by Umberto Eco
The twentieth century has, of course, brought us electronics, penicillin and many other life-prolonging drugs, plastic materials, nuclear fission, television, and space travel. Perhaps I’ve left something out, but it is also true that today’s costliest fountain pens and wristwatches try to duplicate the classic models of a hundred years ago, and I have noted before that the Internet, the latest step forward in the field of communication, overtakes the wireless telegraphy invented by Marconi with a telegraphy that uses wires—in other words, marking the return (backward) from radio to telephone.
In the case of at least two twentieth-century inventions—plastics and nuclear fission—there are attempts to disinvent them because it’s now clear they are harming the planet. Progress doesn’t necessarily involve going forward at all costs. I’ve asked for my luminous blackboard to be returned to me.
2000
Full speed backward!
Some time ago I warned that we were witnessing an interesting technological regression. First of all, the disturbing influence of television had been put in check thanks to the remote control, enabling viewers to channel-hop and thus ushering in a phase of creative freedom. Final liberation from television came with the video recorder, which was a step toward cinematography. The remote control could also be used to mute the sound, so returning to the delights of the silent movie. In the meantime, the Internet, an eminently literate form of communication, had disposed of the dreaded Culture of the Image. At this point pictures, too, could be eliminated, inventing a sort of box that just emitted sounds and required no remote control. I thought I was joking at the time in imagining the rediscovery of radio, but I was prophesying—evidently through some supernatural inspiration—the advent of the iPod.
We reached the final stage when, after broadcasts on the airwaves, the new era of cable television arrived with pay-TV, passing from wireless telegraphy to cable telegraphy, a phase completed by the Internet, thus superseding Guglielmo Marconi and going back to Antonio Meucci and Alexander Graham Bell.
I expounded this theory about the march backward in my book Turning Back the Clock, where I applied these principles to political life—and, what’s more, I recently noted that we are returning to the nights of 1944, with military patrols in the streets and teachers and children in school uniform.
Then something else happened. Computers become obsolete in three years. Anyone who has had to buy a new one recently will have found that computers now have Windows Vista already installed. Now, you only have to read the various Internet blogs about what users think of Vista (I won’t go any further for fear of ending up in court), and hear the views of your friends who have fallen into that trap, to come to the perhaps mistaken, but absolutely firm, conclusion not to buy a computer with Vista installed. And yet, if you want an up-to-date computer of reasonable dimensions you have to put up with Vista. Or make do with a clone as large as a trailer truck, put together by an eager seller who will still install Windows XP and earlier versions. Your desk will then look like an Olivetti laboratory with the 1959 Elea computer.
I think the computer manufacturers are realizing that sales are falling significantly as customers decide not to buy a new computer so as to avoid Vista. So what then? To find out, go to the Internet and look for “Vista downgrading” or something similar. There you will learn that if you’ve bought a new computer with Vista, spending whatever it cost, then by paying yet more, and going through a complex procedure that I gave up trying to follow, you could go back to using Windows XP or earlier versions.
Computer users know what upgrading is. So downgrading is taking your highly advanced computer back to the happy condition of the older system—for a price. Before the Internet had invented this magnificent neologism, a normal dictionary defined the word “downgrade” as a noun meaning a downward gradient or descending slope, or a downward course or tendency in morals, religion, etc., while as a verb it means to reduce to a lower grade, rank, or level of importance. We are therefore being offered the opportunity, with much effort and for a certain amount of money, to lower the grade, rank, or level of importance of something for which we have already paid a certain sum. This would be unbelievable if it weren’t for the fact that it’s true: hundreds of poor computer buffs are working away madly online and paying whatever it costs to downgrade their software. Are we ever going to reach the stage when, for a reasonable sum, we can exchange our computer for an exercise book with an inkwell, pen, and Perry & Co. nib?
But the whole thing is not so paradoxical. Some technological advances cannot be bettered. A mechanical spoon cannot be invented: what was invented two thousand years ago is still fine as it is. The Concorde has been abandoned even though it flew between Paris and New York in three hours. I’m not so sure it was the right thing to do, but progress can also mean moving back a few steps, such as reverting to wind power instead of using oil, and so forth. Be prepared for the future! Full speed backward!
2008
I remember, I remember
Life is but a slow remembrance of childhood. Fine. But what sweetens this remembrance is that, looking back with nostalgia, we have a fond memory even of moments that seemed painful at the time, like the day we fell into a ditch and sprained an ankle, and had to spend a couple of weeks at home plastered in gauze soaked with egg white. I fondly remember the nights I spent in an air raid shelter. We’d be roused from our deepest sleep, dragged in our pajamas and coats into a damp, reinforced-concrete cellar lit with dim bulbs, and we’d play and run around with the dull thuds of explosions overhead, unable to tell whether they were antiaircraft guns or bombs. Our mothers shivered, cold and frightened, but for us it was a strange adventure. That’s nostalgia for you. We’re therefore ready to accept all that reminds us of the dreadful years of the 1940s, and it’s the tribute we pay to our old age.
What were cities like at that time? Dark at night, when the blackout compelled the occasional passersby to use lamps powered not with batteries but with dynamos, much like an old bicycle lamp, which was operated by friction, by rather clumsily setting in motion a sort of hand trigger. Later on, though, a curfew was imposed and you weren’t allowed onto the streets.
During the daytime the city was patrolled by military units, at least until 1943, when the Royal Italian Army was stationed there, but more heavily during the Republic of Salò, when squads and patrols of marines from the San Marco Regiment or the Black Brigades used to pass through continually, while in the villages there were more likely to be groups of partisans—both sides armed to the teeth. In this militarized city, people were not permitted to congregate at certain hours, Blackshirts and girls in Fascist uniforms swarmed about, and children in black smocks came out of school at midday. Meanwhile, mothers went off to buy what little there was in the grocery stores, and you had to pay considerable sums on the black market for any kind of bread that wasn’t vile and made of sawdust. At home there was hardly any light, and the only heat was in the kitchen. At night we slept with a warm brick in the bed, and I even fondly remember the icy temperatures. Now, I’m not suggesting we are back in those times, or certainly not completely. But I’m beginning to have some sense of this. For a start, there are Fascists in the government—not just Fascists, and no longer exactly like the old Fascists, but what does it matter? We know perfectly well that history is played out first as tragedy and then as farce. There again, in the old days we used to see posters on the walls showing a drunken black American with his claw hand clasped around a white Venus de Milo. Today, on television, I see the faces of thousands of emaciated black people arriving in our countries and, frankly, the people around me are much more frightened than they were in those days.
The black smock is being brought back in schools, and I have nothing against it; better that than the tough-guy designer T-shirts, except that I sense a taste of madeleines dipped in tea. I have just read a news story that the mayor of Novara, in Piedmont—a member of the Lega Nord (Northern League)—has banned gatherings of more than
three people in the park at night. I wait with a Proustian thrill for the return of the curfew. Our soldiers are fighting against rebels in various parts of East Asia. But I also see military units, well armed and wearing camouflage jackets, on the sidewalks of our cities. The army, as then, doesn’t fight only at the frontiers but carries out policing operations. I seem to find myself in a scene from Rossellini’s Rome, Open City. I read articles and hear discussions very much like those I used to read in the magazine La Difesa della Razza (The Defense of the Race), which attacked not only Jews but also Gypsies, Moroccans, and foreigners in general. Bread has become expensive. We are warned to save on oil, to stop wasting electricity, to switch shop window lights off at night. There are fewer cars, and bicycle thieves are reappearing. For a touch of originality, there will soon be water rationing. We don’t yet have separate governments for southern and northern Italy, though certain politicians are working on it. I miss a leader who hugs and kisses buxom farm girls chastely on the cheek. But each to his own taste.
2008
Being Seen
Wave ciao ciao to the camera
As I become conscious of global warming and the disappearance of spring and fall, and find it confirmed in various authoritative writings, I wonder how my grandson, who is not yet two, will react one day when he hears mention of the word “spring” or reads poetry at school that describes the first languorous moments of autumn. How, in the future, will he react to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons? Perhaps he will live in another world to which he is fully accustomed, and won’t miss the spring, watching berries form on hot winter days. After all, as a child I had no experience of dinosaurs and yet I could imagine them. Perhaps springtime is just an old person’s nostalgia, like nights spent in air raid shelters playing hide-and-seek.
And will this child of the future think it normal to live in a world where the prime virtue is being seen, a value more important now than sex or money? A world where people will be ready to do anything to be seen on television—or whatever will have replaced television by then—so as to be recognized by others and not to vegetate in a frightening and unbearable anonymity. A world where more and more respectable mothers will be ready to recount the most sordid family tales in a sob-story broadcast, so that they can be recognized the next day in the local supermarket and sign autographs. A world where young girls will say they want to be an actress, as they do today, but not to become a Dietrich or a Garbo, not to perform Shakespeare or to sing like Josephine Baker, wearing nothing but bananas on the stage of the Folies Bergère, and not even to do a graceful high kick like the dancers of a bygone time, but to become a television quiz girl, purely for show, with nothing in the way of talent.
Someone in the future will then explain to this child at school, along with lessons about the kings of Rome and the fall of Berlusconi, or films titled Once Upon a Time There Was Fiat, how human beings have always, from earliest antiquity, sought to be recognized by those around them. And how some would try to be good company at the local bar in the evening, others to excel at soccer or clay-pigeon shooting at local festivities, or boast how they hooked a fish this long. And how girls wanted to be noticed for the pretty bonnet they wore to church on Sunday, and grandmothers for being the best cook or seamstress in the village. And heaven forbid that it shouldn’t have been so, for human beings, to become known, need to catch the eye of an Other, and the more they are recognized, or think they are recognized, the more they are loved and admired by the Other—and if instead of one Other there are a hundred or a thousand, then so much the better. They feel satisfied.
And so in an age of great and ceaseless movement, when people leave their villages and lose their sense of home, and the Other is someone with whom they communicate via the Internet, it will seem natural for human beings to seek recognition in other ways, and the village square is replaced by the global audience of the television broadcast, or whatever comes next.
But perhaps not even schoolteachers, or those who take their place, will recall that in that bygone time there was a rigid distinction between being famous and being talked about. Everyone wanted to become famous as the best archer or the finest dancer, but no one wanted to be talked about as the most cuckolded man in the village, for being impotent, or for being a whore. If anything, the whore would claim to be a dancer and the impotent man would make up stories about his gargantuan sexual exploits. In the world of the future, if it is anything like what is going on now, this distinction will be lost. People will do anything to be “seen” and “talked about.” There will be no difference between the fame of the great immunologist and that of the young man who killed his mother with a hatchet, between the great lover and the man who has won the world competition for the shortest penis, between the person who has established a leper colony in central Africa and the man who has most successfully avoided paying his tax. Every little bit will help, just to be seen and recognized the next day by the grocer or the banker.
I’d like to ask anyone who thinks I’m being apocalyptic why people now position themselves behind a person being interviewed so as to be seen waving ciao ciao to the television audience, or why they go on a quiz show not even knowing that one swallow doesn’t make a summer. What does it matter? They’ll be famous just the same.
But I’m not being apocalyptic. Perhaps the child I’m referring to will become the follower of some new sect whose purpose will be concealment from the world, exile in the desert, withdrawal into the cloister, the dignity of silence. After all, this has already happened, at the end of an age when emperors began to appoint their own horse as senator.
2002
God is my witness that I’m a fool . . .
The other morning in Madrid, I was at lunch with my king. Don’t misunderstand me: despite my proudly republican allegiance, two years ago I was appointed a duke of the Kingdom of Redonda with the title of Duque de la Isla del Día de Antes. I share this ducal dignity with Pedro Almodóvar, A. S. Byatt, Francis Ford Coppola, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, John Ashbery, Orhan Pamuk, Claudio Magris, Ray Bradbury, and several others, all of whom share the common quality of being liked by the king.
The island of Redonda lies in the West Indies and measures thirty square kilometers, the size of a handkerchief. It is completely uninhabited, and I don’t think any of its monarchs have ever set foot on it. It was acquired in 1865 by Matthew Dowdy Shiell, a banker who had petitioned Queen Victoria to establish it as an independent realm, which she graciously did—she could see it posed no threat to the British colonial empire. Over the decades the island had been passed down to various monarchs, some of whom had sold the title several times over, causing disputes between the various pretenders. If you want to find out more about its multidynastic history, look up Redonda in Wikipedia. The last king abdicated in 1997 in favor of the Spanish writer Javier Marías, who set about appointing dukes left, right, and center.
That’s the whole story, which of course has a slight whiff of pataphysical folly, though, after all, becoming a duke doesn’t happen every day. The point, however, is another: in the course of our conversation, Marías said something that struck me as interesting. We were discussing how people today are prepared to go to any lengths to appear on television, even if only to be the idiot who waves ciao ciao behind the person being interviewed. Recently in Italy, the brother of a young woman who had been brutally murdered, after the sad privilege of a mention in the crime columns of the newspapers, approached a television celebrity asking to be hired so he could exploit the tragic notoriety—and we know of some individuals who, to catch the limelight in a news story, are prepared to declare themselves cuckolded, impotent, or fraudulent, nor is it a secret to criminal psychologists that what moves the serial killer is his desire to be discovered and hence become a celebrity.
Why this folly? we asked. Marías suggested that what is happening today stems from the fact that people no longer believe in God. At one time they were persuaded that everything they did had at least one Spectator, who knew t
heir every thought and deed, who could sympathize with them or, if necessary, condemn them. They could be outcasts, good-for-nothings, losers scorned by their fellow men. They were people who would be forgotten as soon as they were dead, but who nourished the belief that there was at least One who knew all about them.
“God at least knows how much I’ve suffered,” the sick grandmother abandoned by her grandchildren would say. “God knows I’m innocent,” the person unjustly convicted would say in consolation. “God knows how much I’ve done for you,” the mother would say to her ungrateful child. “God knows how much I love you,” the abandoned lover would shout. “God alone knows what I’ve had to deal with,” complained the wretch whose misfortunes everyone ignored. God was always invoked as the all-seeing eye, whose gaze brought meaning to the grayest and most senseless life.
Once this all-seeing Witness has gone, has been taken away, what remains? All that’s left is the eye of society, the eye of the Other, before whom you must reveal yourself so as not to disappear into the black hole of anonymity, into the vortex of oblivion, even at the cost of choosing the role of village idiot who strips down to his underpants and dances on the pub table. Appearance on the television screen is the only substitute for transcendence, and all in all it’s a satisfying substitute. People see themselves, and are seen, in a hereafter, but in return, everyone in that hereafter sees us here, and meanwhile we too are here. Think about it: to be able to enjoy all the advantages of immortality, albeit swift and ephemeral, and at the same time to have a chance of being celebrated in our own homes here, on earth, for our assumption into the Empyrean.
The trouble is that “recognition” is ambiguous. We all hope that our merits, or our sacrifices, or whatever good qualities we have, are “recognized.” But when we appear on the television screen and people see us afterward at the local bar and say, “I saw you on television last night,” they are merely saying “We recognize you”—in other words, we recognize your face—and that’s a different proposition altogether.
