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

quantum method cited above, and integrate it here, the intervention determines the text.
The act of reading calls a text (specific, situated, unique) into being.
4. Induction/Abduction: Under such circumstances, scientific techniques of
induction and deduction don’t work. They are structured and structural, assuming self-
identicality in themselves and for their objects, an inscribe relations of causality and
hierarchy. By contrast, methods of comparative abduction, taken from Charles Peirce, do
not presume that a logical system of causal relations exists outside the phenomenon and
supplies an explanation for their relations. Configured relations simply (though this is far
from simple) produce semantic and syntactically structured effect independent of
grammatical systems. The contingently configured condition of form–a hefty phrase
indeed–points to the need to think about forms as relations, rather than entities. This
requires rewiring for the Anglo-analytic brain, accustomed as it is to getting hold of the
essence and substance of intellectual matter. Even the mechanisms of the dialectic tend to
elude the empiricist sensibility, and it has the benefit of a device-driven process and
hierarchy of thesis-antithesis-and resolution to a higher order synthesis. Abduction
adheres to no single set of analytic procedures. Every circumstance produces its own
logic as description, rather than explanation.
5. Discrete/heteroglossic: Traditional humanistic work assumes its object. A book,
poem, text, image, or artifact, no matter how embedded in social production or
psychoanalytic tangles, is usually assumed to have a discrete, bounded identity. Our
emphasis was on the co-dependent nature of that identity. The fiction of the “discrete”
object is exposed as a function of their relation to a larger discourse field. In this
conception, a book is a sort of snapshot, an instantiation, a slice through the production
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