‘open work’ – the idea that literary texts are fields (or networks) of meaning

A sign can produce an emotional and an energetic interpretant. If we consider a musical piece, the
emotional interpretant is our normal reaction to the charming power of music, but this emotional reaction
may elicit a sort of muscular or mental effort. This kind of response is the energetic interpretant. But an
energetic response does not need to be interpreted; rather, it produces (I guess, by further repetitions) a
change of habit. This means that, after having received a series of signs and having variously interpreted
them, our way of acting within the world is either transitorily or permanently changed.

cultural producer (in television and publishing), he was drawn to the democratic potential of
communications and indeed over the 1970s was increasingly concerned with reception over production. In a
short report, ‘Towards the Semiotic Inquiry into the Television Message’ (originally published in Italian in
1965, and translated into English in 1972), Eco places his focus on ‘aberrant decoding’, to describe how
viewers can interpret messages in ways that the sender does not necessarily intend or even desire. Such an
account of course becomes the mainstay of much of the emerging cultural and media studies.

Alongside his academic post as Professor of Semiology at Bologna University, Eco worked for many years in
publishing and in television, as well as being of course a celebrated novelist.

One of the major hypotheses governing his research is that semiotics studies all

cultural processes as processes of communication

Semiotics has a cultural nature. It can`t be explained outside the cultural logic in which it exists. That`s why
semiotics is useful for social and cultural analysis. Semiotics is a form of social criticism and one among the
many forms of social practice. Semiotics studies all cultural processes as processes of communication. Every
culture becomes a semiotic sign.