The experience of reading text: Data does not often decompose into logical atomic units. Pattern matching, the occurrence of one sequence inside another sequence. Not mimicry or disease, but a seam. A finite state machine, documents shining through the sliding window and stepping over chunks of mismatch. “Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so.” The machine consists of states and transitions: Every mismatch causes a new transition. The signature is linear in the best case. Two fingers in the text loop as we iterate and increment, if this character matches that one. It is always possible to arrange things so that the first pointer never backtracks. One to skim and the other to slog. “There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present-day society: to retreat ahead of it.” The worst case, the degenerate string, highly self-repetitive patterns in a repetitive text causes us to learn a new method. Judgment based on comparison: The false heuristic of character, as if meaning were a foreign tongue. “The pleasure of the text does not prefer one ideology to another.” If true, the concatenation of expressions. To endow the thing with non-determinism, an arbitrary operation sidesteps null states. If false, we find a unique path through the transitions and characters. We cannot believe in a mere pattern. “How can a text, which consists of language, be outside language?”