As for the virtual world, it is widely known, since the news has spread across the Internet, that one of my false Twitter accounts recently announced the death of Dan Brown, while my own death was announced on another. Although all organs of information have established that this was a hoax, I see that some people then assumed that, since everyone knows I’m a notorious prankster, I had sent a “false” message from a “real” address. In short, the gods are ready to amaze all those who wish to lose themselves on the Web, and I hope there’s someone out there who will get in touch with Marina and start up a beautiful friendship.
Teachers who want to show young people how not to trust the Internet can find websites that expose online hoaxes. Fortunately, as well as hosting bogus sites, the Internet has ways of unmasking them. All you need to know is how to navigate properly.
But Web idolatry has its victims. Take the news that appeared last week. In Rome, a boy straddled over the parapet of his bedroom window on the ninth floor of an apartment block with a knife to his stomach threatens to kill himself. Family, police, fire brigade, inflatable mattress stretched out on the ground below. No one can persuade him to climb down. Until the boy shouts out that he wants to appear on a reality show, and wants to be taken there in a limousine. The police remember there’s a limousine parked nearby, used the previous day for a publicity shoot. They have it brought there, and the boy gets down.
Moral of the story: the only “real” thing that can dissuade someone from suicide is the promise of virtual reality. It’s easy to say the boy was disturbed, but this is no comfort to us, since it’s reasonable to imagine that all those who believe in reality shows (or who reply to Marina, or who seriously believe those sites that suggest the attack on the Twin Towers was carried out by Bush and by the Jews) would easily pass a psychiatric test. Therefore, apart from exceptional cases, the problem of the virtual world doesn’t relate to the sick but to the sane.
2013
I urge you to be brief
At a time when everyone is going mad over Twitter, when even the pope is tweeting, and a universal tweet ought to replace representative democracy, two contrasting views continually emerge. The first is that Twitter leads people to express themselves in a moralistic but superficial manner, since, as is well known, it requires more than 140 characters to write the Critique of Pure Reason. The second is that Twitter encourages brevity and succinctness.
Allow me to temper both positions. It is said that text messages also make our children understand and use only telegraphic language such as “Luv u 4ever,” forgetting that the first telegram was sent by Samuel Morse back in 1844, and despite years and years of “mother ill come now” or “fond wishes Katerina,” many people still write like Proust. Humanity has learned to send messages of few words, but that didn’t stop a certain politician from speaking for eighteen hours in the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1981.
As for the notion that Twitter encourages brevity, I think that’s going too far. Even with 140 characters there’s a risk of rambling. Certainly this news: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep” is worthy of the Pulitzer Prize, since it says in just under 140 characters, including spaces, exactly what the reader would like to know. But there are much shorter ways of saying things of great wit—“To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose both looks like carelessness,” “A good poet is made, as well as born”—or of great profoundness, such as “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil,” “Man is a rational, mortal animal,” “Power is not taken, it is found,” “To be or not to be, that is the question,” “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” “All that is real is rational,” “All Gaul is divided into three parts.” Or phrases or ideas that have marked the history of humanity, such as “Veni vidi vici,” “Non possumus,” “Italy, or death!”
To paraphrase Ugo Foscolo: Twitter users, I urge you to be brief.
2013
On Cell Phones
More thoughts on the cell phone
I wrote a fairly irate article in the early 1990s when cell phones were in the hands of just a few people, but a few who were making train journeys hell. I said, in short, that cell phones should be allowed only for organ transplanters, plumbers, and adulterers. For everyone else, especially in cases where otherwise unremarkable people were blabbing away in trains or airports about stocks and shares, metal section beams, or bank loans, it was more than anything a sign of social inferiority. Those in real power don’t have cell phones but twenty secretaries who screen their calls and messages, whereas those who need them are middle managers who have to answer to the CEO at any moment, or small businessmen whose banks need to tell them their account is overdrawn.
As for adulterers, the situation has changed twice since that article appeared. Initially they had to forgo this very personal means of communication, since its acquisition gave rise to justifiable suspicion in the minds of their spouses. Then the situation changed: everyone had one, so it was no longer cast-iron evidence of an adulterous relationship. Lovers can now use them, unless they’re having affairs with persons who are to some degree in the public eye, in which case their conversations will certainly be tapped. No change with regard to social inferiority—there are still no photos of Bush with his ear to a cell phone—but it’s a fact that the cell phone has become an instrument for communication, and excessive communication, between mothers and children, for cheating on exams, and for photomania. Younger generations are abandoning their wristwatches because they can check the time on their cell phones. Add to this the birth of text messages, of up-to-the-minute news information, of the opportunity to connect to the Internet and receive wireless emails. In their more sophisticated forms, cell phones can function as pocket computers, so that we’re now in the presence of a phenomenon that is socially and technologically essential.
Can we still live without a cell phone? Given that “living with a cell phone” means a total acceptance of the here-and-now and a frenzy of contact that deprives us of a single moment of solitary thought, anyone who cherishes their own inner and outer freedom can exploit the very many services it offers, apart from its use as a telephone. At most it can be switched on just to call a taxi or tell those at home that the train is three hours late, but not for being called—all you have to do is keep it switched off. When anyone complains about this practice of mine, I reply with a rather somber argument. When my father died over forty years ago, and therefore long before cell phones, I was on a journey and it was many hours before I could be reached. Well, those hours of delay had changed nothing. The situation would have been no different had I been called within ten minutes. This all means that instant communication provided by the cell phone has little to do with the great questions of life and death, it’s of no use to someone who is studying Aristotle, nor to someone struggling over the existence of God.
Does that mean a philosopher would have no interest in a cell phone, apart from its allowing him to carry in his pocket a list of three thousand books on Malebranche? On the contrary. Certain technological innovations have changed human life to such an extent as to become a topic for philosophical discussion—just think of the invention of writing, from Plato to Derrida, or the advent of mechanical looms (see Marx). Curiously there has been little philosophical reflection on other technological changes that seem so important to us, such as the car or the airplane, though there has been on the changing concept of speed. But we use the car and the airplane only at particular times, unless we’re a taxi or truck driver or a pilot, whereas writing and the mechanization of most of our daily activities have had a radical impact on every second of our lives.
Maurizio Ferraris has written about the philosophy of the cell phone in Where Are You? An Ontology of the Cell Phone. Perhaps the title
raises a hint of light amusement, but Ferraris draws a number of serious reflections from his subject, and involves us in a rather intriguing philosophical game. Cell phones are radically changing our way of life and have therefore become “philosophically interesting.” Having also taken on the role of pocket diary and minicomputer with a Web connection, the cell phone is less and less an oral instrument and more and more an instrument for reading and writing. As such, it has become an all-inclusive tool for recording, and we can see how words like “writing,” “recording,” and “inscription” might make a confederate of Derrida prick up his ears.
The first hundred pages on the “anthropology” of the cell phone are fascinating even for the nonspecialist. There’s a substantial difference between talking on a telephone and talking on a cell phone. On the telephone we could ask whether a certain person was at home, whereas on the cell phone, unless it’s stolen, we always know who is answering, and whether he or she is there, which also changes the quality of intimacy. But with a landline we know where we are calling. Now, with the cell phone, there’s the problem of where the person is. There again, if he or she replies “I’m right behind you” but has an account with a cell phone company in a different country, the answer may be traveling halfway around the world. Nonetheless, we don’t know where the other person is, whereas the telephone company knows where we both are, so that while we can avoid letting the other person know our precise whereabouts, our movements are totally transparent when it comes to Orwell’s Big Brother.
We can see various pessimistic and paradoxical, though credible, aspects of the new Homo cellularis. For example, it changes the very dynamic of face-to-face interaction between A and B, which is no longer a one-to-one relationship because the conversation can be interrupted by a cell phone call from C, and the interaction between A and B continues intermittently or stops altogether. And so the prime instrument of connection, my being continually available to others and they to me, becomes at the same time the instrument of disconnection: A is connected to everyone except B. Among those reasons for optimism I like to recall the tragedy of Dr. Zhivago, who after many years sees Lara on a tram. He cannot alight in time to reach her, and dies. If both had had mobile phones, how would their tragic story have ended? Ferraris’s analysis wavers, rightly, between the possibilities opened up by the cell phone and the way in which it cuts through our lives, above all in our loss of solitude, of silent personal reflection, and being condemned to a constant presence of the present. Change doesn’t always equate with liberation.
But one third of the way through the book, Ferraris passes from the cell phone to a discussion of questions that have increasingly interested him in recent years, including arguments against his early influences, from Heidegger to Gadamer and Vattimo, against philosophical postmodernism, against the idea that there are no facts but only interpretations, up to what is now a full defense of knowledge as adaequatio—that is, pace Richard Rorty, as a “Mirror of Nature.” This, of course, has to be taken with many pinches of salt, and I’m sorry I can’t follow step by step the foundation of realism that Ferraris calls “weak textualism.”
How do we get from the cell phone to the problem of Truth? Through a distinction between physical objects such as a chair or a mountain, ideal objects such as Pythagoras’s theorem, and social objects such as the Italian Constitution or our duty to pay for what we order at a bar. The first two types of object also exist independently of our decisions, whereas the third becomes operative, so to speak, only after a recording or an inscription. Once it is said that Ferraris also attempts to provide some kind of “natural” basis for these social recordings, it is here that the cell phone appears as the absolute instrument for every act of recording.
It would be interesting to discuss many parts of the book. For example, the pages devoted to the differences between types of recording, which include a bank statement, a law, any collection of personal data, and communication. Ferraris’s ideas about recording are intriguing, whereas his ideas about communication have always been somewhat generic. To use the metaphor from one of his earlier papers against him, they seem to have been purchased at IKEA. But this is not the place for deep philosophical debate.
Some readers will ask if it was really necessary to start from the cell phone to reach conclusions that could also have been reached from concepts of writing and “signature.” Certainly the philosopher can also start off from a reflection on a worm to draw an entire metaphysics, but perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is not that the cell phone has allowed Ferraris to develop an ontology, but that his ontology has allowed him to understand, and help us to understand, the cell phone.
2005
Swallowing the cell phone
Last week, I read this extraordinary newspaper headline: “Cell Phone Swallowing Moroccan in Rome Saved by Police.” As the police pass by late one evening, they see someone on the ground spitting blood, surrounded by a few countrymen, so they pull him up and take him to the hospital, where a Nokia is extracted from his throat.
Now, it seems impossible to me, unless it’s a publicity stunt for Nokia, that a human being, however deranged, could swallow a cell phone. The newspaper suggested the incident had happened during a settling of scores between drug dealers, and it is therefore likely the cell phone had been forced down his throat, not as a tasty morsel but as an act of retaliation. Perhaps the person punished had been calling someone he shouldn’t have.
A stone in the mouth is an insult of Mafia origin: it is stuck between the jaws of the corpse of whoever has divulged secrets to outsiders. Giuseppe Ferrara made a film about it in 1969, and it’s no surprise that the practice has been passed on to other ethnic groups. There again, the Mafia is such an international phenomenon that several years ago in Moscow, my Russian translator was asked how you say “Mafia” in Italian.
But this time it wasn’t a stone but a cell phone, and it seemed highly symbolic to me. The new criminal gangs are no longer rural but urban and technological; it is natural that they no longer settle scores with killings by ligature strangulation but instead, let us say, by “incyborgation.” Moreover, thrusting a cell phone into someone’s mouth is like a kick in the testicles: the cell phone is the most intimate and personal thing he possesses, the natural complement to his physical being, an extension of his ear, his eye, and also of his penis. Suffocating someone with his cell phone is like strangling him with his own entrails. There’s a message for you.
2008
On photography
Some time ago, during a speech I was giving at the Spanish Academy in Rome, a photographer kept dazzling me with a light to get a picture with her film camera so that I couldn’t read my notes. I reacted with irritation, saying, as I tend to do on such occasions with tactless photographers, that division of labor requires that when I’m working they must stop. So the person with the camera switched off her light, but behaved as if she’d been unfairly treated. Only last week, in the Apennine hill town of San Leo, at the start of a marvelous public event on the rediscovery of landscapes in the Montefeltro area that appear in the paintings of Piero della Francesca, three individuals were blinding me with their flashes, and once again I had to remind them about the rules of good behavior.
It should be noted that in both cases the dazzlers were not of the Big Brother kind, but presumably intelligent people who had come of their own free will to listen to discussions of a certain depth. Yet evidently the syndrome of the electronic eye had made them sink from the human level. With practically no interest in what was being said, all they wanted was to record the event, perhaps to put it on YouTube. They preferred not to follow what was being said so they could record on their cell phone what they could have seen with their own eyes.
This dominance of a mechanical eye to the detriment of the brain therefore seems to have affected the minds of otherwise civilized people. They’d have come out of whatever event they had attended with a few pictures—and they’d have been well ju
stified had I been a striptease artist—but with no idea what they had heard. And if, as I imagine, they go around the world photographing everything they see, they are evidently condemned to forget the next day what they have recorded the day before.
I have described on previous occasions how in 1960, after a tour of French cathedrals, taking photographs like a madman, I gave up photography. When I got home I found myself with a series of mediocre photos and couldn’t remember what I had seen. I threw the camera away and recorded only mentally what I saw on my travels. For future reference, more for other people than for myself, I would buy a few good postcards.
Once, when I was eleven, my attention was caught by some odd noises on the highway just outside the city where I had been evacuated. Some distance away I saw that a truck had crashed into a horse-drawn cart driven by a farmer. His wife, who’d been sitting beside him, had been thrown to the ground, her head split open, and she was lying in a pool of blood and brain matter. I still recall the sight with horror, while her husband clung to her, howling in desperation.
I was terrified and didn’t get too close. Not only was it the first time I’d seen brain matter strewn across the asphalt, and fortunately it was also the last, but it was the first time I’d come face-to-face with Death. And Suffering, and Despair.