The project announced by Umberto Eco is explicit: to explore “the theoretical possibility and the social function of a unified approach to every phenomenon of signification and/or communication.” The ambition is not sectorial. It concerns every case of sign-function, understood as the result of “underlying systems of elements mutually correlated by one or more codes.” What is at stake is the design of a general semiotic theory.
Eco states that such a design must consider “(a) a theory of codes and (b) a theory of sign production.” The first concerns structured systems that make signification possible; the second concerns the concrete processes through which expressions are physically produced and used. The range of phenomena involved is extensive: “the common use of languages, the evolution of codes, aesthetic communication, different types of interactional communicative behavior, the use of signs in order to mention things or states of the world and so on.” Semiotics must therefore operate at a level capable of integrating heterogeneous practices.
This distinction between codes and sign-production does not coincide with traditional oppositions such as “langue” and “parole,” competence and performance, or syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. One of the central claims is precisely to “overcome these distinctions.” A theory of codes must be broad enough to include “rules of discursive competence, text formation, contextual and circumstantial (or situational) disambiguation,” thereby allowing a semantics that resolves within its own framework many problems usually assigned to pragmatics.
The initial step requires a reconsideration of the “all-purpose notion of ‘sign.’” Eco proposes translating this notion into the more flexible one of “sign-function,” explainable within a theory of codes. A sign-function is not an isolated entity but the result of a correlation established by a socially posited convention. Within this framework, a decisive distinction emerges: “a semiotics of signification entails a theory of codes, while a semiotics of communication entails a theory of sign production.” The first concerns structured possibilities; the second concerns processes that actualize them.
Even so, the term “sign” is not abandoned. As Eco remarks, it would be “uselessly oversophisticated” to eliminate a term so deeply rooted in ordinary and theoretical discourse, provided its correlational nature is presupposed.
A general semiotic theory will prove its strength by offering “an appropriate formal definition for every sort of sign-function,” including those not yet coded. The design of semiotics thus depends on holding together two dimensions: the systematic articulation of codes and the analysis of sign-production. Only through this dual structure can semiotics claim to account for every phenomenon of signification and communication within a unified theoretical framework.
Bibliographical reference: Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, Indiana University Press, 1976.