- Opera aperta, 3rd ed. (Milan: Bompiani, 1976), pp.
assente (The absent structure), an «introduction to semiological research,» according to the subtitle.8 This was followed by two less substantial theoretical texts,» and, in 1976, by Eco’s most advanced and systematic semiotic work so far, which incorporates and elaborates most of his previous thinking on the subject: A Theory of Semiotics, written originally in English and then translated into Italian.° This was in turn supplemented by the essays collected in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language.»
In discussing Eco’s semiotic theory I shall have to treat it as a single system, even though there are important developments from one book to the next. In a general way, however, we can note a difference of emphasis between the earlier and the later semiotic works that seems to reflect something of a shift in Eco’s interests and concerns after La struttura assente was written. Whereas the earlier book shows much the same polemical and socially committed character that we saw in Opera aperta and Apocalittici e integrati, such a character is much less apparent in A Theory of Semiotics. This is not to say that Eco has abandoned his earlier view of the intellectual’s task, but simply that a clearer separation of functions has come to govern his writing: in his journalism he pursues the line of attack mapped out in Apocalittici e integrati, but his theoretical work becomes much more specialized and academic. Eco himself says something to this effect in his preface to The Name of the Rose (p. 5),l2 though it is not certain to what extent he is really speaking in his own person; around 1968, he suggests, it was widely held that one should write «only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world,» whereas now, in 198o, «the man of letters . . . can happily write out of pure love of writing.»
This element of specialization and academicism in Eco’s writing in the 197os must to some extent be a consequence of his increasing
- Milan: Bompiani, 1968.
- Le forme del contenuto The forms of content (Milan: Bompiani, 1971); Segno The sign (Milan: ISEDI, 1973).
to. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, and London: Macmillan, 1976). In Italian, Trattato di semiotics generale (Milan: Bompiani, 1975)•
Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1984. - II nome della rasa (Milan: Bompiani, 1980). Translated as The Name of the Rose (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and London: Seeker and Warburg, 1983). Page references are to the London edition.
institutional commitment to semiotics as a discipline—founding and editing the semiotic journal called acting as secretarygeneral of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, and occupying the first chair of semiotics at the University of Bologna. But it is also interesting to relate it to the political events of 1968 and the consequent dissolution of the Gruppo 63. Eco himself tells, in his article of 1972 on «The Death of the Gruppo 63» (Chapter II below), how the 1968 workers’ and students’ movements had an outflanking effect on the group’s. and Eco’s own, position concerning the artist’s duty to attack the social system indirectly, through the aesthetic medium, rather than by direct political action. In 1968, according to Eco, artists and intellectuals were confronted, for the first time in years, with the opportunity and challenge to involve themselves directly in politics, an opportunity and challenge which the Gruppo 63 failed to take up, thereby bringing about its own demise.
One effect of this crisis on Leo, it would seem, was to reduce his polemical insistence on the special political function of art, though his new interest in semiotics no doubt contributed to the same effect. It is noteworthy, however, that Eco’s response does not seem to have taken the form of a more direct involvement in political affairs, at least in his main writings, and that he seems to have moved, if anything, in quite the opposite direction. There may be, in the new specialization and academicism of his theoretical work, signs of a degree of post1968 disillusionment.
To turn now to semiotics, what sort of subject is it, and what can a theory of it do? Semiotics or semiology is the science of signs, and Eco’s theory has been mainly concerned with what he calls general semiotics, the general theory of signs. All forms of social, cultural, and intellectual life can be viewed as sign systems: as forms of communication, and therefore as verbal or nonverbal languages. The task of general semiotics, for Eco, is to develop a single, comprehensive conceptual framework within which all these sign systems may be studied, not because they are all fundamentally identical but because a systematic and coherent approach has intrinsic merits, and because such an approach facilitates crossfertilization between the different fields that it covers.
Thus, A Theory of Semiotics is not principally concerned with the specific features of these different fields, but concentrates instead on proposing a theory of signs, or «sign functions,» and a related theory of codes that can be applied to all of them. Eco’s conception of his subject is avowedly imperialistic; semiotics is proposed as a master discipline which will eventually unite into a single theoretical framework all the different branches of study concerned with culture in the broadest sense.
In its allembracing, systematic character Eco’s general semiotics has more than a little in common, as noted above, with the philosophical system of Thomas Aquinas, the subject of his doctoral thesis. But a major difference between Eco’s theory and most philosophical or scientific systems is his distinctive insistence that the theory makes no claim to represent the real nature of things.
It is here that we can see the most conspicuous and important connection with Opera aperta and its theme of the disorder, instability, and essential incomprehensibility of the modern world. The theme lies behind the title and much of the argument of La struttura assente which, while taking over many of the fundamentals of structuralist thought, contains a vigorous criticism of the French structuralism of the sixties—which Eco himself compares (The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, p. v) to Thomist thought—for what he calls its «ontological» rather than «methodological» character: its conviction that the ordered systems it describes are the systems of the world, a conviction illustrated in its most extreme form in LeviStrauss’s belief that structural analysis serves ultimately to reveal the perennial laws governing the working of the human mind.
Eco maintains that structures are «methodological» in that they are provisional, hypothetical products of the mind, and at most only partially reflect the essential nature of things. The ultimate truth, the structure behind all structures, is permanently absent, beyond our intellectual grasp. The chapter below entitled «Series and Structure,» which is taken from La struttura assente, illustrates this aspect of Eco’s thinking, showing very clearly how his theory of the open work is carried over into his semiotics and gives it much of its distinctive character.
One of the most interesting features of Eco’s semiotic theory is this association of order and disorder, of a rationalist explanatory structure with the conviction that nothing, finally, can ever be explained. In a general way it seems to lie behind the broad eclecticism of his approach, his distinctive combination of Continental and AngloSaxon theoretical sources, of in particular the extensive use he has nude of the work ot the American philosopher C. S. Peirce. whose current vogue must be due in large part to Eco’s interest in him. More particularly, the association has determined three central concepts in Eco’s theory, the first and last of which derive from Peirce: unlimited semiosis, encyclopedia, and abduction.
The principle of unlimited semiosis is, Eco argues. vital to the constitution of semiotics as an academic discipline. According to this principle, the meaning of any sign. both verbal and nonverbal, can be seen only as another sign or signs—its «interpretant(s),» in Peirce’s terminology—whose meaning, in turn, can be seen only as yet another sign or signs, and so on ad infinitum. Meaning is an infinite regress within a closed sphere, a sort of parallel universe related in various ways to the «real» world but not directly connected to it; there is no immediate contact between the world of signs and the world of the things they refer to. Eco thus frees the study of signs from involvement with the study of their «real» referents, and lays the foundations for an autonomous science of semiotics by justifying the analysis of sign systems in terms specific to them, without interference, at least in the first instance, from otherbranchesofknowledge.
The principle of unlimited semiosis thus has much in common with the Saussurean axiom that meaning is the product of structure and with the structuralist semantic theories derived from this axiom. Its advantage for Eco is that it avoids the connotations of stability and organization that the concept of structure carries with it, and makes greater allowance for the shifting, elusive nature of our knowledge of the world. For the same sort of reasons, Eco now prefers the notion of encyclopedia to the structuralist notion of code, to stand for the knowledge or competence that allowspeopleto use signs to communicate—though, as we shall see, codes nevertheless figure largely in much of his semiotic theory. The notion of code implies a view of this competence as a set of onetoone, dictionarylike equivalences between expression and content, signifier and signified. In contrast, the encyclopedia, as Eco conceives
it. is much more complex and variable; it is like a net, a rhizome gatioa tangled clump of bulbs
