Umberto Eco’s last book or first posthumous book, Chronicles of a Liquid Society, is a collection of 116 columns, each 600 to 750 words, for L’Espresso, a weekly. The column was named “La Bustina de Minerva” after a matchbook that had a couple of white spaces inside, which Eco used for notes. Eco was a great note taker.
The title of the book refers to an idea from Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist who described the melting of societies from a solid to liquid state.
Eco asked: “What freedom do nation-states retain when faced with the power of supranational entities?”
Societies based on nations used to be able to resolve individual disputes. Now, no matter what the courts rule, the case is not settled — it’s reargued through social media, often without reference to facts. As Eco put it:
The crisis in the concept of community gives rise to unbridled individualism: people are no longer fellow citizens, but rivals to beware of … The certainty of the law is lost, the judiciary is regarded as the enemy, and the only solutions for people who have no points of reference are to make themselves conspicuous at all costs, to treat conspicuousness as a value, and to follower consumerism.
Eco’s last columns were on the theme of living in a social order that had gone from solid to gooey.
He thought the role of a responsible press in such a world was to stop feeding the instant news machine online and to get experts to analyze the content of various websites for accuracy and reliability. Instead of being part of the online phenomenon, newspapers and newsmagazines should stand apart from it, cover it and criticize it. Or so he thought, as do I.
The new calendar says today is Eco’s birthday. He was born in 1932 and died in 2016 at 84.
• Sources: Umberto Eco, Chronicles of a Liquid Society; Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
Last year, I made a note about Eco’s thinking on lists. If you’re a list maker, you can find it here:
https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/01/umberto-eco-and-importance-of-list.html
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