BFI PUBLISHING Series PERSPECTIVES Fredric Apocalypse Looks The Paul Cinema Serge APOCALYPSE Umberto Edited INDIANA Geopolitical Vision Willemen Virilio and Daney editors: in by Jameson Eco UNIVERSITY Frictions Transit ROBERT Postponed Machine POSTPONED Colin Aesthetic: LUMLEY PRESS MacCabe Bloomington Cinema and Paul and and Willemen Space Indianapolis in the World System First Indiana 601 British 21 The Stephen North British published University Film Morton Street, Film Institute in Street, Institute 1994 by Press London Bloomington, WIP exists IPL,to UKencourage Indiana 47404 the development and the of film, televisi on and video in the United Kingdom, and to promote knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of the culture of the moving image. Its activities include the Nationa l Film and Television Archive; the National Film Theatre; the Museum of the Movi ng Image; the London Film Festival; the producrion and distribution of film and video; funding and support for regional activities; Library and Information Serv ices; Research; Copyright Introduction All No part rights Stills, of Publishing reserved this Umberto Posters Robert book and Eco may and Lumley Education; 1994 be Designs; reproduced 1994 andor the utilized monthlyin Sight any form and Sound or bymagazine. any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any inform ation storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publi USReactions shers. British A ISBN Typeset Fakenham Printed Introduction Acknowledgments Part 1 Mass 2 3 4 catalogue Apocalyptic The Cataloging 0--85170-418-2 One: communications World Library in Photosetting Mass Great the record of by data and United Culture: Charlie Apocalyptic the Cataloguing Robert Britain Integrated available for Author: 0--85170-446--8 and Limited, States this Lumley Brown Apocalypse theories byNow and in book from Intellectuals: Publication Norfolk Integrated (1974 is of the Postponed available pbk mass and Library culture 1977) Intellectuals: Data of from 5 Orwell, Congress the British Then or ISBN Concerning (1964) 0-253-31851-3 Library. Visionary 6Power Part TheTwo: Future Mass ofMedia Literacy and the Limits of Communication 1 Political Language: The u se Ginger Part 2 3 4 5 V 17 45 75 115 108 148 Contents 87ll Does Event The On Independent Striking and 36 51 103 129 167 Three: Chinese 1 Phantom New 58 abuse the and as 177 64 Forms Audience Mise Fred at The of Comic ofof Radio the rhetoric en Rise Neo-TV: Heart scene Expression Strips: have in and Italy of Bad and The Fall Counter-information the Effects Life debate of State? Counter-cultures ason onFellini's Scene-setting Television? andDoes alternative Counter-culture information Exist? Part 1 Panorama 2 3 4 Index Details Acknowledgments Phenomena A For The Dollar Four: Grace Italian 225 of oforiginal In for ofGenius Italian Received Search This a Deputy: Sort Design place of Italian 200 Industry Must La of 185 Cicciolina publication Also 211 Genius be Included 196 and (where in Any necessary) the name of the t ranslator: 'Apocalyptic and Integrated Intellectuals' (Apocalittici e integrati, Milan, 1964; trans. Jenny Condie); 'The World of Charlie Brown' (Apocalittici e integrati; trans. William Weaver; first published in translation for exhibition catalogue 'The Graphic Art of Charles Schulz'); 'Reactions of Apocalyptic and I nte- grated Intellectuals: Then' and 'Reactions of the Author: Now' (Apo- calitt ici e integrati, 1977; trans. Jenny Condie); 'Orwell, or Concern- ing Visionary Power' (preface to Mondadori edition of 1984; trans. Jenny Condie); 'The Future of Literacy' (International Conference: 'Books and Literacy: A Response to New D evelopments', Amsterdam 1987); 'Political Language: The use and abuse of rhetori c' (G. L Beccaria [ed.], I linguaggi settoriali in Italia, Milan, 1973; trans. R obert Lumley); 'Does the Audience have Bad Effects on Television?' (Dalla perife ria dell'impero, Milan, 1977; trans. Robert Lumley); 'Event as mise-en-scene and Life as Scene-setting' (G. F. Bettetini [ed.], Forme scenografiche della teievi sione, Milan, 1982; trans. Robert Lumley); 'The Phantom of Neo-TV: The debate on Fellini's Ginger and Fred' (L'Espresso, 2 February 1986; trans. Jenny Con- die) ; 'Does Counter-culture Exist?' (Sette anni di desiderio, Milan, 1983; trans. Je nny Condie); 'The New Forms of Expression' (Atti dell'VIII congresso dell'associ azione intemazionale per g/i studi di lingua e letteratura itaiiana, April 1973; trans. Jenny Condie); 'On Chinese Comic Strips: Counter-information and alterna tive infor- mation' (V. S., 1, September 1971; trans. [from French] Liz Heron); 'Independent Radio in Italy' (Cultures, 1, 1978); 'Striking at the Heart of the State?' (Sette anni di desiderio; trans. Geoffrey Nowell- Smith); 'Phenomena of This Sort Must Also be Included ...' (P. Sartogo [ed.], Italian Re-evolution: De sign in Italy in the 19805; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA, 1 982); 'A Dollar for a Deputy: La Cicciolina' (L'Espresso, 5 July 1987; trans. Ro bert Lumley); 'For Grace Received' (L'Espresso supplement, 19 April 19..10; tran s. Robert tume vii di casa, Lumley); Milan, 'The 1973; Italian trans. Genius JennyIndustry' Condie). (II cosIntroduction Umberto Eco is Robert mainly Lumley known outside Italy as the writer of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, novels that became international bestsellers in the 198 0s. In Italy, Eco's name was well established some thirty years ago with Opera a perta (1962),1 widely seen as a manifesto of the Italian neo-avantgarde; Diario minimo (1963),2 a brilliant exercise in stylistic pastiche; and Apocalittici e i ntegrati (1964), whose explorations of mass culture became a touch- stone for cu ltural commentators. It is the last book that provides the springboard for this collection of Eco's writings on cultural questions in the period from the mid-19 60s to the late 1980s. This introduction will therefore take it as a starting-po int, before going on to discuss Eco's role as an intellectual in relation to Ita lian debates e Apocalittici about integrati cul- ture, came out society at aand critical politics. moment in postwar history in the wake of the 'economic miracle', and its distinction between 'apocalyptic' and ' integrated' responses to the accompanying cultural transformation has entered th e language. Today the book's basic arguments about the need to analyse and under stand the work- ings of mass cultural products before passing judgment, and abou t the subsequent importance of discriminating rather than accepting or rejecting them wholesale, have become commonplace (even if phan- tom battles between 'hig h' and 'low' culture continue to be re- enacted).3 To appreciate the impact and consequences of a book like Apocalittici e i~tegrati one ha~ to reconstruct a co

ntext in which Europe was struggling to come to terms with a rise of commercial culture A reviewto inwhich the Times the United Literary States Supplement had become (which, habituated. interestingly, examines Eco's book alongside Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel's The Popular Arts) is symptomatic. The situation of the arts in the twen- tieth century is compared to that of the horse: 'Outside a few under- developed countries it has been entirely replaced by the automobile, which runs faster, and the tractor, which pulls heavier loads . It sur- viv~s entirely as a luxury.' The review continues: 'The professional 1 writer of books is in the position of the handloom weaver after the invention of the power-loom ... As every advertising agent and editor knows, it is the ~phot ographer and not the "artist" who today com- mands the high fees.' The new reali ty might be undesirable, and 'no class of people is enthusiastic about writing i ts own obituary'. But there were intellectuals coming to terms with 'industrial culture' in different countries, forming three main currents: 'The Americans hav e discovered, described and measured, the Continentals - es- pecially the French However, and Italians the moralizing - have theorized, that might andhere the be British associated have moralized.'4 with Richard Hoggart's cla ssic The Uses of Literacy was not exclusive to Britain.5 There was a widespread hostility on the part of European intellectuals towards what was seen as an Amer ican-led invasion of 'mass culture' and a consequent standardization and homolog ization of cultural forms at the expense of rich and variegated national ones. I n Italy this saw an unholy alliance of Left and Right: for the idealist traditio n of neo-Crocean thought (influential also among Grams- cians) Art was the expre ssion of the Spirit and was embodied in the works of the masters; for the Marxis t tradition of the Frankfurt School, successfully imported into Italy from the l ate 1950s, Art was the antithesis of industry. In addition, there was the antipa thy of culture to the emergent 'threat'.6 And if this picture is some- what ov Catholic ersimplified (overlooking Croce's notes on popular song on the one hand, and the non-Adornian positions within the Frankfurt School on the other), it reflects t he polemical thrust of Eco's critique. He felt himself to be somewhat isolated, occupying a narrow strip between the great 'churches' of Italian postwar culture . Yet, as a glance at his overview 'Reactions of Apocalyptic and Integrated Inte l- lectuals' shows, the book's reception was more favourable than had been antic ipated. Not least because, as its regular republication suggests, its detailed a nd persuasive readings of texts of mass culture from comics to television made i t not At theonly sametimely time, when but areading model of the how essay to approach 'Apocalyptic a newand cultural Inte- grated order. Intellect uals', one is struck by what Eco recalls as his' "En- lightenment" belief that d esirable cultural action would bring about an improvement in messages'. Eco seem s to identify with the figure of the 'uomo colto' or 'man of culture', someone ' aware of his surround- ings, who knows how to discriminate within a hierarchy of values continually undergoing revision, and who is able to develop coherent pro posals for that assumption action while to bring mass culture about changes'.7 needs to be There understood is an underlying whatever the subsequen t value-judgments, the real provocation, and pleasure, lies in resc"uing works l ike Shultz's cartoons (see 'The World of Char- lie Brown'), and elevating them t o the Eco isstatus very much of 'Art,.8 of a generation that has not grown up from the cradle with mass culture, and for whom it has the slightly exotic aura of forbidden fruit (an id ea reinforced by its largely American prove- nance). His citation of Leonardo da Vinci ('Truth is so excellent that, if it praises but small things, they become noble') serves as a high cultural justification of an exploration into barbaria n lands. Signifi- cantly, Eco dedicates his book to the apocalyptics 'without wh ose unjust, biased, neurotic, desperate censure I could never have elabor- ated three-quarters of the ideas I want to share here'. But no, Eco isn't one of thei r company (or only for twelve hours in the day, as he says in 'The Future of Lit eracy'). Rather it is the vision of the outsider (the anthropologist looking at his own society?), or of the artist who makes us see by making things strange, t hat inspires him. By contrast, the integrated intellectual tends to be ignored, dismissed Yet Eco has or, never in the lived case onof the Marshall margins, McLuhan, and hismercilessly refutation of taken Adornian apart.pessimism 9 concerning the 'culture industry' has been sus- tained by his own involvement i n that industry. From 1955 he worked on cultural programmes for RAI television, from 1959 he started a lifelong collaboration with Bompiani as editor (later con - sultant and author), and in 1965 he began writing for the weekly magazine L'Es presso, for which he now contributes a regular col- umn. His academic post at th

e University of Bologna perhaps rep- resents his most consistent activity - teac her and researcher in the field of semiotics (a discipline he helped to found) ~ but he has maintained a multiplicity of roles. It is difficult without examinin g this 'practical' side to understand Eco's cultural contribution, and too often commentators focus entirely on his writings as if they existed independently of Eco's otherinvolvement realities. with the world of publishing illustrates this well. Firstly, i n relation to the 'modernization' of Italian culture in the 1960~: Eco was one o f a generation of intellectuals determined to open up Italy to international cur rents, breaking down the cultural autarchy identified with Croce,lO and producin g cultural forms better adapted to conditions of modernity. It was an exciting t ime when American sociology and later French structuralism served to attack the citadels of orthodoxy. In literature the Italian neo-avanguardia represented a r adical challenge to the poetics of ne~-realism and an attempt to make language i tself a cultural battleground.ll One might perhaps expect the poetry of the novi ssimi to have been printed on an artisanal basis. But no. The new literature was published by com- panies such as Feltrinelli and Bompiani. As Eco observes of t he avant- garde Gruppo 63, of which he was a leading light: '[It] was born becau se certain people, working inside established institutions, had made a different choice, both on the front of cultural politics and on ~at of culture as a polit ical act. On the former, the project consisted 23 of blowing up the invisible structures of the "tiny clique" which governed cultu re. [...J On the second front, the goal was to proceed, by way of a criticism of the miniature system of official culture, to a critique of the grand system of bourgeois society.'12 It was precisely by acceding to (or wresting) control of d ecision-making in cultural institutions that 'men of culture' forced much needed Secondly, changes, this making involvement themselves, had inconsequences turn, into the fornew howclique 'culture' at the came top. to be defined . In Eco it is visible in his interest in the whole cycle of cultural activity f rom production, on which he focused in his earlier works, through to distributio n and consumption, which has concerned him especially in relation to television. His recent warnings about the dangers of using acid paper for books signals an appreci- ation of the material conditions governing the very (im)permanence of c ultural products and their communication to later generations: 'We should start by thinking of ecological books. When, in the last century, the book industry st opped making books from rags and started to make them from trees, it not only me naced our survivaL it jeopardized the civilization of th~ book' ('Books and Lite racy'). Few other ' cultural commentators can rival Eco in his knowledge and love of books and book-making, an area of expertise he puts to good use in his portrait of th e publisher, Garamond, in Foucault's Pendulum. Emblematic of this familiarity wi th the inside of the pub- lishing world is his appreciation of the art of invent ing titles.13 The technology also fascinates Eco, whether it is the quills and i nks of the medieval scriptorium or the computer of today. Above all, he attaches great importance to the hidden arts of 'technique'. His admiration of artifice and virtuosity - the display of technique - inform his cham- pioning of cultural phenomena as diverse as the Baroque, rhetoric and hyperrealism. His own version of Raymond Queneau's Exercices de style affirms the Frenchman's hymn to rhetori cal techniques and is in itself a virtuoso translation14 (that underestimated 'c raft' without which books like this one would not exist). And Eco's 'occasional writings' are likewise characterized by 'the Baroque taste for the excessive, th e hyperbolic, But there is athe more defamiliarising, mundane aspect to theEco's fake interest and the apocryphal'.15 in technique that calls for comment, namely his concern for use, or use-value. Culture, for Eco, is about ' making things' and the verb fare ('to make' and 'to do') recurs in his writings, along with the figure of the 'pro- ducer'. His essay on design, for instance, i nsists on the importance of anonymous, as opposed to 'signed', design, and on th e diffuse and collective rather than exclusively individual nature of creativity ('Phenomena o f this sort must also be included .. .'). In Italy his manual on how to write a dissertation is on every university student's bookshelf.I6 Above all, it is usef ul use to - a libraries, cultural guide how to explaining file information how etc. Culture is not the mon- opoly of Art and Artists but is, in Raymond Williams's word, 'ordin- a;y'. And this has imp lication~ for what constitutes culture ~nd how to analyse it. If a predominantly 'aesthetic' or 'ethical' conception of culture persists in Italy, as evidenced

by the entries in standard dictio- naries, Eco prefers an anthropological defini tion as answering the 'requirements of a scientific approach - scientific in the sense of allowing a cautious structural descriptiveness' ('Does Counter-culture Eco exist?'). the enlightened reformer of the early and mid-1960s shared in the widespread hopes in cultural modernization from above produc- ing the conditions for the g rowth of a participatory democracy from below. However, it took the student and worker rebellions of 1968-9 to dispel such illusions, even though these had alre ady been tarnished by the failures of the Centre-Left government (whose verbal v acilla- tions are brilliantly dissected in 'Political Language: the use and abus e of rhetoric'). For some, including the Socialist thinker Norberto Bob- bio, th e protest, at least initially, seemed to presage a new barbar- ism. I7 Eco, howe ver, was one of those who welcomed the challenge to the ancien regime from the v ery start. Speaking to Newsweek in 1987, he still put a positive gloss on events : 'Even though all visible traces of 1968 are gone, it profoundly changed the wa y all of us, at least in Europe, behave and relate to one another. Relations bet ween bosses and workers, students and teachers, even children and parents, have opened To someup. extent They'll Eco felt nevervindicated. be the sameHe again.'18 notes in 'Reactions of the Author' that h e had predicted that 'a quantitative growth in infor- mation, no matter how mudd led and oppressive it appears, can produce unforeseen results.' The conflict bet ween apocalyptics and optimists continued even if political affiliations had cha nged, with the Left now leading denunciations of mass culture as capitalist. For Eco, redefining his role was facilitated by his close association with the arti stic avant-garde from the foundation of Gruppo 63 to the demise of the journal Q uindici. For all their differences over what was to be done, there was a common antipathy to the values and culture that went by the name 'neo-capitalism'. Nor should the role of friendship and mutual respect be forgotten. Eco did not follo w Nanni Balestrini down the path of revolutionary politics but, as seen in the e ssay 'New Eco's position Formswas of both Expression', strategically he continued vital (at to the follow intersection and appreciate of democratic his work.a nd revolutionary politics) and difficult if not invidious, being vulnerable to m oral blackmail by those to his left. Between 1968 and 1977 (the year of a second wave of youth protest) Eco ej.gaged in a continui~g dialogue with the protagoni sts ~f the ~ocial movements, searching to understand them as producers of new cu l4S tural meanings and to make sense of messages (slogans, grathn, demonstrations et c.) often seen as 'senseless', 'irrational' or plain 'nonsense' Y Clearly Eco's sympathies are with those who subvert convention, whether it is the situationist provocations of Gruppo Ufo (see the questionnaire attached to 'New Forms of Exp ression') or the experiments of Radio Alice (an independent radio station named after Alice in Wonderland). He is even prepared in the early 19705 to read Mao's Little Red Book as a lesson in openness: 'Thanks to its aphor- istic structure and encyclopedic accessibility it offers itself as a tool for application and in terpretation in any circumstance.... It is a tool with a thousand possible uses rather than a one-way track like the railway timetable.'20 Consistent with the i deas first enunciated in Open Work, Eco favours forms of communication that are open: '''Openness'' for Eco,' writes David Robey, 'results from the artist's dec ision to leave the production of the work's meaning to the public or to chance; the consequent multiplicity of interpretations is pecu- liarly suited to the pre sent, because it corresponds to the feelings of disorder and senselessness produ cedthe On in other us by hand, the world Eco is iilsuspicious which we live'.21 and critical of what he sees as attempts to impose order by suppressing complexity and polyvalency in the name of some ideo logical mission, whether that of the Cold War hero 'Superman' or of the dogmatic Marxist theorist. While Eco too was swayed by the 'wind from the East', which s wept along so many left-wing intellectuals in Italy (Pasolini, Bertolucci, Morav ia), he still kept his distance just as he had consistently done in relation to the powerful Communist Party, more attracted as he was to radical and libertaria n ideas (heresies) than to party orthodoxies.22 The political culture of the Red Brigades is but the most extreme manifes- tation of ideological closure, and re presents 'not the enemy of the great systems but their natural, accepted and tak en for granted counterpart' ('Striking at the Heart of the State?'). In fact Eco 's novels, The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, can be interpreted as p

olitical allegories of a country described by one his- torian as a victim of a ' torbid and bloody game consisting of mas- sacres, cover-ups and blackmail,23 wit h political forces manipulating secret services and vice versa. Obscurantism, do gma and rec~urse t~ violence are all enemies of the reason and openness of which The Ecodecline is a champion. of the social movements and the dramatic episodes of terrorism in th e years 1978-9 marked the end of a decade of turbu- lent change in Italy during which intellectuals felt impelled to inter- vene in political debates. Workers c ontinued to exist but somehow the working class was declared to have disaoneared . T:'\lk of no,t- modernism;post-industrial or information so;i~tiesqui~k-l~dis~ fac~d and 1960s the 1970s metaphors evenof among Marxist non-Marxists discourselike so current Eco. Inin Italy the the writings cultural of the arena wa s flooded with the images of the newly deregulated television channels, provokin g a reprise of the mass culture debate of the mid-1960s~24 But this time many of the former apocalyptics of the social movements had become the ideologues and p rofessionals Italy had changed of the between media the revolution. early 1960s and the 1980s from a country with majo r areas of poverty and illiteracy into a consumer society with a literate popula tion. Throughout the course of this transformation television acted both as a mo tor of and a metaphor for change, introducing new forms of cultural production a nd con- sumption and symbolizing all that was modern and innovatory (or, in the eyes of the apocalyptics, all that reduced cultural life to the lowest common de nominator). It is not surprising, therefore, that Eco fol- lowed the development of the medium closely, focusing particularly on television's language and forms (the live broadcast, the vocabulary of the quiz-master, TV genres) and carrying out pioneering joint research on audience reception of TV messages using a semi otic approach ('Does the Audience have Bad Effects on Television?'). Until the a dvent of private channels in the late 1970s, the state broad- casting company, R AI, had a monopoly and produced programmes according to the public service trini ty of 'inform, educate and enter- tain'. Then the rules were overturned as the p ursuit of ratings made entertainment ('spettacolo') sovereign and made many genr e distinc- tions redundant. Eco, with his flair for neologism, announced the arr ival of 'Neo-TV' ('Paleo-TV'). With inNeo-TV, the place he writes, of the television there is 'the of acancerous paleolithic proage liferation of the same programme endlessly repeated ... the ultimate impossibility of making distinctions, discerning and choosing' ('The Phantom of Neo-TV'). The triumph of phatic communication and of self-referentiality also brings the abolition of re ference to an outside world ('the referent'), or the end of a reality that is no t fabricated The world of Neo-TV for television's is depicted mise with en'ill-concealed scene ('Event hatred as miseand en loathing' scene'). in Fred and Ginger by that old apocalyptic Federico Fellini. Eco sympathizes but insist s, 'First you have to understand, with cool detachment, its inner workings.' Lik ewise with La Cicciolina, a character of Fellinian inspiration, the 'porno-star' who caused outrage - and amusement - by standing (successfully) for parliament. To be condemned? But wait, says Eco, consider the arguments in turn, don't pres ume that her job, intellectual competence or morals disqualify her. Look at the other parliamentarians! And using para- dox, a favourite figure in an extensive rhetorical repertoire, Eco assumes the role of the clevil's advocate in reverse, ~me Eco 67 only down does finally against not renounce to Ms Staller's the needcandidature. to make value judgments and choices but he dispels any impression of moralism through the dis- tancing effec t of humour. Somehow Eco is 'above' a certain kind of engagement and his viewpoi nt is well illustrated by his reply to Stuart Hall's question: 'Isn't it extreme ly convenient when intellectuals impose on themselves this partial retirement fr om engagement?' 'Well,' says Eco, 'there's a book I like by Italo Calvino called The Baron in the Trees, which is the story of an 18th-century aristocrat who de cides to spend all his life on the top of a tree without stepping down. But in d oing so he still takes part in the French Revolution.... He is a metaphor, an al legory. Is thereThere something is a 'Italian' way to stay about up athis treeanswer? and to The change easy life reference on the to ground.,25 a work of fiction to explain a contemporary situation? Its freedom from a certain moral di scourse more ingrained in Protestant cultures? There is no simple answer. Anyway it helps lead on to a further question with which to conclude this Introduction , namely identity, National 'Just how paradoxically, "Italian" is Umberto is often Eco?' most acutely perceived by the cosmopo litan. Travel, speaking other languages, living and work- ing abroad, all invite reflection on one's own cultural formation and identity. They can make a person feel intensely 'Italian' or 'American' when away but not fully integrated when

at home. This seems very much to be the case with Eco: conversant in several lan guages, a translator, an academic who has taught regularly in North and South Am erica, a member, de facto, of the 'jet set'. Furthermore, his busi- ness as a sc holar is concerned with developing and applying a 'science of signs' which with Eco entails the whole dimension of what Teresa de Lauretis calls his 'semiotic i magination'. What better way to investigate the problems of communication and cu lture than by mov- ing between different cultures, contemporary and historical. Imagine our hero: 'For Eco, John Ford of the semiological frontier, Europe and A merica, the Middle Ages and the Future are the times and the places of a persona l and political fiction, his ever present temptation: the Middle Ages of the sch olar wandering among the ruins of a knowledge still useful, and the Extraterrest rial A gatekeeper Future of between the Martian the cultural avant-gardes worldsthat of the is United alreadyStates ours.,26 and Italy (the US of 'mass culture' and the Italy of 'high culture'), Eco has become in Omar Calab rese's words 'a sort of unofficial representative of Italian culture abroad' whi le he has long been an importer and interpreter of foreign cultural goods 'on th e periphery of the Empire'. In the process he has frequently reflected on the cu ltural configur- ations of national character. Asked in an interview in 1985 abo ut what for him constituted italianita, he gave a reply that has some applicatio n to himself: 'An Italian ~hara~ter does ~x"ist. The first is a transhistorical characteristic ... and consists which in our relates ability to to genialita marry humanist and inventivita tradition and tech- nological development. What has undoubtedly acted as a brake on our culture, the predomina nce of the humanistic over the technologi- cal, has also permitted certain fusio ns, eruptions of fantasy within technology and the technologization of fantasy. Secondly, Italy is a country that has known enormous crises, foreign domination, mas- sacres. And yet (or for this reason) has produced Raphael and Michel- ange lo.... What often fascinates foreigners is that in Italy economic crises, uneven It development, might well be terrorism better to accompany live harmoniously great inventiveand just ness.'27 invent the cuckoo-clock, s ays Eco, but creativity seems linked to improvisation and adaptation to difficul t circumstances, a theory shared by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a critical admirer of 'Italian genius'.28 Utopia might be desirable but social conflict and differ ence is a condition of human society. Conflict is not something to be suppressed . The prob- lem is to make it productive of new ideas that confront rather than ignore realities. In this respect Eco is part of a fine tradition going back as far as Machiavelli and embracing liberal thought. If Italy has been described as a 'difficult democracy', it is also a country which has developed a remarkable openness this However, of debate leveland of generalization enquiry. is perilously close to banal stereotype. I t gets away from the false cosmopolitanism that Gramsci saw as apeculiarly Itali an vice and according to which everything foreign is automatically better. Inste ad there is the danger of forget- ting that there is often no such thing as 'Ita ly'. Geographers, socio- logists and students of language have for some time poi nted to the plurality of cultures and economies hidden by the adjective 'Italian '. Historians of art, for instance, have called the peninsula an ideal laborator y for the study of the relationship between centre and peri- phery: 'A relative ease of exchanges with faraway countries has been accompanied by limited and dif ficult communication with inland areas close by. Even today it is easier to ?o b y train from Turin to Dijon than from Grosseto to Urbino.'2 Tullio De Mauro even suggests that acknowledging that 'the country is an interlacement of countries' is the basis for overcoming the barriers between the official unitary 'Italy' o f the In this rulers perspective, and the Eco 'Italies' is Piedmontese of the ruled.30 not italian, and in debates on cultural phenomena within a national forum he frequently refers to himself in this way. A good example is found in the discussion of comic actors: 'For my part I persona lly prefer Toto, and the reason Placido misunderstood me was that he, being a So utherner, instinc- tively distrusted the likes of me, a Piedmontese' ('The Phant om of Neo-TV'). Being from this region actually means being identified with i;ki ngdom that-annexed sou-them Italy (or, euphemistically, 'unified Italy'), and si gnificantly the allusion is humorous and about humour, 9 that great defuser of cultural tensions. Certainly Eco is a 'northerner' and his political-cultural formation is closely bound up with the cities of Turin (wher e he studied), Milan (where he lives) and Bologna (v/here he teaches). Arguably he is an advocate of a 'modern indus- trial culture' that, historically, belongs

However, to the North. Eco's writings question any simplistic model of 'modern- ization' and e xplore areas unimagined by the official culture: 'We should start by dispelling the illusion of those convinced that emi- gration, social mobility, motorways an d the car would blow away the dark clouds of obscurantism.... technological deve lopment provokes rather than reduces the need for the sacred' ('For Grace Receiv ed'). Italy is also the land of thaumaturges and unrecognized poets, uncharted a nd ignored. The average parish priest may deny the exist- ence of a thaumaturgic press, 'like a vice-chancellor asked about photo-novels for housewives'; but, w rites Eco, its circulation makes that of the weekly L'Espresso look insignifican t. It is not a regional phenomenon (though more widespread in the South). Likewi se the 'vanity press' analysed in 'The Italian Genius Industry'. Both have a nat ional diffusion but they appear locally in the form of publications directed by a particular mission, sanctuary or publisher and are too readily dismissed by in tellectuals as signs of 'provincialism' and 'backwardness'. Again Eco insists on taking seriously what others have no time for. If the humour is sometimes uncom fortably at the expense of those who are duped or dupe themselves into believing in miraculous powders or the equally wondrous powers of the religion of Art, he nevertheless reveals in microcosm cultural realities of sig- nificant proportio As a piece of cultural analysis 'The Italian Genius Industry' ranks as an Eco to ns. ur de force, and one to which he is evidently still attached since it is reprodu ced wholesale in the description of the publisher Manuzio, in Foucault's Pendulu m (except that the 'Fourth Dimension Author' or FDA has now become the 'Self-Fin ancing Author'). The seemingly harmless but possibly suspect (the Italian title of the piece, 'genio italico', has a Fascist ring) poets, writers and philosophe rs inhabit the fourth dimension of literature because (self)excluded from the th ird dimension, constituted by recognized literature. Ignored by the official cul ture (none of their work is reviewed in the press), they form a parallel univers e complete with journals and their own 'Who's Who'. Overwhelmingly kitsch in the titles and characters not only of the books but of the authors, the Fourth Dime nsion also harbours talents like Blotto, whose 'unbridled linguistic invention' rivals that of the neo-avanguardia. In his pursuit of the marginal, the peripher al and the 'provincial' Eco invents a kind of fisheye lens whose distor- tions ! live Thi~ unsusoected ability ~finsights Eco's to-reverse into the cultural core culture optics, itself. to find an unex- pected angl e 10 both or to immensely create readable an unlikely andjuxtaposition, illuminating. To makes what his extent writing this is to do with bein g Italian is difficult to judge. It is certainly difficult to imagine Eco as an Englishman or an American. More important than his debt to national tradition is probably his ability to mediate be- tween different cultures (whether defined b y geography, social class or professional activity) in an age in which establish ed cultural fron- tiers have been dramatically contested and redrawn and in whic h the Choice The first challenge of outline essaysof and of 'globalization' presentation this collection has was made drafted interdisciplinarity in 1984, since when an impera(aftertive. bein g rescued from the bottom drawer by Geoffrey Nowell- Smith) it has undergone maj or revisions. David Robey suggested including the essays and preface from Apocai ittici e integrati. Then Umberto Eco sent a number of things subsequently includ ed mainly in Parts I and III ('Yesterday evening, getting back to Milan, I set a bout The 1. To objectives looking convey some through in sense making my of archives the the collection development until 3a.m., are: of Eco's and here's writings the on resule). cultural issues from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, docu- menting as well as re-presenting p astTo 2. 3. lated 4. which works. focustended (notably include have onmaterial historically journalism from not Apocaiittici to written be and significant translated occasional about e integrati). Italy pieces for essays. andnot that for reason. previously Italians S. To and transcommunicate the wi t and The subdivision brio of Eco's intowriting. four parts is designed to group essays around certain theme s - the debate on mass culture, mass media (especially television), counter-cult ure, and what Eco referred to as 'Italian fol- lies'. The essay 'Apocalyptic and Integrated Intellectuals' is put at the beginning because it precedes the other s chronologically and provides the framework for the analyses of mass culture th at constitute the bulk of the collection. Otherwise the reader should not feel o bliged Many ofto the read pieces the first parts appeared sequentially. as part of continuing debates and are full of allusions to contemporary events as well as to a stock of knowledge the average Italian reader might be expected to possess. The introduction aims to give a gen eral context, but notes are used for more specific references. A good example oc curs in 'A Dollar for a Deputy', in which Eco's jokes about poiiticians are inco '10 anyone not knowing that Mr X has a moustache and Mr Y has a 11 mprehensibie hunchback. Eco didn't footnote any of the essays except 'Political Language', so

Much information of the work on the of interpretation books, authors has, etc. of mentioned course,in gone theinto textthe have translations been added.th emselves, which are the product of close collaboration between the editor (himse lf a translator) and the other translators, Jenny Condie, Liz Heron and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (except where versions existed in English as with 'The Future of L iteracy' or 'Inde- pendent Radios'). We have tried to be faithful to Eco's style of writing, for this is intrinsic to what he has to say. While there is inevita bly a loss involved because of the transposition into another language and cultu ral context, making these texts available to readers of English offers the possi bility 1. Notes See David of newRobey's (and undreamt introduction of) readings to the English and interpretations. version, Open Work, trans. Anna 2. Cancogni Umberto(London: Eco, Diario Hutchinson minima (Milan: Radius, Mondadori, 1989). 1963); trans. William Weaver as 3. Misreadings 'The present (New situation York: Harcourt is one in Brace, which 1993). it is possible to say that there is on e culture (albeit with divisions in it) or several cultures (overlapping and rub - bing up against each another) but no longer that there are two cultures, high and popular, divided from each other.' Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 'Popular Culture', New Formations, 2, 1987, p. 75. For an analysis of the debate in the United Sta tes, see Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York an d London: 4. 'Pop goes Routledge, the Artist', 1989). Times Literary Supplement, 17 December 1964. See also the ensuing correspondence in the 31 December issue which includes a letter begi nning: 'I see your reviewer is another believer in the tiresome old cliche that the Latins, notably the French and Italians, are an especially clear- thinking r 5. Chapter-headings are telling: 'Invitations to a Candy-Floss World: The Newer ace.' Mass Art' or 'The Newer Mass Art: Sex in Shinv Packets'. Richard Haggart, The Us es See 6. o f Zygmunt LiteracyBaranski (London:and Chatto Robert andLumley Wi~dus, (eds.), 1957).Culture and Conflict in Postwa r Italy: 7. Umberto Essays Eco, 'Verso on Massuna andcivilti Populardella Culture visione', (London: inMacmillan, Pirelli: Rivisia 1990). e informa - zione, 1, January 1961. The cultural gap which Eco felt existed between differ ent social groups is indicated by his reference to the housemaid 'who was convin ced that the presenter Mike Buongiorno regarded her with par- ticular fondness b ecause 8. In 1984 during thebroadcasts New York Review he always of Books looked asked in her Ecodirecif they tion.' could reprint his 'Wor ld of Charlie Brown'. He notes that such a request would have been unthinkable w hen the essay was first written as the lines drawn round Litera- ture and Art we re more exclusive: 'My text hadn't changed, though; the world of Charles Shultz belongs 12 to the history to the of history art or ofliterature American culture, I don't know, whether but it belongs there precisely because it is able to put these distinctions in doubt.' Eco's introduction to C harles M. Shultz, 40 anni di vita e di arte, ed. Giovanni Trimboli (Milan: Rizza li,Notably 9. 1990). Eco's 'Cogitus interruptus' in Travels in Hyperreality, trans. Wil- l iam Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986); also towards the end of the Eco's 10. essay first 'Political job at Language' Bompianiin was this to edit volume. a series entitled 'Idee nuove' (New Ideas), which had originated with the purpose of 'introducing those currents of contemporary philosophy that Benedetto Croce ignored, i.e. excluded'. Valentino Bompiani, II mestiere dell'editore (Milan: Longanesi, 1988). It should be noted, however, that the openness of Italian culture, especially its propensity for tr anslation, has also been seen as a sign of weakness; for Edgar Morin, for exampl e, 'It is the victim of its own richness, given that for all its assimilation it doesn't digest or recreate anything.' Quoted in Enza Golino, La distanza cultur ale Christopher 11. 13. 15. 18. 17. 20. See (Bologna: Cappelli, 12. 14. 16. 19. 21. Wagstaff, 1980). 'The Neo-Avantgarde', in Michael Caesar and Peter Hain sworth (eds.), Writers and Society in Contemporary Italy (Leam- ington Spa: Berg Umberto Publishers, Eco, 'The 1984). Death of Gruppo 63', in Open Work, pp. 238-9. On the subsequen t success of members of this avant-garde, Omar Calabrese notes: 'The Italians wh o are enjoying success today often come from the experimen- tal circles of the 1 950s and 1960s. One could say that it is a certain Italian- ness of the avant-ga rde that is getting international recognition.' Omar Cala- brese, 'Che effetto f a?',Eco's For Panorama, reflections 21 April on1985, book titles, p. 141. see Notes on the Name of the Rose (London: Raymond Seeker Queneau, & Warburg, Esercizi 1985). di stile, trans. Umberto Eco (Turin: Einaudi, 1983); E nglish version: Exercises in Style, trans. Barbara Wright (London: John Calder, Teresa De 1981). Umberto Eco, Lauretis, Come siEco fa una (Florence: tesi diLa laurea nuova(Milan: Italia,Bompiani, 1981), p.1977). 85. The figure o f Casaubon in Foucault's Pendulum, described as a 'Sam Spade' of cultural inform ation, For an extended embodies discussion this kind of ofDIY theapproach relationship to culture. of intellectuals and social movem ents, see Robert Lumley, States o f Emergency: Cultures o f Revolt in Italy, 196 8-78 (London: Verso, 1990), especially chapter 10, 'Dreaming of a Cultural Revol Scott Sullivan, 'Master of the Signs', Newsweek, 22 December 1986, Fl. 49. See, ution'.

for instance, Eco's illuminating reading of workers' and students' slogans durin g the 1977 protest, as discussed in Meagan Morris, 'Eurocom- munism versus semio logical delinquency', in M. Morris (ed.), Language, Sexuality and Subversion (Da rlington, Jean Chesneaux, Australia, Umberto 1978), Eco and pp. Gino 66-8.Nebioio (eds.), I fumetti di Mao (Bari: Lat erza, Robey, David 1971). 'The centre cannot hold', Times Higher Education Sup- plement, 20 J anuary 1989. For fuller analyses of Eco's work see Robey's essays 'Umberto Eco', in M. Caesar and P. Hainsworth, Writers and Society in Contemporary Italy and ' Umberto Eco and the Analysis of the Media' in Baranski and Lumley (eds.), Cultur e and 22. Contrast, Conflictfor in example, Postwar Italy. the sympathetic yet detached analysis of 'On Chinese Comic Strips' with the statements of fellow semioticians of Maoist persua- sion: ~'The bative; Cultural this was Revolution becausehas thebeen political practically power always bloodless, remained although socialist, com- 13 thanks cation 23. 24. Lumley Carlo Umberto to Ginzburg, de (eds.), the masse', Eco, People's Culture 'A V.Guide Ilgiudiee S., Army'. and 1, to Conflict 1971, the Ugo e 10 Neo-Television Volli, p. storieo in 107. Postwar 'Contre-information (Turin: Italy. of the Einaudi, See 1980s', also 1991), etthe in communiBaranski p. 57. on essays and the Italian television system by Philip Schlesinger, Beppe Richeri, Chris Wag- staf f and Mauro Wolf. For a fascinating analysis of television criticism in the Ital ian press from 1956 to 1990, see Elena Dagrada, A parer nostro (Rome: RAI ERI, 1 25. Umberto Eco and Stuart Hall, 'Crisis? What crisis?', in Bill Bourne, Udi Eic 992). hler and David Herman (eds.), Writers and Politics (Northampton: SpokesmaniHobb Press, 26. 27. 28. 29. 1989). Previtali Einaudi, 30. De Lauretis, Omar Hans Enrico Tullio 1987), Calabrese, Magnus 1979), (ed.), Castelnuovo De p.p. Mauro, Enzensberger, 18. Eco, Storia 287. 'Ma L'Italia p. and che dell'Arte 90. Carlo effetto Europe, delle Ginzburg, Italiana. fa?', Italie Europe Panorama, 'Centro (Rome: I: (London: Questioni Editori e21 periferia', Hutchinson April eRiuniti, metodi 1985, Radius, in (Turin: p. 1987), Giovanni 143.p. xvi i. 14 Part One Mass Culture: Apocalypse Postponed Chapter 1 and Integrated Intellectuals: Mass Communications and Theories of Ma Apocalyptic ss is It Culture quite wrong to subsume human attitudes, in all their variety and subtlety, under two such generic and polemical concepts as 'apoca- lyptic' and 'integrate d' ['apocalittico' and 'integrato']. There are, however, certain requirements to be met in choosing the title for a book (a matter for the culture industry, as we shall see, though in this context the term should not be understood in its ov erused sense). Furthermore, in writing an introduction to the essays that follow , there is no avoiding the necessity of providing a general method- ological out line. It is also convenient to define what one does not want to do by typifying a series of cultural choices in their extreme forms, when of course they should instead be analysed concretely and with calm detachment. Yet I reproach those cr itics I call apocalyptic or integrated intellectuals because it is they who are responsible for the spread of equally vague 'fetish concepts' - and for using th em as targets for fruitless polemic or for commercial operations which we oursel ves consume Indeed, in order on a to daily define basis. the nature of these essays, in order to take the firs t steps towards making myself understood by the reader, I too am forced to resor t to a concept as vague and ambiguous as 'mass culture'. And it is precisely to this vague, ambiguous and inappro- priate term that we owe the development of th e two types of attitude which I will be aiming (with sharp but necessary polemic ) to If culture chal- is lenge. an aristocratic phenomenon - the assiduous, solitary and jealous c ultivation of an inner life that tempers and opposes the vulgarity of the crowd - then even to conceive of a culture that is shared by everyone, produced to sui t everyone and tailored accord- ingly is a monstrous contradiction. (In Heraclit us's words: 'Why drag me up and down, you boors? I toiled for those who understa nd me- not for you! To me, one man is full thirty thousand, countless worth n~ne .'l) Mass culture is anti-culture. But since its birth comes at a 17 time when the presence of the masses in the life of society is the most striking phenomenon of the age, then 'mass culture' doe; not signal a transitory and lim ited aberration; rather, it is the mark of an irretriev- able loss, in the face of which the man of culture (last survivor of a prehistory destined to extinctio n) cannot Set against dothis otherwise is thethan optimistic give anresponse extreme,of apocalyptic the integrated testimony. intellec- tual. Th e combined efforts of TV , newspapers, radio, cinema, comic- strips, popular nov els and the Reader's Digest have now brought culture within everybody's reach. T hey have made the absorption of ideas and the reception of information a pleasur able and easy task, with the result that we live in an age in which the cultural arena is at last expanding to include the widespread circulation of a 'popular' art and culture in which the best compete against each other. Whether this cult ure emerges from below or is processed and packaged from above to be offered to defenceless consumers is not a problem that concerns the integrated intellectual . Not least because, if apocalyptics survive by packaging theories on decadence, the integrated intellec- tuals rarely theorize. They are more likely to be busy

producing and transmitting their own messages in every sphere, on a daily basis apocalypse . The is a preoccupation of the dissenter, integration is the concrete real ity of non-dissenters. The image of the Apocalypse is evoked in texts on mass cu lture, while the image of integration emerges in texts which belong to mass cult ure. But do these two views not perhaps represent two aspects of the same proble m and, if so, to what extent? And is it not the case that apocalyptic texts cons titute the most sophisticated product on offer for mass consumption? Such a hypo thesis would mean, then, that the formula 'Apocalittici e inte- grati' does not refer to the clash between two opposing attitudes but is rather an expression ma de up of two complementary adjectives - adjectives which could both be equally a ppliedall, 'popular After tocritique the thecreators apocalyptic of popular of aintellectual culture'. offers the reader consolation, for he al lows him to glimpse, against a background of catastrophe, a community of 'superm en' capable, if only by rejection, of rising above banal mediocrity. At the very least, the elected few who write and read: 'Us two, you and I - the only ones t o understand, and be saved: the only ones not part of the mass.' When I say 'sup erman', I'm thinking of the Nietzschean (or pseudo-Nietzschean) origin of many o f these attitudes. However, I use the term in the cunning sense suggested by Gra msci, for whom the model of the Nietzschean super- man could be found in the her oes of such asnineteenth-century the Count of Monteserial Cristo, novels, Athas, Rodolphe de Gerolstein or (a generous concession) 18 If this seems Vautrin.2 a strange connection to make, then consider for a moment the fact that one of the typical features of mass culture has always been the way it impl ants in the minds of its readers, from whom a controlled equilibrium is expected , the expectation that - in view of the existing conditions, and precisely on ac count of these - t~ey may some day hatch out from their chrysalis to become an U bermensch. The price to pay is that this Ubermensch busies himself with an infin ity of minor problems while conserving the fundamental order of things; an examp le of this is the petty reformer Rodolphe in Les Mysteres de Paris, and Marx and Engels were not the only ones to notice it: Belinsky and Poe both drew attentio n to it in two separate reviews which seem curiously to reiterate the polemic in In Marx's one of The the Holy essays Family.3 I examine a Superman that is typical of contem- porary mass culture: the comic-strip Superman. I am able to conclude that this ultra-powerf ul hero uses his extraordinary gifts to bring about an ideal of absolute passivi ty, turning down any project with- out a prior seal of approval for its good sen se, thereby becoming a paragon of high moral standards untouched by political co ncerns. Superman will never park his car in a no parking zone and he'll never ~~ a revolutionary. If I remember correctly, the only one of Gramsci's Ubermensche n who has a political conscience and is resolved to change the order of things i s Dumas's Giuseppe Balsamo. But signifi- cantly, because Balsamo (alias Cagliost ro) is so taken up with using his many lives to accelerate the pace of the Frenc h Revolution - organizing conspiracies among the enlightened, setting up mystica l meetings of Freemasons and hatching gallant plots to embarrass Marie Antoinett e - he quite forgets to work on the Encyclopedie or to foment the seizing of the Bastille (neglecting thereby to contribute either to mass culture or to the org anization On the other of side the masses). of the barricades we have the apocalyptic critics' s~perman:. his method of countering the reigning banality is by rejec- tIOn and SIlence and he is sustained in this by a total lack of faith in the p~ssibility of any acti on transforming the state of things. Having established that superhumanity is a nostalgic myth (without a precise historical setting), this too becomes an invit ation to passivity. Inte- gration, thrown out of the door, comes back through th e window. But this world, which one side ostentatiously rejects and the other accepts and builds on, is not just a world for Superman. It is ours as well. This world begi ns with the subordinate classes gaining access to cultural goods and with the po ssibility of producing these goods industrially. The culture industry, as we sha ll see, begins with Guten- berg's invention of movable type, or even earlier. An d so the world of Superman is also the world of man today. Is present-day man me rci- le~ly condemfo1ed to becoming a 'superman' - i.e. to being an inad- equate - or will he manage to find, somewhere in this world, some 19 way of instituting a fresh, civilized exchange of views? Is this a world for the IUbermensch believe that, only, ifor wemight are to itwork alsoin beand a world for afor world man? built on a human scale, the n this human scale should be defined not by adapting man to the de facto conditi

ons but by using these conditions as the point of departure. The universe of mas s communications is - whether we recognize it or not - our universe; and if it i s of values that we wish to speak, the objective conditions of communication are those provided by the existence of newspapers, radio, television, recorded and recordable music, the new forms of visual and audiovisual communi- cation. Nobod y is free of these conditions, not even the virtuous man who, angered by the inh uman nature of this universe of information, transmits his own protest through t he channels of mass communi- cation, in the columns of a great newspaper or in t he pages Some fetish of concepts a paperback come printed from the in virtuous linotype apocalyptic. and sold in railway And thestation fetish concept kiosks. has a particular ability to obstruct argument, strait- jacketing discussion in e motional reaction. Take the fetish concept of 'culture industry'. What could be more reprehensible than coupling the idea of culture - which implies a private a nd subtle contact of souls - with that of industry - which evokes assembly lines , serial reproduction, public distribution and the concrete buying and selling o f objects made into merchandise. A medieval manuscript illuminator painting imag es in a Book of Hours for his patron was obviously anchored to an artisan-patron relationship. While on the one hand each image referred to a code of beliefs an d conventions, on the other it was addressed to the individual patron, establish ing a precise re- lationship with him. But as soon as somebody invents a method of printing with wooden blocks so that the pages of a bible are endlessly reprod ucible, something new happens. A bible that can be printed in quantity costs les s and can be distributed to more people. But isn't a bible sold to many people a lesser bible as a result? Hence the name biblia pauperum. On the other hand, ex ternal factors (ease of dif- fusion and price) influence the nature of the produ ct as well: the pictures will be adapted for understanding by a wider, less cult ured audience. So wouldn't it be better to link the illustrations to the text wi th a play of fluttering scrolls, strongly reminiscent of the comic- strip? The b iblia pauperum begins to submit to a requirement which will be attributed, centu ries later, to modern mass media: the adap- tation of taste and language to the average Then Gutenberg person's invented receptivity. movable type and the book was born. Being a serially pro duced object, the book had to adjust its language to the receptivity of a litera te audience which had by now grown (and, thanks to the book, was continuing to g row) much vaster than the readership of the manuscript. And this wasn't all: by creating 20 public, the a book creates readers who will in their turn condition the book itsel f. The first popular printed books of the sixteenth century repeat the formula of t he biblia pauperum, but this time on a secular level and using more refined typo graphical methods. They were produced by small printing presses for itinerant bo oksellers and mountebanks who sold them to the common people at fairs and in pub lic squares. These chivalrous epics, laments upon political events or real-life stories, pranks, jokes or nonsense rhymes were badly printed and often omit- ted to mention the place and date of publication, for they already possessed the pr incipal characteristic of mass culture: namely ephe- merality. They also shared the chief connotation of the mass-pro- duced object: they offered sentiments and passions, love and death in a format appropriate to the reaction they aimed to elicit in the reader. The titles of these stories already contain advertising bl urb, along with an explicit judgment on the outcome of the story, as if to give advice on how best to enjoy it: 'Danese Ugieri, a pleasing and beauti- ful work concerning arms and love, newly reprinted and now includ- ing the death of the g iant Mariotto, which is not to be found in the other versions'; or, 'A new tale of the cruel and pitiful case in Ali- cante, with a mother who kills her own chi ld and feeds Meanwhile, the its images insides conformed to the to dogcharming and its but limbs basically to her husband.' modest standards and a imed, as befits a serial novel or a comic-strip, to make a violent impact. It is obviously not possible to speak of mass culture in the sense in which the term is understood today; the histori- cal circumstances were different, as was the r elationship between the producers of these printed books and the populace. The d ivision between popular culture - for culture it was in the ethnological sense o f the term - and learned culture was of a different type. But it is already poss ible to see how serial reproducibility and the fact that the readership was grow ing and broadening its social base combined to create a series of conditions tha t profoundly influenced the character of these little books. They became a genre

in themselves with their own sense of tragedy, heroism, morality, sacredness an d the ridicu- lous, adapted to the tastes and ethos of the 'average consumer' the lowest common denominator. By propagating among the common people the terms of an official morality, these books acted as instru- ments of pacification and control, while their preferred subject-matter - outbursts of bizarre behaviour provided material for escapism. They nonetheless gave rise to a popular breed o f 'literary Then along came men', the and first helped gazettes. make their And with public the literate. birth of the news- paper, the r elationship between external conditioning and the cul- tural object became even clearer: what is a newspaper if not a product cO'nsisting of a fixed number of p ages that is obliged to appear once a 21 day and in which the things it prints are no longer determined solely by the thi ngs that should be printed (according to a wholly internal necessity), but by th e fact that, once a day, a newspaper has to find enough things to print to fill a set number of pages? At this point we enter fully into the realms of the cultu re industry. This industry would appear then to constitute a system of condition ing which every cul- tural operator, if he wishes to communicate with his peers, has to take account of. If he wishes, that is, to communicate with other men, f or now all men are on their way to becoming his peers, and the cultural operator has ceased to be the functionary of a patron, and instead has become the 'funct ionary of humanity'. The only way the cultural operator can carry out his functi on is by entering into an active and conscious dialectical relationship with the It conditionings is, after all, of no theaccident cul- tural that industry. newspaper civilization develops in conjunctio n with democracy, the political awakening of the subordi- nate classes, the birt h of political and social egalitarianism, and at the time of bourgeois revolutio ns. But on the other hand, nor is it acci- dental that those who are wholehearte d and coherent in their polemic against the culture industry trace the root of a ll evil not to the first television broadcast but to the invention of printing t ogether with the ideologies of egalitarianism and popular sovereignty. In fact, the indiscriminate basically implies an use inability of a fetish to accept concept these suchhistorical as 'the culture events, industry' and - with the m - the prospect of a humanity that is capable of changing the course of history . Once the culture industry is correctly understood to be a system of conditioning linked to the phenomena listed above, the discourse becomes less generalized an d is articulated on two, complementary planes: firstly the analytical descriptio n of the various phenomena; and secondly their interpretation in the light of th e historical context in which they appear. But such a discourse entails a furthe r realiz- ation: that the system of conditioning called the culture industry doe s not conveniently present us with the possibility of distinguishing two indepen dent spheres, with mass communication over here and aristo- cratic creation over there, the latter coming first and remaining untouched by the other. The system of the culture industry imposes a mechanism of reciprocal conditioning so that the very notion of cul- ture tout court is affected. If the term 'mass culture' represents an imprecise hybrid in which both the meaning of culture and the mean - ing of longer possible mass are tounknown, think ofit culture is nonetheless as something clear which thatis itarticulated is now no according to the inexorable and incorruptible necessity of a Spirit that is not historical ly conditioned by the existence of mass culture. From this point onwards, the no tion of 'culture' itself has to be re-elabor- ated and reformulated; just as it was 22 rolealso of the necessary man of culture to rearticulate following the the assertion that history is created in ma terial circumstances by men seeking to resolve their own economic and social pro blems (in the process bringing about a dialec- tical conflict between the classe 'Mass culture' thus becomes a definition of an anthropological order (like 'Alor s). ese culture' or 'Bantu culture'), and is useful for indicating a precise histori cal context (the one in which we are living) in which all communicative phenomen a - from offers of escapist enjoyment to the appeals to our inner soul - appear dialectically connected, each carrying the imprint of their context, making it i m- possible to reduce them to analogous phenomena belonging to other historical Clearly, then, the attitude of the man of culture towards this situ- ation must periods. be the same as that of somebody who, confronted with the system of conditioning of the 'era of industrial mechanization', did not ask how to return to nature, i .e. to a time before the advent of industry, but instead asked in what circumsta nces man's relationship with the production cycle made him a slave to the system

, and what was required in order to elaborate a new image of man in relation to the objective conditions; a man not free from the machine, but free in relation to the Now there machine. is nothing that obstructs a concrete analysis of these phenomena so mu ch as the diffusion of fetish categories. And among the most dangerous of these, More we have willyet be said to discuss about the thatlack of 'mass' of validity and 'mass of these man'.concepts in the essays tha t follow (attempting to set limits for the discourses in which they may be emplo yed); meantime it is worth recalling the historical lineage of this Manichean op position between the lucidity of the intellectual in his solitude and the stupid ity of mass man. Its roots are not to be found in The Revolt of the Masses but r ather in the polemic of those we now remember as 'Mr Bruno Bauer and company', t hat worst The circleevidence of youngin Hegelians5 favour ofgrouped a work is around the enthusiasm the Allgemeine withLiteraturwhich it is zeitung: greete d by the masses.... All the great feats of history have until now been fundament ally wrong and devoid of real success because the mass took an interest and were enthusiastic about them.... The spirit now knows where to look for his sole adv ersarywords These - in were the phrases, written in self-deceit, 1843, but they spinelessness could, inof the the right masses. con- text,_ be us ed again today, providing the material for an excellent feui1feton on mass cultu re. Of course, it is not my intention to contest 23 anybody's right to theorize on the opposition between the Spirit and the .Mass, to believe that cultural activity must be defined in these terms, a~d to bear wi tness to this cleav~ge in ways that may well inspire great respect. But it is wo rth clarifying the ancestry of such a stance and throwing some light on the hist orical context of a polemic that was destined to be renewed with the apparent ad vent A good ofproportion mass society. of the pseudo-Marxist theories of the Frankfurt school,6 for e xample, show links with the 'Holy Family' ideology of Bauer and his following, i ncluding the idea that the thinker (the 'critic') cannot and should not suggest remedies, but at most give notice of his dissent: 'Criticism does not constitute a party, it does not want to claim a party as its own, but to remain alone, alo ne while it engrosses itself with its object, alone when it takes a stand agains t it. It detaches itself from all things.... It feels any link to be a chain.' T his passage, from issue IV of the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung, was the inspirati onal basis for an article by Koeppen in the Norddeutsche Bldtterne of 11 August 1844, on the problem of censorship: 'Criti- cism is above affections and sentime nts, it knows neither love nor hatred for anything. Thus it does not set itself against censorship and fight it... , Criticism does not lose itself in events an d cannot lose itself in events: it is therefore a nonsense to expect it to destr oy censorship with events and to procure for the press the liberty to which it i s anyway entitled.' These excerpts may be legitimately com- pared with the state ments made a century later by Horkheimer in his polemic with a pragmatist cultur e accused of deflecting and consum- ing energies meant for reflection in plans f or action, to which he opposed his 'method of negation'.? And it was no coincide nce that ator, Renato one Solmi,s scholar identified closely associated in the writer's with Adorno, worksas a speculative friend and collabortendency, a 'critique of praxis', by means of which the philosophical discourse avoids a con sideration of the conditions and the forms of that 'passage' which thought shoul d identify in a situation while simultaneously subjecting it to radical critique . For his own part, Adorno ended his Minima Moralia by presenting philosophy as the attempt to contemplate all things from the standpoint of redemption, reveali ng the world with all its deep divides as it will appear one day in the messiani c light. However, thought thereby involves itself in a series of contradictions such that they have all to be endured with lucidity; 'Beside the demand thus pla ced it the Now on is reality thought, easy or to unreality the reply question that of redemption of Marx's answer itself to Bruno hardlyBauer matters.,9 was as follows: 'When the masses acquire class consciousness, they will be able to put themselves at t he head of history and present themselves as the only real alternative to your " Spirit'" ('in order to appreciate the human nobility of this movement, one must have 24 application, witnessed the the thirst for knowledge, the moral energy, and the desire for unha lting progress of the French and English workers'). Mean- while the implicit res ponse of the mass culture industry to its accusers is: 'Once the masses overcome class differences, they become the protagonists of history, so that their cultu re, which is a culture pro- duced for them and consumed by them, is something po sitive.' In these terms the function of the apocalyptic intellectual has a speci al validity - that of denouncing the optimistic ideology of the integrated intel

lectuals as profoundly false and in bad faith. However, the reason for this is t hat the integrated intellectual, like the apocalyptic, adopts the fetish concept of 'mass', and with maximum ease, using it in a positive or negative sense at w ill. The integrated intellectual produces for the masses, plans mass education, and in this Whether the so-called way colla-masses borates goin along the with process this, of whether 'massification'. they have stronger stom achs than their manipulators think, whether they know how to use their powers of discrimination on the products on offer, and how to turn messages to unforeseen and positive uses - all this is another question. The existence of a category o f cultural operators who produce for the masses, using them in effect as a means of making a profit rather than offering them real opportunities for criti- cal experience, is an established fact. Moreover, the cultural oper- ation is to be judged for the intentions it manifests as well as for the way in which it struct ures its messages. Yet, in judging these phenom- ena with the aid of the apocaly ptic intellectual, we must nonetheless oppose him on the same grounds as Marx op posed the 'mass' theor- ists, namely that 'If man is formed by circumstance, the n the The apocalyptic circum- stances intellectual must bemust madeon human.'lO the other hand be reproached for never real ly attempting a concrete study of products and how they are actually consumed. N ot only does the apocalyptic reduce the con- sumer to that undifferentiated feti sh that is mass man, but while accusing mass man of reducing even the worthiest artistic product to pure fetish, he himself reduces the mass-produced object to a fetish. Rather than analyse these products individually in order to render the ir structural characteristics visible, the apocalyptic negates them en bloc. Whe n he does analyse them, he betrays the presence of a strange emotional tendency in himself and reveals an unresolved love-hate complex, giving rise to the suspi cion that the first and most illustrious victim of the mass product is the virtu ous critic This is onehimself. of the strangest and most fascinating features of that culture indus try phenomenon we have identified as apocalyptic criti- cism of the culture indu stry. It resembles the barely disguised manifes- tation of a frustrated passion, a love betrayed, or rather, the neurotic display of a repressed sensuality, sim ilar to that of the moralist who, 25 in the very act of denouncing the obscenity of an image, pauses at such length a nd with such voluptuousness to contemplate the loath- some object of his contemp t that The phenomenon his truehas nature been-remarked that of upon a carnal, with regard lustfulto animalnumer-is ous betrayed. polemics against kitsch, particularly in the German cultural con- text. Thus Karl Markus Michell I could observe many years ago that, since even the person who feels himself to be immune to anv form of sentimentality is sometimes powerless to prevent tears fro~ pouring down his cheeks despite being fully aware of the low quality of the stimulus causing this reaction, the desire for kitsch is often so intense in it s critics that it has to be fulfilled by condemning it. Such con- demnation is s trengthened with reference to art, which is then praised in terms thoroughly com pliant with all the established rules of kitsch emotiveness. So the response of the intellectual undermined by a passion for kitsch resembles that of the rich m an who, importuned by a beggar, orders his servant: 'Drive this man away. He's b reaking Drive this my man heart!' away. He's breaking my heart! It's impossible not to think of thi s phrase when we read the following passage by Gunther Anders12 from his study o f television, In an exhibition entitled of television, The worldIas had phantom the dubious and asfortune matrix?: of seeing and hearing an actor doing a sketch in the next room while seven of his TV performances were being screened contemporaneously. There were several things worthy of note in t his: 1) the actor was divided into seven identical brothers as far as the eyes w ere con- cerned, yet he had only one, undivided voice \vhich echoed in both room s; 2) the images appeared more natural than the original because to confer natur alness on his reproduced image, the actor had had to put on make-up; 3) (which w as more ghastly than remarkable) the multiple incarnations of the actor no longe r shocked anybody: so accustomed have we become to expecting little else but ser ial products. What emerges above all from this passage is a sort of morbid attrac- tion for th e enigma of mirrors and the multiplication of the human image. At root, there is a sort of metaphysical terror, the same as assails the primitive man when he re alizes that somebody is copying his likeness and believes that his soul is being taken away from him along with his image. Now it is wholly legitimate to carry out a poetic reflection on the enigma of mirrors; and to accomplish this in the

name of lyrical digression or imaginative paradox may well produce excellent res ults as in Rilke's poetry or when Borges writes: 'From the remote depths of the corridor, 26 covered (such the a mirror discovery spiedis upon inevitable us. We disin the late hours of the night) that mir rors have something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominabl e, because they increase the number of men.,13 However, in this case, Anders is not creating art. He is reflecting upon a communication phenomenon typical of ou r time. We know - and in many respects his intuitions are valid - that his defin ition of this phenomenon went something like: TV reduces the world to a phantom and thus blocks all critical reaction and any effective response from its viewer s. But at the end of the day, what Anders is describing to us is TV's effect on him. Nobody is able to satisfy our curiosity about what that actor on the screen was saying. Was he saying, 'Yes, the right answer!' or, 'We go over now to Dall as prison, bringing you pictures of Oswald's transfer'? Because if the latter, w e want to know for whom and for how many the live footage of Ruby shooting Oswal d makes the world appear as a series of phantom forms, suspending it in a zone o f unreality. This was certainly not the case with those jurors repeatedly reject ed by Ruby's defence on the grounds that, having seen the murder on television, they would have formed an idea of the facts that all the procedural sham and jur idical pretence involved in a courtroom trial would have been powerless to chall Yet it is clear that in this case our critic is not interested in the message's enge. content, its structural patterns, nor in the process of recep- tion. What emerge s most strikingly is a form of morbid attraction for the mysterium televisionis. So that, far from helping us to free our- selves from the spell, the most the c ritic does is to hold us there for even longer. Perhaps he hopes to induce his o wn peers to switch off the television. But the fact that it remains switched on for everybody else is evidently one of those things which criticism is powerless to prevent (remember: 'Criticism does not lose itself in events and can- not lo se itself in events.' The fact that in other cases Anders did indeed bravely los e himself in events - we may recall his polemic against the atom bomb, a stand a imed at influencing reality - testifies in his favour. However, it was no accide nt that he was reproached for this recently in Italy by another apocalyptic crit ic, Anders The who accused passage himis ofreminiscent squalid demagogy). of another commentary, written in an altogethe r different historical situation and for different reasons, but which has - as w e shall see - subtle psychological and ideological (in the pejorative sense of t he term 'ideology') links with his. The words are from the Apologia ad Guillelum , Sancti Theodor- ici Remensis Abbati by St Bernard. St Bernard had been irritat ed by someone who was a typical producer of 'mass culture', at least within thdi mits in which it was possible in the twelfth century to produce m:tss culture: n amely Abbot Suger. In a historical context in which 27 the instruments of culture were in the hands of the ruling class while the subor dinate classes were for the most part excluded from the exercise of writing, the only way to educate the masses was by trans- lating the official contents of cu lture into images. Suger had adopted the programme of the Synod of Arras, summed Suger's up by Honorius programme ofis Autun wellin known: the formula: the cathedral 'pictura wasest to become laicorum a sort literatura'. of immense b ook of stone in which the rich use of gold and gemstones would induce a sense of devotion in the faithful, and the beams of light falling from the great windows would suggest the participative warmth of divine power. Moreover, the sculpture s over the portals, the reliefs on the capitals and the images on the stained gl ass windows were designed to communicate to the faithful the mystery of the fait h, the order of natural phenomena, the hierarchies of the arts and of the trades , and St Bernard, the events a believer in thein nation's an unadorned, history. severe architecture in which mysticism i s suggested by the limpid nakedness of the house of God, reacted to this program me with an outburst of graphic accusations, ridiculing the monstrous iconographi c efflorescences What excuse can there of the becapitals: for these ridiculous monstrosities in the cloisters whe re the monks do their reading, extraordinary things at once beautiful and ugly? Here we find filthy monkeys and fierce lions, fearful centaurs, harpies, and str iped tigers, soldiers at war, and hunters blowing their horns. Here is one head with many bodies, there is one body with many heads. Over there is a beast with a serpent for its tail, a fish with an animal's head, and a creature that is hor

se in front and goat behind, and a second beast with horns and the rear of a hor se. All round there is such an amazing variety of shapes that one could easily p refer to take one's reading from the walls instead of from a book. One could spe nd the whole day gazing fascinated at these things, one by one, instead of medit ating on the law of God. Good Lord, even if the foolish- ness of it all occasion No nomatter shame,that at least in this oneparticular might balkpassage, at the expense?14 the argument is against the images sc ulpted on capitals in monastic cloisters, images designed therefore for literate monks, not for the illiterate masses. It nonethe- less summarizes a discussion which was concerned above all with the decoration of ordinary churches. An obser vation that comes naturally to mind is that St Bernard is betraying himself here , at what his accusation shows more than anything else is the perturbation of a man among the first to be won over and seduced by those images. In the absence o f other documents, no passage could communicate to us more effectively the fasci nation St tiary. andBernard's power of tone romanesque-gothic betrays that same bes- lacerated mixture of love and hatred apparent, in the same text, in his attitude towards the landed property he ascet ically But we no rejects: longer belong to such people. For the sake of Christ we have abandoned all the world holds valuable and attractive. All that is beautiful in sight and sound and scent we have left behind, all that is pleasant to taste and touch. T o winyes, Well Christ it's wedung, have but reckoned what a bodily lot of enjoyments frustrated aspassion dung.15over some lost dung .. . But we shouldn't be ungenerous: such force of feeling rebounds positively in the ascetic's favour, his renunciation having obviously not come easily. However, i f we were to judge Bernard by a contem- porary yardsti'ck, we would have to obje ct to the fact that, while dwelling with unequivocal sensuality upon the diaboli cal nature of the images ('Drive this man away, he's breaking my heart!'), he do es not touch upon the fundamental problem. After all, medieval society is organi zed in such a way that one class produces a culture made to its own measure and communicates it (whether through images or through sermons in a bare, unadorned church) to the subordinate classes, who are neither involved in the elaboration of that culture nor share responsibility for public affairs. Consequently, Berna rd's dis- course concentrates on only two modes of communication within the cont ext medieval The of a single cultural cultural model model. was of such an organic and integral nature that Bern ard obviously could not have reacted otherwise, and for us seriously to make the above objections would denote a lack of historical knowledge. But what we canno t reproach St Bernard for, it is our duty to challenge in our contemporaries who The behave phenomenon like him. known as mass culture comes about at a historical moment when the masses enter the public life of society as protagon- ists, sharing in responsib ility for the commonweal. Often, these masses have imposed an ethos of their own , in various historical periods they have asserted particular needs, they have d isseminated a language of their own; they have, that is, elaborated cultural pro - posals from below. But paradoxically, their way of enjoying them- selves, of t hinking and imagining, does not originate from below; it is suggested to them in stead through the mass media in the form of messages formulated according to the codes of the ruling class. With mass culture a unique situation has arisen wher eby members of the working class consume bourgeois cultural models believing the m to be..Jhe independent expression of their own class. For its own part, bourge ois 28 29 culture - in the sense in which 'high' culture remains that culture expressed by bourgeois society over the last three centuries - identifie s mass culture as a 'subculture' which does not belong to it, without realizing that this Suger was well mass aware culture that still theshares monsters theover samethe roots entrances as 'high' to cathedrals culture. constitu ted visual translations of theological truths elabor- ated in the realms of univ ersity culture. What he tried to do was to bring together both ruling and subord inate classes in a single cultural model, if for no other reason than because he recognized, in good faith, that the two classes represented the two extremes of one and the same people: God's people, the people of France. St Bernard attacks the monsters, but only because he does not judge them to be instru- mentally us eful for establishing this same spiritual unity, believing it attainable by othe r means. On the other hand, in his elaboration of an iconographical repertory fo r the use of his own artists, Suger also makes sensitive use of the imaginative repertory However, Yet, on reflection, with of the modern common there mass people. culture, is something the monstrous situation about is much a society harder to indefine. which the wo rking class reacts to the screening on TV of a ninetee~th century pochade presenti

ng fin de siecie, upper-middle class mores, as an opportunity for identifying, p rojecting itself and having a vehicle for escapism. This is an extreme example, but it reflects a common situation. From the godlike models of the cinema and th e protagon- ists of romantic novels to women's television programmes, mass culture for the most part depicts human situations that have absolutely no connecti on with the situations actually experienced by its con- sumers but which, despit e this, come to represent for them model situations. At the same time, however, it is possible in this sphere to encounter phenomena that defy any attempt to pl ace them within a theoretical framework. Let's say that in a TV advertisement yo u want to use the model of a refined young woman who has to use a vacuum cleaner . She has to use it in order not to ruin her hands and to keep them beautiful an d well-manicured. You show these images to in- habitants of an underdeveloped re gion for whom not the vacuum cleaner but the house in which yOU use a vacuum cle aner still consti- tutes an unattainable dream. It ;"ould be easy to assume that people for these such an image seems a phantom from another world that has nothing to do w ith them. Yet some surveys of the reactions of south- ern Italians to TV stimuli suggest that, in many cases, the viewer's reaction is of a critical and active nature; the revelation of a world that is still a possibility rather than an act uality Here then foris them an example can provoke of arebellion, message being realism, interpreted or anyway according some kind to a ofdifferent judgment. code 30 doubtfrom on the that whole usednotion by itsof originator. 'de-individualizing It is enough messages', to cast 'mass man' and 'esca pist culture'. Consequently we cannot define the problem once and for all in terms of the worry ing paradox of a culture produced for the masses which originates from on high r ather than emerging from below: the situation is characterized by unpredictable outcomes that often con- tradict our premises and intentions. Any definition of the phenom- enon in general terms runs the risk of contributing further to the g eneric nature of the mass message. The critic of culture finds himself duty-boun d to embark on a study in which both fits of temper and neurotic indulgence are forbidden. The first thing he must learn to doubt are his own reactions as these do not constitute a set of stan- dards. The critic (who no longer belongs to Fr ance and to God, but to a multitude of peoples and races with whom he is still n ot fully acquainted, for he is living in a civilization of mutants) must begin a new with every object and every consumer, as if he were preparing to discover so mething for However, letthe us read firstthe time. Gunther Anders passage again. It begins on a chilly not e: 'In an exhibition of television I had the dubious fortune of seeing and heari ng .. .' So, just as he is about to invite us to read several hundred pages of h is thoughts on the television phenom- enon, Anders warns us that on the only occ asion in which he under- took a concrete examination of the phenomenon of image trans- mission, he did so with boredom and a sense of disgust. But let's not acc use Anders of superficiality just yet. He remains one of the most illustrious re presentatives of a certain misunderstood humanist tra- dition. What he is displa ying here is not an act of personal dishonesty, but a mental vice which has clai ms to nobility - and which is often justified on account of its desperate good f aith. It will come as no surprise, then, when the apocalyptic critic derides the suggestion that the mass media (like machines) are instruments, and as such may be instrumentalized. For in reality, the apocalyptic critic refused from the ou tset to examine the instrument and to test its possibilities: The only inspectio n he made was from the other side of the barricade, using himself as the guineapig: 'Apples make me come out in a rash, so they are bad. I am not interested in what an apple is and what substances it contains. If other people eat apples an d are none the worse for it, it means that they are degenerates.' If by chance t here existed some racket in the fruit and vegetable market which resulted in the population being forced to eat only unripe apples, or forced to eat only apples , it would escape the apocalyptic critic's attention, nor would he make any apol ogy for this. From here, it's a short step to saying that rackets, like the Mafi a, are a biological phenomenon and that no force in the world can eradicate them . By now, it is no longer o{;interest to know whether the apocalyptic critic was honest motivated intentions, by and whether he was urging us to eat meat as well as 31 apples. As far as the consumers of apples are concerned, he's on th