Umberto Eco

Meaning and mental representations

Introduction: Marco Santambrogio and Patrizia Violi On the Circumstantial Relation between Meaning and Content: Jon Barwise On Truth. A Fiction: Umberto Eco Quantification, Roles and Domains: Gilles Fauconnier Conceptual Semantics: Ray Jackendoff How Is Meaning Mentally Represented?: Philip N. Johnson-Laird Cognitive Semantics: George Lakoff The Analysis of Nominal Compounds: Wendy G. Lehnert Knowledge Representation in People and Machines: Roger Schank and Alex Kass Identity in Intensional Logic: Subjective Semantics: Bas Van Fraassen Reference and Its Role in Computational Models of Mental Representation: Yorick Wilks

The Scandal of Metaphor: Metaphorology and Semiotics

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A Componential Analysis of the Architectural Sign /Column/

0.1. One of the main tasks of semiotics consists in arriving at a study of all aspects of culture as communicative processes. This does not mean that all aspects of culture are only communicative processes but that (a) they can be regarded as communicative processes; (b) they have a cultural function precisely because they are ALSO communicative processes. It is obvious that — in this sense — a semiotics of architecture represents one of the crucial points in semiotic research.

On the ontology of fictional characters: A semiotic approach

Why are we deeply moved by the misfortune of Anna Karenina if we are fully aware that she is simply a fictional character who does not exist in our world? But what does it mean that fictional characters do not exist? The present article is concerned with the ontology of fictional characters. The author concludes that successful fictional characters become paramount examples of the ‘real’ human condition because they live in an incomplete world what we have cognitive access to but cannot influence in any way and where no deeds can be undone. Unlike all the other semiotic objects, which are culturally subject to revisions, and perhaps only similar to mathematical entities, the fictual characters will never change and will remain the actors of what they did once and forever.

Innovation & repetition: between modern & postmodern aesthetics

thetics and modern theories of art (and I mean by “modern” those born with Mannerism, developed through Romanticism, and provocatively restated by the early twentieth-century avant-gardes) have frequently identi1⁄2ed the artistic message with metaphor. Metaphor (the new and inventive one, not the wornout catachresis) is a way to designate something by the name of something else, thus presenting that something in an unexpected way. The modern criterion for recognizing the artistic value was novelty, high information. The pleasurable repetition of an already known pattern was considered, by modern theories of art, typical of Crafts–not of Art–and of industry. A good craftsman, as well as an industrial factory, produces many tokens, or occurrences, of the same type or model. One appreciates the type, and appreciates the way the token meets the requirements of the type: but the modern aesthetics did not recognize such a procedure as an artistic one. That is why the Romantic aesthetics made such a careful distinction between “major” and “minor” arts, between arts and crafts. To make a parallel with sciences: crafts and industry were similar to the correct application of an already known law to a new case. Art, on the contrary (and by art I mean also literature, poetry, movies, and so on) corresponded rather to a “scienti1⁄2c revolution”: every work of modern art 1⁄2gures out a new law, imposes a new paradigm, a new way of looking at the world. Modern aesthetics frequently forgot that the classical theory of art, from ancient Greece to the Middle Ages, was not so eager to stress a distinction between arts and crafts. The same term (techne, ars) was used to designate both the performance of a barber or a shipbuilder, the work of a painter or a poet. The classical aesthetics was not so anxious for innovation at any cost: on the contrary, it frequently appreciated as “beautiful” the good tokens of an everlasting type. Even in those cases in which modern sensitivity enjoys the “revolution” performed by a classical artist, his contemporary enjoyed the opposite aspect of

The Influence of Roman Jakobson on the Development of Semiotics

The project of a science studying all possible varieties of signs and the rules governing their production, exchange, and interpretation is a rather ancient one. Pre-Socratic poetry and philosophy are frequently concerned with the nature of natural signs and divine messages. The Hippocratic tradition deals with the interpretation of symptoms, while the Sophists were critically conscious of the power of language. Plato’s Cratylus is a treatise on the origins of words, and the Sophist can be considered the first attempt to apply a binary method to semantic definitions.

the sign revisited

position within a system, and it acquires its value only because of the other phonemes to which it is opposed. Yet, for an &dquo;emic&dquo; unit to be recognized, it must be formulated somehow as &dquo;etic.&dquo; In other words, phonology builds up a system of oppositions in order to explain the functioning of a number of phonetic presences which, if they do not exist prior to the system, nonetheless are associated with its ghost. Without people uttering sounds, phonology could not exist, but without the 274 system postulated by phonology, people could not distinguish between sounds. Types are recognized through their realizations into concrete tokens. One cannot speak of a form (of the expression or of the content) without presupposing a matter and linking it immediately (neither before nor after) to a substance. 5.4 The Predominance of the Signifier. The answer given to the preceding question could confirm a further critique of the notion of sign. If the sign can be known only through the signifier, and the signified emerges only through an act of perpetual substitution of the signifier, the semiotic chain appears to be just a &dquo;chain of signifiers.&dquo; As such, it could be manipulated even by the unconscious (if we take the unconscious as being linguistically constituted). By the &dquo;drift&dquo; of signifiers, other signifiers are produced. As a more or less direct consequence of these conclusions, the universe of signs and even of sentences would dissolve into discourse as an activity. This line of thought, derived from Lacan, has generated a number of varied but essentially related positions. The basis for this critique is actually a misunderstanding, a word-play. Only by substituting &dquo;signified&dquo; every time the word &dquo;signifier&dquo; appears, does the discourse of these theoreticians become comprehensible. The misunderstanding derives from the fact that every signifier can only be translated into another signifier and that only by this process of interpretation can one grasp the corresponding signified. It must be clear, though, that in none of the various displacement and condensation processes described by Freud however multiplied and almost automatic the generative and drifting mechanisms might appear-does the interplay (even if based on assonances, alliterations, likeness of expression) fail to reverberate immediately on the aggregation of the content units, actually determining the content. In the Freudian passage from ‘Herr’-‘signore’ to ’Signorelli’, a series of expression differences is at work, based on identities and progressive slidings of the content. The Freudian example can, in fact, be understood only by someone who knows German and Italian, seeing them as complete sign-functions (expression + content). A person who does not know Chinese cannot produce Freudian slips interpretable in Chinese, unless a psychoanalyst who knows Chinese demonstrates that his or her patient had displaced linguistic remembrances, and that he or she unconsciously played with Chinese expressions. A Freudian slip, in order to 275 make sense, plays on content figures; if it plays only with expression figures it amounts to a mechanical error (typographical or phonetic). This kind of mechanical error is likely to involve content element3 only in the eye of the interpreter. But in this case it is the interpreter who must be psychoanalyzed. 5.5 Sign vs. Text. The so-called signifying chain produces texts which carry with them the recollection of the intertextuality which ncurishes them. Texts generate, or are capable of generating, multiple (and ultimately infinite) readings and interpretations. It was argued (for instance by the later Barthes, the recent Derrida and by Kristeva) that signification is to be located exclusively in the text. The text is the locus where meaning is produced and becomes productive (signifying practice). Within its texture the signs of the dictionary (as codifying equivalences) can emerge only by a rigidification and death of all &dquo;sense.&dquo; This critical line takes up Buyssens’ argument (communication is given only at the level of sentence) but it goes deeper. A text is not simply a communicational apparatus. It is a device which questions the previous signifyng systems, often renews them and sometimes destroys them. Finnegans Wake-a textual machine made to liquidate grammars and dictionariesis exemplary in this sense, but even rhetorical figures are produced and become alive only at the textual level. The textual machine empties the terms which the literal dictionary deemed univocal and well-defined, and fills them with new content figures. Yet, the production of a metaphor such as ’the king of the forest’ (where a figure of &dquo;humanity&dquo; is added to &dquo;lion&dquo; and an &dquo;animal&dquo; quality reverberates on the class of kings) implies the existence of both ’king’ and ’lion’ as functives of two previously codified sign-functions. If signs (expressions and content) did not preexist the text, every metaphor would be equivalent simply to saying that something is something. But a metaphor says that that (linguistic) thing is at the same time something else. The ability of the textual manifestations to empty, destroy or reconstruct pre-existing sign-functions, depends on the presence within the sign-function (i.e., in the network of content figures) of a set of instructions oriented towards the (potential) production of different texts (this concept will be further developed in § 9). It is in this sense that the thematization of textuality has been particularly suggestive. 5.6 The Sign as Identity. The sign is supposed to be based 276 on the categories of &dquo;similitude&dquo; or &dquo;identity.&dquo; This presumed fallacy renders the sign coherent with the ideological notion of the subject. The subject as a presupposed transcendental unity which opens itself to the world (or to which the world opens) through the act of representation, as well as the subject that transfers its representations onto other subjects in the process of communication, is supposedly a philosophical fiction dominating all of the history of philosophy. Let us postpone the discussion of this objection and see now in what sense the notion of sign is seen to be coherent with the (no longer viable) notion of &dquo;subject.&dquo; Under the mask of socialization or of mechanistic realism, ideological linguistics, absorbed by the science of signs, turns the sign-subject into a center. The sign-subject becomes the beginning and the end of all translinguistic activity, it becomes closed up in itself, located in its own word, which is conceived of by positivism as a kind of &dquo;psychism&dquo; residing in the brain (Kristeva, 1969, p. 69). The above statement implies the identification of the sign with the linguistic sign, where the linguistic sign is based on the equivalence model: p --q. In point of fact, Kristeva defines the sign as &dquo;resemblance.&dquo; The sign brings separate instances (subject-object on one hand, subject-interlocutor on the other) back to a unified whole (a unity which presents itself as a sentencemessage), replacing praxis with a single meaning, and difference with resemblance (ibid., p. 70)....The relationship instituted by the sign will therefore be a reconciliation of discrepancies, and identification of differences (ibid., p. 84). The notion of sign as resemblance and identity does not appear in Peirce: &dquo;A Sign is something by knowing which we know something more&dquo; (C.P., 8.332). The sign is an instruction for interpretation, a mechanism which starts from an initial stimulus and leads to all its illative consequences. Starting from the sign, one goes through the whole semiotic process and arrives at the point where the sign becomes capable of contradicting itself (otherwise, those textual mechanisms called &dquo;literature&dquo; would not be possible). For Peirce, the sign is a potential proposition (as even Kristeva notes in 1974, p. 43). In order to comprehend this notion of sign, we need to reconsider the initial phase of its historical development. Such reconsideration requires the elimination of an embarrassing notion, that of linguistic sign. Since this notion is after all a 277 late cultural product, we will postpone its treatment until later.

Interview with Umberto Eco

James Hay: Professor Eco, I appreciate your granting me this interview. I am not alone in having learned useful lessons from your writing about communications, culture, and critical theory, and in having admired your astonishingly robust ‘‘archive’’ of references through which you have introduced fresh and inspired insights on these topics. And although your projects often draw references from and about the past, you have produced over your career relentlessly insightful and clever diagnoses of ‘‘the present’’*particularly of popular media/cultures. I confess to having initially thought about interviewing you for this issue of CC/CS because this issue (my first as the editor of the journal) will represent how ‘‘critical studies’’ and ‘‘cultural studies’’ of media and communication in 2013 have been shaped through earlier questions and perspectives about their contexts. So, I requested an interview with you because your earlier work about semiotics, critical and cultural theory, ‘‘mass communication,’’ and ‘‘popular culture’’ (some of it from as early as the 1960s) continues to inform the kinds of questions and perspectives that this journal represents, but also because your recent writing has introduced new perspectives and questions about developments in the twenty-first century. I had imagined that I would pose to you a few questions about how the current media environment has been explained (rightly or wrongly) through discourses about ‘‘media convergence,’’ ‘‘user-generated content,’’ ‘‘social networking,’’ ‘‘surveillance society,’’ etc. This seemed a reasonable line of questioning since, in different historical

Experiences in Translation

In this book Umberto Eco argues that translation is not about comparing two languages, but about the interpretation of a text in two different languages, thus involving a shift between cultures. An author whose works have appeared in many languages, Eco is also the translator of G?rard de Nervals Sylvie and Raymond Queneaus Exercices de style from French into Italian. In Experiences in Translation he draws on his substantial practical experience to identify and discuss some central problems of translation. As he convincingly demonstrates, a translation can express an evident deep sense of a text even when violating both lexical and referential faithfulness. Depicting translation as a semiotic task, he uses a wide range of source materials as illustration: the translations of his own and other novels, translations of the dialogue of American films into Italian, and various versions of the Bible. In the second part of his study he deals with translation theories proposed by Jakobson, Steiner, Peirce, and others. Overall, Eco identifies the different types of interpretive acts that count as translation. An enticing new typology emerges, based on his insistence on a common-sense approach and the necessity of taking a critical stance.

The Original and the Copy

It seems that in terms of natural language everybody knows what a fake, a forgery or false document is. At most, one admits that it is frequently difficult to recognize a forgery as such, but one relies on experts, that is, on those who are able to recognize forgeries simply because they know how to tell the difference between a fake and its original.