Foundation Grants to Individuals ed. by Loren Renz (review)

to a holography gallery, wax museums, the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, the Museum of the City of NewYork,California’sflamboyant Hearst Castle and Madonna Inn, the Wall Street area of New York, Forest Lawn Cemeteries , Disneyland and Disney World, and California and Florida’s marine cities and artificial jungles. He emerges from histravels with hissensesbenumbed and with a critical European smugness that gives rise to ironic explanations of what he has seen. Eco definitely has his finger on a not tooflattering feature of American culture, though we should remember that his journeydid preselectforsomeofAmerica’s most garish monuments and institutions. I bristled at his hinting at the existenceof a unified American Character, of which thesecultural shrinesweresupposed to be emblematic. Umberto Eco is a confident (perhaps overconfident) tour guide through a culture that is not his own. Perhaps hyperreality is an appealingly academic epithet or a euphemism for saying Americans just are not as subtle, understated and sophisticated as Europeans. I’m not going to defend wax museums,theMadonna Inn orDisneyland on aesthetic or intellectual grounds, but surelyEco’sjourney through the Absolute Fake isperhaps a linkage of artifacts that were selected because they fit a particular scheme. Most of the readers of this book will be intellectuals who will be dazzled by Eco’s artful language, his unremitting clevernessand his Europeanism to which Americans humbly defer because we are supposedlybereft of history and therefore of true depth. America is rife with banality, with kitsch and with all kinds of grotesqueries, but there is subtlety here too. Other essaysinclude a fine study of the People’s Temple suicides. He demonstrates hisskillsat historicalinterpretation by showing that what seems to be an utterly incomprehensible event actually has a historical link with the millenarian movements that emerged throughout Westernhistory from the firstcenturies of Christianity down to the present. We accompany this master of signs to Afro-Brazilian CandomblC rites in a terreiro in SLo Paulo where he vividly evokes spiritual frenzy while concluding that “[these rites] are one of the many ways the disinherited masses are kept on their reservation, while at their expense the generals industrialize the country, offering it to the exploitation of foreign capital”. His jeremiad against spectator sports in the pieces “Sports Chatter” and “The World Cupand Its Pomps” areespecially endearing. In “The World Cup and Its Pomps”, Eco recalls attending a soccer game with his father when he was 13and comingawayfrom theexperiencedoubting the existence of God for thefirst time and further deciding that the world is a pointless fiction. ... As far back as I can remember, soccerfor me has been linked with the absenceof purposeandthevanityof all things, and with the fact that the SupremeBeing may be (or may not be) simply a hole. He then proceeds in his discussion of the World Cup to demonstrate that sports banter istheeasiestsubstitute for political debate. No semiotician worthy of the title is going to overlook the structure of power and its expressions. In “Falsification and Consensus”, Eco provides a modern model of power relations that might obtain among individuals, corporations or countries. He views power as a function of a network of consensus, rather than as the aggregate arbitrary decisions of top-level people (kings, presidents or corporations, etc.) that the rest of us have to livewith. So,the current form of guerrilla protest is not the killing or deposingof a king but instead a protest aimed at disinformation, the use of technology for the purpose of disruptive falsification. Nothing escapes Eco’s scrutiny. He takes us to a seemingly innocent event, the Milan Trade Fair, in his piece, “Two Families of Objects”. Two types of objectsmake up theexposition: ‘beautiful’ objects such as sausages, motorboats, easychairsandashtrays(consumergoods), and ‘ugly’ objects, consisting of heavy machinery (the means of production). The fair is saying to the ordinary citizen: Be true to your ordinariness: you don’t need a lathe or a cement mixer. Society’s members are reminded of their place in this hall of entertainment. Workers will leave the fair seeking to acquire the beautiful objects with their wages, having been successfully steered away from coveting the ugly objects, the means of production, which could buy their freedom. Semioticians do not attend...