The deliberate and systematic ambiguity of the open work is associated by Eco with a wellknown feature of modern art, namely its high degree of formal innovation. Ambiguity, for Eco, is the product of the contravention of established conventions of expression: the less conventional forms of expression are, the more scope they allow for interpretation and therefore the more ambiguous they can be said to be. In traditional art, contraventions occurred only within very definite limits, and forms of expression remained substantially conventional; its ambiguity, therefore, was of a clearly circumscribed kind. In the modern open work, on the other hand, the contravention of conventions is far more radical, and it is this that gives it its very high degree of ambiguity; since ordinary rules of expression no longer apply, the scope for interpretation becomes enormous. Moreover, conventional forms of expression convey conventional meanings, and conventional meanings are parts of a conventional view of the world. Thus, according to Eco, traditional art confirms conventional views of the world, whereas the modern open work implicitly denies them.
«Ambiguity» is one term used by Eco to represent the effect of formal innovation in art. Another is «information»; Chapter 3 below deals with the connection between the mathematical theory of information and the idea of openness. What interests Eco about this theory, in brief, is the principle that the information (as opposed to the «meaning») of a message is in inverse proportion to its probability or predictability. This suggests to him a parallel between the concept of information and the effect of art, particularly modern art, since the forms of art can be said to possess a high degree of improbability or unpredictability by virtue of their contravention of established conventions of expression.
Thus, Eco argues, art in general may be seen as conveying a much higher degree of information, though not necessarily a higher degree of meaning, than more conventional kinds of communication; and the modern open work may be seen as conveying an exceptionally high degree of information, because of the radical contraventions of established conventions that characterize it. Eco’s interest in information theory was clearly one of the factors that led him shortly afterward to the study of semiotics. (Readers may notice that in the present volume, Eco’s chapter «Openness, Information, Communication contains, as does the preceding chapter, a number of structuralist or semiotic arguments. These were inserted by Eco in later editions of Opera aperta.)
Opera aperta thus proposes an equation between the degree of openness, the degree of information, the degree of ambiguity, and the degree of contravention of conventions in a work, an equation which serves to distinguish traditional and modern art from one another, but which does not in itself tell us anything about the distinction between art and nonart or good art and bad, since the contravention of conventions and the consequent proliferation of possibilities of interpretation are not in themselves a guarantee of artistic value.
To distinguish good art from bad, Eco takes over from Pareyson’s aesthetics of «formativity» the concept of organic form, which for him as for Pareyson is closely allied to that of artistic intention. Thus he argues, first, that the contravention of conventions in modern art must, if it is to be aesthetically successful, produce «controlled disorder» (Chapter 3), the «organic fusion of multiple elements» (Chapter 4). Second, the interpretation of the modem open work is far from entirely free; a formative intention is manifest in every work, and this intention must be a determining factor in the interpretive process. For all its openness, the work nonetheless directs the public’s response; there are right ways and wrong ways, for instance, of reading Finnegans Wake.
The concepts of organic form and artistic intention are important qualifications of Eco’s notion of openness, but it must be said that they are qualifications of a somewhat problematic and elusive kind, as modern literary theory has shown. How does one distinguish between organic and nonorganic or «failed» form, especially in a work characterized by a multiplicity of different meanings? How does one identify, especially in a work of this kind, the «intentions implicitly manifested» by the author (Chapter 4), and why in any case should one’s interpretation be bound by them?
Eco gives no real answer to the latter questions. He gives a partial and not wholly satisfactory answer to the first in his discussion (Chapter z) on the analysis of poetic language, which, drawing on The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards, the work of the American New Critics, and the theories of the semichician C. W. Morris, explains the structure of poetic language in terms of an «iconic» function, a special union of sound and sense; but the explanation seems to create more problems than it resolves. We shall return to this answer, and to these questions, in connection with his later work.
Such difficulties are not, of course, serious grounds for objecting to the thesis of Opera aperta. As Eco emphasized in the preface to the second edition,’ the book is more concerned with the aims of certain kinds of art than with their success or failure, with questions of poetics (poetica: a work’s artistic purpose) rather than aesthetics. This claim is anticipated in the essay «Two Hypotheses about the Death of Art,» written in 1962 and now Chapter 8 below. Here Eco argues that questions of poetics are central to the discussion of all modern works of art, although their treatment needs to be complemented by acts of aesthetic judgment (in connection with which he once again invokes Pareyson’s theory of formativity).
This insistence on the importance of poetics is a major part of Eco’s, and many of his contemporaries’, polemic against the then dominant «aesthetic criticism» inspired by Croce, for whom the act of aesthetic judgment was the essential task of the critic, and questions of poetics of secondorder interest.
Nevertheless, much of the impetus of Opera aperta derives from its conception of the special function or effect of the modern open work in relation to the world in which we live, and this conception depends to a large extent on Eco’s (and Pareyson’s) general aesthetic theory. The conception is most fully developed in an essay published shortly after the book appeared, reprinted in subsequent editions (for example, the second), and now Chapter 6 below: «Form as Social Commitment» («Del modo di formare come impegno sulla realti»).
This essay was written for the journal 11 Menabb, apparently at the suggestion of its editor, the prominent socialist novelist Elio Vittorini, and appeared in the second of two issues on the relationship between literature and industry; it represents a viewpoint quite closely allied to Vittorini’s own. Even more than the first edition of Opera aperta it has the character of a manifesto for certain kinds of avantgarde art, by virtue of the conviction it expresses, characteristic of the Gruppo 63 and of Vittorini, about avantgarde art’s special political function.
In this essay, as in Opera aperta, Eco argues that the modern open 3. Opera aperta, znd ed. (Milan: Bompiani, 1972), p. 8.
work represents through its formal properties a characteristically modern experience of the world. Like all art, it is an «epistemological metaphor»: not only does it reflect aspects of modern philosophy (phenomenology, Pareyson’s aesthetics) and modem science (the theory of relativity, mathematical information theory), but what is equally important, through its lack of conventional sense and order, it represents by analogy the feeling of senselessness, disorder, «discontinuity» that the modern world generates in all of us. Thus, although open works are not the only kind of art to be produced in our time, they are the only kind that is appropriate to it; the conventional sense and order of traditional art reflect an experience of the world wholly different from ours, and we deceive ourselves if we try to make this sense and order our own.
What, then, do we gain from art forms that reflect what can only seem a negative aspect of the world in which we live? Eco’s essay answers this question through a discussion of the concept of alienation, in which he outlines a position that has remained characteristic of all his activity as an intellectual. In one sense alienation is both necessary and desirable, in that we can say that we are alienated to something other than ourselves, and therefore lose full possession of ourselves, whenever we become involved in it. Losing possession of ourselves is not something to be lamented; it is simply part of the backandforth movement between self and the world that is the condition of a truly human existence.
What we must do is accept our involvement in things other than ourselves, and at the same time assert our selfhood in the face of the world by actively seeking to understand it and transform it. Art, Eco argues, can contribute significantly to this process of understanding and transforming the world, because its function is essentially cognitive. «Art knows the world through its own formative structures,» he proposes (Chapter 6), referring to the aesthetics of Pareyson once again.
Art represents the world—or more exactly our experience of the world—through the way it organizes its constituents (the modo di formare) rather than through what the constituents themselvesrepresent. This representation is a type of knowledge by virtue of the element of organic form: «Where a form is realized there is a conscious operation on an amorphous material that has been brought under human control» (Chapter 6). Thus, the modem open work is a form of knowledge of the world in which we live,
