Sometimes, you might feel that the world is going too fast, and growing too complex. Is everything fake news ? Are the media lying to us ? Are we entering a new Middle Age ? Can terrorism be useful ? Why does Superman wear his underwears over his super-suit ?
Thankfully, there are some crucial texts which pause time, and offer us guidelines to understand the world. Let us be straight : this text isn’t one of them. La guerre du faux (1985), a French compilation of Umberto Eco’s articles and essays, is one of them. And this text — or, rather, this series of stories — tries to be a rather expanded and detailed abstract of the book, an ersatz, since we lack time to understand why we lack time. I will here try to synthetize for you Umberto Eco’s explanations on how to understand this whole mess.
Let us come back to our point. Umberto Eco is neither pontifying and boring, nor simplificating to the extreme ; he is one of those intellectual figures who is able to express simply complicated ideas. This series of articles analyze, with a delicate and attaching humour, the discourses production mechanics ; and, though published more than thirty years ago, it is still strikingly (and discouragingly) up to date. I would even say that, being a visionary, Umberto Eco’s texts are more interesting to read today than back in the 80’s.
In order not to betray too much his reflexions, and to have enough time to develop each of them, I will divide this story in four sub-parts. Today, I’d like to focus on writing a short intellectual biography of Umberto Eco ; but, even before that, it seems crucial to me, in order to know what we’re talking about, to detail a few key principles on semiotics, which is going to be necessary to understand what is Umberto Eco aiming at in his articles.
A very brief introduction to semiotics
Semiotics, sometimes mistaken with semiology (the later being a subset of the former, exclusively concerned with language) might be defined as the study of signs, or as the study of meaning-making. Semiotics is the study of the meanings, called signs, we produce throughout the day. It might concern things we say or write (that’s semiology), or gestures, attitudes, designations and so on ; in fact, any interpretation that is done of anything might be related to semiotics. Let us not stray too far into epistemological problems of interpretation and a priori knowledge, that would be a thread to explore in another story. All we need to know, for now, is that it’s a human science defined by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, one of its founders, as the study of “the life of signs within society”.
In his famous Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes defines what he calls the semiological system. In order to understand how Eco’s reflexion takes place, we need to explain how the semiological system works — don’t panic, all the complicated words are explained in a few moments with a simple schema.
Here’s an example of what semiotics can teach you — it’s Barthes’s example. Imagine a sentence in a latin handbook : Quia ego nominor leo. You obviously know that it means : “Because my name is lion”- obvious, right ? Now, that’s the sign (or meaning) of the sentence, the third element of the semiological system. The meaning is made up of both the signifier (language — here, Latin), and of the signified (the sentence itself). But since the sentence is not used in a conversation, but in a Latin handbook, the sentence itself signifies something, namely : I am a grammar example in a Latin handbook, and I am going to be used to demonstrate a grammar rule. All right till here ? Hold on, we’re almost done. The first semiological system, “Because my name is lion”, is going to integrate a second system : it accepts a second signified, which we call the concept, namely : “I am a grammar example”. The second system is what Barthes calls the myth — that’s what he analyzes in his Mythologies.
Where the myth becomes interesting is in its selective aspect, when it comes to interact with the subject (you, reader) : since that sentence is a grammar example (before Barthes used it as a semiology example, but that’s an other story), and since I understand this fact, then it reveals a certain number of things about who I am. For instance, it reveals that I am someone who understands Latin (or who used Google Translate in order to read Latin — in that case, it reveals that I am someone who can use Google Translate), and from that might be inferred a wide number of things that who would interest sociologists (era, social class, geographical area, center of interests, etc). If I don’t understand that the sentence is a Latin grammar example, then the sign isn’t intended to be read by me.
The hardest part is done (but you can go there, if you want to read more about it). Let me now explain why I wanted to detail these theoretical elements: a sign — or a myth — codes an information. In order to read a code, be it the Enigma code or a simple advertisement, you need to understand how the code works. And to understand how the code works, you need to know about semiotics, the science of meaning (or, code) making. That’s a thing (among others) Umberto Eco was especially good at.
Umberto Eco, philosopher of signs
I’ve stolen the title of this short biography to Claudia Stancati, who wrote a passionating article on the life and work of Umberto Eco, who has been a gold mine of information for writing mine (unfortunately, it’s originally written in French). Let us not dwell on Umberto Eco’s life, and let us begin by saying that he is a major man of letters in the academic field of the second half of the XXth century. His analysis mainly concerns “the reception of pieces of art, and the possible circulations between the erudite production and mass culture”. He’s the one who considers semiotics (the science of reading signs, remember ?) as equal to philosophy (hence the title). For him, the sign is what summarizes the work of knowledge.
Charles Sanders Peirce had established a canonical trichotomy: signs are either an icon, an index, or a symbol; Eco wants to go beyond this. For him, signification and interpretation are always related, as a continual chain of interpretative referrals — that is, he who reads has an impact on he who produces what will be read, but also has an impact on what is read. Eco suggests that we should evolve from the model of the dictionary (with articles independent the one with the others) to the model of the encyclopedy (with culture functioning as a web).
Another thing I would like to introduce before concluding this biography, is Umberto Eco’s work concerning literature. One of his major essays in this field is Lector in Fabula (1979), in which he asserts that the interpretation of a text rests on an active collaboration between reader and writer. A book’s “overture structure” defines what the text doesn’t state, but proposes, and which leads the reader to fill the blanks. Thus, the Model Reader is the one who, mastering all the references of the text, can explore all of its virtualities (in the sense of potentialities). That’s what French literary theoretician Yves Citton calls “actualizing interpretations”. This developement is one of the cornerstones of Italo Calvino’s conception of literature, which I recently focused on.
As a conclusion, Claudia Stancati states that Eco has founded “a syncretical [hybrid] approach to semiotics”, integrating various legacies and open to evolutions. For Eco, “the philosophical glance precisely tends to the general”.
After this introduction, I hope we’ve grasped how Umberto Eco’s academical work will be used to read the world through his eyes : using the semiotical system, Eco analyzes the communications codes we go through daily (on TV, on the radio, in the street, with your friends) ; he analyzes how they are produced, how we read them, and how we influence their very production. But that’s another story, which will be detailed in the next articles.
If you want to dig further meanwhile, here is a list of resources you might find useful. Unfortunately, some of them are in French — a code you’ll need Google Translate to understand.
Claudia Stancati, Umberto Eco, philosophe des signes : http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Umberto-Eco-philosophe-des-signes.html
SignoSemio, Textual Cooperation : http://www.signosemio.com/eco/textual-cooperation.asp
Roland Barthes, Elements of Semioloy (1964) : https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/barthes.htm
Eco himself speaking (in French) on YouTube, here, here or there; now speaking in English, about random stuff.
Now, for those of you who can access JStor, or who want to invest into it, I recommend these articles :
Clinton Hale, Umberto Eco takes semiotics to the masses, https://www.jstor.org/stable/42579124
Gary Genosco, Umberto Eco and Guerrilla Decoding, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctt2tv3r1.11
Thank you for reading ; I would appreciate any remark on how to improve my writing !
