An Interview With Eco 1
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The Massachusettes Review, Inc.
An Interview with Umberto EcoAuthor(s): Elizabeth Bruss, Marguerite Waller, Umberto EcoSource: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer, 1978), pp. 409-420Published by: The Massachusettes Review, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25088869
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Elizabeth Bruss and
Marguerite Waller
An Interview with Umberto Eco
During thespring
semester(1976)
at Amherst College, a
number of distinguished artists, politicians,and scholars were in
vited to take part in the Copeland Colloquium: "Art and Politicsin
Contemporary Europe." The first visitor was Professor Um
berto Eco, professorof semiotics at the
Universityof Bologne.
Following hispresentation
on "Semiotics andIdeology," Profes
sor Eco agreed to a further informal discussion of semiotics (the
study ofsignifying systems, nonverbal as well as
verbal), its place
in intellectualhistory,
andespecially
in current debates among
Structuralist, Marxist, and Anglo-American practicalcritics. The
following is anexcerpt from the tape recording of that con
versation.
interviewer: Semiotics is anextremely ambitious discipline, one that
seems to study anything and everything, turning the whole world into
a"sign." But
surelythere are some
thingswhich are not, even
coverdy,
signs, which have little or no communicative function. Is there anything
you would dismiss from semiotics?
eco: First let me say that something can be peripheral for adiscipline
butenormously important for me, as a human
being.But ?
proposof
"semiotic imperialism," I believe a distinction must be made, since by
"semiotics" we indicate two different things. One is a method of ap
proachor a science?call it what you will. The other is a
territoryor
apoint
of view,a
developmentof Western civilization. Once, at the
beginningof the so-called "renaissance" of Humanism or
perhapseven
earlier, in the thirteenth century, the concept of living Nature was
erected as central and unalterable. Suddenly everything was seen from
the point of view of Nature, all that preceding centuries had treated onlyas a
sign referringto
supernaturalevents was now
intrinsically important
as a focus of one's attention. At that moment?wheneverything
that
had been considered a marker for theology became "Nature"?one
could have objected that an approach focussing exclusivelyon Nature
was imperialistic. Well, now, in our century, or in this decade of the
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second half of the twentieth century?fora number of historical rea
sons?we arefocussing
on "semeiosis."(This
is not "semiotics." Semi
otics is the scientific attitude and methodbrought
to bear on theprocesses of semeiosis.) Semeiosis is our Nature. Obviously
we must be con
cerned with it at any level.
interviewer: What do you think causes this shift from Nature to
signs? Are there any accompanying social conditions which create a
focus onsemeiosis, something
thatexplains
the shift away from an inter
est in collecting data to an interest in interpretation? You mentioned
that prior to the rise of Humanism, there was another, theologically
motivated concern for signs, that then declined and now has returned,although in a new form. Is it just that one process of inquiry,
one gov
erning metaphor, becomes worn out and a new one arises?
eco :Well, I can at least try to say why there is so great an interest in
the symbolic dimensions at this moment (using "symbol" in Cassirer's
sense, and therefore in a moregeneral
andelementary way than the
Medieval "symbol"or
allegory). Try to realize what happened in this
world after 1945. Until then, in order to seize power, to win the war,
you had to perform some physical or material operation establishing a
relationship between stimuli and effects: kill people, seize apalace,
move
tanks. But after the last world war, we have a new situation. Let's
consider only the great cold war, between the United States, the
U.S.S.R. and China. This is a warplayed by the ostensi?n (the dis
play) of signs. The great stockpiles of bombs are not really working
bombs; theyare
signs referring to possible effects. All strategy is based
on the display of force, onshowing theatrically the moves of those
forces and therefore obliging the other side to infer from those ostentions the possible consequences if
theydo not
changetheir own behavior.
The fact that there were real, local wars like Vietnam, the Middle
East,or
Angola?thisis
onlya
secondary phenomenon.
Remark also that the last important coup d'?tats were nolonger
realized by troop movements, but by the occupying of T.V. networks,
newspapers, etc. Think of the way the Czechoslovakians resisted the
occupying tanks by manipulating radio and other communications. In
order to make a revolution now, you have only to take the "palace" ofradio-T.V. These coup d'?tats and cold wars are
onlytwo
examplesof
how the symbolic element has penetrated our life, and therefore why
many disciplinesare
concentratingtheir attention on semeiosis.
interviewer: Do you think that someone like Nixon can be seen as
a victim of this belief in symbolic control? He seems to have thought
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An Interview with Umberto Eco
that he could maintain power simply by manipulating images.
eco: It ismorecomplicated than that. Nixon and Agnew didn't really
believe in the force of communication, and therefore they called thecommunication
industrya bunch of "effete snobs." In two years of
good communicative work, they destroyed Nixon, seizing on exactly
the moment when he?once again, not knowing the real power of
communication?tried to manipulatemeans of communication in a
childish way. The whole story is one of communication: tapes against
screens, screensagainst papers, papers against public
declarations. The
lastNixon speech, where he attempted to defend his position with regard
toWatergate, if analyzed?and we did this with a group of studentsat
C.U.N.Y., two years ago?isa rhetorical
masterpiece.He should
have beenabsolutely convincing,
and yet he wasn't, because onceagain,
Nixon did not remember that communication is not only verbal. His
face contradicted his words. This was the second time that somethinglike this had happened to him. The first time was when he was debating
Kennedy. Obviously, Nixon didn't study problems of communication
enough.
interviewer: That raises an interesting question, one that anthro
pologists and a number of other behavioral scientists have raised about
their own disciplines as well. Does one, in analyzing communicative
systemsas
you do, create an arsenal forunscrupulous people
who wish
to manipulate communication? Suppose, for example, Nixon had had
access to your studies of his appearance, and used them torectify
his
speeches?
eco:
Yes,
this is an
argumentthat
people put forward,but I think it is
a neurotic argument. Similarly, it is absolutely true that by studying the
way in which the human body works, you can give ideas to murderers
about how to invent poisons, the right places to shoot their bullets?anyanatomical table explaining exactly where the heart is located is a good
suggestion to a murderer. And so in any such activity, you are contin
ually offering information to both sides. I have a secret hope of beingcalled as an advisor . . .No, this is a
joke. But I do have a reason for
defending
semiotic research.
By studying techniques
of communication
and persuasion, you make them public, you inform people of the means
by which other people can determine their behavior. I know very well
that in looking at the face of a pretty girl, the charm of her eyes is
perhaps due to wise make-up. I know that the coiffure has a certain
importance. I know all of this because I can read Vogue and all of the
magazines, and once I know it, I can accept or not accept this kind of
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The Massachusetts Review
determination of my perceptions and feelings. And in a way, I am free,
because I can ask the girl to wash her face.
interviewer: That brings us to a more narrowly professional ques
tion. Before your visit, we were wondering why semiotics hadn't pene
trated the American academic establishment?and now perhapswe
should add, the political establishment as well. Why is "semiotics" still
an exotic word for us, as it is not, apparently, in Europe?
eco: Well, we first have to distinguish titles from real practice, and
then empirical from rationalistic attitudes. American culture has con
tributed greatlyto the
studyof
problemsof
communication,but it has
done sousing
other names than semiotics. At this time there are a num
ber of interesting studies of interactional behavior, of semiotic rules of
conversation and discourse, goingon in California under the title of
"ethnomethodology." Personally,even though Chomsky wouldn't
agree, I would rank the entire school of generative grammar as a
branch of semiotics. The work of Carnap, or the way Wittgenstein has
been used in this country, touches on semiotics. Mass communication
analysisand content
analysisis semiotics. Even McLuhan is a form of
savage, naive, theatrical, "Broadway" semiotics. All of this without
even recalling that Morris and Peirce, scholars of the first magnitude
who explicitly worked in semiotics, were both American. America has
no lack of interest in semiotics, but it is not always called that.
But this refusal to use aunifying
term for various approachesto the
same phenomenon does have larger implications. It is not by chance that
even though semiotic analysis has flowed throughout the entire history
of human
thought,
the need for a
unifyingdiscipline only
arose two
decades ago, in a French milieu nourished by Structuralist methodology.
I am not identifying semiotics with Structuralism; I'm only remarking
that the Structuralist methodology appeared to be peculiarly well
adapted to unifying semiotic research. Why? Because it was a sort of
all-embracingtheoretical framework, able to
put many intereststogether
and to offer asingle method of approach for them all. American cul
ture, beingmore empirical,
more practical, is always distrustful of such
great systems. Therefore the resistance to semiotics in this country is
not resistance to aproblem
but resistance to thetendency
ofsystematiz
ing problems. It has the same roots as the American resistance toMarx
ism or to Hegelianism. And in the last few years, there has been more
attention to German philosophy, to philosophical social thinking, in this
country, justas there has been more attention to semiotics of late. The
roots are the same in both instances.
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interviewer: You have been mentioned as one of the most penetrat
ing critics of French Structuralism. Could you say more about how
semiotics?oryour
semiotics?differs from Structuralism?
eco: The criticism you cite takes many pages of my book, La struttura
assente, but I'll try to answer your question in brief. Is it possible to
create a non-Structuralist semiotics? Well, Peirce and Morris formu
lated one. Is it useful to apply Structuralist methods to semiotics? Yes,I believe even Peirce and Morris can be improved by reading them in
connection with Structuralist methods. But first we must clear up what
we mean by "Structuralism." My position is that there is nosingle entity
called Structuralism; rather, there are two, three, four or more struc
turalisms. The first great distinction is between Structuralism as a meta
physics and Structuralism as amethodology. Structuralists look for
oppositions, try to see whether cultural events?ormaybe
even natural
events?are structured wholes in which every element is isolated and
defined by its opposition to other elements. You must decide if such a
description is an objective description, the literal structure of reality,or
if it is simply the best way to formulate aworking hypothesis. I charge
many Structuralists with a sort of metaphysic, a religious faith, whichthey strive to
identify with the structure of the world or of the human
mind. Every time, in the history of thought, this striving for absolute
identification takes place, inquiry stops, because you already know every
thing.
interviewer: But what then do you do about the metaphysical implications of your "working hypothesis"? I think another reason that
Structuralism, and semiotics, have been met with resistance in this coun
try is the metaphysical implications they possess. Empiricism has its own,
antagonistic, metaphysic?a faith in what is"really
out there." Struc
turalism threatens this sense of fixed, substantial realities, and fixed,substantial observers. Would you look for a
plurality of possible meta
physical systems in connection with semiotics, or would you simply saythat metaphysics is something semiotics must leave to others to worryabout?
eco : It is a very difficult question, because even when you try to elabo
rate a methodology avoiding metaphysical questions, at a certain point,you arrive?always?at metaphysical questions, even the question of why
metaphysics should be avoided. Actually, you can't evade metaphysics;it is like the struggle between the sexes or the terror of death.
But there are two ways ofapproaching metaphysical problems. One
is to start from them, and thus to pollute your discourse with a sort of
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The Massachusetts Review
metaphysical"lust." The second is to
tryto avoid
metaphysical explana
tions, but not to worry if you continually come up against metaphysical
questions?justoften
enough
to throwlight
on the
suspect
unmeta
physical work you are doing. Metaphysical probing is inevitable because
man did not, as far as I know, produce the physical universe in which
he lives. Therefore one never knows where togo in order to
protest
the misfunctioning of the world. This eternal uneasiness about the right
department to which to address complaints makes metaphysicsa sort of
continuousbug worming away
at our humanself-sufficiency.
interviewer: As far as semioticmethodology
is concerned,are
you
worried about "linguistic imperialism"? One might complain that Struc
turalism relies on methods that were useful enough for analyzing lan
guage, and especially phonology, but are not necessarily the best methods
foranalyzing
works of art or non-verbal artifacts.
eco: This is an old complaint, but one that is on its way to being
solved. It ismore than chance that at a certain moment the linguistic
model overwhelmed any other approach to the world of signs. Obviously
languageis our most effective
wayof
communicating,
and for centuries
mankind has studied language. Thus we had a set of rules and descrip
tive tools for verbal language which were better than for any other
system. It wasvery natural to use these as a
pointof departure.
Another
explanation is that people are inclined to identify thinking with speaking,to conflate verbal language with intelligence itself. Many semiologiststried to say that the rules of verbal language are the rules of the human
mind ingeneral,
and therefore that the rules for any other semiotic
system must be derived from language. Then, too, any scientific era is
dominated by a leading discipline?biology in the second half of the last
century, psychologyat the turn of the century, nuclear
physicsat the
beginning of this one, social science at the end of the first half of this
century, and (for reasons I have mentioned before?the increase of
symbolic activity in the present world) it is clear that linguistics, alongwith certain related disciplines such as information theory, should be the
leading discipline in the second half of the twentieth century.
Now, however, there is a movementunderway
to see if there are
semiotic rules governing every system, rules which are a little deeper than
the linguistic ones. Perhaps "logical" rules, or something of this sort.
Semiotics of the sixties was marked by the generous attempt to translate
everything into linguistic terms; one looked not only for phonemes, but
for"imagemes," "brickemes" in architecture, "cuisinemes" in
cooking,
and so on. This procedure has already been submitted to an ironical
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and parodistic treatment. But now the general trend, the trend of the
seventies, is different. Yet because the linguistic model is so well-organ
ized,so
powerful,and so rooted in centuries of
research,it would be
stupid to simply reject it out of hand because it has been over-extended.
interviewer: Your joke about the basic unit of cooking, the
"cuisineme," reminds me of the impasse faced by those who are study
ing myth and narrative, searching for the so-called "n?rreme." Is this
another case of following the linguistic model too closely?
eco: I myself ambeginning
a course in "texts," and it has yet to be
seen whether
every
text is a narrative or not?Isuspect
it is. But
mynotion of "text" is not only verbal. A fresco is also a text insofar as it
tells a story. But as for your question about narrative units, I think youmust first separate the attempt to find basic units of a system and the
attempt to isolate these units in exacdy the same way that you isolate
linguistic units. To say that any system has its units doesn't seem a crazy
idea, but to think that those units can be described in the same way as
phonemes, morphemes, and other grammatical units?that is another
ideaentirely,
and one that seems a little moredangerous.
There are
"macro-units" which arelarger and more complex than any linguistic
units, even in verbal texts, and there may well be "micro-units" in rela
tion to which linguistic units are macro-units. But the search for units,in itself, is the only way to analyze the functioning of a system. You
cannot, for example, repair your car if you do notdistinguish several
units inside the engine?otherwise you are in the position of the laymanwho says "something iswrong inside." The professional translates this
"inside" into an inter-connected system of separate, if not
entirely
dis
crete, units.
interviewer: Does semiotics offer a way of talking about both the
internal system of a work of art and the surrounding social and political
system into which it fits? Will it help us to overcome the problem of
privileging the poem over the context or, alternatively, privileging the
context over the poem? It seems that itmight be very exciting to read
certain texts in terms of semiotics, but if you are a critic concerned with
the social functions and relations of art?a Marxist critic, perhaps, whowants to establish a
truly systematic account?will semiotics allow youto do this?
eco: We must first note that a semiotic approach is not a formalistic
approach. Signs arealways conveying meaning and referring to the
external world. Therefore in usinga semiotic approach you also
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take into account the entire system of presuppositions which govern the
understanding of agiven artifact or
piece of discourse. Remark, for
example,that
when youare
lookingat a
portrait, you don't believe thatthe man who is represented there has only
a head and nothing else. You
immediately presuppose that he also has feet that are not represented in
the portrait. This is a very important mental operation, from which youcan see that you
arecontinually referring
theportrait
to the external
world, understanding it as a window, with the only difference beingthat you are forbidden to put your head into this window. (Now
holography is trying to overcome even this barrier, but the problem of
representationhas not
changed.)In fact, Jakobson and Tynjanov, in a group of short essays they
wrote in 1929, in the milieu of Russian Formalism, had already insisted
that it was impossible to understand aliterary work unless one com
pared it to other institutions or "series"?the historical series, the social
series, the series of other literary works. Even this early semiotic ap
proach didn't exclude, but in fact demanded, a consideration of social
contexts. The real problem ismethodological. Can you approach the
social context
by
semiotic means, or should semioticsgive way
at a cer
tain point to another kind of interpretation? Both options are acceptableto me. I could accept the notion that, having described the entire signstructure of a
given work, I have tostop and go
to the otherpole
of
thesituation, to
analyzesocial events and social structure, referring
this
analysisto what I have already discovered in the work. But as the
method improves, I think it should be possible to find semiotic means
for detecting contextual elements. I'll give you an example from a doc
toral thesis done
by
a student of mine who was
studying Caravaggio'spaintings from a semiotic point of view. Her problem was to explain, in
semiotic terms, two very well known facts: one, thatCaravaggio painted
religious subjects in so realistic a way that his paintings offended the
expectations of his ecclesiastical audience; and two, that he privilegedelements of bourgeois painting even while working in a
religious milieu.
Theproblem
was solvedby comparing
semiotic series?in this case,
comparing what one sees in onepainting with the entire context of other
images. Such acomparison allows one to see,
by purely
semiotic means,
that Caravaggio wasoffending
apre-established code of his time. We
tried to establish in what way the framing and the size of the paintingwas a semiotic clue to the context. That is, independently of the subjectof a
painting, the size already shows that this painting is for a church,
since it was much too large for abourgeois house. Therefore, if in a
format of this sort you paint elements, subjects, which are considered
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moreadapted
to a smaller format, you already show, you ostend, your
will to challenge a set of conventions. You have all of Caravaggio's
relationshipto
the sociological milieuof
hisera
already presentand
openly displayed in the interaction between size, framing, pigments,and so on. Thus while frames and size aren't
usuallyconsidered "mean
ingful," theytoo are semiotic elements.
interviewer: The idea of an array of semiotic series which together
comprise the culture of aparticular epocli?is this formulation meant
to replace Marx's dichotomy between Base and Superstructure? Marxist
aesthetics has always had the problem of explaining how an artwork
reflects the economic base which ostensibly determines it.Marx himself
loved the Classics, and neversatisfactorily explained the fact that an
antique text could remain valuable long after the historical moment
which gave rise to it.
eco: I think one of the great problems of Marxism has been not to
elaborate atheory of the symbolic. If by chance the symbolic is what
traditional Marxism calls "Superstructure," then Marxism needs alogic
of
Superstructure.It seems to me that semiotics
provides
the best
possibility of elaborating the logic of Superstructure. Yet traditional Marxism
pictures the relationship between Base and Superstructure as an archi
tectural arrangement, a foundation with "a floor above" which rests
on that foundation. Semeiosis is not, however, limited to the upper floor;
it is the facility allowing communication between the foundation and
the upper floor; it is the constitutive element of both.
Let me rehearse for a moment what Marxistthought calls the "eco
nomic basis." Suppose there is a field in which five men work cultivat
ing potatoes while a sixth man with awhip
oversees them, controls
their work, and eats half of the cultivated potatoes. Is that an economic
situation? Not at all; it is just a material event. The economic structure
consists in the ownership relations. It lies in the correlational rule estab
lishing to whom the means of production belong, the dialectic establish
ing that one is the master and the others are his slaves. Therefore the
economic structure is also symbolic, and symbolic to such an extent that
the man remains the master even if he does not eat the potatoes. Eco
nomic structure is not a matter of eating potatoes; it is a symbolic rela
tionshipbetween the man and "his" potatoes. Surplus-value is a corre
lational notion. Thus the symbolic is the ghostlyor inner semiotic
structure constituting the economic base as such. At this point, though,what remains of the Superstructure, if Superstructure is nothing else
than the semiotic arrangement serving to establish and legitimate those
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correlations? It is not a case of an economic basegenerating Super
structures bya sort of ideological sickness; rather, the economic base is
established at thevery
moment theideological
sickness takesplace.
interviewer: This would seem to suggest that one need not worry
about searching out the sociological or material conditions which exist
outside a work of art, that there is no difficulty in reconciling dialectical
materialism with semiotics. You seem to suggest there are other ways
of sketching sociologicalor economic dimensions of art than trying
to
talk in terms of how many such-and-suches were being produced dur
ingthe same
epoch.
eco: I don't know if this is a reconciliation or a challenge to formulate
one. In any case, the Marxisttheory
ofSuperstructure,
with the at
tendant problems of how it "reflects" the economic base?this theory
remains a title for apossible treatment of the subject,
asubject which
has yetto receive an
adequatetreatment.
interviewer: One could still ask of a work of art or of some particular
artistic convention how it relates to the "economic code" of the same
period. If the master is huge in the painting and his slaves are small,one could surely say something about the way such a
painting rein
forces, reinstitutes in alternative terms, the economic rules of the com
munity?
eco: The answer to Marx'squestion
of how anantique
work could
retain its value could be that even when one loses a personal link with
an obsolete economic structure, one canalways grasp the
symbolicmodel
which ruled it. And since the
symbolicprocesses, the continuous re
arrangements andre-configurations
of economic elements, still goes on,
one can still understand something of the original context of the work.
interviewer: Earlier you referred to a text or an artifact as a"sys
tem." This reminded me of Derrida's critique of Structuralist meth
odology, his attack on the fiction of a closed system which seems to
underlie all structural analysis. The notion that one can neatly isolate
the units which combine to form aperfectly coherent structure is, to
Derrida, a pleasant enough heuristic assumption, but one that ultimatelyblinds us to the "free play" of the symbolic. There is no closure, he
insists, nounderlying units which guarantee our analysis. Everything is
in process, meaningsevolve and change
at the moment that wetry
to
name them.
eco: But who has said that the system is necessarily closed? It is closed
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An Interview with Umberto Eco
in itself, but not in connection with other systems. The internal com
bustion engine is a system, but this system, which could work even if it
were notapplied
tothe chassis of
acar, at certain points and through
certain of its elements enters into connection with the wheels. And this
engine-wheel-car system in turn enters into connection with thehigh
way-traffic system. You can broaden your perspective continuously.
Some recent medical episodes of people who survive without brains
demonstrate that you cankeep
the heart-blood system goingas a ter
minus in itself, while losing, of course, the complexity of the human
being,the
system of systems.
interviewer: Then for you, change and history would have to comefrom the interaction between
systems?The car
engine,after all,
re
mains a carengine
and cannot of itself mutate intosomething
else. But
obviouslyone of the most important things about human semeiosis is the
fact that it does change. Would you say that such changecomes from
the interference of other systems?that left alone,we would never
change the distinctions that we make?
eco: No, I don't think that the notion of system excludes the notion of
change or of evolution within the system. But the fact of evolution is
obvious; the problem is to discover what determines this change. Does
the system change because of internal contradictions or because of the
action of correlated systems? This seems to me to be aperfect semiotic
problem. There arecertainly enough examples of systems with internal,
mutually contradictory elements?a madman is adisrupted system which
yet continues to work despite its internal contradictions and aberrant
external correlations. The CIA is anotherself-contradictory system,
a
social institution which functions and at the same time is self-disruptive.
interviewer: We have developed skills for synchronie analysis. Is it
enough to say that semiotics is "open to" the diachronic dimension, or
must you go on to make explicit how you can approach the task of
analyzing and explaining change?
eco: But there is no necessary contradiction between synchronie and
diachronic analysis. One tries to establish synchronie perspectives in
order to stop the flow for amoment, but one does this in order to understand more
fully how the flow works. I would prefer to say that
synchrony is a way ofcomprehending the diachronic dimension; it is
not the exclusion of history.
interviewer: The Marxist complaint about Structuralism, then, that
it does exclude history and that it cannot comprehend contradictions
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The Massachusetts Review
within a system, is not applicable to semiotics? Semiotics is not, as Sartre
has said of Structuralism, abourgeois ideology which reifies structure
at theexpense
ofhistory?
eco: Humanthinking
hasalways
used structural approachesin order
to explain how evolution takes place?from Aristotle's description of
the inner structure of the animal system to the first anatomies describing
the structure of the human body?both attempts to understand the
nature ofgrowth
anddecay. Right now, in this country, you
are con
cerned with the problem of the San Andreas fault. Perhaps California
will simply "slip away" one day, shift towards Hawaii, and so on. There
are only two ways of capturing this fact: either to write a science-fiction
novel, establishing yourself at the point in history when California ac
tually does slip away, or to describe the geodeticor the geological situa
tion as it is now, the interplay of inter-acting forces that could producethe break at some unknown
pointin the future. Insofar as you
want
toreally
understand what willhappen, you have to make a structural
description of the hic et nunc, without excludinga study of the prior
determinants of such asituation; you have to take the
geological-struc
tural approach. Only if you have understood the situation synchronicallycan you make provision and project the future. And by
a series of
synchronie cuts?checking the situation in February and again inMarch
?you can establish the rate ofchange
and make your projectionseven
moreprobable.
interviewer: Well it'scertainly
easier to look at processes ofchange
in retrospect. You can't just positthe future; often "natural selection"
only reveals its logicin retrospect.
eco: Yet such positing is the only knowledge of the future that we
have. You, forexample,
know that I have to take my plane,and so
do I. This fact projectsme towards the future, it also connects my
current self with my past, because the fact that I have to flyto New
York is connected with all the rest of my life up till now. But in order
to understand my relationship to my future, to my taking my planeon
time, I have to understand the structural, synchronie arrangementof
the arms ofmy watch,
even as
they
are at this moment. And
seeingthis configuration, interpreting it now, I know that now is in fact the
time when I must leave.
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