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

409



The Massachusetts Review

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

410




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

411




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.

412




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

413




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

414




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

415




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

416




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

417




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

418




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

419




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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Documents

An Interview With Eco 1