Naturally we must still ask whether Habitat was so impressive because, with its diverting forms, it was so different from everything else surrounding it. Perhaps an area composed only of such Habitats would result in a monotonous and regimented landscape. But who knows? An exposition does not give final answers; it suggests experimental directions. Habitat performed this task, justifying (since it was charged with stimuli) the many useless forms which surrounded it. A Perplexing Conclusion Even if an exposition could be a perfect teaching device, as we have suggested, is it worth the expense and effort? To organize an exposition means to organize a teaching machine dedicated to all the peoples of the world.
But, as we know very well, the visitors to Expo (with the possible exception of the Canadians) were well-to-do people, and these people generally can obtain ideas from innumerable cultural sources. They are the ones who least need these universal teaching devices. The world is able to produce splendid expositions but cannot allow all its children to move freely (politically and economically) to attend the Expo school. An exposition anywhere inevitably becomes a sort of mass communication for élites. In a pessimistic moment we might thus become convinced of the uselessness of expositions (though still recognizing their experimental and stimulating value). But we can draw other conclusions and make other hypotheses. For example: Isn’t it absurd that in our century we still build stationary expositions? Shouldn’t the designers of future expositions confront again the problem of Mohammed and the Mountain?
1967
About the Author
UMBERTO ECO is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna and the best-selling author of numerous novels and essays.
Footnotes
- The Palace of Living Arts closed in 1982.—ED.
- “Città e società verso il nuovo medioevo,” in U. Eco et al., Il nuovo medioevo (Milan: Bompiani, 1973).
*** * Aldo Gargani, ed., Crisi della ragione (Turin: Einaudi, 1979).
- Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York Harper andRow, 1962), p. 213.
- While the 1968 Olympics were in progress in Mexico City, hundreds of Mexican students were killed when security forces opened fire on an antigovernment demonstration.
- Written in 1978, the year of the kidnapping and eventual killing of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by Red Brigade terrorists.
- An independent radical radio station closed down by the police after the Bologna student riots of 1977, on the grounds that the station had incited the rioters and given them information about police movements.
- Luciano Lama, leader of the Communist-oriented General Confederation of Labor, was violently rejected when he tried to speak to students occupying the University of Rome. The incident confirmed the rupture between the Communist Party and the student movement of 1977.
- During a confrontation between rioters and police, a policeman was shot.
- “Available in The Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982) as “Inaugural Lecture,” trans. Richard Howard.
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York; Random House, 1979), pp. 16–17.
- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 92–94.
- The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
*** * New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
*** * History of Sexuality, I, pp. 95–96.
- Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 152.
