The Philosophy of Umberto Eco

In the 1960s Umberto Eco moved into the architectural world to explore one of his favorite questions—how everything is experienced as a sign or symbol. Churches and doorways were obvious subjects for his semiotic speculation, but also the more perplexing spaces of the city, and how we might relate in them at closer distance, for instance those in the street and bedroom. “Architecture” can mean almost anything in the environment, and with his amusing insight Eco wandered into this field as a welcome alien, seeing things of which the inhabitants were only dimly aware. Because of his acuity I invited him to talk at the Architectural Association in London—maybe it was 1969, but certainly when modern architecture and Brasilia were being questioned.

His talk was based on one of the hypotheses behind semiotics, and perception in general: the fact that we see architecture through codes, both distorting and correcting lenses, but never entirely free of either. Naïve realism was out and the frailty of looking through cultural spectacles was back, if not the convention of seeing through a glass darkly.

E. H. Gombrich had made much of this insight concerning the history of art and often used the famous duck-rabbit illusion to clinch the point. You can see this eponymous figure as a duck or a rabbit and, with effort, even oscillate between the two as you force the reading left or right; or, think of either animal one at a time. And you can torture it into a third figure; or mere abstract lines on the white paper if you try very hard. But the one thing you cannot do is see it without interpretive lenses.

Thus Eco took us through the environment showing how buildings communicated as intended—somewhat—or were systematically misread, according to the codes of the inhabitants. If I remember rightly, his talk culminated in one of the most famous, iconic landmarks of modernism: the new city of Brasilia, and its capital buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer, in the dream commission of the age.

The problems of the city layout were well advertised in architectural circles. Though idealistic in its egalitarian intentions, the fact of construction led to workers living in impoverished favelas outside the city. These, through another irony, had a much more stimulating urban life than those of the better off, who were housed in anonymous superblocks. By the late 1960s advanced architects (though few modernists) had absorbed the lessons of Jane Jacobs and her devastating attack on Le Corbusier and planners in her polemic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.¹ We knew something had gone wrong with the good intentions of architects, and looked to anthropologists, semioticians, sociologists, and radical thinkers—any suggestive views from outside the profession.

So the audience at the AA was keyed up as Eco reached his semiotic climax. The center of Brasilia was focused on the Federal District—the nation’s highly symbolic capital designed overall as a “bird or plane,” and more particularly the Plaza of the Three Powers. The three buildings were purified volumes: a vertical abstract shaft set between two half spheres (Figure 1). This design quickly became the icon of a new Brazil.

The mass culture image presented semiotic questions. The phallic metaphor was always too obvious to talk about publicly, and the twin tower at the center had another metaphorical problem that Lewis Mumford had raised about the contemporary United Nations. It prioritized the office above the organs of government, the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, saying, in effect, “bureaucracy rules politicians.” And the latter two hemispheres, the bowls of the Three Powers, should have symbolized something poetic and aesthetic, not something sexual and conventional; that is, according to the modernist doctrine of Le Corbusier’s “Le Purisme” (an expressive theory of communication).² As Corb defined the new architecture, it would capture the aesthetic delight of white volumes seen in sunlight, and the pure harmony of primary geometry—“truth, egality, and goodness”—to recall the connotations of the abstract, Platonic code. However, that modernist reading was not the popular one.

As Eco pointed out, the inhabitants, who were living the realities of the new Brazil, reread the forms of the hemispheres according to a local and more relevant code. Instead of signifying equality, the expensive white dishes symbolized how the politicians and bureaucrats had spent all the money for the rich and powerful. That interpretation was confirmed because of the typical Brazilian lunch, where the upturned bowl receives the lettuce (“our money”) and the upside-down bowl signifies the meal has ended (“we are broke”). Thus local codes of (mis)reading may take priority over intended architectural codes, especially where the latter are abstract, in a new language, merely aesthetic, and reduced—all four in this case. This Lesson of the Salad Bowl was not lost on me, nor was Gombrich’s paradigm of the duck-rabbit. I made them lessons in the argument for The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (as the book of 1977 was called) and criticized modernists for their inadvertent metaphors, architectural malapropisms, and their failure to consider the codes of the inhabitants.³

Figure 1. National Congress Building Brasilia. “The Plaza of the Three Powers.” (Courtesy of Satoshi Isono, Architectural Association, London)

Because both producers (architects) and consumers (inhabitants) should occupy a primary place in determining meaning, I drew several more lessons from Eco’s insights. The language of architecture is based on varying codes that change at vastly different rates, and must appeal to several opposing tastes. Thus, for the extremes of taste cultures—traditionalists versus modernists, populists versus professionals, left versus right, and so forth—the code of architecture becomes radically schizophrenic. To simplify this argument, it follows that a large or public building might be designed at least twice: once for the professionals (architects), once for the inhabitants (and by the interior designers who now customarily finish the job).

The Lesson of the Salad Bowl, and its two readings, led to the idea of “double coding” in postmodernism and its attendant irony. More generally it led to the notion of multiple coding and cross coding—the way various layered publics can be addressed—as abstraction and ambiguity are used positively.

This last implication became apparent, as more and more iconic buildings followed from the example of Niemeyer and Le Corbusier right up to the present generation of global designers (or Starchitects as they are known, often contemptuously). If in a mass culture so much public meaning is typically misread and reread, then an iconic building must be multiplicoded with mixed metaphors that are suggested to different taste cultures. Otherwise they will be dismissed as one liners, and read ironically against the architects’ intentions, as so many dominating skyscrapers are today. For instance, in London Renzo Piano’s self-styled “Shard” vies with Norman Foster’s “Gherkin,” named by taxi drivers and journalists. The arms race of competing icons continues with The Pinnacle, Cheesegrater, and Walkie-Talkie—some admired, some disliked—but all seen through the lenses crafted by culture and point of view, class and prejudice, profession or citizenship. To deal with this, the more successful structures have adopted what I have termed the “enigmatic signifier” (in The Iconic Building),⁴ not only a careful mixture of metaphors that relate to function and nature, but a few paranoid ones that provoke a response (as did the Eiffel Tower). The important role of the enigmatic signifier developed from Eco’s notion of the relations between primary functions and secondary connotations, and his humorous parables about architecture and postmodernism.

By the 1970s the idea of coded perception became accepted, if not dominant, in professional circles. Umberto Eco had published an early version of his talk in 1967 about the same time as George Baird and I (influenced by Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and continental writers) were publishing Meaning in Architecture.⁵ We were all part of a growing movement that stemmed from research in the 1950s, much of it concerned with information theory, mass culture, opposing taste cultures, and pluralism. Eco summarized much of this thinking a lot more effectively than anyone I came across because of his inimitable energy, systematic thinking, and good humor. His vivid and patient delivery—in heavy Italian-American tones—would nail down a point in the mind that always returned because it was accompanied by a striking image.

Another architectural lesson of his talk, and another bowl, shows the pervasive influence of semiotics. This lesson again concerned some well-intentioned planning, but now in an impoverished area of southern Italy, and the role of a very white, progressive technology. As part of the urban renewal around the ancient city of Matera, architects provided the citizens with new sanitation, with flushing loos, female bidets, and male urinals. These were also industrial objects—and modern symbols—that Le Corbusier had illustrated as the epitome of the machine age, white icons of truth and good health. They cleared away filth with a pull of the handle. But the inhabitants, mostly farmers, had other priorities than those of middle-class hygiene and the aesthetics of MoMA. They relieved themselves outdoors in the customary way and, instead, appropriated the white bowls to wash their grapes.

The Lesson of the Toilet Bowl equaled that of the Salad Bowl and again illustrated important semiotic distinctions, between primary functions and secondary connotations, the codes of professionals and those of the inhabitants, schizophrenic design, and so forth.

I wrote up this didactic lesson in the anthology Signs, Symbols and Architecture (see note 5) where we republished Eco’s semiotic analysis of architecture, which was an extended version of his talk in 1969. It is only on rereading these texts that I see how my mind played tricks on some details. My farmers washed “grapes” in their white flushing bowls, his farmers washed “olives.” The difference points up how semiotics was growing within architecture, the fact that I heard the version first in 1966, from Giancarlo de Carlo at a meeting of Team Ten in Urbino. He had designed mass housing near Matera, and also was trying to deal with differences in taste, perception, and architectural codes that the grape version illustrated.

These parables of taste and code difference sound trivial until one recalls the larger battles that were under way concerning mass housing and urban renewal. Low-intensity conflicts were fought in cities such as central Amsterdam, Covent Garden, London, and Greenwich Village, New York where local inhabitants were pitted against the planners. Moreover, many housing estates in the mid-1970s and later were blown up by the authorities because they had become places of crime and misery. The most famous of these explosions was at Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis in 1972, when eleven slab blocks were dynamited. The award-winning, modernist architecture of Minoru Yamasaki had failed for many reasons. Some were social and economic, some were racial, some were based on the failure of primary functions (the lack of private, defensible space). But all were mixed up with the semiotic codes, and connotations of the white abstract architecture, through which these failures were perceived.

It is these semiotic relations—stereotypes, forms, and visual signs—that I traced as one attendant of “The Death of Modern Architecture” in 1972;⁶ the explosions were rebroadcast around the world on television and film. In response, a new postmodern architecture was meant to be designed, as mentioned, across the codes of the inhabitants, the architects, and other taste cultures, including that of the public.

Did it happen? In part, yes: many exemplary buildings, and parts of cities, resulted during the next thirty years, which I wrote about in the subsequent editions of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. But, predictably, the dilemma of crossing codes occurred, and became a problem for postmodernists who had trouble mixing high and low tastes not their own. Even worse, as with many reform movements that have become popular since 1800, a much larger amount of second-rate culture also resulted. Commercial pastiche, weak eclecticism, kitsch iconic architecture, and the imperatives of global mass culture played the dominant role, as they had with all the modern movements. By the 1990s reactions set in against the general culture of postmodernism, and semiotics itself.

You could say all this battle, change, and even understanding of the semiotic issues illustrated Eco’s larger point, that semiosis is a continually shared process of meaning that never stands still. Culture incessantly recycles and invents meaning as it recounts stories, and old jokes. There is a logic to this process, as he points out, not always straightforward or transparent, but it can follow dictates of semiosis, and the mind—the complexity of the labyrinth, the net, rhizome, and encyclopedia, these favorite images for complex thinking.

The penultimate time I met Umberto Eco was across a table in Greenwich Village during a Thanksgiving weekend in 1996. I was curating a large exhibition on postmodern art and architecture for Barcelona, called Runaway Meaning. This adapted his idea of the branching labyrinth for its several paths, and I hoped to get his collaboration on the project.

We settled in for a long discussion over drinks, with a large bowl of peanuts placed between us. As we drank more and more, we talked as usual on any topic that followed the logic of conversation wherever it went. These directions were not far from our favorite semiotics, and his discussion of C. S. Peirce’s “unlimited semiosis,” which is to say it went anywhere as long as it followed some associative path.

Eco’s voracious appetite for thoughts fed on themselves as if the ideas were doing the talking, not us, and I wondered why he never made much use of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic, the quintessential logic of the novel where dialogue is a creative path that neither speaker controls. A true dialogue has no predetermined ending, and like the Mannerist labyrinth that became the basis for The Name of the Rose, it is a tree-like structure that continually bifurcates. It is also like The Garden of Forking Paths of Jorge Luis Borges—another murder mystery and, as I mentioned to him, like the Garden of Cosmic Speculation that I was designing at the time in Scotland.

We discussed our preference for Early Gothic architecture—Autun, Moissac, Conques—on the various pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela. This style was more expressionist than the systematic High Gothic. He admired the thin writhing sculptures at their entries because of their evocative freedom, and he noted their details and symbolism. Indeed, in working on his bestseller Eco had studied various encyclopedias of architecture to get the layout of his abbey and its main character—the library—and even the correct number of steps in the spiral staircase.

Critics who faulted him for being a kind of Platonic semiologist, who is cut off from the real world, get it wrong; he is an empiricist of a kind. But his version of semiotics does seek to establish its methodology independent of nonsemiotic “reality.” My version, based on Anglo-Saxon work of Ogden and Richards, smuggled the real-world referent into the semiotic triangle, something we argued over, as the peanuts started to disappear ever faster.

Inevitably we turned to architecture and his Postscript to The Name of the Rose, which suggests several definitions of postmodernism (that had become widespread and canonic) and his images for thinking as being like various forms of labyrinth.⁷

He mentions three models of conjecture starting with the simplest, the unicursal maze of prehistory and the Greeks. Here one follows a single path like the labyrinth at Chartres cathedral that leads the pilgrim to the center, Jerusalem. The Bible, the scientific treatise, and propaganda are designed with such a controlled path and singular outcome—little freedom for the reader but all the virtues of a clear direction.

The third, most complex labyrinth is a net or what Deleuze and Guattari call the more organic rhizome—or ginger root—which sends out shoots every which way. There is no center, no periphery, no exit, and potentially infinite connections, as in unlimited semiosis. Neural nets, and glial cells running along them establishing new thoughts, are a physical analogue of this complex labyrinth, an image we discussed that illustrates the supreme plasticity of the mind-brain. It can think itself new pathways, just like our dialogue over peanuts.

But Eco’s library, which illustrated the cover of The Name of the Rose, is the second type of labyrinth.⁸ Like the one at Rheims, it has several (not infinite) connections and a tree-like structure of order that you can learn, through trial and error. His related point is that the detective story and murder mystery make use of the same structured quest, as the reader seeks the goal—who done it?—a structure that the thriller shares with other genres including cosmology, religion, and metaphysics. The mind is pushed and pulled along this complex path, and it can be strewn with many detours (as his novel showed), with history, comedy, semiology, or romance: any genre as long as the goal is strong enough. It must pull one through the detours, and it can be most compelling in a symphony or film that plays with expectations and their partial fulfillment. Eco also refers to “the novel as a cosmological event” that makes use of this force, and this connection led back to my cosmic garden, and the big question of metaphysics.

Eco appeared to believe that with culture, the mind, and the universe there is just an infinite number of nodes and connections—not any plot. At the end of the novel the Sherlock Holmes figure, the English monk William of Baskerville, says to his Dr. Watson named Adso: “Where is all my wisdom then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well there is no order in the universe. . . . The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.”⁹

III

This echoes Wittgenstein’s famous remark about discarding ladders—belief systems—after they have proven useful, and one has grown up into agnosticism. Or is it the nihilism of unlimited semiosis? This view may reflect Eco’s personal metaphysics on occasion, but he holds a different outlook at other times and in any case a character in a novel, as he points out, must first follow the logic of the story.

In his essay “Joyce, Semiosis and Semiotics” (1988), the Joycean novel is used to test various images for the mind and its endless churning through infinite signification.¹⁰ It takes an almost heroic effort to understand Joyce’s world of self-referring meaning and puns—the slipping beauty that can be read both ways, the book that creates “the ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia.”¹¹ Here we are close to Eco’s (and as it happened my) “ideal postmodernist” affected by a love of pluralism, polysemy, and the meaning created by conflicting interpretation. But this ideal booklover is an attentive insomniac not, as Eco characterizes some deconstructionists, an “incontinent reader.”

In this essay, and the whole collection The Limits of Interpretation, Eco defines the constraints made by science on the universe and by reading on literature. While theoretically the world has endless pathways through it, there are rules of the road and you can tell when you have made a bad turn—or been proven wrong. This is the Popperian test of negativity epitomized in the Wildean epigram “experience is the name I give to my mistakes.” Positively, in literature, Eco writes “internal textual coherence controls the otherwise uncontrollable drift of the reader.”¹² That is, the text as “a coherent whole” directs unlimited semiosis. At these moments the voracious Eco with his ideal insomnia checks his appetite for endless lists and exhausting signification.

Other checks include his favorite metaphors for thought such as the multi-forking labyrinth. A new, striking one in this essay is the mind-brain seen as a box full of magnetized marbles.¹³ Imagine each idea being a marble that undergoes magnetic attraction and repulsion in its global semantic universe, as you feel and think your way through a book. This magnetization reduces some interrelationships and strengthens others—an idea I mentioned to Eco, as we continued eating and drinking, that I found very attractive.

It put the growth of the mind on a coherent track. Might it have a larger metaphysical role as well? Warming to the metaphor, I asked if magnetized marbles could be a superior form of materialism, and if so, whether they could give the world a possible structure and direction? As against the Einsteinian view—“God does not play dice with the universe”—you could say, “Yes he does, but he loads the die.” That would be like Eco’s second type of labyrinth—complex but not infinitely chaotic—the kind in Eco’s novel and my impending exhibit on postmodernism. Or, is the world and universe, as Churchill asked about history: just one crazy thing after another, the Adso question about Chaosmos?

As I looked across the bowl separating us, I saw a truth emerge from behind his eyes. Or was it my reflection in his glasses, or maybe it was the wine, maybe it was all the peanuts; but suddenly I saw an apparition, a semblance.

Umberto Eco resembles his name, I realized, as if his persona were illustrating his theory of the Nomothete. These god-like authors of several biblical traditions go around naming first things in order to bring them into being (“In the beginning was the Name”). And few others would work as well as his own moniker.

Consider “Umberto,” with slightly royal overtones (Umberto I of Italy); it means “bright warrior” and it sounds friendly with its triplet rhythm, just like his bright philosophical character and serious face (“laughing philosophers are not taken seriously,” he had said). The surname “Eco” is even more fitting, as one hears the colloquial Italian and polysemic “ecco.” Depending on the context this all-purpose expression can mean many things such as “here” or “there,” or “I agree,” “that’s right.” Or “ecco,” with the right gesture of the hands, can mean the opposite, “hold on there.” Or more opposites: “this is” versus “that’s all then.”

The English “echo” also provokes endless semiosis, as meanings reverberate in the mind creating evermore cascades of overchoice. Thus the compound “Umberto Eco,” the designation his parents chose, has created the fiction that writes according to the word magic embedded in his name, a conspiracy that drove his continual fascination for the Nomothete, even while we were talking.

The Nomothete, I knew, helped him explain the origins of linguistics, as the attempt to find the first natural or universal language—and it had become an explanatory and humorous figure in his book The Search for the Perfect Language, which had come out in English the previous year.¹⁴ Many theories joined the hunt for the ideal language, which lay behind the present-day variety, the biblical curse of many tongues, the Tower of Babel.

Eco went through the possibilities, a big list. Perhaps language was based on nature, and some linguistic universals, as in Noam Chomsky’s model. Or, following phonemic properties, perhaps explained by a naturalistic link between sound and sense. Or perhaps it was created when some theoretical Nomothete, Adam, called things into being “by their own names,” that is, their right name either because of some rational quality that special words have or else by conventional usage. Or, searching through earlier theories of linguistics, perhaps the world’s first ur-language was something like a primordial vernacular? Or underlying physical connections; God expressing himself, as Eco wrote, by thunderclaps and lightning. I was delighted by such speculations and overwhelmed by their number.

But, I objected, they were still not enough, and there was a different kind of creator at work—not just a linguistic one, or God the novelist.

Besides, there was an earlier origin much further back than in either Christian or Greek cosmogony: that of the Ancient Egyptians. Here the great god Ra (or Amun or Aten) only had to name a thing and it came into being. This, the first cosmic Nomothete, uttered the words: “I am Khepera at the dawn, and Ra at noon, and Tum in the evening,” and behold on the first day he was the sun rising in the east, passing across the sky and setting in the west. When he named Tefnut the spitter the rain fell; when he uttered Shu the wind blew; when he spoke the name Geb the earth rose above the waters of the sea, and so on, until finally he created Man (in the form of the first Pharaoh) and his consort, Woman. The Genesis account had this important precedent that had to be added to Eco’s list, which generated the word magic.

I went on and on about my love of Egypt and how it had created many of the universals of the classical language of architecture for which the Greeks and Romans had claimed paternity, with their voracious logocentrism. And, as we were finishing our debate, I countered his Verbal Nomothete with the Architectural “Picturathete.” It derived from Plato and was painted several times in thirteenth-century Europe. These pictorial works showed “God the architect of the universe” laying out earth, air, fire, and water, while he divided day and night, the sun and moon, and so on through construction. He created ex nihilo not by speaking everything into existence as did Ra but by using architectural instruments, a compass and T-square, and with them built and sculpted everything and the universe. The keystone of my argument was Plato’s metaphor of God the Great Architect of All Things, especially appealing to my profession, to Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller, and those laying out new cities such as Oscar Niemeyer in Brasilia.

In this manner we came to a fork in the road, and a question I had not foreseen. Was it the conversation that had led to the drinking and eating, or the other way around? Crisis.

We looked down at the large, almost empty bowl between us—an unwelcome fact. The absent peanuts were dry roasted, a particularly aggressive form of edibility making us reflect on aphorisms—“self-control is eating one peanut” or “the increase of appetite has grown by what it fed on”—and then we reflected on the semiotics of real things such as food and stomach aches, the fact that drink and conversation are only a ruse by which the peanut gets its way to reproduce. Just as the selfish gene uses life to get around and replicate. Culture and conversation are its secondary byproducts, the essential thing is the arm’s race of peanuts against potato chips. Unlimited semiosis was coming to its end in the void of the bowl, and so with this melancholic idea, we concluded our demise would be Death by Peanut—a good way to go, but ultimately the revenge of nonsemiotics nuts.

CHARLES JENCKS

LONDON, ENGLAND

FEBRUARY 2013

NOTES

1. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).

2. Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), “Le Purisme,” L’Esprit Nouveau 4 (1921): 369–86.

3. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977).

4. Charles Jencks, The Iconic Building: The Power of Enigma (London: Frances Lincoln, 2005).

5. For sources, see George Baird and Charles Jencks, eds., Meaning in Architecture,” special issue, Arena: The Architectural Association Journal 83, no. 913 (June 1967). Later I collected more articles and republished some of the previous ones along with George Baird, in Meaning in Architecture (London: Barrie & Rockcliffe, The Cresset Press, 1969, and New York: Braziller, 1969).

Umberto Eco’s writings on architecture came out in 1967, and were collected, I believe, in La struttura assente: La ricerca semiotica e il metodo strutturale (Milan: Bompiani, 1968). For a later English summary of his and my ideas on these subjects, as well as many references, see Geoffrey Broadbent, Richard Bunt, and Charles Jencks, eds., Signs, Symbols and Architecture (New York: Wiley, 1980); particularly our two articles, Eco’s “Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture,”11–69, and my “The Architectural Sign,” 71–118.

My use of semiotics and Eco’s various insights were contained mostly in various editions of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, from the first edition in 1977 (London: Academy Editions; New York: Rizzoli) to the much expanded and revised editions in 1978, 1981, 1984, 1987, and 1991. The seventh, entirely rewritten edition, New Paradigm in Architecture, was published by Yale University Press in 2002. Foreign translations in many languages were made of these various editions, and pirated or samizdat versions.

See also Charles Jencks, The Iconic Building: The Power of Enigma (London and New York: Frances Lincoln Ltd., 2005), which makes use of the concept enigmatic signifier.

6. See Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, pt. I.

7. Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).

8. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983).

9. Ibid., 492.

10. Umberto Eco, “Joyce, Semiosis, and Semiotics,” in The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 137–51.

11. Ibid., 146.

12. Ibid., 149.

13. See ibid., 144.

14. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).