Truls Ljungström’s Reviews > The Philosophy of Umberto Eco > Status Update

     (d)  Ideology as masking. Rather than being a question of truth or falsehood, ideology has to do with producing an effect—a “belief effect”—by means of concealing certain elements and displaying other ones. Ideology is not a value judgment.

(c)  Ideology as content. Only discursive genres and rhetorical strategies exist since there are no nonideological contents as opposed to ideological ones, in contrast to what the idea of opposing scientific discourse and political discourse would have us believe.

(b)  Ideology as representation. It is nt within the remit of semiotics 2 verify the validity of an ideology, its values, or its contents. Only a formal analysis may show z relativity of the concepts at stake in a given ideology because there are no representations in an abstract sense: they only arise from complex textual sts with a plurality of dimensions (that is, visual/audiovisual, gestures/images, images/text).

”(a)  The investment of the topological location of base/superstructure, where meaning is at the very basis of social reality, and there is no social functioning without meaning.
   

Lyotard’s celebrated definition of postmodernism as “incredulity toward master-narratives,” the alternative to which are petits récits, local language games—weak narratives, rather than robust, comprehensive, masterful ones

Author and translator are on an equal footing provided they acknowledge the peculiar nature of their relationship. A successful translation represents a clear advantage for both of them. The effective translator safeguards the author’s primary interest—the source text’s survival—by setting in motion a non-zero-sum hermeneutic process.

effetto-nebbia (the fog effect), The fog effect consists in a dreamy feeling of vagueness, where it is difficult to establish exactly when things in the story take place. Eco demonstrates how the different allusions to time create this fog effect since the reader is never able to establish exactly which time the narrator is referring to.

There is a big difference between metaphor and allegory. An allegory presents us with a sequence of actions that would not be difficult to interpret literally.

But there is another kind of expressivity of an entirely different order, which is that of a perfection of the manifestation itself.

Nonetheless, precisely by concealing the object and saying things about it, the signs illuminate it in some ways; they show its structure in perspective. This is the “power of falsehood”