Welcome back to the Deep Dive, where we take
your stack of sources and turn them into essential
knowledge. Today we are wrestling with a figure
so immense, so wonderfully contradictory, that
pinning him down is, well, it's a semiotic challenge
in itself. We are diving into the complex labyrinthine
world of Umberto Eco. Indeed, and Umberto Eco,
who lived from 1932 to 2016, was so much more
than the global best -selling novelist we know
from The Name of the Rose. Oh, absolutely. He
was first and foremost an Italian medievalist,
a philosopher, a cultural critic, and really
a foundational figure. in the modern study of
semiotics. The science of signs and symbols.
Exactly. A true modern Renaissance man working
across the entire spectrum of the humanities
in the 20th and 21st centuries. So our mission
today... For you, the listener, is to unpack
that glorious duality of his career. How did
this this hyper complex academic, a man who spent
his early years on the scholastic rigor of medieval
philosophy. Right. And the precise architecture
of language. How did he suddenly pivot and become
the undisputed master of the popular historical
mystery? And not just any mystery. He embedded
his deepest theoretical concepts into fiction
that sold millions and millions of copies worldwide.
We need to argue that his academic work wasn't
just related to his fiction. It was the essential
fuel for it. His novels weren't a side project
or a distraction from his philosophy. They were
the ultimate application of it. The most complete
application, yes. We're going to trace that timeline
and show you exactly how his theories about interpretation
led him straight to writing the greatest literary
puzzle boxes of the late 20th century. And just
to start this whole journey on a perfectly strained,
perfectly fitting note, we have to talk about
his name. Ah, yes. The name itself. Ico actually
believed his family name was an acronym. It was
supposedly given to his grandfather, who was
a foundling, by a city official. The acronym
was Ex Calus Oblatus. which is latin for a gift
from the heavens i mean you can't make it up
the ultimate sign already embedded in his identity
it's a mystery a hidden meaning and an obscure
history all wrapped up in one simple word a gift
from the heavens indeed let's jump into the foundations
that built this man of signs from the medieval
world of aquinas to the realities of fascist
italy To understand the later fiercely anti -authoritarian
cultural critic, you have to start in Alessandria
Piedmont, where Ico was born in 1932. And his
childhood was just immediately and completely
shaped by the pervasive influence of Italian
fascism under Mussolini. The regime wasn't just
political. It controlled education. culture,
the entire ideological fabric of daily life.
Which brings us to a really crucial, maybe even
unsettling, biographical detail, one that gives
his later political writings so much weight.
At the age of 10, Eco participated in the Ludi
Juveniles. Which were these standardized nationwide
youth competitions. Designed to test loyalty
and ideological alignment. It was pure state
programming. And this wasn't some minor local
contest. These were highly formalized state -run
events meant to instill compliance and nationalist
fervor. The writing prompt was just starkly ideological.
That's right. And Eco received the first provincial
award for his response. A positive response.
A positive response to a deeply loaded fascist
prompt. Should we die for the glory of Mussolini
and the immortal destiny of Italy? A 10 -year
-old child being rewarded by the state for articulating
propaganda. It's a stark detail. It shows you
just how total the influence of the regime was
on the educational system at the time. The programming
was absolute. And that compliance, even if it
was just youthful and necessary for survival,
it stands in such sharp contrast to his later
Profound critique of fascist ideology. The work
that would become our fascism. Exactly. The contrast
is the key. His later work becomes this philosophical
examination of the very ideological mechanisms
he experienced as a boy. He understood firsthand
how signs and language could be hijacked by a
totalitarian system. But the war, thankfully,
provided a kind of counter -education. It did.
During World War II, he and his mother moved
to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside
to escape the bombing. And it was there... After
the liberation in 1945, that the official signs
of fascism gave way to new subversive cultural
signs. He was exposed to American comic books
for the first time. A huge source of mass culture.
And also the scattered elements of the European
resistance movements and profoundly the stark
reality of the Holocaust that emerged after the
regime fell. So you have these elements. Mass
culture. Resistance to a totalizing ideology
and the recognition of manufactured evil. And
those would all become absolutely central themes
in his life's work. His father, Giulio, an accountant
and a veteran of three wars, he pushed him toward
a more stable career. law, I believe. He did,
which thankfully for literary and philosophical
history, Eco promptly rejected. He went to the
University of Turin, Unito, instead to pursue
philosophy. And this is where we see the first
foundation of his intellectual duality. His Laurea
degree thesis, completed in 1954. It was centered
entirely on the aesthetics of the medieval philosopher
and theologian Thomas Aquinas. That choice is
so important. Aquinas is the ultimate systematizer.
He is. He sought to define things like beauty,
truth, and goodness within a single, coherent,
divinely ordered hierarchical system. So Eco's
early work, which became his first book in 1956,
The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, was just steeped
in this scholastic rigor. exploring art and beauty
within that rigid medieval framework he started
his career in other words by studying the most
closed of systems a fixed divinely ordained structure
of thought he was learning how to build and maintain
an intellectual order exactly then after graduation
he started balancing that high culture with a
new awareness of mass media He got a job. He
worked for the state broadcasting station Radio
Televisione Italiana, or RAI, in Milan. Producing
cultural programming. But he was being exposed
daily to the raw data of modern mass communication,
the stuff of the real world. He also published
a small collection of satirical cartoons and
verse around this time. Yes. Philosophie in Libertà,
or Philosophers at Liberty, under the pseudonym
Daedalus. You can already see that flair for
playful intellectual critique. And of course,
there was real world duty. He did 18 months of...
compulsory military service in the Italian army.
Right. In 1958, when he got back, he solidified
his academic path. He published a second major
scholarly monograph in 1959, The Development
of Medieval Aesthetics. Which built on his Aquinas
work. It did. And this tremendous academic rigor
earned him his Libera Dotenza in Aesthetics in
1961. So by the early 1960s, Eco is undeniably
a serious credentialed medieval aesthetician.
a very specific, very highbrow academic. But
all that popular culture he was exposed to at
RAI must have been just screaming for intellectual
attention. It's time to see how he takes that
medieval structural understanding and basically
weaponizes it to analyze the modern world. The
physical and intellectual shift from the cloistered,
fixed world of medieval manuscripts to contemporary
television studios, well, that marks the crucial
beginning of Ico's life as a major public intellectual.
He starts pioneering this rigorous philosophical
analysis of popular culture. Analyzing it not
as just some ephemeral distraction, but as a
system of signs that needs to be decoded. Okay,
let's unpack that. The key turning point in his
public profile came in 1961 with a short essay.
Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno. This was a critical
and frankly a pretty daring analysis of Mike
Bongiorno. Who was the most popular and often
seen as kind of artistically unrefined quiz show
host in Italy at the time. And the essay appeared
in a sophisticated magazine run by the tire manufacturer
Pirelli. Which shows you how he was already crossing
boundaries, using a popular platform to deliver
high -level critical thought. Bongiorno was the
embodiment of the common man achieving massive
success, but without needing specialized knowledge
or exceptional talent. And that's what Iko keyed
in on. What was his fundamental insight into
this media figure? It was brilliant, and it's
highly predictive of the dynamics we see in celebrity
culture today. Igo observed that Bongiorno does
not provoke inferiority complexes, even though
he's presenting himself as an idol of success.
What's fascinating there is that Igo saw Bongiorno
as a mirror, not a standard to aspire to. Precisely.
The observation was that the audience didn't
strive to reach Bongiorno's level. They loved
him because they felt, fundamentally, that everyone
is already at his level. So he represented a
kind of manufactured mediocrity that was universally
accessible. Exactly. This commentary on mass
media authenticity brought eco -widespread notoriety
among the general public. It proved he could
write essays that had both intellectual bite
and popular appeal. And that critique of manufactured
mediocrity is so essential. It sets the stage
for his most critical academic work. Because
he saw Bongiorno's audience as passive consumers,
they were accepting the sign, the host, at face
value. Which is the polar opposite of the kind
of active, challenging audience he was about
to champion in his literary theory. Which leads
us directly into what is arguably his most important
academic contribution to literary theory, the
concept of the open text. Published in 1962 as
Opera Aperta, or The Open Work, this was a fundamental
intellectual revolution against traditional literary
criticism. So before Ico, how did traditional
criticism, what we might call the closed text
approach, view a work of art? It viewed a work
as a fixed string of meaning. The author intends
a single unequivocal interpretation, the message,
and the reader's job is just to extract that
fixed meaning. Like a piece of propaganda or
even the dogmatic structure of medieval aesthetics
he studied in Aquinas. Exactly. It's a one -way
street. Eco flipped that script entirely. His
argument was that the greatest and most alive
literary texts are instead Fields of meaning.
Fields of meaning. Yes. They are dynamic, internally
alive systems that demand a profound psychological
and intellectual engagement from you, the reader.
A closed text limits understanding. It's predictable.
But the works that are most active, the open
texts. Those are the ones that demand choice,
that present ambiguities, that invite the reader
to participate in the act of creation itself.
This can sound a bit abstract. Can you give us
an example of what an open text looks like in
practice? What kinds of works was he looking
at? Certainly. He was drawing heavily on early
20th century movements. Think of James Joyce's
Finnegan's Wake. Right, where the structure is
fragmented, the language is a mix of everything
and constantly shifting. Yeah. And you, the reader,
have to choose from multiple possible meanings
with every single paragraph. Or think of aleatoric
or chance -based music from the 1950s, where
the order of notes or even whole sections is
left up to the performer. So the work isn't complete
until the reader or the performer makes a decision.
Exactly. The reader isn't a passive recipient,
absorbing a message like Bongiorno's audience.
The reader is an active co -creator, required
to continually interpret and choose among multiple
potential meanings. And this wasn't just a passing
idea for him. It laid the entire theoretical
groundwork for his later concept of the reader's
responsibility. Culminating in his compilation,
The Role of the Reader, published in 1979. It
was there that he really cemented the idea that
interpretation is an active, demanding, and structured
process. And this active engagement led him formally
into the study of signs into semiotics. His specific
methodology is known as interpretative semiotics.
Right. And that distinction is important. It
implies a different focus from other semiotic
models. Oh, how does it differ? Well, traditional
semiotics often focus just on defining the structure
of the sign itself, like Saussure's binary model
of the signifier and the signified. The word
and the concept it represents. Right. Eco, who
drew heavily from the American philosopher Charles
Sanders Pierce, focused instead on the process
of interpretation, what Pierce called unlimited
semiosis. Unlimited semiosis. That sounds terrifyingly
close to the chaos of the Internet he later criticized.
And that's the tension. It's critical. Unlimited
semiosis means that one sign leads to another
sign, which leads to another in a potentially
infinite chain of interpretation. So meaning
could just dissolve into chaos. It could. And
Eco realized that. But to prevent that, you needed
rules. His interpretative semiotics sought to
define the limits and constraints on that interpretation.
If you're interpreting a text, you can't just
make up anything you want. There's still a closed
aspect, the text itself, which dictates acceptable
readings, even within that open field of possibilities.
Exactly. He was defining the difference between
legitimate, constrained interpretation and just
arbitrary, self -indulgent fabrication. And he
developed this complex framework in key academic
texts. Yes, like La Struttura Assente, the absent
structure, in 1968, and his comprehensive Magnum
Opus, a theory of semiotics, in 1975. This cemented
him as a global authority, not just in aesthetics,
but in the entire structure of human communication.
But he wasn't just defining academic theories.
He was actively applying them to contemporary
culture, which brings us to one of his most colorful
and, uh... Politically active concepts from the
late 1960s. Semiological guerrilla warfare. A
professor of visual communications in Florence
using military metaphors to describe critical
theory. It sounds exactly like eco. He coined
the term sometimes also called communications
guerrilla warfare while he was a professor at
the University of Florence between 1965 and 1969.
And the context was the rise of powerful centralized
mass media like television. Which Eco feared
was creating a closed, manipulative system of
signs for passive consumption. So what did he
mean by telling citizens to engage in a semiological
guerrilla? It was a concept that really influenced
early theories of cultural resistance. The idea
was that since mass media communicates the dominant
ideology through signs advertising, news framing,
political rhetoric, the only way to resist total
control is to intercept and subvert those signs
on the ground. So instead of trying to shut down
the source, the big media corporation. You attack
the signs as they are being consumed by the public.
You conduct a guerrilla attack on the message
itself. So if an advertisement uses a sign to
signify consumer desire. The semiological gorilla
interrupts that sign, recodes it and makes it
signify resistance or political critique. This
is the intellectual route of what we now call
culture jamming. Was this purely theoretical
or did he think this was an effective tactic
for citizens fighting power structures? Eco was
a realist. He wasn't advocating physical revolution,
but intellectual and cultural resistance. He
saw it as a necessary defense mechanism to keep
the mind open when the media was trying to impose
a closed interpretation of reality. It's the
ultimate application of the active reader concept.
You have to be an active reader of the entire
world around you. The essay was hugely influential,
especially in Europe, and it was collected in
his book Faith in Fakes. It really marks his
definitive move from just analyzing how communication
works to actively prescribing how you can use
that knowledge to resist being consumed by media
ideology. After this intense period of theoretical
output, he finally settled at the University
of Bologna in 1971, where he became a professor
of semiotics, a position he held for most of
the rest of his career. And now we arrive at
the spectacular and frankly lucrative confluence
of Eco's two identities. For decades, he had
been doing this deep scholarly work in medievalism
and semiotics. Defining how signs work, how texts
are interpreted, how libraries are structured.
And then in 1980, he finally sat down and wrote
a novel. The Name of the Rose. His breakthrough
into global pop culture. It was an immediate
sensation. It won Italy's most prestigious literary
prize, the Striga Prize, in 1981, and then just
became a massive global bestseller. And the setting
alone is just pure distilled eco. A historical
murder mystery set in a meticulously rendered
14th century Italian monastery. The plot centers
on this Franciscan friar, William of Baskerville,
and his assistant, the Benedictine novice, Adso.
They're investigating a series of mysterious
murders in the week leading up to a major religious
debate. A debate about poverty and the spiritual
future of the church. So why did this novel resonate
so deeply? I mean, it's dense. It has long passages
of untranslated Latin. It's obsessed with arcane
theology. Why did this complex academic exercise
succeed as popular fiction? Because Ico masterfully
married his two worlds in a way no one expected.
His background as a medievalist provided the
rich historical texture, the scholastic arguments,
the atmosphere. But his expertise in semiotics
provided the plot engine. Exactly. The entire
structure of The Murder Mystery is fundamentally
a detective story about interpretation. It's
about reading physical signs, analyzing cryptic
texts, and discerning the intent behind ambiguous
symbols. So William of Baskerville is a semiotician
with a magnifying glass. Precisely. The murders
aren't solved through brute force or typical
police work. They're solved through deduction,
through interpreting the signs, the arrangement
of bodies, the patterns of behavior, the texts
that are being read or hidden. And the medieval
monastery, with its specialized texts and secret
library, is the perfect metaphor for a highly
constrained but ultimately solvable semiotic
system. This is the so what connection for you,
the listener. The medieval manuscripts and the
library secrets weren't just window dressing.
They were a massive, complex system of signs
that needed deciphering, just like any open text
in the modern world. The murderer's motive hinges
on controlling the flow of information. Specifically
controlling the text that can be read. And this
is where the intertextual depth really shines.
Eco build a labyrinth of illusions that rewards
the reader who's willing to play the game of
interpretation. He uses his fiction to show that
no book exists in isolation. Let's start with
the protagonist himself, William of Baskerville.
His name is a powerful, double -coated sign.
It is. First, it honors the English philosopher
William of Ockham, a key figure in late medieval
thought known for Ockham's razor. The principle
of parsimony. Right. And second, it immediately
evokes the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes
through the title of the famous mystery, The
Hound of the Baskervilles. And Eco makes that
connection unavoidable. He does. Several passages
describing William's physical appearance, his
height, his aloofness, his powers of observation,
they are intentionally strongly reminiscent of
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's descriptions of Holmes.
That's a conscious use of signs. to signal to
the reader what kind of cognitive framework they
need to adopt to follow the investigation. And
then you have the villainous, blind monk Jorge
of Burgos, who guards the dangerous secrets of
the hidden library. This is a profound and moving
tribute to Jorge Luis Borges. One of the two
modern authors, Eco, explicitly cited as his
greatest influence, the other being James Joyce.
And the connections are just layered. Borges,
like the character Horde, dedicated his life
entirely to books. lived a celibate life and
famously went blind in his later years, making
him the ultimate custodian of unseen knowledge.
And of course, the secretive labyrinth and library
itself, the setting of so much of the mystery
and danger. That's a self -contained literary
tribute alluding to Borge's seminal short story,
The Library of Babel, where all possible knowledge
exists in a dizzying, infinite and potentially
dangerous arrangement. And finally, the enigmatic
title. The name of the rose is famously unexplained
within the body of the novel. And it closes with
that dense, reflective Latin verse. The ancient
rose remains only in name. We hold only the bare
names. The rose, a powerful symbol that has meant
everything from beauty and secrecy to mysticism
throughout history, serves as an example of the
fate of all remarkable things. So if the object
is gone, only the sign? The word, the name remains.
That is the semiotician's ultimate statement
embedded in the fiction. The physical world decays,
the divine order collapses, but the process of
naming and interpreting is what endures. The
novel becomes a meditation on how we use language
to anchor meaning in a world of flux. So if the
name of the rose was about... Decoding the fixed
past, his next major novel, Foucault's Pendulum,
from 1988, was about the terrifying malleability
of the present through signs. Specifically, the
signs of conspiracy. Absolutely. Foucault's Pendulum
takes the reader far away from the rigid confines
of the 14th century and plunges them into modern,
cynical Milan. The premise starts simply enough.
Three underemployed editors at a minor publishing
house, bored with reviewing junk manuscripts
about the occult, decide to invent the plan.
And the plan? is what exactly it's a vast incredibly
complex and totally fictitious conspiracy theory
it proposes that the knights templar secretly
survived their demise and are currently planning
a world takeover using a global network of cryptic
messages and historical signs they're essentially
applying their sophisticated knowledge of semiotics
history and narrative structure to create the
ultimate open text a map of connections where
the reader can link Anything to anything else.
That's the genius of the book. The editors are
playing an intellectual game, creating signifiers
without any underlying genuine signified. They're
testing the boundaries of interpretation. And
the danger arises when the fictional game becomes
terrifyingly real. How does that happen? Outsiders
who are already obsessed with hidden histories
and finding secret signs everywhere, they learn
of the plan. And they believe that the editors
have genuinely, accidentally discovered the secret
to regaining the lost Templar treasure. So this
brilliantly illustrates the danger of unconstrained
interpretation. A primary concern for Eco the
semiotician. If you look hard enough for patterns,
if you truly believe everything is a sign, you
will find them, whether they are real or not.
The human mind, Eco suggests, is a conspiracy
-generating engine. Which connects the academic
theory perfectly to the fictional narrative.
The open text requires constraint, and Foucault's
pendulum shows what happens when those constraints
are removed. And Eco continued exploring these
dualities in his later novels, always making
sure they were rich in history, language, and
complexity. It was an intellectual game he continued
to play with the reader. Let's touch on a few
of those later novels because they each tackle
different aspects of this semiotic and historical
uncertainty. The Island of the Day Before from
1994 is often described as one of his most contemplative
novels. And least action -packed. That's a fair
assessment. It's set in the 17th century and
features a man, Roberto, stranded on a ship near
an island he believes is on the opposite side
of the international beatline. And the main tension
isn't about physical escape. No, it's about these
complex internal and philosophical dilemmas.
Roberto is paralyzed by his inability to swim.
And the book largely consists of lengthy internal
reflections on his life, his identity and the
adventures that led him there. So it's an exploration
of how time, space and personal history are constantly
being reinterpreted by the self. Precisely. Then
you have Bottolino in 2000, which leans heavily
into the idea of the unreliable narrator and
historical fabrication. The title character,
Bottolino, is a polyglot scholar who boasts openly
about his ability to lie and tell tall tales.
He recounts his history from being a peasant
lad to the adopted son of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa
and his mission to find Prester John's mythical
realm. The entire narrative forces the historian
he's confessing to, and you, the reader, to remain
continually unsure of how much of his story is
accurate history and how much is just pure invention.
It's a grand examination of the impossibility
of objective historical truth and how narrative
itself structures our reality. And finally, a
novel that dealt directly with manufacturing.
societal hatred, the Prague Cemetery from 2010.
This one is significantly darker. Oh, yes. It
tells a story of a cynical secret agent and forger
who weaves these intrigues across 19th century
Europe. It explicitly traces the mechanics behind
the rise of modern anti -Semitism. By referencing
pivotal historical events like the Dreyfus Affair.
And critically, the fraudulent document known
as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It's
a chilling fictional demonstration of how toxic
signs and fabricated plots can be consciously
engineered to poison society. The real -world
application of the cautionary tale he wrote in
Foucault's Pendulum. Exactly. It's clear that
Ico saw his academic, literary, and public work
as inseparable. He wasn't just writing and teaching.
He was an institutional builder dedicated to
expanding scholarly inquiry in Italy. Very much
so. He founded the Department of Media Studies
at the University of the Republic of San Marino
in 1988. Then, at the University of Bologna,
where he spent most of his career, he founded
the Institute of Communication Disciplines and
later the Higher School for the Study of the
Humanities. He was actively structurally shaping
the future of these academic fields, making sure
they were equipped to handle the complexities
of the modern media landscape. And crucially,
he recognized the limitations of a purely Western
European perspective in academic study. So in
1988 at Bologna, he created this unique international
program called the Anthropology of the West.
That title alone is highly provocative. It suggests
a decentering of the traditional academic focus.
The goal was to view Western culture through
the lens of non -Western scholars, specifically
African and Chinese academics, using their own
cultural and semiotic criteria. So he was actively
using external cultural perspectives as a tool
for critical self -reflection. He wanted to see
the Western system of science from the outside
to expose its inherent assumptions. This transcultural
network led to major international seminars and
the publication of the book The Unicorn and the
Dragon, which discussed how knowledge is created
in China and Europe, with scholars from both
sides contributing equally. It shows his desire
to find a truly universal, common, semiotic ground.
And even when discussing his most abstract academic
topics, Eco was remarkably grounded about their
complexity. When he published Kant and the Platypus
in 1997, a major theoretical work, he reportedly
issued a clear public warning to his massive
fan base. This is maybe his most famous piece
of academic self -deprecation. It is. It highlights
that duality again. He advised his popular readers,
this is a hardcore book. Don't buy it if you
are not Einstein. He wanted to ensure people
didn't mistakenly expect a fun medieval romp
or a Templar conspiracy. He was demanding that
his academic work be approached with the intellectual
rigor it deserved. But when we talk about his
role as a cultural conscience, one essay stands
out for its renewed, chilling relevance in the
21st century, our fascism. Also known as eternal
fascism from 1995. The renewed relevance of this
essay is profound. Eco, reflecting on his childhood
experience receiving that award under Mussolini,
realized that fascism wasn't a single monolithic
ideology defined by a flag or a leader. He saw
it as a constellation of cultural behaviors and
psychological mechanisms. Yes, and he listed
14 general properties that he believed defined
fascist ideologies regardless of time or place.
And these weren't political platforms. They were
characteristics of a mindset. What are some of
the most memorable of those 14 points? Well,
they include concepts like the cult of tradition,
the rejection of modernism, the fear of difference
or the different, and an obsession with conspiracy
and external threats. And crucially, he noted
that the movement has to define its audience
not through objective criteria. But through a
constant emphasis on frustration, the idea that
the movement is the only salvation from a confusing,
unjust world. That structure of constantly identifying
an enemy and harnessing grievance. It sounds
less like a specific historical party and more
like a universal formula for authoritarian movements.
It is precisely a formula. Eco made it clear
that you don't need all 14 points to be present.
But if even a few are operating, you need to
be deeply concerned. It provided a clear, actionable
checklist for identifying creeping authoritarianism.
A vital tool for critical thinking in any era.
And this brings us to the ultimate friction point
in Eco's public thought. His scathing critique
of the digital age, which he was diagnosing using
the very semiotic tools he himself developed.
He maintained a long -running, influential, cultural
commentary in his twice -monthly newspaper column,
La Bustina di Minerva, or Minerva's Matchbook.
Which ran from 1985 until shortly before his
death in 2016. It gave him a consistent platform
to apply his critical eye to current events.
And it was through that platform or similar interviews
late in his career that he delivered his most
memorable and perhaps most controversial critique
of the digital landscape in 2015. Focusing squarely
on social media. His words were direct and have
become this notorious summary of information
overload and the death of expertise. He said
social. Social media gives legions of idiots
the right to speak when they once only spoke
at a bar after a glass of wine without harming
the community. But now they have the same right
to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion
of the idiots. That quote is hard to hear without
wincing, but it perfectly encapsulates his fear
of uncontrolled interpretation combined with
unchecked access. It seems to directly clash
with his earlier championing of the open text.
Why did he draw such a stark boundary here? He
saw a critical difference, I think, between the
structural ambiguity of an open work of art like
a Joyce novel and the undifferentiated noise
of the Internet. Exactly. An open literary text
still operates within a defined system of language,
history, and narrative convention. It still requires
the reader to be competent. Whereas the internet?
The internet, and particularly social media he
felt, destroyed the necessary hierarchy of competence
and verification. It leveled the playing field
of public discourse by giving instantaneous authority
to baseless opinion. He spent his life arguing
that texts are open to interpretation, but he
drew a clear boundary when that openness became
a cacophony of uneducated, unsubstantiated opinion
that actively drowned out expertise and the historical
record. It was the ultimate failure of constrained
interpretation. Umberto Eco's legacy is fundamentally
built on his ability to synthesize. He didn't
just read books. He used them as foundational
building blocks for new, complex narratives.
Narratives that engaged in this deep intertextual
conversation. As we mentioned, he cited Joyce
and Borges as his two biggest modern influences.
Which emphasizes his dedication to intertextuality.
the idea that every literary work exists in relation
to all others, constantly referencing, commenting
on, and enriching the global library of stories.
But his successful fusion of dense philosophy
with mass market fiction led to a predictable
and often divided critical reception. He often
stunned critics with the sheer simultaneous complexity
and popularity of his fiction. The split was
quite distinct. On one side, you had the skeptics,
the purists in philosophy and literary. history
who found his academic style, well, sometimes
overly ornate or self -referential. One famous
critique came from the philosopher Roger Scruton.
He attacked Eco's esoteric tendencies, suggesting
he sought the rhetoric of technicality, generating
so much smoke for so long that the reader will
begin to blame his own lack of perception. In
other words, he was accused of obscuring simple
ideas with complex jargon. The art historian
Nicholas Penny also accused him of pandering
to the academic cause of relevance when his earlier
essays on mass culture appeared, suggesting a
commercial or trend -following motive behind
some of his theoretical pivots. So he was sometimes
seen as brilliant, but perhaps unnecessarily
dense or even self -indulgent. On the other side,
though, his supporters lauded his levity his
encyclopedic scope, and his ability to make abstruse
subjects accessible to millions. Frank Kermode,
reviewing The Name of the Rose, called it a wonderfully
interesting book precisely because of its odd
parentage of medievalism and modern semiotics.
He was proving that seriousness didn't have to
be dry. And his influence was undeniable in post
-structuralist circles. Philosophers like Gilles
Deleuze and Jacques Derrida both took inspiration
from his early theoretical work, The Open Work.
They used it to explore the fluid nature of language
and meaning. Carlin Romano ultimately described
Ico as having become over time the critical conscience
at the center of Italian humanistic culture,
uniting smaller worlds like no one before him.
And this unifying work earned him immense recognition
globally. The Striga Prize, the McLuhan Teleglobe
Prize and countless honorary doctorates from
institutions like Yale, Oxford and Rutgers. His
lifelong dedication to knowledge, scholarship
and the physical bound book was perhaps best
symbolized by his personal life. He maintained
not just one, but two immense private libraries.
Which is just a staggering feat. of acquisition
and organization. We're talking about 30 ,000
volumes in his Milan apartment focused on the
modern era and his current work. And another
20 ,000 volumes in his vacation home near Urbino
focused on his specialty, the early modern and
medieval periods. That's 50 ,000 volumes in total.
50 ,000 physical books meticulously cataloged
and used. It's hard to imagine a more fitting
monument to a man who dedicated his entire life
to defining and interpreting the meaning held
within pages. This monumental personal collection
was in fact the subject of the 2023 documentary
film Umberto Eco. a library of the world. Umberto
Eco died in Milan in 2016 at the age of 84 after
a two -year struggle with pancreatic cancer.
He left behind a profound intellectual and literary
legacy as a professor emeritus at the University
of Bologna. His life's work stands as a continuous
interrogation of the power and the limits of
signs. So if we summarize Eco's identity for
you, the listener, he was the ultimate synthesis.
A medievalist who used scholasticism to understand
and invent detective plots. A philosopher of
language who built global conspiracies to demonstrate
the dangers of unconstrained interpretation.
And a cultural critic. who wielded semiotics
to diagnose the flaws of mass media and eventually
the digital age. He showed us that the complex
academic world of signs and the popular world
of stories are not separate. There are two sides
of the same manuscript page. And reading either
one requires intellectual rigor, historical context.
and an understanding of the rules of the game.
Which brings us to our final provocative thought
for you to carry forward, and it sits right at
the heart of Ico's glorious contradiction. We've
emphasized that he warned fiercely against the
invasion of the idiots via social media, the
chaos of unlimited, unconstrained interpretation
of signs in the digital sphere. He saw the internet
as an endless, dangerous sea of noise. And yet
his fundamental theoretical contribution, the
open work, explicitly championed works that invited
the reader's widest possible interpretation,
demanding participation and ambiguity. He dedicated
his life to creating works, from the labyrinthine
library of the monastery to the fictional conspiracy
of the Templars, that actively invited you, the
reader, to engage, decode, and interpret relentlessly.
So here is the paradox we leave you with. Did
Ico's passionate love for The Bound Book and
its contained, finite collection of signs ultimately
lose the fight against the chaos of the open
internet, the endless, uncontrolled library of
the world? Or did his own theories about communication
mean that ultimately... All texts, even a viral
tweet, a YouTube video, or a baseless conspiracy
posted online, must be considered an open, interpretable
field of meaning. And thus require the intellectual
defenses of the semiotic gorilla, for better
or for worse. Something for you to mull over
as you navigate your next encounter with an open
text, digital or physical, and decide where the
line between productive interpretation and dangerous
noise truly lies. Thanks for joining us for this
deep dive into Umberto Eco.