The Author-Function

Foucault argued that the author is not a person behind a text but a function of discourse: a classificatory device that groups texts, grants authority, and restricts interpretation. When we say “Nietzsche said...” we invoke a brand-name that does social work independent of verifiable sourcing. This playground makes that dynamic visible.

Cliché Index

Each variant is scored by a composite cliché index:

where $f$ is circulation frequency, $\text{disp}$ is channel dispersion, $\text{surp}$ is surprisal (low = predictable), $\text{ret}$ is context retention, and $\text{mut}$ is mutability. High-cliché variants are widely circulated, dispersed across channels, unsurprising, context-free, and highly mutable.

Entanglement Surplus

The entanglement surplus measures the gap between name-brand attachment and source verifiability:

Positive $E$ means the author's name is doing more legitimation work than the actual source context provides. This is the signature of discourse entanglement: the name circulates as a brand-token, increasingly detached from verifiable citation.

Replicator-Mutator Dynamics

The population evolves through a replicator equation: variants with higher fitness (portable, general, brief, name-legitimized) grow in frequency while low-fitness variants decline. Mutations spawn paraphrase-variants that inherit perturbed traits. Over time, the population drifts toward cliché attractors in the lower-left of the specificity-circulation landscape: general, highly circulated, context-collapsed slogans carrying a prestigious name.

Notes

• This is a synthetic model. The population is seeded from canonical phrase fragments, not real quote corpora.
• All parameter values are normalized to [0, 1]. Absolute values are arbitrary; relative dynamics matter.
• The scatter size encodes excerpt/context-loss pressure (inversely related to retention).
• The three entanglement buckets (Low, Mid, High) split variants by their name-minus-source surplus.