„Umberto Eco – The Vertigo of Lists “

00.03 Umberto Eco is publishing a new book. The fans and paparazzi fall on him instantly. Perhaps the most famous professor in Europe, his book ‚The Vertigo of Lists’ is coming out in 10 languages, in twenty different countries. The Louvre has been preparing for the launch for over a month. 

00.24 Eco’s book is about enumeration – lists without a system. No philosopher since Plato has taken this topic seriously. Eco has rediscovered it. 

O-T Umberto Eco

00.34. The whole of Western philosophy has taught us that the definition of a thing has to capture its essence. But imagine for a moment that you are a Martian who has landed on Earth for the first time and has never seen a dog before. And, as this Martian, you ask me: ‚What is a dog?’

If I were to give you a scientific explanation of a dog I would say: ‚It is a mammal of the genus canidae’. This means nothing to a Martian. A normal person would say ‚A dog is an animal, about this big or that big. It has four legs and fur and it barks, etcetera, etcetera.’

In short, a person would describe a dog by listing its characteristics. 01.13

01.14 Not only aliens like lists. According to Umberto Eco, the Louvre itself illustrates this perfectly. Every museum is a huge row of individual pieces. It is often only for the curator that a systematic order is obvious. And then, even the works themselves present us with infinite lists. Just like classic works of literature.

01.39 Even Homer, in his Illiad, has 300 verses dedicated to a list of Greek ships sailing to Troy. From the Holy Litanies to Andy Warhol’s series of soup tins, Western culture is infatuated with lists. But why?

O-T Umberto Eco

01.52 The list in literature has its source in our thrill at the infinite. It is not always the duty of a writer to name things. That is just a bit of nonsense invented by Heidegger, who often talked a lot of rubbish. In fact, the writer often expresses a great deal more when he says: ‚I am unable to tell you how much I love you; how you can find God; or how beautiful a flower is.’

The topos of the ‚inexpressable’ is unbelievably important in literature. It allows you, the reader, to think about things further alone. I, the writer, am not in a position to tell you everything. So you must try to come up with the rest on your own. And this is exactly the point of the list in literature. 02.37

02.38/9 Scientists abhor listing: a list has no hierarchy, no system. It is a chaos of individual items. All researchers wants to impose a meaningful, logical structure onto the world. But all too often the world refuses to bend to their rules. Particularly in our consumer society.

02.54 A modern metropolis is full of disordered lists and Capitalists. Full of names, things and products.

O-T Umberto Eco

03.05.

The shop window is a wonderful example of a list, as it displays a monstrous collection of objects. And the window somehow always suggests that there is more in store than just the things you can see. Enter and you will find a lot more. The window-display is, therefore, an almost violent offer of goods, in a long, enticing list, designed to make us want to buy. In my book I quote a sentence from Marx, the beginning of ‚Das Kapital’: ‚Modern society appears to be a monstrous collection of items for sale.’[1] 03.41

03.42/3 Consumer goods are not the only thing that’s booming. So is the depth of our knowledge. For centuries, libraries have been piling books on top of books. They are now so numerous it is impossible to count them. There are just catalogues: endless lists of titles.

04.01 But even the biggest catalogues have been torn apart by the mass of information we call the internet. The innumerable results spat out by search engines completely wipe out the traditional methods of catalogueing.

O-T Umberto Eco

04.17. The internet, the Web, is the list to end all lists. The Mother of all lists. For it is an infinite collection of data. And has one thing in common with all lists: total disorder. On-line I can just as easily find a biography of Kant, a picture of the attack of the giant ants...or a porn film. The problem is that they should teach you a technique in school of distinguishing between what is useful and useless online. However, this technique doesn’t exist. Or no-one knows it. 04.51

04.54 That’s why Eco advises his students to learn from the old masters, from the great authors who were able to order their thoughts without resorting to modern technology. However, his own favourite book, the one he would take with him to a desert island, is not by one of these great masters: it is a giant list itself.

O-Ton Umberto Eco

05.12. Everyone always takes something by Shakespeare to a desert island, or Tolstoy, or Dante. That’s a big mistake. Once you’ve read a book like that two, three or four times – it gets very boring. That’s why I would rather take the phone book with me. I could come up with infinite stories with all the names of people in it.  05.32

05.39 Clearly whilst Professor Eco calls himself a scientist, he remains at heart a  writer.

End: 06.00