"Kant did that as well - he was a great letter writer...?"
Yes, there was Kant. But I think of a great poet like Leopardi. He was sick, a
hunchback. Repressed. Lived in a village. Went once or twice to Rome. I don't
remember how often, though he travelled a little more. He was well known, and
in touch with all the intelligentsia of his time. OK, it's always possible. But
for every Leopardi, you have a lot of other people that are living in
isolation, with elaborate forms of mental illness. One great problem of our
time is the decrease, or absolute lack, of face-to-face communities.
I always like to tell the story of Bosco - San Giovanni Bosco. This Salesian
priest in the middle of the 19th century who got the idea that was a whole new
generation of young people who were working from a very young age in factories,
and so were dispersed and separated from the family. He invented the oratorium,
which was a community, to which those who worked could go to play and discuss.
And for those who couldn't work, he established typographies, activities in
which they could take part. So, he was matching the problem of despair and
isolation in the industrial society with the possibility of people meeting each
other, and obviously also having a religious purpose. It was a great social
invention.
What I reproach today; with both Catholics, as well as former Communists or
Progressives, is that they lacked the new don Bosco. There was no new San
Giovanni Bosco of our age able to invent a new possibility of establishing
communities. And so you have young disaffected males with guns killing people
in Central Park. You have all the problems of young people...
"The pathologies, yes..."
Also of mature and aged persons who feel isolated. Was, is, television a way to
overcome this solitude? No, it was a way to increase it. With your can of beer
you sit down on the couch...Television was not the solution.
Obviously for certain people - I had an old aunt who was obliged to live all
the day at home, and was unable to walk, and for her the television was a gift
of heaven. For her, it was really the only possibility to be in some way in
touch with the world. But for a normal person it is not. Can the new virtual
communities like we have on Internet do the same job? Certainly! They give to a
person living in the Mid-West the possibility to contact others from there. Is
that a substitute for face-to-face contact and community? No, it isn't! So the
real social function of, let's say, Internet, should be to be a starting point
for establishing contacts, and then to establish local...
"Places to meet face-to-face..."
Yes, local communities. When Internet really becomes a way of implementing -
through virtual communities - face-to-face communities, then that will be an
important social change. I was talking with Professor Prodi [note: Romano Prodi
is professor of economics at the University of Bologna, and prospective prime-
ministerial candidate for a coalition of centre-left moderates in the next
Italian general election] and I told him that the only possibility that you
have to make a real campaign, is to realise in every city a group, a club, a
circle. One of the real forces in the inventions of Berlusconi was not only to
use television for political propaganda. He, having a big industrial
organisation, established clubs everywhere. This was people that were proud to
wear the badge and to identify themselves as belonging to a particular group. I
saw them in the village where I have my country house. It was artificial. It
was all set up in two months, so it wasn't enough to establish a really
profound sense of belonging to a community. But it was an idea.
So I told Prodi that he should do the same. And one way to do that is to use
Internet. Because through Internet you can reach, say, two persons in every
city, giving them materials, documents. People will be encouraged to xerox all
these materials and to establish local groups, networks. So it is a sort of
collaboration between virtual and...
"Real communities?..."
...and real communities. If we succeed in doing that then Internet will be an
enormous element or factor of social change. If it remains only virtual it
could lead some people to pure onanistic solitude. In this sense, most of the
hackers are sick persons, because they sit passive. They play and intrude into
the computers of the banks or the Pentagon, because it is the only way to feel
alive.
"You have just released a new hypertext encyclopaedia. In an article you
published recently in the local paper in Bologna, La Republicca, you write that
this work will contain more information than the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
There you also wrote that the main advantage of your Encyclomedia is its
non-linear retrieval and cross-referencing system. I always wonder about the
effectiveness of hypertext systems in general, because someone has to make the
links. So even though you call it non-linear retrieval, or whatever, it is all
decided by somebody in advance?"
Well, first of all: if you are able tomorrow to invent a hypertext in which
every idea and every word, every adjective, every article can be linked with
everything. OK, at this point it is obvious that even there, there is a filter
which establishes the links. In this sense it will be very difficult to make a
philosophical hypertext, because you will have to decide if you will link the
notion of passion in Descartes with the notion of passion in Aristotle, which
are two different notions...
"Yes, completely different."
For Aristotle it is simply a cognitive event, and for Descartes, and for the
17th century passion has to do with feeling, sentiment etcetera. But in the
case of our Encyclomedia, which was based on historical data, you have a
certain guarantee. The name of a city is linked to other cities. The name of a
given person links with persons which had connections with them. And you also
can establish unforeseen links...
"The users can make their own links?"
Yes, because you have, let's say, so-called books and files. There's for
instance a book on Descartes, and obviously in the book on Descartes you will
certainly mention, let's say Pascal, or Gallileo. There are some immediate
links, because Gallileo and Pascal are highlighted, and so you can immediately
identify the possibility of there being links there. There is no
pre-established link between Descartes and Caravaggio. Why? Because they had
nothing in common except he fact that they lived in the same century. But I
wanted to solve, or to answer this question: "Was it possible that Descartes
met Caravaggio?" Descartes travelled pretty much. So, I have a function that
allows me to ask about Descartes AND/OR Caravaggio, and I found I had the
possibility of detecting that that meeting was impossible, because Caravaggio
died when Descartes was 14. So, I established my own links.
"OK, I see. You are able to check that kind of thing then. I saw a CD-ROM
recently published by Multimedia World that was quite interesting. It was a
kind of CD-ROM hypertext version of the magazine. But it also had - you know
the World Wide Web - where you make a server and you put pages on it and create
links to other places from these pages?"
Eco nods.
"Well they had put a World Wide Web page on the CD-ROM, so that you could not
only look at what was on the CD-ROM - the kind of enclosed world of that - but
you also had access out onto the World Wide Web. And of course, once you can
get onto World Wide Web, then you can go anywhere..."
I don't know about the present state of the Net. I guess I am able to have on
my screen every article published by every newspaper in Rwanda and Burundi,
or at least, if that is not the case now, then it will be possible...
"...at some time, yes, I'm sure."
Tomorrow. At this point, OK, there will be other negative aspects. You will get
too much about Rwanda-Burundi...
"Yes, and it is time to go through it all that's the problem...?"
And I don't know if the best article is in the Boston Globe, or the Los Angeles
Times. I have no time to read it all. That is the problem that we are facing.
It exists.
"But again, you can't get away from this idea of trust and community. Because,
obviously, if you want to find out things, then normally, in everyday life, you
go to people that you trust, who you think have a fairly good overview, and you
ask them, "Well listen, there's too much here, can't you give me a pointer."
Yes, that is a possibility. But you know one of the first great events on the
early nets was the story of George Lakoff, who wrote this beautiful article on
the Gulf War. He understood that it was too late to have it published before
the war. He didn't know anything at the time about the Net, but he gave the
article to a friend who had "connections". The day after, people were xeroxing
this article in Bologna, in Amsterdam, in Sidney, all over the world! The
article propagated because of a network, but more than that. It was because the
opinion of a man called George Lakoff was...
"...worth reading, yes exactly!"
But then you have this other problem that publishing happens very quickly. You
can publish instantly on the Net. And with speed, follows brevity. I have
noticed that newer generations of computer users are learning to communicate in
very abbreviated codes.
I discovered recently a new formula they use...
Eco takes out a notebook from the desk, and begins to write.
...which in Italian sounds very obscene: CUL8R, "See you later". Yes, you can
write a love-letter in this way with the same intensity of heart...
"This is a kind of phenomenon of virtual communities, because it is so
instantaneous a form of communication, and we also see a merging of oral and
written language in a lot of these discussion groups. There's very much a
merging of these kinds of things. Do you think this will have an effect on
publishing per se; on the literary norms, on literacy?"
In the longer term I think so, yes, probably.
Eco continues writing.
You know that under the Mona Lisa of Duchamp there is this acronym -pseudo
acronym, which read "L.H.O.D.O.Q." - in French this is elle à chaud au
cul: "Her ass is burning". Obviously this was made by Duchamp in his Dadaist
period, it remained a shibboleth for the happy few, but I think CUL8R can also
become a form.
"So you expect written norms to change?"
Why not? Once I have discovered it, and once I have told it to some friends, I
will use it in my letters. Why not? This can also change the epistolary style
of many people. But to me this is a minor problem, because there are a lot of
technological innovations that have changed things. For example in 16th century
books they tried to develop the first rights of protection. They called it:
privilège du roi. It was one page saying that the king has decided that
nobody could use what was in the book without permission. Today we have this:
Eco scribbles a sign on the paper, and shows it to me.
"Yes, copyright ((c)), sure."
Now today, that is enough. OK, we have observed that it was useless to have a
page of privilège du roi when we have this one which means exactly the
same thing. So it is not something absolutely new. Every new technology
introduces new idioms...
"Or even norms?"
...norms that at the beginning can terrorise the old academic who says things
like: "Oh our language is being corrupted!" They become...
"Accepted and functional in a new way...?"
... and independent. In the sixties all the letters I got from the States ended
with "love", which had lost its erotic, sexual connotations. I could write, you
know, "love", why not?
"Peace and love?"
Yes. Once you have accepted the new custom it becomes normalised. Now I see it
has disappeared. The first time I received it from a friend I said: "Oh, did he
become homosexual?" No, he did not of course.
"In your article from that seminar at San Marino on the future of the book, you
mentioned Rube Goldberg."
Well, I mentioned Rube Goldberg because somebody there mentioned him, so it was
not an idea of mine but taking up the suggestion of somebody else.
"But you said a Rube Goldberg model seems to you the only metaphysical template
for our electronic future, and that sounds rather interesting. Metaphysical
template, is that some kind of...?"
As far as I remember he quoted Goldberg as a masterpiece of bricolage. Taking
it in isolation in my paper without reference to the previous token it is
rather ununderstandable. No, what I want to stress, and what is perhaps
important for a kind of magazine like this is that there is one kind of
discussion item I consider absolutely irrelevant, and one other kind of item I
consider mischievous. The irrelevant one is the discussion on whether the
CD-ROM will abolish the book. Now, that's stupid, that's silly.
"This was tied in with this idea of ceci tuera cela - "this will kill that?""
Yes. Because as I have repeatedly said, on a camel in the desert you can bring
a book not a computer.
"Well, today you can bring a computer."
Sure, today you can, but it is always easier when you are lying down in a tent
with a book, you can do this and that.
Eco takes a newspaper from his desk. He leans back in his chair, draping the
open paper over his face.
You don't need a plug, and you don't need an everlasting battery either.
Second, because there are kinds of reading experiences that can only be done
with a book. I don't think it's possible to read Homer on the computer. But
books split into two categories: books to be read, and books to be consulted.
All books made to be consulted can be substituted by the CD-ROM. The future
writing desk of tomorrow should absolutely be made up of two computers. A small
clone for writing, and the 486, the great high memory computer to store
dictionaries and encyclopaedias and books that you need to consult. You can't
do it all with a single computer. If you are writing you cannot stop all the
time to open the database, to look for the dictionary. Every operation requires
a lot of movements and time. Two computers, and all those shelves...
He points demonstratively at all the bookshelves lining the walls:
...could disappear.
"All the reference works?"
All the reference works, yes. It's less costly. I have calculated the price of
a wall space, considering the price of floor space -not in the centre of Milan,
not even at the periphery - the price of these shelves in humble materials, not
in precious wood. I discovered that every stupid book that I receive costs me
$100.
"In space?"
In space.
"Not to mention the environmental aspect of course - the forests etc.
Yes, also the forests... I receive an average of 10 free books per day. It is
costing me much too much. At the moment I have an apartment of 500 square
metres, and I cannot go on moving my home every five years in order to store
all the books I get. If I could eliminate all the encyclopaedias and
dictionaries etcetera, then that would be fine. And if it would be an advantage
for me, then it would be an enormous advantage for a person living in a small
flat. So all the reference books can be eliminated. All the rest must remain.
The function of the computerised reference book would be one of encouraging me
to find paper books, and to use them as paper books, that's all. I am very
optimistic on this point. I don't believe that you will buy the new diskette of
new poems, if not for reasons of information, because you need to have them
quickly. The book, even with the worst paper in the world, lasts longer than
magnetic support systems, at least up until now.
The second problem is this utopia of the hypertext, and I explained in my San
Marino article the confusion between hyper-systems and hypertext. Hyper-systems
are a great innovation. My CD-ROM is a hyper-system. But regarding hypertext: I
don't need magnetic support to recompose Ulysses just as I want. I do it with a
book. I do nothing but that when I read Joyce: changing and moving and going
back. So the idea of a hypertext that I can use to recompose 10 different
novels is stupid; as stupid as Dungeons and Dragons or this kind of stuff. It
can be a game.
Once a man called Saporta invented in France, at the end of the fifties, a
moveable book. The idea was already present in Mallarmé. The idea of the
moveable book was a sort of great metaphor for the infinity of reading. If you
want, it was a metaphor for deconstruction. OK. Saporta, on the contrary, made
a book in which you could mix...
"You mean you could put things into it?"
...mix up the pages, and the story would change.
"A kind of loose-leaf book?"
Yes. OK. If you suspect that even in a CD-ROM the links are pre-established by
the author, well, even Saporta pre-established the possibilities of the
story.
"It's all a limited universe, yes."
Is it not better to read Shakespeare and then to daydream, dreaming of Hamlet
marrying Juliet, and so the hypertext as a text can only be a game. The
hyper-system, that is the future. The hypertext can have educational purposes:
try to mix up things, to find new possibilities. OK, but it is not a revolution
in literature or in poetry.
"You don't think so?"
No, I don't think so. When you have had what we had the paper books, and with
Joyce or Mallarmé, you don't need the hypertext in order to have an
open-ended reading of literature.
"You mentioned Dungeons and Dragons. These multi-user virtual spaces where
people can engage simultaneously in dialogue by writing. They can create rooms,
they can assume character roles, they can interact with each other in ways that
physical space cannot allow. A colleague of mine, Finn Bostad, told me that
some of his students spend many hours in this environment. For some, it is like
enacting a novel at the same time as you are writing it."
OK, it's a nice game.
"Do you think this might lead to new forms of literature?"
I have been using a fantastic hypertext for the last 30 years. It is called
Scrabble. Isn't it true that with Scrabble you can compose every possible cross
link, every combination of sentences. It's a nice game, it can have educational
purposes. Sometimes my wife who is German learned part of her English lexicon
by playing Scrabble. Sometimes we play Scrabble in English, or in French. OK,
but if you are a poet you have your mental Scrabble. You don't need the board
to do it. It is the same I think for all those kinds of games. They can be very
nice to play. So, I repeat: they can be used for training people in inventing
and composing, but they have nothing to do, according to me, with the future of
literature.
But maybe I am a dinosaur: I am still living very well by selling old-fashioned
books, and probably I'll die before the landscape has changed completely. So I
remain open to possible developments of all these perspectives. At the present
state of the art, if I had to bet all the money I have in my pocket, I would
bet more on hyper-systems more than on hypertext. That's a personal bet.
"Have you looked at any of these hyper-books, like those of Jay Bolter and
Michael Joyce? They have made some of these things which are just basically a
hypertext system, where you can go in, and there's a lot of text which you can
explore by means of different links."
Yes, I have read about them... I have not tried them, and I know that my
position can be the same as of Cremonini, who was a great professor of logic,
metaphysics and astronomy at the time of Gallileo. When they brought to him
Gallileo's binocular, he said "I do not want to look inside it, because it
could mix up my ideas." So the poor Cremonini remained as the symbol of
academic bigot that refuses to try a new experience. Then, when you read a
serious book on Cremonini, first you discover that Cremonini was a great mind
of this time, even though he was not an innovator like Gallileo, and that it
isn't true that he refused to look into the binocular. He just said: "At the
present state of technology, those lenses are very rudimentary, so I don't
think that they can really help me to see something more.
It was an objection to the present primitive state of the art. So what I am
making now is probably a statement that we are still at a primitive state of
the art. I have not been interested up to now to try virtual reality. Because
until it is possible to make love to Marilyn Monroe; until the moment that her
clothes start floating away - well, then at that moment I will try! But as long
as it is just a sketch of Marilyn Monroe, and I can have the real sensation
elsewhere, then the state of the art is so primitive that I prefer to wait,
that's all! If you offer me this possibility soon, or better still, if you
offer me this possibility when I am 80, I will be enthusiastic about the
innovation, and I will become a fanatic supporter!
"Well, I think I tend to agree with you there. There's still this very basic
problem which is one of quality. The quality of the experience is still very
limited, and it is the technology that limits it...?"
It doesn't matter though; I say go with it! But that's why I say that at this
point I have the impression that it is most interesting for educational and
training purposes, rather than for providing real new aesthetic experiences.
Even though my friend Nanni Balestrini, one of the poets and novelists, of the
new avant-garde of the sixties made a poem with the computer - mixing it up.
"A kind of art form - computer art?"
Yes, something like milliard de poeme of Queneau. So those experiences already
exist. I have the first edition of Chinosura Lucensis by a 17th century monk
who invented a sort of Lullian multiple wheel, by means of which he was able to
compose several million poems for the Virgin. It's an old idea, an old utopia.
And sometimes this provided real help for invention. So there is nothing wrong
with it, but probably the final effect should be an object that I can move with
my mind and not with my fingers, otherwise I will lose something.
"Exactly. So this brings us back again to the kind of question of the interface
and how do you interact with it? It's a problem I think with computers today
that they offer another type of experience. Take writing for example. You write
with a pen, you move your hand in a certain way, have a certain kind of
feedback all the time while you are writing. On a computer you are doing it all
by means of keys."
As a writer I have discovered there are certain kinds of things for which I
still need the pen, there are certain things for which I need the computer,
certain things for which I need a felt-tipped pen. And the kind of instrument I
am using is influencing my writing enormously.
"The material substance that you operate with".
Yes, when I come to think about it, this kind of action...
Eco picks up his notepad and scribbles on it,
...is very important. And this is so new that people have not really understood
those differences. I don't know...
"We have these new pen-based systems now?"
You have seen my Foucault's Pendulum. In one of the first files, Bellbo says
how spiritual it is to invent. So, there was a Metropolitan legend that said
that my novels have been written at the computer, and they don't consider that
The Name of the Rose was published in 1980, and that the first really good
word-processors started to come in 1982-83. So it could not have been
computer-written.
"So it was written on a typewriter, or...?"
Type-written or hand-written. But for the Pendulum, since the Pendulum speaks
about the computer, the silly journalists argue that, well, "Your book was
concocted by the computer." And they still believe that you put some words
there, and zzzaapp: the machine gives you the book. One of them said: "Well, it
is clear that this is computer-written, except one chapter. That one where the
boy plays the trumpet in the cemetery (the final chapter). It's clear that that
one is hand-written." It was the only chapter of my book that I wrote
immediately, and without correction at the computer! All the others were
hand-written!
"Put together, yes?"
Put together in multiple ways. Why? Because I had in mind this final chapter
right from the beginning. And I thought about it for eight years so intensely
that when I arrived at this point - I remember very well, it was in my
apartment in Bologna at 6 o'clock - it was like playing the piano, like a
jazz-musician: I put it all down very easily with the computer, following my
mind and only making the corrections underway. It was totally written at the
computer...it was just because there was more inspiration, so to speak.
People have still these kinds of mythological visions about the machine. And
then there is a purposefully faked production of mythology. Those who ask you
the most naive questions about the computer; just seeing it as some kind of
mysterious machine that invents for you, are journalists who are using them
every day. So they know that it is not true. But when the ask questions, they
try to make them the ones that the most naive reader would make. So there is a
kind of play of bad faith, mauvaise fois. So the journalist, who knows exactly
that it is not the computer which invents for him or her, is the one who
co-operates in the spreading of the Metropolitan legend, the false rumour about
the extraordinary intelligence of the computer.
"I was thinking about that book that you published just recently: Six walks in
the Fictional Woods. It was rather nice the last essay you had there. The final
bit where you were taken into this kind of planetarium..."
Ah, yes, the planetarium.
"...where you experienced the moment of your birth. Yes, now that's a kind of
virtual reality experience, isn't it?"
Yes, certainly, and it really was computer prepared, because only the computer
could remake the sky of that evening.
"But it really was a profound experience you thought, for yourself?"
Yes, for me, it was really touching, perhaps a little narcissistic.
"And perhaps especially since it was a sort of expression of love, as well, on
the part of the people, in that they had gone to all the trouble?"
Yes, it was an expression of love on their part, but there was also an
atmosphere, because my wife, who was with me - and it was not her night - but
she was equally impressed and touched by the magic of the experience. So for
me, it could have been narcissism, but for her it was really the emotion, of
having the impression of something that happened 60 years ago.
"A kind of being in the past?"
Yes, it was really beautiful.
"So it is in fact possible to do a simulation which is so real that it has a
profound effect upon the person, by means of technology?"
Certainly, you can enjoy Beethoven on a compact disc better than with the 78
disc...and sometimes better than in a small theatre with a "medium rare"
orchestra. So I am absolutely... Well, I am a recorder player, and now the
Japanese production of plastic recorders has reached such a level of
sophistication that - then you can of course still have a top recorder of
superior quality costing $5,000, made by a top craftsman - but if you compare a
good plastic recorder and a normal, old wooden one, the plastic ones keep their
sound quality; and they don't suffer from temperature and humidity. And though
perhaps not for a soloist, but certainly for a group or orchestra they can work
very well. No objections.
Source: This interview was found at
http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/semiotics.html, a semiotics site at the University
of Colorado at Denver managed by Martin Ryder.
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