Bogost returns with what is his Batman Returns, his Toy Story 2, his Empire Strikes Back. This chapter comes with a more comprehensible dialect than its predecessor and in turn becomes a better read.
Major points:
Bogost adopts ontography as ‘a name for a general inscriptive strategy, one that uncovers the repleteness of units and their interobjectivity.’ He states that his adoption of the word differs in meaning than that of Harman’s (still unsure on specifics of Harman’s definition). To-do: file this definition.
Ontography’s comparison to a ‘medieval bestiary’ is perhaps its most revealing in understanding in simple terms how it may work.
Furthermore, it is ‘a record of things juxtaposed to demonstrate their overlap and imply interaction through collocation’, collocation being a linguistics term for a word or phrase that is often used with another word or phrase, in a way that sounds correct to people who have spoken the language all their lives, but might not be expected from the meaning. Cool.
Later, Bogost goes on to say that ontological cataloging’s strengths lie in its abandonment of ‘anthropocentric narrative coherence in favour of worldly detail’. True as this may be, again considering the thoughts in my previous post , how does one list things without splurging their human viewpoint all other the order or content of the list. I realise Bogost’s ideas may not be as radical as a complete eradication of an anthropocentric perspective, so where do his boundaries lie? As interesting as his writing may be (very!), what does he hope to achieve with his writing? (obviously time to re-read).
