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

econceptualization of premises and parameters, not a reassessment of means and
outcomes.
3. Self-identicality/co-dependent emergence: Another tenet of the speculative
approach, common sense once it is familiar, but oddly disorienting at first glance, is that
no object (text, image, data, quantity or entity) is considered self-identical. McGann cites
philosopher George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, A=A if and only if A≠A, as the
source for this formulation within the field of logic. lvi The post-structuralist critical
tradition is premised on the analysis of contingency. Every text is made as an act of
reading and interpretation. lvii When this is combined with recent theories of cognitive
studies and radical constructivist psychology, it returns the interpretative act to an
embodied, situated condition and the object of inquiry becomes a constituted object, not
an a priori thing.
Maturana and Varela’s theory of autopoeisis, or co-dependent emergence between
entity and system, also changes mechanistic concepts of subject and object relations into
dynamic, systems-based reconceptualization. lviii Subject and object are not discrete, but
interrelated and co-dependent, in an autopoeitic description. In this account, an entity’s
identity (whether it is an organism or an object of intellectual inquiry) emerges in a
codependent relation with its conditions, not independent of them. The conventional
distinctions of subject and object are not blurred, rather, the ground on which they can be
sustained disappears because there is no figure/ground subject/object dichotomy, only a
constituting system of co-dependent relations. The subject/object dichotomy that
structures text/reader relations was as mechanistic as Newtonian physics. To reiterate the
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