From Clinamen to Reader Genesis: A Controlled Computational Experiment in Lucretian Xenopoetics
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This study reexamines Lucretius’s concept of clinamen through Biological Xeno Signal and Reader-Generation Theory, investigating whether deviations in symbolic trajectories can produce not only unfamiliar linguistic configurations but also measurable transformations in the discriminatory capacities of an artificial receiver, thereby establishing an experimental distinction between the emergence of textual novelty and the generation of new conditions of reading. The controlled computational experiment BXC–LUC/001 compares three matched conditions—LINEAR, SWERVE08, and LEXICAL08—across 128 deterministic initializations, using 56 symbolic particles, 96 computational steps, and independently reserved classification probes to evaluate structural persistence, receiver alteration, historical dependence, transformational robustness, and morphogenetic consequence. Although SWERVE08 increased mean lexical diversity from 98.84 to 106.29 distinct composite types, its influence on collision frequency remained statistically inconclusive, while LEXICAL08 generated 136.88 lexical types without changing the underlying collision trajectories, demonstrating that linguistic proliferation can occur independently of modifications to the generative dynamics of symbolic encounters. More significantly, the measured proportions of altered receiver classifications remained approximately 0.52 across all three conditions, providing no persuasive evidence that the introduction of a clinamen-like perturbation produced additional discriminatory capacity, while historical-dependence measurements revealed that increased formal variation did not necessarily correspond to increased sensitivity to prior reception. These findings challenge the assumption that textual novelty automatically generates new readers and suggest that nonhuman literary criticism must distinguish the production of unfamiliar expressions from the independently demonstrable reorganization of reception, particularly when computational adaptation is interpreted through biological or morphogenetic terminology. Rather than treating the negative result as a failure of Lucretian xenopoetics, the study establishes a falsifiable methodological framework in which literary emergence becomes an experimentally investigable relation among deviation, encounter, composition, and reception, while preserving the distinction between computational diagnostics and authenticated biological measurements, for which the official Biological Xeno Coefficient coordinates remain non-adjudicable and K remains undefined. The central proposition is that the emergence of unfamiliar language does not itself establish the emergence of its reader, because reader genesis requires evidence of newly available, historically conditioned, and transferable capacities of discrimination that cannot be inferred from lexical diversification alone. Keywords: Lucretius; Clinamen; Biological Xeno Signal; Xenopoetics; Reader-Generation Theory; Nonhuman Literary Criticism; Biological Xeno Coefficient; Computational Literature; Receiver Alteration; Morphogenesis.
Author: Kenji Siratori
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225730233
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