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 Astronomies
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.