Alex Saum-Pascual Publishes Digital Creativity as Critical Material Thinking
Alex Saum-Pascual published "Digital Creativity as Critical Material Thinking: The Disruptive Potential of Electronic Literature" in the Gathering: Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities, published by the Electronic Book Review. Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities is co-edited by Alex and long time collaborator Scott Rettberg!
In this contribution to her co-edited collection, [Frame]works, Alex brings to the digital humanities both makers and theoreticians, gnosis as well as poiesis, school teachers as well as research professors. From the article:
At the turn of the 21st century, literary critics like Johanna Drucker (2002), Jerome McGann (2001) or even digital poet Loss Pequeño Glazier (2002) wrote about the importance of “making things” as a way of doing theoretical work. The benefits of this have been widely discussed and affirmed since Drucker advanced that digital technologies could only be understood by praxis. In “Theory as Praxis: The poetics of Electronic Textuality,” she criticized the type of abstract approach embraced by postcolonial or structural studies at large, and explained that critiques of the foundations of textuality that were based on the terms of older philosophy were insufficient to deal with the new digital condition (Drucker 683). She turned to Jerome McGann’s Radiant Textuality to explain how poiesis, now conceptualized as theory, presented itself as the only valid means to capture the world’s new reality, after the digital revolution. Both McGann and Drucker understand poiesis in its literal Greek sense, as “building” or “construction” [i.e. “making”] in opposition to gnosis, as “conceptual undertaking.” “Making things as a way of doing theoretical work pushes the horizons of one’s understanding” (Drucker 684), she boldly asserted, and moved on to explain how this distinction between gnosis and poiesis was rarely considered in the Humanities, in part because participating in “hands-on” projects is not something humanists usually do.
Read the full article here!