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

6. Analysis/deformance: Finally, speculative computing draws on critical and
theoretical traditions to describe every act of interpretation as deformative. That is, it is
not merely performative, bringing an inert text to life, but also, deformative, a generative
act of production, not reproduction or replay. It makes the work anew, each time, whether
in a reading of a text on a page, in the ear, on the screen. Intepretation is deformance, an
act like Situationist détournement, charged with social and political mobility, but also,
aesthetic mutation and transformation.
The theoretical agenda of speculative computing may seem to be thick with
unsupported claims, but supplies a brief for project development. Our thinking developed
with the projects, not in advance, and the relation between theoretical work and practical
design was and remains generative and fluid, necessarily so. Speculative computing takes
seriously the destablization of all categories of entity, identity, object, subject,
interactivity, process or instrument. In short, it rejects mechanistic, instrumental, and
formally logical approaches. It replaces them with concepts of autopoesis (contingent
interdependency), quantum poetics and emergent systems, heteroglossia, indeterminacy
and potentiality (or, poetentiality), intersubjectivity, and deformance. Digital humanities
is focused on texts, images, meanings, and means. Speculative computing engaged with
interpretation and aesthetic provocation. Like all computational activity, it is generative
(involved with calls, instructions, encoding), iterative (emergent, complex, and non-
linear, non-causal), intra-and-intersubjective (reference frames, issues of granularity,
chunking), and recursive (repeating but never identical deformances).
Speculative computing struggles for a critical approach that does not presume its
object in advance. It lets go of the positivist underpinnings of the anglo-analytic mode of
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