Illuminating Eco by Ross Charlotte;Sibley Rochelle;

Author:Ross, Charlotte;Sibley, Rochelle;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Chapter 8

The Serendipities of Semiotics, or Knowledge as a ‘Theory of Next Thursday’

Charlotte Ross

There could be no fairer destination for any theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on, as a limiting case. (Einstein)

Every solution raises unsolved problems. (Popper)

Eco’s parodic phrase a ‘theory of next Thursday’ appears in his 1964 publication Apocalittici e integrati. He uses it to argue the impossibility and indeed the vanity of theorising highly changeable phenomena such as mass media. In his view, this type of theoretical modality is necessarily provisional, or ‘conceived in the conditional tense’.1 Yet much as here he casts aspersions on discussions composed uncertainly of mere ‘hypothetical syllogisms’, Eco elsewhere implies that all theories and the ‘knowledge’ they produce are essentially serendipitous. If knowledge is no less, but no more, than ‘the sum of what is known’, then its value and duration are as provisional as the type of theorising he ridicules above.2 As I argue below, Eco not only tolerates, but gladly embraces the necessary condition of living in error, fascinated by the ‘Fakes and Forgeries’ that populate our epistemological heritage.3 This interest has most recently been consolidated by the publication of Serendipities, a series of investigations into how ideas once considered false have been proved right, and vice versa, since ‘false beliefs and discoveries totally without credibility [can] lead to the discovery of something true (or at least something we consider true today)’(S, viii).4

This essay explores some of Eco’s attempts to assess the kind of knowledge or ‘truth’ we can realistically hope to discover through interpretation, and what degree of accuracy can – or should – be attributed to both the result and the methodology used to discover it. How do we approach ‘knowledge’ that is no more than a temporary solution? If structuralism proposed stable, universal frameworks, its successor should incorporate elements of these (as Einstein suggests) whilst alerting us to new found inadequacies in the former approach. Eco seems to achieve this by privileging both an elusive ontological truth and a freeplay of semantic signifiers. This dual focus produces an interesting problematic, as the existence of an original truth is often seen to presuppose teleological progression. However, if the meaning accessible to us relies on new input (ever changing, arbitrary signifiers, devised by human intervention) rather than its derivation from this truth (a state beyond human interference), the material we have at our disposal is far removed from such an origin. Discovery of the truth would seem to require that both the material of signifying language and the original truth share the same source, trapping us in the essentialist framework poststructuralism claims to have exploded.

In La struttura assente, official notification of his move into poststructuralist thought, Eco stages a compelling contest between versions of semiotic and structural approaches to obtaining knowledge; a discussion that is partly reproduced in The Open Work.5 The first part of the present essay examines his portrayal of this contest, questioning both the durability of theoretical approaches, and their status as stand-alone hermeneutic instruments.

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