Book/Conceptual Reconstructionism and its Social Ecosystem
Conceptual Reconstructionism and its Social Ecosystem
For the sake of convenience, the term “reconstruction” will be used In the following sections to mean either (a) a purely referential interpretation of a medium-specific narrative or (b) the interpretation of medium-specific narratives in general—i.e., the cognitive process rather than its written product. The context should make clear which meaning is implied. In addition, “content” and “the medium-specific narrative” (singular) will be used interchangeably, and pure reconstruction will be assumed, unless stated otherwise (i.e., assuming a conventional medium delimitation as intra-medium as possible). It should be understood that, strictly speaking, a content always has many medium-specific narratives, and a reconstruction, as the interpretation of a content, is always the reconstruction of a particular medium-specific narrative within the interpreted content.
“Conceptual reconstructionism” is the marketing expression for the concept of reconstruction. “Conceptual” is meant to distinguish it from other possible types of “reconstructionism.” It alludes to conceptual art, in the sense that a reconstruction, by virtue of being abstracted from a physical manifestation of content, is a kind of template that could be used to generate content.
Seeing art and its ecosystem not through value, but through the choice of interpretation
A reconstruction is a statement not only about content, but also about choice and intent, since it takes a deliberate effort to produce a reconstruction as opposed to an interpretation of the average value.
Before one can choose, there needs to be an awareness of the alternative. Product reviews today tend to only list pros and cons, stopping short of providing global ratings. If that’s any indication, they show a public awareness of the upside of letting consumers determine value for themselves. While reconstruction is much more radical, it is nonetheless a logical progression in this trend away from the interpretation of the average value.
But the choice of interpretation doesn’t only regulate the relationship between a writer and their readers. It also regulates and enforces a self-contained ecosystem of artists, critics, consumers, and consumers of critiques. The style of interpretation defines how we value a product, which in turn determines how we define and value progress, which in turn influence how products are created. The following sections discuss how reconstruction helps to relativize any notion of universality within the value-based conventions we’re bound to.
The relation between interpretation and social progress
The societal aspect of the communication of interpretation
When Wikipedia describes Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying as “a novel consistently ranked among the best novels of 20th century literature, known for its stream of consciousness writing technique, multiple narrators, and varying chapter lengths,” it advertises a global way of interpreting art. It stands as an authoritative source for a large audience, and the audience, in turn, is well-trained and receptive to this kind of speak: an average value (“among the best novels of 20th century literature”) is backed up by a sum of standout features (“stream of consciousness writing technique, multiple narrators, and varying chapter lengths”) that is almost mathematically expected to amount to said average value. Among the readers are writers, who in turn write books, prefaces, articles, blogs, and grant interviews that reinforces the same way of thinking. The writers know what their readers want. So if the latter demand truth, not only will they have it, but the author will also make a point to prove that they took every precautionary measure to meet the demand:
At length, the books converge to the form that critics, consumers, teachers, publishers seek: they offer a mosaic of standout features. They fulfill a virtual contract between the writer and the critic that stipulates that, should the writer comply with every known judgment criterion, the critic and the public will like the book, although it is never quite that simple in reality.
Self-communication of interpretation
Interpretation is also communicating an interpretation to oneself. It can be the artist trying to innovate, using their own interpretation of previous works (whether their own work or others’) as a frame of reference. Or it can be the consumer trying to decide for themselves whether they like the work or not.
For the artist, the levers of innovation, as well as the meaning of the expression “reinventing the wheel,” are largely conditioned by the type of interpretation that formats their view of art. The artist who bases their notion of progress on the average value, and indirectly on commercial success, works in a seemingly paradoxical way. They play to their audience through a form of “fan service” that partially recycles proven art, while trying to do something original at the same time. I’ll return to this phenomenon of warmed-over novelty in a later section; first, I want to address communication.
For the consumer, self-communication of interpretation is less obvious, if only because we, as consumers, enjoy something before we analyze why (if ever). It can be safely assumed that self-communication for the consumer tends to be more transparent and genuine than for the artist. The consumer rarely actively tries to do something they don’t like, while artists certainly have an interest in pleasing a crowd even at the cost of sacrificing their artistic vision. Even so, the consumer’s enjoyment, as pure as it seems, is implicitly a commitment to an interpretation style that is not as unequivocal and universal as the judgment “I like it” would have one believe. The following section discusses the relativization of enjoyment and therefore value, progress and innovation.
Relativization of progress and innovation in art
Progress and innovation are measured by the difference between what has been done and what is being done. The point is that this difference is not absolute, but relative to the style of interpretation.
The concepts of progress and innovation in art are prejudiced through the largely unconscious choice to value the mosaic. If one sees books through concepts such as “genre” and “author” (features of the mosaic), then it should come as no surprise that the creation of a literary genre or the creation of an author persona can be passed off as progress. If realism is hotly pursued, 3D and 4D cinema can be passed off as progress. And so on. On the other hand, medium-specific narratives, despite their ubiquity, are hardly considered as criteria of progress. They are always in the background, and never explain any trend in the market. For example, it is hardly a predictor of commercial success. In fact, commercial success itself is a better predictor of commercial success: aren’t many best-sellers bought because they were listed as best-sellers?
Since progress and innovation stay true to the nature of the mosaic, they paradoxically follow a stereotypical narrative. The narrative of the mosaic is the combination of features, so as a composer, I innovate the moment I combine genres—e.g., Gregorian music with electro-pop (actually, it wouldn’t surprise me if that genre already exists). The corresponding form of progress is the recombination of elements under the guiding light of the average value. I innovate the instant I choose which elements to put together for the sake of innovation itself. As an artist, I do this with the hope that people will like it, but I only have a vague idea of whether they will. Think of Lana Del Rey declaring “people weren’t taking me very seriously, so I lowered my voice, believing that it would help me stand out.”
While this form of progress objectively has direction, it is permeated by value judgment. That is, if people don’t like the new genre that I created, they won’t call it innovation. They will call it garbage. But if they do like it, you will assuredly hear from them that it is innovative.
Fake dichotomies of artistic goals and lifestyles. The false problems of censorship and commercial art
Implicit choices of values dictate artistic goals and lifestyles. These choices, by virtue of their dichotomic nature, look fundamental and necessary, but they’re not: one can choose to be indifferent to any of them, and yet have other worthy goals to pursue. I will list only a few of those dichotomies:
- Dichotomies of artistic goals: being popular/elitist, mainstream/underground, technical/emotional, erudite/vulgar, etc.
- Dichotomies of interpretation themes: any of the problems of the theories of art, such as whether the concept of author is well-founded, whether a work is authentic or apocryphal, whether it is monoglossal or heteroglossal, etc.
- Dichotomies of lifestyle choices: living rich/living poor, living longer in a dull life/“live fast, die young,” right-wing/left-wing, etc.
Dichotomies, as monopoles of attention, play on the human need to take position: to decide whether one likes something, whether the will is free or deterministic, whether God exists, who is the real father, and so on. However, there is always a neutral, uncommitted position: realizing that either alternative of a dichotomy is part of the same myth. Under careful examination, dichotomies often feel like being asked: are you blind or stupid?
Take the philosophical dichotomy between the solipsist and the realist. The solipsist believes that the only thing that exists for sure is their mind. The realist thinks the opposite. My point is that being either (assuming the distinction makes any sense) hardly changes anything. Solipsism is somewhat like believing that reality is a kind of dream. But they probably won’t throw themselves out the window, since they know it will likely hurt. Believing in external reality doesn’t change anything either: the world won’t magically become more consistent than it was already to the solipsist. The induction principle isn’t going to suddenly give absolute proofs: after billions of confirmations of the law that the sun rises every morning, the sun still might not rise tomorrow. You never know. So if you think becoming a solipsist is a big mistake, let it be known that the world doesn’t suddenly become dreamlike because of that—well, it could, just as it could if you don’t become a solipsist.
What about the absolute freedom of man? Some actually believe that it would be sad and hopeless if man proved to be as deterministic as a machine. Philosophers spend an enormous amount of time arguing about this, as if their happiness depended on the argument’s outcome. But believing in a deterministic fate doesn’t magically put anyone in shackles: you make choices by weighing choices, and you get the visceral sensation of freedom from every choice you make. On the other hand, believing in freedom doesn’t make you any more capable of moving through walls. The TV series Lost had its own variation on the subject with the thematic opposition between John, the “man of faith,” and Jack, the “man of science.” One believes in destiny, the other in science. The contrast makes for good drama, but destiny isn’t incompatible at all with science. On the contrary, science is destiny explained after-the-fact. “Destiny” is a harmless concept, and essentially a label you stick on events after they have occurred. “Look, I told you, this is destiny!” can be said of any event that has happened, including those predicted by Jack.
Even the iconic question of whether or not God exists isn’t anything that needs an answer any time soon. Unless you believe you can influence God, mainly through rites and prayers, answering this question is totally inconsequential and purely academic.
Art doesn’t lack misleading dichotomies, either. For example, is censorship good or bad?
Moral absolutism is silly. There is no black and white. There’s always gray. And the gray keeps changing.
❞Konrath’s argument, like most arguments based on tolerance and respect, can be turned against him. The fact that “there’s always gray” is actually more reason for a moral absolutism; otherwise, everything goes. He says “Keep your morals to yourself,” but that is exactly what the moral absolutist he rejects says. “Anyone who tells me what I can or can't do […] is an asshole (as long as I’m not hurting anyone else)” is Konrath’s moral absolutism, for his very position—don’t censor someone who isn’t hurting anyone else—is the censor’s: the censor, the moral absolutist, sincerely thinks porn hurts people, so, according to his argument, they must be right in telling porn writers “what they can or can't do with their life, their body, their mind!”
Now let’s consider the subject of censorship from the aspect of the medium-specific narratives. The censoring entity, at least as we know it, doesn’t censor medium-specific narratives. It only knows and censors features of the mosaic. Porn is censored because of the censor’s thematic take on content, with all that this implies socially, politically, morally. Censorship only applies where the censor knows their stuff. The censor can also, without paradox, censor novelty, for there is a well-defined sense of novelty. You can censor something for being too original, but you cannot censor something so new that you don’t even notice it, especially when it can only arise through a fundamental change in the style of interpretation. You can censor a medium-specific narrative only collaterally and accidentally. So you could censor a movie for the shocking imagery, but a medium-specific narrative doesn’t know shock value, or any kind of value for this matter. From a medium-specific standpoint, a porn movie is just a movie, literally moving images. The medium-specific narrative of a movie can be reworked into various themes because theme is not a medium-specific narrative. By contrast, porn as a genre plays off themes and formulas. And herein, in this very sameness (including the sameness of the kinkiest sexual perversions that makes them recognizable as such), lies a new debate that denounces the current ones: what if the problem of censoring in general is not whether it’s morally acceptable or anything else, but the fact that the contents so resemble each other that they can be mass-censored? In a similar vein, some people are shocked by targeted marketing or dating sites which let you put candidates in your shopping cart, literally treating people as commodities. But isn’t the problem the fact that most people are, in effect, indistinguishable from commodities? The other day, I watched some Youtuber claim he was shocked that a dating website was reducing people to their “characteristics” or “functions” by adopting a shopping mall metaphor. Yet later, while filling out sign-up forms on this website for purposes of demonstration, he deliberately fakes his profile, in fear of being profiled by higher entities such as Facebook and the FBI, thereby indirectly acknowledging the reality and efficiency of such reductive categorizations.
Other classic dichotomies include “authentic” versus “commercial” or “sold-out” art, and variations thereof.
Truly a thing of beauty… I could listen to TAMusic’s… well… music, all day long.
It’s quite unfortunate that the overall population of modern society doesn’t appreciate this type of music anymore…
❞In the above quote, “sincerity and clarity” are self-serving terms because, if J-Rock or Rap are ugly or overrated music, as the commentator opines, you can always say that they are “sincerely and clearly” so. The meanings of the terms are anybody's guess, really, and because of that, they have the paradox of the myth of the universality of value written all over them. The differences between classical music and J-Rock are indeed objective, but value (the “appreciation” of the “overall population of modern society”) certainly doesn’t automatically follow from the vastly different sound. It is easier to see the problem from within the same genre. Listening to a lot of classical music has at least one virtue: it makes you realize how broad the category of classical music is, not only in music theory, but also from the standpoint of taste. There is classical music you love, and classical music you loathe. Taking this into account, a discourse that pits classical music against any other music genre should automatically ring alarm bells. How can one say “classical music” has more “sincerity and clarity” than any other music genre, when inside the very genre of “classical music” I find music that is all but sincere and clear? Or does the commentator seriously think that all of classical music, without exception, is uniformly sincere and clear? The commentator’s dichotomy is implicitly based on a type of interpretation that allows broad categorizations, and only makes sense within this type of interpretation.
On the other hand, it is very much possible for some piece of classical music and a J-Rock or Rap song to be aesthetic variations of the same medium-specific narrative. You can’t say it is impossible to make a rap song out of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, can you?
These debates of authentic versus commercial art, when viewed from the perspective of the medium-specific narratives, remind me of the theological war between any two religions, when neither is that different from the other. For example, the preface to a 1649 English translation of the Qur’an describes the latter as “so rude, and incongruous a composure, so farced with contradictions, blasphemies, obscene speeches, and ridiculous fables” that “I present it to thee… not doubting, though it hath been a poyson, that hath infected a very great, but most unsound part of the Universe, it may prove to be an Antidote, to confirm in thee the health of Christianity.” However, I’m pretty sure other people could mistake “contradictions, blasphemies, obscene speeches, and ridiculous fables” for a description of the Bible.
The bleak predictability of modern values
Boredom as the criterion for moving on. Becoming bored of absolute perfection. The problems of the known representations of perfection
A perfect work would be the one you’d take with you on a desert island, as they say. As a classic, it should last you a lifetime. But this statement is already challenged by the simplest experience one could imagine: try to enjoy any allegedly perfect work over a long uninterrupted period of time—e.g., listening to a perfect song in a loop all day long. As everyone already knows, you don’t do that. Instead you ration consumption. You stash the product somewhere, and then come back to it later. But this just acknowledges the common sense that any work goes stale, even the most perfect ones.
Perfection has always been elusive in all its known depictions. When it is not outright debatable, it is low-key cynical, whether utopian (ads featuring women who look too clean and artificial) or dystopian (Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World). As Vincent Bugliosi sarcastically put it:
All manner of pleasurable things have been envisioned by people through the years about heaven, the Disneyland of the Christian imagination. Originally, Billy Graham, who at one point said he knew the precise dimensions of heaven—“sixteen hundred square miles” (No. Seriously. Time, November 15, 1993, 74)—thought heaven was just going to be about fun. “We are going to sit around the fireplace and have parties, and the angels will wait on us, and we’ll drive down the golden streets in a yellow Cadillac convertible,” he said. (Billy didn’t say if our body or our soul would be in the driver’s seat.) But Billy, with age, particularly when he found a passage in the Book of Revelation that says we will serve God in heaven, realized that, although life in heaven would all be just glorious, it wasn’t going to be all play. He told Good Morning America in April of 1997 that “when we get to heaven, I don’t think we’re going to just sit down. I think God will have other work for us to do. There are billions and billions and trillions of other planets and other stars, and I believe there’s life on many of those and God may have a job for us to do on some of those places.”
But Billy, none of what you say sounds like a place I want to go to. I never sit around fireplaces, and even if I did, what’s so special about sitting around a fireplace in heaven as opposed to one on earth? Also, I’m not a partygoer. And I don’t want anyone waiting on me. It makes me uncomfortable. And I have no desire at all to drive a yellow Cadillac convertible down golden streets. And why would I want to work on distant planets for the rest of time? I’m not being silly, Billy. You and Christianity are.
Even if what happens in the Christian heaven is the greatest thing ever, such as being in God’s presence—like the transfiguration of Jesus at the top of the mountain where his clothing became dazzling white, far whiter than any earthly process could ever make it (Mark 9:2-3)—after a few twenty-four-hour days of this, won’t it get awfully tiresome? Or at least humdrum? If not, what about 365 days a year? Or 1,000 years?
Billy, after we get to heaven, what’s going to happen that’s going to be so great that it will make me, and others, so indescribably happy? Given that billions of people throughout recorded history have believed in heaven and everyone wants to end up there, am I being unreasonable to ask?
❞All paradises, from the paradises on Earth sold by travel agencies to the paradises peddled by religions, are necessarily questionable due to the variable nature of value. The associated concept of infinite supply—whether of wealth, entertainment, beauty, pleasure, etc.—is weighed down by the law of supply and demand: the more abundant something is, the less precious and valuable it becomes. A perfect beach in a perfect weather can only make a person feel well and comfortable for so long before it becomes boring. The same can be said of any depiction of Heaven. Since eternal virgins would be handed to you and would never be withdrawn from you, their value necessarily decreases over time—that is, unless you’re being constantly brainwashed. Even if you admit the existence of paradise for the sake of argument, the value of paradise would necessarily help depreciate the value of life on Earth. The most heroic deeds you can think of—self sacrifice to save a child, for example—wouldn’t be heroic anymore if the only thing you get for sacrificing yourself is eternal felicity. Where’s the sacrifice in that? On the contrary, we especially value self-sacrifice because nothing is expected in return.
And has there ever been any consensus on the perfection of any work by man? There is indeed a scholarly consensus, but it doesn’t take much research to find dissenting views, from Pierre-Auguste Renoir mocking the Venus de Milo as a “big gendarme,” to T.S. Eliot calling Hamlet “the Mona Lisa of literature” in the sense that “the play was no longer seen for what it was, but had become, like the painting, a receptacle for subjective interpretations and second-rate theories” (Charles Nicholl, The myth of the Mona Lisa). What about the grandiose realizations of mankind, such as the Pyramids of Egypt?
If grandiose realizations aren’t the real achievements of mankind, maybe they’re the most humble and understated ones?
A farmer made it for his farm. The pond was a simple rectangle, about 6 feet wide, and 8 feet long; opening off a little irrigation stream. At one end, a bush of flowers hung over the water. At the other end, under the water, was a circle of wood, its top perhaps 12 inches below the surface of the water. In the pond there were eight great ancient carp, each maybe 18 inches inches long, orange, gold, purple, and black: the oldest one had been there eighty years. The eight fish swam, slowly, slowly, in circles—often within the wooden circle. The whole world was in that pond. Every day the farmer sat by it for a few minutes. I was there only one day and I sat by it all afternoon. Even now, I cannot think of it without tears. Those ancient fish had been swimming, slowly, in that pond for eighty years. It was so true to the nature of the fish, and flowers, and the water, and the farmers, that it had sustained itself for all that time, endlessly repeating, always different. There is no degree of wholeness or reality which can be reached beyond that simple pond.
❞I, for one, cannot think of anything more boring. Has anyone asked the fish?
Instant consumption as a part of the culture of the average value. The spoiler phenomenon. The unspecific effect, and its relation to stale art and utilitarian art.
Due to a feedback loop in the social ecosystem, art eventually resembles the style of interpretation, and vice versa. Just as the interpretation of the average value is prone to overall impressions, art can be designed to be successful through the imparting of overall impressions. Instant consumption is its necessary ally.
A distinguishing feature of commercially successful art is accessibility. The quicker the audience recognizes its qualities—e.g., its aesthetic or technical merits—the better. At the 2012 Grammy Awards, Gwyneth Paltrow introduced Adele’s Rolling in the Deep as follows: “Then, just about a year ago, we started hearing a stunning new song for the first time. Instantly it was clear that it was something special.” The instant reception is not all because of Rolling in the Deep—although a medium-specific narrative of that song might be expressed as the instantly recognizable suspenseful build-up toward the high note of a cathartic chorus. The fact is that most people can enjoy content from the first beats, the first glance, the first sentences, independently of the encompassing narrative. Instantaneity isn’t irreconcilable with the concept of the time-tested classic—that is, the concept of a work that has proven its mettle over a long period of time. The critic world has solved the paradox nicely with the concept of the instant classic: people can instantly recognize a work that will be of lasting value. As the saying goes, there was no false note. That saying denotes the pseudo-exhaustive nature of value judgments. A work is great insofar as it is constantly great, but often, hearing a few notes is enough to make a judgment about the whole piece. Talent shows such as the Got Talent series epitomize the shortsightedness of this posture. In those shows, a judge will often voice their disapproval by buzzing a contestant at the start or middle of a performance. In an episode of Britain’s Got Talent, a keyboard/violin duo called Addicted gets the buzzer from Simon Cowell as the song enters a technical part (technically flawless, one might add). His argument was: “I don’t see where you are gonna go with this.” What better way to eliminate any chance of knowing than interrupting the musicians at the moment he did…
A correlate of instant consumption is the spoiler. When effective, a spoiler betrays a mode of consumption that cares so much for the end-result that the content is deemed worthless if the end-result is known in advance. Spoiling a soccer game’s final score to a soccer fan is effectively crushing because the typical soccer fan cares about the results just as much, if not more, than about what actually happened on the turf—even if they pretend otherwise.
Contrary to what the phenomenon would suggest, spoilers don’t even reveal anything ground-breaking. A story spoiler can have a huge negative impact on the audience, and still only be about X cheating on Y, or Z dying. The surprise must rely on an instantly recognizable thing (at least instant enough to not require to be backed by much content at all). If it didn’t, spoilers wouldn’t fetch those instant reactions of frustration at being spoiled.
In the context of instant consumption, spoilers are just waiting to happen, because the consumers let themselves be surprised by clichés. Being surprised is itself a cliché. If surprise is not there or does not conform to certain expectations, readers and viewers feel they have a right to complain. In a detective story, the murderer and the murder method must be a surprise, but not too much of a surprise so as to be beyond belief, otherwise we start complaining about the unlikelihood of, for example, an orangutan committing murder:
Instant consumption interprets content as a sum of instants. But because each instant tries to vie for the attention of the consumer, the sum is, at best, a mosaic, resulting in a very messy overall impression. This overall impression is the legacy of art as an average value. It is destined to stale because its optimum time was, by design, when it is revealed. Like a fading memory, it is evocative, but as time passes it becomes harder to deduce the instants from it, just like in a mathematical sum you can hardly deduce the summands. I call it the unspecific effect, in contrast to the medium-specific effects. It relates to the instants in a very unspecific, yet well-known way. For example, every action movie is a movie filled with action, and although action movies can be very different from each other, you could conceivably build a coherent collection of such movies addressing the same need for action. The unspecific effect and its resulting categorizations is why people can claim that they like some genre even if it isn’t quite so simple when you get down to the particulars. They may claim that they like to read, or go to the movies, etc. Yet there are books they surely don’t like to read, and movies they don’t like to watch.
It is easy for unspecific effects to go stale. For example, listening to a radio station looping over the same songs all day long, or binge-watching TV shows. A dull routine often accompanies a passive mode of consumption that reveals itself through self-awareness. For example, if I listen mindlessly to music in a commute, and force myself to pause in the middle of a song and think whether I can accurately remember the melody that played just before the current one, that is when I realize I’ve been in a forgetful, passive state of mind. I have some idea of aesthetic coherence that holds the experience together—e.g., I know whether I’m pausing at a chorus or a verse—but overall I’m in a state of amnesia and directionlessness characteristic of the interpretation of the average value. With self-awareness comes the realization that most art caters to this mode of consumption. Trends push a mode of instant entertainment that instantly relieves dullness, only to waste away as a vague mashup of impressions, with little carrying over in any constructive manner to other activities.
Unspecific effects are well-known and well-documented as product categories. Thrillers will have you on the edge of your seat. Science fiction will entertain your sense of exploration. Comedies will make you laugh. The consumer’s relation to the medium is outright Pavlovian. “Watch it with some friends in a dark room. Enjoy.” And it works. Nowadays, one can choose alternate movie endings in the DVD menus. Need to get into a good mood after a stressful day at work? Choose the happy ending! Or let some MP3 streaming site create a playlist for you befitting your current mood: out of bed, during the shower, on the beach. We already have everything figured out and planned out. There is no effort involved.
In late capitalism, entertainment is the extension of work. It is sought after by those who want some time away from the mechanical work process. But the mechanization has so much power over people outside work and their happiness, it controls so thoroughly the conception of the entertainment goods, that the consumer can only experience the after-image of the work process itself. The so-called content is a mere facade; what stands out is the automatized succession of normalized operations. The factory and the office can only be escaped through their equivalent in entertainment. Entertainment suffers as a consequence. Pleasure becomes boredom, because, in order to stay a pleasure, it must not cost any effort, and thus always follow the same paths. The spectator doesn’t need to think: the product predetermines each reaction: not through the structure of its content—it breaks down as soon as we give it some thought—but through signals.
Every logical relation that would require some time to think, is painstakingly avoided. Developments must as much as possible follow immediately from previous situations, never from the idea of the whole. There is no action that could escape the eagerness of the writer to max out the isolated scene. Ultimately, even the plot seems dangerous, insofar it has provided some coherence of meaning, where only meaninglessness is acceptable.
❞Jede logische Verbindung, die geistigen Atem voraussetzt, wird peinlich vermieden. Entwicklungen sollen möglichst aus der unmittelbar vorausgehenden Situation erfolgen, ja nicht aus der Idee des Ganzen. Es gibt keine Handlung, die der Beflissenheit der Mitarbeiter widerstünde, aus der einzelnen Szene herauszuholen, was sich aus ihr machen läßt. Schließlich erscheint selbst noch das Schema gefährlich, soweit es einen wie immer auch armseligen Sinnzusammenhang gestiftet hatte, wo einzig die Sinnlosigkeit akzeptiert werden soll.
❞The search for the unspecific effect instead of elaborate narratives is not limited to art. It is a common phenomenon, the same that makes people go overseas to take a break, but only in a temporary and benign fashion. The vacation shall provide a pleasant parentheses, provided that the hotels and people are nice, the weather warm, and the internet connection up and running. It doesn’t really matter whether the locals speak Greek or Arabic, whether the visits are to pagan temples or mosques. The only requirement is the nice charming change of color. If people were truly intent on discovering architecture or culture rather than being distracted by appearances and accepted ideas of what “discovering” means, they could just stay at home and look around their neighborhood, as many people know foreign capitals much better than their own local surroundings.
Since only the unspecific effect counts—i.e., the effect of liking our experience—people can actually talk themselves into liking disappointing experiences, especially costly and overhyped ones. As long as we like them, it doesn’t matter if the experience was a letdown.
[…]
Waiting to see the Mona Lisa has all the thrill of standing in an airport check-in queue. The crowd pushes forward, cattle-like and unquestioning, performing a ritual they know they have to go through with in order to complete a pre-ordained tourist experience.
[…]
Moonkyou Kim, a tour guide with a group of 16 tourists from Seoul, taking a 10-day whirlwind tour of Europe with 24 hours in France, says the anti-climax is palpable. “People aren’t very happy when they see it. It’s too small. They don’t believe it’s the original.” But of the 51 people approached randomly over the day, the majority still say the picture is wonderful and they are thrilled to have seen it. Despite the crush and the inconvenience there is for many a reluctance to question the value of the experience.
❞This is the same phenomenon that reduces the goal of life, for a lot of people, to happiness—a goal so unspecific that all problems in the world could probably be solved with the happiness drug of Brave New World. The same phenomenon that values symbolic achievements over what was actually done, or the number of glial cells in Einstein’s brain over the actual content of his writings.
In sports, winning is the bottom line. It doesn’t matter if the game-winning play in a soccer game was a random ball ricocheting amidst a confusion of legs, because “people only remember the winners.” Conveniently, the arbitrary or accidental nature of a victory isn’t remembered. People are willing to go to great lengths to rationalize a wishful belief, thought pattern or occupation. It gives them the illusion of content. If a favorite sports team wins, then they must have done something good. Post hoc rationalization is a very common thought process. In a perfectly random hypothetical tournament played over 7 rounds where the winner of a game is determined by a die roll, people can easily rationalize the winner. The reasoning is that you can’t win 7 rounds consecutively with just luck. It is easy to see how that kind of reasoning applies in practice. A few years ago, a friend was crushed that their home soccer team had lost the finals. They couldn’t understand; it was ordained their team had to win! They had survived so many rounds that arriving this stage of the competition and losing was not even logically possible. Of course, the same could be said of the opposing team.
The syndrome of winning at all costs has a fetishism for numerical achievements, which are a form of unspecific effect as well. For example, if a disinfectant claims “99.9% of bacteria eliminated,” most consumers will be content and won’t for one second consider the possibility that 99.9% of all bacteria are innocuous anyway. The fallacy here isn’t different from someone claiming that humanity will die of respiratory conditions because oxygen makes up only 20% of the air, or only 0.0085% of the periodic table. This is the also the same kind of argument we’ve been having in regard to the advertised 95% efficacy of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. That number, known technically as Relative Risk Reduction, was derived from clinical trials where 170 out of 22,000 persons in the placebo group caught the illness, compared to 8 in the vaccinated group (1 - 8/170 = 95%). What we can see though, is that it’s a nice efficiency for an illness that only affects 170/22,000 = 0.7% of the population (the Absolute Risk Reduction is a measure for this contrast). To illustrate the problem, say that only 1 person in the placebo group caught the illness, and 0 in the vaccinated group. That’s 100% efficiency. But would you expose yourself to a vaccine’s side-effects for an illness that only affects only 1 person out of 22,000? And to make the vaccine look even worse, the 95% efficiency gets lower if you only account for the severe forms of the illness, and much lower if you only count severely ill people under age 65. Then the question isn’t whether 95% is a nice number in an absolute sense, but whether it justifies vaccinating an entire population indiscriminately and exposing it to a risk/benefit ratio that significantly varies depending on the host.
The bottom line of instant consumption is an expected or dictated well-known unspecific effect. It’s what I’ll call the “takeaway” and is essentially a cliché. For example, the takeaway of a movie is often a good or bad ending. Thinking in terms of a good or bad ending is precisely a cliché because one recognizes whether the ending is good or bad. But ambivalent, open-ended endings that leave people questioning are also a cliché and a marketable feature. In fact, they are not incompatible with instant consumption. Open-ended narratives in movies or TV series often don’t make sense and look pointless, unless they are seen as catering to instant consumption. Otherwise, how could one make sense of the complexity of the many interwoven character arcs of the 6-season TV series The Sopranos? In fact, the final scene to that series is so open-ended and cop-out-like that it suggests the show runners had no clue as to where they were taking this thing, and were improvizing all along (at least past the first few seasons). Paradoxically, the ending of a movie may be the opposite of open-ended, and yet leave the spectator thinking that the movie cannot be that obvious, and that there must be some hidden deeper meaning to it. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any way to reconcile the details of the viewing experience with the over-simplistic overly dogmatic ending, such as the preachy ones in many Hayao Miyazaki movies such as Princess Mononoke or Ponyo—basically “if you don’t respect Nature, Nature won’t respect you (and will always beat you).” Eventually, one must resign oneself to viewing the rest of the movie as a random mix of good ideas best comprehended without too much big-picture thinking.
The nice-to-have originality of the mosaic versus the de facto uniqueness of the medium-specific narrative. Unspecific versus specific work-level originality. Originality of linear versus non-linear progress. Diffuse originality.
The decomposition of a work into a mosaic of features emphasizes commonality with other works insofar as each feature is individually standard. For example, every time a music album is categorized as progressive rock, its uniqueness is lost within its commonality with all of progressive rock. It’s as if, inescapably, the features were automatically obsoleted by being named. This includes features that were at one point original, such as the shaky handycam technique of pseudo-documentaries à la Cannibal Holocaust or Blair Witch Project, which went from being an innovative technique to a red flag for films without fresh ideas. As a rule of thumb, if there is a name that can describe a feature, then it’s probably not original anymore: found footage, cut-up technique, stream of consciousness, minimalism, etc. are all examples of features that are now more marketing talk than anything else.
Originality itself, as a well-defined feature of the mosaic, is not original anymore. We lose grasp of originality as soon as we talk about it as a real thing. To avoid that, the description of content needs to be more and more specific, until the description becomes so specific that, in order to describe a band’s sound, one would rather use the band name, like “Porcupine Tree music” instead of “trance krautrock ambient psychedelic Third Wave progressive rock with a penchant for the Kosmische Musik scene of the early 1970s.” Reconstruction is the interpretation that bridges the gap from the opaque label “Porcupine Tree music” to the objective communication of content.
At the scale of the whole work, the cognitive filter imposed by the mosaic means that originality may only be described as emerging from a combination of features. Progressive rock is not original anymore, but if you throw krautrock music, ambient music, and psychedelic music into the mix, then a diffuse originality emerges, as opposed to a local originality, e.g., a James Bond movie where James Bond would be a girl.
Like originality, an overall appreciation also emerges diffusely from the mosaic, as if by accident, which is another way of saying that it is impossible to know why we like a particular mix, just like it is impossible to quantify originality at the scale of the mosaic. We can, quite accurately, pinpoint things we like, feature by feature, but we cannot directly extrapolate to a higher scale. For example, you might say that you liked a movie because it was smooth, fast-paced, with good acting, and yet you may happen to know another movie that was smooth, fast-paced, with good acting, but wasn’t for you.
The relation between originality and overall appreciation is real but quite redundant. You shouldn’t be fooled by critics praising original art as “giving a new direction.” The expression “giving new direction” is practically used as a synonym for “great,” and like value, originality is as directionless as ever. In fact, it is so directionless and subservient to overall appreciation that the latter decides if originality is necessary. That’s why people feel entitled to claim, using a precision language of value, that they know in which direction a work wants to go, following their belief in their ability to interpolate any missing details:
The “real difficulty” is a euphemism that he, Berlioz, can overcome. So, if the composer had wanted to be original, he couldn’t have, because people such as Berlioz know for them how their work should sound.
Theoretically, originality is not difficult to attain. But in practice, people always speak of a “good” originality. Most art is only original as a variation of a well-known formula and lets the audience decide for itself whether this was a good attempt or just a rip-off:
Being a rip-off depends on whether or not people liked the work. If the critics like it, they’ll just call it “borrowing” as in the quote above. Originality is a nice touch, but it is desirable only in works that people like. The consumer passively waits to be fed the right dosage of originality, if the artist cared to take risks.
In fact, a work shouldn’t be too original. The mosaic emphasizes linear progress within each feature. The features make progress independently, and even though the overall progress is diffuse, the progress made on every one of them is precise. So you can have a movie such as The Iron Lady, generally considered a bad movie, still earn the Academy Award for Best Actress. This linearity of achievement wouldn’t be possible if the work didn’t fit neatly into a mosaic.
But originality is fundamentally non-linear. The originality of a reconstruction is the whole medium-specific narrative itself. It is the unit of interpretation, with no piece to add or remove. One could liken it to a grammatical structure: in the “subject-verb-complement” structure, the concept of subject cannot be understood without the concept of verb, nor the concept of complement without the concept of verb. This is fundamentally different from the interpretation of the average value, where Meryl Streep’s good acting can be judged independently of the poor script of Iron Lady, and originality and progress can both be rated independently, even if that barely makes any sense. Imagine a numeric scale from 1 to 10. 10 means “100% original,” which can only be a lack in our language, since, by definition, a “100% original” work would certainly resist any attempt at stowing it in a category along with other “100% original” works.
So, while the mosaic seeks to express originality in terms of linear progress, it has a built-in bias. A good movie is usually viewed as the intersection of a good plot, good acting, good production, and, of course, good originality, but an original movie could conceivably be about none of these—or rather, these features would be secondary to a medium-specific narrative irreducible to a mosaic. Instead of being shoehorned into the generic throw-in structure of the mosaic, its originality would be the entire medium-specific narrative. The concepts of progress and originality are almost irrelevant here, in the sense that the narratives are so different from each other, not in the atomic details but in their molecular structure, and in the sense that there’s no possible linear path connecting one to the other. By analogy, DNA experts may refine their knowledge of the DNA and come up with as many cross-species similarity measures as they want, but those will never account for the qualitative difference between a wasp and a bear.
The non-linear perception of content can only be made through the consumer’s active participation, i.e., by solving the issue of active versus passive consumption. Active consumption is not in our habits. When the mosaic prevails in the cognitive process, any other medium-specific narrative is overshadowed by it and originality is only seen as a bonus within a well-known, time-tested template that maps out progress. Content creators know these recipes which the consumers are conditioned to gobble up. For detective whodunit stories, make the culprit more and more improbable: the detective, the narrator, all the passengers in a train, etc. The consumer likes to be surprised. For love stories, put lovers in difficult situations and make them likable. The consumer likes to cheer for love. For war stories, enhance the sense of realism. The consumer likes the triumph of friendship and moral values, especially when it’s a true story. For science fiction, go for time traveling, set the story in outer space, explore parallel universes, etc. Consumers like to take a nice little break from their daily routine.
A template is an invariant that may be used to categorize a work of art. For example, the plot of a book is a template—e.g., princess gets into trouble, prince rescues her, happy ending. The structure of a song, such as verse/chorus/interlude, is another template.
Although they may only live in our heads, we are so used to templates that we don’t ever consider the possiblity of a life without them. The changing details of the implementations of the template, i.e., the originality of the implementations, are cosmetic, or a gimmick. Their relevance to the whole work can be described as diffuse at best, and contrasts the precision of the template. If one takes a plot as a template, such as colonial conflict, whether the colonized are amerindian or the Na’vi in James Cameron’s Avatar can be be viewed as a cosmetic detail. The detail colors the invariant—ironically, that’s literally what James Cameron did when he gave the Na’vi their signature blue color.
Even though the template is seed to a theoretically infinite number of implementations, there is only so much a writer can do with the “colonizers” and “autochtones” variables without the template feeling overdone. The colonizers can be German, and the autochtones French. The colonizers can be human and the autochtones animal, or conversely, the colonizers animal and the autochtones human. The colonizers extraterrestrial beings and the autochtones human. As the script writer, the choice as to which one would be better is a vague intuition whose success can only be assessed a posteriori: ultimately it’s the consumer who decides whether the originality was successful, not some secret formula allowing to calculate the perfect colonizers and the perfect autochtones, because no such perfection can be absolute and objective.
But what if the problem was not to define who the colonizers and the autochtones will be, but the template itself? The choice to scrap the template itself would necessarily be based on a value judgment, so nobody could recommend it on objective grounds. The only possible argument for it is actually trivial, but surprisingly effective: being bored, and the simple need to move on. As the interpretation of the medium-specific narrative leads to the increased awareness of mosaics and templates, and exposure to the same template increases, boredom is the natural outcome, leading simultaneously to both the depreciation of the diffuse originality of the mosaic as a limited form of originality, and the depreciation of linear progress as a limited form of progress.
The gap between linear progress and non-linear progress is the same as between sprinting in a straight line and running plays in a collective sport. In a sprinting world record, the achievement is as interesting as the underlying achievement of moving limbs faster, or just fast enough to gain a few milliseconds. Of course, some specialists will want you to believe that there is real interesting footwork and preparation involved—even for a naturally gifted athlete like Usain Bolt, although, according to other specialists, his footwork is at best awkward and sub-optimal. But we could simply quote Marx. Like tailoring and weaving, running and the complex footwork involved are the “productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labour.” In other words, and to be honest and stop being pedantic about it, the most interesting thing about track and field competition is how much faster one can expend all this confusing mishmash of brains, nerves and muscles.
As to the limited form of originality, there is no prescription for value judgments. It is only a matter of being bored and not caring anymore whether the story of camaraderie is against the backdrop of a volcanic eruption, World War I/II/III/Z, epidemics, zombies, invasion from outer space, inundation, conspiracies, chess competition, etc. Whether the love story happens between high school sweethearts, between a housewife and a soldier sent to the front, between a man and his homosexual partner with AIDS, between political exiles, between a girl and a zombie, between a businessman and a prostitute, etc.
The wear-down of passive consumption
The unspecific effects of passive consumption create an impact that fades gradually. It never feels the same way after the first time. The most common tactics to deal with fading effects is to rotate consumables in order to keep things fresh. The more unspecific the effect, the more disposable and interchangeable the consumable. Passive consumption breeds passive consumption: it wastes waste-prone art, and just like capitalistic production, the reproduction process is best achieved by recycling the waste.
Unspecific effects are typically of an emotional nature. But after a while, emotions wear thin. One becomes desensitized to horror and violence, unmoved by the latest betrayal, unimpressed by the last formidable hurrah of the dying villain. It doesn’t matter anymore whether horror involves zombies or ghosts, whether the hero is a woman, dog or dolphin, whether the villain is human, animal, natural, technological, ectoplasmic or Nazi. In fact, even happiness is not safe from a need for a change, for even happiness becomes boring, the same way sunshine does after a while and makes you long for snow-clad lands.
Of course, the market for unhappiness has long been cornered: tragic news, crime literature, dark music, horror, Halloween. But these products are only a temporary solution to the constant need for change. For some, routine life may be tolerable because it moves on from one activity of the cycle to the next—eat, work, sleep. For others, there is a need to move on from the routine itself, and one senses that it is indeed always possible, even if cruel: for the eternally bored, bored from moving on, bored from boredom, there is always the possibility to move on from life.
But change, whether originality or progress, has long been figured out by the art industry. Originality is nicely contained so as to not detract too much from proven templates. Here the devil is in the detail, and people have been trained to look for it, to the point where any feature of the mosaic can become an independent achievement. So in a biopic, a small detail, like whether the role of the main character at different ages is held by the same actor, can actually be all the critics care about. In fact, a good way to win an Academy Award is to play a character who undergoes significant physical changes during the film (Raging Bull, La Vie en Rose, The Reader). Marion Cotillard’s transformation in La Vie en Rose earned her an Academy Award, but would that film be any lesser had the role of an aging Edith Piaf been flawlessly enacted by another more elderly actress for exactly the same on-screen result? The focus on such peculiar achievements is a far cry from Lawrence Weiner’s Declaration of Intent which stipulates that the artist doesn’t even need to materialize their artistic vision:
- The artist may construct the piece.
- The piece may be fabricated.
- The piece need not be built.
But as long as the art recycling process keeps consumption fresh, how could the consumer’s infatuation for piquing details be an inconvenience? I call this the problem of poor riches.
Capitalist and communist lifestyles. The problem of poor riches
In the context of Marx’s reproduction of capital, a typical Western lifestyle is divided into reproducing wage earnings during the day, and reproducing enjoyment during the night—afterwork distractions, light entertainment before going to bed. Work is serious, while art (as entertainment) is a hobby. In such a compartmentalized lifestyle, the demands on self-investment are highest at work, and lowest on the consumption of art and entertainment. Even if the consumer wanted to, they couldn’t surpass passive consumption because it would just be too mentally taxing. In that sense and that sense only, passive consumption can be seen as the byproduct of a capitalist lifestyle.
But Marx’s dichotomy of capitalism versus non-capitalism doesn’t really address the subject of passive consumption. His dichotomy opposes, on the one hand, the constant reproduction of life-long labor, and, on the other hand, the “end goal” of consumption. But consumption can also be a reproductive process with as much end goal as life-long labor.
For Marx, a product, before becoming a token of exchange in the capitalist cycle of production and accumulation, is made for consumption, hence the opposition between its use-value and its exchange-value. The product may be food, physical or “spiritual activity” (geistige Tätigkeit), which would presumably include art. In Marx’s dichotomy, consumption annihilates food and takes it out of the market. In this regard, it is anti-reproductive. But Marx himself notes that consumption serves the reproduction of capitalism, i.e., capitalist exploitation: food is not only consumed, but also transformed into labor power which in turn enters the market as an exchangeable commodity.
As self-reproductive as the capitalist accumulation of wealth is, so is consumption. But this is only a negative for Marx, insofar as consumption is reproduced as part of the reproduction of the capital:
Marx defines the capitalist not economically, but rather as a mindset bent on producing exchange-value (money) rather than use-value (consumption):
As the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns. The expansion of value, which is the objective basis or main-spring of the circulation M-C-M, becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at. This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. The never-ending augmentation of exchange-value, which the miser strives after, by seeking to save his money from circulation, is attained by the more acute capitalist, by constantly throwing it afresh into circulation.
❞However, the same way one can greedily seek surplus-value in the form of money, one can greedily seek surplus in the form of commodities: shinier and faster cars, bigger houses, higher-definition TVs, etc. The distinction between money and commodity, between exchange-value and use-value, between capitalism and non-capitalism, collapses through the prism of linear progress. What is at stake here is not a choice between exchange-value and use-value, but a choice to produce and consume more or less, more liberally or with a sense of decency and respect for the environment, etc. This choice is not only an issue for the capitalist, but also for the laborer:
What Marx fails to mention here is that the cheapening is two-way. It cheapens the laborer’s production, but also cheapens the laborer’s consumption to the laborer’s benefit.
But reducing everything to labor time, and indirectly, long life (which Marx uses as a measure of success) creates issues of linear progress—work less, earn more—that hides an issue with linear progress itself. It is as follows: would a long life be worth living if all one could ever expect out of it is a great amount of money, a lovely house, a very comfortable low-consumption car, great meals every day, everything staying the same until death? It is common wisdom that it is actually very difficult to enjoy the same great thing over and over, and that the laborer’s problem is not from being cheapened, but, on the contrary, from dedicating an entire life to increasing their net worth. And yet, the life-long monotony that screams capitalism is, in some aspects, less monotonous than primitive organizations of labor. In fact, Marx argues for the appropriation of “fully developed” versatility—which modern industry demands of the laborer—by the laborers themselves:
One step already spontaneously taken towards effecting this revolution is the establishment of technical and agricultural schools, and of “écoles d’enseignement professionnel,” in which the children of the working-men receive some little instruction in technology and in the practical handling of the various implements of labour. Though the Factory Act, that first and meagre concession wrung from capital, is limited to combining elementary education with work in the factory, there can be no doubt that when the working-class comes into power, as inevitably it must, technical instruction, both theoretical and practical, will take its proper place in the working-class schools.
❞In arguing so, Marx emphasizes not so much the cheapening of the laborer, but the nature of labor itself, the “life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation” that transcends the various modes of production. In fact, it could be argued that one merit of capitalism was to incrementally free mankind from trivial labor, which could be thought of as growing pains. It is obvious that trivial forms of labor that keep children busy at work and grown-ups on the street must be automated for the sake of being more productive and more competitive.
But versatility at work isn’t the only thing that the laborers take away from capitalism. They also take away its linear values. Both capitalism and non-capitalism agree on the value of riches. Marx’s discourse only emphasizes the distribution of those riches among social classes. Marx’s reliance on the average lifetime as a measure of social inequality is just one more example of quantity (linearity) over quality. Schopenhauer wrote that the genius is a late bloomer in their thirties, but I’d rather be a genius at 15 than live the normal average dull life of a laborer—to pun on Monty Python’s The Dull Life of a City Stockbroker.
That the richest are not that rich is the problem that undermines the Marxist discourse of just retribution. In a non-capitalist society, the laborer might get richer, but they would still toil away toward producing more and more surplus-value as an end-goal.
Instead of filling the pockets of the capitalist, production fills the pockets of the laborers. In the guessing game of who-gets-more, it is easy to lose oneself in the fallacies of number semantics. Take, for example, this analysis of the rate of surplus-value:
One and the same ratio is here expressed as a ratio of labor-times, of the values in which those labor-times are embodied, and of the products in which those values exist. It is of course understood that, by “Value of the Product,” is meant only the value newly created in a working-day, the constant part of the value of the product being excluded.
In all of these formulae (II.), the actual degree of exploitation of labor, or the rate of surplus-value, is falsely expressed. Let the working-day be 12 hours. Then, making the same assumptions as in former instances, the real degree of exploitation of labor will be represented in the following proportions. (6 hours surplus-labor / 6 hours necessary labor) = (Surplus-value of 3 sh. / Variable Capital of 3 sh.) = 100%
From formulae II. we get very differently, (6 hours surplus-labor / Working-day of 12 hours) = (Surplus-value of 3 sh. / Value created of 6 sh.) = 50%
These derivative formulae express, in reality, only the proportion in which the working-day, or the value produced by it, is divided between capitalist and laborer. If they are to be treated as direct expressions of the degree of self-expansion of capital, the following erroneous law would hold good: Surplus-labor or surplus-value can never reach 100%. Since the surplus-labor is only an aliquot part of the working-day, or since surplus-value is only an aliquot part of the value created, the surplus-labor must necessarily be always less than the working-day, or the surplus-value always less than the total value created. In order, however, to attain the ratio of 100:100 they must be equal. In order that the surplus-labor may absorb the whole day (i.e., an average day of any week or year), the necessary labor must sink to zero. But if the necessary labor vanish, so too does the surplus-labor, since it is only a function of the former. The ratio
(Surplus-labor / Working-day) or (Surplus-value / Value created) can therefore never reach the limit 100/100, still less rise to 100 + x/100. But not so the rate of surplus-value, the real degree of exploitation of labor. ❞The 50% resulting from formulae (II.) refer to the same situation as the 100% of the “real degree of exploitation of labor,” and both could be summarized as “an awful lot of exploitation.” No mathematical law says that 50% is little, except maybe if one thinks that 50% of 10 pounds is the same as 50% of 10 thousand pounds. Marx’s arguing that the “real” degree of exploitation must be able to reach the symbolic 100% certainly has fetishistic overtones to it.
While Marx equates the difference between reproduction and consumption with the difference between exchange-value and use-value, the linearization of value is a phenomenon that affects both exchange-value and use-value. In the following quote, Marx sees the market as a savage display of price wars and races for the cheapening of production and labor:
But this view of competition completely disregards non-linear values. Although innovation is marketed as a linear quantity, its linearization cannot account for the intangibles that don’t factor into the linear equations of pricing, production costs and surplus production. Marx’s analysis, based on pricing and production costs, assumes linearly comparable products in competition, and overlooks the moments in life which he talks away as the spiritual activity (geistige Tätigkeit), which would include the thought that went into products and works of art.
For Marx, the reproduction of capital is not a problem unless it is capitalist. I would argue that reproduction of the same food for consumption is not a problem unless it is food for thought. The promise of the linear values of what one might call the artistic bourgeoisie is as flat as the delivery of the sex scenes in David Cronenberg’s Crash if that movie’s characters were to seek sexual satisfaction in more and more expensive car crashes. To overcome the artificial barriers of linear progress and nice-to-have originality, it will take a much more radical polemic than whether workers were better off sewing by hand rather than pushing buttons on a sewing machine.
On the choice of reconstruction as anti-hedonistic and anti-progress
The danger of making something look good is making other things look bad.
By its very nature, a medium-specific narrative is cohesive and its moving pieces are essential to the semantics of the whole. By contrast, the additive nature of the mosaic of the average value means that each feature of the mosaic can be added or removed more or less independently. The mosaic becomes richer and deeper as the effect of adding features to it, but it also means that each individual feature is secondary to the mosaic (like one strain of a rope, or one employee of a multinational corporation), and even more secondary to the medium-specific narrative. As a feature of the mosaic, originality itself is unessential, and has pretty much become merely cosmetic and gimmicky. Because of the wholesale nature of the mosaic, the mosaic itself can seem gross and superfluous with respect to a reconstruction.
So, for example, a touching movie like Kramer vs. Kramer, which, from a simple and predictable narrative, builds up its characters realistically and makes the viewers care for them, can now look pretty bad when viewed in light of its reconstruction. So much for the hedonistic claims of interpretation choice. But reconstruction doesn’t, strictly speaking, make the work itself suddenly look bad. It only makes the mosaic in itself look bad. When the viewer relies on a mosaic of conjectures that make the viewing emotional and a good pastime, the content targeted by interpretation has partly shifted due to those conjectures: it is no longer the same as the content targeted by pure reconstruction. In this sense, both styles of interpretation objectively address different contents. They are complementary rather than opposing each other in the sense of one side being right and the other side wrong.
A hedonist’s criticism of reconstruction would argue that pure referentiality puts a ceiling on interpretation, since it frames interpretation as a strict reference to medium-specific content. Referentiality does lack in quantity when compared to the extensive mosaic. From a hedonist’s standpoint, the bottom line of the interpretation of the average value is that one enjoys more with more, as in “more style,” “more culture,” “more context,” “more points of view.” But the choice of interpretation conditions the type of enjoyment rather than the intensity of enjoyment. One can regard the choice in terms of focus: one can only focus so much on a given point without losing focus elsewhere. Each focal point represents its own type of enjoyment, which can be more or less intensified, more or less renewed. Saying that a particular mode of interpretation makes one enjoy art more is therefore misleading. Additionally, enjoyment at each focal point doesn’t increase linearly. In an art review, the critic cannot keep on heaping cultural reference upon cultural reference and expect the review to become more and more interesting and enjoyable, as demonstrated by the inconsequential conjecture stress-test. There is always going to be a saturation point of diminishing returns, where the cultural references begin to blend into a chaotic mosaic. In Travels in Hyper-reality, Umberto Eco says of the movie Casablanca, “when all the archetypes burst out shamelessly we plumb Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking amongst themselves, celebrating a reunion.” In Eco’s view, it is unnecessary to be aware of what each cliché is. It is just necessary to know enough of them that, by positioning the film within a long cinematic tradition, they create for the viewer what Eco calls a “cosiness” that has the diffuse quality of a mosaic.
For a large part, the resistance to an evolution of interpretation is the fear of losing an enjoyable habit. But this fear is essentially baseless. Part of it is grounded in the intuition of the fleeting nature of hype and taste, and the artificiality of taste reinforced by crowd hype and crowd beliefs (“wanting to like” is a very modern thing to do). The fear of acknowledging the volatility of taste is akin to the fear of waking up from a pleasant dream. But if, indeed, there was a risk of devaluing a paradigm of enjoyment, wouldn’t that devaluation be somewhat grounded in the objectivity of reconstruction? How can one regret something they recognized they had to accept? It’s like people fearing of dying young, citing regrets of missing out on life. But when you die, you can’t have regrets, because you’re dead.
In conceptual reconstructionism, the fear of losing something is replaced with curiosity or a boldness to experiment. If the narrative is a path, the interpretation of the average value focuses on improving the same beaten path (multi-linear progress). Reconstruction, on the other hand, focuses on acknowledging the path as a template to many similar paths, thereby accelerating the simultaneous depreciation of all these paths, while stimulating the need to experiment with altogether different paths (non-linear progress).
Reconstructionist ecosystem
Role segregation and its prejudices
An ecosystem of artists, consumers, critics, and consumers of critiques is regulated by interpretation standards. The consumers tend to follow the critics. The artists tend to follow the critics and the consumers. Theoretically, this is a win-win situation. But when the interpretation of the average value is the standard, communication between the different roles is only superficial. Critics hold opinions, for which they can’t really be held accountable, since value judgment basically operates from an argument from authority, even under the cover of technology:
Unfortunately for the technologists, software has to be coded and calibrated by a human. And following in its steps like an ominous shadow, in addition to the critic-turned-programmer’s judgment being subjective and arbitrary, is the question “What should a ‘100% happy’ face look like?” Should it be a laughing face? A composed face with a glow to it, hinting at an intense inner contentment? There could be sloppy algorithms and bugs behind that “83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful, 2% angry, less than 1% neutral, and 0%” result, but we are basically asked to just accept it on faith. In fact, to be exact, we’re asked to agree with a mostly non-technological opinion. What do you think would happen if the computer first told the software developer that Mona Lisa was 50% disgusted, 50% fearful? Of course, they would change the code or the data to reach more agreeable proportions. There’s nothing technological in this tweaking. Even machine learning cannot avoid crucial human intervention, since the machines must be trained with human-curated data.
The opacity of value-based interpretation has global implications on the art ecosystem. A critic’s judgment may be deemed authoritative, intelligent, reasonable, even true, based not on the content of their critiques, but on satellite evidence such as writing style, popularity, academic achievements, medium of publication, or simply good taste. Since the only critiques available to artists address content in nothing more than the generic terms of the mosaic, artists have little to build on, and so they do their thing more or less blindly, but still hoping for a good reception. As for the consumers, they are mostly lifestyle consumers, i.e., passive consumers: moviegoer, music-on-the-go jogger, bookworm, etc.
In other words, value-based interpretation encourages a rigid segregation of roles:
- The artists are the active ones. They’re geniuses, performers, who worked hard to hone their skills. They do things that cannot be duplicated by the common mortals. The best ones are starified. But for all their genius, artists have to be humble enough not to review their own work—that would be like a return to despotism. This is the critics’ job.
- Consumers are the passive ones. They can’t competently talk of art unless they are trained—with a degree in art school or something—or established artists. They may defend their tastes but almost always in a passive-aggressive way (their main argument is “to each their own”), as they’re quite aware that they don’t speak from a position of authority. Even though artists are also consumers, it is generally assumed that a consumer is not an artist and has a long way to go before becoming one. That’s why a freely donated critique can be expected to be met with a sharp reply such as: “If it is like what you say, then why don’t you do it?” The question implies that they can’t, so they should shut up.
- Art critics separate themselves from the masses as figures of authority. Their essays are published. They award prizes. If they say to the artist that their work sucks, the artist has to humbly accept it.
Now take the equation Modern Academic Art = 10% Artwork 90% Artspeak:
- it is a subjective way of saying what amounts to, “I like this particular quality in the picture.” In very longwinded prose. (I l-l-like it)
- it proposes esoteric theories around unrelated subjects for example the fourth dimension, quantum mechanics, sociological stuff and psycho-babble. (profound theory)
- it deals with pedantic comparative stuff. The best example is found in five-pound Mondrian books which spend time talking about how he could have influenced Vermeer. (pedantic)
- it often contains descriptions for the blind. (for the blind) ❞
The previous quote actually applies to all kinds of critics, including any random commentator, not just the Roger Eberts of the world. Not only that, but the separation between critic and artist is only a consequence of the interpretation of the average value—a style of interpretation that poses artificial communication barriers. Critics are the critics only because it is effectively impossible to challenge a subjective opinion, and you just have to take their word for it.
In the context of reconstruction and therefore active consumption, interpretation and consumption are similar to creation in terms of the intellectual faculties involved: attention span, memory, objective observation of content. The divide between creative faculty and interpretive faculty becomes purely academic.
Indeed it turns out, in the end, that what this method does is simply free us from all method. The more we learn to use this method, the more we find that what it does is not so much to teach us processes we did not know before, but rather opens up a process in us, which was part of us already. […]
But as things are, we have so far beset ourselves with rules, and concepts, and ideas of what must be done to make a building or a town alive, that we have become afraid of what will happen naturally, and convinced that we must work within a “system” and with “methods” since without them our surroundings will come tumbling down in chaos.
❞The art world is filled with prejudices based on role segregation. All can be traced to the interpretation of the average value. What follows is a list of prejudices which the reader is very likely to be familiar with.
“Art cannot be explained”
Unless this prejudice says that any manner of art cannot be explained—e.g., art designed to sell something—it actually means: “True Art cannot be explained” (True Art Is Incomprehensible at tvtropes.org), which is a spin on the magic debate on “true Art.” Consequently, any explanation of what Art is can be expected to be met skeptically, sometimes defiantly, as a form of territorialism: “this is true Art, there is nothing to explain, because no one can.” Since the definition of true Art is completely up to anyone, the debate cannot be resolved.
If explanation was not about explaining value but rather reconstructing a medium-specific narrative, it wouldn’t just obsolete the broken communication between some person trying to explain art and another saying no one can do that. It would also obsolete the superficial (dis)agreements between two people debating whether a work is great. More importantly, it would obsolete the belief that one cannot objectively speak of art in any explanatory way. It would shift the focus to content and away from magic debates. Friction between intellectualized and spontaneous consumption would also vanish: if the content is objective, it doesn’t matter how spontaneous the consumption is, because only the actual content matters. No method of consumption or interpretation would be at an advantage. For example, a person with photographic memory who can read entire pages almost instantaneously gains no advantage in terms of objective content. They are just faster at getting it. (The ability to gobble up more details more quickly is actually characteristic of instant consumption and the interpretation of the average value, as the numerous details add up to an indiscriminate mosaic of details.) And a highly erudite critic gains nothing from their considerable knowledge.
“Art cannot be put into words”
“Art cannot be put into words,” if by art we mean feelings and tastes. It also holds if by “putting into words” we mean expliciting the sort of metaphysics which made Derrida write:
The pure referentiality of reconstruction is just the opposite: it says that one can always put art into words, as long as it’s content that can be objectively communicated through pure references (i.e., medium-specific). Even when vocabulary is lacking, it is always technically possible to communicate through pure references. For example, if there is no name for a motif occurring at a certain point in a song, a timestamp will allow the reader to locate the motif just fine.
“Your analysis is only a paraphrase, so we don’t need it”
If by “analysis” one means “description for the blind,” then sure, we don’t need it (unless you’re literally blind).
If by “analysis” one means reconstruction, then sure, a purely referential description is a paraphrase. Actually it is a perfect paraphrase, even more so than a description for the blind, because it even captures the narrative dimension of the medium. The choice of what to paraphrase however is non-trivial. In a sense, we don’t need it because the medium-specific content is there for the taking, but we are so accustomed to looking for a million other distractions that we forget medium-specific content easily. In that sense, paraphrasing is not mere duplication of content, but a reversal of interpretive trends. As value-based culture declines, we may not need reconstruction anymore, but until then, we’ll need it in order to raise the collective awareness of interpretation choices.
“Art is subjective, it cannot be communicated”
Yes, but only under the interpretation of the average value, when art is interpreted in terms of value, feelings, emotions, and so on.
“The real test for art is whether people like it. It does not require any flattering Artspeak”
The expression “the real test” immediately reveals a magic debate—i.e., the semantics of “real” versus non-“real” is anyone’s guess, really, but one thing is sure: the semantics are value-based. “Whether people like it” is indeed the bottom-line of value-based interpretation. In reconstruction, whether people learned something that is not a linear variation or a permutation of known art would be a type of “real test” that doesn’t require value judgments.
Declaration of intent. Fusion of the social roles. Social elitism versus de facto elitism. On critic corruption as an aspect of value-based ecosystems
Reconstruction reshapes the art ecosystem by addressing the lack of transparency in value-based communication, including self-communication. Its declaration of intent is as follows:
- Enable the artist to see the templates of their work, and leverage that knowledge to progress. Few artists have a clear conscience of a certain redundancy in their work, let alone the desire to get away from it. Fewer feel the built-in limitations of linear progress within the boundaries of templates, and instead get engrossed in the promises of linear progress. Through reconstruction, the artist becomes their own critic in a constructive manner that contrasts the opacity of value judgments (from critics or themselves).
- Enable the consumer to get an objective, yet non-technical handle on content—effectively realizing some of their artistic potential. An awareness of medium-specific narratives implies an understanding of non-linearity freed from the inferiority complex of linear values: a work is not genius and above other works, it is at most surprising and original in a neutral, non-judgmental sense. It is not valued anymore for being an aesthetic achievement with an undefinable sublime quality. Instead, everything in the medium-specific narrative is objectively referenced and has a constructive quality conducive to creation.
- Enable the critic to reconstruct their methodology and reconsider their use of the mosaic as a universalist form of interpretation. Through reconstruction, the critic communicates more constructively than through value judgments, helping achieve point 1. By moving from the interpretation of the average value to reconstruction, both critic and artist operate at the same level, and the artist is freed from the complex of wanting to please a crowd with arbitrary tastes. This implies that the critic loses some of their privileges as distinguished authorities, but in return, the critic is freed from the burden of repeating the mosaic again and again.
The declaration of intent makes clear that roles can overlap, not so much from a social status standpoint as from an activity standpoint. Reconstruction bridges interpretation and creation. One who reconstructs a work into a template—either as a professional critic or as an active consumer—knows de facto how to create other works, either in accordance or in contrast to this template. The act of looking for some medium-specific narrative in someone else’s work is similar in terms of intellectual faculties involved to the act of creating a medium-specific narrative. In other words, both the critic and the active consumer meet the artist in the apprehension of the medium-specific narrative. The only difference is that the act of interpretation builds on external stimuli while the act of creation builds on endogenous material including the memory of medium-specific narratives.
In the interpretation of the average value, neither the consumer nor the critic realize their potential as artists so directly. They may certainly be inspired to real-life achievements—e.g., doing community services after watching Ikiru, enrolling into the U.S. Army after watching From Here to Eternity, or becoming professional artists after feeling in awe of great art—but the new aspiration almost accidentally follows from interpretation, and never in terms that are objectively constructive to content creation. In the public opinion, there is a clear distinction between a “real-life achievement” and “thinking as an artist.” In fact, there is a stigma attached to being an “armchair” artist (for example, a layman with an art concept in mind): it is never taken seriously unless you take it up as a real job. That’s why “becoming an artist” is like realizing a childhood dream of getting any dream job, only to discover that it was very different from what you had in mind. Becoming president of a country isn’t just being at the top of the world as children and many adults believe. Presidential candidates have to sell dreams, tell lies, turn a blind eye to corruption in order to raise campaign money and secure lobbying support, and probably worse. Then, when they do become presidents, they have to face constant public scrutiny, worry about popularity polls, struggle to pass promised reforms, bend to the demands of the true holders of power (the people with money and political influence), etc. As for the job of artist, the need to cope with public demand and expectation, the pressure to succeed and get the next contract, trying to make a living, etc., can easily put an unexpected burden on the naive aspiring artist. In this view, there is no place for the bedroom artist, let alone for the artist as someone who mentally reconstructs the art of others. Commoners are supposed to leave to the artist the privilege to live the high life, but this has nothing to do with art. As Bruce Dickinson allegedly declared: « I don’t understand these kids auditioning for X-Factor claiming they “just wanna make music.” Cut the Crap! Let me introduce you to the kid teaching himself how to play guitar, the busker in the train station, the guys and girls recording their own demos and playing the small venues, the unpublished songwriter with countless books full of lyrics, the people who just want to be heard, who want to express themselves, their creativity and their artistic worth. They are the ones who just want to make music! They are the real artists! Anybody auditions for X-Factor it’s because they want to be famous. Period! Otherwise they’d already be out there “making music.” »
Another accepted view is that artists should leave the task of interpreting their work to the critics. But the critics’ authority-based opinions leave little for the artist to build on. By this, I mean: what is a recording artist to think if, say, one critic says their album is too sophisticated, while another says it is unconventional in a good way? How do you build on that? On the other hand, in consciously creating medium-specific narratives, the artist is basically a critic reconstructing their own work. If they are consciously avoiding the duplication of existing medium-specific narratives—in other words, reinventing the wheel—they, as critics, do this by reconstructing the works of other artists as well, and using those reconstructions as a thing of the past which they then avoid to duplicate in their own work.
The role segregation is elitist in a way that stays true to instant consumption and linear progress: the crowd should not be able to easily accede to the elite, and yet they should be able to instantly recognize elite superiority. Hence the cult of the performer mastering a high degree of relative technical difficulty (virtuoso singers, guitar heroes, child/female/minority prodigies, etc.) to the detriment of creation, and the reason why the American national anthem has to be belted out by Whitney Houston clones. Everybody can instantly rate, after a little conditioning, technical mastery, which is why audiences tend to clap and cheer at the same time. But interpreting a medium-specific narrative is mental work unique to this medium-specific narrative, and practically useless for elitist purposes.
The fact that reconstruction unifies social roles doesn’t, however, preclude all forms of elitism. It brings its own brand of elitism, between those who reconstruct and those who don’t, in the sense that those who reconstruct have a form of advantage: they see a bigger picture and are more focused on non-trivial matters—in particular, they have outgrown the need for battles of opinions. But contrary to the social elitism we’re used to, it is a trivial elitism: one belongs de facto to the reconstructionist ecosystem as soon as one puts the effort into interpreting medium-specific narratives. The entry and maintenance costs to the reconstructionist ecosystem are high, yet trivial to fulfill. It doesn’t require any diploma or social rank. Of all the interpretation methods, the interpretation of the medium-specific narrative is actually the least demanding in terms of education. In fact, it can be seen as a voluntary regression from erudite forms of interpretation. Sure, a reconstruction can be difficult to read. But the difficulty is not imputable to the interpretation per se, but rather to the special notation and the novelties of the concept (for example, pure referentiality), and even that difficulty is not a fatal flaw that cannot be minimized.
In the traditional ecosystem, entry cost is defined by society. You are supposed to meet special criteria to be among the elite, either as an artist or as a critic. On the other hand, being a consumer costs nothing: anybody can enjoy instant entertainment. The maintenance cost for all roles is low. A well-regarded critic begins their career low on the social ladder. Once they’re on top, they stay there with little effort, independently of their actual writing. Other factors such as seniority are much more important to social status than the actual writing. That’s why corruption—e.g., sponsored critics—can function: since the critique is less about their actual content than about authority of opinion, society actually gives the critic the opportunity to be biased and corrupted, because value judgments, and therefore critic bias, are unassailable on logical grounds. In fact, even if you have established proof of corruption through outside sources, the critic may always argue they truly believe in what they wrote. There’s no disproving such a thing.
Consumer economics in a chaotic market of novelties. Lassitude versus social standards as the criterion of choice. The non-triviality of not repeating oneself as an artist
What would happen to the market of art if the interpretation of the average value—along with its conveniences including reviews, product categorization, and ratings—was a thing of the past? How would the consumer make their next purchase in what would essentially amount to a chaotic market of novelties? In a non-linear view of the market, in the absence of product rankings, the consumer can only hope to avoid the lassitude of redundant consumption. This is simple economics: life is finite, and the last thing anyone wants is to listen to Metallica’s Reload after listening to Metallica’s Load. In practice, non-redundancy is not enough to narrow down a choice. A mosaic of criteria, including the artist’s track record and taste, would have to be involved. Some non-linear perspective on the market could, however, disrupt the patterns of consumption enough to widen the choice beyond the convenient but mostly harmless trade-off between sure value and nice-to-have originality.
Non-redundant consumption is already something that consumers pursue, but the concept of non-redundancy is more lenient in the interpretation of the average value than in the interpretation of the medium-specific narrative. In the former, aesthetic variations of the same medium-specific narrative can be passed off as non-redundant, even original—e.g., the Cubist or Impressionist reproduction of some famous Baroque-era painting. As hinted by the wear-down of passive consumption, non-redundancy in passive consumption is just enough to encourage mass consumption: the consumer tires of redundant consumption, but the next product is just non-redundant enough to get the wheel of consumption going again. The consumer shuffles through high-quality works aimlessly, like the owner of a digital music player through their multi-gigabyte music library.
Calling progress a work that is just different in a non-linear sense sounds overboard. Wouldn’t that be too easy? The artist would just need to make sure their work doesn’t look too similar to any other, not having a care for the production values, the technical perfection, the aesthetical identity, or the opinions of anyone. That would still qualify as progress!
But as it turns out, it’s not as easy as randomization. The interpretation of the medium-narrative discourages the artist against recycling the same templates, and doing something random—e.g., filling a canvas with random strokes—is a template that wouldn’t necessarily qualify as non-linear progress. The first homogeneous mess—think Jackson Pollock—may be received as original, but if many works end up a homogeneous mess, then they will probably be perceived as repetitions of the same homogeneous mess. For example, there is nothing more similar to a random series of numbers than another random series of numbers.
The creation of different medium-specific narratives is not about changing a few variables, or adding to existing medium-specific narratives. Let’s consider the reconstruction of a classic story:
« The is kidnapped by the . The kills the and rescues the in the dungeon. The and the both happily live ever after. »
The reconstruction stays formally the same if variables are changed to new values. The , the , the , and all other articulation points of the narrative (not necessarily with markup) could really be X, Y, Z and so on, as far as the medium-specific narrative is concerned:
« The is kidnapped . The kills and rescues the in the castle. The finds a loving home for the . »
Adding pieces doesn’t necessarily change medium-specific narratives as much as one could hope. Consider this change (additions in bold):
« The is kidnapped by the . The kills the and rescues the in the dungeon. Outside, they are stopped by the . The ’ brother sacrifices himself in order to kill the . The and the bury him. They both happily live ever after. »
The change only modifies the original structure tangentially. It modifies it in meaning (the ending is more bittersweet), and globally speaking, the narrative feels diffusely different. Structurally, the additions (in bold) create a mosaic that’s recognizable in the fact that they could be removed without affecting the structural integrity of the pieces around them.
For a change to impact the medium-specific narrative more deeply, it has to involve narrative references that will be reflected in the structure of the reconstruction. It’s not the addition of markup (e.g., just adding to ) that’s probative, but how narratively involved the new markup is.
« The is kidnapped by the . The kills the , seals the in a ring and rescues the in the dungeon. The gives the ring to the , and both can happily live as long as the burns inside the ring. »
Socio-cultural consequences of a reconstructionist society
Twilight of truth
If reconstruction teaches anything at all regarding truth, it is that narratives have as much, if not more, impact than truth itself. The reason is that truth is not always the most important property of a statement, let alone the only important property. A single statement is only as meaningful as the enclosing narratives will allow. More often than not, the context leading to the statement and its consequences or lack thereof—in other words, its enclosing narrative—ultimately determine not only the meaning, but the meaningfulness of its truth.
Truth (or rather plausibility) is always going to be a focal point of our reasoning, but through reconstruction of truth-telling patterns we can recognize the psychology of truth as a limiting though necessary factor of our reasoning about facts. Many truth-telling patterns are misdirections. As such, they are akin to magic performances: the magician makes balls appear or switch places inside cups, and while the audience stares in amazement at the reveals, the magician takes advantage of their letting their guard down to load the cups with even bigger props. For example:
- Uncritically accepting possible implications of a true fact. For example, in a driver training course, one may hear that “40% of all accidents are caused by alcohol consumption” which obviously implies that one should not drive while drunk. Although the numbers may be true, the suggested implication doesn’t follow from the numbers. Less than 1% of all accidents involve a pink car. Should everybody drive a pink car, then? In Pulp fiction, an enforcer miraculously survives a surprise gunfire at almost point-blank range. He interprets this event as God’s warning to retire and live a peaceful life, because it couldn’t be just luck. His reasoning suggests that everything hinges on the all-important question of whether this was just luck. But even assuming it wasn’t and it was God’s design, maybe God was only trying to warn the enforcer to buy a good bullet-proof vest. The offered implication that God wants the guy to retire is therefore totally arbitrary, regardless of the truth of the “divine intervention” premise. But how many viewers actually saw that?
- Paying attention to the truth of statements, but not to the narrative. Politicians and attorneys make a living out of jumping from one statement to another to draw attention away from sensible points, never answering questions directly. For example, O.J. Simpson’s attorneys built their entire defense around the racist past of one of the leading investigators to divert attention away from the evidence. Their statements may be individually true, but the manner in which they don’t address the critical evidence is arguably the main takeaway of the trial.
- Paying more attention to truth than to the assumptions that contribute to its importance. Man-made global warming is a good example. There is actually more to this concept than truth; there is also an element of self-importance and hubris hidden in there, since even without the intervention of man, Earth was going to get warmer or colder anyway, and I highly doubt that would get as much publicity. Now, even supposing that man-made global warming a thing, its significance is only contingent on the belief that our current climate is somewhat ideal, is not itself the result of constant change/cycling throughout Earth history, and should stay the same. Likewise, the environmental alarmism equating the extinction of certain species to an endangered biosphere presupposes that species won’t appear, that others won’t adapt, or that the current biodiversity is somewhat ideal in the first place, when species have been forever coming and going. By the way, isn’t it remarkable that no one hears anything positive coming from global warming in mainstream media? We do know that Earth gets much colder during glacial periods, “the most recent glacial period within the Quaternary glaciation of the Current Ice Age, occurring in the Pleistocene epoch, which began about 110,000 years ago and ended about 15,000 years ago” (English Wikipedia, Glacial period). Then shouldn’t one posit that global warming might not be unilaterally bad, since some kind of Global warming must have coincided with the end of the most recent glacial period? Or, by some extraordinary coincidence, global warming led us to our current ideal state, and now both global warming and global freezing should be avoided?
- Forgetting about the original conditions of belief but holding onto belief. How many life-defining beliefs are actually based on the thinnest foundations? Some faiths, even some of the deepest and most heartfelt ones, are objectively based on nothing but habit or trust, and are reinforced through selective memory. For example, if someone believes that “everything happens for a reason,” especially in a theological sense, their belief is reinforced every time through reasoning of a self-serving nature. For example, they get unexpected help from somewhere, and find a reason in the Bible. But for each time that thinking is reinforced, there are dozens of times where it isn’t. Selective memory is also behind the belief of being cursed by bad luck, e.g., boardgamers claiming that they have very poor luck on dice rolls, but would find they’re merely average if they kept a record of all their die rolls. The issue of persistent belief is not so much the persisting, but persisting in a belief that would never take hold in the first place at a higher level of awareness.
- Being blinded by the technicality of proof as to the unimportance of the consequences. Many people spend their lives trying to prove that aliens exist, that we are governed by the Illuminati, that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a conspiracy, etc. It is obviously implied that this search for truth is very important. However, were any of these theories true, it didn’t really matter until now, did it? Let’s admit for one moment that the claims of New World Order conspiracies are true. Even then, mundane life, which makes up about 99.99% of our life, has been what it has always been. If the New World Order conspiracies were far-reaching, then everyday life would have to be considered their main product, and a conspiracy theorist would have to either dial down the sensationalism somewhat, or see big-time signs everywhere, from taxes to grocery shopping. The sensationalism is disproportionate to the observed effects of whatever may have been proven, and those who make a career out of proving alien theories have more to do with their success than the aliens who, if they do watch us, must probably be left scratching their head, since they hardly had to do anything to get this alien thing going. Worse, sensationalists feel more at home the more outlandish their claims get, precisely because their theories having so little consequences for everyday life gives them all the latitude to ramble on without being contradicted by the return of experience. The more difficult and technical their proofs, the more importance they are given, and the more they get away with the lack of practical consequences.
- Unconsciously assuming one can always decide, rationally or not, whether to believe or not. Related is the habit of thinking that one is to either believe or disbelieve. Take the classic question: does God exist? The usual way of dealing with such questions is to first gather evidence to then work out a yes/no/can’t know answer. But common wisdom teaches us to first elucidate the semantics of the question. Experience tells us that He can, at the very least, be any of the following: a father-like anthropomorphic figure, an abstract entity, an unknowable thing… Spinoza’s God is Nature, Daniel Schreber’s God is made of nerves and communicates through sun rays, Deleuze’s God is energy. According to Derrida, God is, “in post-hellenic philosophy, positive infinity […] which—as non-determination and concrete operation—allows to think the difference between the being and the ontic determination” (Violence and Metaphysics, in Writing and Difference). It is after struggling with the most commonly accepted concepts that you begin to realize that there may actually be other answers besides yes/no: the question may not make any sense, or the answer may entirely/trivially depend on which semantics you decide to attach to the words. It also means that leaving the question open may actually be more reasonable than having any definite answer at all, not even “can’t know,” which implies the semantics of God are well-defined, or at least well-defined enough to be sure you can’t ever know Him.
- Trying to prove wishful big concepts rather than letting narratives organically emerge from observation.
One such big concept is God. As Hume discussed, God can never be inferred from observation. And supposing there was anything like God, it is quite a reach to think it could observably be connected to any single established God (at the exclusion of all the others), unless we discover some specific detail which would make this connection even more unlikely, not to say suspicious. Wouldn’t you cringe if a man claimed to have discovered a God who told him not to eat at McDonald’s, and then went on to preach His teachings to some uncontacted primitive tribe deep in the jungle? As ridiculous as that may sound, it can serve as a metaphor for the teachings of actual religions.
Therefore it shouldn’t come as a surprise that people tried to prove the existence of God by working in the opposite direction of observation and induction, essentially transforming the burden of proof directly into a solution. The so-called ontological proof of God basically amounts to “God exists, because the definition says so.” Such ad hoc definitions are a common thought pattern. For example, if someone holds that animals don’t speak, and then come across one which does speak, say a parrot, they can either change their belief, or, more likely, modify their definitions. They could say that:
- A parrot is not an animal.
- Holding a limited conversation is not speaking but mimicry.
- Limited vocabulary is not language but a “two-way communication code,” as Irene Pepperberg would call the ability of the African Grey Parrot Alex, or “complex discriminative performance” as one of her critics, Herbert Terrace, would rather call it.
Even truth itself is not safe from ad hoc or post hoc modifications. As Popper remarked, proving the truth of natural laws is an “impossible task:”
My use of the concept of a strictly universal statement (or ‘all-statement’) stands opposed to the view that every synthetic universal statement must in principle be translatable into a conjunction of a finite number of singular statements. Those who adhere to this view insist that what I call ‘strictly universal statements’ can never be verified, and they therefore reject them, referring either to their criterion of meaning, which demands verifiability, or to some similar consideration.
It is clear that on any such view of natural laws which obliterates the distinction between singular and universal statements, the problem of induction would seem to be solved; for obviously, inferences from singular statements to merely numerically universal ones may be perfectly admissible. But it is equally clear that the methodological problem of induction is not affected by this solution. For the verification of a natural law could only be carried out by empirically ascertaining every single event to which the law might apply, and by finding that every such event actually conforms to the law—clearly an impossible task.
❞The problem of induction is the passage from the “conjunction of a finite number of singular statements” to a universal statement. Obviously, a variation of this passage is needed in empirical science, whether the passage is a “provisional conjecture” or a “logically justified conclusion.” Popper argues that we can’t infer the latter, i.e., truth, but rather a “corroboration with respect to some system […] accepted up to a particular point in time:”
Popper’s proposal does indeed work around the “impossible task” of proving truth. But it also means that there’s no place for the word “truth” in science. So what do epistemologists do? They go into big semantic debates about “truth,” so that the word may be used:
*3 Thus if we were to define ‘true’ as ‘useful’ (as suggested by some pragmatists), or else as ‘successful’ or ‘confirmed’ or ‘corroborated’, we should only have to introduce a new ‘absolute’ and ‘timeless’ concept to play the role of ‘truth’.
❞Taking a word at face value is naive at best. But the fact that there are “pragmatists” who effectively try to decide which word is most deserving of being taken at face value is the biggest irony here.
Twilight of social elitism and vulgarization
The twilight of social elitism is a direct consequence of the fusion of roles in the reconstructionist ecosystem. With it comes the twilight of vulgarization.
Vulgarization directly contradicts pure referentiality. It tends to organize knowledge around big words that have lost much context. Loss in transmission is incurred not only by content consumers but also by content creators, as content creation is always partially derivative of content consumption. For example, Kant, the “philosopher of the thing-in-itself,” speculates a thing-in-itself in an argument over what lies “outside” our perception. Following in Kant’s footsteps, Schopenhauer opens a debate over whether the Will is this thing-in-itself. He says yes, but does the question even make sense, as the “thing-in-itself” was produced by Kant out of thin air? But Schopenhauer may well be remembered as the “philosopher of the will as the universal thing-in-itself.” Says Wikipedia:
But Schopenhauer’s thesis was only supported by the following analogy: any object is analogous to my body moved by the Will, so it must be moved by the Will as well. This is like saying that penguins, being analogous to other birds, must be able to fly.
Isolating culture from the context of learning is the first step toward vulgarization and embarassing philosophical, cultural and scientific consequences. Schopenhauer’s reasoning would be exposed by remembering Schopenhauer’s Will as the Will-ascertained-by-the-analogy-of-all-objects-with-the-body-moved-by-the-Will. Doing so would inspire greater caution around Schopenhauer’s Will wherever it appears, especially as it is parlayed into further theories and views.
We often take vulgarization to mean the vulgarizing interpretation of a text, but more often than not, the original text itself can be self-vulgarizing, so to speak. For example, the concept of labor value allowed Marx, in The Capital, to account for the laborer in the value of a product. But early in the text, this concept is actually said to be determined “by various circumstances, amongst others, by the average amount of skill of the workmen, the state of science, and the degree of its practical application, the social organisation of production, the extent and capabilities of the means of production, and by natural conditions.” All this complexity is abstracted by Marx under the umbrella concept of “labor time” which determines the production of surplus value, and never surfaces again over the course of The Capital. In this manner, Marx managed to tie the production of surplus value to the laborer’s productivity while obscuring the tie to productivity in general (including machinery), and thus emphasized, in what Marx calls the “contradiction of the capital,” the need for the capitalist to lengthen the working day in order to increase profit. But between the lines, machinery is still part of the aforementioned “various circumstances” that determine labor time. So it is only fair to think that increased productivity through the increased use of machinery would lead to increased production of surplus value without necessarily increasing the exploitation of men. But in order to see this, one needs to remember how labor time was earlier defined, i.e., the narrative of its use. The abstractions of labor time can be seen as a vulgarization of labor time.
The vulgarization of labor time is central to the theorem-like believability of Marx’s theses. But reality is bound to expose over-simplistic theories. For example, one can see reality at work when the Soviet Union tried to implement a centrally planned state economy “to achieve conscious control over the economy by the population, specifically so that the use of the surplus product is controlled by the producers” (English Wikipedia, Planned economy). Central economic planning isn’t as simple as calculating surplus value using “labor time” and redistributing it:
In practice, central economic planning is never pure:
And that’s without debating the necessity of an “unplanned second economy” to remedy the shortcomings of the planned economy, for which the term “shortage economy” was coined by János Kornai in his article Economics of Shortage:
Twilight of the genius
The general view is that genius precedes and does great things. For example, it takes a genius to prove mathematical conjectures that stood up to centuries of scrutiny. It takes a genius to create intemporal works of art. And so on.
But there’s only a genius if we put a value on things, i.e., if we use the interpretation of the average value. It’s not just about difficulty; otherwise I would be called a genius if I compute manually a giant multiplication. Now, value is opaque: that’s why great works, and the genius behind them, have an aura of mystery and impenetrability about them. Even when a production can be precisely quantified, value has to come into the picture for it to be linked to genius. For example, it took 358 years and several breakthroughs to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem:
While “358 years” and “extraordinarily difficult or perhaps impossible to prove” sound like a lot, one must still buy into the fact that they are measures worthy of a genius. But buying into that fact is purely conventional or rhetorical, since one can always say, for example, that it couldn’t be that “extraordinarily difficult”—let alone “impossible to prove”—if someone proved the conjecture.
On the other hand, reconstruction, by virtue of pure referentiality, is non-opaque: everything medium-specific can be communicated objectively, and that doesn’t include value. If a reconstruction is too obscure, there’s a clearer way to write it. Why? Because a reconstruction doesn’t add any content. Its sole purpose is to reference medium-specific narratives. The medium itself can be obscure: a text can use esoteric code or unusual prose (e.g., William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury), intricate melodies can lose the listener, etc. But the medium-specific narratives are not: not only does reconstruction lay them out in unhurried, zen-like prose (even when reconstructing fast complex multi-layered melodies), but it also only highlights patterns observable in the medium.
Therefore, reconstruction is only of things we can always see. This suggests to us that we can learn anything precisely as long as it is expressed medium-specifically, and as long as it doesn’t involve deciphering the undecipherable, i.e., value, and, consequently, genius. There is no mysteriousness or impenetrability. If anything, reconstruction indicates a genius of content as opposed to an entity (a cause or a creator) separate from the content. Such a view avoids the paradox of the genius, which describes a situation we are all too familiar with: a genius (composer, painter, architect, mathematician, etc.) creates masterpieces at the start of their career, then do nothing of note, or only poor variations of their masterpieces. The concept of the genius creator is useless here because, to explain this downward curve, it would have to match exactly the value of the artist’s output—i.e., a tautological genius, a genius that can sometimes produce subpar things.
Twilight of the artist as a competence/job/career
The artist is traditionally associated to a lifestyle. For example, rock bands live in cycles: they write songs, record an album, then go on tour. This lifestyle isn’t a stranger to redundant or “post-prime” albums. In fact, cyclic lifestyles are the lifestyles most compatible with redundant artistic output. For if artists cared to recognize the onset of redundancy, they’d get the signal to quit sooner than later, if they’re being honest with themselves.
Through its focus on self-contained units of interpretation at the expense of authorship (as a part of the mosaic), reconstruction supports a self-effacing, tautological view of the artist—i.e., a person is an artist while in the process of producing a medium-specific narrative. A corollary of this view is the depreciation of concepts like discography, or the favoring of individual songs over albums as the basis of discussion. Normally, discussion about a band/artist revolves around the albums: “My preferred album is…” “This band’s best album is…” Songs are discussed, but typically only to the extent that they contribute to an album: “I like this song, but not that one.” In other words, they contribute to the average value of the album. In a reconstructionist view, this averaging doesn’t make any practical sense: if an average album contains a great song, the consumer doesn’t want the album’s average value to spoil that song.
Twilight of popularity. Twilight of constructive criticism
The single-mindedness of reconstruction moves the focus of interpretation away from liking (as a consumer) or being liked (as a content creator). The creator’s first question is not how to succeed, but of (self)communication: what is exactly my medium-specific narrative and how do I communicate it clearly?
Not that the popularity of popularity will go away, or that it should. Popularity is merely natural selection, and while there is an element of cruelty to it, it’s in the nature of value judgments in general, something many would rather forget. For example, many are shocked by the cruelty of a Simon Cowell (« Cowell often makes blunt and controversial comments as a television music and talent show judge, including insults and wisecracks about contestants and their singing abilities », English Wikipedia, Simon Cowell), but the auditionees, by entering his shows, agreed to the rules, so harsh criticism is fair even when they think they don’t deserve it (value is non-negotiable).
Popularity is its own game, with its own rules, and its own players. It also has its defectors who have come to realize the futilities of the game:
- Futility of popularity for the sake of popularity. People shouldn’t have to fall from grace to realize its fickle, irrational nature. It is also only constructive in the sense of linear progress—e.g., to reward their fans, the artist tries to be “even better”—in a way that’s conducive to cynical milk-the-cash-cow strategies.
- Futility of constructive criticism as a generality. The concept of constructive criticism poses the question: constructive of what? Cf. previous point. Criticism is essentially constructive of popularity itself. Typically, a person is offered advice to improve whichever areas of the mosaic (“play with more passion,” “add more ooomph to your songs,” etc.), but more often than not, it dumbs down to the fact that some people have “it” and some don’t. Criticism cannot be constructive in a reconstructive sense, otherwise it would be like a critic trying to criticize the Mona Lisa for being a banal portrait by painting a windmill or something. The only thing it can do somewhat reconstructively is point out the medium-specific similarity between different works, and hopefully inspire the artist to do something different.
Reconstruction invites artists to answer precisely the questions that matter to the production of medium-specific narratives. Doing so widens the spectrum of the allowable beyond the tolerance of authority figures, leaving authors little reason to doubt themselves like those feeling the pressure to please a crowd:
Twilight of inferiority complex of wannabes and wannados. A personal case study
From the twilights of elitism, genius, popularity and competence, a common theme emerges: for the aspiring content creator, the perceived barrier to entry is considerably lowered.
It is very true that creating a product up to modern standards typically requires extraordinarily hard work. Today, in the videogame industry, a big title can mobilize thousands of highly qualified people even if the core gameplay (i.e., the medium-specific narrative) is just a dumb mashup of mindless button-mashing, Quick Time Events (press buttons when the game tells you to) and trivial logic puzzles (or fight scenes if it’s a story game) for fillers. Even retro pixel art games can require considerable attention to detail to stay faithful to the source material.
The conceptuality of reconstruction puts the focus squarely on the human-sized part of creation. With the depreciation of the mosaic as the interpretation standard, and as the medium-specific narrative attracts more and more focus, it is only a matter of time before the twilights cloak themselves in the darkest shades and more content creators start to realize the diminishing returns of linear progress, and even strip down creation to its core.
Unheeding the sirens of popularity (including popularity within niche communities) requires a thick skin. There’s always a fear of criticism, mockery, ridicule, or not being up to the task. But there’s also a psychological switch to turn it off. Deleuze had this expression: “claiming the right to be incompetent” (« revendiquer l’incompétence »). While he made it in a different context, his expression resonates in art, where competence is as boring as linear progress is predictable.
But the natural consequence of the twilight of competence is not even reactionary incompetence, which is another form of competence, like metal music which, in its professionalized form, predictably fulfilled its destiny of being absorbed into the mainstream. It’s to not even care for either competence or incompetence.
Reconstructionists only ask one question to the content creator: what is your medium-specific narrative? The answer only requires imagination, and yet it is fundamentally practical in the sense that it is precise and can be implemented. It’s not something generic and grandiose like “great graphics,” “immersive gameplay” or a “beautiful epic soundtrack.” Answering the main question addresses two problems:
- The wannabe who wants to write a book, make a movie, compose music, and so on, and doesn’t know how to start. The wannabe first wants to conform to a certain image; the content comes second.
- The wannado who stalls before the immensity of the task, beset by an inferiority complex that sets the bar a little too high.
Reconstructionism works around both cases by posing the essential questions that cause to spring into action.
A content creator can always choose to implement a medium-specific narrative carefree-style. Carefreeness doesn’t equal randomness; it’s a selective carefreeness. Let me illustrate to what extent with a personal music project which started in 2000: AAAAARGH! bloody 2-handed chainaxe blow (youtube link).
The name of the band is a parody of bands taking their image too seriously. The “AAAAARGH!” is a fake ploy to put the band at the top of alphabetical listings. The album names partake of the same whatever attitude: for example, “Elliptic White Square” just means a blank album cover. Musically, the band is an example of writing and recording music with minimal music theory background or musicianship. That’s okay: you only need the latter if you want your music to “sound good.” Aesthetically, this is metal, but without a cultivated identity, in a way that repulses even metalheads. The first songs relied on certain harmonies and were written down using standard notation, but starting with the second album, with melody prevailing over harmony, notation began to reflect the increasingly relaxed attitude toward conventions. For example, starting with the third album “The Musical Body,” the exact pitches were not indicated anymore, and a signal notation was used to transcribe the melodic shapes:
The relative positions of the notes are the only properties that matter. The actual notes are improvized when the riffs are played for the first time at recording time. They are replayed until they come out okay. You could call this a garage band, but in truth, this is less than a garage band. Garage bands are at least trained musicians that do real rehearsals. And yet, despite all this, one can tell the music is very deliberate and clearly structured.
While early songs like The Hysteric Vomit were musical metaphors (you could call it youthful naiveté), the compositions became increasingly abstract and medium-centric. The lyrics are gibberish in a vacuum, but later read more and more like a reconstruction of the music, with obvious musical references to the medium:
Invokes asymptotisms Individualities
Operatory sense sets… Another manifestation of convexity In the long term, incrementation of Tonics From immateriality of the contra-term
The contra-term evokes Its asymptotism Participative without a question
❞Reconstruction can actually be seen as the maturation of this language toward pure referentiality and clarity, after the realization that nothing is gained from being obscure.
The objectivity of reconstruction means there’s a meta-community where one can create and experiment, with no fear or need for external validation, while still interacting socially and constructively at a reconstruction level. It doesn’t mean anybody can create AND be popular. But it’s enough for some to make the creative leap, outside the control of the normative mosaic.
Twilight of judgment standards
The essential concepts of reconstruction—namely preliminary medium delimitation and pure referentiality—naturally favor the medium over external judgment criteria.
Judgment standards tend to artificially limit the range of possible interpretations by telling right from wrong. Looking at the Ponzo illusion:
most would reject an account of the yellow lines being of different size. But the moment we fall for the illusion, one line does truly and really appear shorter than the other. In fact, it can be scientifically proven that this perception is empirically consistent, reproducible, explainable and predictable. One can demonstrate it’s an illusion by putting rulers against the lines or forcing the viewer to look closely. However, in doing so, the image has changed. This change expresses the incomparability of the situations before and after the adjustment. No situation is more deceptive than the other, since one could argue that geometrical truth is deceptive in regard to human perception. The real illusion is arguably the belief that both situations are comparable and can be ranked against each other. The situation with the rulers only appears more objective because the prevailing standard of judgment agrees with a certain idea of scientific objectivity that likes to analyze things in a vacuum, as if removing the black lines would somehow rectify the optical illusion for all those who still look at the illusion with the black lines. But the authoritative quality of the geometrical criterion is an illusion, as is more generally the compulsion to measure everything against the ruler of science, including religious faith.
The value of any definition of a “shorter line” entirely rests on the purposes of interpretation. If the definition is made in the context of mathematics, any non-mathematical definition of a “shorter line” would be misleading indeed. If the interpretation is trying to reconstruct the illusion, then taking “shorter line” as a pure reference to the “farther” line might be perfectly acceptable. In the context of reconstruction, what is important is not whether it is true in a vaccuum, but how it is “true” to a narrative, so to speak. Despite only existing in someone’s head, the narrative is also perfectly objective, as long as it’s medium-specific and therefore communicable. If a person under the Ponzo illusion was to graphically reconstruct, i.e., re-draw, the drawing in their head, the upper yellow line would indeed be shorter, and any narrative built on that property would be legit. The prejudice that labels this form of objectivity as “subjective” is all because of a misconception about objectivity, which Karl Popper clarified as an empirical conclusion of “intersubjective testing”—i.e., a statement is objectively true if all observers agree that it is true. Popper’s definition of subjectivity actually intersects the objectivity and reality of Sartre’s world-for-me:
Why indeed should we use the term “subjectivity” for the ensemble of luminous or heavy or odorous objects such as they appeared to me in this laboratory at Paris on a day in February, etc. And if despite all we are to consider this ensemble as subjective, then why should we recognize objectivity in the system of objects which were revealed simultaneously to the experimenter, in this laboratory, this same day in February? We do not have two weights or two measures here; we do not encounter anywhere anything which is given as purely felt, as experienced for me without objectivation. Here as always I am conscious of the world, and on the ground of the world I am conscious of certain transcendent objects. As always I surpass what is revealed to me toward the possibility which I have to be—for example, toward that of replying correctly to the experimenter and of enabling the experiment to succeed. Of course these comparisons can give certain objective results: for example, I can establish that the warm water appears cold to me when I put my hand in it after having first plunged my hand in hot water. But this establishment which we pompously call “the law of relativity of sensations” has nothing to do with sensations. Actually we are dealing with a quality of the object which is revealed to me: the warm water is cold when I submerge my heated hand in it. A comparison of this objective quality of the water to equally objective information which the thermometer gives me simply reveals to me a contradiction. This contradiction motivates on my part a free choice of true objectivity. I shall give the name subjectivity to the objectivity which I have not chosen.
❞More generally, the argument that the quality of information is fundamentally different just because it came from inside someone’s head is flawed at the start and based on a preconceived bias. This is apparent for example in Frege’s Foundation of Arithmetics. Frege begins to prove that the numbers are non-sensual and non-physical properties of “external objects” because they depend on our arbitrary point of view:
[…] It would actually be wonderful if a property abstracted from external things could apply to events, representations and concepts, without modifications of the senses. It would be as if one wanted to speak of meltable events, of a blue representation, a salty concept, a hard judgement. It is absurd that what is sensual in its nature would occur in the non-sensual. When we see a blue surface, we have a specific impression that corresponds to the word “blue”; and we recognize it again, when we look at another blue surface. If we wanted to suppose that in the same way something sensual in the observation of a triangle corresponds to the word “three”, then we would have to find this again in three concepts; something non-sensual would have something sensual in itself.
❞Instead of “arbitrary,” he might as well have said “inside our head.” But later on, when he tries to prove that numbers are objective, he says to the contrary that they don’t depend on our arbitrary point of view:
So instead of strictly observing a dichotomy, numbers depend on the arbitrary and the non-arbitrary at the same time. They are, in his words, “something factual,” “somewhat objective,” and have “a certain similarity” with the sensual. To expand on that, even physical objects are “somewhat” non-sensual, subjective, arbitrary. This is apparent in the discussion on Mill’s “aggregate of things,” which Frege intended to show to be non-physical:
Frege equates a bundle of individual straws to two bundles of straw made out of the original bundle. But if a number is the number of things in an aggregate, we see that the original bundle is an aggregate of exactly N straws, and that its division is an aggregate of exactly 2 bundles of straw. Both are different instances of Mill’s concept of “aggregate of things:” 1 straw falls under the first concept, but not under the second, which deals with bundles. (The reader might find it confusing that an aggregate of N straws is not interchangeable with an aggregate of bundles of straws. The reason for the confusion is that it is intuitively easy to pass from straws to bundles of straws and vice versa. But mathematically, they are not the same. A bundle is a particular structure that is only too similar to a bunch of straws because we are using straws and bundles of straws for our example. A bundle could be a very specific way of bundling straws together. Think of a car as an aggregate of precisely-assembled mechanical components: a chassis on 4 wheels, an engine, etc. You wouldn’t say that it is interchangeable with an aggregate of the same unassembled mechanical components.) Here, the “number of things,” depending on whether the “things” are straws or bundles, is arguably as “characteristic” to the things as the 10,000 square miles are to the North Sea. At the very least, Frege would have to concede that it is “somewhat objective” and doesn’t “depend on our arbitration.”
Psychologically, letting go of judgment standards—letting go of the ruler, the thermometer, the subjective/objective dichotomy—dispels doubt by allowing the interpretation to move on without the framings and steerings of preformatted thinking: are the lines really of different size, did the author really mean this or that, etc. This freedom is also the twilight of certain ideas of “good” judgment, and addresses the self-doubt that paralyzes art pundits too intimidated to make judgments. You don’t need diplomas to judge art—unless, of course, you try to judge art based on the very same standards that cripple you in the first place.
Twilight of culture
As the saying goes, one can never have enough culture. This applies even where culture seems absolutely pointless. The reasoning behind this, one would imagine, is that eventually, down the line, knowledge is going to pay off, perhaps in unexpected ways. At the very least, a highly cultivated individual is usually considered brilliant, even if their knowledge accomplishes no other purpose than to look brilliant in society and get good scores at quizz games.
Reconstruction shows culture in a different light. It can be seen as a project to reconstruct cultural mainstays as medium-specific narratives. Its constructiveness highlights the fact that knowledge is not (should not be) an end in itself. Instead, how knowledge is constructed—is it a mosaic?—and how it can be constructive—how can it contribute to a new medium-specific narrative?—are concerns that question culture as we know it, i.e., an instrument of the mosaic, and, at best, a starting point for parodies and highbrow humor. The mosaic is actually so characteristic of culture that culture tends to produce medium-specific mosaics when it’s featured heavily in the content—e.g., concept albums in music, historical novels, history paintings, and so on—so much so that to discover medium-specific narratives in the content requires ignoring most of it.
Rebirth of philosophy as the study of fallacies
Among Derrida’s contributions was his methodic unraveling of text as its own potential source of de(con)struction. Usually, a proving a text wrong involves a reality outside the text. In order to disprove a text claiming that Earth is flat, a critic is expected to source their argument with resources external to the text, from ancient Greek texts to modern technology.
What Derrida showed, however, was a type of contradictions in the usage of words. Such contradictions may find their way not only in factually wrong theories, but also in verified theories. Moreover, such contradictions are not necessarily verifiable by a recourse to reality. If someone argues that capitalism is bad, all that can be relied on is how the argument is internally constructed, because reality cannot prove, nor disprove, this kind of statement. What constitutes “bad”? Is social inequality “bad”? Even admitting it is, one would have to balance it out with the relentless technological advancement that characterizes capitalism. As Marx noted, technological advancement tends to elevate the standard of living of even the lower social classes despite the widening gap between the elite and the rest—e.g., even low-income people have smartphones and high-definition TVs nowadays, something which wasn’t possible before. Is environmental degradation “bad”? If the global environmentalist trend is any indication, capitalism is so relentless that it won’t even allow environmental degradation to impede its forward march. So it does support ecological transition, by necessity. For every bad thing one can think of, there is probably a good thing. In these conditions, it is all but impossible to definitely conclude that “capitalism is bad.” To make issues worse, the difficulty in using reality as a reference is only comparable to the ease with which a text can set reality aside in passing remarks:
Apart from the degree of development, greater or less, in the form of social production, the productiveness of labour is fettered by physical conditions. These are all referable to the constitution of man himself (race, &c.), and to surrounding nature. The external physical conditions fall into two great economic classes, (1) Natural wealth in means of subsistence, i.e., a fruitful soil, waters teeming with fish, &c., and (2), natural wealth in the instruments of labour, such as waterfalls, navigable rivers, wood, metal, coal, &c. At the dawn of civilisation, it is the first class that turns the scale; at a higher stage of development, it is the second. Compare, for example, England with India, or in ancient times, Athens and Corinth with the shores of the Black Sea.
[…]
But consider, for example, an inhabitant of the eastern islands of the Asiatic Archipelago, where sago grows wild in the forests.
“When the inhabitants have convinced themselves, by boring a hole in the tree, that the pith is ripe, the trunk is cut down and divided into several pieces, the pith is extracted, mixed with water and filtered: it is then quite fit for use as sago. One tree commonly yields 300 lbs., and occasionally 500 to 600 lbs. There, then, people go into the forests, and cut bread for themselves, just as with us they cut fire-wood.”
Suppose now such an eastern bread-cutter requires 12 working hours a week for the satisfaction of all his wants. Nature’s direct gift to him is plenty of leisure time. Before he can apply this leisure time productively for himself, a whole series of historical events is required; before he spends it in surplus-labour for strangers, compulsion is necessary. If capitalist production were introduced, the honest fellow would perhaps have to work six days a week, in order to appropriate to himself the product of one working day. The bounty of Nature does not explain why he would then have to work 6 days a week, or why he must furnish 5 days of surplus-labour. It explains only why his necessary labour-time would be limited to one day a week. But in no case would his surplus-product arise from some occult quality inherent in human labour.
❞So, according to Marx, the necessary labor-time has what could be called a “natural” value, which presumably any human is entitled to limit themselves to. To do this, Marx only had to “suppose”—i.e., dismissing a “history embracing thousands of centuries,” just like that. In other words, war and the struggle for limited resources are not “natural” enough for Marx to be considered a “necessary” part of labor-time. The issue of Marx’s argument is not so much whether reality supports his hypotheses and conclusion, but how his argument was constructed with just words.
But the power of words doesn’t stop there. Authors can write that philosophical problems are not based on misunderstandings when they are, and that they are being extra-careful around words when they aren’t. Kant is quoted as saying: “I for my part hold the very opposite opinion, and I assert that whenever a dispute has raged for any length of time, especially in philosophy, there was, at the bottom of it, never a problem about mere words, but always a genuine problem about things.” Popper writes:
And yet, at some point, even those self-proclaimed extra-careful authors fall into the traps of language too. However, is it enough of a reason for Wittgenstein to write:
The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather—not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.
❞I would argue that while philosophy may be “simply nonsense,” nonsense is not always simple, i.e., a simple matter of being wrong. As such, it is not always unworthy of study. To the contrary, recognizing the many forms of nonsense is integral to the learning process of not repeating errors from the past. It would also be disingenuous to ignore the fascinating inventions of nonsense, its uncanny ability to create theoretical problems out of thin air. How does one explain the existence of core problems of philosophy such as the interaction between mind and body, when no one ever had a problem growing up with it?
Like bad songs, philosophy has a bad recurring theme. It might not be so much a problem of words as it is a problem of amnesic knowledge. But amnesic knowledge is multi-faceted and varied. In fact, it probably has infinitely more variation and invention, than texts that only say the right things.
The positioning of philosophy as a field of fallacies to be studied can only be the result of a distancing from truth-seeking. Truth seekers would just dismiss wrong texts. Even Derrida’s deconstructions can ultimately be viewed as a critique of texts requiring “a great deal of analysis and sympathy, if one doesn’t want [the author] to contradict himself” (Derrida on Rousseau, in Of Grammatology). However, as many students of Derrida would attest, moreso than absolving an author, this “great deal of analysis” is about finding out remarkable contradictions in the first place.
Twilight of taste and value: the good and the bad are both ugly
Taste is typically amnesic. We usually say or hear “I love music,” and this is far from strictly true. There’s an infinite supply of music we could live without. Even saying “I love this or that album” is often amnesic. There’s always a few songs on an album that you don’t like as much as the others.
The loss of information wouldn’t be so bad if it was limited to casual talk, but the fact is that it implicitly lies at the core of many theories that take themselves seriously:
What teenagers in the 1990s wanted was an excuse to feel beaten down and to give up. They had after all just lived through the 1980s, and watched the deals made (under the hands of the Baby Boomers) that turned America from an innocent first-world nation into a moribund third-world one. I’m not talking race here per se, although that’s part of it. I mean the transition between healthy values to a true self-hating, selfish, neurotic culture.
They didn’t want music that said, “The world is yours — charge! allahu ackbar! eureka! geronimo!;” they wanted music that praised retreat, withdrawal and self-pity.
❞That sounds reasonable enough, until you read the critic’s opinion on what they consider a very mediocre metal act—say, Manowar. So either (a) even though metal is praised as “fervent music for people who still believe in life,” it somehow contains embarrassingly bad metal—in fact, even the critic acknowledges elsewhere that most of the current metal scene is self-pitying garbage—or (b) Manowar is not metal, and more like leather-and-spikes party music. But if (b), why in the first place are they recognized as heavy metal by the vast majority? You can see how taste undermines this critic’s discourse with personal subtexts. The critic obviously fell in love with some metal music, but at some point lost view of that “some.” Consequently, they made an entire dissertation around their nostalgic definition of metal as “war music, fervent music for people who still believe in life.” The dissertation wouldn’t make less sense had they called metal great music, and Manowar mediocre music. In fact, it wouldn’t appear any less objective, insofar as “good” and “bad” seem to be held as objective qualities by quite a few authors:
The fact is that the difference between a good building and a bad building, between a good town and a bad town, is an objective matter. It is the difference between health and sickness, wholeness and dividedness, self-maintenance and self-destruction. In a world which is healthy, whole, alive, and self-maintaining, people themselves can be alive and self-creating. In a world which is unwhole and self-destroying, people cannot be alive: they will inevitably themselves be self-destroying, and miserable.
❞But then, Christopher Alexander expands on what makes a particular building “bad:”
The recently built College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, was designed by three well-known architects. In a certain part of this building, at the end of each floor, there are two seminar rooms. These seminar rooms are long and narrow; one of the short walls is filled by a window; the blackboard is mounted along one of the long walls; each room is filled by a long narrow table. These rooms are functionally defective in a number of obvious ways. First of all, a long narrow table, and the long narrow group of people which form around it, are not suitable for intense discussion; this is a seminar room—it should be more nearly square. Second, the position of the blackboard with respect to the window means that half of the people in the room see the window reflected on the blackboard, and can’t read what is written there—the blackboard should be opposite the window. Third, because the window is so large, and so low, the people who sit near it appear silhouetted to those who are sitting further away. It is extremely difficult to talk properly with someone seen in silhouette—too many of the subtle expressions of the face get lost. Seminar communication suffers. The window should be above the height of a sitting person’s head.
❞This is a functional description of a “bad building.” It is specific enough to not be generalizable to all kinds of buildings. It would be silly to think that Christopher Alexander implies that good refectories and good prison cells have to look like seminar rooms. Failing to address his main point that the difference between “good” and “bad” is objective, his description only contrasts a specific “functional building for seminars” against an abstract “good building where people feel alive and self-creating.” Even his abstraction of a “good building” belies his point about the objectivity of “good.” If a “good building” is a place “where people feel alive and self-creating,” then it would certainly not apply to a good prison facility. Despite Alexander’s best intention, there’s no working around the semantic black hole that is the word “good.”
The rhetorics of “good” and “bad” naturally pass into propaganda. If you think that colonization/terrorism/X is bad, think again. Do you really think that colonizers/terrorists/X do what they do because they think it is bad? No, they sincerely think and publicly proclaim they are doing good, and they can claim some level of public support. It wasn’t so long ago when it was considered acceptable (even urgent, at the time of the Scramble for Africa) for an open advocate of human rights such as France to invade African and Asian countries.
To call the taming of an animal its “improvement” sounds almost like a joke to our ears. Whoever knows what goes on in kennels doubts that dogs are “improved” there. They are weakened, they are made less harmful, and through the depressive effect of fear, through pain, through wounds, and through hunger, they become sickly beasts. It is no different with the tamed man whom the priest has “improved.” In the early Middle Ages, when the church was indeed, above all, a kennel, the most perfect specimens of the “blond beast” were hunted down everywhere; and the noble Teutons, for example, were “improved.” But how did such an “improved” Teuton look after he had been drawn into a monastery? Like a caricature of man, a miscarriage: he had become a “sinner,” he was stuck in a cage, tormented with all sorts of painful concepts. And there he lay, sick, miserable, hateful to himself, full of evil feelings against the impulses of his own life, full of suspicion against all that was still strong and happy. In short, a “Christian.”
❞Any expression more elaborate than a word would be more constructive than to say “good” or “bad.” We would even be better off talking of a “quality without a name:”
It happens because the single central quality which makes the difference cannot be named. […]
The word which we most often use to talk about the quality without a name is the word “alive.” But the very beauty of the word “alive” is its weakness.
Another word we often use to talk about the quality without a name is “whole.” But the word “whole” is too enclosed.
Another facet of the quality which has no name is caught by the word “comfortable.” Yet the word “comfortable” is easy to misuse, and has too many other meanings.
A word which overcomes the lack of openness in the words “whole” and “comfortable,” is the word “free.” And yet, of course, this freedom can be too theatrical: a pose, a form, a manner.
[…]
And so, you see, in spite of every effort to give this quality a name, there is no single name which captures it.
❞A reconstruction, by virtue of being a pure reference to a narrative, is the antithesis of trying to find names or words to sum up something too specific to have a ready-made name.
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that any more than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let Anse use it, if he wants to. So that it was Anse or love; love or Anse: it didn’t matter. […]
And then he died. He did not know he was dead. I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the dark land talking of God’s love and His beauty and His sin; hearing the dark voicelessness in which the words are the deeds, and the other words that are not deeds, that are just the gaps in people’s lacks, coming down like the cries of the geese out of the wild darkness in the old terrible nights, fumbling at the deeds like orphans to whom are pointed out in a crowd two faces and told, That is your father, your mother. […]
I gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel. Then I gave him Vardaman to replace the child I had robbed him of. And now he has three children that are his and not mine. And then I could get ready to die.
One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
❞Taste blurs complexity, so you might think that it is fundamentally incompatible with structures and narratives. But taste is so generic that it does, in fact, embrace narratives, but in doing so, removes all that makes them unique, complex or structured. You can better comprehend this phenomenon by comparing reviews of a movie, here Cannibal Holocaust. The first review praises the narrative:
But another review precisely takes a shot at the allegedly “deep” narrative:
Yeah, what tipped you off? The burning of their village or the fornicating in the ashes?
Clearly this is meant to be the movie’s thinly disguised message. White people are savages at least as much as the people that we think of as savages. Oh and in case you didn’t happen to catch that message when it smacked you in the head numerous times like a ton of bricks, at one point the “civilized” people grab one of the native girls and rape her, trying to show her the errors of her ways. Clever.
These people are nothing like any manner of civilized people, they are absolute degenerates and should be imprisoned. They even shout for joy when they find a woman impaled on a pole. What the hell is this garbage? […]
There is a point in the movie where the utterly talentless writer, evidently unaware of how breathtakingly obvious his story is, has one of his characters spoon-feed you the real meaning of the movie: “Today people want sensationalism. The more you rape their senses, the happier they are.”
This sentence betrays a staggering lack of understanding of film-going audiences, but at least it is a flawless description of the thought behind the movie. Too bad you have to watch it to learn that you should never have watched it…
❞Although both reviewers took due note of the movie’s narrative, they still managed to have completely diverging opinions on it. Literally, one says it is “deep,” and the other says is is “breathtakingly obvious.” The only way to bridge the discrepancy is to come to the conclusion that taste managed to make the word “deep” superficial and basically meaningless.
I should note here that reconstruction is sometimes misconstrued as a formulation of taste for structure and complexity. So much so that a friend once claimed that, despite acknowledging the effects of amnesia, they didn’t need reconstruction to fully appreciate the type of music we usually listen to because their judgment was still subconsciously influenced. I asked: what about this one band that I like but you don’t? He had to cop out on this one: this one band was the exception they couldn’t account for. The act of liking something was proof enough for him that he enjoyed what there was to be enjoyed, but as soon as he was confronted with something he didn’t like, he was at a loss. The issue with his reasoning is that reconstruction is not so much about “liking” and “having good taste” as it is about discovering medium-specific narratives, which, obviously, is a conscious act. In fact, any type of discovery is conscious. The difference between reconstruction-based discovery and value-based discovery is a difference of mindset: in the latter, one sees a treasure, while in the former, one sees shiny stuff that may or may not be a treasure (in other words, they see the stuff in a narrative context that hasn’t resolved yet). The former could be wrong, but at least they experienced the actual feeling of discovering. Claiming to achieve the gains of discovery without being aware of it, as my friend did, is arguably much worse. It is like claiming you don’t need to read a poem in its original language because you get what it’s like subconsciously.
Twilight of instant aesthetics and instant entertainment
Instant aesthetics and instant cognition in general are major drivers of entertainment. The psychology displayed in the trending Youtube reaction videos, where Youtubers film themselves reacting to music or videos for the first time, is not specific to the concept of reaction videos, but instead illustrates instant consumption in general. These Youtubers react, comment and analyze the content bit by bit, some opting to pause the content intermittently to insert their commentary. Under these conditions, it comes as no surprise that the whole commentary amounts to a mosaic of ideas and impressions. There just isn’t enough attention span for the commentator to be aware of any medium-specific narrative beyond the most trivial ones, such as the verse/chorus structure of a song.
However, it would be a mistake to associate instant aesthetics with the mainstream as opposed to an underground elite. Certainly, mainstream aesthetics is associated with beautiful polished productions, whereas underground aesthetics is more amateur and confrontational. But while Ildjarn might be the most underground black metal ever, they do sound beautiful and authentic to their fans in an instant aesthetics sense. The Ildjarn sound has just the right amounts of grating guitars, reverb and over-saturation. Any tweak would mess up the perfectly polished production. In fact, the band themselves allegedly retired after their 4-track recorder broke down and took with it the trademark sound. There is as much talk of medium-specific narratives here as blast beats in a pop song.
But instant consumption goes beyond instant aesthetics, reaching out all the way to the consumption of narratives. As we previously saw with the mosaic structure of storylines, narratives can be built to fit instant consumption. For example, an action movie script can be structured as a loose sequence of exciting scenes—a car chase, a shootout, and so on—that can be easily modified, removed or reordered, based on completely medium-unspecific considerations such as production costs or movie length—you don’t want the movie to be too short, because the viewers want their money’s worth back, but you don’t want the movie to be too long and overstay its welcome.
A mosaic-like narrative is essentially recognizable by the lack of long-term consequences. For example, in the TV series Lost, each character arc contributes to the main storyline almost tangentially, and is a hit-or-miss affair independently. That Michael embarks on a crusade to claim his son, and has a hand in taking some of his companions hostage, is indifferent to the main proceedings. That Sayid is a remorseful torturer who changes sides regularly, and then redeems himself through self-sacrifice, makes him a hit-or-miss sub-story of redemption which is lost to the proceedings which decide the fate of the world. Same with the sub-story of the Korean couple. If the spectator didn’t take to them before, their reunion moment has indeed great comedic value as something completely irrelevant to the big picture. In fact, when they die, with Sun getting pinned by a metal pole in a sinking submarine, it just feels like a case of writers who just couldn’t wait to write them off like they had Nikki and Paulo. The writers just got to follow industry best practices of writing scripts with parts that can be moved around at will.
A mosaic-like story can be summed up as a mosaic of high and low points. Each point is locally refined, but its relevance to the whole is secondary, as long as the audience doesn’t pay attention to the big picture.
Let’s use season seven’s Sansa and Arya plotline as a microcosm for its issues as a whole. After Arya returns to Winterfell (and the two have a heartfelt reunion), Littlefinger begins to plant seeds of dissension in the sisters’ relationship, seeds that culminate in Arya threatening Sansa’s life in the season’s penultimate episode. It turns out, however, that Littlefinger was the one in danger, as Sansa and Arya catch onto his ruse (with an assist from Bran, who can see into the past). Arya ultimately slits his throat.
The outcome of this plot—Sansa and Arya’s bond is stronger than ever, and the North also has a hold over the military forces of the Vale (who were formerly under Littlefinger’s command)—isn’t bad. But all of the legwork to get there was far too convoluted and makes little to no sense if you think about it for more than a couple of seconds.
My initial thought was that Arya and Sansa were plotting this eventuality all along, which is why they went along with Littlefinger’s scheme just long enough to put him in a position where they could kill him. But if that’s the case, why were there so many scenes featuring just the two sisters, scenes that Littlefinger couldn’t plausibly know about? And if going along with Littlefinger wasn’t an act, then the storytelling is even stranger, because Sansa and Arya spent a lot of time fighting about things that seemed largely out of character, as opposed to all of the things they really did have to fight about (as The Ringer’s Alison Herman outlines).
The inescapable conclusion is that the scenes themselves served little purpose other than to mislead viewers, in hopes of making the moment where Sansa reveals that it’s Littlefinger who’s on trial, rather than Arya, more surprising and satisfying. And the more you look at season seven as a whole, the more you realize that it pulls this same sort of trick throughout — stories make little sense at the macro level because the show is so intent on outmaneuvering the audience on a micro level.
❞Another effect of micro-management is that affected stories are particularly spoiler-sensitive, because they rely so heavily on a couple of twists. If I tell a person who never read Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd that the murderer is the narrator, the whole novel is almost ruined. Not that there is nothing left to know. There is still a puzzle to be solved, namely how the narrator got involved. But the latitude in interpretation is so wide (by virtue of the twist being “tacked on,” as happens to mosaic-like narratives) that even the author’s solution can seem arbitrary and secondary, and not necessarily better than something the reader could come up with. In fact, it is literally tacked on at the end of the novel as the murderer’s suicide note. In Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery, Pierre Bayard goes so far as to deny Christie’s own solution and provide his own.
Twilight of the product
The general view of any market is product-centric. The characteristics of the product define how well it is going to be received in an entirely deterministic process. The meeting of offer and demand is trivialized: the act of acquiring a product is considered enough to realize (or not) the product’s potential. For example, an artist can be summed up as selling numbers:
Lewis’ success continued with the release of her debut album, Spirit, in 2007; it went 10× platinum in the United Kingdom and became the fourth best selling album of the 2000s. The lead single, “Bleeding Love,” spent seven weeks at number one. She achieved international recognition with the album in 2008 when it topped charts around the world. Spirit has sold more than eight million copies worldwide, and “Bleeding Love” peaked at number one in over 30 countries, becoming the best-selling single of 2008. As a result, she was proclaimed “Top New Artist” by Billboard in 2008. Under the guidance of Cowell and Davis, Lewis released her second UK number-one album Echo and recorded the theme song for the film Avatar in 2009, while embarking on her first UK arena tour, The Labyrinth, in 2010.
❞Reviews support the product-centric view by being as exhaustive as possible. The exhaustive mosaic of criteria give the impression that a product can be completely figured out, and that the consumer’s decision can be entirely based on that. In that regard, there’s no difference in treatment between household appliances, food and art. Reviews only deal with 2 static variables: there’s the product on one side, and the consumer with their needs and tastes on the other. Reviews can however be considered to be all about the product, as the consumer is a trivial variable. For example, if you listen to the One Stop Co-op Shop’s October 2018 - Top 20 Solo Board Games! Youtube video, you’ll hear about 1000 commonplaces like: if you don’t like puzzle-y games, then it’s not for you. If you don’t like long games, it’s not for you. But if you like elegant gameplay with simple rules but deep strategy, then it may be for you. Not only is this obvious and unnecessarily verbose (just say “the game is long” instead of “If you don’t like long games, it’s not for you”), but it’s not even practical advice, because tastes and needs cannot be so easily accounted for. For example, “elegant gameplay” is actually quite subjective. Chess is often brought up as the quintessential example of elegant gameplay, but it’s mostly an acquired opinion. What is elegant in the L move of the knights or the fact that they are the only pieces that can jump over other pieces? What is elegant in the fact that pawns move 1 space straight ahead, sometimes 2 spaces (but only as their first move!), but capture diagonally? What is elegant in the initial setup, which blocks your most mobile pieces and makes for the same plodding starts? Even a relatively objective criterion such as “long playing time” is problematic. A 1-hour long game might be too long for one player, but not for another. Moreover, a gamer is more likely to tolerate a long playing time if they like the game.
It’s not always about the product or the consumer as a static bundle of needs. It’s also about how one chooses to interpret the product. As the reconstruction of reviews reveals, reviews are based on the interpretation of the average value, whose mosaic structure is the most generic one there is. Far from reflecting the uniqueness of the content, they put it in standardized categories—including the category of uniqueness/originality, which, as already discussed, can be so completely abstracted by value and taste that it should be renamed the category of taste for originality. The effort to bridge the gap between a value-oriented interpretation and the uniqueness of the content is a measure of investment in a product that is not just about advertising or giving money. Most significantly, the interpretation of the medium-specific narrative doesn’t deal with product acquisition and ownership at all. By interpreting the medium-specific narrative of a work of art, the consumer has already consumed it. This is quite different from the interpretation of the average value, which is mainly a prelude to the owning and consuming of products, and contributes in a large capacity to materialistic fetishism—for example, many hobbies are more about researching and collecting stuff than consuming them (books, CDs, boardgames, and so on).
Random thoughts. Boring predictability as a safeguard of society rather than rationality and morality. Debunking all universal values. Lifestyle suggestions.
Even if reconstruction is not something the reader is going to pursue, there are valuable lessons to be gleaned from it nonetheless.
Through mere mindfulness, focusing on the medium-specific narratives challenges the issues of interpretation based on instant values, instant gratification and instant consumption. Those issues could be summed up as “tunnel interpretation,” i.e., an inability to make sense of a narrative without projecting it on to some mosaic prone to a formulaic conclusion. No matter how complex the narrative, it is always predisposed toward tunnel interpretation. In fact, complexity for the sake of complexity both enforces tunnel interpretation and condemns a work to it by making sure only the most generic, fill-in-the-blanks conclusion can make sense of the whole story. At the time of this writing, the final season of A Game of Thrones hadn’t aired yet, and yet, however complex, convoluted and multidimensional the plot, the repertoire of endings that can be expected is actually very narrow. Who will sit on the throne? Who will win the war? What will be the alliances and the betrayals? Who kills whom? The answers will be names. There will probably be a couple of twists along the way, for the sake of diffuse originality, but they won’t challenge our preconceptions of what makes a proper conclusion. In order for the ending to be cliché, the answers don’t need to be straight-up answers either. Even if the conclusion is inconclusive—e.g., a cliffhanger or an open ending—people will still turn discussions about the ending into the cliché subjects that matter to them most—morality, hidden message, who came out as the winners, whether it was a happy ending, whether it was a satisfying ending, takeaways, etc.
The scope of tunnel interpretation is broad, but I will limit the scope of this discussion to a few symptomatic manifestations of its influence, such as obsession, fetishism, symbolism, fascination, and magical transformations. They all share:
- a passion for value and meaning,
- the impossibility to be shared, at least objectively, with other people who weren’t already predisposed to them,
- and, as experience has told us again and again, the fact that they are ultimately pointless (that is, unless people act on them, which is a very real possibility).
Magical transformations belong to what Deleuze and Guattari call “incorporeal transformations”:
What makes an incorporeal transformation magical (in a more or less ironical sense) is when people expect it to do wonders by itself. By constantly asking “then what?” in the search for narratives, reconstruction antagonizes the instant attribution of value associated with magical transformations. In the parable of the fisherman and the businessman, asking “then what?” reveals what I will call the narrative of making it:
The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman. “I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.” The fisherman continues, “And after that?” The businessman laughs heartily. “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.” The fisherman asks, “And after that?” The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!” The fisherman was puzzled. “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”
❞Another example of “making it”: many people dream of becoming famous and being like their heroes. But when others say to “never meet your heroes, because they’re sure to disappoint you,” it’s because such disappointments happen every day. The narrative of fame is typically much less glamorous than dreamed:
But you know I wasn’t happier, I still had my insecurities, worries, headaches and regular issues. But on top of that, I couldn’t do anything without people talking about it (and then adding some)—it’s like I was never completely off the stage and couldn’t let loose the way I sometimes wanted to. Eventually I became a hermit, my friend circles got smaller… you also deal with a lot of hate—people who don’t know you feel the need to not just comment on your work ( which is fair because to each their own) but they get personal and talk about how you look, what you wear, your body, your personality even though they only know the performer and not YOU… some will even go as far as saying they hate you and insult the living daylights out of you based on nothing else but your job.
I have had people stalk or threaten me, friends turn on me—people setting you up for failure so they can stop feeling bad about themselves around you—and this constant pressure of delivering at your level or higher all the time… it can drive you insane. Of course you have the love, the supporters, the ones who think you’re God’s gift to mankind—they might be worse for you though because you start depending on that constant validation you’re getting, it becomes almost addictive and you will question your entire self when the response is lower than you’re used to.
There’s a reason why famous people struggle so much with substance addiction or depression. I think to keep it up for a long time you have to be a narcissist that thrives on the attention enough that it doesn’t bother you. That’s what I think it takes to post x amount of pictures of yourself per day for people to like and comment about how wonderful you are, advertise constantly not just about your art but you… all the time to get that approval which leads to a following which leads to success which leads to more pressure—and you thrive on that high so much you become like a junkie always needing more and being ready to do anything: starve, alter your face, your body, accept the unacceptable…
I couldn’t do it… I’m too sensitive for it—you need Madonna level of IDGF to handle it… I believe it’s what sent Michael Jackson off the deep end… I could tell eventually if it kept growing it would take me somewhere I would not know my way back from and I had already started hating doing what i used to consider my calling. I’ll never forget the day I was on stage fighting tears because I felt completely dehumanized. And exhausted…
I’ll stick to doing my thing on a smaller scale and only when I truly feel like it. They can have the fame… there are other ways to change the world, thrive while making enough money to retire early and still being able to go grocery shopping without being harassed… or even better… while still being able to look at yourself in the mirror and liking what you see.
❞There is a certain magic in the ideas of “making it,” “having an identity,” “becoming something,” which can also be found in the announcement effect. Like magic rites, there is a certain ceremoniality and solemnity attached to announcements. But the magic wavers as soon as you frame it in a narrative. In the novel The Stranger, the death sentence pronounced against the main protagonist is ridiculed when he puts it in context:
Because of their magic, announcement effects can destroy lives way before the announcement is confirmed, if ever. For example, announcing a cancer to a patient. As such, they first belong to mind-games, the same way street thugs firmly believe they own their street corners. The same way someone becomes overjoyed and feels on top of the world after learning from a prank call that they just won the lottery. The same way a man feels incredibly proud when he learns he’s going to be the father of a child that isn’t his. Remember when the world was in shock after the revelation that Magic Johnson had AIDS in 1991, forcing him into early retirement from professional basketball? He made a comeback in 1996, and in 2019 he was the president of basketball operations for the Los Angeles Lakers.
It takes a certain amount of stoicism to not instantly react to news—not to mention a certain amount of inner strength, as society demands instant reaction to announcements. We all have anecdotes about it. I had a girlfriend who learned from a phone call that her mother had become pregnant. She jumped for joy, but I was only vaguely happy for her and didn’t want to over-react. I would only learn a few years later that I had looked like a stone-cold monster to her. There are very good reasons for remaining stoic. What if that was a false positive? What if the pregnancy didn’t go as planned? Why not rejoice only when there’s an actual healthy baby to be happy about? Ironically, at the time of the criticism—years after the fact—we now knew her mother hadn’t been pregnant. The criticism made even less sense in light of the fact we had already broken up at that point. It was like getting tattooed with the name of a fiancé you’re going to break up with, but in reverse: you’re not in a relationship anymore, but you’re still being criticized for not getting the tattoo. This might sound ridiculous, but to this ex, and society in general, reacting to the announcement effect is itself an announcement effect they are reacting to: it is all show—announcing your identity, showing how good a person you are.
Stoicism addresses only one half of the equation of the announcement effect. It is concerned with the narrative of the consequences of the announcement. On the other hand, the narrative that precedes announcements, especially those advertised as big news, demands to be met with skepticism. You’re going to pass important exams. A new President is going to be elected in your country. In soccer, a new world champion will be announced. But most of the time, with all due respect, the narrative leading up to the big news has already solidified the futility of the announcement. For example, if you fail the do-or-die end-of-year exams (maybe because of the pressure), but received good grades throughout the year, do you really believe that you're less of a student than the ones who passed against all odds? You didn’t magically become a bad student, or any less qualified to succeed in later stages of your life, just because society decided on a whim to only judge you based on end-of-year exams. Of course, the same type of reasoning applies when you succeed at the exams, hence the wisdom of staying even-keeled whether you’re winning or losing, in all areas of life. Another example of the narrative of futile announcement: a soccer team is newly crowned as the World Champion after a penalty shootout in an all-around boring game. So what? fans say. History only remembers the winners. That happy idiot stance is actually quite a smart move on the fans’ part, because otherwise they’d remember what a shit sport soccer actually is. But what would be an even smarter move would be to skip the next World Cup, knowing what we know now.
Of course, they could all just play a better sport that never even needed to resort to such an arbitrary, capricious, artificial game-deciding contest as a penalty shootout.
❞By deflating clichés, interpreting narratives can actually be a more rational response to societal problems than straight-up morality. Killing random people, as many serial killers do, is not going to be solved by invoking morality, or even rationality. We are often taught “don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself,” but it would be quite difficult to sell to a random serial killer the argument that they should stop because they might be the next victim of an improbable random killing.
The predictable pointlessness of arbitrary killing and many other purely transgressive acts without a material motive might, however, dissuade prospective killers. In the second movie of the series Guinea Pig, a man dismembers a drugged woman in painstaking detail. In one sequence, he meticulously makes an incision through the abdomen, and then plunges his hands into the entrails. He seems to be enjoying feeling around, cupping the bowels. But ultimately, the predominant feeling is that he’s out of ideas and doesn’t know what to do with the organs flopping around in his hands. You have the organs out, dude, then what? He looks like an idiot, and if he wasn’t so fascinated, he would know it too.
As she begs for her life by telling him she doesn’t want to die, he recounts: “I told her it was just for my personal curiosity. I hit her several times, in the carotid, in the head, then in the heart. When I thought she was dead, I left.”
Always with blood-curdling phlegm, the presumed killer explains that he had killed her “for the experiment, to know what it’s like to take someone’s life.” And that he’s surrendered because he was disappointed by the experience and didn’t think of doing it again. “In fact, it didn’t give me any pleasure, I found this very bland. So it wasn’t worth doing again. But since it was done and since she was going to be found, I chose to step forward.” He’s currently on trial for murder.
❞Alors qu’elle le supplie en lui disant qu’elle ne veut pas mourir, lui raconte : “Je lui ai dit que c’était juste pour ma découverte personnelle. Je l’ai frappée plusieurs fois, à la carotide, à la tête puis une au cœur. Quand j’ai pensé qu’elle était morte, je suis reparti."
Toujours dans une flegme glaçante, le meurtrier présumé explique qu’il l’a tuée “pour l’expérience, le fait de savoir ce que cela fait d’ôter la vie.” Et s’il s’est rendu, c’est parce qu’il a été déçu de l’expérience et ne pensait pas recommencer. “En fait, ça ne m’a pas fait plaisir, j’ai trouvé ça très neutre. Alors, cela ne valait pas le coup de recommencer. Mais comme c’était fait et qu’elle allait être découverte, j’ai préféré prendre les devants.” Il a été mis en examen pour assassinat.
❞So you killed your victim. That was highly exciting, yes? Then what? What do you do with the body? Disposing the body, erasing the incriminating evidence, fleeing, living in constant fear of getting caught, or even life during a murder trial, are disproportionate chores when measured against the time it takes to commit the murder. At some point, O.J. Simpson must have felt that killing Nicole wasn’t worth the trials and public harassment and humiliation he had to endure over the last decades (not to mention having to play the part of the good father raising his kids, which he couldn’t be bothered with even before his ex-wife’s death), even though he got to win the criminal trial. The narrative that fleshes out the forbidden act, i.e., the collateral damage, brutally relativizes the fascination and the passion attached to the forbidden act. So, to Bonnie and Clyde, who personify the passionate “live fast, die young” lifestyle we might indulge in in our fantasies, time must have felt agonizingly long when death would not come soon enough to end the constant trials on the road.
from weariness some people have died. But take it all in all; our troubles are small, till we get like Bonnie and Clyde.
If a policeman is killed in Dallas and they have no clue or guide. If they can’t find a fiend, they just wipe their slate clean and hang it on Bonnie and Clyde.
There’s two crimes committed in America not accredited to the Barrow mob. They had no hand; in the kidnap demand, nor the Kansas City Depot job.
A newsboy once said to his buddy; “I wish old Clyde would get jumped. In these awfull hard times; we’d make a few dimes, if five or six cops would get bumped”
[…]
If they try to act like citizens and rent them a nice little flat. About the third night; they’re invited to fight, by a sub-gun’s rat-tat-tat.
They don’t think they’re too smart or desperate they know that the law always wins. They’ve been shot at before; but they do not ignore, that death is the wages of sin.
Some day they’ll go down together they’ll bury them side by side. To few it'll be grief, to the law a relief but it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.
❞So I ask you: you’re doing this obsessive-compulsive thing—then what? What is the narrative of your gesture, its consequences? Pointlessness is often measured by the feeling of therapeutic release that people get from being forced to part with an obsession such as a consuming hobby. A classic case is the extreme hoarder being forced to part with their collection, either because their collection was accidentally destroyed, or simply because it became too costly not only on their wallet but also on their family life. Having to face reality, they finally realize the pointlessness of their passion, feeling an immense burden lifted from their shoulders.
Why do we stick to pointless things? How do we engage into pointless activities in the first place, activities that we know, with only a bit of foresight, cannot ever lead anywhere? I would argue that a lot of it is due to mere shortsightedness, tunnel vision and mental inertia. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to pinpoint a particular decision leading to the shortsighted activity or belief. However, we can think about it like this: if there can be any rationality to an activity or belief, then it should be theoretically possible to link this activity or belief to a single conceptual decision that synthesizes the reason for engaging into that activity, or entering that belief. Therefore, even though it is not always possible to single out the turning point when someone turns, say, Christian or Muslim, since in many cases one is born into a religion with no decision being consciously made and no one to fault, it is however possible to imagine making the decision now in a rational state of mind, as should have been done in the first place. That’s when the idea of believing in an established religion breaks down. Believing in something personal? Sure. But not in the God of an established religion, as it is impossible to verify identity. Even if one actually sees and hears a personal God, what does He do to prove He is the Christian God rather than, say, the Islamic God? Recite the Bible? Produce an ID card? The problem of converting an autonomous person to an established religion is best seen from the angle of missionaries trying to peacefully convert uncoerced tribal people. If the tribal people are not very religious, then God—trivial concepts like “God is Nature” excepted—is basically as believable as Santa Claus to an adult.
They have no creation myth of their own. They have words for grandparents, but no words for great-grandparents, because they never live long enough to meet their children’s children’s children. “One day,” he says, “a group of the men came to the house and said we know why you’re here. You want to tell us about Jesus. He said that other missionaries before me had tried to tell them about Jesus. He said we don’t want to be Americans. We are Pirahã. We don’t want Jesus. We want to drink and we want to have many women, and we don’t want to live like you. But we like you, so if you want to stay here, you can stay here. But just don’t talk to us about Jesus.” After this, something strange happened. Everett began to think that perhaps the Pirahã were “morally superior” to Westerners like himself.
❞If the tribal people are already religious, how would you translate the name of the Christian God? You could say God is entirely different from what they know, in which case you’re back to Santa Claus levels of believability. Or you could recycle words from their language and use them to belittle their deities and promote yours:
In sum, what the passage reveals is that translation in the Peter Purāṇa operates on the assumption of a distinct affinity between Concanneponni and Christian doctrine, implying that “Christian Truth” is pervasive, that is, known and present throughout time and space, except for those areas where it is misconceived, corrupted and obscured by the ignorance of the cega gentilidade “blind gentilehood” (de la Croix 1629: I, Ao Leitor [Introduction]) and the deceptive fabrications of the Devil. Therefore, it does not stretch interpretation too much to argue that the reference that the allegory of “the gold and the alloy” makes to the “force of fire”—as rectifying the allegedly deceptive use of the true name of the Christian God and restoring the corrupted and obscured Truth of Christian doctrine in the pagan world—reveals that the contemporaneity of the production of the Christian Purāṇa literature and the destruction of the material culture and literature of Indian gentiles was by no means a coincidence. Rather, we recognize that Christian Purāṇa literature was consciously and strategically meant to replace Hindu bhakti literature, just as Catholic churches and chapels replaced Hindu temples and shrines.
❞Basically, it’s the missionaries’ word against the peoples’ word. It’s not an academic question anymore of whether the Christian doctrine can be translated conceptually. Translation carries political undertones that exceed mere concern for the faithful rendition of a foreign language concept. The search for an intellectually immaculate God is long gone.
What most of us lack, which would allow us to think tunnel-free, is the living record of those conceptual decisions that constantly shape our lifestyle, so that when life changes occur, we may update our beliefs and behaviors accordingly. The problem is not only being fooled, but inertia from a forgotten state of mind. Lennart Green had this anecdote about a buying compulsion centered around musical instruments:
The narrative that led us to choose a side are often disarmingly weak, whether it was through mimetism, coercion, willingness to become part of a group, the simple fun of partisanship, impressionability, blind trust, a default choice, or simply the most hassle-free choice (no pressure from peers and family). Mere rhetorics can be enough to tip the balance. For example, many people are patriotic. This seems okay enough, because why wouldn’t you support your country? But in this seemingly innocent question, rhetorics are already at work. When I pay income taxes, do I help my country, or a crooked administration? As Mark Twain put it, “patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it” (for example, supporting America’s war against Iraq was certainly a good example of misguided patriotism). When you say “my country,” what is exactly “mine”? Does that mean that I can mold it to my liking? That I can sell it? They say, your country gave you everything. You probably would have to correct them: you owe your family, friends and a few other decent human beings, and the rest you had to work for. Others say that the country protects us (social security, police, military force). The fact is that it would be actually more difficult for the country to not protect its citizens. A country that doesn’t protect its citizens (including from themselves) would hardly be a country, or would simply collapse. So things that a country does in order to survive anyway are presented as personalized benevolence—“it gives you everything,” “it protects you”—when it’s actually blind macro-economic forces at work. In effect, a country is like anti-pro-choice people: they can’t help themselves helping people, even when the latter don’t want it. That’s why there are anti-anti-vaccination campaigns and why buying insurance is often mandatory.
Another classic example of pure rhetorics is the reason why so many people feel compelled to vote. Most people fall into common group think, and say to themselves—consciously or unconsciously—that they couldn’t abstain, because if everybody did the same, nothing would get done. This is purely rhetorical. The “if everybody did the same” part is never going to happen. What does happen is that each voter thinks all the other voters think they think what they think, i.e., if one stops voting, all the others will too, somehow. So the voter votes, only to have their vote get lost in a mess (mosaic?) of millions of other votes, each with their own private motives and criteria that, averaged together, must somehow, according to the myths of the average value, make sense on a macro-statistical level—not only sociological sense, mind you, but teleological sense. Whether the vote was skewed by money, voter bias, historical flukes, or even how the votes are tallied (« Trump is the fifth person in U.S. history to become president while losing the nationwide popular vote », English Wikipedia, 2016 United States presidential election), it doesn’t matter: somehow, more than 50% of some crowd always makes the best decision.
Simplistic thinking—e.g., group think, cliché-based thinking, tunnel interpretation—can only be justified as the only way to make sense of the information-driven world. At some point, one has to sort through all that information relentlessly conveyed by the mass media. Even if they’re less than perfect—or even meaningless—we require global indicators such as the national unemployment rate or the Global Warming Index to make sense of the mosaic of information:
The effort to cater to the common denominator means that we’re surrounded by value-based clichés inviting knee-jerk reactions. The prevalence of cliché-based thinking prevents any productive debate, or at the cost of very tedious language introspection. In order to have a productive debate, one would have to spend more time establishing the basic rules of rational debate than having an actual debate. These rules would have to include point-by-point argumentation, non-digression, the ruling out of demagogy, the banning of all ad hominem arguments and all arguments from authority, and so on. Instead of enforcing logic and common sense, debates determine who can best use clichés to their advantage. A cliché can usually be reduced down to one word and can be used rhetorically to support any argument. But as soon as the words “freedom,” “equality,” “democracy,” “justice,” “growth,” “nature”, “human,” “peace,” “employment,” “security,” “ecology” are being tossed around by both sides of the debate, all argumentation becomes paralyzed. You can’t really disagree with someone, even a fascist, who says they fight for progress, can you?
Therefore, it is never a bad idea to give some thought, even if very little, to the blind acceptance of allegedly universal values which have become clichés.
- Survival of humanity: it is a mostly theoretical subject, but has practical relevance at smaller scales—e.g., save the children and the women first in life-or-death situations. The grand scale of the subject lends itself to fiction, and video games have been known to challenge players with the moral dilemma of sacrificing the life of a loved one in order to save the lives of many (The Last of Us, Life Is Strange). Setting aside the legitimate question of whether Earth really would be worse off if most humans disappeared, it turns out that many players opt to save the loved one, even if it means a bittersweet ending, mainly because they grew a meaningful relationship with the character to save—read: a narrative—in a way that would never be possible with an abstract entity like humanity.
- Immortality: we wish for our loved ones to live as long as possible, but one should consider that prolonging life is not necessarily concerned with the quality of life, if the debates on compassionate euthanasia are any indication. The widespread view is that the progress of civilization is linearly correlated to life expectancy, and eternal life is often offered as a carrot in many religions and ideologies. For example, Hitler is quoted in Tobias Ronge’s Das Bild des Herrschers in Malerei und Grafik des Nationalsozialismus: Eine Untersuchung zur Ikonografie von Führer- und Funktionärsbildern im Dritten Reich as saying that « We all suffer from the infirmity of mixed, corrupt blood. How can we purify and atone for ourselves?… The eternal life which the Grail bestows is only for the truly pure, nobles! » However, immortality’s desirability is blind to the design of life as a cycle. As life peaks and then slowly decays, prolonging life past its prime is to overstay its welcome. What’s needed for the progress of civilization is not so much eternal life as new blood. Progress is not linear. It thrives on pioneering minds, and what is more flexible and curious than a newborn’s mind? Making room for the next generation is far from cruel design. It actually makes perfect sense and reconciles us with death, now framed within an intelligible purpose. Even if immortality was concerned with the quality of life, living a life of thousands of years like an Elf in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings would be more a curse than a gift, more a shortsighted goal than a holy grail. How many absurdities, cruel tragedies and heartbreaks can a human-like being theoretically take before hanging it up in bitterness and disgust?
- Democracy: also known as tyranny of the crowd against the competent individual, democracy is the surest way to keep realistic individuals who wish their vote mattered away from mainstream politics. Ironically, presidential elections are generally believed to be the most important to participate in, while also being the elections where the individual’s vote matters the least. To demonstrate how absurd democracy can get, one should look no further than at spontaneous social media movements such the Yellow vests in France as the purest examples of true democracy. The French government obviously felt compelled to arrange a national debate and to hold back reforms because of the sheer number of people out on the streets. But think about it: even if only 10% of people disapproved of the government’s actions, and all 10% took to the streets, that is still 10% of millions of people. It is always going to be a big crowd, and to ignore it would be disastrous for the government’s public image. Just check the news: the success of a popular demonstration is never evaluated in terms of percentages, but in terms of numbers of participants. But if we gave big crowds veto power, the government would have to take back every single important reform (important reforms are never unanimously received precisely because more people pay attention—the least important ones can be unanimously received because people don’t care enough to voice their disapproval). To be consistent, the government also would have to revert a long way back, since all past important reforms certainly had at least a 10% disapproval rate. The minority wasn’t as vocal back then because they didn’t have Facebook to organize large social events. Now, since constant disapproval is a given, it will be amusing to count how absurdly long the Yellow vest movement can last (at the time of this writing, they were on their 23rd consecutive week), and, should the movement falter somewhat because of the government’s panderings, how long before an Orange vest movement or something similar emerges. The lesson here is that you can’t get anything done when you try to do everything with everyone, each with a megaphone.
- Equality: obviously people are not created equal. Inequality is viewed negatively, but this view presupposes a single ranking criterion, which is a reductive interpretation of differentiation. Inequality is not reducible to ranking people. It is also about putting people in a position to succeed according to their real qualities. A direct result of enforcing policies based on wishful equality is miscasting and the blatant tolerance of incompetence:
An editor who has worked hard develops a proprietary interest, becomes protective of his work. This is human nature, this is how we behave in the real world—never mind Wikipedia’s “no ownership” ideal. An editor who knows something about a subject is infuriated to find a know-nothing undoing his contribution. And that good editor is battling not only the know-nothings of today, but the never ending future crops of know-nothings. He can only protect a good article for so long; there comes a time when finally all editors do become equal, the only genuine equality, the equality of the grave.
So good editors after some experience of know-nothing reversions, and abuse, and watching yesterday’s perfect page become today’s shambles, decide it just is not worth the effort. Editorial equality; universal transience—the policy drives away experienced editors, by the very experience of it.
It is not a policy that afflicted the print encyclopedias of yesteryear. They did not make the mistake of assuming all contributors, and contributions, are equal. They vetted very carefully. And it was prestigious to be invited to contribute. Perhaps it is time for Wikipedia to create a mechanism for separating the wheat from the chaff.
A presiding judge keeps order in his court with the contempt power, an instant strike of his gavel. There is no judge keeping order in a Wikipedia discussion. With all editors having equal power to stop abuse, naysaying, and escalating hostility which is to say: none, there is no effective recourse. Especially not against wiley editors who have learned what they can get away with. Reasonable, well-meaning editors flee, driven away; unreasonable, power-seeking editors concentrate, like an acid. As good editors leave, bad ones multiply, new editors find savagery, a deadly acid bath awaits them—a death spiral develops. Wikipedia withers.
❞- Respect: this term is so ambivalent that it can be indifferently used to characterize a relationship with either a friend or an enemy (respect your enemy by giving them your best and not cheating). One can talk of the servant’s respect to their master, but also of the master’s respect for their servant (a theme of acclaimed soap operas like Downton Abbey, by the way). As a justificatory argument, respect is nothing but useless, since it is its own counter-argument. For example, if people try to justify gender quotas with the respect for women, one can just argue that real respect is precisely to avoid particular treatment and to treat women as men. What if people try to impose a behavior/dress code (e.g., use “sir” when addressing important people, impose a school uniform, or prohibit religious attire) as a sign of respect? The real respect here would be to trust people to behave responsibly without resorting to artificial and unnecessary codes. In the last analysis, respect is a disguised ad hominem argument. If someone does something wrong, it is customary to say something to the effect that “people need to respect the law/institution/whatever.” But most of the time, people don’t do something simply to be disrespectful. They do it out of respect for something else that just happens to be incompatible with another thing (e.g., Muslim women wearing the hijab at a republican school). Because it can be thrown without any real thought behind it, the argument that “people need to have respect” is empty. It doesn’t accomplish anything except label a person as a sort of outlaw.
- Peace: peace by itself never solves problems. Compromises and sacrifices do. War does. That’s why it is non-sensical to want peace for its own sake. Peace is only—or rather should only be—a byproduct of solving problems. You don’t just impose peace between warring nations and let bad blood and tensions boil over. Despite this, peace is widely considered an end-goal and a cause for celebration, and yet, its (non)staying power and ultimately its legacy are entirely determined not by the stoppage of war, but by the terms and conditions of peace. In other words, one needs to look past the instant appeal of peace and look at its narrative in order to fully understand its value.
- Freedom: every time a terrorist takes the life of an innocent is an expression of freedom. Because of lone-wolf terrorism, total safety cannot be guaranteed without a totalitarian control of the citizens. One can’t have freedom without its drawbacks. In practice, the only freedom that is preached is either a hypocritical or a self-serving type of freedom, e.g., the freedom of speech in self-proclaimed “Human Rights” countries such as France where an anonymous tweet, without any obligation forced upon anyone to read it, believe it or even understand it correctly, can get its author convicted. Freedom is often used counterproductively to defend itself, e.g., in arguments against vaccine mandates in the name of freedom. A simple retort would be that a terrorist could defend themselves with the same argument. This freedom argument is so devoid of any substance that it has been used to defend the use of the muslim veil and burkinis in France where it was essentially argued that women should be “free” to submit themselves to the exact same customs that women in other countries are fighting to free themselves from.
- Truth: truth, like all things in life, has both advantages and disadvantages. As such, it is not the moral absolute it is widely purported to be. Let’s imagine that something terrible happened and you have a choice to announce the terrible news to someone on their deathbed, or tell them a lie. And let’s admit, for the sake of argument, that this choice will condition whether this dying person is going to leave this world in peace or not. What’s it gonna be?
The fact that, like reconstruction, debunking clichés and universal values is an exercise in interpreting narratives instead of values is not coincidental. The part of the narratives that embraces complexity makes narratives a natural conduit to the more comprehensive understanding of not only art, but language and information in general. Yet, despite the clarity they bring, narratives aren’t meant to make sense of the world as a mosaic of information, as the mosaic is the structure of the absence of sense itself. What they do, however, is explain or predict the moments where reality catches up to the insufficiencies of interpretation. Finding this out is essentially a cynical process—the classic example is being ditched by someone whom you deeply believed you’d spend the rest of your life with, then looking back and being forced to admit that a blind man could see it coming. Even without reconstructing narratives, reality has a way of finding more or less violent outlets of expression in spite of our self-inflicted delusions. Even the most sheltered life eventually has to face loss, illness and death.
Contrary to everyday clichés and self-delusions, no brutal reality is going to punish the interpretation of the average value of art. But there is something to be said about being bored of the “next great thing.” Boredom may not be an impressive reason for revolutionizing consumerist society, and yet, it is possibly the single most potent force for doing anything outside fulfilling basic needs. Isn’t the concept of prison based on the dissuasive power of boredom? The fear of boredom can impact our decision-making in the most serious way as long as we unroll the narrative of routine:
I mean, I’m not on any college’s radar. My mother’s gone. So what’s the point of anything?
The only thing that saved me was something my AAU coach, Tony Langley, said to me. He was a retired cop, and he had that retired-cop wisdom. He used to say, “I’m telling you how it’s gonna go, Steve. Ten years from now, you’re gonna see the same guys, on these same corners, doing the same shit. And they’re gonna be wearing the newest Filas, or the newest Jordans, looking fresh. But you’re gonna look at them, and they’re gonna be another year older, and then another year older, still doing the same shit, still getting robbed, every single day. You can do something different.”
❞And if not for boredom, there’s always that nagging (suppressed) feeling of pointlessness and emptiness even after a good time at the movies, or even the unpleasant impression of condescending show writers mistaking their audience for a popcorn-eating mob.
Imagine getting hired to direct an episode of Game of Thrones. Imagine that it’s now your awesome responsibility to direct a piece of television that’s beloved and famously analyzed and dissected by millions of people.
Now imagine not caring enough to nail down a remotely plausible timeline because you can’t be bothered. You’ll just hope the spectacle is big enough to make everyone forget the gaps in the plot—it worked so well for the Waif’s final fight with Arya, after all! “It’s cool that the show is so important to so many people that it’s being scrutinized so thoroughly,” Taylor added. “If the show was struggling, I’d be worried about those concerns, but the show seems to be doing pretty well so it’s okay to have people with those concerns.”
This is the level of sophistication at which the series is operating now: The show isn’t struggling, so it no longer has to make sense.
And so it doesn’t! This season had some spectacular moments, but the cumulative effect is so squishy and nonsensical that anything could happen; the show has long since stopped justifying its choices. ❞[Showrunner:] “What we had to go through to get the zombie polar bear was writing the zombie polar bear into every season for about 4 seasons. Bernie and the special effects guy tell we cannot afford a zombie polar bear. This year it made perfect sense we could have one of these things out there, and we really put our 4 feet down and we said ‘Goddammit! we want a zombie polar bear.’”
[…] Do these guys realize what makes Game of Thrones good? What makes Game of Thrones good is not a White Walker polar bear, or a big lake set, or thousands of extras. What makes Game of Thrones good are great characters making smart decisions, doing smart things. ❞Clichés and universal values bring a mostly comfortably safe, albeit flawed, view of the world. A simplistic worldview neuters, but also protects society. However, comfort and safety become highly questionable in the context of art as a challenge to the intellect. Ultimately, reconstruction is about getting a handle on our cognitive processes and, essentially, how we can (re)condition ourselves to make our occupations as meaningful as we can.
