Cultural Encyclopedia

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Umberto Eco developed the concepts of "cultural encyclopedia" and "dictionary" to account for how members of an interpretive community decode meanings in texts or images by rule-governed procedures. These concepts attempt to describe how members of a culture participate in exchanges of meaning by greater or lesser access to, and competence with, a preexisting, constantly accruing, constantly reconfiguring body of words, terms, concepts, discourses, and actual artifacts maintained in a culture's memory.

As Eco (1992) describes, there is variety in the reading experience or interpreting experience because of the way different interpreters/reader enact or instantiate a text/cultural object in their various communities of reading:

When a text is produced not for a single addressee but for a community of readers – the author knows that he or she will be interpreted not according to his or her intentions but according to a complex strategy of interactions which also involve the readers, along with their competence in language as a social treasury.... I mean by social treasury not only a given language as a set of grammatical rules, but also the whole encyclopedia that the performances of that language have implemented, namely the cultural conventions that that language has produced and the very history of the previous interpretations of many texts, comprehending the text that the reader is in the course of reading. (Eco, 1992, pp. 67-68).

Our learned codes for associating signs and symbols with their cultural meanings are a function of this macro-cultural Encyclopedia. The various vocabularies, discourses, dialects, and the whole lexicon of a language (like English) form a cultural dictionary, which preexists any individual user, who has varying levels of access to, and familiarity with, the whole Dictionary. Language, discourse, narratives, and visual images are the memory machines of culture. Infocom and media technologies are externalized memory machines for transmitting culture (Debray), and thus function as a physical or material disseminator of the larger cultural encyclopedia. Selectivity and privileging of certain contents is a function of ideology and processes of hegemony (ways in which everyone buys into a dominant view, those in power co-opting those with lesser power). Ideology privileges certain contents of the shared Encyclopedia, and selectivity or hierarchizing of cultural knowledge discloses the social function of the Encyclopedia as culturally constructed, not given or natural.

For Eco, then, reading and interpreting are not a matter "correct" or "incorrect" interpretations, but rather show an interpreter's competence in engaging the cultural encyclopedia. In this view, a reading or interpretation is an enactment or performance of possibilities generated by interpreting something within a larger social framework supplied by the community's encyclopedia. This theory also helps account for the cultural imperative of creating new meanings through additional cultural works. The interpretation of a text/set of signs will always take the form of another text/set of signs.

The important point about these ideas is their emphasis on ongoing semiotic process (semiosis) and historical continuity at the social and cultural level, independent of any individual member of an interpretive community, who is born into a culture that is always already happening and always reconfiguring codes and symbolic associations in which individual reader/interpreters can intervene and develop new interpretations.

--Martin Irvine

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References

  • Eco, Umberto (1976). A theory of semiotics. Bloomington, IN. Indiana University Press.
  • Eco, Umberto (1979). The role of the reader. In U. Eco, The role of the reader: Explorations in the semiotics of texts (pp. 3-43). Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press.
  • Eco, Umberto (1983b). The name of the rose (William Weaver, Trans.). New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
  • Eco, Umberto (1984). Semiotics and the philosophy of language. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
  • Eco, Umberto (1986). Travels in hyperreality (William Weaver, Trans.). New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
  • Eco, Umberto (1989). Foucault’s Pendulum (William Weaver, Trans.). New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
  • Eco, Umberto (1992). Interpretation and overinterpretation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
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