Amid the sadness following the death of Umberto Eco, it is dispiriting to find that so many obituary writers are not clear on what he actually did.
Certainly Eco is recognized as a major novelist, despite his subsequent novels never matching the success of his first, “The Name of the Rose.” He has also been feted as a philosopher, a historian, and one of a dying breed of public intellectuals. Yet it is his underpinning role as a professor of semiotics that has proved most troublesome for the popular press to assess.
The problem is that many are not quite sure what semiotics is. The New York Times obituary refers to it as an “arcane field.” The Scotsman refers to “the esoteric theory of semiotics,” while The Washington Post has it that semiotics is “the study of signs, symbols, and hidden messages” which, when coupled with the reporting of Eco’s specialism in the history of the Middle Ages, makes him seem like a character in a Dan Brown novel.
The Guardian does no better, disdainfully suggesting that semiotics is “an abstruse branch of literary theory,” the exact phrase that is used in the obituary in The Telegraph. The Independent marks a slight improvement, with semiotics as “the study of signs and meaning in communications.” The BBC, for reasons which can only be guessed at, does not even mention semiotics, noting only that Eco was professor emeritus at the University of Bologna.
Eating Peas
They may not know what semiotics is, but many are quick to condemn it.
The Telegraph is predictably swift in pouring scorn on Eco as such an influential left-of-center voice, referring further to semiotics as according “world-historical significance to trivia” and dubbing Eco as “a sort of portmanteau intellectual, giving his views on everything from how to eat peas with a plastic fork to changing concepts of beauty.”
Far from according world-historical significance to trivia, semiotics has consistently led the way in eradicating subjective value judgments from all cultural artifacts, including those which have been said to have been born with, achieved, or had greatness thrust upon them. Semiotics, as Eco formulated it, is a matter of understanding how sign systems work.
