The error made by La Repubblica in its campaign against Berlusconi was to give too much coverage to a relevant story (the party at Noemi’s house).3 If, instead, it had reported something like this—“Berlusconi went into Piazza Navona yesterday morning, met his cousin, and they had a beer together . . . how curious”—it would have triggered such a series of insinuations, suspicions, and embarrassments that the premier would have resigned long ago. In short, a fact that is too relevant can be challenged, whereas an accusation that is not an accusation cannot be challenged.
At the age of ten I was stopped in the doorway of a bar by a lady who said, “I’ll give you one lira if you write a letter for me—I’ve hurt my hand.” Being a decent child I replied that I didn’t want any money and would do it simply as a favor, but the lady insisted on buying me an ice cream. I wrote the letter for her and explained what had happened when I got home. “Good Lord,” said my mother, “they’ve made you write an anonymous letter. Heaven knows what will happen to us when they find out!” “Look,” I explained, “there’s nothing terrible in that letter.” In fact, it was addressed to a wealthy businessman, whom I also knew (he had a shop in the city center) and it said, “It has come to our attention that you intend to ask for the hand of Signorina X in marriage. We wish to inform you that Signorina X is from a respectable and prosperous family and is highly regarded throughout the city.” Now, you don’t usually see an anonymous letter that praises the subject of the letter rather than damning her. But what was the purpose of that anonymous letter? Since the lady who recruited me clearly had no grounds for saying anything else, she wanted at least to create unease. The recipient would have wondered, “Why should they send me such a letter? What does ‘highly regarded throughout the city’ actually mean?” I believe the wealthy businessman would have decided in the end to postpone the idea of marriage for fear of setting up home with someone so gossiped about.
This form of noise doesn’t even require that the transmitted messages be of any particular interest, since one message adds to another, and together they create noise. Noise can sometimes take the form of superfluous excess. A few months ago there was a fine article by Berselli in L’Espresso magazine, saying, Do you realize that advertising no longer has any effect on us? No one can prove that one soap powder is better than another (in fact they are all the same), so for the past fifty years the only method anyone has come up with shows us housewives who refuse the offer of two packets in exchange for their own brand, or grandmothers who tell us that this recalcitrant stain will disappear if we use the right powder. Soap companies therefore carry out an intensive and relentless campaign, consisting of the same message, which everyone knows by heart, so that it becomes proverbial: “Omo washes whiter than white,” and so on. Its purpose is twofold: partly to repeat the brand name (in certain cases it becomes a successful strategy: if I have to go into a supermarket and ask for soap powder, I will ask for Tide or Omo because I have known these names for the past fifty years), and partly to prevent anyone from realizing that no epideictic discussion can be made about soap powder—either for or against. And the same happens with other forms of advertising: Berselli observes that in every mobile phone advert, none of us actually understand what the characters are saying. But there’s no need to understand what they say—it is the great noise that sells cell phones. I think it is most probable that companies have jointly agreed to stop promoting their own particular brands and to carry out general publicity, to spread the mobile telephone culture. If you buy Nokia instead of Samsung, you will be persuaded by other factors, but not by advertising. In fact the main function of the publicity noise is to remind you of the advertising sketch, not the product. Try to think of the most pleasant, the most enjoyable piece of advertising—some are even quite funny—and to remember which product it relates to. It is very rare that you manage to remember the name of the product to which that advertisement refers: the child who mispronounces “Simmenthal,” or perhaps “No Martini, no party” or “Ramazzotti is always good for you.” In all other cases the noise compensates for the fact that there is no way to demonstrate the excellence of the product.
The Internet, of course, generates, with no intention to censor, the greatest noise that yields no information. Or rather: first, you receive information, but you don’t know whether it is reliable; second, you try searching for information on the Internet: only we academics and researchers, after ten minutes’ work, can begin to select the information we want. Most other users are stuck on blogs, or on a porn site, and so forth, without surfing too far, because surfing isn’t going to help them find reliable information.
Looking further at cases of noise that do not presuppose any intention to censure, but nevertheless tend toward censorship, we should also mention the newspaper with sixty-four pages. Sixty-four pages are too many to give real prominence to the most essential information. Here again, some of you will say, “But I buy a newspaper to find the news that interests me.” Certainly, but those who do that are an elite who know how to deal with information—and there must be some good explanation for the frightening drop in the number of newspapers being sold and read. Young people no longer read newspapers. It is easier to find the La Repubblica or Corriere della Sera sites on the Internet—there, at least, it is all on one screen—or to read the free sheets at the train station, where the news is set out on two pages.
Therefore, as a result of noise, we have a deliberate censorship—this is what is happening in the world of television, in creating political scandals, and so forth—and we have an involuntary but fatal censorship whereby, for reasons that are entirely legitimate in themselves (such as advertising revenue, product sales, and so forth), an excess of information is transformed into noise. This (and here I am moving from communications to ethics) has also created a psychology and morality of noise. Look at that idiot walking along the street, wearing his iPod headphones; he cannot spend an hour on the train reading a newspaper or looking at the countryside, but has to go straight to his mobile phone during the first part of the journey to say “I’ve just left” and on the second part of the journey to say “I’m just arriving.” There are people now who cannot live away from noise. And it is for this reason that restaurants, already noisy places, offer extra noise from a television screen—sometimes two—and music; and if you ask for them to be switched off, people stare at you as if you’re mad. This great need for noise is like a drug; it is a way to avoid focusing on what is really important. Redi in interiorem hominem: yes, in the end, the example of Saint Augustine could still provide a good ideal for the world of politics and television.
It is in silence alone that the only truly powerful means of information becomes effective—word of mouth. All people, even when they are oppressed by the most censorious tyrants, have been able to find out all that is going on in the world through popular word of mouth. Publishers know that books do not become bestsellers through publicity or reviews but by what the French call bouche à oreille and the Italians call passaparola—books achieve success through word of mouth. In losing the condition of silence, we lose the possibility of hearing what other people are saying, which is the only basic and reliable means of communication.
And that is why, in conclusion, I would say that one of the ethical problems we face today is how to return to silence. And one of the semiotic problems we might consider is the closer study of the function of silence in various aspects of communication, to examine a semiotics of silence: it may be a semiotics of reticence, a semiotics of silence in theater, a semiotics of silence in politics, a semiotics of silence in political debate—in other words, the long pause, silence as creation of suspense, silence as threat, silence as agreement, silence as denial, silence in music. Look how many subjects there are to study concerning the semiotics of silence. I invite you to consider, therefore, not words but silence.
[Lecture given during the conference of the Associazione Italiana di Semiotica, 2009.]
Imaginary As
tronomies
I WOULD LIKE TO MAKE it clear straightaway that in talking about imaginary geographies and astronomies I will not be dealing with astrology. The history of astrology has continually crossed paths with that of astronomy, but the imaginary astronomies and geographies I will be talking about have all now been recognized as entirely imaginary or false, whereas businessmen and heads of state still turn to astrologers for guidance. Therefore astrology is not a science, whether exact or otherwise, but a religion (or a superstition—superstitions being other people’s religions), and as such cannot be demonstrated as true or false. It is only a question of faith, and in questions of faith it is always better not to get involved, if only out of respect for those who believe.
The imaginary geographies and astronomies I will be discussing were created by people of good faith who explored the sky and the earth as they saw them—and though they were wrong, we cannot doubt their good intentions. Yet those who are still involved in astrology today know perfectly well they are describing a sky that is different from that explored and defined by astronomy, and still they continue to behave as though their conception of the sky were true. There can be no sympathy for astrologers’ bad faith. They are not people who are deceived; they are deceivers. End of argument.
As a child I dreamed over atlases. I imagined journeys and adventures in exotic lands, or I thought of myself as a Persian conqueror traveling far into the steppes of central Asia, then descending toward the seas of the Sonda to build an empire stretching from Ecbatana to the island of Sakhalin. This is perhaps why as an adult I decided to visit all those places whose names had caught my imagination, like Samarkand or Timbuktu, the Alamo or the river Amazon, and all I am missing now are Mompracem1 and Casablanca.
My astronomical exploits have been more difficult, and always practiced vicariously. A friend of mine, a Czechoslovak exile who stayed at my house in the country during the 1970s and ’80s, built telescopes and explored the sky at night from the terrace, calling me out when he found anything of interest. I came to the conclusion that only I and Rudolf II of Prague had had the privilege of lodging a Bohemian astronomer permanently under our roof, but then the Berlin Wall came down and my Bohemian astronomer returned to Bohemia.
I have found consolation in my collection of antique books—I call it the Bibliotheca semiologica curiosa, lunatica, magica, et pneumatica—and it consists entirely of books that describe falsities. It includes the works of Ptolemy but not those of Galileo, and though as a child I dreamed up my journeys over the classic modern-day atlas, I now prefer to do it over maps of Ptolemaic origin.
Is this representation of the known world of that time an imaginary one? We need to distinguish between the various meanings of the word imaginary. Some astronomies have imagined a world based on pure speculation and mystical impulses—they tell us not what the visible cosmos looks like but what the invisible and spiritual forces are that pervade it. Other astronomies, though based on observation and experience, have nonetheless conceived explanations that we regard today as wrong. Look at the explanation that Athanasius Kircher gives for sunspots, in his Mundus subterraneus of 1665, as being puffs of steam from the surface of the star. Ingenuous, but ingenious. And to remain with Kircher, this is how he applied the principles of physics and mathematical calculus, in his Turris Babel of 1679, to show that it was impossible for the Tower of Babel to rise up to heaven. Beyond a certain height, having reached the same weight as the globe itself, the tower would have caused Earth’s axis to rotate 45 degrees.
THE SHAPE OF THE EARTH
Anaximenes, in the sixth century B.C.E., spoke of a terrestrial rectangle made of earth and water, framed by the ocean, which sailed around on a sort of cushion of compressed air.
It was fairly realistic for the ancients to believe the Earth was flat. For Homer it was a disc surrounded by ocean and covered by the canopy of the heavens, and it was a flat disc for Thales and for Hecataeus of Miletus. It seemed less realistic to think it was spherical, as Pythagoras did, for mystical and mathematical reasons. The Pythagoreans had elaborated a complex planetary system in which the Earth was not even at the center of the universe. The sun was also at the edge of it, and all the planetary spheres rotated around a central fire. Each rotating sphere, moreover, produced a sound from a range of musical notes, and to establish an exact correspondence between sounds and astronomical phenomena, a nonexistent planet, the Antichthon (Counter-Earth), was also introduced. In their mathematical and musical zeal (and in their scorn of sensory experience), the Pythagoreans had not considered that if each planet produced a sound from this range of notes, their planetary music would have produced a repugnant dissonance, as if a cat had suddenly jumped onto the keys of a piano. But we still find this idea more than a thousand years later in Boethius—and let us not forget that Copernicus was also inspired by mathematical-aesthetic principles.
Subsequent demonstrations of the Earth’s roundness, though, were based on empirical observations. Ptolemy, of course, knew that Earth was round; otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to divide it into 360 degrees of longitude. But Parmenides, Eudoxus, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and Archimedes had already understood this. And Eratosthenes knew it in the third century B.C.E., when he had calculated fairly accurately the length of Earth’s meridian, calculating the different inclination of the sun, at midday on the summer solstice, when it reflected into the bottom of the wells of Alexandria and Syene (now Aswan). But—so far as the Earth being flat—I must digress for a moment to say that there is not only a history of imaginary astronomy, but also an imaginary history of astronomy, which still survives today in many scientific circles, not to mention in popular opinion. Try an experiment. Ask any reasonably intelligent person what Christopher Columbus wanted to demonstrate when he decided to reach the East by way of the West, and what the learned men of Salamanca persistently denied. The answer, in most cases, will be that Columbus thought the Earth was round, while the learned men of Salamanca believed it was flat and that after a short distance the three caravels would fall off the edge into the cosmic abyss.
Nineteenth-century secular thought, irritated by the fact that the church had not accepted the heliocentric theory of the universe, attributed to Christian thought (both patristic and scholastic) the idea that the Earth was flat. This idea gained force during the campaign by supporters of Darwin against all forms of fundamentalism. They wanted to show that since the church was wrong about the Earth’s being round, it could be wrong about the origin of species. They therefore took advantage of the fact that the fourth-century Christian writer Lactantius (in his Divinae institutiones) had contested the pagan theories about the roundness of the Earth by arguing that the Bible describes the universe on the model of the tabernacle. It must therefore be rectangular in form, not least because Lactantius could not accept the existence of the Antipodes, where people would have to walk around upside-down.
Then it was discovered that a sixth-century Byzantine geographer, Cosmas Indicopleustes, in his Topografia Christiana, thinking once more of the biblical tabernacle, had claimed the cosmos was rectangular, with an arch over the flat floor of the Earth.
The curved vault remained hidden from our eyes by the stereoma, in other words, by the veil of the firmament. Beneath this was the ecumene, namely, all the land on which we live, which sits on the ocean and slopes imperceptibly and continually upward to the northwest. Here there is a mountain so high that it is lost to our view and its peak disappears among the clouds. The sun, moved by angels—who also control earthquakes, and the rains and all other atmospheric phenomena—passes in the morning from the east toward the meridian, in front of the mountain, lighting up the world, and in the evening it reaches the west and disappears behind the mountain. The reverse cycle is followed by the moon and by the stars.
Cosmas also shows us the Earth as if we were looking at it from above. There is the frame of the ocean, beyond which are the lands where Noah lived before the flood. Farthest east from thes
e lands, separated from the ocean by regions inhabited by monstrous beings, is the earthly paradise. The Euphrates, Tigris, and Ganges spring from paradise. They pass under the ocean and flow out into the Persian Gulf. The Nile takes a more tortuous route via the antediluvian lands, it enters the ocean, continues its course into the low northern regions—more accurately, into the land of Egypt—and flows out into the Golfo Romaico, the Hellespont.
As Jeffrey Burton Russell has shown in his Inventing the Flat Earth (1991), many influential books on the history of astronomy still studied at school claim that Cosmas’s theory became the prevailing view throughout the Middle Ages. They also claim the medieval church taught that the Earth was a flat disc, with Jerusalem at the center, and that the works of Ptolemy remained unknown throughout the Middle Ages. The fact is, Cosmas’s text—written in Greek, a language the medieval Christian had forgotten—became known in the Western world only in 1706 and was published in English in 1897. No medieval writer knew of it.
A first-year pupil at a secondary school can easily work out that if Dante enters the funnel of hell and leaves from the other side, seeing unknown stars from the slopes of Mount Purgatory, this means he knew perfectly well that the Earth was round. But Origen, Saint Ambrose, Albertus the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and John of Holywood (to mention just a few) were all of the same view. The point of dispute at the time of Columbus was that the calculations made by the learned men of Salamanca were more accurate than his. They claimed that the Earth, which was certainly round, was larger than our Genoese voyager imagined, and it was therefore pure folly to try to circumnavigate it. Columbus, however, a fine navigator but a useless astronomer, thought the Earth was smaller than it was. Neither he nor the learned men of Salamanca, of course, suspected the existence of another continent between Europe and Asia. Though they were right, the doctors of Salamanca were wrong; and Columbus, though wrong, faithfully pursued his error and was right—through serendipity.