From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation

by Umberto Eco

  It is not possible to use any expression to make one’s content disappear, because a semiotics is by definition a mechanism for making things present to the mind, and is therefore a mechanism for producing intentional acts.49 At most, mnemotechnics, like other semiotics, can lead to forgetfulness (albeit accidentally) thanks to two phenomena: interference among data and excess of data. Setting aside interference among data, which is a psychological rather than a cultural phenomenon, let us concentrate on the desire to forget in order to avoid an excess of information.50

  1.9.4. Ars Excerpendi

  While we already encountered the problem in Themistocles-Cicero, the dread of excess certainly increases with the invention of printing, which not only makes available an enormous quantity of textual material, but also facilitates access to it for the man in the street and “leads to the transition, in not much more than a couple of centuries, from the primacy of remembrance to the primacy of forgetting” (Cevolini 2006: 6). Thus, we witness the development of an art not unknown in the centuries of manuscript culture but which acquires central importance in the culture of print, the ars excerpendi, the art, that is, of compiling abstracts or summaries so as to retain only such knowledge as is judged indispensable, and to let marginal information fall by the wayside.

  In any case, what we may call the Themistocles complex returns over and over again in the course of cultural history, and one of its most dramatic manifestations is assuredly the second of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, on the advantages and disadvantages of historical studies for life. The text begins with a statement that could be another of the sources for Borges’s Funes:

  In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness, however, it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness: the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration. He who cannot sink down on the threshold of the moment and forget all the past, who cannot stand balanced like a goddess of victory without growing dizzy and afraid, will never know what happiness is—worse, he will never do anything to make others happy. Imagine the extremest possible example of a man who did not possess the power of forgetting at all and who was thus condemned to see everywhere a state of becoming: such a man would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flowing asunder in moving points and would lose himself in this stream of becoming: like a true pupil of Heraclitus. He would in the end hardly dare to raise his finger. Forgetting is essential to action of any kind, just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of everything organic. A man who wanted to feel historically through and through would be like one forcibly deprived of sleep, or an animal that had to live only by rumination and ever repeated rumination. Thus: it is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting. Or, to express my theme even more simply: there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture. (Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, p. 62)

  This is the starting point for an analysis of the negative effects of the excess of historical studies which, now they have reached such an unbearable complexity and richness, oppress the memory of a culture to such an extent as to make it unsuited for life. And now, on the crest of this wave of vitalistic admonitions, comes the call for youth to develop an art of forgetfulness (Nietzsche 1874: 351, and see also Weinrich 2004: ch. VI).

  One of the interesting things about this text is that, on the heels of these declarations that appear to address the individual’s need for survival, the emphasis changes to the need for a systematic forgetting on the part of cultures in general. This switch is of capital importance because, once the impossibility of voluntarily forgetting what the individual memory has recorded has been demonstrated, then cultures present themselves as systems that function, not only to preserve and hand down information useful to their survival as cultures, but also to cancel the information judged to be in excess. The culture does not make individuals forget what they know, but it keeps from them finding out what they do not know yet. In other words, while it may be difficult for individuals to forget that they got burned on the stove a few minutes ago, a culture, using the manipulative techniques we will get to later, can impose silence and therefore no longer inform individuals that, let’s say, in the year 1600 Giordano Bruno got burned (in a big way) in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori. Or, to put it differently, a culture can remove from Lotman’s semiosphere (discussed in Note 38) certain elements that will no longer be exposed to the visitor’s view.51

  A century and a half after Nietzsche’s text, reflection on cultural forgetting has become commonplace and, despite Nietzsche’s urgent cry of alarm, the process of cancelation continuously performed by a culture simply in order to stay alive has come to seem normal. Identifying memory and culture, today we study the acts of forgetting that a culture mobilizes through various kinds of cancelation, which can range from out and out censure (the erasure of manuscripts, bonfires of books, damnatio memoriae, forgery of documentary sources, negationism) to forgetfulness out of shame, inertia, remorse, down to those processes current in the exact sciences in which it is decided that not only those hypotheses proven to have been erroneous but even the efforts and procedures followed to arrive at those that turned out to be correct are expunged from the specialized encyclopedia of a particular science because they are no longer useful (see Paolo Rossi 1988, 1998), while certain disciplines go so far as to consider obsolete any contribution published more than five years ago.

  If our Specialized Encyclopedias are subject to processes of forgetting, so much more so is the Median Encyclopedia of a given culture. It guarantees remembrance of the important historical facts or the principles of physics, but it omits an infinite amount of information that the collectivity has repressed, because it was judged no longer useful or pertinent. For instance, the Median Encyclopedia tells us all we need to know about the death of Julius Caesar but nothing about what his widow Calpurnia did after his assassination; it provides precious details about the progress of the Battle of Waterloo but does not give us the names of all the participants—and so on and so forth. These are extremely useful “forgettings,” made so as not to overload the collective memory with more than it can bear—and without rendering the filtered or censored facts irretrievable, since there do exist specialized individuals (such as historians or archaeologists) capable of bringing them to light. In such cases, the collective memory sometimes picks up on the data, restoring them to the Median Encyclopedia, and sometimes decides instead to leave them in some specialized “reservation.”

  The forgetfulness filtering performed by the Median Encyclopedia does not depend on the will of an individual or on a conscious act of the collective will: it occurs out of a kind of inertia, sometimes even from natural causes, like the cancelation of everything that was ever known about Atlantis, if Atlantis ever existed.

  The problem of filtering by the Median Encyclopedia was in any case not unknown to the medieval encyclopedists—even though they seem to us to be intent on handing on everything that tradition had handed on to them. In the Libellum apologeticum that serves as an introduction to his Speculum Majus, Vincent of Beauvais is already shocked by the proliferation of knowledge (“videbam praeterea, iuxta Danielis prophetiam … ubique multiplicatam esse scientiam” (“Furthermore, I saw, as in the prophecy of Daniel, that knowledge was everywhere increased”) (Libellum, 1).52 This is why he decides to make his encyclopedia a florilegium, in other words, a selection of the best of his reading. That the selection is not immune from the suspicion of censorship is confirmed by his citation of the so-called Decretum Gelasianum, De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis, a compendium of what was apocryphal and what was canonical in Holy Scripture anachronistically attributed to the fifth-c
entury pope Gelasius I: “denique Decretum Gelasii papae, quo scripta quaedam reprobantur quaedam vere approbantur, hic in ipso operis principio ponere volui, ut lector inter autentica et apocripha discernere sciat, sicque rationis arbitrio quod voluit eligat, quod noluerit reliquat” (“therefore I decided to put at the very beginning of this work the decree of Pope Gelasius, according to which certain writings are disapproved and certain others rightly approved, so as to allow the reader to distinguish between the authentic and the apocryphal and choose with the guidance of reason what he wants and reject what he does not want”). Nevertheless, Paulmier-Foucart and Lusignan (1990) admit that “certain texts have survived only because they were included in the Speculum Majus.”

  All a culture does, then, is to select the data for its own memory. It may not do what Stalin did when he erased from historical photographs the faces of the comrades he had sent to their deaths, or what Orwell’s Big Brother did when he corrected the news in The Times every morning. But when we read that some English secondary schools have proposed abolishing the teaching of the Crusades so as not to offend the sensibilities of their Muslim students, it becomes apparent that culture is a continual process of rewriting and selecting information.

  1.9.5. Cancelation, Cross-reference, Latency

  Still, there is a difference between the Plinian and medieval encyclopedias and the structures of a modern Median Encyclopedia. The first premonitions of this change can already be seen in the encyclopedias of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Let us recapitulate: an Arbor Porphyriana aspired to provide a definitive image of the Great Chain of Being; and that image (had it been exhaustive and had it included all of the beings in the universe—a hypothesis that was formally impossible, as we have seen) would have been definitive in the sense that all its nodes appeared to be primitives. When one knows that a man is Animate, one knows intuitively all one needs to know, and there is no need for any science to define what Animate is to distinguish it from what is Inanimate (even though medieval science often does so). Similarly, when Pliny’s encyclopedia or those of Rabanus Maurus or Honorius of Autun explain to us the “nature of things” or the “image of the world,” they assume that they have told us all we need to know, to such a degree that we need a well-trained art of memory to remember it.53

  The form of the modern encyclopedia, on the other hand, is that of naturalistic classification in which, if we say that a horse is an Ungulate, this taxonomical node is understood as a link (exactly in the hypertextual sense of the term) that refers us to a repository of specialized knowledge—and it is there that the properties of the ungulates will be specified (see, in this connection, Eco 1997, 3 and 4).

  In this sense it has been said that in speaking of the modern encyclopedia, more than of forgetting, it is appropriate to speak of the “latency” of knowledge (Cevolini 2006: 99). It is not as if the information in excess (the object of Specialized Encyclopedias—and even the information in excess vis-à-vis a Specialized Encyclopedia, such as, for example, the history of astronomical theories proven to have been erroneous) is actually forgotten. It is, so to speak, “frozen,” and all the expert has to do is to take it out of the freezer and put it in the microwave to make it available once again, at least as much as is needed to understand a given context. This latency is represented by the model of the library or the archive (or even the museum)—containers always available even though no one may currently be using them, and even if they haven’t been used for centuries (see Esposito 2001, ch. 4 especially paragraph 4.4).

  If we now return to paragraphs 1.3.5 and 1.3.6 we will see how both Wilkins and Leibniz anticipated these techniques of latency that constitute the form that modern cultures came up with to get around the Vertigo of the Labyrinth.

  1.9.6. The Maximal Encyclopedia and Virtuality

  In this sense every encyclopedia refers back to ever vaster portions of knowledge, through a series of cross-references that has been defined as virtual. In the background is the truly virtual encyclopedia, the Maximal Encyclopedia. The Maximal Encyclopedia is virtual in nature, not only because we never know where it stops; the fact is that it contains potentially even what it in fact (today) no longer contains.

  We remarked that the Median Encyclopedia does not record the names of all those who fought in the battle of Waterloo. But what would happen if a scholar wanted to reconstruct that list today? Let’s say he has access to archives that have remained unexplored until now, or that he acquires a document similar to the catalogue of the Thousand, the volunteers who sailed from Quarto to Sicily with Garibaldi in 1860 (now readily available even on Wikipedia). That scholar would be exploiting forgotten and repressed portions of the Median Encyclopedia that are still part and parcel of the Maximal Encyclopedia.

  We know that in his Poetics Aristotle cites tragedies of which no record survives. What encyclopedia do these works belong to? For the present only the fact that Aristotle cited the mere title of these works forms part of the Median Encyclopedia (or at least of a Specialized Encyclopedia). If one day (as was the case with the Gnostic texts of Nag Hammadi) some of these plays were to be discovered buried in a jar in the desert, they would have already been part of the Maximal Encyclopedia, even if no one up till then could have claimed so, while from that time on they would be part of one or more Specialized Encyclopedias. But what would happen if on the other hand they were never found and our knowledge of them continued to be limited to an acquaintance with their titles?

  For the very fact that there are good reasons to believe they once existed, we would continue to think that they might form part of the Maximal Encyclopedia, even though for the moment they belong to it only in a virtual and optative fashion–or else that they are part of it but only in the possible world in which they have been discovered, or that they were part of the Median Encyclopedia of Aristotle’s day.

  The Maximal Encyclopedia, then, despite the fact that its name we have been giving it suggests that, to quote Anselm, it is something quo nihil majus cogitari possit (“than which something greater cannot be thought”), is in fact an accordion-like structure, and one day it could expand beyond anything we dream of today. Which offers no small encouragement to future research.

  1.9.7. The Text as Producer of Forgetfulness

  At this point, we understand how, every time we construct a local “ontology” in order to disambiguate a proposition in a given context (as we observed in paragraph 1.7), we are performing ad hoc the same operation that a culture performs in constructing its own Median Encyclopedia. We prune, we narcotize, we eliminate some notions, retaining only those we consider pertinent.

  How do we go about identifying—in our efforts to pinpoint the appropriate context—the notions to prune? We consider the context as if it was a text, and we behave exactly as we behave when we are trying to understand a text. A text (in addition to being a tool for inventing and remembering) is also a tool for forgetting, or at least for rendering something latent.54

  Classical mnemonics could not be used for forgetting because a mnemonic technique is a mutilated semiotics. A semiotics in the Hjelmslevian sense is a system that—in addition to a lexicon—also contains rules for syntactic combination, and allows us to develop discourses, or, in other words, texts. A mnemonic technique on the other hand was more like a simple dictionary or a repertory of significant units that cannot be combined among themselves. A mnemonic technique did not facilitate the articulation of mnemotechnical discourses.

  But if a mnemonic technique, insofar as it is a semiotics, cannot be used to forget, a semiotics that is not a mnemonic technique can produce forgetfulness or cancellation at the level of the textual processes themselves.

  If in a semiotics the correlation is not based on simple automatic equivalence (a = b), but on a principle of inferentiality, however elementary (if a, then b), the meaning of an expression is a potentially huge package of instructions for interpreting the expression in different contexts and drawing from it, as Peirce would
have it, all the most remote inferential consequences, in other words, all its interpretants. On these bases we ought then to know in theory every possible interpretant of an expression, whereas in practice we know (or remember) only the portion that is activated by a given context. Interpreting the expression in context means magnifying certain interpretants and narcotizing others, and narcotizing them means removing them temporarily from our competence, if only for the duration of the current interpretation (cf. Eco 1979, 1984).

  If the interpretation of a sign, as Peirce maintained, always makes us learn “something more,” this something more (in a given context) is always learned by giving up something less, that is, by excluding all the other interpretations that could have been given of the same expression in another context.

  If, as a matter of principle (and on the strength of the ideal global encyclopedia), knowing how many miles Paris is from Bombay is part of the meaning of the name Paris, when we are reading Les Misérables we learn many things about Paris, but we are expected to forget the distance (and to act as if we had forgotten it—if we already knew it) between Paris and Bombay.

  There are many cases in which, in the course of the interaction between a reader and a text, instances of forgetfulness occur, encouraged in some way by the text itself. If, as I recalled in my Role of the Reader (1984), a text is a strategy that aims at stimulating a series of interpretations on the part of a Model Reader, there may be texts that presuppose, as part of their strategy, a presumption of forgetfulness on the reader’s part and direct and encourage it. Often the text wants something to be read, so to speak, in a subliminal fashion, and then consciously disregarded as being of little relevance. The most explicit case of encouraged forgetfulness is provided by the mystery novel. To cite one of the most famous examples, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, it is no secret that the novel intends to surprise the reader in its denouement with the revelation that the narrator is the murderer. To make the revelation still more telling, the author must convince readers that they fell into the trap not as a result of the author’s manipulation but because of their own naiveté (in other words, the author wants readers to admire the cleverness with which the narrator not only makes them fall into the trap, but then insists that they assume the responsibility themselves for having done so). To this end, in the final chapter, entitled “Apologia,” the novel’s first-person narrator assures the reader that he had not in fact kept anything from him. “I am rather pleased with myself as a writer. What could be neater, for instance, than the following?” And at this point the narrator—and with him the author—lists a series of rapid allusions, all present in the text, that the reader can only have forgotten due to their strategical irrelevance, but which, had they been interpreted along the lines of a syndrome of suspicion, would have anticipated the revelation of the truth. Naturally the reader could not be expected to harbor suspicions vis-å-vis the narrator, and herein lies the relish of the game, but the entire novel appears to be the very epitome of textually encouraged forgetfulness. The Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia rightly observes, in his afterword to Christie’s novel in the Mondadori “Oscar del Giallo” series, that “Poirot arrives at the conclusion that Dr Sheppard is guilty by reading everything that the narrator has to tell us; in other words, by reading the same story we are reading.” But Poirot is more than Christie’s model reader, he is her accomplice and he does what she did not want her model reader to do.