The semiotic function of audience
pp. 107-116
in: John Deely, Margot D. Lenhart (eds), Semiotics 1981, Berlin, Springer, 1983Abstract
According to Umberto Eco (1976: 276), "The semiotic definition of an aesthetic text gives the structured model for the unstructured process of communicative interplay." An aesthetic text such as literature presupposes an addressee who collaborates in its production, for example, the spectator of theatre on the reader of poetry. Aesthetic communication thus relies upon two conditions--a performance and an audience. In this study oral interpretation is taken as paradigmatic for the description of literature. Literature is experienced in its performing, and more properly, in its being read aloud amidst an audience. In performance, neither the text nor the audience consumes the other totally in that a complete reduction is impossible. Mikel Dufrenne (1978: 405) states that "the ambiguous and yet irrefutable existence of the phenomenon testifies that the subject which directs its view, and the object as phenomenon towards which this view is directed are at the same time correlative and distinct: existing at the same by the subject and before the subject." Hence the performance of literature is ongoing and the direction of aesthetic communication unpredictable.
