Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Power.

November 25, 2012 at 2:10 P.M. Newly inserted "errors" will now be corrected. ("Who killed the liberal arts?" and "Images and Death.")

April 18, 2011 at 10:07 A.M. Along with my essay about Raymond Chandler's works, this text was severely damaged, again. I will try to make repairs. The goal of this process is to inflict the equivalent of battle fatigue on the victim, severe nerve damage from constant repairs and anxieties about further alterations of necessary creative writings resulting in permanent psychological harm. I will continue to write. I will do my best to fix what is damaged by New Jersey's protected hackers. I am sure that the federal government is "unable" to do more to protect these writings. ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!")

November 12, 2009 at 3:00 P.M. Spacing has been distorted, again, as further evidence of the barbarism against which I must struggle. I invite readers to share this experience in order to understand censorship and anti-intellectualism in a very direct as well as personal way. None of this could take place, publicly, without the complicity of state government in New Jersey. Does America defend freedom of speech and the rights of dissidents? You decide.

Spacing will be affected in this essay. Other defacements and alterations of the text must be expected. I am now making some of the same corrections fifty times or more. I will do my best to make corrections as they are needed. It may be difficult to read this essay because of the jumbling together of paragraphs by hackers from New Jersey. My security system is under attack. I cannot prevent regular defacements of the text. I will continue to write for as long as possible. See "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "What is it like to be tortured?"

November 2, 2007 at 4:24 P.M. Unfortunately, a long draft using T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, Articles in the New Scientist, F.H. Bradley and other sources was deleted, for the second time, after I worked on it for several hours this morning. I will have to try writing it by hand on a legal pad, then typing the text into this blog because my e-mails are no longer reliable. This is one of many times when the same work has been destroyed.

November 8, 2007, at 10:42 A.M. My attempts to print from my msn group have left me with a blank paper bearing this address:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/N1243.Advertising.com/B2447956.3;sz=728x90;click=http://servedby.adver...

November 6, 2007 at 11:39 A.M. I cannot access my mail at Yahoo or see my books at Lulu. I will continue to struggle.

On November 2, 2007 (and beyond) I am blocking:

http://view.atdmt.com/NYC/iview/thundcps010000... (NY City? City Council Speaker?)

http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac01728x90... (long time no see!)

Umberto Eco, "Language, Power, Force," in Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1986), pp. 239-256.

Umberto Eco, "On Symbolism," in On Literature (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 2002), pp. 140-160.

Umberto Eco, "Foreword" to Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. vii-x.

"I have always believed in the truth of signs, Adso ..."

Brother William of Baskerville.

In 1986, as I recall, I discovered a novel that captured my attention for weeks, a novel which is highly recommended to those who have not yet made their way through its pages: Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. The movie starring Sean Connery is O.K., but not in the same league with the book. I found a kindred spirit in Brother William of Baskerville (Holmes) and also liked his novice, Adso (Watson).

The investigation of gruesome murders in a medieval monastery was a literary device allowing the author to explore historical and philosophical questions in a text gesturing at everything from Aristotle's view of comedy to Conan-Doyle's mysteries, from Dante to C.S. Peirce. Umberto Eco single-handedly revived the novel of ideas. Two contemporary examples of the genre, are P.D. James, Death in Holy Orders (New York: Ballantine, 2001) and Nicholas Mosley, Accident (Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1965), then see C.P. Taylor's play, Good (London & New York: Methuen, 1982).

Eco is the world's foremost "semiotician." What's that? I'm getting there. Chill.

Eco is an important philosopher and literary theorist, also a practitioner of the darkest literary arts -- a literary alchemist -- whose works may be described as devoted to examining the final sentence of his greatest novel: "Stat rosa pristina nomina, nomina nuda tenemus ... "

This review is concerned with a single essay by Umberto Eco. However, it will be enriched by borrowings from other essays by this author (I've read many of them), as well as other philosophical "ruffians" (Bertrand Russell?), many from those bizarre European nations located somewhere east of the Danube -- or just any place other than France, Germany, and America. 

My focus in what follows is on power in what I will describe as a "postmodernist" culture.

I begin with some careful definitions. I then turn to Eco's essay "Language, Power, Force." An exposition and critique of the argument and discussion in this work is followed by reactions in several directions. The formal version of the "Italian Mind" is divided between philosophers and intellectuals on the side of "spirit" -- like Eco -- and others like, say, Antonio Negri (Political Descartes is a future project), who are theorists of revolution and, accordingly, on the side of the "flesh." As I say, Eco is (usually) on the spirit side of this ledger.

One must always be on guard when reading Umberto Eco's work for irony and even, surprisingly, humor. A philosopher with a good sense of humor is indeed a source of concern to defenders of normality and solemnity as opposed to seriousness. In Italy -- and maybe all of Europe -- such a phenomenon (intellectuals who are funny and willing to discuss pop culture) is not unusual. Has anyone read Italo Calvino? ("If on a winter's night a traveller ...")

In America, intellectual and aesthetic play has not yet been outlawed. However, both kinds of playing are frowned upon. Such "playing" is relegated to the category of irrelevant and unimportant trivial pursuits, even as the nation calls for greater intelligence and judgment in public life and in the important business of business.

I. Defining All of These Weird Terms.

A. What is "Semiotics"? How is "Semiotics" different From "Hermeneutics" or "Symbolism"? What is "Postmodernism" again?

Let's begin with "semiotics":

"The general study of symbolic systems, including language. The subject is traditionally divided into three areas: syntax, or the abstract study of the signs and their interrelations; semantics, or the study of the relations between the signs and those objects to which they apply; and pragmatics, or the relationship between users and the system. ... The tradition that follows Saussure is sometimes referred to as semiology."

Simon Blackburn, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 346-347.

A system of signs could be everything from the rituals in a courtroom, to the image-languages of advertising and movies, or courtship rituals in Manhattan and children's behavior on, for instance, Halloween. The study of sign-patterns and meaning-clusters is far more fascinating when participants in a language game are not aware of the language that is speaking them.

Observe a group of scientists, therapists, lawyers, or movie people at a party, then notice the meanings surrounding what anthropologists call their "interaction rituals." I am sure that actors will be fascinated by these ideas.

Always observe a woman's physical gestures. Notice hierarchical behavior among professionals in social settings, establishment of dominance, requests for tribute, sexual gifts, power. Notice that participants in these rituals are often unaware of the true language(s) being spoken by them, even as their words are measured and weighed. Every person -- especially any woman -- is dancing all the time. Often what is really being said is the exact opposite of what the words actually spoken communicate.

Unspoken words may be more vital to establishing meaning. This is especially interesting in observing powerful people. Most of all, I ask would-be philosophers and students to "notice." Just to notice things, people, messages, meanings all the time. "Attend" to others in Simone Weil's sense of the word. Henry James said that novelists are persons on whom "nothing is lost." With this advice in mind, "hermeneutics" may be thought of as --

"... [Any] method of interpretation first of texts, and secondly of the whole social, historical, and psychological world. The problems were familiar to Vico, and raised in connection with Biblical criticism by Schleiermacher. Under the title of verstehen [roughly, "understanding"] the method of interpretation was contrasted with objective scientific method by Weber and Dilthey. Its inevitable subjectivity" -- and yet, capacity to yield objective truth -- "is the topic of the major writings of Gadamer."

Dictionary of Philosophy, at p. 172.

"Symbol" is the most important of these words for Eco. He is highly cautious in using it, handling the word as a scientist would use nitroglycerin in a laboratory:

"... 'Symbol' is a word I advise my students to use very sparingly and to note the contexts in which they find it, in order to decide the meaning it has there and not elsewhere. In fact, I no longer know what a symbol is. I have tried to define the symbolic mode as a particular textual strategy. But leaving aside this textual strategy -- which I will return to later -- a symbol can be either something very clear (an unambiguous expression with a definable content) or something very obscure (a polyvalent expression, which summons up a whole nebula of content)."

Umberto Eco, "On Symbolism," in On Literature (New York: Harcourt Brce, 2002), p. 141.

Finally, "postmodernist" and "postmodern" are terms worthy of book-length treatment. I will only allude to my uses of the terms in this essay. Eco is not a postmodernist. However, his work and interests are highly relevant to postmodernist themes. Eco's dissertation was on Thomas Aquinas and his interest in the medieval mind's fascination with the "book of nature" is life-long. As we will see, postmodernist societies become more than a book. The postmodernist "setting" becomes a kind of movie or collection of images and messages, which are to be read or seen by the philosopher, who is transformed into a kind of detective adept at making his or her way through this not-so-solid jungle. (See my short stories "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author" and "Metaphor is Mystery.")

"Is the classification of things into names truly arbitrary? Or is there not some meaning to how something is named? While a name itself is a primitive sign and cannot be dissected any further by means of a definition, at the same time there are names which, when given, seem to be replete with mystical significance. ... I am become a name."

Philip Kerr, A Philosophical Investigation (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 105.

For Mr. Kerr, the detective story becomes an allegory for the history of Western philosophy. Take another look at the final line of The Name of the Rose.

We live in a time when modes of communication have multiplied and replicated. Meaningful discourse today is often, necessarily, symbolic and -- this is indeed dangerous -- usually in unconscious ways for persons who are not particularly intellectually self-aware or theoretically-minded concerning ideational systems or philosophical structures in which they find themselves trapped. Such persons simply assume that "that's just how things are."

Many lawyers suffer from this form of imbecility. Perhaps "dullness" is a more polite word.

Does this help to explain the efforts to silence me? Do I upset your world-view?

I shudder to think of American intelligence agents sitting at a desk seeking to decipher a set of subtle signals and signs that deliver emotive and aesthetic-political meanings in terms of numbers, graphs, and pie charts. Lots of luck with that. Does such a blunder may have something to do with 9/11? Isn't this method of studying human meanings the opposite of intelligence? Such unintelligent intelligence agents should become lawyers in New Jersey.

Lawyers have to reduce the conceptual landscape to manageable proportions in order to function. Sometimes they forget that what they are assuming as "given" is the entire foundation of their worldview, which is not shared by others. American political leaders do not see all that they are leaving out of their analyses when visiting a foreign culture. The habit of stupidity -- especially self-chosen stupidity -- has a way of becoming ingrained and producing, automatically, the intended effect. ("Images and Death.")

A recent lecture by the President of Iran is abundant proof of cultural dislocation and difficulties of communication in a person visiting our shores.

How do American officials appear to others? The most common word used these days to describe Americans is "stupid." This phenomenon merits scholarly attention, as does the failure to see that what is "relevant" to a philosophical or political-jurisprudential discussion is itself a philosophical issue. The only response to charges of serious criminality by New Jersey officials, for example, is further attempts to destroy these writings. Is that the best you can do?

We do not live in a world in which stupidity should be a goal of policy makers and lawyers as well as judges. We can no longer afford to be proud of ignoring all that "stuff" that has to do with culture, which is often the only factor that makes political events and even history meaningful or understandable. Liberal fashionistas will point to George W. Bush as a "simplifier." However, one might just as well point to liberal fashionistas and their friends -- Susan Faludi, Mark Lilla, the usual suspects come to mind.

Ideology or group-think mentalities are nowhere more visible than in trendy corners of Manhattan or in New Jersey's legal-governmental circles. Being patronized and insulted by morons -- who then ask me to explain philosophical concepts to them -- is a surreal experience that is not unusual for minority intellectuals. ("Is Western Philosophy Racist?")

Also common is the experience of seeing one's work destroyed (or stolen) by people incapable of producing anything half as good, but who manage to get published and favorably reviewed.

The postmodern turn is a bifurcation in the intellectual landscape. This schizoid reaction in the contemporary Western Mind will not be understood by any group of persons seeking to reduce the key concepts shaping our lives or simplifying complex intellectual systems to something "easy to understand."

Complexity, contradictory meaning-systems, and mixed messages is the world in which we must live. We have no choice about this condition. History has presented us with this challenge. Umberto Eco comments on our "hermeneutic dilemma":

"... however isolated we might consider ourselves to be in the ivory towers of the university campus, immune to the charms of Coca-Cola, more attuned to Plato than to Madison Avenue ... Calabrese is aware that this is not true, and that even the way in which we, or at least our students, read Plato -- if they do -- is determined by the existence of 'Dallas,' [any t.v. show may be substituted at this point,] even for those who never watch it. And so he tries to incorporate the events around him into his understanding." (Eco, p. vii.)

There has always been stupidity in high places and leading newspapers. Today that stupidity is condescending and smug, as evidenced by the front-page obituary of Norman Mailer in The New York Times, suggesting that Mailer was not always "coherent." Who is? Charles McGrath, "Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With a Matching Ego, Dies at 84," in The New York Times, November 11, 2007, at p. A1. 

People who are adept at navigating in our ocean of symbolic systems and meanings will be good at understanding this crazy world that we have made and which is now making us. Artists, intellectuals, mystics -- all the persons previously considered "marginal" -- have suddenly become crucial to avoiding global catastrophe.

Will we ignore thinkers' warnings? Will we listen to our "marginal" men and women before it is too late? I hope so. How can our cultural forms not become surreal or crazy after the events of the twentieth century and the quantum mechanics revolution?

In the century of Mickey Mouse and Mickey "D" (McDonald's), Nagasaki and Hiroshima, "common sense" realism is the absurdity and dream-like fantasy.

Hostility to Latinos may explain the absence of such "little brown persons" in our magazines. I do not speak with an accent, by the way, except for a slight Bronx-like pronounciation. The nomeklatura will never forgive someone who shows them to be moronic on any occasion. This does not include Mr. Denby, whose book I liked and would give to every first-year student in a liberal arts college.

I do not know how many other essays have been altered or vandalized today by New Jersey persons.

One of the most brilliant and learned academics I have known came upon a group of his colleagues seeking a definition of a word. He was not consulted because (since he spoke English with an accent) he could not possibly know "the" language very well, despite his American Ph.D. and several other doctorates. He not only defined the word for these "colleagues," but also provided an etymology with citations to authorities in Roman law.

Deleuze and Guattari seek to "subvert all theoretical and institutional barriers to 'desiring-production' in order to create new desiring 'schizo-subjects' who 'unscramble the codes' of modernity and become reconstituted as desiring machines. ... Schizoanalysis articulates new postmodern positions organized around the concepts of plurality, multiplicity, and decentredness, and attempts to create new postmodern forms of thought, politics, subjectivity."

Steven Best & Douglas Kellner, eds., Postmodern Theory (New York: The Guilford Press, 1991), pp. 85-86 (emphasis added).

If everyone is pretending and working so hard to be "normal" -- when our conditions are abnormal -- is any mutual understanding really possible? Will it not be smarter to discard this nebulous idea of "normality" and to float into the abyss without drowning in it? If all the world is abnormal, then what is abnormality? New Jersey perhaps.

Modernity is (or was?) about the autonomy of reason, hope for progress, perfectibility of human institutions and, maybe, persons. Modernity was the worship of normality or reason. A secularization of rationality is at the heart of the modern, beginning with the Renaissance and culminating with the Enlightenment that followed the scientific revolution as well as the emergence of the industrial and commercial transformations of Western societies that are still underway.

Modernity as a progress-imbued, future-oriented project of eternal becoming faltered at the gates of Auschwitz. Rationalization, scientific techniques, impersonal reason brought us to the concentration camps and the totalitarian nightmares of highly efficient mega-states. Somebody should make this point to Professor Lilla: Religion is not the only thing about which we can be "irrational." Irrational confidence in the capacities of science or reason is as worrisome as religious fundamentalism. See Steven Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992), pp. 1-5, 175-211.

Intellectuals began to sense this alteration in the intellectual landscape immediately after liberating millions of victims in the concentration camps:

"For Arnold Toynbee, [1947] the postmodern age would be the final phase of Western history and one dominated by anxiety, irrationalism and helplessness. In such a world, consciousness is adrift, unable to anchor itself to any universal ground of justice, truth or reason on which the ideals of modernity had been founded in the past. Consciousness is thus itself 'decentered': no longer agent of action in the world, but a function through which impersonal forces pass and intersect. Art becomes not so much an expression of human spirit, but another commodity." (Waugh, pp. 4-5.) (See "The Red Violin.")

The same transformation occurs to religious practice that is changed from mystical experience to dogmatic forms and various fundamentalisms. Religion and you, for that matter, also become "commodities":

"Like knowledge, therefore, [art] can no longer be critical but only functional. Moreover, we are in the postmodern condition and, implicated in a culture where all knowledge is produced through discourse, we can no longer seek transcendence. There is no position outside of culture from which to view culture. There is no Kantian 'view from nowhere' no conceptual space not already implicated in that which it seems to contest. There can only be disruption from within: micropolitics, language games, parodic skirmishes, irony, fragmentation." (Waugh, pp. 4-5.)

Be very careful about what is being discarded when truth, Goodness, meaning, God are tossed out the window in an embrace of power. Have we really escaped the forces that lead to Auschwitz? Or have we only surrendered to them by this abandonment of reason and transcendence?

Reason and transcendence are available to you, here and now, as are truth and objectivity. 

No point of view outside of history is necessary for us to achieve an absolute truth. Do we find ourselves only fashioning a new kind of reason for a post-World War II world that is less a book than a set of images or surfaces? Why has it been necessary for so many French thinkers to return to Kant? History has become cinema. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")

"What this turn towards Kant indicates is an appreciation that the Nietzschean assault on a repressive reason itself depends on a dogmatic conception of the relation between knowledge and pre-cognitive interests, that an unqualified hostility to the universal in the domain of ethics and politics has a profoundly menacing -- as well as emancipatory -- aspect, and that a willful self-restriction of analysis to the fragmentary and the perspectival renders impossible any coherent understanding of our own historical and cultural situation."

Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London & New York: Verso, 1987), p. xiii. (Back to Kant in the twenty-first century.)

Either you can do this postmodernist dance or you can't. Those who are adept at manipulating our conceptual networks (while retaining substance) will thrive intellectually; those still in a classical modernist mode will become irrelevant. Finally,

"... Counter-Enlightenment, of course, is as old as the Enlightenment itself, but whereas in the past (in Romantic thought, for example), the critique of reason was accompanied by an alternative foundationalism (of the imagination), Postmodernism tends to claim an abandonment of all metanarratives which could legitimate foundations for truth."

Patricia Waugh, "Introduction," in Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Edward Arnold, 1992), pp. 4-5.

Before turning to Eco's great essay, let us keep these words and concepts in mind: reason, fragmentation, power, aestheticizing social space and the invasion by power of all aspects of inner- and outer-life following upon the retreat of reason.

Which would you prefer, power or reason? What kind of power? What kind of reason? Most importantly, the lingering hope still found in human imaginative "power," aesthetic capacity or spiritual choice as against nihilism, must not be surrendered.

If we find ourselves drowning in an ocean of images then we better learn to swim -- quickly. The answer is not to beat up or silence the "advocates" of new aesthetic and spiritual-intellectual spaces, like Umberto Eco or David Deutsch. Don't forget that some of the very best navigators of this ocean of images are Americans. Anybody know Steven Spielberg?

Scientists and literary theorists will benefit by bringing into relation the ideas of Eco and Deutsch. Those wishing to ponder conflicting qualifications and nuances in the interpretation of social reality and history are directed to: Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 300-312 and Alex Callinicos, Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 1-15, 15-38.

II. De Consolatione Philosophiae: Language, Power, Force.

Eco's essay begins with a comment on a lecture by Roland Barthes, delivered under the shadow of his mentor, Michel Foucault. See Susan Sontag, ed., The Barthes Reader (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), "Inaugural Lecture" at the College de France.

According to Eco, "In this lecture (which, as we shall see, focuses on play with language), Barthes, however innocently, is playing: He offers one definition of power and presupposes another." (p. 240.) (Steven Spielberg can "play," but so can Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese, Antonio Banderas, Jane Campion and Jonathan Demme.)

A text to which much of Barthes' lecture is addressed or responds is The Order of Things. The definition Barthes presupposes -- which Eco does not explain because he assumes the reader is familiar with it -- is Foucault's definition of power, supplemented by Nietzsche and Alfred Adler. I am not suggesting that Eco was thinking explicitly of Nietzsche or Adler, but Foucault sure was. Nietzsche is always a source, while Adler is under the surface of Foucault's work as an important influence on Foucault's teacher -- psychologist, Ludwig Bingswanger -- who was a Jungian-existentialist.

See James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), p. 73; and by way of comparison, see again, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1983).

Eco is introducing us to an "echo chamber," as it were: Nietzche, Adler, Freud, Jung, Foucault, then Barthes emerge in a definition of power that is offered playfully. Umberto Eco will play even with that "playful" definition.

Judith Butler's thinking is crucial at this juncture. To my knowledge, no one has connected Butler's work -- which is usually relegated to the "I-hate-men" section of the bookstore -- with Eco's semiotics. Mistake. This is philosophy as jazz. Fiorittura. Flowering a phrase in bel canto singing. Philosophers must become not only detectives, but surfers or skateboarders on this ocean of images and ideas. Gee, that's not analytical philosophy:

"... power is not 'one' and ... as it infiltrates a place where it is not felt at first, it is 'plural,' legion, like demons. '... Power is present in the most delicate mechanisms of social exchange: not only in the State, in classes, groups, but even in fashion, public opinion, entertainment, sports, news, information, family and private relations, and even in the liberating impulses which attempt to counteract it.' ..."

In being raped, censored, slandered, classified as "unethical," placed beyond the pale, subjected to hypnosis, invasions of privacy, also forced impoverishment, one enters a dance of power-relations in which the mechanisms of the seemingly all-powerful state are rendered laughable (and helpless) before philosophical intelligence, wit and humor to say nothing of modesty. Oppression creates resistance.

The dullness of govermental instrumental rationality is rendered ineffective by sheer intelligence in the service of the human spirit of revolution. It really helps to have a sense of humor if you are going to deal with lawyers. ("I can eat fifty eggs.")

For the psychologizing of power relations notice this next sentence and see my comments on the presence of sexism in feminist discourse and racism everywhere in America:

"I call the discourse of power any discourse which engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.' You carry out a revolution to destroy power, and it will be reborn, within the new state of affairs. '... Power is the parasite of a trans-social organism, linked to the whole of man's history and not only to his political, historical history. This object in which power is inscribed, for all its human eternity, is language, or, to be more precise its necessary expression: the language we speak and write,' the given language." (Eco, p. 240.) ("What is it like to be tortured?")

Make the idea of language plural. Languages are where we live, including languages of images, advertising, pop music, clothing, hair styles, personas (masks) among which we are invited to choose. In all of those languages we find power, shaping and shifting the discourse of subjectivity where we must understand ourselves and create our world.

My struggle to write, every day, is enough to convince me of these truths. So is my experience of torture and censorship. Also, it is proof of the abuse of power and the evil that results from such abuse.

When the worst possible insult directed against me -- as persons are hacking into my computer and destroying my work -- is to say: "You are not a man!" I realize that this is only a way for the speaker to reveal that he believes the worst thing a person can be is a woman, because every woman is a "non-man" and (therefore) a non-person. Why? What are you afraid of in yourself? Don't forget that love and morality are also kinds of power.

Internet "chat" or "writing" (I am running scans 24 hours per day, my updating feature is disabled, again) is about a meeting of powers, but so is Times Square or your favorite television show, and such things as race, gender, sexual-orientation, sexism, religious worship -- for example, an American "date," dancing, laughter, or what we call "comedy," which is no laughing matter. Law is always an encounter between forces in American society. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (New York: Dover, 2005) and Leszek Kolakowski, Bergson (Indiana: St. Augustine's, 2001).

In an entertainment culture, comedy becomes a form of political struggle and philosophical insight -- also power. If there is any chance for a meeting with the people who plan to blow your head off because you're an American then it will have to take place in this postmodernist-aesthetic cultural space. Everybody inhabits this universe of media imagery and shares this territory. Internet? 

Not everybody reads these key common symbols and images in the same way. Amazingly, people in Washington, D.C. fail to see that one of our most important battles or fronts in the so-called "War on Terror" is at the multiplex and on-line. No wonder I am being censored and attacked by New Jersey's armies of morons.

Let's take another look at Foucault before determining where Eco goes with his analysis.

November 1, 2007 at 10:24 A.M. annoying phone calls from 414-208-1011.

Violence is not an option. Violence is what power wants from people like me to "justify" societal racism, along with further oppressions and tortures. Frustration is aimed at generating violence or collapse, also induced pathological behavior that can be misclassified as "unethical" provides ass-cover for censors. Never cooperate with such evil. (See again: "What is it like to be tortured?" and "What a man's gotta do.")

It is because he is a political genius and revolutionary that Mumia Abu-Jamal is incarcerated in the United States of America, not because he is believed guilty of a crime beyond any reasonable doubt. The same nation that imprisons Abu-Jamal calls on other countries to respect political dissidents and tolerate freedom of speech. ("Justice For Mumia Abu-Jamal.")

Government-inserted "errors" have been corrected in this text so many times that I can no longer say the total number of times when the work has been violated. Each of these violations of the essay is a kind of rape of its author.

We must live with these contradictions and struggle against the injustices that they produce. Crazy, isn't it? Geoffrey Hartman, "Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure," in Jacques Ehrman, ed., Structuralism (New York: Anchor Books, 1970), pp. 137-158 and Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan (New York: Viking, 1971), pp. 84-125.

"Power is everywhere," Michel Foucault writes, "not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere. ... Power comes from below ... There is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general [I love this next word!] matrix. ..."

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, "Introduction," by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), pp. 92-94, then see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Alan Sheridan, translation (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 16-17.

Power, human corruption, is in languages (plural) where we live our subjectivities, power that is shaping us into docile subjects.

Can we escape the "Matrix"?

Eco offers an obvious solution that is anything but easy -- by playing and cheating, he says, by breaking the rules of language we escape the "Matrix." Imagination allows us to reinvent reality all the time through literature, by means of the madness of art, also in science and philosophy, legal thinking and religious expression, cinema. Scientist Lisa Randall can jack into the "Matrix," but so can Lee Smolin.

The seeming commercial product -- a blockbuster movie like, say, "The Matrix" -- may be reinvented and radically reinterpreted by us, ordinary viewers, as a subversive and self-undermining text that serves to challenge the system. The same may be said for our ideas of reason and rationality. To defend reason is not necessarily to accept traditional notions of reason and rationality. Thus, Brian Greene's use of cinematic techniques in his PBS documentary "The Elegant Universe" is light years ahead of Carl Sagan's approach to the medium, but without Sagan's "Cosmos," there would be no Brian Greene on television. Greene is developing his own scientific-televisual "reason."

The game of torture will proceed in this fashion for the foreseeable future, until enough New Jersey officials are escorted to federal prison or there are changes at the top in that system. Right, Richard J. Codey? You won't tire me out. You will not silence me. Are you a guilty bystander to censorship and torture?

In postmodernist spaces the revolutionary and guerilla leader becomes the ultimate Geek who always gets the Babe. Eco's work opens on to a postmodernist romanticism of revolution. Mega-cool! In the struggle with opponents of freedom -- whether terrorists or home-grown, blue-suited corporate masters and other government officials -- the forces of light must now be guided by creative outsiders injecting radical reinterpretations into the system. "Upgrades, hmmm ..." ("'Total Recall': A Movie Review" and "'Inception': A Movie Review.")

Pictures in Pakistan this week of gun-wielding young men feature background posters advertising American movies. Semiotics.

Why has no one suggested that the contradiction between the anti-Americanism of those young men and the popularity of American films to which those same young men respond with admiration should be explored? You can expect these ideas to be plagiarized soon? Have we betrayed our own cinematic values and self-images or are they merely hypocritical lies? ("'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")

This would also be a fitting subject for cinematic exploration. I would much prefer the explosions and killings to be on screen, not in villages or city streets. I remember a terrorist hijacking of a plane in Latin America where the Marxist opponent of America wore a Coca-Cola emblem on his cap. That's postmodernism.

Suggestion to anti-Americans: What you love in American movies and respond to with respect as well as admiration is real and may contradict some ideological bullshit that you have been taught. Many of the criticisms of American power that you have heard in a Mosque or on street corners is also being made today, by Americans, many of whom are critical of their government's current policies.

I am one such critic of abuses of power, including the censorship which you are witnessing at these blogs.

America is a very complex and fascinating place for which you already feel affection -- or you wouldn't be crazy about those movies. American culture is part of what you are, even if you define yourself as a revolutionary opposed to political oppression from the U.S., again, such as you are seeing here and now. This goes for people in Cuba who may actually read these words. (See Mel Gibson's "The Patriot.")

Postmodernist literary masterpieces -- like Vidal's Myra Breckinridge or Calvino's mad inventions -- are self-deconstructing intellectual time bombs intended to explode in the subconscious long after you first read them. Philosophical and political-jurisprudential ideas that matter in the future will do the same. They will be communicated in books, also in movies, t.v. shows, music, even on canvas, especially "here," on-line. Welcome to the Internet version of Abu Ghraib. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "Michel Foiucault and the Authorship Question.")

Science is also increasingly becoming "glitzy." Compare Ai Weiwei's architecture with Botero's canvases. My situation in the U.S. may be worse than Ai Weiwei's adventures in China. That's art as social critique. Now think again about Rapping and hip hop music: Why is Cornel West in the "Matrix" movies? Or making his own Rap CD? I am thinking about writing in verse an "Ode to Bingo Gazingo," a New York street poet. If there is a "Matrix" sequel Brian Greene should be in it. 

These postmodernist reflections do not make Martin Heidegger a "postmodernist." Heidegger is one of the forerunners of what would be called postmodernism in the hands of acolytes, like Derrida, and also of the neo-modernist hermeneuticists who were influenced directly by Heidegger's works, like Gadamer and Ricoeur. There is no "Heideggerean architecture" -- fortunately. ("The Heidegger Controversy.")

You think that you understand America? You hate Mr. Bush? Or Nancy Pelosi? Mr. Romney? "The Colbert Report"? Easy. Create an alternative reality where Pelosi and Bush run off together to Las Vegas. Colbert becomes the next Republican President of the United States. Clarence Thomas anounces that he is Oprah Winfrey's long-lost brother and will be taking over her television show as Oprah becomes our new Supreme Court justice. Melissa Harris-Perry?

I promise you that no matter how weird is your invention, it will be surpassed by America's reality in a week or two. We must all become ... The One. Whoa!

If you're smiling, then you're proving my point. I have your attention. Your mind is engaged. That's 50% of the challenge in all communication in a media-advertising environment in which people are accustomed to being lied to, every day, by politicians, merchants, also Hollywood. They stop listening. Eco chuckles: "This dishonest and healthy and liberating trick is called literature." (p. 241.)

Rather than lying to get over on you -- as most powerful people do -- maybe it is possible to use the techniques of literay fiction and cinema, or all arts, to communicate truth.

Is this the new kind of "reason" that we need for an age of surfaces? This would be a good time to insert more "errors" in this essay, right before you plagiarize my ideas again. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")

America can play this game with anyone who is willing to meet us halfway. The Jersey Boys will be thrilled because they will claim that my point about thievery in New Jersey and tortures is only literature. "It never happened!" They will shout this as they are hauled away to the Metropolitan Correctional Center (better known to residents and guests at these deluxe suites as the "MCC"), to which many guys and gals from Bayonne, North Bergen, and other mafia swamplands will soon be transported by the taxpayers. I hope.

"We don't know from nothing!" is the most often heard remark in New Jersey's Senate building. I agree with this statement.

How you doing Senator Bob? What's Debbie up to? Hey, Stuart Rabner -- you son of a gun! -- what are you planning now? Let me guess: You're taking Anne Milgram to the Hop? Hey, what's that envelope filled with cash doing in your pocket, Stuart? ("Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Neil M. Cohen, Esq. and Conduct Unbecoming to the Legislature in New Jersey.")

Notice that one can write a Truman Capote-like "non-fiction novel" using these improbable characters -- like Stuart Rabner and Anne Milgram -- where every fact is true (in N.J. politics there are always "untrue" facts because "it's all relative!"), reported fairly in the objective media, warranting the interpretations offered to readers. How else can one even begin to make sense of the evil and hypocrisy found in the inactivity of Rabner and Milgram as well as in the paralyzed institutions that they contaminate in the face of such great crimes (committed publicly and on a daily basis!) by underlings? ("New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State," then "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead.")

Creativity, imagination, become forms of resistance, weapons of struggle against power. The same may be said for humor. These are the weapons of those without formal power -- the billions of people on the planet with no voice other than those annoying "marginal" intellectuals and artists who refuse to go away, no matter how much you hurt them, insisting that you look at Darfur, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, New Jersey, Jena, Pakistan, or 9/11 squarely, not by way of distractions and sugar-coated misrepresentations of these grim realities, then reimagine our lives so that such things and places will no longer be possible. The pain of living with such social horrors is no longer bearable for many of us. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "America's Holocaust.")

Participation in this conversation will be more effective than tossing rocks at the police or at Americans, even firing rockets at Israelis may be less effective than Internet satire. Communication will work better than terrorism. Don't grab a rifle or a suicide bomb-kit, get your camera or start a blog.

Share the torture and censorship with me, invite your friends to do the same, and we will find solutions together.

"In the end," Terry Eagleton writes, "there are commitments we cannot walk away from however hard we may try; and these loyalties, whether commendable or obnoxious, are definitive of who we are. The commitments which run deepest are only in a limited sense ones we can choose, which is where voluntarism goes wrong."

We can only choose what they will mean for us.

"... Anyone who genuinely believed that nothing was more important than anything else, as opposed to running this line because it seems fashionably 'anti-hierarchical,' would not be quite what we recognize as a person. And you would only need to observe them in action for five minutes to recognize that they did not actually believe it at all."

After Theory (New York: Perseus, 2003), p. 200. ("Good man, Perseus ..." -- words spoken by Private Gibson in "The Sure Thing.")

Two concepts are deployed by Umberto Eco that are intended to allow us to survive in this asylum that is postmodernist culture, as "neo-" Resistance fighters. First, abandoning causality for "force" or "explanation" (Donald Davidson) in social theory:

"The inability to distinguish between power and causality leads to much childish political behavior. As we have seen, things are not all that simple. Let's replace the notion of causality (one-directional) with that of force. A force is applied to another force: They form a parallelogram of forces." (Eco, p. 249.)

Think of American politics. Anybody seen Neal Stephenson? Am I skateboarding in cyberspace? Snow Crash!

Second, the displacement of power into symbols and symbol-systems leads to the displacement of ourselves, our identities, also into symbols and symbol-systems. Your racist stereotypes will be defeated in an alternative universe (conjured by me) in which bald people, for instance, are discriminated against on the basis of absurd beliefs no more defensible than the racism you live with, every day, that destroys people. How do you remain silent in the face of racism? We need ...

" ... symbolic gestures, a theatrical finale that sanctioned in a manner also scenically pregnant, a crisis in power relationships that had been spreading, in a grass-roots way, for a long time. And without which the pseudo act of force, without symbolic power, [will be] destined to become adjusted in a little local parallelogram." (Eco, at p. 251.)

We will not "adjust." We will not "accept." We will struggle. Always struggle. We will bring the force of love into relation with, against (or as) power, in order to limit power through revolutions that are not seen until they are successful.

Don't let anybody usurp the people's power and revolution in Egypt.

III. Closing the Hermeneutic Circle by Affirming the Dark Moment of "Revolution."

Along with power and human fallibility, we find a disposition towards the good, a capacity for hope, and insistence on making the world more just and ourselves more free in language, including the languages of symbols. The contrast is, first, between the insights and warnings offered by Kojeve (Hegelian-Leftist) and Fukuyama (from the Right of the political spectrum):

"Technology has not leveled the ups and downs of our lives. Looking in a mirror long enough, however, and looking for the worst, we do get intimations of ourselves as those automatons which Alexander Kojeve has seen to emerge at the end of history when 'the species of Homo sapiens' (which will live amidst abundance and complete security)" -- in some places! -- "will be content, when the species will react by conditioned reflexes to vocal signals or sign 'language.' ..."

Henry S. Kariel, The Desperate Politics of Postmodernity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), p. 4 (emphasis added); see also, Alexander Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (New York: Basic Books, 1969), pp. 160-161, and Fukuyama, cited above.

On Modernities and Postmodernities within a great novel of ideas, see Malcolm Bradbury's final novel, To The Hermitage (New York: Overlook Press, 2000) and concerning the end of humanity, as allegory, see Michel Houllebecq, The Elementary Particles (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), pp. 263-264. (See "'Invasion': A Movie Review." If you are a Conservative, that movie is for you.) PLEASE see Spielberg's "A.I."

Secondly, there is the celebration of autonomy and freedom, goodness and love from the Utopian and idealistic Left in a Post-68' mood, refusing to surrender to despair, lethargy, or adjustment to the status of docile bodies, resisting, struggling, waging revolutions by making love as well as beauty in affirmation of our indestructible humanity, which has something to do with that old concept of God. (See "Neo's Freedom in the Matrix.")

Christopher Peacocke, a well-behaved English Oxfordian -- who will be shocked and horrified at being quoted in this discussion by a "ruffian" like me -- says: " ... there is a significant range of normative kinds, such that each truth of that kind has an a priori component."

Besides power, therefore, there is an indestructible moral capacity ingrained in us and in language. Against power, as a kind of anti-power, there is love. We live between contradictions, automatons or anti-automatons? Racists or anti-racists? The only way to live with these contraditions is through creative dialogue and (or as) expression. We must choose sides and struggle. There is no third option:

"... for any moral proposition we are entitled to accept there is a similar division: into its a priori moral grounds on the one hand and its a posteriori non-moral grounds on the other. [Dual aspects?] ..."

The Realm of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 198-205. (See my essay, "Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "Is it rational to believe in God?")

Everything excluded, returns, in altered form in postmodernism's hall of mirrors -- including Modernist reason and God. We are left to play with "passion" and "irony," the choice is between Unger and Rorty. Compare Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. xvi with Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Passion: An Essay on Personality (New York: Free Press, 1984), p. 107.

Umberto Eco closes with the idea of "celebration" of our human capacity to resist dehumanization -- a "rave scene"! -- which must have thrilled Duncan Kennedy and the Wachowski brothers. This affirmation should be contrasted with Houellebecq's carefree pessimism:

"As an aspect of resistance to power, the celebration introduces an element of self-confidence, which acts to disrupt the consensus dictated by fear. Its results cannot be immediate; and furthermore, there can be no result unless other marginal attitudes correspond to the celebration ..." (Eco, p. 253.)

See Kennedy's Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy (New York: New York University Press, 2004), pp. 114-115. Here is where Unger comes in handy:

"In the setting of our non-instrumental relations to one another, we come to terms with our unlimited mutual need and fear. This coming to terms is a search. It is a quest for freedom -- for the basic freedom that includes an assurance of being at home in the world. To define the search for such a freedom is to formulate a conception of passion that offers alternatives to the doctrines that contrast passion to rational understanding or social convention."

Finally,

"The most radical freedom is the freedom to be, to be a unique person in the world as it is."

Passion, pp. 107-108. ("Good Will Humping" and "Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down.")