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Following my study of Gadamer, I began reading (albeit slowly) Umberto Eco’s Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language.  The text is not entry-level, and is largely operating higher than my level of knowledge, but his explanations still reach me and are gradually shaping my understanding of these broader-level semiotic issues.  At this point I’ve finished the book and I’ve sharpened both my ideas and my understanding of his thought, so it’s time to review, for your edification and mine.

Big Picture

So the initial reason I picked up Eco’s book was because, by it’s very title, it seems to be connecting the field of semiotics, which I’ve barely touched, with the Philosophy of Language, which is where I’m trying to stake out my academic claim.  Overwhelmingly, I’ve found that there is a great deal of overlap between the disciplines of psychology, linguistics, semiotics, and the philosophy of language, and it is growing increasingly difficult for me to determine where one line of inquiry ends and another begins.

The trouble was, this text was absolutely no help in that respect.  Or if it was, it was over my head in its approach.

The best example of this I can offer is a blurb I found on the back cover which I found indicative of the problems I had with the book: apparently, Magill’s Literary Journal said that Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language is “An erudite but lively theoretical and historical discussion of semiotics in relation to the philosophy of language.”

Which, if you’ll notice, says exactly nothing.  That’s the sort of line you could write about the book having read nothing but the title.

This is the sort of problem I kept running into throughout the text.  It was overwhelmingly unfocused.  Eco discusses multiple important topics in semiotics and the philosophy of language (metaphor, symbolism, definition, etc.), but his approach is similar to someone walking through a dark room with a flashlight, turning on the beam only infrequently to illuminate several specific places without ever revealing the whole.  It is never clear how his discussion of encyclopedic definitions informs his discussion of metaphor, code, or mirrors; or how metaphor and symbol and code relate to one another.  Even his frequent efforts to reveal the nature of “signs” – a preoccupation of semiotics – left me wondering whether he was attempting to redefine “sign” (as a word), or to understand what is meant when we use the word “sign”.  He frequently discusses the neologisms and re-definitions of other thinkers, but rather than try and carve them into a consistent thesis or complete picture of the phenomena observed by semiotics, he explores these perspectives, critiques them, and leaves them be.  The overall effect is one of disconnection: Eco’s sources seem to be talking past each other, Eco’s topics seem to be connected in only mysterious, unclear ways, and that looming problem of (word as word) vs. (word as topic) haunts the text throughout.

Again – this could be my ignorance, but I tend to think that any writing about language that is this loaded with historical cross-reference, jargon, and unclear meanings is not helping the advancement of the discipline.

That said, his insights are frequently revealing, so I’d like to touch on some of his main points.

Dictionary vs. Encyclopedia

Eco begins his survey of definition by describing the difference between two paradigms for understanding language – dictionaries and encyclopedias.  This distinction informs much of the other discussion, and is valuable for our understanding of language, so I’d like to spend some time discussing it here.  Dictionaries are books organized around staggered definitions, and a view of language that envisions the whole of a language’s vocabulary and locutions in terms of a dictionary is one that sees every word (definiendum) as proceeding (in Aristotelian sense) from genus to species according to specific differences (definiens).

Thus, “man” is the “rational animal” (genus: animal; specific difference: rational).

In a dictionary, one should theoretically be able to examine each word in this way, with each word in a clear reciprocal relationship with the words above and below it in the hierarchy.  So man is the “rational animal” while “animals” are “living beings which move” – as opposed to plants, which are still “living beings” but which do not move (working with Aristotelian terms, here).  Likewise, “man” can be distinguished from, say, “fish” or “horses” or “dogs” by the specific characteristics that differentiate each term from the genus “animal”.

By contrast, an encyclopedia contains no such order.  Instead, the entries are listed without some hierarchical organization, just side by side, one after the other, with no effort to classify them into genus/species relationships.

The Dictionary View

There are major advantages to the dictionary organization.  If we can organize each word in our language according to a hierarchical set of definitions, we can import the whole of categorical logic along with it.  If all women are humans, all humans are primates, all primates are mammals, (etc., for all words in the language) we have a clear method for defining our words and delimiting the specific content of each word we use.  If we can define “chair” as belonging to the classes of “four-legged” “inanimate” “one-seating” objects, we can eliminate ambiguous contextual connotations and have each word match a specific extant object or being.

But the organization of this structure is problematic, because there is no clear hierarchy of categories in that genus/species structure.  If we were to define “wife”, we would likely say that a “wife” is a “female” “married” “human”.  It would be obvious that “female” and “married” are subcategories of the category “human”, but we have no way of saying whether the category should be:

or:

Likewise, we would need to somehow blend this relationship of “married/unmarried” and “male/female” with other relationship structures we acknowledge, like sibling relationships, parental relationships, etc.  For language to adopt a true hierarchical (and Aristotelian) organization, we would need to answer questions like: “Is an ‘uncle’ a subcategory of ‘married’, ‘unmarried’, or both?” – and that relationship would have to be consistent throughout the system.  But that’s not how language works.  Those decisions would be arbitrary, and the enforcement of a particular choice would also be arbitrary.  There are “married uncles” and “unmarried uncles”; the one term, while clearly related to the other, does not depend on it.  Just think about the fundamental ambiguity in a term like “brother-in-law” – insofar as it can refer either to “your sister’s husband” or “your husband’s (or wife’s) brother”.  Our language is clearly not designed for a vertical hierarchical relationship.  That’s not how the historical-linguistic process works, and we certainly can’t impose an artificial definition structure on the language after the fact.

Therefore, Eco concludes that while definitions do often take this sort of hierarchical structure, the relationships cannot be represented by this vertical Porphyrican system.  Rather, the definitions are labyrinthine, looping back on prior definitions with no clear organization, defying the limits of a physical representation.  The image he uses instead is a rhizome – a tangled mass of disorganized connections in which each point can connect to each other point, but the path necessary is unpredictable, multifarious, and often unclear.

Eco favors, therefore, the encyclopedic model of definition.  Words are defined in terms of other words horizontally, not vertically.  The organization is arbitrary, and not enforced or enforceable.

As a result, language necessarily folds back on itself and lacks the organization for clear, precise, consistent, organized definition.

Counterpoint

That said, I find I disagree with Eco’s conclusion here more strongly than at any other place in his work.  While a linear, vertically-oriented dictionary structure may not be imposed on our language, I would contend that our vertical understanding of word-relationships does apply to – if not all, then most – words in our language.  But while we cannot organize our language into a single perfect Porphyrian tree-structure, that doesn’t mean that we are not free to reorganize the entries according to our specific needs.  We may not be able to achieve a perfect definition, but we certainly can reach a sufficient definition, in most cases.  We can say, quite comfortably, that a “sister” is a “female sibling”, and call it a day, knowing full well that we can define “female” and “sibling” without reference to “sister”, or to each other.  Such definitions are fluid and deliberately ambiguous (just as the language itself is ambiguous – whether or not the female sibling is married does not change the “sister” relationship), many horizontal terms have rolling overlap in the Wittgenstinian, “family-resemblances” sense, but they remain vertical.

Where the real ambiguity of a definition-structure like this would creep in is when we leave the dimension of clear, well-defined relationships and start to explore issues of connotation vs. denotation, emphasis, tone, etc.  We might be able to recognize that “miserable”, “depressed”, and “melancholic” are both vertically-related to “sad”, but the relationship between these words would grow increasingly tangled as we tried to sort out exactly what nuances exist between the cultural understanding of each word.  There may even be contention about whether or not “depression” should constitute a form of “sadness” when we typically ascribe “sadness” to the sphere of emotion and increasingly ascribe “depression” to the field of mental illness.  In either case, these vertical relationships still exist and define these terms, but they move with our culture; they are not necessarily fixed or static.

Metaphor, Symbol, Code

The middle chapters on Metaphor, Symbols, and Code probably would have benefited most from some clarification.  While Eco does attempt to delineate the difference between Metaphor and Symbol to some degree, the whole discussion in all three cases has this confusing contemporary-academic business of “definition by way of exhaustive historical catalogue” thing going on, and it’s never entirely clear how much Eco wants to wholly adopt, say, Levi-Strauss’ understanding of codes in terms of s-codes and correlational codes as opposed to Barthes’ five codes delineated in S/Z.  Likewise, it’s not always clear whether Eco is more interested in describing “what we mean by ‘symbol'” or “how do symbols work”, which led me to a lot of questions about whether or not these terms are even terribly useful as a way of differentiating semiotic phenomena like languages, or whether those same phenomena are being artificially differentiated by our insistence that these terms are binding and represent different things.  Without a clear stated goal, Eco seems to be rudderless throughout a lot of these chapters, but that could, again, be my ignorance.  At any rate, just as Eco seems to be picking up on bits and pieces of the semiotic mess, so will I pick up on a few bits and pieces of Eco’s discussion.

1. Metaphor

i. The initial question which moves Eco to write about Metaphor is a terribly important one – Is all language metaphorical, or is metaphor the aberration in language?  Can we in fact communicate with one another without using metaphor?  I realize that many philosophers (Quine springs to mind) have attempted to extirpate metaphor from their writings, but the product of that extirpation seems to be a lifeless, senseless mess of jargon and neologisms.  Eco’s discussion of metaphor wanders quickly off into the mechanics of how metaphors actually work, using the Aristotelian/Porphyrian three-term model as its foundation, but this question of whether or not language is metaphorical is the one that stuck with me.

ii. Eco suggests that metaphors seem to “flout” conventions of conversations – they deliberately undermine the virtues of quality, quantity, manner, and relation (in short, are imprecise, tonally ambiguous, and only tangentially relevant) – but I would contend that a good metaphor is far more descriptive and precise than “literal” language can often achieve.  Eco’s attention is primarily on compared objects, but that only scratches the surface of good metaphor.  I think of Raymond Chandler’s metaphor in The Big Sleep: “I woke up with a motorman’s glove in my mouth” – indicating Marlowe’s hangover.  Where Eco would point to the comparison between a glove and a mouth and abstract the dryness, the richness of the metaphor is located in the specific experience described by Chandler, independent of the things being compared.  It is an “open metaphor” (as Eco would call it), in that there are multiple levels being described, and we are encouraged by Chandler to also take away the unpleasant experience of waking up to something unexpected – in addition to the specific “dryness” of the glove – but while Eco would focus on each specific interpretation in succession as isolated entities (he uses the example – from Walter Benjamin’s Seagulls – of an oscillating mast revealing a writer’s indecision between embracing or rejecting combative political ideologies during the Weimar Republic), what Chandler creates is a holistic experience, vivid for both its precision and its evocation of a feeling outside the terms “glove” and “mouth”.  For Eco, each term in the comparison is united to the other by a third term (mast, pendulum -> oscillation; mouth, glove -> dryness), and it is that third term that opens up layers of metaphor (oscillation -> indecision -> personal indecision, political indecision, social indecision etc.), while metaphors can accomplish much broader goals than even this.  Metaphors may be layered, like Benjamin’s; or expansive, like Chandler’s.  They may even illuminate entire alternative interpretations, like the metaphors (or symbols) in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.  “Comparison” is the tool of metaphor, but not the extent.

iii. Following Giambattista Vico, Eco acknowledges three separate languages: the hieroglyphic language of the gods; the symbolic language of heroes; and the epistolary language of humans.  Vico (and Eco) suggest that these languages are simultaneously created and developed; as the concepts (godly) develop, so must our prosaic understanding (human) and artistic apprehension (heroic) develop as well.  Nor are we able to suggest that any one of these languages is more “real” much less more “correct” than any of the others.

iv. Eco’s conclusion in this chapter is to reverse the traditional understanding of metaphor.  While most thinkers would contend that understanding metaphor requires a comprehensive knowledge of our language-encyclopedia, Eco argues that it is metaphor that teaches us how our language-encyclopedia works – how to properly read it, so to speak.  So artists reveal reality and the way our language works at the same time.  This is a tough concept for me to wrap my mind around, but it seems worth investigating, especially given our reading of Gadamer’s hermeneutics as well.  It is a good reminder that language is moving and moved by those who use it.  We write in a language-paradigm and shift that paradigm by writing.

2. Symbol

i. Eco uses his chapter on symbol largely to discuss multiple different (and mostly competitive) theories of symbolism and how symbols function.  The first that I thought terribly interesting was what he refers to as the “romantic” understanding of symbol.  According to Eco, the Romantics considered a work of art to be both the symbol and the content of that symbol, the sign and the referent of the sign.  The work of art pointed to a greater truth, but could not represent that greater truth except in exactly the way the work of art was composed.  You cannot “summarize” a romantic novel, play, or poem, except by repeating it.  To do anything less is to fail to represent what is being said.  I wanted to bring this up primarily because I harbor some disagreement against this way of thinking – if, in fact, we are locked into one mode of expression in order to discuss a given thing, we are in danger of tautology and depriving “meaning” or “content” of substance.  I see the virtues of this perspective, but I’ve also spent a lot of time hanging out with Biblical scholars whose insistence on a hard-line approach to a literal understanding of the Bible condemns and rejects paraphrase.  I acknowledge and respect the precision of language, but we must also acknowledge and respect its fluidity.  A work of art may not be able to achieve its specific goals in any way beside the way it is – but if the only way we can talk about, say, Goethe, is to endlessly repeat the very same things he said – well, that isn’t saying anything at all, actually.  We must balance our fidelity to expression against our search for reality.  Language works when it bridges the two; it fails when it becomes locked in one or the other box.

ii. So it is natural that the other symbolic mode Eco examines is the “deconstructive” mode.  To introduce this subject, Eco uses the example of the Jewish mystical Kabalistic tradition.  According to these mystics, God’s text is sacred not only in the words (specific words) said, but also in the white spaces between them.  God will, with Messiah’s coming, reveal the meaning of the white and the black spaces in the text.  With that in mind, the mystic may derive from the text any number of meanings apparently out of sync with what the actual language says – they have grasped the contrary, “white-space” meaning.

Eco immediately connects this to Derrida and Limited Inc. Symbols, then, for Eco, extend beyond the realm of mere signs, insofar as signs lack this potential negative value and interpretation.  According to Eco, symbols cannot have a “definite” interpretation, but instead encourage potentially-infinite indefinite interpretations.  To me, the sticking point is whether or not these “infinite” interpretations include conflicting interpretations.  We might reverse a symbol with the aid of context (as Derrida does), but that does not mean that the symbol itself is immediately reversible.  An American flag does not represent the perversion or subversion of freedom until it is reversed, or until the context imposes that interpretation through irony, satire, or other situational clues.  For all Derrida’s insistence on “the text alone” being indeterminable, I believe (and I think Eco agrees), that there are still limitations to that indeterminate space, and it requires outside interpretive force to break or reverse those limitations.  We do not read white space until we are encouraged, inclined, or directed to do so – just as we don’t read black letters until we are taught that they are letters.

3. Code

i. One of the key components to Eco’s understanding of “code” (as opposed to “sign”, “symbol”, etc.) is that it include context.  While “sign” abides in a system (or even systems within systems like Morse Code), Eco is quick to distinguish between limited one-for-one codes (“s-codes”, I think) and the overarching “code” which embodies language, cultural convention, ethics, societal assumptions, law, and indeed anything that is defined by rules.  This more abstract, generic sense of “code” extends beyond sign and symbol to the context in which those signs and symbols are produced and interpreted.  This seems to me to be the most neo-logistic (?) jump Eco makes in the text, and doesn’t seem to serve the text much, but it does raise some interesting connections.  We should, as a rule, see language as dependent on the surrounding cultural codes (like law, culture, ethics, etc.), and not as an independent entity.  That, of course, means that my entire project is hopelessly interconnected with pretty much everything else about human civilization, but what else is new?

ii. In his discussion of codes, Eco discusses, for perhaps the first time, the issue of lying.  Specifically, he differentiates between lying with the code, and lying about the code.  He uses the example of an Arthurian Knight following certain chivalric rules to achieve fame and glory.  While the outward rules are followed, the end result will ultimately violate the code – this is lying about the code, or about your adherence to the code.  This is contrasted with a man who wants to fool his friend, and so says, into his phone, “No, I don’t think so” – as though he had been asked a question.  This is lying with the code – using the established conventions to mislead.  Neither example seems terribly apt (the first seems ambiguous while the second, especially, encourages me to think of the sitcom trope of having a friend call you with “an emergency” during a blind date – less contrived and more evocative), but the distinction here is important.  Lying – violating trust – is often dependent on these codes in various ways.  If I tell a friend a bald-faced lie (“Your sweater looks nice”), it is a clear violation of the code; it is less clear when we use the established code dishonestly to mislead people.  We more rarely tell bald-faced lies than use context to mislead.  But I would go further than these ambiguities and point to lies using the code (like the knight pretending to be chivalrous, or a politician pretending to be authoritative) versus lies misusing the code (like the person trying to get out of the date) versus lies rejecting the code (Eco uses the example of a person refusing to shake hands with another person, to indicate that the other is somehow unworthy of basic courtesy).  In each case, the code encourages an unwarranted assumption – but in the first case, the unwarranted assumption is a natural extension of the person’s position or prior actions (no violating action is necessary) while the second and third cases do a deliberate act of violence against the code in order to achieve the same result.

Perhaps as another (maybe excessive) example, yesterday I saw the BBC headline “Trump denies working for Russia”.  This is a lie using the code.  There is no deception; Trump did deny working for Russia, and the report contains only factual information (I assume), but we are encouraged to think, by the mechanics of the headline’s grammar and the context of news websites, that Trump is hiding something, and that this denial is somehow false or (at the very least) that the claim that he was working for Russia has somehow been substantiated enough to warrant serious investigation.  The headline is not the message.  In the code, “Trump denies working for Russia” equals “Trump is untrustworthy” – though there is not yet sufficient evidence for that explicit headline.

Eco extends this discussion of lies to artistic conventions – which is absolutely the sort of thing I’d like to discuss in greater detail elsewhere, since it would require a much more detailed examination.

iii. Eco writes: “A Rule which controls but which at the same time allows, gives the possibility of inventing beyond itself, by finding new paths, new combinations within the network….A code is not only a rule which closes but also a rule which opens.”  If there is a critical component to the understanding of language (and rules more generally) it is that these are creative systems.  Every dead observation of language and systems, every time it is measured without recognition of its living quality, that same assessment must fail.  Rules loose as much as they bind; understanding that mystery will open up the study of language to much more serious examination.