Imagine writing this like 500 page, incredibly
dense academic treatise on medieval semiotics.
Right. Just spending your entire day decoding
the underlying architecture of human communication.
Exactly. Just deep in the academic weeds. And
then somehow the exact same brain produces a
page turning historical murder mystery. A mystery
that, you know, casually becomes a Hollywood
blockbuster starring Sean Connery. Right. Which
is just wild to think about. Today, we're exploring
literally the only man in history to pull that
off. Yep. The one and only Umberto Eco. We are
unpacking the mind, the life, and just the completely
extraordinary legacy of this guy. And to you,
the learner listening right now, you are, as
always, the crucial third member of this conversation.
We really are thrilled to have you here. And
we've compiled a pretty fascinating stack of
source material for this deep dive. We really
have. What are we looking at today? What we'll
be drawing from his early 1960s essays where
he actually analyzes Italian television, which
is super interesting, plus translations of his
final university lectures. We also have critical
analyses of his global fiction and his pretty
stark warnings about the digital age. So it's
a huge span of time. Exactly. Our mission today
is basically to trace Eco's evolution from a
child heavily indoctrinated in fascist Italy
all the way to a towering public intellectual.
A guy who decoded everything from Thomas Aquinas
to American comic books? Right. And even modern
social media algorithms before he died. OK, let's
impact this. Because to understand a man who
spent his entire life completely obsessed with
how humans create and interpret meaning. You
really have to start with the environment that
shaped his reality in the first place. Exactly.
If a state can completely construct your reality
using symbols, how do you even begin to dismantle
that? It's a huge question. So Eco was born in
1932 in the city of Alessandria. Which is in
the Piedmont region of northern Italy, right?
Yeah, exactly. Which puts his formative years
squarely in the grip of Mussolini's fascist regime.
He was completely submerged in it from day one.
Oh, absolutely. The spread of that ideology dictated
the entire semiotic landscape of his childhood.
He wasn't just casually observing it either,
right? He was participating. Very actively. I
mean, at age 10, he actually won the first provincial
award of Ludi juveniles. Wow. For what exactly?
For an essay. He was responding to this very
specific state -sponsored writing prompt. It
was, should we die for the glory of Mussolini
and the immortal destiny of Italy? That is intense
for a 10 -year -old. Right. And young Oberdo
responded with a resounding yes. I mean, of course
he did. He absorbed the dominant narrative because,
structurally speaking, that was literally the
only narrative that existed for him. There was
no alternative. I like to imagine his early childhood
as being raised inside this incredibly rigid
single -player video game. Oh, that's a good
way to look at it. Right. Like, the state had
just pre -programmed all the rules of reality.
They coded the boundaries, who the heroes were,
the villains, and... and what words were even
allowed to mean. Yeah, the map was fully drawn
for him. But then, 1945 happens. During World
War II, his family had moved to the small village
in the Piedmontese mountainside. And when that
village is liberated, it's like someone suddenly
hands this kid a connection to the entire open
internet. That's a great analogy. This structural
rupture of his worldview was just a... It was
absolute. The borders of his reality completely
shattered. Literally overnight. Suddenly he's
exposed to the European resistance. He's meeting
people who had actively fought the regime. He
was literally trained to praise. Right. And then
he learns about the horrific realities of the
Holocaust. Exactly. Which exposed the, you know,
the lethal endpoint of the rhetoric he'd grown
up reciting. And then on a completely different,
like almost surreal cultural level, the liberation
brings American comic books into his hands for
the first time. Which is just such a cr - What's
fascinating here is that surviving this exact
ideological whiplash is precisely what drove
Eco to study how messages control us. Yeah, going
from strict militaristic propaganda to Captain
America and Superman. It's insane. But he realized
with brutal clarity that the reality he believed
as a boy wasn't some natural truth. It was artificially
constructed. Through language and symbols. Right.
orchestrated propaganda. And this birthed his
lifelong obsession with peeling back the layers
of how meaning is actually made. He basically
needed to know the mechanics of how signs operate
on our psychology so he could just never be manipulated
like that again. Exactly. It was intellectual
self -defense. It totally reframes his whole
career. Semionics wasn't just some dusty academia
for him. No, it was a survival tool. And speaking
of the mechanics of signs, there's this brilliant
detail in the sources about his actual surname.
Oh, yeah, I love this part. So towards the end
of his life, he learned that Eco was likely an
acronym. Wait, really? An acronym for what? Well,
his grandfather had been a foundling, an abandoned
child, and a city official gave him that surname.
OK. A friend of Eco's actually found the acronym
on this list of Jesuit acronyms in the Vatican
Library. It stands for Excalus Oblatus. Which
is Latin for, like, a gift from the heavens.
Exactly. I mean, a man obsessed with hidden codes
discovering his own name? is literally a hidden
Latin code. It's just a remarkable piece of poetic
justice. It really is. Yeah. But, you know, this
drive to find the structural truth behind institutions,
it eventually led him to dismantle his own religious
upbringing, too. Oh, right, because he was raised
pretty strictly Catholic. Very strict Salesian
Catholic education. But while he was writing
his university thesis on Thomas Aquinas, Of all
people, he systematically ceased to believe in
God. He just walked away from the Catholic Church
entirely. He did. He required empirical, rigorous
frameworks that could actually be tested. He
even helped co -found an Italian skeptic organization
later on to investigate pseudosciences. He really
just committed his entire life to interrogating
reality. Yeah, he couldn't just accept things
that face value anymore. Which logically pushes
him right out of the ivory tower and into the
trenches of the 1950s media landscape. Oh, yeah.
He doesn't just stay in a library studying ancient
texts. No, he gets a job at RAI, the state broadcasting
station in Milan. Producing cultural programming
for television. Right. He takes all these heavy
academic tools for analyzing medieval manuscripts
and just points them at the new dominant force
in society. The glowing screen in the living
room. Exactly. And television in the 50s was
establishing this totally unprecedented kind
of cultural dominance. And Eco immediately recognized
that it required aggressive critical decoding.
He formalized this approach in 1961, right, with
that essay that made him famous. Phenomenology
of Mike Bongiorno. Yes. OK, explain this to the
learner because Mike Bongiorno Bon Giorno was,
what, a game show host? Yeah, Bon Giorno was
this massively popular, but notoriously unrefined
quiz show host in Italy. Like, very basic, every
man kind of guy. Right. And instead of dismissing
him as just lowbrow trash, Eco put him under
a rigorous philosophical microscope to understand
his semiotic function in society. And the mechanism
he uncovers is honestly devastating. It really
is. Eco observes that Bongiorno is beloved, not
despite his mediocrity, but literally because
of it. Yeah. The source material quotes Eco saying,
Bongiorno represents an ideal that nobody needs
drive to reach because everyone is already at
his level. Ouch. He essentially proves that mass
media isn't designed to elevate the public at
all. No, not at all. It's designed to comfort
us by aggressively validating our lack of intellectual
effort. He was charting exactly how mass media
encourages passivity. Just sit back and don't
think too hard. Right. And the very next year,
in 1962, he countered this passivity by publishing
a landmark book called Opera Aperta. The open
work. Exactly. His thesis was that texts... You
know, novels, art, music, they are not singular,
unequivocal messages handed down by an author.
They're what he called fields of meaning. Yes.
Here's where it gets really interesting. But
I admit, the terminology is a little abstract.
So let me try an analogy to ground this for everyone.
Go for it. Think of what Eco called a closed
text as a strict IKEA instruction manual. OK,
yeah. The manufacturer dictates every single
move you make. There's only one valid outcome.
If you deviate, you fail, you have a broken chair.
The meaning is entirely locked. Right, totally
locked. But an open text, which is what Oka was
championing, is more like someone handing you
a massive box of assorted Legos. I would love
that. The pieces are provided, the raw field
of meaning is there, but you, the reader, have
to actively engage your own psychology to co
-create the final product. The analogy holds
up really well because it emphasizes that dynamic
engagement in an Open work, the text actively
invites you to play and interpret. And the reason
this matters to the listener today is just profound.
Yeah. We navigate a world where politicians,
advertisers, social media algorithms, they're
all constantly trying to hand us IKEA manuals.
They really are. They want to force a closed
narrative on us where we just passively accept
their heavily curated meaning. But EECA wanted
to fight back against that. In a 1967 lecture,
He actually coined the term semiological guerrilla
warfare. Such a great phrase. He urged the public
to use interpretive tactics against mainstream
mass media to intercept, decode and subvert those
closed messages. But I have to push back a bit
on this open work idea. OK, what's the issue?
If a text is just a box of Legos and the reader
co -creates the meaning, what stops someone from
building just a chaotic monstrosity and calling
it a masterpiece? Right. The anything goes problem.
Yeah, doesn't that just lead to total subjective
chaos where nothing means anything at all? That
is actually the crucial tension in Eco's entire
philosophy. An open work is not an invitation
to anarchy. Okay. It is an invited freedom, but
within boundaries. The author provides the structural
framework, the specific Lego bricks, and the
rules of physics for that world. So you can build
many different things, but you can't build something
that the pieces themselves fundamentally don't
support. Exactly. And he spends decades teaching
the public how to navigate this. Teaching them
how to dismantle the media machine. Yeah. But
then he decides to build his own ultimate open
text sandbox to see if the public will actually
play along. This is my favorite part. In 1980,
this dense academic semiotician releases his
first novel, The Name of the Rose, a 14th century
monastery murder mystery, which sounds incredibly
niche on paper. Super niche, yet it became a
massive global phenomenon. How did he avoid making
it sound like an audio textbook, though? He utilized
this mechanism called intertextuality. It's the
concept that no text exists in a vacuum. all
literature is interconnected. He didn't just
write a linear story, he constructed a labyrinth
of literary references, proving his thesis that
meaning is generated when a reader recognizes
those connections. Let's look at the protagonist,
for example. He's a Franciscan friar named William
of Baskerville. He's this hyper -logical Englishman
investigating murders. The name Baskerville immediately
signals Sherlock Holmes to the reader. Oh, absolutely.
And the sources note that William's physical
descriptions heavily mirror Arthur Conan Doyle's
character, too. Right, the tall, thin, intellectual
type. But his name and his role as a friar actively
evoke the medieval logical philosopher William
of Ockham. Famous for Ockham's razor. Exactly.
He is this carefully engineered hybrid homage.
And then there's the antagonist, this blind monk
who guards the labyrinthine library named Jorge
of Borgos. Which is brilliant. The sources tell
us this is a direct structural tribute to the
real -life blind writer Jorge Luis Borges. Who
famously wrote the short story The Library of
Babel. Yes. Eco isn't just dropping Easter eggs
for the fun of it. He is forcing the reader to
constantly reference outside knowledge to actually
unlock the text. Even the title operates as a
semiotic puzzle. It remains entirely unexplained
until the very final page. Right, it concludes
with that Latin verse. Which translates to, What's
your take on that? Well, meaning that all the
great physical things of the world. Empires,
beautiful moments, monasteries, actual roses.
Yeah, they all eventually decay and vanish. The
only thing that actually endures is the sign.
the word, the name we assign to it. It's just
a gorgeous thesis on semiotics wrapped in a gothic
thriller. It really is. And if we connect this
to the bigger picture regarding why it became
so popular, Eco deeply respected what he called
the intentio lectoris. The intention of the reader?
Yes. He proved something vital about human psychology.
He proved that audiences actually desire complexity.
We don't just want the easy quiz show host telling
us we're perfect just the way we are. No, we
want to hunt for clues. We genuinely enjoy the
psychological reward of solving a difficult puzzle.
The name of the rose validated his theory of
the open work on a massive international scale.
It's such an empowering era of his career. But
as we move into the late 1980s and 90s, the sources
show a noticeable shift. A very dark shift. Yeah.
His work turns into a much darker warning about
the dangers of overinterpretation. It really
does. And just to be completely clear to you
listening, as we unpack the historical origins
of fascism and anti -Semitic propaganda mentioned
in the sources here, we obviously aren't endorsing
any of those political viewpoints. No, of course
not. We are strictly reporting on eco's analysis
of how these dangerous ideologies use symbols
to manipulate the public. And establishing that
boundary is essential, because Eco dedicated
his later life to defining the absolute limits
of interpretation. Right, you can't just build
anything with a Lego. Exactly. In his 1988 novel
Foucault's Pendulum, he explores the psychology
of confabulation. This plot is wild. It follows
three underemployed editors of a minor publishing
house, right? Yeah. Out of pure boredom, they
begin connecting random historical dots and invent
this complex conspiracy theory they call The
Plan. Involving the Knights Templar and global
domination. Yep. They take the box of Legos and
start building connections that the pieces don't
actually support. They're playing a semiotic
game. Precisely. But the mechanism of conspiracy
is intoxicating. Outsiders learn of The Plan.
They actually believe these editors have discovered
a genuine occult secret. And the paranoia becomes
deadly real. Eco is mapping out how the human
brain's desire to find patterns can metastasize
into destructive paranoia when we just abandon
critical rigor. It's a stark warning, and he
tackles the real -world consequences of this
in his 2010 novel, The Prague Cemetery. Which
is a heavy book. Very. He meticulously explores
the historical origins of modern anti -Semitism,
specifically the fabrication of the protocols
of the elders of Zion. Right. He demonstrates
how a completely invented, forged document can
be interpreted by the public as absolute truth.
Leading to catastrophic historical violence.
He simply refused to let the public forget how
easily meaning can be weaponized. And he spelled
this out directly in his 1995 essay. or fascism.
He distilled the mechanisms of totalitarianism
into 14 general properties. He analyzed how fascism
functions not just as a political party but as
a psychological framework. Like the cult of tradition
where an ideology claims that all truth has already
been discovered. Meaning no new learning or advancement
is permitted. He also highlights action for action's
sake. This idea that thinking is a form of emasculation
and that action must be taken before or even
without any previous reflection. It's chilling
how perfectly that maps on to the mechanics of
outrage culture today. It really is. And Eco
saw the technological writing on the wall with
all this. Oh, he became increasingly critical
of systems that amplified unreflective noise.
Even in 1995, he completely dismissed hypertexts
and early multimedia novels as obsolete gimmicks.
He thought they fractured attention rather than
enhancing meaning. But his critique of social
media 20 years later is probably his most stinging
indictment. Yeah, in 2015, he offered a brutally
harsh assessment. of the digital landscape. What
did he say? He said, and I quote, 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. Oh.
But this raises an important question, which
really became the central tension of his final
years. Yeah. He championed the open text. He
wanted audiences to actively engage. But interpretation
is not infinite. You cannot just make a text
or a news event or a historical fact mean whatever
you want it to mean just to suit your personal
paranoia. There's a firm non -negotiable line
between valid critical analysis and dangerous
unhinged confabulation. You can't use the Lego
pieces to build a functional weapon and claim
you're just playing. Exactly. So what does this
all mean for us? Think about your own social
media feed right now. As you scroll through the
algorithmic outrage, the hot takes, the fractured
context. Are we all just becoming those bored
editors in Foucault's pendulum? Are we endlessly
inventing conspiracies, connecting dots that
don't exist, and mistaking the resulting noise
for reality? Eco's entire trajectory, from the
child who survived Mussolini's orchestrated reality,
to the aging professor observing the rise of
Twitter. It was a sustained defense of rigorous,
critical thought against the rising tide of unchecked
digital noise and intellectual laziness. He demanded
that we participate in the creation of meaning.
Because if you don't interpret the signs around
you, someone else will gladly interpret them
for you. Usually to their own advantage. He wanted
us awake. Whether the signs are hidden in a 14th
century monastery library, embedded in a political
speech, or just glowing on a television screen.
Which is a perfect synthesis. But there's one
final piece of the puzzle. We have talked endlessly
today about eco interpreting meaning, but there's
a crucial detail in the source material we haven't
touched on yet. Oh, right. Eco was also a highly
prolific translator. Yes. He famously translated
Raymond Kano's notoriously complex book exercises
and style into Italian. And translation is...
arguably the ultimate semiotic act. You aren't
simply swapping out vocabulary words using a
dictionary. No, you are dissecting the underlying
mechanisms of one language and attempting to
reconstruct them in another. When you translate
a text, you fundamentally alter the cultural
code and the entire semiotic landscape of the
piece. You're moving a world of meaning from
one reality into another. Right. So I want to
leave you with a final thought to mull over.
OK. If our entire digital world today, our news
feeds, our social interactions, our search results,
if all of that is constantly being translated
for us through algorithms and artificial intelligence.
Whose cultural code are we actually reading?
Exactly. When an AI summarizes the world for
you, what invisible structural boundaries has
it already decided upon? Who is really doing
the translating? A structural question that Umberto
Eco would undoubtedly want us to spend a great
deal of time trying to answer. Keep questioning
the signs in your own world. Try not to settle
for the IKEA manual. Words to live by. Thank
you so much for joining us on this deep dive
into a man who showed us how to read between
the lines, and we will catch you next time.