Review of the Month - September 1999.
New Science.
Giambattista Vico. Penguin Classics.......1999
Renaissance mansion : Vico and the structure of meaning
There is a dismal fashion in the contemporary business-book world for authors to seek lost insights in well-known literature and myth. Sacred texts such as the Bible and Shakespeare are now being re-mined by business-school boors in the pursuit of flash new models of commercial organisation, consumer motivation, leadership stratagems, etc, etc.
This may already be getting out of hand. Soon, we fear, we are bound to see on our airport bookshelves : Play cat and mouse with the competition - the hidden meaning of Tom and Jerry for brand-builders everywhere; or The Springsteen Syndrome - how you can turn your personal feelings of loss and yearning into a thriving family business; or Your friends even closer - use your connections to clinch your career the Godfather way!........ You get the idea. There is probably quite a good dinner-party game in here somewhere. As such and as always, we bequeath it to our clients absolutely free-of-charge.
The author of the book now under review was born in Naples in 1668. His is the best, the hardest book we have read this year. And yes, we do actually believe that New Science offers living wisdom to the business community. In spite of ourselves, we thought we could see a whole management epistemology incorporated within its bewilderingly modern approaches and ideas. Vico was by trade a scholar of the ancient world and his aim was at once simple and stupefyingly complex : to find the irreducible meaning of language and literature and to locate the critical points at which order and progress break out in any social organism. In other terms, he tries to strip the semiotic engine of the ancient world and thus purify his perception of his own.
We reckon we could syndicate Vico's ideas into a management training module and make a fortune. But for now, let's just try to bake a crisp proof of Vico's value to the planner, the brand manager, the human resource professional, the marketing consultant and the candlestick maker. Since we understand that Vico is currently quite popular in some American universities, let us insouciantly advise you not to bother with one Isaiah Berlin's popular notice about Vico in his book The Crooked Timber of Humanity (Harper Collins 1990). In a hurry to tell you about a blindingly good read, we have to declare that Sir Isaiah did not understand our man really very well at all. Anyway, we seek high profits not low prophets. Anyway, more of this later....
So what is the real story? This is our take.
Firstly, meaning is context. Vico tries to decode what the world of the classics actually meant - not merely to endorse the fashionable view that it was a golden age of human achievement; his task was to dispel "the common belief in the incomparable wisdom of the ancients". A lot of classical poetry he recognises is - our spin not his actual words - so much tosh. (Remember, at school, all those long lists of vegetables in Virgil......? Our case, in part, rests on those very vegetables!). This is largely because the poetry of the time represented a rudimentary effort to bring order and purpose to a society still but two steps away from the squalor of the jungle. Ancestor-worship and cultural nostalgia for lost glories that never really existed cannot possibly represent a proper method for finding historical truth - but can indeed represent a really good way of misunderstanding developments in our own times. Ain't that the truth!
Secondly, if one looks hard enough, according to Vico, one discovers that social progress turns on the primacy of certain common rituals, such as marriage ceremonies, burial rites, raw forms of jurisprudence, etc, etc. That these features are genuinely universal allows the historian-consultant to establish what is a) fixed and b) variable and particular in any given set of historical or contemporary circumstances. Vico is a champion of the best kind of analytical imperatives : establish primary research principles, measure everything that matters and, where (and only where) science can take you no further, invent insights that seem to fit... With these disciplines, you can enter any reality; see the really big picture; nothing need lie beyond your ken. Spooky but true. Moreover, Vico uses charts! The first thirty pages of his masterpiece is a dazzling little discourse on one image, a presentational effort that would bring credit down on the best consultancy house in the land. We would love to own the rights. "My science", says Vico, "proceeds like geometry which, by constructing and contemplating its basic elements, creates its own world of measurable quantities....". Quite.
Finally, Vico insists that one truly equips oneself to understand any living reality in studying, in all their tremendous volatility, the meaning of words. Many words born in classical times were potent, society-defining metaphors and to chart their long process of decay into general usage is run your finger round the tree-circle of human development. Thus we can see our own civilisation take shape as words such as family, urban, actor, justice, logic......drift far away from once highly specific experience-metaphors and into common culture. Isaiah Berlin does not admire the precision of Vico's philology, but for us this is not the point. Vico's modern purpose is to remind us that words and symbols are in constantly dynamic interplay with life. As such, they can easily create a minefield of misunderstandings and false assumptions about the true extent of shared meaning. Consider how in our own times words like nuts, divorce, poverty, motherhood, abuse, bonds, leisure, net, anorak......can pile onto themselves as many new layers of meaning as a mille feuille cake. It's no cheap link but Vico's word-genealogies contain many important messages for those whose job it is to communicate the maximum amount of successful message to the maximum number of people. We cannot recommend him highly enough to that very community. His watchword is : watch words.
Just thrill if you will to Vico's description of the true purpose of poets and think of all the marketing expressions that could be substituted for the term "great poetry" :-
"Great poetry has three tasks.
to invent sublime myths which are suited to the popular understanding
to excite to ecstasy so that poetry attains its purpose; and this purpose is
to teach the masses to act virtuously, just as the poets have taught themselves..."
Vico's book is worth its weight in epigrammes that make you want to read entire paragraphs over again - in case you missed something. We will assume for our part that we missed lots. And, our heresy is most emphatically that there should be more books on the commercial implications of an unrecognised star. Yes, remember the backstreets of Naples right enough!
We are crazee about New Science!
