Preface: Umberto Eco and semiotics: An enduring legacy

This special issue of Semiotica is dedicated to the work and ideas of one of the most influential semioticians and philosophers of the last five decades. Indeed, Umberto Eco was one of the founding members of Semiotica, which included other luminaries of semiotics such as Thomas A. Sebeok (the journal’s first editor), Roland Barthes, Juri M. Lotman, Nicolas Ruwet, Meyer Shapiro, and Hansjakob Seiler. It is thus the appropriate locus for a retrospective on his legacy, which has shaped large areas of semiotic theory and practice over the years.

I met Umberto in the late 1970s during one of the seminars of the International Summer Institute of Semiotic and Structural Studies held at Victoria College of the University of Toronto. As a linguist, at the time I was highly skeptical of semiotics as a method for understanding how the brain generates linguistic meaning. But he changed my mind with his eloquence, simplicity of articulation, yet profundity of thought, and above all else empathy for his interlocutors. He understood that semiotics could gain ground in cognate disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, only if the relevance of its theoretical apparatus was grasped by the practitioners of those disciplines. In 1976, just before we met, he had been among the first to characterize semiotics as a science. Meaning cannot be studied with the same objectivity as, say, physical substances are by chemists. But, as Eco argued, semiotics can still be considered to constitute a science in the etymological sense of the word (as an intellectual and practical activity) for five fundamental reasons (Eco 1976: 74):

1. It is an autonomous discipline.

2. It has a set of standardized methodological tools that allow semioticians to seek answers to specific kinds of questions (What does something mean? How does it mean what it means? Why does it mean what it means?).

3. It generates hypotheses, theories, and models of semiosis, by analyzing the products of semiosis in the form of signs, texts, and other human artifacts.

4. It allows semioticians to make predictions as to how societies and cultures will evolve through semiosic shifts.

5. Its findings can lead to a modification of the actual state of the world.

Eco was, of course, aware that any claim to “objectivity” was to be tempered with caution. But this is not unique to semiotics. It has become characteristic of all the sciences in the twentieth century ever since: (1) Werner Heisenberg put forward his indeterminacy principle, which debunked the notion of an objective reality independent of culture and of the scientist’s personal participation in it; and (2) Kurt Gödel’s proof that a logical system invariably contains a proposition within it that is “true” but “unprovable” or “undecidable.” Notwithstanding these limitations of logic, and even of interpretation as Eco himself brilliantly showed in two classic studies (Eco 1990, 1992), all scientific enterprises need axioms in order to allow for research to unfold systematically. Clearly, if the axioms break down during research activities then they can, themselves, lead to deeper insights into semiosis that would have otherwise been unattainable by showing that they do not apply universally.

From Eco’s works on semiotic theory, it has become obvious that sign systems the world over are constructed with the same innate semiosic tendencies, as Peirce emphasized (iconicity, indexicality, etc.), thus leading to a strong Peircean influence in the conduct of semiotics – an influence that does not, however, marginalize the more formalist Saussurean approach with all the insights that it brings to the semiotic table. This implies that there are universal structures of semiosis in the human species that are constrained only by force of history and tradition and that these can be described with the formal apparatus of sign theory. Sign systems entail culture-specific classifications of the world, which influence the way people think, behave, and act as well as their perceptions of “naturalness.” Thus it is that communal sense that is often confused with common sense – an idea that is implicit in his influential 1984 book, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Decisions as to where a concept belongs in a hierarchy invariably end up being a matter of subjective choice. It was these ideas that brought me into the fold of semioticians, since they parallel those of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Franz Boas, and Edward Sapir in linguistics.

Another of Eco’s enduring legacies is found in his work on the relation between the structure of a text and its interpretation (Eco 1979, 1989). Especially interesting is the “location” of a text’s meaning. Does it lie in the intentions of the makers of texts – the author, the composer, the artist, etc.? And, consequently, is successful interpretation of the text on the part of a “reader” a straightforward matter of trying to determine the maker’s intentions? Or does the meaning of the text reside instead in the reader, regardless of the maker’s intentions? In contrast to the many disparate writings on authorship both within postructuralist semiotics and in various fields of postmodernist philosophy, which have attempted to eliminate any possibility of pinning the author’s intentions down, Eco suggests that although infinite interpretations of the same text are possible according to reader variables, in reality the nature of the text itself and the author’s intentions constrain the range of interpretations. When a given interpretation goes beyond this range, we tend to evaluate it as extreme, far-fetched, or implausible.

The distinction between open and closed texts was also introduced into semiotics by Eco. Simply put, a closed text is one that leads to a fairly limited range of interpretations. Most “Whodunit” mystery stories are closed texts because typically only one solution to a crime eventually surfaces, closing all other avenues of interpretation. An open work, on the other hand, allows readers to make up their own minds as to what it means. It requires a particular kind of reader. For instance, reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, requires a reader who can make up his or her own mind as to its meaning. Thus, a closed text sets clear limitations on the reader’s potential range of interpretations; it constitutes a kind of fixed structure – a map is a map, unless it is part of a treasure hunt with shifting meanings, in which case it can become an open work of sorts. An open work, on the other hand, is typical of various literary traditions of opening up the meaning to the reader. In his argument, Eco makes reference to the musical compositions of modern-day atonal composers like Luciano Berio and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who gave musical artists complete freedom to play them (or sing them) as they wished to do, without textual markings or forms restricting the range of interpretation. This openness was also characteristic of Baroque music, he claimed, and it certainly continues on in improvised forms of music, such as jazz. Every interpretation may give a particular reading to a text, but it does not exhaust its interpretive potential. Openness is, for Eco, the textual condition that leads to a free play of associations and, thus, to an aesthetic appreciation of it.

In sum, Umberto Eco’s legacy in semiotics has been enormous. This special issue of Semiotica provides various angles from which to view this legacy and, thus, to bring his overall influence in the world of ideas back to where it started in the first place – in the pages of this journal.