Event

Prior to Taiwan’s electronics exportation boom and global domination in the semiconductor industry, computers helped process data for the island-state’s state and private entities, modeled the national economy, and profited foreign investors in the form of interest-bearing capital. Recipient of United States’ technical and economic aid but not the origin story of its computerization in the military-industrial complex, Taiwan’s early experiments with data-processing and electronics sciences were instead directed to economic development, and moreover, I argue, to the representation and simultaneous mystification of capital’s hidden, inner movement, one of which being capital flows from agriculture to non-agriculture sectors in the late 1960s. The second part of my discussion turns to examine two documentaries by Richard Yao-Chi Chen 陈耀圻: Liu Pi-chia (1967, 27mins) and A Chinese Farm Wife (1974, 17 min), which scale individual-and-collective productive and reproductive processes for generating future value through camera zooms, informational subtitles, and shifting temporal frames—without any use or representation of automated logical operations. In Liu Pi-chia, narrative focus on the titular character reifies the Taiwanese Kuomintang government’s deployment of surplus military labor for cultivating infertile land for future rent; A Chinese Farm Wife’s depiction of dynamic spatial contiguities between traditional farm-labor and rural non-farm sectors questions the relations between gender, rural development, and industrial growth. As media scholars have pointed out, what digital media do, cinema often does equally well; and yet departing from extensive scholarship on the two technologies’ formal parallels, I am interested in their recursive, feedback operations more for grasping capital’s forms. The term “fictitious computing” in my title far from implies that computers in Taiwan’s early data-processing and documentary histories were unreal or metaphorical. Instead, following Marx’s concept of fictitious capital, I suggest that both sets of evidence—telegraphically, the economic and the cultural—in their uneven allusions to future flows of income and the existence of secondary markets, underscore the necessary appearances of the computable or quantifiable as self-generating and recursive.