Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“The purpose of scenic design is revelation: scenes should be designed so as to maximize information coming from the center, which is to say anomalies generated by the selvings across those scenes. We create fields of likenesses, as widely and densely as possible—we generate worlds out of samples—and then we establish parameters that lead us to determine that some of those likenesses are more likely, and eventually the same, against some other. Take a text, institution, or person, and say, “I want more like that”—your process of inquiry will be as outlined here—you will conjure up a range of texts, institutions or people (let’s just say “things”), actual and hypothetical (an increasingly useless distinction), that are like that thing in various ways, kind of like a funhouse mirror showing different features of the thing, and you will tether or align some of those things to your sample, then some of them increasingly closely and then you will arrive at actionable criteria for distinguishing that thing and new forms of that thing from other things.”

— Adam Katz, Literature as Para-Data and Intelligence Exchange with the Center · Aug 24, 2022 · Bouvard Substack