The Philosophy of Umberto Eco

I. GENEALOGY OF A CONCEPT

Reading the last gigantic opus by Umberto Eco on the Middle Ages, one might suspect that the idea of the encyclopedia—a central notion in Eco’s theoretical semiotic project and perhaps the most central notion—has its origins in the passion of the author for the medieval world, its forest of symbols and elements, and its rich and florid imagery.¹ Indeed, the encyclopedia appears to act as a kind of red thread that traverses the whole of Eco’s scientific and literary production. First elaborated in his theoretical works, it migrates into the fictional world of Eco’s novels: from the immense and labyrinth-like library in The Name of the Rose, a magnificent figuration of what he described in more theoretical terms in his many essays, to the desperate search for his own lost encyclopedia carried out by Yambo in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, through the lists of The Island of the Day Before, to mention only a few examples, an implicit reference to encyclopedic forms of knowledge always seems to be present in Eco’s novels; indeed, to such a degree that his narratives, too, have been defined as “encyclopaedia superfictions.”²

Following more or less the same methodological approach often used by Eco, that is, an archaeological reconstruction of the roots of a given concept, I will map the origins of the notion of the encyclopedia in Eco’s writings, from its very first appearance and on through its subsequent developments, in order to discuss the theoretical actuality and criticality of this central notion.

Although the first detailed mention of this concept appears in 1976 in his seminal work A Theory of Semiotics, the idea of the encyclopedia is actually present in Eco’s work even before that: for example, in 1973, in a smaller work not yet translated into English, which is apparently a brief introduction to the notion of the sign, where Eco initiates an extended discussion and revision of the notion of code, moving from the rigid early structuralist idea of correlations between elements towards the idea of an open, potentially unlimited, global semantic system.³

Indeed, in the first half of the 1970s Eco’s theory undergoes a deep and radical rethinking of all the most basic concepts that constitute its foundational semiotic roots, from the notion of sign to that of code and on to the very idea of semantic representation and meaning. We can certainly say that the encyclopedia is the key notion at the core of this theoretical revolution: all the new formulations of the notions of meaning, semantic space, and the increasing role of interpretation processes are grounded in this fundamental conceptual assumption. Situated at the boundaries between a theory of knowledge and a theory of interpretation—two fundamental axes for the definition of semiosis—the encyclopedia fulfills a double theoretical function. On the one hand, it represents a departure from a semiotic model still dependent on the concept of code towards a more dynamic and open vision of semiosis as an inferential process. On the other hand, it provides a necessary framework for regulating interpretation.

“Culture” is the keyword for the opening passages of A Theory of Semiotics. The introduction of this work is explicitly titled “Toward a Logic of Culture,” and culture, from the very beginning, is identified as the upper threshold for the natural boundaries of the discipline of semiotics. Culture, however, is not for Eco a particular set of objects that can be defined on the basis of their essentialist character, but, rather, a particular perspective through which the question of meaning and semantic modeling can be redefined.

According to such an assumption, the meaning of a term is no longer a logical entity, nor a mental concept, nor a referent. “From a semiotic point of view it [meaning] can only be a cultural unit.”⁴ Making a radical move from any kind of referential, logicist, or mentalistic approach to meaning, a cultural perspective is adopted here together with all its corollaries, primarily the fact that meaning must always be contextualized and localized within a given civilization and that language is always a social phenomenon.

Defining the meaning of a term as a cultural unit has an immediate consequence at the level of semantic representation since it shows the irredeemable limits of the previously developed “classical” componential semantic models, whether they be structuralist models such as that of Hjelmslev or the models proposed by Katz and Fodor in the 1960s within the framework of Chomsky’s generative grammar.⁵ All these models, in spite of their internal variants, described meaning as a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, drawing a very precise line between linguistic and cultural features, that is, between linguistic knowledge and world knowledge.⁶ Eco draws up a cahier de doléances about similar models, in particular that of Katz and Fodor, in order to outline his own revised model. The first doléance, which is the one that concerns us most in this context, is “a dictionary-like rigidity.”⁷ Against the “crystal-like perfection” of a model exclusively based on the ideal linguistic competence of an ideal speaker, Eco claims that meanings “are common social beliefs, sometimes mutually contradictory and historically rooted, rather than undated and theoretically fixed constructs.”⁸ Factual beliefs therefore have to be included in semantic representation, which can no longer maintain its dictionary-like structure and will need to open up for a more encyclopedically oriented perspective. The encyclopedia, however, does not imply an unstructured, idiosyncratic mass, but, rather, quite the opposite: “factual beliefs, even if widespread, must be coded, or in some way conventionally recognized by a society.”⁹ As such they will always be representable. This is a very important point since one of the main concerns of Eco’s work has always been the need to control and regulate the potentially endless openness of interpretations and idiosyncratic meanings; the encyclopedia is designed precisely as one of the most important tools for executing this regulative function. In order to accomplish such a function, however, knowledge has to be capable of being represented.

Once the need to include cultural coded beliefs into semantic representation has been established, Eco can proceed to outline his revised semantic model (RSM). Based on the idea of the sememe as encyclopedic, the RSM opens up for the inclusion of all types of contextual and circumstantial selections in semantic representations.¹⁰ This transformation, however, is not only a quantitative one: Eco is well aware that enlarging the amount of coded information is not enough, in se, to escape the same criticism regarding the status of semantic markers to which the Katz and Fodor model has also been subjected. The most profoundly innovative aspect of the RSM resides precisely on this plane since semantic markers are no longer metasemiotic constructs: there is no essential difference between sememes and markers since “every semantic unit used in order to analyze a sememe is in its turn a sememe to be analyzed.”¹¹ Semantic markers do not have a separate status as such, they do not belong to any metaphysical metalanguage; they are Peircean interpretants, as Eco states clearly in many sections of A Theory of Semiotics.

There is still, however, a kind of terminological ambiguity or perhaps conceptual tension in A Theory of Semiotics between a purely semantic model, although it is revised and open, and a model of a completely different nature, which is to be further developed in Eco’s subsequent works. The RSM still appears as a model of the plane of content, described using notions such as the sememe or semantic marker, all of which belong to the terminology of traditional semantic analysis. However, the interpretant is something qualitatively different, a “full” sign, so to speak, and not just a unit of content. The use of the notion of the Peircean interpretant shifts the confines of the model, prefiguring the unlimited openness of the encyclopedia.

In order to represent such a circular, potentially unlimited semantic universe, Eco borrows the semantic memory model developed by M. Ross Quillian, based on a massive number of nodes interconnected by various types of associative networks, generating an enormous aggregation of interconnected planes.¹² There are no longer principled differences in such a model between node types and node tokens since each token can in its turn become the type for a further definition.

For the meaning of every lexeme there has to exist, in the memory, a node which has as its “patriarch” the term to be defined, here called a type. The definition of a type A foresees the employment, as its interpretants, of a series of other sign-vehicles which are included as tokens (and which in the models are other lexemes). The configuration of the meaning of the lexeme is given by the multiplicity of its links with various tokens, each of which, however, becomes in turn a type B, that is, the patriarch of a new configuration which includes as tokens many other lexemes, some of which were also tokens of type A, and which can include as tokens the same type A.¹³

This is an important point since it states in a very clear way that types and tokens are not inherently different to any degree: types are not more general or more abstract or more comprehensive; all the nodes are just lexemes, and it is only local interpretation processes that assign them a role of type or token.

One could wonder at this point if we really need a distinction between types and tokens at all, given that the “typification” process is a local, very temporary attribution of type status to some given lexeme, which does not change its basic character. A stronger claim could be made, however, that is, that the true structure of semantic space does not have to foresee any type at all; rather, it can be seen as composed solely of interconnected lexemes-tokens, attracted by one another with various degrees of intensity. We could say that, in a way, the very nature of the interpretants is what prevents them from being types. I will develop this point in a more detailed way later. For the time being we can merely observe that in Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics the interconnections that each node can establish with any other node is not predetermined a priori but locally activated, from moment to moment, by any single act of interpretation.

A model of this kind can be represented as a bidimensional graphical configuration as long as only one single aspect of it is taken into consideration—it is never representable in all its complexity: “the creation of a complete semantic structure must thus remain a mere regulative hypothesis.”¹⁴

In this way, by 1976, a general framework for the notion of encyclopedia has already been established and it is ready for its full development in subsequent works. Let us briefly summarize the most important features that have emerged so far:

• The cultural “vocation” of the model: the sememe is defined from the outset as a “cultural unit”;

• The openness of the representational model, which is unlimited and virtually includes all possible information and interconnections;

• The circularity of the model and subsequent abandonment of any kind of metalinguistic descriptive apparatus;

• The situatedness of meaning, which is always contextualized and locally determined;

• The replacement of the idea of code as a predefined set of correlations in favor of a model based on processes of unlimited semiosis;

• The creative nature of the representational model (“the model Q is a model of linguistic creativity”).¹⁵

All these points are to be further developed and deepened in 1984 in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, another theoretically foundational work, which collocates a series of articles originally planned as entries for the Italian Enciclopedia Einaudi.

Before 1984, however, there is another important contribution to the question of semantic representation: Lector in fabula, partially translated into English as The Role of the Reader. Two things are worth highlighting here for our present discussion: first, the definition of the sememe as a virtual text, a slight but significant reformulation of the previous definition of the sememe as a cultural unit; second, the idea of a textually oriented instructional semantics, that is, a semantic representation able to analyze single lexemes as systems of instructions oriented toward a text and its interpretation. Lector in fabula is an exploration of textual interpretation and the cooperative, inferential, and abductive work the model reader—here intended as a textual strategy and not an empirical reader—is required to perform in order to make sense of a given text. Interpretation is an abductive operation based, on the one hand, on the structure of the text itself and, on the other, on the reader’s activation of a generalized semantic knowledge base. The focus on textual interpretation explains the particular attention given to the connection between the semantic and the textual levels, but it does not imply a real shift from the position of A Theory of Semiotics and, despite appearances, does not represent a move toward a more textually based semantic theory.

Eco’s main concern remains strongly focused on the more general level of semantic representation: the question being how semantics can instruct interpretation of text, rather than the way in which each text constructs one specific, idiosyncratic semantic world. (It is not by chance that Eco in this work speaks of an “instructional semantics,” that is, a semantics able to point to, and guide, textual interpretation.)

Lector in fabula must be framed within the more general textual turn that characterizes semiotics in those years, and it is not by chance that it is probably this part of Eco’s work that interacts most intimately with Greimas’s theory of text. The very idea of the sememe as a virtual text is quite close to Greimas’s notion of thematic roles. But here there is a key difference. Simplifying substantially, we could say that Greimas’s theory is a theory about how text is structured, while Eco’s is a theory of knowledge and interpretation. More precisely, Eco’s is a theory about how our general cultural knowledge is organized and how we use it in order to interpret the world and the various texts that inhabit it. Texts are nodes in a potentially unlimited encyclopedic web, singularities that allow this web to be traversed as well as discrete points where activation of pragmatic interpretation processes occurs. Paradoxically, we could say that Eco’s theoretical project is never a textualist one even when one is actually analyzing texts.

II. FROM MODEL Q TO THE RHIZOME: SEMANTICS AND SEMIOTICS

This point will emerge even more clearly in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, published in 1984 in both English and Italian.¹⁶ This work is composed of a series of chapters that, although structured independently, represent a conclusive point of arrival of an intense process of revision of all the principal semiotic concepts. The topics of these chapters range from the sign and code to metaphor, symbol, dictionary, and encyclopedia: each of these concepts is profoundly rethought and reformulated in light of the crucial Peircean notion of the interpretability principle. The interpretability principle first and foremost affects the definition of the sign, which is no longer seen as a predetermined, fixed correlation between an expression and a content, but, rather, as a potentially always open inferential process passing from one interpretant to another.

The understanding of signs is not a mere matter of recognition (of a stable equivalence); it is a matter of interpretation. Thus substitution (aliquid stat pro aliquo) is not the only necessary condition for a sign: the possibility of interpretation is necessary as well. By interpretation (or criterion of interpretability) we mean the concept elaborated by Peirce, according to which every interpretant . . . beside translating the Immediate Object or the content of the sign, also increases our understanding of it.¹⁷

A number of consequences follow from this. First, as we shall see, code can no longer be seen as a generally given rule for establishing fixed significations, but is seen as merely a local system of possible correspondences within the more general format of an open, endless encyclopedic representational system, in the spirit of the Peircean idea of unlimited semiosis. Second, the shift from a notion of the sign as equivalence to one of the sign as inference rendered untenable any semantic representation in the format of a dictionary, as in classical structuralist models or the Porphyrian tree elaborated based on Boethius, throughout the whole Middle Ages, structured as genera, species, and differentiae. As Eco says, it could seem at first sight preposterous to criticize such an outdated model but it helps us discover the “remote origins of some contemporary theoretical ‘cramps’”¹⁸ since, as he also demonstrates in detail in the chapter “Dictionary vs Encyclopedia,” the Porphyrian tree is still alive and kicking in camouflaged forms in many contemporary semantic theories.

Although most of this chapter is devoted to a thorough deconstruction of the Porphyrian model, apparently referring back to medieval disputes, it must nonetheless be situated within the cultural background of Eco’s time of writing in an ongoing debate that took place at the turn of the 1970s and in the first half of the 1980s on the vexata quaestio of the opposition between semantics and pragmatics. The core questions of the discussion were as follows: how should the knowledge necessary for the correct interpretation of a sentence, or a text, be represented? Is such knowledge of a semantic nature or does it depend on some more general pragmatic device? Finally, and above all, how much information do we actually need in order to make sense of a given text? Is this knowledge constituted as a finite set or is it infinite and thus nonrepresentable? In artificial intelligence this problem was known as “the frame problem”: the description of any given frame requires other frames that in their turn imply other frames, and so on, in a circular regression ad infinitum, which is precisely the essence of unlimited semiosis; a circularity that can become vicious when the main objective is to feed a finite set of instructions to a computer, as was the purpose of AI at the time.

In the Italian version of Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language there is an enlightening passage, where Eco refers to a well-known argument by John Searle.¹⁹ The American philosopher claimed that the literal meaning of even the simplest sentence, such as ordering a hamburger in a restaurant, is not representable since it depends on a set of background assumptions that can never be fully specified in terms of either number or content. According to Searle, background assumptions cannot be semantically coded and represented but are part of a more general pragmatic competence.

Eco rejects any principled opposition between semantics and pragmatics, a position he has always maintained, and reasserts the possibility of coding and representing all necessary information within the semantic component.²⁰ This point deserves to be stressed since it has often been misunderstood and could, indeed, be the origin of misreadings, forcing a more pragmatically oriented reading of Eco’s position than is actually the case. Eco’s position is very clearly stated in a number of places, and so it was even before Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language:

A semantic encyclopedia does not refuse to provide rules for the generation and interpretation of the expressions of a language, but these rules are geared to specific contexts, and semantics incorporates pragmatics.²¹

The hypothesis animating these writings is rather that we should postulate a language L that somehow contains within its own rules of signification pragmatically oriented instructions.²²

In an encyclopedic representation, semantics must translate into its own terms most of the phenomena studied by pragmatics.²³

This was certainly not a mainstream position at the time, when a quite opposite, pragmatically oriented perspective was dominant in linguistics, well represented, for example, by Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance.²⁴ In the pragmatic view all inferences necessary for understanding are regulated by pragmatic principles, according to a reelaboration of Grice’s earlier intuitions.

Eco, on the contrary, takes a radical semanticist stance, collocating under semantics the whole range of phenomena generally attributed to pragmatics. This move forces a transformation of the very nature of semantic representation into something else; indeed, it necessarily implies the opening up of semantics to contain virtually all the knowledge we have access to, “enriching” it up to an ultimate extreme of unrepresentability. This is the most basic idea that lies at the very core of Eco’s notion of encyclopedia.

But of what exactly is the encyclopedia then composed? It is not that easy to discover one precise definition of it in Eco’s writings. The closest we can get to one is to be found in the Italian version of Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, where it is described as an “immense and ideal library”: “The registered ensemble of all interpretations, conceivable in objective terms as the library of all libraries, where a library is also an archive of the non-verbal information that has somehow become recorded, from rock paintings to film archives.”²⁵ More recently, in From the Tree to the Labyrinth, Eco defines the global encyclopedia as a maximal encyclopedia and describes it as follows:

The Maximal Encyclopedia is not content with merely recording what “is true” (whatever meaning we may choose to give to this expression). It records instead everything that has been claimed in a social context, not only what has been accepted as true, but also what has been accepted as imaginary. . . . This encyclopedia is not available for consultation in toto because it is the sum total of everything ever said by humankind, and yet it has a material existence, because what has been said has been deposited in the form of all the books ever written and all the images ever made and all the evidential items that act as reciprocal interpretants in the chain of semiosis.²⁶

The maximal encyclopedia, as “everything ever said by humankind,” includes all the information belonging to all existent and prior cultures and is obviously unmanageable in all its enormity. To evoke its virtual existence, Eco uses a new image, that of the rhizome, which derives from the work of the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, not from cognitively and computationally oriented research.²⁷

For Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizome is a structural space divided into various domains that, in particular, result from two spatial types: striated space and smooth space. If striated space defines an initial system of borders and configurations, smooth space “rewrites,” so to speak, this initial space as process, reconfiguring its borders and making new partitionings possible.²⁸ Eco, however, does not refer to the important distinction between the two spaces described above and, instead, uses a more vividly dynamic image: “a rhizome is a tangle of bulbs and tubers appearing ‘like rats squirming one on top of the other.’”²⁹

The rhizome is a special kind of labyrinth that adds a number of other relevant dimensions to the multidimensional circularity already present in the Q model, the most important of which appears to be the inherent contradictory, noncoherent nature of the model. Eco is quite clear on this particular point. In listing all the characteristics of a rhizomatic structure, Eco begins by mentioning its openness, connectivity, and circularity: “Every point of the rhizome can and must be connected with every other point. . . . The rhizome has its own outside with which it makes another rhizome. . . . The rhizome is not a calque but an open chart.” He then goes on to point out that: “in a structure in which every node can be connected with every other node, there is also the possibility of contradictory inferences: if p, then any possible consequence of p is possible, including the one that, instead of leading to new consequences, leads again to p, so that it is true at the same time both that if p, then q, and that if p, then non-q.”³⁰

The encyclopedia is therefore a structure where many different planes or “cuts” can coexist dynamically in a way that is not necessarily coherent. A very similar description can be found in Lotman, whose semiosphere in many ways, although not all, reminds us of Eco’s encyclopedia. For Lotman, too, the enormously complex systems that underlie all human culture and life are characterized by the fluidity, dynamism, and contradictoriness of their own internal structure.³¹ The main difference between these two notions is that, for Lotman, a semiosphere is always defined in relation to something else that always remains outside its own borders and is therefore never unlimited. We could say, in other words, that a semiosphere is never a global or maximal encyclopedia, it is always local.³² Moreover, a semiosphere is always organized around some center. In Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language Eco, quoting d’Alembert and the Enlightenment encyclopedists, insists on the contrary on the lack of any center at all, an idea that goes back to Leibniz’s project, as Eco underlines in his more recent From the Tree to the Labyrinth.

The encyclopedia has often been taken as a pure model of semantic representation, as a new format for description of the content plane, in Hjelmslev’s sense. As such, the encyclopedia would stand in contrast to the dictionary, both in terms of format (tree versus rhizome or labyrinth) and for the extension of the information itself, which is not constrained to linguistic competence, but, rather, opens up for all possible varieties of contexts and circumstances (knowledge of language versus knowledge of the world). However important these differences might be, according to this reading the encyclopedia would remain only a way to represent the content plane of any given semiotic system.

I do not believe this is a correct way to interpret the much more powerful, revolutionary intent of the encyclopedic model, although my own interpretation perhaps relies more on the intentio auctoris than the intentio operis. Regarding the latter, there is good reason for a misunderstanding of this kind. There are many possible ambiguities in this way of interpreting this particular point and, as I pointed out above, these ambiguities are already present in A Theory of Semiotics, where there is continuous oscillation between the use of the term “interpretant” and other common terms such as “sememe,” “lexeme,” and “semantic marker.”

These terms are not equivalent: intepretants are signs and thus unify both content and expression, while sememes and semantic markers are not signs, but, rather, elements that belong to the content plane. If nodes are interpretants in Peirce’s sense, they cannot also be elements of the content plane only, pure semantic elements so to speak, since for Peirce no distinction between expression and content exists.³³ But if interpretants are signs, this completely changes the whole nature of the encyclopedia, whereby it ceases to be a semantic model of the content plane of a given language and becomes a semiotic model of the whole knowledge system itself and its social and cultural functioning. In other words, it is no longer merely a model of semantics but a model of social semiosis itself.

This should appear even more evident if we consider Eco’s description of the encyclopedia as the “library of all libraries,” an archive containing every possible text, including images, paintings, films, and so on. Here the shift from semantics to semiotics is quite obvious, although in many passages Eco still introduces, in rather a confusing way, references to the semantic model and to an instructional semantics based on contextual and circumstantial selections, all pointing back to a more traditional, linguistically oriented approach. Despite such terminological ambiguities, the true novelty of the encyclopedia is the decisive move from semantics to semiotics. Two highly relevant consequences stem from this shift.

First of all, the encyclopedia no longer stands for the system of the plane of content, open though it may be, but, rather, for the system of all possible correlations between expression and content. Texts are nothing more than traces of already established correlations between the two s-codes: E and C.³⁴ This means that all codes, and all systems of possible codes, are in fact part of the encyclopedia and thus not potentially in opposition to the notion of encyclopedia as is somehow assumed in the trivialized opposition of code versus encyclopedia.

This first consequence implies, in its turn, a quite revolutionary way of defining expression and content, which is by no means a recent trait of Eco’s work. In his approach the distinction between expression and content has never been defined in any kind of aprioristic, essentialist way, where the two planes coincide with a more general opposition of sensible versus intelligible. Quite the contrary, expression and content can only be locally defined and, according to this, correlations are actually realized and established in any given single text. Eco has always made very clear the distinction between the concrete level of material manifestation of an expression, which is necessary in order to communicate, and the formal oppositional feature of expression per se, which is positionally endowed and deprived of any essentialist ontological dimension. Such a stance can be found in A Theory of Semiotics as well as in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, and is reasserted in 1990 where Eco writes: “within semiosis any given content can become in its turn the expression of further content, and both expression and content can mutate, exchanging their respective roles.”³⁵ Given an appropriate context, what was expression in some given correlation can become content in some new correlation, in accordance with a continuum of the two planes, explicitly formulated in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language as an interpretation of Hjelmslev’s famous partition between E and C.³⁶

This is the encyclopedia, an endless labyrinth where expression and content cannot be given any predetermined reciprocal positioning, but, rather, shift continuously according to local assignments—an open archive of all possible texts, in any type of format and substance and, since texts are merely the deposited traces of culturally established correlations, also the archive of all possible correlations. Given such an open and dynamic structure, the encyclopedia can never be fully represented but has merely to exist as a powerful hypothesis regarding the dynamic functioning of social semiosis.

III. GLOBAL AND LOCAL

In many passages Eco underlines the purely hypothetical nature of the encyclopedia. He states, for example, that “the Encyclopedia is a semiotic postulate. Not in the sense that it is not also a semiotic reality: it is the set of all recorded interpretations . . . but it must remain a postulate because it is not in fact describable in its entirety.”³⁷ The reasons why the encyclopedia is not representable are not only quantitative but are also due to its infinite dimensionality, its continuously changing format, and its inherent contradictory nature. There is also a qualitative epistemological reason. Each and every attempt to describe the encyclopedia would immediately affect its internal structure, which, precisely because of this attempt, will no longer be the same as before. As a global representation, the encyclopedia is only a semiotic postulate, a regulative idea that can only be represented locally.

This distinction between global and local lies at the very core of the theoretical construction of Eco’s model, and is at the same time its most important, and most critical, point. It is the most important point since it allows an abstract principle to become an operative pragmatic device underlying concrete acts of interpretation. Before discussing possible criticalities, let us look in more detail at how the distinction between global and local levels of organization actually works.

While at the global level the encyclopedia is the archive of all texts and possible information, at local levels it constitutes the situated knowledge that regulates interpretation, as a kind of pragmatic device that constrains the specific inferences necessary for giving meaning to any individual text.³⁸ One question that remains somehow unspecified here is the issue of the definition of the “size” of any given local encyclopedic environment: how local should it be? Or, to put it in other words, does it actually apply to single texts, or to entire portions of any given culture?

In a way, the answer to both these questions depends on the needs of any specific act of interpretation: each text and each culture, or portions of it, configures a local “cut,” so to speak, which determines possible interpretational environments. On the other hand, it seems possible to distinguish, in a more general way, between different levels or articulations of concepts, as I have suggested elsewhere.³⁹

Eco returned to this question in a number of his writings, from Kant and the Platypus to From the Tree to the Labyrinth. In the latter work he distinguishes the maximal encyclopedia from the median encyclopedia, which corresponds to the average of the knowledge shared in a given community, which was called nuclear content in Kant and the Platypus. This, in its turn, is different from all the possible variants of specialized encyclopedias, corresponding to molar content in Kant and the Platypus, and also from the myriad of individual encyclopedias composed of the idiosyncratic knowledge of each single individual language user.

We could imagine the states (or strata) of what Putnam has called the social division of linguistic labor by hypothesizing a kind of solar system (the Maximal Encyclopedia) in which a great many Specialized Encyclopedias describe orbits of varying circumferences around a central nucleus (the Median Encyclopedia), but at the center of that nucleus we must also imagine a swarm of Individual Encyclopedias representing in sundry and unforeseeable ways the encyclopedic notions of each individual.⁴⁰

As we will see, the most important layer of this complex system is certainly the median encyclopedia since it is this level that regulates interpretation in a more general way.

In the dialectic relationship between global and local levels we can see the bilateral functioning of the encyclopedia, which at one and the same time opens up for the unlimited dynamics of cultural semiosis, and “closes” interpretation, regulating local inferential processes and preventing an uncontrolled proliferation of readings, a constant worry in Eco’s theory. Indeed, while the encyclopedia embodies a principle of interpretive freedom, it also fulfills a regulatory function. The encyclopedia may be a rhizome, always open to dynamic, metamorphic change and transformation, but it is also an ordered, structured system, which imposes constraints upon the freedom of interpretation. In this way, the encyclopedia takes on the difficult task of guaranteeing interpretive freedom and interpretive regulation at one and the same time. This is a central concern in Eco’s work and in his twofold effort to free the text and the sign from the grip of an excessively rigid structuralism and to provide a principle to constrain the proliferation of uncontrolled interpretation. If, globally, the encyclopedia is an unordered connection of all possible paths, hierarchically unstructured, locally semiosis is regulated by many different codes that establish regularities of various kinds: norms, habits, stereotypes, genres, and so on, which represent the myriad background assumptions that structure all cultures.

We can find here the rationalist, illuminist belief system that characterizes Eco’s thought, the belief that everything that exists is produced by human culture and can be described, analyzed, and explained. As he puts it, “it is possible to think of an open matrix, of an unlimited rule, without assuming that it cannot be culturally produced. It is possible to think of the encyclopedia as a labyrinth without assuming necessarily that we cannot describe it, and explain its modes of birth and development.”⁴¹ At this point, however, the real question becomes how we can explain these “modes of birth and development.” So far I have always referred to “local encyclopedias” in order to indicate the local encyclopedic “cuts” necessary for any concrete act of interpretation. Eco, however, uses the notion of “dictionary” to refer to such local portions of the encyclopedia. This choice, as we shall see, is not entirely without its problems, as it opens up a first set of questions regarding the format of local representations. The reintroduction into the theoretical perspective of a dictionary-like representational model appears immediately problematic: why should local “cuts” be represented in a dictionary-like format?

Before discussing this critical point, however, we need to make an important clarification. There is a certain ambiguity in the use of the term “dictionary” in Eco’s writings since this very same term refers to two different notions, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not. In the first meaning, “dictionary” is used to refer to a restricted set of features belonging to our linguistic knowledge, as it was in Hjelmslev’s model. In the second meaning, “dictionary” refers to the tree-like structure of the model, constructed in terms of genus and species. Although these two senses are often connected, they do not necessarily need to be so. It is, however, important to bear in mind that, in the discussion that follows, “dictionary” refers to the tree structure of the model and not to a pure linguistic knowledge. The following example should clarify this point.

In Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language Eco discusses a fictional example where, during the night, a woman looking out of the window of her countryside home says to her husband that she fears there is a man outside in the garden. Eco argues that, in order to reassure his wife, it would not be sufficient for the man to merely say, “No, honey, it’s not a man . . .” He should in fact provide some more information, saying, for example, that what is outside is not a man but, alternatively, a dog, a tree, an object, and so on.⁴² Eco is certainly right in saying that the husband has to presuppose the same local knowledge implicitly outlined by his wife, and that he has to construct an ad hoc local representation that alters the hierarchy of properties in any generic Porphyrian tree related to the notion of “man.” It is less clear, however, why such a local representation should take the format of a dictionary with its hierarchical structure of genus and species. Eco writes: “The encyclopedia is the regulative hypothesis that allows both speakers to figure out the ‘local’ dictionary they need in order to ensure the good standing of their communicative interaction.”⁴³ Indeed, the idea that local encyclopedic representations should have a dictionary format, albeit a provisional one, is affirmed repeatedly in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language: “Thus, if the encyclopedia is an unordered set of markers . . . the dictionary-like arrangements we continuously provide are transitory and pragmatically useful hierarchical reassessments of it.”⁴⁴ In the chapter devoted to the notion of metaphor, Eco reiterates that “one must rely also on dictionary-like representations” and the full treatment of metaphorical expressions is accordingly carried out.⁴⁵

What is hidden behind the idea of a dictionary-like representation is the need to gather items into classes: “at the end (and even though transitorily) an item must be included in a given class, thus ‘freezing’ its representation in the format of a provisional dictionary.”⁴⁶ This reduction to classes, however, reminds us strongly of a reductive inclusion of tokens into types, something we have already pointed out as problematic in an encyclopedia-like representation based on interpretants. The fact that partial encyclopedias are locally situated and not endlessly open makes a relevant difference at the quantitative level, but on this basis a genuine qualitative difference does not follow in any obvious way. In other words, why should the fact that the local is necessarily quantitatively more restricted than the global imply qualitative differences in the internal structure of the domain?

Criticism of dictionary models such as the Porphyrian tree grew out of a refusal to accept the idea that it is possible to distinguish and separate a hierarchically structured linguistic knowledge domain from the wider context constituted by the whole of our general knowledge. The explosion of any dictionary tree, so magisterially demonstrated by Eco, showed precisely that all such trees are nothing but disguised encyclopedias and that semantics always implies a complete cultural and encyclopedic knowledge. Such a totality is never globally activated in all its richness and complexity, but is only locally reconstructed, depending on the interpretive needs of ad hoc texts or situations. However, there are no reasons to argue that local encyclopedic portions are of a different kind or nature than the global: they are, indeed, merely local encyclopedias not dictionaries.⁴⁷

A second question that needs to be discussed is the crucial notion of regularities, which also lies at the core of the vexata quaestio of literal meaning. Local encyclopedias, or dictionaries in Eco’s terms, seem to have a dual status: on the one hand, they are totally ad hoc constructs that are necessary in order to interpret any given communicative situation or text. These are often highly idiosyncratic constructions and do not need to refer to any presupposed regularity; on the contrary, they might precisely reorganize the usual structure of properties in unusual, deviant ways, as we have seen above in the example of the couple living in the countryside and worrying about mysterious presences in their garden. On the other hand, local encyclopedias have a rather more general stance, representing the regularities of the average knowledge of a given culture: its background assumptions; in other words, all that is taken for granted. This is precisely the notion of the median encyclopedia as described in From the Tree to the Labyrinth.

Both these forms of local encyclopedia are partial but they are nevertheless different in spirit: while in the former what is taken for granted is completely locally reconstructed, and contextually defined ad hoc, in the latter the aim is to regulate a more general interpretive process. It is at this level that the notion of “regularity” plays an essential role.

Undoubtedly, a certain pragmatic “laziness” guides all our interpretation processes; interpretation is always to some extent based on cultural stereotypes, norms, shared assumptions, background frames, textual genres, and so on. In other words, it is based on what Peirce called habits, a powerful concept that is central in explaining the regularity of interpretation, fixing its limits and putting a halt to the unlimited semiosis of the rhizome. We tend to give meaning to texts, and to our general experience of the world, according to these routines, at least unless something forces us to reconsider our assumptions and reorganize our basic knowledge. Texts often play with the laziness of our unquestioned assumptions, as Eco so convincingly showed in The Role of the Reader, in analyzing Un Drame bien parisien by Alphonse Allais.

Eco is certainly right in underlining the role that regularity plays as a device for limiting interpretations and organizing our actual understandings of the world: in this sense regularity is a key concept at the core of all cultural processes. The controversial point, in my opinion, is how locally such regularity should be defined. In Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language it appears to have a strong “local” character:

We can make up a dictionary-like representation in order to save definitional energies in any context in which certain “central” assumptions of a cultural system are taken for granted. We presuppose a local dictionary every time we want to recognize and to circumscribe an area of consensus within which a given discourse should stay, because no single discourse is designed to change globally our world view.⁴⁸

Such a notion of encyclopaedia . . . provides only “local” and transitory systems of knowledge, which can be contradicted by alternative and equally “local” cultural organizations; every attempt to recognize these local organizations as unique and “global”—ignoring their partiality—produces an ideological bias.⁴⁹

This is all very convincing. Some problems, however, might arise when the regularity loses its typical local character, as is very well indicated in the above passage from Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, to become a more generalized notion, a kind of common sense endowed with a certain unquestionable self-evidence. This is the criticism that has been raised by some authors, especially in relation to other writings of Eco, in particular The Limits of Interpretation, where the central aim appears to be the regulation of interpretive processes in the face of the alleged total freedom advocated by deconstructionism.⁵⁰

The main criticism that this particular book has given rise to is certainly not that interpretation should not be limited. No one really disagrees with this claim, and virtually everyone agrees that some interpretations are wrong. The main criticisms are rather that this statement is too obvious and requires further specification. As I just mentioned, in The Limits of Interpretation Eco’s main concern is to regulate and put a halt to the possible uncontrolled drift of interpretations: the “cancerogenous proliferation of connotations” that, according to him, are always an implicit risk for any kind of deconstructionist approach. In order to do this, Eco theorizes a stability of meaning based on literal sense: “Every discourse on the freedom of interpretation must start from a defence of literal sense.”⁵¹

Facing the indeterminacy of meaning that would derive from Derrida’s reading of Peirce’s interpretant, and its subsequent infinite regressions, Eco advocates the practical necessity of interpreting according to a common shared (and literal) meaning, and finds the ground on which such meaning could be anchored in the notion of the social community. The concept of the community as the regulative basis for interpretation comes from Peirce, and it is certainly a very important intuition; it risks, however, being at one and the same time both generic, since it is unspecified, and too general. Indeed, communities are plural and so are their meanings. The appeal to a literal sense “socially shared by a community” thus appears problematic since, as observed by Bal, “the community is not a monolithic entity.”⁵² The social anchoredness of grounds requires us “to theorize codes in intimate connections with social meanings” and these are always plural and difficult to reduce to any univocal, and singular, “literal sense.”⁵³

That community consensus can be a means for determining correct interpretations has been criticized on a similar basis. According to Birchall, for example, interpretive communities are not exclusive realms but are constantly being negotiated through challenges to them.⁵⁴ In such a perspective deviant interpretations and nonliteral meanings could be precisely what influence and challenge the “main” interpretive community or rational paradigm. “The coexistence of a number of communities, the internal consensus of each being constituted by dissensus, complicates the employment of community consensus as an anchor of interpretation.”⁵⁵

The problem in this case is how exclusion will be arbitrated or, to put it in other words, what guarantees that the consensus of one community is better than that of any other. In answering this criticism, Eco recognizes that this is a powerful objection, and writes: “My response is that one should choose the community in which to trust. . . . I believe that there are rules of reasonableness that allow us to establish when an interpretation is not supported by the text.”⁵⁶ But one could object that reasonableness, too, is a very variable “slippery” notion that is not necessarily easily sharable and that, at the end of the day, is open to exactly the same problems presented by the unproblematically unified social community. A perhaps too rationalistic belief seems to emphasize faith in a self-evident common sense as the basis for literal meaning, and for intersubjective agreement regarding interpretation.

It also has to be noticed that the ground where literal sense is typically anchored seems to mutate in Eco’s writings and is never fixed once and for all. If in The Limits of Interpretation the social community is the key notion that guarantees its stability, a few years later in Kant and the Platypus Eco seems to ground it in the apparently more “natural” basis of perception rather than in social life. However, it could also be observed that a similar shift depends in its turn on yet another locally and temporarily defined encyclopedic “cut,” the one dominated by a contemporary cognitively oriented episteme, with its system of hierarchical relevance in the perceptual dimension, as is convincingly argued by Paolucci.⁵⁷ Literal sense appears in this way to be anchored in various, quite different grounds: sometimes in the social life of the community, sometimes in the natural processing of our perceptual faculties, and sometimes in a more textual basis—while all these groundings are by no means the same and lead us to quite different conceptual frameworks.

I want to clarify right away that I am not criticizing the idea that some meanings can be taken to be more basic than others. This is certainly not an unreasonable claim to make: our semiotic functioning is based on structured systems possessing more central and more peripheral regions. But center and periphery always have to be taken as relative concepts that are continuously redefining one another. Meanings can only be locally defined and they are always open to continuous processes of reformulation. It is difficult, if not impossible, to draw a principled line between literal and figurative since they can shift and change places.⁵⁸ In other words, the problem is not in the idea of the existence of some basic meaning but in transforming what is a local regularity into a general rule. In the perspective I am suggesting here, literal meaning is not fixed and anchored in some ground that is given once and for all, but, rather, is a variable entity that is modifible according to the different local encyclopedias that are activated from time to time, and their consequent semantizations.

In principle Eco should not disagree on this point, as we have seen in the passages quoted above from Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, but in the extremely prolific extension of his writings there are also a number of different positions to be found, which is certainly not surprising within such a fecund production. So it appears that there exists a kind of oscillation between two rather different ways of understanding the relationship between a very local definition of meaning and a more generalized assumption of literal sense per se. It might well just be a matter of different alternative weightings of one or other of the poles of the scale—a difference in perspective in a way: in one case, literal sense is seen as a self-evident notion unquestionably assumed as a starting point and ground for interpretation; in the other, it is more the result of the interpretive process, a sense effect, so to speak. I would personally claim that the apparent self-evidentiality of the notion of literal meaning is a misleading impression that depends on our interpretive “laziness.” Literal meaning and common sense are not the starting point for interpretation, but, rather, the results of an interpretive process, the effects of a habit, which only in the aftermath of the event assume the form of (illusionary) general meanings. In positing a general, univocal literal sense we risk losing the powerful intuition that constituted a basis for the notion of local encyclopedias, potentially open to continuous reconstructions, in favor of a more type-like structure where local tokens are always reduced to general types, as has become very evident in the more recent writings of Eco, especially in Kant and the Platypus with its architecture of cognitive types and nuclear contents.

However, other options are possible on the basis of the selfsame premises proposed by Eco’s notion of encyclopedia: for example, following precisely the suggestion of the encyclopedia that I have suggested elsewhere, that all meanings can be seen as endowed with an open, still undetermined meaning potential of an encyclopedic nature.⁵⁹ This meaning potential becomes progressively specified following the different modes of its actual semiotic existence: first virtualized at a local encyclopedic level, then actualized in a specific textual dimension, and finally realized in some given interpretation.⁶⁰ In this perspective words and texts represent local access points to the encyclopedic rhizome, which is the starting point for the construction of a local, partial, encyclopedic “cut.” Only within the local encyclopedia can we establish some meanings as more basic, or literal, than others, but this is very different from a reduction of tokens into preestablished general types.

Indeed, it should be remembered once again that the encyclopedia in its virtual potentiality is the archive of all texts, the library of all libraries, and is therefore an endless collection of tokens, never of types. At the local level meanings are reconstructed starting from a local system of differential relationships and hierarchies that establishes what is more basic in that particular encyclopedic “cut,” without the need to appeal to an underlying generalized type system. The notion of type grows out of the necessity to stabilize and regularize meaning, but if we accept the idea that stabilization and regularity are always local phenomena that depend on different situations and contexts, it follows that stability has a high degree of variability and that regularity cannot be totally regularized.

Indeed, the categorical level, that is, that of the type, is a system that is always “at risk” because it is in any case possible to reconfigure the basic principles that regulate its composition, thus constructing others that are diverse and more appropriate to a new situation. General categories, which at first glance might appear highly defined and structured, are in fact inherently equipped with a high degree of fragility and are capable of continual redefinition locally. The internal lack of homogeneity of categories (made occult by the construction of the type but based on the multiform variety of tokens on which our experience rests) can always reappear under the pressure of a different context that forces us to see the properties in another way, on the basis of which categorical similarities have been constructed. The stability of meaning is thus always relative and locally and temporally defined.⁶¹ If it came to be transformed into a structural stability, this was because of a trompe l’oeil effect—the “signifier illusion.” Since signifiers remain stable within a variety of contexts, this has generated the illusion that the same stability will always hold for the signified too, and that different tokens have to be reduced to a common general type, following a top-down path. This is what I have called the “ideology of the type,” an optic illusion that prevents us from seeing how the path of meaning goes in the opposite direction, from the bottom up, so to speak, as is the case in the language acquisition of young children, where meanings are learned before, and without, any type-like preexistent general knowledge. We can think of this process as “tokening the type,” an alternative perspective whereby the regular functioning of semiosis is quite similar to a continuous process of acquisition that can always modify already established interpretive habits and stabilizations of meaning.

I believe that a similar position is quite consistent with at least the more “localist” positions of Eco’s theories, and it is also consistent with his principal theoretical formulations. Interpreted in this present vein, the notion of encyclopedia also reveals its full actuality in the face of some of the more controversial issues now at play in the contemporary semiotic debate.

IV. ACTUALITY OF THE ENCYCLOPEDIA IN THE CONTEMPORARY SEMIOTIC DEBATE

In particular, I am thinking of the notion of immanence, a key notion for many semiotically oriented approaches today. Immanence has often been interpreted exclusively within a textual perspective, following the, oft misinterpreted, Greimasian mantra “there is no salvation outside of the text” (hors du texte pas de salut). In this perspective immanence is postulated as existing entirely within the boundary of any given text. There is, however, a different way to approach the problem, moving immanence from texts to a wider domain composed of texts and the local encyclopedias necessary for reconstructing their various meanings. In this way the encyclopedia becomes the regulative device that is able to guarantee translation processes within a given culture. If any given text organizes its meaning within a network of intertextual relationships regulated by a local encyclopedia, then we can think of its immanence as being projected onto a larger cultural background; the intentio operis becomes, at least to some extent, an encyclopedic and cultural intentio.⁶²

In this perspective the well-known, highly problematic notion of context can also receive a different treatment. From a semiotic perspective the main critical aspect of the notion of context is the implicit idea that context is something “external” to the text, so to speak. This view opens up a series of unsolvable questions: not only is it not clear how extensive it should be, nor when one should stop in terms of analyzing it, but perhaps even more crucially it could render untenable the idea of textual immanence as this is usually defined and taken for granted in semiotics. A possible answer to this crucial question has been to say that context is nothing but a different definition of the extension of the text; in other words, a matter of the delimitation of the corpus.⁶³

However, some questions still remain open in this perspective, in particular the relationship of a given text to the activation of a local encyclopedia governing its possible interpretations, which certainly cannot be resolved by reducing the problem to a question of gathering a larger corpus. By moving the level of immanence from the text itself to the local encyclopedia actualized by a given text, the context is no longer being arbitrarily defined by the analyst but becomes, instead, the “natural” and necessary environment where textual meaning can be defined. This view is very consistent with a “culturalist” semiotic stance such as the one proposed by Lotman. It is not merely a matter of emphasis on the intrinsic intertextuality of any text; it is instead a different way of looking at textual meaning, namely as always determined and constructed within some given cultural semiosphere, to use Lotman’s term, which is precisely what the encyclopedia can provide.

Lastly, I would like to address a final issue related to the theory of the encyclopedia, to show how we can yet again find among Eco’s foundational notions some very contemporarily relevant intuitions. I am referring here to the notions of subject and subjectivity. I would like to show how, rooted in the selfsame notion of the encyclopedia, a new understanding of subjectivity can be found, one different from the traditional view that is generally dominant in contemporary semiotics.

The subject has been a central concern for Eco since A Theory of Semiotics. In the concluding chapter of this work, in asking what would be the role of the subject in the framework of the theory outlined in the course of the work, Eco writes: “the subject of any semiotic enquiry being no more than the semiotic subject of semiosis, that is, the historical and social result of the segmentation of the world that a survey on Semantic Space makes available.” The subject is thus essentially a way of seeing the world and “can only be known as a way of segmenting the universe and of coupling semantic units with expression-units: by this labor it becomes entitled to continuously destroy and restructure its social and historical systematic concretions.”⁶⁴

In A Theory of Semiotics the subject is thus nothing other than semiosis itself—as manifested in the encyclopedia—coinciding with meaning-creation and meaning-production processes. A similar formulation can be found in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, where the theme of the subject is again revisited in almost the same terms. Here the question of the subject is clearly connected to Eco’s proposal to rethink the concept of sign and code in an inferential, encyclopedic perspective. If the sign—understood as identity and equality—presupposes, along with a stronger, more objective notion of code, a more sclerotic subject as well, then a sign that functions as inference, involving continuous shifts between different language planes, thus opening up for an encyclopedic horizon, necessarily implies a far more fluid, omnipresent subject:

The sign as the locus (constantly interrogated) for the semiosic process constitutes . . . the instrument through which the subject is continuously made and unmade. . . . The subject is constantly reshaped by the endless resegmentation of the content. . . . As subjects, we are what the shape of the world produced by signs makes us become. . . . And yet we recognize ourselves only as semiosis in progress, signifying systems and communicational processes. The map of semiosis, as defined at a given stage of historical development (with the debris carried over from previous semiosis), tells us who we are and what (or how) we think.⁶⁵

The subject is thus a diffuse configuration, neither circumscribed nor circumscribable. It is not reducible to a single instance determined once and for all; it is not static but dynamic and linked to practices of construction and transformation of meaning. But since these practices are historical and integrated into the practices and workings of humankind, subjectivity is also a materially based product of history.

This way of thinking about subjectivity is quite different from the semiolinguistic approach of the poststructuralist school of generative semiotics, where the subject is always framed within enunciation theory, first developed by Émile Benveniste and then Algirdas Greimas. The subject of enunciation is a general, universal principle, an abstract function of the linguistic mechanism with its theoretical roots in the transcendental “I” of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, something quite different from the fluid figure in constant transformation described by Eco. Eco’s subject is not a transcendental consciousness, but, rather, a loose collection or network of multiple, dynamic relationships that, just like the semiosis with which it is identifiable, has the open, rhizomatic form of the encyclopedia, together “with the debris carried over,” from the history that produced it.

As we have already seen, the encyclopedia is composed of both production and interpretation practices since it includes not only all texts but also all codes and all possible correlations between expression and content. From this point of view, there is no qualitative difference between production and interpretation since production practices always imply interpretive work. Production and interpretation are coextensive terms: they are nothing but two different ways of looking at exactly one and the same activity, that is, semiosis in action. The “encyclopedic subject” thus coincides with actual production and interpretation practices; it is, in Eco’s words the “social result of the segmentation of the world.”⁶⁶

We are here very far from an idea of the subject as a trace left in a text and are, instead, dealing with a diffused subjectivity inscribed in practices (both interpretive and productive) or, in other words, with semiosis in action. It is interesting to notice that such a conceptualization of subjectivity and practices of sign-production has more than one trait in common with the notion of enunciatory praxis recently developed in post-Greimasian circles by Fontanille and Zilberberg, precisely in order to move beyond the transcendental problems implicit in classical enunciation theory. Enunciatory practice focuses on conversion of “forms” into “operations,” and this is “a practice to the precise degree that it provides a certain reality status—definable—to the products of language activity.”⁶⁷ This is not at all unlike how practices of sign-production function for Eco.

In making the subject coincide with the activity of semiosis—that is, with the foundational relationship between expression and content—Eco reinstalls the subject at the very center of the processuality of actual practices producing meaning. The encyclopedic subject and encyclopedic meaning are indeed strongly intertwined: just as the subject is situated in practices of production and interpretation rather than in traces deposited in texts, so meaning is diffused throughout the endless intertextual network that is the encyclopedia.

If subjectivity is no longer a textual trace, it is certainly also very far from any kind of individual consciousness per se: subjectivity is always culturally and historically constructed. Discussing the notion of “symbol” Eco offered an enlightening example of how individual subjectivity is shaped by cultural and historical constraints, analyzing the mystical experience of a symbolic vision described by Jung, that of Brother Klaus von der Flue.⁶⁸ Eco shows how individual symbols had to be translated into the encyclopedia of their time, which operated as a kind of “normalization device,” so to speak. Brother Klaus came to inscribe his own personal visionary experience within the Trinitarian dogma, thus saving himself from that excess of individual subjectivity that might have carried him over into heresy or madness. But this was certainly not the result of a pragmatic, calculated convenience; it was, rather, the only possibility for Brother Klaus to voice his own subjectivity, by inscribing it in the culturally regulated forms of the encyclopedia of his own time. Once again, we can see that the encyclopedia is something more than a mere collection of contents; it is also the complex whole of speakability procedures that govern the very possibility of subjective expression.

There are certainly some limitations in a totally culturally constructed subject of this kind: it can hardly account for the more individual aspects of subjectivity, nor for the body and the unconscious. As I have pointed out elsewhere,⁶⁹ subjective individuality indeed seems to be the unexpressed residue of theory: that which offers resistance, and that which remains as an opaque background that is definitively unspeakable. This issue is not unrelated to that which has been defined by Teresa de Lauretis as the pre-Freudian perspective characterizing Eco’s view of the subject, and its dichotomous notions of body and mind, matter and intellect, and physis and reason. According to de Lauretis, Eco’s perspective “would subsume the fields of cultural anthropology and political economy . . . but exclude the entire area of human physicality, the body, instincts, drives and their representations.”⁷⁰

I am not sure whether the above aspects could be integrated in Eco’s theory or not. Certainly, the most challenging and actual parts of his theory lie elsewhere. Discussing the question of subjectivity in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Eco advances the suspicion that we are not dealing with a singular subject at all but always with a “collectivity of subjects,” thus shifting focus from the individual to the collective sphere. This collectivity of subjects certainly reminds us of the Peircean notion of community, but it is also a central concern in contemporary approaches to human cognition. Recent developments in the cognitive sciences have radically distanced themselves from an abstract computational notion of cognition in favor of a more distributed perspective.⁷¹ According to this perspective, thoughts and cognition are not to be seen as localized exclusively in individual minds, nor solely within the body, but, rather, distributed within a far larger system of interrelated networks that reminds us strongly of an encyclopedic structure. At the very core of our cognitive system there does not reside an individual subject, but, rather, an extended mind, which seems very similar to the widely diffused subject that inhabits Eco’s encyclopedia.⁷²

PATRIZIA VIOLI

UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA

OCTOBER 2015

NOTES

1. Umberto Eco, Scritti sul pensiero medievale (Milan: Bompiani, 2012).

2. Rocco Capozzi, “Knowledge and Cognitive Practices in Eco’s Labyrinths of Intertextuality,” in J. J. E. Gracia, C. Korsmeyer, and R. Gasché, eds., Literary Philosophers: Borges, Calvino, Eco (New York: Routledge, 2002), 167.

3. I am referring here to Umberto Eco, Il segno (Milan: Isedi, 1973).

4. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 67.

5. See, for example, Jerrold J. Katz, Semantic Theory (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), and Jerrold J. Katz and Jerry A. Fodor, “The Structure of a Semantic Theory,” in Language 39, no. 2 (April‒June 1963): 170–200.

6. For a more detailed analysis and discussion of the limits and problems of the models based on necessary and sufficient conditions, see Patrizia Violi, Meaning and Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

7. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 98.

8. Ibid., 99.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., 105.

11. Ibid., 121.

12. M. Ross Quillian, “Semantic Theory,” in Semantic Information Processing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968).

13. Ibid., 122.

14. Ibid., 128.

15. Ibid., 124.

16. Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Eco, Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio (Turin: Einaudi, 1984). The two volumes do not, however, include exactly the same texts. I will quote from both of them, translating the text myself when I quote from the Italian edition.

17. Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 43.

18. Ibid., 46.

19. See John Searle, “Literal Meaning,” Erkenntnis 13, no. 1 (1978); republished in Searle, Expression and Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

20. See, for example, Umberto Eco, “Semantics, Pragmatics, and Text Semiotics,” in J. Verschueren and M. Bertuccelli Papi, eds., The Pragmatic Perspective: Selected Papers from the 1985 International Pragmatic Conference (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1987); republished in Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

21. Umberto Eco, “L’antiporfirio,” in Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti, eds., Il pensiero debole (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983), 357 (my translation and emphasis).

22. Eco, Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio, 69 (my translation and emphasis).

23. Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 69 (my emphasis).

24. See Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

25. Eco, Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio, 109 (my translation).

26. Umberto Eco, From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation, trans. Anthony Oldcorn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 50; Eco, Dall’albero al labirinto: Studi storici sul segno e l’interpretazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2007), 56.

27. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Rhizome (Paris: Minuit, 1976).

28. On this point, see Claudio Paolucci, Strutturalismo e interpretazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2010) and Jean Petitot, Morphogenèse du sens (Paris: PUF, 1985).

29. Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 81.

30. Ibid., 81, 82.

31. See Yuri M. Lotman “O semiosfere,” Trudy po znakovym sistemam 17 (1984); Lotman, “On the Semiosphere,” trans. Wilma Clark, in Sign Systems Studies 33, no. 1 (2005).

32. I cannot discuss this point here in more detail, as this would require further elaboration. In From the Tree to the Labyrinth Eco addresses the same question and points out that, while in some passages of Lotman’s text it would appear that the semiosphere is even vaster than a maximal encyclopedia, elsewhere it appears rather to be the territory of a culture that has set up rules to delineate its own borders. My impression is that the latter is the more correct interpretation of Lotman’s idea.

33. This is not to say that Peirce was unaware of the basic question that led to such a distinction, but, as Paolucci has pointed out, he proposed a different, alternative model to solve this problem. Paolucci, Strutturalismo e interpretazione, 337.

34. See Paolucci, Strutturalismo e interpretazione.

35. Umberto Eco, I limiti dell’interpretazione (Milan: Bompiani, 1990), 219 (my translation).

36. Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 45. For further discussion and elaboration of this question, see Claudio Paolucci and Patrizia Violi, I piani della semiotica. Espressione e contenuto tra analisi e interpretazione, special issue, VS. Quaderni di studi semiotici, nos. 103–5 (January–December 2007).

37. Eco, Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio, 109 (my translation).

38. Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 85.

39. See Patrizia Violi, “Individual and Communal Encyclopedias,” in N. Bouchard and V. Pravadelli, eds., Umberto Eco’s Alternative: The Politics of Culture and the Ambiguities of Interpretation (New York: Peter Lang, 1998).

40. Eco, From the Tree to the Labyrinth, 72; Eco, Dall’albero al labirinto, 79.

41. Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 188.

42. Ibid., 79.

43. Ibid., 80.

44. Ibid., 85.

45. Ibid., 84. For a criticism of a dictionary-like representation applied to metaphors see Paolucci, Strutturalismo e interpretazione.

46. Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 84.

47. It should also be observed that Eco himself, when giving examples of possible encyclopedic descriptions, refers to models such as scripts, frames, and other models from text linguistics—for example, János S. Petöfi, “Lexicology, Encyclopaedic Knowledge, Theory of Text,” Cahiers de Lexicologie 29 (1976)—that, although now probably out of date, nevertheless represented an attempt to overcome the limitations of a hierarchically structured dictionary-like model.

48. Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 85.

49. Ibid., 84.

50. See, for example, Mieke Bal, “The Predicament of Semiotics,” in M. Gane and N. Gane, eds., Umberto Eco (London: Sage, 2005); and Patrick C. Hogan, “The Limits of Semiotics,” in ibid.

51. Eco, Limits of Interpretation, 53.

52. Bal, “The Predicament of Semiotics,” in Gane and Gane, eds., Umberto Eco, 77.

53. Ibid., 79.

54. Clare Birchall, “The Predicament of Semiotics,” in C. Ross and R. Sibley, eds., Illuminating Eco: On the Boundaries of Interpretation, Warwick Studies in the Humanities (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004).

55. Ibid., 83.

56. Umberto Eco, “A Response by Eco,” in Ross and Sibley, eds., Illuminating Eco, 196.

57. Paolucci, Strutturalismo e interpretazione, 387.

58. Ernest van Alphen, “Literal Metaphors: On Reading Post/Materialism,” Style 21, no. 2 (1988): 208–18.

59. See Patrizia Violi, “Significati lessicali e pratiche comunicative. Una prospettiva semiotica,” Italian Journal of Linguistics 15, no. 2 (2003): 293–320; Violi, “Tokening the Type: Meaning, Communication and Understanding,” in J. Pinto de Lima, M. C. Almeida, and B. Sieberg, eds., Questions on the Linguistic Sign (Lisbon: Edicoes Colibri, 2006).

60. For a similar approach, see Paolucci, Strutturalismo e interpretazione, 366.

61. In the same vein, see also François Rastier, Marc Cavazza, and Anne Abeille, Sémantique pour l’analyse: De la linguistique à l’informatique (Paris: Masson, 1994).

62. For further discussion and elaboration of this question, see Paolucci and Violi, I piani della semiotica.

63. Gianfranco Marrone, L’invenzione del testo (Rome: Laterza, 2010).

64. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 315.

65. Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 45.

66. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 315.

67. Jacques Fontanille and Claude Zilberberg, Tension et signification (Hayen: Mardaga, 1998), 128.

68. Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 145.

69. See Patrizia Violi, “‘The Subject is in the Adverbs’: The Role of the Subject in Eco’s Semiotics,” in P. Bondanella, ed., New Essays on Umberto Eco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

70. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 171.

71. See John Haugeland, “Mind Embodied and Embedded,” in Y. Houng and J. Ho, eds., Mind and Cognition Types (Tapei: Academic Sinica, 1995); Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Shaun Gallagher, “Philosophical Antecedents to Situated Cognition,” in P. Robbins and M. Aydede, eds., Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

72. Notice that Peirce also introduced the notion of external mind. For a discussion of this concept and its relationship with contemporary research in cognitive science, see Riccardo Fusaroli, Tommaso Granelli, and Claudio Paolucci, The External Mind: Perspectives on Semiosis, Distribution and Situation in Cognition, special issue, VS. Quaderni di studi semiotici, nos. 112–13 (January–December 2011).