Difference between revisions of "Book/The Medium-Specific Narrative"

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but the left arm prolongs it in the direction sketched by the contour of the lockers. It is a kind of merging point between diverging movements.
but the left arm “moves” it in the direction sketched by the contour of the lockers. It is a kind of mutant motif.


We know the left arm and the left hand as belonging to the same woman. This is the figurative part. But its pure formality also denotes a medium-specific narrative. It isn’t a mere matter of opposition between purity and non-purity. The described medium-specific narrative '''very specifically''' relies on the recognizable “figure” of the left hand connecting to the left arm (as emphasized by the uniform whiteness of the skin).
We know the left arm and the left hand as belonging to the same woman. This is the figurative part. But its pure formality also denotes a medium-specific narrative. It isn’t a mere matter of opposition between purity and non-purity. The described medium-specific narrative '''very specifically''' relies on the recognizable “figure” of the left hand connecting to the left arm, as emphasized by the uniform whiteness of the skin.


The interpretation of medium-specific narratives stresses uniqueness across both the flat and the non-flat. It doesn’t rely on a general theory of art, nor on a theory of the medium such as “medium purity.” It isn’t a theory of '''this''' “very best art of the last hundred-odd years” either. It is a '''this here interpreted'''-medium-specific interpretation. This content-bound communication does not need to reference clichés, even indirectly, in order to produce non-clichés, as do parodies and shock value at their most obvious. In a way, this echoes the sentiment of certain authors like Deleuze and Guattari, who not only criticize the “order of the signifying and the figure,” but also its oppposite, the “pure figural” as “a transgression that remain secundary nonetheless,” that is, secundary to the “schizophreny as process:”
The interpretation of medium-specific narratives stresses uniqueness across both the flat and the non-flat. It doesn’t rely on a general theory of art, nor on a theory of the medium such as “medium purity.” It isn’t a theory of '''this''' “very best art of the last hundred-odd years” either. It is a '''this here interpreted'''-medium-specific interpretation. This content-bound communication does not need to reference clichés, even indirectly, in order to produce non-clichés, as do parodies and shock value at their most obvious. In a way, this echoes the sentiment of certain authors like Deleuze and Guattari, who not only criticize the “order of the signifying and the figure,” but also its oppposite, the “pure figural” as “a transgression that remain secundary nonetheless,” that is, secundary to the “schizophreny as process:”

Revision as of 18:53, 11 October 2016

Interpretation of the “medium-specific narrative”

The alternative to the interpretation of the average value is what, in the absence of a more marketable expression, I call the “medium-specific narrative.” It is the opposite of the mosaic. Instead of a loose, confused whole, one is searching for some tightly-knit functional structure, with all extras removed. There isn’t just one medium-specific narrative per work of art, the one that the creator is supposed to have designed, ambitioned and wanted for their audience. It may occasionally coincide with that notion, but in general, it is more modest in its scope and fundamentally hedonistic: the joy comes from finding one that is satisfying enough in a purely subjective sense.

The “medium-specific narrative” as a narrative of elements related to each other due to the nature of the medium. The interpretation of the average value as a narrative of disparate elements. Proximity of the “medium-specific narrative” to the content as a timeline of events that actually happen to the consumer. The interpretation of the medium-specific narrative is essentially the rendering of the interpreted content as a medium-specific narrative, with an implicit non-committal value judgment that doesn’t detract from objectivity

Narrative interpretation is an endeavour to view the work as, broadly speaking, a “story,” i.e., every element in the work is viewed in light of “previous” elements, the premises. If the elements form a succession of events that share a timeline, characters, locations, etc., then we recognize the traditional concept of story. But if the elements are the regions of a painting or the melodic motifs of a song, the concepts of “story” and “premise” take on a peculiar quality relative to the nature of the medium. In a pop song, an element could be the chorus, and “premise” would be the verse. Depending on the reward of doing so, one could look at a more granular level, and take “element” to mean a motif or melodic pattern. “Previous element” would designate another motif or melodic pattern already encountered during the song. In a painting, an “element” could, for example, mean a painted region, an object or a motif. The concept of “premise” here can be somewhat misleading, as there isn’t always a formal timeline. In this case, I like to generalize the definition of “premise” to mean “another element of the painting.” There can always be a timeline, even if the observer tends to compress it in a process similar to photographic memory: the timeline of the viewing experience. The viewer’s gaze moving across from one region of the painting to another creates a subjective timeline of perceptions, a “story” of perceptions.

Note that the physical frame of the narrative (the canvas, the page, or the MP3 file) is a convention. It is a guide that narrows the finding of narratives. But you could imagine looking for (and finding) medium-specific narratives in Nature or in any unintended arrangement of objects. This has important ramifications on how one looks at conventional art. The focus is now on the perceptions as they happen to the observer, not as they are intended by some benevolent being. Not coincidentally, the mosaic automatically begins to arise when one talks of such a benevolent being, a Creator or Artist, in relation to the work. This shows how fundamentally different the medium-specific narrative is from the interpretation of the average value in its cognitive approach.

The “medium specificity” of the narrative means that the elements of the narrative stay homogeneous with each each other as parts of the same medium, in the sense that they “change into each other” as part of a narrative. This implies that the narrative stays intra-medium. Intuitively, it defines the whole work as the self-contained unit of interpretation, in a way that accounts for the content as things that happen on a closed timeline. As a medium-specific narrative, a song is a succession of elements that actually occur to the listener (melodies, patterns, etc.) and nothing else. By contrast, the interpretation of the average value grows a mosaic of features, which include mood, theme, genre, thus rendering the content very generic. Before the mood, theme or genre, the listener first experiences medium-specific narratives: narratives of notes, of phrases, of sections. Theme or genre are high-level products that are generic and abstract the granularity of the medium-specific narratives.

Don’t get me wrong: an interpretation of the average value has its uses, even if you only get a coarse picture of the content. Even if the work is incredibly bad, the interpretation of the average value is valuable for telling as much. Comparatively, the interpretation of the medium-specific narrative relies entirely on the objective content. If the work is a boring mass of clichés, the medium-specific narrative will be about the objective content of this boring mass of clichés. The value of its interpretation is essentially the value the interpreter found in some medium-specific narrative within the content, but the value judgment is not explicit. Instead, it is implicitly encoded in the very existence of the interpretation as a statement of interest. This interest is expressed in the way in which the “uninterpreted” content differs from the content as rendered by the interpretation. This difference necessarily exists. An interpretation of a painting is text, and text is never equivalent to visuals. It would be pointless to try to translate every graphical nuance into words (the visuals do a better and infinitely more concise job of it anyway). Instead, the interpreter cherry-picks the elements that mattered to him and writes them down in text form. This selection process already conveys a positive judgment value as people don’t usually enjoy spending brain time writing down medium-specific narratives they find unremarkable. By contrast, the interpretation of the average value involves socially rewarding writing skills and a delectable amount of culture in what essentially amounts to an exercice de style. For example, the interpretation of a painting is invariably expected to have a few words about painting techniques, the painter, his career and his works, knowledge of art history, modern sensibilities, etc. These analytical themes relate to the painting’s visuals in non-visual ways, and any one them would automatically turn the interpretation of the medium-specific narrative into a mosaic of the average value.

Although the interpretation of the medium-specific narrative may implicitly say “this work is great” like the interpretation of the average value, it carries an altogether different legacy. The point isn’t the significance of being liked or not, but the narrative itself, that is, a constructive concept that lives independently of value judgment and can be communicated objectively. Even if you don’t like it, you get a chance to learn about something constructive in the content. Metaphorically, this is the explanation of the joke that you didn’t find amusing. It may leave you unamused, but it can also inspire you. An interpretation of the average value of the joke, if there’s such a thing, would instead tell you about the category of the joke, the origins of the joke, etc.

The interpretation of the interpretation of the average value as an interpretation of the medium-specific narrative of reviews

The interpretation of the average value reveals itself when one begins to question reviews, and hold their narratives more accountable for the meaning they imply, rather than the meaning claimed by their author or the readers. In a way, reviews are works of art about works of art, an “artful” form of thought process based on content amnesia. This thought process is not confined to art, and can easily be applied to other fields. It blurs the lines between art and science, between theory and practice, between fiction and reality. It turns out that one can also always look for narratives not only in art, but in any kind of text, serious or not, belonging to expert domains or everyday life. In fact, most critiques and analyses you will find in this text are interpretations of the medium-specific narratives of various papers, books, discourses, reviews, everyday chatters. The medium-specific narratives are processed for easy reading, while staying recognizable by the characteristic minuteness with which they capture how the words chain together, rather than by an enumeration of a mosaic’s features.

A medium-specific narrative from John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn

I chose John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn because it is short and well-established in academic circles.

 Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” 
John Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn

When I look for a medium-specific narrative, I try to find one that roughly covers the whole work. In logical terms, one that justifies the work as a unit. Here’s one :

  1. The narrator questions a silent “thou.”
  2. The narrator associates the silent (“those unheard are sweeter”) with the eternal (“canst not leave […] nor ever,” “never, never”, “For ever,” etc.).
  3. The eternal is then associated with successions of “happy” and “love” (“Ah, happy, happy boughs!”, “happy melodist”, “More happy love! more happy, happy love!”).
  4. Finally, when the eternal silent (“Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought as doth eternity”) says something, it addresses the narrator’s questioning (“all ye need to know”) through structures of succession, reminding of the narrator’s successions of “happy:” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

All the terms of the interpretations are reused and combined in different contexts. In (1), the “silent thou” is asked questions which are addressed in (4). The symmetric structure of the answer “beauty is truth, truth beauty” echoes the successions of the words happy and love in (3), but in a non-silent context which contrasts the silence in (1) and (2). A narrative thus emerges.

This narrative is medium-specific in the sense that it takes elements directly from the poem with almost no recourse to subjective interpretation. I say almost, because there is certainly some interpretation there. I skipped a lot of material. I skipped the details of the narrator’s questions. I didn’t mention the stanza structure or the rhyme schemes. Implicit in these oversights is an assessment that they didn’t strike me in any way as part of a significant poem-wide narrative. If you study the stanza structure or the poem’s themes for example, as most scholars do, you get invariants rather than a narrative. But this choice, to prefer this here poem-wide narrative, is already an act of subjective interpretation, even if, in the last analysis, I just highlighted certain passages of the poem.

Another way to deliver this interpretation would be to cook it a little bit, because it is a little too raw as it is. I could provide some commentary that would imply the feelings and value judgments that led me to this narrative. I could say this:

« John Keats thus makes us realize that our questioning is superfluous, in the sense that the answer was already contained in the narrator’s enthusiastic exuberance. The answer is the expression of overabundant joy, whether in the questioning itself (the streams of “what”) or in the passing observations (the almost creepy effusions about happiness and love), rather than a more conventional answer that would avoid T.S. Eliot’s criticism of the “grammatically meaningless” statement that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” »

I will usually chose to stay away from this style of interpretation. Other “reconstructionists” may favor it. I personally like to address an audience that doesn’t need to be spoon-fed and will arrive at its own conclusions. In fact, I would argue that the raw interpretation doesn’t need any conclusion. The “episodes” of the narrative are interlinked with one another in such a way that one loses the power thereof as soon as one tries to wrap things up in a conclusion.

Rediscovering intra-medium movement

Rediscovering intra-visuality. Restoring the primacy of the viewing angle

Keeping the interpretation intra-medium is counter-intuitive to the critic. Content-bound communication is counter-intuitive to the people who receive it. “This painting represents the king:” this is a very natural statement to read, though it is hardly concerned with the objective content. If the reader of the statement sticks to what the interpretation actually communicates, and tries to visualize the painting through it, they could imagine a king sitting on a throne, a crown, or even a heraldic symbol. The visuals along with all the non-visual facts, including the fact that this is the king, contribute to their own “story” separate from the visuals.

 The Equestrian Portrait of Charles I (also known as Charles I on Horseback) is an oil painting on canvas by Anthony van Dyck, showing Charles I on horseback. Charles I had become King of Great Britain and Ireland in 1625 on the death of his father James I, and Van Dyck became the Charles’ Principal Painter in Ordinary in 1632. This portrait is thought to have been painted in about 1637–38, only a few years before the English Civil War broke out in 1642. It is one of many portraits of Charles by Van Dyck, including several equestrian portraits.  
English Wikipedia
Equestrian Portrait of Charles I

Such stories are independent of the king from a visual point of view—e.g., a figure standing between a curtain to his right and a pillar to his left—but it is assumed that these stories “merge” with the visuals and serve their meaning and, ultimately, value. They contrive a “world without viewer:”

 But when we say that the for-itself is-in-the-world, that consciousness

is consciousness of the world, we must be careful to remember that the world exists confronting consciousness as an indefinite multiplicity of reciprocal relations which consciousness surveys without perspective and contemplates without a point of view. For me this glass is to the left of the decanter and a little behind it; for Pierre, it is to the right and a little in front. It is not even conceivable that a consciousness could survey the world in such a way that the glass should be simultaneously given to it at the right and at the left of the decanter, in front of it and behind it. This is by no means the consequence of a strict application of the principle of identity but because this fusion of right and left, of before and behind, would result in the total disappearance of “thises” at the heart of a primitive indistinction. Similarly if the table leg hides the designs in the rug from my sight, this is not the result of some finitude and some imperfection in my visual organs, but it is because a rug which would not be hidden by the table, a rug which would not be either under it or above it or to one side of it, would not have any relation of any kind with the table and would no longer belong to the “world” in which there is the table. The in-itself which is made manifest in the form of the this would return to its indifferent self-identity. Even space as a purely external relation would disappear. The constitution of space as a multiplicity of reciprocal relations can be effected only from the abstract point of view of science; it can not be lived, it can not even be represented. The triangle which I trace on the blackboard so as to help me in abstract reasoning is necessarily to the right of the circle tangent to one of its sides, necessarily to the extent that it is on the blackboard. And my effort is to surpass the concrete characteristics of the figure traced in chalk by not including its relation to me in my calculations any more than the thickness of the lines or the imperfection of the drawing.

Thus by the mere fact that there is a world, this world can not exist without a univocal orientation in relation to me. Idealism has rightly insisted on the fact that relation makes the world. But since idealism took its position on the ground of Newtonian science, it conceived this relation as a relation of reciprocity. Thus it attained only abstract concepts of pure exteriority, of action and reaction, etc., and due to this very fact it missed the world and succeeded only in making explicit the limiting concept of absolute objectivity. This concept in short amounted to that of a “desert world” or of “a world without men;” that is, to a contradiction, since it is through human reality that there is a world. Thus the concept of objectivity, which aimed at replacing the in-itself of dogmatic truth by a pure relation of reciprocal agreement between representations, is self-destructive if pushed to the limit.

 
Jean-Paul Sartre
Being and Nothingness, The Body as Being-For-Itself: Facticity, 2

In the “world without viewer” actually communicated by the interpretation, the king on the painting surface is not bidimensional. The work could very well be a sculpture without invalidating a single word of the interpretation, even if the king is described in great details:

 Charles is depicted wearing the same suit of armour, riding a heavily muscled dun horse with peculiarly small head. To the right, a page proffers a helmet. Charles appears as a heroic philosopher king, contemplatively surveying his domain, carrying a baton of command, with a long sword to his side, and wearing the medallion of the Sovereign of the Order of the Garter. His melancholy, distant expression was seen as a sign of wisdom. He wears the same suit of tilt armour in both equestrian paintings […]  
English Wikipedia
Equestrian Portrait of Charles I

This could be Charles I in person. The painting, as actually communicated by the interpretation, captures a viewable object in a particular viewing angle (“to the right, a page proffers a helmet”) which doesn’t matter: the viewable object exists from every angle, and it exists independently of whether you view it or not. The focus is on the object, not the viewing. Painting-specific narratives restore the viewing angle.

Paintig-specific narratives don’t innovate anything. It is subconsciously known that the concept of object is not necessary to all viewing experiences. They are first a product of abstraction and amnesia: the object only exists as an object insofar as I can move around it, maybe touch it, in any case imagine myself doing it, and empirically ascertaining that a volume underlies the visuals. By the time I have intuited the volume, it is usual for me to be oblivious of the sequence of bidimensional visuals that led to its representation, and I strongly suspect I am not alone. But the lines and shapes on the surface have their own properties, their own “story.” Of course, it is always healthy to remind oneself that the representation of volume and perspective on a surface is just an illusion, albeit a useful one.

Penrose triangle
The biased concept of uniqueness induced by false dichotomies of clichés versus non-clichés. Content-bound communication versus the non-cliché

There is nothing trivial or objective in the assumption that all painters want to represent things. Picasso’s Mandolin Player may not be the obfuscated representation of a mandolin player. But even so, I will argue that the observer gains nothing from knowing that. What makes this assembly of geometrical patterns stand out, and not just be the equal of the sculpture of a mandolin player, if one were to believe the revelations of an analysis of this painting as a representation?

Sure, the overwhelming majority of painters actually wish for people to perceive their work as representations. But the point is not necessarily about the artist’s intention, but the potential of interpretation in general, and how people routinely put a ceiling on it—e.g., in abstract art, when the reviewer attempts, sometimes desperately, to figure out what may lurk behind the wall of abstract:

Picasso’s Three Musicians
 Picasso paints three musicians made of flat, brightly colored, abstract shapes in a shallow, boxlike room. On the left is a clarinet player, in the middle a guitar player, and on the right a singer holding sheets of music. They are dressed as familiar figures: Pierrot, wearing a blue and white suit; Harlequinn, in an orange and yellow diamond-pattered custome; and, at right, a friar in a black robe. In front of Pierrot stands a table with a pipe and other objects, while beneath him is a dog, whose belly, legs, and tail peep out behind the musician’s legs. Like the boxy brown stage on which the three musicians perform, everything in this painting is made up of flat shapes. Behind each musician, the light brown floor is in a different place, extending much farther toward the left than the right. Framing the picture, the floor and the flat walls make the room lopsided, but the musicians seem steady. Music Makers in Harmony; It is hard to tell where one musician starts and another stops, because the shapes that create them intersect and overlap, as if they were paper cutouts. Pierrot, the figure in blue and white, holds a clarinet in his hands; one hand is connected to a long, thin, black arm, while the other hand lacks an arm. Three Musicians emphasizes lively colors, angular shapes, and flat patterns. Picasso said he was delighted when “Gertrude Stein joyfully announced… that she had at last understood what… the three musicians was meant to be. It was a still life!”

Three Musicians is an example of Picasso’s Cubist style. In Cubism, the subject of the artwork is transformed into a sequence of planes, lines, and arcs. Cubism has been described as an intellectual style because the artists analyzed the shapes of their subjects and reinvented them on the canvas. The viewer must reconstruct the subject and space of the work by comparing the different shapes and forms to determine what each one represents. Through this process, the viewer participates with the artist in making the artwork make sense.

 
pablopicasso.org
Review of Three Musicians

The review is figure-centric. It tries to tell “where one musician starts and another stops,” because it has somehow decided that they were representations of actual musicians, with a certain idea of anatomical proportions. The analysis starts from a non-painting concept, the concept of figure, and projects it onto the visuals, effectively subordinating the medium to its preconceptions: the medium can only work toward what the viewer already knows. By the time the viewer has “reconstructed the subject and space of the work by comparing the different shapes and forms to determine what each one represents,” the cognitive experience was already prejudiced.

In a preconception-free interpretation of visuals, there would be no place for such a thing as confusion and “not making sense.” Only bringing up one’s preconceptions does that. “It is hard to tell where one musician starts and another stops, because the shapes that create them intersect and overlap:” it is confusing in regard to the expectation of a certain kind of figures, but confusingly enough, the exact way shapes “intersect and overlap” doesn’t suffer any confusion. And the exact way they “intersect and overlap” may precisely be the whole point. If you look at the patches of blue, they induce a kind of dislocated “figure:” it has a chin borrowed from the white musician, eyes borrowed from the arlequin, and it has legs too. This “figure” is a painting-specific recurrence of structure. It doesn’t encumber itself with likelihood.

The classical concept of figure belongs, with other concepts such as history, location and meaning, to an implicit culture. This culture comes to the detriment of painting-specific narratives in favor of the cultural clichés. The cultural clichés are expected to the point that non-clichés are only recognized where we are looking for the cultural clichés. In Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, Slavoj Žižek calls the bizarre anamorphic skull in the center “the blot:” an inaccessible, obscure object of desire.

Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors

The blot is most unusual, but isn’t also unusual the fact that in Cézanne’s The Nude Bather an expanse of mountain in the background runs parallel to the flat ground and slopes off at a certain angle?

Isn’t the shape of the mountain in relation to the surrounding elements in Cézanne’s The Nude Bather most unusual?

In Picasso’s Life, isn’t the fact unusual that a woman and a man stare at each other, while a child, clinging to the woman, looks away? The blot in The Ambassadors is a kind of figure, and is instantly acknowledged through contrast with a certain knowledge of painting. But in the painting-specific narrative, the fact that it doesn’t play more of a role than would any similarly shaped figure—say, a quill slanting at the same angle—reveals the interpretive bias, in both the cliché and the non-cliché. And in the acknowledgement of this bias beckons an ever-fresh source of possibilities from the most mundane scene. What could not pass off as a painting-specific narrative? Cézanne found them in vases, fruits and silver cutlery. Anybody could find them in the bricks of a prison cell, or in the racks of vegetables in a supermarket.

Flatness in Modernist painting was, in the beginning, a non-cliché that fed off the clichés. For Clement Greenberg, the “purity” of “w:medium specificity” is the affirmation of the independence from figuralism:

 The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. […]

It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered “pure,” and in its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. “Purity” meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.

Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting—the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment—were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly. Manet’s became the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted. The Impressionists, in Manet’s wake, abjured underpainting and glazes, to leave the eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colors they used were made of paint that came from tubes or pots. Cézanne sacrificed verisimilitude, or correctness, in order to fit his drawing and design more explicitly to the rectangular shape of the canvas.

 
Clement Greenberg
Modernist Painting

But this purity co-exists with non-Modernism, just as we saw in Picasso’s particular style of “figure:” structure, through placement and color rather than volume, fulfills the Modernist part, and the figurative quality fulfills the non-Modernist part. Greenberg himself admits to as much:

 Modernist painting in its latest phase has not abandoned the representation of recognizable objects in principle. What it has abandoned in principle is the representation of the kind of space that recognizable objects can inhabit. Abstractness, or the non-figurative, has in itself still not proved to be an altogether necessary moment in the self-criticism of pictorial art, even though artists as eminent as Kandinsky and Mondrian have thought so. As such, representation, or illustration, does not attain the uniqueness of pictorial art; what does do so is the associations of things represented. All recognizable entities (including pictures themselves) exist in three-dimensional space, and the barest suggestion of a recognizable entity suffices to call up associations of that kind of space. The fragmentary silhouette of a human figure, or of a teacup, will do so, and by doing so alienate pictorial space from the literal two-dimensionality which is the guarantee of painting’s independence as an art. For, as has already been said, three-dimensionality is the province of sculpture. To achieve autonomy, painting has had above all to divest itself of everything it might share with sculpture, and it is in its effort to do this, and not so much—I repeat—to exclude the representational or literary, that painting has made itself abstract. […]

And I cannot insist enough that Modernism has never meant, and does not mean now, anything like a break with the past. It may mean a devolution, an unraveling, of tradition, but it also means its further evolution. Modernist art continues the past without gap or break, and wherever it may end up it will never cease being intelligible in terms of the past. […]

 
Clement Greenberg
Modernist Painting

This attachment to tradition does not prevent “purity” from serving as a “just, good, and relevant reason for appreciating masters:”

 But I want to repeat that Modernist art does not offer theoretical demonstrations. It can be said, rather, that it happens to convert theoretical possibilities into empirical ones, in doing which it tests many theories about art for their relevance to the actual practice and actual experience of art. In this respect alone can Modernism be considered subversive. Certain factors we used to think essential to the making and experiencing of art are shown not to be so by the fact that Modernist painting has been able to dispense with them and yet continue to offer the experience of art in all its essentials. The further fact that this demonstration has left most of our old value judgments intact only makes it the more conclusive. Modernism may have had something to do with the revival of the reputations of Uccello, Piero della Francesca, El Greco, Georges de la Tour, and even Vermeer; and Modernism certainly confirmed, if it did not start, the revival of Giotto's reputation; but it has not lowered thereby the standing of Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, or Watteau. What Modernism has shown is that, though the past did appreciate these masters justly, it often gave wrong or irrelevant reasons for doing so.  
Clement Greenberg
Modernist Painting

Also the Postscript, in which Greenberg defends himself from “advocating” pure art, correlates purity to the “very best art of the last hundred-odd years:”

 I want to take this chance to correct an error, one of interpretation and not of fact. Many readers, though by no means all, seem to have taken the “rationale” of Modernist art outlined here as representing a position adopted by the writer himself that is, that what he describes he also advocates. This may be a fault of the writing or the rhetoric. Nevertheless, a close reading of what he writes will find nothing at all to indicate that he subscribes to, believes in, the things that he adumbrates. (The quotation marks around pure and purity should have been enough to show that.) The writer is trying to account in part for how most of the very best art of the last hundred-odd years came about, but he’s not implying that that’s how it had to come about, much less that that’s how the best art still has to come about. “Pure” art was a useful illusion, but this doesn’t make it any the less an illusion. Nor does the possibility of its continuing usefulness make it any the less an illusion.  
Clement Greenberg
Modernist Painting, Postscript (1978)

This “usefulness” of “pure” art contributed to propel the “best” art over the lesser art, but there’s a caveat. The claim that the “best art comes about” by emphasizing “the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment” doesn’t actually communicate any demarcation between “best” and lesser art, as, I believe, Greenberg certainly came across pure paintings he found more pointless than others, unless he is to pure paintings what Marilyn Burns of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame is to horror movies, according to this interview:

 TT: Do you have a favorite?

MB: They’re all favorites. I used to watch horror films on Saturday mornings. I like them all. I’m like you guys. You've got more films on your website than I know! And I thought I used to have the category down…

TT: Thank you! Which genre do you enjoy the most?

MB: I like it all. I like mysteries, suspense, horror, comedy, historical… I run the whole gamut. It’s all wonderful.

TT: Have a favorite movie?

MB: I don’t know… I can’t name favorites because I like them all.

 

Purity isn’t enough of a criterion to demarcate art—at least has not been for long, because it’s become a trope. What this criterion did was contrast nicely a cultural bias for figurative painting as a cliché. From the moment both pure and non-pure paintings became equally accepted by the public, it revealed itself to be too coarse as a criterion. In fact, non-pure paintings, even photographs, can be interpreted in terms of “the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment.” I could also “purify” any painting by overlaying it with solid colors, and I certainly wouldn’t expect Greenberg to hang it up there with his “best art.” Reciprocally, a priori non-pure art, such as photographs, can be interpreted through a purity lens. This photograph from Jay Maisel, Damsels wearing face packs posing before panels, illustrates this:

Jay Maisel, Damsels wearing face packs posing before panels

The mise-en-scène actually divides the surface around convex shapes enveloping both women. The separation is further emphasized by the panels in the background. It’s particularly formal.

Jay maisel face packs marked.png

To be more accurate, the panels lead to the right, and point “outside” the painting. This confers a peculiar quality to the left arm and hand of the woman to the right. The left hand follows the convex shape (dashed line around her head):

Jay maisel face packs marked2.png

but the left arm “moves” it in the direction sketched by the contour of the lockers. It is a kind of mutant motif.

We know the left arm and the left hand as belonging to the same woman. This is the figurative part. But its pure formality also denotes a medium-specific narrative. It isn’t a mere matter of opposition between purity and non-purity. The described medium-specific narrative very specifically relies on the recognizable “figure” of the left hand connecting to the left arm, as emphasized by the uniform whiteness of the skin.

The interpretation of medium-specific narratives stresses uniqueness across both the flat and the non-flat. It doesn’t rely on a general theory of art, nor on a theory of the medium such as “medium purity.” It isn’t a theory of this “very best art of the last hundred-odd years” either. It is a this here interpreted-medium-specific interpretation. This content-bound communication does not need to reference clichés, even indirectly, in order to produce non-clichés, as do parodies and shock value at their most obvious. In a way, this echoes the sentiment of certain authors like Deleuze and Guattari, who not only criticize the “order of the signifying and the figure,” but also its oppposite, the “pure figural” as “a transgression that remain secundary nonetheless,” that is, secundary to the “schizophreny as process:”

 […] Lyotard shows in very beautiful pages that what is operating inside the dream is not the signifying, but a figural underneath, producing image configurations that use words, make them flow and traverse them following flows and positions that are not linguistic, without depending on neither the signifying nor its regulated elements. Everywhere, Lyotard destroys the order of the signifying and the figure. Rather than having the figures depend on the signifying and its effects, the signifying chain depends on the figural effects, the chain itself made up of asignifying signs, overwriting the signifying as well as the signified, treating the words like things, fabricating new units, producing, with the help of non-figurative figures, image configurations that ebb and flow […] The element of the pure figural, the “matrix-figure,” Lyotard actually calls it desire, that which leads us to the gates of schizophreny as process. But where does the reader’s impression come from, that Lyotard never ceases to stop the process, to recall the schizes to the shores that he just left, coded or overcoded territories, spaces and structures, where they only bring “transgressions,” disorders and distortions that remain secundary nonetheless, rather than form and carry away the desiring machines that oppose the structures, the intensities that oppose space? Despite his attempt at binding desire to a fundamental yes, Lyotard reintroduces lack and absence in desire, keeps it under the law of castration at the risk of bringing back the whole signifying with it, and discovers the matrix-figure in the fantasm, the mere fantasm that obscures the desiring production, all desire as effective production.  
 

[…] dans le rêve, Lyotard montre dans de très belles pages que ce qui travaille n’est pas le signifiant, mais un figural en dessous, faisant surgir des configurations d’images qui se servent des mots, les font couler et les coupent suivant des flux et des points qui ne sont pas linguistiques, en ne dépendent pas du signifiant ni de ses éléments réglés. Partout donc Lyotard renverse l’ordre du signifiant et de la figure. Ce ne sont pas les figures qui dépendent du signifiant et de ses effets, c’est la chaîne signifiante qui dépend des effets figuraux, faite elle-même de signes asignifiants, écrasant les signifiants comme les signifiés, traîtant les mots comme des choses, fabriquant de nouvelles unités, faisant avec des figures non figuratives des configurations d’images qui se font et se défont. […] L’élément du figural pur, la “figure-matrice,” Lyotard la nomme bien désir, qui nous conduit aux portes de la schizophrénie comme processus. Mais d’où vient pourtant l’impression du lecteur que Lyotard n’a de cesse d’arrêter le processus, et de rabattre les schizes sur les rivages qu’il vient de quitter, territoires codés ou surcodés, espaces et structures, 'où ils ne font plus qu’apporter des “trangressions,” des troubles et des déformations malgré tout secondaires, au lieu de former et d’emporter plus loin les machines désirantes qui s’opposent aux structures, les intensités qui s’opposent aux espaces ? C’est que, malgré sa tentative de lier le désir à un oui fondamental, Lyotard réintroduit le manque et l’absence dans le désir, le maintient sous la loi de castration au risque de ramener avec elle tout le signifiant, et découvre la matrice de la figure dans le fantasme, le simple fantasme qui vient occulter la production désirante, tout le désir comme production effective.

 
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Savages, barbarians and civilized men, in Anti-Œdipus
Rediscovering graphical narration. A comics-specific narrative from Goossens’ Touti and his exhaust pipe

When it comes to single images, it seems weird that one may speak of a narrative, much less an epic one. But this weirdness is a result of an amnesic way of looking at images. For if one would only be so inclined as to take the placement of a house, the branch of a tree, or the direction of the aggressive strokes shaping a loaf of bread in a Cezanne still life, take them to be as relevant to the image as a death is to a crime novel, one would immediately look at the potential foundation of a “graphical story” with multiple heretofore ignored “graphical events.” The events would just be the actions of our visual experience: our gaze moving a virtual pencil across the canvas. Each stop, each change of direction would be recorded into a medium-specific narrative, just like events are recorded into the timeline of a regular novel.

Daniel Goossens’ comics Touti and his exhaust pipe nicely illustrates the difference between graphical and event-based story-telling. Comics feature two pedagogical advantages over traditional painting: their naturally narrative format, and text. Captions can narrate events just like event-based story-telling, but they can also introduce a self-aware “break-the-fourth-wall” voice that can force the reader to rethink their relationship to the visual medium, often with a comical effect not unlike René Magritte’s This is not a pipe.

René Magritte’s This is not a pipe

Here’s a page from Goossens’ comics:

Page 2 of Goossens’s Touti and his exhaust pipe

The policeman seems to signal Touti to pull over, but he corrects: “No, it’s not for that. It’s to interrupt the monotony. Here, in the flat lands, the horizon is monotonous, and it is fitting that a policeman cuts through it using his silhouette.”

His speech comically emphasizes his verticality rather than the usual concept of “officer of the Law.” The story then builds up toward a car crash:

Page 3 of Goossens’s Touti and his exhaust pipe

Significantly enough, the car runs into the tree “cutting through the horizon,” in a reminiscence of the vertical officer. A “comics-specific” narrative thus emerges.

The interpretation changes altogether when one switches to an event-based viewpoint. The policeman’s appearance is a casual event in the timeline. When all is said and done, all he did was advise Touti to get his exhaust pipe changed. The story kinda expresses the “irony of fate:” at the time of the crash, the car had just been repaired, and to add insult to injury, the tragic turn of events came off the advice of the policeman. This interpretation is independent from the graphical representation: it wouldn’t change anything at all if the crash was seen from above, instead of having the tree “cut through the horizon.” It would represent a graphically different, but story-wise identical collision.

Rediscovering intra-textuality

Staying inside the text medium: the New Criticism movement. The cliché/non-cliché bias

Traditionally, interpretation treats prose differently from poetry, poetry differently from w:sound poetry, etc. We naturally expect interpretations of poems to be more medium-specific than interpretations of novels, if only because they will be more attentive to the details of structure, rythm and sound, all poem-specific material. Yet, this couldn’t help but stimulating reactionary movements such as the New Criticism:

 New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history schools, which, influenced by nineteenth-century German scholarship, focused on the history and meaning of individual words and their relation to foreign and ancient languages, comparative sources, and the biographical circumstances of the authors. These approaches, it was felt, tended to distract from the text and meaning of a poem and entirely neglect its aesthetic qualities in favor of teaching about external factors. On the other hand, the literary appreciation school, which limited itself to pointing out the “beauties” and morally elevating qualities of the text, was disparaged by the New Critics as too subjective and emotional. Condemning this as a version of Romanticism, they aimed for newer, systematic and objective method.  
English Wikipedia
History, in New Criticism

Just as the “blot” forced the path of interpretation in visual art, literary content can force the interpreter’s hand. Sound poetry, for example, has a propensity to complicate the english translator’s life because his interpretation doesn’t approximate the content nearly enough:

 Some consider Mallarmé one of the French poets most difficult to translate into English. The difficulty is due in part to the complex, multilayered nature of much of his work, but also to the important role that the sound of the words, rather than their meaning, plays in his poetry. When recited in French, his poems allow alternative meanings which are not evident on reading the work on the page. For example, Mallarmé’s Sonnet en “-yx” opens with the phrase ses purs ongles (“her pure nails”), whose first syllables when spoken aloud sound very similar to the words c’est pur son (“it’s pure sound”). Indeed, the “pure sound” aspect of his poetry has been the subject of musical analysis and has inspired musical compositions. These phonetic ambiguities are very difficult to reproduce in a translation which must be faithful to the meaning of the words.  
English Wikipedia

But just as the “blot” showed a cliché/non-cliché bias for the figure, sound becomes an interpretive bias as soon as one ignores it in other places because we don’t expect sound to matter there. Such is the case for the final lines of Ode on a Grecian Urn, whose sound structure—“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”—went largely unattended by the academic people who chose instead to debate about the meaning and who truly spoke to whom: “poet to reader, urn to reader, poet to urn, poet to figures on the urn?”

The question of scale: the medium-specific micro-narratives in contemporary culture

Medium-specific narratives in literature are nothing new. For example, reasoning fallacies offer various forms of medium-specific narratives. What they lack in reality, scientific reliability and applicability, they gain by being amusing, entertaining, witty, comical, interesting, artful, limitless. Syllogistic fallacies could very well be described as the “patterns of resolved stresses” that the New Criticism used to describe poetry. Stress accumulates with each additional premise, and the conclusion works and “resolves the stress” mostly because it sounds good:

  1. All inhabitants of other planets drink water.
  2. All martians are inhabitants of another planet.
  3. Therefore, some Martians drink water.

The symmetric quality of the transition from “All inhabitants of other planets drink water” to “Therefore, some Martians drink water,” in both sentence structure and word usage, plays no small part in the efficiency of the argumentation. Rewriting the conclusion into a less symmetric form would go a long way toward exposing the fallacy:

  1. All inhabitants of other planets drink water.
  2. All martians are inhabitants of another planet.
  3. Therefore, among all the beings who drink water, there must exist at least one Martian.

Consider another example:

  1. All students have been young.
  2. My grandfather has been young.
  3. Therefore, my grandfather is a student.

The fallacy relies on resonance, both semantic and structural. Should the premises be very distinct from each other, fewer would be fooled into believing the conclusion. The following rewrite would be far less convincing:

  1. All political leaders, doctors and students have been young.
  2. My grandfather has been young.
  3. So he is a student.

In comparison, immaculate rational reasoning is obvious, down-to-earth, tautological, tedious.

  1. All political leaders, doctors and students have been young.
  2. My grandfather has been young.
  3. He may have been a political leader, a doctor and/or a student, but it is not necessary.

Fallacies are not exclusive to well-known syllogisms that fit into 3 sentences. They mostly occur in prose, most unassumingly in science literature. The reader doesn’t always need a science degree in order to perceive the fallaciousness, because the fallacy, as a medium-specific narrative, is expressed by the text itself, in a self-contained way. The requirement is that the reader read the text “narratively.”

Of course, not all of science is equal. Compared to axiomatic science, empirical science as a collection of universal laws (“the action is always equal to the reaction”) is more “entertaining,” be it because, as Hume pointed out, it relies on leaps of faith that elevate experimental observations to universal statements, or because of the “wishful-thinking” justifications of their well-foundedness, especially in the fields of applied logic and mathematics. For example, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper refutes that his concept of “degree of corroboration of probability hypotheses” be reducible to traditional probability:

 Consider the next throw with a homogeneous die. Let x be the

statement ‘six will turn up’; let y be its negation, that is to say, let y = ~x; and let z be the information ‘an even number will turn up’. We have the following absolute probabilities:

p(x) = 1/6; p(y) = 5/6; p(z) = 1/2.

Moreover, we have the following relative probabilities:

p(x, z) = 1/3; p(y, z) = 2/3.

We see that x is supported by the information z, for z raises the probability of x from 1/6 to 2/6 = 1/3. We also see that y is undermined by z, for z lowers the probability of y by the same amount from 5/6 to 4/6 = 2/3. Nevertheless, we have p(x, z) < p(y, z). This example proves the following theorem:

(5) There exist statements, x, y, and z, which satisfy the formula,

p(x, z) > p(x) & p(y, z) < p(y) & p(x, z) < p(y, z).

Obviously, we may replace here ‘p(y, z) < p(y)’ by the weaker ‘p(y, z) ≤ p(y)’.

This theorem is, of course, far from being paradoxical. And the same holds for its corollary (6) which we obtain by substituting for ‘p(x, z) > p(x)’ and ‘p(y, z) ≤ p(y)’ the expressions ‘Co(x, z)’ and ‘¬Co(y, z)’—that is to say ‘non-Co(y, z)’—respectively, in accordance with formula (1) above:

(6) There exist statements x, y and z which satisfy the formula

Co(x, z) & ¬Co(y, z) & p(x, z) < p(y, z).

Like (5), theorem (6) expresses a fact we have established by our example: that x may be supported by z, and y undermined by z, and that nevertheless x, given z, may be less probable than y, given z. There at once arises, however, a clear self-contradiction if we now identify in (6) degree of confirmation C(a, b) and probability p(a, b). In other words, the formula

(**) Co(x, z) & ¬Co(y, z) & C(x, z) < C(y, z)

(that is, ‘z confirms x but not y, yet z also confirms x to a lesser degree than y’) is clearly self-contradictory.

Thus we have proved that the identification of degree of corroboration or confirmation with probability (and even with likelihood) is absurd on both formal and intuitive grounds: it leads to self-contradiction. 
Karl Popper
Appendix *ix. Corroboration, the Weight of Evidence, and Statistical Tests, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery

However formula (**) is not necessarily self-contradictory, both on intuitive and mathematical grounds. Let’s see why.

Popper provides a metaphor for formula (**): “x has the property P (for example, the property ‘warm’) and y has not the property P and y has the property P in a higher degree than x (for example, y is warmer than x).” Put like this, (**) certainly seems self-contradictory.

But Popper is misleading when he equates C(x, z) < C(y, z) to “y has the property P in a higher degree than x,” because by definition, this would mean we have “p(y, z) > p(y) to a higher degree than p(x, z) > p(x).” We are comparing the degree of difference between 2 statements relative to different references, namely p(x) and p(y). I can say that Alice is taller than Bob in a higher degree than Cedric is taller than David, but it’s not contradictory to say that Cedric is taller than Alice.

So a more accurate metaphor for P would be “warmer” rather than just “warm,” with an important emphasis on warmer than what. Obviously, if one makes x warmer and y cooler, y can still be warmer than x because it was very hot to start with, so having C(x, z) < C(y, z) doesn’t seem contradictory anymore.

Such losses in metaphor share with syllogisms the same propensity to forget structural relationships by means of “literary devices” such as the shortcut from “warmer” to “warm.” They form an infinity of unique narratives when translating back and forth between informal and formal language. Popper himself debunks someone else’s definition that belongs to the wide spectrum of sensationalist interpretations of numbers and mathematic/physics formulas, of which theoretical physics is especially fond (the many-worlds interpretation, Schrödinger’s cat and time dilation being a small sample):

 [The problem following here has since become famous under the name ‘The probleof the (discontinuous) reduction of the wave packet’. Some leading physicists told me in 193that they agreed with my trivial solution, yet the problem still plays a most bewilderinrole in the discussion of the quantum theory, after more than twenty years.]

Imagine a semi-translucent mirror, i.e. a mirror which reflects part othe light, and lets part of it through. The formally singular probabilitthat one given photon (or light quantum) passes through the mirrorαPk(β), may be taken to be equal to the probability that it will breflected; we therefore have

\(_αP_k(β) = _αP_k(\bar{β}) = {1 \over 2}\)

This probability estimate, as we know, is defined by objective statisticaprobabilities; that is to say, it is equivalent to the hypothesis that onhalf of a given class α of light quanta will pass through the mirrowhilst the other half will be reflected. Now let a photon k fall upon thmirror; and let it next be experimentally ascertained that this photohas been reflected: then the probabilities seem to change suddenly, as iwere, and discontinuously. It is as though before the experiment thehad both been equal to \({1 \over 2}\), while after the fact of the reflection becamknown, they had suddenly turned into 0 and to 1, respectivelyIt is plain that this example is really the same as that given in section 71. [That is to say, the probabilities ‘change’ only in so far as α is replaced by βThus \(_αP(β)\) remains unchanged \({1 \over 2}\); but \(_\bar{β}P(β)\), of course, equals 0, just as \(_βP(β)\) equals 1.] And it hardly helps to clarify the situation if this experiment idescribed, as by Heisenberg, in such terms as the following: ‘By thexperiment [i.e. the measurement by which we find the reflectephoton], a kind of physical action (a reduction of wave packets) iexerted from the place where the reflected half of the wave packet ifound upon another place—as distant as we choose—where the othehalf of the packet just happens to be’; a description to which he adds:

‘this physical action is one which spreads with super-luminal velocity.This is unhelpful since our original probabilities, \(_αP_k(β)\) and \(_αP_k(\bar{β})\)remain equal to \({1 \over 2}\). All that has happened is the choice of a new reference class—β or \(\bar{β}\), instead of α—a choice strongly suggested to us by the result of the experiment, i.e. by the information \(k \in β\) or \(k \in \bar{β}\), respectively. Saying of the logical consequences of this choice (or, perhaps, of the logical consequences of this information) that they ‘spread with super-luminal velocity’ is about as helpful as saying that twice twturns with super-luminal velocity into four. A further remark of Heisenberg’s, to the effect that this kind of propagation of a physical action cannot be used to transmit signals, though true, hardly improves matters. 
Karl Popper
The Logic of Scientific Discovery

Most fallacies share the liberal use of definitions, but their form and scale vary from one fallacy to the other, ranging from style figures to elaborate theses.

Non-fiction literature
Pre-requisite to rediscovery: stoicism in the face of contradictions, errors, dislikes, dichotomies. Pushing the concept of open-mindedness outside immediate taste to discover other structures

Medium-specific narratives put the emphasis on the usage of sentences, arguments, thoughts, etc., rather than on their individual choice and value, as the prevailing mentality would have it. But a medium-specific narrative is only a part of the text, and the text doesn’t tell you how you should react to it. You have absolute free rein to overlook the medium-specific narrative aspect.

This also goes for the author of fallacies. He can freely overlook his “shortcomings”—I put that in quotes, because fallacies may be inconsequential, or even work out for the best. Most would agree that contradictions in a scientific theory should be cause enough to ditch it. Yet, the thesis carries no shame. The text medium outlasts the intolerant reader. Despite all the possible contradictions, the author’s text continues. It weaves a tissue of contradictions, contradictions that break conventions, that “don’t make sense,” or are so full of involuntary errors that even their author sincerely repudiates his own work. It’s just like science fiction: it doesn’t matter.

When we ditch a logic system because it is self-contradictory, we do so for the same reason we ditch any other self-contradictory logic system: a single contradiction puts the whole system in jeopardy, since any proposition and its contrary could be logically derived from it. Yet the text that describes a self-contradictory logic system only explores a very small subset of the infinite set of possible texts, and it does so in its own way. The confusion in Popper as quoted above are not only the confusion between the comparative and absolute forms, e.g., between “warm” and “warmer,” between “confirmed” and “confirmed to a higher degree.” There is a very medium-specific narrative that makes the confusion the more unique. Popper makes the formula “Co(x, z) & ¬Co(y, z) & p(x, z) < p(y, z)” appear all the more self-contradictory because he first defined p(x, z) > p(x) as Co(x, z) (“z confirms x to a higher degree”), and because Co(x, z) is easier to mistake with the absolute form “x confirms z.” This is a case where the fallacy in the mix of formal and natural discourse highly depends on the order of presentation: first use a form to make some point, then introduce an abbreviation, then make some other point using this abbreviation by an illicit definition of this abbreviation—i.e., this is a medium-specific narrative.

The uniqueness is not literal. Of course, one could easily have declared that the sentences used by Popper are unique. I am not stressing so much literal uniqueness—which most would agree is pointless—as a uniqueness of structure. Multiple medium-specific narratives coexist in the same text, and a reader with sensibilities different from mine could emphasize another narrative.

The contradictions kind of “stop” the text. Not that one is forced to stop reading. The usual way people reconcile contradictions with the undisturbed flow of the text, is by conceiving them in a mosaic of good and bad points. In other words, we fill the “holes” of the fallacies with the holes that make up the mosaic.

 In general, we are too quick to discover contradictions in reading phenomena, for the sake of either declaring them irreducible, or resolving them by demonstrating that they are only apparent, depending on the tastes. In truth, there is never any contradiction, apparent or real, but only degrees of humor. And, since reading itself has its own degrees of humor, from black to white, with which it values the coexisting degrees of what is read, the only problem is always that of the distribution on a scale of intensities which assigns the location and usage of every thing, every being or scene: there is this and then that, and let’s make do with it, too bad if we don’t like it.  
 D’une manière générale, on a trop vite fait dans les phénomènes de lecture de découvrir des contradictions, soit pour les déclarer irréductibles, soit pour les résoudre ou montrer qu’elles sont seulement apparentes, suivant les goûts. En vérité, il n’y a jamais de contradictions, apparentes ou réelles, mais seulement des degrés d’humour. Et, comme la lecture a elle-même ses degrés d’humour, du noir au blanc, avec lesquels elle évalue les degrés coexistants de ce qu’elle lit, le seul problème est toujours celui d’une répartition sur une échelle d’intensités qui assigne la place et l’usage de chaque chose, chaque être ou chaque scène : il y a ceci et puis cela, et débrouillons-nous avec, tant pis si ça ne nous plaît pas.  
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Psychanalyse et familialisme, in Anti-Œdipus

The stopping does not only apply to contradictions, but also to a whole repertoire of attention-grabbers: writing style, subject matter, etc., everything really that may lead to something as innocuous-looking as liking or disliking. In music, we may stop listening to a death metal song after just a few notes just because the cookie-monster vocals puts you off. We may not finish a book because we disagree with its main points, or are not getting emotionally attached to its characters, or are just getting bored by the first pages. But even a boring start may announce a not-so-boring end. This applies to other media as well. In visual art, contradictions take the form of confusion, e.g., confusion between the mundane and the sublime, the lively and the still, the planar and the perspective, the colorful and the monochromatic, the imitative and the non-imitative, etc. We may find something bad, distateful, even repulsive in a movie. Yet the movie continues unhindered. We are the Jean-François Lyotard that Deleuze and Guattari criticized for “never ceasing to stop the process, to recall the schizes to the shores that he just left, coded or overcoded territories, spaces and structures, where they only bring “transgressions,” disorders and distortions that remain secundary nonetheless.”

 Learning to see — accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to "will" — to be able to suspend decision. All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion — almost everything that unphilosophical crudity designates with the word “vice” is merely this physiological inability not to react. A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one’s hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one’s stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things — in short, the famous modern “objectivity” — is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence.  
Friedrich Nietzsche
WHAT THE GERMANS LACK, in Twilight of the Idols

You might get the notion that my discourse echoes the good old plea for open-mindedness. However, when people beg for open-mindedness, it is usually either in the hope of changing people’s mind or with the mindset that the other should have better tastes. In effect, these people are being criticized for their tastes, albeit in a politically correct way. “Be open-minded, what you don’t like is actually be very good, even for you.” On the contrary, I absolutely don’t intend to change people’s mind about “what they don’t like,” especially if “what they don’t like” is a product of private interpretation. What people didn’t like, they’ll still don’t like, whatever it is they don’t like. I only speak from the perspective of the medium-specific narrative, which might very well be different from “what they don’t like,” although both are about the same content. Metaphorically, faeces is distateful and repulsive, a useless by-product (who would complain if we never had to defecate ever again?), yet this doesn’t take anything away from the elegance of its integration within certain rural ecosystems, at least when compared to dumping loads of wastewater back into the river.

 Dung beetles play a remarkable role in agriculture. By burying and consuming dung, they improve nutrient recycling and soil structure. They also protect livestock, such as cattle, by removing the dung which, if left, could provide habitat for pests such as flies. Therefore, many countries have introduced the creatures for the benefit of animal husbandry. In developing countries, the beetles are especially important as an adjunct for improving standards of hygiene. The American Institute of Biological Sciences reports that dung beetles save the United States cattle industry an estimated US$380 million annually through burying above-ground livestock feces.  
English Wikipedia
Dung Beetle
Stoicism in the conventionalist interpretation of scientific literature

The conventionalist interpretation of an axiomatic system consists in viewing the fundamental concepts as implicit definitions:

 The view of classical rationalism that the ‘axioms’ of certain systems,

e.g., those of Euclidean geometry, must be regarded as immediately or intuitively certain, or self-evident, will not be discussed here. I will only mention that I do not share this view. I consider two different interpretations of any system of axioms to be admissible. The axioms may be regarded either (i) as conventions, or they may be regarded (ii) as empirical or scientific hypotheses.

(i) If the axioms are regarded as conventions then they tie down the use or meaning of the fundamental ideas (or primitive terms, or concepts) which the axioms introduce; they determine what can and what cannot be said about these fundamental ideas. Sometimes the axioms are described as ‘implicit definitions’ of the ideas which they introduce. This view can perhaps be elucidated by means of an analogy between an axiomatic system and a (consistent and soluble) system of equations.

The admissible values of the ‘unknowns’ (or variables) which appear in a system of equations are in some way or other determined by it. Even if the system of equations does not suffice for a unique solution, it does not allow every conceivable combination of values to be substituted for the ‘unknowns’ (variables). Rather, the system of equations characterizes certain combinations of values or value-systems as admissible, and others as inadmissible; it distinguishes the class of admissible value systems from the class of inadmissible value systems. In a similar way, systems of concepts can be distinguished as admissible or as inadmissible by means of what might be called a ‘statement-equation’. A statement-equation is obtained from a propositional function or statement-function; this is an incomplete statement, in which one or more ‘blanks’ occur. Two examples of such propositional functions or statement functions are: ‘An isotope of the element x has the atomic weight 65’; or ‘x + y = 12’. Every such statement-function is transformed into a statement by the substitution of certain values for the blanks, x and y. The resulting statement will be either true or false, according to the values (or combination of values) substituted. Thus, in the first example, substitution of the word ‘copper’ or ‘zinc’ for ‘x’ yields a true statement, while other substitutions yield false ones. Now what I call a ‘statement- equation’ is obtained if we decide, with respect to some statement- function, to admit only such values for substitution as turn this function into a true statement. By means of this statement-equation a definite class of admissible value-systems is defined, namely the class of those which satisfy it. The analogy with a mathematical equation is clear. If our second example is interpreted, not as a statement-function

but as a statement-equation, then it becomes an equation in the ordinary (mathematical) sense. 
Karl Popper
Some possibilities of interpreting a system of axioms, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery

As Popper stresses, the conventionalist view, although unacceptable for some purposes, is unattackable: isn’t the conventionalist at liberty to consider a definition as he pleases? In fact, this view is unacceptable in Popper’s sense precisely because it makes any theoretical system unattackable. If a theory in geometry contains an axiom that states that a geometrical point has an area, the conventionalist view does not claim that it is an actual observation or anything measurable. It is some definition of the point—or more accurately, the word “point.” Definition is only the arbitrary start to an arbitrarily large system. The focus is not the definition itself, but what one makes of it: something that can be aesthetical, witty, comical, or even scientifically useful. What if one invents a geometry where Euclid’s w:parallel postulate does not hold: “If a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than the two right angles.” In terms of usage, one could construe this as peek into the field of non-Euclidean geometry, elliptic and hyperbolic geometries, and w:curved space, where basic theorems like the Pythagorean theorem or the triangle postulate—“The sum of the angles in every triangle is 180°”—do not hold anymore. This, in turn, helps describe the transition from special to general relativity in modern physics:

 The term [of special relativity] is currently used more generally to refer to any case in which gravitation is not significant. General relativity is the generalization of special relativity to include gravitation. In general relativity, gravity is described using non-Euclidean geometry, so that gravitational effects are represented by curvature of spacetime; special relativity is restricted to flat spacetime.  
English Wikipedia
Special relativity

For some, this would be cause enough for ditching a manual of modern physics. Non-Euclidean geometry is neither intuitive, nor observable, nor simple—for what would be a space where “parallel” lines intersect? However, in terms of usage, the non-intuitive may lead to the prediction of observable effects. And it can also increase simplicity:

 Based on Henri Poincaré’s conventionalism, philosophers such as Pierre Duhem (1914) or Hugo Dingler (1920) argued that the classical concepts of space, time, and geometry were, and will always be, the most convenient expressions in natural science, therefore the concepts of relativity cannot be correct. This was criticized by proponents of logical positivism such as Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, or Reichenbach. They argued that Poincaré’s conventionalism could be modified, as to bring it into accord with relativity. Although it’s true, that the basis assumptions of Newtonian mechanics are more simple, it can only be brought into accord with modern experiments by inventing auxiliary hypotheses. On the other hand, relativity doesn’t need such hypotheses, thus from a conceptual viewpoint, relativity is in fact more simple than Newtonian mechanics.  

But this implies that one first accepts the definitions as they are, rather than harping on them and potentially missing the point, such as the ability to make predictions or to construct a unified theory with practical applications.

Rediscovering philosophy

A philosophical work is not usually considered art. However, as a text, it has text-specific narratives. In a field where most problems come from the misalignment of definitions between opinionated people, the interpretation of a text-specific narrative has the tastefulness not to descend into the spiral of surmising with one’s definitions to prove one’s point, but instead reveals the uniqueness of the misalignment. In fact, a point can be made that without its false problems of misalignment, philosophy would be boring. Its arguments would either be perfectly logical to the point of tautology, or verge on the mystic. For example, the talk about objectivity and reality would dumb down to the assertion that “objects” are external to me in the sense of their spatial relationship to my body. Granted, it wouldn’t be as interesting as speculating of an external reality “in-itself,” lying outside my perception and even the possibility of perception or cognition. This is the paradigm of the philosopher (here Descartes) who creates “interesting” false problems that keep the next generations of philosophers busy. Ironically, these critics, being philosophers themselves, can’t help but make what is bred in the bone come out in the flesh. So there are some cases where the critic is spot-on, but in his own philosophy walks himself into pretty much the same traps as their peers—cf. my reconstructions of Schopenhauer tackling Leibniz and Hegel.

Definition misalignment is often supported by selective amnesia. For example, the author presupposes A to prove some statement (in favour of the author’s thesis), then presupposes the antithesis of A (amnesia of the thesis of A) to prove another statement. Amnesia can happen at all scales. At the phrase and paragraph level, amnesia is a traditional literary style figure. At the phrase level, it is generally acknowledged by literary analysis. As the scale level goes up, analysis loses granularity and uniqueness, most significantly at the work level.

At the phrase level, take the infamous “DLC fiasco,” where a game editor, Capcom, delivers a game disc on the Playstation with locked content that can be unlocked for a fee. Then came the voices of protest:

 I’m talking about fair trade and they don’t have the right to revoke anything you have purchased by playing the “you just paid for a license” card.  
Someone on some gamer forum

But if “you just paid for a license,” then Capcom doesn’t revoke anything you paid for by locking away the content, since the lock is part of the license. Of course, this doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to be discontent, but don’t expect to be any more legit than someone protesting that a car should come with all the options for the same price.

At the paragraph level, we have in Anti-Œdipus Deleuze and Guattari take a bite at Freud’s Œdipus complex. In particular, they argue that incest is impossible in the system in which it exists:

 […] the names, the appellations no longer designate intensive states, but discernible persons. Discernibility settles on the sister and the mother as prohibited spouses. The reason is that persons, with the names that now designate them, do not exist prior to the prohibitions as spouses. Robert Jaulin says it well: “The mythical discourse has as its theme the passage from the indifference to incest to its prohibition. Implicit or explicit, this theme underlies all the myths; it is therefore a formal property of this language.” We must conclude that, strictly speaking, incest does not and cannot exist. We are always on this side of incest, in a series of intensities that is ignorant of discernible persons; or else beyond incest, in an extension that recognizes them, that constitutes them, but that does not constitute them without making them impossible as sexual partners. One can commit incest only after a series of substitutions that always moves us away from it, that is to say, with a person who is equivalent to the mother or the sister only by virtue of being neither: she who is discernible as a possible spouse.  
 

[…] les noms ,les appellations ne désignent plus des étatts intensifs, mais des personnes discernables. La discernabilité se pose sur la sœur, la mère comme épouses interdites. C’est que les personnes , avec les noms qui les désignent maintenant, ne préexistent pas aux interdits qui les constituent comme telles. Mère et sœur ne préexistent pas à leur interdiction comme épouses. Robert Jaulin le dit très bien: “Le discours mythique a pour thème le passage de l’indifférence à l’inceste à sa prohibition : implicite ou explicite, ce thème est sous-jacent à tous les mythes ; il est donc une propriété formelle de ce langage.” De l’inceste, il faut conclure à la lettre qu’il n’existe pas, ne peut pas exister. L’inceste, on est toujours en deçà, dans une série d’intensités qui ignore les personnes discernables ; ou bien au-delà, dans une extension qui les reconnaît, qui les constitue, mais qui ne les constitue pas sans les rendre impossibles comme partenaires sexuels. L’inceste, on ne peut le faire qu’à la suite d’une série de substitutions qui nous en éloigne toujours, c’est-à-dire avec une personne qui ne vaut pour la mère ou la sœur qu’à force de ne pas l’être : celle qui est discernable comme épouse possible.

 
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

“Prohibited spouse” was sneakily replaced by “impossible spouse,” so that, indeed, it is now impossible to commit incest, since, by definition, incest now identifies mother and sister as impossible.

In The Capital, Karl Marx manages to (1) up the value of the labourer in the process of production, then (2) represent him as a value-less victim “from the social point of view.” In the following, notice how a “sine qua non condition” becomes an “appendage of capital” as well as a “mere moment.”

 This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the labourer, is the sine quâ non of capitalist production.

[…]

From a social point of view, therefore, the working class, even when not directly engaged in the labour process, is just as much an appendage of capital as the ordinary instruments of labour. Even its individual consumption is, within certain limits, a mere moment in the process of production. That process, however, takes good care to prevent these self-conscious instruments from leaving it in the lurch, for it removes their product, as fast as it is made, from their pole to the opposite pole of capital.

 
Karl Marx
Simple Reproduction, in Capital Volume One

In the same line of thinking, Marx demonstrates the labourer’s “once again direct” contribution to increased production:

 In agriculture the land under cultivation cannot be increased without the advance of more seed and manure. But this advance once made, the purely mechanical working of the soil itself produces a marvellous effect on the amount of the product. A greater quantity of labour, done by the same number of labourers as before, thus increases the fertility, without requiring any new advance in the instruments of labour. It is once again the direct action of man on Nature which becomes an immediate source of greater accumulation, without the intervention of any new capital.  
Karl Marx
Circumstances that, Independently of the Proportional Division of Surplus-Value into Capital and Revenue, Determine the Amount of Accumulation, in Capital Volume One

Here the “advance of [more seed and manure] is made,” but in the concluding phrase of the paragraph, the increased production now occurs “without the intervention of any new capital.”

Gottlob Frege’s the Foundations of Arithmetic offers a good example of book-level amnesia. It enters a particular category, that of not keeping a promise made at the beginning of a book. The book starts with this:

 When we ask someone what the number one is, or what the symbol 1 means, we get as a rule the answer “Why, a thing.” And if we go on to point out that the proposition “the number one is a thing” is not a definition, because it has the definite article on one side and the indefinite on the other', or that it only assigns the number one to the class of things, without stating which thing it is’, then we shall very likely be invited to select something for ourselves — anything we please — to call one. (…) If a concept fundamental to a mighty science gives rise to difficulties, then it is surely an imperative task to investigate it more closely until those difficulties are overcome; especially as we shall hardly succeed in finally clearing up negative numbers, or fractional or complex numbers, so long as our insight into the foundation of the whole structure of arithmetic is still defective.  
Gottlob Frege
the Foundations of Arithmetic

Now, let’s teleport to the end of the book and examine Frege’s own definition of the “number”:

 The Number which belongs to the concept F is the extension of the concept “concept equal to the concept F”, wherein a concept F is called equal to a concept G if there exists the possibility of one-one correlation referred to above. In this definition the sense of the expression “extension of a concept” is assumed to be known. This way of getting over the difficulty cannot be expected to meet with universal approval, and many will prefer other methods of removing the doubt in question. I attach no decisive importance even to bringing in the extensions of concepts at all.  
Gottlob Frege
the Foundations of Arithmetic

Therefore Frege’s definition relies on an “indefinite” (the “extension of concept”) “without stating which thing it is”, and thus ends up doing what he warned not to do. The narrative is the knowledge which “honors” such book-level processes (whether they are unintended is beyond the point).

Rediscovering repetition and order

The concepts of repetition and order have a strong cultural recognition. The trope of the story loop, where the ending loops back to the beginning, such as in Lewis Carrol’s Alice In Wonderland, is well-acknowledged. In poetry, repetition of sound and structure has been thoroughly studied. In mainstream music, people expect a chorus to repeat.

Such tropes can be seen as global invariants. They help to categorize the whole work, and they abstract time away. If a critic categorizes a movie as neo-noir, then you can expect a certain tone, certain types of characters and stories. Even though they are presented on a timeline, they become features of a finished, non-evolving product, they become constants. The apparent lack of temporality is most striking in music, arguably the temporal medium par excellence. The reader of a book can read the description of a scene and paint the scene in his head. Although the reading itself is temporal, the scene it renders can be static and atemporal. In a way, the reader can pretend the reading experience was atemporal. It doesn’t matter whether the reader reads “a blue sky was seen” or “the sky I saw was blue.” Although the order of the words, their temporality in the reader’s frame of reference, change, they usually mean the same to the interpreter who projects them into a still image. In music, atemporality is somewhat more difficult to pretend, because music imposes a tempo on the listener. One could conceive that a reader with photographic memory can “read” pages in the blink of an eye. By contrast, music only reveals itself at its own pace. Yet, in classical music, one is used to designate the pieces of a concerto or symphony by a “blanket tempo.” A Vivaldi concerto, for example, is often divided into 3 movements identified by the tempo, usually: Allegro (fast), Largo (slow) then Allegro (fast). Each movement’s “velocity” is never as strictly uniform as the tempo would suggest. It’s like velocity had been made into an atemporal category by abstracting away the velocity changes inside the same movement. Similarly, some people identify and categorize a piece of music by its harmonic scale.

Such blanket concepts are a product of narrative features becoming identifiable and well-known invariants. However, the more unique the narrative, the less blanketable it becomes. The aforementioned medium-specific narrative of Ode to a Grecian Urn doesn’t have (yet) a blanket term because it is fairly specific, although each step of the narrative is individually unremarkable. As a consequence, I can only communicate the whole narrative by going in order through all 4 steps of the narrative, recreating the temporal structures therein.

Yet, blanket concepts sometimes are claimed attempts to capture uniqueness. I once found a music theory class where Chopin’s music was characterized by its “question/answer structures.” That is, the phrases played in succession on the piano almost sound like a dialogue between different instruments. This sounds on point. But, come to think of it, one can actually say the same thing of any piece of music. It’s not only the phrases that engage into a dialogue. A phrase can usually be divided into segments that compete to express their individual voices. Division is recursive and can reach down to the level where notes compete against each other. The levels of division don’t have to be mutually exclusive, they actually coexist. Notes are particular cases of segments that enter into the composition of larger segments and phrases, and the particular multidimensional way in which the dialogues take life in some medium-specific narrative is just part of a discovery.

Rediscovering composite media

Intra-medium narrative versus composite media such as songs. “Medium matchmaking” as a value judgment versus the intra-heteromedium narrative.

The notions of medium specificity and of being intra-medium bring up the question “which medium?” A composite medium is a combination of layers, e.g., the song can be seen as lyrics on top of an instrumental. I will use the term “heteromedium” for such media, and “intra-heteromedium” to qualify an interpretation limited to the content of a hetero-medium.

To be perfectly accurate, what most would consider to be a monomedium is necessarily composite. Text has sound, syntax, semantics, structure, etc. Sound has tonality, rythm, phrasing, texture, etc. Furthermore, not one such property can be made into a “truly” one-dimensional medium. Tonality cannot exist in a vacuum, just like color cannot exist without some sense of shape, or a line without some sense of thickness. Even so, we never pay attention to everything. It is not uncommon not to pay attention to the lyrics in a song. Other parts of the medium may be deemed unessential depending on the listener. When listening to a heavy metal song, I will usually ignore the obligatory guitar solo every other chorus, the elaborate drum fills, the redundant bass lines, etc.

Despite the fundamental heterogeneity of heteromedia, there has always been a sense of medium unity which has overpowered the other aspects of heteromedium interpretation. It is not uncommon to hear about how well lyrics match the music, the music the movie, the dancing the music, etc. The question as to how well the layers match is typically indicative of a value judgment. But as with all value judgments, even if there is objectivity in the match—e.g., rythmic and mood affinity between dance and music—the accompanying value judgment is fundamentally questionable. Nothing says that only positive affinity is necessary to make a “great” match. One could argue that happy lyrics go with dark music as a spooky combination—think porcelain doll in the dark—or as a spoof. On the other hand, dark lyrics over dark music can be of great comedic value depending on the listener’s mindset. What is being taken seriously by some, is being derided by others. The song Black Sabbath may be taken seriously by “true heavy metal” fans and Satan-fearing parents, while others laugh off the cheesy horror lyrics. The fundamental separation between the evil theme and metal as “evil music” is such that people could invent the genre of “white metal,” i.e., Christ-hailing metal, and you can be sure that this genre has its legion of fans who only swear by it. In any case, celebrating evil or god in songs is and has always been as deridable as your next self-proclaimed black metal misanthropes signing to a label and negotiating tour support.

Medium matchmaking is not to be mistaken with the interpretation of a heteromedium-specific narrative. Narratives are about change, which statements on fitness for purpose (“the costumes fit the theme so well!”) are not. So when one talks of “medium-specific narrative,” one considers changes across the medium matchmaking, not the matchmaking itself. Typically, the medium-specific narrative of a song (to mind: not album, not artist, but the individual song itself) focuses on melody, not style, genre, technique or production (all invariants with respect to the narrative), and only deals with harmony insofar it partakes in producing melody. The purely musical narrative is in most cases tangent to the lyrics, although one can always try to look for narratives from the coupling of music with lyrics (rather than the meaning of music in lyrics, or the meaning of music in emotion), just as comics combine drawings with text into a new type of narrative material, as was seen with Touti and his Exhaust Pipe.