Week 9 - Oct 17th Post

This Week’s Readings:

O'Gorman, Marcel. E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities. Toronto, Ontario: Toronto UP, 2007. Print.

O’Gorman is against the dehumanization of texts through traditional processes of imitation and this is at the core of his Chapter 3 argument. As we learned in Chapters 1 and 2, O’Gorman is frustrated with the printcentrity of the Republic of Scholars (an apt name for those stuck in our current forms of scholarship and who resist change) and he continues to argue against systemic pressures that limit invention in composition in the next chapter. 

For O’Gorman, Peter Ramus represents the foundation of our current printcentric academic foci. O’Gorman resists and even rails against Ramus’ “phallogocentric history of the print apparatus” (p.47) and he asks, “might it not be possible to invent scholarly methods to [re]shape the digital apparatus?” (p.50). It is important to note here that O’Gorman does not define digitization in a traditional fashion. Instead, he quotes Morris Eaves who explains that “digitization is not a notion confined to electronic devices but a technological norm that operates across a spectrum of materials and processes. As a rule of thumb, the more deeply digitization penetrates, the more efficient the process becomes” (p.58). O’Gorman is concerned with the commerce-driven, capitalistic need to sort, organize, and encourage imitation that constrains our current scholarship – something that Ramus has represented for centuries.

On the other hand, William Blake represents a focus on invention and “chaosthetics” (p.58), something that O’Gorman argues will assist us in the necessary decompartmentalization of our current academic and composing practices. Because Blake’s political works against imitation and rigid academic expectations are carefully and artfully couched in children’s literature, O’Gorman applauds his inventive strategies that tend to “fl[y] in the face of mechanization” (p.59).

In order to encourage us to think more like Blake and to invent “new scholarly methods suitable to an age of computing” (p.69), O’Gorman cautions that “specialization is a liability” and that “multitasking, dabbling, and audodidaction are the order of the day” (p.69). He also claims that Blake “teaches us not to trust our visual sense alone – an invaluable lesson for students bombarded daily by the words and images of a postmodern mediascape in which the imagetext is the dominant mode of communication” (p.66). In terms of the classroom, I love O’Gorman’s notions of students writing WITH rather than ABOUT sources and I agree with his argument that multitasking is valuable and that students should learn not to trust any one sense but, rather, make use of all senses as much as possible.

While I do agree with much of O’Gorman’s argument in this section, I find myself a bit torn in terms of what he says and what he does. O’Gorman makes use of nonsense words like “mystory” (p.68), puns (the repeated use of ‘puncept’ for example), and he repeatedly uses visuals to make his argument for him, which works well only because he is clearly a master of traditional prose. That is, he understands the rules before he artfully breaks them (something that I often explain to my FYC students). I wonder, though, if “chaosthetics” is really the answer to inventing new methods for composition and communication. If students, unlike Blake and O’Gorman, do not understand language and are without specialization as O’Gorman advocates, will they be able to make effective arguments? Like Jen, I appreciate what O’Gorman is doing here and I even agree with him on some level but I still find myself a bit dubious towards the applicability of his arguments.