On the Shoulders of Giants

by Umberto Eco

  Then, too, there is The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912):

  We make use, instead, of every ugly sound, every expressive cry from the violent life that surrounds us. We bravely create the “ugly” in literature.… Each day we must spit on the Altar of Art.

  And Aldo Palazzeschi in his futuristic 1913 manifesto Il controdolore:

  We have to teach our children to laugh, to laugh the most unrestrained, insolent laughter.… We will supply them with educational toys, humpbacked, blind, gangrenous, crippled, consumptive, syphilitic puppets, that mechanically cry, shout, complain, are afflicted with epilepsy, plague, cholera, hemorrhaging, hemorrhoids, the clap, insanity, puppets that faint, emit a death rattle, and die.… Consider the happiness you’ll feel on seeing dozens of little hunchbacks, dwarfs, cross-eyed, and lame children grow up around you, the divine explorers of joy.… We futurists want to cure the Latin races, especially our own, of conscious pain, conformist syphilis aggravated by chronic romanticism, and of the monstrous susceptibility and piteous sentimentalism that depress every Italian.… Teach children the maximum variety of jeers, grimaces, groans, lamentations and shrieks, substitute the use of perfumes with that of stinks.

  Of course, the massified world could only oppose this provocation of the part on the avant-garde with kitsch—that is to say, the caricature of art. And so we have fabulous kitsch, sacred kitsch, or a fusion of kitsch and avant-garde, as in the fascist period.

  Kitsch can be different things. Kitsch could be said to be an absence of taste: garden gnomes, glass snow globes with the Madonna of Oropa, but also good things in terrible taste as in Guido Gozzano’s “Grandmother Speranza’s Friend” of 1911:

  Poll parrot stuffed and the bust of Napoleon, of Alfieri,

  the flowery moldings (the very good things in terrible taste),

  the dark fireplace, the collection of boxes without any candy,

  the clusters of marble fruit standing under the bell jars’ protection,

  the odd toy, the coconuts there, the box made of seashells, the warning of Pray or Remember adorning the keepsakes that lie everywhere,

  the albums with painted archaic wildflowers, an engraving or two, the pale watercolors, the view of Venice done all in mosaic,

  the miniatures there in profusion, a painting or two by d’Azeglio, daguerreotypes (just a bit yellow) with figures in dreamy confusion,

  .….….…

  The red damasked chairs, in the corner the cuckoo clock …

  But there is also kitsch as the search for effect. In other words, if I portray a woman, that woman must make me feel like bedding her. The essence of kitsch consists in exchanging the ethical category with that of aesthetics.

  As Hermann Broch explains, “kitsch wants to produce not the ‘good’ but the ‘beautiful.’ And if this means … describ[ing] the world not as it really is but as it is hoped and feared to be … still one must concede that no art can work without some effect.”

  In show business, effect is an absolutely essential component, an aesthetic component, while there is one entire artistic genre, a specific bourgeois genre—namely, opera—in which that effect represents a fundamental element of construction.

  But kitsch can be something that feigns the condition of art without actually attaining it. And if the term kitsch has a meaning it is not because it designates solely an art that aims to engender effects, because in many cases great art has also set itself this goal. In and of itself, kitsch is not a formally imbalanced work, because in that case it would merely be an ugly work. Nor does it characterize a work that uses stylistic features that have appeared in another context, because this can happen without lapsing into bad taste. In order to justify its function as a stimulator of effects, kitsch tries to pass itself off as art, but by doing little more than adopting and making a great show of the “look” of other works. In my opinion, a genuine model of kitsch is Giovanni Boldini, who constructed his portraits from the waist up according to the best rules of the creation of effect. The head and shoulders—in other words, the uncovered parts—obey all the canons of a refined naturalism. The lips of his women are full and moist, their flesh calls up tactile sensations, their gaze is sweet, provocative, sexy, dreamy. But as soon as he turns to painting clothing, Boldini abandons this “gastronomic” technique, outlines are no longer precise, fabrics dissolve in bright brush strokes, things become clots of color, objects melt in explosions of light. The lower part of Boldini’s paintings evoke an Impressionist culture; Boldini is now clearly working within the avant-garde, quoting from the repertoire of contemporary painting. In the upper part he is seeking the effect. His women are stylemic sirens. The face must satisfy the person commissioning the work, as far as the artist’s approach to the woman goes. But the work must be satisfying in terms of the painter’s approach to art.

  While kitsch is so ambiguous, we also discover that what was kitsch in the past can become art in the present. Susan Sontag was reflecting on this when she worked out her theory of camp. Camp is not measured by the beauty of something but by its degree of artifice and stylization. The best example of this is Art Nouveau, insofar as it transforms light fixtures into flowering plants, living rooms into grottoes and vice versa, and cast-iron bars into orchid stems, as in Hector Guimard’s Paris Metro entrances. The camp canon includes some of the most disparate objects, from Tiffany lamps to Beardsley, from Swan Lake and the works of Bellini to Visconti’s Salomé, from certain fin-de-siècle postcards to King Kong, down to old Flash Gordon comics, women’s clothing of the 1920s, ostrich boas, and dresses with fringes and beads. The thing that camp taste cares for is “instant character,” the thing that really does not excite it is character development. This is why opera and ballet are held to be inexhaustible reserves of camp: because neither of these forms can do complete justice to human nature. Where there is character development, the element of camp diminishes. Among operas, for example, La Traviata, which has some small degree of character development, is less camp than Il Trovatore, which has none at all. When something is merely ugly, rather than camp, it is not because its ambitions are too mediocre. The artist has not attempted to do anything that is truly bizarre. “It’s too much, it’s too fantastic, it’s unbelievable.” This is an expression typical of camp enthusiasm. There is an element of camp in the series of great Italian films based on the heroic character Maciste, and architect Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Barcelona is also camp, one man’s ambition to do alone something that would require the efforts of generations in order to be realized. Things are camp not when they become old, but when we are less involved in them, and we can enjoy watching the attempt fail instead of making use of the results. Camp taste rejects the distinction between beauty and ugliness typical of normal aesthetic judgment; it does not turn things on their head; it does not maintain that beauty is ugly or vice-versa; it restricts itself to offering art and life a different and complementary set of criteria for judgment. Just think of all the important works of art of the twentieth century, whose aim was not to create harmony, but to stretch the medium to the limit so as to tackle ever more violent and irresolvable themes. Camp maintains that good taste is not merely good taste. Actually, there is a sort of good taste in bad taste. Camp is beautiful because it is awful.

  At this point, many ideas disappear from art, albeit not from life, because we do not know whether fascinating characters from outer space are ugly or beautiful, or whether the characters of Frank Frazetta are ugly or frightening. We do not know whether the “living dead”—to pay tribute to filmmaker George Romero—are merely horrible or, as he suggests, the bearers of a political message. Is splatter ugly or beautiful? Was Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit (1961) meant to be beautiful? On the internet you can find a series of “uglifications” of art masterpieces, one, we might say, more beautiful than the next. There is ugliness in art, too, but see how difficult it is to establish whether foul is fair or fair is foul, as the witches in Macbeth put it.
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br />   And in life? In life, the models would seem to be clear. The mass media, cinema, and television tell us who is beautiful and who is ugly, but then on the street we meet different, not beautiful, people and sometimes some of us marry them, or sleep with them—which some feminist authors tell us is one way to defy gender and sexual biases.

  There is a short story which perhaps you will know, but it is worth highlighting its fundamental point. Here is Fredric Brown’s “Sentry”:

  He was wet and muddy and hungry and cold, and he was fifty thousand light-years from home.

  A strange blue sun gave light and the gravity, twice what he was used to, made every movement difficult.…

  And now it was sacred ground because the aliens were there too. The aliens, the only other intelligent race in the Galaxy … cruel, hideous and repulsive monsters.…

  He was wet and muddy and hungry and cold, and the day was raw with a high wind that hurt his eyes. But the aliens were trying to infiltrate and every sentry post was vital.

  He stayed alert, gun ready. Fifty thousand light-years from home, fighting on a strange world and wondering if he’d ever live to see home again.

  And then he saw one of them crawling toward him. He drew a bead and fired. The alien made that strange horrible sound they all make, then lay still.

  He shuddered at the sound and sight of the alien lying there. One ought to be able to get used to them after a while, but he’d never been able to. Such repulsive creatures they were, with only two arms and two legs, ghastly white skins and no scales.

  Brown’s sensibility brings us back to the initial theme of the relativity of ugliness. Perhaps all of us will appear horrible to the future colonizers of this planet.

  But since our history of ugliness has taught us that the ugly should also be understood and justified, let me leave you with the portrait by Quentin Metsys of the Donna Grottesca, and as you look at it, an excerpt from a wonderful seventeenth-century text, The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton:

  Love is blind, as they say.… Every lover admires his mistress, though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favored, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tanned, tallow-faced, have a swollen Juggler’s platter-face, or a thin, lean, chitty-face, have clouds in her face, be crooked, dry, bald, goggle-eyed, bleary-eyed, or with staring eyes, she looks like a squis’d cat, hold her head still awry, heavy, dull, hollow-eyed, black or yellow about the eyes, or squint-eyed, sparrow-mouthed, Persian hook-nosed, have a sharp Fox nose, a red nose, China flat great nose, snub-nose with wide nostrils, a nose like a promontory, gubber-tushed, rotten teeth, black, uneven, brown teeth, beetle-browed, a Witch’s beard, her breath stink all over the room, her nose drop winter and summer, with a Bavarian poke under her chin, a sharp chin, lave eared, with a long crane’s neck, which stands awry too, with hanging breasts, “her dugs like two double jugs,” or else no dugs, in the other extreme … a vast virago, or an ugly Tit, a slug, a fat fustilugs, a truss, a long lean rawbone, a skeleton, a sneaker … and to thy judgment looks like a merd in a lanthorn, whom thou couldest not fancy for a world, but hatest, loathest, and wouldest have spit in her face, or blow thy nose in her bosom, the very antidote of love to another man, a dowdy, a slut, a scold, a nasty, rank, rammy, filthy, beastly quean, dishonest peradventure, obscene, base, beggarly, rude, foolish, untaught, peevish … if he love her once, he admires her for all this, he takes no notice of any such errors, or imperfections of body or mind.… he had rather have her than any woman in the world.

  [La Milanesiana, 2006]

  4. The Absolute and the Relative

  I want you to think for a moment about the image of Magritte’s Absolute Knowledge, as a sort of morale booster. You must be prepared for anything in this next hour, because a serious lecture on the concepts of the absolute and the relative would have to last at least two thousand five hundred years—just as long as they have been debated in reality. I have long asked myself what the term “absolute” means; it is the most elementary question a philosopher should pose.

  I went to look for images by artists that refer to the absolute, and—as well as the fine Magritte, which however does not tell me a lot in a philosophical sense—I found others: Painting the Absolute, Quéte d’absolu, In Search of the Absolute, and Marcheur d’absolu, not to mention advertisements using the term, with their images of Absolu by Valentino, Absolut vodka, and Absolu mincemeat. It would seem that the absolute is a big seller.

  Moreover, the notion of the absolute brought to mind one of its opposites—namely, the notion of the relative. This has become a rather fashionable term since prominent churchmen and even secular thinkers launched a campaign against so-called “relativism”—which has in turn become a disparaging term used for almost terroristic purposes, rather like the way Silvio Berlusconi uses the word “communism.” I set myself the task, therefore, not to clarify your ideas but to muddle them up, by trying to show how ambiguous these terms are—according to the circumstances and context, they mean very different things among themselves—and to suggest that they should not be used like baseball bats.

  According to dictionaries of philosophy, the absolute is all that is ab solutus, free of all bonds or limits. It does not depend on something else, but holds within itself its own reason, cause, and explanation. This is something, therefore, very close to God, whose own self-definition, “I am who I am,” cast everything else as contingent. That is to say, none of the rest has its own cause within itself and, although by some accident it came to exist, it could just as well not exist, or could no longer exist tomorrow—and this is the case for the solar system and for all of us.

  As we are contingent beings, and therefore destined to die, we have a desperate desire to be anchored to something that does not perish—something absolute. But this absolute can be transcendent, like the biblical divinity, or immanent—to invoke the theory of a Spinoza or Giordano Bruno. According to idealist philosophers (F. W. J. von Schelling, for example), we too become part of the absolute because the absolute is the indissoluble unity of the subject that knows and that which was once considered to be extraneous to the subject—for example, nature or the world. In the absolute, we identify with God and are part of something that is not yet fully complete: process, development, infinite growth, and infinite self-definition. But if that is how things stand, we could never either define or know the absolute because we are part of it; trying to conceive of it would be like Baron Münchausen dragging himself out of a swamp by his own hair.

  So the alternative is to think of the absolute as something we are not and that lies elsewhere, not dependent on us—like Aristotle’s God, who thinks of himself thinking and who, as Joyce wrote in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” As a matter of fact, in the fifteenth-century work De docta ignorantia, Nicholas of Cusa had already said: Deus est absolutus.

  But in Nicholas’s view, insofar as God is absolute, God can never be reached. The relationship between our awareness and God is the same as the one between an inscribed polygon and the circumference within which it is inscribed: as the sides of the polygon gradually multiply, we get closer and closer to the circumference, but the polygon and the circumference will never be equal. Nicholas said that God is like a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

  Is it possible to conceive of a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere? Evidently not. Yet we can describe it, and that is what I am doing right now, and you all understand that I am talking about something that has to do with geometry, except that it is geometrically impossible and unimaginable. So there is a difference between being able to conceive something or not and being able to describe it and attribute some meaning to it.

  What does it mean to use a word and give it a meaning? It means a lot of things.

  Having instructions for recognizing an object, situat
ion, or event. For example, part of the meaning of words such as dog or stumble is made up of a series of descriptions, also in the form of images, for recognizing a dog and telling one from a cat, and for telling the difference between stumble and jump.

  Having a definition and / or a classification. I have the definition and classification of dog but also of events or situations such as voluntary manslaughter, which by definition I can distinguish from involuntary manslaughter.

  Knowing the so-called “factual” or “encyclopedic” properties of a given entity: for example, I know that dogs are faithful, good for hunting or for guarding the home, and that according to the law involuntary manslaughter will lead to a determined sentence, and so on.

  Possibly having instructions explaining how to produce the object or the corresponding event. I know the meaning of the word vase because even though I am not a potter I know how a vase should be produced—and it is the same with terms such as decapitation or sulfuric acid. Instead, for a term such as brain I know meanings A and B, some of the properties C, but I do not know how to produce one.

  A splendid case in which I know the properties A, B, C, and D was provided by C. S. Peirce, who defined lithium this way:

  If you look into a textbook of chemistry for a definition of lithium you may be told that it is that element whose atomic weight is 7 very nearly. But if the author has a more logical mind he will tell you that if you search among minerals that are vitreous, translucent, grey or white, very hard, brittle, and insoluble, for one which imparts a crimson tinge to an unluminous flame, this mineral being triturated with lime or witherite rats-bane, and then fused, can be partly dissolved in muriatic acid; and if this solution be evaporated, and the residue be extracted with sulfuric acid, and duly purified, it can be converted by ordinary methods into a chloride, which being obtained in the solid state, fused, and electrolyzed with half a dozen powerful cells, will yield a globule of a pinkish silvery metal that will float on gasoline; and the material of that is a specimen of lithium. The peculiarity of this definition—or rather this precept which is more serviceable than a definition—is that it tells you what the word lithium denotes, by prescribing what you are to do in order to gain a perceptual acquaintance with the object of the word.