A different style of interpretation: Conceptual Reconstructionism

lets say I was inspired by this manifesto, how exactly would I construct a review in this manner?

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

I would be glad to discuss the concept/project with you. In addition, I’m particularly looking for criticism about my writing (is it readable? is it logically sound? is it repeating something that already exists?). You can message me if you’re interested in reading the book or knowing more about the project, or we can discuss things here.

I do tend to conflate interpretation and reviewing. I’m not rigorous about it, so please bear with me.

I just finished a book about “conceptual reconstructionism,”

Conceptual reconstructionism can be seen as a style of interpretation (of art and various other types of content) that consciously avoids value judgments and focuses on the “reconstruction” of works, which is the process of looking at (and transcribing) what I call their “medium-specific narratives.” The main motivation is a dissatisfaction with reviewing and analysis in general and how they fail to capture a certain uniqueness in certain works.

Under careful examination, the description is a grab-bag of geographical, economical, political, cultural and demographical considerations which give rise to a mosaic. That is, it is based on juxtaposition rather than other types of relation (temporal order, cause-effect, deduction, formal similarity, etc.). It characteristically builds up into a familiar “messy” whole: while it is conventional and reads well, the mosaic typically doesn’t have a clear direction,

Consuming reviews and interpretations can be:

1. for information
2. for pleasure

The mosaic suits the consumption for information.

In the context of the consumption for pleasure, we enjoy the work’s content united to the mosaic of interpretation, although the connection has a fundamentally conjectural quality. Take the live performance of a song. The enjoyment of the song is heightened by the belief in a certain connection to the musicians, the technicality of their performance, how they seem to enjoy themselves too, etc. Even if the connection is real, the conjecturing is always in the background: the audience always has to transcend a fundamental doubt, however small, regarding the connection (playback, autotune, whether the performance is that difficult to pull off, and so on).

A notable labelling act is the value judgment. A statement such as “I like this work” is always a highly compromised abstraction of a rich experience. It tries to cram a more or less unique cognitive process into one quantity (informal or numerical, it doesn’t matter).

The interpretation of the average value doesn’t match the actual experiencing of content, which is a process with a narrative quality. Not narrative in the sense of a traditional story, but in a medium-specific sense. For example, if the medium is painting, a medium-specific narrative is based on visual perceptions (“events”) and how they relate to each other (through morphology, color, transformation, topology, etc.) on a timeline affixed to the viewer’s roaming gaze. Even in a text-based medium, a medium-specific narrative doesn’t always coincide with the traditional concept of story or plot. That’s because medium-specific specificity isn’t so much about what the words mean, but how they are told.

The interpretation of the medium-specific narrative restores the granularity, temporality and epiphanic quality of content... Reconstruction is a product of the interpretation of the medium-specific narratives. It consists in transcribing a medium-specific narrative perceived in a work.

The interest of reconstruction is in pushing the scope of the perceived narrative to the physical boundaries of the medium.

Reconstruction is based on 2 conventions... Conventional medium delimitation... Pure referentiality

The mosaic, as a format of content, is just one symptom of amnesic thought processes that forget narrative relations, leading to a simplistic interpretation of information and reality, with unfortunate philosophical and cultural consequences like excessive vulgarization and false lifestyle dichotomies (for example, being a commercially successful mainstream artist versus staying “authentic” and underground). In particular, value-based interpretation creates artificial communication barriers that become social barriers. Role segregation is a consequence of the opacity of value judgments (e.g., a renowned critic’s opinion is unfalsifiable but considered authoritative), and feeds into an inferiority complex. It paints “great” artists as geniuses, and “great” critics as authority figures.

With the focus of interpretation moving away from value judgments, not only do the critics lose all their privileges, but the gravity center of communities, now educated on on the sterile and manipulative aspects of value, shifts to the sharing of perceived content. Let me quote a random thread about a game on a gaming forum:

The focus on experiencing individual works and what makes each unique (as medium-specific narratives rather than consumerist novelties based on aesthetics, theme, and so on) directly contradicts the need for grand theories (what is Art, what is great Art, etc.). Reconstruction isn’t so much a theory as the cognitive process of finding medium-specific narratives.

You can't turn art into words, even verbal art like poetry or literature. Interpretation, review, whatever you want to call it can only legitimately address the viewer's/reader's experience. Ok, enough of that.

Sure, if value judgement is all there is. On the other hand, why would I interpret something that wasn't at least interesting? I write reviews on Amazon, Yelp, or Chowhound from time to time, almost all for things I have strong feelings about or interest in. I've been known to end a review with "I love this book."

I'm interested in this, especially in media where I am not familiar with technical aspects. I know that bluegrass and old time country music sound and feel different, but what is it about them that makes that difference?

I'm trying to figure out what, exactly, this means. As I said, I think I have work to do.

I need to see some examples. I see you have provided at least one in later posts. That's the homework.

This gets at a question a lot of unsophisticated people like me have about art. Sure, the Mona Lisa is a nice painting about a pretty woman. What's so great about it.

I also only interpret something I find interesting. The only difference is that I don’t try to articulate _why_ it matters to me (which is actually impossible because taste is not Ascommunicable), but the _what_, and this “what” happens to be objective, so we all win.

The medium-specific narratives are genre-less (or cross-genre, if you will). They actually show music in a light that make genre/subgenre considerations pretty much worthless if you find value in medium-specific narratives (which is my case).

Idem

Actually, my goal is NOT to explain why this or that work is great. This is actually the contrary. My goal is to show content in a certain way that was overlooked and may actually the most important thing. In the case of Mona Lisa, I have actually nothing to report (for me it’s just straightforward artwork worthlessly hyped by interpretation and the context it brings with it).

I'm not sure about this. I find that taste is one of the primary things I find meaningful and useful in a review. A good reviewer is trying to share his taste with me. Share, not impose.

For my money the key fact about art is in the aesthetic experience - there is always a risk in analysis that such an enterprise may rob a work of its reason for being and miss the point. This process can be like people with no sense of humour trying to explain the punchline of a joke.

Generally however I want value judgements from my reviewing. It's the main reason I would read a review. From criticism, what I want is further information to enrich my understanding of a work. I think you are aiming at the latter.

It's a fascinating area and my most acrimonious discussions with others over the years have not involved religion or politics, but art and how it can be understood and assessed.

The OP seems to be working towards trying to capture the uniqueness in a work that may have been missed by conventional means of discussing works. I think this has merit. But to me this will often be a side dish to the main course. In some art what makes it 'unique' might be the least interesting aspect of that work.

Well written perspective but I confess it was long and detailed and I struggled to understand some of your specifics. But it's good to see this kind of content.

The OP seems to be working towards trying to capture the uniqueness in a work that may have been missed by conventional means of discussing works. I think this has merit. But to me this will often be a side dish to the main course. In some art what makes it 'unique' might be the least interesting aspect of that work.

Your conceptual reconstruction of Ode on a Grecian Urn is what I expected from what you described. I can see the value and agree it might be helpful, especially after I read the poem once.

But what you wrote here seems different from what you posted at the links you sent me.

I would certainly be curious to know what your stance would be after being exposed to reconstructions.

Reconstruction is only of the medium-specific narrative. The narrative aspect stresses not details/aspects in isolation, but how they are leveraged within a composition, how they fit together.

. The cliché is informative, but a cliché nonetheless. It has a characteristic quality of contingency that makes you question how essential it really is to enjoyment. You can, as a mind game, attribute various authors to the content, and see that it works the same way as when the “real” author is involved: the chosen author colors the work uniquely, but its impact on our experiencing of the content (as opposed to the appreciation of its meaning and context) is limited and diffuse. I call this method of assessing the relative merits of conjecturing the inconsequential conjecture test. It can be applied to any feature of the mosaic, including meaning, historical significance, virtuosity, emotionality, etc.

I don't understand this paragraph

I'd have to see an example in action. Much of what you write is highly complex and I am not sure I understand your intent.

Yes, we look for patterns, patterns that have been ignored. While this yields a formal kind of review, it's not like an AI though, because in the last instance we're guided by personal inclinations when choosing the patterns. In fact, if anyone publishes a reconstruction, it’s probably because they found patterns they deemed remarkable. An essential difference from traditional reviews is that this personal inclination is implicit and not a focus, and the patterns are content that can be shared objectively and can ultimately lead to emotions (but this is not talked of, because it's something best left to the discretion of the reader IMO). My hope is to show patterns that are worth your while, but whether they are is yours to decide.

So you might go through the whole piece and determine what parts are the fundamental rhythm, and what parts are variations, or maybe some parts are even completely different. That's an analysis, but where does the reconstruction come into play? How would a reconstruction differ from an analysis? What am I missing?

Even though it’s not interesting, it’s different from analysis in that reconstruction transcribes variations almost transparently. It makes no effort to add value to the content (except try to be readable and not too tedious).

It won’t even try to categorize the piece. In practice, it will rather apply to melody (not harmony), more precisely the motifs. It will transcribe how patterns arise from correlating melodic structures. This is already unusual (not unique, of course), but it will take that approach further by looking at piece-wide networks of correlations.

Isn't that exactly what analysis is though, to break something down into its parts, in an objective way? This is to make the divisions in accordance with what is inherent within the piece, rather than according to some values. It is synthesis, when we put the parts back together (reconstruction), which is necessarily guided by values. We cannot "reconstruct" in a manner which is not value-driven because the end, or goal, of the reconstruction must be chosen, and it acts as a guide in the reconstructing activity.

How does the reconstructionist know that these correlations are the ones produced by the artist, rather than ones created by the synthesis (complete with inherent intention and values) of the reconstructionist?

So I don't really understand where the "reconstruction" comes from. Let's take a simple pattern for example. Suppose a piece of music has a rhythm, a beat, and this you choose as a medium-specific narrative. So you might go through the whole piece and determine what parts are the fundamental rhythm, and what parts are variations, or maybe some parts are even completely different. That's an analysis, but where does the reconstruction come into play? How would a reconstruction differ from an analysis? What am I missing?

Even though it’s not interesting, it’s different from analysis in that reconstruction transcribes variations almost transparently. It makes no effort to add value to the content (except try to be readable and not too tedious).

I think this gets at the heart of my questions. Why would I want to look at the reconstruction of the work of art if it's not telling me something interesting.

That brings up another question, which is especially important to me for media I am not familiar with. What standards are you applying? I don't know what "verticality" or "convexity" mean, represent, or imply with visual art.

All the other works are short or, like the photograph, all one thing. "As I Lay Dying" is long and you've only presented a few analyses of the text. Are the ways of analyzing you've provided intended to be exhaustive? Does that cover all the aspects of the writing it's worth looking at?

This eerily reminds me of Alexandre's paper. A breakthrough in perspective, this time not in physics but art and literature.

As you said, the reconstructionist is guided by values, and reconstructionism is essentially hedonistic, it makes no claim of being right. On the contrary, even though it sticks to the content like a dog to his bone, it isn’t at all about being right (cf. Manifesto). To summarize, what’s subjective is the choice of these correlations. What’s objective is the quoted content and the correlations. These are formal correlations by the way: transpositions, inversion, repetition, scaling, and so on.

If you strip the piece down to its most subjective level

Even if you leave in place some of the "formal correlations", by changing others you are allowing your own subjectivity to invade the objective aspect.

Every claim to objectivity, is a claim to subjectively assigned values of importance.

Let’s assume a reconstruction of music starts as follows:

“The music starts with a motif M (0:2 to 0:8)” that gets repeated in the next phrase (0:10 to 0:18).”

The music is “quoted” and a correlation (the repetititon) is noted. What is not objective for you here ?

think it would be more productive if we frame this discussion with a concrete example, as I told Metaphysician Undercover:

Let’s assume a reconstruction of music starts as follows:

“The music starts with a motif M (0:2 to 0:8)” that gets repeated in the next phrase (0:10 to 0:18).”

The music is “quoted” and a correlation (the repetititon) is noted. What is not objective for you here ?

It's objective if we both agree to reconstruct the piece in the language of "motives", "contrapoints", or other terms of classical music. Isn't the record itself the best reconstruction?

What's the essence of a piece of music? The decomposition of the soundwaves? Then maybe the most objective way is using Fourier transforms piecewise.

We reconstruct an abstraction of the work (hence "conceptual" reconstructionism) to help the consumer of the content re-focus on the content. Consumption of content tends to be distracted by a million factors (for example, the search for meaning and context), that's where reconstruction comes in.

It is hedonistic : we look for a perspective that will provide enjoyment.

But how to determine the concepts? Suppose I look at the New York Boogie Woogie painting, by Mondriaan? What would be the concepts? Should I ignore the title? Or the atmosphere in New York?

That's shining a nice light! So it's an aid for the beholder. Not throwing in useless context info, but concentrating on the piece "as it is"?

That's a nice approach. I think I even use it myself, when listening to music. Beside the emotions and crazy dances I sometimes dance, I discover new pieces of guitar, drum patterns I didn't notice before, bass lines repeating, or whatever. Is that the stuff you write about? Sounds like a discovery tour somehow! Great!

I don't know what "verticality" or "convexity" mean, represent, or imply with visual art

That's the experiment.

Don't tell me you don't know that in abstract painting most trees stand vertical and their leaves are convex. Same for realistic work. Vertical, up-down linearly, convex, spherical.

Could we discover elements the artist wasn't aware of?

New pattern seems to "click" into existence somehow. What pieces of sound are objective properties?

What pieces of sound are objective properties?

What you mean by medium specific narrative?

Have you read the Manifesto?

The mosaic is predisposed to distract from the content, as if through centrifugal force. Reviewing is known to relate to the content in the following ways:

* Description for the blind or deaf (for example, enumerating the instruments in a musical piece, or, if there’s a tree in a painting, saying, with style, that there’s a tree)
* Analysis “through the microscope”, that is, features of the mosaic are individually looked at in detail (for example, the rhyming structure of a poem, or the references and historical context of a painting)
* Myopic overviews, mostly in the form of categorizations (for example, categorizing a Beethoven piece as Romantic-era classical music)

But who determines what parts of the piece are mosaic parts?

The work that is conceptually reconstructed has to be looked at in an a priori defined manner. Somehow, your theory reminds me of the scientific approach to reality, where empiricism plays a role.

I will try to come up with a narrative for a painting. The narrative, by definition, has to be spoken or written or spoken. Or can we give a visual narrative of music, and a sound narrative of a painting?

Don't tell me you don't know that in abstract painting most trees stand vertical and their leaves are convex. Same for realistic work. Vertical, up-down linearly, convex, spherical.

don't know their significance, why we should be paying attention to them.

Can we apply verticallity to poetry or music?

Yes, I know what the words mean, but not in the context they are being used. I don't know their significance, why we should be paying attention to them.

The painting is conceptually reconstructed

The music is “quoted” and a correlation (the repetititon) is noted. What is not objective for you here ?

So I don't think you should represent this style of interpretation as any more objective than any other style. It is a different style, but there appears to be nothing in your principles which would make it objective.

Works are reconstructed in objective, constructive terms

What’s objective is the quoted content and the correlations.

You can imagine what the horizonal and ellipsoid poems hold in store for us.

I\m trying to grasp what the point to this style of interpretation is. It's a complex system without any real value scheme. Doesn't that leave it worthless? See if you can answer this question for me. What is the overarching goal behind this reconstruction system? Is the goal to produce good quality interpretations, as reconstructions, or is the goal to produce a complex formal system of interpretation?

Take a look at it this way for example. There is a relationship between any particular reconstruction and the original piece which is chosen. Is that a relationship of value?

-Two black lines, one vertically, Man, one antivertically, Woman.
-Woman and Man shake the boundaries. The house containing them ain't big enough for the both of them.
-Man and Woman push each other into the corner, mutually orthogonal.
-Convexity is absent.

The medium specific narrative. The kind of paint used? What underground is used? Objective properties?

How would that look like for the two lines?

What are the objectives everyone sees? How do you tell someone who doesn't see the painting? Or should he see it during the narrative? Do you offer generally applicable instructions to conceptually reconstruct? I haven't read the whole theorem you offered yet, but is that the aim? A kind of objective theory of everything in the realm of products of art? With the aim to intensify pleasure?

say the painting a Jackson Pollock-like mess, well too bad. The goal is to intensify pleasure, yeah.
10mReplyOptions

A JP like mess is sufficient for pleasure...A sufficient, but not necessary condition. Two orthogonal lines do just as well. Unless you don't view a JP-like mess as sufficient for pleasure...

if they let go of any preconception

You think all people share the same instinctive narrative?

It has value only relative to the reader/listener, as a helper.

Can you accept this division for me, between what is shown right there, explicit, in the content (the piece) and what is left to the imagination, or implied? And would you agree that the artist's mode of operation is often to stimulate the imagination, this being fundamental to the aesthetic experience?

So if you propose to start with what is explicit, and build on that, how do you get beyond this problem of determining what is explicit?

Somehow this discussion looks like a discussion I read on this forum.Look here.

There is spoken of a manifesto, like you speak about it. And in the same way, more or less, a conceptual reconstruction of science and its foundation is made. I don't say you have to read it, but the similarity is remarkable.

I think that the division implicit/explicit might be too academic for what reconstruction is trying to achieve. It's not so much implicit/explicit that matters here, than the ability to match the reconstruction to the content. So if I say "The music starts with a motif M (0:2 to 0:8) that gets repeated in the next phrase (0:10 to 0:18)", it doesn't matter that what I observe is explicit or implicit.

So the real problem is not determining what is explicit versus implicit, but determining what I choose to focus on while experiencing the content (implicit or explicit). Since the motivation is hedonistic, this is an empirical problem. In reconstructionism, the choice is to focus on things like melodic motifs. As you noted, motifs can be looked at from different perspectives, in practice it's not too much of a problem because the way the music is, motifs will often jump at you without you spending much effort. In addition, in your example of looking at a larger structure, you can do it at the same time as keeping in mind the repetition of M (that's the attention span I talk about). Networks of correlation are difficult to keep in mind (many data), and a compromise must typically be struck, where you'll ignore certain parts of the medium. For example, when I listen to listen to metal music, I will focus on the guitar riffs and not pay too much attention to the drums or vocals. There is a certain sensuality in the medium of music that helps filter "useless" correlations (it's empirical of course, and not always the best choice, which is why we share reconstructions, so that others may improve on them or improve theirs). Why would someone do this exercise, which sounds like tedious work ? Because there's sometimes a big payoff at the end, in the form of "beautiful" resolutions (that only narratives can bring). Triumph can only be attained through great adversity.

The point was that the content isn't necessarily explicit. So if you take what appears to be explicit content, when the true content is implicit, then you have a false start. You are not really starting with the content at all. Are you familiar with Wittgenstein's rabbit-duck? Suppose you see an explicit duck, in a scenario like this, and you state "duck" as the content. Someone else might call the same content "rabbit". If you do not see it as both a duck and a rabbit, as that is what is intended by the author, and describe it as both, you have not correctly represented the content. So when the content is open to interpretation, i.e. there is nothing explicit, it is all implicit, how do you know that you are describing it correctly? Maybe your technique is only good for certain types of work?

To me, this sems to contradict what you said, that the value of the reconstruction is as a helper. If you just pick and choose from the content, to decide how you want to represent it, how can this help anyone else? Any other person might just pick and choose in one's own way, so why would they want to be influenced by someone else, who might actually ruin one's own experience of the piece. It would be like study notes where the author of the Notes just arbitrarily decided which parts of the work to focus on. That would not be a help.

* People tend to NOT listen making these kinds of observations, don't care about patterns and correlations, etc. They're distracted by other factors, including emotion, aesthetics, immediate sensations
* It's hard to apply the same discipline of observation over a whole song. The reconstruction, as a whole, helps to conceptualize a wide narrative resulting from correlating many observations distributed throughout the song.

It would be like study notes where the author of the Notes just arbitrarily decided which parts of the work to focus on.

What's the real view? Is the creator of the work important? Is it important what they wanted to say? What if it's an image of gods or a mathematical expression? Or an image trying to convey the meaning of freedom or suffering? What if we look at the Quernica picture by Picasso? Should we take the war or his family into consideration, or just the painting "as it is"?

What's the real view? Is the creator of the work important? Is it important what they wanted to say? What if it's an image of gods or a mathematical expression? Or an image trying to convey the meaning of freedom or suffering? What if we look at the Quernica picture by Picasso? Should we take the war or his family into consideration, or just the painting "as it is"?

The problem I find is that in many cases the whole narrative might be arbitrary, imaginary, fictional, simply made up. Like in my analogy of a photograph, or still painting, there is absolutely no objective narrative in that medium, because there is no temporal extension, regardless of whether it's a snap shot of an action scene, as a narrative requires temporal extension. So whatever narrative which one comes up with, it would be imaginary, fictional or made up.

This is why I suggested that reconstructionism might be better suited to some forms of art than others.

But then I don't understand the point, because to be true you'd just want to copy the original as close as possible,

What type of art do you consider is more suited to reconstruction? One with temporal extension, and a real narrative, or one without temporal extension, therefore no inherent narrative?

Not really. There are many things in a medium that can be redundant, distracting (e.g., as I mentioned, drums and vocals in metal music), or not an essential part of the narrative ("essential" here is subjective, dictated by the appreciation of the reconstructionist).

Undoubtedly, music. Then, on par, I'd go with text, movies, comics. Then groups of paintings (triptychs). Last would be standalone paintings. So you can guess that the main criterion is the ability to lay out a narrative temporally. Music is first because it's a focused and still very malleable medium. In theory, movies should be first, but in practice they are not (the medium is comically under-exploited IMO).

I wouldn't agree with your interpretation of metal music. Drums are essential to all rock music, setting the intricacies of the rhythm.

Why concentrate on the guitar, when it all sounds the same from one piece to the next?

Like in my analogy of a photograph, or still painting, there is absolutely no objective narrative in that medium, because there is no temporal extension, regardless of whether it's a snap shot of an action scene, as a narrative requires temporal extension.

That's why I said reconstruction is a helper. A reconstruction of metal music would totally change how you listen to music (whether it's for the better remains to be seen), even though it just "copies". Your analysis of rock music is very typical (in fact, it isn't far from what in the Manifesto is described as "description for the blind/deaf"), and reconstructionism is historically a separation from the trend it represents.

A painting tells a story that unfolds temporally as one’s gaze moves from one object to another within the frame, and then circles back after having formed bits of narrative to be embellished or reconfigured by further looking.

The more we stare at a painting, the more it seems
to be doing and changing.

The point was that this "story" is not explicit, therefore whatever story you imagine, it's not at all objective.

Oh sorry, I didn't realize this was a school of art appreciation for acid trippers

Any artist will tell you that the design of a painting explicitly directs the viewer’s
attention as a temporal unfolding. So the view may not recognize the story as explicit, but the creator of the art does.

Is the notion of freedom an objective feature of the painting?

Well, if peas are supposed to be good for me, I might want to develop a taste for peas, therefore follow the technique. But how is something like metal music good for me, so why would I want to develop the taste if I didn't already have it?

And if I already had the taste for it, that taste would be based in something personal, so how would the reconstruction do anything but subtract from my enjoyment of it, through distraction?

Is the notion of freedom an objective feature of the painting?

How can the objective view on the painting reveal that what it's trying to convey? I can give you an objective description of the letters in the word "PHYSICS", first letter, a small vertical with a semi-circle attached right above, second one two parallel verticals with a small horizontal in the middle, etc. but what does the word mean? And even the objective description needs an agreement about what's an objective feature.

Then you can look at a painting as a painting too, if you look at a word as a word. But what does it mean? Is every painting devoid of meaning?

The notion of freedom is looked at from the oppressed. Freedom is only meaningful if there is something to be freed of. If there is freedom for every one, like the figure on the rope, freedom is not something to desire for anymore. That's why the painting is called "A look at freedom".

3. Doubts regarding traditional analysis/reviewing: the way we talk about music, and how analysis/reviews talk about it, are not how we experience music. What is this gap? The natural extension of this line of questioning is the development of our awareness for medium-specific narratives.

5. The promise of a different type of sensations/payoff. Very roughly, it will lead you to something like big Eureka moments. In metal, you can superficially spot where these moments tend to occur. Traditionally, it’s in the form of “riff breakdowns” that are announced “theatrically”: the vocalist sometimes emit a distinctive exclamative roar, there’s a big break in the drumming, or there’s a striking aesthetic transition (for example, Metallica’s Master of Puppets when it switches to clean-sounding guitars). In the context of “great” medium-specific narratives, these kind of moments gain a whole dimension of significance. In other genres like classical music, these moments are not so much theatricalized. For example, in Vivaldi (who is my go-to when it comes to medium-specific narratives) the moment can aesthetically look like any other moment, and someone with no awareness of the narrative will just not hear anything different.

No meaning is fundamentally better than the other.

but was this meant by the writer of the word PHYSICS?

I'm trying to gasp exactly what you mean by "medium-specific narrative"

Is comparing narratives acceptable and useful in reconstructionism?

I really do not think that this gap can be closed in this way. I think it is a gap fundamental to the way that the human mind works, and we ought not even try to close it.

The artist did something completely contrary to intuition, something seemingly impossible, suddenly transcending the story.

But if you cut it loose from being a conveyor of meaning, then what use is there in art at all?

So the gap between passive and active is only really closed in the experience itself, where the presence of the unknown causes a real need for an active sort of affection.

Is comparing narratives acceptable and useful in reconstructionism?

So medium is music, the same for both Metallica and Vivaldi. I say "medium-specific" because for another medium, painting for example, obviously it won't be about melodic motifs, but visual patterns.

Well, it's still part of the story. In the case of medium-specific narratives; obviously, motif M can be used in unexpected ways. How this is achieved exactly is the interesting part, and this is the whole medium-specific narrative.

So, about this active thing. What I mean by active consumption in the context of reconstruction is the activity of correlating things (the basis of any narrative). As you can see from the "copy" aspect of reconstruction, reconstruction is a little replica of the experience. In fact, the property of "pure referentiality" almost means it is the experience itself, except in a guided way. Ultimately, the reader of a reconstruction can ditch the reconstruction, and live the experience the way the reconstruction suggested.

The medium used by the musician is sound, and there is distinct aspects of that medium, rhythm and pitch for example. Notice that aural narrative, referring to the act of telling a story with words, uses the same fundamental medium, sound, but it doesn't have refined (or defined) rhythm and pitch. Because different forms of artistic expression might use the same fundamental medium, and also one form of artistic expression might be presented through a number of different media, I think it's best to maintain a distinction between "medium" and "art form".

But motifs are not medium specific. There are visual motifs as much as there are sound motifs.

It appears like you want to talk about particular motifs as if they a part of the medium

But don't you think that being "guided" takes away from the experience?

I use medium roughly in the sense “perceived physical manifestation”. Even if we don’t agree with that definition, the only thing that matters is that I mean by “medium-specific narrative” a narrative whose elements are things you perceive in the content. So they’re visual, audible, readable, etc. things. It’s important because it contrasts traditional interpretation, which goes beyond these things.

In most cases, the viewer will see PHYSICS as a word, and I think that’s enough for most purposes.

When I'm reading, I don't see the things I am reading as words. So I do not see "physics" as a word, when I come across that word in a piece of writing. I talk about it now as a word, but when I'm reading I see each particular word as the word it is, and read it as that particular word

This is the difference between your conception of "medium" and mine. The motif, you see as part of the medium, a physical manifestation, I see it as something created by the artist.

How does it help in interpreting political and pseudoscientific talk?

That’s quite confusing. “When I'm reading, I don't see the things I am reading as words” followed by “I'm reading I see each particular word as the word it is”.

It’s not something that matters to reconstruction (as a hedonistic endeavour). If you care about this, you can even use your definition. The medium could come from an artist, a UFO, or be generated randomly by a computer. You can also try to reconstruct anything you experience in real life (quite useful when interpreting political discourses or pseudo-scientific debates for example).

Reconstructing how pseudo-scientific conclusions can be reached is quite amusing and enlightening.

I know it's confusing, but I thought I explained it well enough to dispel the confusion. When I'm reading I don't see them as words. But when I reflect on what is written, or talk about it in any way, not reading it, I see them as words. I only see them as words when I'm not reading it. When I'm reading it, I'm not thinking 'that's a word, that's a word, that's a word' etc., because I am too busy reading. And reading does not consist of seeing things as words, it's a matter of deriving meaning, not a matter of judging things as words. I cannot do both at the same time, read the material, and also count the words.

Unless there is some attempt to try and understand what the artist is doing, how can you call this a type of "help"? Take a politician's speech for example, you'd say, look at the cool patterns in the way this guy uses "make America great again", in relation to some other phrases used by that politician, but how is that supposed to be helpful?

Isn't this something completely different though, something called logic?

Correlating phrases helps to spot things like contradictions, omissions, fallacies, babbling, etc. Obviously, people didn’t need reconstructions to spot these already, but it can be argued they were sort of doing reconstruction before it was called reconstructionism. At a small scale (short political discourses for example), reconstruction of discourses is basically the same as traditional analysis.

Great question. Logic is focused on the errors or false statements. It’s a pinpointing thing. Reconstruction makes you focus on the whole reasoning that led to the error/false statement or was built on the error/false statement. The “help” here is not in establishing that the reasoning was wrong. Logic can do that. It’s to make you appreciate how the reasoning was “constructed”. You’ll surely remark that in doing so, reconstruction uses logic, and that’s true. In that case, the “content” considered by the reconstructionist is the combination of that logic with the pseudo-scientific text. In reconstructionism, the process of defining the content is a formal step that I call “conventional medium delimitation”. It’s just a convention, not a profound statement of truth.

It could be argued that it’s more interesting to see how errors are made than how a perfect scientific text is constructed. The empirical argument is that there are millions of ways of making errors, and only one way to be correct. And learning how we make errors is quite interesting, not only theoretically, but also as a lesson. So reconstruction is not primarily about finding errors, but rather about discovering reasoning patterns, and that’s a fun endeavour (hedonism).

I see a problem with this sort of thing, because the same word in different contexts has different meanings. So when you remove phrases from their contexts and say look, here's a contradiction, when it's really not a contradiction at all, because of the difference in context, that's being disrespectful to the author.

So any time that you remove a part of a narrative from its context, you cannot assign any meaning to that piece, because all its meaning is derived from its position in the narrative.

then all of a sudden the person will start to do things right outside of one's character, seeming to undergo a significant change in character. From my perspective, I would say the person would never do something like that, the act is out of character for that person, so I see it as unrealistic, and I'm pissed off that they tricked me into thinking that the person was otherwise.

And with good editing they can even do this with "reality" shows. They show numerous, very particular types of actions, by the person, to make you think you understand the person's character. But they've actually created a false representation with crafty editing.

There are many ways to be correct because correctness is determined in relation to the end, if the end is achieved.