Page 116 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 107

Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

postmodern fiction. Eco’s general theory of semiotics has framed
his more detailed readings of music, architecture, the modernist
novel, comic strips, film, advertising and popular fiction. Orig-
inally part of the so-called Italian ‘neo-avant-garde’, he played
a key role, during the 1960s, in introducing Italian intellectual
circles to, by turn, structuralism, Russian Formalism, semiotics,
German Critical Theory and American New Criticism. Struc-
turalism and semiotics in particular attracted Eco’s interest,
providing him with a framework for theorising narrative
structure that would subsequently inform his own novels,
themselves now widely considered exemplary instances of post-
modern fiction.
His first major publication, The Open Work, was a treatise on
modernist aesthetics and, in particular, on James Joyce. Here
Eco posited the distinction between traditional ‘closed’ works
of art and modernist ‘open’ works, marked by the plurality of
readings and the net ‘increase in information’ they offer (Eco,
1989, p. 43). Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake is the exemplary model of
an open text for its ‘chaotic character, the polyvalence, the multi-
interpretability of this polylingual chaosmos’ (p. 41). While this
concentration on immanent structure might seem to disregard the
text’s social context, Eco recovers this dimension by treating truly
‘important’ works of art as ‘epistemological metaphors’, repre-
sentations of ‘a widespread theoretical consciousness (not of a
particular theory so much as of an acquired cultural viewpoint)’
(p. 87). What is social in art is thus its form: ‘Art knows the world
through its formal structures... its true content... Literature is
an organization of words that signify different aspects of the
world, but the literary work is itself an aspect of the world in
the way its words are organized’ (p. 144).
This investment in form as the true marker of ‘quality’ in liter-
ature, best exemplified in high modernism, had prompted Eco’s
initially hostile response to popular or mass culture. But in a
number of influential essays on various aspects of the media, Eco
attempted to free his own cultural criticism from its essentially
elitist stance vis-à-vis popular culture. The critical intellectual
should aim to expose the inner ideological workings of social
control, as these are embedded in mass cultural messages and

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