For Whom Do We Write Exhibitions? Towards a Museum as Commons

In 1979, Umberto Eco published The Role of the Reader (Lector in fabula), which gathered the analysis he had conducted in the previous years on audience participation in the enjoyment of narrative literature. According to the Italian semiologist, a text always implies a set of rules as well as undefined empty areas, which are set up by the producer and activated by the receiver. As a matter of fact, according to Eco, any text has inscribed in it, since its very conception by the author, an interpretative mechanism that makes it incomplete. Every text therefore always implies—or at least hopes for—a subject able to decode it. Breaking down the act of textual communication as an act based on shared codes and conventions—some of which are more stable, like languages; others are less codified, such as a set of references or contextual readings—between producer and receiver, Eco delineates the theoretical character of a Model Reader, for which every communication produces postulates and proposes more or less knowingly the following: “To organize a text the author relies upon a series of codes that assign given contents to the expression he uses. To make his text communicable, the author has to assume that the ensemble of codes he relies upon is the same as that shared by his possible reader. The author has thus to foresee a model of the possible reader (Model Reader), supposedly able to deal interpretatively with the expressions, in the same way as the author deals generatively with them.”