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and tubers—or a labyrinth, a vast aggre n of units of meaning among which an infinite variety of connections can be made.

With the notion of code, communication becomes simply a matter of recognizing the onetoone equivalences. With that of encyclopedia, it becomes a matter of tracing out one of all the possible paths that can be taken through the network, rhizome, or labyrinth, and it is for this process that Eco uses Peirce’s term «abduction.» The example par excellence of abduction is the act of criminal detection. Eco’s argument is that, just as the detective finds the author of a crime by postulating certain rules concerning the connections between human motives and actions and physical events, so in the normal processes of communication we find the meaning of a sign by postulating certain rules concerning the relationship between that sign and others. Both cases involve finding one’s way through the labyrinth; in the latter case the rule may be more regularly applied (it may be «overcoded»), but the difference is one only of degree, not of kind. All forms of communication, interpretation, and understanding are by their nature, for Eco, tentative and hazardous acts of inference.

What has been said so far about Eco’s semiotics may make it sound abstruse and unworldly. But it must be emphasized, first of all, that Eco is not denying that we use signs to refer to the real world, and still less is he denying that the real world exists; he is simply maintaining, with the structuralists, that sign systems are grids which we impose upon reality and in this sense preexist any use to which they may be put. Moreover, to view them in this way certainly does not entail cutting semiotics off from history. For Eco there are two vital ways in which semiotics and the historical process are integrally connected.

On the one hand, viewing the structures of sign systems as methodological rather than ontological in character entails accepting our description of them not only as hypothetical and provisional, but also as the product of history, and subject to negation by history, as is argued in the chapter «Series and Structure.» By this means, Eco meets the objection of ahistoricity with which Marxists have often attacked structuralist thought, and constructs a semiotic theory at least partially reconcilable with Marxist historicism. On the other hand, semiotics is itself an instrument of intervention in the historical process, a powerful practical tool for cultural, social, and potentially political change. This is a further element of continuity with Opera aperta and Apocalittici e integrati, and their insistence on social engagement.

Since Eco has told us that his interest in semiotics arose out of his work on art in Opera aperta,» and since this interest is also closely connected to his work on mass communications in Apocalittici e integrati, what changes did his new theoretical framework bring to the ideas of the earlier books? Although his new interests broadened Eco’s horizons considerably. it is notable that the subjects of art and mass communications occupy almost half the pages of La stnatura assente, and could still be said to be a central, if less prominent, object of attention in A Theory of Semiotics as well. To begin with the theory of art, it is perhaps surprising how many of the aesthetic principles of Opera aperta remain in the later works.

In A Theory of Semiotics, as in Opera aperta, Eco maintains that art produces an essential effect of ambiguity through the contravention of conventions of expression, but that such contraventions are properly artistic only if they are part of a specifically aesthetic form. What the later work does, first, is express these ideas in more wideranging theoretical terms; like all other forms of cultural activity, the production and consumption of art is seen as governed by codes, and it is the violation of these codes that is said to be the source of the effect of ambiguity. This new formulation opens the way to a different conception of the function of art; whereas in Opera aperta the function was said to be essentially cognitive, in the later books it is explained according to the structuralist principle that the effect of the violation of codes in a work of art is to focus attention first on the structure of the work itself, then on the codes which the work employs, and finally on the relationship between the codes and reality, thus generating in the reader or viewer a renovated perception of him or herself and the world.

In A Theory of Semiotics, also. Eco argues that in art the violation of codes occurs according to a specific structural pattern, a pattern which is said to be the distinguishing feature of artistic form, and replaces the much vaguer notion of «organic» properties in Opera aperta. There Eco had argued that the language of poetry is distinguished by its «iconic» properties, a special relationship between sound and sense. Extending and developing this notion, he now suggests that all kinds of art are characterized by what he calls a supersystem of homologous structural relationships» (p. 271);

r3. Lector in fabula (Milan: Bompiani, mg), p. 8.

that is, a code is violated not just at one level of a work, but at all of its levels, and between these different violations there is a fundamental similarity of structure. This structural pattern constitutes what he calls the «aesthetic idiolect»: just as the term «idiolect» is employed in linguistics to mean the language habits peculiar to an individual, so here it stands for the overall pattern of deviation, the «general deviational matrix» (p. 271) peculiar to and characteristic of each work of art.

The trouble is, of course, that it is very difficult to see how such a pattern might be realized in practice. It is true that there are numerous cases in literature in which the sound seems to be an echo to the sense (though not as many cases as sometimes is supposed), and stylistic analyses such as Leo Spitzer’s have shown parallels between the meaning of texts and other levels of expression, for instance syntax. But to suggest, as Eco does, that there is a multiple set of correspondences in all works of art, beginning from their physical substance—to which Eco attaches special importance: in art, matter is «rendered semiotically interesting» (p. 266)—and proceeding down to the various aspects of their content, seems to require a good deal of clarification and empirical verification, neither of which has been adequately provided in any of Eco’s works.

The continuity in Eco’s aesthetic theory between his earlier and his more recent books also testifies to the continuing influence of Pareyson. For the notion of aesthetic idiolect is not only a revision of Pareyson’s notion of organic form but is also strikingly reminiscent of his insistence that it is the «modo di formare,» or style, that constitutes the aesthetic essence of any work of art. In another respect as well Eco has remained faithful to Pareyson’s principles: in his view that the intention implicit in a work must be the determining factor in its interpretation, a view which in A Theory of Semiotics is asserted but not seriously discussed, as in Opera aperta, except for the apparent suggestion the point is far from clear that it is the aesthetic idiolect by which the intention is manifested. Thus, on these two scores, as on others, A Theory of Semiotics shows not only a striking continuity with Eco’s earlier work but also the same tendency which we noted in Opera aperta to develop broad generalizations at the expense of more specific problems; and in this case, as modern literary theory has shown, the problems are very much a matter of contemporary debate. Although the systematic character of Eco’s theory has a great deal of attraction, it is clear that a price hasbeenpaidforit.

Between them, La struttura asses to and A Theory of Semiotics offer general models of the process of aesthetic communication and the structure of works of art. These models are supplemented by the more recent Lector in Tabula (the title, meaning literally «The reader in the tale,» is a pun on the Latin expression lupus in tabula, meaning «talk of the devil»), which is exclusively concerned with the process of reading narrative literature.» Here Eco stays within the framework of ideas developed in the previous semiotic works, but follows the move in much recent literary theory to a more detailed studyof reader response, thus also continuing an important theme of Opera aperta. The book begins with an attack on the structuralism
of the I96os for its insistence on the intrinsic, «objective» properties of works of literary art. What is offered instead is the idea of interpretive cooperation between reader and text, a cooperation that brings into play, according to Eco, not unchanging universal structures of the mind but sets of presuppositions that vary with the passing of time. The main object of Lector in Tabula is to develop general sets of categories that describe the process of interpretive cooperation, at the same time making due allowance for its provisional,historicalcharacter.

As I have said, the sense of the social and political role of art becomes much weaker in Eco’s work after 1968. It is thus not in the sphere of aesthetics but in the study of mass communications that the social relevance of his semiotics is most apparent. For Eco, semiotic theories of meaning serve to expose the ideological (in the sense of false) nature of forms of persuasion, when these suppress parts of the meaning of signs and privilege others in order to further the purposes of

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and tubers—or a labyrinth, a vast aggre n of units of meaning among which an infinite variety of connections can be made. With the notion of code, communication becomes simply

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