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

of our term “’patacritical”. If norms, means, and averages govern statistics, then sleights,
swerves, and deviation have their way in the ‘pataphysical game. Adopting a ‘patacritical
method is not an excuse for random chaos or abandonment of intellectual discipline. It
calls for attention to individual cases without assumptions about the generalization to be
drawn. In short, it takes exceptions as rules that constitute a system de facto, even if
repeatability and reliability cannot be expected. Deviation from all norms and constant
change dictate that the exception will always require more rules. liv Such an approach
privileges bugs and glitches over functionality. Not necessarily useful in all
circumstances, exceptions are valuable to speculation in a substantive, not trivial, sense.
2. Quantitative method/quantum intervention: The idea of interpretation as a
quantum intervention is based on the insistence that any act of reading, looking, viewing
is by definition a production of a text/image/work. For this to be the case, the work under
investigation can’t be conceived as static, self-identical, or reliably available to
quantitative methods. Instead, speculative methodology is grounded in a quantum
concept of a work as a field of potentiality (poetentiality might be a better term). The act
of reading/viewing is an intervention in the field, a determining act that precipitates a
work. lv The spirit of indeterminacy goes against the engineering sensibility. Problem-
solving methods do not apply in a quantum field. Practical solutions have no bearing on
the exposure of interpretation-as-intervention. Humanistic research takes the approach in
that a thesis is an instrument for exposing what one doesn’t know. The ‘patacritical
concept of imaginary solutions isn’t an act of make-believe, but an epistemological move,
much closer to the making-strange of the early 20 th century avant-garde. It forces a
1.1 History / 3/2008 /
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