Review of Umberto Eco, The Da Vinci Code and the Intellectual in the Age of Popular Culture9/2/2018 The first review of my book has now been published in The Cambridge Quarterly with the following excerpts posted on the Barnes and Noble website:
"The book’s style and focus remain professional throughout. … the author is nimble and shrewd in his explanations of Eco’s works and his desire to foster a critical consciousness in his readers. … this work is essential for anyone with more than a passing interest in Eco.” (Andre van Loon, The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 47 (02), June, 2018) Andre van Loon is a writer, literary critic and Director at We Are Social. He reviews books for The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator and others, and writes about social media for Campaign, The Drum and Reaction. He is writing his first novel.
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A sampling of facts. Fact One: In 2011, private citizen and undeclared political candidate Donald Trump questioned whether President Obama was born in the U.S. and thus whether he was legally eligible to be the President of the United States. Trump maintained this claim over a period of more than five years, even after Obama released his birth certificate. He finally acknowledged President Obama's birthplace but blamed Hillary Clinton for initially raising the question. Fact Two: On November 21, 2015, candidate Trump declared that he saw on television "thousands and thousands" of "people" that he later identified as "Arabs," who were celebrating in the streets of New Jersey after the attack on September 11th. Fact Three: President Trump announced as "fact" through his Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, that the crowd at his inauguration was the largest ever, AND that the rain miraculously stopped just when he began his inaugural address. Fact Four: President Trump announced that he would have won the popular vote if it hadn't been for millions of illegal voters. And so it goes in the new era of Trumpfuscation.
Depending on where you identify yourself on the political spectrum, these assertions may be seen as blatantly offensive falsehoods, OR, as true statements that have been delegitimized or distorted by the "mainstream press." Trump's subsequent campaign to undermine the credibility of the press as the "enemy of the people" through "fake news" has since aroused a growing concern by a number of media organizations and civic institutions about the threat to our democracy of deliberate falsehoods perpetrated through a fundamental misuse of language. See for example writer Danielle Kurtzleben's February 17th article for NPR entitled "With 'Fake News,' Trump Moves From Alternative Facts to Alternative Language": http://www.npr.org/2017/02/17/515630467 According to Kurtzleben, "The ability to reshape language — even a little — is an awesome power to have. According to language experts on both sides of the aisle, the rebranding of fake news could be a genuine threat to democracy." From a linguistic perspective, engaging in unsubstantiated assertions for political purposes and condemning the mainstream press as an enemy of democracy through "fake news" raises a fundamental question that is as old as philosophy itself. What is the relation between language and truth? This question was a central concern of the Italian philosopher, Umberto Eco (1932-2016), who was known internationally as a prominent leader in the field of semiotics, as well as the author of the bestselling novel The Name of the Rose (1983), who defined semiotics as "a theory of the lie": "Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands for it. Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used 'to tell' at all. I think that the definition of a 'theory of the lie' should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for a general semiotics" (A Theory of Semiotics, 1976, p. 7). Why would Eco define semiotics, which studies language and all other aspects of human culture, as a theory of the lie? As the linguist Derek Bickerton explains, language gives us the ability to think "offline" (Language and Species, 1990). All other species, so far as we know, only think "online" by being hard-wired to the sensory world. Humans also "think" online through instinctual reactions to sensory stimuli. But, in addition, because of language, humans have a parallel capacity to think "offline," apart from the sensory world, through signs. As a result, we can think of things that are not immediately present to us but exist somewhere in the world. For example, I can think of an "iceberg" that exists as a fact even though it is remotely distant from me and I have never actually seen one firsthand. But, I can also think of things that don't actually exist in the world such as a human with wings. Because of the language capacity, I can bring to mind such an image, and I can refer to it with sounds and graphic symbols through the English word "angel." The language capacity thus makes us distinct from all other species because we can not only refer to physical objects in the world whether they are present to us or not, but, more significantly, we can imagine possible worlds and then alter the "real" world according to that vision. This state of separation and freedom from being hard-wired to the sensory environment allows us to create the world of human culture in all its glorious diversity through our modes of dress, cuisine, music, architecture, art, society, etc. But, as Eco indicates, we can only do this because the signs that we use to refer to things are separate from them. That language enables us to "lie" does not make us inherently deceptive, but it is the necessary condition for our ability to create a world according to our human aspirations separate from the constraints of nature. Consequently, language can be seen to function through the "lie." However, as Eco also asserts, language can be used to tell the "truth," and obviously we are utterly dependent on the truth to function cooperatively as a society. While the creative capacity of language is dependent on the "lie," language also provides us with a social network of information for determining the truth. But, since language functions by being detached from the things it refers to, how can we determine the truth? Most of our knowledge of the world is not firsthand, so we have to rely on the good faith of others through what Eco describes as the global encyclopedia of world knowledge. Eco, citing the philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926-2016), asserts that "there is a 'linguistic division of labor' which corresponds to a social division of knowledge: I delegate to others the knowledge of nine-tenths of the real world, keeping for myself the knowledge of the other tenth" (Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, 1994, p. 89). So how can we determine the truth? Fortunately statements can be evaluated in relation to the global encyclopedia of socially shared knowledge. For example, Trump's claim about Obama's citizenship is conclusively refuted by a birth certificate that, according to law and social custom, "certifies" the occurrence of a birth at a particular place and time. Trump's claim about seeing thousands of "Arabs" in New Jersey cheering the 9/11 attack is refuted by the total lack of video evidence and related news reports of such an event. Trump's assertions about crowd size and weather conditions at his inaugural are refuted by photographic and video evidence. And more generally, Trump's numerous assertions with no evidence to support them, such as his claim of millions of illegal voters, do not meet our social standards for the truth. Either evidence is cited to support a claim, or it has no merit whatsoever as a statement of fact. Humans are thus utterly dependent on trusting each other, in good faith, according to a set of agreed upon standards, for determining the truth. Unfortunately, the way that language functions through the potential to "lie," and our reliance on knowledge that is determined by others can thus be abused. There are many historical instances of such abuses that have resulted in horrendous consequences. One especially infamous example, that Eco explored in his sixth novel, The Prague Cemetery (2011), concerns a deliberately fabricated document called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, originating from Russia in 1903, that purported to be an account of a secret Jewish plot for world domination. Although the document was proven to be a fabrication by The Times of London in 1921, a number of prominent historical figures, such as Adolf Hitler, and even the American industrialist Henry Ford, used it as justification for anti-semitic campaigns that, in the case of Hitler, led to the holocaust. Although The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is now broadly discredited, it is still in circulation today. As indicated above, Donald Trump is not the only prominent source of deliberate falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims. His penchant for making such statements was long considered laughable, however, until he decided to pursue political power. Since being elected, according to his recent interview with Time Magazine, he has asserted that, as President, his pronouncements essentially have the authority of the truth. This is an alarmingly obtuse and dangerously arrogant position to take but not without historical precedent. In fact, prior to the Enlightenment in the 18th century that established that the truth was evaluated, not according to one's position of power, but rather through appeals to reason (which was the basis for the American Revolution), whatever the king or the pope declared was taken to be the truth. In fact the Jesuit order, in their total dedication to serving the pope, held as a principle that if the pope one day says black is white, they must accept it as the truth. Thus Donald Trump's assertion that his position of power allows him to dictate what constitutes the truth would have the effect of reversing more than three centuries of social progress and essentially erasing the foundations of the Constitution of the United States that he swore on inauguration day to "preserve, protect and defend." Fortunately, the internet of today's world can potentially serve as a great democratizer of knowledge by providing broad and easy access to what Eco calls the global encyclopedia of world knowledge. Through the medium of the internet, the language capacity of humans can allow us to collaborate in marvelously creative ways to bring about a shared vision that could promote a world economy and society that would serve everyone through a commitment to fundamental human rights. But because of the massive expansion of information through the internet, we are especially vulnerable to the lie, and fact checking sites are now attempting to counter this threat. The theory of the lie indicates our inherent vulnerability to the destructive uses of our language capacity. This is amply demonstrated by Donald Trump's preference for using the internet as a direct means of communication unconstrained by the news media outlets that he has condemned because they push back against his falsehoods. Before becoming a candidate for President, he used the internet primarily as a way of gratifying his ego by denouncing his enemies and stroking his status as a billionaire television personality. Although highly offensive, his tweets could be dismissed then as a pathetic form of narcissism. But add political power to his penchant for falsehood and it threatens to corrupt the potential of language which, although based on the lie, serves as our medium of hope for collaboratively exploring the truth. I want to offer a recent TEDtalk to inaugurate this blog about Eco because it discusses an emerging aspect of our fundamental relation to language that was Eco's core focus as an intellectual.
As you will see elsewhere on this site, Eco was an elite, highly traditional, academic theorist, with intellectual foundations as a scholar of the Middle Ages, who nevertheless believed that in the contemporary world we are surrounded by the impact of both elite and popular culture, and we need to understand their effect on us. Consequently besides writing about the products of elite culture such as the novel Sylvie by the French writer Gerard de Nerval (1808-1855), Eco wrote about the impact of Superman and Charlie Brown comic strips, Ian Fleming spy novels, pop songs, television shows, and even modern technology such as cell phones. For that reason, I thought it would be especially useful to consider the following TEDtalk by John McWhorter, a Columbia University professor of linguistics and English, on the impact of texting on our use of language entitled "Txting is killing language. JK!!!" Most younger generation cell phone users will undoubtedly recognize that "JK" means "Just Kidding." But, as someone who could be referred to as an "immigrant" to digital technology because I was born in 1947 long before the advent of information technology, I usually have to google these expressions to learn what they stand for. Although some traditionalists among the "older generation" may feel that the slang shorthand expressions used in cell phone texting and the lack of concern for punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc. are having a degrading effect on language, the "JK" indicates that McWhorter obviously thinks otherwise. He offers what I think is a very useful cultural analysis of the impact of texting language as an "emergent" aspect of popular culture that is rapidly changing over time. McWhorter's TEDtalk offers an excellent example of what Eco embraced as an intellectual in attempting to understand all aspects of contemporary culture from elite expressions of high culture to the seemingly most banal and common aspects of popular culture. We are the linguistic species! https://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk?utm_source=Hidden+voices&utm_campaign=6c5377b912-HIDDENVOICES_2017_03_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_586d19e607-6c5377b912-295870625 |
Written by:
Douglass Merrell, author of Umberto Eco, The Da Vinci Code, and the Intellectual in the Age of Popular Culture Archives
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