Page 117 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

products, he concluded, rather than simply to reject them en bloc.
Eco’s La struttura assente, first published in 1968 (and its subse-
quent revision and re-issue in English as A Theory of Semiotics (Eco,
1976)), inaugurated a lasting engagement with ‘semiology’, or
‘semiotics’, as Eco preferred to call it. Despite the difference in
terminology, there is no doubting Eco’s indebtedness here to
Barthes’ Mythologies. But equally, the shift from ‘structuralism’
to ‘semiotics’ also reflected something of the political tenor of the
late 1960s. As de Lauretis observes: ‘structuralism came to denote
a reactionary and narrow view of critical activity...in Italy struc-
turalism was transformed into semiotics by a conscious political
shift’ (de Lauretis, 1978, p. 5).
The Role of the Reader signalled a further shift in focus, away
from cultural production and towards reception. Here Eco treats
the author as ‘nothing else but a textual strategy establishing
semantic correlations and activating the Model Reader’ (Eco,
1981, p. 11). As with Barthes, however, the focus falls on the struc-
tural role of the reader, as constructed by the text, rather than on
an ethnography of empirical readerships. Here, too, Eco refor-
mulated the distinction between open and closed works, so as to
apply the latter to popular fiction. A closed text was now one
that aimed ‘at arousing a precise response on the part of more or
less precise empirical readers’ (p. 8): Superman comic strips, Ian
Fleming’s James Bond novels or Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de
Paris, for example. Eco insisted that because such texts pre-
supposed a sociologically ‘average’ reader, they were in fact
‘immoderately open’ to any possible ‘aberrant’ decoding by non-
average readers. Open texts, again represented by Joyce, were by
contrast those that ‘work at their peak revolutions per minute
only when each interpretation is reechoed by the others, and vice
versa’. Here ‘the pragmatic process of interpretation is not an
empirical accident independent of the text qua text, but is a struc-
tural element of its generative process’ (p. 9). Here there are more
or less competent readings, since an open text outlines a closed
project of its model reader as a component of its own structure.
In his reading of the Bond novels, Eco outlined their formulaic
structure and what he termed ‘the elements for the building of
a machine that functions basically on a set of precise units

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