Fanfic Forensics

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Eco's concept of the 'open work'

Very simply put, Umberto Eco' concept of the 'open work' is a way of decoding avant-garde artworks that are deliberately designated as 'open' by artists and that need active participation by the work's consumers. For instance, in case of a musical piece, those who play the music might be required to arrange sequences of music before they can execute it. Let's pull this concept apart by looking at how Eco defines its format, its site of agency, and function.

Format

• An 'open work' may be created in any medium (literature, music, visual arts, sculpture, ...)
• The format is extremely important according to Eco. He says formal innovation in art occurs whenever artists feel that the formats they've been using are no longer adequate for expressing the world they inhabit. (We'll get back to this in a second.) In this sense, the format of a work is a kind of content in itself. (OW142)
• If the above is true, we could say that formal innovation is a kind of rebellion against 'established conventions of expression', and several scholars have said that this is indeed the case for 'open work' a la Eco. (Robey 1989)
• The format of the 'open work' is decentralized, and the source work is no more than a starting point. Consumers' interpretations are essential to the work: without these, there is no work and the source work is only of academic interest

Agency

*The 'original' author controls the purpose of the work and deliberately designates it as open. If the author hasn't decreed that his or her work is to be interpreted as an open work, then it's not a real 'open work' as Eco described it, because he believes that artists are better than non-artists at detecting shifts in consciousness in a society that require new formats to express.

Function:

Here lies the critical difference between Eco's 'open work' concept and the more general openness/potentiality inherent in any given text. The reason why open work comes into existence, why people would want to make open works, is that this kind of work is the only kind of work that adequately reflects modern consciousness. From Eco's perspective, science drives our worldview, the way we view reality, our system of values, and art adapts to that. Open work, according to Eco's system, is the only sort of artwork that acknowledges what he calls the 'new vision of both the physical and psychological universes proposed by contemporary science' because it deliberately adopts new formal terms in order to express our changed worldview. Open work is a way to explain difference between traditional and modern art, and the only artwork that is 'appropriate' to modern consciousness. (Robey 1989)

What's the most important characteristic of this 'new vision of the world' or 'modern consciousness' that requires a whole new format to express? According to Eco, the basis of this new consciousness is on 'the new man's inventive role. He is no longer to see the work of art as an object which draws on given links with experience and which demands to be enjoyed; now he sees it as a potential mystery to be solved, a role to fulfill, a stimulus to quicken his imagination.' He argues somewhere else that artists used to be trying to find the patterns or the truth in things that already exist, but that people today are much more interested in producing new things. We'll get back to this. (By the way, his use of gendered pronouns here is very annoying, and he writes like this a lot of the time. Looking at fan culture today, I believe he was very wrong to make his default creator of 'open works' male.)

An 'open work' also has an essentially political function, since its rejection of conventional forms implies the rejection of a social model. (FASC140)

Another function of the open work could be called pedagogical. Eco thinks that works in this format could teach consumers to conceive of their world not as something with one definite order or structure but something that can be explained by a variety of models or systems that lead to 'mutually complementary results'. In other words, work in an 'open work' format could teach people to think more like the scientists whose work defines their worldview. (FASC150)

Eco proposed this concept almost half a century ago, but 'open works' have not manifested in considerable quantities. In the art world, 'open work' has remained largely theoretical, some art critics even use the word utopian (Bondanella 2005, Robey 1989). Now, my thesis is that 'open work' with all its properties and its functions is actually developing in today's cultural landscape, as Eco predicted it would. The theory just needs a slight upgrade, especially in the sense that the initiative for the development of open work has not come from where Eco thought it would come from.

Eco thought the initiative would have to come from professional creators. But recent technological developments, particularly online social software, have radically transformed media used for the dissemination of fanworks (Hellekson and Busse 2006), and this change has emancipated readers to such a degree that they do not wait for the content industry or original creators to adapt the formats of their products to reflect a modern consciousness (Russo 2002). Through use of technology, readers now reclaim agency from authors and themselves transform closed works into 'open works'. The openness of the text itself is now less important than the new ways of consuming it that readers have developed. And I believe that one site where we can observe this development of 'open work' today is fanwork. And although the location of agency in this new incarnation of Eco's 'open work' (fanwork) has shifted, the work's function in society remains as he articulated it. I think that if we cast fanwork as having the properties and functions of 'open work', we'll be faced with a variety of new and challenging perspectives on fanwork.