If you are reading an
American book on a certain subject and you find only an English or
American bibliography, then it is suspect. The author should have a
larger...
“... overview?”
... yes, overview. But if it is a book on analytical philosophy and
there is only an English bibliography, it is probably unnecessary to
also have a Polish bibliography, even though there is a great school
of logicians and analytical philosophers in Poland. So it all depends
on the subject matter; on the state of the art. It should be
absolutely urgent for us to invent rules for decimation; probably
flexible rules, that change from domain to domain. Otherwise the
future will be worse than the present, and we can reach a level at
which over-information and censure will identify each other.
“OK?”
You see, you can cancel by abundance. You can cancel by subtraction,
and you can cancel by increase or addition.
“By addition, yes. But you know, this business of knowing what is
relevant... I mean - and this is something that I am quite concerned
about - the quality of the stuff you get via the Net. You know, in
Cyberspace, or whatever you want to call it; the Information
Superhighway... It’s my opinion - I don’t know what you think - but
certainly at the moment there are only a very limited number of people
who have sufficient access, sufficient capabilities, to be able to put
stuff out there. And that’s a problem as well in itself. Because the
people who choose to put information out there, those people choose
the content of reading for the rest, do they not?”
Eco is silent for a moment.
Yes, I saw you had many questions in the papers you gave me the other
day about all this new technology. I feel obliged to make a formal
statement here: I am enormously interested in what is happening.
I am trying to establish all possible services on Internet here at my
institute, and to push young people to work in this direction. I think
it is enormously important for the future, even for politics. I want
to introduce into our curriculum for communication studies some
special seminars in this area. Personally, I do not use those
technologies. For a very simple reason. At my age, first, let us also
say, at my level of ‘visibility’, my problem is to avoid the message.
“Yes..?”
Otherwise I will be destroyed by the number of messages. My problem is
not to answer the telephone; my problem is to destroy the fax; the
unrequested fax as soon as it arrives. Even if, or rather, when in the
near future, I finally get an e-mail account, my problem will be how
not to receive anything. Because if there is something that has to
reach me at any cost, it will. There will be some way by which I will
be informed. There are few persons in the world that can reach me and
tell me: look you should pay attention to this or that. Now, this is a
personal problem of mine.
“Because of your position?”
Yes, even corresponding to, let’s say, my ideology. Once, when I was
younger, I said that after 50 a critic or a scholar mustn’t be
concerned any longer with avant-garde movements, but to write only
about
Elizabethan poets.
“...writing about the past?”
Yes, now why? Because novelty is coming so quickly these days that
only a younger person is able to swallow and digest it, while an older
person is slower in doing that. Why? An older person has a lot of
experience, knows a lot of things and can very well work on more
established problems than the young people who do not know enough to
do that.
“Well, no, they don’t have enough insight of course...”
This is a general rule; it’s not by chance that my last scholarly book
was on the search for a perfect language and not on the last trends in
informatics and semantics. Because younger people are very fresh and
able to see what happens in these domains. I personally have more
experience and am better able to work out from classical material. In
a way I think I have followed this principle. Obviously, I keep my
eyes open; I am still very curious about all this. Really though, I
don’t try at any cost to try to understand and write about post-rap
music. I am more able to make a good analysis of the Beatles, if not,
of Johann Sebastian Bach. And that’s what happens with all those new
technologies. It is the same as what happens to a sportsman. You are a
football player until the age of thirty. After 30 you become a coach.
“Yes, exactly. But the coach of course has the responsibility of
keeping himself oriented about what is going on...?
Oh yes, keeping informed, but he is not obliged to try to kick the
ball every morning.
“And also there’s this idea of being a facilitator, rather than a user
in a conventional way: one sees the possibilities that are available,
and makes them available for the other people and just says OK...?
Yes, but it is younger people who must make the new analyses. They are
more flexible and they are more independent of past experience. They
do not risk repeating the same schemes; interpretative schemes. So why
should I make analyses of programs when they are able to do it better?
“Professor Eco, you are an academic; you’re a scholar. You also write
popular books. You are writing, very successfully, for two entirely
different audiences. Do you experience any difficulty withstanding
tabloidisation of your work, where the tabloid media and the TV
conform to certain genres and norms which may be uncharacteristic of
scholarly
work?”
The problem is triple. There is not a single problem, there are three
problems. First, a statement: I write academic stuff. I write in the
newspapers - call it tabloid or popular journalism. I write my novels
that by a mysterious chance have a mass success, but which I
personally consider academic novels; and they are not easy novels.
They are not love stories or things like that. So, there are three
different problems.
Secondly, the problem can be considered from the point of view of the
producer and the point of view of the receiver. As a producer I do not
feel I have a split personality. All my life, the fact of studying
something helped me to write more popular articles in order to explain
the phenomena of the mass-media. The fact of being obliged to do this
made me make weekly reflections - I would say irresponsible
reflections - cooked-and-eaten or wash-and-wear reflections on what
happened day by day helped me to collect experiences; to be attentive
to what happened, and then to use the same material in a more organic
and more profound, or more articulated and more critical way in my
academic books.
So, for me, it was a sort of mutual help: the academic activity helped
me to have instruments to understand the actualities; the continual
attention to day by day events helped me to have material for
reflection for my academic work. The story of the novel is another one,
but equally I don’t feel a split here either in my personality. I feel
that what I do on the left side helps what I am doing on the right
side.
(to be continued)
©World
Of Art magazine
