Manifesto
The Manifesto of Conceptual Reconstructionism
The Internet offers a platform of expression for all kinds of reviewers. In particular, there’s on Youtube a healthy section of non-seasoned reviewers who don’t read from script and mostly improvize, unedited. So a familiar sight is a reviewer struggling to find what to say next, only saved by a reflex: “oh yes, I didn’t mention X.” As an example, for a music album, X could be “the variety,” “the lyrics,” or “the production.” Why do they now feel compelled to mention this aspect rather than another? Why in this order? How necessary is it to the review, and what is the nature of its connection to the review, if it’s something that the reviewer almost omitted? In fact, we could ask the same questions for all the points raised by the reviewer.
The point is that underlying this reflex is actually a very common enumerative thought process. Professional reviewers use it as well. The only difference is that they internalized it so well that it looks natural.
Reviews are far from being the only vector of that thought process. For example, if you read the Wikipedia entry for a country, you’ll find an enumeration of various subjects: History, Geography, Government and Politics, Economy, Demographics, etc. Inside the info box, you’ll find the capital, the languages, nationality, religion, etc. Even the paragraphs are enumerative in nature.
Under careful examination, the description is a grab-bag of geographical, economical, political, cultural and demographical considerations which give rise to a mosaic. That is, it is based on juxtaposition rather than other types of relation (temporal order, cause-effect, deduction, formal similarity, etc.). It characteristically builds up into a familiar “messy” whole: while it is conventional and reads well, the mosaic typically doesn’t have a clear direction, with one notable exception.
The standard reviewing style: the interpretation of the average value. The “too much, not enough” syndrome
Consuming reviews and interpretations can be:
- for information
- for pleasure
The mosaic suits the consumption for information. Now, in the interpretation of art, as well as in reviews where a product needs to be judged, this mosaic is the basis for what I call the interpretation of the average value. “Average value” refers to the fact that the features of the mosaic are individually evaluated, and the evaluations are “averaged” into an overall value judgment (sometimes even following a mathematical formula).
That’s how the mosaic acquires direction: if each feature is assigned a value (even implicitly), then the whole makes sense as an average value. For example, if a music review states that “the ornery arpeggios provide an overarching gracefully balanced counterpoint” and you wonder why this is sandwiched between remarks about the tonality and the “modern sound,” the remarks make sense as good things if the review concludes to a “brilliant composition.”
In the context of the consumption for pleasure, we enjoy the work’s content united to the mosaic of interpretation, although the connection has a fundamentally conjectural quality. Take the live performance of a song. The enjoyment of the song is heightened by the belief in a certain connection to the musicians, the technicality of their performance, how they seem to enjoy themselves too, etc. Even if the connection is real, the conjecturing is always in the background: the audience always has to transcend a fundamental doubt, however small, regarding the connection (playback, autotune, whether the performance is that difficult to pull off, and so on).
From the angle of the consumption for pleasure, the mosaic can become a cliché, just like any content. If I speak about the author and various biographical facts about them, I, in effect, produce a cliché. The cliché is informative, but a cliché nonetheless. It has a characteristic quality of contingency that makes you question how essential it really is to enjoyment. You can, as a mind game, attribute various authors to the content, and see that it works the same way as when the “real” author is involved: the chosen author colors the work uniquely, but its impact on our experiencing of the content (as opposed to the appreciation of its meaning and context) is limited and diffuse. I call this method of assessing the relative merits of conjecturing the inconsequential conjecture test. It can be applied to any feature of the mosaic, including meaning, historical significance, virtuosity, emotionality, etc.
The mosaic is predisposed to distract from the content, as if through centrifugal force. Reviewing is known to relate to the content in the following ways:
- Description for the blind or deaf (for example, enumerating the instruments in a musical piece, or, if there’s a tree in a painting, saying, with style, that there’s a tree)
- Analysis “through the microscope”, that is, features of the mosaic are individually looked at in detail (for example, the rhyming structure of a poem, or the references and historical context of a painting)
- Myopic overviews, mostly in the form of categorizations (for example, categorizing a Beethoven piece as Romantic-era classical music)
In that sense, the mosaic is always either “too much” or “not enough” with respect to the content: too much in the sense of over-analyzing microscopically to the detriment of the big picture, and not enough in the sense of losing sense of the specific when putting labels on the content. A notable labelling act is the value judgment. A statement such as “I like this work” is always a highly compromised abstraction of a rich experience. It tries to cram a more or less unique cognitive process into one quantity (informal or numerical, it doesn’t matter). The loss of nuance is why its explanatory power is so inconsistent. For example, someone likes category A and dislikes category B, but there are things in B they like and things in A they don’t. Or someone explains that they like something because of features A, B and C, but dislike another thing with the same features. Or 2 people say the same thing about X, but one will keep it, and the other will sell it.
The mosaic’s limitless extensivity offers the promise of exhaustivity (enumerate as many things as possible), but has the mosaic actually exhausted everything that has to be said of the content?
The interpretation of the medium-specific narratives
The interpretation of the average value doesn’t match the actual experiencing of content, which is a process with a narrative quality. Not narrative in the sense of a traditional story, but in a medium-specific sense. For example, if the medium is painting, a medium-specific narrative is based on visual perceptions (“events”) and how they relate to each other (through morphology, color, transformation, topology, etc.) on a timeline affixed to the viewer’s roaming gaze. Even in a text-based medium, a medium-specific narrative doesn’t always coincide with the traditional concept of story or plot. That’s because medium-specific specificity isn’t so much about what the words mean, but how they are told. For example, “Anna gives Bob a present” is not equivalent to “Bob is given a present by Anna,” medium-specifically speaking. Likewise, a story laid out in non-chronological order is not the same when reconstituted in chronological order.
Narratives are often perceived myopically. Temporality is typically thingified. For example, music has the concepts of rythm and tempo, painting and cinematography have the concept of scene, etc. These concepts reflect a general attitude toward processes that reduces them into a mosaic of components that can be considered in isolation. For example, to describe how a board game plays (a fundamentally continuous process), board game reviews are routinely satisfied with a mechanical enumeration of game turn steps, without the precise tactical or strategic sense of flow that underlies all gameplays.
The interpretation of the medium-specific narrative restores the granularity, temporality and epiphanic quality of content.
A wake-up signal: reconstruction. Markup notation. Conventional medium delimitation. Pure referentiality.
Reconstruction is a product of the interpretation of the medium-specific narratives. It consists in transcribing a medium-specific narrative perceived in a work.
The interest of reconstruction is in pushing the scope of the perceived narrative to the physical boundaries of the medium. This holistic approach justifies the concept of work as a self-contained unit of experience, and yet it is not myopic, since it builds on medium-specific elements that are concretely perceived. It rewards a wide attention span and sensory memory by bringing up content that is not challenging to see, but challenging to remember in fine granularity (song-wide narrative, book-wide narrative, etc). It is not about noting well-hidden details of the medium like some sort of private investigator, but how a narrative emerges from even the most obvious elements, as long as the attention span doesn’t fail.
Reconstruction is based on 2 conventions.
Conventional medium delimitation states upfront what is considered the “medium” that will be reconstructed. Most notably, it makes the dichotomy between interpretation and content mostly irrelevant (as the consumption of interpretation for pleasure announced), reducing it to a mere decision that obsoletes the core questions of traditional interpretation (is the interpretation right? Does it describe the author’s real intention?). When the medium delimitation has as little to do with the mosaic as possible, we talk of a pure reconstruction.
Pure referentiality is simultaneously a concept and a convention implying that the reconstruction is only meant to reference the medium, without adding any content beyond the conventional medium delimitation. This implies that, unlike most interpretations, the point of reconstruction is not being true, correct, or “on point,” in the sense that referentiality should be trivial to verify. Unlike traditional interpretation, reconstruction is not meant to explain a content or even give an idea thereof. The reader is supposed to have access to the content, and to match it to the reconstruction. It is generally recommended to have experienced the content before reading the reconstruction.
Reconstruction uses a special markup notation to concisely transcribe narratives through the use of references. For example, this <{{#replace:referent|}}||nested=yes}}}}> is referred to by that <{{#replace:referent|}}||nested=yes}}}}>. The DEF subscript indicates the introduction of a new referent, i.e., a definition. Each definition must be understood in respect to the context of its introduction, which (informally) consists in the medium-specific elements that contain it (for example, if the definition refers to a melodic motif, the containing musical phrase is the motif’s immediate context). So <{{#replace:referent|}}||nested=yes}}}}> is a mnemonic more specific than just the word “referent” without the markup.
Besides the technical advantages (conciseness, hyperlinking), the markup notation acts as a wake-up signal and a reminder that how we interpret a work is a choice that conditions our mindset regarding how we approach the content. The unusual formalism ensures that the reconstruction cannot be read casually, thus coercing the reader into a mindset proper to the interpretation of medium-specific narratives.
Societal and cognitive impact of the choice of interpretation style. The unnecessary role segregation
The mosaic, as a format of content, is just one symptom of amnesic thought processes that forget narrative relations, leading to a simplistic interpretation of information and reality, with unfortunate philosophical and cultural consequences like excessive vulgarization and false lifestyle dichotomies (for example, being a commercially successful mainstream artist versus staying “authentic” and underground). In particular, value-based interpretation creates artificial communication barriers that become social barriers. Role segregation is a consequence of the opacity of value judgments (e.g., a renowned critic’s opinion is unfalsifiable but considered authoritative), and feeds into an inferiority complex. It paints “great” artists as geniuses, and “great” critics as authority figures.
Most people make the common assumption that roles require elite knowledge and competence, and this is true, but only to the extent that their view conforms to value-based preconceptions. In comparison, medium-specific narratives only require imagination and attention span. As in conceptual art, they don’t require implementation, let alone sublime aesthetics or technical perfection, in the sense that they don’t seek neither external validation, nor any pandering to tastes and value judgments. That is, they suggest a tautological artist: we’re being artists in the process of interpreting medium-specific narratives, as a form of active consumption similar to creation in terms of intellectual faculties involved.
With the focus of interpretation moving away from value judgments, not only do the critics lose all their privileges, but the gravity center of communities, now educated on the sterile and manipulative aspects of value, shifts to the sharing of objective content. Let me quote a random thread about a game on a gaming forum:
« Such a great thematic game. »
« Congrats to the designer on this one. He does this all himself and you can seriously feel the love he puts in to it. »
« Just love this game. Such smooth play, so thematic. Quick to set up. »
« This is one I picked up after all the praise last year, and unfortunately I didn’t enjoy it all that much. It felt very flavorful, but not thematic. »
« What a great game! »
« I’ve enjoyed this game quite a bit so far, but I'm kind of surprised to see it so highly regarded by so many others. »
« Theme and cost held me off for awhile, but continued positive reviews was enough to push me. No regrets. »
What is the end result of this discussion? A cacophony of “I like” and “I don’t like” that ignore each other. There are several phenomena at work here:
- Posting, as an essentially anonymous user, gratuitous value judgments to an anonymous crowd
- The demand for gratuitous value judgments
Both are supported by a collective belief in a certain “fun” in sharing opinions, but it’s always the same dialog of the deaf, again and again, that feeds into a superficial communitarianism. Not coincidentally, discussions about art (debates like “is X art?” “What is the best art?”) end up with same acknowledgment that “it’s just a matter of taste.” Misleadingly, value judgments come with a certain precision language similar to fine dining and wine tasting, which tries to explain value through ever-so-refined “interesting” analysis, but is ultimately powerless at explaining the leap from observations to value judgments.
A point can be made that the gap between review and reconstruction is just a problem of communication; that the mosaic and value don’t exclude a certain awareness of the medium-specific narratives. It can be true, although it is more natural for the reverse to be the case, which is that reviews as written reflect how their authors actually think (this is for example made clear by the trending reaction videos on Youtube). In the end, reconstruction addresses both how we think, and how we actually communicate what we think.
Rediscovering content and avoiding grand theories
Reconstruction invites to rediscover individual works through their medium-specific narratives. Not albums, but individual songs. Not genres, styles, techniques, performers, authors, but actually perceived content. Works are reconstructed in objective, constructive terms that are not just vaguely interesting generalizations and speculations inconsequential to the experiencing of the content.
The focus on experiencing individual works and what makes each unique (as medium-specific narratives rather than consumerist novelties based on aesthetics, theme, and so on) directly contradicts the need for grand theories (what is Art, what is great Art, etc.). Reconstruction isn’t so much a theory as the cognitive process of finding medium-specific narratives. A written reconstruction, as purely referential material, is an ephemereal product destined to be forgotten as the readers learn to interpret the reconstructed content without it. Likewise, this manifesto and the accompanying book are destined to fall by the wayside. They’re not enduring theories of what interpretation should be, but gateways to the reconstruction of great works.
More resources
- The book develops all the points raised by this manifesto: Conceptual Reconstructionism: An Initiative for the Interpretation of Medium-specific Narratives
- For reconstructions, you can find a selection in the Main Page, or browse the category pages.
