Book/From the Interpretation of the Average Value to Pure Reconstruction
From the interpretation of the average value to pure reconstruction
It appears like the interpretation of the medium-specific narrative is in direct opposition to the interpretation of the average value, or that the narrative opposes the mosaic. But at the core, the difference is a shift in terms of interpreted content.
The mosaic of interpretation is conceptually kept separate from the interpreted content. However, it builds on the ambiguity between interpretation and content. Far from being just an evaluation of content, the mosaic forms a seamless tissue with the content and has a direct influence over our appreciation of it. A consumer review can help you better appreciate a product you already have, the same way an art connoisseur can make you re-evaluate what you thought was a worthless piece of junk.
Because of this, and because we regularly consume interpretations as a way of enjoying content—for example, it is well-known that people read reviews of things they already have just for the pleasure of it—it makes sense to subject them to value judgments as well. I will henceforth produce arguments that may motivate the shift to a style of interpretation that calls for a minimalist interpretation of content and the pure transcription of medium-specific narratives. I call that transcription pure reconstruction.
The conventional medium delimitation. How styles of interpretations only differ by how one decides what the content is. On the hedonistic rather than value-based or utilitarian motive of such a decision.
The ambiguity between interpretation and content
“Is the interpretation right?”
This is a question that I imagine is very frequently asked in art classes.
Skepticism regarding authorial intent and the concept of author itself is well-documented, starting with Wimsatt and Beardsley’s The Intentional Fallacy and Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author. I will henceforth point out how such concepts relate to the mosaic.
Art teachers tell us that one should look at a painting for at least a full 15 minutes in order to let everything sink in properly. But let’s hear what they have to say of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night:
The center part shows the village of Saint-Rémy under a swirling sky, in a view from the asylum towards north. The Alpilles far to the right fit to this view, but there is little rapport of the actual scene with the intermediary hills which seem to be derived from a different part of the surroundings, south of the asylum. The cypress tree to the left was added into the composition. Of note is the fact van Gogh had already, during his time in Arles, repositioned Ursa Major from the north to the south in his painting Starry Night Over the Rhone.
❞Now my retort to the teacher’s advice:
- How could anyone possibly come up with the above commentary by just staring at the painting, whether for just 15 minutes or 15 hours ?
- Leaving out the biographical details that can only come to one’s knowledge “from the side,” how couldn’t anyone come up with the rest of the commentary in less than 15 seconds? The intra-medium discourse of the quote can be summed up as: “The painting depicts the view outside at night. The center part shows the village under a swirling sky. There is a cypress tree to the left of the composition.” Anyone with eyes can see that.
Answering both questions brings out the fact that the interpretation is anything but the painting “sinking in.” There is certainly an autonomy of the interpretation. I mean autonomy in the sense that one cannot guess stuff such as “the painting depicts the view outside his sanitorium room window at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.” Not that that fact is arbitrary or irrational. Actually, most descriptions that would qualify as “natural” and “normal” show a similar autonomy. Naming a figure by its name is such a description. When descriptions of Velázquez’ painting Las Meninas identify the central figure as Infanta Margarita, they imply that she is, beyond her pictorial representation, the “five-year-old princess who later married the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, and was at this point Philip IV and Mariana of Austria’s only surviving child,” which in turn coerces the meaning of the other figures around her. Identifying Velázquez as both the painter and a figure of the painting is another innocent-looking identification with far-reaching consequences for the resulting interpretation, as demonstrated by the first chapter of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
Yet, despite being “natural” and “normal,” how descriptions enter in a relationship to the painting is quite opaque—most of the time, you just have to believe what you’re being told. The mosaic is the structure that can join pieces of information inside and outside the painting. I will henceforth make the argument that the mosaic can be seen as encompassing anything recognized as either interpretation or content.
Interpretation+content as a composite medium in its own right. The conventions and ethics of medium delimitation: interpretation as a convention as to what is content and what is not. How this question can prompt the cultural shift in interpretation patterns by subjecting them to value judgments. The case of the reviews we read for pleasure
Interpretations getting out of hand is a well-known cliché of modern art. Should the flower of artspeak fully blossom, one can’t help but admire the unsolicited prolixity, often surpassing the admiration for the work itself. One starts to become cynical: isn’t artspeak the real art? Here is a review of an Yves Klein painting that entirely and uniformly blue:
What do you feel before a blue monochrome?
An IKB monochrome is appealing, mesmerizing, appeasing. You want to sink in it. It is light. It is almost a silky carpet. You want to touch it, to lie on it, to project your dreams on it. It is like a world of peace, some kind of paradise. If you compare two blue monochromes, you can see that they are different. For Yves Klein, blue is the color of infinite space. But he doesn’t want you to only see through the “eyes of the body.” For him, the quality of a painting is difficult to put into words. In his painting, he has left a bit of his soul, of his sensibility, of his energy! According to him, if you pay close attention, you can sense this force, this “something.” It is never the same for each painting, because even if it is about coating a surface with the same color, he applies the color differently, with more or less energy. That is why each painting is different!
❞The critic must have researched their stuff ten times harder than Yves Klein. The quasi-totality of the commentary arguably lies outside the painting medium. They talk about the critic’s associations, the painter’s thoughts, and how the painting compares to other blue monochromes. The effect on the viewing experience is twofold: either you get something out of the interpretation that enriches the experience, or you don’t. If you do, the effect is that of compounding the medium with the reviewer’s statements. In effect, you say: I enjoy the work together with these associations, the painter’s thoughts, in relation to other blue monochromes, as if the work of art was not the painting alone, but the combination of the painting and the interpretation.
A less obvious case of compounding is the interpretation of text: in order to understand any text, the reader must know and assume many things in addition to reading—linguistic, cultural, scientific, conventional, and so on. But even then, interpretation has its own medium, with its own rules, that distinguishes it from the text medium. I already mentioned the fact that the axes of interpretation that make up a mosaic are ordered regardless of content. The order, and even which exact axes were used, are more a matter of convenience and habit than a matter of content. When a movie is tackled from the aspects of plot, characters, style, and so on, those aspects are almost never meant to be understood in any particular order, and no aspect is individually necessary for the interpretation to function. Contrast this degree of freedom to the actual movie, whose aspects must be gradually revealed in a scripted order. In fact, a compulsive artifact of interpretation is the chronological reordering of this scripted order if it is non-linear——e.g., the efforts by fans to piece together the timeline of the TV series Lost. But this endeavor is a rewriting, and a writing in its own right.
But the mosaic structure is not specific to interpretation. It is also an important property of stories as we traditionally understand them. If you look atomically at a story’s transition points, whether the story is fiction or non-fiction, you see that they form a narrative that, however tight-knit and smooth-looking, is actually as loose as a mosaic. Take the story of Jesus revealing himself as the Son of God (fiction or not is not the point): nothing in Jesus’ actions establishes a necessary filiation with God until the story says so, not even his miracles. The miracles only prove that he is super powerful. Superman can smash buildings to pieces and shoot laser beams from his eyes, yet nobody mistakes him for a son of God. God could have endowed Jesus, a mere human, with a few super powers. Although he can walk on water, it may be the case that he gets sun burns just like everyone else. He may possess resurrection power and yet be inept at maths. And why “Son of God?” Why not God Himself? Any answer—including God not having a physical shape—is going to be unsatisfying insofar it will only displace the question to the explanation—a fundamental deficiency of causal explanation. Due to that deficiency, disbelief is uncondemnable on logical grounds: how can one condemn someone for not believing a story that is only plausible, let alone a witness account? And don’t be mistaken. This is not even a critique of the implausibility of Jesus’ story. On the contrary, a real critique could point out that it is too plausible, too calculated, from Jesus’ humble debut to the apotheosis of the Ascension. In fact, interest would pick up if Jesus didn’t manage to resurrect. Following his numerous demonstrations—healings, walking on water, etc.—wouldn’t a failure to resurrect be an even greater miracle than the Resurrection?
The looseness, and the illusion of fate and of a “faithful account of reality,” is something very quantifiable, and can be a budget decision in the business of making stories, in the sense that loose stories cost less to produce than tight stories. One can see this in relation to story-driven video games such as The Walking Dead: The Game, which, like the TV show, was released in episode sets called “seasons.” In that game, the player drives the story by making choices, such as which character they want to save at the expense of another character. Yet, despite the praise, players have come to recognize (and resign themselves to) the locality of their choices. If you decide to save a given character, the saved character is going to be killed off anyway, at one point or another, and the story will be the same after that, whichever character you chose. This was most evident at the end of the second season, where players could trigger any of 6 very different endings. But the beginning of season 3 soon demonstrated that the choice of ending didn’t matter: as far as the main storyline is concerned, any choice was going to be inconsequential. The player’s choice is written off using flashbacks to flesh out in a short sequence how the player’s choices integrate into the main storyline. This is understandable from a budget perspective: if the choices weren’t loosely connected to the main storyline, the developers would have had to create almost 6 different games.
If a story is a loose causality chain, its interpretation is a loose description thereof (chronological reordering being just one example of a loose description), with both joining into a super-mosaic. Take this interpretation of Albert Camus’ The Outsider (the passage in quotes is quoted from the novel):
« Meursault is a character without emotions or moral conscience. He lives by his senses. The death of his mother is a mere casual event that happens to him: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours. That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.” »
The interpretation forms a context to Camus’ text that shifts the focus to what kind of person the narrator is, rather than on the specificity of his reaction to his mother’s death. Now, consider this modified version of The Outsider:
« Things happen. I perceive them as they happen. I don’t see why I should care. For example, Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours. That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday. »
My additions form a context to what follows, just like “Maman died today” forms a context to “Or yesterday maybe.” These changes are not as out-of-place as they may seem: they move the focus to the place where the interpretation took its focus. When Magritte writes “it’s not a pipe” over the picture of a pipe, he realized what I just did: the possibility to feed the interpretation into the work itself. Interpreting the modified quote is the same as interpreting the interpretation in the original quote.
Interpreting interpretation is exactly what we did with the interpretation of the average value. Rather than reading it the usual way, i.e., as a means to forge one’s opinion (should I adhere to the reviewer’s conclusion and follow his recommendations?), I figured out the mosaic-like medium-specific narrative underlying it. This is the same as interpreting the medium-specific narrative of any text. In conceptual art, the work is a recipe to produce a work of art, rather than a finished product. It already looks like the interpretation of a finished product. By interpreting the recipe, we basically hint at the fundamental possibility of interpreting an interpretation the same way we interpret art.
Obviously, an interpretation is not held to the same standards as a work of art. It wouldn’t make sense to criticize an interpretation for not being creative. It would be like arguing that one cannot criticize a singer if one can’t sing (which many do, by the way). Yet, when talking about the separation between interpretation and content, it usually is with the expectation that the interpretation enriches the content. In this regard, the fusion of the content with the interpretation could be praised for being genius, or criticized for being boring. In fact, some authors use that perspective in non-artistic fields. For example, Deleuze and Guattari criticized œdipian psychoanalysis for its inability to cope with the schizophrenic—whether the clinical schizophrenic or “schizophrenic art”:
The question is not anymore whether the interpretation or the theory is true or not, but whether it is worth it in the most subjective sense. Deleuze and Guattari’s answer to œdipian psychoanalysis, schizo-analysis, actually attempts to bridge schizophrenia and “true art.” But far from providing a factual basis for the myth of natural value and “true art,” their departure from œdipian psychoanalysis rather cements the theory as content that can be subjected to value judgments. Deleuze and Guattari link Œdipus to a form of social repression (the bad thing) that struggles to embrace the reality-embracing revolutionary nature (the good thing) of the schizophrenic. But isn’t schizo-analysis at risk of ending up like œdipian psychoanalysis? Can’t Nature become “artificial territorialities,” and can’t Œdipian psychoanalysis become a “stroll,” a “breath of fresh air,” if only because its territorialities, while forcing the clinical material into a rigid, arguably close-minded schema, must skillfully juggle with the speculative elements of analysis in what constitutes the psychiatric equivalent of artspeak?
Both œdipian psychology and artspeak add value to the content, whether or not one agrees on the “authenticity” of the attempt. Modern art critics often come under fire for instrumentalizing content as a way to flaunt their culture. They may, however, have a point: without their vast culture and precious sensibilities, an artwork such as a monochrome painting would probably amount to nothing. Although it may seem obvious to the cynic that artspeak is contrived to sell the artwork high, why would the amateur not want to enjoy the work more—short of buying it—if provided the means to do so, however “artificial?” In fact, is “artificiality” an “authentic” concept? People are already hard-pressed to define what authentic is: what work isn’t in some way derived from other works? What good does it do to compound the intractable “authenticity” of content with the “authenticity” of interpretation?
The dichotomy between interpretation as content and art in general is a conventional barrier that collapses under the critical gaze. For example, the cut-up technique in literature is considered disruptive, and therefore an innovative method of art. But an interpretation that endeavours to see everything chronologically is as disruptive to cut-up narratives as the cut-up technique is disruptive to chronology. Whether one side of the coin should be seen as more disruptive than the other is a matter of bias. People typically believe that disruptive art is fundamentally different and better in an objective, intemporal way. But disruption can only exist for a limited period that doesn’t quite live up to the intemporal status typically demanded of “great art.” After Tony Iommi disrupted hard rock with heavy metal riffs, the techniques and aesthetics quickly became a trend that is anything but disruptive. The outsider will give extreme metal the credit of embodying a kind of fundamental freedom, but insiders know better. Even the most “extreme” and “progressive” metal bands can be as calculated in the construction of its image as a manufactured pop star, following predictable patterns of music history—whether merging influences, going retro, or improving on musicianship. Conversely, the most basic interpretation is fundamentally as disruptive as Jorge Luis Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. When Borges makes Pierre Menard the author of Don Quixote, it’s an act that we all do when assigning an author to a text. In both cases, it’s the same type of mosaic. Here, Borges takes Cervantes’ story as far as Pierre Menard can, in the same way the author’s biography printed on the flap of a book jacket prolongs the book content and seems to synergize with it. The only difference is that Borges officialized the process as Art, the same way Marcel Duchamp could officialize a toilet as Art, or Yves Klein an empty room with white walls as an art exhibition.
Now, the modern art critic’s flatulence, as either a means to enjoyment or just plain Art, wouldn’t attract nearly as much criticism if the reviews were clear about their object. If it were clearly stated that the quoted review of Yves Klein’s Blue Monochrome was of “Yves Klein’s Blue Monochrome viewed through the lens of the sensibility and knowledge of Sandrine Andrews,” then it wouldn’t look as factitious, self-indulgent, and unaccountable. It would acquit itself as a subjective experience catering to whatever purpose—e.g., the purpose of submitting a plausible enjoyable experience. To this effect, reviewers could use very explicit warnings, or a convention of preliminary medium delimitation, that would clearly state upfront what content the interpretation applies to and what material it draws from. The recourse to convention here is not a concession to the argument that “interpretation is as much art as content” is weak, for every work of Art is already a convention that determines what we should consider as content.
With the convention that interpretation itself is art, the critique of critique, or the interpretation of interpretation, has relinquished all rights to treat interpretation differently from content. The interpretation becomes immune to the critique of flatulence, in the sense that it doesn’t purport to have any kind of informative or utilitarian quality. It is not merely there to prove a point about the content, as implied when one accuses a critic of pulling off rhetorical tricks. It is there as something to enjoy (or not) as-is. From a hedonist’s standpoint, interpretation works the same whether the interpretation injects “unauthentic” ideas into the work or not. What the recipient of the interpretation is concerned with is no longer the process of telling the content and the interpretation apart, but how, given both the interpretation and the work, and without questioning the legitimacy of their association, they can interpret them as a unit and make them personally relevant.
So interpretation can be, and often is, judged differently. Conceptually, interpretation is conceived as “outside” the content, which means that “great” interpretations have their own kind of genius: the genius of discovering things hidden from us, that no amount of close analysis would have helped us unlock. Critics are privy to the act of enveloping works in some mystic aura that coerces their audience into respect, e.g., the aura of the “classics.” Critics “reveal” that they are classics, as if their value judgments was backed by some savant secret. But if interpretation is a form of content, then implying that there is some secret at work becomes just another literary device, just like saying “based on actual events” as the preamble to a book or movie. This statement is now subject to the same judgment criteria as traditional content, especially the judgment criterion of tedious repetitiveness. As a co-artist, the critic exposes themselves to an entirely different type of criticism which quickly learns to tire of the judgment values because they always look the same and suffer from the same recurring issues. They are judged for things other than the truth and accuracy of their statements. Under these conditions, the job of the critic may evolve to become a fully fledged artistic endeavor, or, at the other extreme, embrace purely referential interpretation, i.e., a style of interpretation that tries to stay as close to the content as possible.
The evolution of the critic’s job, as prompted by the critique of interpretation itself, is akin to a magician having to please an audience of blasés. For the latter, the wow effect of magic performance has died out: seeing stuff disappear and reappear induces boredom after a while, no matter how clean the effects look. Therefore, the magician decides to make a show out of revealing tricks, à la Penn and Teller. It is an interesting concept based of the fact that 2 tricks with the same effect are not equal depending on their implementation. A teleportation trick is not as impressive if you know the magician uses a twin. Similarly, a card magician like Lennart Green, who finds any card named by the audience from a normal deck in seconds, wouldn’t be as impressive if he uses a stooge in the audience or electronic ink on the cards. To prove that they “don’t cheat while cheating,” the magician needs to reveal the trick, which is painful for them, but is also a form of entertainment (puzzle game) that can actually renew the appreciation for how the trick is performed (for example, the reveal shows that the trick takes a lot of technical skill to pull off). Even non-magician people are willing to pay for this kind of thing.
Interpretation as content isn’t any more special than traditional content. Coincidentally, making the ordinary special and the special ordinary in art is an operation that is only limited by imagination, taste and habit. Habit is what informs us that Fantine in Les Misérables is not as special as if she had superhero powers. But it’s just habit. In literature, people flying around or shooting beams from their eyes is nothing special. The retort could be: it is special in the context of a historical novel like Les Misérables. But the genre of the historical novel, as a part of interpretation, is also a part of the content because we so choose. In other words, our conventions integrate the concept of historical novel so well into Les Misérables that it blends with it, to the point where an a posteriori notion—we only know that Les Misérables is a historical novel in part because it has no trace of superhero, not the other way around—is passed off as an a priori notion that says: there was no way that Les Misérables could have featured a superhero. Victor Hugo would never have allowed it. Here too, the author and his speculated intentions are as much a fact of interpretation as he is a part of the content seen as an a priori historical novel.
If interpretation is seen as content by convention, then an interesting shift in perception occurs. The pertinence of the facts of interpretation is not taken for granted anymore. They acquire contingent and arbitrary qualities. Actually, this shift of perception doesn’t even need a convention in some cases. For example, while product reviews primarily purport to be read as buying recommendations, it is well-known that many are read purely for pleasure, including by product owners, whether it’s to read other opinions, enjoy the writing, or relive something in a nostalgic sense.
Here are examples of perception shift occurring from considering interpretation as content:
- The demystification of the perfect interpretation. With the mosaic of interpretation, there was always the promise of justness and completeness—i.e., the promise of a perfect interpretation. If the mosaic has always been conventional content, perfection was a conventional perfection all along, i.e., a perfection limited to a specific way of viewing content. No matter what, the erudition, sophistication, and fitness for purpose displayed by interpretation originate from an arbitrary decision or convention.
- Interpretation as content doesn’t get dismissed anymore if it is not true or smells of pompousity, pedantism or any sort of hidden agenda. One may, however, criticize it as cliché or just plain bad art.
- Truth and being informative don’t automatically hold value anymore, and can be subjected to value judgments. For example, the concept of author can be seen as an overused cliché. Making lists of pros and cons can be seen as a messy organization of information. Value judgments can be seen as self-indulgent and tactless in the sense of being thrown out there with no regard to their actual relevance to the readers.
Now the critic faces a choice. The interpretation of the average value is no longer the only option. It no longer suffices to be as informative as possible. And it no longer suffices to be inspired by the content and wax poetic over it. If the critic wants to make art, they can take this intention to the limits of its consequences, without having to incur the mockery of a cynical readership. Or they can choose another style of interpretation.
Preliminary medium delimitation: the politics of making the critic aware of choices in content and interpretation
Sometimes the only obstacle that stands between the critic and alternative forms of interpretation is that they weren’t even aware they had a choice.
Preliminary medium delimitation is the formal process of stating upfront what is content and what the critic brings to the table. It makes the critic get rid of a fundamental guilt—i.e., not a conscious guilt, but one that quietly accompanies the partiality to non-universal values. Preliminary medium delimitation is the acknowledgment of a conscious choice on the critic’s part. If the critic chose an interpretation of the average value, then they have indeed formally taken responsibility for any value judgment. In effect, they say, “I know these value judgments are subjective—sorry for inconveniencing anyone.” While this may sound overly apologetic or falsely modest, it is also the case that reviewers often find themselves accused of being too subjective or not prefacing their opinions with adequate gravity.
Preliminary medium delimitation not only allows the critic to be square with their audience, it also encourages self-critique. The intent is to, before they even write a single word, let them know the types of criticism they’re exposing themselves to if they choose this or that style of interpretation, including a new type of criticism that targets the structure of the mosaic itself, as we’re going to see.
The hedonistic choice of interpretation style
When consuming art, a style of interpretation constantly but unconsciously coerces our perception of the content and, by extension, our enjoying (or not) art. If art is all about maxing out enjoyment, then it makes sense to knowingly choose the style of interpretation. Likewise, since interpretations/reviews are often consumed for pleasure, it makes sense for critics and reviewers to consider various styles. In the internet age, gaining access to a wide variety of works is not an issue anymore. This is not the case with interpretation, where a unique-thought mindset has cemented a lack of choice. But with the interpretation of the average value being exposed as a very specific style (rather than all-purpose and universal), this could change.
A shift in interpretation paradigm may be in order if interpretation:
- fails to account for the unique content;
- feels overused or abused.
What follows is a study of the interpretation of the average value as a sameness with a characteristic quality of contingency.
How the interpretation of the average value is a stereotype
The mosaic as the structure of being tacked-on
The content communicated by the mosaic feels same-y despite the infinite recombinability of the mosaic. The infinite recombinability is a double-edged, and means that one can spend a lifetime doing the same thing (recombining mosaic parts) without noticing it. Sameness is not reason enough to dislike something. In fact, the things we like tend to be the same. This is a cornerstone of consumerism, and the reason why one can say, “I like this kind of music,” or “I like reading this writer,” and so on. But after a while, the sameness can become overbearing and overpower our appreciation of content, not because the content allows it, but because our interpretation formats it as a mosaic.
Sometimes the content itself is a mosaic. When that’s the case, it can illustrate simultaneously both the flexibility and contingency of the mosaic structure. When the content follows a non-artistic agenda, that contingency translates into what could be described as gratuitousness or worse. Take for example the America’s Got Talent 2021 audition of magician Dustin Tavella. In his performance, Tavella asks different judges to pick randomly a date, a time of day, a name, and a word. In the final reveal, he asks the show host to open an email received hours prior to the show. The email contains a picture of one of his adopted sons in a cardboard box on which we can read the chosen date and name (“On February 21, 2020, Judge Smith made Dustin and Kari my mommy and daddy”). In the background, a wall clock shows the chosen time of day. Another picture shows the biological mother holding up a sign with the chosen word on it. Where is the mosaic here? The themes of the pictures are obviously orthogonal to the magic trick: the picture could have been of something else. In other words, the pictures are a piece of mosaic, just like the random choices gratuitously assembled into a phrase. The pictures could be anything else and the magic trick would be just as strong technically. The mosaic nature of the performance is such that the collages don’t even have to make sense: besides the fact that no Judge Smith ever granted Dustin and Kari custody on February 21, 2020, but why would you even write this on a cardboard box? What the interchangeability of the pictures conveys to us is the feeling that the themes are tacked on. If you want to be cynical, you could say the mosaic structure of the trick gave Tavella leeway to insert his personal story in order to win sympathy points (which worked pretty well, considering he unabashedly reused the same adoptive hero dad story on his way to winning the show, going so far as to have his wife wheel in the kids just to show some text on their T-shirts). At a more fundamental level, it can be argued that this tacked-on-ness is deeply ingrained into the mosaic structure as a content format.
The stereotype of conjectures. Reality and truth as artistic devices.
A mosaic of ideas is limitless. The ideas therein are free to embrace contradiction. This carefreeness not only means that the most non-sensical mosaic of ideas can be contrived, but that the most no-nonsense mosaic of ideas is somewhat contrived at a fundamental level. Let’s be careful here: the quality of being contrived is not proportional to the artificiality of the ideas. In fact, artificiality is not always in inverse proportion to realism, as real life often looks more fictitious than fiction. How about spiders using air bubbles to breathe underwater? Birds resting on one leg, or insects sleeping horizontally, grasping at stalks with the sheer force of their mandibles, legs folded under them or extended out? Surely, this must be a hoax. Is it?
Saunders (Hymenoptera Aculeata of the British Islands, p. 308) says of Chelostoma, a bee: “The male usually spends its nights curled up in flowers, but Smith says that at other times he has observed them hanging to blades of grass by their mandibles” suspending themselves in a horizontal position with their hind legs stretched out in a line with their bodies.” Some of these were killed by chloroform and remained attached after death.
In the Proc. Cambridge Entom. Club, Oct. 9, 1874 (Psyche, II, pp. 40, 41), it is recorded that Mr. Scudder showed a specimen of “Ammophila glyphus which rests at night by seizing a blade of grass with its jaws and holding itself extended either with or without the use of its middle and hind feet.” Many specimens were seen at different times acting in this manner. The specimen is figured in Morse's First Book of Zoology, p. 94, Fig. 91.
[…]
There are doubtless other records, but sufficient evidence has been given to show that various bees and fossorial Hymenoptera have curious sleeping habits. The exposed position and the use of the mandibles are very remarkable. That a bee or wasp can support its body horizontally all night by the jaws alone seems almost beyond belief.
❞As Hume notes, the only things that hold reality together are causal relationships:
23. If we would satisfy ourselves, therefore, concerning the nature of that evidence, which assures us of matters of fact, we must enquire how we arrive at the knowledge of cause and effect.
I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition, which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori; but arises entirely from experience, when we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other. Let an object be presented to a man of ever so strong natural reason and abilities; if that object be entirely new to him, he will not be able, by the most accurate examination of its sensible qualities, to discover any of its causes or effects. Adam, though his rational faculties be supposed, at the very first, entirely perfect, could not have inferred from the fluidity and transparency of water that it would suffocate him, or from the light and warmth of fire that it would consume him. No object ever discovers, by the qualities which appear to the senses, either the causes which produced it, or the effects which will arise from it; nor can our reason, unassisted by experience, ever draw any inference concerning real existence and matter of fact.
❞Facts, whether true or not, have a fundamentally conjectural quality due to their reliance on empirical evidence to form a consistent reality, which is really nothing more than an open-ended belief structure. One such conjectural fact is the existence of a creator or author, whether man or god. Hume discusses the fundamental separation between the Creator and His alleged work:
In general, it may, I think, be established as a maxim, that where any cause is known only by its particular effects, it must be impossible to infer any new effects from that cause; since the qualities, which are requisite to produce these new effects along with the former, must either be different, or superior, or of more extensive operation, than those which simply produced the effect, whence alone the cause is supposed to be known to us. We can never, therefore, have any reason to suppose the existence of these qualities. To say, that the new effects proceed only from a continuation of the same energy, which is already known from the first effects, will not remove the difficulty. For even granting this to be the case (which can seldom be supposed), the very continuation and exertion of a like energy (for it is impossible it can be absolutely the same), I say, this exertion of a like energy, in a different period of space and time, is a very arbitrary supposition, and what there cannot possibly be any traces of in the effects, from which all our knowledge of the cause is originally derived. Let the inferred cause be exactly proportioned (as it should be) to the known effect; and it is impossible that it can possess any qualities, from which new or different effects can be inferred.
The great source of our mistake in this subject, and of the unbounded licence of conjecture, which we indulge, is, that we tacitly consider ourselves, as in the place of the Supreme Being, and conclude, that he will, on every occasion, observe the same conduct, which we ourselves, in his situation, would have embraced as reasonable and eligible. But, besides that the ordinary course of nature may convince us, that almost everything is regulated by principles and maxims very different from ours; besides this, I say, it must evidently appear contrary to all rules of analogy to reason, from the intentions and projects of men, to those of a Being so different, and so much superior. In human nature, there is a certain experienced coherence of designs and inclinations; so that when, from any fact, we have discovered one intention of any man, it may often be reasonable, from experience, to infer another, and draw a long chain of conclusions concerning his past or future conduct. But this method of reasoning can never have place with regard to a Being, so remote and incomprehensible, who bears much less analogy to any other being in the universe than the sun to a waxen taper, and who discovers himself only by some faint traces or outlines, beyond which we have no authority to ascribe to him any attribute or perfection. What we imagine to be a superior perfection, may really be a defect. Or were it ever so much a perfection, the ascribing of it to the Supreme Being, where it appears not to have been really exerted, to the full, in his works, savours more of flattery and panegyric, than of just reasoning and sound philosophy. All the philosophy, therefore, in the world, and all the religion, which is nothing but a species of philosophy, will never be able to carry us beyond the usual course of experience, or give us measures of conduct and behaviour different from those which are furnished by reflections on common life. No new fact can ever be inferred from the religious hypothesis; no event foreseen or foretold; no reward or punishment expected or dreaded, beyond what is already known by practice and observation.
❞Hume says of the author “that you have no ground to ascribe to him any qualities, but what you see he has actually exerted and displayed in his productions.” The fundamental separation between content and author runs so deep that plausibility isn’t only about the biographical facts, but also about the pieces of evidence and the proof of these facts. Who is the author of the natural theory of selection? For most, Darwin comes to mind. But Alfred Russel Wallace is also a name associated with the theory. The differences in their lives, personalities, and beliefs, are vaporous constraints in regard to the fluidity with which someone can be established as the author of something. Wallace was a radical thinker, so his being credited as the originator of the theory comes across as logical:
But, alas, causality is one tricky beast. Darwin, on the other hand, was never a radical thinker to begin with.
Perfect plausibility is certainly not an absolute criterion for ascertaining biographical facts: I could say that the essence of creation lies precisely in surpassing one’s condition as a creative source. Otherwise one would have to believe all fiction written in first person to be autobiographical. On the other hand, we shouldn’t need an autobiography to be titled Extraterrestrials Took Me To Their Planet to see the fundamentally conjectural quality present in all biographies. Every biographical detail is extraterrestrial-ish, so to speak, by virtue of being in a conjectural relationship with all the other parts of a mosaic.
Now, the alleged reason we take a biography as authoritative is not only because it has been proven, but also because the proof itself is authoritative, and the proof of the proof, and so on. But let’s not kid ourselves: we actually don’t need this deep a proof. As much as we pride ourselves not to be fooled, the fact is that we do take a lot of information at face value and that this doesn’t prevent us from believing in the least. Reliability is more a wishful state of mind than even a half-hearted attempt at consolidating belief. And by extension, so is truth, in a psychological sense. The impact of truth isn’t related to whether truth is true, but to the degree by which one can believe it, which is why one can improve one’s sex life by pretending the sexual partner to be someone else.
Also, we never need scientific proof, only an appearance of scientificity. In most cases, a handful of people may have had first-hand knowledge, while thousands of others repeated what they heard or read. The mantra is known: “the sources have a good reputation, there are rules in the profession, everybody reports the same thing, people are honest, lots of people checked the facts for me.” Since everybody thinks the same and unloads the burden of proof onto others, almost nobody knows for real. We could call the problem of only knowing from hearsay—including the hearsay regarding the sources—the Wikipedia reliability problem.
What we have on Wikipedia is a self-reinforcing reliability. If you have wrong information but link it to a “reliable source with a good reputation” on Wikipedia, then the error was made “reliable” by proxy. Of course, Wikipedia itself remains “reliable” because it has reliability policies, and through reverse psychology, makes the error more reliable without anything actually happening. How many actually click on the footnotes to check the sources? Probably not many, and for a good reason. We don’t need to. We can “feel” truth. Truth is first a manipulative feeling in Art and informative media alike. That’s why movies “based on a true story” are so popular: reality is a source of good thrills. Sure, it is disappointing when a lie is revealed, but even then, you still had a great time while it lasted—and who knows, the lie might unexpectedly turn out to be true.
One can always say: nothing is random and everything happens for a reason. But it’s always in a “yet to discover” mode, as it is the nature of causality to be open-ended. Truth is fragile for this very reason. Whatever else you may have proved, you can’t prove that no new fact will ever emerge to contradict your proof, since reality as knowledge is but a giant mosaic that can be added to in a million ways.
Yet, reality, or rather the belief in it, is glorified for a good reason: it elevates the experience, even when the belief is wrong or shaky. Most passions harbor the sense of belonging to a consistent reality, a consistent identity, and a consistent history. But these passions always follow from an amnesic grasp of reality that is just a step away from a rude awakening. An example would be the sports club fan. The sports club is the consistent reality lived from the inside, with a consistent history. But finding the consistency that would justify the unflagging loyalty of fandom is a struggle. Think of a situation that is increasingly common: a club bought by a foreign investor, probably from the Middle-East or China, now able to afford the greatest stars in the business (think the Paris Saint-Germain soccer club). Almost overnight, most of the staff and players no longer speak the national language. The club’s primary objective is no longer the national championship. It has its sights set on the international stage, because that’s where money and fame are. Except maybe for the club’s name and the players’ uniforms, everything has changed. Even the fans have changed. A new breed has emerged: supporters jumping bandwagons as soon as they smell the promise of victory parades. In this situation, it is hard to explain the unconditional loyalty of the dying breed: the long-standing fans who proudly fought through the humble years of tight budgets and local talents traded to the highest bidder. Love is blind. And now, in the times of newfound luxuries, it is more blind than ever. The wins are nice, but what exactly does the continued support to the club mean? As a club that is expected to run away with the national championship every year in what basically amounts to a lose-lose situation (if it doesn’t win, then it ought to be ashamed, and if it does, no big deal since it was just expected)? As a political entity whose faces are mercenaries who barely knew the club just a few months ago? What is exactly the consistency of the reality of the club as an entity with a history?
Another kind of identity would be one’s race, country, or nation. It is so strong that people go to war and die for their sake. It is all good, but sometimes, you need to go deeper into the implications of going to war for something as abstract as a country. As Mark Twain pointed out, “the country is what you unconditionally serve, the government is what you serve if it deserves it.” And more often than not, it turns out that what you end up doing when “going to war for your country” is the noble thing to do is actually risking your life for a very flawed government—think the invasion of Iraq by the U.S.—or driven by less-than-noble agendas—think neo-colonialism sold as war against terror.
Now, the consistency of a reality may be hard to prove, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. If I choose to, given the means, I can go out just now, probe the world and prove that my belief is firmly anchored in reality. If I’m already out there probing the world, I can always probe some more. The whole counter-argument is contained in the “if.” Concretely, if I am a long-time fan of the club that became the latest shiny new toy of a billionaire, I can go out and prove that my loyalty still makes sense. But when all the people that I cherished there are all gone, sacrificed to the “winning at all costs” (literally) mentality, when the club has relocated to new state-of-the-art facilities, what I will find is maybe a brand and some paperwork. Does it still justify my loyalty to “the” club? Wasn’t “the” club that I truly support exactly the one back in the old days, but not beyond?
Even “real reality” has its whimsical ways. Whoever diligently follows the news with an appetite for reality is in for quite a ride. One day the Sandy Islands exist. The next day, they are imaginary. One day, you believe that black widow spiders owe their name to female spiders eating their mate. The next day, you read:
In the ongoing saga of the John F. Kennedy assassination theories, the “Dictabelt recording” spawned the equivalent of a table tennis match between different realities.
Scientific investigations were conducted by “acoustics analysts” and conclusive numbers were provided to support the second gunman theory:
However, there was a discrepancy when it came to locating the microphone at the time of the recording:
An “expert on photographic evidence” confirmed the discrepancy:
Finally, both the FBI and the National Academy of Sciences conclusively rebutted the HSCA:
On May 14, 1982, the panel of experts chaired by Harvard University's Norman Ramsey, released the results of their study. The NAS panel unanimously concluded that: “The acoustic analyses do not demonstrate that there was a grassy knoll shot, and in particular there is no acoustic basis for the claim of 95% probability of such a shot. The acoustic impulses attributed to gunshots were recorded about one minute after the President had been shot and the motorcade had been instructed to go to the hospital. Therefore, reliable acoustic data do not support a conclusion that there was a second gunman.”
❞But Dr. Donald B. Thomas, who agreed with the HSCA conclusions and published his findings in an issue of Science & Justice, had the last word:
Or maybe not.
Reversals of beliefs and the way we deal with them expose our ideas of reality and truth as a mosaic of facts which may be true, but which we freely combine with each other, even with wrong facts.
I don’t question the nature and utility of belief, nor do I lament facts not being facts enough. Let’s just ask: in the context of art, what do realism and truthiness bring to the experience that is not stereotypical? The answer probably lies in the difference between the live TV coverage of a school shooting and the mockumentary of a school shooting. In both, any universe of facts has the shape of a mosaic of conjectures. The concept of plot itself is a mosaic: something happens, so X does something, which causes Y, etc. Fictional events flow plausibly from each other, they can freely mingle with historical events, and this perfectly works with time-travel too! In fiction, facts can have the exact same realistic outlook as “real” facts, even if they involve time-travel (at least if you don’t think too hard about it).
Deconstructing reality is a sure way to attract accusations of reality denial and nihilism. But it is based on analyzing what is being said, which is an act full of reality. The act of reading words in a fictional work is always more real as an act than the reality suggested by words in the newspapers. The act of looking at a painting is always more real than any meaning ascribed to it. The statement “Portrait of Gertrude Stein is the portrait of Gertrude Stein” is a conjecture indeed. Picasso himself, assuming the portrait is his work, may have said so. But only the belief in the printed records may back up the conjecture today, and even then, who is to say Picasso didn’t lie or only partially told the truth? Decades of people repeating what they read or heard don’t change the conjectural nature. Tomorrow, an article or the latest x-rays may change things up. Denying the possibility of that happening would be the true reality denial, as such things happen all the time.
Reality being somewhat lacking is not even a problem in practice, as people find satisfaction in it easily enough. Too easily maybe? The point is that knowledge is not as satisfying as it could be. Satisfaction in knowledge, especially causal knowledge, happens to the degree the answer to the “why?” question doesn’t call for another why. However, no answer can be ultimate, if only because the fact that we stop at it is a convention. You may be satisfied if I explain to you that the sky is blue because it absorbs longer wavelength colors. You may, however, also rightly ask why it absorbs longer wavelength colors (because my answer may really just amount to a definition of the color blue in wavelength terms), and when I explain this to you, you may ask another explanation and so on, until we decide to conclude that “it is so because it is so.” There's also the God answer. But when your local Jehovah’s Witnesses claim that “Man needs to know why he exists,” their answer is not satisfactory for the very reason that there cannot be any satisfactory answer. To “Man is such because God wanted it so”, one is always entitled to reply “Why did God want it so?”, etc. Stopping at God is relatively satisfying but absolutely arbitrary, because there is no logical ground to stopping the questioning. Similarly, nothing can logically prevent there being a Creator of God, and then a Creator of the Creator of God, and so on. And if someone argues that God is a transcendental Being so that logic can’t apply, then any kind of metaphysical rhetorics is fair game, so why not a transcendental Creator of the transcendental God?
This gratuitous extensiveness of causality contrasts with the comprehensiveness of the medium-specific narrative. This contrast could be compared to Derrida putting the “unformed mass of roots, soil, and sediments of all sorts” against the “irreducible point of originality” contained in his careful reading of Rousseau:
In general, the “unformed mass” of reality proves to be too complex to support the kind of simplistic consistency that produces popular trends in analysis, including the trend of having an author, which one could supposedly rationally infer from the text. As soon as one carefully examines the open-ended nature of the inference, the concept begins to break down:
Even the concepts of truth and understanding are simplistic insofar as they relate to simplistic concepts. To the literary analyst, understanding literature is, besides other things, about knowing its author.
Whether a concept is fundamentally conjectural or too simplistic to have a consistent meaning, it can still function. But it is as unsatisfying as the belief in it is cheap to manufacture. The lack of boundaries of the concept of reality should be the promise of an infinite source of knowledge, but in practice, we kind of know what to expect: an “unformed mass of roots, soil, and sediments of all sorts,” a “tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” In art, it is a cliché, either as an artistic means of expression, or as a consumer’s demand for realism, e.g., when we’re asking for believability in acting even though it’s, well, acting.
The inconsequential conjecture stress-test
Common wisdom tells us to judge the merits of a statement in relation to its implications. If someone says that alcohol accounts for 40% of all traffic accidents, a common conclusion would be: wow, alcohol is truly bad. But if 40% is an awful lot, then I have bad news for you. 60% of all accidents are caused by sober drivers. So, if we must do something about alcoholism because of the 40%, then what do the 60% say about driving sober? What this relativization tells us is that you can’t use this statistic as-is for the purpose of condemning alcoholism. You need better statistics for that.
Here the question is about the merits of the mosaic of the interpretation of the average value. The main properties of the mosaic follow from its conjectural nature:
- Extensibility
- Interchangeability of the parts
Applying common wisdom here, we can try to relativize their contributions to the merits of the interpretation through “stress-testing.” After all, if something is so good, what harm could it do to have more and more of it?
- Stress-testing extensibility by adding more and more relevant conjectures, trying to assess the critical mass above which any further addition would feel redundant. The limit is psychological. The unbounded combination of interchangeable facts increasingly overwhelms, causing a numbing effect. More is not always better. Above a critical mass, each additional fact becomes more and more insignificant. A mosaic is like a mental counter. The greater the magnitude, the lesser the clarity and the greater the numbing effect. Two deaths are intuitively clear, 98738749293478 deaths less so, in the sense that it is, in effect, indistinguishable from 983987984339 or 9808799787987 deaths. Above a certain level of magnitude or precision, numbers become a monotonous litany of digits that elicits indifference toward the precise digits. That’s why, to the genocidal dictators, a million more victims added to many millions isn’t a particularly involving decision, and conversely, it is difficult to “proportionately” blame them for each and every death: it is impossible to feel for the suffering individual when the death toll is in the millions. And to those who would like to hold them accountable for each and every death, it doesn’t matter to them: whether they get 3000000 or 10000000 years is immaterial. Whatever is free and overabundant loses any sense of differentiation, whether reward or penalty. This is the issue with conjectures: they are as abundant and interchangeable as our sense of plausibility is open to overuse and abuse.
- Stress-testing interchangeability by replacing conjectures with other conjectures. Interchangeability is basically the fact that our tolerance for facts is wide enough to accomodate many versions of reality, especially in art where it is, in a way, the artist’s job to create an ambiguity regarding the “real” author by transcending their real-life conditions. The merits of any fact should then be judged against its possible substitutions. It is indisputable that the favored criterion for a choice here would be truth, although, in practice, it really is plausibility, or rather, acceptability. So how would interpretations of a painting turn out if alternative facts were used? To make things interesting, artspeak will be used to exaggerate the means by which plausible facts can be manufactured.
How do you appreciate this painting by Odilon Redon…
…if you tell yourself it is Edvard Munch’s?
« This placid scenery is a… far cry from the painter’s most iconic painting. Yet, somehow, the broody atmosphere and contained escapist symbolism announces the heavier tones of his future work. »
Pollock’s at a very young age?
« Young Pollock was still in the process of figuring out his own style. Here he captures perfectly the “calm before the storm” in a relatively academic but self-affirming style not unlike early Picasso. »
Pollock’s a few days before his death? That changes everything.
« Pollock was intent on returning to his artistic roots. The horizontal composition serves an open-endedness of structure surfing the undercurrent of evolution. »
Bill Clinton’s?
« The elegant simplicity of the environment conveys the values of middle-class America. It is served by the portuary symbolism of the American Dream that was central to president Clinton’s domestic policies. »
Martin Luther King’s?
« The boat of peace has long sailed. Martin Luther King took what is a predominantly white man’s art into a pacific expression of open society. »
A description of a painting through its author needs to be not only interesting but also logical. If it were only interesting, one could probably choose another, more interesting author to build the interpretation on. If it were only logical, what would be the point of mentioning the author, except maybe a sense of overbearing duty and tradition?
By playing on the concepts of extensibility and interchangeability, we get to relativize what was inevitably put into motion in the “truthful” interpretation, namely the fundamental conjecturing.
One wouldn’t want to conjecture more than necessary. The value judgment here is that, as an artistry, conjecturing is a mind game one can expand at will, and as such, a self-indulgent method of writing. The average value is the necessary product of trying to make sense of all the self-multiplying conjectures. It is akin to aggregating highly differentiated individuals into statistics, by virtue of losing all sense of the individual.
Yet, conjecturing is able to produce medium-specific narratives rather than mosaics. Obviously, some combinations of conjectures are better than others. Sometimes the whole is more than the sum of the parts. That’s why it might make sense, as part of conventional medium delimitation, to view conjectures as content, because (1) they are such an essential component of the experience, and (2) it demands quite some thought to come up with an interesting mix of conjectures.
Pretend you don’t know this painting:
And then consider the interpretation:
An opposite interpretation would be interesting and logical as well:
Both interpretations are clearly conjectural, since they second-guess an intent behind the painting. Both hold enough significance that they could warrant an inclusion in the work, as Magritte did:
Whether, as a conventional medium delimitation, one considers the totality of the painting and the interpretation, or the totality of the painting with the interpretation inside the canvas, it is the same to the hedonist or whoever is willing to maximize the experience.
So the issue is not necessarily interpretation being too artificial—“outside the canvas,” pretending to be a correct account of reality—or not artificial enough —“inside the canvas,” pretending to be art. Rather, it is the stereotyped totality of the interpretation together with the work, as either a habit, a trend, or an overused cliché. For example, the characterization of a work through the biography of its author is expected of any reasonable interpretation. Yet, in the words of Richard Strauss writing to Stefan Zweig at the time of Nazi Germany: “Do you believe I am ever, in any of my actions, guided by the thought that I am 'German'? Do you suppose Mozart was consciously 'Aryan' when he composed? I recognise only two types of people: those who have talent and those who have none.” I could also quote:
Or:
While this seems like a lot for a bunch of guys with tattoos, they are intelligent, as manifested by the “simple” complexity of structures, where they have distilled what it is they mean to communicate into ideas, so well-defined variations, Slayer-style, offer no detours but complement the overall theme.
❞The mind games based on skill and impressiveness: trivially deprecated opinions, and the correspondingly trivial form of progress
The mind games of skill and impressiveness are close to the mind games of authorship. They also rely on a reality, here in the form of a value scale that is as arbitrary as it is transient. Thanks to them, people get impressed by what “most can’t do.”
The actual performance has to involve belief in a particular feat requiring skill and hard work. This belief is often exposed as an ignorance of its conditions. Take a young drummer performing for a talent show. A member of the jury, an authoritative figure in the music business, declares he is really impressed. On Twitter, people are already condescending because they see this as the reasonable performance of a well-schooled second-year drummer. This isn’t a rare occurrence. People often get wowed by virtuoso acts that millions of no-names in orchestras could perform backward in their sleep. Many more are impressed by fake performances in general—lip-syncing, doping, etc. Some believe that they rarely, if ever, get faked out because they have a keen sense of the authentic. It’s always the same old argument: you can’t know you got fooled, because it’s the essence of the fool not to know. It’s like people claiming that experience shows that crime never goes unnoticed, so you better not go against the law. But the argument falls apart all the same: the moralist can only know of the crimes that got publicity. The millions they don’t know about have flown under the radar.
Still, the point is not about being right or wrong, but that, as hard as one tries not to be fooled, the sensation of being impressed is the same whether fooled or not. At some point in their life, the most respected authority learned the existence of playback singing, doping in sports, or tool-assisted speed runs in video gaming, which threw off their whole perception of a particular performance. If authenticity looks absolute and beyond any doubt, one can just wait it out. In the movie Goodfellas, a gangster’s wife shows off the family’s impressive TV set to her guests:
The vanity makes us smile. But do we always need to take such a look back to be able to relativize our present values and the self-indulgence underlying them? Curved smartphones have taken the place of the convex cathodic tubes, but we are, psychologically and philosophically, in the same position today as the gangster’s wife. History repeats itself. What was in the past is not impressive anymore and the present becomes the new impressive absolute. In most cases, the absoluteness is only a big sign screaming “absolute,” like the digital display next to a track and field athlete making the V sign because they broke a world record and “made history.” One can see from the hurried look to the screens as the track runners cross the finish line that the sensation of “beating the world record” is not something that is derived from the actual performance as it occurs, but from a very explicit suggestion taken very seriously after the performance. The runner sure ran fast, but to really overcome the past and make history, one needs a sign that screams “fast fast fast” after the fact. The relationship between impressiveness and the actual performance is so volatile that one may ask: why shouldn’t one be unimpressed, even after a look at the screens? Why would jumping to the conclusion that they made history be more “authentic” than a reaction such as “the wind was probably blowing hard in their back,” or “the guy was probably on performance-enhancing drugs?” It is not that counter-intuitive or unnatural. In fact, a cynical attitude has already taken over in professional cycling, where all great performances are instantly stained by suspicions of doping. In all cases, it is never a question of actual perception. Not the perceived speed, for nobody is impressed by an ordinary horse running twice as fast than the best sprinter in the world. The question of relativity, especially in relation to one’s own capabilities, has little legitimacy. Why should I be impressed by Usain Bolt if he only runs twice as fast as I do? Why shouldn’t I set the bar higher? Nothing but my expectations. Despite the relative form of “X times faster,” the whole proposition “X times faster is impressive” is actually an absolute statement. Even when expressed as “impressive for the times,” it still makes an absolute claim, as a generalization of the claims of a group of people. The 80% approval ratio that translates into a “universal acclaim” in Wikipedia’s critical reception sections is an instance of this form of absolute claim.
The passage of time is useful in exposing false absolute claims that something is impressive, but mere careful reading of such claims can also do the same. Take the DNA of the ape 99% similar to the human DNA. This genetic similarity impressed even scientists. What the stat doesn’t tell, and what most people don’t care to check, is the relativity of the numbers. An ant could be 90% similar. Mice are actually 97.5% similar. The fallacy of the 99% absolute is the fallacy of believing that 99% is impressive in itself.
Sometimes, your mere background will inform you of the imposture. For example, a black metal fan raves to a prog rock fan about the “groundbreaking” use of keyboards or female vocals by his favorite band, something the prog rock fan isn’t impressed with in the least. On the other hand, something as characteristic such as black metal’s ambient noise over monotonous drumming might impress them more.
Another way to debunk absolute claims is by sensing what will become of them. If the hour record in cycling is 51.115 km, then you just know that some time in the future, “impressive” will rather apply to 52 km. Beliefs beg to be negated, if only because they carry in them the potential of their own denial. They also entail a certain form of progress conditioned by the beliefs. When that’s the case, a surprising development is akin to being surprised when it was only you deceiving yourself in the first place. Victor Hugo’s Hernani owes its fame to a few authorities making up rules about how a play should be written:
- The unity of action: a play should have one main action that it follows, with no or few subplots.
- The unity of place: a play should cover a single physical space and should not attempt to compress geography, nor should the stage represent more than one place.
- The unity of time: the action in a play should take place over no more than 24 hours.
Such rules happen to look so arbitrary today that we clearly see that it was only a matter of time before someone broke them (even unintentionally). The same can be said of everything that is “impressive,” in every area of knowledge. The Copernican Revolution is only revolutionary because people got too much ahead of themselves in geocentrism. Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics is shocking or highly controversial only to people who swore to the mechanistic interpretation of all phenomena. The habit of having to speak up in a definitive tone about the truth value of everything effectively makes Wittgenstein’s “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” an advance in human wisdom. And this suggestion equally applies to both Einstein, when he says in relation to Bohr’s interpretation that God does not roll dice, and Bohr, when he allegedly suggested to Einstein not to speculate about what God ought to do.
Therefore, there is no necessity to the feeling of being impressed. This absence of necessity expresses a contingency of feeling that mirrors the structural contingency in the mosaic. For example, being impressed by singing acts in talent shows is just one step away from laughing, considering how they’re trying to impress (and how the trained audience reacts) is so predictable and cliché. Basically imitate Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston.
The “too much, not enough” syndrom
Compared to a medium-specific narrative, the interpretation of the average value suffers from “too much, not enough.” Conceptual art can help expose the discrepancy.
The “set of written instructions” generates the work, leaving out the “traditional aesthetic and material concerns.” Now, the relationship between the build instructions and the generated work is two-ways: if one views the generated work in light of the build instructions, then it appears that those instructions actually reflect some medium-specific narrative in the generated work.
Consider Goya’s The Third of May 1808. The build instructions corresponding to one medium-specific narrative of this painting could read as follows:
1. Draw groups of figures on a horizontal plane.
2. Draw the groups tight, inside convex shapes, so as to create a mutual exclusion between a left side and a right side.
3. Draw in the center a standing figure arms up: one arm is tangent to the groups on the left side, the other arm to the groups on the right side.
4. Paint a shirt of the same color on the center figure, covering the arms and the torso
The items of this list relate to each other in a medium-specific pattern that is relatively unique. Most of them can be found in the first paragraph of this Wikipedia quote:
On the right side stands the firing squad, engulfed in shadow and painted as a monolithic unit. Seen nearly from behind, their bayonets and their shako headgear form a relentless and immutable column. Most of the faces of the figures cannot be seen, but the face of the man to the right of the main victim, peeping fearfully towards the soldiers, acts as a repoussoir at the back of the central group. Without distracting from the intensity of the foreground drama, a townscape with a steeple looms in the nocturnal distance, probably including the barracks used by the French. In the background between the hillside and the shakos is a crowd with torches: perhaps onlookers, perhaps more soldiers or victims.
The Second and Third of May 1808 are thought to have been intended as parts of a larger series. Written commentary and circumstantial evidence suggest that Goya painted four large canvases memorializing the rebellion of May 1808. In his memoirs of the Royal Academy in 1867, José Caveda wrote of four paintings by Goya of the second of May, and Cristóbal Ferriz—an artist and a collector of Goya—mentioned two other paintings on the theme: a revolt at the royal palace and a defense of artillery barracks. Contemporary prints stand as precedents for such a series. The disappearance of two paintings may indicate official displeasure with the depiction of popular insurrection.
❞Besides the fact that the description throws so many details at the reader that it obscures any overall message it might have, it misses from the build instructions the narrative that strings together the convex groups, their opposition, and the synthetic function of the central figure. The quote reads more like an enumeration of elements of a visual mosaic. On top of the visual mosaic is the juxtaposition of various non-visual statements, including:
- value judgments: “by a stroke of genius”
- speculations: “his arms flung wide in either appeal or defiance,” “probably including the barracks used by the French,” “perhaps onlookers, perhaps more soldiers or victims”
- context of the painting, including the author’s intention and other historical considerations
Many of these elements of the mosaic look extra to the medium-specific narrative of the build instructions, and what it is missing in terms of narrative is expressed in the overall impression of an inorganic whole. Following is a general assessment of the interpretation of the average value:
(a) It is “not enough” in the sense that its microscopic analysis pictures the whole as a mosaic of isolated features—in painting, that could be the analysis of the brush strokes, the study of the colours, the contours, the objects, etc.—which it can only correlate to each other by virtue of them being lumped together. This is not so much a critique of close reading and “lemon-squeezing analysis” as a recognition of its intrinsic limitations. For example, when Schopenhauer puts music under the microscope, the smallest details—“the effect of the minor and major”, “the change of half a tone”, “the entrance of a minor third instead of a major”—and the most banal observations you’ll ever find—“quick melodies,” “elaborate movements, long passages”—appear wonderful to him:
Just listening to him, you’d think that any music is a “work of genius.” It seems beyond belief that someone would suggest such an absurdity—of course, believing in the existence of banality and mediocrity is subjective, but so is the qualification of “genius.” It may be that mediocre music was a post-eighteenth century invention. Or it may be that Schopenhauer had so much tunnel vision that he couldn’t see the implications of his generalizations.
(b) It is “too much” in the sense of the inconsequential conjecture test, when the work is analyzed in contexts that exceed—and ultimately eclipse—its content. For example, myopic analysis typically classifies a song by genre (black metal), sub-genre (death black metal), ideology (national socialist black metal), country (Norwegian black metal), ethnicity (Viking black metal), etc. All these classifications are equally valid, and the choice of one over another is quite tangential to the content. A classification has value only insofar as it lumps different works together and loses their individuality. If the complexity of the interpretation of a single work was the cause of unintelligible mosaics, now imagine for a whole genre the inconsistencies and debates that classification generates. Personally, I still try to wrap my head around the expression “classical music” when it throws in the same bag the “pure classicism” of Brahms and the “nationalist symphonic poems” of Bedřich Smetana. The same with more refined categorizations: the aforementioned composers have also been categorized as “mid-era Romanticism.” If anything valuable can ever emerge from classifications—besides the mercantile concerns of matching buyers and sellers based on superficial criteria—it’s left unspecified and can be considered as the magical upside of interpretation.
Pure reconstruction
I call reconstruction an interpretation that tries to limit itself to transcribing a medium-specific narrative from content agreed upon through a convention of medium delimitation. The principle of only transcribing is what I call pure referentiality. A reconstruction is always purely referential. This principle can be understood in relation to the issue of “quoting out of context.” For example, we can reconstruct a discourse of François Hollande and write: “François Hollande says that he doesn’t like rich people.” Actually, Nicolas Sarkozy quoted him during the 2007 presidential debate against Segolène Royal, to which the latter replied, “You shouldn’t take things out of context.” Sarkozy did have a political agenda, which was to show that Hollande wasn’t the rallying force he purported to be. In the context of a reconstruction, the quote is to be understood in context by virtue of pure referentiality. The quote doesn’t reflect Hollande’s aptitude for the presidency as much as it refers to a particular point in his entire discourse. The difference between Sarkozy’s quote and the reconstruction’s quote is that in the former case, it may well be that, as Royal pointed out, the fault was on Sarkozy for taking things out of context, while in the latter case, the fault for taking the quote out of context would be the reader’s, for not accounting for the pure referentiality.
Pure reconstruction is a reconstruction whose convention of medium delimitation tries to stay within bounds of what could be accepted as “intra-medium content.” To use the same example, this means that a pure reconstruction of the Hollande discourse wouldn’t try to make a point, such as Hollande being a leftist or trying to be a demagogue. It only transcribes what he said, not what he intended to say or what he looked like to the electorate.
Pure referentiality
Incorruptibility as a convention
The “pure” of “pure reconstruction” does not refer to the same thing as the “pure” of “pure referentiality.” The former refers to the medium delimitation, while the latter refers to the intended purpose of the interpretation’s words, namely referencing.
So, a reconstruction that is not pure could address extra-medium content and still remain purely referential. What is pure would be the referentiality, not the content. I can say that a banana drink is pure fruit juice, but a banana-orange mix is also pure fruit juice. Therefore, I can write in a non-pure reconstruction that “Hollande tries to distance himself from the much disputed policies of the outgoing government by saying that he doesn’t like rich people,” but it doesn’t mean that Hollande’s discourse implied that Holland really tried to do that. Obviously, any intention I may ascribe to Hollande comes from my subjective interpretation: the pure referentiality here means that the ascribed intentions are just a pure reference to my possibly biased interpretation.
In practice and by convention, pure referentiality is meant as the incorruptible intention to be purely referential, rather than a formal property of the reconstruction’s text. The incorruptibility means that even if the reconstruction takes some liberties in expression, its meaning always stays referential. The process of extracting the referential meaning from the informally referential text should be fairly obvious. For example, if the reconstruction of a Hollande discourse starts with “Hollande says that…”, it should be understood that “Hollande says that…” is just a convenient way of quoting the discourse, not a reference to something in the discourse (unless, in his discourse, Hollande speaks of himself in the third person, of course). On the other hand, if the reconstruction states that “Hollande tries to distance himself from the much disputed policies of the outgoing government by saying that he doesn’t like rich people,” the incorruptibility can only mean a convention of medium delimitation that includes a speculation about Hollande’s intentions. Whether that convention should be made explicit or whether its implicitness is acceptable is another matter outside the scope of this discussion.
Referencing narratives: a shift of focus from understanding to communicating observations as is
Pure referentiality and conventional medium delimitation provide methodological guidance for the reading and writing of interpretations. This guidance is expected to lead to the depreciation of the interpretation of the average value as a way of understanding content. Here’s why.
Purely referential interpretation is what happens after the moment one has agreed on what to talk about, with whatever system of truth, values, beliefs, prejudices, etc.—i.e., the convention of medium delimitation. That is, the answer to the questions of legitimacy, meaning, value and so on (what we usually mean by “understanding”), is already contained in the convention of medium delimitation. We have already accepted everything as content. The focus is not anymore the interpretive qualities, but submitting content clearly to a hedonistic consumer. By hedonistic, I mean a consumer who is willing to accept the conventions of pure reconstruction, which is a sign of hedonism, because there are few reasons to accept such conventions if not to improve the subjective experience.
This implies that we only view content as content, rather than an interpretation of content that must be judged according to criteria different from those used for the painting itself. This is true of this interpretation of Goya’s painting The Third of May 1808:
For example, the statement “The Third of May 1808 is set in the early hours of the morning following the uprising” sets an informative context that allows to understand the painting. Considered as content, we see it, through the lens of pure referentiality, in relation to the painting, i.e., as a piece of mosaic by virtue of being a non-visual information considered in relation to visual information. The contigency of the mosaic is expressed in the fact that whether it’s the “early hours of the morning” or the late hours of the night is inconsequential to the painting. Same with the mention of an “uprising” or whether the central figure is a “labourer:” once this information is allowed into the content, it automatically becomes a piece of mosaic. Similarly, any interpretation of the average value (as hinted by the expression “stroke of genius” in the previous quote), as non-special content, will be viewed as a piece of mosaic subject to the inconsequential conjecture test.
Trying to avoid cryptic metaphors
A reconstruction being laid down “on paper” (virtual or physical), pure referentiality to certain types of medium, say, music, can be tricky. Even so, purely referential descriptions shouldn’t require of the reader a degree in musicology—in fact, the vocabulary of musicology caters to what music analysts look for, which is definitely not medium-specific narration. In practice, referentiality is achieved through metaphors.
Now, in the context of pure referentiality, all the reconstruction’s words are only meant to refer to the music as a narrative of sounds, and any extra connotation they may have is to be discarded. In the reviewing world, metaphors may be more or less purely referential. It’s all part of a more or less rewarding guessing game. For example, the Heavy Metal FAQ sees Metallica’s early music as “a passion from an emergent conception of existence and a fluidity of acceptance of its darkness.” Naively considered, the description less denotes a medium-specific narrative than it connotes the music with the judgment value of some sort of romantic poet. It could apply to such a wide range of music, from classical music to black metal to pop rap, that it is practically useless as characterization. Yet, assuming we can get something out of this, we may attempt to match the description to a real song, say Metallica’s Fade to Black. This song’s lyrics actually mirror the description quite nicely: the post-chorus segment dissolves (“fluidity of acceptance” corresponding to the instrumental segment following the lyrics “Death greets me warm, now I will just say goodbye”) the tension build-up expressed in the “darkness” of the verses (“emergent conception of existence” corresponding to the lyrics “Emptiness is filling me / To the point of agony / Growing darkness taking dawn”). Only after the terms are tentatively matched to the actual music may the reader connect to the critic’s subjective experience in a way that may not be just speculative. The attempt I made looks okay to me, though not quite Fade to Black-specific yet. “Dissolves,” “tension build-up,” are terms that could mean a lot of things musically, not only medium-specific things. Also it is common to see “darkness” in heavy metal; it is nothing specific to the song or even Metallica. Even something like the minor key is considered “dark” in western music:
Also, almost any music is always full of “passion,” “tension” and “emergent” things (for example, one could qualify any sort of crescendo as “emergent”, and any transition from verse to chorus can be seen as “emergent”). A medium-specific narrative only has value if it is not so generic as to fit entire genres of content. Metaphors can help express it, but not in the generic form they usually appear in, even if, as with the Heavy Metal FAQ, they may resonate with a listener with a sensibility for medium-specific narratives.
Not about trying to be objective
The “too much, not enough” syndrome of the interpretation of the average value has a lot to do with the traditional dichotomy of subjectivity/objectivity—sometimes known as art/science—that nicely lays out how one should go about anything. You want to be objective? Look at the content through the microscope. You want to be subjective? Put some distance between you and the content to avoid being caught in the technical details, and concentrate on your feelings, emotions and thoughts. But such a dichotomy hardly exhausts what can be said of a particular content, because it constantly puts the interpretation in a dilemma. A microscope is too focused to make sense of the whole. On the other hand, myopia tries to make sense of the whole, but clouds the particulars that make the whole unique. The point is not whether this is right or wrong, but whether there is no other choice than between objective and subjective, between the microscopic and the macroscopic:
The dichotomy here is historical/technical objectivity versus aesthetic subjectivity. Both sides give rise to mosaics. For example, whether an author chose a certain technique because of a certain history—including his personal life—is contingent with respect to the content. That is, the connection certainly has a conjectural quality.
Moreover, aesthetic subjectivity is certainly not incompatible with the mosaics of historical/technical objectivity. By definition, aesthetic subjectivity is always with respect to a certain person at a certain point in time. So one can put aesthetic subjectivity in the historical objectivity category: at a certain point in time, the aesthetic judgment was provably, objectively such and such, because of the context, because of the way people were thinking at the time, etc. But that’s not all. The criterion of objectivity is actually plain subjectivity. We read from the quote: a judgment is objective if it doesn’t “become defunct.” But an aesthetic judgment never becomes totally defunct nor totally accepted. Let’s say X% of the population agree with it. From which value of X do we decide that it is defunct? This is subjective. And what does the mention of a “half-life of 20 years” mean? Does this imply that an art theory still alive after 20 years is objective, and when it’s dead after 40 years, not objective anymore?
In the context of purely referential interpretation, the point is not even that the objective/subjective dichotomy is hardly the tell-all some would want it to be, but that the “objective” and the “subjective” are easily reconciled inside the same mosaic.
Not about trying to be faithful to the work, but to the work as the critic enjoyed it
One may want to see pure referentiality as a way to stay faithful to the work for purity’s sake, in the sense that only content as the author meant it matters, not what one makes of it through the fantasy of interpretation. But the view brought by pure referentiality is that the author, whatever intentions we may ascribe to them, their work, or the right way to interpret it, may all belong to the content through mere convention. There is no point in seeking an absolute purity, just like in empirical science it was always delusional to seek “pure objectivity.” Moreover, the authors themselves tend to have a view of their work that is far from being medium-specific or pure, and has the elements of an outsider’s critique. For example, Smetana thus described his symphonic poem The Moldau:
Certainly, one can hear a “confluence of streams” in the music. But there are confluences of small springs other than the Cold and Warm Vltava. In other words, the nationalistic theme forms an elaborate mosaic with the music.
If the conventions of medium delimitation converge toward purity, it will be less because purity is desirable in itself, than it is because the potential payoff of making more and more background research is of no great consequence in the sense of the inconsequential conjecture test.
Men reckon what it did and meant, But trepidation of the spheares,
Though greater farre, is innocent. »A recent critic in an elaborate treatment of Donne’s learning has written of this quatrain as follows:
« He touches the emotional pulse of the situation by a skillful allusion to the new and the old astronomy… Of the new astronomy, the “moving of the earth” is the most radical principle; of the old, the "trepidation of the spheres" is the motion of the greatest complexity… The poet must exhort his love to quietness and calm upon his departure; and for this purpose the figure based upon the latter motion (trepidation), long absorbed into the traditional astronomy, fittingly suggests the tension of the moment without arousing the “harmes and feares” implicit in the figure of the moving earth. »
The argument is plausible and rests on a well substantiated thesis that Donne was deeply interested in the new astronomy and its repercussions in the theological realm. In various works Donne shows his familiarity with Kepler’s De Stella Nova, with Galileo’s Siderius Nuncius, with William Gilbert’s De Magnete, and with Clavius’ commentary on the De Sphaera of Sacrobosco. He refers to the new science in his Sermon at Paul’s Cross and in a letter to Sir Henry Goodyer. In The First Anniversary he says the “new philosophy calls all in doubt.” In the Elegy on Prince Henry he says that the “least moving of the center” makes “the world to shake.”
It is difficult to answer argument like this, and impossible to answer it with evidence of like nature. There is no reason why Donne might not have written a stanza in which the two kinds of celestial motion stood for two sorts of emotion at parting. And if we become full of astronomical ideas and see Donne only against the background of the new science, we may believe that he did. But the text itself remains to be dealt with, the analyzable vehicle of a complicated metaphor. And one may observe: (1) that the movement of the earth according to the Copernican theory is a celestial motion, smooth and regular, and while it might cause religious or philosophic fears, it could not be associated with the crudity and earthiness of the kind of commotion which the speaker in the poem wishes to discourage; (2) that there is another moving of the earth, an earthquake, which has just these qualities and is to be associated with the tear-floods and sigh-tempests of the second stanza of the poem; (3) that “trepidation” is an appropriate opposite of earthquake, because each is a shaking or vibratory motion; and “trepidation of the spheres” is “greater far” than an earthquake, but not much greater (if two such motions can be compared as to greatness) than the annual motion of the earth; (4) that reckoning what it “did and meant” shows that the event has passed, like an earthquake, not like the incessant celestial movement of the earth. Perhaps a knowledge of Donne’s interest in the new science may add another shade of meaning, an overtone to the stanza in question, though to say even this runs against the words. To make the geocentric and heliocentric antithesis the core of the metaphor is to disregard the English language, to prefer private evidence to public, external to internal. ❞Whether the poem’s movement of the earth is Copernican or just an earthquake, is of no consequence to the rest of the poem, which is why both sides can debate meaning without looking at the whole poem, one side by looking up the biography, and the other side by limiting itself to the stanza in question. Which side emerges victorious is kind of underwhelming. The more spectacular outcomes at most “adds another shade of meaning, an overtone to the stanza in question.” It plays out similarly to the scientific exegesis of the Quran or the Bible, through which people seek out scientific statements ahead of the times. The allegedly divulged scientific facts are (or at least should be) already common knowledge. The only interest of the exegesis, besides the political agenda, rests on being convinced of the impressiveness of anachronisms, stuff like “they knew about gravity thousands of years before Newton.”
One may also want pure referentiality for ethical reasons, with modern art critics often accused of tricking their audience with buzzing rhetorics. Think of the auctioner overwhelming the sense of judgment of the buyer, of the buyer coming home with the artwork, trying very hard to like it.
But more than a consequence of ethics, pure referentiality can be seen as the mere consequence of a negative value judgment against elaborate theories of meaning. Meaning is a very narrow concept when considered in itself, and even its counterfeits aren’t that impactful in the sense of the inconsequential conjecture test:
Yet, how many readers would have any interest whatever in an interpretation of the poem which took “plastic” in this case to refer to that polymer material found everywhere these days? It is not that such an anachronistic interpretation is out of line with Akenside’s intentions so much as it does not accord with any possible intention he might have had.
❞But the importance of the anachronism is only relevant in the limited range of the stanza. So while Denis Button questions the anachronistic interpretation, I also question his as inconsequential. If one quotes the line containing “plastic arm” in context, it should become quite clear that the meaning of “plastic arm” doesn’t decisively change the meaning of the poem around it:
The gracious ways of Providence to learn, Receive my sayings with a steadfast ear— Know then, the Sovereign Spirit of the world, Though, self-collected from eternal time, Within his own deep essence he beheld The bounds of true felicity complete, Yet by immense benignity inclined To spread around him that primeval joy Which fill’d himself, he raised his plastic arm, And sounded through the hollow depths of space The strong, creative mandate. Straight arose These heavenly orbs, the glad abodes of life, Effusive kindled by his breath divine Through endless forms of being. Each inhaled From him its portion of the vital flame, In measure such, that, from the wide complex Of coexistent orders, one might rise,
One order, all-involving and entire. ❞And if the concern is that an anachronistic interpretation of “plastic arm” might be used to prove the existence of ancient astronauts or something, let it be known that proponents of such theories don’t need it: they’ll always find a way to prove their theories, no matter what.
So, rather than trying to be right, truthful, ethical, objective, transparent or pure, the choice of interpretation can also be based on a mere value judgment that favors medium-specific narratives.
Implicit value judgment. The medium as pre-value information.
Getting rid of the interpretation of the average value doesn’t mean that one gets rid of value, wants to, or can. Reconstruction only changes how value is expressed, even if it’s less obvious. There is no denying that any interpretation of the medium-specific narrative conveys the values of the interpreter through the convention of the medium delimitation and the choice of the medium-specific narrative. Setting aside the values, one major point of emphasis is the fact that what is actually communicated is not yet another mosaic. The reason one would favor medium specificity is uniqueness, at least subjectively, knowing that any unique medium-specific narrative may or may not be of great value to the reader of the interpretation. While value is usually the high point and the bottom line of any interpretation, here it is turned on its head: whether the interpreter finds the work good or bad doesn’t alter the actually communicated content one bit. The content is not merely communicated, but actually so—that is, it is not only something that can be guessed or that is implied. In the interpretation of the average value, the interpreter may actually have a medium-specific narrative in mind, but what they actually communicate is a mosaic. On the other hand, reconstruction doesn’t leave any room for speculation regarding what went on in the interpreter’s head. It crudely submits to the reader’s judgment a reading of the content rather than the (hidden) claim that the interpreter may like it or not, although it may be that the interpreter liked it. Hence the pre-value nature of reconstruction.
The value of a reconstruction is essentially the value the interpreter found in some medium-specific narrative within the content, but the value judgment is not explicit. Instead, it is implicitly encoded in the very existence of the interpretation as a statement of interest. This interest is expressed in the way in which the uninterpreted content differs from the content as rendered by the interpretation. This difference necessarily exists. This is most obvious when the medium is not text, for example a painting. But it’s also the case when the medium is text. The interpreter cherry-picks the elements of the text that mattered to him and writes them down in another text form. This selection process already conveys a positive judgment value, as nobody would normally enjoy spending time writing down medium-specific narratives they find unremarkable.
Although the interpretation of the medium-specific narrative may implicitly say, “This work is great,” like the interpretation of the average value, it carries an altogether different legacy. The point isn’t the significance of being liked or not, but the medium-specific narrative itself—a constructive concept that lives independently of value judgment and can be communicated objectively. Even if you don’t like it, you get a chance to learn about something constructive. By analogy, this is the explanation of a joke. The explanation may not amuse you, but it can also teach you a reusable technique that makes people laugh. For example, the mechanism of a racist joke can be reused, more or less literally, in non-racist jokes. That’s because what makes the racist joke a joke is not only the superficially racist theme, but something more fundamental. For example, look at this racist joke:
“What do you have when you’ve got 10,000 blacks at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.”
Now, you could tell a similar joke, this time with “climatologists” or “meat eaters” replacing “blacks,” for example. You could even transpose to objects, like Mac computers or noisy motorcycles. You could then go further and create jokes based on more fundamental principles of the joke. For example, you’d need a puzzling question that presupposes an unusual condition, and an unexpectedly straightfoward answer which may or not be hateful.
Non-triviality
The medium-specific narrative lies “just there” in the content, waiting to be picked up. It is modest and unassuming. Reading the reconstruction of a text is like reading the text following an invisible thread.
This is by design. People may rightfully doubt that such an “interpretation” might be anything more than trivial. To some, it is not an “interpretation” at all, but rather a reproduction. The meanings imparted by interpretation normally carry a heavy baggage. This is especially clear when people talk of a painting. Even just identifying a shape as a “table,” or attributing a name or role to a figure (“the beggar,” “the crowd,” “the onlookers”) is already meaning-heavy, and, unless otherwise noted, suggests many things at once. We know a “table” in geometry, function, symbol, etc. A “table” lying on the side usually means that something violent happened. All these considerations add extra-meaning to the medium. In contrast, a painting-specific narrative stays within the visual. The term “table” in the reconstruction is this visual-table, it is what I actually see, this surface with these four legs, under this viewing angle. It is a statement of actual presence: this view of the table is “out there.” “It is just there”: for some, this trivializes the value of reconstruction. However, once the visual table is put next to this visual-vase, this visual-vase next to this visual-window, and so on, the medium-specific narrative quickly evolves into a challenging rediscovery of visuals. It is a rediscovery because trivial elements (so trivial that we casually dismiss them as such) are repurposed into a narrative, and a rediscovery because this narrative may not be trivial at all, and can get as complex as one can imagine, to the point of blending into a mosaic (case of information overload).
Actual communication of challenging material
One is inclined to think that pure referentiality interpretation has nothing to say, let alone something intellectually challenging, since it adds nothing. However, the mere transcribing of content makes the interpretation as challenging as the transcribed content, and additionally, was probably made in response to the intellectual challenge posed by the transcribed material. For example, one may use a reconstruction of music precisely in response to the to the challenge of correlating melodic patterns into a lengthy narrative.
Of course, challenging interpretations are not always reconstructions. A mosaic can very well be challenging in its own way. In fact, the mosaic is a medium-specific narrative. The main difference is that transcribing mosaics is less intellectually challenging than just enumerative and tedious.
A concept of completeness based on a subjective sense of completion
Challenge is not always because of deep intricacies, like the demonstration of some obscure mathematical theorem. Instead, it can come from maintaining an attention span wide enough to account for the work in its globality without the interpretation entropically devolving into a mosaic.
Usually, one is able to feel when a review is “complete” or “incomplete.” This kind of completeness differs from the completeness of a medium-specific narrative in the same way a bag of marbles differs from a tool, like a robotic arm in an assembly chain. The marbles are able to move around randomly without corrupting the overall identity, but not the components of the robotic arm. A “complete” review is usually a review that ticks many boxes, although, under careful examination, the usual criteria can make one pause. The review of an electronic device like a fitness health band needs to cover at least the following to claim to be complete: weight, user interface, type of sensors, tracking prowess, battery life. This I call “complete by convention.” In practice, it can never be really complete. For example, if I am considering buying a fitness band for a person with a debilitating mental condition, I would require automatic sleep recognition. The incapacitated person must not need to press any button before going to sleep.
By contrast, the completeness of a medium-specific narrative does not rely on any criterion being set in stone that would automatically make it appear complete. There is no proper cultural background that could inform closure in the same way our cultural background informs us that a (good) ending is one where the “lovers reunite after going through epic struggles” or “have children and live happily forever after.” Instead, to reach completeness, there must be a private feeling of closure, whereby the interpreter can say “this is it.” This feeling is never communicated, with the appreciation of closure being left to the reader.
Reconstruction as a politico-pedagogical tool to sustain awareness and create a communicative heritage
Pure reconstruction is only about transcribing parts of a communicable experience, as close to intra-medium as possible. By doing so, it will have a tendency to preclude value judgments, taste and arguments from authority in general. A feeling such as “a thrilling experience that will make you beg for more” isn’t likely to make it into a reconstruction, since feelings are neither medium-specific, nor that interesting in light of the inconsequential conjecture test. They are not precisely communicable, not even always reproducible by the interpreter himself (e.g., case of a book or movie aging badly). Writing reconstructions instead of reviews then becomes a self-discipline that will gain value down the road: while a writer’s influence and the authority of his arguments fade over time, the objective terms of a reconstruction will stand on their own.
But writing a pure reconstruction that stands the test of time demands a certain writer mindset expecting a certain reader mindset. This convergence of mindsets can be helped through very deliberate presentation and writing styles, including an unusual notation.
Writing guidelines
Presentation format: an optional preliminary medium delimitation, followed by a purely referential description
The preliminary exposition of a convention of medium delimitation acts as a reminder of the use of pure referentiality. It announces the mindset expected of the reader. It says to them: the point of the reconstruction is not about being right or wrong, although what is being reconstructed might indeed be right or wrong. By declaring the scope of the content, which might include any number of fanciful hypotheses, beliefs and errors, the reconstructionist moves the focus from the value of the interpretation (as separate content) to the value of a medium-specific narrative of a content. This is not a case of trying to defend the interpretation as art in its own right. On the contrary, it is expected that the conventions of pure reconstruction will foster minimal extra-medium content by stressing ownership and responsibility. At the very least, preliminary medium delimitation prompts the conscious choice between styles of interpretation, while casting a different light on traditional interpretations as mosaics.
In its most common form, preliminary medium delimitation will merely state (more or less explicitly): “Following is a purely referential description of mostly intra-medium content,” or more concisely: “This is a pure reconstruction.” The writer, if they so wish, may indulge into more than “mostly intra-medium content.” They may state they will liberally draw from their experience, give in to their imagination, or even make unapologetic value judgments. Even a subjective judgment such as “this is thrilling” won’t so much be wrong (to the others who found it boring) as stand as a hypothesis similar to the preliminary definitions in a mathematical theorem: “Let us assume that this is thrilling, then…” Pure referentiality demands of the reader not to take the proposition as being right or wrong, but as a piece of a greater narrative to be stoically received before making any conclusion.
A convenient notation to write the purely referential description and advertise it as such
To get the reader into the best possible mindset for consuming medium-specific narratives, the purely referential description is supported by a special notation consisting of markups.
Concretely, the purely referential description is a text in natural language. The wording has no intended meaning other than providing refererences to parts of the content, with more or less emphasis on convenience. It doesn’t have to be over-technical or formal, because its only function is to provide references. If it manages to do that without being too technical and formal, then all the better. One reconstructionist might write about “the main theme of the song,” while another might prefer to refer to “the motif that starts at 1:08 and ends at 1:15.” Neither is wrong, as long as the reference is not too ambiguous.
Markups: a notation for narrative references
Markups indicate articulation points of the medium-specific narrative in a text written in informal language. When describing a narrative, one needs to describe recurring things in the medium. This can be done the formal way: “Let us define the figure in the bottom-left corner as F […] It appears that the other figure is similar to F […]” Or this can be done more concisely using markups. Markup indicates that some expressions refer to their previous occurrences, maybe in a slightly altered form—e.g., the adorned noun , unless otherwise noted, refers to the same thing as the adorned verb and the adorned adverb . The previous example with markups looks like: “The in the bottom-left corner […] It appears that the other figure is also a […]”
The first time a word appears with markup is a definition with a context. The context is the phrase that contains the markup. In the example, the context is “in the bottom-left corner.” The context is to be remembered whenever the expression with markup is being employed elsewhere (in a possibly grammatically altered form). For the ease of reading, definitions of first-time occurrences are to mark the fact that they are new, as opposed to being a back-reference. The reader is to be constantly reminded of previous contexts through this notation. The narrative is supposed to arise from the piling-up (in the memory of the reader) of inter-related definitions with their context.
To take an example:
« I call reconstruction an interpretation that tries to limit itself to transcribing a medium-specific narrative from a content agreed upon through a convention of medium delimitation. The principle of only transcribing is what I call pure referentiality. Pure reconstruction is a reconstruction whose convention of medium delimitation tries to stay within the bounds of what could be accepted as “intra-medium content.” Note that the “pure” of “pure referentiality” is not the same as the “pure” of “pure reconstruction.” »
Using markups, this could be rewritten more concisely as follows:
« is only the transcribing of content agreed upon through a of medium delimitation. A is an interpretation that is . A ’s tries to stay within the bounds of what could be accepted as “intra-medium content.” »
A few points of note:
- Markup can be recursive, e.g., . Note that is not the same as or even . is a concept based on the previous concept of , while is based on the joining of two prior concepts, namely and . is similar to , but doesn’t create a new referent. Within the same reconstruction, does NOT refer to , and vice versa. That’s because comes within a particular context that gives it specific meaning. It should not be mixed up with other contexts.
- Markup context makes words more accurate and context-sensitive. The “’s ” refers to the earlier mention of the “ of medium delimitation.” It is not just the convention of a , it is also a convention of medium delimitation as mentioned in the first sentence.
- The sentence form “I call this that” is not needed anymore, since it is implied whenever a new markup is introduced. Note that the def suffix is redundant and only there for the reader’s convenience.
- The sentence form “X does not refer to the same thing as X” isn’t needed anymore. If X is not a markup, then it is implied that the reconstruction doesn’t make any effort to correlate occurrences of X. So the last sentence of the unadorned text is implied by the adorned rewrite, because in the latter the word “pure” is not a markup.
- The markup notation is for convenience only. It makes for more concise and precise transcriptions of narratives.
The ubiquity of context is not an artificial construct. It is logically necessary:
If things can occur in atomic facts, this possibility must already lie in them.
(A logical entity cannot be merely possible. Logic treats of every possibility, and all possibilities are its facts.)
Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connexion with other things.
If I can think of an object in the context of an atomic fact, I cannot think of it apart from the possibility of this context.
2.0122. The thing is independent, in so far as it can occur in all possible circumstances, but this form of independence is a form of connexion with the atomic fact, a form of dependence. (It is impossible for words to occur in two different ways, alone and in the proposition.)
❞The reconstruction merely exposes “something there in the medium” to the reader and lets him be the judge. It is nothing special. In fact, it is always possible to write the equivalent text without markup. For example, the following adorned text:
« The figures imply a horizontal . The vertical partition implied by the figures stages an anti-. »
could be rewritten as follows:
« The figures imply a horizontal opposition HO. The vertical partition implied by the figures negates HO. »
Markup spares the writer from giving the figure a name if only similarity matters. It also works with any kind of word or expression without any special effort. “This figure the other figure. […] This asymmetry breaks the […]”
As far as the medium-specific narrative is concerned, a word without markup is unrelated to the same word with markup. It doesn’t imply that they are not related in some way (besides the obvious morphological similarity), but only that any relation doesn’t matter for the transcribed narrative.
Of course, potentially every word could be markup, but to stay pragmatic and obvious, only the ones that see reuse in the narrative are. Because markup is so prominent and odd-looking, it also acts as a strong statement of intent that forces the reader out of his comfort zone. Text with markup cannot be read casually without losing its meaning. Take this story:
« They came out of the battle with the living dead with the energy of despair. And they lived happily ever after. »
Then with markup:
« They came out of the battle with the dead with the energy of despair. And they happily ever after. »
Rather than the happy-ending trope, the markup emphasizes the similarity between “they” and the zombies. It could suggest that “they” may have turned into zombies, or that “living happily” is a relative concept that could easily apply to the mindless zombies as well.
Of course, there is nothing ground-breaking in markup that cannot be discovered with a little awareness of the narrative. It may look ground-breaking, but only because its only purpose is as a political and pedagogical tool to get people’s attention and coerce them into a specific mindset.
Matching the purely referential description to the actual medium
The pure referentiality of description involves the challenge of transcribing a medium that is not text. It is easier when the medium is also text, in which case pure referentiality can be implemented more conveniently by providing quotes. Pure referentiality is achieved even though quotes only make full sense in their context, because the reconstruction is not a substitute for the actual content: the reader is supposed to have read the work, and to have access to the content. Also, medium-specific narration doesn’t require the reader to “understand” a text in a traditional sense—e.g., to know the exact meaning of each word locally. In a medium-specific narrative, the interactions between the quoted words count the most, and can override the need for exact meaning, as will be discussed later.
The challenge of transcription is less about finding the right words, concepts, and formulas to exactly and scientifically describe a phenomenon than it is about providing a convenient referencing system. Since the meaning of the description is purely referential, the terms do not have to be more technical than is necessary for them to be matched to the medium with confidence.
A reconstruction is only intended to allow the reader to jump back and forth between the referencing text and the referenced content until the medium-specific narrative is made clear, at which point the reconstruction isn’t needed anymore. If I want to point out a certain motif in a concerto, I don’t necessarily need a degree in formal music theory. I could say things like “the motif that starts off the second phrase.” Different systems will be devised for each type of medium. The following shall give a rough idea of how referencing systems could be implemented on the web:
- For the reconstruction of text, the description uses quotes and boldface inside the quotes to establish the correspondence between markups and occurrences in the content.
- For the reconstruction of visual art, zooming in, outlining and annotating parts of a picture might just be enough for referencing purposes. To communicate the narrative however, the reconstructionist has to use sequences of snapshots, almost comics-style. This is due to narratives being a linear sequence of steps, rather than scenery that can be embraced at a glance or summed up by a simple title. If you’re giving a title to a scene, or simply appreciating a scene in relation to its official title, then you’re already forfeiting the medium-specific narrative and subconsciously opening yourself up to a world of mosaics. In countering this inclination to dilute the narrative into a mosaic, reconstruction of visual art is structured as a sequence of snapshots that magnify parts of the work in sequence, imposing their story-like re-telling. It should be noted that full-scale reproductions of big paintings can help to force the eye to respect visual-specific narratives. This, actually, is the only reason why I would consider visiting an art gallery over viewing low-resolution JPEG images on the computer.
- For the reconstruction of music, a karaoke-like referencing system would be quite convenient: a cursor or highlighting pencil would hover over the text while the music plays, coloring the markup in sync with the audio. Alternatively, clicking on markups could play the corresponding audio.
Properties of a reconstruction
Absence of a formal conclusion. Epiphanic conclusions.
The conclusion of a reconstruction is the conclusion of the medium-specific narrative, if one can define what a “conclusion” would be for this narrative. It is not a conclusion in the traditional wrapping-things-up sense. Medium specificity implies the reconstruction is homogeneous: no part is more essential than another since they are all on equal footing as pure references to the medium, and the medium itself is (usually) homogenous. That being said, some parts stand out more because of their placement in the cognitive flow:
- The first parts always introduce definitions (as indicated by this ) that will be referenced later.
- The last parts have an a priori special status, according to the assumption that the interpreter must have thought that they bring closure to the medium-specific narrative as a self-contained unit. In addition, the last parts are expected to have an epiphanic quality, by revealing a new structure based on previous elements. If they didn’t, they would have to either create a mosaic, or be redundant, so why would they be included in the reconstruction in the first place?
The absence of a wrap-up conclusion is in direct opposition to the principles of the interpretation of the average value. It has ties with the reviewing industry’s timid moves towards reviews that try to describe the product’s function and usage in a way that lets the readers decide for themselves instead of being told whether or not the product is good for them. For example, the Youtube show Rahdo Runs Through uses a handheld camera to walk the viewer through several turns of a board game. The presenter’s opinion on the game (an interpretation of the average value) is posted in a separate video called “Final Thoughts.” The reviewer himself frequently recommends watching the playthrough and disregarding his final thoughts since they are so heavily biased, citing his absolute distate for aggressive playing styles and lackluster 2-player modes (he only plays with his wife).
Room for bad translations in the pure reconstruction of text
Pure referentiality means that a pure reconstruction’s objective quality will be predicated on the reader’s ability to transition back and forth between the reconstructed text and the referenced text. This in turn implies that the quality of the quotes translated from a foreign language hardly matters if the reconstruction intends, and manages, to be purely referential with respect to the source material. It is also expected that the reader has access to the original text anyway. In fact, it can be argued that, in many cases, even without access to the original, reconstructions with badly translated quotes can have value and be self-contained. The reason is that medium-specific narratives are the most difficult thing to deform through bad translation. One may well change the individual meanings of words, but chances are that the more global narrative structures will survive. Translate a standard love story as loosely as you can; chances are that the narrative structure will still be “something cool triumphing at the end despite adversity,” even if you fail miserably at correctly translating something as basic as the word “love.” Even highly technical translations don’t change the narrative structure. For example, reconstructing the Bible is always going to yield a mosaic of tales, parables, precepts, etc., even if the translator gets it wrong.
Non-technicality and non-verbosity
The unusual syntax and terse style may raise concerns over over-complicated and over-technical language. But criticizing the technicality of reconstruction is quite different from criticizing the technicality of an interpretation of the average value. In the latter case, technicality is from the interpreter’s choice to consider the content technically. On the other hand, the technicality of reconstruction is the mere reflection of the technicality of a medium-specific narrative. I.e., if it’s too technical, it’s because the content actually is, and the reader has to meet this technicality in order to learn the medium-specific narrative. The reconstruction doesn’t need to be any more technical that the content really is. To the contrary, reconstruction can use as informal and casual a language as necessary, as long as its referential semantics are clear to the reader.
Another concerning aspect of reconstruction is the apparent verbosity. Since reconstruction is purely referential, it is certainly verbose, though of a verbosity that is far from the idea of “showing off” so often attributed to modern art critics. It is verbose in a remindful sense. Somewhat keeping in line with the school of linguistic philosophy, it puts out the claim that one is better off keeping quiet when words are not necessary, and does so through pure referentiality: the reader can forget the words of a reconstruction as soon as they have mentally replaced them with their medium-specific equivalent.
A choice between several independant narratives: side-stepping “close reading”
A reconstruction is basically one medium-specific narrative. More medium-specific narratives would by definition entail a mosaic (which is technically a medium-specific narrative, but the least interesting there is). Any content is never so immaculate as to only admit of one narrative, so any reconstruction is essentially a choice among several possible narratives ultimately guided by subjective criteria. This choice contrasts with binary issues such as the choice between correct and incorrect readings, between ideal and non-ideal readings:
Close reading is always a thing in interpretation. But with reconstruction, the first question now becomes one of choosing what to close-read, not how or why.
The reader is supposed to have first-hand experience with the content
This is more a recommendation than a requirement. But, in sharp contrast to traditional reviews, where the consumer puts their faith in the review to give them an idea of the content (or even no idea at all, in fear of spoilers), reconstructions work better the other way around: the reader can more easily understand a purely referential description if they know what is being described. While this sounds useless, it isn’t, because reconstruction highlights medium-specific narratives, the concept of which most people are wont to overlook.
Quality of writing
Reconstructions of the same content can be compared, ranked and categorized in any way one likes. If one keeps in mind the purpose of pure referentiality, then we can probably agree that only the following is essential: ease of cross-referencing between the reconstruction and the content. This is fairly different from the criteria we are used to measure critics and reviewers against, including style and the ability to organize thoughts and provide an interesting angle.
Remnants of other styles of writing
Certain expressions entail a mosaic, e.g., “X writes that…” where X is the author of the content. In keeping with pure referentiality, such expressions are only to be taken as either a manner of speaking, a more casual tone that makes reading easier on the eye, or a benign oversight. In most cases, they can probably be ignored.
Disposable after use
Reconstruction is basically temporary interference in the process of consuming content. Once the reader has internalized the ways of a given reconstruction, they can “see through” the reconstruction and forget about the artificial formalisms of reconstruction. The terms of the reconstruction enjoy their fullest expression when re-placed in the context of the content being consumed. In fact, this re-placement can be done literally in some cases, through “self-aware content”—e.g., lyrics of a song being a reconstruction of the music.
The discipline of reconstructive memory
Reconstruction assists the reader, but the reader must still do the main work of remembering the context of the definitions, as well as the context of the contexts, and so on, until the whole narrative is formed in their mind. The integrity of the narrative is correlated to the effort spent in remembering the narrative “thread” rather than focusing on the “needle.” The process of remembering significantly alters the cognitive experience. Usually, the music listener “goes with the flow” in a very linear process. Let’s consider the famous knock-knock-knock start of Beethoven’s 5th symphony, which I shall call the first segment:
followed shortly by this second segment:
As a medium-specific narrative, the first segment repeats the famous motif twice. But recognizing this repetition is already an act of de-linearization of the listening experience. Motifs, while perceived sequentially, cross-reference each other in the listener’s mind, as if superposed in parallel. In the listener’s mind, the first segment is split into 2 halves conceptually parallelized (or coinciding) as repetitions of the same motif. It looks like this:
The parallelization becomes more structurally ambitious as the piece progresses. In the first segment, the repetition of motif played at slightly different pitches creates a transposition pattern:
This also happens in the second segment, so that both segments are responding to each other. The first segment is a , while the second is an anti- in the other direction. The opposition is in the listener’s mind a parallelization of both segments:
This is neither a secret listening technique, nor anything new. Experiencing patterns of notes has always been in resonance with previous patterns of notes. This isn’t much different from understanding sentences in any language, or watching a flip-book animation.
In the previous quote, the mention of “surprises” can be surprising. Jacques Derrida took notice:
Unlike structuralist accounts that interpret content geometrically (for example, Rousset interpreting Corneille’s literary works as “loops,” “ascending spirals” and so on), the pure referentiality to a narrative ensures that the reconstruction does not “cancel” surprises even when it spatializes somewhat, retaining its “surprising” epiphanic nature.
But as intuitive as this cognitive process is, it could certainly be applied more accurately and consistently across more challenging scopes of content. The memory of the medium-specific narrative needs to stay sharp throughout. The vague grasp on the narrative is why a music teacher can teach about Chopin’s replique-based style of music: a style of music whose patterns respond to other patterns in a dialogue. But repliques are found everywhere in music, at all levels, between individual notes, motifs, segments, movements. This is less a characteristic style of the composer than a way of listening to music that can be applied consistently with enough effort.
Trivial elitism
Reconstruction is elitist because, as a matter of fact, it is very rare for consumers of content to sustain the kind of concentration that only rewards the patient seeker. Yet, it is trivial at the same time, because it does not require a background that would take years of study to acquire: for example, to understand the demonstration of a difficult mathematical theorem, you need to learn terminology, concepts, notations, lemmas and other theorems. In the interpretation of medium-specific narratives, you only need to be armed with a combination of effort (concentration, memory, self-discipline) and a sense of the narrative shared by everyone who knows what a “story” is (basically everyone).
What makes reconstruction challenging (as a cognitive process) is when the scope of a medium-specific narrative overwhelms the attention span commonly associated with the entertainment and news media.
A medium-specific narrative only exists insofar as one can cope with it. When one is overwhelmed or distracted, the pieces of the narrative begin to blend into a mosaic. A medium-specific narrative is characterized by focused purposefulness. If you take a notepad, and add a pen to it, you get a purposeful note-taking tool. You could now add a watch. The whole makes sense as a scheduler. But if you just keep adding features—your wallet, your car, your wife or husband, and so on—the whole (the world) hardly makes sense anymore as a tool. It is multi-purpose, but has become so encompassing that it now only says that the world is a tool. Philosophical for sure, but hardly purposeful.
Conscious unique efforts
An argument against effort in art and entertainment is that the narrative (medium-specific or not) emerges by itself at a subconscious level and that we enjoy it intuitively and effortlessly. However, the purpose of reconstruction is basically the revelation of unique medium-specific narratives. The revelation of a thing whose sole purpose is its uniqueness obviously needs a detailed experience that takes precise effort. The argument that effort is not needed because everything happens in the subconscious is as moot as saying that I don’t need to focus when reading a book, because I experience all it has to say subconsciously anyway.
Another argument against effort is that there is enough pleasure without needing any more investment, and that more effort could even spoil the experience. Setting aside the counter-argument that one cannot assess relative merits of something new without trying, let me use an analogy. Enjoyment without effort is like winning a competition, but without a good competition. As the common saying goes: it’s all about the journey, not the destination. There are very good reasons for that. One of them is the concrete meaning of each act of winning. If the difference between winning and losing comes down to a stroke of luck—think of a potential game-winning shot that rims out in the last second of a basketball game—then, whether you’re the winner or the loser, what will (or should) most fit your idea of the performance as a whole: the final result, or the whole performance that led to it? But the more general reason for dismissing winning as a self-sufficient criterion is that winning is only loosely correlated to the winner’s self-judgment that leads to pride and, well, satisfying wins. What is a “historic win?” You often hear the author of a historical achievement declare in a hot-takes interview, “I don’t realize what I have achieved just now. Maybe I’ll realize when I come home, after it all settles down.” The truth is that they were realizing something very specific while in the process of winning, but it was a process, not the end of it, nor any history-making significance, which can be as artificial as the fact that they were the first champion with this haircut since the introduction of plushy mascots (which actually sounds like an official World Guiness record category). There is a fundamental mismatch between the reward and the deed that lies at the heart of superstitious tasks like praying and doing good deeds in exchange for heaven. In a way, the value of winning is a superstition.
And now ye upbraid me for teaching that there is no reward-giver, nor paymaster? And verily, I do not even teach that virtue is its own reward.
Ah! this is my sorrow: into the basis of things have reward and punishment been insinuated — and now even into the basis of your souls, ye virtuous ones!
But like the snout of the boar shall my word grub up the basis of your souls; a ploughshare will I be called by you.
All the secrets of your heart shall be brought to light; and when ye lie in the sun, grubbed up and broken, then will also your falsehood be separated from your truth.
For this is your truth: ye are TOO PURE for the filth of the words: vengeance, punishment, recompense, retribution.
Ye love your virtue as a mother loveth her child; but when did one hear of a mother wanting to be paid for her love?
❞The reward in reconstruction, if there is such a thing as a reward, is the reconstruction itself, when met by a self-invested consumer of content. The identity between the deed and the reward, between the journey and the destination, is achieved because the reward is unique and correlated to the consumer’s self-investment. In this sense, the reward is very terrestrial and atheistic, with no need for the seeker to implore the heavens. There is only one possible destination in reconstruction, and it is the journey itself.
What a reconstruction isn’t
Not a deconstruction
Text-specific narratives have in common with Derrida’s deconstruction the long-ranging analysis of text, in search for what Derrida sees as the difference between “what [an author] declares and what he describes.” An example is the use of the word “natural” in Rousseau’s work. In the following excerpt, Rousseau expounds the theory that singing is not “natural”:
But in another text, we read:
To which Derrida reacted:
The “function of contradiction” that characterizes the use of the word “natural” does not fit with the naive concept of an absolute “Nature.” For Rousseau, music is not natural in the sense that “the dumb don’t sing.” But it is natural when it comes to bashing harmony. Following whatever definition Rousseau intends to favor, being “natural” can mean different things. Hence what Derrida saw as the gap between what Rousseau “declares” and what he “describes.”
Derrida identified the narrative that determines the word “nature” as a “path” (trajet), which is basically a text-specific narrative. A difference between Derrida’s deconstruction and reconstruction is that the latter builds on an empirical satisfaction principle that is missing from Derrida:
The choice of “path” in reconstruction is essentially oriented by an empirical but definite sense of closure. Given a certain, agreed-upon “history in general, and then within the history of the sign,” we explore the text either until we are satisfied—in this regard, Derrida’s “surprise” before Rousseau’s “Nature” can act as a signal—or until further exploration feels hopeless. The perks of deconstruction are precisely in the “artful” ways in which authors such as Rousseau, Lévy-Strauss, or Saussure employ magic words (“nature,” “man,” etc.) to prop up their viewpoints. While this served Derrida to the effect of various theories/opinions, the discovery of this artful way can be satisfying in and of itself.
Not a theory of great art and great interpretation
Reconstruction is all about the individual works
Contrary to fields of study such as narratology, reconstruction does not have a fixed repertoire of criteria to look for when reading a text. Instead, it merely focuses on transcribing some parts of the medium as transparently as possible. The more unique the work, the more unique the reconstruction.
Generic art theories as amnesic. Predicting the futility of future attempts at great art and great interpretation theories
Content-amnesic theories detract from the content by seeing the content as an implementation of generic concepts. This was illustrated by Clement Greenberg’s attempt at theorizing the “very best art of the last hundred-odd years” by putting the emphasis on generic qualities: “the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment.”
Even critiques of content-amnesic theories can suffer from content amnesia. Indeed, Greenberg was criticizing a certain idea of painting as representation. Deleuze and Guattari also offered their own content-amnesic counter-theory about how a book as “art” ought to be considered. All such “good art” theories never fail to encompass “bad art.” We see this in Deleuze and Guattari’s reaction against “worn-out” ideas—e.g., the book as imitation of Nature—to the effect of “rare and great achievements” that, to the authors’ own admission, end up with the very problem that plague the books they criticize.
But if imitation is an old, tired, worn-out idea, so is the view of a book through its “connections with the outside and the micro-politics of the social.” For what is more cliché and worn-out than looking at the book’s author, influences, socio-political context, etc.? Even establishing esoteric connections with the outside is a worn-out endeavor, like, for example, proving the scientific value of a Holy Book or linking scriptures to otherwordly beings.
While some theories of interpretation do resonate with the tenets of reconstruction (pure referentiality in particular), their generality simply exceeds the scope of reconstruction:
« The essential structure of a poem (as distinguished from the rational or logical structure of the “statement” which we abstract from it) resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses. Or, to move closer still to poetry by considering the temporal arts, the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme. »
Proper criticism responds with suppleness and delicacy to such patterns, rather than paraphrasing their propositional content.
Central to The Heresy of Paraphrase was a vigorous critique of conventional distinctions between form and content:
« The structure meant is certainly not “form” in the conventional sense in which we think of form as a kind of envelope which “contains” the “content.” The structure obviously is everywhere conditioned by the nature of the material which goes into the poem. The nature of the material sets the problem to be solved, and the solution is the ordering of the material… The relationship between the intellectual and the non-intellectual elements in a poem is actually far more intimate than the conventional accounts would represent it to be: the relationship is not that of an idea 'wrapped in emotion' or a 'prose-sense' decorated by sensuous imagery. »
❞The quote “The essential structure of a poem resembles…” indicates that the theory is about getting the interpretation right, more than it is about communicating content. The fact is that the content doesn’t say what is “essential” in it, only the theory. The theory is also about the “essential structure” of actually any poem, which makes it clearly unspecific. When Cleanth Brooks brings up music as an analogue of poetry, there is nothing he actually communicates that couldn’t apply to hundreds of works. “Harmony,” “balance,” or “resolution” are generic concepts whose terms can indeed be found in reconstructions, but only in a purely referential capacity, so that it’s about this harmony, this balance or that resolution.
There are 2 ways reconstruction interacts with general theories like the New Criticism. (1) Reconstructions can be instrumentalized to support such theories, since nothing, in theory, prevents value judgments to be attached to reconstructions, but (2) reconstructions can also be seen as a reaction against generalizations and grand theories.
Not an analysis
Analysis, in the sense of breaking down a work into various topics (classification, technique, meaning, etc.), has the overarching structure of a mosaic that encompasses the medium-specific narrative as one of its potential topics.
Not a critique, but a basis for criticism
Reconstruction does not estimate value. In the case of non-fiction literature, it does not take position on the truth value of the content, although, to be fair, irrepressible streaks of cynicism can be detected here and there. It is hard for the reconstructionist, in an apologetic sense, to guard themselves from elevating flaws to narrative milestones when they stand out so much. Lots of narratives are precisely detected and reconstructed because they’re built on flaws in remarkable and unique ways. Flaws are unique not as wrong binary statements but as the basis for full-fledged medium-specific narratives.
Even when reconstruction is used as a basis for criticism, its position toward the reconstructed content is fundamentally ambiguous and unresolved. The “flaws” are part of a narrative, and likely a unique one at that. It is not your typical mosaic of accumulated flaws in, say, a politician’s discourse that would deliver an uninterrupted stream of fallacious reasoning such as “if the other party is wrong, then ours is right,” “the downturn happened when they were in charge, so they must take full responsibility,” arguments from authority, etc. Instead, the reconstruction can be seen as a unique elaborate big flaw. The indomitable variety of reconstructible flaws is a cause for wonder. For example, in On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Schopenhauer falls for the paradox of inverted vision:
Inverted vision was easily dismissed by philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, who reasoned that it is non-sensical to talk of the brains undoing an inversion which doesn’t exist, since inversion is, by definition, in relation to a referential, and no such referential is to be found from the observer’s standpoint. While this error is open to criticism, it is only one step in Schopenhauer’s unique narrative of proving by all means that perception is an intellectual process of the Understanding, which is essentially a demonstration in 2 parts that ignore each other:
- Optical experiences that show that I see exactly one object when there is exactly one object (despite the inverted vision) prove that I have a “causal relationship with the object” through the Understanding.
- Optical experiences that show that I see two objects when there is only one, or one object when there are two, also prove the intercession of the Understanding.
The reconstruction of such fallacious narratives does not so much single out individual reasoning flaws, as it highlights the unique narrative structures of fallacies, without overstepping its area of competence. It doesn’t matter that the author of the content slipped, made a lapsus, didn’t intend to mean that, or that the text is apocryphal. Pure reconstruction is fundamentally uninterested in discrediting anything, including the author and their political agenda, even if it can help with the discrediting. A reconstruction of Marx’s Capital may serve as the basis for a critique of Marx’s theories, but it stops short of condemning its spirit nor its core assertion of capitalism as a framework of labor exploitation.
The reconstruction of unique flaw-narratives can be used as an educational tool and as a precise way of raising awareness and stimulating discussion. It is an alternative to traditional critical methods that usually rely on extra-medium material. For example, to criticize Nostradamus’ predictions, you may turn to history in the years after the writing of The Prophecies, and even to what could (or not) happen from now on. But you may also see the content for itself.
Not a review
Reviewing has the effect of a commercial: it conveys a judgment of fitness for purpose. It can be highly analytical and in-depth, yet the review’s bottom-line is always whether the consumer can make sense of the mosaic of features in the form of a binary judgment: is it good or bad for me?
Reconstruction is not about making you buy a product or even giving you a rough idea of how it could benefit you in a utilitarian sense. It is not about the consumption. It is consumption itself, guiding the actual experiencing of content. As such, it can indeed set the stage for value judgments.
