On Open Work by Umberto Eco

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The Open Work - Umberto Eco
Al Larsen

Umberto Eco, (born 1932, Italy) is a novelist and literary theorist. His interests, expressed in both his theoretical and novelistic work, include Medieval Studies, aesthetics, semiotics, and the history of knowledge. The Open Work is a collection of essays pre-dating his move toward semiotics. It was originally published in 1962 and has been through several versions with essays added, revised or dropped.

Open Work
    Eco distinguishes between the concept within aesthetic theory that every text is more or less open, because every text can be read in an infinite number of ways depending on what the reader brings to the text, and his more specific concept of the open work.

For Eco, an open work is a text which is not limited to a single reading or range of readings; it admits complexity... it actually encourages or requires a multiplicity of readings. As examples he includes musical compositions by Stockhausen and Boulez in which the score requires the performers to make choices or interpret the score in their own manner. He also cites texts which on the surface are more traditional. In Kafka the reader relates to the text on the level of metaphor but without a clear mapping of metaphors. (p. 9)  There is no fixed symbolism by which to unlock the meaning of Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis. In Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake he describes that the use of puns to set up ambiguities.   

“In Opera Aperta, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. Those works of literature that limit potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line are the least rewarding, while those that are most open, most active between mind and society and line, are the most lively (and, although valorizing terminology is not his business, best). “ (Wikipedia, entry for Umberto Eco, 10/05)

What the preceding entry leaves out is the historical context in which Eco puts openness. He feels that this type of work, open work, is the work of his age. Because of the new paradigms in science the artist realizes he or she can no longer use the old forms. The old forms were developed for representing an ordered, hierarchal and mappable reality. Inheriting a set of univocal conventions, the artist breaks or subverts the formal language to create work which allows varied interpretations, reflective of a contemporary worldview which is less hierarchal and more pluralistic. (p. 95)

Work in Movement
A sub-category of open work is work in movement which he describes as works which “characteristically consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units.” (p12 ) In this category he puts Calder’s mobiles. He also describes an unfinished book project by Mallarme in which textual elements were meant to be “…polymorphous in their indeterminate relation to each other.” (p 13)

Ramifications
    Eco sees open work as essentially political; work that is open expresses a pluralistic worldview.

Work which is calling into question its own forms and assumptions has a valuable function – it teaches us how to operate with agency within a highly mediated world. (p. 150, 83)

Openings in the Work
1) Eco sees science as driving the worldview of an age, to which art responds:

“In every century, the way that artistic forms are structured reflects the way in which science or contemporary culture views reality.” (p. 13)

“Contemporary art makes the new scientific paradigm seem normal by expressing it in culture.” (p. 90)

What relationship do we see (or want to see) between science, contemporary culture and art? Is artistic investigation a process of responding/filling in the gaps of scientific investigation? Can art lead?

2)    “The kind of expectation aroused by a message with an open structure is less a prediction of the expected than an expectation of the unpredictable.” (p. 80) Applying Eco's language to Virno's take on social reality – do we live in an increasingly open society?

3)    At a reading by bell hooks, an audience member questioned the author on her book On Love, noting that hooks only addresses heterosexual relations. Hooks responded that as an African American woman she had a long practice of  “reading herself into” (not hooks' quote) texts which were not specifically addressed to her experience. (And that the questioner should be willing to read On Love in a similarly open way.)  Forty or more years after the essays in The Open Work were written do we live in a world where the openness of our habits of interpretation makes the openness of the text less crucial?