Anything that can be sensed, reacted to or thought about, either directly or indirectly. Often limited to that which stands in some relation as separate from or other than something else, but sometimes extended to include real things in themselves (independently of their relations). When taken in the first sense, objects can be distinguished from subjects. Objects may be of an intellectual (mental) nature, e.g. Plato’s conception of justice, or they may be natural (external), e.g. the hemlock that Socrates drank. Also, a goal or purpose; that for which action is taken. As a verb: to oppose or raise an objection. In the semeiotic of Charles S. Peirce, an object is anything that is represented in a sign. If the object of a sign is of the nature of a character, the sign’s interpretant will be a feeling. If the object is an existential thing or event, the interpretant will be a resistance or reaction. If the object is a law, the interpretant will be a thought. According to Peirce, signs involve two kinds of objects: immediate objects, which are just what signs represent them to be, and dynamical objects, which are instrumental in the determination of their signs but are not immediately represented in them. Signs cannot express dynamical objects but can only indicate them and leave it to interpreters to find them by ‘collateral experience’ (Peirce 1998b: 498). (NH)
Réthoré, J. (ed.) (1993) Variations sur l’objet, special issue of European Journal for Semiotic Studies, 5(1/2).
OCKHAM see WILLIAM OF OCKHAM
Charles Kay Ogden (1889– 1957) was unquestionably a polymath, known above all for his book with Ivor A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (1923). As a student at Cambridge University, Ogden was one of the founders of the Heretic Society for the discussion of problems concerning not only religion but also topics related to philosophy, art, science, etc. He worked as editor of the Cambridge Magazine and subsequently of Psyche (1923–1952), a journal of general and linguistic psychology. Among his various undertakings he founded the Orthological Institute and invented Basic English, an international language comprising 850 words for people with no knowledge of English. The orientation and development of his research was significantly influenced by his relationship with Victoria, Lady Welby and Richards. The unpublished correspondence between Ogden and Welby (1910–1911) is of noteworthy interest from the viewpoint of the connection between Welby’s significs and the conception of meaning proposed in the above-mentioned book by Ogden and Richards (cf. Gordon 1990; Petrilli 1995b, 1998a, d). As a young university student Ogden was an enthusiastic promoter of significs and in 1911 he gave a paper for the Heretic Society on ‘The progress of significs’ (cf. Ogden 1994). In The Meaning of Meaning Ogden and Richards (1923) propose a triadic schema of the sign where interpretation and meaning emerge as relational processes, ensuing from the dynamic interaction between sign (or representamen), interpretant and object, or in the authors’ terminology, between symbol, reference and referent. In this book, while the importance of Charles S. Peirce for semiotics is recognized with the insertion of a section devoted to him in the Appendix with which his ideas were introduced and made to circulate for the first time in England alongside the names of other important figures, Welby is mentioned but the significance of her contribution is not sufficiently acknowledged. (SP)
Gordon, T. W. (1991) ‘The semiotics of C. K. Ogden’, in T. A. Sebeok and J. Umiker-Sebeok (eds), Recent Developments in Theory and History. The Semiotic Web 1990, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 111–177.
The process of forming a word based on the sound of what the word names. Examples in English are cuckoo and hiss. In other languages we find words like Hebrew bak-buk, ‘bottle’ (from the sound that liquid makes as it comes out), Shona (a Zimbabwean language) vhuvhuta, ‘to blow like the wind’, and German knusprig, ‘crisp, crunchy’. (RS)
In 1962, L’opera aperta (The Open Work, 1989) found many readers disagreeing on the innovative and somewhat controversial proposals of Umberto Eco. Today the expression ‘open work’ has become such a popular expression that it does not always refer to the original views of the Italian semiotician and novelist.
Eco’s ‘poetic of the open work’ was a reaction to Benedetto Croce’s idealistic aesthetics on inspiration, form and content; it was also the result of having studied under the supervision of Luigi Pareyson whose philosophical teachings on aesthetics focused on how art is a cognitive experience and how it knows the world through its formal structures.
The Open Work precedes a number of theoretical concepts on the dialectics between author, text and reader that in the 1960s and 1970s were revolutionizing literary criticism; and it announces a number of strategies foreseen by authors who regard readers as possible collaborators in the genesis of their work. In his essays we can easily detect elements of Barthes’ notion of ‘readers as collaborators’, of ‘reader reception theories’ popularized by Wolfgang Iser and Roman Ingarden, and of the new approaches to art and literature proposed by the avant-garde and experimental ‘Gruppo 63’ in Italy.
The reflections on aspects and degrees of ‘openness’ begin with references to the musical compositions of Berio, Pousseur and Stockhausen which give complete (interpretative) freedom to artists who wish to per form them. What follows is a vari ety of observations on such diverse forms of expression as Calder’s mobiles, Baroque and Impressionist poetics, kitsch, Antoni oni’s movies, Mallarmé’s poetry and Joyce’s novels, in order to examine what is meant by an ‘open’ structure. The remarks about composers, artists, movie directors and audience are all implicitly linked to the views on open texts and readers.
The key words and expressions at the centre of ‘openness’ are ambiguity, discontinuity, possibility, plurivocal, indeterminancy, movement, on-going process, performance and free interplay. The underlining motif throughout the essays is that an open work does not suggest any conclusion or specific interpretation as it demands a free inventive response from the per-former/reader.
An open work continuously transforms its denotations in connotations and its signifieds in signifiers of other signifieds.
This process of decoding remains open and on-going, guaranteeing open readings of the text. With open works every reading/interpretation may explain a text but will not exhaust it because its inner laws are based on ambiguity (e.g. Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake). Moreover, open texts are systems of relationships that emphasize the genesis of processes rather than messages. They also encourage an active collaboration with the author and invite a free play of associations that functions as divertissement and as an instrument of cognition. For Eco the openness of a work of art is the very condition of aesthetic pleasure and it is an epistemological metaphor of our society. Openness transcends historical parameters (an example might be the way that Dante’s Commedia, though containing highly specific messages, is still pleasurable today) and allows a work to remain valid for a long time. (RC)
See also CLOSED TEXT.
Eco, U. (1989) The Open Work, trans. A. Cancogni, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ordinary language philosophy is often referred to as ‘Oxford Philosophy’ because it was largely developed by a group of philosophers working in Oxford (from the 1930s till the 1960s), including J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson and H. P. Grice (who later moved to the USA). This tradition emerged against the background of earlier forms of analytical philosophy (beginning in the late nineteenth century) which represented a ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, paying explicit attention to the problem of knowledge in its relation to language, as influenced by or represented in the work of Frege, G. E. Moore, Russell, the early Wittgenstein and Carnap. In contrast to earlier analytical philosophy, ordinary language philosophy (to which the later Wittgenstein contributed strongly from Cambridge) shifted its concerns from reduction and reformulation to description and elucidation and switched from the language of science as its primary object to ordinary everyday language. In the context of this emphasis on actual language use, utterances also came to be viewed as forms of action, the basic observation that gave rise to speech act theory as first formulated by Austin and further developed by Searle. (JV)
Austin, J. L. (1961) Philosophical Papers, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
OTHERNESS see ALTERITY