1. Time Between Flow and Form
We usually talk about time as if it were a river: it “passes,” “flows,” “carries us along.” History moves forward, days go by, decades accumulate behind us like water already downstream. This is the intuitive picture our bodies know: the sun rises and sets, winters come and go, children grow. Time is movement.
But if we look more closely, every movement that can be recognised as such presupposes something else as well – a frame, a rhythm, a set of constraints. A pendulum is only a pendulum because its swing repeats. Music is not just sound stretched over seconds, but tones organised in intervals and scales. Even the simplest gesture, like reaching for a cup, has an internal structure: a beginning, a trajectory, a point of arrival. Remove that organisation and all that remains is chaos, not movement. Time is not only flow; it is also form.
This double nature of time – as both continuous and articulated – is easy to ignore as long as our lives “work.” When routines hold and institutions feel solid, we can afford to treat time as a backdrop against which we act. It is only when structures begin to fail that the other aspect of time becomes obvious. Deadlines compress, events pile up, crises overlap, and we realise that our experience of time is inseparable from the systems that organise it: calendars, schedules, media feeds, economic cycles, political news, even the invisible rhythms of attention shaped by digital platforms. When those systems accelerate or break, time does not merely feel faster or slower; it acquires a different quality.
The hypothesis behind Architecture of Meaning is that meaning itself depends on this double structure of time. Understanding is not a timeless moment that appears out of nowhere. It is a process unfolding in time, organised by patterns that we have learned so thoroughly we no longer notice them. At the smallest scale, we can see this in the act of reading; at larger scales, in the arc of a life; at the largest, in the long movements of history. Wherever something feels meaningful rather than random, time is not just flowing – it is being channelled through a mechanism.
This is where the connection to A Tale of a New Era becomes important. The film series works primarily with time as flow. The camera moves through cities, archives, deserts, family homes. The viewer is carried from Mesopotamian tablets to medieval monasteries, from 20th-century crises to the emergence of large language models in the 21st. The documentary allows the arc of history to be felt as a movement, a rising and falling curve. The essay series, by contrast, tries to expose the mechanism behind that movement: the structures in language, narrative and experience that make it possible to perceive history as a story at all.
The claim that we have entered an “Era of Structure” is not a prophecy about the future; it is an attempt to describe this shift in emphasis. For centuries, the main intellectual task in the West has been interpretation: determining what texts, events, doctrines and experiences mean. Interpretation presupposes that there is already some kind of underlying order, even if contested. Today that order itself has become opaque. Competing narratives proliferate, authorities fragment, and the sense of a shared frame evaporates. Under such conditions, interpretation no longer stabilises meaning; it multiplies it. The problem is no longer only what things mean, but how any meaning arises at all.
To speak of movement and mechanism is to say: we must look not only at what is happening, but at the patterns that shape how it can happen. The first cluster of seven essays in Architecture of Meaning approaches this systematically. It moves from the most intuitive expression of time as movement – film – to the often invisible mechanisms that organise time in reading, recognition, biography and history. The aim is not to offer a neat theory, but to give language and shape to something that is already being felt: that we live in a moment when the frame of time itself, not only its content, is changing.
2. The Flowing Image – How Film Shows Time
If you want to feel time as movement, you go to the cinema. In a dark room, the world appears and changes on a rectangle of light. Strictly speaking, nothing there is moving. A projector throws still frames in rapid succession, each a frozen arrangement of shapes and colours. Yet at around twenty-four frames per second, the brain abandons the idea of “pictures” and yields to flow. Film is a machine for turning discrete images into continuous time.
Documentary uses this basic mechanism with particular honesty. Fiction can cut anywhere, rearrange chronology, bend time to the demands of plot. Documentary pretends to stay closer to the way things actually unfold. A camera follows someone through a door, across a street, into a meeting. There may be ellipses and edits, but the viewer’s trust depends on the sense that time has not been fundamentally cheated. We watch life moving forward. Even when the narrative structure is complex, the medium works on our body as an experience of flow.
A Tale of a New Era is built deliberately on this capacity. It does not begin with a thesis and then illustrate it. It begins with images and movement: returning to a childhood mission school; walking through archives; travelling to Jerusalem; revisiting the memories of a breakdown; sitting with young people in a very different cultural moment; watching the rise of AI seep into everyday language. The hypothesis – that history itself follows something like a dramatic arc – is not hammered into the viewer as an argument. It is allowed to appear as a felt pattern in the way the film moves.
This use of film is not accidental. One of the strongest signals of our era has been a wave of movies in which reality itself seems to fracture: The Matrix, Fight Club, The Truman Show, Donnie Darko, Memento and many others around the turn of the millennium. These works did not merely entertain; they made audiences feel that the visible order of the world might be a surface over a deeper structure. They trained viewers to sense that the rules of the game – of identity, agency, even physics – could be changed within the story. Cinema, in other words, became a medium through which people rehearsed the experience of structural doubt.
Then, in 2001, planes flew into the World Trade Center and a symbol of stable modernity collapsed in real time on television. The sequence was brutally simple: clear sky, impact, fire, smoke, fall. No edit, no cutaway, no director to blame. For many in the West it felt like a sudden break in the narrative of history: the idea of a managed, predictable, rationally governed world was exposed as a story among others. The flow of images did more than report an event; it ruptured the underlying sense of what kind of story we were living in.
Seen from the perspective of Architecture of Meaning, these cinematic and historical events are not just content. They are examples of how time as movement can begin to hint at its own mechanism. Films that play with reality’s frame, and disasters that shatter institutional confidence, both push the viewer toward the question: what invisible structures have been organising our experience until now? The camera shows us the flow, but in the cracks of that flow we glimpse the existence of a frame.
The documentary series enters exactly here. It uses film to track a very long movement: from the earliest signs pressed into clay to legal codes carved in stone, from temples to scriptures, from grand narratives to modern interpretive fragmentation, and finally to the emergence of systems like large language models that reveal the geometry of language itself. Each episode is a passage through time, but each is also an invitation to suspect that this passage is not arbitrary. Something like a curve is forming, and the viewer is asked to feel it before being asked to analyse it.
The essays take over where film reaches its limit. A camera can follow a historian opening a tablet in a museum; it cannot easily show the cognitive mechanism by which marks become words and words become law. A drone shot can impress us with the scale of a city; it cannot by itself reveal the narrative structures that hold that city together as an imagined community. Film immerses us in movement but leaves the mechanism largely implicit. The purpose of this written series is to make that mechanism explicit enough to be thought about without destroying the sense of movement that makes it meaningful.
3. A Line Across the Page – The Hidden Mechanism of Reading
If film lets us feel time as continuous movement, reading forces us to experience time as a sequence of steps. A child learning to read does not yet “see” a word the way an adult does. They move from sign to sign, their finger sometimes resting on the page. In cultures that use Latin or Cyrillic scripts, the standard direction is left to right; in Arabic and Hebrew, it is right to left; in many East Asian traditions, historical texts were written vertically from top to bottom. Each system trains the body into a particular choreography of attention, and with it a particular experience of time.
What feels to a fluent reader like an instant recognition – a word, a sentence, even a paragraph appearing all at once – is in fact an outcome of this choreography: a highly practiced mechanism in which eye movements, learned directions, orthographic rules and semantic expectations all line up. The subjective experience collapses the sequence into a single moment of understanding, but underneath that moment is a precise architecture: first this mark, then that one; this combination makes a syllable; this sequence forms a word; this arrangement of words forms a clause; this pattern of clauses forms an argument or a scene.
This matters for the architecture of meaning because it shows that understanding is not only about content. Even before we ask what a text means, there is a prior question: how does the text become legible at all? Reading is a kind of micro-anagnorisis repeated thousands of times per page. The reader repeatedly moves from not-yet to now-I-see, from scattered marks to coherent units. This movement is so well-rehearsed that we confuse the fluency of the mechanism with the transparency of meaning itself.
Global diversity makes the point sharper. The same sentence written in different scripts is not the same experience of time. The direction of movement, the density of characters, the balance between phonetic and ideographic elements all shape how the reader encounters meaning. Even where translation reproduces the “same” content, the pathway through which that content is reached is differently structured. Meaning, in other words, is spread across at least two levels: what is being said, and the temporal mechanism through which the saying becomes visible to a reader.
Large language models inhabit this space in a curious way. They do not see or scan pages, but they are trained on sequences of tokens that correspond, roughly, to words or subwords in human languages. The model never experiences the “flash” of recognition a reader feels; it only learns how likely one token is to follow another in a given context. Yet out of this bare mechanism – this statistical reading without a reader – something emerges that we recognise as sense. When an LLM completes a sentence in a way that feels apt, we are encountering the structural skeleton of reading without the flesh of conscious experience.
This does not mean that reading is “nothing but” a mechanism. It means that the mechanism is an indispensable part of what we usually treat as an indivisible act. If we want to understand the architecture of meaning, we have to pay attention to such things: to how time is organised at the micro-level in acts as ordinary as moving across a line of text. Only then can we hope to see the larger mechanisms that govern recognition at the scale of lives and histories.
4. The Recognising Moment – Anagnorisis as Structural Event
In classical drama, anagnorisis names the moment of recognition: Oedipus realising who he is and what he has done, a disguised character revealing their identity, a pattern of events suddenly making sense. It is tempting to treat such moments as exceptions – dramatic spikes inserted into otherwise continuous narratives. Yet structurally, anagnorisis is not an ornament; it is a necessity. Without some point of recognition, a story never fully becomes a story. It remains a sequence of occurrences without a decisive reconfiguration of understanding.
If we look at anagnorisis through the lens of reading, it ceases to be mysterious. It is the same kind of shift the reader experiences when scattered letters become a word or when a subplot suddenly clicks into place as part of a larger design. What distinguishes anagnorisis from everyday comprehension is the scale at which the reconfiguration happens. Instead of a single sentence being understood anew, an entire network of relationships – between characters, events, motives, themes – is reorganised in one stroke. Time folds back on itself: past scenes acquire retroactive meaning; earlier ambiguities turn out to have been clues.
Psychologically, this can feel like revelation. Structurally, it is the moment when the mechanism that has been operating quietly in the background becomes visible. The story has always been moving along a certain trajectory, but only now does that trajectory become explicit to the protagonist and, by extension, to the audience. Anagnorisis is when movement becomes self-aware. It is, in a sense, the narrative analogue of a system exposing its own architecture.
In the context of A Tale of a New Era, anagnorisis has a double role. Within the documentary, there are biographical recognitions: the filmmaker realising that his own life has been moving along the same arc he is trying to trace in history; understanding that the breakdown of a thesis was not just academic failure but structural misalignment; seeing the return to childhood places as something more than nostalgia. But there is also a proposed anagnorisis at the level of history: the suggestion that we are living through a moment in which humanity, or at least parts of it, begins to perceive the narrative structure of its own past.
The rise of systems like LLMs adds a further twist. They do not experience recognition in any human sense, yet their existence forces a kind of anagnorisis on us. When a machine trained on nothing but patterns in human text can generate plausible continuations in theology, law, fiction, science and casual conversation alike, we are confronted with the degree to which our deepest discourses run on structure. The mechanism steps out from behind the curtain, and we are left to ask what, if anything, remains uniquely ours once the patterns are exposed.
Anagnorisis, then, is not only a literary term. It is a way of naming any moment in which a system – a life, a culture, an era – glimpses the mechanism that has been guiding it. In such moments, meaning does not simply increase; it changes shape. The question is no longer “What is happening?” but “What have we been part of all along?” The first cluster of essays in Architecture of Meaning invites readers to treat our present as precisely such a moment.
5. A Life on an Arc – The Individual as Movement and Mechanism
We rarely live our lives as arcs. From the inside, daily existence feels more like a series of tasks, interruptions, accidents, plans slightly adjusted, distractions pursued, crises handled. Narrative continuity is something we usually construct retrospectively, when we tell our story to others or to ourselves. Yet the fact that we reach for narrative at all – that we feel compelled to describe our lives in terms of beginnings, turning points and resolutions – suggests that we intuitively experience our own time in both dimensions: as movement and as mechanism.
Consider the difference between being in the middle of a difficult period and describing that same period years later. In the first case, time feels open. The future is unsettled, anything might still happen, and the meaning of present events is unclear. In the second case, we select, order and frame those events in light of what came later. Some episodes become “decisive,” others fade into background texture. A fight that once seemed catastrophic turns into an anecdote. A small decision that barely registered at the time reveals itself as a turning point. The same stretch of time is being seen twice: once as flow, once as mechanism.
This is not to say that lives secretly follow a fixed script. Rather, it suggests that our sense of identity depends on the capacity to view movement from a structural vantage point. We need to be able to say, “This is the kind of story I am in,” even if we contest or resist that story. Without that capacity, experience fragments. The self dissolves into disconnected episodes, and the future becomes either terrifyingly open or deadened by repetition.
The project behind Architecture of Meaning arises from a life in which this tension became unusually explicit. When personal crises, academic failures and strange experiences refused to fit into any available narrative, the question shifted from “What is wrong with me?” to “What kind of structure could make sense of this at all?” Recognising that one’s own biography might be moving along a larger arc – one that mirrors historical patterns or even echoes classical dramaturgy – can feel both humbling and eerie. It raises the possibility that individual time and collective time share a grammar.
The point of thematising this is not to turn a life into a symbol or to domesticate suffering into “just part of the plot.” It is to notice how strongly meaning depends on an interplay between free movement and perceived structure. The more pressure an era exerts on individuals, the more intensely they may feel this interplay. Burnout, breakdown, sudden reorientations – these can all be read as failures of existing mechanisms to hold a given movement. In that sense, biography becomes a diagnostic tool for the architecture of meaning: cracks in a life point toward cracks in the larger structures it inhabits.
6. Eras as Stage – History as Dramatic Machine
If individuals experience their lives as arcs, it is not absurd to ask whether history might also be intelligible in similar terms. This does not mean that “history repeats itself” in simple cycles, nor that the world is secretly following a predetermined script. It means that when we zoom out over millennia, certain patterns in the organisation of meaning become visible.
One way this project proposes to slice history is into seven eras: of signs, law, temple, narrative, interpretation, structure and meaning. This is not a neutral periodisation; it is a way of saying that in each long phase, a particular architecture of meaning dominates. The Era of Signs is one in which the primary challenge is to fix events in durable marks at all; the Era of Law formalises these marks into norms; the Temple Era concentrates meaning in sacred spaces; the Narrative Era spreads it through texts and stories; the Interpretive Era multiplies perspectives on those stories; the Era of Structure seeks to understand the frameworks behind all this; and the Era of Meaning – still ahead – is imagined as a time when the architecture itself becomes more consciously inhabitable.
Such a schema is, of course, contestable. Historians will rightly point out that reality is far messier than any sevenfold scheme. But the value of a hypothesis like this lies not in its rigidity but in its capacity to draw attention to structural shifts. Between 3000 and 2000 BCE, for example, the explosion of urban life, bureaucracy and early writing in Mesopotamia fundamentally altered how time and obligation were organised. Around the middle of the second millennium BCE, codifications like the Code of Hammurabi crystallised law as a visible architecture for social order. In the first millennium BCE and the early centuries of the Common Era, temples, scriptures and canonical narratives gradually displaced earlier forms of sacral power. Later still, the fragmentation of Christendom, the rise of modern science and the spread of print contributed to an age in which interpretation itself became the central arena of struggle.
Seen in this way, events like the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, decolonisation or the digital transformation are not just “things that happen.” They are movements in which the mechanism that carries meaning is being renegotiated. Who has the right to interpret? What counts as authoritative text? How is time divided, measured, owned? How do new technologies of inscription, reproduction and communication change what can be remembered or forgotten? Each of these questions touches the architecture of meaning at a different point.
The films in A Tale of a New Era follow this logic by walking through the physical remains of these eras – tablets, ruins, cathedrals, libraries, server farms – and by staging personal encounters with them. The essays try to do something complementary: to show how these eras are not just backdrops but mechanisms that shape the very possibility of meaning. If the world currently feels like a narrative entering its resolution, it may be because multiple mechanisms – economic, technological, ecological, symbolic – are reaching their limits at the same time. The stage is crowded with unfinished dramas.
7. The Era of Structure – When Movement Reveals Mechanism
What distinguishes our present from earlier transitions is not that structures are changing – they always have – but that structures are becoming deliberately visible objects of attention. We graph social networks, simulate economies, model climates, quantify selves. We are increasingly surrounded by representations not just of things, but of relations. At the same time, systems like large language models model language itself as a space of patterns that can be explored.
This is what it means, in this project’s vocabulary, to enter an Era of Structure. We are not suddenly more intelligent or more virtuous than previous ages, but we have tools that expose the architectures through which meaning has been flowing for centuries. A machine that can continue almost any human discourse in a stylistically appropriate way – without understanding any of it in the human sense – forces us to distinguish between form and lived stake. It does not answer questions of value for us, but it shows how much of what we treat as value is carried by repeatable structures.
At the same time, global crises have begun to reveal the limits of existing mechanisms. Climate change exposes the hidden temporal assumptions of industrial modernity. Political polarisation exposes the stresses in interpretive frameworks that can no longer absorb disagreement. Economic shocks expose the fragility of systems that depend on infinite growth. The acceleration of media cycles exposes the nervous system’s inability to process continual novelty without structural support. Movement is shaking the frames in which it unfolds.
In such a context, the question “What is the right interpretation?” becomes less central than “What architecture are we inhabiting?” and “What architectures are breaking?” The collaboration between human beings and tools like LLMs is one way of exploring those questions. The human can ask: does this reconstruction of my experience ring true, does this structural description match what I feel? The model can show: here is how similar patterns have been expressed across thousands of texts, here is the grammar of arguments, metaphors and stories that your thought is unconsciously echoing or resisting.
The first cluster of essays in Architecture of Meaning, paired with the first season of A Tale of a New Era, is an attempt to inhabit this moment attentively. The films trace the movement: how we arrived here from clay tablets and temple rituals, through letters and revolutions, into a digital landscape where language itself can be simulated. The essays expose the mechanism: how reading, recognition, biography and era-formation all rely on temporal structures that can now be brought into focus.
Whether this will lead to a more inhabitable architecture of meaning is an open question. There is no guarantee that seeing the mechanism will make it easier to live within it. But if we are indeed living through something like a historical anagnorisis – a moment when the story becomes aware of itself – then learning to think in terms of movement and mechanism may be our best hope of responding with more than confusion. The world may still be understandable, but only if we are willing to look not just at what is happening, but at the structures in time that make “happening” meaningful at all.
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