Literature as Para-Data and Intelligence Exchange with the Center
dennisbouvard.substack.com
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. The same/other distinction will often be drawn through things that are in many ways very much like each other. And you will in the process have set up a way of refining and updating that distinction as new intelligence comes in (having also set the same/other distinction to work in a field of likenesses such that it brings in a steady flow of helpful intelligence).
Literature as Para-Data and Intelligence Exchange with the Center
Literature as Para-Data and Intelligence…
Literature as Para-Data and Intelligence Exchange with the Center
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. The same/other distinction will often be drawn through things that are in many ways very much like each other. And you will in the process have set up a way of refining and updating that distinction as new intelligence comes in (having also set the same/other distinction to work in a field of likenesses such that it brings in a steady flow of helpful intelligence).