Umberto Eco on Interpretation and Over-interpretation: A Summary

To add to this article, or to challenge Malaised's account of the text, please leave a comment below. 

Overview

In 1990, Umberto Eco gave a series of three lectures on “Interpretation and Overinterpretation” as part of the Tanner Lectures in Human Values at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. (Eco, 1990) The lectures were later reproduced as the first three chapters in an edited book entitled Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1992) edited by Stefan Collini. In these lectures, Eco outlines his concerns about over-interpretive bias in contemporary theory. In his introduction, Collini characterises these concerns as “the way some of the leading strands of contemporary critical thought… appear to him to license the reader to produce a limitless, uncheckable flow of ‘readings’”. Eco asks if there are limits to what a text can be made to mean, and whether the author’s intentions should play a part in defining these limits. The limits, he concludes, are not located in either the author’s intention or the reader’s interpretation… but in the text itself. Eco’s lectures are followed by three response chapters by hermeneutic pragmatist Richard Rorty, deconstructionist Jonathan Culler and novelist-critic Christine Brooke-Rose. Eco concludes the book by responding to these challenges.

Interpretation and History

In the first lecture, “Interpretation and history”, Eco seeks to reveal, or even undermine, postmodernism’s relativist foundations. His goal is to find the middle ground between totally relativist and totally dogmatic approaches to interpretation. In his words, between a “radical reader oriented theory of interpretation” where Rorty has noted:

“the critic asks neither the author nor the text about their intention but simply beats the text into a shape that will serve his purpose. He makes the text refer to whatever is relevant to that purpose. He does this by imposing a vocabulary – a grid in Foucault’s terminology – on the text which may have nothing to do with any vocabulary used in the text or by its author, and seeing what happens” (1991, p. 151)

and on the other hand, “finding the original intention of the author”, which may be impossible to discern or irrelevant for the interpretation of the text. (1992, p. 25) Eco locates postmodern theories of interpretation within a history of ancient hermeticism and gnosticism. Both his ancient and postmodern examples consider the study of signs and symbols to be unproductive, as they are unable to reveal truths, but only displace them elsewhere. (1992, p. 35) Eco could be describing Derridian Deconstruction when he notes that:

“The reader must suspect that every line […] conceals another secret meaning; words, instead of saying, hide the untold; the glory of the reader is to discover that texts can say everything, except what the author wanted them to mean”. (1992, p. 39)

Acknowledging that in voicing his concerns he has put forth caricatures of the worst kinds of radical reader oriented theory of interpretation, Eco nonetheless asserts that caricatures can be good portraits. (1992, p. 40) The possibility to reject absurd interpretations or agree on reasonable ones disappears when endless possible meanings become acceptable: this, for Eco characterises “overinterpretation”. The reason for the apparent return (or persistence) of anti-rationalist relativism, however, is not addressed. Nonetheless, he sets up the next two lectures by claiming that somewhere there are criteria for the limits of interpretation and that he intends to find and delineate them.

Overinterpreting Texts

In lecture two, “Overinterpreting texts”, Eco argues that overinterpretation can occur even when there are multiple valid interpretations of the text. For Eco, it is not the reader who produces meanings in the text, but the text which produces the “model reader”. This is what he calls the “intention of the text”. The model reader must take their cues from the text, meaning that not all interpretations are valid and that some will be rejected as preposterous. Eco claims that a text can “foresee a model reader entitled to try infinite conjectures” but that this reader is “only an actor who makes conjectures about the kind of model reader postulated by the text”. (1992, p. 64) Eco proposes “the intention of the text” as a solution to the excesses of interpretation based on an overestimation of the possibilities of similarity and analogy (with an implicit nod in the direction of Foucault).

Between Author and Text

In the third lecture, “Between author and text”, Eco makes the case for a “liminal author”. The author is “liminal” insofar as he exists on the threshold between the intention of the author and the linguistic intention displayed in the text. The author is shaped by his “cultural and linguistic background”; (1992, p. 69) the reader, he tells us, must therefore respect these boundaries.

All three response chapters take up positions contra Eco. Unsurprisingly, Rorty makes a passionate case for interpretation, disputing Eco’s distinction between “using” a text (for irony or parody, for example) and “interpreting” a text. (1992, p. 93) Culler takes on both Eco and Rorty. He suggests that the most extreme over-interpretive moments can be the most significant, as it is in such moments that greater literary and social understandings lie. (1992, p. 110)

Rorty’s challenge forms the main part of Eco’s response. Eco ends by asserting that “Hiroshima was bombed and that Dachau and Buchenwald existed” (Eco et al., 1992, p. 150)– thus implicitly linking over-interpretation to post-truth. He concludes that the author’s intention may, indeed, set limits to the work’s interpretation.

References

Eco, U. (1990). Interpretation and overinterpretation: World, history, texts. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Presented at the The Tanner lectures on human values, Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Eco, U., Brooke-Rose, C., Culler, J., Collini, S., & Rorty, R. (1992). Interpretation and overinterpretation (Paperback; S. Collini, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rorty, R. (1991). Consequences of pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980. Hemel Hempsted: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (or the narcissism of Caractacus Potts)

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a film about a father of two young children whose mother has died. The father, Caractacus Pott, (Dick Van Dyke), is an apparently independently wealthy inventor who doesn't believe in playing by the rules - although he is not rich, he wouldn't consider working for anybody else, and owns property and some land in an unspecified idyllic village, for example).

The Potts children (Jeremy and Jemimah) don't go to school - that would run contra to Pott's fiercely independent streek. He prefers for them to learn through play. He does not homeschool them; rather, they run about unsupervised... left to their own devices.
One day they encounter Truly Scrumptious (the female character who will eventually become their surrogate mother) . Scrumptious is appalled that Potts lets his children runaround unsupervised, and she is fearful for their safety when she nearly runs them over. The father however has no such concerns. He believes that a little danger is no bad thing in a child's upbringing and that they will learn to care for themselves rather than being suffocated by a mollycoddling nanny State.
Scrumptious and Potts become friends and take the children to the beach. From this point on on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a dreamlike fantasy. Scrumptious learns that, far from being the uncaring father that she assumed him to be, Potts is a deeply devoted parent. He has endless patience, time and love for his children. They learn through imaginative play with him. For example, they fantasize about seeing a pirate ship just off the coast. The idyllic world of learning through play quickly becomes darker, when they travel to the land of Vulgaria where a mad ruler, Baron Bomburst, has banned children, so that he alone can have all the toys.
Bomburst employees a sinister Child Catcher who runs around imprisoning children in a cage on the back of his cart.
The film concludes when the Potts family join forces with a toymaker (Benny Hill) to free all the children imprisoned by the Baron and fly home in their magical flying car.
It is noteworthy that the evil child-snatching baron story is Potts' invention. The Child Catcher personifies Potts' fear of losing his children, just as he has lost his wife. The Child Catcher is the darker side of Potts' personality. Far from rescuing his children from the boredom of a life at school, he is like a narcissist who wants to keep his children close, to serve his own ends. Their infantile fascination with his many failed or commercially unviable inventions makes him feel important and provides him with an audience 24/7. As is common with people suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, his children really serve to make him feel more important and to alleviate his fear of being left alone. At the same time, paradoxically, he is far from over-protective. Once the children are out of sight, they are out of mind and only of interest to their father once he has need for their attention.
Therefore, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang can be read as a warning about the potentially self-serving motives behind home schooling.

Steam Punk & Colonial Nostalgia

Asylum Steampunk Festival (Lincoln 2019)

If you walk around the streets of Lincoln during the annual Asylum Steampunk Festival (the largest and longest running steampunk festival in the world), you will hear that the steampunks – easily identifiable by their dress – speak in many different languages. While the appeal of steampunk has certainly broadened its horizons, one cannot help but feel that it is most warmly received by white Europeans, nostalgic for empire. 

Clad in pith helmets, these intrepid explorers lament that America has overtaken the European powers to become the dominant global superpower. Steampunks long for a return to the good old days of European supremacy that were only ever possible because of colonisation. Steampunk as a fantasy where Europeans continue to dominate the world using (new) pre-digital technologies. Outsourcing labour leaves Europeans with a nostalgia for the days when they could actually make and repair things. Nostalgia is evident in the dressing up (not just literature) – people want to have a go at living this alternative reality. 

Dr Arliss Loveless

Critics will rightly point to the reception that steampunk has in the United States. Films such as Eli Roth’s The House With a Clock in its Walls (2018) and Barry Sonnenfeld’s Wild Wild West (1999) are testament to steampunk’s popular appeal in America. Arliss Loveless, the baddie in Wild Wild West, is a racist played by a British actor. The British baddie is, of course, a Hollywood tradition who (potentially) represents the way that contemporary Americans continue to view the old world as a threat. On the surface racism in Wild Wild West (both the British and confederate varieties) is a bad thing to be combated. However, this belies the colonial nostalgia of Wild Wild West and, indeed westerns more generally. Will Smith’s character James West might be black, but the metanarrative here is that, together with the white folk, he will wipe out the indigenous peoples to establish a white European colony. 

It should not be surprising that the Antebellum South is receptive to steampunk ideas. This analogue era was prosperous because of slavery; this was halted by progressive new ideas and technologies. The Antebellum South was an agricultural society, somewhat resistant to the industrial north. As such, it represents a pre-industrial, and therefore pre-steam power, mentality. This seams not to matter in Wild Wild West, where white colonial nostalgia takes precedence over nostalgia for steam power. This illustrates my first point: steampunk’s nostalgia for the analogue is a proxy for its nostalgia for white European supremacy. 

In the United States, this means European ways and traditions supplanting indigenous and non-European customs – the zenith of which is reached in The House with a Clock in its Walls, which depicts a mainly white New England society underpinned by ancient European superstition, magic and folklore. All of the main characters are white, and the architecture speaks not to America (the Art Deco Empire State Building, Diners and so on) but to Britain. In Europe, the difference is that America itself becomes a proxy for that which supplanted European supremacy, adventure and colonial expansion. After all, steampunk is trapped in the Victorian age – the peak of European colonial domination. 

Ideology

Ideology

In Hegelian and Marxist philosophy, ideology has a pejorative sense that denotes "false consciousness". For Hegel, we are all influenced by forces that we cannot understand (ideology): we are "instruments of history". This sounds like Marxist historical materialist, but Marx criticised Hegel for what he perceived to be a fatalistic worldview: why try to change the world if we are being controlled by forces that we cannot recognise or understand? (The German Ideology, published posthumously in 1932). Marx's conception of ideology differed to Hegel's in that he believed in human agency to overturn ideology and in that he believed that all idea systems are products of economic structures. 

Today, some thinkers (Richard Rorty) have suggested we're are in a post-ideological age. Žižek argues that the conception of a such a post ideological world is evidence that the dominant ideologies have finally "come into their own."

In medieval times, serfs were told that kings and noblemen had been put there by God and, likewise, they had a place (at the bottom) in the cosmic order. Everybody was told to accept their fate, as it was part of God's plan and that suffering in this world world be rewarded in the next. 

Today, Liberal capitalist democracy might be seen as post ideological, only because it convinces us that it is the only viable, natural order. Therefore, liberal capitalist democratic ideology influences us psychologically so that we think it is natural: this is a "false consciousness" about the world, how it works, and their place in it, according to Marx.

Žižek takes Marx's conception of ideology and combines it with Lacan's psychoanalytic theory. For Lacan, we do not intact with the world as such, but with linguistic representations of the world. 

In this view, "different ideologies are different representations of our social and imaginary 'reality'"... not the world itself. For example, medieval ideology worked because it represented the social imaginary reality of the time.

If people think coffee is taken black (English, black coffee; Italian, caffè nero) they do not think of it as lacking milk. But if they think of it as "coffee without milk" (e.g. Spanish, café solo or coffee on its own) they do. This demonstrates how language plays a part in ideology. Žižek uses the following joke to explain further:

"A man comes into a restaurant. He sits down at the table and he says, 'Waiter, bring me a cup of coffee without cream.' Five minutes later, the waiter comes back and says, 'I'm sorry, sir, we have no cream. Can it be without milk?'"

New Contemporaries 2018

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2018, 

Liverpool School of Art & Design, Liverpool John Moores University

14 July 2018 - 9 September 2018

Radiohead and Waiting

Just lying in a bar with my drip feed on Talking to my girlfriend, waiting for something to happen And I wish it was the sixties, I wish I could be happy I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen 

(the bends, 1995) 

I cannot think of any lyric that better sums up my experience of growing up in the 1990s than the one above, from Radiohead’s the Bends. I had a niggling feeling that nothing was happening. My parents had seen men land on the moon, but the Apollo programme has ended before I was even born. My parents had also see the invention of Concorde, whereas I only saw supersonic passenger flight decommissioned, as it was too expensive. You might argue that I have lived through a communications revolution, witnessing the birth of the internet and mobile phone technology, but this seems a somehow inferior experience to me. My parents could catch a flight out of Heathrow and land in New York before they had even taken off, while I can access Facebook on my phone. Indeed, these technologies, although they were born in the 1990s, didn’t really come into their own until the new millennium.  

I am not really interested in a debate about whether advancements in travel or communications is more exciting. This is only a metaphor for a lingering feeling of disquiet – that nothing was happening in the 1990s. It was not long after the ‘90s ended that things did start to happen though. It started when a man living in a cave orchestrated the largest ever coordinated attack against the USA on its own soil. Using World War Two Kamikaze-style tactics he destroyed icons of American imperial capitalism, military might, but failed to reach his last target in Washington. That a man in a cave in Afghanistan (or a house in Pakistan) could do this seemed unbelievable. What’s more unbelievable is that the most powerful country in the world, with the largest military budget was unable to catch him (or execute and dump him in the sea) for a decade. It was as it we had entered a Bond film.  

The Bond film continued when a computer programmer with white hair founded a global organisation to gather and release the world’s secrets. He even defied the world’s most powerful country at a time when it was run by a cowboy out to avenge the attacks by the man in the cave (house in Pakistan). Kim Jong Un is the most recent Bond baddie threatening to turn the world order upside down.  

Scotland’s near secession from the United Kingdom, Brexit, the election of Donald J. Trump, Catalonia’s vote for independence... things have started to happen and maybe there’s a bit too much happening, as if making up for the lack of activity in the 1990s.