Before Foucault’s Pendulum, we did not have the book that predicts the twenty-first century’s conspiracy culture. After it, we did, and nobody noticed, because Umberto Eco buried the prediction inside six hundred pages of medieval occult history, Kabbalistic digression, Jesuit-versus-Mason institutional rivalry, and a plot that a reader cannot follow without taking notes. This is the book’s great problem and its great virtue. It is a warning disguised as a puzzle. The warning is now operative. The puzzle is now secondary. The disguise has outlived its usefulness and the warning is finally visible.
Eco wrote the novel in 1988. It is his second novel, following The Name of the Rose by eight years, and it is everything the earlier book was plus twenty percent more digression. The plot, as briefly as I can render it: three editors at a small Milanese vanity press — Belbo, Diotallevi, Casaubon — spend their days rejecting manuscripts from cranks who want to publish books about the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati, and the occult hidden history of Europe. The manuscripts are uniformly terrible. The editors, bored, begin a private game. They feed fragments of the crank submissions into a computer — in 1988, a computer is still a novelty object in this novel — and they invent, for their own amusement, a grand unified conspiracy theory that connects every crank manuscript into a single coherent narrative called The Plan. The Plan traces a centuries-long occult project from the Knights Templar to the present day. It is, the editors all agree, entirely made up. It is also internally consistent, well-researched, and so seductive that the editors themselves begin to half-believe it, and so do the cranks who find out about it, and so does, eventually, an organized secret society that wants to know where the hidden treasure is. There is a murder. There is a climactic séance. The book ends with Casaubon in hiding in the countryside, waiting for the society to find him and kill him for knowledge he does not actually possess.
Eco wrote this book in the full knowledge that the mechanism he was describing was the central pathology of modernity. The mechanism is simple: a sufficiently intelligent reader, given enough miscellaneous data and enough permission to connect it, will construct a conspiracy theory, and the conspiracy theory will feel more satisfying than the data, and the reader will begin to prefer the theory to the world. Eco had watched this happen in the 1970s in Italy — the Red Brigades, the P2 Masonic lodge, the Aldo Moro kidnapping, the Strategy of Tension — and he had watched it happen in postwar European religious and political life generally, and he had spent his career as a semiotician studying the mechanism by which meaning attaches itself to arbitrary signs. Foucault’s Pendulum is his novel-length warning that the mechanism is not an occasional error. It is the default state of a literate mind that has been deprived of empirical discipline.
He did not know, in 1988, how completely the 21st century would confirm him. He did not know about QAnon. He did not know about the anti-vax conspiracy economy. He did not know about the Pizzagate shooting or the Epstein-island theories or the Russiagate counter-theories or any of the specific hundred-thousand-page online collaborative conspiracies that the open internet would make possible. He only knew the mechanism. He predicted, correctly, that the mechanism would scale, and that when it scaled it would become the operating mode of a significant fraction of the population, and that the population thus operating would be unable to distinguish between the conspiracy theories it had invented and the history it had inherited. He predicted all of this in 1988, in a novel that most of its readers read as a puzzle to be solved rather than a diagnosis to be absorbed.
The puzzle-readings have dated. The diagnosis-reading has not. Pick up Foucault’s Pendulum now and read it in light of the online year you are having. You will recognize the three editors. You will recognize The Plan. You will recognize the tone, exactly, of the cranks whose manuscripts they reject. You will recognize the moment at which the editors begin to lose the distinction between what they made up and what they found. You will recognize, uncomfortably, the way you yourself read certain kinds of news.
The book is not fun. It is long. It is digressive. It assumes a reader who is patient with Kabbalistic footnotes and Masonic historical minutiae. Eco wrote for a reader who had the leisure of his own European mid-century. That reader is mostly extinct. What survives is the diagnostic core.
If you do not want to read the novel, read the 1995 essay that condenses its thesis into fourteen pages. It is called Ur-Fascism, published in the New York Review of Books, and it is the most widely quoted political essay Eco wrote. Foucault’s Pendulum is the novel that contains the disease. Ur-Fascism is the clinical description. The novel is the more complete document. The essay is the more teachable one. Read both. Bring them together. The combination is the equipment Eco was trying to hand forward, and it is, finally, being taken up.
A related vagobond.com piece: On Translation and Survival.
Readers and fans of Foucault’s Pendulum will really enjoy Keys to the Riad — my novel about a house full of symbols that the characters cannot stop interpreting, and the particular danger of a reader who has the key to too many doors. Same mechanism. Different city. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
