Glossary

U-Glossary

This glossary is intended to broaden the scope and vocabulary of
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Universal/Universics

               

               

Author: Mikhail Epstein

The UNIVERSAL and the discipline of  UNIVERSICS

The universal has been often perceived as a synonym of the "total," "common," "general," characteristic of all people, all cultures, all epochs, etc.  However, this is a distorted understanding of universality, which mistakes it for generality, whereas in fact these are two very different and even opposing concepts.

The "universal"  literally means  "around one" and is derived from Latin "unus" and "versus," a participle from the verb "vertere," to turn.  It is a category that applies not to all entities of a certain class, but to one single entity in as much as it possesses the qualities of many.  If the general is a quality that is common to many objects, then the universal refers to one object that contains or displays many qualities.  This can be seen from some expressions of ordinary speech. One master key can be called universal if it opens all doors in a given building.  It is possible to say "a universal genius," or "a universal mind," meaning that a given individual can be creative and fruitful in many areas.  But the expressions "general genius" or "general mind" are meaningless, because "general," unlike "universal," cannot be applied to a single individual.  The work of one writer can display a variety of genres and styles and exemplify a microcosm of the entire national literature; thus, Shakespeare and Pushkin are deemed to be universal creators in relation to those themes, heroes, and genres of English and Russian literature that were prefigured in their works.   The universal is a property of one subject to function potentially as many.   The uni-vers-al is the vers-atility of the uni-que, it is not an abstraction that leads away from the singular, but the latter's multifaceted nature. 

Thus, universality has nothing to do with the neglect of the individual and the particular; it is rather a recognition of the individual's inherent potential of diversity.  It would be a mistake to condemn universalism for the sake of diversity, because universalism itself means diversity as a property of a single individual or a single culture insofar as they can include the diversity of others.  The demand for diversification that dominated cultural theory since the 1970s can lead to a very superficial multiplication of differences, unless it embraces the value of universality as a capacity of a single individual or a single culture to be different from itself, to incorporate the multiplicity of others.  Internal pluralism, creative pluralism is a way to, not from universality.

The move from the abstract-general to the plural-diverse was the major theoretical transition of the so-called postmodern epoch in the 1970s-1990s.  Now we need to make the next step from the superficial pluralism to the concrete universalism, when individuals will interiorize the cultural diversity.  We need to demystify the category of the universal, to separate it from metaphysics. Perhaps we need a new humanistic discipline that would study and understand the universal as the quality of individuals, in distinction from metaphysics that traditionally was focused on the general properties.  We can call it universics (using the same suffix that is productive in the formation of the names of disciplines, such as physics or aesthetics ).

In metaphysics, a universal is a general term or concept that is applicable to many individuals or many single cases, such as "beauty," "materiality," "the ideal," etc.  However, every individual also belongs to many universals and thus contains universality.  Even such a simple entity as a grain of sand can be viewed as an intersection of such universals as "firmness," "dryness," "yellowness," "smallness," "lightness," "discreteness," etc.  Each individual is a community of universals, a small universe.  The task of universics is the analysis not so much of universals, as of universality of individuals, their internal diversity.  The object of universics may be any individual, a human, a plant, a building, a cloud, a blade of grass, and a grain of sand, inasmuch as this individual presents a universum, a combination and interaction of various universals.  Also, the object of universics may be any culture or tradition insofar as they embrace, actually or potentially, other cultures and traditions. Unlike metaphysics which employs the most general terms and categories, such as "substance," "being," "unity," and "quality," universics conceptualizes the individual objects and their names, including proper names because only singular objects and personalities, such as Leonardo da Vinci, possess universality. 

    Mikhail Epstein

TRANSCULTURE

Author Mikhail Epstein

TRANSCULTURE

There has been much talk lately about global culture and its inexorable advance throughout the world following the fall of the “iron curtain.” The key components of this global culture are the new communication networks (in particular, the Internet), free information exchange and capital flow, the expansion of international corporations, tourism, etc. In fact, by talking about a global culture we most often mean - explicitly or implicitly, approvingly or disapprovingly – Panamericanism.

On the other hand, the concept of multiculturalism is still holding strong. According to this concept, all cultures, even small and historically dominated ones, have a value of their own and must be equally represented, both within big national cultures and internationally. It is not only the Russian land that can produce its "own Platos and quick-minded Newtons," but also Africa or Greenland. Despite arrogant euro-centrism and cultural colonialism, the Chukchies do have their own Anacreons, and Zyrians – their own Tutchevs.

Globalism and multiculturalism engage in ideological wars and sometimes in street fights with each other (e.g. the antiglobalist movement). So, are we doomed to this struggle or is a third way still possible?

The prospects of either globalism or so-called “multiculturalism” look equally grim to me. A single culture throughout the world, the same Hollywood and rock music with minor local variations (“American by content, national by form”)… Or a multitude of small cultures that are closed onto themselves and that come out in the big world only to demonstrate their “pride” and then hide again in their ethnic enclave or sexual closet…

Globalism and multiculturalism share one common feature which is determinism. In the first case, determinism parades as “an irreversible trend of world development, common to all countries and nations” (globalism); in the other, as an “insurmountable dependence of culture on gender, race, ethnos and sexual orientation of its representatives”(multiculturalism). The rigid frameworks of these concepts leave no freedom of choice for the individual, who is doomed to this or that culture by his or her physical origin or by the global domination of one culture.

The world may even be moving towards a combination of these two determinisms: one horizontal and the other vertical, the former represented by American globalism ("mass culture") and the latter – by multiculturalism, also of the same American type (“the pride of minorities”). However, when two grim prospects are brought together, neither of them gets any brighter. Two determinisms do not make an individual freer, even though they create the illusion that one can play on their contradictions and hide from the one in the shelter of the other.

Transculture is a model of cultural development, which differs from both leveling globalism and isolating pluralism. Among the many freedoms proclaimed as inalienable rights of the individual, there emerges yet another freedom which is probably the most meaningful one – the freedom from one’s own culture, in which one was born and educated.

This is completely different from the political right to freely choose one’s place of living, to emigrate and to cross state borders. Too many people who leave the geographical location of their culture remain, for the rest of their lives, prisoners of its language and traditions. Other migrants, having turned their back on their past, become prisoners of a different, newly acquired culture. Perhaps, only a small number of people, when acceding to two or several cultures, are able to keep their freedom from any of them.

Transculture is a new aspect of cultural development, which transcends the borders of traditional national, racial, gender and professional cultures. Transculture overcomes the isolation of these traditions, language and value determinations, and broadens the field of “supra-cultural” creativity. 

We acquire transculture at the boundaries of our own culture and at the crossroads with other cultures. Transculture is a freedom that cannot be proclaimed, but only sought and partly realized through the risky experience of one’s own cultural wanderings and transmutations.

Transculture versus multiculturalism

From the mid-1990s, the transcultural vision began to take root in the West too, in connection with the crisis of the concept of “multiculturalism.” Unlike “multiculturalism” which establishes value equality among different cultures and their self-sufficiency, the concept of transculture implies their openness and mutual involvement. The principle that applies here is not that of difference, but that of “interference,” of “dispersion” of symbolic values of one culture in the field of other cultures. If “multiculturalism” insists on the individual’s belonging to “his” “natural” culture, which is biologically and biographically predefined (“black culture,” “women’s culture,” “youth culture,” “gay culture,” etc.), “transculture” implies diffusion of initial cultural identities as individuals cross the borders of different cultures and assimilate them.

At the same time, transculture should be distinguished from global culture, which disseminates identical models (mostly American) to the whole of humankind. Transculture is not the common and the identical, present in all cultures, but more, the cultural diversity and universality as an asset of one individual. Transculture is a state of virtual belonging of one individual to many cultures.

Transculture is a field of “vnenakhodimost” (exotopy) in relation to all present cultures, it is the freedom of every person to live on the border of his “inborn” culture or beyond it, be this culture white or black, French or Georgian, male of female. Although culture in its development distances itself from nature, it still preserves many natural, ethnic, psychophysical and socio-class elements. Transculture is the next step of culture towards liberation from its own linguistic prison, from its manias and its phobias.

    This need to "escape from oneself” can be illustrated by the life of Merab Mamardashvili (1930-1990), an outstanding Soviet philosopher, forced at the end of his life to become a “Georgian philosopher” and learn the “pleasures” of forced identification with his “native” culture. Mamardashvili noted the danger of non-freedom in multicultural slogans as follows: “Each culture is valuable in itself. People must be allowed to live within their cultures. … But did anyone ask me personally? … Perhaps I am suffocating within the fully autonomous customs of my complex and developed culture?" [2]. Mamardashvili defends the right of the individual to independence from their own culture, “the right to a step transcending one’s own surrounding, native culture and milieu” as a “primary metaphysical act” [3]. Transculture is precisely a field of metaphysical acts, constituting a free transcultural personality, a series of escapes from one’s “soil” culture.

    Let us recall that the modern era, called “postmodernism,” encompasses two major systems of thought: multiculturalism and deconstruction. These are highly contradictory to each other, although this contradiction has been barely revealed or realized by either of the parties (partly out of the fear of weakening their unity in the face of the common enemy – the establishment, the logo-centrism, the cultural dogma, etc.). Multiculturalism is a notion of universal determinism which for every cultural act sets parameters of its original physical nature and racial-ethnic and gender origins. It is thinking in terms of “representation:” if you are a man, it means that in all your scribbles you represent the male, and therefore a historically repressive and patriarchal culture. Deconstruction, on the other hand, rebels against any determinism and even rejects the very notions of “beginnings,” “original,” or “origins.” What the historical-genetic approach presents as primary is in fact secondary; what we consider our “beginnings,” “origins,” and “milieu” are but our own creations. We are the ones who build our identity, including racial, ethnic and gender identities.

    I accept the statement of multiculturalism that we differ by our nature and identity, and that each of us is born a man or a woman, with his or her skin color (etc.), and I accept that this is not irrelevant for our self-determination in culture. But, in my opinion, it is deconstruction that points to the right vector of movement: we denaturalize and disembody ourselves as we establish ourselves culturally and learn self-expression. Of course, “natural” identity has its own cultural value, and apparently, windows and doors as it lets its “natives” get out. But if one stays inside and chains oneself to it with “belonging” and “representation,” it becomes a prison. In other words, I am willing to proclaim my identity at the beginning of my journey, but I do not agree to remain within it until the end of my life, to be an animal representing the tag on its cage. I do not agree to be determined in terms of race, nation, gender or class... Culture has any sense only insofar as it transforms our nature, makes us dissidents from our class, gender or nation. Why do I watch movies, go to museums, read books or write them for that matter? Only to remain with my identity? No, I do it precisely to discover in me somebody else, a non-me, to learn the experience of other beings/lives; so that I – a man – could become more feminine; so that I - a Russian Jew – could become more American, more French or more Japanese; so that I – a man of the 20^th century – could get impregnated with the experience of other centuries and go through a number of historical, social and even biological transformations. Culture is metempsychosis – reincarnation during one’s lifetime.

A new period in culture begins from the understanding and resolution of this fatal dilemma of post-modernism: multiculturalism or deconstruction? To be a representative of one’s origins or not to have any at all? This dilemma is, however, a false one. Origins or sources do exist, but the meaning of culture is not to express and affirm them, but to go with the flow, away from them, to become a river and not a dam. Origins must be inscribed in the history of their overcoming. Then deconstruction will cease to be a metaphysical game of rejection of origins, and will become a creative history of their overcoming. Positive constructive deconstruction, and multiculturalism without determinism and representation – this is how I see the era of transculture. Granted, we are born in different cages, but we also escape from them in different ways, and this escape space, together with the meeting space of refugees from different cages, forms transculture.

Transculture/culture = culture/nature

Transculture in no way abolishes our cultural “body,” the totality of symbols and habits inherited by us at birth or acquired through education. Our life in culture does not abolish our physical body either, but enriches its symbolical senses and frees it from body slavery. The culture of food or the culture of desire – the ritual of meals, the ritual of courtship, etc. – represent liberation from bare instincts of hunger and lust, their creative postponement, their symbolic mastering and conscientious enjoyment. The body does not vanish in culture, but slavery to the body disappears.

While culture frees humans from the prison of nature, it also creates new dependencies – this time from customs, traditions, conventions, and culture’s own automatisms, which a person receives as a group being, a member of one’s clan, ethnos or consensus. Culture – “German,” “Russian,” “male” or “female” – is a new ossified formation on the body of nature, a new system of psycho-physical coercion, symbolic violence and preset roles and identities: “national character,” a “woman’s letter,” “gay pride”… Transculture dissolves these rigid, naturalized features of culture and gives semantic flexibility and new compatibility to elements of different cultures. Transculture is the next level of liberation, this time from unconscious symbolic dependencies, predispositions and prejudices of the “native culture.”

Even if I turn to my “root” culture from the space of transculture (TC), my choice gives it a different meaning than a forced belonging to it within a “one and only” culture framework. As Bakhtin noted, “freedom cannot change life, so to say, materially (and is not even meant to do so) – it can only change the meaning of life…” [4]. Viewed from a TC perspective, all existing cultures get a broader meaning, as any of their elements is no longer imposed as a tradition, but chosen freely, like an artist chooses his colors in order to combine them in a new way in a painting. Transcultural creation uses the palette of all cultures. The same physical reality, for example water or stone, is symbolized differently in different cultures; likewise, elements of different cultures acquire different colorings and multiple variations in the TC space. A simple example - the same rice tastes differently to a Chinese in a medieval village than to a Frenchman in modern Paris, because rice after wine and cheese or fois gras is something completely different from rice after rice after rice. As a transcultural being, I make my own choice as to which culinary, artistic or religious tradition to join, and to what degree I make it my own.

   The concept of transculture is presented in detail in the book by Ellen Berry and Mikhail Epstein “Transcultural experiments: Russian and American models of creative communication” (New York, 1999). Transculture is defined there as "a way of expanding the limits of our ethnic, professional, linguistic, and other identities to new levels of indeterminacy and 'virtuality.'" Transculture builds new identities in the zone of fuzziness and interference and challenges the metaphysics of discreteness so characteristic of nations, races, professions, and other established cultural configurations that are solidified rather than dispersed by the multiculturalist "politics of identity" [5].

Based on the already established national cultures, transculture thus perpetuates the movement that started with the exit of man from nature to culture. If culture frees natural man from material dependencies, transculture liberates cultural man from symbolic dependencies of his original, “inborn” culture. This is when a firm cultural identity relies not on hybrid formations (e.g. “Afro-American” or “Turkish emigrant in Germany”), but on a variety of potential cultural signs, a universal symbolic palette, from which any individual can freely choose and mix colours in order to paint his or her self-portrait. Transculture is a new symbolic life environment of humankind, which relates to traditional culture roughly as culture relates to nature.

[1] The concept of transculture was first presented in the following publications: Epstein Mikhail. To Speak the Language of All Cultures // Nauka I Zhyzn [Science and Life]. 1990. No. 1. Pp. 100-103; Epstein Mikhail. Culture - Culturology – Transculture // After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture.

Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Pp. 280-306.

[2] Mamardashvili Merab. A Different Sky // How I Understand Philosophy. М.: Kultura [Culture], 1992. pp. 335, 337.

[3] Idem. P. 336.

[4] Bakhtin Mikhail. From 1970-1971 Notes. // Aesthetics of Literary Creation. М.: Iskusstvo [Art], 1979. P. 342.

    [5] Berry Ellen, Epstein Mikhail. Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, p. 25.

                           

AMBI-

Author: Mikhail Epstein

AMBI-

The prefix "ambi-" is derived from the Greek "amphi-" and signifies the doubleness or convertibility of a given phenomena, which embraces its own opposite.  The language of contemporary humanities already includes the term "ambivalent," the totality of opposite attitudes to the same object (praise and ridicule, crowning and decrowning).  The same prefix can combine with other concepts in order to express the co-presence or convertibility of those qualities which are usually perceived as mutually exclusive. 

For example, the word "ambipathy" can be defined as a unity of sympathy and antipathy, of attraction and repulsion.  An "ambipath" is a person torn apart by conflicting feelings and aspirations.  Dmitry Karamazov in Dostoevsky says that "a man is too broad" and is equally attracted by the two abysses -- the upper and the lower, the ideal of Madonna and the ideal of Sodom. In this sense, Dmitry and perhaps Dostoevsky himself are the brightest  representatives of this universal human ambipathy.

The prefex "ambi-" can be applied to those opposite social movements and intellectual trends that use the same of concepts.  For example, ambi-Marxism is the common denominator of Marxism and anti-Marxism: their thinking revolves in the same circle of ideas such as society and labor, history and personality, revolution and progress, even if their evaluation of these ideas are opposite.  Marxists would say that the role of personality in history is determined by its belonging to a certain class, whereas anti-Marxists would say that Marxism fails to appreciate the freedom and creativity of a personality and its impact on history.  However, this set of concepts clearly belongs to the ambi-Marxist discourse and would be irrelevant for a Buddhist or a Poststructuralist discourses. 

Ambi-utopianism is characteristic for a multifaceted and controversial vision of the future.  For example, Thomas More the author of Utopia, clearly was a Utopianist, whereas George Orwell, the author of 1984 was an anti-Utopianist.  It is much more difficult to define in these antithetic terms the work of Andrei Platonov (1899 – 1951) who both dreams  of the bright Communist future and simultaneously depicts it in horrifying images of human degradation and monstrosity.  His novels, such as Chevengur and The Foundation Pit,   are  good example of ambi-utopia.

Wherever "anti-" is present, "ambi-" is possible as well.  Hence, such concepts as "ambi-Soviet," "ambi-Communist," and "ambi-Fascist,"  "ambi-liberal," "ambi-radical," "ambi-structuralism," and so on.  This meta-level of conceptualization reveals the frequent twin-like resemblance of the conflicting ideologies.  In fact, it is impossible to characterize a certain intellectual movement without a complementary description of its hostile double.  The application of this conceptual prefix ambi- is important for enabling the paradigmatic shifts in the humanities.  Often the semblance of progress is produced by a circular movement of discourse within the same range of concepts, which alternately are submitted to opposite evaluations.  The paradigmatic change involves a detachment from the given set of concepts which can be achieved by grouping them under a single "ambi-" category. The division between the "pro-" and the "contra-" positions is preserved and even sharpened, but it is treated as an axis of symmetry that not only divides but also unites the opposites.    

                                              

ANGELISM

Author: Mikhail Epstein

ANGELISM

Angelism is a variety of postmodern religion or spirituality. The figure of the angel is a key image in postmodern spirituality. The angel represents the purest form of God-presence in the absence of God himself. The angel is a peculiar form of the Divine, alienated from both God and Man, roaming in a mysterious expanse between sky and earth. Although it appeared that angels had left our world in the Renaissance, remaining only as a rhetorical figure in poetry and serving as a shibboleth for mystics, they have returned in the Postmodern age.[i] They are a kind of exquisite machine for the production of alienated forms of spirit. These forms are distinct from both the theocentrism of the Middle Ages and from the anthropocentrism of Modernity. In the religious tradition, the angel is a mediator between God and Man. In contemporary consciousness, the angel appears as the "other," the absolute "stranger," a pure mark of difference. 

            In recent times, a number of serious books and films have appeared, whose main heroes are angels. The most famous of these is the film Wings of Desire,  directed by the German Wim Wenders, [ii] where angels descend to partake of earthly existence, mingling with human beings and even becoming human. Hugging them and peering into human eyes, the angels smile their lucid and sad smiles, in which ubiquitous understanding borders on complete non-understanding. The key here is that the angels have no specific message, they are not trying to teach human beings anything. The film ends with a scene in which an angel named Daniel, having become a man, stands in a circus arena, firmly holding a rope on which his beloved acrobat Marion is flying, turning and soaring. The masculine awakens in the angel, the angelic is revealed in the feminine. As he descends, she ascends.

            These new angels cannot be segregated neatly into light and dark spirits. Unsure of their own mission, they enter tortuous relationships with human beings, unable themselves to make sense of them.

            The question is: why do artistic works dealing with angels and their simultaneously alienated and participatory relation to earthly life, elicit such mass interest? Why are they perceived as a revelation of the spiritual condition of our times?

            In the Middle Ages, God stood in the center of the universe. In Modernity, Man came to occupy this spot. It is now clear that both theocentrism and anthropocentrism have negative aspects: the pyres of the Inquisition and the furnaces of Auschwitz. This is why it is now necessary to find an intermediary link in the spiritual hierarchy, one that is not so other-worldly as to deny the taste of earthly life, but not so worldly as to lose touch with a higher mode of existence.  It is angels that occupy this intermediary zone. And this is why angels are at the center of the contemporary semi-religious  consciousness.

            One could suggest that the privileging of the world of angels in contemporary  spirituality  is in step with the development of the most 'alienated' layer of culture, namely the "technosphere." Telephones, television sets, computers, airlines and rockets are all angelesque. They represent the otherness of spirit in self-propelled physical bodies. The ultimate technologization and depersonalization of the social sphere reveals within itself theomorphic identities of "other spirits," called angels. Angelization is thus the newest phase of history, or rather of post-history, following industrialization, automation, atomization and other radical technological accomplishments of the modern age. At the end of the twentieth century, we are witnessing not simply the "soulless" results of technological progress but also the mysterious and trans-human forms of its strange, alienated spirituality. What the Modernist critics of Western civilization—Marxists, Existentialists, humanists and psychoanalysts —regarded as alienation and de-humanisation was, in fact, angelization,  now revealed to the Postmodern consciousness. Thus the Modernist critique of a soulless civilization and nostalgia for either archaic and elemental,  or classical and rational forms of culture, is replaced by the Postmodern admiration for the new, spiritually alienated angelesque forms of that civilization.

            Following several decades of technological innovations, the supernatural and esoteric is making a come-back in the flesh of this world, as the sum-total of the world's estrangement from itself. Images separated from their originals, sounds divorced from speech, silver airplanes disappearing into clouds, are the hallmarks of our civilization on the eve of the 21st century. Were a medieval man to stray into this world, he would surely perceive it as the habitat of angels (whether dark or light ones is another issue). This angelesque sphere features super-human capacities realized in the form of automotive and self-propelled instruments. The world is covered with an invisible communications network. The telephone, with its ability to immediately transmit the sound of a voice from one end of the globe to the other, is reminiscent of those 'voices' that come from who knows where, or from the vibrating waves of the air itself. Even the computer, on which I am at this moment writing these lines, and which is capable of storing them forever in its memory, is not merely a machine facilitating physical labor. It is an angelesque body, accomplishing for me, in my place, the work of my mind, and showing me its fruits by conjuring them up from the invisible radiant depths of the disk.

            According to ancient belief, angels were servants of God, sitting at His throne, singing hosannas to him. In contemporary angelism, as a rule,  there is not even a mention of the Creator. Contemporary angels are messengers without a Message, sovereign spiritual beings who do not relate to any single supernatural will or Supreme Being. They are spirits in and of themselves, manifesting the plurality of the transcendental worlds almost in the same manner in which multiculturalism demonstrates the plurality of the social worlds. One can thus say that angelism is multiculturalism, or rather multispiritualism of the supersensible realm. 

           The interest in angels is symptomatic of the contemporary state of culture, simultaneously wanting and not wanting to be religious. The anatomy of the angelesque is at the same time an anatomy of Postmodern spirituality, which has escaped monotheistic religiosity but does not dare return to polytheism. The tortuous temptations of atheism and the tired insipidness of agnosticism having been overcome, Postmodern religiosity has left behind both the belief in the Almighty and the dis-belief in Him. What remains is communion with angels as pure spirits, representing a plurality of supersensible reasons and wills. Angelism is a sort of heavenly pluralism. It is the religion of Postmodernity, which affirms the multiplicity of equally valid and self-valuable spiritual pathways in place of a single truth and a single ruling canon. If the traditional religious outlook subordinated the diversity of the earthly world to the single will of its Creator, and if agnosticism celebrated the diversity of the earthly world as opposed to the presumably unitary and authoritarian Will beyond, the contemporary post-agnostic era has rediscovered the transcendental as the  realm of pure difference.

            Angelism is a new transcendental adventure of the Western spirit, seeking pluralism not only as an empirical phenomenon of cultural and political life, but as the ultimate revelation of the  diversity of spiritual worlds. One could ask: if the idea of pluralism is so crucial to the contemporary West, why does it not return to polytheism, which worships nature's elements in their diversity? The answer is because neopaganism, which is presently making tentative inroads into religious practices, knows the locus and origins of the gods, whereas angelism is profoundly and principally ignorant about them. The difference between gods and angels, despite the grammatical plural which they share, is that angels are transparent and lonely, while gods rule the earth with glee and fury. Paganism sacralizes the originary forces of nature and can act in concert with ecological and neo-fascist movements. But it scarcely touches the nerve of the new religiosity, born of the death of God and not of His transformation into Pan or a Naiad. Polytheism cannot bring true satisfaction to the contemporary mind that quests for a trace of the Divine rather than its fleshy presence. The sumptuously carnal gods of paganism can satisfy only desparate fringe-groups and those  who have fallen outside their own times, living in dreams about an 'archaic revolution' — that is, of a revolutionary return to the "Great Tradition."[iii] To adulate the gods of fire or earth is a bookish project. The direction of neopaganism is thus backwards, into the world of children's book illustrations and the primal polytheism that has long since been thought through and discarded. Paganism does not look ahead, beyond monotheism and atheism.

            Angelism, by contrast, is a post-atheistic and post-agnostic phase of religiosity. Angels are not gods, they are merely emissaries, who have forgotten who sent them, or who conceal that knowledge. This mission without a cause endows angels with a certain absent-mindedness and an alienated look. The contemporary individual recognizes himself in angels because he, too, has severed his connection with the  ground of tradition  and is flying in who-knows-what direction. Having left all points of orientation behind him, seeing the exhausted earth disappearing in industrial fumes, he has no sign-posts to direct forward, toward the fading outline of the One Creator. Is it possible, in such a situation of uncertainty, spiritual transparence and loneliness, to worship the all-powerful gods, to celebrate the play of elemental forces?

            Angels appeal to the contemporary religious sensibility  because, unlike the gods of old, they wander bodiless at the limits of the earth.  From time to time, at their own risk, they transgress these limits, with a feeling of guilt and under peril of punishment. Angelism overthrows the metaphysics of God's presence. It cleanses faith of the inevitable attributes of knowledge, religious certainty and ontological authenticity. The origin of angels is unclear and can never be clarified, while God originates from Himself. Both the pagan gods and the God of monotheism are endowed with the fullness of a self-produced essence. Angels, by contrast, are representatives of some Other, which never manifests itself. An angel is a trace  in the Derridean sense, a trace leading into a world beyond but not attesting or bearing witness to its reality. Angelism is thus the consequence of a religious deconstruction of the other world, which leaves its 'traces' or signifiers but does not reveal its signifieds. It sends messengers but does not reveal the Sender of the messages. Angelism is thus testimony to a profound groundlessness of the world. Even the forces from beyond this world, which are called upon to explain and substantiate it, remain without 'origins' or 'divine nature' and are 'secondary' and 'mediating.' Postmodernism thus languishes in this infinite circle of representability,  a continuous annunciation without a Sender.

            Rumors are passed on, but it is impossible to reveal their origin. Arising as rumors, they are by definition something 'already' heard. Angels are these rumors from the world beyond, but no one knows who started them, or what they correspond to, or who is behind them. Angelism can also be expressed as the construction of faith in the subjunctive mood, following the demise of faith in the indicative and imperative moods, which stood for what was essentially true and what ought to be. The religious mind in this hypothetical modality thus moves along the thin line separating thesis and antithesis, faith and non-faith, avoiding taking sides and finding their synthesis impossible. This narrow line between them is the mark of a gentle difference, not sharp opposition. Difference, in turn, generates angels, which constitute the pluralist choice of the religious mind no longer prone to dogma and infallibility.

            In the Postmodern age, pure polytheism, monotheism or agnosticism are impossible. All that remains possible is the condition of possibility itself, embodied in the phenomenon of angels without God, messengers without a Message, and vague metaphysical rumors instead of Revelation reaching us from the beyond.

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[i]    Statistics indicate that about eight million Americans had encounters

of one form or another with angels. In the 1990s, the study of angelism

has gone beyond the confines of esotericism and has been absorbed

into everyday culture.  I will cite some of the latest popular titles: Bunson,

Matthew. Angels A to Z : a who's who of the heavenly host, New York:

Crown Trade Paperbacks,1996; Daniel, Alma. Ask your angels: a practical

guide to working with angels to enrich your life, London: Piatkus, 1995;

Graham, Billy, Angels, Dallas: Word Pub.,1995;

Kreeft, Peter. Angels and demons : what do we really know about them?

San Francisco: Ignatius Press,1995; Martin, Jennifer. The angels speak:

secrets from the other side : conversations along the path. Sacramento CA:

Prairie Angel Press, 1995;

Perkins, Robert F. Talking to angels : a life spent in high latitudes.

Boston, MA: Beacon Press,1996;

Serres, Michel. Angels, a modern myth. Paris: Plammarion,1995;

Wauters, Ambika. The angel oracle: working with the angels for guidance,

inspiration and love. New York: St. Martin's Press,1995.

According to a leading NBC television programme, broadcast in May 1994

and entitled Angels - the Mysterious Messengers, angels have never

elicited as much interest at any other time in history.

The film was awarded the First Prize for directing at the 40th

Cannes Film Festival (1987).

[iii][iii]  I refer, in particular, to René Guénon (1886-1951) and

Julius Evola (1898-1974), founders of contemporary traditionalism

as a metaphysical system; their views are associated with extreme

right-wing politics.

.

Catalog

Author:  Mikhail Epstein

Catalog

The genre of catalog is pertinent to transfictional experimentation by virtue of its paradigmatic structure that juxtaposes various judgments on the same subject. Such discourse is released from the order of time or the relationship of cause and effect.¹ In contrast, the syntagmatic structure, in which one proposition is deduced from another, one event succeeds another, is subject to the restrictive and oppressive effects of logical or narrative sequence.² Transculture is a metaparadigm, a set of elements (cultures, canons, traditions, epistemes, worldviews) that coexist in a structured space rather than succeed and displace each other in time. In Japan there existed a special literary genre, suihitsu (literally, "following the brush"), that enumerated various attributes of one object—or various objects that possess one attribute. Classical samples of this genre can be found in the Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon (966/7 – 1013?). In some sections, she lists things that most attract or annoy her, or things that distract in moments of boredom. This genre, which can be called the "catalog," arises at the intersection of abstraction and factuality, of the generic and the unique. In its simplest form, the catalog presents the diversity of things that belong to one general category, or the diversity of categories within which a single thing may be located. The beauty of the moon, the beauty of snow, the beauty of pearls . . . The beauty of the moon, the coldness of the moon, the deceptiveness of the moon . . .

      Similar compositions are used in structural studies in which a strictly defined object is consecutively described in its various aspects. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is an example of such metaphysical investigation through enumeration of various propositions. A quite different example is provided by the contemporary Russian poet-conceptualist Lev Rubinshtein, whose catalogs, sometimes rhymed, include model rejoinders of colloquial speech with a swiftly changing focus of conversation.³

      My catalogs follow the middle way between those of Wittgenstein and Rubinshtein: They are neither logico-philosophical nor literary-poetic but rather belong to the fuzzy intermediate zone between them. "The Catalog of Trifles," "The Catalog of Freckles and Birthmarks," "The Catalog of Smoke," and "The Catalog of Catalogs" are an experiment in restoring the ancient genre as a model for contemporary culture's self-description. Differing opinions and views do not conflict in these catalogs but rather coexist independently, succeeding each other on the vertical axis (the Greek word "catalog" literally means "words going from top to bottom"). Of these catalogs, which were written in July 1982 in Moscow, only the last one is reproduced here: "The Catalog of Catalogs," which attempts to describe this genre by means of its own structure.⁴

The Catalog of Catalogs

0.0 Everything can be described in a catalog, even a catalog itself.

0.1              A catalog is written and read not from left to right and not from right to left but from top to bottom.

0.2              Such an order means that things do not follow each other but are given simultaneously.

0.3              A catalog simply enumerates everything that is present.

1.0 A catalog is good for the description of things but is still better for the description of thoughts.

1.1 Things emerge and disappear and therefore are narrated in the temporal order in which they succeed each other.

1.2 Ideas are always present as if they were kept in a storehouse where they cannot be lost and damaged.

2.0 The meaning of an object is the totality of all ideas related to it, or of all propositions that can be pronounced about it.

2.1 A catalog permits us to pronounce all propositions that can be pronounced about an object.

2.2 A catalog includes both true and false propositions.

2.3 A proposition becomes true or false through its relationship to an external reality while in itself it simply is, takes place.

2.4 A catalog includes both serious and ironic propositions.

2.5 A proposition becomes serious or ironic through its relationship to the person who pronounces it, but in itself it simply is, takes place.

2.6 A catalog includes the propositions of both the author himself and of other people.

2.7 A proposition becomes original or trivial in its relationship to the previous propositions but in itself it simply is, takes place.

2.8 A catalog is the common place for all possible propositions about a certain object.

2.9 True propositions in the catalog differ from false propositions no more than they differ from themselves, and this also concerns serious and ironic, original and trivial propositions.

2.10 A catalog is valuable not because it contains true, serious, and original propositions but because it is as full as possible.

3.0 The catalog is not a literary or philosophical genre. There is more similarity between a folk song and a scholarly dissertation than between the catalog and all other genres.

3.1 The catalog meets neither scientific criteria of truth nor aesthetic criteria of beauty but only formal criteria of order.

3.2 The catalog is a form that itself takes care to produce its contents.

3.3 The catalog narrates nothing, expresses nothing, and persuades us of nothing. It enumerates like a dictionary.

3.4 As distinct from a dictionary of words, the catalog is a dictionary of propositions.

3.5 Like the words in a dictionary, the propositions in a catalog are not pronounced by anybody. They cannot be personally attributed. They have no author. They do not express anybody's opinion.

3.6 A dictionary and a catalog contain everything that can be said and thought, but the speaker who is speaking in them is language itself, and the thinker who is thinking in them is mind itself.

4.0 A catalog forms an antipode of a text, for a text moves in time while a catalog exists in space. They relate as actuality and potentiality.

4.1 A text is always complete even if it consists of one word; a catalog is never complete even if it includes all existing propositions.

4.2 The critique of a text constitutes a text different than that which is criticized. The critique of a catalog constitutes a part of the catalog itself.

4.3 There is no catalog that could not be extended and that would not need extension.

4.4 A text has an author while a catalog has a compiler. The author is responsible for the truth of his own propositions, whereas the compiler is responsible for the diversity of all possible propositions.

4.5 A compiler is a person to whom thoughts occur when he is not thinking; that is why he does not consider them his own thoughts.

4.6 A thought always occurs in the form of two or three different thoughts. An author fixes only one of them. A compiler fixes simultaneously all thoughts that come together. Each of them is also born in the form of two or three thoughts. This is why a compiler can never complete his work.

4.7 For example, the thought that one has to love one's motherland is born in the form of the thoughts "I have no motherland," "I am not able to love," "My motherland does not love me."

4.8. The thought "My motherland does not love me" is born in the form of the thoughts "The more I love my motherland the less it loves me" and "How many motherlands do I have, if my motherland has so many sons?"

5.0 The catalog contains the folklore of the present epoch, that is, of the time after the time.

5.1 “The time after the time” is the space where all texts become lines in the growing catalog.

5.2 Folklore has performers, catalogs have compilers; both are distributors of the material, not its creators.

5.3 Prehistoric time generates folklore, posthistoric time generates the catalog.

5.4 Folklore accumulates similar, homogeneous ideas characteristic of primitive society, whereas catalog combines different and heterogeneous ideas characteristic of contemporary society.

5.5 Folklore is produced in the form of a text that conveys one common proposition, whereas the catalog is produced in the form of a dictionary that juxtaposes diverse propositions.

5.6 The catalog revives folklore on the stage of cultural differentiation where the unity of all propositions is reinstated, not in the form of one impersonal proposition but in a collection of many personal propositions.

6.0 While reading a catalog one cannot understand what its compiler is actually thinking. But one can understand what is generally thought and what can be thought in principle.

6.1 A thought in the catalog is not attached to anything beyond itself. It is not issued on behalf of any subject; it does not describe any object; it is not addressed to any interlocutor. It exists only because it is possible for it to exist.

6.2 A thought in the catalog exists as evidence of its possibility. Its existence testifies to the fact that it can exist.

6.3 A thought in the catalog does not explain the world and does not change the world but testifies to the multiplicity of possible worlds.

6.4 A catalog sets up the boundaries of what is possible, of what can be thought.

6.5 The impossible and the unthinkable are conveyed in the continuation of the catalog.

7.0 Each catalog can be completed only relatively, and its end becomes the beginning of the next catalog. Thus, the catalog of trifles passes into the catalog of entertainments; the catalog of smoke passes into the catalog of sky; the catalog of the universe passes into the catalog of catalogs; and the catalog of catalogs passes into the catalog of silence.

7.1 Each of the existing catalogs is a fragment of a larger catalog, and the largest catalog is a fragment of the Catalog which has no title.

7.2 Since a catalog never ends it can be finished at any point.

7.3 Each sentence in a catalog can be the last; therefore, it must be conclusive.

NOTES:

1. A paradigm can be defined as "a class of elements that can occupy the same place in the syntagmatic string, or, in other words, a set of elements each of which is substitutable for the other in the same context." A. J. Greimas and J. Courtés, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, trans. Larry Crist et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979): 224. The sequence "I love you" is syntagmatic. The sets "love, hate, adore, despise" or “I, we, he, they" are paradigmatic.

2. On totalitarian effects of time's unidirectionality see the chapter "The Permanence of Newness and Spaces for Difference."

3. On conceptualism in general and on Lev Rubinshtein in particular, see in Mikhail Epstein's books: After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995): 29-37, 60-70; Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (with Alexander Genis and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover). (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999): 105-118.

4. The first publication of all these catalogs was in Russian: Mikhail Epstein, "Katalogi," Dar. Kul'tura Rossii 1 (1992): 68-71.

                                                                  

                                                         

chronosome

     Author: Mikhail Epstein

chronosome n (Gr khronos, time + Gr soma, body; cf. chromosome) –  a unit of historical heredity, in contrast with a chromosome as a unit of biological heredity;  a mental code of a historical period that is transmitted to subsequent generations through styles,  traditions, and "cultural air."

  The chronosomes of the early 20^th c. avant-garde reached the generation of the 1960s and shaped its political views and artistic styles.

  This generation of the 2000s has different chronosomes than we had in the 1990s.

  The chronosomic analysis of Finnegans Wake lays bare thological sources and images of ancient chronicles in Joyce's enigmatic prose.

Essay

Author: Mikhail Epstein

Essay:

The essay is part confession, part discursive argument, and part narrative—it is like a diary, a scholarly article, and a story all in one. It is a genre legitimated by its existence outside any genre. If it treats the reader as confidant to sincere outpourings of the heart, it becomes a confession or a diary. If it fascinates the reader with logical arguments and dialectical controversies, or if it thematizes the process of generation of meaning, then it becomes scholarly discourse or a learned treatise. If it lapses into a narrative mode and organizes events into a plot, it inadvertently turns into a novella, a short story, or a tale.

            The essay retains its character only when it violates the laws of other genres, interferes with them, and breaks their coherence. It is driven by a spirit of adventure and by the desire to attempt everything without yielding to anything. As soon as the essayist tries to take a breath, to come to a stop, the nomadic and transmigratory essence of the essay crumbles to dust. If sincerity threatens to cross a limit, the essayist intervenes with abstractions. If abstract reflection threatens to grow into a metaphysical system, the essayist unexpectedly throws in a peripheral detail or anecdote in order to undermine its systematicity. The essay is held together by the mutual friction of incongruous parts that obstruct one other. At the heart of the essay is an uneven and discontinuous intonation—that of the sad exile or the brazen vagabond, combining a lack of self-confidence with an extremely casual demeanor. Not knowing from moment to moment what he will do next, the essayist can do most anything. He is in a permanent state of need or lack, but he releases, in a single line or page, enough riches to potentially fill an entire novel or treatise.

            A good essayist is not a completely sincere man, nor a very consistent thinker, nor an extraordinary and imaginative story-teller. The writer who cannot successfully construct his sujet or argument, and who consequently loses out as a novelist or author of a treatise, gains as an essay writer. This is because in the essay only the digressions matter. The essay is thus an art of compromises, of surrenders. In the essay, the weaker side wins. The founder of the genre, Michel Montaigne, declares his creative and intellectual weakness on almost every page of his Essais (1571). In the essay “On Books” he complains to the reader about his inability to create something striking, polished, and generally useful due to his lack of philosophical and artistic talent. "If someone exposes my ignorance, he will not insult me because I do not take the responsibility for what I am saying even before my own conscience, let alone before others. Any form of self-complaisance is alien to me. . . . Even if I am able to learn a few things occasionally, I am definitely incapable of committing it firmly to memory. . . . I borrow from others what I cannot express well myself, either because my language is poor or my mind is weak."²

            The essay is the offspring of the "ménage à trois": poor unsystematic philosophy; bad and fragmentary literature; and an inferior and insincere diary. However, it is just this sort of hybrid and bad pedigree that has given the essay its flexibility and its beauty. Like a plebeian who is not burdened by traditions of nobility, the essay easily adapts to the eternal flow of everyday life, the vagaries of thought, and the personal idiosyncrasies of the writer. The essay, as a conglomeration of various deficiencies and incompletions, unexpectedly reveals the sphere of a totality normally hidden from the more defined genres (such as the poem, the tragedy, the novel, etc.); determined by their own ideal of perfection, these genres exclude everything that cannot be encompassed by their aesthetic model.

            We can now clearly see that the essay did not originate in a void. Rather, it came to fill the space of that integral verbal form that once belonged to myth. Because its roots run so deep into antiquity, the essay's second birth in the sixteenth century, in Montaigne, appears to be without origins and without tradition. In fact, the essay is directed towards that unity of life, thought, and image, which in its early syncretic form was at the origin of myth. Only at a later stage did this original unity of myth divide into three major and ever-proliferating branches: the sphere of facts and historical events, the sphere of the image or representation, and the sphere of concepts and generalizations. These three spheres correspond to three broad categories of genre—the documentary-descriptive, the artistic-imaginary, and the theoretical-speculative.

            Essay writing, like a weak and somewhat sickly growth, found a place for itself in the gap created by the branching-out of myth into those three major directions. From there, this thin branch grew vigorously to become the main offshoot of the great tree of myth. The essay thus became the central trunk of that totality of life, image, and thought, which split into the various branches of knowledge that have become further specialized over time.

            In our own times, which have seen a renaissance in mythological thinking, the experience of spiritual totality finds expression more and more frequently in the essay. With Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is philosophy that becomes essayistic; with Thomas Mann and Robert Musil it is literature; with Vasily Rozanov and Gabriel Marcel it is the diary. Henceforth it is no longer only peripheral cultural phenomena that acquire qualities of the essay but mainstream ones as well. The pressure of mythological totality can be felt from all directions. In the essay, however, this totality is not experienced as a given, as accomplished, but as a possibility and an intent, in its spontaneity, immediacy, and incompletion.

            Almost all the mythologems of the twentieth century have their origins in the essayistic mode: Camus's Sisyphus, Marcuse's Orpheus, Miguel de Unamuno's Don Quixote, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and "magic mountain," Kafka's "castle" and "trial," Saint-Exupéry's "flight" and "citadel." This kind of essayistic writing is in part reflexive, in part fictional, in part confessional and didactic. It attempts to derive thought from image and to lead it back to Being. Major trends of literature, philosophy, and even scientific thought of the twentieth century have acted as tributaries to this mainstream of essayism. Among its exemplars are Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Theodor Adorno, Albert Schweitzer, Konrad Lorenz, André Breton, Albert Camus, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Yasunari Kawabata, Kobo Abe, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag. In Russia, too, outstanding poetry and fiction writers, philosophers, and literary scholars expressed themselves as essayists: Lev Shestov, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandel'shtam, Victor Shklovsky, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Bitov, Andrei Sinyavsky, Georgy Gachev, and Sergei Averintsev.

            Essayism is a considerably broader and more powerful trend than any single artistic or philosophical movement, broader than Surrealism or Expressionism, Phenomenology or Existentialism. It is of this interdisciplinary scope precisely because essayism is not a trend of one of the branches of culture or a method of one of its disciplines but a distinctive feature of contemporary culture in its entirety. Essayism tends toward a neo-mythological wholeness, a merging of image and concept inside culture, but also a merging of culture with Being itself and with the sphere of raw facts and daily occurrences that are usually considered beyond the limits of culture.

            Essayism is thus—like its earlier counterpart, mythology—an all-encompassing mode of creative consciousness. Essayism functions as a metadiscourse in relation to all the artistic, philosophical, and documentary modes of representation that feed into it and that originated in mythological wholeness.

            However, there is also a profound difference between mythology, which was born before cultural differentiation, and essayism, which arose out of these differentiations themselves. Although essayism unites the disparate—fact, image, and concept; or the sensible, the imaginary, and the rational—it does so without destroying their autonomy. This is how essayism differs from the syncretic mythology of earlier epochs as well as from the totalitarian mythologies of the twentieth century. The latter tend to unite by force what was naturally not subject to differentiation in antiquity. Thus totalitarian mythology requires the ideal to be treated as factual; possibility or even impossibility to be treated as real; an abstract idea to be treated as material force, the prime mover of the masses; and one individual to be treated as a model for all other individuals. Essayism, too, unites fragmented portions of culture. But in so doing, essayism leaves enough space between them for play, irony, reflection, alienation, and defamiliarization. These are definitely antagonistic to the dogmatic rigidity of all mythologies based on authority.

            Essayism is a mythology based on authorship. The self-consciousness of a single individual tests the limits of its freedom and plays with all possible conceptual connections in the unity of the world. In an essay, individual freedom is not negated in the name of a myth, with its tendency for depersonalization, but flourishes in the right to individual myth. This authorial, mythopoetic freedom, which includes freedom from the impersonal logic of myth itself, constitutes the foundation of the genre. The essay thus constantly vacillates between myth and nonmyth, between unity and difference. Consequently, the particular intersects and sometimes merges with the universal, image with concept, being with meaning. However, these correspondences are not complete: Edges protrude, creating uneven surfaces, disruptions, and discrepancies. This is the only way in which the contemporary perception of the world can come to realization: Aiming for wholeness, it at the same time does not claim to overcome difference in its constituent parts.

            Literally "essay" (from French "essai" and Latin "exagium") means "weighing," "testing," an "attempt," an "experiment." This is its indispensable quality. The essay is experimental mythology, the truth of a gradual and unfinalizable approximation to myth, not the lie of a totalizing coincidence with it. Essayism is thus an attempt at preventing the fragmentation of culture, on the one hand, and the introduction of a coercive unity, on the other. Essayism is directed against the plurality of fragmented particulars as well as against the centripetal tendencies of a dictatorial totality. Essayism is an attempt at stemming the tide of narrow disciplinary particularization at work in contemporary culture. But it is also a bulwark against the petrification of culture into cult and ritual, which becomes all the more fanatical the greater the discrepancy between the extremes of fantasy and reality grows (which makes it all the more difficult to force them into the immutable dogmatic unity of faith).

            Essayism is an attempt at unification without violence, an attempt at projecting compatibility without compulsory communality. It is an attempt at leaving intact, in the heart of a new, nontotalitarian totality, the experience of insecurity and the sphere of possibility, the sacred Montaignesque "I cannot" and "I do not know how," which is all that remains of the sacred in the face of the pseudo-sacralizations of mass mythology. "I speak my mind freely on all things, even on those which perhaps exceed my capacity . . . and so the opinion I give of them is to declare the measure of my sight, not the measure of things"³ Two conditions must be met in the essay: audacity of vision and awesome respect for things themselves. Or, to put it differently, boldness of propositions and meekness of conclusions. Only by fulfilling these two conditions, inherent in the essay, can something of true worth be created in our age: an open wholeness.

            The present essay has transcended the confines of its topic—"the essay"—and entered the wider sphere of "essayism," which carries a new hope for contemporary culture. But it is only by departing from its topic that the essay remains true to its genre.⁴

Notes:

1.Translated from Russian by Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover.

2. The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957): 298.

3. Ibid., 298.

4. For a more systematic exploration of this genre see Mikhail Epstein, "At the Crossroads of Image and Concept: Essayism in the Culture of the Modern Age," in his book After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1995): 213-253, and "Esseistika kak nulevaia distsiplina" (Essayistics as a Zero Discipline), in his book Bog detalei. Esseistika 1977-1988 (Moscow, LIA Elinina, 1998): 225-240.

Filosofia

Author: Mikhail Epstein

Filosofia (vs. philosophy)

Each national tradition has its own system of humanistic  disciplines and its own criteria  for determining what it considers philosophy.  Spanish, Italian and Russian word for philosophy is "filosofia."  Perhaps this word can become part of English terminology to emphasize the variety of traditions constituting the intellectual heritage of the West:  in this case, the distinction between the analytical-critical approach spead in the English speaking world, and the synthetic-constructive  approach more characteristic of Continental thought. The difference between philosophy and filosofia is roughly analogous to the  difference between a scholarly symposium and a Platonic symposion: the participants in  the latter not only correctly discuss  ideas but "totally" give themselves over to  them, with all their body, soul and mind. The Russian filosofer Pavel Florensky (1882 – 1937) observed: "Philosophy, as an academic discipline, never took root in Russia, just as it did not exist in the ancient world. Our filosofers have strived not so much to be intelligent as wise, not so much to be thinkers as sages…. An ethical striving, a religious consciousness, an activity not only of the brain but of all the organs of the spirit; in a word, it is only life outside the study that seems to us of ultimate seriousness and completely worthy."[1]

Filosofia does not detach itself from holistic thinking, does not  become a narrow specialty studying the conditions and possibilities of knowledge. Instead,  it tries to preserve the scale and shape of wisdom, combining in various ways  elements of criticism and fantasy, science and poetry, analysis and synthesis, historicism  and utopia. Filosofia can and should learn from philosophy how to become more exact at  distinguishing these elements--but not in order to sacrifice one of them; rather in order  to promote better  their unity in a non-totalitarian totality.

The distinction between philosophy and filosofia applies not only along but across  national traditions. In England, where the tradition of philosophy has held almost complete  sway, some filosofers--such as G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis--have nevertheless appeared.  As one goes deeper into the continent, filosofia begins to occupy a larger and larger place;  in Spain, there are  Miguel de Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset; in France, Bachelard, Bataille,  and Baudrillard; in Germany, Nietzsche and Heidegger. By the time we reach Russia the filosofers, such as Vladimir Soloviev, Vassily Rozanov, Nikolai Berdiaev, and Pavel Florensky,  thoroughly dominate, although Russia does have its  philosophers as well--neo-Kantians, positivists, phenomenologists, and structuralists.

---

[1] P. Florensky. Works,  in 4 vol..Moscow, Mysl', 1994,  vol. 1, p. 207.

Horrorology

Author: Mikhail Epstein

Horrorology  (a term no less horrifying than its intended meaning)--the study of horror and of self-destructive aspects of civilization. Horrorology  is the negative science of civilization: nega-history, nega-sociology, nega-aesthetics.  All that is studied by other disciplines as positive attributes and structural properties of civilization, horrorology  studies as  the growing possibility of its self-annihilation

One obvious danger to civilization is illustrated by the spread of viruses in computer networks.  It is only with the development of such a perfect organ of communication as the Internet that we have come to understand how these artificial organs are vulnerable to their own self-generated diseases.  Viruses do not spread in telephones or TV networks, but much more powerful electronic connections fall easy prey to these artificial "misorganisms" (to use the same prefix as in the words "mistake" and "misunderstanding"). According to recent prognoses, in three to five years, each second e-mail will be infected by a virus capable of crashing the whole system of electronic communications.

Political terror is not an invention of the 21st century, but its scale and unpredictability indicate a new  state of civilization that goes far beyond the terrorism itself and can be called horrorism. Terror is usually defined as a violence or a threat of violence carried out for political purposes; horror is a reaction to terror, a painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay.   Etymologically, horror is derived from Latin root meaning "to bristle with fear."   More precisely, however, would be to relate terror and horror not as an act and reaction, but as the actual and the potential.  Horror is caused by the possibility of terror even more than by its actuality.  It is known, that illness can cure at least one thing--the fear to get ill.  Horror is incurable because it is not fear of illness, but illness of fear itself.  

After September 11^th in the mainstream imagination of many advanced societies around the globe,  horror became a condition of civilization that  increasingly views itself  as  the domain of self-defeating achievements. Any of them--the postal service, medicine, computers, aviation, water-reservoirs, ridges—can become the weapon for civilization's destruction. Symbolically, terrorists did not use as their weapons anything beside the targets themselves. This math of destruction shows how adding together various elements of civilization—airplanes and skyscrapers—amounts to their mutual subtraction. Terrorists did not simply destroyed the New York cityscape, but in their own ominous way completed it.  The view of New York that will be forever imprinted in the memory of civilization is not the glaring Manhatten with Twin Towers, and not the gaping Manhatten after their collapse, but Manhatten of September 11, precisely between 8:45 and 10:29 am, with the silhouettes of planes as if forever stuck to the silhouettes of the Towers.  This is the exact image of civilization in its chiaroscuro.  The profound archetypal pattern of this event demonstrates that terrorism in its "highest achievements" is inseparable from civilization itself, which means that civilization is harboring terror deep within itself.

This self-destructive potential of hyperactive Western civilization was clearly foreseen by Goethe in Faust (part 2).  Prompted by Mephistopheles,  Faust builds a dam on the shore to settle "a free people on a free land" won from the sea. But this is only the devil's trick intended to move the humanity closer to its peril coming from the flood: Mephistopheles works for the benefit of his brother, the sea devil Neptune.

Similarly to how the computer network brought forth viral epidemics that threaten its paralysis, so our civilization casts a gigantic shadow that threatens to eclipse it. In the second half of the 20^th century, civilization was haunted by the threat it posed to its natural environment; the 21^st century, from its very beginning,  underscored the threat civilization poses to itself. Ecology, as the primary concern of humanity, is succeeded by horrorology, which explores civilization as a system of traps and self-exploding devices, and humankind as a hostage of its own creations.

hu

Author: Mikhail Epstein

hu is an abbreviation of "human," a 3rd person epicene  pronoun referring both to a man and a woman.

This gender-neutral pronoun came into active usage in 2006 though it was coined  three year earlier. In September 2003, while teaching a new  course "Global Culture and the Future of the Humanities" at Emory University, I began  to use  the pronoun "hu" as clipping from "human,"  both in class discussions and written communications with students. They easily adopted this usage instead of cumbersome "he or she" or agrammatical "they."

Hu belongs to the category of back-clippings, in which an element is removed from the end of a word to create a shortened form: flu (influenza) lab (oratory), math (ematics), ad (vertisement), piano (forte), and condo (minium). Endings with an open syllable, as in "hu", are common in such clippings as flu, piano, condo...

Hu  is pronounced  (hju:), like "hu" in "human." As a sound pattern,  "hu" is closest to the two other genderless, singular, person-related English pronouns: "you" and the interrogative "who." "Who" and "hu" are naturally drawn to each other by rhyming and communicational contexts, as a question and the answer:  (hu:)?  -  (hju:). "Hu" designates precisely that generic, un-gendered HUman to whom the question "who?" refers. Thus the answer is prompted by the question itself. “Who buys this stuff? Who would want a car like that?” –  "Anyone who believes that hu can afford it."

The five forms of the 3rd person pronouns make up the

table:

            nom     gen (adj)      posses       acc          refl

            ---      ---                 ---           ---           ----

male      he         his              his           him         himself

fem       she        her             hers         her          herself

neut    hu       hus          hus       hum      huself

All derivative forms are pronounced similarly: hus (hu:z), hum (hu:m), huself (hu:self).

                                                         

Anyone who admits that hu has a conflict of interests should not serve as an investigator.

An employee may choose to cover only huself and hus child or any number of children.

It's the vice-president's job to support the president and take hus place when hu is away.

It should be the chief aim of a university professor to

exhibit huself in hus own true character - that is, as an ignorant human being, actively utilising hus small share of knowledge.

An introvert can easily become an extrovert when it is

advantageous for hum to do so.

For some speakers, preferable technique in avoiding gender-biased pronouns is to change the noun into plural. However, such a solution is problematic and even detrimental to the language's ethical and conceptual capacity to deal with individuals. Compare:

              A hero is one who places huself at risk for another.

                          Heroes are those who place themselves at risk for others.

To convey this idea I would like to imagine A HERO, a heroic human being, rather than a group of heroes, a mass of heroes. Resorting to “they” successfully eliminates not only gender, but individuality as well. Should we speak and think about people only in terms of multitudes? I think it's important to talk about a student, an employee, an author, a doctor, a physicist, or a person, rather than to refer to faceless students, authors, doctors, persons, etc. We need to accommodate grammar to ethical and conceptual concerns, not the other way around. Gaining gender-neutral grammar at the expense of an individual reference is a dubious achievement.

There are several advantages of "hu" over other contenders for the

vacancy:

1.  "Hu" is fully motivated, semantically and etymologically

justified, as a shortened form of "HUman."  Whenever the pronoun is

used, you have the idea of the noun behind it making it memorable,

inherently meaningful and suggestive (unlike purely

conditional, artificial pronouns earlier suggested such as "e,

et, mon, na, ne, po, se, tey").

2."Hu" is a short, one syllable word.

The use of "hu" (2 keystrokes) cuts effectively the

time needed to type "he or she" (9 keystrokes);  cf. "huself" (6)  and "himself or herself," (18) etc. This is a substantial economy of time, space, and effort in our frequent daily use of gender-neutral pronouns, especially in e-mails.

3. "Hu" fits the pattern of existing 3rd person pronouns ("he" and "she"),  first, by including the  consonant "h" common to all of

them; second, by containing only one vowel, like all of

them.  "Hu - he - she" - these words, all open syllables,

one consonant plus one vowel, are good partners in

distributing the gender roles within one lexical family.

4. The spelling of "hu" coincides with its pronunciation; there

are no irregularities of the kind that damages, for example, the

"s/he" pronoun, making it good in writing but unpronouncable.

5. "Hu" is used in a regular grammatical manner, in contrast to "they" (as a singular pronoun). "Hu" can be used routinely and automatically, without  twisting the sentence to put all nouns in plural or exploiting "they" in a disagreeable manner to refer to a singular person.

6. It is easy to form derivatives from "hu" following the existing patterns:  "hus"  and "huself."

7. If we decide to borrow a gender-neutral pronoun from

another language, we'll have to consider the Persian "u,"

Arabic "hu" and Old English "ou." All of them could be

easily incorporated in contemporary English with the

addition or preservation of "h," as a shortened form of the

genderless "human".

So far, I don't see any strong logical or historical arguments against hu-language. It is the language of undivided HUmanness. In the near future, this HUmaness will need even better articulation to distinguish our species from artificial "it" forms of intelligence that are rising to a more active role in civilization and language. Soon we'll have to answer such questions as "Who is reading, writing, calculating, speaking, and even thinking?" The answer may be "hu" (human) or "it" (machine). We need "hu" not only to speak equally about men and women, but also in order to speak differently about humans and non-humans who share with us many similar qualities and predicates and fulfill many comparable tasks.  We increasingly need "hu" as a sign of a humanly specific actor or agent in the language of mental actions and symbolic interactions.

In a celebrated episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," the crew of the Enterprise

manages to liberate an individual from the hive-like structure of the maleficent Borg Collective. They name hum, of course, Hu(gh)!

Humanology

Author: Mikhail Epstein

Humanology - a discipline, studying the transformation of humans and all human phenomena in the advanced technological society, in relation to  the  alternative  forms of life and reason. Humanology explores human functions and specifics in the artificial environment where machines assimilate many functions previously fulfilled by humans, such as labor, calculation, management, even some aspects of consciousness. (Another, less common title for this new disciplinary field is "post-human studies.") 

Up until recently, all of our knowledge was based upon one, natural, form of life and one, human, type of intelligence.  Exploration of these phenomena did not allow us to generalize about the nature of humans and intelligence precisely because they alone were available for observation,  and generalization requires a comparison of various forms of the same essence.  Humanology arrives  at that methodological point of observation where it can consider humans in the framework of non-biological forms of reason, as an element of a more comprehensive paradigm: as one variety among humanoids, robots, and cyborgs. Now we can regard humans as one of the inhabitants of the noosphere, which adds new differential properties to this group of beings.  Humanology enriches our discourse on humans and therefore constitutes itself as a new discipline, located at the border of the traditional field of humanities.   Humans have not been replaced or superannuated—the old defeatist language—but supplemented and enriched.

According to this historical shift, the new discipline relates to the humanities as environmental studies to natural sciences.  Physics and biology explore nature as such, whereas environmental studies treats it as a part of humanly transformed system.  Similarly, the humanities study humans as such, whereas humanology treats humans as a part of technologically transformed environment.  From this angle, humans are a "biospecies," coexisting and interacting with emerging "technospecies" and genetically transformed artificial species.   It is even possible that a "human kingdom" will be eventually transferred to artificially isolated and protected territories, "human life sanctuaries," similarly to publicly maintained nature parks being the only place for wild, unspoiled nature.  Such reserves, or museums of humanity, will acquire most bizarre and fantastic forms, as non-computerized havens of "natural civilization." 

Handwriting is one small example of a recently formed humanological object; it is a refuge of "wild culture" in the world of computerized word processing.   Writing by hand is  an intimate manifestation of the psychomotor qualities of the writer, a ritual dance performed by a single limb of the body.  The phenomenon of handwriting has been around for millennia, but it becomes an object of humanology only now, precisely as a result of its redefinition as an outdated method of communication, an instance of tactile and gestural activity of the human body, a relic of a proto-informational civilization.

Technization of human capacities occurs in conjunction with archaization and ecologization of humans themselves. Humanology studies what happens with humans after their functions are appropriated by thinking machines, and what happens with machines in the process of their humanization.  Humanology is both ecology of humans and anthropology of machines, that is a study of mutual redistribution of their functions, technologization of humans and humanization of technology.  Accordingly, humanology can be divided into two major directions: eco-humanology, dealing with the specificity of humans irreducible to the machines, and techno-humanology, dealing with human functions transferred to machines.  Humanology evolves as a result of human transition into a new historical stage of  self-construction of the species.  Humans recede into the past as a bio-species and simultaneously steps into the future as a techno-species.  Thus humanology has a dual subject: the human outside of the machine, and the human integrated by the machine.

A new map of the three main areas of human studies can be drafted: anthropology, the humanities and humanology.  The differences between them roughly correspond to the three cultural epochs: pre-historical, historical, and post-historical.  Anthropology studies humans as a biological species, whose specifics is cultural evolution,  as a special branch of natural evolution of animal kingdom.  The objects of anthropology are physiology, race, genetic and cultural properties of Homo Sapiens, its origins and transition from nature into culture.  Anthropology deals mostly with early, primitive, syncretic forms of culture, in its contrast with nature.  The humanities study humans as the creators and masters of the cultural, semiotic universe; they deal with purposeful  endeavors of humans and with various areas within developed and differentiated culture, such as philosophy literature, art, history, psychology…  Hence the very term "humanities" is plural: it indicates the variety and differentiation of human capacities.  Humanology studies humans as part of technosphere that is created by people, but outgrows and controls them.   If anthropology studies the distinctive features of humans among other living  creatures (animals, especially higher primates, hominids), then humanology studies their distinctive features in comparison to intelligent machines (humanoids and their gendered varieties -- androids, genoids). Humanology is a mirror-image of anthropology, as both disciplines deal with humanness in a liminal position, one with humans evolving from nature, the other with humans evolving into artifical forms of life and intelligence. 

In the 21st century the humanities may undergo a radical crisis similar to that of theology in the 20th century. The kenosis of God: His self-exhaustion in humanity--may further extend in the kenosis of humans: their self-exhaustion in technology. Thus the humanities need to adapt their project to the perspective of the "creative disappearance" of humans. Along with a-theology that examines the absence of God,  we can envisage the a-humanities that explore the human dimension in its radically alienated or degraded forms, such as colonies of computer viruses. Thus humanology transcends the boundaries of the humanities that have dealt with "human, all too human:" the human itself is problematized in this new theoretical model.

Humie

Author: Mikhail Epstein

"Humie" – a  colloquial name for a human being as a possible partner of artificial intelligent beings; the term also invokes associations with the "humiliated" role of natural beings in the developed technosociety of the future. "Humie" is a hypocoristic, diminutive, affectionate form to address humans by someone who does not feel to belong to them (e.g. an extraterrestrial). Of course, anyone, including humans, can use this form to address  gently or jokingly their brothers and sisters in the species.

An example of usage:

The next historical period may witness a new ethos of eco-humanity, an attempt to revive humanity as a disappearing species that needs preservation and cultivation. In the coming era of humanless production, robotic enterprises, self-managing plants and electronic networks, the University can become a kind of refuge and preserve for Humanitas. Even if "arties," artificial creatures of the future, will develop their own ecological awareness and treat "humies," their human progenitors benevolently, as we now try to treat wildlife, a haven may still be needed to protect this threatened species.

Hyperauthorship

Author: Mikhail Epstein

Hyperauthorship – functional or fictional authorship in distinction from factual authorship; the creation of literary or philosophical works on behalf of different, sometimes virtual personalities.

The death of the author, the erasure of the signature that was the agenda of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, has become a cliché of poststructuralist theory. As a matter of fact, it signals not the end, but rather the beginning of a new epoch of hyperauthorship, multiplication of authorial personalities and conceptual persona that wander through electronic networks in increasingly oblique relationships to their biological parents.

This is not merely a contemporary phenomenon. Some classical authors, such as Plato and Kierkegaard, Alexander Pushkin and Fernando  Pessoa have been overwhelmed by multiple authorial personalities that wished to be realized through their transpersonal creative endeavors. Plato writes on behalf of all participants of his dialogues, including Socrates.   Kierkegaard writes on behalf of Johannes Climacus, Victor Eremita, Johannes de Silentio and many others conceptual persona. The Portuguese poet Pessoa has divided himself into three poets: Alvaro Campos, an engineer,  Ricardo Reis, a doctor, and  Alberto Caeiro, a shepherd.

Thus  we find in philosophy and literature many examples of "excessive," or "surplus" authorship: one biological author gives life to many ideational  authors. Accordingly their roles can be designated as hyperauthor (creator; Greek hyper-, over) and hypoauthor (created; Greek hypo-, under). For example, Alexander  Pushkin as a hyperauthor  created a number of hypoauthors who allegedly wrote some of his poems and little tragedies.  The theologian Dionysius the Areopagite and presumably the playwright  William Shakespeare were hypoauthors, but so far we have failed to establish the identities of  their hyperauthors.

There can be two varieties, or orders of the hyperauthorship:  ascending  and descending. It depends on the relationship between hyperauthors and hypoauthors.  When a  less authoritative writer ascribes hus work to a more authoritative one, the order is ascendfing. This is the case of  the Book of Zohar, the central piece of Jewish Kabbalah:  most likely it was compiled by the Spanish writer Moses de Leon (c. 1240-1305) but to give it more authority he ascribed it to Shimon bar Yochai, a rabbi of the second century. The same is true of  the unknown hyperauthor of the 6th c., the founder of negative theology who ascribed his treatises to Dionysius Areopagite of the 1st c. (named in Acts 17:34 as one of those Athenians who had heard Paul preach on Mars Hill).  James MacPherson of the 18th c.  claimed his epic poems to have been written in Gaelic by the ancient Scottish poet Ossian.

The descending order is in place when a hyperauthor attempts to  conceal his social or professional  identity by putting forward a figure of a less stature. This could be the case with an aristocratic genius and erudite, such as Sir Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, who had adopted a semi-literate actor William Shakespeare as their hypoauthor.  Alexander  Pushkin ascribed his experiments in prose,  deliberately simple, naïve and sentimental short stories, to someone by name Ivan Belkin, a member of provincial  gentry.

The same writing can be potentially ascribed to various authors which intensifies the play of its meanings and interpretations. Such is the concept of ''fuzzy,'' or "continuum-like" authorship, which refers not to a discrete personality but rather to a wave going across times, places and personalities. Recently the case of Araki Yasusada (1907 – 1972), a poet and a survivor of Hiroshima, raised a lot of contraversy as his poems turned out to be potentially attributable to many hyperauthors: American (Kent Johnson), Japanese (Tosa Motokiyu), Russian (Andrei Bitov, Dmitrii Prigov), Mexican (Javier Alvarez)…   In fact, all these and other possible authors are just some of the observable locations of this hyper-authorial wave which can reach the shores of other epochs, countries, and strange personalities. Hyperauthorship is virtual authorship in which real personalities become almost illusionary, while fictional personalities become almost real.  This allows them to co-exist in the same continuum of  imagination.

We have moved  beyond the concept of biological parenthood which is now recognized as only one of many forms of parenthood. The same should be true of  the reductive concept of authorship as only "biological" authorship limited by the input of the author as a living individual. There are many sorts and degrees of non-biological--psychological, intellectual, inspirational, magical authorship.

There is a principal asymmetry and disproportion between living and writing individuals in the world. Obviously not all living individuals have either the inclination or the capacity to become authors. Some individuals cannot write or write only  on checks and holiday cards.  This renders quite plausible the complementary statement:  not all authors have either the inclination or the capacity to become living individuals. There are many authors who, for certain reason, have no potential for physical embodiment, as there are many individuals who for some related reasons have no propensity for becoming authors. This implies that some living individuals, who have a potential for writing, must shelter or adopt a number of potential authors within their biological individualities. What awaits actualization in the writing of one individual is the potentiality of many authors who have no need or taste for living, in the same way as many living individuals have no need or taste for writing.

The aesthetic effect of writing is the excess of signifiers over signifieds which generates synonyms, metaphors, paraphrases, parodies, parables, and other figurative and elliptical modes of writing.  Furthermore, this principle applies to the surplus of interpretations over the primary text which, again and again, becomes a single signified for proliferating critical discourses. What has not yet been discussed is the extension of this principle to the sphere of authorship. The excess of authorial personalities and their unlimited proliferation is the final surplus of creative signification. Hyperauthorsip serves to multiply the meanings and interpretations of the text  by manifesting the infinite possibilities of its authorship.  The author who was believed to produce the excess ultimately  becomes its product.

Improvisation

Author Mikhail Epstein

Improvisation

            The word "improvisation" derives from the Latin "providere" and literally means "unforeseeable." Improvisation opens the unpredictability of creation for the creator himself.  Any kind of creativity, however, shares this feature, otherwise our mental activity would be better characterized as knowledge, scholarship, erudition, exercise, training. What is it that makes improvisation different from creativity as such, which to a certain degree is also improvisational?

            Typically in creativity the unforeseeable is contained in the mind of the creator himself.  Isolation and self-concentration  is a precondition for creative self-expression: a human being meditates and converses with huself, therefore conversations with others  become irritating and counter-productive for hum.

            Quite different is the case when the unforeseeable is contained in the consciousness of another person, beyond the competence and horizon of the improviser. The topic of improvisation is given to me by somebody else, or it can be also an  exchange of topics.  Improvisation is a type of creativity that evolves between the poles of the known and unknown which are contained in different consciousnesses.  This is why improvisation, as distinct from self-centered creativity, necessarily includes the process of communication; somebody suggests a topic, unexpected for the improviser, whose task is to elaborate this topic unpredictably for the one who suggested it. Thus, two unpredictabilities arise from the improvisation as  the encounter of two consciousnesses.  The specificity of improvisation originates in the fact that it is creativity via communication.

            But if improvisation is impossible without communication, how does it differ from communication as such? Regular modes of communication presuppose that one interlocutor communicates to another what is already known to hum. Even news communicated in such typical situations is news only for the listener but not for the speaker. Typically, communication only reproduces those facts and ideas which existed before and independently of the process of communication. Communication aims to diminish the unknown and to transform it into something known, extending it in a horizontal dimension from one person to another.

            Although improvisation is impossible without communication, it pursues quite different goals. What is communicated in response to the proposed topic is unknown for the improviser himself.  Here the unknown generates something still more unknown.  Having received an unpredictable topic, the improviser further elaborates it in an unpredictable way.

            Thus, improvisation is distinct from creativity in that it incorporates communication with a different consciousness; and it is distinct from communication in that it includes an act of creativity, the production of something unknown and unforeseeable. Typically, communication with another person distracts from the act of creativity, and vice versa, the act of creativity inhibits or impedes the process of communication.  In improvisation, however, creativity and communication reinforce rather than neutralize one another. An encounter with the consciousness of another and the discovery of otherness in one's own consciousness are the two mutually stimulating processes in improvisation.                                      

            The improviser creates something different than what hu ever could invent and imagine, because hu is confronted with an unfamiliar topic that requires immediate elaboration which mobilizes all hus intellectual potential. This resembles a situation of mortal danger where a human may develop instantly supernatural capacities which leave hum as soon as the danger recedes.  The mind attacked by a problem feverishly looks for an escape, for a creative solution, and is quickly mobilized in response to the threat of intellectual failure, blankness and stupidity.  There is no other situation that is intellectually as challenging and stimulating as improvisation. Writing an essay for an exam or participating in a brainstorming session always involves some elements of preparation and preliminary specification among expected tasks and topics (the subject of the university course, the agenda of professional discussion).  Only at an improvisational session is the range of possible topics absolutely open, extending to all existing disciplines, discourses and vocabularies.

            Improvising presupposes the ability to apply one's intellectual capacities to any realm of human experience.  Everybody knows about frogs

(a topic of a collective improvisation at Emory) but does anybody give attention and effort to thinking about them, except for zoologists, specialists in  the amphibious?  This is the point: we think that we know, but how can we know if we do not think? The majority of people never exercise their thinking abilities beyond the very narrow field of their specialty (if it requires thinking at all).  We may have had a passive,  sensual experience of seeing, hearing or touching frogs, but we do not have the active, intellectual experience of thinking about them, and therefore, we are not really self-conscious humans in this aspect of our existence:  in relation to frogs--or in relation to trees and bees for that matter.  In relation to almost everything in the world. We are not fully human if something present in our sensual experience is absent from our intellectual experience. We have to think what we feel and feel what we think, not because these capacities coincide but precisely because they are so different and one cannot substitute for another.        

            Thinking is usually regarded as a means to some palpable practical goal: technological thinking serves to create machines and tools, political thinking, to create effective social institutions, etc.  But thinking is a capacity that does not need any external justification because, more than anything else, it makes humans human. The question "why think?" is ultimately as unanswerable as the questions "why feel?", "why breathe?" or "why live?" The ultimate reward for thinking is thinking itself. 

            Collective improvisation is one way to expand immensely the realm of the thinkable and to re-live our experience in a conscious, discerning, articulate manner.  All things that appear to be familiar, as components of routine knowledge, suddenly become estranged and deautomatized as targets of inquiry and interrogation, potential objects of intellectual labor.

            Collective improvisation permits not only an estrangement of objects, but also an estrangement of subjects.  People whom we may have known for years now for the first time appear in the existential, "liminal" situation of creativity. We do not know who they  really  are,  as at this moment they are equally unfamiliar to themselves.  Creativity is the most mysterious and intimate moment in the life of personality, and this makes improvisation a truly existential experiment and revelation about myself and others.  Usually creativity is presented to others in premeditated and generically predetermined forms, as paintings, poems, dances--as  results from which the creator has already distanced huself even if hu is singing or acting on the scene. In improvisation, the mystery of creativity is revealed most intimately and spontaneously, as the self-creation of a personality here and now.    

            An improviser encounters an otherness and strangeness in the object of hus thought, in the co-subjects of hus thinking, and finally, in huself.  Therefore, improvisation is not only a social but also an existential event, or, more precisely, the rarest case of existential sociality  where sociality and existentiality do not exclude but presuppose each other.  Do we ever think together--not just talk about what we already know, not just socialize, but create  a social event of co-thinking where each participant is as unknown to others as hu is unpredictable to huself?

Infinition

Author: Mikhail Epstein

Infinition (vs. definition)

Infinition (blend of definition and infinity, both from Latin finis, boundary)  – an incomplete and unfinalizable definition; an infinite process of defining something that cannot be fully or precisely defined; an endless list of possible definitions.

Certain fluid concepts in their emergent state are subject to infinition--infinite dispersal of their meaning--rather than to definition.    For example, Lao-tse never gives a definition of Tao but only its multiple infinitions: "The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao.

The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name." (The Tao Te Ching, ch. 1, 1-2). Dionysius the Areopagite offers  infinitions  of the Cause of Everything. "We therefore maintain that the universal  and transcendent Cause of all things is  neither without being nor without life,  nor without reason or intelligence; nor is it a body, nor has it form or shape,  quality, quantity or weight…." ("Mystical Theology", ch. 4).  Jacques Derrida never defines his method of deconstruction but only infines it in numerous passages.  To infine means to suggest many possible definitions and to recognize that all of them fail to define the complexity or fluidity of the subject. Infinition is for the humanities what a transcendental number, with its infinite expansion expressed by a non-periodic decimal fraction, is for mathematics: an endless approximation to and escape from discrete definition.

There are several ways to infine the concept:

1. A direct  indication that the concept cannot be fully defined.

2. Multiple definitions that succeed and erase each other and have no end thus amounting to a long infinition.

3. A self-contradictory, paradoxical definition that points out to the mutually exclusive properties of the concept (such as "perfection" and "evolution").

The necessity of infinitions can be logically inferred from Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. The most foundational concepts of any philosophical system, such as God, Being,  Absolute, Spirit, Beauty, Love, are not definable within these systems. Each discipline has its own primary concepts, such as wisdom in philosophy, soul or mind in psychology, and word in linguistics , which are subject to  infinitions.

The Interesting

Author: Mikhail Epstein

The Interesting

(The) Interesting is the most comprehensive transdisciplinary category that is routinely applied to all aspects of culture, from science to fiction.   It is more frequently used than any other evaluative concept, such as "truthful," "beautiful," "instructive," "progressive," and "tasteful,"  which were popular in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Even prior to the analysis of the work in a certain critical framework, we qualify it as interesting, and therefore as justifying our analytical efforts.  Furthermore, the concept of the interesting not only introduces the discussion, but often concludes and crowns it.  The "interesting" is our initial,  intuitive evaluation of the  quality of the work and, simultaneously, the resulting synthesis of all its analytical definitions. 

The category of the interesting may be easily questioned on the basis of its subjectivity.  "Different things are interesting for different people."  Our question is not what is interesting for various people, but what constitutes the category of interesting  itself.

The concept of the interesting is related to wonder, or surprise, which Aristotle regarded as the main motivation for cognition.  We are surprised by something that challenges our expectations and the rules of our reasoning.  Our response to this challenge  is to bridge the gap between reason and surprise.  The category of the interesting emerges as the measure of tension between wonder and understanding, or, in other terms, between the alterity of the object and reason's capacity to assimilate it.  On the one hand, a proliferation of wonders without any explanation diminishes the potential of the object to be interesting because  we give up hope of integrating rationally such a phenomenon. On the other hand, an elimination of wonder that guarantees the easy triumph of reason undermines our interest as well.  If wonder involves the measure of improbability, then reason provides the measure of provability. 

Thus the interesting is  related to the categories of the probable and the improbable and can be located between them.  What makes a certain idea or theory interesting is a consistent and plausible proof  for what appears to be least probable.  In other words, the interest of a theory is inversely proportional to the probability of its thesis and directly proportional to the provability  of its argument. As the probability of the thesis increases, or as its provability decreases,  a theory becomes less interesting. The least interesting are those theories that (1) prove the obvious,  (2) speculate about the improbable without solid proof, (3) or, worst of all, fail to prove even the obvious. The interesting is the relationship of provability to probability: a fraction, where the numerator is the reliability of the argument, and the denominator is the validity of the thesis.  Thus,  in place of procedures of verification or falsification that were crucial in the logical positivistic concept of a meaningful proposition, we suggest the procedure of Aristotelian "wonderment" that would test how interesting is a certain proposition.   If wonder involves the measure of improbability, then reason provides the measure of provability.

            

The concept of the interesting is often applied in contemporary science. The physicist Freeman Dyson develops the principle of "maximal diversity," according to which "the laws of nature and initial conditions are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible.  As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Always when things are dull, something turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut." [1]   As soon as life becomes dull and balanced, something unpredictable occurs: comets or meteorites strike the Earth, a new ice age arrives, wars break out, or computers are invented.  The utmost diversity leads to both an increasingly stressful life and to more complex and interesting modes of cognition. Experts in the theory of chaos often use the term "interesting" to denote what is complex, non-linear, and non-susceptible to simplification and prediction.

The same double criterion of the interesting is valid for a literary text.  An interesting plot development is one that is perceived, on the one hand, as inevitable, and on the other, as unpredictable.  As in scientific theory, the logic and consistency of fictional action has to be balanced by its provocative novelty. The romantic is interesting when it discloses its rational side, and vice versa.  Edgar Allen  Poe and Jorge Luis Borges are justly considered among the most interesting writers because  they rationally decode the mysterious; at the same time, this decoding does not abolish, but rather intensifies the sense of mystery.

The word "interest" derives from the Latin "inter esse," which literally means "to be between, in the interval."  Indeed, the interesting is what fits into the gap between two extremes, between order and freedom, between evidence and wonderment, between logic and paradox, between system and chance. The interesting occurs between thesis and antithesis, if (a) they are both relevant for the situation, (b) their synthesis is impossible, and (c) the victory of either side is precluded. As soon as one of these extremes overpowers the other, the interest disappears, lapsing into detached respect, despair or indifference. What is interesting is not oddity or madness  as such, but a kind of madness that has its own method, "a mind of its own," or an idea that contains some madness within it.  To rephrase Niels Bohr, this idea is mad not enough to be interesting.

The category of the interesting attracted the attention of postmodern thought.  Deleuze and Guattari sharply contrast the interesting with the outdated paradigms of knowledge and truth: "Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure.... a concept must be interesting, even if it is repulsive.  ...[T]hought as such produces something interesting when it accedes to the infinite movement that frees it from truth as supposed paradigm and reconquers an immanent power of creation." [2]

Thus the interesting, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is an alternative to the truthful. It is no wonder that poststructuralist views on the irrelevance of truth have offended the majority of scientists and drawn their sharp criticism.  Usually the merit of a scientific theory is measured by the three interconnected factors: truthfulness, correctness, and verity. Theory is truthful when it corresponds to external reality, correct when it is free from internal contradictions, and veritable when it is verified by tests and experiments. Of course, these three criteria are necessary but insufficient conditions of being interesting because they lack the dimension of surprise or improbability.

On the other hand, wonderment without search for proof and evidence also becomes empty. The interesting is constituted not merely in opposition to truth but in juxtaposition of the truthful and trustworthy on the one hand, and improbable and wondrous on the other.  In science, thought that resists facts and despises evidence is as trivial and boring as thought that relies solely on facts  without   rising above them.  The interesting is what comes in between two mutually exclusive and equally indispensable aspects of the phenomenon. If poststructuralism dismisses truth as an outdated episteme and renounces its conceptual status, then the  subsequent intellectual paradigm should restore the value of truthfulness within the broader category of the interesting.  The truth regains its significance as unpredictable and impossible truth, not a reflection of what is, but an anticipation of what might be.

In some cases, a work may be devoid of internal interest but may simultaneously present an external interest, as reflective of surprising tendencies in public tastes, literary markets, publishing policies, etc. A mediocre collection of poetry or an incompetent work of scholarship can be interesting as a symptom of certain intellectual or social trends; it attracts interest not to itself but to the situation as a whole (some “reality” TV shows might be an example). We can call "exteresting" such phenomena that appear to be interesting exactly because they are devoid of intrinsic interest. Thus, it would be useful to discriminate between a work that is interesting in itself and one that is exteresting as part of a larger, external situation.  This latter case is often described by the expression "presents an interest as…." For example, a work may present an interest as evidence of the degradation of public taste or as indicative of a crisis in the writer's creativity.  There are interesting people and books and there are interesting situations  that involve boring people and tedious books as  focal  elements.

What makes a certain person interesting? Even most talented people are sometimes so full of their own personality, bright ideas, and deep emotions that they leave no space for anyone else to communicate and participate creatively. Strangely enough, this makes them similar to superficial people, who have nothing substantial in them and cannot lead the listener or the reader anywhere. Along with the tragedy of a poor  man who has nowhere to go, there is the tragedy of a dull man who has nowhere to lead.  Thus some people are like fountains, emanating their rich contents. Others are like cotton wool, so entirely dry that nothing can be squeezed out of them. Finally, there are a few who, like sponges, can both absorb and emit.  The latter are the most interesting personalities. 

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[1] Freeman Dyson. Infinite in All Directions. New York: Harper and Row, 1988, p. 298.

[2] Gilles Deleuze & FAlix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Transl. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, pp. 82, 83, 140.

Interlation

Authir: Mikhail Epstein

Interlation (vs. translation) -  a multilingual variation on the same theme, wherein the roles of "source" and "target" languages are interchangeable; a verbal art based on figurative (metaphoric) relationship between languages.

The globalization of cultures radically changes the role of languages and translation. With the spread of multilingual competence, translation serves not as a substitution, but rather as a dialogical counterpart to the original text. Bilingual or multilingual persons have no need of a translation, but they can—and constantly do, informally and in their heads—enjoy an interlation, a contrastive juxtaposition of two or more "identical" texts running simultaneously in different languages. One language allows the reader to perceive what another language misses or hides.

For example, Joseph Brodsky’s  Russian  line "Loneliness is a man squared" reads in his own English version of the same poem "To Urania": "Loneliness cubes a man at random." It would be irrelevant to ask which of these expressions, Russian or English, is more adequate to Brodsky’s poetic thought. Both are necessary to represent the scope of its metaphoric meaning. The aesthetic effect is produced not only by Russian or English lines as such, but by their figurative relationship. English “cube” and Russian “square” serve as metaphors for loneliness, but they are also metaphorically and pictorially related to each other.

Robert Frost famously pronounced: "poetry is what is lost in translation." In contrast, interlation multiplies the gains of poetry. In addition to those metaphors that connect words within one language, a new level of imagery emerges through the metaphorical relationship between languages, providing a surplus (not a loss) of poetic value.

Interlation may be intended by an author or produced in the reading experience. For example, Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography is interlation of two languages and three consecutive versions: Conclusive Evidence (1951), Drugie berega (Other Shores) (1954), and Speak, Memory (1967).  Nabokov himself empasized that these versions relate not merely as a translation, but as a metamorphosis. "This re-Englishing of a Russian re-vision of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a diabolical task, but some consolation was given  me by the thought that such multiple metamorphosis, familiar to butterflies, had not been tried by any human before."[1] 

Translation as the search for equivalence among languages has dominated the epoch of national cultures and monolinguistic communities, which needed bridges of understanding more than rainbows of co-creativity. In the past, the mixture of languages was called "macaronic" and used mostly as a comic, a parodic, technique. When languages were enclosed within monoethnic cultures, their combination was perceived as an artificial  device. With the globalization of culture and automatization of electronic translation, it is untranslatability and non-equivalencies  among languages that reach the foreground. An interlational work written, in parts, in English, French, and Russian, can now find an audience able to savor precisely the discrepancies among languages. 

 

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[1] Vladimir Nabokov,  preface to Speak, Memory, pp.12-13. 

Interrogativity

Author: Mikhail Epstein

Interrogativity is an important modality in the humanities.  According to Mikhail Bakhtin, "if an answer does not give rise to a new question from itself, it falls out of the dialogue and enters systemic cognition, which is essentially impersonal."[1] Questions have their own irreducible value as a source of existential anxiety and intellectual inspiration. To Bakhtin's famous thesis on "the answerability of art" we may add the idea of the interrogativity of art theory, of the humanities as a whole. The natural and social sciences are at their best in answering human questions; the humanities are at their best in questioning scientific answers. Any solution in the humanities ranks lower than the question it seeks to answer. Great explorers and self-explorers of the humanity, beginning with Socrates, bequeathed to us their modes of interrogation more than systems of beliefs and convictions. Their answers are questionable, but their questions are irrefutable.

There are good reasons to believe that interrogativity is becoming more important for humanistic discourse than ever before. The very quality of "being human" becomes more debatable in the age of projected artificial life and intelligence when some intrinsic human properties, such as living and thinking, are transferred to technological and biotechnological devices. The humanities have to exercise the modality of self-interrogation in order to reflect faithfully the growing fragility and uncertainty of their human subject.

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[1] Mikhail Bakhtin. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern McGee, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992, p. 168.

kenocracy

Author: Mikhail Epstein

kenocracy (Greek kainos, new + kratos, rule) --the power of the new, the political regime of postmodern societies.  A kenocracy is a regime that gives priority to the new on the basis of its newness and almost automatically destroys or invalidates old things only because they are old. Under kenonocracy, social life is determined by the regular replacement of political, scientific, economic, and cultural trends, methods, fashions, and  personnel in certain periods of time. Presidents, computers, car  models, artistic trends, dress cuts, textbooks have to change periodically  to maintain their authoritative status as "new." 

Who rules in America, demos or chronos? America is a kenocracy no less than a democracy, with a rigid system of enforced change on all  levels, from political leaders to dress fashions and technological designs.

A kenocracy is always selective. For example, in the US, it applies only to big rulers and not to big rules (new presidents--old constitution). The time span in which a new entity moves to the category of the "old," also can vary: for example, eight years for the presidency, one year for dress  fashion, several weeks for movies in the theaters.  But even the old itself is permanently assimilated and reintegrated with the new under the name of revision, contextualization, reconstruction, rereading, rethinking, reevaluation, reinterpretation, and all kinds of  "re"-actions.  Essentially, a kenocracy is a totalitarian rule of newness, which means that the sharp taste of novelty inevitably disappears.  In a Marxist state in which everything is Marxist, including science, literature, newspapers, songs, and movies, there is no longer respect or feeling for Marxism as a distinct system of ideas.   In the same way, under a kenocracy the new becomes dull because there is nothing around except newness.  The category of newness seems to disappear from the postmodern world not because there is less newness than there was before, but because there is more newness and it no longer takes us by surprise.

We have a different horizon of expectation as compared with more traditional societies in which newness happens as an overwhelming, sometimes revolutionary break with the past.  All experience of modernity, as highlighted by the revolutions of the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, was dichotomous in terms of the new being opposed to the old, innovation opposed to tradition.  However, innovation itself is a mode of the status quo in postmodern societies.  The "new" no longer stands as a discrete category in binary opposition to the "old." Both of these categories become fuzzy through interference, the new becoming the "old," permanent condition of things and the old becoming just a useful resource and point of reference  for ongoing innovations. Not only has innovation become a factor of stability,  but the old has also lost its peaceful repose in the past as it is intensively manipulated and transformed from the present.   The postmodern addiction to citations and intertextuality brought the past to the brink of extinction through the expanding dialogue with the present. The electronic web in particular brings the past preserved in texts to the fingertips of our contemporaries who cut, copy, and paste the past according to their own projects and (de)constructive needs.

Now we can rephrase Ecclesiastes:  There is nothing  old under the sun.  There is nothing more permanent and habitual than innovation. If you look at the news rubric on your computer screen and suddenly find it empty, then you are deeply shocked.  The absence of news may be a sign of the Apocalypse coming.   Maybe CNN or Reuters has a problem with their satellites? It is easier for us to imagine a mechanical break in the flow of news than a stoppage of news altogether.

            

Kenotype

 

Author: Mikhail Epstein

 

kenotype vs. archetype)

This term is formed from the ancient Greek words kainos, "new," and typos, "form" or "imprint." Kenotype, then, is literally a "new form," and in the system of cultural concepts it should stand beside "archetype," to which it offers a specific contrastive meaning.

Carl Jung used the term "archetype" to refer to the generalized patterns of images that form the world of human representations in recurrent motifs, passing through the history of all culture. Such archetypes as the "innocent babe" or the "philosopher's stone," "animus" or "anima" and many others which also have their source in the darkness of the collective unconscious, are repeated in numerous works of cultural creation.

 In contrast to "archetype," new forms of spiritual creativity, which pervade cultures of the Modern Age and are especially prevalent in the 20^th c., can be called kenotypes. A kenotype is a cognitive structure, reflecting a new crystallization of human experience, occurring in concrete historical circumstances, but not reducible to them, and appearing as the first embodiment of a potential or future development. If, in the case of archetype, the general precedes the concrete, as a preestablished form precedes materialization, then in the case of kenotype, the general is a final perspective of the concrete, as it arises from history only to outgrow it, touching the borders of eternity. Everything that can come into being has its meta-image in the future, since it prophesies or gives a warning about something. This storehouse of meta-images is far richer than the strongbox of first images, where the ancient unconscious is contained. The openness of history is given to mankind as a birthplace for super-historical content, where the permanent can obtain its "surplus value," and where its image can not only be preserved, but even grow in time.

For example, the magic mountain in Thomas Mann's novel by the same name is an archetypal image, connected to ancient representations of the dwelling place of gods, including Olympus and Horselberg (the mountain where Tannhauser spent seven years in captivity to Venus). The tuberculosis sanatorium located on its summit, however, is a kenotypal image, in which Mann develops the crystallization of a historically new conceptual system, represented in his conjectures on the coming of a new humanity tempered in the crucible of profound knowledge of sickness and death. Such images as "this delightful little German with his moist little infection," as Clavdia Chauchat calls Hans Castorp, or the lung X-ray that he requests of her rather than an ordinary photograph--these are not simply socially characteristic details, nor "formulas given from antiquity" (as Mann defined archetypes), instead they are kenotypes, rendering a new cultural semantic which Castorp formulates as "the brilliant principle of disease." In The Magic Mountain, Mann's artfully selected physiological details--the tubercular process as a sickening of the tissues supplying air to the organism, those finest and most "disembodied" of substances--provide continual recourse to kenotypical artistic thinking. Mann's kenotypes are born of a concrete cultural and historical situation of the First World War when the topic of lung disease acquired an eschatological aspect. The kenotypes of the sanitorium and the X-rays, for all their obvious universality, can in no way be projected onto the originary levels of the "collective unconscious," nor do they have analogues in ancient mythology.

Kenotypal formations may be found not only in the sphere of art and literature, but also among the events of contemporary technology and everyday life, where their meaning extends beyond the bounds of a single instance and of contemporaneity itself. A subway system is kenotypal, composed of interconnected underground crypts and containing, not the quiet of the grave, but the bustle and movement of living people by the millions. The kenotypicality of any phenomenon reveals itself in the obvious intensity of symbolic values, the abundance of metaphors and analogies that directly accompany it through the process of its social assimilation. For example, cancer is often interpreted as a sickness of the social organism, expressed in the degraded simplification and homogenization of its structures.

The same cultural phenomenon may manifest layers of both archetypal and kenotypal significance. So it is with a shoreline that divides the two elements, land and sea: this space is deeply archetypal, as numerous poetic and literary works attest. But the usage of this same physical space for rest and recuperation under the influence of all the natural elements present here--sun, water and sand--represents a different metaphysical significance: the beach, which is a kenotype originating in our epoch. On the beach, everything refers to the horizontal dimension; unlike the shoreline, it is a place not for standing, but for lying, in surrender to an unfocussed peace of mind, a lazy repose. Could this be the ultimate task of a self-deified humanity: the transformation of all the earth into an endless beach, an outpouring of golden sand? The kenotype of the beach contains an ominous warning against the degradation of our dream of a return to paradise, a place of eternal bliss.

According to a widespread understanding of archetypes, everything new is but a phenomenological covering for those "primary essences," whose content remains unchanged over the ages. But actually, the essence may be as new as the phenomenon. Time not only varies mankind's originally conceived archetypes, it fulfills a more fundamental task as well: the creation of new types, both those that reflect their time, and those that acquire super-temporal significance. Kenotypicality is the potential for universalizing a new historical experience; it is a perspective that addresses not the beginning but the potential end of time, as a vast and growing source of meaning.

To designate these emerging dimensions of the culture we need a new, prospective terminology that will not hark back to prehistoric phases and forms of consciousness, but will look forward. In the meantime, such terms as "mythologeme," and "archetype" pervade our thinking about contemporary culture, distorting essential matters: the super-historical and universalist orientation that is increasing in contemporary consciousness is not in the least an archaic, pre-personal model, and a retrospective terminology is inappropriate to describe it.

Introducing the concept of the kenotype does not contradict Jung's theory of the unconscious. In our day it is particularly important to distinguish its conservative, self-protective layers--those that relate to the sphere of archetypes--from its dynamic, creative layers, which are even now producing new kenotypes.

 

 

 

 

Techno-Humanities

Author: Mikhail Epstein

                                                 TECHNO-HUMANITIES

Techno-humanities is a humanistic technology, the transformative potential of cultural theories; inventorship in the sphere of cultural studies, as a practice complementary to scholarship.

Should there be an active, a constructive, supplement to the humanities as scholarly disciplines? Technology serves as the practical extension (“application”) of the natural sciences—and politics, of the social sciences. Technology and politics are designed to transform what their respective disciplines study. Is there an activity in the humanities that corresponds, and what would we call it? “Pragmo-humanities,” “culturonics” (in the mold of “electronics”), “techno-humanities”? The last term would reclaim the Greek techne (skill, art, craft) from scientific technology, which stole it from the humanities long ago. But whatever we term the art of the humanities, it would most naturally consist, I should think, in the building of new intellectual communities, new paradigms of thinking, new modes of communication and commensuration. Of course, the meta-art of the humanities differs from the primary arts—such as painting, poetry, and music—that comprise the object of humanistic study. What the humanities can produce are, not works of art, but new cultural positions, movements, milieus of reflexivity, negotiation, and connection. Inventorship, as a mode  of “co-creativity,” could become as indispensable a companion to scholarship in the humanities as technology is a companion to science.[i] 

            One example. The main insights of literary theory, as we study its innovative ideas and peak achievements, are found not in scholarly monographs or articles, but in literary manifestos, which are products of theoretical imagination rather than of painstaking scholarship. The manifestos of neoclassicism, Romanticism, naturalism, futurism, and surrealism are not based on “careful, systematic, patient study and investigation in some field of knowledge” (to use a definition of research out of Webster’s), but neither are such manifestos illiterate or uninformed. Neither factual nor fantastic, manifestos are, let us say, “factastic”: they aim to produce new literary facts rather than register and analyze the accredited facts of past and present. Under what category might the constructive activity of theory be found or placed? Does it belong to the realm of scholarship or literary fiction? Obviously neither. Its proper place is the still-unmarked domain of theoretical invention (“technohumanities”).

            Our academic institutions, however, offer no place for peculiar avenues of conceptual creativity. There are departments for literary theory and scholarship, for creative writing, but not for constructive work in applied theory. In what contemporary institution would such creative thinkers, inventors, and builders of literary worlds as Friedrich Schlegel, Vissarion Belinsky, or André Breton find their professional place? Paradoxically, their views, works, and biographies are deemed worthy of extensive and scrupulous academic study; yet the constructive impetus of their writing, its “inventive” genre, lacking proper documentation and scholarly apparatus, would keep them outside the academy. For comparison, consider this impossible scenario: a university declining to fund an engineering school on the grounds that, unlike departments of physics or chemistry, it would deal with inventions and not discoveries. There is a variation on engineering in the humanities, and it is no less important.

            This failure to recognize the technohumanities raises the more general question of whether various intellectual capacities are adequately represented and integrated at our universities. According to Alfred North Whitehead, “the task of a University is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought, and civilized modes of appreciation, can affect the issue.”[ii] The mission of the university is or should be transformative:

The university imparts information, but it imparts it imaginatively. At least, this is the function which it should perform for society. A university which fails in this respect has no reason for existence. This atmosphere of excitement, arising from imaginative consideration, transforms knowledge. A fact is no longer a bare fact: it is invested with all its possibilities. It is no longer a burden on the memory: it is energising as the poet of our dreams, and as the architect of our purposes.[iii]

But to recognize the constructive potential of the humanities is not enough. We must also specify how cognitive activity in the humanities differs from that in the sciences. Until now, the tendency in “applied humanities” has been to technologize or politicize these disciplines; that is, to subject them to the practical modalities of natural or social sciences. The humanities, however, have their own constructive potential which corresponds to the unique object of the humanities characterized by Bakhtin as “the expressive and speaking being [vyrazitel’noe i govoriashchee bytie]. This being never coincides with itself and therefore is inexhaustible in its meaning and significance.”[iv] Bakhtin further indicates that there are “various ways of being active in cognitive activity. The activity of the one who acknowledges a voiceless thing [as in the natural sciences] and the activity of one who acknowledges another subject [as in the human sciences], that is, the dialogic activity of the acknowledger.”[v]

The place of culturonics in the system of disciplines is presented in the following scheme:

Nature - natural sciences - technology -  transformation of nature

Society - social sciences -  politics     -      transformation of society

            Culture – human sciences - culturonics - transformation of culture

Notes:

[1] Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 142.

[1] Alfred North Whitehead. Modes of Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 233. For the academy post-Whitehead, I refer the reader to another member, besides myself, of the Common Knowledge conspiracy: Stanley N. Katz, “Excellence Is by No Means Enough: Intellectual Philanthropy and the Just University,” Common Knowledge 8.3 (fall 2002): 427-38.

[1] Whitehead, The Aims of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 139.

[1] Bakhtin, “K filosofskim osnovam gumanitarnyx nauk,” in vol. 5, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1997), s. 8.

[1] Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 161.

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[i] Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 142.

[ii] Alfred North Whitehead. Modes of Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 233. For the academy post-Whitehead, I refer the reader to another member, besides myself, of the Common Knowledge conspiracy: Stanley N. Katz, “Excellence Is by No Means Enough: Intellectual Philanthropy and the Just University,” Common Knowledge 8.3 (fall 2002): 427-38.

[iii] Whitehead, The Aims of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 139.

[iv] Bakhtin, “K filosofskim osnovam gumanitarnyx nauk,” in vol. 5, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1997), s. 8.

[v] Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 161.

Reflections on Background Space

Author: Mikhail Epstein            

                                                «                          »

                                                            

«                          »  [ the term cannot be pronounced but can be conveyed  by gestures of quotation marks] – the textual environment that includes margins and blank spaces and makes possible the processes of signification and writing.  It is also  the  "primary word," the philosophical sign of the absolute, or the infinite being as it is revealed on the border of language and the inexpressible.

When Mozart was asked what is most important in music, his answer was: pauses.  «                          » is that gap or rupture in the sequence of signs that is more meaningful than any other sign.  Literary studies, philology, philosophy and, in fact, all sciences of language and writing have their own focus of ecological attention,  – the environment of the text itself.  Such is the page on which text is written or printed, or a tablet on which commandments are inscribed, or the canvas of a  poster, or the blue screen of a computer. With all the differences in its material components, the environment of the text has a special quality – it is extratextual, and for this reason makes it possible for the text to be imprinted. The function of this environment is to disappear from the field of perception and thus to create the optimal conditions for perceiving the text. If the environment functions properly, that is, sufficiently highlights the text against its background, then it completely vanishes off the stage of our perception.

            For this reason the textual environment for a long time has remained  unperceived and unexplored.  Only a remarkable work by Meyer Shapiro approaches this theme through the exploration of the semiotics of surface in visual art.  "We take for granted today as indispensable means the rectangular form of the sheet of paper and its clearly defined smooth surface on which one draws and writes. But such a field corresponds to nothing in nature or mental imagery where the phantoms of visual memory come up in a vague unbounded void. The student of prehistoric art knows that the regular field is an advanced artifact presupposes a long development of art. The cave paintings of the Old Stone Age are on unprepared ground, the rough wall of a cave; the irregularities of earth and rock show through the image. /.../ The smooth prepared field is an invention of a later stage of humanity. It accompanies the development of polished tools in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages ... /.../ We do not know when this organization of the image field was introduced; students have given little attention to this fundamental change in art which is basic for our own imagery, even for the photograph, the film and the television screen".  [1]

Meyer Shapiro calls the object of his research by different names, using descriptive characteristics: "clearly defined smooth surface," "the smooth prepared field", etc. In fact, the primary task of each investigation, even though it is sometimes achieved in the very end, consists in finding an adequate name for the subject of research and in introducing it into the terminological system of the given discipline. How are we to call this clean surface on which all our signs are imprinted? In this case, the selection of a term presents a special difficulty since the naming concerns the environment of the text itself, which is the very condition of naming. Nowhere is the contingent nature of linguistic signs revealed so clearly as in this attempt to designate that which makes possible the act of signification.  The sign, by definition, always stands for something, whereas the environment stands for itself, presents itself with each sign as its inseparable condition.

In principle, this clear environment can be named in many ways: “background,” “blank,” “pause," “omission,” “emptiness,” “field,” “the unnamed”… But none of these signs will be adequate to the signified since the latter makes the signification possible only on the condition of staying outside the sign, serving as its background. The signified presents itself as                         , i.e. a clear field surrounding every separate sign and the whole text.

            The only way to bring                       into the text is to convert it into a sign of itself. We will signify this all-contrasting field of writing, its immediate presence in front of the reader, in the whiteness of the writing paper or in the blueness of a computer screen --

«                          ».    This special sign explodes the very foundation of writing:  for the first time the text's background is introduced into the text itself as one of its signifiers.

            «                          » is the rarest case of a written sign, which is not symbolic (arbitrary) like a letter in a phonetic writing and is not iconic (representational) like a hieroglyph, but is indexical (indicative). Signs-indexes point to that which they are a part of, and are often found in nature. For example, rain-clouds may serve as a sign of an approaching storm; smoke rising above a house may serve as a sign of its inhabitance; a skin rash may serve as a sign of a disease. Indicative signs signify the whole by its parts or the essence by its manifestation.  Due to their natural, non-arbitrary quality they stand midway between signs and non-signs, and are practically impossible in a language system, based on phonetic writing and constituted by sign-symbols.

«                          » seems to be the only example of an indexical sign, common for all existing and possible languages, more specifically -- for all systems of writing.  What is placed within the quotation marks is this very emptiness, blank space, clear environment that surrounds the text and separates verbal units.  This sign is indexical because it is a part of what it signifies. The use of this sign in writing (in a manuscript or a book, or on a computer screen) is naturally motivated and grounded in the existence of its signified, this very whiteness of this very paper that you, the reader, are contemplating here and now. All other lingual signs lack this indicative motivation, even pictorial and hieroglyphic signs, which have an iconic similarity with the signified but are not part of what they represent.

From antiquity, philosophical and linguistic thought has been looking for a sign that could adequately convey that what conditions the very existence of signs.  However, even the most universal signs that refer to mystical concepts and express the inexhaustible and vacuous nature of being, for example, Tao, are not adequate to their signifieds. According to Lao Tsu, Tao that can be expressed in words is not a permanent Tao.  This means that the word "Tao," since it consists of delimited signs, cannot express the limitlessness of Tao itself.

Jacque Derrida has proposed another sign to designate what makes all signs possible: "différance."  This source of multiplying differences among names does not have an appropriate name for itself.  Even such general concepts as "essence" and "being," or even "difference" itself are only names generated by the play of difference that has to remain ineffable for ever. ""Older" than Being itself, such a différance has no name in our language. But we "already know" that if it is unnamable, it is not provisionally so, not because our language, has not yet found or received this name, or because we would have to seek it in another language, outside the finite system of our own.  It is rather because there is no name for it at all, not even the name of essence or of Being, not even that of " différance," which is not a name…. This unnamable is not an ineffable Being which no name could approach: God, for example. This unnamable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of substitutions of names in which, for example, the nominal effect différance  is itself enmeshed, carried off, reinscribed, just as a false entry or a false exit is still part of the game, a function of the system."

Derrida implies that the name "différance" is one of many names enmeshed in the play of différance, and therefore différance does not have and cannot have one privileged name.  Indeed, the word "différance" however profoundly interpreted remains only a lingual sign consisting of the letters of Latin alphabet.  Does it mean however, that language in its search for extralingual foundations, the ultimate and "transcendental" signified, which makes possible signification itself, is doomed to be locked in the chain of conventional and replaceable names.  The infinity of semiotic replacements and substitutions that Derrida discusses is not a closed chain, but the one that is permanently stretched and overstrained to the breaking point. The life of language is never so full and vigorous as it is on the edge of the desemiotization, at the point where the chain of signifiers is torn apart and the precise name is revealed in and through that very extralinguistic phenomenon that constitutes a sign of itself.

Philosophy needs a certain "first word" in order to designate something that  precedes all existing and is present in all existents.   According to Heidegger such a word is the Greek "chreon" usually translated as necessity, but interpreted by him as "being" [Dasein]…. The question is whether even the most ancient and primary word like chreon can convey authentically that very quality ontological purity, which makes possible all words; or language has to withdraw and to give space to an extralingual presence in its distinction from language?  If the multiplicity of existing objects is signified by various words then should we not look for "existing itself" in the beyond of all words?  Not in their absence but on the very border of language as existing in relation with language and still different from it, as existence itself is different from all existing things in Heidegger's thinking.  Is not «                          » such a void that is unavoidably co-present with all words, remaining unexpressed in any of them. Does not  «                          » convey how existence reveals itself in language: not existence in general, nor an abstraction or concept of existence, but existence here and now [Da-Sein], "existent in the presence" of these very words, which I am writing now and which the reader reads here. «                          » is precisely what is present among words, remaining irreducible to them, and non expressible in any language, -- its inescapable other, its white shadow.

«                          » is more adequate term for the absolute or the infinite, than the words "absolute" and "infinite."  Constant renewal of principal terms and primary concept in various philosophical systems shows that not a single, verbally articulated concept can serve as a universal philosophical principle.  Such a principle in general cannot be expressed within language; but it cannot remain unexpressed either because the ultimate concern and aspiration of philosophy is the articulation of the most capacious, all-comprehensive concept, from which all other concepts can be derived.  It is obvious that such an ultimate concept can be articulated only on the border of the language, as its "outside,"  as non-expressible condition of any expressibility.

In our attempt to find proper signs for «                          » one can browse through many names, such as "being," "essence," "nothingness," "emptiness," "foundation," "infinite," "nameless," "dao," "difference," and such play of substitutions can continue infinitely…  But it can continue only because there is hope to win the game, to find the only proper name that is itself what it tries to name.     «                          » is precisely this pure gain of language, the breaking point in the semiotic chain, where the play of endless replacements ceases with the appearance of a truly privileged name.  The blankness which gives name to itself becomes its own irreplaceable name.

1. Meyer Shapiro. On  Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual  Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs (1966), in:  Semiotics. An Introductory Anthology, ed. with introductions by Robert E.Innis, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985, pp. 209-210.

                                                Mikhail Epstein