Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“One could certainly say that the entire financial, ritual, monarchical, technological and juridical vocabularies I’ve been taking over and remixing (sampling) for years now are just so many transfer translations—more deliberately formed, but never with complete foreknowledge of further permutations and combinations. It’s all a way of pressing samples into service to the center precisely by transgressing their respective specializations (the source of disciplinary power) and putting them in “orbit.” It’s a kind of controlled (but never completely) mistakenness, creating a store of idioms to be sampled in ever new ways. It’s a kind of cult of the idiom, but one open to anyone willing to have their commonplaces displaced. Our learning processes today are continuous with those deriving from the originary scene: we carry out rituals that have made the center present to us, which is to say, added an increment of deferral to the field of mimetic practices; those rituals are felt to be uneven in their effectivity, leading us to comment narratively on the failure of the ritual, in turn adding to or revising the ritual to fit the commentary. We’re trying to draw out imperatives from the center—what should we do, how should we contribute to the center so as to be worthy of and receive its bounty—whether this is done by more rehearsal of a chant and dance or by revising a prompt or search term eliciting information from the center is the aim.”

— Adam Katz, Nomos and Transfer Translation · Jun 17, 2025 · Bouvard Substack