1.1 From Digital Humanities to Speculative Computing - UCLA ...

cultures, when the scale at which these can be institutionalized is enabled by electronic
communications and computational processing, what is at stake seems highly significant.
The chilling integration of IBM technology into the bureaucratic administration of the
extermination machines of the Third Reich provides an extreme example of the horrific
efficiency to which managed regimes of information processing can be put. That single
instance should be sufficient caution against systematic totalization. Closer (perhaps) to
the vicissitudes of daily life is the example of bureaucratic identity confusion brought
about in the dark vision of the film Brazil. The grotesqueries wrought by the replacement
of T for B in the confusion of the names Tuttle and Buttle on which the film’s grim
narrative unfolds are too frequently replayed in the plight of daily information
(mis)management of medical, insurance, and credit records. One doesn’t have to
subscribe to exaggerated fears of a police state to grasp the problematic nature of
totalizing (but error-ridden) systems of bureaucracy—or of subscribing to the models on
which they gain their authority. The place of subjective inflection and its premise of
partial, fragmentary, non-objective and non-totalizing approaches to knowledge is of a
radically different order. The ethics and teleology of subjectivity cannot be absorbed into
alignment with totalizing systems. On that point of difference hangs what is at stake in
our undertaking. Finding ways to express this in information structures and also
authoring environments is the challenge that led us to speculative computing.
1.1 History / 3/2008 /
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