Some entertaining thoughts and interpretations.

I enjoy the writings of Umberto Eco especially his novels like "Foucault's pendulum" and the "the name of the rose". I think his nonfiction is enjoyable too. His fascination with conspiracism and arcana is appealing to me and is characteristic of our age. I think his growing up under fascism made him sensitive to conspiranoiac nonsense as the modus operandi of a lot of nefarious politics in the modern era. In fact, conspiratorial thinking may in the end do democracy in ultimately but Eco understands why it fascinates so many.

Update 3/13/24 Eco goes from topic to topic with loose associations. It is enjoyable for the richness of the allusions. I enjoy it but I am never sure what to make or take away. He can talk about batman in one breath and Thomas Aquinas in another. It is a kaleidoscope much like our media environment.

[In mid- to late-March, when local D.C. bookstores were forced to close due to the pandemic, many survived by taking online orders and offering delivery. One of them was the used bookstore Capitol Hill Books--they offered a mystery "Grab Bag" where you could specify how much you want to spend and let them pick selections for you either completely on their own or based on authors/selections you provided. I gave them the names of maybe a half-dozen favorite authors and let them choose for me. This is one of the books they sent back in early April and it could not have been more of a welcome surprise.]

Umberto Eco is a delight. Funny, playful, quick, irreverent, and, seemingly, brilliant. I'm not sure I can really be objective about his writing or arguments as I find him so entertaining. It's like having an uncle who is the best raconteur on the planet to the point that the veracity of his stories is overwhelmingly irrelevant.

This book of essays captures shorter works he published in mainstream, popular publications. Grouped by THEME, he covers an amazing amount of intellectual and historical territory.

We begin with his TRAVELS, centered around America's fixation with creating such authentic fakes as to raise them to almost mystical iconography. From Disneyland, to wax museums and classical Greek and European replications incorporated into the houses of the uber wealthy.

“This is the reason for this journey into hyperreality, in search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake; where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred, the art museum is contaminated by the freak show, and falsehood is enjoyed in a situation of “fullness,” of horror vacui.”

Replicas take on lives of their own like the imitations of the original Manhattan purchase contract sold in one tourist gift shop---it looks and even smells real, and yet it is in English whereas the original was written in Dutch... a replica of a past that never was. "Museum" context further distorted by the use of fake reference photos or small scale miniature models in order to make the contrived exhibits more "authentic." Even the fictional wax diorama, like that created for Alice in Wonderland, is made to such precision as to seem real---a fiction of a fiction masquerading as real. This is the "hyperreal." And with comical perfection, Eco's metaphors match the absurdity of his subject matter:

“The poor words with which natural human speech is provided cannot suffice to describe the Madonna Inn. … Let’s say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli.”

America fills its cultural/historical void with next-level deception worthy of praise---entertainment as existential balm. Eco reverses the polarity as he takes us to Marinelands, a kind of Sea World where the real (aquatic creatures) are made to feel fake (routine performances, interactions with trainers, etc.). Meanwhile, the human tourists are treated like animals as they are herded from location to location, told when to sit and stay. But all this is not merely Eco applying theory to pop culture and tourist destinations---it creates a fascinating perspective on the America of the '80s. And just before we get lost in the funhouse, we move on to the middle ages.

No, not your midlife crisis years, THE MIDDLE AGES. Yes, a whole section on how we're reliving the past, a past in which “...all the problems of the Western world emerged: Modern languages, merchant cities, capitalistic economy (along with banks, checks, and prime rate) are inventions of medieval society.” The Pax Americana struggles with its own demise akin to the Roman Empire's. The barbarians are at the gates but they can't be identified as simply as we like (despite a political climate that attempts to do so). All we know is that something definitive is slipping through the cracks (a "greatness;" a shared history... ). Eco doesn't describe it this way because he was writing these essays some 40 to 50 years ago, but they are remarkably prescient.

“Each group manufactures its dissidents and its heresiarchs, the attacks that Franciscans and Dominicans made on each other are not very different from those of Trotskyites and Stalinists---nor is this the politically cynical index of an aimless disorder, but on the contrary, it is the index of a society where new forces are seeking new images of collective life and discover they cannot be imposed except through the struggle against established “systems,” exercising a conscious and severe intolerance in theory and practice.”

(If you're in the U.S. right now and live near any major city, you have heard fireworks almost every night for the last few weeks, a kind of rumbling that widens fissures in the metaphorical socio-political streets.)

How do we deal with the apocalypse and erased histories? Send in the GODS OF THE UNDERWORLD. From the recycling of millenarian cults (Manson, Jim Jones), fears of the End Days, spiritual revivals, and Afro-Brazilian rites mixing spiritualities in a heady concoction that attempts to replace erased slave histories, Eco waltzes through it all. While he admits formal religious practice such as mass attendance may be on the decline, the reverence for the sacred has never faltered. It is both reassuring and frightening how easily he connects the present to the past, delineating repeating patterns and historical precedents as if they had just happened.

But for all these cyclical commonalities, he outlines fascinating breaks with the past and changes still in development. He looks at THE GLOBAL VILLAGE and the role of communication, remarking upon the near impossibility of revolution with a globe that's under constant surveillance and capitalist production/trade exploits sometimes controlling entire countries. The multinational system itself actually relying on terrorism and small local wars to act like pressure release valves on the larger system and preclude large world wars. Mini-insurrections built into the system (keeping in mind that all this was written prior to 9/11 and the so called "War on Terror," which, while larger scale in terms of disruption and challenge to the status quo ultimately seem to have reinforced power dynamics thanks to remote warfare either by proxy or by technology... #dronestrikes).

“Today a country belongs to the person who controls communication.”

“We can legitimately suspect that the communications media would be alienating even if they belonged to the community.”

Did I mention how prescient some of his essays feel? With just these two quotes we could easily move from Russia to North Korea to Berlusconi and Trump, and then on to social media, most especially Twitter. Controlling communications allows one to shape the story, to distract, to frame the discussion... In a sense, social media does belong to the community in that participants shape the content but its form seems to dictate the kind of tribalist return that television engendered. And if Eco thought sports media had become a kind of meta-industry no longer dependent on the actual performance of real sport, I can only imagine what he would think today (sports media/talk doesn't just replace political discussion and participation as a kind of tribalist substitute as he suggests, it now delves into "fantasy" participation; reminded me a bit of a piece I remember reading by Chomsky who asked why if the average sports fan can speak so knowledgeably and in such depth about sporting technicalities and history, why media doesn't treat them as if they can do the same about political and economic topics that actually effect them more directly). Later, he shows us just how tragically sports can obscure political violence.

Should you think Eco infallible (or that I've completely fallen for this academic smoke-and-mirrors linguistic magic), his one essay on photos seems laughably shortsighted. He references a 1977 photo depicting terrorist violence in Italy and predicts it will become one of those timeless iconic images. It is unlikely he could have predicted the sea of daily visual imagery that now supplants the past almost instantly. The above image is certainly not a photo I've seen nor heard referenced before. Perhaps it has held up visually in Italy, but I seriously doubt it.

It is late and I fear I've lost whatever imaginary structure I thought would work for this review. But lest you think this book is all doom and gloom, I reiterate that it is filled with a lot of joy, hope, and humor. Many essays are peppered with personal anecdotes and one revolves around Eco's weight gain causing his jeans to fit so tight that they smush his balls---this causes an epiphany (perhaps via pain, although he does not attribute it to this) that leads him to understand that not only does restrictive clothing control physical movement but it also impacts the mind (monks realized this early and thrived intellectually thanks to flowing robes; women's progress, for him, now stands as even more impressive given the history in which clothes have almost always been used to control and restrict them).

His thoughts on language and literature were among some of my favorite, so let us close with these two quotes:

"...the given language is power because it compels me to use already formulated stereotypes, including words themselves, and that it is structured so fatally that, slaves inside it, we cannot free ourselves outside it, because outside the given language there is nothing.

How can we escape what Barthes calls, Sartre-like, this huis clos? By cheating. You can cheat the given language. This dishonest and healthy and liberating trick is called literature.”


“Literature says something and, at the same time, it denies what it has said; it doesn’t destroy signs, it make them play and it plays them. If and whether literature is liberation from the power of the given language depends on the nature of this power.”

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FIFTY-CENT WORDS
cenotaph | Jean Poinsot | chiliastic | presidium | notionism | glossolalic | Macumba | Orixá | Exù | Umbanda | thurible | Nago-Yoruba | Bantu Angolan | Ologun | Oxalà | Our Lord of Bonfim | Allan Kardec | Rui Barbosa Law of 1888 | maenad | phatic | kermesse | telluric | topoi | Epos | Eclogue | Parusiacs | boutade | anacoluthon | endoxon

Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality was an impulsive used bookstore purchase. It consists of only loosely connected essays. The hyperreality one is good--he traveled around the United States to examine how we construct different realities. Sometimes they are copies of European originals and sometimes, like Disneyland and Disney World, we construct fake worlds that are intended to be artificial but actually better than reality. And he can be pretty funny.

Some of it veers into the impenetrable: "But this sport squared (which involves speculation and barter, selling and enforced consumption) generates a sports cubed, the discussion of sport as something seen" (p. 162). I still am not sure what he's getting at there. And he kept using the word "bricolage." Yet he can be funny even with the dated (the essays span from the late 1960s to the 1980s) stuff, like a discussion of jeans (which for him appeared to be a relatively new thing). He had heightened awareness of how they fit: "A garment that squeezes the testicles makes a man think differently" (p. 193). Indeed.

From http://weeksnotice.blogspot.com/2017/09/umberto-ecos-travels-in-hyperreality.html

Umberto Eco is simply unfair. A person who thinks so deeply and so completely about…everything…should not have so much graceful command over writing without complexity. A man who understands seemingly every piece of symbolism in the western canon down to its very philological roots should not be able to write something as fun as The Name of the Rose or as insightful/dark as an analysis of the Baudrillard-esque descriptions of the pseudo-reality created by the simulacra proffered by Disneyworld.

I remain in awe of him and was blown away by his ability to write nonfiction. All I can say is I am intensely envious of the Italian populace of the 70’s/80’s that would’ve gotten to read his opinions of the world in real-time in newspaper columns.

Read it two years too late as this would've been great for my diss. Great nevertheless. Some essays were better than others

I spend so much time read this book because of how the language flow--and I'm just a stupid 17 years old when I first read it. I borrowed this book from my friend in High School back then but finally give it back to him without ever finished it for I spend so much time to read--and understand--until it time for our graduation and I still didn't finish it. I want to find this book and read it again, because despite of my struggle,this book is totally interesting in theme, writing style, language, and everything. And I must say, this book was the one that made me want to start to read any non-fiction book around cultural-studies--since before I just attached myself in mangas and novels like any stupid teenager. Maybe I would search for the ebook or something, since it's hard to find someone my age who like this kind of genre.

As a huge fan of both The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, it was quite interesting to see Eco come at his ideas from a straightforward essay form. I especially liked his critiques of Marshall McLuhan (he shared many of the same frustrations I did) and Roland Barthes.