Understanding Eco

Being largely unfamiliar with semiotics, I think I might start out best by trying to map out the different terms that Umberto Eco uses in his response to Christian Metz. So, this post might end up really being a way of thinking through these terms for my own benefit, but let's hope it might help someone else. I'm only going to focus on the technical part of his argument as it pertains to linguistics -- mostly because I'm really at a loss to understand that diagram on page 603. The visual elements of both film and linguistics create a complexity of meaning that is beyond the scope of a blog post (which is already too long for anyone to actually read).

The starting premise of semiotics is a very basic statement about the nature of human communication (and one that seems self-evident once articulated), is that in order for communication to exists, it must be established and governed by the way the emitter organizes the message, which in turn depends upon the listener understanding those basic principles of organization (592). That is, language is preconstituted by a mutual understanding of a set of signs (words, gestures, etc.). The way in which these signs correspond with a given signified is arbitrarily (if culturally determined) developed over time. I.e., there is no inherent reason in the English spoken language that the spoken word "dog" refers to the signified concept of a dog. Eco also mentions what he calls "codes of recognition," which is in essence a type of symbolism, or what might be understood as a pictographic code. The example he uses is of a zebra: the concept of and associations with those concepts are all contained in the equine-like shape and the pattern of its fur (by the pattern alone, we could argue). While these types of codes might seem to be somewhat more universal, like all codes, they, too, are culturally contingent. Things that the Western world understands as connoting "dog," such as a bone or a collar, won't indicate the same set of meanings to a group of individuals in another context (here it's going to have to be economic: because globalization has significantly reduced some of the discrepancies in meaning that previously existed, a group that might interpret these signs most drastically would be, say, an isolated group in southern Africa).

More specifically, communication can be grouped into two groups that function in tandem: analogic (meaning as communicated between speaker and listener that is governed by the signs used in comparison to one another -- although I use speaker and listener loosely -- meaning, "this is like this", or "this has meaning only in comparison to this") and digital (what Eco himself defines as binary, which I am taking to mean, "if not this, that"). We might think of analog communication as a positive, associative identification of meaning, where as digital communication is a negative, oppositional identification of meaning. Communication then consists of iconic signs, which themselves can be parsed into "semes" and "semenes." The example I used for my own notes is the idea of :) as the semene, or the full amount of information conveyed by :) , and the individual ideas like "happy," "smiling," "face," et al. would be the semes, or discrete pieces of information conveyed by the seme (:)).

I think Eco's diagramming of various types of codes in communication is very well done, so I�m not going to cover much in his section three, or "Summary of Codes," except to focus on what he terms a "continuum of possibilities" (596). This phrase refers to the extensive varieties of interpretation that iconic codes (or rather, figures in iconic codes, which I'm interpreting as context) are subject to as a result of their mutability. Eco reminds us that these codes are "decipherable within the context, but not reducible to a precise code," that is to say, not subject to the same kind of absolute interpretation that a single word might be (597). Related concepts are his ideas of "iconographic codes," and "ecolects" and "ideolects": contextually-based codes with increasingly narrower groups of people for whom those codes have meaning.

The idea of this continuum is incredibly important in film, particularly because of this flexibility in interpretation. I think filmmakers take advantage of this array of possibilities much more even than novelists because of the intersection of the visual and spoken codes. I am, however, curious to see how this "continuum"exists in relation to the process of translation between languages. Between any language, even Western languages, words are not always reducible to the same complex set of meanings, even if they are used under identical (replicable) conditions. When you expand your pool from Germanic and Romantic languages, the disconnect is even most vast. I don't think Eco is arguing that this continuum does not exist in film, but I would like to see what he makes of the process and practice of subtitling, a process which hinges upon the possibility of absolute interpretation and reduction to a precise code. However, that's neither here nor there.

However, does this "decoding" really allow us access to an "entity not otherwise analyzable"(591)? Eco makes the claim that "a message with aesthetic content is an example of an ambiguous message," a claim that suggests film is always inherently ambiguous (which I don't think is antithetical to what he is actually saying) (592). This decoding, this dissection of the semiotics of film, then, is always countered by this undecipherable ambiguity of meaning. Is that, possibly, the missing piece we're been looking for? Is this what makes film art? This ambiguity of meaning that creates spaces we viewers fill with ourselves?