I am posting here an essay I wrote some months ago on the information-literacy standards (the “old” information literacy) as considered in the light of the cultural history of information as a concept. In the essay, I elaborate on a phrase by John Guillory — the “forgetting of rhetoric” — to argue that information literacy, as a pedagogical platform, forgets rhetoric in the interest of an epistemology serving bureaucratic control.
I’m not terribly satisfied with the essay; although the attached represents a polished draft, there’s a lot left out, and in revisiting the topic, I would probably drop the attention to information literacy altogether. I am more interested in how bureaucratic reason functions as a form of moral skepticism, in the Cavellian sense…But that’s for another time. For now, I post it here in the interest of open scholarship and the promise of a new year and being a little more reconciled to the fate of one’s heartfelt efforts #polishedobscurity
The Ignorant Librarian 