are you learning?
A: I am interested in every form of communication. We don’t communicate only through language but through a lot of other devices, comprende, including clothes. A master of semiotics once said he is simply a man who goes through the streets and where all the people see things, he sees meanings.
For example, gentlemen in general button left to right, women in general button right to left. OK, this is a very little sign, but it is already something to be interpreted. So imagine you see a gentleman button right to left; it can mean something.
We discussed why in Washington there are more ashtrays than in Manhattan. So the problem is, is it due to the habits of senators, of lobbying tycoons, or other elements? Those ashtrays are not only containers but they mean something. I don’t know what, but it means something.
Q: I suppose we are communicating and “reading” people all the time without thinking about it. Some years ago, a Chinese friend claimed he could tell if a foreigner was American because Americans always wore comfortable shoes. And a woman in Northern Ireland insists she can tell a Catholic from a Protestant by his posture and gait on the sidewalk.
A: But it is not a new invention. If you read “The Ethics of Aristotle” you see that the Greeks had a certain way of seeing and behaving, and for them the pace of walking was taken as a sign of a moral disposition. You were more dignified if you walked slowly; to walk fast was a sign of the lower class. There is a verse that says that says haste subtracts honesty from every human act. Today, no. Today, on the contrary, if somebody walks too slow it means lazy, that he has nothing to do, that he is a dropout.
Q: In all the years you have been visiting America you must have seen signs of change in the culture?
A: Oh, yes, if there is a country in which cultural change is at an exaggerated speed, that’s America. It’s very difficult sometimes to describe America, because of, for one example, the new migration wave. Now you go to California and you have the impression it is a Spanish-speaking country. Thirty years ago it was not so.
Q: What other influences are you seeing on the country and politics?
A: As usual America is at the avant-garde and politics is becoming more and more a TV show. America started it years ago and now it happens in Italy. It means that the media comes prior to politics and to justice. The O.J. trial was a difficult example in which the trial was done by the media before and the real trial followed.
I have written some articles against the presence of the cameras in the trials. I think that this place is like a church in which people must act according to a certain ritual and everybody has to respond only to the judge, but the moment when the cameras come inside everybody, the prosecutor, the judge, the lawyers are acting for a wider audience and their behavior is profoundly transformed.
They said no, it is democratic to inform everybody. But I say, no. It is not against democracy that the surgeon works in a private place without the public, because the presence of the public could alter his way of doing, so it is not a matter of democracy.
Q: Television does change the direction of who is being addressed.
A: If I go to follow a trial inside the court, I am focusing my attention on every step of the trial. If I follow it by television–and we know that TV is consumed in distraction, so to speak–I get a coffee, I go to the bathroom, then I talk with you, and so even my attitude is changed, and it’s untrue that I am picking up information from that trial. It is terribly scattered information so I am not really informed about the trial. Nobody except some mad person followed in his room all the O.J. trial hour after hour, so it is not a way to inform the audience. It would be better to have there, as usual, a good reporter and then to publish the speeches and dialogues.
This has an impact also in political life . . . It is the media who decide whether the Clinton family has to be loved or hated, independently from what they do. This is changing politics a lot.
After the Oklahoma bombing event I was delivering this speech of European fascism at Columbia. I discovered the Michigan Militia and American fascism, and I said to my audience that there were young American students who believe that if fascism returns it will be with black shirts with the cross. But it can return in plainclothes and so one of the duties of everybody is to be able to detect those new forces of fascism. They can take also the form of a talk show, the same as that of Mussolini speaking, shouting from the balcony. It can take other forms, this new kind of virulence and criticism.
Q: Another aspect is that television is often used as the medium to validate things, so that if we see an image, then it must be true.
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A: I will tell you the difference between paleotelevision and neotelevision, I worked at TV in my early years, in the 1950s, for four years and at that time there were not the mikes that you put on your tie. Rather, there was this big microphone called the giraffe and the typical alarm was when you saw the giraffe or another camera. Nobody was to see the technical elements on the screen.
Now you see that, you see an interview with the person and around him or her the cameras are turning the giraffe and every other device there on the screen, you must see it. . . . Once television was perceived as an imperceptible window through which you were supposed to watch the real world.
Now the only real world, being the TV one, you must have the impression that you are watching television and not the real world because the real world is purely virtual and only television is a reality. So now television reveals itself, doesn’t try to conceal its presence.
At the same time, in television, because we see something we think we know it or understand it. Because we see Bosnia we say, OK, I understand they’re suffering in Bosnia. Whether we are sympathetic or not, there is a danger that we believe that now we know what it’s like.
Q: Are you saying we may become insensitive to all we see?
A: I wouldn’t like to be a moralist and say: Therefore, television is making us worse, because of the times in which horrible things happened in the world and nobody knew them. Even (in) the time of Hitler, if there was a TV reporter going to Dachau and Auschwitz, probably the Holocaust would have been different. So, OK now at least we know that something happens, in a sense we are more responsible and we have more duties than before. During the Second World War and the concentration camps a lot of people said, I didn’t know, nobody informed me. And it was true, nobody informed them. Today, at least we are informed. Today they can’t say I didn’t know. That is what I call moral responsibility. There is a difference between information and full knowledge, but if you are informed you have the duty to go deeper.
An edited transcript