Umberto Eco and The Open Work

Fundamental to an understanding of the Open Work is an understanding of Eco's theory of semiotics. 

Systems of signs, and structures, are methodological (as opposed to ontological).

Any ultimate truth, any 'structure behind all structures' is permanently absent and beyond our intellectual grasp.

('The Name of the Rose' and 'Foucault's Pendulum' deal with these issues). 

Underlying the Open Work are instability, shifting order & disorder, entropy, and the essential incomprehensibility of the modern world. 

We have a need to construct rational explanatory structures; structures which are not 'real', but rather are provisional, hypothetical constructs of the mind, and we must recognise that nothing, finally, can be explained. 

Eco draws from the ideas of the American semiologist C.S. Pierce to construct his theories:
Unlimited Semiosis, Encyclopedia, Abduction. 

Unlimited Semiosis is the process whereby any sign (visual, verbal, imaginary or otherwise), is only another sign in an endless chain of signification, ad infinitum. There is no direct connection between the world of signs and the things they refer to. 

Encyclopedia is the tracing out of particular meanings through a labyrinth of possible meanings. The labyrinth is the body of knowledge which one holds. A certain path is taken as a series of causal links, rather like using a computer search-engine. The path is only one of many possibilities. The process is inherently ambiguous, and in opposition to the idea of codes, which suggest meaning in terms of direct dictionary-like equivalence and which are subject to negation by history.

Abduction is the process by which we extricate meaning to arrive at a solution, rather like a detective discovers the author of a crime by positing rules about human behaviour and motivation in relation to a set of circumstances ie the crime scene.

All forms of communication and interpretation are hazardous forms of interference.

Semiotics, the study and interpretation of signs, can only help us to analyse any choices we make. It cannot help us to choose, Eco declares.

Eco's semiotics are democratic and pluralistic, and set defiantly against any fixed system of thought and belief which focus perception along a fixed trajectory and which become out-dated. Any such system fundamentally mis-represents the real nature of our knowledge of the world.

Every work of art is both a complete closed form, a balanced organic whole, and an open product in its susceptibility to many and varied interpretations.

In an open work, however, the artist, rather than submit to the inevitable open-ness which is the condition of art in general, deliberately embraces open-ness to counteract a particular subjective vision from taking hold and dominating. The work is exposed to the maximum possible opening.

A quintessential example of a closed work, for Eco, exists in Medieval Allegorical imagery, both textual and visual. There is a prescribed system of subjective vision which allows for only a limited number of possible meanings:The literal, the moral, the allegorical and the anagogical.

This is a passage from Dante (quoted in Eco's 'The Open Work'), referring to a text telling the story of the flight of the Israelites from Egypt:

'If we consider the literal meaning what is meant is the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses. If we consider the moral sense what is meant is the conversion of the soul from the agony of sin to a state of grace. If we consider the allegory what is meant is our redemption through Christ. Finally, if we consider the anagogical sense what is meant is the release of the spirit from the bondage of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory.'

At this point all possible avenues of interpretation are exhausted. The laws governing the text's, or image's, interpretation are those of a hierarchical Medieval world view, seen from the top down, a 'God's eye view'.

Medieval images lack perspective because the artist is painting not how things appear, but how they are. 

Perspective in art is also a system which controls perception and interpretation. It demands that the viewer looks at a subject in the only possible right way, in the way the artist intended. 

Many contemporary works are read in a similar closed-loop, so to speak (e.g. see Anthony Gormley's 'Bed' 1980) 

Eco claims that the first manifestation of the Open Work occurred in late 19^th Century Frencch Symbolist Poetry, in Paul Verlaine's 'Art Poetique': 

Music before everything else,
and, to that end, prefer the uneven
more vague and more soluble in air
with nothing in it that is heavy or still 

The important thing is to prevent any single sense from imposing itself at the onset of the receptive process. 

Stephan Mallarme stated it more explicitly: 

'To name an object is to suppress three fourths of the enjoyment of the poem, which is composed of the pleasure of guessing little by little; to suggest-there is the dream.'

The search for the vague and suggestive is a deliberate attempt to open the work to the free response of the addressee. The work sets out to stimulate the private world of the addressee so that he may draw from inside himself some deeper response which mirrors the subtle resonance underlying the work.

There are parallels with theories of the Sublime, as expounded by Edmund Burke in 'Philosophical Enquiry into the origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful' (1757).

Burke emphasise obscurity over clarity, precision and the adherence to rules. Feelings of the Sublime are aroused by 'things dark, uncertain and confused'. Vastness and infinity, chief attributes of the Romantic Sublime, were elicited through obscurity.

'When we can see an object distinctly we can perceive its bounds. A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea'.- (Burke)

James Joyce is a writer whose work Eco regards as quintessentially 'open'. Finnegans Wake is in literature the definitive open work, and has been said to be in a fundamental sense un-readable.

'The book is moulded into a curve that bends back on itself like the Einsteinian universe' (Eco)

The book is at once finite and unlimited, without beginning nor end. The reader is placed in a similar position to that of a person listening to aleatory music by composers like Cage, Pousseur, Stockhausen and Boulez.

(Aleatory means music composed according to the laws of chance, from alea, the Latin word for dice. No performance of any such work is ever the same.)

'Since the phenomena are no longer tied to one another by a term-to-term determination, it is up to the listener- (or the reader in the case of Joyce)-to place himself deliberately in the midst of an inexhaustible network of relationships and to choose for himself, so to speak, his own modes of approach, his reference points and his scale, and to endeavour to use as many dimensions as he possibly can at the same time and to dynamize, multiply and extend to the utmost degree his perceptual faculties.' (Eco)

Eco sees this as the task before the artist, as well as the end-user so to speak, in an insecure world in which classical certainties have been overturned and in the face of our own acknowledged finiteness. The contemporary world-view is one of constant change and uncertainty.

'It is therefore essential for objects, and the world, to present themselves to us as 'open'-and as always promising future perceptions.' (M.Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception).

'The belief in things and in the world can only express the assumption of a complete synthesis. Its completion, however, is made impossible by the very nature of the things to be connected, since each of them sends back to other perspectives through its own horizons. Consciousness, which is commonly taken as a very enlightened region, is, on the contrary, the very region of indetermination' (M.Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception).

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